'Do you see the law of prophetic function?'

From T. Austin Sparks’ Prophetic Ministry: Conference Messages*

‘Prophecy is spiritual interpretation… It is the
interpretation of everything from a spiritual

T. Austin Sparks (right) and
 Ni To-sheng (Watchman Nee)

standpoint; the bringing of the spiritual implications of things past, present and future, before the people of God, and giving them to understand the significance of things in their spiritual value and meaning. That was and is the essence of prophetic ministry.

            ‘…The prophets arose as a reaction from God to the course and drift of things amongst His people; a call back, a re-declaration, a re-pronouncement of God’s mind, a bringing into clear view again of the thoughts of God. The prophets stood in the midst of the stream—usually a fast-rushing stream—like a rock; the course of things broke over them. They challenged and resisted the course, and their presence in the midst of the stream represented God’s mind as against the prevailing course of things…

            ‘Here is the thing to which the prophetic ministry all-inclusively relates—the original and ultimate purpose of God in and through His people; and when you have said that, you have got right to the heart of things. We ask again, What is the prophetic ministry, what is the prophetic function, to what does it relate?—and the answer all-inclusively is that it relates to the full, original and ultimate purpose of God in and through His people. …To interpret the mind of God in all matters concerning the purpose of God, to bring all details into line with the purpose, and to make the purpose govern everything…

            ‘(T)he prophetic ministry is an enlightened ministry, and is that which, under the anointing, is to bring things back to the position of absolute safety and security because it is true to Divine principle…

            ‘Prophets were not men who accommodated themselves to anything that was comparative in its goodness. They never let themselves go wholly if the thing was only comparatively good… The prophet cannot accept as full and final what is only comparative, though he rejoices in the measure of good that there may be anywhere.

            ‘A man is called to represent the thoughts of God, to represent them in what he is, not in something that he takes up as a form or line of ministry, not in something that he does. The vessel itself is the ministry…

            ‘The prophet must bring it home by his own experience. God is working the thing right in. He works it in deep and terrible ways in the life of His servant to produce the ministry.

            ‘The vessel thus wrought upon, is the message. People do not come to hear what you have to teach. They have come to see what you are. To see that thing which has been wrought by God. What a price the prophetic instrument has to pay!...

            ‘He takes that vessel through a deep history, breaking and undoing, disillusioning, revolutionizing the whole mentality, so that the things which were held fiercely, assertively, are no longer so held… Everything that was merely objective as to the work of God, as to Divine truth, as to orthodoxy or fundamentalism; all that was held so strongly, in an objective, legalistic way, as to what is right and wrong in methods—it is all dealt with, all broken. There is a new conception entirely, a new outlook upon things; no longer a formal system, something outside you which you take up, but something wrought in an inward way in the vessel It is what the vessel is that is its ministry…

            ‘Do you see the law of prophetic function? It is that God keeps anointed vessels abreast of the truth by experience. Every bit of truth that they give out in word is something that has had a history. They went down into the depths and they were saved by that truth. It was their life and therefore it is a part of them…

            ‘We are better fitted to serve the Lord’s purpose, we are truer prophets, when we can bear with the things with which we do not agree, than when in our zeal we are iconoclast, and seek only to destroy the offending thing…

            ‘The point is this—that there is a voice in the prophets which may be missed, a meaning which may not be apprehended, and the results may be disastrous for the people concerned. … (M)en who were the eyes of God for a people, and signifying to that people God’s thought and purpose concerning them, their Divine vocation, God’s interpretation of their very existence—these prophets who embodied that are all brought into the New Testament dispensation and into the Church, with this clear implication that that is how the Church is to be if it is to get through. The Church is to be a seeing thing, dominated by a specific object and vision, knowing why it exists, having no doubt about it, and poised in utter abandonment thereto, bringing all other things in life into line with that…’ ”

*Witness and Testimony Publishers, London (1954)