Neither Coming On Nor Coming Out

The Claim

Lloyd Pearce of Encounter Church Ballito has said this:

“The anointing is never removed. The anointing is never lifted. That is old covenants. The Holy Spirit would come and God would come in times. And the God would anoint a man to do something. He would anoint a man to speak. He would anoint a man to prophesy. He would anoint a man to operate in healings and then he would remove his presence. And then now we’ve created a doctrine that says that the Holy Spirit lives inside of you but he comes on you for power. He don’t come on you. He comes out of you. When you move in power and when you move in signs and wonders and when you move in what it feels like the anointing, it is not God coming on, it is God coming out.”

Lloyd Pearce, Encounter Church Ballito

This is an odd one to take apart, because a good deal of it is correct, and the correct part is swinging at a charismatic error. Pearce is going after the familiar teaching that the Spirit lives in you but has to land on you again, fresh, every time you need power. He is right to throw it out. The trouble is what he puts in the hole. It keeps the exact assumption that caused the problem in the first place, and it hands the believer something Scripture never handed anybody.

Where He Is Right, and It Is Not a Small Thing

Start with the concession, because it is real. The permanence of the Spirit in the believer is true, and it is precious.

His account of the old covenant is broadly fair. The Spirit came on particular men for particular jobs, and he could leave. The Spirit rushed on Saul and later departed from him (1 Samuel 16:13-14). David had watched that happen up close, which is why he prayed, “take not your Holy Spirit from me” (Psalm 51:11). Something genuinely changed at Pentecost. The Spirit is poured out on all flesh now, not rationed to a handful (Acts 2:17). Christ promised a Helper who would be with us forever (John 14:16-17). The believer is sealed with the promised Holy Spirit, the guarantee of the inheritance (Ephesians 1:13-14), and we are told not to grieve him, “by whom you were sealed for the day of redemption” (Ephesians 4:30). Anyone without the Spirit of Christ does not belong to Christ at all (Romans 8:9). Even the “out of you” line has a text under it: Jesus said that out of the believer’s heart “will flow rivers of living water,” and John tells us plainly he meant the Spirit (John 7:38-39).

So a Spirit who comes and goes on Christians, doled out in visitations, really is a covenantal step backwards, and it really does strip believers of their assurance. Pearce is right to say so. But notice whose money he is spending. The permanence of the Spirit’s indwelling is the sealing and perseverance the Reformed have confessed for centuries. He is borrowing it to bankroll a ministry of signs and wonders. That is where it goes wrong.

He Kept the Wrong Definition of the Anointing

Here is the whole thing in one line. Pearce and the teaching he is correcting are arguing about the plumbing of something they both take for granted. Both of them treat “the anointing” as a power for signs, wonders, healings, prophesying. Their only quarrel is which way it travels: does it come on you or out of you? Neither one stops to ask whether the New Testament ever uses the word that way.

It does not. There are exactly two places where the New Testament speaks of an anointing belonging to ordinary believers, and neither has anything to do with miraculous power.

The first is 2 Corinthians 1:21-22, where God “anointed us, and who has also put his seal on us and given us his Spirit in our hearts as a guarantee.” The anointing there is sitting right next to the sealing and the guarantee. It is about being established in Christ and belonging to him. Not about operating in power.

The second is better, and the irony is worth a minute. John writes, “you have been anointed by the Holy One, and you all have knowledge,” and then, “the anointing that you received from him abides in you… his anointing teaches you about everything, and is true, and is no lie” (1 John 2:20, 27). What is it for? Read what is around it. It is protection against false teachers. John is writing about the ones who went out from among them, about antichrists and deceivers, and the anointing is the thing that lets an ordinary believer know the truth and not get taken. The one anointing the New Testament promises every Christian abides, and it is an anointing for discernment, not for miracles. It is precisely the thing you would need to weigh a claim like this one.

So Pearce wins his argument about permanence and loses the plot on the word itself. He has relocated a power-substance that was never the New Testament’s category to begin with.

The Spirit Is a Person, Not a Fluid

Both sides of this fight quietly treat the Spirit like an impersonal energy. On you, out of you, flowing, moving, released. But the Spirit is a Person. He hands out gifts “to each one individually as he wills” (1 Corinthians 12:11). He can be grieved (Ephesians 4:30). He can be lied to (Acts 5:3-4). Talk about God coming out of you when you move in power slides toward a force you carry instead of a Lord you obey, and that is a short walk to the Word of Faith idea of spiritual power as a substance you tap. The problem was never the direction of the flow. It is the depersonalising.

And the Tap Ends Up in the Man’s Hand

This is where it bites, and it bites in the pew. If the anointing is never lifted, and it comes out of you when you move in power, then the power sits at your disposal. You are the reservoir. It is on tap, permanently, and the only variable left in the equation is whether you are willing to move in it.

Scripture will not have it. Paul had real sign-gifts, and he left Trophimus sick at Miletus (2 Timothy 4:20). Epaphroditus nearly died, and Paul talks about his recovery as God’s mercy, not as something he administered himself (Philippians 2:25-27). He told Timothy to take a little wine for his frequent stomach trouble (1 Timothy 5:23). He asked three times for his own thorn to come out, got told no, and got grace instead (2 Corinthians 12:7-9). An apostle could not turn it on. The Spirit distributes as he wills, not as the vessel wills. A doctrine that makes the power permanent, resident, and self-directed parks a man in a spot no apostle ever stood in. And it reliably produces the towering, permanently anointed figure at the centre of a church that nobody is allowed to question.

The Measure Is Still a Feeling

One more thing, easy to miss. The whole account is anchored to “what it feels like the anointing.” The sensation is the given, and the theology gets built afterward to explain it. That is the same old error in a new coat: experience first, doctrine reverse-engineered to account for it. Whether you say God is coming on or coming out, you are still reading the felt surge as the meter of God’s activity, and Scripture never once invites you to do that.

The Anointing You Actually Have

The good news buried under all of this is better than what is on offer. If you are in Christ, the Spirit indwells you permanently. He will not be removed. He is the seal and the guarantee of your inheritance, and he is not leaving. That is not a licence to dispense power. It is the floor your assurance stands on.

The anointing you actually have, the one John promises, abides in you and teaches you the truth so you do not get deceived. It is worth using on claims like this one.