Our discussion today is centered on the popular theology that is common in Pentecostal circles. It says that you decide the outcome of your life through some positive words that you confess. Hence whenever you find yourself on the sickbed just deny that sickness and confess that you are well. Even something as troubling as poverty can be easily dealt with: “Just speak that you are rich”, they say. I am told that the Bible fully supports that “life and death is in the power of the tongue (Prov 18:21).”
I had time to also consult Dereck Prince, a highly esteemed man in terms of being a sound bible teacher. These are his words, “Whenever we say with our mouth whatever the Bible says about us, we have Jesus as our High Priest in heaven releasing His authority and His blessing. But if we remain silent, in a certain sense we shut off His ministry as a High Priest. And if we make a wrong confession, we do even worse; in a certain sense we invite negative forces which surround us and move upon us.” I really wonder why a good minister like Dereck Prince would come to such a heretic statement about shutting off Jesus’s priesthood through some “negative confession.” Regardless, this doctrine is very much the main diet in the halls of our churches. The teaching even goes further and says that Christians are gods, hence they can – like the Almighty – create things into existence through their words. In that world, prayer is not a humble request to the Lord but it is a declaring and demanding your things to come down from heaven. Faith is not just believing in an able God, but it’s a force that you use to bring whatever you desire into reality.
Gentlemen, I believe there is something severely wrong with this positive confession thing. Here is why…
It is unbiblical!
Believe it or not, you can support anything with the Bible. All you have to do is find one or two verses, isolate them from context, and bend them as hard as you can until they say what you want them to say. However, if you carefully study the whole Bible, thoughtfully and faithfully, especially about this issue, then you won’t miss the fact that God is in control of everything that happens under the sun. It is not your tongue or your positive thoughts. That is why we will all die at exactly that time the Lord has set, regardless of whether we confessed positively or not. You see beloved, we must correctly understand our authority in Christ. Indeed we are seated with Him in heavenly places, with everything under our feet. Yes, we are empowered by the good Spirit to work wonders and to trample over snakes, however, all that does not mean that we have been promoted to the same level with the Almighty, until we can create things like Him. We are still earthly creatures with perishable bodies that are dependent wholly on His grace. This is the reason we pray is it not? Therefore, there is no Biblical teaching (including Proverbs) that says your words contain some positive energy to make miracles through what you confess. If you can find anything consistent with the truth of Scripture, it is something like this,
James 4:13:16 - Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit” – yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. Instead, you ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that. As it is, you boast in your arrogance. All such boasting is evil.
Does it really work?
A certain friend of mine was somewhat not feeling fine one day. Then I jokingly suggested, “Why don’t you just declare that you are healed and speak that sickness off your body?” “Nah, that does not work, I tried that many times,” she answered. I ask you, dear reader, do the positive things you confess ever come to pass? How about the tragic story of the many who have passed away after being ill-advised by their spiritual fathers to shun medical attention, but to heal their condition through some “faith declarations.” What makes me even more cross is that these ministers who preach positive confession expect it to work for you but they themselves visit private doctors every time they get sick. In fact, all the people who began preaching this theology also got sick and died; one by one. Why couldn’t they speak those diseases out of their system? Again I say: Scripture never instructs you to create things with your tongue, rather, we are encouraged to take our cares to God in prayer. It’s His responsibility to answer our prayers, in His own time according to His will.
New Thought
Says Andrew Wommack, “If you are reaping sickness, it’s because you thought sickness. It may not be that you thought ‘I wanna be sick,’ but you have thought things that allow sickness to dominate you…” According to him and his friends, what you think will somehow materialize into reality; negative or otherwise. I will not bother asking what Bible verse they get all that from. Because I know that kind of thing is not Christianity at all, but it is a New Age belief called “new thought”. The founder of the New Thought movement was a fella named Phineas Quimby, who never claimed to be a Christian by any means. His basic teaching was that your thoughts have the ability to influence your physical world, most particularly if you need healing. It is derived from the Hindu idea that the mind has power because somehow we have divine energy within us. Allegedly, some preacher called E. W Kenyon was impressed by Mr. Quimby’s New Thought template, took it, and added the Christian theme to it. Then came a certain Kenneth Hagin; directly influenced by E. W Kenyon and from him, your Pastors are preaching the name it, claim it positive confession alongside the prosperity gospel.
I end this way: I am aware that there could be some soul who can testify that they made some positive declaration and things happened. However, I believe we can say the same thing about some witch-doctor somewhere, whose charms have also worked some spiritual realities for his followers to testify. The issue is not “it works for me” but is it Biblical? Even more, I do not think you can go into church history before the likes of Kenneth Hagin and ever find such a thing as “speaking money into your wallet.” That, my dear friends, is not just unChristian, but it is unrealistic and dangerous. Let’s re-examine these doctrines and be quick to get back to the original truth of the Christian Faith. And the people said, Amen!
Sinothi Ncube
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