On Dec. 29, evangelists Kenneth Copeland and Jesse Duplantis defended their expensive private jets during Copeland's "Believer's Voice of Victory" TV show (video below).

During the program, Duplantis recalled how God allegedly spoke to him on a private plane and asked the pastor if he liked the aircraft.

“I thought, 'That’s an odd statement," Duplantis says, according to RawStory.com. "I said, ‘Well, certainly, Lord.' He said, ‘Do you really like it?’ And I thought, ‘Well yes, Lord.’ And he said, ‘So that’s it? ... You gonna let your faith stagnate?'”

Before Duplantis could finish his story about talking to God on the airplane, Copeland cuts in, according to Friendly Atheist:

"May I interrupt you there for a second? You couldn’t have done that on an airliner ... Stand up and say, 'What’d you say, Lord? OK? No? Yeah?' And the guy sitting over there, saying, 'What the hell does he think he’s doing?' You can’t do that. No, no, this is so important.

"And those of you that are just now coming into these things in the first place, Jesse and I and others -- Keith Moore and Creflo and all of them -- the world is in such a shape, we can’t get there without this. We’ve got to have this.

"The mess that the airlines are in today, I would have to stop -- I’m being very conservative -- at least 75 to 80, more like 90 percent of what we’re doing because you can’t get there from here...

"And this was such a good illustration, the Lord impressed me. That’s why we’re on that airplane. We can talk to God. When I was flying for Oral Roberts, Brother DeWeese, my boss, on the airplane, he said, 'Now, Kenneth, this is sanctuary. It protects the anointing on Brother Roberts.'

"And he said: 'You keep your mouth shut. Don’t talk to him unless he talks, because when he’s on a meeting, he doesn’t talk to anybody but God.'

"Now, Oral used to fly airlines. But, even back then, it got to the place where it was agitating his spiritual, people coming up to him, he had become famous, and they wanting him to pray for them and all that. You can’t manage that today [in] this dope-filled world, and get in a long tube with a bunch of demons, and it’s deadly…

"So anyway, I wanted to make that clear so the devil can't lie to you and say, 'See them there preachers spending all that money, just fat cats riding around.'

"No, we're not; we're in business. Listen, I could scratch my flying itch with my little single engine, open-cockpit airplane. I just come home and fly around in that, and scratch my flying itch. That doesn't have nothing to do with that.

"But we’re in soul business here. We got a dying world around us, Jess. We got a dying nation around us, and we can’t even get there on the airlines."