STILL TELLING HIS SERVANTS

By James Wilson, Coordinator

PrayNorthstate

On New Year’s Eve 2006 a woman and her husband were worshipping the Lord and seeking His blessings for the Scot Valley in which they live. While Diana and Stan were praising and praying to the Lord He spoke to them. He said that He had heard their prayers – and the prayers of many others – and that He was ripping the structures of witchcraft out of the valley that very night. Four weeks later the local newspaper covered a story first broken by CBS News San Francisco in which a charity called Campus California was exposed for stealing the funds they raised for poor children in Africa. The Scot Valley based group sold donated clothing to maintain lavish lifestyles for their leaders, according to the news report. They were also exposed as practicing witches – as the prophecy is visibly and progressively coming to pass.

The prophetic word delivered through Diana and Stan was one component of a larger promise that revival would come to their entire county when word of a healing from cancer got out throughout the region. More than a hundred people have participated in the testimony, prayer for its fulfillment, and ministry opportunities – accompanied by signs and wonders both subtle and dramatic – that are the accumulating fulfillment of this composite revelation over several years.

Prophecy is not new amongst the people of God. In Creation He speaks directly into the cosmos; after that His word is always spoken through human ambassadors – except when He uses a donkey. Every word of Scripture is prophecy – because prophecy is simply whatever God is saying to His people. In Amos 3:7 God tells His people that He will do nothing on the earth without first telling His servants the prophets. That promise is deliberately and directly fulfilled in such Old Testament books as Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Joel.

The Son of God stakes His credibility largely on the fact that He fulfils so many prophetic statements about Himself. It is standard doctrine for all Bible believing Christians that each prophetic utterance of the Old Testament points to Messiah one way or another and – more to the point – the Old Testament was written in order to prepare people for the coming of their Messiah. Jesus demonstrates this in Luke 24 when He opens the scriptures to the disciples on the Emmaus Road in such a way that “our hearts burned within us.” But if all prophecy is fulfilled in the Christ what can we say about prophecy in the New Testament? It is still the uttered Word of God; it must then be prophetic in some sense. And so it is.

Jesus always said that He came to bring the Kingdom of God – on earth as it is in Heaven. He states clearly in Mark 9:1 that some listening to Him will remain alive when the Kingdom comes in power – it came in power with the Pentecost event fifty days after His resurrection. But the coming of the Kingdom was not completed on that day; it is not yet complete on this day. Peter preached that what the crowds were witnessing was a fulfillment of Joel 2:28 in which God predicts the outpouring of His Spirit on all men and women. The Pentecost outpouring was dramatic enough – but the Spirit was only poured out on three thousand people that day – about a tithe of those living in Jerusalem. The disciples have taken the Gospel into Samaria and the nations since then and the Spirit outpouring has reached more than two billion people – about a third of those living on the planet. The Kingdom prophecy is perfectly accurate – but it is a progressive event like the unfolding word given to Diana and Stan for their valley. The Kingdom has come – and it is coming. Every word of the New Testament points to that.

But there is more than a predictive relationship between New Testament prophecy and the coming of the Kingdom. The community envisioned in the prophecy is itself a prophetic community. That is to say it is a Kingdom – and a community – in which the whole people are engaged in bringing forth a composite and communal prophetic revelation of the vision of God in Christ. The Kingdom is not only predicted but literally birthed in the words and acts of the community of the New Covenant. Every word of the New Testament – and much of the Old – engages this reality.

In addition to Joel’s proclamation we find Isaiah 59 predicting that “This is my covenant with them…My Spirit, who is on you, and my words that I have put in your mouth will not depart from your mouth, or from the mouths of your children, or from the mouths of their descendants from this time on and forever.” It is the whole people who will be prophetic – speaking forth the life-breathing words of the Life-breathing Creator. God says, “In will give them an undivided heart and put a new spirit in them…Then they will follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws,” in Ezekiel 11. And He promises in Jeremiah 31:34 that, “No longer will a man teach his neighbor or a man his brother, saying, ‘Know the Lord,’ because they will all know me.” In other words, the community will morph from one in which prophets reside to one in which the corporate life is that of the prophet.

But no one claims that every Christian will be a little Elijah or a little Jeremiah. Ephesians 4 makes it clear that gifts are distributed throughout the Body rather than lodged in special individuals; 1 Corinthians 12 shouts that every part of the Body provides a giftedness to the whole that is beyond calculation. In fact the Spirit of Prophecy – the Spirit of the Living God – that rested on Elijah and Jeremiah rests upon the entire Body in the New Testament Church. In the first century a professional clergy order did not develop because leadership was by giftedness and vocation from moment to moment – in the worship services and in the ministry through which the Church expressed its love for God and mankind. Today members of the Church bring forth words of revelation in whole or in part – and others augment what has been uttered. Prophetic activities – such as the Paah-ho-ammi prayer project of PrayNorthState or the prayer tents of Redding Transformation – require anywhere from dozens to hundreds of people to staff them and bring a different flavor to each tent or team as all pray into the objectives that God has laid on them. Practical projects of service undertaken in the Name of the Lord have always operated along these lines.

The fulfillment of a prophetic vision like the promise a Redding pro-life care-giving ministry called Carenet would operate in three counties and occupy the land belonging to an abortion referring agency required more than twenty years, a succession of directors, and hundreds of God-ordained intersecting opportunities – many of them in the hands of people who knew nothing of the prophetic words they embodied. There was also a progressive quality to the revelation; others prophesied and brought a full-service medical clinic in all three facilities. Prophecy in the New Testament today is both a composite and progressive activity in which all members of the Body have a potentially central role.

We are talking about the difference between Elijah prophesying both drought and rain over a seven year period (1 Kings 17 and 18) and a prayer team for Fiji prophetically halting the rain so that houses could be built in the same way that drought was repeatedly broken in Northern California through the concerted prayers of many more. God spoke His word of power through one man eight hundred years before Christ; He speaks even greater power through many men and women two thousand years later. Ushering in the Kingdom is a corporate project of many in One and One in many.

Ministries such as the Bethel School of Supernatural Ministry exist in order to teach and release multitudes of Christians from many backgrounds into their proper place in a prophetic culture or economy in their communities. This teach-and-release feature is perhaps the defining role of modern day prophets. The school is itself the fruit of a vision shared by pastors Bill Johnson and Kris Vallotton of the church – the latter holding the office of prophet and the former being an apostle in the five-fold ministry scheme of Ephesians 4. Although Kris functions as a prophet in bringing forth fresh revelation for the congregation and for the region in which he ministers, he understands his own highest and best use as drawing out and shaping prophetic gifts in others. It is to fulfil this use that the school exists. Modern day prophets such as Chuck Pierce, Paul Cain and Bob Jones operate in their prophetic giftings as well, but their office is fulfilled primarily in the schools they lead and teach.

In Redding and throughout Northern California some of the most significant prophetic statements have been released by people who are not prophets by office, but who flow in the gift of prophecy because they live in a culture that encourages the composite and progressive outpouring of the Spirit of Prophecy – which is the Spirit of the Living God and of His Kingdom. This outpouring transcends the clothing in which it comes – whether the flamboyance of an ecstatic style of preaching or the quietness of a vision that simply calls people to pray for the promise of God on their communities. It is a great time to be alive in the Body of Christ because He is doing a new thing. But then, isn’t He always?

PrayNorthstate can be reached at 530-941-3470, or at praynorthstate@charter.net