Positive Confession Kills: Tragic Cost of the Cult Agenda

Music Hello. Welcome to another episode of the William Brannum Historical Research Podcast. I'm your host, John Collins, the author and founder of William Brannum Historical Research at William-Brannum.org, and with me I have my co-host, researcher, minister and friend, Chino Ross, pastor and the voice of the understanding scripture and truth by Chino D. Ross, YouTube channel.

Chino, we've had quite a wild ride going through the past few episodes and this positive confession one has apparently hit a note with a lot of people. I know it did me whenever I first started to re-examine that doctrine.

I've done several with Charles, and I tend to agree with Charles. Charles has convinced that there is a recipe for brainwashing people in this movement, and one of the strong components for brainwashing is this positive confession because you get your mind in the state where you try to believe something that isn't true, and when you do that you shut off all critical thinking.

So it is a building block literally to shutting off critical thought. And there's so much we could talk through, and I don't know if we're, I don't know how deep we'll go with this, but I noticed that one commenter really poured their heart out on this episode, and I thought it would be good if we just talk a little bit through that.

I agree with you and Charles, and I've seen Charles's comment also on that one that you and I did on positive confession. I know several months ago John that someone had asked in the comments, would we do one on that?

And I knew that you guys had done one, but it was a big part of Hobart Freeman's teaching as well. I remember he wrote that little booklet entitled Positive Thinking in Confession, which he, according to Jim Brennan, basically copied from someone else when Brennan gave him a little positive thinking in confession book, but it was a big part of his ministry.

And I think part of it had to do with the fact, believe it or not, people might find this hard to believe, but I think Hobart was a very negative, oriented person. If you listen again to some of his early, earliest messages, he did say that he came from a very negative home and a very negative environment.

And so might one of my proofs for him being negatively oriented is, whenever he came to teaching on healing, you know, he said, hey, I've got a divine healing message. It was really not a positive divine healing message. It was a negative message against doctors and medicine and medical science. And that just became a hallmark of him later.

You wouldn't hear him begin a message, and he wouldn't go far with a verse. I want to talk about the positive promises of God. And so he had read you know, first Peter 2 with his stripes, we're healed. But then within a couple of minutes of that, where you were waiting and wanting to hear a positive message on healing, it would go into a negative dressing down of doctors and medical science. And how bad they were, how dangerous drugs were and how the surgeons often operate on the wrong person or the wrong limb. And you know, just stuff like that. And I was, as I would hear those things, I was somewhat

amazed by it. I had not heard anyone else teach such a negative message on divine healing, where almost the point was the reason that you should trust God is because if you don't, here's what you had to look forward to whenever you go to the hospitals and the doctors.

It just did not seem like a sane message or a biblical message at all. But whenever you and I got around to doing one on positive confession, I thought whenever we did that, this is such a benign vanilla generic topic, you know, we're not going to have 20 views on this because big deal positive thinking and positive confession. But you were right, and to your point, I forget that this is probably one of the most important bed rocks in this whole movement.

And the views just exploded on that. And so did the comments. And there was one in particular that just struck me to the core of my being because this woman had expressed how she was struck to the core of her being over hearing what you and I were talking about. You know, we have a lot of people that listen to these podcasts. Sometimes within three or four or five, you'll hear from the person like, oh, I just found these podcasts. And this is just what I've been looking for or this is just what I'm hating or whatever they might have a positive, they might have a negative reaction,

but you hear from them fairly quickly. But occasionally, you know, we have the silent follower, someone who has been listening all along and evidently they're in it for the long haul, but you haven't heard from them at all. And if anyone wants to go back to the one that you and I did several weeks ago when you released it on positive confession.

One of one of the latest comments, maybe not the latest one, but one of the latest, was from a woman named Anna. And I just want to paraphrase some of what she said and then I might even read a couple of the paragraphs of it. And the reason I'm doing this is I told you, John, before we went on the air, you know, I'm sitting here on this, I've got my office door open.

It's beautiful. Fall weather is here. I'm, I am so blessed in my life. I just, I'm living a prosperous, healthy life. I'm not sick. I have plenty of money. I'm not desperate. You know, I'm wholly healthy and happy. And I just don't ever want to get to the place where I take for granted the fact that just because I feel that that's not necessarily everyone's case out there in the listening audience. And I think that's part of the burden that I feel and that obviously you feel are you wouldn't be doing this over all these years. I've tried to find a way to,

and I spend time thinking about these podcasts before we do them. And you are so great shooting from the hip because you let your co-host lead and then you're listening to what they're saying.

And then you draw on your wealth of knowledge and experience to to supplement. By the way, that is how these go. If people don't know how you perform and it does, and it does really well.

But I'm always looking for what's the right word to say? What's the right phrase? What's the right story? What's the right biblical text that we can bring to the table to, and I'm not trying to convince someone against their will. A man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still as Hobart would used to say. And how true that is. I'm not trying to convince someone against their will, but I am trying to pile up the evidence either biblically or anecdotally. For people to say, I think these guys have a point. There's something that they're saying seems to be registering here.

And I think that's what evidently is, has been slowly happening with this woman and I hope with other people. So she tells the story how she was a part of a satellite faith assembly group for years. Her father was a minister in that satellite group. So this is what she has been exposed to her whole life. What her comment really dwells upon is her mother's illness and the final death of her mother.

her death from a terrible disease that created a lot of pain and all of that pain was simply unnecessary. So what this dear woman has said, as she has processed these episodes, I see her saying a couple of things, she says, number one, you guys are right on using these scriptures that you've been using.

She mentions Luke was a physician. You never heard about that at Faith Assembly that he was Dr. Luke. He wasn't just Luke, he was Dr. Luke, that Timothy had stomach issues and rather than pray for divine healing, Paul said, why don't you drink at some alcoholic beverages, wine and that might help your stomach.

You also did not hear that reference very often at Faith Assembly and whenever they did talk about it, Hobart had all of these excuses for it. But basically, you definitely can't drink alcohol when Paul says, Timothy has exactly what I want you to do.

Never told him to get drunk, but he said, I do want you to drink some wine. And Hobart's other excuse was, well, you got to remember that water over there is not like water here in the United States and so you got to be careful whenever you travel to the Middle East and drink water because it's not the kind of purified water that we have over here.

And when he would use to tell that story or give that as his explanation, I would think Timothy is not from the United States, he's from that area. So they were all used to the water over there.

But anyway, she says, you know, what you guys are saying about scripture seems to be right and what you're saying about our experience that people have not been healed. For the most part, people have not been healed.

They have died terrible death. So she said, you're right on scripture, you're right anecdotally. However, that's not what I've been told. And there's a dilemma that these people find themselves in. That's the exact crux of the matter for these people.

We are using scripture. We are telling stories such as Dr. Freeman's own death from multiple illnesses and the fact that he was never healed from his heart condition, his polio short and leg, all the things he said that he had and that he had claimed his healing from.

He was not healed. So you're right on both counts. So what are these people supposed to do? Well, here I'm going to read a little bit of what she had to say for those that haven't seen or won't see the comment that she made.

She said after listening to the last 52 hours of podcast on Faith Assembly and Dr. Hobart Freeman's teaching. things. I'm left shaken to my core, disoriented, conflicted, angry. It has stirred something so deep inside me that I've carried since my mother's death. Her passing still weighs on me in a way that I can't fully put into words because of how completely she believed in faith healing, and how much that belief defined her choices and ultimately, her suffering.

I've been so consumed with faith assembly and Freeman's teachings ever since she died, desperate to understand, to make sense of it all, to figure out how a belief could be so strong that it shaped not only her life but her death and left the rest of us in her shadow. I believe that she had either seven or eight siblings, so you have a large family with a lot of children who have survived this mother's death. She said, I'll never forget when the doctors told us to go in and say our final words. Now, what people

will watch this, this is the power of this false healing message and especially this false positive thinking and confession message. She said, I sat beside her, but instead of saying goodbye, I smiled at her. I told her the doctors were crazy that she was healed, that she would live a long and healthy life as she always had confessed. She says in a few paragraphs before this that her mother, who was a normal mother as far as she felt fine, all of a sudden began experiencing some pain. The pain got worse and worse and worse. She just

endured as long as she possibly could and then they finally were able to talk her into going into the hospital. The doctors checked her over and they said you have cancer and they said you have three weeks to live and she lived three weeks. I want people to see that Dr. Freeman's message of healing was not a message of healing at all. It was a message of suffering. See how long you can suffer, how much pain you can endure before the human body has a breaking point before you finally have to go to the hospital. When had you gone to medical science earlier, you would have

been spared all of this terrible pain that you've been going through prior to that. He was so proud of saying if you go to the doctors, they'll cut on you and mutilate you and pollute you.

with medicine and with drugs, but if you'll go God's way, the way of faith in healing, God will heal you. That all sounds good until you realize that's not what people were experiencing. So, and I know other people, even at the moment that we speak John, who are enduring pain, they endure pain as long as they can, and then they feel like they have failed God because now I've got to go to the doctor, let the doctors check me out and the doctors normally say, you waited too long.

And we talked in an earlier podcast, John, that's one of the problems of this waiting for your manifestation healing. I was talking to someone on the phone yesterday and I said, tell me where, just tell me where in the Gospels or Acts.

Jesus or the early church ever prayed over anyone and said, okay now, take it by faith, go confessing your healing, acting on your healing and during your healing and waiting for your manifestation. Just give me one time that anybody in the Bible ever said, now go and it might be 10 months or 10 years from now, but just go and wait for your manifestation, waiting for the manifestation.

What that does is if it's a serious case of the person, what it does is it gives the opportunity and the time for that serious condition to get so bad that now it's too late.

And you go into the doctors and the doctors say, guess what, I'm so sorry. We probably could have helped you earlier, but it's too late and there's nothing that we can do. So let me just finish reading this one last paragraph I wanted to read from her.

So she is in to the doctor, they say, you know, you're not gonna make it. She's beside her mother's bed. She said, I told her doctors are crazy. You've got this. You're gonna be healed.

You're gonna live a long and healthy life. She said, I can still hear myself saying it. I can still feel the certainty I had in that moment because it was what she had taught us to believe.

And those ended up being my last words to her. Looking back, I torture myself with all the things I wish I had said, all the goodbyes and thank yous and truths that I never spoke.

They were stolen from me by this belief system that we were trapped in and I can never get those moments back. It's so sad. And this ties into something, I've actually had this conversation with a few different people and I'm about to have it in a podcast and recording later today, but there becomes this element in the background to all of this that is literally the agenda over the doctrine.

And... One of the agendas, this is multifaceted, so there isn't just this one thing, but one of the strongest components for the backbone to this movement was the temperance movement, which is why the passage is about the wine, all of the statements that Hobart Freeman had, the avoiding alcohol in general, et cetera.

And it defies one of the greatest miracles that Jesus ever performed, which was turning water into not just wine, but if you read and understand the Greek, which I don't, but I've had scholars tell me, this isn't just wine.

This is one of the finest forms of wine. This would be an intoxicating form of wine. But the agenda was more powerful to them than the doctrine, and they didn't care if the doctrine was right or not, as long as they could sway the masses to their political opinion.

And this was a political movement. One of the, I won't go too far with this. You can study the revival history series if you want to know more, but one of the leaders who became a strong, I guess backbone supporter of the healing revival was William D. Upshaw, who supported Brannum's meetings.

He claimed that he was healed from being a wheelchair invalid in the meetings from William Brannum, went around telling everybody how Brannum healed him, and he had been out of this wheelchair for decades.

And people had seen him physically running down the aisles of Congress. He was a congressman. So year decades prior, this guy is actually physically running. He always did have a crutch with him, but that was part of his stage persona was this crutch.

So I question where many people, not just me question, whether or not he needed it. He was one of the leading, not founders, but one of the leading forces behind the temperance movement. He would go into a state.

He and they would call him the flying squadron because they would sweep through the state one side to the next, spreading temperance movement. And he started what became short lived as the temperance political party running for Washington to become president and try to enforce this globe across the United States.

Where I'm headed with this is this man, when the political movement failed, started advertising and I guess getting kickbacks for helping to advertise these revitalizers, which were if you don't know what this is for the elderly, this is something that makes you feel better, feel younger again and contains alcohol.

So this is a man who is the strongest driving force against alcohol, who's promoting alcohol in his later years. And after this, helping to promote temperance again in the movement. But I could go many directions with all of the different thoughts I have on this, but in the end, it comes down to that.

It is the agenda over the doctrine and they don't care who gets stepped on along the way. These men knew... that what they were saying didn't work 100% of the time. The batting average, I've talked to several people who were there, the batting average is like 3%.

If you're an actual batter in a baseball, you're not gonna get off the bench very much at that batting average, but that was the average of people healed, which is interestingly about the same as if you don't go to a par line at all.

You have an average of people getting better of about 3%. But they knew this, they had to have known. But it was the agenda over the doctrine, they did not care who got stepped on along the way.

And I look at this whole thing now, I just was so stupid that I believed at this positive confession thing. I've given several different examples, but if I had a big hole in my roof, and there's a guy standing here next to me with a shingle and a nail that says, your water is coming in your house, I literally can fix it with this shingle, if you let me crawl up there, and I'm saying, no, God will heal that hole in my roof.

That's literally what this is. You go to the doctor, the doctor has the medication, literally he can fix it right there in some cases. And through positive confession, you're wired to accept that agenda more than actually getting healed.

And it's really sad that they did this. Yeah, I'd like to know the batting average for diabetes and for cancer and for heart disease. You know, it is probably 3% or less under Freeman's Ministry.

What everyone got healed from, or sore left shoulders, or a bum right ankle. That's what everyone got healed from. And you know, we've talked about that before. Yeah, you know, the New Testament shows big examples of healing from big diseases and illnesses.

And you just don't see that in these circles. And that's part of what people should use their brains and think about. So here are last couple of paragraphs from what this lady said. And people can go read it for themselves.

I mean, it was probably one of the longest comments and one of the most well-written, I've seen on any of the things that I've done. And one of the most gut-wrenching because this woman has been through it.

She's watched the death of her mother and evidently her brother as well. And she is struggling to come out of the other side of it and land on her feet. And I'm sure that she will.

I'm sure that she will. This woman writes when she took her, her mother, when she took her final breath, in that moment, a rage rose up inside me that I didn't know was possible.

Anger so raw, so consuming that it split me open. I had never felt anything like it before, watching her slip away after a lifetime of faith. After clinging... into words we thought were truth, but turned out not to be. It broke something in me.

And that break is something I still carry and struggle with every day since. The interesting part is, as I've listened to these podcasts, especially this last one on positive confession. I found myself unable to listen fully objectively. And I think this is probably her speaking for a large number of people out there. I want to, but for some reason, I just can't. I struggle to sit back with an open mind and heart instead.

I listen to correct, to challenge, to argue against what's being said. Because to fully accept what I'm hearing would mean admitting that my mother's death was a direct result of Dr. Hobart Freeman's teachings just as my brother's was.

Being with these two deaths has left me with unbearable cognitive dissonance. Wow. Yes, that is a conclusion that you arrive at. There's no way to sugarcoat it. If what we're saying is true, then Dr. Freeman's teaching was false. And your mother died because of Dr. Freeman's teaching. And she definitely did die because of Dr. Freeman's teaching.

And I just would not want that on my hands. I don't know how he was able, except he was so warped in his own mind, especially the last, you know, six, seven, eight, ten years of his life. He was so warped in his own mind, being convinced that this is the right message and this is the right way. And I'm going to teach it, you know, and just let the people die around me and then we'll come up with reasons why they died, but we're never going to go back and challenge a message. We're going to say there's something wrong with them.

They missed a condition. They were an unbelief. They had sin in their life. They didn't trust God well enough. Something we're never going to use all of the deaths around us to go back and challenge a message. And you know, his daughter, Kathy Kinsey, called me a few weeks ago and she gave a, what did I say, a three minute and 33 second monologue.

And I wasn't able to say anything to her. And she was pretty upset about anybody challenging her father or her father's teaching. And I was able to call her back and say, you know, look, Kathy, you've got to put your...

your belief system on the shelf for just a minute. If you ever hope to be a normal person who thinks and functions and lives life normally, you're gonna have to put that belief system on the shelf for a minute because of this, your son, your first born son, Brent, who was born in 1980, early in that year.

He lived 36 hours and died a respiratory failure. I'm not telling you anything you don't know. You know, you were the mother of that child and I'm so sorry you lost that child. And I'm not bringing that up to create any heartache on your part.

I'm simply bringing that up to say, look, he died, your mother died of cancer, your husband died of cancer, June died, Bruce died. I said, your father, your father was never healed of any of the things he said that he was healed from.

He died with a short leg. None of those 20 visions that people had that well, whenever I get my healing, the whole body of Christ is gonna enter in and we're gonna all get healed.

All those were false visions. None of that came to pass. You know, you just want to get a hold of someone and shake them, but you can't. All you can do is try to use words, use love, use kindness, use persuasion, use scripture, use their personal experiences, which is what I was trying to do with Kathy.

If your son died, your mother died, your husband died, your father by the time that he died and had not been healed of any of these things, he literally looked like somebody who had died in a concentration camp.

He was nothing but a bag of bones. You have got to, at some point in your life, wake up or not, I mean, the decision is all up to us. And thankfully, this woman who's made this comment is at least willing.

She's listened to 52 hours of this. And the one that's really struck her is the positive confession one, because I think you and Charles are probably right, John, that that is somehow, that is the basis and the foundation for all of this stuff.

And you know, it wasn't a day or two after my last phone call to Kathy, you won't believe it, but I get contacted by her oldest son, Curtis, who was born in 1982, with whom I have had conversations on the phone before.

But because I am daring to challenge his grandfather and he doesn't even believe any of this himself, but because I'm daring to challenge his grandfather or because I dared to have a conversation on the phone to his mother about this, then he reaches out to me.

And I won't say all that he said, but I will say this, he's hoping and praying that I will go, to hell, and that I will burn in hell forever and ever. Who prays prayers like that about other human beings? I wouldn't pray that prayer about my worst enemy. I wouldn't do it.

Because hell is too bad and it lasts for too long. Even if I had a huge problem with another person, that's one prayer I would never pray. If I had a bad day, I might say something I shouldn't say about them, but I would never pray for them to go to hell and burn forever and ever. What person prays that about that's the fruit of hope. That's Hobart Freeman's grandson. By the way, that's Hobart Freeman's grandson. That's the fruit of that ministry.

You either agree with the cult and the cult founder and the daughter of the cult founder. You either agree with us or we're going to pray for you to go to hell and burn there forever That's very telling to me, John, on the fruit of a ministry like that.

Have you ever wondered how the Pentecostal movement started or how the progression of modern Pentecostalism transitioned through the latter reign, charismatic and other fringe movements into the new apostolic reformation? You can learn this and more on William Brandham Historical Research's website, William-Brandom.org. On the book's page of the website, you can find the compiled research of John Collins, Charles Paisley, Stephen Montgomery, John McKinnon and others, with links to the paper, audio and digital versions of each book.

You can also find resources and documentation on various people and topics related to those movements. If you want to contribute to the cause, you can support the podcast by clicking the contribute button at the top. And as always, be sure to like and subscribe to the audio or video version that you're listening to or watching. On behalf of William-Brandham Historical Research, we want to thank you for your support. It's always interesting to me how many different themes from all of the different groups always seem to come together and unusually almost at the same time, because we're talking through this and literally this is a conversation about agendas.

And I recently had another, I think in the same conversation, we were talking about how, whenever it's a gospel of agenda, instead of a gospel of Jesus Christ, when you're trying to convince people to stay within your agenda, the problem is not everybody shares the same opinion that you do. And so people will, you know, take the opinion or not take it, they get their choice.

So how do you stop this? You have to give them boundaries of fear to make them stay within your choice or your agenda. So always with an agenda gospel comes this boundaries of fear. That's how, that's literally how this works. And when you compare it to the ancient world. Whenever I, when I left all of this, I began studying just ancient religion.

I wanted to know not just what was it we came from, but what is the roots in history? And sadly, as far back in time as I could go, you're going to find one cult, bread another cult, bread another cult, and you can trace it all the way back different pathways. But the one that I chose was all the way through Nosticism and what was Nosticism. It was a mixture of all of the pagan, old ancient religions mixed with Christianity. And then it came to, it basically landed me in a place where I had to understand the difference between the God of Israel and all of the ancient gods. So I began

studying all of the ancient pagan mythologies. And if you understand how it worked, there was a significant difference between the God of Israel and all the pagan gods. The pagan gods ruled through fear. It was, it was an agenda, and they ruled through fear. And you had to fear the ancient deities. It was, it wasn't based around love, like Christianity is. There are so many verses like perfect love, cast out fear, for example. This is a significant difference from the, the nations that they were heading into with the pagan gods, where you had to sacrifice your children, or you're

going to, you're going to suffer if you don't sacrifice your children to the deities. That's, that's how bad it got. Well, then you compare what these religions were bringing because it was an agenda-driven religion and not a gospel-driven. They were pushing agendas of fear such that you feared not only for, you know, whether you're going to heaven or hell, but whether somebody else might cause others in your movement to lose focus of that agenda. And so that's where all of the condemnation comes. You start targeting all of these individuals who might cast doubt and cause

others not to stay within the agenda. And then it becomes literally this offensive thing like you're talking, you're describing where I want you to go to hell. I want you to get away from our people. What if you influence our people? That's really what that statement is saying. I do not want you to influence others to come to the truth. We have our agenda. You stay out of it.

Well, yeah, I think you're so right, John. So what I, what we have done and I would continue to do is I would give people two paths you need to, there's two avenues by which you can help free yourself from Dr. Freeman's false teaching as well as some of the ones that came before him and some of the ones that have come after. And the first of that is obviously scripture. And we have, we've looked at a lot of different passages. You know, I'm convinced that one of the reasons that we, that we, when I say we, I mean Christendom, Christianity in America today, one of the reasons why

we don't know who the meaning of our Bible, we don't know very well at all. And we don't know the meaning of Bible verses is because we don't know the context of that verse.

And I may sound like a broken record when I get onto this, but I think hermeneutics and the contextual situation of the verse, of any verse of every verse is just one of the most important things people can remember.

And so this proof texting method that Dr. Freeman used, which was just stringing together a lot of text that have the concept or the word he's wanting to preach about within it, that is not a healthy way to understand scripture.

And so some of these passages we have looked at before, John, that Hobart did not like, he not only didn't like the verse, he didn't like the context, but he not only disliked the context, he didn't want to go to the verse itself, but a couple that this woman mentioned, that I didn't read, but we're in her comment, and one was in Colossians four, where Paul said that Luke is a beloved physician.

It's amazing that that little small phrase Luke the beloved physician would be in the Bible and would have been overlooked, so regularly by Dr. Freeman. Now not overlooked by other people, but by him because he came to the belief that medical science, and therefore anyone with a medical degree and nursing degree, physical therapists, pharmacy, pharmacology, drugs, metas, anything, it all goes back to sorcery and witchcraft, and you have to be delivered from that.

And so people who had nursing licenses gave them up. People, I know of one man down south, who I think was just a few classes away from being a dentist, he forsook it, never was able to pursue that.

People who actually had a medical degree, and so they were a medical doctor and could make a good and healthy living doing that. Of course they had to give that up. People who worked at a company that made maybe plastic gloves or syringes that might be bought by a hospital or doctor's office, you can't even work in the medical supply field.

You have to give that up. What are we gonna do with the Bible where Paul, with a smile on his face, unashamedly refers to Luke as a beloved physician. If being a physician is such an evil that is on par with witchcraft and idolatry and sorcery, there's no way Paul could have ever made that statement.

He could have said, Luke, who was a doctor, but because that is a part of witchcraft, he gave all of that up. When he became a Christian, he went, through deliverance and got delivered from all of that.

That is the only context in which Paul could say that. And Paul didn't. Paul just says it in passing, not thinking anyone would have a problem with it. And we don't, but Faith assembly did, in referring to Luke as a beloved physician.

Or the other case she mentioned in 1 Timothy 5 of Timothy, having stomach illnesses that were often enough that Paul said you need to supplement your water intake with some wine intake. That would be a great opportunity for Paul

to lecture Timothy on his lack of faith. I mean, that would be the prime opportunity to say Timothy, where have you been in all of my faith messages that I've been teaching? Where have you been?

If you would have just been listening to my faith messages, then you wouldn't be having these stomach illnesses. One other verse I'm telling, I'm saying people need to go to scripture, look at these passages and say how does this fit into Dr. Freeman's theory of divine healing?

They simply don't. Another passage, which I think I ought to read, because we haven't dealt with this. I'll read a couple of verses here, John, is in Philippians chapter two, and it concerns a Paphroditus.

Philippians two, Paphroditus, Paul is writing to the Philippians from Rome, it's one of the prison epistles, so Paul is under house arrest in Rome, and he's gonna write this letter and send it back to the saints at Philippi in the hands of a Paphroditus.

And he says in verse 26, Philippians two, for he, speaking of a Paphroditus, longed after you all and was full of heaviness because you had heard that he had been sick. And see, that's not even something you could say at faith assembly.

You could say, well, that brother was having a trial, but you can't say they're sick, because if you say you're sick, but before you pray to be healed from your sickness, which means you were healed when you prayed, which means you're no longer sick, which means that anything that you're experiencing now is a lying symptom, it isn't really true, and so yeah.

What were you end up with this is in witchcraft and sorcery, denying the reality of your sickness. My point in this passage is Paul didn't hesitate to say a Paphroditus didn't say was having a trial, the coded language of the faith assembly called, he said, a Paphroditus was sick.

For indeed he was sick, not unto death, but God had mercy on him. And it's interesting that Paul seems to see a paparditis as healing as some type of manifestation of God's mercy in the life of a paparditis.

He didn't say, which you would have had to have said if you were a part of the faith assembly cult, that a paparditis claimed his sickness, then he confessed it, then he acted upon it, and then he endured it until God finally manifested his healing.

Paul doesn't even attribute the healing of a paparditis to the faith of a paparditis. He attributes it to the mercy and love and kindness of God. He said, paparditis got close to death, but God be thanked for his mercy and God spared him from that.

Well, I think this whole, along with this positive confession, this whole healing idea, which is not a biblical idea, this is the, this is the, this is the tale that wags the dog. This is what keeps everything going in Dr. Freeman's movement and ministry.

You've got to believe in this healing message, and you have to confess the right things, and if you don't, you are going to die. And you know, the point of all of these people's story is no matter what they did, as far as confession and acting and enduring, they still suffered, and they still died, and they could have spared themselves so much of that had they saw medical treatment earlier.

So I just don't think that Dr. Freeman ever spent enough time dealing with the actual text of Scripture. You know, he had an agenda, as you just said, John, he had a message, and he was bound and determined to be a proponent of the divine healing message instead of saying, what does the Bible actually say about these things?

As I said earlier, I think the reason that we Western Christians don't understand the Bible very well is because we really don't read it, and we really don't read these verses in their context.

We'll go to church, we'll hear a minister, and he's going to preach a subject on positive confession, and he's going to use verses, they all use verses, everybody uses verses. He's going to say, thou art snared with words of thy mouth.

He's going to say, death and life are in the power of the tongue, and they that love it shall eat the fruit thereof. It's going to quote verses, but they're going to pull them out of their context, and we need to insist on ministers getting us a teaching of that verse.

within the context of that verse. I don't talk about my personal life very much, but you mentioned earlier how healthy you were and how, you know, it's difficult to sympathize with this lady and her mother because you were gifted with having a healthy body and healthy sound mine. And that bothers me, John, that really bothers me, not that I'm healthy, I'm thankful for that, but I don't ever want to forget about the people who don't have my experience. And this is what I want to pour my life and hard into, you know, you don't have to have my experience. You might not be

a healthy person, but let's seek a biblical way to deal with our life and not an undiblical way. I'll start the interruptions. Not okay. Well, see, I'm on the other end of the spectrum. I drew the short end of the stick when it comes to genetics. I don't talk about it much, but my struggles are many. And I'm very thankful for doctors because my life would not be very good if I did not have the medicines that I have to keep me going. And where I'm headed with all of this, the reason why I don't talk about it much in public is because of the cults who are of this mindset, they will attack

it. John left because he couldn't have the positive confession, his body is now therefore falling apart. That's how they usually go with this. And by falling apart, I mean literally it without the medications, I might, I might literally fall apart. But where I'm heading with this is there are key figures within the NAR. I'm not going to mention their names, but they come into this town, especially when grandfather was alive because my grandfather was a patriarch in this divine healing movement. And they would come because, oh, praise God, Brannum could heal anybody and anything and everything. And all you have to do is believe and confess it.

So they're pushing that agenda. Well, what grandfather didn't tell them is just how sickly all of the family was. And I'm talking about this wide array of everything. My grandfather himself, he struggled with cancer. He had, I think it was prostate cancer, but in the later stages of his life, and he did live a long life, but he never got rid of this through positive confession.

I have other family members who suffered with mental health issues until the climax of a mental health issue when they took their own lives. So that's how bad this gets. I have family members who my direct family, they struggled so much that it was unusual for one of them not to be completely bedridden as I was growing up. But the whole time that they're like this and I'm having to do the chores of either a mother or a father, they're confessing that they're healed. And I remember my mother had this little card, business card from William Brannum himself.

This business card said something to the effect. Yesterday he helped me today, he'll do the same. Along with this continue forever, praise his name. This was a chant that we all did to enforce and reinforce our positive confession.

So as either one of them was bedridden, they would go through this and say, praise God, I'm healed. Well, they would get back up temporarily and then struggle again. That's, this was just the life that I lived growing up.

And I'm going to all of these meetings and revivals where everybody, they looked at our family as though we were patriarchs because I have the call and his name, right? My grandfather's the pastor at Brannem Stabernackle and they would, you put on this air like you're not sickly and then you go back home and the whole family knows how bad off you are.

So for this brief moment in time, when we're around people at church, for this brief moment in time, we look like we were healthy. Then you go home and you're suffering. And that's what I got to see from the other side of this.

Now, there are people who did not suffer to the extent that my family did. So they, you know, they may have had some issues and got better or not. I did not see a better.

And to this day, the family members I'm talking about, they suffer heavily to this. Some of the people who are in my family who struggled with, with diseases until the end of their life, thinking that they were healed but also thinking that they had done something wrong that brought that disease on them.

And so they suffered even greater than had they just got some medication for it. Some of the diseases, there was no cure. So I can't say that they would have been healed but they would have at least had some peace of mind and they died having just riddled with turmoil in their head because they were believing this thing and thinking that they were the cause of it.

This thing ruins life. So I sympathize greatly with what this lady is saying. What she's expressing here, I went through this, my family went through this. And after I got out, thankfully, I go to the doctors.

I still, because I'm so programmed, I still struggle sometimes to go to the doctor. And my wife will usually kick me in the butt and say, get out of here, get over there and go to the doctor and get better.

So thankfully, I have somebody who's nudging me on the other side too, but I get it. I know what this is like. And this is the second path, John, that I would tell people to go down, go down a scriptural path, really read the Bible, see what it says and the second path is, how about your own experience?

And that's just what you gave us a lecture on. anecdotally, what's your own experience been like? What was the experience of the pastor, of faith assembly like and the wife of the pastor and all the other leadership and all the other people?

I mean, there have been a few occasional miracles of healing, but we'll go back to the batting average, you know, it's really small. Um, there are so many people that struggled for years not being able to see because they took their glasses off because Hobart said that's not faith to wear glasses or they struggle for years with a growth in or on their body.

And some of them to this day are struggling and the growth is growing. You know, it's not getting smaller. So what else can I say as a podcaster or minister or pastor or teacher or friend?

What else can I say? But the Bible doesn't teach what Hobart Freeman taught. And even if you just want to lay that on the shelf for the moment, and that's what I ask Kathy Kinsey to do, just lay the Bible on a shelf for a moment.

God will not be angry at you for doing that. You haven't forsaken his word or anything. Just lay it on the shelf for a moment because what I'm convinced of is it's not the Bible.

It's your, it's your wrong understanding of the Bible that's causing your downfall. So if you can lay all that on the shelf for a moment and say, okay, let's just be fair and let's just live in reality.

Who do I know who's been raised from the dead? Who do I know who was lame from birth? Who's been raised up? Who do I know who had 2,200 vision? They took their glasses off and a week later, boom, instantly that day, they could see better.

Who do I know that has any of these experiences? Look at your own experience. This woman is looking at her brother's death evidently and her mother's death now. And she's having to face the fact that regardless of if this is not what you were taught by Freeman, death after all these years of positive confession, this is the reality.

I mean, I keep saying these people are simply not in reality. And because they're so afraid, they almost live. I think I've described it in a wilderness of mirrors. They're in a wilderness of mirrors not knowing what direction to turn, because they have all of these verses in their mind.

And I'm convinced that their verses that are misinterpreted, mistaught and misapplied, but they have all of these verses in their mind. They may have just, you know, an innocent verse like Philippians 413, probably one of the most misinterpreted but most often used verses in all the Bible that says, for I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me.

Now if we don't study that in its context, or we're not willing just to use our mind, then we're tempted to make that... into an absolute, but we know that's not an absolute. We know that if you step off of the 10 story building, there's only one way you're going and that's down. That's not up. You can't do all things through Christ who strengthen it to you. You can't fly. There are a lot of things you can't do. You know, people use that verse, find out what its context is there. Paul is talking about. He has learned both with food, without food, in need, in abundance, traveling all around

the Mediterranean world. He did not know sometimes where his next meal would come from. He said, I have learned that Jesus is my source of everything. He will provide for me, but it is in the context in which Paul says that in Philippians 4. So here in conclusion, John, what I would try to say to these people who I know are in their mind, they say, well, look, isn't God is great? God is good.

Why would God allow me to go through these experiences that I have? But what I would try to tell them is let's remember that not only is God great and he definitely is and not only is God good and he definitely is. But we are his people and we have responsibilities. God is our Father as we are the Father to our children. If we have taught our children now, these are the things you shouldn't shouldn't do. And maybe we leave for the day. We go to work and they're old enough to leave alone at home. We have a list for them. We say, do these things in this order on this list.

And they don't do exactly what the list says. And they begin to mess things up during the day. We don't necessarily just come home and rescue them. They have fallen into some folly and it's their own responsibility. But God is good and he has left us with resources.

It's not though he left us with nothing. He left us with the Bible. He's left us with the greatest resource possible. I try to do my best to encourage people. Stop listening to what men tell you.

You can even stop listening to what I tell you. Stop listening to what all men tell you and just read the Bible for yourself. And it's very difficult because we all read it with our own filter, with our own presuppositions. If you come from faith assembly background and you come up on these healing and faith passages, you're reading it unfortunately with Hobart echoing in your mind.

You just have to find a way to say no. I'm just going to read these passages for themselves and see what they say. So I'm saying God is good. God is great. But he has made us responsible for our own life. And if we're going to own a Bible and we do, and if we have a brain and we do, then guess what?

We need to use both of them. We need to use our brain. We need to use the Bible and read it. And then we need to look around. Maybe you're confused about what the Bible says, then look at the end of Hobart Freeman's life.

I'm still surprised to this day that it didn't shock people as much as it should have. And we're gonna talk about this as we get into Hobart Freeman's death. Hobart Freeman was never healed of any of the things that he said that he had and that he had been healed from, none of them.

You know, John, he would even, if you listen to the tapes, 1157 of them as I have, someone asked me yesterday, they call me on the phone. They said, do you still listen to Freeman tapes and I said, unfortunately, yes.

I said, I try to do about two a week just so I can remember the message and just so that it's fresh in my mind because that's been literally 40 or 45 years ago.

So yes, I still do listen. And so I hear stories like I heard one the other day where he had an abscess inside his mouth. And he said, you know, every time I'd go to brush my teeth, I could see it and it was sore.

But I just claimed by faith and I confessed I was healed and he said, you know, after three or four weeks, God finally manifested my healing. And I'm going, no, after three or four weeks, your body finally healed itself.

That's a whole problem with this stupid manifestation doctrine. If it's a minor issue in a few weeks, the body's gonna rid itself of that. And then these people run to church and say, I wanna thank God for manifesting my healing.

If it's a serious condition, it's not gonna get better. It's gonna get worse. And by the time you go to the doctor, it's too late. This manifestation doctrine is absolutely horrible. It either kills people or it allows people to go to church and give a false testimony that God did something miraculous.

When in fact, it was just their own body. So for this dear woman and others like her going through, I don't know what writers in church history, John, have called the dark night of the soul.

I'm not in that. Thank God. I'm not in that at this point in my life. But I have been in it, trust me, many decades ago, as I wrestled and struggled with some of these things.

And I know you went through, John, a dark night of the soul. You didn't just go to bed Sunday night and wake up Monday morning. I'm called free and I've got it all figured out.

It takes some time and what I would encourage people is to let them know it's okay to challenge some of your beliefs and doctrines. Even if you decide to come back to them and you settle on them, that's okay, too.

I don't ever tell anybody what you've got to believe, but you need to make sure... Sure that it's your belief and not someone else's belief and God's not mad at you. God's not mad at you if you want to challenge some things and debate it and put up some resistance is probably going to be very healthy for you.

A simple reading of Psalms in the book of Job will show God's not mad at the saints of all who struggled in the dark night of the soul. I think it can be a very healthy experience to go through.

I think a person could be, believe it or not, John, just as in just as precarious a situation if they just reject everything Hobart taught simply because I told them to. You can't do that.

You can't follow any man's teaching. Don't do anything because someone told you to do it. Do it because you see this is what the scriptures say and do it because your experience and the experience of people around you, you're able to attune yourself to that, to learn to live in reality, the leftover people from faith assembly or from all of these other faith healing cults, John or not in reality.

People go right on being sick, go right on dying and they just pretend like it really didn't happen and that's a crime against yourself to ever do that to yourself. When people wonder where is God in all this, God is right there with you and He is shouting at you as loudly as He can with the death and disease of all these people around you and maybe your own untreated illness that's gone for 20 years and you're no better, how much louder can God shout at you that this message is wrong because in the Bible when

people prayed, people got healed. So I think I will end my part of it on that note there, John. There's very little I could add to that but the only thing that I will say is that we were also taught in this type of movement, both the brannemism, both yours, many of the others that I'm dealing with.

We were taught that God's love depended on whether or not He healed you. If He didn't heal you, then they would never come out and say that openly if He didn't heal you, He doesn't love you.

What they would do instead would say God shows His love because He heals us and it's part of the atonement. So therefore we're bound to Him in this healing thing. What you're left with when people aren't healed, they feel like it can't be that God doesn't love me because that's not what the Bible says.

It must be something that I have done that has estranged me from God. The only thing that I would say is that none of that you can find in the Bible. You only can find it in these questions.

groups, which leads you to the question that I'll leave it with, and you guys can take it or leave it, but was it the Christian God that these people were serving? I have to ask the question because it sounds different. If you read the Bible, this doctrine specifically makes it sound like a different God. So with that, I'll say thank you for doing this.

I agree with you. Thanks, Sean. If you've enjoyed a show and you want more information, you can check us out on the web. You can find us at William-Pranem.org. For more about the dark side of the New Apostolic Reformation, you can read Weaponized Religion from Christian Identity to the NAR, available on Amazon, Kindle, and Automate.