ANOINTING THE CREATIVE
© Morris E. Ruddick
“He does not restrain them when His voice is heard. He does great things beyond our comprehension.” Job 37:4,5
Mounting pressures often precede greater revelations from God. Understanding God’s majesty and its correlation to the creative dimension of His nature is not 
only appropriate for the times. It is a requisite for being prepared for what is next with what God wants to release through us.
Job was overwhelmed by the loss of his family, his fortune and his health. His wife had given up on him. To compound all that, his friends had become finger-pointers and begun casting blame. It was at that juncture, as illustrated in the opening scripture, that Elihu gave Job a very blunt and dramatic defense of God’s majesty. Elihu’s word preceded God revealing Himself to Job in a way he had never known. What followed was a time of greater blessing and effectiveness than Job had ever thought possible.
In times of uncertainty and disorder, it is easy to get overwhelmed. Many years ago, the Lord gave me a word of wisdom addressing the issue of facing change. That word was that whatever sphere of influence we walk into, to immediately begin looking beyond it, lest it overwhelm. That wisdom carried the presumption of keeping our eyes on the Lord.
That word applies in good times and bad. We tend to get lax and slip into the status quo when things are going well. Yet, when things start hitting the fan we slow down, get distracted and diverted as we grabble with what our focus should be. In each instance, in different ways, we have slipped into being constrained and manipulated by the circumstances.
Yet this word to Job from Elihu focused on getting to a place where we can hear from God. In gazing upon His majesty, it taps the release of the creative.
The Bridge to the Unknown
While the “creative” has been popularized and limited largely to be the arts, the advertising field and to right brain type of functions, from a spiritual stance it represents much more. The creative is the bridge into the unknown. It includes business, technology and even the way we think.
The business world seeks the steps applied by Steve Jobs and the creative climate he fostered at Apple. Einstein once wisely stated that imagination is a lot more important than knowledge. The imagination is the part of the creative that gets outside the box into that dimension beyond the boundaries of the natural.
So it is for our potential. With God being the Creator, when we give focus to seeking Him as the One guiding our pathway we begin anointing our sphere of the creative far beyond the level demonstrated by the world.
This is why Scripture described Daniel as ten times better than his occult counterparts in the king’s court. It was what Pharaoh recognized in Joseph that prompted him to promote Joseph from being a prisoner to becoming prime minister. Joseph and Daniel heard from God and received creative revelation beyond the scope of their human comprehension. Entrance into the creative works hand-and-hand with the prophetic.
The creative anointing is a process. Iridium was the forerunner of satellite phones. It had the technology. However, in the course of twelve years, Iridium was still operating with its original business assumptions. Kodak, the name synonymous with film invented the digital camera but then in 2012 went bankrupt. Despite their technological edges, these companies lacked the creative business foresight to keep up with the big picture changes taking place in the markets they served.
The Process
The creative is a process. It is progressive.
Moses imparted the wisdom that the secret things belong to the Lord. Yet, glimmers of these secret things are revealed to us, as His people and to our children (Deut 29:29). They are revealed by God. In God, the creative taps the future to bridge and instill a heritage that spans generations.
What God imparted to Moses was the framework to release the creative designed for a society in touch with the Creator. Against all odds historically this framework has demonstrated the power that will coalesce when God’s Kingdom is released for all time.
Again, the unfolding of the creative is a process. It involves our mind-sets, the way we view things. It incorporates the development and application of our gifts. It also includes bringing increase, as illustrated by the parable of the talents. God’s nature is not only creative and innovative, it builds and brings increase.
This process finds root and progresses with the wisdom Elihu passed on to Job: “He does not restrain them when His voice is heard. He does great things beyond our comprehension.”
Thinking. The process begins and ends with the way we think. God commented that He chose Abraham because Abraham would impart His ways to his household. As God’s people, we need to discern the heart and mind of the Lord. Knowing His heart and mind begins by knowing His ways with an undivided heart (Ps 86:11).
Our thinking needs to be guided by being God-centered and Kingdom-oriented in all that we do. Even at an early age, Joseph grasped the heart and mind of the Lord demonstrated by his prophetic dreams.
We also need mind-sets that are entrepreneurial and poised to embracing the new things God will bring into our situation. Being entrepreneurial just doesn’t mean having our own business, although that is a means toward greater dependence on God and self sufficiency. Being entrepreneurial means constantly identifying opportunity and bringing forth increase in blessing by this process.
Our thinking needs to be leadership-minded, in how we influence and bless others with our gifts. Tz’dakah is the Hebrew word that means righteous charity. It is a community dynamic and responsibility that fosters opportunity and lends a helping hand to those in our sphere seeking the steps to God’s calling for their lives.
It incorporates the mantle of Abraham to be blessed to be a blessing. Paul underscored the point of this mantle with the wisdom to bear one another’s burdens and so fulfill the law of Christ. Jesus lived it by mapping out our pathway punctuated by the words of Isaiah in that He took up our infirmities and carried our sorrows.
Creative thinking thrives when the model of the spiritual, the economic and community are operating together among God’s people. Myopic thinking will stop the flow of the process and cause stagnation and what we refer to as the status quo.
The Gifts. The process incorporates the development of our gifts. The Word of God tells us that God gives gifts to men. To each is given a natural gift and to those who seek Him, as Elihu was admonishing Job, to combine it with a spiritual gift.
Before Job went through the fire, he was a righteous, religious man. When he emerged, his righteousness was enhanced as he became a spiritual man who ways were in communion with and interacting with God.
When our natural and spiritual gifts come together and are combined with the anointing of God something sparks. The creative is released. It doesn’t happen overnight. It requires development and excellence of this combination of our natural and spiritual gifts. When our natural and spiritual gifts are operating together the creative process has detonated into flame and becomes anointed.
This was the anointing evident in Joseph when he was but a slave in Potiphar’s house and in prison. Genesis 39 describes it bringing blessing and success to the ones he served. It was an anointing that everyone witnessed and knew came from God. It evoked the trust of each who had authority over Joseph: Potiphar, the jailer and then Pharaoh.
Increase. Entrepreneurship is a key part of this process. True entrepreneurship creates. It innovates and builds. From that will come increase. Iridium and Kodak created, but failed to innovate and build.
Entrepreneurship discerns opportunity and knows what to do about it. Within and outside business settings this is the dynamic, identifying and capitalizing on opportunity that extends the blessing to others to make the community of God’s people to function and grow in the way God intended.
Jesus’ parable of the talents places a high priority on the ones who find opportunity to bring increase from that with which they’ve been entrusted. He made it clear that the results will vary depending to our specific gifts and abilities. He said that the opportunity would be given each according to his own ability (Matt 25:15).
The creative process operating within community forms the basis of self-sufficiency that protects God’s people against the backlash that will cyclically erupt from the world. The age-old seduction to be like everyone else is a trap that undermines the potential of self-sufficiency that God outlined to Moses in the wisdom designed to govern the community of God’s people.
Big Picture Strategy
One of the biggest stumbling blocks for God’s people over the centuries has been spiritual myopia. As King, David placed great dependence on the tribe of Issachar, whose anointing was to discern and understand the times and to know what to do. When we get to the point of considering the role of the creative anointing within community, we need the uniqueness of the Issachar anointing. We need God’s big-picture outlook and we need the strategy He is imparting for the future.
Both the big picture and the strategy is the Kingdom. Jesus’ central focus in preparing His followers was the Kingdom strategy, how to apply righteous power in corrupt settings. Similarly, the big picture was the restoration of Israel as the foundation of the Kingdom that would come forth with the bridging of the natural and spiritual with His return. Anointing the creative will employ this strategy in advancing us toward this big picture scenario of restoration.
God-Conscious Dependence
Genuine God-consciousness comes first from time spent with Him. It is a vital part of this creative process that unfolds over a lifetime. Time spent with Him fuels and enhances the creative anointing.
Then acts of faith, of putting into application this type of thinking and the gifts, along with the process of building and bringing increase will develop and mature over time. The diversity of these interactions within community will build the community and provide an influence, as well as a safe place within the world around us.
God never intended for his people to operate in monastic settings, but rather to be the igniters and examples of the knowledge of Him to the world around us. His wisdom is the self-sufficiency that makes us factors of influence while keeping us from being squeezed into the world’s mold.
The key to maintaining the creative anointing from God is God-conscious dependence. This is what keeps the process moving forward and growing.
Throughout the history of God’s people, those who rose to become what we consider as heroes of faith held an important thing in common: humility. Humility demands a focused consciousness of and dependency on God. It underlies the confidence that is in God and not ourselves.
Having worked closely with leaders who have spent extended times in hard-labor prisons for their faith, each will attest to the dynamic of the resulting humility and confidence in God — in which His reality has been revealed and demonstrated beyond any human comprehension. The second most dangerous place for believers in leadership is having a confidence that believes in their own press releases. The most dangerous place is those, believing in their own press releases, imparting that influence to others. Nothing stops the process faster, opening the gates for deception.
Humility keeps the calibration between the natural and spiritual in precision-level balance. Job emerged from his experience in the fire humbled, but with a spiritual strength and confidence that brought a much greater impact from his gifts.
God-conscious dependency is the faith that consistently reaches for God’s wisdom in the midst of adversity. Joseph and Daniel learned this humble dependency on God through adversity. For Moses and David, it was the same. Paul described the dynamic by stating that in his weakness that God would manifest.
Keeping the process flowing involves constant calibration between the natural and the spiritual. That calibration takes practice and it takes time. Yet, it is how destinies are determined. It is how the authority of vibrant prayer lives is developed.
In a world in which knowledge is leapfrogging, the status quo and using old models can stymie, divert and even destroy the process yielded by the creative anointing. God’s people have an edge. With God as Senior Partner, the one whose majesty we embrace, we can expect that He will continually reveal great and mighty things beyond our natural grasp, when our focus is Him and we are listening.
“Lord, You will do nothing without revealing your secrets unto your servants the prophets.” Amos 3:7
