Todd and Katie discuss why anointing and assignment rarely arrive on the same schedule, and what it actually takes to go deeper in God.
Most people, when they receive a touch from God or a sense of calling, want to run with it immediately. That impulse is understandable. But going deeper in God is almost never a sprint. It is a long, sometimes confusing process of preparation, refinement, and learning to wait on His timing rather than your own.
David is the clearest example. From the moment Samuel anointed him to the day he actually became king, somewhere between twenty and twenty-five years passed. That is a long time to know you are called and not yet be in position. During those years David was learning how to function in a palace, how to lead people, how to navigate complex relationships, how to hold his tongue when he knew Saul was not God's choice but the throne still wasn't his. The anointing came first. The readiness came later. Those are two very different things.
It's always longer than what you want or expect.
One of the most common mistakes in ministry is treating a word from God, or a gift beginning to manifest, as permission to move immediately. It isn't. God's assignment and God's timing are separate realities. A gifting can attract opportunities long before you are ready to steward them. The question is always whether a particular open door is actually the one the Lord wants you to walk through, or whether it will lead you somewhere you are not supposed to be yet.
Todd described this from his own experience. In the late 1980s, as the call of God was becoming increasingly visible on his life, other ministers began approaching him. Come work with me. You need to leave. There were offers, opportunities, reasons to go. Each time he knew in his heart: I'm not finished here. So he stayed. And because he stayed, he remained under the covering of his father's wisdom, a man with decades of ministry experience whose practical knowledge and integrity shaped Todd in ways that no shortcut could have replicated.
When he finally did leave, it was because his father came to him and released him. Not because an opportunity looked good. Not because he had grown impatient. Because the person who was over him, who loved him and wanted what was best for him, confirmed it was time.
Promotion comes from God, and others notice it and say, yes, absolutely, this is the thing.
There is a particular kind of impatience that looks spiritual but isn't. It shows up when someone receives a genuine call from God and then immediately starts deciding how it should unfold. They know they are called to be an evangelist, so they launch their own ministry. They want to follow the pattern of someone who has been successful, so they copy the model. What they miss is that the call does not belong to them. They get to decide whether they will walk in it. The how is not theirs to determine.
Serving under established, godly leadership accelerates growth in ways that independence cannot. The opportunities to minister are greater. The wisdom available is deeper. The refinement is real, and sometimes uncomfortable, but it produces something that classroom training alone never will. Katie reflected on her own years of practical training, working closely with a minister whose anointing was powerful and whose standards were high. It was not always easy. But the things worked out of her during those years, and the things worked into her, prepared her for everything that came after.
The call of God doesn't belong to us. Our only real choice is whether we walk in it or not.
Jeremiah 29:11 is one of the most quoted verses in contemporary Christianity. What most people miss is that it does not stand alone. The promise of God's plans and a hopeful future in verse 11 is conditional on what verses 12 and 13 require: calling on Him, praying, seeking Him with your whole heart. The plan is real. But seeing it fulfilled in your life depends on an active, desperate hunger for God, not a passive assumption that the promise will take care of itself.
That hunger is not a one-time event. It is easy to receive a touch from God and then level out there, treating that experience as the destination. Going deeper means continuing to hunger beyond what you have already tasted. Think about how an appetite develops. A child only wants chicken nuggets because that is all they know. As they grow and their palate expands, they discover there is so much more. Many people's experience of God is similarly limited by what they have already encountered. They have not pushed into territory they have never been in before. They have not asked what else God wants to show them, what places in Him they have never reached.
Draw near to God and He will draw near to you. James 4:8 is simple. It is also demanding. It requires actually showing up.
One of the more practical pieces of this conversation was about recognizing when you have stepped outside of God's presence without realizing it. It happens gradually. You start in the Spirit, acting or speaking from a place that is clearly God-directed. Then something shifts, you go one step further than you should, and suddenly you are operating in the same body, the same mind, the same face in the mirror, but without His presence undergirding what you are doing.
The Holy Spirit teaches you where those limits are, but only if you are paying attention and willing to stop when He says stop. Not just with actions but with words, with tone, with the insinuation behind what you say. Learning to pull back, to ask God what He likes and what He doesn't, is part of growing up spiritually. A spiritually immature person does not pick up on those cues. They are oblivious. Maturity means developing the sensitivity to notice when you have gone too far and the humility to come back.
"If God isn't even real to you, how could He be real through you?"
The Apostle Paul is a striking case study in all of this. His encounter with Christ on the road to Damascus was total and immediate. But from the very beginning, the Lord told him he would suffer. Not as a footnote, as the terms of the assignment. What those sufferings produced was a man who could bear the weight of planting churches across the ancient world, write letters that still govern Christian theology today, and eventually lay down his life without flinching. He also knew when to escape in a basket rather than charge a walled city out of bravado. Anointing and boldness do not mean ignoring the specific direction of the Holy Spirit in a specific moment. Paul let himself be lowered down a wall at night because that was what was needed. He lived to preach again.
There is a tendency in some Christian circles to treat discipline, structure, and accountability as somehow less spiritual than prayer and anointing. But you cannot actually go deeper in God while resisting the structures He uses to grow you. Godly leadership over your life. Accountability. The willingness to submit to correction from someone who loves you and sees you clearly. These are not bureaucratic obstacles to the Spirit. They are the architecture through which God produces lasting fruit.
This applies beyond ministry. If you are called into business, into politics, into any arena, the same dynamics hold. Growth requires that your integrity, your ethics, and your relational structures grow with your capacity. More responsibility without deeper character is not promotion. It is instability.
Patience is a fruit of the Spirit, which means it has to be developed. In a culture where attention spans have collapsed and everything moves at speed, the very formation that God uses most, the long season, the repeated refinement, the decades between anointing and assignment, feels unbearable. But that formation is not a delay in the plan. It is the plan. Nobody who thinks they have plateaued and that this is probably all God has for them is reading the situation correctly. God always wants to take you further. The question is whether you are willing to go through what getting there actually requires.
