You’ve probably heard about the daring Christian high school senior who finally gathered enough courage to approach the girl he liked and try out his new surefire pick-up line: “God told me we should date.” She replied, “Well, God didn’t tell me.”
The one true God speaks. He speaks 11 times in the Bible’s opening chapter (Gen. 1:3, 6, 9, 11, 14, 20, 22, 24, 26, 28, 29). Throughout biblical history, God speaks repeatedly, and his speech—whether direct or through holy men taught by the Holy Spirit—is recorded as God’s full and final revelation: the holy Scriptures. Moreover, Scripture is “living and active” (Heb. 4:12). God continues to speak to us through his Word and by his Spirit today.
Our challenge is discerning the Father’s voice. Our charge is following the Son’s call. Our task is being sensitive to the Spirit’s promptings. As Christians, our hope is that we can testify, “God told me . . .”
Yet this phrase, “God told me,” grates on me like nails screeched down a chalkboard. As with the daring Christian senior, it’s often employed as an unassailable justification for self-serving beliefs or actions that might otherwise be difficult to defend. It seems that for some reason, we think, My brothers and sisters in Christ can’t argue with me if God told me.
How, then, do we take seriously that God speaks yet embrace firmly Scripture’s authority? Can we hear Father, Son, and Spirit speak in our personal circumstances in immediate and specific ways and say truly, “God told me”?
Yes, within three guardrails.
Respect Authorial Intent
Authors craft sentences to communicate substance. I mean something with each line I write. So too the biblical authors. Likewise, God. Meaning doesn’t reside in the reader. Meaning resides within the vocabulary, syntax, sentences, and discourse of a given text. This is true for this article, for the last book you read, and for the Bible.
Can we hear Father, Son, and Spirit speak in our personal circumstances in immediate and specific ways and say truly, ‘God told me’?
Christians too often treat the Bible like a source of Christianized fortune-cookie wisdom. Snap a sound bite from the Bible and claim it for your life circumstances. Perhaps on the first day of a new job, you open your Bible to Jeremiah 29:11: “For I know the plans I have for you, declares the LORD, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope.” So with an optimistic bounce in your step, you set off thinking, God told me he’ll make me prosper in this job.
But the author’s intent in Jeremiah 29 was to help God’s people settle down in exile for 70 years before God’s glorious future came to fruition. If we’re stuck in a tedious, dead-end job and we open Jeremiah 29:11, we may be right to hear God tell us to commit to it and to honor him in it. This implication of this passage aligns with the text’s original authorial intent.
As the Spirit applies the Bible to our lives—and he does—he’ll not tell us something contrary to what the passage’s author originally intended.
Recall Historical Readings
Tradition, church history, creeds, and confessions aren’t infallible. They don’t carry scriptural authority. But they’re good guides. For two millennia, Christians have considered, debated, refined, and documented their understanding of the Bible—what they’ve heard from God. This vast collection of Christian heritage is God’s good gift to us today.
I once preached on Psalm 37 at a wedding: “Delight yourself in the LORD, and he will give you the desires of your heart” (v. 4). We might reason, God told me if at our wedding we sing hymns, have prayers, read the Bible, and do that entire ceremony in a church building, God will give us the desires of our hearts: financial security, three children (two boys and one girl), a lovely house in a refined neighborhood, and health to enjoy it all. Psalm 37 makes no such promise!
Church history would help us see this. Augustine famously wrote, “Our hearts are restless until they rest in [God].” John Calvin explains, “This delight is set in opposition to the vain and deceitful allurements of the world.” Charles Spurgeon says, “There are many things which nature might desire which grace would never permit us to ask for.” If you read Psalm 37:4 on the morning of your wedding, you’d be right to hear God tell you, “Even if your fiancée doesn’t turn up today, you still have me, and in that, you can delight.”
If we think we’re hearing God tell us something that lies outside the boundaries of historical readings of the Bible, this ought to give us pause.
Receive Wise Counsel
Perhaps you believe God is telling you to do something more drastic than being overly optimistic on your first day at a new job or including songs and prayers in your wedding ceremony. Maybe you’ve just read 2 Timothy 4:2—“Preach the word”—and after more than a decade as a financial consultant, you believe God’s telling you to pursue vocational pastoral ministry. In this instance, receive wise counsel.
Tradition, church history, creeds, and confessions aren’t infallible. But they’re good guides.
Hearing a call to vocational ministry better adheres to the authorial intent of 2 Timothy 4:2, which is clearly a call to young Timothy to “preach the word” because he’s been appointed to do so by the “laying on of hands” (1 Tim. 4:14; 2 Tim. 1:6). Here Timothy is called to exercise his gift in accordance with the recognition of the broader body of Christ.
But before you make a seismic shift that would realign not only your career but your entire life, you need trusted and wise Christian counsel. Share your burden and conviction with mature brothers and sisters in Christ and then listen to their response. That includes your pastors, and your church’s denominational leadership. Be open to receiving correction. God often uses means to accomplish his purposes, and his wise people are a key means.
What we think God is telling us can often be clarified or confuted by wise counsel.
Living and Active
Hebrews 4:12 asserts that “the word of God is living and active.” This isn’t saying Scripture changes or means different things to different people. Rather, God’s Word is powerfully at work in us, and it makes different demands of different people at different times in different circumstances. This is what it means to hear God’s voice today.
So don’t ignore the Spirit’s promptings. But don’t pass off personal agendas as divine promptings; this honors no one. If what we believe God told us agrees with a passage’s authorial intent, historical readings, and wise counsel, then receive that word and act faithfully.
The Gospel Coalition