Hearing the Voice of God with Jim Osman

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July 28, 2023

Someone claimed that the reason people are not seeing people convert to Christ when evangelizing is because they are listening to the voice of God. Jim Osman will join to review a video from this person explaining how to hear the voice of God.

00:09: Can you show me, because we're going to use some hermeneutics, can you show me anywhere in the Old Testament where that word perpetual is not perpetual?
00:17: Because, again, I understand you're appealing, again, sure, no, no, no, hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on, wait a minute,
00:24: I thought I was going to get to have a talk here. You asked the question. Hang on a second, sir. Be quiet now. Well, there you go.
00:31: I will mute you because it's not your show. You asked the question. I'm going to give you the answer. Genesis 6 -4, the word olam is used, referring to those who are of old.
00:43: Deuteronomy, I'll just rattle off all the ones where it's used, not referring to perpetual. Genesis 6 -4,
00:50: Deuteronomy 32 -7, Joshua 24 -2, 1 Samuel 27 -8,
00:57: Job 22 -15, Psalm 24 -7, 24 -9, 25 -6, 41 -13, 77 -9, 90 -2, 103 -17, 106 -48, 119 -52, 143 -3,
01:17: Proverbs 8 -23, Proverbs 22 -28, Proverbs 23 -10, and Ecclesiastes 1 -10.
01:25: Should I go on for more? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. This is
01:32: Apologetics Live. To answer your questions, your host from Striving for Eternity Ministries, Andrew Rapoport.
01:45: Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I always love that highly intelligent answer that he provided when, yeah, he thought he had a great question there, and that's one of the classics.
01:58: All right, so, well, welcome to another edition of Apologetics Live. We're glad to have you with us.
02:04: This is presented by Striving for Eternity. This is where we hope to answer your questions.
02:11: We can answer, I argue, I can answer any question you have about God and the Bible. If you doubt that, just join us here and we can find out.
02:19: But I don't know is a perfectly good answer. So, we're going to deal with a video tonight.
02:26: We're going to do another video review, a much shorter one. We can actually get through, well, actually,
02:32: Chris and Drew made it through maybe five minutes of that video. So, let me bring
02:39: Drew in. Drew, welcome. Your internet is hopefully stable for tonight. We're going to find out.
02:44: Hopefully. Yeah, we will find out. If it cuts out, I'll just hang out in the background and monitor comments and things like that.
02:52: All right. So, we're going to talk about a video that was sent to me.
03:00: And let me give some, well, before we get that, let me bring in our guest here,
03:06: Jim Osmond of Kootenai Community Church. Jim, welcome. Hey, gentlemen. Glad to be here.
03:11: Now, he just likes to show off that beautiful scenery of Idaho. Isn't that great?
03:19: Yeah. So, you can't see right behind him. He's got a great garden right over there, over his left shoulder there.
03:27: Yeah. Can you see that? Yeah, you can't really see it. Is it behind the trees?
03:34: No, it's in front of the trees. Kind of almost. Oh, okay. There you go.
03:40: I got it. Corn. Yeah. You got corn there now. All right. Yeah. I plan on, you know, while you're away,
03:48: I plan on going to the garden and just picking things. I have your knowledge. Just going and stealing some vegetables because they cost too much at the store?
03:58: Yeah, exactly. So, all right. So, we did,
04:05: I was thinking of actually triggering Jim here because just before we started the show,
04:11: I saw a clip there, Jim, of Nancy Pelosi praising Adam Schiff for restoring faith and integrity to our government.
04:22: If anybody can do it, Adam Schiff can. Faith, integrity, and government are words that don't go together.
04:32: That's exactly right. Yeah. So, this video that we're going to play was sent to me by a gentleman.
04:41: He was in an evangelism group and basically he was challenging those of us in this evangelism group saying that the reason we were not really seeing success or, you know, people coming to Christ in our evangelism is because we were not, or at least
05:02: I was not, learning how to hear the voice of God. And so, he gave me this video that explains how we can hear the voice of God because his argument,
05:14: Jim, was that hearing the voice of God is necessary to have evangelism because that's how you get, you know, fruitful evangelism.
05:25: And so, we invited you in because, well, I think you've written the world's best book on this subject.
05:31: I think I have it right here. There you go. Oh, that's my praise. I appreciate that. The only problem
05:36: I found with that book was the forward. I mean, you bumped me for John MacArthur?
05:43: Really? Well, sometimes. It was really close. I thought, oh,
05:49: Andrew, John, I don't know which. Yeah, I mean, I was just looking to get an early copy of it, but yeah.
05:58: So, but no, so let's first, before we play a video for folks who may not have seen you around, maybe people are new to this show and haven't seen you, just introduce yourself to folks so they'll know where you're at, how to pronounce that town your church is in.
06:16: Yeah. You know, it took me like a year to pronounce it right, but yeah. My name is John Hoffman. I pastor a church in rural
06:23: North Idaho in Kootenai, K -O -O -T -E -N -A -I, Kootenai, Idaho. It's called
06:28: Kootenai Community Church. Yeah, I had the hardest time with that the first time.
06:34: So, let's talk real briefly about the book, God Doesn't Whisper. It's a book you've written. Just give a real quick overview of your background and why you wrote that book.
06:47: Yeah, I grew up, well I shouldn't say I grew up, I grew up in a, not a church going home, but my early exposure to Christianity as a new believer was among people who taught and believed that you could hear the voice of God and that we needed to hear the voice of God to make decisions in day -to -day life, like which college to attend, whether I should go back for a second year of college, which woman to marry, when to get married, all of that stuff, the day -to -day mundane decisions.
07:11: And that was what I had adopted as sort of my worldview, my Christian perspective on Scripture and being led by the
07:18: Spirit. That's what I thought being led by the Spirit was. I was quickly disillusioned of that and started to research how
07:24: God leads us and what Scripture teaches about the voice of God and whether we should hear from God or not.
07:31: And so I began to examine a lot of the presuppositions and Scripture passages that are pressed into service for that worldview or that Christian view that says we should be listening for the still, small voice, being led by nudges and nudgings and promptings and impressions and feelings and signs and Scripture and all of that.
07:55: I started to evaluate whether any or all of that was biblical, and I found that that's not exactly how
08:00: God says that we should make decisions and that there's nothing in Scripture that promises that we will hear the voice of God and there's nothing in Scripture that teaches that we should be listening for the voice of God.
08:09: So I came to write the book basically as an answer to a previous perspective that I had had on hearing the voice of God and being led by the
08:17: Spirit and what it meant to walk with God. And the book basically kind of deals with those three presuppositions that people bring to this view.
08:28: One of them being that we need to hear the voice of God, and second, that we can be taught to hear the voice of God, and that we then should be listening for the voice of God, that God needs to communicate
08:41: His voice to us and give us that guidance. I kind of deal with those three presuppositions and then the various elements of the methodology in the book as well.
08:51: So that's kind of a brief overview of it. All right. So let's go and play this horrific video.
09:01: He's got three. So he has three points that he looks to make in this.
09:07: So he describes this video as how to hear God's voice, three powerful strategies for increasing accuracy and consistency.
09:19: Now, I mean, just right off the bat, I know I saw this comment in here. Justin Peter says, if you want to hear the voice of God, read your
09:27: Bible out loud. Actually, what he says is, if you want to hear the voice of God, read your Bible. If you want to hear it audibly, read it out loud.
09:35: So that is how we hear. That is how we properly hear God's voice. But let's play the first part and deal with each one of these in order.
09:45: So here we go. Hey, are you a Christian who wants to hear God's voice?
09:51: Or maybe you do hear him, but you want to hear him more accurately and on a more consistent basis.
09:57: Listen, whether you are new to the faith or you've been a believer for years, these three strategies are going to help you tune your spiritual ears and develop a more intimate hearing relationship with the
10:09: Lord. And for our Jesus veterans, the first two may seem a little cliche, but stick around for step three, because I've got a challenge for you that is guaranteed to stretch anybody who participates.
10:21: Let's get into it. Step one, read the Bible. I know, cliche.
10:27: You may even be really tired of hearing it, but people are saying it because it's true.
10:33: Familiarity with the one true God and his unchanging character through the scriptures is key to accurately hearing the voice of God.
10:45: Are you or have you ever been in a relationship where healthy communication has been important?
10:50: Of course you have. And did that healthy communication come 100 % naturally or did you have to work on it?
10:58: The more you get to know the person you are trying to communicate with, the easier it is to hear and understand what they're saying.
11:06: Read God's word with him, meditating on it, studying it, asking him questions about it, learning about his unchanging character, the eternal nature of our
11:18: God, perfectly revealed to us in the son of God and God himself, Jesus the
11:23: Christ. Listen, like detecting counterfeit money. It is the careful study of the authentic that will help us discern the counterfeit.
11:33: And there are counterfeit voices. Step two, journal your prayer life.
11:39: Okay, so step one. I'll back that up a bit. Step one. If he stopped at step one,
11:46: I think we would be good with this, right? Partially. I mean, there's some definitions that we need to work out here.
11:55: I would totally agree with the statement that if you want to hear God speak, you should read scripture because I would say that it's in scripture that God speaks, but not in the mystical way that he's talking about.
12:06: And I don't mean the same thing by that that he means. So I would differ with him on two points.
12:12: First, when we say that, when we say if you want to hear
12:17: God speak, read the Bible. And if you want to hear him speak audibly, read it out loud. That's Justin's quip.
12:23: When Justin says that, and when we affirm that, when I say that, what I mean by that is that the voice of God comes when
12:31: I read the text of scripture and rightly understand the meaning of the text. So when
12:36: I am reading 1 Thessalonians chapter 4 and I hear God's words say that his will for my life is my sanctification, that I abstain from sexual immorality, and that I do this and that I do that, etc.
12:49: I hear that. I understand that the Spirit of God is revealing the mind of God to me in that I'm hearing the voice of God through the pages of scripture.
12:57: So scripture is the medium through which we hear the voice of God. The meaning of scripture is the voice of God.
13:05: So when he says, when people like this in the Hearing the Voice of God movement or HVG movement, when they say that you should read the
13:12: Bible, you'll notice that what he was saying in that was that we read the Bible so that we can become familiar with who
13:19: God is, so we can know more about his nature and his character. Not so that we can hear the voice of God in the pages of scripture because scripture is the medium.
13:28: Scripture is the thing that informs or tunes our ears so that we can know what
13:33: God's voice is like so that when we hear the voice of God, it's not in scripture. It's outside of scripture coming to us through some other medium.
13:41: So for this guy, scripture is not the medium through which we hear the voice of God and the meaning of scripture is not the voice of God.
13:48: Scripture itself only simply tunes your ears, your tuning fork. It simply tunes you to hear
13:54: God outside of scripture. So for him, scripture is not the voice of God itself or the word of God itself.
14:03: Now, he would probably argue if you pressed him on it, to be fair, he would probably argue that scripture is the word of God.
14:11: It's the inerrant word of God. It's the infallible word of God. It's the inspired word of God, and there's nothing else like it, and that's why we should read it.
14:18: But for him, it is all of those things, but the benefit of scripture is not that we may understand the will of God and thus hear the voice of God through the meaning and the medium of scripture, but scripture's benefit is in helping us know the voice of God when we hear it outside of scripture.
14:34: That's the main benefit of scripture. When you read people like Henry Blackaby and Joyce Meyer and Priscilla Schreier, those who talk about hearing the voice of God outside of scripture, when they talk about scripture and the benefit of it, it's that it allows us to hear
14:50: God outside of scripture, because scripture sort of tunes our spiritual ears to know his voice when he's trying to speak to us, and we're trying to hear him.
14:59: So that's the first distinctive, is that for him, scripture doesn't contain the word of God. It is not the word of God.
15:05: It just simply helps you hear the word of God outside of scripture. Yeah, there was a second one that I was going to get to there, but I skipped my mind now.
15:15: One of the things that got me was the guarantee. He guarantees you can hear, he's going to give you a way to guarantee that you can hear from God.
15:26: Yeah, and to guarantee that, he has to guarantee that God is going to be speaking to you, because if God's not speaking to you, you're not going to hear him no matter how hard you listen.
15:34: If I don't say anything to you, it doesn't matter how well trained you are in listening to me. If I'm not speaking to you, you're not going to hear anything from me.
15:41: So his assumption is much like Robert Morris' assumption, frequency, that God is always speaking.
15:48: He's always just like a parrot with its tail on fire. He's always talking, and that all you have to do is tune in in order to pick up that frequency and listen to it.
15:59: He can guarantee you that you will hear the voice of God, but in order to do that, he has to guarantee that God's going to be speaking to you, and he can't guarantee that.
16:06: As if God could never choose to be silent, he always has to speak. Nobody can make that guarantee.
16:12: Yeah, well, I think embedded in that, it gets to the idea that what God is doing is he's sitting there wanting to talk to everybody.
16:21: It's just that we're not listening. Yeah, or that he's always talking and we're not able to hear him because we're not tuning in.
16:28: That's the other aspect of it, is that I need to be taught how to hear the voice of God. There's nobody in Scripture, just to deny the whole premise of his video, there's nobody in Scripture that ever had to be taught how to hear the voice of God.
16:39: Nobody. Paul never taught classes on it. Nobody. Moses never taught classes on it.
16:44: There's no indication in Scripture that anybody who heard God speak ever had to be taught how to do so, because you don't need to be taught to hear something like that.
16:53: Because when God speaks, he speaks audibly or infallibly, and he is infallibly able to get his message across.
16:59: It doesn't matter if I have my head underwater with earplugs in, I will still hear God speak if he speaks to me.
17:06: There's no necessity to cultivate any kind of a discipline to hear
17:11: God's voice because God doesn't struggle to be heard when he intends to be heard. Yeah, there's a comment here that says
17:19: Samuel, and I think he's referencing Samuel when Samuel was sleeping and he heard the Lord say his voice, but then he went up, and I forgot who he was going to see.
17:29: Eli, yeah. And Eli had to say, no, that's the Lord. So when you hear it again, say, here
17:34: I am, Lord. Well, that wasn't Samuel having to be taught to hear the Word of the Lord. He just heard his name, and he thought it was
17:42: Eli, and Eli said, no, that's God, hear it. But the way... He heard it, and he understood it perfectly, and it was clear.
17:50: He understood every single thing that God said to him. And at no point did Samuel... The only thing
17:55: Samuel was confused about is where it was coming from, because the text says that the Word of God through prophets was rare in those days.
18:03: So Samuel never expected to hear the voice of God, contrary to what HBG teachers and these continuing revelationists say today.
18:10: Samuel never expected to hear the voice of God. He wasn't tuning in to hear it. He was laying down. He heard somebody call his name, and he didn't even think it was
18:17: God. He understood it, and he heard it, and he didn't have to learn how to do it. He understood it and heard it, and that's it.
18:25: There's no running to be done. Right. I like what you had said with the tuning, because that is really what you're...
18:35: It sounds like he's getting to it. He's got to tune in to God. God's just talking over the radio waves nonstop, and we have to tune in to the right channel, is almost how it sounds.
18:46: Curtis is... I saw a comment from Curtis. So he is watching. He said, hey, sorry,
18:53: I couldn't join StreamYard. I've got about 15 minutes. So if you do want to join, just go to ApologeticsLive .com,
19:01: and I did mention to him when he first sent me the video that we were going to do this review of it.
19:08: But just go to ApologeticsLive .com. Scroll down. You can watch it there. You can watch the show, but you can also scroll down to where the duck icon is.
19:17: That's the StreamYard. Click that, and that's how you could join. And if you do that, folks, you've just got to allow the camera and video to be used by your browser.
19:27: But that's how you join every week. We change that link, so it's always set. So you can just always go there, join, ask any questions that you have.
19:35: So yeah, so the one thing that I saw was the guarantee. But the other thing is, you know, when we...
19:46: When he's making the case as if this is something that... It gets down to the core issue
19:55: I have with a lot of this, is that sufficiency of Scripture isn't enough. And I should mention,
20:01: Jim, you mentioned the initials. In your book, God Doesn't Whisper, you have the acronym for hearing the voice of God as HVG.
20:10: So folks, if you hear him mention HVG, it's just shorthand for hearing the voice of God. That's the real thing.
20:23: Even you mentioned in your comment, it's as if what he's doing is saying, hey, Scripture's not enough.
20:29: Get the Scripture to be able to get into the real conversation. So it's really just a springboard for that more important conversation, hearing
20:41: God speak to you personally. And Jim, have you, in your experience, having dealt with this for years, you've had people that say they hear from the voice of God.
20:54: Do they all agree? No, no. No, I mean, I get mixed messages all the time.
21:01: It's amazing how subjective the voice of God is to people. You know, and I just dealt with this recently.
21:09: So I was down in Washington, D .C., doing a tour at the Museum of the Bible. And what ended up happening is we were in a hotel that night, and I was in the hot tub.
21:19: And as, you know, Drew, you know, I like to go in hot tubs to evangelize. We would sit in a hotel hot tub.
21:25: You have different people coming in and going out every 40 minutes, and you just start conversations. So the first person
21:32: I was in was this woman named Susan, who identified herself as an apostle.
21:42: Right there, I had a problem. But she said she was in the
21:47: Church of Christ. And I'm like... I didn't think they have apostles in the Church of Christ?
21:53: And they don't have women. But I think the issue is that I was really concerned because I was like, oh, well, you're kind of...
21:59: You know, I ended up finding out, I don't think she's Church of Christ. I think she said that's the name of her church. But I think it's a oneness
22:06: Pentecostal. Because she hung out in the hot tub, and I now, you know, was talking to this guy,
22:13: Connor. Connor was 18 years old, explaining the gospel. It was a great conversation.
22:20: And just as he gets to a point, he says, you know, I said, is there anything stopping you from praying to receive
22:26: Christ right now? And he goes, no, I think this is something I really got to do. And Susan, who had been quiet, she was telling her boys to come in, this man's preaching, this man's preaching.
22:36: And so she was thrilled with it until I asked him if he wanted to pray and receive Christ. And then she goes, wait a minute, sir.
22:43: You didn't tell him he needs to be baptized first. Which is kind of funny because we were in a...
22:50: You know, we could just dunk you right here, right? And unfortunately, the conversation went from him, like talking about him praying to receive
23:00: Christ, to her arguing against the Trinity. She said that, well, how do you baptize?
23:07: You baptize in the name. Jesus is the Father, is the Holy Spirit. You know, it's one person.
23:14: So I'm like, oh, okay. And so I'm trying, like... And I know you guys probably have experienced this as well.
23:21: You want to focus in on the one person you're talking to, right? And yet now
23:26: I got to get into a kind of an argument debate over the Trinity and whether baptism saves and things like that.
23:34: But here was the thing. She ultimately went to this. She said, I know that my doctrine's right.
23:42: My teaching is right because God spoke to me. And so what she said was her son was in surgery.
23:51: They couldn't get his son to wake up after surgery from the anesthesia. They had been trying for three hours.
23:57: And before he went in, he was singing some song. And they brought her in and told her he won't wake up.
24:04: And she, you know... God told her what to say to him based on the song he was singing beforehand.
24:11: And as soon as she referenced that song, he woke up. And so she's like, so that means that God speaks to me and I can't be wrong.
24:19: And that right there, Jim, is the thing I struggle with. I'm sitting there and saying, well, this is what
24:27: Scripture says. And she just jettisoned all of that because God spoke to her directly and gave her a message that we don't see in Scripture.
24:39: But she was saying, she's only giving me Scripture. I'm like, that whole story wasn't Scripture. Show me in the Bible where that story occurred.
24:46: I know a lady who left her husband and moved in with some other guy and had an affair and then ended up divorcing him.
24:53: And all of that stemmed from the fact that she felt that God had spoke to her and revealed to her that this is what she's supposed to do.
25:00: The fact that Scripture contradicted that and did not grant her that freedom meant nothing to her. It was irrelevant.
25:06: Yeah. And that's the danger I see. I see Curtis back there. I'm going to bring him in to see if we can at least hear him.
25:14: Curtis, are you there? Yes. Can you hear me? We can hear you. We just can't see your video. Oh, weird.
25:20: It has the OBS signal saying that the camera's off. Okay. Well, I'm not anything to look at right now anyway.
25:32: I don't know how much of it you heard and if there's anything that... I think
25:37: I've heard everything from the very start. Okay. I wish
25:43: I had more than five minutes because this is such an honor to have the video reviewed.
25:48: But a few of the things that you were saying I felt like were maybe a misunderstanding of any claims that I was making or at least an overstatement of those things.
26:05: So the very description of your conversation today on Twitter when
26:14: I responded to you in that biblical evangelism group I mean, by no means do
26:21: I intend to say that people aren't coming to Christ because people aren't listening to the voice of the
26:31: Lord. Okay. I don't agree with that whatsoever. I believe it's the gospel. The gospel is the power of God for salvation to everybody who believes.
26:42: I guess a couple more things that I could maybe clear up and maybe you'd have a follow -up question about.
26:49: Clearly I am a bit of a continuationist. I'm not a debater or an arguer, really.
26:58: So I'm not used to supporting claims and that kind of language.
27:06: Sorry, let me make my point. However, clearly I am somebody who believes you can hear the voice of God.
27:15: However, I do believe that the Scripture as it's been given to us in the original languages is like you said
27:24: Oh, your name's not popping up on the stream. My apologies. Yes, Jim. As you said, if you pressed me on it,
27:32: I believe that the Word of God is inerrant and complete and I agree with that.
27:38: I do agree with that. And as I do believe that we can hear the
27:46: Lord presently, I believe that everything that you think you hear should be judged according to those
27:55: Scriptures. And anecdotally, my confidence in the ability to hear the
28:05: Lord is my experiences hearing Him and having those things confirmed.
28:14: Kind of trial and error. Can I make one more kind of response?
28:21: Yeah, and let me just first say if I misrepresented the conversation on Twitter then forgive me.
28:28: No, it's okay. Yeah, absolutely. Those things happen. You can always come back in another week when you have more time.
28:34: So that's fine too. You can listen to this on the podcast or watch it and next week we're going to be talking with someone,
28:43: I don't know, Jim may want to come in on this, but we got someone that wants to defend Benny Hinn and his ministry.
28:48: So that's for next week. That should be fun.
28:54: Yeah, that'll be fun for everybody. Let's see.
29:04: Well, I can't remember what I was going to say so maybe I shouldn't say it. Well, you can't say it if you don't remember.
29:12: That's an easy out for me, right? Well, I have a few minutes. Do you have any specific questions for me while I'm on the line or do you just want to continue with your process?
29:24: Well, the very end of the video, okay, this is important for me to clear up because my heart was racing as I heard you speaking about this because I was like, no, that's not what
29:33: I think. That's not... The very end of the video, I do say, and you'll probably listen to it, it's only a five minute video, but I say it's
29:46: God's choice when to speak, but we can prepare ourselves to hear
29:52: Him. And that's something I believe, that's why I said it. And the three points that I make, the three strategies
30:05: I'm trying to teach in this video, or hand off in some way,
30:11: I'm not a teacher either, but those three strategies are for that purpose.
30:18: I believe those three things can help us cultivate a hearing and grow in a hearing relationship with the
30:28: Lord, which I know Jim, you don't believe, but...
30:35: Does that make sense? Yeah, can I ask you a question to sort of interact with that? Because I'd be curious to how you would answer a couple of points.
30:42: Sure, I'll try. Yeah, I might say I don't know, but we can try. That's fair. One, where do you see in Scripture that this ability to hear the voice of God is cultivated or developed by anyone who heard the voice of God?
31:04: the first things that are coming to mind are in Acts, the...
31:15: Was it a group of... No, no, no, that was earlier. I don't know.
31:22: I don't know how to answer that with Scriptures right now for you off the top of my head. But I'm looking at the early apostles following the
31:31: Lord. There's verses like when it's... Is it Paul who says, and it seemed right to us and to the
31:40: Holy Spirit to go such and such. And I'm thinking there might be a couple references to prophecies or people that were prophesying that the things that they heard did not come to pass or weren't.
32:01: Yeah, so you could be talking about Agabus there, so whether he was... Agabus. Yeah, whether he was speaking infallibly or not, and whether that was a false prophecy or not.
32:11: We could probably lay that aside for... But I'm mostly interested in examples of people cultivating this discipline.
32:18: Yeah, well, it's more of... When I look at... I'm sorry. Whether it's Paul or Nebuchadnezzar or Abraham or Moses or any of the prophets or any of the apostles or any revelation that when
32:27: God wills to be heard, He just simply speaks and ensures that those to whom
32:34: He is speaking have the ability to hear Him. He doesn't struggle to overcome our distractedness or our busyness or our deafness to His voice because God doesn't try ever to be heard.
32:46: He just speaks and is heard. I don't believe God tries to do anything. Hmm. So that's why
32:53: I was curious if you can come up with an example in Scripture of anybody who heard the voice of God who had to cultivate this discipline.
32:58: And then the follow -up question... Sure. And Curtis, we don't have to have a whole conversation tonight because these questions... Well, I won't be able to. No, I understand that.
33:05: And I would love to come back on and have you give a chance to think this through. It's like when
33:10: Drew and I debated pre -millennialism. He had to go home and think it through a little bit. So, if you think this through and come back with me,
33:21: I would love to have more interaction because I'm curious to that if you can name anybody in Scripture who heard the voice of God that had to cultivate this decision.
33:29: Okay. One, or number two, is there any place in Scripture that teaches us how to cultivate this discipline?
33:35: Sure. So, for instance, Paul writing to Gentiles who had never been, who had never received the oracles of God.
33:41: All the Gentile churches to which Paul writes, you would expect at some point in one of those epistles, to the
33:46: Corinthians, to the Galatians, to the Philippians, to somebody that Paul would have, if this discipline is so important, that Paul would have laid out something about how to hear the voice of God.
33:58: Because you would assume that that is pretty important. Like for Timothy, for instance, when Paul wrote to him in 2
34:04: Timothy, or Peter wrote to his readers in 2 Peter, knowing that the Apostles were about to pass away from the scene, they don't give any instructions to their protégés in the faith on how to hear the voice of God or to cultivate that discipline.
34:17: There's no instruction given in the pastoral epistles. There's no requirement to elders that they be able to hear the voice of God in order to lead the church or be qualified for eldership.
34:26: There's no requirement for deacons to be able to hear that. And for those who are in the HVG movement, this is a very essential discipline for evangelism and obedience and faithful servants and Christian growth.
34:37: And yet, I don't see any instructions anywhere in any of the epistles. And we would expect most to see it, as I said, in epistles written to Gentiles, who had not been the recipients of the oracles of God like the
34:49: Jews had. You would expect from epistles to lay out for us, here's how you do this.
34:54: I mean, Paul tells us how to structure the church of God, how elders should function and deacons should function and women in ministry and how the
35:03: Lord's Supper should be done and how Christians should judge one another, set up their own court systems, church discipline, all this essential stuff.
35:09: We have instructions on it, spiritual gifts, and yet not a word about how to cultivate this discipline.
35:15: So that's where I'm curious about. Yeah. Well, one of my older videos that I took down now because I sensed kind of some arrogance in there and it wasn't helpful anymore,
35:26: I went through Jeremiah to talk about the Lord showing the almond branch to Jeremiah and then kind of teaching him how to, what he was saying through that picture that Jeremiah was seeing.
35:42: And the reason why I went into that is because a few times in my history with the
35:48: Lord, I've seen something and then that has led to that being fruitful.
35:59: And then the other place, this kind of seems a little bit like an argument from silence, like you're making a point that because it's not taught on in the
36:17: New Testament, it doesn't, it's not for us or it doesn't exist.
36:23: And that seems, it feels like a strong argument the way you're saying it, but I wonder if there's a lot of other things that we do in relationship with him that we don't have strong instruction on in the
36:39: New Testament. But don't you think that if this is such a crucial thing for our evangelism and our spiritual growth that there would be some explanation?
36:49: Oh, okay. Thank you. Thank you. I don't believe this is a crucial thing. I believe the cross is the only crucial thing.
36:58: I think you, I don't, I think maybe I'm being grouped in with people that maybe there's people out there that believe this is an essential part of our relationship with the
37:14: Lord. I don't believe that. I believe
37:23: Scripture and Scripture alone contains everything we need for, what is that quote?
37:31: A life of godliness or something? Is that sola scriptura? Yeah, all that pertains to life and godliness.
37:37: Yeah, amen. But there's a whole lot that's not in the Scriptures that we practice and believe as well that is from us attempting to follow
37:51: Jesus in the Scriptures, and then we get church practices and history and such.
37:59: Did I make myself clear that I don't believe you have to hear the voice of the
38:05: Lord in these ways in order to have a salvific and even experiential relationship with him.
38:14: I just believe that it's available to us, and I want to help people prepare to hear him if he does choose to speak to us.
38:28: So, there was a question that came in that maybe I can ask, because I know you're short on time. I'm sorry, yeah,
38:34: I'm kind of ADD too. Can I give myself five minutes? I'll give myself a hard -out at 745.
38:40: Okay. Look, we can set up a time where you and Jim can both be on, and we can have a two -hour discussion.
38:51: That's so gracious of you. But, you know, Rick had asked this when you were explaining it, and because I kind of heard a similar thing.
39:01: It sounded like you were saying you know it's the voice of God through trial and error.
39:08: Is that what you're meaning to say? Yeah, because I believe, you know, it's like any, you know, us attempting to do something in following the
39:20: Lord, we're either going to be right or wrong about it, and that's why words need to be judged.
39:33: We're supposed to judge teaching by the Scriptures. We're supposed to judge everything by the
39:40: Scriptures. So, if you believe in faith, you are hearing the voice of the
39:48: Lord in the various thousands of ways
39:53: He speaks. Do... We've got to judge what we think we're hearing, and maybe you'll get to that in the...
40:04: No, I already said that in the clips that you watched already, that there are counterfeits, influences, voices, that we got to...
40:15: Yeah, and that's something, when you come back in, I would like to dive into more, because my question, and this will be good, because you'll get a chance to hear some of our questions, and that way you can come kind of prepared.
40:28: Yeah, I'm looking forward to it, to hearing those. If there's counterfeits, like we know
40:33: Mormons claim they hear from God, you know, hear it with Muslims and others, not so much
40:41: Muslims, but only one Muslim I know had said that, but there are different groups. If there's counterfeit voices, how do you know that the voice you're hearing is from God?
40:54: For example, at the end of this, you're going to talk about getting a waitress's name. Yep, Lisa.
41:01: How do you know that's God's voice and not a demon's voice? Because you can't go to Scripture on something like that and compare with Scripture and say, oh,
41:09: God's going to give me a voice of my waitress. Sure. If that was a demon's voice, boy, it led to some terrible fruit for the wrong side for them.
41:23: But you test it? I don't know. This is an interesting question that I've been asked before.
41:33: I'm starting to find that people that don't believe that you can hear the voice of God do believe you can hear and be influenced by the voice of evil spirits.
41:50: That's odd to me. The worry for us who believe that we hear the voice of God is that maybe you're not hearing the voice of God and it's a voice of another spirit instead.
42:04: Curtis, to be fair, for our side, we're not saying that we can never hear from God.
42:10: We're saying that we only hear from God in Scripture. So the experiences, the nudgings, the random thoughts that pop into our heads, things that we could attribute to God that are outside of Scripture, the question is how do you test that?
42:26: Especially on something like my stewardess's name.
42:31: There's nothing in Scripture that promises God's going to give you your stewardess's name. Well, I'm not making that promise or guarantee either.
42:37: Only God will speak or not. So how can I test that?
42:42: That's a revelation that I can't test. You literally test it. You just go up to them and ask.
42:49: But you're saying test it by Scripture. Oh, I'm sorry. Yes. Okay, Jim. My apologies.
42:55: What I was talking about judging was if there was any sort of revelation in the
43:01: Word. Right before I was able to jump on StreamYard, you mentioned a woman that just did something completely unbiblical because she was like, well,
43:10: I heard God's voice. That's not okay. Clearly it wasn't
43:15: God speaking if it's in contradiction to... The thing is that in her example,
43:22: Susan had said what the voice told her to say and her son woke up.
43:28: Now her doctrine is not biblical. That's the whole point. Her trial and error, it was confirmed by her son waking up out of the surgery that they couldn't do for three hours.
43:43: So if I'm hearing what you're saying... I didn't hear that part of the testimony. Wow, that's amazing.
43:52: He wasn't able to come out of the anesthesia until she said what she claims
43:58: God... You're saying that wasn't God because... I would say it wasn't God because God doesn't talk to us today in that way.
44:06: He speaks to us through word. That would be the difference. It wasn't like something revealed that was in contradiction to the
44:14: Scripture. No, it's like you with the waitress. It's not going to be in Scripture.
44:22: How could it be? To answer the question you asked about the demons, I don't think that we can't hear
44:31: God. I'm saying that God isn't speaking that way. Okay.
44:36: Can we hear from demons? Yes, because they're trying to deceive. So demons are speaking but God isn't in that way.
44:46: Well, God has given us an objective thing to examine. Yes, He has.
44:55: Why would we need anything more than that? I'm talking about availability to us.
45:03: God isn't just pragmatic. He's a husband. I'm glad my wife doesn't only give me what
45:09: I need. We're in relationship with one another. We give. That's what grace is about.
45:16: It's not just for salvation. It's for relationship. I'm sorry.
45:21: I have to go. I was just going to say we're two minutes over your time. I'll email you.
45:27: I appreciate you jumping in even for a few minutes. That's good. We can ask you questions throughout.
45:34: Sure. Let the people in the comments know that there's a real guy behind that video.
45:39: That was my first attempt at a refreshing of my YouTube. It was maybe a rough video.
45:47: Someone may know you better than me. Last question. Someone said, there's no scripture about cultivating how to hear
45:55: God. That's why he's stumped. He's a PhD. Do you have a PhD? No.
46:01: I have two years at a private Christian college and I dropped out to go to New York City on mission.
46:08: Maybe someone knows you better than I do. Wow. Maybe it's an honorary doctorate from the commenter.
46:15: Yeah. Good. Thank you so much.
46:21: I appreciate it. You've all been very gracious. God bless you.
46:28: God bless the rest of your discussion. It's an honor to have the video reviewed. Rick says thank you for calling in.
46:35: We'll be able to... Melissa wants you to come back. Great. Let's get on to...
46:43: Before we get to his second point, let me just say, there was a comment,
46:50: Jim. You said you don't think God tries. I'll be honest with you.
46:56: This is the real reason we have you in is because when you're on, then we get Missionary Gamer to actually pay attention.
47:02: The only time we ever get him in and commenting is when you're on. He wrote exactly what
47:08: I wanted to say. He said, God doesn't try. Sounds like a great title for a book.
47:15: Coming soon. Another comment is from the one and only
47:21: Mr. Justin Peters. He says, Jim, the standard answer by HVG proponents to your question would be
47:29: Samuel might want to address that with him. We knew we were going to have to address that at some point.
47:36: Now might be a good time to address that because of the things that were said. You want to address that?
47:44: Samuel proves the exact opposite of what HVG proponents claim. That is that Samuel, I mean,
47:50: Priscilla Schreier wrote an entire book on Samuel. Just 1 Samuel chapter 3 describing there how
47:57: Samuel learned to hear the voice of God and all the qualities that are necessary for one to learn to hear the voice of God. Just a straightforward, plain reading of the passage doesn't teach anything like that.
48:07: Samuel did not have to be taught how to hear the voice of God. He didn't need to cultivate the discipline or posture himself in any way.
48:16: Samuel heard everything that God said to him. He heard it clearly. He heard it plainly. He didn't need to be taught how to hear it.
48:23: The only thing Samuel got wrong was who was speaking the voice. Now if God had said
48:29: Samuel, this is Yahweh speaking, then he would have understood exactly who it was and who was speaking, but all he heard was his name, and he went and pursued who he thought was calling his name, which was
48:39: Eli, and it wasn't, and then he went back and he heard it again, then he went back to Eli, and Eli eventually recognized what was going on.
48:47: He said next time, recognize that it's the Lord who is talking to you, so say Yahweh your servant is listening and then you'll have a conversation with God, and that's what
48:56: Samuel did, but Samuel understood what was said. It wasn't a nudging. It wasn't a prompting.
49:01: It was an audible voice, which is why he got up and went to Eli because he thought that Eli was calling his name.
49:07: He didn't need to learn anything. He heard it just fine without ever cultivating that discipline. There's also another scripture people would use to say, well, you must find this way to quiet yourself and then learn to listen for the voice of God, and that's the idea of the still small voice.
49:28: Yeah. Yeah, still small voice was a voice. It's interesting that Elijah as a prophet heard the
49:36: Word of God come to him on a number of occasions before the reference to the still small voice when he was in the cave where the
49:42: Lord came unto Elijah, and he said, the Lord said unto Elijah, etc. You read that all the way through the narrative, all the way up to that point.
49:50: What they like to do is they like to grab that one phrase, still small voice, which is oddly translated, and it's translated in a number of different ways, like the sound of a silent whisper, the sound of a quiet nothingness, it's the sound of a gentle breeze, etc.
50:05: That's how it's variously translated because it's only used that one time in that one place in all of Scripture, and it's a very odd Hebrew phrase that is very difficult to translate.
50:15: So rather than looking at all the multiple examples of the Word of the Lord coming unto Elijah where God spoke clearly and Elijah perfectly understood exactly what it said, they glom on to this reference to the still small voice and then, like Dallas Willard, who makes a tremendous amount out of the still small voice nonsense, he takes that one phrase and he blows this up into an entire theology of being led by nudgings and promptings and impressions and visions and dreams and signs and feelings and fleeces and everything else about it.
50:44: And that's all, the still small voice becomes this umbrella under which all of these various voices of God are sort of lumped.
50:51: So the still small voice becomes just a reference to anything that you know, I see a tree now and the
50:57: Lord is just impressing upon me now that man, I need to plant a tree. He must be telling me to plant a tree in my own yard.
51:03: That must have been the still small voice to me. Or it could be a sign, or it could be I read something in Scripture and a word pops off the phrase, or it could be my neighbor says the word
51:12: Africa to me and well, maybe the Lord's still small voice is telling me I should be a missionary to Africa. That still small voice just becomes a devil's brew of any subjective impression that people want to call the voice of God.
51:27: So that is what Elijah heard was something outside of the cave it wasn't an internal impression which is why he went outside the cave to hear it.
51:36: So it wasn't an internal impression. It wasn't something inside of himself inside of his own mind. And that's how people use the still small voice.
51:43: But he heard the still small voice and then he exited the cave which he would not have needed to do if what he was receiving was an internal inaudible divine revelation inside of his heart or his mind inside of his own thoughts.
51:55: So that is another passage that is abused out of hand every time it's used. Yeah, exactly.
52:03: Yeah. So, alright, so let's go on to his point number two. Alright, we've got three to do and we've spent an hour on the first one, so we're going to have to hurry up.
52:12: Yeah, well, yeah. They'll be quicker. Here we go. Are counterfeit voices.
52:19: Step two, journal your prayer life. If you are truly a Christian and not just because you were born in a
52:25: Christian household or your parents told you you were, but you have decided that Jesus is the
52:31: Christ and confessed him as Lord and believed in your heart that God raised him from the dead. He's given you his
52:36: Holy Spirit. Then you've already heard him. Jesus said that no one can come to him unless the
52:42: Father draws them to him. He cried out to your depths and you answered his call.
52:48: Journaling helps me funnel all my thoughts into one stream. And as I begin to write what
52:55: I believe I'm hearing, it focuses my attention on that one beautiful still small voice.
53:02: Begin to journal during your prayer times. As you keep an account of the conversations with the Lord that you're having on a daily basis, you will begin to hear him more consistently and more accurately.
53:14: Hey, has this been helpful so far? Leave a like and share it with a friend. Alright, now on to...
53:19: Okay, so, I mean right there you already answered almost as if Justin knew where this was going to go.
53:30: That still small voice. I mean, the idea of journaling, you know, that's very common in the
53:41: HBG movement, those who are continuationists. Jack Deere suggests that you journal and write down your dreams that you have or your visions that you have.
53:52: Journaling becomes a way where you are recording your thoughts. That ironically, and I'd be curious to know
53:58: Curtis' response to this would be the whole idea of journaling what the Lord might be speaking to me was the way that Jesus Calling came into existence.
54:06: So I'd like to know then if my journaling and my writing down these revelations is important.
54:13: Yeah, very good. Jesus Calling anyone? Exactly right. If writing down my revelations is important, then if this is what
54:21: God is speaking and I'm writing it down, then what exactly qualitatively makes it different than Scripture?
54:28: Less than Scripture. And why is that not? If God is speaking and God speaks authoritatively and God speaks inerrantly because He can't make an error and He speaks infallibly because He can't fail to do anything, then how is
54:43: God speaking to me if I get it right? How is it not on par with Scripture? Correct.
54:48: And let me just mention... I have yet to hear an intelligent answer to that question. Yeah, and let me just, for folks who may have heard you mention
54:54: Jesus Calling and not know the history of it, but in the introduction to that book, she claims that she basically shut off her brain and she claims it's
55:07: God that was writing the book. And so she was just the funnel, she was just the tool and the
55:14: Spirit wrote it. Now the reality is if that's what happened, and Peter from Missionary Gamer says, if you journal and it's something
55:24: God speaks, is it then to be added to the 66 books of the Bible? That's basically what you're getting to,
55:30: Jim, and that's what I would say with Jesus Calling. If what Jesus Calling is claiming is true, this auto -writing where her brain's shut off and God is supposedly the one writing through it, she's recognizing a
55:44: Spirit is doing it, but yet there's things in that book that are not in line with Scripture, so I would end up saying, well, it was demonic then.
55:52: But if her claim is true, or if journaling and this is
55:57: God speaking to you, should not we see this as the 67th book of the
56:04: Bible? What gives Scripture its authoritative, inerrant, and infallible qualities?
56:12: Is it the fact that it's written down? If so, then if I take what God speaks to me and I write it down, is it not then
56:17: Scripture? Is the fact that Scripture was given, is it the fact that it's old that makes it authoritative and inerrant and infallible?
56:25: Or is it the people to whom it was given, the apostles and prophets, that makes it infallible? It has to be one of those three things.
56:32: And I would argue that it is none of those three things. It's the source. Because it comes from God, it is therefore by nature infallible, inerrant, and authoritative.
56:41: And so if God is its source, and if it has those qualities because it comes from God, then if God speaks to you, it must be authoritative, inerrant, and infallible by definition.
56:52: It can't be anything else. Scripture has no category for a revelation that comes from Yahweh that is possibly errant, possibly fallible, and not authoritative.
57:02: There is no such thing. If He speaks it, it is canonical, and it is authoritative. Well, Sarah Young, if I remember correctly, in that very introduction, she says,
57:13: I had Scripture, but it wasn't enough. I needed more. Yep, that's right.
57:19: They say the quiet part out loud. Yeah. You know, what you see with that, and Justin Peters has a great video taking all these guys from 2020 and their predictions, and then just pointing out how they all, every one of them, missed
57:38: COVID, missed Trump not being president. I mean, every one of them missed those two major events, and yet they just go, well, hey, it's okay.
57:49: We all have to be 85 % right. I mean, this is, you know, they're claiming
57:55: God said these things, and yet it's wrong consistently, and one of the things
58:00: I find with the journaling is, I remember a guy that I was talking to on the plane, and he was trying to say he does this.
58:08: He journals, and he journals dreams, and they always come true.
58:15: The issue is that I said, well, you know, give me some examples, and he couldn't remember too many offhand, but the ones he could remember were so vague.
58:25: It's kind of like when I was in college, and there was a girl that I knew that she, I mean, she just really trusted in the horoscopes, because every day it came true, and for one month,
58:35: I made her read all 12 horoscopes, and all 12 came true every day. It's amazing, you know, because they're so general that when you're looking to get it to be true, and the thing
58:45: I said with this guy on the plane was, have any of yours not come true? And he said, well, some of them haven't been fulfilled yet.
58:54: So anyone that didn't happen yet, you just go, well, that's still future. So if you got something wrong, it's going to happen in the future, and therefore it's never actually, you know, with this trial and error type of method, it's never actually wrong with the journaling, because it just hasn't happened.
59:14: So you're looking at it, and God spoke to you and told you this, and that I'm going to get a job at Apple.
59:23: Well, I get a job at IBM. Well, see, but that doesn't mean it hasn't happened.
59:28: I will eventually get it from Apple, right? And until the point you die, I mean,
59:33: I remember someone I knew in college, her mother believed God spoke to her, and she was going to get a million dollars one day.
59:39: She died never having the million dollars, but up until the day she died, she kept believing that it was going to happen in the future.
59:47: Well, that's the whole thing I have the issue with, I guess, with the journaling is you're looking for it to be true, so when you find enough that you can say, oh, see, that fits, that's the proof.
59:57: Now I can say God spoke this one to me, but you're believing all the others he spoke to even though they haven't been fulfilled.
01:00:06: And you just push that fulfillment off to, you know, I guess until you die.
01:00:14: Yeah, the trial and error approach to this ends up undermining our confidence in Scripture, and here's how it does it.
01:00:21: If I learn to hear the voice of God, and I only hear it accurately through trial and error, then how can
01:00:27: I be assured that the apostles and the prophets got it right, and that they didn't get it wrong?
01:00:33: How can I be assured that Scripture is not their trial and error? Because they're men like us, and so if I can only hear the voice of God by giving it a swing, by doing my best, and that's the only way that I can develop this discipline and hear from God, then how do
01:00:49: I know that somebody that was the writer of Scripture, that they got it right every single time?
01:00:55: If God can speak, and the recipient can get it wrong, then how do we know that God spoke and the recipients who wrote
01:01:03: Scripture got it right? What is our guarantee? So again, what makes
01:01:08: Scripture unique? What makes it sufficient? What makes it authoritative? Is it the fact that it came to those men?
01:01:14: Well, those men were sinners like we are. Those men were fallen like we are. They were men who needed to be redeemed.
01:01:20: They were men who made mistakes, so if God can't overcome my inadequacies and failures to communicate accurately to me every single time, then how do
01:01:29: I know that He did that for Paul? That He did that for Mark? That He did that for Matthew and John? That trial -and -error approach, this whole, yeah, we just take a swing at it, hopefully we get it right, and, well, he's going to get to this in the third part of the video where he gets more into the trial -and -error aspect of it, but it doesn't instill any confidence in either
01:01:49: God's ability to speak or God's ability to make sure that we are hearing accurately what
01:01:57: He says. You know, that's a really good point, though, Jim, and I guess I hadn't heard that or thought about that, but if that's what we're supposed to do, is just God speaks to us and we write it down, and it could be from God, it could not be
01:02:11: God, but if it's God, I mean, when Paul wrote, it wasn't
01:02:17: Paul that made it inspired, and God wasn't dictating to him. That's why we say it's
01:02:24: God's Word, because God wrote through Paul, so it's God's Word because God had
01:02:30: Paul write that, and it's the nature of who God is that makes it inspired.
01:02:36: That's right. Right? And so if God is writing, is telling, working through you to write something in your journal, then yeah, it's inspired.
01:02:45: Your journal... Try to communicate. Yeah. So he did go...
01:02:52: Hold on. Let me develop that a little bit. So if God speaks, and I don't hear Him, then
01:02:57: He has tried to communicate to me and failed, and therefore
01:03:02: God can fail. So just work out the implications of that. God can't fail because of a lack of power, or because of a lack of knowledge.
01:03:10: One of those two cases. One of those two. But God lacks neither power nor knowledge, and therefore He cannot fail.
01:03:16: Yeah, or you take the side of the word faith that says God's trying to communicate, and you were the problem.
01:03:23: You weren't able to do it. So something's wrong with you. He's trying to communicate. If I have failed to hear that, then
01:03:30: God has failed to communicate to me. So it's...
01:03:35: You have set up... This is a false God. This is an idol. People have created an idol, and the idol is a
01:03:43: God. It's not Yahweh, but it is a God who is trying to speak, trying to get
01:03:48: His message across, trying to direct us, trying to correct us, trying to guide us, and our inability to hear this, or our lack of discipline in cultivating this ability, or any number of things, keeps
01:04:04: God from being successful in what He is trying to do, and it keeps Him from doing it and succeeding in it, and from accomplishing what
01:04:11: He sets out to do. And that is not the God of Bible, the God of the Bible. The God of the Bible sits enthroned in the heavens, and He does as He pleases.
01:04:18: He accomplishes all of His good pleasure. That's what Scripture says. So, if God communicates, the person will hear it infallibly all the time, and it will be infallible, authoritative, and inerrant revelation.
01:04:29: And Jim, this is why this is so important, the point that you just made. People don't even recognize it's so subtle that they suddenly have a
01:04:39: God who is not the God of the Bible. That's right. Not even realizing that.
01:04:45: That shift occurs... I mean, that's why... People ask, well, why should you write this book?
01:04:53: I mean, I got asked that by someone that, well, this woman, Susan, that I wanted to give her a free copy of your book.
01:05:00: She didn't want one. But I told her, you know, I'll give you a free copy if you'll read it. And she was like, why would someone want to write a book on that?
01:05:07: And I tried to explain exactly this, right? Because you're not realizing that you're shifting from what the
01:05:14: Bible says to what you wish the Bible said. And you end up having a different God than the
01:05:20: God of the Bible without even noticing it. Yeah. And I don't think
01:05:25: Curtis is doing that because I think he would disagree. I don't think most people who practice this are intentionally saying,
01:05:32: I'm going to set up an idol and I'm going to worship that idol, or I'm going to disparage God. But these are the implications of bad theology and assumptions that we make when we come to the text of Scripture.
01:05:41: That's the implications of it. I don't disparage Curtis's sincerity or his love for the
01:05:46: Lord or anything like that. I'm not trying to shortchange that in the least. I'm just saying that when you start teaching this, you've got to be you've got to be a second level thinker.
01:05:56: You've got to think in terms of Oh, thanks Peter. Peter says,
01:06:04: I guess I'm just here for product placement. You've got to be thinking in terms of what are the implications of this theology that I'm believing in and practicing?
01:06:14: Am I believing that God needs to speak to me outside of Scripture? If God is speaking outside of Scripture then is it because He needs it or because I need it?
01:06:23: If it's because He needs it, then you're saying that God needs something and therefore that's a false idol.
01:06:31: God needs nothing. He's not served by human hands Paul says in Acts chapter 17. He has no needs whatsoever.
01:06:37: He is completely self -sufficient. So does God need to speak to me outside of Scripture? Which means that He is not self -sufficient and it means that Scripture is not sufficient because He needs to get something to me that He hasn't put in Scripture, which you would think
01:06:51: He would think forward enough to know what I need and put it in Scripture for me. If He were an infinite
01:06:56: God, He could do that. Or is it because I need Him to speak to me outside of Scripture?
01:07:02: And if that's the case, then that's saying that Scripture itself is not sufficient. To go back to something that Curtis said earlier, we get these revelations and then we test them by Scripture to see if they're true and valid in keeping with Scripture.
01:07:14: Well, if it contradicts Scripture, then I have to reject it. But if it is in keeping with Scripture and Scripture already addresses, then
01:07:20: I don't need that revelation. And so if I end up having a revelation that I can't test by Scripture, and it doesn't contradict
01:07:27: Scripture, but there's nothing in Scripture that affirms it, like the name of my waitress in the restaurant, this is an unnecessary revelation.
01:07:34: Then I can't test it at all, and therefore the whole idea that we should be testing everything by Scripture falls apart.
01:07:42: The only revelation that is of any use to us then is stuff that we can't test by Scripture because Scripture doesn't address it.
01:07:48: It's kind of like with the gift of languages. Everyone wants to say they speak an angelic language, because there's no way of testing that and verifying it.
01:07:56: It's the same thing here. All of these voices experiences. Yeah, all these experiences are something can't be tested with Scripture and therefore it's just, hey, you just gotta trust me.
01:08:09: And that's the whole thing with it. Okay, he's got one point left.
01:08:15: Let's, and this is half the video, or almost half the video, so let's play this. To our third and final strategy, ask the
01:08:24: Holy Spirit about people around you and test the info. I told you it would be a challenge.
01:08:31: Listen, you have been given the same Holy Spirit that you read about in the
01:08:36: Scriptures. The same Holy Spirit that raised Jesus from the dead who leads and speaks and shows.
01:08:44: If our commission is about sharing Jesus with everyone around us and discipling the nations, don't you think that the presence of Jesus in us and upon us will be interested in speaking into people's lives?
01:08:58: So, here's the challenge. Choose a person or ask the Holy Spirit to highlight someone. Then ask the
01:09:04: Lord about that person. The first thing you see, feel, hear, the first impression you have, ask the
01:09:11: Lord about that impression. You may hear more, you may not. Now, approach that person and test that information.
01:09:20: Just ask them about what you felt. You could say, hey, sorry, I know this is weird, but is your name and you may say, hey,
01:09:27: Curtis, what if I make a mistake? I don't want to misrepresent the Lord. What if I didn't hear accurately?
01:09:34: Number one, you probably will make a mistake, but you will also hear him accurately and you won't know until you test it.
01:09:42: Number two, you are not claiming to be a perfect and inerrant prophet of God and if you are, stop it.
01:09:50: Say you ask a person if they are an oil painter, they're into oil painting.
01:09:55: Worst case scenario, they're like, no, I'm not. Why did you ask that? And you turn around and say, hey, listen,
01:10:01: I'm a Christian and I'm practicing hearing God's voice. What is your name? What are you into?
01:10:07: And then you tell them how much Jesus loves them and you share the gospel with them. Begin simply, begin boldly, and whatever happens, share the gospel.
01:10:16: Challenge accepted? Check out this video where God told me my server's name before we got there and the
01:10:21: Lord used our brief encounter to transform Lisa's life completely. Let me know in the comments what you think and how it goes.
01:10:29: I want to hear your testimonies, guys. Okay, so that covered...
01:10:35: This brings back terrible memories from when I was in the Vineyard Church. Do tell.
01:10:43: So we used to do this thing that were called treasure hunts where we would get together and we would pray and everyone would basically ask
01:10:53: God for a vision, whether it be what someone specifically looked like or a color t -shirt or something like that.
01:11:01: And then we would pray and then we would wait to hear from the Lord. And then we would go out to the park or we would go to the store or the mall or something and we would just look around for someone who fit the description of what
01:11:16: God gave us. And it was the biggest failure every single time.
01:11:24: And when I finally realized that I was moving away from charismatic teaching and actually reading my
01:11:32: Bible, I quit kind of participating and I went to go just to kind of watch and observe.
01:11:40: And one of the things that happened was one of the guys that was with us, he got this specific vision of a woman, her son, on a swing at a playground.
01:11:51: And I thought, well, that's kind of weird because we're not going to visit playgrounds.
01:11:57: This is kind of odd. But we were walking by somewhere and he said, oh, I think that's her.
01:12:03: And I said, okay, well, go give her the gospel. And he said, no, I think the Lord was just wanting me to be obedient.
01:12:10: And I said, I don't think that's it. So then I went to go give her the gospel. Right. So you could have cut out everything that he just said in that last point, except for the very end where he said, hey, my name is such and such.
01:12:25: Let me tell you about Jesus. That's all you need to do because that's what we're commanded to do anyway. We don't need any of the other garbage and nonsense.
01:12:34: And the benefit is that you don't end up misrepresenting God or making it look like you want to tell her about a
01:12:40: God who can't speak accurately. Right. The thing that struck me is,
01:12:46: Curtis says in there, you will be wrong. Expect that God speaks to you in such a way that he tells you something that's wrong.
01:12:57: And again, back to the reliability of Scripture. If I can do that, then how do
01:13:02: I know Paul got it right? Correct. I'm not playing baseball here where batting 300 gets me into the
01:13:08: Hall of Fame. That's not how God operates. It's either a thousand percent or it's nothing.
01:13:16: Yeah, and because the thing is, when you have people that will try to cherry pick the
01:13:22: Bible, like, well, this is inspired and this isn't, there's people that try to do that. And what you end up finding is when they're doing that, they're setting themselves up as judge over God's word.
01:13:34: They're the ones now that is going to say, God spoke this, but not that.
01:13:39: That's a dangerous place to be. Well, he's kind of doing a similar thing in the sense of saying, you're going to go and try this out, but who are you giving this credit to?
01:13:50: So you're going to go up and say to the waitress, hey, your name's Lisa, and she's going to go, or is your name
01:13:57: Lisa? She's going to go, no. Well, now, you're claiming that was from God, right?
01:14:05: Now, look, a simple reality is that for many people, your mind may pick things up unconsciously.
01:14:14: You may, maybe you overheard someone call the waitress Lisa, or she said that, but you didn't pick it up enough to know that she said it, and then you're thinking, oh,
01:14:27: God's going to, I think her name is Lisa, I'm going to ask her. Right? And then you go, oh, see, it's confirmed. Well, it may just be that your unconscious mind heard something that your conscious mind didn't realize, and then you think that's of God.
01:14:41: But the thing that gets me concerned is when you have people, when he's saying to just try this and know you're going to be wrong, then, you know, it goes back to Jim's next book, right?
01:14:55: Because God doesn't try. Okay? I mean, that's the whole thing that I see with it is that you're saying this is of God.
01:15:09: Well, God cannot lie. Titus 1 -2. He cannot give you error.
01:15:15: Because this is a really scary place in my mind is if God can deceive somebody into thinking
01:15:24: I'm speaking to you and I'm giving you false information, then how could you trust anything in the
01:15:29: Bible? Because all of it could be part of God's deception. I mean, this is an argument that I make with Muslims all the time.
01:15:38: Because they'll end up sitting there and saying, well, you know, they're going to argue that God can give contradictory information in the
01:15:49: Quran in believing that the Trinity is the Father, the Mother, and the Son. Or that the sperm of men are in the low parts of their back.
01:16:00: Okay? That's error. But they're crediting that error to God. That's what
01:16:08: I think happens when you try this and say this is God speaking.
01:16:14: And it's just your own feelings. Well, a lot of the people that I know that still think that God speaks outside of Scripture, the question that I ask them all the time,
01:16:26: I say, what is it that God has not said in His Word that He must say outside of it?
01:16:32: And they have yet to come back with an answer. Yeah, that's a very good point.
01:16:41: The trial and error approach, I mean, let's take Curtis's example that he gave.
01:16:47: Really what you're saying in that situation is that God either gave him the wrong information or couldn't give him the right information.
01:16:55: Because the assumption is that God is speaking in that moment, or that He will speak. And if the assumption is that He, if the assumption is not that He is speaking, then why do you assume that you should be trying to listen?
01:17:08: You have to know if you're going to try and listen, you have to know that He is, that you're expecting
01:17:14: Him to speak. And that's one of the presuppositions that I deal with in God Doesn't Whisper is that we can expect to hear from God outside of Scripture.
01:17:21: So that's the assumption that He's operating is that I can expect that God's going to give me the name of my waitress or tell me something about this rando that I come across in the mall.
01:17:30: God's going to give me some piece of information that's going to give me a platform to share the gospel with this person, which we don't need any of this, as you already pointed out, to share the gospel.
01:17:37: We just need to share the gospel. But the assumption is that God's going to give me this piece of information. So if I get it wrong, then one of two things happen.
01:17:44: Either God gave me the wrong information, in which case He's lying and deceiving, or two, He was unable to give me the right information because there was something that was more powerful than Him.
01:17:52: So either way, you have a false God that is not Yahweh. There's no third option.
01:17:59: So here's a question that Adam's asking. Curtis mentioned something about the
01:18:05: Holy Spirit. What would you say to him about the Holy Spirit's role in evangelism?
01:18:12: The first thing I would say is that it's not the role of the Holy Spirit to reveal to me information about whoever
01:18:18: I'm talking to. The role of the Holy Spirit is to move in the heart of whoever
01:18:24: I'm talking to as I'm giving them the gospel in order to point them to Christ. Convict the world of sin, righteousness, and judgment to come.
01:18:33: That's what the Spirit does. Spirit gives us, enables our giftedness and works through us and gives us the words.
01:18:39: And as we communicate the power of the gospel, the Spirit either uses that message to harden the heart of the hearer or soften the heart of the hearer towards the gospel.
01:18:48: The Spirit of God is at work in that, but to say that the role of the Spirit of God is to give me that piece of information, to give me a platform to do that, that's not what
01:18:57: Scripture says, but Scripture does say that the Spirit convicts and the Spirit draws and the Spirit regenerates and the
01:19:02: Spirit opens the eyes, the Spirit grants repentance, the Spirit creates faith within, the
01:19:07: Spirit does all of these activities and works in us sharing the gospel, including giving us the opportunity and the venue to do so and giving us the words and bringing
01:19:16: Scripture to our minds so that we are effective in doing it in the moment. That's the role of the
01:19:22: Holy Spirit. It looks like Caleb has an answer for you with the
01:19:28: HVG, where it can be found in Scripture, Jim. So here you go. Caleb says
01:19:34: HVG can be found in Revelation 22, 22. Drew, you want to go look that up real quick?
01:19:42: Yes, yes, yes, I got it right here, right here in my NASB. There must be a textual variant here, because it's not here.
01:19:58: Yeah, because verse 21 says, The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ be with you all.
01:20:03: Amen. The end. There is no 22. Nice, well played.
01:20:10: Yeah, I saw that and laughed, and he says later, Revelation 22, 22 is my go -to verse these days.
01:20:18: Well, Caleb, I'm stealing that one. I like it. Yeah, that's a good one. Let's get,
01:20:24: I know Melissa's backstage has a question that she wants to ask about God's will.
01:20:30: Let me just get through some of these questions real quick with you, Jim, that came up. So let's see.
01:20:38: Alright, so John says, question, do you believe God could not speak a word of wisdom or knowledge today, or God simply would never would?
01:20:55: And I don't know if this was a question he had for you, or when Curtis was on, but so, you know, if God could speak in the
01:21:05: New Testament times a word of wisdom and knowledge, you know, is it that God just doesn't do that today?
01:21:12: Yeah, so I'm not making any claims about what God can or cannot do. I'm making claims about what we can expect
01:21:18: God to do based upon what is revealed in Scripture. So God could speak to me through a leprechaun in my refrigerator if He wanted to, but I have no reason to believe that He will, and therefore
01:21:28: I'm not likely to go stand in front of my refrigerator waiting for Revelation from God. God can make a donkey talk, but you're not going to see me this evening after the broadcast standing next to the fence in my neighbor's field talking to the donkeys waiting for Revelation from God.
01:21:41: So we're not talking about what God can or cannot do. God can do anything. God could speak to me right now if He wanted to, but what
01:21:48: I am saying is that we're describing what is normative for us as Christians to expect, and we should expect
01:21:54: God to speak to us in His Word. He speaks to us in His Word when we understand the text. So there's no need for a word of wisdom or a word of knowledge, and a lot of times what gets lumped into that category is unusual insight or sometimes providence.
01:22:08: You know, I feel an uneasy feeling about something, and so I just kind of get out of an area. Turns out there was a stabbing there.
01:22:14: I find that out on the news the next day. Was that a word of knowledge or a word of wisdom, or was it just an uneasiness in the situation that I was subconsciously picking up, or the
01:22:24: Spirit of God by His providence was just moving? I don't call that the voice of God. I would call that extraordinary providence.
01:22:29: I would call that God working in my circumstances and my situations. I would even attribute that to God directing my steps.
01:22:38: I believe that God directs every last step that I take, everything that I do, everything that I plan, everything that I execute, everything that I accomplish.
01:22:44: He is sovereign over all of it. He directs and ordains all of it, but I don't attribute it to the voice of God, and I don't claim it's revelation or Him speaking to me.
01:22:52: I just do what God has commanded me to do in Scripture, and I trust that in obeying that, that I'm going to end up walking out
01:22:59: His will, living in obedience to Him, that He's provided everything in His Word that is necessary for life and godliness and for me to live an obedient,
01:23:07: God -honoring, Christian life. He's given me everything I need, so I strive to obey that, trusting that God will establish all of my steps and accomplish
01:23:14: His will for me. And that's hard enough to obey. I have enough in Scripture to keep me busy for the rest of my life.
01:23:21: Andrew, what if we, what if somehow you and I went up to Idaho?
01:23:27: Dress me up like a leprechaun and I hid in Jim's fridge. If anybody could pull it off,
01:23:34: Drew, it would be you. You need to drink the almond milk. It's magically delicious.
01:23:42: Well, I think that I think I have a word from the Lord that if I open
01:23:47: Jim's, you know, refrigerator, I'm going to find bacon in there. Probably.
01:23:54: Because I think every dish that, I know, okay, so Drew, I don't know if I shared this with you, but when
01:24:00: Jim had his first conference and I spoke at the conference, at the end of the weekend, I made a comment to Jim, every single dish that was made in his home had bacon in it.
01:24:12: I was like, did you do that on purpose? He goes, yeah, I just wanted to make sure you weren't kosher anymore. All right, so Tracy, this is what
01:24:21: I was saying, that Susan claims to be a prophet, an apostle. She goes, for $600, I can become an apostle and then
01:24:28: I'll be able to hear God, right? That's right. I'll give it to you for $5 .50. Yeah, I think that's exactly how it works.
01:24:36: So this is a question that's geared toward Curtis, so when he comes back, we may get an answer, but Dee is asking,
01:24:43: Curtis, why would someone need to hear the voice of God and how exactly does one does hearing the voice of God, what does it sound like?
01:24:54: This is the thing that gets me, is that people will say they don't need it, but God does it and yet there's so much time focused on teaching people how to,
01:25:07: I mean, look, just before the show, I decided to do a quick search on hearing the voice of God, or how to hear the voice of God, and there's a ton of videos teaching people this.
01:25:20: Why? Why do we need to focus that much time on something scripture never teaches? And second, when you ask what does it sound like, it seems to always sound like what people want.
01:25:31: I mean, I'll go back to my days in college where a guy, he got a word from the
01:25:37: Lord that this girl who was engaged was going to marry him. And she broke off the engagement and married him, saying this is,
01:25:49: God spoke. So she's got to do this. They're divorced today, by the way. So, yeah.
01:25:58: Well, going back to what Curtis said about we hear from demons, people on our side, we hear from demons.
01:26:06: What I wanted to tell him was, I don't need to hear from demons because I have my own flesh that's warring against me.
01:26:13: That's demonic enough, right? I need to continually put that to death. And this was, again, earlier with some of what he was saying is, why would
01:26:23: God allow you to hear an error? So this is kind of, Jim, you brought this up, and that's a question we would have for Curtis.
01:26:32: Why would this trial and error, you're going to hear something that is going to be wrong? Yeah. years worthwhile, she's saying he contradicted himself by saying it's an impression and that you could be wrong while also saying you're hearing from God.
01:26:52: And I think this is the point you're trying to make, Jim, is that God can't be wrong. Yeah, that's right.
01:27:00: And so she decided to look it up and said, impression. An idea, feeling, or opinion about something or someone, especially one formed without conscious thought or on the basis of little evidence.
01:27:14: Even Oxford language knows. So she looked it up in the dictionary and realizes, you know, this is not something, it's just a feeling you have.
01:27:24: But it's amazing to me that so many people hear the voice of God saying what they want
01:27:29: God to say. Yeah, and there's nothing in Scripture that says that our feelings are the voice of God or that our impressions are the voice of God.
01:27:37: It's just not in Scripture. That's not what the still small voice was and there's nothing in Scripture that teaches that our impressions or nudgings or promptings or feelings are any reliable measure of truth.
01:27:50: They're not. In fact, we are commanded in Scripture to look away from our heart, to not trust our heart, and instead to look outside of us to the objective revealed
01:27:58: Word of God. HBG teaching ends up causing us to focus and look inwardly, to introspect and to examine and exegete our own feelings.
01:28:07: And that's the polar opposite of what would honor God. We're commanded to do that with Scripture and to look to Scripture and Scripture alone.
01:28:16: Yeah, and I mean, look, in all the times I've noticed that people that say they hear from God, it's always, you know, it's something that's in line with what their will is, what they want.
01:28:27: There's only once that I had someone tell me that they heard God speak to them and they didn't want it to come true.
01:28:36: They were against it, but they ended up doing it because they realized it was from God. And it was a woman who felt that she was called to go to become a pastor in a
01:28:45: Lutheran church. And she said that she did that because God kept telling her she should go and be a pastor.
01:28:52: And I pointed out that Scripture's very clear that He wouldn't want you to be a pastor.
01:28:59: And so the issue was, she was like, but I wasn't looking for this. God kept telling me to do this.
01:29:06: Well, that wouldn't have been God. Yeah, no, Tanya Harris, in her book, what's it called?
01:29:15: Tanya, T -A -N -I -A, Harris, H -A -R -R -I -S, I forget what her book is called, but it is,
01:29:20: I was on Justin Brierley's broadcast, Unbelievable, and she and I had an hour, hour and a half discussion or something like that on her book and my book because they're polar opposites of one another.
01:29:31: And after the broadcast, I asked her that same question because she pastors a church, and I said, Scripture's clear, and yet you have this conflict between what
01:29:38: Scripture says and what you think you heard God speak to you. And she had no response to that, other than just that she just appealed to her experience.
01:29:49: The experience is that, and Scripture can't mean this, and so she found a way of explaining away
01:29:54: Scripture in favor of her experience, and I found that to be the case 99 .9
01:30:00: % of the time that people have visions, impressions, promptings, or nudgings that contradict Scripture. Yeah.
01:30:07: And that right there is the red flag. Alright, so let's see,
01:30:13: I don't know if we have, okay, this is just a comment, John is saying Curtis teaching are simply shocking, dumb, and straight up occult brought into Christianity.
01:30:28: He has to repent before it's too late. Now, that's going to be hard to hear, but it is from the occult, that is where we see the occult and the occult.
01:30:39: I mean, some of the practice that we see, we've seen in Mormonism years before, 100 years before we saw it in Christianity, and so the fact that the occult is, and there's so many groups that they trust that this is the proof, this is what vindicates.
01:31:00: And so, here, a question from Melissa, how come none of these people ever hear God rebuking them?
01:31:06: Yeah, I'll add one to that, how come they never hear God clearing up fine points of doctrine over which we differ?
01:31:13: I mean, we never get any reliable God -inspired revelation on anything outside of Scripture that we need some more clarity on.
01:31:24: The meaning of 1 Corinthians 15 29, for instance, things like that, we never get any reliable revelation as to, authoritative on those issues.
01:31:34: That's a good point. So, alright, we got through most of the questions, I know we're going to have
01:31:39: Melissa come in, she's been waiting backstage, but before we do, it'd be a good time for us to mention our sponsor,
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01:32:40: use the promo code SFE to get your discount. All right. Let me bring Melissa in.
01:32:48: And so, there we go. Melissa, welcome to the show. You had a question about the will of God.
01:32:56: Yeah, hi. I am talking about the part of the Bible known as the
01:33:02: Lord's Prayer, and it says for His will be done, and the other day
01:33:08: I heard my pastor, I think he was just saying that only refers to,
01:33:14: I don't know, maybe I could be wrong, but it refers to the gospel, but does it go further than that?
01:33:21: Does it mean certain things He wants to be done? That's how I always thought about it. Maybe I'm wrong.
01:33:29: So, and let me just rephrase it, make sure I understand the question. So, you're saying does, in the
01:33:35: Lord's Prayer, where He says Thy will be done, is that just referring to sharing the gospel?
01:33:44: Is that only referring to in the sense of the gospel to be to be done, yeah, shared, or is it more than that?
01:33:54: I would say it's more than that. Jim, it looks like you were going to say something, but... Yeah, I would say it's more than that. I mean, it would incorporate certainly gospel proclamation and advance in the growth of the
01:34:03: Church, but it would have to go beyond that to, I want God's will to be done concerning the judgment of the wicked, concerning the nations, the rise and fall of kings, because God's will is holy and pure.
01:34:14: I want to pray that His will be done even in my own life, in terms of what He ordains for me and His steps and what
01:34:19: He appoints for me and my children and my Church. I want God's will for those things, not my own will.
01:34:25: And so that's the instruction there. We should pray not for my will to be done, but God's will to be done.
01:34:30: We want to see, and His will is the glorification of His name and the advancement of His truth and His kingdom.
01:34:36: And so when we pray that prayer for God's will to be done, we're praying for God to advance
01:34:41: His causes and His purposes and to receive glory for what He has done in creation. And so that would incorporate not just gospel proclamation, but I think the minute details of each of our individual lives and ministries as well.
01:34:56: Does that mean like we're praying for in our life for His will to be done, for us to align with God?
01:35:05: Do you think that's a good thing? Yeah, I think that's entirely appropriate. I want to line up with God's will.
01:35:11: I want to do God's will. And I find that in Scripture. So I take the principles that He has given to me in Scripture and the direct commands and then
01:35:18: I obey those. I work those out in my life and I seek to obey those, putting to death my own desires and trying to do that which pleases the
01:35:25: Lord. And when I do that, then I'm walking in truth and in His path and in His holiness and what
01:35:30: He has ordained for me. So I'm striving to be obedient to Him, which is His will. I'm striving to pursue my own sanctification, which is
01:35:38: His will, pursue holiness without which no one can see the Lord, and to obey His commands. And so those elements of my own personal sanctification and obedience, those are aspects of His will as well.
01:35:50: Yeah. Now John is saying this, Jim. He says, don't ask
01:35:56: Drew that question because he's post -meal. I would actually agree with everything that Jim just said about that.
01:36:05: I don't think that particularly has to be any type of eschatology attached to it.
01:36:11: I think what Jim explained is perfectly biblical. Yeah, but being post -meal you also think you'll bring in the kingdom.
01:36:19: You'll bring in God's will. In which case he can pray that it be done. I've never said that.
01:36:29: Hey, you know, you'll get a kick out of this, but so someone came to church and had a bunch of books from two authors.
01:36:41: One was Michael Brown, and so the pastor was given these books, donated, he figured the one in church who would read these would be me, but the five volumes set from Michael Brown on answering
01:36:54: Jewish objectives. And I only had the first two, so I was glad to get the other three. And then the other three books were
01:37:01: Rashtuni. Are they his institutes of biblical law?
01:37:07: Yeah, so I have those now. If you don't want them, I'll take them. I figured
01:37:12: I would have a home with them I'm sure. I got those, and I may send them your way.
01:37:20: But I figured I may, you know, they'll go on my heresy section.
01:37:31: Okay, well, Melissa, anything else? Can I drop my link?
01:37:38: I know you always want to promote your show. I think it goes up actually when
01:37:43: I actually mention it. I think some people start listening. So it's TruthBeToldRadio .com
01:37:50: TruthBeToldRadio .com Check that out. That's my show. Thanks for answering my question, everybody. Thanks, Melissa. Alright, so we had a couple more questions.
01:38:01: They were one directed toward me. This was early on, and I'll give the answer that I immediately thought of.
01:38:08: But someone said, Can Andrew name one male or female name that starts with Q off the top of his head?
01:38:15: I can ask any question, right? So yeah, male and female.
01:38:22: I could do that. Queen and Queenie. Because those were the two guys that were dressed in tutus, pretending to be girls, dancing in front of me in New York City when
01:38:35: I was evangelizing. So yeah, one guy was named Queen, and one was Queenie. So it's both male and female.
01:38:42: So there you go. KT said,
01:38:48: Andrew, been praying for you, Andrew. Keep us updated. So just real quick,
01:38:53: I'll give an update. I have not been able to see. I saw the neuro ophthalmologist with the double vision that I'm having.
01:39:02: I do appreciate the prayers. It has been really a struggle. Being on the computer is not helpful.
01:39:11: So even doing the show, I'm having to look away and things like that because trying to read is very difficult.
01:39:19: It has to do with the way I turn my head. It creates more or less double vision. We think tomorrow
01:39:26: I'll go to an ophthalmologist who supposedly all they've got to do is give me these special prism eyeglasses that I'll have to wear the rest of my life, and that supposedly fixes it.
01:39:35: It's supposedly a genetic thing. My father has it too. He's got prism glasses.
01:39:40: So hopefully that's all it is. I'm hoping that there's some other way to solve it other than wearing glasses.
01:39:49: If that's the worst of it, then that's the worst of it. I won't have an update really probably until September, but the 8th
01:39:59: I'll go to a cardiologist to do a stress test, and the same day I'll do an MRI. That's to rule out whether it's an effect of a stroke that I may have had or if it's a brain aneurysm.
01:40:11: We want to rule those two out, but the neuro -ophthalmologist was very confident that this is what it is.
01:40:17: He said it's a classic case. It's genetic. The fact that my father had it only vindicated it.
01:40:24: One of the things is that the way you compensate for this nerve 4 palsy is what it's called is
01:40:31: I tend to tilt my head to the left. That gets rid of it. If I tilt my head to the right,
01:40:36: I have double vision. He said, go look at old pictures and you'll probably see that you've always done that. As soon as he said it,
01:40:42: I went, yeah, that's actually true. Almost every picture, my head is kind of tilted. Turns out my son does that as well.
01:40:51: That may be all it is. That's what we're hoping because brain aneurysm sounds bad, stroke sounds bad.
01:41:00: If I survive my trip to Idaho, which I say that a little tongue -in -cheek because Jim, last time was pretty members of your church.
01:41:12: The head of security in your church. They tried to kill you, didn't they? The head of security, no less.
01:41:19: It was really funny. Jim introduced me that way. He said the head of security tried to kill him this week.
01:41:25: He tried to make it look like an accident. We've learned from our mistakes this time around.
01:41:32: We won't drop the ball this time, Andrew. Hence the reason
01:41:38: I told Thomas that I'm going to bring two glocks with me just in case one gives out.
01:41:50: Yeah. Jim, thanks for coming in. We mentioned it a couple times, but I do encourage you folks to get the book,
01:41:59: God Doesn't Whisper. You should really get the companion one,
01:42:05: God Doesn't Whisper and God Doesn't Try. Oh, wait. We've got to pre -order the one when that's available.
01:42:12: God Doesn't Try is probably going to go to the editor tomorrow. I'm hoping to have final formatting and everything done and up for publication by the end of September.
01:42:23: That's the goal. Yeah. Also, if you have
01:42:29: AGTV, Jim has a video series on God Doesn't Whisper as well.
01:42:35: I do encourage you to get God Doesn't Whisper. We have it on Striving for Eternity.
01:42:41: You can go to strivingforeternity .org in our store and you can get it right from there. It goes right from Amazon and gets to...
01:42:48: Jim still gets paid from Amazon. Actually, this is something people don't know. Let me encourage you why you should buy cases of Jim's books.
01:42:58: Because you're not actually helping Jim. Not that that's a bad thing to do, but the money for the books actually go toward missionaries who've retired and left the mission field because when people retire from the mission field, they come home and all the money dries up because they're not on mission field.
01:43:17: And Jim has a heart for them and has been giving the money toward basically missionaries who need to have some income and living after the mission field.
01:43:29: That's what you're actually supporting by buying a case of them to give away, which is really good to do, by the way.
01:43:35: And if you're going to do that, go to my website, jimosman .com and contact me directly. I'll get you a break on the cases so that we cut
01:43:43: Amazon out of the mix and you get a good deal and the missionaries get supported. Yeah.
01:43:50: So John says, great show. Thank you, Andrew Drew. The two of you always teach me something every week.
01:43:58: Great job. Well, we didn't do much teaching this time. We really didn't. Most of the show,
01:44:04: I just sat here like this. Going, uh -huh. Agree, agree.
01:44:10: I don't need to say anything when Jim's on. We'll just let him, ask him a question and turn him loose.
01:44:16: Yeah. But Jim, I appreciate you coming in. Like I said, it's the only way that we get
01:44:23: Peter to watch and comment. I said that before and he said something like, ouch, way to hurt a brother.
01:44:32: Actually, no, the way that I hurt Peter is by getting into ATV accidents and therefore not going out to do open air with him.
01:44:43: So, Caleb is saying, much needed topic. Thank you for talking about this.
01:44:48: Thank you, Jim. I do think this is really an important topic.
01:44:58: I did an interview today, Jim, with a podcast called Doxological or Doxologic and they had seen the conference, the cessationist conference we did up at your church and had asked me to come on and talk about miracles and one of the things is is that it was like, why is this such a hard topic?
01:45:22: Hearing the voice of God or the charismatic gifts, the view of cessationism, why is it so hard?
01:45:29: I think the reason this is so hard for people is because they take it so personal. If we're saying they are not hearing from God, I think what they hear is we're saying they're not saved.
01:45:43: Yeah. In many ways you've taken away what they view as their personal, direct line to God, and so when you take away that experience or you question that experience or cause them to question that experience, you're causing them to question something that's at the very heart of their
01:45:56: Christian life. And I want, and my goal is never just to make people feel bad or to question their salvation or anything.
01:46:03: What I want people to do is make sure that you have the right thing at the heart of your Christian life, and that is a trust in the sufficiency and authority of Scripture and not in private revelations or feelings or impressions or promptings.
01:46:15: I want people to have their faith grounded on the one thing that should be grounding their faith and that is the
01:46:21: Scriptures themselves. So I've had that experience where I've talked to people about this and they get upset, they get mad, they walk out, they storm out, they send me nasty grams because they feel like I've cut the bat phone to them.
01:46:35: They had a personal connection to God that now I've severed. Now I've caused them to doubt whether that ever existed.
01:46:40: And for many people it's an emotional thing. It's an emotional reaction, not an intellectual or biblical reaction.
01:46:47: Yeah. And that's the thing with some of this, like, look, if when we get asked, well, you know, you're saying this isn't from God, then who's it from?
01:46:58: And, you know, I, as Justin says, can't exegete your experience, but...
01:47:03: It could be your own, it could be your own thoughts. It could be your own, your own experiences. It could be you conjuring them up.
01:47:09: And look, there are people out there who have a random thought pops into their head. They assume that it's from God.
01:47:14: And then you ask them, well, if that wasn't God, then what was it? Well, it might just be a random thought that popped into your head.
01:47:20: I mean, you could consider that, right? You could consider the fact that it could be psychosomatic.
01:47:26: You could consider the fact that demons could be deceiving you. You could be just considering the fact that it's, what do they call that phenomenon where you assume something's the case, a confirmation bias.
01:47:37: So when you walk into a situation, you assume that God's going to speak to me through this, and then I feel this impression, or I feel this feeling, and I assume that that's from God, and then it works out well.
01:47:48: Well, see, that's confirmation bias. It was God speaking to me after all. And maybe none of it was from God at all.
01:47:54: Maybe it was just circumstances that you are attributing to be divine revelation when in fact it's not divine revelation.
01:48:01: And that's the whole thing that I guess I'm trying to raise with folks is the fact that just because we're saying that it's not
01:48:12: God doesn't mean it's demonic. That's right. It could be a number of causes of this phenomenon.
01:48:21: Yeah. And so, because that's the big thing that everyone will jump to. So it's like,
01:48:26: I just want to be clear, no, we're not saying it's demonic. So, it could be many things.
01:48:33: Like I said with the waitress, it could be that you subconsciously didn't even know that you heard the name.
01:48:41: Yeah. So, there's a lot of different ways to explain it, but you know,
01:48:47: I look forward to Curtis coming on. Jim, if you can come on, we can have a good dialogue about this, and I think it'll be helpful for folks.
01:48:54: Yeah, and if he's willing to do that, then maybe it would be beneficial for me to draft up a series of questions or something that I would challenge him with on this subject, that he could prepare and think through it.
01:49:07: That way he's not caught flat -footed, and he has an opportunity to really prepare some substantive answers. Maybe some of them he's not thought through.
01:49:14: Maybe some of them he has, but at least then it wouldn't feel like oh, I haven't had a chance to think through this, and it could be a more profitable, productive conversation.
01:49:22: And he could do the same thing, and then we would not be going into it blind, as it were. And I'm grateful, since we're passing on kudos,
01:49:28: I want to thank Curtis for coming on. I think he was gracious to come into the lion's den, as it were, and to even spend 45 minutes with us, or a half hour, as it was.
01:49:38: It takes a lot of courage, and I'm grateful that he did it in a gracious way. Yeah, and I'll publicly apologize, because what ended up happening was,
01:49:48: I had mentioned on Twitter that we were going to review it, but I don't know if I gave him the date.
01:49:53: I might have, but it would have been when we set it up. And just before we went live,
01:50:00: I went and grabbed his email from YouTube, and shot him a quick email. So that may be why he wasn't really prepared, and came in briefly, and didn't have the time.
01:50:09: So I'm glad that he came in, especially because he not only was able to clarify some things, but also be able to set up where we can have a longer discussion, which would be helpful,
01:50:17: I think, for a lot of folks. So I look forward to that. So next week, and Jim, you're more than welcome to come in on this, we have someone that wants to come in.
01:50:30: His name is James Park, and we got into a discussion on Facebook, and he wants to defend the ministry of Benny Hinn.
01:50:41: And so, I'm hoping that I reached out to both Justin Peters and Kosti Hinn, to see if they would be willing to come in.
01:50:49: Jim, you're more than welcome as well. Because, you know, I don't follow
01:50:55: Benny Hinn that much. I just know enough to know, yep, I'm not going to be following this.
01:51:00: Yeah, I don't follow him that much either. I mean, I know some of the, you know, I know the basic stuff about Benny Hinn, where he's at, what he's about.
01:51:07: But I don't, Justin watches him, I mean, he's a fanboy. If anybody's a fanboy,
01:51:14: Justin is, he watches all of his stuff. So, yeah. Or Kosti.
01:51:20: Either one of those guys would be perfect. Both of them can make it. Well, I mean, who better to answer questions about Benny Hinn than his nephew, right?
01:51:28: That's right. Who worked for the ministry, yeah. And so, after that,
01:51:36: I don't know, maybe on the 10th, if both Jim and Curtis are available, we could do a show then on...
01:51:48: August 10th? Yeah, if you're around. I'm going to be in Pennsylvania. You're going to be in Pennsylvania, that's right. So, okay.
01:51:53: So, if we do it, it'd probably be while I'm out at Jim's. So, maybe Jim and I could do it from the church there.
01:52:00: So, which would be good. Yeah, very possible. All right. Well, folks,
01:52:06: I hope this was helpful, educational. I hope that we got questions that you had answered, and if not, you're welcome to come in next
01:52:14: Thursday, ask any question you have about God in the Bible, and we will seek to answer it here.
01:52:20: And next week, if you want to talk about Benny Hinn, yep, we're going to talk about that. So, let others know.
01:52:27: It's always fun to... The neat thing is watching the chat, because the chat has their own...
01:52:33: Sometimes the chat has things that have nothing to do with the show. So, watching it live is...
01:52:38: I will look at the chat and go, huh? What's going on in chat? And then you gotta scroll all the way up to find what led to the conversation.
01:52:47: And then you've forgotten about the show. Yeah. There's a new feature of StreamYard.
01:52:52: I'm going to be able to download the chat at some point. So, I'm looking forward to that. Well, there was...
01:52:58: If you remember when I think it was Ben Zion was on, and you asked me a question about something you said,
01:53:05: I was in the chat, just reading the comments. I was so distracted. Yeah.
01:53:12: So, all right. Well, with that, folks, we hope you have a good night and just strive to make today an eternal day for the glory of God, and we'll see you next week.