Why I Am Still Surprised by the Voice of God: How God Speaks Today Through Prophecies, Dreams, and Visions

by Jack Deere

“You can’t use that passage,” he said. “That was the apostle Paul, not an ordinary Christian. And besides, the book of Acts took place at the crossroads of salvation history. They had to get the foundation right back then.” But it made no sense to argue that God cared where Paul planted churches but didn’t care where we plant churches, or that he wanted to get the foundation right but didn’t care how we built on it.

The primary purpose of the gift of prophecy is to move the hearts of believers and unbelievers to call on the name of the Lord.

When we say it is abnormal, we are comparing the experience of the New Testament church in the book of Acts to something else we regard as normal. Is this “something else” another scriptural history of the New Testament church? No, the book of Acts is the only inspired, inerrant account we have of the church’s history.

they were prevented from recognizing him. Jesus gave them the remedy for their depression by “beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he explained to them what was said in all the Scriptures concerning himself ” (Luke 24:27). The greatest sermon ever preached was preached by the Son of God. The subject was the Son of God. The text was the entire Old Testament. It lasted all day. And only two people heard it. At dinner that evening, they recognized Jesus, and he vanished from their sight. They said, “Were not our hearts burning within us while he talked with us on the road and opened the Scriptures to us?” (Luke 24:32). Jesus could have revealed himself as soon as he met them, but he didn’t. He was showing them and all his family to come after them that the primary way he will meet us is by revealing himself to us in his written Word. It is not the only way he reveals himself or speaks to us, but for me it is the primary way I meet him.

Example of Jesus using scripture to speak to us and show us things

I believed that one day, I would do better because I knew better. But better never showed up.

I was more afraid of Satan’s ability to deceive me than the Holy Spirit’s ability to lead me.

I thought the reason God was speaking to me was to guide me in my service to Jesus. I didn’t know then that it gave him pleasure to speak to me and to teach me to love what he loved. He wanted to be friends with me.

Before I believed in the voice of God, I sometimes found my prayers interrupted by an impression out of nowhere to pray for something I hadn’t thought of. I tried to dismiss these pesky interruptions because they weren’t on my prayer list. It’s as though I said to the Holy Spirit, “Get out of here. I’m trying to pray!”

The Corinthians were abusing spiritual gifts, especially the gift of tongues. We might expect Paul to quell their enthusiasm for the spiritual gifts, but he didn’t. He corrected the abuse and told them to pursue spiritual gifts diligently and use them with love, especially prophecy (1 Corinthians 14:1). There are twenty-one spiritual gifts. God gave them to be used, not simply to be studied.

I came to see that I loved the Bible more than I loved God. I didn’t love the Bible too much; I loved God too little. I saw that God would never let his book steal from him the pleasure it gave him to speak directly to the children he loves. God does not speak to us because he needs to; he speaks to us because he wants to.

The more we ask God to speak to us, the more we will hear his voice. The more we hear his voice, the more we will recognize its character.

This is the greatest miracle I know. I am loved by an infinite Person who loves to tell me so.

I had read the biblical examples of God speaking to Isaiah or to Paul, but I had always assumed those communications came with the unmistakable clarity of an audible voice.

I see the wisdom of God in the bridling of our power, for there was only one Person who had the character to bear the power of the Spirit without limit (John 3:34), and yet even he had to embrace sacrifice.

I assumed Isaiah always heard God speak with the clarity of an audible voice, but I taught that no writer of Scripture wrote God’s word by taking down some sort of mechanical dictation. Rather than speaking in an audible voice, the Holy Spirit produced impressions in the minds of the scriptural authors, and they knew these impressions were from God, and they knew they were writing Scripture (1 Corinthians 14:37–38). God gave the writers freedom to express those impressions in their own vocabulary and style. That is why the writing prophets are so different from one another.

Eventually the house of prayer became a house of lecture.

we are still basically a one-gift church that teaches almost exclusively and pays a little lip service to evangelism,

I used to tell people that they if they wanted to move with consistent power in healing and prophetic gifts that they had to be willing to fail in front of people. But that was sugarcoating it. Those who want to move with spiritual power have to be more than willing; they have to fail in front of others over and over. There may be exceptions to this rule. If that encourages you, you probably won’t be an exception.

He never stopped speaking to me. That’s just what fathers do. For a little while, I believed in the voice. But then I got smart and outgrew my need to hear my Father’s voice. He just smiled at his little boy. That’s what the great fathers do. I kept right on growing prouder of my knowledge of his written Word. I used the skills he gave me to distance myself from him. “For though the LORD is high, he regards the lowly, but the haughty he knows from afar” (Psalm 138:6 ESV, emphasis added). I taught the Psalms in Hebrew, but that verse never found a home in my heart until I heard the voice of the Lord speaking to me outside of the Bible.

The third error is the failure to explain why two who were not apostles, Stephen and Philip, did signs and wonders. This is an insurmountable exception to the theory that the purpose of signs and wonders was to authenticate the apostles as trustworthy teachers of doctrine.

The overwhelming majority of biblical examples of both godly ministry and passionate devotion are drawn from the lives of the few, special, and exceptional characters who became prominent in salvation history. It is impossible, therefore, to justify logically or biblically a hermeneutical principle that (1) is primarily based on the observation that only a few in the Bible possess or do certain things, and (2) functions to justify the cessation of these things. Paul is the only significant church planter in the New Testament, and most of the apostles seem to stay in Jerusalem rather than going out to plant churches. Does that mean that only the few were intended to plant churches, and that when Paul died, church planting also died? Even though the observation is correct, the conclusion is false, because it contradicts New Testament commands to evangelize and disciple the world (Matthew 28:18–20; Luke 24:47; Acts 1:8).

All of the gifts of the Spirit were in operation at the church in Corinth (1 Corinthians 12:7–10). Some have argued that 1 Corinthians 12:8–10 contains a summary of the gifts given to the whole church rather than gifts that were actually present in the Corinthian church. Their goal is to suggest that only the apostles and a few others experienced the miraculous gifts. They would like us to believe that the average Corinthian Christian only had the “nonmiraculous” gifts.4 Paul specifically contradicts this suggestion when he tells the Corinthians that none of the spiritual gifts (charismata) were lacking among them (1 Corinthians 1:7). The description in 1 Corinthians 14:26, where tongues and prophecy were present in the normal Corinthian worship service, also contradicts this interpretation. The gift of prophecy was also in use in Rome (Romans 12:6), Ephesus (Ephesians 4:11), and Thessalonica (1 Thessalonians 5:20). The casual way in which Paul mentions miracles in Galatians 3:5 suggests that miracles were common among the Galatian churches.