|
The Heart of a
Prophet - W.E. Smith
But when he
saw many of the Pharisees and Sadducees coming for baptism,
he said to them, “You brood of vipers, who warned you to
flee from the wrath to come? (Matt 3:7)
Dear Brethren, we
urgently petition our Gracious Father for all of you that you will
be found patiently waiting and watching in the Lord Jesus, as the
hour closes in on midnight, and the Thief is at the door! Oh how so
many saints are asleep, or drifting into soul-filled slumber as the
world races onward towards its date with destiny and the awful
judgment of the Most High God! And where, brethren, where are the
teachers, the shepherds, the prophets of the church providing that
much needed meat in due season, exhorting the children of light to
all vigilance and separation from this evil world? Where are they
indeed? Heaven help us in this dread hour dear ones! And for this we
pray always in Jesus’ Glorious Name! Amen.
These past days I
found myself revisiting the lives of the great ones among our kind -
the prophets of old, for whatever gripped them and held them is what
I want and need. I want nothing and no one out before me but my God,
to be sold out in all abandonment to His will and purpose, to His
moment-by-moment direction and leading. To have a power able to
divide light from darkness and soul from spirit, and the complete
and utter loss of all that I have become in this sin-drenched world.
So strange, so
eclectic are these characters my friends, the Elijahs and Jeremiahs
and Jonahs of the world, moving alone in the murky shadows with
their God, breathing in His words and breathing out His fiery
indignation; utterly rejected by their own, and forsaken, yet always
sustained for yet another day by the Lord who loved them and
preserved them. Oh how we would all do well to have this spirit dear
ones; to be poured out into His cup! Oh that we would see what they
saw, and comprehend the days in which we live!
Notice how
Austin-Sparks captures this so powerfully in reference to Elijah -
That is what comes
very clearly before us at the outset in the case of Elijah.
There is no doubt about God’s sovereign choice, and there is no
question as to God having endued Elijah with Divine power.
Nevertheless, we see him at every step under the hand of God,
and those steps are all steps which are a disciplining of the
man himself. God is dealing with His servant all the time, and
bringing him, all the way along, under His hand, so that he
never becomes something in himself, but has everything in the
Lord, and only in the Lord. We make a great mistake if we think
that it is enough to have the Divine thought as to Divine
purpose, that is, to have the knowledge of what God desires to
do. That is not enough, that knowledge of the thought of God is
not sufficient. There has to be a dealing with us in relation to
that Divine thought, and that dealing with us is usually in a
way which is altogether beyond our understanding…
That kind of
ministry, born out from that secret history with God, needs very
special government by God to preserve its safety, to safeguard
it from all those forces which can destroy it, and that is why
Elijah, having such a ministry, needed to be governed in every
step by God. There must be no generalization of movement in his
case, there must be specific movement, God dictating every step.
So God preserves that authority as He produces it, that is, by a
hidden life. Such a life and such a ministry must not be
exposed, otherwise it will be destroyed.
Indeed, we read
much of the prophet’s public ministry, but behind it all there
must be this “hidden life” nurtured and sustained by the Living
God!
You see, here is a
man, having had this deep, secret preparation with God in much
prayer, who finds himself brought out in Divine authority to
make a great announcement which represents a crisis in the
purpose of God. You would expect that, from that point, he would
go straight on from strength to strength, from place to place,
would at once become a recognized authority, a recognized
servant of God, and be very much before the public eye. But God
would guard against any servant of His taking up a Divine
purpose and a Divine commission in himself, taking it up in his
own energy. That will destroy it, and there must be a hiding, a
very real hiding. If a geographical hiding is God’s way of
getting a spiritual hiding, well, be it so. If God chooses to
send us out of the realm of public life and ministry into some
remote and hidden place, in order to take us away from the
imminent peril of our becoming something, of our being taken up
to be made something of, our going on in the strength of our own
self-life, that is all well and good; but whether it be
geographical or not, the word of the Lord to all His servants
would always be, “Hide thyself!”
Dear saints, we don’t
need to formally be ordained a prophet to have a prophet’s heart,
and to be hid away in the secret chambers with our God. Here is
sublimity and power my friends, and yet to have such a heart we must
also be willing to bear a prophet’s scars. REJECTION, LONELINESS,
ISOLATION, BEWILDERMENT, TESTING, ABANDONMENT; that strange
sensibility that this world is not our home and that we were never
meant to be established in it. Oh there are many like Lot and Demas
among us content to dwell in the walled city with the gates and the
painted splendor of the world - but that can never be for us. No
career, no wife, no children, no happy home for Jeremiah living so
close to the time of judgment. Rather, to the smug, the indifferent,
the cold, the blind, the worldly, the servant of the Lord must be
content to provide this “meat in due season”, to prepare a remnant
who will forsake the easy, formalized way of the many, and follow
the Lord into the pathless wilderness.
For the burden of the
prophet - to restore, to recover, to set upright that which has
toppled, is not an easy one to bear; in fact it is a great mystery
how they bear it at all. Only the Lord knows His strange working
upon the human heart. The prophet of the Lord must always oppose the
false, cold religious establishment of his day, even at the expense
of being hated and hunted for it by those who take their Lord for a
fool and refuse to believe He will fulfill every one of His words!
Here then are some
penetrating insights from one (Leonard Ravenhill), who himself was
something of a prophet crying in the wilderness -
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 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.
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.
And here we were
worrying about our 401k, or not being able to take that exotic
family vacation, or the sports standings. Oh Lord help us! Grant us
by Your grace the prophet’s heart and the prophet’s separation, the
prophet’s tears and the prophet’s faith and the prophet’s love for
your wayward people in these dark times!
The prophet is one who
is poured out by the Lord (Lam 2:19), and his blood is precious to
the One who sent Him and keeps him. One day, brethren, He Himself
will exact awful vengeance on all those who have spilled it (Rev
16:6). This is certain, for the Lord God is a just God, and He will
forever advocate for His beloved servants.
And I heard the
angel of the waters saying, “Righteous are You, who are and who
were, O Holy One, because You judged these things; for they
poured out the blood of saints and prophets, and You have given
them blood to drink. They deserve it.” (Rev 16:5-6)
Another who seemingly
had also glimpsed the strange and wonderful world of the prophet
wrote the following regarding Jeremiah -
”My eyes fail
because of tears, My spirit is greatly troubled; My heart is
poured out on the earth, because of the destruction of the
daughter of my people, when little ones and infants faint in the
streets of the city…” (Lamentations 2:11)
In a time of
national calamity and moral collapse there was a heart that
burned with this fire of repentance and righteousness. In the
midst of riot and rampage through Israel’s streets, stood one
lone prophet with the message of the hour mixed with tears. Like
Ramah, he refused to be comforted. Like his Lord, he could not
ignore the plight of his people. He witnessed and pleaded on the
corner of every street and hedge of Jerusalem for their lives
and their liberties, to truly return to the Lord. Echoing
through the alleys and lanes of the city it could be heard,
“Arise! Cry
aloud in the night! At the beginning of the night watches; Pour
out your heart like water before the presence of the Lord! Lift
up your hands to Him, for the life of your young children who
faint because of hunger at the top of every street!”
Lamentations 2:19)
See, Jeremiah was
no stranger to his nation’s sin and pain. He did not observe
from a terraced temple treasury at the passing of the publican
and prostitute that paraded through the streets of Jerusalem. He
did not stand as high priest and judge to the agony and cry of
Zion’s children, but to the contrary, he walked with them, he
pleaded with them, he wept with them! Like his Messiah, he was
no stranger to their desperation; he stood with them at the
threshold of their judgment and cried.
“…Call upon Me
and come pray to Me! And I will listen to you! And you will seek
Me and find Me, when you search for Me with all your heart…”
(Jer. 29:12&13.)
Judgment never
falls without the tears of the prophet falling first -
‘And when he
was come near, he beheld the city, and wept over it…’ (Jesus
over Jerusalem) (Luke 19:41)
Yet today in
modern day clergy, hidden behind insulated church walls, one can
easily stand afar off and preach of their plight, but never
fight the good fight. Sleep unaware through the night, never
shining His glorious light. It is easier to preach of their
demise, than to look them in the eyes. It is less toil to walk
by on the other side, than to bind up their wounds with oil and
wine. God is looking for prophets that will weep with those that
weep, leave the ninety-nine for even one lost sheep. That will
open the prison doors and set the captives free. The Lord is
imploring in this dark hour,
“Who will
follow Me?”
And so what is the
prophet’s heart? Indeed, it is nothing less than the beating heart
of the Lord God Himself; He who searches the hearts and knows all
those named by His name, yet who seek everything else but His
Kingdom and His righteousness.
Oh, my anguish,
my anguish!
I writhe in
pain.
Oh, the agony
of my heart!
My heart pounds
within me,
I cannot keep
silent.
For I have
heard the sound of the trumpet;
I have heard
the battle cry. (Jer 4:19)
Dear saints, as we
consider the imminence and gravity of the Lord’s Appearing for the
watchful among His people, and as we look upon the almost hopeless
state of the Laodecian church in this and other countries, let us be
faithful in providing the solid food of His prophetic word in due
season, that we too might be found faithful at His coming.
Who then is a
faithful and wise servant, whom his lord hath made ruler over
his household, to give them meat in due season? (Matt 24:45)
The meat is the word
of exhortation and the season is upon us, to be sure! And yet we
must also recognize that, like the times of the ancient prophets,
the many in our day will not receive this strong meat, and
ultimately come to reject the ones dispensing it -
For when for
the time ye ought to be teachers, ye have need that one teach
you again which be the first principles of the oracles of God;
and are become such as have need of milk, and not of strong
meat. (Heb 5:12)
In closing, I will
leave you with the words of Elijah to the people of Israel, spoken
at a time grimly similar to our own in the Church of Christ. The
time for choosing brethren, is at hand, for the Lord will soon
descend into His Presence, and the midnight cry will go forth -
Elijah came
near to all the people and said, ” How long will you hesitate
between two opinions? If the LORD is God, follow Him; but if
Baal, follow him.” But the people did not answer him a word.(1
Kings 18:21)
And so what is your
answer my brethren? Did you know that you are either for the Lord
your God or against Him? Search your hearts with the light of His
Holy Spirit and His Word, and you will know. You will know! Then
choose life and blessing; choose the Lord and His Christ, and not
the idols of this world, that you may live -
I call heaven
and earth to record this day against you, that I have set before
you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore choose life,
that both thou and thy seed may live: (Deut 30:19)
[Note that this choice
was being offered to a saved people on the other side of the sea;
this had nothing whatsoever to do with being redeemed by the blood,
but being qualified to assume dominion in the Lord's Kingdom.]
We will, the Lord
permitting, certainly have more to say about these matters in the
days ahead. Please pray for one another out there in the wilderness
brethren, and please pray for us here, that His will be done always,
and for His glory alone!
Your friend and
brother in Christ Jesus,
Wayne
|
