Conspiracy Fears (02/08/2026)

Podcast

Welcome and Prayer: Jim Calhoun

Come Lord, join us here today
Give us today
And let us
Give it back to you

We will receive today
As it comes
With joys
And sorrows
Upsets
And our wins
We will receive
The trials
The temptations
The disappointments
And the fears
Large and small
Spoken and known
And even
Those worries, anxieties and fears
We hide
Hide ourselves

We will receive this day
As a gift from you
Knowing your care in our lives
Knowing that your care is just
As strong in the lives
Of our friends, neighbors
And everyone else.
Dropping our need
To judge others
Our habits of resentment
Our inclination to withhold

And we will give to you
Our trust
That you are with us
Our hope
That all things
Will be made
New and right
Our hard work
As partners
Restoring the world
Our affection
For your abiding care,
For our second chances
For all that is good
In our lives
We will give you all we are
As best we can
This day
Amen

Morning Talk: chuck smith, jr.

“The LORD spoke thus to me . . . .” Isaiah 8:11

Intro: I’ll finish reading the verse in a moment, but first we will pause here
– every morning when I open my Bible, I don’t jump into it
• but at the entrance to the Scriptures, I take a moment to slow my breath, and focus my attention
◦ I bring awareness to God’s presence and let myself hear him say,
“at the entrance of the tent of meeting before the LORD, where I will meet with you to speak to you there” (Ex. 29:42)
• so before I even begin reading, I’m already listening to God
◦ and there is always something in my reading worth writing
◦ (though not necessarily worth sharing with others)
– yesterday morning, when I began, I felt a familiar frustration
• my desperate longing is to actually hear God,
◦ for his voice to be so clearly in my brain, there’s no doubt I’m hearing him
◦ anyway, the first words I read yesterday were, “And the LORD spoke to Moses . . . .”
• normally, my eyes would have glided over that phrase,
◦ especially because what follows is long and repetitious
◦ anyway, reading the opening line, I may have felt a twinge of jealousy
▫ but then, like from a small inner voice I heard,
“See, I do speak to you. Wasn’t this what you were just now thinking? Desiring?”

That experience lacked the intensity of physical sound,
– but it was enough that I realized what I have to do;
• and that is: continue to practice improving my spiritual perception
• I want to tune in to God’s communication more clearly
– I know that every true follower of Jesus hears from him
“My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me” (Jn. 10:27)
“Today, if you will hear his voice,
do not harden your hearts . . . .” (Heb. 3:7-15)
• but if, especially, we all receive God’s Spirit and become prophets, then certainly we must hear God’s voice (Acts 2:17-18)
• it’s my strong belief we need to listen to God now more clearly than ever in our nation’s history
◦ here’s why:

A person I don’t know, sent me a link to a YouTube channel

The video was presented as a documentary,
– presenting a history of a false “Latter Rain” teaching in Pentecostal culture
• the narrator spoke with certainty, as if he possessed incontrovertible truth
◦ he credited three men with conspiring to develop and propagate the Latter Rain
◦ Paul Cain, John Wimber, and my dad
• who ever put this together was not simply mistaken, but invented blatant lies
◦ Dad was outspoken in his rejection of the Latter Rain and publicly criticized Paul Cain
– this is not the first time Dad has been defamed by false teachers andsham reports
• in 1970’s John Todd was speaking in churches around LA
◦ he told a story of how he was raised by Satanists
◦ but his big story was that the church of Satan funneled eight million dollars through him which he gave my dad to start Maranatha! Music
• it is now well known that John Todd was mentally unsound and a pathological liar
◦ my point is that back then, his lies were told in churches, and believed people who attended them
• people were pleased to think they had “inside scoop” on Calvary Chapel and Maranatha! Music
◦ all they really had was deception

It seems like gossip is one of human nature’s chief pleasures
“The words of a whisperer are like delicious morsels;
they go down into the inner parts of the body” (Pr. 18:8)

In 1964, Harper’s Magazine published article by Richard Hofstader
– in “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” Hofstader explains,
“American politics has often been an arena for angry minds.” And, “we have seen [in the Goldwater movement] much political leverage can be got out of the animosities and passions of a small minority.”
• he labeled problem he exposes as paranoid, “because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind.”
And style because “Style has more to do with the way in which ideas are believed than with the truth or falsity of their content.”
• one of his examples was a quote taken from a Texas newspaper published in 1855
Hofstader, European kings joined the Pope to undermine and destroy “our political, civil, and religious institutions. We have the best reasons for believing that corruption has found its way into our Executive Chamber, and that our Executive head is tainted with the infectious venom of Catholicism”
◦ a couple more quotes:
Hofstader, “. . . the modern right wing, as Daniel Bell has put it, feels dispossessed: America has largely been taken away from them and their kind, though they are determined to try to repossess it and to prevent the final destructive act of subversion.”
“The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms–he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values.”
– the entire article is well worth reading, and as to how it lines up with what’s been happening in our nation past ten years, which is unnerving to witness
• conspiracy theories create fear, and fear creates conspiracy theories
• examples include: the Illuminati, Masons, Trilateral Commission, and the United Nations

Early in my ministry, I liked to keep up with Evangelical institutions
– I had a subscription to “Christianity Today” and received monthly newsletters from Focus On Family, the 700 Club, and others
• but by late 1970’s I noticed an irritating trend
◦ first, the newsletters weren’t about news, but supposed conspiracies and hidden agendas to undermine Christian faith and family values
◦ second, every one of the “newsletters” was devoted to inciting fear with the goal of increasing their revenue through donations that would go to fight the “agendas” they claimed to be exposing
◦ the culprits were modernists, secular humanists, moral relativists, scientists, socialists, and gays
– the leaders of those organizations were conditioning Christians to live in fear
• none of these issues posed a deadly threat to the average Christian home
◦ but since then, the rise of internet communications and access to social media, even non-readers have become exposed to what had been only on the fringe
• and given the computer skills and savvy distortion of information by influencers,
◦ a great mass of Evangelicals have been sucked into bogus conspiracy theories
◦ again, religious ministries had set their followers up for this

It may surprise you how God spoke directly to this phenomenon
“For the LORD spoke thus to me with his strong hand upon me, and warned me not to walk in the way of this people, saying: ‘Do not call conspiracy all this people calls conspiracy, and do not fear what they fear, nor be in dread. But the LORD of hosts, him you shall honor as holy. Let him be your fear, and let him be your dread. And he will become a sanctuary and a stone of offense and a rock of stumbling to both houses of Israel, a trap and a snare to the inhabitants of Jerusalem. And many shall stumble on it. They shall fall and be broken; they shall be snared and taken” Isaiah 8:11-15

Let’s notice first Isaiah’s emphasis, “with his strong hand upon me”
– that is unusual; in fact, it appears nowhere else in the Scriptures
• given the force of this statement, I think it’s okay to conclude this is a critical warning
◦ what is the heart of the warning?
◦ Isaiah was not to “walk in the way of these people”
• he was to reject a trend that swept through his society
– there are two parts to the warning:
• part one: “Do not call conspiracy all that this people calls conspiracy”
◦ conspiracy or “secret plot”
• part two: “and do not fear what they fear, nor be in dread”
◦ if God is our greatest fear, then we have nothing to fear

There were two potential outcomes for those who heard Isaiah’s message
– either God could be a sanctuary–a safe and holy place of protection
• or with their nation they could stumble into ruin
– this situation was going on at that very moment
• God wanted to address it, and Isaiah was listening
• our situation today is very much like theirs – who is listening?

Pastors and spiritual leaders have an obligation to their followers
– we’re not prophets, like Isaiah, but we can sound a warning
• I’ve never understood why anyone reacts to the threat,
that someone is trying to take prayer out of schools
◦ anyone who prays, knows how real and how private it is, and that there are no and no circumstances in which we cannot pray
◦ no one can take that from either us or our children or grandchildren
• and no one has taken God out of schools–or anywhere else; it can’t be done!
– but this is why we need to be able to hear God’s voice
• in every anxiety, every set back, every hardship, God is telling us, “Be still and know that I am God”
◦ but that won’t do us any good if we’re not listening
• and if God ever speaks to us “with his strong hand upon us”
◦ we had better be listening

The purpose of having spiritual disciplines and exercises:

To improve our perception and receptivity to God
– to his presence, to his love, to his grace, to his mercy, and to his voice
– the heart of the spiritual disciplines is focused attention
• read with focused attention, meditate with focused attention, contemplate with focused attention, and pray with focused attention

Conclusion: Look, we’re not going to get a phone call from God

That’s why we must practice
And the cool thing is,
even when practicing, we’re experiencing him
So let’s look forward to listening and hearing from God this week
He has much to tell us, and we have much to gain by paying attention