Sid: We want everyone everywhere to be red hot for the Messiah and I am concerned, that’s why I’m interviewing this week, my friend, Mike Shreve. Mike and I have teamed up together to produce a book for New Agers. There are so many reasons that we need this book at this moment in history because I believe you cannot understand what Satan’s is up to in the end times without understanding the New Age. And there are so many people caught and trapped in the New Age that are really God seekers; but they have zeal for God, but not according to knowledge. They are really truth seekers, but they don’t have the knowledge and I’ll tell you another thing that concerns me greatly is that a lot of these New Age courses they are so deceitful that well meaning Christians get in it and then because it has such a spiritual hold after they’re in it they open themselves up to demons or familiar spirit and it’s very difficult for them to get out. You don’t even want to touch something like that, for instance I’ve heard for years a top personality on television pitching the course on miracles. And we love this personality so therefore whatever books she recommends we get into. Mike Shreve, what is wrong about this something like the course on miracles or TM; they’re so deceitful many Christians get into it.
Mike: Well, the course in miracles was written because the author and some of her coworkers were in strife all the time and arguing and fussing with each other and they thought that they’re has got to be a better way of living. And so it’s so it’s all about kindness and generosity and forgiveness and mercy, but they bypass the big issue. Simplifying it, Helen Schucman who wrote the course in miracles, taught that salvation is nothing more than right mindedness. Being saved is not about going to the cross, she said she teaches the crucification had no part in the atonement. And they totally dismissed these claims of Christianity. The emphasis is on forgiving others, they say we don’t need to get forgiveness from God, because to a New Ager God is just an impersonal life force, anyway. The gospel is all about getting forgiveness from God. It’s not about getting forgiveness from each other that certainly is a partial truth; it is not the whole truth. And salvation is more than just thinking right, salvation is a spiritual rebirth. Where the Holy Spirit enters back into us and really you know Sid, that’s the big dividing line between New Agers and the Biblical point of view. New Agers teach that a divine essence is already within every human being; to find God you look within. The Bible teaches that prior to salvation God is external, He’s outside of us and to find God, you invite Him into your heart from without. And from the upper room testifies of that it. The Holy Spirit came into the upper room like a rushing mighty wind and all the disciples were filled. That was God outside of them coming into them. But see the course of miracles and all of these other New Age books and groups and teachers…
Sid: There are so many of these groups out there and there taught in college courses, there taught in by doctors, I mean look at how many people get involved in Yoga because a doctor says that it can lower your blood pressure.
Mike: Right and they have no idea that they are walking right into a net to capture they’re soul because they start studying Hoffa Yoga and then they get intrigued about the whole concept and start digging deeper and digging deeper and then they get into Raja Yoga and Mantra Yoga and all these other …
Sid: But how about all the…it’s just a proliferation of New Age on television, the Harry Potter you can’t watch TV without seeing something connected with the New Age. Well, it just seems like the there is such proliferation of it right now.
Mike: Well, even Mickey Mouse is the sorcerer in some of the films that they have done, because again they don’t differentiate between this state of man being separated from God and needing God to come into us from without. They just say that all of this power, whether it manifests as a sorcery power or whether it manifests…
Sid: I mean what about all the video games that are out there?
Mike: Yeah, yeah in fact the movie Avatar is drawing from Hinduism. The word, Avatar means the incarnation of God.
Sid: Tell me about each one of these stories; they are so fascinating we learn so much and of course the hero of every story is Jesus. Tell me about Vail Carruth.
Mike: Well, Vail Carruth was a student of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi she’s in chapter eight of the book, “Truth Seekers” and she was very very devoted to TM and she was one of the first teachers of TM in this country. And she stumbled on to salvation experience because one of her friends who was into physic phenomena started into a practice called calling on the Name of the Lord and they just decided that it would be powerful to choose the name of a deity and just called on that name over and over again until they got some kind of supernatural manifestation. Well having somewhat of a Christian foundation as a child, she thought she would choose the name Jesus and during certain meditation times where they met to call on the name of a deity; she began calling on the name of Jesus. And she started feeling this power that would come over her that was so far surpassing any power that she had experienced in Transcendental Meditation. And she began to de-emphasize the TM in her life and she started spending more time actually calling on the name of Jesus because she felt that there was a greater intensity with it. And then during that period in her life she had a real encounter with Jesus, where she realized that His death on the cross was what salvation was all about. And that’s when she left TM all together, but her personal experience is intriguing to me because it shows the power of calling on the right name. Something else about Vail’s story was that when she was calling on the name of the Lord, she also one night decided she was going to quote the Lord’s Prayer. Our Father which art in Heaven, Hallow it be Thy Name, Thy Kingdom Come, Thy Will be done on earth as it is in Heaven; she went all the way through the end where she said, Thine is the Kingdom and the power and the glory. And when she said that she said this powerful burst of brilliant white came into the room and just shook her to the core of her being. And she realized it’s Jesus, it’s Jesus so the next day Vail removed all the pictures of guru’s and spiritual masters from the walls of her house and left one picture up and that was the picture of Jesus; because she realized that He truly was the only way. He said that I am the door and by me if any man enters in he shall be saved. And she said that whole experience was summed up this way that wave after, wave of the purest and deepest and most undesirable love poured through every fiber of her being. That when she had this encounter with Jesus she knew that she was loved by God and wasn’t mediating on some impersonal cosmic force, it was an encounter with the love of God and that’s what everyone needs.
Sid: Now what about all that junk that she had been in with all of those years, I mean I understand she meditated twelve hours a day. Look how diligent she was to this Hindu TM type stuff.
Mike: Oh, she was, she was in a group that studied directly under Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and so they went into it very intensely.
Sid: But she explains this love of God literally broke her free of all of that bondage, it was greater than the bondage.
Mike: That’s right and she left it all behind.
Sid: And also I think that it’s really neat is that when she returned to her room the picture of Jesus supernaturally had moved beside her pillow.
Mike: That’s right, it was on the wall which was quite a distance from the bed and when she came into her bedroom the picture was laying right there on her bed. And she knew it was a sign from God that Jesus was saying you know, I’m your Savior, I’m your Lord, I’m close to you. I’m going to come even closer and deeper in your life and that was just a unique experience.
Sid: Just out of curiosity, you spent a life time researching these things and you came from a New Age back ground but when you did this book, was there one thing that really struck you that perhaps you hadn’t even thought much about before?
Mike: Well, the thing that really gripped me through story after story, ten people in this book that were truth seekers, is the key issue. The key issue is this, is truth objective or subjective. Now what does that mean, let me simplify it, many people teach that you can have your truth, I can have my truth and we can all be right at the same time. That’s the idea that truth is subjected; it is created by each individual person or is truth the same for everybody? Or is it objective and I believe that we prove in this book that the truth is the same for everyone.
Sid: It reminds me of Pontius Pilate who said, what is truth? And Jesus said, what a great question, no but he should have said that. Well we’re out of time…