More than Conquerors
by R.C. Sproul Jr.

What are your spiritual gifts? I believe we have rather a too narrow view of exactly what the Spirit can give us. Let’s see. Oh, some say, I have the gift of hospitality. Others have the gift of teaching. Some have the gift of giving, and others the gift of mercy. Those are all fine gifts, wonderful gifts. But I think there is so much more. My friend Ken Myers rightly claims that he has been given the gift of bibliography. Want to know what you ought to read on a particular theme? Ask Ken, he’ll know. Or the gift of insane optimism? Got a harebrained idea you want to be encouraged with? Ask Laurence. He’ll be all for it.

Of course part of what motivates me to expand the canon of spiritual gifts is simply this —I think I have gifts that don’t often make the list. I believe specifically that God has been gracious to grant me the gift of thick skin. (No cracks now that He obviously placed all this thick skin around my middle.) He has given me the gift of a bad sense of hearing. If you need someone to yell at, I’m your man. Call me names, spew venom at me, and I’ll just go on my merry way. Verbal barbs bounce right off me.

If we are to expand the gift canon, however, we need to beware the same problems that manifest themselves within the more narrow canon. When Paul writes to the church of Corinth about God’s gifting of His people, He reminds them of the deep temptation in all of us to elevate the gifts we have been given to a status they might not deserve. (And in so doing forgetting that they are gifts, imagining that we mustered these things up ourselves.) If I’m Ken Myers I might be tempted to think that the future of the kingdom rests in my hands, since I’m the one recommending the good books. I might also think myself terribly clever for accumulating all this priceless knowledge. If I’m Laurence I might think that while it’s all well and good to be gifted at hospitality, that surely isn’t nearly as important as being a Barnabas, a son of encouragement. And aren’t I the sweetest thing since I grew this wonderful gift?

Of course in one sense thick skin isn’t a gift at all. If it is, it is only a gift for me. The great thing is how you use it. Because I have thick skin, I can do the work of the prophet. I can bring suit against God’s people for their infidelity. I can start the firestorm, because I’m not afraid of being burned. It’s not the gift, so to speak, but how you use it.

I’m not Ken Myers, and I’m not Laurence. But I have the same kind of temptation. It’s fine to direct people to good books. It’s great to be an encourager. But the really important role, the great calling is to be thick-skinned, to be able to stand while others are assaulting you. When I am thinking this way I’m suggesting, “What need does the thick skin have of the foot?” And when I’m thinking this way, I’m thinking I grew this skin myself.

Nevertheless, while the church needs all the gifts of the Spirit, there is a sense in which thick-skin, and the prophetic role that goes with it, is the calling of all in the church. Recall what happens when Moses begins to feel the burden of his calling. “I am not able to bear all these people alone, because the burden is too heavy for me. If you will treat me like this, please kill me here and now” (Numbers 11: 14-15). Things are not going well for Moses. He alone is serving as judge over this wandering nation. God does not grant Moses’ request, but instead gifted seventy men to help Moses take up the burden, “Then the Lord came down in the cloud, and spoke to him, and took of the Spirit that was upon him, and placed the same upon the seventy elders; and it happened when the Spirit rested upon them, that they prophesied” (verse 25). God’s grace overflows, however. “But two men had remained in the camp: the name of one was Eldad, and the name of the other was Medad. And the Spirit rested upon them. Now they were among those listed, but had not gone out to the tabernacle; yet they prophesied in the camp. And a young man ran and told Moses, and said, ‘Eldad and Medad are prophesying in the camp.’ So Joshua the son of Nun, Moses’ assistant, one of his choice men, answered and said, ‘Moses, my lord, forbid them!” (verses 26-28).

Don’t you just love the zeal of Joshua? There’s unauthorized prophecy going on, because there is unauthorized gifting of the Spirit. And Joshua wants it to stop. Moses, however, takes a different tack, “Then Moses said to him, ‘Are you zealous for my sake? Oh that all the Lord’s people were prophets and that the Lord would put His Spirit upon them!” (verse 29).

Moses wishes that all God’s people would be gifted by the Holy Spirit, and that all would prophesy. His wish came true at Pentecost. And is still true today.

To understand this we need to understand what it means to prophesy. I have not changed my understanding of the sign gifts. I’m not arguing that we all need to prophesy in exactly the same manner that Biblical prophets did so. They gave to us God’s Word. Now we have God’s Word. But their role was not merely to write down God’s Word, but to speak it, principally to God’s people. Now that we have all of God’s Word, we have more rather than less reason to speak it. Now all of us ought to be about the business of bringing to bear the Word of God in the lives of God’s people, and in the broader world as well. The only future we need to foretell is the same broad future that all the Biblical prophets foretold, “If you do not repent, God will bring great judgment upon you. If you do repent, God will bless you.” We know this not because God whispered such in our ears, but because He wrote it in His Word.

There is yet more we have, or at least ought to have, in common with Biblical prophets. When Jesus warned His disciples that they were not greater than their master, that they would be reviled, and persecuted for their faith, He was calling them to the office of prophet. The world will not persecute us if all we do is have Jesus in our hearts. The world doesn’t care what private fantasies we carry around in our little heads. Loving Jesus, if we mean by that that we have a warm tingly feeling every time we hear His name, is no offense to the unbelieving world. We can say, “It seems to me ...” all day long and not a lost soul would bat an eyelash.

We get into hot water, however, when we declare not what we think, nor how we feel about what we think, but when we begin as the prophets, “Thus saith the Lord...” When we speak about “What Jesus means to me,” we are not speaking God’s words, but our own. When instead we declare, “Repent or perish,” then we are bringing God’s message to the world.

We fail to do this because we are weak. We fail to do this because we are cowards. We fail to do this because we are thin-skinned, because we do not love the Lord enough to be attacked for His sake. Oh we don’t admit this. We leave behind our prophet card because we would rather love people into the kingdom. We think we know better than God.

Nor do we prophesy to each other. We do not speak to the church, because of our so called love for each other. We are, after all, on the same side. But in failing to prophesy to each other, we remove the one thing that can bring us together, the one thing that can truly unite us, the effective working of the Word in our lives. We do this because we know that if we do, we will be persecuted for His name’s sake, even inside the church.

And worse still, when God raises up prophets in our midst, like Joshua we think the best thing we can do is to shush them. We tell John Piper to tone it down a bit with that whole sold out for Jesus stuff. It only drives the yuppies away. We tell Dr. Rushdoony to stop talking about the law of God so much, or we might get a bad report on CBS. We tell Doug Wilson to learn to be nice, because he’s turning people off. When a true prophet shows up, we run for cover.

If we are going to build the kingdom of God, we need to do it with boldness, as warriors. And because the weapons of our warfare are not carnal, we had better be sure that the words we use are words of power. And that requires first that they be God’s Words, and second that we do not mumble our way through them.

More still we will be prophetic with the very way we live our lives. When we live simple lives we speak to the church and to the watching world that the hustle and bustle of the pursuit of personal peace and affluence is wrong. That’s all it takes to be attacked, again from within the church. When we refuse to play the rhetorical games of the world around us, when we speak simply, we will be perceived as those who carry a big stick, and will be assaulted for it. This is our simple message, repent. But to speak that simple message simply, we need to have thick skins.

When we live our lives more separately, again we speak to the church and to the watching world. Our very lives are prophetic theater, as we drive far from us the thinking and the doing of this world. When we see children as a blessing from God, many who see our little army marching through the grocery store, will vilify us, for they will feel the weight of the lightness of their own choices. They will howl because we say, simply by showing up, that we have found true blessings, while all they have is a nice bass boat. When we show our love for one another, we show the world, and those who are of the world in the church, how empty their relationships are, and so they hate us. When we refuse to adopt safe and decorous modes of speech, we show the world and those of the world in the church, that they’re wearing skirts.

When we think through our actions, our emotions, our thoughts, when we are deliberate, we are doing nothing more than being prophetic, to ourselves. Being deliberate means nothing more than bringing the Word of God to bear on our own lives. It means not asking, “What would Jesus do?” but “What does Jesus say?” It means refusing to allow the unspoken assumptions of the prophets of this world to determine how we will live our lives.

In one sense we do this not because we want the glory of being a prophet. The only glorious prophets are those who tickle people’s ears. But in another sense we do want the glory of the prophet, which is this, not the honor of being honored, but the honor of being vilified for Christ’s sake. We are just simple enough, just separate enough, just deliberate enough to actually believe the Great Prophet when He promised, “Blessed are you when they revile you, and persecute you, and say all kinds of evil against you falsely for My sake. Rejoice and be exceedingly glad, for great is your reward in heaven, for so they persecuted the prophets who were before you.”