Chokepoints of the Anointing

 When Heaven Has Oil, but the Lamps Aren’t Receiving It

There are things in the natural world that reveal spiritual principles if we have eyes to see them. One of those things is the existence of strategic oil chokepoints. Places such as:

• Strait of Hormuz: the Iranians cause the world oil markets major trouble.
• Strait of Malacca: a link between the Pacific and Indian Oceans.
• Suez Canal and Bab al-Mandab Strait: the Houthis cause major interruptions in the oil Markets of the world.

The Bab al-Mandab Strait connects Yemen and the Horn of Africa, these narrow passages through which enormous amounts of the world’s energy supply must travel. What makes these places powerful is not that they produce the oil. The Strait of Hormuz does not drill for oil. The Suez Canal does not manufacture oil. Bab al-Mandab does not refine oil. They simply occupy strategic positions between the source and the destination.

Because so much supply must pass through relatively narrow places, whoever influences the chokepoint can affect what happens far beyond it. That has begun to speak deeply to my spirit because I believe there can also be chokepoints of the anointing.

The revelation is this: the problem may not always be that there is no oil; sometimes the problem is that something has gotten into the passage through which the oil is supposed to flow. Heaven has not run out of oil. God has not lost His power. The Holy Spirit has not grown weak. Jesus Christ is still the same yesterday, today, and forever (Hebrews 13:8). The promise of Acts 2:17 has not expired: “I will pour out of My Spirit on all flesh.” Yet it is possible for the Source to be full while lamps downstream are burning low because something has restricted the flow.

Zechariah 4 gives us a beautiful picture of uninterrupted spiritual supply. Zechariah sees a lampstand, a bowl, lamps, pipes, and two olive trees supplying oil. Then God gives the prophet the key to understanding what he is seeing: “Not by might nor by power, but by My Spirit, says the LORD of hosts” (Zechariah 4:6). There was a source, there was a conduit, and there was a destination. The olive trees supplied, the pipes carried, and the lamps burned. That causes me to ask serious questions about the church:

What if we have been praying for more oil when we should also be asking God to inspect the pipes?

What if heaven is supplying, but pride, jealousy, competition, unforgiveness, compromise, fear of man, religious politics, commercialization, celebrity culture, or human control have become spiritual chokepoints?

Pride can become a chokepoint because Scripture says, “God resists the proud, but gives grace to the humble” (James 4:6; 1 Peter 5:5). God has not stopped being gracious, but pride can position a person against the very grace he desperately needs. Unforgiveness can restrict what God desires to do through us because Jesus repeatedly connected our relationship with God to the condition of our relationships with others (Matthew 6:14–15; Mark 11:25). Compromise can restrict the flow because a vessel cannot continually embrace what grieves the Spirit and expect unrestricted spiritual power (Ephesians 4:30). The issue is not a shortage in heaven. The issue can be an obstruction in the vessel.

Exodus 1: 8-22

⁸ Now there arose a new king over Egypt, who did not know Joseph. ⁹ And he said to his people, “Look, the people of the children of Israel are more and mightier than we; ¹⁰ come, let us deal shrewdly with them, lest they multiply, and it happen, in the event of war, that they also join our enemies and fight against us, and so go up out of the land.” ¹¹ Therefore they set taskmasters over them to afflict them with their burdens. And they built for Pharaoh supply cities, Pithom and Raamses. ¹² But the more they afflicted them, the more they multiplied and grew. And they were in dread of the children of Israel. ¹³ So the Egyptians made the children of Israel serve with rigor. ¹⁴ And they made their lives bitter with hard bondage—in mortar, in brick, and in all manner of service in the field. All their service in which they made them serve was with rigor.

¹⁵ Then the king of Egypt spoke to the Hebrew midwives, of whom the name of one was Shiphrah and the name of the other Puah; ¹⁶ and he said, “When you do the duties of a midwife for the Hebrew women, and see them on the birthstools, if it is a son, then you shall kill him; but if it is a daughter, then she shall live.” ¹⁷ But the midwives feared God, and did not do as the king of Egypt commanded them, but saved the male children alive. ¹⁸ So the king of Egypt called for the midwives and said to them, “Why have you done this thing, and saved the male children alive?”

¹⁹ And the midwives said to Pharaoh, “Because the Hebrew women are not like the Egyptian women; for they are lively and give birth before the midwives come to them.”

²⁰ Therefore God dealt well with the midwives, and the people multiplied and grew very mighty. ²¹ And so it was, because the midwives feared God, that He provided households for them.

²² So Pharaoh commanded all his people, saying, “Every son who is born you shall cast into the river, and every daughter you shall save alive.”

Exodus shows us that God does not merely expose chokepoints; sometimes God sends His answer directly into them. Pharaoh had created a chokepoint against the future of Israel. He afflicted the Hebrews with increasingly severe bondage, commanded the midwives to kill the Hebrew sons at birth, and finally decreed, “Every son who is born you shall cast into the river”. Pharaoh was attempting to choke Israel’s future at the point of birth. If he could control the next generation, he believed he could control the destiny of the nation. Yet Pharaoh did not understand that God was already preparing His answer.

The Bible says, Then Jochebed gave birth to Moses. When she could no longer hide him, she made an ark of bulrushes, covered it with asphalt and pitch, placed Moses inside it, and laid it among the reeds by the river’s bank (Exodus 2:1–3). Pharaoh had commanded that Hebrew sons be thrown into the Nile to die, but Jochebed placed her son into that same river under a covering. What Pharaoh intended to be a river of death, God turned into a highway for the deliverer. Pharaoh thought he controlled the river, but God controlled the destination.

I see the hand of a Master Surgeon in this. When there is a blockage in the human body, a physician knows where intervention must take place. Spiritually speaking, it is as though God injected Moses into the bloodstream of Egypt. Moses entered the very river Pharaoh had chosen as an instrument of death, but instead of dying there, he was carried directly toward Pharaoh’s own household. Pharaoh’s daughter found him, had compassion upon him, and drew him from the water (Exodus 2:5–10). The deliverer entered the system Pharaoh controlled without Pharaoh even recognizing what God was doing.

The irony becomes even greater. Miriam approached Pharaoh’s daughter and offered to find a Hebrew woman to nurse the child. Jochebed was brought back and Pharaoh’s daughter told her, “Take this child away and nurse him for me, and I will give you your wages” (Exodus 2:7–9). Pharaoh had tried to destroy the Hebrew sons, yet his own household became involved in preserving the Hebrew deliverer. The system designed to destroy Moses helped finance his preservation. Pharaoh poisoned the river with a decree of death, but God put a deliverer in the river.

This reveals something powerful about chokepoints: the enemy does not always recognize the answer God is sending through the very system he believes he controls. Moses entered Egypt’s bloodstream as a helpless baby. He could not speak to Pharaoh. He could not stretch out a rod. He could not command a nation to move. He could not even preserve himself. At that stage, Moses had to be carried completely by the providence of God. But the baby God injected into the chokepoint would not remain a baby. God would take him through Pharaoh’s palace, through rejection, through Midian, through forty years in the wilderness, and finally to the burning bush where the voice of God would call him into his assignment (Exodus 2–3).

Years later, Moses returned to Egypt as a surrendered deliverer. The baby who had once floated helplessly through Pharaoh’s river now stood before Pharaoh declaring the word of the Lord: “Let My people go” (Exodus 5:1). God had injected the answer into Egypt years before Egypt knew it had a problem. Pharaoh thought Moses was simply another Hebrew child marked for destruction, but God saw a deliverer. Pharaoh saw a baby in a basket; God saw a man with a rod standing before a sea.

Then Moses came to the Red Sea, and the revelation becomes even greater. Israel had finally been released from Egypt, but Pharaoh pursued them. Suddenly the entire nation stood at another chokepoint. Pharaoh’s army was behind them, the sea was before them, and there appeared to be nowhere for Israel to go (Exodus 14:5–12). Pharaoh was making one final attempt to stop the flow of God’s people. He could not prevent them from leaving Egypt, so he would try to choke their movement at the sea.

But this time, somebody say “something has changed”. Say “But this time Moses was no longer the helpless baby being carried through the water”. Now he was the surrendered servant standing before the water.

God said to Moses, “Tell the children of Israel to go forward. But lift up your rod, and stretch out your hand over the sea and divide it” (Exodus 14:15–16). Moses had no ability within himself to divide the Red Sea.

The rod was not magical. Moses did not possess independent supernatural power. Yet Moses had learned surrender. Exodus 14:21 says, “Then Moses stretched out his hand over the sea; and the LORD caused the sea to go back by a strong east wind all that night.”

This is surrendered ministry in one picture: Moses stretched; God moved.

Look at the transformation. In Exodus 2, someone else stretched out their hands and placed Moses into the water. In Exodus 14, Moses stretched out his own hand over the water. At the Nile, Moses was carried by providence. At the Red Sea, Moses became an instrument through whom divine authority operated. At the Nile, one little ark carried Moses through the water. At the Red Sea, the surrendered Moses stood while God opened a highway through the water for an entire nation.

The baby who once needed an ark to carry him through the water became the servant God used to carry a nation through the water.

That is what God can do with a surrendered vessel. First, God put Moses into a chokepoint. Years later, God put Moses at a chokepoint. The first time, God preserved him through it. The second time, God used him to open it for others. God put him in. God brought him out. God prepared him. Then God sent him back so others could come out.

This may be one of the great purposes of the anointing. God does not merely anoint us to survive what tried to destroy us; sometimes He brings us back to that very place carrying something that can open the way for others. Moses did not return to Egypt merely to testify that God had preserved him. He returned carrying a word for an entire nation. His deliverance became somebody else’s doorway. His survival became somebody else’s Exodus.

When Moses stretched out his hand, the waters divided and “the children of Israel went into the midst of the sea on the dry ground” (Exodus 14:22). One surrendered servant stood at the chokepoint, obeyed the voice of God, and suddenly an entire generation could move forward. A true deliverer does not merely find a way through; a true deliverer becomes an instrument in God’s hand through whom a way is opened for others.