This sermon emphasizes the importance of returning to the roots of faith, recognizing Jesus as the fulfillment of God's promises to Israel. It challenges the church to seek God's face, contend for the true faith, and be a distinct people reflecting the God of Israel. The speaker urges a deep repentance, restoration, and a commitment to be a people who worship in spirit and truth, not falling into mechanical forms of worship but seeking a genuine encounter with God.

Jesus. And we see the beauty of their lives, and their character, and their integrity, and we hear them speak their many languages, and see their intensity, and their passion, and their character, and their nature, and our hearts come at them for the kingdom of God, that they might be an end-time people of God, proclaiming the salvation throughout the earth. Is, uh, is this on? Are you hearing me? Yeah? Well, got your seatbelts on? I think I'm going to be snorting and pawing at the ground like an enraged bull. Something has reached a crescendo and climax. I have lost my capacity to hear, let alone participate in worship. You need to pray for me. It's reached a point where it jangles my sensibilities. Something must be wrong with me, I don't know. But, uh, I want to pray and not bring a jaundiced note, but something redemptive, and maybe the Lord is playing upon me to sound something not only for yourself, but I see we're being televised this morning, and it probably is a statement for the larger church, of which you are a reflection also. Because there is a terrible sameness that pervades all of Christendom today. Utterly predictable. So many choruses, then this, then that, the introduction, the speaker, you're on, blah, blah, blah, off. And we call that worship, and we've had a service, and we've met with the Lord. Lord, if you have another view on this, we would like to hear it. And if we're a little bit out of whack, adjust us. And if we have succumbed to some kind of charismatic Pentecostal culture, and has become dear to us and familiar, as anything will, but it somehow jangles your sensibilities, then let us know. We're willing to be adjusted. And we thank you for the privilege of being related to a living God who speaks. May the earth hear your voice today, this morning, now, and your people, and may they be able to give a hearty yea and amen, however much you may have to jab us a bit. And we thank you and give you the praise for that kind of love, which is really the Father's love. And lots of us have grown up without it, and it shows. So come, we're willing to be spanked, chastened, changed, that you might be honored and glorified in this earth before the end comes. In Jesus' name we pray, amen. Well, this is going to be a rare experience for you, because I somehow, fumbling and bumbling through the papers that I carry with me of my deathless prose and notes that I take and sometimes speak from, I just have my eye happen to fall upon notes that I took and reflections from Karl Barth. I'm sure you've never heard of him, but you ought to. He's a great blessing, benefit to the church, but the remarkable thing is that he has been lost to the consideration of our entire generation. He's out of vogue. He's no longer popular. And even if he were, you're not likely to have heard him because he's a theologian. And we Pentecostals are a little bit suspicious about people who think. It's not an activity that we're all that familiar with ourselves. And we think that somehow it's antithetical to the Holy Spirit. So I want to assure you, I'm reading from a man whose mind was directed by the Holy Spirit. And when he came out with his book on the epistle to the Romans in 1918, it was a veritable bomb blast. I mean, it just reverberated throughout the entire theological world because he was a German-speaking Swiss theologian teaching in Germany and sounded a new note. It was a return to the word. It was a neoconservativism from a church that had moved into liberal theology and finally eventuated in God is dead theology. And so Barth broke right into that. His name is spelled B-A-R-T-H. And in German, you don't pronounce the H. It's S-H-A-R-D, Barth, Carl Barth. Can I read a little bit? He's talking about our relation to God if it is on the wrong side of resurrection. That is to say, if we have only given assent to the credo or the doctrine, but we are not ourselves living in it, we're on the wrong side. And I think that that's descriptive of virtually the entire church. Our relationship to God is ungodly. We suppose that we know what we are saying when we say God. We assign to him the highest place in our world. And in so doing, we place him fundamentally on one line with ourselves and with things. We assume that he needs something, and so that we are able to arrange our relation to him as we arrange our other relationships, we press ourselves into proximity with him, and so, all unthinking, we make him nigh unto ourselves. I wish I had time just to break down his statements and rephrase them so that it would be more acceptable to your hearing. But I think that you can follow this, and likely our session is being taped. You'll be able to hear it again. I love him for what he's saying. He has the audacity to break in and to suggest that we don't know God as we ought. That, in fact, there may well be a massive religious deception going on, aided and abetted by our choruses, that move us in kind of euphoric ways to think that because we get a rise out of it that somehow that constitutes worship and the knowledge of God. The fact of the matter is, saints, we don't know as we ought to know. And I think we have come full circle, and we're sharing the sin of Israel that God might comprehend all in his mercy. Because he said to Israel, and who should have known him better than his own chosen people and his covenantal people of whom I am descendant, that you thought I was such a one as yourself. You know, if you're not careful, there's an unconscious process that takes place by which we project onto God and form him in our image. He becomes a little patsy errand boy, and we see him as something given to make our marriages better or find us a husband, a wife, a girlfriend, or take care of our bodies, our health, our finances. We are losing, saints, or perhaps have never known God as we ought. But the sense of God is grievously absent from the church. It would be much better for us to walk into a Sunday morning service without a pre-recorded canned music coming up, lest we have to face the terrible silence. But face the silence and sit there in our poverty, in our spiritual poverty, and recognize and acknowledge that we don't know as we ought. Then we are candidates for knowing. But so long as we presume to bluff our way through and get the whole thing filled with noise and music and sound, he's left impotent. He cannot help us. We have to lie in the bed that we ourselves are making while all the world shrivels up and dies around us. We're the ground and pillar and truth. Do you know that? We are called to be the ground and pillar of truth. What hope for the world and for New Zealand if we are not that? If we're just a little pale reflection of an already existing society that has its quaint Sunday culture. So I appreciate this man. You can imagine the shrieks and the howls that went up when he made statements of this kind. So in all unthinking we make him nigh unto ourselves. We allow ourselves an ordinary communication with him. We permit ourselves to reckon with him as though there were not any extraordinary behavior on our part. We dare to deck ourselves out as his companions, patrons, advisors, and commissioners. We confound time with eternity. This is the ungodliness of our relation to God, and our relation to God is unrighteous. Secretly we are ourselves the master in this relationship. We are not really concerned with God, but with our own requirements. Excuse me while I wipe the drool off my chin. Are you drooling? Salivating? Or getting a little brittle and edgy and irritable? This is the word of truth, saints, and all the church needs to hear it. It's unrighteous when we fit God into our pattern and scheme and the doer of deeds that accommodate our convenience. We need to be made inconvenient for him. And the church has become domesticated, a routine of services and a little Sunday polish for our lives. But God as God is not known, not honored, not reverenced, not served. We are not really concerned with God, but with our own requirements. Isn't that a remarkable statement? How many can see it? And to which God must adjust himself. Our arrogance demands that in addition to everything else. And so we set God upon the throne of the world. We mean by God ourselves. In quote, believing on him, unquote, we justify, enjoy, and adore ourselves. Our devotion consists in a solemn affirmation of ourselves and of the world in a pious setting, aside of the contradiction. Under the banners of humility and emotion, we rise in rebellion against God. I have to read that one again. Under the banners of humility and emotion. Maybe I would paraphrase it. Under the banners of worship and music, we rise in rebellion against God. And don't even recognize it as that. We confound time with eternity. This is our unrighteousness. Such is our relation to God apart from and without Christ on this side of resurrection. If we're on the wrong side, these things must invariably follow. These consequences, this deterioration is inevitable. If we are not on the right side of resurrection, that is to say, actually living out of the life of God. Thinking of ourselves what can be thought only of God, we are unable to think of Him more highly than we think of ourselves. Being to ourselves what God ought to be, He is more to us than we are to ourselves. This secret identification of ourselves with God carries with it isolation from Him. Isn't that interesting? That instead of bringing us near to God, the consequence is a further separation from God. And maybe that's why we have to turn the amplifiers up even higher and become even more frenetic in our religious activity and invites more and more realm or room for the soulish realm to have its activity. I think the evidence of the true knowledge of God is the enjoyment of silence. The ability to be quiet in God's presence and to wait upon Him without getting edgy or irritated or irritable or thinking that something must happen to fill the time and fill the hour. And then just to allow God in His presence to begin to move upon us, maybe in patterns and forms that we had not intended. In fact, God being the creator, I can't imagine that any two Sundays should ever be the same. Maybe on one occasion we'll begin with the Word. Maybe some outburst of tongues and interpretation will commence the meeting. Maybe we'll forget music entirely. When this predictable sameness comes over the church, it's a symptom that we are far from God who in the beginning created and still creates if we allow Him His opportunity. You imagine the excitement of coming to fellowship then? What will He say now? What will He do now? What expression of His heart has He appointed for this hour and this day? You cannot know and find out until you arrive. Oh, what an end to the weariness of the flesh and getting the kids all prepared in all of the havoc of a Sunday morning to get them crammed into the service and go through the canned mechanical prescribed and predictable thing and go home again. How is He honored in all that? Men have imprisoned and encased the truth, the righteousness of God. They have rimmed it to their own measure and thereby robbed it both of its earnestness and of its significance. They have made it ordinary, harmless, useless and therefore transformed it into untruth. I'm trying to understand myself this morning. Why have I lost my capacity to even be present in so-called worship and be fairly agreeable and able to stand and give some... No, I had to leave the building. I think it was in conjunction with yesterday, that yesterday was so earnest in God, so intense in the importance of God, that this right alongside of that, the contrast was so stunning that it rendered me incapable of bearing it. But if this is what you know and all that you know, you might even be disposed to think that this is reality, that this is the faith. And we even have a better form of it than the church down the street because we're Pentecostal. We need a rude awakening. We need a thorough shaking. We have lost or have never known the sense of God as He in fact is and not as we think Him to be. So maybe I'm just ventilating my own frustration, my own awareness of my own acute need that is a reflection of the condition of the church itself. And he says about this ungodliness that it will not fail to thrust us into ever new forms of unrighteousness. Now, I don't want to be nasty or critical, but I wouldn't altogether dismiss the possibility that what is celebrated as the Toronto Revival might be the new form of unrighteousness. And if it's not, the next will be yet more bizarre, more ungainly, more questionable, more dubious, more charged and shot through with men bellowing like animals and other kinds of things that would seem to be totally incompatible with the holiness of God. There's a decelerating thing. There's a spiral downward. There's something about the nature of the faith. You either go on upward or you necessarily fall backward and down and maybe even out. Just over the breakfast table, the comment came up, I'll share it with you for what it's worth, that maybe what underlines and gives us the security to go on in the kind of frivolity and lightness that characterizes the church is that we have the assurance that we can't lose our salvation. But what if you can dangerously tease God and finally exhaust his long patience to the point where your name is blotted out from the Lamb's Book of Life, that you've acted so consistently apart from God for so long and have become so hard to his entreaties, so incapable of hearing and being corrected, that in the last analysis you're no better off than those who are not saved and in fact become that again by having your name blotted out of the Lamb's Book of Life. I'll tell you, if we even were alive to the fear of such a possibility, the whole complexion and atmosphere of the church would be changed in a moment. We would not allow ourselves levity and lightness if the consequence of unrighteousness is a continual spiraling downward and possibly out. We would be much more jealous and careful and watchful about our corporate and personal conduct in life. He says, this is the rebellion which makes it impossible for us to see the new dimensional plane and the meaning of our salvation. Against such rebellion there can be revealed only the wrath of God. Well, we know the judgment is coming. There's a day of the Lord coming. Or do we know? Because we don't act as if we know. The air that we exude is that this is the best of all possible worlds and if not it can be improved and that somehow it will go on indefinitely. There's no sense of imminence of an end or of judgment or of the last days or the conclusion of the age. There's no hanging in with the kind of Lord, come Lord Jesus, I can't take it another day that my soul is vexed and chafed by the unrighteousness that is everywhere about me. I can't breathe and live in this world that is a lie. I'm waiting for the end, the righteous end that must come and I'm expecting it. I'm hastening and looking for the appearing of the Lord. That what I'm describing is not the status and mentality of the church presently. Although ironically it was 2,000 years ago. They expected then what we ought more rightly to be expecting now. And how is it that we have lost this sense that would impute to our life a sense of urgency and seriousness and a dynamic that makes the church the church. What we have been reduced to is a succession of services and even those are not all that good. Now don't look at me like that. We hear preaching, it's biblical, edifying, but it's not requiring. It doesn't put God's finger in our chest. It doesn't make personal requirement of us. It is altogether general. It's biblical, but it's a set piece. Maybe even a performance. We are not hearing the word of the Lord. There's a famine for the word of the Lord. That is to say what he himself is speaking now. And God calls this rebellion. So I want to try in these statements with what may be at the heart of our malady. Namely our divorce from those things that pertain to Israel. That something has happened with the church has become a kind of entity unto itself. Apart from its forebears. Apart from its antecedents. Apart from the historical and unbroken continuum of the holy things that have come through the apostles and the prophets that have their origins in the Davidic root. The Hebraic faith into which you were inducted by the mercy and grace of God. You're altogether, if you'll allow me to say it, far too Gentile. And that's a serious point because I forgot where it is that Paul says. Now don't, he's speaking to the non-Jewish church and he says now don't do as the Gentiles do. Isn't that a strange thing to say to a church that is itself Gentile? Because how does Paul see them? They have become Hebraicized. They have been brought into the Hebraic faith. And so don't now act like those Gentiles out there. Something new has happened to you. You who are far off have been brought nigh into the commonwealth of Israel, into the covenants and promises and hopes of Israel. Now so don't go deporting yourself as if you are them. See what I mean? Let me read that for you in Ephesians. You might want to turn to chapter 2 and 3 of that great book given to us by one who is called to the mysteries of the faith, a steward of the mysteries who tells us to remember in chapter 2 in verse 11 therefore remember that you formerly you, the Gentiles in the flesh who are called uncircumcision by the so-called circumcision which is performed in the flesh by human hands remember that you were at that time separate from Messiah. Now I know your Bible says Christ. Mine does too. But come on, let's go back to the original Hebrew word because it has connotations and meanings that have been lost to us through the use of the Greek. As a Jewish kid growing up in Brooklyn and a seeker after truth I never once thought for a moment that there could be any connection with a figure named Jesus Christ with my Jewish life. And no one was ever able to explain to me that Christ is not Jesus' last name because I certainly knew a Ginsburg and Cohen and Greenberg but I never knew a Jewish family by the name of Christ. I had to wait until I was saved in my 35th year to learn that Christ is not a surname it's a title and that it's the English translation of the Greek word Christos which is the translation of the Hebrew word Moshiach and Messiah. Oh, I tell you dear saints when you take that word to your lips like the rare wine that it is and hold it in your mouth and feel the dotting effect of that before you swallow down that life-giving thing and feel the warmth permeate your entire being you have not really savored and enjoyed and understood the preciousness of the faith to which you were called who were once far off and without God and without hope in the world. You were brought nigh by the blood of their Messiah. The word Messiah has no meaning no significance apart from its Hebraic, Old Testament prophetic and biblical setting. To bring that out as some kind of New Testament term and see us as some kind of abrupt innovation different from and other than that which has preceded us is to lose the faith. And I don't think I can ever describe this but it was recent and it's being recalled to my memory now in a little interchange with German saints a little band of young believers in their early thirties to whom I had become something of a spiritual father and I began increasingly to offend them by the kinds of things that you're hearing from me and about the issue of nation and what might have been Germany's calling in God if the nation had ever thought to seek Him and forsake its own imperialist and inflated ambition. And they got so irritated by these thoughts that one girl she was virtually gritting her teeth she could barely contain her indignation and spat out at me and she said, and what about Christ? What about Christ? I thought it was spelled with a K the way she was sounding it she was spitting out what about Christ? What she was saying is what about the New Testament? What about to be saved in Christ and apart from all this Hebraic stuff? I almost got the impression that the Christ that she was sounding was not at all the Messiah of Israel but some kind of deity for Gentiles apart from Jews. And if you go on like that you will really continue to convince and persuade Jews that that's true. I had to say to these Germans what nation have Jews lived in and have had a longer tenure than your nation? For two thousand years there's been a Jewish presence in your nation and all that we call Jewish has had its formation with you even the Yiddish language and yet for that how many Jews who have been with you since time immemorial have ever realized that the God whom you ostensibly worship is the God of Jacob? You have not communicated anything to the Jews in your midst that your God is their God. So completely have you severed the historic and ancestral continuum and have established something altogether independent and apart? We need to find a way back to the authentic root and source and that might be the corrective in bringing us into an alignment with God as God for if he's not the God of Jacob and the God of Israel, who is he? And can we know him better than his relationship with that people? Paul speaks in Romans 11 about the severity and the goodness of God in what connection? In his dealing with this ancient people. There's no fear in the church for God. The fear of God is absent from the church and that's why we take the horrendous liberties that we do for how shall we fear him if we have not known his severity his judgments, his dealings how far he will go even with his own ancient people who are yet the apple of his eye despite their fallenness. We cannot know God except in the revelation that comes from his long historic dealing with his own people and what he will yet do with them before the end comes. To know God is to know him as the God of Israel the God of Jacob or we are likely to be forming a God of our own image and of our own making and putting the title Jesus on him. But I'll tell you that is as vast a deception as anything that Mormons and any sect and any deception going. I don't know when it was not too long ago I was sitting in the church and all of a sudden I was stabbed with the thought that we can be completely orthodox in our credo and be as much deceived as any Jehovah witness. That deception does not require unorthodox views you can become deceived in your orthodoxy in your kosher beliefs so to speak in your statements of faith maybe even more deceived because you think that that's your security. You have the husk of it you have the form of it but you have not the essence and the vitality and the truth of it and that makes the truth all the more the lie. Don't think that you're not a candidate for deception. I can't think of any more dangerous mentality that we should think ourselves safe from deception when the end of the age is awash in deceptions of every variety and kind and seeks first to nullify the church before it even infects and corrupts the world. We need to keep our hearts with all diligence and need to be sure that the God that we celebrate whom we have called Jesus is in fact God and not the projection of our own imagining who does our bidding and serves our convenience. You need to contend for the faith continually that was earnestly once and for all given the saints. If you don't contend and fall into a kind of a slipshod easy casualness you're almost guaranteeing your deception. I would hate to die in that condition because in whatever condition we end this life or in the Lord's coming in that condition we eternally remain. There is no remedy. There's a finality. There's closure. This life is given that we might know God. He has established the bounds of our habitation and made of all nations one blood that we might seek after God that we might find Him who is not far from any of us. This is the preeminent purpose for our being and for our life. But we have to confess it has not remained primary. It's secondary at best. It's been lost in the shuffle. Our car, our home, our family our job, our career, our vocation has pushed out the concern of God. You need to contend for this faith. More than just shutting off the TV set it requires its removal. It requires a radical dealing with our own flesh or else we will find ourselves outside the faith all the time that we think that we're actually in fact in it. Doesn't Paul say that the Lord will not come before a great falling away? He uses the word great to show the magnitude of this last day's phenomenon called apostasia. And if you think and I'm saying this so many times I'm tiring myself to hear myself repeat it but you need to hear it if it's the first time. Apostasy does not mean that you're necessarily outside the church picketing against the church and nodding your fist against God. The deadliest apostasy is within the church itself. Sitting in the pews putting the dollar in the collection plate singing the choruses saying yes and amen but your hearts are far from Him and you don't know Him as you ought and you don't seek Him as you ought. The great psalm of Psalm 24 who will ascend the holy hill of God? He who has clean hands and a pure heart and has not given his soul over to vanity and this is the generation it says of them that seek thee that seek thy face O God of Jacob. Come on saints how many of us are seekers? How many of us who are conducting worship are worshipers by ourselves and without instruments before we come up and seek to communicate the sense of God to others? How many of us know what it means to wait on the Lord and to come into the sense of His presence and can find time for that in all of our busy schedule and demand? To seek Him and to seek thy face is like an added dimension of seeking that the mere seeking of God is not enough to qualify you for the ascent of the holy hill but to seek His face the most intimate aspect of God Himself. I can't think of a greater deterrent for deception than the knowledge of God as He in fact is and not as we thought Him to be. I've been in conferences and places of so-called revival as the only what shall I say square peg in a round hole. I've been called the wet blanket out of the north. I sit there with a face you know I don't know about you but what I feel is reflected here. I can't compose my face religiously. If my spirit is numb and my inner man is jangled and my alarms are going off for what is taking place I'm not going to sit there and look ecstatic. And it's painful to be the only one in that condition who is looking strange and out of it when everyone else seems to be inducted in having a ball. You have to jealously keep your sense of God in your center your vital center and measure everything that comes to you that purports to be God and from God against what is already validly established by God in your history with Him through His dealings and the work of the cross. Have you a history? How then shall you stand in the last days when those who overcome overcome by the blood of the Lamb and the word of their testimony? And I'm not talking about I just want to say that's not what he's talking about. The word of the testimony is the history of God's demonstrated faithfulness in His many interventions when we have allowed Him to bring us to desperate straits where if God be not God we perish. You got a history like that? Or has your life been so circumspect, so ordered, so nicely contained that it has had no opportunity to open you to dimensions of experience and the revelation of the knowledge of Him that would be your end time provision to stand. You don't have to be in hazardous places to experience the cross and the trials of God and the dealings of God right where you are, right behind your own closed doors and the shades, right within your marriage family, right within your employment situation, within your body and its health. God has ways of dealing and bringing that knowledge of Him in the fellowship of His sufferings. I had a night before last night, last night I slept, praise God, but the night before none of you would ever want to experience. To say that it was hell is not an exaggeration. To say that I was stretched out and broken up to pieces and crunched and flattened as if I had been run over by a Mack truck is not an exaggeration. To say that my mind was unbearably being played upon with erotic images of things that I should have found detestable and protested but were so powerful that I could not blot them out of my consciousness. I was skewered, I was roasted over the fire all the night long and that night was not as bad as the one that I experienced in Manila only weeks ago. How is it that God allows that? It has something to do with yesterday and the messages that were given in a condition of sleeplessness and utter weakness and pounding headache all through the day. There's a suffering, saints, that needs to be filled up in and by the church that remains. And I meet every now and then an agonized soul who cannot bear it a moment longer. They cannot take conventional church even in its best charismatic and Pentecostal forms and they're just being shredded by the pain of it. And I have often to counsel them until God releases you, bear it. The very bearing of the pain of the church, the suffering of what the church presently is in the anguish of your spirit because you know it's so far removed from the reality of God is something that has to be born. And because you'll bear it and pray out of it for God's intervention, there's a hope that it might come. And when God sees that that hope is spent and that the people are deaf and want not to hear but to continue in their practices, He'll release that suffering saint from that anguish. Have you suffered for the church? Do you know that church is a suffering before it's a glory? If your church experience has not brought you a measure of pain and suffering and confrontation and collision and abrasion and irritation and all the kinds of things that can only come from saints, you're not in church. You're in some kind of Sunday institutional setting that has guarded and protected you from the very thing that God has calculated you to experience. Church is a suffering before it's a glory. And it's a necessary suffering because it's a preparation for eternity. Are you ready now to rule and reign with Christ? Come on, your kids are talking back to you and are snotty and rebellious, taking liberties that were unheard of a decade ago. And this is happening everywhere. We're not even able to rule our own houses well. Are we going to rule and reign with Christ? Our pastors are running off with organists. There's fornication. Divorce and remarriage is as common in the church, in my country, I don't know about yours, as with the world. We have not welcomed the disciplines of God. We have not been jealous for His name and honor. We've allowed things to slip. We're not invited to participate in the kinds of decisions that would require of us a seeking of God for wisdom. We actually prefer anonymity. We like to remain faceless in the pew and just put our few dollars in the collection plate and pay the expense of having somebody else do it. But Paul says, when you come together, each one has a tongue, an interpretation, a prophecy, a revelation, a hymn, a psalm. That's how the church was enriched at the first. It was not impoverished as it is today with a bunch of blank saints who are incapable of bringing anything into the church and into its life that might enrich the body. They don't even see themselves as the body. They may use the language of the body, but are they a body in the organic and authentic sense so long as we are conglomerates of individuality and privatism? No wonder that we don't have to share and we have not besought ourselves to have something either. We're right up to the TV set watching the Late Late Show on the last thing on Saturday night or the sports or whatever it is and then come to the Sunday morning service hoping that some spiritual roulette will take place able to pierce our denseness by the man whom we're paying to do it. And if he doesn't succeed, we'll find another. Oh, oh, oh. No wonder my Jewish people languish, still waiting to be made jealous by nothing that has yet come from the church historically that even begins to touch that. We have forgotten who Jesus is as the Messiah of Israel. And when Paul says, so then in chapter 2, verse 19, you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints. Which saints? The saints who were already saints before you came on the scene who were Jewish. You are fellow saints with them and citizens with them in their already existing commonwealth of Israel and are of God's household. And he repeats it again in chapter 3, verse 6, that to be specific, that the Gentiles are fellow heirs and fellow members of the body. Which body? The body that existed and had its historical continuance before you were ever invited to be part. You are the continuation, not an innovation, of something that already was. It was the household of God. It was the assembly of the righteous. You are fellow partakers of the promise in Christ Jesus through our Gospel. Am I still mic'd? Listen to Paul in the first verses of the Book of Romans. Paul, a servant of Yeshua HaMashiach, Jesus the Messiah, called to be an apostle, separated unto the Gospel of God, which he had promised afore by his prophets in the holy Jewish scriptures to Israel. I'm embellishing. I'm adding a word here or there without any fear that lightning is going to come through the ceiling and strike me. Because I think what I'm adding, though Paul does not say it, you know why? It was so well understood at that time. But now it needs to be explicitly stated for we have forgotten. And that's why Paul says in Ephesians, Now remember, remember, remember that you who are far off have been brought nigh. This Gospel is not some New Testament innovation apart from and different than other than the whole counsel of God that was waiting for a Messiah to bring deliverance from sin and fulfillment and entry into a kingdom which was promised Israel. Which he had promised before by his prophets, his Jewish prophets in the holy scriptures, the Jewish scriptures concerning his son, Yeshua HaMashiach, our Lord, which was made of the seed of David according to the flesh and declared to be the son of God with power according to the Ruach HaKodesh, the spirit of holiness by the resurrection from the dead. You want to know, saints? In my 34th year hard-boiled, antagonistic Jewish atheist, cynic and antagonist to Christianity, I wouldn't have allowed your existence. You were not to me some harmless culture. You were an impediment to the progress of mankind that needs to be abolished. I would have come at you with the same threatenings and murderings as Saul of old. But when I picked up the New Testament for the first time, a history teacher schooled at the University of California at Berkeley to study documents, when I picked up this document and began reading it for the first time, the first thought that struck me despite all my Jewish prejudice against Christ was, this is a Jewish book. Do you know that we don't even call our children Peter or John or James because we think they are, quote, Christian names? But when you read about them, my God, they're as Jewish as the day is long. The whole book is suffused with things that are so patently Jewish to anyone who can see it. And the most Jewish of all is Yeshua HaMashiach, Jesus the Christ, the Holy One of Israel. It was an astonishment for me because every depiction of Jesus that I had seen in my first 34 years living in Christian America was a complete contradiction to anything that I could have Jewishly understood. Listen, dear saints, you're not saved for yourself. Paul says in Romans 11, Have they stumbled that they should fall? Is God finished with them? Are they permanently out of His purposes? God forbid you should think that, for through their fall salvation has come to the Gentiles so as to move them to jealousy. You have a purpose for your salvation beyond yourself. And praise God for that or else you would again fall into an inevitable spiritual egocentrism where all you know is yourself. Isn't that true now? What's the first thing you're going to say when you leave this building? How did you like the service? How did you like the speaker? Where are we going to eat? Me, me, me. My, my, my. How did I like? How did you like? Everything is predicated from the perspective of the vantage point of self. The very thing which God calls us to be delivered. This is His salvation to the uttermost. We're still steeped in it. Not so much now carnal things in the world, but religious things and spiritual things, but just as deadly if we are the center. And we will remain that until we have an understanding there's a purpose for our salvation beyond ourselves. It's to the ancient people and their descendants from whom we have derived our faith. We owe them something who have been grafted into their root. And the only way we can pay it is by a demonstration of something so invincibly and clearly Hebraic coming from Gentiles that it will stagger them as they view it. That's why Paul could say to the church, now don't do as those Gentiles do. And what did I say to you? You're far too Gentile. You've lost the sense that your God is the God of Jacob or you've never understood Him as that. And this is not a little appellation. This is God's self-chosen designation by which He insists He be known. And if you don't know Him in that way you're already on the ground for deception. You're already a candidate to fill in your own image of God for you've forgotten whose God He in fact is and insists that He be recognized. So Jesus is not just any man. The church's whole doctrine of the incarnation and the atonement becomes abstract and valueless and meaningless to the extent that this comes to be regarded as something accidental and incidental and not a man in general, a neutral man but the conclusion and sum of the history of God with the people of Israel. Only Kolbat could say that. But what remains for us is are we able to understand what He is saying and take it to heart. Have we fallen so low that we are incapable of understanding the gifted men whom God has given to the church to challenge and to keep the true faith alive. Do you know what He's saying here? That the very sacred foundational doctrines of the faith atonement itself can become abstract and valueless and meaningless to the extent that Jesus is considered some neutral man rather than the sum and the substance of the history of God with the people of Israel. The one who fulfills the covenant made by God with this people and it is as such that He is the obedient son and servant of God. He comes as a Messiah to fulfill prophecy and to fulfill the things that the Father has established in what has been promised to this nation as of old who had to be born in a certain place and time and serve with a certain character and fulfill a certain destiny as it pertains to the people of Israel. This was so clear to the apostles and disciples of the early faith that Peter required a supernatural revelation from God in a trance to begin to open the possibility for him that this faith is also to be made available to non-Jews. A sheet had to come down in a trance with unclean animals and the voice of God speaking out and saying, Peter, take and eat! And Peter complaining as an Orthodox Jew, but God, I've never eaten anything unclean! And God said, What I have made clean, called down, not unclean. And I think it's repeated three times so obdurate and stiff was Peter in his Jewish understanding. This was their faith. This was their fulfillment. They never thought that it had anything to do with the goyim, with the heathen. He had to have a trance, a vision in a trance and while he was awakening, there were the men down below, Gentiles, coming to take him to the house of a Gentile, which he would never have entered as an Orthodox Jew. But he could now freely enter and freely share the gospel and the good news and before he could get the whole message out of his mouth, the Holy Spirit fell on them also. How can we deny them water who have received the gift that has come to us? Clearly we perceive that God is opening the door to the righteous of all nations, that the Gentiles are also welcomed in. You know, if you knew that, you would have a sense of gratitude for those Jewish men who have preceded you, the prophets and the apostles, who have protected and guarded and kept the faith much more diligently than you are presently doing. And out of a sense of obligation for the inheritance and the treasure that has come to you, you would nurture it and guard it and make it known to those who now, though they are Jews, are without God and without hope in the world, being far off in their worldly, secular, rabbinical Judaism or philosophies or whatsoever, but are apart from God. Can you see the mystery of God? We've come full circle. You were once far off, now they are far off. And how are they to be brought back and be grafted into their own root? By the demonstration made by you corporately as the church, in such an unmistakable way that they, though they had been hostile enemies of the gospel, must recognize that what you have is their God. The unmistakable evidence, the effulgence of God, the holiness of God, that no matter how dark they are in their atheism and unbelief, when they see it, particularly as it is expressed through Gentiles, they must fall before that demonstration. It is the ultimate witness of God. It's the light that lightens the Gentiles. It is the glory of the God of Israel. How's your light this morning, saints? Have you been jealous over it? Do you cry out, light, more light? Are you the kind of fool that I am, that I cannot even eat a meal in a restaurant that is and cold atmospheric? I ask for light. Light, more light. And we would have had a devastating, empty, nothing day yesterday if I had not my brothers to pray with me and I could share with them in detail the horror of the kinds of erotic things that were passing through my semi-sleep, awake consciousness for which I needed prayer and purging and that the darkness of it must flee when it is brought into the light as he is in the light. I did not receive my baptism in the Holy Spirit in the Pentecostal Church which I attended because the Spirit of God was grieved by the kind of situation that prevailed there. Resentments, broken relationships that had gone on for decades. People would not leave the same door together. I got my baptism in the Spirit on a sloping farm floor with a bunch of slapdash saints who had no distinction but one thing, they loved Israel. And in that love and in that presence, the moment that they laid hands on me, boom! Something broke and went that I had been seeking a year to loosen, to obtain. Instantly, the hard thing crumbled and granulated and poured out of my mouth with sobs of a convulsive kind that I could not control and when this was emptied and I stood before God, in came a filling from within and when it reached my mouth, boom! Out came the heavenly language and I'd been his fool from that time. I could not obtain it in the Pentecostal Church. What a statement of how far from the light we are. Listen, saints, we're the ground and pillar of truth. We are reality itself. We have a God who himself is truth. Contend for that faith. Keep it. Seek it. Pursue it. Seek his face. Be ruthless against your own flesh. Make time for him. Don't go along with the crowd. Don't go along with the established forms. Don't fall into the rut that everyone else is doing. Come and wait on the Lord in silence. Call a moratorium on your worship. Let the Lord restore the sense of himself that you might worship him in spirit and in truth and the rest will follow. Let's pray. Well, I thank you, Lord, that I was totally empty this morning and uninspired. I had nothing to say, no message. But I came and believe, Lord, that you're not only speaking to this immediate people but through the tapes being made to a much vaster audience who are essentially in the same melancholy condition. Lord, will you forgive us that you had to come and jar us to awake for us to be aware of the kind of liberties that we have taken with you, that we were going on with business as usual and even getting to enjoy it and thought we were doing you service by turning the amplifiers up. We're so removed, my God, from where we need to be. And we ask your forgiveness for that departure, the erosion of true faith over the years until we have just become a religious form. Forgive us all that, my God, and take away the clutter, the debris, the things that have dulled our spirit and bring us to a place before you that perchance should you be gracious, you will allow the sense of yourself again to touch our heart, our spirit, our consciousness, our understanding. And when it comes, Lord, we will cherish it. We will guard it. We will keep it. We will not allow it, my God, to be compromised. We will not be open for any new thing that comes down the way that everybody seems to be celebrating. Help us to be a people for your name. And Lord, there are not many Jews round about, but we have a sense that if we will come to the place where we will demonstrate and exhibit you as the God of Israel, you'll bring them to us. You'll make our prayers effectual in their behalf, and you'll work something, my God, that will conclude this age and bring your coming and your kingdom. Seal up these words for us, Lord. May we not go from them to our where we're going to eat, what we're going to do, to our sport, to our pleasure. Let there be something solemn that has entered our heart and spirit. Let it reverberate in our hearts, my God. Let it continue to speak to us. Let us ponder it. Let us find a private place somewhere today where we can go down on our knees, go down on our faces, and just stretch and prostrate ourselves out before you. We're not asking for anything, Lord. We're not wanting something from you that we have terms and conditions, and that's why we're coming before you. We're coming before you because you're God. You don't have to give us anything in return. There doesn't have to be a benefit that accrues to us. We seek your face because you're God. Because you deserve to be sought. You're the Holy One. Come, precious God. Bless this people. Let this be a watershed for them, a turning point to save them from falling, my God, into the mechanical form of things that makes everything the same everywhere. Let them be the distinctive people of God of this community and this locality and of this nation that turns the head not only of Jews but of the unbelieving Gentiles as well. For whatever will make a Jew jealous will certainly affect a non-Jew powerfully. I bless them, Lord, with these words. Seal them. Let not a syllable fall to the floor. Bring it to their recall again and again. Bring repentance. Bring restoration. Come, my God, in these last days and be our God and we will be your people. In Jesus' name, we pray. Keep your head bowed. Don't look up. Talk to the Lord out of your deepest heart. Transact something with Him. He's a God of truth. He's waiting only for your acknowledgement that you've been slipshod and careless and indifferent. Let Him know that that you liked the easy way, that you didn't want to be required of, that you preferred anonymity in the pew while someone else did it and conducted the service. He's a deep calling unto deep. Speak to Him from that place. Answer Him who has spoken to you from the deeps and let something begin that is a day of new beginning that will guarantee an eternity of a much brighter and precious kind.