New Thought Deception, The Danger of Happy Lies, Finding Truth in Scripture – w/ Melissa Dougherty

Aaron Smith

Everyone welcome back to another episode of the Marriage After God podcast. I’m here with Melissa Doherty. Welcome to the show.

Melissa Dougherty (00:28)
Yeah, thanks for having me on.

Aaron Smith (00:30)
I’m excited for this conversation. I’ve been seeing some of your videos on YouTube and I just love that your heart for the church is to have our eyes open to the truth and to not listen to the lies. And there’s a lot of lies out there. So I can’t wait to get into the conversation about your new book, Happy Lies, and talk about that. But before we do, I think it’d be awesome to let our audience know a bit about yourself. You know, who are you? How old are you? Marriage? Children? All that stuff.

Melissa Dougherty (00:56)
Well, a true lady never reveals her age, so. Yeah, no, I live here in New Mexico with my husband and our two girls. 14 and 10 are their ages. Yeah, I’ve been doing YouTube for a few years now. And I, let’s see, what else to know about me in that regard? I’ve been a Christian since I was 16. Before YouTube, my bread and butter was a semi-professional artist. My husband is a

Aaron Smith (00:59)
Mmm.

Melissa Dougherty (01:26)
Hot air balloon. He’s working to be a hot air balloon pilot. We own a hot air balloon We’re out here in New Mexico. Yeah, it’s It’s we are very eccentric. I’m learning. I’m like man. We’re kind of different With just what we do. He’s very adventurous and this last year he Decided yeah, I’m gonna you know, I’m gonna do this. He works out here in New Mexico. There’s a well-known Balloon company called Rainbow Riders

Aaron Smith (01:31)
that’s an interesting career.

Melissa Dougherty (01:52)
And every morning you’re waking up, it’s crazy, at 4 a.m. or earlier just to get the winds right. You have to wake up very early, get the baskets ready, he’s on a balloon crew and so he helps Rainbow Riders. He’s employed by them. And then he’s been doing that for a few years but then yeah, last year he decided, you know what, I’m gonna buy my own balloon and it’s a special shape. So it’s a clown balloon.

Aaron Smith (02:03)
Yeah.

Melissa Dougherty (02:18)
has three separate clown faces on it. And that’s, it’s so much fun. We’re trying to mention it. No. Yes. It’s so, that’s the other thing is that, you know, New Mexico is a desert and the winds are insane sometimes. Today it’s particularly psychotic. But yeah, as even the month of January into February, it calms down, but.

Aaron Smith (02:23)
Wow, so today would not be the day he’s going out because it sounds windy. Yeah.

Melissa Dougherty (02:43)
It’s kind of crazy how early they get up and how cold it is, but then into spring and summer, it gets better. And that’s probably when I’ll finally go up because I’m like, I’m not going to be freezing in the morning getting on your balloon. So yeah, but he’s working his way to be a pilot. And yeah, we just, have a lot of fun. I love my family.

Aaron Smith (02:57)
until it’s a little warmer.

That’s a really cool job. You’re a couple years ahead of me on age-wise with your kids. My oldest is turning 13 at the end of this year. So that’s my oldest, yeah. My youngest we just had, she’s like five months old.

Melissa Dougherty (03:11)
That’s your oldest? yeah, yeah.

man, that’s

a big span. That’s a long span. Yeah, I love these years. They’re so fun.

Aaron Smith (03:20)
Yeah, yeah, and so we’re

about to have a teenager which is terrifying but also awesome. So, go ahead.

Melissa Dougherty (03:25)
Yeah, you know, my 14

year old turned out to be so far so I asked her the other day, I drive up in the driveway and I just got groceries and I go to pop the trunk and I just see her coming out to help me and I was like, you know what, can you like, what are we doing right with you? I mean, can you tell the other teenagers how to teenage? And she’s like, mom, I don’t think I’m doing it right. I was like, you’re right, actually, you need to come out stomping your feet mad at me that I’m asking you to help. So yeah, it’s pretty fun.

Aaron Smith (03:39)
I love that.

Don’t give

her ideas. Don’t give her ideas. She’ll have plenty of her own. It’s that firstborn mentality. My oldest son is always wanting, he just made his breakfast and bed this morning. He came and he’s like, don’t wake up. I want to make you waffles. I’m like, okay. I know. It’s like you keep going every day. So you mentioned that you got saved at 16.

Melissa Dougherty (03:54)
Exactly.

my word.

That is awesome. That’s wonderful. Good job. Yeah, maybe this is boring. Yeah.

Aaron Smith (04:17)
But from a little bit of what I’ve read in your book, I have to admit I haven’t finished it about halfway through, but that was kind of like the beginning of your testimony is getting saved in that journey that God took you on. Probably didn’t feel like it at the time, but you were on a journey. don’t you? Can you share a little bit about that transition of getting saved and then kind of what took place that led you to where you’re at today in your current ministry online?

Melissa Dougherty (04:27)
Yes.

Yeah, sure. So I grew up always having a relationship with God. I always believed in God, single mom, three kids. And I grew up with this spirituality within my family that was just very, it just seemed very super spiritual. I mean, that’s a simplistic way I’m gonna put it, is that it seemed like just this Christianity on steroids. And so there’s an element there of growing up in my family.

Aaron Smith (05:09)
Mm-hmm.

Melissa Dougherty (05:14)
of this super spiritual type of belief system and it was put in the form of, these spiritual experiences that we’ve had within our family make us kind of special, like our view of Jesus, of God. And so these were the ideas. I didn’t know where they came from though, and that’s very important because you go to a general Christian church or an evangelical Christian church or.

you know, any church out there and it’s, you you preach the Bible. In the concept that I grew up with, it was, but there’s more out there and you gotta be on this higher spiritual plane. This is what Jesus really taught. And so I had a very strong allure to the supernatural. So that’s important to know as a backdrop, just kind of how I grew up. But I didn’t really think much of it. I mean, I became a teenager and I…

didn’t care at all about the things of God, going to church, anything like that until 16 came, very dark place, and just was at a random party one day. And I had a friend there at the time who had just gotten saved, and he’s just there talking about Jesus, telling everybody about God. The irony is that he was drinking himself, but that’s whole different thing. mean, God can use anybody I’m learning to get the point across.

Aaron Smith (06:35)
huh.

Melissa Dougherty (06:39)
I heard the gospel that night, basically, and I believed it. And it was so beautiful because if there was ever a, in my view, a spiritual experience, like a miraculous spiritual experience, I I went from being in the dark, suicidal, absolutely just this one person one night, and I woke up the next day, and I remember like lifting up in my bed thinking, this is new.

Like I felt like whatever it was yesterday died. Like whoever that person was died. And this is so important because I didn’t know what the Bible said about new creation, born again, or anything like that. I felt it before I read it. Like I experienced it before it was confirmed in scripture. smells smelt differently. I craved different foods. I wanted to take care of myself. I wanted to quit cussing. Like all this, I felt clean. Like I felt washed and redeemed, all this.

Aaron Smith (07:12)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, stuff that

no one told you.

Melissa Dougherty (07:36)
It stopped at no one told me. like, this is amazing. It was just the beginning of my honeymoon with God. it was, sorry, that was my iPad. It was quite awesome, you know? so, but the biggest thing I had was this hunger to know the Bible. And that’s ironically where the problem started because in the beginning of my book, was, the word that I used is that I came across what I would have considered very cynical Christians. Like anti-intellectual, just,

They didn’t really want to deal with questions that I had, like hard questions that I had. I wanted to sit down and ask questions about hell. I don’t get it. Why does God send people to hell? Like that’s the wrong question. Now I get it, right? But I don’t understand the violence in the Old Testament. Like I have genuine questions about the Christian faith. Yeah, like these are 101 questions. Questions that had I known. I mean, 2,000 years since the resurrection.

Aaron Smith (08:26)
Normal good questions.

Melissa Dougherty (08:35)
they have been answering since millennia. so, you know what I mean? And so there was an element there where I was just like, what’s wrong with you guys? What’s wrong with you people? What’s happening here? And so there was this allure, okay, to kind of explore more into Christianity, but this looked like a dead end, right? And so I went this way, right? I’m like, these Christians over here, man, they’re open arms. Wow, look at them, they’re thinking.

Aaron Smith (08:57)
Yeah.

Melissa Dougherty (09:04)
They talk about spirituality and man, they’re really open-minded. And a lot of these Christians, they talked about Jesus, they quoted scripture. They just seemed like it was just Christianity on steroids. It seemed way more spiritual. They didn’t shut the door on all these things. There seemed to be alternative explanations for the things that made me uncomfortable like hell or the violence in the Old Testament. and by the way, look, God has corrected all this other stuff in the Bible.

by raising up these spiritual people that can give us new spiritual information. Yeah, and this is what Jesus wanted, this is what Jesus taught. And so I’m like, sign me up, let’s go. And so there’s more to that, but gradually as time went on, I just plunged right into this type of Christianity. And it wasn’t until I had my first child, my now 14-year-old, that was in…

2010, but it was around 2011, it was when two Jehovah’s Witnesses showed up at my door. At this time, I was knee deep in these teachings. I believed in and practiced the law of attraction, speaking things into existence. My mind and words and emotions, especially emotions, had power. Very, very, very emotional. Your emotions are powerful.

Aaron Smith (10:19)
Hmm, very emotional.

Melissa Dougherty (10:25)
then manifestation, lots of other things. There’s so many other things, but just to give you a taste of the things that I was into, the beliefs I was into, thinking they were Christian by the way, thinking that these were things that were taught in the Bible, or things that Jesus really taught. so the Jehovah’s Witnesses show up, and long story short here, I was like, hold on a second, I thought a lot of things that you guys believed were, you know, rumors.

And to be clear, at this point, I had a very open-minded view within my Christian faith that if you said you believed in God, it was always like what we had in common. I was always trying to find what we had in common as not to look like just this closed-minded fundamentalist freak. You know what I mean? It was always like, God is love, let’s be loving, let’s find common ground. I’m so glad that works for you. I’m sure that Jesus would honor that. There’s no way he’s gonna judge you.

Aaron Smith (11:03)
Anyway.

Melissa Dougherty (11:21)
for believing that way, you know? And I thought the same with Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormons. So what tipped me off about them though, and what was just, something’s not right here, was that some of their beliefs did seem really particularly odd to me. And it was the belief of Jesus being Michael the Archangel, and I’m like, what? Where are you getting that from? Like, I’m dumb to the Bible, kind of, but where is that coming from? Yes, and so it was, I felt the…

Aaron Smith (11:43)
Yeah.

That doesn’t sound right. Yeah, there’s something off.

Melissa Dougherty (11:50)
I felt like the Holy Spirit for the first time in a long time. I felt this urgency of go research, go research, and I did. I went and I researched, and then I had a problem because if what they believed was wrong, what standard did I have for that? What was the standard? It was scripture. Okay, well, how do I know I can trust what scripture says? Because if scripture is true, the Jehovah’s Witnesses are wrong.

And it wasn’t that I didn’t trust scripture, I just didn’t have any reason to trust it. I’m like, how do we know there’s not mistakes? How did we know that this was written down correctly? How do we know there’s not books missing, right? Because that was the other thing, is that, look at these missing books that were taken out of the Bible, these other gospels. And so I just had these big question marks, but it wasn’t that I didn’t have any other reason, like tangible reason, to not believe that. So then at that point,

Aaron Smith (12:33)
Yeah.

Melissa Dougherty (12:47)
I was forced to kind of, okay, how do I know if I can trust the Bible? Because if I know the Bible’s true, then the Jehovah’s Witnesses are wrong. But if the Bible’s true, uh-oh, a lot of things I believe are wrong. And that’s really what started me researching if we could trust scripture. And I came across a lot of apologists and really smart scholars who give you the information on how did we get the Bible? so that’s really where that came from. And then…

I came across the serpent sly online where there was this new ager having a discussion with an intellectual Christian. It was very interesting and the Christian posed the question to the new ager of, you believe that we can be like God? Interesting, it sounds like a slimy serpent to me. And I’m like, oh, oh it does. And it just put me back in my chair. A lot of Christians listening might be like, well duh.

Aaron Smith (13:35)
Mm.

Melissa Dougherty (13:43)
Not for me, not for me at that time. That was like the first time I heard that and it just shocked me. I’m like, I fell for it. I fell for literally the oldest lie in the book that we could be like God. Cause I had that belief that I was divine like Jesus. Jesus is not uniquely divine in a lot of, and the scary part is that again, it was made to look Christian. So that’s how that all started and how from that point in 2011, I got into a…

Aaron Smith (14:01)
Mm.

Melissa Dougherty (14:11)
witnessing to Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormons. And it taught me so much, like a lot of people skills, how I could trust my Bible. And I realized, I was in this belief system called New Age, but that really wasn’t the case. It was really this belief system called New Thought. And I didn’t realize there was a big difference between the two until, I would say quite recently, until about two and a half, three years ago now, where I’m like, I’m not an ex-New Ager. I’m actually an ex-New Thoughter.

Aaron Smith (14:25)
Mm-hmm.

Melissa Dougherty (14:41)
I thought that they were just kind of all under the New Age umbrella. I thought New Thought was just this weird wiggity-whack belief. And every wiggity-whack belief I had thought just went underneath the New Age umbrella. That was not the case. And so I discovered really what my spiritual roots were growing up. Like, what was this? Why did this Christianity allow such an open spirituality, a yearning for spiritual experience, and kind of like this…

Aaron Smith (14:47)
Mm-hmm.

Melissa Dougherty (15:09)
metaphysical view of scripture and Jesus. But the New Age doesn’t do that. And so I took a lot of untangling in that regard, but that’s kind of how I got into ministry and where I am at today.

Aaron Smith (15:23)
You know, I never heard of New Thought until I was reading your book. I have heard of New Age for sure. And when you’re describing the things to me, I’m like, oh, I know what that is. Yeah, I know what that is. I didn’t know it had a term. Of course, everything has a term and everything comes from somewhere. But you brought up the slimy serpent. It reminds me this whole thing. You know, all of this slippery slope, all of these sneaky little truths. you had a quote in there from Spurgeon.

Melissa Dougherty (15:27)
Yeah, you know what it is.

Mm-hmm.

Aaron Smith (15:52)
about, it’s not about seeing the lies, about seeing the almost truths. know, like the, it’s like how do you discern between truth and almost truth? And that’s the reality is like when you go back to Genesis, the serpent didn’t tempt Eve with murder or lying or he didn’t tempt her with anything else, he tempted her with questioning the Word of God. He’s like, did God say? And that’s essentially what New Thought is. It’s elevating

Melissa Dougherty (15:56)
Yes.

Aaron Smith (16:19)
from what I’m understanding and from what I’ve seen from other people. It’s elevating your own emotions, your own ideas, your own self above the truth of God and then deciding how that fits in. it sounds like that’s what you started getting presented with. And I think it’s awesome the way God works so many times. Like you said, he can use anyone. was just, when you mentioned that friend that got saved, but was getting drunk with you guys, cause he’s, he’s a brand new baby. And he’s like, he’s like, he’s like, I’m excited. He’s like,

party was already planned, I’m just going to go.” And then just inhibitions go, and he’s just preaching. You know, and I’m sure that God convicted him on that at another point because that’s what God does. God used a similar story in my life where I was at school, there was a bunch of these Christians that I wanted to be friends with. And what’s funny is like they weren’t even really Christians or they grew up and fell away from the Lord and they had like a just a superficial Christianity. Like they were raised in it.

Melissa Dougherty (17:05)
Mm.

Mm-hmm.

Aaron Smith (17:16)
But that even had an influence on me. The little that they had, the ability that they had to influence me in my own walk. So I just thought that was awesome. But the interesting thing that God brought Jehovah Witnesses to you, that that experience opened your eyes and the Holy Spirit was like, hey, listen to what they’re saying and what is that? How is that lining up with what you know of me? Which then led you on this journey in. And I would argue that there’s probably many Christians that struggle with what you were going through.

don’t even struggle with it. They are just in it. They’ve believed things. They don’t open the Word of God. They listen to what their pastor says, and they take it as just 100 % truth without ever exploring that. you felt that prompt in the Holy Spirit. You started researching it. They said this, but I don’t know why I don’t agree with that. There’s something off about it. And you went on that journey.

Melissa Dougherty (17:48)
They’re in it.

Yeah.

Aaron Smith (18:14)
What in the Word of God started making you trust it? Because I know you started looking up, you know, other scholars and other, you intellectuals, but what was it in the Word of God that was like, I need to believe this?

Melissa Dougherty (18:27)
Yeah, for me, I think a lot of things pulled out the rug, but the Gospel of John was particularly powerful because, well, and here’s what’s very interesting about this is that, remember, I got into ministry to Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormons, okay? And a lot of that was doing ministry with former Jehovah’s Witnesses and former.

former Muslims, Muslims, Mormons. And well, yeah, even Muslims, I’m sure, you know, but a different ministry. Yeah. But, you know, let’s take Jehovah’s Witnesses. They don’t believe that Jesus is God. Right? They believe that that is a lie. And that if you believe in the Trinity, that it’s a lie from the pit of, well, Satan, they don’t believe in hell either. And so it’s made up by the church. They call it Christendom.

Aaron Smith (19:03)
That’s a different ministry, yeah.

Melissa Dougherty (19:27)
You know, it’s a derogatory term that it’s, you know, we have the truth that, you know, they think that they had this, but it’s been messed up. We’re the ones here to fix whatever they messed up kind of thing. So one of the fundamental things that I had to learn, see, it’s just very interesting and simultaneously learning about this religion, you have to know why Jesus said he was God, uniquely God, uniquely God, and why it’s such a blasphemous thing to claim.

any sort of powers for yourself that are uniquely God’s. Okay? And so that to me was so powerful because I came from this type of Christianity, which by the way, I had gone to church. Like a non-heretical church. a church. Yeah, like a regular, you know, just, look, there’s a big church, let’s go there. A church, you know, that, you know.

Aaron Smith (20:18)
Good Church.

Melissa Dougherty (20:26)
volunteering and helping out while believing these things. Like that’s how Christian it sounded. I just thought I was smarter. I thought that I knew better. I thought that, you know, what they’re teaching is great and that’s the other thing is that a lot of things that were taught were more life application principles. So if there were more scripture being taught that I didn’t agree with, I’m like yeah they don’t understand. They’re not there. They’re not ready to understand.

the entirety of it, but I was still involved in my church. So that’s really important. There wasn’t really anything that tipped me off. But learning that it is possible for a Christian to say, I’m not God, I would never say that. I would never say that I’m, I didn’t fall for the serpent’s lie. I don’t believe that I’m God. No, no, here’s where it comes in. This is where it gets tricky, is that the divinity, the power, let’s just say power.

that is uniquely given to Jesus, okay, is then given to you as somebody who’s awakened to it, okay? So like the way that it was framed to me, for example, was the Christ consciousness, all right? This is a metaphysical kind of definition for becoming conscious of this inherent power that you have as an image bearer of God. Do you see how like Christian this sounds?

Aaron Smith (21:36)
Mm-hmm.

yeah.

Melissa Dougherty (21:50)
Yeah, like you’re an image bearer of God. Here, it’s in scripture. And being an image bearer means that you are the exact duplicate of God. You’re the image of God. You can have that power and that ability to create. You’re just like God. He created, you can create too. You just have to see it. This is what Jesus taught. There’s nothing in there saying, you’re God.

But do you see everything that I just said basically says, you’re God. It’s tricky. It doesn’t come out and quite say it. And so that’s how it’s posed to me. It’s like, yeah, Jesus was the Christ. You have the Holy Spirit dwelling in you, don’t you? Well, yeah. Well, so did Jesus. That means that you have the same power he had. This is the Christ within. You have Christ within, don’t you? Well, yeah, of course I do. That means you have the same power Jesus has. You see how it’s tricky. Because even a lot of Christians listening to that, they’re like, well,

Aaron Smith (22:20)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Melissa Dougherty (22:46)
I have the Holy Spirit, I have Christ inside me, huh, yeah, it’s the definition of terms, okay, it’s the same changing of terms. And so all of that to say and learning about the Jehovah’s Witness view of Jesus isn’t God.

Aaron Smith (22:48)
Yeah.

Melissa Dougherty (23:01)
was so humbling for me to realize, no, no, no, that only uniquely belongs to Jesus. And there’s a sovereignty and a providence there that we are not equal to God and we are not entitled to that power as believers. And in New Thought, the three things that you would want, mostly in that belief system,

Aaron Smith (23:11)
Mm-hmm.

Melissa Dougherty (23:31)
There’s a lot of other things, but I just simplify it. You want health, wealth, and romance. Those are the three things that people want more than anything. so when you’re told that, and by the way, these beliefs, new thought beliefs began with the idea that you could heal yourself through your right thinking, and then it later evolved into this prosperity. So the health and prosperity idea that God always wants you to be health and prosperous, that’s a new thought idea.

Aaron Smith (23:51)
Mm-hmm.

Melissa Dougherty (24:01)
And so people might hear that and they think, prosperity gospel, yeah, that’s actually a new thought concept. Very interesting. And then affirming in the now, I am statements, that’s once again kind of taking an idea of divinity and saying, there’s power in your I am, because there’s power in your thoughts, words, and feelings. And so in learning, in other words, in unlearning all of these concepts that

Aaron Smith (24:01)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Melissa Dougherty (24:30)
were just unique to Jesus. It was the gospel of John that just, you know what I mean? Like it gets you kind of, it gets you. I remember reading it and I just put the Bible down and I’m like, that is so good. Because it’s not only is it good, but it’s better. Like being your own God is a burden. It’s not a good thing. And it’s just so tricky how it comes in this language of humility, but it sells you pride. It comes in this language of,

Aaron Smith (24:45)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Melissa Dougherty (25:00)
personal power, but it sells you emptiness at the same, you know what I mean? It’s so tricky in that regard.

Aaron Smith (25:07)
Well,

in a lot of these new thought lies, these happy lies that have been purveyed, they get manifested—I’m using that word on purpose—in different ways and different groups, depending on how, you know, in the prosperity gospel sector, you you have this

Melissa Dougherty (25:20)
Yes.

Aaron Smith (25:28)
Hey, we’re going to tap into the power of God so that we can have the prosperity that God wants us to have. I I brought this up a lot of times because it’s so sad to me, but I had an email once from a wife saying, you know, she, her equation went this way. God wants me to be happy. I’m not happy in my marriage. Therefore God wants me to leave my husband. Right? So the prosperity idea is like, no, I’m not getting what God wants me to have. Therefore his will is something else.

Melissa Dougherty (25:48)
Yes.

100%.

Aaron Smith (25:56)
And then you have, you were talking about that divinity, that internal divinity that comes from that little God concept that comes out of some other church traditions. And what it always does is it’s going to minimize Christ and it’s going to elevate you on every aspect, which is the exact opposite of what Paul said. He’s like, I must decrease, know, or John said, I must decrease so that he must increase. And you have the same principle being preached throughout all the Bible.

about us lessening ourselves and elevating Christ. And so you have this…it sounds like you…in all of these different areas of Christendom, you…and even in the cult Christian, the Christian cults, know, Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormonism, they’ve taken the same ideas and they just have amplified them. You know, I was having a conversation with a Jehovah’s Witness and I was preaching to him and he was trying to preach to me and…

Melissa Dougherty (26:31)
again.

Aaron Smith (26:55)
I just had to keep going back to the idea of who Christ was because that’s all that matters at the end of day for him to have his mind changed. It’s not whether this verse over here means this or this section of the Bible means this. It’s, Jesus God? No. Well then, how did Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross atone for your sins? He’s like, well, it just did. I’m like, well, so could your sacrifice atone for my sins? No. Well then, how did Christ’s? The only way it could is if

was God. Because man cannot atone for man’s sin. And that got him thinking. He didn’t surrender to that. But I’m like, unless Jesus is God, his death on the cross means nothing. It’s like putting another human being on the cross and trying to say that their sacrifice is enough for the sins of the whole world. I said, doesn’t work. all of these new thoughts, when they permeate church and the truth, what it does is it minimizes

Christ is and it elevates who we are. That’s what I keep hearing. And you were seeing that even though you weren’t catching it in church necessarily, this whole situation with the Jehovah Witness and digging in and talking with ex-Jehovah Witnesses recognizing like, wait a minute, the deity of Christ changes everything about what I believe. I mean, it really… Go ahead.

Melissa Dougherty (28:12)
Yeah, and the salvation

aspect of it too, like what you were saying.

Aaron Smith (28:17)
Yeah, and it’s, I mean, when it comes down to the gospel, this is another thing I’ve had in a lot of these, I don’t know what the terms are, not prosperity, but hypercharismatic circles, this idea of having enough faith. you don’t have enough faith to get XYZ, which again is minimizing the work of Christ.

Melissa Dougherty (28:31)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Yes.

Aaron Smith (28:45)
in your life, minimizing the work of the Holy Spirit in your life, minimizing the fact that His grace is sufficient for us, that His power is made perfect in our weakness, and that we should glory in our weakness because it means He’s going to make us strong because we become strengthened by His strength, not our own. It all minimizes the Word, minimizes the truth, minimizes the things that God already said and are permanent, and it elevates what we are doing, which—

Detrimentally, like you said, that burden of being God, being divine. Like there’s a burden of like, I’m not doing enough. I failed. So therefore, you know, have I lost something? It puts all of the burden of the cross on you, which is the exact opposite of the good news. It’s the cross, the burden of the cross is put on Christ for our sake, which then frees us. So how I want to go to the new thoughts. I’m sure our listeners, this is probably the first time hearing this idea of new thought.

Melissa Dougherty (29:43)
you

Aaron Smith (29:44)
This is a, I would imagine it’s postmodern, it’s like a new version of Gnosticism or the opposite of Gnosticism because we kind of went postmodern to this new version of Gnosticism where everyone’s like, no, everything’s what we can touch, what we can feel, what’s physical. And then in the church, there was this swing to like hyper spiritual, not trust necessarily the whole word of God, but you know, let’s impart onto it what we feel.

I want dig into a little bit of that because I want my listeners to pray and evaluate their own selves. What things are they believing? What things are they hearing? Are they taking as 1 John tells us and testing every spirit, testing everything we hear through the Word of God and letting the Word of God be the final truth for us? I know I’m saying a lot. In the New Thought Belief system, what was one of the hardest ones, of the hardest new thoughts, beliefs that you had to let go of?

as you were kind of shifting away from that.

Melissa Dougherty (30:44)
Well, there’s so many.

There’s two that I really struggled with. I will start with their definition of love. And I say they, like the new thought definition of love. In this belief system, I have a whole chapter. There’s always gonna be more in the book, by the way, everyone listening, but there’s a whole chapter about defining terms. one, thank you.

Aaron Smith (31:10)
I love that chapter by the way. That’s a great

chapter. You go through all of these definition terms and then what New Thoughts defines it as and what the Bible defines it as. And I thought that was beautifully done.

Melissa Dougherty (31:20)
Yeah, it’s

metaphysical Christianity, know, the positive thinking movement in America, you know, and metaphysical just means that there’s always a deeper meaning, like an esoteric hidden meaning in whatever it is that you’re reading. So, for example, love, all right? Love was a power, okay? Two buzzwords within the New Thought movement is vibrations and frequencies.

Aaron Smith (31:48)
Mm-hmm.

Melissa Dougherty (31:48)
you will hear a lot of misuse of science along with a lot of new thought beliefs to elevate your mind power. Okay? So what I mean by that is your feelings have the highest vibrational frequency in the universe. So how you feel about something is fundamentally important on if it will materialize in your reality. Are you following?

The highest vibrational frequency you can feel and be on is love. So Jesus was the example of what it means to live in a posture of constant love, the highest vibration, the highest frequency they would say. So when he walked on water, when he healed people, he was living within that vibration. The highest law is love. So whenever they would say God is love,

To me, that’s like, man, love is God. Love is how we will heal ourselves. Love is how we attract into, when you show love for anything, that is in essence what you are doing to yourself. Love your neighbor. So if you were to hear this through that lens, all of a sudden it makes scripture really different wherever the word love is used.

So to love your neighbor means you’re loving yourself, which means feeling towards them these feelings of love, because ultimately if you feel anything that’s less positive, you’re bringing that on yourself. Like it’s in that sense, it kind of sounds like karma, know? Like it sounds like, whatever I’m doing to them, I’m doing to myself. And so that took me a while to unlearn. In fact, I don’t have my Bible here with me. I made a video about this actually a long time ago.

Aaron Smith (33:32)
Yeah.

Melissa Dougherty (33:43)
where I put a little squiggle, like a star and a squiggle next to the scriptures that talked about love, because I’m like, I don’t know what that means. What does that actually mean? And that’s, by the way, the posture we should go to scripture with, is what did Paul, Jesus, Luke, Matthew, what did they mean when this was being written? And then I’m going to reform around that meaning, not impose my meaning to scripture.

Aaron Smith (33:50)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Melissa Dougherty (34:12)
So that’s the first one was love. The second one, well, I practiced the law of attraction, but the argument, for so long, I could not figure this out. And I even have a section in my book about this. But the belief that my experience equals truth and it worked. Like it worked. How do you explain to me that

Whatever it was, I was practicing the law of attraction, which if people don’t know what that is, by the way, if you’re listening and you’re like, what are you talking about? First, that was made popular by the book The Secret by Rhonda Byrne. Loved that, I loved that book. I read The Power by her as well. That one was, also, that The Power is written by Rhonda Byrne, but it’s about the law of attraction, which they also call the law of love. Very interesting. It’s the most powerful,

Power in the universe. It’s magic, basically. It’s the belief that like attracts like. And everything that I just said, take it as if your thoughts are things. Okay, thoughts are things. That’s basically the simplest way I can put it. You are a mirror. And whatever you are feeling, thinking, and speaking must come to you. You are an attractional being. And positive and negative…

Aaron Smith (35:24)
Yeah.

like a magnet.

Melissa Dougherty (35:39)
Frequencies, vibrations, whatever it is, you’re a magnet. You are a divine magnet and you are attracting those things into you. So this is, they say, good news. Because then that means you can change the way you’re thinking and it will change your life. And the way they posture this is such good marketing because it’s so confident. You must get this. You will get this if you change the way you’re thinking and feeling and blah, blah. Okay, now here’s the thing. What do you do?

Aaron Smith (36:06)
and good.

Melissa Dougherty (36:09)
when you’re doing that and it works. That right? Okay. So what do you do if I am, let me be very specific. I am thinking about, I want to attract, they say play with it. Play with the magic of your mind. Okay. The mind magic that you can bend reality to your thoughts. Play with it. Test it. We are confident that it will work. Okay. Now what do you do?

Aaron Smith (36:11)
You know, yeah.

Melissa Dougherty (36:35)
There’s lots of factors that some people might think, oh, know, confirmation bias. Oh, like, there’s another word for it too, that if you’re actually looking for something, you will see it. Okay, but put that aside for a second. Yeah, there you go, man, look at you. Yes, okay. You thought of that a little too quickly. That was great. Yeah, but let’s just say something crazy. Think of something really, really random out there. I wanna imagine a red high heeled shoe in the middle of the road missing its heel.

Aaron Smith (36:43)
Yeah, the better mine half phenomenon. Yeah.

you

Melissa Dougherty (37:04)
something dumb, right? You’re like, I’m gonna think of something so out there that I have to, I will notice it when I see it, but I attracted it into my reality. And maybe a week, and then you feel it. You think about it, you put it out there. You are believing that you will see this random thing, whatever it is, this red high heeled shoe missing a heel. And my, you are driving down the road one day on the side of the road randomly out of nowhere. There’s a red high heeled shoe missing its heel.

Aaron Smith (37:06)
Okay.

Melissa Dougherty (37:33)
And then you’re like, it works. Like, what do do with that, right? And then you think about other things that you can attract into your reality. The example given in the book by Rhonda Byrne herself was a calla lily, a flower that she wanted to attract into her reality. And she tells the story about how she went to dinner one night at a friend’s house and she was shocked, but you’re not supposed to be shocked.

Aaron Smith (37:36)
Yeah.

Melissa Dougherty (37:59)
You’re not supposed to act and feel shocked. You’re supposed to be like, nope, this is the way, this is real, this is my reality. Because again, you have to be careful of your feelings and your thoughts. She sits down at the table and she sees the calla lilies and doesn’t say anything, she says. And then as she’s leaving, she says out of nowhere, one of the people there plucks a calla lily and just hands it to her. And she’s like, that’s the power of the law of attraction. And so it’s like, so in other words, all that to say,

Aaron Smith (38:03)
you

Melissa Dougherty (38:28)
That, I struggled with that. I’m like, what do do? Whenever you’re told, wow, there’s a Christian way to do this, it works. So therefore, it’s true, right? There’s a Christian way to practice this thing that obviously works. I had the hardest time with that argument. And so I’m hoping that in the book, I write about the reasons why this can work.

And so the philosophies that go behind that concept as well. So yeah, those are the two things that I struggled with.

Aaron Smith (38:52)
Yeah.

I literally was just, this is where I ended in the book was in this section of it, it works. Yeah. What I, I manifested, yeah. Which those are, yeah, those are the terms that people use. And, and I,

Melissa Dougherty (39:03)
What is it? no way. You manifested it.

Like what do you

do with those strange coincidences that are not coincidences, right? It’s… Yeah, yeah.

Aaron Smith (39:18)
Well, I don’t believe in coincidences. I

never have because I believe God orchestrates things and things happen. also I believe God gave us really powerful brains. They’re very, very powerful. mean, our brain literally controls every aspect of our body, our breathing, our blood pressure, hormones. And so it makes sense to me that these types of things work.

On some part, they’re psychological tricks. But we also have to remember we are very spiritual creatures, and I’m not trying to go hyper-spiritual. I’m being honest. The Bible tells us that the battles that we are against are not against flesh and blood, but against the principalities, the powers of this dark age. And so it makes sense, and you even bring this up in the book, that these things can work, but just because they work doesn’t mean they’re the right way. And it also means the enemy can absolutely

come and give you things and present things to you and make things manifest for you because his whole goal at end of the day is to deceive, to remove you from the love of God, to take you away if he can. And that’s what he’s trying to do. Keep you blinded, keep you in the dark. And that is a huge danger and it makes sense when you say it was a hard thing because you’re like, I’m doing these things and they’re working. I feel better. I’m less depressed.

things are changing my life. I’m making more money. And that is a huge danger because just because those things are happening doesn’t mean it’s how God wants us to operate. Yeah.

Melissa Dougherty (40:52)
and you assume God is blessing you. You assume that that is

God confirming to you that these things are good and true. It’s tricky because, and we see this in the church, well look at the size of my congregation, of course God is blessing me. Look at the size of my YouTube channel, of course God is blessing me, I must be doing something right. That doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re doing something right, it’s tricky.

Aaron Smith (41:07)
Yeah, this is good.

Well, let’s flip it on its head. We just had a Bible time with my kids this morning and we were talking about how Jesus came up to a blind man and the disciple was like, who sinned? Was it him or was his parents? And he’s like, well, neither. He’s like, this is so that the glory of God will be shown. And they’re like, well, because that was not what they understood. They understood just as Job’s friends did. You do right, God blesses you. You do wrong, God curses you.

Melissa Dougherty (41:45)
Yeah. Exactly.

Aaron Smith (41:47)
And the Bible tells us that the rain falls on the good and the bad. God gives the sunlight to the good and the bad. I think it’s called the general graces or the general mercies of God. He just takes care of the world the way he promises he’s going to do. But if our mentality is like, this thing’s working, therefore this is from God, then we have to flip it on our head and be like, well, if it’s not working, it’s

Melissa Dougherty (41:51)
And just on the address, yeah.

Aaron Smith (42:16)
not from God. And you can’t just blanket things that way. You have to look at the Word of God and be like, how does God want me to deal with these things? How does God want me to operate in this world regardless of because I could cheat someone and get rich? I mean, well, I got rich.

Melissa Dougherty (42:17)
Yeah, you have to test. You have to test all things.

Yeah, it’s kind of like you were saying before.

Yeah, like happiness quest versus truth quest kind of thing. And I think that’s really what it is,

Aaron Smith (42:40)
Yeah,

and if any one of these new thoughts, this way of thinking… I always tell people when comes to the prosperity gospel, all of these new thought things actually, just as we were talking about before, they are almost true. This is why they work because, as the Bible says, to think on things that are above, to think on things that are pure and good and noteworthy.

And that’s what God wants us to dwell on because our thoughts matter. That’s a biblical truth. Our thoughts matter. And it says, take every thought captive into the obedience of Christ, tearing down strongholds and everything that raises itself up against the knowledge of God. So these ways of being, I always call it, it’s counterfeit, it’s cop, it’s not counterfeit, yeah, it’s counterfeit and it’s plagiarism. There’s lots of people out there that are pseudo-Christian and they just steal the truths of God and they

they put their, you know, their name by the byline. Like this quote’s from me, but it’s like, God said that actually. You don’t get the credit for that. And so when you like Tony Robbins, all these, like this idea of self-help often works because it’s based on actual truths from God, but they’re manipulated, counterfeited, and plagiarized. They’re short-changed. what it does is it takes it as in

Melissa Dougherty (43:43)
Mm-hmm.

Yes.

They’re short-changed.

Aaron Smith (44:09)
believe it’s Romans, it says they worship the creation rather than the Creator. It’s like, look how these things bless you so that you can take credit for the blessings, so that you can take credit for the

Melissa Dougherty (44:18)
Yeah, and they wouldn’t even see it that way.

That’s the tricky part.

Aaron Smith (44:22)
And it’s hard because truth is truth no matter where comes from, but God wants the credit for it. God wants to be the one who is the truth giver. He is truth. So when we take the credit for it, it turns into this new thought idea. It turns into new age thinking. It turns into, am God, not you.

Melissa Dougherty (44:40)
Yeah, and it’s interesting with the whole thing that

goes back to his self.

Aaron Smith (44:47)
Self-worship. We’re not just creation. I want go back to the…you talked about image bearers. Because again, these all…a lot of these new…I was reading these new thought ideas and how they’ve permeated the church and they just kind of exist, these lies. They are founded in things that the Bible says. So when you can read and be like, see, it says it right here. See, like, look what it says right here. This is…you know, I…

Melissa Dougherty (45:12)
Yes.

Aaron Smith (45:16)
This is why I have such a hard time with the major extremes on some of the Christian theologies, theological positions. On one extreme you have all spiritual, all feeling. On another extreme you have, you know, black and white only. And I think there’s a definitely not an extreme on either one of those. When some people in the Reformed world, which I love,

and there’s people in the Charismatic world that I love and I believe that they love Jesus and they’re believers, they’ll say, like, there’s nothing good in us at all. And then on the other side, they’ll have, no, I’m like God. God’s divinity is in me. And you’re like, well, no, actually, neither of those are true, but partially true. When Jesus talks about the image of God in us, he uses the example of a coin. The coin was not Caesar, but it had Caesar’s image on it. And he says, well, then give to Caesar what’s his.

And the point that he was giving to the Pharisees was like, you aren’t giving yourselves to your Creator. You are holding back and making yourselves higher than Him with your laws. And he’s saying the image that’s on you is His image. Give it back to Him. He’s not saying they’re God or gods. He’s just saying that the stamp that’s on them, the uniqueness of their creation is His image. They bear that likeness in the way they were created.

Melissa Dougherty (46:29)
Mm-hmm.

Aaron Smith (46:42)
But so I would I could never tell someone that they have nothing in them That’s redeemable or good because that’s not true. The only reason we’re redeemable is because we’re made in his image. He can redeem what is his Already we’re in his image, but I can also not say that we’re little gods that we are divine in because we’re made in his image We are Jesus himself. We are that that’s to lower Christ down and to raise ourself up And so there’s this middle space that us as believers get to wrestle with for our whole life

Melissa Dougherty (46:53)
Mm-hmm.

Aaron Smith (47:12)
of like, does it look like to be made in His image, to be humble and recognize that I’m a sinner, but I’m also saved, that I’m also freed from the chains of sin and death. And I think that’s where a lot of this stuff gets so attractive, is because it’s going to play on our flesh in one way the other. It’s going to say, you want to be like God? You are. And I go, yeah. Or…

Melissa Dougherty (47:37)
Mm-hmm.

Aaron Smith (47:40)
What do you have to say about that? I was just ranting for a little bit.

Melissa Dougherty (47:43)
Yeah, I know. I think that a lot of the issue comes from the idea that humans are inherently good. I think that that’s the part of the problem is that, you have reformed who would say, you know, there’s nothing good in you. There is some truth to that in that regard where there’s, especially when it comes to human nature, we will devolve into a chaotic, are like selfishness, you know? This is why

Aaron Smith (47:49)
Mm-hmm.

We’re prone

to it.

Melissa Dougherty (48:13)
Yeah, and this

is, it’s so interesting how even forms of government can show you this inherent truth, like socialism. Why doesn’t it work? Because humans aren’t good. Like, you know what I mean? Like, we, it looks good on paper, but we’re not, we, we, will choose the wrong thing thinking it’s good, right? And so there’s, there’s this inherent goodness that we think we have that we don’t. That is a fundamental belief of new thought, is that humans are inherently good because you have the divine within.

Aaron Smith (48:21)
Yeah. Exactly.

Melissa Dougherty (48:43)
and your only sin is your ignorance to that. So if you can see that you are enough, that you are this, that you are that, that you are an image bearer of God in the sense that you share that worth of God, then you will be, it’s like backwards, it kind of puts its on its head. And you brought up the, let’s take love, right? We brought that up before. Because I had to learn so much about it, 1 John was like a really good study on this.

Aaron Smith (48:57)
Yeah, the divinity.

Melissa Dougherty (49:13)
It’s to what you’re saying. You’re made in the image of God, so that means, say you’re a non-believer, right? This is a lot of arguments that atheists make about God even existing. Is that, well, I can do good things, and I don’t believe in God. well, who’s to say what’s good? That’s a whole other argument, because if you don’t believe in God, by what standard? anyway, yeah, so love, all right? You can take love. Say you’re an atheist or non-believer or whatever. You can believe in any other religion, and you have a child, and you love your child.

Aaron Smith (49:31)
Yeah.

Melissa Dougherty (49:42)
That means you’re made in the image of God. You have this ability to feel love, to give love, to do unselfish things. David Wood is a great example of this. I don’t know if anybody knows who David Wood is, but he’s a very popular Christian apologist online who deals a lot with Muslim theology and atheist theology. His best friend was Nabil Qureshi. He’s mentioned in his book.

Anyway, David’s very unique because David’s a psychopath. He can’t feel anything. Right? Like he doesn’t, you know what I mean? Like he feels, oh, yeah, yeah, huh, huh. David is a, this is one of the fundamental things about his testimony. It’s actually kind of an R rated testimony that he has. He tried to commit a murder. Yeah, he tried to kill his own dad.

Aaron Smith (50:16)
What? He says that this is what he says about himself.

I’m Googling him right now.

Melissa Dougherty (50:35)
and he felt he didn’t feel anything, right? And it’s a very interesting story. In prison, he became a believer. He has one of the most interesting testimonies I’ve ever heard in my life. Anyway, the point is that I bring him up. He’s an image bearer of God. Can he love? Like, can he do these things? And so it’s very interesting to kind of look at the morality of that. Here’s all this to say. The point that John, one of the points that John is making, right? Because you have all these four different words for love in Greek. You have eros.

You have, gosh, what’s the other one? Jorge? Yeah, like you have, have, you know, romantic love, friend love. What’s the other one? Yeah, Eros, yes, exactly. And then, then, so you can feel those three things, right? You can feel, you know, friendly love, romantic love, all these other types of love. And then there’s Agape, okay? And that’s what he’s saying. like, you can feel these things, but you’re made complete.

Aaron Smith (51:06)
Philadelphia.

Aeros.

and then a gap.

Melissa Dougherty (51:34)
in God’s love. Like now you can understand God love, agape, and as a believer, because you the indwelt Holy Spirit, this is how you will know that you are followers of God. And that’s the type of love that he’s talking about. So in other words, it could be love, it could be anything, you’re shortchanged in it. You’re an image bearer of God, shortchanged in what it means to be made whole and complete in God. This is a theme throughout my whole book.

Because the idea in new thought is that you’re already whole, that you are already complete. Your sin is that you don’t recognize that. And I’m here to say, no, no, there’s only one that can make you whole. You are not inherently divine. You are not inherently good. It’s you have to have Him come make you new in order to know what that means.

That’s kind of what I would put forth as far as being made complete in God and being image bearers. It’s that yes, you are made in the image of God, but you are not born children of God. They are not the same thing. And John 3 talks about this. Everybody loves John 3, 16. know, for God to love the world that he gave his one and only son, that whoever believes in him shall have everlasting life. But they don’t like read the rest.

Which I find fascinating. The rest of it, I think it’s verses 17 through 20, 22 I think it is. But basically he’s saying that I didn’t come to the world to condemn the world. people in a lot of fluffy, fuzzy, teddy bear belief systems of Christianity love to use that. They’ll say, look, he didn’t come to condemn. But I’m like, yeah, keep reading. It’s because you’re already condemned. You’re already condemned. He didn’t come to condemn you because you already are condemned.

Aaron Smith (53:15)
Exactly.

Melissa Dougherty (53:21)
And he even says, later on, I’m paraphrasing all this by memory, it’s that those who don’t believe are condemned already. And I’m like, all right, so that means that you’re born in this aspect of being in the image of God, but you’re born into condemnation. He comes to save you from that, which implies that you are not whole. You’re not inherently whole. And then if you keep reading, it’s talking about why. Why don’t they?

come into the light. The light is coming to the world. They refuse to come to the light because they love their darkness. They love their sin. And I think that that’s just so interesting because they don’t think of it as darkness. It’s the light that’s dark. Luke talks about this. Be careful that the light you have isn’t darkness. Satan comes as an angel of light. So these are themes throughout my book that I play with. Wholeness, dark light.

Aaron Smith (53:55)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Melissa Dougherty (54:19)
Don’t be afraid of the light.

Aaron Smith (54:19)
Yep.

And I love also, I just want to point this out. You have in a lot of these sections, is it at end of every chapter you have like a focus on the truth and then you have like a stand firm section and it’s like here’s these lies and here’s how to know what the truth is about them and then here’s how to stand on the truth.

Melissa Dougherty (54:28)
Most chapters, yeah. Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Aaron Smith (54:42)
So it’s very applicable and I love that about your book. I actually love the way you write also. I just want to make note of that. I know I watched your video and you’re like, I never wanted to do this, but I did it. And you’re a really good writer. And I love the humor that you have, the humor you put throughout it also. So, because it’s a very heavy subject in some places, but you have these little bits of humor in there that I thought you have a gift for it. I just want you to know that.

Melissa Dougherty (54:47)
Thank you. Very intimidating to write a book.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Aaron Smith (55:09)
So you should keep doing it. Something

Melissa Dougherty (55:10)
Thank you. I appreciate it.

Aaron Smith (55:11)
that I want to just really highlight, the whole point of this book is to dispel the lies. You’re dragging these lies that are hidden in plain sight into the light so that believers, and non-believers, but you’re really focused on speaking to believers, I think, in the book, to check the things that they’re believing against the Word of God.

Melissa Dougherty (55:22)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Aaron Smith (55:37)
and actually letting the Word of God be the truth foundation, not what they impose on it, not what they want it to mean, but what does it actually mean? What is it actually saying? how should my life be formed around it rather than the other way around? The Church in many ways—I’m not saying that I hate generalizations, but it’s hard to do because it’s hard not to do—in many ways and in many places has

boiled the Word of God down to just a bunch of good ideas rather than the… Yeah, it’s like, here’s some moral truths, here’s some good ideas, let me… I’m going to pull this little piece out and I’m going to wrap my story around that. And you miss the context, you miss the purpose, you miss the meaning. And then we also, what we do, and this is the whole… I think this is the whole heart behind New Thought and it’s the whole heart behind what the enemy does, is we superimpose ourselves everywhere.

Melissa Dougherty (56:09)
Yeah. Morality.

Aaron Smith (56:34)
We’re like, this, how does this apply to me directly? Like, well, maybe it’s not has nothing to do with you actually. Maybe it has something to do with the character of God. Maybe you need to surrender your view of God to this idea of God rather than you trying to superimpose yourself on the scriptures. But I just want to I just wanted to bring that to the attention. This is something that we do always with my audience. it’s literally our home ministry. We talk about marriage. We use marriage as a platform to to push people to Jesus and to push people to the word of God. That’s literally what we use.

Melissa Dougherty (56:37)
Yes.

Aaron Smith (57:04)
marriage for is to talk about that. And that’s your heart in this book is making sure that we as believers are not relying on our emotions, not relying on what someone told us, not relying on these ideas that exist out here, but actually to focus them all down into like, what is the word actually said? And how does that, what does that mean for me in the body of Christ? How can my listeners

Melissa Dougherty (57:29)
Mm-hmm.

Aaron Smith (57:34)
First of if get the book, you have lot of, like I said, application. Here’s how you can stand on the truth. But what can they do right now? What are some steps they can be taking so that they can actually trust the Word of God? They can know that what they… Maybe they’ve been believing some of these happy lies, you know, these new thought ideas. What would you say to them to draw them back to the Word of God? Where would you want them to start? It sounds like John. I love the Gospel of John. It’s the most spiritual.

Melissa Dougherty (57:43)
Mm.

Mm-hmm.

Aaron Smith (58:02)
chapter. It’s got most of his miracles in it, but in a different way. So how would you draw my listeners back to the Word of God?

Melissa Dougherty (58:11)
Yeah, well actually it’s kind of funny. was purposely looking for something I wrote down during another interview a while back that was absolutely brilliant and it’s right over there. I’m gonna break protocol and go grab it real quick. Don’t worry, I’m coming back, I promise.

Aaron Smith (58:22)
Go get it. Go get it.

We’ll look at your painting on the wall. That’s yours, right?

Melissa Dougherty (58:29)
That is mine. Yeah. That’s semi-professional artistry. Comes in handy. Okay, there. I’m back. All right. Now, I was in an interview and I thought that this was one of the most brilliant things. And it’s one of those things that you hear that after writing a book, you’re like, man, I wish that I put this in my book. It was so good. Okay, it’s four things to look out for. Okay, when I am thinking about what listeners need to do.

Practically speaking about this, first, know what this movement is. Second, know scripture, right? That’s pretty basic. You gotta know what this is in order to even spot it, which is why I wrote this book, is every chapter had to be nuanced in this regard, because it’s like what you said, some of it’s very good, and some of it isn’t. So how do we, yeah, it’s like you’re signing up for this belief system, not realizing that’s what it is, it’s really subtle. However, let me give people what I would consider

Aaron Smith (59:16)
Close, so close.

Melissa Dougherty (59:27)
a element of understanding what this is and what to do about it. First, if you’re trying to understand what new thought is or anything in general, the first thing you’ve got to remember or ask yourself is, it new? Is this new? Is this something that somebody’s coming for saying, hey, I have new spiritual information for you? Second, is it secretive? Yes. Second, this is very important, is it a secret? Is this secretive?

Aaron Smith (59:48)
Danger. Yeah.

Melissa Dougherty (59:54)
We love this. Okay, let me just say, this is what got me. Because I was like, oh, I’ve stumbled upon some secret, hidden, spiritual wisdom that nobody knows. Yeah, everybody knows this. Everybody for millennia have been duped by this esoteric, look, there’s new spiritual hidden information. Is it secret? Because it’s really not a secret.

Aaron Smith (1:00:04)
Hmm. Yeah.

Yeah, we’re

continually having that craving from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. We’re constantly like, what’s that secret we need to know?

Melissa Dougherty (1:00:20)
Yeah. It makes it where Jesus is not enough.

Yeah, like he’s not enough. I want more. Give me more. Yeah, and it’s the sin of more. I want more spirituality, more of this. The third thing is who and what is emphasized. Okay, so if this is the tricky one, because like I said, a lot of this stuff can sound biblical, but it’s a very hard question to ask yourself. Who or what is emphasized? And then the last one is who gets the glory.

Aaron Smith (1:00:26)
Mm-hmm. That’s not enough.

Yeah.

Melissa Dougherty (1:00:50)
And the problem is, that, like I said before, it’s like this comes, it sells you pride with the language of humility. So we would, we would go over that list. Some people listening like, yeah, that’s not me. Are you sure? You know what I mean? And I think sometimes it takes, you know, kind of pulling back those layers as a Christian, which the fundamental plight of the Christian is to see how we can be more like Jesus, right? But you’re not Jesus. How you can be more like

Aaron Smith (1:01:06)
Mm-hmm.

You’re not Jesus.

Melissa Dougherty (1:01:20)
Yeah, well,

let me rephrase it. How can you be more like God? Right? That doesn’t mean that you can become God. You know what I mean? It’s like there’s this element of knowing what’s a straight line versus what’s a squiggly line and seeing, oh, I know I should be doing this. And then thinking you’re doing this, but you’re really doing the squiggly line. That’s where it gets tricky. those are the things I think I would leave your listeners with to kind of think about.

maybe with this belief system.

Aaron Smith (1:01:53)
I like that. So, is it new? Is it secret? Like exclusive? Those are important things. The exclusive one, I was actually going mention this earlier, I went on some other ramp, I guess. But something that I’ve learned to understand about the truths of the Word of God is if they cannot be applied in every human’s life, then it’s probably not the truth from Word of God. What I mean by that is the prosperity gospel does not work.

Melissa Dougherty (1:01:56)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah. Yeah.

Aaron Smith (1:02:24)
everywhere. It might work in Beverly Hills. It might work in certain places in Florida. It might work on some level, this idea of God wants me to be prosperous, but it doesn’t work in the depths of the Congo. It doesn’t work in impoverished Africa. It doesn’t work in impoverished India. you can’t take that gospel. That gospel doesn’t work with everyone. So the truths of the Word of God, the truths

Melissa Dougherty (1:02:37)
Mm-hmm.

Aaron Smith (1:02:52)
that God has given to us are universal. They work right now in my studio, in your studio, in Africa, in India. And if they’re exclusive, like you said, to this group of people, then it’s off and it needs to be adjusted. Maybe it’s a little off, but a little off is not good because if you’re a little off shooting to the moon, by the time you get there, you’re going to be trillion miles away. But those are four really good things just to like a litmus test, like, hey, what is this I’m hearing?

Where does that, where does scripture say that? Is it new? Is it secret? Is it something that, or is it, and where’s it coming from? You know, those are really good. It reminds me of, it reminds me of what John says is about testing every spirit. My wife and I did a whole episode months ago, late, early last year talking about, words in the power of words. know that that sounds new agey because people use that like, you’re

Melissa Dougherty (1:03:36)
Bye.

No,

but I know exactly what you’re Yep. I know exactly what you’re Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Aaron Smith (1:03:51)
We were talking about the truth of it, of what words we choose to believe over other words. What

things the Bible says versus what other people say about what the Bible says. And really digging down to the fact that the word of life is spirit. And so the things that we choose to believe and hear are going to affect us, which is again why these things are so weird because they are founded in some form of truth. That’s why they sometimes work.

And so as believers, we are to be vigilant, the word says. We need to be aware of the schemes of the enemy. Understand, doesn’t mean we like need to study the enemy, but we need to be aware of the schemes. How does he work to draw, to deceive us, to tear us down? And at the end of day, really need to be in the Word of God ourselves and know what the word says.

Melissa Dougherty (1:04:38)
Thank

Aaron Smith (1:04:49)
because the Holy Spirit uses the Word of God in our lives to convict us, to teach us, to reveal to us. So when we hear something, I would imagine for you, you heard what those Jehovah Witnesses saying, and whether you knew why or not, the Holy Spirit was using the Word of God to convict you of like, wait, what they’re saying is wrong. I don’t exactly know why, but it is. Because if you would have kept going the other way, you probably would have been like, hey, actually, that sounds okay. Yeah, because I’m kind of on that same… Yeah, let’s synchronize it, but…

Melissa Dougherty (1:05:12)
I think I synchronize this, know, make it, yeah.

Aaron Smith (1:05:18)
I really love that. think that’s really good. And I love what you’re doing with your ministry on YouTube and on your podcast and now in your book, which by the way, it’s called Happy Lies. I’m just going show it to everyone. I love the, again, the practical in it. But this is the deception of our age, isn’t it? And like, it’s the church adopting the world’s message rather than adopting what God said. It’s us believing the serpent. Did God really say that?

This sounds, but you can be God’s. He knows that you’ll be like Him if you know these things. God wants something so much more for us, and those things are going to lead us to, like you said, the weight on our shoulders rather than on Christ’s, and the burden on our shoulders rather than Christ’s. But He’s the one that carries the actual burden. We need to let it go. So, do you have anything left you want to say before we get out of here?

Melissa Dougherty (1:06:09)
No, I think that covers it. I just want to thank you for never having me on.

Aaron Smith (1:06:12)
Yeah.

Yeah, well, thank me. Thank me. It’s elevating me. Now, thank you for what you’re doing. I really appreciate it. And we need we need more truth tellers pointing people back to Jesus and his words, not just the red words, but like the Bible as a whole, which this is probably there’s a whole nother conversation. But it’s why I have you ever read the book The Word of God in English by Leland Reichen? He’s a

Melissa Dougherty (1:06:16)
I’m sorry.

Mm-mm.

Aaron Smith (1:06:43)
He’s not a Bible scholar. He’s a literary scholar. He studies language and writing. And he builds a whole case on why, essentially, translations are so much better than dynamic equivalent translations. And dynamic equivalent would be like the NIV, which is a very mild version, but the message would be far on that side. Essentially, where the translators impose what they believe the writer meant.

on the Word of God rather than what did the author say. Let’s just put what he said and then let the Holy Spirit or the teaching interpret after the fact. Because it matters what the Word of God says. It matters what the original authors said. Okay, I’m ranting again. I’m sorry. I appreciate you being on. I love what you’re doing and I hope we have another conversation in game in the future.

Melissa Dougherty (1:07:17)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Hahaha.

Yeah, I know. Thanks for having me on. It’s been nice.

Aaron Smith (1:07:40)
Yep, bless.

Melissa Dougherty (1:07:43)
Cool, and see you hit the record button, so.

Aaron Smith (1:07:46)
It’s recording still, eh?

Melissa Dougherty (1:07:48)
Yeah.