Thank you so much for your support, Jeff, and for mentioning that you too have heard a voice. Yes, it is very hard to bring up these things, but the reality of demonic involvement really needs to be acknowledged, and really, how can we test the spirits effectively unless it is acknowledged? Those who just declare that they are sure their own experiences of these phenomena are from the Lord without offering any information by which they might be tested are very much at fault.

Yes, fear and confusion ARE the effect in those churches on people who have some spiritual discernment. But if you mention having such confusion they will pompously misapply the verse that the Lord is not the author of confusion, by which they mean that somehow if you are experiencing such a state it's your own fault, without offering a shred of hope to resolve it, but of course the confusion is the natural effect of somehow knowing this isn't the voice of our Shepherd we're hearing while being told that it is. Truly, even the elect can be just about deceived in these terrible days. There must be many of the Lord's in those churches.

You've probably hit on it: It certainly doesn't seem that God would speak to you in a meaningless riddle. During a period when I was not yet a believer in Christ but had come to believe in supernatural reality I had a very strange riddle-like vision that had me puzzling over its meaning for years, involving words and numbers written in white by an unseen hand on black space. Very spooky. The devil must delight in getting us to wrack our brains over such things that merely distract us from serving the Lord.

Yes, maybe we can agree at least that whatever comes from the Lord would be edifying and serve some purpose in some way we can point to. That's not a specific test given in so many words in scripture as far as I recall, but it's certainly in the spirit of scripture.

This stuff makes me mad when I see how I've been dragged through all that deception, and you too, and how others still are, and how they continue to assert that the gifts are genuine and for today based really only on their own experience and a verse or two of scripture. I'm grateful to be finally getting free of it but there are still lingering effects. These things are oppressive and discouraging at the very least. When will total freedom come?