BECOMING A PROPHET

ON BECOMING A PROPHET

                “Pursue love, yet desire earnestly spiritual gifts, but especially that you may prophesy.” 1 Cor. 14:1

                All of us, who love the Lord, share a desire to hear His voice. How often do we wish that God would just tell us what to do next? It would seem an easy thing to follow Him if He would just tell us what to do. Unfortunately, or at least it seems so to us, God usually deals in principle rather than giving us a straight answer and so we feel that we are left to guess His will.

                I asked the Lord why it must be this way and He shared with me these five things:

1.       We must live by faith and not by sight.(Abraham, the father of faith went out not knowing where He was going)

2.       We have been given the right of choices in which He will be with us in whatever choice we make as long as we walk with Him.

3.       He then told me that once we have matured enough to hear a “Yes” or “No” answer from Him then we will enter into a new realm of obedience – the kind of obedience that prophets walk in.

4.       We must understand that prophecy is not so much about foretelling the future as it is about speaking forth the authentic Word of God that brings understanding.

5.       Prophecy helps us to correctly understand the times and seasons in which we live and the purposes of God for them.

                Many times when I ask the Lord what to do in certain situations, or what choice to make when I come to a fork in the road, He will teach me many things in principle without actually answering my question. It can be frustrating at times and yet in the process I am learning important lessons.

                For instance, we understand that the making of a prophet is most often a maturing process rather than an instant anointing to suddenly go out and speak for God. We must first learn to hear His voice in small things. We learn to obey Him in small things first and then He will move us on to a little bit bigger things. All the while we are learning to sort out His voice from our own inner voices. It is a maturing experience that can take many years until a person reaches a point where they can very accurately distinguish God’ s voice in their spirit from their own voice which comes from the mind. One voice is from heaven and the other is of the flesh and we cannot really truly speak for God until we know the difference. There is another voice of the devil as well, but hopefully we have learned to turn that one off by now.

                Once a person has come to the place where they are able to hear and obey God in the big things, then he is mature enough to speak for God in prophetic matters.

                But there are a few things we need to understand along the way:

1.       Our bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit. Hearing God’s voice is not a matter of hearing a booming voice from heaven, but a still small voice in our spirit.

2.       Our spirit must grow up and mature in us to the point where we can hear it and be led by it. This maturing comes from feeding upon the Word of God for as Jesus said: “It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh profits nothing; the words that I have spoken to you are spirit and are life.” Jn. 6:63. This is very important because spiritual maturity comes in feeding upon the word and obeying the word. We also build up our spirit by praying in the spirit. Jude 20, 1Cor. 14:4,15,18.

3.       Of course the most fundamental part of hearing God’s voice is in being born again, for if our spirit has not been made alive by the Holy Spirit then… well… dead men can’t hear.

4.       Then, of course there is the above mentioned process of maturing where we learn to hear god in little things and to obey in the little things so that we will be mature enough to hear God in bigger things.

                This is why many of His prophets were honed in the wilderness away from people. Moses, David, John the Baptist, even Jesus quietly worked in his father’s carpenter shop largely away from the public eye for  most of His life. Then the Holy Spirit led Him into the wilderness for 40 days to learn what Moses learned in 40 years. Moses had stubbornness and self- sufficiency to unlearn, whereas Jesus had walked with God from the very beginning.

                So we see these prophets of old, suddenly popping out of the wilderness to change the world of their day and what we don’t see is the years of learning to hear God’s voice in the little things that eventually led them to speak for God with boldness and clarity.

                The Lord also shared in the story of Mary, Martha and Lazarus that we often concentrate more on doing rather than becoming. We try to fulfill our purpose with busy work in place of hearing God’s voice. We want to please Him and in our world, pleasing usually means doing. Martha was like that, but Jesus told her that Mary had chosen the better way. Martha was busy doing, but Mary sat at His feet.

                How many of us today rush from one busy project to the next while having little or no time to spend with the Lord as Mary did? But the Lord told me that a person that hears His voice can accomplish more in a day than most can in a lifetime of busy work apart from hearing His voice.

                It is what Jesus WAS, more than what He DID that turned the whole world upside down in His day and continues to turn the world upside down to this day. Healing had been done before and many had died for their faith, but HE was the Son of God. He and His Father were One. God was in Christ reconciling the world unto Him. He… the Creator of the universe… was walking in our shoes. His first priority was His prayer time with the Father… everything else came as a divine appointment from the Father. You never find Jesus wringing His hands and saying, “What do I do next… What do I do next?

                Even in the garden of Gethsemane Jesus spoke on behalf of His weakness as a man, but nevertheless surrendered to what He knew to be the Father’s will. He was not in a quandary as to what to do… rather He was feeling our human pain and the overwhelming sense of separation that sin brings… and it was our sins and not His that was bringing on this horrifying gap. Eternal oneness was for the first time being divided. His sacrifice can only be measured by infinity… His suffering by hell itself.

                If you want to hear God’s voice or to speak for Him, then enter into His realm of suffering. Prophecy is the way of the cross… not the way of fame and fortune. Prophets stand on the great divide between heaven and hell. They long for smooth words, but most often they are sent with a message of warning… of coming judgment… of condemnation of sin. Most of the “prophets that prophesy smooth sailing and prosperity today do not speak for God at all.

                I was reminded of the movie, “The Karate Kid.” In doing mundane tasks of painting fences, sanding decks and waxing cars he was learning the moves he would use to fight a good fight. Many Christians today want to go out and fight the good fight without first learning the moves. They want to be somebody without paying the price of authenticity.

                The ancient prophets of God were all ruggedly authentic. They were God pleasers rather than people pleasers. They walked according to the one voice. They worked miracles because they lived by divine appointment. They spoke what God wanted them to say… not what the people wanted to hear.

                And so most of them were stoned to death, or thrown into prison. Isaiah was sawn in two. Others were boiled in oil, crucified, beheaded or tortured to death. The world hates authenticity. Satan hates authenticity. His kingdom is built on lies whereas authenticity is built on truth… therefore the world hates truth.

                We live in a world today where truth and lies are coming to a climactic face off. Lies will bully the world for a season, but truth will win in the end. Truth is reality and reality is the way things really are and the way things really are is what makes truth authentic.

                We hunger to hear God’s voice today because we hunger for authenticity. In authenticity there is purpose. In truth there is freedom from the bondage of lies. The bully runs in abject fear when faced with authentic truth. Light and darkness cannot share the same space. Light is the presence of all power; while darkness is the absence of all power.

                Do you want to become a prophet? Then learn to love truth more than life itself. Learn to crave an authentic walk with God over the applause of men. Learn to love with a love that goes deeper than flattery. Love gives. Love suffers. Love heals. Love weeps with those who weep and rejoices with those who rejoice. True love comes only from God. The church today is suffering from a lack of true love and therefore a lack of authenticity.

                We are often guided more by tradition and comfort than we are by the Word of God or the Still Small Voice.  Truth puts us in conflict with the world and we don’t like conflict.         Soon trouble is going to break upon the world that will reveal to us just how authentic we are… how much of our lives are rooted and grounded in God and His Word and how much has just been play acting. Many false prophets will be exposed.

                Many of God’s real people, who are not prophets now, are being forged in the fires of obscurity. They are learning authenticity. They are learning to love truth and even to love people with a divine sort of love. When the right times comes they will seemingly pop out of the wilderness with a life changing message that will be right for the time and it will save many. They are the nobodys whom God has saved like a quiver of arrows for His last day ministry to the world.

                So don’t grow weary my friends. Instead press into the heart of God and He will call you forth in your appointed time.