Excerpts from "The Picture of a Prophet" by Leonard Ravenhill

Posted: 2008-05-08 09:12:45

Excerpts from “The Picture of a Prophet” by Leonard Ravenhill   (1994) (taken from “The Banner” (Winter 2008) Pinecrest Bible T.C., Salisbury Center, NY)

• Introductory note by David Nelson: This article is for all who are desiring to follow the Lord in these days. Would that all God’s people prophesy. All of us will experience the things described below whatever our gifts are for we all will be hated by the world the closer we walk with the Lord. We as Prophetic Ministry do not claim to have achieved all that is below but we with all of you are seeking for so much more of this. 

The prophet in his day is fully accepted of God and totally 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 these experiences. They are his “brand name.”

The prophet comes to set up that which (will) 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. 

The prophet is God’s detective seeking for a lost treasure. He is totally “otherworldly.” He marches to another drummer. He breathes the rarified air of inspiration. He is a “seer” who comes to lead the blind. He lives in the heights of God and comes into the valley with a “Thus saith the Lord.” He lives in “splendid isolation.” He is the villain of today and the hero of tomorrow. He is excommunicated while alive and exalted when dead! He is friendless while living and famous when dead. He eats daily 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 has a heart like a volcano and his words are as fire. He faces God before he faces men, but he is self-effacing.

Our national need at this hour is not that the dollar recover its strength, or that we save face (in the world), 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. 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 this nation at this given moment is a FAMINE OF HEARING OF THE WORDS OF GOD. (Amos 8:11)

Millions have been spent on evangelism in the last 25 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?

GOD’S MEN ARE IN HIDING UNTIL THE DAY OF THEIR SHOWING FORTH. They will come.

There is a terrible vacuum in evangelical Christianity today. The missing person in our ranks is the prophet. *(Let me add a note from David Nelson here. We are missing the Lord, we are missing all the gifts of the Spirit to be expressed from the least of the brethren to the greatest. We are missing meetings being 100% led by the Lord. There is a lot we are missing but the Lord will restore His glory to the true Church, His Bride, the tabernacle of David will rise again, and all things will be restored to glorify His name as never before!) We need men with terrible earnestness. Men totally otherworldly. Men rejected by other men, even good men, because they consider them too austere, too severely committed, too negative and unsociable.

Let them be as plain as John the Baptist. Let them for a season be voices crying in the wilderness of modern theology and stagnant “churchianity.” Let them be as selfless as Paul the Apostle. Let them too, say and live, “This ONE thing I do.”

Let them reject ecclesiastical favors. Let them be self-abasing, non-self-seeking, non-self-projecting, non-self-glorying, non-self-promoting. Let them say nothing that will draw men to themselves but only that which will move men to God. Let them come daily from the throne room of a holy God, the place where they have received the order of the day.

Let them, under God, unstop the ears of millions who are deaf through the clatter of shekels milked from this hour of material mesmerism. Let them cry with a voice this century has not heard because they have seen a vision no man in this century has seen. God, send us (these men and women of true revival) 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!