I’ve been hesitant to share this video that I watched about a week ago. I am a deeply religious (religious in a good sense) follower of Jesus Christ. I care about his church, his word, his name, and how people outside of saving faith view them. Undoubtedly Christians, myself included, at their worst, have done much damage to his image, some out of ignorance to the teachings of the bible and its implications in their lives, others out of manipulative false teaching.
Where there is ignorance, the bible calls for grace, patience, and restoration, where there is false teaching, the bible calls for it to be confronted and exposed. The post accompanying this video is long because I want to be clear. I am a Christian, I believe God heals people, I believe he performs miracles, and I believe many time those miracles are outward in appearance i.e. “healings”. However, I believe God’s greatest miracles, and his most forward concern in sending his son to us, is inward on our hearts. The impatient father who hears the truth and begins to treat his family with tenderness, the spouse lost and wanting to leave their marriage who is transformed and given a love for their spouse that they thought was long gone, the teenager trying to fill theirs lives by adapting to any sense of identity they can find, only to let all of it go and rest in their new identity as a child of God. Salvation is God’s most important and inward miracle.
Confronting false teaching has put me at odds with both friends and family. I understand their reasoning, and for sure if I was just nitpicking or being a jerk they would have just cause. The thing is I’m not being picky. When people are used and taken advantage of in the name of Jesus, and the central message of the Gospel is so distorted that it is non-existent, it must be stopped. So here’s the thing when it comes to the specific issue of “Faith Healers” as confronted in this video. They preach a false gospel, and offer false hope, and they do so while filing their own pockets. The people that they fool place their faith in these men, and not Jesus, and are always led to a false hope in man, that always leads them to despair. Please hear what I am saying, its not about how much money they make, I have no problem with preachers making a lot of money, I do have a problem when they do so on the backs of a false message. Some people have a problem with me declaring these people to be false teachers, again I understand why, but that is the only appropriate term for them. Seeing as they do harm to the image of the church, the image of Christ, his message, and his people, I have no problem pointing them out as the false teachers they are, and distancing them from the fold of God.
The importance of this has never been more clear to me that just last weekend while having a conversation about Christianity with a new co-worker. He would probably describe himself as spiritual but most certainly he is not a Christian. A few minutes in to the conversation it was clear that his views about Christianity were primarily fueled by false teaching, and rightly he dismissed these claims as false. So in the middle of the conversation I said “This is the central message of the bible. There isn’t good people and bad people, there’s bad people and Jesus, and all of those bad people, who are us, need this one good person to save us. God is perfect and Holy, we are sinful and fallen, Jesus is sufficient and the only way that we can get to God.” He said in response, “I’ve never heard any of that before, that’s beautiful.”
How, with so much wealth, prosperity, private jets, tv time and crusades, has he never heard the most basic and life giving truth of the Gospel? The only logical conclusion is that these men and women in the “Faith Healing” movement must not be teaching it. If theses men in women who claim to be doing God’s work never proclaim the gospel, then even if everyone they meet is healed of their illness, then ultimately they’ve done no good, for that persons soul is still dangerously fallen.
*If you want to talk specifics I’d be glad to, however the video below is not mine, so if you comment on the video itself I will not receive it, instead comment on my blog if you want to have a dialogue.
Theist the Bearded 