Former New Age Follower Shares Testimony and Warning
Warren B. Smith shares about how his wife and he became deceived with the teachings of the New Age Movement, via A Course in Miracles, taught by Oprah. The devil has his false prophets and teachers just like Jesus Christ has His True ministers of the Gospel.
We often point at the failings of Christian leaders and followers as justification for our turning away from God and His Word to the New Age teachings. But have we really ever studied the source of the New Age Movement and its promoters? If you knew you were breaking bread with the devil, would you willfully do it? Would you follow a teaching that originated in the Occult? Isn’t this what Jesus and Paul meant when they told us that Satan transforms himself into angels of light, and the wolf comes disguised as a sheep? Not everyone who is nice and kind is of God. Psalms 55:21 ESV says, “His speech was smooth as butter, yet war was in his heart; his words were softer than oil, yet they were drawn swords.” This is why Jesus said that the Pharisees were clean and proper on the outside, but inside they were corrupt and full of death and evil. God judges the hearts, the intents, and the motives, and man judges the outward manifestations of words and appearances. If it pleases the carnal mind and natural fleshly man, then it can’t be all bad, right?
The devil knows how we judge things and others, and he uses it to his advantage, by making evil appear as good, wrong appear as right, and demons appear as spirit-guides. ‘Testing’ the spirit behind a person and his/her words is imperative today for spiritual survival. This is the reason for this post, to show how something so innocuous as A Course in Miracles can be so demonic; and that someone who is as popular as Oprah can be used to lead so many astray from the true Jesus Christ.
Please take time to read Warren’s post describing how he and his wife were deceived into believing that they were a god that judged for themselves what was right and what was wrong, when in fact, as they later learned, they needed Jesus Christ and His Word to show them what they really needed was a savior to save them from their selfish desire to be a god in and of themselves.
A couple of quotes from the post:
“For some time now, my spiritual teachings had convinced me that I was a sinless, guiltless, perfect Son of God and that I was every bit as much a part of the universal Christ as Jesus or Buddha or anyone else. I had been taught that I was a holy part of God, inherently equal to Christ and that I didn’t need to be saved, redeemed, or born again. Because evil was only an illusion, there was no evil to be saved from. I had believed that I was responsible for myself and my world and I was the creator of my own reality.”
“In the midst of my study, I started to understand that for a number of years I had been letting my spiritual teachers—most especially the Course—tell me who Jesus really was and what His teachings really meant. I could see that through my own laziness in never reading or studying the Bible for myself, I had swallowed a false gospel—hook, line, and sinker.”
“I realized now that, although I was made in the image of God, I was not God or a part of God in any way. God was God, and I was me. I wasn’t Christ or a part of Christ, and neither was Buddha or anyone else. Jesus was the Christ, and there was no other. And, in spite of what anyone else tried to say, He had won an amazing victory on the cross of Calvary—one that Joy and I had learned to call on time after time. It was a victory that was fully described in the Scriptures and that so many of the old hymns proclaimed.”
“Something very mysterious had happened on that ‘old rugged cross’ that a whole New Age was doing hand-over-head flips to completely avoid. It was the ‘victory in Jesus’ that A Course in Miracles was desperately trying to redefine and explain away.”
“Finally, after all we had been through, I was starting to see that the heart of the Gospel is not so much that God helps those who help themselves, but rather that God helps those who can’t help themselves. It was not in affirming our strength, but in recognizing our weakness, that we had finally learned to ask the Lord for help. It was His grace, not our own self-sufficiency that had saved the day. Yet even though we had recognized our need to be saved from the evil that was coming at us, we had stubbornly refused to acknowledge Jesus as our personal Lord and Saviour. Clinging tenaciously to our metaphysical identities, we hadn’t understood that our faith ultimately had to be in Jesus, not in ourselves, and that Jesus meant it when He said:
“I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me.” (John 14:6)