Every Christian can hear God. This being the case, every Christian can share God’s messages with others: We can prophesy.
See, Christians are at all different levels of maturity. Some of us call it
No matter which kind of immaturity we’re talking about, immature people are gonna do dumb. They don’t know any better. And an immature human is always gonna be an immature Christian. We need to recognize this, and not move immature Christians of any sort into any positions of responsibility.
Y’see, to the person who’s brand-new at listening to God, they may not realize every voice in their head sounds exactly the same. We weed out which spirits are God’s (or
You know the devil’s totally gonna take advantage of this.
Some of these wannabe prophets never do learn the difference. Fr’instance
Now to the other extreme: We got Christians who for the rest of their life presume their own voice is God’s. And whattaya know:
Inbetween we got prophets who do actually hear God. But they can likewise bollix their own prophecies for one rather obvious reason: They think their prophetic ability is fruit. Yep, they confused
1 Corinthians 13.1-3 KWL - 1 When I speak in human and angelic tongues:
- When I have no love, I’ve become the sound of a gong, a clanging cymbal.
- 2 When I have a prophecy—“I knew the whole mystery! I know everything!”—
- when I have all the faith necessary to move mountains:
- When I have no love, I’m nobody.
- 3 Might I give away everything I possess?
- Perhaps submit my body so I could be praised for my sacrifice?
- When I have no love, I benefit nobody.
—they’re noise. They’re nobody. They benefit nobody. They will someday. Just not just yet.
But lemme remind you these immature Christians aren’t ready to speak for God… but do actually hear him. I’m not at all saying they don’t. Nor am I saying they’re frauds, nor malicious, nor bad Christians. They might not be! But because they lack fruit, they’re functionally just as error-plagued and destructive as any false prophet.
So I warn you about ’em now. Watch out for them. Don’t become one of them.
The impatient prophet.
Hearing the Holy Spirit is awesome. God’s talking to us! Problem is, when we’re new at the whole prophecy deal, we’re so jazzed about this fact, we lose our tiny minds: “I just heard from God! Lookit me!”
With this lapse of commonsense come a whole lot of other lapses. The impatient prophet doesn’t bother to…
- ask the Holy Spirit just what he meant by that message.
- ask for further revelation, further insight, further anything.
- think about the manner in which this message should be presented—whether discreetly, tactfully, kindly, fruitfully.
- meditate on the message a bit, and see what more they could unfold from it.
- double-check it against the scriptures.
- bounce it off fellow prophets; they don’t figure they need to.
And we always need to.
When God drops a message on them, they wanna share it at that very instant. And so they’ve adopted beliefs which justify this behavior. They claim God wants them to share it immediately: His timing is perfect, and he saves his messages for the perfect time, so they’ve gotta be declared now. If we delay, it means we’re disobediently quenching the Spirit, or lack faith, or some other rubbish thing which tries to
Sometimes God’s messages need to stand alone and speak for themselves. Other times the prophet is meant to interpret it, and provide an explanation. The Spirit tells us which is which. The impatient prophet doesn’t wanna wait that long. Either they present every message as if it stands alone—and as a result, a lot of ’em make no sense. Or they interpret every message the Spirit grants them—and mangle the interpretation, ’cause their fruitlessness means they suck at interpretation.
’Cause they put no time into interpretation. The prophet Daniel asked for time,
How do they justify this? They assume the Spirit put it in ’em. That this is one of those cases where we needn’t worry what to say, ’cause the Spirit does the speaking for us.
Again, rubbish. God is perfect at timing, but that means he does include time for us to interpret him correctly. The overflow of our hearts
Impatient prophets likewise figure if God made ’em a prophet, and gave ’em a message, infallibility is also part of the package. ’Tain’t so. Prophets are human, and humans make mistakes. Just as young children will misunderstand Mommy, and what they think they heard her say comes out garbled, partial, or sometimes not at all what Mommy said: An immature prophet makes the very same mistake with the Holy Spirit. They got his message, jumped to a conclusion about what it meant, preached their guesses, and in so doing totally botched his message.
The unkind prophet.
Love behaves patiently and kindly,
Problem is, prophets who have only a passing knowledge of
Obviously they skipped the moral of Jonah, in which God had to demonstrate to his rebellious prophet (who knew this already, and wasn’t happy about it) how God doesn’t wanna destroy sinners; he wants them to repent!
Immature prophets aren’t the only folks who wanna zealously denounce every sin they don’t like. This attitude of wrath, fury, and hellfire is the entire foundation of
If they are prophets, and do hear God’s messages of forgiveness… well, they’ll either squelch and de-emphasize them, or they’ll twist them: “God wants you to know he loves sinners. He’ll forgive your every sin. But let me just remind you he’s telling you this because a day of wrath and judgment is coming, so you’d better repent now!” And they actually believe God’s cool with their graceless little additions.
In other cases they skip the whole truth-in-love idea,
They forget the fact kindness is what draws people to God.
The loveless prophet.
Too many churches see prophets as a position of honor and authority. Too many immature Christians see prophets as a position of power. Obviously some of ’em covet power. So that’s why they wanna become prophets, and get involved in prophetic ministry. It’s less about people, and more about might. It’s less about love, and more about control.
Hence you’re not gonna see a lot of love in immature prophets. Go down the rest of the 1 Corinthians definition and you’ll see ’em violate every bit of it:
- Prophets who can’t get control of their emotions. Nor do they care to.
1Co 13.4 - Prophets who definitely draw attention to how great they are, or how important their ministry is. It’s all part of looking out for themselves.
1Co 13.4-5 - Prophets who exaggerate. All their stories are made to sound like successes. All their messages are made to sound like they were received with awe and gratitude. Sometimes truth just gets in the way of exalting themselves.
1Co 13.4, 6 - Prophets who ignore others’ considerations. They want to get people out of their comfort zones. Want to hop over boundaries. Don’t care about keeping confidences when it makes a really great story.
1Co 13.5 - Prophets who are deliberately provocative. It’s “who they are.”
1Co 13.5 - Prophets who love to be the “bad boys” and “bad girls” of their churches, and tell the pastors off, or challenge the status quo simply because it maintains their rebel status.
1Co 13.6 - Prophets who try to maintain their rank and position. Hence they put up with nothing, trust no one, hope for nothing, and worry about their survival.
1Co 13.7
It’s all about them. Little about God.
Now like I said, this is immaturity. Hang out with the Holy Spirit long enough, and he’ll rebuke all this loveless behavior, correct them, and reshape them into a proper prophet. He’ll put legitimate prophets around them, who can disciple and guide them. They’ll grow out of it.
Or, y’know, they can go find an immature prophet who’s been clinging to their immature behavior for a good long time, know how to successfully disguise their immaturity as fruit, know how to convince Christians they’re the real thing by telling us everything we want to hear, and learn how to arrest their development in its tracks. True, they won’t be listening to God anymore, but so long that they don’t destroy any lives (or nobody finds out), they can make a good long successful career of prophesying to all the King Ahabs in our world.
Really hoping you’re not interested in that, though.
