These women such as Voskamp, Beth Moore, Priscilla Shirer, etc., tend to write and speak in ways that are emotionally captivating to women, and draw them into the experience; often that experience being one of erotic (eros) love rather than agape love. While much of this appears benign on the surface, at a deeper level it’s very dangerous and borderline blasphemous.

People familiar with author Ann Voskamp know that she is a charismatic, melodramatic writer who writes in a tedious, semi-poetic style that you either love or hate. Her grammatical style of placing adjectives after the noun or using uncommon words for rhythm that the average person would have to look up to understand what she’s talking about, can be very exhausting or very captivating depending on one’s preference. However, there is no doubt that many women have fallen victim to her impressionistic linguistic style and have been captivated by her insights into her “Holy Experience,” or what she proclaims to be a life transforming experience from God.

But are the experiences she writes about Biblical?

Recently, Mrs. Voskamp posted a blog that was an excerpt from her devotional, One Thousand Gifts, titledWhen You’ve Been Looking for a Sign. In the excerpt, she speaks of a time when she is depressed about certain situations in her life that aren’t going the way she expects. Her and a high-school friend decide to take a walk and she notices a chalk writing on the sidewalk that says “Hey beautiful, you are loved!” She then writes in the excerpt:

And she laughs loud and we’re carried and hey, who needs Ryan Gosling and his “Hey Girl” meme when you’ve got God with His “Hey Beautiful” promise?

She ultimately interprets this to be a sign from God that, in his Grace, He is communicating to her that He thinks of her as beautiful and he loves her.  Mrs. Voskamp continues on to teach very bad theology based on her experience. She claims that through her new revelation from God, she now sees God in a new light. She claims that through this “epiphany,” she now understands God’s grace and his timing.

How does she know that this is a sign from God?

She is seeing a defacement on the sidewalk and because, in her mind, she is seeing something that she wants to see and hearing what she wants to hear, she is attributing it to God. But nowhere in Scripture does it say that God speaks to us this way. She is claiming that this writing is a revelation from God. My question to Ann would be, since it’s God speaking to her, should we now add that picture she took of the writing to our canon of Scripture? Is God graceful to us in our daily lives? Yes. But does God speak to us, or reveal things to us through any means other than Scripture? No. So, outside of Scripture, we really have no way of hearing directly from God and the Bible is very clear that by attributing things to God that he did not say, you run the risk of blaspheming the Holy Spirit (Matthew 12:31-32). This is precisely what Ann Voskamp is doing.

[Editor’s note: This article is incomplete. The source for this document was originally published on entreatingfavor.com – however, the original URL is no longer available.]