A genuine Christian faith demands a whole-hearted personal involvement with Jesus, and He challenges us to leave everything in order to follow Him. However, zeal without discernment may lead to disaster. In the following chapters I will describe how such a disaster happened to me and how, in my yearning for a deeper knowledge of Jesus, I strayed into experiences of occult powers and into a cultic life-style. No one is immune to the kind of distortions of the Christian faith which I am going to describe. It could happen anywhere and to anyone.
I do not believe that some of the people I will mention in this book are necessarily any more power-hungry or evil than most other people. Indeed, they may well genuinely want to serve God and to bless other people. In spite of this, it is still possible that they may have been seduced by something other than the true and liberating Gospel of Jesus Christ and by something that is not the Holy Spirit. I know this can happen because it happened to me.
When I joined the Faith movement, I was quite aware that they had some questionable teachings. Nevertheless, it did not occur to me to question the source of the power behind the mighty signs and the supernatural encounters that I saw and experienced in their meetings. I was fully convinced that it was God Who worked all these signs and wonders and that it was His power that worked so mightily in the services. Any of the other Christian groups that I was acquainted with at that time could not, in any way, measure up to this kind of supernatural display of power. Concluding that what took place was of God, my choice seemed obvious: I preferred experiencing God in a movement with certain erroneous teachings rather than not experiencing Him in a movement that had a correct doctrine.
In writing this book, I am challenging my previous belief that all the things I experienced in this movement were of God. This may come as a shock to some readers and it may cause some people to doubt whether some of their own experiences have been of God. I know how devastating this can be. It feels as if the very foundation of your life is crumbling under your feet. However, no matter how devastating it may be to discover that the basis of one’s faith is false, it is better than to continue living on a lie. When everything else is tottering around you, Jesus is still there. The historical facts about Jesus in the Bible are trustworthy, and He Who has made heaven and earth does not waver just because a movement does.
This book is the result of my efforts to find a way of living a whole-hearted Christian life while avoiding the pitfalls of false doctrine, occult powers, or an authoritarian leadership. It is my prayer that my findings might prevent some people from being shipwrecked in their faith, and that they might get a better understanding of the true Gospel of Jesus Christ.
Torbjörn Swartling,
Uddevalla,
Sweden,