Roundtable Discussion with Phil Johnson and Jim Osman

Welcome to the program, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Justin Peters. I hope that you and your family are doing well today.

I don't even know which, am I supposed to be looking at that camera? I hope you're doing well. Thank you very much for joining us.

And I am joined today by Jim Osmond, pastor of Kootenai Community Church.

We are here in Sandpoint, Idaho, as well as Phil Johnson, executive director of Grace to You.

And we are doing a live event, so this is very unscripted, and we're just going to kind of have a discussion here about the prophetic standards statement that Michael Brown and Joseph Matera, leader of the

United States Coalition of Apostolic Leaders, they were the two primary figures in drafting this statement, came about in February, and this statement was written in response to the undeniable, massive face plant that all, literally all of the prominent leaders in the charismatic slash prophetic movement have done in the last calendar year, or a little bit better.

In 2020, they failed to prophesy COVID coming. After COVID came, they decreed it, they banished it to be gone.

Of course, that didn't work. They failed to see the riots coming, the George Floyd incident and the riots that ensued nightly all across the entire country.

None of the prophets saw that coming. None of the prophets saw the president of the United States contracting

COVID. None of, and literally 100 % of the prominent prophets all prophesied that Donald Trump would win the

United States presidential election. Of course, they got that wrong. Issues of voting irregularities and all that aside, even if you believe that and hold to that, they failed to prophesy that that would happen.

So they literally missed it on everything. They didn't see the riots on January 6th, whatever you want to call them.

So an undeniable face plant brought a lot of deserved, in our opinion, embarrassment to the charismatic movement, the prophetic movement.

And so they drafted this statement beginning in February, and according to articles that we have all read here, it says, it is said to have been, the statement has been checked over by a dozen individuals during subsequent

Zoom meetings. So this was not, this is not just a rough draft. This is a statement that was drafted, went through many revisions, went through a number of prominent prophetic leaders, their approval, got their approval, so, and they put this up on the website.

And so we're going to talk about this. Because the desire, the stated desire, it was to bring some accountability to the prophetic movement in light of this embarrassment.

So we're going to talk about this and why none of the three of us believe that this has really helped their position any.

We're going to talk about some of the theological problems and indeed just logical problems with this movement.

So Jim, Phil, thank you brothers for joining us. Thanks for having us. All right.

So I gave a little bit of background there and why the statement was necessary and how it came about.

So let's talk just a little bit about some of the initial signatories to this statement.

We have, of course, Michael Brown and Joseph Matera. We also have the CEO of Charisma Magazine, Stephen Strang.

Stacey Campbell. Stacey Campbell, you might remember, was one of the ones that gave her endorsement to Todd Bentley.

Stacey Campbell is a lady that shakes her head back and forth violently. Mark Tirona, Randy Clark.

Mark Driscoll is a signer. James Gall, Jeremiah Johnson, Chris Vallotton of Bethel.

And so those people, Stacey Campbell, Mark Tirona, James Gall, Jeremiah Johnson, clear false prophets.

But then you also have some men like Sam Storms and Wayne Grudem that signed this statement.

So brothers, what are your thoughts on this? You've got Craig Keener as well, who's a bit more of a respectable theologian.

Lee Grady, who was the editor of Charisma, or at least he was a commenter in there, who frequently criticized charismatic overreach and things like that.

So it doesn't surprise me that he would sign this. But right alongside them you've got, you know,

Mark Driscoll actually doesn't lend any credibility to this. Jennifer LeClaire, Patricia King, Chris Vallotton, it's a mix of people who are credible and people who have a long, long record of making false prophecies.

And it doesn't really solve anything. We'll talk about that. But I don't think this solves anything.

There are things in this statement that I would fully agree with. But those things,

I don't think these people really believe. Because if they did believe them, they wouldn't be making false prophecies and they wouldn't be defending the practice of prophets who consistently make false prophecies, repeatedly year after year after year.

It just so happened that in 2020 there were enough significant events that anyone who was a true prophet should have foreseen or talked about, and none of them did.

And what they did say they got wrong. So it discredits the movement. And this is a desperate attempt to try to regain some credibility for a movement that has squandered all the credibility it ever had, and it really didn't deserve any credibility to begin with.

Honestly, don't think this is going to have any long -lasting impact or do any good.

And my advice to people is, read through it and ask yourself, if all of these measures had been instituted prior to 2020, would that have derailed the problem that they're trying to deal with here?

Would they have solved the problem of all of those wrong prophecies with what they call accountability? And the answer is no, because their idea of accountability is to get all of these false prophets together collectively and share one another's words from the

Lord. And if they all agree, then they can embrace that as a matter of faith. And that's exactly what they would have done with the prediction that Trump was going to win the election.

They would have all been wrong still. So none of the measures that they've set up here really would deter any future disasters like we've just seen.

I think the movement has squandered credibility. There are enough superstitious and gullible people that they'll still have followers.

But I honestly don't see how any thoughtful person who genuinely believes the

Scriptures and goes by the biblical standard of Deuteronomy 18, that if a prophet pretends to speak in the name of the

Lord and what he says is going to come to pass doesn't come to pass, Scripture says not only do you have no obligation to believe him or give him any credibility ever in the future, in the

Old Testament, that was a capital offense. The person was to be put to death. So it's a sin to do that.

It's a sin on the same level as adultery or murder or any other crimes that were capital crimes in the

Old Testament. And to embrace a theology that says, no, no, no, that's changed in the

New Testament era so that it's okay to make false statements and still claim to be a prophet from the

Lord. When Scripture says no such thing, gives nobody any permission to change the

Lord's standard like that, that just compounds one sin with a worse sin.

And I think whatever scorn or criticism this movement gets is richly deserved.

Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. And you're exactly right. When all of these prophets were saying the exact same thing, of course, they were all wrong.

It wouldn't have fixed anything. Right. They would have simply reinforced one another.

Right, which is what they did. As I read this, I think, why didn't that occur to any of these people that, you know, if they do what they claim they want to do here, and before they proclaim a prophecy as a word from the

Lord, they test that with other prophets, would it not occur to them that had they done that here, it wouldn't have changed a thing?

Exactly. In fact, probably what it would have done would have been emboldened them to make even stronger statements to people pretending to be messages from God that were no such thing.

Right. Well, this statement is, as I have it numbered, has 22 individual we believe statements or we affirm or we reject.

And so we don't have time, of course, to go through all of those in detail, but we're going to hit a few of the high points.

And I want to start with number one. Of course, to lay our cards on the table, all three of us, we are cessationists.

We do not believe that the apostolic gifts, the signed gifts continue to be in operation, but we do affirm gifts like teaching, mercy, administration, exhortation, those gifts.

But I want to deal with one of the common charismatic objections to our position because in 1

Corinthians 14, it says that we are to earnestly desire the spiritual gifts, especially that you may prophesy.

That's what Apostle Paul says. So, Jim, as a cessationist, how do you answer that objection?

Well, sometimes people ask me, are you a cessationist? And I say, yes. And then they say, they make a statement something like, so you don't believe in the gifts.

And I always have to clarify, you're talking about, you're lumping in all gifts. Of course,

I believe in the gifts. I actually believe that all of the gifts that Scripture lists and many more probably have been active at various times in the history of the church.

So I believe that all of those gifts that Scripture describes were given. Some of them were given at a specific time for a specific purpose, and then the gifts have either ceased to be given or they have fulfilled their function and they're no longer given because they fulfilled their function.

So I believe in all kinds of the...all the spiritual gifts, the gift of teaching, administration, the gift of leadership, etc.

All those gifts are still active in the church today, and I still believe the Holy Spirit gives those gifts. But that's not what...our

position is not that no more spiritual gifts are being given or that no spiritual gifts are active. That's not the cessationist position.

The cessationist position is that all of the gifts are given for a specific purpose and for...with a specific goal in mind.

If the gift that was given has accomplished that goal and that purpose is no longer necessary to be accomplished, then that gift no longer needs to be given.

And we would put some of the miraculous and apostolic gifts that we see in the New Testament, the gift of miracles, the gift of healing, the gift of tongues, the gift of prophecy, as they're describing it, and the gift of discernment...or

not discernment, but word of knowledge. Those miraculous revelatory gifts, having fulfilled their purpose, are no longer given.

And we still benefit from those gifts today because we have the New Testament, we have the results and the fruit of those gifts being given, but having accomplished their purpose, there's no more...no

reason for those gifts to be given in the modern church. So, that's strictly the cessationist position. So, when we have a command in Scripture that says we are to pursue earnestly those gifts, especially that we may prophesy,

I would say, well, that, of course, was given at a time when prophecy was still actively given as a gift before the completion of the

New Testament canon, before the purpose of the gift of prophecy had been fulfilled. And probably the closest thing to a gift of prophecy that we would have today would be the gift of teaching or preaching, that exertory gift that we operate from the pulpit or we proclaim the truth.

That would be a prophetic gift in a sense, but it's not the gift of...that's not prophecy as they're describing it in this statement, but that is prophecy as we, as cessationists, would probably describe it.

The closest thing to that would be the proclamation of the word of the Lord, but it wouldn't be a new word, it would be the word that's already been given that we are to explain and to preach and to teach.

So, we ought to pursue even that gift today, the nearest equivalent of that being the gift of teaching and preaching, and we should value that gift for what it does in the church today.

Right. Okay. Yeah, and good preaching is a form of prophecy because you're speaking the word of the

Lord if you're preaching the word. And you have to take that text in context. Paul is writing to the

Corinthian church, which was full of extreme charismatics, let's say. That would be the closest parallel today.

People who were enthralled with the idea of speaking in tongues so much that they would do it all at once, and it was a cacophony of noise, and Paul scolds them for that.

He says, if an unbeliever walks in, he's going to think you're all crazy because you're saying stuff that nobody understands in languages that nobody speaks.

And that's why he says, so, no, desire the best gifts, especially that you may prophesy because prophecy as opposed to tongues, tongues was actually also a form of prophecy because it was a translatable message, and Paul says, don't do it unless somebody's there to translate.

But it was a translatable message, a prophetic word from the Lord. But if nobody understands it, he says, who's edified by that other than you yourself?

You build yourself up at the expense of legitimate use of the spiritual gifts.

So he says, desire they may prophesy, that is, speak a word from the Lord in a language that people understand.

So that's the point, and the context there is he's contrasting a misuse of spiritual gifts that does nothing but build up the person who's doing it with a legitimate use of the spiritual gifts, which edifies others.

And so he's saying, if you really want a valuable spiritual gift, if you want to do something that will truly edify the church, ask to prophesy, not to speak in a language that nobody understands.

So that's the idea. That text doesn't prove that these gifts were ongoing and forever.

In fact, that's one of the criticisms I would have of this statement. It refuses to make any distinction between foundational things like prophets and apostles, which

Scripture says in Ephesians 2, that's the foundation on which the church is built.

If it's foundational, you don't keep using that, you know? You don't keep building a foundation.

Right, you just don't keep doing it. And Paul, in 2 Corinthians 12, 12, refers to these miraculous manifestations as the signs of an apostle.

These were signs that signified an apostle. So that in the New Testament, the only time you ever see anybody exercising miraculous gifts like healing and speaking in tongues and prophecy, it's always before the canon of Scripture is complete, obviously, because it's in the canon of Scripture, and it's always in the presence of an apostle.

So an apostle could convey that gift to someone else by the laying on of hands, but it was always associated with the apostle himself.

It's a sign of an apostle, one of the proofs that they are an apostle, and that was one of the defenses the apostle

Paul used when people said, well, he's not a real apostle because he wasn't one of the 12, right?

But he said, no, I've done all the signs of an apostle. He could convey these miraculous gifts by the laying on of his hands.

That isn't how these gifts are used today. So when you say, we're all cessationists, my answer is, yes,

I'm a principled cessationist, convinced by Scripture itself that these gifts are not for everyone at all times, but I would also argue that even the most wild -eyed charismatic is to some degree a cessationist.

I don't know of a single serious charismatic today who believes that all the gifts are functioning exactly as they did in the

New Testament. In fact, Jack Deere, who famously converted to charismatic views back in the 1990s, wrote a book in which he said the same thing as a charismatic.

He didn't know a single charismatic. He felt it was unfair for non -charismatics to suggest that charismatic gifts of healing today are not biblical -quality gifts because we don't heal lame people.

We don't see any people born lame or blind receive their sight or ability to walk.

He says it's different because it's not like it happened in the apostolic era.

My answer to that is he has just confessed that he is a cessationist of sorts.

And so why not look at this realistically and acknowledge that a lot, in fact, if not all of what you see on television from these televangelists who claim to have gifts of healing, that's just chicanery and not real, and it bears no resemblance whatsoever to what we see in Scripture, which these are verifiable miracles done in the presence of large crowds that no one could gainsay.

But today the miracles are all…the supposed miracles are all invisible and unprovable.

Right. Todd, go ahead. I was going to say they do the same thing then with prophecy that they do with the gift of healing. They'll say that the gift of healing as it functions today is not the same as what the apostles did in the first century.

They make the same argument with prophecy saying that the prophecy of today is not the same as it was in the Old Testament or even in the early church, that God could speak in the

Old Testament infallibly and authoritatively and inherently through those prophets, but that He's not doing…that's not the same gift of prophecy today, which is why they make a distinction in the statement about the

Old Testament prophets could be stoned and executed for getting it wrong. They want to have a totally different standard for New Testament prophets, and the

New Testament prophet is less authoritative, less inerrant, less infallible, and less accountable than the

Old Testament prophecy is. So they're actually making the case that that gift of prophecy as it functions today is not the same as it was in the early church.

That's right. By sheer… And that's a cessationist argument. The sheer power of reality forces them to a kind of cessationism no matter what view they hold.

They're going to have to say, no, this isn't the same as it was, because they simply cannot do apostolic quality miracles, and they don't get apostolic quality prophecies, and then my question is, if it's so fallible, and it's more fallible than the fortune cookies

I get at the Chinese restaurant, what good is it? How can you view this as a gift from God if it's so dangerous on the one hand and completely unedifying on the other?

Right. Yeah. I've quit before that a magic eight ball has far more prophetic power in it than any of these so -called prophets do in them.

And that's not just a joke. No, it's true. That is literally the case. And riddle me this,

Batman, going to the point that we were just making, that even they, the people who wrote and drafted and signed the statement, acknowledge that New Testament prophets are held to a lesser standard than Old Testament.

How is it that in the New Testament, we have Jesus, who is our better high priest, offered a better sacrifice, instituted a better covenant?

Everything about the New Covenant is better. It's the whole theme of the book of Hebrews that you're preaching through right now.

How is it that everything is better except the gift of prophecy? The gift of prophecy tanked.

It is tanked in the New Testament. How is it that... I would add to that, Justin, nobody in the history of biblical belief has ever issued more severe warnings against the dangers of false prophets than Jesus himself.

And he constantly was warning to beware of false prophets. So we have all these people prophesying falsely, and this statement has the gall to say that just because someone prophesies falsely, it doesn't make them a false prophet.

That in my view is the heart of the problem with this statement. It comes at the end.

I'll read it. We do not believe that a sincere prophet who delivers an inaccurate message is therefore a false prophet.

I just don't get that because they've done this not only once, but they do it repeatedly.

If I stole your wallet frequently or lied to you frequently, you would call me a thief or a liar, right?

So how is it that someone who constantly prophesies falsely is not to be regarded as a false prophet?

That beggars common sense. Yeah, exactly. They've literally redefined the biblical definition of a prophet.

They've made up their own definition that simply cannot be found in Scripture. Well, they've actually created a third category.

So they want to have true prophets, false prophets, and then true believers who say wrong things, speak inaccurately.

They say that in the 21st statement that they make in the second paragraph. They say, finally, while we believe in holding prophets accountable for their words in accordance with Scriptures, we do not believe that a sincere prophet who delivers inaccurate messages is therefore a false prophet.

And instead, that's the statement that Phil just read, instead, as Jesus explained, as the Old Testament emphasized, false prophets, wolves in sheep's clothing, in contrast to true believers who might speak inaccurately.

Thus a false prophet is someone who operates under a false spirit masquerading as a Holy Spirit. Now, I would argue that a false prophet is somebody who operates under a different spirit masquerading as the

Holy Spirit. That would include those people, but it would also include people who say, thus sayeth the

Lord and get it wrong. So, they've created, they want to create a third category, false prophets, true prophets, and then these folks in the middle who speak for God, say, thus sayeth the

Lord, they get it wrong, and they are just, in their words, true believers who might speak inaccurately. And of course, that's a straw man argument.

True believers say inaccurate things. Isaiah said inaccurate things, but not when he was functioning as a prophet speaking for the

Word of the Lord. Exactly. I think every preacher, no matter how good he is or how careful he is with his study, probably at some point in his lifetime is going to say wrong things as well.

That just puts you in that middle category. That's right. And I would confess that. I'm in the middle category. I've said things in the past that I wouldn't stand by now,

I think they were wrong. But the difference is, I didn't do that in the name of the Lord.

I didn't say, God told me to say this. I'm speaking to the best of my understanding.

And that's a huge difference. I think they see it as not much difference, but it's a huge difference.

On the one hand to say, at times I trust my own intuition, you know,

I'll get a feeling that I should do this thing or do that thing. And I don't know any other reason why not to, it doesn't violate any biblical standard or whatever.

So I go with my instinct or my intuition. And if it turns out to be right, I thank

God for the providence that used that, but I wouldn't call it inspiration or revelation.

And I wouldn't call it a prophecy. They call it a prophecy up front before they know whether it's true or false.

And by attributing to the Lord words that He has not said, they sin a sin that literally would have cost them their lives under the

Old Testament. Absolutely. And that's actually a point I made in a recent video that I uploaded my YouTube channel, the problem with the charismatic movement in a nutshell.

And I put a video of Mario Murillo, who's another one of these guys. And he was talking about the failed prophets and failed prophecies.

And he said, that's not the real issue. He said, that's not the serious issue. He said, the more serious issue at hand is that an election has been stolen.

That is more serious to him. And I just said, there you go. That right there encapsulates what is wrong with the charismatic movement because for them, the serious issue is not that you put words in God's mouth that He did not say.

That's not the serious issue. The serious issue is what happened with the election. And I was like, there you go. That right there, that's the problem.

Yeah. All right. I want us to look at, and I might point out that in this article from Christianity Daily, it says that the, quote, the overwhelming majority of prophets have not even signed this statement.

So, you have a list there of the prophets who haven't signed it? Yeah. A very partial list. Yeah. Chuck Pierce, and he's a guy who literally made up out of whole cloth this prophecy that he supposedly made, and I've proven that to be a lie.

Chuck Pierce, Cindy Jacobs, she's out there. Kenneth Copeland. If Kenneth Copeland is not a false prophet, the term has no meaning.

Lance Wallnau, Dutch Sheets, Benny Hinn, some of those prominent names have not.

But the overwhelming majority of prophets in this movement have not,

I mean, even this statement, extremely flawed as it is, is too much for them. Yeah. So, we talked about a couple of the people who signed that.

You went through the list of the charismatic, Stephen Strange and other charismatic extremists, the wingnuts of the movement, were some of the names you mentioned earlier that had signed it.

Patricia King. Yeah, yeah. Jennifer LeClaire. Yeah. But in that group, grouped in with those signatories to this letter, this statement, was also

Wayne Grudem and Sam Storms. Right. Now, Wayne Grudem has lent a lot of intellectual heft to the continuationist reformed camp.

These people who want to have a foot in each camp and be a continuationist and be reformed. And some of Wayne Grudem's exegesis on passages of the

New Testament is some of the best work that I can find in any of my commentaries. He is very sharp and he's a godly man who loves the

Lord, and theologically rich and sound in so many areas, and yet in this area, he attaches his name to this.

So now you have this group, this mixed group of people where you have a good reformed theologian who is very solid in most areas, who signs on to this, and you have the extreme charismatic group that has signed on to this.

And then you have this group of extreme charismatics who refuse to submit to the standards of this statement.

So now the question, this creates a very interesting dilemma because in the statement they say that anybody who refuses to be part of the oversight or submit themselves to the oversight of the type of people who signed this statement are no longer fit to be in ministry.

They should not be recognized as being in prophetic ministry. So now this creates a division amongst the extreme charismatics.

Are the people like Benny Hinn, Kenneth Copeland, Lance Wallnau, are they going...if they're not going to submit to this statement and the oversight of the people who signed this statement, then the people who did sign this statement cannot have anything to do with the people who didn't sign the statement if they're going to be abiding by the terms of the statement.

Yeah, but I don't think any of us expect that to happen. No, I think... I won't hold my breath. I mean, I started out saying there are some things...actually,

I didn't say this yet, but let me say it. There are some things, some statements in this document that I would affirm myself.

The problem is I don't think the people who signed it really believe these things. For example, they say, this is your paragraph 19 and 20, we reject any threatening words from prophets today warning their followers that judgment will fall on them if they fail to obey the prophet's words.

We see this as a dangerous form of spiritual manipulation. A lot of the signatories actually have been constantly guilty of that.

I would include even Michael Brown, who is afraid, I think, to criticize by name anyone who claims to be a prophet because he lives with the fear that blaspheming the

Holy Spirit might be an unpardonable sin. He believes he could lose his salvation, and so he's not going to actually say anything, and he'll warn us, you know, you're flirting with blaspheming the

Holy Spirit. So he's actually doing what this paragraph says they shouldn't do. In the next paragraph, we reject the spiritual manipulation of the prophetic gift for the personal benefit of the prophet or of his or her ministry, whether to garner favor, power, or financial gain, and under no circumstances can a prophet charge money to deliver a prophetic word.

This is spiritual abuse of the worst kind and is detestable in God's sight. Now, I wish they meant that, but I don't expect that to be enforced or followed on a large scale by any number of these people because that would undermine what they're doing.

And I think there are provisions in this statement that if they tried to actually do it consistently, it would mean the end of the movement.

So I don't really believe they mean this or that it will happen, we'll see. But if they do mean it, if the people who signed it meant this, and they're saying, anyone who doesn't sign this, we're not going to partner with them in ministry, then what you're going to see is a massive split between the prophetic wing of the charismatic movement.

Yeah, and when I read this, I thought, well, this puts Michael Brown in a real pickle because by his own admission, he has been good personal friends with Sid Roth for nearly 40 years now.

Yeah, and Benny Hinn. And Benny Hinn, he's been on his program, gave him a high five. Sid Roth is the nuttiest of the nuttiest.

I mean, Sid Roth is what Babylon B wants to be when it grows up.

I mean, it... Actually, Michael Brown said he didn't know Benny Hinn well enough to be critical of him.

So he was on his television broadcast for several broadcasts. But I asked him, why don't you point out his errors?

He said he wasn't familiar enough with it to do that. But still, if you don't have enough discernment to watch

Benny Hinn and see what he said over the years and look at his annual prophecies that have always been wrong, and you can't say, no, this man is a false prophet, then

I don't trust you to hold anyone accountable in this movement. It's not going to happen. That's right.

So on number eight, it says that we believe that prophecies should first be tested by the word.

Then if the prophetic word is not contrary to scriptures, it should be evaluated by other mature leaders.

Now, a couple of points. I hear the charismatic say this a lot, you know, when you get a prophetic word from someone and test it by the scriptures, and as long as it agrees with scripture, then it's okay.

But that's just not true. Because if I were to go up to, say, a young man who's graduating from high school, 18 years old, and he's trying to figure out what he's going to do with the rest of his life, let's call him

Bob. And I said, Bob, you know, the Lord has just been laying you on my heart, and I've been dreaming,

I've been getting these dreams about you, Bob, that you're supposed to be a missionary, that you're supposed to go to Zimbabwe and be a missionary.

Well, that's certainly not contrary to scripture to tell someone that, hey, maybe you should think about missions.

But if I say, God has told me that you're supposed to be a missionary, that's not contrary to scripture.

But if he believes that I'm getting this from God, and then this young man named Bob, he goes off to Zimbabwe and becomes a missionary, when that's not at all what he's supposed to do,

I could completely wreck that man's life. That's right. Plus, what they suggest in that paragraph, letting mature leaders,

I don't, I'd love to know who they would put in that classification, but let them evaluate it.

Take that and just let's take two or three of the more significant prophecies from 2020 that they got wrong.

The election prediction or Copeland, Kenneth Copeland, blowing

COVID away, let's take those two. Suppose they submitted that to this sort of evaluation.

Well, in the first place, neither of those prophecies have anything to do with anything that's in scripture. So you can't really say this contradicts scripture.

And since we'll take the election of the president, for example, since every prophet in the movement made the same prophecy, they're definitely going to affirm that.

I wonder what they would have done with Kenneth Copeland claiming to have blown COVID away.

But the point is, a lot of us and a lot of secular people latched on to a video of him doing that and made fun of it.

But I don't know of anyone in the prophetic movement who actually condemned him when that happened.

Nor do I. So what sort of willingness do they have to actually practice this kind of accountability?

I saw your notes on this in that, on that paragraph you wrote, this has never happened.

They've never done this. That's right. They didn't do it when the prophecies were given. That's right. None of them called them to account and said, hey, you're violating clear biblical standards because this statement is them trying to say, this codifies what scripture teaches.

But Michael Brown, at no point that I'm aware of, ever called any of these false prophets out and said, what you're saying is unbiblical.

So this never happened before when they were making the false prophecies. This never happened. Them calling one another to account or evaluating anything in the movement.

It never happened back then. Now they're saying this is the standard by which prophecies should operate. Well, starting now?

Or should this have been done a year ago, two years ago, the last 10 years? They haven't been doing this all along.

They're not going to start doing this now. This is nothing more than them covering their tracks and making it look as if, look, these are the standards that we have, and so we're real sorry that we didn't live up to them.

And Justin, you follow this movement more closely than I do, but you know that one of the popular practices among a lot of the more high -profile prophecies, at the beginning of the year, they make an annual prophecy that is, you know, very fortune cookie -like.

It's vague and all that. But at the beginning of 2020, I vividly remember it was going to be a year of breakthrough and prosperity.

Vision. 2020 vision. Yeah. And so all the prophecies really went absolutely, you know, 180 degrees opposite of what really characterized the year.

They don't even come back and revisit that after the fact. I mean, unless you count this statement as a kind of public apology, but I don't see it as that.

They're not really admitting that they've been wrong. No, no, they're not. They're not admitting.

And some of the prominent prophets to this day are saying that Trump's really the president and the military is loyal to Donald Trump and not

Biden, and Donald Trump's still going to get an office. It's just any day now, he's going to be reinstalled in the

White House. But yeah, you're exactly right. And comically, one of these initial signatories, a guy named

James Gall, he did just what you're talking about. In January of 2020, he gave his prophetic word.

And part of his prophetic word, I don't have the direct quote in front of me, but he said that literally, quote, stadiums will be filled.

It would be the year of the full stadium. I mean, you can't make this stuff up.

But this is one of the supposed mature leaders that's going to give accountability.

Historically, charismatics have been very skilled at reinterpreting their prophecies after the fact.

He could have come back and said, well, yeah, stadiums were filled with the COVID virus.

That's what the prophecy meant. You remember the famous, maybe you don't, you might be too young to remember the famous Oral Roberts prophecy of the 900 foot

Jesus, which was a tactic he used to try to raise money for a hospital that he wanted to build just across the street from Oral Roberts University there in Tulsa.

And they built this massive building. It still stands out there in the middle of nowhere. That building sat empty for most of the first decade of its life, if not longer.

It never really became a functioning hospital. Today, I think they sold it.

So it has some medical offices in it and all that. But every aspect of the prophecy he made in those days was false.

But he kept coming back and reinterpreting it and saying, no, no, here's what that meant. And you remember, ultimately, when the project was deeply in debt and he couldn't pay it off, he said that the

Lord had told him that if his supporters didn't give like, I don't know, $20 million or something to pay off the rest of the debt, the

Lord was going to take Oral Roberts home. And we all sat on the edge of our seats to see what would happen.

And just at the deadline, some unbeliever, I think it was a guy who owned a dog track in Florida, sent him the money.

So he escaped the death sentence. And he used that then to say, see, all of this was true prophecy.

The Lord got what he wanted. But every aspect of it along the way was wrong. And, you know,

I lived in Tulsa for part of that time, surrounded by lots of charismatics who believed Oral Roberts was, you know, a true prophet.

None of them allowed any question at all, ever, about any of that, even when it was clear that, objectively, what he said was false.

They were willing to do any sort of intellectual gymnastics to reinterpret it so that they didn't have to acknowledge that Oral Roberts' prophecy was a false prophecy.

And that's what's happened up until now. I think the disaster of 2020 was just so profound and so far -reaching that instead now they have to do something like this because you can't reinterpret all those prophecies in a way that makes them in any way credible.

But they're trying to salvage some of the credibility of the movement itself.

I hope it doesn't work. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. I predict. I prophesy that it won't work.

Is that a word from the Lord? It's a word from the Lord. No, it weren't. And, you know, he talks about mature leaders, and assuming that some of these mature leaders would be the same people that signed this statement,

I mean, you've got Stacey Campbell here who gave her prophetic affirmation to Todd Bentley.

I mean, Stacey Campbell... Is she the one with the head shake? She's the one with the head shake. Yeah. I can't even... No, it hurts to watch, actually.

It does. It gives me a migraine just to watch her prophesy. But Stacey Campbell, Rick Joyner, Bill Johnson, Che Ahn, all of these guys and gals, they prophesied over Todd Bentley, saying that the

Lord was going to bring a great worldwide revival through Todd Bentley. I mean, this is a guy who was bragging about kicking elderly women in the face with a spiker boot.

I mean, if you can't tell Todd Bentley is a false prophet, then you shouldn't be allowed out of the house without adult supervision.

But some of us were saying that before he ever morally discredited himself in a public way for the first time.

I mean, he was one of those whose extremism and unbiblical style was so obvious from the beginning that it should have been easy,

I think, for any mature Christian leader to say, this is not a guy people should be following.

But even some of the best reformed charismatics refused to say a single word of concern about him.

Yeah. Unfortunately, that is true. Which goes to something that I say often, that once you take a continuous position of, as Chris Rosewood would say, a restorationist position, but if you believe that all of those gifts continue, then you have, by definition, abandoned the sufficiency of Scripture.

Right? I mean, you can't have your cake and eat it too. No. So... If we need those gifts, then that means that we need something not provided in Scripture today.

Right. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. That's a very important point, too.

The sufficiency of Scripture, the principle of sola scriptura, is so important.

I mean, it was one of the principal pillars of Reformation doctrine, and Wayne Grudem understands this.

I know he does, because in his book on the New Testament gift of prophecy, it's an adaptation,

I think, of his doctoral dissertation or some work he'd done before on the gift of prophecy, and it's where he argues and tries to defend the idea that New Testament prophecy is a lesser gift and a different standard than Old Testament prophecy.

He makes that argument in many chapters throughout what's a fairly thick book, and then, at least in the first edition of that book, there was an appendix where he was affirming the principle of sola scriptura, the doctrine of sufficiency of Scripture.

And I used to tell people, I wish the book had been published in the opposite order so that the thing on the sufficiency of Scripture was first.

Because I honestly think that if you really believe that, if you really affirm everything he says, and it's quite a good defense of the sufficiency of Scripture, but if you truly embrace that, then the rest of the book is basically debunked already.

It's a shame they put it at the end. And I always encourage people, if you must read that book, start with the appendix.

Yep, I agree. All right, I think this will kind of go to what we were talking about a little bit earlier, but it says on number 16, we understand that prophecies can be conditional, that section that says, any statement of apology, so this is if a prophet, quote -unquote, gets it wrong, any statement of apology and or explanation clarification should be delivered to the audience to whom the erroneous word was given.

So, well, they're right there. I mean, you never have, there's not an example,

Old or New Testament, of a true prophet ever having to give an apology.

No, no, because you've got Deuteronomy 18, because he's supposed to be stoned, he's not.

In fact, I put that in the margin of mine, on that very paragraph. On the one side, I've got, well, see

Deuteronomy 18, this is why. You don't see that in the Old Testament. But then

I put in the other margin, I predict this won't happen. This is not going to happen. It's never happened before.

The so -called apologies, when they are forced to acknowledge a false prophecy, generally attempt to either minimize the nature of the sin or reinterpret the prophecy so that it's not truly false after all, or simply take a wait and see, well, maybe we don't understand what that prophecy meant to begin with.

So... They never question the legitimacy of the prophecy itself. Yeah. One of the most notorious examples of this happened at the church on the way in Southern California after Jack Aford retired, and they got a new pastor, and they had a prophet come in on a

Wednesday night in a midweek service, I think it was Wednesday. Yeah, I remember that. And he prophesied that the new pastor would be greater than Jack Aford ever was, and have a worldwide ministry, and it was going to leave an impact that's comparable to John the

Baptist, and all that sort of rhetoric. And I think it was that very night, the pastor died of a heart attack or some sudden death.

And the official answer the church gave was that the powerful was so frightening to the devil that the devil killed him.

So what are we saying there? We believe in the sovereignty of Satan? Exactly. And Jim, you've written a book on spiritual warfare, but that's one of the undercurrents in the charismatic movement is that they ascribe to Satan far more power and authority than what he really has, right?

Yeah, in this instance, with Hayford, Satan actually had the ability to thwart

God's designs for that church, and for that pastor, and for the ministry, and all of the countless thousands of people who were to be impacted.

According to the Word of God and the will of God, Satan came in and interrupted that and thwarted all of that. Right. So if you buy that story, then in that case at least, the gates of hell did prevail against him.

That's right. Exactly. Yep. All right, so I want us to look at number 21 because I was telling you guys before we started this, we could probably do the whole thing on number 21 and 22 here, the last and next to last sections.

So the statement says, we reject the notion that a contemporary prophetic word is on the same level of inspiration or authority as Scripture.

Break. Okay, my break. This is one of the things that I say all the time in my own teaching.

If God is speaking, God is speaking, and God cannot speak less authoritatively on one occasion than He does on another.

So they've created this tiered level of authority.

So they'll say that when God speaks in Scripture, that's authoritative, but when He speaks to us outside of Scripture, it's still

God speaking, but it's not as authoritative as the Word of God. And it's not inspired.

And it's not inspired. It's not on the same level of inspiration or authority as Scripture. You've just written a book entitled

God Doesn't Whisper, so talk to us about this. So the way I deal with this is

I say, what makes Scripture inspired, authoritative, inerrant, and infallible? What is it about Scripture that gives it those qualities?

Is it because it's written down? And because it's written down, it therefore is inerrant, infallible, uninspired, and authoritative?

No, that can't be it. Is it the fact that it's old revelation and what we have today is new? Is that what gives it those qualities?

No, it can't be that. Is it because of the vehicles through which it came, that it was apostles and prophets that spoke this, and we don't have those today?

Is that what makes it inspired? What is it about Scripture that gives it this super level of authority, inspiration, inerrancy, and infallibility?

The only answer to that question is, what gives Scripture that quality is that God spoke it, okay?

So if God spoke it and God is speaking to you, then how can it not be as inspired, authoritative, inerrant, and infallible as Scripture?

Because God cannot speak in an unauthoritative or non -authoritative way or an errant or fallible or non -inspired.

The very idea of inspiration is God breathed. If God speaks this out and the product is His revelation, if He's speaking through prophets, how can it be anything other than on the same level as Scripture?

If you believe God is omniscient and Scripture clearly says God cannot lie, so He knows everything, how could

He possibly, and He can't lie, how could He possibly speak anything that's fallible or untrue?

It's just a denial of either the authority of God or the truthfulness of God or the omniscience of God.

You have to have a lesser God in order to believe that there can be a word from the

Lord that's not really authoritative. In fact, the classic Scripture on this is Proverbs 30, verses 5 and 6, every word of God is true.

He's a shield to those who take refuge in Him. The very next verse says, do not add to His words.

I mean, I would love to see them grapple with those texts in a statement like this.

Exactly. And instead, what they say is that God can give a word that is not necessarily true.

It's not inerrant. It's not infallible. A Scripture has these qualities. Why? Well, because it's

Scripture, which is just a form of question -begging, it's just a circular argument. It has that because it's Scripture. But they want to have their cake and eat it too.

They want to have Scripture, which is this type of word from God, but then modern -day revelations is a different thing.

So at one point in the statement, I can find it here in a second, they talk about, it's in Statement 21, we reject the notion that a contemporary prophetic word is on the same level or inspiration of Scripture.

But later on that same paragraph that you started there, it is the written word alone that can lay claim to being the

Word of God. Prophecies are at best a word from the Lord to be tested by the Word of God. So they're trying to make a distinction between the

Word of the Lord and a word from the Lord. Scripture is the Word of the Lord. We get a word from the

Lord, which is a distinction that no Old Testament prophet or no author of Scripture ever made. You never had somebody saying, oh, did you get a word, did you have the

Word of the Lord come to you? No, it wasn't the Word of the Lord, it was a word from the Lord. So it's a little sketchy when it's from the

Lord, if it's of the Lord, it's authoritative. If it's from the Lord, not so much.

Not so much. Let's be clear too, there's nothing in the New Testament that justifies the idea that there's been a shift like that.

Exactly. You know, while you're on paragraph 21, this is the penultimate declaration in the thing.

There's only one more statement after this. But I mark this up big time because this is the key declaration, number 21.

It's the one that starts with, we reject the notion that a contemporary prophetic word is on the same level of inspiration. So they set up this two tiers of words of the

Lord and words from the Lord, or the Word of God and a word from the Lord. And then the very next paragraph starts with this statement, finally, while we believe in holding prophets accountable for their words, we do not believe that a sincere prophet who delivers an inaccurate message is therefore a false prophet.

Now I've marked two things on that. We've read this statement several times, that they don't believe you can prophesy falsely.

They don't believe that makes you a false prophet. But what's almost more offensive to me is the opening phrase there, where they claim that they believe in holding prophets accountable for their words.

No, they don't. And they never have. That's right. And you can't point to a single place in all the repertoire of, say,

Michael Brown, who would be one of the more outspoken charismatics, who acknowledges that there are, in general terms, that there are extremes and misuses and abuses in the charismatic movement.

But he doesn't hold anyone accountable for that. I mean, he won't even say that he thinks Kenneth Copeland is a false prophet, or he doesn't know enough about Benny Hinn to make an evaluation of him.

He's not holding anyone in particular accountable for false prophecies. Never has.

Never have any of these. And Wayne Grudem, who opened the door to give this sort of credibility to that, he should be the one who's out on the forefront, actually rebuking and pointing out and correcting all this.

It shouldn't be up to us cessationists, you know? We need, you know, I say we, but it would be nice to see if the

Wayne Grudems and the Sam Storms of this movement, and by the way, the fringe of this movement is not

Benny Hinn and Kenneth Copeland. That's the mainstream. No, they're the mainstream. That's right. The fringe is

Wayne Storm, I mean, Wayne Grudem and Sam Storms. That's the fringe. I've said the same thing for years. And there isn't that much distance, maybe in what they believe and teach, but in reality, in the terms of how they fellowship with one another, there isn't a lot of difference between the radical, ridiculous fringe and these guys who we say write some good things and we would have some respect for.

Sam Storms was aligned with the Kansas City Prophets during the worst of that bizarre fiasco, supposedly influencing them in a better doctrinal direction, but I don't see any positive fruit coming from that.

Right. No, nor do I. It's a very, once you take that continuous position, the camel's nose is under the tent, and it's a very slippery slope, very slippery slope from where Sam Storms is to where Benny Hinn and Kenneth Copeland and fill in the blank are.

The difference is one of degree, not of substance. Substantively, they agree on the theology.

The difference is just in the way that they implement that theology. It's not a different theology.

It's the same theology concerning Scripture and concerning these gifts. And we talk about holding somebody accountable, they make a statement at the end of that paragraph that Phil was just reading from, thus a false prophet is someone who operates under a false spirit masquerading as the

Holy Spirit. So my question to Wayne Grudem, Sam Storms, and the others in this movement, the people who've signed this declaration, name for me the prominent charismatics that you believe that describes, or the prominent charismatic false prophets, the people you would actually call a false prophet, the ones that you would say are unaccountable, their prophecies are consistently false, they're not just believers saying wrong things, these guys are people masquerading in our movement.

Name them. Who are they? Give us a statement at the end of this statement that says, these people are Kenneth Copeland.

Name the names. Yeah. We're going to be holding people accountable, just don't talk about how good it is to hold them accountable. Right. Give us the names of the people that you think you are describing here that they're obviously trying to distance themselves from this group.

But in many ways, it's much like liberals do today, politically speaking, where they just say, well, we're not amongst that group, and then we all look around and say, who's the enemy again?

Like, do these people actually exist? We're not in that group. We just want you to know we're not in that group, and nobody can find anybody in that group.

Right. And they're doing the same thing here with prophecy. We want you to know that there's a whole bunch of really wacky people out there, and we're holding them accountable.

Who are they? Name them. Name them. Give us names. There ought to be hundreds of them that are masquerading in your genuine movement.

You can't say that with a straight face. We believe in holding people accountable, and then show up at, you know,

Bethel and Redding alongside some of the wackiness that goes on there. And they wouldn't even include people at Bethel and Redding in that group of people that they say we're distancing ourselves from them and won't do ministry with them.

And you know, I absolutely agree with you. But I would say even if they didn't want to name names,

I would be satisfied somewhat if they would simply give a list of criteria. How do you know that someone is operating under a false spirit while masquerading as the

Holy Spirit? I would say anybody who gives a false prophecy, that's the proof. This didn't come from the

Holy Spirit because it's clearly false. So you're operating under a false spirit of some kind, right?

Right. So this statement means absolutely nothing if you don't have some criteria by which to determine who are these people?

What does this even mean? If it doesn't include somebody like Kenneth Copeland, who blows away

COVID and all the other shenanigans he does, but that one I think topped them all.

I think of that, and I think anybody who can watch that and see him do that and make that claim and know that it had absolutely no effect whatsoever and still say, well,

I wouldn't really classify him as a false prophet. That's a person who utterly lacks any standard of biblical discernment, and nothing he says about the subject is going to persuade me at all.

And the best way for them to cover their tracks if they really want to police their own movement is not to produce a statement like this, which is going to do absolutely nothing to prevent further abuse, but it is to really call out the heretics and the charlatans in their own movement and to name those names.

That they won't do. So they demonstrate in the way that they handle the people in their own movement that the fact that they cannot name any of those names, they demonstrate that they're not interested in all at policing this.

This is nothing more than them saying, well, we do have standards and we're willing to hold to them and we're all supposed to read this and think, oh, okay, well,

I cleaned it up. But it doesn't. No, it doesn't clean up anything. Yeah, it's analogous to the many heretics out there who teach and advocate all sorts of false doctrines and undermine everything that's cardinal truth that would uphold the gospel and then claim, no, no,

I'm orthodox because look at my website, you'll find my doctrinal statement and it's perfectly sound.

You go there and look at it and yeah, it's a sound doctrinal statement, but I know from what you teach that you don't believe that.

And this is just more of that. You know from what these people actually do and have done for years that this is posturing.

It's not meaningful. Right. And I want to bring up too in this number 21, that I have number 21, we reject the notion that a contemporary prophetic work.

So that part, and it says, let me just read it. We reject the notion that a contemporary prophetic work is on the same level or inspiration or authority as scripture.

We dealt with that. Now look at how this next phrase is phrased, or that God always speaks inerrantly through prophets today, since the

Bible says we only know in part and prophesy in part. Now that is a gross abuse of that passage.

I guess we could talk about what that passage means, but I was watching you and Chris Roseborough and you all dealt with this.

The way that that is stated is actually heretical. Yeah, it is.

In essence, they're saying, if you take all the intervening words out and just put the phrase, the operative phrase, these are their exact words.

We reject the notion that God always speaks inerrantly. And it boils down to that.

That is actually what they're saying when they say, I have a word from the Lord, but it may be wrong.

What you're saying is then God doesn't always speak inerrantly. And in effect, that's what they're saying.

I think when you reduce it to that level of clarity, they're going to deny that that's what they're saying. But that in practice is how they act, how they teach, what they do.

That is what they believe. They don't think that God always speaks inerrantly. You know that statement, let

God be true and every man a liar. In the charismatic movement, every prophet is true, but God is the liar. He's the one who speaks falsely.

But no prophet is ever false. It's God Himself who's false. Prophets always get it right.

They're always true. They're never going to be questioned in this movement. But God Himself is the one who cannot speak inerrantly.

Exactly. Because the subject here is God, the verb is speaks. Yeah. And the adverb.

The way Phil phrased it there is absolutely right. We reject the notion that God speaks, always speaks inerrantly.

And you could say, you know, you might would say, well, that was just poorly worded if this was a first draft or something.

But by their own admission, this went through many revisions. It crossed many eyes and physical eyes.

You know, a lot of different charismatic leaders read this, and it was massaged and edited and all that.

And this is what they came up with. That's troubling. Well, that is actually their theology, though. They have to state that.

It's stated so patently clearly there that it's hard for us to miss it. It's obvious on the surface.

But that is what they have to believe to hold to the idea that they can have a prophet who speaks from the Lord and says, this is the

Word of the Lord, but they get it wrong. And they say things that are wrong. They have to say that God does not always speak inerrantly.

Sometimes He speaks through a prophet, but it somehow comes out the other end wrong, which means that either...it

can only mean that God either intentionally is not speaking inerrantly, so He's intentionally lying.

That's one option. Or that God cannot guarantee the successful and inerrant delivery of His message through the prophet.

So you either have a God who is not omniscient, or sorry, not omnipotent, or a

God who is not always intentionally truthful. Right. Yeah. That's a great point.

There's no place anywhere in Scripture, Old Testament or New Testament, where the Lord spoke to someone and they said,

I believe the Lord might be saying. You know, when the Lord speaks, you know it. And even if He's speaking in a dream, there's in the few handful of instances in Scripture where you have the

Lord giving a revelation through a dream, none of them woke up and said, I think this might be a message from God.

It was so vivid and so profound that there was no question. This is God speaking to me, you know?

And that is how God speaks. He doesn't whisper. That's a good idea. That's a very good title.

And He doesn't stutter, and He doesn't use vague language or confusing metaphors.

If He's speaking, and if He's speaking to you, you know what He's saying and you know what He means by it.

And that clarity is lacking from all of the modern -day prophecies, which is another good reason to regard them as not only wrong, but dangerous, just dangerous.

If you think God is telling you to do something and you're not quite sure how to understand it, you're in trouble.

Okay. All right. So the last one, we therefore recognize distinctions between a believer who gives an inaccurate prophecy.

We were talking about that subject matter just a minute ago. But there in the very last paragraph, it says, the calls of God's gifts and calling are irrevocable.

Romans 11, 29 totally misses the point of that text. We understand that a person who has been prophetically gifted might be able to function in that gifting even though they are no longer in right relationship with God.

That is why it's imperative that we judge a prophet by the fruit of their life and ministry rather than by their gift, also recognizing that there are some who started right but will be rejected in the end, and they use as their scriptural support

Matthew 7, 21 through 23. And like, wait a minute, wait a minute.

They're saying that these people were never known by Jesus, that this paragraph is true. I never knew you.

And I have in my notes, what part about never knew you do you not understand? Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, that is almost stunning. They're almost suggesting here that a false prophet could have the genuine gift of prophecy.

Right. That's the other side of that statement because it's imperative that we judge a prophet by the fruit of their life and ministry rather than by their gift.

So you're telling me that somebody can have the true gift of prophecy and produce bad fruit from it.

Yeah. There's so many layers of badness with that. That's a closing statement. And the part

I underlined is, a person who has been prophetically gifted might be able to function in that gifting, even though they are no longer in right relationship with God.

Which is to say, a guy has now morally disqualified himself for...

Todd Bentley. Yeah. All right. So Todd Bentley. And yet, because the gifts and calling of God are not revocable, and he exercised the gift of a prophet they think, and he's had the hands laid on him by people who claim to be apostles, they can't write him off and say, oh, he was a false prophet from the beginning.

So what they've just done is defined a principle that means nobody, no matter how badly they default in the faith, he could walk away from the faith completely, and they would never be able to say, well, see, he was a false prophet.

You can never make that, you can never draw that conclusion. Which is why they can never name names of anybody who...

That's right. And if it's a guy like Bentley, who won't leave the public eye and get out of ministry, but keeps making prophecies, if you believe that he began well, does that how it says?

He began, started right? Yep. He started right? So we think he's a true prophet.

That means that even though we think now he's in a bad place, whatever he says,

I have to listen to and think through and evaluate. You can never write him off and say, this guy's dangerous,

I don't need to listen to him. And even with Todd Bentley, since you brought him up, Michael Brown was part of this team that examined him, did an investigation into Todd Bentley to see if he is or is not qualified for ministry.

And I'm like, right there, I mean, okay, he brags about kicking old ladies in the face with his biker boot. He's not qualified for ministry.

But whatever. Well, he's also not morally pure. He is the definition of someone who is not above reproach.

You have to have a commission to decide whether he's fit for ministry? That is the practical fruit of where this kind of theology leads.

Right. Go ahead. Sorry. No, no, no, that's fine. Because all that's true. And so they finally came out and they said, yes, okay, we agree,

Todd Bentley is not fit for ministry. He should not be in ministry. But even in saying that, they said, we believe that he is gifted.

Yeah. We believe he is gifted. And my question is by whom? Gifted by whom?

Yeah. Not the Holy Spirit. And so they're genuinely operating in a gift, though no longer in a right relationship with God.

It means that God is not the one who's working through that gift, but somehow that gift operates ex operata by itself by virtue of the fact that it just is without any divine enablement through it.

That this false prophet or this morally corrupt individual without any relationship with the Lord can use this gift and it can be the genuine gift and he can speak genuine words from God, even though he's not in a right relationship with God.

Right. And I think one of this... Go ahead. No, I was going to say, this paragraph, what they tried to give you with one hand all the way through the first 20 statements of this, that we're going to police our movement and here are the standards.

They take it all away with this last paragraph, because this last paragraph is them saying, even though we've said we're going to police our whole movement according to these standards, there are actually no standards now by which we can police the movement.

Because we can't say that somebody who's morally compromised is a false prophet. We can't say that somebody who's made a false prophecy is a false prophet.

And we can't say that somebody who's no longer even in a right relationship with God is a false prophet. And we can't say that somebody who's started off well and has now made a train wreck is a false prophet.

According to that last paragraph, there is nobody that they can actually say is a false prophet. Right. So we'll police our movement according to these standards.

But last paragraph, there's no way we can possibly police this movement because none of what we said before this means anything.

This is a longstanding problem. And you'll remember, we talked about this, I think, at the Strange Fire Conference with regard to Paul Cain, who was the standout prophet in the 1990s.

He was involved with the Vineyard Movement and all the people who were touting prophecy at the time looked to Paul Cain.

And it came to light years later that he was secretly homosexual and an alcoholic and utterly morally disqualified on every level.

And still, and I don't want to misquote anyone, so I can't remember exactly who it was, but it was one of the men who we would classify as a reformed and respectable and sound theologian other than his views, his superstitious views on charismatic gifts.

He said, yeah, he was really disappointed in Paul Cain, but he still believed he had a remarkable gift of prophecy.

And I look at that and I think that this is a sort of impenetrable, willful blindness to an obvious moral defect that Scripture would instruct us pretty clearly on.

But once you buy into this sort of theology, it's impossible for you to see it.

You can't acknowledge it or it's going to knock down the whole deck of cards.

The fact that so many of these prophets are not fit for ministry and they've disqualified themselves in many ways besides the fact that their prophecies are more false than true by magnitudes.

And still, you feel some inner compulsion that has to be driven by superstition or a sort of willful gullibility.

You cannot say this guy is a false prophet. It's why they can talk about false prophecy in general and acknowledge that it exists, but you will never hear anyone point to a specific instance of a false prophet and say, that man is a false prophet.

This person is disqualified. So if you can't even say, okay,

I was duped by Paul Cain or I was duped by Todd Bentley, there's really no level of satanic tomfoolery that you're not susceptible to.

Yeah, that's right. That's exactly right. You know, if they stumbled upon a man who was previously they believed to have the gift of prophecy and they stumbled upon him in his private life and he was offering up a goat on a pentagram or something, they would find a way of not even having to call him a false prophet.

There's no standard. There is literally no standard that would disqualify somebody in that movement. All of their blustering before this.

That's right. And in the absence of any standard, all the talk about accountability amounts to nothing.

That's right. Because there's no standard to hold anyone truly accountable to. That's right. Yeah. I mean, if you can't call

Kenneth Copeland and Todd Bentley and Benny Hinn false prophets, then there's nobody you can call a false prophet.

There is no standard. So this, yeah. And I'm, again, I'm stunned by that application of Matthew 7, 21 through 23.

I mean, Jesus said, I never knew you. Not that I knew you and now you're just straying from me.

I never knew you. These are unregenerate people. So wow.

We can say one other very positive thing about the statement and that is that they did not abuse John 10, my sheep hear my voice.

The fact that that passage managed to not make it... Oh, but they did. Did it make it into the statement? Well, it's not in the statement, but I just read something from Michael Brown just yesterday.

Well, that was his, are you suffering from prophetic burnout? Yeah, yeah, yeah. That was on the stream, that article, are you suffering from prophetic burnout?

It was his way of kind of saying, just because we've got it wrong and you've been exhausted and doubting your faith, don't doubt the fact that Jesus promised you

He would speak to you because my sheep hear my voice. But that verse at least was not put through the meat grinder of this statement and included in an abused fashion in this statement.

I don't think it was anyway. Yeah, it's not in this statement, but what have you said about John 10, 27, if you can't get that verse right?

Yeah, if you can't get that verse right, if you can't understand the context of that verse and see that Jesus is not describing

His sheep hearing private whispers, but that He is describing His work of drawing His sheep to Himself in salvation, if you can't understand the plain written text of Scripture, there is no reason

I should trust you in teaching me how to interpret the vague impressions that pop into my mind as the voice of God.

If you can't interpret soundly the written text that's right there, I cannot trust you to give me the principles to interpret the vague notions that pop into my head at a random moment.

And anybody who uses John 10 to teach that Jesus has promised

His sheep, His people, personal and private revelations, has no business teaching Scripture. You are ill -equipped to handle any written text if you cannot get that one right.

That's how passionately I feel about it. Now, Justin, before we get away, I want to go back to something earlier, and that was the statement that it's number eight in your numbered list about mature leaders evaluating it and all of that.

We commented on what's the standard of maturity. One thing I want to point out is that the very next section, number nine, actually says that if you don't have prophets, people claiming to speak for the

Lord, then you can't come to full health and maturity. That's the end of that paragraph. It says we're dependent on the five -fold ministry leaders.

That five -fold is a reference to Ephesians that includes prophets and apostles. So if you don't have prophets and apostles, and they say only then will the body come into full health and maturity.

So anyone who is the least bit skeptical about the gift of prophecy, you wouldn't even have to be a full -blown cessationist.

But if you didn't want to say, yes, prophet and apostle are ongoing offices in the church, even though Ephesians 2 says those were foundational, you have to believe they're ongoing offices in the church or you aren't mature enough to do the sort of accountability that they're saying here.

So they undermine the possibility of really exposing any obvious error anyway, because only a person who has a theology that's inherently gullible can be deemed mature enough in the first place.

If you're a cessationist, you're by definition immature in their view. So that's why

I say accountability, though they talk about it a lot, it's not something they're equipped to actually do.

Yeah. Absolutely not. Absolutely not. All right. Well, I think we gave this a pretty good going over.

Any final thoughts, Phil, Jim? I think we've thoroughly, I think, assessed the problems with the movement.

I think we've covered it. Okay. All right. Well, I hate to quote myself, but if you want to...

I was going to say that maybe you just give a plug or explanation of why Phil is here. Yeah. Why is Phil here?

So for those who are watching on the YouTube channel, Phil is here at Kootenai Community Church because he's doing a conference here in about two hours on the life and legacy of Charles Spurgeon, and that's going to be streamed on the

Kootenai Community Church YouTube channel. It's going to be live streamed. We have about 200 people showing up here, and Phil's going to be doing that session tonight, introducing

Spurgeon and his childhood, and then we're doing a Q &A to get to know Phil a little bit. And then tomorrow, beginning at 8 .30

a .m. Pacific time, we're going to continue that live stream. And all day, it's five or six more sessions on the life and legacy of Charles Spurgeon.

So that's how Phil is here and why he is here tonight. All right.

Phil, your website, gty .org? That's right. Okay. And Jim?

KootenaiChurch .org. All right. Okay. Thank you, brothers. Thank you. Thank you. Appreciate it very much.

Dear ones, until our next time together, may the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the fellowship of His Holy Spirit.