A Theological Response to Criticism of the Lakeland Outpouring and Todd Bentley 大家可以从马正远的博客下载pdf文件,有55页. http://jaesonma.com/LakelandCORRECTED BIBLICAL REASONS TO RECEIVE GOD’S GLORY AND GIVE IT AWAY IN POWER EVANGELISM © June 8, 2008 (Corrected Version) By Dr. Gary S. Greig Senior Editor, Theology and Acquisitions, Regal Publishing Group Former Associate Professor of Old Testament and Hebrew, Regent University School of Divinity Ph.D., 1990, Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, The University of Chicago Contents An unmistakable outpouring of the Holy Spirit ...... 2 Criticism generating a lot of heat but little light... 2 Objection 1: “The healings aren’t really real” and “People are only working themselves into altered states of consciousness.”...... 3 Is the devil behind the healings and resurrections? 4 Normative New Testament evangelism is accompanied by God’s power ..... 5 Objection 2: “Many healings are partial or gradual, and some people lose their healing after they claim to have been healed.” “Healings in the New Testament always happened immediately and could not be ‘lost’.”....... 8 Don’t let the enemy steal your healing! Close the door to all sin ........ 9 Objection 3: “The manifestations, shaking, vibrating, laughing, talk of electricity, and weird behavior didn’t happen in the Bible and cannot be from God.” ....10 Forget the weirdness and look at the fruit ..11 The raw power of God and human flesh: shaking, falling, and vibrating ......12 Energy, electricity, heat, and fire—yes, they’re in the Bible too...13 Shadows, handkerchiefs, and aprons: creativity without hand-wringing.....14 Cataloging manifestations of God’s power coming upon human bodies....16 Having a healthy, biblical expectation of miracles..18 Objection 4: “There is no emphasis on repentance and holiness in the Lakeland meetings, as there always has been in classic revivals and awakenings throughout recent history as in the Great Awakening and the Second Great Awakening.”....18 Objection 5: “We should not be teaching people to interact with angels. Satan masquerades as an angel of light and people can be deceived by demonic angels like Joseph Smith, founder of Mormonism, was deceived by the deceptive, demonic angel ‘Moroni.’” ....19 Golden bowl prayer and worship has only Father God’s address on it..20 Prayer and worship, no. Interaction, yes. Back to discerning the fruit .21 Focusing on Father God and interacting with His household servants ..21 A resurrected computer and a stopgap repair from an angel of the Lord ...22 God’s people speaking God’s words to angels ....23 Learning to pass on God’s words to the angels leads to very good fruit ...23 Objection 6: “It’s wrong and misguided for us to describe angels in detail or to mention their names. This will get our focus off of Jesus.” ..25 Objection 7: “There is no such thing as angels manifesting themselves as female angels in Scripture. Jesus taught that angels are genderless. Talk of female angels is New Age deception.”25 Guardian angels and mirroring God’s image in humans..27 “Perhaps it’s his angel”??!!—Not a typical quote from today’s Western Church...27 “In the image of God He made him, male and female He made them” ...28 God the Father and the motherly aspects of His nature....29 The ‘Imago Dei’ and the angels: Justin, Tertullian, and Calvin...30 Zechariah’s visions and angelic spirits carrying out Yahweh’s will ..31 Objection 8: “No Scripture supports the idea that the Holy Spirit bestows healing mantles through His angels. Only the Holy Spirit ministers healing, not angels.” ...35 The Angel of His presence and ten thousand angels accompanying the Holy Spirit from Sinai ...35 Healing mantles—don’t leave the meetings without them....36 Clothed with the Spirit, burning with fire...37 The Holy Spirit can heal and strengthen through angels too ...37 Objection 9: “Todd Bentley teaching that believers can go up frequently in the Spirit to God’s throne in heaven, is unbiblical and borders on New Age visualization.” ...38 Jesus saw the Father in the heavenly throne room....39 Hebrews: entering the heavenly sanctuary and approaching the throne ....41 Which part of ‘approaching’ and ‘entering’ do we not understand!?....43 New Age? No way! Biblical practice leads to good fruit again ...44 Objection 10: “Todd Bentley is a false prophet, because he teaches things I cannot find in Scripture.” .44 It is the fruit that matters most in distinguishing true and false prophets ..45 Assessing good vs. bad character even more than prophetic accuracy ....48 1 Kings 13—true prophets should not let themselves become false prophets ...49 False prophets focus on money, serve self not the Lord, and will be divisive, arrogant, competitive..........52-55 Biblical Reasons to Receive God’s Glory and Give It Away in Power Evangelism 2 © Gary S. Greig, Ph.D., 2008 An unmistakable outpouring of the Holy Spirit Over the past month and a half, there has been an unmistakable outpouring of the Holy Spirit in Lakeland, Florida, led by Canadian healing evangelist Todd Bentley, Stephen Strader, pastor of Ignited Church, Lakeland, Florida, David Tomberlin, and other colleagues of these leaders. Thousands of Christian leaders from almost 40 countries have visited the Lakeland meetings, and millions around the world in 214 nations have watched on live television through God TV and the internet, as multiple lame people have gotten out of their wheelchairs and walked, as blind eyes have received sight, as deaf ears have opened, and as of this writing, up to 20 accounts have been reported of clinically dead people being raised to life through the prayers of people who have visited the Lakeland meetings. The Lakeland meetings not only bear similarities to the Argentine revival of the 1980s-1990s and the Toronto and Brownsville awakenings of the 1990s (each of which I personally witnessed or experienced), the level of God’s power being poured out in the meetings is extraordinary, to say the least. It is clear from the daily broadcasts of the Lakeland meetings that scores of people are putting their faith in Christ and many are being healed from all kinds of diseases and conditions. Todd Bentley, 32, a tattooed, body-pierced, T-shirt-wearing evangelist from British Columbia, is not really "your grandmother's evangelist", as Charisma editor Lee Grady puts it. "I grew up a drug addict," Bentley explains. "I got saved at 18 in my drug dealer's trailer because I had an experience with God." His purpose, he says, is to preach intimacy with God. "Christianity has become a religious, organized structure. But people are realizing that the power of God is real, and that the Kingdom of God isn't just a bunch of people sitting around talking [see 1 Cor. 4:20]." Todd Bentley is no fly-by-night Bible teacher, “with an untutored grasp of Christian theology,” as one theology professor erroneously claimed.1 I beg to differ. I have personally followed Todd’s teachings (on CD’s and on the internet), his books, and his ministry for the last eight years, and I have never found a biblically and theologically untrained evangelist or ministry leader over the past twenty years who accurately interprets and rightly handles the Scriptures as well as Todd Bentley has done in his teachings and writings. For example Todd’s book, The Reality of the Supernatural World: Exploring Heavenly Realms and Prophetic Experiences,2 is not only straightforward in it’s treatment of the relevant biblical evidence but is also careful and judicious, and the same cannot be said of many charismatic authors’ treatment of Scripture in the huge amount of books being published in the Prayer and Renewal movement today. Criticism generating a lot of heat but little light Unfortunately in North America, when the Holy Spirit moves through a new leader to spread the gospel and further God’s Kingdom, there has arisen the normal rash of so-called Bible “experts,” heresy hunters, and even godly leaders in the Body of Christ who feel the need to criticize or “correct” what they do not understand 1 Such an accusation betrays this professor’s own unwillingness to examine carefully Todd Bentley’s teachings and to re-examine carefully the relevant biblical passages and their interpretation by historic biblical scholarship and by theologians throughout the history of the Church: his attitude hardly represents objective theological scholarship. 2 Todd Bentley, The Reality of the Supernatural World: Exploring Heavenly Realms and Prophetic Experiences, Ladysmith, BC, Canada: Sound of Fire Productions, 2005. Biblical Reasons to Receive God’s Glory and Give It Away in Power Evangelism 3 about the way God is moving or what they show themselves to be unaware of in Scripture, as it relates to what the Scriptures show about power evangelism, the power of the Holy Spirit, and the spiritual inheritance and Kingdom mission of every believer today, that has been taught by Todd Bentley over the years and is now being taught about and ministered at the Lakeland meetings. Following are the chief objections and criticisms on the Internet and circulating in e-mail newsletters and in print that I am aware of that need to be answered in the light of Scripture: Objection 1: “The healings aren’t really real” and “People are only working themselves into altered states of consciousness.” One can hardly believe the credulity and the tacit denial of reality in such claims. It is hardly objective to claim about the Lakeland meetings, as the reporter of the Tampa Tribune did in a recent article, that “whether healing in a medical sense is delivered here may be hard to measure.” This kind of thinking is echoed by selfproclaimed Bible “experts,” theologians, and critics, who really do not know the Scriptures well, who are unfamiliar with biblical languages (Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic), who are unfamiliar with the value of much of historic biblical scholarship, who seem to know nothing of the healing power of the resurrected Jesus Christ operating in the world today, and who seem to be completely ignorant of what the Bible shows about power evangelism, healing, and revival. Such people claim about Lakeland the same things they claimed about the past outpourings of the Holy Spirit in Argentina, Toronto, and Brownsville that “desperate people are looking for quick fixes” but are only getting “false hope.” These so-called “experts” claim that “participants leave [the meetings] believing they are truly healed, but back in the real world they find nothing has changed.” Again one is amazed that such presumptuous statements are made publicly without any supporting evidence whatsoever from Scripture or from any other authoritative source to prove their claims. Come on, dear readers: this is not that complicated! Such statements so obviously deny the empirical facts readily visible to the naked eye watching the Lakeland meetings. One has just to watch the nightly meetings: people who have so obviously been confined to wheel chairs are getting out of them and walking and running! Some of those formerly bound to wheelchairs were obviously unwieldy in taking their first steps, clearly confirming the fact that they have been unable to walk for years. One could watch on the Internet and on God TV as people with blind eyes start laughing as they can now see out of their formerly blind eyes, and people with deaf ears say they can now hear out of their formerly deaf ears. Multiple children with crossed-eyes, whose parents and relatives testified on live TV that they had been born with the condition, were visibly healed with perfectly normal eyes. And the list of clearly evident healings goes on and on. To suggest, as some of the critics do, that all these people experiencing dramatic healings, who are testifying and visibly demonstrating that they have been healed and can do things with the healed parts of their bodies that they were formerly unable to do—to suggest they are liars or are somehow “making it up” is not at all credible, and it borders on the kind of insane thinking of world leaders like Mahmoud Ahmadinajad, President of Iran, who actually tried to convince students and faculty at Columbia University on September 24, 2007, that the Holocaust murder of millions of Jews never happened in World War II. It was self-evident to all observers then that it was not very wise to try to convince highly intelligent, thinking people, who make it their business to do careful historical research, that the Nazi Holocaust never happened. And it hardly represented clear-headed, objective thinking on Biblical Reasons to Receive God’s Ahmadinajad’s part. But this is how many critics are approaching the evidence seen online and on TV in the daily Lakeland meetings. After all, how does one “make up” getting out of a wheelchair and walking after being bound to that wheelchair for 10 years, with one’s family members testifying, as happens frequently at Lakeland, to one’s previous inability to even stand up, let alone walk around? How do you “make up” people coming back from being clinically dead (!), especially after the onset of rigor mortis stiffening the muscles and limbs, that typically manifests within one-tothree hours of clinical death3? How does one make up impossible miracles like these? One recent case of an older woman being resurrected after rigor-mortis had set in has been called a medical “miracle” by doctors and has been reported by the Associated Press,4 ABC News,5 and Fox News6 for the whole world to see. Is the devil behind the healings and resurrections? It is also clear that the devil and demons are not the source of these healings, no matter how much critics claim the opposite. Yes, in the last days, which we are in, Scripture says that there will be false prophets and messiahs exercising counterfeit miracles, signs, and wonders, as is made clear by Matt. 24:24, 2 Thes. 2:7-13, and Rev. 13:11-17. But the one big difference is the fruit (Matt. 7:15-23 and see below at the end of this paper on biblical guidelines for discerning good and bad fruit). The fruit of these false prophets’ and messiahs’ words and deeds of power will not consist of people loving Jesus and wanting to serve God with all their hearts. Instead, false prophets and messiahs will cause people to “delight in wickedness” (2 Thes. 2:12) and to serve themselves, man, Mammon, money, and ultimately the Beast (Rev. 13:15-16; see 2 Tim 3:1-5 “[in the last days] People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient”). And last time I checked the relevant Scripture passages, it was manifestly self-evident that the devil would hardly make lame people walk, blind people see, deaf people hear, and dead people come back to life, so that they love and praise Jesus and want to serve God like never before, as has manifestly been the case with those who have been healed and resurrected from the dead through the Lakeland outpouring. Jesus’ healing ministry included both healing and casting out demons, as summary descriptive statements from the Synoptic Gospels like Matt. 4:23, parallel to Mark 1:39, clearly show. And Jesus was accused by the Pharisees of deriving his power from the devil and demonic forces, to which He responded that the devil wasn’t in the business of casting out his demons and healing people in a way that glorifies God and His Kingdom—only the Holy Spirit heals people to glorify Jesus and to manifest God’s Kingdom: Matt. 12:27-287-- 12:27 And if I cast out demons by Beelzebul, by whom do your sons cast them out? For this reason they will be your judges. 12:28 But if I cast out demons by the Spirit of God, then the kingdom of God has already overtaken you. Some of today’s critics also claim that true biblical revival is confined only to “believers having meaningful prayer, sharing the gospel with others and learning the Bible.” But such statements are biblically incomplete and are therefore to be rejected. And those who make these statements offer no biblical references whatsoever to support these claims. Where in heaven’s name is the Bible passage that proves that true biblical revival only involves believers having “meaningful prayer” (whatever that means: what is “unmeaningful prayer”?), “sharing the gospel,” and “learning the Bible”? Clearly biblical revival can involve these activities but it is not limited to them—it is much, much more! Normative New Testament evangelism is accompanied by God’s power A simple perusal of the following passages shows that true biblical revival always involved word and deed, the preaching of the gospel alongside people ministering and xperiencing (not just talking about) God’s healing and miraculous power: Matt. 4:23; 9:35-36; 10:1, 7-8; 11:5; 12:15, 18; 15:30; 19:2 (cf. Mk. 10:1); 21:14 (cf. Lk. 21:37); Mk. 1: 38-39; 2:2, 11; 3:14-15; 6:12-13; 10:1 (cf. Mat. 19:2); Lk. 4:18; 5:17, 24; 6:6-11, 17-18; 7:22; 9:1-2; 10:9, 13; 13:10-13, 22, 32; 14:4, 7ff.; 21:37 (cf. Mat. 21:14); 16:15-18, 20; Jn. 3:2; 7:14-15, 21-23, 31, 38; 10:25, 32, 38; 12:37, 49; 14:10, 12; Acts 1:1; 2:22; 3:6, 12; 4:29-30; 5:12-16, 20-21, 28, 42; 6:8, 10; 8:4-7, 12; 9:17-18 (cf. 22:13), 34-35; 10:38; 14:3, 8-10, 15ff.; 15:12, 36; 18:5, 11 (cf. II Cor. 12:12; I Cor. 2:4-5); 19:8-12; Rom. 15:18-19; I Cor. 2:4-5; 11:1; 12:1-11, 28-31; 14:22-25; II Cor. 12:12; Gal. 3:5; Phil. 4:9; I Thes. 1:5-6; Heb. 2:3-4; 6:1-2; Jas. 5:13-16. Indeed Paul said in Romans 15:18-19 that only the proclamation of the gospel that is accompanied by healing, signs and wonders, that display the power of the risen Lord, represents a full proclamation of the gospel: Rom. 15:18-19 (NIV)— I will not venture to speak of anything except what Christ has accomplished through me in leading the Gentiles to obey God by what I have said and done— by the power of signs and miracles, through the power of the Spirit. So from Jerusalem all the way around to Illyricum, I have fully proclaimed the gospel of Christ. [italics and boldface mine] In this passage Paul characterizes his twofold ministry ("word and deed") by saying,"I have fully proclaimed” (Greek pleroo "fill, complete, fulfill"8) the gospel of Christ"(Rom. 15:19b). Paul's account seems to make it clear that a "full" gospel 8BDAG (W. Bauer, W. F. Arndt, W. F. Gingrich, and F. W. Danker, A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000]), pp. 827-829; The use of Greek pleroo "bring (the gospel) to full expression" in Rom. 15:19 cannot mean that Paul finished preaching the gospel, because he was still planning to visit Rome and preach the gospel further in Spain (Rom. 1:13, 15; 15:23f.). Nor can it mean that he said everything there was to say about the gospel (J. Murray, The Epistle to the Romans [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1968], p. 214). But, as New Testament scholar Prof. Gerhard Friedrich points out, it means that Paul proclaimed the gospel in the way he described in 15:18-19, "in word and deed, by the power of signs and wonders, by the power of the Spirit": "Again, Rom. 15:19 . . . does not mean that Paul has concluded his missionary work, but that the gospel is fulfilled when it has taken full effect. In the preaching of Paul Christ has shown Himself effective in word and sign and miracle (v. 18). Hence the gospel has been brought to fulfillment from Jerusalem to Illyricum and Christ is named in the communities (v.20)" (Friedrich, in G. Kittel, ed., Theological Dictionary of the New Testament [Grand Rapids:Eerdmans, 1964-74], vol. 2, p. 732). proclamation consists both of preaching or teaching the word and of attendant works of power--signs and wonders--through the power of the Holy Spirit. Mainstream New Testament scholars have known this for a very long time. And most of the critics and Bible “experts” criticizing the Lakeland outpouring and Todd Bentley would have a very hard time demonstrating that they know the text of the New Testament better than these scholars. For example, German New Testament scholar, Prof. Otfried Hofius, summarizes the New Testament evidence concerning the integral relationship of healing, signs and wonders, and spiritual gifts to the proclamation of the gospel: According to the witness of the Synoptic Gospels, Jesus sent out his disciples to preach and to perform miracles (Mat. 10:7f.; Mk. 3:14f.; Lk. 9:1f.; 10:9; cf. Mk. 6:7ff.; Lk. 9:6) . . . . Similarly, Acts mentions many times the correlation of apostolic proclamation and apostolic miracle-working (2:2f.; 4:29f.; cf. 3:1ff.; 4:16, 22; 5:12; 6:8; 8:5ff.; 9:32ff.; 15:12; 20:7ff.). The miracles are co-ordinated with the preaching--they are "accompanying signs," by which Christ confirms the word of the witnesses (Acts 14:3; cf. Mk. 16:20). As in the authoritative word (Acts 6:10) so in the signs is manifested the power of the Holy Spirit promised to the disciples (Acts 1:8). . . . For Paul, too, "word and deed," preaching and signs belong together; in both Christ is at work in the power of the Spirit (Rom. 15:18f.). Signs and wonders accompany the proclamation which takes place "in demonstration of the Spirit and power" (1 Cor. 2:4; cf. 1 Thes. 1:5). . . . To the hearers of the preaching also the Holy Spirit mediates miraculous powers (Gal. 3:5). That is why alongside the gifts of proclamation the charisma of healing and the power to perform miracles belong to the living gifts of the Spirit in the church (1 Cor. 12:18ff., 28; cf. Jas. 5:14f.). Finally Hebrews also bears witness that God confirms the preaching of salvation, which proclaims the dawn of the age of salvation, by signs and wonders (2:3ff.), which, as "powers of the world to come" (6:5), foreshadow the completion of salvation. . . . Preaching and miracles thus belong essentially together according to the New Testament. In both Jesus Christ proves himself to be the living Lord, present in his church in the Holy Spirit.9 Normative New Testament evangelism, then, includes healing ministry and ministry with all spiritual gifts, as a careful examination of the passages cited above prove. But this conclusion does not suggest, on the other hand, that any form of evangelism not accompanied by miracles is not true evangelism or that such evangelism is substandard, as some critics say that advocates of power evangelism are claiming. The fact that Paul preached the gospel without any signs and wonders at the Areopagus in Athens (Acts 17:16-34) is enough to show that evangelism is not substandard when no signs or wonders are performed, though it is not normative New Testament evangelism. The obviously anointed ministry of such a great evangelist as Billy Graham is enough to show that evangelism unaccompanied by miraculous healing is not substandard. But even Graham affirms the use in the 9O. Hofius, in C. Brown, ed., The New International Dictionary of New Testament Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1986), vol. 2, pp. 632-633. Biblical Reasons to Receive God’s Glory and Give It Away in Power Evangelism 7 © Gary S. Greig, Ph.D., 2008 Church today of all spiritual gifts, including the miraculous gifts--healing, tongues, miraculous powers, etc.--because, according to him, they are biblical.10 Embracing Jesus’ way of doing evangelism And though evangelism unaccompanied by healing and miraculous gifts is not substandard, it does seem biblically abnormal for critics and Bible “experts” to reject and refuse to embrace the way Jesus, the apostles, and the Early Church normally evangelized with preaching accompanied by miraculous gifts and healing signs and wonders. And no, it will not do to claim the old, tired-out, stale, unbiblical claim that healing and miracles stopped after the New Testament apostolic age. It has been proven over and over again from internal textual evidence in the New Testament and from empirical evidence throughout Church history that healing and miracles were normal in the post-biblical Early Church and continued throughout the entire stretch of Church history till today.11 The fact is that Todd Bentley and his colleagues are only doing what Jesus commanded! Jesus not only commanded His disciples to heal the sick when He sent them out to preach the gospel of the Kingdom of God (Matt. 10:1f., 5-8; Mk. 6:7, 12-13; Lk. 9:1-2; 10:1, 9), but Jesus also commanded His disciples to train all disciples in the Early Church to depend on God’s Spirit and both to preach the gospel and heal the sick. Just as Jesus trained His disciples to reproduce His message and His Kingdom ministry, they, in turn, were to train the Church to do the same (In 1 Cor. 11:1 Paul says “Follow my example as I follow the example of Christ”; Phil. 4:9; 1 Thes. 1:6): Matt. 28:18-20— 28:18 Then Jesus came up and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. 28:19 Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, 28:20 teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” [italics and boldface mine] John 14:12-13—14:12 I tell you the solemn truth, the person who believes in me will perform the miraculous12 deeds that I am doing, and will perform greater deeds than these, because I am going to the Father. The apostles not only proclaimed the gospel with preaching and healing, but they also taught the disciples they made to proclaim the gospel with preaching and healing--non-apostles like Stephen (Acts 6:8, 10), Philip (Acts 8:4-7, 12); Ananias 10Billy Graham, The Holy Spirit: Activating God's Power in Your Life (Waco: Word, 1978), chapter 13. 11 G. S. Greig and K. N. Springer, eds., The Kingdom and the Power, Ventura, CA: Regal Books, 1993; J. Ruthven, On the Cessation of the Charismata: The Protestant Polemic on Postbiblical Miracles, Sheffield Academic, 1993; Jack Deere, Surprised by the Power of the Spirit, Zondervan Publishing House, 1993; S. M. Burgess, The Holy Spirit: Eastern Christian Traditions Peabody: Hendrickson, 1989. 12 New Testament scholars widely recognize that the Greek term, erga "works," when referring to Jesus and God the Father in the Gospel of John, denote miraculous works and are closely related to the semeia, "signs," of Jesus. So, for example, the healing of the man born blind in John 9 is referred to as "the works of God (ta erga tou Theou)" in John 9:3 and as one of "such signs (toiauta semeia)" in John 9:16 ("The deeds of God and Jesus, specifically miracles" BDAG, p. 390; R. C. Trench, Notes on the Miracles of Our Lord [London: Macmillan, 1856], p. 6; K. H. Rengstorf, "semeion," in G. Kittel, ed., Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, vol. 7, pp. 247-248). Biblical Reasons to Receive God’s Glory and Give It Away in Power Evangelism 8 © Gary S. Greig, Ph.D., 2008 (Acts 9: 17-18; 22:12-16); congregations like the Corinthians (1 Cor. 11:1; 12:9); the Galatians (Gal. 3:5)13; the Philippians (Phil. 4:9); the Thessalonians (1 Thes. 1:5-6); and Jewish Christian congregations (Heb. 6:1-214; James 5:14-16). Hebrews 6:1-2 says that the “elementary teachings” of the Early Church included teaching and training on the laying on of hands, which was one of the standard means of healing the sick in the Gospels and Acts.15 This clearly shows that training believers how to heal the sick through the laying on of hands was a part of the elementary teachings of the Early Church, further demonstrating that every disciple in the Early Church was trained to heal the sick and do the miraculous works of Jesus. We are to follow the example of apostolic leaders who have gone before us throughout Church history, even as they followed Jesus’ example (1 Cor. 11:1). It was, after all, Jesus who said, "A student is not above his teacher, but everyone who is fully trained will be like his teacher" (Luke 6:40; cf. Mat. 10:25). Jesus' words are still a mandate for us today. Todd Bentley and his ministry deserve applause, not criticism, for being committed to Jesus’ mandate to equip all disciples to spread the gospel with power! The real question is: Is the Body of Christ going to commit herself, or not, to obeying Jesus’ commands to preach and heal? He is giving us a powerful example and offering a powerful anointing in the Lakeland outpouring, as He has done in past outpourings and revivals. We dare not ignore the message Jesus is sending us. Jesus said in Matt. 24:14 “And this gospel of the kingdom will be preached throughout the whole inhabited earth as a testimony to all the nations, and then the end will come.” We need to follow Todd Bentley’s example and get passionately and single-heartedly focused on Jesus, stir up a desperate hunger for His glory, and give ourselves to obeying His commands in Scripture to preach the gospel and heal the sick in all nations, as the Day of the Lord and the end of the Age is drawing near!