-by Leonard Ravenhill.
The prophet in his day is fully accepted of God and totally rejected by men.
Years back, Dr. Gregory Mantle was right when he said, "No man
can be fully accepted until he is totally rejected." The prophet of
the Lord is aware of both these experiences. They are his "brand name."
The group, challenged by the prophet because they are smug and
comfortably insulated from a perishing world in their warm but
untested theology, is not likely to vote him "Man of the year" when
he refers to them as habituates of the synagogue of Satan!
The prophet comes to set up that which is upset. His work is to
call into line those who are out of line! He is unpopular because he
opposes the popular in morality and spirituality. In a day of faceless
politicians and voiceless preachers, there is not a more urgent
national need than that we cry to God for a prophet! The function
of the prophet, as Austin-Sparks once said, "has almost always
been that of recovery."
The prophet is God's detective seeking for a lost treasure. The
degree of his effectiveness is determined by his measure of
unpopularity. Compromise is not known to him.
He has no price tags.
He is totally 'otherworldly.'
He is unquestionably controversial and unpardonably hostile.
He marches to another drummer!
He breathes the rarefied air of inspiration.
He is a "seer" who comes to lead the blind.
He lives in the heights of God and comes into the valley with a
"thus saith the Lord."
He shares some of the foreknowledge of God and so is aware of
impending judgment.
He lives in 'splendid isolation.'
He is forthright and outright, but he claims no birthright.
His message is "repent, be reconciled to God or else...!"
His prophecies are parried.
His truth brings torment, but his voice is never void.
He is the villain of today and the hero of tomorrow.
He is excommunicated while alive and exalted when dead!
He is dishonored with epithets when breathing and honored with
epitaphs when dead.
He is a schoolmaster to bring us to Christ, but few 'make the grade'
in his class.
He is friendless while living and famous when dead.
He is against the establishment in ministry; then he is established
as a saint by posterity.
He eats daily the bread of affliction while he ministers, but he feeds
the Bread of Life to those who listen.
He walks before men for days but has walked before God for years.
He is a scourge to the nation before he is scourged by the nation.
He announces, pronounces, and denounces!
He has a heart like a volcano and his words are as fire.
He talks to men about God.
He carries the lamp of truth amongst heretics while he is lampooned by men.
He faces God before he faces men, but he is self-effacing.
He hides with God in the secret place, but he has nothing to hide
in the marketplace.
He is naturally sensitive but supernaturally spiritual.
He has passion, purpose and pugnacity.
He is ordained of God but disdained by men.
Our national need at this hour is not that the dollar recover its
strength, or that we save face over the Watergate affair, or that we
find the answer to the ecology problem. We need a God-sent prophet!
I am bombarded with talk or letters about the coming shortages in
our national life: bread, fuel, energy. I read between the lines from
people not practiced in scaring folk. They feel that the "seven years
of plenty" are over for us. The "seven years of famine" are ahead.
But the greatest famine of all in this nation at this given moment is
a FAMINE OF THE HEARING OF THE WORDS OF GOD (Amos 8:11).
Millions have been spent on evangelism in the last twenty-five years.
Hundreds of gospel messages streak through the air over the nation
every day. Crusades have been held; healing meetings have made
a vital contribution. "Come-outers" have "come out" and settled, too,
without a nation-shaking revival. Organizers we have. Skilled
preachers abound. Multi-million dollar Christian organizations
straddle the nation. BUT where, oh where, is the prophet? Where
are the incandescent men fresh from the holy place? Where is the
Moses to plead in fasting before the holiness of the Lord for our
moldy morality, our political perfidy, and sour and sick spirituality?
GOD'S MEN ARE IN HIDING UNTIL THE DAY OF THEIR SHOWING FORTH.
They will come.
The prophet is violated during his ministry, but he is vindicated by history.
There is a terrible vacuum in evangelical Christianity today. The
missing person in our ranks is the prophet. The man with a terrible
earnestness. The man totally otherworldly. The man rejected by
other men, even other good men, because they consider him too
austere, too severely committed, too negative and unsociable.
Let him be as plain as John the Baptist.
Let him for a season be a voice crying in the wilderness of modern
theology and stagnant "churchianity."
Let him be as selfless as Paul the apostle.
Let him, too, say and live, "This ONE thing I do."
Let him reject ecclesiastical favors.
Let him be self-abasing, nonself-seeking, nonself-projecting,
nonself-righteous, nonself-glorying, nonself-promoting.
Let him say nothing that will draw men to himself but only that which
will move men to God.
Let him come daily from the throne room of a holy God, the place
where he has received the order of the day. Let him, under God,
unstop the ears of the millions who are deaf through the clatter of
shekels milked from this hour of material mesmerism.
Let him cry with a voice this century has not heard because he
has seen a vision no man in this century has seen. God send us
this Moses to lead us from the wilderness of crass materialism,
where the rattlesnakes of lust bite us and where enlightened men,
totally blind spiritually, lead us to an ever-nearing Armageddon.
---------------------------------------------------------
God have mercy! Send us PROPHETS!
"When a prophet is accepted and deified, his message is lost. The
prophet is only useful so long as he is stoned as a public nuisance
calling us to repentance, disturbing our comfortable routines,
breaking our respectable idols, shattering our sacred conventions."
-A. G. Gardiner.
"The function of the Prophet has almost invariably been that of
recovery. That implies that his business is related to something
lost. That something being absolutely essential to God's full
satisfaction, the dominant note of the Prophet was one of
dissatisfaction. And, there being the additional factor that, for
obvious reasons, the people were not disposed to go the costly
way of God's full purpose, the Prophet was usually an unpopular person."
-T. Austin Sparks.
"Those whom God calls to such a ministry - and a call is essential -
must be prepared for a pathway of unpopularity and misunderstanding.
"You troubler of Israel" was the way Ahab addressed Elijah."
-Arthur Wallis.
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