They said to him, "Where is Sarah your wife?" And he said, "She is in the tent." The Lord said, "I will surely return to you about this time next year, and Sarah your wife shall have a son." - Genesis 18:9-10 (ESV)
And they said unto him, Where is Sarah thy wife? And he said, Behold, in the tent. And he said, I will certainly return unto thee according to the time of life; and, lo, Sarah thy wife shall have a son. And Sarah heard it in the tent door, which was behind him. - Genesis 18:9-10 (KJV)
The above link is to a video teaching from another false teacher littering the Charismatic landscape. Lovy Elias is his name, and he fancies himself a prophet. I do not know why anyone would trust this obvious charlatan who apparently was named after Thurston Howell's wife on the old Gilligan's Island sitcom. Nonetheless, he has 348,000 followers on YouTube alone, so he must be fooling quite a few people and I pray this writing finds them and frees them. The good thing about blatantly false teachers is they are easy to expose because they do not have the indwelt Holy Spirit inside and thus, have no sense of how to rightly handle scripture. They rely on charisma and manipulation to sucker people in. Throughout this video we hear people who sure seemed to be strategically placed next to microphones so they can gush at the "teaching" they are receiving. This is more than just the usual amen chorus that the likes of Steven Furtick employ. These folks are shouting silliness like "teach us papa" that makes you just cringe inside. This video starts off apparently selling the notion that our birthday is somehow cosmically connected to God and the blessings we receive from Him, but it goes wildly off the rails because the key verse he hangs this entire mess on, he clearly does not understand. What is more, he is clearly lazy because a simple google search and five minutes in commentaries would have revealed the truth for him before making an ass of himself here. Of course, he does not care. As long as he sounds sincere and pious, then he assumes the suckers will accept everything he has to say. Let us reason together again beloved as we sort through this pseudo-spiritual slop.
"Everything spiritual was designed for you to take advantage of. No spirit comes into the world except through a portal. Your birthday communicates when heaven opened to release your spirit into the world. For your birthday, there is a special grace that you receive every year that is supposed to carry you through that year. Every year marks growth and there is a special grace for every growth. I feel like I am talking to myself. If you are there shout fire." - Lovy Elias
Ah yes, the old "portal" theology. It is a favorite among the Charismatic crazy crowd. According to this false prophet, my own special portal opens only when I am born and when I die. Thus, he concludes that our birthday holds special significance. Again, the idea is to sound esoteric and mysterious. To achieve that, he teaches we receive a "special" grace. Not just your ordinary grace! In the video, he teaches that just like we are expected to grow physically every year, we are also supposed to grow spiritually, and our frustration is often born out of not advancing spiritually. Huh? Without being saved, there is no "spiritually." Then Lovy starts this pattern where he fishes for feedback by saying he feels like he is talking to himself. I watched another horrible teaching from him on finances where he literally would not move forward with the teaching until the number of "thumbs up"; or likes, increased past a certain threshold. Then for some unknown reason he demands the people there shout "fire", to which they eagerly obey and call him papa again.
He then has someone read from Genesis 18, our key verses today. He gets unnecessarily hung up on the phrase "according to the time of life" and wrongly equates this to mean "birthday." It does not and if he were not so arrogant or lazy, he could have figured it out. I placed both the KJV and the ESV in the key verses and we see that this mysterious phrase simply meant - "about this time next year." To be sure, I check the commentaries and none of them claim this phrase found in the King James meant birthday. Nonetheless, Lovy Elias actually claimed here that the "grace Sarah desired", to have children, could only be given on her birthday. As if God was somehow limited in His own creation. This is very important because his entire teaching hinges on this absurd understanding of this sentence fragment in Genesis. From this launching point, Lovy flies off the rails, crashes and burns.
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