Introduction
Cult leaders are relatively easy to identify. Perhaps our greatest danger comes not from them but from what I call Christian heresies or “near-cults.”
“A heretic,” someone has said, “is a person who has a complete grasp of a half-truth.” The closer a false teacher gets to the truth, the more dangerous he becomes. Such false prophets are everywhere. They are nothing more than masqueraders coming into your home as TV personalities.
These “near-cult” leaders are characterized by three things.
1. Claims of person visitations by God. First, they claim to have special visitations from Jesus and from his angels who personally appear to them and talk to them. In these supposed visitations they don’t receive new theology but new projects or missions that they want us to help them do.
Let me illustrate. Several years ago, one of the leading television preachers said the Lord told him to build a 500-million-dollar complex that would join together the healing streams of medicine and faith. Later when his City of Faith was in financial trouble Jesus reportedly appeared to him “standing 900 feet tall” and assured him that the project would be completed. A year later he reportedly had a seven-hour revelation in which God promised a breakthrough in cancer treatment.
Later he told of another supernatural meeting at which time Jesus and an angel told him to open the doors of his hospital to the poor of the world. At that time Jesus promised to bless his financial supporters if they would help him serve the poor.
It seems strange to me that his vision was to build a hospital in a city that already had too many hospital beds rather than in a country like India that desperately needs medical facilities. And it seems strange that his vision for finding a cure for cancer did not come until he was facing a financial crisis. And it seems stranger still that the revelation to open the hospital to the poor did not come until a low patient load threatened the accreditation of his medical school. It seems evident to me that his visitations are born more out of expediency than divine intervention.
Beware of any men who say to you, “The Lord showed me very clearly” or “Jesus visited and talked to me and told me to ...” Hold them in suspicion, for these sound more like hallucinations than revelations, more like nightmares than dreams. They are born out of that messiah complex I have already talked about.
I have been a pastor for more than 30 years, and in all those years I have been led, directed, and impressed by God again and again. But I have never had a heavenly visitation from Jesus or an angel. Nor do I need one.
In our church we have built multiple buildings and undertaken vast missions projects, but the Lord never visited me and told me to do any of them. I just looked out and saw the need, prayed about it, and then said to my congregation, “Let’s do it.” God gave me intelligence and I assume he expects me to use it.
On the surface it may appear to be more spiritual to seek heavenly visitations for all of our decisions rather than to just go ahead and use the intelligence God gave us and do the obvious thing. But it is not. If God gave you a watch would you honor him more by asking him for the time of day or by consulting the watch? If God gave a sailor a compass, would the sailor please God more by kneeling in a frenzy of prayer to persuade God to show him which way to go or by steering according to the compass? Except for those things that are specifically commanded or forbidden, it is God’s will that we be free to exercise our own intelligent choice.
2. Seed-faith giving. A second thing that characterizes these “near-cult” leaders is their preoccupation with money. They are forever facing an impending financial crisis and will have to go off the air if your gift does not come in immediately.
Recently at least three Better Business Bureaus in Canada found it necessary to alert the public, especially the elderly, to high-pressure financial appeals made by one such television preacher. One of his “faith building” letters contained a packet of vegetable oil which the evangelist described as “holy Bible anointing oil.” The letter said that the oil was to be used “to turn on God’s healing and prospering blessings in your life.” Recipients were told to make a cross on their forehead with the oil, then go into a room alone and take out any money they had and make a cross on each bill. They were told to do this in faith for God to heal their money problems. “Anoint your checkbook if you have one.” Finally, his letter asked his supporters to mail the largest bills or check they had. In his letters he urges, “Give God your best, then expect his best.” “Remember,” he wrote, “the greater the sacrifice, the greater the blessing.”
Another such TV preacher wrote, “Your seed-faith gift will help you get a hundredfold return” and “God has promised specific increases in the lives of those who help build and equip the research tower.” Their “seed-faith” theology always promises material rewards for sacrificial gifts.
I believe in the law of sowing and reaping. But we can’t barter with God. Seed-faith theology, taken to extremes, reduces God to a sugar daddy. If you want his blessings and his love, you pay him off.
If we give to God because we think that by giving we have somehow placed him in our debt and he is required to come through for us and meet our needs we have perverted the scriptures. Our only motive for giving should be love. When we encourage people to give in order to have their needs met or so they will receive “a hundredfold in return,” we have appealed to their sense of greed and desperation, neither of which seems admirable to me.
To give correctly we must give out of a pure heart, out of love and thanksgiving. We must give expecting nothing and hoping for nothing in return.
While these preachers appeal for our sacrificial gifts, they are building vast personal and financial empires for themselves and their families. Have you noticed that they almost all include their sons in their ministry? The reason is that there is no success without a successor. And all the while they live a jet-set lifestyle. They live in expensive homes, drive foreign luxury cars, dress in the finest tailor-made clothing, own elegant winter and summer homes, belong to the most elite country clubs, and enjoy lengthy vacations. In the words of the former daughter-in-law of one of them, “We were allowed great personal excesses.”
Recently one of the most popular of these men told his viewers that he and his wife had already given everything they owned to their financially troubled ministry and urged them to help pay the bills of his ministry so he could stay on the air. Then two months later he acknowledged on a nationally televised show that they had bought a $449,000 mountainside home near Palm Springs, California.
Though the scriptures teach that the laborer is worthy of his hire and it is not wrong to receive pay, beware of those who promise rewards for sacrificial giving. Don’t be hoodwinked into giving God’s money to those whose lifestyle cannot be observed or who give no accounting of their finances to a responsible body. These are often religious con artists who fleece people in the name of God. Those who are preoccupied with money, those who use sophisticated marketing techniques to sell Jesus, to make him more attractive so people will get involved and support what they are doing, do not bear the marks of a genuine follower of Christ. Like the false prophets of old they “make merchandise” of the innocent and unsuspecting for personal gain (2 Peter 2:3).
3. Faith healing and faith healers. Third, these “near-cult” leaders promise health as well as wealth to their followers. They preach that New Testament miracles are still operative and that if their followers will turn to God in faith, he will heal them of all their diseases. But, of course, they never leave themselves unprotected. If you pray and are not healed, then it is because of an insufficient faith on your part. That troubles me. Why does it take so little faith to be saved and so much faith to be healed?
I believe in faith healing, but I do not believe in faith healers, especially anointed men or women who heal by their touch and their prayer. That day has passed away. Today the ministry of healing has been given to the local church. “Is any sick among you? let him call for the elders of the church; and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord: And the prayer of faith shall save the sick, and the Lord shall raise him up” (James 5:14-15).
Beware of any person who claims to have miracle working power. Oh, I know what they say. “It is God who does the healing.” But it is always connected with their touch, their prayers, or some contact with them.
Don’t be hoodwinked by those who offer easy solutions to life’s problems. The God of the Bible does not promise to change our circumstances but to go through them with us. David expressed it this way: “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me” (Psalms 23:4).
We need a better understanding of miracles today. So far as we know from scripture Jesus never used any of the people he healed. Those he cured all disappeared as soon as he performed his miracles on them. He restored sight to blind Bartimaeus, and Bartimaeus then vanishes to be heard from no more. He raised Jarius’ daughter from the dead and she then promptly fades from the pages of scripture. He cured the woman who had been crippled for 18 years and she then disappears forever. On the other hand Jesus did no miracles in the lives of the 12 apostles. But they are the ones he used extensively in doing God’s work.
There is no law in scripture that says God won’t use you if he performs a miracle in your life, but he didn’t use such people in the days of his flesh. The choice seems to be: do you want to be used or do you want a miracle?
The point of this sermon is this: there were false prophets masquerading as men of God in Paul’s day and there are false prophets still doing the same thing today. This should not surprise us, for this has long been one of Satan’s tactics.
So how do we recognize the counterfeits? With so many varied religious groups, cults, near-cults and heresies today, we can’t know them all. How then can we discern the true from the false?
Billy Graham said that his wife, Ruth, sat at a banquet one evening with the head of Scotland Yard’s counterfeit investigation division. As they talked she asked him whether he spent a great deal of time studying counterfeit bills. The inspector replied, “Quite to the contrary. I spend my time studying the real.”
The best advice against deception that I can give is to urge you to spend your time getting to know Christ and his word. When you know the real, you can more easily spot the counterfeit.