The prophet's handbook

By now it should be evident to you that the prophetic office requires thinkers. God has His greatest successes with people who think. That is, people who use their heads in harmony with their emotions, their will, and their individuality in unison with His Holy Spirit. Otherwise, apart from being a divinely inspired thinker, the prophet’s mouth is incompetent and unreliable. A thinker may be born with the capacity and faculty for intelligent, sensitive, and reasonable thought; however, the ability to put these qualities to productive use to God’s advantage takes learning. Whether Christians like it or not, instances of supernatural acquisition of utilitarian knowledge are rare. Even in the instances where they seemed to occur, it was the multiplication of some sort of core knowledge that was built upon. A thinker, for the record, is also one with vision, imagination, and creativity. A thinker has analytical skills and the capacity for sound judgment in making decisions. Thinkers are people with sagacity who weigh matters carefully and are governed and guided by the wisdom of careful deliberation. Thinkers must be strong-willed, self-restrained deliberators who meditate and contemplate to the fullest extent the repercussions, impacts, and outcomes of their and others’ actions. They must, if they are prophets, have a sense of the practical plans associated with their words and deeds. Thinkers tend to be purposeful people, motivated by wisdom and endowed with great mental focus. God’s thinkers are high conceptualizers gifted with innovative ideas and capable of intense mental activity. For thinkers, concentration is not usually a problem; they can often will themselves to concentrate on what they deem important and vital. Moving chiefly by design, thinkers have excellent deductive powers and well-disciplined reasoning faculties. Their ability is to withdraw from a matter—to stand away from it for the time it takes to purview it from all sides. In the meantime they exercise great restraint in delaying responses and reactions until meticulously and methodically weighing and evaluating all aspects of the matter under consideration. The church of Jesus Christ all too often diminishes the Lord’s glory in the minds of others because believers refuse to think. Many of them do not even know how to think and are unfortunately “emotion-bound.” God, however, is a thinker. He thinks more quickly and astutely than we do, but He is unquestionably a deliberate, methodical, and contemplative thinker. To become a credible prophet, you must resolve to become a thinker, too. The Prophet’s Office Is Leadership