This sermon emphasizes the importance of preparing for the last days and the restoration of Israel, highlighting the need for sanctification, mercy, and a deep consecration to God. It calls for a transformation in the church's understanding, faith, and relationship with God, especially in the context of the prophesied events involving Israel and the nations. The message challenges believers to move beyond comfort and complacency to a radical commitment to God's purposes and the salvation of His people.

Well, bless you saints. How many are here for the first time today? Can you raise your hand? Hi. Wow. We have to start all over from scratch. My. I thought I was bringing a concluding word and had done all the spade work, and now this was just the finale, but we may have to, I don't know how, the Lord will have to sum up again, give you a sense of what we have been discussing. So I want to pray for an extraordinary grace to conclude. I'm always calling upon God as the Alpha and the Omega. He gives the beginning, I believe He did so this morning, and He must now bring the end. And trust that you who are catching up and have come for a first time will somehow catch a sense of what has already gone forth, and to know that the tapes of it are available. I don't know how the Lord is going to lead me in some kind of survey of Scripture. I've heard echoes of complaint that this man makes grandiose and sweeping statements, but very little Scripture to substantiate. My problem is not finding Scripture. The problem is the surfeit, S-U-R-F-E-I-T, of Scripture. It's an embarrassment of riches. We're inundated. I don't know of a subject more replete with Scripture than Israel in the last days. The remarkable thing is that despite the plethora—I'm taking all my liberties in English tonight— P-L-E-T-H-R-I-R-A—despite the supreme abundance of Scripture on the subject of Israel and the last days' travail, calamity, devastation, and return, there is so little understood about that. I have to conclude that we simply are not reading the prophets. And just to assuage your own sense of guilt, I myself was in the same boat. The prophets were there, but they were not consulted except to find a preaching text. There seems to be a veil over the eyes of the Church about the revelation of Israel's last days' dealing, sifting, and return as there is over Israel itself with regard to the Messiah. Both veils need to be lifted when it, when your heart, shall turn toward the Lord, when you're willing for the full implications of His Lordship, when every last reservation has been removed and there's a total abandon to God, it's remarkable how the flood of revelation and understanding comes. If you're curious how I myself have come to it, it has nothing to do, I don't think, with the fact that I'm Jewish. I've been Jewish now 67 years, but the mystery of Israel has only been my preoccupation for about the last 10 years. And as it happens, it was birthed out of death. I don't think that this is accidental, I think somehow it's significant that the community of which I've been speaking earlier today, after its 10th year of life together, after we had worked our way through so many remarkable crises and were beginning to see daylight, and to become established and to have a prophetical school where men like Sam came, then the Lord brought the entire thing into death. We were required to be unraveled and closed down, we were required to abandon the property and leave it to the vandals and to the elements, without explanation, it was just made increasingly clear to me, God wanted to bring the whole thing into death. That included at that time my marriage, my ministry, the legal status of the Ben Israel ministry, the whole thing. And I remember the stout resistance of one of the three elders who said that he was there for my prophetic ministry, but would not receive this word from me, and despite my many attempts to persuade him, God is wanting a total forsaken and an abandonment, he insisted on staying because he loved the rustic location and everything else about it. We had one final time of confrontation, I shared again what I believe God's intention was, and I didn't know why he was requiring it, that's what makes it a death, he's not under obligation to explain. No, he couldn't see it, we went to bed that night and it was finished, the next morning was departure, I had already left the property, he was the only one remaining, with just a handful of souls, and when I saw him come to the breakfast table, I said to him, what happened to you? His face was a study. Oh, he said, before I went to bed, I prayed, Lord, if I'm mistaken, please correct me, but he was the kind of man who was not often mistaken, and the Lord said to him, and I'm quoting his words exactly, if you'll not leave, I'll kill you. He left, and the property was abandoned for three years, it may have been 30 years. I was put on a sabbatical silence, all of this without explanation, forbidden to preach. I sought employment, I was in my, I don't know, early or mid-fifties, I had a couple of university degrees and a few books and a communicator, I couldn't find a dishwashing job. I was a piece of obsolescence, it was humiliation unto death to come home after a day of weary employment seeking, defeated and unwanted. And just as the Lord would have it, I visited a Lutheran seminary being in that neighborhood one day in St. Paul, Minnesota, and was surprised at the atmosphere that seemed to prevail. I had never taken seminary seriously, and I looked in the catalog and they had some juicy courses, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Christian Ethics, Church History, and I thought, you know, it wouldn't be a bad thing to audit a course one day. Well, it just so happened that the Lutheran professor who had invited me to stop by was still on the premises, and we had a cup of coffee, and I told her I wouldn't mind auditing the course. He said, Artie said, why don't you take the two-year program in theology? And something inside went boing! But it was so incomprehensible that God would ask me, a Jew raised up by the Spirit, to go to a liberal Lutheran seminary, that I could not reconcile it. I remember driving home that day, muttering under my breath, and I got home, and there was the mail of the day, and the top letter was from Morsh Rosen of Jews for Jesus, who had recruited me years before to bring me into Jewish mission work, and to whom I had written and asked the question, what do you think I ought to be doing, Morsh? The Lord has dissolved the community and the ministry, I can't find employment. What ought I to be doing? He said, number one, you need to be studying theology, confirmation. And then I dragged my feet for many weeks until it was put up or shut up, I had to make a decision. I took a brother with me, a real rugged, end-time man who has scant patience for theology. I said, let the Lord confirm it through him, and he did. We went to the seminary, and I asked if we could sit in a class and audit it. It was on Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and what a disappointment. The professor had leather patches on his elbows, and he smoked a pipe. He was like out of central casting from Hollywood, and the thing was quite droll, D-R-O-L-L, and flat, and I thought, boy, this is theology? Maybe, I hope this brother is going to discourage me, and we left the class, his face was downcast. I knew he was terribly unimpressed. We came to the door, and he turned and he faced me, and he said, Artie said, I believe that the Lord wants you to come here because of prudence. There's a scripture in Proverbs about wisdom and prudence, I wish I could remember the exact word, and the moment he said that, that word was like a shaft in my heart, and I agreed that I was not to be there for theological reasons, but for character logical reasons, and for two years when I went, I was daily sifted among the feminists who constituted over 65% of the student body, and many of whom were full-blown witches, and foaming at their mouth at me because I had the audacity to call God he, and use sexist language, and didn't I know about the mother goddess preceding the father? We actually had a lecture from one of these women in one of my classes on witchcraft, not to alert us and to warn us, but to draw us. I went up to the professor after the class, and I said, if Luther knew what was being done in an institution bearing his name, he'd turn over in his grave. Oh, he said, but we need to be informed. I said, that's too high a price to pay for information. Well, I don't know why I'm telling you all that, it was a bloody time for me. I was separated from my wife, threatening divorce or worse, living in the basement of a home of a Lutheran charismatic couple, who when I came back every day, bloodied and bowed, would bind my wounds, and clean them up, and pray for me, and resuscitate me that I could go back for another day. Now, I began that seminary in an off quarter, where I could not take the courses required to begin the study of theology, so they fixed up a program for me, and I ended up taking a course in Judaism and Christianity, anti-Semitism in the 20th century, modern thoughts since Luther, and all of a sudden it dawned on me, I'm in a Lutheran seminary for Jewish purposes, and that I would have to write a paper to conclude my study, it would be on the Holocaust. Not because of any course that I took, or any professor's instruction, but in the inadvertent way that God will, going to the library to find one book, your eye falls on another, the Lord himself just began to open to me a stream of increasing revelation of the mystery of Israel and the church in the last days. And when that first quarter ended, I was in my fourteenth month of sabbatical silence, and the phone rang. I had determined that I was going to work out the implications that the Lord was showing me for the church in the last days about Israel, and the phone rang, it was a call from California from a pastor I didn't know, Artie said, we've been praying over here, you don't know us, but we believe that God wants you to speak to us, a seminar on Israel and the church in the last days. Boing, that little witness from God, I went, and that was the end of my fourteen month's sabbatical silence. I say all that to say this, what I'm sharing with you has been born out of death, real felt taste experienced death. To go back to an abandoned community, to get something left behind, and to hear the doors creaking in the wind, and an absolute stifling silence where there had been the voice of fifty-five saints, is to taste death. To come to it in the winter, in the bleakness, and to drive the twenty feet into the driver as far as you could, because the snow had not been cleared, and to let the dog out of the car, and for him to go five feet, and then come back with his tail between his legs, will give you an idea of the death that we had to taste. We experienced the desolation of God. Now we are back on that property. My wife is back, my children are back, another band of souls is back, Jim is with us. The whole structure of the life is changed, we're on the resurrection side. Somehow there's a connection between death and resurrection, and the mystery of Israel. Not only the revelation of it, but equally the communication of it, and for those of you who were not here this morning, I share briefly how I was ravaged last night by powers of darkness, and absolutely run over by a Mack truck, and even now I still have a substantial headache and feel hot and flushed and somewhat out of it. That has to do with today's speaking. If this is what is required for the speaking on the subject, what shall be required for its fulfillment? So I want flat out to say that the requirement to be to Israel, what I believe God calls the church to be in the last days, is a resurrection requirement. It simply cannot be fulfilled on the basis of well-meaning religious or even charismatic ability. We must eminently be the sons and daughters of the resurrection, and meet them and greet them and sustain them and be to them what we ought in their own flight and despair, or the whole thing will have failed. Maybe we can begin. Have I prayed yet? Oh my Lord, precious God, Jesus, forgive me for saying so much without first clearing it with you. But if I've said already things that were not of you, will you please just blot it out of the memory and the consideration of these who have heard and will hear on tape? But if this was somehow a necessary prelude, that even your church needs to come of age and understand that we're not marketing some novel things or radical things for their own sake, but revelation of profound things reserved for the last days that were given out of death and need to be communicated out of death and fulfilled out of death, then help them to understand the centrality of death and resurrection demonstrated by yourself in your own suffering unto death and being raised in exaltation on high. And that this is Israel's necessity also, and that is the reason for her own last days to avail, that is future. Lord, communicate these things, especially to those who are just arriving for the first time tonight, and give them a substantial understanding. We bless you and give you the praise in Jesus' name, amen. Let's turn to Ezekiel chapter 20. This is a principle text that the Lord has quickened for me. It begins in verse 33, and I believe that we need to understand it not as something past in Israel's history, but something future. What is confusing is that so much of Israel's past is like Israel's future. There's a cyclical thing, a pattern of God's dealing with that nation. Sin, judgment, exile, sifting, restoration, return. And that will be the pattern of the end as well. But there are ways to distinguish whether we're reading something of Israel's past or something of Israel's future, because this is a great question. If it's all finished, and Israel has done her last suffering and need not experience any future plight or devastation, it's a totally different story. Then we can well encourage them to believe that they are secure within the boundaries of their own present nation and need not fear again devastation and exile. But if these things are to come, and they have a false sense of security that these things are past, and that the time of Jacob's trouble was the Holocaust, and it's finished and need not be expected again, and devastation does come, it will not only be a physical but a moral devastation, and not only for those upon whose heads it will come, but even an unsuspecting and unprepared church. Not the least of the reasons that God sent me into Israel three, four or so years ago with the message of Ezekiel 37 that I share this afternoon was to save Christians from a possible falling away in disillusionment if their vain hopes were not fulfilled for Israel's success and establishment, and they would see the nation devastated and expelled again out of its own land. Their question would be, where is God? Some are still asking that question about the Holocaust. And how about the scriptures that said that they would be safe within their boundaries? What confidence can we have in God and his word might well trigger something of the last day's apostasy of which Paul warns. So we're not talking about a small thing, saints. We're talking about a remarkably significant thing, not only for Israel, but for the church itself. If this is true in the scenario that we anticipate of widespread affliction, flight, devastation, and death for the majority of what constitutes world Jewry today, a devastating war and loss and defeat in Israel and possible expulsion as a result of that defeat and captivity, then we ought to be about the business of preparing ourselves in the anticipation of those things. By the way, that is the reason why we ourselves are in the location that we are for 21 years. We are in one of the most remote wilderness locations of America. We are eight miles from the closest town, population 200 if everyone's there. We are in one of the most severe weather locations in the United States. The temperatures are almost always below that of Alaska. Our winter is nine months long. And we're there because God has supernaturally called us to prepare a place of refuge for Jews in flight in the last days. I can't tell you how much God has had to rub my face in the grip of this reality because of my own reluctance to consider scenarios of this kind. I despise sensationalism. I don't like melodramatics, flight, refuge, Koriten Boom, taking in, hiding, moving on to the next place. But I want to tell you, and I'll make it very brief, I have physically been on those places. Place after place, we are in a continuum of places throughout North America. I've been into Mexico and have seen segments of a route of escape through the wilderness of that nation that is unbelievably frightening. That except God reveal himself supernaturally and provide supernaturally in the heat and arid wasteland of that wilderness, no one could survive. You say, why would God sift modern, urbane Jews through the wilderness? Your very question is embarrassing for you. Haven't you ever been sifted? Haven't you ever been in wilderness condition with God? Has your life been that safeguarded and circumspect? God has not brought you to places of unbearable trial, of dry, long dealings where you're required to search out your soul and find God in ways that you've not before known him? That could only have been revealed in wilderness when everything else that would have modified or blurred the issues are stripped away? No one needs that experience more than those who have blurred the issues of life and eternity by their mindsets, their ideologies, their philosophies, their way of living as Jews have. I'll tell you it was a revelation for me in community, as you'll read if you get the book Reality here, when we butchered our first pig and our first lamb. I was a nice Jewish boy who grew up with the supermarkets, and you'd go into the frozen food department or the butcher case, and there's the meat all nicely packed and silver-thin. It was another thing to see the grip and the reality of animals that we had brought up from a lamb to the point where they had to be slaughtered, and that pig died hard. I tell you, I've never heard such screeching and howls and shrieks out of the bowels of hell to preserve that filthy protoplasmic life, but the sheep went as a lamb to the slaughter, not a sound, not a jerk, the contrast was staggering. When we butchered the pig, the knife that went into it went right into its heart, there was a perforation, but it didn't stop it from its howling and shrieks. There's something about the realities from which we are insulated and protected by modern life itself that has cellophane and packaged God. We ourselves are a bit of packaged cellophane. A lot of us are cardboard cutouts and papier-mâché saints, that if the wind blows too hard or something comes of an adverse kind, we become soggy or collapse and fall. We need a bit of wilderness, and they desperately will need this being stripped of everything, as I myself needed it 32 years ago when I was uprooted, not only out of my physical place, but my ideological place, as a Jew with opinions, stripped of everything, my opinions weren't worth a bean, my humanist presumptions and confidences, gone, and flushed into the nations, and moved from place to place. And there to meet a believer here, and a believer there, and one who picked me up with a car there, and one who said this to me there, and one who gave me a New Testament there, that by the time I reached Jerusalem over a year later, I was a prepared vessel for God to call me by name, as I wandered lost into a bookstore, a Bible bookstore in that city, and was commanded to remain, and out of which I came four days later, saved. Wilderness is a necessary experience for those who have been insulated from reality, from truth, and from God. Jews are in the forefront of that unreality in all of their urbanity and sophistication. Verse 33, of Ezekiel 20, As I live, saith the Lord God, surely with a mighty hand and with a stretched out arm, and with fury poured out, will I rule over you. Okay, you Bible scholars, is God ruling over Israel today? Has he ruled over Israel historically in modern times? Absolutely not. In Israel's increasing predicament today in that nation, is God being consulted or sought as an answer for the terrible problems that they face, ringed about by hostile nations and a hostile Palestinian presence within? Have they consulted God in giving away portions of their own nation, to serve as foothold for the enemy, who doesn't need now the four minutes that would have been required to send nuclear or germ-tipped warheads on missiles from Iraq or Iran? But within minutes, Israel's destiny can be altered by a flood of hostile men armed to the teeth, who were only allotted to be 9,000, according to the Oslo Agreement, as a peace force to stabilize the occupied areas, and have now become more than 20,000 former terrorists armed to the teeth for more than just local policing. When will it come that the dam will burst and all hell will break loose on a nation that has to learn that they're not going to obtain their security by a covenant with death? I will rule over you. And if God doesn't rule over that nation, over which nation will he rule? For the law of the Lord must go forth out of that nation, out of Zion and out of Jerusalem, but it's a word to all nations. But it must begin with that nation in the very place where he was crucified by them. I will rule over you, but it will take a fury poured out. I will bring you out from the people and will gather you out of the countries wherein you are scattered with a mighty hand and with a stretched out arm and with fury poured out. We don't have to be Bible scholars to know when God repeats himself twice in two verses with a phrase as cogent as that, he means it. And I'm interpreting the fury poured out to be a global anti-Christ persecution against Jews where they will not be safe in any nation in the world, including your own. They will be uprooted. They must be. They will be compelled to flee. They must be because God says, I will meet with you, not in the place of your comfort and security and in all of your nicely established categories, but in the wilderness of the nations. I will bring you into the wilderness of the people, the nations, and there will I plead with you face to face in verse 35, just as I pleaded with your fathers in the wilderness in the land of Egypt, so I plead with you, saith the Lord God, I will cause you to pass under the rod and will bring you into the bond of the covenant. Some will actually come to faith as the course, as the result of God's struggling and pleading with them in this hour of severity that comes. And these will constitute the redeemed of the Lord who returned to Zion, mourning and sighing, fleeing away and everlasting joy upon their heads. They will come into the bond of his covenant, and I will purge out from you the rebels and them that transgress against me. I will bring them forth out of the country where they're sojourned. They shall not enter into the land of Israel, and you shall know that I am the Lord. How much of an exegete, you know what that word means? The Greek word to draw out the meaning from scriptures. Do we have to be to recognize that what is being described is not something of Israel's past, but something of Israel's future? How do you know what? Because it says, and you shall know that I am the Lord. This is what is required for that knowing, nothing less. It's not God being arbitrary, God being cruel. It's God being righteous and meeting out what is exactly necessary, knowing the condition of this people and judging them for their sin, and yet meeting them in the judgment and revealing himself to them that they might constitute the redeemed of the Lord that returned to Zion. I'll tell you, if the redeemed of the Lord do not return to Zion, the Lord himself will not be their king on the holy hill of Zion, and we will still have to contend with lousy human governments and warfare and vexation in the nations. They'll not study war no more until he rules. The issue of Israel's restoration is the issue of the theocratic rule of God. We're not talking only about the fate of an ethnic group. We're talking about the conclusion of God's redemptive cosmic plan for the nations in which he insists that this one nation be the pivot and the locus of his government over all nations. I will rule over you and over them. I will purge out the rebels from among you that transgress against me. By the way, are you hearing okay in the back? Is there enough volume? Yeah? I will bring them forth out of the country where they sojourn, and they shall not enter into the land of Israel. You shall know that I am the Lord. I suspect that the rebels will constitute the greater part of world Jewry and will not survive the process of attrition of those last days. It will be a remnant that constitute the restored nation. And here's the point for you. There'll be no remnant at all that could survive at all except for the mercy received through you in the wilderness of the nations. You say, what part of New Zealand are you talking about? Some little known remote section? Well, as I said earlier today in my last visit to New Zealand, as I was speaking on this subject, the Lord impressed me to say to the hearers, the whole of New Zealand is a wilderness among the nations. You're different. You're out of the way. You're something else. You've not been drawn into the vortex of great enterprise and great commercial success and great influence among the powers. You yourself are a little wilderness of the nations. And I believe for that reason, there might be a greater expression throughout this entire country of Jews in flight than is to be found elsewhere. It's remarkable how God appoints things like that. It may well have been that it was for this time of the kingdom that you have come and that everything till now is preparation. That there's been no really notable distinction for New Zealand in New Zealand except the preparation for this one act that preserves a remnant of God's people, Israel, by which they can return to Zion and be the establishment and the locus of his rule over the nations. And is that bad? That everything till now is preparation for this conclusion of the ages that releases the coming of the king, his kingdom and his glory. We ought to praise God if he would give us this privilege, this honor and this distinction. But I want to tell you, it's not going to be a patsy, cheap and easy thing to perform. Notice the text. I will meet with you, God speaking to Israel, face to face in the wilderness of the nations. How can he be in so many places at once? And what does he mean by that? I'm persuaded. See, this is now a prophetic man interpreting prophetic scripture. My spirit, something in the way that I am wrought in God, something in the way that he has raised me up and given me understanding persuades me that what this means is that the revelation of himself will come through the face of the Gentiles who extend to Jews mercy that they might obtain mercy and do it in an unbegrudging way as if it is not their religious obligation. But joyously, even if it imperils their own life. I'm saved because of the revelation that came to me in my wilderness trek of 32 years ago when I saw in the face of a Gentile girl with whom I should have had nothing to do and was the symbol of all that I despise in Protestant Christianity, middle class existence, the light that lightens the Gentiles and the glory of the people of Israel. I want to say your faces will have to be much more joyous than I'm now able to observe just listening to the scenario. You have to be some kind of strange people who counted a privilege to be caught up and drawn into these final purposes of God, even with the issue of peril and the possible loss of life. Because these Jews will be ruthlessly and relentlessly pursued unto death. What do you think your prize will be if you're caught helping them? I'm very fond of saying, will the true church please stand up? That this issue of the last days will identify who in fact the church is. It's something that's required of us more than a begrudging submission to this truth. It needs to be joyously demonstrated, counting it all joy, the privilege to be participant in the conclusion of the ages. And if it takes our life, well, so much the greater. We have an eternal reward that shall not fade away, a crown of glory. I'll bet you if we took a survey tonight, just of you sitting here and you are ruthlessly honest, there wouldn't be one among 10 of you who has any real consideration of eternity at all. We're not eternally minded. We're this life minded. We're now minded. We're in the world minded. We're lacking one of the most vibrant and dynamic expectations that made the early church the church. It's expectation of the world or the ages to come. Unto him be glory in the church, world without end, throughout all ages by Christ Jesus. Paul concludes Ephesians chapter 3. We are not eternally minded saints, and it shows. We're as fearful, as easily intimidated, as insecure as men in the world. And the great liberating power of anticipating the reward to come for faithful service in this life is not a predominant factor in present Christian living. You say, how have we lost all this? You've lost it in exact proportion as you have lost or never known the mystery of Israel. For the issue of Israel is the issue of eternity, is the issue of last days, is the issue of millennium, is the issue of reward. So, notice verse 41 in the end of it, that when I bring you out from the people and gather you out of the countries wherein you have been scattered, I will be sanctified in you before the heathen. Elsewhere, it says in the prophets, I will not do this in the corner, but before the face of all nations. I will be sanctified through you. What does that mean? I will be revealed to you. I will be revealed to the nations in a way that they have not considered me. When they observe palpably and visibly and historically in time, both my judgment and my mercy executed on Israel. God's dealings with Israel is the revelation of himself that concludes the age. No one will have to question then, was this Zionism? Was this a return that men themselves have affected by their own political ability or wealth? It will be so utterly supernatural, so radically and unequivocally, God, both judging and restoring, both making desolate and returning, that he will be sanctified before the face of all nations. In fact, the judgment upon all nations rests upon their response to God after they see this. As for Israel, you shall remember your ways in verse 43. When I shall bring you back, in verse 42, to the land of Israel, to the country for which I lifted up my hand to give it to you, fathers, when I shall bring you back is different from when you brought yourself back. Look what happened then. Friction, animosity, hatred, the requirement for the use of violence to sustain and to preserve your political existence. Even now, Israel has recently concluded that the necessity for torture, as the justification for torture when you capture suspected Hamas terrorists, who might have information, which if you can extract it, it might save Jews who would otherwise be blown up in another bus explosion. Can you imagine Jews ever willfully, consciously, as principle, condescending to the torture of helpless prisoners for their preservation? That's the extremity to which men will be driven when they are required to preserve their own existence independent of God. There's much more that I could say that would make you shudder about the conditions that are increasingly prevailing in Israel. It's already past the point of no return. And if every fear were requited, and every security obtained, and Arafat and the PLO really sincerely agreeing to the peace terms, and Israel could enjoy security, it would just be another political state. It would be the Hong Kong of the Middle East. It would be a flourishing commercial center with its massage parlors, its prostitution rings, its gambling casinos, which already presently exist like any other nation. Though God has a destiny for that nation to bless all the families of the earth. That's why this last day's sifting is so radically required. You say, brother, this is true. And the scriptures seem evidently to support your view. What ought we to be thinking and doing if we are the ones in the wilderness place who make this survival possible? Revelation 12 speaks about a woman in the wilderness pursued by the dragon who seeks her destruction. And she's given the wings of an eagle to come into the wilderness where she is fed for three and a half years. That is the confirmation in the book of Revelation of what we're reading in Ezekiel 20. That's why I say there's a plethora, an abundance of scripture that confirm this last day's view. The remarkable thing in the face of all of the testimony of the word is the ignorance of the church with regard to it, as we are so close now to the event itself. And that's why our Sunday is more or less like any other Sunday. A succession of services, a kind of spiritual roulette, hoping there'll be some novelty, a visiting speaker, a blessing from Toronto, some kind of thing to break into the dullness and the grayness of our predictable Christian life that has sunk to this level because we lack the animation and motivation that would have called us to sainthood and to maturity and to being the people of God who can embrace and fulfill our calling that concludes this age through them. The absence of our consideration of Israel has skunked us it has left us obsolete, it's left us high and dry, and because it is central to God's last day's purposes through the church. Face to face, your face. Isaiah 50, 35 speaks about this wilderness trek. There are other places, I'm limited by time. Once you begin to open your understanding and check out the scripture references in the margins, it's bye-bye baby. You're on a journey that will astonish you. You'll not have to scrounge for a few scriptures to sustain your view. You'll be overwhelmingly inundated in the flood of scriptures that confirm this, and you will share my astonishment. How could we have so long been ignorant when there's such a voluminous testimony of God of this coming agenda? Isaiah 35 speaks of the wilderness and the solitary place that shall be glad for them. As the desert shall rejoice and blossom as a rose, it shall blossom abundantly and rejoice even with joy and singing the glory of Lebanon shall be given unto it. It's not in Lebanon, it's in the nations, but the glory of Lebanon shall be given unto it. Who's going to give it? The Lord himself, supernaturally. It shall blossom abundantly and rejoice even with joy and singing, because nature itself is expectant and waiting this fulfillment and this completion. Creation itself is travailing, waiting for the manifestation of the sons of God to be freed from its own bondage and futility. Dumb and insensate nature is waiting for the concluding last day's acts that brings the Lord and his redemptive glory to creation. That's why the desert will be glad for them, because when it sees them, they know that the Lord is not far behind, and in their restoration is his coming, his kingdom, his glory, and the completion of his whole redemptive program for creation itself. It's cosmic. Where's our singing? Where's our rejoicing? Where's our anticipation? Now in verse three, the text abruptly changes and someone is being addressed by God who is not Israel, and they're being told and commanded, strengthen ye the weak hands and confirm the feeble knees. Who have the weak hands and feeble knees? The Jews in the desperation of their plight. Most of us are soft. We're not prepared for three and a half years of wilderness trek where we will be demoralized, shattered, undone. This is going to come suddenly with a fury poured out psychologically and morally. We will be glassy-eyed and stupefied. I still remember the film that I used to show in my history class as an atheist of the Nazi time and the Warsaw Ghetto and how the Jews were compressed in that ghetto and forced into a place of death by disease and starvation before their final revolt. And the image I can't get out of my mind all these years later is a Jewish woman holding her dead baby. Her hair was strewn down her face. She evidently gave the impression that it was not long before the suddenness of this calamity that she was a well-kept, attractive woman, maybe upper-middle class, and the world was her oyster. She was enjoying life and maybe had servants. I have spoken to Viennese Jews who used to mix their tuna fish with butter. I said, how luxurious, but how quickly does the entire thing change? When the trains rolled into Auschwitz, Jewish women at the beginning thought they were coming to some rest camp, and the last thing they did before they got off the cars was to look into the mirrors and hurriedly make up their faces and their cosmetics, only to be sorted out right on the train tracks and led right into the fire. The suddenness of this fury will be overwhelming. This woman with her dead baby was walking like a caged animal. She was insane. She had gone mad. She had one foot on the sidewalk, one foot in the gutter, up and down, with one stocking up, one stocking down, totally askew with this dead, lifeless thing, limp, hanging in her arms, and just completely shattered that her nerves and mind had gone under the suddenness and the fury of what had struck her. That's an anticipation of what we can reasonably expect. And that's why God is saying to someone in the wilderness who is evidently not raptured before the tribulation and is still there, you strengthen the weak hands. You confirm the feeble knees. Say to them that are of a fearful heart, be strong. Fear not. Behold, your God will come with vengeance, even God with a recompense. He's allowed your enemies to decimate you, but where do you see what he's going to do with your enemies? Many of the nations that are now having a field day, maliciously bringing you into captivity and screwing you all over the world, will themselves be expelled as nations for all the future. They will be obliterated as nations in the judgment of God that comes to those nations who have gone beyond being the rod of his chastisement for Jews and have taken a special delight in rubbing it into the faces of this people. Your God will come. Even with a recompense, he will come and save you. I can't tell you how important I feel that this is. Can you understand that a people can be so stretched out unto death, morally, that they're ready to give up the ghost, that they have no hope, that they are desolate and ready to die and perish, if only they could have hung on long enough to receive the God who will save them. There needs to be a word spoken to them somewhere in the midst of their crisis, which is the if it doesn't come, they will not endure and constitute the redeemed of the Lord. But what kind of a word is it? A word of well-meaning, slap on the back, chin up brother, your God will come, he will save you, and they'll perish. They'll keel over and die if it's only a word of well-wishing human intention. It's got to be a word of such a kind that when men hear it, however desolate their condition, they leap, the lame leap, and the blind see, and pools break out in the arid ground, and waters overflow at the word that has come of a prophetic kind that constitutes event for those who hear it. You think tonight's a little message? Tonight is an issue of life and death for those who are not present with us, and whose eternal fate is being decided by our ability to hear words of this kind, receive them, and set in motion the course of things that will make us a saving grace to those people. But what kind of a word do you need to hear in order to have that set in motion that will inconvenience you long before they come, that will require of you, as my brother spoke and prayed, an alteration of your lifestyle, of your present church configuration, of the succession of Sunday services only, the requirement to come into that quality of relationship that the church knew at the first, that releases the sanctifying power and work of God, that perfects the character of His people, and releases the anointing, and brings them into prophetic authority, that when they speak a word, it raises the dead, and they need to speak it together as one word, as I said earlier today, when it is commanded. Everything in our privatistic lifestyle, our selfishness, our subjectivity, our doing our own thing, and the being casual Christians on our terms, militates against the fulfillment of the thing that is being described tonight. We need to be a people who can say, your God is coming. Don't be afraid, because we ourselves have met Him in our crisis. He has come to us in our desperation. He has brought us through wilderness times where we thought we would perish, and He came. And that's why we ourselves were required to die as a community. That's why we had to abandon the property. That's why we had to experience desolation, that we would one day know that the God who makes desolate is the God who restores. And not only know it, but speak it in a way that when our kinsmen hear the word from us, they will leap unto life. There's no cheap shortcut to speaking prophetically. It's the experience of deaths and the God who raises from the dead again and again. That when we speak, we will speak a resurrection word that brings life to those whose life is failing in the highway of the Lord, the highway of holiness, presently under construction. Oh, I could tell you stories how the Lord has brought me personally to such places where I would least expect to find them. In French-speaking Switzerland, where saints wanted me to see a property for sale that had been a posh girl's school, originally a Moravian property, you know the Moravian church that had itself been persecuted centuries before and had used this place as a refuge from persecution. And in modern times, it had become a posh girl's school and was now for sale. And they felt that God wanted them to buy it at the cost of millions to establish a community. It was a city on a hill in the wilderness of Switzerland, outside the main thoroughfares and the mainstream cities out of the way. So I walked over the grounds with them. It was remarkable. And I heard the history that it was originally a property given to Moravians as a place of refuge for persecution. And without thinking, I said, wouldn't it be remarkable that a place that has its inception as a place of refuge for Moravians should end as a place of refuge for Jews? The word had hardly come out of my mouth when the Spirit of God fell with such power that we stopped walking, talking, and breathing. We just stood there, paralyzed. We had stumbled on the heart of God and took hands and prayed, Lord, what are you saying? And when we finished praying, these French-speaking Swiss friends said, Art, you need to go into the office of the director and tell him what God is saying or they'll sell this property for profit and it'll be removed from God's purpose for the Jews. I said, no, I can't do it. You know what these French-speaking Swiss will think of me, an American off the walls, harebrained character talking about scenarios like that. No, no, no. Art, you must. Well, I took a deep breath and in I walked and opened the door and there was this man sitting behind this vast and impressive desk. And the first thing my eye fell upon were my books in French right in the center of his desk and found out he had just finished reading them with his wife and thought that they were terrific. And when I told him what God had said without a word to me, he picks up the phone and he says, let me put you in touch with the Moravian pastor in charge of the sale of the property. I couldn't have bought that for money. And I'm talking to this man and the man says, well, evidently we need to see each other. I said, yes, I agree. When can we do that, I asked. He said, well, I'll be in Basel on Monday. I said, you will? My program has just been changed. I'll be in Basel on Monday. And we sat down for two to three hours and I shared with him along the lines I'm sharing with you. But you know what else I added? I said, your Moravian movement has become a curio. You're a little piece of Christian obsolescence. There was a time when you prayed 24 hours around the clock. There was a time when Moravians would sell themselves into slavery to be brought into Africa and into the Caribbean islands in order to bring the gospel to the desperate. But now you're just a little Christian culture of a quaint kind. But if you preserve this property for the Jews and not sell it for profit, he will bless them that will bless thee. And it may well be that your latter days will be more glorious than your former. They've not sold it. I can multiply these stories, saints. This is not a fiction. It's already being enacted and being prepared so that the redeemed of the Lord, the last verse of chapter 35 shall return. They didn't leave it as the redeemed. They left it as perplexed Jews whose bottom had fallen out and whose confidence that their nation somehow must be preserved was destroyed by circumstances that were unthinkable that God has allowed in the fulfillment of his ultimate will and purpose for this nation. The redeemed of the Lord shall return and come to Zion with singing and everlasting joy upon their heads. They shall obtain joy and gladness and sorrow and sighing shall flee away. Almost invariably in these prophetic scriptures, the references are, you shall no longer be afraid. You shall be secure. I will make you to lie down. You shall not again be forced out from your boundaries. You need not fear terror at night. There's reference after reference in these concluding prophetic chapters that comforts a people who evidently had as their last historical experience before everlasting joy came upon their heads of devastation, terror, pursuit, violence, and death. Isaiah 51 or 49, you can just virtually turn through every page and find remarkable statements along these lines. Isaiah 49 in verse 19, for thy waste and desolate places and the land of thy destruction shall even now be too narrow by reason of the inhabitants and they that swallowed thee up shall be far from thee, shall be far away. And the children which thou shalt have after thou has lost the other shall say again in thine ears, this place is too narrow for me. You've placed to me that I may dwell. Thou shalt say in your heart, who has begotten me? These seem I have lost my children and I'm desolate, a captive and removing to and fro. Who has brought up these? Behold, I was left alone. These, where had they been? Thus saith the Lord God, behold, I will lift up my hand to the Gentiles and set up my standards to the people and they shall bring thy sons in their arms and thy daughters shall be carried away, carried upon their shoulders. Kings shall be thy nursing fathers and queens thy nursing mothers. They shall bow down to thee with their face toward the earth and lick up the dust of thy feet and thou shalt know that I am the Lord for thou shalt not be ashamed that wait for me. Is that past or future? Clearly future. It speaks of such a requiting of a suffering of an excessive kind. Terrible devastation towards waste and desolate places are reiterated again and again in the prophetic scriptures. When I bring you back, you shall rebuild the waste places and the cities left desolate. And I want to go on record as saying that I believe that's present day Haifa, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Tiberias and every modern day city of Israel shall be left waste, ruined and desolate. And that the first project upon those whom the Lord shall return is the rebuilding of these waste places. Therefore, in verse 11 of chapter 51 of Isaiah, the redeemed of the Lord shall return and come with singing to Zion, the same verse again, and everlasting joy shall be upon their heads. They shall obtain gladness and joy. Sorrow and mourning shall flee away. I, even I am he that comforts you. Who art thou that you should be afraid of man that shall die and the Son of Man shall be made as grass. And forgets the Lord thy maker that has stretched forth the heavens and laid the foundations of the earth and has feared continually every day because of the fury of the oppressor with a fury poured out as if he were ready to destroy. And where is the fury of the oppressor? The captive exile hastened that he may be loosed and that he should not die in the pit nor that his bread should fail. But I am the Lord and thy God that divided the sea whose waves roared, the Lord of hosts is his name. Awake, awake in verse 17. Stand up, O Jerusalem, which has drunk at the hand of the Lord the cup of his fury. It may have come through hostile nations, but it is his fury and his judgment. Thou hast drunken the drugs of the cup of trembling and won them out. These two things in verse 19 are common to thee. And who shall be sorry for thee? Desolation and destruction and the famine and the sword. And by whom shall I comfort thee? Thy sons have fainted their lie at the head of all the streets as a wild bullmen that they are full of the fury of the Lord and the rebuke of thy God. Verse 22, thus saith the Lord, thy God that pleadeth the cause of his people. Behold, I have taken out of thine hand the cup of trembling, even the drugs of the cup of my fury. Thou shall drink it no more again. But I will put it into the hand of them that afflict thee, which have said to thy soul, bow down that we may go over. And thou hast laid thy body as the ground and as the street to them that went over. This is future. It's not only a destruction, it's a humiliation. It's spite. It's Islamic hatred having opportunity to fully ventilate itself on a defeated, broken people. And God will judge them that many of those nations that I've said will be no more. So shake yourself in verse 52, chapter 52 in verse 2, out from the dust. Arise and sit down, O Jerusalem. Loose thyself from the bands of thy neck, O captive daughter of Zion. This is God's deliverance that will come. There shall no more come to you the unclean than the uncircumcised at the end of verse 1. Verse 5. Now therefore what have I there, saith the Lord? My people is taken away for naught. They that rule over thee, make them to howl, saith the Lord, and my name continually every day is blasphemed. Therefore my people shall know my name. Therefore they shall know in that day that I am the Lord, that I am he that doth speak. Behold, it is I. Do they yet know? And will they know until they pass through the experience described here powerfully and cogently and prophetically? This is future. It must come because they must know. And there's no cheaper knowing than to know the God who has made desolate and also restores. In the end of it is the assurance in verse 12. You shall not go out with haste nor go by flight, for the Lord will go before you and the God of Israel will be your reward. No more flight, no more journey, no more last days, exodus, exile, no more being strewn through the world. Because thy watchman shall lift up thy voice in verse 8. The voice together shall they sing, for they shall see eye to eye when the Lord brings again Zion and break forth into joy. Sing together you waste places of Jerusalem, for the Lord hath comforted his people. He hath redeemed Jerusalem. The Lord hath made bare his holy arm in verse 10 in the eyes of all the nations and all the ends of the earth shall see the salvation of thy God that has come to you. And I shall be sanctified in their sight by what I have demonstrated in the severity of my dealings to you. And now the mercy that comes by which you shall be returned supernaturally by me as the redeemed of the Lord. In Joel chapter 3, chapter 2, verse 27, you shall know that I am in the midst of Israel, that I am the Lord your God and none else in my people shall never be ashamed, never again be ashamed. In chapter 3 in verse 1, for behold in those days and in that time when I bring again the captivity of Judah and Jerusalem, I will also gather all nations and will bring them down into the valley of Jehoshaphat and will plead with them there for my people and for my heritage Israel whom they have scattered among the nations and parted my land. And they have cast lots for my people and have given a boy for a harlot and sold a girl for wine that they might drink. Verse 6, the children also of Judah and the children of Jerusalem have you sold unto the Greeks that you might remove them far from their border. Behold, I will raise them out of the place where you have sold them and will return your recompense upon your own head. I mean, how much more literal, graphic, and clear can God get? And I'm skimming. If you invest yourself in these books, you'll be overwhelmed by the consistency of the testimony of a necessary last days trial, dealing, sifting, devastation, desolation within the land and outside of it, and the salvation of a remnant as the redeemed of the Lord shall return to Zion. And if they return and are redeemed, it's because of you and you only. Amos, the very next book, the last chapter of Amos 9, verse 8, the eyes of the Lord are upon the sinful kingdom. I will destroy it from the face of the earth, except I will not utterly destroy the house of Jacob, saith the Lord. I will command that I will sift the house of Israel among all nations, like as corn is sifted in a sieve, and not the least grain will fall upon the earth. For all the sinners of my people shall die by the sword, which say, the evil shall not overtake nor confront us. In that day, I will raise up the tabernacle of David. And that is not a form of charismatic worship. It's not banging tambourines and singing Hebraic lilting melodies. The tabernacle of David is the Davidic government of God that will rule over all nations in that day, when God will deal with Israel and then restore them. There's no text that I know, more compact, that brings in every element of this vast scenario than the one we are now considering. I will raise up the tabernacle of David that is firm, and close up its breaches, and raise up its ruins. I will build up, as in the days of old, that they may possess the remnant of Edom. Edom not only means Jordan, it is symbolic of all Gentile nations, that when this tabernacle of David is raised up, when this law shall go forth out of Zion, when the government of God shall be emitted from the restored nation out of its capital in the holy hill of Zion, every nation will be in submission to that God and to that rule. That they may possess the remnant of Edom and of all the heathen which are called by my name, saith the Lord. Has this happened yet? No. Clearly, it waits for the sifting of the house of Israel first. The rebels must be purged out, for God's house will be holy. It will be a sanctuary unto him. It will be his dwelling place in the city which he has chosen and where he has put his name. And his law will go forth out of that place and out of that restored nation, or it will not go forth at all. How does the chapter end? In a millennial glory. The days come, saith the Lord, that the plowman shall overtake the reaper, and the treader of grapes him that sows seed, and the mountain shall drop sweet wine, and the hill shall melt. This is the figurative millennial description of the glory of God that now comes to an earlier devastated nation made desolate and left in ruin. And I will bring again the captivity of my people, and they shall build the waste cities, Haifa, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and inhabit them. And they shall plant vineyards and drink the wine thereof, and they shall also make gardens and eat the fruit of them. And I will plant them upon their land organically. It will not be this humanistic, political insertion of Israel that has brought all of the vitriolic, angry reaction against those who were native to that land before they came in 1948. I will plant them. And they shall no more be pulled up out of the land which I have given them, saith the Lord thy God. One last section in Jeremiah, and then I'll conclude, appreciating your patience as you understand that it's not only you who are being addressed tonight, but numberless people through the tapes that are being made who need an extensive and scriptural foundation for the consideration of a scenario of this kind. What we have been describing is the time of Jacob's trouble. Jesus speaks of it in the Olivet Discourse in Matthew 24 and Luke 21 when he was asked, what are the signs of your coming and of the end of the world? This is the end sense. And he says, there will be a time of tribulation such has never been known before that will retrace all previous affliction, including the devastations of Jerusalem in 70 AD and 586 BC and the Holocaust itself of the Hitler time. It will be far more extensive and far more painful. And in fact, if God does not cut that time short, none of the elect will survive. No Jewish flesh will survive. And Jesus is really paraphrasing what we are now going to read in Jeremiah chapter 30. The word that came to Jeremiah from the Lord saying, thus speaketh the Lord God of Israel saying, write thee all the words that I have spoken unto thee in a book. For lo, the days come, saith the Lord, that I will bring again the captivity of my people. Notice the frequency of the word captivity. It's not a metaphor, a literal, actual captivity of my people, Israel and Judah, saith the Lord, I will cause them to return to the land that I gave to their fathers and they shall possess it. These are the words that the Lord spoke concerning Israel, concerning Judah. For thus saith the Lord, we have heard a voice of trembling, of fear and of peace. Ask now and see whether a man does travail with child. Wherefore do we see every man with his hands on his loins as a woman in travail and all faces are turned into paleness. Can you picture that? In the day when the dam bursts and there's a phenomenal influx of terrorists onto the teeth coming out of Gaza, Jericho, the West Bank now under Palestinian control in concert with an attack of all Arab nations around about Israel, that from within without they are suddenly pulverized and are defenseless. All of their trust, all of their confidence in their armaments, their prowess, their ability that has saved them in every previous war, not available. Their hands will be on their loins, their faces will be turned pale because the unthinkable has happened. The state in which they expected their security and their future suddenly overwhelmed, crushed, destroyed, sent into captivity and into exile. Alas, for that day is great so that none is like it. It is even the time of Jacob's trouble, but he shall be saved out of it. Wherever Jacob is to be found, whether in Israel or in Wellington or Auckland, it will be a day of trouble worldwide and globally. And the only thing that will save them out of it is the mercy extended by you that they might obtain mercy. Coming at the risk of your Gentile lives that Jews would have to stroke their chin and ask themselves, why are these goyim, these Gentiles whom we have historically feared and been suspicious of, willing now not only to succor us and to offer us refuge and safety from this peril that pursues us, but they're doing it at the risk of their own lives and they're doing it joyously for us and the Gentiles. Not only will they be grateful for the mercy poured out, I think that they will be moved to jealousy for a demonstration of the magnanimity of God, the love and the grace of God exhibited through men who do not count their lives as dear unto themselves. And if that doesn't persuade them, nothing else will. That is calculated and given by God when he meets with them face to face in the wilderness of the nations. How's your face, saints? Come on, you dear precious saints who put the kettle on and have a kapa, or whatever the equivalent is in New Zealand, whose life is preciously fixed and established and cordial and agreeable and secure and comfortable, willing to risk all that for a Jew who may not even be grateful for your sacrifice and might complain and express ingratitude because you don't have bagels in the freezer? I'll tell you, it will tap something and trigger something that will rise out of your belly that will astonish you. You thought you were so liberal. I don't have any prejudice. I like Jews at a distance. I can even take you for an hour or two. But meet them in their perplexity. Meet them in their untoward condition, in the rudeness and the suddenness of the fury poured out, who even in their best condition are a trial, and see how you will respond. I want to tell you, dear saints, if you have not first submitted to the deepest sanctifying work of God, to find out that residue of things that don't ordinarily show themselves when our lives are placid and well-ordered, you will fail in that day in showing them the face of God. That's why I have the wife that I have. God bless her. She has a way, it's uncanny, of saying something at such a moment that I had never expected and could never have considered that drives me up the wall in a fury, just when I was complimenting myself on my sainthood. Can you see the genius of God in this? Can you see the mystery of God in this? The relationship between the church and Israel, fixed, given of God, inescapable, calculated for their restoration and our sanctification and transfiguration. It's the crisis of the Jew that will finally compel us to be the saints that we are, and the church has historically failed that test. Check out Luther. The giants of the Reformation, when they were irritated by Jews, lost it. Luther fully expected that the Jews would come running to the Lutheran Reformation church because now it's free from the Catholic trappings and all that casserai of images and idols of repulsed Jews, and now they'll see the Messianic faith. They didn't even take a step in that direction, and he disputed with rabbis for three days and was perplexed and aghast and spit out his guts. He couldn't persuade them of what was to him so evidently true. They had another interpretation. You know what they say? Two Jews, three arguments. And Luther, who had first said that he could not blame Jews for not having become Christians for the way that they had been so savagely historically treated, became himself the author of a book called The Lies of the Jews, calling for the destruction of the synagogue and the burning of the Talmud and the dispersal of that people and all the rest that Hitler took seriously, force increased later. Chrysostom, the golden-mouthed orator, one of the apostolic fathers of the faith, anti-Semitic. Some of the greatest giants of the faith missed it there. Are you saying, brother, that we're going to succeed where Luther failed? Exactly. And you'll succeed for the reason that he failed. He was indifferent to the issues of sanctification. He was only interested in regeneration and justification and the Jesha lived by faith, but not the issues that have to do with holiness and character. And when he was tested by the Jew, he failed the test. For God's sake, for his kingdom of his coming, may we not fail it. For God will sift Israel through every nation for this very purpose, that you might be sifted. And what do you think is the first exercise of the king who comes when the remnant is restored and he's upon his throne judging the Gentile nations and separating the sheep from the goats on the basis of one question only, what did you do with the least of these, my brethren? Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or naked or in prison? As you did not do it for the least of these, my brethren, and they will be the least, you did not do it unto me and depart and be placed, thrown into the lake of fire, prepared for the devil and for his angels. What a severe, eternal judgment for the failure of one thing, for the failure of that one thing is the failure of everything. And how about those who did extend mercy at their own risk? Come, you righteous, and inherit the kingdom prepared for you everlastingly. What, did you become righteous just because you extended yourself to the Jew? No, in being righteous, you could not help yourself. You had to express the bowels of God's mercy no matter the cost to your own physical, earthly life. Righteousness required it, and you could not do otherwise. Come now and inherit the reward prepared for you. So I want to end tonight and don't think this has been exhaustive. I'm exhausted, but the treatment is only a superficial beginning of an opening of this vast last day subject. Central to the church's consideration for its own sake as the church, it will require much, if not everything. Such sanctification, where do we obtain it? Such a separation from the deepest hidden things of our heart that ordinarily are not triggered and brought to the surface. Where will we be dealt with in such a way as to be dealt with there? In the church, in the face-to-face relationship with other saints, in the frequency and intensity of relationship beyond mere services that makes church church. In the community of God's people. When I preached this the first time, a woman cried out of the congregation, but she said, we don't even have mercy for each other. How shall we have mercy for the Jews? And I said, exactly. Enough of this casual stuff of ships passing in the night, of relative strangers sharing a hall for the purpose of a service, calling each other brother without truth. Oh, I can tell you this, my agony as a young believer holding my little plastic cup and my little biscuit waiting for the signal that we could take communion together when we were not together. Once a month, once a year was enough for me. But when we came to community, daily communion, and nobody told us. Of course, we couldn't afford wine. It was water, but the Lord turned it to wine. Because we needed the impartation of the life and the substance and the spirit of God just to be to each other as saints in community what we ought. For within the first 10 days, we lost being nice guys and pleasant and regular fellows and began to reveal such a depth of depravity and animosity and jealousy and irritation and resentment as overwhelmed us. It was passing through a veil of disillusionment. And if we were going to express kindness and charity and grace and mercy and love to each other on the daily basis of the tensions and the demands of it, as a people together, we needed the life of God given in his body and his blood. I'll tell you what, you take tonight's message seriously. It will transform your entire Christian life and every aspect of it. Faith, the Holy Spirit, the church, the word of God. Israel is the key. It's a hermeneutical key of interpretation of understanding. And when it is reinserted, even after these centuries of neglect, click, click, click, things come together in a new and vital perception that is electrifying and apostolic, the church as God intended from the first. Eternity is restored. Millennial expectation is restored. The anticipation of reward is restored. True relationship is restored. The baptism of the Holy Spirit is restored. Communion is restored. Faith is restored. The prophets are restored. The word is restored. Preaching is restored. The cross is restored. I want to pray for that in this nation. I think the whole nation is appointed for such a mass movement of my people in the mystery of God. For your sake in this, but something needs to begin now. A consecration, a giving of ourselves to God in abandonment, a letting go. Of the safe parameters of our life and an acknowledgement in truth to the God of truth. Lord, this frightens me. I'm trembling. Who's sufficient for this? This is more than I'm able. I'm unprepared. I'm soft. I'm compromised in many ways, but I'm willing. How do I get from where I presently am to this kind of Christianity, this reality of church and of being and of faith, where my words can be spoken to a people in wilderness who are nigh unto death, and in the hearing of it, they'll leap? I want to be part of that, and I'm inviting you to take me from where I presently am and bring me to that place with others of like mind and heart, whatever it costs. This is entirely voluntary, saints. You don't have to do it. You can just know that you'll fall into apostasy if you don't. It's God's call to apostolicity, long overdue. We have to make up for a lot of lost ground in time. It'll be painful before it's glorious, but it'll be an eternal glory, and to your eternal delight and not your shame. He's only waiting for your yes. Let's pray. Lord, this speaking tonight—I don't know if your saints know it—was totally impossible, except that it issued out of your life. No man can order such a survey and bring things together in the cogency of these last days things to a people who have no sense of it in any way that is challenging and compelling and requiring, except by the power of your life. This mystery is of you, that it might be fulfilled through you, that it might be to you as glory forever. And I'm inviting these children who have been selfish, narrow, faint in their faith, modest in their intentions, desiring a kind of Christian respectability, but not a kind of faith that would make radical imposition on their real interests, to repent for that before you, to forsake this pattern of life that's dear to them and is so patently unapostolic, and to invite you to deal with them, to bring them to their own wilderness experience, trial, and sifting. A preparation of character and life, that in that day we shall not fail, is something that needs freely to be given, as freely as Jesus gave his own life, who is waiting for yours. And so as the minister of this Word, I invite you to transact with God. You can do it in any way that you please. You can go right down on your knees by the chair where you're sitting and make that transaction, giving yourself over to him and saying, Lord, whatever it takes, let me not be eternally ashamed. You can come forward. You can kneel. You can stand. There needs to be some physical expression and statement of your intention. What is your intention with God? How far will you go? And if you're not giving yourself an abandonment after a word of the kind tonight, are you waiting for another one, more compelling? Another spiritual roulette where you'll feel like it? There's a choice and a decision that needs to be made, and that set time has come. Who will make it? For Jesus, for his glory, for his kingdom. Something that will affect all your subsequent life and the fulfillment of the things that have been spoken.