Judgmental Disposition quenches the Prophetic Spirit
I was seeking the Lord as to why we as the people of God have such a hard time truely turning from our ways and throwing ourselves wholeheartedly into the heart of God for our lives.
I know people who have followed the prophetic movement for many more years than I. Some of them know some of the major leaders in the prophetic movement before they were ever famous and had large ministries. The romance of the office of the prophet doesn’t affect them. They know they are just messed up errant people just like anyone else. This is good to a degree.
But think of Jesus and John the Baptist? In Matthew 11 Jesus makes the statement “Blessed is he who is not offended because of Me”…He then goes on to give an indictment against that generation as one that was unresponsive, one that called John the baptist demonized, and called Jesus a drunken sinful fool.
The issues with making judgments about Jesus and John the Baptist has less to do with finding fault with them and more about NOT UNDERSTANDING them. We are naturally disrupted by that which we do not understand, we are provoked in our flesh to make judgments about that which we do not understand.
To bring this full circle, we may have had a history of seeing the weakness of true prophetic leaders in the body of Christ, but if we let judgments take root in our hearts, it will dull our hearts from the word of the Lord coming to them.
A generation with a critical spirit will be HARDENED by the prophetic word of the Lord. They see the gulf between where they are and where the prophet is calling them, and because they don’t understand the heart of the Lord, they are pressed to make judgments in their hearts towards the prophets, thus allowing them to be unresponsive. It’s a way of exalting ourselves above the knowledge of God.
bunny trail – one of the main ministries of Paul was commending himself unto the conscience of men as to not hinder them from receiving the message because of this propensity latent in the human heart to cut people down in our minds when confronted with the burden of the prophetic word of the Lord.
While my heart is to contend for Jeremiah 23:22, one who stands in the counsel of the Lord and hears his word that people may turn…I am feeling the weight of this reality, that if the hearts of men are drawn to cut themselves off from the word by seeing weaknesses in my life, I would only serve to harden their hearts.
It really puts discipleship in context to proclaiming the word of God. But at the end of the day I cannot be held responsible to the conditions of the hearts of men ultimately, they called the spotless lamb a drunken sinner and the “greatest man born of a woman” a demonized maniac.
So here we find a tension. The people of God need a word to emerge that would turn their hearts. They need a vessel that would commend itself to their conscience, but they also need that root of pride to be unresponsive to the word of the Lord to be uprooted.
Lord grant to your people wisdom in Jesus name…
