Sinclair Ferguson laments the desire of many for direct revelation from God:

Why, then, should Christians today—by contrast with their fathers—be so thirsty to experience immediate personal revelation from God (“God told me . . .”) when His desire for us is the ongoing work of the Spirit opening up our understanding through mediated revelation of the New Testament?
   There seem to be three reasons:
   1. It may appear to be more exciting, more obviously supernatural, to have direct revelation rather than Bible revelation. It seems to many people to be more “spiritual,” more “divine,” more “personal.”
   2. To many people, it feels much more convincing to be able to say, “God told me . . .” than to say, “The Bible tells me. . . .”
   3. Direct revelation makes it unnecessary to engage in painstaking Bible study and careful consideration of Christian doctrine in order to know the will of God. By comparison with immediate revelation, Bible study seems—to be frank—boring. Although rarely said, underlying all of this is a sinister thought: the Bible is not very clear. By contrast, it is assumed that direct revelation cannot possibly be misunderstood.

—Sinclair Ferguson, In Christ Alone: Living the Gospel Centered Life (Reformation Trust, 2007), 107.

While I agree that all three of Ferguson’s reasons are correct, I think the third is the most common, and perhaps the one that leads to rationalizing (I know, an odd word in this context) the first two. I believe most Christians are just too lazy to do the hard work of Bible study. The less apathetic among them fall back on the entirely sentimental reasons one and two.

All this is very sad, because those people are going to learn absolutely nothing from God, because God is not going to speak to them. Yes, my subjectively-guided friend, you read that right. If you claim that God has spoken to you, I don’t believe you. I don’t think you are lying (unless you say it on TBN; then I’m quite convinced you’re making it up); I just think you are deluded, mistaking the voices in your head for the Holy Spirit.

Conversely, if you are willing to buckle down and “be diligent to present yourself approved to God as a workman who does not need to be ashamed, accurately handling the word of truth,”* you will “[increase] in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and man,”† and be “[sanctified] in the truth.”‡