God Told Me

What you may hear

Adult class, offered as the end of a discussion:

“I was praying about it and God told me to take the job. I just had this overwhelming peace about it, so I knew it was him.”

Or from a teacher, in a children’s class: “If you get real quiet, God will speak to your heart and tell you what he wants you to do.”

Why it matters

Start with what is not wrong. God does govern our lives. Christians do pray about decisions and often come away settled. Wisdom, counsel, and a quiet conscience are real gifts and it would be foolish to sneer at them.

The problem is the promotion. An impression gets described as a word from God, and once that happens three things follow that the speaker never intended.

It cannot be tested. A word from God is not open to correction. If the peace was the message, then anyone questioning the decision is questioning God, and the conversation is over.

It outranks Scripture in practice, no matter what the person says about Scripture in principle. The written Word is public, checkable, and sometimes unwelcome. The inner impression is private and congenial. When they conflict, you can guess which one bends.

It leaves people with no answer when nothing comes. Teach a class that God speaks in impressions and you have created a room where the ones who hear nothing conclude God is not speaking to them — while he is, out loud, in the book on the table, every Sunday.

With children this is sharper still. Tell an eight-year-old that God will speak to her heart if she gets quiet enough, and she will get quiet, and she will hear her own thoughts, and she will either manufacture something or decide that God talks to everyone but her.

What to do instead

1. Relocate the speaking, do not deny it. God speaks. He does it in a way you can point at: the Word read, preached, and applied. That is not a lesser form of speech. It is the form he promised.
2. Give the impression its real name and keep it. “I prayed, I thought about it, I felt settled, so I decided” is honest, useful, and unobjectionable. Nothing is lost but the claim.
3. Teach the test. Anything that contradicts Scripture is not from God, whatever it felt like. Say this before it is needed, calmly, when nobody’s decision is on the table.
4. Protect the ones who hear nothing. Say out loud, in class, that many faithful Christians never have such experiences and are not missing anything.
5. Escalate when an impression is directing someone somewhere harmful. If a person is making a serious decision — about a marriage, a job, a child, their own safety — on the strength of a private message, that goes to the pastor promptly. This is one of the few entries where the doctrinal problem can become an urgent pastoral one.

One line you can actually use

“God does speak to you. He does it in a book, out loud, where somebody else can check it.”

If the student asks

“So God doesn’t guide us personally? That feels cold.”

The objection is fair and the answer should not be a lecture on enthusiasm.

“He guides you constantly — through the Word, through wisdom, through the people he put around you, through circumstances you didn’t arrange. What I’m not going to do is tell you your feelings are his voice, because the day they’re wrong, you’d have to decide whether God lied to you. I’d rather you have something you can go back and read.”

The children’s version — “how do I know what God wants me to do?” — has a plain answer: he has told you, in the commandments, and everything he hasn’t told you is yours to decide with the mind he gave you.

The confessional citation

Binding:

• Augsburg Confession V — the Spirit is given through the Word and sacraments as instruments; the article rejects those who hold that the Spirit comes to people without the external Word, through their own preparations and works. Decisive, and worth noticing that the Confession names this error rather than merely disagreeing with it.
• Small Catechism, the Creed, Third Article — the Spirit calls by the gospel, enlightens with his gifts, and keeps in the true faith. The instrument is named.
• Small Catechism, the Ten Commandments — what God requires is published, not intuited.

Supplementary, not binding here: the Smalcald Articles on enthusiasm are the classic Lutheran treatment and the best further reading.

Scripture: 2 Timothy 3:16–17; 2 Peter 1:19; Deuteronomy 29:29.

What not to do

• Do not ridicule the experience. Something real happened to this person; you are correcting the label, not the event.
• Do not deny providence. A God who no longer governs anything is not the Lutheran alternative to enthusiasm.
• Do not make Scripture into a decision-vending machine. “The Bible tells you which job to take” is the same error in a different costume.
• Do not press someone in front of the class. A person defending an impression publicly will dig in. Say the principle; take the case aside.