<p>Free sharing permitted under the Creative Commons <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/">BY-NC-ND 3.0 (US)</a> license.</p>

Advent HOPE Sabbath School

Howard Peth

Contemplative Prayer: A Clear and Present Danger

My name is Howard Peth, and as the young lady said, today happens to be my birthday, my 82nd birthday.

And so it's a special day for me, but what's really special, you know, after you have 81 birthdays, not like a little kid anymore where it's an exciting day.

But I'm excited to be here to have a chance to chat with you folks about a very important topic.

And it's important because it's dealing with a heresy.

1 man called it a heresy on steroids that the devil is getting into many churches, Protestant churches, it's been in the Catholic church for some decades, centuries even.

But the Protestants have often resisted it because it's dealing with spiritualism, which God condemns.

And sad to say it's coming to some extent infiltrating into our own beloved Adventist Church.

So I'm glad to share a warning against that.

Especially I see a lot in this audience, Advent Hope is often known as a group of young people and the youth, of course, the Adventist youth are the future of our church.

So I'm glad to be here and I hope that you will be blessed too by our message.

We want to turn the spotlight on contemplative prayer this morning.

And I know the young lady did a beautiful prayer for opening, but could you just bow your heads?

Dear Heavenly Father, we thank you for your blessings, for your truth, for your church.

And we pray that by your Spirit, you will be with us, not only with me, but with all of us here to have open minds and attentive hearts to hear what you would say to us.

Now in Revelation, God warns that the devil has come down to us in great wrath and why is that?

Because he knows he has but a short time.

He's working I think very hard in these last days pulling out all the stops in a last-ditch effort to reach the world before his time is up.

And Paul, Apostle Paul, gives the same warning, too.

He says that in the latter times, that's the times that we're living in now, some shall depart from the faith.

That means they were Christians, but he's warning that some will depart from that belief and give heed to seducing spirits, devils, and believe their doctrines.

Now contemplative prayer, as it says in your bulletin, is a clear and present danger.

It's very clear, as we'll see, and it's present right now.

The reason why it's such a dangerous and deadly concept is that you know and I know that the devil's target has always been your mind.

In the Garden of Eden, he was able to persuade Eve's mind, and that's what caused all the trouble in the world to this day.

They're beginning to wake up, and 2 years ago, when Ted Wilson was inaugurated as our General Conference President, in that beautiful speech that he gave toward the end of the speech, so it makes a lasting impression, I think he chose that last part, to say very clearly, he said, stay away from non-biblical spiritual disciplines of spiritual formation that are rooted in mysticism and contemplative prayer, centering prayer, they call it sometimes, and the emerging church movement in which they are promoted.

So my publisher, I've written some things, my publisher asked me to write about this and I did.

It was published just last December by Pacific Press and it was approved by our church's Biblical Research Institute.

And just this last month of August, the entire issue of Ministry Magazine, that's a professional Journal for Pastors, the whole issue was devoted to this problem.

And Derek Morris, who is the editor of it now, he wrote a great editorial about it, and he should know because he, as well trained and dedicated as he was, he was deceived by this about 20 years ago and got into some of this error, but the Lord led him out of it And he tells in this editorial that it's dangerous.

He's so thankful to the Lord for enlightening him and hoping that other pastors who may have been misled can come out of it as he did.

And then Elder Finley wrote a long article and other things in that.

I went to the ASI convention in Cincinnati they had in August.

And on the very night that I spoke, they had a very nice presentation on 3ABN, and I think on the Hope Channel 2 Live.

Dan Jackson is the president of the North American Division.

We all know Mark Finley, and I mentioned Eric Morris.

At any rate, it was 6 people on a roundtable discussion talking about this very dangerous subject.

But let's get into contemplative prayer now.

Let's first of all see what it really is and how it works.

I know that many people, if you mention, do you know what contemplative prayer is, they'll say, no I don't think I've ever heard about that.

Or others will say, well, I've heard about it, but I really don't know much about it.

And it could be defined maybe in a single word, like spiritualism, sort of a spooky thing.

It's something that God's word has condemned in the strongest possible terms.

He says, do not suffer or allow a witch to live.

Or another word that would be fitting here is the word mysticism.

I think I need to define mysticism because it's not quite as familiar to most of us.

But the Merriam-Webster dictionary defines it as the experience of direct contact with oh, whatever God a person has or the spirits and so forth.

It's direct knowledge of God or spiritual faith and so forth.

So it's for people who don't want to have a second-hand experience.

They want direct experience with God or the spirit world personally.

They don't want to have to study some sacred text like the Bible or listen to an inspired sermon, even if it is inspired from somebody else.

That's the way it is with the Hindu guru, the Buddhist priest, the African witch doctor, the Indian medicine man, or a spiritualistic medium or channeler of the new age.

Even professional psychics in the same boat.

All of them believe that they've been blessed with the gift of direct personal contact with the invisible supernatural world of all-knowing spirits.

And right along with those mystics, we expect it in their case perhaps, but the innocent Christian who was misled to indulge in contemplative prayer also communicates directly with the same mystical Forbidden world of spirits who will reply They honestly will and do reply to him or her personally.

What's not realized is that the voice of those spirits that they think are angels, God's angels, is really that of 1 of Satan's fallen angels, a devil or demon.

So if Satan can deceive and seduce and convert a real Christian into becoming a mystic instead, They become so addicted to contemplate a prayer that he longs to listen directly to spirit voices becoming knowingly or unknowingly a spiritualist.

When I was joining the church 50 years ago or so, I knew about spiritualism, roughly, seances and that, but it was sort of old-fashioned.

This is at the cutting edge of the devil's deceptions.

Well, if Satan can do that, he will, and then he's really got the person, I'm afraid.

And what they do in contemplative prayer, they'll tell you if somebody is foolish enough to go into training on this, they say, well, how does it really work?

They say, well, you have to learn to be silent.

You have to learn to empty your mind so that it becomes a mental void and banish all thoughts from it.

And of course the devil likes that because then he could begin to fill it with his deceptions.

People say, well Isn't it hard to empty one's mind?

Even when I'm going to sleep at night and trying to get some rest, I keep having maybe a worry or concern or some other thought intrude, and I can't get to sleep.

But you know that the ancient Hindus of the East, thousands of years ago, a couple of millenniums, learned how to do this with what they call a mantra.

I think it's pronounced mantra, right, Gordon?

Mantras and mysticism are what are involved here and it's helpful to understand the correct definition of the word mantra.

The English translation that comes from the Sanskrit language, which is the language of Hinduism and India there.

Man means to think and tra means to be liberated from.

So It essentially means literally to escape from thought, just to empty your mind.

And this Catholic monk gives us a very good definition here and helpful comments.

He says, listen to the mantra as you say it, gently but repeatedly.

If thoughts or images come, these are distractions at the time of meditation.

The Mantra is a word, a syllable, or a short phrase that you can say when a thought comes in.

You can say, Jesus, if you choose that as your sacred word, your mantra.

Every time a thought comes in and you just knock it down from your mind.

He says, say it, returning to your sacred word.

And the way to ignore it is to say your mantra.

And they also, notice, they encourage you to return to this meditation period faithfully, they say, every morning for 20 minutes or more, and every evening for 20 minutes or more.

And the people who get into this begin to go into that regimen.

Now Henri Nouwen, he was born in Holland, the Netherlands, but he lived most of his life and did most of his work here in the United States.

Back to Menu

Contemplative Prayer: A Clear and Present Danger

Transcript

Sponsor

Recorded

Attachments

Sound Doctrine