3 Kinds of Prophetic Words & How to Deliver Them

In many of the prophetic words we give we have no idea what we’re talking about—we only see in part! (See 1 Corinthians 13:9-12.)

Therefore, we often do not understand the context into which we speak. The job is to be faithful to the part you do have, which means you will often wonder how the prophetic word is going to be applied. Some of the imagery that God shows you will mean everything to the recipient and very little to you. To know that the prophetic call is set up for you to not fully understand is a very strange thing indeed.

Nevertheless, this shouldn’t completely surprise us. Prophetic and indeed Christian leadership is a peculiar thing. When it is done well, it runs almost counter to everything the world has told us. The world says, “Look good! Create yourself by accumulating wealth, experiences, and travels—and then broadcast your life to an audience who will tell you how awesome you are!” But the gospel of the Kingdom jars against this. Jesus said to His followers in the gospel of Luke, “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me” (Luke 9:23 NIV).

Mature prophets can keep standing in situations and repetitively speak things forth, all the while having limited clarity or no real feel for what they’re speaking into. It doesn’t always feel good. In fact, on occasion it is quite draining! This consistently pushes you to deny yourself the need to be celebrated so that whatever God wants is communicated. Sometimes you have to say the hard things, the strange things, the abnormal and atypical things, the uncomfortable things.

Three Categories of Prophetic Words

What we prophesy usually fits into one of three categories:

1. Prophetic Generalities

First, we speak our words, our agenda, and our ideas, giving prophetic generalities. God hasn’t spoken in the moment, but we, the prophet, can pull together a reasonable Scripture verse or idea that might be generally useful. Things like, “You’re coming into a fresh understanding of how much God loves you,” is usually always true, and most prophets will know this without actually hearing God say anything. It is picking biblical truths, tailored as best we think the person needs to hear.

This style of revelation (if we can even call it that) is not always as dreadful as it sounds, as it encapsulates good ideas, sensible words, and possibly the best strategy that we have on a matter. It would be better to couch it in opinion, so you would say, “I think if you did this you would see a turnaround.” It is wisdom without revelation. Listen carefully to revelation in the future and you might be surprised just how much of what we in the church call the “word the Lord” is basically just this approach!

2. Prophetic Words We Understand and Like

The second category of prophecy is when we speak God’s words, we like them, and they feel like “good words” to our own spirits. The word “sits right” with us. We understand the prophecy.

These are the “flying high” moments of revelation, when you feel joyfully alive as the words coming out of your mouth are words that you want to be there, and they are full of wisdom and revelation!

Pleasingly, they make you look good and afterward you think you did a great job and everyone thinks that you’re epic. Because of the considerable “feel good” that this type of prophecy generates, it is all too easy for most people to stay in this style of revelation. After all, why would you willingly choose any other style of prophecy unless you robustly feared the Lord?

3. Prophetic Words We Don’t Like

Finally, there is the type of revelation that means we speak God’s words, and we don’t like them—they taste bitter to us. We don’t understand them—they make us look strange. There is an immediate awareness that to be obedient will mean some degree of dying to yourself in the communication of them. You don’t get to pick and choose what you release, and you don’t get to add your opinion to the word. No one wants to hear that!

This is not just a matter of bringing “justice” or “consequences” words. In fact, on occasions it is quite the opposite. Once, God asked me to prophesy over a church leader whom I knew for a fact was in sexual sin. At the time I was still reeling from the sudden disclosure of his quite considerable history of perversion that had come to light just twenty-four hours prior. Sexual sin demons oozed out of every pore of him! As I stood at the front of his church, wondering how to navigate this with his congregation, God asked me to prophesy, calling him “pure,” “spotless,” and “righteous” before Him.

As the Lord told me this, the internal wrestle within me was immense! “But those words are not true, Jesus! They are not even close to being accurate!” I argued. I knew that I would look a fool if I said those things out loud.

I took the microphone, closed my eyes, clenched my fist, pressed deeply into the Holy Spirit, and said, “God calls you pure, spotless, and righteous.” The gasps from the congregation were audible. I looked like a crazy fool who was only massaging the leader’s ego and securing him in position. The rest of the day was just unpleasant because I subsequently couldn’t get the congregation’s buy-in to anything else I had to say!

Several years passed and I was attending a large conference in another part of the country. Out of the blue, this leader and his wife happened to appear, standing beside me at the front during the worship. Let me tell you, he was unrecognizable! He was in every way pure, spotless, and righteous. My jaw dropped as I did a double take to check it was the same person, and, as I did so, God whispered in my ear, “You did that—you created his future all those years ago, by giving him something to step into.”

On more than one occasion God has asked me to tell a church or ministry that He is closing them down and removing His grace, even when every fiber of my being wanted to speak life and call them back into fullness! Perhaps one of the most challenging moments of obedience came when God asked me to publicly tell a minister that he had not ever been called to ministry and so he was in the wrong job.

The soul searching one must do over these kinds of words is almost indescribable, where disobedience feels like a choice you might never recover from, but equally, obedience feels like relational suicide. In this particular situation with the minister-who-should-never-have-been, his wife screamed and fell to her knees, publicly crying out, “We knew it! We knew it! We just didn’t know what to do!” Incredibly, despite my apprehension, they were grateful!

How to Deliver Difficult Words

Best practice, generally, is to sit in very private rooms to deliver these sorts of words. On the rare occasions that they must be made publicly, it is usually only because the people involved have already been told by God, repetitively, over years, but have consistently chosen disobedience. When the word makes it to the public domain it is, in reality, an extreme mercy of God to give a final opportunity for redress and reframing.

In a split second, you can feel somewhat hijacked by God, but this quickly gives way to the reward of hearing His voice and being trusted by Him.

In one situation, midway through preaching about something else, God suddenly gave me the name of a ministry that I did not previously know existed and asked me to prophesy that they were, “Ishmael and not Isaac.” After delivering the word I could feel, all at once, a mix of things: the pleasure of the Father, the swirl of others’ human emotions, my own personal wrestle of, “Did I go about it the right way?” and the thoughts about future personal reputational damage. However, putting something in the public domain like that is utterly transparent and rightly gives everyone the ability to weigh and test the word and, in cases like this, to discern their alignment to the ministry involved. This is an incredibly important process, giving us the opportunity to assess if what we’re doing is what, and how, God wants things done.

I used to ask God why He works like this, but He alone knows. Now I fear Him rightly, and not man, and in the anointing I understand that my life is not my own. Neither is my reputation, and I know that the prophetic anointing always gives people choices and provokes decision-making. The prophet in Scripture is never about harmony but is always about righteousness. This takes years to settle into and must always be underpinned by an absolute driving passion for the people of God and a love for His church.

We want to be an echo of God. When we are not, what it tends to generate is harsh, rude, or deliberately shocking opinions, just to stand out for standing out’s sake, along with self-generated, man-made, spiritual visions that God never gave you—because you wanted to look “cutting edge.”

Sometimes I have prophesied and thought, “Wow, what a great word for that person—God You are really blessing them!” and God has replied to me, “That was a justice word! It would have been a different prophecy had they not been needing to reap what they sowed.” What I had prophesied, and thought was good, was actually much less than they would have received at another time. Every listener would have celebrated what God was saying in the moment had they not had an eye to see what God was doing behind the scenes.

Boldness

It is emphatically undeniable that the prophet requires a divinely generated, courageous boldness (not rudeness)! You have to get happy at not holding back in response to what God is saying through you.

How is your courage and boldness? I find that—at the entry level—most prophetic types have so wrangled and battled to come to terms with navigating their frustration of the status quo that they struggle to be courageously life-giving in their words. As a result, they lean into a kind of frustrated telling-off instead!

It is a lifelong journey to become a useful voice—finding your words, tone, heart setting, language, platform, and sound. It is a process to lose your fear (but not become belligerent in the process) so that the fear of God can replace it. Mantles of divinely generated, courageous boldness must come forth and be picked up and worn by emerging prophets. Of course, it’s not just a matter of loudness or how strongly you say something, it’s more nuanced than that. Sometimes you must prophesy in a whisper— get comfortable in the peculiarity of the call!

Get comfortable that you are not going to be popular in some moments. Not that people will always be raging against you as if you are at war with them; they are simply uncomfortable with the challenge you present. I have lost count of the number of platforms that I have stood on and said, “God, do I really need to say that?”—and all that was being said was relatively normal. But it was such a provocation nevertheless—because that’s the anointing. Never underestimate how your anointing provokes, even before you have opened your mouth! A prophet can walk into a room in total, dignified silence and still irritate others because the anointing provokes change. Prophets comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.