Become An Effective Messenger

I wanted to share a few thoughts with you about delivering God's prophetic word to the body of Christ. Before I can share these thoughts, I need to lay a brief framework about how God speaks prophetically through a person. Sometimes God gives us a message to share in a manner where He dictates word for word pecisely what He wants said. If He gives it that way, then we are responsible to share it precisely as we receive it, without changing a single word. But most of the time, that is not how God chooses to give words.

God's preference seems to be to give a message to His messenger, then let that messenger find the words to express that message. In other words, He allows us to select the words to articulate His message. Yes, the word is from God because He supplies the message it communicates; it is His prophecy. But He allows us to participate with Him in it. He gives us the task of choosing the words to convey His message.

When God gives us words that way, then our delivery skill can impact how effective that word is. The clearer we communicate God's message, the better it will be understood and the more power it will have.

I know that some of you are raising your eyebrows right now, and you are almost ready to reject what I have just said. That is because some people have been taught to respect prophecy (God's spoken word) in the same manner that they respect Scripture (God's written word).

But God does not put them on the same level. The Bible is infallible; it is the standard by which we evaluate everything else. But modern-day prophecy is not infallible because it comes through flawed human messengers, and at times it is not 100% accurate. That is why the Bible tells us to judge prophecy. In order to judge it, we depend on the Bible and on God's Spirit, Who lives inside of us. While we do judge prophecy, the Bible is not something we judge. We are expected to accept it as absolute; there is not a passage anywhere in the Bible that invites us to prayerfully judge the Bible and decide what parts of it to receive. The entire Bible is the word of God and it is to be accepted, not judged. That puts the Bible on a different standard than modern-day prophecy, and modern-day prophecy must be judged as per 1 Corinthians 14:29.

It is true that we are to respect the message that God speaks through His modern-day prophets once we have judged it to truly be His word. We need to understand the dynamics of how He gives words to best understand how to judge and respect them.

God uses flawed people to accomplish His purposes. He could do it all Himself and do a much better job than we could ever do, but He doesn't choose to do it that way. He chooses to involve His children in doing with Him what He is doing.

Let's look for a second at healing the sick, because that will help us to better understand the principle about prophecy. When we lay hands on a sick person and pray for them and they are miraculously healed, who did the healing? Did God do it, or did we do it? Or was it a joint effort?

Surely God did it in the sense that we do not have any inate ability within us to do miracles--that power comes from the Spirit of God, Who lives inside of us. Yet, God often limits Himself to not healing the person until some human is laying hands on them or praying a prayer of faith. E.g., the miraculous healings usually go to the people who are prayed for, and the sick people who are not prayed for don't usually get a miracle healing.

(Of course, there are always exceptions to this. There are stories of God sovereignly reaching out and touching a sick preson when no one prayed for them. He can do that because He is Almighty God and He loves to heal. But most of the time, He doesn't do it that way.) Most of the time, He sends someone to the sick person to pray for them, just like He sent Ananias to pray for blind Saul that he might receive his sight in Acts 9:17.

Why does He choose to do it that way? I think it is because He likes to involve His children in the works He is doing, to have us do it with Him. As we grow in our faith and experience, we become better at moving with God in supernatural healing, and then we see more and more of the people who we pray for get healed. We grow in our skill, the skill of cooperating with God to do what He is doing in physical healing. We grow in our skill and ability of working with God to heal the sick, because that is how God wants it to be.

It is similiar with the prophetic. We are able to grow in our ablity to move with God, to become more precise mouthpieces, to speak His words and deliver His message. We literally become more skillful in delivering God's word as we grow in our gifting. That means that when we start out we are not as good at it as God wants us to become. He uses us before we are experts, before we are perfect at it, but He wants us to keep growing in the gifing that He has put within us. Occasionally a person rises up who did not go through a learning curve, who simply started out at a great level of power and anointing and propehtic skill--but that is the exception. Most of us will grow in our gifting and develop more skill at flowing with God's Spirit and speaking His words.

One of our goals in the prophetic should be to communicate clearly.

(There are exceptions to this. There are times when God releases so much anointing with the prophecy that the precise words spoken to deliver the message don't matter at all...the Holy Spirit works in the hearer's heart and communicates what He wants them to know. I can think of several modern-day examples of this, including some of the corporate words that Cindy Jacobs or Heidi Baker have given. Let me use Heidi as an example. At times she is so much under the power of God that she is a crumpled heap on the floor and she can barely get the words out and there are repeated phrases and incomplete sentences and a bunch of "ho-o-o-o's"--yet her words are so powerful because of God's manifest presence as His word is being delivered. When the anointing is that strong, you don't need clarity of delivery, the Holy Spirit bears witness directly to the spirit of the listeners in a strong and tangible way.)

But most of the time, most of us need to try to deliver God's message clearly and accurately. We must take the message that God has put inside of us and find a way to express it that will let the hearer know and understand what God wants to say.

There is a factor called "prophetic style" that enters into ths. You may have noticed that some of the modern-day prophets have different styles from each other. Some are loud and forceful, some are soft-spoken and gentle, some are down-to-earth and use humor in their delivery. That is biblical. In fact, we see different prophetic styles in the Bible. John the Baptist was forceful and in-your-face, but Jeremiah was a weeper and Isaiah was a poet. Those are all valid prophetic styles, God has used all of these delivery methods and many others. He wants His prophets to participate with Him in giving His message, so He allows them to put little bit of themselves in that message in the form of their delivery style. Yes, His message comes across clearly, but so does some of the prophet's own style.

I know we always talk about speaking "pure words," about conveying only God's message and not our own. That is the way it should be; we are not to add our own message to God's message. The message must come from Him, not from us, or it is corrupted and impure. But at the same time, we are allowed (even expected) to put a tad of ourselves into the message by the words we choose to convey that message, by our tone of voice and facial expressions, and by the gestures we use.

God is capable of sending an angel to deliver His words and there are still reports of Him doing that today. So why does He send you with His message? Since He can send an angel, have you ever wondered why He chooses to speak through you? It is because there is a part of you that He wants to permit into the message, a part of your delivery style to go along with what He wants delivered. God knows you and your style and that affects the messages that He will give you. For instance, He won't usually give the "forceful shouting prophet" a tender message of God's love and comfort. Likewise, He won't usually use the tentative weeping prophet to deliver a faith-building message of an ensuing victory as you are about to go into battle.

This is a simple fact: if you have a prophetic gifting, then God has chosen you to deliver certain of His messages. He allows you to be a part of that message in your delivery style, in your current level of gifting and in your ability to share accurately what He is saying, etc. The messenger is, by default, a small part of the message, and it can't be helped.

Therefore, it should be our goal to become the very best messengers that it is possible for us to be. We should try to grow in and improve our delivery skills, to become more skilled and more able to accurately reflect the message that God has given us to deliver.

That is why I have written this teaching series, so we can talk about how to develop our delivery skills and become the best messenger that it is possible for us to be.