Demystifying Modern Prophecy: Secret Mechanics Behind Charismatic Revelation

Hello and welcome to another episode have the William Branham Historical Research Podcast. I'm your host John Collins the author and founder of William Branham Historical Research and with me I have my co-host and friend Brantley Smith. Brantley it's good to be back and to talk about IHOP KC and all things prophetic. I was thinking after the last time we spoke there's so many topics that are in my head that I want to go through with you about IHOP KC and it really goes to the broader community of the New Apostolic Reformation but one of the things I really wanted to discuss with

somebody who has started to deprogram and started to question everything but is at the very early stages of their journey which I kind of consider you in that category but with regards to the prophetic so I wanted to kind of demystify what that means but also to get your perspective of what is the prophetic. Oh man well it's good to be back number one second you've offended me already this morning that I'm just beginning the journey but yeah it's it's only been about five years I think that I would count in my book which is just beginning I think

it takes you about two to three years to figure out like where the ground is and then like if you're Superman and then after that you know it's like okay what can I what can I hold on to but yeah the prophetic it's it's one of the things that is is hard to navigate because so much of it shaped my life a personal prophecy whether that was a prophetic word at a conference or a dream though I had some point or so a lot of that stuff's hard to navigate in process and even the most confusing thing is that in some of those things you

find threads of truth that you can't let go of and so yeah the prophetic was all over I hop day one that I walked in to first day of orientation everybody's running around I don't know if they I doubt they did this and in the brand of code they everybody was running around with tape recorders and prophesying over people pushing record and then at the end of the day they gave you the tape recorder the tape from your recorder but yeah lots lots of experiences and stories I'm sure oh yeah you know it wasn't that way for us it's it's kind of

funny because at this in the same way that I see you as a new person who has escaped a cult even though it's been five years I see I hop KC as a new cult that has formed that really hasn't gone as destructive as it could have. It's kind of, you know, all of the things that has happened. It's kind of unbelievable, but it could be so much worse. And I know that's probably not sympathetic to the victims.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not trying to make light of it. But I came from one that was so far worse. And to, again, to demystifying the prophetic, we were taught that it was the manifested sons of God theology, same thing that you kind of grew up with and were a part of. We were listening to recordings how we too can be this manifested son of God. And there's one, I can never find it when I go try to look it up. But there's this one passage, this passage. This is one statement brand of maids in his transcripts when he's talking about using the phrase, thus say at the Lord.

And he says it's so common. It sticks to your bones like grits and beans and gravy or, you know, some, some hillbilly statement that he uses. But what he's trying to say in essence is that you too can do it. Just say thus say at the Lord. Say it. And that really was the precursor to what became the word of faith movement. You too can have the word of faith. You too can do it.

Even shades of limber there. Exactly. More than people realize, if you listen to Wembers sermons, it's like it came right from Brandon's playbook, but with a different twist. So it sounded like his own. Yeah. I thought you were crazy whenever you first brought up the Wembers connection because he is such a good guy in our circles. And you know, we'll never know like what, what was happening behind closed doors and stuff with him and what his influences and stuff were. But you realize that this stuff is like the analogy Jesus gives. It's like 11 and it just ends up

everywhere. It spreads and infects. And then you just, it takes over. Then people don't even realize that they're describing to this stuff. You know, while you while it is mystifying the prophetic and we're trying to demystify it, it is also erasing the covenants. If you think about the way that they view prophets and prophecy and understand what a covenantal prophet is, that's a phrase that you won't find any single member of the New Apostolic Reformation referring to a covenantal prophet. At least I haven't found it. And if they do, they really skim the surface and make light

of it. But under the old covenant, there were old covenant prophets that were talking about the things that Israel had done wrong and the reasons that the curses were coming or the reasons that the blessings were coming. And the blessings were a futuristic prophecy. You did this, you have done this good thing. So I promised I would give you the blessings, I being God. Here are the blessings and the prophets would proclaim the blessings. So that was futuristic. But a vast majority of the prophecies weren't futuristic. They were talking about the things that you've done in the

past that have done wrong. And I promised that I would send this curse, I being God. promise that I would send this curse. So the prophet was literally just a mouthpiece for God, but it was a covenantal prophecy. It was something that because of the old covenant law, that's why that whole system existed.

Yeah, like if I'm looking at some of the positives from that whole idea that I still hold on to a little bit is that I believe that God, the divine, however you're defining it where you're at right now, I think interacts with us. Like I think that's, I think we are knitted into the fabric of whatever God is and we can't separate ourselves from that. I think that God speaks to people. Like I don't deny that. But what we saw in our circles was much more than just God speaking to someone, but people giving direction, people

making determinations about people. And it's so funny last time we talked, we talked a lot about incantations and divination and all that kind of stuff. Different expressions of it would seep into charismatic Christianity, even though they can dim it. And I think you see the same thing with the prophetic. I mean, I was just listening to a story last night about somebody who had a pastor that was naming demons in them and taking them through deliverance and by, you know, some kind of supernatural power was able to identify all these things and then asked her to name the demon that was in there. And she's like, I ran

out of demons today. I didn't know. It's just so interesting to see how something that can be good and encouraging becomes a weapon for destruction and also a tool for control to brainwash people to convince people of what God thinks. And they don't realize their own, their own human agendas that are mixed into it. I mean, that's the IHOP KC prophetic history in a nutshell. Whenever you go back and look at the Ernie grew and stuff and how they were going to the churches around Kansas City like it's crazy. Yeah. People started to ask me to name demons. I'd probably go through the list of demons in the Disney

cartoons and pick names that they're unfamiliar with. What's it? Sharna bog, I think is how it's said in Fantasia. I'd go through these names and they'd be like, Oh, yeah, that's a good name. Good. What's funny is that's what they're doing essentially. And I think again, if you come back to try to demystify what is prophecy, you find out that in many cases, a lot of what is being said across the pulpit as prophetic, it's either a common sense or be Fantasia. It's really you could compare the similarities between Disney cartoons and they're kind of quite astounding when you do. But the so let's start with this. When

you were in IHOP KC, how would you have defined what prophecy or the prophetic was? How did they teach you prophecy? Yeah. So the very foundational thing that always quoted was that scripture and revelation that the testimony of Jesus is the essence of prophecy.

And so they tried to cast a wide net with it and pretty much saying anything that testified of Jesus was prophetic because you have to realize like what we even incurs my circles what we understand is as prophetic as far as like giving a word to someone. And even in I hop we kind of had a more narrow definition I guess when we looked at, I can't if it's Corinthians or where it was to talk about the encouragement and edification and exhortation was the purpose of prophecy.

And so they would talk about that but we also looked at the singing, the spontaneous singing that happened, the playing of instruments and different expressions of worship. We solved that as prophetic. They referred to it as prophetic worship and prophetic singers and prophetic musicians.

So that term was woven into the fabric of the community. But as far as the way that it was taught they did give a lot of guardrails for it. And so we heard frequently no mates dates or babies.

Even though I encountered the mates one myself one time which was a fun story of me in a high school girlfriend that walked into a service. She had moved to Kansas City and we were dating at the time. And this lady comes up and tells us that we're going to get married. And I was like, oh well, it freaked her out too. And we didn't get married. It's a prize boiler.

And so it's interesting to see how all that plays out and even seeing the ways that they used it to, I've heard stories of different bad behavior situations happening within like I hop you with students off campus or whatever it might be. And the way that they attempt to address that first is by giving a word of the Lord from the pulpit instead of like taking things head on.

So the prophetic was a big part. And even in the harp and bowl model, I guess one of the, if I can call it, I don't know if I can call it pure, but one of the most common expressions of the prophetic and the harp and bowl models, what they called oracles, which is if you're in the middle of a worship set and you saw somebody, I don't have a Bible within reach, but they would hold up their Bible in the air. One of the prophetic singers, and that meant they had, they had a oracle, a song they wanted to sing that they felt like God was speaking to the room. And the

worship leader would, you know, they had their little structure. The worship leader would approve or not approve. And they would, they would sing their oracle, which was usually just something like God loves you. He sees you, you know, that very simple, like love type stuff. It wasn't moved to Africa and sell all your belongings and wasn't nothing like grandiose like that.

They kind of kept guardrails on it, but it did that in itself did not prevent it from being abused, I don't believe. Because of the way that the prophecy and the idea of what a prophet is, has been so much obscured by the movement.

People don't understand even some of the phrases, like, so word of faith and brannemism both would use the phrase and just throw it around, thus say it the Lord. And because it's in, using the word thus, it's the old Queen's English from the KJV, it sounds mystical, it's like this, you know, shaman is saying this weird thing.

But essentially that's just saying God is telling you. And it would be the same as if you went into a room of people and started shouting really loudly, John says, do this. And I'm in the room and I look at you and I say, wait a minute, I never said that.

That's kind of what God is doing, looking down at these people, because they're using that phrase thus say the Lord, as though God is speaking through their mouth, when in fact it's usually coming from their head.

And eventually in this podcast, I want to break that down a bit, but needless to say, God didn't say half of the things that they said. In fact, some of them are even anti-biblical and they'll use thus say if the Lord behind it, and there's no way that God said something that's anti-biblical.

Yeah, and it's used so flippantly in those circles. And that's something that Mike would try to push back on, but we've touched on before, like in the context of spiritual abuse of talking about people, speaking on behalf of God, things that God would never say.

And I think that that falls very easily. I think we can put that in the Ten Commandment bucket of using the Lord's name in vain. Like I think that's a pretty simple connection to make.

And Mike would frequently, Mike always had like different things that he would talk about from the pulpit, as far as like guidelines and advice and kind of under this guise of like pastoral kind of thing.

And like whatever he talked about, movements of the spirit, I'm using quotation marks if you're not watching, but you talk about movements of the spirit, you talk about hamburger helper God involved all the time.

He's like maybe 20% of it is real and 80% of it's, you know, just us just having a good time, not anything, you know, not anything destructive or bad motive or anything. It's just we just enjoyed a little bit much and amplify, you know.

So I remember him having that conversation many times, but the other one he talked about in the context of that, say the Lord is he would say, everybody's only allowed one thus say at the Lord a year is what he would tell everyone.

Which is funny. And so like the other day, Lisa Bickel, you know, she's been on her, which is Mike's sister that rents Hope City has been on her little diet tribe of trying to restore Mike and she's crying victim because they've lost funding in the midst of all of this, you know, a couple hundred thousand dollars and every other word out of her mouth is, just say at the Lord, just say at the Lord, just say at the Lord, and I think it's because it's the only only, like it's their last ditch effort.

It's kind of like a Hail Mary pass in a sense that they're sitting there looking at the community. and think if they say, they'll say it's the Lord enough, that they'll be convinced that it's God's will.

And that's how they get away with the stuff. And people trust them and believe them. And I mean, I trusted them, I believed them, not trying to say anything less about those people. Like we've all been there in those seats.

But yeah, I think it's very unusual. I mean, and that's what made everything so seductive for lack of a better word is we heard frequently Mike talk about how rare it is for somebody to hear the audible voice of God.

And Mike would say, you only get one thus say at the Lord of Gear and things like that, which caused you to put your guard down a little bit and be more receptive to those things when it did happen.

Because you thought every moment that it happened was an extra special moment. It kind of made it more important in a sense. Absolutely. It's like, you know, I could give a thousand examples. I gave the example of you being in a room shouting, John said, it's also similar to, if I asked you over to my house, and I turn on the water faucet and I say, look, I can make water.

And you're sitting there thinking, wow, he's made water. But it's essentially coming from the water company, right? If they shut off the water from there and I have no water, Mike saying that you only get one per year, that's you controlling the faucet.

And that's really trying to say that you're the one who's producing this. That's not the way it works. But that is the way that the movement has, by and large, trained the people to believe.

It's just, it's nonsense when you think about it. Yes, being able to remove yourself from that environment, step away and critique everything, question everything again, and then just all the little things like that, it just becomes very obvious that it seems calculated in a sense is what it seems.

So I guess it's not obvious, but. So I've mentioned a few times that people want me to take sides on whether or not the gifts continue. And I argue that, well, one of the gifts, many of the gifts that they describe in the Bible, you aren't really ranking in the same category, but they're specifically talking to prophecy and they're talking to speaking in tongues.

And ignoring all of the rest, the gift of being a good servant is not among the gifts that they include. But I don't, I purposefully, exactly. I purposefully don't pick a category because I have had things happen to myself and to others that I'm aware is beyond what is natural in the human realm.

So what category, what category do I put them in? I'm not going to say, but I have seen it. And so I'll go a little bit further with that than I usually do. My great grandmother was a prophetess.

I'm going to pull it out of it. Exactly. So I don't talk about this much because it's a. thing that I put into a category of this is personal and this is not something that the world should know.

And that's the number one point I want to make. Whenever this kind of thing is real, the people don't try to broadcast it. They don't try to make it something that puts them onto a higher pedestal or a platform, makes people see them as different than other humans.

In fact, they would be abhorred to think that you are putting them into a superior status because you have this thing that happens to you. I've had a thing happen to me and I can assure you that the vague things that they're calling prophetic in the movements, that's not the way it works if it's real.

That's the way it works if it's imagination. And I will also say that to the people who have this kind of thing happen to them, whenever it's real, it is so vivid that you can't deny it.

The details are going to be accurate, the situation. It's like if you're looking at a TV and you're watching a movie and some person comes into the scene, but everything else in the scene is removed.

You know exactly what's happening, you know exactly why it's happening, and it's so overwhelming that whenever the thing becomes real, you're suddenly instantly, you're like, oh my gosh, that's exactly what happened. But it isn't like you want to go tell the world, hey, I can do this thing.

Come watch me. Let me get on a stage and get 1,000 people in front of me. It's more like, well that's very personal and I'm a little surprised that happened. That's usually the way it works.

But it is so real to you that it can't change over time. If you tell the story today, if you tell the story next year, 10 years from now, it was so real to you, that story will remain the same every single time.

But the way that the movement has trained people to believe in the prophetic is that it's so excessively vague that it might be something as ridiculous as a butterfly landing on somebody's nose means that we're going to invade Russia.

I mean something as weird as that. They take it so far to the extreme of being vague and then they say it gets more clear with time. Well, what they're doing is they're trying to make time match the original details.

Yeah. We see that all the time with the Chris Reed, Jeremiah Johnson types that they must have like all their prophetic words like in a notion template or something where they can like just like something happens and they can just like Google the word in their prophetic words and dreams and stuff that they've written down because those jokers will pull out something from five years ago and make the most obscure connections with it.

Like I think the whole, if I remember right, the whole Trump prophecy thing started with a Kim Clement talking about a Trump bet is what it was. And that's just like snowballed into what it's been today, which is crazy, but I can resonate with those real things.

Or what I perceive is real, and that's what's hard to, that's what's hard to be honest about with myself, is there logical explanations for these things that happen in these things that I feel felt and experienced.

That's the world of quantum stuff is so fascinating, just seeing how connected things are and how things react to each other. And so sometimes I wonder, is there scientific reasoning for this stuff that we just don't understand yet?

But I remember being at a conference when I was 16 and then getting a word. That was very specific. And then it was something that kept with me and why I ended up going to IHOP was because of that prophetic word.

And right at like the next day, I think it was, I got offered a scholarship to go to IHOP, which I think I only met like three other people, like my whole time there, they got scholarships to go to IHOP you.

But I ended up my last little bit of time at IHOP, I went to California to do what they called an externship with a church there. In that pastor, almost verbatim quoted that prophetic word to me.

Now there could be, could there have been something I shared it with a friend and then they shared it with him or something like they're very well could that something like that could have happened.

And I've tried to rack my brain and think like, is there somebody I told that could have told him? Could I don't remember ever telling him this word? And but it was very impactful because it was a transitional time in my life when it happened and he brought up those same phrases.

And so I still that those kind of things hang in the back of my head. And and sometimes it's like a guiding light to be honest. It's kind of like something that pulls me back down to ground and reminds me of like, is this still the thread that's constant through my life that keeps coming back and it gives it does.

It gives me a comfort and a sense of I think a sense of peace and safety that God has me, whatever that means, that like that I'm protected and OK and safe and and I don't want to take that for myself as crazy as that sounds.

I like I realize it's like I'm starting to like navigate all these theological ideas and things. There's there's things I choose not to touch because they're they're still precious to me. They're still important to me.

They still mean a lot and there's a lot of curtains. I've been scared to pull back and see the wizard behind them. And I think that's OK. Like I don't think, I think sometimes we put so much weight into truth.

This goes down really crazy, but we put so much weight into the pursuit of truth and you know, the old saying ignorance is bliss. Like sometimes it's just better off that we don't know.

If you're happy and content with something, I have that conversation with Christians often because they look at my journey and they wonder how I can interact with them and even though I might have different beliefs and still call myself a Christian.

And one of the first things always tell people is like, like, I don't wish my journey on you. Like if you were happy with your beliefs and they're bringing you comfort, you're not experiencing harm, you're not experiencing abuse most of the time they are, just don't realize it, but in these religious contexts, but not have to touch those things.

And so that's all a weird tangent, but that's, I got into my fields thinking about that prophetic word and how it's guided me and stuff. And so like some of that's hard to let go of, it is.

And some of it, I don't know that we should let go of, but it's hard. It is. And you know, and that's part of the reason why I don't take either side of the issue.

Like I said, I've had things, I've seen things, I've had things happen to me that I cannot explain. When it happened, it's 100% accurate. The instance, which I'll probably never tell this in public, but the thing that I saw was so accurately detailed.

Whenever it happened, I knew exactly, this is the moment, this is exactly it. And it shocked me to the point that I was scared. It puts a, it really instills this fear. And my memory of that will never change for the rest of my life.

I know exactly what happened. I know exactly the event, I know exactly why. And I know the consequences that would have happened had I not seen this thing. So whenever, when that happens, you don't make things up, you don't add details, you don't try to embellish it.

There's no need to embellish it, right? But, so here's the other problem with this. When you're in this type of movement that you try to focus on the prophetic, which that's very common between what you were in and what I was in, if something like this does happen to you, now, because you've been trained to think of it differently than just simply, oh, it happened and I'm glad this happened.

Instead, you try to say, what can it make it happen again? I want it happen again. I want to be something bigger, I want to be better. And no matter who you are, my personality is not the type of personality that wants to be out front.

This whole thing that I'm doing with the podcast is actually out of my element. So it's not like I would even navigate to that, but each time that I would have something similar happen, I would try to just grasp it's draws to believe that it was more real than it was.

And what I'm trying to say with this and trying to delicately not go too far with the story because it is very personal and it involves other people, which is, it's also very personal.

Whenever this happens to you, it's so real, but it's real in your head, right? And there's this fine line between, what is real... in your head and what is, like I said, imagination. So if you're very intently thinking on whatever subject it is, whatever is the problem in your life, whatever you need God's help with, if you're focusing your mind and attention on that, you're constantly thinking about it. And your brain, because the way the brains work, you start thinking of all the intricate ways in which the things may play out in the situation that you're in. And so those become very real in your brain.

Well, what happens is, in your brain, as you're going through all of these scenarios, whenever one of them happens, you've thought through, I don't know, 50 different scenarios in your head. And then one suddenly happens, when you're in this type of movement, you try to believe that that one scenario out of the 50 that you had in your head was prophetic. God told me that this thing happened. And it happened exactly like I thought. People, so I've been in this kind of movement. I know how this works. People will do this and not tell you the other 49 ways that

the brain had taken that same scenario and thought of the same different, the different types of outcomes. I was part of this movement. I did the same exact things. Now, the fine line of question comes in, did God really give you this? One thing out of the 50, the one that was correct, did he really give you this? And if so, are you blessed because of it? Well, I take the position that if you believe all blessings come from God, then yes, absolutely. But you really can't call it prophecy. Yeah, it's funny. Like as you, I think last time we recorded together, we talked

talked about Brunei Brown talking about hyper vigilance and being able to read a room and going through all the different things in her head. And that's what I found myself in that same situation before, where I'm thinking through all the situations that can happen and all those things.

And sometimes it's just a very natural human response to things, to think through possibilities and all those things. And the coincidence gets labeled as something divine. Have we ever, have we or anybody else ever talked to you about the prophecy rooms at IHOP?

I don't think you and I have. I know that Jed has and I know that Adam has, but it's fascinating. Yeah, it's one of the things that you kind of keep some kind of conscience like I never felt good about the prophecy rooms as weird as that sounds. One expression of that was me talking about the tape recorder. So people ran around the tape recorders and they would give you the tape and you'd stick it in somebody else's recorder or they would pass it around and stuff.

But whenever we would do like ministry trips or I think we had two for class before participate in the prophecy rooms and on these ministry trips and stuff, it would be a requirement for our students to facilitate these prophecy rooms. And people would come expecting to hear from God, from you.

Like, and that's just a weird position to be good in. And it's not as black and white as it seems in the sense that like there were moments that I remember pretty much what would happen.

They would be in the ones I participated in. There would be maybe two, three people who are prophesying and then two to four people who are getting prophesied over. And I had moments where I felt like those extra special feelings that we call the Holy Spirit.

I don't know that we think the Spirit of God. And like I remember sometimes having those moments in there and people breaking down in tears as you said something like I remember one time telling a guy that I saw him building something like Noah building an ark kind of thing.

And it wasn't anything profound. The guys started weeping in tears. Like and apparently he had just started a business or something and like and things like that. Like that was encouraging to that dude.

Like do I think it was harmful? No, I don't think it was. Like it could have been like if I used that little piece if I knew that piece of knowledge and then used it to change his direction or something, maybe it could have been manipulative.

But I think some of those moments just help people feel seen and not lost as a speck in the universe, I guess. But the flip side of that is like,

if you were feeling unspiritual and you didn't want to be there, you didn't want to prophesy over people. You felt bad about it. Like you just didn't feel in the mood for it. Whatever you want to define that.

But is that we would still go there cranky and hungry or whatever on these ministry trips and still like force a word over somebody. Like I mean, I remember moments sitting in there. I was just like flip open my Bible and like look for a song or something and be like, okay, let's just, let's do this one.

The Lord loves you. Like you know, you just default to some simple stuff sometimes. But yeah, it was a weird thing and what's funny is like it feels very, as far as I know, well, as far as I know, nobody ever paid for prophecy.

But I guarantee that people got in those prophecy rooms and like had their mind blown and then gave lots of money to the ministry, I'm sure. 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?

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What's fascinating about it to me is if you understand just the simple psychology behind the prayer room. Number one, it is ingenious. The people who thought up this concept, which there isn't anything that you can find in the Bible really under the New Covenant Christian Christianity, there's nothing you can find in New Covenant Christianity that is matching.

But it is so ingenious because what basically is happening is there's the state of Euphoria. And you can look through every other religion that exists. And you're going to find a similar thing. The only difference is they don't call it the Holy Spirit.

They don't call it whatever is their deity or whatever is their pagan belief. But in Christianity, you have to call it the Holy Spirit, whether it is or not. And there's this question, I'm not going to say it's not, but there's this question as to whether it really is or it's not for the sins.

Exactly. And that's one of the things we grew up with, do not question the Holy Spirit or you will be cut off from God forever. But that's really not. So when you're in this type of Euphoria, you get into this mental state.

Here's where I think Christianity really shines. If you understand just the basic principles of psychology, the things that are bothering you up here when it comes out your mouth, it bothers you less up here because you've now had to process it.

So things like Confess your sins one to another. This is actually one of the most basic principles of psychology. You have something that you've done wrong. Tell everybody else, process it with them. They will give you some encouragement, they'll make you feel better.

Yes, you did something wrong. Don't do it again, but it's not that bad. You can overcome this. This is a great thing. This is like group therapy, right? That's a good thing. But so think through that principle, you've got something that's really bothering you.

Something that maybe is making you lose sleep at night, you're just continually thinking about it. You process it, you engage the group, and now you no longer are bottling it up. All of that came out, all that emotion came out, and that's discussing again, sin in your life.

Well, now take the flip side. You have something that is really troubling you just in life in general, same emotions, same bottling it up, and then it comes out and you say, oh my gosh, it's prophecy.

It's the same experience in two different ways. But you never find somebody who is saying that whenever this came out from the sinful side, this was a prophetic sin. And it's the same exact experience, right?

The point I'm trying to make with this is, if you read the Old Testament and you understand the Old Testament prophecies, if you want to claim the prophetic, both sides were claimed. You, Israel, have done this sinful thing and I, God, am sending this curse.

That was a prophetic thing. You, Israel, have done this good thing and I'm giving you the blessings. This is a prophetic thing. But again, that is covenantal prophecy. It has no relationship to what we see today in Christianity.

But they've separated the two because of the prosperity gospel and the prosperity health gospel. You can't have a prophecy about the sinful things in your life. You can only have it about the good.

The thing it makes me think of is the thing you would see happen. I worked with the teen camps a lot for two years whenever I was there. The thing that you would always see people do is they would come up and if they were going to name a sin or something, it was always, if it was a young man, it was always something to do with lust is what it was.

And it's like, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to look at a hormonal 13, 14 year old boy and say that you struggle with lust. Like, I think that's a given and I think our challenge is to teach them how to navigate that healthily.

Like, that's where, that's what our part in that journey is. But you also look at like the positive confession stuff. Like it's no, it's not a mystery that word of faith and even in non-Christian circles, you look at like these manifestation kind of like speak your reality into existence kind of things that people wouldn't do it if it didn't have some kind of positive experience or outcome for them.

And I've seen that and it's crazy. Like I look at like certain people who are a little new AG that I know and are all into that stuff and they speak things into existence.

I don't know how. I don't know the psychology behind it. I don't know if the universe responds to their positive confession or if it's just that they're focused on their goals and they're actually achieving their goals because they're talking about them all the time.

But then that, I feel like that's always our conversation is talking about the good and the bad and how we always come back to that tangling kind of term and they're just so infused together.

And that's what makes these things so, so dangerous is you take tools for good and have people hijack it, go down a little MK ultra rabbit holes and stuff and talk about people getting it, using it to manipulate people like it's well what they've done, they've twisted prophecy into something that it isn't.

And when you do this, now you open the door for all of these other things that it isn't. One of the things is this intercessory prophecy type world. I don't know if I'm assuming they had that and I'll help KC.

but you have basically these intercessory people who are the mediators between God and man. And it, I was laughing when you were talking because it brought up a memory that I have shared on here. I remember sitting in a service and this absolutely gorgeous 20-ish-year-old girl walked up to the front, wearing not really revealing, but somewhat tight clothing, and sits like in the front row. Every guy in the room saw this. Like, if you're a male, you're going to see this, right? And then the sermon transitioned in the middle to how this woman had a seductive spirit on her. And number one, this was incredibly wrong from the Master

Minister to do this. How does this woman feel being preached at? But to all of the other man, oh my gosh, how does he know? I was seduced by the spirit of how beautiful she was.

It's in her heart. And so the other thing, I don't know if you had it to the same extent. In Branamism, there was no separation between beauty and lust. If you saw someone beautiful, it was lust, no matter what. And it took me a long time, I'll bet it took 10 years to get that out of my head. The difference between those two things, God makes things beautiful. You may lust after them, but there is a difference. So anyway, everybody in here is thinking that he can identify the spirits because this beautiful lady walked up front. Well, what has happened in the movement

because of this intercessory, intermediary type thing? They take common, nonsensical things. Like you said, every male who's growing up, they're developing their hormones of raging, they're going to have this thing. And every single one of them are going to believe that this is actually some prophetic intercessory spirit. Yeah, it's the people who claim to read mail and just really they're just really broken humans, leading broken humans. And it's the same kind of stuff.

It's unbelievable when you think about it. And so put yourself, take yourself out of that. And put yourself into the person who's claiming to be this inner intercessor or whatever. You yourself have to know that you're doing this to a person. But here's where it gets weird.

And I don't think people really realize this. There are people who are doing this. And they've been conditioned to believe that it is real. It's part of the religion. But inwardly, they'd recognize what they're doing. They recognize that number one, they're using common sense.

Here's an adolescent male. We know what most of the adolescent males are struggling with. But if we can show this spiritual connection, whether it exists or not, I can help them improve their lives. So it becomes like these fives.

programs where people go, they overcome alcohol. There's nothing in alcoholics anonymous where a person comes and says, I'm the divine intermediary between you and God, but yet they can do the same exact things. They can say, how many of you are struggling with this? And everybody in the room is an alcoholic. So they all know that they have whatever is the topic at hand. How many of you just get away with my cult friends, like we all have an internal critic, like there's certain things that we get about that's like, absolutely, right? So this person who is in AA, leading the

group, how many of you are having family issues because of your alcohol? Well, probably nine out of 10 of them are going to, if they're abusing alcohol heavily, they're going to have that issue.

And the other ones don't have any family, that's what it takes exactly. But the person's not going to say, now God spoke to me and said, some of you are having trouble with your family. That's not how it works. But when you go to a church setting, they're doing the same exact things. But because you're in this world where you're trying to believe in angels, demons, prophecy, all of this nonsense, yes, this thought formed, yes, you had the, you had the critical thinking enough to know and realize that the people are struggling. But you're, you're trained to believe that that is God, whether it's

actually God or not. Yeah. Yeah. It gives this credibility and authority to the people speaking these things too, whether it's warranted or not. It bolsters them in the image of the congregants or the members or whoever they're leading. Whenever I think about those kind of figures at IHOP, some of them were kind of shrouded in mystery a little bit. We kind of had these like wise sage types that would have been around for years and been in the, been doing prayer meetings for decades.

And but kind of like low hanging fruit stuff would be like somebody like Lou, angle that we always, you know, Lou always had a fast for something. There was always some kind of fast going on, whether the whole community was participating or not. And it usually had to do something political as usually what it had to do with whenever it was Lou. It was some states trying to pass a gay marriage bill or or an abortion ban or or something, something's going on.

And it was always interesting to see how easily people believed Lou, myself included. I can probably count on one hand whenever I was fully in the amount of times that I heard Lou speak that I didn't end up in tears because I really felt moved by what he was saying and felt like it was God. But on the flip side, like now I can look back at the timelines and I can see I was at IHOP during the, as I'm trying to remember when Obama got elected the first time as it rommed.

that was running against him, I believe. And, you know, I can't remember exactly what Lou's word was on the front of it, but I remember like people panicking and like after Obama gets elected and it goes against all the prophetic words, like somebody's gotta get up there and say something, you know, and Lou would be that kind of guy that would step in in those moments and say something, whether it was BS or not, I don't know, probably was.

But there is an unspoken rule when you're in this movement, always say something, never remain silent. As long as you say something, say it spiritually and make it sound spiritual. And whatever, even if it failed, man, if you make it sound spiritual, it's prophetic.

It really is. And like the more coincidences you can highlight, the more accurate it is. That's when we went on, I remember a lot of people getting really disappointed. We went on this ministry trip to Southern California.

I'm sure we could do the math and figure out, because it was like the hundred year anniversary of Azusa is what it was. And we were going on this ministry trip there. And I remember a guy in the IHOP circles who's been a little bit embroiled in scandal lately, himself, Dean Briggs, I don't know if you know the name.

He gave us all this big old handout of all the prophetic reasons of why the third grade awakening was going to start when we went to Southern California and had a handout in all these bullet points of reinforcing the idea of why this third grade awakening was going to happen.

And I can't tell you how many disillusioned and disappointed people I have talked to in the decade sense, who really sincerely thought that they were going to experience the third grade awakening. One of my friends was, I heard him talk about it a little bit, and I don't want to put words in his mouth, so I don't want to talk too detailed about it.

But he was leading worship for like the big hurrah kind of a moment that we were outdoors. I can't remember exactly where we were. Maybe it was like near where the old house was supposed to be or something or in some kind of park and he's leading worship and stuff.

And he's like, man, even while he was up there singing, I think he thought that this was going to be the start of it kind of thing. And that's how much we believe to these people and put stock in it.

It was this weird mountain of ascension of spirituality that people climb and you knew when somebody was higher on that mountain than you were. And you always aspired to be one of those people at the top of the mountain

because of the equal proximity to God in a sense is where it was, but. Well, that's just it. Whenever you, in this type of movement, it is you that controls the prophecy, not God.

In the Bible, the prophets had no control over it whatsoever. When God spoke, they spoke. And when God didn't speak, they didn't speak. They just had normal lives like you and I. But the movement has tried to change it such that if you take any Old Testament prophet, Isaiah, or Ezekiel, it was.

It would be as though they wrote 100 Bibles of Prophecy, and there's a reason for that. If they give one solid word of God and everybody is looking for that word to come to pass, it is a single moment in time, a single prophecy, everybody is going to evaluate, did this happen or did this not happen?

And that's a big deal, and it was a big deal for Israel. But if they scatterbombed them with a thousand prophecies and they had a thousand Bibles of prophecies, you can't remember them all, number one.

But number two, if one fails, you just move on to the next one. And that's what they're doing. If I can scatterbombed them with a hundred prophecies a minute, then they're going to totally forget when one fails.

Yeah, like, I mean, what is the Lord, I'm trying to remember, I call the independent coalition of apostolic, whatever it's called, the council of apostolic leaders. Like, I think they have like a whole statement, like, on false prophecy, like, repenting and like, all that kind of stuff.

And like, that's the thing is like, none of us remember when they got it wrong because like it happens so frequently, we move on to the next thing. And so like, nobody's going to be the one to be like, well, Jeremiah Johnson on a Saturday night at my church said this and it didn't happen.

Like, that those kind of things just like, don't, don't happen. They probably should, like, they're probably should be, you know, people tracking this stuff. Maybe we can put an AI on it or something to track, you know, the accuracy of these words and, you know, 99% failure rate or something.

You know, it's funny that you went there because that was actually where I was going to end up as the climax is AI. So, so I'll let the global, global profit technologies, we'll consider every single thing that I have said, scatter bomb with prophecies, get 1,000 of them, watch how people react.

Over time, what you want, you begin to understand by reading the faces in the crowd, those that are appealing, those that they will reject, those that are directly related to them. Over time, what happens is, even without knowing it, you start to become a cold reader.

You start to read your crowds and then you know what to say to your crowds. And then if you repeat this in different cities, you know the ones that are going to be fascinating to the ones in the cities.

You become a cold reader and that's, you can look up cold reading, you can see exactly where I'm headed with that. But whenever you do this also, whenever you start to critically think about what may happen and you start to think outcomes, it literally becomes a calculation of outcomes.

And the more details you have surrounding the more information, leading to calculating the outcome, the more accurate your prophecy becomes. So before you give a prophecy to a crowd, you're going to, people in the movement do this.

I don't know if people realize this. They will find out all of the details that support the idea for the prophecy. And if you don't believe me, just go listen to any of them that will give whatever is prophecy, and they'll say, and look, if you read today's news, you're going to find x, y, and z. If you listen to the news radio, they're going to give the supporting details.

That's because they have done their background checks. They know they have calculated the potential outcomes. And that's how these prayer room, there was a school of the prophets in Brannem's time. And they were teaching them things like this, how to predict outcomes.

Because if you can predict a lot of outcomes, one of them will happen. And then people will believe you're a prophet. And now think of AI. You have all of this wealth of information, more outcomes than a human can possibly predict. Right now, I know people that have done this, what, what's an example? They, uh, they're, they're a gaming. People are gambling on games. They'll say, what is the outcome of this game? And then they'll go put a bunch of money on it. You read it on the news. People are winning earnings.

In the lottery, I think there was a lottery outcome. Somebody got the numbers from AI. And all it is is predicting outcomes based on the criteria that we have at hand. The part that is a little bit scary, I had this conversation with Jed. I'm not really afraid of AI in the sense that people will abuse it and say things that they won't. But I am afraid in the fact that it can be used to trick people in different ways than you can possibly think about one of which is predicting outcomes. Yeah. Yeah. The, the, the, the

bias reinforcement of like, I use chat GPT the most. And the way that it tells me what I want to hear all the time is, is unsettling. Um, and it, you know, there's ways around that and such. But yeah, the thing that's coming to mind was how many times have you set a service and heard, heard somebody quote, the wars and rumors of wars and, you know, personally, it's perfect kind of thing. And then they point, you know, I feel like World War 3 has been prophesied since my, since my birth. And like, obviously, the next World

War is going to be World War 3. Like, it doesn't take a profit to know that, you know, and humans are violent. Like, that's what they're going to do. And let's, we have some kind of huge movement of peace. World War 3 is going to happen eventually. But, you know, it does. It gives him credibility there. It's, it's, it's, it's probability and statistics is what it is. It's, but we call it the spirit of God. The sad part is if you, if you go look at Operation Condor and read through the declassified documents, World War 3 has

actually happened. They've missed anybody who predicts it. They've missed the number because it was in the classified documents. It says World War 3. I come across that one I was doing the research into Colonial Dignidad and started to understand the government ties between all of this, which is scary if you understand the ties between Laterane ministers and the government. But anyway, so, so many things that I could say about this. And in the end, it's this. They have tried to mystify what prophecy really is.

so that people can't understand it, so that when they use the trickery people are so mystified and they don't understand it to the extent that they believe it, whether it's real or not, and yet if somebody were to really have a gift and want to explain it to a person, they're not going to try to mystify it. They're going to be very plain, very simple, very real.

Yes, this thing happened. I don't understand this thing that happened. I don't think I'm overly spiritual. God was helping me with something. That's usually how a real prophecy would work, but it's not this thing that turns into this, I want to build a ministry, I want to bigger church, I want to have an audience of 10,000 people in a stadium somewhere at night so that I can get my name in the news media. That's not how it works. It's little simple things that you and I could, it could happen to an average person, it could happen to the most unspiritual center in the

city. If God wants to change their heart, I believe that God could give a prophecy to one of somebody who is not even a Christian to try to lead them to Christ. If you understand and believe God, that's how it would work. It's not this fascinating thing that they've made it into.

No, no, it's not. I remember near the beginning of any construction journey, having the small moment where I was really wrestling with the Bible and what the Bible meant to me in that time, and I was like, we argue so much about who God is as revealed through these scriptures, and it's like, man, if we just lift it up our eyes and looked around at the world around us, like we would see just glimmers of who God is everywhere around us. We don't have to worry about argue about this. We know what love looks like when we experience love, and it doesn't,

it doesn't seek its own way. It's not looking to grow a church. It's not looking for higher salaries. It's looking for the well-being of one another. I think that's what is most discouraging to me and not even with with NAR, but just broader Western evangelical Christianity. I think the most disappointing thing to me is that we have built a church that is more known for its belief in God, and it's the public displays of how much it loves God, Sean Floyd running around during the pandemic, doing lettuce worship, and not by the rubric that Jesus gave us. He said that we would know that

the world would know that you were my disciples by your love for one another, never said anything about their political stances, never said anything about their belief systems, like Jesus came and showed a way of life to people. We like to argue about whether there's a Trinity or not, or whether there's...

You know, an afterlife or not or these things and Jesus is like blessed or the poor or blessed or those who more like he gives us like practical Like just like go live and and I think that you know I think like I've demystified a lot of my faith. I think in a sense, but in a way It feels more mystical. I guess in a sense and in believing that that that every day has purpose that I'm not living for some Aetherial eternal world anymore. I'm not living for some Pastors dream of my life, you know my whole life, you know, I got told you know, it's gonna go into ministry and this and that and I still do ministry stuff and still enjoy it, but

Living life is is what we've forgotten how to do we've forgotten how to love people we've forgotten how to you know have conversations with people instead We know how to argue and how to divide that's that's what churches have taught us And I don't know how I ended up there from prophetic, but that's that's a bonus content. There you go Well, I can see your passion about it. So next time we get together you're going to do a sermon on how to love people Yeah, let's do it. Awesome Well, if you've enjoyed our show and you want more information, you can check us out on the web

You can find us at William-Branum.org From 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 audible

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