Today I am just slightly inspired to pop off a few thoughts to the faithful on something that has inadvertently caught my attention. It has to do with our sources for information on what God is doing or not doing today, especially here in North America. I have written on this before, but feel a bit impelled to more strongly echo it here.
Contrary to where I was 30 years ago during the PTL scandal, following every televangelist voice I could lay ears on, today I neither read nor watch any Christian media. I don’t have a TV. I only listen to the radio a few minutes here or there for news if I happen to be in my car. I don’t read or watch any Christian news media online. And I only read or watch any secular news media sparingly.
It is from this background that I ended up unexpectedly led today to be looking at the CharismaNews website to verify some information someone had sent me. As my eyes fell on the page and scanned down throughout the mash of articles and photographs and video clips, it was immediately very clear to my innermost man what the Spirit was whispering to me:
“Don’t believe a word of it.”
The scripture tells us that faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the Word of God. The Word of God in turn comes to us by very simple means involving reading, or listening, or watching, or just praying and meditating. The Word comes to our spirits on many conveyances through such means.
But what we have to understand is that no conveyance itself is the Word of God and that no conveyance, especially digitally transmitted conveyances on a computer screen, no matter how exquisitely technologically dressed, can purport to actually be conveying the Word of God or even necessarily even the basic factual truth about anything!
Electronic conveyance of information is not about the information. It is about image. It is all about image. Everything is about the conveying of an image, and these images are being crafted to suit the creator. And by the way, if you didn’t understand this already, image is the life force behind idolatry.
So when you go to a website like CharismaNews to seek “information” by which you hope you might better understand the truth about what God is doing, that is not what is happening.
What is happening is you are being bombarded by crafted imagery through sight and sound and music beds and clever headlines to lead you to believe something about something that may have no correspondence at all to the truth of what God is saying or doing about anything relative to the images you are “experiencing.”
Yet the deception is rampant throughout this media saturated “Christian” culture that “God is speaking” through each and every techno-polished report and “prophecy” being posted online or conveyed through the airwaves. And the more effectively the soul can be stirred up through the combined visual and sound effects of the presentation, the more authoritative God’s voice must be behind it. This goes on right down to the thirty-second video promos Christian speakers use to advertise their latest teaching series and conferences in church meetings.
The reality is that God is decidedly not speaking through almost all of it. It is just noise, noise and more noise. And if you truly want or expect to hear from God, you are going to have to actually put away image laden media, and get back to the simplicity of the direct spoken voice and the unadorned printed page, the means He has used throughout history as His best conveyances for His Word. (Yes, even I am contemplating simplifying my own threadbare archaic website!)
Where this is especially problematic is pertaining to things prophetic. The prophetic movement has been under assault by media usurpation of the spoken word of God for decades now. This has produced the utter cacophony of competing “words” in the hodgepodge of the “prophetic marketplace”—something I have written about before here and here.
I am telling you, if you want to hear what God is really saying today, don’t go to the “ElijahList” or to the internet prophecy blogs or to any other source out there that is relying on the power of image to convey that prophecy. You will not be getting the mind of God.
I am telling you, this is what is going to divide the Bride from the virgins at the midnight hour. The reason the virgins won’t have oil in their lamps when the Lord returns is because they were trusting in human electricity to light their way.
But when all the “lights” suddenly go out one midnight because the grid gets blown up or shut down, and there is no more internet, no more TV, no more radio, and no more YouTube videos backed with drama music to tell us what “God is saying” and doing, the virgin lamps will be found to be bone dry!
So I plead with you. No, rather, it is the Lord who is pleading, so I hear it: If you haven’t already done so, start divorcing yourself from the world of artificial image conveyance as your source for knowing what God is saying and doing today. Get back to the simplicity of prayer, meditation, read the scriptures, be highly selective about the digital conveyances you do consult in becoming informed by the indwelling Spirit of Truth about anything purporting to be going on. He will ultimately guide you to all wisdom in this, of course.
So that’s it. That’s all I wanted to say today. Be blessed as you keep sharpening your ears and eyes of the Spirit in the prayer closet ahead of the Lord’s coming…..
Love,
Chris Anderson
New Meadow Neck, Rhode Island
First Love Ministry
- a ministry of Anglemar Fellowship
http://www.firstloveministry.org11/16
Webmaster littleflock@netzero.net
Page created May 21, 2017
