Originally Posted by Igzy

Yes, and in response to our friend Evangelical who seems pretty reasonable, with Lee the devil was always in the details of the actual fruit his teaching produced.

For example, Lee took the reasonable truism that we should love each other equally and distorted it into the unreasonable falsity that we should not have any friends or special relationships. Thus if you were personally closer to a certain brother Lee would condemn that as "natural affection," as "honey." (He would pronounce "honey" in a way that made the "h" sound like he was clearing his throat.)

That of course is a hyper-spiritual teaching that the Bible doesn't hold us to. Like I said, its hoo-hah. But this kind of thing was useful to Lee in that by cutting us off from personal relationships he made us that much more dependent on our relationship with his ministry and his ideals to meet our emotional needs.

"The natural" to Lee was a kind of "flesh lite." It would be a tough sell to say flatly that having a friend was a work of the flesh. But bring in this fuzzy, softer threat of "the natural" and you've got a way to condemn just about any seemingly normal human behavior (having friends, having fun, taking vacations, heck even having personal likes and dislikes) as being contrary to the Spirit. And that's exactly what he did.

Guess what? Nowhere does the Bible condemn the natural or say it is something negative.

Did you even hear Lee teach in person? I did, many times. I know what he said, I know how we were expected to receive it, I know how it was applied and I know how it screwed people up.