It Was All God – Pride or Humility?

– By Henry E. Neufeld

The gentleman came to me with a sheaf of papers after a meeting at which I was speaking. “I’d like you to read this,” he said, holding them out to me.

Now this was before I had started publishing, not that I haven’t had related experiences since. But even so, this gentleman wanted me to tell him whether he should seek a publisher. In our conversation, it actually became clear that what he wanted to hear was that his manuscript was great and he should urgently seek a publisher. He wanted affirmation, not discernment.

He looked right at me and said: “God gave me all of this. These aren’t my words. I couldn’t have written them. It was all God.”

There are at least two ways to take a statement like that. The first is that the man believed that what he was holding in his hand was something good. (For the record, it wasn’t. I can’t tell you it was wrong; it was simply too incoherent for me to be certain.) He might then be humbly saying that he could not do this on our own. It is good for us to remember that without God, we are not. Period!

But there is another sense in which such a statement might be made, and I have sensed it in many cases, and this is to try to force someone to pay more attention. It might be that the writer is concerned about the quality and wants to catch the reader’s intention. It might be that the writer lacks credentials and believes that the claim that God did it is the only thing that will give the contents weight.

I commit an entire chapter of my book When People Speak for God to this topic in a chapter titled Practical Considerations of Hearing. The problem is that we are all too willing to make the claim to be speaking for God in the church today without realizing how serious such a claim is.

via www.energionpubs.com

This is some very important reading from Henry E. Neufeld.

Read the entire article and read the book!

Henry's cautions and suggestions extend beyond a call for better language around issues of inspiration, prophetic utterances, and authoritative speech. They call for genuine humility before God and man rather than the kind that claims a direct pipeline to and from the will of the Father.