# John Bevere - Grace "Empowerment"



## Indifferently (Jan 6, 2015)

Greetings! This is my first post on the Puritan Board so please be gentle!

A minister from a local church recently gave me the Prosperity evangelist John Bevere's 2009 book, _Extraordinary: The Life You're Meant to Live_ and recommended I read it because presumably he thought I might find the book edifying. 

Bevere's essential argument is that God has called everyone to live an extraordinary life. This includes wealth and prosperity, as well as freedom from sin and bringing heaven's conditions to earth. What allows us to live this extraordinary life is God's grace, but we must "hook up the pipeline" of "faith" to the "river" of God's grace - to use Bevere's analogy - in order to receive it. Since Jesus said we can "remove mountains" if we have faith, this is also indicative of our ability to demand things from God and perform miracles. If we are not successful in doing this, it's not because God is unwilling, but because we don't have enough "faith". Jesus will also judge us on judgment day if we do not make use of this "grace".

There are innumerable other problems with the book, but this seems to be the major theological point being made by the author. 

I am shocked at what is in this book. I had no previous experience of the prosperity "gospel" so much of this is new to me. I want to know if anybody has any specific resources to counter this kind of material, that I could research and articulate. I'd like to do two things:

1) I'd like to write a piece for myself to arrange my thoughts on the book's distortions of both the concepts of faith and grace, and make clear comparison to the Reformed doctrines. I have plenty of quotes from the book. I'm just not quite sure where to start.

2) I'd like to winsomely recommend and offer some literature to my friend who recommended this book.

Does anyone have any recommendations/help?


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## Gforce9 (Jan 6, 2015)

A few books come to mind:
Don Carson is not Reformed, but has some good things to say. These health/wealth folks are to good, careful Bible handling as Hellen Keller or Ray Charles are to over-the-road trucking.

http://www.amazon.com/Exegetical-Fallacies-D-Carson/dp/0801020867/ref=sr_1_fkmr0_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1420573028&sr=8-1-fkmr0&keywords=Don+carson+exegetical+fall

Knowing Scripture: R. C. Sproul: 9780830837236: Amazon.com: Books


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## Indifferently (Jan 6, 2015)

Gforce9 said:


> A few books come to mind:
> Don Carson is not Reformed, but has some good things to say. These health/wealth folks are to good, careful Bible handling as Hellen Keller or Ray Charles are to over-the-road trucking.
> 
> Exegetical Fallacies: D. A. Carson: 9780801020865: Amazon.com: Books
> ...



Thank you.

Bevere uses multiple versions of the Bible, many of which are paraphrases, and liberally switches between them. On one page, he drew a five-verse passage from three different versions.


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## Free Christian (Jan 6, 2015)

Hi Kyle. Put "prosperity gospel" into the search engine here and you will find some ideas too from the threads that will come up.


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## nick (Jan 11, 2015)

"Free Christian" is right: search is your friend. You can also look for "Word of faith".

There are also plenty of documentaries on YouTube. Here's one: http://youtu.be/PzSsnhXIRnk


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