In this sermon, the speaker expresses his frustration and disappointment at not being able to prepare a proper outline for his sermon. He talks about the feeling of being bound and unable to move or speak, comparing it to the story of Lazarus being in the grave for four days. Despite feeling like a failure, the speaker acknowledges that God can bring forth something unexpected and powerful, just like the resurrection of Lazarus. The sermon ends with a mention of a Jewish woman who reached out to the speaker after reading his book, indicating that God can work in mysterious ways to touch people's lives.

Very much in keeping with what has been spoken for the four Sundays, the Lord has not allowed me the luxury of preparation. I've tried earnestly and even desperately, and have pleaded with God that he would, on this one occasion, allow me an outline, at least. But nothing doing, it's going to be a makeshift, on the spot, bringing together, not only a speaking of the principles that have been enumerated through the week, but a demonstration. So if I fail, he fails, and the whole thing goes up in smoke in the final session. Let's just bow our heads and pray for God's glorious success, because it's a matter of life and death for us all, for the world. Precious God, if that sounds bumptious, I pray that you'll make that real in the speaking this morning. Lord, we just look to you now, in whatever our condition, because it's not in ourselves, mighty God, but in thee, in your wisdom, your power, your grace, your love, your knowledge, your glory. We ask that it would all come together now, bring a fit conclusion, and breathe upon us, Lord God, something of the glory of the things which have pleased you to express this week through this piece of clay. Have your way now in this concluding session. Give us attentive ears and hearts, with a disposition to receive and to do what you shall speak. We'll thank you and praise you for your goodness and your mercies in being with us through this series. For your namesake now and for your kingdom, in Jesus' name we pray. We're going to try to conclude from a text that was begun last week. John the 11th chapter, the story of Lazarus. I mentioned the other night how I cringe when speakers use the word story in referring to things that are in the scriptures. Somehow it just offends my Jewish sensibilities. It suggests something fictional. So I believe with all my heart that Lazarus is more than a story. It's an actual event, and an event charged with meaning of such awesome significance that I think that the Lord has reserved it for the end of the age. But before we turn to it this morning, I just want to try some kind of a thumbnail summary and review the dualities of things that have been mentioned since the first Sunday. Isn't it interesting that when one is an atheist, there's always such a welter of things to bring confusion into life. There are always so many imponderables. I think surely one of the factors that precipitated my moral breakdown as an atheist teacher was my failure to compute grades for my students. As you can see, an earnest Jewish teacher exercising himself to come up with a fair grade at the end of the school year, wrestling with all of the imponderables, trying to weigh every nuance to give a student a fair grade, knowing that if you miss it by a plus or a minus, you're affecting a life. And I began to see in that futile exercise that I was human, all too human, and that my mortality and my limitations were a very great weight. And this was the kind of vexation that had come into my life with adolescence and with consciousness. All of the variables of the world. What if I take this path? Well, then what about the path that I failed to take? What experience would I have encountered there that might have been life-changing? And so the frustration, trying to be in all places and at all times and read all books and understand all things and fail in all things. But there's a wonderful simplicity that comes into the soul of a believer when the Spirit of God has entry. For some reason, all of the multitudinous things dissipate and everything becomes reduced to a choice of one thing or another. Have you noticed that? Terrible polarities, radical alternatives, and nothing in between. If you have not noticed it, let me assure you that you increasingly shall notice it because this is eminently a radical age. It's an age of polarization and there are some critical forces at work now rapidly bringing things into two camps. And we're going to find that the neutral ground between is going to continue to dissipate and finally to disappear. We're going to be spiritual radicals wholly committed to God. Men and women of the Spirit walking in apostolic splendor and glory, which is to say also experiencing apostolic persecution and suffering we're going to find ourselves in another camp altogether. Something that is seemingly religious, respectable, trite, powerless, inimical and opposed to God, and in some kind of unsavory union with the political forces that be. It's going to be another wedding between Jezebel and Ahab and we're on a direct course to the conclusion of the age in which these two polarities will be the only alternatives offered to men. There's a kingdom of this present world and there's a kingdom of God. There are two trees in the garden, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, which to eat from it is to die, and the tree of life. There are two men, Adam and Christ, and we read in the scriptures last week that in Adam all die, but in Christ all are made alive. I want to assure you that that means that every Adamic act is dead. Everything that has its origin in flesh, in man, has no life-giving possibility. Oh, it might cause a ripple, there might be a titillation, it might break the monotony of an hour, it might bring with it a distraction or an amusement or an entertainment, but it has no eternal consequence. It is not out of the life of God. Two radical choices of kingdoms of trees of men, of the thing which is earthly or the thing which is heavenly, of the thing which is below or the thing which cometh down from above. And last week we mentioned the statement of Peter, which the whole world would applaud if it were to be made in our own generation. Honors would have been heaped upon such a one who said, Lord, let it be far from you. Why, that statement, I was almost going to say reeks, abounds in human sentiment, in well-meaning intention, in altruism, in all the things that the world applauds and which has every appearance of good. How then can we understand Jesus' remark, Get thee behind me, Satan, for you savor of the things which feed not of God, but of men. The radicalness of the response of Jesus to the well-meaning statement of a disciple has really not registered upon our souls. There are things which have their origin above and things which have their origin below. There is a clash of kingdoms, and the overwhelming pity is this, that many of us who label ourselves Christians are not living, acting, and purporting ourselves in the kingdom way. We still continue to eat from the wrong tree, still continue to draw from the things that are Adamic, and we haven't understood the law of the spirit of life which is in Christ Jesus. And maybe this is more than a problem of misunderstanding. Maybe it has something to do with the human heart after all, that we understand what we want to understand, and there is something so offensive to the root principle of the kingdom of God that few have appropriated it. And here it is, that the life of God has its origin out of death. There is a cross which we use to decorate our churches, which we'll want to hang around our necks and to plant on our dashboards with suction cups, but which we're loathe to know in our experience. And so far as we shrink from the measure of death that is implied by the cross, there simply is no life in us. In a sense, this morning we're having a demonstration. It's death to face a crowd of people without preparation. It's death of fear and intimidation and embarrassment and mortification to consider the failure of stumbling and choking and sputtering if one has nothing to lean upon that can bail him through. It's death to utterly trust yourself into the hands of God that when His life shall be revealed, your life shall be revealed with Him also. But what if it pleases Him not to reveal it? And in the course of these previous Sundays, I gave you some illustrations out of painful experiences in my past where it pleased God before howling, enraged audiences, Jewish, not to reveal His life and to leave me limp and anemic, utterly defenseless, without even the virtue of cleverness to ward off the enormous attack of my adversaries. Beside the indignity and the humiliation of that, not even an explanation for the absence of the anointing and the Spirit of God. And to languish in that condition for weeks, licking one's wounds, listening to the devil persuade you that you've missed it, that you never should have left the teaching profession, and who told you anyway that you were called in ministry to your own people, and that when God gave you the most glorious opportunity of your life at a college in New York City, 85% Jewish, you were a dismal and drab failure. And then unsuspectingly, as God always will, in that resurrection morn, something breaks forth. A thin, raspy voice over a phone, a Jewish woman asking if she could come and visit you, in that she has some questions that were raised by the reading of your book, brought home by her son who was a student at that college, who told his mother of the extraordinary experience he had that day when a Jewish man came to the college and faced a howling and enraged audience and set forth his convictions very simply and faced his accusers without a retort or an answer. He had never seen such a demonstration. With that review and preliminary, can we turn then to the text of the morning in John, the 11th chapter, which we began last week? Lazarus, who is loved of Jesus, and how shall we understand, therefore, that when he is informed that Lazarus is ill, therefore it says in the 6th verse, even when he heard that Lazarus was sick, he still stayed two days longer in the same place where he was. How many times have I been tempted to grab a microphone and to yell halt at the proceedings that oftentimes follow charismatic or full gospel affairs, where people think that as a matter of course and mechanically, there always needs be an invitation or a lineup for healing, for prayer, for deliverance, that somehow that that is to be expected and to be required and that if a saint is to experience sickness, that somehow that that is a scandalous thing that ought to be immediately remedied. I want to suggest that there might be sicknesses which are quite allowed of God. Dealings in the bodies and lives of saints which we are as quick to seek to remedy, which God himself is not in a rush to relieve. It's the difference between operating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and operating from the tree of life. If the life of God is not in the invitation, if the life of God is not in the prayer, why do we insist on going through the mechanical motion because we feel obligated or something is required from us. Jesus remained two days longer after he heard that his friend was sick. He delayed long enough for his friend to die and it says that he loved Lazarus. Do you call that love? And how many of you and how many in Christendom have been languishing for two days in unrelieved pain, physical or otherwise, and assumes that the Lord is wholly oblivious and indifferent to your circumstance. Remember what happened when Jesus finally came to Bethany? Both sisters rushed to him and said exactly the same thing. Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. May I say something? Well, you can have it. I'll say it anyway. The most grievous ill that afflicts God's people is the failure to understand who he is. How many of us mouth, Lord, Lord, Lord, if you had been here. But dear children, if he is Lord, he is there. He is the omnipresent God who is wholly aware of every aspect of your life and circumstance. Every hair on your head is numbered. Why then do you think that he is somehow absent? If you had been here, the disciples said to him, Rabbi, the Jews only recently were intending and trying to stone you and you're thinking of going back there again? Even the disciples misunderstood who he was and saw him in part only. And those who use the word Lord fail to understand the implications of the very word that they speak. Jesus said to her, your brother shall rise again in the 23rd verse. And Martha replied, I know that he'll rise again at the resurrection on the last day. Doesn't that sound like us? I know that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that. I know that, that, that, that, that, that, that. I can read off the doctrines of the faith and the catechisms. I've read Watchman me. We know, but we don't know as we ought to know. We think that because we say it or because we give a sense to it, that we know it. But dear, dear children, the knowing of the resurrection life of Christ is going to be a matter of life and death at the end of the age. Not the knowing of the doctrine, the knowing of the life. The knowing of the experience, that when you shall allow yourself the taste of death, that there shall be a resurrection of His life out of your mortification and humiliation. That because He lives, you shall live also. And that salvation is to believe that Jesus is Lord and that God has raised Him from the dead is the only doctrine that God has allowed to stand for salvation, not just once, but again and again and again. There's probably not another doctrine that is so universally approved and so little truly believed than the resurrection of Christ. Do you believe that if you're joined with Him, in His death and burial, that you too shall be raised to newness of life? Will you believe it after you've languished for three weeks licking your wounds? Will you believe it in hours and moments of mortification, disappointment, emptiness? Will you believe it if you're a Lazarus and you've wrestled for days with fever and you're leaving your sheets stained with sweat and you have to look into the faces of your sisters who are not succeeding in concealing their disappointment because the Lord has not come? And you believe He's going to come any moment and lay His hand on your fevered brow and in a moment dismiss that fever and rebuke it and raise you up out of the sickbed? And your life is speeding away by seconds and He does not come and you perish? And will you believe it when you're put in the tomb and find that your consciousness is not dismissed and the days go by and you believe that the third day is resurrection day and you're counting the hours, five, four, three, two, one to go, and surely in that last hour on the third day you're going to hear His voice say, come forth, and you're down to thirty minutes, twenty, ten, five, four, three, two, one, and you're counting the seconds and your heart is bursting with expectation for the voice of the Lord that shall say, come forth, and it does not? The utter crushing disappointment, the absolute dejection, every category blown to smithereens of our religious expectancy and understanding. Jesus said, where have you laid Him? And one of the sisters said, but Lord, He's been four days in the grave, by now He's spinketh. How many of us would be content to remain bound up in our feet, our hands, and our heads? We can't go, we can't do, and we can't speak. And we're reproached, that stinks, it's past the third day and into the fourth, and the Lord has not yet come. I don't know how to breathe the things that are in my heart in the short time that we have and yet to call this a conclusion, but I believe with all my heart that every true apostolic minister and ministry of God that is to be used of Him at the end of the age in the bringing forth of His glory must be submitted into the dust of death, to be brought forth on a fourth day, only in the hour of His calling. Pat, have you experienced something like that? Something? What's your program for the Jewish people of Kansas City? I don't have one. Well, what are you doing in New York if you don't like the, what you call the cutesy ministries? Of guys with stars of David on their back, handing out broadsides and giving street demonstrations. What's your alternative? What's your program? I don't have one. Why did you leave New Jersey, 25 miles from two and a half million Jews, and go up to northern Minnesota where there's not a Jew for hundreds of miles around? Because the Lord bade me go. Well, give me an explanation. I don't have one. Dear children, death is obedience unto God without explanation. Death is submitting to sickness and the tomb without explanation. Death is utter helplessness, bound up in hands and feet and head, unable to walk and to go and to speak, though your heart is bursting to proclaim the truths of God to a dying world until you hear the voice of the Lord saying, Lazarus, do you think of an accident that the name Lazarus means helpless? And I'd like to ask you dear Presbyterians, so much like my dear Jewish people, this question. Helplessness is only another name for dying. We pride ourselves in our accomplishment, in our expertise, in our prowess, in our ability. How many of us would be willing to suffer the humiliation of foolishness and futility and helplessness, not being able to give answer, not being able to give explanation, only to wait bound to hear the one voice that can release our life, which is to say his life out of death, Lazarus come forth. You know that this chapter contains the briefest verse in all the scriptures, two words, it's the thirty-fifth verse, it says, Jesus wept. I don't know about you, but that moves me to examine, what were the circumstances that brought my Lord to weep? Was it some sentimental, chactering thing, some schmaltzy response to the death of a young man whom he loved? Was it the pleading voices of these sisters, Lord if you had been here, my brother would not have died? Was it the entourage of Jewish souls who followed Jesus to the tomb to watch the fireworks and the dynamics and to see some sentimental bash that would take place, anxious for some diversion that would break the monotony of their lives? Jesus wept. It says in the thirty-third verse, when Jesus saw her sobbing, and the Jews who came with her also sobbing, he was deeply moved in spirit and troubled, he chafed in spirit and sighed and was disturbed. Jesus wept. I suppose he was weeping, if I could suggest this, because these people professed to be Jews, professed to love him and called him Lord, and would have said with Paul to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord, and yet they were weeping over a physical death. Can't you just wait to go and to shock off this mortal coil and to be in full union with Christ in the spirit and no more to have the barrier of the flesh and all the things that are incumbent upon it standing in the way of this perfect union? Aren't you waiting for the day? Or has it become just a bit groovy and comfy on this side? Not quite anxious to hear that trump and to throw off this mortal coil. I remember that I had a rare experience in Minnesota to be invited to a funeral parlor with the casket open, which is not done in Jewish practice. And the reason I was invited is that it was a 30-year-old woman who had died of cancer and a glorious saint known to all as being an exemplary believer. And her death was so mysterious, no one could explain why God would be pleased to remove so bright a light from so gray an environment. Her husband was some kind of ordinary piece of mortality who was not a believer, who suffered the eccentric wife who was deeply spiritual and went along with it, though she was a nuisance and an irritant. And I think people believe that somehow when I was going to lean over the coffin and touch that waxing figure and breathe something by the inspiration of the spirit, that she would bat her eyelashes and lift up her head and come forth. It somehow never happened. But I sat in the front pew and looked on that casket and watched the procession of people who came up to pay their respects. And I don't know whether I'm a peculiar Jew or what, but I wondered as I watched one by one of them come up and heard their banalities and their utterances, just who was it who was dead and who was it who was alive? I think that that woman in her repose, in her tranquility, the glory of God shining forth even out of death, that there is more life to be spoken for her than the number of lumbering adults that came up to mumble their pleasantries and left. I wondered how many times did their clothing have to go into washing machines? How many meals did they ingest in 40, 50, and 60 years? How much air did they breathe and space did they occupy? And what did all of their sound and fury signify in the course of those years? And what of it besides its mechanical and biological motion and the sound that lent the silences can be called life? I think that God began to speak to my understanding that very night and to show me how far removed I was from kingdom understanding, that life is more than biological activity, that the only thing that can truly be called life is that thing which serves the purposes of his kingdom and is the emanation and the showing forth of his glory. And that woman succeeded in doing that in her death more so than the lumbering numbers who came up to mutter their respects. Oh children, Jesus wept and he chafed in the spirit at their sickening sobbing over the demise of a young man. I know that he'll rise again at the resurrection on the last day. We know, but we don't know. Jesus said to her, I am myself the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in and adheres to and trusts and relies on me, although he may die, yet he shall live and whoever continues to live and believe on me shall never actually die at all. Do you believe this? It's almost as if Jesus is speaking that to us directly in this hour. Do you believe this? Do you believe that if the Lord should call you to a tomb of inactivity, of something stultifying, where you can't draw from your own resources, where you're bound up in your hands and your feet and your head, and your cleverness is not going to bail you out, and you have to live with the terrible silence or the reproach that being four days in the grave you stink. Would you be willing? It says that Lazarus was a friend of Jesus. I wonder how many friends of Jesus there are in our own generation who would be willing to be deserted in sickness, to be abandoned in death, to be bound up inactive, unused, stinking, hid in Christ until his life shall be revealed, that our life might be revealed with him. I wish I could take a kind of an accounting right now to compute how meaningful, how sensible these things are that I'm speaking. Or does it sound somehow religious, sermon-y, abstract, and somehow unrelated to the reality? I began by saying five weeks ago, the only mistake I believe that the Lord made is not giving me a zipper to zip down this chest and take out of the cavity a heart and ring it, because I know that I'm speaking the utter truth of God that has eminently to do with the greatest awesome realities, but so removed from our true understanding and our experience that they sound somehow just no more than a biblical dissertation or a commentary on the eleventh chapter of John. Our faith is the resurrection faith, or it's nothing. It's interesting that when Lazarus came forth, it says that in the forty-fifth verse, upon seeing what Jesus had done, many of the Jews who had come with Mary believed on him. They trusted in him and adhered to him and relied on him. A Jewish man who never spoke a word, never gave a testimony, never preached a sermon, was the cause of more Jews coming into the kingdom and the knowledge of Jesus as Messiah than whole hosts of door-knockers before and since. I don't think there's any other explanation for it, but that there's a glory that comes forth out of death that stirs men to eternal commitment that nothing else can produce. In the twelfth chapter of the Gospel of John, it says, The group that had been with Jesus, when he called Lazarus out of the tomb and raised him from among the dead, kept telling it to others, bearing witness. It was for this reason that the crowd went out to meet him, because they had heard that he had performed this sign and proof and miracle. Then the Pharisees said among themselves, You see how futile your efforts are, and how you accomplish nothing? See, the whole world is running after him. Jesus said, You shall not see me again until you shall say, Blessed is he who cometh in the name of the Lord. Hosanna, blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord, was what was shouted the day that Jesus made his triumphal entry into Jerusalem on the back of the colt of an ass. Branches were strewn in the way, and cloaks laid out before him. And the great crowds massed, because the word had gotten around that Lazarus had been raised from the dead. You can put me on record as saying that I don't believe that there shall be crowds of Jewish men and women saying again, Hosanna, blessed is he who cometh in the name of the Lord, until they shall see again in our generation, the Lazaruses of our generation, the helpless ones, the friends of Jesus, coming forth out of death. And I'll say in the same breath, until they see it, and until they say it, the Lord is not returning. No wonder that but a few verses after, Jesus said, I assure you most solemnly, and I tell you that unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just one grain and never becomes more, but lives by itself alone. But if it dies, it produces many others and yields a rich harvest. Anyone who loves his life loses it, but anyone who hates his life in this world will keep it to life eternal. Whoever has no love for, no concern for, no regard for his life here on the earth, but despises it, preserves his life forever and ever. And if anyone would serve me, he must continue to follow me, to cleave steadfastly to me and conform wholly to my example in living, and if need be, in dying. And wherever I am, there will my servant be also. In the first verses of the Gospel of John, in him was life, and the life was the light of men. How many of us have received illumination not from that life? How many of us have realized that some of the most grievous defects in modern-day Christendom have been the consequence of well-meaning men who have, by their own efforts, taken principles of God and manipulated them, even systematizing them, giving a show of what seems to be spiritual wisdom, but the end result has been confusion and mayhem, because only in him is life, and his life is the life of men. He who hath the Son hath life, and he who hath not the Son hath not life. This is the love of God toward us, that he has given us his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him shall not perish, but have everlasting life. This is the love of God toward us, that he has given us his Son, that we should live through him. Dear children, can I sum it up this way? It is quite possible to be an intelligent and well-meaning religionist who subscribes to all of the correct doctrines of God, and go about one's whole life religiously, and not once ever have touched or experienced or lived by the life that burst forth out of death two thousand years ago. Jesus died for reasons more than the saving us from our sins. He died to begin a new kingdom on a new principle, in a new mode and a new way, it's called the resurrection life, and he said, because I live, you shall live also. Have you ever heard yourself speaking words that were not of your making? Have you ever seen yourself performing deeds that were not of your choosing? Have you been a vessel for the expression of the wisdom of God, or the power of God, the life of God, coming forth when you have willingly dismissed by an act of choice and brought to death what would have been a substitute measure on your own part that was human, all too human? Have you entered into a baptism by which the waters of death have covered over all flesh, including your mind, that you might be raised with him to newness of life again and again and again, as often as you believe in this and reckon yourself indeed dead unto yourself, but alive unto God in Christ? Or is it that not only we may have all sins, but most assuredly we have all fallen short of the glory of God? We began in the first session by speaking about two trees in the garden, and the book that begins with two trees ends also with a tree. In the last chapter of the book of Revelation, the 22nd chapter, he showed me a pure river of water of life, clear as crystal, proceeding out of the throne of God and out of the land. In the midst of the street of it, and on either side of the river, was there the tree of life which bare twelve manner of fruits, and yielded her fruit every month, and the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations. And there shall be no more curse, but the throne of God and of the land shall be in it, and his servants shall serve him, not themselves. How many are guilty of that, that in the name of Jesus, and in the name of serving God, also suffering, serving themselves. But in the pure waters of life that flow out from under the throne, and by the tree of life, every act, every word, every utterance, every impulse has its origin in God, serves his kingdom purposes only, and sets forth his glory. Blessed are they that do his commandments, he says in the 14th verse of that chapter, that they may have right to the tree of life, and may enter in through the gate unto the city. The whole scriptures from beginning to end, offer ever and always only a choice of one of two things. Two trees, two kingdoms, two men, Adam or Christ, two sources above or below, two ways of flesh or the spirit, two sources of life, their own or the resurrection, continually faced with choice. How many of my Jewish people know that in the very book of Jeremiah, this theme is expressed in the 17th chapter, that the issue is not Judaism versus Christianity, that the issue is the kingdom of God, or the kingdom of this present world. And that last kingdom has its honors, it has its rewards, it has its things that are impressive and cultured, intellectual, even religious, but it has not life. In the 17th chapter of Jeremiah, in the 5th verse, thus saith the Lord, Cursed be the man that trusteth in man, and makes flesh his arm, and whose heart departeth from the Lord. Word to God that I could just speak from the rooftop that one scripture for my Jewish people and an entire modern world that has adopted a Jewish lifestyle. How many who are patently ignorant of the scriptures are found to quote again and again that which is not to be found in the scripture, God helps those who help themselves. That is a lie and is wholly opposed to the way of God. More true is it to say that God helps those who are helpless. Lazarus, come forth. This morning at a very early hour, I was groaning before God and reviewing with Him the enormous responsibilities that I have to face in these immediate days, including this concluding session this morning. An Israel tour that is going to begin in a few days, shepherding over 90 souls, conferences to be conducted in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv and in Germany, accommodations and arrangements in organizational matters for which I have no talent nor ability whatsoever. Things to be spoken that I haven't had the leisure yet even to begin to consider. Responsibilities for lives in Minnesota and lives here and something to begin going forth to the Jewish people in this city and possibility of a weekly television program and any number of things for which I have to say, Lord, who is sufficient? God does not help those who help themselves. He helps those who recognize their helplessness. Cursed, says the Lord, is the man that trusts in man and makes flesh his own and whose heart departs from the Lord. For he shall be like the heath in the desert and shall not see when good comes but shall inhabit the places in the wilderness in a salt land and not inhabit it. And the very next verse is the other alternative. But blessed is the man that trusts in the Lord and whose hope the Lord is. Not just on the third day when we expect resurrection, I know that the resurrection will come on the last day, but that one who is willing to suffer the reproach even unto stinking. Yea, though he slay me, yet will I trust him and will not budge nor move until the Lord himself shall cry. Not only is that man blessed but he is the source of blessings for a mankind that would otherwise perish. For he shall be as a tree, not as the tree but if I can presume upon God, with the tree and in the tree planted by the waters that spreads out her roots by the river and shall not see when heat comes, but her leaves shall be green and shall not be careful in the year of drought, neither shall cease from yielding fruit. I want to say in a concluding word, I believe that there is a drought coming. There is a drought that already is which is only the first harbinger, the first presentiment of a drought which God is bringing upon the earth in enormous measure, physically and spiritually. Who shall stand in that day? Who shall be able to comfort the brokenhearted and open the eyes of the blind and set the captive free? But that one who is a tree planted by the waters whose leaf is evergreen, who shall not see when heat comes neither shall be careful in the year of drought neither shall cease from yielding fruit. It's the fruit of the resurrection, it's the fruit of his life which springs forth only from one place, out of death by whatever word you call it, humiliation, weakness ineptitude, speechlessness, silence, mortification embarrassment, if we're willing to suffer that to be bound up in our hands, our head and our feet there's going to be an hour when we'll hear the voice of him who alone has the right to command our life and to bring forth from it the fruits of resurrection. Because of Lazarus many believed on him How many friends of Jesus do we have in the congregation this morning who would say to the Lord whatever it pleases you to do, in sickness even unto death I have no life in myself and I say with Paul, for me to live is Christ I'm willing to be dead and dead with Christ in God until your life is revealed Did you seal such a covenant with the Lord this morning? Because children, that is the way to the kingdom Will you bow your heads with me? Precious God If I go by any impression of my own of what I can pick up hearing out of my own mouth I would say that the word that would describe this session is failure. It sounds like a bunch of religious gobbledygook another religious sermonizing another bunch of platitudes and references to scripture that sounds like just plain hogwash but I have been faithful and obedient to give you a mouth to speak and to bring forth what it pleases you and which is not to be measured by my hearing and I ask now precious God that you'll take careful note of as many friends of Jesus that are in this room and that shall subsequently be hearing this tape and shall be willing to say in this moment of invitation I am willing to become helpless. I'm willing to count all things as done in which I have not only prided myself but have sought even to serve God my strength, my wisdom, my cleverness, my eloquence, my ability, my education my experience, willing to die to all these things and to be pressed into a cave and to be bound up in hands and heads and feet until the moment that it shall please you to call me forth if that is a covenant with which you would seek to enter the kingdom way this morning will you stand up before God, will you sit? Don't stand up like this death is another word for suffering it's not the convenient cessation of consciousness you're willing to languish on a bed in sweaty feet and look at the faces of your mortified friends because the Lord has not come, you're willing to suffer things from him for which he shall give no explanation, you're willing to be stripped of all things and to be made a reproach to the point where you stink precious God in Jesus name, I ask you to make an accounting and to seal in heaven by name every soul that has stood to this invitation that from this army of resurrection saints there shall be such a demonstration of the glory of God that these ears shall hear out of the mouths of now for whose name Jesus is only a curse, Hosanna rested is he who comes in the name of the Lord, out of the mortification and the humiliation and the suffering of these lives bring forth the demonstration of the glory of your kingdom for the salvation of many at the conclusion of this age and we'll thank you and praise you for the opportunity to enter and to be part with you in the tree of life, in the kingdom of God, in Jesus holy name we pray and God's people said, Amen God bless you.