What Charismatic Christians Get WRONG About Hearing God’s Voice

When I was a kid, no one ever taught me about hearing God’s voice. I think the closest anyone ever got was by paraphrasing Jiminy Cricket’s line from the old Disney Pinocchio movie: “Always let your conscience be your guide.” So, outside of the words spoken at Sunday morning services, I never expected to “hear” God speaking to me.

When I was twenty-five, that changed when a friend invited me to a Rodney Howard-Browne revival meeting and the Lord baptized me in His Spirit. Days later, I was able to hear a voice which just HAD to be that of the Holy Spirit. Oh, it wasn’t audible, but consisted of words that stirred in my gut, then traveled into my mind as coherent sentences. My body would actually have a visceral reaction when this happened.

Long story short, this was not God.

It was a demon.

Though it eventually was forced out of me by a lot of worship and prayer, it continued to impersonate the Holy Spirit from outside of me. Two decades passed before I figured out that it couldn’t be God, because one day the voice would be telling me to grow an MLM business, and a month later it would be telling me that I was out of God’s will doing it, that I should be blogging instead.

For one of many examples.

Ladies and gentlemen, God does not have ADHD (I say that will all due respect to those who do, because I’m one of you). His mind does not change.

More to the point: He rarely speaks words into your head. In hindsight, only a half dozen or so times when I “heard” a voice clearly was it God. The time I remember most vividly was a day in late 1999. I was pouring rice or beans into a bag from a Whole Foods Market bin, trying to store up a year's worth of dried goods in preparation for the coming and inevitable Y2K crisis.

The words You don’t have to do this dropped into my mind so clear and so authoritative, that I instantly stopped filling the bag.

And I woke up the morning of January 1, 2000, to find the world just as it had been the day before. 

The voice had been correct; I hadn't needed to stock up on a year's worth of food as the false prophets in the church had been claiming. I could only assume that that time, the voice had been God's. 

Whoa whoa whoa! Back up, Emily! Your saying you’d been baptized in the Holy Spirit, and then possessed by a demon? That’s impossible!

First of all, it’s not impossible. Explaining how is beyond my spiritual paygrade, but get online and you’ll find other people talking about their experiences with demon possession even though they had saving faith in Yeshua. And maybe it hadn’t been possession in my case, but just an occasional whack to my spirit.

Regardless, there’s another equally important question to ask here, and that is, where on earth did the evil spirit come from?

I’d like to think that Rodney H.B. was not as corrupt in the mid-nineties as he has become, and that the only spirit moving in his meetings was the one promised by Yeshua to be our teacher and comforter. But I can’t be sure. What I can say with a decent amount of confidence is that sometimes, in some places, there are demons that impersonate the Holy Spirit during charismatic Christian church services that cause the same kind of manifestations that occur when God’s presence touches people.

That is another fact that you can verify with deep enough research.

But I think the real problem was that I inadvertently invited the enemy into my life with pride. The friend who had invited me to the revival meeting dumped a pile of books from the Word of Faith movement into my lap. I remember reading Charles Capps and several books by Kenneth Hagin in particular. (Hey, I was a naïve twenty-five-year-old, okay? Give me a break.)

One Hagin book in particular said that if I wanted any of the gifts of the Spirit, all I had to do was pray for them (an assertion with zero Scripture behind it). Well, I’d seen Rodney prophesy at the meetings, and I thought it was really cool. Wouldn’t people be impressed if I had the spirit of prophesy? I got disproportionately excited about it (welcome to the world of ADHD). I was finally going to be somebody important!

So I asked God for the gift of prophesy.

I got some kind of answer, but it wasn’t from God. That was when I started to get words in my gut.

Among other things, I ended up embarrassing myself by writing out several false prophesies for the pastoral staff to read. Worse, I ended up hurting a new friend by falsely prophesying that she was supernaturally pregnant.

I need to emphasize that the words coming out of my mouth weren’t mine. I had little control over what I said. I felt like if I didn’t let them out, I was going to explode.

Ladies and gentlemen, does that kind of manipulation sound like God to you?

“The Lord told me…”

Thus we arrive at one of many problems with the charismatic non-denomination denomination: the members, already feeling superior because they believe they have something special that other Christians don’t, hear words in their gut and/or head and believe it has to be the Holy Spirit.

Even when the words build up their pride.

Even when the words encourage self-centeredness.

To say things like, “I think the Lord is leading me this way,” or, “I believe God impressed me to do Y” is one thing. To claim that they actually hear clear words from God is another.

It rarely happens.

Yet charismatic Christians use the phrase, “God told me” all the bleeping time.

Why?

Because when you have a “pastor” who has no real accountability to anyone else and therefore is a spiritual loose cannon, that person is bound to eventually develop, if not a Messianic complex, then an ego the size of Texas.

Which they will not repent of.

Which will give the enemy free rein in their services.

Leading to many in the congregation unwittingly to acquire a guardian demon.

ALSO.

Many charismatic Christians are poorly discipled, if at all, and end up like me: full of pride and feeling superior to other Christians. This lack of humility opens you up to all sorts of literal hell. It's the invitation the demons hovering around you have been waiting for.

The REAL voice of God. 

Outside of Scripture, the voice of God is almost always:

**1. A growing conviction over time, or

**2. A wordless knowing on the inside.

And in both cases, the conviction or knowing will never glorify people, nor go against God’s Word.

So the next time a Christian starts to say that the Lord told them something, slowly back away. Or, if you’re up for it, challenge them.

Feeling convicted or frightened by my words? If you’re truly a Christian, and you've been "hearing" a spiritual voice that you thought was the Holy Spirit,** you can get rid of your unwanted invisible and fake friend with a simple command for them to leave. That’s what I did.

It got real quiet for a while. Uncomfortably quiet.

Until I remembered that I’m supposed to walk by faith. Not by a constant stream of suggestions, affirmations, and clarifications.

And when I remembered that?

Peace.

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 **This works the same if you are constantly bombarded with negative thoughts.