A few years ago, famous and wealthy well-known prosperity charlatan, Benny Hinn announced that he’d been teaching falsely on the doctrine of prosperity. In a shocking video, Hinn admitted that he’s been preaching a false prosperity gospel, that giving money and sowing seeds is a false gospel and an affront to the gospel, and that he wouldn’t be doing it any longer. Hinn explained that he had been moved by the gospel of grace and repentance to change his ways.

Like a dog that returns to its own vomit, it didn’t take long, however, for Hinn to keep moving forward with his false teachings. In fact, it took less than an hour as the commercials in that very episode where he made this claim to repentance asked for people to send “seed-faith” money to him in exchange for prosperity blessings.

This appears to be a growing phenomenon in the prosperity gospel cult. A few years later, another false prosperity teacher, Todd White, did something similar and even invoked the name of Charles Spurgeon—a preacher who would rebuke Todd White into the floor—to prop up his false repentance on.

For example, in 2020, White preached a sermon where he claimed that he had begun reading Charles Spurgeon, George Whitefield, and Ray Comfort and said that these men had helped him understand the gospel in a way he’s never understood before. Being that these men he named are some of the most solid Evangelists in history and modern times, one would be led to believe that he would want to emulate these men and their theology. Despite the fact that he claimed to be following these men, he continues to promote unsound theology, false doctrine, and a false understanding of the gospel which all of these men he named would contradict. Yet, unless you dug deeper into this, you wouldn’t really know. Todd White simply used the names of these men to steal credibility from them.

Now, in the latest example of this phenomenon, Creflo Dollar, who has been propped up relentlessly by men like Kenneth Copeland and Jesse Duplantis, also did something similar. In a recent video, he claims that he has been convicted of his false teaching on tithing, but says he won’t apologize for it or step down.

I want to start off by saying to you that I’m still growing and that the teachings that I’ve shared in times past on the subject of tithing were not correct. And today I stand in humility to correct some things that I’ve taught for years and believed for years, but could never understand it clearly because I had not yet been confronted with the gospel of grace, which has made the difference.

I won’t apologize because if it wasn’t for me going down that route, I would have never ended up where I am right now. But I will say that I have no shame at all, at saying to you, throw away every book, every tape, and every video I ever did on the subject of tithing unless it lines up with this. I’ve done some corrective teaching in Atlanta last 10 years, but not to the degree of what we’re getting ready to do now.

So why is this important? Because religion is sustained by two factors, fear, and guilt. And if there’s one subject that the church has used, for a long time, to keep people in fear and guilt, it is in that subject of tithing, and it has to be corrected, and it’s got to be corrected now. I may lose some friends, preachers may not ever invite me no more, but I think I already been through that, so it doesn’t matter.”

This is exactly what the Scriptures speak of in Jude where it says that these men will creep in deceptively and take people captive.

For certain people have crept in unnoticed who long ago were designated for this condemnation, ungodly people, who pervert the grace of our God into sensuality and deny our only Master and Lord, Jesus Christ. —Jude 4