Art Katz emphasizes the stark contrast between the rich young ruler and blind Bartimaeus, illustrating the difference between self-righteousness and true humility before God. The rich young ruler, despite his commendable actions, fails to recognize his need for mercy, while Bartimaeus, in his abject poverty, cries out for Jesus' compassion. Katz challenges the congregation to reflect on their own spiritual state, questioning whether they identify more with the prideful ruler or the desperate beggar. He underscores that true discipleship requires a complete abandonment of self and a recognition of Jesus as the Son of David, leading to a transformative relationship with Him. The sermon calls for a deeper understanding of faith that transcends mere doctrine, urging believers to follow Jesus in the way of humility and surrender.

Rich Young Ruler: “No Man is Good” Would you turn with me to Mark chapter 10. I think the Lord had me up early this morning for your sake reviewing this text about the rich young ruler who came eagerly running to Jesus. Who had every credential to be impressive and approached Jesus in a commendable way. Calling Him “good teacher and what must I do to inherit eternal life?” So you know something is wrong already and Jesus was quick to correct him and not allow himself to get away with this salutary greeting “good teacher”. Because Jesus said “their no man good, why call us now me good?” He wouldn't allow so to be complimented, because it would have given to this Jewish man a basis for the affirmation of himself as being good. You understand that? Well if you don't understand it, get the tape, because you'll need to hear whatever is going to come out more than once to get it. But this episode is so remarkably full of input and significance that we need to contemplate it many times over. In fact I've come to a time now in my 38th year of a believer of looking upon the episodes in the life of Jesus is not just a kind of happenstance that today this happened, the next day that happened, but that every day at every episode ever encounter is not only a thing in itself fought with remarkable instruction, but it's in a special textbook for the last days. It is eschatological in its implications as if what took place then was in the mind of the Father who orchestrated it for our instruction upon whom the end of the age have come. So you need to read these episodes in another way than the way in which we have read them as if they are just quaint little historical things that have taken place in the life of Jesus. They are programmatic, they are orchestrated, they are calculated for our instruction. So I'd love to deal with this in the kind of attention and detail that it deserves. Time won't allow that, because I want to contrast two men. Where one episode falls on the heels of the other, first the rich young ruler and then secondly blind Bartimaeus who is a beggar at the side of the road crying out to Jesus son of David have mercy on me. Which of the Two Men do you Represent? There's a remarkable contrast between two Jewish men and I want to say to you dear saints that these polarities and what they represent in themselves are like classic paradigms of two alternatives that are available to us and as you're hearing this morning you need to consider which of the two men do I most represent in the way which I myself am constituted. Do I more reflect and resemble the rich young ruler who has kept all the commandments, who was flattering to Jesus, who wants to do something to obtain eternal life or am I more resembling blind Bartimaeus a beggar crying out for mercy. You see the way that we prophetic men think? We always see symbolically, we always see in terms of stark alternatives of black and white, of polarities, of choices, of tensions and so it's a helpful way to look upon reality itself. So as in verse 17 of chapter 10. Mark 10:17 As He was setting out on a journey, a man ran up to Him and knelt before Him, and asked Him, “Good Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?” Remarkable question and altogether very complimentary. The man runs and the man kneels. Hey, can you ask for more than that? He’s zealous and he’s pious. And you would have thought that those qualities alone and the recognition of Jesus as a teacher would have qualified him right there and then in itself to inherit eternal life. But everything that seems externally to compliment him really is negative and not only does not qualify him it disqualifies him, because he's coming from another mentality, another mindset, another way of understanding that is completely in opposition to Jesus, to faith, and to reality. We need to recognize that, because so many of us in our secret hearts are in greater sympathy with this young men than we are with the blind beggar. So “good teacher” the very fact that he acknowledges the truth that Jesus is a teacher, rabbi, rabboni is not enough. In fact, partial acknowledgement of the truth constitutes a lie. When you read my book “the spirit of truth”, I recite what we wish to say as kids in Brooklyn in the Depression years: “the truth is the whole truth and nothing but the truth or it's a lie.” The truth is the whole truth and nothing, but the truth or it's a lie. A partial truth for the exclusion of the whole truth is a lie and many of us live in partial truths and living a lie. And so it's complimentary. Wasn’t Jesus a teacher? Yes, but that's not the whole statement about Him. And if you center on that as if it were you're really engaged and promoting a lie. And it goes with the whole lifestyle of a man who has kept all the commandments and thinks that you can be good and Jesus baits him on. Mark 10:18 And Jesus said to him, “Why do you call Me good? No one is good except God alone That's the foundational truth. Mark 10:19,20 You know the commandments, ‘Do not murder, Do not commit adultery, Do not steal, Do not bear false witness, Do not defraud, Honor your father and mother.’” And he said to Him, “Teacher, I have kept all these things from my youth up.” I qualify. Mark 10:21 Looking at him, Jesus felt a love for him I compassionately seeing right through the whole superficial external righteousness of the man that is a facade and behind it is emptiness and egotism self-assertion, but loves him even in that condition or else He would not have spoken to him as firmly as we're going to read. Mark 10:21,22 Jesus said you lack one thing: go sell what you own, give the money to the poor you'll have treasure in heaven and come, follow me when he heard this he was shocked and went away grieving for he had many possessions It's remarkable how little we understand the word “love” and particularly the love of God. Many of us would be offended that Jesus was so curt with this man and so sharp and so incisive and so offending and couldn't He have been more, what's the word accommodating and lead him by a process into a better understanding. Why does He have to raise up a kind of an ultimatum of such a kind, so severe, so all demanding and all requiring that He knows that this man must necessarily fail, cannot possibly keep or even had the desire to keep and that he'll turn away grieving and Jesus lets him go. That would have disqualified him from any school of evangelism that we know, that we would conduct and yet I have hope that though the scripture though does not indicate this man though he leaves grieving might one day return broken. And that when Jesus spoke to him and required of him was divinely ordained and full of the compassion, love, and wisdom of God that is severe before it is merciful. And in fact the severity is mercy. Can you follow that? You imagine a church like this? One thing you lack. Go and sell what you own. Such a requirement of totality and give to the poor you'll have treasure in heaven come follow Me. And so even the disciples who observed all that, who then can be saved and Jesus said “without God it's impossible but with God all things are possible, because it's hard to enter the kingdom of God.” This isn't just religious accommodation, this is an ultimate alignment with God in the context of His kingdom and for that the entry is very narrow, very demanding, very requiring and not many are willing. Beggar at the Roadside causes Jesus to stop Well this most so much more that can be said about this episode but we need to juxtapose it and contrast it with the next that falls right on the heels of this with a Jewish man again, but of another kind altogether. And so we read in chapter 10 verse 46. Mark 10:46 They came to Jericho Which I think is the lowest place on the face of the earth. Physically it's below sea level and hot and intense and not a desirable place. Mark 10:46 - 48 And as He was leaving Jericho with His disciples and a large crowd, a blind beggar named Bartimaeus, the son of Timaeus, was sitting by the road. When he heard that it was Jesus the Nazarene, he began to cry out and say, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!” Many were sternly telling him to be quiet I guess that was the entourage with Jesus. Religionist, something like ourselves who want to maintain an appropriate propriety and religious decorum and are annoyed by anyone crying out insistently from the roadside “Jesus thou son of David”. They tried to shut him up, but the more they try to shut him up in order conduct the appropriate service without distraction the more he cried and the remarkable thing is that Jesus stopped for him. Mark 10:49,50 And Jesus stopped and said, “Call him here.” So they called the blind man, saying to him, “Take heart, get up! He is calling you.” Throwing aside his cloak, he sprang up and came to Jesus Now I'll tell you how we preachers of a prophetic kind think that the throwing off of the cloak and getting up and coming is not just the man removing a physical constraint, but making a symbolic spiritual statement of an ultimate kind. In fact, I would go so far to say unless any of us, yet retain our cloaks, our outward guise and our external form have we really come and can we really follow. The call of Jesus is utterly radical and you cannot make it and respond to it with your cloak on. They threw off his cloak, he threw off the outer garment, he threw off the thing of his identification and he came abject sinner, beggar, blind, stinking in rags to the call of Jesus. What a contrast with the rich young ruler who probably was well clothed and had no necessity to take off his cloak. He wanted the acceptance of himself just as he was not only externally and as he was dressed, but his inner furnishing as well. His concept of righteousness, “good teacher”, his concept of “what must I do to inherit eternal life?” As if it's something that could be the reward for what a man will perform. He came with all of his baggage, but the blind beggar came stripped. Nothing, but the stinking wretch that he was, because this is abject poverty. Well look it up when you get home. I don't know that I can define it. There's poverty and there's abject poverty. Someone said “blessed are the poor but we North Americans read it and we don't even know what poor means”, you've got to go to India to know what poor means and find people who lived all their life on the street and on the sidewalk who have never been into a building. Poor is desperate abject poverty that except something comes to you from outside yourself as mercy you have nothing and it's in that condition that this blind man came at the call of Jesus. The remarkable thing is why did Jesus stop? Because He heard Himself being identified in a way that His Own nation had yet failed to recognize Him and has failed to recognize Him to this day. “Jesus thou son of David” and it's a good question to ask whether the church has so recognized Him, but there's something about that identification that so touched the depths of Jesus’ heart that He stood still. The fact that a blind man who could not see was able to identify Jesus with this designation is a remarkable statement of sensitive spiritual insight. What does it mean to be a Son of David? What's the significance of the son of David? Well David was an adulterer. David was a murderer. David was indifferent to his own sin until he was confronted through his own prophet. There's something shameful about David as well as glorious. And the Lord Himself is not ashamed to be called the greater David even the root and the offspring of David. There's something about David that speaks also of one who will inhabit the throne of David and rule from the throne of David in the holy hill of Zion. David. If you're not ruling you don't understand it. And you know what the heck of it is? We are called to be Davidic. David and to be Davidic is a certain kind of Hebrewism, it's a certain Semitic understanding that is the very genius of God. David encapsulates what is beloved in God's sight even though it has a capability for sin of the most shocking kind: adultery followed by murderous conspiracy. Nevertheless this is also the seed (not sure) of Israel. This is a man of God in all of his frailty, all of a sensuality, all of his failure, all of his remarkable apprehension of God to compose that remarkable book of Psalms that is a literature of an uncommon kind. Are you reading it daily? It'll change you. When I want to read men who knew God and drew upon Him as their strength and safety and hightower and refuge I go to the Psalms. I cannot find a corresponding degree of intimate knowledge of God anywhere in the New Testament perhaps with the exception of Paul as I find it in David. And I want to say until the church itself becomes Davidic we are falling short of the glory of God. Until the church itself becomes Davidic we have not a testimony to the Jewish people that will move them to jealousy. They've got to see in us though we are Gentiles by and large, despite what our origin or our culture they need to see something of a transcendent spiritual kind that transfuses the life of those who are in this relatedness with God. You know why? Because they have sold all that they have and have given all that they have and they have come and they have followed Him. This identity, this Davidic thing there is too deep for words all I can do is gasp and sigh and appeal to the grace of God and the Spirit of God to communicate something for your Gentile understanding that probably has never been sounded for you. To move you into a place of desire, to whet, “whet” your spiritual desire to come into a quality of relationship and union with God by which what is His intrinsic Semitic and Davidic character is communicated to you. That's why Jesus loved to be identified as the son of David. It's not a reference to His governmental role as ruling from the throne of David, but to what His essential character is His relationship to the Father. “Jesus thou son of David have mercy upon me.” No condition, no credential, “not consider me, because I also am good and I've done all these Commandments from my youth up. I'm an abject blind beggar, I'm a stinking piece of wretch at the side of the road. I have no qualification and the only thing that will obtain for me any benefit to my blindness is Your mercy.” Jesus stopped for that. Remarkable contrast and so I ask again of these two polarities which do you more greatly resemble? One who is proud of religious accomplishment, you've kept all the commandments, you've kept your nose clean, you have avoided any really conspicuous sin. Certainly you've never even come close to the kinds of sin that David had committed they would be too shocking for you. And I'm not encouraging that, but the depth of Dvid's repentance was appropriate to the depth of his sin and has given us the glorious fifty first Psalm that has blessed generations and will throughout all posterity. That could only come out of the depth of a brokenness of a man confronted with the hideousness of his own sin: “create in me a clean heart and renew in me a right spirit.” God loves that. Mark 10:50 So throwing off his cloak he sprang up and came to Jesus He came to Jesus as the son of David, he didn't come to Jesus as the good teacher, he didn't come to the idea of Jesus he came to the person of Jesus. Mark 10:51 And Jesus said to him ‘what do you want me to do for you?’, the blind man said to Him ‘my teacher rabboni let me see again’ Israel Prophetic of this Blind Man Implying that he was not born blind, but once was able to see and has become blind. You know how we prophetic men read that? This man is a statement of Israel itself. They once saw, but they have not seen now from a millennia, since the rejection of their own Messiah. A blindness has come over the nation and except for the peripheral Jew like myself that remnant that God saves in every generation. The nation remains today, yet in its blindness and however prosperous it is externally it really is a beggar. It doesn't know it yet, but I believe that the conditions will come and already a foot by which they will find themselves at the side of the road. Poverty-stricken and incapable of anything, except what comes to them from outside themselves. They must be reduced before they'll see again. So this blind beggar is a kind of a statement of Israel itself and the issue of their seeing and of their restoration, because once they see and recognize that the greater David. What a blessing for all the families of the earth! What an ability to fulfill our priestly call, which Paul says in Romans is without repentance, the gifts and callings of God. That we ought to be a priestly nation to the nations. Right now we can't perform it. We're blind, what shall we communicate? We can see secular things and philosophical things and earthly things, but we can't see the things that are eternal and that are really significant until God gives us sight. Well He's waiting for our call. He's waiting for the recognition that this Jesus who has not been rightly depicted and set forth for the Jewish people by the church will somehow be communicated to us in our blindness and that will recognize in him the greater David. And when He hears I'll cry “Jesus thou son of David”, He'll stop, “what can I do for that only I can do, for unless I relieve your blindness. It's a condition that will haunt you into eternity, but it waits for your recognition of Me and you're coming to Me. Throwing off your cloak and your Jewish presumption, you're Jewish pride, you have your confidence, your humanism, your ideologies, all of the kinds of things in which you have falsely invested your faith and your hope and will you'll come to Me like that I'll let you see again.” Mark 10:52 Jesus said to him go your faith has made you whole, immediately he regained his sight Are you attentive to these words? Again regained indicating it was a sight once had, now lost and now regained, because his faith had made him whole. What does it mean? That he had the correct credo like you? That he could enumerate the articles of doctrine. Is that what faith is? Or is faith of profound apprehension of the mystery of God and of the Godhead and of the Son of God and of the character of God that recognizes the constituent Semitic Davidic element of God by a blind man crying out in that one designation that may Jesus stop. A whole nation could not see it, but a blind man at the side of the road out of his desperation, out of his poverty could both recognize it and cry out and would not shut up. They could not silence him though he was disturbing the service until Jesus heard him and gave answer. And you know the remarkable thing is? The rich young ruler turned away grieving, but this blind beggar now having gained his sight it says followed Him on the way or followed Him in the way. That's the whole issue dear saints, that's salvation to the uttermost, is not just gaining your sight and a relationship and being saved out of death and hell, having your sins forgiven. It's to follow Him in the way. The issue is a relationship and a call and His way is not our way. Inspiration from Oswald Chambers This is more than just the little perk phrase as if to indicate well then wherever Jesus walked he walked. No, he followed Him in the characteristic way of the Son of God and that way is the way of the cross. That's the way of suffering. That's the way of humiliation. So grateful for his sight that he followed Jesus in the way. This morning's selection or yesterday's in Oswald Chambers. Do you read my “Utmost for His Highest”? How many do? Raise your hand. Good. Keep it up, precious gift to the church. Take a look at yesterday's selection, which is the text from which I have read today. That's why it was my selection for today, because yesterday something stirred in the reading of Chambers that wakened me in the early morning hours to be the text in the subject for my sharing with you. Art, do you have to do that? Don't you have a briefcase full of messages appropriate for every occasion? No and besides this is too important for today. Just to give a message. Today requires the explicit and appointed word intended by God for you and the church through you whatever's recorded, according to the wisdom of God Who knows the end from the beginning and knows what is before us and knows our lack of preparedness and understanding and maturity. And that this is even a work to walk in established before the foundations of the earth were laid. Yesterday's selection inspired today and Oswald Chambers always has the richest insight as to what the call is to follow Him. That salvation is the call to discipleship. I was a young believer 38 years ago. I thought there were two categories of Christians those that are saved and those that are disciples. I thought most are saved, but the disciples must be a minority. It took some years before I realized that God's intention is that every saved person is to be a disciple and to follow Him. And so he says “ it requires absolute annihilation of my right to myself.” See only a blind beggar can give that, because everything has already been annihilated, he has nothing. That's what abject poverty is and the last thing he had was his cloak and he cast that off, but the rich young ruler had possessions which he could not disavow or put aside. They were more important to him than eternal life, than the kingdom of God and that does not just mean material possessions. How about doctrinal possessions? How about your favorite doctrine? How about your understanding of the faith? How about what is dear to you that is correct and Biblical, but somehow more than you have realized is more dear than the Lord Himself? He got up and he came to Jesus, not to the idea about Jesus. He didn't come to the doctrines about the faith he came to the faith Himself. Your faith has saved you. It's made you whole. It’s more than the accumulation of correct doctrines. In fact, ironically it might be that accumulation that most keeps us from following Him. I don't know if you can understand that? I hope you can. And am I talking against doctrine? No, but when doctrine has taken on idolatrous proportions as happened so often in fundamentalist and evangelical circles that the idea of God and the doctrine about God have displaced God Himself. And we cannot recognize Him as the Son of David, because we’re unwilling. “This following Him requires an annihilation, a complete putting away of my right to myself. An identification with Himself, following Jesus and not the idea of Him. A relationship with Himself in which there is no other relationship”, Oswald Chambers says. It's not to do with salvation or sanctification, but with unconditional identification of Jesus Christ. That's a humiliating relationship as a Son of David who is on the way to the cross. That identification of the blind formerly blind beggar followed Him in that way. The question is have we? Have we come to an absoluteness of abandonment toward God by which we have thrown off our cloak, which we have given up our possessions not the material ones so much, as the ideological ones. As the conceptual doctrinal things that have become so dear to us that represent our riches. He says “very few who have known the absolute of abandonment to Jesus.” The beggar was capable of that absoluteness the rich young ruler was not. He says “if you are hard and vindictive, insistent on your own way.” Davidic Character vs. Gentilic Character Or in view of a recent confrontation with a perk right young Christian here in Canada. I would say instead of hard and vindictive insistent, I would say argumentative on your own way. Using even the vocabulary of God, even doctrinal things and Biblical things of God not so much for understanding that would glorify God as a means for your own self-exaltation. They have become your riches and keeps you from following Him. So if you're brittle, hard, vindictive, defensive, self-justifying, argumentative, confident that the other person is more likely to be wrong than you are. It's an indication that there are whole tracts of your nature that have never been transformed. Do I dare say that their whole tracts of your Gentile nature that have never been transformed. If you're hard, vindictive, self-justifying, proud, having correct and more correct than the other guy. That's very Gentilic. And the only thing that has the power to counter the man and break that is the recognition of Jesus as the Son of David. That is to say the Jewishness of Jesus, the Semitic essence, the intrinsic identity of Jesus as a Jew. It's remarkable how Christians will even argue that Jesus was not Jewish. And when I say Jewish I'm not talking about a cultural definition, I'm talking about a quintessential essence of what He is in His Own Person that as is indicated in the genealogy given in the first verses of Matthew, Son of David, Son of Abraham. This is the essential Jew, this is the quintessential Jew that transcends culture and time. This is the absolute son of Shem and is calculated for your Gentile character that God wants to break and humble and transfuse with what He isn't Himself when you'll come to Him if you have given up all that you hold dear and cast aside even your last cloak and come and cry out for sight. See I am speaking mysteriously and prophetically, so you need ears to hear what I see in the identification of Jesus as a Son of David. That I don't believe that the church by and large has yet come to recognize any more than it has come to recognize that God is the God of Jacob. In only times that we see that in the Psalms? God referring to himself as the God of Jacob ? Who's Jacob? He's the usurper, he's the wheeler and dealer, he's the one who lives by his wit, he deceives his own brother. And you would think that God would disavow that name and remember Israel as Israel. No, He wants to be remembered as the God of Jacob. There's something about our God that is not too proud to identify Himself not with the best of His people, but with their worst. Are you willing? And until you are, you're not in the right place of identification and union with Him. You're only a correct religionist and you're not exuding and showing forth their quality, the intrinsic quality of the Son of David that God wants to permeate the entire church. You're not Davidic, you're a Gentile Christian. Correct, maybe too correct, and feel confident in your correctness and your correctness has become your riches, but you need to be humbled and broken and be at the side of the road see yourself as a beggar and cry out to Jesus in the way that He waits to be recognized. For that recognition there's not only something that honors Him it changes you. Maybe I would not have had to wait until I was 35 to get saved outside of America, out on the road with a pack on my back if there were more expressions of the Davidic character of God in the church that I touched every day as a high school teacher and as my life as a man in the United States looking for answers. So it's humiliating for us to recognize and acknowledge as Gentiles, but this recognition requires us to throw off our cloak or prestigious correct identity with a Messiah who calls Himself by the name of an adulterer and a murderer who dribbled in his beard and scribbled on door posts and hidden caves. I love David, because I love David I love Jesus, they're one in the same. The Son of David is the root and the offspring of David but what is David? What is caught in the name of a man who has put in a flight from persecution has to feign insanity and dribble in his beard and scribble on door posts that they would have compassion for a madman and let him go. That's our David and lives in a cave not with the best of Israel that followed after soul, but the first those that were indebted, the disgruntled, the discontent, the offscouring made up the army of David and subsequently the kingdom of David. I love this, it gets at the heart of what God is as God that He loves to be called Son of David that He loves to be called the God of Jacob, but does He have a people who love that identification. So when I came in Germany in Nürnberg to preach to a German congregation having spent the afternoon at a cemetery a Jewish cemetery not far away that goes back to the 1400’s, because we Jews have been in Germany since the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD and dispersed to the Roman Empire and the gravestones were so thick that the Nazis could not topple them. You know what it means for a Jew like me to go into a Jewish cemetery in Germany and walk through those tombstones and put my hand on them? We Jews are very tactile, we're feeling, we’re Davidic, we’re sensual, and to feel the effacing of tombstones that the windswept and the faintest little indication of the Hebraic and German inscription. And then come and stand before a charismatic German congregation and say to them “how is it that my people have lived in your midst for 2000 years and did not know that the God whom you celebrate and worship was their God? Didn't you ever tell them that your God is the God of Jacob? And when I said that I watched the whole audience of German mouths drop their jaws dropped. Not only had they not told Jew, but they themselves had never recognized or honored God or identified Him as the God of Jacob and therefore they had not the Hebraic reality to convey the Jews who were lost and lived for two thousand years in their midst. And because they could not save them they ended up destroying them. You know that God is the God of Jacob? You know that Jesus is the Son of David. But do you know it in such a way that is not just an addition to your already correct doctrinal knowledge, but it's a knowledge that has transformed you and taken the harsh brittle aspects off of your Gentilic personalities and given you a Davidic disposition of your own. Which is the distinctive of the church that is the church. Are you willing to shock off your cloak and run to Him to receive sight and understanding and follow Him in the way? He waits to hear your recognition and your call. It's a humiliating recognition and to follow Him in that way. David in the cave, Jesus in the stable. David pursued, Jesus persecuted. Follow the Lamb wherever He goes So let me finish. One thing you lack, Jesus said the only good thing from Jesus's point of view is union with Himself and nothing in between. He really means nothing, even correct things can interpose ourselves between ourselves and Him and keep us from the full recognition of His Hebraic identity. Who is the root and offspring and will affect our identity. Our true identity, that is not an issue of race or culture, but its authenticity itself. To be Davidic is to be authentic, is to be real, because that's what God Himself is. And only an abject beggar could find it, but a rich young ruler had to turn away from it. This is a salvation and it's the salvation of the Jews. Salvation of the Jews is more than just passing on the baton, it's a distinctive salvation intrinsic to that which is authentically Jewish which is authenticity itself. And unless you have acquired it and taken on this Semitic Davidic thing. Are you really saved to an uttermost by which you follow Him in the way? That's much more than being punctual and attending regularly the Sunday services. It breaks and cancels the power of Gentilism, which is the spirit of the world, the spirit of prestige, the spirit of pride, the spirit of self-assurance, the spirit of being correct, the spirit of being brittle and self-justifying and argumentative. God's answer to that Gentility disposition is the Davidic character of Himself that can only be obtained in a union by those who throw off their cloaks and all their best possessions to follow Him. So let me pray. There's still Jesus who says “Come, Follow Me.” And the road is the way, not your idea of Him, but He Himself to follow Him. I'm following Him not only here this morning, but on my way. I'm on my way to New York City, the place of my birth not to visit but to live. Because the Lord has given an explicit call that I'm to put aside ministry to the church and come to New York City and give myself to the Jewish community there. You can pray for me that they'll see in me something of the Davidic character of their God. Known by every reckoning I'm an enemy: Jewish Christian out to proselytize, out to convert. Something will be communicated that will touch their deepest thoughts as has already been my experience over the years when the Lord has brought me to contact with these Hasidic ultra-orthodox Jews. Who have said to me “we know you have a spirit but we don't know what spirit that is.” Well they'll know soon enough, it's the rule ha kodesh, the Spirit of holiness, it’s the Spirit of our God. It's a Davidic spirit and you don't have it by being born Jewish you have it by union with Him who was the ultimate Jew and the son of Shem even the son of David, Jesus Himself. Pray for me in New York, because I'm following the Lamb wherever He goes. And it's your call also for the time is short and the hour urgent. Closing Prayer So Lord, I pray for this congregation, representative of so many in Canada and of North America and the world, correct us all, get-out but brittle and not evidencing the salvation which is of the Jews. Not recognizing and an identifying and being in union with that essential quality and character which is in God Himself as the Son of David that would have transcended both their national, racial, and natural and natural origins and give the character of God corporately as the as the people of God who follow Hm in the way. So what if you were here this morning how many in this congregation recognizing that they are blind however correct and would cry out Jesus thou son of David have mercy on me. I believe that there's so much as one in this congregation who felt themselves being described today more in keeping with the rich young ruler than the blind beggar and would cry out and stand up right where you're sitting and say these words Jesus thou son of David have mercy on me. He will who's desperate enough who's poverty-stricken enough who's poverty is so abject that they recognize this need and believe that the Lord is here even in His servant who actually is so expecting this morning about am my Father's name is David, I'm a son of David both naturally and spiritually and that if you will cry out not to me, but the greatest son who is my life you'll receive mercy your eyes will be opened your poverty will be alleviated you'll follow him in the way.