For many years I’ve had people want to stick me in some sort of palsy-walsy club with Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, all because I tell them I’m a Christian.

The attitude is something like, “How am I supposed to believe in your God when He’s got crackpots like them as your head representatives?!”

What’s funny is that in the Bible, in both Testaments—and with great fanfare—God Himself warns the reader to watch out for false men who profess to be God’s prophet, disciple, bishop, preacher, etc.

As my pastor (Richard Jordan) says, “Friend, God never ordained any man to preach the wrong message. Lots of preachers say, ‘God called me to preach.’ You ask them, ‘Well, how’d He do that?’ and they tell you these magnificent stories of this experience they had and how it all came down.

“Well, immediately you begin to kind of wonder, you know. Did you ever hear how God saved and called (heavyweight boxing champ) George Foreman to preach? You talk about a wild story! It’s this big dramatic experience where he goes to the hospital on a stretcher and sees this image . . . It’s all baloney. It’s just stuff and yet people like him use that as their authority to go out and minister and preach.”

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In an online Q&A interview with Foreman on the website Beliefnet, he talks about a “religious awakening” he had in 1977 immediately following his loss in what was his last boxing match (to Jimmy Young) and slinking back to his dressing room.

Foreman recalls, “And I was dead, and I could smell death and it was just the most horrible thing. It was like someone dropped me off in the deep sea—no help—there was no way I could get out of this. And I said, as a tough man, I’ve always been tough, I said, ‘I don’t care if this is death, I still believe there’s a God.’ When I said that, a gigantic hand snatched me out of this ‘nothing,’ and I was lying in the dressing room bleeding, blood flowing through my veins.

“And evidently they had picked me up off the floor in the dressing room and laid me on the table, because that’s where I was and everybody was standing around me crying, and I said to my doctor, ‘Move your hands, the thorns on his head are making him bleed.’ I saw blood coming down my forehead, and I hadn’t been hit in the boxing match. And I told my masseur, Mr. Fuller, ‘You move your hand because he’s bleeding and they crucified him.’ And I started screaming words I never screamed before that Jesus Christ was coming alive in me. And I jumped in the shower started screaming ‘Hallelujah, I’m clean, I’m born again, I’m going out to save the world!’ and they said, You better put on some clothes first [laughs].

“They held me down on the table, and they finally got an ambulance to tie me down and took me to the Intensive Care in Puerto Rico. For ten years after I could never even make a fist, let alone box again, I was just totally wiped out. I had no idea there was really God. I just didn’t know. I tried to explain it away as much as I could—you got hit too hard, you’re hot, I didn’t believe in religion; Jesus, I never even thought it existed. My mother was so poor, [when] things would get hard and she’d always say, ‘O Lord, O Jesus.’ I said, ‘One day I’m going to be rich and I’ll never hear that again!’ ”

*****

Jordan says, “You don't understand anything about the Christian life when you don't understand what prayer is, and I'm not talking about traditional praying. That's thinking ‘gain is godliness.’( I Tim. 6 says, ‘If any man teach otherwise, and consent not to wholesome words, even the words of our Lord Jesus Christ, and to the doctrine which is according to godliness. . . Perverse disputings of men of corrupt minds, and destitute of the truth, supposing that gain is godliness: from such withdraw thyself.)

“Prayer is this intimate feasting and fellowship you have with God on that personal inner-man basis because you are the temple of God; you are the house of prayer.

“You don't go across the heavens with Dr. Burpo and shut the door in the drawing room of God and pray (Editor’s Note: Wikipedia says of this one-time nationally famous radio evangelist, C. W. Burpo, that his ‘broadcasting signature was the sound effect of a closing door announcing his intention to pray in his radio ‘Throne Room’).

“You are the temple of god and you have instant access, unbarred, unfettered, never interrupted access with the Father. And every detail of your life—you think about them and you talk to Him about them and you apply the identity you have in Christ to those things and become occupied with His thinking. This is what brings self-control, discipline and the mastery of details of life.”

*****

Of Hebrews 11:17 (“By faith Abraham, when he was tried, offered up Isaac: and he that had received the promises offered up his only begotten son”), Jordan says, “Boy, I tell you folks, you could preach for a month off that verse!

“There’s something extraordinary in that verse about the trying of your faith; about the expansion of your horizons; about taking that wonderful position you have in Christ and seeing it be a living reality in your life day by day.

“The whole issue in Hebrews is ‘by faith,’ and by believing what God said, Abraham offered up his son. Faith is to believe what God says to you. You'll never have faith if you don't have God's Word to you, and that's why you've got to rightly divide it! It’s essential!

“You can't rest in something God didn't tell you to do because if God didn't tell you to do it, it's unbelief. It's no more wrong for you to operate on the basis of human viewpoint and go out into the world and get its viewpoint and base your life on that—humanism, and hedonism, and materialism, and all the rest. That's no more wrong before God, for God never told you to do the things you do. . .”

*****

“The tendency that man has to connect physical suffering and personal disaster with divine judgment is bogus,” says Jordan. “You can't impute a meaning to an event unless you have some kind of (biblical) revelation that tells you the meaning of the event.

“People like to look back at something bad that’s happened in life and sit down and say, ‘Well that disastrous event that just happened—God must be telling us thus and so because of it.’

“That is the thinking of pagans! Paganism is the oldest religion on the planet. We’re not just talking about people running around in the Amazon jungles with no clothes on and that kind of stuff. We're talking about a religion that is based on human viewpoint that permeates the whole world. It's almost inherent in lost men's thinking.

“There's this idea in Christian theology, Islamic theology, Judaic theology, etc., where God is in control, and when bad things happen, or these events take place, ‘God did it and it wasn’t just an accident.’

“God doesn't communicate with us through our circumstances, impressions, hunches. Your circumstances and your emotions are not means of divine revelation. Your circumstances are the stage upon which you are to take the revelation in that Word, put it in your heart and go live it out. They are not where you go look for God's will, there where you go do God's will.”

*****

In Acts 2:4, Peter gives an explanation for the phenomena accompanying the Holy Spirit coming on the nation Israel. The verse says, “And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance.”

The passage goes on to say, “And there were dwelling at Jerusalem Jews, devout men, out of every nation under heaven. Now when this was noised abroad, the multitude came together, and were confounded, because that every man heard them speak in his own language.”

Jordan explains, “So why did they need the gift of tongues? Because these people from all the nations of the earth had come there to Jerusalem. Three times a year every male believing Israelite had to go to Jerusalem. First Passover, then Pentecost and the Feast of Tabernacles. Every believing Jew journeyed to Jerusalem for those three feast days.

“They're scattered all over the world, but they still come because the temple's still there.

Speaking in tongues was not just some ecstatic utterance to give them a hootenanny experience and jump up and run around the building and go, ‘Whoop-wee, glory to God!’

“The stuff you see in religion today is really the pagan occultist kind of activities that go on all over the world.

“Do you know where the largest water baptism experience that happens each year takes place? India. Ganges River. The Hindus gather together on a special day and there’ll literally be millions of people there to wash away their sins in that germ-infested, polluted water.

“Every religion on the face of the earth has a water baptism ceremony. I wonder why. They're all counterfeiting God's religion because water baptism started with Moses. The tongue-talking stuff did too.

“Isaiah 8:19 (‘And when they shall say unto you, Seek unto them that have familiar spirits, and unto wizards that peep, and that mutter: should not a people seek unto their God? for the living to the dead?’) warned Israel about the people from the occult who talked in tongues in their midst, peeping and muttering. They had gibberish.

“Why would you have to tell somebody; mock them about an idol being dumb—couldn't talk? Haggai 2 says they think the idols can talk. That's why in I Cor. 2, Paul starts out by reminding the Gentiles, 'Hey, you were led unto these dumb idols. You were caught up in that stuff yourself at one time.’

*****

An angel in the Bible is a messenger from God and they do two things: they bring messages from God and protect people; executing God's will.

“Satan is not an angel; never has been, never will be,” says Jordan. “He transforms himself into a messenger of light. Now, the inference of that word ‘light’ is it gives off light. Satan is transforming himself into a source of divine revelation. A source of, ‘Yeah, hath God said?’

“Satan blinds your mind with that impetus, that desire your flesh has to perform and gain merit before God and not die. It’s, ‘Don't let me die; don’t let me be unimportant to the world,’ and he's the God of this world. Paul calls him ‘the prince of the power of the air’ and ‘the sprit that now works in children of disobedience.’

“And when you go back to II Cor. 11 you notice this deception (his program is designed to work on the basis of deception), when it says the (false preachers) appear like the apostles of Christ when they're not. Satan appears like an angel of light when he's not.

Specifically, Paul writes, “For such are false apostles, deceitful workers, transforming themselves into the apostles of Christ.
[14] And no marvel; for Satan himself is transformed into an angel of light.
[15] Therefore it is no great thing if his ministers also be transformed as the ministers of righteousness; whose end shall be according to their works.”

“Notice the dude's got preachers,” says Jordan. “People out ministering; also called ‘ministers of righteousness.’ This crowd is not going out preaching same-sex marriage, abortion, and the other sinful, prurient things of the world. They're going out preaching righteousness (Editor’s Note: Think Rick Warren and his ‘Purpose-Driven Life’). These are people saying, ‘If you want to be right with God, you've got to do right to be right. A man's not justified by faith only, but a man's justified by works.’

*****

In the Bible, birds are associated with Satan and demonic activity. In Gen. 15, when God's making His covenant with Abraham, birds are used as representatives of demons. They have something to do with the habitation of Satan's policy of evil.

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Leaven in the Bible is a picture of false doctrine. Matt. 16:6 reports, “Then Jesus said unto them, Take heed and beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and of the Sadducees.”

Wherever leaven is found in the Bible it's always going to be something bad. Paul says in I Cor. 5:6, “Know ye not that a little leaven leaveneth the whole lump?”

Leaven represents a persuasion to entice people not to rightly divide the word and go back under the law program.