Skillet's John and Korey Cooper just described spiritual abuse they endured at an NAR church. Unfortunately, their story shapes a pattern showing up in many churches across the country. Josh, Michael and Michael will speak with a former elder of the Cooper's church to understand what happened and learn how to better recognize spiritual abuse. 

ABOUT THIS EPISODE:
John and Korey Cooper recently sat down for a long, detailed interview on Alisa Childers' YouTube channel (link to full episode below) and described what they say happened inside Korey's lifelong church. Leadership they'd trusted for decades had quietly embraced New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) theology. When the Coopers began asking direct theological questions, they say the response wasn't a proper answer. Instead, it was pressure, prophetic words used against people close to them, and warnings that leaving would cost them God's blessing.

In reviewing the Coopers' story, Joshua Lewis, Michael Miller, and Michael Rowntree will walk through what the New Apostolic Reformation actually teaches about apostolic authority, why "sound doctrine" so easily gets redefined once a leader claims that kind of role, and why asking a direct question about a church's beliefs should never be treated as rebellion. We'll look at where this movement's theology runs into what Scripture actually says about who qualifies to lead (1 Timothy 3, Titus 1:9), who the church is actually built on (Ephesians 2:20), and whether any leader, even a real apostle, is above correction (Galatians 1:8).

Join us to better understand the Coopers' story and learn how to spot spiritual abuse before it costs you.

ALISA CHILDERS' INTERVIEW:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-GwayjaKqfQ

 0:00 – Introduction
 2:13 – Caleb's Background Story
 3:20 – Reacting to Cooper Interview
 9:36 – Church Structure Overview
 15:12 – VNC Course Explained
 18:23 – Apostles as Foundation Doctrine
 27:47 – Caleb's Theological Journey
 33:35 – Relational Leverage and Control
 39:24 – Darvo Text and Gaslighting
 44:07 – Right vs Wrong Loyalty
 50:41 – Isolation and Matthew 18
 58:00 – Gossip vs Slander Defined
 1:06:35 – Third-Party Investigation Findings
 1:11:24 – False Visions Red Flags
 1:16:11 – Hope and Healing After 

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John Bevere's "Under Cover" has sold close to half a million copies and shaped how a generation of churches views submission. In a previous episode, Joshua Lewis and Michael Miller discussed the dangers of the type of authority Bevere's book promotes (see link below). But does "Under Cover" also present a different Gospel? 

ABOUT THIS EPISODE
Josh and Michael return to "Under Cover" to track how often the book confuses law and gospel, treating obedience as the source of faith and the ground of salvation instead of its fruit. They compare Bevere's own quotes against Luke 14, Matthew 7, Galatians, Hebrews 11, and James 2. 

Unfortunately, what they find is a consistent pattern: obedience is the ground of assurance instead of its fruit, and faith is treated as something you earn your way into rather than something freely given.

Join us to understand where Bevere's book veers from Scripture and how to better recognize doctrinal drift when you see it.

0:00 – Introduction
1:03 – Law and Gospel Explained
6:49 – Luke 14 Wedding Parable
17:16 – Matthew 7:21 Lord Lord
30:41 – Bevere's Sobering Vision
35:04 – God's Unconditional Acceptance
42:43 – Cain, Abel, and Faith
50:31 – Galatians and Witchcraft Curse
59:51 – Abraham's Obedience Examined
1:09:16 – James, Faith Without Works

PREVIOUS EPISODE ON JOHN BEVERE'S "UNDER COVER":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IWoF5MsH9pE

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Ask a first-century rabbi if biblical prophecy had ceased, and he'd say yes. Ask him if God still spoke, and he'd tell you about the Bat Kol.

ABOUT THIS EPISODE:
Josh, Michael and Michael explore the biblical case that prophecy operates at more than one level of authority. Scripture itself is uniquely inspired, infallible, and authoritative, while other genuine prophetic revelation can still occur without becoming Scripture. To explore this more, we turn to rabbinic Judaism and the fascinating concept of the Bat Kol.

Bat Kol means "daughter of a voice." It's rabbinic Judaism's term for a diminished echo of prophecy that kept showing up long after the age of the biblical prophets. This historical evidence suggests that the idea of genuine, non-canonical revelation was not foreign to ancient Jewish thought and may provide important historical support for the continuity view of prophecy.

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Can you take the mark of the beast by accident? Get it through an RFID chip? A vaccine? A barcode to buy and sell? It's a question that's kept believers concerned, especially with new technologies appearing. But most answers on the Internet start in the wrong place. Michael Rowntree starts in the Bible with Ezekiel and Deuteronomy.

ABOUT THIS EPISODE
Michael walks through Revelation 13:16–18, then follows it back to its Old Testament roots. His case: the mark of the beast was never a physical mark, but a spiritual insignia, a counterfeit of God's own seal. What it actually signifies is allegiance.

Join Michael to understand:
- Why Ezekiel 9 and Deuteronomy 6 hold the real key to interpreting Revelation 13:16–18
- How the seal of God in Revelation 7:3 and 14:4 and the mark of the beast counterfeit each other
- Why the mark speaks of allegiance, ownership, and protection, and why none of those happen to you by accident
- A closer look at gematria, the practice of calculating 666 to pin down a specific antichrist, and why Michael thinks it falls short
- What Michael believes it actually means to prepare for the mark of the beast today

0:00 – Introduction
1:11 – Revelation 13 Mark Text
3:34 – Seal Context Revelation 6-7
7:55 – Ezekiel 9 Background
10:00 – Deuteronomy 6 Background
11:57 – Counterfeits in Revelation 13
13:40 – Daniel 7 & the Four Beasts
15:27 – Tests of Allegiance
18:46 – Technology and the Mark
20:20 – Decoding 666
23:48 – The World Made Right
25:21 – Hope in Revelation

📖BOOK:
The World Made Right: Finding Confident Hope in the Book of Revelation 
https://www.michaelrowntree.com/the-world-made-right/

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A lot of churches either forbid tongues in public altogether or let them run with no interpretation and no order. Scripture never actually gives you those two options. So what does the Bible prescribe for the gift of tongues in church? 

ABOUT THIS EPISODE:
Josh, Michael, and Michael sit down with the question that splits churches on both sides of the Word and Spirit divide: what does it actually look like to practice the gifts of tongues and interpretation, named together in 1 Corinthians 12:10, in corporate worship, biblically? Not in theory, but in practice, on a Sunday, in a room full of people, with order intact and the body edified.

Cessationist churches simply avoid the conversation entirely by not recognizing that the gift of tongues is still for today. Meanwhile, many charismatic churches practice tongues publicly with real sincerity but without the structure Paul actually prescribed: no clear call for interpretation, no one recognized as an interpreter of tongues, no accountability, no sense of "let it be done for building up," for the edification of the church (1 Corinthians 14:26). Both extremes miss what Scripture is actually asking for.

As such, many believers are left without a clear, biblical middle to stand on. We'll walk through 1 Corinthians 14 verse by verse, laying out Paul's actual instructions: what tongues in the assembly is for, why interpretation matters, who should speak and how many, and why "let all things be done decently and in order" (1 Corinthians 14:40) isn't a suppression of the gift but the framework that lets it function safely.

0:00 – Introduction
4:51 – Verifying Authentic Tongues Gift
12:14 – Interpretation Required for Every Tongue?
19:38 – Who Calls Interpretation?
33:49 – Tongue And Interpreter Roles
34:48 – Limits On Tongue Speakers
45:53 – No Interpreter Present
49:54 – Singing In Tongues
52:14 – Interpretation Accuracy Standards
1:02:59 – Shutting Down False Tongues
1:10:36 – Order Not Quenching Spirit

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Why do we need a nuclear family? What actually determines the difference between a boy and a girl? These feel like brand-new questions, but the ideas that make them askable were actually seeded four hundred years ago. Dr. Jordan Cooper joins us to trace them back to their source.

ABOUT THE EPISODE: 
Lutheran theologian and pastor Dr. Cooper walks Josh through the philosophical roots of the modern progressive mind and the broader philosophy of the left: Descartes and Cartesian doubt, Kant's Copernican Revolution, Hume's empiricism and skepticism, Hobbes's social contract theory, and Thomas Paine's radical individualism, the intellectual scaffolding beneath everything from critical theory to postmodernism. It's the same scaffolding underneath the questions above. Once Hume argues that even something as basic as cause and effect is just an assumption rather than a certainty, and Kant argues that categories like space and time are imposed by the mind rather than discovered in the world, the door opens to treating categories like family and gender the same way: not given, but constructed, and open to being remade.

Dr. Cooper's book Makers of the Modern Mind grew out of years doing campus ministry at Cornell, watching students absorb progressive assumptions and secular philosophy they'd never actually examined. Drawing on his background in Lutheran theology and Christian apologetics, this conversation is a guided tour through where those assumptions came from, and why the question underneath almost all of them, in philosophy, politics, and the modern culture wars alike, is simply: what is a human being?

0:00 – Introduction
1:14 – Dr. Jordan Cooper
2:45 – Lutheran Branding Problem
4:21 – Makers of the Modern Mind
10:23 – Union With Christ Doctrine
16:30 – Descartes' Cogito Ergo Sum
26:38 – Kant's Copernican Revolution
31:33 – David Hume's Skepticism
42:35 – Thomas Paine & Liberalism
51:21 – Right Vs Left Liberalism
56:52 – Applying Philosophy Today

ABOUT THE GUEST:
📖https://www.amazon.com/Makers-Modern-Mind-Thinkers-Formed/dp/1952295823

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A pastor pulls a college kid on stage, lays hands on him, tells him to "speak the holy language," and when nothing comes out, tells him his faith is weak. That's the true story that opens a recent Dial In Ministries episode on tongues. We're responding to their episode . . . and we agree with more of it than you'd expect. 

ABOUT THE EPISODE: 
Jonny Ardavanis and Hank Bowen make a solid biblical case that tongues in Acts and 1 Corinthians means real human languages, not gibberish or glossolalia in the ecstatic-speech sense, and that "tongues of angels" in 1 Corinthians 13 is rhetorical, not literal. We agree with them on both. 

Where we split: they're arguing from a cessationist frame — that the sign gifts of the Holy Spirit ceased with the apostles. We're continuationists and believe the gift of tongues is still active in the church today. We'll discuss where we agree and disagree on the exegesis, and why we land in a different place on whether spiritual gifts like this one continue.

0:00 – Introduction
0:17 – Dial In Ministries Overview
1:57 – Rowntree's Opening Thoughts
2:43 – Miller's Opening Thoughts
4:41 – Acts 2 Known Languages
8:49 – Xenolalia Vs Glossolalia
21:29 – Acts 10 And 19
28:21 – 1 Corinthians 14 Tongues
33:52 – Prayer Language Debate
43:52 – Baptism Of Holy Spirit
53:48 – Preaching Versus Experience
1:04:41 – Tongues In Church History

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ABOUT THE REMNANT RADIO: 
The Remnant Radio exists to equip believers who are hungry for the radical middle of both Word and Spirit. Subscribe for twice-weekly content on theology, church history and the gifts of the Spirit.

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Pharaoh's magicians didn't fake it. Exodus 7 says they did the same thing Moses and Aaron did, "by their secret arts." So what does the Bible actually say is happening when magic works?

ABOUT THE EPISODE:
Nelly Van Sickle, pastor at Evergreen Calvary Chapel and creator of The Dancing Toaster Podcast joins Remnant Radio to walk through his "History of Magic" series, a biblical dig into where magic in the Bible actually comes from, starting in the ancient Near East with Egypt and Mesopotamia.

Egypt called its force Heka, something built into the fabric of creation itself, not invoked so much as cooperated with. Mesopotamian mythology named its spirits and negotiated with them directly. If the power on display in Old Testament magic was real, where did it actually come from, and why does Deuteronomy 18 treat some of it as off-limits instead of harmless nonsense? Dr. Michael Heiser used to point out that God doesn't legislate against things that don't exist, and that idea sits underneath this whole conversation: a biblical worldview takes demonology seriously precisely because it takes the supernatural worldview of Scripture seriously.

From there, the conversation turns to names, authority, and who actually gets to use the power of Jesus's name in spiritual warfare (think Sons of Sceva). Nelly also shares how researching the ancient occult reshaped his own theology of the supernatural, moving him from cautious and functionally cessationist toward a more continuationist conviction, wanting to see the gifts of the Spirit practiced rightly.

The occult is surging back into Western culture, and most Christians don't have a framework for it beyond "that's not real" or "don't go near it." This episode is an attempt to give you one. Join us as we trace the history of magic and the authority we have in Christ to stand against it.

0:00 – Introduction
1:19 – Nelly Van Sickle
2:20 – Origins of History of Magic
3:45 – Egyptian Magic in Exodus
8:03 – Mesopotamian Spiritual Worldview
11:47 – Myth of White Magic
16:04 – Naming Spirits and Deities
21:07 – Egypt's Heka System
33:05 – Yahweh's Name and Authority
37:38 – Continuationist Cessationist Testimony
45:36 – Magical Practices and Divination
59:05 – Why Context Matters Today

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Deuteronomy 18 is the traditional chapter people reach for to test a prophet. But is Deut 18 the right test for the modern church? Or is it more nuanced for the New Covenant? Does modern prophecy in the local church operate the same?

Josh, Michael, and Michael will examine Deut 18 together and explore whether this passage operates the same in the modern church as it did with Moses and a theocratic nation.

0:00 – Introduction
0:41 – Cessationist Video Response
4:30 – Reading Deuteronomy 18:15-22
8:02 – Christ Exclusive View
10:43 – Early Church Fathers Quotes
15:04 – Combined View Explained
19:25 – Meaning of Presumptuously
24:20 – Deuteronomy 13 vs 18
32:03 – Nathan Misses Prophecy
43:56 – Acts 21:4 Analysis
1:13:05 – True vs False Prophets
1:18:33 – Accountability and Closing

Subscribe to The Remnant Radio newsletter and receive our FREE introduction to spiritual gifts eBook. Plus, get access to: discounts, news about upcoming shows, courses and conferences - and more. Subscribe now at TheRemnantRadio.com.

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ABOUT THE REMNANT RADIO: 
The Remnant Radio exists to equip believers who are hungry for the radical middle of both Word and Spirit. Subscribe for twice-weekly content on theology, church history and the gifts of the Spirit.

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Have you ever prayed for a breakthrough that never came, and wondered what that says about your faith? Dr. Craig Keener, one of the most respected New Testament scholars, says we're only looking at half the story. He joins Remnant Radio to explore the theology of suffering - not as a theological afterthought for the Spirit-filled believer, but an essential part of the story Scripture actually tells.

ABOUT THE EPISODE:
Dr. Craig Keener, F.M. and Ada Thompson Professor of Biblical Studies at Asbury Theological Seminary, has spent his career defending the biblical and historical case for the miraculous. His two-volume Miracles is an essential read for believers (also available in his shorter version Miracles Today). His newest book on suffering turns to the question that so often gets left unanswered: what do we do when we've prayed, and prayed, and the diagnosis doesn't change?

Keener explores what Scripture actually shows us about suffering and healing side by side, including in the lives of the apostles. The conversation moves through difficult ground in Christian theology: whether suffering can be God's will, how the crucifixion holds together the greatest evil and the greatest good in human history, and why the two churches in Revelation given no correction from Christ are the two enduring persecution.

This isn't an argument against miracles. Keener has given his career to defending them. Rather, it's an invitation to hold suffering and hope together, the way Scripture always has.

0:00 – Introduction
2:06 – Keener's Testimony and Ministry
4:16 – Why Write About Suffering
8:38 – Western vs Global Suffering
14:19 – The Problem of Evil
15:55 – Miracles as Foretaste
23:10 – Purpose Found in Suffering
32:52 – Keener's Divorce and PTSD
41:34 – Faith Defined Rightly
44:46 – Birth Pangs and New Creation
54:16 – Caring for the Poor
58:48 – God's Will and Suffering

ABOUT THE GUEST:
- Dr. Craig Keener's website — https://craigkeener.com
- Suffering: Its Meaning for the Spirit-Filled Life by Craig S. Keener  https://a.co/d/0iO8MUtB
- Miracles Today https://a.co/d/0i145Az1
- Miracles : 2 Volumes: The Credibility of the New Testament Accounts https://a.co/d/0gOxo5Ar

Subscribe to The Remnant Radio newsletter and receive our FREE introduction to spiritual gifts eBook. Plus, get access to: discounts, news about upcoming shows, courses and conferences - and more. Subscribe now at TheRemnantRadio.com.

Support the show

ABOUT THE REMNANT RADIO: 
The Remnant Radio exists to equip believers who are hungry for the radical middle of both Word and Spirit. Subscribe for twice-weekly content on theology, church history and the gifts of the Spirit.

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