Guards Up

[Some more observations on what is called the "Lakeland Revival."]

Guards Up [Excerpts]

When I was speaking at a church in Mississippi last year, the pastor said a very interesting thing to me. I had spoken about not being deceived in the last days. Deception will be everywhere, and if you are not very careful, Satan will deceive you and pull you away from the truth. Afterwards, he made a very simple statement to me. He said one of our main problems as Christians is that when we get around religious folks, we put our guards down instead of up. We naturally trust religious people, because we don’t think they will steer us in the wrong direction. But when the Bible tells us about false christs and false prophets, those are religious folks that we need to careful of.

So let’s put our guards up and take a look at something that is happening right now that seems to be turning into a phenomenon. Remember your guard is your Bible, and we must filter things through that prism to see if something is true or not.

1 John:4:1Beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God: because many false prophets are gone out into the world.
See All... says, “Beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God: because many false prophets are gone out into the world.”

The word “try” here means to test or to examine something. There is nothing wrong with questioning things and examining things to see if they are really of God. As a matter of fact, that is what we are supposed to be doing! We can’t contend for the faith unless we test and try things. That is how we can then tell if false teachings are making their way into our Christian circles.

There is something happening right now called the Florida Outpouring. It is a supposed move of God where a lot of people are being saved and a lot of people are being healed. People are driving in from everywhere to be there, and people have flown as far away as Australia to be at these meetings. The services are led by Todd Bentley. I have been getting a lot of emails about this and some phone calls. So I decided to take a look at what was happening and test the spirits to see if they were from God.

One night, I decided to watch this Florida Outpouring. It was a four hour service that evening. Todd used six scripture verses where he had people go to their Bibles. It took about ten minutes. How does a four hour service have only ten minutes of Scripture in it? He even mentioned that he has been getting critiqued by people because he hasn’t been using the word of God in his services. We must challenge our audiences to know the word of God above all else, so that they will not be deceived in the coming days.

During this service, Todd had children come up. Of course kids haven’t been conditioned like adults. When he laid hands on the kids to slay them in the spirit, which again is not in the Bible, many of the kids didn’t fall over. He would even push on their head some. They wouldn’t fall over. If this was all true, I would think the Holy Spirit would have enough power to knock a kid over! So again very clearly it is not the Holy Spirit, but some other kind of spirit.

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