Prophet Blessing #8: Revealing Life's Treasures

Beloved, I call your spirit to attention, and I invite the Prophet portion to come explore how God has designed you to enrich the world in your unique way.

Prophet, one of the most exquisitely elegant gifts your tribe gives the world is your perspective on the treasures people have. This is not only deeply valued by us but it strikes a stupendous blow at the King’s enemy. From the Garden of Eden on, the devil has threatened people with the poverty spirit by hiding from them the treasures they truly have.

Consider how Naomi the Prophet revealed to Ruth the treasures she had in Israel when she assumed she had none because she was a foreigner.

First there was the treasure of economic opportunity. Not only did the Mosaic Law allow gleaning in the fields but there were special privileges for the widows and aliens as well as the poor. Moab did not provide foraging privileges to their own people so she had no reason to expect that in Israel. But in reality, she had triple rights: poor, widow and alien. And the Prophet showed her.

Ruth had no idea that she was legal heir to choice land in Israel. She never dreamed she could COMPEL a wealthy man to marry her and give her children. These were treasures she had. They were given to her by God, but she would have lived and died in poverty and widowhood if God had not given her a Prophet to reveal to her the treasures He had given her. This is what Prophets do. You can spot God’s gifts where others only see barrenness and blockages. You then put into language the treasures they already have and, by being their eyes for them, you destroy the bondage of poverty which had them enchained.

It was a Prophet, George Washington Carver, who God sent to the South after the Civil War to show Black subsistence farmers the treasure they had in the land. They called the land “Big Hungry” because it devoured their labor and gave them back so little in return.

The Prophet saw endless resources already in their hands. He showed them the nutritional value of tomatoes which they thought were poisonous to eat. He turned trash into compost which then produced robust crops. He used clay from the river bank to make whitewash to give a more attractive look to their small homes.

Finally the Prophet introduced peanuts as a crop that added nitrogen into the soil instead of depleting it. When cotton was grown after a peanut crop, the yield was massively higher than before.

It took a Prophet to see wealth in the poverty of post-Civil War Alabama, so that is exactly who God sent to show them their very own treasures. God had placed in Wilbur and Orville Wright a storehouse of inventiveness. This was His personal, premeditated gift to them. It was theirs and no man could lay claim to what God had given them.

God knew the culture they were born into would not easily recognize their inventiveness, much less celebrate it. So God sent a Prophet, their mother Susan Wright, to articulate for them that they were possessors of an uncommon gift. She championed their design because she saw it. The world has been a different place because of a Prophet mother who saw her sons as more than the theologians or businessmen others thought they could become.

During the late 1900s White flight became normative in America, causing the concept of the city to be identified with crime, poverty and spiritual defilement. As a response to this, banks and insurance companies discriminated economically against the inner city residents, leaving them trapped in their poverty.

Angered by the poverty that fed on the lie of powerlessness, God sent another of the grand Prophet tribe, a man by the name of John Dawson to express to the entire world the concept of the redemptive gifts of cities. This Prophet saw what others could not see which was the treasure that God had imbedded in the land before man came. John did not place that treasure there. It was there all along. But the treasure was useless to billions of people over millennia of time until a Prophet told them it was there. Today, around the world, men and women are defying hopelessness by pursuing the treasures in the land that belong to them --- all because a Prophet showed them that they were not poor.

This is a magnificent gift that you give to the world, Prophet! It seems almost miraculous the way you can enrich us so profoundly, so relentlessly, individually and corporately without ever being impoverished yourself.

You simply see our treasures for us.

You are SO welcome in our midst, Prophet. You are God’s default tribe, breaking the chains of the poverty spirit off us. You are most welcome among us as you walk in your grand and magnificent gift of perspective. We bless you in the name of our King, Jesus Christ.

At the Centrum B & B
Leiden, Netherlands
October 13, 2008

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