A Word for You This Month?

What this page is asking

The message is familiar across continents and denominations, and it has a recognisable shape. It is dated: this month, this year, before this quarter ends. It concerns circumstances: money, a job, a house, a marriage, a healing, an open door. It is unconditional: it is declared over everyone listening, whatever they believe or do. And it resets: when the month disappoints, the next month’s word explains the disappointment and renews the promise, without ever asking whether last month’s word was true.

Stated precisely:

Three positions, labelled, and used consistently throughout

This question can be got wrong in two directions. A page that only attacked cheerful preaching would end up commending gloom, and the New Testament does not do that either.

Notice what C and F share. Both say that God is good, that he hears prayer and that the believer has reason for hope. They disagree about one thing: whether that hope may be converted into a dated forecast of circumstances. That is the question the rest of the page follows.

What the page concludes, stated up front

The prompt behind this page

Everything below was produced by giving the following brief to a frontier language model with web search, which assembled and checked the sources. It is published so you can run it yourself, change it, sharpen it, or reverse it. Three experiments are worth more than reading this page. Reverse it: ask for the strongest biblical case for declaring a coming month or year over a congregation, and see which texts it must lean on and whether they are read in context. Date it: ask the model to collect year-ahead sermon titles from December 2019 and set them beside what 2020 brought. Apply it: paste in a monthly message you have actually received and ask which of the ten areas below it passes or fails.

Write a detailed, source-first, interactive article, in British
English, for a general reader who is willing to work. Quote Scripture
from the Authorised Version. Date and attribute every other
quotation: give the work, the edition or translation, the section,
and the page where possible. Distinguish evidence from inference at
the point of use. Verify every quotation against a reliable published
source; where a quotation cannot be verified, cut it. Do not invent
quotes or statistics.

TITLE. A Word for You This Month?

THESIS TO TEST. Many TV and social media preachers all over the
world have time-scoped messages. The typical message is that this
month will be marvellous. Then next month it is, "Have you lost in
the previous month? Don't worry! This month will be marvellous."
Contrast this with what the Bible says, with special emphasis on the
New Testament and the historic church. As a concrete example, a few
months before Covid, many said that the coming year would be a year
of special blessing.

SCOPE. This is about feel-good messages that seem to have no basis
in the Bible or historical Christianity. Where an area has already
been covered (such as prophecy, in Dossier 03), summarise and
cross-link rather than repeat.

AREAS TO TEST.
 1. Guaranteed success vs the cross (Mark 8:34-35; John 16:33).
 2. Prediction vs proclamation: the preacher announces what God
    has done in Christ (1 Corinthians 1:18-24; 15:1-4).
 3. Prosperity vs suffering as normal discipleship (Acts 14:22;
    Romans 5:3-5; 1 Peter 4:12-13).
 4. Wish fulfilment vs God's providence: "If the Lord will"
    (James 4:13-16; Matthew 6:10; Romans 8:28).
 5. Endless reassurance vs repentance: real consolation, but also a
    summons to repent, obey, forgive and pursue holiness (Acts 2:38;
    Titus 2:11-14); a return to loving God and neighbour.
 6. Short-term excitement vs perseverance (Hebrews 10:35-39;
    12:1-3; Revelation 2:10).
 7. Unaccountable prophecy vs discernment: false predictions cannot
    simply be forgotten when the calendar changes (Matthew 7:15-23;
    1 Corinthians 14:29; 1 Thessalonians 5:20-22).
 8. The celebrity messenger vs the historic Church: Scripture,
    creed, sacrament, communal discipline, pastoral accountability.
 9. Temporal rewards vs eschatological hope (1 Corinthians 15;
    Revelation 21:1-5).
10. Novel revelations vs "the faith once delivered" (Jude 3;
    2 Timothy 1:13-14), as the Fathers and later catholic, Orthodox
    and Protestant traditions judged teaching.

POSITIONS. Label and use consistently: C - the Consolation (God's
word for this month is his word for every month: presence, mercy,
forgiveness, the resurrection) HELD; F - the Forecast (this month
or year will bring improved circumstances) UNDER TEST; G - the
Gloom (expect nothing good in this life) REJECTED.

OBJECTIONS. Answer them inside the argument, in their proponents'
strongest terms. No separate counter-case section.

NAMING. No living person named as an example of anything. No
present-day preacher, ministry, broadcast or congregation described
or implied. Every monthly message quoted is composed and labelled as
composed. Historical figures named where the record is closed;
organisations only from their own published documents.

INTERACTIVES. A priors quiz up front. A sort of statements into
promise, forecast and prayer. A zoom-out reader for Jeremiah 29:11.
Tabs for other verses borrowed for monthly words, in context. A
predict-then-reveal on survey data. A twelve-month simulator that
shows what the reset does with every outcome. A predict-then-reveal
on what historic pastors said in a plague. An objection drill the
reader answers before seeing a reply. Memory cards. A month-by-month
view of what the historic church prayed. A verdict board. A closing
diagnostic for testing the next monthly word the reader hears.

OUTPUT: a single self-contained interactive HTML page, professional
and readable, light theme by default with a dark switch, stating the
question at the top, publishing this prompt in full, repeating key
points in prominent boxes for skimming readers, and giving the reader
something to do in every major section. Also produce a plain-English
quick version of about fifteen minutes with three short exercises.

The page you are reading is the output of that brief after the sources were checked. In three places the evidence added something the brief did not expect. First, the historic church was never silent about months: its calendar assigned a prayer to every week of the year, so the contrast is not between speaking to a month and refusing to, but between two very different things to say (Part XII). Second, the only dated forecast the New Testament gives to a church is a forecast of trouble: “ye shall have tribulation ten days” (Revelation 2:10; Part IX). Third, the demand for accountability does not come only from outside: in 2021, after widely publicised failed predictions, a group of charismatic leaders published a statement calling for public correction of prophetic words that did not come to pass (Part VI).

What do you currently think?

Ten questions. Each has an answer you can check in the texts and sources in Part XV. Answer before reading and lock them in; they come back in Part XIV beside the sources.

What follows

Anatomy of a monthly word

Begin with what the message actually says. The examples below are composed by this page; none is quoted from any person or broadcast. They are built to show a pattern that readers will recognise from their own feeds, and each exaggerates nothing that is not commonly heard.

The same pattern was visible on a larger scale at the end of 2019, when a wordplay on “20/20” circulated widely in sermons, church posters and social posts: 2020 would be the year of perfect vision, of clarity, of double blessing. That is a description of a common phrase, not an attribution to any speaker; readers can search for it themselves (Part XV). Within three months of the new year, churches on every continent were closed by a pandemic.

Four features

Try it: promise, forecast, or prayer?

Twelve statements. Some are Scripture, some are composed examples of the monthly word, one is the 2019 wordplay. Sort each into a promise Scripture gives believers, a dated forecast of circumstances, or a prayer or hope, rightly held loosely. Then read the note.

“If the Lord will”

One passage in the New Testament speaks to people who make confident statements about the next year. It is short enough to read in full.

James 4:13–16
Go to now, ye that say, To day or to morrow we will go into such a city, and continue there a year, and buy and sell, and get gain: Whereas ye know not what shall be on the morrow. For what is your life? It is even a vapour, that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away. For that ye ought to say, If the Lord will, we shall live, and do this, or that. But now ye rejoice in your boastings: all such rejoicing is evil.

Notice exactly what James objects to. The merchants are not wicked for planning to trade; James does not tell them to stop. He objects to the form of their speech: a period (“a year”), a place, and an outcome (“get gain”), stated as though the future were theirs to announce. His correction is not “expect loss” but “If the Lord will.” And he names the attitude: boasting, the confident public announcement of a future one does not control.

The monthly word differs from the merchants in one respect, and it makes the problem worse, not better. The merchants forecast their own year. The monthly word forecasts other people’s month, and does so in God’s name.

The same instinct elsewhere

Paul lived by the rule James states. He planned journeys carefully, and wrote them as plans under God’s will: “I will return again unto you, if God will” (Acts 18:21); “I will come to you shortly, if the Lord will” (1 Corinthians 4:19); “I trust to tarry a while with you, if the Lord permit” (16:7). Several of those plans did not happen as written, and he said so (2 Corinthians 1:15–23).

What “If the Lord will” does not mean

It would be easy to turn James into Position G, as though the Christian should expect nothing and pray for nothing. James says the opposite in the same letter: “ye have not, because ye ask not” (4:2), and “the effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much” (5:16). The Christian may ask boldly for a job, a cure, a safe journey, a good harvest. What changes is the grammar. A prayer asks; a forecast announces. A prayer leaves the answer with God; a forecast has already supplied it.

The borrowed verses

A monthly word usually comes with a verse. A small number of texts carry most of the weight, and the most borrowed of all is Jeremiah 29:11. It is an Old Testament text, and the page reads it because the monthly word does. Read it the way the monthly word reads it, and then read it the way its first hearers did.

Try it: zoom out, one layer at a time

Read the verse on its own, then add context a layer at a time. At each layer, before revealing the note, ask what the verse is promising, to whom, and when.

This is the sharpest irony on the page. Jeremiah 28 and 29 set two messages side by side. Hananiah’s was dated, near, and cheerful; it was also what the people wanted to hear, and it was false. Jeremiah’s was long, hard, and full of real hope; it told the exiles to build houses, plant gardens, marry, and “seek the peace of the city” where they were, because relief would come after they were dead. The monthly word quotes Jeremiah’s promise in Hananiah’s voice.

Try it: four more borrowed verses

Each tab shows a verse often attached to a monthly or yearly word, how it is used (in a composed example), what its setting says, and what it does promise.

The cross, not the breakthrough

The monthly word promises victory in the near term. The first thing Jesus told his disciples after they confessed him as the Christ was the opposite.

Mark 8:31, 34–35
And he began to teach them, that the Son of man must suffer many things … and be killed, and after three days rise again. … Whosoever will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me. For whosoever will save his life shall lose it; but whosoever shall lose his life for my sake and the gospel’s, the same shall save it.

Peter’s response to this teaching is worth noticing. He “took him, and began to rebuke him” (8:32). Peter was, in effect, the first to declare a better season over Jesus, and Jesus’ answer was the sharpest rebuke in the Gospels: “Get thee behind me, Satan: for thou savourest not the things that be of God, but the things that be of men” (8:33).

On his last night, Jesus gave his disciples a word for the time ahead. It is the closest thing in the Gospels to a word for the coming season, and it contains a forecast:

John 16:33
These things I have spoken unto you, that in me ye might have peace. In the world ye shall have tribulation: but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world.

There is a promise here, and it is enormous: peace, “in me,” and a victory already won. There is also a forecast, and it is “tribulation.” Jesus puts the good cheer on the far side of the tribulation, not in place of it.

Luther’s name for it

In 1518, defending his theology before his own Augustinian order at Heidelberg, Luther drew a line between two ways of doing theology. His twenty-first thesis reads:

A theologian of glory calls evil good and good evil. A theologian of the cross calls the thing what it actually is.

Martin Luther, Heidelberg Disputation, thesis 21 (1518). Luther’s Works, vol. 31, trans. Harold J. Grimm (Philadelphia: Muhlenberg, 1957), p. 40.

In the explanation that follows, Luther says the theologian of glory, not knowing God “hidden in suffering,” prefers “glory to the cross, strength to weakness.” The monthly word is a small, repeatable theology of glory. It calls a bad month the enemy’s defeat about to happen, and a good month the proof of the word. The theology of the cross calls a bad month a bad month, and then says where God is in it.

A year earlier, Luther had ended the Ninety-five Theses in the same place:

92. Away, then, with all those prophets who say to the people of Christ, “Peace, peace,” and there is no peace!
93. Blessed be all those prophets who say to the people of Christ, “Cross, cross,” and there is no cross!
94. Christians are to be exhorted that they be diligent in following Christ, their Head, through penalties, deaths, and hell;
95. And thus be confident of entering into heaven rather through many tribulations, than through the assurance of peace.

Martin Luther, Ninety-five Theses, 92–95 (31 October 1517). Trans. Adolph Spaeth, L. D. Reed, Henry Eyster Jacobs et al., Works of Martin Luther, vol. 1 (Philadelphia: A. J. Holman, 1915).

Thesis 92 quotes Jeremiah (6:14; 8:11). Thesis 95 quotes Acts 14:22. The Reformation’s founding document ends by rejecting preachers who promise peace, and by telling Christians to expect to enter heaven “through many tribulations.”

Suffering as normal

The monthly word treats a bad month as an interruption: something the enemy did, soon to be reversed. The apostles treated suffering as the ordinary condition of Christian life. Read three texts from three different apostles.

Paul’s own record, which he gives reluctantly, reads like a list of the months the monthly word promises will not come: “in labours more abundant, in stripes above measure, in prisons more frequent, in deaths oft … in weariness and painfulness, in watchings often, in hunger and thirst, in fastings often, in cold and nakedness” (2 Corinthians 11:23–27). He prayed three times for a “thorn in the flesh” to be removed, and the answer was no: “My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness” (12:7–9).

Hebrews 11 is the roll-call of faith, and it ends with those whose faith did not change their circumstances: they “were tortured, not accepting deliverance … they wandered about in sheepskins and goatskins; being destitute, afflicted, tormented” (11:35–37). The writer’s verdict on all of them, the successful and the destitute alike, is: “these all, having obtained a good report through faith, received not the promise” (11:39).

How widespread is the other belief?

The largest cross-national survey on the question is still the Pew Forum’s Spirit and Power study of ten countries, published in October 2006. It asked Pentecostals, charismatics and other Christians whether they agreed that “God will grant material prosperity to all believers who have enough faith.” Predict before you reveal.

Source: Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, Spirit and Power: A 10-Country Survey of Pentecostals (October 2006), p. 30. Surveys were conducted in 2006; figures are for respondents agreeing. The statement surveyed is about faith and prosperity in general, not about monthly or yearly promises specifically; no survey this page found measures time-scoped promises as such.

The reset: when a word can’t fail

A monthly word spoken in God’s name (“God is saying,” “the Lord showed me,” “I decree over you”) is a prophetic claim, whatever the speaker calls it. Scripture gives such claims a test that could hardly be simpler:

Deuteronomy 18:22
When a prophet speaketh in the name of the LORD, if the thing follow not, nor come to pass, that is the thing which the LORD hath not spoken, but the prophet hath spoken it presumptuously: thou shalt not be afraid of him.

The New Testament keeps the test and widens it. “Beware of false prophets … Ye shall know them by their fruits” (Matthew 7:15–16). “Let the prophets speak two or three, and let the other judge” (1 Corinthians 14:29). “Despise not prophesyings. Prove all things; hold fast that which is good” (1 Thessalonians 5:20–21). A church that received prophecy was told to weigh it, not to forget it.

The earliest church order outside the New Testament, the Didache (usually dated late first or early second century), gave congregations practical tests for travelling prophets. Two of them fit the monthly word closely:

Not every one that speaks in the Spirit is a prophet; but only if he hold the ways of the Lord. Therefore from their ways shall the false prophet and the prophet be known. … But whoever says in the Spirit, Give me money, or something else, you shall not listen to him; but if he says to you to give for others’ sake who are in need, let no one judge him.

Didache 11. Trans. M. B. Riddle, Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 7 (Buffalo: Christian Literature, 1886).

What the reset does to the test

Deuteronomy’s test depends on one thing: that the outcome is allowed to count. The reset removes exactly that. If a good month confirms the word, and a bad month is explained as the enemy fighting the good month about to come, then there is no possible month that counts against it. The word has become unfalsifiable: not proven, but immune to proof.

Try it: run the year

Twelve months, twelve composed monthly words. For each month, tell the simulator how your month actually went: better, about the same, or worse. Watch what the next word does with your answer. Or press “Let the year happen” to have the months decided at random.

Hananiah: a dated word, tested

The Old Testament gives one case of a time-scoped promise of relief tested in the open, and it is the chapter before Jeremiah 29:11. In 594/593 BC, with the first exiles already in Babylon, the prophet Hananiah announced in the temple: “Within two full years will I bring again into this place all the vessels of the LORD’s house” (Jeremiah 28:3). Jeremiah’s reply is the principle this page rests on:

Jeremiah 28:6, 9
Amen: the LORD do so: the LORD perform thy words which thou hast prophesied … The prophet which prophesieth of peace, when the word of the prophet shall come to pass, then shall the prophet be known, that the LORD hath truly sent him.

Jeremiah does not resent good news. “Amen: the LORD do so.” He wishes it were true. But a prophet of peace, he says, has to wait for the event before being believed. Then the word of the Lord came: “The LORD hath not sent thee; but thou makest this people to trust in a lie” (28:15). Hananiah died two months later (28:1, 17). The exile lasted seventy years.

Not only an outsider’s complaint

In April 2021, after widely publicised predictions about the previous year had failed, a group of charismatic leaders published a Prophetic Standards Statement calling for accountability within their own movement. Among other things it says that when a prophetic word proves wrong, the one who gave it “must be willing to take full responsibility, demonstrating genuine contrition before God and people,” and that “any statement of apology and/or explanation/clarification should be delivered to the audience to whom the erroneous word was given.” (Text as published at propheticstandards.com, updated August 2022.) Whatever one thinks of the wider movement, the principle is Jeremiah’s, and it is the opposite of the reset.

The plague year test

The year announced in late 2019 as a year of perfect vision became the year of a global pandemic. That was not the first time a Christian community entered a plague, and it is possible to set the 2019 forecasts beside what Christian pastors actually said when plague came before. Two cases are well documented.

Carthage, about AD 252

Around 250 a pestilence spread across the Roman world, and it reached Carthage in North Africa. Its bishop, Cyprian, had just led his church through the Decian persecution. Some of his people were troubled by something the plague revealed: it did not distinguish between them and their pagan neighbours. Before reading his answer, predict it.

But nevertheless it disturbs some that the power of this Disease attacks our people equally with the heathens, as if the Christian believed for this purpose, that he might have the enjoyment of the world and this life free from the contact of ills; and not as one who undergoes all adverse things here and is reserved for future joy. It disturbs some that this mortality is common to us with others; and yet what is there in this world which is not common to us with others, so long as this flesh of ours still remains, according to the law of our first birth, common to us with them?

Cyprian of Carthage, On the Mortality 8 (c. 252). Trans. Robert Ernest Wallis, Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 5 (Buffalo: Christian Literature, 1886).

In the next section he goes further: “if the Christian know and keep fast under what condition and what law he has believed, he will be aware that he must suffer more than others in the world” (On the Mortality 9). Cyprian did not promise his people that the plague would pass them by. He told them that a Christian who expected it to had misunderstood what he believed for.

Wittenberg, 1527

When plague reached Wittenberg in 1527, Luther was asked by the pastor of Breslau whether a Christian might flee. His open letter, Whether One May Flee from a Deadly Plague, allowed that many may, required pastors, magistrates and those with duties to their neighbours to stay, and described how he himself intended to act:

Therefore I shall ask God mercifully to protect us. Then I shall fumigate, help purify the air, administer medicine, and take it. I shall avoid places and persons where my presence is not needed in order not to become contaminated and thus perchance infect and pollute others, and so cause their death as a result of my negligence. If God should wish to take me, he will surely find me and I have done what he has expected of me and so I am not responsible for either my own death or the death of others. If my neighbor needs me, however, I shall not avoid place or person but will go freely.

Martin Luther, Whether One May Flee from a Deadly Plague (1527). Trans. Carl J. Schindler, Luther’s Works, vol. 43 (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1968), pp. 131–32.

Luther prays for protection, which is Position C: bold prayer for a good outcome. He does not promise himself or anyone else that the prayer will be answered as asked: “If God should wish to take me, he will surely find me.” And he spends most of the passage on what he owes his neighbour.

What the apostles announced

The monthly word is a prediction: it announces something that will happen to the hearer. The New Testament’s word for preaching, kērygma, is a herald’s proclamation: it announces something that has happened. Paul summarises what he preached:

1 Corinthians 15:1, 3–4
Moreover, brethren, I declare unto you the gospel which I preached unto you, which also ye have received, and wherein ye stand … For I delivered unto you first of all that which I also received, how that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures; And that he was buried, and that he rose again the third day according to the scriptures.

Every verb in the gospel is in the past tense. Christ died, was buried, rose. The only future Paul attaches to it is the resurrection of the dead, which the rest of the chapter argues. And he contrasts the gospel with what audiences ask for: “For the Jews require a sign, and the Greeks seek after wisdom: But we preach Christ crucified, unto the Jews a stumblingblock, and unto the Greeks foolishness” (1 Corinthians 1:22–23).

Try it: what did the apostolic sermons announce?

Acts records the content of several apostolic sermons. Ten things a sermon might announce are listed below. Tick every one you think appears in the sermons of Acts (2, 3, 10, 13, 17 and 20), then check.

The apostles did make promises about the future, and they made them boldly: forgiveness, the gift of the Spirit, “times of refreshing … from the presence of the Lord” (Acts 3:19), and a day of judgement and resurrection (17:31). Every one of those promises is either given now or waits for the return of Christ. None is attached to the coming month.

Repentance and endurance

Two features of apostolic preaching are almost entirely absent from the monthly word. The first is a call to change. The second is a call to endure.

Consolation that summons

The apostles comforted constantly. Paul calls God “the God of all comfort; Who comforteth us in all our tribulation” (2 Corinthians 1:3–4). But their comfort always came with a summons. The first Christian sermon ends: “Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins, and ye shall receive the gift of the Holy Ghost” (Acts 2:38). And when Paul describes what grace itself teaches, it is a way of life:

Titus 2:11–14
For the grace of God that bringeth salvation hath appeared to all men, Teaching us that, denying ungodliness and worldly lusts, we should live soberly, righteously, and godly, in this present world; Looking for that blessed hope, and the glorious appearing of the great God and our Saviour Jesus Christ; Who gave himself for us, that he might redeem us from all iniquity, and purify unto himself a peculiar people, zealous of good works.

Grace here does not promise a better month. It teaches a different life in “this present world,” while looking for a hope that is not in this world at all. The summary Jesus gave of that life is the two great commandments: love God with all your heart, and your neighbour as yourself (Matthew 22:37–39). A monthly word that asks nothing of the hearer except to receive has left both out.

Jesus was once told about a disaster: Galileans killed by Pilate, and eighteen people crushed when a tower fell at Siloam. The popular reading was that the victims must have been worse sinners. Jesus rejected it, and then turned the event into a call to his hearers: “I tell you, Nay: but, except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish” (Luke 13:1–5). He did not tell them their own coming year would be spared.

Try it: answer the objection before reading a reply

Endurance, not monthly peaks

The monthly word runs on a cycle of excitement: a high at the start of the month, disappointment at the end, and a new high with the new word. The New Testament’s long-distance virtue is patience (hypomonē, endurance), and the letters return to it constantly.

There is a word that Scripture does renew every morning, and it is worth setting beside the monthly word. It was written in the ruins of Jerusalem after its fall to Babylon:

Lamentations 3:22–23
It is of the LORD’s mercies that we are not consumed, because his compassions fail not. They are new every morning: great is thy faithfulness.

What is new every morning is not the circumstances; the city was still in ruins. It is the mercy.

Try it: ten texts to carry into any month

Read the question on each card, try to recall the text, then turn it over and mark whether you knew it.

The hope that is dated

It would be wrong to say the New Testament gives no dated hope. It gives one, and it sets the date by an event rather than a calendar: the return of Christ, the resurrection of the dead, and the renewal of all things. The monthly word takes that hope and moves it forward to next month.

1 Corinthians 15:19–20
If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable. But now is Christ risen from the dead, and become the firstfruits of them that slept.

Paul’s logic is striking. If the Christian’s hope were for this life only, Christians would be the most pitiable people alive, because this life does not reliably reward faith. The hope that makes the Christian life worth living lies on the far side of death. And when Scripture describes the moment all trouble ends, it places it there:

Revelation 21:4–5
And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away. And he that sat upon the throne said, Behold, I make all things new.

“Behold, I make all things new” is sometimes quoted on the first of a month. It is said from the throne at the end of history, over a new heaven and a new earth (21:1).

Calvin, writing in the Institutes, drew the pastoral conclusion from this. Affliction, he says, is one of God’s means of loosening our grip on the present:

Whatever be the kind of tribulation with which we are afflicted, we should always consider the end of it to be, that we may be trained to despise the present, and thereby stimulated to aspire to the future life. For since God well knows how strongly we are inclined by nature to a slavish love of this world, in order to prevent us from clinging too strongly to it, he employs the fittest reason for calling us back, and shaking off our lethargy.

John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion III.9.1 (1559). Trans. Henry Beveridge (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1845).

Calvin is careful in the same chapter not to become Position G: the present life is a gift of God, not to be hated, and its blessings are to be received with thanks (III.9.3). What he refuses is to let the present life become the place where hope lives. The monthly word moves hope into exactly that place.

The messenger and the faith once delivered

The last two of the ten areas concern not what is said but who says it and where it comes from.

The media messenger and the historic church

Historic Christianity, in its Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant forms alike, placed preaching inside a set of checks. The preacher was ordained by others and answerable to them. What he preached was read alongside an appointed portion of Scripture, confessed in a creed, and joined to the sacraments. His congregation knew him, and he knew them, and discipline ran in both directions. None of these checks is a guarantee against error, and every tradition has records of their failure. But each gives the hearer somewhere to take a complaint.

A monthly word delivered by broadcast or social feed usually stands outside all of them. The speaker does not know the hearer’s month and will not be present at the end of it. The hearer cannot bring the word back and ask for it to be weighed. The format rewards frequency, reach and response, and a monthly cadence suits it perfectly. This is an observation about the medium, labelled as analysis, and not a claim about any speaker’s motive. But Paul’s warning fits the medium uncomfortably well:

2 Timothy 4:3–4
For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but after their own lusts shall they heap to themselves teachers, having itching ears; And they shall turn away their ears from the truth, and shall be turned unto fables.

Where the monthly word is tied to a gift (a “seed” for the month, a first-fruits offering to secure the year), the Didache’s test in Part VI applies directly, and so does Peter: “through covetousness shall they with feigned words make merchandise of you” (2 Peter 2:3). What a giver owes and does not owe is the subject of Dossier 08, “Just Give. Don’t Ask Questions.”

Novelty and the faith once delivered

Jude urged his readers to “earnestly contend for the faith which was once delivered unto the saints” (Jude 3). Paul told Timothy to “hold fast the form of sound words” and to keep “that good thing which was committed unto thee” (2 Timothy 1:13–14). The early church’s standing test of a teaching was whether it belonged to that deposit. Around 434, Vincent of Lérins put it in a formula: hold “that faith which has been believed everywhere, always, by all” (Commonitorium 2; trans. C. A. Heurtley, NPNF II/11, 1894).

The monthly word does not pass that test and does not try to. It presents itself as a fresh word for a fresh period, which is its appeal. The page has looked for a precedent in the Fathers, the medieval church and the Reformers for a practice of declaring improved circumstances over a congregation for a coming month or year, and has found none. What it found instead, in Parts IV, VII and XII, is the opposite practice, consistently, across traditions that agreed on little else.

What the church said to each month

Here the evidence corrected the brief. It would be natural to assume that the historic church simply had no word for a particular month, and that the monthly word fills a gap. The opposite is true. For most of Christian history, in the East and the West, time itself was organised as a word from God. The church’s year ran from Advent through Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Easter, Ascension and Pentecost, and then through the long season after Trinity (or Pentecost) back to Advent. Every Sunday had its appointed readings, and in the Western churches every Sunday had its own short prayer, the collect, many of them translated from Latin prayers already centuries old.

So the historic church did give its people a word for this month. The question is what it said.

Try it: pick a month

Choose a month to see a prayer or confession the historic church put in its people’s mouths at roughly that time of year, set beside a composed monthly word for the same month. The collects are from the English Book of Common Prayer (1662), the most widely used Protestant prayer book; seasons that depend on Easter move by a few weeks each year.

Three texts that answer the monthly word directly

The Litany. Cranmer’s English Litany of 1544, kept in the 1662 prayer book and prayed on Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays, asks deliverance “from lightning and tempest; from plague, pestilence, and famine,” and then prays:

In all time of our tribulation; in all time of our wealth; in the hour of death, and in the day of judgement, Good Lord, deliver us.

The Litany, Book of Common Prayer (1662).

The church prayed to be delivered in its time of wealth as well as its time of tribulation, because it regarded prosperity as a spiritual danger in its own right. It expected both to come, and did not tell God which to send.

The Heidelberg Catechism (1563), the most widely used confession of the Reformed churches, defines God’s providence in terms that could be read as a list of months:

[Q. 27] The almighty and everywhere present power of God; whereby, as it were by his hand, he upholds and governs heaven, earth, and all creatures; so that herbs and grass, rain and drought, fruitful and barren years, meat and drink, health and sickness, riches and poverty, yea, and all things come, not by chance, but by his fatherly hand.
[Q. 28] That we may be patient in adversity; thankful in prosperity; and that in all things, which may hereafter befall us, we place our firm trust in our faithful God and Father.

Heidelberg Catechism, Lord’s Day 10, Q. 27–28 (1563). Traditional English translation, as published by the Christian Classics Ethereal Library.

“Fruitful and barren years” both come by the Father’s hand. The catechism teaches the believer how to receive each: patience in one, thanks in the other, trust in both. It does not teach him to forecast which is coming.

The Covenant Service. From 1755 John Wesley led Methodists in a service renewing their covenant with God, adapted from the Puritan Richard Alleine; he published the order in 1780, and it became the Methodist way of beginning a new year. Its prayer, in the form used by British Methodists since 1936, is the historic Protestant “word for the new year”:

I am no longer my own, but thine. Put me to what thou wilt, rank me with whom thou wilt. Put me to doing, put me to suffering. Let me be employed for thee or laid aside for thee, exalted for thee or brought low for thee. Let me be full, let me be empty. Let me have all things, let me have nothing. I freely and heartily yield all things to thy pleasure and disposal.

The Covenant Prayer, Methodist Book of Offices (1936), adapted from John Wesley, Directions for Renewing Our Covenant with God (1780).

How the saints spoke at the end

Two deaths from the early church have been retold for centuries precisely because of what was said. Asked in about 155 to curse Christ and save his life, the aged bishop Polycarp of Smyrna replied: “Eighty and six years have I served Him, and He never did me any injury: how then can I blaspheme my King and my Saviour?” (Martyrdom of Polycarp 9; ANF vol. 1). He said it on his way to the fire. And John Chrysostom, deposed as archbishop of Constantinople and dying on a forced march into exile in 407, is reported to have died with the words is reported by his friend and biographer Palladius to have ended with the words “Glory be to God for all things.”ldquo;Glory be to God for all thingsis reported by his friend and biographer Palladius to have ended with the words “Glory be to God for all things.”rdquo; (the account goes back to his friend and biographer Palladius, Dialogue on the Life of Chrysostom 11).

Neither man’s last month was marvellous by any measure the monthly word uses. Both said God had done them no wrong.

The judgement, and a test

Before seeing the page’s verdicts, give your own. Ten claims, one for each of the ten areas in the brief.

Try it: rate the thesis claim by claim

The page’s judgement

So the thesis stands. The New Testament and the historic church give no basis for promising believers a better month, and none for renewing that promise whatever happened in the last one. What they give instead is not less hope but a different hope: Christ’s presence in every month, mercies new every morning, forgiveness, the call to repent and to love, strength to endure, and a resurrection no month can cancel. That word does not need to be reset, because it was never placed on the month.

Try it: test the next monthly word you hear

Seven questions to ask about a message you have actually received: on television, online, in a forwarded image or from a pulpit. Nothing you select is stored or sent anywhere. The result applies the tests of this page; it is a way of organising the evidence, not a verdict on any speaker.

Your answers, revisited

Here are your locked-in answers from the top of the page, beside what the sources say and where each is discussed.

Check it yourself

Sixteen items. The Scripture is free in any edition, and nearly all of the historic material is free online (New Advent; CCEL; Project Wittenberg). If you read only three, read the first three. Together they take about twenty minutes and settle the core question without any help from this page.

1. 1. Jeremiah 28–29. Read this first. Ten minutes. Two prophets, two timetables. Note Hananiah’s “two full years,” Jeremiah’s “seventy years,” and where 29:11 falls between them.
2. 2. James 4:13–17 and Matthew 6:25–34. Read this first. Five minutes. What to say about next year, and what to do about tomorrow.
3. 3. Cyprian, On the Mortality (c. 252), especially sections 1–16. Read this first. A bishop writing in a plague. ANF vol. 5; free at New Advent.
4. 4. Mark 8:27–38; John 16:25–33; Acts 14:19–23. Peter’s rebuke, Jesus’ last word before the cross, and Paul’s word to new converts after being stoned.
5. 5. Romans 5:1–5 and 8:18–39; 2 Corinthians 4:7–18; 11:23–12:10; 1 Peter 4:12–19; Hebrews 11:32–40. Suffering as normal, and faith that did not change its circumstances.
6. 6. Acts 2:14–41; 3:12–26; 10:34–43; 13:16–41; 17:22–31; 20:17–38; 1 Corinthians 15. What the apostles announced. Count the dated promises of better circumstances.
7. 7. Deuteronomy 18:15–22; Matthew 7:15–23; 1 Corinthians 14:29–33; 1 Thessalonians 5:19–22. How a word spoken in God’s name is tested. Then Dossier 03 for the full treatment.
8. 8. Hebrews 10:32–39; 12:1–13; Revelation 2:8–11; Lamentations 3:19–33. Endurance, the ten days at Smyrna, and mercies new every morning.
9. 9. Didache 11–13 (late 1st or early 2nd century). Tests for travelling prophets. ANF vol. 7; free at New Advent.
10. 10. Martin Luther, Ninety-five Theses 92–95 (1517) and Heidelberg Disputation theses 19–24 (1518), LW 31. The end of the theses is free at Project Wittenberg.
11. 11. Martin Luther, Whether One May Flee from a Deadly Plague (1527), LW 43. Widely reprinted online since 2020.
12. 12. John Calvin, Institutes III.7–10 (1559), on self-denial, bearing the cross, meditation on the future life, and the right use of the present life. Beveridge trans., free at CCEL.
13. 13. The Book of Common Prayer (1662): the Litany, and the collects for the Sundays after Trinity. Free at the Church of England website. Read the collects for Trinity 4, 6 and 8 together.
14. 14. Heidelberg Catechism, Lord’s Days 1 and 10 (1563); and John Wesley’s Covenant Service (1755; published 1780). Both free online in many editions.
15. 15. Pew Forum, Spirit and Power: A 10-Country Survey of Pentecostals (October 2006), especially p. 30; and the Prophetic Standards Statement (April 2021; updated 2022), propheticstandards.com.
16. 16. Your own archive. Search your video history, your messages or a search engine for “2020 year of perfect vision” or “2020 year of double” with a date filter ending in December 2019. Then read the messages posted in April 2020. Note whether any of them mention December.

No living person is named on this page as an example of anything. No present-day preacher, ministry, broadcast or congregation is assessed or identified. Every monthly message quoted is composed by this page and labelled as composed; the 2019 “perfect vision” wordplay is described as a widely circulated phrase and attributed to no one.