In this sermon, the speaker emphasizes the power of a shout in the spiritual realm. They explain that a shout of a certain quality and constitution has the ability to break the powers of darkness and bring victory. The speaker references the biblical story of the Israelites conquering Jericho by shouting and blowing trumpets. They also highlight the importance of resting in God's Sabbath and performing His works in that rest. The sermon concludes with a call to prayer and self-reflection on one's position in relation to God's calling.

Well, you all know the great episode of the taking of Jericho, and I just recommend strongly that you invest yourself in this portion of scripture again, not as some kind of tale, a piece of fiction, an account out of antiquity that has a slight historic import, but as the most vital and current thing before our consideration in this hour, because we have come full circle, and the Church now stands where that Israel stood then, preparatory to the taking of the land. The whole purpose of our being, the whole purpose of our salvation, and all that God has invested in us as preparation, is now for this. We are at the threshold. The earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof, the world and those who dwell in it, and God is wanting to make manifest in the entire earth the triumph that was won two thousand years ago at Calvary, the purpose for which is much larger than our personal salvation. It's the establishing of His rule and His reign, of bringing a sanity into the earth, economic, social, political, and in every way, a culture that has its origin in heaven rather than in hell, a basis for equality and relationship between races, sexes, in which the King is finally enthroned in all the earth. And that's our purpose and that's our calling. Because we've not seen it, because we've not attended it, our life is less than it ought. We've not been sufficiently motivated, as only this can. And I've been wondering all these years why I've been so occupied with the issue of maturity, and the maturity of the saints and my own, and now I understand the purpose for it. We're going to be scrutinized. We're going to be thoroughly examined. The world is going to probe us with its eyes, wanting to see a contradiction that is visible in receding chins and trembling lips and eyes that are downcast and afraid to look up and that are not resolute, voices with tremors rather than clarion calls, because there's compromise in the secret place of our life. We cannot call a nation to righteousness because we ourselves are not living in it. There's a preparation that's required in this hour if God is going to take the land through his people. He's out. He's captain of the host. He's not a patsy. He's not an errand boy to do our bidding. He's calling us to a militancy, a company of the saints and each man in his place, ready in that seventh day to give a shout that brings the wall down. I almost want to say that today's message is the anatomy of a shout, because this is not just a piece of verbal dexterity. This is not hoping against hope that something is going to work on that seventh day. If this shout does not work, not only are we of all men most to be pitied, but we of all men are finished. Instead of those Canaanites hulking in the shadows as this mighty valorous army comes in and does that city in, they come out and do us in. This is put up or shut up. There's no place of neutrality. There's no kind of a compromised settlement or resolution. It's either ultimate triumph or disaster and nothing in between. And I kind of like those terms. I like it that there's no other option. It's ultimate and utter and absolute. It always was, but we never saw it because we're living in a society that doesn't like these kinds of distinctions and categories. It likes what is mediated and approximate and maybe an if and how and what about and I guess and I'm only human. It doesn't like the absoluteness of God and the utterness of God. It likes to be relative and it depends on the circumstances. The whole spirit of the world is contrary to the absoluteness of God and is offended by it and the great pity is so also are his people. We must look up and behold the captain of the horse with his sword drawn. There's something in his eye. There's a single eyedness that needs to come into us also and what we are and the way we act will be in proportion to our beholding of him and not the Jericho that stands in the way. We've walked around it. We've looked at it. He's given us six days to behold it and we've really seen it. It is impressive. It's awesome. It blocks the way to all Canaan. It's a fortress in the way with double thick walls, 30 feet high, the outer wall six feet thick and the inner wall 15 feet thick. Nothing has ever so much as cracked that hardened exterior let alone brought it down and God says it's not to be done with explosives or missiles or the technology of men but a shout. But it's not just some ordinary charismatic shout hoping for the best. Coupled with burps and the other kinds of things that find expression through our overeating and indulgence. It's a shout of ultimate faith. It's expressed in a moment but it's the some statement of all our moments, of all of our living and if that living is improper, contradicted, compromised and not of faith, if our faith is only, what shall I say, doctrinal, outward, cerebral, plastic, it's a shout that will be defective and will bounce off the wall rather than bring them down flat. Joshua commanded the people in verse 10 of chapter 6 saying, You shall not shout nor let your voice be heard nor let a word proceed out of your mouth until the day I tell you, then shall you shout. I'll tell you if you have spiritual eyes, you need to wince in the reading of that because how would you like to be the one so commanded and there's something in you that rises up now and says, no one's going to tell me. That's why what proceeds, that shout and that moment of march is the cutting of a knife. Make these sharp knives and circumcise the children of Israel a second time. Cut away that fleshly thing that harbors and encourages rebellion, self-will, independence, double talking, critical spirit. Can you respond to this? Your voice shall not be heard. What an authority and it's coming to you through a man. You're commanded. We're not used to this kind of talk. This whole military meter, this flavor, this character of things is contrary to the spirit in which we have been brought up even charismatically speaking. We're civilians through and through and no one can tell us. We might agree but we don't like to be commanded and some wit has wisely remarked that the great miracle was not the walls coming down. It was God's people shutting up for seven days. It requires a circumcision that is a real cutting and the longer it has been delayed the more painful and bloody but it's absolutely necessary for them and for us and it requires also a discipline. A disciplined life, a disciplined living, a content, a structure, a character that is shaped in our lives in which that shout which is only a moment in the speaking is the sum total of all of the moments of the disciplined living which has preceded it. The statement of which is the room that you left this morning or your closet or your bathroom or your bookkeeping or the various other aspects of your life that show a disorderliness and a lack of order and discipline and requirement. And so it was that when Joshua had spoken to the people everything begins with the speaking. Everything begins with a word and it's a word that must be given. It's the rhema of God spoken through men. When you hear that word and you hear the command then you act and not until then. Can you get the sense of this? The initiative is from God. It comes in his appointed moment. It is his stratagem. It contradicts our intelligence, our reason, our will, what we would have thought the appropriate strategy for the taking of this great city. It doesn't come out of committees. It doesn't come through reason or analysis or what has been previously proven or approved or successful. It comes by that which is given by the rhema of the Spirit of God through the word in the moment of God's own timing. When you hear it through men then shall you shout and not before. Are you living so in anticipation of that? Are you presently so responding to things like that? Do you know what it means to wait for the thing that God alone initiates in his own time? Can you keep quiet until then? The whole coming through of Israel rested on one thing. Priests whose feet opened the waters and made them to stand as two banks, tremulous with tremendous tonnage waiting to burst and to come through and to inundate and to destroy. But so long as they stood firm with their feet in the midst of the Jordan, the rivers held and the whole of Israel passed through creaking slowly with its bubbas and zetas and grandmothers and grandfathers and the young and the old while these priests stood still in the Jordan. Do you think that's a slight accomplishment? Can you stand still in a river of death while everything that is before you by the natural eye is threatening your destruction? That kind of priesthood is not stamped off the assembly line. That's not some kind of cheapy ministry that you're going to learn in three-month discipleship school. It requires a profound preparation for men who are the first ones in and the last ones out and it's painful and costly. And until God will have such men, the Israel of God is yet locked up in the wilderness and the land is not yet taken. I might even give an invitation today for those who desire to be such candidates to be the priests and the bearers of the ark and those who will blow the trump that commands the shout who will be first ones in and last ones out. Not at a time when you can cross on your ability because God calls us to cross at flood stage at the time of the harvest which is now. Not when it's some little trickle of a stream if you've seen the Jordan where you take off your shoes and go over tipsy toe holding your shoes in your hand and rolling your cuffs up. He bids us cross when we cannot of our own ability do it because God will never call us to anything that we can accomplish of ourselves. Don't you know that yet? If you're living in a kind of Christianity that you can perform on the basis of your ability you're outside the faith. God has called us to the patently impossible and except that we go over in his time by his spirit by a faith which is given by a character which is tempered we don't go over and then when we cross we're circumcised. God cuts the flesh that we might find our place in the camp and be made whole. So when it's time to march around the city it's not where we elect to march. I like to be up this place or that place. I don't want this guy kicking his hand in my teeth. I don't like walking alongside this guy. I, I, I has been cut away on and left on the hill of Forskins. You're in the place that God has commanded and not the place that you desire by your own fleshly ambition and you'll stay in that place every day for six days and you'll walk around that five mile perimeter and you'll take a good look at those double thick walls. It's true they're made out of mud but humanly speaking they're awesome and formidable and powerfully impressive and God wants it, wants it to be rubbed into your eyeballs that your natural calculation says this isn't going to work. There's no way that a shout is going to bring that down. Maybe if there were an outer wall alone but the inner wall is twice the the thickness of the outer. That's, this is going to require Abrahamic faith because God did not call him to that till he was virtually a hundred years old and Sarah's womb was deadened and barren and then God gave him a word and called him out of his tent and said behold the stars your progeny that which comes forth out of your loins out of your body now as good as dead shall be as numberless as these stars and he believed God. The same faith that believes God whose body is now dead and who and the wife and the womb of whose wife is deadened because the word of God came to every appearance to the contrary is the same faith by which the walls come down and it's the only faith. It's Abrahamic and it's apostolic. It's not giddy, it's not glib, it's not running, rubbing a genie lamp, it's not a charismatic abracadabra in a hope for a Cadillacs. It's a powerful deep faith that is more than acceding to correct doctrine. It's a lifestyle. It's a mode of being. Are you moving from faith to faith? Are you growing in the faith? Are your eyes fixed on the things that are invisible and eternal as being more real than that which is temporal and seen? It's going to take a struggle. It's going to take a battle with the eyeballs not to be impressed by the things that are visible. One of the difficulties of last night were people getting up and moving around as I was speaking. Talk about the lack of discipline, the restlessness that was in the congregation. Supposing you were commanded not to move, not to speak. Could you even do it through the course of a service let alone for six days? I don't have a word to describe the extraordinary requirement of faith. The particular character of this kind of faith, the true faith alone that will bring the wall down, that allows us to go in every man before him and take this city. What our present church experience ought to be is a preparation for and a continual growth in that faith from faith to faith. Right now we're shot through with humanism, idealism, dullness of mind, of heart, and of spirit, and unbelief, and fear, and timidity. We look at ourselves and we look at at our impossibilities. We're intimidated by our own weakness as we behold ourselves. What shall we say then of double thick walls five miles around? There's something that God wants rubbed right into our consciousness and it says of Abraham that he hoped against hope. He believed in order that he might become a father of many nations. So shall your descendants be. Are you a descendant of Abraham this morning? I didn't ask if you were born Jewish because that doesn't of itself provide anything. So shall your descendants be the sons and daughters of faith who hope against hope. The Amplified says for Abraham, human reasoning for hope being gone. Hallelujah. How'd you like to come to that place where the human reasons for hope are gone? That's why you walk around it six days. It's the number of man God wants you to see. It's impossible. Nothing that you can do is going to accomplish it. He wants you to see those walls till it's so much in your eyes and in your brain that only a believing, only a faith contrary to all that is visible, natural, carnal, sensual, earthly will bring those walls down. He's not going to allow the land to be taken on any basis other than that. Leave your missiles home and your TNT and your explosives. God's cities and his land must be taken in his way or it will not be taken. The just shall live by faith and conquer by faith and triumph by faith and this is more than victory. Victory is just winning, squeaking through, removing the thing that it was for us, the threat and the jeopardy to our life and our security that we can breathe free. The rockets are no longer coming, shooting their missiles upon us from Lebanon. The terrorist threat somehow has been aborted and pushed back. That may be victory if it's victory at all, but it's not triumph. You say what's the difference between victory and triumph? Victory has to do with the things that alleviate us from that which is a threat to our security, but triumph eventuates in that which pertains to the glory of God and God's, the land, Canaan is going to be taken in triumph. The basis for it is in triumph. It's the triumph of the cross and that's why when the moment came on the seventh day, Joshua said, at the seventh time in verse 16 of the sixth chapter, came about at the seventh time, is not a good number? Six is the end of human, of everything that can be humanly exhausted, but on the seventh day, seven times around after 35 miles of walking, nothing left of you at all that can take anything. The trumpets blasted seven times on the seventh day, on seven times around on the number of rest and in that they went in and they took the city. Make a footnote. Will you make a note? Are you taking notes? What are you here to be entertained? The glorious works of God by which the triumph of Christ shall be made manifest in every place through the heroic labor of God's people in the face of jeopardy and terror and opposition of all kinds shall be performed in the Sabbath rest of God or it shall not be performed at all. My dear brother Matt said last night, Art, you were speaking out of the rest. That's right. And I'm speaking out of it today, though I had only about four hours sleep last night. And I don't think I've had enough hours of sleep in the last three days to constitute one day's worth. It's remarkable. The more the message has to do with the resurrection power and the life and the authority of God that is given, the less I'm allowed to speak it out of the sap of my own natural life. God is going to have us to take the land out of the exhaustion of our own natural prowess. And it's going to be out of the rest of faith or it's not going to be at all. It's going to be on the seventh day, seven times around when the seven trumpets blast, then shall you shout. When every human reason is against shouting, against going in, when you think that you're prostrated and been extended beyond any human ability, that you should have reserved something now to take that city, then God says go. Are you living like that presently? You know what the church presently operates? On the basis of what it thinks it can do. That's why I love this guy. What, a hundred million orphans a year? That's not on the basis of what you can do. That's on the basis of what he can do. We've said, well, let's see, what can we do? We've got a congregation this size. We've have an average budget that runs approximately about this. We on that basis can do this. That's not faith. That's human speculation. That's arithmetic. That's calculation. There needs to be an enlargement, not on the basis of how we view ourselves and what is the possibility from that thing that is given, but the viewing of God who is infinite and unlimited in his possibilities. By which thing do you view? How do you see? And it came about at the seventh time when the priest blew the trumpets. Joshua said to the people, shout. Is your life a preparation for that kind of act? Faith which is an act, because that which is not of faith is sin. And the shout that is given in sin bounces off the walls, but does not bring them down. The Lord has given you. Where? At Calvary. Has given you. The power, the triumph, the overcoming ability has already been rendered. He's made an open spoil of the enemy. He has the keys of death and hell. And though you've been looking at those walls for seven days now, six every day for six days and seven times on the seventh day, that's 13 times you've perceived the walls. It's not an auspicious number. And on the word that he has now given to you, go in, shout for the Lord has given you the city. Have you that faith, that believing? Will you go as act before you see the walls come? Will you shout and shout all together in one moment as one shout all of God's people? Not those who are waiting to see first and then they'll come in with their voices, but in the instant of the word that comes, one shout as one voice from all of the diversity of God's people, black and white, young and old, male and female, Jew and Gentile. I'll tell you, this is more than ecumenicism. We're going to be a one mind, one heart, one spirit, one agreement. Because when God says shout, he wants one shout. And it had better be one or we're going to be destroyed rather than be destroyers. We are in preparation right now for that. And whatever stands in the way of that one voice and one shout, our individualism, our opinions, our this, our that, I don't like, I don't know, who's to say, maybe this is not reasonable, has got to be dealt with by God. There's got to be a crossing over folks from a wilderness kind of bumbling about in which we have wallowed in the individualism that the world has encouraged to a crossing over to a place of discipline as another kind of people best described by one word, an army with each man in his place. Not a bunch of automatons, as I said last night, who are mindless and go in as if they're jerked by strings as puppets, but full orbed men and women, deeply alive in God, utter individuals in the choicest and deepest meaning of that word, but disciplined to respond in the moment of God to the authority of God as it comes to them through the men of God who are called to authority over them. Then shall you shout when I shall command you. This shout, though it comes in a moment and I never tire of talking about it, is the exclamation of a total life lived in the spirit. It's not taking a deep breath and hoping against hope that it might, it's going to work. It's this, it's a statement of the sum total of all of our moments. And I want to spend the balance of my time just talking about the anatomy of a shout. And I'm quoting from a little book called Helps to Holiness by a Samuel Brangle, which I received as Christmas present from a local Christian bookstore, a Salvation Army officer of whom I'd never heard, who has a chapter on shouting. Praise God for one man who knows the unspeakable profundity of the phenomenon of the shout. There's a secret spring of power, he writes, and victory in shouting. It is a secret spring of power. The devil throws a spell over people which can be broken in no other way. Have you ever heard feeble prayer in which you say the correct thing and it is absolutely powerless to affect anything? And the exact same words had it been spoken, an exclamation in believing expressed as shout would have set the prisoner free. You say, what's the difference? The words are exactly the same, but the spirit of the speaking is contrary. One is timid, tentative, kind of faintly hopeful, waiting to see if it will work. And the other is the absolute exclamation of a faith that has no disparities and no contradictions because it comes out of a life that has lived in a righteousness of God in utter consistency. The reason why that which is not of faith is sin is because your sinful dispositions, your practices, your mindsets, and your indulgences have kept you from the absoluteness of a faith that has no loopholes, no waverings. It's resonant with an absolute assurance which is natural to a life that has lived in the righteousness of God that is pure. That's why I say again this shout in that moment is not just an act of verbal dexterity. It's a statement of the purity of the army of God. It's a statement of its character in God. It's a statement of its discipline in God. Everything is summed up in the quality of that shout. It's the secret spring of power. It's the key to victory. And it breaks the powers of darkness that cannot be broken in any other way. Nothing else can bring down the walls but a shout of this constitution. It sweeps everything before it. It's not just a raucous empty noise. It's not just a loud thing. It's a qualitative thing. It's not the firing of blanks. There's an explosive power, a penetration. There's something so compacted, so built in, the temperedness of this whole body of faith in a tremendous unanimity of spirit, a oneness of seeing and agreement with God and with his word, a response to the rhema of God. Now, a people who are accustomed to a being commanded and will obey in that moment is all summed up and expressed in that explosive shout. It's the statement of what takes place in us in the secret places. And what happens in the public place standing before the walls is the sum total of what has taken place and everything that has proceeded in the secret places. Oh, do you understand me? God is calling for an earnestness in this hour who sees us in the secret places in which we think we're not seen. But I'll tell you what, what happens in that public place and in that public moment is the sum total of all the things that have gone on privately, secretly and unseen. And this is the motive to clean us up in those private places. There are people who wait on God in secret places, who seek his face with their whole hearts, who groan in prayer with an honorable longing to know God in all his fullness and to see his kingdom come with power, who plead the promises, who search the word of God and meditate on it day and night. They are full of the great and thorough truths of God. Their faith is made perfect. This has got to be a perfect faith. It has got to be a perfect shout. And it's something that is made. It took Abraham 25 or so years to come to it, that he could believe God contrary to his own body now dead. And church is not church, except all of its services, its activities and its teachings are that which will promote, encourage and build and make this kind of faith, this kind of living. This is a faith which is a total lifestyle. It's a mode of being. It's a totality of things that has a whole view that includes the lifestyle, the way we spend our time, our thoughts, the renewed mind, the attitude, the expectancy, the urgency that is all summed up in the word faith made perfect, that is full of the great and thorough truths of God because we are continually steeped in it. We have no room in our life for small talk, for frivolity, for things that are merely light. We don't put our feet up on the coffee table and take in the ball game. We have closed ourselves off from the corrupting leavens of the world. There's a purity and intensity, a single-eyedness in all of God's people. I wrote in the margin, not what is summoned in the moment, but the statement of all our moments in the communion of special dealings in the unseen and secret places of God is what is expressed in that show. Do you have secret dealings with God? Have you been dealt with? Is there a communion of suffering where the Lord has been invited and welcomed to deal with you in the secret places? Or you have no stomach for that kind of thing because it is the consequence of that, the sum total of all the moments of that, that is expressed in the moment of shout. So when God opened the door for us in Tanzania to come into the home of the head of the supreme court and the department of the ministry of justice, we did not come in feebly and with reservation and tentatively hoping to say something that perhaps might be impressive. We came in resolutely, clearly, authoritatively and powerfully in that moment that took us by surprise and for which we were not prepared in that moment. But every moment that had preceded that moment was its preparation. Are you willing to be so prepared? I want to repeat again, this army is not a conscripted army. You're not drafted. It is utterly voluntary and so also is its preparation. And you're not going to get out easy today, I'm telling you. You're not just going to hear words like these and leave and then question debate whether you enjoyed it or not. You're going to sign up or you're going to refuse a summons to the army of God. And I'm meeting people and I know people in the city who have responded to previous invitations and everything has changed. Everything has been affected. It was in Kansas City that we gave the message some years ago of the crossing of the Jordan. And there are people in this room today who stood up then whose lives have not been the same from that crossing. And this morning is going to be something like that. God is not playing. He's not just giving messages to titillate our ears and that we might enjoy scripturally. His message is a call. It's the very trumpet self. It is his shout. What happens in the critical once and for all public place, the historical and irretrievable moment is determined in the sum of all our previous moments. I'm glad this is going on tape because there's no way that you can understand this now. You'll need to hear this several times over. I wrote this somewhere in the morning hours between 1 a.m. and I don't know what happens in the critical once and for all public place standing before the walls of Jericho in that historical and irretrievable once and for all moment is determined in the sum of all our previous moments. How are your moments now? How is your life now being lived? Casually, indifferently, sloppily, slovenly. God is waiting for a whole people who give one shout. And when all the people shouted, see, we're in this together or else God wouldn't be sending preachers like this to Chicago to sound this word and to Wisconsin and then to Kansas City. We're all in this together. These walls will not come down till it's one shout from all of God's people. What, you thought that you were an observer? You like to be in the congregation and hide in the obscurity of the pew? You like to slink in your seat and just look out enough to see the head of the speaker but not to be conspicuous where you might be pointed out? You've been spoiled by a distorted faith that is not the faith at all. God has not called us to a spectator game. He's called us to a radical involvement and participation in which each man must be in his place. Do you know what your place is in the army of God? You'll never know it except you first cross through a river of death and come up on the other side and submit yourself to the cuttings of God and be made whole and find your place in the camp. This brother writes, nothing fills hell with dismay like a reckless daredevil shouting faith. I had to just cross out a few words and fill in my own. I don't like the idea of reckless. This isn't the kind of a recklessness where you hope it's going to work. I think abandoned may be a better word. Nothing fills hell with dismay as an abandoned shout of faith and a total faith that believes it's going to come down. Nothing can stand before a man with a genuine shout in his soul. Earth and hell flee before him. The wall fell down flat. Victory always comes when a man dares to trust God and express his faith in a shout. Shouting is the final and highest expression of faith made perfect. Even though you've seen the walls 13 times, still will you shout and there won't be a tremor of unbelief or doubt or fear or apprehension to be found in the tenor of your voice. How are you fixed now? How are your voices now? What do they betray now? Fear, apprehension, uncertainty, doubt, unbelief. God is calling us to a crossing over and to the welcoming of his dealings and his cuttings to the growth from faith to faith that gives 75% of its income. People have said, well Art, I'm not living in your kind of situation. You guys are up there in northern Minnesota living by faith, trusting God to meet the needs of 55, 60 people three times a day and feed and clothe and house you and keep you warm in those severe Minnesota winters. But I'm a professional. I live in Kansas City. I have a handsome income. So the Lord has given me a different kind of lifestyle. Well, no one is compelling you to live up to your means, certainly not beyond it. But have you ever thought of living beneath it? Voluntarily giving away 75% of it and living under 25% and trusting God not for the for the hi-fi but for the bread on the table? The just shall live by faith and it's got to begin now. We've got to welcome the radicalizing of our life and not allow the conditions of our life to be determined by the norms that prevail in Kansas City or in Johnson County, but in heaven! For it's a kingdom of heaven that God wants on the earth and not the standard of living that has been conventionally established according to what we are able in terms of the present economy. God has not called you to live on the basis of it, but on the basis of the king and his requirement. Our ministry in East Germany, where we've gone back now countless times and God has given us great grace and favor with most outstanding saints, began by coming on a Friday night to a charismatic prayer meeting where the cream of the crop was assembled. The choicest of God's people in the great city of Leipzig. And they gave me 10 minutes to bring a Grußwort, a word of greeting, because you're not legally allowed to preach. And the word that God gave me was that they shouldn't feel sorry for themselves because they're living in a communist regime and that they're under severe restriction and that they don't have the kind of latitude and freedom of movement that their western Christian brothers have and that they're living in a deprived economy and have not the affluence and the enjoyments of their western counterparts. Because I said, I know of saints who are living in the West, whose standard of living is less than your own and whose freedom of movement and imposition and restriction is more severe than your own. And I was speaking about ourselves, but I didn't tell them. See, we can't jump into a car when we want to and go into town to get a tube of toothpaste and a shoestring. But the real reason is that our eyes itch for the voluptuous and sensual delights that come in just walking through the shopping mall, because we need an alternative to our boredom, because we're tired of looking at the same saints. We can't go when we want to go merely because we have cars that are physically available. There's a God who has moderated our lifestyle and is tightening the screws and bringing us into a heavenly discipline. And God is saying that the army that is going to come to me is going to welcome also involuntarily receive the restrictions and the disciplines that I will impose and not the lifestyle that the society would have you to wallow in. Voluptuous, sensual, carnal, full of distraction, accessible and at your fingertips by turning on a dial, flipping a switch, jumping into the car. When we came into the community situation in Minnesota, it wasn't long that my youngest son, who was then 10, said, Daddy, say, can you bring me into Bemidji and take me to the shopping mall? I said, what do you want to get? Oh, he said, I don't want to get anything. He said, I just want to see. That kind of seeing ruins faith. We need to look upon the things that are invisible and eternal. And it's going to take a battle to discipline our eyeballs and take them away from the voluptuous and seductive things in which the world wants us always occupied, contrary to the spirit of faith. To see the triumph to which God is calling us that is yet presently invisible, or there'll not be a shout that will bring walls down. I feel so frustrated this morning. I'm cramming in one message, what should take five days to be patiently and carefully examined. And I pray that you're hearing not only the words, but the spirit of the speaking and the urgency and a growing awareness and a conviction that the world has done a number on us, that we've been talking the vocabulary of the kingdom of God, but we've been living in another kingdom contrary to it. It's the kingdom of this present world. Another mode, another lifestyle from which Daniel radically separated himself and would not defile himself by eating at the king's table. And to that man was afforded a vision of a kingdom that filled the whole earth thousands of years before it was ever expressed in New Testament writings. Shouting is the final and highest expression of faith. It looks to Jesus only for victory. And by faith, fully and fearlessly grasps the blessing with confidence and with a shout. It's not a faith that is weak or mixed with doubt and fear. When it is perfect, it will explode in the moment in which God summons it. Is all your life an anticipation for that moment and a preparation for that moment? Or is your life presently live unto yourself and for yourself? And you thought that faith was coming to the Sunday services, the midweek Bible study, and putting your tithes in the collection plate. That is so minimal, so beneath the requirement of God for this hour that I have not sufficient words to disparage it. And yet how many Christians are complimented for that kind of consistency and made to believe that that is the standard to which we should all aspire? I want to say it's beneath the apostolic standard. It's beneath the standard necessary to bring down the walls with a shout. God, what doesn't want us to talk about mountains, he wants us to move mountains. You notice the character of our prayer. We say, Lord, you know this, you know that, and you see the situation and how difficult this is. And I pray, Lord, that you'll help. And the Lord's waiting for us to speak the word that will move the mountain, not describe the mountain. He knows what it is. He doesn't want an attitude of faith, he wants an act of faith. That's authoritative. See, they had the ark of the Lord with them as they marched around for seven days and on the seventh day. But when the moment came, they didn't turn to look to the ark for the shout of God to come out of the ark, though he was present, it had to come out of them. That's the faith that moves the, that brings the walls down and moves the mountain. It's not, Lord, we ask you to take care of this problem of demoniacal activity and satanic opposition, and that you would remove from us this problem and this distraction. He's waiting for you to do it. He's given you authority. He wants you to express it out of your mouth. And together, the ark was present but silent. And God has delegated, I wrote this somewhere in the early morning hours, I hope I can read my writing, has delegated the authority to his church as a militant company in the one shout that comes alone in true unity of spirit and not false ecumenicism. God has delegated to us the authority. That shout is not going to come out of the ark. It's got to come out of us. The ark was there, but it was silent, though present. And it's the shout that comes not from a bunch of ramshackle, loose-ended individuals who happen to be stumbling around the city, but a militant company in the disciplined order of God who shout as with one voice in the true unity of the spirit and not some kind of hokey and false ecumenicism. You can believe that when God is after something, Satan is also trying to counterfeit that reality in the same moment in some cheap and easier way than that which God is seeking to obtain. Where there is victory, there is shouting. And when there is no shouting, faith and patience are in retreat. You know what that shout is? It's a shout of such totality that there's no prospect or possibility of retreat. It's going in or perishing. As for me, I would rather perish in the moment of the shout that somehow did not succeed than I should have some reserve clause in the back of my mind or some escape stratagem of what to do if the shout doesn't work. I want to abandon all to the efficacy of the shout and I'm prepared to perish that in the event that it should fail, then I should find some other way to retract and to escape and preserve myself. You understand what I'm saying? The shout will not work if you have an escape clause mentality. It has got to be in an utterness and a totality to God unto death that will perish or it will not bring the wall down. The shout of ultimate faith, that perfect faith that brings walls down, is issued by armies that would rather perish believing than have a reserve of a cowardly retreat if their faith should fail. Praise God for the technology of tapes. This is more than can be heard or understood in a single hearing and I pray that you'll study it and even study it together. The shout is ultimate faith without reservation, undiminished by sinful doubt or fear. So the people shouted in verse 20, and the priest blew the trumpets and it came about when the people heard the sound of the trumpet that the people shouted with a great shout and every wall fell down flat. So the people went up into the city, every man straight ahead, and they took the city. Glory, huh? Sounds great, but I want you to know it's not antiseptic. It's not some neat little operation in which you don't become besplattered with blood. The taking of the city is a violent thing and it's a bloody thing and it's not a neat and antiseptic thing. It's a soldierly thing for which there's no room for squeamishness or humanism or sentimentality because taking the city is defined in the 21st verse and they utterly destroyed everything. Can you be that ruthless? Oh, I don't have a heart for that. I mean these beautiful Canaanite women, I mean it's not their fault that their men are lustful and practice every kind of sodomite thing and bestiality with animals and here's a young girl where she's hardly out of puberty. Surely she can be retrained. We'll send her to our Bible school. She'll get converted. In that moment, God doesn't want your squeamish humanisms. He doesn't want your conditional obedience. He wants a total obedience that is unsparing and the remarkable thing is this isn't by some dulled army that is implacable and blind and indifferent to the total destruction that is required and yet they perform it. Oh children, you can understand me now. If you can understand me now. I want to say that in the moment that the walls go down, it's only the beginning, not the end. Then we go in and utterly destroy the city because God's judgment is upon it totally and if you have no stomach for the judgment of God, you'll be found out in that moment. If you have a reserve clause in your heart, if you like his kindness and his goodness and his mercy and his love but you have not reckoned on and equally admired and loved and been in fear of and reverence of his judgment, you have been making a God in your own image who is not the God of the captain of the host. There's a reason why our bodies are so weak and shot through with corruption. Why pastors are afraid to point the finger and identify the sins of their people. Why they marry and remarry and why divorce is becoming widespread even in charismatic circles. We will not judge. We're more afraid of man than we are of God. We always want to make nice. We're patsies. We've been suckered into something soft and easy. Judgment is as much an attribute of God as his mercy. As a matter of fact, mercy has no meaning independent of his judgment. Mercy and judgment must meet and kiss righteousness and truth and if we will balk in that moment after the walls have gone down, we shall have failed in accomplishing the purpose of God. If there's some tremor of humanism that lingers in you, some soft kind of sentimentality that wants to spare, that cannot bring itself to the ruthless utterness of total obedience to God, you'll be found out in that moment. That's why every moment now needs to be in preparation. I'm not talking about implacable murderers who just go in and have a lust for blood and enjoy it. I'm talking about a sensitive people who wince but are obedient nevertheless. When people come up to me after a message and say, Art, how could you have said that? Wow, weren't you afraid? How can you speak like that? I said, dear brother, to be obedient to speak is not the fearful thing. It's to be disobedient that frightens me. Obedience is absolute or it's disobedient and as God had you to perceive the walls and God had Abraham to contemplate his mortality and his body now dead in the deadness of Sarah's womb, you'll meet also to contemplate the beauty of the Canaanites. Boy, I'll tell you they got some good-looking women. Some of the men ain't bad either and the beauty of these children, their big wide brown eyes and if that doesn't bother you too much and you recognize that they're all corrupted by the filth of their practices, how about the soft spot you have for animals? Because God said utterly destroy everything in the city, both men and women, young and old, ox and sheep and donkey with the edge of the sword. Art, I have a soft spot for animals. Look, there's certainly this animal couldn't have done any harm. God isn't asking you to evaluate. He's not calling you to determine by your reason what measure of obedience is going to be performed. He's calling you to an utterness and a totality to God. When he says everything, that's what he means. Are you offended by these words? I'm only speaking from the word of God. I haven't made this up and God is not talking about a literal wielding of swords but an obedience of like kind that took the first Canaan needs also to be exercised at the end of the age and the spiritual battles that are before us in a world that is hostile and opposed to God by which sentimentality and human weakness and softness and ease will contradict and abort the purposes of God. Again, I say this is not by ruthless automatons but by the most sensitive, perfected expressions of humanity on the face of the earth to people of God. Are people called to sensitivity, called to love, called to compassion, called also to righteousness and called utterly to obedience in the face of their sensitivity. And it's an ultimate call and it's a total call for those who will cross over. Would to God we heard such words at these at the inception of our Christian life, then the last 10, 15, 20, 30 or 40 years would not have been as misspent. Going through successions of services and the monotony of the predictable things that happen on Sunday mornings, we would have had a different kind of urgency, a different mindset, a different attitude, a different expectancy, a higher seriousness, a solemnity. We would have demanded more from the men of God who lead us. We would have required more. We would have welcomed the disciplines of God. I said last night this is a new hour. God is sounding a trump. He's winked and times passed but he's not winking longer. He'll make up the years that the canker worm has stolen if our Christian living has been misspent, self-seeking, indolent and indulgent. But are you ready from today to say yes, to take your shoes off and to go down on your face before the captain of the host and say in that absoluteness and utterness toward God, what saith my Lord to his servant? People did that last night, went flat out on their faces. They did it in La Crosse, Wisconsin and men told me later that when they went down, God was there to meet them. Something was transacted on that ground because it was holy. It's not the physical terra firma. It's not Wisconsin and it's not the ground of Kansas City. It's the ground of commitment that is utter to God and without equivocation or compromise and total in its intention, what saith my Lord to his servant? What is an open-ended and holy total question before God and anything that he chooses to finger, to change, to alter? Do you dare ask it? We'll not move in to take the land until we begin on that holy ground. If soulish humanism is still alive in us, it will be revealed in that moment that God says, go in and utterly destroy. It balks at the judgment of God. We need now to receive judgment. We need now to receive correction, not with pursed lips and cringing, but with joy and delight for a God who loves us so much that we can be the beneficiary of his judgments now. His judgments are life-giving. He's a judge and he's righteous. It's not something to be avoided and to be shrunk from. It's to be welcomed and to be received. It makes us into be sons and daughters and not cowardly, sniveling kids who never grow up. And if we loved his judgments and loved his righteousness, because we see the efficacy and the life-giving quality of it, we will not then withhold ourselves from being the instrument by which it is brought to others. Your attitude toward the judgment of God is the final and the ultimate measure of where you are in relationship to him. And we're seeing some big men come down on this day who had no stomach for God's judgments. If you have no stomach for his judgments, you have no stomach for the judge. And you're living in a deception despite your oohs and ahs and choruses and euphoric things by which you think you love God. The measure is not what you do and feel in the midst of the euphoria of choruses. It's what you're willing to receive with joy in the midst of his judgments. You know I've never spoken like this? Never. First time. You're privileged. It's holy. God is speaking with such a solemnity and seriousness to his people now, as we have never before been honored to hear him. This isn't a Bible study. It's a call. And the stakes are enormous. And they burned the city with fire and all that was in it. Verse 24. Total, devastating, uncompromising, unrelenting judgment in obedience to the requirement of God by which the earth is purged and a new heaven and a new earth is obtained wherein dwelleth righteousness. I want you to bow your heads this morning before the captain of the host, praying that you've had ears to hear and to ask the Lord, where am I in all of this? Where am I, Lord? I'm bewildered. I'm shaken. I've never been so charged with a word like this. I don't even know that I'm on the Canaan side. For all of my fancy lingo and vocabulary about the end times and the purposes of God, I don't even know that I'm on the Canaan side. I might yet be on the wilderness side, not yet having crossed over. Or I may have tentatively crossed, but I'm not willing to submit my flesh to cutting. I don't have any militant inclination at all. I enjoy my civilian status. No one's going to tell me. I'll shout when I feel like it, and I'll break silence when I feel like it. Feeling, feeling, feeling, because my whole life is sensual and feeling oriented. I've never gone down before the Most High and put my head on his holy ground. I've had my head up, arrogant, with my thoughts, my fantasizing, my flights of imagination, my willful, fleshly, lustful contemplations for my ease, my satisfaction, my future. My head has never gone down before God. Even my spiritual thoughts are my own thoughts, which reinforce me and comfort me in the lifestyle that I enjoy and have determined for myself. I don't want to go down to that, lest he gives me another thought that would require me to give 75% of my income away and live on the 25, to feed the orphans by it and trust God for my own sustenance to come by faith. I don't want to go down and say, what saith my Lord to his servant, lest he say that, and yet even more fearful things. So I ask you in the name of Jesus and the seriousness of the hour in which we have been called and the moment that we now stand before him, the historic thing that has been struck, not to look pious, not to look down as if you're religiously contemplating something, when your heart is determined that you're not crossing. Joshua didn't have any more anticipation than you, when he was abruptly met by a man who stood opposite him and told him he was neither for him nor against him, that but he had come for something much higher, much greater. Take off your shoes to the ground upon which you stand is holy ground. And he did so. I love those words, folks. I just have to admit it. They're so simple. And he did so. The long and the short of it, the whole issue, the eternal weight of things is summed up in those words. And he did so. It's a militant response. It's instant. It does not equivocate. It does not compromise. It does not wait for further explanation. The Lord spoke. It was foolish. He didn't ask what it meant. And he did so. And I want to call you to that obedience this morning. A faith which is an act, something that you obey and something that you do. And he did so. I want to ask anyone in this room who is living on the wilderness side, and they know it. You're part of the Israel of God, but not the disciplined part. Floundering about, knocking about, and coming to like that kind of aimless drift, that if you've never crossed over through the place of death, knowing that what awaits you on the other side is the sharp knife of circumcision, I invite you to do it now. You say, do what? Faith that is an act. And he did so. To get out of your seat and start where this piano is and walk right across and in front of me and come around that loudspeaker and take your seat again. Does that sound foolish? No more foolish than walking around the city and shouting. I'm only going to repeat it one more time. If you know that you're on the wilderness side, you have never crossed over, never passed through death, God is inviting you this morning to go right across this Jordan. It's symbolic, but spiritually significant, recognized of God. It's an act of faith, and by it, you're inviting yourself for a sharp cutting. God's not playing around. He's told you what awaits you in this crossing. Watch new problems. Watch new agitations. You got along famously with your boss? It's not going to be so hereafter. They're going to be cutting. They're going to be economic, financial dealings. Your flesh is going to be found out. He'll probe for it. He'll feel it. He knows where you are in your humanism, in your idealism, idealisms, in your fantasizing, and he's going to cut. He's going to cut, and it's going to be an ouch. There'll be blood, but you'll be made whole. You'll find your place in the camp. There's an ordered place in the militant company of God, which you could not have occupied to now, because you couldn't keep your mouth shut. Full of gossip and twitching and double-talking, vain words. There's a profound crossing for those who have never crossed over. If God doesn't begin to attend to your life in a new kind of severity in his love, you can dismiss me as a false prophet. You're opening yourself to the holy dealings of God in the secret places, that in the public place, we can shout together the shout that brings the wall down. You're not going to be able to pick and choose after this, where you want to go, what you want to do. Your vacation, your time, it's no longer yours. You're in the army now. Even your religious flesh is going to be cut away, what you thought you were going to do for God. He may have other intentions altogether than from what you thought, because your fleshly mind is going to be circumcised. You're crossing over into the land. Yes, it's milk and honey, but there's a battle first. There's a war on, and you're saying bye-bye to the civilian life. Hallelujah. I'm thrilled. Thank you, Jesus. My God, your people have heard your voice. This isn't some little hokey device. This is bringing a rejoicing in heaven. Invisible witnesses are clapping their hands who have bled and sacrificed and suffered before you and are not complete without you. Thank you, Lord. Precious God, register each one by name in heaven. Thank you, my God. Thank you, Jesus. Bring this people into the rest in the midst of requirement, midst of demanding requirement. Let it flow out of that seventh-day Sabbath rest. Thank you, Jesus. The younger ones, the older ones, kids that have been timid in school to speak in your behalf, to be counted as part of your company, let it all be changed. Are we all over on the other side? Are we standing now at Jericho, recognizing that God has called us to a task and not to an enjoyment? That the salvation of our souls is the beginning of something and not the end in itself? That there's something that pertains to his glory that is beyond the issues of our security and our enjoyments? Do we know that now? Are we ready now to look up and to behold the captain of the horse with the sword drawn, our commander-in-chief militant, fierce in his determination and single-eyed, and to come down before him in trembling and ask that one question alone that ends all questions. What saith my master to his slave, my lord to his servant? For those who have never prostrated themselves in that utterness toward God that is without reservation of any kind, I invite you to do it. Come out into the aisle or by your seat or plenty of carpet here, praise God, and come down on holy ground. It's not the building, it's not Kansas City, it's the ground of an utterness toward God that is once and for all absolute, unsparing, and until he has it, we don't go further. What saith my lord to his servant? It's a foolish requirement on a Sunday morning, but I think that history is waiting, the captain of the host is waiting, a dying world is waiting, and I pray that you'll not withhold yourself. Thank you, precious God, for this morning. I believe with all my heart that it is historic, that there's something divinely transacted, that it's not finished yet. It's something that's established in the moment, but it begins an ongoing and continuous thing that is without end. It shall hasten the day of your appearing and bring righteousness into the earth. Have, my God, all that you desire because of what you have spoken to your people this morning. We just thank you and praise you, the privilege, the high calling which is ours in Christ Jesus. Thank you for the grace, my God, and the enablement given to the obedient. Come and establish triumphantly your banner, your name in all the earth. We thank you and praise you in Jesus' holy name.