Our two children are grown now with families of their own. In observing our babies and grand-babies I know this—a baby seems to think everything he can get his hands on is intended for his mouth.
A newborn puts his hands in his mouth. As he grows a little older and learns to crawl across the floor if he finds a screw it goes in his mouth, if he finds a spoon it goes in his mouth, if he finds a spider it goes in his mouth.
Babies are ignorant concerning these things. They don't know what should go in their mouths and what shouldn't. And babies have died as a result of not knowing that. They have gotten hold of something poisonous and it killed them.
In one case I know of, a 14 month old baby, crawling across the floor, picked up some spoiled food left there perhaps by an older child. Before they could get the baby to a doctor, it died. An autopsy revealed the poisonous food. The parents went back home and found some of the food on the floor of a room which was seldom used. That little one didn't know he shouldn't eat it. He was ignorant concerning the effect it would have.
What am I getting to? The same thing is true spiritually speaking. We need to be careful what goes into our spiritual mouths. We need to be as careful about what we read as we are about what we eat physically. Christians many times think nothing at all of gulping down some poisonous doctrine which will poison life spiritually, rob them of their spirituality, and ruin their testimony if they accept it.
A number of years ago a denominational minister was filled with the Holy Spirit and had a marvelous experience with God. I'll guarantee you this much, I know of no greater soul winner in any church than that man. He was outstanding. He would get people saved when no one else could. It seemed to me you could stand up the twelve best preachers in America and let all of them preach and give an altar call—then he could take the same crowd, preach to them, and get more souls saved than any of the others after they'd had first shot at it. That was his ministry; an evangelistic type ministry. But he got to reading after some false stuff, finally accepted some false doctrine, and got off on it. If he has won a soul in more than twenty years I don't know it and no one else does either.
I know of some born-again, Spirit-filled people who were soul winners, getting people saved and filled with the Holy Spirit. But they got taken up with certain doctrines. Some of them told me, "God is doing a different thing nowadays." No. God's not doing a different thing nowadays. They're just off their rockers. He's still concerned about saving people. They just left the fundamental truths of the doctrine of the Word of God and went off on something that doesn't amount to a hill of beans.
Some things are actually poisonous in themselves. And some things it doesn't make a whole lot of difference how you believe on them—they are simply not essential to salvation and it wouldn't make any difference whether you believed it, or you didn't believe it.
But too many times Christian people will feed on everything in the world except the right thing, and will become poisoned. Then they lead disciples off after themselves. If the Spirit of God is in it, He is concerned about there being unity. Did you notice Ephesians 4:13 says, "Till we all come in the unity of the faith"? That which will divide Christians is not of the Spirit of God—it's of the devil. The Spirit of Love never divides.
I went into a Christian home once and saw some books I knew to be poisonous lying on a living room table. They were religious books, but they were poisonous. (We need not only be careful about secular books, but we need to be careful about reading religious books.) I purposely worked the conversation around to these books. I picked one up and said something about it.
This person was a born-again, Spirit-filled Christian but they said "Oh that is the most marvelous book."
"Is it?" I said.
"Yes."
In the early days of my Christian experience I had happened to get hold of some of these books and had detected immediately the poison in them. So I just turned to certain pages and began to read certain things aloud.
"Well now, Brother Hagin, they give chapter and verse in there. I looked some of them up and those verses are in the Bible."
I said, "Certainly. If they didn't give some verses—though they may take them out of their setting—and a little Bible, folks wouldn't read it. If you were going to poison a dog he wouldn't eat just the poison. You have to put the poison on a good piece of meat."
Do you see what I'm talking about? You have to put the poison on a good piece of meat to get a dog to come. The devil will use some good scripture to get you to eat it, but he'll put a little poison on it. Be careful no matter who you read after. Don't read everything you can get your hands on. Unless you are a fully mature Christian and able to rightly divide it, it would be best not to read such things.
Years ago I held a meeting for a Full Gospel minister, a very well educated man, a doctor of divinity. Up to that time I had never seen a larger personal library than his. There's no telling how many hundreds of volumes lined the walls from ceiling to floor. Being a bookworm myself I was interested in looking it over. I read some of his books while I was there in three weeks of meetings.
As we talked one day he said, "Brother Hagin, I'll be perfectly honest with you. There are some things I've read that I wish I'd never read. They bother me. They hinder me yet, though I don't read them anymore..." And he mentioned some of these books. They were religious books. But he said, "I just wish I had never read them. It hinders my faith today. It hinders me in believing God today."
It would have been better for him never to have built that into his inner consciousness. But he had.
When I start reading something that takes faith out of me instead of putting faith in me, I have enough sense to lay it down right then. Be careful what you feed upon. There is a saying used in the area of man's natural diet, "You are what you eat." The same thing is true spiritually, "You are what you read."
CONTINUE
