The Holy Spirit, Censorship, and More

0:00 Hello everyone and welcome to this October 3rd edition of the STRANG Report. Thank you for tuning in. Of course it will be available a long time on the internet. That's a good thing about digital. In the not so recent past we had radio programs or then talk shows and it's on there and it's off. In fact it was hard in the 50s and 60s as I recall growing up that even record something. Well here we are it's online forever.

0:42 I'm Stephen Strang and I've never had an introduction like that to the STRANG Report but it's the podcast where we deal with life in the Holy Spirit and that's what I'm going to talk about today. Some difficult things that are happening in the church that I think that you need to be informed about. So stay tuned. Encourage other people to watch this. Tell them to tune in live. In fact I'd like to find out where people are watching live. In fact it was a week ago yesterday I think or let's see no it wasn't it would have been the Thursday before.

1:22 I was on vacation my wife and I visited Greece and the Greek Isles and we were on a ship somewhere in the Aegean Sea and it was 11 o'clock at night and I was doing something on my cell phone on the balcony outside our little state room and it popped up that the STRANG Report was coming up. Well it was four o'clock back home and I had prerecorded some podcasts. So there I am in the dark in the Aegean Sea watching myself had a prerecorded program that was going out live around the world and I mentioned that in my last STRANG Report it was kind of cool and I want you to tell me where you're from and then as we have time at the end of the podcast maybe we can do some questions and answers.

2:07 Be sure to hit the like, subscribe if you haven't. If you subscribe then you are notified when a live podcast is coming up which is every Tuesday and Thursday at 4 p.m. Eastern time and we want your comments. I want to see your comments what you like not like and then of course you can share it. You know there's a certain amount of cancel culture that goes on. We have actually been censored by Big Tech on some issues where they didn't agree and it had to do with things like healing where I some of it I don't even really understand these community standards so we need to go around them by going straight to you and as you share links and as we send it out by email and different things we're not as vulnerable to Big Tech and to censorship.

2:57 You know there are people who don't want the message of the gospel going out. They actually consider that people who believe in the Bible are the only ones holding them back from whatever they consider fun whether it's gambling or drug use or pornography or the gay lifestyle or whatever. You know these things are against the word of God if people believe the word of God and believe that standards should be reflected in society based on our deeply held values then that holds people back and these have been eroding the last couple of generations.

3:41 I mean going all the way back to prohibition and the depression era you know that was the big issue in the Christian community in the teens leading up to the passage of prohibition. That was the issue that would have been as big as the gay lifestyle and abortion rolled into one which are kind of the two big issues that seem to be a demarcation between those who stand for strict Bible values. In fact today I'm going to talk about how there's a certain amount of censorship even within the Christian community. There are those who believe that the work of the Holy Spirit ended with the life of the last apostle.

4:23 Now there's not a scripture and you have to really use your imagination to take a phrase here and there to even think that but there are those they call themselves sensationists. In other words there was a dispensation when the gospel was presented the Holy Spirit was out poured and the church was formed and during that period there were miracles, there were tongues, there was prophecy, there were all the things we read about in the New Testament and that when the last apostle died that ended. In fact this gives me an opportunity to mention the trip we were on.

5:03 My wife and I had never been to Greece or to Turkey and we had wanted to you know that's where the apostle Paul was. We actually arranged for a trip. It would have been in the spring of 2020. Well what happened in 2020? COVID and of course that trip never happened so we're finally kind of getting around to it. It was a cruise. We went to five different Greek Isles one a day but we also went to what the Bible calls Thessalonica. I found out the Greeks call it Thessaloniki. It is the second biggest city in Greece. It's a huge metropolitan area but that is where Paul wrote first and second Thessalonians.

5:49 We also had the opportunity to go to Ephesus which is in Turkey, Ephesus was one of the seven churches. Paul of course was there two times, one time a fairly short trip, another time for a couple of years. He spoke in the big arena. I forget what they call it. It seats 25,000 people. Archaeologists have unearthed it just in the last 50 or 75 years. There's an awful lot of archaeology that is making people be able to see what Ephesus was like. It was a great city. It was where the temple of Artemis was.

6:31 This is where he was interrupting the silver smith who was selling souvenirs to people who came to the temple of Artemis. That's what got him into trouble in Ephesus. We found it very interesting. In fact, to joy my wife and I, going to Ephesus was the highlight of the entire trip. I'm not here really to talk about my trip although there's nothing wrong on this live podcast to bring you up to date because we also went to Athens of course where Paul was at the Parthenon, the Acropolis.

7:11 Then we went to Corinth which is maybe an hour's drive away, not that far. And saw where the Jewish community was. There's a church named St. Paul's where he undoubtedly ministered right there where the Jewish community was. As you know, 1st and 2nd Corinthians are great books of the Bible. They're some of my favorites. Paul talked, in fact, they had a plaque there where they had put part of 1st Corinthians, chapter 13, one of the most famous passages in the Bible, the love chapter.

7:52 And it says, whether there be tongues they shall cease. And those who believe in that cite that scripture. But you know it also says, if there shall be knowledge it will pass away. And these same people go on knowledge, you know, it's kind of a religious knowledge. They talk about defending the Bible and believing the Bible and they're probably very sincere people. I'll give them that. But they're sincerely wrong. And this is not new. It's a doctrine that's been around a long time. I think it's very, very dangerous doctrine. Some of the people are very, very adamant about it. Other people, this is just how they see life.

8:34 Some of them are very, very nasty. And they have made a movie. And I'm going to be doing several podcasts on the movie. In fact, if anyone who's watching has seen it, it's only been out a couple of days. And I'm going to really do a deep dive. I've watched the trailer. I've talked to some people about it. And basically they just say, all this stuff's a bunch of nonsense. And they show little clips of Pentecostals doing Pentecostal style worship, which they think is just undignified or little clips taken out of context. I personally believe it's like spitting in the wind.

9:15 You know, the Holy Spirit is moving around the world. There are those who say that there are somewhere between 400 million and 600 million people alive today who've received this precious gift called the baptism in the Holy Spirit. And I've seen this my whole life. When people receive the baptism in the Holy Spirit and the power, they get enthusiastic. They believe God. They believe God for miracles, for healing. They get all excited. Now, are there abuses and excesses, of course, but you can say that about every single movement in human life. I don't care who it is.

9:56 Every segment of the church has it. And of course, outside the church, it exists. And none of us can judge an entire community by a few extremists. I don't care if you're talking about Jewish extremists or Muslims or even secular extremists. It's just not fair to blackball an entire movement based on those few examples. That's the point I'm making. This isn't to say that we shouldn't call it out. In fact, in my own gentle way today, I'm calling these people out because there's nothing in Scripture that says all these things are going to happen and on the day the last apostle dies, they're going to end.

10:40 Now we believe that the last apostle who died was John, John the beloved. Not John, to be confused with John the Baptist. He wrote the book of John, 1st, 2nd, 3rd John, and also the book of Revelation. He wrote them from Ephesus. This is something I didn't really know because I think of him as being on the Isle of Patmos, which is one of the Greek Isles. Our crews did not take us to Patmos. We would have very much liked to see Patmos, but I don't think it's really as commercialized for cruise ships and things. For some reason, they don't take people there. You can take a tour there.

11:21 I've talked to people who've done this. He was exiled on the Isle of Patmos, but he lived for a number of years in Ephesus. It was a major city in Asia Minor, which is now Turkey, and it became very, very dangerous, of course, to live in Jerusalem. There's all kinds of, there's a church for St. John there, but also for Mary because some of this is tradition, some of it's historical fact that Mary moved to Ephesus and actually died in Ephesus. We actually went to the place they call Mary's house. It was, again, archaeology.

12:02 They excavated. They found it. There's a spring there. It's Roman Catholic, even though that part of the world is mostly Greek Orthodox. Of course, Turkey is a Muslim nation. There's a little tiny bit of religious freedom, but not much. They do allow the tourists to come. Even the Pope went there a couple of years ago. They were telling us about it. Mary spent the rest of her life there, and they say that John wrote several of his books. Well, we believe he was probably the last apostle to die. That must mean that the work of the Holy Spirit ceased. Well, it didn't cease. What it did was, over a period of years, the church became corrupt.

12:44 It actually absorbed some of the pagan rituals. That's my opinion. There are scholars who could say it better than I did, but even at Mary's house, they had what they called holy water. There's nothing really about holy water in the New Testament, but holy water, there was an aspect of paganism with holy water as well. It was not explained to us real well. In my opinion, that's how they adapted. There's parts of the world where they venerate the Virgin Mary, but the Spaniards, when they came to the New World as Catholics, and to their credit, evangelized the native people, they would hook on to some well-known female goddess and turn it into worship of the Virgin Mary.

13:39 I'm not trying to make a big point of it. I'm just trying to explain my point of view. If you have an opinion or if you want to comment, I encourage you to do that. In fact, a couple of times, I've asked people where they're from, and somebody was calling in or watching from Sri Lanka and some other far-flung places. That was a lot of fun to find out. Also, if you have any questions or if you happen to be one of the very first people to see this movie, I would be interested in your comments. Where are you watching from? Share your comments. I'm interested in finding out. I will be doing a deep dive, as I said, maybe even showing some clips from this documentary is called Sensationist.

14:25 That's it, just Sensationist. They make fun of Pentecostals and Charismatics. They claim to believe the Bible, but they don't. They don't believe the Bible. Let me make a comment, because in a way, they are going to help me promote my book, because my book is really an answer to this. This book is a primer. I could have called it Spirit-led Living 101, because it talks about the work of the Holy Spirit in the world today, about the baptism of the Holy Spirit. I go into all the different gifts. I tell stories from men and women of God.

15:05 Some of them still alive. Some of them I knew. Some of them I didn't know. A lot of them are pretty spectacular examples. It's very carefully documented with footnotes. Then I talk about deliverance. There's a lot of demonic activity. In fact, I believe that there's demonic activity that would blind people's eyes to the work of the Holy Spirit. The Bible does talk about calling good things bad and bad things good, or evil and righteousness. Righteous things evil and evil is okay.

15:47 We're seeing that in our culture, where things that the Bible calls in, people are celebrating, and things where the Bible says is good. They're even calling hate. You know, within the Christian church, I'm talking about mainly within the Protestant church, the Catholics and the Greek Orthodox are kind of left out of this. There's a segment of Protestantism that early in the 20th century, when the Holy Spirit was out ported Azusa Street, they came against it. They came against it very, very strongly. I'm called Pam from Little River Academy in Texas.

16:28 Hello. Thanks for sending us your comment. Anyway, getting back to what I was saying, and here's Andrea Bolden, gag Liano. Don't I know you Andrea from Indiana Atlantic? It's nice to hear from you again. Anyway, letting me get back to my thought. There was actually a prominent leader named R.A. Tory, very well respected, wrote a lot of books. He actually called the baptism of the Holy Spirit in speaking in tongues the last vomit of hell. I couldn't, when I learned that, and it's not widely known, but it's also not a secret that that happened.

17:10 I mean, he did it very publicly. I thought, if anything is blasphemy of the Holy Spirit, that must be it. I would think that people would be careful just to be sure that they did not blaspheme the Holy Spirit, because the Bible clearly says that that is the one thing that will not be forgiven. I don't want to judge, but I just think people should be careful. They should just be careful. In the same way, you should be careful with things that could be heresy. We need to walk in wisdom. We need to walk carefully. We need to walk humbly. I want what I say to be humble. I happen to know a couple of the people that are in the movie, or at least I know of them.

17:55 I won't say that they're bad people. I just believe that they're deceived. I believe that the devil wants to deceive people to think that what is the Holy Spirit is maybe something that they should stay away from. And listen, in the Christian books selling industry, which I've been in most of my adult life, there were an awful lot of people in the CBA who are very wary of the Holy Spirit and of Pentecostals. In fact, there was a certain amount of cancel culture back then. There were a lot of these good-hearted Protestant shopkeepers that wouldn't even carry a book by someone like Kenneth Hagan or Oral Roberts or Kenneth Copeland. They just wouldn't.

18:37 We had those of us who published those kind of materials or those ministries had to just go around the gatekeepers of the day. This was long before the Internet and what we're familiar with now. So in a way, I've been dealing with, I don't remember those people in the CBA as necessarily being nasty, the movie. You can judge for yourself when you watch it. It sounded pretty nasty to me. And I'll say more about this. I've already lined up a couple of interviews. I did talk to one leader that is targeted in this video. And he told me by text just a few minutes before we went on the air that the Lord specifically told him decades ago not to defend himself against attackers.

19:28 I had asked him to come on my podcast and to answer it. Dr. Michael Brown, I've asked Dr. Brown, he's delighted. He debates these people in other settings at conferences and so forth. And apparently a bunch of them got together and put together this documentary partly because Greg Locke's out in Jesus' name was so successful. I mean, time will tell and maybe we'll do a little investigating to find out if that's true. I may bring some of these people on my podcast and debate with them. We'll see how that goes. But I'd be interested to know what you think if you have any questions.

20:09 I appreciate the few people who did comments already and we'll be following up on it. I want to, Andrea says we need more connection to the Holy Spirit. That's absolutely right, Andrea. And I hope you've read my book since you know me personally. But that is a point of the book. We need to connect. It's not a theological treatise. I'm not a theologian. I'm not a pastor. I've never been. I'm a Christian journalist and writer who wanted to encourage people to experience the power of the Holy Spirit in a day when people almost seem confused and depressed and like we're losing it every turn. No, we're not. The devil is coming on like gangbusters.

20:50 And I think, and this is true. I mean, when drag queens are reading stories and libraries to impressionable little children, there's something sick about that. And we all are aware of that aspect of the upside down world. But in a way, it's even more sinister when people in the church are trying to deceive believers into believing that the work of the Holy Spirit is somehow wrong or evil. I believe that all things work together for good. I believe that even good will come out of this. I believe that people's eyes will be open to how shallow it is and how it's not biblical at all. To me, it's kind of the same old, same old.

21:32 This has been going around for a long time. My grandfather, who is a Pentecostal, a pioneer, we call him pioneer Pentecostal preachers in Kansas in the 1930s, was actually publicly challenged in the newspaper by one of the denominations that believes in sensationism to drink poison because there's a scripture that says they shall drink poison, they shall handle snakes, and nothing will happen to them. He challenged my grandfather to do this. Now of course, my grandfather did not do it. But I mean, he was making fun of the Pentecostal preacher and trying to twist scripture to come against him.

22:21 Now, who was I talking to recently? Was it Benny Hinn? and we were talking about that this doctrine of sensationism is nowhere in the Bible, which I've already said. It was a doctrine that is only a couple of hundred years ago where people tried to explain why we didn't see the gifts in operation. But the church went into a period that was so bad, they called it the dark ages. There were popes where it was like a political type of situation. It's well known in history that there were popes in that era who had illegitimate children, who were actually powerful on the basis that they were the illegitimate children of popes.

23:05 I mean, think about it, it's ludicrous. The church had gotten so bad that they were selling indulgences to get people into heaven and that's what sparked Martin Luther, who was a faithful Catholic monk who did pilgrimages and everything else trying to find God. He finally felt that that was too far and he challenged it with his 13 theses that he nailed to the 95 theses. I knew that but it came out wrong. Thank you, John, for correcting me. On the door in Whitburg, Germany, that's what sparked the Protestant Reformation, which changed history every bit as much as the printing press or Columbus, which would have been kind of in the same era.

23:56 I mean, it absolutely changed the course of history and it was the result of the fact that the church had fallen so far from following God. Now I believe that the Catholic Church today is very different than the church back in that era. I really do. But it was people trying to explain why that didn't happen. Actually, there are Pentecostal academics who tell that there are examples of Pentecostalism through history. I've done a little bit of research on this. My own ancestors were Huguenots. That's what they call the Protestants in France and they were very devout people and they would pray and sometimes they would fall on the floor and almost go into trances when there was great prayer.

24:47 Well, guess what? That sounds like what happens in some Pentecostal churches today. There are other examples of where there was speaking in tongues, et cetera, et cetera. So I don't believe that it ever totally died out. It always has a remnant, but it did kind of go underground and there came revivals. Those are all works of the Holy Spirit no matter what we call them in the early 20th century. The whole holiness movement of the day was praying for a baptism in the Holy Spirit. Even our Aetori who I quoted wrote a pamphlet. I saw one with my own eyes.

25:27 It was called the Baptism of the Holy Spirit. It was around 1900. Six years later in 1906, the Azusa Street revival happened and the Pentecostals said that that was the baptism of the Holy Spirit and there were others who said, no, it's not the baptism of the Holy Spirit and that's where a schism came. The Pentecostal movement was headed by a black man, William Seymour, and a lot of it came out of the black experience. I've talked about this before and as we move ahead, I may talk about it more because I think it's important to understand what's happening.

26:08 In the black experience, they would clap their hands and raise their hands and shout hallelujah and a lot of the Pentecostal forms of worship came from that rather than coming from the Protestant churches of Europe, which were very staid, which came out of the Roman Catholic experience. Some of the things in this movie attack like they show clips of preachers running around the platform or people kind of shouting and raising their hands as if this was odd. Listen, go to any black church or predominantly African American church and you're going to see that kind of thing.

26:50 I really believe that attacking that is a latent form of racism. The Pentecostal church is one of the parts of society that became integrated and one of the things where white culture was influenced by black culture. Now, I'm just making a comment. I could go into it in a lot more depth and in fact, I may invite sometime one of my black academic friends to come on my podcast and we can discuss this very thing. But when people make fun of Pentecostal worship, they're making fun of the black religious experience. In my opinion, I don't have a lot of more time to talk about it.

27:32 I thank you for watching this long. I ask you to subscribe to the Strang Report on YouTube or rumble or your favorite podcast player. Sign up for the Strang Report newsletter. Start your inbox every Tuesday by going to stevestrangbooks.com to sign up and leave your comments and share this with other people. Thank you for watching today to the Strang Report, the podcast that's about spirit led living. God bless you. From 1975, Charisma has been at the forefront of reporting on revival, miracles, and the move of God in our world. Charisma magazine is now going exclusively online to reach beyond the physical barriers of a print issue.

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