The Making of a prophet
THE MAKING of A PROPHET - by T. Austin-Sparks
Prophetic ministry is not something that you can take up. It is
something that you are. No academy can make you a prophet.
Samuel instituted the schools of the prophets... But there is a
great deal of difference between those academic prophets and the
living, anointed prophets. The academic prophets became members
of a profession and swiftly degenerated into something unworthy.
All the false prophets came from schools of prophets, and were
accepted publicly on that ground. They had been to college and
were accepted. But they were false prophets. Going to a religious
college does not of itself make you a prophet of God.
My point is this - the identity of the vessel with its ministry is the very heart of Divine thought. A man is called to represent the thoughts of God, to represent them in what he is, not in something that he takes up as a form or line of ministry, not in somethingthat he does. The vessel itself is the ministry and you cannot divide between the two.
THE NECESSITY for SELF-EMPTYING
That explains everything in the life of the great prophets. It explains
the life of Moses, the prophet whom the Lord God raised up from
among his brethren (Deut. 18:15,18). Moses essayed to take up
his life-work. He was a man of tremendous abilities, "learned in all
the wisdom of the Egyptians " (Acts 7:22), with great natural
qualifications and gifts, and then somehow he got some conception
of a life-work for God. It was quite true; it was a true conception, a
right idea; he was very honest, there was no question at all about
his motives; but he essayed to take up that work on the basis of
what he was naturally, with his own ability, qualifications and zeal,
and on that basis disaster was allowed to come upon the whole
thing.
Not so are prophets made; not so can the prophetic office be
exercised. Moses must go into the wilderness and for forty years
be emptied out, until there is nothing left of all that as a basis upon
which he can have confidence to do the work of God or fulfil any
Divine commission. He was by nature a man "mighty in his words
and works"; and yet now he says, "I am not eloquent... I am slow
of speech..." (Exodus 4:10). There has been a tremendous
undercutting of all natural facility and resource...
We go through times of trial and test under the hand of God, and it
is so easy to get into that frame of mind which says in effect, 'The
Lord does not want us, He need not have us!' We let everything go,
we do not care about anything; we have gone down under our trials
and we are rendered useless. I do not believe the Lord ever comes
to a person like that to take them up. Elijah, dispirited, fled to the
wilderness, and to a cave in the mountains; but he had to get
somewhere else before the Lord could do anything with him. "What
doest thou here, Elijah?" (I Kings 19:9). The Lord never comes to
a man and recommissions him when he is in despair. 'God shall
forgive thee all but thy despair' (F. W. H. Myers, 'St. Paul') -
because despair is lost faith in God, and God can never do
anything with one who has lost faith.
Moses was emptied to the last drop, and yet he was not angry or
disagreeable with God. What was the Lord doing? He was making
a prophet. Beforehand, the man would have taken up an office, he
would have made the prophetic function serve him, he would have
used it. There was no inward, vital relationship between the man
and the work that he was to do; they were two separate things; the
work was objective to the man. At the end of forty years in the
wilderness he is in a state for this to become subjective; something
has been done. There has been brought about a state which
makes the man fit to be a living expression of the Divine thought.
He has been emptied of his own thoughts to make room for
God's thoughts; he has been emptied of his own strength, that all
the energy should be of God... That was the great lesson this
prophet had to learn. 'I cannot!' 'All right', said the Lord, 'but I AM.'
A great deal is made of the natural side of many of the Lord's
servants, and usually with tragic results. A lot is made of Paul. '
What a great man Paul was naturally, what intellect he had, what
training, what tremendous abilities!' That may all be true, but ask
Paul what value it was to him when he was right up against a
spiritual situation. He will cry, "Who is sufficient for these things?
... Our sufficiency is from God" (II Cor. 2:16; 3:5). Paul was taken
through experiences where he, like Moses, despaired of life. He
said, "We... had the sentence of death within ourselves, that we
should not trust in ourselves, but in God which raiseth the dead"
(II Cor. 1:9).
MESSAGE INWROUGHT by ACTUAL EXPERIENCE
You see, the principle is at work all the time, that God is going to
make the ministry and the minister identical. You see it in all the
prophets. The Lord stood at nothing. He took infinite pains. He
worked even through domestic life, the closest relationships of life.
Think of the tragedy of Hosea's domestic life. Think of Ezekiel,
whose wife the Lord took away in death at a stroke. The Lord said,
'Get up in the morning, anoint your face, allow not the slightest
suggestion of mourning or tragedy to be detected; go out as
always before, as though nothing had happened; show yourself to
the people, go about with a bright countenance, provoke them to
enquire what you mean by such outrageous behaviour.' The Lord
brought this heartbreak upon him and then required him to act
thus. Why? Ezekiel was a prophet; he had got to embody his
message, and the message was this: 'Israel, God's wife, has
become lost to God, dead to God, and Israel takes no notice of it;
she goes on the same as ever, as though nothing had happened.'
The prophet must bring it home by his own experience. God is
working the thing right in. He works it in in deep and terrible ways
in the life of His servant to produce ministry.
God is not allowing us to take up things and subjects. If we are
under the Holy Ghost, He is going to make us prophets; that is,
He is going to make the prophecy a thing that has taken place in
us, so that what we say is only making vocal something that has
been going on, that has been done in us. God has been doing it
through years in strange, deep, terrible ways in some lives,
standing at nothing, touching everything; and the vessel, thus
wrought upon, is the message. People do not come to hear what
you have to teach. They have come to see what you are, to see
that thing which has been wrought by God. What a price the
prophetic instrument has to pay!
So Moses went into the wilderness, to the awful undoing of his
natural life, his natural mentality; to be brought to zero; to have
the thing wrought in him. And was God justified? - for after all it
was a question of resource for the future. Oh, the strain that was
going to bear down upon that life! Sometimes Moses well-nigh
broke; at times he did crack under the strain. "I am not able to
bear all this people alone, because it is too heavy for me"
(Num. 11:14)... A terrific strain was going to bear down upon him,
and only a deep inwrought thing, something that had been done
inside, would be enough to carry through...
With us, too, the strain may be terrific; oft-times there will come
the very strong temptation - 'Let go a little, compromise a little, do
not be so utter; you will get more open doors if you will only
broaden out a bit; you can have a lot more if you ease up!' What
is going to save you in that hour of temptation? The only thing is
that God has done this thing in you. It is part of your very being -
not something you can give up; it is you, your very life. That is
the only thing. God knew what He was doing with Moses. The
thing had got to be so much one with the man that there was no
dividing between them. The man was the prophetic ministry.
He was rejected by his brethren; they would not have him. "Who
made thee a prince and a judge over us?" (Ex. 2:14). That is the
human side of it. But there was the Divine side. It was of God that
he went into the wilderness for forty years. It had to be, from God's
side. It looked as though it was man's doing. But it was not so.
These two things went together. Rejection by his brethren was all
in line with the sovereign purpose of God. It was the only way in
which God got the opportunity He needed to reconstitute this
man. The real preparation of this prophet took place during the
time that his brethren repudiated him. Oh, the sovereignty of God,
the wonderful sovereignty of God! A dark time, a deep time; a
breaking, crushing, grinding time; emptied out. It seems as if
everything is going, that nothing will be left. Yet all that is God's
way of making prophetic ministry.