Are You on The Way, or The Wayside?
James 1:5-8 (NLT) says, “If you need wisdom, ask our generous God, and he will give it to you. He will not rebuke you for asking. But when you ask Him, be sure that your faith is in God alone. Do not waver, for a person with divided loyalty is as unsettled as a wave of the sea that is blown and tossed by the wind. Such people should not expect to receive anything from the Lord. Their loyalty is divided between God and the world, and they are unstable in everything they do.” (emphasis mine)
When I was a teenager I was given the book God Calling. At first it all sounded good, but… there was a little niggling doubt in the back of my mind that something just wasn’t right. Because I had been brought up in a Bible-teaching church and was a baptized Christian, the Holy Spirit nudged me that it was wrong. However, I didn’t know HOW it was wrong, because I hadn’t yet read the Bible cover to cover for myself. What I should have done is take it to my parents and had them read it. But I was too dense to think of such a thing.
Then, when I went back and read the preface to the book I noticed that it said the book was written by “two listeners” and that they would listen and write what they heard and were told to write. They were engaging in automatic writing, and they thought they were channeling God. But God doesn’t participate in automatic writing!
Many years later I learned that God Calling is a very famous New Age religion book, and that I had been right to discard it. (The same person later gave me A Course in Miracles, another channeled book. I threw that one away, too. Btw, the Enneagram was also given through channeling and automatic writing.)
So when Jesus Calling appeared on the scene, my Spidey sense (the Holy Spirit?) tingled.
“Huh,” I thought, “Why would they entitle a Christian book so similarly to a famous New Age book? Is it a play on words?” (Bzzzz) “Or is it related to God Calling?” (Ding ding ding!)
When I came across it in a bookstore and read the introduction, Sarah Young stated that her most favorite book in the world was God Calling.
Ms. Young said she wanted an experience like the two listeners had, and that her book is the result of what her Jesus revealed to her. But if that were really true, then her book would be on the same level as the Bible! Yet it was riddled with errors that don’t align with the Bible. How could her Jesus get it so wrong?
Unless, of course, her Jesus isn’t our Jesus, and her Jesus revealed the truth of who he really was when he declared to her to gather at “Wayside Meetings.” Her Jesus tells us to “take time to rest by the wayside.”
When we turn to our Bible and read the Parable of the Sower, it is the seed that is sown on the wayside that the birds eat (Luke 8 verse 5), and Jesus himself tells us that the birds represent Satan who snatches the Word away from people’s hearts, so that they will not believe in Him and be saved (Luke 8 verse 12). You can read the parable for yourself, right here in Luke 8:4-15, in the easy to read New Living Translation, or the King James Version, where the word “way side” is used instead of the NLT’s “footpath.”
Now, the old, printed dictionaries (the older the dictionary the more information and examples you will find in regard to the original meaning of the word) tell us that the word WAY “is the generic word for any kind of a passage or route from one place to another.” (The New Century Dictionary 1927). A Wayfarer is a traveler. Wayward is “wilful, untoward, capricious, perverse, contrary, headstrong, stubborn, obstinate, disobedient, froward, unruly, refractory, and intractable.”
The WAYSIDE is the edge of the Way, path, or road. To be “on the wayside” means you are skirting the path. You are taking a side path. You are off the path. You are in rebellion, walking just off the Way.
The idiom “to fall by the wayside” means to “give up; to fail to continue.” To “go by the wayside” means “to be discarded due to other considerations.” (TheFreeDictionary.com) The wayside is where litterbugs toss their trash.
When you look at the etymology of the word “way side,” you can see that Wayside really means off the path. A wayside inn would be on the edge of the way, right off the path.
In the Bible, Jesus talks a lot about The Way and the narrow path, but he never tells us to take time to rest by the wayside, and there isn’t a single word about “wayside” meetings.
In Luke 8:18 Jesus says, “So pay attention to how you hear. To those who listen to my teaching, more understanding will be given. But for those who are not listening, even what they think they understand will be taken away from them.”
Do you still want to rest by the Wayside?
The first Christians were called “Followers on The Way,” because Jesus Christ said, “I am The Way, the Truth, and the Life, and no one gets to the Father except through me.” (John 14:6)
So often, when we encounter New Age or Old Path teachings, we brush away the Holy Spirit nudges that something is wrong, and convince ourselves that it is WE who are wrong, that WE are misinterpreting Scripture, that they quote a lot of Scripture so it must be right, or that it “isn’t that bad.”
But Satan parades as Light! Deceived New Age people often “quote” Scripture, but they SUBTLY change words, usually small, seemingly insignificant words. And when our little alarm bell sounds we too often convince ourselves that it is “just a new translation, the words aren’t exactly how we memorized it, but we know what they mean.”
The tricky thing is, they often will use the same words as in the Bible, but will attribute completely different meanings. They use the same passages of Scripture, but they give a slightly new interpretation. Thus, these new teachings fool many Christians because we do not know our Bibles well enough.
Now the Holy Spirit tells us clearly that in the last times some will turn away from the true faith; they will follow deceptive spirits and teachings that come from demons.
1 Timothy 4:1
Was Jesus coming to earth as a man to save us from our sins a ‘dark night’ for him?
Sarah Young’s “Jesus” sounds pretty glum and dejected when he talks about his birth. He says that the night he was born in “a filthy stable. That was a dark night for Me, even though angels lit up the sky proclaiming ‘Glory!’ to awe-struck shepherds.”
Is that how you’ve always seen Christ’s birth? As a “dark night” for him? It’s not how the shepherds saw it. Luke 2 verse 20 tells us that when the shepherds went back to their flocks, they were “glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen. It was just as the angel had told them.” Read Luke chapter 2 for yourself.
Make sure that the light you think you have is not actually darkness.
Luke 11:35
Doesn’t her Jesus depress you in that sentence? It did me. It made me wonder why we even celebrate his birth! I’m so glad that my Jesus came to earth eagerly, joyfully, and willingly to do His Father’s Will. And that is why I celebrate his birth, his death, and his resurrection: He died for me!
I believe that we do have “Holy Spirit nudges” helping warn us, and sometimes it may be a really direct command like “Stop,” “Go this way,” “Change lanes,” or even “Don’t read this book,” (I thought this was a good video about that: God’s Method of Consistently Warning and Teaching, esp. minutes 8-11). But the audacity of writing an entire book full of messages and saying that they are from Jesus Himself…do you see how dangerous this is? She is writing as though her book has come straight from the mouth of Jesus!
Still skeptical? Take a look for yourself on Spiritual Research Network.org: Jesus Calling and Sarah Young’s New Age/Occult (hidden) Teachings. This link will take you to a webpage with a compiled list of many articles, and a video.
I encourage you to, at the very least, please read this (the first article from the SRN link above): Extra-Biblical Names in the Jesus Calling Series. It is absolutely shocking. The names Sarah Young’s “jesus” calls himself do not appear in the Bible, but can be found in mythology, Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, Theosophy, New Thought, New Age, and psychic literature!
And guess what name is never used in “jesus Calling” – JESUS CHRIST!
Neither does her jesus call himself: Advocate, High Priest, Jesus of Nazareth, Mediator, Servant, Son of David, Son of Man, or Son of God.
Instead, he has 39 other names he calls himself, such as: eternal Lover (Hinduism), passionate Lover, perpetual Lover, Sun (New Age), ultimate Desire, ultimate Pleasure, Controller of the Universe (Hinduism), Director (New Age Ascended Masters), Initiator (New Age/Theosophy), and many others.
2 Timothy 4:3-4 tells us, For a time is coming when people will no longer listen to sound and wholesome teaching. They will follow their own desires and will look for teachers who will tell them whatever their itching ears want to hear. They will reject the truth and chase after myths.
If you’ve been deceived by Sarah Young’s counterfeit jesus, ask Jesus Christ to forgive you, and help you to stay on The Way, the narrow path.
Colossians 2:8 warns, “Don’t let anyone capture you with empty philosophies and high-sounding nonsense that come from human thinking and from the spiritual powers of this world, rather than from Christ,” but over time, professing Christians are subtly taught the new interpretations, which do not align with what the Bible actually says.
I think not having a daily Bible reading is the most dangerous and destructive thing that professing Christians do. They let others be the experts and teach them instead of picking up their own Bible and reading it cover to cover, to get the big picture, to get context, and to know God’s Word, his love letter to us. Throughout the centuries thousands of people have died fighting for the freedom to read the Bible for themselves! And we just let it gather dust on our shelves. It’s pitiful.
Too many people think that the Bible is “too hard” to understand, or “too boring.” The Bible is the most complex book you will ever read, and that is why it takes a lifetime of study, but you will understand a lot of it, and it isn’t boring.
Most people would rather pick up a devotional than read their Bible, and this is why so many people are being deceived about a New Age channeled book from a Spirit Guide that is NOT Jesus.
Subtle new age teachings are happening in thousands of churches, and this is why we must pray, read, and study the Bible for ourselves! We look upon other people favorably, thinking they couldn’t possibly be deceived by something that wasn’t godly; and convince ourselves that we are the problem, that we aren’t smart enough to discern the truth, and so we, too, become deceived.
So when you get that little bell that tells you, “Hmmm, that doesn’t sound quite right to me,” you need to be able to go to your Bible and study it out for yourself, and with your husband. Don’t ask any old friend what they think. Pray, and ask God to lead you to the Truth! It’s simply amazing how He will! There are also some commentaries that can help you decipher verses, and you can study with other Christians, but you need to remember that there are many deceived Christians out there, drowning in New Ageism, thinking it is pure Gospel. Thus, the astronomical sales of ungodly books to a deceived church.
Publishing houses are no longer careful about printing theologically sound doctrine (in fact, Thomas Nelson, Young’s publisher, is now owned by Harper Collins – the publisher of the Satanic Bible), and there are many churches teaching unsound doctrine. They can get away with this because people aren’t reading their Bibles.
You happily put up with whatever anyone tells you, even if they preach a different Jesus than the one we preach, or a different kind of Spirit than the one you received, or a different kind of gospel than the one you believed.
2 Corinthians 11:4
One more thing – have you noticed that only women read this book? It reminds me of 2 Timothy 3:7! Why would you read this book when you have the actual Word of God?
If you are currently reading jc and are loving it, have you noticed that you are addicted to reading it, and not the Bible? Do you often quote a passage from the book, instead of from Scripture? Do you feel unsatisfied if you haven’t read this book? Do you feel that Jesus is not only your Lord and Savior, but your boyfriend? These are all red flags.
I hope that your boat has been rocked, and that you will read and listen to the resources I’ve mentioned, and prayerfully judge for yourself.
Brenna E. Scott has written several articles, including the one about extra-Biblical names above, and this one is also worth reading: The Voice of the jc series – More like Jesus Christ or more like a Deceiver?
She writes, “His credible use of scripture and compassionate words certainly mimic the true Jesus. His understanding and acceptance of human struggles draw the reader in. His convincing presentation of partial biblical truths allays doubt. But embedded in the messages are peculiar statements that may be missed by the reader—statements that may seem a little ‘off.’ They don’t sound like Jesus as revealed in Scripture…. It’s as if Young’s “Jesus” occasionally slips up and reveals his true agenda. Some of the more revealing quotations are collected in the following pages, and troubling themes emerge:
- He seeks entrance
- He wants your house clean and empty!
- He invades
- He targets the weak, like a predator
- He wants a physical body to live through
- He is spatially close, surrounding and hovering over you
- He wants vocal summons
- He sounds needy
- He uses a belittling tone
- He sounds limited, by needing your cooperation to act
- He is refreshed and blessed by you
- He romances you, even in a sensual way
- He flatters you
- He says odd and disturbing things
- He contradicts himself
- He brags” She then goes on to detail all the sentences in all of Young’s books where this takes place.
Beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God: because many false prophets are gone out into the world.
1 John 4:1
Warren B. Smith wrote a book called “Another Jesus” Calling: How Sarah Young’s False Christ is Deceiving the Church. Part I discusses 10 concerns about God Calling, and Part II discusses 20 concerns about Jesus Calling.
Smith has done a lot of research. He says that in the original book, Young wrote that her Jesus told her that he was “training” her “to be a channel of My loving Presence.” She wrote: “I have continued to receive personal messages from God as I meditate on Him. The more difficult my life circumstances, the more I need these encouraging directives from my Creator.”
There are 7 Appendixes, and the first one “Changing Jesus Calling: Damage Control for a False Christ” is all about how the book has been revised each time people point out that the book doesn’t align with Scripture. Even Young’s declaration of how much she loved God Calling has been omitted from the versions printed after 2013. Her publishers have changed “this practice of listening to God” to “this practice of being still in God’s presence,” “I want to share some of the messages I have received” to “I want to share some of the writings I have gleaned from these quiet moments,” “The messages that follow” to “The devotions that follow,” and many more.
Warren B. Smith has written many books. The one I own, in addition to “Another Jesus” Calling, is The Light That Was Dark: From the New Age to Amazing Grace and it is excellent! Smith was deceived by Gurus, Spirit Guides, A Course in Miracles (which is the complete opposite of the Bible in every way, including having its own false Jesus), and psychics. I highly recommend his book. You won’t want to put it down. He learned about Jesus from the book “The Beautiful Side of Evil” by Johanna Michaelsen, and he and his wife were saved spiritually and physically. Both of these books are extremely useful for anyone who is involved in any occult practice, as well.
May God bless you as you stay on The Way!
Janine
Listen to this informative interview with Warren B. Smith while you work around the house (if the video disappears, you may be able to find it here, on BereanResearch.org):
Were you taken in by the jc series? Did you hear or feel any warning bells? Btw, an author called Marie Chapian is now writing similar books. If you own a jc book, what will you do with it?
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