TURNING LOVE BACKWARD

One of the teachers of the law came and heard them debating. Noticing that Jesus had given them a good answer, he asked him, “Of all the commandments, which is the most important?” “The most important one,” answered Jesus, “is this: ‘Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one.’ ”

“ ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these.” (Mark 12:28-31)

The Coming Of Dueling Revelations

Apprising Ministries told you in posts like Contemplative Spirituality Growing Within Mainstream Evangelicalism and Disciplines To Deception In Southern Baptist Convention about the increasing inroads into evangelicalism made by corrupt Contemplative Spirituality/Mysticism (CSM).

This is the centered on the self neo-Gnostic musings of Living Spiritual Teacher and Quaker mystic Richard Foster—and his spiritual twin Dallas Willard—who are spreading this spurious Spiritual Formation (SF). It’s important to note this CSM has as it central vehicle Contemplative/Centering Prayer (CCP), a form of meditation in an altered state of consciousness.

No, of course it’s practioners don’t like to admit to being in an altered state of consciousness; but as Bob DeWaay brought out in his article Contemporary Christian Divination: The False Claims and Practices of Christian Mystics:

The type of meditation that Christian mystics advocate requires a different state of consciousness than normal, awake, thinking. That is why there is so much interest in dreams among mystics. Sleeping is one time that all humans are in a different state of consciousness. The alpha level of brain activity happens when people are entering sleep and waking up. The theta level is a where people go under deep hypnosis or deep meditation, and in the early stages of sleep.

Hypnosis and eastern meditative techniques purposely put someone in an altered state of consciousness with the hope of learning something about the unconscious or subconscious mind or contacting the world of the spirits. Christian versions of it suggest that God can be contacted by purposely entering an altered state of consciousness (though few like to call it that). (Online source)

And if this kind of spiritual foolishness isn’t bad enough, those of us who have studied CSM and its transcendental meditation-lite of CCP, will tell you that at some point practitioners eventually receive a highly subjective personal “experience,” i.e. a delusion, which mystics of all stripes are seeking. They may express it in slightly different ways, but that’s why I’ve been telling you they speak of this experience using words like “enlightenment” and ”transformation”; Buddhists call it “satori,” but the result is always the same.

With remarkable similarity, practitioners of CSM in various religions, eventually describe their experience roughly along the following lines: All of a sudden as I meditated I was filled with an overwhelming sense of God’s presence/love, and I then realized I was one with Him/Her/It, as well as with the creation itself—which for many of these mystics is also alive and dwelling in God i.e. panentheism; but in the Bible the Lord tells us that this is really rooted in the love of the self. As in the last days — men will be lovers of self (see—2 Timothy 3:2).

That’s why, as I previously pointed out e.g. in Contemplative Spirituality/Mysticism Creeps Closer…To Your Church, as CSM slithers deeper into the church visible we’re seeing more and more spiritually obtuse evangelical leaders now buying into an insipid Rodney King theology of “Can’t we all just get along?” And the time has arrived in the genuine Church of Jesus Christ for us to take off the gloves and begin to counterattack this attempted infiltration into His Body by men who know not God; and who just do not believe His Word.

As ambassadors of Jesus, what is to be gained by one-sided “conversation” with the egregiously ecumenical Emerging Church aka Emergent Church, which is a cult of neo-liberalism—morphing into Emergence Christianity (EC)? Such as these, who pervert the historic orthodox Christian faith, through delusions arrived at in their neo-Gnostic CSM. Instead, we must preach the absolute Truth of Holy Scripture to them, and then pray that God will open their eyes before—not only they are lost—but all those who follow them end swallowed up within the matrix of their neopagan mysticism.

With this in mind, I’ve already gone on record that I’m not against experience per se with the Lord; and I’m actively involved with a pursuit of God. So what are these new Gnostics to do when I lean across the table as it were, look them straight in the eye, and say to such men: “Either your views about how we can commune with our God are right; or those which I have been expressing in my articles on the Emerging/ent/ence Church and Contemplative Spirituality/Mysticism are.” For you see men and women, truly there is no middle ground; and I personally can live with that.

Let Rise Up O Men Of God And Have Done With Lesser Things

Now, here’s what I meant by dueling revelations; suppose I say that what Christ has sent me to say here is this: The man-loving Ecumenical Church of Deceit (ECoD), which is right now swallowing up mainstream evangelicalism—and its no-gospel message of “make the world a better place”—has turned the idea of love exactly backward. And this is actually quite easily proved by the passage from the Bible that I used above. We specifically note in the text, the end of the b part of verse 28, where Jesus is asked — “Of all the commandments, which is the most important?”

The King James Version here brings out my point even a little clearer when it reads — “Which is the first commandment of all?” This would mean that Christ Jesus—the LORD God Almighty in human flesh—has just been asked by one of His Own creations to explain to him, “in all of Your Word, what is the most important thing a man can possibly do while he is here on this cursed earth.” In the Master’s cogent response we see how the various sections of the Church Growth Movement, comprising what I’ve been calling the ECoD, have actually reversed that which is most important.

Look at verse 29, and I’ll use the King James here again because it shows what Jesus meant when, in His answer to the Scribe, Christ said:

The first of all the commandments is, Hear, O Israel; The Lord our God is one Lord: And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength: this is the first commandment.

Can you see that; “The most important [Commandment],” says Jesus, is to “Love the Lord your God.” And then we get to verse 31 — And the second is like, namely this, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. There is none other commandment greater than these. In this day of backward Christianity we must come to understand that, while there are no greater commandments than these, they are quite simply not equal to each other. Look at verse 31 again — The second is this”; meaning obviously that it is not the first, nor is it the greatest.

Men and women, tied up in our very commission as the Body of Christ—His Church—is our Lord’s clear command in John 20:21 — “As My Father hath sent Me, even so send I you.” Therefore our allegiance as “ambassadors for Christ” is to be fiercely loyal to the LORD our God; no matter whom it is we must facedown, or may even have to confront. You must understand that it’s only from this kind of love that Christ will then move through us to do all the other things the ECoD thinks it does on its own. Many have forgotten that this is what Jesus means when He plainly tells us:

“But whoever denies Me before men, I will also deny him before My Father who is in heaven. Do not think that I came to bring peace on the earth; I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I came to SET A MAN AGAINST HIS FATHER, AND A DAUGHTER AGAINST HER MOTHER, AND A DAUGHTER-IN-LAW AGAINST HER MOTHER-IN-LAW; and A MAN’S ENEMIES WILL BE THE MEMBERS OF HIS HOUSEHOLD.

He who loves father or mother more than Me is not worthy of Me; and he who loves son or daughter more than Me is not worthy of Me. And he who does not take his cross and follow after Me is not worthy of Me. He who has found his life will lose it, and he who has lost his life for My sake will find it. He who receives you receives Me, and he who receives Me receives Him who sent Me.”  (Matthew 10:33-40, NASB)

I tell you in the Lord that we who love God first must finally be willing to take off the kid gloves and ride to the sound of the guns. Nothing good will ever come from compromising with these people whose spiritual forebears have already perished in what cult-expert Dr. Walter Martin (1928-1989) called the Cult of Liberal Theology, and which would kill the mainlines denominations. We simply cannot continue compromise with professing Christians who seek special revelation apart from the Bible e.g. Through Rob Bell “The Great Enlightened Ones” Tell Us Man Has Divine Greatness.

Today I exhort you to rise up with us and stand for Jesus against this attempted satanic infiltration into our Lord’s Church by “seducing spirits” spreading their “doctrines of devils.” O yes, it will likely cost you something personally as you come into conflict with leaders throughout the ECoD to be found in John 8:42-46; but if you claim to be someone sent by Christ to teach (see—James 3:1), the growing lateness of the hour demands that you now ask yourself a hard question: “In the time in which He was sent, what exactly did the same stance cost the Lord that I say I love?”

My dear brothers and sisters, I also strongly encourage you to contemplate the following along with me: And who knows but that you have come to royal position for such a time as this?

See also:

“INWARD JOURNEY” ESPOUSED BY RICHARD FOSTER IS A FORM OF DIVINATION

THE EMERGING CHURCH SOWING ITS NEO-ORTHODOX CONFUSION ON SCRIPTURE

THE EMERGING CHURCH HIGH-JACKING EVANGELICALISM

APPRISING MINISTRIES WITH A PEEK AT THE COMING SOTERIOLOGY OF EMERGENCE CHRISTIANITY

CHRISTIAN SOLDIERS STANDING UP FOR JESUS?

DR. WALTER MARTIN: CHRISTIANITY IN CRISIS OF CONFLICT

IRRECONCILABLE HOSTILITY