Oprah Winfrey will be letting out all the stops on her XM Satellite Radio program this year. Beginning January 1, 2008, “Oprah and Friends” will offer a year-long course on the New Age teachings of A Course in Miracles. A lesson a day throughout the year will completely cover the 365 lessons from the Course in Miracles workbook.

Lesson #29 asks you to go through your day affirming that, “God is in everything I see.”

Lesson #61 tells each person to repeat the affirmation, “I am the light of the world.”

Lesson #70 teaches the student to say and believe, “My salvation comes from me.”

By the end of the year, “Oprah and Friends” listeners will have completed all off the lessons laid out in the Course in Miracles workbook. Those who finish the course will have a wholly redefined spiritual mindset—a New Age worldview that includes the belief that there is no sin, no evil, no devil, and that God is in everyone and everything.

A Course in Miracles teaches its students to rethink everything they believe about God and life. The course workbook bluntly states: “This is a course in mind training” and is dedicated to “thought reversal.”

Teaching A Course in Miracles will be Oprah’s longtime friend and special XM Satellite Radio reporter Marianne Williamson, who also happens to be one of today’s premier New Age leaders. She and Conversations with God author Neale Donald Walsch co-founded the American Renaissance Alliance in 1997, which later became the Global Renaissance Alliance of New Age leaders, changing its name again in 2005 to the Peace Alliance.

The Peace Alliance seeks to usher in an era of global peace founded on the principles of a New Age and new spirituality that they are now referring to as a “civil rights movement for the soul.”

They all agree that the principles of this New Age and new spirituality are clearly articulated in A Course in Miracles, which is fast becoming the New Age Bible. So what is A Course in Miracles and what does it teach? A Course in Miracles is allegedly “new revelation” from Jesus to help humanity work though these troubled times.

This “Jesus”—who bears no doctrinal resemblance to the Bible’s Jesus Christ—began delivering his channeled teachings in 1965 to a Columbia University Professor of Medical Psychology by the name of Helen Schuman. One day Schuman heard an “inner voice” stating, “This is a course in miracles. Please take notes.” For seven years she diligently took spiritual dictation from this inner voice that described himself as “Jesus.”

A Course in Miracles was quietly published in 1975 by the Foundation for Inner Peace. For many years “the Course” was an underground cult classic for New Age seekers who studied “the Course” individually, with friends, or in small study groups. Here are some quotes from the “Jesus” of A Course in Miracles:

There is no sin.

A slain Christ has no meaning.

The journey to the cross should be the last “useless journey.”

Do not make the pathetic error of “clinging to the old rugged cross.”

The Name of Jesus Christ as such is but a symbol…It is a symbol that is safely used as a
replacement for the many names of all the gods to which you pray.

God is in everything I see.

The recognition of God is the recognition of yourself.

The oneness of the Creator and the creation is your wholeness, your sanity and your limitless power.

The Atonement is the final lesson [man] need learn, for it teaches him that, never having sinned, he has no need of salvation.

Most Christians recognize that these teachings are the opposite of what the Bible teaches. At this critical time in the history of the world, the “New Gospel” is coming right at the world and the Church with its New Age teachings and its New Age Peace Plan. But this New Age Peace Plan has at its deceptive core the bottom-line teaching from A Course in Miracles that “we are all one” because God is “in” everyone and everything.

But the Bible is clear that we are not God (see Ezekiel 28:2; Hosea 11:9). And per Galatians 3:26-28, our only oneness is in Jesus Christ—not in ourselves as “God” and “Christ.”

What Oprah and Marianne Williamson and the world will learn one day is that humanity’s only real and lasting peace is with the true Jesus Christ who is described and quoted in the Holy Bible (see Romans 5:1). Oprah Winfrey’s misplaced faith in Marianne Williamson and the New Age teachings of A Course in Miracles is a sure sign of the times.

But an even surer sign of the times is that most Christians are not taking heed to what is happening in the world and in the Church. We are not contending for the faith as the Bible admonishes us to do in Jude 3.

It is time for all of our Purpose-Driven and Emerging church pastors to address the real issue of the day. Our true Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ is being reinvented, redefined, and blasphemed right in front of our eyes and hardly anyone seems to notice or care.

If we want the world to know who Jesus Christ is, we need to also warn them about who He is not. There is a false New Age “Christ” making huge inroads into the world and into the Church. The Apostle Paul said that “it is a shame” we have to even talk about these things, but talk about them we must (Ephesians 5:12-16).

If people want to follow Oprah Winfrey and the New Age “Christ” of A Course in Miracles, they certainly have that right. But let them be warned that the New Age “Christ” they are following is not the same Jesus Christ who is so clearly and authoritatively presented in the pages of the Bible.