Redemptive Gift – Prophet

She has the Redemptive gift of a prophet and sees things in black and white:

There is right and wrong, good and bad. It’s a very simplistic world view. She can assess a

situation in about 3 seconds and tell you whether it’s good or bad.

She tends to take initiative and enjoy things that are new.

If someone else is not making something new around them she will. The prophet does a terrible

job of maintaining something that is running well. If you put a prophet in an organizational or

administrative position with a program that is running well, she will do one of four things; she

will improve it, change it, enlarge it or quit. (I have actually done this in the work place)

To maintain status quo absolutely totally cuts against the core, the grain, the spiritual DNA of

how God made a prophet. They do not maintain, they make new. You bring a prophet into a

situation where there is chaos, they can be quite cheerful for awhile as they restore some order,

establish a proper framework, but as soon as the thing is fixed, they want out.

A prophet processes very quickly and has an opinion on everything all the time and is quite

willing to share it.

The prophet shifts gears very quickly.

The prophet takes the initiative to judge others

There is a compulsion to pass judgment on anything and everything, and hopefully a more

mature prophet keeps his mouth shut most of the time but through my mind I am saying, “right,

wrong, not good, should be better, change this.” The evaluation is always there.

The prophet knows no fear unless she’s been seriously wounded.

There is a basic boldness in dealing with others and with situations. The fact that she hasn’t done

something before doesn’t intimidate her. She just has a confidence the she can figure it out. She

is not intimidated by the unknown.

Another core-value deep in the DNA of the prophet is an inability to tolerate bondage. They

do not like to be locked up, trapped down, set in a closed situation. The whole concept of being

in bondage is anathema to the prophet. They prefer to run rather than be imprisoned.

The prophet is extraordinarily generous, but many times the prophet gives impulsively and

unwisely. The prophet brings her “no fear” attitude alongside her giving and will give her last

dollar without any hesitation. It is amazing to watch how fast a prophet can go from sacrificial

giving, to someone who uses it unwisely, to judging themselves for squandering the Lord’s

money.

There is a need to have vision, a need to have a reason.

Here is an elegant illustration of prophets: If you took a bunch of prophets and put them on a

ship that was loaded with everything necessary for the good life and went out to see, within a

matter of two or three days each one would, one at a time, quietly seek out the captain. They’d

ask him where they were going and if the captain said, “what is it that you need, we have

everything on the ship you need for pleasure?” The prophet would say, “no, it’s not that I need

anything, I just want to know where we’re going.” “We’re going no place in particular but the

ship has everything you need for enjoyment.”

That doesn’t compute with the prophet, and one after another they would go to the rear of the

ship and jump overboard, because the prophet cannot not go somewhere. They cannot be busy

proceeding and not know where they are proceeding to and why. There is a need to have vision,

a need to have a reason even if it is a bad reason. The need to have a deadline, a point, an

objective is non-negotiable with the prophet. Take away the reason to live and the destructions to

the prophet are immense. Where there is hopelessness, where there is bondage, where there is no

future and the prophet feels trapped, it destroys her soul and the prophet can literally will herself

to death where there has been that degree of hopelessness.

The prophet also demonstrates her gift in the area of full disclosure. When selling a used car,

unless she is really carnal, it is impossible for her to cover up the defects. She would rather

discloses them, telling every little defect, doing all she can to un-sell the care after it is sold

because of that compulsion for honesty and integrity.

The prophet is very, very hard on herself.

She is legendary for beating up others for their sins, but very few understand how hard she is on

herself. When a prophet has majorly sinned, like when Peter denied Christ, it is really hard for

her to forgive herself, and to restore her to ministry and dignity, because they are far fiercer in

their own denunciation than they are in reproving other peoples sin.

It is important for the prophet to make sense out of everything.

A prophet tends to hold truth much more tightly than relationships. This is true with family.

It’s not that the prophet is overly rejecting her family, although the tendency to be judgmental

can lead to a lot of family fragmentation, it’s just an “out of sight out of mind” thing. There is the

current world where they live, with two toes in the day and the rest of them in tomorrow, and

worrying about yesterday’s relationships just isn’t part of the prophets DNA most of the time.

The prophet has a passion for excellence in herself and in everyone else.

The prophet has probably the largest range of emotions of any gift.

The prophet is going to have the deepest compassion, the most mercy, and the fiercest

judgmental spirit all in the same person. The prophet is going to have the deepest depression, the

most profound hopelessness, and at the same time the capacity to celebrate God with exuberance,

with an extravagance that no other gift can match.

They run the entire gamut. One of the marks of a wounded prophet is one who has pulled in her

emotions and is only playing on 10 notes or so because she is so afraid of the depression she has

fallen into in the past. So in order to not fall into the depression, she has to pull in and also not

experience the joys. This is sad because God has designed the prophet to be intense, passionate,

and to be extreme in the most emotional settings. Sometimes even to the grief of those around

them.

Birthright

The prophet, if you will, is the research and development scientist in the Body of Christ. The R

& D scientist does not invent any new principles. The laws of science are fixed. She may

discover new ones, but she doesn’t invent any. The prophet is called upon to see new

applications, new ways to implement those principles in new situations. To be able to look at a

new environmental situation, go to the word of God, take a story from there, boil it down to its

principles, and bring that principle back out to a new application.

The reason the prophet does not like to do maintenance is because there is no applications of

principles. Once something is up and running, it’s up and running, there’s closure. The prophet

gets no joy out of standing, watching principles that are already assembled work.

The prophet does not celebrate more than about 10 minutes, “Okay, it worked, that’s good, that’s

fun, next.” The prophet needs an environment, needs either a problem or blank piece of paper to

apply principles, to weave together resources, to make something from nothing based upon

principles.

You also need to understand the boldness and faith of the prophet. The prophet understands the

power of truth. The prophet is the only gift whose faith is based on the principles and not on

relationship.

For the manifestation gift of prophesying, God sovereignty makes known to the individual what

is going to happen in the future. That is the kind of usage we are accustomed to for the word

prophet. But the redemptive gift of prophet does the same thing in a different way. Using

principles, she can know in advance what will happen.

A good redemptive gift of a prophet is someone who can build, not just one who can criticize.

Any carnal, immature prophet can run around and say, “this is broken, and that is wrong, and this

you shouldn’t do” and so on. That is very damaging to the church and very low level. A good

prophet is someone who can embrace the problem and apply the principles in such a way as to

effectively repair the problem.

The prophet is the one that God commissions to know the principles that will rebuild. To know,

not just the evilness of sin, but to know the fullness of god’s grace to be able to restore.

The prophet is one that is drawn to brokenness. You usually find the prophet working on the two

extremes; leaders and those who are broken and want to be restored. It doesn’t matter how badly

they’re broken, or what it is, it doesn’t matter how hopeless they are in themselves. There is

something that rises up within the prophet. There is a holy rage of fierce anger that the devil

would dare to destroy a work of God, a human being, a city, or a community, that God has

created. There is a passion and desire to bring the principles to apply, to restore, to rebuild, to

release into the fullness of the birthright.

So the cult of comfort is the enduring enemy of the prophet and the prophet is not content to

arrive at excellence alone. There is no fulfillment no life for the prophet in merely excelling in

her own right. Her life, fulfillment, joy her exuberance, her identity comes in showing a picture

of God so real, so dynamic, so current, so applicable that it will move people out of the

complacency and comfort of plus 20 to where they possess their birthright. It is in the joy of

others, the fulfillment of others experiencing their birthright that the prophet finds her own

greatest fulfillment.

This is the call of the prophet, to move beyond comfort, to provide the vision and the principles

to bring a group of people to possess their individual birthrights. That is what it is for the prophet

to possess her own birthright.