But, God Told Me…
"God told me..." is almost always a ploy to get what we want anyway, and it has been used to manipulate people from time immemorial. Elizabeth Barton, the “Mad Nun of Kent,” a 16th century English rockstar evangelist and prophetess, was executed on April 20, 1534, along with five Catholic priests who were brutally executed. This was the same year that the Church of England officially became independent from the pope. Elizabeth got in trouble with the highest authorities because she drew crowds preaching that God told her that Henry VIII would lose his kingdom in a month and die if he divorced Katherine of Aragon (a Roman Catholic) and married Anne Boleyn (a convinced Protestant). Whether Elizabeth was a mentally disturbed person who fell into trances or a master manipulator like Aimee Semple McPherson is not known, but the fact is that Henry lived another fifteen years after his annulment and remarriage. Elizabeth was fanatical Roman Catholic with a charismatic bent, and she despised all things Martin Luther.
Protestants would soon populate the newly formed Church of England, and in 1538 orders were given that an English Bible be placed "in some convenient place" in every church in England. God, of course, speaks in lots of ways and in any way he wishes, but the Bible is the means whereby he specially chooses to communicate with his people. In the Bible we hear the path that will lead us to embrace and ever hold fast the blessed hope of everlasting life (Cranmer's prayer for the 2nd Sunday of Advent), we are given in it everything necessary for salvation and the substance of every future creed and confession (Thirty-nine Articles 6), and whose main theme in the Old and New Testaments is Jesus the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world (Article 7). Holy Scripture (sola Scriptura) is the highest authority over all other authorities, including "God told me."
““I have good news for you: the voices in your heart are all your own. So you don’t have to get all anxious about figuring out which ones of your voices is God. None of them is. The revelation of God comes in another way, through the word of God in the Bible, and this is something you can find outside your heart.””
Good News For Anxious Christians, Phillip Cary