This post was updated on 20260220.
I still wonder sometimes why God has me writing these blogs and making these videos, when I feel like I am the least of all to teach others anything because I am the one who is still learning the most—because I am learning directly from God-in-my-mind, day-and-night. Some of it, I’ve never heard another human being teach and if I tried to teach it, I would utterly fail because it is too complex. That’s when I hear God say, “Exactly. My children don’t need any more human teachers to tell them what to think; they need to become my pupils so that I can teach them always.” I realize that God doesn’t want me to teach what I know, but rather to show how I regularly learn from God.
I am not trying to say that human teachers are a bad thing. I have received much encouragement from the words of several Christian leaders:
- Shawn Bolz (but I can’t recommend him anymore),
- Randy Clark and Global Awakening,
- Bill Johnson, Kris Vallotton,
- Todd White and Lifestyle Christianity (but I can’t recommend him anymore),
- Ben Fitzgerald and Awaken Europe, as well as
- For King and Country,
- Mercy Me,
- all of Bethel Music,
- Tauren Wells,
- Danny Gokey, and the like.
Through some (not all) of the words of these people, God confirmed what God spoke to me beforehand—but THAT is the difference between godly discipleship and worldly discipleship. Human teachers tell you what you should think, while God-as-teacher uses human beings to confirm what God is teaching you.
The Fruit of Human Teachers
When I first starting on this crazy journey called Christianity, I was taught to “sit under the teaching of” human teachers. My pastors, Bible study leaders, and small group leaders got to tell me how to pray, how to read the Bible, how to walk out my religion. The authors they recommended were on my authorized reading list. If I ran across someone new, I would ask for their approval or disapproval of my new option. They decided what I learned and what I didn’t. I concluded they did so by hearing from God in a way I didn’t. But I was wrong.
The problem was, they weren’t asking God, they were replicating their human Christian “culture”. Very little of what they were teaching me was what God wanted me to learn. They taught me to read the Bible regularly—that was from God—but the way they taught me to interpret the Bible was not from God. In fact, it was just a collection of interpretations passed on from pastor to pastor, and teacher to teacher which—when compiled—was called “doctrine” or “systematic theology”. Their actions were no different than rabbi after rabbi, and lawyer after lawyer memorizing what this person or that rabbi said about the Jewish Bible in Yeshua’s day: teaching without authority. Yet these rabbis were the very same people who could not recognize Yeshua when they met him face-to-face.
“You study the scriptures because you believe they will give you eternal life but these scriptures testify about me; yet you refuse to come to me.”
John 5:39 (My Paraphrase)
A House on Sand
When I went to seminary, I realized the folly of my ways. After an anointed teaching by the President of the seminary about how the scriptures are really translated and interpreted (not really unto black-and-white conclusions, but into a whole lotta gray), my faith fell out from under me.
After some time, I realized I had spent years studying the scriptures but not doing all that they said because I had been taught that way by man. I didn’t follow the Holy Spirit like Yeshua said to, I followed human church leaders. I didn’t heal the sick, raise the dead, cast out demons, or cleanse lepers like Yeshua said to, I explained those instructions away because they were no longer “for our time”. In fact, I didn’t really have faith in God—so I couldn’t please God—and I certainly didn’t have a personal relationship with God because relationships requires two-way conversation. I didn’t dialogue, I monologued and then tried to extract life-rules from the scriptures—rules that those very scriptures said would only keep me stuck in my brokenness. So they did.
When yet another relationship with a narcissist caused my PTSD’d body to start shutting down, I realized that the fruit of building my faith upon the teachings of man was a crumbling life. Much like a house built sand, when the wind and the waves came, it could not stand.
“But everyone who hears these words of mine and does not put them into practice is like a foolish man who built his house on sand. The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell with a great crash.”
Matthew 7:26-27 (NIV)
God as Teacher
That’s when I cried out to God and demanded he/she speak to me like the prophets in the Bible. God (gladly?) accepted my demands and began to speak. “I love you, I’m going to heal you,” was one of the first messages God used to teach me about him/herself. “I worried that Satan was trying to trick me! “You know the Bible. Who uses love and who uses fear?” God asked. That’s when realized the judgmental doctrine-Nazi God that I thought I served was not God at all; the loving voice that wouldn’t leave me alone day or night until I relented to his/her pursuit and let him/her love me into wholeness was the real God.
From that day to this, God has used at least one event per day to teach me about the nature of: God, angels and demons, men and women, adults and children, the Earth and the stars, and so on. I can’t remember one-tenth of it in my mind, but my heart and body have been transformed—healed—by the hearing of it. Some weeks (like the last few weeks) the learning is so much that the idea of stopping to write it all down feels overwhelming. Then, I remember that I don’t have to share what God taught me, only how God teaches me.
Who is Your Teacher?
When God is your teacher, the teaching never stops, so your growing never has to stop. You are not limited by the experiences of human beings with limited faith, or people pursuing a calling that is not yours to pursue. Instead, you are learning from a boundless being full of love and power, purpose and plans for YOUR life, who knowsYOU intimately, and speaks in a way that only YOU will understand, because YOU are a unique fingerprint of God that never has and will never exist again.
Who is your teacher? If it’s not God, or you don’t know, I invite you to pray some version of this prayer:
God, please become my teacher. I want to learn from you first, and let your teaching be confirmed by the testimony of two or three witnesses until I can recognize your voice and your methods in my life. I want to be your disciple, conformed to your image, not an image of any human being, no matter how holy they may seem. I give you permission to help me unlearn what is in error, so that I can become like a child and come to you as a little child. I pray this in Yeshua’s name, amen.
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