Have The Following Gourds Infected Your Church?- Part One

"We went out into the field to gather herbs, and found a wild vine, and gathered thereof wild gourds his lap full and came and shed them into the pot of pottage, for they knew them not"- 2 Kings 4:39.

First of all, I would like to thank Tim Wirth who has invited me to post here for a few weeks while he is moving to the Mid-West and we pray that he has a safe and productive journey.

There was a famine in the land during the days of Elisha just as there is a spiritual famine today. The gourds infecting the church of this age are psychology, the Purpose Driven and Possibility Thinking philosophies, and Faith Movement theology, which are the real "wild gourds". A spiritual famine is on not knowing the word of God and this horrible condition is growing by the day due to user friendly churches, emergent groups, and the mega church. Yes, they may well be carrying a Bible but do the words of God carry them? How can we obtain the promises if we don't even know what the word of God has to say?

It is recorded that one of the prophets had gathered various herbs to put into a stew, although THEY DIDN'T KNOW WHAT KIND OF HERBS THEY HAD GATHERED. Some within that group knew there was poison in the pot as they had developed their taste buds to know the difference. Can we say the same today?

Many of us have exchanged the truth of God for the lie (Romans 1:25) and those lies have turned into the many resources of Satan (John 8:44). We have taken the gospel out of the church and replaced it with extra-biblical revelation and possibility thinking. Of the latter, some preach only from the so-called positive texts of the Bible despite Proverbs 30:5 to the contrary- "Every word of God is pure". What many of us might perceive as being negative may well be just what we need to be hearing to convict us of our sins and not coddle them.

When a preacher today gets excited about the word of God we act as if there were something wrong with him. "Why isn't he telling us more jokes? I want him to make me feel good". So the people turn to a warm and fuzzy pastor that make us feel good about ourselves and that is poison in the pot! We have allowed our taste buds to disintegrate when it comes to discerning truth. We have willingly inserted falsehood into the church as the sons of the prophets had done by placing potential harmful herbs in the stew. We seem to have no idea how detrimental our additives are to the word of God and our clergy seem to be in the same "stew". More in my next post.

David Norris
Spiritual Pathways Ministries