In this sermon, the speaker reflects on the importance of discipleship and the need for believers to watch and pray during times of trial. He acknowledges the controversy surrounding discipleship and emphasizes the need for principles to be rooted in the cross and the life of God. The speaker also highlights the importance of repentance and daily acknowledgement of one's own sinfulness. He shares his personal testimony of encountering God and being transformed from a life of blasphemy and sin to a life of praise and acknowledgement of God.

Nobody knows how empty I've been approaching this speaking stance through every meeting, and what God has been doing right on the spot to assemble it together. I don't know how it's coming out, how you're receiving it, what you think of it. All I know is it doesn't have much to do with me. And so much as the oath of this morning, I tried desperately to find the face of the Lord. If only he would give me a clear direction. If only he would make alive some scripture. But he would not. So I came down armed. I've got my Bible, and a history of the Jews in Germany, and a book written by a great German saint who was martyred for his faith, called Life Together by Dietrich Bonhoeffer. It may be that I'll use none of these, or all of them. I don't know what. Maybe this is the humiliation that Mary was talking about, that God has reserved for those of low estate. Let's just pray together. I've said, Lord, give a fit conclusion to the peculiar speakings of these days. Precious God, precious God. I don't know what it is, mighty God, that you're after, or what it is that you're seeking to demonstrate, except perhaps that the thing that is pure and sinless is born out of the thing that is barren. If so, Lord, bring forth something this morning that's holy. Oh, great God, expose your great Father's heart to us. Breathe upon us, mighty God. Such things as delight you this morning, Lord. Precious God, just let us hear from you, mighty God. We don't give a rap for the speaking reputation of any man, Lord, or what men shall think. Only let us hear from thee, Lord. May I be the most transparent vehicle, Lord, for the expression of your own wisdom and love and truth, as you've enjoyed in many a season, that this people might hear a pure utterance and a revelation of your own heart. And we'll thank you and praise you for that now, in Jesus' holy name. I joked last night about what conversion means. It's when God takes a former Marxist and communist and makes him utterly conservative, so much so that he could contemplate being a Republican. But I have a deeper expression of that conversion this morning. It's God who can take a Jew who is not content to let bygones be bygones, or that men should forget the horror of World War II, but one who was an active antagonist and filled with hatred against the German people. One who, when he was drafted into the armed forces and learned that he was going to Germany, went with such detestation and hatred in his heart as he sought never to be able to look a German straight in the face. When God can take such a man as that and make such a one a lover of the German people and of Germany, you can know that such a one has been utterly converted. There's a great mystery of God that has to do with the Jews and the German people. I wouldn't think that it would be appropriate to speak about that this morning. It's a kind of a private burden that I carry, except that it contains a great mystery and has got so much to do and to express about the revelation of sin and judgment and salvation. Fantastic, the uncanny resemblances between the Jewish and the German people. As much as we've glared at each other and spoken harsh things to and about each other, you can barely separate the two peoples. And a lot of what we call Jewish culture and Yiddishkeit is really German in its origin and vice versa. In fact, the Yiddish language, I don't know if you know this, there are two languages that are peculiar to the Jewish people. One is Hebrew, which has only been resuscitated in recent times with the birth of the State of Israel, the national language of Israel, and it was also the language of the synagogue and of worship. But a language more common to the Jews until recent times, throughout all of these recent centuries, is Yiddish. Yiddish is not like Hebrew. Although it can be written with Hebrew characters, it is really Germanic. And anybody who speaks Yiddish can probably be understood by Germans and vice versa. The Jews developed this lingua franca, this international language, from centuries of living in Germany. And much of what we call Germany today is the result of Jewish occupation in that land. I've had the experience of visiting the city of Worms, spelled W-O-R-M-S, on the Rhineland, and the most melancholy experience where Jewish occupation has continued unhindered until the Hitler time for almost 2,000 years. There's been Jewish settlements in Rhine. When the Germans were barbarians and drinking beer out of skulls, there was a pocket of civilization that had to do with literacy and ethics and morality and culture and refinement, and it was Jewish. It had to do with commerce and trade, and it was Jewish. And that finally found its way into the entire German bloodstream, and so a lot of what makes Germany today one of the great and formidable nations of the earth that has twice in modern times brought almost to destruction the entire modern world is essentially Jewish in its configuration. There's no way even to understand the 20th century independent of three Jewish men who happened also to be German-speaking, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, and Albert Einstein. These German-Jewish geniuses have devastated the modern world, and they were all men who worked out of the belief that they would bring to the earth good. I suppose there's no one more difficult to convert or to show his need than one who is as sublimely perfected as are Germans and Jews. Highly intellectual, highly refined, highly cultural. Hard to persuade a people like that, that they have need. And yet I believe that the most dramatic and profound chapters of God's dealings at the end of the age will have to be with both the Germans and the Jews. Ironic that we should have suffered in such magnitude at the hands of the German people, where they came within a hair's breadth of absolutely extirpating from the face of the earth the entire Jewish people. And yet I believe that God has reserved for them the special mission at the end of the age of praying into salvation the lost sheep of the house of Israel. What do you think of them apples? Isn't that just like God? About five years ago, when I was in fellowship with a German brother in my living room in New York City at that time, the Spirit of God just came upon us in a moment, in the midst of a conversation, and left us with the same impression that we were rendered speechless. That the same people whom Satan had used to cast Jews into the physical fires would be the same people that God would use to save them from the fire of his eternal judgment. And I thought, now how is God going to perform that? And for years I had to carry that burden quietly until the Lord gave opportunity for me to visit in that country and to minister in that country and to recognize that it was going to be not by direct witness or encounter, but by supplication and prayer in the Spirit. It's the effectual fervent prayer of righteous men and women that avails much. And maybe there's a reason why God chose to save me in the manner that he did, which is to show me how important is the thing that I've just expressed. Could there have been a more rapid atheist than what I was? Could there have been one who was more militantly against God and would have, if the conditions were available, gone out and slaughtered the saints and made a mock of God's work in God's church? I would have been appalled for my own generation going out of my way to imprison the saints. And God in his great mercy stretched forth the arm of which we've been speaking through these days and touched one who did not so much as ever imagine that there was a living God and made him so real and so powerful by the revelation of his Spirit and boxed me up and put me in a corner in Jerusalem and brought me by finding myself lost in that great city, going into a store to ask for directions to find that I'd entered into a bookstore and that to my amazement they sold Bibles and New Testaments and Christian literature, yet the woman at the desk was so evidently Jewish I said, what is this place? Oh, she said, we're a congregation of Jewish believers in the Messiah Jesus. Something in my heart went snap! And she said, this is our bookstore adjoining our chapel. And a still small voice, of which I would have said if any man hears such voices he ought immediately to find himself a psychiatrist, spoke to me and I knew in that moment this is the voice of him with whom I have to do and called me by name and commanded me not to leave that place. And in my first act of obedience as a Jewish man to the voice of the God who spoke to Abraham, four days later I was swept into the kingdom of God. And out of the same mouth that had come blasphemy and cursings and oaths and revilings and invitations to violence and seduction came praise and acknowledgement of God. I came back to California to resume my teaching career in the Bay Area, absolutely stunned that not only was there a living God after all but that he could seek and find me and relentlessly pursue me for 14 months like a hound of heaven and not let me go. I wondered how it was that God could save one who was so rank and blasphemous an enemy as I was. And I contained that question in my heart until some months after my return the Lord began to open up a modest ministry of giving my testimony. And it was at one of the first of those meetings that a woman came up to me after the conclusion of the service and called me Brother Katz. She was from every natural appearance a Gentile of the Gentiles as I was a Hebrew of the Hebrews but she could call me Brother Katz. I liked that. And she said, Brother Katz, you don't know me but you had my daughter as a student in your history class. She knew that you were an atheist and a radical and came home from school in the afternoons weeping over you. Since that day, she said, both my daughter and I have been praying for you. And something in my heart went boing! And I was like that needle stuck on the record repeating over and again like a mindless idiot so you're the one, so you're the one, so you're the one, so you're the one whose prayers have entered me into the kingdom of God for surely I had not one friend who knew what the word prayer meant. Well, I'll tell you children, there's something about the effectual fervent prayer of righteous men and women. That kind of fervency is not something that can be affected by whipping up your emotion or wringing your fingers or pounding your breast or any such thing. It's the automatic consequence of those who are walking in the righteousness of God. How then is there to be the release of that kind of supplication and groan from German hearts and mouths who are still proud, arrogant, self-assured and satisfied with sprinkling infants, with nominal forms of religion, with hokey little religious ceremonialism who have not ever once been broken in their pride and in their arrogance that they might repent and be poured out before God. Just like the Jews, not knowing the righteousness of God, they go about seeking to affect their own righteousness. And they do such a masterful job with the light Lutheran gloss which they have on their lives that to all effects and purposes you would think them Christian. Maybe it takes something like the utter humiliation of a Hitler time to show them as it showed the disciples 2000 years before that when the dark hour of trial came they were unable even to watch and to pray and that when their master was apprehended by wicked men they had to flee in panic. I met a German man of 70 years of age at whose home I stayed on one or two visits who had lived in Berlin during that Nazi period. And he told me proudly that he had many Jewish friends and business colleagues. Oh, I said, really? Well, what did you do then when you looked out your window of your Berlin apartment and saw the Nazi youth coming with the armbands and swastikas to beat up the Jewish kids and pull the beards of the old men and smash the store windows and inscribe their swastikas all over the place? He stood for a minute and he thought. He had a distant, faraway look in his eye. And he said, Art, what could I do, he said. I pulled the shade down and I walked away. In the hour of crisis, his thin Lutheranism was inadequate to enable him to stand and to suffer the reproach, the incrimination, the persecution, the identification unto suffering and death that would have been his had he stood with a despised Jewish people. Aren't you glad that you're not going to have to face that? Or are you? I'll never forget a woman telling me in the state of Washington how she had a nightmare. I said, what was it? Oh, she said, I dreamt that we were asleep in the house, the whole family and I, and in the middle of the night there was a furious pounding on the door. And she said, we hurriedly put on our nightclothes and came down to see what it was and opened the door and hooded men came bursting into the room and commanded that we be dressed and take nothing with us and they bound us and threw us in the back of the car and off we drove in the middle of the night. And she said, I cried out to these men in the car, why are you doing this? And the answer was, you are among those who love the Jewish people. Who knows that there shall not be another dark hour of trial right here in groovy River City, in the home of the brave, in the land of the free. Because if we've seen anything in modern times, if we can read our history aright, the Germans who were noted for the depth of their civilization and culture were able to systematically cremate millions of people and send them up smokestack in ashes. The French, known for their exquisite culture and delicacy, were able to suspend Algerians and Vietnamese by their thumbs and perform water torches and put hoses into mouths of men and swell their bellies to bursting in order to extract information. Americans have been guilty of massacres, of wiping out entire communities of innocent Vietnamese without so much as blinking an eyelash. I'll tell you something children, I was yet an atheist in my early twenties when God brought me to Germany as a G.I. And on Yom Kippur, the day of atonement, not disposed to going to synagogues as I was an atheist, I went instead to something far more appropriate, I went to Dachau. And I wanted to see for myself what was these death camps. After all, hot shot, art cat, he's not going to learn anything new. Just pinch him and he can just pour out volumes of information. But I'll tell you, there's nothing like actual contact. There's nothing like the awesome reality itself. And we have been a people shielded from the awesome realities by boob tubes, by books. It comes to us silted and without its shock. And if you should visit Dachau today, you'll not recognize what it was a quarter of a century ago when I visited it. It's been all nicely cleaned up and tidied, thank you, in the wonderful systematic and fastidious way that Germans have. All of the old stinking rotten barracks have been torn down and they've leveled the entire place and landscaped it with stones, put up a little monument and a little museum and they've given you one model barrack, brand new, antiseptic. When I was there, it was quite another thing. The stench of death still pervaded the place. And I ran my hand over the root bunks full of splinters that somehow I should feel something of the place where my own people had been huddled together like skeletons. Went into the place where the gas room was, saw the oven, saw the bones, saw the ashes, put my hand on the smokestack and almost freaked out as something broke that was beyond mind and emotion and will to contain. I learned a lesson that day. God saved me from the stupid simplicity of thinking that there are good guys and bad guys. And that somehow because I had the happy accident of being born in Brooklyn and being Jewish and having the advantage of wearing the uniform of Uncle Sam, that somehow what I was looking at was someone else's crime. The magnitude of that crime was such that I recognized that we are all implicated and there but for the grace of God go I. If I had been born in Germany, I would have been the one stoking the bodies into the oven. After all, had I not been a murderer already? Had I not given looks that could kill and speak words that could maim and kill? Truly there is not a righteous man upon the earth that doeth good and sinneth not. If God should mark iniquity, who can stand? Isn't it amazing that as often as we shake our heads and give ascent to those scriptures, we perhaps still in our heart of hearts don't believe them? I want to quote you from Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Think of the paradoxes of God at the end of the age. Jew quoting from a German and so prepared by the life of this man that God is going to return this Jew to Germany to speak this message to the German people. If you want to know what we're doing in Germany, it's this. We're confronting a proud and arrogant self-sufficient people who have never atoned for their sins, who have only suffered a bruised conscience and have never been deeply repented and broken and contrite to come to the cross of Christ Jesus, that there might be the release of the Spirit that will save the lost sheep of Israel before the judgment of God shall fall. Who better to bring the message than a Jew who has experienced the forgiveness and the atonement of God, who has come to Him in spirit and in truth. Bonhoeffer writes, The greatest psychological insight and ability and experience cannot grasp this one thing, what sin is. Worldly wisdom knows what distress and weakness and failure are, but it does not know the godlessness of men. And so it also does not know that man is destroyed only by his sin and can be healed only by forgiveness. Only the Christian knows this. In the presence of a psychiatrist I can only be a sick man. In the presence of a Christian brother I can dare to be a sinner. What he means is dare to acknowledge that I'm a sinner. The psychiatrist must first search my heart and yet he never plums its ultimate depth. The Christian brother knows when I come to him, here is a sinner like myself, a godless man who wants to confess and yearns for God's forgiveness. The psychiatrist views me as if there were no God. The brother views me as I am before the judging and merciful God and the cross of Jesus Christ. It is not lack of psychological knowledge, but lack of love for the crucified Jesus Christ that makes us so poor and inefficient in brotherly confession. He says elsewhere that if we shall not acknowledge the totality and the depravity of sin, God will bring us to humiliating circumstances in our own life which will reveal it. And that's what happened to Peter when Jesus fixed his eye upon him having already been buffeted and knocked about and bloodied and he saw that one who was loudest in his profession, though all the world deny you, yet will I never deny you, having denied him thrice before the cock crowed with mutterings and with oaths. And then it says, he went out and he wept bitterly. We often think that the great message that came from Peter's lips on the day of Pentecost was the result of the baptism in the Holy Spirit. And I don't doubt that it had some part to play. But I think that the greater explanation for the speakings of Peter and the great epistles that have to do with suffering which are given us in 1 and 2 Peter are the result not of the baptism of the Holy Spirit so much as a man who went out and wept bitterly. This is where the germination has got to be brought and also many of us who have not really been there. Bonhoeffer writes, anybody who lives beneath the cross and who has discerned in the cross of Jesus the utter wickedness of all men and of his own heart will find there is no sin that can ever be alien to him. I want to tell you that God is giving me in recent years an unusual kind of revelation. Though I was saved and a believer I still brought with me into the kingdom something of that tenacious Jewish spirit that has to do with ethical posture. There were certain things that other men could condescend to do which our cats never would until God showed me of the kinds of things of which I am capable. Like, for example, perversion. Would you ever believe that you're capable of that? And don't you often wince and shudder when you have to make contact with a homosexual or someone else who has fallen to some sickly thing and you can't run away fast enough? You cannot believe the kinds of things of which we are capable. And God is making me to see that there's nothing in the earth to which men can taste in their degeneracy that is not impossible also to me. You know what I think he's trying to do? Save me from some kind of exclusive Christian moral snobbishness that I can look down my long nose upon others and say, I would never have done that. I would never have cremated a Jew. Really? I can remember times according to the scripture when Jews ate their own children. Can you believe that a moral, ethical, and religious person could condescend to cannibalism? What is it going to take for us to believe what the Word of God says? That there's no man good, no not one. How are we going to appeal for others to come to the knowledge of the cross and true forgiveness if we ourselves have not attained to it? I had a recent conversation with the head of the Pentecostal movement in Romania, precious man. In fact, I have a renewed respect for denominations. I'm not so quick to say Babylon. In fact, many times I'm more prone to see Babylon in Charismatica than I am to see it in the good old denominations that have weathered many a storm. Where there are real pioneers, the men who have given their lives and have walked with integrity. Such a man was this one whom the Lord allowed me to visit in that country. He asked me what I thought of the Charismatic movement and I shared something of my mixed feelings. I'm not absolutely gung-ho. And I asked him what he thought and he expressed a very interesting statement. He said, well, Artie said I'm a little suspicious of the sudden popularity of the Holy Spirit. The sudden facility that you Americans seem to find in the gift of the Spirit and all it has to do with the Holy Spirit in a people who have not established their life on a foundation of repentance. When he said that, I was pinned to the wall. And all of a sudden he said in one sentence, what had been lurking in my spirit for so many years that I had not been able to identify. This whole controversy that seems to have shaken the body of Christ about discipleship and all of the other issues that seem to be dividing and affecting us. Authority, submission. I thought to myself as I heard these men, these principles sound very correct. I can't fault these principles. The only thing possibly that can be faulted is that these principles have been abstractly extrapolated and taken from the scriptures and acted upon as if it were some kind of a plaything. Independent from the cross and the life of God which issues out of death. I'll tell you even the most correct things can be terribly dangerous if not fatal if it's lived independently from and does not organically rise from the life that came bursting forth out of death on the third day. That man spoke volumes to me in one sentence when he said you're building on an unsure foundation if the gifts of the Spirit and the life of the Spirit is not brought forth from a foundation of repentance. Now I'm just, I don't even know where I'm going children. I'm just talking. I just picked up this book in Washington coming down here. Fabulous, it's a collector's item, it's out of print. The Jews of Germany, a story of 16th century. It just broke my heart and just pulled my heart right out of my chest. What sufferings have the Jewish people endured? What victims through the Middle Ages? Everything that went wrong from a well-being poison to the death of a Gentile to a plague was in the last analysis always attributed to them. They were the laughingstock, the scorn, the derision, the scapegoat, the whipping boys for every single thing that happened in Europe. And in order to finance the crusades the men with the white crosses emblazoned on their chests looted and pillaged and raped and robbed every Jewish community through Europe on their way to the Holy Land. Jews have paid in blood and in misery and wretchedness for having forsaken their God. You want to know something? The issue of the Holocaust, the understanding of why it is that in this 20th century in an age of enlightenment 6 million Jews could be systematically fed to the oven is the greatest and single issue which men have overlooked in modern times. It is the key to both the salvation of the Jews and the Germans. The Germans want to brush it off and say, well, that's past history. An unfortunate episode shall not happen again. We've learned our lesson. And the Jews, even more grotesquely, annually celebrate it in a sentimental and schmaltzy way. Oh, how we suffered for being Jews. We died with the Shema Yisrael on our lips. Bologna, brother. You didn't die for being Jews. You died for not being Jewish enough. And where is there a man godly enough and brave enough who will stand up and tell that to the Jewish people? There's a world that needs to be confronted and brought to repentance on the brute facts of what our own history has revealed. Not that the Holocaust is an ugly thing in itself, but that it's the greatest revelation of just what is our nature and our condition according to what God has all along told us and we would not believe and therefore saw the consequence in our own generation. What an amazing thing for Jewish people to learn that whatsoever man soweth, that too shall he reap. And that they were instrumental through the centuries in shaping the environment and the culture in Germany which in the 20th century was going to make them victims. Listen to this. It speaks about the Jews in Germany through the Middle Ages. What witnesses, the author says, they were. It was not enough that they disputed the efficacy of the sacraments such as baptism or the validity of the mysteries such as the Trinity, but what they were above all supposed to confirm that Jesus was the Messiah, that they ceaselessly denied. By their example, if not by their efforts, they were a standing encouragement to backsliding and heresy. As long as there remained a member of the old faith who denied the new, the church felt ill at ease in its heritage. More than one Christian entering a thwarted ghetto house to raise alone or have his horoscope read left for home a troubled soul and fit for burning. The Jew was skilled at laying bare the weak spots of the church. For this purpose he had not only a profound knowledge of the scriptures, but a wit sharpened by oppression. He was the master of incredulity, the mentor of rebellion. He was to be found at work in the blasphemy plants of an Emperor Frederick or the princes of Swabia and Aragon. It was he who forged the weapons of reason and irony which the skeptics of the Renaissance and the freethinkers of the 17th century were to wield with deadly effect. A sarcasm of Voltaire is nothing but the last echo of a quip whispered six centuries before in the dark alleys of the ghetto. Now I know that there are many of you in this room who have hardly understood what I've read. And it bears repetition, but I'll just say this. What is it saying? That brilliant Jews, full of unbelief, skeptical of the scriptures and the New Testament revelation of the arm of the Lord that was not revealed to them continued to eat away at the minimal faith of Germans around them all through the Middle Ages. And any unsuspecting German man who was brought into a Jewish house for the purposes of commerce or what found himself engaged in a dispute in which he came out the loser. And I'll tell you frankly out of my own experience, my favorite pastime as an atheist was to engage a Christian in debate and wipe him out. I never found one who could wrestle with me and come out victor. This is serious stuff, children. This is life and death. Do you know that? The fate of my people is hanging in the balance, waiting for the penetration of the thick, arrogant, proud German hide by the work of God's Spirit or else. You want to know something about German history? God sent them a Pentecostal revival in the first decade of the 20th century. Oh, it wasn't altogether pure and there were some ungainly things and some excesses and some emotionalism. You know these proud, stiff theological Germans concluded when they met in Berlin to consider what this was? They concluded that this came not from above, this came from below. It's called the Berlin Declaration of 1912. And they renounced it for its enthusiasm. And you want to know what? The same men before the generation was out were required to receive something that came not from above but from below and that was full of pagan enthusiasm and in the end brought down almost an entire modern world and destroyed Germany. Their spiritual pride prevented them from seeing the authentic work of God and they missed it. And what would have filled the deep longing of German hearts for a reality beyond bourgeois culture they did not have and therefore were compelled to receive something which came from below. I want to tell you, history is not likely to be disregarded. They pulled the shade down when God gave them an opportunity and if you reject the Holy Spirit you're likely to find yourself being compelled to receive another. Let's go back to where we've been reading through these days in the Gospel of Luke. Maybe we're better prepared to receive the conclusion now. I mentioned in passing about Simeon, an elderly man who was brought to the temple in the 8th day when the babe Jesus was brought for dedication. The 25th verse of the 2nd chapter of Luke And behold there was a man in Jerusalem whose name was Simeon the same man was just and devout waiting for the consolation of Israel and the Holy Ghost was upon him and it was revealed unto him by the Holy Ghost that he should not see death before he had seen the Lord's Christ and he came by the Spirit into the temple when the parents brought in the child Jesus to do for him after the custom of the law then took him up in his arms and blessed God and said Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace according to thy word for mine eyes have seen thy salvation which thou hast prepared before the face of all people a light to lighten the Gentiles and the glory of thy people Israel and I mentioned when we spoke of this last that this is not just true for Simeon but it's true for every man except it be revealed to us by the Holy Spirit except we come by the Spirit except we see in the face of Jesus the salvation of God we shall die there's a nation fitted for death and a Jewish people on death's course except they see the face of Jesus except the arm of the Lord be revealed they shall see death it's the choice of one of two things and therefore I conclude with the same question that I raised in the beginning to whom is the arm of the Lord revealed why have the Germans not seen it who have been content with infant sprinklings and all of the other superficial nominal forms of religion of which that stands as a symbol because they're proud self-sufficient self-assured theological correct moral and would never condescend to homosexuality to depraved things they're the authors of culture and refinement and have not understood that there's no man good no, not one why callest thou me good Jesus said to a Jewish man who wanted to compliment him there's no man good but God Abraham believed God and God imputed righteousness unto him what kind of a man was Simeon it says that he was a just and devout man waiting for the consolation of Israel Israel needs to be consoled there's something that needs to be bound up there's something that needs to be rectified and made whole there's a relationship that needs to be restored of a people who have been strewn over the face of the earth made a byword and a hyst and a proverb among all the nations in the earth to which they have been driven what a roll call of calamity what fatalities numbered by the millions what seas of blood have been poured out what shrieks of mothers who have had children plucked from their hands in Russia and Poland and Ukraine and watched the heads of their babies smashed against walls by drunken slobs who have come in the name of Christ in the Easter season to take care of those Christ killers there's no way that we can understand what Jews have paid for forsaking the Lord their God for not having hearkened unto him for not having been obedient to his commandments and to his statutes and having walked in the way for not having kept his Sabbath for having despoiled his land and there's a remnant of them that God in his great mercy yet wants to save from a fire so fierce and so unrelenting that it makes Auschwitz and Dachau and all of the other of those death camps and ovens kid stuff there's a great cry that has got to go out over the earth repent for the kingdom of God is at hand and it cannot be spoken by a ragtailed mob of shallow charismatics whose giddy little exercises have not themselves been built on the foundation of brokenness and repentance again and again and again God is waiting for a people who are just and devout who themselves are waiting for the consolation of Israel there was another old woman what is it with this Lord? the old, the barren, the stricken in years the simple functionaries in the temple a simple virgin these God uses to show forth his resplendent glory and at the very end there's another elderly woman 36th verse one Anna, a prophetess a widow it says in the 37th year who has served God with fastings and prayers night and days for decades and in the 38th verse was she coming in that instant oh what a coincidence gave thanks likewise unto the Lord and spake of him to all them that looked for redemption in Jerusalem may God give us the disposition of an Anna and of Simeon may we be barren and stricken oh I mean we could be 21 year old hotshot but may we have a spirit as if we're barren and stricken with years may we be just and devout may we deeply recognize that there's only one consolation for both Jew and German and it comes from a blood that was poured out at great cost on the cross if you think that I've come to you unprepared which is my usual condition how was it then that when I was in Tubingen University in some recent weeks I got up in the last morning of our stay there knowing that we were going to have an outdoor meeting spontaneous, impromptu for as many as would stop and listen right outside the cafeteria, the Mensa right under the banners of Spartacus, the name of the communist party movement for the students there before our arrogant students headstrong self-sufficient, wise in their own light and speak to them the foolish gospel of Jesus Christ and you know what the Lord said to me? speak to them about Julius Caesar and Jesus Christ and I did praise God that he'll use something from your old academic background sanctified for his purpose and I reminded them of a play written by a great genius Shakespeare called Julius Caesar which celebrated the death of one piece of clay a Roman emperor and you remember when Mark Anthony took that butchered body up on the steps and spoke to a great Roman mob friends, Romans, countrymen give me your ear I've come not to praise Caesar but to bury him what a sneaky beginning when his whole idea was to use the death of Caesar for his own purposes and to incite a mob to rebellion and then he went on to say as he held up the cloak in which Caesar was butchered and people could see the places where the knife went in oh he said if you would see the body if you moved to tears seeing this cloak what if you saw the body you couldn't contain your tears if you knew about this noble Caesar and what he had laid up in store for you and he said I just happened to have his will with me and he kind of pulled out of his sleeve a parchment and he said of course I don't dare read it you wouldn't be able to take it if you knew what it was that he had promised you oh they cried out read it, read it, read the will and so of course he had to comply and he read the will to every Roman citizen eighty-five denarii or whatever the form of exchange was out of the great treasure of Caesar for every Roman citizen enough for a night out on the town hallelujah, see a real big blow and besides that he's given his gardens as a park in which you can have recreation and the cries came out from your ears oh noble Caesar was there ever such a one as this noble Caesar that was for the death of a piece of clay and I went on to speak of one far more noble whose death and whose blood has not been half so well commemorated by those who profess to love him as human genius had commemorated the death of a piece of clay and I want to read that in conclusion this morning in Isaiah 53 we'll begin where we should begin in the twelfth chapter the thirteenth verse behold my servant shall deal prudently he shall be exalted and extolled and be very high I don't know of any single servant to whom God has ever used such words as these there's only one who is extolled and exalted and very high and I'll tell you in all of our service it's got to be him who is extolled and exalted and very high and many were astonished at his face his visage was so marked more than any man and his form more than the sons of men so shall he sprinkle many nations and the kings shall shut their mouths at him for that which they had not been told them shall they see and that which they had not heard shall they consider but who shall believe our report and to whom is the arm of the Lord revealed after a whole lifetime I've seen icky portraits of Jesus with every blonde wispy hair in place and little aquiline nose and receding chin and multiple eyes the Lord arrested my atheistic career at its height when he moved me by circumstances in that same fourteen month hitchhiking expedition of which the book Ben Israel speaks to go to a place called Colmont in France on the German French border and there to see a painting which the sisters of Mary at Darmstadt have greatly celebrated called The Passion of Jesus by a medieval artist by the name of Grunwald, have you ever seen it? It's one of the most grotesque paintings upon which you'll ever lay your eyes. I had to avert my face and turn it away it wasn't anything like these sickly icky gooey things that we see now it showed a man so grotesquely distended so broken and misshapen his fingers in the gnarled paroxysms of death with such strain and sunken eyes and the evidences of brutal beating and marred more than any man pieces of wood actually stuck into his flesh from the things with which they flagellated his body the flesh was putrid green I never saw such an ugly thing no wonder the father had also to avert his face we have not affixed our eyes upon him high and lifted up and therefore every other thing that we have seen has suffered a fatal distortion we've seen him in gooey ways and probably we've cast him in our own image but we've not seen him as these scriptures describe no wonder they will not read Isaiah 53 in a synagogue it is so unmistakable a description of one who came down from glory and lay aside his deity not only to take upon himself the form of man but to be excruciatingly tortured and pounded to a pulp agonizingly suspended on nails between heaven and earth and his blood let that we might have a Passover lamb for all seasons once and for all but who has believed that report if we're proud and look for some messiah to come and pump in glory who's going to believe this if we have religious reckoning is based on our own human mind who can believe this report and to whom is the honor of the lord revealed for he shall grow up before him as a tender plant and as a root out of a dry ground he has no form nor comeliness and when we shall see him there's no beauty that we should desire him cat didn't you pray this morning that he came as an alabaster box handsome and resplendent a glory in whose face we beheld the glory of the father yes but this describes him on the cross he had no form nor comeliness that we shall desire him there's no beauty that we shall desire him he's despised and rejected of men and men of sorrows and acquainted with grief and we hid as it were our faces from him he was despised and we esteemed him not surely he hath borne our griefs and carried our sorrows yet we did prefer him stricken smitten of God and afflicted but he was wounded for our transgressions he was bruised for our iniquities and the chastisement of our peace was upon him and with his stripes we are healed you know what I said to that German people on my last visit to Munich I said God says that if you'll not confess your own iniquities and the iniquities of your fathers you cannot be forgiven you know that he says the same thing for Israel that we Jews are required to acknowledge also the sins of our fathers as well as our own sins you know what some of these young Germans said well I had nothing to do with that I wasn't even born then you know what I said to them if you had been would you have acted any differently than your father who was there what shall we say in America who have been saved from such things would we have acted any differently if we had been there and what shall we Jews say who point the finger of accusation at others would we have acted differently if we had been there surely all we like sheep have gone astray we have turned everyone to his own way and the Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us all he was oppressed and he was afflicted yet he opened not his mouth he is brought as a lamb to the slaughter and as a sheep before his shearers is dumb so he openeth not his mouth he was taken from prison and from judgment and who shall declare his generation for he was cut off out of the land of the living for the transgression of my people was he stricken he made his grave with the wicked and with the rich in his death because he had done no violence neither were any deceit in his mouth yet it pleased the Lord to bruise him he hath put him to grief and when you shall make his soul an offering for sin when you shall take the essence of his life his blood and make that an offering for your sin is your transgression that's what that means when you all take this blood and mark it to the doorpost and lintel of your heart and your life then he shall see his seed and shall prolong his days and the pleasure of the Lord shall prosper in his hands he shall see of the travail of his soul and shall be satisfied it was worth it all it was worth agonizing it was worth sweating drops of blood at Gethsemane it was worth the taunt and the jeers it was worth being racked up it was worth the tongue cleaving to the roof of my mouth when I shall see a sinner repent and receive forgiveness and washing and cleansing by the blood which I'm releasing he shall see of the travail of his soul and shall be satisfied and by his knowledge or by the knowledge of him shall my righteous servant justify many for he shall bear their iniquities therefore will I divide him a portion with the great and he shall divide the spoiled with the strong because he has poured out his soul unto death and he was numbered with the transgressors and he bare the sin of many and made intercession for the transgressors one last word from Bonhoeffer he says if we make of our confession a shallow thing it will become the final most abominable vicious and impure prostitution of the heart the act of confession becomes an idle lustful babbling confession confession as a pious work is an invention of the devil yeah I'm a sinner yeah that's right you're right I'm a sinner forgive me will you I receive the blood of the lord pass me that communion cup where is it a kool aid that's ok he says that's the last and final act vicious impure prostitution of the heart confession as a pious work is an invention of the devil it is only God's offer of grace help and forgiveness that could make us dare to enter the abyss of confession confession as a routine duty is spiritual death there are a lot of us sitting in that now without luster without joy our wine has turned to water oh we've been confessing but it's been a shallow and impure prostitution of the heart we have not deeply acknowledged and confessed that we're guilty of shoving bodies into ovens we've not acknowledged the guilt and the sins of our fathers as our own we've not seen the depths of our own depravity and the terror of sin in our own sneaky and deepest hearts we think somehow that God has a relationship with us different than from every other because he's seen our virtue and he recognizes that we're one of his there's no man good no not one another german woman has written a book repentance the secret of the joy filled life and she speaks of daily repentance daily repentance a just man devout waiting for the consolation of his will how's your spirit this morning there's something that rings in the ear of God that jangles the sensibility it says amen and hallelujah on earth but when it sends to heaven there's something in it that's harsh self-righteous inflated pompous self-satisfied smug there's not enough of the thing that God loves that's of lowest state and humiliated broken God says to this man will I look he was of a contrite and broken spirit who makes a sacrifice as if he were cutting off a dog's head who pours out the oblation as if it were swine's blood Lord what are you saying how exaggerated must you speak to us till we understand that you're holy holy holy and that the only thing you'll hear from man is I abhor myself and I repent in dust and ashes God said to Job's accusers you have not spoken as my servant Job has spoken and my anger is kindled against you to whom is the arm of the Lord revealed and who shall reveal the arm of the Lord to others those who are of a contrite and broken spirit low estate who me waiting for the consolation of Israel calling others to repent who themselves are living daily in contrition and repenting Hallelujah let's bow our heads precious God precious God precious God two thousand years later mighty God we have performed the Jewish sin anew we have taken the holy oracles of God the things that are divine and costly and made of them only mere religion we pass the cup as mere ceremony we speak and sing of the blood without true cognition of what it means we talk about the cross and dangle it about our neck and put it on the dashboard of our cars but have not in fact come to it if we've brought some of our worst sins we've not brought ourselves and your judgment precious God in Jesus name let your blood flow this morning mighty God pour in that wonderful gentle way you have over our souls mighty God take away every tarnish mighty God remove the dross from our silver that we might be a lustrous people again give us that true wine of your own blood not adulterated and mixed with water and sappy things oh precious God may we be the broken people the contrite ones the resurrected ones the circumcised ones who have no confidence in the flesh who rejoice in the Messiah Jesus and worship God in the spirit precious God we pray for Germany as we pray for Jerusalem in the same breath stretch forth a mighty arm to save with an outstretched arm mighty God plead with the arrogant people and reveal mighty God the arm of the Lord that they might be saved may be we waiting only for the consolation of Israel even the Lord Yeshua Hamashiach Jesus the Christ in whose name we pray and all of God's people said Amen