In this sermon, the speaker shares a personal experience of watching a TV program during the World Series halftime. The program featured young minority girls aspiring to become models, but one disturbing scene caught the speaker's attention. A man inappropriately touched one of the girls while posing her near a car. This incident led the speaker to reflect on the prevalent evil in the world. The sermon then delves into the reaction of the prophet Isaiah when he encountered the revelation of God's resplendent majesty. The prophet felt a deep sense of shame and recognized his own sinfulness in the presence of God. The sermon concludes by emphasizing the importance of understanding the reality of sin and the need for repentance and obedience to God's call.

Well, good morning you dear saints, you gluttons for punishment. My messages are delayed action bombs, so I trust that something will go off after a process of time. And this morning, I feel impressed to share with you a new word that has come in the recent days in Mexico that I think is going to be a significant arrow in the quiver. I'm not even sure of all that it means. It has all kinds of resonances and hints of import. You can get from it what you will, or you can get nothing. Or later on, all of a sudden, it will spring to life as God deals with you. The text is from Isaiah 6, which is familiar to us all. So I was quite surprised when the Lord quickened this and underlined new ways of perceiving that text that I had never before considered, and the effect upon the Mexican hearers was profound. So I think we're on to something that you need to hear. And if it doesn't fit right now, don't set it aside. Set it, how shall I say, on a shelf, being prepared to take it down and consider it as you go on. But I think it's going to be one of those seminal messages that come forth every now and then, the rhema, word of God, that isn't always immediately understandable to all to whom it comes, and yet it needs to be expressed in point of time. So Lord, grace, my God, grace, to open that precious text. And if they'll not receive any other benefit, let them catch a glimpse of what opening a text means, that you'll save them from the characteristic mentality of American believers who run through the scriptures as if it was gone with the wind, and what it means to hesitate and to dwell and to luxuriate in the language of a text, and to exegete and open and consider its implications in such a way, Lord, that if they don't get anything from this text, but the methodology, the hermeneutic of interpretation of how to read and ponder and weigh, let that be of sufficient value in itself that we can cast away one service without waste. So we bless you and we thank you, and we look to such application and use, my God, as it shall please you now to give this classicus locus, this classic text smack dab there in chapter six suddenly and pivotal for all of the prophet's future and Israel's destiny. Teach us what these things mean. We thank and give you praise in Jesus name. Amen. Did you say amen? Did you have a sense of ominous weightiness? Okay, I'm probably more at home in Mexico than I am in Kansas City. So, in the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord sitting on a throne high and lofty or high and lifted up, and the hem of his robe filled the temple. Seraphs were in attendance above him. Each had six wings. With two, they covered their faces. With two, they covered their feet. With two, they flew. And one called to another and said, Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts. The whole earth is full of his glory. The pivots on the threshold shook at the voices of those who called, and the house filled with smoke. And I said, Woe is me. I am undone. I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips. Yet my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts. Then one of the seraphs flew to me holding a live coal that had been taken from the altar with a pair of tongues. The seraph touched my mouth with it and said, Now this has touched your lips. Your guilt has departed. Your sin has blotted out. Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, Whom shall I send, and who will go for us? And I said, Here am I. Send me. And he said, Go, and say to this people, Keep listening, but do not comprehend. Keep looking, but do not understand. Make the mind of this people dull, and stop their ears and shut their eyes, that they may not look with their eyes and listen with their ears and comprehend with their minds, and turn and be healed or be saved. Then said I, Lord, how long, O Lord? And he said, Until cities lie waste without inhabitant, and houses without people, and the land is utterly desolate, until the Lord sends everyone far away, and vast is the emptiness or the forsaken places in the midst of the land. Even if a tenth part remain in it, it will be burned again, like a terebrant or an oak, whose stump remains standing when it is felled. The holy seed is its stump. Amen. What thinketh thou of such a text as this? Isn't it monumental? Are you guilty with me of having too eerily dismissed it as some kind of mystic vision of the Lord high and lifted up with his train filling the temple? It must be some hyper state of the Lord's glory, but why would it affect the prophet so much that he would say that he's undone? So I began to perceive it anew, and I'll share that with you. I believe that what the prophet saw was the king and the greatest moment of his majesty, when all that he is is brought to a point of such expression that anyone who contemplates that moment rightly has got to be altogether devastated and undone. At what point do you think that is, being high and lifted up? My own opinion is it's the crucifixion of the king, because nothing reveals the majesty of God than the depth of his suffering, experienced and born for us as atonement. Well, how could Isaiah have seen that six or seven centuries before the historic advent? Well, that's a typical Kansas City question. That's the limitation of your mentality that thinks in that kind of order. It hasn't happened yet. How can he see it? Forgetting that the Lord was slain from before the foundations of the earth being laid, that the crucifixion is such an event that it has escaped your attention, and therefore you'll be marred and limited if you continue in this short end of the stick, minimal comprehension of the crucifixion as a body of doctrine to which you must submit or agree, but you've not seen the glory. You've got to see the glory, or there's no sending. This is not just an episode in the life of a prophet. This is a paradigm. This is the unfolding of a remarkable pattern of a sequence of events by which the prophet who already had a ministry and was already cautioning and warning the nation of its sin from chapter one of his book through chapter five now enters a new dimension, and his subsequent ministry after this as one sent is no longer merely to warn or to caution, but to judge. His word will now constitute judgment. They'll not hear. They'll not see. Their hearts will be dulled because the prophet has spoken to them in a new depth of urgency and weight and authority as one sent, and at this point we should take a time out because I don't know where you are, but do you dwell on the word sent as you ought? Do you understand the significance of the difference between one who went and one who is sent, that most of the activity of our time and generation, however well-meaning, is self-initiated, committee determined, that we don't know what it means to be sent from the one who is enthroned, and that that is the root of the word apostolic. Apostolos means a sent one, but I know you only too well. You're American only to American. You itch to go and to do and be seen and cut a swath, but we're not seeing sendings of the kind that initiated the church's history, from Antioch being sent, but those that were sent turned the world upside down. So you do err because you do not sufficiently honor and esteem the phenomenon of sending, nor do you understand the difference between the consequence of the work that results from one's sent as one who is self-initiated and is going, and furthermore, you're not all that assured that the world needs to be turned upside down. Maybe it needs to be modified. Some of its excesses may be reduced, but essentially you're quite compatible. It's a world that you enjoy. You just want to fit into it in some way to bring some measure of significance, but you certainly don't want to overturn it. You don't see it as being as evil as art sees it. You're not chafed by its, not its immorality, its amorality. You've learned to live with it too long, and you've, you know, you don't have that prophetic jealousy and basis for comparison that would be yours if you saw the Lord high and lifted up. See, I know I'm talking off the top of my head, but don't miss a word of it. Everything hinges upon seeing the Lord as the Lord, because after 41, 42 years in the faith worldwide, examining and evaluating and touching its best forms, I suppose that you would be included there, I would have to say that the greatest grief of the condition of the church and its leadership and its prominent ministers—are you ready for this?—is that they do not know God as God. They do not know him as he, in fact, is. And once you have gotten away with the true knowledge and have some specious counterfeit that is much more in harmony with your own ambition and intentions as the God who approves, there's no fear. There's no awe. Therefore, you take liberties and initiate conduct that was not sent from heaven. Everything rests on seeing the Lord high and lifted up and enthroned in his majestic glory that was brought to perfection in the moment of his most excruciating suffering at Calvary. That's what this prophet saw. And he cried out, I'm undone. I'm a man of unclean lips. But listen, you dear saints, the problem is not the unclean lips. The problem is I'm a man. Let that sink into your Kansas City, Olathe, Midwest, charismatic mentality. I'm a man. So you're much too deeply humanistic than you know. You're much too friendly. And at peace with man, you don't see the inveterate evil. You don't see the intrinsic nature of man that is opposed to God. You don't see the ambitions, the self-initiated activity as being an act of direct rebellion against God. You don't see our impatience and unwillingness to wait to be sent as to being any particular offense. See what I mean? What Isaiah saw was himself. Woe is me. I'm undone. I'm a man. And if I'm a man of necessity, my lips are going to be defiled, even though a prophet. It's intrinsic to being a man to speak unwisely and to harangue women who take you to the airport if they missed the parking space. Here's what I want to say. Until we agree and come to this low appreciation or estimation of ourselves, we will always suffer the loss of the high exaltation of God. The two things are inextricably joined. You cannot perceive the truth of yourself. Many of you are living in la-la land. You have self-estimation and self-celebration and appreciation of yourself because you're pretty or you're clever or what that is far out of proportion to the way in which you really need to see yourself. And the reason that you were able to indulge such exaltation is because you had no basis for comparison. You saw yourself only in comparison to others and in that way you saw your superiority. But when you see yourself in comparison to God, you're dead and that's the way we need to see it. I'm not commending this because I'm morbid. I'm commending this because this is the way of sanity. This is truth. This is reality and it's at the foundation of any true sending. Why would God send a half-baked Kansas City-ite anywhere in the world? What are they going to communicate? They can't communicate anything that exceeds where they themselves are and what they themselves understand. Or you may bring some palliative, some measure of good, but you're not going to turn anybody's world upside down. You're not going to confront two or three hundred black men who have traveled that sacrifice and distance and tell them in the first speaking that you're one sent from the throne of heaven with a sent word and that you're not speaking that for effect. But it's a statement of truth that rivets those men in their places and brings a jerk to their whole posture to say this is something else and other than what we have known in the visits of white men from America. This man is not a white man from America. This man, strange phenomenon that he is, is beyond what we can understand naturally and his true origin and center is not America but heaven. He's sent from the throne. So listen, you guys. You think I'm just beating up at the air? Do you understand this? Either this sounds like the most flagrant egotism or the deepest humility. To be a sent one is not something which you boast. You're sent because he has elected you in your foolishness and your terrible paradoxical weakness and all your highfalutin consideration of the issues of what is moral and righteous can be contradicted by you in a moment if a woman drives by an available parking spot and you're found out. So listen, dear saints. Forget about any sending, any going of any consequence because it is consequential because one who is sent from the throne bears the authority and the unction and the anointing of that one who sends. Who will go for us? The word who haunts me. It's like, is there a candidate anywhere in this audience of hundreds? Is there a candidate for sending who has risen above the culture, the commonplace mentality, the correctness of his doctrine and knows God as God, sees God as terrifying, stupefying vast and sees him in his greatest act not as an object for sentimental pity but the revelation of the nature of God in his suffering and death which had ever and always been his nature. The only thing that the cross did was reveal what God always was and is. Got the picture? God's a servant. He's a sent one himself for the father. And what did it mean for this sent son who had lived eternally in the presence of the father in an exalted condition of relationship that defies any ability on our part even to begin to imagine having to forsake that and leave it to come down to this crusty globe and take upon himself the form of a man of flesh, be imprisoned in a body, begin life as a helpless infant laid in a manger and suffer all of the kinds of things that taking upon himself an earthly human existence as a Jew and as a son of David, son of Abraham, son of Adam so to speak was requisite. We don't know the humility of God until we have rightly pondered what it meant for the son to come down into this earth. It was the crucifixion before the crucifixion. Every instance of it, every act of it is the issue of self-denial, is the issue of compassionate concern for others at the expense of oneself. You think I'm happy with what I'm saying. I'm not saying it right. But who can? But we need to probe this more than any other consideration in all of our end time fancies and wanting to become sophisticated in understanding the last days movement of the Jews and the church and the excitement of it. We need to go back to this. Who shall go for us is a piercing question as if it implies you can look far and wide but you're not going to find many candidates. The only one who can go is the one who has seen and having seen comes to such a place of repulsion for himself that he is undone. And we're not talking about Joe Blow. We're talking about Isaiah the prince of the prophets. So what shall you say? If the prince of the prophets says I'm undone at the seeing of God as he really is in his glory, what shall you say? And until you say it with the same shriek and heart-piercing cry that God waits to hear that he can remedy, how are you a candidate for going? See how archaic I am? You follow a guy like me, there's not going to be happy occasions and large scale activity. There may not be any activity at all until we are grounded in this revelation. But what does it wait on? Being the Bible student that you are. How does the text begin? In the year that King Uzziah dies. Lord, what are you saying? Are you just giving that as a historic index that we could date something because we know the lifespan of this king and would have an approximate way to date the event? Or does the death of the king have something to do with the revelation of the prophet? What would you suspect? I wish this were interactive. The death of the king is an inextricable, ineluctable factor that sets in motion the entire episode. That's my opinion. Where does it say that? It doesn't. It's left for us to surmise, to interpret. So what does that have to do with anything much? That somehow a death has got to precede a revelation of this magnitude because the revelation issues in a call and the call issues in a judgment to Israel in which the prophet goes forth in a new authority now having been sent. Now hang on to this. Right to this moment. This judgment in Israel is still extant. It is still valid. It is still in motion. Israel is bound. Its eyes are closed. Nationally speaking, its heart is numb. It cannot hear, cannot see, cannot understand. You can spit your guts out and they don't know what you're talking about. They're civil and gracious on any of the subject, but on this they become impenetrable because the judgment has been decreed. Well, how do you fit in, cats? I'm a peripheral Jew. I'm not the nation. I'm just a little bit of the offscouring. The nation itself stands this moment under this judgment. You still want to be a prophet? Did you think that once you're sent to speak that that means necessary blessing for the hearers? What if it would mean necessary judgment for the hearers as may actually be true for you here with me last night and today? Some measure of judgment goes forth in the prophetic proclamation that is designed to bring to death areas of the flesh that are impudent and untrained and undisciplined and need this judgment. So it's not a pleasant task. And only those who are dead and see themselves as woe is me are the only ones who are capable of going and functioning in that kind of judgment. And it's all the same to them whether their hearers are blessed or their hearers are judged. The issue is obedience to go and say to them, your ears shall be shut, your eyes shall be open. Are you guys following me so far? We're talking about a massive central episode of the salvational history of mankind and of the people of Israel. Having been warned for five chapters, God now lowers the boom and speaks to the prophets words that will not just exacerbate or warn, but judge. For that you need to be sent. And it takes the authority of the one who sends in order for that to be affected. Now why am I saying all this? Because if it took ascending to give to the prophet the authority so to speak as to judge, what will it take to relieve this judgment? Because even the prophet says, how long Lord? He can't believe that God's last word is irremediable judgment. And the Lord says until cities are laid waste, left without inhabit, until there's a cataclysmic devastation that comes upon the land of the kind that Jesus will find in his return when two-thirds have already been have perished and the women have been ravaged and one-third are brought through the fire. So we're moving toward this finality, this conclusion. Israel is under judgment through a prophetic word, but the judgment needs to be reversed and the people be released by another sending. If it took ascending to bring the judgment, it will take ascending to end the judgment. There needs to be a prophetic company who have seen the Lord and know him in his majesty high and lifted up and are stricken to death of their own presumption about themselves and their own vanity that they are as good as dead. And unless a call comes from off the altar of God, they cannot speak. Have you noticed in this text? God does not in any way placate the prophet and say, don't get carried away, buddy. Your reaction is much too exaggerated. I'm not saying that you need that you are what you say you are. But God's silence and the sending of an angel with a call from the altar clearly implies that God is in complete agreement with the prophet's own estimation of himself. Are we going on too long? No? Why do you look like we're going on too long? Because every sentence that I'm saying is so conceptually loaded that if you're not used to it, you fog up and you can only take so much. So I'll try and bring this to a close, although the text is inexhaustible. The important point is the reaction of the prophet to the revelation of God seen in his resplendent majesty as crucified, evoking such a sense of his own shame. Because Karl Barth, my favorite theologian, should become yours, B-A-R-T-H, the great German Swiss thinker, says the reality of sin cannot be known or described except in relation to the one who has vanquished it. I know that's over your head, but let's go over it once more in patient condescension to Midwest America. What does the great theologian say? The reality of sin. I'd like to just take a quick poll. How many people here think they know the reality of sin? Raise your hand if you think you know the reality of sin. I want to tell you this. If you don't know the reality of sin, you don't know nothing. If you don't know that reality, you have no reality. For the reality of sin is the pervasive foundation of all reality. And if you don't have it, all of your highfalutin nonsense about redemption and the cross and all the kinds of things that you think you believe are only just a vapor. They're just sound and fury. It's just something reduced to a nomenclature, to a body of doctrine. That's not knowing. Don't you understand? That's not knowing. That's only cerebral agreement with certain evident truths that changes nothing. And why should God send you in that condition? Has there nothing better to do, no better candidate that he's got to send you with that shallow notion that falls short of the acknowledgment of his glory and of what atonement means and what God has paid to obtain it because you knew the terror of sin? Paul says, knowing the terror of sin, I persuade men. And I'm sure I can bet you dollars to donuts, dear sister, you do not know it. But you need to put it as an object of high priority. How do you come to know the reality or the terror of sin, realizing that that is the underlay of everything? Because what did Jesus do or perform that was so consequential and worthy of our admiration, let alone our adoration, if we don't understand what problem he met in his death? Are you guys following me? Prove it. My faith is fainting. This is reality, saints. And as we Jews say, oy vey, if what prevails in the church is the measure of reality that needs to be communicated to the world, the world is dying for reality. It's out of whack. It has no foundations. It's oblivious to eternity. It does not know what sin and judgment and hell are. Jesus can be dispensed with as a peripheral nothing celebrated at Christmas time to give the apartment stores the occasion for our orgies of buying, that even Japan has a Christmas, that the world has produced the birth of the advent of the son who met the sin problem in his death and turn it into a culture for commerce. How is it then that you're not wounded, that you don't ache over that, that you're not chafed, and that, in fact, you can go into those stores and indulge yourself as much as any, rather than boycott the event itself? Got the idea? Oh, listen, you guys, I'm not coming back again. I'm on my way out. So I want to be as insulting as I can get. I want to stab you. And if my impression is erroneous to you, just let the Lord stab me, because I can't believe, looking upon you and watching your polite yawns, that you really know what the terror of sin is and, therefore, are able to persuade men. You certainly have not persuaded Jewish men, even here in Kansas City or any place where you are. So they look upon you as just a harmless, Gentile equivalent of their Hanukkah, and their Hanukkah is as much a false piece of bologna as your Christmas, and the world goes down in death while these things are celebrated as being somehow real. No wonder our kids are freaking out. Let me repeat, Karl Barth, the reality of sin, which is the sine qua non, you know the Latin phrase? That absolutely essential requirement without which nothing else follows. The sine qua non is the reality of sin. Cannot be known, not maybe it can, cannot be known or described except in relation to the one who has vanquished it. There is no way to estimate sin independent of Jesus. To sentimentalize Jesus or to let that Australian character get away with his movie that just celebrates the flagellation and the physical abuse and is a Catholic distortion of the great atonement is to trivialize God. To miss it here, saints, is to miss it everywhere. We need to call a moratorium. There needs to be a great cry going out from Christendom that we have missed it, and that the only way to see it and perceive the great central event of history, the advent of the Son from heaven who takes upon himself the form of a man and that of a Jew and suffers death as the consequence for the sin of mankind in order to appease the honor of his father who has been disgraced by the sinful covenant breaking humanity. Until that has broken on our souls, until we have seen that in the context of the suffering, the humility, the anguish of soul, let this cup pass, we have not the knowledge of sin and therefore ever everything will suffer in proportion. The knowledge of atonement, the church, the subject of Israel, the last days and times, everything will suffer the want of this foundation that is rooted in the phenomenon of sin. You guys know what evil is? Oh, you're much too nice. Evil. You know how vile evil is? How vicious, how inveterate, how intrinsic to man and to his nature. Not just when he's doing the most malicious things, but even when he's acting at his best. Like Donald Trump, who has now become a fashion icon. Did you know that? There are Donald Trump suits and Donald Trump shirts and Donald Trump ties and that the men's fashion leaders are astonished that overnight this nobody has become the head of men's fashion wear. How come? Because there's something with which he's identified that men want to adopt. The prestige, the mysticum of success, having several wives and that's evil saints. There's a prevalent evil. I watched, what was I watching? The World Series and in the halftime, which was boring, I just flicked around the dial just to see what else was on. And there was one program about young girls becoming models and they were all minority girls, just full of excitement at the prospect that they're on TV and maybe this will start the recognition and a career. And one girl had to be posed near a car and she had tight pants on and the guy stuck his hand right on her behind and lifted it up onto the fender of the car in order to show it the greater advantage. I went through the ceiling. You probably wouldn't even have blinked an eyelash. And then at the end they had a little discussion on fashion and there was the filmmaker and one of the girls and there was a guy who had, he was black, but he had the huskiest voice, but he was dressed like a woman. He was a transvestite having a legitimate place on the panel talking about modeling as if his opinion was to be desired and the fact that he is a transvestite who lives in complete travesty to the design of God who made them male and female is not in any way an impediment to his use. In fact, it probably ensures his greater use. You understand? Listen guys, this world is evil. This world is vile. This world is vicious. This world is anti-God. This world is at enmity with God. So you can believe that it's going to sentimentalize the cross. That's Catholicism. And in some way keep us from an apprehension of the reality that the cross alone reveals. And I wrote at the bottom of the page, to have an inadequate sense of sin is to have an inadequate sense of God. Got that? It all goes together. You have a low estimation of sin. How then can you exalt God? And I wonder what is it that keeps us from adoration? I've been toying with the word. I myself have not yet come to that place of adoration, but I suspect that when I do or when we will, we will have come to the ultimate place of relationship with God that is transcendent and breaks through in realms of worship and praise that cannot be imitated or affected in lesser places and that releases the authority and power of God by those who have come to such a place of worship because they can be trusted. I'm speaking as if this is a last occasion. Have you noticed? I'm not even looking at the clock, knowing that if you don't get this from me, you're not going to get it probably from anyone. I'm going for broke for your souls, for your future, for the day in which you will esteem the word sent as being the root of Apostolos sent one, that you're willing to wait, that you know you're presently unqualified, that you have nothing really to communicate in the sense that would turn the world upside down or that God should impart you an authority that you would need in facing nations or peoples who are intrinsically hostile or indifferent to your message and the only way they'll hear you is if they recognize that indeed you're a sent one in the authority of God bearing a sent word. You think those black ministers wanted to hear me? They wanted to learn how they could augment their ministries and come to greater measure of success in their own self-esteem. They're careerists. The fact that they're Africans doesn't save them from human ambition. It's all the more reason to employ ministry as a way to out from the deadening poverty that afflicts the entire nation. Now you have an income. Now you have a suit on your back. Now you have a reason for being. These men were all careerists and wanted to remain so. All they wanted to hear was what technique or method that you've developed in America can we employ that will enhance our quote ministry. They didn't want to become undone. Let me repeat what I'm suspecting God is wanting to communicate in this text. Israel's present condition as a nation is to be condemned to judgment because a prophet came who was sent and spoke and performed it. And nothing has happened from that day to this. The until has not yet come and when it comes it will come in apocalyptic devastation and ruin in Israel. But when that happens I'm suspecting that the judgment that had come by prophetic speaking needs to be relieved by prophetic speaking. But where are the Isaiahs of our generation? Where can we conceive of a corporate sending of a corporate Isaiah who could be sent who's speaking now will open eyes rather than close them. Open hearts rather than close them. Save rather than condemn. It's waiting for those who are sent which is waiting for those who have seen the truth of their condition and have cried out over it because they have seen the Lord as he is high and lifted up. But what precipitates everything the year that King Uzziah dies. So let me end with this you patient saints. What is the Uzziah of your life? Still alive with whom you are in some kind of relationship of symbiotic relationship of fascination or esteem because the Uzziah is not necessarily an evil person. King Uzziah was one of Israel's better kings except that he lapsed into leprosy by presumption. But evidently there was a relationship between the king and the prophet that however much it may have served the prophet in the course of his own walk and growth was now an impediment. Do you know of anyone who holds a role like that? It could be your own children, it could be your ambition for ministry, it could be a known leader. One man fell out of a seat when I was speaking like this, a precious minister from El Salvador. I said who was the Uzziah that God revealed to you? He said it was me, I myself. Something has to die saints that precedes the unfolding of this whole thing of revelation and sending and call. Uzziah, we don't have to wait for the termination of a natural life, we can bring it to death. We can choose the death of that favorite thing that may have meant something in the past but your clinging to it keeps you from the fullness of the revelation of the Lord high and lifted up. I'm just talking off the top of my head. I don't know how else to describe what King Uzziah must have meant for the prophet and why his death was critical to everything that subsequently followed. Now listen to this you Christian Zionists, what if your Uzziah is the state of Israel itself? The very thing that you want to see succeed and God says unless you allow that to come to death, you'll not see me because it's in the death of Israel as in my own death that the greatest revelation of the truth of what I am as God is revealed. But if you're unwilling to relinquish and want to hang on to Israel as he presently is hoping that whatever her defects, there'll be an amelioration and an improvement, you're being kept from the revelation of the Lord high and lifted up. How will I know that the revelation will have come when you can say with the seraphim, holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts and that the whole earth is full of his glory. When you come to angelic seeing, not just in general but over the sovereignty of God that takes your Uzziah, when you acknowledge the rightness of that death, of bringing that to a death or God will actually do it through physical death and that it's not mere accident but the divine strategy, the divine will and that you can in the face of it not just acknowledge it, not just swallow it down and learn to live with it but exalt God because of it. Hey, I'm getting right to the punchline now. When you can exalt God in his judgments, when you can see in God his glory and greatest revelation of himself in those things that seem to be the fiercest contradiction of God, what, he's going to raise up the state of Israel and then allow it to be reduced and the land made desolate and everyone is cast far away? That contradicts your very understanding of God, his mercy, his kindness, his goodness, which is exactly what needs to be contradicted because it's your humanistic view of God. It's your nice way of seeing him that you can walk with this God of your imagining that reinforces you in your own status quo. When you can say holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts and that the whole earth is full of his glory, not just in triumphal moments but in the moments of death and disappointment and what seem to be the severest contradictions of God, you have arrived. You have come to the knowledge. You have seen the Lord and you have seen yourself and he'll purge you and he'll send you. So I want to pray now that if you don't know who Uzziah is for you, the Lord will show it. And I don't know with the various forms that it could be a person, a thing, a ministry, your own ambition. Lord, quite a morning, quite a, how do they say it, a discursive, wide ranging sweep from one text and that if you didn't shut Art up, he could have still gone on for another hour and drawn out and found other implications that are inherent in that text. My God, we have quoted that text. We've used it as sermons. We thought we knew and understood it. We were playing with it like a toy and we ourselves were not affected and didn't even understand the supremacy of one sent from the throne of heaven. Where from what other source shall one be sent? And we were so alive to our own itch and our own ambition that we didn't have to wait for that. Just let some door of opportunity open because there are needs everywhere in the earth that would welcome high spirited and bright fuzzy tailed young believers from the Midwest to bring blessing. But the earth then yet remains in its curse and still needing to be turned over. So my God, Lord, let what you have shared with us not suffer any loss that we will not limit the Holy One of Israel because we can only take so much conceptual speaking at any one time and that therefore what you have spoken will not fall to the ground but that you'll continue to allow it to seep into our deeps and search us out and reveal to us who that Uzziah is, likely someone who is presumptuous in the realm of ministry and try to usurp the function of priests because he was a king and we admired that one and wanted to be identified with that one and share something therefore of his own presumption and therefore he has to die for us and we have to die for him if we're to see the Lord as he in fact is high and lifted up. So Lord, let this message sink deep into the very foundations of all that is represented in this room and continue to unfold it, explicate, show my God its meaning and even now have its effect on as many who are being touched and can see an application that they need to acknowledge and to repent about in preserving Uzziah rather than willing for his extinction for we do not see his angels Lord and we don't see the earth full of your glory we see only the present moment. Come and bring us into that agreement with the seraphim that qualifies us to be sent ones that do not bring a merely cultural time dated perspective but the timeless view of the angels of God who forever perceive the glory of God that's in the earth. Bless this American audience Lord and help it because it's American and bring it to an apostolic and prophetic place for Israel's sake needing to be freed from the judgment that has been imposed upon it by the speaking of a prophet by a fresh and new speaking of a prophetic company who can be sent who's speaking to open the blind eyes, open the deaf ears, open the closed hearts that they might be saved. What a destiny for the church Lord at the conclusion of the age. Thank you for the preciousness of the call, the holiness of the text in this day in Jesus name. Amen.