Tag Archives: Joseph Prince

Dis-Graceful Conduct

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I have heard and read so much against the so-called hyper-grace movement lately that I feel like I must speak up.  People have stopped preaching the Gospel so that they can preach against the preachers who preach about Grace.  Now who do you think is really behind that?  If you want a clue, let me say it again: People have stopped preaching the Gospel so that they can preach against the preachers who preach about Grace.

And here’s what they say about them: that they are teaching people that there is no need for repentance.  I have never heard any of the grace preachers saying anything of the sort.  It’s ridiculous!  Joseph Prince is the main preacher accused of preaching hyper-grace.  I have never heard Joseph Prince preach that sin is OK with God.

But what I have heard is his accusers mixing law in with the message of grace.  Why would they do that?  Because they don’t really understand the power of grace.  They use the law as a means of controlling new believers until they know how to behave.  If Joseph Prince and the other grace preachers are guilty of anything, it’s trusting the Holy Spirit too much.  That’s right, they leave the picky little transitional tweaks up to the Holy Spirit.  Girls, new believers, that haven’t figured out yet that they need to dress more modestly, and men who still cuss.  Rather than wag his finger at them, he preaches the message of grace.

The message of grace is the message of how much God loves us, and it’s that love that changes us from the inside out.  We came to Christ based on love.  It is an ever-deepening knowledge of that love that gives us the power to change.  Not a change based on external pressure, but change born of our own reciprocal love for a God who loves us much more than we can ever understand.  It is our love for God that makes us want to live our lives in such a way that we please Him and bring glory to His Name.

Anybody who claims to be born again, but continues in sin is not really born again (1 John 1:6 & 2:15).  The litmus test for this is fruit.  What kind of fruit does their life bear?  If they are continuing in sin, that will be obvious to all sooner or later.  If someone is determined to continue in their sin, no amount of preaching or “discipling” by controlling their behavior will work in the end.

But when someone really grasps “how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ” (Ephesians 3:18), there really is only one response: to live to please Him.  They don’t have to constantly check themselves for hidden sins and doctrinal error because they willingly lay aside their flesh and begin to live in the Spirit and to walk in the power of that same grace that saved them.  That’s why it’s important to preach the Gospel of Grace, and to keep emphasizing the love of God.  Judgment is surely and swiftly coming.  But while the fear of Judgment might get some people in the door, it is the love that saves them, and love that helps them to truly walk in the “newness of life,” (Romans 6:4).

Believing that you must control new believers is flesh and it is unbelief.  Grace is available not only to save, but to empower the new life.  Let go and let God.

Dreaming Truth

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Day Seven

I had a dream that faded almost as soon as I was awake.  All I remember of it were impressions: I had something embarrassing happen to me, but I don’t know what.  The devil tried to make me feel ashamed for the embarrassment, I don’t remember how.  I shrugged off embarrassment, and the Lord told me (the only thing that I remember clearly): “Where pride is absent, grace abounds.”  Perhaps that means that hurt pride results in shame.

I don’t always dream about the devil, but when I do, I tend to remember it.  A couple of times, I’m sure that’s because he was actually there.  I will tell you about them, not because we should be fixated on the devil—not at all!  But I think these particular dreams are instructive.

The first time I dreamed about the devil I was 17 years old, born again, and newly filled with the Holy Spirit.  However, I didn’t really know or understand how to walk with the Lord.  I had been raised in the Episcopal Church, and made my decision to follow Jesus the night before my Confirmation.  But I just didn’t know that we could pray spontaneous prayers, so when I had a need (sick relative or whatever), I looked it up in the Book of Common Prayer and prayed from the book.  But when I was 17 my parents started going to a Charismatic Episcopalian prayer group.  They invited me, too.  I had never heard people pray like this, and I loved it.

A man from the prayer group was involved with the Full Gospel Businessmen, and invited us to come to a meeting.  The man who preached talked the whole time about the Holy Spirit.  I was fascinated.  We Episcopalians always called Him “The Holy Ghost.”  And He was the mysterious member of the Godhead.  But this man talked like he actually knew the Holy Spirit.  At the end of his sermon, he invited anybody wanting to receive the baptism of the Holy Spirit to come down front.  I had no idea what that was, but I wanted it.  So I went down front.  I hadn’t known it at the time, but my parents were right behind me.  The man laid his hand on my head and immediately I had strange words in my mind.  I hadn’t known what to expect, nobody had told me.  But the man said, “Speak those words.”  So I did.

The first devil dream came shortly afterwards.  I dreamed that I was in my bedroom, with everything exactly in place, just as I had left it before going to sleep.  He entered my room by the door and walked around to the side of the bed where I was laying.  In the dream, my skin jumped up to goosebumps and I was very scared.  Then he grinned and sat down on the bed beside me.  I felt the mattress compress under him.  That’s when I woke up, and I could still feel the mattress compressed where he had sat.  I was very frightened and completely weirded-out.

Now, I understand why the devil visited me in that dream: he was trying to catch up with God as usual, but he was too late.

He showed up at other times in dreams through the years, doing scary things like walking around my bed in my new house.  The floor in the bedroom was linoleum, and although I didn’t see him, I could hear his hoof-steps on the floor.  Another time I saw my Bible get pulled out of the bookcase by invisible hands and put in backwards (spine inward).  But sitting on my bed was the scariest thing of all.

This winter while I was home visiting my family for Christmas break I had the first devil dream I had had in a many years.  Again, in my dream I could see my room exactly as I had left it before going to sleep.  I saw the devil standing by my window, backlit by the landscape lights outside.  Immediately, I turned my back to him and in my dream went right back to sleep.  A few weeks later I heard about how Martin Luther handled the devil’s nighttime visits.  He wrote:

When the devil comes at night to worry me, this is what I say to him: “Devil, I have to sleep now. That is God’s commandment, for us to work by day and sleep at night.”

Ha!  Just what I did, but I didn’t talk to him.

A week or two later, I had another devil dream, and this one paralleled the first one.  My room was exactly as I had left it before sleep.  The devil came in the door and walked around the bed to where I was sleeping and sat down on the bed.  Again I felt the mattress compress under him.  But this time instead of fear, I got angry.  I told him to get out of my room.  And I woke up.

As I observed above, I believe that the devil is just trying to catch up with God.  But he can’t.  I heard a Joseph Prince sermon recently that I wrote about in I Will Make You Know.  Basically he pointed out that where you see the devil interfering, God has already been at work blessing you.  Therefore, give God praise and thanksgiving for blessing you in the area where you see trouble.  You can read it in more detail by following the link.

Just imagine the trouble we could give the devil if only we really understood our inheritance as God’s children.  We were made to live as more than conquerors, so why are we living ordinary lives?  In the movie Superman II (1982), Superman gives up his superpowers for love.  Very romantic, and not so much different than God becoming a human because of love for us.  But many Christians are living Clark Kent lives that are excruciatingly ordinary, when we have been given the right to live the supernatural lives we were made to live.

This is day 7 of my fast for understanding of these End Times, and how better to prepare for what’s ahead.  I believe that living in God’s supernatural empowerment is key.  God is good!

I Will Make You Know

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One of my favorite phrases in Italian is ti faccio verdere—literally “I will make you see,” or as we say in English, “I will show you.”  The first time I heard this phrase I didn’t like the implication of the literal translation as forcing someone to see something.  I could almost imagine keeping my eyes squeezed shut so that nobody could make me see something I don’t want to see.  But hearing the kind way this was said to me, I came to love this phrase and its fraternal twin: ti faccio sapere—“I will make you know,” or as we say in English, I will explain to you.

Last night I had the opportunity to reconnect with a friend and have dinner at his house.  Samuele is a well-traveled and sophisticated person who speaks English, but we always communicate in Italian.  As he shares more and more of his interesting life, I understand that some things really are more beautifully communicated in Italian.  It seems that the Italians can make language as delicious as they make food.

After a pleasant evening, Samuele walked me to the subway.  We found that the subway was closed and I had to take a substitute bus to a subway station three stops away.  As the bus passed the first subway station from Samuele’s house, I saw a fire truck.  I knew then that it was a suicide, which was later confirmed by the news.  That station where the man threw himself under a train is called De Angeli—“from the angels.”  But I don’t think he was hoping for angels to take him up to Heaven.  These subway suicides happen every so often in Milan—and more frequently since the financial crisis hit Italy.  And this is the fourth suicide in six months that has been done either by someone I know or by someone physically near me.

The increasing frequency of suicides is evidence of things that are happening in the spiritual realm.  The devil is working overtime to discourage people to the point of suicide.  And that’s easy enough for him to do with people whose faith is in their finances.

But I recently heard a sermon by Joseph Prince.  He said that we are wrong when we think (as we often do) that the devil starts messing up your health or your finances, and then we must pray and ask God to come in and make these things right again.  What he said was, “God is not running behind the devil, but it’s the devil that is running behind God.”  He said that the devil sees God pouring out blessings on your health or finances or work, and steps in to try and stop the blessings.  And what do we do?  We start worrying: Could these headaches be brain tumors? Am I about to lose my job?  And we toss and turn at night, trying to figure out how to go about controlling the damage—even when no real damage has been done.  Then he quoted:

Even if I should choose to boast, I would not be a fool, because I would be speaking the truth. But I refrain, so no one will think more of me than is warranted by what I do or say, or because of these surpassingly great revelations. Therefore, in order to keep me from becoming conceited, I was given a thorn in my flesh, a messenger of Satan, to torment me.  Three times I pleaded with the Lord to take it away from me.  But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.”  Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me.  That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong.

2 Corinthians 12:6-10

He said that many people think that the “thorn in his flesh” is some kind of illness, but Joseph Prince said that other places in the Bible where that term is used, it is always a person—and it appears to be here, too.  But literally it’s a “messenger of Satan,” a fallen angel (angels are mostly messengers).

Here’s the part that blew my mind: he said that just like Paul, our response to these irritations, this petty meddling of the devil should be to thank God for the blessings He is pouring out on us.  Stop whining and start worshiping, praising, thanking God for the blessings.  It’s counter-intuitive (and I love that!), but nothing will make the devil flee faster than praise, worship, and thanksgiving to God.  And then those blessings can really start to flow as God intended.

Joseph Prince explained the flow of blessings from God like a hose from God in Heaven to us here on earth.  The blessings are always flowing, flowing, flowing, but when we worry, for example, about our finances, then we are tying a knot in the hose and the blessings can’t flow.  That’s exactly what the devil wants!

It’s important that we keep our family, friends, and neighbors in our prayers.  But the devil’s interference in this world is not a reason to despair.  In fact, these are times when people need Jesus more than ever.  You might be the only Jesus that some of your co-workers and casual acquaintances may ever know.  Many Christians these days are shy about sharing their faith, afraid of being laughed at, called “politically incorrect” or “intolerant,” or of losing their job.  But what if you had the chance to tell someone about Jesus and give them the hope that can change their whole outlook from suicidal to joyful?  And what if you are the only person that God has given this chance to?  I will “make” you see Jesus!  I will make you know Jesus!