I am amused when I see people take pride in spiritual titles. Sporting titles like prophet and apostle, for instance, come with heavy responsibility that leave little margin for error. Consider the young man sent to Bethel with a strict prophetic mandate.  He was to prophesy to the altar about the coming of one Josiah who would burn the priests of the high places on it. The instructions were so strict that he was warned neither to accept any form of gratuity in Bethel nor return by the same route he had taken on his out-bound journey. That order was contradicted by another man who claimed to be a prophet and had received a counter order to entertain him. Perhaps already fatigued and hungry, he followed the older man for a meal. That was his last, for a lion tore him apart on his return journey.

There are things that you cannot outsource if you want to make the most of your spiritual life. You cannot outsource your devotional life, and you cannot get a substitute for hearing God.

The young man’s mistake was allowing a middle man to come between him and God. There are settled attributes of God. One of them is order. Another is consistency. If God intended to change His earlier instruction, He would have delivered the new directive by the same means as the first. Rather than confirming with God directly, the young prophet relied on a middleman and that proved disastrous. There are things that you cannot outsource if you want to make the most of your spiritual life. You cannot outsource your devotional life, and you cannot get a substitute for hearing God. It is the will of the Father to communicate directly with each of His children.