Prophets, speak for man where other voices belittle and vilify man. Although the pathos of men marred by sin pierces your minds, let God’s action to heal the broken thrill your hearts. Learn that moral renaissance, not pessimism, is the Christian answer to wrong.
You know what sin is. You are familiar with its grief when the jokes turn sour and the memory becomes a nightmare. You know sin’s deceit, its hurt and its guilt, and you know its victims yearn for healing, for more life, for life with God.
You understand the vitality of the human spirit. You see its origin in God and its urge toward God, and you understand its anguish when alienated from God. Speak, prophets; speak from the joy that knows sin cannot forever divide what God determines to unite, namely, himself and man. Stand up and point to Christ, who activates a people to champion man’s reconciliation with God, and with man.
Does leniency toward licentiousness or deference to “respectability” deter you from working for man’s moral renewal? Take those empty hearts, tormented minds, and outraged bodies to the community of grace. Prove that sin can be excised and persons incited to grow toward the stature of Christ. Quit dallying with growth in grace as a mere dogma: show that it is Christ achieving love’s verities in the common experiences of life. Illustrate the facts that lives stymied by sin’s tyranny can be released to total trust in Christ, can be sustained in the fellowship of shared strength, and shall become Christ’s new creation. You often proclaim the comfort of the Holy Spirit; good—now let your personality reveal that the joy of heaven has already penetrated earth’s sorrows. Inform the fallen that they do not need boot strap courage or dark despair: show them Christ has come to them!
Prophets, tell man he has immediate access to the Christ-way for his daily walk. Portray Christ’s holy love and moral purity in your own Christian manhood. Pick up the defeated from the shadowed valleys, and call down the haughty from the plains of ease. You lead the way up the road of virtue ribboning across the crags of vulgar violence against humanity.
The Christ to be preached to the face of sin is in your lives for healing, on your lips for speaking, and at your hands for helping. The Holy Spirit has been given. New life has come and is here: live it! Say on, prophets, say it: challenge men to be what Christ has made them—a servant people, a holy people, his body. Advance beyond the platitude that grace is God’s justifying persons. State the practical truth that grace is God’s enabling persons to do his holy will. Infiltrate the filth of culture with the visible truth that no hour is so horrible but what a man can be true, true to the God who is forever true.
Does zeal drive you to the frontiers? Excellent! But take another look. The Master is ahead of you, standing yet on the Judean hills. He calls you back to the true frontier he staked out in Palestine: the wasteland of anxious and aimless hearts. Man your posts there, stemming hell’s tide, parrying Satan’s enticements, structuring love’s unities, and erecting purity’s guidon. Look at your own battle scars and state that Christians who emerge unscathed by evil’s flame simply came to the fray as spectators, not as Christ’s legions for man’s liberation.
Does impatience propel you to join the avant-garde? Good! Let the light of Christ’s love on you be a piercing preview of the promised fulfillment of all life’s joy. Dare to think through the dazzling truths of eternal wisdom that undergird the reasons of the heart. Go on to the hearts that need you; the Christ will meet you there. You should be in the avant-garde; true heralds have always appeared there. You know your exploratory work is nowhere else but at the heart of the Gospel, and in human hearts. Quit thinking you should hold back; you have not yet gone far enough.
Prophets, tell those loved of God that it is not their job to sit about waiting for others to love them, to pamper and soothe them. Inform them that it is their duty to extend the beauty of love to others—to lift, to share, and to give. Divine love has come to Christians; warn them to stop keeping it and to start giving it. Remind Christians that they were unworthy and without status when they received God’s love. Have them cease looking for a return on their investment of love; specify that they are to spend and be spent without thought of recompense. Remind them that the love channeled through them comes from an inexhaustible source: God. It can’t be wasted. Dare them to be reckless with that love, or know they are doomed to lose it.
The cities lie waste beneath the facade of modernity. Lust, greed, and crime breed horrendous havoc in the land. Hating life, our culture gulps down “the bitter mingled cup of ancient woes” (Aeschylus). The Spinner of the centuries cries, “NOW, now loose men and women of compassion in the earth, loose them for Christ and for the healing of life.” Say it, prophets, and say it again: Human life is made to glorify God and to enjoy him forever; all else is hatred against humanity.
Prophets, make way for the healing grace that swells to surge through human lives. Put into public view Christ’s life already given to man—out with it now!
Prophets: speak for man!
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