In this sermon, the speaker emphasizes the need for Christians to not only speak about their faith but also demonstrate it through their actions. They highlight the importance of living a life that reflects the truth of the Gospel, especially in a world filled with injustice and chaos. The speaker also addresses the changing times and the impact of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, stating that the world will never be the same again. They emphasize the inadequacy of patriotism and even Christianity as they were understood before the crisis, calling for a deeper understanding and appropriation of faith.

...and everything's okay. Well, Dave is right that I'm not going to be speaking on the subject of Israel tonight, but something else that has been gestating in my spirit. I'm waiting to hear myself what that is. And so I have a whole lump of holy clay to be thrust on the wheel, and for the Lord to put his fingers in and see what emerges from the ooze. I have David Wilkerson's article. Have you seen that on the recent catastrophe? Outstanding. It even forbids anyone touching the subject after that. So I have also my own small comment that I composed and put on our website. Some thoughts and a few other things that I've been carrying in an article from a newspaper, and we can go in any direction. I'm going to pray in just a moment. But however it comes out tonight, one thing I can assure you, the books are good. Extraordinarily good. That would be almost, I don't know what, a slight to not avail yourself while they're here. I don't think you'll find any of them in a bookstore. Maybe the Spirit of Truth. But the Holocaust book, my Lord, I just got a dig from a Lutheran theologian, whom I went out of my way to hear, and I showed him the book. Oh, he said, the Holocaust, where was God? This should make you a lot of money. I said, no, I think it's more likely to have me stoned. A very revealing comment, and I'm still trying to understand why there was an instantaneous recoil from that man to myself. Not that I've not experienced that before. I wonder if it's something like the legacy of Lutheranism and the Anabaptists, who were dismissed by Luther as shvamorai, which is translated fanatics, because they elevated men who had no theological credentials, like a Jacob Hutter, who was a hat maker, and died maybe within the first ten years of his Christian life. In fact, I was just at Innsbruck in Austria, at the very place where he was burned to death, as the nobility and Catholic hierarchy watched from the golden dach, the golden roof, the little portico of the man burning below, who had been subject to torture for a few months, in which they poured brandy into his wounds and lit them. So I do come out of a tradition of that kind, and I want to consciously remain in that tradition, in the unbroken continuum of saints of every generation who have suffered for his namesake, and who are to this day repellent to those who occupy ecclesiastical roles of significance in church systems. Can you follow that? Good. So, this theologian, I went out of my way to hear him, arriving from Amsterdam at about midnight, at 1 a.m. Holland time, to find that the agency with whom I had arranged for my rental, car rental, was closed. And there's a little note to call thrifty cars, and I called them, they couldn't do a thing for me, I had to fish around with three pieces of luggage, sweaty, hot, one o'clock in the morning, and then drive 50, 60 miles out of the countryside to a farm where I was being put up for the night. And then all of that to hear this theologian, whose writings I have admired, and who speaks often, makes references to apostolic succession, which is the moot question about Catholicism and Protestantism, and in the luncheon that followed the last session yesterday with the question and answer time, having shown him my book, Apostolic Foundations, and completely ignored it, my question was, to what degree do you understand the phrase apostolic succession to imply a certain character of lifestyle, a certain mode of being, and where in Christendom do you find it pursued anywhere, and what will you say are its distinctive constituent elements? How would you like that for a question? And the man jerked and found a glib way to talk around it and out of it, but he had no answer. But I commend this book to you that he ignored. It's a gem, a classic. Someone said it's the summation of all your life art. Apostolic character, apostolic proclamation, apostolic perception, the subject of eternity, the principalities and powers of the air. This is a treasure trove, and being now readied for publication in Germany, where all these books are in several foreign languages, but I highly commend this and the Holocaust book, the issue of God's judgment, which if we had read it and understood it, we would not have been so shocked by the recent catastrophe in New York, the spirit of truth. I don't know anyone else who has picked up this theme, to examine what does God call the foundation, how does he say it, the truth, the foundation, the pillar. The church is the foundation and pillar of truth. Have you heard that? That's a verse, the scripture. But so little understood, so little desired, so little loved. Truth is more than something to be acknowledged. It's got to be passionately sought, or you'll be a victim of deception. So I can commend that. This is in French, Lithuanian, Dutch, I don't know the other language. Oh, Tamil in India, where we're going in February. You can pray for me, first time into that part of the world. And a little gem called apostolic conversion. If this is not first understood and taken to heart, the rest does not follow. Many saved, but few converted. What does it mean to be converted from an apostolic point of view? And on our website, you'll find an entire book called The Prophetic Call, which is not yet in print, but a publisher who did the Holocaust book said, Art, please send us 50 pages of something on the subject that has now become so avid a consideration for many Christians in the new popularity of propheticness. And so this is a selection from that larger book, but it's a little gem that stands for itself. So tonight, the whole package is yours for $100. Thank you, Lord, precious God on high. You know that we're sticking our necks out, my God, and gladly willing to stumble, chokes, blutter, and fail, if only to give you an opportunity to sound some things that cannot come except by that willingness. So, Lord, may we hear your voice. And there are many who have commented on the catastrophe in New York and Washington, and we're almost now grown to a place of weariness with everyone wanting to get into the act and make his own prophetic pronouncement. But we'd love to hear, Lord, a little something from you on this subject and invite you just to sift through what I have before me and draw from it what you will. Give us a statement, Lord, out of your own heart of a kind that will challenge and change us, deepen us in our appropriation of the faith. Let us not pass over the devastation that has come right into our own nation as some kind of momentary aberration and has passed, and we need not anticipate something like that again, but to draw its meaning, recognizing that you're sovereign, that anything that happens anywhere and everywhere is under your oversight, if not your actual instigation, and therefore we dare not miss its meaning. So help us, my God, to probe and understand and use this earthen vessel tonight to that end. We thank you and praise you for the privilege of exploring the issues of truth and the issues of the faith, a wonderful privilege, exquisite for us who are in the faith. In Jesus' name, amen. Well, I dabbled a little note somewhere in... I always forget the name of that city. I've just come from it in Alabama, Birmingham. I don't know why the thought came to me, and I have it before me, to say to the Church, don't expect hope for solution in this present world. Isn't that a... what a statement to open an inquiry. Don't expect hope in this present world. And the phrase, this present world, is right out of Paul and was current to the apostolic generation and the prophets that preceded it, implying present world as something transient and passing because all of them look significantly to the eschatological future. This is passing away, but what we're expecting and waiting for is the Lord to come from heaven, the establishment of his kingdom, the consummation of the age. This is only temporary, this present world. So don't look for solution in this present world because its problems, like Israel's, are intractable and issue, like Israel, from the effectual dismissal of God from his own world. This is the thing that's in my heart to explore, that we have effectually, we all the more as Christians, dismissed God from his own creation while purportedly at the same time to be honoring him. David Wilkerson speaks about idolatry, but I would take it one step further. The worst and the most subtle and powerful of all forms is that form of idolatry that is practiced in Jesus' name, where though we invoke the name Jesus, what we have in our thought and heart about that name is something other than who he is in himself. Maybe someone who will help us along in the way, find us a boyfriend, girlfriend, husband, take care of our ills, our economy, an errand boy. You can have a mentality of that kind about God and Jesus that is effectually what you understand when you invoke the word. So the mere fact that you can manipulate or utter the word does not save you. In fact, it puts you under a greater condemnation and judgment because it's taking the Lord's name in vain in the most profound sense, and you're making what is intended to be authentic as an ultimate idol. So the issue is to knowing God as God. And one of the things that help us to know him as God is to assess his judgments and to recognize his hand in them and that they have fallen upon Israel historically and will yet fall upon Israel in the world in the time of Jacob's trouble and are falling upon us, and maybe the first installment of tragic episodes will give us a depth of understanding about God that nothing else can provide. Our website is called The Burning Bush. Why? Because the rabbis say that what God was waiting for in Moses was his willingness to turn and look into the fire, that he could have circumvented an uncomfortable revelation that has strange connotations, and if you want safety, just bypass it and don't even be disturbed by the phenomenon. But Moses turned aside to see and to ask why this bush burns but is not consumed. And when God saw that, he called to Moses twice, Moses, Moses, the ground upon which you stand is holy. God honors those who will turn aside to see, and the rabbis, I don't often quote them, but in this case I like what they say, is that what impressed God was that anyone who will turn aside to see need not think that he can turn back again. Once you make this turn, there's no turning back to the way in which you saw previously. This seeing of God in the fire is an ultimate revelation of God himself in judgment. Fire is always a symbol of judgment, and he waits to be found there. But who has a stomach for that? We'd love to discover or learn about God and his love, his mercy, his goodness, kindness, etc., etc., but we omit his judgment, forgetting that he has a seamless garment that could not be parted out. You have to take the whole thing whole. You have to eat the lamb whole and not just pick the parts that you like, devour the whole lamb. And his judgment is an intrinsic... What is mercy independent of judgment? What is righteousness independent of judgment? For when his judgments are in the earth, the world will learn righteousness. His judgments are painful, and he does not give them without having exhausted every means of grace to bring men to a consciousness through his word of that which would affect the change for which in the failure judgment must come. But I praise God for his judgments, painful though they are. And maybe the worst thing is to allow them to pass and to dismiss them as accident or aberration or the activity of a Hitler or obsessed Islamic fanatics and not understand that all of these things are in the employ of God. So what is God complaining about? What is he trying to stir us to acknowledge? What he's trying to acknowledge is the effectual dismissal of himself from his own world. Something like the Enlightenment, something like Thomas Jefferson, the deists who acknowledged that God had set the world in motion, something like a clockmaker and then backed off and allowed us after that to take over. He just gives us a playground for our use, but he is not expected to be a participant in the creation that he himself has framed. That was the attitude of the deists. You know that Jefferson scissored out sections of the Bible that were uncomfortable for him. But the point is that we who do not see ourselves as deists in our mentalities scissor God out. And we like him to be quoted when sessions of Congress are invoked or when we marry or bury or give sermons. But in every other way, in the effectual practical affairs of our life and of the nation, not only do we not expect God to be present or to intervene, but we would be offended if he does so. There's nothing more offensive to modernity and to the modern mind than the intrusion of God in the affairs of men. We want to do it ourselves. So he is effectually being dismissed in his own world. One thing to be dismissed by atheists, but to be dismissed by his own people who have lived so long with that dismissal that they think it normative is a sorry condition that can perhaps only be corrected by judgment. So that's what Israel has done and is doing presently. If you read, keeping up, as much as its back is to the wall, as much as its condition is utterly alarming, as much as there's no evidence of any way in which they can negotiate with an intractable enemy, still, with all of the mounting cycle of violence and retribution and generating new waves of violence and vengeance and so on and so forth, there's not even a thought or a disposition to consider the God of our fathers. Maybe we ought to pray. Maybe we ought to fast. Could it be that the God of the psalmists who called him, my fortress, my hope, my strength, is God still and that he can be consulted and sought and that he could be the answer for a predicament for which we have no solution except the increase of violence? Who thinks like that? And how is this violence coming? Through Islamic terrorism. It's ironic how God appoints the instrument of judgment, ironically, to be the consequence of our own sinful rejection. That if you know the history of Islam and its origin and this illiterate demonic man, as was described to me today rightly, who took his cue from Jewish monotheism and the Christian monotheism, though it's subscribed to a Trinitarian view of God that doctrinally, in actual practice, lived, as we still do today, in a monotheistic way. And so Islam is another monotheistic idolatry, another perversion of the faith which has ironically come to haunt and to threaten the very life of that nation which inspired Muhammad by its own example after the advent of Jesus. Why do you say that, Art? Because the advent of Jesus was the revelation of the triune God, par excellence. The Son on the cross, the Father in heaven, to whom the Son is crying out, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? And giving himself without blemish, without spot, as sacrifice by the eternal Spirit. Our Jewish rejection of Jesus crucified is equally, at the same time, the rejection of the triune God. And condemns us to continue in a monotheistic insistence after that revelation. So while God may have tolerated the simplistic view of himself in a single term, after the revelation of himself in his triune form, to continue in that is an offense against God. And so we have created the very monster that now seeks to devour us. And that same monster, Islam, has threatened Christianity historically. Right to the gates of Vienna. And the very great apostolic centers like Antioch and... I'm tired. What are the great apostolic centers? Ephesus. And the city in Egypt, not Cairo, but Alexandria, that were great centers of apostolic activity and a vibrant church, were in time overrun by the Islamic Horde. And like Constantinople today have been turned totally Islamic. The great church and cathedral of Constantinople is today the Islamic... What do you call it? Mosque of Istanbul. So we mustn't dismiss those things as mere historic accident, but a statement from God that because your faith is defunct, because you have not maintained its apostolic integrity, I have allowed it to be judged by that people whose... We call it fanaticism, whose fervent and avid faith shames us, and who have a theocratic view of God that we lack as Christians and have all the more right to believe. Are you following me? You have to be clever to follow me tonight. The words are very lean and clear and sharp. Have you noticed that Islam is theocratic? Of course their God is a false God and a no-God, but they believe that he's intended to rule over the world and over nations, and they're going to prove that and establish that through violence. They have a theocratic view that God is not to be confined to a Saturday phenomenon or a Friday phenomenon, but to rule the world, which is the view that is appropriate to us for believing in the king as not some mystical figure and the kingdom as not some kind of internal and subjective inward thing, but an actual rule of God over his creation out of the holy hill of Zion in the city of Jerusalem in the redeemed nation Israel. Because of our failure to believe that, continue that, and expect that, and because when we say, thy kingdom come, we're speaking in airy, figurative, and abstract terms, and do not expect a literal kingdom, we're being shamed by a people who do. Because Jews celebrated German culture and civilization as the finest expression of humanism that has even become the messianic alternative for which they could no longer believe in scripture. They died at German hands. But inhumanely, that the celebration of this liberal civilization of Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, all of the great giants of literature, philosophy, became not only their annihilators, but in the most cruel and inhuman terms. Can you see God in this? Do you have a sense for this? His judgments are so ironic, are so just, and it's not that he inflicts them. Oh, you did this, now I'm going to do that. But whatsoever a man has sown, that too shall he reap. You honored Germany as a messianic alternative, and you thought that it was the answer for the world? Now you're going to die at the very hands that you so celebrated, whose culture was only paper thin and had become now bestial, who failed to save you for 2,000 years in Germany, will now annihilate you. So the judgments of God are not inflicted, they issue out of our own intransigence and our own sin. The very character of it determines the form of the judgment. Elementary, my dear Watson, you don't have to wait for a Jewish guy to come and share these foundational views. And that's why we have not warned the world. We don't really believe that there's a day of the Lord that is coming, that is going to judge the world by that man whom he has raised from the dead. So the world dismisses us as a Sunday culture, rightly, because we don't exhibit and bear a word of self-impending judgment. We don't live as if we believe it itself is coming. And we ourselves are so taken up with the world and so affected by it that in our deeps we want to see it to continue and not to be judged. The last thing that we would desire is to see the world judge that we've come so to enjoy and appreciate. Can't it be improved? Like Abraham crying out for Ishmael, can't Ishmael live? Can't the world be improved, Lord, progressively? Can't Israel be improved progressively by increasing amelioration to grow into and become the messianic hope? Must it face judgment and death and then resurrection? See, even the very thought of that is an offense to most Christians. We are humanists more than we know and prefer progressive improvement and amelioration rather than apocalyptic judgment, devastation, death, and resurrection. Therefore, we don't have a message for the world. So I went out on my way to hear this theologian, but it was hollow. He was correct, but it was hollow. There was nothing about it that was, in fact, apostolic. When I raised the question, all he could do was choke and stumble. He could not answer. Because you can only answer it in the measure of the reality which you have appropriated. But if you are satisfied merely with terminology, with a vocabulary, with doctrine, then how can you answer not only in a question, but how can you answer as witness in the world? And we have been satisfied with mere doctrinal correctness rather than existential demonstration of the things that we purport to believe. And for that reason, we're being judged. We have become a phraseological Christianity. Listen, I was a high school teacher for several years, and I know the system. Induct the students into a certain vocabulary of response which they can answer back and get the appropriate grades so they can be promoted and go on to their credentializing and whatever they're going to do in the world. But actual comprehension, actual appropriation, actual reality is not the thing that is to be sought or communicated. Just have them to respond verbally and appropriately and they get an A. It's as if we have the technical word, we have the corresponding reality. You know what that's called? Deception. May God keep us from glib, anxious speaking if there's not a corresponding reality with those words. Lest we be deceived to think that because we say the right thing, we are the right thing. In fact, what is apostolic is the thing in itself. It's not the man who has the vocabulary, it's the man who is the very demonstration of what he speaks. And Paul, of course, is the most marvelous example. And that's why at Athens, which was the epitome of civilization, he could challenge its philosophers and rulers about the shabby way in which they conduct themselves in all falsity, purporting to seek truth but never coming to the knowledge of it, and wanting to hear some new thing every day. And that's why they allowed the babbler to come up to Mars Hill for the novelty of what he might bring. But there was no earnest desire for truth that could be lived. Why? Because these philosophers had their own retinue of boys. Homosexuality was flagrant and it was quite commonplace for the most distinguished ethicists to have a young boy with whom they could engage in homosexual acts. Therefore, he said, on my way here I observed your monuments to the unknown God. But I'm telling you, phonies, that you're not going to get away with it hereafter. Because him whom you ignorantly worship and desire to remain ignorant about, I declare unto you. How'd you like a guy like that today? Not confronting the Mars Hill of the world, but the Mars Hill of the church. And then telling them that God has rinked in times past, but he commands all men everywhere now to repent, for he has appointed a day in which he will judge the world by that man whom he's raised from the dead. Come on, Paul. These guys have no Bible school background. They've never heard about resurrection, one being raised from the dead. It's an offense to Greek intellectuality, to the rational mind, to believe that God could raise the dead. And that this one whom he has raised is going to be the judge of the world? How are they to believe that? They have no background and basis for it. And that because he was raised from the dead, this is the distinction in his right to be judged? And he turned away and walked away. Most dismissed him. Some said, well, here again, this man never did. Some clave unto him and believed. And the great question is, how could Paul put forth a message of a day that God has appointed by which he will judge the world, which includes Athens, on the basis of a man raised from the dead? To a people, philosophers, who do not believe in that kind of supernaturalism, and who are greatly offended by any reference to resurrection. And the whole answer is that he could speak it and walk away because he was himself the living demonstration. He was the man of the resurrection. How else do you explain his message? I perceive that in all things you're too superstitious. What a way to begin. Hey, haven't you ever been to Bible school? Don't you know about principles of evangelism? You don't begin by insulting your audience? He began by insulting his audience. Why? Because the message, like the man, was itself a resurrection phenomenon. And if we had a church like that, of whose foundation the apostle is, and are continuing in that kind of reality and confrontation with the unbelieving world, we would not be experiencing planes flying into buildings, flown by frenzied Islamic fanaticals who are really sober, middle class, educated, and refined men by every other reckoning. This isn't the scum at the bottom of the barrel. This is the best of Islamic society, and they can determine to give themselves a net kind of violence. There's got to be a factor that we should consider. A judgment because we have diminished God. That's what I wanted to talk to you tonight, I don't know if I'll get to it, about trivializing God by domesticating Him, by turning Him to our purposes, by putting Him in our employment, rubbing a genie lamp in prayer, praying for blessing. I mean, if you could see it by the eye of God, it disfigures Him. It makes Him an errand boy. Hey, we're talking about the most high. The God who created the heavens and the earth and all that in it is is not someone for our convenience. We are for His convenience. We've got it all wrong. And to use Him and His word to commence sessions of Congress and various other kinds of functions that take the edges off of our secular life and bring a little amenity of a flourish of a religious kind is the employment of God for the purposes of man. And when you get away with that for a long period of time, it effectually minimizes, trivializes, and diminishes God as God. And the fact that the fear of God is absent even from the congregation of God's people indicates how far we have gone in this, that we have lost the sense of awe and reverence and fear of the Most High, or we would not be so conducting ourselves. It's really remarkable that Islam is offended by the immorality of the West, that men who do not think it a scruple to fly innocent victims into commercial towers and take thousands of lives with them are offended by our moral life, by miniskirts, and sex, and perversion, and in what city is there not a gay day parade sanctioned by the mayor or the governor in the United States of America? And this deeply offends them, and we don't even blink an eyelash at what ought more deeply to offend us. And therefore God uses them in the incensed indignation they have as being morally superior to a West that is degraded and cannot therefore be an instrument in the world. They're bringing a greater morality. It's a judgment upon our immorality that they could celebrate themselves at our expense, because they see us, what to them is Western is a synonym for Christian, one and the same. I was looking at some of the gorgeous girls there at the seminary, I mean really endowed bodily, and I thought to myself, okay, so you have it, but do you have to exhibit it? Who says that you have to wear a snug sweater and one that ends at your belly button so that if you stretch to get your books off a shelf there it is exposed at a Christian seminary? Because you have it, do you have to exhibit it? Are you unconscious that you are being a provocation and a temptation to young men? Where's your decorum? Why don't you conceal which the Muslim women do with their black garments and whatchamacallits around their heads that you can't even barely see anything that suggests their femininity, while we in our culture exhibit it brazenly without censure and in the church. So what's our answer now to this attack? We're mounting a reply in a physical way. We've been stung. Our nation has been assailed, and we only know how to act in one way, with force. And so what do we obtain? Tens upon thousands or hundreds of thousands of refugees shattering their little villages in their mud huts, leaving them homeless in a situation that cannot be won by such means. But what other means have we but force? The use of arms, and one of the things I have, that I found in the Herald Tribune on my flight from Amsterdam, Lockheed Fighter Award cheered in Britain. Lockheed has won a contract for warplanes. I don't know how many billions of dollars for the conceivable future that would even award contracts to other suppliers of parts in Great Britain and elsewhere. It virtually revives the economy. It's interesting that when the Lord comes, and the Lord shall go forth out of Zion, the Word of the Lord out of Jerusalem, men shall study war no more. And they'll turn their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks. All implements of peace. For we have no idea what the economy of weaponry means in the world. We are number one of the world's manufacturers and sellers of instruments of death. And I thank God for the privileged tour I had of the Douglas factory in Houston where the F-16 bomber fighter is made, because I have a friend who works there as an engineer, and I've been pleading with him to seek employment elsewhere, but the money is too good. And I went on a Saturday when men were working overtime, and the Lord gave me the name as I looked, the word I have never ever used before nor since, as I looked at these employees with their beer guts hanging over their belts. And the word was gnome, g-n-o-m-e. They are gnomes. They're not human. They've become something else. They're deformed in their humanity. They're technicians of a kind that are ever so slow in their movement, in making sure that they clock that time and a half or double time, and are living a life of great indulgence, manufacturing these instruments of death. And when I saw the name on the plane, Thailand, the new name for Burma, I mean, some of the most small and insignificant nations have to have an F-16 or more because their neighbor has one. It's not that they're so much as threatened as they are challenged in the whole issue of prestige, of power, of armaments, and that whole mentality that pervades the world of which we are at the center. So I won't even read from this, but just to know, the world is wicked. And someone told me today that those bombs that are being dropped in Afghanistan, what are they called where the bombs open up other bombs and affect a great area? Cluster bombs. Each one costs, what, $60,000 each? Well, at the same time I'm listening to national public radio that unemployment is increasing in America, and many are affected who do not even qualify for any kind of aid or help. And so the contradiction of this kind of investment in death and the inability to provide men with the things that pertain to their integrity, their families, their maintenance, is a contradiction that ought to leave us gasping. And probably not the least reason for it is the ineptitude of the church, its quietness, its inability to see these things and to protest or cry out or call the nation to righteousness and to tell them that there's a day in which God will judge all nations by that man whom he has raised from the dead, that he's winked in times past but calls men now everywhere to repent. I would say that the church that is unable to proclaim that, has not the courage to proclaim it, does not see that the imminence of that day and that we're pointing to this day of judgment, the conclusion to the age, disqualifies itself as church and condemns itself, however correct its vocabulary, to being a kind of Sunday culture that does not even engage its own children. Our own children are bored with what we are about and come under protest and at the first opportunity will not come at all. We've not persuaded them that what we are about deserves their participation and we don't even see that. We look the other way. Isn't it amazing? And we give them crayons and things to doodle with. One of my last meetings in Holland, a prominent church in Groningen, I'm sitting and looking this way and there's a whole lineup of kids in their puberty or early teens doing their thing, playing with little toys or coloring books or reading comic books while the adults are worshiping God and are totally unmoved and non-reflective of what is taking place and they're not encouraged to be participant but to be quiet by doing their thing. How is that a preparation for reality when we'll not even have the courage to see the truth of the condition of our own children and ask why it is that what we are about does not engage them. It engages us at least we enjoy the worship, not so sure that it's rising above the ceiling that the Lord himself is being blessed especially if it's more something to affect the atmosphere. See, that's why you've got to read the book The Spirit of Truth. Truth is more than a technical matter. There's a spirit of truth. We've got to see through the outward forms and the superficial external things to the truth of something, have the heart and the courage to recognize it, which is why the son of man who is called to prophesy to Israel's bones or they will not live needs first to be brought down and into the valley of dry bones by the hand of the Lord and the Spirit of God. He can't stay up, elevated charismatic place. He's got to come into the grit of things as God sees them or he cannot speak for God if he'll not see with God and we also have got to come into the grit. So this use of force now and retaliation in what seems to be a no-win situation and complicates and generates a further anger against the great Satan, which is the way the Islamic nations see us for we're fulfilling what they expect from us. Mindless, wholesale devastation that cannot win. But we have no other alternative. We've got to act. We've been stung and patriotism calls for this and we're going to get the culprit. Dead or alive, I think that was the President's term, as if we're still in the Lone Ranger Cowboys and Indians time when there's a shootout at the KO Corral and the good guys win. What our dear President doesn't know and what his shallow Christianity has not revealed to him is that with the bombing of the crashing of those planes into those towers, the world has changed and will not ever again be the same. Not only have the rules changed, the rules have been removed. You're not going to find the bad guys at the KO Corral and get rid of them. Bom, bom, bom with a few blasts and go back to things as they were. This is a whole other world and whole new dimensions of consideration have come with that act of violence that need to be recognized and that patriotism as we have understood it is inadequate and even the Christianity that we are happy that the President has obtained is at a level inadequate to meet the crisis that has come. But it's our kind of Christianity. He's a reflection of our kind of evangelicalism. So if you turn to my website, you'll find Tragic Event. Click on that and you'll read The Shaking of All Things that Can Be Shaken. Some comments on the tragedy of September 11th, 2001. That Humpty Dumpty has had a great fall with the coming down of the towers of the world's financial center and it is the world itself that can never again be the same. What security, confidence, or trust can systems of security have momentarily failed and can henceforth be remedied and strengthened, which of course they're striving to do at airports and we're acting humanly, all too humanly. So it's not that the system has failed that can be corrected or improved, but system itself has failed. That systems have failed. Systems can no longer be our confidence, our trust, and our hope for they are penetrable. Even the Pentagon cannot be defended against. So we have to review in what we have placed our trust and our confidence in institutions and systems for system is the antithesis of God. The church is an organism, not a system. And when the church itself becomes a system or an institution how then shall it bring a corrective word to the world and its systems and institutions when it itself has become one? Why have we become an institution and a system and an organization and a structure rather than the apostolic organism, the brilliant thing that God called the church to be and was at the first, that they even had to invent or employ a Greek word to describe the quality of their relationship koinonia, because there's no English equivalent, because it's the cross, because that kind of relationship requires suffering, because it requires speaking the truth in love, and being willing to receive a word spoken as correction or bringing it ourself and running the risk of being misunderstood that we might go on from faith to faith and glory to glory as an organism that exhibits heaven and a mode of being and living that would even move Jews to jealousy who are themselves masters of system. System is convenience, organism is a mess and we're unwilling for it, for we want no stoop, no bother. Sunday services at a right hour that allow us to sleep in from Saturday night and do not keep us from the golf course after the service or the ball game. As if God sanctions this and wants us to be comforted with the thought that this is normative, this is Christianity, this is the West. It's the very thing that infuriates Muslims but we live with it and actually prefer it. We don't want a Christianity that would be more demanding than that. So, what was wrought by man and constitutes the assured verities of life and safety that taken for granted foundations of being itself are themselves forever shaken. Henceforth nothing can be assumed as sure, no institution of society even government itself is inviolable. Anything could be penetrated. The rudiments of human civilization, law, order, justice are overnight and in the day collapsed, rendered undone. And we've come to a place where if God be not God and there's no resurrection, we of all men are most to be pitied. Either we have an answer and are the demonstration of that answer or the world is without hope. And that's our purpose for being in this world is not just to speak an alternative but to demonstrate it. But what a requirement that is that will demand much more than Sunday services and midweek Bible studies. So men moved by cold, satanic calculation without fear of imprisonment or even death take with them unsuspecting innocent and defenseless thousands into sudden catastrophe and all this stupefyingly in the name of rectifying injustice or drawing attention to a wrong. Anything and everything goes when the reverence, let alone the respect for life, have perished. Now there's a note. Anything goes when the respect for life, let alone the reverence for life, has perished. When life has become cheap, expendable, when it doesn't take anything to think of taking 5,000 lives or 6 million, we are at a pretty low ebb. And why has the respect for life perished? Because the respect for God has perished who is its creator. That's why. So the foundations have been destroyed and what can the righteous do? Has the church adequately understood and seriously considered the very scripture that it quotes, that in last days all things can be shaken and will be shaken, that only those things that can remain will remain? What shall we say now to a shaken nation and world? I wrote this a day or two after the event. Will we speak courageously, prophetically, the consequences of God-forsakenness to an ostensibly Judeo-Christian world? Will we say to the world that purports to believe in God that our belief has been a sham, it's a pretense, it's a Sunday or Saturday matter and that we do not take God into our deepest consideration and we who say Lord do not even consult him in the things and determinations that we ourselves make without his consideration. We say Lord, Lord. But when it comes to what we shall do, where we will go, what we will spend, what we will save, we make those decisions ourselves. Career, marriage, he's Lord in title but not in fact. So how can we confront a world that has rejected him when in effect we constitute a rejection in ourselves, all the more grievous because we use the language of the Lord but do not defer to it in fact. Got the idea? Well the Lord knows I've got to make a living and so I want a career and I like to do this so I'll go to college, I'll take that course and I'll graduate and get a diploma and I'll find employment in that field. Surely he'll come behind and sanction the whole thing. Won't he? Well the great apostle began his apostolic career with one question and he continued his entire life until his death in the light of that question. Lord, what would you have for me to do? Not what shall I determine is appropriate because my determinations have led me to be a persecutor and a murderer of your own church and to persecute you. So I've learned my lesson. I can't make reckonings on the basis of my Judaic references or my own skill or intelligence but what would you have for me to do? So he calls an ordinary believer, what's his name who laid hands on Paul that he might see? Ananias. Ananias. Tell him what great things he must suffer for my namesake. That's what he has to do. You know why we have not asked the question? And why we're not living under the canopy of that question? We don't want to hear that answer. So we're living sub-Christianly. We're living sub-apostolically and therefore the Lord is beginning to shake all things that can be shaken that have been more effectually the place of our confidence and trust than God himself. How shall we comfort the nation? What shall we say to it in its catastrophe? What can we say prophetically if we ourselves don't see the truth of our own condition? And mumble platitudes that neither instruct nor console but only vex and antagonize a troubled and grieving world. What if we have already too long made the faith itself a platitude and have ourselves shared with the world the trust in its institutions and indeed ourselves have become one? Maybe that's why the Lord sent me to Birmingham. I thought it was to hear a theologian whose writings I have admired but what I was more instructed by was to be again in that environment as I was sharing today watching the faculty with their cloaks and their hoods that they got from the institution by which they obtained their PhDs walking in solemn procession down the middle of this chapel which has an ornate dome and painted ceilings just like what's its name in Rome the protestant equivalent and I got the sense of institution of certification of degrees by which you can graduate and reach a place of prominence in your field but what was wanting was reality It's something that has become a self-perpetuating institution and trains up those who will foster and aid it in its continuance but does not affect the world and certainly has not moved Jews to jealousy We have made the faith a platitude now in the light of this catastrophe our pretensions our piety and hype are revealed as fraudulent performance for the sudden crisis like all crisis has found us out to reveal our inadequacy I take a play on the phrase an absolute power reveals absolutely, you know that slogan and I have changed it to say crisis reveals an absolute crisis reveals absolutely. The truth of our condition is not revealed in our comfort and in our placid meetings the truth of our condition is revealed when crisis strikes unsuspectingly and suddenly and what is revealed then is the truth that has ever and always been our condition but had been concealed until the crisis had revealed it Crisis has come and it has revealed the truth of our condition as a church and like all institutions we ourselves are shaken our truths sufficiently satisfying to ourselves in an ordered and structured world are in the debacle of yesterday's smoking ruins revealed as flaccid truisms You'll have to read this on the website What's the difference between truth and truism A truism is that which once was true but over a course of time has become robbed of its real content has become cliched and has become a truism rather than a truth When our truths have become truisms that church is under judgment and condemnation. So we have to contend for the truth we have to contend for the faith that is once and for all given the saints earnestly and it's not contending that we have given So we're afraid even to suggest to the nation that it might be prudent to inquire of God's judgment in the tragedy or allow for the consideration of His sovereignty because if God is not sovereign and things happen independent of His will, how then is God God? It may well be that there's another explanation for the collapse of those towers in a hellish inferno but whatever the explanation God has got to be factored in is it something of which He was unaware, that it took Him by surprise or that He knew of it but was impotent powerless to do anything about it You see these are ultimate questions about God that such a tragedy requires to be asked but the church that will not so much as have the courage to ask the questions voids itself as the church, as the ground and pillar of truth It allows the issue of God's sovereignty to be dulled and not to be raised as an issue. That's where we are saints. Our silence condemns us and it doesn't mean that if we speak out that there's necessarily going to be an effect and a consequence to justify our breaking the silence but whether there's an effect or not by our speaking we have an obligation not to remain silent We've got to raise the question even if we ourselves cannot answer it because it's a question that must be brought to the consciousness of the nation. Where was God? Is He sovereign or is He not sovereign? Is He God or not God? Let alone the question that it could be a judgment and then what is He judging? And how is He kind and how is He loving to allow 5000 innocents to suffer the kind of horrific death that they did? How is that appropriate to the character of God as we understand Him or as we think Him to be? Maybe we need to rethink of God because we like to think of God as the Old Testament God of wrath but this is the age of grace in Jesus and it's unbecoming of God to act in judgment now in modern times as He has done historically in the past of Old Testament times though out of the other side of our mouths we say the same yesterday, today and forever He's an offense to our modernity but He's unchanged and He's at liberty to judge when and where He will and in fact the world ends in judgment in the day of the Lord So why should we be astonished, surprised or offended? Rather we should anticipate what follows that judgment the coming of the King and a righteousness in the earth, a new heaven and a new earth wherein dwelleth righteousness because in Thessalonians Paul thanks the former pagans who received the word from Him not as being the word of man but the word of God which performs a work in them that believe that and who were turned by His preaching from their idols to serve the living God to forsake their idols and serve the living God and to wait for His Son who comes from heaven and will save them from the wrath to come Listen you dear saints It's an embarrassment today to read that let alone to express that let alone to expect that that would be descriptive of our faith today as it was of pagans saved overnight by the apostolic proclamation of a Paul and are waiting for the coming of His Son. Are we waiting? Well don't rush Lord, I still haven't enjoyed my my retirement or my plans let alone to save us from the day of His wrath See how much we are out of the apostolic context of the biblical faith? It is only in the context of irremediable and eternal ruin that present judgments however horrific can be considered as merciful warnings of that which is to come In other words, what would justify a judgment now even the holocaust let alone the destruction of trade towers is that there's yet a greater judgment that is eternal for which the present judgment is a preliminary warning There's only one soul that I know of public consequence who believed that and spoke that and that was Basilea Schlinck of the Sisters of Meredith. Do you know this movement? You should know She's a 20th century oracle now dead but she spoke of preliminary judgments ultimate judgments to alert those who would otherwise suffer an irremediable and eternal judgment without remedy Unless we understand that eternal consequence we cannot properly assess what is taking place in time but the church is notoriously lacking in any sense of eternity for the world is too much with us and we live in the present parameters of our familiar culture and that's why my book on the Apostolic Foundations devotes an entire chapter to eternity not something to be expected after we die but to be factored into our present consideration for the expectation of it should affect everything practically presently now How great must that ultimate and eternal judgment be from which God would save men if tragedy of this kind be considered a preliminary if we'll not think of this tragedy in the context of eternity we're not thinking and to bring this before the nation's consideration we would be condemned as fanatical ourselves because already in Germany I'm reading and elsewhere in Europe from this recent trip that the authors of the magazines are saying that the enemy is not Islam so much as fundamentalism itself whether it comes from Arabs Jews in Israel or Christians in the West that these fundamental and dogmatic assertions of people who are narrow in their view and don't see the wisdom of a relativistic universe in which you cannot say this or that and insist upon something with an apostolic absoluteness that this is the threat to the world so if we are going to speak boldly of eternal issues raised by the recent catastrophe we will be condemned by that as being fanatical, absolute dogmatic lacking in consideration what you can even suggest that Islam is not another valid faith posture but a heresy and a demonic phenomenon that has no basis in truth at all and celebrate your Christianity as the only true faith posture and the God of the Bible as the only true God and the Bible itself as the only true statement, come on that's narrow and exclusive and you can go to prison for that in some countries now as being prejudicial against others who deserve more equitable recognition hey, this is getting sticky, so we better keep a low profile, not make such statements can you imagine what it would do to Bush's political career if he had the chutzpah, the outrage to call the nation to repentance or even so much as say a day of fasting and prayer to say that we are without solution that this tragedy indicates an evil beyond that which men can meet by their conventional means and that the only posture for us is to seek God, that would end his career. Yes, he can be a Christian of a kind, but not that kind. Yes, we can be a church of a kind, but not that kind or we will find ourselves not only objects of derision, but objects of persecution so play it safe and go along don't make ripples don't make statements of that kind this is a pluralistic age of tolerance and you certainly don't want to be considered intolerant, do you? so we cannot return to business as usual, a life as we have known it trusted and hoped for an apocalypse has come not into our theaters, but into the rudiments of life itself I don't understand it I never go to the movies but the horror films are big money makers people love to see sweeping catastrophes and floods and inundations and fire and explosions and things blowing up the cheapest of films have it and you can sit in the seat and deliciously watch the violence and know that it will not touch you but now God has allowed apocalypse to come, not on the screen but in the very rudiments of life why? because we have allowed it on our screens because it's a money making proven thing and we have not complained did you write a letter to the editor as I did? when star wars came out the last of it's great epics and I went into the store and there were these 6-7 foot cardboard cut out figures from the star wars fantasia of demonic things looming over my shoulder in a supermarket where they invaded my privacy with their filthy images for which pepsicola corporation paid 250 million dollars to use the star wars insignia in their products and you can get it on their different cans and that the kids slept outdoors at night in front of the theater to be the first ones in when the doors opened and that employers allowed their workers a day off knowing they were going to take it anyway that they should not miss the advent of this great epic film and we were silent in that and I wrote a letter to the editor and I threw it, appealed to the christian readers how is it that your kids are not camped outside the doors of the church waiting for them to open whom you allow to sleep out in the street in a sleeping bag that they should be the first ones in to see that filthy film what a commentary on our age I'm not exhibiting myself saints but silence condemns us and therefore I had to write a statement on princess Diana's funeral what has that got to do with anything Art it's got to do with everything because that jet setter was being celebrated as a christian and given the highest acknowledgement of society in a christian funeral performed by the highest cleric in the Anglican church giving the impression that this was a christian being buried rather than a jet setting woman of another kind and being exhibited and demonstrated around the world in full TV coverage day and night and I was waiting to hear the English church rise up in protest but it instead went to the funeral signed the guest book and added to the mountain of flowers it took six weeks to remove by bulldozers for this princess Diana cult paraded as a christian and the church in England is condemned to this day for its silence I would have been condemned prophetically if I had not made some kind of statement which is on our website without any impact or consequence except that silence would have condemned me there are things that have to be spoken whether or not they will have a solitary or practical consequence or else there is an erosion in our own spirit and a dulling in our own sensibility and a conformity to the world from which we cannot escape keep your hearts with all diligence for out of it proceed all the issues of life contend for the faith once and for all given the saints earnestly or you'll succumb to something much less for which you'll not be condemned or shamed for everyone else shares that same mentality and it's become normative and yet it is sub-christian so I conclude by saying your Waco church out of the debris and dust of your own ineptitude call the world not with harsh condemnation but with a compassion that does not repulse but draws to anticipate rather the coming of the Lord don't lay it on them this is Babylon you guys got it, you deserve it but in a compassionate way that reveals that judgment comes to the house of God first and we ourselves deserve judgment before we can lower the boom on others and to draw their attention to the coming of the Lord, a new heaven, new earth wherein dwelleth righteousness and to repent for the day of the Lord which is at hand that's what these signs mean, when you see these things look up for your redemption droth nigh as being a hope as well as a judgment and that we need to judge ourselves as the house of God grieving for the souls of men when he saw the city holy given to idolatry to Athens to bring the biblical perspective to Athenians that we should bring to our own communities to bring an uncompromising word but tenderly brought to a nation that has been assaulted for the church itself is at stake now as never before in its response to this catastrophe well I got so much more I think that's enough a whole statement on the trivializing of God that I've mentioned in some moments in passing but of which we need to be made conscious that if he's not exalted and recognized creator, coming king judge then we minimize him and we have trivialized our God and made him a subject for seminaries and for lectures or as a creed for our ministers who perpetuate the church as system and become itself an institution promoting programs blessing people producing a Christianized president who legitimates the use of power not knowing any other alternative and does not call the nation or the world to the recognition of the cross that has come that is very nature spiritual and that the only answer beyond force that is really a hope and significant is the one given in scripture that we often quote and I'll read it in conclusion in 2 Chronicles chapter 7 God says when I shut up heavens and there is no rain or command the locusts to devour land or send pestilence notice when I shut up when I command, when I send pestilence, drought it shows God as autonomous it shows God as sovereign when I do this when I do that, what are you to do then if my people who are called by my name will humble themselves and pray I don't know if any any other activity more humbling than prayer and especially praying with others corporately and together because I know that there are husbands who cannot pray with their wives and parents with their children and even in congregations that are boisterous that I've experienced on this trip to Germany, Holland Albania and Austria when at the beginning of the services, boisterous worship and people with their hands above their heads and they're really letting go and letting God know and then the word comes and a challenging word and then an invitation to pray in the hearing of the God who has spoken so as to transact something of significance for time or for eternity and they all become dumb silent and incapable of praying who at the beginning of the service were fully able with their mouths to give so-called worship either the one is a phony or the other untrue. They've been found out. Praying is humbling. True prayer is a form of dying and if you're receiving any benefit tonight it's because somewhere in Minnesota and elsewhere in the world there are some people who are travailing before God for tonight or else a word like this cannot go forth it needs not so much to be spoken as to be birthed. It's not just a statement for you, it's a statement beyond you that we hope will have wide circulation through the tape and have a corresponding consequence that kind of work, the word of God as an event beyond a service, beyond a sermon requires prayer supplication travail to enter into the whole process of birthing something that whose time has come is a suffering and a humiliation which we are too proud to perform. When my people are called by my name will humble themselves and pray and seek my face I've been a believer 37 years dear saints and I know that there's no more difficult thing than to seek God. Try it sometime four or five o'clock in the morning you'll feel like an absolute fool in the darkness of that hour and the cold drafts that are coming up from the floor that give you invitation to crawl back into bed where it's warm because the heaven is like brass, nothing is being affected, what's the purpose of being there in that early morning hour calling on God, you can't even fashion and form a prayer seeking God is opposed by the world, the flesh and the devil but who ascend to the holy hill of Zion who are able to throw the bolt that opens the gate that the king of heaven might come in only those who have clean hands, pure hearts, whose souls are freed from vanity who ascend that hill who go up because they seek the face of God we are non-seekers we're not willing for the the wasteful activity of an early morning rising to seek God, when at a more convenient hour the same thing can be done but the fact of the matter is it's not done who will seek my face and turn from their wicked ways and will you recognize it as wicked though it does not mean fornication, prostitution gambling, drinking but it means insincerity it means hypocrisy it means seeing the Lord as a busboy or someone to run errands or to guarantee your security or your future, is to minimize God and to strip him of his greatness to make him less than what he in fact is and yet to use the word Jesus that's wicked, unless you see it as wicked, how shall you rightly repent of it and turn from it he says then I will hear from heaven then I will hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and heal their land when you read David Wilkerson's recent newsletter and the recollection of what was given him in 1992 about the devastation of New York City in fire and that he says even the midland of America, where I'm from in Minnesota will not be spared it's a frightening vision of devastating judgments nationwide for which there's no answer, the whole of civil order is completely collapsed we only have the apparatus at best that can handle one or two intransigents but when the whole nation runs berserk when there's total chaos and anarchy we've come to an end from which only God can heal the nation if those who are called by his name will seek his face and pray I want to pray for that kind of church here and everywhere or this nation and the world has had it so bow your heads with me so Lord I don't know how this has sounded in the ears of your people as if they're being berated or their knuckles being wrapped, but you know Lord there's nothing mean spirited about this sharing tonight for we prophetic men see ourselves as joined with the church even in its present condition and have compassion upon it because we know our own frames and that we are as dust and if there weren't people dependent upon me and looking to me and I was just by myself and making my way in the world I would be much less the man and much less the Christian that my responsibility compels me to be so Lord I pray with these precious children whom you have gathered to yourself tonight that this word will not fall to the floor we have prayed for a distinct congregation to be formed tonight that would be able to hear this and draw the very word out of God's heart not knowing what direction to go or how to pursue this having all these different things to quote and to employ so let this people know they are appointed and to whom much is given much is required may new waves of intercession rise up out of Columbia, South Carolina by those who will find themselves up in ridiculous hours of day and night to travail by the spirit for what other travail is travail except that which is your own agonizing through your own spirit beyond the respectable limitations of self-conscious religious prayer Lord we have never broken through that veil we're on the wrong side all we know is conventional respectable prayer which is okay except in a time of crisis which has come and so I pray fresh release that there are daughters of Zion in this room and men also who will seek your face early and call upon your name and turn from the ways that are wicked for which we have not been condemned for they are not ostensible and vicious apparent sin but of a more subtle kind that degrades and minimizes and trivializes God even as we employ his name so Lord bless the church let it to be my God what you intended for if the church is not the church what shall be hoped for in the world if it is not a plumb line from heaven against which all things can be measured what shall we hope for in the world if the church has no stomach for truth what shall we hope for in the world so my God bless the responsible men and women whom you have gathered to yourself tonight to hear this rambling discourse and open to them deepened understanding of what the recent calamities mean and what can be anticipated in the soon future and return to the church an awareness of the day of the Lord and the soon appearing of God in judgment that we might give a warning to those who have no anticipation at all and think that one day is like another and that this is the best of all worlds and it will go on inevitably never to be judged and to be brought into the same ruin devastation and fire that was experienced in the buildings in New York and in Washington my God wake the church to the apocalyptic future of the last days as the early church knew it two thousand years ago much better than we who are at the very threshold of this conclusion and don't have anything that approaches their awareness we're not living as we ought seeing these things what manner of men ought we to be we are not those things because we do not see those things and I'm asking my God that you will make those things real that you'll send prophets and apostles who bear these burdens to communicate them to the church that it might wake from its sleep and be my God the thing for which you have intended it lest it be judged more even than the world for judgment begins in the house of God shall we bless you Lord thank you for your love thank you for your jealousy thank you for pursuing us thank you for opening the door to a world like this let it not fall to the ground let it not go forth void but accomplish every purpose unto which it was sent thank you for your jealous love that will not let us go change us Lord revive the word apostolic as not being the designation for a denomination but the reality to which we are called of which you are the high priest and the apostle of our confession as holy brethren make that word dear to us and real to us Lord we pray save us from mere evangelicalism even with a charismatic flourish bring us to the verity of the faith that the church knew at the first when great grace was upon them all and with power gave the apostles testimony of the resurrection of Jesus Christ that testimony is needed now more than ever and waits upon the church upon whom great grace has fallen may this people be that church is my prayer in Jesus name and God's people said amen okay sit for a minute don't rush out and if there's anything that you need to say to the Lord let's take a few minutes for that that you can pray from your seat standing sitting something of a personal kind something for the church of you yourself are in the right place you can pray for the church not just your own expression the church at large something needs to be said to God some kind of response to the way in which we have been addressed and I want to take a few minutes for that before we dismiss so let the Lord hear your voice and not the Lord only but the powers of darkness that lurk over this community and over the state and over this nation that have never been so much as impressed with the church at all for Jesus they know and Paul they know but the church at where who they will tremble tonight if you will have the courage to break through the mask of privacy and your pride of integrity of self-consciousness and pray aloud something to the Lord they will take note of you for a first time and it's long overdue let the Lord hear your voice let the church hear your voice let the powers hear your voice and you'll be on the way to true things