"God is a Spirit: and they that worship him
must worship him in spirit and IN TRUTH."
(John 4:24 - my capitalization of words for emphasis)
Question. When is a Christian to avoid participating in worship like the plague?
Answer. (Which you must surely know already!) When it is not the God of the Bible who is being worshipped!
Which, in a nutshell, is the reason for me presenting this little piece concerning what is hyped as being the biggest Christian event in the UK. With an expected attendance of over 30,000, 'The Big Church Festival' taking place on 27/28 May, 2023 at the Wiston Estate in West Sussex is a jamboree of quite extraordinary proportions, with more than 50 artists performing across several stages. Such a great coming together has to be good for the health and expression of the Faith in these islands, must it not? This surely has to be something for we believers to feel good about and cheer on, yes? If only that was indeed the case...
By way of emphasizing just how cautious we must be when it comes to feted artists on the Christian music/worship scene today, I want here to focus on one example of a tare masquerading as wheat who has a huge following among the deceived, a lady hailed as a "great friend" of 'The Big Church Festival' by the name of Amanda Lindsey Cook, who will be appearing there again this year. If I've absolutely shocked and dismayed anyone by saying this of her, I will present concrete evidence - by the testimony of her own lips - that she in no way knows either the true God of the Bible or His Son, for she is NOT a born-again believer but a dyed-in-the-wool New Ager.
On April 11, 2019, 'The Christian Post' published an interview with her, which sadly provides abundant proof of what I am averring here. No-one who has experienced the new birth, and is indwelt by the Holy Spirit who witnesses only to absolute Truth, could say the things that she does in this interview, which testifies only to the fact that she is on an entirely different path to the Narrow Way; it is in fact the broad highway whose destination is destruction! (All that I quote here can be verified by accessing the relevant article: https://www.christianpost.com/news/bethels-amanda-lindsey-cook-reveals-why-she-went-silent-what-she-learned-during-difficult-season.html )
Cook: "Every day I increasingly felt like gravity and the great beyond, called God, was working in my favor. It was bringing things together, bringing things back to me and organizing puzzle pieces in a way that I didn't see they would fit together but they started fitting together. So it's as much a literal experience as it is a canon of sorts."
My comment: Cook is here identifying with a force. (Word of Faith teaching commonly holds that faith is a force). But even more worrying is her reference to "the great beyond, called God," going on to call Him an IT! This shocking depersonalization of the living God is nothing less than a blasphemous denial of and a mystical New Age re-definition of who He really is.
Cook: "I love this divine essence that we so commonly refer to as God. I think it becomes this common, almost familiar thing that it has connotations because we basically impose our belief system on whatever we think God is when we say the word "God." I love the names that this essence and this divine presence gives itself. In the Old Testament, where God describes themselves as "I am," also the name Yahweh, the intake and exhale of breath. I (also) love the name Emmanuel, "ever-present."
My comment: Her "God" is again defined as an IT, a vague and impersonal "divine essence" that gives ITself names. It's important not to miss the significance of her referencing Yahweh as "the intake and exhale of breath." The contemplative movement - an exponentially growing branch of counterfeit Christianity - has sanitised what is a deeply Hindu/Buddhist practice as "breath/centering prayer" but it is an Eastern occult technique for entering into an altered state of consciousness ("the silence") allowing supposed communing with the god within, of which all are seen to be a part. We might well also note that Emmanuel does not mean "ever-present" as Cook alleges of this essence/presence, but rather "God With Us" - and it is a prophetic Name of the Biblical Jesus, whom she perceives only as a New Age entity, as we'll go on to all too plainly see.
Cook: "So for this (song), I feel like there's a few layers to it. The song comes from the phrase, "I am because you are," the whole phrase, it's acknowledging that "I exist because you exist and therefore we exist." It's this common acknowledgment, this communal aspect of living, where we're all connected, we're all part of the common thread... to be connected at the source to this divine presence, this Christ consciousness, and to celebrate that in the very center of our own heart, the center of my own soul, that's where it exists. It's holding me together and it's holding you together, it's holding us together."
My comment: Cook's panentheistic mindset is clearly evidenced here, and surely most damningly by her use of the term "Christ consciousness," which has absolutely nothing to do with the Christ of Biblical revelation and everything to do with the supposed universally present internal "IT" of New Age thinking.
Cook: "When I got there (the house), I called one of my friends, Stephanie. I said to her, "because it's empty I thought it would feel eerie, but it actually feels really friendly." We started musing on that (and thought) perhaps that's actually what going into our soul feels like. When St. Theresa of Avila talks about the interior castle, perhaps that's what it actually feels like to go inward to the hidden spaces - the eternal internal, infinite spaciousness that is our spirit. Stephanie came out for a weekend and we talked about canonizing that kind of motif, that kind of picture in modern language. Perhaps, it's a thank you note to St. Theresa. Perhaps, it's a thank you note to everyone who has given us a language for those spaces in our soul."
My comment: OK. Teresa of Avila was a Roman Catholic mystic, and her book 'The Interior Castle' that Cook so favourably refers to here is a prominent work on "Christian" mysticism and "Christian" meditation, i.e. contemplative spirituality. "Going into our soul?" What Cook is talking about is the process of communing with the supposed god (of which we are all part) within, via occult practices.
Still not convinced? To see, and unarguably so, that Cook has completely bought into the New Age worldview and worships a different "Jesus," let's go to her Facebook posting of 19 April 2019, which reads:
"Happy Good Friday everyone. I never know how to greet people on this day... a day we mark as a moment in time when the Enlightened Master seemed to descend into shadows. It would have seemed at the time that it was a step backwards rather than a triumph. It would seem that life rolls out for all of us in a similar fashion. We want to fast forward these parts, these traumatic events."
So we know now that to Cook, the very Son of God, the Word made flesh, is merely an Enlightened Master of the New Age! Oh, may she find the real Christ while there is yet time for her to do so!
After the above exposing of the true, utterly delusional nature of her spirituality, it is easy to see why Amanda Cook is part of the Bethel stable of artists. Bill Johnson's NAR operation in Redding, California is a veritable epicentre of apostasy in these "anything goes" End Times which we have been catapulted into. And an integral part of the Bethel poison is its hugely influential music wing, which of course includes the Bethel Music "worship" group and Jesus Culture. Quite apart from Cook, and further greatly emphasizing the completely unsound and deceptive nature of 'The Big Church Festival,' Bethel Music will also be back there, as well as (Hillsong) United and Matt Maher. If perchance you didn't know, Maher is a committed Roman Catholic whose "Jesus" is the Eucharistic Christ of that utterly false faith, and not the Jesus of The Word. He is at the very forefront of the antichrist agenda to create unity between Roman Catholicism and evangelicalism, such unity being not in Truth but in Bible-debasing compromise!
As I write these words, a multitude of professing Christians will be eagerly getting ready to travel from all parts of the UK to the South East to participate in this sad, ecumenical shindig, throwing discernment and wisdom to the four winds. As an awful consequence, they will be enthusiastically singing along with artists who have a very different "Jesus," not knowing the real One. How dreadful to be joining in with the worship of a false god, blind to the blasphemy of their actions. I can only hope and pray that even just one person might happen upon this article, and the spiritual cataracts will be mercifully cut from their clouded eyes!
MY FRIENDS, WE MUST ALWAYS WORSHIP THE ONE TRUE GOD IN TRUTH ONLY!
"Be ye not unequally yoked together with unbelievers:
for what fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness?
and what communion hath light with darkness?"
(2 Corinthians 6:14)
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