This sermon emphasizes the importance of recognizing and honoring the true manifestation of the Holy Spirit in the church, contrasting it with the misuse of charismatic gifts. It delves into the need for authenticity in prayer and worship, highlighting the significance of a tested vessel with godly character to deliver a true word from God in crisis moments. The speaker also stresses the church's role in coveting the Holy Spirit and His gifts, with a burning jealousy for the glory of God forever as the centerpiece of the church's identity.

I'll speak seven minutes worth, and then they said take 15 minutes, and then as I was speaking up came a note from my co-author, now gone on to be with the Lord of then Israel, take 45 minutes. I said, oh praise God, they're recognizing the anointing on this word, and I took 45 minutes, keeping Catherine Kuhlman waiting in the wings, and when she came out and the flashbulbs popped, and the catchers fell under the power, where she would reach behind the person being prayed for to touch the catcher, and down went the catcher, and the people were hilarious. It was a carnival, because she came up with the boast, well we've heard about the Holy Spirit, but now I'm going to demonstrate Him. And it was an agony for me, this is the first time I have ever publicly confessed this, but I think it's time. I had to leave. I could not bear to stand four feet away from the ostensible display of power, where bodies were falling left and right, in the complete sense, absence of any sense of the presence of God. You want to know what anguish is? It's seeing external demonstration of power without the intuitive and sensed presence of the living God, and it was more than I could bear. I yanked my poor wife off the platform before 4,000 people, and she went hysterical. It was enough to be married to a man like me, but to be publicly humiliated before 4,000 without explanation, and she carried on on the sidewalk as we were waiting for a taxi to pick her up, while other Jewish believers were observing the condition of my marriage. This is the message the Lord gave. When I came back after speaking it and sat on the platform, everyone turned their shoulder away as if I was some pitiful piece of refuse. I thought, what did I do to offend? Then I learned that I'd taken 45 minutes when the note said, take 4-5 minutes, and I didn't see the dash. Well, what can you do? It was my sight then, it's my hearing now. So get what value you can from this enfeebled and aged veteran. But a prophecy did ring out as soon as I sat down. Somebody on the platform cried out, this is the word that I have called you to hear. Not the sugar candy that has so far been given, but this word, and it went on like that. I found out later that that exact prophecy was spoken four other places in the auditorium before the audience of 4,000 people. And I don't know what you think of Basilia Schlinck and the Evangelical Sisters of Mary. Do you know this movement? She has recently died. She is an oracle. She was an oracle. She's the 20th century voice for the Lord, whose great book on repentance, The Secret of the Joy-Filled Life, is one of the great classics of contemporary Christian writing. Some of the sisters from her movement were in that audience, and they said later, this was the word of the Lord. It's in this book, but the price has just gone up. So, because you were late and indifferent, now it's going to cost you more, but it's worth it. If you paid $100 a book, you're not overpaying. It's priceless, and this is my first book, just republished in English. It's available in Hebrew, German, French, Russian, I don't know how many languages. It's being prepared in Chinese. Of an ideological Jew, who had been brought to a place of disillusionment in his 34th year with a broken marriage to a German woman, doesn't God know how to bring us Jews down? He gives you a wife who had belonged to the Hitler youth and is schizophrenic, and in the fury and the intensity of her psychological and emotional condition, how does she ventilate her disturbance, but finding the one place in this stolid piece of rock where I was penetrable, my Jewishness? Is my language too fancy for you? Come up here and be there. I'm elevating the whole level of Christian literacy, and it's long overdue. It's about time you cracked your dictionaries. And loved words, and their meanings, are just a bunch of pappy, soft touches that affect nothing. Language, that's our prophetic responsibility to God, to cherish and to employ. And where do you read this language? This is a book written by an atheist. This is not a retrospective book. What does that mean, Art? Retrospective means when someone looks back and writes something of their memory of it. This is not that. This is the journal that I carried as a hitchhiking Jewish atheist through Europe and Middle East and Israel, looking for philosophical answers, and how I was apprehended by the living God. Hotter than Stoughton, which is the most distinguished English publishing company of Great Britain, published one edition of this book in the 1970s, and I later met the head of the religious books department who approved it. He said, when your book came across my desk, I realized it was the finest literary work I had ever read by a contemporary Christian. And because of its quality, I knew it would not be a commercial success. Nevertheless, I felt an obligation to print it. You, dear saints, this is not only a stirring book of the mercy of God that pursues a man because he's prayed for by one of his ex-students and her mother, roly-poly middle-class Christian woman, but because it's the template and pattern of God's future salvation for the lost sheep of the house of Israel. For they, like me, will be uprooted from their places of security and affluence and success in America and all the world, and will be again exiled and in flight through the nations. And that's how God apprehended me, through the nations. It was the consistent witness of Christians picking me up off the side of the road as I lived for 14 months with what was on my back and expressing to me the love, the mercy, the tender concern of God because I was a rabid anti-Christian. And yet I could not easily dismiss this species of mankind that was neither Jewish nor Gentile. They were something else and other. And because of them, when a New Testament came into my hands for the first time, can you imagine? Almost 35 years old, a teacher of history, skilled and trained in the analysis of documents, commending to his students to go to the primary source, and I had never gone to the source, either the Old or the New Testament. They were books for the weak. But in the first reading of the New Testament, in the Gospel of John, in one statement out of the mouth of Jesus, and I've not recovered. So, Lord, let there be a rush on the books and let them serve every purpose for which you have intended them because not one of these books have anything to do with my promotion. I haven't lifted a finger for any one of them. I have had to be pursued by publishers, for the Lord himself, in his own sovereign way, has brought these books out in his time and in the many languages in which they are in print. It has not to do with human promotion or self-seeking. It's a provision of God, and the multiplying ability of God to use media and books to put into the hands of saints those things intended for their edification. I'm not a man to listen to tates, but I like a book. I like something where I can read, write, mark, underline, put asterisks. One of these books, Reality, I don't know about the other, it's translated to Hebrew, and they are just distributed for free in Israel, just to let you know, and I was really blessed by this book, I read it in Hebrew, and we don't buy it in Israel, we get them for free. So, just to get an idea about... You got it for free? You can see me later. He read it in Hebrew. Then Israel is also in Hebrew. When I came to the Ukraine and Russia on my last visit, people were stopping me on the streets and plastering my face with kisses. I found that I had become a culture hero because people's lives were changed by apostolic foundations in Russia, spirit of truth in Russia. People who had lived under communist bondage for seven decades were freed by these books, which were so expansive a statement of the liberty of God in the spirit. So, I praise God for books. Now, Lord, thank you for giving me this occasion to dot the i's and cross the t's and add a little afterthought, which I ask that you will make foundational for all the church. And this statement will be demanding of your people. It will stretch them in the hearing. They'll hear conceptual things that are over their heads. I'm not expecting that they're going to be able to receive and understand this word in this first hearing. But I thank you for the recording equipment and pray blessing upon it and those who are operating it that later on they can go back and hear again or see again and ponder and reflect upon that which they could not obtain in the first hearing. Bless this word, Lord. Bless the spirit of the speaking. May your voice be heard in this piece of earth and your word go forth that shall not return to void. We thank and give you the praise in Jesus' name. God's people said, amen. Well, I have here a little something that I wrote up at the impulse of the Lord. It began as a statement on what is the context by which God intended the operation of the gifts of the spirit. Of course, I have had a long and haunting sense that the charismatic age was somehow not quite the context of God's intention. When men spoke about reviving denominations or wanted the operation of the gifts of the spirit to make their meetings more exciting, I knew that this was something other and less than God's intention and that it deprecated the spirit of God. It made God a utility for our purposes. And if the spirit of God is demeaned, what shall we say of God himself? Maybe the whole absence of the sense of God, the fear of God and the awe of God is not the least of the consequences of our callow, charismatic generation that was so easy with regard to the Holy Spirit where you could have left out the designation holy. It became a kind of convenience for men. But I like the Hebrew, the ruach ha'kodesh, the spirit of holiness. So we mustn't traffic in that, nor must we make merchandise of this holy thing that God has given for holy purposes and not the convenience of men nor their religion. So this outline started as that, but then as it went on, I realized that I was writing something much more. It could almost be considered a summary of what are the distinguishing and distinctive features of that church which can be called apostolic. I tried to define or begin to grope and feel for how do we discern true prophets and apostles? What is the distinctive, what is the unmistakable mark that makes a man a prophet or an apostle? And now this morning I want to pick up what are the distinguishing marks that characterize a church that is really the church, which is to say the church that is apostolic. What are the constituent elements? What must be its mindset, its heart, its service, its conduct, its attitude? So this has become a kind of a magna carta of apostolic faith, a manifesto, a statement, that begins with the radical apprehension of the end marks and identifies such a body as to be opposed by the powers of darkness as a threat upon whom its vicious spite is to be ventilated. Such a body finds itself in felt disjuncture and enmity with the world, its systems and false values, which are discerned and consciously repudiated, and therefore, to that degree, a harbinger, a foretaste, is the statement of a kingdom already come in such proportion and reality as to emancipate and deliver its deceived victims. See what I mean? You're not going to get this in one hearing. I'm going to go back over the entire statement. How does it begin? What distinguishes the church that is the church? The apprehension, the radical apprehension of the end. We are a peculiar people because we have a profound beginning, a profound origin, a profound history in the forebears of our faith, the patriarchs, our inheritance, whether we're Jews in faith or Gentiles in faith. It's our inheritance. Our identity would be diffused and lost if we were not conscious of what has preceded us. And in fact, we have lost that consciousness. And the attempts now to refine our Jewish roots is something of a knee-flex reaction of a people who are conscious that we have lost the continuity and contact with the things that are our inheritance and give us the essential content of our faith, which is Hebraic. Because you dumb-dumbs who were lost and without God, without hope in the world, drinking beer out of skulls and fornicating like jackrabbits in all of your pagan idolatries and all the kinds of things in which you would still be presently active have been brought nigh by the blood of the Messiah Jesus into the spiritual commonwealth of Israel. And though present Israel doesn't know beans about its own inheritance, you have become the possessors of their history. Father Abraham is your father. The patriarchs are your progenitors. The Psalms are your treasure. Are you reading them? Reading is hardly the word. Are you luxuriating in them? You dwell in the Psalms every morning. You cannot begin the day except you read the Psalm for the day. And if you're reading it like blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, you'd better not even attempt it. This isn't how many verses and how many chapters you've read to fulfill your religious obligation. This is a love. This is, what shall I say, an embrace. This is the privilege of peering into the psalmist, the Davidic mind and heart of the great Hebrew saints of old who knew God in a way that makes our present charismatic pretension shabby. If we knew God as they knew him, we would not be getting away with the kinds of things that are being perpetrated in Jesus' name even today and perhaps even in these very days in this very place. The knowledge of God is all. Oh, if we could know him as the psalmist to cry out. And they're always crying out for the Lord's intervention because their lives are at stake. They're in jeopardy. Their enemies, the wicked who are opposed to the righteous are out for their life. There's something about the Davidic life that the powers of darkness, particularly as it is to be found in the religious realm, cannot tolerate its existence. Saul will always hate David. And that distinction will characterize the conflict of the true church, the Davidic church, at the end of the age. Notice the word Davidic? Do you like it? Davidic. It has a resonance of something Davidic, of David himself, who was beloved, who was the sweet singer of Israel, the psalmist and the great king, whose government was like a dew refreshing the earth and not some heavy-handed activity. David is something else. And you know what? The church is not the church until it's Davidic, until it has found this character, this essence, this indefinable something that God so loves because it is so like him. Where are you going to obtain it if you do not consult the Psalms? Are you going to find it in experience and excitement? Much better to have an early morning time perusing and immersing yourself in this indescribable literature of which there is nothing like it and its kind. You don't love God until you love the Psalms, for the Psalms are filled with the love of God and the understanding that the faith of God is not some narrow and provincial thing intended for one nation, Israel, alone, but through Israel to all nations. God wants to Hebraicize the earth. He wanted one nation who would demonstrate what a relationship with him means that would be visible to the nations that they might also enter into the praises of the God of Jacob. So, what is an epistolic church? One that radically apprehends the end because it has also radically apprehended the beginning. Unless you know, dear saints, that there's a beginning and an end, that we're moving toward a conclusion and a consummation, you are then trapped into a kind of succession of Sundays that are going nowhere. A spiritual roulette hoping for an interesting sermon, one that will wake you up on your Sunday morning topper, T-O-R, T-O-R. That is the consequence of lingering too long before the television set on Saturday night and trusting that George will do it on Sunday morning. After all, you're paying his salary. That's what he's supposed to do. You're not going anywhere. You have no sense of direction. You don't even know what the word consummation means. End is not an end. It's a new beginning of a millennial and glorious kind for which the last instances of history are filled with apocalyptic tension, climactic engagement and confrontation and blood and sweat and tears and violence and death and tribulation and trial. How will you face it when it comes upon you and you are unsuspecting because you didn't know that this characterizes the end for which, therefore, the present ought to be preparation. Therefore, our every sermon, conference, ought significantly to be imbuing us with that understanding that aims us and fits us toward the end and the conclusion and the triumph of Christ in the age. So much so that you will count your martyrdom a privilege. I don't think martyrdom is only for Indonesians. We're going to face it right here. I'm the last one who's expecting to die in bed. And I think when my end comes, it's not going to come so much from an enraged world as it will be from those who will kill me and claim they are doing God a service, a radical apprehension of the end. I'm saying that the true apostolic church is by definition eschatological. There. The word is out of the bag. You're stuck. It's about time, too. An apocalyptic end. Apocalyptic, I know it means the revealing, but revealing of what? The wrath and judgments of God, the final upheavals in the earth, the cosmic disturbances and the last messianic throes before the coming of the king, who comes in wrath and in judgment and also to be the agent of Israel's deliverance when all the nations of the world have come against Jerusalem to destroy it. And if all the nations includes the United States, where will you be? Are you going to sanction that or look the other way or go along? Are you going to be faced with the same kind of perplexity that the German church had to face with the advent of Hitler? In the land of Goethe, Schiller, Fichte, Hegel, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and Kant? I know you don't know one of those names, but you should. At least one. Kant, K-A-N-T. The great ethicist. That means one who occupies himself with ethics. That's German. And we Jews love so much German philosophy and ethics and literature and poetry and music that we could not conceive that the gutter scum at the bottom of the barrel who met in beer halls and basements would one day take possession of the whole range of government and set in motion our annihilation. Of course it can't happen here. We are apple pie and mother and the Seattle Mariners and the Minnesota Twins. I mean, it can't happen here. It could happen in Germany, though their culture was so eminently beyond anything that we have even begun to understand. And within a decade, it came down like the deck of cards. The church, government, education, the university, some of the greatest Old Testament commentators became Nazis. Kyle. What's the New Testament? Do I have that name right? Hill? Kittel! That's the one I want, Kittel. Kyle and Delitzsch. Kyle was a Messianic Hebrew Christian. And if you haven't read their commentaries on the Old Testaments, you're missing something magnificent. The great commentators of the 19th century. Read some of these men. David Barron, Hebrew Christian commentator. And who was his mentor? Their names escape me. Anyhow, there's a rich literature out there, saints. Here's what I'm saying. The collapse of German civilization with the church at the advent of Nazism and the annihilation of the Jew is a textbook for us on the last days. And if a civilization as rich as that went down like the proverbial deck of cards, what will happen to us when the same Antichrist spirit comes over this nation? How many will be able to resist it? How many will be able to stand against it? How many of us will go to concentration camps with Jews in our identification with them rather than look the other way in the face of their suffering? Because I want to stand here and say today with all the authority that I have in God, such a time is coming. You're naive if you haven't understood that. If you think that Israel is going to get better and improve, you're mistaken. It's on the way to catastrophic devastation in the time of Jacob's trouble wherever Jacob is, and that includes the United States. Hey, listen, you guys. We have been 26 years in northern Minnesota in the boondocks, in the Arctic blast, in the coldest temperatures of the nation because we were brought there by God 26 years ago to establish a place of refuge for Jews in flight in North America from persecution. Can you see why I can't enter into your fun and games? There's too much in me that's sober in anticipation of that which is to come. I know something about the end and the kind of preparation that should be coming to the saints who are going to walk this out where there'll be no Jewish survival at all because the issue of Jewish survival and the return of the redeemed of Israel to Zion is the issue of the Lord's coming as king. It's the issue of his kingdom. Therefore, you need to understand Israel not in some sentimental context that these people deserve a homeland, etc., etc., after all that they have suffered, but that the issue of Israel can only be rightly understood apostolically in the context of the kingdom of God. Israel is the hub and the nub of God's theocratic intention for his rule over creation. The law must go forth out of Zion and the word of the Lord out of Jerusalem. Not as it is presently constituted. Now it's a pitiful, sinful city. I can't bear even to visit it. It's an anguish even to visit. The prostitution rings and the extortion rings in high schools. Violence in the Israeli high schools is one of the most troubling phenomena of present Israeli society. But so is violence everywhere. More women are bashed by hustings in Israel than in any other land. More abortions in Israel than in any other land. We're secular to the hilt. And you want them to succeed in that condition by getting better? Whew. Did you hope for that for yourself? Or did you need a profound conversion of death that eventuates in resurrection unto newness of life? And if you needed it, what do they need? We're going to be the nexus of God's kingdom. Not anyone who clutches the skirt of a Jew knows that he can take us to God. Something drastic has got to afflict them before they can be brought into that ultimate destiny that God foresaw through Abraham that his seed would bless all the families of the earth. If this is not part of your consideration, maybe central to all of your consideration, you are outside the apostolic faith. Your Christianity has degenerated into mere culture. You need to apprehend the end radically. But I can understand why you have been slow to do it. Because it means suffering, trial, difficulty. If they're going to experience Jacob's trouble, what are we going to experience? If the powers of darkness hate their guts and want to annihilate the entire race so that there'll be no return to Zion and no king coming of the descendants of David to sit from the throne of David and rule over them in the world, how shall we be perceived by those same powers? Because, after all, aren't we in the same commonwealth with them? Haven't you been brought into their covenants and promises and hopes by the blood of Messiah Jesus? Aren't you grafted into their tree and sucking life up out of their root? Or are you lifeless? Because unless you're conscious of this remarkable metaphor of being grafted into Israel's tree, how then can you derive the benefit of the life that flows up through its root? Lost to them who are broken off branches, but you should be bearing their fruit by that sap, the divine life, so as to move them to jealousy. Oh, Lord, I'm still in the first paragraph. We've got all morning long. I will even skip lunch or will eat it while Art's talking. Are you understanding, dear saints, that I'm not saying any of these things because I'm Jewish? I didn't know them as a Jew. I'm saying all of these things because I'm God's prophetic statesman, because he's put these words in my mouth, because he's given me an opportunity to make an insertion this morning that will justify all of these days together. It will be absolutely foundational for all the future of the church, and there are not many who can proclaim these kinds of things. That's how you'll tell the phony from the true. These conferences, prophecy conferences, and not one mention of Israel in the whole duration of them? That's prophetic? And it's got to do with fun and games and personal things that they can tell you your Social Security number and your Aunt Anna's hangnail and blah, blah, blah, and someone's got a... They call that prophetic? And you run with glee and delight that you might be the one who's called and receive a personal prophecy? If there's any subject compelling in the heart of God foremost for the consideration of the church who knows nothing about it, even in their present affinity and disposition toward Israel, that's kindly. It's this subject. And if it's not proclaimed and set forth by foundational men, how shall it be understood? You'll not get it from your pastors. After they get it from the prophet, after the ground has been broken, after it's been opened up, after you have considered Romans 11 and the apostolic genius of what Paul sees that is climaxed by the greatest effulgence of praise in all Scripture, Romans 11, 33 through 36, oh, the depths of the riches both of the wisdom and the knowledge of God, who has been his counselor? Who has given to him, and it shall be given again? Where did God get this? For of him and through him and to him are all things to whom be glory forever. You dear disqualified saints who have never once reflected on this glorious conclusion of the most significant massive statement on the mystery of Israel given in all Scripture by the great apostle Paul, which he received by revelation and of which he enjoins us not to miss this mystery lest you become wise in your own conceit and we have missed it. We've not sought it, we've not desired to know it, and I praise God it's a mystery, one that you're not going to find an explanation through any cerebral activity of your own. If it doesn't come revealed, it doesn't come. And how shall it be revealed? By some character like me who takes 45 minutes instead of 4 to 5 minutes and gets on platforms where men, if they knew better, would never have allowed him, but they thought he was going to be a Jewish novelty and cute, but alack and alas, he's turned the house upside down and kept Catherine Kuhlman waiting. When you'll hear it from a foundational man, you've heard it. I only wish that I had the luxury of giving you that statement that we have given in the Philippines and other places in Southeast Asia and all over the world that take 4 to 5 days, but you will be forever changed. But look it up. Ask the Lord. Lord, I need the central component, this key, the centrality of Israel, not in some sentimental regard as a political entity that needs to succeed, but the national, the intent for the nation in your theocratic intention to make of them the locus of your world rule. I need to know that because it's more than a mere piece of idle curiosity. I need to know it because unless I know it, understand it, and am apprehended by it, how shall I be to them what I must in their time of final tribulation where the church is God's exclusive and intended salvific agency? If any of them survive, it's because of you. But of course if you're raptured and not available, what are you going to do? We'll explain to them that the Lord had an escape route for you while they have to suffer in the earth. There's nothing that more puts the death knell on this noxious novelty called pre-tribulation rapture that has less than a two-century history and began with some hysterical woman called a prophecy than the proper understanding of the issue of Israel in the last days that requires the presence of a church of an ultimate kind in the earth or there'll be no Jewish survival at all. It's the purpose for your being. But you'll not be able to fulfill it as a bunch of sappy saints. You'll only be able to fulfill it as an apostolic and prophetic entity, which is why God is pouring out His soul this morning to sink that word into your foundations. Even if your mind cannot grasp it, the spirit of the word will go in and will not return to Him void. The church that is the church, that is apostolic, radically apprehends the end. It is eschatologically minded, for eschatological means the things pertaining to the end. And it's not afraid that the end is clothed in violence, smoke, judgment, wrath, the final dealings of God, the culmination of the nations and their long opposition to God. And you're placed in it. And when the powers of darkness see that you understand these things, you are mocked for a first time. Up till now, they said, Jesus, we know Him, Paul, we know, but the church at Salmon, Idaho, who? Or Timbuktu, or wherever you're from, Kansas City, who? You're of no consequence. We yawn at your profession that you're going to take cities for Christ through praise and worship. But to God, it was so simple and effortless and without sacrifice. And we can do it musically. Hey, listen, we've got all the apparatus and hi-fi and speakers. Well, that's how you do it. Of course, that was not available to Paul. So it has to wait for your generation and your technology. The principalities and powers of the air, dear saints, are the critical subject for the church's consideration over the last days. Mere demon deliverance of an individual kind, however beneficial and grateful we are for that activity, is only skimming the surface of a much greater subject. The greater subject is not the issue of individual bondage. It's the issue of a ruling angiology that are fallen and have influence to jerk and manipulate entire nations and races. Oh, dear God, where do you see that in history? What do you think Nazism is? You can't explain Nazism sociologically. It's a spirit phenomenon, and the powers of darkness that fomented it in the land of Gerda, Schiller, Fichte, and Hegel prevail still in the realm of the air over that nation waiting their next opportunity. You know what I've observed? Only that believer who has an apprehension of the mystery of Israel has equally with it an understanding of the mystery of iniquity and of the powers of darkness and knows what it will take to unseat them. The two things go hand in hand. Well, I'm telling you that if you move in the direction of which you're being encouraged this morning, you're going to become mocked. The powers of darkness who formerly yawned over your most strenuous activity that you thought was taking cities now will regard you with a new concern and caution, if not fear, for now you're on the right track, and now you constitute a threat. And because of that, you can expect their opposition. And because of their opposition, you'll know that you cannot face this press alone, and you'll need the coordinate strength of the body of Christ, who equally recognizes that they are in a contest of an ultimate kind and need each other's prayer, encouragement, and not to give the enemy any advantage by speaking those things that are corrected for us which we welcome as being the act of love itself. It makes the church the church. We have to turn the chairs around and look in each other's faces and confront what needs to be confronted. If God has given us a discernment and a key, but in such solicitous love that the person knows that you're not nailing them, because we're in something together and we're concerned for the condition of the body altogether. You see, the whole thing becomes tightened up. The slack goes out. The church becomes the church with a new seriousness and a new depth and quality of prayer which has never gotten off the ground because true prayer cannot exceed the truth of the relationships of those who are praying. Prayer, like worship, is not a technique or a methodology. It's a spiritual statement of the truth of the reality of your life together. Intercession is a corporate travail by people who are living corporately and are not the aggregate of individualities that come together for the purposes of a conference. Got the picture? And it all started with the subject of Israel, and here we are in the subject of the church. And that's the way God intended it. Because you have neglected the one, you have forfeited the other. And the powers of darkness are totally unimpressed. Turn up the amplifiers, and they'll continue to yawn. So what do I say here? Such a body is one to be opposed by the powers of darkness as a threat upon whom its vicious spite is to be ventilated. But such a body finds itself in felt disjuncture with the world. And when you read that these high school grads are given $8.5 million as a bonus to sign a contract that will earn for them $25 or $52 or some other astronomic amount of millions of dollars for the next 10 years as a contract for a baseball player, you are automatically revolted. You're anguished in your soul. You see in that the demise of all value. It's a corruption that will pervade all the lump. And you lean back and smile and, Hey, and this kid's made it big, and he's only 18. What do they pay, $50,000 for a pitch? The rise and fall of the American empire and the corruption of its values because there's a church of dum-dums upon whom this has not been registered and will even go along and pay the bill. No moral discernment. No anguish of soul for the anti-Christ thing that is already prevailing in our culture. We are not in a felt disjuncture with the world. We are in the world and with the world and using its promotions, its mentality, and all the kinds of things to augment our religion that augment the sales in Wal-Mart. All you have to do is flood the mailboxes. Oral Roberts knows that. And you'll get a certain percentage back that will far exceed anything that it cost you to send out that enormous mass mailing and finance everything, even a lifestyle, that you can live as a robber baron and be celebrated as the great hero of faith. You think the powers of the air are impressed with that? Jesus they know and Paul they know. They know whom to fear, whom to recognize. When they see authenticity, when they see a fluke, fake, counterfeit success based on the world's model, using manipulation, they yawn. We need to be so, how shall I say it, sensitive as to not to condescend to anything in which the world majors. Choosing to be foolish pilgrims, strangers, and sojourners in the earth rather than we should in any way accommodate them in response to their advertising, to their allures, to their seductions. We would hate it. Our souls should be chafed like righteous lot rather than condescend and be in the whole system of merchandising together with everybody else. Paul, when he woke up that morning in Athens where he had not intended to be in flight from persecution and he saw the city wholly given to idolatry. He was chafed and grieved in his soul. Therefore, confronted he the devout Jews in the synagogue and in the marketplace where idolatry has its most profound forms. There was a therefore that set Paul on an apostolic journey in Athens because the spirit within him grieved when he saw the city wholly given to idolatry. Where's our grief? The true apostolic church will be grieving. It will be at disjunction with the world. It will not be one of the boys. It will not embrace a Christianity by which it could think itself Christian at the same time enjoy the acceptance of its neighbors as being nice guys. You'll no longer be fun. You'll no longer be invited to the barbecue. You're too solemn. You're too serious. There's a strange look in your eye as if you see beyond the apparent and see the things that are ultimate and eternal that makes you unfit to be fun and one of the boys. You willing for that? Do you want to be a pilgrim and a stranger? Or do you want to be accepted even as a Christian? First time I ever preached on pilgrim, strangers, and sojourners I had to leave... Well, the brother threw his passport down on the floor that night. He'd just gotten a visa to go somewhere and he was so convicted that he was so much part of the American landscape he threw his American passport on the ground so much as to show where his true identity is to be found in heaven. And the next morning I had to fly out but I was a standby. And I watched all of the passengers with the tickets getting right on and I stood by and watched them go by hoping my name would be called. And people looked at me like you pitiful object. You're not in the flow. Are you willing to bear that continually? Not just in the world but in Christendom and in the church where all of a sudden you've become too radical not the fun that you used to be even as a Christian. You have strange preoccupations now. You're even coming... you're taken up with the Jews and you've lost your center which used to be Christ now it's Israel the kind of thing of which I'm accused when actually the fact of the matter is to be taken up with Israel is to be taken up with Christ for he is their king and he comes with their restoration. Can you bear misunderstanding? I'm called now a Christian anti-Semite. Why? Because I'm speaking of a dire future for present Israel and Jews worldwide. Of course if you loved Israel you wouldn't say things like that. You wouldn't make nice. You would give them comfort now even if it's a false comfort. Well when you get my next newsletter now being prepared you'll see the announcement of a new correspondence school for Jewish evangelism called Apocalyptic Evangelism looking for Christians who can be schooled to do with Jews what I would do if I had your opportunity. You'll be able to face them and confront them in ways in which they have never been confronted by speaking to them of the things that pertain to their future and you're going to alert them and tell them that according to your knowledge of scripture and prophecy there's a time of Jacob's trouble that's future of which they need to understand or they will be victim like their Jewish forebears in Germany. Can you do that? I don't think they're going to sit down and take that nicely without anger, without irritation. How can you say that? If you wilt easily, you're out of the game. If you need their approval, you're out of the game. If you're a soft sap that says, I know Jews that are more Christian than Christians, you're disqualified. If you're impressed with their external qualifications and impressiveness of which we Jews are very impressive and don't understand what the word of God says about all men everywhere that there's no man good, there's not a righteous soul upon the earth who doeth good and sinneth not. No matter how much they appear good, civil, they don't bark at their wives as we do. They have nice awards and are mannerly and cultured and have several university degrees. They don't need your Christ until you make that need known to them. Jewish evangelism is the ultimate test of the church and we have wisely avoided it. And let Moshe Rosen and the Jews for Jesus do it. Parachurch organizations, but we have forfeited the intrinsic call of God of which Paul says, I'm not ashamed of the gospel of Jesus Christ, which by the way is the gospel of the kingdom, the Davidic kingdom and it's coming. For it is the power of God unto salvation through everyone who believes to the Jew first and also to the Greek. That's God's priority, saints. And we have nicely circumvented that requirement. You know why? We're cowards. Because we know Jews are tough. Because we're intimidated. Because we barely got through high school. Because our English is lacking. Because we think that they have some superior knowledge and ability. We circumvent them. We compliment them when we should be challenging them. We have forfeited the priority of the Lord and the powers of darkness know it. And they say this is a church that we're required to fear when they themselves choose at random which of God's requirements they will observe and which they will disallow. To miss the issue of the Jew and the priority of God is to miss God and to bring ourselves of being of no repute before the powers of the air. As I told the Filipino pastors, better that you should be known by the powers of darkness than you should be esteemed by matter. You think that's an easy statement? You know these Filipino pastors, they're up from poverty and now they're finally finding a place of some measure of success and life and respectability and acceptance. And you're saying, if you're going to count for God, it would be better if you were feared by the power of darkness than to receive the esteem of men. And they nod and say, yes, that's right, Art. I said, okay, now you're not going to be feared by the powers of darkness unless you first forfeit your desire for the esteem of men. How many of you will stand and say this day I forfeit, I'm unwilling to consider, I shall not seek to be acknowledged, respected, esteemed by men. I choose to be marked and acknowledged by the powers of darkness. Okay. Oh, you're getting serious, you guys. Praise the Lord. Lord, mark this because I know the powers of darkness are marking it and they're trembling over Salmon, Idaho, and what has been convened here that is exceeding the intention of those who have established these days. Let this be historic, my God, and let these children take back to their fellowships and their communities this new resolution, better to be marked by the powers of darkness as one to be feared than I should enjoy or seek for that seductive acceptance of men. I'd rather be misunderstood, and I will be misunderstood, and I'm willing to be a reproach, stranger, sojourner, in this earth, but to serve the purposes of God that consummate and conclude the age in glory in your coming. For Jesus' sake, in his name, amen. You may be seated. Hey, I'm still on the first paragraph. How much more can you take? So... Okay. Remember, he said that, and he's an authority. You know, dear saints, we are involved in a cosmic drama, C-O-S-M-I-C, and the awareness of that will break up the provincial, narrow parameters of your present faith and understanding. Yes, you're in a locality. God has planted you there, but what is being worked has an ultimate and cosmic significance. It touches the end of the ages. It brings God, who is the creator of the heaven and the earth, into his own creation to establish his rule and to prevail over the rebellious nations. It ends the powers of darkness that suffered their initial defeat at the cross and experienced their final defeat in another people who, in the body of Christ, again suffer their opposition and bear it with the same magnanimity and grace as their Lord before them. That's why it is given to the beast to overcome the church. But in being overcome, something is displayed that would not otherwise have been expressed or revealed. The character of God in patient forbearance and suffering unjustly and with rejoicing, knowing that it signals the end of the age and that those who bear this have obtained for themselves an eternal reward that shall not corrupt nor rust away the crown. That's eschatological. And I know it's not part of your present thinking and needs to be. For it's the anticipation of the Lord who comes and brings his rewards with him to give to every man according to his works. That is the greatest incentive for those works that will pass through the fire and not be burnt. I've got works, dear saints, I've got to spare. But what do you have? I'll tell you something about the works of God that will not be consumed. He has to be the author of it. It'll never be comfortable as you're not able to perform it out of your own human and religious ability. Anything that you can perform by your ability is ipso facto disqualified as a work of God. Like this morning, the speaking. You think you're looking at some virtuoso? Look, my no hands. If the Lord ever ceased in a moment to be the life of my life and the speaking of my speaking and the wisdom of my wisdom, I'd fall flat and shrivel up before you like nothing. This is a work this morning. This isn't a message. This is a work. And it shall be enduring and have consequence for both time and for eternity. And when you are engaged in labors of that kind, day and night, from country to country, you have to say with Paul, who is sufficient for these things? Listen, you dear saints. You are, every one of you, living beneath the glory of God. You are, every one of you, living on the level of your human and religious ability and doing a nice job of it. So long as you remain at this level, but once you kick in the gear and shift into the apostolic realm of engagement with the powers of the air and the issue of Israel and being God's salvific provision for them in their last day's extremity, you'll recognize you cannot perform it. And that the resurrection has not been given to us as a doctrine to approve, but as a mode of being and living to enjoy. Got the picture? You're living beneath the resurrection, which means you're living beneath the glory. And your contemporary Christianity, even in its so-called charismatic Pentecostal forms, has not required it. Put the centerpiece back into the faith, Israel, the last days, powers of darkness, the end, cosmic conflict, and you'll have to become prophetic and apostolic, which is to say, you'll have to live by God. How else are you going to speak to those bones? How are you going to speak to the dry bones of Israel that are now in process of that death? When God shall command you, just when you don't feel like it, as I have not felt like it in the two times that I've spoken here previously, and often do not feel like it, but I'm still yet required to obey. This morning I feel like it. It's a real luxury. But I can tell you that when ultimate requirement comes for you, you're likely not to feel like it. Will you be responsive to the command of God when he says, when you can hardly believe yourself that they can live? Have you a faith to believe for that? And that a greater faith that what you speak is going to bring life to those bones? Yes, you. You housewives and carpenters and ordinary guys. Your speaking is going to raise that dead? Well, you could believe it if Ott spoke it. But me, or David Hogan. But me? Yes. Unless it comes from you, ordinary so-called saints, which is a contradiction in terms. There's no such thing as an ordinary saint. Your sacramental personalities, your pieces of God-imbued divinity in earthen vessels, unless you have the prophetic authority and faith to address those bones that they might live, they'll not live. And what does Paul say about their living? It'll be life from the dead for all the world. What shall their return be? If their falling away has been the blessing of the Gentiles, what shall their return be but life from the dead? But what is the issue of their return is not them. They will be inert, I-N-E-R-T. They will be out of it. They will be dry bones, helpless. They must be, because we Jews are so self-sufficient. And the word self is abomination in God's sight. Never again. What a Jewish proud boast, oh yeah? See what you'll get. Never again. They're going to be dead saints, and if they live again, it's only because of the word that will proceed from you corporately, of one mind and one heart and one will when God shall command it, prophesy to those bones. If you have the faith to believe for that, and they still don't live, though they stand and flesh has come upon them, and they still need the spirit of God, and God says, prophesy to the wind, O son of man. The wind is the ruach of God himself. You're going to tell God what to do? You're going to command him that his spirit should enter that risen frame? I'm not that presumptuous, son. I'm spiritual. I wouldn't dare presume to say to God, commanding his spirit. I'm just Joe Dukes. If you will not, that nation remains in its death. If you're so spiritual that you cannot transcend your own limitations that have to do with your image and your spirituality, if that's more important to you than obedience, they perish. Oh, I tell you, I marvel at the faith of God that he's believing you for this. Whew! Lord, I believe, help all my unbelief. Thank you, Lord. So it's in this context, in the sense of cosmic drama whose conclusion is felt as imminent, what that word means, not eminent, imminent, is at hand, soon to come to pass. The Lord is at the door. The judge is at the door. There's a sense of immediacy, of urgency, of imminence that characterizes the true church. Don't ask me, oh, Lord, how long is this going to take? The issue is not chronology. The issue is expectancy. The early church 2,000 years ago had a greater sense of the imminence of the coming of the Lord than you. And he's at the door. So it's not the issue of chronology so much as a spiritual understanding of expectancy that is called urgent, imminent, near. And once you get that, what is Wal-Mart? What is a Seattle Mariners? What is anything? When this looms large, the conclusion of the age and the end of the whole cosmic drama that had its advent going back to Abraham, and that the final episodes devolve upon you. It eclipses all other categories and minimizes what has formerly held your attention as being substantial. For the powers of the air are masters of converting those things that are ultimate and making them to be transient and momentary, and taking the things that are irrelevant and making them to seem substantial and enduring. It's a whole inversion of values, and you have gone for it. You palpitate over the things that are ephemeral in passing and are entirely indifferent and unknowledgeable about that which is eternal. You have no sense of the immediacy that requires preparation and brings to the church, as only it can bring, a high seriousness that makes the church the church. It's no more, what carpet do we buy, or do we have a building program, or do we invite the speaker? Everything now is fixed in a kind of solemnity and high seriousness that demands of all the saints and not just the guy who's on the platform. We're in something together, and the proof of it is that we have even persuaded our kids, who have been going along, you know, nicely, but their heart is not really in it, and as soon as they begin to feel the sap of their own adolescence and their awakening of their sexual desires and see some of the heavily-breasted young women that, my God, they're coming to it much earlier than I ever knew, their little interest in going along to services will as quickly dissipate away. The test of the church that is the church is that we have persuaded our own children about the truth of what we are about, and it's not merely an adult culture to which we subscribe because we enjoy it. We're in something together of an ultimate kind, and though the kids don't know the word ultimate, the sense of that reality pervades their souls, and they don't need a youth program. They need a church that's apostolic, that's occupied with the ultimate purposes of God and knows that these issues are urgent because it's an authentic body and a serious threat to the powers of darkness, and such a people that follows do not love their lives unto death because they live consciously, willfully, and sacrificially as being the agents of Israel's salvation, whatever the cost. This is conscious and willful. That's something inadvertent that falls upon us, and we have to think, what do we do in such a moment? We anticipate what's coming. We have gone beyond mere sentimental identification with present Israel. We know that there's a drama of a much greater significance through which this people must pass in the last days, and they will be staggering down our dirt roads and over these mountains and hills and passes as the least of these, his brethren, because God says, I will meet with you in the wilderness of the nations face to face. If you are not that face, dear saints, with whom shall they meet? And if they meet you and they see only religious obligation, well, I guess I got through art said so, but I sure don't have a heart for this because what if I'm caught in extending mercy and taking them into my attic or into my basement who are stinking in rags, the least of these, my brethren, when do we see you hungry, thirsty, and in prison? If you didn't do it for the least of these, my brethren, even Steven Spielberg will be reduced to the least and Jerry Levin of Time Warner Corporation and every Jewish hotshot who is now rolling in the millions with homes here and there and yachts and boats will find themselves coming down out of the passes of these mountains and hills through thorns and thistles with stinking rags on their back and knocking at your back door. You better see in them the brethren of the Lord. You better see in them the Lord, even in their present unsaved condition. They'll not be cute and they're not even going to be grateful. They'll be mischievous and mean. Even in our best condition we're difficult. What will we be in our worst? And how will you react if we're not grateful for your hospitality and the risk that you're taking and taking us in? If you go sour on us and show your true nature which was only thinly disguised by amens and hallelujahs but when it's tested by the Jew shows that there has not been a depth of the sanctifying work of God because you do not exhibit the unconditional love of God. You're very conditional. You love people who meet this criteria, that criteria. You don't give your mercy to anyone except they deserve it. But where do we come to a place where these Jews who have always tested the church that has failed will not fail in this test? That when they come to us they're not going to see a grim face of religious obligation or worse they're going to see the gracious features of God. They're going to see an unconditional love and acceptance even though they constitute to us a threat and a peril for our lives. We still will welcome them and count it all privilege. No matter what it costs us we know there's an eternal reward. We're privileged to have part in their final redemption. They've never met a people like that. You'll move them to jealousy. But are you in that condition now? And how will you obtain it? In the church. That is the church. When we turn the seats around and look in each other's faces and go from glory to glory beholding in each other's faces the glory of God and have to deal now with our distemper our ugliness and bad humor and irritation at the loss of our privacy when you dare come in with our first calling and my hair was up in curlers and the husband's watching the football game and feel that your coming is an intrusion on our privacy instead of the welcome that the early church knew when saints went from house to house daily breaking bread. Israel is going to make you to be the church at last for you would not have sorted up yourself. You would have coveted your privacy more than the sanctifying work of God. You don't want to be bothered. You don't want to be dealt with. And you can hide in the obscurity of the pew in successful churches 500, 600, 700, 800, 1000 and never be recognized or called upon and go back from having attended the service into the privacy of your lifestyle unmolested but unchanged. I know what I'm talking about, saints. We've lived in a community for 26 years and I was found out in the first week. It's a humiliation to have your wife shout at the top of her lungs as you're going to the prayer meeting go tell them what a great saint you are. Slam! And the door bangs fall behind you and the shockwaves go out to the entire community and you come into the prayer meeting looking sheepish and spiritual knowing that everyone has heard your wife's robust cry. This is what keeps a true prophet from becoming false. Only this if you're going to be a holiday inn white-shoed spectacular who is the man of faith and power who comes down in the mystical moments and shows himself and goes back into the privacy of his own retreat bearing the same difficulties and unresolved perplexities that you struggle with. And you're looking up with such enwrapped admiration because she needs exactly what you need. The kind of commiseration solace, prayer, counsel that God intends for all the church the shepherds as well as the sheep when the church is the church and has turned its seats around and is facing one another as we in fact are or it will not be for the Jews what we ought. And I know you had not the incentive but if their coming and their restoration if the redeemed of the Lord returning to Zion is the coming of their king and his global rule then it's worth everything even our present suffering and that's what the church is before it's a glory. If you think the church is a place of pleasure and enjoyment not in its first function there's no greater anguish than the suffering of the church in the church as anyone knows who has been earnest in that relationship. That's what makes it authentic because it is conscious of these things and willfully appropriates it knowing that it requires sacrifice. It recognizes and accepts a mandate and task that compels it to the radical apprehension of the cross. Not as a adornment or a piece of architecture or a symbol but the reality that means death. Especially that death that we have so long postponed of our religious and spiritual self-life. That's where self hides itself in its last expression in our spirituality. That's where God finds us out in true church the cross. And with that finding is also the appropriation of the arisen and ascendant Christ life. We become the sons and daughters of the resurrection. That's how the Lord the Father declared the decree this day have I begotten you and I've given you the throne of David the holy hill of Zion as king and given you the nations and the Gentiles as your inheritance. This day I have declared the decree which day? The day of Jesus' nativity or the day of his resurrection? Thou art my son. You become a son in the day of your resurrection. The Lord's waiting for that from many who have not yet yielded up their lives unto death. And that's been a theme throughout all these days. I'm just suspicious about whether our coming forward is that appropriation. The Holy Spirit moment by moment explicit direction by God for situations for which our past experience could not have prepared us. New and unexpected difficulties, tensions, conditions that could not have been known. How do we move through them and accept that God in those electric moments when we're at a standstill not knowing this way or that when life and death is hanging on the decision and the movement of the body if we do not hear a prophecy or a tongue and an interpretation that rings out of the congregation not by some self-appointed prophet or prophetess whose carnal as all get out and the Lord says and gives you some trite banal kind of statement that cannot be God speaking but an electric word thus saith the Lord this way and not that go ye out against them the battle is not mine but yours saith the Lord and so when Judah heard that they went down on their faces because they knew that that was the word of the Lord because it came out of the mouth of the priest Jehoziel who was known in the congregation and whose character was tested he was not a flake. How much of our prophecies are exactly that? Spoken by presumptuous, carnal ill-formed, immature saints who want their voices heard or attention directed to themselves and we allow those statements to go by as being God. Don't think you don't pay a price for that. Don't think you're not dulled by that cheap acceptance that when the Lord does speak you'll be less disposed to be able to hear him because you have been dulled by the too easy acceptance of anything goes. My pastors were afraid to call into question something that is ostensibly spoken by the Spirit for they don't want to offend men because the perpetuation of the church is more important than the glory of God. Only a jealousy for the glory will give us a capacity to be willing to offend and to be offended and to call into question those dubious things that need to be examined so that we might have in the last days a true word from God in crisis moments that rings with the veracity and the authority of God and out of a tested vessel whose character we know because we know him. That's the intention of God for the gifts of the Spirit and not the charismatic misuse to which we have put them in our generation if indeed they were ever the real thing. The church that is the church covets the Holy Spirit, the gifts of the Spirit, the operation of the Spirit moment by moment. It's the Ruach HaKodesh, the Holy Spirit, not a convenience for us. And it's reflected in our prayer, it's reflected in our worship because prayer and worship are the statements of our authenticity, of the truth of our corporate life together. And when the powers of the air hear that true praise, true prayer, they are imperiled. Our church is not the conglomerate of individualities who are independent, whose focus is upon themselves, who have never been broken. But the reality of the body is considered to be the first and foremost purpose for the being of that people. Your career, family, job, security, secondary. The first purpose is the church, the body, the organic reality to which you're called that requires sacrifice, pain, suffering, humiliation to be that reality. And when you attain to it, you will see it measured and expressed in the truth of your prayer because it will not be your prayer so much that is religious and correct, but His prayer being expressed through you. And the worship, likewise, will not be something for our enjoyment as for His blessedness. The truth of our worship and the truth of our prayer is the truth of our reality. And we can't disguise that by turning up the amplifiers. It's the truth of our life together that also gives to the body a discernment both to recognize and to oppose the powers of darkness because Paul says, we wrestle not against flesh and blood but against the true evil, the powers of the air, the rulers of this world's darkness. But we wrestle, but only when there's a we. It's not individual virtuosos that are the knights in shining armor. It's the we that wrestles where there's no wrestling at all. But wrestling is ultimate conflict, ultimate combat. It's messy. You go down in the dirt. It's an issue of test of will as well as strength. Where is the we that wrestles? It's the statement of the truth of the body that discerns and opposes those configurations of powers over their own localities that have bound men for generations and will continue to do so until there rises up in that locality a piece of this apostolic reality that wrestles corporately and together in agonizing prayer and breaks the power because what it issues from you is authentic and it's the only thing that the powers of the air are compelled to recognize. And you didn't come to it cheaply. You came to it through suffering, through anguish, through humiliation, through disappointment, through disillusionment, not only in others but also in yourself. And that once-a-month communion stuff with the little plastic cup and wafer, that has long since gone down the drain. Now it's weekly. Now it's daily. Now you can't wait. It's more than an emblem and a symbol. It's the substance and spirit of the life of God himself that is his very enablement that he might be formed in us and give us the power to fulfill the thing that is beyond our ability. And we take it together, no longer as a symbol, a life-giving provision, a sacrament. And so all of the sacraments become sacramental. Baptism is no longer getting wet. Baptism is now a burial at issues in a resurrection unto newness of life. It's no longer a religious obligation. It's a transaction of death unto life. Sacraments that are become, that are made sacramental again, holy, because they are divine provisions for the church that is the church. And authority in the body, genuinely and authentically submitted to by its members because they recognize the anointing and call of those whom God has established as that authority. Not because of ecclesiastical title or office or credential obtained through a religious process, but because the character and the life and the substance of the one who is appointed is evident and recognized and welcomed by all the body as God's provision for its governance. We are no longer an opinionated, self-willed and autonomous people, individuals doing our own thing, calling our own shots, but a submitted, disciplined, sacrificial body. And our children reflect the truth of it in their willingness to participate. We have an apostolic mindset that sees everything in the light of eternity. So much so as to consider our present afflictions light and momentary. We take our strippings with joy. And don't think you'll not be stripped. As I have been. To come back to the farm and to find out that the guy whom I had entrusted with the property in those three years that we were in the grave and I was the first one back and gave this guy a break and a place to live and paid his child support payments and we acquired seven horses and bridles and leather harnesses to pull equipment because we were anticipating a day when you can either buy nor sell without the mark of Christ. And the guy calls me up in Chicago. I'm about to leave. He was a disjointed character and I was warned not to take him in, but I always am willing to risk for the hope of redemption. And now he was about to leave. What shall I take, he said, who came to me with nothing but two pigs and a dog. I said, well, I don't know. I thought to myself, take half. Three and a half horses each. And the brother who was with me said, let him take what he thinks is right. I said, take what you think is right. And I came back from the trip. All seven horses gone. All vehicles gone. All tools, equipment, nuts, bolts, every item gone. Even the very rope that was used to pull the hay up to the loft 40 years before that character appeared. He took that also. He took even the oak boards upon which the horses stood and urinated. And he was helped to empty me out by other believers who never ever thought, isn't this guy being excessive? Spiritual men. And I was stripped. And something rose up out of the depths of my gut that's called anger. And the Lord said, uh-uh. Take your stripping with joy. As they did, as the saints of old, knowing that they had in heaven a much greater recompense, knowing in themselves, not doctrinally, but in themselves, that whatever the loss in this earth, there's a much greater measure that will be eternal and abiding that enables us to take our strippings with joy, for nothing more defeats the powers of the air when we do not react humanly to distress and loss, but count it all privilege and joy for the glory. How do they say it? Eternal weight of glory. Because we know in ourselves we have a greater recompense in heaven. Because we are heavenly minded. Because we have our citizenship in heaven. We're not here as part of the culture and the civilization that is demonic. We're here as pilgrims, strangers, and sojourners that witnessed in the earth and to prepare a place of refuge for the flight of God's people Israel in the last day's distress, particularly if we come from locales that are in the wilderness and out of the beaten paths and away from urban centers. Dirt roads. Every time I see it, my spirit leaps. If you're on one, cherish that property. I tell you, the day is coming when I'll not be the first Jew, but there'll be others distressed, knocking on your door, and you've anticipated them and can receive them and show them the face of their God with joy. For it's not only your goods that will be threatened, but your life. So this is a whole lifestyle. It's the outworking of a decision as having been already consciously chosen and consistently maintained, which brings you into a conscious and unbroken continuum with the apostolic and prophetic past and the invisible cloud of witnesses that has preceded it. Whew. Only you could say that, Art. Yes, because only I know it. But you need to know it. Are you in a conscious and unbroken continuum with all that has preceded you in the history of the faith? Do you know that even now, this morning, there's a cloud of invisible witnesses over us who all died having received a good report but did not receive the promise, who are not yet complete without us, and they're looking upon us and egging us on and prompting us to go on and to fulfill the thing for which they suffered and died and which will require our suffering also? Do you know that? Do you pray for that? Lord, I pray that you will form a cloud of invisible witnesses over us who have had some part in the history of this locality and know what this drama is about. We need their active presence from the other side. Who thinks like that, apostolically and prophetically minded men? They are in an unbroken continuum with the whole treasure of the past. We have received the, what do you call it, when the runners pass on the... and where to bring it to the finish line. Unless you see that continuity consciously and rejoice for it, how shall you run your race? This is not some imaginative thing that I'm plucking out of the air, saints. This is definitive Christianity, but it has been lost to us and therefore we are rendered provincial, localized, fixed in our little culture and time, and have lost the whole cosmic expansiveness of that whole glorious past and its consummation in these last days. Got the picture? Okay, I'm going to conclude. You want to have part in this? It's going to cost you. And it may well culminate in martyrdom. But martyrdom has ever and always been the definitive calling of the Church. Not in the last moment's expiration, but in the character of its life continually. We live as martyrs, but we might die as martyrs. What is the last moment is the sum of all the moments that have preceded it. I'm living as a martyr. And it's a glorious thing. It's a freeing thing. So I want to call you to that. Only a church of that kind will move Israel to jealousy, and they have not seen it in their history. It waits for the last days, a final demonstration of which you are part, or God would not be speaking like this this morning and giving me all this time to do so. Let's pray. So we bless you, Lord. We love a serious God. It's not that you have not a sense of humor, for how could you have taken us so long without it? But you are serious. Your glory is at issue here, your coming and your kingdom, in which, in your chosenness, you have fixed your eye on a place called Zion, a hill. Lord, I'm sure there are more mountains that would have been impressive and more appropriate for your kingdom. The holy hill of Zion in that city of Jerusalem marked from pillar to post throughout its history with that people Israel stiff-necked, apostate, fallen, mocking, rebellious, insubordinate, blaspheming, and you've not given up on them, and you're still going to fulfill your promise and your calling that the gifts and callings of God are irrevocable, without repentance, that you've called them to be a nation of priests and a light into the world, and they'll be that even though they don't desire it and want to be like all other nations, you will still fulfill your word, your promise, and your call, for how are you God if you cannot succeed in fulfilling your word? And you're going to do it through the church? Come on, Lord. Have you looked around lately? See how easily manipulated we are? We're a bunch of easily manageable, manipulable people for excitement. You're going to bring us to apostolic and prophetic maturity? To a cross that is the cross and not a plastic equivalent thereof? To the embrace of suffering as privilege? To the consideration of martyrdom as a high and holy calling that we will know in ourselves that we'll have a recompense in heaven? That brings us joy when we should be murmuring and complaining about the loss? Lord, I admire your faith, but surely you have deserved it and given your life for it. And you will have it with the eternal praise of your glory forever. And I bless this church here, Lord, and I know that much of what you have expressed in me this morning is over their heads or rattles them or confuses them. They don't know how to take it in. If they can't even perceive, how shall they act it but by the grace of God? And I ask that grace, Lord, the grace of understanding, the mercy that enables us to fulfill it, because if we are not the receivers of your palpable mercy, how shall we extend mercy that they may obtain mercy? Let mercy not be a technical category, a little doctrine of mercy, but a real mercy of the kind that I have needed this morning to propagate and put these words before this people. And what will they need to fulfill them but the very same mercy. And that's your specialty, and I ask it for them. This is a called people. This is a select congregation. You have brought them out of the nooks and crannies, Lord. They may have come for the wrong motives. Nevertheless, you'll have your will. And I bless them. My God, let not a syllable fall to the ground. Let them rush for the books, for the tapes. Let them ponder and reflect. Let them resolve whatever it takes to be this kind of entity in my locality and in the world, in this cosmic drama, whatever the sacrifice, whatever the opposition of the powers of darkness who recognize my intention, yet do I make it. Don't leave me out. Don't pass me by. Don't give me any grounds for eternal regret that I lived an entire Christian life beneath your glory and missed the whole substance and point of my calling. I was a get-by saint with just those minimum of things that maintain my Christian respectability, but certainly not the embrace of anything that threatened my real interests. But the day of eternity will find me out. And I don't want to look to your coming with fear and dread. I want to look to it with joy, to receive, my God, my reward for my labors that were true labors because you appointed them well over my head and beyond my ability. But the grace and the life that is in the resurrection was my enablement. You didn't leave me an orphan. You called me beyond that which I am capable because I know if the Christianity that I'm in is liable to my ability, I'm out of the faith. It's an apostate Christianity rather than an apostolic. That faith which is the faith is beyond any ability in ourselves to fulfill, and therefore your life, the power that broke the bonds and fetters of death and ascended you on high, is our very provision. Oh, we're going to come to that communion table, Lord, with a new earnestness, a new desire. Talk about hungering and thirsting for the bread of life that has come down from heaven. It will not be for us a little puffy thing or little cubicle with a little plastic thing that we can take it alongside each other when we're given the signal. We'll rush to your holy table for the enablement, my God, of the life and the substance and the spirit in that broken bread that we may ourselves be it in our own generation and pour it out to the world, to the nations, and to your people, Israel. That's the faith, and we say yes to it this morning as if we're hearing it for the first time. This is the gospel of the kingdom, and when this gospel shall be proclaimed in all the earth, then will the end come. You, dear saints, I don't even want you to stand up at this invitation, but if in your heart, before the Most High, say, Lord, what art is describing, I can't quite follow it all, but I know it's true. I want that. I want to be part in that. I want to be a member in that body and that church that fulfills this destiny that might require of me much in the beginning, opposition, embarrassment, reproach, misunderstanding, in the end, maybe my bodily life, but I will count it all privilege, for I know that nothing can come to me except it be allowed from above. I can walk with great freedom in this life, so precious a calling and so great a provision. Are you settling that in your heart, saints? Are you saying yes, Lord? That is a true yes? Oh, it's going to cost you. You, dear precious black brothers and sisters, you're going to stand in between your outraged black kinsmen who are after the Jews because they're going to be moved to such a pitch of hatred against the Jews who have exploited them in their ghetto dwellings and have not paid them fair. I don't know how it's going to be, and you're going to stand in between and protect your Jewish kinsmen because your identification with the Jew and the sons of Israel, even in their unbelief, is greater than that of your own race. There's a special call upon you in the last days for Israel, and so every North American Indian, and so every race and every despised people whom the world has not regarded will be given a place of special prominence in the purposes of God toward the Jew in the last days. Your heads will be crowned with glory, even though you hope the blood will be coming down because the Hasidic, ultra- orthodox community in Brooklyn, New York is in a black ghetto. It's God's provision. We are in a North American Indian reservation. It's God's provision. So bless your saints, Lord. Hear their hearts, their yes, and require of them. That's what that yes means. When they get home, things are different. All of a sudden, their books, their magazines, the things that never before occurred to them, all of a sudden look differently, even offensive. The TV thing is an eyesore. It's no more the issue of just controlling the programs. It's its removal. This is serious. We're in something together that requires authentic spirituality, consecration, devotion, mourning, early risings, seeking the Lord, dwelling in His Word, loving the Psalms, reading the book of Proverbs, and wheresoever the Lord will take us in our daily journey in times of true devotion by which we learn Him and are like Him, for He's imparting the very substance and spirit of His life into us. Oh, I bless this people, Lord. Let me be for them something this morning and in these days more than just an interesting speaker. May I be the demonstration of the very reality to which they themselves are called. For they will attain it on no other basis than the measure that I have through the appropriation of the cross and death that we might have in your life. Your life is triumphant and we bless you for to you will be all the praise and glory forever and ever as Paul said. For of you and to you and through you are all things to whom be... Oh, the depth of the riches, both of the wisdom and the knowledge of God. How unsearchable are His judgments and His ways past finding God. For who has known the mind of the Lord who has been His counselor, who has first given to Him and it shall be recompensed to Him again. For of Him, you can join me in that, and through and to Him are all things to whom glory forever. Like the Apostle Paul, the church of the last days that can rightly be called apostolic has as its centerpiece this burning jealousy for the glory of God forever. And that will save you from every flaky thing that otherwise would have attracted and seduced you. Be jealous for His glory. Amen. I come all the way from Africa to come here to America. When I first landed