Is That The Holy Spirit, or Just Your Feelings?

In 2012 Pat Robertson told his television audience that God had told him Mitt Romney would win the presidency and serve two terms. Romney lost, and Robertson later admitted on air that he thought he had heard clearly from God and missed it anyway. This episode tests the phrase "God told me" against Scripture, using a failed political prophecy, a former Satanist's viral testimony, a string of televangelist claims, and a story from Ellen G. White's own life.

The episode opens with Pat Robertson's Romney prediction and his later on-air admission that he had missed it, then turns to Scripture to show that emotions themselves can be worked on by spirits that are not the Holy Spirit. Saul's righteous anger in 1 Samuel 11 and his murderous rage in 1 Samuel 18 came from two different sources but felt similar enough that Saul could not always tell them apart. Peter's love for Christ became, in one moment, Satan speaking through him in Matthew 16. Jeremiah 17:9 says the heart itself is deceitful.

From there the episode examines Riaan Swiegelaar, a former Satanist whose testimony about an encounter with a being he identified as Jesus during a ritual went viral in 2022. His own words, and the analysis from Blood Bought Ministries and Pastor Anthony Baker, show a testimony built on a feeling of love rather than Scripture, missing repentance, confession, and the cross, and language about guides and ongoing personal revelation that matches Ellen White's description in The Great Controversy of Satan appearing as a being of dazzling brightness resembling the Son of God.

The episode then walks through a run of public figures who prefaced claims with some version of "God told me": Julie Green's predictions of execution for named political figures, Jeremiah Johnson's public apology for his failed Trump 2020 prophecy, Jesse Duplantis and Oral Roberts tying personal finances to a word from the Lord, Kat Kerr commanding Hurricane Dorian, and Robin Bullock's claim about the cause of homosexuality. None of these claims came true or lined up with Scripture, and all were introduced the same way.

The episode closes with the biblical test for any of this: 1 John 4:1 to try the spirits, Isaiah 8:20 to measure every claim by the word, and 2 Corinthians 13:1 on the need for two or three witnesses. It ends with the story of a man who approached a young Ellen White and told her God had said they were meant to marry, and her refusal to accept that claim on his word alone, with an appeal to test any voice, including the presenter's own, against Scripture before acting on it.