Following the Thread Part 3 of 7

ARTICLE 3 OF 7

The Tilt We Stopped Noticing

Have you ever walked into a room and felt, before you could name it, that something was a bit off? Not wrong exactly. Not broken. Just not quite level. Then you look, and there it is. A picture hanging at a slight angle. A table sitting unevenly on the floor. Something small enough you’d walk past it a hundred times without noticing, and once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

I think something like that has happened, gradually and without anyone particularly intending it, in the way some parts of the church have come to talk about authority and prophecy and spiritual power. Not a dramatic collapse. More a picture that’s hung at a slight angle for so long we’ve got used to it.

And a tilt in the foundations compounds in effect. A small lean at the base becomes a more pronounced lean further up. By the time the building’s several storeys high, the floors feel off and the doors don’t hang right, and everyone inside has adjusted their posture to compensate without realising they’re doing it.

Nobody chose the wonky foundation. Nobody planned the tilt. Everyone inside is genuinely doing their best, genuinely loving God, genuinely trying to serve well. But the tilt is still the tilt.

A word that gathered too much weight

One of the places I’ve noticed the lean most clearly is in a word that’s become very familiar in charismatic and apostolic circles over the last few decades.

The word is government. As in, releasing governmental authority. Establishing heavenly government over a city or a region. Governmental apostles or prophets. If you’ve spent time in these communities, you might recognise the language. It threads through conferences and prophetic gatherings like something load bearing, something foundational.

The passion behind it is genuine. The desire to see God’s kingdom come in real, tangible ways, to believe prayer and prophecy and Spirit filled community make a difference beyond Sunday morning, that’s not a misguided desire. That’s something the Spirit puts in us. I’ve felt it myself.

But when I went back to the New Testament to find the full shape of this idea, I kept landing somewhere a bit different from where the language these days had been pointing me.

I followed the thread back to Isaiah 9:6 and found the anchor. The air cleared straight away. The Scripture rings out as clear as a bell: the government shall be upon his shoulder. It’s glorious. And the New Testament receives this as something already accomplished. Already fulfilled in Christ. The government of heaven sits on the shoulders of the risen Son, held there, active there, completely and gloriously settled there.

And it’s worth being plain about where that authority comes from in the first place, because this isn’t only Isaiah’s picture. After he rose from the dead, Jesus said it himself, without qualification: all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Not earned over time, not divided up between him and a string of deputies. All of it, given by the Father to the Son, completely. Whatever authority shows up anywhere else in the church, in a leader, a prophetic voice, a structure or a title, it was never a separate supply. It’s derived. Borrowed from the one who actually holds it. Paul puts the same thing simply: there is no authority except what comes from God. Nobody generates authority of their own. We only ever receive it, carry it for a while, and hand it back.

Which means it isn’t waiting to be released through us. We don’t generate the government of heaven. We do get to live inside it. Witness to it. Align ourselves with it. Serve under it. The more I’ve sat with that, the more it feels like relief. Like something I’d been straining toward was already given. The government is on his shoulders, where Isaiah always said it would be, and our invitation is to live joyfully and freely beneath it, not to try and hitch it up onto our own shoulders and carry it ourselves.

Then I took a more careful look at the word translated governments in 1 Corinthians 12. And I found that it carries much more the sense of a skilled navigator, someone who steers a ship with wisdom and care, serving the journey. It sits in a list next to helps and healing and tongues. Not a throne. Not a structure of spiritual authority over others. But a humble, practical, serving word.

Something about that fits. It feels like level ground.

What the language has cost us

I don’t think the language of government has been neutral in some of our communities. Language shapes culture, and culture shapes people.

When governmental authority attaches to particular individuals, when someone apparently carries it over a region, or speaks with it into our lives, something shifts in the relational air around them. Their words carry a different weight. Questions get harder for us to ask. And the community can start organising itself around the authority being claimed, rather than around Jesus, and the shared life of the Spirit we enjoy together.

Nobody usually plans for that. It builds, slowly, one layer at a time. And back to wonky foundations, by the time people notice they’re leaning, it can just feel like how things are.

And then there’s prophecy

One of the ways governmental language has taken hold in environments I’m aware of, is through the prophetic gift, through the idea that certain prophetic voices carry a governing weight. The impression that a prophetic word can be a kind of spiritual ruling. That’s heavy. And one implication that can flow from it can be that questioning the word would be something close to disobedience.

I love prophecy. I love that the Spirit speaks, that a word lands in exactly the right place at exactly the right time and unlocks something that couldn’t have been unlocked any other way. I’ve been on both ends of that. It’s one of the most beautiful things I know about life in the Spirit.

So this isn’t a critique of the gift, but more a conversation between people who love the same thing, wanting to hold it the way it was always meant to be held.

Paul makes it plain. The one who prophesies speaks to people for their strengthening, encouragement and comfort. That’s the grain of the gift. Its natural direction of movement, toward the person, toward their flourishing, calling something forward, holding them gently in difficulty.

And then he says something I think is genuinely freeing. We know in part, and we prophesy in part. In part. Even real, Spirit-given prophecy is partial. Regardless of who prophesies. It sees something true and worth receiving, but never the whole picture, this side of eternity.

That’s not something to be embarrassed about. It’s the honest, humble description of how the gift moves through human beings. And when we get that, it changes how we hold prophetic words, our own and everyone else’s.

I’ve occasionally found myself in a space where prophecy had taken on a weight it was never designed to carry. Where a word started sounding more like a directive than something offered for others to discern. Where the intensity of delivery became a kind of measure of the word’s authority, and the community shifted, slowly, from weighing together to deferring instead.

I don’t think anybody plans for that culture. I imagine it grows out of a genuine desire to take the Spirit seriously. But somewhere in the growing, something shifted, and the gift that was meant to strengthen and encourage started to feel like pressure. The partial becomes definitive. The offering becomes the ruling.

I think that’s a loss for everyone. For the people receiving, and for the people carrying the gift too, because a prophetic word loaded with governing authority becomes a weight it was never built to carry. It bends the gift out of shape, and probably the person trying to carry it as well.

The posture I keep returning to, in my own practice and in what I long for, is much simpler and much freer. Offered with love and faith, held with open hands. I sense something, I may feel it strongly, see it clearly. But I share it for others to take to God, to talk it through and weigh it with him.

That keeps the gift in its right place. Space for something to be received freely, weighed together, allowed to do the work it was given to do. The gift doesn’t actually need to be asserted to be real. When it’s genuine, it finds its own way.

I’ve been prophesying a long time now, and the longer I do it, the more I hold to this. Not because I’ve lost confidence in the gift, but because I know I only ever see in part, and the person in front of me carries the same Spirit I do. I’m far more comfortable with bringing an offering, than being looked to as if I’m an oracle. That doesn’t minimise the gift, but seems to be the right fit.

There’s something better waiting

When the government stays on his shoulders where it belongs, and the prophetic gift is held with open hands the way it was designed to be held, something lightens. The strain eases. The performance pressure drops. Everybody breathes more freely, because nobody’s trying to be more than human, and the Spirit is trusted to do what only the Spirit can do.

We don’t need to claim government when we get to serve the King. We don’t need to assert the gift when the gift, offered freely, is well able to find its own way.

There’s a freedom in that I think we need. Maybe you’ve been feeling like a shift is needed but not sure quite what’s wrong. It can feel like that when the foundation is slightly off and we’ve been walking around on a bit of a lean.

A thought to sit with: Is there something you’ve been carrying in your prophetic ministry, or in how you’ve received prophetic words, that’s heavier than it was designed to be? What would it feel like to lay that down?