Prophet Blessing #3: A Team to Birth the Vision
Beloved, I call your spirit to attention, and I invite the Prophet portion to come explore God’s gifts to you.
Prophet, you often feel like you are alone in implementing the visions God has conceived in you. Nothing could be farther from the truth.
In actuality, God designed a team to take what you conceive and to implement it. Consider for a moment the redemptive gifts as one picture of the kind of team God might give you.
You, the Prophet, are often called upon by God to conceive the new thing that is in His heart. You carry it alone for months or even decades, or at times you are part of a global “womb” in the Body of Christ, carrying a new thing for one or more generations.
The Exhorter is gifted with knowing and ruling over the seasons, so God may well use that gift to start “labor” when the baby is full term and the world is ready.
Frequently God uses the Giver gift, either in a person, a place or an institution to birth what the Prophet conceived.
The Servant is then tapped to protect the new birth from premature death during the immediate assaults by God’s Ancient Enemy.
The Teacher cleanses the new vision from the violence of the birthing process and validates its right to take its place in the spiritual community.
The Ruler takes the small thing and grows it to its full size with ease and confidence.
Then God brings in the Mercy gift to establish the proper alignment of God’s new gift to mankind into the mix of all the rest of the spiritual, social and natural eco systems.
So, Prophet, will God give you a team of one of each gift? Probably not.
The Master Musician knows the exact proportions of each instrument needed to play the music of your new conception. You might need a small ensemble or a full orchestra. He knows precisely what instruments in what ratio are needed for your music.
So you ask, “Where is my team? Why do I feel so alone?”
Ah, Prophet. Peace! And have faith in the Giver of all Good Gifts to complete your team in the right way, at the right time.
Roland Allen was a great missionary to China in the late 1800s. As one with the redemptive gift of Prophet, he conceived a magnificent new model for missions work. But his team was not ready in his life time because the season was not yet right.
Before his death in 1948, two things happened. First, he fell from favor with the institutional church and retreated to Nairobi, Kenya, where even there his Bishop forbade him to preach anymore. Second, he told his sons that his books would come into their own in the 1960s.
And in fact, they did. During the 1960s and ‘70s my own father was part of the team of tens of thousands of missionaries who birthed and built what Allen conceived.
Prophet, I invite you today to renounce the Elijah syndrome. He was magnificently competent himself but crashed and burned when he thought there was no team for him. Far from having no team, Father had prepared an extra-ordinary Giver assistant to walk intimately with him.
In addition to that, God had positioned 7,000 teammates for him in what appeared to be a spiritually barren land.
Prophet! Your Father is the ultimate team builder. He has graced you to conceive His heart in this world and has prepared the perfect team, at the perfect time to carry His vision conceived in you to the full extent He envisioned.
I invite you to embrace your team by faith, even when it is totally invisible to you, because in so doing, you proclaim the righteous wisdom of your God.
I bless you, Prophet, as the strategic beginning of a fascinating precise team designed for you and for you alone.
Welcome in our midst, Prophet, because some of us are the rest of your team. You are most welcome among us. We bless you in the name of our King, Jesus Christ.
At home
Fullerton, CA
September 20, 2008
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