OneThing 2011: Lou Engle on Dreams, Tornadoes, and Abortion

To read about Mike Bickle's talk at OneThing 2011, click here. To read about Corey Russell's comment on the "unequally yoked," click here.

The International House of Prayer's 2011 OneThing conference took place on December 28-31, 2011 at the Kansas City Convention Center. IHOP has since posted videos and MP3 files of the event at www[dot]ihop[dot]org/onething/. I would be remiss if I did not post on Lou Engle's December 31st talk, which contained familiar messages about dreams, prophesy, and abortion.

The MP3 recording began with Engle praising the Bound 4 Life anti-abortion ministry. Engle insisted that "seed" was being sown that night, and that years from now, audience members would be winning souls and working with orphans and adoption services.

Engle described his Christian anthropology to the audience, claiming that God forms the seat of human emotion and creates humans so that they long for their creator. Quoting Psalm 139:13 -- "you knit me together in my mother's womb" -- he celebrated how God shapes humans just as he shaped Adam in the Genesis creation story. "The womb is God's art studio," Engle said. "It's his secret laboratory where he creates those who bear his very image. You are a piece of artwork, not just a piece of work." Using a metaphor from his Firestorm 2011 talk, Engle told listeners that God wrote a novel about each of their lives, and that God doesn't writing boring novels.

Engle stressed at length the spiritual importance of dreams, which are one medium through which the divine speaks to believers. At the 17:00, he had this to say.

"We trivialize the prophetic. We trivialize our night visions and just say, 'Well, I just had a dream. It was only a dream.' Only a dream!? The Bible says in the last days, your old men will dream dreams and see visions. The language of the last days is revelatory, audible, hearing and seeing, and you say it's just a dream? Many people see the burning bush and don't even go toward it."

Engle described how Brian Kim's dream led to the creation of Bound 4 Life, an anti-abortion ministry in which members demonstrate with red tape over their mouths with "LIFE" written on it. The first such demonstration received media attention in Washington D.C., Engle said, claiming that the media is subject to prophetic ministry at the 27:13 mark.

"What I didn't realize is that the media would fall in love with the image, and they would blast that image all over the world. While standing out there, it was prophesy that was going on. The media was prophesying life, life, life, life. The media comes under the prophetic ministry of the church. The media doesn't have the last word in America. The prophetic praying church has the last word."

Engle spoke of life bands, the anti-abortion wrist bands distributed by Bound 4 Life. He described another man's dream in which a life band sat alongside David's slingshot and Samson's jawbone-bludgeon in Heaven's weapon hall of fame. He spoke at length about miraculous happenings and anti-abortion activism, attributing it to God's influence.

At the 32:27 mark, Engle spoke of sex trafficking in the same breath as abortion, claiming that God wants to make war on "the destruction of women's lives." This is not the first time Engle has suggested a moral equivalency between sex trafficking and reproductive freedom, nor is it the first time that an anti-abortion figure has suggested that abortion harms women.

"I tell you, I believe we are heading into a moment when God wants to make war on sex trafficking. He wants to make war on the abortion of babies and the destruction of women's lives, and a people that are hearing the prophetic voice are not playing games."

Engle claimed that the devastating tornado that hit Joplin, Missouri in 2011 was a sign of God's judgment upon abortion. At the 40:46, he said this.

"The Joplin tornado came last year, three tornadoes in one, rumbling through the land. I said right after that to my friends, 'This is the beginning of God's redemptive judgments for the shedding of innocent blood of the unborn. This is a sign.' God's separating the nation on the issue of abortion, just like he did when the Missouri Compromise. Out of Missouri, again, something's going on."

Engle recited a story he shared at a June 2011 gathering in Kansas City, in which a pastor dreamed that he urged President Obama to end abortion, and the pastor's daughter dreamed about President Lincon and the numerical code 52911 (the date that President Obama visited Joplin). As he has many times before, Engle spoke of racial justice and the ending of abortion in the same breath at the 44:49 mark.

"I believe as Lincoln was a president who presided over a nation that was under the judgment of the shedding of innocent blood because of the blood of the slaves, so too now President Obama is presiding over a nation that is under the judgments of God for the shedding of innocent blood of the unborn. But wouldn't it be like God that a man from Illinois could release an Emancipation Proclamation to let the blacks go free so that a black man could be president to let the unborn go free."

To read additional commentary, visit the following link.

Right Wing Watch: Lou Engle has Prophecy of Looming Natural Disasters and Economic Wreckage Because of Legal Abortion