1 Corinthians 12:13, Romans 8:9, and Ephesians 1:13-14 all convey one wildly important truth: that every believer receives the Holy Spirit upon salvation. There is also a separate baptism or filling of the Holy Spirit, which is another entire podcast season in its own right, but we’ll scratch the surface of it a little bit together in this episode. As we do, I’ll paint a more cohesive picture of what is actually required when you Gather Gall because this kind of Holy Spirit filling yields an uncommon and special kind of gifting.

It’s a Holy Spirit anointing that needs a specific, God-ordained appointment for its use and very often comes with a time of anonymity before that appointment takes place. We’re looking at all of that today, as well as what it looks like to walk through that anonymous in-between as if you weren’t really anonymous at all. So get your Bible, notebook, and pen ready – we’re about to cover some holy ground!

So far this season, we’ve talked at length about giftings and calling, but the conversation isn’t complete without also discussing the special anointing that goes along with them – the thing that, according to Charles Spurgeon, is the difference between sin and sacrifice. In other words, any Old Testament Jew could perform a sacrifice but, if they weren’t an anointed priest? It wasn’t holy or usable or even acceptable to God.

Anointing

To understand anointing, I want you to look at the first use of the word in the Bible in Genesis 28:16-22 with Jacob who had a vivid encounter with God in a dream. And the thing that I love about this is that what Jacob did after that dream, he did seemingly on impulse (and, if you’ve been following along through this entire season, the topic of doing what just comes naturally for you to do falls in line perfectly here). When he woke up, he took the stone he used as a pillow, set it up as a pillar, and poured oil on top of it.

Later, in Genesis 31:13, God told Jacob that, when he poured that oil out onto that pillar, he had anointed it. Then, a few chapters later, in Genesis 35, God told Jacob to go back to the same place where God had appeared to him and where he had anointed that pillar and make an altar there. So Jacob did. He went back to that town, set up an altar in that same exact place, and poured oil onto it, anointing the altar the way he did the pillar, only this time he knew what he was doing. But there’s an interesting detail in all of this, because when Abraham originally unknowingly anointed the pillar in Genesis 28:19, the text says that he called the name of that place Bethel (meaning “House of God”) when, before that, it was called Luz, which means “almond tree.” But Jacob didn’t use almond oil to anoint his pillar, which would seem to be the obvious choice since he was in a place named for the almond trees that distinguished it or rampantly grew around it. But in Genesis 28:18, the Hebrew word used for “oil” in Genesis 28:18 is specifically olive oil. Almond-tree-Luz didn’t become House-of-God Bethel until after Jacob poured that oil out on it. Something ordinary, once anointed, became something holy. The oil of anointing changed it from one to the other. The oil of anointing changes you from Saul to Paul. The oil of anointing is the thing that distinguishes a person from the rest of the pack.

And the clincher about all of it is: you cannot anoint yourself for it, no matter how badly you want it. Go to Israel and you’ll see olive trees everywhere. Deuteronomy 28:40 says “You shall have olive trees throughout all your territory, but you shall not anoint yourself with the oil.” It’s not your place to pluck off some olives, crush them up, and make yourself some oil. It’s not. This kind of anointing has to come from God.

Appointing

Before we talk about the appointing portion of all of this I want to first go back to the previous episode and the ways that you can lose your calling. We talked about losing it because of fear and pride and those things getting the better of you and your faith. But there’s one other glaring way in which a calling can be stripped from you that I didn’t mention in the previous episode and it’s exactly what happened to Saul in 1 Samuel 15. He lost his role as king (in God’s eyes, at least) because of disobedience. You can read the whole story on your own about how Saul was rejected by God as king, but verse 23 sums it all up in a way you can’t argue against when Samuel, the priest who anointed Saul as king in 1 Samuel 10 says to Saul: “Rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft and stubbornness is as iniquity and idolatry. Because you have rejected the word of the Lord, He also has rejected you from being king.” Then, a few verses later, Samuel says: “The Lord has torn the kingdom of Israel from you today, and has given it to a neighbor of yours, who is better than you.” Ouch. In the very next chapter, David is anointed king even though Saul still stood in his appointed place as king (and wouldn’t give up the throne for another 20 years).

Now, when David was finally publicly  appointed as king some 20 years after his very private anointing at home, he acknowledged that God, Himself, had both chosen him and appointed him as ruler over His people (you can see that in 2 Samuel 6:21). The Hebrew word David used for that appointing is sava, and it’s a really interesting one because, in its usage, the words “command” and “commission” are used almost interchangeably. Psalm 33 uses it in verse nine, where it said “Let all the inhabitants of the world stand in awe of the Lord, for He spoke, and it was done; He commanded, and it stood fast. Psalm 148:5 reiterates that with the fact that God commanded (this Hebrew word, sava) and they were created (they, being the sun, moon, stars, heavens of heavens and the waters above the heavens). But you don’t see sava in any of the creation text in the first chapter of Genesis. It’s only used after to describe how he created – by speaking or commanding. The first use of sava isn’t until God is speaking to Adam in Genesis 2, appointed him to the garden in Eden to tend to it and freely eat from every tree inside of it. But God’s one sava-command was to not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. And we know how that turned out – because of Adam’s disobedience, he was kicked out of the garden, his role, as garden caretaker, was stripped from him… just like Saul.

So, you have David in 1 Samuel 16 being pulled in from the fields where he was minding his own business tending to the family sheep when he is anointed by God to be king. He wasn’t looking for it! It was nowhere even close to being on his radar. But, nearly two decades before his appointing, he’s anointed out of nowhere. Then, messengers from the current king come to David’s house and ask for him. They don’t tell him what they want him for, they just say “The king wants to see you.” Can you imagine?! If I were David, I’d be thinking “This is it! Here we go!” But he gets there and basically becomes another servant when he was probably expecting to be handed over the throne. But, despite his anointing, he was nowhere even close to actually inheriting it. 1 Samuel 16:23 sums it up this way: “And so it was, whenever the spirit from God was upon Saul, that David would take a harp and play it with his hand. Then Saul would become refreshed and well, and the distressing spirit would depart from him.” And this carried on for a almost a decade. Nine years stretch between 1 Samuel 16 and 1 Samuel 18 when Saul begins to resent David, and his harp playing no longer soothes him. Nine years.

Friend, that is the

Anonymous In-Between

It’s that awkward, sometimes infuriating, very often lonely period between your anointing and your appointing that God uses to equip you. If you look at the Greek for for apostle (apostolos, which details a person sent to an appointed place with very specific orders) and dig into its etymology, you’ll find yourself looking at a compound of two Greek words: apo (meaning separation) and stellō (which means arranging or putting something in order, or preparing it, or equipping it for use). Now, I’ve always thought of separation in the sense of a public separation, not a private one. The kind where a person is pulled out of a crowd and sent to the front of the line to lead or to the center of the stage. But, here’s the kicker: stellō also means “to withdraw yourself.” If you dig even deeper, you’ll find that that it all not only describes doing the things necessary to put a person into their appointed position, it’s also doing all of the things necessary to keep them there long term, removing any and all obstacles, stripping away anything that could trip you up, and it all points to a period of hidden establishment, which is so counterintuitive to our culture today. We like to watch people get built up, brick by brick, follower by follower, being established like-by-like before our very eyes. But God’s way of establishment – particularly with the ones He hand-picks and anoints for an extra-special, wildly important display of His Spirit – is very often hidden from public view.

It’s the kind of anonymity that happens in plain view of the people around you. David, though seemingly plucked from obscurity, definitely wasn’t anonymous when he was anointed. Saul’s servants had clearly heard of him. They said themselves that they had heard of a son of Jesse the Bethlehemite, who was not only skillful in playing the harp, he was also known as a mighty man of valor, a man of war, prudent in speech, and (just to add to the pile of things) handsome. Everything you could possibly want in a king, right? But that part was entirely anonymous to them. That’s the anonymity I’m talking about. It’s walking around feeling the anointing oil practically dripping off of your skin, but nobody else sees it yet because God is not ready to reveal it yet. It’s no different than Jesus walking around this earth for three decades before it was His time. Jesus. The Messiah. God incarnate walked down the street brushing against people who knew him as Joseph’s son, never ever saw Him as the Son of God. That’s the anonymous in-between. Jesus, who Isaiah 61 says that Spirit of God is upon because the Lord has anointed Him to preach good tidings to the poor. He sent Him to heal the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to those who are bound. On and on it goes listing the things that Jesus was anointed hundreds of years before He came to this earth. But we know nothing of the first 30 years of His life after His celebrated and miraculous birth. He slipped into an intentional and divinely covered kind of anonymity until God was ready to reveal Him to the world.

You definitely want to listen to the full episode of this one because this re-cap barely begins to scratch the surface of everything we cover together! You can find it here!

Thanks so much for listening!