Am I prophet? But how? If I am a layman, I cannot be a prophet... Then let me remind you that you are not only a prophet, but also a priest and king! Already in another article we had talked about the triple function of priests, prophetic and royalty that we acquired in the baptism, focusing on the priestly part [Me a priest]. So now we’ll analyze what entails in our daily life being also prophets.

Today when we hear the word prophet we can imagine something that has nothing to do with the prophets of the Old Testament. It may come to our imagination that the Prophet is the one who foretells something, almost like a soothsayer, and certainly we’re not called to be soothsayers. 

The Prophets of the Old Testament, like those who are called to be, appeared in the midst of the people of Israel with two objectives, to announce and denounce. And we are called to the same task, to proclaim and denounce, we are told clearly by Paul VI in Lumen Gentium: "The holy people of God also participates in the prophetic function of Christ, spreading his living testimony especially with the life of faith and charity and Offering God the sacrifice of praise, which is the fruit of the lips that confess his name. " Let us then analyze this double mission that we have as prophets.

Announce. Prophet means "spokesman" and, therefore, it’s clear that one of the things we should do as spokespersons is to give someone else's message. 

And as Catholics, what’s the best message we can give? Evidently the Gospel! But this doesn’t mean that you have to go out into the streets and squares with a Bible in hand and read it to every person who goes through, as if we were giving the news. It means rather that we have to bring the gospel to all areas of our lives, both in word and in action. The problem is how we're going to talk about something we don't know in depth. From there the importance of knowing the Sacred Scriptures, it’s not important to know them by heart, but to know their teachings, to transmit them to others and to be able to live them in our daily life. It may be that living the teachings of the Gospel in everyday life sounds very high and complicated, but I propose something that you can do: every week take a passage from the Gospel in which you can see a virtue of Christ, read it every morning and during those days, try to live that virtue and talk to others about it. You will see that quickly this can become a great habit and little by little you can go announcing the best news in the world.

Report. The function of the prophets was also to denounce the people their evil deeds. They were sent by God to warn Israel that they were deviating from the right way. How much is missing in our day prophets of this type? That is why each one of us also has to be able to, with our testimony and our word, make people understand when they’re not going on the right track. We may think that being like those Old Testament prophets implies telling everyone to change the way they live their lives, but in reality, that is not possible. However, what we can do is help those who are near us to improve in some aspect of their life in which they are moving away from God. Many people, from our family, our school or work partners appreciate a good advice, given with charity, or some words of encouragement when they are going through some rough times. That’s where we must be prophets, stand firm in our Catholic principles and share them with others.

It’s very likely that, if we seek to act as prophets, the world will treat us as such. And how did they treat the prophets in ancient times? They often repudiated them, didn’t listen to them, envied and pointed at them and sometimes even blamed them for evil. But don’t be discouraged, if any of this begins to happen, you can be more certain that you are acting as a prophet. If you want to read some extraordinary lives of prophets to encourage you, you can search the Old Testament for the stories of Elijah, Elisha or Daniel, who dedicated themselves to announcing and reporting and were persecuted for that, but they always trusted God and came out of all their problems.

And don't forget to keep reading the articles about what it means to be priests and kings, so that we can truly understand these functions and live these extraordinary missions that we have as baptized.