[-From the foreword to the wonderful book 'Why Revival Tarries']-

Great industrial concerns have in their employ men who are needed only
when there is a breakdown somewhere. When something goes wrong with
the machinery, these men spring into action to locate and remove the
trouble and get the machinery rolling again.

For these men a smoothly operating system has no interest. They
are specialists concerned with trouble and how to find and correct it.

In the kingdom of God things are not too different. God has always had
His specialists whose chief concern has been the moral breakdown,
the decline in the spiritual health of the nation or the church. Such
men were Elijah, Jeremiah, Malachi and others of their kind who
appeared at critical moments in history to reprove,  rebuke and exhort
in the name of God and righteousness.

A thousand or ten thousand ordinary priests or pastors or teachers
could labor quietly on almost unnoticed while the spiritual life of
Israel or the church was normal. But let the people of God go astray
from the paths of truth and immediately the specialist appeared almost
out of nowhere. His instinct for trouble brought him to the help of
the Lord and of Israel.

Such a man was likely to be drastic, radical, possibly at times
violent, and the curious crowd that gathered to watch him work
soon branded him as extreme, fanatical, negative. And in a sense they
were right. He was single-minded, severe, fearless, and these were the
qualities the circumstances demanded. He shocked some, frightened
others and alienated not a few, but he knew who had called him and
what he was sent to do. His ministry was geared to the emergency, and
that fact marked him out as different, a man apart.

To such men as this the church owes a debt too heavy to pay. The
curious thing is that she seldom tries to pay him while he lives, but
the next generation builds his sepulcher and writes his biography, as
if instinctively and awkwardly to discharge an obligation the previous
generation to a large extent ignored...

-A.W. Tozer.