In this sermon, the speaker emphasizes the importance of rendering honor, obedience, and gratitude to fathers and those in positions of authority. He acknowledges that human nature often resists submission due to a desire for self-exaltation. The speaker also highlights the significance of using the English language effectively and encourages the audience to value and employ words with meaningful impact. Additionally, he references the commandment to honor one's mother and father, emphasizing its inclusion in the Ten Commandments and its importance in God's wisdom and understanding.

minor affliction, but all the more, Lord, whatever weakness that has brought, that that would give greater opportunity for the expression of your strength. So we are made strong, my God, in you, and we're so jealous over this word. And I trust that it's your jealousy, and that nothing shall be lost to your people whom you've assembled, and beyond and through them to the larger congregation, the church, that a statement will come forth, Lord, of a continuing kind for what you gave us yesterday. That was precious. I've been around for almost 40 years. I would say yesterday was remarkably precious. And we just invite you to continue and bring that perspective, my God, to such a peak, and to dot the I's, cross the T's, show us its application, its implications, and whatsoever you will. We're so privileged, Lord. What shall we say to you? So privileged. So come and have your full sway. Thank you, my God, for your thoughts that are so unspeakably precious, full of wisdom and understanding and on time. So be with this piece of dust, Lord, and let your children not only hear your words, but your voice. We thank and give you praise in Jesus' name. Amen. Well, among my many books, if I indulge anything, it's the purchase of books. And Inge says, are you going to read them all? When will you ever read them? Well, I said, they're there positionally, so at any moment the Lord can finger what he will, what he wills, and I'll have it, the accessibility. I can't tell you what a privilege to have the complete work of Karl Barth, 14 volumes of church dogmatics that no man in a single lifetime could ever read. But when someone alludes to a particular volume and you want to follow up that reference, there it is at your fingertips on the shelf. So I'm appreciating that. So somehow my eye was directed to a little booklet by Arthur Pink. How many people know that name? Oh, you need to read Arthur Pink's work on David. That's a milestone work. He's a British preacher, teacher, Bible commentator. And here's his little book on the Ten Commandments. And so I thought, what has he to say on the commandment, thou shalt honor thy mother and thy father? Beside the thought that God would include that as a statement in itself of all the things for which we could be commanded, that had sufficient priority in the wisdom and understanding of the Most High that it was included. I believe it's the fifth and right after the fourth, keeping the Shabbat. So here are the foundational thunderclap statements of God, not only for the believing community, but for all mankind. One day when every knee shall bend and every mouth confess that Jesus is Lord, the whole world will subscribe to the law and the commandments of righteousness of God, of which this will be a center. That somehow, because it's included, is the testimony in itself that it bears with him an uncommon weight that we would never give it as earthlings. And the test and the proof of that is the way in which parental authority is not only ignored, but despised in our time. And as you'll see, as I just share with you some of his comments, particularly when it pertained to youth, when he says, let us consider the duties of children to their parents. They are to love and reverence them, being fearful of offending due to respect they bear them. A genuine filial veneration is to actuate children so that they abstain from whatever would grieve or offend their parents. In that one statement, we have the whole divine alternative to adolescent promiscuity and to children having children. And the whole spate of illegitimacy that is one of the foundational data of our time is the promiscuity, the sexual ease with which the children of our generation fornicate. Why? Because they have no fear, because they're not concerned about whether or not they offend their parents. So when I read that, I thought, wow, here was God's provision and so great wisdom to put a restraint on the youthful passions that claw and clamor for indulgence and that God's provision is you shall honor your father and your mother. And if something would offend them, you deny yourself that gratification. That the issue of not offending the parents from your call to honor is a sufficient deterrent to any invitation or disposition to indulge your flesh. So in the absence of that, it is so clearly and conspicuously absent in our time. Children are enemies to their parents under their own rules. They mock them. If you read some of the confessions, that shooting in Colorado at that high school, and one of the young ladies who was not a victim, but she was turned back to the Lord by the demonstration of the faith of one who did suffer death. And she writes her biography and it's loaded with rebellion against parents, witchcraft and curses and voodoo. It's unbelievable the vehemence and the vitriolic hatred of this middle class Protestant girl against loving Christian parents who gave no rise, no occasion. This isn't an instance of child neglect or child abuse. These are loving parents and yet she with another friend were meeting privately and nursing and cultivating and brooding in this demonic way against their parents. It's the spirit of the age and it's contrary, of course, to the wisdom and the counsel of God. So we need to know when we read the statistics of illegitimate children, of children having children. The root cause of it is the failure to honor thy father and thy mother. And he says that this commandment is not only to the literal father and mother, but it is to be applied to all our superiors. The end of the precept is that since the Lord God desires the preservation of the order he has appointed, the degree of preeminence fixed by him ought to be inviolably preserved. I don't know if you can catch this as it's read, can you? But it'll be on the tape and every good writer writes so compactly that it's hard to follow and hear it. Because another consequence of our generation is that we've lost an appreciation for words, words that bear weight and concept. There's so much blab that when someone says something in a pointed way, we're unable to appropriate it. I'll read it again. He's saying that this commandment is rooted in the necessity to preserve order. And if the respect for the structure that is inherent in creation out of the wisdom of God is neglected, you'll have chaos, you'll have anarchy, you'll have devastation. And that's what we're having from every level, from the home to society, where the respect for order, the respect for authority has declined. There you see the onrush of every kind of collapse of order. So the end of the precept is that since the Lord desires the preservation of the order he has appointed, this is the divine order. This isn't some human construct of something that we think will have a certain efficacy and keep things going. This is the divine order out of the divine wisdom. And the commandment given to see to its preservation is thou shalt honor. And the father and the mother is a statement not only for your actual parents, but any expression of those in the place of a superior authority. From a policeman to an elder, to the judge, to the president. I don't know if you've observed the cartoons and the way in which President Bush is depicted in cartoons. I think basically he's not a bad looking guy, but those cartoons are such a disfigurement. And by the way, the process by which Jews ended up in the ovens began earlier with disparaging comments in German newspapers about Jewishness and of a tinctured anti-Semitic kind that became increasingly bold until it became flagrant. And then cartoons of Jews virtually with horns, beards, hook-nosed, avaricious, greedy, lustful, protect your blonde daughters from these monsters. So that the disparagement of the Jew that made him a candidate for the oven, because he no longer was human but subhuman, began through a process of demeaning that began in the press through editorials, through comments, and through cartoons. We're seeing that now with Bush, and occasionally we see it with a reference to evangelical Christianity. That the fundamentalists are becoming the ogres and the resistors of progress, and we will be depicted in a kind of a caricatured kind until we will be candidates for concentration camps or ovens. So all of that is a statement of disorder and disrespect and a lack of honoring. I remember saying to my youngest son one day in his adolescent displeasure, he came down, he didn't say a word, and I took a look at him and I said, fix your face. I'm not going to allow you to wear that expression. Merely because you have not verbalized it is not a reason that I can ignore what your face is saying. And for me to ignore that comment and that statement is to encourage you to allow yourself to fester and to brood on that resentment. Fix your face. And you know what the remarkable thing was? He instantly fixed his face. He put away that spiteful, angry, resentment, sneering kind of thing and took upon himself a pleasant massage. But most parents would not ever make an issue of it. So long as it hasn't erupted to the verbal level of outright resistance or, what's the word, rebellion, they kind of look the other way. There's a fear. What a remarkable reversal. Instead of children fearing their parents with filial respect, parents are fearing their children. And so they don't want to, what's the word, they don't want to push the issue. And so they ignore to look the other way. But it's an issue that cannot be denied. And our unwillingness to exert our authority invites a greater resentment. Because it may well be that if we knew the cause of youthful and adolescent rebellion, it's an instinctive and intuitive complaint and cry against the failure for us to express the authority that they crave and need to have and that we're unwilling to express. So the moment I said, fix your face in the authority which is mine as father, which is an authority reflective of what is given me in the divine order, he instantly obeyed. So I hadn't thought to say all these things, but the best things that issue for me are the things that I hadn't thought to say. So I hope that there's some practical value for parents in this room and others who will be hearing these statements. So he says we should render honor, obedience and gratitude to anyone who is a father or holds a position of superiority or authority in the order of God. But this precept is exceedingly repugnant to the depravity of human nature, whose ardent desire of exaltation or self-exaltation will scarcely admit of subjection. Praise God for British writers. If they convey no other virtue than to show us how to use the English language, that's reason enough. That's English, folks. I want you to know that you're sitting on a great repository and a great treasure that is suffering neglect and erosion and corrosion because you're not employing words with significant meaning. So let's have less babble, less blah, blah, blah, and fewer words, but with more precise speaking and meaning and content. Listen to this. This precept, honor thy father and thy mother, is exceedingly repugnant to the depravity of human nature. Don't think because your kids have tagged along to church and are joining the youth section that that's the statement that they are born again by the Spirit of God. There's a lot of pseudo conversion and feigned Christianity, even feigned spirituality, which means that the Adamic nature is still regnant, is still on the throne, still in charge. And it will be that this commandment to that nature will be exceedingly repugnant because it's the ardent desire of the Adamic nature for self-exaltation, which will scarcely admit of subjection. To bend and to bow and to submit is that the real nexus of whatever remains in us that is Adamic. And when I gave that first statement last year on the Tent of Shem and that it was God's provision for Japheth, for Japheth left to himself unattended because of the enlargement, which his name means, would be a vehicle for destruction, which World War II and World War I have clearly revealed. But in order for Japheth to enjoy the benefit of Shem and whatever attends Shem and the environment in which Shem dwells because he's ever living and having his being in and before God, the whole issue of being a Shem is what Paul says at the conclusion of Romans 11, You want to know what a definition of a son of Shem is? One who lives for that alone. A son of Shem is his every thought, conduct, action, breath, and being is of him, through him, and for him, to whom belongs glory forever. Well, I'll tell you what, just to be close to anyone who lives like that has got to be a blessing. Anything that would exude from such a one, whether he speaks or is silent, has got to confer some kind of valence of heavenly things. And that's the blessing God intends for Shem, that will change him, it will mediate, take the rough edges, more than take the rough edges off, make him the full human being that in his enlargement can be a blessing and not a threat. And even a blessing to Shem himself. So, what's the catch? You have to bow to enter the tent. There's the tent, but you have to break your stiff posture and bend and bow in order to enter. And when I gave that invitation, all hell broke loose, because whatever was Adamic, whatever yet remained in man, balked and expressed what he writes here. It was exceedingly repugnant, because this exaltation of man will scarcely admit of subjection, of bowing. So may we be, what's the word, not just flexible, pliant. You guys are getting some good English words here. Pliant, that means ever disposed to bow. When there's a choice in the matter of whether you should stiffen and resist or bow and submit, choose to take the likely error of bowing rather than the error of resisting. Always to be pliant, always disposed before God to yield. Even when we're right, we're wrong. There's a precious word that came up a year or two ago, out of Colbert, that catches the spirit of when you're right, you're wrong. It'll come to me later. But I thought if the church could be characterized by that word and that disposition, that spirit, what a witness. And you know where the word was born? It's in the English language, but it came to me in a message in New Zealand over the issue of who really owns New Zealand. The Maoris, the indigenous people who were there some perhaps thousands of years before the advent of white settlers, and though they were primitive in their civilization and in their culture, and the white men came, just like the story of the American Indian here, within a couple of generations, they had built their cities and affected the economy and done more with that native soil than ever the Maoris had done, who were a hunting and fishing primitive community. So now the issue in the 20th century is whose land is it really? The white settlers who have developed it and obtained a commercial and economic progress or those who were there before you? Only the wisdom of Solomon could give an answer to a question of that kind, but it's a question that haunts the earth. This is not just New Zealand. It's also Australia. It's also the United States of America, wherever racial consciousness is being increased. The issue is the conflict between the colonizer and those who were there before. And so the Lord said something like, don't be insistent upon your claim, whether you are a Maori or a New Zealander. But even if you're right in your claim, you're wrong. Defer to the other and accommodate and condescend and bow before the other one, because I think it would do more to erase Maori rage, their indignation at white exclusion and white superiority by white men bowing, not necessarily concede the nation to the Maoris, but to give to this people a measure of respect and honoring. To the point where they might be so affected as to say, you know, it's really not all that matter, much of a question anyway, of who really, in fact, owns it. We, in fact, have really prospered by what you have done in your enlargement, in your Jafeth use of the land. So let's even forget whose it is and let's enjoy what God has given together. Your attitude toward me has broken my resistance toward you. There's something about submission that is so precious. But as Peter says to women in First Peter three, submit yourselves to your husbands with a chaste, how do you say, with a quiet spirit, with a meek and a quiet spirit. Which means that it's not a submission by which you clench your teeth and stop your indignation against this guy because you're so much superior to him. You're so much more spiritual than he is. He's a clod and he'll spend all day in front of the TV set watching a football game and you would much rather ruminate over the scriptures and you ought to submit to him. So you have everything that contends against what God requires, but he requires it. Okay, I'll do it, but I'll do it with clenched teeth. But God says, accept that it's with a quiet and meek spirit, which in his sight is of great price. It's not submission at all. In order for a woman to really be submitted to a clod like that, which by the way would be the very release of the man to move him from the foot from the TV set to the Bible is the demonstration that issues from his wife when it's authentic. But for it to be authentic is the issue of the cross. Bowing and going down before another is death. It's the cross. And the evidence of whether or not that has been truly affected is whether what issues from you is a quiet and meek spirit or just the quietness that comes because you have clamped your mouth shut. So he reminded me of a text. Maybe you want to turn to Luke chapter two of an example of the Lord himself in what honoring father and mother means, which was interestingly, the first message that I gave at a prophetical school of some four or five years ago, which I thought was a complete flop. I thought, Lord, what a minor note to sound. Is that the way you're going to ring in an historic prophetical school? Every school has got to be historic. And the message was from Luke 2, 51, when Jesus had gone up with his family to Jerusalem for the Passover and then disappeared. They didn't recognize his absence until they were on their return. And of course, they were panic stricken. Where is our son? And went back and inquired here and there. And finally, they found him. And when they saw him at verse 48, they were amazed. And his mother said unto him, son, why hast thou thus dealt with us? Behold, thy father and I have sought thee sorrowing. And he said unto them, how is it that you sought me? Didn't you know that I must be about my father's business? Here's a son of Shem speaking. There's only one purpose for my life. It's to honor and glorify the father. Didn't you know? And they understood not the saying which he spoke unto them. How dense can you be after the visitation of angels and yet to miss the clear meaning that issued from this boy's mouth. But here's the punchline. Verse 51, he went down with them. He went down with them because Jerusalem, of course, is probably one of the greatest heights in Israel. Elevated. So they go up to Jerusalem for the three occasions in which the men of Israel are to attend to the Lord on the three feast occasions, Passover being one. And then when you return to your place, you go down. But you know the way we prophetically read that statement? He went down with them. He submitted himself to them. All the more galling when they couldn't even understand the simplicity of his statement. Didn't you know that I have to be about my father's business? Why were you concerned and apprehensive and anxious? Is this what I'm going to have to live with? That I have to give you an explanation every time I'm called to some obedience? If this is the way it's going to be, I can't cut that. That's not an atmosphere in which I can thrive and come into my full messianic being. That's what we would have said. But that's not what he said. He went down with them. It's more than just descending to the altitude of Nazareth. It's going down in humiliation to live with parents who will not understand you. How would you like to live with a husband who cannot understand you? How would you like to live with a wife who cannot understand you and wish that you were some other kind of preacher and funny like so-and-so? And why do you get people aggravated? But he went down. And I would submit that his going down was the key, as the scripture will show us, to the whole sending forth of the fully mature Son of God at this critical juncture. He went down with them and came to Nazareth. Of course, what's Nazareth? Nazareth is scumsville. Nazareth is the bottom of the barrel. Can any good thing come out of Nazareth? Not only does he return with them, but to where does he return? To a city whose reputation is a stink and was subject unto them. Isn't that precious? Whether he's understood or not understood, he was subject unto them because his subjection unto them was not predicated upon their understanding of him or his call. They had not to display any virtue, any particular quality. They were simply parents. And God said, honor thy father and thy mother. And he was subject unto them. All the more significant when the parents don't understand. That kind of submission will yield a greater spiritual reward than submission that is easier to give because the parents are in tune with you and do understand. So if you're facing a circumstance like that, whether it's on the job, under your roof, in your marriage, with children, relationship, there's a greater spiritual value to be subject to that one and to that condition, that circumstance, because it's difficult than it would be if it were accommodating. Verse 52, and Jesus increased in wisdom. Wow. Is that just a little, this verse follows that verse? Or is it that this verse follows the spiritual logic of that verse? He was subject unto them and Jesus increased. You want to increase? Increase by subjection. Increase by bowing. Don't increase by self-assertion and by striving. That's the spirit of the world. It's not the spirit of Shem. Jesus increased in wisdom and stature and in favor with God and with man. So there we have the example of a young Jesus honoring his father by honoring his father. By being subject, by going down. Here he says that King David, after he was anointed for the throne by Samuel, fulfilled his father's appointment by tending his sheep. You can come and say, look dad, up till now I didn't mind this. It's stinky and it's swarmed with flies and bugs and insects. I know that because I tried to go up to a spiritually elevated place when we were immigrants in Israel years ago. I rose early with the rising of the sun and I climbed up this thorny side in Galilee to find a place to sit on the rock and look out over the Galilean landscape and muse upon God. And there was the droppings of the sheep. Evidently the Palestinian shepherds had taken their flocks up over those hills and wherever the droppings were, flies were. And when that sun came up and got warm, those flies were all around me. And I started to get bitten. And I had welts on my legs the size of a silver dollar. And I lost all my spiritual inspiration. So I can see that Samuel having come and anointed and said, you're God's choice. You're the chosen one. You're the king of Israel. He would come the next day and say to his dad, I have to submit my resignation. For me to continue to tend sheep after this would be uncomplimentary to the magnitude of the call that has come to me. Sure, son. Not a word, not a whimper, not a complaint. He went back to the sheep. Isn't that precious? You have to pray for me. I guess I'm getting mellow in my older years. That kind of stuff touches me. I love that. And it's exactly that quotient, that dimension of things that I feel is so absent from our abrasive Christianity. Because even when we're right, we're right. And we want the other guy to know it, no matter what kind of faction and friction it will cause. This is the spirit of the son of Shem. He went back to his sheep. He went down to Nazareth and he was subject unto them. Pray for the restoration of the Ten Commandments and the fifth in a special way. So children ought to hearken to their instructions and to imitate the godly practices of their parents. Their language must ever be respectful and their gestures be token submission. Where are you coming from, brother? Are you on the face of the earth that you would request and expect that this is a realistic expectation for children of our generation, even in Christian homes, that their language should be respectful? I know of instances where Christian parents are cursed by their children and called every filthy name in the book, and somehow the parents take it and bear it. I don't call that love. So he says that if you're going to honor this commandment, your language must be respectful. And not only your language, but your gestures must be token submission. It mustn't stiffen your back and you'll take out the garbage, but you'll let it be known that though you're taking it out, you're taking it out under, what's the word, under complaint, under duress, because you've got to. No, let your demeanor and your posture indicate that this is an act of submission that's genuine and heartfelt. So bring your body into compliance as well as your mouth, and then you'll be honoring the commandment. And he speaks of Joseph that when he was long separated from his father, Jacob, and Jacob came to Egypt, where Joseph had now risen to such a state of excellency over the entire land, that not seeing his father all those years, he says, he bowed himself with his face to the ground before his father. I think the text may say three times. This is, again, not a little gesture of culture. This is heartfelt, deep recognition of the respect to his father. And that had not had opportunity to be expressed over a long separation. He bowed with his face to the ground. Can you imagine any kid in our generation doing that to a father or mother in our time, or the equivalent? And then he reminds us that of the wicked it is written, they are not afraid to speak evil of dignitaries. Why are they wicked? Because they're turning their back on the very clear commandment of God to honor authority by speaking evil of dignitaries, people in authority, and they're not afraid. The issue of not being afraid is not the issue of being afraid of the dignitaries. It's not being afraid of God. There's the want of godly reverence and fear of the God who has spoken and the God who has given commandments, established his priorities, and has communicated to mankind what are the essential recognitions that must be maintained if order is to be maintained, and that there would be an habitation that is appropriate to men that I've created in my image. This goes all the way back to God. Respectful authority is the respect for God. Disrespect for man and the expression of that has at its root an indignation and a disrespect for God who established this order. So strictly has God enjoined them to quiet submission to their masters. He's speaking now about slaves, that even when a servant has given no just cause for rebuke, yet he is to silently suffer the groundless anger of his master. Talk about equal rights and what do they call it to give Negro students a place of preference in the university systems? Affirmative action. Affirmative action is completely contrary to what Paul has written of how a servant in a submitted and inferior relationship is to relate to his master. Not ever is there a whisper or an intimation by Paul or by Jesus that a man who is subject to slavery should rise against it, but to submit to that condition. And the scripture says in whatsoever condition you're called therein remain, even if it's the condition of slavery, because in that relationship you have perhaps more opportunity to glorify God the Father than if you were in a free condition. How you relate to your master in subjection will give more occasion to display the grace of God in you, which is to say God as God, than if you were free just to be your own master and call your own shots. Therefore remain in that condition. But in that condition don't murmur, don't complain, don't retaliate, certainly don't use violence to extricate yourself, nor employ it in speech, nor even exhibit an attitude of contempt to the master because he's misusing his privileged superiority over you in a way to be abusive. Bear it. Well, I have to say at this point, there's a black brother and I came to his home on one of my trips. He was the head of a fellowship and I don't know how it came up in conversation, but I think the Lord was already turning these thoughts over in my own spirit. I said, the greatest thing you can do for the black church. He was complaining about the congregation, the larger congregation where he was a member, how hokey it was and that the minister was a kind of a prima donna who was a flashy dresser and had an expensive wardrobe and demanded and required all kinds of attention and repetitious in his messages. I don't know what his complaints were. And he wondered whether he should even submit to such a one or go off in some independent direction. You know what I said, the best thing you can do for the black church and the black church is desperately in need is be an Uncle Tom. You need to show the black church and the black church needs to show the white church in America what true submission is, that the greatest figure in American history, in American literature, the most Christlike figure in American literature is Uncle Tom, who patiently bore suffering at the hands of those to whom he had fallen in slavery and bore it in so Christlike a demeanor that he exuded the very radiance of God. He condemned an entire generation and likely won others to the knowledge of God, whom he exemplified in his own suffering patience. When I suggested to him that the greatest role that he could take upon himself was to become an Uncle Tom, this was a man who was on an upward social mobility. He was really coming into professional recognition with a salary of an appropriate kind, his own home. And every instinct and every impulse in a black American who has known any degree and measure of deprivation because of his race yearns instinctively to show the other guy who has clamped him down that he could be his equal, not only his equal, but play the game better than he and succeed at it better than he. So tell such a man who's already tasting this success, why don't you forsake that and take on a deeper call and walk in the role of an Uncle Tom? You know what that man did? He went down on the kitchen floor in slobbering tears. He wept like a baby because he knew that what was coming to him was not a human suggestion, but a divine call and he could not receive it. He cried like a grown man weeping because the call was greater than anything he could have conceived. He would serve God at any level, he'll be himself a minister, a shepherd, he did have a small body of souls connected with him, he was a teacher and he'll do this, he'll serve, but to forsake this identity of equality and to voluntarily choose to come into a submitted relationship of that which was known in the earliest time of slavery. And that that somehow will be a convey the greatest sense of the reality of the kingdom to a generation who have not known it. That's what I'm unwilling. The end of the story is not long after he ran off with one of the young women in the small circle of souls of which he was the overseer, the entire fellowship was devastated, the marriage ended in divorce, the children are devastated, are out of the faith and only the Lord will know the consequences of what has taken place. And I'm not saying that his rejection of the call led automatically to a sexual transgression and to the collapse of the fellowship and marriage and so on, but I wouldn't put it past God. I wouldn't say it could not be related, that when a call comes of an ultimate kind and you'll not submit yourself and subject yourself and go down and bow to receive that, that the arrogance that keeps you from that acknowledgement and submission will have its consequence in the other areas and aspects of your life. You know something, the way some people see Uncle Tom is having never read the book Uncle Tom. We see Uncle Tom, blacks see Uncle Tom as people that submit to the white man in the sense that they tell on others. In other words, he's sort of a one that's weak. He's an Uncle Tom in my view is one that's weak and he'll, he leans, he fears the white man. So he tells and rats on the other people and not someone that's submitted in a Christlike view. So the black view of an Uncle Tom is totally different from reading the book Uncle Tom. I'm glad you said that. That means that that man, if you would assume that call knows that he's going to be abjectly misunderstood. He'll be understood in the way that the phrase Uncle Tom has come to be understood by black people as sellout, as cop out. And yet willing to do it, knowing that you're going to be misunderstood would be the greater submission to God and the greater virtue. So yes, bowing before God is costly. Even in the sense that, like you were saying, John the Baptist said, be content with your wages. Don't ask for a raise. I had an opportunity to do that and I couldn't raise. And you had a tape out on slavery, which was real good. What's the name of that tape? I can't remember the name of it. Simon has it in those. It's a real good. Oh, yeah, it goes with this. Oh, I'm just saying. Oh, thank you for reminding me. You know where that message was spoken of all places in Russia. I don't know if Oleg was there. It was the first message when Brother Paul had collected those ministers. And I'm before the Lord. I don't know what to speak. What do you say to these men in a place of being ministers in Russia with the threat of a renaissance of communism again? What's the word? So you begin by beginning. And what was the word? Paul's word. I forgot in what book. It's like a minor note. I was almost embarrassed to speak it. I said, this is a little minor. Paul speaking about widows and slaves. I said, but that little pinprick of a hole emits a light of the deepest kind in the revelation of what it means to be apostolic. Paul's attitude about slaves and about widows was a minuscule view of the macrocosm of what apostolicity is. You know what happened after that? They never came to another meeting. They never came to another meeting. And so all of the morning meetings for ministers were nothing. At night we had public meetings. They didn't even come to the public meetings, though they were anointed because of the offense of that word about Paul and his attitude toward widows and slaves. And I think that the thing that turned them off was this. They were expecting some really high powered statement from an American speaker on how to succeed as ministers. How do you do it? You guys are doing it in America. You've got big churches and great budgets. And now let us know. So here comes this jerk talking about Paul on slavery and widows was a complete disappointment and disillusionment and a rejection, which indicates that even though as ministers, they did not respect the authority of this servant prophetically. And that in respecting, they would say, we don't understand why God would have chosen as esoteric a subject as this that has no visible relevance to our situation in Russia. But we have to assume that if you bear this kind of place in God and have this kind of calling that what issues from you is from God and he will later show us the significance of that. At any rate, we will not allow our indignation to have such sway as to cut you off completely hereafter. In that they have written, what shall I say, death sentence on their own ministries. Certainly it's got to have an implication for all their future. Because when you reject the prophetic way, the prophetic man, it's often God's last provision. And what follows in the history of Israel is judgment. So I don't want to surmise what the consequence would have been. Just remembering, maybe Simon can help me here. When you returned from that trip to Russia, you brought that word in our living room that following Sunday, your first Sunday back with us. And I remember you concluded the message with the statement, embrace your chains. And it was a glorious gush of the spirit of God. One of my favorite messages that you spoke on a regular Sunday with us that it came out of that Simon, just to commend that tape to some of these that are here. What was the name of that? Did you call it Widows and Slaves? The price has just gone up because it's so richly develops what's only being touched here. One statement I would like to also suggest you write down. I wrote it down and I found Art using the exact word that I was writing, which he had not used before. So because of that and a little bit of call it superstition on my part, I was writing the statement, call of an ultimate kind requires that one bow in costly submission. At the very moment I was writing the word costly, Art was saying costly. And so I would urge that you underline the word costly. A call of an ultimate kind requires that one bow in costly submission. If it's not costly, you can well question whether it's submission at all. It's got to be costly. It's got to run across the natural grain of your own life and preference and disposition or it's not submission. And the true affecting of that submission is not something that you can perform out of well-meaning intention or charismatic religiosity. It has got to be the grace of God. It has got to be the life of God. And you know what? This is the nature of that life. The nature of the life of God is to be submitted. Can you believe that? The most high God, the creator of the heavens and the earth has as the most intrinsic disposition of his own nature submittedness. He gave himself without spot and blemish as a sacrifice. The last act of Jesus is the summation of all of Jesus and all of Jesus is the summation of all of God, the father. He demonstrated what is the nature of the father who stands at the door of a heart and knocks. So, you cannot perform this without the grace of God. The grace of God is the life of God and the life of God is not only the enablement, but in the enablement is the expression of the character of that life. So, when you submit in true submission with a quiet and mixed spirit, something is being expressed of very God himself that that husband, though he is not submitted to the word, will nevertheless bow to God without the word by the demonstration of the chaste and obedient wife who is without fear. Isn't that a remarkable statement? And that's not only a statement for wives, that's the statement for the church in its final and eternal identity as the bride of Christ. Are we going to be a bride adorned for this bridegroom whose very nature is submission when we ourselves shall come with some kind of residue of self-exaltation and reservation and indignation and you can't tell me and I... It's an incompatible match. So, God has got to deal with us in this life and fit us in this life to come to that purity of that woman, that bride, the heart of which is expressed in 1 Peter 3. Okay, just off the top of my head I'm trying to think what would be the most galling requirement that God can make of a church in demonstration of this kind of willingness to be submitted or subjected to another than being submitted or subjected to the Jew. To bow before a spiritual inferior who is even outside the faith and has not yet come to the recognition of Jesus and yet that God would require of us to be blessed to see that we have a disposition toward this people of a truly submitted kind, respecting them because they are the fathers of our faith who are in present darkness. Think of that. Maybe you can think of some greater requirement but I think for most Christians that would be galling. How can I ask this? Maybe not galling when you consider Jews in the abstract but when you consider Jews in their actuality. It's another story as you can find out from any person in the Venezuelan community who waited on my mother here in the year that she was with us before her death. It was galling for me and I'm Jewish and I'm her son but when this 96-year-old lady is telling me who already is a senior citizen, she's barking out orders at me as if I'm some 10-year-old little snot-nosed kid that can be bandied about. Hey, my dignity, my age, my car. I have to say I felt the chasing. The Lord let me know that there's a residue that yet remains with me with my own Jewish mother as a Jew. How then will it be for Gentiles with Jews who are alien to them when they shall have to bear the same kind of irritableness that we got from my mother barking orders and this is not good enough or how about this or that. How will they take it? What will issue from them from their blind side when they're hit with that kind of relationship for which they've had no preparation? What will they exhibit at that moment will be altogether telling and historically and eternally significant because the final episode of the whole redemptive drama of Israel is what they encounter in the wilderness of their final uprooting and being casted through the nations when God says in Ezekiel 20, I will meet with you in the wilderness of the nations face to face and there you will come under the rod of my authority and come into the dimensions of my covenant. Something is being scheduled. The final conclusion to the drama is an encounter by Jews in their final flight in the time of Jacob's trouble in the wilderness when God will meet with them but meet with them face to face. They'll not be looking at surly Gentile faces who are screwing up their countenances. How long do I have to suffer this? These people are terrible. They're mean-spirited and their language is vile. You hear an old lady 96 cursing who gives to the B'nai B'rith and to Hadassah and every kind of Jewish cause. God has seen to it that we're going to be severely thoroughly tested and the greatest test that can come to us to come to us from the adversary of our faith, the enemies of the gospel for our sake. So know that it's coming and that it cannot be met on any imagined ground but authenticity itself, which is a synonym for that which is apostolic to show forth the nature of God when they shall press us and test us. And after we have extended ourselves to them in kindness and find that it's unappreciated and that they have mean things to say when we have expended ourselves at risk, you'll have every ingredient that will lend itself to justifying yourself in some explosive rejection. Well, that's the way you're going to be. Forget it. And if we have come to that, we will have missed a moment. So you know what, dear saints, it would not be exaggeration to say you need to seize every occasion now in preparation for that one moment. Because as we said yesterday, there comes sometimes in a lifetime a single moment. And in that moment, everything is at stake and all is revealed. That was the issue in the moment that came with Noah's drunkenness and revealed the truth of his sons. It's the moment that will come for us and the moment of Israel's final destitution that will reveal the truth of us. And if that truth not be revealed, there'll be no Jew that will be coming returning to Zion with everlasting joy upon their heads. It's the issue of their salvation that they will see their God as he is exhibited through us in patient forbearance and subjecting ourselves to them in all of their unmanly and uncivil behavior when it shall cost us even to make that demonstration. Can you follow me? Okay. And doesn't the church, the body of Christ that is the church, give ample opportunity almost daily for such response? If you're not experiencing it almost in a daily way, you're out of the faith. You're out of the context of the faith. You're in some kind of glass house euphoria of unreality that saves you from these humiliating, embarrassing, and irritating collisions with the saints and with the authority that's in the body. We learned this lesson years ago in the formation of this community where we were so desperately poor living beneath the government's prescribed poverty level that if anything came to us in the mail or by any means, we were so desperate for food, insulation, housing, pregnant women with inadequate housing that we trembled over how any dollar should be spent. And when you're an elder and announce that, well, we have just received a gift, but it's going to be employed for an overseas trip, it's like hitting someone in the solar plexus. What? I've got a pregnant wife here. My children are not being adequately fed. They have dental problems. They're not rightly clothed. And you're going to take that money for an overseas trip? That's a luxury that we can't enjoy, cats. And who are you to say so anyway? We had questions about your eldership. Have you seen your marriage lately? Yes, every day. So you see what I'm saying? It's the tensions of life together that reveal the very truth of our condition. And if that's not happening for you now, can you have the spiritual audacity to pray for it? Lord, lead me out of these safe regions of conventional Christendom and bring me into that quality relationship of the kind that you intend by which your redemptive work can take place. That when I shall be tested along with the church in the last days by this Jewish people in the intemperate condition in which they will be brought by the suddenness of their uprooting and their being again cast through nations, we will not be found wanting. That they will indeed see in us the face of God. And indeed my salvation, if you read Ben Israel, has everything to do with seeing the face of God in this Gentile girl whom I met overseas and brought my whole umbrage and superior Jewish superiority, intellectual superiority to bear on this little girl from Kansas who's just a little believer on vacation having completed high school. And kind enough to walk with me in the path surrounding the city and probing her motives. Why are you being kind? Because though I'd been a Marxist and social activist, I didn't know what kindness was. And she answered every question, well, it's the love of God. What a pathetic answer. And she kept saying the love of God, the love of God as my level scale of indignation rose. And finally I thought, she says love of God one more time, she's going to get it. I'm not going to withhold, I'm going to let go of that same blast that every Christian has received from me in so-called witnessing and I've reduced them to dust. So what is this little girl? And sure enough she mentions God. I said, look kid, you're a nice girl, but I can't stand this God talk. Answer me a question that no Christian has ever been able to answer for me. You're talking about God, how do you know that he is? Oh, she said, without hesitation, I know that he is because he lives in me. And when she said that, the big hulk went down in one sagging collapse in the dust like a felled ox because that word hit me with power. I know because, and when I finally recovered, what hit me, what she said was not theological, wasn't even intellectual. What gave it its power? What gave it its power was that she had the face to prove it. And I want to say to you dear non-Jewish believers, I don't call you Gentiles because there's been a radical change in that status. You're the people of Israel, a non-Jewish people, you can't change that generic factor, but there's nothing like seeing the face of God through a Gentile face for a Jew. That's all I can tell you. To see the face of God expressed through snub-nosed, freckled face, black, is a revelation of the utmost kind, the uttermost kind, in keeping with the scripture that this is the light that lightens the Gentiles and the glory of the people of Israel. When we see the glory of the people of Israel, which we have not known as the people of Israel, in the light that lightens the Gentiles, we are saved. And it's that demonstration which is the capstone and the conclusion of our age, for which we need to be in conscious anticipation and willing preparation. By letting the Lord turn up the juice now, tighten the screws now, give us those difficult situations now, test us now in the areas of subjection, submission, and that when the time comes and we have to listen to some Jew berating us, for whom we have extended ourselves at the risk of our life, will not so much as even change our face, will not so much as lose our affection and esteem for them, because it's not predicated on what they are or what they have attained, because it's the esteem of God and his love for that people in whatever their condition, and therefore it cannot be lost even when they are ungainly. Can you relate to Christians like that, now, that you'll still accord to them an esteem and an affection independent of their track record? And if they fail you in your expectation and in your disappointment, there'll be no alteration of your love and esteem? So the church is now the fulcrum for all the future if we but recognize it and utilize it. Which brings me to the next subject. What a man will do when he's entirely free to do what he wills is what he in fact is, as we said yesterday. That opportunity, that testing of Shem and Japheth to see a helpless naked father, where everything that is human wells up in you to take advantage of the weakness of that one that is now displayed in shame, and even to elevate yourself at the expense of the fallen one and say, well, now he's totally discredited. I have every right now to come into my own as the son who has come of age and he's had his time and now I will take over and I will be the object of God's attention and the vehicle of his use. That's exactly the temptation that came to the church with the fall of Israel. Now we will take over. They had their chance, now they're naked and destitute in their weakness and now we will be for God and we just shunned them to the side. That was an historic tragedy and it was only possible because the church of that hour, like the church of this hour, was not Shem-like in its character. We failed the test and we'll suffer the consequence of that failure even now until we identify with those who committed it as being one with them in that failure and in that sin. Time does not alter anything, nor distance, nor history. We are with them as Christians in that rejection of Israel that was not expressed by Shem with his fallen father. So there needs to be a release for us that comes by an acknowledgement that we stand guilty with the church that still continues to see itself as the Israel of God, still continuing the arrogance against which Paul had warned. I would not have you to be ignorant of this mystery, brethren, lest you become wise in your own conceit. And all of our inflated charismatic carryings on, pick up any issue of, what's the magazine? Charisma. And just see the advertisements for the conferences is enough to make you gag. The advertisements, the loud, bold statements of what they believe that conference is going to be with multicolored and the array of ministers who are now doctors, by the way, if you've noticed. Bishops. Bishops. Your stomach knots when you turn those pages, which is the reason I don't turn them. But it's exactly what Paul warned. And I think that the root of it is the reaction of the church to the fallen Israel. And we'll continue to suffer this arrogance until we acknowledge with brokenness that we missed it at that historic point. And that we want to be free of the sins of our fathers. And acknowledge and give credit to a people whom God has not cast away, who are only temporarily set aside. And maybe not the least reason for which they have been temporarily set aside was to test us. What will you do when you see them down but not out? Noah was not out. He was only down. But that being down was sufficient occasion to test the heart of his sons. And Israel's being down has been sufficient occasion to test that of the church. And it tested still. So the tent of Shem was established in the moment of entering the tent of another as one's own. There's something about being a mediator of intercession, being identification, that the son identified with the father in his shame. He did not turn away from his father, not gauging on him because of a superior spirituality that cannot be offended. Understand what I'm saying? He wasn't guarding his spirituality that if I look at my father and see him in that despicable condition, there'll be some spiritual loss to me. No, it was respect not to look upon him in that condition because he was identified with him. There but for grace of God go I. If my father who is the righteous preacher of his generation and was faithful to God through decades of building the absurdity of an ark and was a preacher to a generation doomed to destruction because it had given its over to a total iniquity. How can I allow this one instance to discredit the whole faithfulness of a man throughout his lifetime? So I have to recognize in that that however faithful he has been yet being man, there's a place of vulnerability and weakness to which I myself also am subject being man. So my coming into his tent is coming into his situation. I'm not just coming for an expediency. It's a statement of my identification. I'm one with him in the abject condition in which he's fallen. That's why when Noah came out of his drunken stupor and he prophetically made statements. It was so out of the heart of God. Blessed be the God of Shem because he recognized that this what his son had done is more than just politeness. It's more than just expediency, exigency of something that a man would do in a moment out of a kind of religious cleverness. It was the very act of God himself. God himself would not have done other than what Shem did. And Shem did it by God because his life is of him, through him and to him to whom be glory forever. I don't think it's too exaggerated to say that the issue of the tent of Shem, the advent of the tent of Shem came by Shem's act by entering into his father's circumstance, his father's shame, his father's humiliation and to cover him. If that's true, then what is the point of entry for the tent of Shem in the last days and the historical situation to which we are already moving. But us, sons and daughters of Shem, entering the tent not of Noah but of Jewry. And there down and out last days humiliation. They will be stretched out and unbelievably exposed. Those things that civilization and its amenities confer keep from the exposure of the truth of our condition. You're living in a penthouse. There's something about being rich that covers the truth of your condition. You can hedge yourself about by luxury, by men bowing before you, respecting you for your great cleverness by which your wealth was obtained. Your library is impressive and is everywhere about you. You own objects of art. You have antiques. You have on your wall millions of dollars worth of paintings that belong in public museums because you've been a collector and can afford it. And you have a certain dignity appropriate to your wealth, to your station in life. On top of that, you're Jewish and you have given millions in charity to the state of Israel and you've endowed the Jewish theological seminary so that squirts like me could come and take a course and so on. But when that is suddenly stripped, here's the point, and it will be, what is exposed, but what had been up to that moment concealed by the amenities of civilization and wealth? Can you understand? We're living in a lie, saints. The whole world lives in a lie. And we're kept from the recognition of the truth of our condition. And that's why there's got to be the severest stripping in the last days for the people of Israel. For how shall they enter into their priestly function and be the blessing to all the families of the earth if they themselves are yet in the place of deception? So everything that is contrary to truth has to be removed and it's going to happen suddenly. We're going to find them in a condition more despicable than what Noah experienced. They will be exposed and naked and the object of derision and contempt of all the Gentile world that is waiting for its opportunity, for every Gentile that has been chafed at the expense of a Jew, either in fact or in imagination, because of their wealth and because of their success, that moves the natural man to envy, will finally have his opportunity, as Canaan and Ham did, to say, Now you finally got it. I'm superior to you. You who have always made me feel inferior. Now I can look down on your public and open disgrace for you are proliferated throughout the world. You've been uprooted and you've been cast to all nations and you don't even know what tomorrow will bring and your fortune is done in a day. It brings you nothing. The exact plight that fell upon German Jews in the Nazi time, suddenly and overnight, who found themselves evicted from their professorships, their position as judges in the courts and publishers of newspapers, places of eminence in German society, to find themselves not only out of their professions, but out of their homes. I can't remember what city it was, where there's a monument of the synagogue that existed in this neighborhood, but you ought to see the houses that yet remained in that neighborhood, now occupied by Germans, formerly occupied by Jews, that had room for their servants. I mean, they lived well, beautifully, luxuriously, but overnight it was stripped and removed and the same ones found themselves with their hair shorn, their clothing removed, and finally in their death even their gold fillings removed and all that they had was a number. They were deprived even of the dignity of the identification of a name. In fact, have experienced since some kind of inferior status to the Jew to finally have a vengeance and to enjoy that falling condition. The only non-Jew who will not share that global celebration of Jewish fullness will be the church. Because like Shem, they will come into that tent. Like Shem, they will share an identification with the fallen one. Because if we don't, we can't cover them. Don't think that covering them is some kind of clinical thing that we can perform by just draping something. Covering is a divine act, but it cannot be performed without an identification with the stricken one. All right. Hal Lindsey in his book, The Road to Holocaust, asked the question, could the atrocities of Nancy Europe have ever taken place in a Europe that had not cultivated that, well, you'll know it by the name, replacement theology? That perspective was in a way uncovering Israel, exposing it to the free access of the powers of the air that was working through that German government. And just quickly, there's a cryptic passage, it's in Daniel chapter 11, where it uses this revealing phrase, and it's not even a matter particularly of context or exegetical meaning, but it just captures the spirit of this. It says, and this is the revealing messenger speaking to Daniel, it says, the robbers of your people will establish themselves or exalt themselves to establish the vision. And, of course, Daniel's vision was the vision of the kingdom of God, which John, of course, told us would last for a thousand years. Hitler's whole spirit was to restore the Third Reich that would rule a thousand years. The people who have exalted themselves to establish the vision will be seen again in the last day's siege of Jerusalem when Antichrist will lead his forces to again occupy the place of God's rest and usurp that holy hill from its appointed calling and destiny. And so there's something deep even in the church in its uncovering that has permitted this exposure that has left Israel to the ravages of the powers of the air without a prophetic protest even. And there's something in which the church also has fulfilled that role of exalting themselves to establish the vision and also been not in the same way that the Germans were the robbers of your people confiscating their goods to the point of this Arab word they used. But how about the way in which the church has exalted itself to establish the vision when the whole book of Daniel opens with the promise that this will be given not to another people. This is the people that God has appointed that the vision will be established and it is a presumption and a usurpation of the highest order that the church has stumbled into in their triumphal replacement. To show that we're not talking out of our hats or that this is a mere theorizing or just a perspective that's particularly dear to us in some subjective way but that it is altogether grounded in scripture I want us to examine one text briefly before the break in Psalm 102. You can get the tape where I've spoken on this subject at greater length and read this text at your own leisure carefully because the first half of the text sounds like a psalmist in a concentration camp describing almost in vivid terms exactly what Jews suffered in the Nazi time in those camps where your skin becomes blackened and parched and you can't eat and you're alone in your destitution where he says in verse 11 my days are like a shadow that declines and I'm withered like grass but thou, O Lord here's where the whole poem shifts and changes that even in his broken and destitute condition there's some kind of a faith of hope that rises in God at the most abject time when there's least occasion to believe for it but thou, O Lord shall endure forever I'm turning to dust I'm decaying my body is wasting away I'm nothing I've been stripped of everything but you, O Lord shall endure forever and thy remembrance unto all generations thou shalt arise I always love these the word arise suggestive of the great theme of resurrection and have mercy upon Zion for the whole issue of God at the end of the age with Israel is the revelation of his mercy for he will have mercy upon whom he will have mercy which means totally undeserved attention and grace from God for the time to favor her yea, the set time has come now here's the key point what makes it the set time that releases God to express mercy to Jews in a destitute concentration camp condition in which they are without any hope of anything but death it's because your servants take pleasure in her stones and favor the dust thereof unlimited volumes could be written in commentary on this one verse it's cryptic, it's poetic it's laden with meaning but it has to be drawn out but here's the point to give you a help in drawing it out it's not Israel itself who affects the point at which time God will favor Zion the destitution depravity unto death is not the turning point the set time comes because not of what is revealed in Israel's condition but is revealed through his servants which is the church it's a mystical reference to the church because the word church could not be employed by the psalmist writing this thousands of years before Christ but when my servants shall have pleasure in her stones and favor the dust thereof because it will be reduced to dust Israel is going to experience devastation, the great cities and rising towers of Tel Aviv will come down it will all crumble, the whole thing will be a devastation, a place without habitation the land has become, it says in Isaiah, our destruction it will be dust but what is our attitude when Israel will have failed our expectancy when we had hoped it would have been this Israel that would have restored the glory of God, that this Israel would have been the fulfillment of prophetic expectation and we had all along sought for it and we made trips and we planted trees and we made contributions and we prayed against Arafat and all those kinds of things and in the end despite all that it comes down and it comes down in so abject and terrible a way that the world gloats at it and rubs its hand with glee at what has fallen upon this proud arrogant people but the servants of God take another attitude completely they find favor in the stones they're identified with the judgment, that's what that means it's not the stones per se this is not antiquarian, this is not archaeological this is symbolic the stones if you can identify with the stones what then is your identification with the people who once were housed in those stones, see what I mean if they found favor because it was the stones of Israel because an identification with this people all the more of such a kind that has caught the attention of God it is so unrealistic to expect it that while all the world is gloating at Israel's collapse because you can understand Israel become increasingly arrogant in defying the world in its own necessity to preserve itself that's already an accusation why can't they be more accommodating why can't they agree to these terms ok so they're making some concession they've taken out a few watchtowers from some of the settlements but will they uproot the settlements themselves and will they do this in order to obtain that or will they insist no this is our land and it's alright and you guys have got to live I believe Israel become increasingly intractable they must because their confidence in being bailed out by the United States certainly not the United Nations can ever be a true confidence they will have to depend upon themselves and in doing so they'll make themselves less attractive in the world, more objectionable more difficult, more Jewish more stubborn, more stiff necked more recalcitrant so that by the time of their devastation the world that has had enough of them and have been threatened by the lack of peace that issues out of the Middle East crisis will enjoy their plight but what is the set time to favor Zion when my servants have found favor in her stones and pleasure in her stones and favor the dust thereof you may have it expressed a little differently in your Bible it's the issue of identification for the issue of identification is the issue of intercession it's the issue of coming into their tent suffering their shame their identification and in fact if they're going to be pursued worldwide, the time will come when Jews will be as hated globally as they were hated in Europe and sought out and found that if you had so much as one great grandfather, 164th Jewish blood, you were a candidate for the ovens, if that same kind of anti-Christ demonic hatred of the Jew will now have full expression globally, what will be the fate of those Christians who will identify with them not just in their minds but with their bodies their identification will be an act every bit as much as it was the act of Shem for his father coming in so Ham comes out and tells, gives the report to the two brothers our father is in drunken condition naked, what they do with that report is the key to the whole of the future instead of just commiserating or feeling sorry, waiting for the guy to sober up or even joining Canaan and Ham in their delight over the father's condition they come into the condition empathy pathos identification mutuality the servants are Gentiles but they are one with God in identification with the fallen people this is beyond sentiment what Shem had for his father was beyond sentiment, even beyond filial obligation it was his identification with God of the father, the heart of the father that cannot bear to allow one's father to suffer a humiliation and shame and lay uncovered in his own tent that's the kind of thing that will end the history as it began the history the commencement of Shem has its conclusion with the church being to Israel what the son Shem was to his father and the ironic thing is that I need to find that identification myself, being born a Jew does not automatically fit me to be a Jew with the Jews I could be superior even in my Jewishness over and against my own people so it's not a racial ethnic thing it's a spiritual thing it's the Shem thing and it's the thing to which we're called and to which we're moving so we bless you Lord, what a remarkable mystery, what a majestic conclusion to the age and that your servants isn't that remarkable, we're talking about servants find favor in her stones and empathy compassion with her dust thank you precious God, and when you see that the set time has come, you will arise and deliver Israel from that predicament, for nothing else will suffice, nothing that man or religion can perform, certainly that a Jew can perform in his stricken condition or any condition, but only that you can perform when the set time has come, you will arise let it come soon Lord we pray and let it come if it's not too shameful of boasting all the more in degree and proportion because of these days that we're enjoying together that what is being spoken, what is being reviewed here and considered here will not fall to the ground it will not just be an enjoyment for those whom you've gathered, it will find its way in to the body, those who have no present consciousness of the Jew at all and in fact have lingering anti-Semitic dispositions, will be met by this word, and it will set in motion that preparation for such a people such a servant people for which you wait thank you Lord that we're privileged to be participants in this, come out of a sick bed and sit down and you unfold this remarkable thing, and in fact it seems like a sick bed and a weakness would be a necessary requirement for the unfolding and the bringing forth of it and not any man's expertise or vain strength so we bless you that even in the communication of the mystery, the mystery itself is being propounded and enacted right before our eyes and that is what a prophetical school is that's what propheticism itself is, that's what to be prophetic is and so we thank you Lord for the event we bow if you don't give us another word if I have to go back to the hospital today and we take another turn and the school is dismissed it's not what we had hoped to have in full we would say we have received full measure thank you Lord, precious what you've given us is precious beyond all speaking we almost have to imagine we're growing up in the hearing of this there's a maturity that comes in the very hearing, it compels us to rise up with such a word, and we thank you Lord what a history, what a destiny what a call is the church of Jesus Christ of the last days toward this people and it will take millennia to rejoice and to celebrate the majesty of this so great wisdom and will that will be perfected and established because you have said thank you Lord so, receive our gratitude continue to keep us my God in the environment, the atmosphere which you have established by your own presence, the high seriousness of God, and that even though we take a break and walk about it will not be lost and we'll come back to it my God as readily as we have left it so, bless us together bring a conclusion to this morning's time and seal it we thank you and give you praise for the privilege of it, in Jesus name, Amen