The Congregation of the Dead

Lightly edited for readability while preserving the speaker’s meaning and substantive statements.

1. 0:05:17

   worship you, mighty God. We worship you, Lord Jesus Christ of Nazareth, the Holy One of Israel, the only Messiah, the one who died and rose from the dead, the one who is alive forevermore. You have the keys of hell and death. It is only through you there is eternal life. There is only forgiveness of sins through you. You are the only one by which we can be saved from eternal damnation. We come to you, Lord, today and give thanks for your love that you willingly laid down your life on that cross to become the sacrifice, the atonement, the propitiation for our sins and not for our sins only, but also for the sins of the whole world. And you said, if any man will hear your voice and will come to you, Lord, you'll give him the water of life. But you call sinners to repentance, Lord. You call us to turn from sin and wickedness and to follow you with all of our heart. And so, Lord, we pray that you will make that clear today and, Lord, the rest of this time, whether it's until you come, Lord, whatever it takes, Lord, that you move upon the true message of the gospel. We pray that today in Jesus' name. Amen. Amen. You may be seated this morning. Welcome, everyone to Fire and Grace Church, those who are watching and listening and half our congregation that's at home, I guess. I want everybody to turn to Second Chronicles this morning. We got a little I don't think I've ever preached anything from this passage. I want to point out something here. And yes, Second Chronicles, Chapter 12. Just go ahead and turn there. We'll get get ready. And I don't know. I guess we this is kind of like part two of come out of her, my people. I know we didn't call the last one that one, but that's what the Lord spoke to me. Come out of her, my people. I went ahead and had them name it the Roman Catholic or Babylon, just so people would understand what we're talking about. But it's not just the Roman Catholic Church. It's the problem. Okay, it's not just the extreme Charismani acts that have taken things way too far and have connected with Rome and have all kinds of false signs and wonders and Kundalini spirits. We addressed that last week. And of course, for those of you that want to know more, I addressed it in great detail in

2. 0:08:19

   my book, The Polluted Church from Rome to Kansas City. I addressed it and exposed it and defined it and named the main players 12 years ago. Okay. And of course, a few weeks ago, I've mentioned this, but it really is a problem. Um, but when we talk about the church world, you've got these extremes. You've got the extreme Charismani act. Anything goes supernatural. We don't discern anything and we don't keep anything out. Anything goes. That's your Bethel Church. That's Benny Hen. That's on down the line. In fact, yesterday, I found out something about Benny Hen. I did not know. I found out that Benny Hen had a spiritual experience in which the passed away dead Catherine Coleman appeared to him. And then after that, he said, and he spoke to her. And then after that, he said, that's when the anointing came on me. Now, let me tell you, if you're communicating with the dead, the anointing that comes on you is not the Holy Spirit. And that explains to me why in 1991, when I went to a Benny Hen crusade in Mobile, one of the things that was absent from the entire show, and I'm going to call it a show, the carnival, uh, one of the things that was absent is the anointing, the presence of God, the power, the true power and glory of the spirit. And you know, it was amazing because it was an arena full of people worshiping God. Um, they had a beautiful choir singing and I'm sitting there on the main floor just wondering, where is the Holy Spirit? Where is the anointing? Where is the glory of God? And what I saw was some counterfeit crap. He comes up and waves his hand and blows on the crowd and all these people start falling backwards. And I'm going to tell you, here's what happens. If the rows in front of you fall backwards, you're going down. And if I hadn't, I mean, the people in front of me, the chairs collapsed, fell on me. I had, I mean, and then back then I was in my 20s. So I was a lot better shape and balance and all this stuff. I had to spin around and I was falling down and there was a little four year old girl right under me that if I hadn't caught myself with both hands, I would have just crushed that portal. And one of the things I said back then was, you know, and I went with some true brothers and we went there truly open to see is this God or is it not? And we did not find God there. We did not sense his spirit, his anointing, his power. Did we see some supernatural manifestations of some nonsense? Yeah, we did. Here's what's interesting though. It was wild because back in those days I was troubled by it, but the Lord spoke to me and said, do not talk about it.

3. 0:11:24

   Now, do not put your mouth on Benny hinges yet. And I didn't know why. And I think maybe the Lord was trying to deal with him as he did kind of try to repent of some things after that. Um, but as we see that nothing really has changed. And to me though, it's troubling because like I found out yesterday, I didn't know this, but, uh, Bill Johnson's deceased late wife, Benny Johnson, that's not her real name that she changed her name to Benny because to, uh, Benny hint. And there's just so many weird things. She was the one, uh, the wife of Bill Johnson that would go to the lay on the graves and try to soak the anointing up from dead, uh, you know, ministers of the past. And of course they caught a lot of hell and flack for that as they should. Um, let me just tell you right now, we don't have to seek the dead to have the anointing. We seek the living and we seek Jesus. That's where the anointing comes from. Uh, and here's the thing. If you love righteousness, as Hebrews one says, if you love righteousness and hate iniquity, hate sin, and that means these occult practices, that means the compromise. If you hate it, the Bible says the Lord will anoint you with the oil of gladness above your fellows. You want the anointing, you've got to hate all of this stuff that's evil. All this counterfeit, all the compromise, all the sin, the Eastern religious practices and occult practices that they've adopted. You got to hate all that. And then if you do, if you hate it and speak against it and stand on the Lord's side, you will be anointed. That's a fact. And the anointing, and when I say the anointing, that means the presence of God, the touch of God, the power of God, the unction, as they call it, the unction and moving of the Holy Spirit will be upon you to pray, to fast, to witness, to lay hands on the sick, to cast out demons. You will have the real anointing, to discern what is of God and what's not. But if you are just open to anything, if you think God's not serious about sin, if you don't think God's not serious about repentance from sin, if you don't think God's serious about keeping his house, his sanctuary clean of all of this counterfeit, demonic occult practices, if you don't think all that's important, then what's going to happen to you is you're going to be swallowed up by this nonsense. I was blown away to find out. I mean, there's so many weird stuff there. The worship leader at Bethel, just to give you an example of what I'm talking about, the worship leader at Bethel says that the Holy Spirit hers like the genie from Aladdin.

4. 0:14:27

   Okay, now the genies are gins in Islam and they are demons. How would you would ever compare the Holy Spirit to a demon? That's actually blasphemy and she's up there giggling about it. I heard Bill Johnson say yesterday, I'm listening to this whole series on it, I heard Bill Johnson admit that he was never called to the ministry. It's amazing how the Lord hits these people, I think, with the truth serum and they just tell you the truth sometimes, right? But here's what blew my mind. That church has about 11,000 people that attend and 2,500 students in their school of ministry that might as well be Hogwarts. I mean, they're literally teaching people how to prophesy by just letting them try over and over again, no matter how many times they get it wrong. They're basically training soothsayers. There's none of this wait till the Holy Spirit comes upon you and as he wills, let the gift of prophecy or word of knowledge or whatever flow through you. There's no balanced teaching whatsoever because the gifts of the Holy Spirit are as he wills, not as we will. You can't just decide I'm going to prophesy. I don't get this and you can't teach people how to prophesy. This is what's so insane, but here's the thing, that is just one of our problems out there and what I've tried to teach everybody is this and I've spent the last 15 years, but even before that I was preaching and teaching on this is that we don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. The gifts of the Holy Spirit are still for the church, the true church, the true gifts. We don't have to settle for the counterfeit. We don't have to settle for an imitation, but what blows me away is how I think about this. Thousands upon thousands go to that church every Sunday and it is a complete fiasco. I call it a crack fair. Y'all don't know what a crack fair is. I'm gonna show you in a minute. Well let's put the picture up. This is a crack fair. Why do we call it a crack fair? Because most of the workers there, they pull off the streets in Atlanta or somewhere and most of them are crackheads or meth heads or whatever, but let me explain something to you. You see this carnival up here. Let me tell you, you take a child, you drive a child by this place and they

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