What the Gift of Prophecy Is For
For anyone new to it, prophetic ministry can look confusing, uncomfortable, or even a little suspicious — especially with how much has gone wrong in that space in recent years. In a short teaching before an evening of prophetic ministry at The Creative’s Intensive, Ps. Matt Wakefield offered a simple, biblically grounded frame for what the gift is actually meant to do.
You were known before you had anything to show for it
Wakefield starts with a simple but weighty idea: before you had any success, any failure, or any sin to your name, God already knew you. And if God knew you, that means he already had something to say about you — completely apart from your record.
That matters because most of us build our sense of identity out of what’s happened since. Our wins. Our failures. What people have said about us, good and bad. Prophecy points somewhere else entirely: back to what was already true before any of that started.
A metal detector, not a magic trick
Wakefield illustrates the idea with a trip to the beach with his daughter, who loves hunting for seashells — broken or whole, she doesn’t care. His observation: every beach has treasure buried in it. Most people walk right over it. It takes the right tool — something like a metal detector — to actually find what’s already there.
That’s the picture for prophecy. It doesn’t invent something new about a person. It helps recover something real that was already true, buried under disappointment, trauma, or just the ordinary weight of life. “Let me bring the truth back to the surface again” is how he puts it — not exposing something hidden out of judgment, but surfacing something good that got covered up.
What Scripture actually says it’s for
Wakefield grounds the teaching in two places: 1 Corinthians 12, which names prophecy as one of the gifts of the Holy Spirit, and 1 Corinthians 14, which states its purpose plainly — to strengthen, encourage, and comfort. Not to point out sin. Not to dig up pain. The goal, in his words, is “to bring the strength, bring the encouragement, bring the purpose of God to the season.”
That’s a useful filter for evaluating any prophetic word, whether at AXL or anywhere else: does it strengthen, encourage, and comfort — or does it do something else?
A sandwich shop in Seattle
Wakefield tells a story about ordering food at a sandwich shop with his wife on a tight budget, and having what he describes as a sudden, detailed sense of the cashier’s home life — bills stacking up, three kids, one of them sick. Rather than announcing a prophetic word, he simply asked, “Can I encourage you?” — deliberately using language that had nothing to do with church jargon.
She said yes. What he shared brought her to tears, and a coworker who witnessed it came over asking if he was a psychic. His answer: no — just that God loves people enough to want to speak purpose and destiny over them, whether or not they’re inside a church building.
An invitation, not a guarantee
Wakefield closes with language he says gets used often in his church culture: “prophecy is not a guarantee, but it’s an invitation.” That framing does real work. It means a prophetic word isn’t something to passively accept as settled fact — it’s something to bring before God and test, weigh, and respond to. It also means the person delivering a word isn’t claiming certainty on God’s behalf; they’re offering something to be received, prayed through, and confirmed.
That posture — offered humbly, received prayerfully, tested honestly — is what keeps the gift healthy. It’s also, ultimately, the whole point: not a performance, and not a guarantee, but an invitation to hear something true that was there all along.
This teaching draws from Ps. Matt Wakefield’s message on the gift of prophecy at AXL Creative Co.’s The Creative’s Intensive.