After a preacher in Virginia died there was an ad in the newspaper assuring people that the guy’s son, also a preacher, would continue with the church’s successful healing ministry.

See the problem with that?

On TV, many of the “healing” televangelists who knock people down as they yell stuff like, “HEAL, in the name of Jesus!”, wear eyeglasses.

So much for the proverb, “Physician, heal thyself.” (Luke 4:23)

Despite all the logic that plainly shows the Pentecostal/Charismatic movement is pure heresy, mainline evangelicalism is absolutely permeated with the influence of it today.

My pastor, Richard Jordan (Shorewood Bible Church, Rolling Meadows, Ill.), recently told about being in a Chicago-area meeting of 300 ministers and witnessing the preachers “so caught up by Charismatic habits and traditions and mannerisms they don't even know it.

“The vocabulary, the things they were saying, the way they talked, the way they sang. You go to fundamental evangelical churches. . .There's a big fight going on right now among fundamental Independent Baptist people and hats off to the Independent Baptists who, for the last 50 years, have been the ones who've carried the torch for fundamentalism across America.

“When you talk about 'contemporary worship,’ you're really just talking about the Charismatic way of doing things in the evangelical community. You do everything except the so-called gift things.”

The sign gifts were given to early Christians to show the Jews their Gospel message was from God. The signs were phased out once the Apostle Paul’s letters were completed and provided all the necessary information for the Jews about God’s change in program from focusing only on Israel to dealing with Jews and Gentiles alike.

But Pentecostals want to pretend they’re back at Pentecost.

Just the other week Pentecostals from around the world converged on Los Angeles to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the famed Azusa Street Revival that launched their movement.

“As of yesterday a crowd of 23,000 had gathered at the Los Angeles Convention Center for special revival services,” reported J. Lee Grady, editor of Charisma magazine, in an online column.

Grady explained that 3,000 marchers “ended their procession where Pentecostal pioneer William ‘Daddy’ Seymour held his famous Azusa Street Revival, in the Little Tokyo neighborhood a century ago. . . Azusa is truly a miracle worth celebrating. Seymour’s unscripted, racially mixed prayer meetings, housed in a dilapidated building that was once a livery stable, attracted curious Christians from around the world between 1906 and 1909.

“Many of those who visited testified of receiving a life-changing ‘baptism of the Holy Spirit’ that was contagious.

“Pentecostal fervor spread quickly, giving birth to countless new denominations. What began in that tiny building on Azusa Street (furnished with crude plank benches and a pulpit made of shoeboxes) has grown to be a movement of 500 million Christians who believe that the miracles performed in the book of Acts still happen.”

The bottom line is you can’t by faith ask God to heal you of cancer in God’s current dispensation of grace, outlined by Paul. You can’t by faith speak in tongues either. God’s simply not doing any of that today.

As my pastor says about Believers who believe in this kind of Pentecostal stuff, “Although you can’t be demon-possessed, you can become demon-obsessed and you can certainly be demon-oppressed. They can corrupt your minds from the simplicity that’s in Christ by teaching you false doctrine.”

In an old sermon I have on tape, Jordan gave a long list of things from Paul’s writings “that the Tongues Movement will never look square in the eyeball and face.”

Paul writes clearly in I Cor. 14: 20-22, “ Brethren, be not children in understanding: howbeit in malice be ye children, but in understanding be men.

“In the law it is written, With men of other tongues and other lips will I speak unto this people; and yet for all that will they not hear me, saith the Lord.

“Wherefore tongues are for a sign, not to them that believe, but to them that believe not: but prophesying serveth not for them that believe not, but for them which believe.”

In verse 21, when Paul refers to “this people,” he’s saying tongues are for the benefit of the nation Israel.

When he says not to be children in understanding, he’s referring to someone who’s not mature.

“He doesn’t mean he’s a devil; he just means he’s a little baby,” explains Jordan. “There comes a time when you and I have to grow up. We have to quit being Cub Scouts and Brownies and we have to grow up to spiritual manhood.”

Paul makes clear the ministry of tongues was never for the edification of Gentiles; it was for Israel.

“If you want to speak in tongues, you don’t go out and get a bunch of Gentile businessmen together, you get a bunch of Jewish businessmen together and you have a Jewish ministry,” says Jordan. “As far as God’s Word is concerned, that’s what they’re for. They’re not to go out and convince a bunch of saved Jews, but to convince lost Jews of what God’s doing and what God’s speaking.”

(Editor’s Note: To be continued. . .)