“…in proportion to his faith.”

Romans 12:6 in my NIV reads, “We have different gifts according to the grace given us. If a man’s gift is prophesying, let him use it in proportion to his faith.” I looked at 4 different translations and they all say the same thing, in essence. The basic idea of this particular verse is that the one prophesying should not go any further than the boundry of his faith, i.e. if it hasn’t been made sure in his inner man that he is to issue a word, then he is to go no further than the faith that is given. In another post I talked somewhat extensively about what faith is, so I won’t go into all that again except to briefly say that it is what is given of God to us so that we may know conclusively that He is, or that something is issuing from Him in the moment. So how does this affect the area of prophetic speaking?

First, I have to share a story about Bethel Church’s Supernatural School of Ministry and how they “train” people to prophesy. This story involves two friends of mine, only one of which won’t mind me using his actual name, so the unamed man will be called “Dude”, and he’s the one currently going to the school as we speak. Richie is the guy he was talking to about his schooling and what it entailed.
The conversation was small talk mostly until Dude told Richie that in his “prophetic training” they take people and put them behind partitions so that they can’t see and bring in a guy or a girl and made the one behind the partition “give them a word from the Lord”. My friend Richie asked Dude, “what if God isn’t giving you a ‘word’?” Dude’s response just floored Richie, and myself as well when I heard it. Dude said, “you just guess“, to which Richie was quick to tell him that “that ain’t God bro!”. Apparently there is this popular teaching there that God is constantly sending out messages, like radio waves, and you just have to have your “bunny ears up” to recieve and that sometimes you should just say what pops into your mind cuz it “might be God.” I guess there’s no fear of it just being presumptious flesh being put on the spot to perform? The bible says that the flesh wars against the Spirit of God (gal. 5:17) and that the Spirit of God is at war against the flesh. Why not wait until God gives assurance of a word, just as He gives us assurance of salvation (1 John 5:10)? Didn’t Jesus say that the Spirit of God would guide into all truth (John 16:3)? That’s not just doctrinal truth, but ALL truth. He doesn’t guide us into vagueness and require, much less desire us to speak without knowing He’s in it first. Romans 14:23b says that “anything not done in faith (absolute assurance that God is okay with it) is SIN.”

So how might God view this teaching at this school that is teaching people to guess because “it might be God”? I honestly wonder how much place scripture is given in settings such as these.
Playing guessing games with the souls and minds of men and women should be a frightening and sobering proposition for us and is serious business to God. This makes me think back to Jeremiah 23:16 where the Lord said that these kinds of prophets “speak visions from their own minds and not from the mouth of the Lord.” In other words, they just guess or shoot out whatever they think is fitting or “might be” from God. The problem with the kinds of people who run after these prophets and the prophets themselves is that if they persist in this then God may sorta begin bumping their heads into one another, so to speak. Observe Ezekiel 14:7-11:

Eze 14:6 “Therefore say to the house of Israel, ‘Thus says the Lord GOD, “Repent and turn away from your idols and turn your faces away from all your abominations.
Eze 14:7 “For anyone of the house of Israel or of the immigrants who stay in Israel who separates himself from Me, sets up his idols in his heart, puts right before his face the stumbling block of his iniquity, and {then} comes to the prophet to inquire of Me for himself, I the LORD will be brought to answer him in My own person.
Eze 14:8 “I will set My face against that man and make him a sign and a proverb, and I will cut him off from among My people. So you will know that I am the LORD.
Eze 14:9 “But if the prophet is prevailed upon to speak a word, it is I, the LORD, who have prevailed upon that prophet, and I will stretch out My hand against him and destroy him from among My people Israel.
Eze 14:10 “They will bear {the punishment of} their iniquity; as the iniquity of the inquirer is, so the iniquity of the prophet will be,
Eze 14:11 in order that the house of Israel may no longer stray from Me and no longer defile themselves with all their transgressions. Thus they will be My people, and I shall be their God,’” declares the Lord GOD.”

The most frightening thing is that we see that God is actually “prevailing upon” the prophets to prophesy falsely according to the deceptions of these people, to give them a word in favor of their lives so as to destroy them both; the one seeking a word and the one giving it. You see, these false prophets today aren’t just operating out of the flesh or in a worst case scenario a demon, but it is just like with King Saul, i.e. “Now the Spirit of the LORD departed from Saul, and an evil spirit from the LORD terrorized him. Saul’s servants then said to him, “Behold now, an evil spirit from God is terrorizing you.” (1 samuel 16:14-15)

Even those around him knew the truth. No one had to tell them, they could see it and they didn’t even have Ezekiel or Jeremiah or the N.T. to tell them that God would send delusions to those who consistently reject the Truth (2 Thess. 2:10b-12). I’m not saying that everyone who operates this way is demonized, but I do believe that it’s dangerous ground to be on when you have a God who in times past has ushered in a deception to the people of God that causes them to prophesy. And when this kind of ‘prophetic movement’ is ushered in by God Himself, it is always immensley popular and becomes the ‘majority rule’ mindset.

Just as a side note, many different scholars that I’ve read up on define “prophesy” in an interesting and frightening manner. It seems that its meaning has two natures; one for the true prophet, one for the false. For the true it simply means to speak forth the word of the Lord. But when this word na’ba (prophesy, in Hebrew) is used regarding the false prophet it means, “to rage, to play the madman, to act insane accompanied by loud shrieks and spasmodic jerking of the body.” This actually reminds me of something that was once hailed as an ‘extreme disciple’ recording of alleged words from the Lord, but I digress.
There’s something bad in the well water saints, and I believe that God Himself put it there. The only thing more scary than that is what he states as His reasons for doing so. He said in Deuteronomy that this was from Him to test the love of His people, to see wether or not they would run after someone preaching a false message though it be accompanied by signs and wonders.

There wouldn’t be such a ready supply of this kind of thing if there wasn’t such a demand. That, I believe, is the biggest part of the problem. We want God to be something other than Who and What He is. When we can’t find Him to be this thing, or person, we seem to repeat the same mistakes as our Israelite forebears, i.e. adding a little and taking away a little from who God is; we exalt certain passages and ignore others that require something from us.

Guessing in prophetic things is like shooting craps. (Goodness sakes, at least use loaded dice!) It’s an unsure thing to guess. To guess presupposes doubt. Just because guessing sometimes proves right doesn’t give us any luxury to indulge in it when prophesying to an open heart. Doubt is all the more incentive to keep silent until God makes something sure. Oswald Chambers says, “When in doubt, don’t!” I agree, and so does Paul the apostle. That’s why he said what he said in Romans 14:23. In fact, to do something in anything less than full assurance of the Spirit of God is to bring condemnation upon us. We are condemned by doing anything from the realm of doubt, especially prophesying!!! And yet these “prophetic elite” continue to teach this wrong teaching. And the worst part is that it’s not just doctrine that is debatable and doesn’t really affect the christian walk that much, but rather it is the very issue of God and His thoughts and wether or not what we are hearing is truly that. Would you walk across an unstable bridge over a raging river? Me neither, but that is the spiritual equivalent to what these kinds of folks are doing all over the world who subscribe to this. And what compounds it is that many are sooooo open to personal prophesy (and indeed run after with undue and indiscriminate zeal) that they will actually coordinate their lives around “words” from the Lord, so-called at least.

So if you go to this school or are taught this kind of thing by anyone then know this: God is not okay with anyone speaking on His behalf who has not first stood in His council to recieve His words (Jer. 23:22). True prophetic speech is that kind of speaking that brings the reality, truth and majesty of God to bear upon the hearer. It brings weight, conviction and power to shake the inner man no matter what he thinks he believes, religiously, philosophically or otherwise. The true prophetic speaker has stood in the council of God in the secret place and carries about in him a kind of deposit of those times with God where He has revealed His holiness and His character, and anything spoken that does not proceed from that Holy God is instantly detected and rejected. Why? For the same reason that no woman can call my cell phone and try to impersonate my wife. I have known her for years and carry in my mind an experiential knowledge of how she speaks, what she sounds like and what kinds of things she says and even how she thinks. It’s similar with God, though it is in part (1 Cor. 13:9), yet that does not in any way suggest that being partial it is necessarily mixed with falsity, it’s just not the whole picture. When a prophetic word is uttered and is even keeping with what things God has said in the past and matches what kinds of things He would have or will say yet did not have its origins in the mind of Christ, it can still be only a human will uttering what it knows cranially, but didn’t recieve from the Holy Place, that is, the private council of God. This is just dangerous. “The good is the enemy of the perfect”.

Guessing is not from God. It is sin, however well meaning, and it is so sinful that it can bring actuall condemnation onto us (if not corrected) such as the kind we spoke of in Ezekiel 14 and 1 Samuel 16 earlier. I might also remind you of the scenario of Michaiah and Ahab and the 400 false prophets all speaking “thus saith the Lord”, yet all of them speaking by a lying demon that asked God for permission to do His work…which, frightfully for the false, God allowed it and even knew that it would be successful. Wow…an actuall demon, employed of God to decieve those who claim to speak on Yahweh’s behalf. HE’LL HAVE NONE OF IT, YOU CAN BE SURE OF THAT!!

When you begin to open your mouth and speak things in a prophetic fashion, yet you are not absolutely convinced of its origins as proceeding from God, you numb your discernement so that the next time its easier to say what is not of God, then its easier after that and so on, and so on until you finally cannot distinguish the difference between your soulish nature and God. When that happens and you continue to speak for God, though not really from His actual council, the Liar is just around the corner asking to have a place in your speaking and this should cause you to have much sobriety as you ponder the potential outcomes of speaking words that some will follow, permanently altering their lives and possibly diverting their lives from God’s eternal purposes.

If you speak for God out of doubt and “guessing”, stop now while you still have time and repent!! Get alone with God and get away from this wrong teaching and hold your peace. Learn to obey the voice of God in your everyday mundane life, in your marriage, regarding your fathering/mothering, in your workplace as it relates to integrity. These are the true training grounds of a prophetic spokesman, not spouting off conjecture to fulfill a quota for your prophetic training class. You won’t find your giftings and God’s unction being ultimately lessened, but increased…though you may experience times of what seems like a silence from God. This is normal; God took 40 years to make Moses into a man to lead Israel out of Egypt, who knows how many for Elijah, 30 years for John the Baptist, 30 years even for Jesus, the very Son of God! (uh, and actually very God Himself), and altogether about 17 years to make Paul the man who could be a “sent one”. This, I believe, is the big temptation for us. We all want to be out doing instead of being. Let your doing come forth from your being. Be patient. Let God distill your soul and ferment your spirit. Remember what it was first like when you knew you were born again? Remember that absolute, unshakeable knowledge in your inner man? That is the same criteria for speaking for God. That same assurance that let’s you know you’re saved is from the Spirit of God, and it’s the same assurance from the same Spirit that must proceed all prophetic speech and spiritual gift operation.

Think it over. Chew on it. Digest it.
May the Lord’s smile and blessing be upon you,

mark jr.