False Prophets: 7 Signs to Discern Lies and Truth in the Prophetic
When I am teaching introductory classes about the prophetic gift there is nearly always a question from one of the nervous participants along the lines of, “What if I prophesy wrongly or inaccurately—does that make me a ‘false prophet’?”
Most beginners in the gift wrestle to distinguish the voice of God from their own internal monologue. Layer this with perhaps some limited biblical knowledge and/or a lack of linguistic ability that might struggle to apply the English language to the voice of the divine, and we can probably surmise that a reasonable amount of prophecy from novices poorly reflects what God is actually trying to communicate!
Nevertheless, in these entry-level classes we are always careful to reassuringly respond that, “No, wrong words make you a poor prophet, not a false prophet.” We make it clear to our inexperienced students: false prophets are out to see the church utterly destroyed. If you want to see the church completely annihilated and under demonic control, then, yes, you are very likely a Jezebelic false prophet! The aim in giving this comfort to beginners in the gift is to empower them to have a go at prophecy in a safe environment and to iron out, with us, their early-years stumbling blocks to prophetic utterance.
However, in the more senior classes that we teach to emerging prophets, the definition of “false prophet” we give runs a much narrower line, where persistent failures in the waters of poor prophecy that cause and culminate in an unrepentant and repetitive leading astray of the people, will earn you the unfortunate title of “false prophet.” Perhaps not a false prophet by Jezebel’s standards, but nevertheless a “false” prophet in the sense of single-mindedly and continually leading people away from the core of the word of the Lord, and from Jesus Christ Himself. Maybe the term “unfaithful prophet” is a more accurate term to describe this kind of erroneous behavior, where a person’s heart genuinely loves Jesus, but they are flawed in how they keep outworking “revelation.” (Conceivably, there might be a sliding scale downward, from poor prophecy to unfaithful prophet to false prophet. And that goes for the other fivefold gifts too!) Whatever we call them, the sad fact is that the unfaithful prophet usually does untold damage before they are stopped in their tracks.
Characteristics of Unfaithful Prophets
1. Self-Promotion
Self-promotion is when you prophesy for personal advantage, redefining God for personal agenda. Most prophets will know what stirs a congregation up and can play this to their benefit. At its core it is feel-good revelation to get people on your side and liking you, promising all sorts of advancement and financial reward from God into their lives, with no tempering of holiness or process. It’s introducing ourselves more than we introduce God—you know that you’re on thin ice when congregations are hearing more about your product and resources than what God is actually saying. (Included under this category would be the publishing of “click-bait words” for fame on social media, just so that you rise in notoriety.)
Once this spirit of self-preference over God preference has taken hold it will lead to a violation of good prophetic protocol and best practice, releasing words without due process. The word will sound good to you, and you know it will make you look great (or get you views), and so you give in to the temptation of releasing it without the due diligence of submission, testing, and editing.
This category of unfaithful prophecy also includes political preference over God preference and national preference over Kingdom preference. In this, our personal biases lead us away from promoting God’s words and into promoting our own preferred or inherited ideologies.
In general, good protocol dictates that 1) words for churches go to church platforms, 2) words for leaders go to leaders (these are not often for public consumption), and 3) words for nations can be more publicly shared. Therefore, learn to manage your prophetic urgency and your need to be seen, by rightly appropriating words and sitting on your personal desire for visibility. You have nothing to prove—we all know everybody can hear the voice of God (see 1 Corinthians 14:31). It’s not impressive to hear God, but it is impressive to steward those words righteously. In Scripture we see that major words for governmental leaders often came on the back of preestablished relational lines of communication. For example, Daniel was summoned, Joseph was recommended and called upon, and Micaiah was invited in. If you don’t have access to the political leaders, pray it instead. Ask God the reasons why you don’t yet have access to deliver the word: are you trustworthy in motive with not wanting your own name known? So note this well: if you don’t have relational access to a leader, the word is for you to pray, not for you to show off.
2. Distorting the Message
Remember, God is equally wrath and love. If you cannot navigate both, you will bring an incomplete representation of God. When you do this, you lead people away from the fullness of who He is. Distortion is willfully misrepresenting God to be either harsher, or kinder, than He has communicated with you through His word. I would urge you to ask some trusted people what it’s like to be on the receiving end of your revelation, because it is easy to get caught up in a moment and to misunderstand the impression that you are giving of what God has said.
3. Releasing Fear and Anxiety
Releasing or putting atmospheres into the room that are not the Kingdom of God is another sign of an unfaithful prophet. John writes, “Dear friends, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world” (1 John 4:1 NIV). We are to test the spirits of the prophet. This is noteworthy—we are not just to weigh the words (see 1 Corinthians 14:29). In testing the spirits, we test the motivation of the speaker, we test the atmosphere or spiritual feeling that they have created. Did their word come from the Spirit of God, their human spirit, or a demonic spirit?
If you prophesy from a fear base, a wrong judgment base, or a base of over-realized compassion, your “spirit” or motivation will not be wholly pure. Be aware that you can show unsanctified compassion and even speak mercy where God is not speaking mercy. Therefore, when we listen to words, we weigh and judge what they do in the room.
Did they motivate us and call us into the right place, or, for example, did they just drop us into unsanctified fear and tension?
When you release words from the wrong motivation, you rob the people of God’s best. God always has our best interests at heart over the long haul, even during our trials. Even if there is the need to release a word about the consequences of sin, there must always be some redemption woven into it. I have heard prophetic words that are right in their content and wrong in their motivation, meaning that they will have created an ungodly response in the hearts of the listener, despite their accuracy. Therefore, the prophet must ask what the will of God is. Your question must be, “What is God’s best here?” and not, “What is my best outcome for this room?” The right attitude coming from you the prophet will enable challenging words to be received. After all, you want your listener to be motivated to follow God with relative ease.
4. Problematic Altar Calls
My definition of a “problematic altar call” is when a congregation rushes to the front to receive an impartation from the speaker rather than from God. A prophet should not lead people to themselves or exclusively and consistently to the impartation that they can give, but to God. We seem to have developed a strange and disturbing church culture of believing that it is the speaker who has what we want or need! We must always be very clear that prophetic words and messages do not originate in the prophet. They originate with God, and they are given to connect people back to Him.
St. Augustine wrote, “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.”1 Have we created restless people by our ministry style, which brings men to us and establishes the repetitive, habitual need to receive from a person, leading to the modern phenomenon of “conference junkies”?
Have we got sucked into mixing up an addictive recipe that contains a sprinkle of inspiration, a dash of theology, a touch of the Bible, and a whole lot of sweet personality? Leaders, speakers, and ministers, have you ever asked yourself, “What motivates people to come forward at the end of our meetings? Why do we call them to the front?” If we answer ourselves honestly, it is probably more often for self-validation reasons (to make us feel that we’ve done a good job) rather than for any deep stirring from God Himself in that moment.
5. Stale Words
Traveling ministers often exhaustedly prophesy the same thing over and over again because they lack the preparation time to receive and interpret a fresh word. Admittedly, God sometimes has us carry words for an extended season, but one of my personal pet hates is someone telling me of a word or dream they had that is many years old. It is usually quite apparent from this that the sharer has not recognized that the timeframe for implementation of the revelation has long ago expired. Watch that your words are not out of season!
Even the stork in the sky knows her appointed seasons, and the dove, the swift and the thrush observe the time of their migration. But my people do not know the requirements of the Lord (Jeremiah 8:7 NIV).
Be punctual to your season. Understand that seasons change—and can change very rapidly. It’s why Peter the apostle talks about being “established in present truth” (see 2 Peter 1:12 NKJV)—truth is always true, but God certainly seems to have varying truth emphases across different seasons—and also why Ecclesiastes tells us that there is a time and season for every activity under heaven. Sometimes we embrace, sometimes we refrain! (See Ecclesiastes 3:1,5.)
A preacher speaking from yesterday’s revelation can lead us into methodology, stuckness, and boredom! Stale words become a trap to us—we get out of the pace of God and fail to realize what is required from us today. They cause us to lose our edge and pull us into protecting where we are, rather than motivating us to embrace advancing. Prophetic people recognize stale communication by the level of frustration it awakens internally—even though there may be nothing intrinsically wrong with what is being said. You can listen to considerable quantities of preaching and prophesying, and the content rings true, yet you still find yourself unnerved by it. This is frequently because it is not in step with what God is doing in the present moment.
From the tribe of Issachar, there were 200 leaders of the tribe with their relatives. All these men understood the signs of the times and knew the best course for Israel to take (1 Chronicles 12:32 NLT).
Issachar has always been understood to be the prophetic tribe because of their understanding of the timings and rhythms of the calendar for the nation of Israel. A mature prophetic voice will continually be seeking to keep their people up to date with what God is saying in that present moment, as well as being able to secure a people’s future by understanding how to frame their forth-telling. Take time to ask God if what you are carrying is still fresh and has not expired.
6. Prophesying Prayers
Turning our intercession into a “thus says the Lord” (prophesying our prayers) has led whole people groups to follow what one person (or more) earnestly desired, rather than responding to what God was saying. This doesn’t always happen for nefarious reasons or because of ulterior motives and can often come about inadvertently or by an accidental overshoot. So much of our time together should be spent pouring ourselves out in prayer, and it takes great maturity and discipline to only pray as the Spirit leads, mirroring the standards and plans of the Kingdom of Jesus in our intercession. However, our prayers frequently fall into the cate- gory of our own demands and desires, where we pray through our preferences, not pausing to listen to the Lord. We fail to realize (or admit) that our preferences are not always either what God is saying or what He wants us to pray.
Prophets must be very guarded and extremely careful in identifying the difference between a word of prophecy and a word in prayer. Both should be what God wants, but often a word of prophecy is what God is saying and a word in prayer is what we are personally desiring. For example, you can, by all means, bring the political candidate that you desire to be elected before the Lord in prayer, but do not make that a prophetic utterance! Just because you petition it in prayer does not mean that God wants it or will do it. Prophets, we must keep ourselves to a high standard, where we are clinically clear in our communication, outlining either that we are prophesying or that we are praying, with no room for any ambiguity.
7. Prophesying Other People’s Words
“Therefore…I am against the prophets who steal from one another words supposedly from me.” So declares the Lord in Jeremiah 23:30 (NIV). The Message interprets this verse vividly:
I’ve had it with the “prophets” who get all their sermons secondhand from each other. Yes, I’ve had it with them. They make up stuff and then pretend it’s a real sermon.
As we can clearly see, the Bible is very strong on the error of echoing prophecy! Even if a senior, established prophet has brought a marvelous word that resonates with our own spirit and we judge it to be a true word, we still must hold ourselves to a standard where we source what God is saying to us. God gives different revelation to each prophet to form a woven collective tapestry of all our parts. Revelation is entrusted into personality types that can deliver its differing styles and approaches. What He puts into one prophet, He will rarely put into a second prophet in exactly the same way. Words certainly will join up and overlap but are rarely ever identical.
Therefore, watch out that you do not become lazy, scared of getting it wrong, or overly enamored with another prophet’s approach to the point that we withhold the part that is our portion—and therefore mandatory for us to bring.
Be Faithful to Your Portion
If we have inadvertently stepped into any of these seven unfaithful behavior patterns, it is time to take some time out and ask God to reframe how we disseminate and steward the revelation He has for us to bring. We want to be faithful to our portion and found faithful to the call, not found accidentally unfaithful by slipping into sloppy habits or modeling what we see around about us.
