A whole new world will open up for you as you discover not just what the anointing is, but what it means to you.
The Bible defines the anointing as “God on flesh doing those things that flesh cannot do.” In other words, it’s God doing through people like us what we couldn’t do on our own (2 Corinthians 4:7).
The Hebrew word Messiah and the Greek word Christ both mean “the anointed.” For centuries the Jews waited for the Promised Messiah (the Anointed One), through whom the yoke of Satan’s oppression would be destroyed: “And it shall come to pass in that day, that his burden shall be taken away from off thy shoulder, and his yoke from off thy neck, and the yoke shall be destroyed because of the anointing” (Isaiah 10:27).
The word destroyed means “absolutely crushed, corrupted beyond use, no good for the devil’s use anymore.” At the beginning of His ministry, Jesus stood in the synagogue one Sabbath and read this prophecy from the book of Isaiah:
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised, to preach the acceptable year of the Lord…. And he began to say unto them, This day is this scripture fulfilled in your ears” (Luke 4:18-19, 21).
Jesus had the yoke-destroying, burden-removing power of Almighty God all over Him, and that’s what He preached and demonstrated during His ministry. And the anointing didn’t end with Jesus. After He was crucified and right before He ascended into heaven, Jesus told His followers to wait in Jerusalem until they were baptized in the Holy Spirit and received “power after that the Holy Ghost is come upon you” (Acts 1:4-5, 8). Just as the word Christ is not just another name for Jesus but is defined as “the Anointed One,” Christians means more than just followers of Jesus. It means “the anointeds.”
If you are “in Christ,” there is an anointing for everything you are called to do, no matter how small or how great the task. That’s why the Apostle Paul could say, “I can do all things through Christ (the Anointed and His Anointing) which strengtheneth me” (Philippians 4:13).