The latest book from Joel Osteen crosses the line...

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God said to Moses, "I am who I am." And he said, "Say this to the people of Israel, "I am has sent me to you.'" -- Exodus 3: 14 (ESV)

If you heard there was a new Christian book coming out entitled, "The Power of I Am", you might get very excited at first. It could be a fantastic journey through the awesome attributes of God! Perhaps it is an in depth study on the seven "I am" statements from Jesus in the Gospel of John. Maybe it is a look at the incredible encounter Moses had with God when the creator of the universe told us His glorious name -- I Am! Either way, what a subject for believers to embrace. A God focused book about the God who saved us while we were yet still sinners. The God who is the bread of life, the light of the world, the good shepherd, the resurrection and the life, the way the truth and the life and the vine to our branches. Only the truly reprobate could take the moment when God personalized Himself to the human race and make it about us. Only someone who has no clue about doctrine and less understanding of blasphemy could take the amazing concept of I Am and turn it into a decree and declare, word of faith, nonsensical heresy. In other words, only Joel Osteen.

Beloved we have no more time left to be coddling wolves. I understand that Joel seems like a great guy. He has a million dollar smile and a positive, uplifting, motivational gift that few have. None of that is going to matter when we are standing before Christ giving account and discover that He never knew us. I cannot tell you how many brothers and sisters give a nod and a wink when it comes to Osteen. Oh what harm is he doing! He makes me feel better about myself! It is time to stop making our salvation to be just about us. There are other people out there and they do not need to hear that this is their best life now. They need to hear they are a sinner and Christ died to save them. The gospel Joel preaches is no gospel at all. It is completely different with a different Jesus that has zero power to save anyone. The Bible teaches us about those who would bring a different gospel:

I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting him who called you in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel-- not that there is another one, but there are some who trouble you and want to distort the gospel of Christ. But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel contrary to the one we preached to you, let him be accursed. As we have said before, so now I say again: If anyone is preaching to you a gospel contrary to the one you received, let him be accursed. - Galatians 1: 6-9 (ESV)

So Joel Osteen's new book is entitled, "The Power of I Am" but it has nothing to do with God. It has to do with you. It has to do with the power Joel says is inside of you. He thinks so little about God that he cannot even see how utterly blasphemous it is to take the name of the Lord, I Am, and use it to prop up his word faith heresy. It is staggering in it insolence and obliviousness. This book idea came out of the popularity of a sermon he gave by the same title. Oprah loved it so much she used it in her life class series and Joel was happy to come on and pitch it. Here is a link to the sermon:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_kjSK-PcU9o

The opening premise is that what follows our self-statements that begin with "I am" determine our life. That what follows the words "I am" will "come looking for you." So if you choose to say I am ugly, then ugliness will come looking for you. If you say I am poor then poverty will seek you out. The good news according to Joel is that we get to choose the I am statements that come out of our mouth. So if we say, I am healthy then health will start looking for us. If we say I am blessed then blessing will start looking for us. The principle he claims is at work here is that the positive I am statements "trigger God" to send these things to you.

I kid you not. He actually said that. For the pro-Joel crowd who cannot see the enormity of damage he causes in the kingdom we need to pause here and consider these opening heresies. God is not up in heaven waiting for us to say positive things about ourselves so He can finally release blessings upon us. He is not some narcissistic tooth fairy. He is omnipotent and that means all-powerful. Who is god in the scenario Joel has outlined? We are! Our words control God! What absurdities! Imagine a person seeking God because they were just diagnosed with terminal cancer and they hear this nonsense. That all they have to do is say I am healthy every morning and then God will be activated to send health their way. Then they get worse. Then they die. Then they go to hell because they were separated from God and Joel did nothing to help the separation. Instead he sold her some magic beans that had no magic in them at all. What damage is then done to her family who watched her say these silly self-help statements every morning while she was dying? Will they ever want to come to God? Probably not. Probably an entire family wiped out from the possibility of salvation even though the cancer may have been the triggering event to send that woman seeking the Lord! At one point Joel says that even if you are poor you should say I am well-off. How would that work in the slums of third world countries Joel? If your theology is only good for the suburbs then it is by definition false. So we come to the first Bible twisting of this sermon:

For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them. - Ephesians 2: 10 (ESV)

To Joel, because the New Living Translation (NLT) says "masterpiece" instead of workmanship, this means that God wants us to constantly remind ourselves that we are a masterpiece. A work of art. One of a kind. Me, me, me. The problem is that the NLT often misses the mark when it comes to good translation and to quote verse ten here out of context is borderline criminal. Verse ten is part of a teaching on the new way of grace versus the old way of works. That we cannot by our own works do anything. That we are actually God's workmanship, created by Him for His good pleasure and to do His works He has laid out for us. Powerful when you meditate on it but Joel Osteen takes it and turns it into a really bad Saturday Night Live skit of the Stuart Smalley show.

Next up Joel wants to use the Bible to show people who spoke positively about themselves. So he heads to the Psalms, which are largely very uplifting and positive and refers us to Psalm 139 where David said, "I praise you because you made me in a wonderful way." Osteen then wonders what it would be like if we all talked about ourselves like David did. So what's wrong with that preacher? Two things. First it misrepresents what God is trying to get across in Psalm 139 and secondly, it cherry picks a verse and makes a false assumption about David. So you can ascribe to Joel's teaching if you like but do not delude yourself into thinking it is remotely what God said and if we are not approaching the Bible to hear from God then why approach it at all? Psalm 139 is not about David positively confessing who he is. It is a celebration of the omniscience and omnipresence of God Almighty! The one verse he references out of context is meant to marvel at the work God has done in creating us. It is to bring glory to God but Joel Osteen uses it to teach people to bring glory to themselves. Secondly however, he leaves the listener with the impression that David believed in positive confession and the word faith tenets when nothing in Scripture indicates that. It is just as easy to find verses David wrote that were of the opposite emotions:

My heart is in anguish within me; the terrors of death have fallen upon me.Fear and trembling come upon me, and horror overwhelms me.And I say, "Oh, that I had wings like a dove! I would fly away and be at rest;yes, I would wander far away; I would lodge in the wilderness; SelahI would hurry to find a shelter from the raging wind and tempest." - Psalm 55: 4-8 (ESV)

What? David confessing that his heart is in anguish? That the terrors of death have fallen upon him? That horror overwhelms him? Doesn't he realize that anguish, terror, and horror will seek him out? What absolute nonsense from Osteen. What is more disturbing however is that this teaching will slaughter sheep. It will lead people to hell yet we think because he does it with a smile we ought to give him a pass. But we should not and hopefully the next scripture abuse is enough to convince us. Osteen tells the story of Sarai, the wife of Abraham. He explains that because a woman not bearing children was looked down upon Sarai must have had a lot of bad "I ams." Joel said he could see her saying, "I am a failure, I am not attractive, I am inferior." But now she has this promise from God that as an older woman she was going to have a baby but according to Osteen, "God knew it would never come to pass unless He changed her I ams." He would go on to say that this was so imperative that God changed her name to Sarah, which means princess. So according to Pastor Joel, now Sarah had to hear over and over again that she was a princess every time someone said her name. Good morning princess (Sarah). Pass the ketchup princess (Sarah). This way it got down on the inside of her. So she went from I am a failure to I am a princess. Wow, what a story! What a tale of transformation! If only it were true! But it is not beloved. NONE of this is true. None of it is accurate. None of this is scriptural. Let's go down the list of bible twisting:

1) While it is true that barrenness for women was looked down upon Joel reads into scripture all of the negative "I ams." Nowhere does the Bible even hint that Sarai said all of these negative things about herself.

2) Once again the god Osteen is preaching about is not the God of the Bible. The notion that God could not bring something He wanted to pass unless we changed our self talk is ludicrous. It is arrogantly ludicrous.

3) Osteen teaches here that God changed her name to Sarah in order to change her self image and reverse the curse of the negative I ams. Perhaps Joel should have checked some research materials first. The names Sarai and Sarah mean the same thing in Hebrew - princess. This eviscerates his entire premise that now she heard from everyone she was a princess because her former name meant the same exact thing. Most scholars believe that the true significance of the name change is a seal of the covenant God was making. Why let thousands of years of solid research and bible teaching stop you when you got books to sell?

Beloved if you read this and think it is no big deal that is really a big problem. That someone would abuse the sacred Word of God for what amounts to shameful monetary gain should offend us. Forget Kentucky clerks who do not understand the Bible. This is where we ought to feel grieved in our spirit because not only is His Word being butchered but it is being done to lead people away from Christ! For the unsaved person at his church that day do you think their biggest problem is they don't think highly about themselves? Probably the opposite! Their biggest problem is they do not know Jesus Christ. It would be as offensive as if someone preached that when we say the right "I ams" we invite the goodness of God. As if His goodness needs an invitation from our desperately wicked hearts. Yet that is exactly what Osteen says in this sermon. It would be as offensive as if someone said that the words we speak can bless or curse our future. You guessed it beloved. He said it during this sermon. As if we control the blessings of God by merely speaking it. As if we can actually lay a curse upon ourselves with our words even though Jesus broke every curse at Calvary! The unmitigated gall! But he was not done as Osteen next rips a verse out of context from the Prophet Joel where God was telling the nations to not look for excuses to avoid the coming war. The line is - let your weak say I am strong. What Joel Osteen does to this is breathtakingly evil:

"Scripture says, let the weak say I am strong. So let the sick say I am healthy. Let the poor say I am well-off." - Joel Osteen

Osteen of course added the second and third lines. They are not in the Bible. Can you imagine someone about to lose their home and this is what they are told God is saying? Or someone very ill. There was a story a few weeks back about a woman who refused cancer treatment because she was believing her "seed faith" was going to heal her by all the money she was sending in to Kenneth Copeland's ministries. She of course died. May God have mercy on Kenneth Copeland because he will answer for ever sheep he has slaughtered in pursuit of the riches of this world. The same goes for Joel Osteen. Even though this is an enormous amount of heresy for less than a half hour of preaching, Osteen was not quite done yet. He next goes into the story of the 12 spies and teaches that the 10 with the bad report simply had bad "I ams" while Caleb and Joshua had good "I ams." As silly as this is what he does next is far more egregious:

"These ten spies went on to say, "Moses, why did you even bring us here. We will die in the wilderness." God answered back something very powerful. He said in Numbers 14:28 "I will do for you exactly what you have said. You said you were going to die in the wilderness, so you will die in the wilderness." God is saying the same thing to us. I'm going to do exactly what you've been saying." - Joel Osteen

What? Beloved this is why understanding scripture is so crucial. The point here was not that they had negative I ams. It was that they had no faith in God. More importantly however is the presumptive exhortation that God is saying the same thing to us today. Is this sinking in yet? How wrong is it to fill believers and those seeking God with false hopes of fairy tales regarding God. That He is just waiting for us to speak so that He might act. Once again, that makes us God, not Him. In the theology of Joel Osteen, we are gods. That is what word faith believes. A lot of it is centered on the butchering of one particular scripture, which Osteen mentions throughout this sermon:

Therefore it is of faith that it might be according to grace, so that the promise might be sure to all the seed, not only to those who are of the law, but also to those who are of the faith of Abraham, who is the father of us all (as it is written, "I have made you a father of many nations") in the presence of Him whom he believed--God, who gives life to the dead and calls those things which do not exist as though they did; - Romans 4: 16-17 (ESV)

Osteen teaches at different points in this half hour that we are taught to call things that were not as if they were. He openly admits that many of these affirmations may not even be true but that we are to call things that are not as if they were. That our words have the creative power of God. Let me assure you they do not. These verses from Romans cannot be clearer. It is GOD who has the power to call things that are not as if they were. That is because He is above our time. He has foreknowledge. He knew Abraham was going to be the father of many nations even before the child of promise was born. These verses do not teach us that we have this power at all.

But therein lies the rub beloved. The theology of Joel Osteen teaches us that we are in fact little gods. That our words have the power to create when only God's does. That we are to call things into existence when only God can. He is not a brother in error. He is a wolf of the highest order. His intent is irrelevant. The only thing that matters is his teaching. For years I have been warning against him. That every day is not a Friday and this is not our best life. That we do not go to church and worship for ourselves as his wife once famously quipped. We have to start thinking of the people who are too young in the Lord to know any better and those desperately seeking him who get taught this garbage. That if we just think better of ourselves then all the riches of this life will be ours. The entire concept of his latest book is utter blasphemy against the name of God. A revered name. A name to fear. The name at which every knee shall bow and every tongue confess. Instead, Joel Osteen took that name, made it about you, slapped a glossy cover on it and for only $20 you can read about how great you art. Heaven help Joel Osteen to repent and those who follow him, may the Lord show them mercy. But for us who truly know better it is time to stop coddling the wolf. I am has sent me to you beloved.

Reverend Anthony Wade - September 17, 2015

Authors Bio:
Credentialed Minister of the Gospel for the Assemblies of God. Owner and founder of 828 ministries. Vice President for Goodwill Industries. Always remember that in all things God works for the good of those who love Him and are called according to His purpose.