The above series on this blog includes an example of a biblical approach to sharing concerns with your pastor/elders when the New Apostolic Reformation theology is brought into your church whether by simple ignorance of the fast-growing global movement–or on purpose. The church member cited the entrance into her church’s teachings of just one of the most concerning aspects of NAR theology: that Jesus wasn’t fully God and man while here on earth https://pnissila.blog/2024/02/09/what-she-said-and-how-to-her-pastors-on-leaving-a-nar-influenced-church/
Book referenced in Markell’s interview
Reckless Christianity, The Destructive New Teachings and Practices of Bill Johnson, Bethel Church, and the Global Movement of Apostles and Prophets (new, by Holly Pivec and Dr. R. Douglas Geivett).
Other books by Pivec and Geivett:
Counterfeit Kingdom: The Dangers of New Revelation, New Prophets, and New Age Practices in the Church
A New Apostolic Reformation?: A Biblical Response to a Worldwide Movement
Few doubt, anymore, we are in another world war, a very sigificant war, both temporal and spiritual, perhaps even that war prophesied to close out the end times just before Jesus comes back the second time to rule for the next millenium.
Although I’ve written over 260 “survival” posts the past 12 years (along with the rest of my topics) that are featured here and here, there seems to be no end to perspectives and strategies as I glean more and more from the Word of God and parallel secular sources. Thus, I continue.
This time I want to share a kind of personal writing prompt, from several years ago, that I always keep in mind and that seems especially apropos just now.
11 “Now whatever city or town you enter, inquire who in it is worthy, and stay there till you go out.12 And when you go into a household, greet it.13 If the household is worthy, let your peace come upon it.But if it is not worthy, let your peace return to you.14 And whoever will not receive you nor hear your words, when you depart from that house or city,shake off the dust from your feet. (Matthew 10:11-14)
You can try your best, do your best, change-up your best, or search for a better way to clear up any misunderstanding about your intentions, words, or deeds–you can even apologize where it’s due if you know the offense–but sometimes it’s just a no-go with whomever you are trying to extend the hand of peace. Continue reading →
NAR (New Apostolic Reformation) Revival–“Tokin’ the Ghost”?
You have to admit, it’s a pretty exciting experience at a toe-tappin’, rock ‘n roll, NAR revival, jumpin’ to a 10o-decibel Jesus jam or transe-ing out to bongo and binaural beats chanting some new-revelation mantra until you fall down “drunk in the spirit“. Or maybe laughing uncontrollably or moaning and screaming and rolling around on the floor after you have gone through a “fire tunnel“…
Yeah, there’s a little Scripture sprinkled in here and there, but who takes time to “Berean it” when Continue reading →
Ever wonder how New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) followers get the notion that their literal words create literal reality (a popular Word of Faith doctrine incorporated into NAR beliefs and seeded into several popular NAR song lyrics. Example)?
Ever wonder why NARites believe when they “declare and decree” certain things like raising people from the dead and changes in the very laws of nature (“Just like God,” say all the “little gods”)?
Ever wonder how to take trips to heaven at will, as taught in NAR schools of supernatural ministry? (A real mind trip) Continue reading →
When a friend of mine first became aware of the extraoardinarily subtle nature of the deceptions of the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) that sells its false doctrines with great skill and song (here’s a sampling of more of its mechanisms of attraction), she nailed the nature of its power: “But their teachings are SO CLOSE to the Scriptures!”
Yup.
The better to seduce them by, touting feelings over (biblical) foundations and experiences over exegesis, pulling the enticed deeper and deeper into a gnostic woods strewn with false apostles and prophets and promoters…
In short: so close to the real land of milk and honey yet so far, far away.
Encouragement today:
Beware the Borderlands
Beware the borderlands
of thoughts, and words and deeds,
of slippery slopes,
forbidden roads
where shine their wares and creeds.
Beware deception lands
where fakes and shills and snakes
lead and guide,
ensnare and blind,
with whate’er it takes.
Beware the conquered lands
of beauty, bucks, and brawn,
where white-washed tombs,
those, roadsides strewn,
await with gaping yawns.
Featured today is a teaching on the pre-Tribulation Rapture of believers by prophecy expert Mondo Gonzales speaking on the Jan Markell radio program.
For those who disagree with this stance but who are at least willing to take another look at the evidence provided, perhaps you will be encouraged and comforted, too. – pbn
Essentially, I am an encourager in the Body of Christ. We each have a role.
Although we love encouragement, it is a two-sided coin: one, the usual, positive kind, the other, however, the warning kind.
These days, given the situations in the world and in the Church, both filled with ever-expanding deception, distraction, and division (as prophesied), being human, we need all the positive encouragement we can get as the warnings increase, gaining volume and speed.
And in all our individual “ministries” we need each other–arguably more so than ever before.
Thus in what ways I can, I try to do my bit.
Here is another take on encouragement for you (perhaps just now weary) fellow worker in Christ’s Great Commission–for such a time as this: Continue reading →
At the beginning of this millennium, most people, including Jewish Americans, thought antisemitism had mostly been banished from the land. But after 9/11, against all reason, it started growing again. Today it manifests itself everywhere. Young people speak antisemitic slogans as a bizarre form of virtue signaling.
We can see it in the signs and hear it in the chants on campuses and in the streets. Young people, most born after 9/11/2001, today sing out the ideologies of our 2001 enemy — “Death to America!” … “There is only one Solution, Intifada. Revolution!” … “Long live Hamas!” … “Death to Jews!” They compare those who disagree with them to the Ku Klux Klan. But who would agree more with the chant, “Death to Jews!” than the KKK? These pitiful children have become the thing they decry.
But perhaps this last presentation from a previous era when students grappled with their own wars and rumors of wars, puts it most clearly:
A Call to Real Virtue and Another Kind of Resistance
All three featured above tell, in each their own way, what might be summed up thus: war breaks not only bodies, minds, and souls, but can extend out to families, friends, people groups, and nations as well.
Usually minds are the first in harm’s way. Case in point. As one young pro-Hamas/Palestinian protestor put it last week, “”Resistance is glorious.” (source, first feature).
To put it bluntly and honestly to all who run after today’s popular campus tribes and vibes: the “sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll” of new (college) freedoms, thrills, and privileges may soon fade–but if your vitriol bleeds out into the real world, encouraged by all the Daddies Warbucks of this era, there will be any number of disabled–and dead–to follow.
Not so glorious.
Additionally, it could very well be that many of you, too, now of prime military age, will be left on today’s literal battlegrounds.
Your posters and street theater are impressive, but when powerful warmongers chart the inevitable course to conflagration, ordnance drowns out oratory. It’s just the way it is in a flawed world where brotherhood is all too often shattered by the kind of lethal rage that beckons the big guns…
But I would ask you to resist in another way in order to stop enriching the undertakers, to harken back to Starr’s lyrics.
Resist being part of that history that, tragically, repeats itself. And find cohorts of like mind.
Make some new history.
Make it good.
But note, however–like all others in this kind of resistance, you may have to stand alone for a little while. And some other things. So count the cost.
Also note: the above is not necessarily a call to arms but, you might say, it is a call to real virtue–which takes real courage, the kind of courage that helps keep the machinery of civilization building up, not tearing down, in order to keep the human race as free and cohesive as we can be, despite the odds, in mind, body, and soul; family, friends, and communities.
Even in such a time as this.
Like the heroes we truly admire.
We know their names now, if not so much then.*
*ONE SUCH HERO, SOPHIE SCHOLL
COLLEGE STUDENT AND NAZI RESISTER, 1921-1943
If the reader needs to be inspired by a college student who opposed the real Nazi regime and was part of a non-violent resistance group during World War II called the White Rose, here is her memorable story. She paid a big price, however, even for merely speaking out against the war.
Sophia Magdalena Scholl[a] (9 May 1921 – 22 February 1943) was a German student and anti-Nazi political activist, active within the White Rose non-violent resistance group in Nazi Germany.[1][2]
Getting closer to the bone from a politician with whom I would respectfully disagree on many things, but not on this (although I might use other character descriptors):
Fetterman no filter:
"If you show up in a Starbucks with a bullhorn and start yelling at people, that doesn't make you noble, It just makes you an asshole." pic.twitter.com/uHisWdA8PZ
“Jan Markell spends the hour with Michele Bachmann. We may be in the most prophetic hour of our lifetime. Our U.S. Administration is on “team Iran” and not “team Israel.” This has terrible consequences for America. It places both Israel—and America—in the center of the storm today.” – show promo
pnissila 
