I'm very skeptical. By nature, I'm very skeptical.
I'm skeptical of everything, but I'm willing to believe anything.
Two minutes and speak to how the prophetic works today.
Define it.
How would you...
Would you take two minutes and define it?
How you would discern what is true biblical prophecy today?
How you weigh it as to whether or not it is true or false?
How it might be stated, if it were true? Must it be verifiable?
Does it have to be specific in the way it stated so that you can discern?
Or a lot of times I see it's this broad, general broad, sweeping kind of statements.
it's unverified?
It's hard to know. I mean, I'm not kidding about defining it, because a term like that
is used in lots of different ways.
And sometimes the person using the term isn't even thinking about,
like, is the person hearing me thinking this or this or that?
You know, it's just not registering at all?
You know, they're not really thinking about it. So I do think we need to be aware of that,
that the term itself can be parsed in different ways.
But I'll just use a personal example here.
So if I had somebody come up to me and said, "Hey, Mike, I had a dream last night,
and you were in it. And I saw this or that or the other thing happening,
and you know, this is your car, and I saw this, you know."
And basically, they're thinking,
I didn't really see anything happen, or I did see something happen to you.
I just wanted you to know that I had this dream. What I would say is, thank you,
I would check and see, am I omniscient today? Because I wasn't yesterday.
And if I'm not omniscient today, I don't know whether this is a word from God or not.
I won't dismiss it, I'll think about it. If I find myself in a situation described like that,
maybe the Lord will bring something to mind
that will make me make the right turns instead of the left, I don't know that.
I'm willing to have that direction, but I don't know that it means anything.
So I would wait and see what Providence produces.
If there's content to it; some doctrinal, whatever, you know, some teaching point,
I'm going to immediately put that in my sifter when it comes to Scripture.
And if it's like, well, you know, I can't really see anything wrong with that.
Maybe that's an idea I should think about. Or maybe I'll get some clarity on it later.
You see, because I actually believe that if God can do this, I think he can.
He's also capable of alerting me to the fact
that oh, this hooks into that conversation you just had, dummy.
So I like to describe myself as I'm willing. I'm very skeptical. By nature, I'm very skeptical.
I'm skeptical of everything, but I'm willing to believe anything. Okay, I'm both.
What I want is I want to see does it produce fruit. I want to see if it aligns with Scripture.
And if I can't weed it out, after those two initial questions, I'm willing to just sit here on it.
I don't know.
Now, I think it gets overused a lot. This whole idea, because a lot of it, you know,
I don't go around interviewing people, you know, hey, what, what prophetic word
did you hear someone say or what dream did you... you know, I don't bother with that.
But a lot of the stuff that I've heard, this is the thought that pops into my head.
Well, could you just go read that, like over in Matthew 4?
Like, why is that new? And then again, if I'm in an impish mood
the second thought would be, well, maybe God knows they're not reading their Bible.
Like he had to actually tell him something, but again, that's needling it a little bit.
But a lot of this stuff I find is already revealed in Scripture.
So I don't know what the point is when it's that kind of stuff.
So if it's not then it's like, okay, you know, maybe the Lord's in this,
maybe he's not maybe it's just you had pizza or something, you know, who knows?
But I'm willing to suspend judgment on it and just wait and see.
That's just how I handle it.