Prophecy

I've been spending some time reading the prophets and am doing so again this morning. And as I was reading I've hit a section where it's a lot of "The Lord said unto me" type things. And I started thinking, what would happen if we had people going around saying things like that today.
My first reaction is we would think they're nuts. No one would listen. No one would pay attention. We've had thousands of years of people saying "God told me" only to find out that it wasn't true nor God. We would simply think "yeah right" and continue on with our day (it even happened to me not to long ago at a Wal-Mart. No one believed this guy).

But then I started thinking, no wait. We do believe in that kind of prophecy still. Just with one rule: It has to be good. If people are praying at church and someone tells another "God just spoke to me, He said you're going to be rich", we are all over that. Blessings upon you. Name it and claim it. We have no problem believing someone was spoken to by God if they have something good to say, but if it's bad, it can't be God.

And then I realized. That is exactly what is going on with the prophets in the Old Testament. A majority of them are saying things the people don't want to hear. And yet Jeremiah talks about how there are other prophets and they are not speaking the Word of God, they are just saying good things. And the kings and the people are eating it up and ignoring what they don't want to hear. They think something is from God if it's good. If it's bad, the "prophet" must be wrong.

Even in churches today, three thousand years later, are we different? Forget prophecy, if a pastor stands up on Sunday morning and says something the congregation doesn't want to hear, do they realize they should change or do they write it off as the pastor was wrong today? I even remember talking with a youth pastor in town about the idea of internet churches, you go online and pick the sermon you want to hear and he started to laugh. "We'd never hear about sin again. Give me grace every time!"

So really, how far have we come with God in three thousand years? And if we want to go further, what do we need to do?

T