PTM WEEKLY UPDATE -- MARCH 9, 2009
Dreams, extremes and religious schemes
Q. My wife and I have a friend who complained that she didn't have a zeal for the things of God. Then she encountered a pentecostal / charismatic group and seemed to find greater joy in her walk. The group is led by Barbie Breathitt, who teaches all sorts of strange stuff like this (excerpted and edited from Ms. Breathitt's website):
• The bride is entering a new cycle of anointing -- God is releasing his angels all over the globe.
• God is releasing the spirit of prayer, a reformation of purity, and a supernatural dimension of power that is opening spiritual gates of access.
• God is developing consecrated lovers with a standard of holiness and character of integrity for this last-days move.
• The spirit of Elijah is coming upon a remnant bride's heart in these final hours.
• The ministry of prayer, coupled with the spirit of unity, opens spiritual gates for angels to enter into the earthly realms.
• God has commissioned encampments of angels to surround his ministers today.
• The Holy Spirit revealed he was healing those with chronic pain. As I stood to prophesy this word of knowledge, suddenly seven rainbow-colored angels that had been standing around the perimeter of the audience flooded the altar area, producing such a forceful wind, that I was blown onto one foot and fought to maintain my balance.
• A woman in the audience afflicted with scoliosis heard a violent wind blow the back doors of the church open and the footsteps of an angel walking behind her. She felt hands of fire resting on her hips. She was totally engulfed in a fragrance of celestial air and a brilliant amber light of God's golden glory.I know we all have our own walk with the Lord but I find this stuff somewhat ridiculous, perhaps bordering on troubling, yet our friend totally loves it. I'm just curious where Ms. Breathitt comes up with all this stuff and where is the biblical basis for it. I've heard of the Toronto Revival, barking, slain in the spirit and all that stuff. I recently was visiting a church and in the service the pastor had some people lined up to be prayed for and told them that if they didn't feel a power to fall down when he touched them to go ahead and fall down anyway in humility to God because you never know -- God might minister to you on the floor. I thought that was interesting, but after reading Ms. Breathitt's writing I now consider it very mild. Perhaps this is not so much a question as it is a request to help make sense of it all.
A. You're right -- it's more than "somewhat ridiculous." It's sad and pathetic that well-meaning people are taken in by this foolishness.
Ten or twenty years ago charismatic television, radio and media were dominated by a predictable panoply of personalities including Benny Hinn, the Copelands, Joyce Meyer, Marilyn Hickey, Rodney Howard-Browne, Rod Parsley, Robert Tilton and Jan and Phil Crouch. Before them, there were such luminaries as A.A. Allen, Jack Coe, William Branham and Katherine Kuhlman. Before them, before radio and television, spiritual snake-oil salesmen crisscrossed the country, holding their tent meetings and healing services -- often moving on to the next town before their gullible victims discovered that the miracles were false and they had not been healed after all.
In the last few years we are seeing a whole new lineup of charismatic and health/wealth teachers who drain unsuspecting believers of cash and cause the average man and woman on the street to question the sanity of Christiandom.
Sadly, these religious side-show barkers were not a dying breed! Yet in the last few years we have started to see a whole new lineup of charismatic and health/wealth teachers who drain unsuspecting believers of cash and cause the average man and woman on the street to question the sanity of Christiandom -- and provide truckloads of fodder for various anti-God pundits.
Along with Todd Bentley and others, Barbie Breathitt is one of this new wave of charismatic health/wealth, word/faith preachers. Your excerpts of her teaching give a taste of Barbie's culture, liberally laced with religious-sounding words and phrases (which are sometimes hard to pin down. Just what is the "spirit of Elijah," anyway?). Consider the following, about her ministry:
Barbie, a Florida native, is president of Breath of the Spirit Ministries, established in Texas in 2004. It's not immediately clear where she received her doctorate or ordination. There is no statement of beliefs on her organization's website, but she lists endorsements from a dozen or so church pastors, who seem to be part of her charismatic genre.
Her unique selling proposition seems to be dream interpretation. Toward that end she offers a special website called MyOnar.com (we are informed at the top of the page that onar is the Greek word for dream. I'm not sure why this is significant -- why not Aramaic or Latvian?). The site offers those who register a handy way to record dreams in writing and to have them interpreted, presumably by Barbie's staff, who will email users the results. Registrants on this page must agree to a lengthy legal proviso releasing Barbie and her organization from any liability for problems one may encounter when one acts on her interpretations or advice (apparently Barbie's father is a lawyer).
She also offers a vast array of courses, conferences and CDs on dream interpretation, healing, angels and prophecy -- all at a wide range of prices or "suggested donations." She offers an extensive collection of "Dream Cards" at 5 dollars a pop, which are said to interpret various categories of dream symbols.
From a business standpoint, this all seems ingenious -- and lucrative. Barbie and her staff are obviously gifted entrepreneurs. However, doctrinally, Plain Truth Ministries has weighed in repeatedly on health/wealth, end-times and word/faith theology, all three of which are in Barbie's purview. Go to our website at www.ptm.org, use the "search our site" tool to look up any of these teachings, and you'll be busy reading for hours if not days.
What about dreams? While it is certainly true that God spoke to various people through dreams in both the Old and New Testaments, these are exceptional events, and there is no indication that theophonies (audible or visual appearances of God) in dreams and visions are normal for Christians today. Biblical figures such as Joseph and Daniel were given special dreams or were inspired to interpret specific dreams, but nowhere in the Bible are followers of God instructed to make a practice of drawing spiritual or prophetic significance from their nightly dreams. Instruction on exactly how to interpret dreams is also conspicuously absent from the Bible. Instead, God warns his people in Deuteronomy 13:1 about those who claim to foretell the future by dreams. Dream interpretation is a staple of primitive and shamanistic religions worldwide. It may be similar to tea-leaf reading, palmistry and astrology -- a superstitious reliance on various signs to predict the future, replacing our God-given free will with determinism and fatalism. Not only does it have nothing to do with the gospel, it can interfere with sound life-choices and decision making.
From a scientific standpoint, the biological purpose of dreams is still debated, but it is known that dreams seem to be connected with the formation of long-term memory, and the brain performing "housekeeping" functions as it files and organizes cognitive and emotional information. It seems that those who are deprived of dream (REM) sleep suffer adverse psychological and physiological reactions. Our dreams, sometimes rich with metaphor, may provide insight into our emotional state and into our various subconscious conflicts -- but nothing more.
The Holy Spirit works directly and straightforwardly within our minds as we consciously invite him to do so, as we consciously make decisions, and as we do our homework in preparation to make important decisions. He does not need to speak to us in some mysterious dream-code that requires "interpretation" from a third party on the Internet.
Someone might say, "Health/wealth, word/faith, end-times teachers are not all bad -- I've learned valuable lessons from them." True -- few such teachers are 100% wrong about everything. They may even seem to teach the essentials of Christian doctrine. But (to offer a metaphor that has been in the news recently) it is possible for good, wholesome, nutritious food to be contaminated with serious toxins. For example, food contaminated with salmonella may look attractive, smell wonderful and taste delicious. Usually we don't worry because we trust the grocer or restaurant where we obtained the food. Or perhaps the package looks good, and we reason that surely such professional and attractive packaging would not contain contaminated food. Yet the only totally safe way to determine if toxic bacteria are present is to have the food tested in a lab (or to eat it and wait for the results to take effect, but that method may end in disaster!). Likewise, many unsuspecting believers have been too trusting of attractively packaged health/wealth, word/faith, end-times notions, and have been seriously hurt because they failed to test these religious schemes against sound scriptural teaching.
In Christ,
Monte WolvertonRETURN TO PTM WEEKLY UPDATE CONTENTS PAGE
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