Reflections of a Trail Blazer

Prophetic Pain

Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no physician there? Why then has not the health of the daughter of my people been restored? Jeremiah 8:22

There is the cliché that says that “hurting people hurt people.” While this is true, most hurting people do not know they are hurting others. Why? Because their own pain blinds them to the pain they may cause others.

Pain has no favorites. Regardless of culture, nationality, religious denomination, gender or walk in life, everyone is familiar with pain. Even physical pain can affect our emotional health.

Prophets do not encounter pain more than any other human being. However, their emotional and spiritual makeup may cause them to process pain differently than most other types of ministers.  God “wired” each ministry gift in such a way to enable each person to be able to function according to that gift. A prophet is extremely visual; extremely auditory and extreme in their feelings. Every prophet has some level of these three areas. Most prophets are dominant in one of these areas and there are some who are dominant in all three.

There are as many different types of prophets as there are prophets. The emotional impact of life on a prophet depends a lot on the unique personality of the prophet. There are many causes of pain. Most of these causes can be boiled down to one cause:  Rejection.

Rejection has been the instrument of emotional pain ever since the fall of Lucifer and eventually the fall of man. How does this affect the office of the Prophet?  Remember our simple definition of prophet? The prophet is one who speaks for another. In the case of the office of the Prophet we are talking about one who speaks for God or probably a better way to say it is the prophet declares the word of the Lord as if it were God, Himself speaking. I can remember as a youngster my dad sending me to my brothers and sisters who may have been squabbling with a message. I always said, “Dad said for you to stop or he is coming in here!” Some of you remember such instances. Well, I was speaking as my dad’s prophet. If my brothers and sisters had not listened to me, they were not listening to my dad.

The same is true of a prophet of God. He tells them to go to their brothers and sisters and tell them what Dad said–

If the prophet’s voice cannot be heard then the children of God will remain ignorant and the enemy of the Lord will continue to deceive the people. The easiest way to stop someone in their tracks is to reject them.

When anyone is rejected the normal reaction is to become preoccupied with “self.” We either believe the things said about us or we try to defend ourselves. Neither is the correct route to take. In order to defend ourselves we may find ourselves doing exactly what brings us pain—rejecting others to protect ourselves. This rejecting of others is often manifested in cynicism, undue criticism and even paranoia.  It is not uncommon to take on the attitude that we can protect ourselves much better than God can.

There is a core reason why most people carry pain for so many years of their life.

Lack of Value Through Improper Identification

When each of us is born into the world we are completely dependent upon the person to whom we were born. Their disposition of our lives is out of our control. We have no say over that. Some are not raised by their birth parents. Others have great parents who blunder through the child-rearing stage. Some children are adopted and, sad to say, quite a few are not raised by anyone. They just simply grow up. The affect of these various lifestyles on a person create varying degrees of a value concept.

If your parents did not know or understand how God’s word works, you were raised by people who loved you the best way they understood love. However, much was lacking. Without an intimate knowledge of God no one is capable of God’s kind of love. What most people refer to as love is not God’s love. It is self-love. I love you for what you can do for me; or I love you for what I will receive from loving you. When someone hurts us we have a difficult time understanding how they could do something like that to us, after all we did for them.

Our love was conditional. I really encourage you to read the book by Bob Mumford entitled The Agape Road.  He also has a wonderful video teaching entitled Unshared Love which explores this whole topic.

If your parents did not know who they were, what God’s purpose and plan was for their life, they were not able to tell you who God said you were. Consequently they identified you according to their needs. Your value became defined according to how your parents understood their value, which they received from the ones who raised them.

There is a spiritual principle in the gospel of John chapter 15 concerning our destiny.

If anyone does not abide in Me, he is thrown away as a branch, and dries up; and they gather them, and cast them into the fire, and they are burned. (John 15:6)

When we do not stay connected to Christ, letting Him identify who we are, other people gather us up and determine our destiny apart from Christ.

This happened to some of our parents and this spiritual principle has continued through generations. The affect this has on a prophet can be seen through the selfish needs of people. The life of a prophet takes on a whole new dimension when the people clamor after them because of what they know. The ministry has evolved over generations into a self-serving ministry, both on the part of the minister and on the part of the one receiving ministry. When someone realizes that a person can “know things” or “sense things” the value of that prophet rises just like the stock market. The prophet is then sought out to meet the needs of others. A young, inexperienced prophet does not recognize this right away. All they can see is that they have now found a place of value among others. Already debilitated, further pain comes to the prophet when they realize that their function is valued more than the person they are.

If there was an injury to the spirit of a child, whether through abuse or simple ignorant neglect, a point of entry was created for that child to be oppressed either by a demon or by ignorance. Every pain is not demon originated but I believe that every pain is endured out of ignorance.

By the time that child becomes an adult there has been much time and meditation given to that place of pain. After years of this pain you and I discover various ways of medicating that pain. We pick up bad habits of eating, drinking, or simply living hard and fast. Many prophets will simply withdraw emotionally, socially and sometimes spiritually. Our drug of choice is anything that helps us either forget the pain or to simply get through the pain.

Eventually, over time, we may forget why we have developed these habits. Some injuries were inflicted upon children as babies or even while they were still in the womb. As adults they cannot tell you why they do what they do. They only know the “medication” they are using works for a while.

Different forms of manipulation and control become active at some level in the life of a hurting person. They want to maintain vigilance over that area of pain so that no one injures them that way again, even if they do not remember how they were hurt in the first place.

Personal Prophetic Pain

I learned very quickly as a child to suppress my feelings and to keep my thoughts to myself. I was always accused of being “too-sensitive” or, as my father would say, “you make a mountain out of a mole-hill.” What I did not know is that others were not seeing what I saw; feeling what I felt or knew what I knew.

As a child I experienced disapproval and non-acceptance at every level of my life: at home, at school and on the playground. I was always good, but not good enough. I made good grades, but my bad conduct would make the perfect grade null and void. My parents focused very strongly on behavior and tasks. I knew all of the things wrong with me because I heard them all of the time. I did not know what was right with me except when I completed a task perfectly.

By the time I was a young adult my silence was misunderstood as being standoffish, snobbish, and insolent and in some cases as acting superior to others. Whenever I would try to squelch those labels by becoming more social my conversation was placed under scrutiny again.

My mother used to tell me that I was born before my time. I was an adult before I began to fully understand that comment.

The result in my life was that I learned how to be extremely introverted while convincing others I was very extroverted. I was very social, yet no one really knew the “real me.” Those who would get a glimpse of the “real me” would then label me as being weird or just plain strange. I actually felt some relief once, when I was about nineteen years old. A young man in my life said that I said things most people thought but were afraid to say. That comment gave me a sense of sanity that I could hold onto.

Without any guidance or understanding of who I was and how God wired me I stumbled through a fair amount of my adult life as an emotional wreck. I felt isolated, alienated and unloved. I thought when I came into the church this would change. It became worse. I had learned how to control myself so well that it became very difficult for someone to know me. While others manipulate people I had learned to manipulate my emotions. My thinking was that when people did not know how I felt they could not use those feelings to hurt me. My experience as a child was that when I expressed my thoughts or feelings I was reprimanded for those expressions. My father would get excited over a perfect grade. I finally figured out that the only way to be of value was to do everything right. The first time I heard that God loved me with all of my mistakes and imperfections I was relieved. This was the actual beginning of my moving away from the place where pain came into my life and the eventual courage to close the door to it. The fact that I can tell you about it and I do not feel anger or bitterness toward my parents or others in my life is a sign to me that the door has been closed. My parents did the best they could with the information they had. They had no idea what a prophet was and how to raise a prophetic child.

Even though I was introduced to Christ at the age of seven, I did not receive the true work of the cross until I was twenty-six. True salvation means being totally delivered from the works of satan in our life prior to the cross. That was my freedom. There were two scriptures that I was given to memorize as a young Christian. Both have directed my walk with the Lord today.

The first one is found in Psalms 119:18: Open my eyes, that I may behold Wonderful things from Thy law. My continued prayer when I am confused has been this scripture: Open my eyes, Lord.

The second one set me free and is still setting me free. I pray it brings freedom to you as well. It is found in 2 Corinthians 5:17:

Therefore if any man is in Christ, [he is] a new creature; the old things passed away; behold, new things have come.

I discovered with this verse that when I surrendered my life to Christ I became a completely new creation and those things that had to do with my life prior to coming to Christ, though they exist in the past, they have no control over my present or my future.

There are times in my life when I am challenged with the thoughts of the life I had before I surrendered to Christ. Those thoughts do not hold me as long as they previously did because I revert my thinking back to 2 Corinthians 5:17 a lot quicker than I used to.

As a result my value is not found in my ability to function as a minister. My value is found in my being a son of God. Is this difficult? As we are faced with day to day circumstances it can be very difficult. Is it do-able? Absolutely, because God said it was do-able (Matthew 19:26) as long as I participate with Him. Difficult does not mean impossible and delay does not mean denial. It is in the difficult times that we have the opportunity to decide if we will become stronger or bitter; or as I have seen some do, simply shut down and not function at all.

As we study the purpose of the prophetic it will become easier to understand why the prophet can fall into an emotional ditch from time to time.

The prophet is constructed emotionally, spiritually and physically to be able to “hold on to” a thought; to incubate words and images. A prophet is not just given words from God to speak, but they are given strategies, destinies, and facts that will impact generations to come.

Abraham was told that he would become the father of many nations. God has to first move Abraham into position so that he can begin incubating the words He is going to say to him. God elaborately orchestrates events and instructions so that He can deposit His plans and purposes into Abraham. We will explore this more when we study Prophetic Purpose. All that God did concerning Abraham has to do with you and me. Abraham’s purpose in life was to impact every generation born from that point in time. Abraham was birthing in nations that did not exist at that time (Romans 4:17)

Many times prophets and people are misdirected by placing their focus on today (Isaac) when the real focus should be placed beyond you and me to the thousandth generation (Deuteronomy 7:9). It was not just about Abraham and Sara getting to have a baby at an old age. It was about finding someone who would continue to incubate a fertile dream of God so that the seed of that incubation would continue throughout time.

Because the prophet has been graced with the ability to hold something in their spirit for such a long time it requires understanding God’s word which provides for letting go of things that should not be held onto. One of those provisions is found in Luke 9:62

And Jesus said unto him, No man, having put his hand to the plough, and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God.

When we continue to look at the past we are not equipped to move ahead. Paul says in Philippians 3:13

Brethren, I do not regard myself as having laid hold of [it] yet; but one thing [I do]: forgetting what [lies] behind and reaching forward to what [lies] ahead,

Where there is no understanding, and where we have not allowed God’s word to bring healing the function of the prophet can become perverted. The function then becomes the prophet’s medication for their pain. It also becomes a tool the prophet uses to “whip the body of Christ” into shape.

Is there no balm in Gilead? The Hebrew root of the word Gilead has to do with trust and memorials or testimonies.

Healing can come when we begin to focus our attention on our covenant with our Heavenly Father and we release the covenant we made with pain.

© J M Bush January 2010