If there has
been one distinguishing characteristic of popular Charismatic, Pentecostal and
even Evangelical Christianity at the turn of this millennium, it has been the
pursuit of the “New Thing”, the “great endtimes revival” which would sweep the
world into the Kingdom and usher in the “greatest move of God ever seen”,
greater even than in the book of the Acts.
Through the prophecies and teachings of Charismatic leaders, an
expectation has developed of a last days cutting edged church, moving in such
power and anointing that world leaders would search out the wisdom of their
leaders and whole nations would fall trembling at their feet! In spite of the fact that there is no
scriptural justification for this fantasy, it appeals to the desire in a good
many Christians to be seen as relevant and powerful. Millions around the world have bought into it, as evidenced by the
immediate pilgrimages to such sites as Toronto, Pensacola and many other lesser
locations designated as having received the “New Anointing”.
In three years estimates of up to a
half million people visited Toronto Airport Vineyard, and stood in lines at
times for three and four hours waiting to come into the church! And for what were they waiting? Not for the preaching and teaching of the
Word of God, as much as for an experience with the “presence of the Lord”! such experiences ranged from uncontrollable
laughter, to guttural roaring, crying, prophesying, being slain in the spirit,
put into trances, and even for many, being put into such an altered state of
consciousness, they made animal noises!
It was not the Word of the Lord as much as an unmediated experience of
“the presence” of the Lord which the pilgrims sought.
To their credit, the Assemblies of
God initially resisted this excess, having seen it all before in the “New Order
of the Latter Rain” movement which they had denounced as heretical in
1950. At one point, they could see
plainly that the Vineyard movement, out of which the Toronto Phenomenon grew,
was influenced by the very Latter Rain/ Manifested Sons of God errors that they
once refuted. They were particularly
cautious of the Kansas City Prophets of the Vineyard. Unfortunately, it was only a matter of time before an Assemblies
of God version of the Toronto Blessing sprang forth at the Brownsville Assembly
of God in Pensacola, Florida. That
particular outpouring became the turning point that brought the bulk of the
Assemblies of God movement into what became known as “The River”.
In spite of protestations to the
contrary, the Assembly of God version of the “New Anointing” is identical to
the Vineyard’s version. This is
because, rather than coming down out of heaven as a “Rushing, mighty wind”,
Steve Hill brought this “New Anointing” over from England, after asking his
hosts, “Where is the Holy Spirit moving in London?” and being directed to the
Holy Trinity church, Brompton, and having hands laid upon him by the vicar,
Sandy Millar. (HTB is nearly synonymous
with the Toronto Blessing in the British mind, having done more than anyone to
blanket the churches in the UK with it.
In fact the expression Toronto Blessing was coined by an HTB staff
member.) Steve brought “it” home, where
he ministered “it” to the Brownsville Assembly of God in Pensacola, Florida,
where perhaps another million have gone to get “it” and to take “it” back to
their own churches. In this way what
was once primarily a Vineyard, and then a Charismatic, phenomenon, has been
brought into the mainstream of classical Pentecostalism and even the wider
evangelical world.
A prominent example within the
Assemblies of God of a pastor and church radicalized by this “New Anointing”,
comes out of the testimony of Pastor Steve Benson, from 1st Assembly
of God in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Here
is his own account of his initial encounter with this “New Anointing”.
When
Steve [Hill] and John [Kilpatrick] started to anoint me with oil, they doubled
over and shouted, “The anointing!!’ I
collapsed. I felt like the three of use
were swirling around the room like a vortex of a whirlpool . . . they walked out
of the office. I felt as if my body was
being pulled apart . . . was being stretched out of shape beyond measure. I asked the Lord, ‘What does this mean,
Lord?’ The Lord answered, ‘I’m just
crucifying your flesh’. I opened my
eyes and the first thing I looked at were my hands, because they were tingling
with the power of God.
The
manifestations of this spirit, as you can see, go far beyond the commonly
understood gifts of the Spirit. This is
not about speaking in tongues, or even very much about prophecy or divine
healing. The manifestation of this “New
Anointing” is more likely to bring people into an unmediated experience of
power. Joseph Chambers’ End Times
Digest, March 1997, quotes Pastor John Kilpatrick, of the Brownsville
Assembly of God, as testifying,
I have
hundreds of times laid hands on the unsaved and I have watched them being
thrown across the ground. I mean I have
watched them fly through the air, fall to the ground to where they couldn’t get
up again for an hour or two hours. The
next thing you know is, “What shall I do to be saved?”. . . Friends, I am not talking
hundreds anymore, thousands this has happened to. Thousands have been convinced by the power . . . We have had
people, agnostics and God haters, businessmen coming into our meetings and they
have been thrown into the air up against a wall and hit the ground when we
shook their hand.
What are we
to make of this “New Anointing?” Is
this the Holy Spirit of God doing a “new thing” among us? Or could this be something fleshly and
human, or perhaps even something more sinister? Since the mid 1990s when the Assemblies of God mainstreamed it
“The River” of blessing, this “presence” that people have been willing to
embark on pilgrimages to various locations, has swollen into a floodtide of
unusual manifestations and experiences!
No longer just in Toronto or Pensacola, hundreds and even thousands of
churches are reporting their own manifestations of this “Presence”. Here is just a sampling of New Wine
testimonies reported on the Internet:
Automatic
finger pointing – “It was prophesied over me that I was a
weathervane . . . all of a sudden my finger started pointing at people and in
the air towards heaven . . . I was in a very conservative church and during the
service, there went my finger. I sat there for a half an hour that way . .
. The Pastor got up to give the altar
call for those to get saved. He was so
drunk in the spirit he could not. He
then called another pastor forward to give the altar call. He also fell laughing to the floor. The first pastor managed to pull himself to
the podium still laughing and said, ‘If you want to get saved, see that ladies
finger, follow that finger . . .’”
Brave
Heart anointing? – “That night the place [Church] was full
of two thousand plus persons, and there was a real spirit of anticipation . . .
Pastor ~~~~~ got up . . . as he began to exhort the people during the
announcements, he took hold of the large Brave Heart sword that was there from
the night before. He began to get
bolder and bolder as he pointed the sword towards the congregation, and charged
them to a revived spirit . . . after two hours . . .[he] suggested
the whole church ‘Pass under the sword through a fire tunnel.’ The two senior Pastors . . . would hold up
two swords, so as to form an arch . . . all two thousand of the congregation
waited patiently for the chance to be prayed through the fire tunnel.”
Starting
out in the flesh – “She recounted her experiences in ‘coming into
the river’ during a Rodney Howard Browne meeting at a church across town [Marilyn
Hickey’s church] . . . She had a very tough time figuring out what God
wanted from her, and she really wanted to get into the laughing thing. God told her to yield. ‘Whaddya mean, yield?’ . . . she was flat on
her back and God told her to start laughing even if it was ‘just the flesh’ to
start out with. In a few minutes
something rose up inside her and away she went. The point being, she had given God something to work with . . .”
I didn’t
really have to try very hard to find these testimonies, they are a mere
skimming of a bulging file, gleaned from testimonies from the Internet, Charisma
Magazine, and other sources of the manifestations of this “New Anointing”. In fact I deliberately didn’t use some of
the more extreme manifestations, the above are just typical ones, so as to not
sensationalize. I haven’t gotten into
the multiple gold dust secretions, “birthings”, and oil and even feathers that
are allegedly supernaturally manifesting in countless “renewal” churches and
gatherings. We are obviously no longer
awaiting this “New Anointing” it is here and people are being impacted by
it. This is why I believe that we
should consider this anointing in the light of several truths.
First of all
Jesus warned us specifically when he cautioned,
Then if
any man say unto you, Lo, here is Christ, or there, believe it not. For there shall arise false Christs, and
false prophets and shall show great signs and wonders; insomuch if it be
possible they shall deceive the very elect [and by the
Greek construction, it is clear that Jesus is saying it is possible] . . . Wherefore
if they shall say unto you, Behold he is in the desert; go not forth: behold he
is in the secret chambers; believe it not. (Matthew 24:23-26.)
Note that
the warning does not concern the problem of people claiming that Jesus is here
or there, but that Christ is! This is a
very significant distinction, because no one is claiming that Jesus has come to
Pensacola or Toronto, or to one of Rodney Howard Browne’s crusades, rather they
are claiming that these wonders and signs and breakthroughs are a result of the
outpouring of an “anointing”. And what
is the Greek way of saying anointed, or anointing? “Christ” is the Greek way of
saying anointing. To receive of Rodney
Howard Browne’s anointing is another way of saying Rodney Howard Browne’s
Christ! When they say there is an
anointing being poured out in the Toronto Airport Vineyard they are in effect
saying, Look there is Christ! The danger
is not that of being deceived by false Jesuses; after all most Christians know
that the real Jesus has holes in His hands and feet. The warning is “beware of false Christs”, false anointings!
John also
warned us explicitly when he gave us the test for the Spirit of Truth and the
Spirit of error,
Hereby
know ye the Spirit of God: Every Spirit that confesseth that Jesus Christ is
come in the flesh is of God: and every spirit that denieth that Jesus Christ
has come in the flesh is not of God: and this is that Spirit of anti-christ . .
.” (I John 4:3-4.)
What are we
to be looking for as Christians? Our
blessed hope is the appearing of our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ! And how is it that he shall return? Bodily, the way he was taken up into heaven,
in the flesh, as the angel told the apostles,
Yet men
of Galilee, why stand ye gazing up into heaven? The same Jesus, which is taken up from you into heaven, shall so
come in like manner as ye have seen him go into heaven. (Acts 1:11.)
John warned
us that in some way the Anti-christ will seek to spiritualize Jesus Christ to
deceive the world. There is more than
one way to do this. To the Jehovah’s
Witnesses, Christ did not raise bodily from the dead, but in spirit. This is an obviously anti-christ
doctrine. To the Mormons the denial is
that Jesus became the Christ, rather than that Jesus Christ came in the
flesh. But to modern Pentecostals and
Charismatics the deception is that instead of awaiting the bodily return of
Jesus Christ, we are rather to await the outpouring of a new anointing (Christ)
which will empower us to become the greatest generation of the church ever!
What we have
in this new anointing is a disincarnate Christ! It manifests itself in many ways foreign to the Jesus of the
Bible. People get drunk in it, soak in
it, follow it, tremble in the presence of it, go into trances in the name of
it. John Kilpatrick, pastor of the
Brownsville Assembly of God, was so drunk in it for several weeks, he had to
have help dressing in the morning! He
called it “the Glory!” Instead of the
patient waiting for the coming of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ from
heaven, Pentecostals and Charismatics and even many evangelicals have entered
into a disincarnate “presence”, seeking “it”, instead of Him!
Consider the
fact that, from the beginning, at both Toronto and Pensacola, “it” was
invoked! The true Spirit of Jesus
Christ is in the church, praying with and through the church, “Come Lord
Jesus!” for the Spirit and the Bride say “Come” The false spirit, on the contrary is invoked by the command of
the newly anointed, “Come! Come Holy Spirit! More! More!” and, as in the
testimony of Pastor Benson, the spirit was invoked by simply hitting him in the
stomach and shouting in unison, “The Anointing!”
The
depersonalized nature of this spirit is further attested to in the testimonies
of the many who went to “get it”, and perhaps “bring it back to their
churches”, that others might “soak in it” and perhaps even come under the heavy
weight of “it” as Pastor Kilpatrick often has testified.
We need to
consider also, how it is that our God changes lives. In the new paradigm, “the River”, there seems to be a strong
emphasis on change without preaching; instead unbelievers are zapped, as
witnessed by the above testimony of Kilpatrick, about the thousands who have
been thrown against the wall by the anointing and come up two or three hours
later asking what they must do to be saved.
In fact there seems almost at times to be an anti-preaching bias. When standing outside, in the depths of the
Canadian winter, to interview those waiting for three hours to get into the
Toronto Airport Vineyard services in 1995, a good many pastors from around the
world were available. Without
exception, the constant theme was, “We don’t preach anymore, since the Spirit
came, we don’t need to, the Spirit has taken over.”
Ours is the
Faith in the Logos of God; God has spoken, and by the Word he “Heals
us and delivers us from our destruction”.
“In the beginning was the Word” and it is the Truth that shall
make men free. The God of the Bible
doesn’t ‘zap’ people into conversion, “The Son of God has come and has given
us an understanding. . .” (I John 5:20).
Whenever
God’s people are denied a consistent, sound doctrinal diet, they are tempted to
resort to symbols: pageants, sensuality and personalities as a golden calf
substitute. This explains “Brave Heart”
swords, Marches for Jesus, Identificational repentances, symbolic actions such
as driving stakes engraved with scriptures at the corners of cities, Spiritual
warfare dances with staves and a whole host of other pagan practices currently
taking place in Pentecostal and Charismatic churches around the world. When the God of the Bible wants to effect
change He presents Truth to the minds and consciences of the people, demanding
that they conform to it. It is “Truth
that sets free.” Paganism and magic are
anti-rational and symbolic and are not Christianity.
Perhaps this
current explosion of mysticised Christianity represents the failure of Pastors,
especially Pentecostals, to feed the church with sound doctrine, after all what
are people looking for anyway? I
thought we found what we wanted when we came to the Fountain of Living Water,
Jesus! Why this restlessness, this
openness to anything and everything except sound doctrine? I believe that we are in the time of the
famine spoken of by both Amos and Paul,
Behold,
the days come saith the Lord God, that I will send a famine in the Land, not a
famine of bread, nor a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the Lord,
and they shall wander from sea to sea, and from the North even to the east,
they shall run to and fro to seek the Word of the Lord and shall not find it .
. . (Amos 8:11-12.)
For the
time will come when they shall not endure sound doctrine, but after their own
lusts shall they heap to themselves teachers, having itching ears; and they
shall turn away their ears from the truth, and shall be turned unto fables, (I
Timothy 4:3-4.)
Is there a
way back? How do you admit you are
wrong after going under the “tunnel of fire”?
Worse yet, how can you admit you were deceived when you were the one who
formed the tunnel with your “Braveheart” sword? It is because we are often unwilling to be reproached, we want to
be great, and regarded as “cutting edge” that we become seduced by all of
this. How else could we explain the
proud boasting, the swelling prophecies, the desire to have the power to turn
stones into bread? “If we confess
our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from
all unrighteousness.”
Book
Review
The God
Chasers Tommy Tenney
(Destiny Image)
Tommy Tenney
is a third generation United Pentecostal [Oneness Pentecostal] minister who
bills himself and his growing following as “God Chasers”. He is the author of a best-selling book
entitled The God Chasers. He has
also served as a pastor for ten years and has spent another 17 years as a
“revivalist”. According to the blurb on
the back cover of his recent book, he has been used to both “spark and fuel the
fires of revival”. It also states that
although “He has experienced the miraculous. . .more importantly he knows the
value of intimacy with a humility before God.”
The book, The
God Chasers, is a call to those who consider themselves to be hungry for
the manifested presence of God. It
begins with a narrative which should strike a chord with those who have been
radicalized by experience-based religion à la Toronto and Pensacola. In the chapter entitled “The day I almost
caught Him”, (“Him” referring to God), Tenney describes a service he held in
Houston, Texas, in which upon the reading of II Chronicles 7:14, and an
exhortation by the host pastor to “seek God’s face rather than just His hand”,
a loud thunderclap sounded and split the pulpit into two pieces! From there the usual “river” manifestations
exploded across the sanctuary, slayings in the spirit, profuse cryings, and
even the bodies of businessmen stacked up “like cordwood”!
Businessmen
tore their ties off, and they were literally stacked on top of one another, in
the most horribly harmonious sound of repentance you ever heard.
By his own
confession, Tenney had been up to that point merely a professional revivalist,
We’ve
talked, preached and taught about revival until the church is sick of hearing
about it. That’s what I did for a
living, I preached revivals, or so I thought.
Then God broke out of His box and ruined everything when He showed up.
Tenney
echoes an earlier prophecy of the late John Wimber, by saying that “God is
coming back to repossess His church.”
But his premise is that the only thing that hinders God from
“repossessing His church” is the lack of spiritual hunger, which Tenney and
others seem to interpret as a hunger for the “manifested presence” of God. Thus the book, The God Chasers, is
aimed at those who are,
. . . tired
of trying to pass out tracts, knock on doors, and make things happen. . . we’ve
been trying to make things happen for a long time. Now He wants to make it happen!(p.12.)
Part of the
problem according to Tenney, comes down to the predictable assertion that too
many of us have been “Camped out on some dusty truth known to everyone.”
There’s the
problem: “dusty truth”! But of course Tenney would lead us and guide
us into his alternative to “dusty truth”, what he calls “Revelation”,
The
difference between the truth of God and revelation is very simple. Truth is where God has been. Revelation is where God is. Truth is God’s tracks. It is His Trail, His path, but it leads to
what? It leads to Him. Perhaps the masses of people are happy to
know where God’s been, but true God Chasers are not content to study God’s
trail, His truths, they want to know Him.
They want to know where He is and what He is doing right now. . . There
is a vast difference between present truth and past truth. I am afraid that most of what the church has
studied is past truth, and very little of what we know is present truth”. (From
the introduction.)
Tenney’s
call for an abandonment of “past truth” in favour of his more relevant “present
truth” is far from original. He is only
the latest in a long line of teachers who have tapped into the discontentment
that many have in this entertainment age, subtly denigrating the sound teaching
of the Word of God, in order to promote the latest expression of
experienced-based religion. As the
children of Israel tired of manna, in their day, the modern children of God
“will not endure sound doctrine” either.
Tenney, like many others these days, is adept at ridiculing teaching and
Bible study, as though they were as irrelevant as a game of “Trivial Pursuit”,
It is simply
not enough to know about God. We have
churches filled with people who can win Bible trivia contests but who don’t
know Him. (p.3.)
So much for
those Christians, off into “dusty truth”, enamored by God’s tracks but what
about the New Agers and occultists?
Tenney is sure that they have the purest of motives,
You can’t
tell me they’re not hungry for God when they wear crystals around their necks,
lay down hundreds of dollars a day to listen to Gurus, and call psychics to the
tune of billions of dollars a year. (p.2.)
Of course
these pure hearted seekers are only hindered by one obstacle, in their search
for God, the church! (I always thought that it was the fact that “there is none
that seeks after God”, that rather than seeking God, witches and occultists and
those who seek fortune tellers were in rebellion to God.)
They’re
hungry to hear from something that’s beyond themselves, something they are not
hearing in the church today. The bottom
line is that people are sick of the church because the church has been somewhat
less than the book has advertised.” (p.3.)
Naomi and
her family have something in common with the people who leave or totally avoid
churches today – they left “that” place and went somewhere else to find
bread. I can tell you why people are
flocking to the bars, the clubs, and the Psychics by the millions. They are just trying to get by, they are
just trying to survive because the church has failed them. They looked, or their parents and friends
looked and reported, and the spiritual cupboard was bare” (p.19-20)
The church
is the one forcing people who are earnestly searching for God out into the bars
and clubs? What ever happened to “They
knew God but would not glorify Him as God, neither were they thankful . . .
therefore they are without excuse”?
Not so according to Tenney, these good-hearted witches and occultists
actually came to church but found nothing, therefore they have had no choice
but to go into the occult! This kind of
accusation will always find a ready audience in our modern “seeker sensitive”
world, discontented, and casting about for any scapegoat for their sense of
restlessness. The church is at fault!
Between the
various personal experiences recounted by Tenney and his attempts at whetting
the spiritual appetites which the book calls for, glimpses of the author’s
theology can be seen. As we have
already seen, Tenney holds to a curious view of the Word of God, as being
“God’s tracks”, “where God’s been”, and “past truth”, interesting; but not
enough for the “God chasers”. Tenney
further denigrates the Word of god, and those who would insist on measuring all
things by it, in a very unusual and creative way, he calls the Scripture “old
love letters”, appearing to pay some homage to them, yet at the same time
rendering their present application irrelevant.
I’m afraid
we have satiated our hunger for Him by reading old love letters from him to the
churches in the epistles of the New Testament.
These are good, holy and necessary, but we never have intimacy with Him
. . .(p.15.)
Tenney
generously concedes that the Scriptures are “good, holy and necessary”, but . .
. (and there is a world of meaning in that “but”) by designating Scripture to
the status of “old love letters”, he renders them inadequate for present
intimacy with God! Picture Paul
relegating Scripture to the status of “old love letters”! Jesus never contrasted “intimacy” with God
and “power” from God as opposed to Scripture, He equated them! “Do ye not err? Not knowing the scripture or the power of God?” Knowing and loving Scripture is the only way
to begin to have intimacy with God, not the obstacle of it! Of course there could be a problem of people
being “hearers of the Word and not doers of it”, but the answer is not to
compare Scripture to “old love letters” or worse yet, to relegate scriptural
knowledge to “being able to win a Bible Trivia game”. What is Tenney promoting?
Perhaps the answer to this can be found in the oft-cited nugget of
charismatic wisdom,
. . . A man
with experience is never at the mercy of a man with only an argument… If we can lead people into the manifest
presence of God, all false theological houses of cards will tumble down.
(p.20).
[Tenney
denies the Trinity—what does he know about theology? J.P. Editor]
This saying
or some variation of it is basically the underlying assumption of the entire
“River” revival, that experience supercedes “doctrine”, and that the Word alone
is insufficient for relationship with God.
Did the
apostles believe this way? Did they
ever “split pulpits”? Did they
constantly contrast Truth and intimacy?
Peter had the ultimate sensual religious encounter, He saw the
transfigured Jesus, but rather than contrast his experience on the holy
mountain with those who are still “stuck in some dusty truth”, Peter commended
us to the “more sure Word of Prophecy, which you would do well to take heed
unto”. Peter never held a laughing
revival, nor did Paul ever refer to himself as God’s bartender. James never saw the need to put loaves of
bread on the altar so that it could soak up the anointing.
Nor did the
apostles ever conduct the kind of spiritual warfare Tenney and others proclaim
in the name of “Taking their cities for God”.
I am after
cities . . . Once while preaching at a conference . . . in Portland, Oregon, I
heard him [Frank Dimazio] mention something that caught my attention. He said that a number of pastors in the
Portland area had united together to drive some stakes in the ground at
strategic places around the perimeter of their region and the city and at every
major intersection. The process took
them hours because they also prayed over those stakes, as they were physical
symbols marking a spiritual declaration and demarcation line. I felt the stirring of the Holy Spirit so I
said, “Frank, if you’ll provide the stakes, then I’ll go to the cities I feel
called to and help the pastors stake out that territory for God.” (p.102-103.)
Is this
another Toronto or Pensacola? I think
Tenney and I would probably disagree. I
would say that this “intimacy” that is being sought is of the same nature as
that “presence” that pilgrims to Toronto and Pensacola have sought encounters
with. Tenney seems to allude to these
earlier revivals, on p.21, as being somewhat less than what he is promoting,
People don’t
sense God’s presence at our gatherings because it is just not there
sufficiently to register on our gauges . . . when people get just a little
touch of God mixed with a lot of something that is not God, it inoculates them
against the real thing. Once they’ve
been inoculated by a crumb of God’s presence, then when they say “God is really
here, they say, “No, I’ve been there, done that. I bought the T-shirt, and I didn’t find Him, it really didn’t
work for me.” The problem was that God
was there alright, but not enough of Him.
There was no experience of meeting Him at the Damascus road. There was no undeniable, overwhelming sense
of His manifested presence.
Tenney may
well have made a point without realizing it.
He acknowledges that the experienced-based revivals of our day (with
their sensual encounters with “the presence”) tend eventually towards a “been
there done that” attitude, as repeated mystical experiences lead into a kind of
spiritual “law of diminishing returns”, but the answer, according to Tenney, is
more of “it”. Toronto and Pensacola
were only crumbs, there’s more of it in the purer form. Rodney Howard Browne held forth to those who
were weary of “dead religion” a fresh touch of God, a drink of the “new
wine”. Toronto came along and offered
those same people an opportunity to “soak in” the manifested anointing of God. Pensacola, which in spite of denials to the
contrary, is directly descended from the Toronto Blessing (Steve Hill, bringing
“it” back with him from Holy Trinity church, Brompton, the Toronto Church of
England) offered a purer touch revival than Toronto, putting more emphasis on
repentance. But to Tenney, these were
just crumbs. What does he offer? More of God? These are all the same claims, the same clichés, the same
criticisms of doctrine, and even in many cases the same denigrations of the
Word. I predict that, as in the other
“waves” this also will leave many emptier even than they were before. Unfortunately this will only open them up to
the next excursion into mystical, experienced-based religion.
Orthodox
Christianity has held that true Hunger for God is valid and can be validly met
through seeking Him, fasting, prayer, a renewal of obedience to Him, a going
back to wherever it was that we left Him. “Signs and wonders” are not God nor do they satisfy. Even fantastic signs such as splitting
pulpits, slaying whole crowds in the spirit, businessmen laying around like
‘cordwood’, none of this necessarily has anything to do with truly hungering
for God.
Finally, is The
God Chasers really about the kind of hunger for God that perhaps Tozer
wrote of, or Spurgeon, Wesley, Nee and the other giants of the Faith of days
gone by? You be the judge. But lest there by any doubt that some other
kind of hunger is at work here, consider that the last page of this Destiny
Image book is an advertising page featuring the full line of God Chaser
products. The God Chasers hat is
available for a mere $17.99, the God Chaser shirt is available in four
sizes for a mere $16.99, and for those who truly want to attest to this new
hunger, the God Chasers license plate is available for a mere $6.99!
Assembly
of God Pastor Bill Randles, Cedar Rapids, Iowa
[[This is just another “man-made” idea of
how to “popularize” Christianity. Don’t
be deceived by these false prophets with their false “Rhema words” (oracles)
from God. They are like the false
prophets of old recorded in Jeremiah chapter 23. Tom Adcock, President, Jesus People Information Center, 4338 3rd
Ave., Sacramento, CA 95817 www.mission.org/jesuspeople. Only a fool blindly jumps in “a river”
without checking what is under the surface.]]
Excerpt from
Mending the Nets--Themes from First John by Pastor Bill Randles, St.
Matthew Publishing Ltd., 24 Geldart St, Cambridge CBI 2LX, UK, 2000, pp.110-126
To read this
excellent book in it’s entirety send a $10.00 check or money order made out to
“Bill Randles”, 8600 C Ave. Marion, Iowa 52302. He will pay shipping charge.
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