In this sermon, the speaker describes a powerful encounter where he witnessed a group of Jews challenging him and others with clever arguments. He reflects on the importance of having answers rooted in the Scriptures and being led by the life of God. The speaker then shares a story about Watchman Nee and emphasizes the need for our actions and activities to be guided by the life of God. He also mentions a moment when he spoke at a university and left the audience speechless with a statement about the human condition. Finally, he concludes by inviting those who were mocking him to pray for salvation. Overall, the sermon emphasizes the importance of being led by the life of God and having a deep understanding of the Scriptures.

You're stiff this morning, it's because I am stiff. I have a very sore neck. That came in the same week as my 48th birthday. Is God trying to tell me something? Ha, ha, ha. I'll get him. As I said to my wife with dramatic concentration, when there's a pain in the neck, the whole body is affected. Hint, hint, hint, hint. Ha, ha, ha. Well, I've just come back from Minnesota yesterday. Tumultuous and significant days for us, and I think even for Kansas City, which I'll not have an opportunity perhaps to talk about, but this left me without any real opportunity to prepare. But I have one thing in my heart, there's a certain portion of scripture, and I may end up reading every rendering of it to be found in the Gospels. I think all of the Gospels describe this one episode. And it's got eminently to do with the kingdom of God. In fact, I would say it's at its heart. And I'll tell you how God began to underline this theme in my understanding. Someone once said to me, how do you prepare for your overseas trips? You'll get a newsletter, you'll read an account of the most recent overseas trip. England, Yugoslavia, Germany. And they're usually very significant days and lasting five to six weeks. Like this morning, usually without preparation. Always full of untoward events and things that cannot be anticipated, that have to be met at the moment by the Spirit of God, by the life of God. The very things I've been speaking in these few weeks. And only the Lord knows what is accomplished in them. Usually there's not very much visible to be seen that one can point to. And someone said, how do you prepare for these trips? And I thought about it, and the answer is not very well. It's not because I'm slipshod or negligent, it's just because it's pleased the Lord to give me a very crowded life. And I don't have the luxury, often times, of preparation. I think this is what we're going to find ourselves as in that last day. If I haven't used the phrase, the end of the age or the last days, let me use it now. And let me say that I believe it with all my heart, devoutly, that these are the last days. And they're different from all the days which have preceded them. And they're going to be days of enormous conflict, enormous crisis. Paper mache Christians will not be able to stand in that day. I think there's a God who wants us to do more than just teeter-totter our way through the age and hang in there grimly. He wants us to raise a standard and to show forth His glory. If there has ever been an hour that has demanded the maturity of God's people, individually and corporately, this is that hour. And when you knit the way that I knit, both Jewish and spiritually, and you open up the Kansas City Star or the Times, I forgot which it was, and see in the first page a little inset in a box that tells you what to do in the event that the fuel shall fail. What to do in severely cold weather when the fuel supply shall fail. How to take all of your carpets and how to hem all your family into one room and close off all the other rooms of the house. How to lay down the carpets, the blankets, and seal the drafts. How to operate economically a wood-burning fireplace if you have one. In a word, how to survive in Kansas City. Did you ever think that we would come to such a day when such a statement would be found in the first page of a city's newspaper? And I'll tell you, dear children, it's only the beginning of things. I'm not saying this to frighten you. I'm saying this to alert you. There's a God who is speaking words of preparation to those who have ears to hear. The great lament of Jesus to the Jewish people of his own generation was, if only you knew the hour of your own visitation. And probably the same thing could be cried now to the spiritual Israel, the body of Christ christened them. Well, getting back to how I prepare. I said to this guy, well, about a half hour before I have to run off to the airport, I take my $3 suitcase that I got at the garage sale and I just throw a few things in that I think I'm going to need and usually something to read beside a few Bibles. And I'll just pick up something by the nightstand that my books have been accumulating that I never get read. And so I found myself on a couple of trips ago opening up my suitcase and just sticking my hand in to find what I brought to read. And I pulled out a little kind of booklet that was cheaply printed with one or two page essays by a man of whom I had never heard. And my eye fell upon the title of one of them and it said, The Humility of God. Does that ever happen to you when something catches your eye and is a spiritual boing? The Humility of God. I can't tell you how much I was arrested by that title. I knew that God expected for men to know humility, but that God himself was humble was a mind-boggling concept. And that was the beginning of the opening of a new train of thought and understanding which now so possesses me that I can stand before you today without preparation and our only problem will be just to watch the clock when the Lord will just have to put the scissors in just that much of the row or it will go on and on and on. Dear children, humility is the way of God. And you're looking at a Brooklyn specimen who walked in exactly the opposite spirit for 35 years. He was Mr. Arrogance. And there's even a Jewish word for it, chutzpah. And we pride ourselves in it and give our little darling smart little slaps on the backside and say, son of a gun, chip off the old block. His first day in school and he told the teacher, what for? The world admires the very qualities that God abhors. In case you've never noted it, it says in Luke, the 14th chapter, that which is esteemed of men is abomination in the sight of God. There's a precious little book which I'll commend to you by Andrew Murray called Humility, the Beauty of Holiness. And I hope that we'll have sufficient time this morning for me to quote a few things from it. Maybe I'll start with one quotation. Jesus came to bring humility to earth, to make us partakers of it, and by it to save us. How do you like them apples? How many of us have ever thought that salvation was to be brought out of the kingdom of arrogance and entered into the kingdom of humility? That that is salvation. And that it was brought from heaven to earth. Do you know that? I'll tell you why it had to be. Because there's not a cotton-picking man on the face of the earth who could ever have invented it. It is just inimical to human nature. It's opposed. There's not an atom in our nature or makeup that could ever have conceived what humility is. So the very trip when I threw those haphazard things into the suitcase, and P.S. there's nothing haphazard in the kingdom. Did you know that? Wouldn't you believe it that I had opportunity to visit again the sisters of Mary of Darmstadt? How many people know that work? Raise your hand. Oh my. Overwhelming ignorance. Ha ha ha ha ha ha. Children. Hey, we're just going to have to file a petition for a two-hour Sunday morning session. This is just too great. Your need is too great. But you've not heard of Vasily Ishchenko? One of God's greatest end-time oracles, and this work in Germany, which, by the way, we're going to visit on our tour to Israel on the way back. Israel and Germany. I can't tell you how pure and holy a work it is, and you come onto exalted ground when you put your foot there. And it began out of the rubble and devastation of World War II when the city of Darmstadt was leveled in 20 minutes, and tens of thousands lost their lives. And out of that rubble and smoke and ruin came a bunch of charred women who recognized in one fell swoop that antiseptic and anemic Lutheranism somehow was insufficient for the age. May I say that I hope it will not take that to persuade you that Presbyterianism in and of itself is not the answer for the age either, or any other ism but the way of God and the knowledge of Him in spirit and in truth. But out of the repentance of that ruin, and this, by the way, is what I believe God is bringing upon the earth, His judgments are not the expression of some malicious God who loves to pound men to pieces, but who recognizes that their pride and their stubbornness and their arrogance will not permit of any understanding except that they first come to a place of brokenness through actual conditions. If this were not so, I wouldn't be standing here. I would still continue to be Mr. Arrogant. But it was out of brokenness and the devastation and the rubble and ruin of my own life that I heard for the first time a still small voice, which I had until my 34th year, scorned. Are you willing to see your little empires come down and your securities devastated and the foundational things which you have counted so sure, air, water, terra firma under your feet, heat, fuel, the most elemental aspects of life jeopardized? That's the love of God to shake the earth in the last days that all things that can be shaken might be shaken, that we might come to the knowledge of Him. And I'll tell you in the same breath we're dying for the absence of that knowledge. We may have a lot of religious cleverness and know how to quote a scripture or two or present prepared faces on Sunday, but that's not going to save us. Only the way of humility is going to save us. And you know what the heck of it is? You can't learn it. Praise God for His genius because He knows how Jewish we are and we'd love to learn it. Hey, how do you become humble? You mean if I read Andrew Murray I'll get it? No. See, this is what the Jews are all about. Great Talmudic scholars burying their heads in books and stroking their whiskers and memorizing and imbibing the wisdom of the sages of times past and living in unspeakable ignorance and darkness about a God whom they profess to know because the deep and the hidden things of God are revealed by His Spirit and cannot be digged out by human cunning or effort. When God smells sweat, He runs the other way. Jesus came to bring humility back to earth to make us partakers of it and buy it to save us. Remember how He brought it down to earth? Unto us a child is born and unto us a son is given. And if you've forgotten the humiliation of infancy, can I remind you? Remember all that stuff you made in your diapers? Remember you had no control over your bowels? Remember you had to be changed several times a day? Remember that you were continually bawling and utterly dependent upon those in whose arms you were placed for everything? How'd you like to do it today? You're so proud of yourself and so sufficient so able to rule over every situation and that's the very antithesis of God's Spirit. The essential characteristic of God's children is humility and that's why He's been as silent as He is. He's just that courtly, He's just that gentlemanly. He doesn't shout. His voice is not heard in the streets. A broken reed will not break and a smoking flax will not extinguish. But we're loudmouths, we've got clever things to say. We pound the tables, we make demands, we're full of striving and exertions. Even as Christians, the only way to have humility is to have Him. It's got to come down from heaven as it came down in the first and it's got to be received in the same spirit in which it's sent or you can't have it. And that's why God says to this man, I will look. He who is of a broken and contrite spirit who trembles at my word. This is a closed book until we meet this requirement of God. Not because He arbitrarily sets such requirements but because He knows that it's patently impossible to receive anything spiritually so long as you're walking in the spirit of arrogance. To be humble is to be open, to be yielded, to be supple, to be available for the things that God speaks. So I went to Germany in the same period of time when the Lord put that thing in my suitcase and it was around the Christmas season. And I'll tell you if there's anything icky to a Jew is those Christmas displays. Yuck. The whole thing ought to be shoved into the dustbin. The whole pagan claptrap, the whole celebration, the whole buying and spending and having and getting. Why, even the Japanese celebrate it and do a better job of it than we. It's an orgy of parties and boxes and tinsel that you want to gag. But they had a little display that strangely attracted me. Under a tree, some talented sister of their fellowship had put a terracotta figurine of the infant Jesus. And I'll tell you that I couldn't take my eyes from it. And I'm not a sentimental type as some here know. There was something so compelling about that infant it looked absolutely cherubic. And its little hands were extended up to heaven in complete helplessness. And I looked closely at its face. I can't describe the face. It was an expression of such repose, such trust, such utter rest, such innate joy. And then I began to reflect that God not only lay aside his deity to take upon himself the form of a man, and that's humiliating. And God has found wonderful ways to remind me of it continually. I remember once after a powerful message, deeply anointed of God, where the walls were shaking when it was over. People sat stunned in their seats. They had heard out of the mouth of God. And some kid with great saucer eyes came to me and said, How do you keep humble when God uses you like that? And the moment that he asked that question, I was suffering from a condition that is remedied by appointment H, is it? Are you allowed to say that? Can you discuss this in Sunday school? And I looked at him in a kind of patronizing way. I said, Dear boy, God has ways. To be reminded of your humanity is to be reminded of humility. It's humbling to be a man. And God could have found any number of ways in his genius to have solved the problems of elimination than the way that he decided to do it. So no matter how great we are, we have the same requirement as the lowest bum. It's humbling. I think one of the things that saved me as a teacher of American history was always to visualize the great giants of history in their DVDs. But I'm not just making little clips this morning. Here's my point. If it's humbling for man to be man, how much more for God? And not only a man, but a man to be rejected. A man to be despised. A man to hear from his own people, whom he called to be a nation of priests and a light unto the world, that he was the azelbub, and that they identified him with Satan, and that they plucked his beard and smote him, painfully rejected him and taunted him even in his death. That's humiliation, children. And on that same trip, not only to see this terracotta figure of Jesus the infant and to be reminded of these things, but to be brought again to Colmar, France, Alsace-Lorraine, and go to that museum that I visited 13 years ago as a Jewish atheist at the recommendation of a German artist to see one painting, The Crucifixion of Jesus, of all of the sloppy sentimentality that has been heaped on the themes that pertain to Jesus, all of those pictures that have been totally unconvincing from which we Jews have turned with contempt, of the Jesus of the receding chin and the milky blue eyes and every little blond wispy hair in place, utterly unrecognizable as a Jew, let alone as suffering servant, to stand transfixed before that painting and to see the most horrible depiction of suffering humanity that the Holy Spirit has ever driven a man to paint. It's the ugliest picture that I have ever seen. And you have to time yourself how long you can endure to gaze upon it. You never saw a more gnarled figure with grotesque fingers and the paroxysms of death stretched up to heaven than the hands of Jesus with the spikes through. White lips, and all of the evidence of suffering written right in his face, and the figure so brutally distorted and grotesquely extended you wonder if you're looking at a man. It looks almost like an animal. All the more because the figures around him, of his mother and John and others, are just painted in beautiful symmetry and proportion, but his figure is obscene. And as I stood watching that painting, 13 years after I had seen it as an atheist, certain thoughts came to mind which probably could not have occurred on the first seeing. I noticed that the convention that Renaissance artists had adopted of always putting a loincloth on Jesus, of course this one was tattered, and it was bespotted with blood, but nevertheless he was afforded the most elementary dignity of covering his private parts even in death. But you know as I stood there that day, although the scriptures say nothing about it, there's no word that his enemies afforded him that grace, I thought to myself, maybe this is just a convention of artists. Because our thoughts are not his thoughts. And we always fall short of the truths of God. We always impose our human understanding. We've never understood the things of God. Or we would have gasped long ago and smitten ourselves and struck our breasts as Jews do and cried out, Oy vey, woe is me, I'm undone. There's not enough cry of anguish, of understanding, of seeing things as God sees them because we're not spiritual beings. Everything is tainted and tainted and touched by our own human understanding, even religiously speaking. Or there'd be far more cries than the earth. Or we would know how to pray as we ought. Or there'd be deep gas and sucking for air. But you know I just want to suggest that it may be that Jesus left the world as he came into it utterly naked. What do you think of that, folks? From the beginning when God brought humility down to earth and from the end when he raised it up again, it went and it left naked in utter humiliation. And that is the way of God. I want to read to you the one portion of scripture which the Lord has quickened to me. I may read it in all the Gospels. It's called the triumphal entry of Jesus. How many people know what that triumph is? It's when Jesus came four days before his death into Jerusalem riding on the back of the colt of an ass. Just to show you how far our understanding is from God. The words that God signifies triumphal entry. The passion of Christ. His glorification has eminently to do with humiliation and suffering. But when we think of passion, we can wipe the slobber off our chins because we're thinking of some orgiastic revelry that has to do with deep gratification of self. When we think of glorification, it's getting a raise or some acknowledgement from our profession, from the world, some human exaltation. When we think of triumph, it's when our ship has come in. But when God thinks of it, it's a man despised of his people astride the back of the colt of an ass. Not even a full-grown animal. Some weak animal, some newly born thing with spindly legs, feet of tottering under the weight of this burden. Entering into Jerusalem. Can you ever imagine a more ungainly picture of a man whose legs are astride that animal almost touching the ground? You don't know whether to laugh, or to cover your mouth, or to cry. That's how the king entered Jerusalem, children. And I'll tell you what, we're not going to enter Jerusalem in any other way at the end of the age. There's a city to be taken. There's a messianic ministry and mission to be fulfilled. But it's not going to be done, except it's conducted in the name of the Lord. Which is to say, in the same character, and the same spirit, and the same humility. And it came to pass when he was come near to Bethpage and Bethany at the mount called the Mount of Olives, he sent two of his disciples saying, Go into the village opposite you, in which at your entering you shall find a colt tied, on which yet never man sat. Loose him and bring him here. And if any man ask you, Why do you loose him? Thus shall you say unto him, Because the Lord hath need of him. And they that were sent went their way and found even as he had said unto them. And as they were loosing the colt, its owner said unto them, Why loose ye the colt? And they said, The Lord hath need of him. And they brought him to Jesus, and they cast their garments upon the colt, and they sat Jesus upon it. And as he went, they spread their clothes in the way. And when he was come near, even at the descent of the Mount of Olives, the whole multitude of the disciples began to rejoice, and praised God with a loud voice for all the mighty works that they had seen, saying, Blessed be the King who cometh in the name of the Lord, peace in heaven and glory in the highest. Blessed be the King who cometh in the name of the Lord. May I say this? If the King was required to come in the name of the Lord, and I don't believe that that's some patsy formula in the name of Jesus, that as if we recited, we have found it. A name always betokens a character. If the King had to come in the character of God in his entry into Jerusalem, shall we come in any lesser way? I'll never forget the first time I heard that message preached from a platform of a Pentecostal church. Two men were in that kind of a tandem ministry playing music, singing, and speaking, and while the one guy was proclaiming how they cut down branches and threw them in the way, and others lay their cloaks on the path, this guy was adjusting his cuffs and his cufflinks and fixing his sartorial appearance. And I thought to myself, I'd like to see him lay his cufflinks and his fancy shirt in the way of that ass, or strew it over the back. Maybe we have three categories of Christians. Those who would do it and take the thing most dear, even if it would leave them naked, for the honor that that beast upon which the King sits will ride over it. And those who can't quite bring themselves to that measure of sacrifice, but recognizing still the exalted moment and wanting some way to participate, will cut off branches and strew them in the way. And others will be totally indifferent to the thing altogether and not understand the glory of what God is above. Children, there are kingdoms in collision. Do you know that? There are kingdoms in conflict. If the issue was not Judaism versus Christianity, that's kid stuff. The issue is this. The kingdom of this present world, based on power, greed, human ambition, human skullduggery, striving, effort, manipulation, versus the kingdom of God. And the very spirit and heart of it is the way of humility. The King coming, riding on the back of the colt of an ass. It says, The multitudes that went before and that followed cried, saying, Hosanna to the Son of David. Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord. Hosanna in the highest. A certain man who visited Kansas City some weeks ago, whom I consider also to be an orator, said about the importance of the Jewish people believing on Jesus, that it is the final and last and most significant peace to be concluded in God's holy purposes. That until the Jewish people as a people and as a nation will say, Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord, our salvation is still nigh. How many of us in this room or in Christendom altogether are waiting on the second coming of the Lord? When, for God's sake, are we going to start getting honest, which has also got to do with the kingdom, and say that we're not in any particular rush? I mean, it's pretty groovy, and who wants to terminate our stay? We've just got that new hi-fi and things are relatively comfortable, and yet we speak all of the unctuous clichés about the coming of the Lord, as if we were some bitterly oppressed minority besieged and facing the most horrendous conditions, and looking to the skies from whence our salvation cometh. Baroony! But I'll tell you this, if you'll hang in there, the hour shall soon come when, if you'll not fall away, you'll be such a one. It will be a tiny minority that is besieged and oppressed, looking to the skies from whence cometh their salvation. I'll never forget the horrendous response of the Jewish community to Key 73. How many of you remember that pitiful little bleat? Hardly more than a hiccup. But it cost millions, because men felt that they ought to do something evangelistic. And so millions were extended, and ah, the most innocuous kind of business that was hardly more than a beep, that had that so little effect. But if you'll listen to the Jewish community, you would imagine some great monolithic machine crunching through cities and streets and yanking Jewish children out of the bosoms of their families. We Jews have a tendency to overreact. But don't be deceived. Nothing that I'm speaking before you is an overreaction or over-exaggeration. If anything, I'm being subdued. I remember a remark a rabbi said. He was very offended and very upset. And he saw dangerous political implications in what seemed to him to be a growing coalition between conservative political forces and this fundamental Christianity that talks about a salvation that cometh from the heavens. You want to know, children? At the last day, there's going to be two classes of people. And the distinction between them shall not be measured in terms of whether they're Jewish or Gentile, but only in this. One that shall look down toward men who shall seek their salvation in their IBM machines and their computers and in the corporate wisdom of men which shall fail them. You ever see a computer work when electricity has failed? Worthless hunk of junk. And those, a much smaller number, who shall be looking to the heavens for their salvation. Let me ask you a question this morning. How many of you are already walking in such a way, habitually looking to the heavens for your salvation? How many of you would have dared to come into this room today with a crick in your neck and hardly no more than five minutes preparation to believe that God will not abandon you, but in your futility and helplessness and humiliation if you should fail? And who wants to face that? That the same God will succor you and speak out of your mouth necessary wisdom. Would you believe that? And if he chooses not to, are you willing to suffer the humiliation that would necessarily follow? Oh, children, I can tell you I've experienced glories of God. I told you last week I'm a glory monger. My Jewish heart will not consider anything less. And that's why I'm not running off to start some little cutesy thing to the Jewish people in Kansas City, though I could probably do it as well as anyone now going. I'm waiting for that thing which cometh down from heaven. I'm waiting for that thing which is perfect, which has its origin only in him and comes perfectly in his time. It has nothing to do with anything haphazard or chance. That's not some kind of appeasement or placating or that has something to do with giving us some opportunity to do something that we might feel that somehow we're requiting God for his goodness. Nothing tinged with flesh. Nothing tinged with human ambition. No building of religious kingdoms. But I'll tell you that if you're going to wait for the glory of God and that's a crown, you need first to wear another. It's made up of thorns and it's painful and sometimes leaves you bleeding and it's called humiliation. And I have tasted both and that's why I'm equipped to speak to you about kingdoms in collision. I know both intimately well. And I can tell you about the times when I've seen the glories of God. So devastating, so awesome. Such fullness, such a presence. Your scalp tingles with the presence of God. Coming to Harvard University on a Friday, your fast day, weak, beggarly, bereft of anything to say. Hardly able to remember your name, completely washed out. Hoping against hope that it'll be the smallest possible audience that you'll escape with a minimum of embarrassment and humiliation. Only to find when you enter the room that it's jam-packed with a carnival crowd of Coliseum-spirited students who have come for the sport to jeer and to make fun and to wreak havoc with this Jewish freak who believes in Jesus. And when you see their faces, the glint in their eyes, you despair. I remember taking off my corduroy jacket, crumpled as I was and throwing it on a table and looking out and taking that kind of breath that a man takes when he's faced a firing squad and saying something like this. I had hoped to prepare something clever for you knowing your reputation. But my condition is such tonight that you're going to see only one of two things. Utter human fiasco or the glory of God. May I ask you a question before I go on? How would you like to predicate your life entirely only on these two radical options? You've been doing a good job. You're so Jewish. Living by your own wit and your own abilities and getting by handsomely. But we have all sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. And until the Jewish people see that glory, they're not going to cry out Hosanna in the highest. Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord because they've not seen anyone coming in the name of the Lord. They've only seen religious practitioners like themselves with just another vocabulary, less comely and less appetizing and less to be understood than their own. Getting by just will not do it. Only the glory of God will. And so with that I opened my mouth expecting the worst and guess what happened? Out of my abject emptiness, out of my total nothingness, I heard a dissertation from God come forth with such power, so acute, that I watched men absolutely riveted to their seats. I saw men so stunned that their jaws were agape. I heard a statement about the human condition that was so airtight that there was not a place for a man to hide. And for the first time in my university speaking experience, which began, by the way, at the University of Kansas eight years ago, when I went in the same faith and the same hope, not a single student had a question to raise after that statement. There wasn't one wise guy who had a quip to make, one wise alecky comment, or one sardonic question. They were stunned and they were speechless. And I myself didn't know what to do in such a condition. So I said, Jesus said that his sheep would hear his voice. And I'm going to invite as many of you who came here tonight to jeer and to make sport, to bow your heads and follow me in a prayer for salvation if you've heard his voice through my Brooklyn accent. And I bowed my head and I began to pray, a sinner's prayer. And I thought, well, there would be maybe two, three, four, five out of those hundreds who have heard his voice and would pray. But I heard such a crescendo of voices that it must have been hundreds. And when I finished praying and lifted up my head and my eye just spanned the room, I could see the evidences of salvation. When the Spirit of God has just been born, when that infant thing has come into the heart of one who is contrite and broken and humbled. Gasps and sputterings and men still with their hands over their mouths or stricken looks in their faces or the tittering or the giggling that sometimes take place with the impartation of the Spirit of life. Hey guys, salvation isn't just some airy, phantasmal phrase. It's something absolutely real. It's the entering of a new kingdom by a new spirit. When you're willing to let go the spirit of arrogance and the spirit of the world and the spirit of striving and be utterly naked to receive from heaven the spirit of humility which is salvation. And from that time forth, cast all your cares upon him. You can't do it as a proud man, but pride has no place in the kingdom. I don't know how many were saved in that meeting. Stunned and speechless as they sensed a new presence in their lives. And I didn't know how to go on. I just said, well, let's praise the God who has saved us. And would you believe it that the guys who came to give me this were giving God this? And that the glory filled the room as the praises went up to heaven? I can't tell you how thick was the presence of God and the Christian kids like stunned in front of the speaking stand like they hadn't bargained on this. They thought they were going to hear some clever human presentation, some witty kind of, I don't know, Jews for Jesus type thing, but they got the glory of God. One woman came up to me with a copy of my book wanting me to autograph it and saying, Mr. Katz, will you bless me? And I felt like some ancient Hebrew patriarch. I said, what kind of blessing do you want? She said, she wanted the blessing of the Holy Spirit. How many of you want that? You want to be more deeply enrolled in the humilities of God? Ask for that blessing. Someone once said, what is the evidence of the baptism of the Holy Spirit? And a person wisely answered, trouble. Those that are laughing know that it's true. So I said, will you believe God that as I lay my hand on your forehead that you'll receive what you ask even as we pray? After that night she could believe anything. And the moment I touched her I had hardly begun praying. These 15 students lined up in front of the speaking stand. Among them stunned Jewish intellectuals. This woman broke forth in a scream of speaking in other tongues that absolutely pulverized them. There was no question of the utter supernaturalness of what came forth out of her mouth right on the spot. That's the glory of God, children. So I've tasted of the glories if you're willing to come spent, wasted, without human inspiration and self-humiliation that will follow. But I want to tell you this. That the way of the kingdom is no guarantee that you're going to always taste the glory. More likely it's the crown of thorns before the crown of glory. And if you're unwilling to wear the one neither shall you have the other. And what we have chosen for ourselves is a little course of Christian respectability that is neither abject shame and humiliation nor glory. And the world has suffered for our compromise. We are not a salt unto the earth. We're just another religious institution that has already choked the earth with dross. We've accepted cowardly compromise unwilling to suffer humiliation and therefore we have not made manifest the glory. But just to balance it out and just to show you that both are part of this life and this kingdom I came again to another university this time in New York 85% Jewish. It was the first gospel outreach in the history of that school City College of New York. And it's a deep bastion of Jewish orthodoxy and intellectualism. And if you've had any contact with Jews of that kind they are terrifying. They have also an anointing of their own. It's the spirit of arrogance and human contentiousness and striving which so blinded the Jews of Jesus' own generation that they could never conceive that that one who came into Jerusalem on the back of an ass was indeed the king. Now I tell you children that there's no difference between the kingdom and the king. The kingdom is only the king writ large. God had called us to that meeting. We were there months before speaking to a small Christian group of students and the spirit of God fell. We were broken. We were weeping. God showed us that we would have this outreach. This wasn't something that was born in the minds of men. I would never have dreamed to undertake it if it were. Months of prayer. Months of fasting. Months of preparation. Months of investment of energy and money and all kinds of things for this. We had grandiose visions of what God was going to do there that day. How the fire of God was going to fall. How Jewish kids were going to fall on their faces and cry out to God for mercy and call on the name of the Lord. For there is no other name given under heaven or on earth whereby a man may be saved. Whosoever shall call on the name of the Lord shall be saved. And I'll tell you when I tried it 12 years ago I choked and I sputtered. It took heroic effort to come out of that proud throat out of which had come such invective such revolutionary slogans such seductive phrases to call on the name which had been poisoned and polluted for Jewish consideration. It took something to call on that name. But we expected it that day when they saw the glory of God. If God could do it at Harvard what could he not do at City College? 85% of his kinsmen there. And so I was up the night before at Boston University. We had a wonderful meeting and I was up until 4 o'clock in the morning talking with the Jewish brother who had arranged that he had not yet come into the baptism of the Holy Spirit and persuading him about what was available in the kingdom. Not taking any thought that I needed rest because I know that his strength was made perfect in my weakness. He's demonstrated it again and again. It's not me who is going to confront those Jewish people the next day. It's the Lord himself. Do you believe that? I mean not do you believe it here sitting in Second Presbyterian Church. Will you believe it at City College? The judge shall live by faith. Not just talk about it. And faith is on the firing line. And if it's a matter of life or death it's not a matter of faith. That's why we're so weak and flabby. Because we've not allowed God to put us in such places of extremity. I remember being picked up at the airport and driven to that meeting. If I was a mess at Harvard you should have seen me that day talk about crumpled and out of it. And I came into the room and the meeting had already started. It was jammed to the rafters. There was a spirit in that room of such antagonism and bitterness you could cut it with a knife. The place was alive with electric and hate and bitterness. And I've been called by Jews worse than Hitler. Who only sought to destroy their bodies and I'm seeking to destroy their souls. And I'm a Jewish missionary and all of the other filthy epithets and the things that have to do with their understanding. And there's no way to explain. Many times you just only have to stand there and receive their hatred and their bitterness to compound it for 2,000 years. The Spanish Inquisition and the pogroms and forced conversions and exiles and baby skulls smashed on the Easter and Passover season. And there's no way to explain that you have nothing to do with that but that you represent the kingdom. If it's taking me five weeks to explain to you how am I going to explain to them when they don't even give me a word edgewise. But God. Right? So I came and I stood and I opened my mouth and I spoke about the holiness of God. And from the moment I opened my mouth I knew I was finished. I never heard anything more lame more pathetic more anemic. It was just a dribble. It fell out of my lips and fell to the ground clunk and it lay there. It was uninspired. It was unanointed. God simply was not in it. And as I was speaking I knew it. I didn't know why. I searched my soul. Was there a hidden sin in my life? Had I failed to pray or to fast? Had I done this or that? Why wasn't the Lord with me? Didn't the Lord know this was D-Day? Why was he absent and so far from my calling? Looking at those faces with the Van Dyke's beards and the venom and the hatred pouring out of their eyes shifting in their seats wholly indifferent to the weak and anemic words coming out of my mouth waiting for their opportunity to clobber me. And it came soon enough when in my customary way I opened for questions and answers. Mamma Mia. The first one to stand up was the rabbi of the Hillel group. Polished, urbane, multilingual deeply educated. He made me to look like the most inane jackass like some dolt who doesn't speak Hebrew which I don't who came with a King James Bible which I did. Offending the sensibilities of these intellectual Jews with old wise tales that go back to antiquity. What an offense. And he tore me up one side and down the other. I'll tell you that the mafia couldn't have done a better job. And when he finished and every word was like a knife and he stalked out of that room his heels clicked on that floor the room shook and he slammed the door we were stunned by the attack. That was only the beginning. Then another Jew got up to pick up where he left off. One more clever than the next. And another and another and another and I could not answer them a word. How come aren't you clever also? Hey, don't you have answers? You've been around for a while? I could not answer them a word. Remember what I told you about Watchman Me how he went to correct a brother and he had the mandate to do it in the scriptures and he came to his door and he raised his arm to knock and that's as far as it got. The life of God was not in his knocking. How much of your activity is by the life of God? And if God were to remove his life how much of it would continue? How much of Christendom would continue? How much of our activity in our Sunday folder rolls and our campaigns and our evangelism would continue if God were absent? You know what I think? A great deal. Because it was begun without his participation and it goes on by human and animal energies and it continues without him. I think for 95% of it he never had part. How would you like to live a life like his life that you might say with Paul for me to live as Christ? And if his life is not in a particular moment it could be very embarrassing. You're not clever. You have nothing to say because God has nothing to say. You're not witty because God is not witty. You have no wisdom because he's not supplying it. You're just with your face sticking out. Suffering the humiliation and not being able to give an explanation. You want to live that kind of life? That's the kingdom children and few there be that have any stomach for it. But Judaism is their love by whatever name because it leaves your pride intact. And just go to any synagogue and see the flattery that is poured out on men and see the pews with the inscriptions and the brass plates of the donations. The whole filthy system is predicated on human pride and flattery. It can't understand the king riding on the back of an ass. Well if you think that I described the worst of my humiliation I haven't come to it yet. You say what? They tore you to pieces? They left you bleeding and raw? You were crucified by the mouths of men? Their words were like knives? They cut your flesh? You had not an answer and you suffered wave after wave of attack before the eyes of many? And that was not the height of the humiliation? No. Or the depth of it? You know what it was? It wasn't from the enemies. It was from the friends. It was from the Christians that the worst humiliation came. Not that they said anything. Maybe that was it. But their faces spoke volumes. You know what their faces said? You blew it, cats. Hey, fella, we thought that you were some kind of an anointed messenger. We thought that God had called you to university ministry, that you were an encounter specialist. We heard of what had happened at Harvard. What's the matter, fella? Ain't you prayed up? Got hidden sin in your life? That's what their faces were saying. And you know what I had to say? Nothing. Because I had no answer. I didn't understand, and God was not explaining to me why it pleased him, after what he had done at Harvard, not to do also the same at City College. Are you willing to live with such a God? And to walk with him? And it has nothing to do with your understanding? How many of you live continually preempting God and determining every judgment and every decision and every act of whether you think and you approve of what God says? When it fits your circumstance, do you realize what you're doing? You're exalting yourself above the most high. Yes, the word says so and so, but in my circumstance and situation where it's not quite appropriate, then surely there must be some room for exceptions. I went home like a wounded dog, and I sulked for three weeks, licking my wounds, not understanding. And I think that the greatest glories of God are going to come without our understanding. What does our understanding have to do with it? And about three weeks later, I got a phone call one night from a woman with a thin little raspy voice. Mr. Katz, I read your book, and I'm a Jewish woman, and I got some questions. Can I come over? I said, look, lady, I can't answer anybody. Don't come to me. I'm blind and I'm nothing. But if you want to come, all right. So she came. She had questions. You should have seen that woman. Sunken eyes and the veins and all of the signs of fatigue and being battered from pillar to post. A victim of the world, crunched in a system of arrogance and pride and left for dead. Just a little palpitating heartbeat left, and she read my book. There's a thin line of connection that maybe God might be God. A compulsive chain smoker blowing her fumes in my face as she's asking the questions, and I'm trying pitifully to answer them. And when she ground the last cigarette into the filled ashtray two hours later, her last question was, what must I do to be saved? And I told her. And she bowed her little anemic neck with the veins sticking out, and she followed me word for word. You know, I've seen some brilliant Jews follow me word for word. Men with degrees on their walls and all kinds of human attainment and flashy pinky rings and all of that stuff. But when it came time to pray, they didn't know how, but they were willing to follow me word for word. God's kingdom has everything to do with humility, except you come as a child, you cannot receive it. She followed me word for word and passed from death to life. I remember putting the coat on her frail shoulders as I saw her out the door that night. I said, by the way, I said, how is it you came to me? How is it you got my book? Oh, she said, didn't I tell you? I said, no. She said, my son brought it home from City College three weeks ago. He was there at that meeting and he came home so excited. He said, a man came to school today. She said, a Jewish man. And he stood and he gave his simple convictions and the moment he finished, he was mercilessly attacked and he didn't answer his accusers a word. His mother said, I had never seen such a demonstration. And he insisted that I read the book and I came today with these questions. One thin Jewish soul. Dear children, which kingdom are you in? From which life are you living? Do you really celebrate the king who came in his triumphal entry, a stride, a jackass, ungainly and jerking and halting, its little legs buckling under the weight? I can't think of a more pathetic, almost obscene scene and God calls that triumph? And that battered and limp, gangrenous form that was on the cross depicted in that painting, that's the glorification of Jesus and his passion? Listen, something is grievously askew. Either God is all whacked out of shape or we are. Which kingdom are you in? And how many of you would follow the king? That's how you enter and walk in his humility. It begins with the bowing of the head and the giving up of a fright and saying Lord from this day forth I forsake the kingdom of this present world. I forsake the way of arrogance and pride and striving and even exertion and will of doing my thing and the awards and flattery of many and I'm willing to walk in a way of humiliation and I know that you're going to take me in my word. You're going to empty me out. You're going to leave me limp and for dead. The things that are going to take place in my life that will be inexplicable but I'm willing to show forth your glory out of my humiliation that a Jewish people and a dying people at the end of the age might say Hosanna in the highest. Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.