What separates true ministers from frauds? While many are still busy reinventing the ministry wheel, God confirms the stewardship of His choice in the real apostolic character.

Benny Hinn is the latest of a long list of ministers who have tried to test what separates true ministry from Satan’s pool of counterfeits. The problem is that his “fool-proof test” is based on the failed ministry models of the past 40 years.

Despite Hinn’s efforts to lay out the stresses of ministry and the inherent challenges every minister faces in the false church body, he is again blindsided by the expectations Satan has built into the church which ministers have paid tribute to for decades.

Like many ministers, Hinn skipped all of God’s covenant connections that the anointing uses to develop the divine nature that our faith needs to reciprocate to God. Instead, his principles circle around the same ministerial misses that others have rehashed.

The days of asking for blind trust are over.

God has been chastising ministers who have chosen to hold onto a legacy of error. Where did their teaching lead?

• Despair and hopelessness.
• Broken promises and restarts.
• A faith void of divine contact in search of the next breakthrough.
• Fruitless souls abandoned in the wilderness, searching for meaning.

The devil led the church into thousands of wilderness paths: the healing movement, the prosperity movement, the faith movement, the shepherding movement, the deliverance movement, the laughter movement, and the prophetic movement all had their hand in betraying Christ.

And so ministers, wandering in those same wilderness trails, fell into a rut, upholding the doctrinal heritage they had built, repeating the same words without recognizing the error: the wilderness is not the environment God created for our faith to flourish. Jesus’ covenant is that perfect environment. (Heb. 8:6-13)

Believers are now finding out about the wilderness secret Satan tried to hide.

Faith was never meant to wander in barren paths — it was meant to flourish in Christ’s covenant. Through His restored apostolic government, God is teaching the church again to “Think Covenant” as He unfolds Christ in the fulness of His covenant contact.

Believers are again regaining all they had lost and, for the first time, stepping into their true heritage in Christ. God’s covenant connections are not optional. They are the very design of your faith. Neglecting to clarify Jesus’ covenant environment, ministers are unable to follow God’s connections to lead and nurture believers in the life of Christ.

What separates true ministers from frauds? The covenant of Jesus Christ and the real apostolic stewardship. Only God’s real apostles bring back the lost foundation of truth.

Apostle Paul said, “Be followers of me, even as I also of Christ.” And the same is true today. (1 Cor. 11:1)

As hearts are again prepared to hear the true gospel preached, a divine circumcision is taking place, whereas Christians are losing their taste for the old wine. The bitter taste of the wilderness dregs was masked and sweetened by Satan’s lies, and as God removes the lie, the bitterness is unmistakable: isolation from God.

Fraudulent ministers neglect to connect you to Christ’s covenant, choosing to develop your faith in the wilderness, where they rebrand isolation as a blessing. But isolation from God breeds only selfishness. The self-referencing gospel that cries, me, me, me.

God wants to share everything He placed in Jesus with you, but Satan turned the gospel inward. As Jesus said, the devil is a thief. His self-referencing gospel steals your faith through subtle substitutions.

John 10:10
The thief cometh not, but for to steal, and to kill, and to destroy: I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly.

Jesus describes the devil as a thief who comes to steal, kill, and destroy your soul. Satan’s ministers do the same thing through their covenant-less gospels.

There’s a ripple effect to allowing yourself to be led into the wilderness experience, where you are isolated from all that God shares in Christ. Each minister in the false church body claims to be a pathfinder, but they are the “wandering stars” that Apostle Jude warned against. Setting your course on a wandering star is disastrous. (Jude 1:13)

With every challenge, ministers pause, take a step back, and begin to think and pray, “Lord, how far have we drifted from your original gospel, and how do we get back?”

The answer is always the same: return to Christ’s covenant, where every connection is made living through His stewardship.

The most asked question about Jesus’ covenant centers on the divine connections God built for our fellowship with Him and fruit bearing in His kingdom. People ask, “What are these connections I keep hearing about? I’ve never heard this before. How do they work? Why are they necessary?”

The devil loves to experiment with people’s thinking. He says we don’t need God’s connections because he has a warehouse full of substitutes and similarities.

God is not merely laying open His rebukes against Satan’s ministers; He is vacating his seat of authority through them. In this next section I want to share a meaningful quote from Apostle Eric vonAnderseck’s upcoming final lesson in the Second 8th Week Series entitled “Apostles Restore the Lost Foundation”.

As Apostle Eric lays bare the dangerous wilderness mindset that has ruled the church we understand why God is correcting it:

The current church body is made up of wilderness believers — those who have given a zero-star rating to the ministers who led them into the wilderness and abandoned them there. The wilderness is where their faith soured and turned inward.

Satan’s exemptions from covenant faith are your baptism into his wilderness. Each exemption is a counterfeit initiation as he climatizes you to your wilderness home, which he delicately calls God’s kingdom. His manipulations are cloaked in care as he softly rebrands barrenness as belonging.

The wilderness Christian tells a story of emptiness. God intended us to live the life of Christ — fully equipped in His kingdom. But the barren wilderness that Christians find themselves in today is void of everything God placed in Christ. They’re told that:

“The wilderness test separates the believer from worldly influences and deepens spiritual understanding.”

Satan’s ministers christen the wilderness as God’s nursery, breaking the bottle of false ceremony over barren ground, but let’s look at what’s missing. When God separates a believer from the world unto Himself, he gives divine tokens for that separation to equip and empower us for fruit bearing.

God planned a reciprocal act on our part. We separate ourselves from the world unto God by accepting and using the spiritual tools He sanctified with Jesus’ blood. It is His promise to be with us as He creates in us what He is. We accept His Word—Jesus Christ—and walk in all He has prepared for us.

Faced with an empty, fruitless faith, believers are told to see this as a proving ground or test: to see where God might be testing their patience, testing their mettle to see what they are made of, or perhaps testing their faithfulness.

Christians are taught to see each “test” as an opportunity for God to show up—an invitation to self-discovery, a chance to realign their faith to get a fresh start.

But the wilderness is not a test—it is a void:

• The void speaks of what is missing.
• It reveals the absence of covenant contact.
• It exposes the lack of apostolic instruction.
• It stirs a search. But the search is not for truth but for substitutes, where your imagination becomes your advocate.

God is naming the ache of the wilderness believer as He exposes not just the emotional toll, but the doctrinal vacuum that Satan created when he shifted the church from apostolic instruction to self-authored spirituality.

Satan merely gave the church his own perception. When he walked away from God, he redesigned his disobedience into a test…

Always remember: the wilderness is not a test—it is a void, and the void doesn’t simply mean emptiness—it means absence. The absence of Jesus’ true apostles signals the absence of the things God placed in Christ to work in us. (Eph. 3:20)

God is not in the void. He is exposing the anatomy of the void.

This is not a passive absence, but as a counterfeit system actively shaping the believer’s perception, language, and spiritual trajectory.

We are grateful for this very important awakening for the church. The real apostolic character uncovers the full depth of the devil’s strategy. It isn’t just deception, but a full-scale replacement of God’s divine order with many substitutes.

God returns the church to Jesus.

The Lord begins with a different kind of knowledge and pattern: Jesus’ covenant knowledge, which apostles lay in the heart of each believer as a foundation. We understand now why the foundation of truth (the one whole and complete body of knowledge) must first be set in the heart before we can exercise our will with it to follow only this way that Jesus made for us.

The Spirit bears witness with our spirit through each cycle of growth that God is forming His likeness in us. We are part of this living process.

God’s plan is that we draw from the same blueprint of knowledge He draws from. He starts with the knowledge of Jesus’ covenant to bear witness to Christ—and we start there too—we consent to God’s covenant knowledge, and the Holy Spirit bears witness with that agreement with many gifts of confirmation and consolidation, which we receive to reciprocate to Him as He effects change by His power in our soul to create in us His likeness. (Rom.8:29)