ONE PROPHET's WILDERNESS - A Must-Read
Posted by: prophetic <prophetic@...>
by Michael Clark
This is the story of how God dealt with me in His
wilderness. One day in 1980 I was praying and seeking
the Lord for direction on what He wanted me to say in
my church home meeting, He showed me a vision of
myself standing on a pedestal in a white robe with all
the people in my home group on their knees around
the bottom of the pedestal giving glory to God. As each
word of praise went upward to heaven and passed me
by, I reached out and grabbed it and tucked it in my
robe next to my heart. After seeing this I cried out, "Oh
God! Is this what I am doing to you? If it is, then Lord
kill it!" The gift in me was releasing praises to God, but
in my immaturity and desire to be recognized as valid
I had sought to be exalted above others and thereby
invalidated the gift He had given me.
You see when one is truly dead to self and alive to Him,
there is no offense taken when your word is rejected and
no pride generated when it is received. There is only one
way that I know that God can work so great a death in
an individual and that is through tribulation and wilderness.
Shortly after I prayed that prayer of death, God started
answering it. First He asked me, "Michael, if I cease to
move by my Spirit in your meetings, will you try to fake
it?" I said, "No Lord, you quit and I quit." The next day
two of the key families in the group called me and told
me that they were not coming to the meetings any
more. I blessed them and told them that I thought the
Lord was telling me that I was to shut it down. The
following meeting I announced to the group that it was
the last meeting that we would be coming to, but that
they were free to continue without us. They had one
more meeting and it died.
Next, the church that I was affiliated with was split by a
prophetic holiness cult. As the leaders of this group
called me in on the carpet and tried to rein me in and
get me under their authority, I refused and came under
attack and curses by them. My response was to say
to them, "I have had all this fun with you Christians I
can stand. I'm out of here! I'm heading for Midian on the
back side of the desert. I'll see you in about 40 years!"
The leader said a most curious thing, "Michael, it need
not take that long."
After that meeting I was mad at the Church and mad at
God. The next thing I knew His clear voice, which spoke
to me so often, ceased to be heard. The scriptures that
had so nourished me seemed dead and dried up. I could
not find meaningful fellowship with any other Christians.
My prayers seemed to fall off the edge of my lip and hit
the floor. I felt so alone and betrayed.
Then the Sabean raiding parties started coming in
(Job 1:15). I could not find work anywhere! I had three
journeyman licenses in my billfold and was sure that I
would always have a "meal ticket," but no way! I had
been cut off form my supply. I was too proud to accept
unemployment, and we (my family of six) were reduced
to gleaning food from muddy farm fields and diving in
supermarket dumpsters at night for food. Some days I
was so depressed I just laid in bed, curled up in a fetal
position.
About this time, my wife was near the end of her rope.
She pray one day, "God this school for prophets is very
hard. Why do I have to audit all the classes?" The Lord
spoke to her clearly, "You are not auditing the classes.
You are a matriculated student." She saw me through
my wilderness and now she is in her own wilderness,
being purified by God.
Finally when we were just about to get a third month
behind on our home mortgage and the banker was about
to foreclose, I found work. It was humbling to accept a
job opportunity through my Mormon uncle, but it was
work. The job was an electrician position on Akutan
Island in Alaska's Aleutian chain, a treeless, wind swept
volcanic rock on the edge of the Arctic Ocean. Now I
was in a literal wilderness as well as a spiritual one, and
my family was not allowed to come.
I was cut off, dying inside, missing my family, but most
of all missing my Lord. At one point in my tenure on that
rock, sitting on my bunk in my depression I watched my
consciousness get up out of my body and head for the
door as if to say, "I can't stand to live with you anymore,
I'm leaving." I cried out to Jesus to please hold me
together long enough to get me back home to my family
again. He did.
>From that point on it was a very slow and gradual ramp
up out of that terrible pit, but for the next ten years He
kept drawing me to Him with invisible cords, but not
enough that I could perceive it. I spent 14 years in all in
that spiritual wilderness.
I had a significant encounter with Him in 1990 at a mens'
retreat in Idaho. The pastor had another brother and
myself stand in the midst of the men and explained to
them that God had called us to the prophetic and that He
had us in a time of wilderness, asking them to pray for us.
The next day I confessed to the men and to God that I
had been mad at God for letting Christians attack me and
for taking away from me all things that were spiritual for
all those years. I confessed that I had sinned by judging
God and His church and asked for forgiveness. That
started the "big thaw" in my spiritual winter. Things were
finally coming back into perspective, "He is God, I'm a
sinner," not the other way around.
In 1991 I had my first real Holy Ghost encounter with
God in eleven years... His presence came down on me with
such intensity that I could hardly breathe. I was back at the
Motel between meetings, sitting on the floor in the laundry
room between two washing machines reading the book of
Jonah. All of a sudden He filled the room! The book of Jonah
came alive! Every word was jumping off the page and straight
into my heart.
There were more encounters with Him and more testings
and trials at the hands of Christians after that, but I kept
"short accounts" and had learned to forgive and keep
seeking His face in each one. I had determined that I
was tired of a diet of, as my friend called it, "roast pastor."
I was not accepted with open arms back into church
ministries for I still saw things from that prophetic
perspective, but I didn't make it my duty to set all of
them "right," either.
Jesus said of the Pharisees, "They are blind guides
leading the blind. Leave them alone, they will fall into
the ditch." Sometimes, the best cure for a disease is to
let it run its course. When one is on his back in a ditch,
it might just be the first time that he has ever looked up
and become humbled enough to seek help! Saul the
persecutor of the Church found this out. "All good gifts
come DOWN from the Father of lights." God opposes
the proud and lifts up the humble.
Well, I said all that to say this... You who are called to
be prophets, study the scriptures and see the common
thread of wilderness in the lives of God's prophets and
invite His mighty humbling hand to prove your heart in
His crucible of affliction, that He might truly use you as
His purified instrument. Even after this period of
wilderness, called by some "the dark night of the soul,"
I find that He continues to work His death in me as I
continue to follow Him and speak His words.
-Michael Clark.