What a whopper of a scandal on Ted Haggard, the Colorado Springs mega-pastor who was dismissed from his evangelical empire today after accusations he engaged in drug-fueled trysts with a gay male prostitute.

Here’s what I once wrote about Haggard on this site:

“Among lots of easy, easy tip-offs Haggard is a false, apostate teacher is he believes the Devil talks to him. Look at this passage from an in-depth article in Harpers’ Magazine on Haggard: ‘Sometimes, he says, Control (Haggard's term for evil forces) would call him late on Saturday night, threatening to kill him. 'Any more impertinence out of you, Ted Haggard,' he claims Control once told him, 'and there will be unrelenting pandemonium in this city.'

“He also believes the Devil interacts with his followers. In a memo Haggard delivered earlier this year to his congregation, in preparation for NBC's arrival, he cautioned: ‘If a camera is on you during a worship service, worship; don't dance, jump, etc. … Jumping and dancing in church looks too bizarre for most to relate to. … Don't talk about the Devil, demons, voices speaking to you. … Instead, tell your personal story in common-sense language. … Don't be spooky or weird. Don't switch into a glassy-eyed heavenly mode.’

“Haggard boasts that God's talked to him for years about his own ministry through visions, events and prophetic revelations (‘he believes he foresaw Internet prayer networks before the Internet existed,’ reports Harper's). Once it was God speaking through a kids' baseball game!

"In Letters from Home, Haggard's book of advice for his children, he tells of a word from God he had while watching a baseball game at summer camp, reveals this month's cover story on Haggard in Christianity Today magazine. ‘At one moment ‘the Holy Spirit came upon me and said, [If you will obey me, your life will work like this.]' Haggard watched as the team at bat began to hit every ball, scoring again and again. Then, 'the Holy Spirit came on me again and said, [If you disobey me, your life will go like this.]' The team got few hits. Their opponents became formidable."

Imagine suggesting God manipulated whether or not a baseball team wins all in order to teach Haggard a lesson.

It's the silliest of pure pagan superstition, and yet even officials in the highest levels of our government revere him as some super-authoritative ‘man of God’ with good sense and speaking the truth.

*****

The big thing right now with all the false TV preachers and mega-church evangelicals, is we’re to eradicate poverty above all else if we are truly Christians. This is the social gospel of neo-evangelicalism that first took off in the ’70s and has now infiltrated much of Christendom.

Just tonight in flipping TV channels (they actually have a local, non-cable station here dedicated solely to Christian sermons, singing, studies, talk shows, etc.) I came across Dr. Robert Schuller’s son behind the pulpit at the opulent Crystal Cathedral, using the verse in Matt. 19:24 about it being easier for a camel to go through a needle’s eye than for a rich man to get into heaven.

In making the point that most all Americans are “rich” by Third World standards, he intimated that God was heavily weighing each Christian’s eternal rewards by how much came out of their bank accounts to help poor people—Islamists, Hinduists, Voodoists, whatever—around the globe.

Of course, Schuller Jr. is the same one who recently testified on the Hour of Power show about how early on in his ministry the church was going through a financial crisis and so they got the staff together to pray for four hours straight one evening, pleading with God to give them the funds. Wouldn’t you know, the next morning after their prayer-cram session, the exact amount that was needed appeared in the church’s P.O. Box.

Now, logically, the problem with that is it takes at least two days to get a check into someone’s P.O. Box. If God was responding to their four-hour petition drive, He would have then had to speak to the heart of the person who wrote the check and that person would then have to put the check in the mail.

*****

As my pastor, Richard Jordan, once summed up about all these phony TV guys, “They come along and say, ‘God has fantastic blessings for you if you’ll just do this and this and this,’ and they make the Christian life all about a performance standard

“You’ll hear that constantly if you turn on that stupid television or that goofy radio. There’s always someone telling you that God has something just for you if you’ll just do this-and-that.

“They don’t preach grace to you. They don’t tell you God’s given it to you all by His grace—‘Everything for Nothing’—and that there’s nothing you can ever do to merit it.

“They say, ‘Oh, you’ve got to feel it. Yes, I feel it tonight!’ They say, ‘You’ve got to feel your blessing; you’ve got to feel that you’re seated in the heavenly places.’ And if you don’t feel it, well, you know something’s the matter with you; something’s wrong with you walk if you don’t feel like you’re seated in the heavenly places tonight.

“They’ll tell you that John 15 says if you don’t have fruit—and more fruit—

you’re an unprofitable vine and He’ll come along and snip you off and cast you into the fire. So you’ve got to get out there and bear some fruit! And if you don’t have fruit, there’s something wrong with you.

“What they’re trying to cover up and make you not believe is that when God saved you, the Spirit of God put you under Christ, and the Spirit of God sealed you in Christ until the day of redemption, in spite of your shortcomings; in spite of your failures.

“God didn’t save you by your life. He didn’t save you by your performance and he doesn’t keep you saved by your performance.

“They want you to believe you’re not secure in Christ; that somehow somebody’s come around and snipped off the little finger of the Lord Jesus Christ’s Body (of which all Believers are members, according to Paul).”