Leonard Ravenhill

Bethany Fellowship Inc. © 1979

The prophet is a man of deep pathos in the classic sense of the word, which means "suffering." He suffers with his people, for his people, and because of his people. Above all, he suffers with God and for God, because sin and unrighteous- ness alienate the people from their holy God. (Italics mine.)

– Dr. Victor Buksbazen

Oh, ye white-faced, weak-kneed believers! Believers in what? Ye shifty speculators, stealers of prophetic mantles! go, drink yourselves to death, and go to your proper devil! Ye are not the church of Christ, might well be the speech which ascended Pauls might deliver to us, as we reshuffle the theological cards, and rearrange our credenda, and modify and dilute our doctrinal positions and enthusiasms.

– Dr. Joseph Parker

Our pulpits today are occupied with puppets rather than with prophets, with organizers rather than with agonizers.

– Leonard Ravenhill

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Chapter 2

Picture of a Prophet

The prophet in his day is fully accepted of God and to- tally 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 of 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 are 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 lost spiritual treasures. The degree of his effectiveness is determined by the measure of his 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 with 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 he claims no birth. right.

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.

Daily he eats 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. God talks to him about men. 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 re- cover 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 plenty" are over for us. The "seven years of famine" are ahead.

But the greatest famine of all in the 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 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, with- out 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 politi- cal 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 other- worldly. 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 this hour of material mesmerism.

Let him cry with a voice this century has not heard be- cause 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 enlightened men, totally blind spiritually, lead us to an ever-nearing Armageddon.

God have mercy; send us PROPHETS!

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