The gentleman came to me with a sheaf of papers after a meeting at which I was speaking. “I’d like you to read this,” he said, holding them out to me.
Now this was before I had started publishing, not that I haven’t had related experiences since. But even so, this gentleman wanted me to tell him whether he should seek a publisher. In our conversation, it actually became clear that what he wanted to hear was that his manuscript was great and he should urgently seek a publisher. He wanted affirmation, not discernment.
He looked right at me and said: “God gave me all of this. These aren’t my words. I couldn’t have written them. It was all God.”
There are at least two ways to take a statement like that. The first is that the man believed that what he was holding in his hand was something good. (For the record, it wasn’t. I can’t tell you it was wrong; it was simply too incoherent for me to be certain.) He might then be humbly saying that he could not do this on our own. It is good for us to remember that without God, we are not. Period!
But there is another sense in which such a statement might be made, and I have sensed it in many cases, and this is to try to force someone to pay more attention. It might be that the writer is concerned about the quality and wants to catch the reader’s intention. It might be that the writer lacks credentials and believes that the claim that God did it is the only thing that will give the contents weight.
I commit an entire chapter of my book When People Speak for God to this topic in a chapter titled Practical Considerations of Hearing. The problem is that we are all too willing to make the claim to be speaking for God in the church today without realizing how serious such a claim is.
In charismatic communities this often comes out very directly, with people claiming to speak prophetic words frequently. Now I want to be clear that I believe God can and does speak. If I could summarize the thesis of my book in the size of a tweet, it would be, “God always speaks; we rarely listen.” (That line doesn’t occur in the book itself, but it does summarize the thought.) But in Old Testament times the claim to be a prophet was serious. The penalty for being a false prophet was death.
When discussing someone’s claim to be a prophet, I have been told a number of times over the last few years that one cannot always throw strikes. Now when we’re praying for one another, advising one another, sharing what we believe we heard from God in our devotional time, that’s quite true. The key in each of those cases is that we’re talking about what we have understood and not claiming that we are directly passing on a message from God for the hearer. But the attitude that dismisses claims of false prophecy as unimportant cannot, in my view, be reconciled with any scriptural view of prophecy.
Those who don’t believe in modern prophecy shouldn’t feel left out, however. A preacher in the pulpit, proclaiming God’s word needs to take that point very seriously. If I pridefully proclaim my own view as God’s view, not acknowledging that I am a broken vessel pouring out God’s word as I best understands it, and inviting you to search for yourself and hear God for yourself, I am in danger of the same fault. I could be said to “speak presumptuously” (Deut. 18:17-22) and one need not read far to find the penalty for that.
I think that this is another of those Christian paradoxes, however, like the incarnation. It is clearly impossible for Jesus to be 100% God and 100% human at the same time, yet that is precisely what I believe. It is (humanly) impossible to proclaim God’s word with full conviction and complete humility, yet I see that as the call to those who preach and teach.
The canon of scripture as we have it consists of materials that were read many times over the centuries by God’s people with the resulting conviction that this is God speaking. Sometimes the prophets said specifically “this is what God says.” At other times we have extended writing that doesn’t make that announcement. In discussing canonization, we often fail to emphasize the fact that the body of believers that made the canon a formal canon was already using roughly those books. Why? I believe it is because they heard God speaking in them.
Whatever the format by which I present God’s word, whether in a blog post, in writing, in teaching, in a sermon or a private conversation, the key issue will be this: Do people hear God through me? When I make the claim, I am in danger of pride. I don’t deny that God may call on a prophet to say “This is what God has to say.” He certainly has. I don’t deny that God may call on a preacher to say, “This is the word of the Lord” when he preaches.
But the most important thing is that the preacher or teacher actually gets out of the way and lets the Holy Spirit work. If I get out of the way, people will recognize what God is saying to them, often when I have said it very poorly. As a friend of mine said in a recent sermon, it’s a miracle that people ever hear God’s word when he’s standing in the pulpit. And he’s a pretty good preacher!
When I am weak, then I am strong! – 2 Corinthians 12:10
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