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Gramster Rant: Satan's Favorite Tool Is a Counterfeit
Here's something you have to understand if you want to make sense of anything happening in the charismatic and Pentecostal world right now.
What does Satan do to everything that God tries to do? He creates a counterfeit. He creates fake things. Every single time. That's his game. That's always been his game.
And when you look at the charismatic Pentecostal church as a whole, what you find underneath all the sincerity, underneath all the warmth, underneath all the people that are genuinely kind and that you actually adore, is a counterfeit so polished, so emotionally compelling, so experientially satisfying that real people don't even realize they've bought a fake. Our heart breaks because they are so deceived. They are buying a counterfeit. They are having a spiritual experience, but it is not the Holy Spirit.
These aren't bad people. Some of them are folks that we really like. Some of them we actually adore. But they are so thoroughly deceived into an experience that is not the Holy Spirit, and the damage it does is not theoretical. It is real. It happens to real people. And we have sat across from those people.
When Bad Theology Meets a Desperate Person
A young single mother came to us after years in a hyper-charismatic church. She'd been told over and over, meeting after meeting, service after service, that if she would just sew her seed, wealth would come back to her. She just had to sew enough seed, and she had to sew it in faith. If her faith was strong enough, it would come.
She was a single mother and it was very difficult making ends meet. She had about thirty dollars left in her bank account, not enough to pay rent, not enough to buy groceries. But she'd been told it was a faith problem. So she gave it all to God.
Less than a week later, she got an eviction notice.
She went to a really dark place. A really dark place. She told us that that night she was sitting at home alone, her son was in bed, and she just thought: I don't have the faith to even raise my son. My faith is so bad and so poor, I can't even feed him. And she started thinking, when you're in those dark, desperate places, sometimes your thinking gets a little skewed, she started thinking that if she just killed herself, somebody else who had more faith than she did could take care of her son and feed him.
That story was the first one that really woke us up.
This is important stuff. This is really important stuff.
And so that's why we talk about it. That's why we want to encourage you to get into God's word, really study it for yourself, understand the scriptures and what they mean, and find yourself a good teacher. It matters. It matters to real people.
The Hard Theological Reality
Here's the bottom line: if the speaking in tongues gibberish, which we consider to be pagan gibberish, is from the Holy Spirit, then the Bible is not true. The Bible in context is not true. And if the Bible is true, then there is something deeply wrong with the speaking in tongues gibberish. Those are the only two options. There is no third door.
Matthew 24:11 and 24 warn us plainly:
"Many false prophets will arise and mislead many. For false Christs and false prophets will arise and will show great signs and wonders, so as to mislead, if possible, even the elect."
The signs and wonders are not proof of authenticity. They can be counterfeited. That's the warning. That's always been the warning.
Salvaged by God Deep Dive: What the Gifts of the Spirit Actually Are
Are the spiritual gifts of the Holy Spirit still active in the church today? In short, yes. Scripture is clear that God has graciously bestowed spiritual gifts to every believer for the sake of edifying one another and glorifying Him.
The anchor for all of this is 1 Peter 4:10-11:
"Each of you should use whatever gift you have received to serve others as faithful stewards of God's grace in its various forms. If anyone speaks, they should do so as one who speaks the very words of God. If anyone serves, they should do so with the strength God provides, so that in all things God may be praised through Jesus Christ. To him be the glory and the power forever and ever. Amen."
Peter identifies two broad categories right there: speaking gifts and serving gifts.
Elsewhere, scripture gives us more detailed lists:
- Romans 12 — teaching, exhortation, leadership, giving, mercy, and others
- 1 Corinthians 12 — wisdom, knowledge, faith, discernment, and more
Many Christians, particularly new believers, look at those lists and get confused about which gifts they've received. But the truth is that the Spirit does in fact bestow unique blends of spiritual gifts to every believer, equipping each one to serve in a precise role that He has designed. Paul makes that explicit in 1 Corinthians 12:4-7. No two believers are exactly alike in how they're gifted.
Discernment, for example, is a very real gift, one that often operates quietly, without fanfare, where someone simply sees things long before others do. You don't have to announce it. You don't have to perform it. It's just there. Leadership is real. Teaching is real. Mercy is real. These gifts are active and alive in the church today.
What the Bible Does Not Teach
What the Bible does not teach, nowhere in 1 Peter 4, nowhere in Romans 12, nowhere in 1 Corinthians 12, is that gifts are received by the intensity of your faith, that there's a second-tier spiritual experience that unlocks them, or that the evidence of spiritual arrival is speaking in foreign-sounding syllables you've never studied.
You receive Jesus Christ by faith. You want to pray in the spirit? Pray in faith. The gifts flow from your relationship with Him, by God's sovereign distribution, not by how charged the atmosphere is at your next altar call.
"Praying in the Spirit" Doesn't Mean What They Say It Means
One of the most consistent misappropriations of scripture in charismatic circles is using the phrase "praying in the spirit" as a synonym for speaking in tongues. But when you go back to God's word, stay in God's word, and keep looking at God's word, the meaning is right there.
Galatians 5:16 says:
"But I say, walk by the spirit and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh."
Here's the question worth sitting with: if "walk in the spirit" meant walking differently, some altered gait that signals spiritual elevation, we'd all notice. Nobody suggests that. Nobody walks goofy and different because they're walking in the spirit. So why would "praying in the spirit" suddenly mean your tongue starts making sounds you've never made before?
It's silly on the face of it.
To walk in the spirit is to not let the flesh rule, to not gratify the desires of the flesh. To pray in the spirit is to not pray about the flesh, to not let your flesh determine what you're asking for or how you're asking. You're still the same person who speaks a regular language and walks on two legs down the street. None of that changes. What changes is what's ruling you from the inside.
When the Desperation Is Real
Now, there are real, legitimate experiences of believers in genuine moments of desperation and devastation who have been so overwhelmed before God that words failed them entirely. Who got on their knees, who were even laying on their side, and started to groan and make utterances before the Lord. And they know that God came and visited them. Romans 8:26 speaks directly to this:
"The Spirit intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words."
Those are real experiences. They come out of two things: desperation and devastation.
That is not, and this needs to be said clearly, the gibberish speaking in tongues being promoted in charismatic churches. Those are two entirely different things. Aligning them is a serious injustice to both the people who have genuinely cried out to God from the floor of their prayer closet and to the biblical text itself.
Coming Out: David Robbins Jr.'s Story
David Robbins Jr. grew up in Nashville, born and raised. He came up in the Baptist church, then attended a Church of Christ school from elementary through high school. He went to MTSU, got into the party scene, and kind of fell away for a while. He never lost his faith completely, but he got distracted down the wrong road. Then about ten or twelve years ago, God brought him back around, and he started attending church again and being more involved.
When he came back, he ended up in a charismatic church, and what got him through the door was exactly what gets most people through the door: the worship service.
"It was so moving. It was emotional. And I felt something."
Chasing the Juice
That feeling became the measuring stick. He started equating the emotional experience, people worshiping intensely, people getting emotional, people laying on the floor, with spiritual proximity to God. These people must be so close to God. And so he found himself thinking: if I can feel like this all the time, this must mean I'm hyper-spiritual. I'm getting closer to God.
So he sought the emotional experience. And for a while, it felt like it was working.
But over time he noticed there wasn't much teaching from scripture. It was personal experience. It was I feel and the Holy Spirit is telling me and anecdotal stories that were somehow supposed to prove what the speaker was saying was true, rather than going to the word of God and seeing what the word of God actually says.
The people producing the most visible experiences got put on a pedestal. And what happened, whether people realized it or not, was a kind of idolizing. These people are so spiritual. I want to be like them. I want to get that. You're no longer learning from scripture. You're learning about the person on the stage.
It becomes a hamster wheel. You're constantly chasing experiences, trying to level up spiritually. And eventually you just get burned out to the point where it feels like this just isn't working anymore, and you start wondering: is any of this even real?
The Blame Always Lands on You
When David started voicing those questions to people in the church, the response was consistent:
- You're going through spiritual warfare.
- You're not doing enough for God.
- Your heart posture isn't right.
- Your faith isn't mature enough.
The problem always landed back on him. Never on the teaching. Never on the practice itself. There was something wrong with him, not with what wasn't making sense to him.
So to question anything became evidence of your own spiritual deficiency. And because the community around him was warm and kind and sincere, it became deeply confusing, this back-and-forth of maybe it really is me and maybe I'm just not aligned and all the Christianese that comes with it. Eventually the confusion curdled into exhaustion: I just can't cut it. I can't do enough. I can't get spiritual enough.
The Turning Point
The shift came through scripture, specifically through learning to actually study it rather than just read it passively and agree with it. He started watching Chris Rosebrough's channel, Fighting for the Faith, which taught him the difference between exegesis (drawing meaning out of the text) and eisegesis (reading your experience into the text). His friend Greg, who had been leading a solid men's Bible study, had already been laying that foundation, teaching him to read the Bible, meditate on it, and spend real time in it. Once David was genuinely in the word, the text itself did the dismantling.
And then there was a specific moment he'll never forget.
He was at a ministry event. A young man was there who wanted to receive the so-called baptism of the Holy Spirit, the second-tier experience that, in this teaching, would produce the gift of tongues. Someone asked David to pray for him. By this point David was already pulling away from the teaching, already uncomfortable. He prayed out loud anyway. And it just seemed wrong in his spirit.
The young man wasn't able to speak in tongues. And the look of disappointment on his face, David said he'll never forget it. He's had no way to find that person since. But that moment is precisely why the stakes of this conversation are real. These are real people. Real faces. Real disappointment, produced by a teaching that doesn't hold up.
What Peace Actually Feels Like
Leaving was hard, not because the theology was difficult to dismantle once he was genuinely studying, but because the people were real. Kind people. Sincere people. Some friendships survived. Some will never be the same. And once you leave, you become the outsider.
But on the other side of all of it: peace.
"I'm not chasing constant miracles and signs and wonders and the tongues and decreeing and declaring. Instead, I'm seeking God through the scriptures."
He started noticing what he called the beauty in the subtlety of how God actually works, in a conversation that turns at the right moment, in something ordinary that shouldn't have gone the way it did and yet it did.
God is not just in the supernatural. God is in the ordinary. He's in the extremely ordinary. Changing a diaper is an act of worship to the Lord, caring for someone who cannot care for themselves. Teaching your kids. Being present in the mundane. And God is pleased and honored in those ordinary things.
You don't have to crave the emotional experiences. You don't have to crave the supernatural. The peace that comes from being rooted in Christ and in God's word, that unmanufactured, unperformed contentment, is the realest thing you'll ever find.
The Gibberish Doesn't Pass the Test
Let's be direct. The speaking in tongues practiced in most charismatic and Pentecostal churches today fails every biblical test. Not some. Every single one.
In the New Testament, the gift of tongues was the supernatural ability to speak in known human languages, languages the speaker had never learned, for the purpose of proclaiming the gospel to people who spoke those languages. Acts 2 is the defining moment. The people gathered in Jerusalem heard the disciples speaking in their own native languages. Parthians, Medes, Elamites, people from a dozen different regions, each one heard the wonders of God declared in their own mother tongue.
There was no gibberish. There was no heavenly angelic language that nobody could understand. There were real, known, identifiable human languages spoken miraculously by people who had never learned them.
Calling the modern charismatic version a "heavenly language" is a misinterpretation of scripture. That's all it is.
The Interpretation Problem
Paul's instructions in 1 Corinthians 14 are equally clear: if tongues are spoken publicly, an interpreter must be present. If no interpreter is available, the speaker is to remain silent. They are to be quiet.
In the vast majority of charismatic services today, tongues are spoken publicly with no interpretation at all, not because the interpreter happened to be absent, but because the practice itself is not what the Bible is describing.
And here is the question that keeps coming up for people once they start paying honest attention: if you've been speaking in tongues for months or years, why hasn't your vocabulary expanded? If this is an actual language, angelic, heavenly, spiritual, whatever you want to call it, why are you repeating the same syllables over and over? Why is there no grammar? No new sentences? No growth in the language itself?
David put it plainly from his own experience:
"I just realized I'm just kind of repeating the same stuff. Like, this is supposed to be an actual language. Why do I not have an entire vocabulary? Why are there no other sentences?"
When you sit with that question honestly, the answer is that it isn't a language at all.
How the Counterfeit Spreads
Watch how the practice actually spreads. Someone attends a service. The worship is emotionally powerful. People around them begin speaking. The atmosphere is charged. They try it themselves, it feels right. It gets reinforced by the community: yes, that's it, you've got it. Over time, what began as an emotional experience becomes a theological identity. Evidence of the second baptism. Proof of spiritual arrival. And if you don't have it, there's something wrong with you.
Here's a question worth asking plainly: if something has to be taught, is it really a gift of the Spirit? Is it supernatural? If it can be taught to most people, it's very hard to make the case that it is.
That's not a gift. That's a conditioned behavior dressed in spiritual language. And when Satan starts twisting scripture, that's exactly what he does. He turns it so that it satisfies us, gives us something for us, makes us feel good, and gives us a juice we want to keep pursuing.
The Pattern of Harm and the Warning That's Always Been There
The New Testament is full of warnings against false prophets. And what you consistently find in the charismatic movement is that significance gets placed on people, the ones producing the most dramatic signs, the most visible experiences, the most fluent tongues, and gets taken away from Jesus. Spiritual authority gets attached to spiritual performance. And when performance grants authority, the words of those performers start to carry more weight than the word of God itself.
That's how you end up with a widow being told her husband would have lived if he'd just had enough faith. That's how you end up with a young single mother giving away her last thirty dollars, getting an eviction notice, and sitting alone in the dark thinking she isn't fit to raise her own child. It's manipulation. And it diminishes the word of God to nothing.
When someone begins to question, when the hamster wheel stops working and they start asking honest questions, what happens in these environments is that the problem gets located in the questioner. Every time. And the solution is always to press in harder, give more, worship longer, surrender deeper.
That's exactly why it's dangerous. Because these are real people. They're kind. They're sincere. They want God. And they end up in a really dark place, not because they were spiritually weak, but because they were told a counterfeit was the real thing and then blamed when the counterfeit didn't deliver.
If you're in it right now, if you're starting to feel that burnout, if you're asking yourself whether any of this is even real, don't hesitate. Pray. Seek God. Ask Him for help to lead you to the truth and to give you the strength to follow it. Leaving is difficult. The relationships are real. The community is real. The warmth is real.
But the other side is so much better.
Final Thoughts
The gifts of the Holy Spirit, the ones actually described in 1 Peter 4, Romans 12, and 1 Corinthians 12, are real. They are active. They are alive. And they are being graciously bestowed on believers right now, equipping each one to serve in the precise role God has designed for them.
What the charismatic and Pentecostal movements have done is create a counterfeit bent on those gifts, one that chases experiences, elevates people over scripture, and ends up hurting the very people it claims to be setting free.
It all comes down to sola scriptura. The Bible is sufficient. It is enough. You don't need to add anything to it. And the experiences you get in a life genuinely rooted in God's word, although sometimes ordinary, sometimes extremely ordinary, will be extraordinarily good because you know that you are saved.
It's not the signs and wonders that are the evidence of God at work. It's a transformed life. Because honestly, who can change the heart of man? Nobody but God.
Stay in God's word. Study it. Study, study, study. And find yourself a good teacher.
It's important to do.