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KrispyKrittr wrote:
I think the first question should be... what does "unannointed" mean?
Obviously a blatantly false teaching is not annointed.
But KJ, you say the preacher did a horrible job preaching on the passage he read. What does that mean? You're trained, so you probably have a very systematic way of preaching, and a systematic way you like to hear preaching. There is nothing wrong with that. But I know for me, there have been times when I've brought a teaching to our body of believers where I had the teaching all mapped out and knew where I was going, and all the points I felt God wanted me to make... and in the course of the teaching I veered from where I thought I was going into a completely different direction... and didn't end up anywhere near where I thought I would... and God moved among those who were listening.
And if a stranger was there, and heard it, they might have come away with the same conclusion... that was a horrible teaching on that first verse he started out with. Yea, it might have been, but God took the whole thing in a different direction because He had somethings He wanted to do in a few hearts.
So... what is meant by annointed?
There are those who believe goosebumps are the standard by which we should judge annointing. We seem to be seeing a growing number of those folks popping up on this forum. Scripture is no longer the measuring stick, goosebumps are.
Obviously that's horribly wrong and spiritually immature.
Are we all annointed to preach the gospel? We are commanded to go into all the world and preach and teach and make disciples. Thats not the "world of the elect", as the some of the Calvinists here believe. It's the "whole world". If we are commanded, are we not also then annointed to carry it out?
Krispy
AMEN |
|  2008/5/5 11:37 | | Ruach34
Member
Joined: 2006/2/7
Posts: 296
Beijing
| | Re: | | If our responses, even judgments, to the preached word and gifts of the Spirit are without grace and love we are, in fact, like the disciples of Christ wanting to 'call down fire' on those men and ridding themselves of the man that was casting out demons in Christ's name (Luke 9).
We cannot have that grace and love (truth) without the Holy Spirit of Christ Jesus.
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RICH
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| | 2008/5/5 12:09 | Profile | Tears_of_joy
Member
Joined: 2003/10/30
Posts: 1554
| | Re: | | Some food for thought:
[b]OUR SUFFICIENCY IS OF GOD by E.M. Bounds
Taken from [url=https://www.sermonindex.net/modules/articles/index.php?view=article&aid=610]Power Through Prayer[/url][/b]
THE [b]sweetest[/b] graces by a slight perversion may bear the [b]bitterest[/b] fruit. The sun gives [b]life[/b], but sunstrokes are [b]death[/b]. Preaching is to give [b]life[/b]; it may [b]kill[/b]. The preacher holds the keys; he may lock as well as unlock. Preaching is God's great institution for the planting and maturing of spiritual life. When properly executed, its [b]benefits[/b] are untold; when wrongly executed, no evil can exceed its [b]damaging[/b] results. It is an easy matter to destroy the flock if the shepherd be unwary or the pasture be destroyed, easy to capture the citadel if the watchmen be asleep or the food and water be poisoned. Invested with such gracious prerogatives, exposed to so great evils, involving so many grave responsibilities, it would be a parody on the shrewdness of the devil and a libel on his character and reputation if he did not bring his master influences to adulterate the preacher and the preaching.
In face of all this, the exclamatory interrogatory of Paul, "Who is sufficient for these things?" is never out of order.
Paul says: "Our sufficiency is of God, who also hath made us able ministers of the new testament; not of the letter, but of the spirit: for the letter [b]killeth[/b], but the [b]spirit giveth life.[/b]"
The true ministry is God-touched, God-enabled, and God-made. The Spirit of God is on the preacher in anointing power, the fruit of the Spirit is in his heart, the Spirit of God has vitalized the man and the word; his preaching gives life,
gives life as the spring gives life;
gives life as the resurrection gives life;
gives ardent life as the summer gives ardent life; gives fruitful life as the autumn gives fruitful life.
The life-giving preacher is a man of God, whose heart is ever athirst for God, whose soul is ever following hard after God, whose eye is single to God, and in whom by the power of God's Spirit the flesh and the world have been crucified and his ministry is like the generous flood of a life-giving river.
The preaching that [b]kills[/b] is non-spiritual preaching. The ability of the preaching is not from God. Lower sources than God have given to it energy and stimulant. The Spirit is not evident in the preacher nor his preaching. Many kinds of forces may be projected and stimulated by preaching that kills, but they are not spiritual forces. They may resemble spiritual forces, but are only the shadow, the counterfeit; life they may seem to have, but the life is magnetized. The preaching that kills is the letter; shapely and orderly it may be, but it is the letter still, the dry, husky letter, the empty, bald shell. The letter may have the germ of life in it, but it has no breath of spring to evoke it; winter seeds they are, as hard as the winter's soil, as icy as the winter's air, no thawing nor germinating by them. This letter-preaching has the truth. But even divine truth has no life-giving energy alone; it must be energized by the Spirit, with all God's forces at its back. Truth unquickened by God's Spirit deadens as much as, or more than, error. It may be the truth without admixture; but without the Spirit its shade and touch are deadly, its truth error, its light darkness. The letter-preaching is unctionless, neither mellowed nor oiled by the Spirit. There may be tears, but tears cannot run God's machinery; tears may be but summer's breath on a snow-covered iceberg, nothing but surface slush. Feelings and earnestness there may be, but it is the emotion of the actor and the earnestness of the attorney. The preacher may feel from the kindling of his own sparks, be eloquent over his own exegesis, earnest in delivering the product of his own brain; the professor may usurp the place and imitate the fire of the apostle; brains and nerves may serve the place and feign the work of God's Spirit, and by these forces the letter may glow and sparkle like an illumined text, but the glow and sparkle will be as barren of life as the field sown with pearls. The death-dealing element lies back of the words, back of the sermon, back of the occasion, back of the manner, back of the action. The great hindrance is in the preacher himself. He has not in himself the mighty life-creating forces. There may be no discount on his orthodoxy, honesty, cleanness, or earnestness; but somehow the man, the inner man, in its secret places has never broken down and surrendered to God, his inner life is not a great highway for the transmission of God's message, God's power. Somehow self and not God rules in the holy of holiest. Somewhere, all unconscious to himself, some spiritual nonconductor has touched his inner being, and the divine current has been arrested. His inner being has never felt its thorough spiritual bankruptcy, its utter powerlessness; he has never learned to cry out with an ineffable cry of self-despair and self-helplessness till God's power and God's fire comes in and fills, purifies, empowers. Self-esteem, self-ability in some pernicious shape has defamed and violated the temple which should be held sacred for God. [i]Life-giving preaching costs the preacher much -- death to self, crucifixion to the world, the travail of his own soul.[/i] [b]Crucified preaching only can give life. Crucified preaching can come only from a crucified man.[/b] |
| | 2008/5/5 12:31 | Profile | KingJimmy
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Joined: 2003/5/8
Posts: 4419
Charlotte, NC
| | Re: | | Quote:
But KJ, you say the preacher did a horrible job preaching on the passage he read. What does that mean?
What I mean is the message had no life in it. One sensed nothing of God's presence or glory in it. Even though I am trained and do care for a certain style of preaching, it is not on the basis of this by which I made my assessment. I simply could not hear my Masters voice in the man speaking.
He was rambling on and on, saying 2 or 3 sentences or telling a short story that had nothing to do with anything he previously had said, nor anything with the text which he had read. He could have very well said what he said by reading Leviticus 27. He got plenty of excited, and his excitement stirred up the excitement of many others. But, for the life of me, I could not see anything he said that was worth getting excited over. He said nothing that was biblically wrong or contradictory. But his message was not derived from the Scripture and seemed to have no backing whatsoever of the Spirit.
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Jimmy H
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| | 2008/5/5 13:11 | Profile | Tears_of_joy
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Joined: 2003/10/30
Posts: 1554
| | Re: | | KingJimmy wrote:
Quote:
What I mean is the message had [b]no life in it[/b]. One sensed nothing of [b]God's presence or glory in it. [/b]
Quote:
He said nothing that was biblically wrong or contradictory. But his message was not derived from the Scripture and seemed to have no backing whatsoever of the Spirit.
Yes, brother, I understand what you mean here.
Here are some more food for thought that goes in that direction:
[b]THE LETTER KILLETH by E.M.Bounds
Taken from [url=http://www.biblebelievers.com/em_bounds/em-bounds_ch03.html]Power Through Prayer[/url][/b]
THE preaching that [b]kills[/b] may be, and often is, orthodox -- dogmatically, inviolably orthodox. We love orthodoxy. It is good. It is the best. It is the clean, clear-cut teaching of God's Word, the trophies won by truth in its conflict with error, the levees which faith has raised against the desolating floods of honest or reckless misbelief or unbelief; but orthodoxy, clear and hard as crystal, suspicious and militant, may be but the letter well-shaped, well-named, and well-learned, the letter which kills. Nothing is so [b]dead as a dead[/b] orthodoxy, too dead to speculate, too dead to think, to study, or to pray.
The preaching that kills may have insight and grasp of principles, may be scholarly and critical in taste, may have every minutia of the derivation and grammar of the letter, may be able to trim the letter into its perfect pattern, and illume it as Plato and Cicero may be illumined, may study it as a lawyer studies his text-books to form his brief or to defend his case, and yet be like a frost, a killing frost. Letter-preaching may be eloquent, enameled with poetry and rhetoric, sprinkled with prayer spiced with sensation, illumined by genius and yet these be but the massive or chaste, costly mountings, the rare and beautiful flowers which coffin the corpse. The preaching which kills may be without scholarship, unmarked by any freshness of thought or feeling, clothed in tasteless generalities or vapid specialties, with style irregular, slovenly, savoring neither of closet nor of study, graced neither by thought, expression, or prayer. Under such preaching how wide and utter the desolation! how profound the spiritual death!
This letter-preaching deals with the surface and shadow of things, and not the things themselves. It does not penetrate the inner part. [b]It has no deep insight into, no strong grasp of, the hidden life of God's Word.[/b] It is true to the outside, but the outside is the hull which must be broken and penetrated for the [b]kernel[/b]. The letter may be dressed so as to attract and be fashionable, but the attraction is not toward God nor is the fashion for heaven. The failure is in the preacher. God has not made him. He has never been in the hands of God like clay in the hands of the potter. [i]He has been busy about the sermon, its thought and finish, its drawing and impressive forces; but the deep things of God have never been sought, studied, fathomed, experienced by him.[/i] He has never stood before "the throne high and lifted up," never heard the seraphim song, never seen the vision nor felt the rush of that awful holiness, and cried out in utter abandon and despair under the sense of weakness and guilt, and had his life renewed, his heart touched, purged, inflamed by the live coal [b]from God's altar.[/b] His ministry may draw people to him, to the Church, to the form and ceremony; but no true drawings to God, no sweet, holy, divine communion induced. The Church has been frescoed but not edified, pleased but not sanctified. Life is suppressed; a chill is on the summer air; the soil is baked. The city of our God becomes the city of the dead; the Church a graveyard, not an embattled army. Praise and prayer are stifled; worship is dead. The preacher and the preaching have helped sin, not holiness; peopled hell, not heaven.
Preaching which kills is prayerless preaching. Without prayer the preacher creates death, and not life. The preacher who is feeble in prayer is feeble in life-giving forces. The preacher who has retired prayer as a conspicuous and largely prevailing element in his own character has shorn his preaching of its distinctive life-giving power. Professional praying there is and will be, but professional praying helps the preaching to its deadly work. Professional praying chills and kills both preaching and praying. Much of the lax devotion and lazy, irreverent attitudes in congregational praying are attributable to professional praying in the pulpit. Long, discursive, dry, and inane are the prayers in many pulpits. Without unction or heart, they fall like a killing frost on all the graces of worship. Death-dealing prayers they are. Every vestige of devotion has perished under their breath. The deader they are the longer they grow. A plea for short praying, live praying, real heart praying, praying by the Holy Spirit -- direct, specific, ardent, simple, unctuous in the pulpit -- is in order. A school to teach preachers how to pray, as God counts praying, would be more beneficial to true piety, true worship, and true preaching than all theological schools.
Stop! Pause! Consider! Where are we? What are we doing? Preaching to kill? Praying to kill? Praying to God! the great God, the Maker of all worlds, the Judge of all men! What reverence! what simplicity! what sincerity! what truth in the inward parts is demanded! How real we must be! How hearty! Prayer to God the noblest exercise, the loftiest effort of man, the most real thing! Shall we not discard forever accursed preaching that kills and prayer that kills, and do the real thing, the mightiest thing -- prayerful praying, life-creating preaching, bring the mightiest force to bear on heaven and earth and draw on God's exhaustless and open treasure for the need and beggary of man? |
| | 2008/5/5 13:26 | Profile | dohzman
Member
Joined: 2004/10/13
Posts: 2132
| | Also | | One more thing, John Wesley preached before he was saved, I believe the Word of God alone is anointed. I believe that a wicked, evil person can read God's written Word out loud and it will have an affect on the hearers because The Holy Writ is not mans' words but God's Words, it is Spirit breathed, therefore it carries with it, an anointing of it self.
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D.Miller
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| | 2008/5/5 14:35 | Profile | roadsign
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Joined: 2005/5/2
Posts: 3777
| | Re: Also | | Quote:
Does God honor an unanointed preached word?
It seems that we are accepting the possibility that God can burst any faltering means to speak to people.
Yet, I share another possibility: that God uses bad words in themselves yes, bad preaching, bad preachers BECAUSE they are bad. Certainly I speak for myself. Faltering preaching has helped me face my idolatrous reliance on the preacher. (Really, its a bigger problem than just me. The way the structure functions incubates the problem by keeping parishioners dependent.) God shook me from my idolatrous dependency through bitter disappointments. I needed to grow up and learn to lean on him. I needed Jesus to be my mediator not any human. I needed to dig into the word for myself, etc.
If God had placed only good preachers in my life, I would have happily continued to rely on them, and never consider the need to launch out in faith - into that uncertain domain: reliance on the Spirit.
I believe that our concern here has less to do with bad preaching, and even whether is usable or not than about what God is doing in our own lives through it. Its always easy to discuss a problem far removed from ourselves those we cant do anything about anyway. But that may miss the point. Our frustration, anger or criticism towards bad preaching may be a thin veneer concealing idolatry. Its a bit like a wife who discovers she married a lemon and then gets angry, critical and frustrated. Her manner of dealing with this may be an indication that she is trusting in hubby to be for her what only God can be.
Likewise, God uses a not-so-ideal pastor to shake people from their idolatrous dependencies. The few will awaken, but the many will cling to their rigid expectations and find a way to have them met. That could include beating up the preacher for failing them rather than considering how they can to minister to him (or her).
... And then we wonder why they aren't measuring up.
Quote:
If our responses, even judgments, to the preached word and gifts of the Spirit are without grace and love we are, in fact, like the disciples of Christ wanting to 'call down fire' on those men and ridding themselves of the man that was casting out demons in Christ's name (Luke 9).
Diane
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Diane
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| | 2008/5/5 15:11 | Profile | Tears_of_joy
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Joined: 2003/10/30
Posts: 1554
| | Re: | | It's not about good preaching or bad preaching. Good preacher or bad preacher.
It's about preaching or preacher who conducts life or death. |
| | 2008/5/5 15:33 | Profile |
| | Re: | | Quote:
What I mean is the message had no life in it. One sensed nothing of God's presence or glory in it. Even though I am trained and do care for a certain style of preaching, it is not on the basis of this by which I made my assessment. I simply could not hear my Masters voice in the man speaking.
One thing that I have always found fascinating is that two people can hear the same sermon and come away with completely different effects. One would say "what a blessing that was... God really spoke to my heart!" and the other will say "I got nothing out that at all!"
One day I might read a portion of scripture and get nothing out of it... a year later that same portion of scripture will drive me to my knees.
It's all in how the Holy Spirit is working. Has nothing to do with us, or the man who's preaching. God's Word is what is annointed at all times. I dont think "the annointing" is on the preacher as much as it is on the hearer. If a man's heart is receptive, then the Holy Spirit will do His work. If a man is not receptive, and is unteachable and hard headed... then the Holy Spirit will not work. It's not that He isnt able to... it's that He wont.
So, just because to you it wasnt "annointed" doesnt mean someone else didnt come away completely blessed... and obviously some were as evidenced by the reception at the alter.
And it doesnt mean that because your response was different (or indifferent) that you were unteachable or unopen... just means the Holy Spirit may be doing something different in you at that time. Rejoice that some there were blessed by the Word.
It's wonderful to think that God used a preacher who maybe isnt that great of an orator to bring people into a deeper walk. He will use the foolish things of the world! Praise God.
Krispy |
| | 2008/5/5 15:37 | | tjservant
Member
Joined: 2006/8/25
Posts: 1658
Indiana USA
| | Re: | | Quote:
KrispyKrittr wrote:
Quote:
What I mean is the message had no life in it. One sensed nothing of God's presence or glory in it. Even though I am trained and do care for a certain style of preaching, it is not on the basis of this by which I made my assessment. I simply could not hear my Masters voice in the man speaking.
One thing that I have always found fascinating is that two people can hear the same sermon and come away with completely different effects. One would say "what a blessing that was... God really spoke to my heart!" and the other will say "I got nothing out that at all!"
One day I might read a portion of scripture and get nothing out of it... a year later that same portion of scripture will drive me to my knees.
It's all in how the Holy Spirit is working. Has nothing to do with us, or the man who's preaching. God's Word is what is annointed at all times. I dont think "the annointing" is on the preacher as much as it is on the hearer. If a man's heart is receptive, then the Holy Spirit will do His work. If a man is not receptive, and is unteachable and hard headed... then the Holy Spirit will not work. It's not that He isnt able to... it's that He wont.
So, just because to you it wasnt "annointed" doesnt mean someone else didnt come away completely blessed... and obviously some were as evidenced by the reception at the alter.
And it doesnt mean that because your response was different (or indifferent) that you were unteachable or unopen... just means the Holy Spirit may be doing something different in you at that time. Rejoice that some there were blessed by the Word.
It's wonderful to think that God used a preacher who maybe isnt that great of an orator to bring people into a deeper walk. He will use the foolish things of the world! Praise God.
Krispy
I started Ten Shekels and a Shirt at least 5 times before I finished it. I thought it was dull and dry
but I kept trying to listen
wondering what all the hype was about because of all the good things I had heard about it.
When I finally finished it I realized it was ME not him (Paris Reidhead) that was the problem.
Not saying this is the case in the KJ situation
just adding to Krispys insights.
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TJ
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| | 2008/5/5 16:33 | Profile |
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