Excerpted from Of God and Men
A prophet is one who knows his times and
what God is trying to say to the people of his times.
What
God says to His church at any given period depends altogether upon her moral and
spiritual condition and upon the spiritual need of the hour. Religious leaders
who continue mechanically to expound the Scriptures without regard to the current
religious situation are no better than the scribes and lawyers of Jesus' day who
faithfully parroted the Law without the remotest notion of what was going on around
them spiritually. They fed the same diet to all and seemed wholly unaware that
there was such a thing as meat in due season. The prophets never made that mistake
nor wasted their efforts in that manner. They invariably spoke to the condition
of the people of their times.
Today we need prophetic preachers; not preachers
of prophecy merely, but preachers with a gift of prophecy. The word of wisdom
is missing. We need the gift of discernment again in our pulpits. It is not ability
to predict that we need, but the anointed eye, the power of spiritual penetration
and interpretation, the ability to appraise the religious scene as viewed from
God's position, and to tell us what is actually going on.
There has probably
never been another time in the history of the world when so many people knew so
much about religious happenings as they do today. The newspapers are eager to
print religious news; the secular news magazines devote several pages of each
issue to the doings of the church and the synagogue; a number of press associations
gather church news and make it available to the religious journals at a small
cost. Even the hiring of professional publicity men to plug one or another preacher
or religious movement is no longer uncommon; the mails are stuffed with circulars
and "releases," while radio and television join to tell the listening public what
religious people are doing throughout the world.
Greater publicity for
religion may be well and I have no fault to find with it. Surely religion should
be the most newsworthy thing on earth, and there may be some small encouragement
in the thought that vast numbers of persons want to read about it. What disturbs
me is that amidst all the religious hubbub hardly a voice is raised to tell us
what God thinks about the whole thing.
Where is the man who can see through
the ticker tape and confetti to discover which way the parade is headed, why it
started in the first place and, particularly, who is riding up front in the seat
of honor?
Not the fact that the churches are unusually active these days,
not what religious people are doing, should engage our attention, but why these
things are so. The big question is Why? And no one seems to have an answer for
it. Not only is there no answer, but scarcely is there anyone to ask the question.
It just never occurs to us that such a question remains to be asked. Christian
people continue to gossip religious shoptalk with scarcely as much as a puzzled
look. The soundness of current Christianity is assumed by the religious masses
as was the soundness of Judaism when Christ appeared. People know they are seeing
certain activity, but just what it means they do not know, nor have they the faintest
idea of where God is or what relation He has toward the whole thing.
What
is needed desperately today is prophetic insight. Scholars can interpret the past;
it takes prophets to interpret the present. Learning will enable a man to pass
judgment on our yesterdays, but it requires a gift of clear seeing to pass sentence
on our own day. One hundred years from now historians will know what was taking
place religiously in this year of our Lord; but that will be too late for us.
We should know right now.
If Christianity is to receive a rejuvenation
it must be by other means than any now being used. If the church in the second
half of this century is to recover from the injuries she suffered in the first
half, there must appear a new type of preacher. The proper, ruler-of-the-synagogue
type will never do. Neither will the priestly type of man who carries out his
duties, takes his pay and asks no questions, nor the smooth-talking pastoral type
who knows how to make the Christian religion acceptable to everyone. All these
have been tried and found wanting.
Another kind of religious leader must
arise among us. He must be of the old prophet type, a man who has seen visions
of God and has heard a voice from the Throne. When he comes (and I pray God there
will be not one but many) he will stand in flat contradiction to everything our
smirking, smooth civilization holds dear. He will contradict, denounce and protest
in the name of God and will earn the hatred and opposition of a large segment
of Christendom. Such a man is likely to be lean, rugged, blunt-spoken and a little
bit angry with the world. He will love Christ and the souls of men to the point
of willingness to die for the glory of the one and the salvation of the other.
But he will fear nothing that breathes with mortal breath.
We need to have
the gifts of the Spirit restored again to the church, and it is my belief that
the one gift we need most now is the gift of prophecy.
AW Tozer
AW
Tozer - The Gift of Prophetic insight 
