A Foreign Vocabulary – A Foreign Religion Pt. 2
“CHRISTIANS ARE THOSE WHO HAVE MOVED
BEYOND BEING SINNERS SAVED BY GRACE,
AND NOW ARE SAINTS WHO ONLY SIN
ON OCCASION.”
So says a Protestant Pastor who has many clergy friends who echo his convictions in many different ways these days. Like the Methodist pastor who recently said, “I will never use the word sinner in this church. You are not sinners, for you are the children of God.” Or like the Charismatic clergyman who says, “We should not call people sinners, they already know that and have enough bad news in their lives as it is.” Or like the Reformed pastor who says, “Jesus never called anyone a sinner, and neither should we.”
You talk about a foreign vocabulary and a foreign religion. But it does explain why in many if not most worship services in the modern church, we never hear the pastor pray a prayer of the confession of sin and asking God for the forgiveness of sins any more. That is now obsolete and has been relegated to antiquity! The song Amazing Grace is now banned from much of contemporary worship because of lines like:
“AMAZING GRACE HOW SWEET THE SOUND THAT SAVED
A WRETCH LIKE ME.”
Nor is “Alas And Did My Savior Bleed” allowed in contemporary worship because of lines like:
“WOULD HE DEVOTE THAT SACRED HEAD FOR SUCH A
WORM AS I.”
If you will, the believer’s standing in life and their standing with God is no longer that of sinners saved by God’s totally unmerited favor (grace), but that of saints who rarely if ever need the grace of God because they seldom sin and have now been sainted by God. I heard some time ago a TV evangelist say that there are several days in any given week that he does not sin at all. As a matter of fact, life in much of the Christian Church today is now lived by this principle:
“CHRISTIANS HAVE MOVED BEYOND GOD’S GRACE BECAUSE THEY
DON’T DISGRACE GOD ANY LONGER.”
If you will:
“BECAUSE OF THEIR RARE SINS, CHRISTIANS HAVE MOVE BEYOND
UNMERITED FAVOR TO MERITED FAVOR AND
EARNED BLESSINGS.”
In all of this and more, we are totally losing the “Blood Gospel of Jesus Christ.” As a matter of fact, in today’s worship and preaching, sinners have become like those invisible people in the Oz Series of books. And as result, the Cross of Jesus Christ has been shrunk, the Blood of Jesus Christ has been diluted, and sinners desperately in need of Jesus Christ on a daily basis are getting harder and harder to find.
Now as a co-laborer with Jesus Christ, I have been forced to wonder whether much of the modern trans-denominational church is really His church any longer. It doesn’t seem like it, for it no longer feels like home. Its vocabulary is no longer the vocabulary of the Bible or of historic Christianity. Again and again I now find myself laying down my hammer against an ecclesiastical two-by-four and scratch my head until it becomes raw and begins to bleed.
Help is on the way! First of all, we hear the familiar words of the Apostle John the Gospel writer in John 1:16.
“For of His (Christ) fullness we have all received, and grace
upon grace.”
You see, being saved by God’s grace is not a one time deal in the past, and that’s all there is to it. Being saved by God’s grace is the MOMENT BY MOMENT DYNAMIC of the being saved and being forgiven life in Jesus Christ. Salvation is not static and stagnant, but active and alive, as we work out our salvation and God works in us to will and to do according to His good pleasure!
It will help us to understand this if we think of the similar words in Psalm 84:5, 8 about another reality in the Christian life:
“How blessed is the man whose strength is in Thee….”
“They go from strength to strength….”
In other words, in our lives, we do not get zapped with God’s strength one time, and then we will never have to rely on Him for a new supply of strength again. It does not say:
“WE ARE STRENGTHENED ONCE AND FOR ALL.”
If that were the case, it is certain that we would not feel the need to depend upon the Divine Strengthener day by day and moment by moment.
It does not say that, but instead teaches us that:
“MOMENT BY MOMENT WE MUST GO FROM A FRESH SUPPLY OF GOD’S
STRENGTH TO ANOTHER FRESH SUPPLY OF GOD’S STRENGTH.”
So it is that the Bible tells us that those who wait on the Lord will gain new strength. (Isaiah 40:31)
Listen now:
“ONE UNRENEWED MOMENT OF DIVINE STRENGTH WOULD INSTANTLY
TURN US INTO A COLLECTION OF TOY SOLDIERS
AND PLASTIC BARBIE DOLLS.”
So too John 1:16 teaches us that neither are we grace-zapped sinners once, and then we will never have to be graced-sinners again! Rather:
“THE CHRISTIAN LIFE IS NOTHING MORE AND NOTHING LESS THAN
A MOMENT BY MOMENT BEING SAVED FROM GRACE TO GRACE.”
If that weren’t so, we would in very short order not feel the need to seek the Savior for His forgiving grace any longer.
The truth is this:
“CHRISTIANS ARE SINNERS WHO HAVE BEEN SAVED BY GRACE, ARE
SINNERS WHO ARE BEING SAVED BY GRACE, AND WILL BE
SINNERS WHO WILL BE SAVED BY GRACE.”
Being sinners saved by grace by grace by grace not only defines who we were, but it defines who we are and who we will be.
Listen closely again:
“BECAUSE WE GO FROM GRACE TO GRACE TO GRACE, IF GOD WERE
TO PULL THE PLUG ON HIS GRACE, WE WOULD INSTANTLY
BECOME UNGRACED AND UNSAVED AND
UNFORGIVEN SINNERS.”
And that one UNGRACED MOMENT would instantly become a yawning, gaping, darkness in our lives that would stretch ahead of us like an eternal sentence in Hell.
In short:
“IF WE ARE NOT SINNERS SAVED BY GRACE MOMENT BY MOMENT, THEN WE ARE
NOT SAVED SINNERS PERIOD, BUT ARE LOST SINNERS FOREVER.”
In summary:
“IF WE DIDN’T RECEIVE GOD’S STRENGTH FOR ONE SECOND, WE WOULD
BE DEAD. IF WE DIDN’T RECEIVE GOD’S GRACE FOR ONE SECOND,
WE WOULD BE DAMNED.”
Second, if we sinned only occasionally, then on our good days, which would be the majority, we would not have to ask God for His forgiving grace in Jesus Christ. But that theory about sinning only rarely or occasionally bites the dust big time in the light of the daily prayer that Jesus taught us to pray in Matthew 6:11, 12,
“Give us this daily our daily bread,”
“And forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.”
Of course, for on our own we are spiritual debtors to God every day of our lives. Why? Simply because the finite cannot ever meet the infinite demands of God in this world, any more than imperfection can ever meet the demands of His perfection. We are in the red at the end of every day, which is why Jesus taught us to pray for God each day to cancel our debt, and forgive us what we owe Him and cannot pay. We should sign off our prayer station each day with a cry for forgiveness, so that if we do die before we wake, we know that the Lord our souls will take.
Modern religious people have lost the vast distinction between the perfect God and imperfect man, so that they look upon themselves as creditors rather than debtors. When the fact is that at the end of every day compared to the Holy God, while God is the Holy Triune God, all of us are more like the THREE STOOGES. He is Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and we are Moe, Curly and Larry. In short, compared to God we really do screw up every day, and our lives truly are a COMEDY OF ERRORS.
The only way for modern religious people to again be amazed and humbled by God’s forgiving grace is to once again catch Isaiah’s vision of the Holy God in Isaiah 6:1-3 where he says,
“In the year of King Uzziah’s death, I saw the Lord sitting on a
throne, lofty and exalted, with the train of His robe
filling the temple,”
“Seraphim stood above Him….”
“And one called to another and said, ‘Holy, Holy, Holy, is the Lord
God of hosts, the whole earth is filled with His glory.”
That will pretty well do it, as it caused Isaiah to erupt with an expression of his sinfulness in Isaiah 6:5,
“Then I said, ‘Woe is me, for I am ruined! Because I am a man of unclean
lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips; for my eyes
have seen the King, the Lord of hosts.”
There it is! That’s enough to cure anyone of this foreign gibberish and this foreign religion namely, that we only occasionally and even rarely sin. Even if we have not robbed a bank, murdered our neighbor, or taken God’s name in vain, still at the end of the day compared to the King, the Lord of Hosts, we are in and of ourselves spiritual slobs desperately in need of the forgiving grace and cleansing blood of Jesus. WOE IS US!
So too, the older I have become, and the more I have grown up in Christ, the more I feel like the Apostle Paul who very near the end of his “Born Again-Sainted (Set Apart Unto God) Life,” cried out in I Timothy 1:15,
“It is a trustworthy statement, deserving full acceptance, that Christ Jesus
came into the world to save sinners, among whom
I am foremost (chief) of all.”
See it:
“THE APOSTLE PAUL DID NOT DECLARE, ‘I WAS THE FOREMOST
OF SINNERS,’ BUT INSTEAD DECLARES, ‘I AM THE
CHIEF OF SINNERS.”
*****
Now a new quote from this foreign vocabulary and foreign religion that we must deal with, and it goes like this:
“I HAVE RECENTLY SUSTAINED A PAINFUL LEG INJURY, AND WE ALSO
VERY RECENTLY HAVE HAD TWO DEATHS IN THE FAMILY. HOW IS
IT THAT I AND MY FAMILY OF CHRISTIANS ARE
IN SUCH BONDAGE?”
So states a precious Pentecostal daughter of God. When I heard it, I knew immediately that I was listening to a foreign language of a foreign religion. Her words slammed me in the chest and broke my heart, because I knew that this dear saint of God is living a lie that she has been taught. Her statement is uttered by many others in different words, but it is all the same non-Bible verbiage. It isn’t what she is going through that are bondages in her life, but her language is the bondage as we shall see.
I really don’t know where to begin. I have noticed that everything painful, even death itself, is blamed on the devil by so many. If you will, lingering affliction or premature death (any death before the age of 70) is because the afflicted or the dying or the dead are in bondage to Satan which bondage must be broken in the name of Jesus. That is to say, anything painful or potentially deadly in the Christian’s life is because Satan has snuck up to his room, climbed up on his bed, and bound him with bonds of sickness, pain and death. So that any Christian who is sick or in pain or dies is in the bondage of the devil.
Let’s stop talking this strange sounding language here, and let us hear plainly from God as His people. First of all, Jesus Christ has taken His children out of bondage. That is the whole point of the story of redemption throughout the Bible. We read these words in Exodus 20:1-2 about God’s people and their deliverance from Egypt,
”Then God spoke all these words, saying,
‘I am the Lord your God, Who brought you out of the land of
Egypt, OUT OF THE HOUSE OF BONDAGE.’ ”
God’s children are not in bondage. The Passover Lamb set them free from bondage. Egypt was a type of the Kingdom of Darkness. Pharaoh was a type of Satan. Pharaoh’s armies were a type of demons. The Passover Lamb was a type of Jesus Christ by Whose blood we are set free from Satan’s chains and bonds which Jesus can break as easily as snapping string.
Come now, Christians are either free or they have been duped. They have not been duped, for the promise of Jesus Christ in John 8:36 unequivocally and triumphantly states;
“If therefore the Son shall make you free, you shall be free indeed.”
How can you be free indeed? Either you are free or you are not free! What is this INDEED stuff? Simply this, that when Jesus brings us out of Satan’s house of bondage, there isn’t one trace in our lives that we ever lived in that bondage house, or were held captive to sin there. Unbounded freedom! Now we are talking Bible language and true Christianity! INDEED FREEDOM!
Second, how awesome that God is our STRONGHOLD. We are no longer in Satan’s stronghold of bondage but instead are in God’s STRONGHOLD OF FREEDOM. We read in Psalm 59:17,
“O my strength, I will sing praises to Thee, for God
is our STRONGHOLD….”
How awesome that God is our FORTRESS. We read in Psalm18:2,
“The Lord is my rock and my FORTRESS and my deliverer, My
God, my rock, in Whom I take refuge.”
How awesome that God is our REFUGE. We read in Psalm 46:1,
“God is our REFUGE and our strength.”
My, my, you can’t be in a SAFER AND STRONGER STRONGHOLD than God. You can’t be in a more FORTIFIED FORTRESS than God. You can’t be in a more SECURE REFUGE than God. God our fortress and stronghold and refuge is IMPREGNABLE, IMPENETRABLE, UNBREACHABLE, INDESTRUCTIBLE. No wonder Martin Luther wrote:
“A MIGHTY FORTRESS IS OUR GOD, A BULWARK NEVER FAILING.”
A BULWARK is a STRONG PROTECTION. No BULLY BEELZEBUB is going to BUST OUR BULWARK. Glory to God!
Which is why Francis J. Crosby wrote:
“SAFE IN THE ARMS OF JESUS, SAFE ON HIS GENTLE BREAST,
THERE BY HIS LOVE O’ERSHADED, SWEETLY MY SOUL
SHALL REST….”
“SAFE IN THE ARMS OF JESUS, SAFE FROM CORRODING CARE,
SAFE FROM THE WORLD’S TEMPTATIONS; SIN
CANNOT HARM ME THERE.”
All of this Biblical vocabulary is completely unknown in this foreign vocabulary and foreign religion. You will never hear modern Pentecostals/Charismatics talk like the Psalmist or like Fanny Crosby. Never!!!
Instead I have noticed that a lot of Preachers, Evangelists, and Parishioners preach and evangelize and talk like God’s Kids are NON-STRONGHOLDED, NON-FORTRESSED, AND NON-REFUGED SITTING DUCKS TO SATAN, and that the OLE DEVIL can climb all over them and bind THEIR SOULS, THEIR BODIES, THEIR SPIRITS, THEIR MINDS and put them in chains any ole way he wants to and at any ole time he wants to.
I guess then that all of this talk of God being OUR STRONGHOLD AND OUR FORTRESS AND OUR REFUGE is just a lot of hot air. If you will:
“GOD IS NOT ALL THAT HE IS BUILT UP TO BE IN HIS WORD,
AND IN FACT GOD IS A SEIVE AT BEST.”
Look, if you have an evangelist who tells you or conveys to you that GOD’S KIDS are DEFENSELESS TIN CANS ON FENCE POSTS THAT THE DEVIL CAN PICK OFF ANY OLE TIME HE WANTS TO, you better get a different evangelist, because that picture is a complete contradiction to and rape of the Word of God.
It reminds me of the story about a doctor who was making the rounds in a ward of terminally ill patients. He asked each of them whether he or she had any final requests. To one older lady, he said, “Is there anything you especially want before you pass on?” She replied, “Yes, I’d like to see my immediate family one more time.” “Of course,” said the doctor, “I’ll arrange it.”
He asked a second patient for his last wishes, and the patient said, “I’m a Catholic, and I’d like to see my priest for confession and last rites.” “Certainly,” the doctor replied, “I’ll arrange it.”
Then he approached a third patient and asked, “Have you any last wish, sir?” The elderly man said, “Yes, I would like to see a different doctor.” My sentiments exactly!
Listen now!!!! Write this Biblical truth on the walls of your minds and hearts. When for instance there is a moral failure in our lives:
“THE SPIRITUAL STRONGHOLD-FORTRESS-REFUGE-GOD IN THE
CHRISTIAN LIFE IS NEVER TAKEN OR BREACHED BY FORCE,
BUT BY OUR CHOOSING TO STEP OUTSIDE THE FORT.”
We then have chosen to say the following:
“NOT THY WILL BUT MY WILL BE DONE.”
Then we have opened ourselves up to Satan’s manipulation and control.
Third, we live in an imperfect state and world, yes, even as Christians, and as such, we make mistakes and fall off from ladders, bump our heads, and stub our toes. I was sitting having fellowship after the church service Sunday morning, and I was drinking lemonade and eating a cookie. I was talking with some folks and as it often is with me, I was demonstratively making a point and knocked the lemonade cup out of one hand via the other emphatic hand, and baptized myself in sweetness. My spirit was not that sweet at the moment, but I did not say, “You devil you.” Come on now, stop it!!! What I did say was, “Bob, you dummy you.”
Come now, it is so true when it is said;
“TO ERR IS HUMAN, AND TO FORGIVE IS DIVINE.”
I was not in some sort of “DEMONIC LEMONADE-SPILLING BONDAGE” any more than my dear sister in Christ was in some sort of “DEMONIC FALLING-OFF-LADDERS BONDAGE.” Satan did not knock the cup out of my hand, I did, and I had to suffer the consequences of a drenched and stained Sunday shirt and pants as well as a drowned ego. Satan did not knock the daughter of God off from the ladder, she accidently did it, and now she suffers the painful consequences of her fallibility. I prayed for her healing in Jesus’ name, but I did not bind Satan or attempt to break his imaginary bonds in my prayer for her.
In the meantime, we are to thank the Lord in everything and for everything, knowing that no matter what, He works all things together for good to those who love Him. Now we are talking Bible vocabulary, which shockingly sounds like foreign language to the foregin religionists.
For crying out loud, we live in an imperfect world as imperfect people, and getting sick, having accidents, and making mistakes etc. are all part of the human condition. It does not mean that we are in bondage, and for the most part it only proves we are human even as Christians.
Even if Satan does buffet us, as he did the Apostle Paul, he has to get God’s permission first. Paul was not in bondage to Satan, but God was masterfully in and through Paul’s thorn in the flesh enabling Paul through weakness to find God’s all sufficient strength.
Fourth, when we die as God’s children, it is not Satan who pulls our earthly plugs, but it is the Lord who holds the keys. We read in Revelation 1:18 Jesus’ words,
“…I am alive forevermore, and I have the keys of death
and of Hades.”
To hear some of the new religionists talk, you would think that Satan holds the keys to the door of death, and that he opens and closes death’s iron door as he chooses. Baloney! Not so! Jesus does and no one else.
Concerning our lives on earth from beginning to end, we read in the Psalmist’s words in Psalm 31:14-15,
“But as for me, I trust in the Lord, I say, ‘Thou are my God.’”
“My times are in Thy hand….”
God’s children are in the hands of the Lord and not in the hands of the devil. Jesus makes sure that no one will snatch His own out of His hands. It is so true to say to God’s people that the Lord’s hand is upon them. That is not bondage but an incredible privilege and blessing.
The Apostle Paul wrote in Philippians 1:21,
“For to me, to live is Christ, and to die is gain.”
Death for the Christian is not some demonic bondage, but rather a Divine deliverance from this vale of tears into the glorious presence of the Lord. Death for the Christian is not demonic defeat but Divine victory, for through Jesus Christ the door of death has become of gate of Heaven. For the world, death is indeed the downside. Way down!!! But for the Christian death is the upside. Way up!!!
God have mercy! Just in the recent past, I have seen with my own eyes and heard with my own ears these new religionists holding resurrection services for Christian deceased loved ones. I have heard them bind the devil and commanding in Jesus’ name the dead one to come out of the casket. To be honest, it struck me just as freaky as the first time I attended a funeral in a Catholic church and the priest blew smoke all over and around the casket. The foreign religionists in Protestant churches were now blowing verbal smoke all over the corpses and caskets. The dearly departed in both cases were totally unresponsive! They were not in bondage, but their grieving relatives were.
*****
Now to another quote from this foreign vocabulary and foreign religion:
“DID YOU KNOW THAT WE CAN CREATE WITH OUR WORDS JUST
LIKE GOD CREATED WITH HIS WORDS, IF WE HAVE
ENOUGH FAITH?
Where did I hear this one? It was at a Christmas gathering of my wife’s extended family. A man came up to me, knowing that I was a minister, and spoke the exact words to me that you have just read in the above. I remember hearing his words as a foreign vocabulary from a foreign religion, and the full explanation for his deceived announcement would come later after much further study on my part. So we may as well get right to it.
First, where did such a strange sounding concept come from, namely equating our imaginary creative powers with God’s exclusive creative powers? To my surprise, I discovered what was at the bottom of it, namely, a false proposition about faith that these foreign religionists put forward. It is this, that God lives and works by faith even as Christians live and work by faith. How do you do! There it is! Everything God does is faith-based and everything Christians do is faith-based. These are the internal wheels that move their entire misguided theological system. This is the epicenter, namely presenting the gods of faith and the God of faith as faith co-equals.
I am forced to identify a prominent person here, for it is Kenneth Copeland who states:
“FAITH WAS THE RAW MATERIAL SUBSTANCE THAT THE SPIRIT
OF GOD USED TO FORM THE UNIVERSE.” (Kenneth Copeland
Authority of the Believer II, Fort Worth: Kenneth Copeland
Ministries, 1987, Audiotape #01-0302 Side 1)
Laying aside for the moment the statement that God faith-formed the world, which we will address at length in a moment, faith is defined here as:
“RAW MATERIAL SUBSTANCE.”
Raw is a word which suggests something like unprocessed crude oil! Material substance sounds like some sort of faith tablet that the pastor can prescribe to a parishioner who is struggling with doubt. You know, “Take two of these faith tablets every four hours and call me in the morning.” Placebo religion!
Second, the teaching that God lives and works by faith is so twisted that you do not need much light in order to discover its deformity! Those that believe this false teaching ought to blush in the dark for doing so. Nowhere does the Bible teach, suggest, or even hint that God has faith, lives by faith, or operates by faith. It is a total fabrication. The fact of the matter is that if God has faith, and if God lives and acts by faith, then God is not God, for that makes Him a believer and not the to-be-believed-in One.
According to Hebrew’s 11:1,
“Now faith (pistis) is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction
of things not seen.”
Let’s start with the latter half of the Bible’s definition of faith first – faith is the conviction of things not seen. We read about God in Hebrews 4:13,
“And there is no creature hidden from His sight, but all things are open
and laid bare to the eyes of Him with whom we have to do.”
Everything is seen by God. All things! Nothing is hidden from God. There are no hiding places from God. Adam and Eve played the first hide-and-go-seek game with God. (Genesis 3:8) They even tried to cover their nakedness with fig leaves sewed together. (Genesis 3:7) What a wasted camouflage! The hiding was over before the seeking began, and their camouflaged pants and skirt went out of date before they had been sewn together. It may be fun to play hide-go-seek games with your kids, but God’s kids find out very quickly that there is no fun in playing hide-go-seek games with God. Every place we hide He is there already.
When God called out to Adam in Genesis 3:9, “Where are you,” He was not saying to him, “Come out, come out, wherever you are!” What He wanted Adam to admit to himself was where in his sinful state he now was in his relationship to God – cut off from His Creator! So visible is everything and everyone to God, that the Bible tells us that everything and everyone is wide open and laid bare before Him.
Faith therefore has no place in God! They are contradictions! Why would God Who sees all things need faith which is the conviction of things not seen? Thinking of God with faith is like picturing Him as a blind man walking with His seeing-eye dog named “Faith.”
The requirement laid down by God for Christians in this time-space dimension is stated in II Corinthians 5:7,
“For we walk by faith, not by sight.”
It must be said of God in the eternal dimension on the other hand that,
“He walks by sight, not by faith.”
Faith for God would be a totally useless and demeaning thing. In fact, why would God need faith when He not only sees all things, but sees through them too?
But our discussion of faith is not yet complete. According to Hebrews 11:1, faith is not only the conviction of things not seen, but it is the assurance of things hoped for. God neither lives by faith or by hope. It makes no sense in either case. Hope is the only thing that can take a man out of a dismal present into the promise of a brighter future. God is not in a dismal present awaiting and hoping for a brighter future. God is eternal light, and in Him there is no darkness! God never has a dark day hoping that things will brighten up tomorrow.
More than this, there is no future to God, for God is eternal. There is no yesterday or tomorrow in eternity, and therefore there is no past nostalgia or future hope with God. God is eternal, and eternity is timeless. It is truly mind boggling that everything is already fully and perfectly accomplished before God. He sees the beginning, the middle and the end all at once. So we read words like these in Romans 8:24,
“…but hope that is seen is not hope; for why does one also hope for what he sees?”
Therefore God does not need hope. He sees His fully accomplished ends as well as His perfectly begun beginnings, and everything in between that may look like a hodgepodge to us but makes total sense to Him. He hopes for nothing. He does not reminisce about the good old days. Nor does He hope for better days ahead. Hope therefore has no place in God!
Third, Copeland then goes on to explain how God’s faith-force works in the following quotation:
“GOD USED WORDS WHEN HE CREATED THE HEAVEN AND THE EARTH…
EACH TIME GOD SPOKE, HE RELEASED HIS FAITH – THE CREATIVE
POWER TO BRING HIS WORDS TO PASS.” (Kenneth Copeland,
The Power of the Tongue, Fort Worth: KCP
Publications, 1980, Page 4)
Kenneth Copeland in the above refers to creation, and when he does he declares as a Biblical fact that God created the world by faith-force. Moreover, he states that God released His faith-force through words, and that His creative words were empowered by His faith-force.
Foreign Religionists of the Copeland brand teach that God spoke “Faith-Force Words,” and thereby realized the miracles of the six-day creation. So likewise these foreign religionists tell us that believers, who also live by faith as gods, create and control circumstances through their “Faith-Force Words” as well. Even as the great and only God said, “Let there be,” and there was, so the foreign religionists teach that believers as gods can likewise say, “Let there be,” and there will be.
States Kenneth Copeland:
“THE VERY FAITH THAT GOD USED WHEN HE CREATED…IS THE FAITH
THAT IS BURNING IN YOUR SPIRIT…WELL, HE CREATED ALL THE
PLANETS, HOW COME YOU CAN’T CREATE SOMETHING? YOU
DON’T KNOW AS MUCH AS HE DOES. HE HAS GREATER
WORKING KNOWLEDGE OF THAT FAITH THAN YOU
DO. BUT WE’RE LEARNING. OUR TIME IS COMING.
AND IN SOME WAYS IT IS ALREADY HERE.”
(Kenneth Copeland, John Hagee Today,
August 18, 1999)
There you pretty much have it. Taking Copeland’s quotes together, many foreign religionists with their foreign vocabulary teach that even as God created by faith-force released through His words, so believers can create by faith-force released through their words. God just happens to be better at it, for after all He has had more experience and practice operating in faith-force word creativity.
But then again, stop making excuses, for we are creative little gods too. Hop to it! The little men-gods are catching up with God. It just takes time! Practice makes perfect! Our time is coming. Just stay with it until you get the real hang of it. I guess you have to attend Kenneth Copeland’s faith-force-word training classes for apprentice-gods to get really good at it. Regular people train dogs. Foreign Religionists train gods. The man at the funeral home had no doubt been to one or more of the classes.
The syllogism at this point should be carefully outlined. It would go like this:
“Christians are creative gods.” (Major Premise)
“God created through faith-force words.” (Minor Premise)
“Christians can create through faith-force words.” (Conclusion)
The only problem with this syllogism is that the major premise and the minor premise are both false, and therefore the entire syllogism reaches an equally false conclusion.
For just a moment, imagine getting caught up in all of this, namely, that faith is a force, and that this faith-force is released through the words of your mouth to create what you want to create, to affect what you want to affect, and to get what you want to get. Can you imagine the tremendous power of suggestion that this has in the lives of the spiritually gullible and naive, and the excesses to which this could lead, not to mention the messes that people could get themselves into through it?
And again, when you are faith-force gods, you can call forth riches and stuff too. All men by nature want it all, and now with faith-force you can have it all. After all, creative little faith-force gods should have it all, don’t you think? That really is no different from those however who do not pay much attention to God, but who think that they are gods too. Ted Turner has had his wealth and phenomenal business success. When he sold his television network to Time Warner, he was quoted as saying, “The only thing I hate about it is I’ll never be the wealthiest man in America now.” Oh don’t feel bad Teddy boy, just get some faith and you can have God and have it all again too. That is how modern Christianity works.
I have actually seen and heard these “Faith-Force Sayers” declaring their faith for a new house, and declaring in faith with their mouths that God was now going to make a way where there seemed to be no way, money where there was no money, and a house where there was no house. After all, they gave Him no options. What choice did He have? The creative faith-force gods had spoken, and He had to agree. They had “Faith-Force Spoken” it, and now it simply had to become. My, my, what absolutely handy and hands-on arrangement. Simple, easy, clean! No downside or disappointments!
Then, upon the basis of their faith-force declarations and their faith-mouth proclamations, they wrote checks on faith for their new house, with the totally presumptuous assurance that God would now provide the funds which they by faith had declared, and which at the time they did not have. God didn’t provide, and the police had another name for it all – “Hot Checks.” Their checks bounced higher than a goofy-ball. That is only one tragic example of this foreign vocabulary being carried out in a “Faith-Force Word-Fiasco.”
Fourth, this also explains why you seldom hear these foreign religionists with their foreign vocabulary pray or ask God for anything. Rather, they order and create with their faith-force commands. Biblical, historic Christianity and Biblical vocabulary are gone. Disappeared! Now it is up to us to find it back. I pray that these teachings will help us to the glory of God!
