I am going to try to be as "nice" as I can be with this post, but I will not sacrifice honesty to sound good to people here on CF.
I would like the following questions answered.
Question 1: Why have I made so many enemies on this forum and on my forum since I started asking questions about Todd Bentley? All I did was post a bunch of links, and post my concerns about his relationship with Emma and the Kansas City prophets. I also posted a concern that someone with a past of molesting children in a sex ring would have a children's ministry, that he would put himself in temptation's way.
So why have I made so many enemies here?
All I did was post honest concerns and real questions.
I have been deeply wounded by the fact that people who I thought were my friends are unable to handle the fact that I don't accept everything on its face, and I thought we were "cool like that", that even though they may not agree, they wouldn't stoop to the low blows that I've been given.
Now, with regards to my angry posts, they did not begin until people had been jumping on me at some length. Anyone who knows me knows that if you keep after me with attacks such as these, I'm not exactly going to be baking you a birthday cake.
Bottom line: I did not start the war between me and some people on these forums.
And since when does an honest concern by someone mean that "they're dredging up the past"?
If, for example, a con artist who embezzled millions of dollars was put in charge of a financial ministry, would NO ONE have honest questions about that person being tempted to steal?
Or what about a former alcoholic being put in charge of the ministry that goes downtown near the bars?
If a serial child molester gets out of jail, should he or she NOT be put on the Sex Offender's registry, and should YOU as a parent NOT receive notification if he or she is moving into your neighborhood? Are parents "doing the work of Satan" if they have concerns that someone who got saved in prison, but who is a child molester, is now living in their neighborhood?
Does this make THEM "of the devil", "false accusers", "in the flesh"?
So maybe someone can answer Question #1.
___________________________________________
Question 2: If a person questions, how does this make them the friend of Satan? If the Emma thing bothers me, how am I now the emissary of the devil?
___________________________________________
Question 3: At what point did I criticize the revival? Have I not said, like millions of times, that I am glad for the signs, wonders, conversions, healings, and other miracles people have been experiencing at the revival?
Heck, I've not even criticized the MAN Todd Bentley. I've only expressed concerns.
___________________________________________
Question 4: Since when do you have the right to mock and make fun of an honest apology I issued from my heart? to judge the realness of what I have written from the bottom of my soul? You don't know me. You have no right to insinuate anything about my apology, to imply I put strings to it, or anything else.
I apologized for how I behaved. I was wrong to speak in a certain manner, and was very sorry for it. You're my brothers and sisters in Christ. You give me the benefit of the doubt, not the full brunt of the doubt. It's not your place to go judging whether an apology was real. It's your place to believe it and accept it.
I certainly would have accepted yours.
__________________________________________
Question 5: Why is it you think that others should just give you the right to like Todd Bentley, but you wish to come down on others who exercise THEIR rights to disagree with certain things about the issue of the revival?
__________________________________________
Honestly ... This tees me off to no end, that from the moment I began posting the links, a bunch of people jumped on me [and continue to do so] like I don't have the right to have questions about what goes on in the body of Christ.
How many of you have questioned...
Benny Hinn?
Creflo Dollar?
Ted Haggard?
Jimmy Swaggart?
Jim Bakker?
Carlton Pearson?
But you come down on me, ONLY because I do nothing different from what you yourself have done.
And who gives YOU the right to treat ME or anyone else the same way you say we are treating Todd Bentley?
The sad fact is that everything you've been accusing us of, you've done the exact same thing to God's anointed - the posters on this forum.
You have falsely accused us - of touching God's anointed.
You have dredged up the past on us - bringing up old offenses from other topics.
You have condemned the brethren - saying we're destroying God's work.
Don't accuse me of ANY of this any more - NONE OF IT. Why?
Because you are doing it to us every single day on this forum.
I'm so tired of these superspiritual lectures from people who have done nothing but viciously attack me and lie about my character and say all kinds of slanderous things.
Please, if you like the revival, that's cool, just speak highly of your brother in Christ and of the revival. Don't come down in the negative on people who have questions and concerns.
All I did at the beginning was to post my concerns. Now, I've gotten angry, not because people don't want to listen to me, but because they decide that for me to disagree with their view of Todd Bentley, for me to look into things, for me to discern and to discover, for me to say the Emperor might not have clothes on, that for me to do all of this means I'm tantamount to the devil himself.
My love for all of you is just as real as ever. I'm just very angry right now.
Sometimes, it's okay to get mad with your family.
It doesn't mean I hate anyone, or love them less.
But I will not sit at this chair and let you lie and slander about me.
If you think I won't stand up for myself in the face of this crap, you're dead wrong.
Perhaps you can believe the words of my fiancee, in a post she wrote on our other forum ...
I wish that a bunch of people on this forum would give me a break.
And don't lecture me about my tone.
My tone with you did not start until you began calling me everything but a child of God.
I don't hate you, but I'm highly miffed at the treatment I received.
I never came down on any of you for liking Todd Bentley.
I only got hot and fiery when you started attacking me personally.
I honestly feel betrayed and backstabbed and left out to dry by a bunch of people who never even tried to understand what I wrote.
I come from a history of two major church scandals where I saw the leadership ignore the red flags. Both times, it was total disaster.
I don't want to see the red flags ignored in the case of Todd Bentley.
I don't want people to come back later and wonder if they were really converted.
I don't want people to think their healings were fake.
I don't want kids to lose hope in authorities and leadership.
I don't want to see hearts and homes broken.
I don't want to see young believers having a shipwreck of the faith.
I don't want to see people say "well, the leader did it, I can do it too".
I don't want to see people leave the church, never to darken the doors again.
I don't want the world to have one more reason to say "HYPOCRITES!!!"
If you could just hear the late-night phone calls I heard from people who called me with anger and bitterness and hatred toward God, it would break your hearts.
If you could hear the young people who were discouraged away from going into the ministry over these scandals, it would crush you.
If you could hear the sadness of people who've walked away from God through this, who think he can't restore them any more, you would cry your eyes out.
If you could hear the older saints say, "I've been through this Charismatic junk 80 times before, and I'm going to my old church, where the Holy Spirit wasn't there, where there was no power of God or spiritual gifts, but where there was honesty", it would drag you down.
If you could be with these people at the restaurant literally feeling their hearts broken, and their spirits dragging the ground, you would know their pain.
If you could watch the people go back to drunkenness, and find out they waded out drunk into the waves down in the Atlantic at the local beach, because they wanted to pass out in the water, and wanted it all to end, you would understand.
... and all of this because people chose to stick their heads in the sand.
I counseled a LOT of people, lifted them from despair, cautioned them to keep their eyes on Jesus, and helped them through these scandals when I was only in my early 20s. They turned to me because the "elders", the "older men", the "wise ones" were the ones who had created this mess in the first place by their refusal to deal with things by nipping them in the bud.
I was basically the only person who kept touch with the Pastor in the first scandal, a man twenty years my senior. He had felt abandoned by the people, because they cast him down and he felt like Adam, hiding in his work and in his friendships with other people outside the church. I talked with him long hours. God ran me into him when no one had seen him and when he was hiding, on quite a FEW occasions. I eventually ended up helping him in his business of painting and wallpapering as an apprentice. I went with him and his fiancee up to the mountains when he was building a mountain cabin, and helped them on the weekends to develop the property.
I ran into him at the beach once when he was riding his bike.
I saw him at a concert once when he was by himself.
Once, God ran me into him at the county library, and God gave me quite a few words to give him, as he closed his eyes, kept saying "Mmm, yes, God", lifted his hands in praise [as he'd not done in so long], and as tears were coming to his eyes in the realization that God had not forgotten him, or forgotten what he'd called this man to do [Isaiah 41:10].
He went through a lot with this situation, and the Lord put me in his life as one person to help him rebound, and remind him of the call of God on his life.
He has told me time and time again, "Steve, you were the only one. If it had not been for you, no one would have kept in touch with me and encouraged me and lifted me up."
But this restoration and all that tried to fight against it, the loneliness, the abandonment, the separation, the loss of friends, the loss of a church, the depression, the hopelessness, the rejection, the temptation from Satan to just go back and give up, the feeling that "God could never use me again", all of these were the price he paid for the signs being overlooked and ignored.
This is a very emotional issue for me.
I have seen the lives destroyed from leadership on down.
I don't want this thing to end up this way.
I don't want to see the Lakeland revival go to the wayside as lives do the same.
I don't want to see people get discouraged and give up.
I don't want to see leaders go through the twenty-year hell my former pastor went through, that valley of the shadow of death I have walked with him through as a spiritual son.
Believe me.
I have seen the signs before.
They're there.
The bottom-line problem is the unwillingness to close the doors of Satan off forever.
I don't hate Todd Bentley. I love him like a brother.
I just question his judgment.
And I'd like to avoid seeing lives destroyed because of it.
Say what you will about "well, people are responsible for themselves" -
That whole "shepherd is smitten, sheep will scatter" thing was written for a reason.
I hope this post reveals more of my true heart. I'm not a hater; I am rather a lover -
a lover of God; a lover of His people; a lover of his shepherds; a lover of souls.
I would like the following questions answered.
Question 1: Why have I made so many enemies on this forum and on my forum since I started asking questions about Todd Bentley? All I did was post a bunch of links, and post my concerns about his relationship with Emma and the Kansas City prophets. I also posted a concern that someone with a past of molesting children in a sex ring would have a children's ministry, that he would put himself in temptation's way.
So why have I made so many enemies here?
All I did was post honest concerns and real questions.
I have been deeply wounded by the fact that people who I thought were my friends are unable to handle the fact that I don't accept everything on its face, and I thought we were "cool like that", that even though they may not agree, they wouldn't stoop to the low blows that I've been given.
Now, with regards to my angry posts, they did not begin until people had been jumping on me at some length. Anyone who knows me knows that if you keep after me with attacks such as these, I'm not exactly going to be baking you a birthday cake.
Bottom line: I did not start the war between me and some people on these forums. And since when does an honest concern by someone mean that "they're dredging up the past"?
If, for example, a con artist who embezzled millions of dollars was put in charge of a financial ministry, would NO ONE have honest questions about that person being tempted to steal?
Or what about a former alcoholic being put in charge of the ministry that goes downtown near the bars?
If a serial child molester gets out of jail, should he or she NOT be put on the Sex Offender's registry, and should YOU as a parent NOT receive notification if he or she is moving into your neighborhood? Are parents "doing the work of Satan" if they have concerns that someone who got saved in prison, but who is a child molester, is now living in their neighborhood?
Does this make THEM "of the devil", "false accusers", "in the flesh"?
So maybe someone can answer Question #1.
___________________________________________
Question 2: If a person questions, how does this make them the friend of Satan? If the Emma thing bothers me, how am I now the emissary of the devil?
___________________________________________
Question 3: At what point did I criticize the revival? Have I not said, like millions of times, that I am glad for the signs, wonders, conversions, healings, and other miracles people have been experiencing at the revival?
Heck, I've not even criticized the MAN Todd Bentley. I've only expressed concerns.
___________________________________________
Question 4: Since when do you have the right to mock and make fun of an honest apology I issued from my heart? to judge the realness of what I have written from the bottom of my soul? You don't know me. You have no right to insinuate anything about my apology, to imply I put strings to it, or anything else.
I apologized for how I behaved. I was wrong to speak in a certain manner, and was very sorry for it. You're my brothers and sisters in Christ. You give me the benefit of the doubt, not the full brunt of the doubt. It's not your place to go judging whether an apology was real. It's your place to believe it and accept it.
I certainly would have accepted yours.
__________________________________________
Question 5: Why is it you think that others should just give you the right to like Todd Bentley, but you wish to come down on others who exercise THEIR rights to disagree with certain things about the issue of the revival?
__________________________________________
Honestly ... This tees me off to no end, that from the moment I began posting the links, a bunch of people jumped on me [and continue to do so] like I don't have the right to have questions about what goes on in the body of Christ.
How many of you have questioned...
Benny Hinn?
Creflo Dollar?
Ted Haggard?
Jimmy Swaggart?
Jim Bakker?
Carlton Pearson?
But you come down on me, ONLY because I do nothing different from what you yourself have done.
And who gives YOU the right to treat ME or anyone else the same way you say we are treating Todd Bentley?
The sad fact is that everything you've been accusing us of, you've done the exact same thing to God's anointed - the posters on this forum.
You have falsely accused us - of touching God's anointed.
You have dredged up the past on us - bringing up old offenses from other topics.
You have condemned the brethren - saying we're destroying God's work.
Don't accuse me of ANY of this any more - NONE OF IT. Why?
Because you are doing it to us every single day on this forum.
I'm so tired of these superspiritual lectures from people who have done nothing but viciously attack me and lie about my character and say all kinds of slanderous things.
Please, if you like the revival, that's cool, just speak highly of your brother in Christ and of the revival. Don't come down in the negative on people who have questions and concerns.
All I did at the beginning was to post my concerns. Now, I've gotten angry, not because people don't want to listen to me, but because they decide that for me to disagree with their view of Todd Bentley, for me to look into things, for me to discern and to discover, for me to say the Emperor might not have clothes on, that for me to do all of this means I'm tantamount to the devil himself.
My love for all of you is just as real as ever. I'm just very angry right now.
Sometimes, it's okay to get mad with your family.
It doesn't mean I hate anyone, or love them less.
But I will not sit at this chair and let you lie and slander about me.
If you think I won't stand up for myself in the face of this crap, you're dead wrong.
Perhaps you can believe the words of my fiancee, in a post she wrote on our other forum ...
I'm just trying here ...As for our opinions on the revival. We actually have pretty much the SAME opinion except we word our posts differently
- I think this revival is a wonderful thing and I am so blessed that ppl are getting healed ya know?
- Stephen is very happy that ppl are getting saved, healed, and delivered and welcomes it.
- I have been getting a check in my spirit about the revival though....Something is going on that is NOT right.
- Stephen questioned Todd Bentley's judgment on certain things and is just pointing out that if certain things aren't taken care of--They will blow up in the ministry's face.
- I happen to like Todd Bentley.
- Stephen likes Todd Bentley.
- We both just want him to open his eyes and cut off those bad affiliations so that his ministry will prosper.
- We both also think he should just come clean and tell what happened in his past so it won't hang over him for the rest of his life and haunt him.
- We both see that he truly is after God's own heart and wants to do the perfect will of God.
- I believe there are some good things happening down in Florida right now.
- Stephen believes there are some good things happening in Florida as well :]
- This angel named "Emma" needs to BACK THE HECK OFF and leave Todd Bentley ALONE! Both of us don't feel comfortable about that.
I mean...Honestly.....[And no, I'm not here calling the angel "Emma-O". For all we know it could be something totally different] this is the "angel" that helped Jones, Cain, and Bickle in their movement right?
Well look what happened to those guys. They ALL got seriously waaaaaaaay out there in their stuff. They started taking over small churches, having affairs with men and women both, telling women to come into the office and stand "naked before the Lord", Cain even came to the revival and told everyone that the whole him having sex with men was FALSE and that he wasn't gay! LIES!
What the crap is that?
This angel "helped" these men with their ministry's and look at where their ministries have gone. STRAIGHT TO HELL.
I don't say that to be mean--But SERIOUSLY!
Both Stephen and I don't wanna see Todd Bentley on the same path. We wanna see him prosper and succeed!
We just want you peeps not to be in the dark and know what's going on. But hey, everyone has their own opinions and I respect that. That's what makes us all unique :] I would just wish that we all can state our opinions without name calling, that's all
So to answer your question, yes. We have talked about many things--And when we have a disagreement, we state our points and WHY we think what we think. It's actually been very productive when we do that. Because I'll say things Stephen never realized or he'll say things I've never realized and we both leave with expanded views on the subject and normally come to an agreement afterwards.
It's all good
I wish that a bunch of people on this forum would give me a break.
And don't lecture me about my tone.
My tone with you did not start until you began calling me everything but a child of God.
I don't hate you, but I'm highly miffed at the treatment I received.
I never came down on any of you for liking Todd Bentley.
I only got hot and fiery when you started attacking me personally.
I honestly feel betrayed and backstabbed and left out to dry by a bunch of people who never even tried to understand what I wrote.
I come from a history of two major church scandals where I saw the leadership ignore the red flags. Both times, it was total disaster.
I don't want to see the red flags ignored in the case of Todd Bentley.
I don't want people to come back later and wonder if they were really converted.
I don't want people to think their healings were fake.
I don't want kids to lose hope in authorities and leadership.
I don't want to see hearts and homes broken.
I don't want to see young believers having a shipwreck of the faith.
I don't want to see people say "well, the leader did it, I can do it too".
I don't want to see people leave the church, never to darken the doors again.
I don't want the world to have one more reason to say "HYPOCRITES!!!"
If you could just hear the late-night phone calls I heard from people who called me with anger and bitterness and hatred toward God, it would break your hearts.
If you could hear the young people who were discouraged away from going into the ministry over these scandals, it would crush you.
If you could hear the sadness of people who've walked away from God through this, who think he can't restore them any more, you would cry your eyes out.
If you could hear the older saints say, "I've been through this Charismatic junk 80 times before, and I'm going to my old church, where the Holy Spirit wasn't there, where there was no power of God or spiritual gifts, but where there was honesty", it would drag you down.
If you could be with these people at the restaurant literally feeling their hearts broken, and their spirits dragging the ground, you would know their pain.
If you could watch the people go back to drunkenness, and find out they waded out drunk into the waves down in the Atlantic at the local beach, because they wanted to pass out in the water, and wanted it all to end, you would understand.
... and all of this because people chose to stick their heads in the sand.
I counseled a LOT of people, lifted them from despair, cautioned them to keep their eyes on Jesus, and helped them through these scandals when I was only in my early 20s. They turned to me because the "elders", the "older men", the "wise ones" were the ones who had created this mess in the first place by their refusal to deal with things by nipping them in the bud.
I was basically the only person who kept touch with the Pastor in the first scandal, a man twenty years my senior. He had felt abandoned by the people, because they cast him down and he felt like Adam, hiding in his work and in his friendships with other people outside the church. I talked with him long hours. God ran me into him when no one had seen him and when he was hiding, on quite a FEW occasions. I eventually ended up helping him in his business of painting and wallpapering as an apprentice. I went with him and his fiancee up to the mountains when he was building a mountain cabin, and helped them on the weekends to develop the property.
I ran into him at the beach once when he was riding his bike.
I saw him at a concert once when he was by himself.
Once, God ran me into him at the county library, and God gave me quite a few words to give him, as he closed his eyes, kept saying "Mmm, yes, God", lifted his hands in praise [as he'd not done in so long], and as tears were coming to his eyes in the realization that God had not forgotten him, or forgotten what he'd called this man to do [Isaiah 41:10].
He went through a lot with this situation, and the Lord put me in his life as one person to help him rebound, and remind him of the call of God on his life.
He has told me time and time again, "Steve, you were the only one. If it had not been for you, no one would have kept in touch with me and encouraged me and lifted me up."
But this restoration and all that tried to fight against it, the loneliness, the abandonment, the separation, the loss of friends, the loss of a church, the depression, the hopelessness, the rejection, the temptation from Satan to just go back and give up, the feeling that "God could never use me again", all of these were the price he paid for the signs being overlooked and ignored.
This is a very emotional issue for me.
I have seen the lives destroyed from leadership on down.
I don't want this thing to end up this way.
I don't want to see the Lakeland revival go to the wayside as lives do the same.
I don't want to see people get discouraged and give up.
I don't want to see leaders go through the twenty-year hell my former pastor went through, that valley of the shadow of death I have walked with him through as a spiritual son.
Believe me.
I have seen the signs before.
They're there.
The bottom-line problem is the unwillingness to close the doors of Satan off forever.
I don't hate Todd Bentley. I love him like a brother.
I just question his judgment.
And I'd like to avoid seeing lives destroyed because of it.
Say what you will about "well, people are responsible for themselves" -
That whole "shepherd is smitten, sheep will scatter" thing was written for a reason.
I hope this post reveals more of my true heart. I'm not a hater; I am rather a lover -
a lover of God; a lover of His people; a lover of his shepherds; a lover of souls.
