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, without 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 political perfidy, and sour and sick spirituality?
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 otherworldly. 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 because 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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5 comments:
"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."
Wow, what a statement! As a society how much have we lost the ability to see our need for God because of everything that is available to us?
Perhaps the economic downturn/ depression/ whatever you want to call it... will bring us back to God and make us rely on him for everything.
I sometimes wonder what it would be like to live like the Amish without all the tecnology that has us constantly on the go and running from thing to thing without ever slowing down and looking at what is around us. We miss so much of life and opportunitites to help people by being so "materially mesmerized."
Great point Nutcracker -
I would love to live as the Amish do.....I'd just have to learn a new trade.......
I am soooooooo dependent on modern technology to do my job it's crazy.
But your point is well taken. All the fruits of the modern world that God has allowed us to partake in has actually pushed us further from Him.
How much that must displease him.
Ray Comfort expressed that same concern in an personal analogy he had with his children when they were young.
He loved coming home and having his children greet him at the door with hugs and kisses. One day he decided to buy the kids a TV because he loved them so much. One day he came home expecting the hugs and kisses and didn't so much as get a hello because the kids were glued to the TV.
He told them that if the TV was going to come between their love and affection for him, then the TV was going to have to go.
This applies true to what God has lavished on us as well. Sometimes God has to remove some things from us when our affection for Him is diminished from it once was.
God is a jealous God and will not share the affection we are supposed to have with Him with anything else.
There are God's prophets among us today. Too bad we keep ignoring them. We have no ears and no eyes.
There are God's prophets among us today. Too bad we keep ignoring them. We have no ears and no eyes.
"Nevertheless, this book goes forth with a mission. It is written with the profound conviction that the paramount need of the twentieth century is a mighty evangelical revival such as that which was experienced two hundred years ago. Thus, I have sought to show what were the doctrines used of God in the eighteenth-century Revival, and to display the extraordinary fervour which characterized the men whom God raised up in that blessed work. Yea, this book is written in the desire—perhaps in a measure of inner certainty—that we shall see the great Head of the Church once more bring into being His special instruments of revival, that He will again raise up unto Himself certain young men whom He may use in this glorious employ. And what manner of men will they be? Men mighty in the Scriptures, their lives dominated by a sense of the greatness, the majesty and holiness of God, and their minds and hearts aglow with the great truths of the doctrines of grace. They will be men who have learned what it is to die to self, to human aims and personal ambitions; men who are willing to be ‘fools for Christ’s sake’, who will bear reproach and falsehood, who will labour and suffer, and whose supreme desire will be, not to gain earth’s accolades, but to win the Master’s approbation when they appear before His awesome judgment seat. They will be men who will preach with broken hearts and tear-filled eyes, and upon whose ministries God will grant an extraordinary effusion of the Holy Spirit, and who will witness ‘signs and wonders following’ in the transformation of multitudes of human lives."
Arnold Dallimore, George Whitefield, pages 15-16
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