Todd and Katie Holmes break down the difference between genuinely hearing God and following emotion, fear, or self-will dressed up as spiritual direction.
Todd and I have spent years watching people make decisions they were absolutely convinced God told them to make. And then you watch what happens. Sometimes you find yourself thinking, "Hmm, really? God told you that?" Because what follows is a disaster. Which raises a fair question: if God was in it, why did it fall apart so completely?
The answer, most of the time, isn't that God failed. It's that people weren't hearing God at all. They were hearing something else — their emotions, their desires, their fear, or just their own will dressed up in spiritual language.
The single most reliable test for whether you're hearing from God is simple: does it line up with the Word of God? Not a verse grabbed out of context and pasted onto what you already wanted to do. The whole counsel of Scripture, read consistently, studied daily, built into your life over time.
God is not going to tell you something that contradicts what he's already written. He's not going to lead you into impurity, into strife, into something that destroys the fruit of the Spirit in your life. Love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, meekness, temperance, faithfulness — whatever God is genuinely speaking to you will activate those things, not kill them.
Whatever God speaks to us is going to cause us to walk closer to him.
So if you feel like God is telling you to go give someone a piece of your mind, I'd gently suggest you didn't hear from God. You don't need to pray again. You need to listen better, because his heart will always be revealed in the direction he gives you.
This is where a lot of people miss it, and I'll be honest: I think women are more susceptible here than men, not because women are weaker, but because emotion is so central to how we process reality. That's not a flaw — it's actually a gift when the Spirit is ruling over it. But when it isn't, emotion can become the lens through which everything gets filtered, including what we think God is saying.
The pattern looks like this: something feels right, feels exciting, meets a need, makes the flesh comfortable. And so the conclusion becomes, "This must be God, because I feel good about it." Or: "He's kind to me, so he must be sent from God." Or: "This makes me feel secure, so it must be God's will."
"When you're led by something that seems good, and it's something that you want, and it meets a need of yours — then you can see how someone would say, this is definitely God."
That's exactly when you need to slow down, not speed up. Because the enemy knows how to package things that look right, feel right, and check all your boxes — while leading you somewhere you never intended to go.
When I was growing up, my parents pastored a church in Indiana. A man came in, mid-thirties, decent looking, said all the right things. Two women in the church became enamored with him. My parents saw something was off and went to those women directly: be careful, something isn't right here. The women dismissed it. A few weeks later, the man showed up to a prayer meeting with his arm heavily bandaged. Both women had nursing backgrounds and immediately wanted to help. They were bringing food, doing everything for him. My mom called one of them and said, "Something is wrong in this situation." The woman brushed her off.
Eventually my parents called everyone together at the church. As the conversation unfolded, they asked to see the injury. The man started backtracking. One of the women, persistent and not taking no for an answer, somehow got him to trip and fall — and the two of them unwrapped the bandage to find absolutely nothing wrong with his arm. The whole thing was manufactured.
Now, anyone hearing that story from the outside can say obviously that wasn't God. But when you're inside it, when something is meeting a need you have, when it feels good and safe and right — that's when your discernment has to be rooted in something more solid than how you feel.
The Bible tells us to follow after peace, and it describes peace as the umpire of our lives. Like in a baseball game: safe or out. Peace makes the call.
But there's a difference between the peace of God and emotional comfort. The peace of God is rooted in truth. When you know the Word, when you're grounded in what God has actually said, you can have peace in the middle of a storm — not because circumstances are pleasant, but because your foundation doesn't move.
I remember being a little boy, sharing a room with my sister. A storm came through, and a tree branch outside the window kept hitting the glass. When lightning flashed, it looked like an arm with fingers scratching at the window. I was five years old and absolutely terrified. I couldn't even scream. I finally broke free, ran across the hall, and jumped into bed with my parents.
My dad picked me up, heard my explanation, and walked me back to the room. He flipped the light on. He showed me the window, showed me the tree, showed me what was actually happening. And that was the end of it. From that point on, I loved storms.
Truth changed everything. The fear wasn't based on reality — it was based on what I imagined in the dark. And that's exactly what the enemy does with people who aren't grounded in the Word. He keeps the lights off so that imaginations run wild, and then people make moves based on fear rather than truth.
The truth will set you free from imaginations. Imaginations hold people captive.
One of the clearest signs someone is operating outside of God's leading is how they respond to spiritual oversight. When a pastor, a mentor, a spiritual authority comes alongside and says, "Hey, I need to address something here" — the response to that is revealing.
Half the people I've seen go into ministry, when told they need to change something, decide not to change. The response is usually some version of: "You're trying to hurt me. You're stifling me. You don't understand the call of God on my life."
But pruning isn't destruction. It's what produces growth. If you want a plant to grow healthier and stronger, you prune it. The parts that aren't producing get cut back. That's not punishment — that's a gift. And when spiritual authority comes to address something in your life, many times it's because God sent them, because he loves you enough not to let you stay where you are.
God sends spiritual authority your way not to block you, but because he loves you enough to prune what isn't producing.
The vine analogy is worth sitting with. Vines left completely untrained become ground cover. They spread everywhere, trip you up, and eventually people just want to tear them out entirely. But put up a trellis, direct the growth, and that same vine becomes something beautiful. The potential was always there. The structure is what brought it forth.
People who resist every form of structure and call it spirituality aren't operating at a higher level. They're operating like three-year-olds who want to do what they want, when they want, with no accountability — and calling it being Spirit-led.
Here's something we've had to learn over the years, and it's not always easy to hold onto: when a challenge comes, it doesn't mean you missed God. Very often it means the opposite. You're being tested so you can advance.
Think about it the way you'd think about school. You can't go from elementary school to middle school without passing tests. You can't become a doctor without passing medical boards. You know those tests are coming before you even start. You don't walk into a medical program thinking, "I hope they just let me skip the boards." You prepare, you sit for them, and you pass.
The same structure exists in the kingdom. The challenges that come while you're in the will of God aren't signs you've gone off course. They're the tests that qualify you for the next level. Passing them requires you to stay in the Word, guard your heart, refuse offense, and hold your ground.
"The challenges that we have faced — it has been what has enabled greater growth in us and has caused us to be able to go to another level. Without those challenges, we wouldn't be able to progress."
If you get hit with a challenge and immediately conclude that someone is blocking you, that a leader is holding you back, that it's somebody else's fault — you've handed yourself a way out of ever having to change. And change is always the cost of going higher.
The people who keep going are the ones who stay faithful with what's in front of them, who refuse to chase abstract "words" that feel exciting but have no traction in their actual life, and who trust that God's plan for them is already complete — even when the current chapter is hard.
We've been there. Every challenge we've faced has produced something in us that we couldn't have gotten any other way. The grace of God is sufficient, but it works through the process, not around it. Stay in the Word. Stay faithful. Keep showing up.
