Monday September 5, 2022
Don’t Claim Every ‘Prophecy’!
I Timothy 4:16 – Watch your life and doctrine closely. Persevere in them, because if you do, you will save both yourself and your hearers.
You’ve been there, haven’t you, where a preacher makes a prophetic declaration based on an interpretation of Scripture, and everybody yells ‘Amen’? Like ‘Our God is the God of supernatural breakthroughs, and I say to you, your breakthrough is coming to you this week’ and everyone ‘receives’ it with an affirmative shout? What do you believe about such things? Can we just pick any piece of Scripture that suits us and ‘apply’ it whenever we want to? Is every statement of blessing in the Bible meant for me whenever I want it to apply to me? And haven’t we all become ‘prophets’, making prophetic declarations to ourselves and to others at will, as though prophecy has become a matter of human initiative?
For prophecy never had its origin in the human will, but prophets, though human, spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit. (2 Peter 1:21)
Presumably, our ‘mass prophets’ mean well – for their hearers or themselves, but no one has a right to elevate their good wishes into prophecy. Prophecy is a declaration of the will and mind of God, not an expression of anyone’s wish, no matter how laudable those wishes are.
Rather than yell ‘amen’ to every wonderful declaration made for you and expecting it to come to pass because it has been so declared, why don’t you pray? Present your desires to God as requests, and seek to discover His will for you. In 1 John 5:14 it says:
This is the confidence we have in approaching God: that if we ask anything according to his will, he hears us.
Friend, please pay close attention to the things you believe. It’s a matter of life and death!