Some Personal Thoughts of the Lakeland Revival
thoughts by Charles P. Schmitt, founding pastor
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ADDENDUM: Since the publishing of the following article, word has circulated about the separation of Todd Bentley from his wife. The following observations and concerns yet remain the same, but now we must add to our prayers, the restoration of this marriage and the repentance and restoration of this brother. The Body of Christ is not called by God to be harsh and unredemptive (and for this reason we do not align ourselves with those who so severely criticize this servant of God); the Church is called to be a restorative and redemptive community, and by God’s grace we will stand in faith for repentance and redemption and restoration in this situation.
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People whose discernment I trust—my wife, my daughter, another of our pastors, plus various of our saints—have all returned from Lakeland, Florida with very positive reports of the manifest Presence of God. And I myself was positively impressed as I watched Todd Bentley on GOD TV. His presentation on healing was very scriptural; his message exalted our Lord Jesus, and his appeal for souls to respond to the salvation call was inspiring. I was blest by him and by his ministry. And then just recently we had Jeff Garvin at Immanuel’s. Jeff is one of Todd Bentley’s associate ministers, and his time with us was excellent—Christ exalting, scriptural and anointed! Jeff’s report on Todd Bentley is that he is a man of God—not without his flaws—but a man anointed and passionate for the glory of Jesus Christ!
Sounds of grave concern, however, have come from other sources. J. Lee Grady, editor of Charisma Magazine, in his April 2008 article, “Honest Questions About the Lakeland Revival,” wrote: “Bentley is one of several charismatic ministers who have emphasized angels in the last several years. He has taught about angels who bring financial breakthroughs or revelations, and he sometimes refers to an angel named Emma who supposedly played a role in initiating a prophetic movement in Kansas City in the 1980’s. Bentley describes Emma as a woman in a flowing white dress who floats a few feet off the floor… Paul was adamant that preoccupation with angels can lead to serious deception. We need to tread carefully here! We have no business teaching God’s people to commune with angels or to seek revelations from them. And if any revival movement —no matter how exciting or passionate—mixes the gospel of Jesus with this strange fire, the results could be devastating. We need to remember that Mormonism was born out of one man’s encounter with a dark angel who claimed to speak for God.”
During our time with Jeff Garvin, we asked him about “Emma.” He stated that he himself had no involvement with that “revelation,” but offered Zechariah 5:9 as an explanation for “women angels”—“There before me [Zechariah] were two women, with the wind in their wings! They had wings like those of a stork…” (5:9). After examining that text, I personally would not want to build a doctrine on that verse, especially since the stork is a detestable unclean bird (Leviticus 11:13, 19). In the rest of Scripture, angels always appear in masculine form; and I do not believe (and neither do other biblical students) that Zechariah’s vision of the “two women with wind in their wings… wings like those of a stork” are female angels!
Grady in his April 2008 writing continued to express his further concern over “ministers who have allowed people to behave like epileptics on stage, [attributing] their attention-getting antics to the Holy Spirit … such behavior feeds carnality and grieves the Holy Spirit … When we put bizarre behavior on the platform, we imply that it is normative. Thus more strange fire is allowed to spread.”
In a controversial article entitled, “A Face To Face Encounter,” Todd Bentley himself described his trip into the “Third Heaven” where he discussed the authorship of the book of Hebrews with the apostle Paul! Paul said to Bentley, “When I [Paul] was in the third heaven, Abraham was with me like you [Bentley] are with me now. Abraham himself shared with me and I simply wrote … The authorship [of Hebrews] isn’t clear because it was Abraham and I; Abraham shared the content with me.”
I can state with little doubt that there would be no serious biblical scholar that would believe that Abraham and Paul wrote Hebrews together! (Actually, Paul’s testimony in Galatians 1:12 of how he received the Gospel would have made it impossible for him to have written Hebrews 2:3, and Abraham even more so!)
These revelations about the angel Emma and about Abraham co-authoring Hebrews with Paul deeply concern me. Who exactly did Todd Bentley see floating into the room in a white dress? Who exactly spoke to Todd about the authorship of Hebrews? These are serious questions. As I weighed all of these reports—so many positive and yet so many negative— I personally felt myself almost torn in half—part of me wanting to applaud what God is doing in answer to the hunger of thousands of sincere seekers in Lakeland, and part of me wanting, like Lee Grady, to sound an alarm!
As I called out in desperation to God, he spoke clearly to me. I remember exactly where I was standing when I heard the Good Shepherd say: “Separate the precious from the vile.” I knew that word was in the Scriptures, and with the help of the concordance, I found the statement—“…if you take out the precious from the vile [literally, from the worthless], you shall be as my mouth” (Jeremiah 15:19). The Amplified Bible makes it clear that Jeremiah the prophet himself was under God’s scrutiny in this—“If you separate the precious from the vile [cleansing your own heart from unworthy words], you shall be as my mouthpiece.” I saw that I needed to apply that word to my own understandings of what was happening at Lakeland! I needed to separate the precious from the worthless.
Revivals have a history of quickly becoming muddy, not because the work of God is not pure, but because human vessels pollute the stream! John Wesley observed, “At the first, revival is true and pure, but after a few weeks watch for counterfeits.” He feared those extremes that would “bring the real work into contempt.” Jonathan Edwards in the Great Awakening sounded his concern over extremes: “A great deal of caution and pains were found necessary to keep the people from running wild.” Revivalist Charles Finney also warned: “God’s Spirit leads men by intelligence, not through mere impressions… I have known some cases where people have… greatly injured… the cause of God, by giving themselves up to a… fanatical following of impressions.” And one of the more powerful moves of God in recent history, the Welsh Revival of 1904, saw “people … run off into things that are odd and foolish, unreasonable and indecent….” And a few years after that in 1906 at Azusa Street, Frank Bartleman wrote of that move, “Many are willing to seek ‘power’ from every battery they can lay their hands on, in order to perform miracles… A true ‘Pentecost’ will produce a mighty conviction of sin, a turning to God. False manifestations produce only excitement and wonder …Any work that exalts the Holy Ghost or the ‘gifts’ above Jesus will finally land up in fanaticism.” And the same concerns can be raised of the Latter Rain Revival of the mid-1900s with its serious errors and distortions, and the Healing Revivals that followed, as with every ongoing move of the Holy Spirit down to this very day!
What then, in all of this, shall we do? We could close our eyes and swallow all that goes on across the revival landscape “hook, line, and sinker,” or we could go to the opposite extreme, as I fear some have done, and throw the proverbial baby out with the dirty bathwater, declaring Lakeland to be an end-time deception (as they have done with Toronto and Brownsville).
But I sense the heart of God is rather for us to separate the worthless dross from the precious silver—“take out the precious from the vile.” I sense that’s what “discerning of spirits” (1 Corinthians 12:10) is all about!
Paul apparently faced these exact same challenges. That is why he wrote these words to the Thessalonians: “Do not put out the Spirit’s fire; do not treat prophecies with contempt. Test everything. Hold on to the good. Avoid every kind of evil.” (1 Thessalonians 5:19-21)!
George Wood, General Superintendent of the Assemblies of God, recently issued three major guidelines for determining the long-term validity of any revival move of God. These are Brother Wood’s words: “(1) Is Jesus Christ exalted? …The focus for any lasting revival always must be on Jesus. The Holy Spirit has not come to glorify Himself or any human or angelic personality. (2) Is the Word of God proclaimed? …Miraculous manifestations are never the test of a true revival—fidelity to God’s Word is the test. (3) Are persons repenting of sin and being baptized in water and the Holy Spirit? Unless these… events of the Christian life occur, along with the sanctifying work of the Spirit that leads to a holy life, then the miracles, crowds, and enthusiasm will quickly wane.”
These three guidelines provide very wise counsel! And so, by the grace of God we will continue to “test everything,” bringing all things for scrutiny to the Holy Scriptures. We will “hold onto the good,” and we will avoid the evil, that worthless dross! And by the grace of God, in all of this, we will not throw the baby out with the dirty bathwater! We will not “put out the Spirit’s fire”; we will not “treat prophecies with contempt.” But we will separate the precious from the worthless, that we ourselves might be God’s mouthpiece, His messengers, His spokesmen in these crucial last days! Amen!
