When God spoke in Scripture, people trembled. Today we line up hoping to be told we're favored.

We say we want to hear from God. But do we want what He actually says?

Modern spiritual culture has taught us to expect a particular kind of word-personal, affirming, a promise of destiny, breakthrough, and favor. Yet when God spoke to people in the Bible, the response was rarely reassurance. It was weight: a command issued before any evidence, an assignment that reordered a life, a burden carried at real cost. Moses begged to die. Jeremiah was thrown into a pit. Paul was given a thorn he was never allowed to lose.

In Do We Really Want God to Speak?, Q. Wolfgang Watkins puts an unsettling question to a hungry church: have we quietly traded the voice of God for a personalized form of spiritual reassurance-and begun calling the two the same thing?

Moving from the trembling of the prophets to Paul's own instructions on prophecy in 1 Corinthians 14, this book recovers what revelation has always been: not the relief of our anxiety but the increase of our responsibility-and, rightly understood, not a burden to dread but a dignity to receive. Bracing, generous, and deeply biblical, it is an invitation to stop collecting comfortable words and to want, instead, the weighty word that can actually hold a life.

Do we really want God to speak-or only to be reassured? The answer changes everything.A serious, hopeful book for anyone willing to ask whether they want to be addressed by God-or only reassured.

Q. Wolfgang Watkins is a bishop, executive coach, and senior advisor to C-level leaders, with a background spanning Wharton, the boardroom, and the church. A teacher of spiritual formation and prophetic ministry, he trains believers in churches and on university campuses across the country.