How to Discern Truth Amid a Sea of False Prophesies

Test #4: Do any concrete realities accompany the prophetic word?

Obviously this flows from the previous test. There will often be some sort of tangible confirming reality embedded in or accompanying the prophecy itself. When God called Moses to go to Egypt and tell Pharaoh to let the Jewish people go, the built-in confirmation was a physical burning bush. When Saul, who became Paul, received his call to ministry, he saw a bright light, heard an audible voice and suffered blindness for a few days. These were concrete manifestations accompanying the revelations.

In 1992 I received a flood of prophetic words indicating that God wanted me to plant a church in Denver. I had just resigned from a difficult position as executive pastor of a large church, and I very much wanted to leave town. I told the Lord that if He were truly speaking through those words, He would have to provide three months’ worth of income upfront.

The confirming reality came when people attending a conference in Vermont, where I was a speaker, began to give to us. No announcement had been made, but before it was over, those wonderful people had provided one-and-a-half times the amount I had asked of the Lord. A concrete reality accompanied the prophecy.

Obviously, not all true words contain an immediate confirming reality. In such cases, the prophetic word should be prayed over, not lived for, until reality does or does not validate the word.

Test #5: Have you filtered out your emotions?

Human emotions form a kind of lens that distorts the prophetic word, magnifying and adding to it, as it passes through the heart of the prophetic person. Emotions affect the hearer in the same way, shaping what and how we hear. Extreme negative words excite our fears, ignite anticipation and even inflate our sense of pride in knowing something esoterically spiritual.

On the other side, positive words can have the same impact, effectively shielding out the peace flowing from the Father’s heart and distorting the word as we allow ourselves to be carried away. We must seek and live in intimacy with the Lord, not the excitement generated by any positive or negative prophetic pronouncement.

I will never forget the months leading up to the 2008 presidential election. I was actually with a group of well-known prophetic people who declared that Sam Brownback, then a senator from Kansas, would be the next president.

First, this reflected an emotional desire to see a conservative candidate in the office and it clouded their hearing. Second, their emotional state prevented a reasoned assessment—a reality check—of the condition and direction of the culture around us. Barack Obama won the election.

Test #6: Have you measured the speaker’s fulfillment record?

Before receiving any prophetic word as truth, take time to examine the track record and character of the speaker. While I don’t believe the New Testament requires 100 percent accuracy, it does require substantial accuracy.

In Acts 11:28, Agabus accurately prophesied a famine so that the body of Christ could prepare in advance. Later, in Acts 21:11, he told Paul that the Jews would arrest him if he went to Jerusalem.

One hundred percent accurate? Not quite. The Romans, not the Jews, arrested him, although they did it in response to Jewish pressure. Agabus’ track record for accuracy fell just short of 100 percent, but he was certainly accurate in substance.

Deuteronomy 18:21-22 addresses this kind of scenario: “You may say in your heart, ‘How will we know the word which the Lord has not spoken?’ When a prophet speaks in the name of the Lord, if the thing does not come about or come true, that is the thing which the Lord has not spoken. The prophet has spoken it presumptuously; you shall not be afraid of him.”

Examine, therefore, the track record of the speaker.

In my opinion, we as a Christian body have done this poorly. When a prophetic speaker’s words have failed to be at least substantially accurate over time, we ought to stop listening. The problem is that some prophetic ministers very skillfully stir up excitement, which leads those of us conditioned by our emotionally driven culture to keep listening, even after a demonstrable history of inaccuracy.

In any case, Jesus remains our rock, the One—the only one—in whose eternal words we can rest. In Him we place our faith, not in the prophetic pronouncements of fallible men and women. Scripture cannot be broken, but words passing through the hearts of broken men and women certainly can be.

This must not lead us to deny the prophetic gift, but rather to grow in maturity and perhaps to dismantle the pedestals on which we have so perilously placed these precious saints who move in the prophetic gift.

R. Loren Sandford is senior pastor of New Song Church and Ministries in Denver and author of several books, including Visions of the Coming Days and Purifying the Prophetic. Though recognition as a prophetic voice has never been his ambition, his passion for people and the church have led directly to a prophetic calling and the need to hear the voice of God so he could help prepare God’s people for the coming days.

Listen to prophetic insight Loren Sandford shared in 2008 about the American church that still rings true today at prophetic.charismamag.com