The most important requirement to understanding prophecy is to submit to the lordship of Jesus Christ through the repentance of sins and obedience. God gives grace to the humble but He opposes the proud. Only when a believer humbles himself will God exalt him and open his spiritual eyes.

Seek God and His wisdom with all of your heart. No book, including this one, can convey true understanding from the Holy Spirit. Much of the Bible's purpose is to impart personal understanding to the one who seeks it. To all others it will make no sense. This book only shows you where to look. By humbling yourself before God will He give you understanding.So many of us come into end-time prophecy with preconceived ideas. Ideas that were taught to us by well intentioned believers who many times are simply relaying what they themselves have been taught. There are also teachers who intentionally or unintentionally mislead their hearers. And let us not forget how the times and events around us shape our opinions and beliefs.
Wherever our notions have come from we need to admit that many of us are lazy in following up on these ideas in the scriptures.
The Bereans were of more noble character . . . . . they received the message with great eagerness and examined the Scriptures every day to see if what Paul said was true (Acts 17:11).
As believers we need to question everything against the standard of all truth found in the Bible, just like the Bereans did with Paul's message. If it doesn't agree then discard it. Probably the worst thing we can do is flock to teachers and churches preaching a gospel that tickles our ears with what we want to hear.
For the time will come when men will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear. They will turn their ears away from the truth and turn aside to myths. But you, keep your head in all situations, endure hardship, do the work of an evangelist, discharge all the duties of your ministry (2 Timothy 4:3-5).
The Bible prophesies that this will happen. Scripture says many will fall away from the faith. They won't stop believing the myths and that defines their falling away. We must ever be in the mode of unlearning what man has taught for his own comfort and seek God's wisdom to fill our hearts with understanding.ALWAYS and without exception, read all context in scripture. Prophecy always has a context and should never be read or interpreted without it. If someone justifies their belief based on a smattering of scripture you will do well not to believe them until you can go and view those scriptures in their proper context. Think of a verse as a detail and the context as the big picture. You can't understand the big picture without the details and you can't understand the details apart from the big picture.There is no new prophecy apart from the Bible. God doesn't change what He set out to do. He reveals His will to the prophets and it will be fulfilled to His glory (Amos 3:7). Scripture you find in one part of the Bible will always be confirmed elsewhere in the Bible.God is incredibly patient. He has repeated the same time-line of end-time events through His prophets almost from cover to cover in the Bible. They do not change except in regards to specific details or where additional prophecy intertwined that spoke to the people of the past and have already been fulfilled. Even these intertwined prophecies are encompassed by scripture that still leads the reader toward the end-times.Most prophecy has a dual purpose. It speaks to the people and events of the near future of the prophet who delivers the message. And it usually doubles in its meaning by delivering a message to and about the distant future - the end times.Most of the prophets received revelations that came in a pattern of waves or cycles. The purpose of these cycles is to give multiple perspectives of the same events in the prophecy.

Illustration: Picture yourself seated alone in a circle of chairs and staged in the center is a play which is always performed facing the same direction. When the play is over you get up and move to the next seat and the play will start all over again. The play won't change, but each time it ends you move over to the next seat until you have sat in all the seats. The major sequences of the storyline will always be familiar to you, but the details will differ, even between just one seat and the next. If you put all of the varying details together you will have the benefit of deeper meaning of the story. So it is with prophecy, the basic chain of events always appears to be similar but the change of perspective in each cycle changes the details and thereby enhances the big picture. In doing this God has furnished us with an amazing amount of details about what is to come.