In the list of the nine gifts of the Spirit, I Corinthians 12:10 names the gift of prophecy. The gift of prophecy is needed very much in the great flow of the Spirit which God is bringing to His people in these days. Prophecy is like a railroad track, because it can be the channel through which every other gift and ministry can, and usually does, flow. It can be combined with the word of wisdom, with the word of knowledge, and with the discerning of spirits. Combined with the gift of faith, it becomes creative. It can also be a channel of judgment. By itself, it can be used to speak to men for edification, exhortation, and comfort (I Corinthians 14:3).
Think of the many different combinations that are possible when the various gifts of the Spirit are linked together. God is a God of a variety of movings, and the manifestation of the Holy Spirit comes in various combinations in order that the Lord can be glorified. When a church settles into a certain formal rut, it is an indication that the people do not have much of God. Oh, how we ought to wait on the Lord and believe to receive the wonderful flow of the Holy Spirit that can come in the gift of prophecy.
Three factors—faith, revelation, and enthusiasm (or violence)—are very important in prophecy. First, let us see why faith is necessary. Romans 12:6 says, And since we have gifts that differ according to the grace given to us, let each exercise them accordingly: if prophecy, according to the proportion of his faith.
A person can prophesy from the time that he comes into Christ. In fact, Acts 19 gives a truer pattern for the endtime believer than Acts 2. Acts 19:6 reveals that Paul laid hands on the disciples, and they all received the Holy Spirit and spoke with tongues and prophesied. The purpose of receiving the Spirit is to enable us to move in the realm of spirit. Prophecy, then, is a gift that should be manifested soon after receiving the Holy Spirit, because it is a channel by which the believer grows and expands.
As you begin to prophesy, and continue to do so, remember that you prophesy according to the proportion of your faith. If there is not much faith, the prophecy will not mean much. The less faith, the more the prophecy fails in its impact, in its purpose, and in its function. If you are not believing with a true, living faith that what you say is going to happen, do not prophesy it; you will be merely talking out of the top of your head. You carry a responsibility when you prophesy.
The Scripture tells us to covet earnestly the best gifts, but rather that you prophesy (I Corinthians 12:31; 14:1). The best gifts are channeled through prophecy, and often the initiation of other gifts comes through the flow of prophecy in your life. As you prophesy faithfully, soon you notice that other ingredients are added to it: a word of wisdom, a word of knowledge, a supernatural faith, or a discerning of spirits. While you are flowing in prophecy, other gifts are channeled with it and spring up almost without your realizing that God has brought them to you.
Usually, very few gifts come out of speaking in tongues; more come out of prophesying. The spiritual faculties of an individual are exercised more completely in prophecy than in tongues. When you speak in tongues, your understanding is unfruitful; but when you prophesy, your understanding is fruitful, and other people who hear it also understand. Prophecy can stir up edification, exhortation, and comfort to others, which is not true of tongues. In a church service, why cling to an operation of tongues and of interpretation which is restricted by the Word: “Two, or at the most three,” according to I Corinthians 14:27. Verse 31 says that all may prophesy, one by one.
There is greater latitude with prophecy than with the more restricted gifts of tongues and interpretation. Nevertheless, you should never despise tongues or feel that they are of little value. When your understanding is unfruitful and you do not know what to pray, reach into the Lord and let the tongues flow. You will be edified, because the Spirit will make intercession through you and bring you into a great deal of blessing, even beyond your understanding. Tongues serve a needful purpose.
How important it is for a person to have faith as soon as he begins to walk with the Lord. From the moment that he receives a word from the Lord, he starts going through testings and problems. Even the little children go through the problems of spiritual warfare. They must be protected and prayed for, and yet it is surprising how quickly they increase in faith. Any little child can ask God for something, but a child whose faith has been tested will be very effective in receiving what he prays for and in seeing his prophecies fulfilled.
As a Christian begins to mature and his faith is tested, his prophecies become more effective because the human element is refined out of his prophesying. A person who is emotionally upset cannot be objective in his praying or prophesying: nor will he be very effective. An individual may believe in violent praying and prophesying, but this does not mean that the emotions within him should take over the flow of revelation. He will be effective to the extent that the soulish element is eliminated from the flow of his prophecy and revelation.
Let us use two hypothetical people to illustrate the effect that the carnal nature has on prophesying. One person realizes that the other is stealing money from the goodwill box. The first person is so upset over it that he loses his temper. He becomes furious—not just righteously indignant, but furious—and he begins to pray and prophesy judgment. How can God fulfill that? The sin of that person is as great as the one who is stealing the money. One carnal nature trying to prophesy against another carnal nature will not work. But suppose that the first person realizes that he has a bad spirit about the matter, and he prays until his spirit is absolutely right; then he goes to the brother and confronts him. Then the word that God gives him to prophesy will most probably come to pass.
When the revelation and the faith that come to you are tested, little by little the emotional element, the reasoning element, the vindictive element—all the human elements—are slowly but surely refined out. Then all that remains is pure faith. This is the reason that God dealt severely with His people in the past, especially His prophets, He wanted them to prophesy a word that was valid.
One Old Testament prophet was not fit to prophesy. He had no love; neither did he have the fear of the Lord in his heart. The Lord gave him a revelation and told him to prophesy, but his old soulish nature, with its emotions and prejudices, rose up. You can read about him in the explosive, four-chapter book of Jonah. Jonah was told to go and prophesy against Nineveh, but he went the other way as fast as he could. He went down to the seaport, paid his fare, and left. The Lord then began to deal with him to refine his faith; for it was mixed with all the corruption of the old fleshly nature. God placed Jonah in a drastic situation until he began to pray and seek the Lord. How surprisingly different his prophesying was after that little experience!
The Lord puts the active believer through the fire and the testings in dealing with him, and the first thing that bubbles up to the surface is all the scum. The Lord must keep dealing with him, because he must prophesy according to the proportion of his faith. But after a while, faith takes over in an ever increasing proportion in prophesying; and there is less and less of his human emotions—feelings, reactions, jealousies, judgments, withdrawal, rebellion, unbelief, and doubt. There is less and less of the human element because the Lord is dealing with it all the time.
When anyone first receives revelation, he does not realize that it must be refined. He sees revelation, not through the pure eye of the Spirit, but through a jaundiced eye that views everything in a distorted manner. How blessed are the eyes that see! To the Laodicean church the Lord said, “Anoint your eyes with eyesalve that you may see” (Revelation 3:18). Sometimes a person will start reacting vindictively to something that God has shown him about another person, and he starts voicing how God is going to deal with him. Because he is not speaking in the love of God, but secretly in his heart he is glad, God will not allow his prophecies to be fulfilled.
Simon, the magician who turned to the Lord among all those in Samaria, saw what was happening when Peter and John laid hands on the people. He offered to give them a large sum of money if they would give him the gift so that he also could lay hands on people. Peter, telling Simon that his spirit was not right before God, said, “Your money perish with you. I perceive that you are in the gall of bitterness and in the bond of iniquity” (Acts 8:18–23). Those were strong words; but how could a gift operate in such a man? Everything about his attitude, including his thinking that he could buy a gift of the Spirit, was wrong; he was in the gall of bitterness. Bitterness has to go. A gift should start with repentance and heart searching.
When you receive a word from the Lord to prophesy, search your heart. Before you speak that word, be sure that you can speak it with the force that comes with a great proportion of pure, unadulterated faith. Then you will be delighted to find that you are not really seeking your own welfare, but you are seeking first the Kingdom. If you do not have any personal ambition, and you are committing your revelation to the Lord in an impersonal way, God will bless you.
Many people have never reached an objectivity when it comes to prophesying or praying. You must pray, “Lord, Thy will be done,” even if your brother is exalted and you are degraded, even if you ask the Lord to release a million dollars to send forth the word, and He enables everyone else to give while you can give nothing. You do not have to be the channel through which it comes. You need only be one who is faithful to prophesy and loose it. Someone else can become the immediate channel. Such objectivity is not easily attained.
Several years ago, a remnant of believers prayed for the release of God’s people from the bondage of denominationalism, and for God to break the walls of division. They prophesied for quite a while before many good brothers started coming out and wandering around. The prophecies and prayers of that little remnant loosed many from bondage and started the Charismatic movement. Much of the teaching that God gave to that remnant is now being taught by some who are in the denominational world, usually with a distorted viewpoint that is not true to the word which was first given; but at least it is a step in the right direction. Should those who were originally faithful to bring forth the teaching be upset? No, they should simply thank God that it is happening.
When Paul was in bonds and imprisonment, some of the faithful brothers had greater liberty in the Spirit to go out and preach. Others, who did not like Paul and wanted to make it harder on him, also preached boldly then, thinking to add to his bonds and imprisonment. With great objectivity, Paul said, “I will rejoice. Whatever their motive, Christ is being preached” (Philippians 1:18). He was completely objective; his personal interests did not matter in the situation. That takes faith.
Objective faith is necessary in this end-time war over God’s word. When Satan battles the word, God allows it; He lets you be tested to see if you can be shaken on the word. The word goes through the fire, and what happens? You are burned out of the situation and the word prevails. The word of God comes forth, and your faith is purified in the process.
God is dealing with an end-time remnant; therefore, it is becoming the greatest prophetic community that has ever existed in the history of the world. Not many dealings come from the outside world; God is dealing directly with His people. There is continual persecution, but it is surprising that it is not even more severe. Like Paul, the Spirit-led disciple today studies to be quiet, wanting to live peaceably with all and to be a blessing; yet he is a violent revolutionary in the Kingdom of God. In the entire Christian world, it is the remnant that is really revolutionary. It can prophesy and bring down forever the sectarianism that the denominations took centuries to build. Like the city of Carthage, sectarianism will not only be torn down, but the fields will be plowed with salt. Never again will anyone be able to erect Babylon’s walls in their thinking.
The dealings of God are severe upon His people who have received a pure word. Because that word is being tested, it is running very swiftly; and it seems that it is going to fill the whole earth. Little groups in the United States and in other parts of the world are being born as people near and far happen to listen to a few tapes or read some literature of a living word that the Lord is bringing in this day. The days of Elijah, the days of the prophets, are being repeated. A remnant will prophesy and change the economy; they will prophesy and change the weather. They have only begun.
When the prophetic flow of this hour is fully released, the hearer will realize the necessity of leaving the soulish level of living and reacting against the word. He cannot hear a prophetic word and react to it on a soulish, emotional level without becoming a victim of his own soulishness. Although he leaves a church service in a high soulish state, he can soon become discouraged.
A Spirit-filled believer cannot prophesy or sing in the Spirit or truly worship the Lord in the Spirit without the soulish element being refined; and the first step of that refining process is exposure. God exposes the problems so that they can be seen. The more he tries to prophesy and move in God, the more trouble he has with certain little elements in his life. This is a good sign that God is dealing with his soul life. As this happens, his prophecies take on strength and an explosive quality that are not just sound and fury, but a detonating force that is destructive as well as creative. Before prophesying, it is helpful to submit to the Lord and to seek His will, saying in your heart, “Thy will be done; I seek first Thy Kingdom, Lord.” Then prophesy. The purer the motivation, the purer the faith, and the purer the enthusiasm, the more effective the prophesying will be.
The third ingredient of prophecy which must be purified is enthusiasm (or violence). The word “enthusiasm” originates from en Theos, two Greek words meaning “in God.” In times past, people had enthusiasm when they were in God, but they found no joy in living outside of the Lord. You can actually come to the end of your emotional human motivation and into the pure divine motivation for living. As you learn to drink of the Spirit, enthusiasm comes. Many times the circumstances of your life are not the basis for freedom, and if you brood upon your situation, you can become very unhappy. In God, there is freedom and joy in your spirit. When there is joyful strength in your spirit because you are believing God, that is the time to prophesy. Prophesy out of the violence of purified emotion. By obeying the truth there comes a sanctification of your soul life, so that it is pure before God (I Peter 1:22). Then as you stand and prophesy, there is a release. Your prophesying will gain in strength as the fires of testing purify you. Every day you will become more of a living epistle of Christ to speak a living word. Hebrews 11:3 says that through faith we understand that the ages were created by the word of God.
No matter what we experience, we can believe that everything will turn out right. A truth concerning this is found in Romans 8:28: And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose. Even though evil forces and persons exist to work against our lives, yet some strange law of God makes it all work together for our good. This is difficult to understand.
Evil can come against you to destroy you, but God has a law that will operate to turn it around for your good. Years after Joseph’s brothers sold him into slavery, he was reunited with them, and he said, “You meant it for evil, but God meant it for good to save many people’s lives” (Genesis 50:20). That is how the Joseph ministry was born. God had to do much to refine that overconfident young man before he could become a savior to the ancient world by the way he stored up food. The Joseph ministry did not come forth until God had tested him on the word He had given him, so that his faith, his vision, and his revelation could become strong. The pure prophet’s vision to interpret dreams probably never would have been given to Joseph if he had not been falsely accused, put into prison, and forgotten by man. Only in prison did his prophetic discerning powers and his ability to interpret dreams come forth.
God knows how to work everything for good, but you can help Him and make it work for you a little more smoothly and quickly. Stop and think what God is trying to work in you. Is He dealing with your unbelief? Is He dealing with your withdrawal? Is He trying to remove the responses of the old life from you? Is He renewing and transforming your mind and bringing you into the mind of Christ? Then begin to prophesy that the Lord will release you and bless you and bring you into His full will. This hastens the whole procedure. The Lord gives you the revelation of what He wants done, and the sooner it is done, the sooner you get out of the dealing.
You can pray that a problem will disappear, hoping that when you wake up in the morning, it will not be there. When it seems as if the Lord is not going to deal with the problem, you may want to give up. Instead, you should learn to say, “Lord, this harasses me, but my eye is on You; and I am going to serve You and walk with You, regardless of this problem.” Then the Lord can take away the problem, for that is what He wants to work in you.
Find out what the Lord wants you to do, and cooperate with it. Prophesy it! Believe for it! Put the whole force of your God-given faith toward believing for that perfect submission to the will of the Lord and for complete release into Him. The quicker you do that, the happier He will be with your situation and the quicker He will stop the harassments. Just start submitting to the Lord, and take hold of the word that God has for you. Let the Lord refine you.
The Lord will refine each of the three ingredients in your prophesying: enthusiasm, faith, and revelation. He will refine revelation by removing from you the things that divert your revelation from being on course. When people open up to the Holy Spirit, personal ambition and self-seeking are deadly and invariably will divert them from the pure course. Above everything else, watch that you do not fall into an old-order rut of building your own place or a kingdom for yourself. You should be building God’s Kingdom and at all times be absolutely expendable for the glory of God.
Back in the days of the wooden frigates, a ship’s compass was kept in a box in the helm where the ship was steered. In one shipwreck, it was found that for some reason a nail had been driven near the ship’s compass. The nail had sufficient iron magnetism to deflect the needle of the compass just enough to turn the ship off course. The crew was without any reckoning because a storm made it impossible for them to get any sighting so that they could determine their position with a sextant; consequently, the ship was wrecked. Similarly, you can have a revelation from the Lord and be absolutely positive that it is the exact revelation. But if something of the flesh or of a wrong motivation is involved, by the time that revelation comes through to your mind, it may be deflected only a little from the course, just enough to miss the mark.
When God reveals to His people what He is going to bring forth in the earth, they must start prophesying and aiming for it, without allowing anything to deflect them from the course of His perfect will. They must do exactly what He says and be exactly what He wants them to be—sons of God raised up to loose all creation from its futility (Romans 8:19–21).
Prophesy the word of the Lord. Give yourself to it with a violence of spirit. If you find things of your old nature—in your soul life, in your personality, in your emotions—coming up and battling you to stifle the flow of the Spirit, do violence to them. Command that the work of the cross be done. The work of the cross may be general in nature, but there are many specific applications. When you find something wrong in your life, nail it to the cross. Specifically and definitely get rid of it as fast as you can.
Learn to become God’s mouthpiece by speaking the word of the Lord. Loose things, and they will be loosed! Prophesy to loose finances without worrying the next minute how to obtain them! Prophesy against unbelief! Most of the problems contributing to the failure of prophecy are due to unbelief in your own mind. There is nothing wrong with the word of God or with the things that God is bringing forth. There is nothing wrong in the timing. This is the time; this is the season for it. You may think it is not just the split second; but whenever you come that close, God will meet your heart. There is always a little overlapping period. Within this generation, all of God’s promises are to come to pass. More should be happening than has been seen.
Here is a key that will help your flow of prophecy above everything else: Follow after love; yet desire earnestly spiritual gifts, but rather that ye may prophesy. I Corinthians 14:1. Above the earnest desire for spiritual gifts should be this even greater and more intense coveting or desire: Wherefore, my brethren, desire earnestly to prophesy…. Verse 39. That is an apostolic command: “Desire it earnestly.” There must be an intense desire to prophesy and to prophesy purely, an intense desire to see your prophecy come to pass, and an intense desire to be a believer. Faith is initiated by the human will. Faith is not generated by disciplining the mind.
The faith that comes from God grows through the discipline of the human will. You will believe just as much as you are determined to believe, just as much as you covet earnestly to believe. You will prophesy if you covet earnestly to prophesy. It will happen if you want it to happen with all your heart. Why would God promise that if it were not so? Why would He tell you in I Corinthians 12:31, “Yet show I unto thee a more excellent way”? In chapters 13 and 14, He shows the more excellent way by which the gifts and the ministry of the Body of Christ come into being, and a more excellent way of its functioning.
The fastest way to move into the flow of prophecy is by taking the leash off the desire of your heart toward God and by having the most intense motivation that you can have—the earnest coveting. Want what He wants above everything else. Look over all the other things that you want and are working for, and lay them aside. If God wills, you will take them up again some day, but right now you must prophesy the word of the Lord. Desire to do this more than anything else. Desire to come to the church services and be right on course when you prophesy, not just bubbling forth, but proclaiming what you speak with such faith that it will come to pass.
If a remnant of God can perfect the quality of their prophesying, they can move this generation. God can turn it loose. One host of prophecies that are right on target can turn things loose, and from that time on there will not be enough pastors or literature to meet the demands of the hungry hearts. Facilities that are needed must be loosed so that the living word that God has been bringing can be received quickly all over the world. It can happen.
If you want a drizzle, you can have a drizzle; but why not ask the Lord for rain in this time of latter rain (Zechariah 10:1). If you follow on to know the Lord, He will come unto you as the rain (Hosea 6:3). Have you felt that there is not quite enough of God released in your life? Then with all your heart, intensely and earnestly, desire the gift of prophecy. Do not let anything in your heart pull back from it. You must earnestly desire it. You must have such an intense, sanctified, refined desire for something to happen that you think about it day and night, visualizing it in your heart. Only as you desire to prophesy with everything in your spirit will you break into it. When young people set their hearts to walk honestly before the Lord, they go through testings. Everything of corruption in their spirits comes to the surface. That is their time to get hold of God. That is the climate in which prophets and prophetesses come forth.
You may move along at a certain level, and because you are really sincere, God gives you a chance to change. You change in a climate of upheaval. He puts the fire to you, and if you seek Him with all your heart in the midst of the fire, a pure faith comes forth and you prophesy. Then God has Himself another prophet.
Would you like to have the Lord help you put into action what you have learned about the gift of prophecy? Any step forward is better than none. Five intense minutes a day are better than nothing at all. Keep the fires going; refine the soulish element. Keep the pure prophecy flowing. Determine that every day you will prophesy a pure word that will explode into something new. Think what might happen in one church service if each person spent one hour working on this. What might happen within a year if you pursued this every single day? You might have all kinds of troubles. The devil will do everything he can to come against you, and God will probably allow it. As soon as God sees that you really want to prophesy, He will let you go through the testings to get the job done.
Rid yourself of all impediments so that when you start prophesying, something really happens. Proclaim it. Ask the Lord for the spirit of prophecy to come upon you, praying, “Lord Jesus, I earnestly desire to proclaim Thy word from a pure heart, with all my heart, all my soul, all my mind, all my strength. It will be before me day and night. I proclaim a new level of prophecy for myself and for the whole Body of Christ. I am going to move in it, in the name of the Lord.”
The army of the Lord will war by prophecy. They will generate release by prophecy. They will agree, and things will be loosed in heaven; they will agree, and things will be bound in heaven. Everything will come forth because of true, intense, perfect faith and the proportion of it by which God’s people prophesy the word of the Lord.