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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS AND CONTRIBUTING RESOURCES
Author: Teresa Seputis ts@godspeak.net http://www.godspeak.net

FireSide Chat II

Informal Prophetic MentoringWith Teresa Seputis

Week 11
Dealing With Some Difficult Questions
Part 2
Our Desires Imitating God's Voice

Last week we started talking about a difficult situation. We talked about what happens when words of life and destiny are released over a terminally ill person, then that person dies shortly afterwards.

This type of thing leaves questions: was the word from God and somehow unfulfilled? Or was it a false word?

In our case it was even more difficult because the terminally ill lady was one of the prophetic-school chatroom leaders, and many of our chatroom participants gave words to encourage her just 48 hours before she died. Several of those words were things like "this sickness is not unto death" and "God still has more things for you to do on this earth." Obviously, those words went unfulfilled since she died so soon after they were given.

That has been traumatic for the ones who spoke the words to her. At the time, they truly believed they were hearing God and they felt that they were speaking what the Lord was saying. But since Vicky died shortly after those words were given, it has raised some difficult questions. Some are convinced that the words were true God-words and they can't understand how they went unfulfilled. Others are left wondering whether or not they can hear God correctly. And yet others are asking themselves if they've accidentally become false prophets. One or two think that the leader tricked people into prophesying what that leader hoped God would say instead of what God was really saying (though I don't agree with that assessment.) This incident has raised some difficult questions for a lot of people.

I started to address this last week, I said that there is no single "right answer" to this type of question, but I would like to throw out three things to consider.

  1. The words might have been God-words, but were conditional in nature.

  2. The words might have come from the people's hearts imitating God's voice to them because they were emotionally involved.

  3. There might have been spiritual warfare effecting Vicky's outcome.

We talked about the first one (some prophesies are conditional) last week. This week I'd like to discuss the second one, and we will talk about the third one next week.

Our Hearts Can Imitate God's Voice And Produce "False" Words

It is harder to hear God clearly when you are emotionally involved. Do you know why that is? It is because the more you have at stake, the more your own heart is likely to jump in with opinions and imitate God's voice to you in an attempt to get it's own way. In other words, our own heart and desires and issues and fallen nature can deceive us by imitating God's voice to us.

We all have fallen natures, don't we? Even when we love God with all of our hearts, we still have a carnal fallen nature to deal with. And that nature can definitely get in the way of us hearing God speak to us. Even the Apostle Paul struggled with his fallen nature. Many consider Paul to be one of the greatest New Testament believers, a hero of the faith, a very mature and godly man. But look what he says about it in Romans 7:14-20 (NLT):

14 The law is good, then. The trouble is not with the law but with me, because I am sold into slavery, with sin as my master. 15 I don't understand myself at all, for I really want to do what is right, but I don't do it. Instead, I do the very thing I hate. 16 I know perfectly well that what I am doing is wrong, and my bad conscience shows that I agree that the law is good. 17 But I can't help myself, because it is sin inside me that makes me do these evil things.

18 I know I am rotten through and through so far as my old sinful nature is concerned. No matter which way I turn, I can't make myself do right. I want to, but I can't. 19 When I want to do good, I don't. And when I try not to do wrong, I do it anyway. 20 But if I am doing what I don't want to do, I am not really the one doing it; the sin within me is doing it.

The sad fact is that we were born with a sinful nature, and that nature will continue to effect us until the day that we are perfected in Christ. Yes, the Holy Spirit is at work in us, transforming us to be more like Jesus as per 2 Cor 3:18, "But we all, with unveiled face, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, just as by the Spirit of the Lord."

Unfortunately, the transformation process will not be completed until we are with Jesus in glory and have been given our new eternal bodies that no longer carry the sinful nature. In the meanwhile, we continue to struggle with our fallen nature. The sad fact is that we have wants and desires that don't always conform to the perfect will of God.

And at times, we can want something so bad that our own heart/desires will try and convince us that God is going this to us. Jeremiah17:9-10 says, "The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked; who can know it? I, the Lord, search the heart, I test the mind..." In other words, our own hearts can deceive us, but they can't deceive God. And when our heart tries to imitate God's voice to us, that imitation won't stand up to the scrutiny of God's truth.

Our heart can get "selective hearing" at times, where it only hears what it really wants to hear and it ignores everything else that the Lord and the Bible have to say. I cannot tell you how many times people who have gone through painful divorces have "heard" God promise that their marriage would be restored--even though the spouse had already remarried to another person. Instead of moving on with their lives, they hold on to that "promise" for years and years and wonder why God hasn't fulfilled it yet. That is an example of a very intense desire of the heart mimicking God's voice to them, and telling them what they wish He would say.

In general the more intensely that we want something, the greater the level of deception our heart will apply in imitating God's voice. Most of the time when our own heart imitates God, it will not be at that strong of a level of intensity as what I shared above. Let me give you an example of a less intense (but equally deceitful) desire.

There was a time when I was suffering from hypoglycemia. The Lord told me that I was not eat anything with sugar at that time. But I was visiting some friends in Canada and they took me out to eat at a very nice restaurant. When the dessert menus were passed out, I really wanted some dessert. The pictures looked so good, and everyone else was going to have some. I knew God had instructed me not to eat any sweets. But I really wanted some. So I asked God if I could have a dessert. I thought I heard the Lord say to me "Sure, Teresa go ahead with My blessings. I promise you that you can eat dessert and not get sick."

Now, who do you think told me that? Was it God or my own desires? I was immediately reminded of the way the Lord had instructed me not to eat sweets because it was bad for my health (because of the hypoglycemia). Some Scripture came to mind. I remembered John 14:15 (about obeying Jesus because we love Him). Could that have been the Holy Spirit speaking to me to correct my "mishearing?" I choose to ignore it. Then another passage came to mind, the passage about our bodies being the temple of the Holy Spirit and not our own (1 Corinthians 6:19). I choose to ignore that as well, holding on to what I heard, e.g., that I could have dessert. So I had dessert and it tasted good. But about an hour after I ate it, I had a hypoglycemia attack and was sick for the rest of the night.

In my case, the Lord used Scripture to try and show me that I'd heard the desires of my own heart instead of His voice. He is faithful that way, when we hear wrong, He will usually try to speak His truth to us. But often times we choose not to listen because we heard something we really wanted to hear, so we give in those desires. As Jeremiah 17:9 says, our hearts are desperately wicked. At times they will imitate God's voice to tell us what we really want to hear.

We need to make sure we apply God's truth to the situation instead of immediately giving in to our desires. If I had listened to Him just before ordering dessert, then I would not have gotten sick that night. God was faithful to speak to me and let me know that He hadn't really said that. I was just unwilling to listen because I wanted to hear that it was ok to have dessert.

The sad fact is that, at times, our hearts do imitate God's voice to us. We need to be willing to bounce what we hear against God's truth and verify that it really is God speaking to us.

The same thing can happen when we are prophesying. It is more likely to happen when we are emotionally vested in the person (or topic) that we are speaking into. It is particularly hard to hear God clearly when we are speaking into the life of someone who we know and like, especially if we know that person is dying of a terminal illness. Our heart wants that person to recover and be well. We want them to be happy and to have a prosperous life. And it is very easy for our desires to imitate God's voice to us, so that we end up prophesying our desires for that person instead of prophesying God's word to them.

Does that make us a false prophet? No--not if we only do it rarely. But it is a mistake anytime we say "God says..." when God hasn't actually said that. If we make a mistake, then we need to fess up to our mistake, to prayerfully review it with the Lord and to learn from it.

God's goal is not to destroy us if we make a mistake. That used to happen in the Old Testament. If a word spoken in God's name did not come true, the prophet was to be stoned for it. But it is different in the New Testament because each believer has the Holy Spirit residing in him, helping him to judge the word.

In the New Testament, there is room for a learning curve. The Bible commands us to grow in our gifting, and there is room to make mistakes as we learn to speak for God. He won't strike us dead or disqualify us if we make a mistake. He doesn't get angry when the desires of your heart want good for a person and you mistake those desires for His voice--providing that you learn from it and don't keep repeating that mistake over and over again. God wants you to learn from your mistake so you are less likely to make it in the future.

Again, I am not saying that the words spoken over Vicky were mistakes and bad words. They may have been. But they may have been conditional words where the condition went unfulfilled, which we discussed last week. Or there may have been unopposed spiritual warfare interfering with the word. We will talk about that (the role of spiritual warfare in the prophetic) next week.


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-- Do not republish without written permission from <copyright@godspeak.org> --

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