Differentiating Jesus from the Word

(We temporarily return to regular PP programing. For newcomers, these are the kinds of statements that have kept PP going much longer than I ever imagined it would.)

Perry Noble preached on how to hear from God today. We’ve chronicled problems with Noble’s extra-biblical view of revelation many times on this blog, but today’s statement probably takes the cake.

All too often we seek answers in the Scriptures when we should be seeking Jesus…because HE will ultimately BE the answer to whatever we are facing.

Exactly how does one find answers from Jesus if not from Scripture? Perhaps we ask the portrait of Jesus we have on our wall? The imaginary Jesus we keep under our bed?

Jesus is the Word. To suggest that he has a message that is outside Scripture is–how else to say it?–blasphemy.

Noble’s construction lets believers ignore Scripture altogether and make desisions based on their gut or based on their imagination of who Jesus is. Wearing a WWJD bracelet is not the same thing as knowing and studying Scripture.

After denigrating Scripture, Noble finds another way to hear God’s voice (a point he appears to have added to his sermon at the last minute).

Circumstances are often God’s megaphone that HE is using to scream to us. It’s amazing to many how many times in the Scriptures that God spoke so clearly and revealed who He was during a storm!!!

What could Noble’s circumstances divinity possibly be telling him right now?

What was the same divinity screaming at me this summer?

Real wisdom from Furtick

A really promising tweet from Furtick tonight.

It’s hard to differentiate between a vision & a delusion-both cause you to see things that no one else sees.

No sarcasm here; it’s good that he’s recognizing this.

Muddying the vision problem

Noble compounds his slippery personal revelation problem with this weekend tweet:

Being filled with vision doesn’t always mean that God is inspiring us…but rather that He’s disturbing us!

Two quick points.

1. He acknowledges that vision does equal inspiration. Even though he assures us that it doesn’t “always” mean inspiration, the implication is that it is often inspiration. As we’ve discussed before, inspiration is a very special theological term, and, in most Protestant churches, it’s not a term that pastors apply to themselves.
2. Such visions are infallible. Not only are they inspired, they can’t be wrong (an automatic quality of inspiration, anyway). If a pastor’s vision fails your Biblical test and disturbs you, it just proves that the vision is correct and you need to obey.

For a some background on the problem of senior pastors leading churches through their visions from God check these posts.

How does God speak to us?

How does God speak to us and reveal his will? I’ve written about how preachers should talk about God’s revelation, so this will extend that to consider how we think and talk about how God speaks to us as laypeople.

Has God stopped speaking to us?

Just because God closed the book on his written revelation, does not mean that the book is dead. The question assumes that God has thought of more things to say in the past two thousand years. It also assumes that what he as said is at least a little bit worn out now.

God’s Word is eternal and imperishable. That means that it is as powerful and present as the day it was written. Our words do pass away (if we’re speaking, they die on our lips), are forgotten, and sometimes contradicted. God’s words are not.

One of the ironic aspects of liberal complaints against the sola scriptura position is that they say that we think God no longer speaks. To the contrary, we think that God continues to speak so powerfully and completely that he need not say anything else.

For example, one especially awful passage in The Shack is its characterization of seminaries.

In seminary he had been taught that God had completely stopped any overt communication with moderns, preferring to have them only listen to and follow sacred Scripture, properly interpreted, of course. God’s voice had been reduced to paper. (p. 65)

I would argue that seminaries exist because they do think that God’s Word is alive and a suitable object of focused study. The author of The Shack is the one who might more accurately be said to believe that God’s Word is dead, which is why he saw a need to write a new version of God for us.

Is God’s Word the foundation for personal revelation and guidance?

God’s Word should be a foundation for our faith in God, but it is not a foundation for additional words. We can use it as a measuring stick against which to measure words spoken by man. It cannot be a measuring stick for measuring additional words from God for two reasons.

First, we cannot bifurcate God’s words into any hierarchical system. New or old. Written or spoken. Perfect and pretty good. If God says something, it is always perfect, so cannot be inferior to anything else he’s ever said. If we are to say that God speaks something outside of the Bible, it would be blasphemy if we didn’t treat it as being as authoritative and permanent as the Bible.

Second, God has told us that he has finished his revelation. Revelation 22:18 warns us not to add anything to the Bible. Jesus tells us in Luke 16:17 that his Word is perfect down to the dot on an i. God’s revelation to us is also complete. God, who reveled himself to us through his Word, describes himself in Revelation 21:6 in literary terms—he is the Alpha and Omega, the A to Z, the whole story.

God’s Word is complete, perfect and unalterable. He need not add anything to it.

Does God speak to us when we ask for wisdom and guidance?

God has given us his Word, which is sufficient for both wisdom (Proverbs 1:1-7) and guidance (Psalm 119:105). Wait, you say, Psalm 119 doesn’t tell me whether I should marry Betty or Sally, or whether I should take the job in Iowa or Texas. How can I know what God wants me to do?

Pray that the Holy Spirit would give you wisdom, which we assume you’ve been developing through studying God’s written Word.

If you ask God to “tell you” what you should do, how do you know when you’ve received your answer? How do you distinguish between the effects of God whispering to you, caffeine, last night’s pizza, or Satan? How can you be certain that your deceptive heart is properly recognizing the speaker?

You can’t be sure. As 2 Peter 1:19 tells us, God’s Word is certain. If you can’t be certain, it’s not God speaking.

(I’m not including in this discussion some other ways God speaks to us, which would include general revelation, our conscience, and preaching. To keep the discussion reasonably simple, I’m just thinking about gut feelings or meditative states that tend to be translated into “God told me…” moments.)

How do we speak of God’s guidance?

First, don’t preface statements by telling us that God told you something. He probably didn’t, but you also put him on the hook for all kinds of nonsense.

Second, take ownership for your own thinking and planning, and treat God’s Word as sufficient for developing and sanctifying your wisdom and decision making.

Instead of saying, “God told me to be a missionary to India,” say, “God told us to go into all the world, so, based on my love for India and its culture, I think that the best way for me to serve him is to be a missionary to India.”

Instead of saying, “God told me to be an electrician,” say, “God told us that we should work to support ourselves and our families, so, based on my personal aptitudes and interests, I think that the best way to serve God through work is to pursue a career as an electrician.”

You honor God by submitting your desires to his Word, yet you don’t risk dishonoring his name should you or your plans fail.

Anyway, that’s what I think. You’ll need to ask God to tell you what he thinks.

How good is your caller ID? (Updated)

Perry Noble advised pastors on how to hear from God last week.

One of the KEYS to receive REVELATION is PREPARATION!  It’s not that God isn’t wanting to download HUGE vision into us as leaders…but many times we just aren’t ready for it.

Now, I might have said that the key to receive revelation was to open the Bible and read it, but perhaps that’s because I’m just not ready for Noblesque visions. Noble, and many other leaders like him, promote themselves as special vessels for God’s direct messages, to which all their followers must submit without question.

Noble certainly believes God continues to speak beyond the Bible. On Sunday, he seemed to rebuke the Bible-only approach to God’s word.

It is a dangerous thing to say God is silent when the Bible says that His Word is living and active!

The crazy thing is that this gets it all backwards. Folk who believe that the Bible contains, and closes the book on, God’s revelation to us do so because we believe that that revealed Word is eternally living and active. When you think you need to have new revelation downloaded by God, it is a good indication that you don’t really believe that the Bible is sufficiently living and active in 2009.

Besides holding a low view of Scripture, Noble’s position is inherently weak and dangerous in its susceptibility to error, especially when it’s combined with a violent intolerance to being tested and criticized.

John Calvin warned that when we think we hear God in our gut, we can’t always be certain that we’re not hearing yesterday’s lunch or the Devil himself.

Since Satan transforms himself into an angel of light, what authority can the Spirit have with us if he be not ascertained by an infallible mark? …but these miserable men err as if bent on their own destruction, while they seek the Spirit from themselves rather than from Him. (Ch IX.1)

The only infallible mark of the Holy Spirit’s authorship is the written Word of God–the Bible. The Scriptures are the Spirit’s finest and complete works, to which he need not add even a single comma.

When a leader tells us that he has “heard” God speak to him in any way that comes from inside him or was downloaded to him, we should wonder whether he has a special spiritual caller ID. There’s a good chance that it’s not actually God.

There’s enough in the Bible for clear-eyed biblical leaders to lead with. Anything beyond that is red-alert territory.

Calvin again:

With no less confidence than folly, they fasten upon any dreaming notion which may have casually sprung in their minds. Surely a very different sobriety becomes the children of God. (Ch IX.3)

UPDATE:

Brad Cooper reports this Noble quote from an all-staff meeting yesterday:

We must continue to dig into God’s Word because ‘Today’s Church cannot be lead on yesterday’s revelation.’

What was yesterday’s revelation? How is that different from today’s revelation?

How many revelations are there?

Does revelation have to conform to and change with culture?

How did the New Testament church survive for 2,000 years based on insufficient revelation?

More on Revelation from the Visionary

Furtick :  Prioritize the Presence of God.

Your best innovation flows from revelation.  You must prioritize the presence of God in your life.

More can be accomplished in a nanosecond of prayer, worship, and listening to the voice of the Holy Spirit than a month’s worth of strategy meetings in the flesh.

Many leaders have created virtually no margin to make room for the kind of divine encounters that birth true vision and revolutionary concept.  I can trace the genesis of many of the most important ideas in the history of our church to a specific moment in the presence of God.  I can trace my most frustrating seasons to a deficiency of time allocated to my most important task: seeking the wisdom of the Lord.

What would Moses have missed had he never turned aside to see the burning bush?
If the leaders in the church in the book of Acts had neglected prayer and the Word to serve tables, how might the influence of the Gospel been impeded worldwide?

What revelation, inspiration, imagination and innovation is left undiscovered in your life because you’re failing to prioritize the presence of God?

Is Steven talking about extra-Biblical revelation again? Is this really what “leadership” is about in the modern church? Mighty man of God climbs his own metaphorical Mt. Sinai to await divine inspiration. Those of us who are commoners just have to sit dumbly and wait for our leader to speak…

Really?

1 Peter 2:9 ( and the entire New Testament honestly ) seem to infer that we all have a direct connection to God through His Son Jesus.  His Word has been given to us all, and is sufficient revelation for teaching, rebuking, correcting, and training in righteousness. What did God leave out?

Furtick gets imagination confused with revelation. In his final paragraph, he seems to equate the two.

Products of my imagination will carry more weight if I claim them to be divinely inspired. Just ask Joseph Smith.

Rick’s Revelation

Rick Warren tweets:

God taught me the 5 Purposes of Church at 24, but few paid attention. Now,in my50s,I ask”What 24yrold should I be listening to?

1. Had God been hiding these purposes until 30 years ago? You mean to tell me the Church wandered around for 1,970 or so years without knowing its purpose, until 24 year old Rick Warren comes along and recieves some type of special knowledge from God?
2. Is Warren really hoping to find another man in his 20s who has received new divine revelation?
3. Which 24 year old should you listen to? Pretty much anyone who is clinging tightly to the Word of God. Of course, that wouldn’t be new revelation, but really, really old revelation…but at least it is real revelation.
4. Age shouldn’t disqualify someone from being heard, nor should it be the reason we listen to them. I am sure there are some 24 year olds out there carrying the true message of God…and I would love to hear them. I know for a fact that there are some men in their 60s who are faithfully delivering God’s word.
5. Why is the messenger all that important anyway? The message itself is what matters.

New Turnstile Church strategy: We avoid God’s Word to keep you from sin

Almost two weeks ago, I asked Perry Noble supporters to give us examples of Noble’s biblical wisdom. I asked someone to describe the emperor’s advertised grand clothes, not seeing any myself, and all of his supporters on this site (and there are many) decided he was best left in his jeans and tee shirt.

Perhaps Noble was a little peeved at being abandoned on these pages, but if you review his tweets from last weekend, it appears that he provided his own response, which was, to paraphrase, It’s best that I don’t preach as well as some others.

How else do you explain this tweet?

The worse thing God could give some of us is more information b/c it would not draw us 2 Him but cause us to run from Him in disobedience!

It must be nice to think you can give advice to God, though perhaps he’s just emulating his pal Steven Furtick, who thinks God spent too much time talking about Moses and wasted all his time on Leviticus. Or Andy Stanley who says we should excise the word shepherd from Jesus’ teaching. As he says, “That word needs to go away.”

Andy Stanley also says that concealing or dumbing down information is a useful leadership technique:

Here’s an incredibly important principle. You cannot communicate complicated information to large groups of people. As you increase the number of people, you have to decrease the complexity of the information.

We talked about church marketing earlier in the week, and here we see how a sales mentality can corrupt faithful preaching. Note two lessons that Tony Morgan says are a characteristic of proper church marketing:

We focus less on what we say and more on how we act.

We reduce the number of competing messages we are trying to communicate.

The spoken word is deprecated and replaced by action, guided by a local pastor who thinks there’s benefit in intentionally hiding the whole counsel of God from his congregation. As Noble reminds us, an emphasis on continual action also suggests that we can stop learning.

Many times with me it isn’t always learning something new…but rather being reminded of what I should already know!

Stay shallow, friends. Stay shallow.

(An alternate interpretation of Noble’s first tweet would be that God only gives new revelation to people who are willing and able to properly respond to it, which often includes Noble himself. Such an interpretation suggests that the Bible is insufficient, and sets up pastors as special receptors of extra-biblical wisdom. It also limits God in whom he’s allowed to speak to.)

Solving the vision problem

What’s the alternative to claiming special infallible visions from God? Although we’ve criticized Noble and Furtick in recent days for their grand vision pronouncements, how should they lead their churches when they feel so driven by God’s visions?

Simple. Instead of saying “God told me,” they should lead by prefacing their visions with “I think” or “I want.”

Here are some problems with the God-told-me approach.

1. It claims infallibility. When a leader says “God says,” it really takes the leader out of the equation and suggests that if you think the vision is wrong or unwise, you have a problem with God. We’ve seen specific examples of this kind of thinking from Noble and Furtick. Because God is never wrong or unwise, we are forced to yield to these visions as being perfectly right and good.
2. It demands unquestioning obedience. This follows from the first point. If God said it, every Christian must obey it. If you’re a leader, it’s a wonderful tool to be able to wield, where your very words are perceived as demands from God.
3. It turns questions into fractious divisions. If, on the other hand, we wonder whether a leader’s vision really is straight from the throne of Heaven (PP, for example), we are castigated as not only being against the man, but being against the kingdom of God. As I pointed out yesterday, it gets to the point where Noble considers his critics as being in the family of the Devil more than in the family of God.

Here are some advantages of the I-think approach.

• It depends on wisdom. Unless a leader can point to chapter and verse (God’s special revelation), anything else is a product of human wisdom. By God’s grace, he has given us wisdom, which should be informed by Scripture with the Holy Spirit’s help. We are expected to use it. To say that a decision is a product of human wisdom does not necessarily mean it’s wrong, but it doesn’t claim infallibility for itself. It is possible, however, that is is wrong.
• It makes leaders take responsibility. When a leader claims God’s revelation for his decisions, he can also blame God for the results. If the leader is leading based on personal wisdom, it forces him to count the cost and take responsibility for consequences.
• It demands responsibility and discernment by hearers. Even though Paul was speaking the very words of God to the Bereans, he consented to having them test his words to discern that they were true. Repeatedly, Scripture tells us to test the words of our leaders to see if they conform to God’s word. If the leader claims divine inspiration, there is no possibility or need to test the words. In the Biblical model, followers must take responsibility for the words of the leader, and need to correct or abandon false teachers.
• It leaves room for disagreement. If it’s possible that a leader’s decisions may be unwise, there is space for criticism and correction. For example, when Perry Noble asked his tweets whether he should wear the grope-your-wife T-shirt, he was asking whether it was wise to do that, and we perceived an invitation to help him with his decision–something I complimented him on in the subsequent discussion. On the other hand, when he said that God told him to play Highway to Hell in church, no criticism is brooked, even though many of us PPers see that as a very unwise act.
• It distinguishes between God’s revelation and a leader’s passion. Noble’s reference to a deeply felt vision a few days ago was a good clue to what these really are–his personal hopes and goals for the church. Every leader should have goals for where he wants to lead, and it is perfectly appropriate to communicate them as such. What is inappropriate is when the leader takes his goals and raises them to the level of special revelation. A Holy Spirit-led leader will often have his goals coincide with God’s purpose for the church, and we pray for our leaders that that is the case. A Holy Spirit-led leader will also know that there’s a difference between what comes out of God’s mouth and what comes out of his, and he’ll be careful to make sure that his followers understand that difference as well.

On such foundations are cults built

Perry Noble tells us not to question him; today, Steven Furtick tells us not to question his revelation.

A sampling of today’s dangerous wisdom:

Sometimes you’ll have an encounter with God that’s so intense you can’t reveal it to everyone in your life. …

Sometimes God plants a vision in your heart so outrageous that you need to keep it to yourself for a while. …

Sometimes you’ll feel out of place when you come down from the mountain after meeting with God.  It may take time for the people surrounding you to get adjusted to the new reality.  Sometimes you’ll have to cover your vision with a veil until what you’ve seen becomes clear to others too.  Don’t take it as an insult.  Don’t question the validity of your revelation. [Emphasis added]

Just thank God that your vision is too luminous for human eyes to behold.
It’s a sign of a very bright future.

Can someone tell me how these words would be out of place coming from a David Koresh or a Jim Jones?