Please note: Spoken messages tend to contain grammatical errors, which would ordinarily be corrected before publication. I have refrained from making such corrections for fear of being accused of tampering with his words. Dr. Evans’ sermon is to be judged by his use of Scripture, not by his use of grammar.

That’s a
tragedy!

If a professor
likes it,
it must be OK!

The power’s
so great?

Anything involving
a big crowd
must be OK!

I tell you what, that made hairs stand on the back of my neck. Heh, heh. It’s weird. I stood up, heh, heh, felt nothing! Hah. Well, not, not like that, I did feel an anointing and I felt a flow of the spirit and all that, but I never felt any of this other stuff. I began to think, What’s wrong with me? Heh, heh, heh.

I go there to the British conference and the General Superintendent of the Assemblies of God stands up to welcome all the delegates. And he’s welcoming all the delegates and next minute he starts shaking like this, shaking, and then he falls flat on the deck and he stays there for the rest of the meeting.

This is the British conference! The staid British conference. Then, to my amazement, they got so excited they had all these kind of flags all the place and they grabbed all these flags and rushed out the front and they’re waving these flags and praising God.

Oh, God! Heh, heh. It is strange. Strange phenomenas, I don’t understand it all. I can’t grasp it all, but, uh, as we get into the message, uh, the fruit is what you look at.

I took with me a South Australian pastor and he went to Toronto. I didn’t go to Toronto because things, program had been changed, and twice I’ve tried to go to Toronto and twice it hasn’t happened and I’ve come to the feeling, belief that God doesn’t want me to go. For some reason or other, ’cause people think, you know, oh it’s this or that or whatever.

But, uh, he went to Toronto and he said that the Vineyard church in the Toronto has, is now the largest tourist attraction in Canada. They’re coming in plane loads. They’ve got a new facility that seats four thousand. And he said, they’re coming in plane loads; all the hotels around are booked solid, and this pastor friend from Adelaide went to those meetings and, he said, they had them day and night, six days a week, Monday off, but all the rest of the time, day and night, morning and night, he says, the morning meetings there’d at least be fifteen hundred people standing at the altar. Now that church a year ago was two hundred.

The largest tourist attraction in Canada?
Here we have Dr. Evans’ second appeal to authority. If they get a big crowd, it must be okay.

How absurd! The Adelaide Crows attract 40,000 people to every home game they play. The Rolling Stones have no trouble gathering 50,000 at a time for a concert (at $90 a head). Crowds of over 100,000 gather every time the Pope appears at his front window.

They’re coming in plane loads!
That applies to Moslems at Mecca and Catholics at Lourdes and soccer fans at Wembley Stadium. When did a crowd become the evidence of God’s approval?

Now that church a year ago was two hundred.
And eighteen months further on (1996), Andrew Evans was forced to admit—following a visit to Toronto—that the attendance had since shrunk to only fifty people! What do numbers prove?

If an Adelaide
pastor does it,
it must be OK!

And they line up for hours to come to the meetings and he sat there and went forward for prayer a fair bit, never got touched, never felt anything. In fact he, at one stage, acted as a catcher for them. Never felt anything. And he got right to the end of the week and, uh, most of the people had gone, there may be twenty, thirty people left, and he’s just sitting there and a brother came and said, “Would you like prayer?” And he’d been prayed for numbers of times, and he said, “Yes, I would.”

And so he’s prayed for and he says suddenly the power of God hit him, he pitched forward on his face, and he was on his face for about an hour, crying. And he says, during that period, even though theologically he taught about God and the Fatherhood of God, he said in that hour on his face before God crying, he got a new insight to the Fatherhood of God.

He said, then when that insight became, to understand that insight of God and the greatness of God, he began to laugh and he said he laughed for half-an-hour, just laughed, and joy just welled up within him. So then, uh, as he went to get up, he accidentally hit a brother on the foot with his hand. And this brother went bang. Powerful things.

A South Australian pastor?
Here we have Dr. Evans’ third appeal to authority. If an Adelaide pastor experiences falling, crying and laughing, it must be okay.

Any one who will travel halfway across the world, then go to every meeting for a week, waiting in a 4,000 seater auditorium until only twenty or thirty people remain, has a very high level of motivation to experience something, anything! Motivational experts credit this kind of desire with the power to create all sorts of wonders in a person’s life.

Earnestly desired (but unbiblical) manifestations do not prove the presence of the Holy Spirit or the blessing of God.

Not Jehovah’s
Witnesses or
Mormons, so it
must be OK!

Now, what is all this? It’s either the devil, it’s either God, or it’s the flesh. So I’m going to give you four ways you can discern. Go back to our text, one John four one. It says, don’t believe every spirit, but try the spirits to see if they’re of God, because many false prophets have gone into the world. Verse two, By this you know the Spirit of God, every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is of God. So the first test is, What do they teach about Jesus Christ.

This is the cornerstone that all cults separate from true Christianity. As you know, the Jehovah’s Witnesses have a belief of, that He is “a god.” The Mormons have a belief that He is “a being,” Jesus is a being that came out of a union with God the Father and a female deity.

Not a Jehovah’s Witness or a Mormon?
Here we have Dr. Evans’ fourth appeal to authority. If they’re not Jehovah’s Witnesses or Mormons, they must be okay.

But are the doctrinal positions of the chief architects of the “Toronto blessing” any better than those of the famous cults? This would have been the appropriate place for Dr. Evans to examine the heretical teachings of Rodney Howard-Browne and his friends but, instead, he glibly deflects the focus to the old cults.

Kenneth Copeland, Kenneth Hagin and Benny Hinn (major influences on Rodney Howard-Browne) all teach heresy concerning the person of Jesus Christ and the nature of His work of redemption. The avoidance of membership in one of the old cults is no proof of the absence of false teaching. The Church needs to take a closer look at the “Christian” heresies of some of the leaders of the “Toronto blessing” movement.

Even the
demons believe that!

And that’s why, John writing, he says, Anyone that confess that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is of God. He says by, in, uh, one John, in two John one seven, For many deceivers have gone out into the world who do not confess Jesus Christ as coming in the flesh. This is a deceiver, an antichrist. But verse three says, And every spirit of one John one, uh, four says that every spirit that does not confess that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is not of God and is the spirit of antichrist which you’ve heard are coming and is now already in the world.

And as I’ve talked to people of all groups, whether it is Sunderland, Sunderland, and Ken Gott the leader which is coming to be with us in June, it’s just by uh, a miracle of events he’s in this country in June, and so he’s coming to be with us in June, you’ll hear first hand from this very fine young man what God’s doing in Sunderland. Or whether it’s in, uh, Toronto or whether it’s Rodney Howard-Browne, when they come to the Jesus Test there is no question that they believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, the divine eternal Son of God, they confess Him as Lord and Saviour and they pass the test of his divinity.

In fact, when Rodney came to Australia one person was talking to me on the phone and carrying on and criticising and everything about Rodney and I says, Well, why don’t you do the Matthew eighteen which says Go to your brother? You, you’re spreading your videos, your tapes, all your propaganda around, why don’t you go to your brother, and ring him up? So he rung him up and he said, Rodney do you believe that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh? He said, Of course I do. No problem. I believe in the divinity of Jesus. And so, when anything is occurring, unusual occurring, you put that test to them, as they respond about the fact of the Lord Jesus and His rulership as the Messiah and the Christ, they pass the first test.

So they pass the first test?
Here we have more of the same technique used by Dr. Andrew Evans in A New Wave of the Holy Spirit, that is, the glib quoting of ‘proof ’ texts. This shallow exegesis of Scripture, foisted on to an ignorant but trusting congregation by a denominational leader, is a disgrace.

John was responding to the Gnostic heresy, which separated the Human and the Divine natures of Jesus, saying the ‘human’ Jesus died, but not the ‘spiritual’ Jesus. In other words, they taught that Jesus Christ had not come “in the flesh.” The way to sort out the Gnostic teachers from the true Christian teachers was to ask them if they believed that Jesus Christ had come “in the flesh.”

If someone says that Jesus did not come “in the flesh,” we are to reject them. But if they say that Jesus did come “in the flesh,” they have only passed the Gnostic heresy test. This doesn’t mean that every other word that comes out of their mouth is divinely inspired. We must assess every statement on its Biblical merit.

What does Dr. Evans do with James 2:19? You believe that there is one God. Good! Even the demons believe that — and shudder. This was a response to the Old Covenant test of orthodoxy, based on the declaration of Deuteronomy 6:4, Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. James is saying that someone may pass the orthodoxy test at this point, but still be far from God. The demons passed that test, but still they trembled (in fear of their judgment to come).

And what would Dr. Evans do with the demon-possessed man of Mark 5? When he saw Jesus from a distance, he ran and fell on his knees in front of him. He shouted at the top of his voice, “What do you want with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God?” (Mark 5:6-7). According to Dr. Evans, “as they respond about the fact of the Lord Jesus and His rulership as the Messiah and the Christ, they pass the first test.”

Given the demon-possessed man’s orthodox declaration concerning Jesus, we can only assume that Dr. Andrew Evans would place him in charge of the church’s teaching program.

Jesus just quietly said, “Come out of this man, you evil spirit!” Here was discernment beyond the ability of Dr. Andrew Evans: Jesus knew him by his fruit (Mark 5:3-5). Even if people fall on their knees before Him, and say that Jesus is the “Son of the Most High God,” but they spend their time crying out mindlessly and damaging their bodies, they have come under demonic influence and need to be delivered.

Jesus speciality
was removing
dumbness, not
causing it!

So, what’s happening is not of the devil because they’ve passed the test that John gave us. So maybe then, it’s the flesh or the Spirit, so we have to give them the second test. And the second test: — Is the things that are happening, and the teachings that are occurring, Biblical? You know, the manifestations are unusual, to say the least. I can’t work out how Trevor is struck dumb. I can’t work that out, and Pentecostals would have said that that can’t possibly be, so either Trevor was struck dumb in the flesh or the Spirit.

Struck dumb in the flesh or the Spirit?
Here we have a very glib avoidance of the issue. Dr. Evans has artificially reduced the possibilities to “the flesh or the Spirit,” pretending that Satan is never responsible for sending people dumb. What does Dr. Evans do with:
Matthew 9:32, where a man who was demon-possessed and could not talk was brought to Jesus. And when the demon was driven out, the man who had been mute spoke.
Matthew 12:22, where They brought to him a demon-possessed man who was blind and mute, and Jesus healed him, so that he could both talk and see.
Matthew 15:30, where Great crowds came to him, bringing the lame, the blind, the crippled, the mute and many others, and laid them at his feet; and he healed them.
and so on, throughout the Gospels.

Notice that Jesus’ speciality was removing dumbness, not causing it! The spirit that Dr. Andrew Evans has embraced, and is now subtly imposing on others, acts in the opposite manner to that of Jesus Christ. Christians, be warned!

Looking for
another
Messiah!

So either Trevor was struck drumb in the flesh or the Spirit. I’m getting tongue-tied myself, right now. But all I know, as you look at Scripture, over and over again, God, when He met with certain people, sovereignly touched them, many times there was incredible manifestations. Think of Paul of Sarsus, Saul of Tarsus. Help me get through this, Lord. Saul of Tarsus. Knocked down, and made blind when he met the Living God. Think of Zechariah. Struck dumb for months, when he met the Living God.

Last update: 17 May 1997
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Copyright (c) Henry G. Sheppard 1995, 1997