You Don’t Have to be on a List Made by Men

Last week I went out with a group from The Last Reformation and did street healing. I only got to pray for one person during our outing, and her infirmity was not very glamorous. She had a sore neck. I commanded the pain to leave, and she was healed. Other people with the group also performed healings.

This stuff is unquestionably real, and it definitely comes from God. There are people out there claiming there is a “kundalini” spirit that actually performs Christian healing, and their “proof” is that sometimes problems come back. Look…if Spirit-baptized Christian can go out and heal in the name of Jesus, exactly as the apostles did, and it’s really a yoga demon doing the work…we have no chance. God isn’t going to treat us like that. He expects us to do things correctly, and Christians can be deceived, but he’s not going to set the bar so high there is no possibility of success.

One of the things I hate about movies featuring Satan is that he is depicted as all-powerful, and people who fight him are shown as weak and abandoned. Movie Satan can work all sorts of miracles, but Movie Catholic God sits in heaven and does absolutely nothing to stop him or help believers.

This is not how real life works. In real life, Satan is like a scorched dust speck compared to God, and believers are infinitely more powerful than Satan. Christians who lack information can have a lot of trouble dealing with hostile spirits, but God has not abandoned us, and there are many Christians out there exercising dominion in the name of Jesus and working genuine miracles.

People who claim we are healing by the power of demons are buying into the Movie Satan myth. Satan is not that powerful. He’s a fallen angel, and angels are a dime a dozen. He’s not ubiquitous. He’s far from omnipotent. He’s not omniscient. He doesn’t know the future. He can’t read your thoughts. When God is on your side, Satan might as well be a fly, and you’re the swatter.

As for problems coming back, well, that’s classic evil-spirit behavior. Spirits do not like being cast out. The Bible says they walk around in dry places, gather allies to help them, and try to return. Jesus said this would happen, and he certainly did not heal people by the power of a kundalini spirit.

I don’t even know what “kundalini” means. I just know it’s a term associated with Hinduism and yoga, which are things no Christian should go near.

The miracles Satan performed in the Bible were not very impressive compared to the things God did. God parted the Red Sea and made the sun stand still in the sky. The notion of an all-powerful Satan is ridiculous.

Anyway, I was thinking about miracles this morning, and it made me think about the terrible problems with Catholicism.

Catholics believe miracles are rare, and they promote the notion that only super-virtuous people can perform them. This is a great thing for Satan, because it keeps Christians weak. If you’re convinced you could never perform a miracle, you will never be a threat to Satan. He doesn’t have to fight you, because you refuse to step into the ring.

In the Catholic church, there are special people called “saints.” The Bible calls all believers saints, but the pope disagrees. To be a Catholic saint, you have to work at least two miracles, and you have to be incredibly virtuous.

Two miracles. Not two thousand. You only have to perform two miracles, and you’re in. And in spite of this very minimal requirement, only a few thousand people have made the grade in 2000 years! There should have been billions.

Satan must be giddy about this.

To make things worse, Catholics pray to saints. Praying to dead people is idolatry and necromancy. The notion of worshiping human beings came into the church back when the man-pleasers running things decided the best way to bring pagans in was to let them keep their false gods. They got to keep Zeus and Odin and whomever else they wanted to worship. They just had to call them by new names.

There is a spring in a French town called Lourdes. Catholics believe SOME people who bathe in the water there get healed. Imagine that. The Bible mentions a pool where sick people flocked. They waited for an angel to stir the water, and then whoever clambered into the water first got healed. Jesus found a man there awaiting healing, and he short-circuited the whole process. He healed him without the need for immersion. The apostles went on to heal people so powerfully that even the touch of their shadows got the job done.

So Jesus died 2000 years ago, he and his disciples proved it was no longer necessary to wait at a special spot for healing, and Catholicism has taken people back to the bad old days of waiting in line!

That is not progress.

Should I nominate myself for sainthood? I’ve had many miracle healings. The student I prayed for in North Carolina got healed, and I have gotten myself healed many times.

Last night, I realized my left thumb was bothering me, as if I had arthritis. I commanded the pain to go and so on, and I was better, instantly. This morning, I noticed a lesser problem with my right thumb, and I healed it, too. Let’s see. That’s two miracles. That’s as many as “Saint” John Paul II had, and I’m not counting the student or the many other times I’ve healed myself. Why am I not a card-carrying saint? How come I’m not on Wikipedia?

I am not a person of superhuman virtue. God still works through me, and he will work through you, too. It’s normal. Anyone who tells you you have to be super-righteous is speaking for Satan in order to keep you on the bench.

I have a friend who gets healed over and over. Should I contact the Vatican and nominate her, too?

It makes sense that God would heal through people who are clearly imperfect. His mission is to publicize himself, not you. If he only worked through extremely virtuous people, those they helped would come to worship the people, not God. This describes what happened in the Catholic Church.

Judaism has a worse problem than Catholicism. They believe there have been only 6 gentile prophets, and they believe there have been no Jewish prophets since Malachi. If God sent them a prophet tomorrow, what chance would he have?

It’s amazing how hostile human beings are to everyone God sends. When Jesus stood up in the synagogue and said he was the Messiah, his friends and neighbors, who had known him for years, promptly tried to throw him off a cliff. How would you feel if the people in your neighborhood were suddenly comfortable with the idea of throwing you off a cliff and watching your brains and viscera splatter on the rocks below?

The Jews had already killed other prophets. Christians have a long tradition of burning, slandering, and ostracizing people who are Spirit-led.

On the whole, people never change, and religious people are the most dangerous to God’s vessels!

The strangest thing about persecution of God’s servants and children is that the same people who do it end up venerating them posthumously, and they all think they wouldn’t do it again! Of course, they WOULD do it again, because they’re blind. If Jesus came back today and appeared to be a man, as he did before, Christians, Jews, and Muslims would trample each other, trying to get to him to kill him. Pagans and atheists would probably be much less of a problem, at least at first.

I’ve been persecuted by two head pastors and a number of lesser church figures, all of whom claimed to be full of the Holy Spirit! All the things I said that got me in trouble were true, and yet this happened, and NOBODY has apologized or admitted fault, even after it was obvious that they were wrong. I would be amazed if even one of them changed his mind about me.

I’m nearly nothing, what I said was clearly right, and this still happened to me. It would be much worse for Jesus.

It’s interesting when I think about it. What if my pastors had admitted I was right? They could have put me on the stage, and I could have told people some extremely helpful things. Many people might have been saved, healed, or at least spared the great financial harm of excessive offerings. By suppressing and opposing me, Rich Wilkerson Sr., Rich Wilkerson Jr., Albert Santiago, and Albert’s late wife Aleida managed to prevent a lot of people from receiving very great benefits. See Mark 9:42.

Back when I was serving at Trinity Church, Richie (Rich Jr.) actually preached against things I said. That’s how much I annoyed the family the church was designed to promote.

I remember him saying, “It’s not about how much you pray in tongues. It’s about RELATIONSHIP.” Then he ended up palling around with Kim Kardashian, who continued posing for nude photos which were published on the web.

Richie’s church is called “The Vous Church.” “‘Vous” is short for “Rendezvous,” which is what he called his Tuesday services at Trinity. I don’t think he realizes no one who hasn’t been to Trinity knows what “Vous Church” means, and he doesn’t know it should start with an apostrophe.

Anyway, here is a snippet from an Esquire article about the church:

I’ve been reporting on American religion for years. I’ve been to megachurches and tiny chapels and compounds and covens and strange temples. I’ve met believers who say Christ was a cowboy and believers who think Bobby McFerrin’s “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” was divine revelation; strippers who consider their nakedness a testimony and soldiers who etched Scripture onto their rifles. I have seen the silly and the sublime. And what always make me marvel are the layers of stories beneath even the glossiest surface, followers who bring to their faith depths averred by even the most callow leaders. Maybe that’s so at Vous, too. But never before Vous had I encountered a church that seemed so completely empty.

Another passage which didn’t shock me in the least:

When I explained that my visit to Vous’s three services was more about the church’s guests than it was about Rich himself, Rich smiled and tilted his head quizzically. I said I’d just wander around and talk with the crowd. Chris looked pained. Rich was concerned. “I don’t really know who these people are,” he said. He meant he didn’t know what they’d say. No problem, though. They’d already lined up Vous insiders for me to interview. “Bro,” Rich said, “let’s just stage it, all right?”

Vintage Richie.

You wouldn’t expect a leftist publication to be kind to a Christian pastor, but I know the Wilkersons, and these passages are exactly what I would expect an honest and perceptive unbelieving journalist to write.

It’s sad, because good things used to happen at the Rendezvous. Richie had a lot of potential.

Or maybe he didn’t. Maybe good things happened because of other people who were there.

At Trinity, the best things happened when the pastors were not around to put a stop to them.

Do I seem too critical? Go read Paul and see how he named names. I’m a teddy bear compared to him.

Look…you can heal people, including yourself. You can preach solid doctrine that will change lives. You can prophesy. You don’t need the pope or Joel Osteen or even Torben Sondergaard. You just need to get started. You’re as important as anyone who ever lived, so stop thinking you have to sit in a church and throw money at a man who will spend it on exotic cars, plastic surgery, tacky designer clothes, and trips to Maui.

One more thing. You don’t owe God anything. Does that sound awful? It’s not. Your past debts have been paid, and if you stumble in the future, you will be forgiven as long as you repent. If you’re saved and you confess and repent as you should, God is not blocking the good things you ask for. He wants to give them to you. You don’t have to earn them. Someone else already did that. The bills are all paid, without exception.

You don’t have to sit and wait for a saint to drag you into the spring at Lourdes. You can have a better spring that flows inside you every day. In fact, you’re supposed to BE the spring.