Refining Your Prophetic Calling in the Wilderness
It wasn’t the palace, the seminary, or the courts of the king that gave David a voice—it was the wilderness.
The moments that aren’t glorious unlock so much more than you realize. For David, his job of shepherding his father’s sheep was the place where he learned to hear the voice of the Lord.
David discovered his own voice doing a humble, not-so-glamorous job. When David was alone worshipping the Lord, God gave David his voice. When David went against the lion and the bear, he began exercising it and it was as he faced more and more battles and obstacles in the wilderness where he soon realised the authority and potency of his God given voice arise. This prepared David for when it was time for him to stand against Goliath.
We don’t always choose the environment where our voices emerge, but all voices are conceived in the wilderness. Voices that emerge from anywhere else will not carry the following:
Anointing or unction
God’s power
Weightiness and conviction
The Identity Process
Discovering one’s voice can be a difficult process. As I discussed above, David had to go against a lion, a bear, and a giant, and on top of this, David had to be alone in the wild. I have personally found the following portion of Scripture to be a great explanation for how we can receive and find our individual voices in God.
The word of the Lord came to me, saying, “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.” “Alas, Sovereign Lord,” I said, “I do not know how to speak; I am too young.” But the Lord said to me, “Do not say, ‘I am too young.’ You must go to everyone I send you to and say whatever I command you. Do not be afraid of them, for I am with you and will rescue you,” declares the Lord. Then the Lord reached out his hand and touched my mouth and said to me, “I have put my words in your mouth. See, today I appoint you over nations and kingdoms to uproot and tear down, to destroy and overthrow, to build and to plant” (Jeremiah 1:4–10).
This passage reveals that Jeremiah was called to be a voice since his birth, but it wasn’t until he reached adulthood that this voice was explained, revealed, and activated. Jeremiah’s response to God reveals his lack of confidence. He says to God:
“I do not know how to speak.”
“I am too young.”
These statements sum up where Jeremiah was at mentally when God called him. He felt unready, unable, and disqualified, but God reminded Him of the only thing that matters: God is with us, and He will give us the words we need to speak. That sums up emerging voices who are responding to the call of the wild. Wild ones are called to be the mouthpiece that God uses, not the mouthpiece for a religious cause or man-made mission, but God’s alone.
Moses struggled with this too when God called him to set his people free.
But Moses said to the Lord, “Oh, my Lord, I am not eloquent, either in the past or since you have spoken to your servant, but I am slow of speech and of tongue.” Then the Lord said to him, “Who has made man’s mouth? Who makes him mute, or deaf, or seeing, or blind? Is it not I, the Lord? Now therefore go, and I will be with your mouth and teach you what you shall speak” (Exodus 4:10–12 ESV).
See how these two stories mirror the same insecurity and the same solution? I have seen far too many called and anointed voices give up in the discovery phase, even before they walk through the trial phase (that’s coming up!), simply because they disqualify themselves. The most anointed people I have met in my life haven’t been the most gifted and able. They simply have been the ones willing to let God fill their mouths with His words!
Receiver Up!
People ask me all time, “Have you always prophesied the way you do now?” and my answer is no. I have always had a natural prophetic “knowing,” but most of it wasn’t awakened or discovered until I was in my twenties. Initially, the prophetic call and gifting didn’t come at some big moment. That “knowing” just seemed to slowly increase over the years until I begun to ask myself, “Why am I thinking this? This is not my thought!”
The first time I remember hearing God’s voice in a way that I would say was clearly Him speaking was in 2005. Christy and I had just started running our church’s youth group that January, and one day as I was driving to church for our Friday night meeting, I heard a voice on the inside begin to speak. It was as if thoughts and ideas were popping up that I had nothing to do with, and I recognized it as God speaking to me. I wrote down what He told me and what I heard. It was a prophetic word over that year, but at the time, I had no grid to understand what I was receiving. My receiver was up, though. Prior to that experience, my prophetic calling had been manifesting for years in my songwriting, but I had always just written off the random, “inspired” moments I would have as creativity even though they were more that, even surreal and other-worldly.
Messing Up The Flow
Things began to change in a dramatic way during my 2006 “soaking season.” I was so hungry for God that I wanted others to be just as hungry as I was. I was leading and being trained as a worship pastor at our church. Now, when I say “trained,” I mean Holy Spirit trained, thrown in the deep end of the pool of trial and error. But I was all in. My encounters at home were spilling into every part of my life, and my worship leading began to be affected in way I didn’t see coming. The first time in happened was awkward.
Our church was somewhat free, but we stuck to singing only the words of the songs for the full thirty minutes of praise and worship every service. Back then, there was no spontaneous worship, so we just sang one song to the next until we were through with our worship set. But this one day was different. I could feel my spirit burning to the point that I just wanted to put the guitar down and lay down and get drunk in the Spirit. I was not feeling like I was going to be able to keep my composure much longer, so as we finished the song we were singing, I directed the band to hold the key, and they did. I didn’t know what I was doing, but I didn’t want to move on from that place. I could feel words in my spirit begin to erupt out of me, but in moment of hesitancy, I stopped it and moved onto the next song with a confused congregation who didn’t know what it was going on.
A few Sunday nights later, I was leading worship and didn’t have the same feelings I had at the service weeks earlier, but my spirit was burning again like something needed to come out. We finished a song when I suddenly felt a strong surge of a word of the Lord bubbling up again; however, this time I let it erupt, and I prophesied over the church (but didn’t know what it was). It felt amazing, but unfortunately, I had a few people tell me that it was nonsense, so I shut it down for many years thereafter.
Like A Fire in My Bones
The problem with shutting down your voice is that eventually sooner or later it’s going to come out again with a potency. Jeremiah learned this.
But if I say, “I will not mention his word or speak anymore in his name,” his word is in my heart like a fire, a fire shut up in my bones. I am weary of holding it in; indeed, I cannot (Jeremiah 20:9).
What a different tune Jeremiah has in this verse. He realizes that it’s more exhausting to hold his tongue than free it. I learned this the hard way, too.
In my last worship pastor role, we were part of a church that loved Jesus but just didn’t value prophecy, and as I had discovered, prophecy was my flow! I had been spiritually suffocated not being able to completely unleash the way I was supposed to. One day, I just decided that I wasn’t going to shut it down the next time it happened and deal with the consequences. One Sunday morning shortly after that as I was in the bridge of a song, I suddenly felt the overwhelming bubbling forth of the Spirit inside me, and this time it felt involuntary as words from God gushed out. For about forty seconds, I prophesied to the horror of the pastors. That was the day I knew I had finally stepped into the wild prophetic calling God had always ordained for me. The rest is history.
