My thoughts are chaff

A second test that the spiritual leader is delivering God’s message is to be found in the fact that he considers his own thoughts and conceptions as insignificant in comparison with those of God. They are mere “chaff.”

If they include and embrace the Word of God, and are the means of setting forth that Word, they are, like the husk, valuable for the sake of the kernel within; but if it be only their own dreams and visions that these teachers are giving to men, there is nothing but chaff without a kernel, to be borne away by the first wind that blows. And so Jeremiah says concerning the preaching of the Word: “What is the chaff to the wheat?”

We have long insisted, and again emphatically repeat, that what the people need on matters of doctrine and duty, is not what “I think” or another man “thinks” (for all have equally a right to “think,”) but what God thinks. Man’s “opinion” changes; God’s opinion never changes; man’s “conceptions” of truth differ; God’s idea of truth is eternally the same.

A. T. Pierson, From the Pulpit to the Palm-Branch: A Memorial of C. H. Spurgeon (New York: A. C. Armstrong and Son, 1892), 236–237.