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 Gods detective seeking for a lost treasure.

The degree of his effectiveness is determined by his measure of

unpopularity.

He does not know compromise.

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 claims not 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 recovers its

strength,.. 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, and 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 Word 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?

Gods 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.

He is 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 the 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 the enlightened men, totally blind spiritually, lead us to an

ever-nearing Armageddon.

God have mercy! Send us prophets!

 

(By Leonard Ravenhill)