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Prophets and Prophetic Words Weekly Newsletter Series by Mark W. Weaver The Preparation of the Prophet Reconciliation.com
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The Prophet's Soul Pain Filter
The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; A broken and a contrite heart, O God, You will not despise. Psalm 51:17 NAS
God wastes nothing in preparing His prophets for service. Last week, we discussed the value of the wilderness experience in the preparation of God's Prophets. All circumstances and relationships serve His goal. His mission is to strike at the very heart of His servants, conquer them, and secure them for His own. God often takes His prophets through "hell on earth" to carry out His sanctifying purpose. The result of God's dealings in our lives is "soul pain."
Part of the package that comes with God's call to prophetic ministry is a strong sense of right and wrong. For God's Prophets, the temptation to judge and critize others is an easy trap. One reason why God often allows His prophets to endure injustice and hurt is to balance the prophet's tendency toward criticism with a sensitivity to the hurts of others. Because of his hurts, the prophet learns to forgive and to relinquish his bitterness - to come to a place of brokenness and surrender.
Jeremiah learned of God's sovereign ownership of His life through much pain and heartache. Open your Bible and read Lamentations chapter three. Jeremiah left no doubt that he believed God to be the author of his heartache. What do you think about the following statement in Jeremiah's painful lament?
"He has driven me and made me walk in darkness and not in light." Lamentations 3:2 Do those words describe something you think that God would do? What does Lamentations chapter three teach us about the sovereignty of God? Because the preparation process involves so much pain and heartache, the prophet must understand that it is a sovereign God who is orchestrating the events of our lives - sovereignly keeping watch over the processes of temptation, sin, and failure. Though God does not tempt us, nor cause us to sin, He allows the devil to tempt us in order to sift us and shake us.
"Let no man say when he is tempted, I am tempted of God: for God cannot be tempted with evil, neither tempteth he any man:" James 1:13
"And the LORD said unto Satan, Hast thou considered my servant Job, that there is none like him in the earth, a perfect and an upright man, one that feareth God, and escheweth evil? and still he holdeth fast his integrity, although thou movedst me against him, to destroy him without cause. And Satan answered the LORD, and said, Skin for skin, yea, all that a man hath will he give for his life. But put forth thine hand now, and touch his bone and his flesh, and he will curse thee to thy face. And the LORD said unto Satan, Behold, he is in thine hand; but save his life." Job 2:3-6
"And the Lord said, Simon, Simon, behold, Satan hath desired to have you, that he may sift you as wheat:" Luke 22:31
Trials and tribulations, feelings of rejection and abandonment by God - even though He is really very near - and the accompanying difficulty, hurt our souls. Hurt can lead us down one of two roads. The road of unforgiveness takes us to bitterness. The road of forgiveness takes us to surrender and brokenness. If the prophet in preparation does not understand God's sovereign purpose in his trials, he may be tempted to go down the wrong road - the one which leads to bitterness. Bitterness grows from unrelinquished ownership. The bitter soul hangs onto feelings that his life has been violated. The broken soul knows that his life belongs to God.
Even though God wants His prophets to discern right from wrong, He wants grace and compassion to flow from our hearts and our words. When God determines that His prophet has been brought to a place of surrender, the prophet is deemed ready for service.
What happens when someone with a prophetic gift and calling is still suffering from hurt or rejection and has not yet chosen to forgive? Their keen "prophetic" insights are often displayed in sarcasm or cutting remarks. Somehow the words seem right when they first come out, but later, they grow to become bitter bile in the mouth.
A church desiring prophetic ministry must be extremely cautious not to anoint or lay hands on any one too quickly (I Tim 5:22). To do so may abort God's training process and short circuit the long-term effectiveness of a budding prophet's ministry.
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Theology? Wait a minute!
What does theology have to do with prophets and prophetic words?
Theology is an often misunderstood word among Christians. Some Christians have even been heard to say - "We don't need theology. We just need Jesus." But who is Jesus? Was he just a man? Or is He God as well? If Jesus is not God, then why do we need him? And if He is God, and we believe Him to be so, then, whether we like it or not, we have a theology.
Theology is inescapable in our lives. It is our belief system. Our theology is that which puts personal meaning into the facts of religious history. Jesus died on a cross and rose from the dead. Those are the facts. But through His death He bore the judgment for my sin. And through His resurrection He overcame death itself. That is theology - that which puts meaning into those facts.
Much like the many other "...ologies" we grew up with in school, theology is a science. When we think of biology, for example, we recognize that this field of science catalogues and classifies living things into plant (botany) and animal (zoology) kingdoms. Beyond these broad categories, the study of life is then subdivided into numerous smaller categories. Cytology, histology, anatomy, physiology, and embryology are but a few.
Like the other sciences, theology classifies and separates knowledge about God into categories. Theology catalogues truth. For many centuries, theologians have been culling truth from the Holy Scriptures and neatly organizing it into categories. Open a pure theology book and you will probably find several different areas of concentration:
The study of God
The study of man
The study of sin
The study of Christ's atonement
The study of death and resurrection
The study of heaven and hell
The study of end-time events
The study of the Church
Every Christian operates out of a personal theology - a way of thinking about the topics enumerated above. Our ideas have been formed over time through personal study of scripture, through books and literature we have read, and through messages we have heard. In turn, all that we attempt to communicate, whether verbally or in some other form, is expressed in terms of the way we understand things to be - our personal theology. For our purposes here, we will call it a "theological filter."
Thus, every "prophetic" message delivered by a human messenger has a slant or an angle based upon the prophet's "theological" perspective. Consider the following examples:
Prophet No. 1: This prophet holds the theological view that Christ's return is imminent - probably within the lifetime of most people alive today. So convinced is this individual that Christ is coming soon, that his messages are usually peppered with, and sometimes even prefaced with, language like "in these last days..." Because of this prophet's personal theological filter, the imminency of Christ's return is weighted with the same measure of certainty as more sure gospel elements such as the atonement or the resurrection.
Prophet No. 2: In contrast, this prophet is not as certain of Christ's imminent return, but is convinced that culture should reflect the glory of God. Because of this prophet's personal theological filter, his messages reflect the theme of bringing the government or kingdom of God to bear upon society and culture. This individual often frames his messages from God with such phrases as: "Western Society," "Christian World-Life View," and "Judeo-Christian culture."
These two prophetic voices, though both speaking for God, can almost at times appear to be at cross purposes. Prophet No. 1 is so convinced of Christ's imminent return, that winning the culture almost seems to be a waste of time. On the other hand, Prophet No. 2 is so consumed with winning and shaping culture that he might not be prepared for a dramatic shift or fresh move of the Holy Spirit. These of course are not the only types of prophetic voices. Actually, there are as many flavors and varieties as there are people called and gifted in the prophetic.
Just as we grow in our personal lives into God's grace and our knowledge of Christ and His kingdom, so we grow in our prophetic ministries. Our understanding of God's Word increases and our burdens shift over time. And these gradual, subtle transformations in our thinking and perspective are directly related to our ever-developing personal theologies.
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