A prevailing sense of isolation among prophets and seers, produced, by erroneous interpretations and implementations of “intimacy with God”, leaves us with people operating in a vacuum who should be fully engaged in open, leadership level, public dialogue.
Prophets as leaders escapes us. Some apostles even assume prophets are mouthpieces with no more responsibility than to speak and share and “go back to the cave” and stare at the rocks until you get something else.
Prophet as leader seems far away when it should be as real as Sunday morning sunrise! We need some thunder in the house! We need some oversight for the process of revelation that will move us past the Cracker Jack prize mentality that “Prophecy for Dummies” has produced!
Personal prophecy for those with conferenceitis is another excuse to avoid submitting to leaders so God’s purpose can be pursued with principle, process, and protocol. It is an escape from the process of preparation. It is a magic want approach to destiny. It is as wrong as horoscopes and star gazing when pursued outside prophetic process.
Personal Prophecy Delusions
Personal prophesy dominates the modern lineup simply because the conference-based promotion of prophetic seeks to mainstream the prophetic by fleshly means. The subtle promise that you might get a life-changing word attracts scrapbook prophetic junkies. They hope some word will obligate God to finally get His act together and make their Disney star wishes come true with a personal “bippidity-boppity boo”.
Having prophesied to tens of thousands of people, I won’t stand for anyone assuming here that I have a problem with personal prophecy. But the merchandising of the prophetic is not just a problem for those charging $200 for a good word and $500 for a better word. It is the merchandising that arises when we put the hottest prophets on the circuit on the flyer with the implication that you just haven’t been in the room with the right level of prophet, but if you get to this one…(pay your $75 pre-registration fee today lest you miss this conference and God never get the “set you into your amazing future” prophecy you’ve been hoping for).
Multiple Levels
The Prophet releases revelation with multiple levels of revelation. The Prophet engages in awareness of the opposing views. The Prophet understands the dialogue requires more than mouthpiece function. The Prophet has eldership authority and responsibility, oversight of a scope of blueprinted territory.
The sense in which both apostle and prophet are foundational becomes more clear in this way: the scope of assignment comes from the blueprints they share in leadership function. When prophets (or apostles) step outside the scope of their blueprints assignments or scuttle back into a cave, they abjugate the vitals of their leadership.
They become much less that God intended prophets to be. The idea that a prophet needs to become a hermit and leave the real leadership to others is the very limitation we need to breakthrough. That mentality puts the prophet into performance mode as much as anything else. The prophets begin to see themselves only valuable when they rush out of the caves, to the platforms, release the most recent thing they got in the cave. On the way back to the cave, they fall more deeply under the influence of the faulty conclusion that “my part is now over’.
Of course, sometimes the observable oddity of prophets and their assumed weirdness that cloaks their insecurities makes people want them to live in caves. Prophets as leaders prophesy without wearing flashing bow ties, blue streaks in their hair, half shaven faces, and pony tails, long fingernails, and locust blood on their chins. “Cave slug” fashions are not necessary to prophetic accuracy.
