Should We Protect the Healing Minister’s Anointing by Keeping Him in an Isolation Room Before His Entourage Escorts Him to the Platform When It’s Time to Preach?

I had a church want to do this “Green Room” thing to me, and I asked to be allowed to worship God with the congregation.   I didn’t want to feel like I was in an isolation room on a game show where I wasn’t supposed to know what was going on.  I like worshipping God, and when they let me mingle with the saints and do that, it made me a lot happier than the original plan would have made me.  (I don’t flip through my Bible during worship as so many preachers seem to do – I actually WORSHIP God with everyone else!  I do my preparation before I get there.  And I’m as excited and enthusiastic about worship as anyone when we get going.)

The premise behind the whole isolation room and entourage thing is that the preacher’s anointing will be “protected.”  Perish the thought that any of it might spill out before the appointed time and happen to bless somebody!

I do understand that sometimes people will try to throng the preacher and need to be stopped so that the preacher can actually get up and preach!  Or maybe the local church just has a lot of really annoying people who want to pester the minister with frivolous prayer requests and chitchat.  So having some ushers around can be a good thing if that’s the idea.  However, I don’t need ushers to stop the anointing from getting out, and I don’t need to be in an isolation room so that I don’t lose the anointing.  The anointing isn’t that fragile.  If it is, I’m in the wrong business!  If we can’t be “real people” when we minister, we’ll leave the impression that you have to be in some hyper-spiritual state before you can minister effectively.  The anointing works just fine at the supermarket with no ushers or isolation room.  It works nicely on the golf course with no entourage to protect it.  I’ve proven these things out.  It’s not about being hyper-spiritual as much as it is about being bold – and caring about people enough to want to let God use you to minister healing to them even if they’re “unlovely” people.

Part of the problem is that we as preachers have convinced ourselves that the anointing only works when we have the right atmosphere, the right music, the right people, the right order of the service, and so on – which you might not ever have in most places!  Many times, I’ve had to get up and try to stir people’s faith after the music team doused everyone with a fire hose of unbelief with the songs they picked out and/or silly comments they made between songs!  Or in another case, they let some silly saint with minimal Bible knowledge get up and “testify” for an hour about how God took his marriage, his business and his health to draw him closer to Himself.  Amazingly, God did move after I got up there! If you think that everything has to be perfect before the anointing can flow, you’ll never flow in it because things will never be perfect.  Host churches and pastors will never be perfect, but God can move despite all our imperfections.

They didn’t have isolation rooms in their church buildings in Acts – because they didn’t HAVE church buildings!  The miracles in Acts were done out among the people without our modern trappings.  That tells me that our modern trappings aren’t essential if we want to see miracles.

We need to stop seeing the anointing as something so fragile that it will dissipate at a moment’s notice.  Otherwise, we’ll get an unhealthy mindset that wonders if we’re “prayed up” enough (the devil will always tell you that you’re not) or if we’ve studied enough or if we’ve fasted enough or whatever.  This puts the burden and emphasis on YOU rather than on JESUS where it belongs!  God can use very “unspiritual” people who make themselves available to Him.  He isn’t going to yank the anointing from you if you make a mistake or if you had to deal with an emergency with your car before the service and you didn’t have as much time to pray beforehand as you’d hoped for.

The Word says that the anointing abides in you (1 John 2:27)!  It does not say that the anointing only comes on you when you work yourself up into a mega-spiritual state and keep yourself that way by isolating yourself from everything and everyone.  You don’t have to worry that the anointing is going to leave if someone talks to you before a service.

Jesus isolated Himself at times to go pray, but you don’t see Him isolating Himself at the synagogue until worship was over and then addressing the people.  And the story of the woman with the issue of blood shows that He didn’t have an entourage to stop people from touching Him.  In His case, He WANTED people to touch the hem of His garment and get healed by the anointing that was on Him!  Perhaps if we would be like that, we would see more miracles.