God Doesn’t Whisper with Jim Osman

Andrew Rappaport's Rapp Report

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I think that's tremendous. I think Stephen Furtick's doing the same thing. Welcome to The Wrap Report with your host,

00:37

Andrew Rapoport, where we provide biblical interpretation and application. This is a ministry of Striving for Eternity and the

00:44

Christian Podcast Community. For more content or to request a speaker for your church, go to strivingforeternity .org.

00:51

All right, welcome to another edition of The Wrap Report. I am your host, Andrew Rapoport, and we are going to have a guest on today about a new book that is, well, a little bit needed in our common

01:04

American Christianity. But, Bud, welcome. How are you doing today? Doing great,

01:10

Andrew. Thank you for having me back. Yeah, well, you know, this is a little different, Bud, because this is where, you know, we're taking a guest co -host of the show and making him just a guest.

01:22

So, I don't know how this, he may try to take over the show. But, you know, it was necessary to have you on this episode, because, you know, we have our guest, and, well, you know,

01:37

I've vowed after the last time I interviewed him that I was never going to admit that I've ever read any of his books.

01:44

But you have read his books, so it's good. You could be here to be informed and be able to ask intelligent questions about his book, and I'll just,

01:51

I'll pretend like I haven't read it, because, you know, I don't want to give him that satisfaction. So, Jim Osmond, how are you, sir?

02:02

It's good to see you again. Yeah, liar, liar, pants on fire. Oh, sorry. Words I never thought

02:09

I'd ever hear come out of my mouth. So, but for folks who weren't around for the last time, you've written several books.

02:19

I had you on a while ago to talk about your three previous books, in which case you were busting on me because I was,

02:25

I think it was with the Stairway to Heaven one, where I was pretending, I forget what I said, but you were like, you really didn't read it.

02:31

I was pretending like I hadn't. Threw you off well, but now, you know, and so here was the thing.

02:37

I will, but I don't know if I told you this part, but I was really hurt because he said that he was going to make me read this book.

02:43

And so he was going to have me, you know, write something about the book to be included in the book.

02:49

And he never invited me to do that. He replaced me with some other guy that wrote the forward.

02:56

Like an endorsement, you mean? Yeah, but. That kind of thing? But to be replaced by the other guy.

03:01

Who do you replace me with? Oh, wow, I don't know. John, John MacArthur, who's that guy?

03:09

Oh, yeah, it's right there on the cover of the book. Yeah. Like, really, you replaced me with John MacArthur of all people?

03:18

I was going to read it, maybe. I just wasn't going to admit to it. Yeah, well, R .C.

03:24

Sproul is dead, and J .I. Packer died, and so all of the greats are dying away. So I thought, well,

03:30

I'll see if John would write it. And he was gracious enough to do that. Actually, that part I did read. I did read what

03:35

John wrote, and it was very kind. Listen, the forward is the best part of the book. If you read that, you don't need to read anything else, because I just repeat what he says through the rest of the book.

03:44

So basically what you're saying is what he did in about four pages, you did in 300.

03:50

No, no, no. Why use a sentence when a paragraph will do? That's my motto. Well, I guess why use a sentence when a chapter will do?

03:58

Yeah, that's right. All right, well, and I should say, for folks to get any of your books or information about your books, they can go to jimosman .com.

04:10

And I'm glad to see that your webmaster has corrected that page, because there was a glitch there early on on your website.

04:21

Yes. It had a quasi -endorsement from Andrew Rappaport as a placeholder, for those of you who may not know.

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And the quote from Andrew said something like, even though I haven't read any of Jim's books,

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I hear that they're really good, and I should probably endorse them. So that was a placeholder until I actually read it.

04:40

I think more what it was, was that your webmaster wanted to make sure I actually put an endorsement, and that was a good way to force me to do it.

04:49

Wow, can you feel the love? But he said that he was going to do that, just show it to Jim and not actually put it up, but he put the real endorsement.

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And Jim loved it so much that he just left it up until I wrote one. I will say that on your website,

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I have a longer endorsement than either Justin Peters or John MacArthur, just for the record. So let's get into this, because this book is something different.

05:26

I know you've been working on it for a long time. Each of your books have some things that are kind of similar, and yet each of them are different, and they focus in on specific areas and topics.

05:39

And I guess we should mention, just briefly, for your other books, and I forget which order they were written in, because I'm not sure, but you have

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Truth and Territory. Truth or Territory. The Prosperity of the

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Wicked, which is from Psalm, I think it was 73? Correct, yeah. And then

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The Selling of the Stairway to Heaven, isn't that an Eagles song or something? It was close.

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There's a lot of 80s nostalgia that comes up before my book when you do an Amazon search. And we've done a previous episode on those.

06:18

I'll link that in the show notes. But this book is, I should check, because I was thinking about this earlier today, to see if your books have been getting thicker and thicker as they've been coming out, because a couple of them are thinner, and then this one is a doozy.

06:34

It's like 300 pages. Yeah. And the best parts are forward, huh?

06:39

Truth and Territory start off at 220 pages or something like that. And that was the first one.

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And then I wrote two shorter ones. The one on 73, Psalm 73, is kind of unique.

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It's just an exposition of that psalm, answering the question, why does God sometimes allow the wicked to prosper?

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And then this book is more of an apologetic polemic against hearing the voice of God theology.

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It's the longest one so far. Yeah, let me actually ask you a question about the prosperity of the wicked. Roughly how many pages was that one?

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I don't know. Like 100, 150, I think, right? Something like that? Yeah, about that.

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And that was a sermon. So did you allow people to get a dinner break when you were preaching through that?

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What I did is I wanted to preach through. Psalm 73 nicely divides it into two portions.

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Sort of the beginning where he's wrestling with the prosperity of the wicked, and then the second half, which is the answer to the dilemma. And so I preached it in two sermons.

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Not one, two sermons. But then as I was going through those two sermons, there was so much stuff that was hitting the editing room floor before I preached it that I thought, this deserves really probably six or seven sermons itself.

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And I wanted to do justice to it. So that's when I eventually decided I'm just going to write a book and take my sermons and expand them.

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It's not word for word. I rewrote all of the material using my sermon and the outline kind of as the gist of the book.

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And then I included all the stuff that I had to cut in order to make it sermon -like. Oh, so it wasn't that people were sitting there from, you know, morning till the following Sunday.

08:18

Okay, just checking. I mean, I know you could go long. I just, I wasn't sure how long.

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I think, I'm trying to remember how many chapters there are in that book, but probably eight chapters.

08:32

You could do eight sermons on that psalm and deal with that subject. It's just such a fascinating psalm.

08:39

You know, maybe I'll do that. Maybe I'll just take that book and just preach it. Yeah. Let's get into your latest book,

08:48

God Doesn't Whisper, which you wanted to, by the way, you wanted to get the domain for that, and yet someone has that domain who wouldn't believe in the book.

09:03

That's right. Somebody who believes God is speaking to her. I would suggest that everyone should go out to GodDoesn'tWhisper and comment and ask

09:12

Linda, who owns that domain, where to get a copy of God Doesn't Whisper by Jim Osmond.

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And maybe she'll get a copy and then realize that it's wrong.

09:25

What do you mean by the title God Doesn't Whisper? In that book, I'm taking on the very common

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Christian belief that God speaks to us in nudgings and promptings, still small voices,

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Gideon style fleeces, a peace in the heart, dreams, visions, promptings and nudgings in the heart, just the signs, open doors, things like that.

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My contention is that God speaks to us in His word and in His word alone that everything that He's given to us in His word is sufficient for all of life and godliness and that we need nothing else.

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So I'm taking issue with the teaching that says Christians should learn to hear the voice of God, that we can learn to hear the voice of God and that we should expect to hear the voice of God outside of scripture.

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And I'm saying that He's not whispering to us. When God wants to speak, He has no problem being heard.

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If He's not speaking to us, then there's nothing we can do to hear Him if He's not speaking.

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There's no discipline we can learn to manage to hear if He's not speaking. And if He is speaking, we're not going to miss it because God ensures that people to whom

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He is speaking hear what He is saying loud and clear which He has done all the way through scripture. And of course

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I don't believe that He is speaking to us today because we have everything that we need in scripture. Now that's a difference for you if I remember correctly from your youth, when you were in Bible college, you were looking for nudgings and feelings and a word from the

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Lord in making some major decision in your life. Yeah, in fact, chapter one starts off with a crisis that I went through in my first year of Bible college.

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I went to Bible college up in Saskatchewan in Canada, Pembroke, Saskatchewan, Miller College of the

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Bible. And at the end of my first year I was so hungry for truth and so desirous to know more and study theology that I wanted to stay at Bible college.

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But I thought I needed some clear direction from God to make that decision. So all of my classmates kept talking as if God was speaking to them and giving them clear direction.

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They'd say, the Lord spoke to my heart and told me, or the Lord clearly revealed, or the Lord gave me a sign, or I heard this still small voice telling me

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I needed to come back for Bible college. And I wanted to hear this, and I wasn't hearing it, and I thought maybe it was because I didn't grow up in a church -going family, or maybe it was because I was a new believer,

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I was immature, maybe I wasn't spiritual enough to hear the voice of God, but my hope and desire was that someday

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I too would be able to pick up on these slight communications, these whispers and nudgings that God was apparently giving to all those people.

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Someday I would learn that discipline, or gain that ability. And so I really wrestled through that decision, and I was begging

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God to speak to me. Give me a sign, give me anything. And I started to ask Him for a sign just like, give me the next year's tuition, fully paid.

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And if you do that, then I'll know it's your will for me to come back. If somebody steps up and offers to pay the next year's tuition. Then I, after hearing nothing from the

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Lord, I kind of doubled back and thought, well, maybe half a year's tuition, maybe just one semester.

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So I prayed for that as a sign, and then I brought it down to just my books.

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Lord, if you just find somebody to pay for my books, then I'll take that as a sign. And of course that didn't happen, and I kind of felt like Abraham negotiating for a city, for 10, 12 righteous men, trying to make a deal with God.

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I just wanted to hear Him give me some clear instruction, some clear direction. And that crisis really made me doubt whether or not this is how

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God speaks to us, or whether I even need to hear those type of whispers and impressions in order to make

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God -honoring decisions. And then I just went back to Bible college. Didn't you know that you were supposed to wet like a mat and put it outside in a fleece and leave it outside and see if it was dry in the morning?

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That's chapter 11. You already know that. I had fleeces like that, and that was one of them.

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If you'll pay the tuition, if you find somebody to pay my books, then I'll take that as a sign.

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That'll be a fleece. If you want me to do this, cause this to happen. If you don't want me to do this, cause X to happen. And I just couldn't imagine that God didn't want me to come back to Bible college, because that's what

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I wanted to do. I just had given up all my hopes of doing whatever it was that I had planned to do after high school, which

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I wanted to become a CPA, go to a secular university. So I eventually abandoned that and just wanted to study doctrine and theology and scripture and get grounded in that, and go a full three years, or maybe four, at Bible college.

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And I couldn't imagine that God didn't want me to do that. I wanted to do it so bad, but I felt I needed a sign. I needed him to speak to me.

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I think that's interesting. Let me interject, cause I hadn't really thought about this, but you mention it in the book.

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You give a good detail of that. And it made you question the level of your spirituality.

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Are you mature enough? Are you faithful enough spiritually? But did it ever cause you to question your salvation?

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Was that ever an issue that came up for you because you weren't getting the answers audibly or by sign or whatever?

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Was that an issue? It kind of was, but it was coupled with something else that I really wrestled with in my first year of Bible college, and that was whether or not

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I had a spiritual gift. I could not see that I had any kind of spiritual gift. I met, again, other students at college who would say that they knew what their spiritual gift was, and I heard teachers talking about every

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Christian has a spiritual gift. And I had expected that this would become clear to me that I would know exactly what my spiritual gift is.

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And I didn't know what it was, and I had no way of, I hadn't discovered what it was. And I didn't even know really how to figure that out unless God showed me what it was, revealed to me what it was.

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And so, the fact that I wasn't hearing the voice of God in the still small voice and the whisper coupled with the fact that I didn't know what my spiritual gift was, and I felt like I should, made me question at times whether or not

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I was truly saved, whether or not I was even a, maybe I was just a lower class Christian, and I wasn't one of the top tier

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Christians, and I did struggle with that. Yeah, because one of the issues that always comes up is, maybe

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I'm not sincere enough. And, you know, that's a natural response that a lot of folks would have.

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So, interesting. And some of those Hearing the Voice of God teachers like Charles Stanley and Priscilla Schrier would say that if you long to hear the voice of God, if you really, really want to, that's one of the things that we have to want to hear

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God's voice, and He'll speak to us, because He really wants to speak to us, and He really wants to make it clear. So, He just wants us to want to hear

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Him speak. And if we do that, then we'll hear the whispers of God, just like they did in Bible times. You know, that was actually a very interesting thing with the book is, you know,

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I expected to see a lot of Benny Hinn or, you know, his ilk that speak this way often.

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They're always having, I know you've dealt with this in other works, but where they're always, you know, getting a vision, they're always talking about going up to heaven, and all these dreams and stuff.

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But what surprised me is how much you were quoting more solid, what we would consider solid conservative

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Christians, like, as you just mentioned, Charles Stanley. I mean, most people wouldn't think of Charles Stanley being in this same camp where you'd commonly hear a

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Benny Hinn. Yeah, that's right. And I really was targeting in my dealing with the teachers,

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I was kind of targeting or leaning a little more towards people who are teachers who would call themselves cessationists and say that these revelatory gifts are no longer being given today.

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There's a lot of people in that camp who would believe in this hearing the voice of God methodology for making decisions, and I was really leaning towards people who would be in more broadly speaking, our theological circles, and not necessarily going after the charismatics and the

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NAR, because my target audience was the little old lady sitting in the Baptist pew who thinks that God's whispering in her ear where to go to lunch after church, or the little, the house, the stay -at -home mom who's waiting for the

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Lord to reveal through a sign which neighbor she needs to evangelize next. And those are the people that I was going after who would probably look at the

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NAR and the Word of Faith guys or the extreme charismatics and say, no, no, I disagree with all that.

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I don't want anything to do with all that crazy nonsense that goes on over there. I'm a

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Baptist. I don't believe in all that charismatic, charismania nonsense, but yet they will have yet adopted the theology of how to hear from God straight out of charismatic circles.

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They just haven't sort of customized Henry Blackaby style into how to do it in a way that's still quote -unquote cessationist.

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And so that's really the people that I was trying to target. I could have quoted a lot of Jack Deere and Benny Hinn and Kenneth Copeland.

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That's easy pickings. And I could have gone after that, but I didn't want to have half of my audience say, yeah,

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I agree with Jim. Those people are horrible. I wanted them to look at what they themselves do and evaluate whether or not they are relying upon the sufficiency of Scripture.

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You know, you explain a story with Charles Stanley with his Thanksgiving turkey. I'm praying and hearing the

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Lord tell him exactly where to get a turkey. And people will say, well, what do you do with that? It seems like this, he says he heard from the

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Lord and look, it happened. Let me caveat it with this. The question comes up, what do you do with this when people have these experiences?

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And I know we can't exegete experiences, so that's not the answer. But when we look at this, here's my thing that puzzles me is you have professing believers who say, here's my experience, and look, it happened just as I feel the

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Lord told me, but yet I will hear Mormons and Catholics and plenty of others that will say the same exact thing, that they knew they were supposed to be somewhere because the

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Lord told them, and the fact that the Lord told them and it happened is proof that they're following the right

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God. What does that do to a Charles Stanley when he tells you that he heard the voice of the

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Lord that told him where to buy a Thanksgiving turkey? Well, I don't doubt for one moment that people have experiences.

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When you start off with people being trained to think and speak as if every thought that pops into their head is divine revelation, every impression or nudging or prompting or intuition that they might have is the voice of God, the authoritative voice of God in their lives, when people believe that, then of course they're going to have thoughts, and they're going to have intuitions, and they're going to feel strongly that they should do something or that something is about to happen, and then they're going to assign that to the voice of God and say, well, this must be the

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Lord speaking, and then when it turns out exactly as they thought that it might turn out, they're going to say, well, see the Lord revealed this to me or told me this.

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I have no doubt that people have those experiences, but I go back to the very beginning of that little scenario that I just laid out.

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Why should I believe that every nudging or prompting, every thought that comes into my head is a divine missive?

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Why should I believe that? Why should I believe that my thoughts are not just thoughts? My wife has fantastic intuition.

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She can look at a situation or something will happen and she gets an unsettled feeling about it.

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It's not the voice of God speaking to her. We don't call that divine revelation. It's women's intuition. Women have a women's intuition.

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We call it women's intuition because it is an actual thing. It's not the voice of God. And the way that I know that these intuitions and these thoughts and ideas are not the voice of God even when they work out well, is that even unbelievers have this happen to them.

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Even unbelievers will say, they can walk up to me and say, you know, I don't know why, but I just got this feeling that I should go back in to the house before I left to go to the airport, and they go back in and find out that they left the iron on.

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What do you attribute that to? Is that the voice of God? Well, you know, we're told by the people in Hearing the

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Voice of God theology circles that as Christians, we need to tune in to God's frequency, and we need to want to hear from God and try to hear from God and learn this discipline of hearing from God, and eventually we will.

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Well, if unbelievers can pick up these cues and these clues and have no problem hearing the same voices that we as Christians have, why should

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I believe that their thoughts are not the voice of God, but my thoughts are? My thoughts are the same kind, the same nature.

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Okay, and you know, one thing with what you said that I'm kind of, I would have to pick a bone with is you say your wife has intuition, but yet she's your wife.

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I mean, I'm just saying. Well, I didn't say she's a good judge of character. She likes you as well.

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Yeah, there's a difference. Yeah, there's a difference. All right, so after this break, what I'd like to do is get into, because really the bedrock of your whole book is these three faulty assumptions that everything, those who say they hear the voice of God, there's three faulty assumptions that really it rests on.

22:21

I want to go through those right after this break. Unbelievers now have no excuse to misinterpret the

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I think right now, we're about to get to about 40. With that, and by the way, Jim, you're one of them.

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Your sermons every week, your Sunday sermons end up as the Kootenai Community Church Podcast, so you're also a member.

24:48

Let's go over these three faulty assumptions, because I think this really does, and this is what

24:54

I liked about the book that I didn't read, it lays out a foundation really for the rest of the book, because a lot of it's based on these three faulty assumptions, so why don't you get into those?

25:10

Yeah, so the three assumptions that are made, and these are kind of the doctrines that really lie unchallenged at the foundation of people who believe that they're hearing the voice of God through nudgings and promptings and impressions, etc.

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The three foundations are these. First, that I need to hear from God outside Scripture, and basically by that, what

25:29

I mean is I am unable to make decisions as a pastor. I'm unable to make decisions as a father or as a leader or in my day -to -day life if I'm not hearing constantly these whispers from God, Him giving me these revelations about what house to buy, what deacon to appoint next, which youth leader to hire, what car to buy, where to have lunch, etc.

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And I need to hear from God if I'm going to be obedient. In fact, some of the HVG, I call it

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HVG, Hearing the Voice of God teachers that I quote in the book, say just that. I think it is Robert Morris who says,

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I couldn't be a pastor of a church without constantly hearing the voice of God in decisions that I make, as if Scripture is not enough for him.

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So that's the first assumption, is that I need this, that I lack something. Scripture hasn't given me all that is necessary for life and God, for ministry, that I need something more.

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I need God to make these revelations to me and to whisper His directions in my ear. That's the first assumption.

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The second one is that I should expect to hear from God outside Scripture. Jesus said in John 10, my sheep hear my voice, and so if there's a promise there that His people are going to hear

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His voice, then I should expect this from God, and that God has promised to reveal these things, and God has promised to continue speaking to me in Scripture.

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This is the second assumption, is that if the saints of old all heard the voice of God, if they all received revelation,

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I should expect to as well. So assumption number one, I need to hear from God outside Scripture. Assumption number two,

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I should expect to. And the third one is that I can learn, or that I must learn to hear from God outside Scripture.

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And typically, hearing the voice of God proponents use 1 Samuel chapter 3, that Samuel who heard the voice of God didn't know it was

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God speaking to him, and he had to learn how to hear from God as a prophet, and that you and I must learn this discipline as well, that there is some key to understanding, there are a list of keys to understanding how to hear

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God speak, and we need to learn how to hear the whisper, to interpret the whisper, and then to obey the whispers.

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And so, people like Priscilla Schrier and Robert Morris and Henry Blackaby, they have whole paradigms, whole ways of structuring this methodology whereby we can learn this discipline, this very essential discipline of hearing from God.

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And it involves quieting our hearts and quieting ourselves and listening, reading Scripture and listening for a voice, and then when we hear the voice, acting on it, obeying it, writing it down sometimes, exegeting it, talking to others, there's this very complicated construct, a methodology that we supposedly need in order to hear

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God speak. So those are the three assumptions. And I deal with those in the texts that are often cited to make those cases, and that's what's mostly unchallenged in those circles.

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Nobody ever steps up to say, do I really need to hear from God? Is Scripture not enough? Nobody steps up and says, is this something that really can be learned?

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If God is speaking, do I need to learn something, how to hear Him? I mean, this is really what Robert Morris would say.

28:33

Go ahead. I was going to say, really, the battle that it seems to be right now is the sufficiency of Scripture.

28:39

Yeah, well, three of my four books deal with the sufficiency of Scripture. Truth or Territory deals with the sufficiency of Scripture in the area of spiritual warfare.

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Do I need to interview demons, and do I need special methodologies and prayer mantras, et cetera, to fight the truth of war?

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That's sufficiency of Scripture. The second one, The Selling the Stairway of Heaven, do I need visitations from four -year -old boys who go to heaven and have outer -body experiences to confirm the truth of Scripture?

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Do I need Don Piper, 90 Minutes in Heaven, to spend 90 minutes outside Heaven, outside Heaven's gates, to tell me that Scripture is real, and that Jesus is real, and that the

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Bible is true, and that Heaven is our eternal home? Do I need that, or is Scripture enough? And then this book, do I need to hear

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God speak to me outside Scripture? Or is Scripture sufficient? And I contend that Scripture is sufficient.

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Yeah, but for some, it's not. In fact, for some, they even, shall we say, mock that.

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Now, I'm going to play a clip here for you, and Bud was like, are you really going to do this?

29:34

You're really, do we have to talk about this person yet again? But I think that,

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I think it'll be helpful. You know. Because it's prevalent. It's prevalent.

29:46

Just like he's pointed out, just like the book points out, this is prevalent in evangelicalism.

29:55

So, I did give you grief on that. Yeah, you did. So, Jim, let's have you interact with this right here from Beth Moore, considered a conservative

30:06

Christian and an SBC. But here's what she says about these things. What I'm about to explain to you is one reason, amid a thousand, that I love

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Jesus Christ so much for. I mean, this is the kind of thing that just blows my mind about Him.

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A number of months back, I had, was sleeping regular all night, and I need you to know something.

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In all of these 53 years of living, I just never have had a meaningful dream. And it's not been because I haven't asked for Him.

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If there is a manifestation of God or the Spirit, I've somewhere asked for it. I mean,

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I'm just going, I will, I will. And most of the time, He goes, you know what? Some people are safer with the word on the page.

30:50

And so, He just... So, what do you think about that, Jim? That she desires these manifestations?

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She desires the manifestations, but she really makes it clear. She desires the manifestations over the word on the page.

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The word on the page, yeah. You know, that is a scary theology. I'll say something shocking.

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I would ask you, would you rather have, or I would ask her, I'd ask my congregations actually, would you rather have the

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Book of Amos, to read the Book of Amos, or a personal, visible appearance of Jesus Christ and His glory?

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Which one would you, which one do you think is more reliable, and which one should you cherish more? And I know that we would all be inclined to say, well,

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I would cherish or view as more reliable the personal, visible appearance of Jesus. Well, if you turn to 2

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Peter chapter 1, where Peter talks about that, he considers the written word more sure, the prophetic word more sure than his experience.

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And our inclination is to think that the experience is better, that what we see with our eyes is better, that some manifestation is better.

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It's not. Amos would be better than that experience. And I just choose Amos because it's probably a little -known

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Old Testament book that most people couldn't tell you the name or the date or the gist of Amos at all.

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And so, there's a book that we are unfamiliar with, and the fact that she would prefer the manifestation to over the written word says a lot about her understanding of the written word.

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Yeah, and I mean, I could have played more where she'd like, she's saying how she, for her, and she started by saying, this is why she loves

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Jesus, because he gave her a dream. He gave her this dream.

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But she's looking for that, and she actually says in there, and I won't play this clip, but she actually says in there that she was asking for this over and over for a long time.

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And this is what I think we see so often in Christianity is, as you were saying, it's that the word of God is not sufficient for people like this.

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They're being taught that, okay, you have the word of God, but it's not enough. And the thing that gets me is the mockery that she had for the word of the

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Lord of Lords and King of Kings. And she's making it a joke. Everyone's laughing. Like, are you kidding me?

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The prophetic word is more sure than that experience. And Peter had an experience that rivals any experience you could hope to have.

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And that's the one he cites there in 2 Peter chapter 1, the mount of transfiguration, seeing the Lord transfigured before his eyes.

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And he said, we have the prophetic word made more sure. Amos is better than that experience. And the fact that she would think that the experience is better than just the written word?

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Oh, what a pathetically low view of scripture. Let me deal with a thing that you deal with in addressing these faulty arguments that people make.

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They'll often go to, when they're trying to teach people that you have to learn how to hear from the voice of God, they will look to Eli and Samuel.

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And here you have Samuel. He hears God call his name. He goes to Eli thinking it's Eli. Eli says, go back to bed.

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Goes back to bed. Hears it again. Comes to Eli. Eli now realizes, wait, this is the

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Lord. Next time ask him what he wants. Now, so many people turn to that and will say, but look, here is an example of us having to learn how to hear from the voice of God.

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So I have a couple questions with this for you. Did Samuel actually hear

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God or did he have to first learn how to hear God before he realized someone was speaking to him?

34:46

Yeah, that's the irony of using that passage. He heard clearly. These people who say you have to learn how to hear

34:51

God, Samuel heard the Lord clearly. It was a clear communication. Samuel didn't think that he was calling

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Levi or Hoppy or Phineas or anybody else in the temple. Samuel understood God was calling to him. But Samuel didn't understand who it was that was calling him, because as the text says, the word of the

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Lord is rare in those days. So ironically, Charles Stanley uses that passage to talk about how commonly

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God speaks to us and how easy it is to learn to hear God, just like Samuel did. And he neglects to quote the part of the passage that says the word of the

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Lord is rare in those days. And that's why Samuel thought it was Eli calling and not the

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Lord calling. Samuel didn't expect to hear from God outside of Scripture. He wasn't wandering around saying, you know,

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I think the Lord is going to speak to me. I think I should expect God to speak to me. I just need to learn how to hear them.

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And so when he heard that word, he didn't immediately assume oh, that must be the Lord speaking, as most hearing the voice of God proponents today would say.

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They hear something and think, oh, but the Lord must be speaking. He just assumed what anybody should assume, that when somebody called his name, it must have been somebody else there in the temple and not the

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Lord. So he didn't need to learn how to hear the voice of God because he heard it just fine. He just didn't understand who it was that was speaking to him.

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He got the source wrong, not the content or the proposition that was being communicated.

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Almost as if they got it completely backwards. Completely backwards. And you look at John 10, you look at Gideon's Fleece, the peace in the heart, all of these passages that are typically cited by people who think they're hearing the voice of God, they get the methodology, the example completely backwards almost every time.

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It's the polar opposite of what they say. You know, I would just interject that one of the really helpful and impressive things that you've done in the book is rightly take these teachers who are promoting this, and using the very proof texts that they cite, and you're correctly using hermeneutics to interpret those in a biblical way that's faithful to the context and the content of analogia scriptura, you're exposing that.

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And I don't think the average pew sitter has any ability to comprehend that.

37:05

So what you've done there is great. In fact, I think what's that other guy who wrote your foreword instead of Andrew?

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MacArthur even compliments you on that, that you point the readers back to Scripture, and rightly handle

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Scripture. So thank you for doing that. It's a tremendous resource. You know, there's two things

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I picked up, if I had read the book, that is. Which you should.

37:35

I'm not going to confirm or deny. The thing, though, is that the book is filled with two things that I've noticed.

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One, tons of quotes, lengthy quotes from these people so that it's in context.

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You're hearing it, and it's not just the guys on the fringe, it's the people that we would look to and say that they're conservative.

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But lengthy quotes so you see that this is not just cherry picking. The other thing that I see throughout the book is, which

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I know you, so I know you do this, is the exposition of Scripture.

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Really, the third section of your book is taking every one of these claims, the fleece, hearing a still small voice, you take each one of them in context, break them out, and explain what they actually mean.

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And really decimate the arguments that they hold. In fact, most of them, again, they have it completely opposite.

38:39

So, let's go through a couple of those, as many as we'll have time for, but let's look at some of the arguments that we often hear from the

38:48

I kept noticing in your book the HVG. I thought that stood for home vacation goods or something.

38:58

Hearing from the voice of God. Let's deal with some of them. The first one I think, and it's really where you get the title of your book from, right?

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I hear a still small voice. Why is that not one that they should be using for the position that they're holding to?

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Well, this is where I started because most people just refer to the voice of God as the still small voice.

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They use that so frequently. Charles Stanley, Robert Morris, Priscilla Schreier said this is the indispensable way that God speaks to us.

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Dallas Willard calls this the indispensable still small voice. And he uses

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Elijah in 1 Kings there as sort of the template. The model by which we can pattern our own hearing from God after.

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And that phrase still small voice is I'm just going to pull up the various translations.

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It's translated various different ways. It's translated as a still small voice, the sound of a low whisper, the sound of a gentle blowing, the voice of a gentle whisper, a soft whisper.

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It's only used one time in all the Old Testament, that phrase. And it's very difficult to translate, which is why it's been translated so variously in so many different ways.

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And so it's very unsure exactly what it was that Elijah heard. We do know something. He heard something outside of the cave.

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He was inside the cave. He had to go outside the cave in order to hear it. And so that tells me that it wasn't an internal voice.

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It wasn't something he heard in his head because he wouldn't have needed to go outside the cave in order to hear it. He heard something outside that was akin to a gentle blowing whisper.

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This is after the fire and after the earthquake and after the wind and all that. He heard something soft and something gentle and he went outside to hear it and then the

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Lord spoke to him. And the Lord's speaking is not characterized as the still small voice. The Lord's speaking is characterized as straightforward.

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The word of the Lord came to Elijah and he had a conversation with Elijah. So Elijah was a prophet of God.

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We would expect that the Lord would speak to Elijah and speak through Elijah. We would expect that Elijah would have conversations with God, which prophets did.

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And so being a unique man, that would be something that would be unique to him. And when the

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Lord spoke to Elijah, it didn't come as a still small voice. It came as a the word of the

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Lord came to Elijah. And that's how 1 Kings characterizes it consistently. And so it's ironic that they take

41:21

Elijah, they take that one phrase which really doesn't describe, it describes a sound that Elijah heard and they use that one phrase in one particular translation of it.

41:30

Not a consistent as it's translated in other ways, but one particular translation of it.

41:35

And they adopt that as the model for this entire Hearing the Voice of God theology. That God speaks to us in gentle whispers that we hear internally and that's the voice of God.

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And it's the opposite of what happened with Elijah. Elijah did not hear an internal voice. It was external to himself.

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In fact, it was external to the cave in which he was sitting. He had to go outside. And there the Lord spoke to him, not in whispers, but in clear conversation in a quotable sense.

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It was the audible voice of God that Elijah heard, not an internal voice. So that's just an example of how they abuse a passage and a translation of scripture in order to build this theology.

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Now you have a number of them here in your book. Let's just try to pick maybe two others.

42:16

That first one is probably the most known, but you have the verse jumped off the page,

42:22

God gave me a sign, God opened the door, I put out a fleece, I had peace about it,

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I felt led, I had a dream, I saw a man in white. I think when we look at these, probably the most common ones that we're going to hear is

42:37

I had peace about it, or I put out a fleece, or God gave me a sign. Why don't you deal with maybe a couple of those?

42:47

Okay, I'll go through them quickly. The idea that God gave me a sign, people will look at their circumstances, and this is a way of trying to divine the voice of God from circumstances, things that happen in our lives.

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I think I gave this example in that chapter, I'm a church and a missionary gets up and gives a church update on his mission field, and he's from Africa, and then

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I go out to lunch and I hear the song Africa from Toto, and then I hear it again in the elevator on Wednesday, and then

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I look up in the clouds on Saturday, and I see the shape of the clouds of Africa. Is the

43:18

Lord trying to tell me something about Africa? Should I be looking at these signs as ways that God is trying to give me some sort of prompting or nudging about a thing that I need to pursue through these various circumstantial signs.

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And so I deal with that in that chapter. Putting out a fleece goes back to Gideon, the idea that we would pray to God and say,

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Lord, if you want me to do X, then make this happen. If you want me to do Y, then make this happen. And that we can take this circumstance, however it cashes out, as an indication of God's will, and that we should make decisions on the basis of that.

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And then a piece about it, I've had people say this, you know, I prayed about this, and I feel the Lord's telling me this, and as I pray about it,

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I have a piece about it. Joyce Meyer calls the piece just this indispensable thing. She says, never make a decision without consulting the piece.

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And this is just a way of trying to read the affections or feelings of our own hearts as if that itself is the voice of God.

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If we feel at peace with something, then we should do that thing.

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And if we don't, if we feel what they sometimes call a check in the spirit, then we should not make that decision or not do that thing.

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And they would use this as a means of divining the voice of God, that God speaks to us through this peace in our heart.

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You know, I remember doing some open air preaching about ten some years ago in New York City.

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We had a young man and his wife that had been saved maybe for three months, and he came out, he was food shopping, came out and listened to me.

44:44

And he was listening to preaching, and he ended up saying, he just came up afterwards, and he used the typical, and this is why this book is so important, because it's the typical lingo.

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He turns to me and says, well, I heard you preaching and the Lord just spoke to me in my heart. And I looked at him and said, and I don't remember this, he tells this story,

45:03

I don't remember saying it, but I can picture me saying it. And I supposedly turned to him and just said, it was probably heartburn.

45:09

And he said he went home that night and was so agitated over the fact that he's saying that God did this thing, and I made light of it, like I just rejected it out of hand.

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And he kept coming back every Saturday. Now, granted, this was in the summer, and he kept coming out, he told me that, because I would preach for like three hours, his ice cream would melt, he had those cookies that were in a can where you pop it open, and he said that blew up once.

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You know, I said, you should really go food shopping after I'm done preaching. But he had told me years later that he was so upset that I just called it heartburn, that he couldn't figure out why

45:46

I didn't see that this was the Lord doing something. But I think this shows how prevalent this is in American Christianity.

45:55

Do you find that to be the same? Oh, I think it's everywhere, yeah. When I was at Bible College, it was all the way through the student body, and I don't think that, other than the church in which

46:08

I pastor right now, and this is a relatively small circle, I think it's endemic throughout

46:15

Christianity. The verbiage, the language has worked its way into evangelicalism to the point where people just talk about, you know,

46:24

I just had a hankering for Mexican food after church, so the Lord spoke to me, must have spoke to me and told me this, or the

46:30

Lord told me to give you a call, you know, because you popped into their mind at some point while they're having devotions or they're in the shower, and you popped into their head and they said,

46:40

I should call that person. Yeah, I really should call that person. So they take that as the voice of God. And again,

46:45

I go back to the assumption, why should I think that just because I have a thought about something, that that's the voice of God? And I'm not saying that the

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Lord cannot use our thoughts or that He cannot direct our hearts to do certain things. I totally believe that.

46:57

If God can direct the heart of a king like the rivers of water, then He can use my thoughts and my intuitions and my feelings about certain things to direct my steps, but I can't call that divine revelation.

47:09

I can't call that the voice of God, because that's not the voice of God. That might be providence. It might be what Spurgeon would call extraordinary providences, but it's not the voice of God.

47:18

It's not revelatory knowledge. I think that God does direct our hearts. He does change our affections. He makes me desire

47:24

X instead of Y, and so I end up doing X, but that's not the voice of God. Scripture doesn't call that the voice of God.

47:30

Sometimes we just have thoughts, and sometimes they work out well, but there's no light that comes on on my forehead that tells me when

47:37

God is speaking to me. I can't know that. I can't know sometimes extraordinary providences until it's in hindsight, until I look back and see, wow, that was through the

47:45

Lord's handiwork in that direction. I would say that the crisis that resulted in Bible college there from me wanting direction about whether or not to come back,

47:55

I ended up doing what I wanted to do. The Lord so laid it on my heart that I was compelled to come back for a first year, or for second year after first year, and so I did, and now

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I can look back and say, in the providence of God, I believe that He was directing my steps back then, and I wouldn't say that He spoke to me and told me

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I should come back by giving man that desire. I would use biblical language to communicate that. I had a desire to go back.

48:19

I wanted to study these things. I felt compelled to do it. God changed my desires, and so I ended up doing that.

48:26

Well, now it worked out really well. My Bible college education comes in really handy, and now

48:31

I'm pastoring a church, and I'm preaching weekly, and teaching weekly, and writing books, and so that really worked out well, but I wouldn't have known that in first year

48:38

Bible college, that that's what the Lord was doing, and I would have been wrong for me at that point to say that's the voice of God.

48:44

It's wrong for me now to look back and say, my feelings there, my inclinations there were the voice of God, because that's not the voice of God.

48:52

God's not whispering in that way. God changes our heart. He directs our affections. He convicts us. He encourages us.

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He comforts us. He exhorts us. He does all kinds of things that end up directing our hearts and our steps in various ways to please

49:04

Him, and that's the language we should use instead of this notion that God is speaking to us.

49:11

Go ahead, bud. Oh, I'm sorry. Andrew, if you could let somebody who's actually read the book talk, that would be great.

49:19

Thank you, Pastor. I appreciate that. I'll catch grief for it later, but nevertheless,

49:26

I wanted to say what you just observed is really the threshold. At some point, you spill over into what you have to identify as providence, and that is always a mystery and a miracle of God's working in our lives that is gleaned in hindsight.

49:46

It is not foresight. So, at some point, this kind of teaching spills over into the necessity of providence.

49:55

But I had told a couple of folks that, by virtue of Andrew, was going to have an opportunity to speak to you, and I had a couple of questions that they wanted to ask, and these are regenerative believers.

50:09

They are biblical. They are sound in their theology. One of them, Eugene, asked this.

50:18

He said, Since in Scripture God has spoken so plainly and clearly, all that we need to know for life and godliness, you just cited

50:25

Peter, why do you think there is such a need for those who claim to be Christians, why do they need to hear

50:33

God whisper some extra -biblical word? Why do you think this has become so prevalent in evangelicalism?

50:41

I think it is because we, as a Christian culture in the West, we have bought into this notion that we need the supernatural.

50:49

We need manifestations. We need feelings. We have become a feelings -oriented or feelings -driven

50:55

Christian culture so that I need to feel God. I need to feel that He's close. Well, what better way to feel that He's close than to have

51:02

Him, to constantly hear Him whispering in your ear, and knowing that you have this personal relationship. That's what

51:07

Priscilla Schrier describes this, and Charles Stanley also speaks of what kind of a

51:13

God, what kind of personal relationship is it if you're not hearing from God regularly? Henry Blackaby says if you're not hearing from God regularly, what kind of a relationship is that where we do all the talking and God does all the listening?

51:24

So we bought into the notion that in order to have a personal emotive, affectionate relationship with God, that we need to have this two -way communication to hear

51:34

Him speak. And once we buy into that, then of course I've got to have the experience and the manifestation like Beth Moore that we looked at earlier.

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We have to have those experiences and those manifestations in their present in order to have that feeling of closeness and intimacy with God.

51:50

Rather than finding our joy and our intimacy and seeing the hand of God in our work, in our lives, at work in our lives, in all the

51:58

Biblical ways and all the Biblical things that He does. I think it was Phil Johnson with Grace to You who one time said,

52:04

I think I heard him say that people who think that the only time that God is at work is when you see Him in the supernatural, involved in these miraculous, spectacular things that happen in life, they like to be able to point to that and say, oh look,

52:15

God is at work. Well, who is it that really sees the hand of God in their lives? The person who only sees

52:20

Him in the supernatural manifestations? Or the person who sees Him in the day -to -day minutia of divine providence?

52:28

In Him directing our steps? And that's why I would recommend a book by like the Doctrine of Providence by the

52:34

Puritan, is it Watson? The Doctrine of Providence, a Puritan classic.

52:39

That's a fantastic book that just describes God's providential outworking of all things. There's one by R .C.

52:46

Sproul on Joseph and the Coat of Many Colors. I should have prepped that. I forget what the title that was, but anyway,

52:52

Andrew can look it up and put it in the show notes. But I would recommend two books like that to understand how God works through providence, what providence is, and once you understand divine providence and how

53:01

He's at work, you can see it all over the place, if you know what to look for. But we've been trained to only look for the supernatural, the spectacular, the stuff that makes us feel like God is there.

53:12

God is working through all of these things that don't do anything to make us feel things. He's just at work in everything, all the details of my life.

53:20

Every last detail of it. Yeah, providence is the miracle. Yeah, it is. Magnificent.

53:26

And it's daily and it's everyday and it's the big things and the small things and it's the things we don't even know are going on.

53:33

Well, before Andrew picks up, I will later have a, I guess you'd call it, a

53:39

Beelzebub's advocate question. So you can prep for that. Well, one of the things

53:47

I think why this is so dangerous in Christianity is the fact that what

53:54

I've seen people using that they've heard from the Lord, heard the voice of the

53:59

Lord, to justify even sinful behavior, but make it sound spiritual, or at least they feel spiritual.

54:06

I remember in a prayer meeting once where we had a gentleman who, at work, he had someone who had done something that was wrong and the supervisor came to this gentleman and the supervisor even said the reason he was coming to this gentleman about the situation was because the gentleman was an eyewitness to the situation and he was a

54:30

Christian. So what was he saying? He was saying because this guy was a Christian, he was expecting the truth.

54:35

But this guy said that the Lord told him to lie to protect his co -worker from saying what actually happened to his boss so that he could have an opportunity to witness to the co -worker.

54:50

And I sat down with him afterwards and said, no, God never says to lie. That's not what Scripture would say. That wasn't the voice of the

54:57

Lord. But he couldn't see that in his mind, God spoke to him and told him he should lie to his boss to protect a co -worker so he had an opportunity to share the gospel with him, which

55:08

I'm like, you really think your co -worker is going to hear your boss is saying, you're a

55:13

Christian so I'm coming to you and you just lied and your co -worker who did wrong knows it.

55:19

Is he really going to believe that you're any different than him? But this is the danger that I end up seeing with this.

55:27

One of the major things, and I want to after this break cover this, is, and you've kind of hit on it a little, which is people view this as the means of decision making.

55:39

And if you remove this, Jim, from their thinking in decision making, that leaves people that are believing this with a question of how then do

55:48

I make decisions? So after this break, I want you to pick up with this and let's talk about how people make decisions.

55:56

Before we go to break again, the book is God Doesn't Whisper. It is available on Amazon .com.

56:01

You can get it in Kindle or paperback. So go to Amazon .com, God Does Not Whisper.

56:07

Right after this break, we're going to talk about how do we decide, how do we understand, how do we make decisions without hearing from the voice of God.

56:17

The good news is, striving for eternity would love to come to your church to spend two days with your folks, teaching them biblical hermeneutics.

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57:54

Alright, so, Jim, let's deal with this, because this really is a major thing that I think most people are going to struggle with now.

58:01

If they go through your book, they realize, everything that I've been kind of taught, everything that I've been believing about decision -making is now thrown out the window.

58:09

How then do we make decisions? Well, I would say we make decisions in the same way that the

58:17

Apostles made decisions, and that is that if we have an opportunity to choose between two options,

58:23

A and B, we need to ask two questions. What does the moral will of God reveal concerning this decision?

58:30

And that is, His revealed will in Scripture, what He has said, that I need to flee from immorality, that I need to do all things for the glory of God, that I need to...

58:40

Scripture lays out the moral parameters in which we are to live as believers, and that's a pretty big circle, but it leaves a lot of options.

58:49

When we're choosing between A and B, it still leaves probably most options open to us. Then the second question we need to ask is, what does wisdom say?

58:57

What does God's word reveal? Would be the wise thing to do? Is there warnings of foolishness that I need to avoid here?

59:04

And once we've answered those two questions, we've found that there's nothing about this decision or these options that violates

59:10

God's clearly revealed moral will or the wisdom that He has given to me in Scripture, then we are free to make, and this is going to sound shocking to some people, we are free to make either decision with God's blessing.

59:22

We're free to decide to do anything we want, so long as it does not violate Scripture, and it does not violate

59:28

God's sound wisdom. And that leaves the option open to us. We are free to marry any woman we want as long as it doesn't violate

59:37

God's moral will or violate God's wisdom. We're free to take any job we want, to buy any house we want, as long as it doesn't violate

59:44

God's moral will revealed in Scripture or sound wisdom. And it's not that God does not care which choice we make, it's as if He's apathetic.

59:52

It's that God is not intent on revealing to us which choice to make. We are free to make that choice with the firm conviction that in doing so, we're not violating

01:00:01

God's will, and we can make that decision with the conviction that He will bless or use whatever decision it is that we end up making.

01:00:10

And, you know, you mentioned Friesen's book, which does address this.

01:00:18

I dealt within two chapters basically what Gary Friesen spends I don't know, 500 pages going through or something.

01:00:23

My book is thick. His is three of my books put together. But he lays out that there's a lot of overlap between what

01:00:31

Gary Friesen has written and what I've written in terms of some of the methodologies that I critique, but he lays out the wisdom model for decision making, which

01:00:39

I just basically briefly gave to you here. And he shows that it's actually what the apostles did. You read

01:00:45

Paul in the book of Romans, and he talks about wanting to go to the city of Rome and eventually to visit them, and he talks about his strong desire to do so, and then he says maybe perhaps at last in the will of God I'll be able to make this trip and to come and see you.

01:00:58

And he doesn't say, you know, the Lord is revealing to me that this is what my travel plan should be, or the Lord gave me a vision of Rome, or the

01:01:05

Lord laid Rome on my heart, or the Lord has whispered to my heart, Rome, over and over again.

01:01:11

He doesn't use any of that language. He just says, I have a desire to come see you. There's a spiritual benefit to this.

01:01:16

I'm called to be the apostle to the Gentiles, so it makes sense that this is within God's moral will. There's nothing unwise about it, and maybe the

01:01:23

Lord will open up the door to do so, and I'll be able to come and do it. Basically, the apostle Paul was not waiting to hear a word from God.

01:01:29

He was just making a decision that was in keeping with what God had revealed in Scripture, and in keeping with what he desired ultimately to do.

01:01:37

I start the book by talking about that crisis of college, whether I should go back to the second year or not. The end of the book tells you exactly how it is that I made that decision.

01:01:45

I ended up doing exactly what I wanted to do. I wanted to go study Scripture. That was what I wanted to do, so I decided to do that.

01:01:52

I didn't hear the voice of God in deciding to do that. I didn't, God didn't speak to me and tell me which woman to marry, or which city to live in, or which church to pastor, or which house to buy, or what to name my kids, or none of that.

01:02:04

I don't need anything from God. He's given to me everything in Scripture to make God -glorifying decisions. And so if I'm making it within the parameters of what

01:02:11

God has revealed in Scripture, in terms of his moral will and his wisdom, then I'm free to make any of those decisions with the promise or the full confidence that I'm not violating

01:02:21

God's will in doing so. Yeah, and I think that this is, this book is, even though I didn't read it, of course.

01:02:29

Um, yeah. That's a good one. Listen, that, what he's talking about right there, if he had gone through all the book,

01:02:39

I mean 16, was there 19 chapters, something like that? Let me see,

01:02:44

I did at least check, I did read the table of contents there. 20 chapters, 20 chapters. You got a copy of it, flip it open.

01:02:51

If you had not included that on how to make decisions without hearing the voice of God, it would have been a little bit empty at the end.

01:03:00

But that is a profound teaching that you've kind of summarized there from Friesen, the wisdom model versus the traditional model, and most

01:03:11

Christians don't grasp that. They don't understand that we've been given principles of wisdom throughout all of Scripture that guide us, that instruct us, and that give us liberty in Christ to make

01:03:23

God -honoring decisions that are not going to ever be contrary to His sovereignty. Yeah, and I trust that when

01:03:31

I desire to do something, if it's not violating God's moral will and violating wisdom, that my desire to do that might itself be the inclination that I need in order to make that decision one way or the other.

01:03:44

And God gives us the freedom, and does that mean that we're going to make some mistakes? Yeah, it does. It means we're going to make some stupid decisions from time to time.

01:03:51

I've made my share of them. But those stupid decisions end up being a sanctifying work in my life in helping me make better decisions later on, and helping me to see the hand of God sometimes in working through those decisions.

01:04:04

And God is not promised to reveal to us the nature of every decision that we're to make, or the decision that we're to make in every given circumstance and situation.

01:04:15

And a lot of times, I don't want to go too long on this, but the people who think that they need to hear the voice of God in order to make a decision, they oftentimes try and say that we need to hear it just in order to make the big decisions.

01:04:28

Who to marry, which church to go to, what city to live in, what job to take, what college to attend, etc.

01:04:34

And so they're listening for the voice of God for what they call the big decisions, but I make the point in one of the chapters early on in the book, we have no way of knowing which decisions are the big decisions or the small decisions.

01:04:44

It might be that my decision of which city to live in is quite inconsequential, but my decision of which shirt to wear to Walmart could be quite substantial in the long run.

01:04:53

We have no way of knowing what decision, what act of providence is going to be monumental down the road.

01:04:59

I've done some things where I thought I didn't even give it a moment's thought in the moment of doing one thing or the other, but then later on I find out, man, this had a tremendous impact later on.

01:05:09

The ramifications of this went on forever, and this really impacted this person. I had no idea that that was going on.

01:05:14

We have no way of knowing what the big decisions are or the small decisions, and so we should make all decisions the same way. We examine

01:05:20

Scripture. Does it violate God's moral will? No. Does it violate wisdom? No. Then we can do what we want. We can choose either one and trust in the providence and sovereignty of God.

01:05:29

The shirt at Walmart, great, great illustration of that. Thank you. Andrew, you'll have to read the book to find out about it.

01:05:36

We won't go into it now. But let me ask a contrary question, because you open up the book and you're talking about how you came to the title of the book, and it was a

01:05:51

Christian book distributors circular, I think, that came in the mail, and you're sitting at the table and there was a

01:06:00

Batterson book that was promoted, and don't you think, Pastor, that that was actually a sign from God?

01:06:09

No, I don't. I think it was remarkable providence. It was one of those things where when that flyer came through and I looked at the title

01:06:20

Batterson's book, Whisper, and I thought, oh, good grief, another one. Why do I even have to deal with this?

01:06:25

And I had already spent $200 buying all these books from these people so I could read them and interact with their position, and I said to my son,

01:06:33

I'm going to have to buy another one, and I slid it across the table to him, and I said, God doesn't whisper. And I thought, that is the perfect title for the book.

01:06:40

And when you bring up, somebody sent me a screenshot of an Amazon search for God doesn't whisper, and it brings up Batterson's book as well as my book right next to it, and I thought, this is perfect.

01:06:50

That's exactly what I want. There's providence for you. Yeah, exactly, that kind of providence.

01:06:56

I don't think that that was the voice of God. Do I think it was God's providence that He caused all of those things to happen in order to drop that in my lap?

01:07:04

Yeah, there's sometimes that things happen, and I think, oh, this is perfect. This worked out perfectly. But that's not the voice of God. It's just things working out perfectly, and us recognizing it in the moment.

01:07:13

But I don't call that divine revelation. I don't call it the voice of God. Okay, I just wanted you to have an opportunity to answer that.

01:07:21

Thank you. And that's the thing of when we look at the difference of providence,

01:07:29

God does use these things. But one of the things that I think of when you were saying the

01:07:34

Africa thing, maybe it's because we're thinking of something, because this is a very common known phenomenon.

01:07:43

If you think of something, you're going to hear where you, as in your example,

01:07:48

Africa, you're thinking of Africa. Well, you would have heard that song in the elevator,

01:07:54

I think was how you said it. You would have heard that anyway, and you wouldn't have thought twice.

01:07:59

But now because you're thinking of it, you pick up on that word. That is an association that occurs.

01:08:07

That's common. That's not God. Because guess what? The unbelievers have that happen equally.

01:08:15

Yeah, they do. It's a psychological phenomenon when I got a

01:08:21

Toyota Tundra, a blue Toyota Tundra after I got that blue Toyota Tundra. I couldn't tell you how many times

01:08:27

I saw blue Toyota Tundras. My neighbor two doors down from me has a blue Toyota. There's another Tundra just like it at the end of my road.

01:08:33

I probably wouldn't have been able to even tell you how many blue Tundras there were in my neighborhood until I got one, and now that I got one,

01:08:39

I see them everywhere. I see them on the streets constantly. I wonder if people driving by those trucks think that those people are me, people who know me.

01:08:46

And so it's quite a phenomenon that happens quite regularly to us because we just, it's the frequency illusion.

01:08:52

Once we become aware of something, we see it everywhere, and we can't unsee it. But that's not the voice of God.

01:08:58

That's just us becoming aware of our surroundings. Almost like if you look at the FedEx sign and you look at the

01:09:05

E and the X, there's actually an arrow there. That's on purpose, right?

01:09:10

So it's the FedEx, and it's an arrow. Once you see that, you're always going to see it. Was that God revealing an arrow?

01:09:17

No. It was actually a psychologically planned thing. And then once you spot it, and now some of you that are listening are going to go and spot that, and guess what?

01:09:25

You're going to be like, I always see it. Now you can't unsee it. You know? It's one of those things.

01:09:31

That's not God speaking to us. But so many people want to excuse it this way.

01:09:37

Bud, do you have anything else you want to ask of Jim? Yeah. I have my

01:09:43

Beelzebub advocate question. So let's say, which

01:09:48

I do, I believe in sovereignty. I believe in providence. I believe in the authority and the sufficiency of Scripture.

01:09:58

If I genuinely believe those things, but I still employ some of the practices that you've highlighted here in your book, what's the big deal?

01:10:09

What's the problem going to be? Why is it such a threat if I do that? It's all going to work out in the end anyway, right?

01:10:17

Well, what you're telling me is that you believe in the sovereignty of God, and you believe that Scripture is sufficient, but everything you practice says the exact opposite.

01:10:24

So now the problem is you have a dichotomy between what you say you believe in and what you're actually practicing. That would be the first issue that I would raise there.

01:10:32

You're telling me that Scripture is sufficient, but you're going to rely upon pieces and fleeces and still small voices, promptings, nudgings, and a dozen other methodologies to give you direction that you'll admit that you don't need.

01:10:43

So that's something of a schizophrenic position there to say that. So it's betraying a profession in the

01:10:50

Word of God by the practice that's opposite. Yeah, exactly.

01:10:56

You could coerce the same Orthodox statement of belief in the sufficiency of Scripture from Priscilla Schreier, Charles Stanley, Dallas Willard, Mark Batterson, Robert Morris, all of those guys that I critique in the book.

01:11:12

Henry Blackaby, all of them would affirm the sufficiency of Scripture. All of them would say, we believe that Scripture is unique, it's authoritative, it's divine, it's not like the impressions that we have.

01:11:23

It's in a class by itself. We believe in a high view of Scripture. They would all say that. But then everything that they practice and everything that they teach on the subject betrays that they really do not believe that, because they're practicing things that undermine that belief.

01:11:36

Absolutely. And just to qualify, I don't practice any of those things. But your point is one of valuable discernment.

01:11:46

We have to not only look at the profession that someone makes, in this case with regards to the authority and sufficiency of Scripture, but we also have to look at their practice.

01:11:57

I think there's an important teaching element there with regards to discernment, and we have to make judgments based on that.

01:12:07

Yeah. Yeah, I agree. In closing out,

01:12:13

I would say this is, you know, I have several copies of the book. Maybe I'll read one one day.

01:12:22

I'll never admit to it. Don't worry, Jim. No, but on a serious note, though, you are an excellent writer.

01:12:32

It's very clear. It's easy for anyone to understand. The fact that you back it up with so much, both of their quotations that hold to the position, quotations from Scripture, and more importantly, the exegesis of Scripture, so people understand the text, understand the arguments, it makes it very easy to read, very clear in understanding.

01:12:51

And because this is so prevalent in our culture, in our churches, I think it's necessary to have multiple copies on hand.

01:13:00

I know Bud has already given out several copies and bought several copies, and it's something where you almost want to buy them by the case to make sure you have them.

01:13:07

I had, as I shared with you before we went live, someone that was over at my house and asking, how can

01:13:14

I know a decision to make, and how do I learn to hear the voice of God?

01:13:20

And all I did was reach over, grab a copy of your book, and said, here, read this. That'll answer your question.

01:13:27

You know, because you're asking the wrong question. And I don't know many books that cover this topic like this, and I think that's why

01:13:37

John MacArthur was willing to put his name to it and get behind it and say the things he said about it. And I agreed with him that it is a very good exegesis of Scripture to answer this issue, and it's really a unique work.

01:13:53

And that's why I wanted to highlight it. And I recommend everyone going to Amazon and buying some copies. Not just one, but several.

01:13:59

Because I think that this is something that you will want to have on hand. After you read a copy, you don't want to give your copy away, so you want to have some extra copies.

01:14:07

Because it is one that you're going to want to and probably need to give to others to read, to clarify in their life.

01:14:16

Help them in their decision -making biblically on how to do that. So Jim, any other things you want to say?

01:14:24

One thing I would just say is that if you want bulk copies, numerous copies, I can arrange that at a discount better than what you get on Amazon.

01:14:32

So if somebody is interested in buying 10, 12, 20 copies, something like that, I can do that better than Amazon can do it in terms of the price that I can offer.

01:14:42

And it would be better for you that way. Because I appreciate the willingness to distribute them and make the resource available.

01:14:49

Now, I should mention this as well. How can folks get ahold of you? I'm going to put the link to Kootenai Community Church in there, and also to your website.

01:14:58

Yeah, the website is jimosman .com jimosman .com is my website. You can see my Amazon author page there, as well as all the books

01:15:04

I've written. That's jimosman .com And if you go there, there's a contact form you can reach out and get ahold of me, and I can arrange to get a bulk shipment to you.

01:15:16

So in the show notes, if you click on the thing that says, you know, get your copy of Jim Osman's book, or get your copy of God Doesn't Whisper Today, if you click on that, that's going to take you to his website.

01:15:28

And here's the thing, folks. Jim writes these books not to make money.

01:15:34

Quite literally. Not saying that, like, well, Christians don't make money when they're writing books, but Jim, your first three books, explain to people what that went toward, and then what is the proceeds of this book going toward?

01:15:48

So, my first three books, we were trying to build a new church building, and we used it as a fundraiser.

01:15:55

The first three books, all the money went to the building fund, so I don't make any money off of the sale of the books.

01:16:01

Now that we're in our new facility, we're actually occupying the downstairs, and we're getting ready to start work on the upstairs. The need for money for the building fund is not like it used to be.

01:16:09

So, now we're switching over, and we're going to put that money into a fund that we hope that will accumulate interest and grow over the years, and we want to use that money to provide for missionaries that our church has supported, who come home from the mission field after decades of faithful service in retirement.

01:16:25

We want to use that money to help support those missionaries, and eventually it'll probably be a retirement, we're going to call it the

01:16:31

Christian Workers Retirement Fund. So it's going to be a fund used to help retired pastors from our church, or to support people within our congregation who have served faithfully, and then retired, and they continue to be part of ministry, active ministry, but we want to use it to supplement their income.

01:16:48

So that's the goal of that. Which is so amazing, because when you shared that with me, it didn't dawn on me, you were like, you know, how many of these missionaries they're on the field 30, 40 years, some longer, and they retire because they realize they cannot keep doing that work anymore.

01:17:04

They come home being a missionary on a foreign field, they're not having a retirement, they're not having a home that they're building equity in, they come back with nothing, and then all their support dries up because they're not doing that work anymore.

01:17:20

So they're really not being well treated in retirement, and you have a vision toward caring for missionaries in their retirement years when they haven't really been able to store that up, and I think that that's amazing.

01:17:35

So there's even more reason to get lots of copies. I would argue, don't get them at the bulk discount, you know, get the money into this retirement account, but if you do want to get them, get them in bulk, contact

01:17:47

Jim at his website, jimosman .com. Bud, were you going to say something closing out there?

01:17:52

No, I think that's great. I didn't know that, Pastor, that you were doing that. I knew that the earlier books were going to the building fund, and what you're doing here,

01:18:02

I think that's tremendous. I think Stephen Furtick's doing the same thing, by the way. Wow! Did he really just say that?

01:18:10

I'm sorry. I'm in good company now. And with that, Bud, that's a wrap.

01:18:17

This podcast is part of the Striving for Eternity ministry. For more content, or to request a speaker or seminar to your church, go to strivingforeternity .org.

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