https://www.gty.org/library/blog/B160122/the-lord-told-me
The church has fallen into a dangerous pattern when it comes to divine direction. Too many believers today are trying to hear directly from God—whether through an audible voice or a stirring of their souls. Worse still are the people who legitimize everything from heresy to fundraising schemes to simple personal decisions by asserting the leading of the Lord.
Christians on both sides of the charismatic fence must realize a vital truth: God’s revelation is complete for now. The canon of Scripture is closed. As the apostle John penned the final words of the last book of the New Testament, he recorded this warning: “I testify to everyone who hears the words of the prophecy of this book: if anyone adds to them, God shall add to him the plagues which are written in this book; and if anyone takes away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part from the tree of life and from the holy city, which are written in this book” (Revelation 22:18–19).
https://www.gotquestions.org/God-telling-me.html
What we are not to do is expect to hear voices from God. There is a dangerous trend today where people seek to hear a “word from the Lord,” extraneous to what He has already given us in the Bible. “The Lord told me . . .” has become the mantra of experience-driven Christianity. Unfortunately, what He “tells” one person often contradicts what He “tells” another, and these extra-biblical revelations have proven to be very divisive, tearing apart church after church as one person’s experience seeks to take precedence over another’s. This results in chaos, benefiting no one except Satan, who loves to sow discord among believers. We should make the apostle Peter our example in these matters. In spite of the miraculous experience on the Mount of Transfiguration, where he beheld the glorified Christ speaking with Moses and Elijah, Peter refused to rely on that experience, declaring instead that “And so we have the prophetic word confirmed, which you do well to heed as a light that shines in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts” (2 Peter 1:18–19, NKJV).
The Scriptures are clear that God does not speak directly to us today in any other way except through the Scriptures — to teach otherwise is to contradict the Word of God. Hebrews 1:1–2 explains that in these last days, God has spoken to us through His son Jesus which is finally revealed and recorded in His Word. To claim that God further reveals any specific revelation to us, no matter how minuscule it may seem, is to blaspheme the Holy Spirit by attributing things to Him that he does not do.
How does God speak to us today? Undoubtedly, you have heard people say this: “Well, God has spoken to me and He’s told me that you are to do such and such. Pastor, God has spoken to me and He’s told me to tell you that our church needs to go this direction.” And it is just ubiquitous out there in the evangelical world — whatever evangelical means nowadays — that God speaks to people in still, small voices, maybe audible voices, dreams, visions, hunches, all of these things; and you hear this so commonly.
Has it ever made you stop and wonder, “What’s wrong with me? Why don’t I hear God speak to me that way? Is there something wrong with me? Is there something wrong with my relationship with the Lord? Do these people have a closer walk with God than I do? What’s wrong with me?” And if you have ever had those thoughts, I hope that this session will be an encouragement to you as we look at how God does and does not speak to us today.
Now as we begin, I want to define a couple of terms, because these are widely misunderstood. Revelation. Revelation refers to God revealing new information that has been previously hidden. So God revealing new information that up until this point has previously been hidden.
Revelation is not happening anymore today. You hear people say this all the time: “Well, God gave me revelation on this.” Well, no He didn’t, because God is not revealing anything new that has not already been revealed in Scripture. Now what may have happened to you is illumination. Illumination refers to the enabling work of the Holy Spirit in the lives of believers in order to understand and appropriate the truths of Scripture. Revelation is not happening anymore today; illumination, however, is. Illumination should be a regular part, in fact, of the Christian’s life, as the Holy Spirit helps us to understand and appropriate the written Word of God.
“Lord, teach us to pray.” What did Jesus say? “Okay, here’s how you do it. You talk to God, and then you get real quiet and you listen for that still small voice.” Is that what He said? No, He didn’t say that at all. He said, “When you pray, say this: ‘Lord, hallowed by Thy name,’” nothing about listening for some still small voice, nothing about listening for God to speak back to you. So this whole notion of prayer being a two-way street, that is foreign to the Word of God. There’s nothing in the Bible about that at all.
Anytime I hear somebody say, “Well, yeah, I know God speaks in the Bible and I know that’s His Word, but I need something more,” here’s my question: “Have you mastered this Book? From Genesis 1:1 to Revelation 22:21, you have completely mastered it; there is nothing else that you can glean from this Book, no more drops of truth you could possibly squeeze out of its pages; you have mastered it from cover to cover?” If the answer to that question is no — and it is — then please don’t tell me the Bible’s not enough. You don’t even understand what you have in black and white right in front of you. Please don’t tell me the Bible’s not enough.
This was Sarah Young’s inspiration for Jesus Calling. Sarah Young says this: “I knew that God communicated with me through the Bible, but I yearned for more.” You see, the Bible just was not enough for Sarah Young. And you know what? That is the mindset of the vast majority of professing Christians today. The Bible just is not enough for most people, we’ve got to have something more. “I yearned for more.”
All of the devotionals in there, 365 of them, all of them are written in the first person of Jesus Christ: “I Jesus am such and such. I will do this, I will do that.” They’re all written in the first person for Jesus. If Jesus really is calling Sarah Young and she is writing down what He is saying, you know what she’s doing? She’s writing Scripture. That’s what she’s doing, she’s writing Scripture, because God cannot speak less authoritatively on one occasion than He does on another. Friends, if God is speaking, God is speaking, and whatever He says carries the exact same authority as does John 3:16 or Romans 10:9 and 10.
Beth Moore says, “I built a snowman. I laughed with God. He laughed with me. I am so in love with Him. I am so in love with Him.” Beth Moore wants you to believe that she has such an intimate relationship with Jesus that she not only hears Him, but can even see the expression that is apparently on His face, and Jesus wanted her to go and play with Him, so they built snowmen together. You see, Beth Moore has such a deep relationship with Christ, far deeper, of course, than what you have. This is a modern-day version of the ancient heresy known as Gnosticism.
https://www.gotquestions.org/gnostic-definition.html
The Gnostic believes in acquiring special, mystical knowledge as the means for salvation.
https://www.gty.org/library/blog/B170612/are-mental-impressions-divine-revelation
They believe God somehow communicates His will personally to individuals through inner promptings, signs, feelings of peace or uneasiness, strong impressions on the mind, or other similar means.
For reasons we shall examine, it is not wise to seek divine guidance through subjective impressions like these. Nowhere does Scripture encourage us to attempt to discern God’s will through such means. As we shall see, that sort of decision making can lead to confusion, disappointment, and sometimes spiritual tragedy.
And the truth is that treating subjective impressions as messages from the Holy Spirit is not really much different from claiming to receive divine revelation. Though most Christians who follow subjective impressions would not dream of listening to extrabiblical “prophecies,” in effect they are doing the same thing.
https://www.challies.com/articles/10-serious-problems-with-jesus-calling/
- She speaks for God.
- She proclaims the insufficiency of the Bible.
- Her deepest experience of God comes through a practice God does not endorse.
- She is inspired by untrustworthy models.
- She provides lesser revelation.
- She mimics occult practices.
- Her emphasis does not match the Bible’s.
- Her tone does not match the Bible’s.
- She generates confusion.
- Her book has been corrected.
If you want to hear God speak to you, there’s one way I guarantee you will hear God speak: read your Bible. If you want to hear God speak to you audibly, read it out loud.
This notion of God speaking today outside of the confines of Scripture can be traced back to a movement known as pietism — and there’s a lot that could be said about this. But pietism was a reaction to what was at least perceived to be a highly intellectualized, almost cold orthodoxy coming out of the Protestant Reformation. It was anything but. But some people perceived it to be rather too intellectualized. And so in the late 1600s, early to mid 1700s, this movement became known as pietism.
Philip Spener was the father of pietism, and he was no heretic, but he began to deviate just a little bit from the sufficiency of God’s Word. And as pietism grew, as is the case, error always begets more error. And then you get to men like Count Nikolaus von Zinzendorf who we could say was a heretic. But this kind of goes back to the movement known as pietism.
In a more modern version, divine revelation knowledge — you’ve probably heard of this term. The term was first coined by Essek W. Kenyon. Kenyon is the grandfather of what we call today the Word of Faith movement, New Apostolic Reformation. He’s the one that first coined this term. Kenyon believed in two different types knowledge. The first of these is sensory knowledge, that which we get through our five senses: sight, sound, taste, smell, and touch. The other kind of knowledge is revelation knowledge, and this is supernatural knowledge that comes only from God.
Now according to Kenyon, the catch to this is that these two spheres of knowledge are mutually exclusive, and what that means is that reasoning or logical thought is of no value. So if you really want to go deep with God, if you want to get to the deep, secret, hidden things of God, you’ve got to disengage your mind, put the old noodle in park. I’m going to show you some more modern expressions of this.
You may have heard of the practice known as Lectio Divina. This is a practice that was endorsed by Pope Benedict XVI in 2005. This is a Catholic discipline — highly, highly mystical, very unbiblical. Lectio Divina’s been practiced by some modern evangelical names. We’ll talk about these, one of which is Beth Moore.
Now let me say in the onset, in this presentation I’m going to show you a lot of clips from a lot of different people, very wide spectrum of modern evangelical preachers. Some of the clips are from rank charlatans and heretics. Some of the clips are from people that we would not put in that basket. And I’m doing this not to lump everybody in this presentation in the same basket, I purposefully have a wide range here to show you how ubiquitous this belief is that God speaks today outside of Scripture.
Beth Moore: very, very troublesome teacher. Unfortunately, a lot could be said of her. But Beth Moore, I want to read this quote to you from her book Praying God’s Word. She says, “What little I know I want others to know. Before God tells me a secret,” – now if He’s telling you a secret – and she says – “He knows up front I’m going to tell it,” so I’m not sure how secretive that is. But she says, “By and large, that’s our deal.” So Beth Moore has this secret deal with God. This is Gnosticism. This is a modern-day version of the ancient heresy of Gnosticism.
Also from Beth Moore in her book entitled When Godly People Do Ungodly Things, and this is rather ironically subtitled, Arming Yourself in an Age of Seduction. But Beth Moore says this. She says, “I heard the voice of God speak to my heart, ‘Come and play.’ I love that He said, ‘Come,’ not go, ‘Come.’ That meant He was already there. I also love how I could tell by the sweet tone of His silent voice,” – I’m not sure how a silent voice has a tone. But she said, “I could tell by the sweet tone of His silent voice that He was smiling. I could have outlined His expression with my finger.”
Now other than that just being a little bit weird, she goes on and she says, “I built a snowman. I laughed with God, He laughed with me. I am so in love with Him. I am so in love with Him.” Beth Moore wants you to believe that she has such an intimate relationship with Jesus that she not only hears Him, but can even see the expression that is apparently on His face; and Jesus wanted her to go and play with Him, so they built snowmen together. You see, Beth Moore has such a deep relationship with Christ, far deeper, of course, than what you have. This is a modern-day version of the ancient heresy known as Gnosticism.
Now a few clips. Watch this from Rick Warren. [Video starts] “Last week we began a new miniseries on “Understanding How to Hear the Voice of God.” Very few things are more important than this because you can’t have a relationship to God if you can’t hear God. If all you do is ever talk to Him in prayer and you never hear God speak to you, that’s a one-way relationship, that isn’t much of a relationship.” [Video ends]
So if you never hear God speak to you, then you really don’t have much of a relationship with God. This from Priscilla Shirer. [Video starts] “Hi, I’m Priscilla Shirer, and I’m hoping that you’ll join me for a six-week journey as we talk about how we can hear and discern the voice of God in our lives. Do you really expect and anticipate that the divine voice of God can be heard by you? Do you really think that He loved you enough to die for you but doesn’t love you enough to then talk to you?” [Video ends]
“Do you really think that He loves you enough to die for you but does not love you enough to talk to you?” What an insult. What a slight to the Word of God. God speaks to us today all the time through the Scriptures. Now she may not have meant it that way. And I want to say that the sincerity of these individuals is not what I’m calling into question. Sincerity is not what matters, truth matters.
Now this from Charles Stanley. [Video starts] “So are you asking if God speaks specifically, and the answer is yes, He does. Let me give you two or three examples. Speaking about buying groceries. On a particular day I had a very short period of time, and so I wanted to buy a turkey for Thanksgiving. My time was really running out and I thought, ‘Well, I shouldn’t do this now.’ I said, ‘God, just show me what to do.’ It’s like God said, ‘Go to this store, buy the turkey now.’ Against sort of my will, I went. I walked right in, straight to the right place, the right pound of turkey, walked right out, paid and got back in the car in less than about 25 minutes. Did God tell me to go? Yes, He did.” [Video ends] So close is Charles Stanley’s relationship with God that God even tells him where to go to buy his Thanksgiving Day turkey.
Now I’m guessing that probably most of us in here God’s never told us where to buy our turkeys. But you see, this is how close he is with the Lord. And they buttress themselves, they use these claims to lift themselves up. Whether knowingly or unknowingly, they do it to lift themselves up to let you know just how close of a relationship with God they have. And if you don’t have that kind of relationship, if you don’t have that kind of intimacy with God, then there’s something wrong in your relationship with Him.
Now Sam Storms is someone who would share our view of soteriology, a more reformed view of soteriology. But Sam Storms is also a continuous charismatic. I want to read you this out of his book Practicing the Power. Sam Storm says this: “To be the recipient of prophetic revelation from God whether in dreams, impressions, trances, visions, or words of knowledge and words of wisdom can be nothing short of euphoric. The experience brings feelings of nearness to God and a heightened sense of spiritual intimacy that isn’t often the case with the other of the charismata. This is an unfortunate denigration of the non-apostolic gifts: the gifts of teaching, mercy, administration, exhortation, hospitality, the gift of giving. All of these gifts as card-carrying cessationists, all of us would affirm those gifts. But those gifts are somehow lesser. And if you don’t experience the apostolic gifts, the sign gifts, if you don’t experience those gifts, then you just don’t have the same nearness with God as you’re supposed to.”
This is a very unfortunate degradation of the more normative gifts, the non-apostolic gifts. And this goes against Scripture of course. This goes against what Paul says, teaches in 1 Corinthians chapter 12. Again, this is a modern-day version of Gnosticism. So if you are someone who gets dreams and visions and you hear still, small voices, and God speaks to you maybe even audibly, you’re a have. But if you’re one of these poor souls and all you have is the Bible and you’re indwelt by the Holy Spirit of God, well, then you’re just a have not. You’re just not as spiritual. You just don’t have the same nearness with God as the haves do. This is Gnosticism.
I would submit to you that the resource, the book that is singularly most responsible for introducing charismatic theology into at least theoretically non-charismatic churches is Experiencing God by Henry Blackaby that came out in 1991. If you go back before 1991, at least in non-charismatic churches, almost everyone would have understood that God speaks to us through the Bible, we speak to Him in prayer. Today hardly anybody understands that; and I believe experiencing God is singularly most responsible for introducing these notions into non-charismatic churches.
Experiencing God, Henry Blackaby says this: “If you have troubling hearing God speak, you are in trouble at the very heart of your Christian experience.” So this is very, very important, “You should be hearing God speak to you regularly, and if you don’t then you’re in trouble at the very heart of your Christian experience.”
Now I’m going to show you a videoclip of a man named Sid Roth, and I want to offer you a disclaimer before I do. I just want you to brace yourself, because what you’re about to see is one of the most disturbing, one of the most shocking videos that I’ve ever come across – and that’s saying a lot given what I spend a lot of time in study. But this is shocking. But I want to show you just how far this can go. Okay, watch this from Sid Roth. His television show entitled It’s Supernatural that appears on TBN. Watch this.
[Video starts] “Hello, Sid Roth here. Welcome to my world where it’s naturally supernatural. I have read of the great men and women of faith. One in particular intrigues me so much. His name: Smith Wigglesworth. He had some of the most outrageous miracles I ever heard of in my life. Let me give you one example.
“Some parents had a two-month-old baby dying in the hospital. The parents kidnapped the child, took the child to a Smith Wigglesworth meeting; and Smith looks at the child, looks at the parents, and said, ‘Can I do what God tells me to do?’ Well, what would you do if you were the parent? The child’s dying anyway, right? He takes the baby, two-month-old, throws the baby against a wall – the baby. Then the baby’s on the floor. Have you ever seen someone play soccer? Have you ever seen them kick a soccer ball? He does that with the baby. The baby falls into the congregation. No crying. Is it dead? One hundred percent healed, no crying.” [Video ends]
Is that not shocking? Friends, this went out on worldwide television. And lest you think that, “Oh, nobody would believe that,” the very fact that they put it on worldwide television is self-evident proof that people do believe this. And let’s keep in mind that one of the charismatic mantras is this: “Well, what God does for one, He’ll do for you.” And people are sitting at home and they’re watching this, and these people, they claim to hear from God. And a person’s sitting at home and he’s thinking, “Wow, well God told Smith Wigglesworth to throw a sick baby against a wall. My kid’s sick. My neighbor’s kid is sick. What God does for one, He’ll do for you.”
The very fact that they aired this on worldwide television is self-evident proof that people are dumb enough to believe this. It’s a very dangerous thing to say, “God told me to do such and such.” You see how extreme this can get.
How do you know God told you to do that? Well, Henry Blackaby says, “I sensed God’s call. I prayed and sensed God wanted me to. I began to sense a great urgency. We began to sense God leading us. Our church sensed God wanted us to do such and such. One of our members felt led to do this.” Same verbiage that the charismatic movement uses.
Well, how do you know this? When God speaks, what does that sense feel like? Well, we’re never really told. This from Bill Hybels. Bill Hybels, up until about a year or so ago was a pastor, wrote this book The Power of a Whisper, and he says this in his book. He says, “Without a hint of exaggeration, I can boldly declare that God’s low-volume whispers have saved me from a life of sure boredom and self-destruction.”
It’s a very ironic statement for him to make, given what has happened with Bill Hybels. God says in Jeremiah, “Is not My word like a fire,” declares the Lord, “and like a hammer which shatters a rock?” Doesn’t sound very boring to me. You see, this is a denigration of the authority and the sufficiency of God’s Word. Now they would not say that in so many words, but that is exactly what it is.
This from Robert Morris. Robert Morris tells us that prayer is a two-way street. So when we pray, we are to pray to God, and then we are to listen for Him to talk back to us. Watch this from Robert Morris.
[Video starts] “You know, if we said we’re going to have a class on prayer, you’d say, ‘I need that.’ And even the disciples said, ‘Teach us to pray.’ But let me remind you that hearing God is the second half of prayer, because if you can’t hear God, why would you pray? Now one reason is to make our requests and petitions be known to God. But God never intended prayer to be a giving of our to-do list to Him every morning. He intended prayer to be communication between a Father and His children. And if you’ll just take some time and start to listen, you’ll be amazed that He’ll speak.” [Video ends]