It's very humble and bold of you to admit your mistake. Like MikeMcK said, it is very important to test signs and wonders, and even though it has happened for some people, it doesn't always happen the same for another. My husband said he saw gold running down the walls when we were in a meeting. He was looking all around amazed for ages at this gold liquid just running down the walls.
I believe those things can happen, but even when they do we must still test everything.
I know I have posted a link to this before but I feel it is a very good teaching, a teaching by Derek Prince that reminds us of how to keep the balance by testing. I'm only going to put up chapter 1 but there are another 2 here (http://www.geocities.com/lostorfound_2/Deception.htm) if you want to read them.
Signs and Wonders Do Not Determine Truth
There has been in recent years a worldwide explosion of signs and wonders. Some have been biblical and helpful. Others have been bizarre and unbiblical. Signs and wonders are not new. They are recorded in various passages of the Bible and in different periods of church history. However, the current explosion extends more widely than any particular church or denomination and has attracted widespread attention in both the religious and the secular media.
I want to make it plain that I have no personal prejudice or anxiety concerning unusual manifestations. In actual fact, I have in my own lifetime experienced quite a number of them. They do not frighten me. I am not negative about them.
As I recorded in my booklet
Uproar in the Church, my own personal encounter with Jesus in World War II began in a very unconventional way. In the middle of the night, in a barrack room of the British Army, I spent more than an hour on my back on the floor, with my body first racked by convulsive sobs and then filled with a river of laughter which grew continually louder.
Next morning, I found myself a completely different person, changed not by any act of my will but by yielding to the supernatural power that had flowed through me. I then looked up various passages in the Bible that speak about laughter. To my surprise, I discovered that - for God's people - laughter is not primarily, as we imagine, a reaction to something comical, but rather an expression of triumph over our enemies.
In Psalm 2:4, David actually depicts God Himself as laughing:
He who sits in the heavens shall laugh: The Lord shall hold them in derision,
Here, God's laughter is not a reaction to some comedy that is being enacted on earth. Rather, it is His response to the ridiculous human midgets who have the effrontery to oppose His purposes. It is His expression of triumph over all the forces of evil.
Sometimes, God fills us with His own laughter that we may share in His triumph over those who are both His enemies and ours.
Later I pastored a fellowship in London that met on the top floor of a five-story building. One evening a lame man was miraculously healed and threw away his crutches. We all burst into spontaneous praise. At that moment the building began to tremble and shake with the power of God. The praise and shaking continued for about thirty minutes.
I realized that something similar was recorded of the early church in Acts 4:31:
And when they had prayed, the place where they were assembled together was shaken; and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit, and they spoke the word of God with boldness.
At that particular time, our fellowship was conducting several evangelistic meetings each week in the streets of London, and we certainly needed more than natural boldness.
But with regard to any kind of manifestation, there are two questions that I always want to ask. Number one: Is it a manifestation of the Holy Spirit of God? Or is it a manifestation from some other source? And number two (and this is related to it): Is the manifestation in question in harmony with Scripture?
In 2 Timothy 3:16, Paul says,
All Scripture is given by inspiration of God. In other words, the Holy Spirit is the author of all Scripture, and He never says or does anything to contradict Himself. Every genuine manifestation of the Holy Spirit will, in some way. harmonize with Scripture.
Now, I want to begin with some warnings of Jesus, particularly related to the end time period in which I believe we are living. These are warnings against deception. They are found in Matthew chapter 24, verses 4, 5, 11 and 24. In other words, four times in 21 verses, Jesus specifically warns us against deception in this period of the close of the age.
The first thing Jesus said about the events leading up to His return, in Matthew 24:4:
"Take heed that no one deceives you." Verse 5:
"For many will come in My name, saying, 'I am the Messiah (Christ),' and will deceive many." Verse 11:
"Then many false prophets will rise up and deceive many." And then in verse 24:
"For false messiahs (christs) and false prophets will rise and show great signs and wonders to deceive, if possible, even the elect."
So, Jesus warns us four times against deception. Anybody who shrugs off that warning or treats it lightly does so at the risk of his own soul.
The greatest single danger in this end time is not sickness, nor poverty, nor persecution. It is deception. If anybody says, "It could never happen to me," it has already happened to that person, because that person is saying something could never happen that Jesus said would happen. That is a sufficient indication that such a person is deceived.
Next, I want to say something important about signs and wonders. They do not determine truth. It is very essential to understand that.
Signs and wonders do not determine truth! Truth is already determined and established, and it is the Word of God. In John 17:17, Jesus is praying to the Father, and He says,
"Your word is truth." And in Psalm 119:89, the psalmist said,
Forever, 0 Lord, Your word is settled in heaven. Nothing that happens on earth can ever change the smallest little sign or letter of the Word of God. It is forever settled in heaven.
Now, the Bible speaks about signs and wonders. It says some things about them that are good, and some that are very frightening. I want to turn to 2 Thessalonians chapter 2 and read a few verses there, beginning at verse 9.
The coming of the lawless one [that is the title of the Antichrist] is according to the working of Satan, with all power, signs, and lying wonders, and with all unrighteous deception among those who perish, because they did not receive the love of the truth, that they might be saved. And for this reason God will send them strong delusion, that they should believe the lie, that they all may be condemned who did not believe the truth but had pleasure in unrighteousness.
So, Paul says here there are such things as lying signs and wonders. There are true signs and there are lying signs. True signs attest the truth. Lying signs attest lies. Satan is fully capable of supernatural signs and wonders.
Unfortunately, many in the Charismatic movement have the attitude that if something is supernatural, it must be from God. There is no scriptural basis for that assumption. Satan is perfectly capable of producing powerful signs and wonders to attest his lies, and the reason such people are deceived is
because they did not receive the love of the truth. On such people God will send
strong delusion.
That is one of the most frightening statements in the Bible. If
God sends you
strong delusion, you will be deluded. I think that is one of the most severe judgments of God recorded in Scripture, sending these people
strong delusion. They will be condemned, these people, because
they did not believe the truth but had pleasure in unrighteousness.
Therefore, signs and wonders are not a guarantee that something is the truth. There is only one sure way to know the truth. It is in the Word of God. Jesus said in John 8:32,
"You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." There is no other way to be sure that we can escape deception in these days except that we know and apply the truth of God's Word, the Scripture.
In 1994, for the first time, I was brought into fairly direct contact with one of the groups where those manifestations were occurring. A group of leaders went to some of their meetings and returned all excited, saying they had experienced something wonderful and we all needed to experience it. They said, "Now, you don't test it. You don't try it out. You don't examine it. You just open up to it and receive it." That was the first time that I really began to be suspicious of some of these things, because such a statement is directly contrary to Scripture.
In I Thessalonians 5:21, Paul says to Christians,
Test all things: hold fast what is good. So, if we do not test things, we are disobeying Scripture, and anybody who tells us not to test things is, himself, not in harmony with Scripture.
Our hearts cannot be relied upon to give us the truth. Proverbs 28:26 says,
He who trusts in his own heart is a fool. So do not be a fool. Do not trust your own heart. Do not rely upon what your heart tells you, because it is not reliable. Again, in Jeremiah 17:9 the prophet says,
The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?
That word
deceitful in the Hebrew is a very interesting word. In 1946, I was attending the Hebrew University in Jerusalem as a guest student studying the nature - or the law - of the Hebrew language. I was listening to the head professor in this field at that time talking about this verse: Jeremiah 17:9:
The heart is deceitful above all things. He gave reasons which I cannot carry over from Hebrew to show that this form of the word
deceitful is active, not passive. It does not mean that your heart is deceived. It means that your heart deceives you, so you cannot trust your own heart.
The professor gave a very vivid picture of what it means to find out the truth about your own heart. He said it is like someone peeling an onion. You peel off skin after skin, but you never know when you have reached the last skin - and all the time your eyes are watering. So that has remained with me now for 50 years - such a vivid, scriptural warning against relying on my own heart to tell me the truth. There is only one source of truth, and that is the Scripture.
Mixture Produces Confusion and Division
Now, I would like to give briefly my summation of this whole phenomenon /movement/whatever-you-want-to-call-it, based partly on personal observation and partly on what I believe to be reliable reports. My summation is very simple: it is a mixture of spirits, both the Holy Spirit and unholy spirits. They are mixed together.
In Leviticus 19:19, God warns us against mixture. He is opposed to mixture. God says this,
"You shall keep My statutes. You shall not let your livestock breed with another kind. You shall not sow your field with mixed seed. Nor shall a garment of mixed linen and wool come upon you." So, God warns against three things: breeding mixed livestock, sowing with mixed seed and wearing a mixed garment.
We could say that sowing with mixed seed represents the message that we bring, when it is partly truth and partly error. Wearing a mixed garment would be like a lifestyle that is partly scriptural and partly of this world. And letting livestock breed with livestock of an incompatible kind would be equivalent to a Christian ministry or group aligning itself with a group or ministry that is non-Christian.
It is an interesting thing about such breeding; its product is always sterile. For instance, you can mate a horse with a donkey and the product is a mule. But a mule is always sterile; it cannot reproduce. I think that is one reason why there are so many "sterile" operations in Christendom - they are being bred with the wrong mate.
Now, I have observed this carefully, and I have had grievous experience of this condition of a mixture of spirits. I find that it is something which the Scripture warns us against. For instance, there is a character in the Bible, King Saul, who had a mixture of spirits. At one time, he prophesied in the Holy Spirit; at another time, he prophesied in a demon. His career is really a warning. He was a king who ruled for forty years. He was a successful military commander. He had a lot of successes. But mixture was his undoing, and his life closed with tragedy. On the last night of his life, he went to consult a witch, and the next day he committed suicide on the battlefield. Surely that offers no encouragement to any of us to cultivate any kind of spiritual mixture in our lives.
I have observed that the result of mixture is two things: first of all, confusion; and then division. For instance, we have this mixed message, part of which is true, part of which is false. People can respond in two ways. Some will see the good and focus on it, and therefore accept the bad. Some will focus on the bad, and therefore reject the good. In either case, it does not accomplish God's purposes.
Once upon a time I was a pastor, a long time ago, but I remember that the most difficult kind of people to deal with were people who were a mixture. I will give you a little imaginary example. We have Sister Jones in our congregation. One Sunday she gives a beautiful, prophetic message and everybody is uplifted, excited. But two Sundays later, she stands up and gives a revelation which she had in a dream. The further she goes with this revelation, the more confused and confusing it becomes. Eventually, as pastor, I have to say to her, "Sister Jones, I thank you, but I really don't believe that is from the Lord," and she sits down - but that is not the end.
After the meeting, Sister White comes to me and says, "Brother Prince, how could you talk to Sister Jones like that? Don't you remember that beautiful prophecy she gave two Sundays ago?" And when Sister White is gone, Brother Black comes to me, and he says, "If that's the kind of revelation she has, I won't listen to any more of her prophecies!"
So, you see what we have? Confusion, and out of confusion, division. I believe that is exactly what is happening in the church: confusion resulting in division. Certainly there is tremendous division! I believe confusion will always produce division.
The Bible gives us no liberty to tolerate the incursion of evil into the church. We are not to be passive; we are not to be neutral. Proverbs 8:13 says,
The fear of the Lord is to hate evil. It is sinful to compromise with evil. It is sinful to be neutral toward evil. In John 10:10 Jesus spoke about the thief, the devil, who comes:
to steal, to kill and to destroy. We always need to remember, whether it is in an individual life or in a congregation, the devil only comes with three objectives:
to steal, to kill and to destroy.
I can remember many times I have been speaking with a person who needed deliverance from an evil spirit, and I have said to that person, "Remember, the devil has three reasons for being in your life:
to steal, to kill and to destroy. You need to take a stand against him, not be neutral - you must drive him out." What is true of an individual is true of a congregation. It is true for the body of Christ, worldwide.
Some of these unusual manifestations have been compared with unusual manifestations that accompanied the ministry of John Wesley, George Whitefield, Jonathan Edwards and Charles Finney. Undoubtedly there were unusual manifestations in the ministries of those four men, and I have studied some of them myself, but I think the differences are greater than the similarities with the present situation. Let me point out to you three differences:
First of all, all those men majored on the strong preaching of God's Word. They hardly did anything until they had preached the Word of God, or apart from the preaching of the Word of God. Finney, himself, commented somewhere about his ministry, "I usually spoke an hour or two." I do not know how many contemporary Christians in the West would listen to a two-hour sermon, but Finney gave the Word in its purity and in its power.
Second difference: All those men made a strong call for repentance. That was their primary demand on the people to whom they ministered. Some people call what we are seeing today "a refreshing," but in Acts 3:19 Peter says that
refreshing must be
preceded by repentance. Any
refreshing that bypasses repentance is not scriptural.
The third difference is that in the ministry of those men, there is no record as far as I know that any of them laid hands on people. I am not saying that it is unscriptural to lay hands on people, but there is a difference. There is a situation in which people receive directly for themselves from the preached Word and another situation in which people have hands laid on them by others.
If I could take a simple example. It is like rain. If you are out in the open and the rain falls upon you, you have received your rain direct from heaven. But, on the other hand, if rain is caught and stored in some kind of a cistern, then you are not receiving that rain direct from heaven. You have to take into account the cistern and the pipes through which you receive the rain.
This is very vivid for me, because my first wife, Lydia, and I lived in Kenya for five years in a house where our water came from rain caught on the roof and channeled into concrete cisterns. Although the water came from heaven, we quickly learned by experience that if it stayed for any length of time in the cistern, worms developed in it and, consequently, we always had to boil our drinking water. There was nothing wrong with the rain as it came down, but something happened in the channel through which the rain came to us, and it was no longer pure. I think this can be true of laying on of hands. It is a channel which is not always pure.
Recently some ministers have moved from actually laying on hands to some other action of the hands - such as waving or pointing. However, this does not change the fact that something is being transmitted through the hands. Otherwise, there is no reason to use the hands at all. The important question still remains: Are those hands pure channels through which only the Holy Spirit can flow?
For instance, Ruth and I were in a meeting fairly recently where ministers deeply involved in the current move were speaking. We were sitting about two rows behind a woman who was having a terrible experience. She was like somebody continually trying to burp or trying to vomit, and she just went on and on and on. Eventually, I said to Ruth, "I think we ought to try to help her."
So, although it was not a meeting for which we were responsible, we went over quietly and started to talk to her. We discovered very quickly that she was speaking in a tongue, but for both of us it was evident that it was a false tongue; it was not a Holy Spirit tongue. We challenged her to confess that Jesus is Lord, and she was not willing or able to say that. So I conclude that she had a false spirit.
Later on, the people who were with her came over and talked to us and asked us what they should do about it. I asked them, "How did it happen?" And they said, "Well, she went to a church that's involved in this move and somebody laid hands on her and this is the way she has been since then. But," they said, "she's convinced it's from God. We can't help her." That is just an example of "rain" that came through a "cistern" that was not pure.
Also, in the present move, there is a great deal of emphasis on love. I agree that love is the greatest thing. But the trouble is that people are not always clear about the nature of love as it is described in the New Testament. First of all, love in us is expressed by obedience to the Lord. Any kind of love that does not result in obedience is unscriptural love.
In John 14:15, Jesus said to His disciples,
"If you love Me, keep My commandments," or, in a perhaps better text,
"You will keep My commandments." In other words, what is the evidence that you love Him? The evidence is keeping His commandments. Then in verse 21a. Jesus says,
"He who has My commandments and keeps them. it is he who loves Me." And in 1 John 5:3, it says,
For this is the love of God, that we keep His commandments. Therefore, any kind of love that does not result in obedience to the will of God revealed in His Word is not scriptural love. It is a counterfeit, a substitute for the real thing.
Then, we need to consider the way that God expresses His love toward us. True, God is our Father, and He loves us. But as a Father, if necessary, He is prepared to discipline us. In the messages to the seven churches depicted in Revelation, I would say that Laodicea is probably the one that corresponds most closely to the contemporary church in the West. And to that church the Lord said,
"As many as I love, I rebuke and chasten. Therefore be zealous and repent" (Rev. 3:19).
So, God's love is not sloppy. It is not sentimental. It is right down-to- earth. If we are straying from His ways and if we are disobedient, His love is expressed in rebuking us and chastening us, and He commands us to repent. Once again we have the problem of trying to get what God promises, but bypassing the basic condition of repentance - which is a deception.
I recently read the following comment by a British Bible teacher:
Some Christians take the text "God is love" and turn it around to mean "Love is God." In other words, nothing can be wrong if it is rooted in love. However, any love that comes between us and God is an illegitimate love ...
Likewise any love that diverts us from obedience to God's Word is illegitimate.