The Jerusalem Council wanted to bring the Gentile people under the Law of Moses by having them be circumcised, but the Gentiles were Gentiles and not natural Jews. They were not required to become Jews. God was changing their religious culture because their culture was not God’s intended culture of freedom, liberty, and of His eternal kingdom, which is spiritual, not earthly, carnal, and of this world.
In the twenty-first century church there is still change that needs to be done. God’s is raising up not just a few men and women called prophets to release His mind and heart, but He is raising up companies of prophets and prophetic people. The culture of the church is changing as apostles and prophets are taking their stance and position governmentally to bring reformation.
Ye also, as lively stones, are built up a spiritual house, an holy priesthood, to offer up spiritual sacrifices, acceptable to God by Jesus Christ.
—1 PETER 2:5, KJV
God’s people are a spiritual house made up of spiritual people. That being said, it is our position in God to be a prophetic people and live a prophetic lifestyle. If we are built up as a spiritual house, then the prophetic is a building gift, or rather, the only gift out of nine gifts of the Spirit that brings edification. There is present-day truth that we should seek to understand and seek to know regarding God’s perception on modern-day prophets, prophecy, and prophetic ministry. We must shift from the old wineskin, the model and structure of things of the past, and embark on the new wineskin that is for today.
There were several strategic restoration reformation movements in the past five hundred years, such as the Protestant Reformation, Charismatic movement, Pentecostal movement, Word of Faith movement, Evangelical and Prophetic movements, Apostolic New Reformation movement, Saints movement, and others that brought tremendous change to the church culture. Throughout those decades many people, even if they were stuck in denominationalism, embraced these restored truths. As covenant believers we do not have to be stuck in these restored truths but can manifest them and walk in present truth. The prophetic is for everyone, not just a few anointed vessels that God has called out from the womb as prophets, but God can use anyone to prophesy like the prophets. Everyone is not called to be a prophet, but everyone can communicate for God, which I call a prophetic culture.
In 1 Samuel 19:24, we read that in Ramah the presence of God was resident to such a degree that it impacted Saul during his paranoid, schizophrenic and double-minded behavior. Even while he was seeking to murder David, the Spirit of the Lord was mighty such that the spirit of prophecy came on Saul, and he prophesied naked all day and all night. The prophetic can change a lunatic king into a prophesying machine. The prophetic spirit changed the attitude and culture of a jealous, bipolar, and rebellious king. Prophets resident in a local church can develop a prophetic culture and impart a prophetic dimension into that assembly that will raise the water level for others to swim in and launch out in the prophetic river. My heart, focus, and emphasis in this book are to help train, develop, equip, educate, encourage, and challenge believers to live and embrace a prophetic lifestyle and culture. It’s my desire that you will develop and establish a prophetic culture wherever you may go and whatever you may do in God, whether it’s through worship, prophetic teams, pioneering, prayer, fasting, worship, deliverance, helps, teaching, preaching, singing, dancing, writing, arts, music, impartation, ordaining, commissioning, laying on of hands, or fathering.
The Holy Spirit is a prophetic spirit, and God will always raise up a prophetic generation (Num. 11:29; Acts 2:14–18). When the prophetic culture is established, men, women, boys, girls, young, old, “servants and handmaidens” will prophesy in their generation. The unction to function is provided by faith to speak as oracles of God biblically. God will not force anyone to speak what’s on His heart and mind. God will use the faith of those among His people who want to speak for Him. We should not make prophesying complicated and confusing when it was not intended to be. This book will bring clarity and disclose many scriptural truths about this powerful building gift.
Could you imagine if everyone you came into contact with prophesied and communicated effectively God’s intentions for your life? We would not see many disconnected and disenfranchised people in the body of Christ and world.
Did you know that something will never happen in your life without the prophetic word of the Lord and prayer? This ministry is something that God instituted and desires to facilitate with the help of ministering angels in order to bring your personal prophecies to pass. In Psalm 103:20 (KJV) it says, “Bless the LORD, ye his angels that excel in strength, that do his commandments, hearkening unto the voice of his word” (emphasis added). Notice that angels hearken—listen and act upon—the voice of God’s Word. We know that the Bible is God’s Word. Angels don’t hearken just to God’s Word, but rather they hearken to the voice of His Word. In other words, angels act on God’s Word that we speak out of our mouths. They listen to us speaking God’s Word or prophesying the word of the Lord. And when we speak God’s Word, angels are released to perform it in our lives. In other words, when the prophetic word of God is released, ministering angels are simultaneously released to carry out His eternal purpose in our lives.
Your words are assigned to your life, just as angels are as well. (See Exodus 23:20, 22.) The Word of the Lord says that an angel hearkens unto the voice of the Lord. When God’s uses anointed prophets and prophetic people to prophesy into your situation, life is created, and portals, gates, and doorways are opened for you. God wants to use your voice to reach nations. The Bible says in Psalm 19:3 (KJV), “There is no speech or language where their voice is not heard.” Verse 4 continues, “Their voice goes out into all the earth, their words to the ends of the world.” You were born to prophesy and communicate to the earth His original intent and purpose. God desires that every nationality, culture, and believer around the world will speak prophetically and will be heard throughout the Earth regardless of what language he or she speaks. One of the only times that unbelievers will know your Lord and King is that His divine voice is trumpeted through yours. When there is a prophetic culture, atmosphere, climate, and environment created and established, the heavens will open, the Earth will shake, and heaven will come down.
It is intense when we as Spirit-filled believers prophesy and minister through prophetic worship. The heavens will drop at the presence of the Lord. What am I saying? The Old Testament Hebrew word for prophesy is nataph, meaning “to ooze, distill gradually, by implication to fall in drops, figuratively to speak by inspiration, prophecy, and discourse.” The Hebrew word is translated, “drop,” (see Judg. 5:4; Ezek. 21:2; Amos 7:16), and “prophesy” (see Mic. 2:6, 11).2 The dew of heaven is released when anointed prophets, prophetic worship leaders, and people begin to release God’s words through prophetic utterance. The presence of the Lord will fall in that place like rain. I have been in places where there has been strong prophetic inspirational release and radical worship, and I literally felt raindrops in those meetings. God’s tangible glory and presence came down. God wants to come down and live with us.
The Bible says that God inhabits the praises of His people (Ps. 22:3). When we live a prophetic lifestyle, these acts of God will not just be visitations of His presence but will be holy habitations. God wants to live among His people and speak through them with signs, wonders, and miracles accompanying His word. When believers and prophets prophesy, the word of the Lord will drop on an individual or a place like rain, or the Lord will come in a dark cloud bringing showers of blessings or even judgments on a nation that has turned from Him.
The Hebrew word for “prophecy” is the word naba, which means “to prophesy, speak (or sing) by inspiration (in prediction or simple discourse), and prophesy under the influence of divine spirit, in the ecstatic state.” This Hebrew word is translated prophesy (see 1 Sam. 10, 11; Jer. 2:8, 26:11; Ezek. 37:7; Joel 2:28; Amos 3:8), and also to make oneself a prophet (see Jer. 29:26–27).3 Naba in a sense is like a water
fountain that springs up, bubbling up, flowing forth, gushing out or pouring down. The same word naba as in prophecy is another Hebrew word nabiy, which is the word for “prophet,” which means “an inspired man.”
The feminine form is nabiyah, or “prophetess,” which is an inspired woman, a prophet’s wife, or poetess.4 There are many theological debates about whether women should be called prophet rather than prophetess, but a prophetess is a biblical term used to describe a female prophet, just as there was the term, title, or word shepherdess in the Old Testament. Rachel, the wife of Jacob and mother of Joseph, was a shepherdess of her father’s flock. She displays this principle. The inspiration to prophesy can drop like rain (nataph) and bubble up from inside one’s belly (naba). We must not get it confused in regard to the function of nataph coming down and naba bubbling up. It is the same Holy Spirit initiating both functions, and the out-come is similar when God speaks them forth in an anointed man or woman.
As you read this book, it is my heartfelt desire to see a generation come into the prophetic anointing and that as you pursue love and earnestly desire spiritual gifts, one being to prophesy, you will come away with the confidence, boldness, authority, and power to prophesy like never before. I pray that this book will release the necessary impartation and activation to cause you to fulfill your prophetic destiny. Whether you are a seasoned prophet, emerging prophet, apostle, teacher, pastor, or leader in any area of society, Gods wants to develop a prophetic culture in your life. God wants to establish a prophetic culture in the DNA of your church as a pastor or an apostle of a new church plant, ministry, or work. God desires that you live a prophetic lifestyle such that as men see you they will see you as a living epistle read by men. Before you were born, God had a plan for your life and for your generation. Will you be the voice of God that He will use to change the culture and world that you live in? The time is now; this is what you have been born to do!
1 John Eckhardt, God Still Speaks (Lake Mary, FL: Charisma House, 2009), 68. See also Blue Letter Bible, s.v. “shamar,” http://www.blueletterbible.org/search/lexiconc.cfm?Criteria=watch&st=any (accessed July 10, 2013).
2 Kevin J. Conner, The Church in the New Testament (Portland, OR: City Bible Publishing, 1982), 154. See also Blue Letter Bible, s.v. “nataph” http://www.blueletterbible.org/search/lexiconc.cfm?Criteria=prophesy&st=any (accessed July 10, 2013).
3 Conner, 154. See also Blue Letter Bible, s.v. “naba” http://www.blueletterbible.org/search/lexiconc.cfm?Criteria=prophesy&st=any (accessed July 10, 2013).
4 Eckhardt, God Still Speaks, 10.
Chapter One
BEFORE YOU WERE BORN
Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart; I appointed you as a prophet to the nations.
—JEREMIAH 1:5
IN THE FIRST chapter of Jeremiah, God began to engage in a personal, one-on-one dialogue with the young Jeremiah, who had a prophetic call on his life to be a prophet of God.
The Lord began to share with him His foreknowledge of Jeremiah’s call before Jeremiah was ever conceived in his mother’s womb. The Lord also revealed to Jeremiah his prophetic identity in just a few statements, that God Himself had appointed him as a prophet to the nations.
Any prophet or prophetic leader can understand and bear witness with this passage of Scripture. It is a personal prophecy given by God to His chosen vessel, whom the Lord just commissioned. The Father also begins to tell Jeremiah that before He formed him, He knew him personally. This is a very interesting statement because it outlines that God was the one who created him and used the womb of his very own mother to be the vehicle to conceive him from. Before Jeremiah was birthed in the natural realm he was originally conceived out of the spiritual womb of God, which was His mind. Jeremiah was being birthed forth through a divine thought, desire, and concept of the Lord.
The Father preplanned and predestined to deliver Jeremiah in the earth long before Jeremiah was ever thought of by his natural parents. With that desire of God came Jeremiah’s calling to prophetic duty. This big conversation that God had with Jeremiah was like a father telling his son about the beginning of his son’s life. God’s intention to conceive Jeremiah reminds me of married couples desiring and making necessary plans to have a baby of their own. They begin to use wisdom in the planning process of bringing a new life into the world.
When a husband and wife receive the news from their family physician that they are pregnant, the first thing the couple starts thinking in anticipation about their new arrival is what the gender of their child will be, the time their child will actually be born, and possible girl and boy names. Using that as an illustration, we must understand that God already knew and determined Jeremiah’s name, gender, birth date, and his prophetic career. The Lord knows you by name and your destiny, which is attached to your purpose. The uniqueness of Jeremiah’s calling is that the calling is associated with the meaning of his own name and the prophetic function that the calling applies to. Jeremiah’s name in Hebrew means “May Yahweh lift up high, thrust or establish.”5 So, that being said, God was going to lift him up, thrust him, and establish him as a prophet in this high calling of the Lord.
The prophetic takes on the same function as the meaning of Jeremiah’s name, meaning in Hebrew, “Yah is high.”6 In other words Jeremiah had a high calling from God. Whatever calling you have from the Lord is a high calling in His eyes. Jeremiah’s name also took on the characteristic of what the prophetic does when it comes to a person. The prophetic comes to build up, to establish, encourage, and to exhort.
Prophecy is divinely inspired and an anointed utterance; it is a supernatural proclamation in a known language. It is the manifestation of the Spirit of God—not as a heightened natural ability]—and it may be possessed and operated by all who have the infilling of the Holy Spirit. (See 1 Corinthians 14:31.) Intellect, faith, and will are operative in this gift, but its exercise is not intellectually based. It is calling forth words from the Spirit of God. The gift of prophecy operates when there is high worship and praying (1 Sam. 10:5–6), when other prophets are present (1 Sam. 10:9–10), and through the laying on of hands by ministers of the gospel (Acts 19:1–6).
PROPHECY WILL FIND YOU
Have you ever been in a place where you needed to hear the word of the Lord, and then suddenly the word of the Lord came to you? Or perhaps you were studying something and then revelation knowledge came to you, which brought the answers to your questions or problems. Have you ever been somewhere and a prophetic word came from a pastor, leader, prophet, or someone who just came with a confirming word that you had been waiting on? Yes, we all have in one way or another had a word of the Lord come to us. It may have been through reading the Bible in our devotional time or praying or just simply being in church hearing something that caused your spirit to bear witness.
The word of the Lord came to Jeremiah personally, and it came from God Himself and not from any other source. There is nothing like receiving a direct prophecy from the Father! The prophetic word of the Lord had Jeremiah in mind. Prophecy is the inspired mind of God communicated toward an individual that He has called and chosen.
God was the very source of Jeremiah’s purpose, and he did not have any choice over his own calling, purpose, and destiny but only needed to embrace and walk in that which he was called to. The call of a prophet was predetermined and preordained by God before Jeremiah’s conception and neither determined nor ordained after he was birthed. The Scripture uses this manner of speech to declare that God appointed his ministering vessels to their holy offices before they were born and not after, as in Isaiah 49:1 and Galatians 1:15.
The Lord called and set apart Isaiah as well to this office from his very birth. The emphasis here is laid on the fact that he was called and not on the particular time period when it was done. The concept is that the prophet Isaiah did not presumptuously assume his office or position, nor did he enter into it without being appointed by the Lord Himself. He had be
en designated and selected to the position of a prophet even before he was ever born. The Scripture does not state that Isaiah chose to run for the prophetic office like a person running for presidency or some other public office, nor was he appointed and voted to the office by human government but by the spiritual government of God, thereby being selected by the sovereign Lord only.
In the Book of Isaiah the Prophet Isaiah identifies the one who had called him and announced the calling with certainty and assurance. Isaiah was announcing his prophetic birth certificate. A person does not have any choice of selecting who their own parents are to be and when or where and how they will be conceived. Emphasis was given to these holy men of God that were chosen by the Lord to do something great for Him in their generation, and the prophetic work was at the forefront of what God was requiring out of them. These men were prophets of God but were born to prophesy.
The focus and implication here is, What is God calling you to do for your generation, and do you know what you have been born to do?
Regardless of what area of society a person may be called to impact and change for kingdom purposes, we must understand that the prophetic element is important to present and introduce to future generations that are unborn. There is power in the word of the Lord. Through the prophetic anointing and intercessory prayers, a believer can veto demonic legislations, laws, and policies.
We can overthrow existing satanic governments and thrones that are established illegally, and we can tear down and close demonic altars and portals that are opened over whole regions, territories, and nations, like Jeremiah and Elijah did. I believe in God-inspired prophecies because future generations are birthed through what we speak. The prophetic culture and way should be incorporated in the life of every believer. This particular gift should not be foreign to believers, just as the supernatural power of God through the Holy Spirit shouldn’t be foreign. Throughout the history of the Bible we see the very acts of God demonstrated through holy men of God.
Born to Prophesy Page 3
