Replacing the Lion of Judah with a Gargoyle

“The church is so subnormal that if it ever got back to the New Testament normal it would seem to people to be abnormal.” (Vance Havner)

Imagine a time in America when true, biblical, Christianity will be considered heretical by the majority of professing Christians, not to mention secular society. Further imagine that the new normal for Christianity will be ecumenical paganism sprinkled with a smattering of Christian rhetoric and doctrine. That time is rapidly approaching. The groundwork for this diabolical era has been laid, and the framework set in place. The unbelievable truth is that scores of professing Christian leaders are converting to pagan Christianity (an oxymoron if there ever was one). The list of converts reads like a “Who’s Who in Christianity”.

This Pagan Christianity combines New Age beliefs and practices with Christianity to form a pagan “gospel” called Contemplative Spirituality. Why would even a casual Christian want to do such a thing? One reason given is to promote spirituality in Protestantism that supposedly went missing when the movement severed from the Roman Catholic Church. What spirituality, we might ask? Several popular Roman Catholics, namely Thomas Merton, Thomas Keating, and Henri Nouwen, decided that their religion was not spiritual enough. These individuals by their own admission were unspiritual and without intimacy with God. They turned to Buddhists, Hindus, and Sufi Muslims for assistance with becoming spiritual. From those pagan religions they appropriated and incorporated Contemplative Spirituality into Christianity. Now a whole host of their Protestant contemporaries such as Rick Warren, Richard Foster, Dallas Willard (now deceased), Brian McClaren, Rob Bell, including lesser knowns such as Ruth Haley Barton, have taken up the cause. They insist that the only way to restore spiritual life to Christianity is to employ paganism to teach us how to pray and get in touch with the inner Christ.

They insist that Contemplative Spirituality is the only way to appropriating all the benefits of God. In doing so, they are in fact declaring that not only are pagans more spiritual than Christians, but that pagans are more intimate with and knowledgeable about the one true God. In other words, they consider true Christianity to be a weak and unspiritual failure because it has ignored paganism. These concepts are not being held secret, but are openly proclaimed. They have declared that this other path to God was the true path all along. In spite of not having even one verse of scripture that validates their claim, they are implying that the Holy Spirit is now insufficient to meet the Christian’s needs. It is like saying that a massive, eternal, electrical power plant is insufficient to supply ones home with electricity, but a tiny watch battery will do the trick.

Contemplative Spirituality includes the practice of Contemplative Prayer. During Contemplative Prayer one sits with hands in the Yoga “salutation to the sun” position, counting his or her breaths, and chanting a 1 to 3 word mantra until the mind is vacated of all thoughts. There is usually a spiritual director (guru) present to assist the individual in achieving the vacuous state. Often people will receive a spirit guide (a demon spirit) at this point in the process of Contemplative Prayer. Spiritual directors and practitioners claim that one will never be spiritual, intimate with God or fellow humanity, and achieve oneness with other religions until he or she practices Contemplative Prayer. They claim that the purpose is to get in touch with the inner Christ that supposedly dwells in all people and even in animals and inanimate things. The inner Christ is part of the overarching Cosmic Christ, which they claim Jesus took part of. Thus, they deny that He was and is the Christ. They are in effect replacing the Lion of Judah with a Gargoyle.

Although millions of professing Christians have fallen head over heels in love with Contemplative Prayer, and entire denominations are being taken over by it, I am not so ecstatic. The reason is because God delivered me from darkness that included alcoholism, drug addiction, and paganism. He brought me into intimacy with Him by pouring into me the gift of the Holy Spirit. I grew in faith and knowledge, navigated numerous trials and crises, and realized all my spiritual growth and productivity, because of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. I never needed anything or anyone more than Him. When I became dry and unspiritual, I discovered that true prayer and yielding to the Holy Spirit was the answer. He always brought me back to rich fulfillment in Christ Jesus.

The Holy Spirit is the source of all essential and healthy spirituality. But He is not the source of all spirituality. Satan is in fact the source of all unhealthy spirituality. It is therefore imperative that one makes certain that he or she does not absorb spirituality from satanic sources. Unhealthy spirituality is the activity of demon spirits. Demons work through means and methods contrary to God’s word and nature. One of those means is enchantment. Enchantment is a lure that Satan uses to draw people into devilish means and methods. It is a magic spell, a form of bewitchment. In fact, enchantment comes from the Latin word incantare, which literally means to “chant (a magic spell) upon”.

Contemplative Prayer, the major source of pagan spirituality, involves chanting a mantra until one enters an altered state of consciousness. At that point the individual becomes enchanted and thus susceptible to demon possession. This indeed gives such a person a great measure of unhealthy spirituality and intimacy with the god of this world, Satan. A true Christian is possessed by the Holy Spirit. The only way a true Christian can become demon possessed is for the Holy Spirit to relinquish His possession. God’s word declares that a Christian’s body is the temple of the Holy Spirit. It goes on to declare that the Holy Spirit will not dwell in an unclean temple (body). Obviously, a lack of spirituality does not exist in a person possessed by and yielded to the Holy Spirit. It just as obvious that individuals not possessed by the Holy Spirit are unqualified to lead the way to true spirituality. It is especially true of those individuals that have been drawn into unhealthy spirituality.

What has occurred in pagan Christianity is that people (by their own admission) who were unspiritual had rejected the Holy Spirit. In doing so they rejected the source of all healthy spirituality. Instead of repenting and coming back to God, they sought unhealthy spirituality from the broken cisterns of paganism. Now their contemporaries insist that all true Christians must abandon the matchless power and wisdom of God’s Holy Spirit and drink with them the poison water of paganism.

My first question is; “Why would any true Christian want to do that?” There is no palpable benefit in abandoning the source of spiritual life to wander about the graveyard of paganism. My second question is; “Why would anyone believe that paganism, the residence of demons and darkness, condemned by God as a lie, could ever produce anything more that the squalor of spiritual poverty and death?” However, in spite of those glaring realities, and the fact that the greatest men and women of God throughout Christian history never needed paganism, these influential promoters of Contemplative Spirituality are declaring it to be the ancient path to fullness of God. They have rejected the confines of truth, ignored the scriptural warnings, and are ingesting a deadly mixture. Pagan Christianity is a fatal dose of deception. When the soul begins to die from its effects, there is no turning back in these last days. It is essentially spiritual suicide.

The answer to spiritual deficiency is to go back to the unfailing supply. God, the Holy Spirit, cannot fail and will never be insufficient to meet our needs. We may be unwilling to meet the requirements for His indwelling, refuse to allow Him to purge us of carnal, selfish, motives and ambitions, and all else that opposes the Divine Nature. But He will never be inadequate to meet the spiritual needs of all who come to God with an open and sincere heart of submission to His will. Pagan Christianity leads to submission to Satan. It is a paradigm historically associated with the backslidden or apostate condition.

Backslidden Israel left the springs of living water for the broken cisterns of paganism. Fallen humanity has repeatedly sought a different way to God (or rather, a god) that does not follow the path of righteousness. When apostasy occurs, the alternate path is heralded as the true path, while God’s way is decried as a false or insufficient path. In spite of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, the advocates of Contemplative Spirituality have succumbed to the great and final deception. They are now fully in the grip of the great and final apostasy. As such, they now believe that up is down, right is wrong, left is right, good is bad, evil is righteousness, and vice versa. The path out to freedom appears to them as a path to bondage and doom. They cannot be helped when they believe that the cure is the disease. The poison that they have ingested tastes good at the present, but eventually the consequences of deception will arrive. The reality is that the choice to engage in Contemplative Prayer is a bad and fatal choice to enter a path to utter destruction. Guard your hearts and minds! No one else is going to do it for you.