In this sermon, the speaker addresses various topics related to the Christian faith. He acknowledges that some may find these topics irrelevant or boring, but emphasizes the importance of understanding them in light of the growth of the Christian movement. The speaker also warns against being deceived in the last days and encourages the audience to be like the Bereans, who diligently searched the Scriptures to verify the truth. He concludes by discussing the issue of strange fire and criticizing the practice of emotional experiences in religious gatherings, particularly those involving falling and physical healing.

Thank you for that song. I appreciate that music immensely and the words that so aptly go together there. What a blessing. Well, it's Friday, and I guess we're coming down the homestretch here. I have a number of subjects which I would like to at least talk about a little bit, but will not be able to go into the detail of them. To some of you, you are pretty far removed, perhaps, and isolated from what I'm speaking about. And maybe it seems a bit irreverent or boring to you, but I just say this to you, if you live another twenty years, the way this thing has grown and is growing, I expect you will bump into it sooner or later and may well appreciate the things you learned here today and will think back as to what was taught here and the warnings given. Shall we bow our heads for prayer? I want to thank you, dear Lord, once again, for this wonderful opportunity to gather with these lovely young people who I'm convinced that many of them love you and love your Word and love the Christian life, and what a blessing to interact with them here this week. I pray that you would write deeply and deliberately upon their heart the things that are being taught, that they can have a major benefit in their walk with the things that they have learned here. Do bless them and protect them from the enemy and the wiles of Satan, and let them not be ignorant of his devices. I pray for power and strength and victory in their Christian life and experience. I pray in Jesus' name. Amen. Beginning here with a few minor ones, perhaps, that I just want to make mention of. Some of these are waves that have come through that are not as pertinent maybe today as they might have been some years ago, but I do feel they bear mentioning. I'm not sure how heavy the influence is in some of these things yet in some circles, but there may be more than I realize, but we have tried to separate ourselves pretty far from them. The one is the matter of healing. Our churches had had a certain amount of influence coming out of Georgia, an outfit down there, a deliverance ministry in Georgia, that taught that 80% of all sickness is due to sin, and more directly so, a being. They taught that sin, rather than it being a work of the flesh in your and my life, it was a being, or rather, ultimately a demon. And so what really needed to happen, whether you had, like I mentioned yesterday in that prayer concerning arthritis or whatever, nicotine or whatever, it was all considered to be a spirit or a demon, and what you really needed was deliverance. This man taught that I'm at 80% and I hope to get to 100%, and it was so sad, because he would take someone born with spina bifida, or someone who had curvature of the spine that developed over the years in their childhood, and believe that they really had a demon in them that caused it all, and that the individual needed deliverance. He put people on such a trip, you know, that ended up being nothing, and not true. But that teaching that came out of there is still excellent today some. Another one that went with it was that one of the great deficiencies that you may have in your life today is that you lack a father's love on the young lady's part, or a mother's love on the young man's part, and somebody needs to stand in a proxy for that and give you a mother's love, or give you a father's love. And even though the church can make up some of those deficiencies, nobody can ever replace that in full reality, and it ends up being just, like, groping for the right word, but you can imagine where that ends up at, and sometimes even to the point of moral failure or questioning it all. They would have sessions, people would travel there from around the country, they would have sessions there, but then people are laying on of hands and rebuking those spirits and those demons and what have you, but then people would come back, and some of them even started ministries where they, in maybe a smaller way, began to teach the same thing. Let me tell you something about healing that is very, very interesting in my experience. I worked in a psychiatric hospital for a year and four months in Ohio in my 1W service, so I had some experience in that, and then in eight months in an orthopedic ward. But they tell me that about one-third, 33% or so of all sicknesses would correct themselves without you doing anything, taking any medication or anything. In that, and I really thank God for that, that he has made the body to fight off disease and to heal itself. And so there's a lot of healings going on that credit is given to this or that, that simply are that. They heal themselves by what God gave us in the body. Another third they tell me are psychosomatic healings, that they are in your head and can be cured with water pills or placebos, as we used to give in the hospital. Many a times people came in and thought they had this and that and the other thing, and we gave them placebos or water pills and they felt better. And that's just the way the mind works. The problem is up here sometimes, and we don't want to get out of bed because we're lazy or what have you, and we think we're sick and we're not, and if we would just get up and go to work, we'd soon feel better. But anyway, there's about a third they say that could be healed. The idea is going to a doctor or practitioner and getting some pills, even though they're water, and taking them. You think they're doing you good and you have a positive attitude about your visit and you get better. Amazing, isn't it, how all that works in the mind. And then there's about a third they say that are real. And what a blessing it is in life to be able to separate them in our homes and in our lives and not run to the doctor every time we have a scratchy throat and go on antibiotics when the body, as they say, if you have a bad cold, it lasts about seven days, and if you go to the doctor, it lasts about seven days. Yeah, the body heals itself with most of those things. Now, there are times when a severe strep throat or something can be dangerous and you actually need antibiotics for. But for the normal viruses of the winter or summer or whenever you get them, you don't need those things. And I encourage you to save your money and let God heal you through the things that he has given us, too. But then there are serious illnesses and many cancers today and many things that need major attention and even then they can't be healed. So when there's a healing campaign going on and there's a lot of praying and laying on of hands to heal people and they go home and they feel better and a lot of it is up here because of the deliverance or the healing that they went through. But some of it is just simply we do get healed. The body heals itself. But I grieve over the deception that came out of this. That was destructive in some churches. The next one I'd like to talk about, like I say, I can't do all of these. Let me just read the scripture here. In 1 John 4, 1 to 3, Beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God. Because many false prophets are going out into the world, hereby know ye the spirit of God. Every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is of God. And every spirit that confesses not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is not of God. And that is that spirit of Antichrist whereof ye have heard that it should come. And even now, already it is in the world. 1 John 4, 1 through 3. Try the spirits. I consider it a great blessing to be a part of a church where the gifts vary. And among us, we have always had those discernment gifts over the years that we're able to test and to try and to question. I remember in our early years, in the basement in New Holland even, where people claimed that they had the gift of tongues. And right in the middle of it were questioned as they were speaking it. Do you confess that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh? And the young lady said, no. And she was told, you better get rid of that thing, wherever you got it. And I know where she got it. She got it in a major campaign, I think in New Jersey, where they got her in a back room and taught her the tongues, the modern babbling. And perhaps by laying on the fence, I forget what all they did to her. And she came out of that and she nearly went crazy from that experience. But I'm not saying that's the only way. I think you can try the spirit simply by examining it, by its fruit and by the scripture. You can know a lot of times, God, and through prayer. Ask God, what is this? I've heard of different people that went into some of these charismatic services where people were being slain in the spirit and they didn't believe in it. They determined they were not going to fall over. And some of the leaders were so upset that they actually tried to push them over, you know, in order to have a certain phenomena come forth. But, oh, it's just sad when you hear some of the things that have taken place in these kind of meetings. Another small one that I'd like to talk about is proxy forgiveness. I don't know if you've ever heard of that, and I hope you'll never run into it, but we have. And that is the fact that someone has sinned against you in a major way. Maybe even a mother or a father abused you or what have you and have died or are unconverted or have never made amends. But especially so in the case of death. And so they have designed that someone else should stand in the place of your mother and ask you forgiveness for what she did to you, even though she's a total stranger or coming from wherever. And they call it proxy forgiveness. They stand in proxy of your mother or your father or your uncle or your aunt and ask forgiveness for the thing that happened to you. And you emotionally get really involved with the whole thing and accept the forgiveness. And it's supposed to bring about an emotional healing. Yeah, the story that is very relevant or very pertinent to that is of a five-year-old boy who lost his mother in a traffic accident. And he had to grow up without a mother or a new stepmother, which maybe he never knit to in the way he did with his physical mother. It's always those kind of problems. But he had that proxy thing done to him. And, you know, he was told, I'm sorry, the other lady said, I'm sorry I wasn't there. And it wasn't the stepmother either. Sorry I wasn't there when you started riding your bike or when you had your first day in school. And he totally lost it emotionally and wept for probably hours or for a long time. Just the emotional trauma of somebody standing in place of his mother who he lost at five years old. Not good. These things are not in the Bible. They are psychologically dreamt up by somebody and put on people today and all this. Another one is slaying in the spirit that I'd like to speak about. Very, very prevalent thing in charismatic circles today. And I'll have, if I have time, I want to read a certain meeting like that. But the old men that I mentioned beforehand, especially Benny Hinn comes to mind, he'll take his coat and just whip it out over the crowd and the people fall over by the dozens. And they, you know, they try to justify a little bit by Daniel in the book of Daniel when Michael came there and he fell down before him. But the other justification in the New Testament they have is when they came to arrest Jesus and Jesus said, Whom seek ye? And they would say, and he said, I am he. And they all fell back. But they weren't Christians and that was a very unique situation. They normally didn't catch a thief or a criminal that way in any way. But it is just so sad as multitudes, thousands of people go through an emotional experience that seems to me to be demonic. It is wicked and wrong. And people falling all over the place on the platforms and over top of each other and what have you in these kind of meetings and believe that it's a spiritual, legitimate experience. I'm here to tell you it is not. It is a strong delusion again. By the way, I didn't give my title. I just want to talk about title. My message would be strange fire this morning. And I believe that is strange fire. Another one I would like to say about healing that I failed to mention here is that they feel like healing is in the atonement. Physical healing is in the atonement. And that they have the right to heal people or God wants people to be healed physically the same as he does spiritually. I disagree. I believe that the healing in the atonement, if you want to call it the greater part of healing in the atonement is spiritual. Isaiah 53 talks about by his stripes you are healed. And that is quoted again in Matthew. But to believe that you and I can go to any person in the world and offer them physical healing the same as spiritual healing, I believe is a deception. I do not believe it is God's will to heal everybody. Individuals do heal. And like I said, I even mentioned already that he has built in us a body that fights off infection and heals itself of sicknesses and many things that happen to it in accidents with broken bones and open wounds and all that that can be healed. I just heard of one the other day who terribly fell twenty some feet and broke, I think it was up to ninety bones in his body. And I think he is still living. But that healing is not in the atonement that you can offer like salvation is for the spiritual healing that God can give you. Jesus did not die to heal everybody. And that is evident already in the book of Acts and through the epistles when we have evidence of people not being healed even by the apostles already. It was much greater in the beginning of the book of Acts for the authentication that this what was happening at Pentecost was truly of God. And so there were major resurrections of the dead, healing lame men at the temple there, beautiful and many other things. People got healed in order to prove and authenticate that the apostles were of God. But after the church got established and grew and all of that, then that diminished. And I believe that. I would not call myself a full cessationist that I believe that none of those gifts ever would manifest again. But I would say they are greatly diminished. And as I said the other day, they may show up in the firing field, in the jungle, on the mission field here and there a bit, but are not like they were in the book of Acts. And one of the, in the early part of the book of Acts, one of the big mistakes the charismatic movement has made and many others is to believe and preach and teach that we must restore everything of the book of Acts in a revival. And there are men close home, let me tell you, that are promoting that today. And it's a delusion. I don't believe it's true. I don't believe it's the will of God that the book of Acts is reenacted and all that it needs is our faith to believe it, to activate it again and get the whole ball rolling and we will experience everything they experienced then. And that's all connected with this thing that we can experience or do everything that Jesus did. And that's not true. And never was and never has a man lived in these two thousand year history that can do everything Jesus did. Another one that is a bit small and yet very subtle in our time and yet we've had to deal with that is the whole matter of visualization. This came out of Ed Smith's book on Theophostic counseling, if you ever heard of that out of Kentucky and made a wave years ago. And the remnants of this are still there today. Where a person is taught to, as someone works with them and prays with them and counsels them, to close their eyes and then they see an image coming to them and they're supposed to let him wrap his arms around you or whatever. And so there's kind of a visualization of healing spiritually or physically in that whole matter and that is also has ended up. The idea is if you have a Theophostic counseling experience at the beginning was that if you have one of them you'll never need it again. But even Ed Smith had to back off and realize that that didn't work. But that also is connected with Hindu religion, visualization and other oriental religions. And I believe there's a connection to that with this whole deception that that's where the source is. And I believe that it can be very dark, demonic deception connected with that visualization. I believe what we experience can be experienced with your eyes open so to speak and you know what's going on and you don't have to close your eyes and imagine or visualize certain things happening to you. That is dangerous. Stay away from it. Here's another one. I hope you've never heard of this before but I thought I'll just mention it. Some of these major charismatic leaders believe that Satan has the dominion of the world and they have to, Christ has to ask permission to do certain things. It just grieves my heart again. It's blasphemous almost. What they have done is made Christ a human and deified man. In their teaching they'll bring Christ down, like I said, that he has to be born again in hell. Suffering there spiritually has to be born again. And then they deify man and call us gods. We are gods. We are gods and believe that we should be called gods. Another one I'd like to give is prophecy. Another very, very dangerous one through the years and is still very extant today. In that there are prophecies given concerning matters, future, present, whatever, by these individuals and believe that they have a word from the Lord to tell you. And I appreciate a little booklet I got years ago. I think the title of it was God told me to tell you. But that's how the whole thing runs. And so in a meeting what will happen is some self-appointed prophet will come up to you and say various things. One of them he might say, it happened close by here, just down the road a ways, at a meeting is they came up to a couple and say, you have marriage problems. And he came as a prophet saying, you've got marriage problems. And the couple said, really we don't, you know, and all that. Well, he perceived in the spirit that they had marriage problems and they needed help. So you have all kinds of things like that. Others have been in this connected with the healing thing is that I prophesy that by a certain time you're going to get up. You're going to sit up. He might be laying there in a coma, but by the end of the month or the end of this or that or whatever, you're going to sit up and walk and you'll be OK. Prophecies like that are given. But here's the dangerous one. And those didn't happen in embarrassment. They had to disassociate themselves with the victim that laid there in a coma and as a vegetable for months and never did recover. Some of them in that case was they even died shortly and they were prophesied they weren't going to die. Very, very dangerous thing that has happened. But here's the real dangerous one. And they'll come up to you and say, young man, I perceive that God has his hand upon your life and God's going to do some great things with you. And they prophesy on you and how that God is going to use you. There's a major revival coming in a few years and you're going to be part of it and God's going to use you. And I'll tell you, if you want to literally look what that does to a young man, you swell with pride. Oh, God, I'm a special person. I'm called God. I've been prophesied on and it can do incredible damage to the humility of a Christian brother or sister to hear those kind of prophecies. And they happen on both sides of the house. That one, too, grieves me, those prophecies like that. If you ever hear that or see that happen, I believe there are callings of God. And I'm not saying that there's never a case where a godly man might give you some encouragement to give attention perhaps to a gift that he might see in you and think that if you handle it right, that God may be able to use you in a good way for his kingdom's sake. There's a portion of that that may be okay at the time. I would say that. But to make these kind of prophecies at random in a crowd like they have done and puff people up thinking they are something special. And there's so much psychology in that anyway. But they actually say these things, God told me to tell you, thus and thus and thus is going to happen. So many, so many delusions, so many false prophecies have been given to individuals like that. So many young people, Christians have been destroyed by pride with this kind of thing. And the next thing was actually a deception. And it's what led you for you to feel special and feel anointed of God and call of God in a special way. Like I say, that doesn't mean you may not have a call upon your life from pretty young. I had some of that myself, but nobody ever gave it to me. I believe it was just that God laid it upon my heart in my young years. And even to the point where I hardly told the soul but would try to prepare myself a bit for it. God told me to tell you. The next one I'd like to talk about a little bit is the sins of the fathers. That is a big one. Taken from the Old Testament, that the iniquity of the fathers shall be on the children, even unto the third and fourth generation, on them that hate me. And of course, a thousand generations to them that love me. Let me just tell you that that is used all across the board and comes very close home in our churches. In that when a person has a given problem, it's very quickly somebody says, well, I think it's ancestral. I think you have an ancestral sin in your life. And I have seen people who have dug into their grandfathers and great grandfathers to see what sin they might have committed in order to possibly rid themselves of this curse that came from my great grandfather in his immorality or his drunkenness or alcohol. Yeah, or whatever, all kinds of things. And they get an idea that I have some affinity to alcoholism because great grandpa was a drunk. Well, I don't believe that. I do believe that there can be environmental and even maybe some genetic tendencies to a given weakness, may I say, or something like that. But a lot of it is in the way we're brought up. With a lot of criticism and cursing going on or alcohol flows freely in our house or this and that, of course we have a tendency to follow in the sins of how we were brought up. But I've seen many a man that has looked at all that and saw the effect that it had upon my dad or granddad and said, I will have nothing to do with it. Many a boy has never taken a drink because they saw the effect in their life. But the other thing is this scripture is written on them that hate me. And I think for most of us, I would say if we go back to dig around a bit on how our grandfathers and great grandfathers lived, they were not perfect men. But were they men that hated God? Hardly so. Hardly so. Yes, there are exceptions. Some of us come out of the pit. And we did have a background like that. But let me just read the scripture in Ezekiel 18. 18 verse 19 to try to clear some of this up. So there are influences that can definitely influence our lives depending what kind of an environment we're brought up or some of the genetic tendencies that we have as a family or our heritage or background. But in Ezekiel 18 verse 19, I want to read this. Yet ye say, why doth not the son bear the iniquity of the father? When the son hath done that which is lawful and right, and hath kept all my statutes, and hath done them, he shall surely live. The soul that sinneth, it shall die. The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father, neither shall the father bear the iniquity of the son. The righteousness of the righteous shall be upon him, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be upon him. But if the wicked shall turn from all his sins that he hath committed, and keep all my statutes, and do that which is lawful and right, he shall surely live, he shall not die. All his transgressions that he hath committed, they shall not be mentioned unto him in his righteousness that he hath done. He shall live. Have I any pleasure at all that the wicked should die, saith the Lord God, and not that he should return from his ways and live? So I take that to answer this whole question. There is entirely too much blame being given on ancestral sins in many seminars that are going on all over the country these days, right now, yet. And as soon as somebody has a little extra moral problem or other problem or whatever, they say, nah, I think it's ancestral. He's got a curse on him that came down through the family line. Well, according to this, I would like, this is my challenge. Don't accept that. Even though you may see some environmental tendencies that you may have through your upbringing or through your family line and so on, you're determined by the Word of God to follow Ezekiel chapter 18 and say, the soul that sinneth it shall die. If you're going to commit your life to sin and to those evil habits, you're going to have the effect of it. But I just heard of one the other day where somebody gave me a message to evaluate where the individual felt like he had a spirit of rejection on him. So he found out and was told that his mother went through major rejection when she was pregnant with him. And so therefore, he believed that he has a spirit of rejection in him because his mother was suffering for rejection in her life at the time she was pregnant with him. I'd say don't accept that. Simply open your heart that I am who I am and whatever my mother went through or my father at the time I was conceived or in the womb, I will not accept that to affect me, but I will live by the Word of God and be redeemed by the power of Scripture. I didn't intentionally avoid the gifts of tongues, but it's too big of a subject almost for me to handle. And because I didn't see it as heavily pertinent to this group of people, I decided to treat it lightly. I do encourage you, if you have a question on that issue, to listen to Brother Mark Miller's very thorough expedition of that at his home church. He would have a CD or you might be able to listen to it online and has done a good work on that. But I would like to say to you this morning in short, the real miracle of tongues in the book of Acts at the beginning was people speaking and preaching the Word of God and 17 nations hearing it in their own language, in their own tongue. And that is the safest gift of tongues that exists. That's the safest one. And when this tongue thing broke out in the history of the charismatic and Pentecostal church, they were all excited. They thought they had languages rather than modern babbling and that they could send missionaries out across the world and they could preach in English and the people would understand it in their native tongue. Many of them had to return in embarrassment because it isn't true. And so what this thing has been dumbed down as just some modern babbling today because they can't do the other. The other has never worked for them in any consistent way. I'm not saying there are some reports out there that legitimately that has actually happened. People have, again, in foreign countries where the gospel, no Bible, what have you, and they have preached and the people have heard and understood. I even talked personally to a man in Russia who couldn't read or write in German. He was in Russia, but there was a German heritage around him and he had a German Bible, but he couldn't read it. He asked God to help him and God actually gave him the gift of understanding that German Bible. And so there are things like that that I believe can happen. But again, the safest thing for you to believe and experience concerning tongues ever is that of languages and let the modern babbling, let it lay. It is so deceptive. People think and are told that it's a sign of the Holy Spirit and the evidence of the baptism of the Holy Spirit. And so they babble and think they have the baptism of the Holy Spirit and they don't have the power to even live a godly life. And it's a delusion. It's a deception. Don't go there. Don't go there. When that thing starts happening back away, the deception just grows like a monster. Many times in a congregation where that is happening. Now let me read what I was going to read for you yet at the end. This again is a bit far away from you, but growing in leaps and bounds across the country. As I mentioned, things happening in some of the major cities of America and especially now in New York City and Reading, California, Seattle, Washington and many other places. It was an amazing spectacle. The church carpet was strewn with sprawled bodies, some on top of one another. Various individuals wept as in mourning. Some shook uncontrollably. Limbs twitching in powerful spasms. Others stumbled under the influence, unable to put one foot in front of the other in a straight line. Some were caught up in the rapture of a full car vision. The majority reeled from unstoppable laughter. Faces red and hands over cramped stomach muscles. Many sliding to the floor in a disheveled heap in front of or underneath the pews. The din was phenomenal. Like a kind of hysterical battleground, this bedlam of unrestrained emotion had claimed its fallen warriors. And all we did to follow direction from the man in the pulpit. Although we at New Covenant Fellowship had never previously witnessed anything like holy laughter, the doctrinal groundwork had already been laid. We knew that the cutting edge church was always the first to experience the mighty, mysterious work of God. And we received the latest move with open arms. The power was almost inconceivable. Never before had so many been laid out by the touch of God, being caught up in the ecstasy of heavenly realms and known such joy and release in his wonderful presence. As we constantly lived on the brink of every new manifestation of power, we were ripe for a fresh anointing, a wind that would sweep into the congregation and through us out into our town. Well, there's a lot more to the story, but those are the kind of experiences that are happening in our very day. And I encourage you that if you ever get anything close to a meeting like that, that you run. You run from it as fast as you can get out of there. Brother Denny and I, years ago, were called to Texas to a homeschooling family there that was open to our teachings and wanted to have some weekend meetings. And the building was scheduled only to Sunday morning. And so the homeschooling family said, well, there's some meetings going on here in our church where we normally go. They had a little cell group, I think, or something that we met with and preached for. Would you like to go to the services? And we said, okay. Our flight was not out till Monday morning. We'll go with you. And we went in there, and this is the kind of thing that we experienced. They got a bunch of ladies up front, and they wanted to bless them for the services that they had given in preparing food or what have you for the weekend. And so they wanted to minister to them, and they started laughing and carrying on up there. First of all, there was this strange music and people with eyes closed, young girls up front there, not very modestly dressed, swaying back and forth to the music. And then they started to minister to these women that they had up there in a group. And they began to laugh. And then people started falling over and falling over in the aisleways. And Brother Denny said, let's get out of here. And we got up and went to our host and said, hey, we don't want to be here for this. And we went outside. He came out, and I think he was a bit flustered to know what to do with it all and with us and everything. But that was the closest and the only time I ever had an experience like that. And I never want another one. It was so strange. The music is strange. The girls singing with their breathy microphone singing with contemporary music and swaying with closed eyes, being attired in a way that was not appropriate. And then this other stuff started taking place. So that was my introduction to it in reality. OK, I think I'm nearly finished here. My final plea was examine everything, try the spirits, like I mentioned, and examine everything by the Scripture. That's my plea to you. Don't go after the frothy, frivolous, emotional experiences. I believe in emotion, and I don't want a dead, heavy church that has no emotion. I don't want to go there either. But somewhere there's a reality, there's truth, there's a proper obedience to the Scripture, and that's where I want to live. And that's the experience that I want to have in church. I want reality. I want truth. And I do not want to be deceived. And I think as we test everything like this and watch the fruit of it like I have through the years, which I have an advantage there over you, I understand that. But examine it by the Scripture to see, be Bereans, and see whether these things be so or not. And God preserve you and help you that you will not be deceived in the last days by this movement. I pray that for all of you in Jesus' name. Thank you. 1-7522 You are welcome to copy this message for free distribution. This ministry is supported by your donations. May the Lord Jesus bless you.