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By April J. Buchanan | Religion Columnist

A well-known pastor – who is also a false teacher – recently said to his congregation that they need to “put a demand on God” (Mike Todd). According to him, he received this as a direct divine revelation from God. According to him, God said He can’t do anything unless we put a demand on Him first. I ask, who then is sovereign?

A low view of God and a high view of man always show up in man-centered preaching. It is also often missed by the masses as the message provokes strong emotion and an atmosphere is created to induce an emotional experience. Many walk out feeling like they heard from God and experienced God, but they were manipulated into an emotional experience that, because they were in a church setting they equate with God. They fail to test the actual teaching against the Word of God. They assume the one teaching must be sharing the truth because they said, “God told me.”

Once we come out of the dark lights, and the emotionally manipulative music and learn how to study our Bibles, one can almost feel the blanket of delusion falling off. We stand completely exposed before God. We see ourselves as we are before a holy God. We fall before Him in repentance and faith. The truth now exposes our deception and we see Him for who He is as He has revealed Himself. We see how we wrongly represented Him and how we chased by-products of Him, subjective experiences that we equated with Him, and how little we knew Him at all.

Who are we learning from? Are they constantly appealing to something outside of Scripture that leads us away from God or are they bringing us again and again to the more sure Word of God? Are their lives marked by faithfulness to the Word of God? Are they pointing us to them or God? Are they pointing us to their claims of subjective experiences and extra-biblical revelation or are they bringing us back to God’s Word as they go into the text to bring out of it what it means?

Many sheep are being led astray by hirelings and wolves. They claim to speak for God. But the words they speak do not sound like God, but rather that of their imaginations.

“Wolves always get tired of sheep food.” ~ Hensworth Jonas, Q&A panel of the G3 Ministries Reformation Conference

Faithful shepherds feed the sheep God’s Word. They care for the sheep and they do not abandon them when the wolf comes.

Little children can tell when you make even a minor adjustment to their favorite dish. They have an uncanny ability to tell you when it doesn’t taste right.

Likewise, we must be faithful to study God’s Word and know the voice of our Shepherd, able to recognize when hirelings and wolves are speaking words contrary to our Shepherd’s voice.

We have the prophetic Word more sure.

Grace and Peace

Soli Deo Gloria