The Anointing To PastorAnd it's dangerous—really dangerous—to intrude into another
office.
Ministering in the Wrong Office
In Old Testament days, if you intruded into another office,
you fell dead instantly. Two fellows intruded into the Holy Place
and fell dead instantly, for example.
In these days of grace—thank God for grace—you can get
by with it longer, but you can't get by with it forever. Sooner or
later, as the Bible says, if you don't judge yourself, you'll have to
be judged so you won't be condemned with the world:
1 CORINTHIANS 11:31,32
31 For if we would judge ourselves, we should not be judged.
32 But when we are judged, we are chastened of the Lord, that
we should not be condemned with the world.
Through my 50 years in the ministry, I've known mighty
men of God—and I mean mighty men—who were anointed by
the Holy Spirit to function in such offices as prophet and
evangelist, with the working of miracles, gifts of healings, and
the gift of special faith manifested through them. Some of them
ought to be alive still today, but they're dead because they tried
to function—and had no anointing to function—over in another
office.
If they had stayed in their own office, they wouldn't have
died prematurely. You can add to or diminish the anointing. The
anointing they had diminished.
One day Gordon Lindsay, founder of Christ for the Nations,
and I were discussing one of the outstanding ministers who had
died—one who had stood at the forefront of the Healing
Revival. We were all in the Voice of Healing organization at one
time.
God had told me two years before that this minister was
going to die—and he died exactly when the Lord said he would.
Somebody asked me, "Why didn't you go tell him?"