Prophetic reality and vocation 01

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Our faith in Christ unto new birth and spiritual maturity is apprehended by revelation. It is induced by God and produced by God. It consists mainly of an inner work of the Holy Spirit.

 

Our faith expresses itself in communication, it is something to be shared. God communicates and we behave accordingly – and we communicate. God gave to men and they wrote. We read and react. In this process of communication God holds the initiative. And he evaluates our response according to heavenly protocol.

 

Prophets are men of the book. Prophets are men of communication, they have learned to read, to listen and to obey. They are men of heavenly protocol. The prophetic dimension is first of all the dimension of hearing, of observance, and then of established correspondence – in thought and behaviour. Respect, reverence and submissiveness are virtues to be found in the prophetic constituency.

 

Propheticness is the ministry of spiritual interpretation. It is a ministry to the Church in as much it delivers an ongoing evaluation of the status and stature of the fellowship according to eternal criterions. To minister in the prophetic office involves holding things to the full thought of God.

 

L.W.

Fire in the Bones 01

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The courage and burden of the Old Testament prophets, the prophets of scandalous impossibility, was to find speech that is adequate for the character of God. There would be no prophets (as here understood) without this God who is the subject of their speech, and there would be no prophetic word were God not a God of whom it can be said, “Thus says the LORD”; to put it succinctly, human utterance sounds holy speech.

 

Accordingly, for all our interest in sociology and politics, the theme we strike is theological in nature and has to do with the character of God and the courage to bring this God to speech What the prophets assert is that human processes and policies are, apart from this God, wrongly construed. I suggest three ways of speaking about this God who keeps human history open to possibility. The character of this God who does wonders (pela’) is described one oracle at a time, one crisis at a time, one possibility at a time:

 

1. This God, unlike other gods, is holy, brooking no rivals, utterly unapproachable. There is at the center of the historical process a force and a will that cannot be harnessed, domesticated, manipulated, or bought off.

 

2. This God, unlike other gods, is a “lover of justice” (Ps. 99:4), intolerant of injustice, mightily at work in the public processes of history, allied with the powerless, critical of the greedy powerful, intervening with a “preferential option for the marginal.”

 

3. This God, unlike other gods, because holy and because just, is a dangerous, subversive God, unsettling every status quo that offends holiness and that mocks justice. This God, unlike any other, is one who subverts, ending what is cherished and beginning what we little expect, in order that the world may receive and enact its proper life as God’s creation.

 

The prophetic word in history is human utterance about this God, unintimidated by modernity, unimpressed by excessive religion, nonnegotiable about rhetoric, nondefensive about its epistemology, daring to insist that this God who works wonders in the historical process is still at large, liberating and healing.

 

From:

Like Fire in the Bones

Walter Brueggemann

Tozer Majesty 03

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That our idea of God correspond as nearly as possible to the true being of God is of immense importance to us.  Compared with our actual thoughts about Him, our creedal statements are of little consequence.  Our real idea of God may lie buried under the rubbish of conventional religious notions and may require an intelligent and vigorous search before it is finally unearthed and exposed for what it is.  Only after an ordeal of painful self-probing are we likely to discover what we actually believe about God.

A right conception of God is basic not only to systematic theology but to practical Christian living as well.  It is to worship what the foundation is to the temple; where it is inadequate or out of plumb the whole structure must sooner or later collapse.  I believe there is scarcely an error in doctrine or a failure in applying Christian ethics that cannot be traced finally to imperfect and ignoble thoughts about God.

It is my opinion that the Christian conception of God current in these middle years of the twentieth century is so decadent as to be utterly beneath the dignity of the Most High God and actually to constitute for professed believers something amounting to a moral calamity.
All the problems of heaven and earth, though they were to confront us together and at once, would be nothing compared with the overwhelming problem of God: That He is; what He is like; and what we as moral beings must do about Him.

The man who comes to a right belief about God is relieved of ten thousand temporal problems, for he sees at once that these have to do with matters which at the most cannot concern him for very long; but even if the multiple burdens of time may be lifted from him, the one mighty single burden of eternity begins to press down upon him with a weight more crushing than all the woes of the world piled one upon another.  That mighty burden is his obligation to God.  It includes an instant and lifelong duty to love God with every power of mind and soul, to obey Him perfectly, and to worship Him acceptably.  And when the man’s laboring conscience tells him that he has done none of these things, but has from childhood been guilty of foul revolt against the Majesty in the heavens, the inner pressure of self-accusation may become too heavy to bear

From: The Knowledge of the Holy

A prophet’s passion # 01

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And I, John, saw the holy city, New Jerusalem, coming down from God out of Heaven.
Rev 21:2

A man of God, the prophet stands as a mouthpiece of the Lord among men because he has been brought by the Lord to a point of seeing. A man of God, the prophet is what he is based on a heavenly purpose and on Heavens acting in his life to bring him to a place of seeing.

A prophet is what he is because the Lord has allowed him to become a seer, called him to seeing and made him able to look into Heaven. The prophet is what and where he is because he has found the ultimate grace to see God and to have been apprehended by the Father.

A seer of the heavenly category is a man who has come out from a confrontation with Heaven, still alive but for ever changed. A seer of this kind has been brought before God to be taken in by and to be given over to a seeing as God sees, abandoning himself to the things of Heaven and to come out from such an encounter as a man made alive, made to live, live what he has been apprehended for. This kind of man is set aside to live what he has seen. He speaks by what he is rather than by the words he is able to engage, and his words are weak representations of the life he is sent to bring to men as he returns from his seeing. But his words holds prophetic substance, a driving force which confronts like he himself has been confronted during his seeing.

The prophet has been made alive to the realities beyond. The seeing of the things beyond is the sole raison d’être of the prophetic man. Prophetic work deepens and intensifies, the prophetic burden becomes the more intense as the heavenly realm and the things beyond are lost to the main lot of men in the haze of contemporary pursuits and enterprises.

The seer has eyed the true city, true city life, and its service. John saw the city, he had been apprehended by its inherent relevance. In it he had found life, abundant life gathered up in service pleasing to the Lord expressed in a kind of worship which held no vain self-interest.  He had seen life, abundant living detailed in extravagant service in truth before men marked by willingness to sacrifice.

An abundant life does not show itself in abundant dreaming, but in sacrificial, priestly living among real and tangible objects and to actual and practical purposes.

The seer looses his true seeing at the point where he looses his focus: “As in Heaven, so on earth”. The prophetic realm is to be defined as the realm of relevant and true seeing.

The passion of a prophet springs forth from a seeing of the things beyond.
The passion of a prophet springs forth from a seeing mastered by Heaven.
The passion of a prophet springs forth from a seeing which brings heavenly confrontation.
The passion of a prophet springs forth from a seeing of a service suitable to God and men.
The passion of a prophet springs forth from a seeing which demands radical adherence.

Lars Widerberg

Tozer on entertainment 02

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Entertainment Is a Symptom

 

This is the cause of a very serious breakdown in modern evangelicalism. The idea of cultivation and exercise, so dear to the saints of old, has now no place in our total religious picture. It is too slow, too common. We now demand glamour and fast flowing dramatic action. A generation of Christians reared among push buttons and automatic machines is impatient of slower and less direct methods of reaching their goals. We have been trying to apply machine-age methods to our relations with God. We read our chapter, have our short devotions and rush away, hoping to make up for our deep inward bankruptcy by attending another gospel meeting or listening to another thrilling story told by a religious adventurer lately returned from afar.

 

The tragic results of this spirit are all about us: shallow loves, hollow religious philosophies, the preponderance of the element of fun in gospel meetings, the glorification of men, trust in religious externalities, quasi-religious fellowships, salesmanship methods, the mistaking of dynamic personality for the power of the Spirit. These and such as these are the symptoms of an evil disease, a deep and serious malady of the soul.

 

The Pursuit of God

Katz Prophecy 05

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5 – The Voice of the Prophet

 

God puts a great premium on the voice of the prophets. It is not just their words, but their voice that carries the urgency and divine seriousness of God. If you change that and yet retain the technical word, you have lost the message. There is the resonance of God in his speaking that conveys not only the content and the meaning, but also the disposition of God’s own heart and how He feels about what is being said. The mood of the speaking has nothing to do with the prophet’s choosing. There are times when he is like a piece of putty and he cannot alter it. He is uncomfortable speaking like that and wishes that he had the liberty to give the word the flourish that it needs. He is, however, as much bound in God in the manner of the speaking as the content of the speaking. Other times the same man is beside himself. He cannot be contained. He is falling off the edge of the platform (so to speak) in the intensity of the moment. In both cases, it is not the man who makes that determination, but God.

 

When the prophet, whom God has raised up early and sent often (Jer. 7:25), is not heard and the word is rejected, then the next and last thing is judgment. It is, therefore no wonder that there is an urgency in the speaking and that his words are designed to shock more than edify. The prophet is, therefore, often seen as being horrid, slashing and offensive. The most common accusation is ‘unloving,’ which he has to bear. That is the way it often sounds and appears, but how many of us can see that the harsh word is uttermost love? For a prophet, not to have spoken it would have been unloving—if that is what the urgency of the moment required. That is not a justification to be in that mode continually, but in the moment that God calls for it, it must not be withheld.

 

[The prophet’s mood is often in violent opposition to the mood that has already been established in the congregation, especially by the ‘worship team.’ We ourselves are frequently in conflict with worship teams and worship leaders. They seem often to have an independent purpose for their own activity, no matter what, and establish some kind of mood, however contrary to God it is. Instead of working in conjunction with the word that is to come, or sensing the mood and heart of God, they have already got their choruses numbered and what they are going to sing and do. They have their musical virtuoso, talent and amplifiers and they are going to ‘do their thing,’ and leave you to make the best of it afterwards as well as you can. Many messages have been dulled and the power of them lost because of that unspoken opposition and tension where worship ministry is celebrated as the ultimate thing in itself. We need perhaps to pull the plug out of every overhead projector and every amplifier! Let us rather just splutter and choke along and miss a word here and there and come into the spirit of God’s worship, than that we should be led with choruses and more choruses and more choruses. What it seems they are often really trying to do is to effect an atmosphere for a service, rather than touch the heart of God, let alone prepare for the receiving of a holy word for those assembled.]

 

A prophet will often send people home jarred and unhappy with many unanswered questions. He has not that mentality that wants everything to be wrapped up in one package with a ribbon on it, in one service, and send people home happy. He will let the people go home pained and even agonizing. He will raise perplexing questions that he himself has not adequately answered, and they themselves have got to wrestle and fight their way through to a truer place in God. There are very few pastors, maybe one in a hundred, who would be willing to allow his congregation to suffer that kind of stress and tension. “Send them home happy” is the unspoken premise of contemporary religion to which prophets do not subscribe. They are not in the mood for sending people home happy. They are of a kind to send them home agitated with questions that the hearers are compelled to consider and that cannot be asked and answered in one service.

 

The prophet’s suspicions are alerted if there is any bombast, theatrics or sensationalism that conjures up a manner or a mode of excitement or anything else that the ear loves to hear that would draw out those who are bored and want some kind of alternative to their boredom. The one who speaks of coming judgment should not invest it with anything more than the word itself. He does not have to bring to it an additional quality so as to make it compelling to the hearer. The word itself speaks for itself. Anyone who would seek to bring an extraneous element through his own personality or manner of speaking is likely false. The prophet, therefore, does not have great latitude in how he deports himself. If we are highly individualistic and want to cut a swath for ourselves or do our own thing in our own way, then we are disqualified.

 

Though the prophet’s life is wholly given over to God, there is no surrender of identity. In fact, his authentic identity is established. He loses his life but he has found it. Prophets are distinct, flesh and blood men with personalities. They are not robots who bear the word of God as a mechanical contrivance. They are formed in the womb, and that forming is God’s.