SO YOU THINK YOU'RE CALLED TO BE A PROPHET?

Dear PTB: Since you say you are praying the binding and loosing prayers (I am assuming from Shattering Your Strongholds), I will try to answer your questions that are really somewhat out of the format that this Q&A page was intended to provide. It was intended for questions regarding use of these principles. I will try to address, quite directly and truthfully, your questions below. If you feel offended or angry at anything I say, please stop and pray the binding and loosing prayers immediately to bring your soul into whatever submission to God's will that you can. You have asked me to speak into your life, which I am honored to do. I will speak carefully from what I believe is the truth of God. Know that anger, defensiveness, hurt feelings, and offense are reactions out of the soul, they are never a reaction from the born again spirit.

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Rev. Savard, I haven't been a Christian for long, maybe a little over a year and I've backslid once already. Several months ago I became a member at my church and I am really loving the Lord and all that He has done and is doing and going to do in my life. I've asked God to reveal to me my calling and He has. I'm a prophet and soon to pastor or maybe just preach in my own ministry. The Lord has led me to a lot of scriptures with the warning of being deceived and about false prophets coming up. I'm a little confused as to whether or not God was telling me that I was a false prophet or if I should beware of false prophets?

I'm very pleased to see that you are aware of the possibility of being deceived. Good for you. The danger is not so much in whether or not you might be a false prophet, as it is in whether or not you might be a "baby" prophet-yet-in-training who is giving false prophecies. Both 1) prophets with unsurrendered souls and hardened hearts, and 2) immature "baby" prophets-in-training with unsurrendered souls and tender hearts, can "prophesy" false prophecies. What is the common factor here? THE UNSURRENDERED SOUL.

I've already applied the scriptures that He led me to to myself, but I still get alot of prophetic words and revelations. I'm aware that just because one gets revelation or prophecies, that doesn't necessarily mean that they are a prophet

God has clearly said in many places in the Scriptures that a prophet will be known or judged to be a true prophet if the words of the prophet come to pass. Two of these verses are Jeremiah 28:9, "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" (KJV), and Ezekiel 33:33, "And when this cometh to pass, (lo, it will come,) then shall they know that a prophet hath been among them" (KJV). In other words, the coming to pass of the words prophesied is the true test of ANY prophet's words. To be a true prophet of the Lord requires a strong commitment to searching and reading and meditating upon the Word of God so as to not prophesy a soulish prophecy. You need to have a strong inner foundation of the Word to recognize subtle deceptions from your unsurrendered soul or the devil. To be a true prophet of the Lord requires a surrendered and submitted soul, and a fixed commitment to wanting only the will of God to be done--never the will of the prophet. This is exactly the goal of the binding and loosing prayer principles, that only God's will is wanted.

I would encourage you to read and reread the book of Jeremiah. This book, perhaps more than any other (in my estimation) shows how God feels about the difference between a true prophet and those who prophesy out of their own souls. To prophecy words that are not given by God is a very, very dangerous thing. To prophesy out of your own soul (ANY Christian who is not aware of the deceptiveness of their own unsurrendered soul can do this) not only places you in a dangerous place, it places the one you have prophesied to into the same dangerous place if they come into agreement with your false or soulish prophecy. Why do people come into agreement with false prophecies? Because they make the person feel good and his or her soul can detect personal benefit from believing they must be true.

Also, I believe that the Lord led me to leave my job to be available for Him full time and the Lord has been preparing me for something, maybe that ministry.

The Lord often trains His people and teaches them discipline and order by having them submit to the routine of jobs and daily responsibilities. He wants you already on the path of discipline and obedience by the time you need to move in it during a ministry assignment He gives to you. He will very clearly open and close doors to verify His desires for change of such a work status in your life.

I shared this same information with my Pastor who is also a prophet and he basically took me to one of the same scriptures that the Holy Spirit had led me to. I've been inspired by the Holy Spirit to write several sermons and I shared one of them with my Pastor and he said the "sermon" that I shared with him would be a nice book to minister to people with. I agree, but I also believe that it is a sermon to be preached.

A pastor must be very careful of who he or she allows to preach in the pulpit of the flock he or she has been given to shepherd. If God has a message for you to preach, when you are ready to preach that message, nothing will hold back God's favor to open that door for you. If you are to preach in this pastor's pulpit, God will arrange the favor and the timing. This is not something for you to try to arrange or manipulate.

Our church has just completed a special time of dedication and worship, and I was constantly on the floor (exhibiting a physical manifestation), sometimes a lot. I also do the same thing sometimes during praising the Lord. I know I have physically "affected" other people with this (manifestation) accidentally. My Pastor brought these things to my attention and he asked me, "Did you get revelation as to why you would be (exhibiting this manifestation)"?

This pastor's response is a very valid question that I might have well asked myself.

I know there was some sarcasm in his question because I told him about some of the revelations God had given me.

Your previous statement is not only a criticism and a judgment of one of God's spiritual leaders, it is also a word curse that can backlash on you as well as being destructive to the leader if you verbalize it to other people. You don't know this to be true, but your soul wants it to be true in order to justify and validate its "need" to believe that your pastor is in error in not accepting and validating what you believe to be true. You may well be a potential prophet, but God uses people in authority over us to hold us in a state of training and learning until we are ready to be used. This is God's doing, not necessarily the doing of the authority figures. Can these authority figures have wrong motives? Yes, they certainly can. But God will not allow you to be held back from your destiny because of someone else's wrong motives. He will, however, allow you to be trained and matured through learning how to react spiritually to those wrong motives of others. The only thing that can hold you back from fulfilling great destiny purposes for your life is the stubbornness of your own unsurrendered soul.

Just read about Joseph being locked in prison for something he had not done, and know that God never wastes anything in our lives (no matter how negative it may seem to us and others around us at the time). I am quite sure that God used that time of imprisonment to teach Joseph to surrender to the greater purpose yet to come. God was setting him up to become a powerful influence in a foreign culture in order to make a way for his own family to be saved in a time of great famine. So often we pitch a soulish "fit" when God puts us into hard places. That hard place may be the beginning of His process to put us into positions of great authority, even before world leaders, to fulfill plans so great we cannot comprehend them. We pitch a "fit" and abort God's plans, and then we have to go back to the "school of hard places" once again for more remedial spiritual training.

God so prepared Joseph that he held no hard feelings or offenses against his brothers (rascals that they were). Genesis 50:20 says that Joseph said this to his brothers who had deeply wronged him, even to the putting of his life in mortal danger, "But as for you, ye thought evil against me; but God meant it unto good, to bring to pass, as it is this day, to save much people alive" (KJV).

Galatians 4:1-2 tells us this: "The heir (this could also be a baby prophet, or baby pastor, or baby apostle), as long as he is a child, differeth nothing from a servant, though he be lord of all; but is under tutors and governors until the time appointed of the father" (KJV). When one is a prophet-yet-in-training, regardless of the incredible potential of that young "master," he or she must be tutored and governed, sometimes even contained, by those with more experience and understanding until the Father of us all appoints that one as being ready. The time of the appointing as being ready is in the hands of the Father, never in the hands of the tutors or governors. Don't worry that you won't be given your opportunities to fulfill your destiny once you reach the point where God can begin to move you into them. No one can open a door that God has shut, and no one can shut a door that God opens.

I told my Pastor that I believed (the physical manifestion) was God purging me.

I know that you believe this is part of God preparing you to become a prophet. However, I don't see anything in the Word to support such a belief. Since the physical manifestation you describe is so distracting to other people, and it seems to me to serve no purpose as validated by Scripture, I would get on my knees about your beliefs about it. Don't become defensive about having done it previously, just set your mind and your will to come into alignment with God's truth about it and let Him speak to you about what it means now. How do you do this? You should bind your will to the will of God, bind your mind to the mind of Christ, bind yourself to the full truth of God's Word, and loose any wrong beliefs, half-truth, wrong teachings, and wrong agreements about the physical manifestation. Ask God to show you the purpose or the reason for why such a manifestation might be scriptural or useful to His Kingdom purposes. God wants us to know His purposes and plans for our lives. He does not want to keep secrets from us that could help us mature and grow in His destiny purposes for our lives.

Could you help me Rev. Savard? Do you think I should continue to believe that I am one of God's prophets?

You obviously want to be used to God. This is a good thing, and I commend you for wanting to cooperate with God in this calling. However, I heard a missionary say something so true and valuable, some ten years ago, that I often repeat it. When he was younger, this man believed God called him to be a missionary to the Philippines. So he sold everything he had, quit his job, and prepared himself (as he believed he should get prepared) to go to the mission field for God. God did not send him until 13 years later. He had heard the call of God correctly, but he didn't understand the concept of being prepared to fulfill it. There is often a unknown time for training and maturing between the call and the going forth to fulfill it. What most affects the length of that unknown passage of time? The individual's ability to submit themselves to obedience and learning and maturing in the purposes of the call.

I don't want to continue to say the Lord sent me or the Lord said, if indeed He didn't. So I'm getting a little unsure at this point. What do you think about the sermons, me being a pastor, the purging and my Pastor's response to all of this? Please help me and most of all please pray for me. Please bind me and loose what you think and believe may need to be loosed and bound. Rev. Savard, I trust you and the decisions you make.

I do not want to discourage you in any way, as you may well be one of the greatest end times prophets God is now raising up. But you do need further experience with God, particularly in allowing Him to train you in the use of His gifts. This is not a caution that you must sit and wait for 13 years, rather this is a call to you to redirect your energies into preparation for being used. Read, read, and reread the book of Jeremiah along with as much other Scripture as you can make time to read. Ask your pastor if there are any books he can recommend on the offices of the five-fold ministries, particularly the prophets. Read about all of the Old Testament prophets and learn from them. One final word of caution, from my own experience and my own beliefs. Prophecy is being misused and abused these days. So-called prophets are prophesying out of their own souls that which they believe people want to hear, also that which the so-called priogets believe validates what they have soulishly chosen to believe about certain churches, ministries, and individuals.

One good word for you to always think about: If you already have strong feelings about an individual or a ministry needing correction and then you believe God has given you a prophecy that validates exactly what you have been already thinking, it is almost always a false prophecy coming out of your soul. The prophetic words I trust the most are the words a prophet gives that are nearly as surprising to the prophet as to the one being prophesied to. I hope this helps. Rev. Liberty Savard

      

Follow-up Response

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Hi Rev. Savard. I thank you for your timely response and most of all, I thank you for your honesty. I was not offended by any of it. Regarding the part of your response, " The danger is not so much in whether or not you might be a false prophet, as it is in whether or not you might be a "baby" prophet-yet-in-training who is giving false prophecies," how do I know if I'm giving false prophecies? Quite a few of my "prophecies" have been confirmed and have come to pass, but I understand that the devil can give confirmation and make "prophecies" come to pass also, is this correct? If so, how do I know who's the source behind it being confirmed and/or coming to pass?

The devil does not "make" prophecies come to pass, rather he sets up the unsurrendered soul to "think" certain things ahead of the time of what he is going to cause to come to pass. He does the same thing when he is aware of other things coming to pass even though he has nothing to do with them. I do not think Satan can read your mind, nor do I think he can foretell the future. He simply is aware of things already in progress (things the finite minds of humans have no way of knowing until they actually happen) and pre-determines how he can take advantage of them. He does this by implanting suggestions into the mind through access into unsurrendered souls that do not or cannot discern his intervention or interference. These doors of access into the unsurrendered human soul are explained in detail in Shattering Your Strongholds as being brought about through the self-establishment of strongholds in the mind.

Knowing who/what is the source of something coming to pass is where the spiritual gift (nine spiritual gifts in 1 Corinthians 12:7-11) of Discerning of Spirits comes into use. This is NOT the gift of discernment as some think it is--a "gift" that can be used to discern anything you want. It is the gift of Discerning of Spirits, a spiritual gift given by the Holy Ghost to know what spirit or Spirit is operating behind any supernatural happening, including the seeming fulfillment of prophecy. It is the gifting to know if an evil spirit, the Holy Spirit, or the soul of a man or woman is in operation. This is something everyone needs to understand. A Christian does NOT automatically always know when the Holy Ghost is bringing something to pass. A Christian whose unsurrendered soul can be accessed and confused by the enemy can "fall for" a counterfeit work or manifestation that only appears to be of God.

As for my unsurrendered soul, I do surrender my unsurrender soul to the will of God, I pull down, smash, crush and destroy any and all strongholds in my soul that I've erected to protect any wrong beliefs, attitudes, behavior, thinking, thoughts, thoughts patterns, wrong relationships, wrong agreements and I loose any and all effects that have come out of those aforementioned things...did I do right? If so, did I leave anything out? Please help!

Yes, you are right on here, with the possible exception of loosing soul ties. Have you read my second and third books, Breaking the Power and/or Producing the Promise? Each one has a chapter on soul power/soul ties. This would be good information for you to read. Also, in Producing the Promise there is a chapter on the power of agreement (right or wrong) that will give you further understanding.

As for the book of Jeremiah, the Holy Spirit has led me to this book and I have read it several times. He also led me to the book of Job, Isaiah, Micah, Lamentations and Ezekiel which I have read, but I will reread them and continue to do so until I come into full understanding or wherever I should be with these books.

GOOD FOR YOU! I COMMEND YOU.

As for me leaving my job, I may have done so in haste and I asked God to forgive me for moving in my time if indeed He did not tell me to move at that time. But I do know that God is training me and teaching me discipline and order.

Good for you. Now, know this: we can be aware of something being taught to us or being worked out in our life, but we still have need to go "through" the experience of it. This can take some time and some maturing. For an example, when we are younger we can understand that we are growing and maturing physically, yet we still have to go through the actual growing process to become physically mature. Knowing you are in training does not complete the process of going through the training. Being in training and learning order and discipline is where you want to be cooperating with God as freely and purely as possible. This is where the principles of praying the binding and loosing prayers help to clear out the unusable humanistic and worldly clutter our "pack rat" minds have accumulated that can cause missteps and misdirection in our best of intentions.

As for the (physical manifestation) or "purging" portion of my question, I do understand that may not be of God, but I didn't know at the time and I never meant to do it. I truly thought and believed that this was a "purging process".

I understand what you are saying. I wasn't criticizing you, I was saying that you should not feel any condemnation from what you may have already done in this manner. I was encouraging you that it was time to seek God and ask for revelation and confirmation in the Word for understanding from now on. Everyone makes mistakes, and ministers in training make a lot of them. I heard a Bible teacher once say: If you aren't making some mistakes, you aren't taking enough risks in trying to implement what you are learning. I concur heartily!

Regarding the part where I stated "now I know there was some sarcasm there because I told him about some of the revelations God had given me," I truly meant no disrespect to my pastor, God or you . . . I must say I am sorry if I indicated that I by any chance was criticizing and/or judging my pastor. I may have criticized and/or judged him, but it was not intentional and may God forgive me and have mercy on my soul, in Jesus name I pray. Amen. Thank you Lord.

He absolutely will and so do I. However, I still think there is something important here to be learned Why do you need to learn things that don't seem to apply to you at a given time? So you can understand how to teach others the same thing. You say you are sorry if you indicated that by any chance you were criticizing or judging your pastor. Please hear me, for this is something extremely important. Whether you meant to indicate it or not, whether it was intentional or not, you did speak judgment and criticism of his response to you. Recognize that your soul is trying to rationalize and justify your intentions behind what you said. If you can recognize this, you can be way ahead of those who cannot recognize it. You can be sensitive to it the next time your soul tries to do it again, and stop it. But you have responded to my pointing this out in a very good manner and asked God to forgive you. Well done.

Please know that I am not trying to hammer the fact of the words you said, that's been cleared by your repentance. I'm trying to get you to realize that this can be a very subtle area that our unsurrendered souls will rationalize and justify. If you can get that understanding now, you can save yourself a great deal of trouble later on. I had to learn it the hard way, and I am still living with the fall out from situations years ago where I spoke judgment over other ministers and ministries. Having to live with this fall out helps me to understand the importance of understanding about not creating it in the first place. We can repent and turn away from what we have done and still find "consequences" like weeds in our paths for some time. It is better to learn how not to "sow" those weedy consequences by choosing to strive to speak only blessing and wisdom and the Words of God come from our mouths. That, my friend, is a life long project.

Now, consider the following. Many (more like most, actually) Christians do not realize the power that all of their words produce to bless or condemn--bless or condemn themselves and/or others. That is why we are urged in the New Testament to not even jest. The word jest/jesting in the original Greek covers a range from being facetious (which means clever, foolish, sarcastic, joking) all the way to being scurrilous (which means offensive, insulting, reproachful, insolent, obscene). One effective way to judge if our words could be received as offensive, insulting, or reproachful to another person is to ask yourself this: would you be willing to go to the person you say you didn't mean to offend or insult and tell them in person exactly what you had said? Asking yourself if you are willing to repeat the exact words you have said (without any soulish editing to rationalize or justify what you feel your actual intent was--just repeating aloud the exact words you originally said) in person or better yet, in a public meeting in church, can often rob your unsurrendered soul of its ability to tell you that you really didn't do anything wrong.

When we say we are just "kidding" or just "joking" or "didn't mean it," this is often an attempt to soften a less-than-kind point we really do want to make but we hope we cannot be held accountable for making. (I know that you were not attempting to do what I am going to say next, but this is a good thing to realize and understand.) Even worse, saying we are just "kidding" or just "joking" or "didn't mean it" is often an attempt to transfer "blame" by accusing the other person as not having a sense of humor, being too sensitive, or deliberately misunderstanding what what we have said. Our spoken words have enormous power, regardless of a malicious or innocent intent in speaking them--power that can open doors of access to works of the enemy.

I confess that I am still struggling with my own lightening quick tendency to speak with sarcastic humor when I think the other person can understand me. A spiritual leader must never excuse his or her words by whether or not another person can understand them or has misunderstood them. A spiritual leader must be held accountable for speaking any words that can give Satan room to mess around with them and hurt another person by them.

We have to constantly watch what we say about others, for we can easily judge wrongly without even thinking about it. This is part of the society we live in. Everyone in the world today seems to have an opinion about everything and everyone else. Christians, especially Christian leaders (in training or otherwise) must learn to be aware of this.

Well Rev. Savard...you have answered all my questions and have been a lot of help and once again, I thank you for your timely response and your honesty. May God continue to use you for His service & Glory and may He continue to bless you and yours!

And blessings back to you. Keep pressing on, as I sense that you have a very dynamic future ahead of you. God is working with you for great and mighty purposes. Rev. Savard