In this sermon, the speaker focuses on 1st Corinthians 10, stating that it is one of the least understood passages in the New Testament due to our erroneous worldview. The sermon begins with a discussion on idolatry and the importance of leaving it behind. The speaker then delves into the realm of magic, distinguishing between harmless tricks and magic with demonic power. The sermon also addresses the influence of toys, books, and games that may have connections to the demonic realm. The speaker emphasizes the need for Christians to be discerning and cautious in their choices, avoiding practices that go against biblical teachings.

Hello, this is Brother Denny. Welcome to Charity Ministries. Our desire is that your life would be blessed and changed by this message. This message is not copyrighted and is not to be bought or sold. You are welcome to make copies for your friends and neighbors. If you would like additional messages, please go to our website for a complete listing at www.charityministries.org. If you would like a catalog of other sermons, please call 1-800-227-7902 or write to Charity Ministries, 400 West Main Street, Suite 1, EFRA PA 17522. These messages are offered to all without charge by the free will offerings of God's people. A special thank you to all who support this ministry. Dean Hostetler is with us tonight again from Goshen, Indiana. Dean is from Napanee, Indiana. Dean is ordained by the Mennonite Church for the deliverance ministries. And he's here tonight to share with us again on spiritual warfare. Let's pray, shall we? Father, we're so grateful tonight again for Jesus, who is on His throne. He's at the right hand of the Father and is high and lifted up. And Father, we recognize tonight that every knee is going to bow and every tongue confess He is Lord to the glory of God the Father. And tonight, Lord, again, we too would like to see that Jesus. So bless our brethren as He leads us in our thinking tonight. In Jesus' name. Turn with me in your Bibles this evening to a passage we read last night. Repetition is one of the keys to learning. I ask you to turn to 1 Corinthians 10. And I submit to you that this is probably the least understood passage in the New Testament, basically because of our erroneous worldview that we looked at last evening. I want to begin looking at the passage beginning with verse 14. Therefore, my beloved, flee from idolatry. I speak to wise men. You judge what I say. Is not the cup of blessing which we bless a sharing in the blood of Christ? Is not the bread that we break a sharing in the body of Christ? Since there is one bread, we who are many are one body. For we all partake of the one bread. Look at the nation Israel. Are not those who eat the sacrifices sharers in the altar? What do I mean then? That a thing sacrificed to idols is anything? Or that an idol is anything? Then comes that resounding, No! The idol is nothing. Then right in the next breath, Paul says, But I say that the things which the Gentiles sacrifice, they sacrifice to demons, not to God. And I don't want you to become sharers in demons. The Bible affirms over and over the reality of a demonic world, a world of spirit that is malevolent, evil, sinister. You can't drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of demons. You cannot partake of the table and the Lord and the table of demons. Notice that he doesn't say you shouldn't. He says you can't. He's emphatic about that. Do we provoke the Lord to jealousy? Are we stronger than he? The things that we want to look at this evening are the forms that sorcery, witchcraft, occultism takes in the communities in which we live. Are we to think that such things belong in Africa and in India? Yes, they are there. To date I have been in 42 different countries of the world. And I have found the sins of sorcery everywhere that I have gone. It's worldwide. The community in which you live is no exception. It's embedded here as well. It still flourishes in the community where I live. There was a period of time when there were five healing magicians within two miles of where I lived. Powerful men and women who performed miracles. But what was the power behind it? I notice that the audience is larger this evening than it was last night. I want to say a few words about world view. I don't want to belabor the point this evening. Suffice it to say that there are three realms. The realm of God. The realm of demons and angels. And the realm of men and things. In a recent conversation with a Mennonite pastor, he said to me, don't ever address Satan. You'll make him mad. The problem with that man is he had a terribly faulty world view. He did not see himself seated with Christ in heavenly places. That's what Ephesians 1 and 2 say. It says we are seated with Christ in the heavenlies. Far above the principalities and the powers of this world. That pastor saw himself beneath Satan. That's a terrible position to be as a leader of God's people. We must take Scripture at face value. The standpoint of what it means. When the Bible says that I am seated here by faith, then that's where I am. That does not speak as to my maturity or my perfection. It speaks of my position. And it speaks of yours. Let's get that point straight. We are not down here or down here. We are up here. It is true that we, the church, are the body here on earth. Christ is the head. The head and body are a unit. I want to speak more pointedly to that issue tomorrow morning. The authority of the believer. And then tomorrow night, the effects of the sins of sorcery in people's lives and their descendants. Those of you that have the outline that was handed out last night, I invite your attention to the second page. Not all of the truth of God is found in your Bible. God has created natural law. The realm of science. We looked at that from the book of Job last evening. Where Job raises zero answers to the questions of God. God raises with him 80 scientific questions and Job can't answer a single one. And the best brains of earth today can answer 80. Nonetheless, God is the God of science. And he is Lord of the universe. Now, if I want to know the formula for sulfuric acid, for example, I do not consult my Bible. It's not there. But it is part of God's created truth. I will need to consult my brother, who is a research chemist for Jevedon Corporation in New Jersey. He knows how to put sulfuric acid together. So does any other chemist on the face of the earth that uses the same set of methods, produces the same thing. That's part of God's created truth. If I want to know how to get to the moon, I need to see the space scientists. They have the know-how and the hardware. That's part of God's created truth. But it's not in my Bible. The same way not all that Satan does and operates is in my Bible. The general principles of his operation are there, and we looked at those last night. But we'll have to look to the society around us to see the specifics of what is practiced in any given community. The first issue that we want to look at this evening is the realm of superstition. I found this in a funny paper one day. Bagwood. He's shaving, and he broke a mirror. They say that's seven years' bad luck. He goes out the door on the way to work, and a black cat goes across his path. Oh, no. A black cat went in front of my path. The cat sits there wondering about what's going on, and Bagwood says, Well, it's for sure now that my fate is sealed. I'm doomed forever. Next, he walks underneath a ladder. And the man on the ladder says, Hey, look, can't you see what you're doing? He gets to the office. His hair is standing straight on end. And Mr. Didders asks, What's the matter with Bagwood? The rest of the help says, We don't know, but he's been that way for a whole hour. The realm of superstition. Superstition is the root feeder of all occult practices, of all sorcery, of all witchcraft. You show me a community where people are superstitious, and I'll show you a community that's shot through with sorcery. They're a hand and glove. They're not separate. Pennsylvania Dutch Hex Times. People paint them on their furniture, on their barns. Said to be folk art. Oh, no, they're not. Those are focal points for wicked spirits. One occasion, dealing with a demonized woman from Chicago, they came down with a group of people from Chicago to our home. They wanted to go to Amish Acres, west of Nappanee. Personally, I wish the place was a million miles away. This woman, who was not yet freed from demonic control, encountered the Pennsylvania Dutch Hex Times in the gift shop. And the demons were immediately in manifestation, and my wife found it necessary to deal with them publicly. The second realm that we want to look at tonight is the realm of fortune-telling. Remember the passage in Deuteronomy 18 that we read last night? The heading of divination. Discovering things hidden and secret by means of the powers of darkness. Many are the people who order their lives by horoscopes, by the signs of the zodiac and the almanac. You leave the horoscope out of the daily newspaper, the editor will get more phone calls than about any other thing. There are 1,750 daily newspapers in this country and over 1,300 carry horoscope columns. Why? Because it's so popular. Is it based on truth? No. But people order their lives by it. The cabbage has to be planted in a certain sign. If you want to castrate the pig, you most assuredly don't do it in the sign of Leo, because that would kill the pig. My father was a carpenter, and I recall so vividly one time going to repair a barn roof. We came unannounced, and the man had to go to the house to consult the almanac to see whether it was the right sign to put shingles on the roof. Because if you put them on in the wrong sign, they wouldn't stay down. They would curl up. Fence posts are put in that way so they won't freeze up. People order their work, their social relationships, even marriages, by the horoscope. There's the palm readers and the tea leaf gazers, those that use a pendulum to determine the sex of an unborn child and a host of other things that it's used for. There's the use of the divining rod. Find a place to put the whale. Ouch! Sorry. That's what the Bible says. Diviners get questions. Do questions ask? The answers have to come from someone or from something else. They don't fall down out of the sky. Yes, I've heard all the different arguments. There's magnetism between me and the ground. There's a chemical reaction. Pray tell, how does a stick have magnetic properties? Can you define that for me, please? Some say it's a gift of God. Some say it's a super-conscious theory. The interesting question about the whole realm is, why? Does genuine Christian, in the presence of the act, pray, in Jesus' name, I bind the power behind the rod solid? And it doesn't work. Now if that thing is of God, does prayer stall the operations of the Holy Spirit? You decide. But if it can be brought to a halt by prayer and binding the force behind it, then the force most obviously is demonic. There are four kinds of divination. There's a terrestrial kind, which concerns itself with the earth. There's a kind that deals with inanimate objects, like perhaps a person wants to find a grave site that is abandoned. Then there is the kind of divination that deals with people, with living things. And there's the kind that seeks information. Now scientific instruments and a divining rod have a very close parallel up to a point. A scientific instrument cannot give you answers to questions that are asked of the instrument. But the water diviner, asking questions, either in his mind or verbally, can get answers from the actions of the rod. Where do those answers come from? Some say it's gamma rays. Those do not have physical properties. There are outside forces moving that rod. There is a takeoff from this principle of divination called Dr. Abrams' black box. I got scads of phone calls from this community a couple of years ago about that thing. This little box, got a door on it, glass plate with a rubber diaphragm stretched across it. Got some dials on it, some rheostats. You can plug it into electricity if you want to. You don't have to, it will work just as good without. You can even put an antenna in your field if you want to, that's supposed to enhance it too. If your turkeys need worming, you take a picture of the flock of turkeys and a sample of the appropriate wormer and put it in the box. You stroke the little plate until it builds up some resistance and you fumble with the dials. And presto, the turkeys are wormed. Can eradicate thistles in your field, the aphids in the alfalfa by similar methods. I know of the father of a prominent Mennonite leader who went up and down the Shenandoah Valley with that black box healing people's illnesses. Dr. Abrams, the originator of that thing, was an unconventional medical doctor about the turn of the century. Another person by the name of Ruth Drowns picked up the whole idea, amplified it and enhanced the instrument. She fixed it up with more complicated dials into which you put a drop of blood. By putting that drop of blood in and then hooking up a wire to the machine over to the drop of blood, she could give you a blood count of red and white blood corpuscles, a urine analysis, the blood pressure of the person, the temperature of the person, the person's diet, all from a drop of blood. Now what's going on here? The drop of blood, the picture of the field or the flock of turkeys is the fetish. The point of contact. The power behind the box is demonic. There's nothing scientific about that thing. You find the same kind of stuff done by the African sorcerers in the Maundy Highlands of West Africa with a three-legged stool. Very same thing. The only thing that happened in this country was that the instrument, the fetish, became a little more sophisticated than a three-legged stool. Divining rods, pendulums, etc., can be used over maps to determine places for well sites, find lost people with a picture, etc. It is not the equipment that the people have. It's the person that is mediumistic. If you have a father or a grandfather that was a water diviner, it will be quite likely that in the family system you will find more people with mediumistic power because it travels down the generational lines by the laws of heredity. I want to speak more to that tomorrow night. Some people use rods, pryer handles, wires. In a congregation in Saskatchewan, I met up with five water diviners in one congregation. There they used a crowbar. There are plenty of biblical prohibitions against this practice, and nowhere do I find affirmations of it. Well, having said all of that, what then is the Christian response? Let me give you two illustrations. I was speaking at a church about 65 miles south and west from where I live. The congregation was growing rapidly. They needed more space. They were adding a room to the auditorium. The elders of the congregation came under conviction that they should not use the well on the property any longer because of the means by which it was found, the divining rod. The water quality was poor. The well was 112 feet deep, and wells are difficult to find in that locality. They did the next logical thing. They held prayer meetings. Lord, where shall we put the new well that we need? One of the elders came to inspiration about 12 feet south of that oak tree. That was where they drilled. To the consternation of the whole community, they got all the good water they could use at an unheard of depth, 12 feet. Mark Ball, Mennonite pastor in Lyttos, Pennsylvania, told me the following story. They needed a new well. They did not believe in the use of the divining rod. So they got on their knees before the Lord and asked, Lord, where shall we put this well that we need? We don't know exactly where it ought to be. To both of them came the inspiration over there in the crook of the sidewalk. That's the place to drill. And so they did. A little very awkward place for the well driller to get to, but that's where they put it. And they got water. About a year later, he saw an ad in the local newspaper where the laboratory in town was offering a special and having a water tested in. He hadn't had that done yet. So he got a jug of water, took it down to the lab. A couple of days later, he came back for the test results. The man who ran the test said to him, Did you get that water out of your well? Yeah, what's wrong with my water? Well, look at this test. I have never tested water like this. Your water quality is better than bottled water in the store. Now, why shall we resort to the sins of sorcery when we have the availabilities of Almighty God? Fortune telling takes various different forms. One of the forms that is very common is the use of suggestion. Let's say you've got a row of teenage girls here. One of them decides to go to the fortune teller. He looks at her and says, Ah, I see in the near future three boyfriends in your life. You marry the tallest one. You die with the birth of the third child. Now tell me, how many brains do you need to tell teenage girls there will be a couple of boyfriends in the near future? Every last one of us can be just as accurate. Natural course of life. But you see the power of suggestion comes true. So she latches on to the tallest one. Now what happens with the birth of the third child? Fear. Any truth to the whole thing? No. Just suggestion. But you see what it does? The second method they use is deceit. Tell you anything that they think you'd like to hear. If I'm around you very long, I'll get you sized up and I'll have pretty good ideas of things you'd like to hear. You can feed people most anything because people are far more gullible than they are scientific. The third realm is genuine fortune telling where the people are in league with the powers of darkness and they bring tomorrow over into here. God in his providence has outlined to you and I the general course of history here in the book. But not the specifics. If you and I knew that on Monday we were going to be involved in an accident and lose a leg, do you think we could handle that this evening? God in his providence has kept that promise. But the fortune teller can reach over there and get it. I know a farmer in the community where we live who lost his billfold. He had four hundred dollars in it. They couldn't find it. He looked everywhere. Finally, in desperation, he went to the fortune teller in Elkhart who said to him, Go home. Go down your lane to the second field. Turn in at the gate. Go to the right four fence posts. You'll find your billfold three feet south of that fence post. That's where it was. That's genuine fortune telling. In league with the powers of darkness. The next area we want to look at is the realm of magic. Again, as I said last evening, we are not here dealing with sleight of hand tricks. There are those magicians who can pull golf balls out of your nose, handkerchiefs from your sleeves. Those are not evil. It's the ability to move the hand faster than the eye can catch it. What I'm talking about is magic that has demonic power behind it. There's love magic. There's hate magic. There's healing magic. There's persecution magic. There's death magic. I've had to deal with all of those. Found them in the lives of oppressed people. Letters of protection. Here's one from the newspaper. A prayer to Saint Jude. Sometimes it's called an ode to Saint Jude. Again, a novena to Saint Jude. It's a Catholic thing, where you recite things three times backwards and forwards, or some other kind of sequence. The whole business becomes magic. Another form that flourishes. I'll recite one of these to you. This letter, written by the hand of Jesus Christ. Parchment of white and letters of gold. Fell into the forest in Magdeburg, Germany in 1783. At the rehashing of the Ten Commandments, good moralisms on how to live. Don't work late on Saturday night. Get ready for Sunday. Pay all your bills. This letter must be published in all the churches. Whoever wants to make a copy of it, may. Whoever has it in their possession has protection from fire, from storms, from accidents, from illness. Some read it's valuable to stop severe bleeding with. I met up with a Mennonite pastor. I was speaking in the congregation. He pulled out his billfold and pulled out a tattered piece of paper and handed it to me. He said, what is this thing? I read one paragraph and I said to him, it's a letter of protection. Where'd you get that? My father gave me that 24 years ago and told me don't ever destroy it. Suffice it to say that that congregation was shot through with problems from one end to the other. But praise the Lord, we ended up burning that document publicly that night. The man was freed from the oppression under which he had been living. Those things are demonic instruments. They are connected with fate, not faith. Healing magic. All the variety of forms of that thing. Today we have some new things on the scene. Here's an article on therapeutic touch, which is invading the nursing profession. You center yourself on something out there. Notice I said something. Then you run your hand across the person's body a couple of inches away from the body to pick up the auras of the body, the magnetic fields. By so doing you find where it hurts. Then you focus on the hurt spot and then there's a flow of energy from the person to the afflicted for healing. Hindu healing practices, that's all it is. This whole thing is propagated by Dolores Kreiger, nursing professor at New York University. Where'd she get her start? From a Hungarian psychic by the name of Dora Kuntz. Occult transfer. Another one that flourishes among us, iridology, iris diagnosis. People look in the iris of the eye. They do not have medical training. I'm not talking about the medical practitioner or the eye doctor who is trained to look at the blood vessels in the retina. These practitioners that I'm referring to divide the iris of the eye in from 12 to 16 segments. Then they say that each segment is connected to another part of the body. Diagnose ailments, prescribe vitamins, minerals, and herbs for cures. One of the most notorious of these men lived for a good many years in the Byrne, Indiana area. That man tell you blood pressure within two points of accuracy by looking at you across the room. His diagnostic ability was 98% accurate. There's no medical doctor that can do that without sophisticated instrumentation. When he vacated his house and moved into another, the people that moved into his house began to experience ghost phenomena. Good reason for it. The one end of the body is the eye. The other end is the foot. Am I against looking in your eye and rubbing each other's foot? No! But if you have mediumistic power, you will transfer it to the next person. Therein lies the danger. Applied kinesiology. Hold out your arm. Put the pills over here in this hand. Or some food in your mouth. See how much pressure it takes to push down the arm. Practiced by some chiropractors and some osteopaths. Scientific? No, not at all. A few years ago I was speaking in a missionary church in Granger, Indiana. A couple about 35 years of age asked audience, a 9 year old son. They had taken the son at 4 years of age to one of these applied kinesiologists for some bodily ailment. From that point on the son became hyperactive. Now he was 9 years of age and a failure in school. After hearing what they had to say, I said to them, You have been involved with the powers of darkness unwittingly. They began to confess their involvement with this occult practitioner. After they had finished, I looked at the 9 year old boy and began to address the powers of darkness that were resident in him. Began to give orders in Jesus name, you have heard the parents confession, I cast you out. After a few minutes of that there was a sudden convulsion in the boy and he was normal. He went from an F to an A in school overnight. Even the school teachers came asking the parents what happened here. You see that passage in 1 Corinthians 10. Points out that there are practices that seem to be harmless on the surface. But they're dangerous. Because behind them lies demon power. Here's a set of dolls that you can buy. If you have these dolls in your possession, you will have health, wealth and prosperity. Bunch of magic dolls. Coming from the Yucatan of Mexico. In the community where I live, nobody advertises this. But everybody knows who the people are that practice it. You've got a sick child. You take it to Mr. or Mrs. So and So. Who will take a piece of string and measure the length of the child's foot and multiply that length times 7. And you knot it together into a loop. You pass the child's body through the loop three times and all the while there are some formulas recited. Perhaps under the person's breath. You finish with in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit or the Lord's Prayer. That's frosting to make it look good. Now you wrap the string around a raw egg. You put it in the hot coals and the fire. The worse the illness, the louder the egg will crack when it explodes and burns up. That string will not burn. You can leave it in the fire half an hour, just as strong as it ever was. In the Goshen area, you hang it on a south wall in our area and you bury it. The next day the child is recovered. That's not Apatow or India, that's where I live. You've got the same characters right here. Number sequences backwards and forwards. Different kinds of strokings. Blocks of hair. Samples of uric. Sample of spittle, etc. All kinds of ways by which healing magic is performed. There's hardly a community that doesn't have a fire blower. Someone that can blow the pain from a burn. By magical means. The wart removers. Kernels of corn. Beans. Bacon rinds. Old dish rack. Potato peels. What have you. Some of the formulas for that is treat the wart and throw the item over your left shoulder in the dark of the moon. All kinds of ways. There are so many magical healing methods. They almost defy description. But what is the motivating power behind them? Spiritism. My youngest sister is a school teacher in the LaVille school system south of South Bend. She brought me this one day. Third grade children's workbook. How to make a Ouija board. Beware what your children are getting involved in in school. Incidentally, about 15 years ago I gave an address right here at the local Christian high school. First thing in the morning. The session lasted the whole four noon. I came away from that session thoroughly convinced that three-fourths of the people in the community ordered their life by the horoscope. I could tell it off of the questions the children raised. It's not the way it ought to be in a Christian community. Dungeons and Dragons. Said to be a game. It's not. A very sinister demonic instrument. I have taken the time to read the player's handbooks. Page 7 for example. This game is designed to initiate you into witchcraft and sorcery. It says that in that many words. Players need to have a patron god. The curses and the incantations must be verbalized in order for them to have full effect. That thing is sinister to the core. Automatic writing for pencils right by themselves. Table tipping. Levitation. Two fingers and a chant. Astral travel where people go into trance. Send their psychic to somewhere else. The Ikenkar group. Nearly every major city has a chapter of that. The teachings of Paul Twitchell. Hinduism with a Christian face pulled across it. You've got one of those things right down here at Fairfield. Maharishi Yoga. Recently in the city of Fort Wayne I encountered a man who had participated in that thing for three years. He could levitate himself two feet off of the ground. We found the man host to four wicked spirits that needed to be cast out in Jesus' name. It's right in your own backyard. I am appalled at the amount of people I have met in the last couple years alone that have signed contracts with Satan in their own blood to get power. I could tell you some horrifying stories about that. One was even done by a Mennonite bishop in eastern Pennsylvania. Literature. The Satanic Bible authored by Anthony Bates. I suggest to you that you do not read it. Leave it alone. I read the chapter on the black mass. It's enough to curdle your blood. I was at a conference lately where a police officer was speaking about these kinds of involvements among the youth. And he made this statement that the Satanic Bible is outselling the Holy Bible in this country 50 to 1. The bookstores can't even keep the thing in stock. Necromanicon. That book is so sinister I tore most of it out and threw it away. I don't even want it in my possession. Listen to what it says on the first page. Necromanicon's magic is nothing to fool with. And it may expose you to psychological forces with which you cannot cope. Remember, if you tinker with the incantations, you were warned. Young people in the state of Pennsylvania have been buying that thing by the thousands. Put together by Alistair Crowell in England, who was the son of a Plymouth Brethren pastor. It fell my lot in life about nine years ago to lend a hand to a high priestess of Satanic worship in Chicago that wanted out. It's a long story. I'll not go into it tonight. We have not the time. The hour is getting late. This book, the book of holy mysteries, was in her possession. When she went to burn her sorcery paraphernalia, which consisted of her crystal ball, her altar, her wand, her knife, her oils, her incense, her books, her Ouija board, etc. She carried this book and her Ouija board from the third floor apartment in Chicago to the alley trash three times in a row. As fast as she got upstairs, there it was. I shared that with Fred Dickinson, chairman of the department of theology at Moody's. Fred didn't blink an eye. He looked me straight in the face. He said, I had a situation like that where it was six times, not three. I looked through this book and one of the sessions that we worked with this woman, the whole book was filled with recipes of sorcery, how to cast spells. Two chapters on death magic. She told me pointedly, I have killed hundreds of people with my magic. Edgar Cayce Foundation, Virginia Beach. Presbyterian elder turned transhealer. Died in 1947. This foundation is still going. There are 42 instructors on staff. Many of them hold chairs of responsibility in leading universities and the psychology departments. Some of them have reputable seminary degrees. What's behind the whole thing? Spiritism of a rank sort. I was sitting in the airport in Washington, D.C. awaiting a plane. Nicely dressed woman came in and sat down beside of me. Presently I saw she got out some literature which turned out to be Edgar Cayce stuff. I paid attention and directly I got in conversation with her. She goes to the Edgar Cayce Foundation four times a year. She is a high official in the educational department in the state of Michigan. She goes to see her past life therapist. She and I had an interesting conversation for the next hour. Toys. Not all toys are innocent. Some are directly designed to initiate people into the realm of the demonic. The cartoons, many of them, the Smurfs, the Trolls, the Elves, etc., are based on demonic themes. If you have a television in your house, see to it that it is regulated for what the children see. Here is a book titled, The Long Lost Friend, put together by George Holman in Pennsylvania in the 1800s. It has been translated to English. It is still in print. It flourishes among the Pennsylvania Dutch-speaking people, revered by many more highly than the Bible. What is in the book? Half of it are formulas of herbal medicine. The other half are just blatant recipes of sorcery. That is all it is. The sixth and seventh books of Moses. Those books have nothing to do with the Bible or with Moses. The recipes of sorcery put together by the Catholic monks in the 14th century. They are still in print. It was in a bookstore a while ago in Michigan City, Indiana. I saw on the occult bookshelf more than 400 titles. They number in the thousands today as people get plugged more and more into this weird area. Rock music. It is oriented to the drug culture. Advocates free love and sex. Postulates the authority itself based on Eastern religions designed to be felt, not heard. The idea is to deaden the subconscious. That stuff is born of the jungles and the seances. Halloween. Halloween is a celebration that you cannot Christianize. There is nothing Christian in it. And still we have Halloween parties in the name of the church. The Druid priests got to party together in the 7th century. They were the sorcerers of England. The jack-o-lantern, which is an integral part, comes from Scotland. The story goes something like this. There was a very ungodly man by the name of Jack, who played practical jokes on the devil, frequently got drunk and beat up on his wife. When he died, since he hadn't lived a good life, he couldn't get into heaven. And since he had played practical jokes on the devil, he wouldn't let him into hell. So in consolation, he threw out a live coal, which he put in a hollowed-out turnip, to flash a little light on his pathway till judgment day. Does that square with anything you read in your Bible? There isn't a line in Scripture that tells you that Satan runs hell, or that he's there. What the Bible does say is that it's a place prepared for Satan and his angels. And when Satan gets there, he'll be chief victim. And then we think that we can Christianize that kind of a setup. You can't. Don't even try. Secret societies and lodges. The Masonic Lodge is the biggest offender. Are you aware that 18% of the leadership of the Southern Baptist Church is involved in the Masonic Lodge, let alone the membership? Right here is a book, Should a Christian be a Mason, by Storms. The oaths that you take to become part of the Masonic Lodge are in this book. It's enough to curdle your blood. My oldest son was pastor of a Mennonite church that had five Masonic Lodge members in it. That's awful. New Age stuff. There is nothing New Age. Age-old sorcery and new clothes, that's all. What does the New Age philosophy consist of? Let's look at it. Number one. Tear down your old belief system and throw it out because it's worthless. Two. Replace it with humanistic behavior modification techniques. Three. All is one. There's just as much of God in that plant or this desk as there is in you and I. There's just as much of God in a rock. That's the philosophy behind it. Another enterable belief of New Age practitioners is reincarnation. Not resurrection. Reincarnation. Which means that because you haven't lived a good life in this life, you have a lot of karma to work off, so you need another life to do it in. And eventually, after enough lives, maybe you can reach perfection. What does the Bible say about that? Confess your sins, repent, and receive the Lord Jesus Christ so that you can participate in the presence of God for time and eternity. Diametrically opposed to New Age philosophy. Since you are your own God is what they are postulating, therefore you can control your own environment and destiny. If there ever was a system of works, there is one. But that thing is flourishing all over the world. And we need to be aware of it.