Real prophets have to be Christians.
Non-Christian “prophets” are also known as psychics, mediums, channelers, fortune-tellers, astrologers and all sorts of things.
Many of them will claim to be Christians, wear crosses, quote the Bible and speak Christianese, but largely they’re just using Christian props; they have no more of a relationship with Jesus than any pagan.
Real prophets let you test them
Real prophets know their Bible, and know God expects us to test prophets. They’re ready for it. They’re fine with it, actually: They can stand up to testing. They know they’re just passing a message; they have no intention of enforcing that message.
Fake prophets are just the opposite. Testing them challenges their authority, and they won’t have it: “You have to listen to me. I’m God’s anointed. Raise not thy hand against God’s anointed,” and crap like that. That’s not Christian talk; that’s antichrist talk. If your church is led by such a person, get out quick.
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Real prophets produce fruit of the Spirit Lots of people think a prophet is supposed to preach doom and gloom and destruction, because the prophets of the Old Testament (OT) warned about such things. So when they prophesy, they only preach doom and gloom and destruction. There’s no joy in their messages. There’s no love, patience, kindness, or even goodness. There’s just woe.
There’s a lot of woe in OT prophecies because woe was coming — easily preventable woe, by the way, because God had thoroughly warned the Hebrews that if they dissolved their relationship with Him, woe would come. The prophets were simply reiterating this fact. But Christians live in an entirely different context.
Still, it’s really easy to take our attitudes and overlay them on top of God’s words.
A sarcastic person will present a message sarcastically; an angry person will present it angrily; a bitter person will present it bitterly; and a kind person will present it kindly. And that’s why Paul commented,
If I had the gift of prophecy, and if I understood all of God’s secret plans and possessed all knowledge, and if I had such faith that I could move mountains, but didn’t love others, I would be nothing. Paul, 1 Corinthians 13.2 NLT That being the case, we need to be extremely skeptical of fruitless Christians.
Yeah, they might have actually heard from God, so we can’t dismiss them outright. But we can’t trust them either.
If a prophecy is about the future, it has to happen When prophets refer to the future, it’s generally the near future—the next day, week, month, or year. Not the distant future. That’s because predictions of the future are meant to confirm that someone is legitimately a prophet.
You can’t use the distant future to prove whether someone is truly a prophet.
You’ll be dead by then.
A prediction of the future should be something that’s not obvious, or fairly unexpected.
Prophecy has to follow the rules for good theology
Prophecy has to follow a proper interpretation of the scriptures. It shouldn’t contradict anything God’s said already. (To be fair, it may — but when it does, it’s because God wants to grab your attention, not because God is cancelling out anything He’s said in the past.)
It should be consistent with what He’s said in the scriptures.
- http://morechrist.blogspot.com/2010/11/prophecy-and-identifying-fake-prophets.html