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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 experieces. 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 the line! He is unpopular in morality and spirituality.
In a day of faceless politicians and voiceless preachers, there is not a more urgant 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 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 judgement.
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 when 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 feeds the Bread
of Life to those who will 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 is self-effacing.
He hides with God in the secret place, but 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 man.
Our national need at this hour is not the 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 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 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 dollor Christian organizations
straddle the nation. BUT, where, oh where, is the prophet? Where are the incandescent men fresh from the holy place? Where
is 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 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 stagnent
"churchianity."
Let him be as selfless as Paul the apostle.
Let him, too, say and live, "This ONE thing I do."
Let
him reject ecclesiastiecal 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 millions who are deaf through the clatter of shelkels 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 materalism, 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!
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