Understanding the Anointingthe anointing. There's no use being divided on the subject.
Some people who minister under the anointing know
nothing about faith. That was one of the major problems we had
in the days of the great Healing Revival here in the United States
in 1947-58. Almost all of the healing evangelists were
ministering under the anointing—the power of God—but some
of them knew very little about the Bible. (They made some of
the most stupid statements concerning the Bible you ever heard
in your life.)
Most of the ministers involved in this movement belonged to
the Voice of Healing organization. We always had a convention
at Thanksgiving. At our 1954 convention in Philadelphia, I said
to some of the brethren, "When all the rest of these fellows are
gone, I'll still be out there ministering." They're all gone except
one or two of us, and I'm still ministering.
Why? Because I saw the difference between ministering
under an anointing and ministering by faith, and I minister both
ways.
What happened to the others? Preacher after preacher got
sick themselves. These were men who had been mightily used of
God to do marvelous things, but they ministered only under the
anointing. Some of them came to talk to me after they got sick.
One man said, "This anointing—this gift or whatever
ministry I've got—will work for other people, but it won't work
for me." (The anointing is always there to minister to somebody
else.) "Why won't it work for me?" he asked.
I said, "God didn't give the ministry of the apostle to
minister to the apostle. He gave it to minister to the Body of
Christ. You're going to have to get healed like the rest of us—by
faith—or else do without it." He looked at me like he'd seen a
ghost.
"Well," he said, "I guess I'll do without it, because I don't
know anything about faith."
I said, "You ought to have been listening when some of us
who do know something about it were preaching and teaching.