Nothing Like Finding A Lost Treasure

Today I was driving by the YMCA to park by the soccer fields (which is our church property) and pray for Southwest and the building project and everything when I decided I needed some good music to listen to as well.

The problem is that I hate radio music and I only have a tape player in my Escort - which meant I had to go digging for some tapes in my trunk.

The good thing is that I found a tape that I thought I had lost a long time ago. It's by the band L.S.U., and the album is called "The Grape Prophet". What an absolutely incredible album. As for a secular artist this album sounds like, the closest I can think of is Jane's Addiction, back in their "Nothing's Shocking" days.

Anyway, the whole album is a story, an allegory about a man named Ellis who picks oranges in an orchard, when he notices that most of his fellow orange pickers have left the orchard because of someone named "The Grape Prophet". A lady orange picker encourages Ellis to check this prophet out - she tells him to "come into the fold for your future is ours and your mind, in time. Spin the callous wheel, don't let the coil spoil." He goes to a meeting, where the Grape Prophet is speaking English - and an interpreter is interpreting in English what the prophet is saying because the prophet speaks with strange words and hidden meanings. The prophet says that he "supped" with Jesus and told him secrets that he "just can't tell." Then some minor prophets encourage Ellis to come to Kansas City and check the Prophet out for himself. Ellis at the end of the album refuses and loses all of his picker friends, who go and join the Grape Prophet.

Michael Knott, who I consider one of the greatest lyricists and musicians of Christian music, wrote this album as an allegory of a situation that was taking place in The Vineyard Church in the late 1980's - early 1990's. A man from Kansas City came to the Vineyard in Anaheim (a church I visited several times when I was going to school in Southern California) and prophesied some of the same things that are on the album; notably that he had lunch with Jesus and Jesus told him all of these secrets. He encouraged people to leave Southern California and come to Kansas City to experience some of these secrets. A bunch of people left the church and joined this man (named Bob Jones) in Kansas City. I remember what a huge story this was at the time, and I wonder where the Kansas City Prophet is now.

The point behind this post - besides the fact that The Grape Prophet is an incredible album - is to always weigh what someone in the church says with what the Bible says. I'm thankful that Southwest has a senior minister who is well-grounded in Scripture and allows the Bible to be his guide to teaching; not allowing his teaching to be his guide to the Bible - which happens quite a bit in some churches. I worked for a senior minister once who would do the latter, and it was very frustrating to see people just take it in and accept what he said as the truth. The problem is that we are so biblically illiterate that we don't even know what the Bible does or doesn't say. So we trust people who are supposed to be in the Word daily to interpret Scripture for us. At some point we need to be able to feed ourselves with God's word and not be dependent on others to feed us - otherwise, we are like someone who prefers someone to chew our food for us and spit it back onto a plate for us to then digest. Yeah, that's a gross analogy, but it makes the point.