I have a great uncle Alan in Florence, Italy, who lays hands on people to heal them. But not the way like maybe you’re thinking: people come to his house and pay him a fee, and he sits them on a small wooden chair in the middle of his kitchen and puts his hands on them where they’re hurt or sick, and his hands get really hot, and the person gets healed and off they go. This happened in front of my face when visiting. Nothing about Jesus or God or any other god or any spiritual discussion. He’s not a Christian. It’s just one of the jobs he does for a living. He also makes world-renowned classical guitars. Like, “no big.”
Have you ever heard of people with famous healing gifts who die of liver failure because they were lifelong alcoholics, and wonder, “Why did God keep working through them so powerfully if they weren’t <insert my religious idea of sin and worthiness>?” Or have you ever heard a “secular” song and thought, “I can sing these lyrics to God, if I think of it that way”? Maybe you’ve seen a movie that brought you to tears thinking about heaven when it had nothing to do with heaven?
Romans 11:29 teaches why. For context, verse 11:13 says, “But I am speaking to you who are Gentiles.” In this passage, Paul is explaining to the non-Jewish believers that they have been “grafted into a cultivated olive tree” in place of other branches (being Jews) that “were broken off for their unbelief.” And referencing those unbelieving Jews in verse 28, he says, “but in relation to choice, they are beloved on account of their fathers; for the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable.”
More simply, the Holy Spirit wants us to know that before we are born we receive spiritual gifts and purposes that are not taken away no matter what we believe.
I’m saying, “Before we are born,” because the statement above references gifts and callings already in place for the Jews because of Abraham & Jacob. I’m saying, “No matter what we believe,” because Paul is referring to Jews who have not believed and their branches have been broken off of the vine, replaced by believing Gentiles.
So your soul is adorned with gifts in heaven – where the soul is created. Then you get tested on earth to see what you’re gonna do with them. Think, “Parable of the talents.” And you keep them regardless of your decisions on earth; they are irrevocable which means they don’t get taken away.
I think we all get this thought, “If I’m really good and follow all the rules, God will use me more and better…” And then we see in both real life and the scriptures – it doesn’t actually work like that, does it? Gifts don’t operate because of approval, do they? Nor do they because of purity or holiness or righteousness. People of all beliefs and all disciplines have spiritual gifts and use them. And that kinda blows our sense of justice out of the water, and then we learn that the operation of gifts has nothing to do with justice, either, huh? I laugh at myself.
Mom & dad used to sing, “Ya better watch out, ya better not cry, ya better not pout, I’m tellin’ you why…” We learned about gifts from the spirit of a policeman. We learned about them from the spirit of the pharisee. We have tied gifts to the law! He knows when you’ve been bad or good so be good for goodness sake – or you get coal. Our enemies want us to believe that, so we subsequently believe that our spiritual gifts won’t work until we’re “X-amount well-behaved” – so we won’t even try using them until we “feel approved of”.
So if we think our gifts work based on how we feel – whether we feel “worthy” or not… Well, WE’RE RIGHT – to disastrous effect! We can be crippled by that mindset.
Let’s not let that serpent trick us like that; are you with me? Boldly go! We will have massive impact, while realizing that our ability to follow law has nothing to do with it – which makes us give more glory to God because we’re certain that the gifts of God moving through us are not attained through our flesh!
Galatians 3:3 and 3:5, “Are you so foolish? Having begun by the Spirit, are you now being perfected by the flesh? Does he who supplies the Spirit to you and works miracles among you do so by works of the law, or by hearing with faith”
Irrevocable. No matter what we believe or what we do with our flesh. One of the laws of supernature.
It said it right there in Galatians, he works miracles among you by faith. And faith is “what we expect to happen”, right? Uncle Alan expects that when someone shows up, his hands will get hot and their body will get hot and illness or injury will leave, and it does. He has total faith that his gift will do its thing, so much so that he tells people to bring their money. He has no concept of “have I been a good enough boy for this to work today?” He just has faith in the presence of the gift. This is true for billions of people on this planet; an endless sea of spiritual gifts and callings, unrevoked.
Let’s look specifically at the prophetic gift. Of the gifts, the Holy Spirit underscores its importance – why he writes in 1Cor 14:1, “Pursue love, yet earnestly desire spiritual gifts, but especially that you may prophesy.” The function of prophecy is to give direction from God to humanity. The Old Testament prophet hears from heaven and goes to tell the king, who then knows how to lead the nation. After Jesus’ resurrection, the king is augmented by the apostle, who likewise needs to hear from the prophets in order to correctly lead the church.
So the prophetic gift can be given to someone before they’re born, and it’s going to operate regardless of what they believe, and it’s going to lead people. Just like Uncle Alan or the famous alcoholic healer, by whom God is going to heal his people regardless of the state of the vessel – because he loves his children. Like those with healing gifts, the person with a prophetic gift will hear things that are in the spirit and vocalize or illustrate them to the world. They’ll attribute what they hear to “my muse” or their own brilliance or whatever nice idea comes to deceive their mind about the source of their messages.
And people are gonna follow what they say.
Why will people follow? Every soul is created in heaven, then born on earth, and spends their life trying to get back to their Father who created them. Whether we find Jesus or Buddah or Star Wars or Budweiser and barbeque potato chips; these are all expressions of the same hunt for consolation from a home that we remember, we know we’re not in, and that we long for.
In its hunt, every soul – in its base undefiled, unconfused, undeceived core – is able to recognize its maker and the heaven it came from before it was woven into an earthly body. Through our first birth and growing up under these earthly laws of nature we unlearn the heavenly laws of supernature we knew so well. But the soul doesn’t ever really forget… and it will recognize heavenly things regardless of what we believe with our brains. Because of this, all people reverberate when we encounter the things of the spirit. (that’s why people will repent and be baptized when they hear the true gospel, which is a foolish message apart from the spirit)
Just about every artist in any idiom you’ve ever seen or heard is a prophet, and the resonance of souls becomes clear when you look at how art affects people. The songs and movies and paintings and poems and photographs you’ve seen became popular because many people’s souls recognize the aspects of heaven present in the art, and they resonate like, “Yup! This feels right, like something I feel like I knew but couldn’t put words on it. This speaks to me.” I tell people, “Your soul will Yup when it recognizes heaven.” Much like John leapt in Elizabeth’s womb when pregnant Mary approached and said hey. Then they both start makin’ up poetry.
So the only reason you’ve even heard a song on the radio is because so many thousands of people’s souls reverberated with what it was saying – it got popular enough that you eventually heard it. Trace any piece of art back to its birthplace: you’ll find a prophet (or a prophetic gift at least).
Here’s how we might picture this principle in action. Let’s set our example back in “before viral videos” time.
Some guy is strumming three chords on his acoustic guitar and singing some melodies for his friends around a campfire. The friends are like, “Dude, that’s great, I love this! You should make a band!” (yup)
Dude gets in a band and shows them his song. Yup, they love it too and start playing it around the city.
Bunch of people hear it and love it because they are also Yupping.
Record scout hears the band play and sees all the people that are into it, and recognizes the song would Yup with people all over the country.
Record company signs the band and brings them in to make a record, which they release and hand to the national radio DJs.
DJs get into it (yup) and spin it. People hear it on the radio and love it (yup) and go buy the record.
And now you’ve heard AC/DC’s platinum record “Highway to Hell” because a few million people’s soul’s resonated with the prophetic message that they heard.
Wait, what?
Yeah, man, think about it. That song is literally a warning from God, “You’re on a highway to hell!” and the conclusion should be, “Repent and believe!” But because the prophet wasn’t under submission to God, he heard the message through something like a dirty filter. Audiences’ souls heard it and leaped, thinking, “It’s true! We ~are~ on a highway to hell!” But instead of repenting they’re celebrating because of the same lack of submission to God.
Does the dirty filter and the resulting party make the song any less a prophecy leading the people in a direction?
It’s also common to hear love songs that are easy to redirect as affection to our Father because they’re really close to the mark. “How sweet it is to be loved by you.” “What the world needs now is love, sweet love.” Or modify one word like with Stevie, “Isn’t he lovely? Isn’t he wonderful?”
“Roxanne, you don't have to put on the red light,” is a message not to align with the whore of Babylon, as a jealous God declares his love for us and calls to woo us out of it.
Radiohead is loaded with prophecy.
Some songs by artists who deny God can literally be sung, every word, directly to God as worship. I bet you can comment with some examples; I’d love to hear them.
Films are another great example of this. A script writer gets this awesome vision for a story and skillfully writes it out. They present it to filmmakers who resonate and decide, “Yup, this is worth dumping a few-dozen-million dollars into.” They go to the trouble of recruiting and hiring a couple thousand people to make the film because everyone who reads the script says, “Yup!” They send the end product out to the theaters and millions of people go watch it and Yup, too. You saw The Matrix because thousands of people before you heard the prophet and resonated with the message. (oh yeah, don’t get me started on The Matrix; it’s the purest picture that we have of what it’s supposed to be like to be born again and then grow up again into Christ.)
Remember Ezekiel, in chapter 4 where the Lord tells him to build a little model of Jerusalem out of a brick and dirt and little model attackers and an iron plate as a wall? Then in chapter 5 he has to smash parts of it with a sword and burn parts of it… The prophetic spirit works through sculpture, paintings; all kinds of art forms. I’m telling ya, “If it got popular enough that you’ve seen it or heard it: prophet.”
Consequently, the resonating or Yupping is how the prophetic gift will help us recognize the voice of God from our own thoughts. Very handy to learn what this feels like… However: Our souls also resonate with other spiritual sources than heaven and the Lord. I’m talking about me and you and everyone – discernment of spirits is crucial to ask for and mature in, because we can all be deceived. A prophet that’s under an imposter spirit – a demon or principality – gets tricked by that same Yup feeling. Therefore let the one who thinks he stands watch out that he does not fall. Messages that convey resonance must be held up against scripture, which is the only way to judge accurately.
If you have thought, “A spiritual gift can only be given to someone through the filling of the Holy Spirit,” then I propose to you, how could there be such a thing as a false prophet if that were true? In the Old and New Testaments they exist and we are warned about them.
Jeremiah 14:14, Then the LORD said to me, “The prophets are prophesying falsehood in My name. I have neither sent them nor commanded them, nor spoken to them; they are prophesying to you a false vision, divination, futility, and the deception of their own minds.”
These guys aren’t just “thinking their own things and saying them.” The Lord is not saying, “Don’t pay them any mind, they’re just spouting their own thoughts and it’s harmless.” The words being spoken have weight in the spirit, and they are affecting people’s decisions. He says they’re getting an actual vision, and it’s a false one – not what heaven is showing but what something else is showing. He says the source is “divination”, which is engaging in conversation with demons to achieve something in the spirit. He calls it “futility” – a name the Holy Spirit gives to “worldly things” – which he refers to in Ecclesiastes 1:14: “I have seen all the works which have been done under the sun, and behold, all is futility and striving after wind.” Meaning, the Holy Spirit says, “I’ve seen literally everything in the world and I give it this label: futility.” Finally, he says that their minds have been deceived (by whom? oh yeah, the demonic audience of their divination) and they’ve accepted it as their own. It’s not a deception from their own minds; it’s a deception of. The mind is the object of the deception from an external source.
So my point here is that the Lord is not calling false prophets “not prophets”. There’s a difference. They are prophets. They’re listening to a different voice. So if you can prophesy by a voice that’s not the Lord’s, you clearly don’t need to be filled with the Holy Spirit in order to receive the gift of prophecy. By extension that would apply to every spiritual gift.
Now we’re at the “who cares?” part. I propose to us that this is one more way we learn to love everyone, everywhere, on our way to perfection. Imagine if we stop shunning artists who have a dirty filter. They’ve got nothing but experience in the kingdom of the world as a frame of reference; their tenure under our enemy. Imagine if we stop avoiding them and cursing them and publicly condemning them – and instead think, “Wow, here’s another powerful prophetic gift that Christ (not Jesus) would benefit from if we welcome them into love.” And then imagine we acted on that thought.
Then take it way beyond just artists and the gift of prophecy. The gifts that are given to men before birth are active in every field. I keep making an example of artists because it’s a clear picture I can use to illustrate my point. (we’ve all been exposed to art in some form, and it's one of my areas of expertise) But politicians are apostles, right? Judges are apostles, too. (because the Lord put judges in place to direct the nation before there were kings) We can go on forever finding examples.
Look for the gift behind a man’s actions and behind his station, and we see him more closely to how the Lord sees him. In the same manner that we look beyond actions to discern the principality that influences people, we look beyond people’s beliefs to discern the spirit of God that's trying to peek through. Then we love more easily, more readily.
This attitude of, “looking beyond the man to see the spirits at work” is a huge part of fishing the men.
I am so appreciative of the time you spend with me. I covered this now because I’m going to need to refer to this principle often in subsequent articles, and I wanted you to understand what I mean. Thank you for coming with me.
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