Faith and Culture

Christians, Beware

There’s a dangerous deception lurking in our churches

Photo by Bruce Barrow on Unsplash

There is an energy to thought and when you identify what you desire and write down your vision, you begin the process of mobilizing the energy to create the life you want.

• “The Energy Bus” by Jon Gordon

As I was researching leadership books for work, I found myself reading The Energy Bus by Jon Gordon. It’s a highly energetic and motivating read, and Jon is a wonderful storyteller. It was recommended to me by a coworker, so I grabbed a copy and read it for myself.

However, as my eyes traveled across the quote above, I froze.

Where had I heard this before?

Inspiring Deception

Melissa Dougherty, an insightful Christian apologist, has done a lot of work in the realm of New Age/New Thought and how to recognize the teachings. She came from the overlapping world of New Age and New Thought, and she produces wonderful content on YouTube if you want to learn more about these beliefs.

However, New Thought isn’t really new. Rather, it’s just a repackaging of Satan’s age-old MO: “I can be as powerful as God.”

From the beginning, he has caused mankind to question God’s motives and authority, convincing us that we are sufficient on our own.

But friends, beware. These lies sound so good to our flesh because they cause all kinds of warm, fuzzy feelings to well up inside us. They stroke our ego and feed our pride.

One of them is the Law of Attraction. If you’re not familiar with it, this is the belief that positive or negative thoughts attract positive or negative things into our lives. It’s not biblical.

This messaging has wormed its way into churches for centuries, and as Christians, we need to be on alert. Satan prowls around like a lion, ready and waiting to pounce at the next available opportunity (1 Peter 5:8).

In her book, Happy Lies, Melissa talks about her journey to discover the truth about the lies she’d believed were Christian teachings, but were really deceptions dressed as the gospel. In her book, she says:

Love and truth go hand in hand. To love Jesus is to love truth.

It’s hard to seek the truth when lies feel good. But as Christians, we should want to know the truth about Jesus and his teachings if we claim to love him.

So, let’s seek some truth.

Exposing the Lie

As I sat on my bed reading about how the energy of my thoughts could create the life I desired, it dawned on me that this is exactly what Melissa had been talking about.

In my early Christian walk, before the Lord led me to find her teachings, I think I would have believed every bit of the bright yellow book with a cheerful school bus on the cover. As a matter of fact, I was led astray by similar teachings many times in my spiritual infancy. Thankfully, though, the Lord nurtures and disciplines His children, and He places people in our lives to teach and grow us.

Another quote from The Energy Bus specifically spells out the Law of Attraction when it says:

Thoughts are magnetic. What we think about, we attract…the energy we project through our thoughts is the energy we receive… Positive energy and positive people create positive results.

At this point, alarm bells were sounding in my head.

I’ve seen this belief, dressed as biblical practice, crop up in churches too. It usually shows up by way of vision boards and vision planning, but it can creep into small groups and sermons just the same.

One very popular “vision” passage, which I talk about in this video, is Habakkuk 2:2–3. It says:

And the LORD answered me: “Write the vision; make it plain on tablets, so he may run who reads it.

For still the vision awaits its appointed time; it hastens to the end — it will not lie. If it seems slow, wait for it; it will surely come; it will not delay.”

Now, read by itself, I understand the inclination to use it as scriptural evidence that our wishes and dreams will come true if we write them down (sound like “name it, claim it” to anyone?).

However, that’s not what this passage is referencing. It’s not a blank check to write down whatever goal we have so that we can manifest it into existence.

It doesn’t work that way.

When we read the surrounding passages, we can see that the vision in this passage is referring to the coming Messiah. The Lord was telling Habakkuk to write his vision down so that future generations would know about the promise of Jesus.

It’s not about writing down our career goals so we can “create energy” to bring them to fruition.

But what’s the harm?

This practice may seem innocent enough, and it’s true that focusing on good and beautiful things, rather than the ugliness of this life, will affect the way we see the world. So truly, what’s the harm in writing down our ambitions and desires?

The danger lies in the meaning behind it.

Planning is a good thing. Writing out our goals is a good thing. There’s nothing wrong with being good stewards of the time the Lord has given us.

However, if we believe that there’s something mystical or spiritual or magical about writing something down in order to increase the chances of it happening, or thinking God is obligated to do something for us because we wrote it down, we’re essentially saying we can speak things into existence.

Who, according to the Bible, has the power and authority to speak things into existence?

Yahweh.

In the beginning… God said… and there was (Genesis 1).

Humans are created in the image of God, and our words are powerful to affect change in the world around us, but we don’t hold the power or authority to create by our words only. God alone does that.

Our thoughts don’t create energy, and they don’t radiate into the universe. Our thoughts can be misleading, which is why Scripture tells us to take them captive.

Be alert, brothers and sisters. There’s nothing new under the sun, but our enemy is really good at repacking old lies to make them look like shiny new truths.

Thanks for reading! My heart is truly to see others dive deeper into Scripture and reason through things biblically. These are wild times, but together we can chase clarity in a confused world!

If that sounds like something you want to do, please consider following Rooted in Reason so you’ll be notified when there’s a new post.

Press on, friends. 🫶🏻

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