What is the Word of Faith Movement? (Part 2)

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Inside the Mind of Manson: Part 3

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to let the facts speak for themselves in the light of Scripture. The positive confessionists tell us that it is always

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God's will to heal. Always. Which means that if you are not healed, there must be something wrong with you.

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You are told when you believe and are not healed, number one, the reason why you are still sick is that you have a lack of faith.

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If you only had more faith, you would have been healed. Two, you're told that there must be secret sin buried somewhere in your life and your walk with God, and that secret sin is preventing you from being healed.

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Three, you're told that you're out of fellowship with God, and if you were in proper fellowship with him,

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God has to heal you. That's a very important point.

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This teaching maintains that if you are serving the Lord and trusting the

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Lord and exercising faith in the Lord, God must heal you on the positive confession.

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Finally, you are told that you must be making negative confessions.

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Now, what is a negative confession? Well, the negative confession is saying,

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I don't feel good today. Anybody here never made a negative confession? I don't feel good today.

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They sneeze. Their nose runs. Their eyes run. They cough.

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But they are positively affirming the fact that there is absolutely nothing wrong with them while they are communicating disease to everybody within 50 feet.

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All right. Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen, to Cultish, Entering the King of the Cults. My name is Jeremiah Roberts, one of the co -hosts here.

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I'm here with Andrew, super sleuth of the show. What up, what up? And we are here with Melissa Doherty.

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There you go. There's always room for improvement. Always getting better day by day. I just positively confess to your proper last name.

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We are here with Stephen Bancars. We are here before the world ends.

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We're all in lockdown and who knows what happens there. So, yeah, we are in part two having this discussion about the

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Word of Faith movement. That was Dr. Walter Martin. It just so happens he ended that clip with talking about being aware of sneezing around you.

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And it just so happens that we are in the middle of a pandemic. And this is an almost like important and relevant discussion to have because when we're talking about theology and understanding the world around you, how do you make sense of the current events right now?

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You just got a message that your kid's school got shut down for three weeks. This is affecting all of us. Did that happen because is there just not enough positive confession in the world?

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There's just a lack of it and there's just been too much. People have just been affirming that there might be a pandemic and now we have a pandemic.

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So, how do we make sense of these things? That's the practical aspects. But Stephen, you've put a lot of effort in this.

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So, I'm really going to kind of hand this to you so we can really kind of just really jump into the nitty -gritty of this.

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So, let's jump in. I think it would be important. So, there's a whole bunch of different places to go from that. One would be to answer your question, based on the

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Word of Faith doctrine and theology and also based on New Age theology and New Thought theology and doctrine, the reason why there is a pandemic right now is we brought this on ourselves somehow by something we were believing or confessing individually or collectively.

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One of the laws of faith in the Word of Faith movement is never make a negative confession.

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And otherwise, as Job said, what I have feared will come upon me has happened, right?

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And they will use that as a proof text that there is this mechanism built into the universe, this spiritual set of laws, where if we are speaking things out loud that are negative, these laws that God built into the universe, he's sovereign over them, but they operate automatically.

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They're going to reflex back into our reality, that which we are confessing with our mouth. And this makes me think of in the

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New Age movement and something that you definitely have a lot of experience in, which I want to hear you comment on, is the

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Law of Attraction and the Secret. Because the Law of Attraction is a very prevalent

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New Age, New Thought doctrine that goes back to the late 1800s, early 1900s, modern day.

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This is something that when Oprah Winfrey heard the message taught in the Secret, which is the Law of Attraction, which does parallel Word of Faith, which we're going to prove, she said, this is the message

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I've been trying to teach my audience for the last 21 years, is the Law of Attraction. And the

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Law of Attraction is basically, you are going to manifest in your reality that which is aligned with your dominant thoughts, your dominant energy, and your dominant words, and your dominant emotions.

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So whatever I am putting out into the universe, there is a mechanism, a set of spiritual laws, in this case, the

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Law of Attraction, that is impersonal, and that is going to guarantee

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I'm going to manifest in my reality that which I am putting out. So whatever is going on inside me is going to attract more of that into my world.

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Like attracts like. So if I want to get a raise at my job, if I start confessing positively,

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I'm going to get a raise. I'm going to be promoted at my job, or I'm going to be healed.

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I'm going to be protected from the coronavirus. This idea that my words have intrinsic metaphysical power, and that there's a set of spiritual laws that's going to ensure that I'm going to be protected when my words interact with that law.

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It's like cheat codes. It's like cheat codes. And some Word of Faith teachers will even call it a faith force. My faith words interact with a faith force.

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And it directly parallels the Law of Attraction, which goes back to the late 1800s, early 1900s.

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And it's extremely concerning when we start, and I want to hear your comments on this in particular, because you have background in the

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Law of Attraction. This was something you were practicing, thinking that this was compatible with Christianity. But here's a few quotes here.

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This is from Kenyon. He says, there are great spiritual laws that govern the unseen forces of life.

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Kenneth Copeland has said, spiritual law gave birth to physical law. The world and the physical forces governing it were created by the power of faith, a spiritual force.

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God, a spirit, created all matter, and he created all with the force of faith. Faith is a spiritual force, a spiritual energy, a spiritual power.

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It is this force of faith, which makes the laws of the spirit world function.

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So we'll come back in a second to faith being a force, because that's really interesting. And what is faith, biblically speaking?

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But the issue here is that there's spiritual laws in the universe that are impersonal, that we can interact with, with our words, with our positive confession.

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And that's why our words have power, because God built the universe, apparently, on this set of impersonal metaphysical laws, which is exactly what

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I believed when I was in the New Age Movement, which lacks biblical precedent, but once again, has new thought precedent. So what was your experience with Law of Attraction?

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Well, for somebody who was really, really into the Law of Attraction, that was just one of many laws. So you had the

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Law of Faith, you had the Law of Prosperity, the Law of Tithing, all this other stuff that went along with it, that the

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Law of Attraction was just the king of. So if you're going to take, it's hard to add to what you said, because you said it really well.

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It really is, that encompasses everything that somebody in the New Thought or New Age would believe.

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Because if you say something, or if you declare, you're bringing that out into your reality.

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And I cannot stop thinking about Kenneth Copeland, because he's the one who, he'll sit there, and I watch some of his stuff, but he'll sit there in his sermons, or, you know,

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I use that term lightly, and it's like a healing crusade. Hallelujah, thank you, Jesus, I have 20 people healed from this ailment, or whatever it was.

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And he'll basically tell people that, speak it now, speak it now, pray it now, believe it, receive it, kind of thing.

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And it parallels so many teachers like Joelstein. And whenever you see this, whenever you have a childhood that's basically telling you that you can create your own reality, it does mess with your imagination.

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You think that you can make things happen that aren't supposed to happen, like making unicorns exist and things like that,

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I mean, for a five -year -old. And then you have people like this, in the

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New Thought, who are teaching this, who you think are Christian. So inherently, you're confusing what is

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New Age, New Thought, with what you see to be actual biblical Christianity. So, yeah.

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And I'd like to hear your guys' thoughts on these quotes that I'm going to read here, talking about faith being a spiritual force, like gravity.

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So one of the laws of faith, in the Word of Faith movement, is that faith is a force, that's the first one.

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The second would be that this force is released through the spoken word. So you guys, you are extremely biblically studied, and especially touching the relationship between the will of man and the sovereignty of God, and the role faith plays in prayer.

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And I'd be curious to hear your first kind of knee -jerk reaction to these quotes, because this is completely foreign to the

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Bible. I couldn't really believe what I was hearing when I was reading this. So here's Charles Capp, or Charlie Capp, a

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Word of Faith teacher, and quoted from God's Creative Power Will Work for You, God released his faith in words.

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God created the universe by methods, which you have just put into motion by the words of your mouth.

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God released his faith in words. Man is created in the image of God, therefore man releases his faith in words.

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Okay, now you couldn't really truly say, this is Kenneth Copeland, that God created the universe out of nothing, because faith is something, right?

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And that's a really big distinction here. But he created it out of nothing insofar as, he created it out of nothing as far as there being any, not being any form or substance like it.

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In other words, he didn't have a world to create a world out of. He didn't have dust to make dust from. There was no chemical substance known as matter to make more matter from.

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The whole thing was born out of the force of faith that was residing inside the being of God.

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So the idea here is, he's basically saying God did not create the universe ex nihilo. God created it out of a force.

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So you have the Trinity, but then you have this set of forces that God utilized that resides in God's being, but is its own force with its own set of laws.

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Here's from rama .org, Kenneth Hagin's ministry, faith is a spiritual force. Here's Kenneth Copeland, it's not a mind force, it is a spirit force.

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It is not a mind force, it's a spirit force. Why does the world not accept the logic that if fear, a spiritual force will make a man sick, then faith, the opposite spiritual force will make him well.

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If the force of fear can imprison a man, then the force of faith can make him free.

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So the thing that I want us to get a hand along here is that what they are teaching in effect is that there is metaphysical thingness to faith.

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So when I say a word of faith out and I believe that God is for me, and if God is for me, who can be against me?

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That's self -edifying for sure. And I believe that it's important to make confessions about the promises of God, but the question is, what are we actually promised?

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But the distinction here is, are those words merely me affirming my trust in a sovereign

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God, or are those words themselves having some kind of metaphysical interaction with this set of laws instead of forces in the universe?

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And those words, that faith itself has thingness to it, has substance to it. And they'll quote from the

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KJV, faith is the substance of things not seen. It's a mistranslation. It has nothing to do with being a substance. So what do we think about the idea of faith being a metaphysical substance?

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That when I speak words of faith, in the spirit world, there's actually something going out, the force of faith, like an electric bolt, like gravity,

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Kenneth Copeland compares it to gravity, that that is in effect what is going and producing causal effects in the natural world, is the force of faith.

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That is what has effectual power, is a metaphysical force that we release through our words, kind of like,

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I don't know, like a magician. What do you think of that? Well, first and foremost is that looking at faith in its most simplistic terms, like what does the

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Bible say? It says, Ephesians 2 verse 8 and 9, for you're saved by grace through faith alone.

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It is the gift of God and not of yourselves, lest any man should boast. So what you see there is that one is a distinction between the creator and me being the imago

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Dei, the created being. And so almost the reality is the act of faith as a

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Christian is an acknowledgement of me as a sinner, putting my faith, like acknowledging that he is

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God and I am not. So we know that God is good and that he is truthful because he's eternal, he doesn't change.

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And so every aspect of God is always a characteristic of his nature. And so that's what you see there.

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And so the idea of faith being sort of the spiritual metaphysical, something that you can sort of like wield and bend the universe to your will, you don't see that from a biblical precedent.

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You see this as a gift that God gives us, as an ability to respond to the message of what

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Christ did, Christ and him crucified. So that aspect, again, you're seeing when you boil down these comparisons between New Thought and these originators of the

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Word of Faith movement, I would just see it looking at the very basic aspect, something completely antithetical to the basic, this is basic Christianity 101, as Waltimore called it, essential

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Christianity. One of my favorite verses, Romans 3 verse 26, says that God is just and he is the justifier of the one that has faith in Jesus.

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So the role of faith is that the sinner places his trust in God's son and through that act of faith, which is a gift of God, God actually, through a legal standpoint, justifies that sinner on that basis of faith, which is a gift of God to begin with.

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So it just goes from when you look at this is why it's so important to become familiar with the original.

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Understand the basics of what the Bible says about faith. What does the Bible say about the gospel?

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And this is why it's important. This is why when you look at what typically is brought up on a

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Sunday service, for those of you who actually are still going to church right now, who knows, you might be quarantined, but yeah, just that is the reality.

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Who knows where we'll be two weeks from now. But yeah, I mean, a lot of times there's just all these practical, like 10 ways to increase the marriage or all these different things about how to have your best life now, which we're talking about, but there's not this real practical exegetical looking to the word of God and explaining and examining these teachings.

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So that's a redefinition of terms. Yeah, absolutely. That's exactly what it is. When I think of faith and the word faith movement, if I'm trying to understand them right, it sounds like faith to them is the unmoved mover, the great causer, the one that's using a hierarchy to God himself as this force, the unmoved mover.

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But how do they get to that is where I think, well, they do take Hebrews 11 and they use verse three and I'll read it from the

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NIV and I'll explain a little bit of how they butcher the passage. And I'm trying to be respectful when

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I say that, but I'm going to start with first with verse one, which is what Stephen quoted earlier from a different translation.

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But here it is. Now, faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see. This is what the agents were commended for.

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By faith, we understand that the universe was formed at God's command so that what is seen was not made out of what was visible.

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So they take verse three and they say, by faith, this unmoved mover, this force, the universe was formed at God's words, literally that it had this power to create this.

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Well, the actual understanding of this verse in the context that it's written is saying we take by faith.

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Literally, we believe God when he tells us in his word in Genesis that he formed something from nothing, essentially that that's what the verse is communicating, but they use that verse to communicate and say, well, no, it's this, this force by faith that he actually created the universe out of his command.

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But I would reply and I would say, no, it's the faith that led Stephen to be martyred when he was being stoned to death, looking up and then seeing the face of face of Christ.

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You know, it's the faith that led Daniel. If you continue to read in the book of Hebrews that led

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Daniel to go to not bow down to when they told him to not pray.

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This is the faith, the faith that stands up to trials, to adversity, to suffering. The question is, is where, where does your faith lie?

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Is it in the promises of God or is it the promises that it's something that you can actually manipulate and use like, it's like a cheat code earlier.

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That's not, that's not faith in God. We're now having faith in a force. It's not, it's not

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God anymore. So you have no faith. So I would say in the, in the, in the context in trials, in adverse, in adversity and in suffering,

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I think that you wouldn't be able to say Jesus is Lord. You would actually say Kaiser Curios, Caesar is

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Lord, and you'd bow down at the state. Well, you'd have to say that ultimately the

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Lordship of my life is in the hands of the words

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I'm decreeing and declaring. If faith is the ultimate force, that is the ultimate bringer to pass, right?

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The ultimate causal power is faith, right? So when God created the universe, like you quoted from Hebrews 11 verse three, you know, it says in the

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ESV by faith, we understand the universe was created by the word God. Right? So we understand this by faith that God created the universe.

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Like he said, it's pretty simple, right? But they, they want to interpret and say, we understand that the universe was created by the faith of God.

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Exactly by faith. Right? So it wasn't created from nothing. It was created by his faith and faith is a force like gravity. So this faith is apparently eternally existing in the

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Trinity. Yes. Right? So it has the property of eternality. That's exactly. And it's not God. It's a force that God taps into and utilizes, which is very, very problematic theologically.

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But what's also problematic here is that when we look at, it does have parallel to me when I'm, when I'm thinking about this, being in the new age movement, always being told my words, my words have like a vibratory frequency to them and they go out into the metaphysical world and they carry a frequency.

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If it's a positive frequency, it's going to bring back things that are aligned with that positive frequency. So I have to be careful with the words

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I'm speaking because it's going to interact with the spiritual laws in the universe because words actually have metaphysical substance to them.

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Right. Right. So basically here's a quote from Charles Fillmore saying a new thought teacher saying, faith is the perceiving power of the mind linked with appear to shape substance.

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Here's a quote from the secret. Remember that your thoughts and words are the primary cause of everything. So when you think, then say a sustainable thought, it is immediately sent out to the universe.

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That thought magnetically attaches itself to the like frequency back to your back to you through your feelings.

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Here's another quote from the law of attraction .com. Words consist of vibration and sound. It is these vibrations that create your very reality that surrounds you.

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Words are the creator, the creator of our universe, our lives and our reality. So our faith words are what create our reality.

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It's exactly what these word of faith teachers are saying. That, that, that exactly what I was thinking. And what does the Bible say? Does it say that we're the authors and the perfecters of our faith?

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No, it says Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith who for the joy set before him endured the cross, scorning it shame and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.

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Consider him who endured such opposition from sinful men so that you will not grow weary and lose heart. There's a battle.

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There's a struggle for every Christian in your struggle against sin. You have not yet resisted to the point of shedding your blood.

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And you have forgotten that word of encouragement that addresses you as sons. My son do not make light of the

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Lord's discipline and do not lose heart when he rebukes you. Are you even being rebuked in that sense?

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Like your faith, if you're the author of your faith, it's not the faith from God because he clearly is the author and perfecter of your faith.

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Right. I would say, show me from scripture one single example where faith is described as being a power or a substance because it's just, it's confidence in God.

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It's confidence and trust. I'd point out too that whenever we're doing our whole Bethel segment, this is exactly what

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Bill Johnson believes about faith, is that the reason why you can heal is because there's a sense of power in your faith.

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Your faith is power. That's right. That's what they do believe. That comes from the power of life and death is in the tongue, which just means my words have the ability to speak life and encouragement into someone or to tear someone down and be discouraging.

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It says just previously to that verse in Proverbs 16 that a gentle tongue is a tree of life.

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It doesn't mean that a gentle tongue can speak a tree of life into existence. Right. That's not what it's saying at all.

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It's just saying that my words have a great level of influence over the minds and thoughts and spirits of other people, but they don't have effectual power and causal power.

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The minute you start saying my words have thingness to them, my faith faith words have thingness, and they are what are causing new things to manifest in my world.

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Great. You're practicing the law of attraction. Yes, exactly. And just what I was thinking about too is that the commonality, which

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I'm seeing, and you see it in a New Age thought and now also in the world of faith, where it seems in both cases, one of the aspects is that there's no personhood in God.

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It's just this divine force or divine consciousness, but there's not necessarily a personhood. Even in the

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Word of Faith movement, though, in a sense where they may just acknowledge the personhood of God, but in practice, there's an aspect where you see the nature of Jesus and really

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God stripped of his personhood, because all that God becomes is almost like a vicarious catalyst to bring about whatever you're trying to...

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However you're trying to manifest the universe to your will. A mechanism. By the positive confession you bring out to the world.

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So God is not the sovereign creator that is now the Lord and the sovereign creator of your life.

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He's now this vicarious catalyst by which to bring about and bend the universe to your will.

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And it's funny how we're talking about the state of current events. Who knows where we'll be two weeks from now?

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This may have passed over, or we might be under quarantine or under martial law.

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Who knows? We don't really know. But the funny thing is, even right now, you're seeing the practical faultiness on a global scale exposed.

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You're seeing it, like I said, you're seeing it with the Bethel healing rooms closed. You're seeing it with, instead of Joel Osteen giving out these positive declarations that, you know, you're best pandemic now.

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You're dealing with these aspects where all of a sudden, when the rubber meets the road, and this is now on a global scale, you have wealth collapsing and you have wealth hangs in the balance.

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Drudge Report just updated up to saying, and again, this is just who knows what we'll be two weeks from now. At least at this point, they said that there could be up to 150 million

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Americans that attain this virus. We don't know what the outcome of that will be. I mean, there's other people that are recovering, but right now people are in fear because both of these things that are promised by positively confessing are now, it's like these two giant pillars.

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It's like the coronavirus is like that Samson pulling it down, you know? And so now, this is where you have to be practical and look at how you really address these things.

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The thing is, if everything that is going on right now can be solved by the force of faith, then let's just utilize the force of faith.

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If it was brought on by something that we feared or something we confessed, well, let's just confess the opposite.

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But what they're doing by backing away and shutting down these things is showing, wait, it actually does come down to the sovereign choice of God to choose, am

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I going to heal? And that ties into this other law that is taught in the

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Word of Faith movement. We looked at faith being a force that's released through the spoken word, which ties into the second law, which is what you confess, you will possess.

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So positive confession and affirmation brings you that which you are affirming.

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It brings it to pass. So here are some more quotes on that, and this ties into faith being a force, but it's because faith is a power and a force that things come to pass.

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So the reason why when I confess and I declare and I decree, it's because faith is a metaphysical force and it's interacting with the spiritual laws and it's going to bring these things into my reality.

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And I have a sovereign right from God because I'm made in his image. I'm a little God to use this force of faith as God did when he created the universe.

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So it's all interlinked and entwined together. But here's some quotes about positive confession coming from Word of Faith teachers.

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And we're going to contrast them with new thought, new age teachers, and we'll see what we're all thinking about this stuff.

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So here is E .W. Kenyon, the grandfather of the Word of Faith movement. What I confess,

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I possess. It took me a long time to see this truth. After I saw it and thought I understood it, I still could not act upon it.

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Christianity is called, quote, the great confession. The law of that confession is that I confess

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I have a thing before I consciously possess it. You notice that confession of the lips comes before God acts upon our spirits and recreates them.

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I have learned this law that when I boldly confess, then and only then do

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I possess. A .B. Simpson, this is like a Pentecostal guy from the early 1900s, believe ye, he asks, and then utters the great law of faith, which determines for every one of us, the measure of according to your faith, be it done unto you.

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And there is the secret which opens heaven, commands all the forces and resources of the throne.

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It is not agonizing prayer. Forget about, you know, fervency, you know, forget about the parables where Jesus says, you know, if your neighbor comes and he knocks and he says, get me bread, you're going to say, well,

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I'm sleeping with my family. I can't get up, but because he's persistent, you're going to get up and give it to him anyway. Forget about that.

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Right? It's not much labor. It is simply this, according to your faith, I just have to be convinced in my own mind.

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Great. Here's another quote from Kenneth Hagin. Kenneth Hagin, you can have what you say. The children of Israel got exactly what they said.

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You always get and have in your life what you believe for and say. Those who have a quick confession of faith receive almost instantly.

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The woman with the issue of blood got exactly what she said. Those Israelites who accepted the majority report got exactly what they said.

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They wandered in the wilderness until every one of them died. It's because of their confession, not the judgment of God. Charlie Kapp, even though God had the image, this is another word of faith teacher, even though God had the image inside him and the spirit of God was there to cause it to come to pass, it had to be released out of his mouth before any changes could take place.

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Everything you say will come to pass. Robert Tilton, this televangelist, word of faith televangelist, whatever comes out of your mouth shall be produced in your life.

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Joel Osteen, whatever follows the I am will eventually find you. Joel Osteen again, in the power of I am, when negative thoughts come, the key is to never verbalize them.

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Kenneth Copeland, our words have spiritual power, power that changes circumstances and shapes destinies.

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Words are spiritual, they carry power. When we speak his words in faith, they have the same power to change our circumstances as when he spoke creation into being.

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Kenneth Hagin, and here's a logical implication of this. Kenneth Hagin admits this in this next quote, but by their own definitions of what faith is and what positive confession does, being a

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Christian doesn't require any of this in order for these laws to become effective in one's own life.

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Because they haven't specified it's faith in Jesus Christ. Exactly, what's the faith? What is faith? The object of the faith, they're just saying faith.

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It's a force now. It's a power. It's a force now. Have faith in the outcome. Faith is a force, it's going to bring the outcome, positively confess it, and it's going to come to pass.

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Kenneth Hagin admits this, he says, it used to bother me when I'd see unsaved people getting results, but my church members not getting any.

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Then it dawned on me what sinners were doing. They were cooperating with this law, the law of faith.

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Ouch. So what he's saying is they're getting prosperity, they're getting things, what he would call actual blessings from God that actually prove you have a faith, or you're actually manipulating this force.

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It doesn't come with the knowledge of Jesus Christ being God dying on the cross. This is how a new ager could claim to have results and not know

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Jesus. That would be what repel them a lot of times. But what does it profit a man to gain the world but forfeit his soul?

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What does it profit to be a deist who believes that your prayers and your words are ultimately answered by mechanisms and not

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God himself? Right, right. So basically God set up the universe on these spiritual laws, and our words interact with these spiritual laws.

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And guess what an unbeliever, Kenneth Hagin admits, an unbeliever can use these principles to their own advantage, just like new age teachers do.

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Why do I need prayer when I have these? God's not listening. We've got these forces, mechanisms. God's already put them in motion.

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He's sitting back. He's not involved with his creation. He's no longer personal in the deist point of view. He's not needed in the realm of manifestation and prosperity and blessing.

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The sovereignty of God isn't needed. He set up the laws and it's up to us. He's doing something else. It's up to us as little gods to exercise our faith like God did.

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Well, and I think that people hopefully see by now why we're doing this, like why we're even saying anything, because this is closer to new thought and new age than it ever will be in what we find in the

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Bible. Oh yeah. Yeah. Here's a few quotes from new age teachers on this. Imagine Marianne Williamson, imagine the most outrageously positive possibility for your life, claim it and consider it done.

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Here's Charles Fillmore, in the teaching of Jesus Christ, we have found that certain thoughts held in the minds of the people are causing widespread misery and death.

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We also found that these thoughts can be dissolved through prayer and conscious will. Paul understood this when he said, be transformed by the renewing of your mind.

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So the thoughts in the minds of people were causing misery and death. And disease. And disease. There is a definite relationship.

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This is a textbook of Christian healing from the unity school of Christianity, which is just a metaphysical cult.

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There is a definite relation between the thoughts that man holds on in his mind and the conditions that are manifest in his body and his affairs.

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In your true self, you are well and perfect, even as Christ is whole and perfect.

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God's will concerning you is to be healthy. There are no incurable diseases with God. All things are possible. One good thought or word in dude with faith will dissolve a thousand error thoughts or words.

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Two positive declarations of truth will put all evil to fight. And here is the flight to flight.

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Here is the secret. When you say I am, the words that follow are summoning creation with a mighty force because you are declaring it to be fact.

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You are stating it with certainty. And so immediately after you say, I am tired, or I am broke, or I am sick,

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I am late, I am overweight, the genie says, which is a metaphor for the law of attraction in the universe, your wish is my command.

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Knowing this, why not use the I am to your advantage? I am healthy. I am receiving every good thing. I am happy.

33:56

I am abundant. It sounds exactly like Joel Osteen. Yeah. We just quoted him. I actually heard this quote recently, and I'm going to say this here because this is,

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I normally don't speak about this guy on my channel, but I want your guys' thoughts on this because this is absurd. And just as Christians, how do we reconcile this?

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We know that within the mainstream evangelical charismatic circuit,

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I identify as charismatic, but what's going on in the charismatic circuit that we're familiar with, you guys have done podcasts on Bethel, for example, there's a quote that came out recently by Todd White.

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And he was saying, first of all, if you have a problem with people like Kenneth Hagin or Kenneth Copeland, it's because you have no

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Holy Spirit. You have no relationship. And he said that about Oral Roberts too.

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If you have a problem with these guys, you have no Holy Spirit, no relationship. So if I have a problem with the idea that I'm just as much an incarnation of Jesus as Christ was, if I have a problem with that, it's because I have no

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Holy Spirit. If I have a problem with the idea that Oral Roberts had a vision of a 900 foot tall

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Jesus, that's because I don't have the Holy Spirit. But the point is he was talking about Kenneth Copeland being like this herald in the faith, this general in the faith.

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And he said that, Kenneth, when I was reading this, when I heard you say that, that just blew me away.

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And Kenneth was like, don't say that. Don't say that. The power of life and death is in the tongue. When I was in the service one time, or I heard about this story of this woman in the service, and she was sitting in the service and said, oh, that just blew me away when the pastor said something profound and a tornado came through and ripped through the building and cut it in half.

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The power of life and death is in the tongue. And Todd White is like, his response to that was,

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I'll just be quiet and let you do the talking then. Like, whoa, man, that's wisdom. Whoa. That's just so crazy.

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Like, what do we think about that? Do we think that if I say that blew me away, I'm increasing the chances of a tornado coming through?

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Because they believe that you are endowed with deity, that there's spiritual laws set up in the universe.

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Your faith is a spiritual force. When you release it with positive confession or negative confession, that force goes through, interacts with these laws and brings that to pass in your life.

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That's pure New Age. We've established that. But how can we interact with that as Christians and not be like, what is this?

36:17

Like the Looney Tunes? Yeah. I would say as a whole that you would look at this sort of behavior and you see this across the board with cults and cultish movements, whether it's

36:30

Jehovah's Witnesses with their disfellowship and how they shun people who begin to question the watchtower.

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You see with Scientology with their disconnection policies and where people are shunned and disconnected and you're not allowed to, once you begin questioning, you become demonized.

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You start being accused of what are your crimes. And you see that throughout it where there's this, all of a sudden there's this demonization when you begin to question about what they're saying is legitimate, doesn't match up with scripture.

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And so when I hear that, it definitely raises red flags. And so what I would just say off of that, and again, just on a personal level,

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I have not always really read too much of Todd White. I'm not saying he's not saved.

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I'm not saying he's not well -intentioned. I'm not even going there. But the fact that Kenneth Copeland has that kind of authority in that area of the body of Christ and that a statement so profoundly silly is, well, that blew me away.

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A tornado came over. That's being received as high wisdom. Oh yeah. But just in fairness, in that particular instance,

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I would still have a precedent that the Bible says to test all things. And so we see as a whole in the totality of scripture, especially in the

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New Testament, you see this encouraging to test all things, hold fast to that, which is good.

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And we always talk about in Acts 17 verse 11, when it talks about these who are more noble minded in Thessalonica, they search the scriptures daily to see if these things were so.

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It talks very highly of them. So I would just say off of it, and I don't know Todd White's heart, but I would say

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I would have a precedent to test what he says by scripture saying, if you question these leaders, you don't have the

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Holy Spirit. I would have to humbly and adamantly reject that statement because it's not in conformity with scripture.

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1 John 2 .27 says that for, and again, it says, but the anointing that you receive from him abides in you, for you have no need for anyone to teach you.

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But as his anointing teaches you about everything and it is true, and there is no lie, just as it has been taught in you, abide in him.

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It talks about, and there's other translations that talks about the Holy One, which abides in you, that teaches you the truth.

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And one of the aspects of the Holy Spirit is the ability to discern because the

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Holy Spirit illuminates the text of scripture. And how many times have we been at times, especially dealing with cultism, where you're dealing with some sort of false teacher or dealing with some sort of cult leader talking to a cultist, and like you dealt with the missionaries in the airport on the way here, while there still are people in airports, thankfully, and who knows if they'll be here by two weeks from now.

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But all that being said is that how many times have the alarm bells gone off of that?

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So what they're trying to do is in that particular statement, it would be, I would reject and say it's unbiblical because if Oral Roberts or any of these people are saying something, and with these statements about these visions where they're seeing

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God as a man, and even some of these strange, and going back to some of the things we saw in Bethel, even like moving in glory rooms with Joshua Mills, like that stuff

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I would say is adamantly spiritually dangerous for sure. We would have a precedent to, if they're trying to make a statement that we don't have the

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Holy Spirit, I'd adamantly reject that, because the Holy Spirit is the one that illuminates the text of scripture, and we're called to test things by scripture.

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So if I say there's something that is adamantly not matching up to the word of God, I have a right to call it out.

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And you don't have a biblical basis. I dare anyone by scripture to back a statement like that.

39:49

Yeah, it's kind of like the, it's kind of like what you said, if you were to read the Bible a hundred times front to back, there is no way you'd come up with these, with these teachings.

39:58

Right. You know, and so positive confession would be equated to what a new ager would call affirmation.

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I mean, you'd say these things over and over again, almost religiously, and expect that outcome.

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That's inherently completely something you would find in the new age. You are this, you are that, whatever it is.

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And then the equation of that would be positive confession. Yeah. My thought process with them, especially in the exercising of faith, faith and questioning if you have the

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Holy Spirit, if their measurement is by what you gain through the power of positive confession, I'd say, what about the apostle

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Paul? He had a thorn in his flesh. He asked three times for it to be removed, and God said, no.

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Do you have greater faith than Paul? I would say to these men, are you the rich young ruler? You claim to have faith.

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You claim to know him. But if Jesus Christ asks you to give it all up, all of your worldly and earthly possessions, would you at the point of that and follow him?

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This is what Paul says. He says, but whatever, this is in Philippians chapter three, he says, but whatever gain I had, I counted it as loss for the sake of Christ.

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Indeed, I count everything as lost because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ my

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Lord. For his sake, I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish in order that I may gain

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Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own, that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ, faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith.

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And then furthermore, he goes, he says this in Philippians chapter three, he says, for many of whom I've often told you and now tell you, even with tears, walk as enemies of the cross of Christ.

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He warns, he warns the church of Philippi, says their end is destruction. Their God is their belly and they glory in their shame with their minds set on earthly things.

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And this is our promise that we can have hope for. It says, but our citizenship is in heaven and from it, we await a savior, the

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Lord Jesus Christ, who will transform our lowly body to be like his glorious body. That's not now.

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It's not now. By the power that enables him to even subject all things to himself. That's not now.

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Right. And what about like the sufficiency of Christ? Like Christ being enough. Is he enough? Paul's saying there, versus what just two planets has said, faith demands that we have possessions.

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And you know, I have two planes and you're going to let your, I was talking to the Lord on my plane. He's like, well, you got a plane now you're going to let your faith stagnate.

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I was like, oh Lord, is that you? And there's this quote we were going to get into, but it's not totally related to the topic of new age and new thought, but the idea of God having a body.

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Kenneth Copeland has said that God is a six foot one, six foot two man, about 200 pounds who lives on another planet.

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That God made this planet after the image of the mother planet. And we can provide primary quotes, the date, the tape name.

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If people want that, we can provide that. So if you're going to say that people who are skeptical of Copeland don't have the

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Holy Spirit and we have a problem with saying God's a six foot one man on the mother planet. Like there's a big disconnect there.

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Either you don't really know what Kenneth Copeland is saying and has said in the past openly and repeatedly, or maybe you're not in tune with the

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Holy Spirit like you thought you were. And when it comes to this idea of faith, I want to comment on this too, because we were talking about positive confession.

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Does positive confession have any intrinsic effectual ability to bring about, or to bring to pass something new into my reality in and of itself?

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If the word of faith principles are true, what I confess, I possess. Well, is that true?

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I would like to know what they say with this. The Bible gives seven examples of prayers that will not be answered.

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Confess all you like. If you fall under one of these categories, God's not hearing you. The prayers of unrepentant sinners who blatantly disregard his moral will, even if you're saved,

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John 9, 31, 1 Peter 3, 12, Psalm 66, 18,

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Proverbs 28, verse nine. If a man departs from the law of the Lord, even his prayer becomes an abomination to him.

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Prayers that are said by those not abiding in Christ, John 15, verse seven. Prayers that go against what

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God is willing to do. There's a scope in which God is willing to act.

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First John 5, 14 to 15. Prayers motivated by wrong, selfish motives, James 4, 5.

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You have not because you have not. People like that verse that don't like the second part of the verse, and you receive not because you ask amiss to spend it on yourselves.

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The prayers of those who are dishonoring their wives unrepentantly, 1 Peter 3, 11. Prayers that are said for attention or to impress people, boastful and arrogant prayers,

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Matthew 6, 5. Prayers of those not born again in Christ. So that would rule out Hagen's interpretation.

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They were receiving it through the law of faith. John 14, 6. No one comes to the father but through me, alienated from the life of God, Colossians 1, 21.

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And 1 Timothy 2, 5 says there's one God, one mediator between man and God, the man Christ Jesus.

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I'd also say this, the Bible tells us that faith and words on their own are useless.

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Here's a quote from Proverbs 14, 23. In all toil there is profit. When you actually set your hand to the plow, there's profit.

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But mere talk ends only in poverty. That's interesting. I thought talk and faith words were going to bring riches into my life.

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Nope. Not if you're not setting your hand to the plow, your words mean nothing. Your words have no intrinsic ability to bring something to pass in your life.

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This is the most shocking example. And I saw this in the book we were reading for preparation for this,

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The Word of Faith Controversy, very balanced approach to this. It doesn't talk about new thought, new age parallels, but this example,

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I wish I would have used this as an example for why the law of attraction is false. You have in Revelation 3, verses 17 to 18, when

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Jesus is addressing the church in Laodicea, this is a knockdown argument against word of faith teaching.

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Jesus says this to the church, for you say, I am rich, I have prospered, and I need nothing.

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If they're confessing that positively, word of faith teachers are telling them, you've received it.

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You have it. What you confess, you possess. So that's what they're confessing. I'm rich. I have prospered.

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I need nothing. Joel Osteen in practice, not realizing Jesus says that you are wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked.

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I counsel you to buy from me gold refined by fire so that you may be rich, and white garments so that you may clothe yourselves, and the shame of your nakedness may not be seen, and salve to anoint your eyes so that you may see.

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Jesus is telling them, you can confess all you want. You're saying these things. They're not true. You haven't come to me to receive anything.

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I'm the one who's going to sovereignly release these things to you. Your positive confession of them is erroneous.

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You say you're rich. You're not rich. The word of faith movement tells us the minute you start confessing it, you receive it.

46:58

I love that you bring that epistle to the church later. I see it because even earlier in that,

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Jesus says, I know thy works. So regardless of what you think you're confessing, you can fool yourself.

47:11

You can fool your minister. You can fool others, but you can never fool Christ ever. I think you brought up a really interesting point that just came into my mind while you're talking is that you cannot separate

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God's justice from faith. Let's give it to the word of faith real quick and say that there's faith, this unmoved mover that can be tapped into.

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So if it's going to move and work for you, would it do something that negates

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God's justice and righteousness? So for example, Jim Jones, he was a new thought teacher. He practiced it.

47:43

He wanted it. And he wanted to manifest communism into this physical reality and 913 people died.

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Therefore, the law of faith that he was actually commanding, it happened. Where's the justice?

47:54

If there's this law, how can this attribute, I would say of God, we would say in a sense, because he would have created it of somehow he has to be before all of it.

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How can it work without God's justice? They would have to say it because it's a spiritual law, a metaphysical law built into the universe that God set up.

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And that as Hagen has admitted, unbelievers themselves can use and are getting success from even though his church followers weren't, that it wouldn't be contingent upon God's prescriptive will.

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It's just the mere presence of faith and the force of faith goes out, interacts with the spiritual, whatever it is.

48:37

Some word of faith teachers call it the faith force, interacts with these laws that are built in the universe and it brings them that which they have faith for.

48:44

It's not contingent on if it's in accord with God's moral will or not. Exactly. And you just brought up earlier, all of those beautiful Bible verses that say the exact opposite.

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And I'm so glad for it that our God is a just God. He's a righteous God. And he doesn't listen to those types of things or move according to someone else's will.

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He's not our slave. We're supposed to be slaves to him. Right. So basically what you would have to say is that, you know, we can quote here from the book of, you know, first imaginations and you would have to say that, you know,

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God puts these conditions on whether or not he will lend an ear to our prayer. And he says, he will provide you according to your needs, not according to all your wants, but according to your needs.

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He is the one who will sovereignly release blessings and favor upon your life. I would say in my own words, should we cooperate with him?

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You know, should we pray with faith? Jesus praises people 18 times for having faith.

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Without faith it's impossible to praise God. Yeah, we should be praying in faith. We just went through seven different conditions.

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You know, we need to be taking God seriously. There's no like disgusting, unrepentant sin in our life.

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Like we're just sinning night and day and then say a two second prayer before bed and think God's going to answer it. That kind of thing.

49:53

Yeah. If you don't want to go through God's method of how to have a relationship with him and how to be a son to him as a sovereign father who wants to provide provision for us, that's okay.

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Because you can get what you want through a second means. By positive confession, the power of faith interacting with metaphysical laws he built into the universe.

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You can bypass and circumvent all of that and use faith words to get what you want. That's what the word of faith teachers are necessarily implying by the system they've set up.

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You can circumvent God's means of fathering us and bestowing good things upon us and do it through a mere mechanism, whether or not you even know him.

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Without a personal relationship to Jesus Christ growing in grace and being conformed into the image of God, you're just using a mechanism.

50:43

Regardless of how you're treating your wife, regardless of your relationship to the law of God. And this is also an important conversation when right now the entire world is jumping into uncharted waters with where things are right now by the time this podcast gets released.

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And it's one of those things where this whole movement as a whole, it strips the power of what real essential

51:09

Christianity and the gospel really has, which is the ability to suffer well and have true meaning and suffering.

51:18

Like in Philippians it says it's only to believe, but to suffer for his sake, for the sake of Christ. And when all of a sudden, when you don't have that and you think that you have this ability to bend the universe to your will, yet there's no, there's no, there's no, the shelves are, the store shelves are empty and you're stuck inside your home and you can't go outside or whatever, wherever this uncharted this is beyond precedent of anything

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I've ever experienced in my lifetime. But you have a precedent when you look at other Christians in history, the amount of persecution of even the early church.

51:56

There are stories of Christians who dealt when the black plague was around of people who knew that this was that time was, people knew that time was limited.

52:05

Like one of my favorite, C .S. Lewis in his book, The Screwtape Letters, he talks about how the, he's talking to his,

52:16

Wormwood is talking to his nephew Screwtape and he talks about how on one hand he said that like suffering is a good, it's sometimes good to use, but you have to be careful because we don't allow suffering when you, all of a sudden when you start having suffering being precedent, then people start looking to the enemy which they talk to as God.

52:37

So almost in a sense where Satan was, or what they're talking about in The Screwtape Letters is that we, if we just kind of keep people in this sort of like utopia, there's always going to be this abundance of material things and distractions and food and just all the different stuff and all the different entertainment you can distract us with and then we'll be fine.

52:57

We don't have this need for God. But all of a sudden when all those things that we rely upon are stripped away, now as a presence where Christians say this is an opportunity to share the true hope of the gospel, and you would even see this with Christians during the

53:11

Black Plague, where they would go out into the streets and they would go and reach the lost because they knew that they had assurance that they would be in heaven but these people would be in hell.

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There are stories of pastors who would go and would dig a subtle, like a shallow grave and would stand and would just stand in the streets out like in these like dirt roads and just open air preach knowing that if it's my time to go, this

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Black Plague gets me, I'm just going to fall back into this grave and I'm going to be with the Lord. Like there is this intensity of understanding the frailty of life and that's one of the things too like our society has really stripped us from because like you see an accident happens right now like what do we do?

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It's everyone just go and clean up, get off the road, get out of people's sight right?

53:57

And now it's almost in a sense we're on a global scale. No one can escape this wherever this is headed.

54:05

Looking mortality in the face. Yeah, looking mortality in the face and as a Christian we can understand that there are plenty of people who have gone, who have suffered and wherever this is headed and like the true message of the gospel like we have the ability, whatever this entails, to suffer well.

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If to be absent with the body is to be present with the Lord. The Bible also talks about how like Paul talks about who he says there's moments where we were brought into such a position that we even despaired for life but God put that in such a way that we would be reliant on him not on ourselves and the whole context of that is faith.

54:47

Amen. And so that's where like we have the ability to one be a good witness and if you're listening to this if you're a

54:54

Christian and if you don't like this you know what you need to repent and believe the gospel because as you can see this world had there's no stability in this world and you need to turn to Christ and turn from your sin and if not you're going to spend you think this is bad try hell.

55:11

I mean hell's would be way worse. You don't want it. I mean I'm saying that you don't want to be there so turn to Christ repent and believe the gospel like this and so I'm saying that but we have this ability to understand just like I said

55:23

I'm repeating myself but just to suffer well but also have a peace and assurance in times like these where we understand that God is in control we need to be reliant on him and not have this unwarranted guilt that somehow what's going on around us is because is our fault because we haven't positively confessed enough.

55:43

Yeah or we don't or we've made negative confessions. Like I've been down here and I guess

55:50

I have faith in the Lord's providence over my life like the way

55:55

I think about it is Lord I'm trying to serve you out here if I get something you know I've been biting my nails I shouldn't be doing that but I've been doing some pretty bad stuff so if I get hit with it even if I get it

56:06

I'm not going to get mad at God. I mean like God I was serving you so if you take my life here what's going to happen I'm going to stand before you and ask you a question why did you why would you allow me to die just trying to serve you in ministry and you're going to give me a sufficient answer

56:19

I'm going to jump for joy because I'm in your presence eternally now versus well if I catch it

56:25

I got to be real my faith was a problem that I have a spiritual condition I have a spiritual issue and I didn't have enough faith to fix it or I started confessing never so I gotta start writing out the words

56:36

I'm saying each day and make a certain amount of confession so I didn't confess maybe I need to go to Bethelstore .com and buy a declaration counter and make sure

56:43

I'm counting all the positive declarations I'm making and I need to try and get 150 a day it's a real thing that exists yeah and it causes panic within people and it's it's like well let's rest in the promises of God and yeah

56:55

I'm going to pray out the promises of God in faith and with boldness because I'm commanded to boldly approach the throne of grace in the time of need and there's lots of things

57:04

I'm I do want to declare the promises of God over my life I only have a right to declare that which

57:11

I'm guaranteed yeah right that God has already told me in his word so I can declare that in the end

57:18

I'll have victory in Christ amen right I can declare that in the end if God is for me who can be against me amen

57:25

I can declare that God will never leave me nor forsake me but where's this idea that I can start declaring that all of Florida we will be protected by by from the coronavirus not in there and then

57:35

I can start declaring that my body will not contract this virus like am

57:41

I promised to go from birth to death in Christ without ever experiencing any sickness or any illness ever apparently not am

57:50

I promised to go from birth to death in Christ never going through any circumstantial trial

57:55

Paul was shipwrecked stoned bitten by did he just have enough faith to avoid these things right exactly um so I guess what's concerning is that when we look at some of these teachers and their their new thought roots and their new thought parallels what's concerning for me is like I talked about the

58:12

Bethel declaration counter this is not segregated to just the 1970s and 1980s word of faith preachers that our parents listened to and our grandparents listened to right this is now manifesting in mainstream charismatic evangelical

58:28

Christianity where some of these same teachers that we've quoted from are now yoking up with very big very prominent ministries who are herald heralding them as heroes and generals of the faith and are adopting their their same language their vernacular their mannerisms their doctrine their teaching and they are passing this off as you know some great mantle yeah some great man and even people who want to unravel they want to obtain the mantle of uh

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William Branham for example for example and he did he who did healing certain multiple healing services with Jim Jones yeah it's a documented fact and that's just an example of did the that's just one particular example he also said that the trinity was demonic and believed that we are the biological offspring of satan yeah that satan reproduced with eve in the garden gave birth to all of us serpency doctrine yeah serpency doctrine he also practiced astrology as well so but you know praise god apparently an angel would show up at his at his uh sermons and start healing people so you know he's got this crazy mantle there's pictures of it which is funny because isn't healing a gift of the spirit it's if it's if it really is a ministry of the spirit for today what does the angel have to do with it nothing right didn't jesus go to give us the spirit yeah amen right so why does an angel have to come in and play a function of the spirit if it's really of god it's just it's very strange what what is the need of the church to mimic secular pagan worship like what's the need of the church for that we don't need it no but yet it's influenced in like bleeding into it in so many ways well what what it comes down to i think is in the garden of eden you have a promise of status for godhood and a promise of secret knowledge and power power comes from knowledge and power comes from status right and we're attracted to power now is it intrinsically we need to be empowered by what god says about us we need to be empowered from the fact that we are joint heirs a holy nation a royal priesthood we are sons of god i want to derive my sense of you know empowerment if you will from what god says about me right that's healthy versus i want to compete with god for his throne and be empowered by the lies of satan that i'm i'm deity i'm ontologically equivalent to god that i have the ability to have creative power in the same way god did and it really does funnel back to the edenic lie yep that the word of faith teachers are kind of capitalizing on you know and when it comes to what some of these teachers in the word of faith movement the ministries they're yoking up with in particular it was interesting so benny hann being a big word of faith teacher kenneth copeland being another word of faith teacher in the the dangerous hyper charismatic circuit that you guys have talked about on this podcast a lot they're yoking up they're doing conferences with them and they're being applauded and they always talk about you know if you just look at copeland's eyes he's got this fire i hear them say that all the time this fire i just can't get over it when you look at moho i think he looks crazy personally i think he looks demonic if you guys look at if you listen to audio of our first episode uh go to our facebook page we actually shared the video too it's um it looks like he dipped his hand in some oil it looks like some sort of like it's just see if you bear witness to this disturbing and see if that has any kind of resemblance to what it says in the book of acts that when steven before he gave his speech they upon him and his face was shining like the face of an angel is that what we're seeing with kenneth copeland he like watch his interview recently with um inside edition yes yes and see is that the face of an angel while i was just thinking look at that anointing but he's going on these stages and giving these talks everyone's applauding him and these churches are like really excited that he's partnering with them and that they're partnering with him and yeah these same teachers teachings are leaking into mainstream evangelical charismatic uh circles and and one big example there are these maybe we can have a whole different discussion about this one time but they're these they're called the send yep they're filling up stadiums and having really big 50 60 000 people come and fill up a stadium where they have all these hyper charismatic teachers come on and you know share about healing and give prophetic words and they had the send last year and they had sean bolt come up and give a talk francis chan was actually there he had actually had a really good talk at the beginning um but the point is um during the course of the set i signed up for live stream because i was like i gotta see this i gotta i just i'm gonna go to the one this year they're having another one this year in kansas city maybe we'll see maybe yeah maybe right and so guess what happens near the end of it guess who comes up on stage benny hinn and he leads it for the last two hours even though he wasn't on the uh description as one of the guest speakers but he's heralded as this general of the faith but they know christianity will freak out if they find out he's speaking there so i was talking to someone who was supposed to be a speaker at the send who helped organize and facilitate it and i was like it looked like you guys left benny hinn off the list because you knew that if you included him there you know the body of christ would freak out and be like what's going on like he's disqualified himself from being able to teach he's taught tritheism he's taught that each member of the trinity has like three tripartite there's nine there's nine yeah well great yeah um there's a lot of things he's said and done that he's not above reproach he's not well thought of by outsiders he's not able to teach just get him off the stage and he's like yeah that's what happened we knew that people were going to freak out so we didn't have him included on the list right but they're quite happy to partner with them and they're actually now front running this hyper charismatic revivalist type charge where we want to bring them on to lead and come alongside of us as we're going to usher in this new revival that god is doing and you know we're gonna you know bill johnson kenneth copeland you know here we come yeah and same theology um same teaching and as we've demonstrated when it comes to these faith teachings these declaration -based teachings they have no biblical precedent or justification but they they have a very clear new age new thought parallel right and that should make people think i want nothing to do with that if i can't find it in scripture but i can find it in phineas quimby and ronda bern and not not cherry picking scripture yeah like they because even even the new thought authors will use scripture but it's it's the teachings that it comes down to is that if you read the bible alone you would never come up with these teachings yeah right and just um just to wrap things up here too and i'll let you jump in any thoughts too it's just that you know when we launch cultists we just we're like we're just going to start because they're we'll just kind of figure out as we go there's just a huge need and we're like are we ever going to run out of topics or ideas we feel like it feels like we've only scratched the surface and you know it's as a whole i mean and obviously a lot of people know us because of our initial bethel episodes and there's a while where we kind of took sort of like a break from it kind of distance ourselves and all transparency just because we still on many levels we still feel like this is still on many levels still an in -house conversation i would say there's a lot of people who go to bet who attend bethel who are saved and born again uh obviously i would make a definitive case that there is um i believe that lygia stevens who was on this episode very very very nice uh gentleman i i would say that he is a brother i would uh think in areas as far as like theologically that i would not uh obviously agree with given that he attends at bethel and you know and concerns in regard obviously in regards to levels of discernment things like that but um you know this is we're dealing mostly our focus primarily is definitive cults and so when we're looking at the discernment realm we kind of leave that to other people whether it's like justin peters or people like over in wretched radio i think when we want to approach this topic um we're dealing with definitive cults or at least waltamart would talk about when you start toying with the essentials and given this sort of unholy alliance between new thought and word of faith combined combined with that it's cultish and it's very and it's not just something that's stagnant it's an evolved it's an evolving entity um and just funny because right now we're coming up on almost a year anniversary of when we launched uh when we released the fact the series defecting from bethel lindsey davis and i think at that point i became really just aware that this is just there's a lot of emotionally charged thought and this episode and that episode didn't create that it just channeled something that was already there i'm fully convinced of that and so i would i i really hope that this podcast will do and even like this these discussions these conversations will hopefully be a catalyst for other people to have conversations and say wait a second we're not here to go after or demonize anyone we're just trying to have the conversations with love and just lay the facts we're not playing any sensationalist like exorcist music to try and like build up a sway in a mode like an emotive you know precedent towards someone we're just trying to say these are concerns look at the facts um and we're not bashing anybody either but we're when we're looking at at a hold this movement this is not stagnant it's an evolving evolving entity and we like i would say in all unanimous agreement we see it to where it could evolve towards a definitive cultism almost in the same way where you know mormonism has evolved a lot we i see is still this movement as a whole sort of evolving on a level where it could go there and that's that's really the concern here so it's premised on new thought christian science principles that we've documented with primary sources have existed for over a hundred years and they're influencing that sect of christianity today that's why you can't listen to a sermon anymore without i release and i declare and we decree this and god we don't have to ask if this is your will we know it's your will to resurrect so and so from the dead where are these teachings coming from they're coming from john g lake william brannum and that weird sort of latter rain area of pentecostalism and they're coming from kenyon and his new thought predecessors yep it's a it's a combination of those and here this is the product right and so it is evolving towards something that's cultish because it's cultish at its roots at its foundation and while they might not adopt every single thing every word of faith teacher has said they're adopting a lot of it they're adopting enough where we need to say hey guys a lot of you out will affirm your brothers love you in christ please consider these things thoughtfully and prayerfully before the lord test them against and uh you know please test care what the word of god says yeah please care about it you should jesus says sanctify them by the truth thy word is truth god's word is truth you cannot declare or manifest your own salvation yeah you can't it's a it's a gift from god lest any man should boast right you you cannot manifest your salvation the first thing that needs to be looked at is how do you stand before god are you justified through the righteous robes of christ and relying on faith through him or are you trying to bend god to work to your will to gain the material things of this world when one day you will die you cannot publicly declare yourself from the grave it's a promise that's given to all of us right and there's a reason for that remember your mortality remember your death it is imminent it is coming no matter how much you surround yourself with material possessions your death is still looking you in the face and your time is running out so tremble tremble and repent are you ready to meet the lord are you just trying to get catch a feel exactly and just trying to improve your life circumstance oh right one more thing i want to say too is like what i've had this conviction of is i've been trying to understand these things and you know studying word of faith teachings and even hyper charismatic teachings and what i what i believe everyone in the body of christ should do is emphasize what jesus emphasized and emphasize what paul emphasized in correct ratios in relatively correct ratios so if i read the new testament which is like this long you can read in like two weeks right if i read that over and over and over and over and over again what kind of christianity will that produce if i'm emphasizing what jesus emphasized in his 70 plus commandments and emphasizing what paul emphasized in his ministry which is mostly doctrinal truth and sanctification imitate me as i imitate christ yeah am i going to come away with a type of spirituality that is based around the power of life and death is in the tongue no you reject it and you'll have what you say like that's not what your christianity will look like if you're emphasizing things correctly there's an error in emphasis read the bible more than you read joel osteen books in tdj yeah or whatever yeah like read the word of god and trust yourself that the holy spirit will bring the word of god um you know to life in you and will bring understanding and you know it's not too complex for you to understand you don't have to default to these teachers and don't think someone's a spiritual authority just because they bear the name of christ right because that's i think that's hard is that they look at these men like they're like they're the red phone to god they're apostles that they're apostles that they're they're the ones that you know bear witness to truth so all right well this has been good i believe this is uh it's always funny when you like you start you're like how where's this conversation going we covered a lot of ground there's so much more we could cover we've gone here for a long time and i think we're uh carmen our producers come in a couple times so we've gone we obviously have gone in extra innings but we wanted to really put together this important uh conversation for you and just you really want to consider i mean who knows where things will be right now as as we record this it is uh thursday march the 12th by the time we release the second episode it'll be it'll be uh tuesday march the 24th lord willing and uh so all that being said you know who knows we don't know where things will be right now but it's one of those moments where you have to really take into account what is your ultimate hope do you are you is your hope and what you how you can bend and positively confess and use faith and bend the universe to your world and use god as a catalyst or you are you putting your trust in the one who ultimately knows the future works all things according to the pleasure of his good will so this is the important uh conversation to have this will be uh hopefully many more important conversations maybe we'll do a follow -up podcast from the comfort of our homes if we're all quarantined by then who knows what's happening but um you know it's all you can do so uh all that being said uh thank you for listening to and going extra innings with us for this uh part two of this series i thank you all so much for listening steven melissa uh thank you guys for coming on here thank you save travel mercies getting back home yeah it's getting it's getting crazy out there yeah uh so all that being said i thank you all for so much for listening again um also right now we're in unprecedented economic times with everything going crazy however this program if you're blessed by this today please share this with someone who needs to hear this and hopefully be encouraged by this podcast also we need your support we're very grateful for everyone who's donated has been part of the cultish crew but we need this program to continue and the only way it can we can continue and be a voice in these unprecedented times we need your support so we can try and get out as much free content for you guys as much as possible so all that being said thank you guys for listening and go to the cultist show .com