God Doesn't Whisper with Jim Osman

Welcome to The Wrap Report with your host, Andrew Rapoport, where we provide Biblical interpretation and application. This is a ministry of Striving for Eternity and the Christian Podcast Community. For more content, or to request a speaker for your church, go to strivingforeternity .org.

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

How are you doing today?

I'm doing great, Andrew. Thank you for having me back.

Yeah, well, you know, this is a little different, Bud, because this is where, you know, we're taking a guest co-host of the show and making him just a guest. So I don't know how this, he may try to take over the show, but, you know, it was necessary to have you on this episode because, you know, we have our guest and, well, you know, I've vowed after the last time I interviewed him that I was never going to admit that I've ever read any of his books, but you have read his books, so it's good.

You could be here to be informed and be able to ask intelligent questions about his book and I'll just, I'll pretend like I haven't read it because, you know, I don't want to give him that satisfaction.

So, Jim Osmond, how are you, sir? It's good to see you again. Yeah.

Liar, liar, pants on fire. Oh, sorry. Words I never thought I'd ever hear come out of my mouth.

So for folks who weren't around for the last time that you've written in several books, I had you on a while ago to talk about your three previous books, in which case you were busting on me because I was, I think it was with the Stairway to Heaven one where I was pretending, I forget what I said, but you were like, you really didn't read it.

I was pretending like I hadn't, threw you off well, but, you know, and so here was the thing, I will, but I don't know if I told you this part, but I was really hurt because he said that he was going to make me read this book and so he was going to have me, you know, write something about the book to be included in the book and he never invited me to do that.

He replaced me with some other guy that wrote the forward. Like an endorsement, you mean? Yeah, but to be replaced by the other guy, who do you replace me with? Oh, wow, I don't know. John MacArthur, who's that guy?

Oh, yeah, it's right there on the cover of the book.

Yeah, like, like really, you replaced me with John MacArthur of all people? I was gonna read it, maybe, I just wasn't going to admit to it.

Yeah, well, R .C. Sproul is dead and G .I. Packer died and so all of the greats are dying away. So I thought, well, I'll see if John would write it. He was gracious enough to do that.

Actually, that part I did read. I did read what John wrote and it was very kind.

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

So basically what you're saying is what he did in about four pages, you did in two, three hundred? No, no, no.

Why use a sentence when a paragraph will do, that's my, that's my problem.

Well, I guess, I guess, why use a sentence when a chapter will do? Yeah, that's right. Well, so, so, and I should say, so for folks to get any of your books or information about your books, they can go to jimosman .com and I'm glad to see that your, your webmaster has corrected that page because there was a glitch there early on on your, your, your website.

Yes.

It had a, it had a quasi endorsement from Andrew Rappaport as a placeholder for those of you who may not know. And it said, the quote from Andrew said something like, even though I haven't read any of Jim's books, I hear that they're really good and I should probably endorse them.

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

Can you feel the love? Yeah, well, but he said that he was going to do that as a, you know, and just show it to Jim and not actually put it, put it up, but he put the real endorsement and Jim loved it so much that he just left it up until I wrote one.

I will say that my, I do on your website, I have a longer endorsement than either Justin Peters or John MacArthur, just for the record. So let's, so let's get into this because this book is something different.

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

And I guess we should mention just briefly, excuse me, for your other books, and I forget which order they were written in because I, you know, I'm not sure, but you have truth and territory. Yeah, truth or territory.

Truth or territory. The Prosperity of the Wicked, which is from Psalm, I think it was 73? Correct. Yeah. Okay. And then The Selling of the Stairway to Heaven, which was, isn't that an Eagles song or something?

It was close. Yeah. There's a lot of 80s nostalgia that comes up before my book when you do an Amazon search.

So, so, and we've done a previous episode on those, I'll link that in the show notes, but this book is, and I, I actually would, I should check because I was thinking about this earlier today to see if your books have been getting thicker and thicker as they've been coming out because a couple of them are thinner and then this one is a doozy.

It's like 300 pages.

Yeah. And the truth or territory start off at 220 pages or something like that. And that was the first one. And then I wrote two shorter ones. The one on 73, Psalm 73 is, is kind of unique. It's just an exposition of that psalm with answering the question, what happens to the, why does God sometimes allow the wicked to prosper?

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

It is the longest one so far. Yeah. I mean, let me actually ask you a question about the prosperity of the wicked. How many, roughly how many pages was that one? Like a hundred, like a hundred, hundred fifty, I think, right?

Sound like that? Yeah. About that. And that was a sermon. So, I mean, did you allow people to get a dinner break when you were preaching through that?

What, what I did is I wanted to preach through Psalm 73 nicely divides into two portions, the sort of the beginning where he's wrestling with the prosperity of the wicked and then the second half, which is the answer to the dilemma.

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

And I wanted to do justice to it. So I, that's when I eventually decided I'm just going to write a book and take my sermons and expand them. I didn't, I didn't, it's not word for word, it was, I rewrote all of the material using my sermon and the outline kind of as the gist of the book.

And then I included all the stuff that I had had to cut in order to make it a sermon length.

Oh, so, so it wasn't that people were sitting there from, you know, morning till the following Sunday. Okay. Just checking. I mean, I, I know you could go long. I just, I wasn't sure how long.

So I think, I'm trying to remember how many chapters there are in that book, but I probably eight chapters. You could, you could do eight sermons on that psalm and deal with that subject. It's just such a fascinating psalm.

You know, maybe I'll do that. Maybe I'll just take that book and just preach it. Yeah. All right. So let's, let's get into your latest book. God Doesn't Whisper, which, which you wanted to, by the way, you wanted to get the domain for that.

And yet someone has that domain who wouldn't believe in the book.

That's right. Somebody who believes that God is speaking to her.

I would suggest that everyone should go out to God, God Doesn't Whisper and, and comment and ask Linda who owns that domain, if where to get a copy of God Doesn't Whisper by Jim Osmond and maybe she'll get a copy and, and then realize that, yeah, what do you mean by the title?

God Doesn't Whisper?

The Thesis of God Doesn't Whisper

In that book, I'm taking on the very common Christian belief that God speaks to us in nudgings and promptings, still small voices, Gideon style fleeces, a peace in the heart, dreams, visions, promptings and nudgings in the heart, just the sense signs, open doors, things like that.

My contention is that God speaks to us in his word and in his word alone, that everything that he's given to us in his word is sufficient for all of life and godliness and that we need nothing else. So I'm, I'm taking issue with the, with the teaching that says Christians should learn to hear the voice of God, that we can learn to hear the voice of God and that we should expect to hear the voice of God outside of scripture.

And, and, and I'm saying that he's not whispering to us when God wants to speak, he has no problem being heard. He, if he's not speaking to us, then there's nothing we can do to hear him. If he's not speaking, there's no discipline we can learn to, to manage to hear if he's not speaking.

And if he is speaking, we're not going to miss it because God ensures that people to whom he is speaking, hear what he is saying loud and clear, which he has done all the way through scripture. And of course, I don't believe that he is speaking to us today because we have everything that we need in scripture.

That's a difference for you. If I, if I remember correctly from your youth, when you were in Bible college, you were looking for nudgings and feelings and a word from the Lord in making some major decision in your life.

A Bible College Crisis Over Hearing God's Voice

Yeah. In fact, chapter one starts off with a crisis that I went through in my first year of Bible college. I went to Bible college and up in Saskatchewan in Canada, Pambron, Saskatchewan, Miller College of the Bible.

And at the end of my first year, I was so hungry for truth and so desirous to know more and study theology that I wanted to stay at Bible college, but I thought I needed some clear direction from God to make that decision.

So all of my classmates kept talking as if God was speaking to them and giving them clear direction. And they'd say, the Lord, you know, the Lord spoke to my heart and told me, or the Lord clearly revealed, or the Lord gave me a sign, or I just, I heard the still small voice telling me I needed to come back for Bible college.

And I wanted to hear this and I wasn't hearing it. And I thought maybe it was because I didn't grow up in a church going family, or maybe I was because I was a new believer, I was immature. Maybe I wasn't spiritual enough to hear the voice of God, but my hope and desire was that someday I too would be able to pick up on these slight communications, these whispers and nudgings that God was apparently given to all those people.

Someday I would learn that discipline or gain that ability. And so I really wrestled through that decision and I was begging God to speak to me, give me a sign, give me anything. And I started to ask him for a sign, just like, give me the next year's tuition fully paid.

And if you do that, then I'll know it's your will for me to come back as somebody steps up and offers to pay the next year's tuition. And then I, nothing, after hearing nothing from the Lord, I kind of doubled back and thought, well, maybe, maybe half a year's tuition, maybe just one semester.

So I prayed for that as a sign and, and then I brought it down to just, just my books. If the Lord, if you just find somebody to pay for my books, then I'll take that as a sign. And of course that didn't happen.

And I kind of felt like Abraham negotiating for a city for 10, 12 righteous men, trying to make a deal with God. I just wanted to hear him give me some clear instruction, some clear direction. And that crisis really made me doubt whether or not this is how God speaks to us or whether I need, even need to hear those type of whispers and impressions in order to make God-honoring decisions.

Didn't you know that you were supposed to wet like a mat and put it outside and, you know, fleece and leave it outside?

That's chapter 11, Andrew, you already know that.

I had fleeces like that. And that was one of them. You know, if you will, if you'll pay the tuition, if you find somebody to pay my books and I'll take that as a sign. That'll be a fleece. If you want me to do this, cause this to happen.

If you don't want me to do this, cause X to happen. And I just couldn't imagine that God didn't want me to come back to Bible college because that's what I wanted to do. I just had given up all my hopes of doing whatever it was that I was, had planned to do after high school, which I wanted to become a CPA, go to a secular university.

So I eventually abandoned that and just wanted to, I wanted to study doctrine and theology and scripture and get grounded in that and go a full three years or maybe four at Bible college. And I couldn't imagine that God didn't want me to do that.

I wanted to do it so bad, but I felt I needed a sign. I needed him to speak to me.

I think that's interesting. Let me interject cause I hadn't really thought about this, but you mentioned it in the book. You give a good detail of that. And it made you question the level of your spirituality.

Are you mature enough? Are you faithful enough spiritually, but did it ever cause you to question your salvation? Was that ever an issue that came up for you because you weren't getting the answers audibly or by sign or whatever?

Yeah, it kind of was, but it was coupled with something else that I really wrestled with in my first year of Bible college. And that was whether or not I had a spiritual gift. I could not see that I had any kind of spiritual gift.

And I met again, other students at college who would say that they knew what their spiritual gift was. And I heard teachers talking about every Christian has a spiritual gift. And I had expected that this would become clear to me that I would know exactly what my spiritual gift is.

And I didn't know what it was. And I had no way of, I hadn't discovered what it was and I didn't even know really how to figure that out unless God showed me what it was, revealed to me what it was. And so the fact that I wasn't hearing the voice of God in the still small voice and the whisper coupled with the fact that I didn't know what my spiritual gift was and I felt like I should made me question at times whether or not I was truly saved, whether or not I was even a, maybe I was just a lower class Christian and I wasn't one of the top tier Christians.

And I did struggle with that.

Why Conservative Christians Still Promote Hearing God's Voice

Yeah. Because one of the issues that always comes up is maybe I'm not sincere enough. And that's a natural response that a lot of folks would have. So interesting.

And some of those hearing the voice of God teachers like Charles Stanley and Priscilla Schreier would say that if you long to hear the voice of God, if you really, really want to, that's one of the things that we have to want to hear God's voice and he'll speak to us because he really wants to speak to us and he really wants to make it clear.

So he just wants us to want to him, to hear him speak. And if we do that, then we'll hear the whispers of God, just like they did in Bible times.

That was actually a very interesting thing with the book is, you know, I expected to see a lot of Benny Hinn or, you know, his ilk that speak this way off in there. They're always having, I know you've, you've dealt with this in other works, but where they're always, you know, getting a vision, they're getting, you know, they're, they're, they're always talking about going up to heaven and all these dreams and stuff.

But what surprised me is how much you were quoting more solid, what we would consider solid conservative Christians, like, as you just mentioned, Charles Stanley. I mean, most people wouldn't think of Charles Stanley being in this same camp where you'd commonly hear a Benny Hinn.

Yeah, that's right. And I really was targeting in my dealing with the teachers. I was kind of targeting or leaning a little more towards what people who are teachers who would call themselves cessationists and say that the, these revelatory gifts are no longer being given today.

There's a lot of people in that camp who, who would, who believe in this hearing the voice of God methodology for making decisions. And I was really leaning towards people who would be in broad, more broadly speaking, our theological circles and not necessarily going after the, the charismatics and the NAR because my target audience was the little old lady sitting in the Baptist pew who thinks that God's whispering in her ear where to go to lunch after church or the, the little, the house, the, the, the stay at home mom, who's waiting for the Lord to reveal through a sign, which neighbor she needs to evangelize next.

And those are the people that I was going after who would probably look at the NAR and the word of faith guys or the extreme charismatics and say, no, no, I disagree with all of that. I don't want anything to do with all that crazy nonsense that goes on over there.

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

They just haven't sort of customized Henry Blackaby style into how to do it in a way that's still quote unquote cessationist. And so that's really the people that I was trying to target. I could have quoted a lot of Jack Deere and Benny Hinn and Kenneth Copeland.

That's easy picking. And I could have gone after that, but, but I didn't want to have half of my audience say, yeah, I agree with Jim. Those people are horrible. I wanted them to look at what they, they themselves do and evaluate whether or not they are relying upon the sufficiency of scripture.

You know, you, you explain a story with Charles Stanley with his Thanksgiving turkey on praying and hearing the Lord tell him exactly where to get a turkey. And people will say, well, what do you do with that?

Right? It seems like this, he says he heard from the Lord and look, it happened. And so here, let me caveat it with this. So the question comes up, what do you do with this when people have these, these experiences?

And I know we can't exegete experiences, so that's not the answer. But when we, when we look at this, here's my thing that puzzles me is you have professing believers who say, here's my experience and look, it happened just as I feel the Lord told me, but yet I will hear Mormons and Catholics and plenty of others, you know, that will say the same exact thing that they, they knew they were supposed to be somewhere because the Lord told them and, and the fact that the Lord told them and it happened is proof that they're following the right God.

What does that do to a Charles Stanley when he tells you that he heard the voice of the Lord that told him where to buy a Thanksgiving turkey?

Well, I, I don't doubt for one moment that people have experiences. When you start off with people being trained to think and speak as if every thought that pops into their head is divine revelation, every, every impression or nudging or prompting or intuition that they might have is, is the voice of God, the authoritative voice of God in their lives.

Um, when people believe that, then of course they're going to have thoughts and they're going to have intuitions and they're going to, they're going to feel strongly that they should do something or that something is about to happen.

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

I have no doubt that people have those experiences, but I go back to the very beginning of that little scenario that I just laid out. Why should I believe that every nudging or prompting every thought that comes into my head is a divine missive?

Why should I believe that? Why should I believe that my thoughts are not just thoughts? My wife has fantastic intuition. She can look at a situation or something will happen and she just, she gets an unsettled feeling about it.

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

And the way that I know that these intuitions and these thoughts and ideas are not the voice of God, even when they work out well, is that even unbelievers have this happen to them. Even unbelievers will say, it can walk up to me and say, you know, I don't know why, but I just got this feeling that I should go back in to the house before I left to go to the airport.

And they go back in and find out that they left the iron on. What do you attribute that to? Is that the voice of God? Well, you know, we're told by the people in hearing the voice of God theology circles that as Christians, we need to tune in to God's frequency and we need to want to hear from God and try to hear from God and learn this discipline of hearing from God.

And eventually we will. Well, if unbelievers can pick up these cues and these clues and have no problem hearing the same voices that we as Christians have, why should I believe that their thoughts are not the voice of God, but my thoughts are?

When the thoughts are the same kind, the same nature.

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

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

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

I want to go through those right after this break. Unbelievers now have no excuse to misinterpret the Bible like they ever did. Interpreting the Bible has never been easier or less expensive. Get your copy of what does it mean to me?

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All right, and we are a proud member of the Christian Podcast Community. It is a ministry of striving for eternity. So 37 podcasts, I think right now we're about to get to about 40. So with that, and by the way, Jim, you're one of them.

Your sermons every week, your Sunday sermons end up as the Kootenai Community Church Podcast. So you're also a member. Let's go over these three faulty assumptions, because I think this really does, and this is what I liked about the book that I didn't read.

It lays out a foundation really for the rest of the book, because a lot of it's based on these three faulty assumptions.

So why don't you get into those? Yeah, so the three assumptions that are made, and these are kind of the doctrines that really lie unchallenged at the foundation of people who believe that they're hearing the voice of God through nudgings and promptings and impressions, et cetera.

The three foundations are these. First that I need to hear from God outside scripture, and basically by that what I mean is I am unable to make decisions as a pastor. I'm unable to make decisions as a father or as a leader or in my day-to-day life if I'm not hearing constantly these whispers from God, Him giving me these revelations about what house to buy, what beacon to appoint next, which youth leader to hire, what car to buy, where to have lunch, et cetera.

I need to hear from God if I'm going to be obedient. In fact, some of the HBG, I call it HBG, Hearing the Voice of God teachers that I quote in the book say just that. I think it is Robert Morris who says, I couldn't be a pastor of a church without constantly hearing the voice of God in decisions that I make as if scripture is not enough for him.

So that's the first assumption is that I need this, that I lack something. Scripture hasn't given me all that is necessary for life and God, for ministry, that I need something more. I need God to make these revelations to me and to whisper His directions in my ear.

That's the first assumption. The second one is that I should expect to hear from God outside scripture. Jesus said in John 10, my sheep hear my voice. And so if there's a promise there that His people are going to hear His voice, then I should expect this from God and that God has promised to reveal these things and God has promised to continue speaking to me in scripture.

This is the second assumption is that if the saints of old all heard the voice of God, if they all received revelation, I should expect to as well. So assumption number one, I need to hear from God outside scriptures.

Assumption number two, I should expect to. And the third one is that I can learn or that I must learn to hear from God outside scripture. And typically hearing the voice of God proponents use 1 Samuel chapter 3, that Samuel who heard the voice of God didn't know it was God speaking to him and he had to learn how to hear from God as a prophet and that you and I must learn this discipline as well.

That there is some key to understanding. There are a list of keys to understanding how to hear God speak and we need to learn how to hear the whisper, to interpret the whisper, and then to obey the whispers.

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

And it involves quieting our hearts and quieting ourselves and listening, reading scripture and listening for a voice. And then when we hear the voice, acting on it, obeying it, writing it down, sometimes exegeting it, talking to others.

There's this very complicated construct, a methodology that we supposedly need in order to hear God speak. So those are the three assumptions. And I deal with those in the texts that are often cited to make those cases.

And that's what's mostly unchallenged in those circles. Nobody ever steps up to say, do I really need to hear from God? Is scripture not enough? Nobody steps up and said, is this something that really can be learned?

If God is speaking, do I need to learn something? How do you hear him?

I mean, this is really what Morris would say, but yeah, I was going to say this is really the battle that it seems to be right now is the sufficiency of scripture.

The Sufficiency of Scripture in Spiritual Warfare, Heaven, and Decision-Making

Yeah, well, three of three of my four books deal with the sufficiency of scripture. Truth or Territory deals with sufficiency of scripture in the area of spiritual warfare. Do I need to interview demons and do I need special methodologies and prayer mantras, et cetera, to fight the truth of war?

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

Do I need Don Piper, 90 minutes in heaven to spend 90 minutes outside heaven, outside heaven's gates to tell me that scripture is real and that Jesus is real and that the Bible is true and that heaven is our eternal home?

Do I need that or is scripture enough? And then this book, do I need to hear God speak to me outside scripture or is scripture sufficient? And I contend the scripture is sufficient.

Yeah, but for some, it's not. In fact, for some, they even, shall we say, mock that. Now, I'm going to play a clip here for you. And, you know, Bud was like, are you really going to do this? You're really, do we have to talk about this person yet again?

But I think that, I think it'll be helpful. Because it's prevalent.

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

So, I didn't get your grief on that. So, yeah, you did. So, Jim, let's have you interact with this right here from Beth Moore, considered a conservative Christian and an SBC. But here's what she says about these things.

What I'm about to explain to you is one reason, amid a thousand, that I love Jesus Christ so much for. I mean, this is the kind of thing that just blows my mind about him. A number of months back, I was sleeping regular all night, and I need you to know something.

In all of these 53 years of living, I just never have had a meaningful dream. And it's not been because I haven't asked for him. If there is a manifestation of God or the Spirit, I've somewhere asked for it.

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

So, what do you think about that, Jim? That she desires these manifestations?

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

Yeah. You know, that is a scary theology. I'll say something shocking. I would ask you, would you rather have, or I would ask her, I've asked my congregations actually, would you rather have the book of Amos, to read the book of Amos, or a personal visible appearance of Jesus Christ and his glory?

Which one do you think is more reliable and which one should you cherish more? And I know that we would all be inclined to say, well, I would cherish or view as more reliable, the personal visible appearance of Jesus.

Well, if you turn to 2 Peter chapter one, where Peter talks about that, he considers the written word more sure, the prophetic word more sure than his experience. And our inclination is to think that the experience is better, that what we see with our eyes is better, that some manifestation is better.

It's not. Amos would be better than that experience. And I just choose Amos because it's probably a little known old Testament book that most people couldn't tell you the, the name or the date or the, or the gist of Amos at all.

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

Yeah. And I could have played more where she'd like, she's, she's saying how she, for her, and she started by saying, this is why she loves Jesus because he gave her a dream. He gave her this dream, but she's, she's looking for that.

And she actually says in there, I won't play this clip, but she actually says in there that she was asking for this over and over for a long time. And this is what I think we see. So, so often in Christianity is, as you were saying, it's, it's that the word of God is not sufficient for people like this.

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

And she's making it a joke.

Everyone's laughing. Like, are you kidding me? Yeah. I mean, the prophetic word is more sure than that experience. And Peter had an experience that, that rivals any experience you could have hoped out.

And that's the one he cites there in second Peter chapter one. The, the Mount of Transfiguration, seeing the Lord transfigured before his eyes. And he said, we have the prophetic word made more sure. Amos is better than that experience.

And the fact that she would think that the experience is better than just the written word. Oh, what a pathetically low view of scripture.

Samuel, Eli, and the Myth of Learning to Hear God

Okay. So let me deal with a thing that you deal with in addressing these faulty arguments that people make. They're, they'll often go to when they're trying to teach people that you have to, you got to learn how to hear from the voice of God.