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Exchanged Glory IV: A Time for Every Purpose
<page 32>I slowly lost hope that I would ever resolve my issues with the subjective voice of God.
Though I was struggling greatly, there was reason for hope. A short time before my family difficulties, I had put in place a theological change that was already rearranging my life. I was starting to experience, in an everyday way, the sort of Holy Spirit power I had read about in the Bible.
For years I had been ill at ease with the idea that God speaks to us outside of what He says in the Bible. It wasn’t that I believed He never spoke in this way. It was more a question of how often. Was it something we should expect once in a lifetime, occasionally, or many times a day?
I knew that the book of Acts described God giving this kind of guidance. I was even fairly certain that I had received it on at least a few occasions. For example, as I described in Chapter Two of this book, “Family Blessings,” a friend shared a vision that helped me minister to my daughter.[26] I was grateful when I received that sort of specific direction, but I had found it difficult to make it a regular part of my life.
One major obstacle was that I had been hounded by harassing demonic voices since I was a teenager.[27] Hearing from the spiritual world was no problem for me. Picking out the Holy Spirit among the cacophony of noise was. I had made enough mistakes while trying to do so that I was gun-shy about being able to make my way through the static. It was safer to concentrate on the words of the Bible.
What God says in the Bible is what I call His objective voice. Everyone can study it and compare notes to arrive at the truth. We won’t always agree, but we have a solid foundation for making decisions.
Hearing God speak outside of the Bible is what I call the subjective voice of God (or the prophetic voice of God – I use both terms to mean the same thing.) The word ‘subjective’ means that each individual must decide for themselves where the message came from and what it means. In many cases, it is tough for others to test. One person says, “I think God is saying this,” and another says, “I think He is saying something different.” Unless one of the messages is unscriptural, it is hard to say for sure who is right
When I was young, I had believed that hearing the subjective voice of God was one of the most important keys to Christian living. I strove to listen to it for close to twenty years, but I found my attempts to do so confusing, especially when people disagreed with me. Over the years, I grew <page 33>increasingly suspicious about what I and others were doing, and then events at the church I attended (and still attend) left me feeling skeptical.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, we were in a time of blessing and growth. I enjoyed teaching and helping to lead worship.[28] I hoped that the outpouring of God’s Spirit would eventually lead to me being released from the shackles of my secular job into full time ministry. His word was burning in my heart; it was hard to hold it back in order to make money.
At that time, another church in our area ran into trouble, and a number of people from that congregation switched to ours. Many of those who came were old friends who had come because they believed that the leaders of this other church had lost track of the subjective voice of God. They felt that programs and structures had replaced the dynamic life of the Holy Spirit.
This occurred at the time in which I was studying theology and memorizing my way through the book of Proverbs.[29] While I liked the dynamic life of the Holy Spirit, God seemed to be showing me that structure and programs could have some value. I found myself disagreeing with my friends. They stressed that we needed to only do what the Spirit was telling us or we would make mistakes and waste our time on dead works. I on the other hand, felt the Spirit leading me to use my mind to make decisions, experiment, and learn from my mistakes.
I held back on sharing my beliefs during meetings in order to avoid public disagreements. At the same time, I tried to privately work out my differences with others.
What happened next had a great impact on me. Some of my friends with whom I was trying to come to unity had a disagreement with the elders of our church, and they decided to leave and start a new church.
I was stung. It seemed to me that they were using the subjective voice of God as an excuse for the weaknesses of their hearts. They were dismissing the clear Scriptures about unity for something far less certain. I had been trying to give everyone the benefit of the doubt – to see my Christian family members in the best light possible. Now it was hard to avoid becoming cynical.
I began to doubt that anyone was hearing from God …and even if someone was, that we could figure out which of us it was. Maybe those who left were following the Spirit – maybe they weren’t. Who could say for sure? If I was honest with myself, could I really say for sure I was hearing from Him? What was there about my discernment that gave me any good reason to believe it over others?
As our now smaller group began to look for God to show us what to do next, I had three problems. First, I had little faith that He would show us. Second, I had even less faith that we would understand Him if He did. Finally, while the split had greatly weakened my trust in the subjective voice of God, it had only strengthened that belief in others. My fellow church members sought God with greater resolve to find out what He had for us next.
This effectively ended my hopes for full time ministry, and it left me unsure how to even share my heart. I was a wisdom-oriented teacher who greatly doubted prophetic guidance in a church that believed prophetic guidance was a key element that the church had been missing for a long time.
<page 34>I had never before felt so out of place at church. I went through a long period where my friendships were tested by my many doubts and my unexpressed disappointment. I sometimes sat in our meetings and looked out the window at a little Reformed church down the street, wondering if I would feel more at home there. The best I seemed able to do was to ignore my feelings in an attempt to live “with all lowliness and gentleness, with longsuffering, bearing with one another in love, endeavoring to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.” (Ephesians 4:2-3)
Unfortunately, my problems with the subjective voice of God grew worse rather than better. As I studied theology, I found that a number of the prophecies at church contained doctrines that I no longer believed. This added to my suspicions about what we were doing.
I seemed destined to separate from the Charismatic movement. This especially became a possibility after I listened to a tape series that questioned modern day prophecy. The speaker argued (successfully I believe) that when the Charismatic movement claimed that modern day prophecy was usually a mixture of God’s words and our own, we weren’t being scriptural. In the Bible when someone said, “Thus says the Lord,” they were expected to be right. If we didn’t expect the same, we had changed the definition of the word ‘prophecy.’
I wanted to disagree with the tape series, and I even read a book that presented a different view, but the reasoning seemed solid. As far as I could tell, the Bible taught one-hundred percent accuracy for prophecy, and that was too high of a standard for what we did. Though I didn’t want to give up the hope that the Holy Spirit would speak to us in this way, I felt it best to keep a safe distance until I better understood what we were doing.
I slowly lost hope that I would ever resolve my issues with the subjective voice of God. After all, I had been in groups that greatly valued it for close to twenty-five years. If thousands of hours of exposure and study hadn’t convinced me of what we were doing, what reason did I have to believe that I would ever be convinced?
God was about to surprise me again. One day I heard someone make a brief comment about Deuteronomy 18:15-22, and I realized I had misunderstood what Moses had written about prophecy. This set off a chain reaction in my heart that rearranged my understanding of just about every scripture I knew on the subject. It didn’t stop until I had settled on a theology that I felt safe putting into practice.
I suddenly found that I knew how to make this “wisdom-defying” area work in everyday life. In a sense, I “Proverbsitized” it. I made it less mystical and more wisdom-related, which allowed me to act on it.
Where previously I had struggled to crawl, I was now able to run. As a result, my life turned into a “charismatic-fest” of spiritual experiences that transformed my life. The next four chapters will describe the theological change. After that I will describe the “charismatic-fest” of spiritual experiences.
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