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As we said in earlier lessons, prophecy has two components: 1) the message God wants to share and 2) how the message is shared, (e.g., the things we use to communicate God's message, such as the words we choose, our tone of voice (if spoken) or our grammar and composition (if written), etc.)
Many times God gives us the message, but allows us to figure out how to package it (e.g., choose the words to convey His message). Since God lets us be involved in the process, one of our goals should be to get as good as we can at delivering it. That means we want to share the message God has given us as clearly and accurately as possible, and we want to improve our delivery skills to do so. And that is what we are going to talk about in our remaining lessons.
Types Of Words
God gives words in three primary ways: spoken, written or demonstrated (prophetically acted out). Spoken words are words that are meant to be heard, where the intended recipient hears the message at the same time that the deliverer gives the message. Usually they are first given orally, e.g., someone speaks them aloud. A spoken word may later be written down (transcribed), but initially the Lord had someone speak the word to the intended receiver. This is the kind of word you may hear at church (or a Christian conference) during worship, or at a prophetic presbytery or call-out session.
Written words are words that the Lord intends to be read, not heard. Written words may occasionally be read out loud to someone, but most of the time they are intended as something for people to read for themselves. One of the important things about written words is that there is a time delay between when the deliverer gives them and when the receiver gets them. That delay means that things don't have to come out perfectly on the first pass, the deliverer can go back over them and adjust them if they need tweaking. Most of what you read on the internet are written words.
Demonstated words are words where the prophet does something (an action) rather than saying something or writing something. The action they do is symbolic of a message from God. Many times God will have them act it out first and then later on He will have them explain what those actions meant. We find an example of this in Ezekiel 4, where Ezekiel was instructed to build a clay model of Jerusalem and then lay siege against it, as well as to publicly lay on his left side for a 390 days to represent bearing Israel's iniquity, then lay on his right side for 40 days to represent bearing Judah's iniquity.
Guidelines For Giving Efective Written Words
It would be far too big of a project to work on all three different delivery types at the same time, because each type has its own set of guidelines. Some of the guidelines overlap for all the delivery styles, but many of them do not. That is why we are going to focus in on just one of the three. This teaching series will focus on becoming more effective when giving written words. We will look at the things we can do to make God's message come across more clearly, so it can be more easily understood and accepted.
I am going to share some guideliens that the Lord has given to me. God took me through a process to develop these guidelines. A lot of it came as I prayerfully reviewed thousands of words that various people submitted to the prophetic-word email list over the past seven years. God began making me aware of some common "mistakes" in those words, e.g., things that obscured the message and clouded what God was trying to communiate. Once I became aware of the mistakes, God began giving me some principles to avoid them. These princples (e.g., guidelines) are intended to help people learn to better communicate God's message in written form, so that the words are easy for people to understand and receive.
I have seven guidelines that I would like to share. We will start looking at them in this lesson and will continue doing so over the following lessons. The guildelines are:
1. DELIVER ONE MESSAGE PER WORD, NOT MULTIPLE ONES
God generally gives us a message to share, and tells us who it is for, then lets us choose how to package and deliver that message. At times, He may give us more than one written message and we decide to bundle them all together in a single word instead of creating multiple words.
This usually isn't a problem in spoken words, because God knows the person will be hearing it at the same time we are speaking it, which is usually the at same time that God gives it to us. He knows it would be too hard for us to process things quickly on the fly and sort out what should be in which message. So He usually gives us one single self-contained message at a time.
But written words are different, because there is usually a time delay built into them. E.g., God doesn't usually intend for them to be delivered at the same time that He gives them to us; He intends for us to write them down. That gives us time to prayerfully review them, modify them to communicate more clearly, etc. Then the written word is made public (by email, by internet bulletin board, or put in a newsletter or magazine). The recepient will read the word later on at their leisure. Let me emphasize the last point, the words are not given to the intended recipient at the same time that God gives them to us. That means that we don't have to "get it perfect" on the first pass. We can prayerfully review it with the Lord and get it just the way He wants it.
At times the Lord give us words on multiple subjects. It is easy for the prophet to make the mistake of throwing them all into a single word instead of dividing it into multiple words. When that happens, the word appears to wander all over the place, and it becomes hard to tell what the word is actually trying to say. This is bad because people may miss the point that God is trying to make.
Let me give you an example from a real-life word, a word that was recently submitted to the prophetic-word list. The first paragraph talked about our destiny in Christ. The second paragraph talked about warfare and overcoming our past failures, which could be a logical progression from the first topic. But the third paragraph radically switched gears and talked about pleasing others. The next paragraph changed directions again to talk about evangelism and being God's light to the lost. Then the word switched gears one final time, inviting us to draw into a close and intimate relationship with God. When I finished reading that word, I had no idea of what its message was. Was it about destiny? Or was it about overcoming failure to walk in Christ's victory? Or was it about pleasing man verses pleasing God? Or was it about evangelism? Or was it about intimacy with God? Any one of those themes could make a very legitimate word on its own merit, but when they were all combined into a single word, the message got obscured. It became difficult to figure out what the meaning of that word was.
Generally, any given prophetic word should stick to a single theme, it should have a main message. If we feel that God is giving us two completely different themes or messages, we should package them as two separate and distinct words.
2. DELIVER GOD'S MESSAGE AND NOT YOUR OWN OPINIONS.
I don't think I need to develop this guideline a lot. We all know how important it is to give pure words; we never want to add our own message to His word. But the problem is that at times we can add our own message without being aware that we are doing so. Let me give you a real life example.
I have an acquaintance who is a very legitimate and very gifted prophet. This man also happens to have a passion for evangelism. It is ok to have that type of passion, but unfortunately it reflected in every single word he gave. Every one of his words had two themes, one of which was always evangelism. The part about evangelism was almost word-for-word identical in every one of his prophecies.
Not that long ago, God instructed me to approach him and call that to his attention. I was a little nervous to do so, because I did not want to hurt his feelings or offend him. But God wanted him to be aware of it, and He gave me the job of pointing it out to him. To this man's credit, he was very open to what I shared and has very much of a heart and a desire to be a clear and accurate messenger for the Lord. He had been adding to the words he gave, and was not even aware that he was doing so. Now he is aware of that tendency, and just being aware of it is probably all that is necessary to fix the problem.
Let's explore this a tad further. He added the topic of evangelism to every one of his words. Does God have a passion for evangelism? You bet He does! In fact, that is one of God's biggest passions. But does God want to talk about evangelism in every single prophetic word He gives through this man? Of course not!
This prophet simply got into the habit of throwing in two paragraphs on evangelism into each word he gave. He was not consciously trying to add to God's word, it just "felt right" to do that because he was used to doing that. Those paragraphs probably came from God in the first place, probably in a word he gave some time ago. He really liked what they said, it sort of stuck with him. In other words, he passionately agreed with what God said that one time on evangelism. He liked it so much he started using it all the time, regardless of what God was talking about in the rest of the word. God might be giving him a message on intimacy with God, but somewhere in that word there would suddenly be two pragraphs about us being God's light to the lost and about God's passion and desire for the lost to come to Him.
The reason that I shared this guideline is because it can be easy to add to God's word when we have a passion for something or have a strong opinion on something. We may need to take mental stock of our passions and opinions. Then we may need to prayerfully review the word we are writing and ask God to point out to us anything of ourselves that He is not saying that snuck into the word. We don't want to prophesy our opinion, we want to prophesy God's. We don't want to add to the message, we want to give a pure word from the Lord.