A brief, almost good word, about the Word of Faith Movement

Last updated on: January 16, 2017 at 10:59 pm by John Mark N. Reynolds

A brief, almost good word, about the Word of Faith Movement 2017-01-16T22:59:29-04:00 John Mark N. Reynolds

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Let’s face it: the church of a Cross, martyrs, and the school for souls is not the church where the right words can make all the pain go away. Once as a boy, I was in the car and my daddy was listening to one of the “name it, claim it” pastors. At one point, the man dismissed Paul’s thorn in the flesh, some unknown problem that God would not heal, with the statement: Paul lacked the New Testament. We could do better than Paul and . . . I will never know what came next, because my mild mannered father went superman on the cassette stop button while yelling: “Heresy.”

And so it was and is.

Yet he also was listening to that tape, because very good people were being helped by bits of the teaching. Of course, other people were led to financial mistakes (claiming things God did not wish them to have with their credit card) and a crisis of faith when they could not get their “confession right.” If you have never known a person afraid to admit they felt sick, who would pause after saying, “I feel bad” only to say, but “Praise the Lord! I am feeling better by faith” then you have seen a bizarrely American form of religious bondage.

If Dale Carnegie married Mary Baker Eddy, the Word of Faith movement would be their unholy child.

So how were people helped by this false teaching?

One sermon Dad pointed out that where the fire of God’s anointing is found, there is also “strange fire.” Somebody is always adding their own stuff, usually pretty bad stuff, to God’s Word. That’s deadly, but the death comes because people are playing with something almost right. They are putting their words over God’s Word.

The Word of Faith movement led people to read the Bible . . . really read the Bible. Fred Sanders, theologian and Torrey Honors tutor extraordinaire, once pointed out to me that nobody who was not reading the Bible and praying daily really needed our spiritual advice. Reading the Bible and praying is not the answer to every problem, but failure to do so is fatal.

Don’t go to the doctor if you have refused to drink water for three days or eat for a month and ask why you feel like death.

All that memorized Bible did people some good . . . . and led people who also had good pastoring away from the cassette tapes (now the streaming videos) and back to God’s severe mercy.

But the good accidentally done by the heretics, and intentionally done by the Holy Spirit, was in giving joy to a particular kind of sad sack soul. These Christians know we are the faith of the martyrs, but have none of the martyr’s joy. They forget fasting is for feasting and that the school of souls has graduation days and not just in heaven. They weren’t “naming and claiming” a new house, car, or job. They were speaking the truth of God’s Word about their lives.

I know these folk well, because I am one of them. I am tempted by the sin of seeing things as worse than they are. Satan is around, the flesh is weak, but Jesus is Lord after all. A great many of us sang the Scriptures cheerfully and were in no danger of confusing Scriptural promises with materialism.

We were more likely to feel guilty eating an ice cream when the money could have gone to missions. Of course, the only person to attack beauty in Scripture that way was Judas . . . and agreeing with Judas is not a good idea. We have a poverty mentality and have not learned to rejoice in abundance.

That is wrong.

Of course, we did not need the heretics, frauds, and grifters to tell us that. Dad was preaching this truth every Sunday, but that might be the point. God was trying to bring balance: severe mercy, fasting and feasting. Grifters took the truth and made it a lie, but still some good was done.

I started to say something good about the heretics, but ended up saying something good about God. He uses even the heretics.

Thank God.

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