Scripture Over Feelings - Judging the Charismatic Movement by Its Fruit

Now, I wanna talk about judging, because the Bible condemns certain kinds of it, and we hear it all the time from false teachers saying, "Don't judge.

Don't judge." I got something on my ...

When you got ADD, every little thing bothers you, and there was this little piece of fuzz up there.

[laughs] Uh, you hear about, "Don't judge.

Don't say anything about what we're doing.

And by the way, look how many people have just been delivered.

Look at all these prophecies, prophetic words that we give." None of that is fruit, and the kind of judging they're talking about keeps us quiet, and today more than ever, we need other believers to speak up, and we all do that in different ways.

I'm doing this.

You know, I, I don't talk about this all the time when I'm preaching or teaching because my responsibility as a pastor is to make sure I'm helping to grow the saints.

But man, I got a fire in me [laughs] to push back on this stuff, that I needed an outlet.

And all of us have different ways that we can do this.

Maybe yours would be starting in the podcast like this or a blog.

There's a girl in our church, in fact, I interviewed her and her husband that had left the UPC.

She just wrote a book, a- not about this, but about what God has helped her through.

We all have experiences in our life that God will redeem and use us, and if you've come out of these movements, sometimes the place that He uses you is to push back against that movement, and we need more voices.

We need a lot of pastors to speak up against this.

But the Bible condemns certain kinds of judging, hypocritical kind, the superficial stuff, self-righteous kind of judging, where we're, we don't like the way somebody dresses.

As, uh, one of our elders often says, "We don't like the cut of their jib." [laughs] In fact, the one time we've ever had to do ...

Well, one of the, the biggest time we've ever had to do a church discipline kind of a scenario, calling somebody to repentance in front of the church, was over something like this.

It can be really damaging.

It can be really hurtful.

When I started attending the church I now pastor back in the late '90s, I would get superficially judged because of the clothes that I wore or the fact that I've got a lot of tattoos.

And people were very quick to remind me how I was going to hell because I had a tattoo that I couldn't do anything about now.

[laughs] That kind of stuff, or my hair was a different color.

Before, having blue hair was a political statement.