From Voice, Nov/Dec 2012. Used by permission.
Despite the fact that the majority of conservative evangelical
Christians since the Reformation have held to a cessationist position
with regard to divine revelation, true cessationists are rapidly
disappearing. In the articles and books I have written nothing has
evoked as much criticism and anger as my position that God is speaking
to His people today exclusively through Scripture. Due to the influence
of a multitude of popular authors, theologians and conference speakers,
cessationism is barely treading water, even within the most biblically
solid churches and organizations.
As a matter of fact, among those who claim to be evangelicals there
are five identifiable views prevalent today on the matter of revelation:
Pentecostal/Charismatic/Thirdwave
All miraculous gifts exist today, including the gift of prophecy. God
speaks through prophets and to His people both audibly (through dreams,
visions, words of knowledge), and inwardly (inaudibly in the mind or
heart). Representatives of this position are Jack Deere, John Wimber,
the Kansas City Prophets, the Assemblies of God and the Word of Faith
movement. Charismatic author Tommy Tenney, in his popular book The God
Chasers, writes,
God chasers…are not interested in camping out on some dusty truth known to everyone. They are after the fresh presence of the Almighty… A true God chaser is not happy with just past truth; he must have present truth. God chasers don’t want to just study the moldy pages of what God has done; they are anxious to see what God is doing.1
Classical Mysticism/Spiritual Formation
Through the use of various disciplines and spiritual exercises, God
will speak to us both audibly and inaudibly. Dallas Willard and Richard
Foster are two such examples. Willard, a leader within the Spiritual
Formation Movement, recently updated a previous book renaming it Hearing God, Developing a Conversational Relationship with God.
The thrust of his book is that we can live “the kind of life where
hearing God is not an uncommon occurrence, [for] hearing God is but one
dimension of a richly interactive relationship and obtaining guidance is
but one facet of hearing God.”2
In other words, the maturing Christian should expect to hear the voice
of God on a regular basis, independent from Scripture, and that voice
will reveal God’s individual, specific will for his life. Such personal
communication from the Lord, we are told, is absolutely essential
because without it there can be no intimate walk with God.3 And it is those who are hearing from God today, in this way, who will redefine “Christian spirituality for our time.”4
Evangelical Mysticism
God is speaking to Christians regularly, mostly inaudibly through
inner voices, hunches, promptings, feelings and circumstances (examples:
Henry Blackaby and Beth Moore). Southern Baptists ministers Henry and
Richard Blackaby wrote Hearing God’s Voice to “teach God’s people not only to recognize his voice but also immediately to obey his voice when they heard it.”5
They promise that “as you spend time with Jesus, you will gradually
come to recognize his voice more readily than you did at first…You won’t
be fooled by other voices because you know your Lord’s voice so well.”6
And, once you have figured out when God is speaking to you, “write it
down in a journal so you can refer back to it as you follow him.”7
In this category could be placed the New Calvinists or Calvinistic
Charismatics such as John Piper, Wayne Grudem, Mark Driscoll and C. J.
Mahaney. Their followers are sometimes called the young, restless, and
Reformed. Continue at Gary Gilley
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