Anyone with ears to hear must listen to the Spirit and understand what He is saying. (Revelation 3:22 NLT)
A striking feature of our time is that so few of the voices have a
distinctive message. There is a painful lack of a clear word of
authority for the times.... Why is it so? May it
not be that so many who might have this ministry have
become so much a part of a system? A system which puts
preachers so much upon a professional basis, the effect
of which is to make preaching a matter of demand and
supply; of providing for the established religious order
and program? Not only in the matter of preaching, but
in the whole organization and activity of
"Christianity" as we have it in the
systematized form today. There is not the freedom and
detachment for speaking ONLY when "the burden of the
word of the Lord" is upon the prophet, or when he
could say, "The hand of the Lord was upon me."
The present order requires a man to speak every so often;
hence he must get something, and this necessity
means either that God must be offered our program and
asked to meet it (which He will not do) or the preacher
must make something for the constantly recurring
occasion. This is a pernicious system and it opens the
door to any number of dangerous and baneful intrusions of
what is of man and not of God. The most serious aspect of
this way of things is that it results in voices, voices,
voices, a confusion of voices, but not the
specific voice with the specific utterance of God for the
time...
Here we have the necessity for an awakening to what God has to say. In the Revelation this is "He that hath an ear, let him hear," and in the case of Laodicea - which represents the end - it is "I counsel thee to buy of me eyesalve that thou mayest see." "And I turned to see the voice that spoke with me," said John. God is speaking, He has something to say, but there must be "a Spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of Him, the eyes of your heart being enlightened."