There is also abundant hype in the prophetic. The huper comes from the Greek definer for super, abounding, and hyper. It comes from God, however, not man. At every point, we need to add hype, we reveal a deficit in our mature function as God’s representatives.
While Jesus did many miracles, signs and wonders that gave validity to His authoritative teaching, He did them because He saw Father do them. Jesus didn’t use hype. Jesus avoided hype. Jesus allowed all the hype in His life and ministry to be God’s hype.
The temptation to hype is as basic as the temptations of Jesus. Hype appeals to pride, flesh, and Gnosticism. Hype assumes that we need something more than what God is providing.
Prophets Want to Be Heard
Prophets communicate. All the stuff about how they hear, see, know, perceive, gain impressions, or imagine means nothing if they don’t communicate. All that can be done without communication, and prophecy is, by definition, communication. Prophets want to be heard because that is the function of a prophet.
The burden of the teacher is the ones that do not get the training. The burden of the shepherd is the sheep that wanders away. The burden of the evangel is the one who did not hear.
The burden of the prophet is the one that did not receive the message. Prophets want to be heard, not just listened to. Heard. Because prophets are responsible for the response, not just the message.
So, prophets are vulnerable to hype. Hype might cause people to really listen. If I am not being taken seriously, or as seriously as I expect to be taken, hype is my effort to raise the volume or deepen the impact or broaden the influence. Hype is geared toward getting people to respond by taking the message seriously. It is a kind of desperation to help God out with His strategy.
Immediately a prophet seeks to gain attention, for whatever reason, through hype, he or she will pad the message with hype.
God’s Hype is Enough
God always sets the level of hype, not man. Oddly enough, the hype most common to prophets is negative hype, the hype of the people rejecting the message is greater than the hype of God. If the prophet cannot live with that aspect of assignment and continues to internalize the rejection of God, taking it personally, that prophet will include chapters of hype around a simply word.
Signs come from God to indicate urgency. They can validate a message for both content and timing. Prophetic people recognize signs, or indicators. The signs from God are obvious to them. This is important to their confidence or boldness in proclaiming, and the signs may not be for anyone else. In fact, signs that God gives prophets may be a hindrance to the people to whom the message is addressed if the signs were only addressed to the prophet. A prophet must know when God is confirming the message and the timing of releasing it without insisting upon majoring on the signs to convince people of his or her legitimacy.
When God has signs in place for those receiving the message, God’s hype is enough. Man’s additions always distract, feed the thing to be avoided most, and diminish validation for all prophetic function.
Identity through Prophecy
The “I am” of “prophet” does not need hype. When the “I am” of function is padded or embellished, identity through ministry warps the entire thing: person, message, calling, communication, interpretation, acceptance. In fact, identity in a prophet can dismantle the mantle because the personality becomes such a block that people dismiss God’s message as they dismiss the hyper used to establish the prophet.
When an accurate word reveals the secrets of the heart, the Bible says, the person will realize their deep spiritual need. They will be reveals for their need of God. They will turn to God.
If people who don’t understand these things come in and hear everyone speaking in an unknown language, they will think you are crazy. But if all of you are prophesying, and people who don’t understand these things come in, they will be convicted of sin and judged by what you say. As they listen, their secret thoughts will be exposed, and they will fall to their knees and worship God, declaring, “God is truly here among you.” 1 Corinthians 14
The sign from God is inherent to the message. God’s hype is enough. When the prophet seeks to out-prophesy or prove himself or herself with the revelation levels, or distinguish themselves with oddities that identify them as unique, the effort to create the impression of being needed or preferred demands some evidence of being more than others, being more accurate, or seeing better or more completely. The one-up comes from manmade hype with a “well, if you really want to see what God is doing, listen to me.”
Some of the training modules promise this in the hype of their training promotion: “Come up higher because God wants to have a people with more hype.” They say it in a different way, but the obvious inference is that they are at a higher level because of some heightened spirituality. The hype is that you are misunderstood by your hype, and they understand your hype, so you can be set free to even more hype though their leadership.
God has invested plenty of hype into revelation. The use of “a major word” or “a high-level word” or “significant word” just adds to the misunderstanding. And, our penchant to assume that if God has anything to say, He will surely show it to the leader of our prayer network or the famous faces from TV or some list continues to feed this unbiblical idea.
God’s hype can be to speak through a donkey. God’s hype can be to reveal embarrassing secrets of the heart. God’s hype can be to initialize with dream, vision, trance, and impression a process that leads to a moment of revelation flow. Some of the signs are included in the message. Some are God’s way of speaking and revealing to the prophet that should be kept between God and the prophet.
Falling on the floor in the middle of something can be God’s sign. That can happen in public. Then, when explaining what you saw in vision to the people who witnessed you falling out in a trance can be a test.
Four Eagles and the Holy Land
I was washing feet one night on the platform, and I realized that I was going into a trance. I fell away a bit from the bowl of water. (Good thinking, huh!) and was immediately in visionary impression. God was speaking to me as He showed me four eagles, then said He was sending Ruthanne and me to the Holy Land. “You are never rightly related to any nation until you are rightly related to Israel,” He says.
The next day, two bald eagles with white heads and wing spans of six feet flew over our backyard and sat on our house. Then, I heard the screams of two golden eagles as they flew over our house and backyard low enough that I felt I could jump up and grab them by the talons! The next day someone called and gave us a trip to the Holy Land, paid in full.
God invested plenty of hype in that prophetic revelation! I didn’t need to add any to validate myself.
In sharing the message, adding anything to these real signs would only call undue attention to something not included in the message, distracting from the revelation’s application and implementation for the whole Ecclesia.
Cut the Hype!
We need to dial back the idea that God is showing off through us. We need to rethink our “high five” for a good word responses, invest several loads of humility into the process, sit a bunch of people down to test their true intentions, and hammer out a better protocol for prophetic process so we don’t continue to make chocolate milk when God is giving us skim.
We have no responsibility to improve on the hype. We have a deep responsibility to allow God to define the hype, set the dial for its emphasis in the prophetic, and move people back to hearing Him more than insisting that we need to prove that there are prophets today.
