The Here I Stand Theology Podcast / The False Teaching of Priscilla Shirer

It ruins you for church as usual.

Oh, hey.

It ruins you.

Yeah.

That regular, old, mundane, Christian, read a verse a day to keep the devil away, sit in church, go because my mama went, my grandmother went, this is what we do, all of that goes.

Away. Okay.

Because you're hungering for what you know you've experienced before, actually sensing the voice of God, His presence near you. Listen, sometimes hearing God is less about having a specific word and more about just the nearness of His presence.

False Teachers and the Need for Biblical Discernment

On this episode, we are going to be discussing the dangerous nature of the subtlety that many false teachers use. Today, we're going to be examining a recent interview with Priscilla Shower and her husband on the TBN network.

Will you recant or will you not?

Since your majesty and your lordships desire a simple reply, unless by scripture and by plain reason and not by popes and councils who have so often contradicted themselves.

Right.

If you would, today, we want to welcome you to the Here I Stand Theology Podcast, where we are a podcast devoted to a pointed and spirited debate of biblical doctrine with an emphasis on the biblical doctrine.

For we must keep guard on the words of the truth. We must hold fast to the integrity of the scriptures themselves. Let's just go ahead today and front load this episode with the scripture. For in 2 Timothy chapter 3, this is what the word of God says, 2 Timothy chapter 3.

But understand this, that in the last days, there will come times of difficulty. For people will be lovers of self, lovers of money, proud, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, heartless, unappeasable, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not loving good, treacherous, reckless, swollen with conceit, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, having the appearance of godliness but denying its power.

Avoid such people is what the scriptures teach us. For among them are those who creep into households and capture weak women, burdened with sins and led astray by various passions, always learning yet never able to arrive at the knowledge of the truth.

Just as Janus and John Brace opposed Moses, so these men also oppose the truth. They are men corrupted in mind and disqualified regarding the faith, but they will not get very far, for their folly will be plain to all, as was with those two men.

You however, Paul is speaking to Timothy, you however, have followed my teaching, my conduct, my aim in life, my faith, my patience, my love and steadfastness, my persecutions and sufferings that happened to me at Antioch, at Halconium, and at Lystra, which persecutions I endured, yet from them all the Lord rescued me.

Indeed, all who desire to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will suffer persecution, but as for you, continue in what you have learned and have firmly believed, knowing from whom you have learned it and how from childhood you have been acquainted with the sacred writings which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus.

All scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work. Paul goes on, I charge you in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who is to judge the living and the dead, and by his appearing and his kingdom, preach the word, be ready in season and out of season, reprove, rebuke and exhort with complete patience and teaching, for the time will come, the time is coming, when people will not endure sound teaching but have itching ears, they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander off into myths.

As for you, always be sober-minded, endure suffering, do the work of an evangelist, fulfill your ministry. All right, so there we have read the words of the Apostle Paul to young Pastor Timothy. And in this passage, what we're seeing, what we're looking at, what we've read there is the warning that goes out for Timothy to be on guard against false teaching.

Now there are very overt false teachers in the world today. There are some very subtle false teachers in the world today. Now I'm giving the benefit of the doubt here to Priscilla Shirer. I'm going to call her a subtle false teacher.

I cannot say that it is with malicious intent that she's teaching what she's teaching. For what she's teaching and what we're going to observe today in our time together is that what she says half the time does not jive with what she says the other half of the time.

What she says in half a breath, she reverses and changes in the second half of that very same breath. And this is what makes false teaching, this subtlety of false teaching, so very dangerous today. So let's jump right in on this and look at that.

Let's see what she's going to say here next. You've heard it. We're not talking. We're not. Because my mama did it. My grandmama did it. I'm not trying to do that because it's the Bible. But listen to what, listen to what they say, the folks at TBN and her in the beginning of this discussion.

The voice of God. Today we're going to unpack that. So why is this subject matter something that is really important?

It is important because this facet of our faith is what separates our faith from every other so-called faith on the face of the earth. That our God lives.

Amen. I don't believe there's any Christian that would deny that is the truth that she says there. Our God lives for we're taught in the scriptures that Christ died for our sins. He was buried and that he rose again on the third day that he lives.

He's alive and he speaks to us. We have an actual relationship with him. And that that's so casually thrown around this whole relationship thing. But what good is any relationship if nobody's talking to each other, if there's no communication, if there's not a connectedness that is ongoing and continual.

So this issue of discerning the voice of God, first of all, believing that he does speak. But second of all, trusting in the fact that as his kids, we have the privilege to actually discern and have a distinction of his voice between all the other voices that also want to get a word in edgewise.

That's something that really can change and transform the trajectory of your entire Christian experience.

So did you notice that, that we have the privilege to discern what is the voice of God and what is not the voice of God? Now the great challenge herein lies for us as God's people. As God's people, we have a unwavering objective standard as to the truth and the veracity of what is and what is not God's word.

Now we could, you can be in a crowded room and you can have the examples given. You can be in a crowded room as a child and you can have a hundred voices in that room. And some people will say, well, when your mom or your daddy hollers your name out, then you stop what you're doing.

You recognize it doesn't matter who's hollering at you before that. In a very real way, that is true, right? In reality. But the fact of the matter is that as Christians, we do not have an external voice that is God audibly speaking to us.

We've heard it before, right? Justin Peter said it. If you want to hear God speak, read the Bible. If you want to hear God speak audibly, read your Bible out loud. For it is in the Bible, 2 Timothy 3, 16, the word of God is inspired.

It's God breathed. It is God's word. The Bible tells us in another place, holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost. We have the divinely inspired, inerrant, infallible, sufficient word of God and the dangerous idea of what's being communicated here in this, in this, in these, in these clips is the dangerous and subtlety of this, of this false teaching.

So grabs the heart and the mind of so many Christians, because they true, they truly do want more, like Priscilla Shower says, they want more. They want to have a real tangible experience with God. But my friends, I can assure you most certainly that when you are born again by the Holy Ghost of God, you are made a new creature.

You are translated out of darkness into the marvelous and glorious light of the gospel of Jesus Christ. You are a new creature. You certainly have the Holy Spirit that indwells in you and the Holy Spirit at times, and she'll say this in a little while, illuminates the word of God to us.

But then she says, but, and then he speaks in other ways. So this is going to be our challenge as we go throughout this time.

We're going to discern the voice of God. Let me ask you a question. In the Priscilla Jerry world, does God speak audibly? Does he only speak through his word? What are the different ways that you certainly know of that God speaks to you?

I've never heard the audible voice of God, babe.

Have you?

Did I miss something?

I have not.

She puts her husband on the spot there, but no, not yet.

But I think there is something internal in you that you feel the presence of God and it lines up with scripture, which confirms, okay, this is what I'm hearing.

That's right. So the Holy Spirit of God illumines scripture.

The book.

Truth, right there. Truth. The Holy Spirit of God illumines the scripture. Amen.

Is alive. And he causes the old presets of scripture to have a nowness and a newness that applies and intersects with our personal experience. So as Jerry mentioned, the Holy Spirit in us confirms and corroborates and connects with the word of God and causes it to intersect with our experience.

And so that, that verse that has something to do with David and Goliath, all of a sudden, it's not about David and Goliath. It actually applies to what you're facing right now.

Flag on the play. No, you are not David. I wish I had the clip of Matt Chandler saying you're not David. No, the scripture does not apply in that way. The old Testament scriptures point us to Christ and to Christ alone.

We are not to look for ourselves in this. We're not trying to find principles on how to be a better businessman or a businesswoman. We're not trying to see principles on how to be a better boss. We're not trying to find principles on how that we can attain the financial blessings of God.

We are sought. We are seeking in the scriptures, Jesus Christ himself and no other. We're not looking for anything else inside the scriptures themselves.

And in your life, and you understand it as a directive straight, straight from God. And then there's the conviction.

All right, right there. So a directive straight from God, when we are interpreting the circumstances of our lives always as a directive from God, we're going to find ourselves in a mess.

You know, the conviction of the Holy Spirit, that, that green light of ease and peace that says go, that, that yellow light of warning and an easiness that says, hold up a minute till you get clarity.

And then that red light that is a straight up, no, there's no peace. There's confusion. There's dissension. That's the Holy Spirit's way of telling you, no, don't go there. There's a better.

Yes.

For you, if you'll just wait and be patient.

What is a better, yes, I agree. God has gifted us as human beings with common sense. God has given to us ability to discern circumstances. As a matter of fact, even in speaking about the coming judgment on Jerusalem, Jesus, Jesus rebuked the Pharisees.

He said, look, you can, you can tell that a storm's coming right now. I can look out the window here and I can see the storm looming over the mountain and I can see it coming toward us. Therefore, I can say, I can discern, well, there's a storm coming.

I probably need to have my umbrella, right? But that doesn't mean that there's a financial storm coming. It doesn't mean that there's an emotional storm coming. It doesn't mean that there's going to be a storm of this or a storm of that at looming on the, on the horizon.

Obviously, that's the truth. As Christians, as human beings, we're either coming out of a storm, right? Or we're in a storm or about to go into a storm. Our lives are turmoil. That is the natural, natural course for us as fallen human beings.

Have you ever heard the still, small voice of the Lord in a phrase, in an impression? Describe some of what is in discerning the voice of God, how the Lord speaks or how this conversation unfolds with you.

Yes. Well, most of the time.

Scripture as the Standard for Hearing God

Now here again, half a breath, truth, the other half error. My friend, if you've got a mixture of truth and error, you've got purity and poison. Notice what she says here.

Most of the time, God speaks to me through his word. It is exactly what I described. It is reading through a portion of scripture. And on that day, it's like the Holy Spirit has taken out a highlighter and has highlighted this verse you have seen a million times before, but on that day it leaps up off the page and it grips you.

That's the only way I can really describe it is that it grips you in the depths of your soul and causes you to pause for a moment because it seems to be literally speaking to something that's happening in your life.

Most of the time, that is the voice of God. We have discounted, I think, the power of scripture because if we say we want to hear from God and we never actually read the love letter that he wrote to us, we don't want to really hear from God.

And we rarely will because the canon of scripture, it not only provides the boundary into which everything God says to us will fall because he'll never say anything that manipulates the scriptures or his character as revealed in the scriptures.

So it not only gives us the boundary, but it also provides for us the number one mechanism through which we have the privilege to hear him in the first place.

Beautiful.

Okay, so start us out on, because I know so many people wonder, oh, how can I hear God's voice for ourself?

Or trust it.

Or trust it. How can I trust God's voice when I do hear it? Is that really him? Is it me?

Well, let me just start by putting a little grace over this entire situation. The reality is that sometimes you do not know until hindsight that what you heard was the.

Voice of God. There you go.

And the reality is that there is grace and mercy to cover our missteps.

So again, let's bring to the forefront here, the scriptures, as we have them in the canon of scripture, the scriptures, the 66 books of the Old and the New Testament, as we have set forth in our confessions of faith in the 1689 confession, as we have set forth in the Westminster Confession, we have the standard of scripture.

And we can be certain of the standard of scripture. Now, what Ms. Shirer is saying here is partially true. It is still very much partially false. It is very much weighted toward falsehood. And this is the danger, because she is making our ideas and our thoughts equal with the thoughts of God.

Now, we can know, according to the scriptures, that that is a false weight and a false balance. We know this because what did the prophet Isaiah say, speaking on the Lord's behalf? My ways are higher than your ways and my thoughts are higher than your thoughts, says the Lord.

Right. So we can never equate. We should never equate our thoughts, our ideas, no matter how lofty or good they may be, truly be, or even seem to be. We can never equate those to the word of God. This is a constant discipline that we must have as Christian men and women.

That being said, let's take just a moment here and promote the folks over at 1689 Designs. We want to encourage you to go to their website, 1689designs .com, and buy you a bunch of good Christian gear.

All right. All right. And so we are back. So let's jump right back into this now. Let's take a look here and see what she continues to say.

And that the Lord, in his graciousness toward us, his knowledge of our frailty and our humanity, for the willing heart who desires to do his will, even when we make mistakes, he allows them to become our greatest teachers for hearing him correctly in the future.

He does not hold it against us because we've misstepped along the way. So just grace for those of us who have ever heard God wrong.

If you have ever heard God wrong. Again, the basic premise must be the scripture is the standard for God's voice, for God's speech, for God's ideas, for God's thoughts.

And I wish we could get it, get it right. One of the people I sort of interviewed when I was first writing that book many, you know, over a decade ago now, I interviewed Henry Blackaby, who wrote Experiencing God.

And I, you know, had my notebook out, my pen. I was going to take a seminary class from Henry Blackaby, you know, and I said, how do you know when you're hearing God? And he gave me lots of incredible answers to that question.

But really, he summed it up this way. He said, the more you know God, the more clearly you can hear God.

So how are you going to know God better?

By reading his word, there was really nothing for me to write down because it boiled down.

To Priscilla, it's simple, he said, the more you know him, the more clearly you can hear him. So the reason why we go to the scriptures, the reason why we have quiet time, the reason why we fellowship with other believers, we're going to help us remain encouraged in our faith is because we're just trying to get to know God.

When you know his character, when you know the nuances of what he does say and what he wouldn't say because of how he spoke to our forefathers, because of how he handled circumstances previous.

So just so just to make sure that you're getting that, she is actually pointing people right here to the idea, to the fact that if they are to know God's character, if they are to know how God thinks, how God has responded with our forefathers.

Then they must go to the scriptures. And yet in the same breath,.

Honestly, with people in the scriptures who were going through some of the same scenarios we're going through now, when you see his personality and his character, then you know when you hear the voice of fear, that don't sound like my God.

When you hear the voice of your ego, pride, jealousy, divisiveness, stepping in all of that stuff that in our flesh is also trying to get a word in edgewise. We can quickly, quickly pinpoint the voice of a stranger, because if we know God, the more clearly we can discern and divide his voice from a stranger.

Providence, Blessing, and Inner Impressions

OK, now you talked about seeking God's provision and his blessings on our life and then knowing who what his character is. Talk about that, because I found that fascinating.

Yes. So God's blessing and I believe his provisions are corroboration of his word to us. So in other words.

So here's the challenge. Let's let's let's hear what she said there again, just so we don't take this out of.

Context. And I believe his provisions are corroboration of his word to us.

So God's provision is a corroboration of his word to us. All right. So there they are talking about monetary blessing, financial blessing here. So and they are equating the blessing of of corroborating God's word with financial.

Blessing. In other words, while in the Old Testament, there were external means as a primary way for folks to hear God in the New. Truth Testament, and now in this time frame as well, we have something they didn't have, we have the Holy Spirit.

So the primary way he is.

So let's pause right here just for a. Hmm. Let's think about that. Something for you all to think about as you're watching the episode. After you're finished watching the episode, ask yourself, but didn't they have the Holy Spirit in the Old Testament?

Consider that question. And then I would point you to the scriptures themselves. Let's take a look here for just a moment. Just as a quick side note. I think it may be first Peter.

After one, let's see, maybe it's second Peter.

Ah, yes. Let's notice here in second Peter chapter one, verse 16. Let's bring that up on the screen here. Let's second Peter chapter one, verse 16, for we did not follow cleverly devised myths when we made known to you, Paul or Peter speaking to those to the dispersion scattered abroad.

We did not follow cleverly devised myths when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. But we were eyewitnesses of his majesty for when he received glory from God the father and the voice was born to him by the majestic glory saying, this is my beloved son with whom I am well pleased.

We ourselves also heard this very voice born from heaven, for we were with him on the holy mountain. So let's let's understand here the apostle Peter, Peter, James and John were with Jesus on the Mount of Transfiguration.

They heard the voice of God. And now we hear how Peter is pointing to those who are scattered abroad after the persecution, after the crucifixion, the death, the burial and the resurrection, those that have been scattered throughout the earth for the name of Jesus.

He said this. And we have the prophetic word more fully confirmed to you, which do well to pay attention as to a lamp shining in a dark place until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts.

Knowing this, first of all, that no prophecy of scripture comes from someone's own interpretation, for no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man. But men spake from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.

Again, let's go to Hebrews chapter one. The writer of Hebrews. I'm going to stand out and say it. I go with Paul being the author of the Sermon of Hebrews here. But this is what the scripture says. Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers, how?

By the prophets. But in these last days, he has spoken to us by his son, whom he appointed the heir of all things, through whom also he created the world. And so with that being said, it's very important.

For us, right, to understand. That God has not changed his method nor his mode of communication to his people, holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Spirit of God in the Old Testament, so believers certainly did have the Holy Spirit.

In the New Testament, you're going to hear her making this distinction, making this difference here so that for us in modern times, we can say, oh, well, we can hear God in different ways. We can talk, we can communicate with God differently than Christians of the past have, but we cannot.

God's mode of communication is still the same. It is through his holy word.

But his goal hasn't his goal is still for his kids to hear his voice. So he's chosen the Holy Spirit of God to be the the way that we hear and know what it is that his will is for our life. But he still uses external means his provision, his blessings, his aligning of providence.

Some people would call it luck or coincidence. No, it's the aligning of God's handiwork in our life to confirm that what we're sensing on the inside is in.

Isn't that isn't this putting our thoughts on the same level as God's word, that is the subtle dangerousness of this type of false teaching.

How he's aligning the direction for our life to just it does change you. You know what it does? You know what it does? Yeah. It ruins you for church as usual. Oh, it ruins you. Yeah. That regular old mundane Christian rediverse a day to keep the devil away sit in church, go because my mama went, my grandmother went, this is what we do.

All of that goes away because you're hungering for what, you know, you've experienced before actually sensing the voice of God, his presence near you. Listen, sometimes hearing God is less about having a specific word and more about just a nearness of his presence.

That's about having a specific word and just having the nearness of his presence again. I will never be one to discount the emotional aspect of being born again, of being saved, to say that you can't feel, you can't know that you're saved.

You can certainly emotionally and passionately recognize the fact that you have been born again, that you have been passed from death unto life. But our emotional experience isn't the standard. The standard is the word of God.

That being said, let's take another quick break here to hear from Logos Bible.

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So let's continue here now that we've got the mood lightened just a bit.

Just knowing that he's near. I'm talking about. I got you.

Yeah. Does somebody your size ever feel goosebumps that ever happened to you ever?

I'm telling you what, Matt Crouch here. I wanted to include this because he makes a couple of comments in this interview that are just super awkward.

You know, you know, I'm going to have goosebumps right now.

Oh, hey, hey, hey, hey.

Yeah. How much time we have left in the show? They're needing to get out. OK. And by the way, we're going to unpack this. So get right back into the subject matter. It's important subject matter. Even the idea of the way the publisher and all that kind of stuff.

This is a this is on the heart of God right now. This is the people being this.

All right. This is on the heart of God right now. So you need to pay attention. This is what they're saying. This is the heart of God right now.

Satisfied with the mundane. Yeah, we are wanting to hear God's voice, wanting to know. You know, I don't I mean, you know, not what to to eat today. Yeah, necessarily. But needing to know to help their kids.

Yeah. To their jobs there, you know, in every area of your life, I believe God is speaking or wants to speak or wants to have a say.

Yes. And I want to say, too, that just that sense of dissatisfaction that someone may be feeling that we all feel when we're going to be launched into the next level in our.

Relationship. Have you been launched into the next level of your relationship with God yet? And what does that level look like and who determines those levels? And how do you know when you level up?

With God, sometimes that dissatisfaction makes us so upset and so frustrated because we just want to know the answer, we want to get to the answer, but the dissatisfaction itself is a sign of God's spirit working with you.

And the dissatisfaction, the journey that it is going to lead you on, the lessons that are meant to be learned, they're going to be learned because the dissatisfaction sent you on a journey.

So this, I think, is another one of the very dangerous and subtle ideologies that is communicated here, that when you get spiritually stagnant, that God will make you that the Holy Spirit will make you dissatisfied to know that you need more.

Again, we keep returning to the premise, more what? What more can we have than we have in the scriptures and the fact that the Holy Spirit himself, the third person of the Godhead Trinity, affirms, illumines and enlightens our hearts and our minds daily, renewing us not in our outward man, but in our inward man through the scriptures themselves.

We are, Jesus himself taught, blessed are they who hunger and thirst after righteousness. Well, what does he say? They shall be filled. That means we are satisfied as Christians. As a genuine born again spirit of God, not having said under the false teaching like you're hearing here, you can be satisfied with the word of God for it is our bread.

It is our water. It is our life.

The journey itself is not a waste of time. Discerning the voice of God is never something you're going to arrive at. It is never something you're going to be successful at. It is going to be a journey with God as you walk in the rhythms of grace.

You will be on your deathbed still wanting to know whether or not you have clearly heard the voice of God because we are human.

Doesn't that seem like uncertainty? Again, God has given us certainty in his word.

He's mysterious. He is God. And aren't we glad that he's not just a big version of us? And so I gleaned so much of what the word of God was, who it described God to be, what he did in the Old Testament and the New Testament.

I knew all that, but felt dissatisfied because if he did that for them, then why am I not experiencing that for me?

Do you see if God did all that for them, why did God do what he did when we read in the Old Testament, when we read about the creation of the heaven and the earth, when we read about God making man in his image after his likeness, when we read about God taking rib from Adam's side and making a woman, when we read about Moses, when we read about Noah, when we read about Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, when we read about David, when we read about Samuel, when we read all through the Old Testament and the New Testament.

What and why did God do what he did? It wasn't giving us a prescriptive pattern for our lives. It was the descriptive history of him working in time and space to bring about redemption in the person of his son, Jesus Christ.

And so my problem and my issue with this is that when someone says what she said, why am I not experiencing those things? Why have I never walked through the Red Sea? Why have I never picked up a stone and slung it at a giant?

So on and so forth as the Scriptures is hijacked and butchered. The idea is put in people's minds that they should be experiencing the same things that they experience in the Old Testament and in the New Testament again, for that matter, when it's not about us, it's about Jesus Christ.

There was an unrest in my heart. I wanted more. I wanted to see and experience this God of the Bible. And it is that dissatisfaction that sent me on just a personal journey that connected me with people who were in different streams of the faith.

And instead of closing them out, I invited in what it is that God was teaching them and the ways that he had demonstrated himself to them. And by just listening and gleaning and inviting from the breadth of the body of Christ, I began to realize that there is so much more than our little box of our little stream presents to us, that there is more that can be that doesn't take away or water down what we have.

But on the firm foundation of where God has already laid in our life, there are deeper depths and there are higher heights. And so I just started walking the journey. And I'm so grateful to the Lord because again, Lord, I need to retrain my spiritual ears.

I'm praying and saying, Lord, would you heighten my spiritual senses? You know, just like we have five physical senses. We've got spiritual sense.

Again, our spiritual senses will be heightened to the degree in which we are in the word of God. If you want your spiritual senses to be heightened, don't expect to have your spiritual senses honed by going around the corner and looking for this or that or thinking that because you think something that is that it is God's idea in God's thoughts.

But go to the word of God.

If you want your spiritual senses, Lord, I need my radar to be up so that I need my.

Radar. To be up again, get in the word, your presence and hear your voice.

And I'm going to need you to make my detectors sensitive again, Lord.

And the Lord's greatest gift ever.

It's a greatest gift. It means there's a new level. He wants to take you to a new level. I've been trying to keep myself from getting frustrated by those moments. Right. And just go with God.

Just go with God. Just roll with it. That's the that's the predominant message preached by most false teachers. Just go with it. Don't be connected to the word of God and trust the word of God is the only and soul sufficient rule of faith and practice for yourself as a Christian.

Just roll with it. Just go with God.

You know, Lord, I pray that your word would be alive. I pray that the assignment of the enemy against them, against their children, against their spouses, Lord, that those assignments would be canceled and that they would see those assignments replaced by your grace, your love and your mercy washing over them and their experience.