Forces in our culture want to rip the foundations of Christian faith right out from under America. Here are four lies we must challenge.

This past week I spent four days preaching at Emmanuel College, a Christian liberal arts school in northeast Georgia. I love speaking to college students because they are spiritually hungry, they love passionate worship and I don’t have to wear a tie.

On the third night (after a young man got saved and delivered of drug addiction—yeah God!) I told the kids I needed to get brutally honest. They gave me permission to shoot straight. Because I genuinely care about them—and because they will be spiritual leaders before too long—I warned them about four lies they must confront.

Every Christian in this country must learn to dissect these lies using the Word of God. The devil is working overtime today to gain control of our nation’s soul. We are in a life-and-death struggle. This is not a time for Christians to be squishy in their faith or spineless in their convictions. We must plant our feet on the bedrock principles of the Bible and oppose each of these lies:

1. Hell does not exist. Jesus preached about hell more than anyone in the Bible. His words dripped with love, but He didn’t soft-pedal when addressing the eternal consequences of sin. When He began His ministry, he read from the book of Isaiah, announcing that He had come not only to “proclaim the favorable year of the Lord” but also “the day of vengeance of our God” (Is. 61:2, NASB).

The real gospel is a double-edged sword that offers both the “kindness and severity of God” (Rom. 11:22, emphasis added). That’s why hell is one four-letter word we should use more often—not to condemn people in mean-spirited judgment but to warn them that mercy has a time limit.

The world rejects the concept of hell because it’s too exclusive. Our Oprah-ized culture insists that everyone deserves a warm and fuzzy life free of consequences. “How can a loving God send anyone to hell?” people ask. If we truly love them we will explain that hell is not a metaphor—it is a real place of dreadful separation from God that sinners choose when they reject Him. We must start preaching about hell again instead of worrying about who might leave our church or how our unpopular message might affect our TV ratings.

2. God didn’t create the world. 2009 is the 150th anniversary of the publication of Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species, so you can be sure the scientific community will bombard us this year with more “proof” of this sketchy theory. The mainstream media and academia insist that evolution is pure fact. Anyone who dares to challenge it is considered a religious idiot.

What people don’t realize is that Darwinism, besides being laughably lacking in scientific basis, has roots in spiritualism. Welsh naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace shared many of Darwin’s beliefs and encouraged him to publish his book. Wallace believed in spirit guides, participated in séances and was intrigued by all things paranormal. He promoted the “science” of evolution because it supported his anti-God views. Is it any wonder, then, that this doctrine he and Darwin propagated has been used to undermine Christianity ever since?

The world does not want to believe in a Creator because if He is real, then He has ultimate authority over His creation. On the flip side, man has no moral responsibility if he crawled out of a primordial soup, grew fins, then legs, and then became a talking ape. Evolution is not really about science at all—it is about rebellion against God’s rule over us.

3. All religions lead to God. This isn’t a new lie, but it is enjoying a revival today. President Bush has obviously flirted with the idea, since he has told reporters that Muslims and Christians worship the same God. Barack Obama attended a church for 20 years that teaches that Jesus is not the only way to salvation—and he has publicly acknowledged that he believes this.

The doctrine of universalism—which states that all people will ultimately gain salvation and enjoy heaven—has become the religion of the masses. Even some charismatic and Pentecostal preachers such as Carlton Pearson of Oklahoma and D.E. Paulk of Atlanta have abandoned biblical orthodoxy to embrace this heresy. They are now on a crusade to rewrite Christian theology—and they have allies in some mainline denominations (such as the Episcopal Church) where the authority of Scripture is denied.

Christians who embrace universalism are like the prophets of Baal in Jezebel’s court who had been neutered. They preach a powerless message that cannot change anyone. We must arise in the spirit of Elijah to confront this deception and prove to the world that the one true God answers by fire.

4. Man can redefine morality. This is perhaps the most deadly lie of all. Everywhere we look today, leaders in media, politics, education and entertainment are plotting the virtual overthrow of conventional morals. They want a hedonistic world with no rules and no guilt. This was most obvious last month when Newsweek published a cover story brazenly claiming that the Bible approves of same-sex marriage.

A lying spirit has invaded many mainline churches and is convincing weak Christians to change their views about homosexuality, abortion and fornication. Evil is called good while those who stand for the biblical values of purity and traditional marriage are labeled bigots.

If we ignore these lies they will engulf us. We need a zero-tolerance policy for spiritual compromise. While we must demonstrate overwhelming compassion and love for sinners, God requires us to oppose cultural brainwashing. We cannot be silent on the issues the devil is attacking.

If you are wavering in your faith on any of these four fundamentals, get honest about your doubts, repent of your lukewarmness and dig in God’s Word until your mind is renewed. Don’t become a brainwash victim.

Most of the women profiled did not set out to become full-time ministers, let alone apostolic church leaders. In fact, many of them had no formal Bible-school training when God first tapped them on the shoulder and they, like the prophet Jonah, tried to run from His call. But in spite of their seeming lack of preparation, their initial resistance and persecution from those around them, God led them supernaturally into leadership and is using them mightily to advance His kingdom. Will you fully heed to God’s call on your life? These women did and they have impacted many lives on their journey.

Beverly Crawford

Beverly Crawford has been hungry for God since she was a little girl. But after her mother died when she was 10, she turned away from Him and focused on other pursuits.

In 1974, a friend invited her to church, and Crawford, at 29, gave her life to Christ and was filled with the Holy Spirit. She joined a large West Coast congregation and became involved in ministry, teaching Sunday school and a Bible study for women that eventually attracted men as well. It grew so large that the only venue big enough to host it was the 1,400-seat sanctuary.

“That’s how things got started,” she says. “That’s how I learned to flow in the gifts.”

During her 10 years at the church, Crawford was licensed and given responsibility for the youth department, the women’s ministry and the singles ministry—yet she had never been to Bible school. All her training came from the Holy Spirit, she says.

In the mid-1980s, she stepped down from her church duties and began an outreach Bible study. At the time she had no intention of starting a church, but on the way to joining a different congregation, God spoke to her.

“He told me, ‘I didn’t tell you to join a church; I told you to start one,'” she says.

Today Crawford’s Bible Enrichment Fellowship International Church in Inglewood, California, has 4,000 members and supports radio and television ministries as well as an apostolic network, prophetic seminars, and numerous community outreaches.

Kimberly Daniels

To look at her now, poised and well-dressed, expounding on God’s Word before her 500-member congregation at Spoken Word Ministries in Jacksonville, Florida, you’d never know Kimberly Daniels spent her youth on the streets of that same city, running with a gang and becoming involved in crime and violence. A prostitute and drug addict for a time, Daniels was anything but the picture of a future pastor.

Today, however, the only hint of her former life is her familiarity with the devil’s ways—and her willingness to confront the enemy when she discerns he is encroaching on God’s territory. In fact, it was her boldness to take on the devil in order to bring deliverance to inner-city youth that first earned her a reputation as the “Demon Buster.”

Daniels kicked her cocaine habit when she joined the Army and then gave her life to Christ while on active duty in Germany. She immediately began leading a Bible study and was preaching within six months.

When she returned to the U.S., she started a center to help girls get off drugs but had trouble finding a church that would accept them. Finally, God told her: “You pastor them.” And out of her drug center came a church.

In addition to pastoring Spoken Word and overseeing Word Bible College, Daniels leads Commanders of the Morning, a large network of intercessors she trains in prayer and spiritual warfare. Through her Iron Sharpens Iron ministry she equips believers to operate in the fivefold ministry and encourages them to fulfill their God-appointed roles in the church. She also travels worldwide to minister in conferences and plans to open a second church, Rhema Way City Church, in Jacksonville this year.

Naomi Dowdy

When Naomi Dowdy was a girl, God spoke to her through the hymn “Let the Lower Lights Be Burning,” a song that likens believers to the lights around a lighthouse. While she was singing the words of the chorus—”Let the lower lights be burning/ Send a gleam across the wave!”—in a church service one day, she heard a voice say aloud to her, “That’s what I want you to do.”

Later, in San Diego, Dowdy sat on the shore as often as possible—but it wasn’t to let her light shine for sinners. She had drifted from God and was working the night shift so she could spend all day on the beach.

But immediately after she gave her life to Christ at age 25, Dowdy says, she began preaching, first on Skid Row in San Diego and later on the radio. Then God appeared to her in a vision and told her He was going to send her to “the islands of the sea.” For nine years she worked as a missionary in the Marshall Islands, teaching at Bible schools, planting churches and training pastors throughout Asia—until God offered her her own church.

“I didn’t want to be a pastor,” Dowdy says. “It was not even on the radar screen.”

But she agreed to lead the pioneer Assemblies of God church in Singapore for six months. Nearly 30 years later, she resigned as senior pastor of Trinity Christian Centre. She had grown the church from 42 to 4,500 members, founded a Bible school and seminary—now TCA College—and developed a cell model currently used by thousands of churches around the world.

Dowdy, with bases in both Dallas and Singapore, continues to give spiritual oversight to the church as the resident apostle. She is also the founder and president of Global Leadership Network and the Global Covenant Network.

Maureen D. Eha is the features editor of Charisma.

This article is from the June 2007 issue of Charisma

Editor’s Note: The word below was shared by R. Loren Sandford, founder and senior pastor of New Song Fellowship in Denver, Colorado, with his congregation in early January as part one of a two-part sermon titled “Prophetic Words for 2009.” You can order both parts of the message on CD through the church’s Web site (). Sandford is the author of several books, including Understanding Prophetic People and The Prophetic Church (both published by Chosen). In the word, he encourages believers not to fear the future but to look ahead with hope toward all the good things God is going to do in our nation.

Prophetic Words for 2009
By R. Loren Sandford

We just came through a historic presidential election. Seventy percent of evangelical Christians like us voted against the man who won. Before the election—and now especially since the outcome became clear—I have read and heard prophecies of doom and gloom from many on the Christian right who don’t like the results. I want to begin by balancing and debunking some of that.

Despite the pronouncements of a growing number of so-called prophets, Barack Obama will not be our last president. He is not the Antichrist, contrary to some of the writings I’ve recently come across. I believe that he will actually undergo a conversion in his faith while in office as solid evangelical voices speak with him in love—voices that work with his faith to bless and advise him without promoting a right-wing political agenda. He will listen to such voices.

Furthermore, if we will pray, his current stances regarding abortion and gay marriage will change. If we will pray for him with love and respect, he will go down in history not only as the first African-American to win the presidency but as one of our greatest presidents. He has the gifts to inspire this nation to shed its crippling blanket of fear and rise again. He has already moved to a more centrist position than he held during the election. I say these things having not voted for the man. I believe this is the word of the Lord.

1 Tim. 2:1-4 [says], “First of all, then, I urge that entreaties and prayers, petitions and thanksgivings, be made on behalf of all men, for kings and all who are in authority, so that we may lead a tranquil and quiet life in all godliness and dignity. This is good and acceptable in the sight of God our Savior, who desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth” (NASB).

Despite a quickening stream of prophecies foreseeing doom and gloom, America is not going to fall, disintegrate or break up. What will happen is that the center of our national identity will fragment. It’s already happening. Historically, incoming immigrants have always been eager to become Americans in both language and culture. This is no longer the case.

Incoming ethnic groups will no longer be joining our national culture but will cling to their own, preferring instead to create islands of their own languages and cultures. This kind of diversity will shatter the centered national identity we once knew. As a result, politics will become increasingly splintered and we will find it more and more difficult to come to any form of national unity. Racial and ethnic differences will lead to escalating tensions. Some have seen and sensed this looming fragmentation and have misinterpreted it as the imminent breakup of the nation.

Churches like my own congregation will be called to stand in the gap. I don’t see a great number of multicultural churches springing up. Immigrants coming into the country now generally don’t want that, again preferring to create islands of their own culture in which they feel comfortable. But churches like ours can and will model interracial harmony in our own midst and we can and will speak prophetically into conflicts as they develop and as we are able.

The U.S. economy will not collapse, but a radical shift is under way that may take some time to fully emerge. I believe the Lord told me that six months after Obama takes office we would see a whirlwind of change. I saw in a vision a mini-tornado with papers swirling in it. Some of the whirlwind will be brought about as the economic base of this nation shifts and changes and as that change accelerates. Many of the papers I saw will be legislation for changes. Many changes. America as we have known it is at an end.

It will be a turbulent time but not necessarily a bad time. In November 2007 I wrote that we were about to enter a time of the rollercoaster—a time of fear, with many ups and downs—but that the believer need not fear. God is with us. Now the rollercoaster is here. As just one example, witness the wild swings in the stock market. What was once considered newsworthy has now become commonplace.

I read in the news recently that by mid-2009 economists expect the economy to begin to recover. That struck me because it corresponds with the six months the Lord told me about, that Obama would win, that there would be six months of delusionary hope and then a whirlwind of change. If we pray for our president, the delusionary nature of that hope can be changed into real hope. But we will certainly see a whirlwind of change to parallel economic recovery.

One of the things we must pray into is that historically recession/depression tends to produce wars. I warned more than a year ago that if the Bush White House didn’t redeem the Bush presidency, the 2008 election would be a backlash and that the result would not be good no matter what party you aligned with. And I said that our enemies would be waiting for someone in the White House that they perceived would be weaker and that then we would have war.

Especially in light of the current historic recession, war remains a significant danger. Pray for strength and wisdom for our leaders and for the Lord to disarm the spirit of war. It’s an old tactic of the enemy to send war to stop a worldwide revival. In 1904 the great Welsh Revival resulted in waves of young missionaries going out into the world. That was followed in 1906 by the Azusa Street Revival that ignited the Pentecostal Movement. Again, missions movements flowered. There was serious talk of being able to complete the Great Commission within their lifetimes and then the Lord would come in accord with Matthew 24:14, “This gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in the whole world as a testimony to all the nations, and then the end will come.”

The enemy of our soul ignited World War I in 1914 and put an end to it by neutralizing a generation. World War II grew out of the Great Depression and again took out a generation. The Jesus Movement sprang up in the early 1970s and tens of thousands of young people came to Jesus. The Vietnam War and the culture of self largely neutralized the Jesus Movement in America before it could have its full impact. We’re on the cusp again. Worldwide revival is under way. Unprecedented numbers of people are coming to Jesus on every continent. The enemy would love to start a war to shut it all down. He would love start a war before the current younger generation in the western world can experience a revival of their own—something they have yet to see.

Prayer, not diplomacy, will head off war, but in all these calls for prayer we’re going to have to rise out of our own personal concerns, in which the current demon-inspired blanket of fear imprisons us, and choose to focus on issues larger and more significant than our own individual lives.

America’s strength vis a vis other nations will diminish in the days to come. Economics at home and the growth of other strong economies in the world will make it more and more difficult for us to function as the world’s policeman as we have done in the past. America will be forced to assume a much more humble position in the scheme of things and work more with other nations to accomplish what needs to be accomplished. A change of attitude and national character are needed and will be thrust upon us. This humbler attitude may serve to open up new nations for missionaries coming from the U.S. to penetrate previously closed cultures. Diminished hatred for America can only help the spread of the gospel.

Judgment is coming on nations that support radical Islam and its Sharia law. First, the Lord told me some time ago that Islam would collapse under the weight of its own lovelessness, having no real concept of the Father’s love. The judgment on Islam will come partly in the form of diminishing wealth. This will unfold as a revolution takes hold in the realm of transportation that will transition us out of an oil-dominated culture and economy. Other forms of energy will displace oil as the predominant fuel. [This trend] has already begun and will gather steam in 2009 and the years to follow. A whole new economy will be birthed—and I’m excited about it. It’s a huge part of the whirlwind of changes we will see developing.

As far back as nine years ago I was prophesying that mega-churches would be standing empty in this country, that a huge shift was coming and that God would take the sheep from shepherds who would not lead them into the things of the Spirit and the meat of Word and that He would give them to those who would.

[In the January issue of Charisma magazine, executive editor Lee Grady] wrote an opening article called “Holy Demolition.” (To read his column, click here.) He reported on three leading mega-churches that have all but collapsed. These are just examples of a broader trend. … Judgment has begun with the house of God. God is calling us to move to a new level of looking and being like Him. We are being called higher into our birthright.

“But God, being rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in our transgressions, made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved), and raised us up with Him, and seated us with Him in the heavenly places, in Christ Jesus” (Eph. 2:4-6).

What an incredible privilege—and isn’t it time we looked like it?

It was 1999 when the Lord spoke to me about the move of God in the new millennium being a “season of tens.” I didn’t know what that phrase meant. The Lord therefore impressed me to look up the tenth chapter of every book of the New Testament that has a tenth chapter.

Every one of these chapters contains a strong theme or statement concerning some aspect of God’s people being sent out to gather a harvest of souls, or of people being sovereignly gathered in by some means. We are coming into the season of tens. Now. … God was confirming to me the nature of the new millennium for believers like you and me. As the first decade has progressed, these things have taken root and have grown worldwide. There has been an explosion of prophetic and healing evangelism. Even closed countries are being penetrated by the gospel.

In light of all this, here are some principles to live by in the days to come—prophetic summons from heaven.

Recent years have been a time of cleansing, repairing the foundation and learning. God has gently penetrated areas of sin and dysfunction in our lives and has taught us how to deal with them through an army of His servants teaching inner transformation and wholeness. We’ve seen major life changes. Hearts have come to repentance. Longstanding bitterness has been laid to rest. Marriages have been healed. The weak have grown strong.

Many of us who really understood the purpose for all that healing, and who were able to transcend the self-orientation that grips our culture, have grown from being self-centered into [being ready] to reach out and to live outside ourselves for the sake of the kingdom.

During this recent time, we’ve been blessed but not responsible. We were invited to come cuddle up with the Father and humbly receive. It has been a time of the revelation of the Father’s love through a host of great teachers like Jack Frost and others. It has been a season just for us, for refreshing, healing, adjusting and refocusing our lives.

We are now at a place of a shift in the seasons. If we were blessed but not responsible in past years, then we are now blessed to be responsible. We’ve graduated. Grown up. It’s time to begin to come into the destiny prepared for us, promised for us and prophesied for us.

Destiny and promise, Layer One: Because of the process of growth we’ve been through, God is going to release favor on us like we’ve never seen before if we will pick up what we’ve been given and move with it.

He loves each of us because that is the nature of grace, but to be entrusted with the exercise of real power is a different issue. When my children were babies, I hugged and loved them, but I didn’t give them guns for Christmas or access to the family credit card.

To be entrusted with real power requires a deeper level of the character of Jesus in us. This is why judgment has begun to fall and leaders are being exposed in their sin. Without the character of Jesus we inevitably become abusers. For a great many of us who’ve been in training through these last years, that process of character formation has been the focus of life. We’ve lived an extended season of preparation.

Now it’s time to move in the fruit of all those years of preparation. If we will do it, God will sovereignly gather to us multitudes of people who need a pure drink of the presence, grace and love of God. They’ll hear about the deeds of God among His people and they’ll stream to us to get it.

Destiny and promise, Layer Two: We have come to a season of prophetic fulfillment and prophetic release. What God has promised is coming to us and we are moving from the season of the refreshing anointing of the Lord into an anointing of promised power.

In Matthew 10 and Luke 10, Jesus gave His disciples authority, first the 12 and then the 70, and He sent them out to cast out demons and to heal the sick. The miracles drew the multitudes. The miracles declared to all the world, “We’re not playing games. This is more than just a theological proposition or a set of ideas. God is real!”

There are still sick people in the world, demonized people, lame, blind and more. God loves them just as much today as He did when Jesus walked the earth. That’s why He hasn’t stopped doing miracles. We’ve seen more miracles in my congregation in the last 8 months than in all the years since we started in 1992 combined.

But now we’re called to take it outside the walls of the church and do in the marketplace what has been prophesied. Prophecies don’t come to fulfillment by accident but usually because people acted on them.

Destiny and promise, Layer Three: We have come into a season of increase in the prophetic itself, when most of what we do by our actions and by what we say with our mouths will carry prophetic significance and prophetic impact. The prophetic word uproots what is not God and plants what is, breaks down what is not God and builds what is (see Jer. 1:10). We have been called to be a church that by its very existence causes things not of God to fall, and things that are of God to rise.

It’s time for those of us with prophetic anointing to carry that out into the world, the marketplace, the workplace, the neighborhood. When people know by the prophetic word that God has their name, address and phone number delivered by someone in love, then they respond. It’s time to overcome our fear and begin to cross the boundaries to touch those outside the faith. The culture around us is daily becoming more ripe to receive.

Destiny and promise, Layer Four: To spontaneously enjoy the presence of God without any other agenda. Worship is going to go places it never went before. God is going to engage us in deeper and more dramatic ways in worship. Already, during worship, people are being sovereignly touched and physically healed without human intervention in my own congregation and in other places. I expect other and greater manifestations of His presence in the days to come.

It is a time such as Jesus spoke of in John 4:23-24: “‘But an hour is coming, and now is, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth; for such people the Father seeks to be His worshipers. God is spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth.'”

We’re going to need those times at the well in worship in the coming years in order not to be consumed by the intensity of what God will be giving us. Times on the mountain or drinking at the well of His presence keep us simple and pure. We must stay close to the Source. Such times of true and deep worship will keep us refreshed and empowered in the long and exciting years ahead.

Finally, the only thing that can stop this season from being the greatest time of our lives and the most exciting move of God in our lifetimes is fear. That’s why I began this word by speaking against the things the fear mongers are trying to tell us while they claim to be prophetic. “For God has not given us a spirit of timidity, but of power and love and discipline” (2 Tim. 1:7).

Fear is a prison. It makes you emotionally self-centered and sucks the hope out of life. Fear paralyzes its victims and blinds them to opportunities. Fear blinds us to the needs of others. It consumes our joy. Fear is useless. Without cause.

Matthew 6 removes the need for fear. We have a Father who cares for us, who will care for us. He never lets us down. Because of that, we’re free to walk in the power of the kingdom of God. Why do you supposed that when Jesus sent the 12 out on their first missionary journey to heal the sick, cast out demons and raise the dead, He told them, “Do not acquire gold, or silver, or copper for your money belts, or a bag for your journey, or even two coats, or sandals, or a staff; for the worker is worthy of his support” (Matt. 10:9-10). God would provide. No fear.

Trust Him in the days to come. They can be the best and most exciting days of our lives. We were born for such a time as this.