ROB O'SHEA - ACTOR

The Prophetic Anointing

Two Kinds of Anointings

There are essentially two aspects, or two kinds of anointing – an external anointing and an internal anointing. We saw that there is basically one difference between the two. The internal anointing is something that is permanently within. If you like, it is the anointing on tap. The external anointing is something that comes under God’s timing at God’s choice, spontaneously and sovereignly as the Spirit of God moves upon us. It is not under our control until God moves upon us.

We saw that the two flow together. I would like to look at that more here as we consider using the prophetic anointing. We have spoken concerning prophetic gifts; concerning prophetic listening; concerning prophetic utterance. There are a lot of different subjects that we have covered concerning the use of the prophetic ministry. Now I want to see how we can apply this concept of the external and the internal anointing specifically to the ministry of the prophet, to see how it s and how it operates.

Old and New Testament Anointings

Anointing In the Old Testament

We see that the internal and external anointings on the prophet flow together. In the Old Testament the prophet did not have the internal anointing. They only had the external anointing. So they were totally reliant on God moving upon them and giving them a word. If the word did not come they could not do anything. The prophet had to sit and wait. The Scriptures say, "And the Word of the Lord came to the prophet (so and so)," and God spoke.

We read at times of prophets like Elijah and Elisha who make statements like, "The Lord has hidden this thing from me, that I do not know what is happening." If God did not give the revelation they would not know what was going on. They were totally reliant on the Spirit of God coming upon them spontaneously at the right time for a specific season and for a purpose.

Anointing In the New Testament

Now in the New Testament it still works the same. The external anointing still s the same way that it always does. The external anointing comes spontaneously upon the prophet in God’s sovereign will, in His timing, in the right place, at the right time. It is a ministry of God. It is produced by the Spirit of God. It is not something that comes from the spirit of man. It is not something we produce ourselves. It is gift ministry and the Holy Spirit is in control of that ministry.

External Anointing – Like a Rainstorm

But the external anointing, when it comes in a New Testament prophet - not only a prophet, but a New Testament believer – when the external anointing comes it creates something else. It causes a surge to take place in the internal anointing. It is like a rainstorm suddenly coming upon a river that has a slow flowing stream or even a dry riverbed. And there comes this sudden rainstorm and it produces what they call a flash flood. Suddenly out of nowhere this dry riverbed becomes a gushing, fast flowing river. The water pours down and causes the river to gush forth.

So you are walking down this dry riverbed minding your own business, and suddenly you see a wall of water coming towards you. It is a flash flood. There has come a build up further down the river of all the waters that were collected from the rain, and suddenly the river gushes back to life and it pours forth. It travels all the way down the channel that it has cut, down to the sea. It pours its water forth.

Now that is what happens with the anointing. When the external anointing comes upon a person it causes a surge to take place within. That is why usually when the anointing comes upon you, you can feel it tangibly. You can feel it physically. But what you feel more than anything else, is something coming out of your gut. Jesus said, "Out of your belly shall flow rivers of living water."

When the anointing comes upon you, you feel your river starting to fill up. It wants to pour out and your stomach wants to burst. Well, it is not really in your tummy. It just feels like it is coming from there. It is coming from the deep recesses of your heart and your spirit. It is coming from deep within. There is a gush taking place within, and it is going to pour forth.

When I first moved into the prophetic anointing and the prophetic ministry the Lord taught me some things about how to use the anointing; about how to bring myself to a place where the anointing could flow.

You see, it is not good enough to have a rainstorm come down and the water to gush forth if there is not a river bed, a channel for the river to flow in. The river must have a place to flow to, otherwise you have floods taking place in the community. You have homes being destroyed. You have cars being washed away. There needs to be a place for the water to go to when it comes.

The Underground Stream: The Internal Anointing

The Lord began to teach me how to go down to that underground stream that flows within our spirits, which is where the inner anointing is. It is like an underground stream. You do not see it from the outside, but people know who know about these things, that if you dig in the right place and you go down deep enough into the earth, you are going to hit a gusher. There is water down there.

If you know the right place to dig, you can get down there and tap an underground stream, and tap into the water that is flowing under there, continuously all the time. You can reach in and draw out from that underground stream. And you can obtain water in the midst of what may be a desert, where there is no water anywhere; where there is no municipal water supply. You may be able to sink down into the ground and tap water out of an underground stream.

The Lord showed me that the Spirit of God within us, the inner anointing, is like an underground stream. We need to learn to tap into that. I am going to be dealing with that a little bit in this study, and I am going to show you how to tap down into that underground stream and how to set it up.

Questions on Using the Anointing

As God taught me how to tap down into that underground stream and to have it come gushing up, I began to wonder how I was going to use this when ministering to others. I knew what it was like to flow in the anointing. I knew how it felt. I knew the effects that it had on me. I knew that if I was in the Spirit and there was somebody here right now, I could minister to them because the anointing was on me, and it was great. If I could stand up and preach, the anointing was on me, and I could call people forward for ministry while the anointing was flowing; while the wind was blowing; while the Spirit was moving.

But I began to say to myself and to the Lord, "Lord, what happens if I’m going out there into the world in my day to day life and experience? What happens if I am rubbing shoulders with people? What happens if somebody is visiting me or I am visiting them and there is a need for the anointing. How am I going to go about getting in the Spirit; getting into the anointing; getting the flow to take place like You did when You walked down the streets and healed people? Like Peter and John did at the Beautiful Gate with the lame man and they reached out, and just lifted him up and spoke life into his body?"

Set Up Your Windmill

The Lord gave me a very simple picture. I have shared it before, and I want to go into more detail here. He said, "All you need to do is sink a pipe down into your underground stream and set up a channel for the water to flow. Then put a windmill on top."

What does a windmill do? All a windmill is, is a mechanically operated pump that pumps when the wind blows. And as the wind blows upon the blades and the blades turn, it causes the pump to move and suck the water out of the pipe. No wind blows, no water is sucked. That was my problem. I could see me there with my pipe sunk down all great. And I would be standing there and somebody would be coming and saying, "Okay, I want some water."

I would be saying, "Well, there’s plenty down there. If we just knew how to take it out I could let you have some."

The Lord Provides the Wind

The Lord said, "You set up your windmill and I’ll provide the wind. All you need to do is set up the windmill, and when it is time for the water to come out, I will provide the wind. And when I blow My wind on your windmill and it begins to turn, the water will come out, provided the pipe is there; provided the pump is attached to the pipe. The water will come out."

Well, I knew what the wind was. The wind is a picture of the Spirit isn’t it? You see, what the Lord was saying is, "If you set up the internal anointing correctly, when the time is right I’ll blow the external anointing on you. And when I blow the external anointing on you, the internal anointing will come gushing forth and the power will be there."

Example – The Day of Pentecost

We saw it on the Day of Pentecost, how the Spirit came down on them – the cloven tongues of fire – and it says, "And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit, and began to speak in tongues." As the anointing came on it gushed forth and they spoke in tongues. And you see it again and again in the Scriptures. As the anointing comes upon people, it rises up and pours out. People are filled with the Spirit.

Practical Application

I would like to have a look in this message firstly at how we can set up our windmill, and once we have looked at that we are going to find out what to do with our windmill. And we are going to find out how to go about getting water up, and what we are going to do with the water when it comes out. Because it is no good having the windmill set up and the wind is blowing, the windmill is turning and the water is gushing and it is flowing everywhere and making mud. It doesn’t help anybody!

Sink Your Pipe In

Well, if you are going to put up a windmill, the first thing you are going to have to do is you are going to have to sink a pipe into that underground stream. The Scripture says, "First comes the natural and then the spiritual," so let’s look at what happens in the natural if you do that, and give it a spiritual application.

Effort is Needed

When is the last time you took out your shovel, went into your back yard and dug yourself a borehole? It takes effort. It takes a lot of effort to drill down into an underground stream. If you are going to dig a big hole then you are going to make a well. And it is going to take a lot of effort to dig a well. It is easier to sink a pipe.

Well, depending on how big a pipe you are going to sink down it is going to determine what type of water supply you are going to have. We are going to look at that shortly. But you are going to have to sink a pipe down into the underground, and that is going to take a bit of digging. It is going to take a bit of removal of the dirt. It is going to take building a channel from ground floor to basement.

Spiritual Application: Increasing the Anointing

How are we going to do that in the Spirit? We spoke about how what we call the baptism of the Spirit is when the Spirit comes upon a person and what takes place is a link is produced between the spirit within, the Holy Spirit dwelling in your human spirit. Now that the external anointing of the Holy Spirit comes upon the body, there needs to come a breakthrough in between. When a channel is created between the spirit and the body the spirit begins to pray.

Pray in Tongues

How does the Spirit begin to pray? In other tongues. Paul said, "When I speak in tongues my spirit prays, but my understanding is unfruitful." It is your spirit linking directly with your body. It comes when you reach that point of breakthrough.

Now there are a lot of people who do not understand this. They say, "Well, I have the Spirit of God when I was saved. Why must I receive the baptism of the Spirit?" There are others who say, "You don’t get the Spirit until the anointing has come upon you." We have these two extremes. But you have the Spirit. You had the inner anointing from the moment you were born again. You had your underground stream. But there needs to come a channel that is created. That channel that is created is the ability to speak with other tongues.

If you want to be a prophet and you do not want to speak in other tongues, then you might as well go home. I mean it. You can have a degree of revelation, but if you want the anointing to gush forth; if you want to enter into New Testament prophetic power that goes beyond what the Old Testament guys had, you are going to have to learn to cause the flow to take place, so that when the anointing comes upon you there comes a gushing forth from within that you can speak forth the power of God.

Create a Channel

That is all that speaking in tongues is. It is a channel. It is when you have your pipe sunk down. And until your pipe is sunk down, you do not have the ability to tap into that internal resource that is sitting in your spirit. It comes out through speech. And yes, you can get a degree out through speech in English. But God has given tongues so that the mind does not stand in the way, because tongues transcends the mind.

It is amazing, but when I started this prophetic series I ended up harping on tongues, and I am doing it again. Could it be God is trying to say something here? Tongues is important. In the very first assignment we gave in the Prophetic School you were told to go and pray in tongues for an hour. Some people did this successfully and many complained. Many battled. Many even argued and said, "It is stupid. I don’t like it. Why should we do it?" Well if you just want to have a trickle out of your windmill it is up to you. But you need to sink down into the underground stream and you need to set a firm channel into that underground stream if you want the power to gush forth.

Increase Your Capacity

Then if you want to increase the capacity of water that is going to come out of that pipe, you are going to have to have a bigger pipe. You can have a thin little pipe, but there is only a certain volume of water that can come through a thin pipe, per minute, per hour. It is going to take you a lot longer to fill a bucket up with a thin pipe than it is going to take with a broad pipe. That is why the water supplies to our cities are not sent to us in thin pipes. The thin pipe may supply your house good enough, but if they had that thin pipe supplying everybody down the road you will have what we have here in Mexico where the water supply drops right down and just trickles out of the tap.

Use the Word

You need a broader pipe. How do you broaden the pipe? Well, the pipe is the Word. Why? Because what you receive out of your spirit can only be interpreted by the Word. It can only be understood by the Word, because your spirit speaks in impressions and in pictures. We dealt with it in Prophetic Listening, how to receive the impulses that come up out of your spirit. If you see a picture coming up into your mind out of your spirit, how do you know what it means unless you know the Word of God? Unless you know the symbols that are used in the Scriptures concerning spiritual things, how will you understand?

It is the same as interpreting dreams. It is symbolic; it is pictures. You can only understand the impressions that come up out of your spirit by the Word. And because they are impressions that come to your mind, that do not come out of your spirit but come from the enemy attacking from without, how can you know what comes from within and what is coming from the enemy?

We are going to deal with this in quite a lot of detail when we look at Prophetic Deception, so I am not going to go into it much here. You are going to have to be filled with the Word. But prophets don’t like to do that.

"Well, I’m not a Teacher, I’m a Prophet. We will leave it to the Teachers to go and study all the doctrines and study all the Scriptures."

Be Filled With the Word

It gets to the point where I hear some Prophets saying, "What do we need the Bible for? I will just wait on the Lord and He’ll give me a prophetic word?" You are treading on dangerous territory. You are going to have one thin little clogged pipe that is not going to give out much water let me tell you. You are going to have to be filled with the Word, Prophet of God, if you want to in the anointing, and if you want the prophetic anointing to pour forth. You are going to have to be filled with the Word.

It is not enough just to learn about the prophetic ministry. It is not enough just to learn about the gifts of the Spirit. It is not enough just to learn about the anointing. You had better be filled with the Word, otherwise the anointing cannot flow, because the Spirit works through the Word. I will look at it more as we go on.

You Can’t Hide It

Well now, you have sunk your pipe down. You have widened your pipe to increase the flow. Now you had better put your windmill in place. You had better stick it where the wind is. You do not put it down on the ground where the wind is blocked by the trees and the buildings. You do not put it hidden away inside a building, inside a wall somewhere where nobody can see it.

You cannot hide a windmill. If you ride down the countryside you will see them. You will see them standing proud and high in the sky. You cannot hide it. If you want to be used by God and minister forth His power, you cannot do it in hiding. You are going to have to come out into the open and make yourself available to the Lord. You are going to have to say, "Okay, Lord, I’ll do it. I am prepared to stand firm, to stand bold, to stand out and be available for You to blow Your wind on me when You choose to use me."

Yes, God trained His prophets in secret, and yes He has called you to a time of hiding and waiting on Him. That was the time you learned to sink the pipe down. That was the time you did all your construction work, widened the pipe and had it all set up. Now you had better put your windmill in place, and you had better wave it high in the sky for the whole world to see.

You had better be available for God to use otherwise He is not going to use you. How can He use you if you are hidden away? Nobody knows you are there. You are going to have to be where God can put you in a situation where He can bring people across your path that you can minister to. You are going to have to be available to the Lord. You are going to have to be able to say, "Father, do with me as You please. Lord, use me as and when You want to use me."

Keep It Primed and Full

Once you have done that you need to keep your pipe primed and full of water. You have to keep it that way. Most windmills and boreholes have a tank. The windmill blows and it fills the tank first, and when you draw water you draw it from the tank. As soon as the level of the water in the tank begins to fall the windmill kicks in again. When the tank becomes full the windmill engages a clutch assembly, which causes the pump to stop turning. Then the wind can blow but the pump stops turning.

You have to be primed. You have to be filled up. Well you know that being filled with the Spirit is great, but it does not last. You have barely arrived home after the meeting and it can be gone. Try it. Just go and get into a fight with your husband or wife and it is gone. You have lost it. It is like somebody burst the balloon. Somebody just opened the faucet and let all the water out. It is gone. You are going to have to keep it filled up.

How are you going to do that? You are going to have to pray in tongues daily. You are going to have to go in there and maintain that channel and get the water coming and free, otherwise it goes stagnant in the pipe. Then when it comes time for the Spirit of God to move on you what comes out is dirty rotten water for a while before it comes pure. You have some poor thirsty person coming along for water, and you give them this gungy, horrible, smelly water. They do not want to come near you again. They do not want to receive your ministry. You open your mouth to speak the prophetic word and what comes out is all the junk that is in your mind, instead of what the Spirit of God wants to say.

You need to spend time in the presence of the Lord praying in tongues. You need to spend time in the presence of the Lord in praise and worship.

"Oh, Hallelujah, thank you Jesus. Praise you Lord," and you just let it flow. You let your pipe get filled up. You let your pump be primed and ready to go. You are ready now for the wind to blow.