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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.”
The prophet is God’s 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 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,
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?
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.
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!
©1994 by Leonard Ravenhill,
Lindale, TX
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