The anointing doesn't come before you move — it comes when you do. Discipline, feedback, and staying planted are what actually produce the fruit.
Waiting for the feeling is a trap. The inspiration, the surge of motivation, the overwhelming sense that now is the moment — most days, none of that arrives. And if you've built your life around waiting for it, you're not going to get much done.
That's the core of what keeps coming up in conversation: too many Christians are idle, sitting still while they wait for God to sovereignly propel them forward. The assumption seems to be that if something is truly called and anointed, it will feel that way at the start. But that's backwards. The anointing doesn't precede the movement — it accompanies it.
You have to engage with the plan of God to activate the anointing on your life.
Samson is the example. The anointing didn't manifest until he actually moved against the enemy. That's when it was activated. The same principle plays out every single week: podcasts recorded without knowing exactly where the conversation will go, services prepared and delivered even when the weight of ministry feels heavy, Zoom calls held on schedule whether or not there's a surge of inspiration behind them. The notes for a given episode might be a completely blank screen. But you open your mouth, and God makes your tongue as the pen of a ready writer. A writer who never starts writing isn't a writer at all — just someone with a title.
Motivation is wonderful when it shows up. But it doesn't show up reliably, and waiting for it is how people stall out. Making the bed is the small, absurd illustration that actually captures it: you do it not because you feel called to, not because the Holy Spirit stirs something deep about pillow placement, but because it's a responsibility and it's going to get done. That discipline, applied consistently across every area of life, is what produces results. And it is that same mode of operation, not some separate spiritual gear, that carries over into ministry, leadership, and everything else.
The discipline isn't in conflict with being led by the Spirit. Both operate together. You prepare, you show up, you do the work — and as you move in faith, trusting that your footsteps are ordered, that what you put your hand to will prosper, the Holy Spirit flows through what you've already committed to doing. Faith isn't passive. It's mixed with action.
There's a story from a teenage summer job that puts all of this into focus. Working out in the orange groves of a man named Charlie Crisofolli, who ran what was then the largest citrus operation in the world, a moment unfolded that has stayed vivid for decades. Charlie pulled an orange from a tree, bit into it, didn't like what he tasted, and then pulled an axe from his tractor. He spent the next few minutes scoring the trunk of that tree — deep cuts all the way around, causing real damage. The explanation was simple: the orange was bitter when it should be sweet. The trauma of the scoring would cause the tree to heal, and the fruit the following year would be sweeter for it.
It needed the tribulation. It needed the test. It needed the trial.
A year later, standing at that same tree, the follow-through arrived. The orange was pulled, peeled, and tasted — and it was a completely different thing. Not because the tree had been given easier conditions. Because it had been pushed through something hard.
The fruit of the Spirit in a believer's life works the same way. It's not developed for your own benefit. It's for the people around you, the ones who will receive something from your life because you didn't quit when things got difficult. James calls it counting trials as joy — not because suffering feels good, but because if you can see far enough forward to imagine what the process is actually producing, the perspective shifts. This current trial is going to propel you further. It's developing the depth and sweetness you couldn't manufacture any other way.
The fruit of the spirit in your life is not for you. It's for other people to benefit from.
Mistaking the test for the devil is a common failure. A student who thinks their teacher is being used by the devil for giving an exam isn't thinking clearly — the teacher is an extension of the process that will make them capable. God works the same way. You signed up. The tests come with enrollment.
A tree doesn't replant itself. It doesn't wander from yard to yard looking for a better situation. It grows where it is, and if the conditions are right and the roots go deep, it gets everything it needs without needing to visit the neighbor's lawn. That image maps directly onto spiritual restlessness: people who won't commit to where God has placed them, who are always looking over at what's happening in someone else's ministry, someone else's church, someone else's covering. Rootedness is what enables growth. Instability is what causes the storm damage.
And when storms do come — and they always come — the answer from Revelation is clear: strengthen that which remains. Whatever is left, work with it. Don't just give up because there isn't much left. Prop it up, link with someone stronger, and keep going.
When you give someone an opportunity to speak and they walk off without asking for any feedback, they're optimizing for experience rather than growth. Experience alone doesn't produce excellence. What produces excellence is experience plus honest correction plus the willingness to adjust.
Asking your dad after every early sermon what you did wrong, what could be tighter, what landed and what didn't — that's the practice that got you ready before Bible college even started. By the time homiletics class arrived, it was familiar ground. And that habit hasn't stopped. After every service, the ask goes out: what do I need to do differently? Not because of insecurity, but because wanting to improve is how improvement happens.
"What causes you to be excellent is not the experience. It's the feedback — so that you can improve, make adjustments."
People who don't ask aren't bad people. But they plateau. The ceiling they hit is built out of the questions they never asked.
Refusing to let anyone further along speak into your life is just pride wearing the costume of independence. The older generation has already forgotten more than most younger people have learned yet. That's not a slight — it's just arithmetic. Years compound. And yet, in a culture that defaults to dismissing anyone who seems out of touch or older or from a different context, that accumulated knowledge gets bypassed by people who need it most.
The practice of staying teachable isn't about age, and it doesn't stop at a certain level of accomplishment. You still ask questions of people who are further along. You still listen to women in the church who've walked longer roads. And as you get older yourself, the responsibility flips: now you have to be intentional about passing things forward to the ones coming up behind you, because they can't see yet what they'll eventually need.
Remaining teachable, staying prepared, engaging with the plan, letting the anointing meet you in motion — that's the whole thing. Stay humble enough to keep learning, and keep moving whether or not the feeling shows up.
