A Relationship Only Some Can Have?

What this is about

Many Christians today are taught that a real relationship with Jesus means hearing him speak to you personally — often, about specific things in your life, beyond what the Bible says — and that this is what a mature Christian looks like. Those who don’t experience it can feel second-class.

This page asks: is that what the Bible and the historic Church teach? Or is it a modern idea? And if the Bible tells us how to recognise someone who loves Jesus, what does it say?

There are three ways of thinking about this:

The short answer

The first exercise: to whom is it said?

Eight things the New Testament says Christians have. For each, decide whether it’s said of all the believers being addressed, or only of some. Commit before you read the answer.

0 of 8 answered.

How the Spirit usually leads

If the Holy Spirit doesn’t usually lead Christians by a stream of private instructions, how does he lead them? The Bible’s answer is ordinary and thorough: through the Bible, through prayer (the Lord’s Prayer asks that God’s will be done, not that it be explained), through the Church, through communion, through wisdom, through a mind being renewed (Romans 12:2), through the work God has given us, and through his care in the circumstances of life.

The big things, God has told us plainly: be holy, give thanks, forgive, tell the truth, look after widows and orphans. The particular choices — which job, which city, often which person to marry — he leaves to wisdom, inside what he has told us. James assumes Christians make plans; he just tells them to say “If the Lord will” (James 4:15).

In 1750 John Wesley, who preached the Spirit’s work for fifty years, warned against people who expect “particular directions from God … in the most trifling circumstances of life”. How do you find God’s will, then? “Not by waiting for supernatural dreams … not by looking for any particular impressions or sudden impulses on his mind: no; but by consulting the oracles of God.” And he added that the Spirit helps “during the whole process”.

The Oxford theologian Austin Farrer told a true story from his own family in a sermon called “Inspiration by the Spirit” (in The End of Man, 1973, pp. 62–66). His cousin Harriet was told by a doctor that her leg should be amputated. “But,” she said, “that very night the Holy Ghost said to me, ‘Miss Barker, don’t you have it off.’” She was, Farrer says, “useless to herself, and a care to others, for the remaining forty years of her life.” His little aunt Ellen fainted at the sight of blood — yet through her teens the conviction grew in her that Christ wanted her to go to India as a missionary doctor, and she went. Farrer describes her calling as “slowly maturing in patience and fidelity, with no excitement, no tension, no oracles from the skies.” His advice: “always suspect claims to inspired guidance which bypass reasoned argument.” And his answer to whether ordinary Christians are inspired: “Yes, he is indeed. Just as inspired as he is Christian.”

The second exercise: how was it decided?

Eight decisions from Acts and Paul’s letters. For each, decide how the Bible says it was made: by a revelation or sign, by thinking it through, or by circumstances.

0 of 8 answered.

“If ye love me”

On the night before he died, Jesus told his disciples at length what their relationship with him would be like after he had gone. Over and over, he said the same thing: “If ye love me, keep my commandments” (John 14:15). “He that hath my commandments, and keepeth them, he it is that loveth me” (14:21). “This is my commandment, That ye love one another, as I have loved you” (15:12). And he promised: “If a man love me, he will keep my words: and my Father will love him, and we will come unto him, and make our abode with him” (14:23).

What would the Holy Spirit do? “Bring all things to your remembrance, whatsoever I have said unto you” (14:26). Remind, not replace.

John’s first letter gives the tests: we know we know him “if we keep his commandments” (2:3); we know we have life “because we love the brethren” (3:14); and if we see someone in need and shut our hearts, “how dwelleth the love of God in him?” (3:17). Every one of these can be seen by other people, over time. None of them is a private message.

That gives us a firm rule. A claimed word from God can’t overrule what Christ has already commanded. If someone says God told them to hate a group of people, to shun a family, or to leave their wife, they have proved the message isn’t from God. Even “an angel from heaven” preaching something different is to be refused (Galatians 1:8).

The third exercise: test the word

Seven things someone might say God told them. All are made up by this page. For each, decide: does it go against what Jesus taught, is it already in the Bible, or is it just advice to be weighed?

0 of 7 answered.

Where the idea came from

People have claimed direct messages from God since the second century, and the Church always tested them. Around 170, a group called the Montanists said the Holy Spirit was speaking new instructions through their prophets; the churches rejected it. Around 180, Irenaeus described a teacher named Marcus who told followers, “Open your mouth, speak whatsoever occurs to you, and you shall prophesy” — and they ended up thanking him and giving him their money.

The Reformers Luther and Calvin warned against people claiming the Spirit apart from the Bible. The Catholic mystic John of the Cross told people devoted to prayer not to seek visions or voices, because God has said everything in his Son. Wesley and Jonathan Edwards, leaders of the great eighteenth-century revivals, gave the same warning. The early Quakers were an honest exception: they did teach that every believer could be guided by an inner light.

The modern picture came together later. From the 1870s, holiness movements taught a “higher Christian life”, a second stage beyond ordinary faith. In the 1920s and 30s, a movement called the Oxford Group taught people to sit each morning with a notebook and write down their thoughts as God’s guidance. In 1935 a book called God Calling printed daily messages written as if from Jesus. Its best-known successor, Jesus Calling (2004), began with its author explaining that she knew God spoke through the Bible, “but I yearned for more.”

Is it Gnostic? Not really: people who hold this view believe in creation, in Jesus becoming human, and in the resurrection, which the Gnostics denied. But splitting Christians into the “spiritual” and the ordinary, and depending on those who claim special knowledge, is exactly what Irenaeus fought. His answer still stands: the truth is “within the power of all … in every Church”.

And for the ordinary Christian, there is good news. On the first Easter evening, the risen Jesus walked with two disciples. He talked with them by “opening the scriptures”, and they recognised him “in breaking of bread” (Luke 24:32, 35). Their hearts burned. That is still how he meets every one of his people — not just some.

Check it yourself

Six things, all short, nearly all free.

1. 1. John 14–15 and 1 John. Do this one. Thirty minutes. Mark every sentence that says how love for Jesus is recognised.
2. 2. 1 Corinthians 1–3 and 12–13. Twenty minutes. The church with every gift, and what Paul says it lacked.
3. 3. Acts 13–18. Twenty minutes. Note how each decision is made.
4. 4. Deuteronomy 18:9–22 and Isaiah 8:19–20. Five minutes. Divination forbidden, and what God gives instead.
5. 5. John Wesley, The Nature of Enthusiasm (1750), §§18–26. Fifteen minutes, free at the Wesley Center Online.
6. 6. One question, put to the Christian you most admire. Do this one too. Ask them, “How has Christ led you?” Then listen.