In a number of movements in the Christian faith, God’s people are taught by both precept and example to preface many of their decisions with the words “God told me.”

“God told me to start attending Pastor Fielding’s church.”

“God told me to marry Felicia Norris.”

“God told me to buy a Volvo.”

“God told me that I’m a prophetess.”

“God told me to break up with Rotunda.”

“God spoke to me and told me to rebuke my aunt Nina.”

God told me … it’s central to the vocabulary of a number of Christian traditions.

Several years ago, I made a disturbing observation about this type of language. That in well over half the cases when I’ve heard a person use the words “God told me,” what they said later turned out to be what the person wanted, and God got the rap for it.

Before you read on, please keep in mind that I believe that God speaks to His people in a variety of different ways. So this chapter doesn’t have in view whether or not God speaks to His children. He certainly does. What I’m addressing here is the tendency of many Christians to announce that God has told them something.

From Revise Us Again by Frank Viola, author

Frank Viola, author, is working on a new article defining the word heresy.

The article will probably release in the Fall. It’s co-written with another Christian author.

Viola is fast working on several new projects in addition to this one.

Frank Viola Author has just published Who Is Your Covering?

 

by T. Austin-Sparks

We are met at the very threshold of that realm with a statement which is calculated to check our steps for the moment, and if we approach with a sense of knowing or possessing anything already, with a sense of contentment, of personal satisfaction, or with any sense other than that of needing to know everything, then this word should bring us to a standstill at once: “…no one knoweth the Son, save the Father…” Maybe we thought we knew something about the Lord Jesus, and that we had ability to know; that study, and listening, and various other forms of our own application and activity could bring us to a knowledge, but at the outset we are told that “…no one knoweth the Son, save the Father…” All that the Son is, is locked up with the Father, and He alone knows.

When, therefore, we have faced that fact, and have recognised its implications, we shall see that here is a land which is locked up, into which we cannot enter, and for which we have no equipment. There is nothing in us of faculty to enter into the secrets of that realm of Christ. Then following the discovery of that somewhat startling fact of man’s utter incapacity to know by nature, the next fact that confronts us is this: “…it was the good pleasure of God… to reveal his Son in me…” While God has all that locked up in Himself, in His own possession, and He alone has the knowledge of the Son, it is in His heart, nevertheless, to give revelation. And, given the truth that we are so utterly dependent upon revelation from God, and that all human faculty and facility is ruled out in this respect, since such revelation can only be known by a Divine revealing after an inward kind, we are making it to be very evident that everything is of grace when we renounce all trust in works, when we turn away from self-sufficiency, self-reliance, from all confidence in the flesh, and any pride of advance and approach.

Read these two passages in the light of what Paul was when known as Saul of Tarsus, before the Lord met with him, and afterward as Paul the Apostle, and you will gain something more of their force. Saul of Tarsus would have called himself a master in Israel, one well-learned in the scriptures, with a certain strength of self-assurance, self-confidence, and self-sufficiency in his apprehension and knowledge of the oracles of God. Even such a one as he will have to come to the recognition that none of that is of avail in the realm of Christ; where he realises that he is utterly blind, utterly ignorant, utterly helpless, altogether ruled out, and needing the grace of God for the very first glimmer of light; to come down very low, and say: “…it was the good pleasure of God… to reveal his Son in me…” That is grace.

That marked the beginning, and for this present meditation we are considering the unexplored fulness of what God has Himself placed within His Son, the Lord Jesus, actually and in purpose, as being the object of His grace toward us. His grace has led Him to seek to bring us by revelation into all that knowledge which He Himself possesses as His own secret knowledge of His fulness in His Son the Lord Jesus. ALL THINGS IN CHRIST.