Motivators are False Prophets 2

Let her alone; for her soul is vexed within her: and the LORD hath hid it from me, and hath not told me. (2 Kings 4: 27b)

I am sure that most believers who follow motivational preachers already hate me. And I am fine with that because I am convinced that God is very clear about those who minister to Him.

I am therefore not seeking to win you to my argument or convince you to be my friend or supporter.

I am content to share as clearly as I can God’s message, however much it might hurt some of you.

My hope is that just as surgery, however painful and death threatening it is, is always better than a cocktail of painkillers, however effective in dulling pain they may be, my message will remove one person from the deception the enemy has succeeded in rooting in contemporary Christian ministry through motivational preaching.

I will start with the verse above.

We know that Elisha was a prophet mightily used of God, a prophet who always knew what to do whatever situation he met.

Yet at this time we see a dumbfounded prophet.

Here comes a friend and supporter who had sacrificed so much for Elisha, and not after any prompting from the prophet.

She is clearly hurting, and bitterly so. Yet the man of God had no idea, not only about what was ailing her, but also what to do in the situation.

How can a man of God fail to have the word of God? Is that even practicable?

Yet that was the reality. As Elisha himself said, God had hidden it from him and refused to reveal anything concerning the situation.

You see, God does not speak because we want to hear Him. He does not speak because we need those answers.

And that is where the motivators get it so wrong.

Incidentally, what we see with Elisha was also prevalent with many other prophets, probably all the prophets we have longer stories about. Allow me to give a few.

Daniel prayed for some time before receiving the answer Nebuchadnezzar was looking for. We later see him fasting for three weeks before receiving the eschatological revelations we so love.

Jeremiah prayed for ten days before receiving God’s orders concerning the remnants. And it was so complete because it even dealt with their rebellion.

Moses never had an answer as he had to ask God about each and every situation brought to him.

Let me stop here though I could continue for page after page about prophets and the delays they encountered before receiving those revelations.

The motivator always has those answers already cut and dried. He has no uncertainties. He has no dark places. He has no delays.

The motivator has all his answers. But they are always one sided. They only speak one message, call it the message of hope as if hope is all there is to life.

Though hope is essential to our Christian lives, it is only a portion of the totality of that life.

The truth is that God speaks. I will be the last person to question that fact since He speaks to me.

God is also very clear to those who are sold out to Him so that they do not guess what He is saying. This means that they are able to clearly hear when He speaks and know when He is silent as we see with Elisha. And that is not the only time we see Elisha in such a predicament.

Simply speaking, God’s servant knows that God is at liberty to speak when He wants and how He wants. We do not determine how or when He should speak.

Those who have followed my writing for long know that I have written quite a bit on Job’s three friends.

Yet did you know that those friends were actually motivational speakers?

If you follow their speeches, you will realise that they started speaking so motivationally. But they ran out of steam because Job’s situation was not as cut and dried as other situations they had faced.

That is why they then used their motivational knowledge to full capacity simply because motivation is closed to anything else.

Motivation has no answers to pain. Motivation has no answer to God’s silence. Motivation has no answer to uncertainties.

That is why we see them starting with a message of hope, the only message motivation has, to extreme condemnation once they realised that Job’s situation was outside their neatly packed theology.

Like I always say they were using the scriptures to advance their theology. And for the most part their theology had no issues. When people quote from the book of Job, very rarely will they want to know who spoke those words because the theology behind them is fine.

They were wicked comforters because their theological persuasions did not include Job’s situation. And they were judged because they did not seek to know what God had to say about that situation.

That for me is the greatest danger of motivation. It is so one tracked.

It is not that the message is irrelevant. It is only that the message applies to a very narrow constituency, if I may call it that. The rest of the population and situations are completely left out of their ministrations.

You see, there are times you need hope to survive another day. But that is not all the time.

Most times you need focus and direction to be able to work.

Allow me to explain.

A farmer needs hope to be able to prepare his land after several seasons of crop or rain failure.

But he does not hope the weeds will not grow once the rains come as that will require hard work.

A parent educates his children in hope that they will come out fine. But he does not hope their characters will just happen. He must pick that rod to, like many parents say, drive that foolishness and evil away.

Paying fees is done in hope. Discipline does not need hope as I know that I will reap what I sow.

Motivation seeks to help me build my tabernacle around hope alone.

That is why Job’s three friends had a problem. Hope motivates people to start working. It does not get into the nitty gritty of the actual work.

To the worker therefore, hope can many times be a distraction.

Hope will get me out of bed amidst those exhausted and paining joints. But hope will not be the energy that will lift that hoe in that hot sun. though it will challenge me to use my savings buying that seed, it will not put that seed in the ground.

I know some of you are getting confused.

There must be a context for motivation. Motivation cannot be open ended. And that is why I have given those examples.

This also is the reason I am calling the motivator a false prophet.

You will again allow me to give an example using the church pulpit for emphasis.

The pastor is preaching and in his motivational preaching, whether it is comedic or not, chooses to play the prophet.

‘God is saying that you will get that job. That interview you have been invited to will get you the job you have always dreamed of’.

Now imagine with me that there is a person in that congregation attending a job interview, and in big congregations that is practically impossible not to have a few such. That prophecy is flush on for that person who leaves with their hopes in the clouds.

Suppose in the interview the boss says that the job is yours for the taking. But …

Do you think that person will have qualms sleeping with that boss or taking a loan to buy that prophesied job?

Would you call what that preacher said prophetic?

Yet week after week, year in year out, this is the fare congregations are living on. Pastors and bishops are competing with each other on who is a better motivator than the other instead of simply teaching the word and allowing God to use it to motivate His people if they so need motivation.

The focus of their sermons and whatever they may call those deceptions is on making people feel good about themselves even as they aspire for purely human ambitions.

In all my life I have never heard a motivator prophesying or even telling someone that they will need to leave that dream job to go take the Gospel to an unreached people group. In fact, I have never heard them even praying about ministry and ministers except themselves and theirs. And this is something I have challenged some of them about.

You see, they need those gifts, gifts that could very easily be redirected to other ministers and ministries if the revelation leaked to the congregation.

Yet I am convinced that the motivators are most destructive around the area of sin and guilt. That is why I have started with God’s silence.

That is the battle true prophets fought with most vehemently.

Then said the prophet Jeremiah unto Hananiah the prophet, Hear now, Hananiah; The LORD hath not sent thee; but thou makest this people to trust in a lie. Therefore thus saith the LORD; Behold, I will cast thee from off the face of the earth: this year thou shalt die, because thou hast taught rebellion against the LORD. (Jeremiah 28: 15, 16)

Jeremiah had been given a difficult message to deliver, a message that required him to walk with a yoke on his neck I don’t know for how long.

The message was, repent and then submit to Nebuchadnezzar. He even warned against false prophets. It is also worth noting that some Jews and vessels of God’s temple had already been carried to Babylon. I am sure Jeremiah had been speaking over the years about the happenings since at this time he had already occupied the prophetic office for over thirty years.

In the midst of that message appears a very effective and powerful motivational prophet.

He trashes Jeremiah’s prophecy and even breaks that yoke on his neck. He then goes ahead to say what everybody wanted to hear.

Not only did he nullify the prophet’s message he goes ahead to prophesy that the people and objects that had been carried to Chaldea would be returned.

Now who do you think the Jews heard? Which message was more palatable?

That is what made God so enraged that He not only prophesied his death, but He also did it in less than two months.

This is the clearest indicator that the motivator fuels rebellion against God by dulling the cutting edge of conviction thereby making the sinner comfortable in their sin.

Allow me to give situations I have come across in ministry.

Take this example of a wife who commits adultery.

The guilt will be crippling.

She then goes to her pastor or close friend who is a motivator and what do they tell her?

God has forgiven and received you because Christ died for you. You simply need to walk in that forgiveness. And it stops at that.

When the husband learns of that betrayal, he will justifiably become enraged. Do you know what this wife tells him?

I was forgiven. I am walking in freedom.

She then starts blaming her husband for unforgiveness especially if he seeks a solution to that sin.

The motivator has turned the sinner into a saint and victim of persecution and the offended into the villain because he wants to resolve and properly heal his marriage.

I know of wives who sneak for days from their marriages to go to those motivators, spending a premium on those escapades (and I use this word intentionally). Yet that conman is not ashamed of being called a conman.

But I will not stop calling them so.

For of this sort are they which creep into houses, and lead captive silly women laden with sins, led away with divers lusts, (2Timothy 3:6)

How does someone allow someone’s wife in their company (what they call ministry) for days without the express permission of her husband? Interestingly, the purpose of the same is prayer for that husband.

Yet that is how narrow motivators are. No wonder their churches overflow with women.

You will then see she said motivated woman bashing her husband from all fronts because of the motivation she received from her man of God (is it not god?).

You will see her waiting for her husband to repent for judging her sin that the motivator told her was done away with just by confessing to him. She will do everything in her power and even to outsourcing ‘logic’ to convince him that he is the sinner who needs to repent since that is what her motivator told her.

How do you expect that motivated woman to submit to her ‘unreasonable and unforgiving’ husband? How do you expect that marriage to survive?

Yet motivators do not mind that because they feed off that rebellion they have created and nurtured.

I know of motivators who rush into marital problems for the single purpose of getting their newest lay. They will pretend to resolve marital issues when all the time they are looking into getting a new woman to sleep with.

I know of situations where motivators ran off with their friend’s wife, even offering to pay for their divorce fees. Until the friend discovered that his wife had become the motivator’s concubine, since he had a legal wife.

Thus saith the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel, of Ahab the son of Kolaiah, and of Zedekiah the son of Maaseiah, which prophesy a lie unto you in my name; Behold, I will deliver them into the hand of Nebuchadrezzar king of Babylon; and he shall slay them before your eyes; And of them shall be taken up a curse by all the captivity of Judah which are in Babylon, saying, The LORD make thee like Zedekiah and like Ahab, whom the king of Babylon roasted in the fire; Because they have committed villany in Israel, and have committed adultery with their neighbours' wives, and have spoken lying words in my name, which I have not commanded them; even I know, and am a witness, saith the LORD. (Jeremiah 29: 21 – 23)

It is practically impossible to speak for God against His revelation or silence (which is what most motivation ultimately is) and live right amongst His people.

And the world is rife with story after another of this or the other motivator caught pants down (whatever that means) in illicit sexual situations.

Very respectable ministers have had to dish out vast amounts of cash to cover up their infidelity or perversion. The abortion industry thrives because motivators must continue to project that perfect marriage front against the reality on the ground.

Covering up God’s silence with motivation not only deceives people into believing a lie it worsens the situation by making sin and rebellion fine by making conviction and guilt uncool.

Jeremiah was for years screaming, repent, using all the means at his disposal, when these motivators were shouting, receive your restoration, have your best life now, receive, the season of your restoration is now, and many other motivational messages.

Is it any wonder than that Judah went headlong into the judgment Jeremiah had been threatening all those years?

That is what is happening to the church of Christ in our generation due to the overabundance of motivation in the church.

When God’s ministers (and this is an assumption), focus on positive vibes instead of God’s revelation and especially painting God’s clear portrait to those people under their instruction, they are in effect driving people against God.

This means that these motivators are clearly enemies of the Gospel they presume to be propagating. This because they are offering comfort to rebellion instead of confronting it.

Our spirits are much more receptive to motivation than they are to a challenge to change just as it is easier to swallow juice than it is to chew and swallow meat.

I do not know whether you are getting what I am saying or you are still sticking to your conman. And I will not ply you out of him.

What I want is for you to know the kind of message you are interacting with and especially how God looks at it.

Interact with your Bible in prayer to ascertain that what I am saying is scriptural or not because your response to this message will have serious ramifications either way. And this, you must know, is not a threat, though I wish it was one.