Katz Prophecy 07

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The Spirit of Prophecy: An Examination of the Prophetic Call
Art Katz

 
7 – The Seriousness of the Word Spoken

There is a weight of responsibility on God’s people to correctly identify whom God has set before them, and there is a choosing. In making that decision and choice, something is struck that will profoundly affect that believing life for the rest of its days. Just the presence of the man, let alone the radical content of his word, puts a premium of requirement upon the hearer. What do you do with this man and this word? Something has come in a moment of time that requires something from you, and if you will not recognize it and give it, then you are not just going to go on, you are going to fall back. Something unexpected and incisive has come and your response to that will affect your whole continuance and future in God.

In the light of that, the prophet has a great responsibility to be the authentic thing that compels God’s people to choose with an earnestness that was never theirs before. How much more seriously do we need to consider our own walk, and for that reason, how dare we give ourselves over to casual, carnal lifestyles ourselves? There is a seriousness of God now coming to their fellowship that is making a requirement like nothing that it has ever known. All of a sudden they are having a guest speaker, and the moment he opens his mouth something is struck and something is required that was never required or even hinted at before and will be full of portent for all of their future.

The prophet’s function is so absolutely the matter of life and death, more so than can be said of other callings. If it is a false word, then it could be death. If it does not bring a warning, then it could also be death—literal, physical death. If it does not indicate the issues that are eternal, then it could be robbing the hearer. It is not an exaggeration to say that the rejection of the prophets was the death of Israel.
How can one say more for something that is life or death for a people, and yet God invests that in flesh and blood, in mere man, who is subject to every frailty and weakness of his humanity! It is an enormous weight of responsibility that he can say, “Thus says the Lord”, or even if he does not intone that inscription, it is implied, and the weight of that has to borne on the faintness and weakness of his mere humanity.

When God calls Ezekiel, “Son of man,” He is not just mouthing a few words. It is as if the prophet needs to be reminded of his humanity. God chooses a frail piece of humanity for so ponderous a task because it is a statement against the mystery of the principalities and the powers of the air. The prophet himself in his own person, in the election of God, is itself a statement against the wisdom of the powers of darkness.
One would think that God would reserve such elect speaking for Himself. He alone is qualified and has the authority, and yet to invest it in flesh, the very mystery of incarnation, runs smack dab into the heart of the wisdom of the powers of the air. They would never have done a thing like that, but would have chosen something appropriate to the task, for example, something weighty, monumental, dignified and that carries all the credentials. God’s prophets, therefore, are extremely conscious of their frail humanity, not only at the inception of their call, but also in all the whole longevity of their use.

Fire in the Bones 04

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3. Out of God’s justice, prophetic speech characteristically speaks about human suffering. It takes human suffering as a definitional datum of the human, historical process. Thus, already in the exodus narrative, when Israel cries out, God sees, God hears, God knows, God remembers, and God intervenes (Exod. 2:23-25; 3:7-14).12 It is the utterance of hurt that moves God to newness. The powers of modernity want not to notice human suffering; they want to define suffering as a legitimate and necessary cost of well-being or as an inexplicable given of human history. Prophetic speech demystifies pain and sees clearly that much pain is principally caused by the manipulation of economic and political access whereby the strong regularly destroy the weak. Such suffering is not a legitimate, bearable cost; and it is not inexplicable. Instead, social pain is a product of social relationships that can be transformed. Prophetic speech focused in hurt speaks against any tidy administration of social relations that crushes human reality in the interest of order, progress, profit, or “the common good.”

From:
Like Fire in the Bones
Walter Brueggemann

Tozer on entertainment 04

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Don’t Seek Entertainment

 

There is a cross for you and me and there is a cross for every one of us. And that cross is subjective and internal and experiential. That cross is that which we voluntarily take up—that’s hard and bitter and distasteful—that we do for Christ’s sake and suffer the consequences and despise the shame.

 

But the evangelicals of which we are a part say, “Let the cross kill Jesus but we will live on and be happy and have fun.” But the cross on the hill has got to become the cross in the heart. When the cross on the hill has been transformed by the miraculous grace of the Holy Ghost into the cross in the heart, then we begin to know something of what it means and it will become to us the cross of power. (Sermon #40 on Hebrews, Toronto)

 

We have the breezy, self-confident Christians with little affinity for Christ and His cross. We have the joy-bell boys that can bounce out there and look as much like a game show host as possible. Yet, they are doing it for Jesus’ sake?! The hypocrites! They’re not doing it for Jesus’ sake at all; they are doing it in their own carnal flesh and are using the church as a theater because they haven’t yet reached the place where the legitimate theater would take them.

 

(Sermon, “Complete Surrender,” Chicago)

Tozer on Worship 04

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God is infinitely more concerned that He have worshipers then that He have workers. We have degenerated into the place where we put God on charity and make Him to be a foreman who can’t find help.

 He stands at the wayside asking, “How many helpers will come to My rescue and come and do My work?”

If we could only remember that God doesn’t need anybody here – God does not need anybody in this city.

 

From

The Chief End of Man, Sermon #4, Toronto, 1962

Burden in the Valley

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The Burden of the Valley of Vision

 

Reading: Isaiah 22:1

 

The word “burden” here just does mean a load or weight, as much as a man can carry. Thus the Prophets felt what the Lord had shown them to be something that weighed heavily upon them and often overwhelmed them.

 

The prophetic function is brought into operation at a time when things are not well with the people and work of God, when declension has set in; when things have lost their distinctive Divine character; when there is a falling short or an accretion of features which were never intended by God.

 

The Prophet in principle is one who represents, in himself and his vision, God’s reaction to either a dangerous tendency or a positive deviation. He stands on God’s full ground and the trend breaks on him.

 

That which constitutes this prophetic function is spiritual perception, discernment, and insight. The Prophet sees, and he sees what others are not seeing. It is vision, and this vision is not just of an enterprise, a “work,” a venture; it is a state, a condition. It is not for the work as such that he is concerned, but for the spiritual state that dishonors and grieves the Lord.

 

This faculty of spiritual discernment makes the Prophet a very lonely man, and brings upon him all the charges of being singular, extreme, idealistic, unbalanced, spiritually proud, and even schismatic. He makes many enemies for himself.

 

Sometimes he is not vindicated until after he has left the earthly scene of his testimony. Nevertheless, the Prophet is the instrument of keeping the Lord’s full thought alive, and of maintaining vision without which the people are doomed to disintegration.

 

While it has so often been an individual with whom the Lord has deposited His fuller thought and made His prophetic vessel, it has also very frequently been a company of His people in which He has been more utterly represented. Such companies are seen scattered down the ages. They were the Lord’s reactionary vessels. Such, surely, are the “Overcomers” of every “end-time.”

 

The mass of Christians may be too taken up with the externals and accepted ways of Christianity; too spiritually satisfied with the lesser; too bound by tradition and fettered by the established order. The Lord cannot do His full thing with them because He does not put His new wine into old wineskins; the skins would burst and the life be wasted, not conserved to definite purpose.

 

He finds Himself limited by an order which, while it may have been right at a certain time and for a certain period to carry His testimony up to a certain point, yet now remains as the fixed bound, and for want of an essential adjustableness His fuller purposes are impossible of realization. So it was with Judaism, so it has become with Christianity, and so it is with many an instrumentality which has been greatly used by Him.

 

There is no finality with us here, and it is dangerous to the Lord’s interest to conclude that, because the Lord led and gave a pattern at a certain time, that was full and final and must remain. Every bit of new revelation will call for adjustment, but revelation waits for such a sense of need as to at least make for willingness to adjust.

 

The Lord needs that which really does represent His fullest possible thought, and not those who are just doing a good work. But it costs; and this is the “burden of the valley of vision.”

 

T. Austin-Sparks