I thought God was speaking to me. But was He really?
I was on fire for Jesus after returning from Bangkok, telling anyone who’d listen that God is bigger than any of us could comprehend, yet He loves us and is with us in our day-to-day lives, even when we don’t notice Him quietly orchestrating everything behind the scenes. I shared my crazy stories as a testimony, not intending to boast in myself, but in God, and most people shared in my excitement. However, not everyone did.
One of them was “Andrew,” a member of my small group. Andrew was a pastor’s son and had been a Christian for over twenty years. He had come from a church known for its intense study of the Scriptures. He knew the Bible very well.
Andrew didn’t believe that the God speaks to people the same way today as He did during biblical times, so all this talk of me hearing God caused him concern that I was being deceived by Satan. It didn’t help that I left for Bangkok before getting baptized: Andrew accused me of putting my career interests ahead of God by taking this screenwriting job instead of pursuing ministry, and for not postponing the trip until after I was baptized. I didn’t see it that way at all, and I replied to Andrew that the reason I left for Bangkok when I did was because I believed that God was the one who had sent me there to begin with.
He asked me why I believed that. I told him about the time I prayed for help and heard that I’d get paid to write a movie in Bangkok sometime in June, so when the offer to write a movie in Bangkok came in on June 1st, I couldn’t help but see that as a fulfillment of “what God had told me.”
Andrew was adamant that there was no way I could have “heard” God, as God only speaks through the Bible, and that we cannot trust voices, impressions, or dreams.
I countered that God spoke to people through voices and dreams throughout the Bible: Moses, Samuel, Gideon, Daniel, Joseph (both of them– the Old Testament Joseph, son of Jacob, as well as the New Testament Joseph, husband of Jesus’ mother, Mary), just to name a few. Andrew insisted that God only did that during biblical times, but doesn’t do that anymore. He warned me to be careful of anything presented as “gifts of the Holy Spirit.”
I couldn’t understand this. Weren’t gifts of the Holy Spirit biblical? I read about them in the first Letter to the Corinthians. If what Andrew was saying were true, then what had I been experiencing all these years? The dreams about meeting my wife, who spurred me to start going to church? The voice calling me to let go of my show and serve in ministry instead? My falling to the ground in laughter and tears the moment I believed that Jesus Christ died on a cross so that I could be forgiven? Weren’t these all good things? It’s not like I was hearing voices telling me to worship other gods or deny who Jesus is. We’re called to test the spirits to see if they’re from God (1 Jn. 4:1-3), and no one can say that Jesus is Lord except by the Holy Spirit (1 Cor. 12: 3).
Andrew and I butted heads, with neither one of us willing to flinch from our positions. Our battle spilled over into small group meetings, which I, as the leader, should not have allowed. Our spat got ugly at times: one of our group members told me that if I didn’t resolve this conflict, it could tear the entire group apart.
Our group members would email one another Bible verses that were meant to encourage everyone, but Andrew and I used them as ammo to defend our positions while attacking each other. One night, I got an email from Andrew that so infuriated me, my wife said, “Look at your face. You’re scaring me. What’s wrong with you?” I stormed off into our home office, ready to fire off a reply-all response, when I caught sight of a card that Andrew had given me before we started fighting. I had placed the card on a stand and set it on my desk.
The card had my name on it, along with its meaning—“Crowned one.” At the bottom of the card was a verse from Jeremiah, chapter 29, verse 11:
“For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.”
When I read these words, they virtually jumped off the card and confronted me to my face. I felt a sudden release of pressure within me, like a large tennis ball being chopped in half, releasing the air that had been compressed within it. The words I read were no longer just words printed in ink on card stock; they were the Word of God, “alive and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart” (Heb. 4:12).
I was cut to the heart, convicted of my sin towards Andrew, whom I now realized God had placed in my life not to harm me, but to prosper me, to help prepare me for the future. Andrew turned out to be the mentor I had been praying for– I had desperately prayed for someone who could help me process the events of my journey, and I was expecting someone like a pastor, but God instead gave me a member of my own small group. This reinforced the lesson I had learned in Bangkok about not putting my trust in princes, but in God Himself.
My anger and resentment towards Andrew had built up like a pressure cooker, manifesting in the fearsome look of rage Soo saw on me just moments earlier. Ephesians 4:26-27 says, “‘In your anger do not sin’: Do not let the sun go down while you are still angry, and do not give the devil a foothold.” The moment I forgave Andrew and thanked God for placing him in my life, that pressure was released; the devil no longer had a foothold on me.
I resolved to reconcile with Andrew, and even though I still did not agree completely with his arguments, I would humble myself and concede defeat, if that’s what it would take to bring peace back into our small group. Reconciliation can only begin when one party reaches out to the other.
I emailed Andrew that night to arrange a meeting at my home, when Soo wouldn’t be around. It would be just Andrew and me, face to face, man to man.
When Andrew came over, I was ready to apologize when he shocked me by apologizing first. I told him that I was the one who needed to apologize, and we ended up competing for the right to apologize to the other, like two friends who both insist on paying the check at a restaurant. It was a display of mutual submission that ended with hugs and a restoration of the love and respect we used to have for one another. I saw beauty in the way God worked: it was when I agreed to humble myself and seek forgiveness from Andrew that God moved Andrew to do the same.
Let us therefore make every effort to do what leads to peace and to mutual edification. (Rom. 14:19)
A lot of good came out of this conflict. I learned that in order to understand the true gifts of the Holy Spirit, I’d have to study what the Bible says about them because it is entirely possible to be deceived by Satan and his demons, who can counterfeit miraculous displays of power, signs, and wonders (2 Thess. 2:9-10), and appear as “servants of righteousness” (2 Cor. 11:14).
God soon provided me with two more mentors, both of whom had years of experience in ministries involving gifts of the Holy Spirit. One of them would constantly stress to me that the Bible is the word of God and the most accurate way He speaks to us, so any revelations we might receive by way of voices, impressions, dreams, or words must be tested and found in alignment with Scripture, because God will not contradict His own word. He encouraged me to be like the Bereans, who “examined the Scriptures every day” to see if what they were being told was true (Acts 17:11). I remembered the impression I received early on about needing to study the Bible and know it well.
This mentor was one of the lay leaders serving with my primary mentor, pastor “Rocky,” whom our senior pastor had connected me to via email when I first returned from Bangkok. Rocky had experience working with freaks like me: people at church who heard voices and saw visions, thinking we might be crazy because no one else around us could relate. Rocky was starting to bring us all together so that we could, as a community, study the Scriptures and find a biblical way to exercise our gifts, like Professor X pulling together a band of misunderstood mutants to teach them how to use their powers for good. At Pastor Rocky’s invitation, I started attending his group’s regular meetings.
What a relief to know that I wasn’t crazy after all.
One of the first things we were taught was that we weren’t special. Gifts of the Holy Spirit are distributed as He determines (1 Cor. 12:11) for the sake of the common good (v. 7). These gifts are not for us personally, and we did nothing to earn them or deserve them, so we cannot take pride in them. Because the Holy Spirit testifies about Jesus (Jn. 15:26), gifts of the Spirit should not to draw attention to us, but to Jesus, the only One who should receive glory.
We were taught to see ourselves as servants, not superstars. And that’s the way it should be.
He must become greater; I must become less (Jn. 3:30).
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