This needs to stop..

If this is what happens in your church, your church is NOT a Biblical church.

This is attributing the work of the devil to the Holy Spirit of God.

This is blasphemy.

Stop it.

A Word from God

Every year at LifeGate church they have what they call a Presbytery.  

They invite three presbyters people who claim to speak for God from other churches to spend a week or so "prophesying' over church staff members and then over people throughout the congregation.  At each event after the six or so staff members are brought on stage and prophesied over  told stuff about themselves that they already knew, the presbyters people who claim to speak for God spend about an hour or so selecting people in the audience to stand and receive their own special word from God.

*Before I go any further, I want to make it clear that I honestly think that most of these presbyters do believe that whatever thoughts that come to mind at that moment really do come from God.  But I also think that some of them know darn well that they don’t.*

This is an event that attendees of this church don’t want to miss.  Come on, the chance for someone to pick you out of the crowd to receive a word from God directly? In front of everyone? No way is anyone going to miss that if at all possible!  People pray for weeks before the actual event, begging God to speak to them during the Presbytery.  They skip work to attend this event.  Every day they would go to the event hopeful, just sure that God was going to speak to them and every day all but maybe ten people would go home disappointed.

Clay and I were never disappointed though.  We attended each of these Presbytery events while we were members of this church and even though there were a few hundred people at each one, my husband was selected to receive a word.

Every time.

We were all told at each event that these presbyters would only be choosing people out of the crowd at God’s prompting. That it would have nothing to do with who you were, who you knew, where you were sitting, or what you looked like.   Clay is a pretty big guy with piercings, tattoos, and a four-inch mohawk. He’s just not the type of guy who is ever overlooked in a crowded room. But I’m sure that had nothing to do with him being chosen to receive a word from a presbyter every single year.  Right??

I really don’t remember much of what he was told the second and third year but I remember the very first “word from God” that he received pretty well. I remember it because it was so absolutely wonderful. It was the kind of word everyone prays to hear.

After pointing to him and asking us to stand he stared at us for about 20 seconds and then said:

"You are a man of faith.  God has given you this gift.  You are a man of faith.  He wants you to declare it. Blessings will come to you if declare it.  Green pastures, financial blessing, cup runneth over.  He wants to bless you.  He wants you to rule! He wants you to reign! You are a man of faith!  Say it!  Declare it!  God says “If you do this, I’m going to give you everything!”

That’s probably the best word from God ever right?  Financial blessing!  Cup runneth over! Rule! Reign! Everything!  

Who wouldn’t grab on to that with both hands and hang on to it for dear life?  And we did.  Oh boy did we!  Never mind that he was laid-off just 2 weeks later, and then laid off twice more in the next 18 months.  That was pretty frustrating, but we held on to the promise.  God said He’s going to give us everything!

  

 Now, throughout these last couple years since leaving that church, I have had a few facepalm moments.  Every time I learned that I had believed something that wasn’t true about Jesus or the Bible.  Every time I had to unlearn something and learn it the right way.  Every time it occurred to me that I had taught someone else something that was nothing but new age apostasy.  

Even still, when I think I know something about the Bible I have to ask myself if it’s something I know because I learned it through prayer and study of Scripture or is it something I think I know because a church leader at LifeGate told it to me?  But let me tell you, the facepalm I gave myself when I realized the real truth behind that ‘word from God’ might have even left a bruise.

The words of that prophesy big fat lie from the devil played through my head..

He wants you to declare it.~ Declare what?  

The gospel? Scripture? That he is a sinner who if not for the death of the Son of the Almighty God upon a cross to pay for his sin that he would be destined to suffer the wrath of the Holy Father in the lake of fire for all eternity?  That Jesus is the Son of God who was raised from the dead?  That it is only through Jesus that anyone can repent of their sins, receive forgiveness and go to the Father?

Nope.  None of that. Just declare that he is a man of faith.

Blessings will come to you if declare it.  Green pastures, financial blessing, cup runneth over.- He wants you to rule! He wants you to reign!~ Money, power, blessings, everything you could possibly want! Focus on this!  It’s all about you! 

But rule what?  Reign over what?  Himself?  Others?  Or perhaps he will reign in victory over all the debt we would incur while he was laid-off three times..?

These presbyters deceived, puffed up, liars claim that the words that they give come directly from God through the Holy Spirit.  But what is the primary work of the Holy Spirit? To bear witness of Jesus!

 “But when the Helper comes, whom I will send to you from the Father, the Spirit of truth, who proceeds from the Father, he will bear witness about me.” ~ John 15:26.  

There was no mention of the Son of God.  No mention of the Gospel.  No mention of who He is, what He’s done.  Nope, it was all about Clay.

“If you do this, I’m going to give you everything!”

“And the devil said to Him, I will give You all this domain and it’s glory; for it has been handed over to me, and I give it to whomever I wish. Therefore if You worship before me, it shall all be Yours.”~ Luke 4:6-7

That is what they do.  These presbyters tell you good things about you.  In fact, before they get started giving these messages from God they will tell you that a true word from God will only build you up.  A word from God will never make you feel bad, guilty, ashamed or bring you down in any way.  

*If you want to continue believe that don’t ever read anything from the Old Testament prophets, or anything from the book of Revelation*

After Clay and I learned who God really is, after we realized that this church was not teaching Scripture and after we understood the meaning of Sola Scriptura; we knew that these prophetic words weren’t really from God.  But up until that moment, we believed that word we were given.  We believed it completely.  

For four years!

So why does everyone love the presbytery?  Why do we sit there hoping and praying that a presbyter will call on us and give us our very own personal message from God? Because it will be happy and exciting and full of great stuff all about us!  And if any of it makes us feel bad or convicted, we can just toss that aside because that’s what we want to hear.

Just eat the fish and leave the bones right?

People have told me that they know that these prophetic words are really from God because they were told things that no one but God would know or because what they were told actually came to pass.

Please..  Television psychics do the same thing.

And I ask you, just because someone was able to tell you something that you don't think anyone else would know, why do you just assume that it's from God?  

Because the devil would only tell you bad stuff?

He didn't tell Jesus bad stuff, why should you be any different?

No wonder, for even Satan disguises himself as an angel of light. Therefore it is not surprising if his servants also disguise themselves as servants of righteousness, whose end will be according to their deeds.~ 1 Corinthians 11:14-15

It's not just the leaders of LifeGate who do this.  It's everywhere..

Beth Moore, Joyce Meyer, Gateway Church, Elevation Church, Bethel.

Tons of people do this. It's not just church leaders anymore either.  Anyone can approach you and say they have a word from God.

Most of the people who attend churches like this believe that God has given them special messages for others at least once in their lives.

"Words from God" given in churches like Lifegate all do the same damage.  They minimize the importance of Scripture throughout the church.  

The Bible becomes something that just sits on our nightstands or something to carry to church in pretty bible cases, but rarely opened.

It becomes insufficient.  

Why spend time in prayer or study Scripture when we can just go to someone and ask them what God has to say to us?

Or better yet, we can just decide on what we want to hear, ask God, and then accept the first happy thought that pops into our heads.

Just read your Bible.

For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but wanting to have their ears tickled, they will accumulate for themselves teachers in accordance to their own desires. ~ 2 Timothy 4:3

“If you want to hear from God, read the Bible.  If you want to hear from God audibly, read it out loud.” – Justin Peters

*please don't bother commenting on this telling me that you know that the word you received really was from God because you could back it up with Scripture. I'll delete it. Anything in the Bible can be twisted to suit your needs.  It happens ALL THE TIME.*   

In the beginning..

On January of 2015 LifeGate church put on their first “Greater Glory” conference.  

Clay and I were still members of the church at this time.  In fact Clay was providing security for David Perkins, the speaker at the conference. 

The last day of the conference was the last day we attended LifeGate Church.  

The next day I went in, sat down at the computer and removed as much of our information as I could from their database, emailed the pastors to tell them that we would not be back, I put my set of keys on the desk, and we left.  This wasn’t planned.  We hadn’t set a date to leave LifeGate, we hadn’t discussed it with anyone, we hadn’t found a new church.  

We just left.

I had wanted to leave for almost a year prior to that but Clay wasn't ready.  But something happened at the conference that sealed it for him and at that moment he was ready to go.

Maybe I'll explain what happened in another blog post..

For the first four years that we attended LifeGate we were happy.  

Really happy.  

It was our first experience belonging to a church and we were devoted members. 

We made friends with leadership quickly and volunteered constantly- helping our friends prepare meals for everyone on Wednesday nights, setting up luncheons for funerals and I made two thousand phone calls reminding people to give money to the church (not even kidding).  

Clay took care of repairs that their maintenance people didn’t know how to do themselves and he helped form the security team.  

For the last year I volunteered in the office four or five days a week making phone calls and doing data entry.  

Clay and I would stand in the senior pastor's office and pray over him before he would go out and give his “talks” on Saturday nights. For 5 years we practically lived at LifeGate church.  

We were popular, and we liked it.

But we were naive about the whole church thing.  Aside from the boring church services we were forced to attend as children (that we never paid attention to) this was what we thought church was supposed to be. 

Colored lights, fog machines, loud music, people dancing and singing to feel-good songs played in upbeat tones to get us all hyped-up and ready to listen to a feel-good sermon all about us.  

The pastors were funny, they threw candy from the stage, and handed out free copies of Jesus Calling, Heaven is for real, The Circle Maker, The Shack and any other self-centered heretical book they were promoting at the moment.  They even used props and drew pictures to keep us all engaged.  It was fun.  We were “doing life together”.

From the beginning there were things that didn’t sit right with me and at first I chalked it up to being a new Christian.  After all, I was still learning “church”.  Even as I read more of the Bible and began to see that what I was reading wasn’t lining up with what I was seeing or hearing at LifeGate, it didn’t sway me.  These were my friends!  They were like my family.  In fact, I liked a lot of them more than certain members of my real family.

So what if something they preached from the pulpit didn’t exactly line up with what I read in the Bible?  There are so many different ways to interpret the Bible right?  Was it really a big deal that they used verses completely out of context as long as they loved Jesus?  That’s what’s important isn't?  That we love Jesus? 

 Everything else is religion and legalism.  It’s the relationship that counts!  

Besides, just because I thought that particular verses meant something else didn't that just prove that the Bible means different things to different people?

The Bible was alive.  We were told that all the time.  

And things that have life change all the time.

Duh!

Yeah, for real..  I actually believed that..

At the time I had no idea what a Confession was or why they were so important.  Plus if anyone had told me about them at that time I would have ignored them or said something like "how do we know that the people who wrote the confession were right?" which is exactly what the people who still attend that church (and others like it) say when I mention a Confession now..

At the time I truly believed that how you feel was what was important.

Besides, they were pastors!  Obviously they knew much more about the Bible than I did.  So I disregarded what I read and how I understood it and went with whatever they said while pushing aside the “but that’s not what the Bible says” thoughts whenever they came into my head.

But then my husband’s cousin sent me a Bible class in the mail.  The Levitical Sacrificial System.  Wow!  This was the “meat” that I read about in the Bible! I completed the class and then took it again.  I learned and wanted to learn more.  

This was when I started asking questions about what I was reading in the Bible.  

Simple questions like:

Are the 10 Commandments given in the order they are given for a particular reason?  

Every single person I asked (six pastors including the senior pastor and one person who was actually employed at a bible college at the time) couldn't give me an answer except to say “I’m not really sure” or “I’ve never wondered about that, let me know what you find out”.  

How do we know that certain books of the Bible are actual historic events and not just parables to teach a moral lesson?  

I mentioned three books of the Bible specifically when asking this question- Job, Esther, and Ruth.  

I asked three of the pastors. 

The first one said “I know they are real historical events, but I will have to check some of the books I kept from college to explain why and I’ll get back to you.”  

He didn't.

The second one answered with a couple questions of his own- 

“why do you need to know? Why can’t you just have faith that they really happened?”

 He never actually answered any of my questions.

Now that I think about it, he never answered any of my questions that pertained to the Bible specifically.   

The third pastor said “I'm not sure, I'll look into it and let you know”.  

He did come back later with an answer and then admitted to me that while he was online looking for the answer he also learned that Luke was not one of the twelve apostles. 

He actually said “I didn’t know that”.  

He had been a pastor for 20 years and he didn’t know that. 

*sigh*

If you didn’t pick up on it, one of the books I asked about was the book of Ruth.  

Ruth!  The wife of Boaz and the mother of Obed.  Obed was the father of Jesse.  Jesse was the father of David.  How can it be that not just one pastor, but THREE pastors did not know that Ruth was the great-grandmother of King David?  

The Bible clearly says so.

I'm not talking about new Christians here, I'm talking about pastors.  It’s literally their job to know this stuff!

I realized that if I wanted to know more about the Bible that I wasn’t going to learn it from the leaders of the church (ironic eh?) so I enrolled in theology school.  By this time I knew that LifeGate was seriously selling people short as far as educating them in Scripture, but I still stayed. 

 I still wanted to stay.  

Sure I grumbled occasionally because I wasn’t learning anything that I didn’t already know, but all in all LifeGate Church was a great place to be.  

By this time my husband and I were even more popular, we were part of the in-crowd. Everyone knew us, and some of the pastors were telling visitors about me and my “amazing testimony”.

I really did have an amazing testimony. Something that can only be described as a “God thing” really did happen, and it lead me to the pastor’s office where I repeated the prayer that saved me got me started on a journey toward my salvation four years later.  The problem though, for those first four years I really did think I was saved.

I wasn’t and neither was Clay.

I’m not going to go into everything that happened leading up to the moment that I sat in that pastor’s office repeating a prayer that would save me give me a false sense of security for the next four years but suffice to say that all at once I was aware that everything I had believed about God and myself up until that moment was a total lie and that I needed to know the truth.

So, I sat in the pastor’s office and told him what had happened.  

Then for the next hour or so he told me about himself and how he used to be a selfish guy who wasn’t interested in who Jesus was, but one day while he was visiting this little red church he ran down to the front, fell on his knees and cried and then confessed that he was a sinner and needed Jesus and then he was saved.  There was quite a bit more detail than that but that’s the gist of it..  So I repeated the prayer, admitted that I was a sinner, asked Jesus to please come into my heart, and I was saved!

I wasn’t though.  

I thought I was.  

I really did.  

I was doing everything I was supposed to be doing.  Serving, attending every event, leading a table at Hearts, giving money so people could go on mission trips, joining prayer groups, volunteering at the homeless shelter, handing out money to anyone and everyone, and was part of a small group full of other popular people.  

I read my Jesus Calling book every day, read the bible for two hours every morning, and then studied it for another two hours at night. If there was something a Christian should be doing, believe me I was doing it.

But I wasn’t saved.  

I was simply a person who went to church a lot and did a lot of stuff there while handing out a lot of money. 

And then one day I watched a video on Youtube by David Platt talking about how it doesn’t matter what any particular scripture means to any particular person; what mattered was what the bible said it meant. 

I actually jumped off my couch and yelled "YES!"

Over the next few weeks I searched for more videos.  

That David Platt video led me to a video of Todd Friel and that led me to videos from the Strange Fire Conference put on by John MacArthur and that led me to a video seminar by Justin Peters, and that led me to a video called 10 indictments against the modern church by Paul Washer, and that is what led me to God.  

That is when I really heard the Gospel and understood what salvation was, who Jesus really was, who and what I really was, what it was that Jesus was saving me from and why I so desperately needed Him. 

People please, seriously..  

Saying a prayer inviting Jesus into your heart is not going to save you.  

Nothing you do is going to save you.  

Not a choice or a decision that you make.

No one is saved without hearing the gospel and no one hears and understands the Gospel without God giving them the grace to do so.

You don’t have to believe me.

Read the bible and find out for yourself.