You have already decided to fire the employee. Your ego is bruised, your patience exhausted, and the case is closed in your mind. But you are a Christian leader, so you do the spiritual thing: you crack open your Bible. You flip through the pages, half-praying, half-hunting. And then you find it. “Iron sharpens iron” (Proverbs 27:17). There it is. Biblical confirmation. This person is not iron; they are dead weight. They are holding back the team. You are not being vindictive, you are being a good steward of the mission. God clearly wants you to make the hard call. You close the Bible, satisfied. You have aligned with Scripture.
Except you have not. You have just made God say what you wanted Him to say. You picked up the Bible like a ventriloquist picks up a dummy, threw your voice into it, and had it nod along with your bad idea. You called this “seeking God’s will,” but what you really sought was permission. And the most terrifying part is that you genuinely believed you were being faithful.
We do not actually want a god. We want a deity we can put on our lap and make sound suspiciously like us. We call gossip “venting.” We call greed “stewardship.” We call cowardice “keeping the peace.” We cherry-pick verses, ignore context, and convince ourselves that our pre-determined decision has divine endorsement. This is not submission to Scripture; it is Scripture manipulation. And it is one of the most dangerous traps in Christian leadership, because when you believe God is on your side, you stop listening to Him.
The ultimate example of this is Satan quoting Scripture to Jesus in the wilderness (Matthew 4). Satan did not make up lies; he used the Bible. He took God’s Word out of context and twisted it to serve his agenda. If the Enemy himself weaponized Scripture, what makes us think we are immune? The issue is not whether you are using the Bible; it is whether you are submitting to it or just using it to baptize your ego.
The reason this is so dangerous is that you lose the ability to hear God’s actual voice. When you make God sound like you, there is no longer any external standard to challenge you. Your decisions are beyond critique because they are “God’s will.” Your ego has become infallible. And when that happens, you are not a leader governed by Truth; you are a leader governed by yourself with a Bible verse as a cover story.
So how do you recognize when you are doing this? Start by asking whether you are looking for alignment or validation. Alignment asks, “What is true?” Validation asks, “How can I justify what I already want?” If you know what you want to do before you open the Bible, you are not seeking counsel; you are shopping for proof-texts. Another warning sign is the feeling of relief when you find a verse that supports your position. That relief is not the peace of the Holy Spirit; it is the comfort of the ego finding an escape hatch. True alignment often feels disruptive, not comforting, because it forces you to confront what you would rather ignore.
This is where yesterday’s framework of the Three Witnesses becomes critical. Scripture (the Constitution), Counsel (the Jury), and Conscience (the Spirit) serve as checks against the Ventriloquist God. Scripture alone can be twisted; we all do it. But when you add Counsel (people who will challenge you, not just validate you) and Conscience (the internal alarm that you have seared by ignoring it), the delusion becomes harder to maintain. If all three witnesses say “Stop,” and you go anyway, that is not a mistake. That is disobedience. The Three Witnesses exist not to give you certainty, but to protect you from yourself.
The antidote to the Ventriloquist God is humility. Humility is the willingness to admit that you might be wrong, that your emotions might be clouding your judgment, that the verse you think supports your decision might actually condemn it if you read the next three verses. Humility says, “I do not want permission; I want Truth.” And Truth often looks like surrender, not validation. It looks like closing the laptop, putting down the phone, and admitting that what you want to do and what you should do are not the same thing.
The third step of the Watchman’s Protocol is ALIGN. You have Arrested the thought (stopped the emotional spiral) and Audited the impulse (checked whether you are turning Inward or Upward). Now comes the hardest part: holding your impulse up against the Compass of Truth and seeing if you are headed in the right direction. This is not about finding a verse to quote; it is about asking whether your decision reflects the character of God or just the preferences of your ego. And if the answer is uncomfortable, that discomfort is not a sign you are doing it wrong. It is a sign you are doing it right.
Tomorrow, we will talk about the final step: ACT. Once you have aligned, you still have to move. But you cannot act rightly if you have aligned wrongly. And the quickest way to align wrongly is to make God sound like you. So before you take that step, before you send that email or fire that employee or make that call, ask yourself: Am I listening to God, or am I listening to my own voice disguised as His? Because the difference between those two things is the difference between wisdom and self-deception.
The Ventriloquist God will tell you whatever you want to hear. The real God will tell you what you need to hear, even when it costs you. The question is which voice you are listening to.
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