Last week’s Chicago Tribune had a full-page feature about a 35-year-old yoga instructor on the city’s North Side who made a year-long personal commitment to “follow every bit of advice Oprah Winfrey doles out, whether in the magazine, on the Web site or on her TV show.”

What was glaring by its omission was any focus on Oprah’s heavily promoted New Age spirituality. I mean, anybody who knows anything about Oprah’s obsession with her guru, Eckhart Tolle, knows that his “You’re God and I’m God” philosophy—pushed in his Oprah’s Book Club endorsed New York Times bestseller A New Earth: Awakening to your Life’s Purpose—is at the core of her being.

Oprah’s main man Tolle writes, “All religions are equally false and equally true, depending on how you use them. You can use them in service of the ego, or you can use them in the service of the Truth. If you believe only your religion is the Truth, you are using it in the service of the ego. . . There is only one absolute Truth, and all the other truths emanate from it. . . The Truth is inseparable from who you are. Yes, you ARE the Truth.

“If you look for it elsewhere, you will be deceived every time. The very Being that you are is Truth. Jesus tried to convey that when he said, ‘I am the way and the truth and the life’. . . Jesus speaks of the innermost I am, the essence identity of every man and woman, every life-form, in fact. He speaks of the life you are.

“Some Christian mystics have called it the Christ within; Buddhists call it your Buddha nature; for Hindus, it is Atman, the indwelling God. When you are in touch with that dimension within yourself—and being in touch with it is your natural state, not some miraculous achievement—all your actions and relationships will reflect the oneness with all life that you sense deep within. This is love.

“Laws, commandments, rules, and regulations are necessary for those who are cutoff from who they are, the Truth within. They prevent the worst excesses of the ego, and often they don’t even do that. ‘Love and do what you will,’ said St. Augustine. Words cannot get much closer to the Truth than that.”

*****

At a summer Bible conference this past August, Jordan made the point, “If you don’t have the Bible, you can’t distinguish between your soul and your spirit, and if you can’t distinguish between the two you’re going to wind up thinking you are God because your spirit is cut off from God—can’t communicate with Him. The only thing it can communicate with is satanic spirits.

“What did Satan tell Eve? Imagine telling Eve, ‘God doesn’t want you to eat that fruit because He knows when you eat it, you’ll be like the gods.’ Tell me something—who was Eve? When God decided to create Adam and Eve what did He say? ‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness,’ and it was ‘in the image of God created he him; male and female.’

“Weren’t Adam and Eve already like God? Satan says, ‘You can be like one of the gods,’ plural; the angels. If I’m godlike, why would I want to stoop down to be angel-like? You see what a con he was pulling on her? She was already godlike. She was already made in the image of God.

“To fall for Satan’s lie she had to abandon the identity God already gave her. But she wanted to be her own god. That was the ploy. Kind of a nutty thing but she fell for it.

“God’s Word is able to distinguish between the two parts of your inner man and it’s ‘a discerner of the thoughts and intents of your heart.’ Has it ever dawned on you that somebody can read your mind and it’s not your mama?”

*****

Jordan continues, “You don’t recognize all your sins. You’ve done things and then looked back three or four weeks later and said, ‘Oooh, I was wrong back there.’ You didn’t even know it at the time. You didn’t even know to confess it because you didn’t acknowledge it.

“The other thing is you’ve got some sins in your life you just ain’t gonna quit. We might as well talk like honest folks here. There are some of those things God’s Word says don’t do and you say, ‘Well, I think I want to do them anyway.’ ”

(Editor’s Note: To be continued . . .)