Appeal to Kobus Van Rensburg (and to many others who preach another gospel)

The internet is an amazing source of information especially when searching for the truth about the true Gospel of Jesus Christ.  I found this gem last night while doing some research.  Now not only does this letter to Kobus van Rensburg bear a striking resemblance to most things in my article on Kobus van Rensburg but the author (Andrè L Immelman) puts the Gospel of Jesus Christ into wonderful perspective.  i.e., the Gospel of Jesus Christ has been replaced with another gospel, one that does not preach repentance of sin but instead one that uses signs and wonders, prosperity and false teaching to bring people to the ‘Lord’.  Although this letter is addressed to Kobus van Rensburg  it actually applies to EVERY SINGLE Pastor/Minister/Preacher out there and to you (the ones who are being led astray).

This letter explains what the Gospel of Jesus Christ is supposed to be - so, if you want to, or need to, understand what the true Gospel of Jesus Christ is then this letter is for you as well.

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Appeal To Kobus van Rensburg
(Thursday, 06 April 2006) - - Last Updated (Wednesday, 15 November 2006)

This appeal to Kobus and Annalise van Rensburg of Spirit Word Ministries in South Africa followed on to a decision not to be yoked with Spirit Word Ministries - here is that appeal;

Dear Kobus & Annalise,

Please understand my heart in all of this - this is not an imperious act of usurpation on my part, nor am I bowing to the pressures from others! But as a crusader for the Truth, I need to always only do the ‘right thing’ and after prayerful consideration and consulting several giants of the faith on the matter, I humbly submit my response below for your consideration and comment.

Firstly, it is imperative that we measure all our actions, all our claims and all our thoughts only against God’s Word, so what you or I may believe or may feel or may claim in the matter, is really of no importance whatsoever (Prv 14:12) - all that matters is what God says in the matter (Jhn 17:17)!

Secondly, I ask that you do not dismiss my response below out-of-hand just because you’re irked with me - please study it carefully and aided by a trustworthy rendering of God’s Word!

I have no doubt that you are both very sincere in what you’re doing, but it is really not about sincerity at all - it is all about the Truth! And although I appreciate your telephone call to me on Friday afternoon Kobus, it only served to exacerbate my concerns - please permit me to share these with you in the spirit of (Mat 18:15 and Gal 6:1):

1. You lay claim to and are widely held to be a scholar of Scripture but yet, Annalise’s email to me this past weekend clearly demonstrates a very poor grasp of certain Biblical fundamentals - you slighted me by stating; “If you feel that God has appointed you to judge preachers and ministries, which I don’t find scriptural, you are still welcome to our ministry.” The only response that I am able to tender is the following:

1.1. Act 17:11  - exhorts us to be Bereans and to check everything against God’s Word;

1.2. 1Cor 5:12  - whilst we are not to judge the motives of men or to judge hypocritically (Mat 7:1, 3-5)  Paul nevertheless calls us here      to judge people inside the church;

1.3. 1Pet 4:17  - the time is now for judgment of the church;

1.4. 2Tim 4:2   - we are to rebuke and correct each other using God’s Word as our measure;

1.5. 2Cor 6:14  - we are called to judge whether others are indeed Christian and in particular those who claim to be ‘Christian’, whether they are true disciples of Jesus Christ otherwise we will not be able to recognise an unequal yoke;

1.6. Jas5:20    - we are to judge sin in the church and we are to judge between good and evil, what is right and what is not when weighed against the absolute truth of God’s Word;

1.7. Mat7:15:16 - Jesus warns us to be aware of false prophets and to judge them by their fruits;

1.8. Eph 5:11   - we are to have nothing to do with false teachers or false prophets and we are to expose them;

1.9. etc.

2. During our telephone conversation you on Friday Kobus, you stated that you’ve never claimed any Prophetic gift or to be a prophet (sic) and yet, your web site home page introduces you as; founder and Senior Pastor (of Spirit Word Ministries), Prophet and Teacher.  Moreover, your web site gives a number of (highly esoteric) revelational prophecies. It is very clear to me from Scripture that in the primary sense, the church today no longer has apostles and prophets as their ministry ended when the foundation of the church was laid during the time of Pentecost and when the NT canon was completed, for now we have the full revelation of Christ in His Word available to us (Heb 1:1). Therefore, whilst I am able to accept prophetic utterances of an ex-positional nature in the contemporary church, any prophetic utterances of a revelatory nature (such as those found on your web site) however is an egregious violation of (Det 4:2, 12:32, Prv 30:6, Jer 26:2 and of Rev 22:19) in particular!

3. You also claimed that you have no problem with Catholics, etc. (sic) - this clearly led me to understand that your  ’acceptance’ of Catholics extended beyond a Christian care and concern for the people and in fact, to a tolerance of Catholic doctrine itself - if this is indeed the case, then you clearly lack any degree of spiritual discernment Kobus, for we are commanded to expose all forms of doctrinal error - (Eph 5:11). The moment we become true Disciples of Christ, we give up our right to be silent - the Christian responsibility does not stop with our rejection of evil, but it extends to expose error, especially if it is found in the church - (2The 3:6,14,15)

4. But what really concerned and troubled me deeply Kobus, were your two statements to me that:

4.1.  you only preach the gospel of Jesus Christ, of the healing of the sick and raising of the dead (sic) and that

4.2.  if you advertised that people needed to come to church only to hear the gospel of Jesus Christ because they were sinners destined for hell and in needed to repent of their sins, that you will not fill the church; (sic)

These are serious indictments of your ministry which demonstrate either a lack of understanding of the gospel of Jesus Christ or at the very least, an aberration thereof. You are now preaching a different gospel Kobus (Gal 1:6) that can only cause very sincere believers to be sincerely led under your leadership, to eternal damnation (Mat 7:23)!

There is simply no gospel of healing, or of miracles, or of immortality; (as you claim on the Carte Blanche exposé of your ministry) that you can claim on demand from God as if He were some genie locked in a lamp (Mat 4:7) waiting to serve the needs of the many desperate people who flock to you for help! There is but one gospel, and that is a gospel which seeks to reconcile a fallen man to a sovereign God by grace through faith in Jesus Christ alone (2Cor 5:18-20). Paul understood the consequences of preaching a different gospel when he lamented. “Woe to me if I do not preach the gospel!” (1Cor 9:16 NIV).

We know that the gospel of Jesus Christ is foolishness to the world (1Cor 1:18), that the degenerate are not naturally drawn to Christ (1Cor 2:14) and that it is indeed hard for anyone to preach the gospel because the world refuses to accept it (Jhn 6:6). Therefore, I can understand why anyone would be tempted to use the attraction of ‘miraculous healing’ to lure people into his church, but herein lies the essence of the problem Kobus - unless anyone throws himself/herself onto God’s mercy for any reason other than in acknowledgment of God’s sovereignty and a deep conviction of personal depravity because of his/her sinful nature in an act of total surrender to God’s redeeming grace, it only results in disappointment with the ‘gospel’ and a false convert/an apostate (Jas 4:3 & Luk 18:1), i.e. the type of believer who honors God with his lips but whose heart is far from Him (Mrk 7:6,7) and the very person (i.e. a sincere believer) whom Jesus will one day deny (Mat 7:21ff) and cast into hell! You do not need showy attractions to lure people to come to church Kobus - it is God to adds adherents to the ranks of the true church (Act 2:47), and not the attraction of miraculous signs and wonders!

Yes, in Jhn 2:23-25, we read that many people who witnessed the miraculous signs that Jesus were performing, did come to believe in Jesus. However, Jesus realised that their belief was entirely superficial - it was a belief centered on Him as a miracle worker and not on Him as the Messiah, the Son of God sent to save the world (Jhn 3:16). The Jews demanded miracles and what they did not want, was the cross!

It is so that we are called to imitate Christ (1Cor 4:16), but that does not extend to those qualities that uniquely determine and that define Christ’s incarnation and it certainly does not bestow upon us the need to replicate Christ’s miracles! Jesus only performed miracles and extended those powers to his apostles as the founders of the NT church to prove, in the absence of the written Word of God which we have in our possession today, his divinity (Jhn 10:25,38 & 14:11) or that God may be glorified (Jhn 11:4)!

Interestingly, we are told that even the miracles failed to always draw people to Christ (Jhn 15:25) or bring about repentance, salvation or any holiness and in fact on one instance, it lead to disobedience (Mrk 1:40-45)! It was when the focus of worship shifted from Christ to the healing (and other) miracles instead, that Jesus instructed his disciples to not to tell anyone about the miracles (Mrk 1:44, 7:36 & Luk 5:15), because people were now coming to Him for all the wrong reasons and with all the wrong motives (e.g. to seek healing instead of salvation)! Jesus even went so far to denounce those cities where he had performed miracles because the people there failed to repent - so miracles do not lead to repentance (Mat 11:20), an essential part of the salvation process (Act 2:38)! I seriously doubt if Jesus would have permitted any of his miracles to be demonstrated on international television or boasted about on the Internet - never did Jesus perform any miracles just to ‘show off’  in some act of simony (Act 8:18) and even when Jesus was challenged by Satan to perform miracles, did Jesus refuse (Mat 4:1-11)!

In fact, none (except one) of Christ’s miracles had any lasting effect - Jesus fed the 5,000 but they were hungry again the following morning, He cured lepers but they contracted some other disease and He raised Lazarus from the dead, but he too died of some other cause. And the only one miracle that had any lasting effect and significance was in fact His resurrection and that is what we ought to focus all our evangelising efforts on!

Time and again, the Bible exhorts us to always keep our focus concentrated on Jesus - Peter began to falter and sink as soon as he took his eyes off Jesus (Mat 14:30) and like a runner, we are to remain focused on the goal, that is Christ Jesus (1Cor 9:26 & Gal 3:14) and nothing else!

Can God heal? Of course! Does God still miraculously heal? Yes! But does God always heal? No, and for you to preach the possibility of immortality Kobus, is nothing less than an unBiblical heresy! Moreover, to assert (either explicitly or implicitly) that when people do not experience God’s healing power in the lives, that they do not have sufficient faith, demonstrates both a poor understanding of the Biblical meaning of ‘faith’ that can cause people to lose heart altogether and become apostates, something that will deny them to ever savor the gospel of Jesus Christ again (Heb 6:4-6) and cause them to be eternally damned to hell (Mat 7:21ff)! If someone has sufficient faith for the miraculous gift of salvation, then he/she surely has enough faith to be miraculously healed in this life, but only if God so willed and not because some self-appointed prophet; demands performance from God on cue in front of a television audience!

I would not deny Kobus that healing and other miracles can and do happen at your church, but I would challenge you to:

4.3.  offer credible medical evidence that anyone who experiences some form of healing in your church does so in a dramatic, visible and sustainable manner - if the healing is truly of God, then one would surely expect the disabled to grow limbs, the deaf to regain their loss of hearing, the blind to see, etc., but more importantly,

4.4.  prove to me that anyone who comes to your church with the expectation of healing, ever enters into a proper, saving relationship with Christ! Whilst they may profess to believe, we know that merely believing is not enough (Satan and his demonic cohorts believe - Mat 4:3) and we know that the evidence of miracles (even genuine ones) do not cause people to believe (Jhn 12:37).

So this is the real problem Kobus - the miraculous healings; shift the focus away from the true gospel of Jesus Christ to focus on a different gospel, one that may bring about some degree of temporary physical relief, but one that does not lead to salvation (1Jhn 1:6)! It may all feel good to you an all the people who partake in the experience, but in the end, we are told that this ‘therapeutic theology’, this gross ‘commercialisation’ of Christianity, only leads to (spiritual) death (Prv 16:25)!

Please recall here what God’s Word prophetically tells us about all of this: we know that in the ‘last days’ (which we have ample evidence that we’re experiencing it right now - Mat 24), the church will look for miraculous signs (Mat 16:3,4) and that there will be men who will respond to that from within the church (i.e. these are not just the David Koresh’s or the Jim Jones’ of the world, but in fact, credible Christian leaders whom we trust and rely on for our spiritual guidance) to pander to the needs of ‘believers’ and introduce a false gospel into the church (2Pet 2:1) that will cause a great many very sincere believers within the church to (unwittingly) be led astray (Mat 7:15, Act 20:29,30, 2Pet 2:2 & Jud 1:4)  i.e. to abandon the faith in order to (unwittingly) follow deceiving spirits (1Tim 4:1) just because:

- they enjoy what they’re being taught (2Tim 4:3,4);
- they’re no longer able to discern truth from error for themselves (Jer 7:24);
- they’ve abandoned God’s Truth for the lie of a different gospel (2Thes 2:11); and
- they have become Biblically illiterate (which leads to death) (Hos 4:6).

Your particular style of healing also disturbs me greatly Kobus - if you truly possess some form of supernatural gift of healing, then why all the theatrics under controlled conditions and in front of a television audience? Why not present your gift to the sick and the dying in hospitals and in hospices, i.e., ‘under the radar screen’ as we’ve been commanded to do (Mat 6:1,5) instead of on international television and the Internet? Your method also does not comport with the post-NT definition of divine healing which demands that we call for the elders to pray over him and anoint him with oil (Jas 5:14) - none of this highly spurious theatrics!

However, all the many ‘miracle healings’ that I’ve personally witnessed, clearly evidence some degree of supernatural activity, although it does lack any Biblical evidence! In support of your claims, you rely heavily on (Mrk 16:17,18) when it is an well established fact that (Mrk 16:9-20) is not part of God’s Word, and even if it were, a proper hermeneutic exegesis of all of Scripture clearly voids it as a basis for supernatural signs and wonders. The question then is this - what then is the true source of what people experience at the miracle healing occasions?

The answer I do believe, lies in the fact that all the healings also only seem to operate at a psychosomatic level where the possibility of either fraud and/or hypnotic suggestion is very real – I’ve seen nothing at any of these events which any competent ‘hypnotist’ can’t easily replicate or where the individual suspension of all critical judgment under highly conducive conditions would not cause an individual to sincerely claim some relief (especially if it causes endorphins to be discharged into the body by the brain - it is a most effective painkiller, albeit only temporary)! The scene (shot by you) wherein the woman’s leg appears to grow longer is one of the oldest tricks in the trade Kobus - that one dates back to Marjoe Gortner in the 60s! Shame on you!

But there is yet another possible and far more dangerous cause for the phenomena which you claim people experience at SWM:  having tested the spirits Kobus (1Jhn 4:1), I can only conclude that the source and origin of all the signs and wonders evidenced at your many ‘miraculous’ healings are entirely attributable to nothing less than demonic activity that has all the appearances of being from God Himself (2Cor 11:14,15) but in fact, comes from Satan (2Cor 11:3) for we are told that Satan uses signs and wonders to advance his schemes in the world (Mat 24:24, Mrk 13:22 & 2The 2:9,10)!

Please know that I’m not accusing you of being demon possessed, but given your sincerity, I do nevertheless believe that that you are the unwitting instrument in the hands of Satan (Mat 24:24, Mrk 13:22 & 2Tim 2:26), used by him to deceive a great many very sincere believers (2Cor 11:13-15 & Gal 3:1) to be drawn away from the gospel of Jesus Christ and towards a different gospel instead! We know that demons have the ability to counterfeit miracles (2The 2:9, Mat 24:24 & Rev 13:13), so it is not surprising that there is indeed hard evidence to support some miraculous phenomena during these ‘miraculous’ events, but we know that demonic power is limited (Exo 7:12 & Luk 4:1-13), which is why you never see anything of the truly dramatic, e.g. the disabled growing limbs or the dead being restored back to life, for that is God’s exclusive purview. Therefore, if I am correct in my assessment Kobus, then please permit the right person the opportunity to minister to you - this is an incredibly dangerous place for a man of your influence to be in!

5. I’ve also given careful thought Annalise, why it is that you would like Dr Hovind to speak from the SWM Platform? - In all your communications, you make extensive reference to the many people that you reach throughout Africa (your claim of 300 000 mil people is just wrong!) and although the SWM platform is an attractive potential for the important message which Dr Hovind carries, I do believe that any form of endorsement of an apostate ministry such as Spirit Word Ministries, is tantamount to spiritual suicide! It is for this reason that I cannot be a part of or encourage any support a ministry which does not proclaim the true gospel of Jesus Christ (Eph 5:6,7, 1Cor 15:33 & 2Cor 6:14)!

It is so that Jesus spoke at the synagogue (Mat 13:54) but not as a platform to reach others where he could be confused or associated with the Pharisees or the Sadducees in any way, but where Jesus could minister to the Jewish leaders there! Similarly, Paul spoke at Mars hill (Act 17:22) where he used that occasion to defend the pure gospel of Jesus Christ amongst the Greeks who were only intent on the gaining of wisdom.

In all our communications, it has become patently clear to me that your motive for wishing Dr Hovind to speak at SWM, is that he would lend authority and give credibility to your ministry, when the real reason for inviting Dr Hovind to come to South Africa, is so that the confidence of the church in the Bible and a literary-literal interpretation thereof may be restored! These two motives simply do not comport.

6. Throughout the Bible, we are given clear, explicit instructions NOT to associate with anyone or any doctrine that in any way seeks to subvert God’s Truth (Deu 13ff, 1Cor 15:33, 2Cor 6:14, Eph 5:7,11 & 1Jhn 1:6).

In conclusion Kobus and Annalise, I ask that you please grant us the opportunity to minister to you, that you might once against return to the pure gospel of Jesus Christ (Jer 6:16) and that you abandon all the showy, man-made, emotionally driven fanfare of fake signs and wonders on public television in favour of the true gospel of Jesus Christ (Jer 2:13).

Please let not your godliness be a means for any financial gain (1Tim 6:5)! I know that it will severely impact on the size of your church and your ministry, but it’s not about numbers – it’s all about reconciling one heart at a time with the living Lord!

If I seem to be condemnatory or judgmental in any way, please consider what Paul wrote under similar circumstances to the Galatians:  “But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach a gospel other than the one we preached to you, let him be eternally condemned!”

As we have already said, so now I say again: If anybody is preaching to you a gospel other than what you accepted, let him be eternally condemned!

- Gal 1:8,9 (NIV)
Please may I call upon you to consider these words prayerfully: Therefore, since through God’s mercy we have this ministry, we do not lose heart. Rather we have renounced secret and shameful ways; we do not use deception, or do we distort the word of God. On the contrary, by setting forth the truth plainly we commend ourselves to every man’s conscience in the sight of God.

- 2Cor 4:1,2 (NIV)
Your steward in Christ,

Andrè L Immelman
6 April 2006

http://www.mpowerministries.co.za

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