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Discussion Forum : General Topics : And They Crucified Him by Art Katz

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eagleswings
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Joined: 2003/12/30
Posts: 297
Connecticut, USA

 Re: And They Crucified Him

I will be privileged to hear him speak this coming Sunday, looking forward to it.

Are you aware that his itinery shows Jan.9-11? :-D


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Roger P.

 2004/1/9 13:24Profile
eagleswings
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Joined: 2003/12/30
Posts: 297
Connecticut, USA

 Re: And They Crucified Him

8. In the religious unreality that pervades our church services, we are unconsciously yielding more and more to a spirit of manipulatiuon to produce some semblance of life against the deadness and grayness of unresolved conflict, unconfessed sin, nurtured resentment and inability to forgive which are the evidence of the Cross neglected. What are you going to do with a carnal congregation who brings in their dead weight and their grayness? You’re compelled, if you’re going to have anything that’s called ‘a successful service’, to condescend to manipulation. Manipulation is the antithesis of faith. It’s a scandal and a shame that many of our services, particularly in the Pentecostal realm, look more like high school football rallies -- an attempt to pump up flesh in the guise of spirit -- because of the avoidance of the Cross. People simply insist on clinging to their resentments, their bitternesses, theiir unconfessed sins. And because we have cowards in the pulpit, and because we don’t want to be shaken or disturbed, we put a thin gloss over that whole mess and try and pump up some measure of successful religion that will bring a flush to our cheeks and give us a Sunday hour.

Have you not read the final verse of the second chapter of the book of Ephesians? ‘To God be glory in the Church’. It is an unspeakable scandal that of all of the insitutions to be be found on the earth in this hour the Church is the deadest. Our religion becomes increasingly a performance, monotonous and predictable, rather than a lively and life-giving communion of the saints. There’s nothing you can prediict with greater regularity than what’s going to happen in church on Sunday. Waiting on God in silence that would reveal our spiritual bankruptcy is drowned out by our amplifiers and ceaseless activity lest we acknowlege our condition. There’s a reason why we’re uncomfortable with silence. There is a tacit and unspoken agreement between clergy and congregation by which ‘the show goes on’ for the preservation of a safe status quo while carnality and sin abound unchecked and unadressed in the lives both of the congregants and the ministers. In the name of being defenders of the faith, stodgy and fearful men are to be found actually opposing it, not having the ‘faith which was once delivered unto the saints’. Thus those who consider themselves the most vigilant guardians of the faith do violence to the faith and smother it.


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Roger P.

 2004/1/9 13:54Profile
eagleswings
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Joined: 2003/12/30
Posts: 297
Connecticut, USA

 Re: And They Crucified Him

9. In the Evangelical churches therefore one is likely to find, I’m quoting now another writer, ‘Biblicism without liberating preaching.’ Correct texts and doctrinally sound sermons that simply do not liberate or convict. In the Pentecostal churches, nostalgia for the days of former glory, sentimental and teary, in a salty marsh long since separated from the River of Life that has left it behind, proclaiming Holy Ghost distinctives long-ago abandoned in actual experience. It’s been my unhappy experience, again and again, to note that no church is more ‘doubly dead’ than that which has once known the Holy Spirit. The condition of Pentecostal churches in the world is unbelievable. In the Charismatic realm, sing-song superficiality, the hardening of the spontaneity of the Spirit into a fixed liturgy of choruses, pregnant pauses, pontifical prophesies that are mere truisms and which are ignored as quickly as they are spoken. Haven’t you noticed that? You can almost count on it now: the regularity of the number of songs that we’ll sing, and then by some unspoken agreement a certain momentary silence that will allow someone to come forth with a tongue, an interpretation or a prophecy of the most general kind that you would hardly think God would bother to speak, and which likely He’s not, and which is accepted for the nothing that it is because we go right on with business as usual, not at all touched. It’s become performance.

Dear children, there’s a God who is very grieved. If that uttrerance is holy utterance, we ought so to be mindful of it and to respond appropriately, but our disregard of it and our nonchalance itself is the proof of what our real attitude about such kinds of ‘Holy Spirit’ activity is. Altogether there is an inexorable tendency to brainwash and conform men till we are all persuaded that we are seeing The Emperor’s New Clothes while he is yet pathetically naked.

Do you know the story? About how two shifty tailors came to town, a couple of hucksters who told the king that they had certain golden thread and they would weave him a gorgeous wardrobe unlike anything that any king had ever worn. And so when the poor man came to be fitted he saw nothing, but he heard the ecstatic ‘ooh’s and ‘aah’s of these tailors and their henchmen and thought, “Well maybe there’s something wrong with me. I guess it is beautiful, but I don’t see it.’ How many times have you sat leaden in a congregation and thought, ‘I guess there’s something wrong with me’ when the truth of the matter is there was something right with you which you should not have squelched and swallowed down. If you did it it was to the detriment of your spirit and made your discernment dull.

How much of our modern religion is The Emperor’s New Clothes? Everybody’s ‘ooh’ing and ‘aah’ing. Lots of ‘Amen’s and ‘Halleleula’s and loud choruses and exclamations and ecstatic references until you feel, ‘Gee, maybe there’s something wrong with me. I better enter into this,’ and you do -- by the flesh. But the pathetic thing is the Emperor is yet naked.


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Roger P.

 2004/1/9 14:06Profile
lwpray
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Joined: 2003/6/22
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 Re:


Mr Katz has no friends among those who promote the “New thing-ism” or among the many vanity prophets.
He is, on the other hand, a dear friend among the many who dare to follow hard after God.
Ravenhill said a few good words about him, commending his way of living “just above the poverty line”, strong before the Lord, fearless among men. He has continued along these paths while visiting many nations. And we love to listen to him as he puts perfect words to events and issues in the modern church.


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Lars Widerberg

 2004/1/9 15:56Profile
crsschk
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Joined: 2003/6/11
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 Re:

Quote:
Are you aware that his itinery shows Jan.9-11?



Thanks Roger,

Yes, but I can find no other information other than the church he will be at on Sunday.


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Mike Balog

 2004/1/9 22:42Profile
eagleswings
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Joined: 2003/12/30
Posts: 297
Connecticut, USA

 Re: And They Crucified Him

10. Until we come to the nakedness of the Cross, we’ll not have the garment of His righteousness. At the time when the Church should be preparing herself to be a visible place of refuge in a coming age of disaster, as an island of sanity and reality in a sick world, she herself is declining into pusilanimous faith and superstition. She is producing a new breed of super-executives, slick promoters, computer centers and multi-million dollar facilities that have elicited even the admiration of the world, but has no message for it. I’m amazed, depression babe that I am, at what we are producing or what is being produced in this generation -- a slick, religious executive, promoters of which the world might well be proud, who build their little petty kingdoms of multi-million dollar kinds with hundreds upon hundreds sitting in their pews looking upon the Emperor’s new clothes.

Weary millions tramp about in a no-man’s land of religious frustration and defeat, professing for doctrines realities which they never have experienced, while legalisms abound in the very name of grace. I came back with such a cry from a recent overseas trip that the Gospel, the everlasting Gospel of Jesus Christ needs to be proclaimed, not so much to the world as, first, to the Church. It is amazing how few Christians know it; how few understand it; how few have been affected by it; how few are living in it; how many who call themselves “Christians” enjoying the benefits, so-called, of the New Covenant are living essential Old Covenant lives, bound and under the law, thinking that by their deeds they can somehow buy themselves something that could be called redemptive. Do you think only the Jews know the Law? Law is any attempt by men, through human effort, to earn for themselves a modicum of religious satisfaction, and acceptance with God. ‘God gave His only-begotten Son, full of grace,’ and how many of us have yet to taste that grace. Legalisms abound in a no-man’s land of religious frustration and defeat. Weary millions profess for doctrines realities which they never have experienced.

You have to excuse me for being a simple believer and a naive man, but I just have a respect for words, and had it even as an atheist. How much more then as a believer. That the things that we speak ought to be true or we ought not to say them. I’ll tell you that every glib and facile easy kind of speaking is going to cost us plenty in our own spirit and life, for the Sprit of God is first and pre-eminently the Spirit of Truth before He is any other thing.

Only His Cross distinguishes belief from unbelief and even more from superstition. Are we willing to bring to the Cross, the plumbline of God from heaven, our wish-dreams and subjective fantasies, our total life for His total correction? I’ll tell you that if you have not the Cross as a standard, as a plumbline, and that thing by which our own life should be squared, how then are you assured of being built straight in Him? Are we not rather a people like those of old who desire a king who would ‘come down from the Cross and we will believe Him’ rather than be required, or invited, to join Him on it What is our real spirit, and with whom would we agree we would be standing at the base of the Cross two thousand years ago. It’s not that they were Jews that they cried out, ‘Come down from the Cross and we will believe you and you’ll be our king.’ It’s that they were men who have no stomach for a King Who is impaled on a Cross and certainly no desire to be joined in union with Him there. How many of us who talk about the Cross really in our hearts desire that He come down from it.


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Roger P.

 2004/1/9 23:36Profile
eagleswings
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Joined: 2003/12/30
Posts: 297
Connecticut, USA

 Re: And They Crucified Him

11. Our attitude about prosperity as being the measure of spirituality, our unwillingness to consider that the sacrosanct ‘rapture’ theory is really only a theory, only a century or so old, and that it may well be wrong. And if so, it would leave us grievously unprepared for soon-coming eventualities and realities for which we have been too soft and too spoiled and too undisciplined to face. We still want a king who will come down. One can well ask whether the veil of unreality that keeps us from the glories of God and His Kingdom shall ever be rent until we give up the Ghost and cry with a loud voice.

Have you ever given up the Ghost? The fifteenth chapter of Mark, a description of the same event with a slightly different emphasis: ‘And Jesus cried with a loud voice,’ thirty seventh verse, ‘and gave up the Ghost. And the veil of the temple was rent in twain from the top to the bottom, and when the centurion which stood over against Him saw that, He said “Truly, this man was the Son of God”.’

You know what I have a feeling about? That the final revelation of the mystery of God-in-flesh, which Jesus demonstrated in His own Body, is to be reserved for us at the end of the age. And despite the tens of thousands of bumper stickers, rallies, campaigns and other no fuss, no stoop, no bother kinds of evangelism, which have not saved the world, that the final witness for which God is reserving and indeed preparing us is another Body, impaled on a Cross in ultimate suffering for the ultimate revelation of the Truth of God-in-flesh, that maybe not an unbelieving Roman, but unbelieving Jews and those who share that spirit of that Jewish life-style, ‘seeing these things.’ will cry out, ‘truly this is the Son of God.’

Nothing reveals like suffering. The whole unbelieving mankind, which has deified man and is becoming brutalized and sensual waits the revealing of the mystery of God indwelt in men, when it shall be compelled to crucify us for the same reasons that it crucified Him. It may be that ultimate Truth will again be revealed in ultimate suffering to the only cry that will save: ‘Truly, this is the Son of God.’ You say, ‘What do you mean, Art, that “They’re going to be compelled to crucify us for the same reasons for which they crucified Him.”?’

I think it has something to do with this: that a writer has said that Jesus suffered and died, not by happenstance, nor only for the fulfillment of the Father’s plan for atonement, but that He brought it upon Himself by His own character, by His own life and by His message. What then shall be brought upon us if we adopt His character, move in His Life and proclaim His message. I wonder if God is not preparing a Body again for burial, but a Body that will, in the final and ultimate moment of dying, be able to yield up the Ghost. ‘When he saw this ... .’


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Roger P.

 2004/1/9 23:38Profile
eagleswings
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Joined: 2003/12/30
Posts: 297
Connecticut, USA

 Re: And They Crucified Him

12. How are you doing in yielding up … now? It’s been our experience in our little community situation in Minnesota, having people come to us who are ardent in their belief in discipleship and commitment and submission -- really believed it -- that we have heard a screech and a holler and a copping out and a flight when it was actually required for the rubber to hit the road. And that we have seen a depth of revelation of the independency of spirit and self-willedness and rebellion in God’s people, when a yielding is required, that is shocking. When He gave up the Ghost, when He yielded up the Ghost, in ultimate suffering for the Truth’s sake, one whom we would never expect to be able to sense or see anything spiritually, cried out with the cry that saves, ‘Truly this, this Man, was the Son of God.’

I believe with all my heart that God is seeking again and preparing again for the end of the age such a man. He’ll not be one who is accustomed to conventional preliminaries.and likes rip-roaring religious times and lots of excitement and emotion and going home happy, but I think that that son and that man will be drafted from among those who could come to a strange situation, as for example like tonight, in the foolishness of an almost empty auditorium, without the advantage of the accustomed preliminaries of service, with not so much as a note sung or played, to hear rather unusual words spoken or even read, without any of the histrionic and glamorous means of projecting messages through personality, and know that God is speaking something solemn, something needful which has been grievously left unspoken in our entire generation. The spirit that clamors for prosperity, for ‘blessings,’ and the rapture is not the spirit that’s going to appreciate a message on suffering and the Cross.

We know that the spirit of Antichrist is already in the world, and ‘anti’ not only means 'opposed', but seeking to be 'something like' Him, 'yet not' Him. How shocked and stunned might we be to realize to what degree we ourselves have submitted and may actually be operating in that spirit if our Christ is not the Christ Who suffered, died and rose again -- not just as doctrine -- but in the actuality of our own knowledge and experience.

The issue of the Cross is the issue of death. Suffering is dying, and we have not been prepared either by our churches, let alone in the world, to be disposed to consider it or to do it. The way of the Cross is the way of abandonment. ‘A great darkness came over the earth’ while Jesus was impaled on the Cross. How many of us would be willing for a great darkness, a great nothingness, to come upon us? Even to the point that those things that we thought we understood, the little notions that we have, the doctrines of which we’re so assured, should also be brought to the nothingness of that darkness.


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Roger P.

 2004/1/9 23:49Profile
eagleswings
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Joined: 2003/12/30
Posts: 297
Connecticut, USA

 Re: And They Crucified Him

13. There’s a veil that needs to be rent, torn perhaps this time not from the top to the bottom, but from the bottom to the top, as we give up the ghost with a loud cry, that those who are seeing us might cry out, ‘Truly this man is a son of God.’.The darkness that covered Jesus on the Cross must come upon you also, as a negation of all things, even that which we think we have understood about the Cross itself. The Cross is the most unreligious symbol that could ever be imagined. The crucifixion of Jesus, that pathetic thing, that words cannot describe or comprehend, the ending of a life in nakedness that began in nakedness is the complete negation of every kind of conventional wisdom and religious notion that men could conjure. There’s no way to come to it by your reasoning. The fact that we think we have is contradicted by our lives. You can only come to it in darkness and repentance and in no other way, because it is perverse, it is ugly, it is unappealing and unattractive, for which reason only perverse, ugly, unappealing and unattractive people have never had difficulty coming to the Cross. To see Him as He is means also to see ourselves as we are, and to have a distorted notion of Him is also to have a distorted and self-exalting notion of ourselves. If the prophet Isaiah seeing the Lord, ‘high and lifted up, ‘ cried out, ‘Woe is me. I am undone. I’m a man of unclean lips and I live in the midst of a people of unclean lips,’ what then shall we say who are not prophets and oracles of God? We need to have our vision and our sight corrected; we need to address our lives to the plumbline of God, the standard of God, the Cross of Christ Jesus. Not academically, superficially or religiouly, but in the actual experience of our lives as those who have come, willing to abandon everything -- to enter into a darkness; to rend every veil that keeps us from coming into that inner sanctuary that was described tonight; a willingness even to yield up the ghost with a loud voice.

To the Romans the Cross is always perverse, unrespectable, unaesthetic, totally inappropriate to God, a scandal. Have you made peace with that scandal? Would you be willing to suffer expulsion and death in identification with it? Only one who is himself perverse and unrespectable can suffer the scandal of the Cross. How many of us secretly believe that we’re doing God a favor? Others needed to be saved out of their sin, and though we technically acknowledge, ‘well, maybe that was true,’ our deepest heart believes that God saw in us some virtue, and some ability that He needs to employ for His Kingdom, and we have somehow a special basis for our relationship which is different from that of others. The Cross is the only basis -- the Cross in Truth -- for those who can receive its scandal.

A writer says that ‘The Cross is the utterly incommensurable factor in the revelation of God,’ and that ‘we have become far too used to it.’ We have made a theory of salvation out of it, but that is not the Cross. We have sentimentalized and distorted and taken the sting out of it; we have negated its death and suffering. It needs to be recalled as an event, and we need to make it for ourselves an event. The central, pivotal, event of all our faith and life. All must go dark for us, become as night in the daytime of our comfortable religious understanding.


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Roger P.

 2004/1/10 15:48Profile
eagleswings
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Joined: 2003/12/30
Posts: 297
Connecticut, USA

 Re: And They Crucified Him

14. The veil was rent; the rocks were rent; the graves were opened, and the dead came forth into the Holy City. It needs to happen again. And the only place that it can happen, in a true coming, is to this scandalous union in suffering and death with Him. Now I’ve spoken what God has given me.

It’s been my experience in fourteen years as a believer and about eleven years in full-time service that there’s no message more difficult to proclaim than the Cross. There’s nothing more difficult to press on the true consciousness of God’s saints than the glory of this Cross. We have become too used to it. We have made of it only a theory for salvation. We’ve come to altar-call after altar-call, and invitation after invitation; we’ve laid our lives down before Christ again and again and again, and yet somehow we’re still very much alive. The veil of selfishness and self-interest and vanity and pride is still not rent. The rocks of our heart are still not split. We still remain dead, and in our tombs. Few of us have entered the Holy City, let alone the sanctuary and the Holy Place. So I’m just going to invite you to come to this Cross; it needs to become an event. How many of you will do it if you realize that you’re opening yourself up for suffering that God in His wisdom will be pleased to inflict? How many of us will choose to walk in the way of the Cross; and not having walked in the Way, we have not graduated to the Truth; and not loving the Truth, we have not tasted of the Life. It begins with the Way and it ends with the Life.


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Roger P.

 2004/1/10 15:51Profile





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