We will continue to evaluate the way I’ve handled giving the word about the impending West Coast disasters. Of course, these are from my perspective, and therefore, are subjective. Presently, I am being accused of having many different motives for giving these words, all of which I do not consider to be true, so I don’t want to answer them just to be defensive. However, I think they are excellent examples of how we can expect people to react to words like this.
I cannot understand why anyone would ever want to give a word like I have about the West Coast unless they really have seen something. If I have anything personal to gain from this, I have not figured it out yet. At best, I will look bad until these come to pass. My experience tells me that when they come to pass, I am not likely to be thought of more highly, and very likely, it will be worse for me. Already some are accusing me of bringing to pass these events with curses. I appreciate that they think so highly of my spiritual authority, but I don’t think anyone has the power to bring about such major events except the Lord. This is coming from friends, so you can imagine what my enemies are saying.
Prophecy is not given to prophets for them to make friends with. If you have been given a word or message like the one I was given for the West Coast, you can count on it not making you any friends and probably causing you to lose some of them. If we are going to be used prophetically, we need to settle in our hearts right away that we will live to please the Lord and not men. The Apostle Paul wrote inGalatians 1:10, “If I were still seeking to please men, I would not be a bondservant of Christ.” To the degree that we are driven by the fear of man, or the desire to please men, we have compromised our ability to be a spokesperson for the Lord.
We may think that when our prophecies come true then people will believe us and think better of us. Again, that has not been my experience. The Scriptures also bear out that this will be rare at best. As we see with the Lord Himself, even when His prophecy about the temple being destroyed came true, not many of the Jews repented and turned to Him. It is possible that a few did, and I think the Lord would have given this word and gone to the cross even for one. That is His nature. He is the Good Shepherd who would leave the ninety-nine to seek out just one who was lost. This should be our nature as well.
To be a messenger, we have to be satisfied to receive our approval from the Lord and trust Him with the consequences that concern us. There is a high probability that those consequences will be that the messenger is going to get shot at by the very ones they’re sent to help. This looks bad for the earthly-minded, or the selfishly-ambitious, and serves to keep them away. It has not been fun to receive the attacks and accusations that have been constant for me in the last twenty-five years, but one taste of heaven, and the reward for faithfulness will make it overwhelmingly worth it.
We must keep focused on the fact that our job is obedience, and we will trust that on the Judgment Day all will be made right. I personally try to keep my motives as simple as that—to hear on that day,“Well done, good and faithful servant” (see Matthew 25:21 NIV). When I start thinking about how people are going to react to something, or even how it might affect my relationship with friends, it usually works out differently anyway, so why waste time or mindshare going there?
Because of my past experiences, I realize I may have become too jaded, and if I have, that is a flaw. When people have expressed to me their concern about the way some West Coast leaders have responded to these prophecies, I had to admit to them that I too was surprised, but my surprise was that it was not much worse. I thought most handled this with a lot of grace and respect, and far more than I was expecting were open. I also think most handled this probably much better than I might have if the roles had been reversed.
Even so, I confess to being troubled by some of the West Coast Christian leaders’ attempted psychoanalysis, and the attributing to me of motives or reasons that were not only wrong, but I think are the opposite of the truth. That was a surprise, especially the way some whom I know pretty well shared them publicly without coming to me first. Some of them were upset with me for not sharing these words with them first, and I think there is merit to that, too. I am sorry that I was not much more sensitive to do this. I assumed that after years of hearing some of this from us, they were well aware of it, but then again, I was assuming they had heard messages that they may not have heard at all. I’ll have to take the blame for that assumption.
Also to my surprise, the very ones I was expecting the most resistance from over these words, such as leaders in the movie industry and the business community, have responded like I was expecting only the most mature Christian leaders to respond. They are asking good questions with sincere openness. I have been recommending that they inquire of the Lord about it, and He has been answering them in dramatic ways. Again, this was the response I was expecting to get from church leaders, but as some have been saying for some time, and I have been rejecting, maybe the most important Christian leaders are no longer church leaders.
For as long as I have been a Christian I have been devoted to the local church. As I often teach, we are severely limited in our Christian maturity without a strong local church relationship. However, out of all of the great heroes of the faith in Scripture, I have only been able to find four who were Levites or today who we would call the professional clergy. Church history bears out much the same pattern. Maybe today we are about to again experience that some of the most important Christian leaders are not church leaders, but are in business, the military, government, education, or a host of other vocations.
If this is the case, who should be the main ones we try to reach with important words?
