This sermon by Art Katz delves into the importance of authenticity, truth, and anointing in the church. He highlights the need for a genuine relationship with God, the dangers of religious clichés, and the prophetic anticipation of apocalyptic suffering for Israel. Art emphasizes the significance of standing with the oppressed, particularly Jews, in the last days and the necessity for sacrificial love and courage in the face of persecution.

Hello, thanks for joining us today. Our guest is Art Katz. He's renowned around the world for doing ministry. Quite a bit of ministry, I believe, Art. Messianic ministry, will we call it that? Well, occasionally. It's just service to the church. My Jewish people, when I can find them. Right. Now, you've just come off of a junket to Europe. Tell us a little bit about what you were doing there. Well, I was in England, France, Germany, Denmark, Belgium, just speaking into churches and ministers' conferences, varieties and diverse things that the Lord opens, just as here. It wasn't yesterday. We were at the pit at the University of North Carolina, where indeed I met a Jewish young man. So the Lord has us in varieties of places, full gospel occasions. Yes. Now, you've been traveling around the world, so you've been able to firsthand observe the church. Now, you have some very strong thoughts about the condition of the church, what state the church is in today. And I think last night at a home of a friend, Alex and Leah Jones, God really moved upon you in a very special way to talk about the church. How about kind of rehearse that again for our viewers today? Yeah, I'm happy for the opportunity because it's still very much in my heart. I'm simmering with it, and I think I'm sensing something of the Lord's grief for the condition of the church, the unreality of the church. And I think nowhere is it more flagrant than in, ironically, the Holy Spirit charismatic Pentecostal dimension. I don't have all that much contact with fundamental churches, but I think in a certain sense they may well be cleaner than we, who they make no profession of the gifts of the Spirit which we purport to have, and therefore they don't run into the kinds of excesses and abuses that we exhibit. So that was what the Lord had put on my heart last night. I have a paper here that I had composed before I left for this trip, and I do a lot of papers, and this one was stimulated by a paper given to me by a brother on the subject of anointing, in which his principal theme is that anointing is not some fixed phenomenon that God confers on individuals as if it were an office, an ecclesiastical office in the church, but something proportionate to one's actual authentic relationship with God in moment-by-moment obedience to the thing which he requires. And with it comes the spirit of revelation, and he gives the example of Peter recognizing that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, upon which the Lord says, upon this rock I will build my church, and that the rock is not even Peter himself, but rather the revelation that had come through the spirit in a moment given, which is to be the foundation of the church itself, the operation of God's spirit by those who are in true union with him. And so we've moved away from this moment-by-moment dependency in authentic relationship with God to somehow thinking that anointing is a fixed thing conferred upon certain men of faith and power, and that naivety requires us to turn up the amplifiers and give a sense of anointing or a certain loudness in the church, and now speaking in our activity, which the naive presume to think is anointing. And so last night's message was a call to authenticity, to reality, because God is the God of truth, and when we move off and away from that place and come to unreality, his spirit is not there, and we therefore compensate for it by turning up the dials, which further deepens the unreality and puts the church in a lamentable place and condition. Now I think both you and I were witnesses of this phenomenon the night before last at a full gospel event here in Durham. It had all of the trappings of the kinds of things by which men respond to the cues that are given and use words like revival and praise the Lord and I feel the presence of God. These have almost become cliched expressions, and we're expected to jump when we hear them, and we do, but it's not the prompting, in my opinion, of God's spirit, and the whole thing is becoming increasingly unreal. I call it surrealism. That's a form of art that is very exacting in its depicting of real things, but the whole thing that is depicted is unreal. I don't know if you've ever heard the name Salvador Dali, was a great surrealistic artist, painstaking attention to detail, but the actual thing that he was depicting was mirage, was an unreality, and we are lapsing into that, and either I'm in a poor condition myself or my condition is of such a kind that I'm picking up and discerning God's own sense of things and his grief. Now, I have an extra motivation for being concerned for the reality of the church, namely that the church is God's appointed agency in moving Jews to jealousy, and we Jews, even in our darkness, have a kind of unfailing radar that we can in a moment identify and sense whether something is real or feigned, and I think that we would be more relentless in identifying the phoniness of televangelist ministries than the church itself that has supported men right into their deceptions and into their moral failures and past their moral failures, where a Jew would have clicked him on the TV set and instantly had a reaction against the hype that has become so familiar to us that we don't even wince anymore. We become dull. You cannot be exposed to untruth and come away unscathed. Something is lost. Your spirit becomes dull, and then the next opportunity for being brought into an unreality is the greater, until, by a series of meetings and exposures and the whole content of that kind of thing, we become deceived and concerned that we're moving toward that. Yes. Okay, what I hear you say, Ennard, is that we're placing such an emphasis on the manifestation of a service. And the real tragedy that I heard you say is, too, that if a man gets up, even the people can put pressure on a man who is anointed to perform. And if he walks into the service and doesn't feel an anointing, he feels compelled to still do certain things, say certain things in certain manners to appear to have the anointing. That's good. Yeah. I think that if we were vigilant for the truth, instead of allowing ourselves to be boxed in like that and queued in to perform, we would blow the whistle and say, something's amiss here, I don't sense God's presence and I'm not going to allow you to manipulate me to produce something that will give you a high. Let's look and pray and see what it is that somehow has alienated God and find our way back to Him who is reality. And, of course, that would jar people and adversely affect the service and spoil it, perhaps. But God calls the church to be the ground and pillar of truth. And if we are unwilling for the risk of a spoiled service, if the show must go on, it will invariably become a show. And in that show and in that congregation are people who are hurting, whose marriages are threatened, whose family life is collapsing, whose own sense of integrity is failing and sense of God. And yet they're being brought into a certain environment, the milieu, an atmosphere in which they have to wear a kind of a chintzy smile and ain't we got fun and we're all spiritual and come out of that and go back again into their grayness and the unhappy situation that is at home and in their real life that is not met by the unreality to which they are exposed in the church. And then they think something is wrong with them, that they're not sufficiently spiritual, they're out of the spirit, when it's the system itself, the religious thing itself, that's at fault and of which they are the victim and the product. Yeah. Art, in the segment today, let's talk more about the anointing because the anointing oil, the Bible says, breaks the yoke. Yeah. And we're talking about that. I have been talking about that. We have folks coming into church, they're in trouble, they're hurting, they have real problems that are maybe kind of glazed over because of a super service and yet I know too, God does move in very tremendous ways in the lives of people in services but they have got to be able to leave there knowing that God has changed their life. And the anointing, let's talk about the anointing because we talked earlier that the anointing comes with the price. Yeah. Let's talk about that. In my opinion, and I've been a believer 32 years and could travel broadly, as we said at the beginning, the anointing is my life. If I'm not in the anointing of God, woe unto me and those who are hearing me because I have a kind of prophetic jealousy that any given moment of service is once and for all and shall not be given again. That there's a sense in which eternity hangs in the balance and life and death issues are being propounded and can only be propounded in the anointing of God. We're not talking about merchandise or making a sale. Great issues are at stake and can only go forth in the power of God. And so my sense is that the anointing oil is the measure of God's approval on the thing that is being spoken and performed. He anoints what he appoints. And when we move from that in the promotion of our own ministry, our own self, our own vanity, the Lord recoils. The Spirit of God is not attesting to that. And that's when we raise the decibels of our sound system to compensate. So I would say that a man has the measure of anointing in proportion to the consistency of his obedience to God. Which will often bring him into conflict with his own interests or the promotion of his own ministry or with those to whom he's ministering. There's got to be a certain kind of integrity and a ruthlessness, certainly a fearlessness with regard to accommodating men. And there are not many who are walking that way with any consistency that the oil of God would be upon them and that there would be a residue. Because it's not that God just doles it out by the spoonful for the moment. But as you know, often when we finish our time of ministry, the anointing yet lingers. Even sometimes so strongly we can't even fall asleep. The energy remains. Now in Zechariah 4, there's remarkable discussion about the two men who stand by the Lord and by the candlestick of God and feed it. And it says, and the oil or the anointing is within themselves. It's not that some artificial linkage, but that there's an accumulation of something that has come through obedience. It comes through prayer. It comes through anything in which there is a replication of the cross. A suffering. A suffering that is born in an obedience to the Lord. The willingness to suffer humiliation. To bring disappointments. To be disappointed even in ourselves. In other words, a suffering that need not be our experience if we're willing to, if we want to play it safe, to go along, to be promoted within a system. When we risk those things or have no interest in those things and we serve the purposes of God, as I did last night when people held their breath because I was virtually naming names. I cited the experience of the full gospel banquet that you and I attended the night before as a very example of the unreality that parades as anointing and is called even revival, where we saw a young minister get up and bring a series of cliched statements, even referring to the cross, but there was no explication of the cross. There was no word of the cross or requirement to face the cross in one's experience, but just to rev up the atmosphere and create a certain thing through verbiage. That's not going to build a residue of anointing or oil. A beautiful portion of scripture is about the virgins, the five wise virgins and the five foolish. The five wise had an abundance of oil beyond the requirement of the moment so that they didn't have to go fishing for it when the midnight hour came and the Lord called and the door was open for the wedding banquet, but the five foolish, their light was already flickering out. They had only oil to carry them to midnight, but not through it. And they missed out. And it's interesting that when they finally sought to get in, the Lord would not open the door to them and though they cried out, he said, I never knew you. It raises the question of what kind of oil did they have even until midnight? Was it some kind of synthetic equivalent of the true, seeing that he didn't know them? Because the oil is God's conferring of himself, his spirit, because the believer and the servant is in union with him according to his purpose and will. Or it might have been that they had a minimal oil that they had attained with prayer in petitions that had only to do with their own need. The residue that would have been sufficient as an abundance beyond that would have been prayers that go beyond our need. Now, I don't know if you'll remember, Frank, but virtually every word that was said in testimony that night that we attended had to do with me and mine. The benefit, the blessing, God gave me, he does for me, he will do for me, me, me, me, me, me. And I mean, it's true that, and I've been a recipient as all believers of the things that God gives and does. But when our whole Christian viewpoint is fixed at the level of what we will receive and our petitions and prayers is, Lord, do for me and give for me, there's no abundance beyond that. I think that the abundance, the extra oil, comes when our prayers go beyond our own interest and need to take up the things that have to do with the Lord's need. His name, his honor, his glory, his purpose, his will. And that the virgins lacked an abundance indicates that their petitions were fixed at the level of self. And I think that that's characteristic, unhappily, of most of the church today, even, and all the more painfully, the charismatic and the Pentecostal segment of it. Well, I think, too, Art, that we, as you mentioned, in our prayer life, most of it is directed toward us. Now, obviously, there are times where we have to direct prayers to our own needs, but we have to be praying for others, and more importantly, as you said, we've got to be praying for God's purposes, God's will. What do you want to accomplish through my life? What are you seeking to work in and through me? Now, a lot of people have this thing about praying that praying will exempt them from all the troubles of life, but yet when Daniel prayed, his praying put him in the lion's den. And it didn't extricate him from it until later. See, even when believers pray for revival, what they're wanting is a shot in the arm, a benefit and a blessing that would accrue to them. Now, it's interesting that two of the men that were with us that night, in fact, leaders in that chapter, were with us the next day at the pit at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. And the place was ringed around with students, black and white, overwhelmingly lost. And they came for the performance. They wanted to see me do my thing and preach in some kind of way of Paul and rivet the attention. That happened the previous time. This time, the Lord seemed to impress us not to publicly speak, but to go and seek out little knots of students and go one-on-one in conversation. And we did that for about two hours, and we had four or five of the richest conversations and challenges to men, and the last of which was with a Jewish young man himself. And I just rejoiced that I had stumbled on one of my own kinsmen. The thing is that the other two men sat talking to each other the entire length of time, and never once, though they were ostensibly filled with the Holy Spirit, and the night before, putting on such a performance of spirit of revival that is with them, but where was it when they were in contact with the lost, when eternity was hanging in the balance? Where was that vitality and anointing and spirit so ostensibly displayed the night before in the Christian cultural setting, which was a performance? The fact that they lacked it in the world, where it should have penetrated the unbelieving, was an embarrassing statement that maybe what they purported to have the night before, they did not in fact have. For if they had it, they would not have had to be encouraged or provoked to go and speak to students. The very life that is in them would have been pressing them for expression to the lost. So something is profoundly amiss, Frank. And you know how a prophetic man operates. He draws from the experience of the day, the grist of what is happening in the conjunction between that full gospel event that we attended and the next day at the pit, the contrast. And so it raises some very serious questions about truth, integrity, righteousness, the Word of God, our relationship with the Lord, and that what we have been exaggerating and building up in a kind of phraseological Christianity in key words that evoke certain responses is in fact not true. And God is the God of truth. And the Spirit is the Spirit of truth before it's the Spirit of power. And so we need to return to reality and to a God who is truth. In truth, we're going to find ourselves painfully deceived. And here's what I want to say, and here was my burden. I took a nap yesterday afternoon. I was wiped out. And then I had to get up and seek the Lord for that night's Word. And the impression that the Lord put upon my heart was this. Don't spare. Name names, so to speak. Identify and share with the men the experience through which you have passed with them. Without naming the name, they know who is being referred to. Because if they do not howl at the deviousness of their life and the deceit of it in the name of the Lord yet, what will happen in the day of the Lord's appearing and before the throne of His judgment when we stand before Him and in that moment, in the moment of eternity, we see as we are seeing and we recognize the fraudulence of our life too late to remedy any part of it. And we are fixed and stuck with that unreality for all eternity. It's an unspeakable shame. It's an eternal embarrassment without remedy. Every one of us have had experiences where we have been flushed with embarrassment. And there's a red burning and the most uncomfortable feeling when you're caught in moments like that. But praise God, the moment passes. But how about if it was fixed eternally and it never passed? God was giving men an opportunity last night to see their condition and the untruth of it and however well-meaning their intentions and thinking that they were even doing God's service and promoting that and to cry out an acknowledgement of its truth and ask for God's forgiveness. The Lord put upon my heart the word call, C-A-U-L. It's a biblical word, a Hebraic word about the call of the heart. It's a membrane that grows over the heart. It's a viscous, transparent kind of tissue that for every untruth, every lie, every deceit, every cutting of corners, every unfaithfulness, every taking of liberties where we don't insist upon the truth, something develops over our heart. It's the call of the heart. It's a membrane and it becomes thicker and thicker by every untruth until our hearts are rendered dull. The Spirit of God cannot come through that veil that is over our own heart that is the product of our own insincerity and our own deceit. And last night I used Psalm 24. The Lord quickened about who shall ascend the hill of the Lord? He who has clean hands, a pure heart, and has not given his soul over to vanity or to deceit. I will tell you that in my impression the overwhelming number of quote charismatic, spirit-filled, Pentecostal believers cannot ascend that hill. They have given themselves to deceit. The system itself encourages it. And on a few occasions when I get into churches like that and speak in the integrity of God the things that he gives, I tell you that people stop breathing. They know that a moment of truth has come that requires the most radical of adjustments. And the believers, many of them will respond, but the men, the officialdom whose positions and religious office is caught up with the system are defensive of it. And even on the recent trip from which we have returned in Australia we found that in two occasions where God spoke in a penetrating way which is his mercy they took the tapes out of circulation after my departure. Now they're going to be standing before the Lord one day and have to give account. Now what's the issue of ascending the mount of God? Why is it so critical that... and God raises the question who shall ascend? As if to say how many candidates are there? Who's even desirous of going up? Most of us like to remain at the plateau of familiarity in things that give us some vibes and kicks and warm feelings and sentimental things. We don't want to go up. Up is defying gravity. You get burs and sticky things in your legs. You pant for air. It's hard. But who will go up? Who will ascend the hill of the Lord who has a pure heart and clean hands and has not given his soul up to vanity? And then the Psalms 24 ends speaking about the king of glory and is at the gate as if to say he's waiting to come in but he'll not knock the gate down. He has restricted himself and imposed a condition upon himself that the gate must be opened by those who ascend the hill of God and have hands clean enough to throw the bowl that allows the king of glory to come in. Now if the king of glory did not come in at the pit at the University of North Carolina yesterday morning what eternal tragedy and loss to black and white if it was only a few well-meaning men speaking their cliches. In fact, those students told me we are so turned off by men who come and holler at us and insult us that we don't even recommend that you speak publicly because we're habituated to being turned off by those who have preceded you. That's why I had to go one-on-one. But whether we give them forced spiritual laws, a little cliched are you saved, brother? Or allow the king of glory to come in is the issue of having ascended the hill of God. In a word, the world is in desperate dying condition. I'll go further than that, Frank. I would say that in the South the South is at the verge and at the border of an enormous racial holocaust. The resentments and the bitternesses I'm being told this by believers that are mounting in the South and that no amount of civil legislation or political answer can handle the situation. We've tried that. There's got to be something from God and a mercy from God. The king of glory needs to come in to the social situation in the South by those who will allow him in who can throw the bolt who have ascended the hill. So our unreality, religiously, is costing us dearly and will eventuate in rivers of blood in the streets of Durham and Raleigh and places in Georgia where we have been unless there's a true church that can ascend that hill and throw the bolt that opens the gate that allows the king of glory to come in. The stakes are great. Talking about, and I guess maybe the politically correct term today is racial reconciliation. And yet the church, the genuine church should be at the heart of that. And yet there is so little progress whether in the South or anywhere, but as you said, the South, probably more than many places on either the white side or the black side where real efforts are being made. I mean, we talk it. We think it's a good idea. But yet our churches are not very much interracially mixed. Our friendships are not interracially mixed. Practically nothing. We talk it, and it's a good thing to talk about how we're going to go about it. What are the dangers we're facing now? As you mentioned, really dangers of some physical conflict if something doesn't turn this around. Well, as we said at the beginning, it's the anointing that breaks the yoke. And men whose hearts are bitter, who are captive to their own bitterness, resentment, and hatred need that yoke broken by an anointed word that is not some feigned religious cliché and how you're doing brother that is insincere. And so the anointing is the critical key and the issue of anointing is the issue of truth. The issue of authentic relationship with God because if we're not authentically related with Him in truth moment by moment, how shall we be related with men? And if we're not authentic with ourselves who are of the same race, the same religious persuasion, what shall we be expressing to those who are outside of our orbit and to whom we need to bring a greater reality? I said to someone about the outreach at the university the other day, the challenge is to bring to these students a reality greater than what they themselves know and esteem. And you cannot fabricate that. There's something ironic. I've been a believer for 32 years and struggling with these issues and I was a Jew who was turned off by Christianity for the first 35 years of my life because I could not stand clichés, empty vacuous phrases, cheap religious things that seemed even to be an obstruction to the progress of mankind and still are. There's something about the nature of that which is holy that if it's not jealously guarded and watched over, becomes the cruelest of deceptions and clichés. It becomes the introversion, the negation of what is holy. It becomes in a word, religion. And I said to one of the students who thought, well, are you giving me some religious talk here? I said, no. I said, Jesus came to bring us life and that more abundantly. And because we, the church, have not jealously guarded the life, have not lived in the life, have not been jealous for the spirit of the life, which can only go forth in truth, the life and the faith has degenerated into mere religion, into clichés and we're looking for revival to bring some kind of jumpstart to a very gray condition that needs a much deeper remedy than some kind of back thumpet slapping preacher who can string together a number of clichéd phrases with a hyped up ability and call that revival. In talking about revival and talking about what God is doing, I remember you mentioned this book the other night, Apostolic Conversion, Pretext for Reality, which is basically what we've been talking about. Give us a little background on how this came about and what some of the reactions were when you preached this message. This is a single message booklet, Frank, that is really the transcription of a spoken word. And that word came to a congregation in California that seemed to have it together. They were charismatic. They were prospering in the Lord and abounding in joy and happiness. And I said, what am I doing here, Lord? They were an uttermost success. And I was there for four nights. After two nights, I was despairing and crying out to God that I had treasure from the Lord to share, but there was a wall against which the word bounced back into my teeth. They simply were not receiving, and I sensed that somewhere in the unconscious realm they had covenanted so far and no further. Not only were they charismatic, but they were also wealthy. It was a very prosperous congregation, even financially. In fact, the home that we were staying, I don't know how many thousands of square feet of space, an outside three-storied garage, and a big boat. Well, maybe there's something there by which men will not want to go further because it will threaten and jeopardize their very substantial vested material interest, whether it's that or other things I don't know. I did know I was up against a brick wall, and what's the point of having a treasure and unable to share it? And so we fasted that third day and sought the Lord, and that night he gave this message on the anatomy of conversion. What is conversion? God would have all men to be converted, and so I say, many saved but few converted, and examined Paul's conversion experience to try to identify what are the critical factors by which a man will cry out, Lord, what would you have for me to do? And to live his entire apostolic life in the light of that continuing question. There are numbers, in fact I would suspect the overwhelming majority of even spiritual believers who have not once asked that question, let alone lived consistently in it, either not having the faith to believe that God would answer or not desiring an answer that would put them in opposition to their own self-interest. You can't seek the mind of the Lord and the will of God if you yet have some design for yourself. You've got to come to him on utterly naked ground that whatever his will is, as he will reveal it, we intend to do it. Well, when they heard that anointed word, it was so powerfully anointed, Frank, nothing could stand against it. These people went down, and it was more than a little ceremonial response. I mean, they were digging into the woodwork, and I don't know how long they were down. There were groans and cries that ascended to heaven that were real, and when they got up, I could see in their faces something had changed. That change has gone on now three years later. One-third of the congregation has left because this pastor has been so converted himself that his preaching has changed, and men meet with him now six o'clock in the morning daily, and they're seeking God's direction radically. It has thrown the church into a financial crisis. It has cost something, but something profound has happened. When I saw that, I said, this word needs to be in print, and that's what this booklet is. And so we would just commend it to anyone who's watching us who would like to have it. They can write our little ministry in northern Minnesota. We're up there in the frozen tundra and have been there for almost a quarter of a century in obedience to God. I'm a New Yorker, Frank. I'm a graduate of the University of California at Berkeley. I should be in some urbane, sophisticated center. I'm up in the boondocks. Why? Because God has called us there to prepare a place of refuge for Jews in last day's flight and distress in this very country. Unless the church will be converted radically and anointed radically, we cannot be to Jews in their final extremity what we must. So this is a significant booklet. There are other books, Reality, The Hope of Glory. Maybe some believers know of me and have heard of these books published by Morningstar, and the most recent is The Spirit of Truth. And if we miss it here, we miss it everywhere. And so if you can't get these in your local bookstore, by Art Katz, then write us in Minnesota, Route 2, La Porte, L-A-P-O-R-T-E, means in French, the door, Minnesota, M-N-5-6-4-6-1. So Ben Israel or Art Katz, Route 2. You don't even need the route number. In such a country, just Ben Israel or Art Katz, La Porte, Minnesota, 5-6-4-6-1. And we'd love to hear from the people who watch and their response to what we're sharing and about a newsletter that we publish seasonally and about our books and tapes. Art, let's talk some about your personal testimony because I think folks would be interested in how you, growing up as a Jewish boy, found Jesus Christ and accepted him as your Messiah when a large part of the Jewish nation still does not. Yeah. Well, I wasn't your little village atheist. I was a professional atheist and vehemently bitter against religion and Christianity most of all because I believed then, as most Jews do now, including my own mother, that Hitler was a Christian. Well, he's not a Muslim. He's not a Jew. What is he? Jews can't distinguish between born-again and nominal Christians. Every Gentile who is not a Muslim is a Christian and what we have suffered, we have suffered, quote, at Christian hands. Even the Crusaders, with the white crosses on their tunics, were Christians who burned, you know, in our synagogues and looted and pillaged our communities in Europe to finance their Crusades. And so we are born with an inveterate hostility against Christianity. I'll tell you that I could not even name the name of Jesus peaceably but only as a curse word, in anger. Oh, Jesus Christ, that kind of a thing. The call on the name of the Lord was one of the most excruciating moments of my life in my 35th year and if God had not given me the grace to overcome historic Jewish prejudice, I'd be dead today. The ability to call on his name was the birth of his life in me and it was a grace that was given because he knows the field that the enemy has had in corrupting that name for Jewish consideration. Not only what we have suffered historically in violence but even the thing that we were discussing earlier, the flakiness of Christianity is so beneath the level of integrity to be found in traditional Jewish religious life that why should we even be interested? So I had all of these prejudices and yet, because I had not God, I had ideology, I had philosophy, my life came to a crisis in its 34th year. I was teaching history in a high school in California. My marriage had failed to a German woman. How could it possibly succeed as a natural man? We were just opposing forces and I realized that I could raise questions with my students but I couldn't answer them. And so I took a year's leave of absence from the teaching profession to find philosophical answers. I mean, what else will an atheist look for? And I put a pack on my back and I traveled through Europe because we Jews have been so influential in shaping the Western world and I thought, if I'm going to find an answer, I've got to find it where philosophy and values have been created even by us because something is amiss. Our predicament is worsening. It's not just an odd cat who's in trouble. The world itself is on the verge of moral collapse, of atomic annihilation. The world is shot and I had no answers. My ideology could not answer. And so I kept a diary, a journal, through that experience and it's just remarkable that day by day I was noting that I was being picked up off the side of the road by an unusual kind of people. They were Gentiles but there was something in them that I could not identify beyond what a Gentile is. A warmth and a love and a depth of something, a peace that was challenging me and their words were remarkably penetrating. They were anointed words. Until finally I had gotten so stirred up that when the opportunity to read a New Testament came into my hands, I greedily took it. I was a teacher of history and I used to say to my students, now you've got to go to the primary source. I had never gone there myself as far as Jesus was concerned. I was turned off to Jesus from the cliched stereotype depictions of him that had come from those who do not know him as they ought. And yet the word Jesus is continually falling from their lips. I used to say, brother, it makes a Jew cringe. Do you know Jesus? What, you're a Hokie, you know? And so I got a copy aboard the deck of a tramp steamer by a Jewish fellow passenger who had been given it on the waterfront of New York City. And I began to read. I don't know how I got into the Gospel of John, but from the beginning I recognized that what I was reading was not human literature. There was an anointing, there was a vibrancy, a power in that book. And all of the men that I was reading about were Jews. Peter and John, these are names that we don't use today for Jews, but they were clearly Jewish men, and none more so than Jesus himself. And the figure of Jesus was so compelling that this man is either a megalomaniac, a madman, who thinks that he's sent of God and is allowing Jews to fall at his feet and worship him, and he doesn't rebuke them, and he says, Blessed art thou, or he is who men think him to be, who are honoring him as God. I could not, I mean, I can't tell you what a predicament, a radical predicament it brought me. One, put up or shut up, there's no middle ground here. And finally I came to the episode of the woman taken in adultery, and the adversaries of Jesus had the opportunity finally to be rid of this unsettling nuisance, and I was so gripped by the whole drama, the predicament of it, I understood what these religious men represented. The fact that they're Jews is incidental because we have exactly the same corollary among Gentile Christians today. Religious righteousness perfected by men and challenged by something that exudes from Jesus that cannot be identified. And now here's the chance to do him in because he had said he had not come to destroy the law but to fulfill it. And they said, Okay, wise guy, the law says death by stoning. This woman was caught in the very act. What do you say? I said, Well, he's finished now. What can he say? And I didn't want to see my new hero lost. I had lost other Jewish heroes, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud. Is this going to be another one? And so I kept my finger in the book and closed it, and I thought, Well, Katz, you're clever. Think of some answer that he could give. And I wrapped my Jewish brain up one side and down the other, Frank. And I came to that place finally where I thought, There's no human answer for the predicament that Jesus is in. And that's where exactly I needed to be brought because I had lived from human resource all my adult life, confidence in man and man's reason and man's wisdom and man's generosity and goodwill. But this is beyond man. If there's an answer now, it must be beyond man. And with trembling hands, I opened the book, and I'll tell you why my hands were trembling. I was caught in the act. I saw myself identified with that woman. I was a fornicator and an adulterer myself. I deserve stoning. I deserve the judgment of God. And so it was more than an academic interest for me. What can he say? And so I read on, and he was bent over the ground with his finger in the dirt. I don't know what he was inscribing. And he looked up into the faces of these indignant men and he spoke one line, as you know, Let him who is without sin cast the first stone. I'll tell you that literally, Frank, the line came up off the page into my eyes and into my brain. I began trembling like a leaf. And the remarkable thing is that the process did not stop with my brain because we Jews are brain-centered. The intelligence is the altar of our false god. But it went beyond my brain and into my heart like a sword cutting me in half. And I knew that I knew that I knew in that moment, in the power of God's revelation, there's a living God, this is his book, and Jesus is who he claims to be. Hallelujah. Praise God. That's a very astounding revelation. Exactly. That you have been able to take this same message, carry it around the world that Jesus Christ is the Messiah, the Lord and the Redeemer. Amen. Let's talk about, in this last segment, about what you're doing in your ministry, what you feel God wants you to do. I want you to touch again because I think if I heard you right, you were talking about in Minnesota you want a place where escaping Jews... Can I flatter you, Frank, publicly? This is one of the best interviews I have ever had, and I have had many. Your questions are perfect. Thank you. I look forward to answering this one. Good. Okay, but let's talk then about what you're doing, and let's touch, too, again, if you will, on the Minnesota location and how that relates to your ministry. Good. Okay. Should we, right now? Yes, yes. Oh, okay. I thought we had to take a pause. No, no. Okay. Well, I have a prophetic anticipation for my people Israel that is not in keeping with what most people who are even sympathetic to Israel expect. Namely, I'm expecting apocalyptic suffering that is described in Jeremiah 30 and 31 as the time of Jacob's trouble, and I believe that present political Zionist Israel is scheduled for disaster, and that God has even allowed the establishment of that state in order to have a presence of Jews in the Middle East that would trigger violent reaction against themselves, though they have up until now had his assist, so to speak, in wars that have preserved the nation, to bring it to a final place where there will be an eruption in which they will not succeed nor be preserved, but I believe will suffer a defeat and be cast out again into the nations and probably triggering reaction against Jews everywhere in the world. I'm expecting Jews in flight where they are in the world. Two-thirds of us are not in Israel but in the nations, and in Amos chapter 9 God says, I will sift you through the nations as one sifts corn in a sieve and not one grain shall fall to the ground. The remnant that will survive this final process of sifting and return to Zion will be the redeemed of the Lord, for whom mourning and sighing coming from this last day's tragic violence will pass away and everlasting joy will be upon their heads. But the sifting of God is not reserved for Israel only, but for the nations and for the church in the nations through the crisis that will come to it in having to observe these Jews being passed through in flight in a worldwide global hatred against them that will not leave one Jew alive that seeks their annihilation. And the only reason that any will survive will be the mercy that will come to Jews in that time as it is expressed to a church willing to take the risk of peril to itself in order to extend it. Can you see why I'm so concerned for the quality and the condition of the church? The way it is presently constituted today would give me very little hope that they would have a martyr's ability for the love of God, for the forwarding of his purposes, especially for Jews. Why should a Gentile extend himself for a Jew at risk of his own life except that he is so caught up in the purposes of God, so anticipates and understands what is happening historically and recognizes that the Lord himself is contained in the heavens waiting for the restoration of all things spoken by the prophets that pertains to Israel's last day's restoration, that this survival and return is the issue of the Lord's coming and with him the Lord's kingdom and with his kingdom righteousness and justice in the earth for all men. And so for that, sacrifice can be borne. And it's interesting that when the Lord comes after his establishment through Israel's restoration, his first throne judgment is predicated on one question only. What have you done for the least of these, my brethren? But Lord, when did we see you thirsty, naked, hungry, and in prison? As you did not do it for the least of these, my brethren, you did it not unto me. And those are cast out into the lake of fire reserved for the devil and his angels in an eternal torment for the failure of one thing, our response to the Jews in their humiliated condition of the last days, which is a replication of the Lord's own path to Calvary. When he was despised, when he was rejected, who identified with him? And so we will have another visible opportunity to see the issue of the cross and the suffering of the cross played out through Jews who don't even realize what they are depicting, but giving the nations one last opportunity to recognize in their distress the whole issue of the cross and of Jesus himself. And Israel, in its unbelief, in its own experience of their sufferings, having a key to understand and to recognize what his sufferings for them was, which they had repudiated and rejected, and therefore made inevitable their own. It may be that in the experience of their sufferings they'll recognize the Messiah who had come before them and in that way be open to receive him, that they might return as the redeemed of the Lord. It's a great final last days drama, and it is so real, Frank, that God is presently building places of refuge throughout this nation and elsewhere in the world, and we have been called to northern Minnesota supernaturally by the voice of the Lord 22 years ago and have been in a sub-zero frozen segment of the continent whose temperatures are almost invariably lower than that of Alaska. There's a funnel of arctic weather that comes through our place, and yet this is where the Lord called us, because it says in Ezekiel 20, I will meet with you in the wilderness of the nations. Jews that are caught in New York and Washington or Raleigh or any urban center have had it. The only hope for survival will come by being in the out-of-the-way places, but how will they survive? Who will feed them there? It's the picture of the woman in the wilderness who is given wings to escape the dragon seeking to devour her where a place has been prepared for her where she is fed for three and a half years. We are a part of the divine mechanism for Jewish survival in the last days, and I'm sure that there are viewers watching us here who are going to be shouting and leaping out of their chairs because the Lord had already spoken to their spirits that they would have participated in something, or they knew that something was coming, or they had a property, or they're in the prospect of buying one, that they knew that there was something, and they needed to hear a word that they're not off the wall, they're not mad that such a prospect can take place in the United States, that we will come to an anti-Christ time of such fierce racial hatred against Jews, what will that do for blacks, and what will it do for the church that stands with the oppressed, but to suffer with them as was true even in the Nazi time when Christians and Gentiles extended themselves for Jews and were caught, they suffered the fate of Jews, if not worse. Who has the courage, the will, to stand so in the last days? Well, I certainly, I know the question was posed, would you be willing to die for Christ, and someone said, well, the flesh, of course, would repel against that, but I trust God that if I should ever be called upon to die for him, that at that moment I will say I will die rather than deny Jesus Christ my Lord. Art, I appreciate so much you taking time out of your busy schedule, I know you're getting ready to leave here now and head to... Moravian Falls. Okay, and from there, you're just so busy and traveling so extensively, we wish you Godspeed. Thank you. And we'll try to keep our viewers in touch with what you're doing. We do have a prophetical school, I do stay home for the summer, because we have students coming to us from all over the world, where we examine these last days questions, the centrality of Israel and the purposes of God, the issues of the church, the prophetic and apostolic ministries, the issue of anointing the Holy Spirit, and so we welcome any response from the viewers who would like to visit and spend any portion of that summertime with us. We'd love to have them, of course. Thanks, Art, for being with us. My joy.