Roger Teale is a Yorkshireman who lives in Kentucky, USA. He prophesies with the unmistakable accent of a Yorkshireman and the rhythm of the King James Version of the Bible. I saw this remarkable man minister at C.O.C. in West End, Brisbane, traced him to his motel, and requested an interview.
He said, “Ring back in 30 minutes, brother.” I did and was granted a long interview, which I recorded on audio. As I closed it, I asked him to pray for me. When he did his prophetic anointing broke through his prayer, and a prophecy ensued. What follows is an excerpt from that prophecy.
“Yea, I shall send My angels to enable, yea, to go before thee, and to minister with thee, that thou mayest have the ability, saith the Lord, for it shall surely be a battle. Therefore, I have spoken this concerning Mine angel and Mine angel’s presence shall be felt and shall be known, for yea, I shall send them forth at My timing and My choosing.
Therefore, yea, saith the Lord, thou hast spoken much of that which thou will do, and yea, this day, saith the Lord, think, circumspectly. Yea, I would have thee to know, saith the Lord, to judge nothing before the time, but to consider diligently; and yea, saith the Lord, as thou wilt consider diligently, saith God, I will cause thee to reason intelligently in thy mind, and yea, saith the Lord, thou shalt even work things out according to that which is expedient and that which is not. And yea, saith the Lord, as thou would do this, this shall be according to My pleasure.
For yea, saith God, I shall move by My Spirit as I have spoken, and thou shalt surely have a part of it, and the anointing shall be upon thee, and surely, thou shalt drink of the cup of blessing, and joy, saith the Lord, thou shalt draw out of the wells of salvation.
Therefore, saith the Lord, as I have spoken, surely it shall come to pass, but yea, be upon thy face and be humbled, and yea, chasten thyself and come out unspotted from the world, for even as thou art my temple, and yea, as I would dwell in thee by My Spirit, surely shall go forth a message of deliverance, surely shall go forth the arrow of deliverance that shall loose the captives, set the oppressed FREE, saith God, and break the yoke of bondage, of suspicion and pride and idolatry that would hold this nation.
Therefore, look for it, saith the Lord, for the time is determined that I shall speak again!”
That “time” might well have been before dawn, on the morning of our first visit to the United Kingdom in 1991 (the first of twenty visits). The reason I present this extract in the rhythmic, somewhat outmoded English of the King James Version, is because it took me a week to transcribe the entire interview, of which the above extract is a small portion.
Soon after, I found myself prophesying at length and frequently. In other words, during the difficult week it took me to transcribe the interview. Years before I had edited a newspaper and had got used to taking notes in council meetings verbatim, so I was particular in getting every word correct. Which was difficult due to the speaker’s thick accent, so I played and replayed the cassette tape over and over to get every word right– and in doing so, picked up the prophet’s anointing!
(I have a longtime friend who, as a young mechanic, played a well-known evangelist’s audio tapes so often while repairing cars, the tapes wore out; but by the time they did, the healing anointing on the evangelist’s life had come upon him.)
I flowed in that prophetic anointing, as well as my own, for a year or two, and prophesied over two entire congregations! It’s not easy to deliver personal prophecies while a pastor follows you around! I moved back to my own calling after realizing the Lord had not called me to be a prophet but a teacher with a spiritual gift of healing. It was a sort of spiritual hitchhike, which I enjoyed personally, as well as for how the Lord used it to bless not only our church but others as well.
Every now and then, the Spirit of the Lord will come upon me, and when that happens, the faith that comes with it makes it more of a declaration — one so filled with certainty that I assure the recipient that he or she can “take it to the bank”!
The Christmas Eve after my time with Roger Teale, fewer than usual people were present in our meeting, when the Spirit of the Lord surged up from within me and caused me to prophesy over seven young people, one after another and each one accurately.
Thus began a prophetic period that lasted for about two years. Not long after that prophetic flow, I prophesied over nearly everyone in the two churches: one in Melbourne and the other on the Gold Coast.
In 1982, the Lord gave me specific verses of scripture for members of the “Run of Faith” event in which two teams set out from Perth: one running north and then across the Top End of Australia and down the East Coast to Brisbane. As a member of the committee, I was tasked with producing a magazine that would feature the national event.
During it, I flew to Hobart to encourage those who had run across the Nullarbor Plain to Melbourne, and then by ship to Tasmania. After running around that island, they would then run northward from Melbourne to Brisbane, where both teams would meet. The event would climax in a series of meetings, at which the speaker would be Dr Benson Idahosa, from Nigeria.
In Hobart, the team members were exhausted and ready to give up after their long run across the barren (as the Latin name implies, and to the runners’ endless) Nullarbor Plain. The Lord gave me a specific bible verse and a prophecy for each runner. It restored their spirits and enabled them to continue their marathon run around Tasmania and then northward to Brisbane.
No other runners had ever undertaken an around-Australia run. The prophetic mantle that had come upon me while ‘deciphering’ Roger Teale’s Yorkshire accent during that week, and which began to flow that Christmas Eve, remained on me for two years. It had begun with my encounter with Roger Teale, the unusual and to me hard to understand, but in my experience, an authentic and memorable prophet of God.