Bill Johnson - Valuing The Prophetic
People will often say, «I just don’t hear his voice, but I feel his peace». In John 1:14, it says of Jesus: he is the Word of God made flesh. Anytime you sense presence, the word is there. It may not have touched your intellect, but it is touching your spirit man. Sometimes, we wait for external voices to affirm, confirm, or give clear direction when the Lord is actually revealing himself to us. I just sense his peace. He’s speaking. He’s engaging with you and he’s imparting an awareness of who he is and with him comes clarity concerning the will of God. Sometimes, we minister out of the emotion, the emotional response to the anointing. Everything that we do in worship is filtered through David said, «Bless the Lord, o my soul».
Our mind, our will, our emotions, the emotional response to God, it proves we’re alive. It’s the response to his person, his voice, his word. Response to a testimony. We are responding to who he is. But that emotion is not the anointing itself. And, sometimes, we make the mistake of when we’re praying for people, we sense this incredible emotion and don’t realize that we’re not cooperating with the anointing, we’re cooperating with our response to the anointing. Let me try to illustrate this. Let’s say that your rent was due, it’s past due, you need a thousand dollars by midnight tonight, or you’re going to be evicted from your house. And somebody comes to you tonight and they give you a thousand dollars. You begin to jump up and down, you shout, «Thank you, Jesus»! You give this person a hug. You run around the sanctuary. That’s the emotional response to the gift.
When you go to the landlord, your emotional response won’t pay your rent. Eventually, you’ll have to cooperate with what was given to you and learn to transfer that to the landlord so that the rent is paid. The anointing is a person. And we can sit here and respond to the person, which is legitimate. It’s important. It shows we’re alive when the joy, the celebration, the raised hands, the laying on our faces, all these things that we do are responses that filter through will and intellect and emotion. These are the offerings that we give him. They’re extremely vital. But when it comes to ministering to somebody who needs a miracle, that emotion will not change their situation. That’s where the focus gets turned back to the gift that was given to us.
When you lay hands on people, you are not laying hands on them as a sympathetic gesture. It is not, we wanna just have that human touch. That has value, but it doesn’t release a miracle. We actually lay hands on people because of what is in us. Touch, voice, and prophetic act releases what is in us into the environment we’re wanting to change. The resurrected Christ, the spirit that raised Jesus from the dead, dwells in us. And he looks for opportunities to flow through. So, touch is literally to release eternity into time. It’s to take the impossible breaking presence that is in me, release into that situation. We see it in so many different settings throughout scripture.
We see them line the streets with sick people, when Peter walked by. Forgive me for repeat, but I need to set the stage for where I wanna take you. We see the shadow touching. There’s no substance to a shadow. Your shadow will always release whatever overshadows you. Whatever you have set your affection upon will affect the environment that you invade. If that affection, that attention of the heart, is on worry, fear, etc., then I will carry anxiousness into any environment that I go. Fear is misplaced worship. Fear is actually the enemy touching the strings of our heart that were designed to express affection and trust to him, and they are now removed from him towards circumstances that are so extremely inferior to him that it’s dishonored.
It’s not a reason for shame, but it is a reason for repentance to realize that when I embrace anxiety and fear, what I have done is I have used the tool God gave me for worship and I’ve put my affection on the inferior. You can tell what I value by what I think about. If a problem has captured my attention and has taken me into fear and anxiety, then, it is misplaced worship. How many, I’ve asked you this question before, so how many of you have had something trouble you so much it just kept you awake at night? It was just hard to go to sleep. You know, my hands, legs are raised. So, we know that we know how to meditate. We just have to shift what we set our heart on, what we meditate on.
God’s economy is transferred, his currency is word and presence, which are two sides of the same coin. He spoke everything into being that is in existence, with one exception: he didn’t speak man into being. He fashioned man of what he spoke into being. Sometimes, he likes to work with what’s already there. Loaves and fishes. Could have created new food, but he wanted to co-labor. He would much rather co-labor with what he has made than to he easily could have manifested himself to marry the virgin who was about to bear the Christ child and explain to her what was about to happen. But, instead, he sent her Gabriel, the messenger angel, because God actually delights in what he has made operating in its design. He is glorified by every facet of his creation functioning in their design. Fear keeps us from functioning in our design.
I want you to look at 2 Chronicles 20. We’ve got this military conflict. We have the Lord giving strategy, giving direction, giving plan to the people of God. And, in verse 20, this is easy to remember, 20/20, clear vision, verse 20: «So, they arose early in the morning and went out into the wilderness of tekoa: and as they went out, Jehoshaphat stood and said, 'hear me, o Judah and you inhabitants of Jerusalem: believe in the Lord your God, and you shall be established: believe his prophets, and you shall prosper'». Okay, now, listen carefully. I want you to hear this over and over again in your heart, «Believe in the Lord your God, and you shall be established: believe his prophets, and you shall prosper».
There’s this crazy idea that has entered, much of the church that: because I am a child of God, all I need is him. I love people, I care for people, I spend my life with people, but, essentially, my life depends directly on God speaking to me and caring for me. There’s enough truth to that to keep people in deception. My need to hear from God for myself does not nullify my my need of the prophets does not cancel out my need to hear from God for myself. They work in tandem. The way most of us function, if he only spoke to us directly, we would become independent. We would use what he said to prove we’re superior. We would argue, proving we’re right and someone else is wrong. When the word comes through community, it affects community, it blesses community, and it emphasizes our need for one another. The Bible says we are members of one another and uses the physical body to illustrate what it looks like to be joined together.
In Acts 2, we won’t go there, but in Acts 2, king David is actually called a prophet. A prophet is someone who hears directly from the Lord. But when he wanted to build a temple for God, God wouldn’t talk to him. If God is silent, it’s never punishment. It’s either because he has already spoken and you need to review what you’ve heard or he’s trying to connect you with the right people that will add into your life the missing piece. Because it emphasizes connection. It emphasizes the fact we don’t have it all. The Bible does not say: I have the mind of Christ. It says: we have the mind of Christ. It says: «Our Father, who art in heaven». There’s something that is gained in the corporate expression that you cannot gain any other way. This excites me, now. The healing revival.
How many of you have read anything or heard anything about the healing revival back in 1948 on into the 50s? Some of the most extraordinary things, literally, that the world has ever seen happened in that era. But it was all through the generals of the army. It was the season. It was the generals of the army. What God is doing in this hour is the generals are equipping the saints. So, picture it this way: here’s this high level of anointing that nobody can reach to, so this general of army equips all the saints around him until they come into a place of anointing that was once only occupied by the generals of the army. That releases them to explore even greater dimensions and realms in the Spirit of God so that we can manifest Jesus much more clearly in glory, in power, in presence, in purity. I was really inspired by, this happened, I don’t know, 15 years or so ago.
Kris was asking, one of the great heroes that we’ve had in the realms of anointing was a man named William Branham. Tragic things at the end, but that doesn’t mess up how God used him. Solomon still made it into the book. Value what God values, if you wanna live smart. Favor who he favors. All right. He asked the Lord, «Lord, I want his gift, I wanna operate in his anointing». Something to that effect. And the Lord spoke very clearly and he says: you couldn’t handle it. Am I right? You couldn’t handle it. And, Kris, then, came back and said: «Well, then, don’t give it to me only. Give it to the entire church». And the moment he had in the Lord, if I remember correctly, is that he felt that the Lord was pleased over his response. It wasn’t about him having an anointing that draws everybody’s attention. It was about the church coming into a place in God that represents Jesus more clearly.
I love that example so much. I’ve used it a number of times. So, here is this powerful moment in Israel’s history. And it says they believed God and they believe his prophets. Interesting, in scripture it says: and Israel believed God and they believed Moses. They weren’t contradictory. It was necessary to see a co-laboring expression of what it looked like to trust God. It’s easy to say, «I trust God and don’t trust any people,» because it can’t be measured. John put it another way: it’s easy to say you love God, whom you can’t see, and hate your brother, whom you can see. It’s illegal to claim a spiritual reality that cannot be measured in the natural.
So: I love God with all my heart. You have to be able to examine and measure it in how I treat people. It’s what validates that unseen reality that I am supposed to walk in. It’s the same in faith. It requires a faith in the giftings of God, not that people are always a hundred percent. But the Spirit of God is within us to help us weed through the times there’s error or their opinion has been added to a word. That’s the truth. In the Old Testament, the prophets were judged. In the New Testament, prophecy is judged.
So, here, it says they believed God and they believed his prophets. It says they believed God and they believed Moses. Gideon, at one point, says: give this shout, it’s a shout of declaration, a shout of praise, to break these vases with candles, and it’s a weird story, break these candles and then shout for the Lord and for…? Gideon. Sometimes, we can live impressed by our own faith that cannot be measured, when, in fact, it is measured by our confidence in the sovereignty of God to use the people around us to fill it in where we lack. It’s called trust.
So, it says: «Believe the Lord your God, you’ll be established: believe his prophets and you will prosper». Anybody in here wanna prosper? I know that some are too holy for it, and I get it. I get it. You don’t need it. But the rest of us really want the prosper. I’ve told, every once in a while, I tell people, I say, «Listen, if you’re not hungry for more, then you’re just being selfish». Yeah, it’s the most acceptable form of selfishness. Because it proves to me you’re untouched by the needs of people around you. That’s not you. That’s them other folks. It’s them other folks. It’s not even you on TV. It’s not you, either. It’s everybody else.
All right, go to Ezra 6. And we’ll read another verse. And then we’ll just, we’ll camp on it for a few minutes and try to find a place to land, all right? It’s just another verse that just talks about, in Ezra 6, on page 665 in the anointed version, verse 14, it says: «So, the elders of the Jews built, and they prospered through the prophesying of Haggai the prophet and Zechariah the son of Iddo».
Isn’t that interesting? They prospered through the prophesying of these prophets. This is not a new subject for us. I bring this up every few months in some measure. Tonight, it will be a little bit different measure. But what you dwell on shows me what you value. It’s what you treasure. And, if it’s incorrect, if it’s inferior, if you’re dwelling in something inferior, then it becomes misplaced worship. If it is part of what exists in the realm of God’s kingdom, his rule, think on these things, things that are lovely, of good report, etc. When I’m locked in to who he is, just think of this process. Enter his gates with thanksgiving, his courts with praise. All right?
What is thanksgiving a response to? The works of God. The actions of God. What is praise a response to? His nature. His character. Okay? So, thanksgiving is my response to a work of God. Now, the Lord spoke and he said to Israel: I have revealed my works, but to Moses I have the currency that we use in this interaction is response to what we’ve discovered of him. The cancer that was healed. The vertebrae missing in the back and the ladies who are running and dancing, jumping around the room. I hear this news. I don’t understand ever how he does that stuff, but I don’t ever try to understand it. I don’t try to wrap my head around it: I try to wrap my heart around it. My heart will always take me to places my head can’t fit.
So, I embrace that which he’s done and then give appropriate response. But, then, what happens is you start seeing he heals, he restores. You become more deeply impressed with his nature as a father to care for his own. So, now, it’s gone from the works. We never move from the works, in the sense that they aren’t valuable. 'Cause they’re always valuable. Jesus never scolded anyone who pursued him for a miracle. He never, ever said to somebody, «You should be seeking relationship with me and not your eyesight». He would always perform the miracle to give them access to the relationship. The miracle creates the faith for ongoing encounter. It’s valuable.