When Speculation Becomes “Scripture”

Katie Souza: …This show is going to challenge people and their thoughts about things. I was visited when I was a young girl and aliens, alien beings, implanted an interdimensional device in me that harvested my eggs over my lifetime.

Lance Ford: Hi there, I’m Lance Ford. Welcome to the Restore Report. Okay, I’ve seen some strange things over the years, but I have to tell you, this one, it’s near the top of the list. Because today, we apparently have to talk about alien egg harvesting, demon-human hybrid breeding programs, interdimensional implants, heavenly body transfer technology, extraterrestrial stealing human energy, and why Goliath was supposedly jealous of David because David had a better, and I’m not making this up, dirt body. Now, it would be easy to spend the next few minutes simply making fun of this, and I don’t want to do that because underneath all the bizarre language is something much more serious. Frankly, it’s something that’s really much more common. It’s what happens when a Christian teacher takes a biblical text, adds several layers of supposition and personal revelation,

Lance Ford: and then presents the entire package to people as though God said all of it. And that’s the issue I really think that we need to talk about because there’s a line between what the Bible says, what we reasonably infer from what the Bible says, and what somebody imagines might be true. And Christian teachers have an obligation to tell people where those lines are. We cannot take speculation and just elevate it to the level of the written Word of God. And yet, unfortunately, there are large parts of contemporary charismatic culture that have become remarkably comfortable doing that exact thing. You know, a teacher says, God showed me, or I had a vision, or the Lord revealed this to me. I went to heaven, an angel told me. Jesus showed up in my hotel room.

Lance Ford: I discovered a secret in the Hebrew. And then a few Bible verses get attached to it, and suddenly the speculation’s been baptized with biblical authority. And man, that is beyond dangerous, friends, especially when it’s being delivered through books and podcasts, through conferences and television networks and just massive social media platforms to Christians who may not have been taught how to distinguish the biblical text from the teacher’s interpretation of the text. So today, I want to do something very simple. I want to ask the question the Bereans ask. Is this actually in the Bible?

Lance Ford: Because according to Acts 17, when Paul himself preached in Berea, the people didn’t say, well, Paul’s an apostle, so who are we to question him? No, Luke says that they received the message eagerly, but then they examined the Scriptures every day to see whether what Paul said was true. And Luke commends them for it.

Lance Ford: And just think about that.

Lance Ford: If the apostle Paul’s teaching could be examined against Scripture, the apostle Paul, then Katie Souza’s teaching can be examined against Scripture. My teaching can be examined against Scripture. Your pastor’s teaching can be examined against Scripture. And every prophet, apostle, bishop, celebrity teacher, podcast host, and best-selling author can be examined against Scripture. And should be.

Lance Ford: Nobody gets a pass.

Lance Ford: Katie Souza has become a really well-known charismatic minister with a substantial audience. Somewhere around 240,000 YouTube subscribers. And she says that when she was a girl, the alien beings implanted an interdimensional device inside her body that harvested her eggs so that those eggs could be used to create hybrid children.

Katie Souza: This show is going to challenge people and their thoughts about things. But, you know, we brought receipts with Scripture. We brought receipts with, you know, stories, testimonies, not just my own, but other people’s testimony. You know, just a reminder of, you know, my testimony, which is going to bring in our content today that I was visited when I was a young girl and aliens, alien beings implanted an interdimensional device in me that harvested my eggs over my lifetime. Because eggs, you get hundreds of thousands of eggs when you’re born with hundreds of thousands of eggs if you’re female. But they don’t mature until you ovulate. So this device obviously was harvesting them right when they would mature so that they could then try to work their work. And I have no idea how they do that, but to try to create a hybrid child, which they actually eventually did.

Katie Souza: And I saw it.

Katie Souza: I was shown it.

Katie Souza: And its name was Starburst.

Katie Souza: Yeah.

Katie Souza: That’s why my husband and I are childless right now.

Lance Ford: She says this has happened to thousands of other women as well. In fact, she has a new book that’s just come out called Star Gods, Unmasking the Alien Agenda, Fallen Angels, and End Time Deception. And so it’s being published by Charisma Media, which is a great place for it to be published. Charisma Magazine recently put Souza on the cover of their magazine under the headline, The Coming Alien Invasion. So this isn’t somebody that’s just sitting around with friends late at night having an imaginative conversation about UFOs, which is something that a lot of us have done. No, this is being marketed as Christian teaching. And Souza says she can back it up biblically. She says she has, her words, receipts with Scripture. Okay.

Lance Ford: Well, let’s examine those receipts. Now, I want to say something carefully here. I don’t know what Katie Souza has experienced. She says she had experiences as a child that she later didn’t remember. And that decades later, God began revealing them to her, what actually happened to her. And she says this, that this led her into Scripture and ancient history and spiritual warfare and years of research. Now, I don’t know what’s inside another person’s experience. People, they have dreams.

Lance Ford: They have visions.

Lance Ford: People experience trauma.

Lance Ford: People have memories that they interpret in different ways. So there’s a huge difference between Katie Souza saying, I believe this happened to me. And Katie Souza saying, this is what happened to me. And Scripture proves that there’s an alien demonic program harvesting human eggs and producing hybrid children. You know, those are entirely different kinds of claims. The first is a personal testimony.

Lance Ford: The second is being laid down as Christian doctrine. And once you move into doctrine, we have to ask, show me the text. Not the vision.

Lance Ford: Not the experience.

Lance Ford: Not the dream.

Lance Ford: Not the ancient mythology.

Lance Ford: Not the YouTube video.

Lance Ford: Not the UFO whistleblower.

Lance Ford: No.

Lance Ford: Show us the text.

Lance Ford: So Souza starts out just like a lot of these teachings do with Genesis 6. And this is where Genesis says that the sons of God saw the daughters of men and took wives for themselves. And the Nephilim are mentioned in the passage. And we should be fair.

Lance Ford: There is an ancient and very respectable interpretation that understands the sons of God as rebellious spiritual beings. And there’s other interpreters that understand the passage differently. And so we could spend an entire episode or episodes on Genesis 6. But I’m perfectly willing for the sake of the argument to just say, okay, well, let’s grant Souza the supernatural interpretation. Let’s say these are rebellious spiritual beings. And that’s fine.

Lance Ford: What does Genesis 6 actually tell us, though? It tells us that the sons of God took the daughters of men. That’s the text.

Lance Ford: It says nothing about UFOs, flying saucers, interdimensional medical devices, egg harvesting, sperm harvesting, extraterrestrial laboratories, government hybridization programs, aliens stealing human DNA, or demons needing genetically engineered human bodies in order, you know, to obtain legal jurisdiction over planet Earth. None of that is in Genesis 6.

Lance Ford: And this is where we need to understand how speculative theology works. It starts with something that’s in the Bible. And then it adds something that might be inferred. Then it adds something that might possibly follow from the inference. Then another idea is attached.

Lance Ford: Then another.

Lance Ford: Then a vision.

Lance Ford: Then somebody’s testimony.

Lance Ford: Then Greek mythology.

Lance Ford: Then a government UFO report.

Lance Ford: And eventually the teacher says, see, the Bible told us this all along. No, it didn’t.

Lance Ford: The Bible provided the first brick and you built the rest of the house. Genesis 6 simply does not mention alien spacecraft, egg extraction, interdimensional implants, or modern hybridization laboratories. Those elements are being imported into the passage. And that distinction is absolutely essential. There’s a difference between exegesis and imagination. Exegesis draws the meaning out of the text. And that’s good biblical hermeneutics or interpretation. But speculation, it brings ideas with it to the text. And then it tries to make the text support those ideas. Let me give you a grid that I think could be helpful. When you listen to any Bible teacher, there’s at least four categories that you should keep separate. Number one.

Lance Ford: What does the Bible text explicitly say? That’s our foundation.

Lance Ford: Number two.

Lance Ford: What is a reasonable interpretation of what the text means? Sometimes Christians disagree here. I mean, not sometimes, a lot of times, many times, Christians disagree. I mean, there’s so many texts that there’s just different viewpoints of it. And that’s okay.

Lance Ford: But number three.

Lance Ford: What might reasonably be inferred from the text? Inference isn’t necessarily wrong because theology requires inference. But we should identify it as inference when that’s what it is. And then there’s number four.

Lance Ford: What am I speculating could be possible? Again, speculation itself, it’s not automatically sinful. You can wonder about things.

Lance Ford: We all wonder about things.

Lance Ford: I mean, Paul said that we see through a glass dimly. You can say, I wonder if, or could it be? What if?

Lance Ford: And here’s an idea.

Lance Ford: There’s nothing wrong with that at all. We all do that.

Lance Ford: But you have to leave it where it belongs. The problem comes when a teacher moves from level four all the way back to level one and says, the Bible teaches this.

Lance Ford: It doesn’t.

Lance Ford: You do.

Lance Ford: And attaching three Bible verses to your speculation doesn’t transform your speculation into the word of God.

Katie Souza: This is Jude 1, 6, 7. It says, and the angels kept not, this is going to answer our question here, kept not their first estate, but left their own habitation. He has reserved an everlasting chains under darkness under judgment of the great day, even as Sodom and Gomorrah. So again, now Jude is comparing the angels from Genesis 6 to the sins of Sodom and Gomorrah, which the people gave themselves over to what? Fornication and going after strange flesh. See, the people in Sodom and Gomorrah went after strange flesh because they were going after like men wanted to be with men, women with women. The men, even in Sodom and Gomorrah, remember when the angels showed up there to get them out? They were like, bring those men out. We want to have, you know, SEX with them. Yeah.

Katie Souza: Well, sounds like it was normal practice for human beings to have sex with angels because they were demanding that these angels be brought out so that they could have intercourse with them. Wow.

Katie Souza: So, I mean, I wonder where they learned that. They learned that from Genesis 6.

Katie Souza: Here’s another example.

Katie Souza: Souza uses Jude 6.

Katie Souza: Now, Jude talks about angels that didn’t keep their proper domain, but abandoned their proper dwelling. It says that these angels that were judged left their first estate and their habitation. What does that mean?

Katie Souza: The word habitation there is the Greek word oiketerion. According to the Strong’s lexicon, it means that’s a body as a dwelling place for a spirit. So, what does that mean?

Katie Souza: The angels left their habitation.

Katie Souza: They had a body, okay, a glorified one that lived in heaven. But it says they left their glorified bodies. They left their habitation, okay, to do this fornication, meaning they have the ability, the technology to leave their glorified bodies and go into a flesh body so that they can engage in sexual relationships.

Lance Ford: Souza takes the Greek word oiketerion, dwelling or habitation, and she builds an elaborate theory that angels had heavenly bodies that they could exit and then they could enter flesh bodies and later return to spirit form. And she describes this in terms of what amounts to heavenly technology. That’s the words that she uses.

Lance Ford: Now, watch the progression.

Lance Ford: Jude says they abandoned their proper dwelling. Souza says they exited heavenly bodies. Then, they entered flesh bodies.

Lance Ford: Then, there’s a heavenly technology that makes this possible. Then, modern alien manifestations are using this same technology. It’s not hard to see what happened. Only the first statement came from Jude. The rest came from Katie Souza.

Lance Ford: So, this is exactly how biblical authority gets transferred to human imagination. Because the teacher keeps talking, Bible verse, explanation, inference, speculation, vision, story. Another Bible verse.

Lance Ford: Five minutes later, the average listener can no longer even remember which part was it that the Bible said. Which part did God really verifiably say? And that’s the question that you have to keep asking. Where did the Bible stop?

Katie Souza: And people will say, well, how is that possible? Well, look, that technology exists in heaven because Jesus did it. Jesus came in a what?

Katie Souza: Flesh body.

Katie Souza: He knew how to implant.

Katie Souza: God the Father implanted Christ into a flesh body. Remember, the Bible says, a body you have prepared for me. That’s talking about Jesus.

Katie Souza: We’ll read that Scripture in a little bit. But that technology for them, for celestial beings to leave their habitation, their oiketerion, to go into a flesh body, fully exists in heaven.

Lance Ford: And then this becomes even more troubling because Souza apparently appeals to the incarnation of Jesus as an example of this kind of body transfer process. And so the idea is basically that God puts Christ into a human body, demonstrating how celestial beings can enter physical bodies. No, that’s not the Christian doctrine of the incarnation. John 1.14 says the word became flesh. The eternal son did not have a glorified human body somewhere in heaven, climb out of it, transfer into Mary’s womb, and later jump back into another celestial body. The eternal word assumed human nature, and Jesus’ glorified human body follows his resurrection, not his birth in Bethlehem. So now we’re no longer speculating about aliens, we’re using speculation to redefine Christology. And that’s where somebody needs to say stop. You don’t get to take one of the central mysteries of Christian faith and turn it into supporting evidence for your extraterrestrial embodiment theory.

Lance Ford: Now Souza also appeals to ancient mythology, stories of gods coming down and having children of humans, Hercules, demigods, stories from Greek and Roman mythology. And then Acts 14, she brings that into the discussion. Paul heals a man in Lystra, and the crowd shouts, the gods have come down to us in human form. They call Barnabas Zeus and Paul Hermes. And Souza uses this as further confirmation that ancient people understood celestial beings could take on human bodies. And there’s a very simple problem with that. The people in Acts 14 are wrong.

Lance Ford: Luke is not reporting their statement because he wants Christians to believe Zeus and Hermes actually came down in human bodies. Paul and Barnabas, they tear their clothes and rush into the crowd trying to stop them. And this is basic interpretation.

Lance Ford: The Bible can accurately record somebody saying something false. Pharaoh speaks falsely in the Bible. Satan speaks falsely in the Bible.

Lance Ford: Job’s friends speak in the Bible.

Lance Ford: The fact that a statement occurs in Scripture does not mean that Scripture is endorsing the statement as true. You have to read context.

Katie Souza: Here’s another thing. So they want to have children because they want to make themselves like the Most High God who has children. That’s us.

Katie Souza: But they also, they need to steal our bodies, our DNA, our eggs, our sperm, because they know they have to have a dirt body. They have to be a spirit living in a dirt body in order to take dominion over all the earth. That’s Psalm 8.

Katie Souza: Psalm 8 says, what is man that You are mindful of him? This is what it says in the Amplified Classic, which amplifies all the wording in the text. Who are you, O earth-born man, that you’ve been given dominion over all the works of his hands? You see, God made a rule.

Katie Souza: Yeah.

Katie Souza: That only a spirit living in a dirt body, that’s what we are, a spirit living in a dirt body, can have dominion over all the works of his hands. So they go, oh, okay, we have to create these hybrid bodies. We have to create these dirt bodies.

Lance Ford: Now we get to maybe the most interesting phrase in this whole thing. Dirt body.

Lance Ford: So Souza appeals to Psalm 8.

Lance Ford: Psalm 8 celebrates the extraordinary vocation that God gave humanity within creation. What is man that you are mindful of him? Beautiful passage.

Lance Ford: I don’t think we think about that enough. Absolutely beautiful thought.

Lance Ford: And Hebrews 2 ultimately connects that human vocation to Jesus. But Souza constructs something just more elaborate. Apparently there’s a cosmic legal principle that only beings possessing bodies made from the physical material of earth can exercise dominion here. Dirt bodies.

Lance Ford: So, fallen angels need human DNA and therefore they need eggs and sperm. Therefore, hybrid bodies can be produced. Then spirits can inhabit those bodies. And because the bodies contain human genetic material, the demons now have a legal standing on earth. That’s an entire theological system. But where is it in Psalm 8?

Lance Ford: It isn’t.

Lance Ford: Psalm 8 says humanity has been given dominion. It does not say spiritual beings can acquire legal standing on earth if they just obtain a body containing human DNA. There’s not a secret cosmic property rights clause buried in Psalm 8. You cannot make up the missing mechanism and then call the mechanism biblical.

Katie Souza: They are jealous of us. Okay, look at Goliath.

Katie Souza: Goliath was a Nephilim, right?

Katie Souza: Okay.

Katie Souza: When he’s going, when David comes to fight Goliath, it’s a very interesting thing that happens in this exchange. And people don’t understand.

Katie Souza: They don’t get this and they don’t see it. Okay, so in this fight with David and Goliath, it says that the giant looked at him, looked at David, and despised him because he was young and good looking. Go to 1 Samuel 19 and read it.

Katie Souza: It says, Goliath looked at David and it says, and Goliath despised David because he was young and good looking. Why does the Bible add that?

Katie Souza: He didn’t despise David.

Katie Souza: The giant didn’t despise David because he saw in him that he was eventually going to become the king of Israel. He didn’t despise David because he had the huevos, I’m sorry, the eggs to come against the giant. He didn’t despise David for any of that. He despised him for one reason.

Katie Souza: He was young and good looking.

Katie Souza: They are so jealous of our dirt bodies. They want what we have.

Katie Souza: That’s why we have to stop despising our dirt bodies. We live in this earthen body.

Katie Souza: We possess something that they wish they had. And that’s why they’re stealing it from us. That’s why they’re creating hybrid children. Because this, they desire having this more than anything else.

Lance Ford: Now Souza gets to Goliath. 1 Samuel says that Goliath saw David, that he noticed he was young and ruddy and handsome, and he despised him. That’s in the text.

Lance Ford: But apparently Souza suggests that Goliath was jealous of David’s human body. David had this beautiful dirt body. Goliath, connected somehow to the giant or Nephilim bloodline, despised him. Except you can solve this mystery by reading the next verse. Goliath says, am I a dog?

Lance Ford: That you come to me with sticks?

Lance Ford: The problem that Goliath had was he was insulted. He is this Philistine war champion, and he’s walked onto the battlefield expecting Israel to send him a warrior, their best warrior. Instead, what they send looks like a shepherd boy carrying sticks. You don’t need secret revelation.

Lance Ford: You need the next verse.

Lance Ford: And that really gets to the heart of this episode. Sometimes the antidote to sensational revelation is simply, read the paragraph. And this is where I want to broaden the conversation. Because if all we do is just finish this episode saying, wow, Katie, Souza, believe some really wild things. Then we really will have just missed the point. Souza is an extreme example of something that’s become deeply embedded in significant streams of the charismatic movement. And I say this as somebody that believes the Holy Spirit is active. And I feel like I have to say this because sometimes in comments we’ll get disparaged as people that are cessationists or don’t believe in the Holy Spirit. Nothing could be further from the truth. I met my wife at one of the most well-known charismatic Bible colleges that I graduated from. We both graduated from over 40 years.

Lance Ford: I was in the vineyard movement, which is part of the Pentecostal charismatic movement. It’s been part of my life, my entire, over 40 years of ministry. And so I very much believe that the Holy Spirit is active and alive. And that there has not been any detente between the angels of God and demonic spirits and demonic powers. And so I’m not over in a camp that doesn’t believe in the supernatural and the power. But I have felt for years and years and decades and decades that a lot of part of the, a big part of the charismatic movement believes that you can’t have the Holy Spirit in your brain at the same time. And we can, and we should, we should use our minds and we should use our reasoning. It’s not in combat with the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit steps in and does amazing things at times that interrupts our reasoning abilities. But that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t have reasoning and have logic and, and not be gullible because we don’t know the Scriptures.

Lance Ford: And the Holy Spirit will never do something or say something today that contradicts these Scriptures that were written decades and decades and decades ago. So I believe in spiritual gifts.

Lance Ford: I believe God can heal.

Lance Ford: I believe God can do things that we can’t explain. But we have to rest on the authority of the Scriptures. What happens when somebody says, God told me? What weight does that carry?

Lance Ford: Because in some Christian environments, the phrase, God told me, functions like a theological trump card. Conversation over.

Lance Ford: God told me.

Lance Ford: Questioning it becomes questioning God. And especially if the person saying God told them has a platform. Especially if they have a big following. Especially if they have a stage.

Lance Ford: But that’s not how the New Testament teaches Christians to respond to spiritual claims. First John says, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits. First Thessalonians 5 says, do not despise prophecies, but test everything. Hold fast what is good.

Lance Ford: So, hopefully you hear both sides.

Lance Ford: We don’t despise it, but we test it. So, Paul doesn’t say, somebody prophesied, therefore receive it. No, he says test it.

Lance Ford: First Corinthians 14 says, when prophets speak, the others should weigh what’s said. Weigh it.

Lance Ford: Evaluate it.

Lance Ford: Apply discernment to it.

Lance Ford: The New Testament charismatic community was not supposed to be a gullible community. It was supposed to be a discerning community. And that’s my heart for my charismatic brothers and sisters. We need people that believe in the activity of the Holy Spirit. The world needs it as much or more than it ever has in its history. And so, that’s one of the things that breaks my heart about the foolishness that takes place in the charismatic community today. And there’s just so little discernment.

Other clip: All right. Well, listen, let’s jump into some questions about heaven. For anyone that’s new, Kat’s been to heaven. Along with a lot of other people, even ones that I know, personally, have had visited heaven. You’ve had hundreds or thousands of times. Thousands of times.

Other clip: The son, Katrina’s six-year-old son, wants to know if there are saber-toothed cats and woolly mammoths in heaven. And also, can you ride them?

Other clip: The answer is absolutely yes.

Other clip: And I know sometimes your head goes to its natural mind. And I tell people, put your natural mind on a shelf.

Lance Ford: And so, this means that no contemporary prophecy or revelation or vision or impression should ever be allowed to quietly rise to the level of Scripture. Proverbs 30 says, Every word of God proves true.

Lance Ford: And then immediately it warns, Do not add to his words, lest he rebuke you and you be found a liar. That’s sobering.

Lance Ford: Because Christian teachers, they do not have permission to improve on God’s Word. We don’t need to make it more interesting. We don’t need to make it more sensational. We don’t need to uncover secret knowledge so people will buy our books. We don’t need to construct an entire cosmic universe between the sentences. Where Scripture speaks clearly, we should speak clearly. Where Scripture gives us room for interpretation, we should acknowledge interpretation. Where we’re making an inference, we should call it an inference. And where we’re speculating, we should have the humility to say, I’m speculating.

Lance Ford: You know, Paul even does that in the Scriptures. Have you ever noticed?

Lance Ford: Paul says, I, Paul, say, not the Holy Spirit, but Paul says. So, Paul, even, there’s places, even in his writing, where he said, this is, this is what I think.

Lance Ford: I want you to know, though.

Lance Ford: So, he sets it apart and he says, now this is, this is my opinion.

Lance Ford: So, one of the greatest abuses of biblical authority happens when teachers refuse to make those distinctions. And I think it’s especially dangerous in charismatic celebrity culture because sensational revelation is rewarded. I read Genesis 6 and there’s several difficult interpretive possibilities. Doesn’t sell many conference tickets. Demons are stealing women’s eggs to create an end times hybrid army. Now, man, that’ll sell.

Lance Ford: And once attention becomes the currency, revelation tends to become more dramatic. The stories, they get bigger.

Lance Ford: The secrets get deeper.

Lance Ford: The warfare gets more complicated.

Lance Ford: And suddenly, ordinary Christianity doesn’t seem sufficient anymore. Now, you need the teacher’s new book to understand what Satan’s really doing. And these substantial social media audiences and conference audiences, it really matters. Reach matters.

Lance Ford: Influence matters.

Lance Ford: And James says that teachers are judged more strictly for a reason. And so, this is where I want to come back to Acts 17. The Bereans.

Lance Ford: I love this passage.

Lance Ford: Paul comes preaching Christ.

Lance Ford: And Luke says they received the word with eagerness. And so, these aren’t hostile skeptics. They’re receptive.

Lance Ford: They’re hungry.

Lance Ford: They’re listening.

Lance Ford: But they’re also checking.

Lance Ford: They examine the Scriptures daily to see whether these things are so. And that’s the balance we desperately need, friends. Eagerness without gullibility.

Lance Ford: Openness without naivety.

Lance Ford: Faith without abandoning discernment. You don’t have to become cynical.

Lance Ford: You don’t have to assume everybody is being dishonest. You don’t have to reject everything supernatural. But you do need an open Bible.

Lance Ford: And I wish we could recover this across the charismatic world. Imagine if every conference attendee did this. Every podcast listener.

Lance Ford: Every person that watches Christian television. Every church member hearing a prophetic word. Every person buying the latest book promising some hidden revelation. Instead of asking, was that powerful? We should ask, was that biblical?

Lance Ford: And instead of, did I get goosebumps on that one? We should ask, where is that in the text? And instead of, does this person have an anointing? We should ask, are they handling Scripture faithfully? So, you know, the question would be, well, do they know the Greek? We should ask, is that actually what the Greek word means in the context? Instead of, they quoted seven Bible verses, ask, do these seven Bible verses actually teach the thing that they’re claiming? Because one of the easiest ways to deceive Christians is not to stop quoting the Bible. It’s to quote the Bible constantly while making it say things it never said. Okay, so I want to give you three questions to take with you. And here’s really what I want every Restore Report viewer to take away from this episode. Whenever somebody presents a dramatic spiritual teaching, ask three questions.

Lance Ford: Number one, what does the Scripture actually say? Open it.

Lance Ford: Read before the verse.

Lance Ford: Read after the verse.

Lance Ford: Read the chapter.

Lance Ford: Ask what the author was talking about. Number two, what has the teacher added? So, identify every step between the text and the conclusion. The Bible says X, the teacher infers Y. Then assumes Z.

Lance Ford: Then adds a vision.

Lance Ford: Then connects it to mythology.

Lance Ford: Then connects that to a podcast.

Lance Ford: Then suddenly says, the Bible proves it. Slow it down.

Lance Ford: Separate the pieces.

Lance Ford: And number three, what authority is being claimed for the speculation? Is that person saying, here’s an idea that I’ve been thinking about, I’m considering, I haven’t landed on it, I’m not saying that this is theologically correct? See, that’s fine.

Lance Ford: Or is the person saying, God revealed this hidden truth and Christians need this knowledge? See, those are radically different claims. The more authority that somebody claims, the more scrutiny they should expect. Not less, but more.

Lance Ford: And here’s where I want to land on this. Christianity believes in mystery.

Lance Ford: But mystery is not permission to make things up. Christianity believes in spiritual warfare. But spiritual warfare is not permission to construct elaborate, invisible worlds out of speculation. Christianity believes that the Holy Spirit speaks and leads. But God told me, does not place a teacher beyond examination. And Christianity believes the Bible is the word of God. Which is exactly why we must be incredibly careful not to make our words sound like God’s words. The Bible is not raw material for our imagination to mix with. It’s not a collection of phrases that we can pull apart and rebuild into whatever theological system just fascinates us. And a Bible verse attached to a claim doesn’t make the claim biblical. Katie Souzan may sincerely believe these things happen to her. I’m not questioning her sincerity.

Lance Ford: But sincerity is not our standard.

Lance Ford: Scripture is.

Lance Ford: And once somebody says the Bible proves this, we have every right, we actually have every obligation to say, Okay, show me.

Lance Ford: And if the Bible says one sentence while the teacher supplies the next ten paragraphs, we need to know the difference. That’s what the Bereans did.

Lance Ford: And Luke called them noble for doing it. They listened.

Lance Ford: They received.

Lance Ford: And then they opened the Scriptures. Church, we need to become Bereans again. Especially in an age of viral prophets, online apostles, celebrity teachers, secret revelations, supernatural podcasts, algorithm-driven conspiracy theories, and the Christian publishing machines that just constantly look for the next sensational idea to package and bind and sell. So don’t surrender your discernment. Wake it up.

Lance Ford: Open your Bible.

Lance Ford: Read the context.

Lance Ford: Check the claims.

Lance Ford: Separate text from inference.

Lance Ford: Separate inference from speculation. And never allow someone’s personal revelation to silently acquire the authority of the written word of God. Because a teacher quoting Scripture is not the same thing as a teacher faithfully teaching Scripture. Thanks for joining us on this episode of the Restore Report, a podcast dedicated to helping the church heal, reform, and look like Jesus again. Our hope is simple.

Lance Ford: Not just to expose what’s broken, but to help rebuild what’s healthy, humble, and true to Jesus. And before we close, I want to invite you to keep walking with us. Very soon, we’ll be launching RestoringTheChurch.com. And it’s a new resource created to help churches and leaders respond faithfully in moments of crisis and pursue transparency and truth and care well for those that have been harmed. It’s also a place we hope will help God’s people imagine a healthier way forward and one that reflects the heart of Jesus more clearly. If you’d like to be the first to know when the site goes live and these resources become available, visit RestoringTheChurch.com and fill out the form. And we’ll be honored to have you join us in this work of the restoration. Until next time, let’s keep working for a church that looks more like Him. Thank you.