Warts Complete the Portrait

I sat down to breakfast with Youtube today, and I found a great video. Torben Sondergaard of The Last Reformation talked for almost eight minutes about the movement’s failures. The title of the video is “What you see on YouTube is NOT the full picture.”

When I went to their baptism event last week, I asked four veterans whether TLR posted videos of its failures, and one of them said, “NO ONE does that.” He was smiling when he said it; obviously, I am not the first person who has noticed the extraordinary online success rate of Youtube healers.

It’s very important for strong miracle-working ministries to expose their failures. If they don’t, a number of bad consequences may follow.

1. Other people who try to heal and so on may get discouraged because they think they’re way behind the curve.

2. People who believe in the ministries that don’t admit failure may become bitter and resentful when they find out what really happens, and they may drift away from Christianity.

3. People who don’t believe in God yet may lump the exposed ministries in with the endless river of liars and con artists, and they may be less likely to accept Jesus.

4. The secretive ministries may fail to improve. Who is going to pray for you to be corrected if you give people the impression that you’re a complete success? Nobody.

TLR is not doing enough to publicize its failures. It it were, I would know about it already. That’s the test. I’ve watched a lot of their videos, and I went to their event, and I didn’t get the message until today. Sondergaard says he says the same things at their events, but if he said them when I attended, I did not notice. If I haven’t gotten the memo until today, many other people are in the same boat.

That may look harsh when you read it, but I don’t mean it that way. I just think they need to make sure people hear what they’re saying.

The impression I get is that generally, healing ministries don’t have the full picture. Some are great with baptism, some are great with getting people relief (which may or may not last), and some are great at getting people to accept Jesus, but every ministry seems to be weak in one area or another. Maybe they need to watch each other’s videos so they can learn from each other’s strengths!

I’ve picked up a few things that seem to be solid.

1. The sinner’s prayer is not enough. It’s incomplete. You don’t just ask for salvation. You tell Jesus you want to follow him and continue his work. You can lose your salvation if you don’t follow Jesus, and you also won’t have real power or victory. He doesn’t save people so they can go on smoking weed and going to strip clubs.

2. It can be harder to help Christians than nonbelievers, and some of the reasons are known. God holds Christians to a higher standard than the ignorant, so a Christian who holds onto sin or iniquity (such as unforgiveness) may not receive help until he confesses to God and repents. Also, Christians can be full of bad doctrine that interferes with their faith, and they can also be very self-righteous and unwilling to admit they have iniquities, demons, or even physical ailments. It looks like it’s important to deal with these issues if you want a Christian to have an effective baptism, have the gift of tongues released, or receive healing. If you fail to get results, you should consider these problems and deal with them. Not all of the Youtube guys seem to be on top of this knowledge.

3. If you get someone healed, you have to follow through. A person who receives healing is supposed to go on and become a follower of Christ. If they don’t, they may lose their healing, and worse things may happen, the last of which would be damnation.

Jesus left, and he expected us to multiply and continue what he was doing.

Healing isn’t a good thing, in and of itself. Healing a person who doesn’t receive teaching afterward may just encourage him to continue living in rebellion. I won’t pray for someone to be healed unless it’s connected with repentance. The purpose of Jesus’ healing ministry wasn’t to end disease. It was to help them become children of God. What good is it to be in good health when you die and go to hell?

Healing unbelievers only serves one purpose: it’s a sales tactic. If you don’t make the sale, the samples are worthless and counterproductive.

If you heal people, and you don’t help them become children of God, you’re setting them up for attacks and defeats. You’re also setting the body of Christ up for embarrassment, because the people you let down will come back later and testify against God and his children.

People who have been healed by preachers like Kathryn Kuhlman and Benny Hinn have had their problems return shortly thereafter. It’s not enough to sweep the house and put it in order. You have to bring the Holy Spirit in and put him in charge.

God may not want you to be healed if you’re out of line. Feel-good preachers are terrified of saying so, but it’s just how it is. Look what he did to Herod, Miriam, and Gehazi. He gave the Egyptians boils. He gave the Philistines unbearable hemorrhoids.

When I saw Torben speak, he pointed something out. When the apostles helped people receive salvation, they didn’t use the sinner’s prayer, which did not exist at the time. They didn’t just have people say they believed in Jesus and wanted to be forgiven and saved. They invariably asked people to give their lives to Jesus. That’s completely different.

Modern Christians who still believe in hell are obsessed with salvation. They think that if 80,000 people go to a stadium, get excited by a sermon, and say the sinner’s prayer, those people will all go to heaven no matter what they do afterward. In the Bible, things are different. I learned this from Torben. New believers in the Bible take up their crosses and start doing what Jesus did.

Another interesting thing Torben points out: in the Bible, baptism and conversion happen on the same day. They didn’t say, “We have a baptism coming up in June, so sign up.”

Torben thinks you have to continue in Christ in order to be saved, and I think he’s right. One of the huge problems that turned me off of megachurches was their self-righteous insistence that refusing to correct people was okay because it helped more people “get saved.”

I always told people that human beings were the bricks that made up the church, and I said you couldn’t expect to add new layers to the building when the lower layers were rotten. I said that feel-good Christianity would attract more believers in the short term, but that those believers would be weak and hypocritical, so eventually, the process would generate FEWER salvations. We actually see that happening now; Christianity is shrinking in America.

Consider that. The oily guys in the $4000 suits and the little hipsters with tattoos and skinny jeans keep telling us we have to tell people what they want to hear in order to grow the church, yet on their watch, Christianity’s popularity in America has plummeted sharply. Obviously, they are driving people away. People are turned off by their insincerity.

America was overwhelmingly Christian when angry preachers were talking about hell every week. Now it’s going pagan under the sweet-talking hipsters and hucksters. Go figure.

If Torben’s view is correct, then what I said makes sense. Besides, why would you want to do a job badly? Why would you want to produce ignorant, weak Christians if you could produce apostles?

Look what Paul said in Philippians: “Therefore, my beloved, as you have always obeyed, not as in my presence only, but now much more in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God who works in you both to will and to do for His good pleasure.”

If raising your hand in a stadium, and then going home to smoke weed and fornicate, will get you into heaven sixty years later, why do we have to “work out our own salvation with fear and trembling”?

I have been right about a lot of doctrine, but I now think I was wrong about instant, permanent salvation without a change of heart. In the machine of Christianity, it’s a part which does not fit or function.