February 24, 2009: "God Told Me..."

Christians ought not to say that God has spoken to them when what they really mean is that they have a strong gut feeling. This common evangelical practice of interpreting an emotional tug as the voice of God is sinful and shameful and must stop.

Case in point: the resignation four weeks ago of Willow Creek's Chicago Campus pastor, Steve Wu. Wu came to WC Chicago in 2006 after being tabbed by WC's Senior Pastor Bill Hybels. As reported in a church press release at the time, "As soon as Hybels met Wu, he said he knew God had spoken." Interim pastor Jeff Small concurred: "There's this huge confirmation in my spirit that not only is he the right guy, he's God's man for the job." Wu himself agreed: "Wu said he felt the tap of the Holy Spirit and knew God was calling him to Chicago."

Now that Wu has resigned because of sexual sin, joining that foul host of disgraced clergymen who have devastated their churches and brought shame on the name of Christ, what are we to make of Hybel's, Small's and Wu's statements just three years ago to the effect that "God had spoken"? Simply this: they were all wrong. God had not spoken. Wu was not God's man for the job. There was no tap of the Holy Spirit.

Years ago a church that I attended hired an associate pastor, and there was plenty of "God-talk" at his installation. God had directed the church to call him, God had moved in his heart to accept the call, God had brought him to the church to accomplish good things. Then he got fired 18 months later. I was never particularly fond of this minister, and for all I know his firing was just - but I recall wondering at the time, "What in the world happened to all those things God assured us of when we hired him?"

Our problem in the evangelical sub-culture is that we have a sinful, scandalous, seldom-acknowledged habit of speaking presumptuously in the name of the Lord. This is an abomination that many sincere believers fall into, in part because they have been trained to think (in unbiblical terms) of "having a relationship with Jesus Christ," and have learned the simple trick of crafting a dialogue in their heads and labeling one of the voices "God." When such people tell us what God has told them, I believe it becomes our duty to remember it, and apply when applicable the test of Deuteronomy 18:21-22: "You may say to yourselves, 'How can we know when a message has not been spoken by the Lord?' If what a prophet proclaims in the name of the Lord does not take place or come true, that is a message the Lord has not spoken. That prophet has spoken presumptuously. Do not be afraid of him." Not only ought we not fear those whose God-talk proves false, we probably should not waste a lot of time listening to them either.

Back in 2003 a sincere fellow pastor wrote some God-talk into my installation vows, and I respectfully insisted that he take it out. I can't remember exactly what the words were - something about knowing that God was going to use me to serve the church. I explained to him that I didn't even know for sure that I would be alive, or that Jesus wouldn't return, 10 minutes from now! Since God hadn't told me that much, how could I dare say confident things about a future he had not seen fit to reveal?

Something very instructive may be learned from the tragic case of pastor and author Gordon MacDonald. In 1984 MacDonald was contacted by an international Christian organization and asked if he would be willing to be a candidate for its presidency. He agreed, and soon both he and his wife Gail were feeling the call of God. Years later he wrote, "The books we read, the conversations we held, the prayers we prayed, the voice of God we heard in our souls - everything pointed to my getting this position. We felt God was saying, 'This is going to happen.'"

Then it didn't happen. MacDonald didn't get the job, and the ground came out from under his feet. He wrote, "At a subterranean level, I told God, 'You've made a perfect fool out of me. You drew me to the finish line and said, 'I'm sorry.' I no longer know your language. You speak a different language than I've been trained to understand.' I was questioning God, something I had never really done. I doubted whether it was possible to hear God speak."

In the aftermath of his meltdown MacDonald cheated on his wife, likewise joining that foul host of disgraced clergymen who have devastated their churches and brought shame on the name of Christ.

Though MacDonald came to doubt whether it was possible to hear God speak, in fact that is something none of us should ever doubt. God does speak. He says things like "Do not commit adultery," and "Be not drunk with wine" and "Rejoice evermore" and "Love the Lord your God." It's all there at our finger-tips in our readily accessible Bibles. As for whether God might also speak to us directly, outside the Bible, well, I don't deny that it is possible. I think it even happened to me once. Just once. But people who think it happens to them all the time, every day, might do well to consider the fact that the Bible records God giving a direct message to the Apostle Paul only four times in his whole life! (Acts 9:4-6; 18:9-10; 22:17-21; and 27:23-26.) Elsewhere Paul speaks humbly, saying for example to Philemon: "Perhaps the reason he [Onesimus] was separated from you for a little while was that you might have him back for good" (Philemon 15). Note the "perhaps" in that sentence - not "God has said" or "God told me" – but very quietly, tentatively, "perhaps". Only God knows for sure.

Many Christians need to learn to start saying "perhaps" when their gut and their training and their evangelical culture are all tempting them to say, "Listen to what God told me."