"Yes sir" -- Shannon
"How old are you?" -- Leader
"Young, 2 or 3" -- Shannon
"Can you see Jesus there? (Answer- yes) Can you see His face? Look into His eyes. What is He saying to you?" -- Leader
"I love you son." -- Shannon
"Just receive that. I want you to feel Jesus walk over towards you. Let me know when he is there." -- Leader
"He is there, I try to kneel. He stood me back up" -- Shannon
"Yes, he would not let you kneel. All of the fear and pain stems from this point. This is the core memory the Holy Spirit wants to heal. Shannon, I can hear Jesus saying this to me, for you. All of the things you have longed to do. To feel validated. The things you have tried to attain. To get feeling loved. To get recognition. All of the things you did in high school, then going into the Navy, then becoming a Navy Seal and how in all of those things the joy was taken away. Jesus is saying "I am restoring all of that because those things are true about you. You are a Navy Seal. You are an elite warrior. You are an amazing young man. And all that the enemy meant for evil, Jesus and the Holy Spirit is changing. He is going to turn it for good. You are the embodiment of what a Navy Seal is. It's true, it's who you are. You are a warrior for Him. You're honoring Him. He is also saying very clearly -- what I have given you no man can take. -- Leader
What the heck was that? Making up a narrative in your mind's eye? God wouldn't let you kneel? As if driven by guilt, Darren Wilson films a brief interlude with Shannon after this where he asks him what he would tell skeptics who think he was just making this stuff up. Beloved, it is not a matter of making things up. I can believe that Shannon felt that everything was real but that does not make it real. Shannon responds that he does not even think he can call himself a Christian! What was the point then of this exercise? It is the same exact thing you would get if you went to a yogi or a mystic. Picture yourself when you were three, imagine the person that hurt you is there and that they are apologizing or somehow making good. The only difference is they stuck Jesus in to the role of change agent. The rest of the prayer session seemed to be an exercise in affirming Shannon as a Navy Seal, not as a Christian. I do not doubt his pain nor do I doubt that this place may have helped him to deal with that pain. It just had nothing to do with the Gospel. I would actually fear for Shannon because when you open the door into the spirit realm you better be able to discern which are from God and which are not. Beloved there were actually two other scenes left undiscussed. They had problems as well but for the sake of length, I will leave it off with three of the closing quotes from this dangerous pile of heresy:
"God doesn't want us to just have this understanding of his thoughts in the Word alone. Yes, the Word is powerful, it is significant, it's huge, it is foundational but then comes the voice, the experience, of the spirit of god." -- Robbie Dawkins
"At the end of the day we want people encountering Jesus. We want people talking about Jesus. The whole thing is about making Jesus famous in the earth." -- Banning Liebscher
"This life is one relentless dance between us and the God who is pursuing us." -- Darren Wilson
But you cannot just talk about Jesus or pretend the whole thing is experiential. You cannot separate Him from His Word. When you do, you think you can command healing at your whims. When you do, you take ordinary coincidences and turn them into divine encounters. When you do, you think nothing of engaging in Eastern Mystic visualization and actually think it is prayer. When you do, you think Jesus makes trips to Mecca to demand salvation from targeted Muslims. In short, you can be as deluded as Darren Wilson into thinking you are making a movie guided by the Holy Spirit when in reality you are being led by the carnal spirits of this world and demonic forces in high places. I usually have a key verse for devotionals but this time I will offer up the entire Bible because the whole canon of Scripture screams to discerning Christians to stay far away from this dangerous, dangerous movie. This life beloved? It is one relentless dance between ourselves and the devil trying to kill us with our Father waiting for us to come home.
Reverend Anthony Wade -- September 30, 2016
