In this sermon, the speaker reflects on the hardships and struggles that a couple faced in their early years, living in a small trailer with frost coming through their door. The speaker emphasizes that what the couple is today is a result of God's formation through those difficult times. The sermon then shifts to a discussion about the church's call to New York and whether it signifies the end of the times of the Gentiles. The speaker urges the church to focus on this call and understand its significance deeply. The sermon concludes with a plea for God's palpable mercy and a reminder that the church must be willing to suffer for the sake of Israel and God's glory.

A few more of the things that were expressed in Canada so that you can really understand the whole context and what came from it. Remember that I'm speaking to a general Christian audience. Maybe a lot of this would not be appropriate for you, but as I just shared with my Austrian brother, what we're discussing today is imperative for the nation Austria, for the church in Austria, the depth of its history of anti-semitism that was more vehement against the Jew than German anti-semitism. And maybe the Jews of Vienna was one of the prized elite communities of world Jewry that gave birth to such men as Sigmund Freud and a whole intellectual cultural constellation of Jews who ate their torta. What's the famous torta in Vienna? Sacher torta. And so you have to picture them sitting outside in these cafes with their nicely trimmed Van Dyck beards, with their intellectual ability, their university backgrounds, their professors, their surgeons, their specialists, enjoying the liberal environment of Viennese culture, loving the German language and German culture. And it's not long after that, that the same ones are scrubbing the sidewalk with toothbrush or being yanked by their beards. So all the while they were enjoying that privileged quality of life and being more predominant in Austrian and Viennese society as professionals and journalists. Who's the fellow who created Zionism? Herzl. Who? Herzl. Herzl was a Viennese journalist. So the prominence of German speaking Jews in Western civilization is remarkable, which includes not only Freud, but Karl Marx, Albert Einstein, any number of Jewish writers, authors and so on. And that will excite the envy of the Gentiles that these Jews who are Christ killers are yet living high on the hog, if you'll excuse the expression, and therefore being a source of irritation. And the desire of the Gentile heart is to bring them down, to humiliate them, not only to see them lose, but to rub their face in their humiliation, which explains something of the character of the Holocaust itself. It was not enough just to systematically annihilate them, they had to be robbed of their identity. Their heads had to be shaved, their names reduced to a number, and treated with the kind of contempt that one would not even express toward animals. From that people whom they celebrated more than any other that had given to the world, Goethe, Schiller, Fichte, Hegel, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and all of the great giants, Kant, K-A-N-T, the great philosopher, the Jews emulated and appreciated became the very Frankenstein that devoured them. That is taken up in the Holocaust book, that this is the ironic judgment of God that if Jews have found an alternative messianism other than that which is biblical and spiritual in man or society or in human civilization, he will turn that very thing that is celebrated into being the engine of their destruction. And not their destruction only, but their complete debasement and the robbing of their humanity and their utter humiliation. So we need to be tempered by that. I'm raising other reasons why it is that Jews would be held with disdain or contempt or resentment by nominal Christians having to do with the issue of God's election. That God would elect a Jew. I will have mercy upon whom will have mercy is irritating to people who don't agree with God's choice. They don't seem to deserve it. Surely he should have elected someone more apparently virtuous of deserving of the honor as being central to all nations. So if we have an unspoken controversy with God over the issue of election, it will come out over the election of the Jew. And that's why God has elected the Jew because that represents the stumbling stone in Zion for a Gentile church who give only nominal assent to what God has chosen, but in the deeps of their gut don't really agree with it. Not to agree with God in his chosenness is not to agree with God. For the issue of the God who chooses is the issue of God. I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy is the God who says I am that I am and I will be what I will be. If you dispute my choosing, you're really at log ahead with myself. And what reveals that is your resistance to my choice. Otherwise you would have thought you're in perfect compliance with me. Your antagonism over the choice is really a basic antagonism with me that would never have been revealed except that you bristled over my choice of the Jew. See what I mean? And that's why the Jew was chosen for the sake of Gentiles that their secret hearts be revealed. We are not one with God until we choose what he has chosen. And if we're only giving a nominal assent because well it's in the scripture, I guess we have to, is that really an identification with his heart? Are we loving what he loves and choosing what he chooses? You see how significant the issue of the Jew is in the wisdom of God. All the more because they are offensive, all the more because their track record stinks, all the more because he says frankly, you are blaspheming my name in every nation where I've sent you. And yet, because I have chosen you, because I have made a covenant, the deliverer will come out of Zion according to the covenant that I have made with you as it is written. So the issue of God's faithfulness is the issue of God. The covenant which he has made according to what he has written for if he does not fulfill it, how then is he God? All the more is he marvelous when he fulfills it with the unwillingness of that people to be a nation of priests and a light unto the world. Unwilling to be called and to be chosen. So the issue of Israel is the issue of God. And it's the issue of the church that is to be the church. We've got to stumble over that stumbling stone set in Zion and make peace with it in the deeps of our being and not just in a nominal ascent like, well, what can you do? I guess we have to agree. That's what it says. Jacob I have loved and Esau I have hated. We have to just allow God to be God and see in our hearts that our irritation over the issue of what he has chosen is a revelation that though we say we're subscribed to the grace in our hearts, we are really founded on merit and deserving of what men are and what they do. The reason that God has chosen Israel is that there could be no basis that their election is the issue of their merit. It's because they are patently so without merit. Having been so unfaithful and apostate and covenant breaking throughout their history, does it make their choice all the more significantly the statement of God as God? If they had any attribute of merit, then our whole understanding of God and what is represented in his choosing of them would have been lost. And we ourselves then would predicate our relationship both with God and with men on the basis of merit. I like you because I like what you do. I like what you accomplish. I like your style. And how would that affect the church? It would be an elitist superior thing based on preference, which is really the exaltation of man. That's why what is involved in the choice of the Jew in Israel is cosmic in its significance. And we need to see that and come to the deepest agreement with God. Even if it requires a breaking of those things that have never really surrendered to the issue of grace and really in our hearts like to predicate our choices and our decisions and our affinities on the basis of merit, even our own merit. And that's why we're unhappy Christians because you don't measure up to our own demand. We don't even accept ourselves because we disappoint ourselves. He might have mercy on us, but we don't have mercy on ourselves. He might love us, but we ourselves are self-hating because we don't measure up to the standard that we have established on the basis of merit and performance. We don't really know that we are accepted in the beloved irrespective of any condition. And that's why we can't join the father in the feast for the prodigal son who returns because he didn't deserve it. Look, he wasted his entire substance. And now the father goes out to meet him and greet him with a kiss and a ring and a cloak and kills the father calf and makes the splendid party with music. I'm not going to enter that. I'm resentful that this guy who misspent his life in the substance and I've been all the way time faithful and keeping my nose to the grindstone and doing the dutiful thing. And you never made a party like that for me. Bravo. How much of that attitude of the older son is in the church and therefore does not desire the return of that prodigal because they don't deserve it. So our faith is predicated more on the issue of deserving and of merit and of works contrary to our doctrine. And it's only the issue of what God has chosen that reveals it. So unless you can enter that feast with rejoicing as the father rejoices, because this is life from the dead. How are we one with the Lord? How then shall we be a bride for the bridegroom if we are not adorned for him and like him? So the deepest issues of self, of attainment, of accomplishment, of prestige, of performance, of credentials that the world celebrates is more in us than we know. And unless we know that we are accepted in the beloved, we will not be able to join the father in the feast. And not to join the father in the feast is not to join the father. So that God has a gift and calling that is without repentance and is irrevocable despite their lousy track record, is an offense to us. They're disqualified. And that was the question put to Paul by the Roman church. Is God finished now with the Jew? They blew it. They had an opportunity. They stoned the prophets. The son of God came, they crucified him. Are they finished? And now we take over and we succeed where they failed. Paul in his all of his apostolic stature raises himself to his full person and God says, God forbid that you should think that. God forbid that you should draw that conclusion that because they have so grievously failed that God has finished with them. Because what then of his covenant? What then of his promise? What then of his restoration? What then of his love? And they have stumbled. It's only momentary in order that by their fall, salvation could come to you. So as to move them to jealousy. This is the mystery of Israel and the church. And as I said in this message, I have known renowned men of God with international reputations. I mentioned one by name, Ern Baxter, who comes from Canada, comes out of the latter rain movement, an outstanding speaker, powerful and eloquent, almost for a season, a spiritual father to me. And he said to me, Art, I have never understood Romans nine through 11. Romans 11 is a mystery to me. And I said, oh, I said to the audience, well, that's a remarkable contradiction that a man could be so eloquent and deep in his knowledge of God in other ways and not see this. So central to all the purposes of God that the scholars say Romans nine through 11 is not an addendum to the book of Romans. It's a centerpiece that everything from one, chapter one through eight is preparation. And everything from 12 to 16 is the issue that flows from it for the church. That's the centerpiece. And you don't know that it's been a mystery to you. Well, I can understand that could be a mystery to you. But what I can't understand is that you could announce that with such nonchalance as if it's of no great moment. Why doesn't it stab your heart that it's a mystery to you that has never been revealed? Because Paul says, I would not have you to be ignorant of this mystery, brethren, lest you become wise in your own conceit. There's a consequence and a penalty for the failure to understand this mystery. Why, as a man of God and a worldwide renowned minister looked to by many, have you not been chafed by the absence of that mystery? I can understand you're not knowing it, but I cannot understand your indifference and casual way in which you say it as if, well, I just don't know that. That that is the heart of the mystery and of God himself. And so that is it. And the fact that you're Canadian, Anglo-Saxon, coming out of a certain Pentecostal movement that celebrates the church as if the restoration of the church is the end all and the be all of God's whole purpose is more of a significant statement of this latent anti-Semitism than you know. I would never expect an Ern Baxter ever to say a harsh word about a Jew, but his own casual willingness to announce that, well, it's a mystery I've never understood and go on to other things as if it does not count for much is an ultimate expression of that latent disposition. And the church needs to see it. God is the God of Jacob. I said to them and the God of Israel that's repeated so frequently, especially in the Psalms and how often has a Christian doted on God's own designation of himself as being the God of Jacob. Why isn't God ashamed of Jacob? Why isn't he saying he's the God of Israel or the God of all the world or the God of the church? Invariably when he addresses and speaks of himself, he gives this identification. Is he trying to say something to us? Is he trying to say if I'm not ashamed to identify myself with Jacob and all of his Jacob chicanery and character usurping nature and all of the things that had to become Israel, why are you ashamed? And since many have heard me say this, when I went out in Germany near Munich on Nuremberg to a Jewish cemetery that had never been destroyed by the Nazis because the granite tombstones were so thick going back to the 1400s that they could not be toppled and you can barely discern the Hebrew but it's a haunting place to visit to see these lopsided tombstones lurching in a macabre graveyard that speaks of the centuries and centuries of Jewish residents in Germany. And I came from there into the meeting place of charismatics and I said to them, how is it that my Jewish kinsmen have been so long in your presence and never knew that the God that you were celebrating and worshiping is their God? Didn't you ever tell them that your God is the God of Jacob? And their jaws fell. Not only did they never tell them, they never themselves realized or acknowledged that that was God's own chosen identification because as Germans, it embarrassed them and they had no disposition to recognize God as that God. And so here again is another expression of that antipathy for the Jew that is unwilling to acknowledge God as the God of Jacob. And if we're not acknowledged what God says for himself, how shall we be in identification with that God? Because this is the deepest statement of his heart. Not Jacob on his best condition, but Jacob as Jacob. I'm the God of Jacob, I'm the God of Israel. And the heck of it is that we're grafted into their tree. Lord, couldn't there be some other provision? Yes, we were wild branches and fruitless, but couldn't you have done something else to be grafted into their tree? That we have to begrudgingly acknowledge that we're not autonomous and separate from them as a new kind of a novelty and an innovation, but that we have got to go back and see ourselves rooted in their tree. Even though their branches have broken off, you still call it their tree. And unless we acknowledge that we are grafted in their tree, how shall we receive the benefit of the sap that issues from that root? Here I'm on prophetic ground. I can't say, let's say, what does it say that ought? I can't give you a text. But I surmise and suspect that the reason for our present fruitlessness as Christians is though we are technically grafted in until we acknowledge with gratitude that grafting and with respect and appreciation and esteem, we are deprived from the flow of the sap of the life of God through that root. We might just as well be back again into our old wild origins for the little fruit that we are exhibiting. But the fruit can only come from the life. The life flows through the root, the trunk and the foot from the tree if we will consciously acknowledge and receive that it's God's very provision against our Gentile pride to make that acknowledgement and that admission. And if we will not, then we suffer the stigma of fruitlessness. And what do we do as an alternative? Because we see all around us the evidence of that fruitlessness and the torpor and grayness of the church and its lack of real apostolic resonance, we'll look for revival. We'll run to Toronto, we'll run to Pensacola, we'll run wherever there's some hope of fanning some sense of life. But how much, I raised the question in Canada, will God honor the places to which we run if we are turning from the source to which he has given us in his wisdom? How much is he in the places? And what are we in fact receiving? However exciting and visible it seems to be, except that there's a mercy of God that will allow a measure to come through, but not to the point that it will constitute a substitute for the source to which he himself has directed us and requires us the root of their tree. Because until we look elsewhere and away from that tree, we retain our Gentile pride and separateness, how then are we the church? There's a mystery even in the grafting into the tree that needs to be prophetically explicated. And if your doctrine will not even make an allowance for the possibility, is it because of your jealousy for the doctrine or is there a deep-seated antagonism to the tree itself? I can't even answer those questions, but they need to be raised. And I raised them in Canada. And I don't think people were happy to hear the kinds of things that were being said. And so we pray for the peace of Jerusalem, but do we really pray? And how should we pray? And do we really echo the cry of Paul at the commencement of Roman's time? I would wish myself a curse for my brethren's sake that they might be saved. We have allowed Paul to make a statement like that, thinking, well, that's his Jewish identification with his own kinsmen. That's what he says, my kinsmen according to the flesh. But the question I want to raise and raised in Canada and elsewhere, is that crying out of Paul out of his ethnicity? Is that Paul speaking out of his fleshly identification with his kinsmen? Or is that the cry of Paul that comes out of the deep of his apostolic character and life, which is to say his union with the high priest and the apostle about confession, that that cry is the father's cry, is God's cry? You say, well, what's the significance of that question, Art? It's this. If it's only Paul speaking out of his Jewishness, we can't hope to emulate that. That's his baby. That comes out of a natural ethnic identity. But if Paul's, the depth of Paul's cry is out of his apostolic union and identification with the chief priest and high apostle of our faith, then that cry is as possible for us as it was for him. And in fact, the question is, is God wanting that? And until we will begin where he begins in nine with that cry, can we follow him all the way through 10 and through 11 and end with him with the remarkable doxology of verses 32 through 36 of the depth of the riches, both the wisdom and knowledge of God who has been his counselor? For of him and through him and to him are all things to whom be glory forever. Unless we begin with a cry, can we end with the glory? We can employ the language of it, but do we have the joy of it? Do we have the apostolic apprehension of it? Because I'll say this, if we do not agree with Paul, I have not been brought to that apostolic place of a jealousy for God's glory forever and realize that it's to be obtained historically in time in the final act of God's judgment and mercy toward Israel through the church. How shall we suffer the things that are needful for us in the last days because of them and with them and maybe even at their hands? It's only the jealousy, the apostolic prophetic jealousy for the glory of God that will enable us to bear what we must. Doctrine will not do it. Being correct will not do it. Only to be inflamed as he, oh, the glory of God forever. Time ends, history ends, the millennium comes. It's God's last statement, last act. But by it, generations will continue to commemorate what God has done to the very ends of the earth. They'll rehearse God's final demonstration and revelation of himself in his mercy that has come to a people totally undeserving of it by which they are not just restored and returned but exalted above all nations and made the centerpiece and pivot of God's whole theocratic rule. I'm saying this, this is typically prophetic. You can't pinpoint where authors would say that. Give me a text. I'm giving you a cry. I'm giving you an intuition, a sense, an inward thing that will not come to the glory unless we in some measure begin with the cry. And that is available to us. And we cannot excuse ourselves by saying I'm not Jewish. Why aren't you? In the sense of the identification of being grafted into the tree. You who are far off without God and hope in the world have been brought nigh by the blood of the Messiah into their commonwealth, into their covenants and hopes and promises. If that's not Jewish in the spiritual sense, I don't know what is. It's more Jewish than Jewish. Why aren't they your kinsmen? And this is one of the offenses for which I was interrogated. How can you call Jews brethren? Jesus could not be saying in Matthew 25, the least of these my brethren being Jews. Well, he couldn't. To whom was he saying it? To men who called him Lord. Both those that extended mercy and those who did not say Lord, when did we see you? The fact that they called him Lord indicates what their status is as Christians. Who then would be the least of these his brethren? And if they are this Jewish people in their most despicable, broken, final devastated form to him as brethren yet unsaved, what are they to us? And if they are not that to us now, will they be that to us then? If they are not brethren now, will they be brethren to us when they're yet more despicable than they presently are? There's something God is calling for now to be identified with his heart, his understanding that he can't prove. And that unless we get it prophetically, we don't get it. This is the genius of the callings of God. And the ones who are most offended or threatened are those who are preserving the doctrinal faith. Where does it say that? Well, I don't know that it actually says it, but it's implied or I'm reading that. Where do you say that the blind beggar who is regaining his sight is symbolic and a statement of Israel judged and reduced to beggarly blindness and can only obtain their sight and follow him when they'll cry out to the son of David for mercy. Until yesterday morning, I had never heard that myself, let alone ever having spoken it. And I'm saying that to say this, this is a prophetical school and God is wanting us to be acquainted with what that word means. For it brings a stretching to the church. It's at a frontier, it's at another new threshold. But in the same church are those elements that are called to protect and preserve what is given in doctrinal and stated. So we have even within the church, the tension of those who want to preserve and the tension of those who want to stretch. And somehow we live in that tension without being enemies and recognize the validity of each other's call. And one is the safeguard and counterpoise to the other. I pity the prophet who has not men with whom he's related who are insistent on the word. Pity the men of the word who cannot be affected and stretched by the vision and impulse of the prophet. So that's the mystery of the church. And the issue that awakens us to the whole magnitude of it is this people waiting. We don't even know they're waiting and are the object of God's attention in these last days. When I went to Phoenix after the call to New York had come to share with a fellowship and a brother, a Jewish brother, Shelly Volk, whom I had led to the Lord of his own kitchen table in the reading of Isaiah 53, who spent nine years with us in poverty, having come from upper middle class Jewish life where they had a new Buick every year and a new wardrobe and lived in that little trailer at the very commencement of the road at the Ben Israel property that could have fitted into their garage for nine years with the frost coming through their door and never once complained. What he is today is the result of what God formed through those times of hardship and struggle. And so I was in Phoenix speaking and sharing the New York call. And when I finished, he got up on the platform and he said, art's call to New York is the bell tolling for all the church. It's not just some individual invitation that pertains to him. It's the statement of God that a focus has come of this people in themselves where the Lord even said, you want to diminish your activity to the church and make this your principal focus. If God is saying that, are we coming to the end of the times of the Gentiles? And is God bringing foremost now the consideration of this people? So Lord, give us grace to understand where we are at and what all of this represents and what you are speaking and not to react as some did in Canada with irritation, anger, that their very anger is itself a symptom, Lord, of the very thing that you're touching and saying is the truth of our condition. So we bless you, Lord. Precious God. We keep asking for grace and we keep asking for mercy to fulfill this mystery and unless we receive a mercy even to understand its dimensions, how should we have a mercy to extend to them? There's got to be a palpable mercy even in the hearing of a word like this because it uproots and shakes so much. There's got to be a mercy for the person who shares it for no two times will it ever be the same and it's not some mechanical thing that you can trot out at will. Takes some mercy to proclaim, it takes some mercy to hear. What will it take to fulfill? To those who are earnest and recognize that this is the profound call of the church and the mystery that God has given and exposited through Paul, it'll take mercy. Mercy, Lord, upon mercy. Palpable, tangible mercy. I was thinking about walking up here the other day from Shakespeare in that final scene from Hamlet where there's a duel between Hamlet and the son of Polonius whose daughter died a suicide, I forgot her name, Ophelia and there's a final dueling match that is supposed to be the design for taking Hamlet's own life by the usurping king who killed his father and Hamlet didn't know that the sword was tipped with a poison that but one scratch would bring his death and there's a moment in the exchange of what was supposed to be just an innocent contest where someone cries out, a hit, a hit, a palpable hit and the Lord reminds me that's a palpable hit. What we need is a palpable mercy. Not just a mercy doctrinally or theoretically but actually. Real mercy, Lord. Mercy to understand, mercy to fulfill. Mercy, my God, to move with you into this threshold and over and into a realm, my God, that is unknown and has been reserved till now. So we ask that, Lord. We're experiencing mercy already more than we know. May you continue, Lord, with the mercies that are new every morning. The chesed of God, the Rachmanus of God, the pity, all of these Jewish words that the Jews know, pity, Rachmanus. Can't you have any Rachmanus? Lord, have a church with a heart like unto your own, touched by God, by your own compassion that you wait for, that the set time to favor Zion will not come until your servant people have compassion on her stones and pity on her dust. And that's not for her antiquity. That's for Haifa, Tel Aviv, and Jerusalem and every present-day city that will be reduced for rubble and all the world will gloat and rub their hands. Ah, they got what they deserve. Praise God, they had it coming. But there'll be a strange people here in the earth who do not gloat and join the world in its celebration of Israel's disaster but have compassion on her stones and pity on her dust. That's more than mechanical. That's more than doctrinal. It's the people who have come into union with the heart of God as Paul had in his cry in Romans nine. And that will be the issue that God calls the set time to favor Zion and to deliver them will come out and turn Jacob from their transgression and deliver them from their distress. It's not Israel that's at issue. It's the church. A church that could have compassion on her stones, pity upon her dust. And not sentimental, but the same depth of heartfelt identification with that people in their pitiful and despicable condition brought on by their own sin. And we don't want to say they had it coming. Of course they had it coming. But how can you be so clinical in your acknowledging that without your heart also breaking at it? It's because you don't recognize what a sinner you were. That God loved you while you were yet in your sins and died for you while you were yet an enemy. Why then can't you have that attitude of God toward them? Because you have not really understood the deeps of your own salvation. So Lord, give us an understanding. We bless you. Have the people of you wait for that Kairos, K-A-I-R-O-S, the set time. And it will be signaled by not what is happening to Israel, but what is expressed through your servants. Bring us to that place, Lord. Whatever it takes, break our hard hearts. Break us up in the deeps. As the brother said to me, you need a deeper brokenness. You need a deeper circumcision of the heart. How prophetic. A statement to all the church, especially that segment of the church, critiquing me for an obedience to God. And not recognizing of that, but being offended by it. Lord, teach us what these things mean. And if anyone thinks that I'm tooting my own horn or appealing for sympathy, they are missing it, I believe, as much as those men who misconstrued me there. This is deeper than blowing one's own horn. There are elements here that are constituent in any prophetic obedience, to which we all here are called in one measure or another, and must understand and be willing to pay it, knowing that we will be misunderstood. Thank you, Lord. It's a privilege, and so let it settle into our hearts and spirits, dwelling richly, Lord, and having this powerful, sanctifying work, forming us in your image, not by waving a magic wand over us, but in the precious school of life, in the realities to which we are called. We bless you, Lord. We welcome that work and give you all praise and honor for it in Yeshua's name.