Truth, Reality, and the Anointing, 1

by Art Katz
(Transcribed excerpts from a video interview of Art Katz in Raleigh, North Carolina, 1997)

I think I'm sensing something of the Lord's grief for the condition of the church, the unreality of the church. I think no where is it more flagrant than in, ironically, the Holy Spirit, Charismatic, Pentecostal dimension.

I don't have all that much contact with fundamental churches, but I think in a certain sense they may well be cleaner than we. They make no profession of the gifts of the Spirit which we purport to have and therefore, they don't run into the kind of excesses and abuses that we exhibit. That was what the Lord put on my heart.

I have a paper here that was composed and was stimulated by a brother on the subject of anointing in which his principle theme is that anointing is not some fixed phenomenon that God confers on individuals as if it were an office, an ecclesiastical office in the church, but something proportionate to one's actual authentic relationship with God in moment by moment obedience to the thing which He requires.

And in it and with it comes the spirit of revelation and he gives the example of Peter recognizing that Jesus is the Christ the Son of God and upon which He says "upon this rock I will build My church". The rock was not Peter himself but rather the revelation that had come through the Spirit in a moment given, which is to be the foundation itself, the operation of God's Spirit in them who are in true union with Him.

We've moved away from this moment by moment dependency in authentic relationship with God to somehow thinking that anointing is a fixed thing conferred upon certain men of faith and power and that naivete requires us to turn up the amplifiers to give a sense of anointing, a certain loudness in the church, in our speaking, in our activity which the naive presume to think IS anointing.

The message is a call to authenticity, to reality, because God is the God of truth. When we move off and away from that place and come to unreality, the Spirit is not there, and we therefore compensate for it by turning up the dials, which further deepens the unreality and puts the church in a lamentable place and condition.

Cues are used like "revival!", "praise the Lord!, and "I feel the presence of God". These have almost become like cliched expressions. We're almost expected to jump when we hear them, and we do! But it's not the prompting, in my opinion, of God's spirit. The whole thing is becoming increasingly unreal. I call it surrealism - a form of art that's very exacting in it's depicting of real things - but the whole thing that is depicted is unreal.

I don't know if you've ever heard the name Salvador Dali. He was the great surrealistic artist, who had painstaking attention to detail, but the actual thing that he was depicting was mirage, an unreality. We are lapsing into that. Either I'm in poor condition myself, or my condition is of such a kind that I'm picking up and discerning God's own sense of things and His grief.

I have an extra motivation for being concerned for the reality of the church, namely, that the church is God's appointed agency in moving Jews to jealousy. And we Jews, even in our darkness have a kind of unfailing radar whereby we can, in a moment, identify and sense whether something is real or feigned.

I think that we would be more relentless in identifying the phoniness of televangelist ministries than the church itself, which has supported them right into their deceptions and into their moral failures and past their moral failures. Whereas a Jew would have clicked on the TV set and instantly had a reaction against the hype that has become so familiar to us that we don't even wince anymore.

We've become dull. You cannot be exposed to untruth and come away unscathed. Something is lost. Your spirit becomes dull and then the next opportunity for being brought into unreality is the greater, until by a series of meetings and exposures and the whole content of that kind of thing, we become deceived. I am concerned that we're moving toward that.

If we were vigilant for the truth instead of allowing ourselves to be boxed in and cued to perform, we would blow the whistle and say, "Something's amiss here. I don't sense God's presence and I'm not going to allow you to manipulate me to produce something that will give you a high. Let's look and pray and see what it is that somehow has alienated God and find our way back to Him who IS reality".

Of course that would jar people, adversely affect the service, and spoil it perhaps. But God calls the church to be the ground and pillar of truth. If we are unwilling to the risk a spoiled service and the show must go on, it will invariably become a show. In that show, in that congregation, are people who are hurting. Marriages are threatened. Family life is collapsing. Their own sense of integrity is failing and their sense of God is faltering.

Yet they're being brought into a certain environment; an atmosphere where they have to wear a kind of chintzy smile and "ain't we got fun" and "we're all spiritual" masks. They come out of that and go back again into the greyness. Their unhappy situation that is at home in their real life which is not met in the unreality to which they are exposed to in the church.

They think something is wrong with them, because of what they are exposed to in the church. When they think something is wrong with them because they are not sufficiently spiritual or out of the Spirit, they don't realize it's the system itself. The religious thing itself is at fault of which they are the victim and the product.

In my opinion, I've been a believer 32 years and traveled broadly, the anointing is my life. If I'm not in the anointing of God, woe unto me and woe unto those who are hearing me. I have a kind of prophetic jealousy that, at any given moment of service, is once and for all and shall not be given again. There is a sense in which eternity hangs in the balance. Life and death issues are being propounded and can only be propounded in the anointing of God.

We're not talking about merchandise or making a sale. Grave issues are at stake and can only go forth in the power of God. My sense is that the anointing oil is the measure of God's approval on the thing that is being spoken and performed. He anoints what He appoints and when we move from that, in the promotion of our own ministry, our own self, our own vanity; the Lord recoils.

The Spirit of God is not attesting to that and that's when we raise the decibels of our sound system to compensate. So I would say that a man has the measure of anointing in proportion to the consistency of his obedience to God. This will often bring him into conflict with his own interests, or the promotion of his own ministry, or with those to whom he is ministering.

There's got to be a certain kind of integrity and ruthlessness, certainly a fearlessness with regard to accommodating men. There are not many who are walking that way with any consistency that the oil of God would be upon them and that there would be a residue. Its not that God just doles it out by the spoonful for the moment. Often when we finish our ministry, the anointing yet lingers even sometimes so strongly we can't fall asleep; the energy remains.