Elijah asked God to stop the rain to wake up the people of Israel. And He did. What a wake-up call! We can also pray that God will allow things to happen that will awaken many Christians once again. These are things that make us aware of where we stand spiritually. The coronavirus pandemic has revealed a lot – but it has also woken up some believers.
But God didn’t just close the heavens back then. He first announced the whole thing through prophetic ministry – and He used Elijah to do so. Incidentally, the Lord often did this: when the people strayed from Him and began to practice idolatry, He sent prophets who called the people to repentance and conversion. However, this was a task that meant great suffering for the prophets and often even brought them martyrdom – at the hands of those who called them to repentance.
This is why Stephen says to the Jews in Acts 7: “Which of the prophets did your fathers not persecute?” (Acts 7:52).
What is the situation today? Today, there are no longer any prophets who, like Moses or Elijah, for example, were publicly appointed by God and who were divinely inspired to predict the future or who could say: “Thus says the Lord.”
What still exists today, however, is a prophetic ministry. This is also called prophecy in the New Testament. This means that believers speak to the hearts and consciences of others on behalf of God or under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. It is, therefore, about having the right word at exactly the right time that the Lord lays on someone’s heart and that speaks into the lives of others.
Paul says in 1 Corinthians 14:1 that we should strive to prophesy – even if we may sometimes not even realize it ourselves when God speaks through us.
This can be encouragement or exhortation. Both are needed. God uses prophetic ministry to make His will clear to us in a particular situation or to point out things in our lives that we need to put right.
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