"Now it happened, when I returned to Jerusalem and was praying in the temple, that I was in a trance and saw Him saying to me, 'Make haste and get out of Jerusalem quickly, for they will not receive your testimony concerning Me.' So I said, 'Lord, they know that in every synagogue I imprisoned and beat those who believe on You. And when the blood of Your martyr Stephen was shed, I also was standing by consenting to his death, and guarding the clothes of those who were killing him.' Then He said to me, 'Depart, for I will send you far from here to the Gentiles.' " Acts 22:17-21

As we have mentioned several times before, while Acts is generally a solid blueprint for the Church until Christ returns, not everything that happened is “normative.” Some things, though they happened in Acts, are specific to that special time when God was establishing the Church by the ministry of the Holy Spirit through the Apostles. This is clearly the case when speaking of visions and conversations with the Lord.

Though we would not say God cannot do those things in our day, we can safely say that He does not. The dialogue between Paul and the Lord is not normative. In fact, when believers say that have had visions and/or conversations with the Lord, we must be highly suspicious. Not that the people are trying to be deceptive but they are most likely imagining, and mistakenly thinking that their thoughts were the words of God.

The Lord does not appear to us. We believe in and love Him though “we have not seen Him!” (1 Peter 1:8)
God speaks to us through His Word, the Bible when it is read, and faithfully preached, and taught.

One practical and important reason to doubt reports of people’s “conversations” with the Lord is that more often than not, what people report the Lord supposedly said to them is unbiblical.

As John Owen (1616-1683) once famously said of these extra-biblical revelations: We must test such things with scripture. If it is not scriptural it is to be rejected. If it is scriptural, a special revelation was not needed—we needed only to know the Scriptures (my paraphrase of Owen’s thoughts on the matter).

Remember how often Jesus chastised the religious leaders of His day with the words, “You do not know the scriptures,” “Have you not read the scriptures?” etc.