Foreword

Everybody wants to be a Prophet

The Prophetic Ministry has taken the Church by storm since the turn of the century. In the past prophets were very rare, and it looked like they had disappeared from the Church.

But then, suddenly God began to restore the Prophetic Ministry and this ministry became available to believers who did not think they could ever qualify for it.

Prophetic teachers rose up and schools for the prophets all came into being. I was blessed to be amongst the first to lay down a systematic teaching series for the preparation and training of the Prophetic Office.

But not everyone is called to rise up into the higher level Fivefold Office of the Prophet. Many are called to simply function in the Prophetic Ministry. I realized that I had left a hole in my original teaching on the subject by not giving enough teaching about the actual functioning of a prophet in the local church.

The Prophetic Office functions in the Universal Church, and a prophet in office is called to equip the saints for the work of the ministry, and to lay the groundwork for the development and training of ministries in the End Times Church.

Many, however, will continue to function practically in the Prophetic Ministry without needing to rise up into full Prophetic Office. And even those who are called to full office often find that they have never really learned how to function practically in the true prophetic ministry.

So the main purpose of this book is to help those who are just starting out in the Prophetic Ministry to grow confident and learn how to do this ministry well.

And for those who are in training for higher office, or may have already qualified for such an office, this book will bring a much needed emphasis on the importance of seeing this as a practical ministry, and not just a level of attainment in ministry.

I send forth this book then, in the hope that it will motivate you to get involved in this ministry by showing how easy it can be. I will be sharing many of my own experiences along the way.

If you have been feeling unsure about moving into this ministry, or have lost interest in prophetic ministry, then this book is especially for you.

I hope that the Lord will use it to show you that you can do this, or to restore the fire that may have once burned in you for one of the most exciting ministries in the Body of Christ.

In His Presence

Les D. Crause

Apostle, Prophet and Entrepreneur
Global Business Ministries International

February 2012

Chapter 01 – The Ministry Manifests

It all started when I finally went into ministry and became the pastor of my own church. I had waited years for this opportunity and now at last I could minister to people as a fulltime job.

In the years that led to my ordination and placement I had done everything I could to prepare for the call to ministry.

In the early years I left my job to attend a full time Bible School. Then after that I kept buying and reading books, until I had become an expert in teaching the Word.

Now here I was, a highly qualified Bible Teacher, pastoring a small church of people who did not fully appreciate the awesome teaching that I was giving them.

Often I would prepare a powerful teaching message, but only a handful of people turned up to listen. Nobody really seemed to appreciate or be interested in the Teaching Ministry.

As I became involved in personal ministry and counseling, I realized that it was easy to stand up and preach on a subject. But when I was faced with someone who had a problem I felt quite weak and helpless.

The best I could do was to invite them to my next preach, so that they could hear from the pulpit, the truths that would change their lives.

I needed more than just knowledge of principles. I needed revelation of what was happening in the lives of the people I was working with.

The Lord heard my cry, and I found that after a while I began to have ideas come to my mind about people. At first I thought this was my imagination, but later I realized that the Lord was starting to show me things in the Spirit.

The last thing in my mind was the idea that perhaps the Lord was leading me into a prophetic ministry. I was called to be a teacher, not a prophet.

So I held back on the revelations that God was giving me, and used them only to show me which principles of the Word I should share.

This is something that I had learned to do not long after the Lord filled me with the Holy Spirit. At that time I had received a gift of the spirit that kept getting me into trouble. It was the gift of discerning of spirits.

When I first began to exercise this revelation gift I started to see demonic bondages in the lives of people. I thought that the right thing to do was to tell people what God had shown me. But instead of receiving my revelation, folks got upset with me.

Nobody likes to be told they have a demonic bondage in their life, just as nobody will admit that they have a problem in their marriage. In fact, nobody finds it easy to admit that they have failed.

When I first learned how to counsel people I realized that we are all responsible for the problems in our lives. The cause of our problems is not the way others treated us, but the way we responded to those problems.

I found that it was much easier to preach the Word from the pulpit and let the Holy Spirit convict of sin. So even if I knew by revelation that there was a problem in the person's life, I held that knowledge back for fear of the rejection that it would cause.

What I did not realize was that the Lord was already beginning to show me the problems that a person faces when they begin to operate in the Prophetic Ministry. So instead of allowing the Lord to use me in the revelation gifts, and add the Word of Knowledge and Word of Wisdom, I suppressed the revelations He gave me.

If you have begun to operate in the gifts of revelation and flow in a prophetic ministry, then you understand what I am talking about. You have probably already experienced something similar.

Perhaps you got all excited about what the Lord showed you and went to share it with the person involved. But instead of sharing in your excitement and appreciating your revelation, they rejected it outright.

This has been the experience of everyone who has ever flowed in the Prophetic Ministry. And perhaps the main reason for this is because nobody has taught those in this ministry how to use it correctly.

I retreated to the safe haven of the Word, and that was actually a good thing. Now I could minister to people without experiencing their rejection. But I went too far in the other direction, and I failed to address what the Lord showed me about them.

It was much easier to stand up and preach about the Scriptural pattern for marriage, than it was to confront someone on their failure in their marriage. I somehow needed to learn a balance. I needed to combine my revelations with the ministry of the Word.

The Lord gave me that first problem church to teach me a little about how to do this. It was a difficult church and I struggled to make it flourish. In the end my superiors decided that it was better for me to leave there and minister for a while under a senior minister.

That was when I learned an amazing lesson. Since I was due to leave within a month, I stopped worrying about how people would respond to my revelations.

I decided to go ahead and act on what the Lord was showing me. I began to share some of my revelations along with the ministry of the Word.

The results took me totally by surprise. Suddenly people began to respond better to me. And some of those who had opposed me now began to say,

"It is a pity that you are leaving now. You are finally really ministering to us and we like your ministry."

This was my first experience with using the Prophetic Ministry in a small way, but it was not enough to give me the confidence to let the Lord use me that way. I still had a few more experiences up ahead before I could rise up fully into becoming a true Prophet of God.

Learning to Pray

I wish I could say that I learned my lesson in my first church and that I finally allowed the Lord to use me in prophetic ministry. But that would be a lie.

I soon reverted to my safe ground in the Teaching Ministry, and when I became an assistant in a large church I tried once more to use only the ministry I knew well.

The church that I was working in was run by my senior pastor who was an evangelist. And the church was strictly controlled by elders who laid down the law and were very fussy about what was done in the church.

It was a matter of time before I found myself no longer in the ministry, and in the end I even had to leave the country I grew up in. Every time I tried to minister in a local church I rose up with my successful teaching ministry and became a threat to the local pastor.

In the end all possibilities for ministry ended. The Lord brought me to the place He wanted me to be. I was ready to do whatever He wanted me to do. And that was when my true Prophetic Ministry finally began.

It started one night as we went to the Sunday meeting of a local church we were going to.

We arrived early for prayer before the main meeting started and sat down to pray with those who had come to pray. But there was a kind of restlessness inside me and I felt uncomfortable, so I got up and walked outside.

There, as I paced up and down near the border of the property, the Lord began to explode inside me in revelation in a way I had never known it before. His voice was so clear that it almost felt like someone speaking out loud.

His words to me were,

''Your time here is finished. I am taking you out into something new."

This experience was so startling for me that I went and called my family out of the meeting hall, and we went home instead of waiting for the meeting.

It was now clear to me that my ministry was about to change. But what direction would it take? I found out shortly afterwards as I got down one day with my wife to pray and ask the Lord for provision.

I started out praying a standard prayer and found myself coming under a strong conviction of the Holy Spirit. I still had bitterness in my heart towards church leaders who had rejected me and hurt me. The Lord made it clear to me that He could not bless me until I dealt with these things.

What started out that day as a simple, short time of prayer turned into a very long prayer time, as the Holy Spirit began to move upon me and draw me into a closer relationship with the Lord.

This prayer experience was so powerful that I felt I wanted to pray more. So I began to set aside time each day to pray. In fact I was so stirred that I took a few days off work to spend more time in prayer.

The more I prayed, the more aware I became of the Lord in the Spirit. I had read somewhere that praying in tongues for long periods had a powerful effect, so I thought I would give it a try.

I soon proved the principle to be true, and after praying for over an hour in tongues I broke through to a new realm in the Spirit. And then the ultimate experience was when the Lord Jesus Himself appeared to me in a vision and gave me a revelation of His love.

Now the prophetic gifts began to explode inside of me, and I could not wait to get into His presence to pray.

Praying in tongues became my way of charging up and I found it common for me to pray in tongues for 15 minutes just to warm up and get into the prophetic flow.

Then the Lord began to lead me to go and share with people. Some He sent to me to come and receive ministry.

The Prophetic Ministry developed so quickly that I did not have time to think what I was doing. I just opened my mouth and shared what I was seeing in the Spirit.

The love that the Lord had poured into my heart seemed to make people more receptive to what I shared with them. I found myself telling them what God wanted to do in their lives. And sometimes I knew things about them that they did not tell me.

This came so naturally to me that I did not fully realize what I was doing. It was only later when I saw a prophet operating publicly for the first time that it hit me. I turned to my wife and said,

"What he is doing is the same thing I have been doing without realizing it. Perhaps the Lord has called me to be a prophet."

That night as I sat in the pews watching this prophet calling people up and prophesying over them, I wished he would call me up also and tell me what God had called me to do.

But somehow he did not notice me. He noticed people all around me but he did not get anything for me.

I was disappointed but I learned later that the Lord did not want me to learn from other prophets.

It is not that they had nothing I could learn from. It was simply the fact that God had called me to receive different things directly from Him. Then He wanted me to go and teach these things to others.

I began to realize that each of the experiences I was going through was designed by the Lord to build a principle into me. And each of these principles would become the foundation on which I would build my prophetic ministry.

I will be sharing these principles with you in detail in this book, so that you can begin to apply them to your own prophetic ministry. The experiences that I have shared so far all taught me some of these principles, but there was more.

What I have not fully covered yet is the main function of the Prophetic Ministry, which is the act of speaking out prophecy. This is the operation of the gift of the Spirit known as the Gift of Prophecy.

Many are confused on the subject of the Gift of Prophecy and think that their ability to hear from God in revelation and function as a prophet is a gift in itself. This is not true at all. You do not have 'the prophetic gift' as though this is a divine ability on its own.

I will discuss this in detail in a later chapter.