Ravenhill:. Send us Prophets

Picture of a Prophet
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."

Chip Brogden: Ministering to the Lord

"There were in the church at Antioch certain prophets and teachers… and as they ministered to the Lord, and fasted, the Holy Ghost said, “Separate for Me Barnabas and Saul for the work I have called them to do (Acts 13:1a,2).” 
 
There is much to be gleaned from this passage of Scripture. The first thing that strikes us is that the prophets and teachers were gathered together to minister to the Lord. How seldom we see this today! In the first place, prophets and teachers are rarely able to get together regarding anything. The prophet thinks the teacher is too intellectual, and the teacher thinks the prophet is too ethereal. The prophet favors inspiration and revelation, while the teacher favors illumination and study. The two seem to naturally be at odds, and this is probably necessary to keep everyone balanced. The prophet needs the teacher, and the teacher needs the prophet.
 
But here we see that everyone has come together, not to have a prophets and teachers conference, but to minister to the Lord. They have not lost their first love! Prophetic things have their place, but there is a time when prophetic things must be put on hold. Teaching and instruction have their place, but there is a time when no one should be teaching or saying anything. There is a time when the saints should gather together for the purpose of ministering to the Lord.

The Greek word for “ministered” here is “leitourgeo”, and we get our English word “liturgy” from it. It meant the performance of priestly or ministerial functions. Interestingly enough, it could only be used in connection with the Temple, since that was the only valid place a priest or minister could perform the functions. In Acts 13 we see the word used to describe the Church in Antioch. What does this mean? Simply this: we are the temple of the living God, a house of living stones, offering up ourselves as the sacrifices, ministering to the Lord as a holy nation, as a royal priesthood. Hence, we need no earthly temple or priest to represent us to God. We worship God in Spirit and in Truth.

The fact that the Holy Spirit moved and revealed the Lord’s Need while they were ministering to the Lord is significant. How can we know the Lord’s Need unless we have ministered to Him? Perhaps there were a dozen or so missions that might be done, and they could have fulfilled any number of needs and been considered good Christians. But the issue is not how many needs can we meet, but is the Lord’s Need met? What if we meet everyone’s need but the Lord’s Need is not satisfied? Let us meet the Lord’s Need first, and give Him His portion; then we are fit to stand before people and minister to them. This is the motivation for ministering to the Lord. People with no patience for these things will forge ahead on their own, see a need, and move at once to meet it, just like a good business person will do. But the Kingdom is not based on business principles. Our foremost concern is satisfying the Lord’s heart, being with Him, meeting His Need. Ministry to men is founded upon ministry to the Lord.

http://theschoolofchrist.org/articles/the-priests-of-the-lord-part-1.html


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Lenord Ravenhill: Lord Send Us Your Prophets

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!
by
Leonard Ravenhill

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On your walls, O Jerusalem, I have appointed watchmen
All day and all night they will never keep silent
You who remind the LORD, take no rest for yourselves;
And give Him no rest until He establishes
And makes Jerusalem a praise in the earth

F. B. Meyer: The Call of Jeremiah

It is not to be expected that a superficial gaze will discern the special qualifications that attracted the Divine choice to Jeremiah. But that is no wonder. The instruments of the Divine purpose in all ages have not been such as man would have selected. There were several reasons why Jeremiah might have been passed over.

1. He was young. How young we do not know; but young enough for him to start back at the Divine proposal with the cry, "Ah! Lord God! behold, I cannot speak; for I am a child." Without doubt, as a boy he had enjoyed peculiar advantages. God has often selected the young for posts of eminent service: Samuel and Timothy; Joseph and David; Daniel and John the Baptist.

2. He was naturally timid and sensitive. By nature he seemed cast in too delicate a mould to be able to combat the dangers and difficulties of his time. He reminds us of a denizen of the sea, accustomed to live within its shell, but suddenly deprived of its strong encasement, and thrown without covering on the sharp edges of the rocks. The bitter complaint of his afterlife was that his mother had brought him into a world of strife and contention. Many are moulded upon this type. They have the sensitiveness of a girl, and the nervous organism of a gazelle. They love the shallows, with their carpet of silver sand, rather than the strong billows that test a man's endurance. For them it is enough to run with footmen; they have no desire to contend with horses. Yet such, like Jeremiah, may play an heroic part on the world's stage, if only they will let God lay down the iron of His might along the lines of their natural weakness. His strength is only made perfect in weakness. It is to those who have no might that He increaseth strength.

3. He specially shrank from the burden he was summoned to bear. His chosen theme would have been God's mercy — the boundlessness of His compassion, the tenderness of His pity. But to be charged with a message of judgment; to announce the woeful day; to oppose every suggestion of heroic resistance; to charge home on the prophetic and the priestly orders, to each of which he belonged, and the anger of each of which he incurred, the crimes by which they were disgraced — this was the commission that was furthest from his choice (Jeremiah 17:16).

4. He was conscious of his deficiency in speech. Like Moses, he could say, "O my Lord, I am not eloquent, neither heretofore, nor since Thou hast spoken unto Thy servant: but I am slow of speech, and of a slow tongue." The best speakers for God are frequently they who are least gifted with human eloquence; for if that be richly present — the mighty power of moving men — there is an imminent peril of relying on it, and attributing the results to its magnetic spell. God cannot give His glory to another. He may not share His praise with man. He dare not expose His servants to the temptation of sacrificing to their own net or trusting their own ability. Do not, then, despair because of these apparent disqualifications. Notwithstanding all, the Word of the Lord shall come to thee; not for thy sake alone, but for those to whom thou shalt be sent. The one thing that God demands of thee is absolute consecration to His purpose, and willingness to go on any errand on which He may send thee.

(F. B. Meyer, B. A.)

Tozer: Only God can Prepare a Prophet

Jacob knew Esau lived for his stomach, so he waited for the right moment and then brewed up a mess of good stew. The aroma would make any man hungry, and when Esau arrived hungry, Jacob took the advantage and said, “Sell me your birthright and you can have the stew.”

Even Jacob’s own mother, Rebekah, led him down the road of treachery and deception in deceiving her husband to bless Jacob in place of Esau.

When I read this story, I do not really like Jacob very much. I think his

Tozer: The Prophet Brings God's Message

The true prophet is called to be a voice of God to his generation. His mission is to bring God’s message to God’s people, in such a way that they hear it and obey it. Therefore, he needs to be rooted deeply in the Word of God. What is the purpose and mission of the Word of God? To find us, to locate us—to identify us and our times—and to reveal truth to us. Its purpose is to show what is wrong with us, but also to show what is right with us.
...
Now, the work of the prophet is to convey God’s Word to God’s people in the proper balance. God never says anything negative to His people but what He also presents the positive side. We are to deal with the negative, but we are to focus on what is right about our walk with God. It does not matter if things are either negative or positive in the world. Out in the world, people are lost, and until they come to faith in Jesus Christ, God has nothing really to say about them. They are headed for judgment to come. In the church, it is a different story. Regardless of how badly a person has backslidden, God always has a way to come back prepared for him or her. Nobody has ever done anything that was a surprise to God. I am sure that it did not shock God when Adam and Eve did what they did in the Garden of Eden. He was not standing in the heavens rubbing His hands together, worrying about what He would do next. God’s plan is always built in eternity and cannot be destroyed by time.

Tozer: The Message Should bore into...

This generation has forgotten that the message does not clean up and shine the outside of a person; rather, it bores into the very heart and core of a person and radically changes that person from the inside. The time has come to hear once again the voice of God through His prophets. A prophet is not cultivated; a prophet is called and sent by God. One of my passions is to see God once again in the center of His church—to see Him honored and glorified in such a manner that it will push out all the things that are contrary to the holiness of God. O, God, God of the prophets of old, fall upon us in our utter weakness and radically transform Your Church today. In Jesus’ name. Amen.

Tozer: The Prophet Called to

One of the main factors of the New Testament church is the prophets. They were used of God to lead the church through tumultuous times and prevent her from falling into heresies. Heresies began almost the day the church was born.

 When you read through the New Testament and follow up with the early history of the church, you can see that the church was successful as they listened to the voice of the prophets. When they turned a deaf ear to that voice, the church quickly sank into heresies. Some of those heresies linger on to this day. My great passion and love for the church leads me to cry out in desperation that what we need today are prophets. Where are the prophets to guide today’s church through the quagmire of heresies around us? Those early church prophets were successful to the degree that the church listened to them. The voice of the prophet today is seldom heard, not because there are no prophets speaking for God, but because the noise and clatter of our culture have so invaded the church that they have drowned out that voice. Because the voice is not being heard, the church is in danger of falling into the quagmire of heresy.

Tozer, Voice of the Prophet, page 17

Kris Vallotton: 14 Years

It is the Lord’s choosing. However, if you are called, you still have the responsibility to develop your gift. I remember hearing Graham Cooke say many years ago during a conference: “It takes fourteen years for a person to develop into a prophet after being called.

Kris Vallotton: Pastor vs Prophet

Each of us receives from people based on the role that we understand them to play in our lives. For example, someone seeking counsel from a prophet must realize that, unlike a pastor (whose best counsel comes after much listening), a prophet will often give his or her best insight with little or no prior information. A person trying to receive this type of counsel without understanding the gift and role of the prophet may think to themselves, “How can you give me counsel when you don’t even understand my situation?” Therefore, it is important for us to understand the various roles that the members of the Body of Christ play in our lives.

Kris Vallotton: Prophets are Gifts

Christ gave the prophets to the church as a gift. The main function of a prophet is to equip the saints to do the work of service. The prophet equips the church with eyes to see and ears to hear. The grace that prophets carry

literally cause people to be able to hear the voice of the Spirit. Prophets have the authority to correct and direct because they are a part of the government of God

The Prophet: A Different Fabric

Why can one go to a Benny Hinn meeting and be healed of something, and then ten years later not be healed of something just as simple? Say a tooth is healed, and yet a cavity comes in right next to the healed tooth?

In one case, the tooth is healed under the anointing of the one presenting the ministry of the Lord. His or her years of walking in the Lord manifests in your healing, whereas, when we pray for this new healing, it might not have the strength as the original minister.

The secret is in anointing upon a person. The greater the time in the presence of the Lord, the greater the strength of the anointing.

A Prophet ... A Different Fabric

I believe the call of a prophet is one of the slowest developing call of all. I also believe that the material a prophet is made from is different than the other calls. It is made up of a very sensitive fabric that must be made into a strong, supernatural finely woven material. Able to be sensitive to pic up the most sensitive amount of dew, yet strong enough to hold back a flood.

If you are called to this office, please do not dismay at the length of time it takes to be matured, processed, and strengthened. In the end, you will be grateful that the fabric you are made out of will be strong and very enduring.