Jeremiah 22-26

"If any prophet, priest, or anyone else says, 'I have a prophecy from the Lord,' I will punish that person along with his entire family. You should keep asking each other, 'what is the Lord's answer?' or 'What is the Lord saying?' But stop using this phrase, 'prophecy from the Lord.' For people are using it to give authority to their own ideas, turning upside down the words of our God, the living God, the Lord Almighty." Jeremiah 23:34-36

Wow. God is not at all wishy-washy in his desire for people to speak, hear, and understand the truth. Just the other day, I listened to a self-proclaimed 'prophet of the Lord' and I am thinking the study of Jeremiah is very, very important today, just as it was important in its time. It is so easy to get caught up in hype, or peer pressure, or manipulation, or any number of other tactics sometimes used by powerful speakers. But when it comes to the word of God being preached/spoken/etc., we have to be oh so careful that we do not allow false prophets to speak into our lives.

On the flip side, the responsibility we have as Christians is not to give ourselves or our ideas authority by claiming we have a 'prophecy from the Lord.'