God Will Often Correct Our Understanding

If God is with us, the world around us will align itself with God’s calling, and our part is simply to discern opportunities for that anointing and that Power of God within us to flow.

When the Power of God begins to move in David’s life, the circumstances surrounding his life also begin to conspire in his favor, bringing David toward the destiny God has ordained for him and for which He originally gave him His anointing.

We see several interesting things happen in David’s life. First, we saw that he is brought to the palace, where he first comes into contact with the king himself; he learns things about the palace, how things are done there, and learns from Saul. He is in position when the giant appears, and David intervenes in a very powerful way. There are a couple of very interesting things we can see here.

Number one: the reaction of David’s brothers when David realizes that Goliath is insulting the Holy Spirit. When David asks questions about what is happening and discovers that Saul has promised a considerable reward to whoever defeats the giant, David’s brothers—who do not have that anointing of the Holy Spirit and cannot see things from the bold and diligent perspective from which David sees them under God’s anointing—react negatively. They criticize David, accusing him of being quarrelsome and of doing unnecessary foolish things.

When a person does not have God’s anointing and sees God’s anointing manifesting itself in others, that person will generally react in a critical and insulting way. We have seen this throughout the entire history of the great revivals of the Holy Spirit: people who were not part of that move and therefore could not understand the mysteries and peculiarities of how God’s move unfolds in settings of power—generally, those unanointed people, untaught in the move of God—will act negatively.

And the danger is that those who are anointed by the Holy Spirit will let themselves be intimidated by those who do not understand the move of God, stop using the anointing, and try to accommodate themselves to those people’s criticisms. This is one of the greatest dangers and one of the greatest mistakes a Church, a ministry, or an individual can make, because a person who is not part of the move of the Holy Spirit will never understand or see things differently.

We see the case of Michal, Saul’s daughter who became David’s wife. One day, when Michal sees David dancing under God’s Pentecostal move, as the Ark of God is being brought to Jerusalem, David takes off his clothes, remains in his undergarments, and dances before God with complete freedom. Michal says that she saw him from her window and despised David. And when David comes home, full of excitement and joy over God’s move among the people, Michal tells him: Oh, look how the king of Israel has lowered himself, dancing before the public like some nobody. And David tells her: Yes, it was before my God, who took the anointing from your father and gave it to me, that I danced.

One of the terrible things a person filled with the Holy Spirit can do is let themselves be intimidated and try, as it were, to bring the move of God down to a level where everyone will accept it and everyone will approve of it. People who do not know the move of God will never be able to understand what is happening in the lives of those who are moved by the Holy Spirit. Strange things happen where the ministry of the Holy Spirit is in motion, and they are not necessarily pleasant or aesthetically acceptable things; God does whatever He wants, and sometimes He humbles the intellect and culture in order to do what He wants to do in our lives.

So thank God David did not let his brothers intimidate him but continued doing what he had to do. God was providing him with an opportunity to do something. I think I will leave this meditation at that key point. When God moves in the powerful move of His Spirit, the strangest things can happen, and we simply have to be obedient to the Holy Spirit.

We see it in the New Testament in the case of Cornelius and his family. When Peter arrives there, God overturns all the theology the Christians had up to that point, with their imperfect knowledge of the move of the Holy Spirit. Peter had thought of these people: They are impure; God will never have anything to do with these Gentiles. But God says: No, I want these people on My team, and sovereignly, independently, He causes His Spirit to fall upon Cornelius and his people. This became a great lesson for Peter: what God calls pure, let no one call impure.

Many times God will correct our intellect, or the intellect of people who do not know the move of the Holy Spirit, by doing things that will humble the intellect but will expand our faith and allow us—by being innocent like children and not putting obstacles in the way of God’s move in our lives—to reach another level of understanding and a greater capacity to use the gift of God in our lives. May the Lord bless us, and until our next study.