Nuggets from Seeking and Finding God—Perverting Saving Faith | thebereancall.org

Dave Hunt

Sadly, for many, faith is a power of the mind and God is merely a placebo that helps one “believe” and thereby activates this mind power. “Prayer is communicating with the deep unconscious…. Your unconscious mind…[has a] power that turns wishes into realities,” said a popular Protestant leader before his recent decease. He said further, “You don’t know the power you have within you!... You make the world into anything you choose.” It is Babel again in a more sophisticated form. The power of “thinking” becomes the magic stairway that leads to the paradise where all one’s wishes can be fulfilled.

God has blasphemously been called “the greatest Positive Thinker [or Possibility Thinker] that ever was!” To some “faith teachers,” faith is a mind power that even God uses—a force contained in words that is released when one speaks forth “the word of faith.” “By the spoken word,” declares the founder and pastor of the world’s largest church, “we create our universe…you create the presence of Jesus with your mouth…through visualization and dreaming you can incubate your future and hatch the results.” Here we have an evangelical form of Christian Science or Science of Mind. It is an abomination to the true God of the Bible.

For many Christians, the power of belief becomes one’s Tower of Babel, the magic steps by which one climbs to that “state of mind called heaven.” Biblical faith, however, is believing that God will answer one’s prayer. That changes everything! We could never truly believe that a prayer would be answered—nor should we want it to be—unless we were certain it was God’s will. Faith is not a magic power we direct at God to get Him to bless our plans, but “the obedience of faith” (Romans:16:26) brings us into submission to Him as the instruments of His will.