Sister, I did read what you said, and I corrected my mistake in my @
#587 comment where I referred to the meaning that led me to mistakenly express what you had said about fakers. I whole heartedly agree about the Copeland video. It is grim and unquestionably false. And yet it is not without power is it? The overarching effect on an entire congregation is too great to simply dismiss as a powerless show. Rebuking it is another matter. How will you rebuke a show of power unless you can discern the power thereof? And why would you rebuke a power that is expressed in words so that it carries through the air to the ears and the mind and in sight through the eyes of those who have sight and is capable of producing a great show of power in the many. Isn't that the character of Simon the Magician as expressed in Acts 8:9-24?
Well what you said was that we should rebuke the man. That seems likely reasonable and would arrest the show of power in one man or perhaps even two men if you then show him the door. But how will you rebuke an entire congregation of an hundred men or thousands of men and women who say that they have Christ and in no less a meaning than Simon the Magician who also believed as the Scripture says and was baptised as are the many in this Copeland video. So I asked if you understood Sorcery. No problem if you don't desire to answer that question - now qualified - but in simplicity the term speaks to Galatians 5:20 and to the second fruit of the flesh after idolatry - as listed.
You suggest that I would be hard pressed to receive a rebuke sister. When I came back from my honeymoon my wife went to our marital home and I went to the church we attended. It was an AOG pentecostal church. When I walked through the door into the central isle the pastor was preaching and he was visible in the pulpit right ahead of me. I literally stood there as his words fell into me ears and heard him rebuking my marriage and by intention myself because I had disobeyed him and asked a sister in the church to marry me before the six month probationary period of my membership had been fulfilled. A few of the other members of the youth group who sat at the back of the church where the door opened into the street turned their heads to me standing in their sight and knew that I had been rebuked. As it happened what I heard in a literal disapproval of my manner of marriage was the last thing the pastor spoke. Perhaps because there I was in the very midst of the church and he knew that he would have to give an account.
So yes Sister I can quietly yield to a rebuke no matter how publicly and no matter how stern its effect on others. But to yield to it in my spirit when it is false - no sister - I am a brass wall. But if a brother or a sister is wounded because they are looking for a wife or husband and my engagement is know to the youth leader because I foolishly sough her advise on how to ask a sister to date me - forgetting what the pastor had said to me when I entered his church - and now more are offended because I am now found to be in disobedience because I broke the condition of my probation period - I just ask the Lord to raise up their wife and their husband to release them from the effect of a mistaken pastor who has given the weakness of the flesh in others who are faltering in their proposals a means to carry their emotional wounds to a new height when they turn and I see in their faces an accusatory spirit. No need to express your disapproval sister of a mistaken pastor - I don't need to hear it.
Rebuke is for our own good when it is a true rebuke - in rather the same way that tongues is for our own edification when we speak to God in groans too difficult to express in our own minds - or else when we are bearing witness in the Spirit to another in the church and we have a gift of interpretation or else we know another has that gift. How will you rebuke an entire church or a power that is evident in numbers of brethren and makes of them commodes of a sorceric effect. So I asked you what do you know about Sorcery.
Sorry for the ramble sister. The Lord knows. What I said to that pastor in the hearing of the entire church - was "by what authority do you condemn my marriage." Its not difficult to resist mistaken words - it is rather more difficult to arrest the effects that ensue from it.