Unction: the anointing

I tell you, this thing has been bothering me for the past two weeks. Why our Christian lives and ministries seem dry and usual, lacking something that I was not able to explain until now. For as far as I can remember, back in the days when I was young in faith, there was a burning fire to seek out for something unknown to me yet undoubtedly believed it existed. Though aware this is no excuse for me now, but I must argue my case.

Now I have learnt that somewhere along the path I substituted this drive with intellectual learning and mere human information. The point of surrender till all my groanings in prayer lost all meaning to me diminished in significance! I let the wind of modernity swift me gradually and without  understanding I find myself acting in futility. But thanks be to the God of steadfastness who revives and restores His people and has caused me to gain an understanding of the unction of the Holy one!

Let us look at these scriptures;

(1John 2:20) But ye have an unction from the Holy One, and ye know all things. (KJV)

 

(1John 2:20) But you have an anointing from the Holy One, and you know all things. (NKJV)

(1John 2:27) But the anointing which you have received from Him abides in you, and you do not need that anyone teach you; but as the same anointing teaches you concerning all things, and is true, and is not a lie, and just as it has taught you, you will abide in Him. (NKJV) 

Unction is the anointing of the Holy Ghost, separating unto God’s work and qualifying for it. Without this unction there are no true spiritual results accomplished; Without unction our work in ministry remains potent.

Many pleasant impressions may be made, but these all fall far below the ends of gospel preaching. This unction may be simulated. There are many things that look like it, there are many results that resemble its effects; but they are foreign to its results and to its nature. The fervor or softness excited by a pathetic or emotional sermon may look like the movements of the divine unction, but they have no pungent, perpetrating heart-breaking force. No heart-healing balm is there in these surface, sympathetic, emotional movements; they are not radical, neither sin-searching nor sin-curing.

Unction backs and interpenetrates the revealed truth with all the force of God. It qualifies the preacher’s heart, and brings it to that condition of tenderness, of purity, of force and light that necessary to secure the highest results.

Without the unction, God is absent.

Unction is that indefinable, indescribable something. This unction comes to the preacher not in the study but in
the closet. It is heaven’s distillation in answer to prayer. It impregnates, suffuses, softens percolates, cuts and soothes. It carries the Word like Dynamite, like salt; makes the word a soother, an arranger, a revealer, a searcher; makes the hearer a culprit or a saint, makes him weep like a child and live like a giant. This unction is not a gift of the genius. It is not found in the halls of learning. No eloquence can woo it. No industry can win it. No prelatical hands can confer it. It is the gift of God – the signet set to His own messengers. It is heavens knighthood given to the chosen true and brave ones who have sought this anointed honor through many an hour of tearful, wrestling prayer.

Earnestness is good and impressive: genius is gifted and great. Thought kindles and inspires, but it takes a diviner endowment, a more powerful energy than earnestness or genius or thought to break the chains of sin, to win estranged and depraved hearts to God, to repair the breaches and restore the church to her old ways of purity and power. Nothing but this holy unction can do this.

May I seek relentlessly the unction!

to the reader: some content was borrowed from the book by Edward M. Bounds, Power Through Prayer