The Anointing: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow

by R.T. Kendall

Next to the gift of salvation and the sure knowledge that we will go to heaven when we die, the anointing is our most precious possession.

But the Holy Spirit often incorporates our natural abilities and superimposes great grace upon them so that they appear supernatural to others but seem natural to those who have them.

Will I come to terms with the way God has chosen to work in me? Will I admit that God has given me a certain gift? Will I affirm His sovereign dealings with me? Or will I be jealous of another’s gift, position or responsibility?

I have had to admit that I am no Jonathan Edwards or Martyn Lloyd-Jones. That is painful, especially when some people feel I should be more high-powered than I am. What can we do? The only thing we can do is get our approval from God who made us as we are and put us where we are, unworthy though we are.

The anointing is what comes easily. Your actual anointing is in easy operation when you function without fatigue. Your sphere of anointing is in easy operation when you function without fatigue. Your sphere of anointing is when you work without having to break a door down in order to walk through it. You let it open without raising a little finger.

In the meantime God, who earmarked Joseph for greatness one day, also earmarked him for a long, hard era of preparation. The Bible calls this “chastening” (KJV), or being “disciplined” (Heb. 12:6). This word comes from a Greek word that means “enforced learning.” God has a way of teaching us a lesson. Joseph needed to be humbled.

The gifts of the Spirit are one thing, the fruit another. Sadly, most of us want the gifts.

Billy Graham said that it seems that the devil gets 75 percent of God’s best men through sexual temptation.

I eventually came to terms with my limits—probably the hardest thing I have ever done. It became a matter of sheer obedience to God. I had to affirm Him for making me as I am and affirm myself, even if people didn’t like it. After all, I began to see with ever-increasing conviction that what matters is what God thinks and the way I will be regarded on the Final Day.

Whether or not we receive a reward will be determined by our accepting our anointing (which requires obedience) and living within its limitations (which means not disobeying), whatever the profile that follows.

If you or I are operating at a level that brings fatigue and leads to what we now call “burnout,” something has gone wrong; we moved outside our anointing at some stage. It should never happen.

But burnout is what we bring on ourselves by taking on what God did not command.

When Paul said we should not think of ourselves more highly than we ought to think, he explained how we can do this: by accepting the “measure,” that is, limit, of our faith.

When we live within the limitations of our anointing there is freedom.

When I move outside my anointing I am trespassing. When I try to mimic somebody else I am stealing another’s anointing, and it always backfires on me.

The funny thing is, when I try to imitate someone else I never capture their real genius but their eccentricity. It is a fact that what is most easily copied in any man or woman is their odd manner or even their weakness.

The fresh anointing is the essential thing. It is what replenishes the irrevocable. If our irrevocable anointing (Rom. 11:29) is not replenished by a fresh touch of God, we are depending on yesterday’s anointing.

A poll was taken not long ago that revealed how much time the average clergyman or church leader actually spent alone with God in prayer and private devotions every day. The average: four minutes a day.

One of the hardest lessons for us to learn is that we cannot monopolize the Holy Spirit. We cannot get a corner on the “Holy Spirit market.” He is not for sale, and He will not allow Himself to be franchised like a fast-food chain.

Dr. Lloyd-Jones once said to me, “The worst thing that can happen to a man is to succeed before he is ready.”

I have sincerely prayed that God will not bless me with great success until He sees that I am not taking myself too seriously.

The man or woman who takes himself or herself too seriously is a ripe candidate for becoming yesterday’s man or woman.

Jealousy—the sin nobody talks about—is the downfall of many a gifted person. It blinds. It eats on the spirit. It consumes our thoughts. It seems right at the time. It ruined Saul.

That is how low Saul sank. He had no integrity whatsoever. The person who becomes yesterday’s man or woman and stone-deaf to the Spirit almost always loses clear thinking.

All of us must come to terms with an unchanging fact: Not one of us is above God’s Word. We all like to think we are God’s favorites.

The task of every generation is to discover in which direction our sovereign Redeemer is moving, then to move in that direction.

Discontinuity. That is what threatens us—when there is no precedent that we can put our finger on. The precedent for the unprecedented, however, is biblical. It is the theme running right through Hebrews 11, the faith chapter of the Bible. Not a single person mentioned there had the luxury of repeating yesterday’s anointing.

Not knowing where we are going, yet knowing we are following God, can be most painful indeed. God has a way of giving us sufficient revelation for ourselves but not enough that it convinces others.

The stigma is knowing you have heard from God but having to do what no one else may be required to do.

Dr. Lloyd-Jones used to say to me, “The Bible was not given to replace direct and immediate revelation from God; it was given to correct abuses.”

The Scriptures do not replace the miraculous; they correct abuses when people hear “words” that couldn’t have come from God because they don’t cohere with biblical theology.

When God said, “How long will you mourn?”, the implication was that Samuel had been in that state for a good while. And too long.

We are all like that. We want to stay as we are. After many years of pastoral experience I think perhaps I have learned at least one thing: People don’t want their problems solved; they want them understood.

Samuel was getting a kind of training every servant of Christ must undergo: seeing that those we have admired aren’t perfect.

We do our admirers no favor to let them adulate us or get too attached to us. We are going to disappoint them—it is only a matter of time.

“What do we suppose the devil would want us to do?” In other words, most of us have a fairly shrewd idea what the devil hopes we will do with a certain feeling. Do the opposite, and you will be right most of the time. This is relevant with regard to sexual temptation, intellectual temptation, financial temptation, social temptation or temptation connected with ambition.

The Holy Spirit will always affirm the Bible. He will always lead us in a way that dignifies the plain teaching of Scripture. If your “word” from the Lord goes against the teaching of God’s Word, then you did not hear from God after all.

We can cope with a lot that people say against us—as long as they are fully in the picture and still disagree. But what hurts is when they aren’t in the picture and form judgments and perceptions that are based on limited information.

The pain of being today’s man is that you can’t convince another person of what you see unless the same Holy Spirit shows them as well.

We may think that the “much” that follows the “least” means we have arrived. But the “much” may lead us to an era of long preparation that is designed for the secret anointing entrusted to us.

The most important kind of preparation in any case is spiritual preparation. It is what refines and develops the spirit. It is what prepares the way for usefulness in God’s hands. It is not an easy kind of preparation. It is when we find out what people are like, how mean and unkind they can be—those closest to us and those often thought to be the most spiritual. It is when we also learn our own hearts aren’t perfect.

has often been said that the greatest opposition to what God is doing today comes from those who were on the cutting edge of what God was doing yesterday, that the greatest hostility to what God is doing now comes from those who were on the front line of what God was doing yesterday. The greatest attacks on any current move of the Holy Spirit often come from those who were part of yesterday’s move of the Spirit. The reason: jealousy.

man or woman with a secret anointing always needs further preparation. It would be what would make David into a real man.

God knows how much we all need friends. A friend is someone who knows all about you and still likes you! If you and I have even just one friend like that, we are fortunate. David had the best. God will do this for you, too; your secret anointing will not only need refining but also a friendship that compensates for the suffering.

How we respond to another’s jealousy will determine whether we will truly come through as tomorrow’s man or woman. It is what saved David and eventually made him great, although it could have been his undoing.

If a goal of spirituality is partly to close the time gap between the moment when we observe the manifestation of the Spirit and our actual affirmation of it, so likewise must tomorrow’s servant of Christ learn to close the time gap between sin and repentance.

The chief way we grieve the Spirit is by bitterness. A bitter spirit that always seems right at the time. We feel nothing. The backslider in heart is always “filled with his own ways” (Prov. 14:14, KJV). It seems right when we are bitter.

Vindication is God’s act. It is what He does best! The one thing He doesn’t want is our help. Indeed, if we pull strings to advance ourselves—as if to help God out—God will back off and leave it to us so that we may see what a mess we will make of things.

The gospel is complete without signs and wonders, but the Bible is not complete without signs and wonders. And yet signs and wonders came later—at the same time as God revealed His name. We therefore have every right to connect God’s name to signs and wonders.

A willing spirit, what he went on to call a “broken spirit” (v. 17), is required of tomorrow’s servant of the Lord if our anointing is to be useful to God.