INSIGHTS FROM AMOS, PART I
As this tumultuous season in the world continues to unfold, we will need to clearly understand what our heart’s cry is as it is often connected to our calling and what we were born to do. We must also allow God to calibrate that cry with what He is crying out in this hour!
The life and times of the prophet Amos have much to show us about how God calls ordinary people to speak for Him in extraordinary times. None of what God does, or who He has made us to be happens in a vacuum. Amos was called in a specific hour, in a specific milieu, with certain concerns that God made use of, to fill a spiritual void. He was called because of who he was and his willingness to be obedient, not because he was formally trained.
Perhaps you feel like an ordinary person who is not really equipped to serve God in any significant way. Or perhaps you want to serve God but feel unqualified and unsure of what He wants you to do. Perhaps you don’t see yourself as someone who has anything much to offer God. Perhaps Amos felt the same way. Sometimes the existing spiritual culture that is status quo or blatantly backslidden can make you feel that way.
Amos was called by God, and he was “among the herdsman of Tekoa” and “took care of sycamore fig trees.”[1] He was the equivalent of a Peter (-a fisherman), or Matthew (-a tax collector). He had no special lineage. He was called to be a prophet but had no formal prophetic training. He didn’t attend a school of the prophets, and he didn’t come from the priestly line. Though some would call these spiritual deficits, God saw them as assets that would aid Amos in how God wanted to use him.
Amos was a herdsman out on the hills. Yet, God saw something in his heart that He could make use of. A man or woman is not separate, or should not be separate, from their message. While God speaks through prophets, He does not force His words from their mouths. He builds His character, identity, and values into them. Then they can roar His Words purely.
God looks to see a fire burning in His people and makes use of the heat to speak forth so that the hearts’ of those he is trying to reach can be, as John Wesley recalled in his journal, “strangely warmed.”
What is burning in your heart? If you can identify what burns within you, you will begin to understand a little of what you have to offer God. We offer Him our little, and He can do much with it.
Our little is little indeed: it may be unrefined, it may be a mixture of flesh and spirit, but somewhere in the discovery of what burdens you, what deeply affects you, what you think about day and night, is your calling in seed form. He will need to purify it, but offer Him the water from the bottom of your well dug with your blood, sweat, tears, and prayers, and let Him purify it and use it as He will.
In any hour, God only has a limited number of people that will respond to Him in obedience. That fact may startle you! We would like to think that we would all do what God asks of us, but on the ground, in real time, that is not actually the case. Utter obedience to God has always been a relatively rare commodity. Thank God that will not always be the case, but in this era it is.
Amos was not a professional prophet, not invested or embedded in the religious system of the day. Moreover, he did not make a living from being a prophet. So perhaps he could better see where things were diverging from the heart of God. Amos could see that what was being offered to God, while having a form of religion, wasn’t at all what God wanted. It could very well be that others weren’t seeing that with the same clarity, or that they actually were but were not making themselves available to be part of the correction.
But who is going to listen to a herdsman give a prophetic word? Apparently, a lot of people! Amaziah the priest has an issue with him and tells him to go back to the hills to be a herdsman! People didn’t what Amos meddling with “how things were.” It won’t be the first time, or the last, that a prophet is accused of treason for saying that sin and rebellion against God will cause a people to fall.
Yet something burns in Amos’s heart —something that resonates with the heart and sentiment of God’s heart, and therefore, God calls and sends Amos to speak for Him. Amos looks around him and sees the hypocrisy, the lack of righteousness, the forsaking of the true way of following God, and his heart becomes united with the heart of God. And out gushes the prophetic proclamations!
He is like a man undone and overtaken: ”The lion has roared, who will not fear? The Sovereign LORD has spoken, who can but prophesy?”[2] This is an hour when we must identify with what is burning on the heart of God and entrain with the same part that is buried in us. For if we are a true believer, a coal from the fire of that altar has been uniquely given to us and we must discover it and fan it into flames. This will become our life message.
Whether we preach, prophesy, or simply obey God in our daily actions, our lives speak forth a message, so let it be a clear one. Amos prophesied during the reigns of Uzziah and Jeroboam. If Uzziah sounds familiar, that was king that the prophet Isaiah spoke of when he had his own vision of the holiness of God, and his call to be sent.[3] Isaiah and Amos were contemporaries and signposts for holiness and righteousness. They were two burning coals in the fire of God in that generation.
Amidst the darkness of any hour, a spirit of holiness is always raised up as a standard. Amos sees a plumb-line coming down from heaven measuring the unjust ways of Israel.[4] In these days, we must listen to our heart cry and ask what God would have us do with that cry. What breaks our hearts? What seems unbearable to us? What makes us weep? What makes us cry “Maranatha” until our throats are parched?
God has put a plumb-line in the heart of each of us, and when something is not straight, something arises within us. Let God measure the straightness of your heart so that He might use you to correct the crookedness of things.
Amos prophesied “two years before the earthquake.” His call came at a specific hour for a specific reason. So it will be with you. In this season, it will have to be every man and woman with a fire burning in their hearts on deck. But make your message a clarion call. Let God straighten you, and that will straighten others without you having to persuade them. Do what you will do because you can’t do anything else. Realize that you are given to this time and place to make a difference.
Realize that your passion must be brought under the Master’s control so that it burns exactly in the place He intends it to. Prophetic people are fired and finished in the “furnace of affliction.” Burn brightly, my brothers and sisters.
Rose-Marie Slosek came to know the Lord in the early seventies and has a passion for organic church and the maturing of the Body of Christ. She serves on the Emmaus Online Lead Team, leads Maranatha Northeast, and a local home fellowship. She can be reached at rmslosek@comcast.net.
[1] Amos 7:14
[2] Amos 3:8
[3] Isaiah 6:1
[4] Amos 7:7
