The Holy Spirit is Our Only Protection From Temptation

The leftist press is going after Perry Stone, but they can’t be faulted for it. They have a case.

Perry Stone was one of my favorite preachers. He has a remarkable gift for understanding the Bible. He exposes and explains things like no one else. He points out startling connections between the Old Testament and the New Testament.

He has a show called Manna-Fest. I used to watch every week, and I also became a partner. He had a site where you could sign up for recurring donations, and partners received material other people did not.

He used to say he would not ask for money. He had faith God would provide it, and for many years, that worked just fine. He had a problem with Trinity Broadcasting, which was one of the networks that featured his show. He wanted to give things away, but Trinity had a policy: people who appeared on their broadcasts weren’t allowed to advertise products that didn’t cost people anything. That’s Trinity for you. Wrong, and not at all ashamed of it.

I enjoyed his work, but I started to notice problems. For one thing, he was angry and argumentative. Sometimes he was very hostile to nonbelievers. He also got into it with Christians who didn’t agree with him. He seemed proud, and pride is the worst weakness.

I believe many of the things he passed on to viewers came straight from God, but he also said things that were silly. It seemed that he sometimes kept talking when God was silent. I remember him telling a crowd the word “embarrass” came from the words “bare” and “ass,” which is ridiculous. I call this “going outside your anointing.” God gave him the ability to do certain things, and Stone apparently got the idea that he could do other things just as well.

I learned he was very good at explaining the Bible, but he wasn’t that great with practical help. He gave weak advice about the actual business of being a Christian. I think some of the things he taught about cleaning up our lives and our families were just his guesses.

I canceled my membership years ago.

Stone had another weakness. He palled around with prosperity preachers. One day I saw a video of him with Steve Munsey. This man runs a huge megachurch in Indiana. He is a pig. He pretends to be some kind of expert, billing himself as a doctor. He makes up lies about Jewish holidays in order to get money. For example, he tells people the ancient Jews made big monetary donations on Passover in exchange for seven blessings.

I’ve written about Munsey before. I’m repeating things so this blog entry will stand on its own feet.

Munsey is the mentor of Rich Wilkerson Sr., the pastor of Miami’s Trinity Church. I attended and volunteered there for several years. Trinity abuses and cheats volunteers, employees, and members. For example, I have been told they deduct tithes from their employees’ checks, and they also force employees to work unpaid hours as volunteers, which is illegal.

I learned how wrong Munsey was, and then I learned Wilkerson knew he was wrong and taught his garbage anyway. I used to criticize Munsey and the other prosperity preachers on social media, and Wilkerson came to consider me a big threat to his church. When I left, he called friends of mine in for secret meetings about me, and of course, they told me.

Munsey pulled in many millions of dollars every year, but he let his house and his church go into foreclosure. He paid himself and his wife extravagantly. He had a plane. He had his own zoo. The bankruptcy judge was highly critical of Munsey, to say the least.

Perry Stone was not a true prosperity preacher. He didn’t tell people God would pay them for giving him offerings, as Munsey did. Unfortunately, he praised Munsey as a man of God and was proud to appear with him. He helped Munsey take people’s savings.

Eventually, Stone went the megachurch route. He built a big compound. First thing you know, he no longer trusted God to pay the bills. The man who used to brag that he never borrowed money suddenly began asking viewers to donate.

In the years that followed, women came forward and accused Stone of misbehaving, and he admitted his guilt. He didn’t say he touched or groped anyone, but he admitted he had said things he should not have. His board told him he had to quit preaching for 8 months.

Now Stone is doing what famous Christian crooks do. He is turning off comments on his Youtube videos. Some are still open to comments, but some are not. Kenneth Copeland and Paula White do the same thing. Roaches are afraid of the light. They’re not doing it because there is some godly purpose. They do it to prevent people from exposing them.

On Christmas Day, Stone’s hometown paper, The Chattanooga Times Free Press, published an article labeled “Women in Perry Stone’s ministry allege sexual misconduct, say FBI is investigating televangelist.” Yahoo News picked it up. That’s remarkable. Stone is fairly obscure compared to people like T.D. Jakes and Joel Osteen. Most Americans don’t know who he is. Still, Yahoo’s people decided to republish the article, which can’t be seen on the Chattanooga paper’s site without a membership. Obviously, Yahoo wants to discredit Christians, and that has to be the primary motivation for carrying the story, but how much can we complain if it’s largely true?

Here are some disturbing allegations (as yet unproven) from the story:

1. Stone approached ministry workers (some in their early twenties) and told them his wife didn’t satisfy him sexually. He said he had a dream suggesting something bad was going to happen to his wife, and he claimed God had told him to be with other women.

2. Stone showed women he was sexually aroused.

3. Stone groped women.

There are other accusations, but these seem to be the worst. Stone’s organization claims some accusations have been refuted, but they admit some are true.

At a recent event, a woman in the crowd stood up and called Stone a “nasty perv” and said women had left the ministry because he “kept touching them.”

Stone’s quoted response is, “Ma’am, I’ll have you arrested, and I’ll bring a lawsuit against you for making statements like that.” After that, he supposedly said, “You’ve talked to people who told 16 lies on my wife and I! That’s who you’ve been talking to.”

Stone also relied on the Cuomo defense. Here is a quotation:

I am not a perfect man. People have taken me hugging and kissing them on the cheek wrong. I quit that. I’m Italian. My whole family holds hands, rubs backs. I didn’t know you can look at somebody and say, “Hey, how you doing?” and they can take it wrong.

He then allegedly said God had told him the people who had accused him would have to answer for it when they died. The Bible, on the other hand, says sins will be forgiven.

The story says 9 women “employed by or connected with” Stone’s ministry have provided letters listing disturbing accusations.

Stone posted a Facebook video saying he had a dream about seven ugly fish with big mouths. They were trying to keep fishermen, representing pastors, from catching other fish which represented young people searching for Christ. He said that in the dream, he killed one fish by hitting it in the head with a pole.

He claims the woman who stood up and called him out is one of the seven fish, and he says one of them is marked by God for a “significant loss.”

It’s very bad.

Obviously, he committed sexual sins with or against women in his ministry. That is undeniable, no matter what the actual sins were.

He may also have told women God wanted him to commit adultery. That would be taking God’s name in vain for a very evil cause. It would be a very great sin for a preacher to commit.

He appears to be focusing more on criticizing the people who are talking about his failures than on confession and repentance. A long time ago, God gave me this: “The concealment of a sin is worse than the sin itself.” Deceiving people about his misdeeds is very bad, and if he is blaming individuals who are telling the truth, it’s far, far worse. Jesus was killed for telling the truth, as were many prophets.

I don’t know if the fish dream is legitimate or not, but it has a bad smell to it. God isn’t the only one who gives people dreams. Threatening people with God’s judgment when they speak the truth for good reason is dangerous. I doubt God had anything to do with the dream.

Stone should never have threatened to have his heckler arrested, unless she did more than talk. If yelling in church is a crime, it’s hard to guess what crime it might be. It sounds like Stone is so proud, he becomes enraged when people say anything negative to him. It reminds me of the way Jesus was slapped for talking to the high priest who was in the process of trying to murder him.

I am pretty familiar with Stone, and he is an emotional person. It wouldn’t surprise me if he reacted from anger and defensiveness instead of listening calmly and responding rationally. It’s what I would expect from him. I have never known him to dig too deeply into criticism of himself or people he is affiliated with.

Here is my guess: Stone’s pride caused him to sink into self-deceit and weakened his relationship with God. It allowed him to fall into adultery or at least something close to it, and then it helped him justify going after his truthful critics instead of confronting his character problems.

I think Steve Munsey is like a tapeworm that infects lost preachers, and Stone opened himself up so Munsey could invade. I believe Stone’s ego made him want a big, impressive compound like the huge churches his Mammon-worshiping friends had, so he left God’s provision behind and started manipulating human beings to get money.

Remember Abraham. God told him he would have a son by Sarah, but he got tired of waiting, so he impregnated a servant. That servant’s descendants should never have existed. They plague Israel’s children until this day. God was going to make good on his promise, but Abraham and Sarah took things into their own hands and relied on the power of the flesh. This is what Stone appears to have done. Maybe God would have given him a big compound eventually without manipulation, or maybe God wanted something else for him, but Stone couldn’t wait for God to show him.

Oddly, Stone just put up an excellent video. It was about a spirit that was seen hovering over a church. It built sexual attraction between men and women in the pews. He said this represented a problem that was intended to destroy the body of Christ in the last days. He also provided a remedy. He said the answer was to pray in tongues a great deal to overcome the spirit’s power.

If Stone is so messed up right now, why was the video so useful? Because Stone’s dad saw the spirit and provided the information. It happened years ago. His dad died a long time back. Stone himself merely relayed the information to the world. Ironically, Stone himself didn’t take the advice. It was obviously for him as well as the rest of us.

I don’t think Stone will recover. Has any preacher ever escaped the clutches of self-admiration or a craving for approval from the public? I can’t think of any. Pride is the worst iniquity, because it shelters all the others so they can continue to fester and grow. If you don’t have too much pride, you can recover from anything.

Many preachers glow with pride. Their egos are so immense, they defy understanding. They quiver with rage when anyone questions them, as though they were generals and the rest of us were privates. God’s kingdom doesn’t work that way. There are only two levels: God’s and ours. If you’re a son, you’re a son, not a grandson or the slave of a son. If you listen to the Holy Spirit, you have the authority to argue with anyone who gets off the track.

It’s very sad to see Stone falling like this. I have prayed for his recovery, and I posted my analysis on one of his Youtubes. Maybe he’ll come around. Thank God I was shown his weaknesses before things got this far.