If you’ve spent much time around Charismatics or if you simply observe their methods, you’ll no doubt come away at times scratching your head and asking, “Where do they get this stuff?”.
I grew up in a Pentecostal church, so I know whereof I speak. I have seen and heard more than my fair share of oddities.
I can’t count the words of so-called prophecy I heard and was always amazed that no one else thought it strange that these words were invariably delivered in poorly imitated King James English. I’ve heard more “thee’s” and “thou’s,” “eth’s” and “est’s” than you can shake a stick at. My question is: Why? What on earth makes these people think that God speaks in this way. I’ve heard people who have never read a KJV snap off a word of prophecy chock-full of “Yea, I say unto thee’s” and “Lo, I wouldst that thou shouldst…” It wouldn’t be polite to say what I really think of this!
Then we’ve got these “spiritual warfare” and “spiritual mapping” knuckleheads. I defy anyone on earth to show me this in Scripture! It isn’t there! We don’t read of Paul coming into Athens and binding the spirit of idolatry and coming against the Apollo spirit that held Athens in its power. I don’t recall Paul casting out Zeus or Peter making war in the heavenlies against the unbelief of the Sanhedrin. Jesus never taught His disciples to win the world through “friendship evangelism” or by “being the gospel.”
Unfortunately, America is the largest purveyor of this hogwash to the rest of the world. We like our Burger-King “Have it your way” religion. And apparently Scripture has become little more than a figurehead to much of contemporary Evangelicalism. The Bible is to many churches what the queen is to England: a beloved symbol of some grand days of yesteryear, but virtually without any actual power to effect anything today.
“Slain in the Spirit,” “Spiritual mapping,” “War in the Heveanlies,” “Friendship Evangelism,” not to mention a host of spirits of this and spirits of that which rivals all the convoluted gods and titans of Greek mythology. - - Where do they get this stuff?
I've seen this go on, too - and what's really sad is that some of this "make it up as you go" version of Christianity has made it into mainstream evangelical books. No one ever thinks to ask where this convoluted system of demonology is ever described in the Bible.
ReplyDeleteTake, for instance, Beth Moore's "Breaking Free", which was popular a few years ago. She goes into this elaborate explanation of "generatioanl curses" and how somene, at sometime, "moved the boundary marker" and Satan has cursed the bloodline and we have these "hidden chambers" and yada yada yada....and evangelical women, in Bible-preaching churches, ate it all up as Gospel truth.
It rarely, if ever, occurs to anyone to ask, "Excuse me....where is this teaching in the Bible? Can you give me a verse for that?"