Out Of The New Age

I met a woman at church this week who had recently come out of the New Age Movement into Christianity. I was able to sit down with her and get a real perspective on what she went through.

She told me she grew up poor with a single mother and two little brothers in the inner city. She knew what it’s like to go to sleep hungry when there just isn’t a thing to eat. She wore hand-me-downs and rode on buses.

She was fortunate to, as she said, “marry well”. Her husband was a prosperous businessman and they eventually had five children, a lovely home, and a successful business in one of the top ten most affluent counties in the country.

She said that our society, built on capitalism and free markets, has always measured success in one way and one way only – money. So they found spiritual fulfillment in New Age ideas of prosperity from finding your inner self.

But she and her husband began to see cracks and flaws in New Age and in searching elsewhere found “Christianity” in Houston, Texas. Joel Osteen, pastor of Lakewood Church in Houston, with 30,000 attendees per week, the largest evangelical church in America, could well be the “Poster Pastor” for the prosperity gospel.

They were there for a while but through a series of circumstances, they lost their infatuation for the prosperity teachings.

She carried in her purse some quotes from Joel Osteen as follows:
“Many of you today know this, you believe it down here in your heart. But the reason that you’re not experiencing as much as you should is because you’re not declaring it. You’ve got to give life to your faith by speaking it out. Your words have creative power. When you go around saying, ‘I have favor, people want to be good to me and supernatural doors are opening – when you make those declarations of faith, you are charging the atmosphere. And your own words can help to bring it to pass.” (Joel Osteen, Experiencing More Of God’s Favor, Tape #212, Daystar, July 10, 2004).

“Words are like seeds, they have creative power…You can change your world by simply changing your words.” (Joel Osteen, Speaking Faith Filled Words, Tape 223, Daystar Television, May 2, 2004).

She said that the picture of God as a Cosmic Vending Machine is not a Christian view of our Creator, but unmistakably New Age.

She said that it was easy for her to think of God this way before she’d actually met Him. Now it seems like an atrocity. And such an unbelievable aberration for Christians who are supposed to have made a commitment to get materialism out of their hearts to make room for Jesus. Being a Christian is all about how closely we are becoming conformed to Christ and how well we serve Him.

She said, “As a Christian now, I realize the ugliness of my old belief in karma – that it was this kind of belief that allowed the misery in India to continue unabated, that encouraged people to pass by suffering without any response, thinking, He doesn’t need help – he’s just working out his karma.”

She continued, “But when Christians point to individual faith as the source of or lack of health and wealth, isn’t that the same? Isn’t it just a philosophy which gets us off the hook for responsibility for our fellow man?”

She finally said, “There’s just too much prosperity teaching going on in Christianity today. I really like this church because there is no “name it and claim it” teaching going on here. Thank you for listening to my story.”

I replied, “You don’t have to thank me. What you have said is what I believe also.”

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