In this guest article, Pastor R. Loren Sandford calls for a reformation of the prophetic movement after the many failed prophecies of 2020 including predictions about COVID-19 and the re-election of President Trump.

Never in my life have I felt such a sense of disarray in the body of Christ, and most especially around prophetic ministry. Over the years, too many prophetic words have been published, taken seriously, seized upon by the body of Christ in a flurry of excitement and then failed to materialize. And yet we, the body of Christ, kept listening. I highly value good prophetic ministry, but we’ve been in need of serious prophetic reformation for a very long time.

Going back 21 years there were all the prophetic warnings about an impending Y2K disaster when the computers would crash and the world would fall apart. Prophets told us to store up food and supplies because when the computers crashed, the world would be paralyzed. Some even sold survival packages. It didn’t happen. The reality was that computers simply didn’t work like that, then or now, but almost no one seemed willing to check that out. I knew it prophetically but I believe in objective confirmations, so I asked an IBM executive what was up. Big problem? Yes. What will happen? He told me that people would get their paychecks on Wednesday instead of Friday but the computers wouldn’t crash.

The problem was that, instead of facing facts, people preferred to get stirred up about it and then claim that it didn’t happen because we prayed it wouldn’t happen. The reality was that computers simply didn’t function like that. There never would have been a crash with or without prayer. The prophets were wrong. Something similar, but less known, happened leading up to 2008. A group of otherwise reliable prophets prophesied that Senator Brownbeck of Kansas would be elected president. Brownbeck ran for his party’s nomination and failed.

Many well known prophetic voices told us that that the Covid-19 crisis would dissipate at Passover, 2020. Obviously, it didn’t and here we are, ten months later, wearing masks and enduring the shutdowns. Now we’re looking at a similar situation involving a large number of prophets who predicted a specific political outcome for 2020 that has not come to pass. Some of them are holding onto the idea that the election will be miraculously overturned, but there is no legal path for that to occur.

All of this has shaken the entire charismatic wing of the church. A subtle form of idolatry is being purged away by the hand of God, intended to restore us to the true center and purpose of prophetic ministry if we’ll embrace the shaking. I’ll say it as simply as I can. We placed too much faith in the prophets. Their words – our words – were elevated to the same level of infallibility as the Scriptures by a great many people. Wrong! So very wrong!

The truth is that in this compounded crisis of church closures and prophetic failure, we’re being driven back to the simplicity of Jesus Christ and Him crucified, to that purified message, to that foundation as the central theme. We are being summoned back to a basic, deep and simplified intimacy with God that we seem to have lost and into which we prophetic people were obligated to lead God’s people.

In the charismatic wing of the church we’ve made a lot of noise in recent decades, not just in the prophetic world, but in a long list of other ways. We preached keys to this and keys to that. We built big flashy ministries and cultivated huge ministry platforms. Commercialization of ministry products has exploded. We’ve had ever more dramatic prophetic words issued by those of us with the biggest names and the widest recognition.

In this yearlong crisis we’ve endured, it’s like looking at a building being demolished right down to the foundation so that something better and more solid can be built on it. I hear the voice of the Lord saying STOP. When did you begin relating to the structure itself as if it were the foundation? I must dismantle the structure and restore you to the foundation.

As prophetic people, this a time to come back to the prayer closet where our primary calling lies, on our knees and on our faces, even in sackcloth and ashes repenting. Back to the simple things – the cross, the blood, intimacy with Jesus without all the bling and flash to distract us from the vision of His face. Back to solid Bible study, cherishing the eternal written Word where especially we charismatics have been out of balance in seeking supernatural experiences, dreams and visions while neglecting the study of the eternal and unchanging Word of God, the Bible.

It’s time to return to simple fellowship with one another in love, cherishing the beauty of what God has created in our brothers and sisters. Feed the hungry, clothe the naked, visit the sick and in prison for this is pure religion in the sight of God (James 1:27). Heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers and cast out demons, but do it all from simple, quiet intimacy with our Father, our Savior and Holy Spirit.

We need to study again the prophets who went before us and reform the thrust of our own ministries. What was their message? The vast majority of what has been passed down to us in the biblical prophets is a call to come out of idolatry, to purify the focus on God alone. The prophets separated the precious from the vile, the holy from the unholy and good from evil. They pointed out what was idolatry to a people too blind to see it for themselves. Their gift was first and foundationally a gift of discernment, to cut through the fog and see where pollutions had entered in, then to hear from God how to address it, to pass His warnings on. Predictions were predicated on how Israel would choose to respond to the warnings. Would they repent? And if they did not then destruction was certain. Other predictions told them how God would use the destruction to refine and restore them, then to bring them back to the land to live once again under God’s favor.

It was all relational. Biblical prophetic ministry was about relational issues between God and the people He loved. None of the prophets prophesied simply because they could. In fact, Amos 3:7 – Surely the Lord God does nothing Unless He reveals His secret counsel To His servants the prophets. Clearly, not everything a prophet knew or heard was to be spoken aloud, and the same is true today. Much of what we hear is for our ears alone to guide us in how and what we pray, or simply to share the burden on the Lord’s heart in oneness with Him. God does love our company.

I Corinthians 14:3 – But one who prophesies speaks to men for edification and exhortation and consolation. I want to suggest something you may not have seen in this verse. Remember that some things the Lord speaks to a prophet are not to be spoken aloud. Part of what I Corinthians 14:3 is telling us is that we ought to question whether a word we’ve received is really going to benefit the body of Christ to edify, console or exhort, or is it just meant to inform our own praying and connect us with the burden on God’s heart?

We need to ask how something we’re sensing or hearing from God benefits the body of Christ if we were to speak it aloud. Or have we made it just fortune-telling, just something that generates excitement but doesn’t really point people to Jesus or connect them more intimately with Him? Remember that the spirit of prophecy is the testimony of Jesus. Once again, the core of the message is Jesus Christ and Him crucified.

That said, how was prophesying a Trump victory in the election supposed to 1) reveal Jesus or testify to Him in any real way and 2) how was that supposed to edify and strengthen the body of Christ as a body? Did many of us even consider these things before we put that word out there? Was that even a question? Or were we too eager to attract attention and build our followings? I don’t mean to be critical or accusatory here. I’m putting myself in the category of one who normally does not fail in this regard, but I allowed myself to fail in this instance.

Because we failed to ask these questions, instead of strengthening God’s people in the testimony of Jesus and connecting them more intimately and firmly with Him, we rather stirred them up to connect their hope in an idolatrous way to a man or a political party. The fruit is that we’ve thrown the church into disarray and the name of Jesus has been dragged through the mud.

In this regard, it doesn’t really matter who was right and who was wrong, whether we who issued apologies were right or wrong, or whether those who continue to stand on some kind of miracle to overturn the election are right or wrong. The hard fact is that Donald Trump is not in the White House and the charismatic wing of the body of Christ has been badly shaken and divided, not strengthened. For this, we all bear responsibility before the throne of God. Repentance is in order.

PR

This article is from Prophetic Moments 143, used with permission.

Video version (length: 10:57) of this article: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CI39wlW5RK4

God is speaking today and Pastor Loren Sandford urges all of us to pursue biblical discernment.

With so many questionable prophetic words circulating these days, concerning both the wider world and personal prophecies, wouldn’t it be a good thing for the body of Christ to sharpen its discernment? I fear that to fail to do this will ultimately result in a tragic disillusionment with prophetic ministry at a time in history when accurate plumb line prophetic ministry is desperately needed. What are some ways to sort true words from false?

#1: Does this supposed word from God stand the test of Scripture?

Colossians 2:18 warns against the one who takes his “stand on visions he has seen, inflated without cause by his fleshly mind.” It can be supposed revelatory visions we believe reveal a truth or it can be receiving a vision for some ministry you want to do or a position you’re convinced you hold that fills you with an energy that isn’t the Lord. In any case, it must square with the eternal Word. The apostle Paul wrote: “But even if we, or an angel from heaven, should preach to you a gospel contrary to what we have preached to you, he is to be accursed!” (Galatians 1:8)

#2: Does this word reflect the revealed nature and character of God?

Begin this test with I John 4:8: “The one who does not love does not know God, for God is love.” God is love. His love may take many forms, ranging from tenderness to discipline and even anger, but it will always be love for our sake – love in the content of the word and love in the spirit of the word.

#3: Does this word line up with what God is already doing and with what the Bible tells us God wants to do? 

Question words that lead us in different directions than those already in evidence, bearing fruit in our lives and ministries. For instance, we founded the church I pastor on a vision for mercy—that we would be a place of refuge and healing. But for a time, we allowed ourselves to be side-tracked by those who called for a spiritual warfare emphasis. The result was predictably wounding. Until God brought about a cleansing, removed the competing voices and restored us to the original vision, warfare nearly destroyed us. We should have known. There have been others who called for a primary emphasis on prophetic ministry as our foundation. It resulted in deception and harm because God had dictated and confirmed a different foundation.

This call to reform by Loren Sandford was originally published on December 31, 2010.

I find myself beyond appalled and deeply concerned about a trend I have seen developing in the body of Christ for several years now. I believe this trend is propelling us toward a crisis in the charismatic Christian world that may well derail and destroy revival before it can take firm root.

It seems that in the quest to become more and more supernatural many have increasingly wandered away from the plumbline of solid Christian doctrine and responsible accurate interpretation of the Scriptures. The resultant weirdness flowing from key leaders in various places is leading many followers into what can only be called heresy.

Some prominent teachers in the renewal movement now espouse “open theism” which posits that God does not know the future, the end from the beginning. It then builds on that premise to diminish the revelation of the omniscience and absolute power of our God that Scripture so clearly articulates. Another teaching gaining ground among us is the idea that once we have come to Jesus we need never repent again because we are no longer sinners. What about Paul’s statement concerning sinners, for instance, among whom he identified himself in present tense as “foremost of all” (I Timothy 1:15)? I think some people need to do a thorough study of New Testament exhortations to repent.

The problem stretches from the heretical to the silly. I recently returned from a ministry trip to New Zealand where one prominent leader has been teaching that we can unleash our spirituality by taking monoatomic gold pills. Why? Because Adam was made of monoatomic gold! What!? Another teacher here in the U.S. teaches that God didn’t part the Red Sea; Moses did! Where is our discernment? Recently I’ve heard it taught that it would be OK to pierce the ear in the lobe, but not at the top because the top is the ear gate and you might hinder your ability to hear God. Where is there any real foundation for this in God’s Word?

I am aware of one Christian leader who has devised a method of Christian divination, claiming that in doing so he has redeemed something for Christian use that the enemy stole. What happened to the biblical injunction against engaging in that kind of activity and the penalties for doing it?

I’m just scratching the surface here with a few representative examples. Where is the justification for any of this when held up to the light of solid exegesis of God’s Word? And if you don’t know what exegesis is, take some time to look it up and learn to understand how to read the Bible accurately for what it actually says. It’s time for us to stop interpreting the Bible through the filter of our personal revelations and personal experiences and learn to interpret our personal revelations and personal experiences by the Bible.

Michael L. Brown, Authentic Fire: A Response to John MacArthur’s Strange Fire (Excel Publishers, Dec 12, 2013), 418 pages.

In my review of John MacArthur’s Strange Fire, I pointed out what I considered to be inexcusable intellectual dishonesty regarding the Charismatic Movement and its contributions to worldwide Christianity. Blanket statements were made with little documentation or knowledge of those within the movement who have made strong intellectual, scholarly and corrective statements. MacArthur singled out rare abuses and presented them as if they characterized the entire movement.

I therefore find Michael Brown’s Authentic Fire to be, not only an appropriate response, but a devastating rebuttal so thoroughly documented and footnoted as to be almost overwhelming. He treats John MacArthur with due respect, while confronting massive errors and refraining from any hint of the mocking tone so prevalent in Strange Fire. In doing so, he doesn’t hesitate to point out areas of concern that thinking charismatics share with MacArthur. What I called inexcusable and dishonest in Strange Fire, Brown characterizes as an enormous blind spot, granting MacArthur some benefit of the doubt. Nevertheless, he truthfully poses an indictment: “You see, it is one thing to address serious errors and abuses, as I and others have done. It is another thing to fail to recognize and, worse still, mock the contemporary work of the Spirit, to vilify godly leaders, and to damn to hell countless millions of brothers and sisters in Jesus.”

Brown has done his homework. With numerous quotes from works of the likes of Derek Prince, David Wilkerson, John Wimber, Leonard Ravenhill, Oswald Chambers, A. W. Tozer and a host of others, he makes an ironclad case for the existence of sound theology and biblical practices within mainstream charismatic circles. He does this without denying the occasional abuses that have obviously occurred, but puts them in their proper perspective.

As an insider to the Charismatic Renewal, Brown points out, not only abuses that need correction, but failures in discernment as happened, for instance, in the Lakeland Revival. Far from denying that abuses and failures exist, he includes confessions like this one addressing the “coronation” of Todd Bentley: “Although I never attended any of the meetings and watched only two services online, one of them absolutely horrified me, as some of the most respected charismatic leaders in the nation gathered to lay hands on the main leader, Todd Bentley, in what seemed to be kind of a coronation service. Some of these men were friends of mine, and I was so grieved over what was taking place that I had to turn the meeting off, unable to watch what seemed to be almost an act of self-mockery.”

As a graduate of Fuller Theological Seminary, 1976, I have no trouble reading scholarly works. That being said, I find Authentic Fire almost daunting in its documentation, bordering on the tedious in its thoroughness. I mean this as a shining compliment. This is no short paperback meant for devotional or inspirational reading by the average person. In Authentic Fire, by means of an avalanche of actual fact and exposure of faulty reasoning, errors in scholarship, presentation of misinformation, use of faulty biblical exegesis and ignorance of actual revival history in MacArthur’s work are effectively refuted.

Prophesying in the Father’s Heart
An excerpt from a teaching given at the Hearing Heaven conference at Fusion Church, Auckland, New Zealand in August, 2010.

This is a pre-publication review of John MacArthur, Strange Fire: The Danger of Offending the Holy Spirit with Counterfeit Worship (Thomas Nelson, Nov 12, 2013) 9781400205172.

Strange Fire by John MacArthur is basically an attack on anything and everything related to the Charismatic Movement and the various movements descended from it, as if the whole of it were composed of one monolithic set of doctrines and practices that all of us espouse. It invalidates anything that smacks of the supernatural or of emotion freely expressed in God’s presence. MacArthur pours his vitriol – and I mean vitriol – through the filter of his own prejudices and theological presuppositions in a way that blinds him to the differences between the various movements within the charismatic stream and causes him to deny the existence of the majority of us who do not agree with or practice the abuses he objects to. In doing so he ignores or reinterprets, through very poor exegesis, the clear teaching of much of the Scripture as well.

Ironically, as he formulates his attack, he builds upon concerns that many of us in the movement share. I share his concern over abuses in prophetic ministry, aberrant doctrines, fallen leaders, manipulative fundraising, acting out in fleshly ways that are not of the Spirit and fakery on the part of some associated with the movement. As an insider, I confront these things as well, seeking what is genuine and calling for biblical grounding. MacArthur commits grievous error, however, in claiming that these abuses characterize the movement as a whole. They do not.

For example, I am a charismatic and have been from my childhood in the 1950s. I am also a graduate of Fuller Theological Seminary, 1976. Consequently, I have been steeped in exegetical principle and the doctrines of the historic faith from a time when Fuller described itself as “reformed” in its theology. Consequently, I do not embrace aberrant theologies. Reading MacArthur, you’d think that all charismatics espouse prosperity teaching. We do not. You’d think that we are all Word of Faith adherents when, in fact, they constitute a small minority and promote a doctrine many of us oppose. I actually wrote a rebuttal of those two doctrines in my own book, Purifying the Prophetic.

Pneuma Review: What was it like growing up in a household where your parents had such a distinctive ministry? Please tell our readers about your own journey and how you came into prophetic ministry.

R. Loren Sandford: There were strong positives and strong negatives. It wasn’t just that the ministry was distinctive, but that it was also pioneering in three areas (the charismatic movement in general, inner healing and the prophetic) not well understood or received in the early days. This drew persecution both from the local congregations my father pastored and from the wider body of Christ. As children (I’m the eldest of their six) we felt it and were deeply wounded by it. It drew a lot of energy from our folks which often left them with a deficient awareness of how it affected us. Those were lonely years for me at a time when I was really too young to understand or process what was coming at us.

The turning point came in 1988 when John Paul Jackson prophesied over me in a pastors’ meeting that my own prophetic calling was not my father’s calling and that the fear of my father’s calling had kept me out of my own prophetic destiny. I began to pay attention to things I simply “knew” in ways I cannot describe. Even so, twenty-five more years would pass in a dark night of the soul designed to crush and break me to conform more to His image before I came into what has now unfolded. I began to realize that I had so often been right when others had been wrong. While much of that error was born in dreams, visions and mystical experiences, I just knew things in my spirit. It wasn’t until about five years ago, however, that the Lord told me clearly to put myself on the line and go public with the things I was hearing from Him in that simple rational knowing.

Pneuma Review: What kind of experiences does the Lord use to train and mature the truly prophetic person?

Sandford: Character formation and wholeness are everything. These can only be accessed through what Paul described as, “I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself up for me” (Galatians 2:2). In Romans 12:14-15 he called us to, “Pursue peace with all men, and the sanctification without which no one will see the Lord. See to it that no one comes short of the grace of God; that no root of bitterness springing up causes trouble, and by it many be defiled.” There must be a dying before there can be a resurrection. This is more than positional. It’s a real experience that more often than not involves some pain.