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Discussion Forum : Scriptures and Doctrine : My meeting with Pastor Joseph Prince- by Dr Michael Brown

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TMK
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 My meeting with Pastor Joseph Prince- by Dr Michael Brown

http://www.charismanews.com/opinion/in-the-line-of-fire/62639-my-meeting-with-joseph-prince


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Todd

 2017/1/26 21:47Profile
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 Re: My meeting with Pastor Joseph Prince- by Dr Michael Brown

Quote:
When I wrote the book Hyper-Grace: Exposing the Dangers of the Modern Grace Movement, I reached out to the main authors I quoted in the book, asking them for permission to quote their writings if I went beyond the normal publishing guidelines, also asking them if they would like to reconsider any of their positions.

But I did not reach out to Pastor Prince, wrongly assuming he would not be interested in dialoguing with me based on my experience with some previous leaders who refused to interact. I apologized to him for my failure to do so, and he graciously received that apology.

He also wanted to make clear that he strongly differed with the positions of some of the others I quoted in my book, and what grieved him was not that I misrepresented his position when citing him but rather that he was cited side-by-side with some others whose views he strongly rejected.




The quotes by Joseph Prince in Micheal Browns book are still one's that Micheal Brown disagreed with. Even if Joseph Prince is changing some of his views overall it is a mis-balanced gospel that is not in line with the historic Church, hence he will state in his teachings over and over again that he is excited to see the "gospel of grace" or the "gospel of paul" being restored to the church. And what he means by this is that his emphasis of teaching is the purity of the gospel being restored to the Church, hence it has been lost since arguably the time of Paul and is now being restored.

CRI institute carefully examines some teachings of ministries and not to slander but to discern and help. They themselves are not perfect. Here is a review of one of Joseph Princes books the did:

Joseph Prince: Unmerited Favor
http://www.equip.org/article/joseph-prince-unmerited-favor/

In his book, Destined to Reign: The Secret to Effortless Success, Wholeness and Victorious Living he says:

The more you realize that you are righteous, the more victory you will experience over sin! Wake up every morning and give thanks that you are the righteousness of God through Jesus Christ. (p. 31)

Is Jesus righteous before God? Yes! Then so are you. Is He accepted before God? Yes! Then so are you. Is He well-pleasing before God? Yes! Then so are you. (p. 58)



This thinking takes away any responsibility, any sense of obedience, it makes everything automatic and all we are to do is believe. This simply is not what the New Testament teaches. It sounds good but in the end Joseph Prince is preaching a new gospel as he says it is being restored his way of teaching.


Micheal Brown is attempting to peace-make and understand other view points, but in the end I wonder if he can really endorse fully Joseph Prince from his prosperity gospel views, his large salary and extremes of teaching in grace only.


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SI Moderator - Greg Gordon

 2017/1/26 22:07Profile
joliboy11
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 Re:

for me mr. Prince thinks that his theology on grace is what really works and Biblical. Not really...

 2017/1/26 23:36Profile
leyoung
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Joined: 2016/11/15
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 Re:

Thank you Greg. This article by Michael Brown really bothered me because if someone in the body of Christ so influential as Joseph Prince has been teaching error about something as significant as this false grace message then surely after confrontation and admonishment there must come an acknowledgment that they were wrong or off base and would require a repentant message and an apology to the body of Christ.
I didn't hear that with Joseph Prince.
I remember when DEREK Prince acknowledged wrong teaching after the shepherding movement became heretical in the late 70's or 80's.
It was important that he publicly repent as many had embraced this movement. I have known many pastors who never acknowledge to the people in their church or following that they had embraced and taught error causing many to stumble.
Something does not add up with Michael Brown agreeing to embrace "where we agree" and letting him off the hook for crucial errors that have not been acknowledged.


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Leslie

 2017/1/27 3:42Profile
dolfan
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 Re:

A problem arises when you become a voice of prophetic correction for profit. Books published and sold which offer to rebut other books published and sold. Win-win, if you are in the business of publishing and selling books.

It creates its own pressure to keep the hits coming. Joseph Prince is a false teacher, period. Brown's book was not wrong. But, Brown is free now to write a book about grace without it being a polemic to J. Prince. I would suppose he may want to distance himself from his hyper-grace book and I doubt it sold all that well. Amazon has it a little south of #152,000. By comparison, a popular novel from 1985 ranks about #41,000 for perspective. Brown's book is well enough reviewed but not enough people cared enough to pay him for his work in that regard OR perhaps he wants to improve his bottom line in a future work and wants to make amends with those people who bought Destined to Reign (or, Ruin, IMO). BTW, that book ranks about #21,400 on Amazon. Good money.

This is my opinion. I do not mean to be harsh. But, any olive leaf to a false prophet like Joseph Prince has to be seen as just that. There HAS to be a reason. The simplest explanation usually is right. And, being charitable to a lie doesn't fly as a legitimate reason.


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Tim

 2017/1/27 7:35Profile
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 Re:

Several years ago I listened to a series of teachings by Joseph Prince that seemed to be in line with the Word of God, and that were a blessing to some friends of ours that are not novices when it comes to the things of God. So I assumed that he was pretty much on the right track in his teaching.

Then one day I happened to watch a teaching that he did on confession of sin that greatly deserved me, because I believe that the teaching was erroneous. The teaching was that the scripture in 1 John on the confession of sin was written not to believers but to unbelievers, and that it was not necessary for believers to confess their sin because Jesus bore it. We know that this is not true for all of the epistles were written to various churches. It is true that Jesus Christ paid the price for all of our sins, but 1 John makes it very plain that when we sin we step out of the light into the dark, our fellowship with God is broken, and the only way for our communion with God to be restored is through the acknowledging and confession of our sin before the Lord.


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Mike

 2017/1/27 11:37Profile









 Re:

So what EXACTLY is the error of Joseph Prince?

Can some quites or links be provided?

 2017/1/27 23:13
ChadC
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 Re: My meeting with Pastor Joseph Prince- by Dr Michael Brown

I have personally found what I deem the "Hyper-Grace" movement heralded by Joseph Prince and others to be one of the most deceptive repackaging of the Gospel we have seen in the last 20 years.

The enemy is always desirous to steer the Church away from intimacy, away from a place of potency, and away from heralding and receiving true salvation.

Spurgeon once stated that "Discernment is not knowing the difference between right and wrong, it is knowing the difference between right and almost right". Our enemy loves to come in and get our teaching and doctrine off degree by degree until we are wildly erring.

Having left a church that was choosing to embrace these concepts I have had some experience as to the results it produces.

In short it makes complete allowance for the leaven of sin to pervade the flock under an unbiblical definition of "Grace". I have found God's Word to be very clear concerning this. Paul stated in Romans "What shall we say then? Shall we continue in sin that grace may abound? Certainly not! How shall we who died to sin live any longer in it?" (6:1). We are not to live in or with sin.

Andrew Murray's exegesis in "Two Covenants" does a masterful job of drawing out from scripture the very clear teaching that the Lord provided both the payment for our sin and the power to overcome it. Once this New Testament concept is clearly seen, the next step is to hold ourselves up to God's standard revealed in His Word as to what a Christian is. One of the characteristics we find of someone "in the way" is that he or she should hate sin.

One of the roles we see of the Holy Spirit which Jesus detailed before He left was to convict of sin and show the way of living righteously.

"And when He (the Holy Spirit) has come, He will convict the world of sin, and of righteousness, and of judgment: of sin, because they do not believe in Me; of righteousness, because I go to My Father and you see Me no more;" (Jn 16:8-10)

There are many great truths we can draw from this section of John's Gospel, but in short I believe that Jesus in part is saying "don't worry about me going away, I will send another teacher and helper which is even more capable than me, He will convict the world of it's destructive sin and reveal how to live righteously since I will no longer be here as an example, I'm going back to my Father..." One of the Holy Spirit's functions is to show us sin and provide the enabling ability for us to leave it.

Scripture also makes it very clear that sinning should be a rarity for us. While we are in this "tent", our flesh will always desire sinful things which war against the holy ways and life of God, we are to "buffet" our bodies like Paul said and bring our thoughts and desires which diminish the flow and power of the Holy Spirit into subjection.

John wrote in his first letter (starting at 1:7) "But if we walk in the light as He is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleanses us from all sin." The Blood of Christ here is our life source, like the sap keeps a tree alive, the living blood of Christ coursing through our spirit makes us alive in Him.

The apostle John goes on to say "if we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. 10 If we say that we have not sinned, we make Him a liar, and His word is not in us."

So we will still have sin in this body of corruption until we are resurrected in our new glorious ones.

Knowing that the creation of Chapters and verses in God's Word were created by Bishops (by men not the original writers) I believe the following verse in Chapter 2 is the apex of John's thoughts on sin.

"My little children, these things I write to you, so that you may not sin. And IF anyone sins, we have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous."

I find the "IF" in "IF anyone sins" in the verse above to be extremely important, and yet rarely, if ever, taught on.

When I met the Lord the first time at 15 the first thing the Holy Spirit did was convict me of sin... I can't tell you how good it felt to have that eternally sobering reality imbedded in my soul that there truly was a deep and vast goodness which was eternally against what sin was. Conviction is not condemnation, but it leaves a deep yearning and mandate to leave sin behind. I would find that if there were sin in my life the conduit of the life of the Holy Spirit was diminished if not stopped altogether until I both repented and changed. It was usually something the Lord had encouraged me on which I had either ignored or refused.

David understood this concept well as in many of his Psalm's he expresses that if there is sin in his life God does not hear him. Jesus' half brother James states in his letter in chapter 5 that the "fervent, effectual prayer, OF A RIGHTEOUS, man (or woman) avails much". Most churches and teachers I have heard assume everyone is in a "righteous" place with God because we are "under the blood"... which we are. But again, just because our past sin has been forgiven and access to the Holy Spirit opened, it does not mean we will not have sin requiring further repentance of. If we need to be living righteously for our prayers to be effective, then it seems logical that to live righteously is part of the normal Christian life. This is why Peter admonishes us to "Be holy as He is holy... Be Holy in all your conduct".

Sadly I was steered away from these convictions and truths the Lord impressed on me in the early months of my journey with Him. Older and seemingly wiser men in the faith erroneously taught me not to worry about sin so much... that we could never walk righteously before God, that's why we needed Jesus' death on the cross. I should have listened to God concerning this instead. Our Shepherds need to lead us more to being directly under the teaching of the Holy Spirit as "you have no need that any man should teach you, but the Spirit of God". God's kindness though, brought me back, but not after many years of confusion and spiritual failure.

The Hyper-Grace movement redefines and relegates all Scripture concerning sin to a meaningless and toothless place of importance in God's Word... and yet sin is the primary pillar of the Gospel heralded by John the Baptist with his Baptism's from sin and Jesus' cup on the cross to "finish" and complete the Sacrifices needed in the Law of Moses for sin. Jesus became not only our Passover from sin and death but also the conduit of the Holy Spirit to part the red seas of our past lives to a life free of sinning. But again it is not that we won't ever sin, but that through the power of the Holy Spirit we receive the abundant life of His blood to live and walk as Jesus did (1 John 1) to live righteously.

Another one of my favorite portions of scripture along these lines is in Paul's admonition to his younger disciple Timothy. Paul states;

"Nevertheless the solid foundation of God stands, having this seal: “The Lord knows those who are His,” and, “Let everyone who names the name of Christ depart from iniquity." (2 Tim 2:19)

In light of the previous verses in 2 Timothy chapter 2 Paul is essentially saying, "Timothy if you really want to know who is really following Christ, here's a good litmus test".... do they flee iniquity?"

I have known many who have met the Lord and many who have been convicted but who sadly never moved on to actually leaving their iniquity. Whether through wrong teaching or just rebellion, they deny through not leaving sin, the very life of Christ they so crave.

Lastly my favorite verses in regards to refuting the false teaching found in the Hyper-Grace movement is found in Paul's clear definition of Grace found in his letter to Titus:

"For the grace of God that brings salvation has appeared to all men, teaching us that, denying ungodliness and worldly lusts, we should live soberly, righteously, and godly in the present age, looking for the blessed hope and glorious appearing of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ, who gave Himself for us, that He might redeem us from every lawless deed and purify for Himself His own special people, zealous for good works." (Titus 2).

"Grace" is the power of God in us to bring a salvation which allows us to not be a slave to sin and offers us a way to deny all ungodliness so we might be a pure people and "special" before Him!

In closing the enemy hates us having the intimacy with the Father which comes through a following and abiding obedience, he hates the power which comes via prayer when we are living righteously, and he hates the salvation which allows for "His will to be done on earth as it is in heaven" which comes from it. I believe the enemy loves the "Hyper-Grace" doctrine.

His richest blessings in and through you!

Brother Chad


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Chad C

 2017/1/28 7:46Profile
ChadC
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 Re: My meeting with Pastor Joseph Prince- by Dr Michael Brown

I didn't realize that so many had given this errant doctrine the term of "Hyper-Grace"!

The Holy Spirit is amazing sometimes!


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Chad C

 2017/1/28 8:24Profile
AbideinHim
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 Re:

Brother Chad,

Thank you very much for the excellent explanation that you gave of the Hyper Grace Movement.

The Roman epistle is the gospel of grace, and the good news is that “where sin abounded, grace did much more abound.” The lie of the enemy back in the early church and even now is that the more that you sin, the more that the grace of God will be poured out on you. The Apostle Paul deals with this error in Romans 6: “What shall we say then? Shall we continue in sin, that grace may abound? God forbid. How shall we that are dead to sin, live any longer therein? (Romans 6: 1,2)

I remember hearing a message as a young Christian that we are going to sin every day. So if that is our expectation, and if we do not have the faith to believe God to keep us from sin, then sinning every day is inevitable. The normal Christian life and experience should be that we are dead to sin and alive unto righteousness. Of course we are going to be tempted, but no Christian has to sin, for “sin shall not have dominion over you, for you are not under the law but under grace.” (Romans 6:14) In this scripture it is clear that grace is not a license to sin, but it is the power that is working in our lives to keep us from sinning.

Every Christian should know that there is all of the difference in the world between the condemnation of the devil over sins that have been repented of and the conviction of the Holy Spirit that will bring us to true repentance when we have sinned.

The reason why sinners are able to sit in a church and feel loved but not come under any conviction of sin is because of the Hyper grace message. The Holy Spirit will never make us feel comfortable in our sin.


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Mike

 2017/1/28 8:34Profile





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