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Anointed to Preach

Anointed to PreachBy Kenneth E. Hagin

Rev. Kenneth E. Hagin recalls how quiet he was as a boy and how that changed after he was born again, healed, and baptized in the Holy Ghost.

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I remember how it shocked my Grandma when I announced, just as a boy, “I’m going to be a preacher.”

Grandma said, “Why, son, you can’t preach—you can’t talk!”

It was true. Because my heart didn’t beat right and I would pass out if I tried to exert myself, I had learned in my younger years to sit around and keep my mouth shut. In fact, the year before I became bedfast, Grandpa Drake said one night at the supper table, “I saw your teacher, Miss Bessie Mae Hamilton, today, and I asked, ‘How is Kenneth doing?’

“‘Oh,’ she said, ‘Mr. Drake, he’s just like he always was. If you waited on him to say anything, he’d never say anything. In fact, he could miss the class and nobody would ever know it.’”

That put an idea in my mind! I decided to try that out. I had only two classes in the afternoon—Miss Bessie Mae’s and another—so two or three times a week I’d play hooky and go to the movie.

You know, they never did miss me. They never counted me absent. That’s how quiet I was in class. Of course, after I got saved, I quit doing that. When I went back to high school after my healing, I never missed a day.

After I was saved and healed, I began to preach as a young Baptist boy. I knew I was called to preach, and the anointing to preach would come upon me. I didn’t have any anointing to teach, and I didn’t like teaching.

I’d pray, study, and prepare sermon outlines—and I’ve got nearly all of them still. I don’t preach some of them anymore, but they represent all the light I had then. (God will bless you because you’re walking in all the light you have.)

The first time I preached, I preached 45 minutes. Some beginners go 10 or 15 minutes. I went 45. And I’ve been going ever since!

For a number of years I was a preacher—and, oh, I could preach! I was a preaching machine! I like that anointing! When it came upon me, I’d preach so hard and fast, the congregation would say, “Slow down! Slow down! We can’t get half of what you say, you go so fast.”

LightI didn’t have the baptism in the Holy Spirit then, but I had the Holy Spirit in me, and an anointing would come on me because I was called to that office. (In the Old Testament, too, the anointing came on people to stand in certain offices.) I could relate some phenomenal things that happened when the anointing to preach came upon me as a young Baptist boy preacher.

One Sunday night I was preaching an evangelistic-type sermon from James 4:14, where James asks, “For what is your life? It is even a vapour, that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away.” I’d been preaching about 15 minutes, anointed by the Holy Spirit, when the power of God came into that church auditorium and filled it like a cloud.

I could not see a single member—I was in the cloud. I could hear the sound of my voice, but I didn’t know one word of what I said. For 17 minutes—I looked at my watch—I couldn’t distinguish a word.

Finally I could see people on the first three rows of seats. Then the anointing began to go away. It was just like a cloud lifted from the whole group. I didn’t say anything about it; I closed the service normally.

Several days later I asked a very spiritual old gentleman who had been there, “Was anything different about the service Sunday night?”

“Well, why?” he replied.

“Well, you tell me if there was, and then I’ll tell you why.”

He said, “Well, the only thing was that people have been talking about it all over the community. It seemed like your face shone. It didn’t look like you—it just looked like the face of an angel.”

Then I told him about it. I told him I hadn’t known one word I said for the last 17 minutes of the service, the anointing was upon me so. That’s all a work of the Holy Spirit: the anointing and the glory cloud.

After being baptized in the Holy Spirit, I entered into a greater dimension of the power of God, and that anointing to preach increased. There is a scriptural basis for this: Elisha desired a double portion of Elijah’s anointing. Elijah was anointed by the Holy Spirit to stand in the office of prophet, and Elisha had a double portion of that anointing—a greater anointing, in other words, to stand in the same office.





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