The word I have for the church came to me in an unconventional way, so I’ll make it plain by simply saying, I feel the Lord sees that His church has too little compassion, a term that in biblical languages refers to “a gut-level compulsion to help those in need.” It refers to being moved in the bowels, and so He is saying that His Church has blocked up bowels, constipation in a way, and so it needs its bowels to be loosed. And I do not know what the Lord will do to ‘loose our bowels of compassion,’ only that it is a message He is fairly serious about. We are supposed to be people who CHOOSE to forgive, help those in need, and even love our enemies. If we do not choose to do these things, that is, if we do not choose to walk in the spirit, while He may provide us with some incentives to obey, He will certainly NOT FORCE US TO.

The symptoms of this love-less malady include being lukewarm, indifferent, selfish and walking in the ways of the flesh. We are still, I feel, in a time when we can choose to choose, or choose to wait and see, but this grace period will quickly come to a close, I suspect through some very hard, even catastrophic circumstances. (Many people have seen this, including myself.) So this is a season when it is increasingly dangerous to continue being lukewarm because God is orchestrating a shaking to polarize the people of the earth, starting with those called by His name.

God has drawn us into this Valley of Decision to intentionally precipitate a watershed, dividing the church-going Christians between the two camps of the sheep and the goats. The average person will not understand they are being sifted, and is likely to be greatly perplexed, confused and distressed. Ultimately it will be those who will run TO the Lord in their distress who will find shelter as sheep in the care of the Good Shepherd and be saved; those who for whatever reason DO NOT run to Him for help — be it from stubbornness, hardened hearts, selfishness, false images of God (false doctrines), or whatever — will gravitate towards the camp of the goats and be lost. In a way both camps are basically confused, both are immature. But God will be found by the humble, while He will remain hidden to the proud.

Part of this problem has developed obviously because of immature leadership who have not preached the real gospel or taught the meat of the word (they have not understood it). But beyond doctrines and theologies, they have led lives as examples of the carnal nature instead of living lives that have been examples of Christ. The core of this problem again is a root of selfishness, not being submitted in spirit or in truth to the Lord of Love, for that would surely have transformed them into the true image of the Lord, the God of Unfeigned, Spiritual Love.

This is the first issue we need to be aware of — the troubles the people are dealing with. So these are the kinds of problems we, the prophets and intercessors, are being called on to minister to, not only today in this season, but potentially from now until the end of this great purging.

However, the second and real issue I want to address is this: the sin of the prophets. People serve as prophets not because of their own inherent righteousness or spirituality. People are chosen to serve as prophets by God’s Grace alone, and it is by His Grace alone that He has equipped them, opened their eyes, and illuminated their souls with the Light of His truth. Also, prophets serve the Lord primarily as HEARERS, and without stepping past the hearing and becoming DOERS, they too will face the judgment for the sin of not walking in Love. This is very quickly forgotten by many who serve in the prophetic realm by my observation. We read many dozen prophetic words in a given month, and work very hard to cautiously chew over and digest them to understand the Voice of the Lord over a given period of time to discern the season. Sadly, there are times when we read prophetic words that are undoubtedly Truthful Revelations from the Divine, yet the prophets have fallen into the sins of Jonah and Jeremiah — We fall for the same sins as these men did as we hear God’s Truth, but then mock the Body who is blinded and in sin, or become embittered against the leadership who are failing to do their jobs well, or worse if we become indifferent to the looming destruction of the weak whose sins the Lord is exposing to and through us.

I know God mocks the mockers (Psalm 59:8, Proverbs 3:34), and He will accuse the sinful at the Judgment (Psalm 103:9, something that shocked me when He explained that to me recently), and He will vomit the lukewarm out of his mouth (Revelations 3:16); yet God can do that because HE IS GOD; He alone is perfect in righteousness, wisdom and justice. We aren’t, and so we can’t do those things! We are servants, not masters. We are still going to have to stand before Him and we will ourselves be judged as we have judged others — this especially includes judging those we have prophesied to or about.

Jonah and Jeremiah

We as prophets can be tempted to act like Jonah, who had God’s word, and knew God’s behavior well enough that He knew God was going to spare the lives of the murderous Ninevites if they repented. But he reacted in sin by fleeing to prevent the sinners from being given the chance to be saved. He says this to God, “I knew you were going to forgive them, so that’s why I fled.” God showed Jonah, by way of an object lesson in supernatural gardening, that if Jonah would be right to feel upset about the death of a weedy vine, how much more would God feel upset about the condemnation (not just physical death, but spiritual damnation into Hell for eternity) of a whole city of people who did not know right from wrong in the first place. Jonah already had the Word of God for sinners, but it was only finally at the end of the story that he began to understand a revelation of the Heart of God for sinners. This is very important. Jonah’s sin was not having love or compassion for the sinners he was prophesying to — and so we are also made aware of the standard of behavior we as prophets and intercessors are being held accountable for.

Then there was Jeremiah, who had a harder assignment than Jonah in most ways. My heart goes out to him since he was sent to tell the people of the Lord that God was going to bring their sins to account unless they repented — NOW. They believed in a kind of prosperity gospel, and WERE CONVINCED God would never let Jerusalem fall. So not only did they not repent but they added to their sins by horribly persecuting Jeremiah, burning his prophetic warnings, and even trying to kill him. Jeremiah was rightfully upset, and complained to God about his plight, first in Jeremiah 12, asking God whether it wouldn’t be better to just kill all the sinners so the land would be healed. God says in verse 5, “If you have run with footmen and they have tired you out, then how can you compete with horses?” basically telling Jeremiah that he needed to find a greater source of strength than his own emotional store, because even greater trouble was on the way, and I think giving him the chance to see a bigger perspective. Jeremiah was forgetting he was being sent to save these sinners, not condemn them. Bitter, Jeremiah complains again in chapter 15, only this time he asks God if He could be really trusted to care for him or will He be as a deceptive spring whose waters fail ... God replied by telling Jeremiah …. to repent! (v. 19) This word is rendered in some versions as ‘return’ but is the same word used in verse 7, saying, God will destroy the rebellious people “for they have not returned from their wicked ways.” I think ‘repent’ is a good rendering of this word, but what did Jeremiah, the one who had God’s prophetic truth, have to repent of?

Jeremiah did not understand God’s heart — not toward himself, or for the sinners he was warning. He became hopeless because he was bitter, having lost all compassion for the people God was trying to save, and he feared God would let him die as well. Jeremiah had a hard job so I don’t blame him — I’d probably complain a lot worse that he did! — but it was recorded in Scripture to be a lesson to us and I think it is appropriate for what I see happening in the prophetic community at this time.

There were worse examples of course, such as Caiaphas, who acted worse than Balaam or King Saul did in my opinion. A grumpy old man, Caiaphas prophesied that Jesus would die to gather God’s people together, and so he plotted to kill Jesus himself. Talk about having God’s True Word but missing God’s True Heart! I’d hate to think any of us are following his example. God forbid!

Nevertheless, we’ve been shown the lives of these prophets as models for us to understand our hearts and shortcomings so we can be set free and actually grow into the Fullness of the Stature of Christ. We may begin our prophetic ministries acting like Jonah, and would feel justified to complain and become embittered of heart like Jeremiah, but we need to repent and become like Samuel to please the Lord and fulfill our callings.

Samuel knew the people’s sin in rejecting God as their King and it devastated him. YET HE CONTINUED TO PRAY for them. He confronted the people and called down rain during harvest as a sign and really got the people’s attention. When they were afraid, he warned them NOT to run FROM God, but to draw near and He would lead them in His way. This is 1 Samuel 12:18-25. But then about himself in verse 23 he basically says, “As for me, God Forbid that I would sin against God by NOT continuing to pray for you.” He knew their sin, but he knew God’s heart, and He also knew his commission and so was faithful not to abandon them to the devouring lion as Jonah tried to do. Samuel wanted to help them be saved.

Our reaction as prophets and intercessors needs to be like Samuel, but we may react like either Jonah or Jeremiah until we’ve developed the right heart of compassion. How else are we going to be able to endure standing in the Gap, being stretched between God’s Heart of Love to forgive and nurture, and His Holy Wrath and Justice to punish and ‘cut off’ the wicked — standing between a Holy God and a Sinful People … and not quit? But this is what it means to be a priest, a shepherd, and the true meaning of serving the Lord as a prophet and intercessor ... that’s what Christ did and what He is calling us to do as well. May we be found faithful!

Edward Johnson,

This e-mail address is being protected from spambots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it