Back in the early 2000’s I was a volunteer with Living Stones Christian Fellowship at Penn State and was being trained to do campus ministry.  We did a retreat each fall and spring (I think this was the fall retreat), and I was praying and fasting prior to the event.  I was also at a stage in my life where I had just begun to learn to hear God’s voice and was practicing it at every opportunity.  As I prayed for the event, I began to seek God about it.  In that process I may or may not have asked the Lord what the speaker was supposed to preach on (I don’t recall), but I definitely asked God what He wanted to do during the weekend.

After writing down the list of things God shared with me, I went to one of the campus pastors with the list in hand . . .

. . . and told him God wanted to do the things on the list, so he needed to tell the speaker to speak on those specific topics.

Yes, I literally told him that.

In hindsight that probably wasn’t one of my brightest or best moments, and the campus pastor seemed to agree with that analysis.  He rebuked me for being arrogant and prideful and informed me that the speaker hears from God perfectly fine without my assistance and that if God wants the speaker to address something, then he will tell the speaker about it, not me.

I was taken aback by the response, as I felt it was somewhat important, and he not only didn’t listen to me at all but chastised me for wrong heart motives.  Certainly, he might not have been entirely wrong, but keep in mind that I was still fairly new to the prophetic.  In spite of the fact that I was learning that anyone can hear from God, that somehow didn’t translate into recognizing that anyone can hear from God, least of all people who had learned to hear God’s voice long before I did.  I wasn’t intentionally being arrogant, but rather was inexperienced.  Nevertheless, he did have a good point.  I even tried to talk to the speaker, who was someone from the church, and he wasn’t very open to listening to me either.  With all doors firmly shut in my face, the only option left was to pray.  And while praying probably should have been the first thing that I did, I didn’t know that.

Fast forward to the event, even though they weren’t the message “topics”, he addressed every single thing on my list as key components of his messages.

What did I learn from this?

First, I was right.  But there was another lesson:  God talks to other people too.  Don’t feel a need to broadcast everything God tells you to others, especially if you lack sufficient platform or individual relationship.  Pray and let God do the work.  After all, that’s probably half or more of the reason he told you in the first place.

I recently read something in Ivan Roman’s book Prophets Among Us (a book I highly recommend), that pointed out that prophets often get so excited and instantly invested into the things God shares with them that sometimes they forget either the timing or other factors related to the situation.  While I’m not claiming to be a prophet by sharing this, I can tell you I felt an urgency behind what the Lord shared with me, and the urgency combined with prophetic immaturity certainly wasn’t a great combination.

Growing in the prophetic is as important as learning to hear God’s voice.  If all we do is learn to hear God but never grow in maturity beyond that, we end up doing things like I did—things that make us look like arrogant jerks, know-it-alls, or worse.

Just because God gives us a word about something doesn’t mean everyone else needs to change to fit what we believe God is saying.  It can be a struggle, as our heart’s desire is often to see what we hear God saying come to pass, but oftentimes prayer is all that is needed in a given situation.  When we realize the power of prayer, we will be better equipped to trust that our prayers accomplish far more than our efforts at human manipulation.  In the end, this key of wisdom for growing in the prophetic is to learn when to share, and when to pray—and to recognize that we are always supposed to pray regardless of whether we share or not.