To "Know" Jesus Christ
A person who is being driven with the passion which possesses a prophet, is a person who strives, desires, yearns for intimacy with his Father, God, his Son, Jesus Christ, through His Spirit, the Holy Spirit. Adam and Eve lost that intimacy when they sinned, but Jesus made a way out of a circumstance that seemed to have no way out, by being our Sacrificial Lamb. Because of His death, we can have a resurrected life in and through Him. Some day we will be like Him, like the Spirit of Jesus Christ, when we are with Him in heaven. A taste of that intimacy today, here on earth, is what drives the passion of a prophet.
I know personally, when I was willing to make Jesus not only my Savior but also my Lord, the first thing that changed in my life was my desire to read the Logos Word, the Bible. I asked the Holy Spirit to bring life to passages that I had trouble understanding. I underlined any passage about salvation in red, any passage about the Holy Spirit in yellow, and soon discovered several threads than ran from Genesis through Revelation. The Logos Word, the Bible, became “alive” as the Spirit of Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit, began to teach me these truths that I had never seen before.
I now yearned, was driven, discovered my desire to “live out” this written Logos Word by allowing the Holy Spirit to make it the Rhema or “Living Word”. Every believer in Jesus Christ who has allowed Jesus to be their Lord and asked the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Jesus Christ, to take total control, will attest to the fact that “living out” the Word becomes easier, if not eventually supernaturally natural. A prophet is a person who takes this yearning, this desiring, this passion to even a higher level of intimacy, for they strive to “know Jesus” even more. The scripture, the Logos Word, opens up in a new and living way as the Spirit of Jesus Christ is exposed through the Old Testament Patriarch, the Psalmist, and the prophets. The same Spirit that taught those early believers on the Road to Emmaus, is the same Spirit who can teach today’s believers about Jesus’ fulfillment of all scripture, the Logos Word, the written Word, the Bible.
If teachers of the written Logos Word surrender their control to the Spirit of Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit, their “academic” knowledge will become “living experience”. The early followers did not just “know about” Jesus, or “know of” Jesus, but now intimately “knew” Jesus. Jesus the prophet, the teacher, the Messiah, now became a “living experience” in their lives, and the book of Acts became a reality as they “acted” out their lives through the leading of the Holy Spirit, that Spirit of Jesus Christ.
Every believer who relinquishes control to the Spirit of Jesus Christ “grows” in Jesus. Those who want to take it to an even deeper, more intimate level allow the spirit of the prophet to manifest it self in their lives. The Church today cannot afford NOT to allow the spirit of the prophet, the passion of the prophet, the point of view of the prophet to manifest it self! Spirit of prophecy, come.