Looking back on my own life and prophetic ministry, I’ve seen how the Lord brings past issues to the surface every so often to teach me. I experienced a lot of rejection and racism in my life when I was younger.
My way of dealing with those issues was to assume people always wanted something from me or wanted to use me. To protect myself, when dealing with people my guard was always up, and I tried to “calculate” what people wanted. Then I would “calculate” my reactions to protect myself from being taken advantage of.
As I became more well-known for the prophetic, I found myself doing a lot of calculating, but I was still getting taken advantage of more and more. People would say things like, “Oh, I traveled all this way because God told me that you have a prophetic word for me.” And there would be no prophetic word because the Holy Spirit didn’t give me anything, so then this terrible feeling of failure would come over me.
One time I was at a New Year’s Eve party, sitting on the couch and hanging out with some friends. A guy whom I had just met came into the living room, sat across from me and started looking at me. He continued to stare at me for three hours.Yes, three hours!
I fell asleep on the couch and when I woke up, he was still staring at me waiting for a prophetic word. Do you know how uncomfortable that makes a person feel? Yet he didn’t care; he was determined to get a prophetic word.
I was at another party, a birthday party, when the guests started asking me if I had a prophetic word for the birthday person. They placed the microphone in my hands like I had the power to turn “it” on. Prophecy is a sovereign gift of God, and some people want to manipulate it. As they put the microphone in my hands, I rolled my eyes. Yes, I was frustrated.
Some people will follow me around wherever I go. It turns me off when people follow me for a word. But a lot of times they will keep following me and then they ask, “You got something for me?”
I’m like, “No, I don’t have anything.”
“You sure?”
“Yes, I’m sure.”
“Can you ask God?”
“Um, yes, I did already.”
Most people probably mean well, but still, nobody wants to be taken advantage of like that. It makes you feel used, like they don’t care about you as a person and are just interested in you because they want a prophetic word. Then, when you don’t have something for them, most just disappear.
I have come to realize, for the people seeking a prophetic word from me, it is an opportunity that may not happen again, so I have more grace about it now. God has given you the responsibility of stewarding His gift, and being manipulated into using it puts undue pressure on you. There’s a lot more to operating in the prophetic than just giving a prophetic word to someone and moving on. Keeping yourself out there to be used by God can and will be a sacrifice. It takes a physical and mental toll, and you also open yourself up to being taken advantage of by people.
Now, if the Holy Spirit is directing a person to me, that’s one thing. He does do that from time to time, but He will let me know. I emphasize “He” will let me know. That’s why I try to stay pliable and listen for His voice. Yet when people use their circumstances to manipulate me into coming up with a word for them, that’s when my walls go up.
When God wants to speak a prophetic word to a stranger, it’s because He loves them. I don’t know the stranger or have any feelings toward them, but I still have to go through the sacrifice and experience the effects of it because God loves them so much. Sometimes even when a person is manipulating the situation, God does want you to speak to them.
The preceding was excerpted from chapter 2 of Hubie Synn’s Lessons From a Wandering Prophet (Charisma House 2022). For more information on Lessons From a Wandering Prophet, check out MyCharismaShop.com.
Hubie Synn is a speaker and prophet who travels around the world. He has ministered to Super Bowl hero David Tyree, media personalities, Grammy Award-winning artists and countless others. A certified public accountant by trade, he resides in New Jersey with his wife and five children.
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