This sermon emphasizes the importance of understanding and embracing the centrality of Israel in God's redemptive plan, highlighting the need for the church to align with God's prophetic and apostolic intentions. It challenges the church to move beyond shallow experiences and self-centered Christianity, calling for a deep transformation that involves sacrificial love and a willingness to suffer for the sake of Israel's restoration. The speaker urges a return to the truth of God's word, the cross, and the fullness of the Spirit, emphasizing the critical role Israel plays in revealing God's glory and establishing His kingdom on earth.

I'm sure that I'm the most conclusive evidence of Collins' naivety to invite me to be a speaker. Surely he should have known better. It shows he hasn't been around too much, but for the Lord has prevailed and used our brother's innocence to bring a speaker who's not always welcomed. So I received this as coming from the Lord and believe that he wants me to say something and I've been rooting over it now for several days and through the day, I've very much appreciated our brother Bob yesterday, commending to us that we should all publish our biographies and I have 30 years ago, this was the journal of my conversion, the story of a Jewish atheist looking for philosophical answers to his distraught life, taking a year's leave of absence from the teaching profession with a pack on my back, not a hippie with long hair, but an unkempt soul and kept keeping a journal of my experience. So if you want to see how God apprehends a radical and atheistic Jew, this is the classic statement. It's all the more remarkable because it's not a book written in retrospect where someone looks back. This is the actual journal kept by an atheist in the process of being apprehended by God, including the revelation that came to me in the first reading of a new Testament aboard the deck of a tramp steamer on my way from Italy to Greece. You've got to know that Greece was more significant for me at that time than Israel, because I was more a Greek than I was a Hebrew. I celebrated man and man has his center and the steam in all that has issued out of Greek civilization. In fact, in my classroom in Oakland, California, I had a big sign over the blackboard, go Greek. So the God who has been amused by me and has waited, brought me to be the Hebrew of his intention in Jerusalem at the end of that journey. And I've been serving the Lord for these last 37 years saved because of the prayer of one of my students and her mother who had never laid eyes on my face. So I'm a privileged man and the Lord has been pleased to issue a number of books. Some of you may not know this. Others have been blessed by it. Reality. It's also a book that goes back for a couple of decades. People tell me they read it annually and it deserves to be read annually. You'll find some episodes out of our community life of Northern Minnesota, for example, having to slay a pig and a lamb side by side was one of the most instructive experiences in my life of how it is that the lamb died silently and how it is that the pig died with such groans and creaks and howls and shrieks as I did not know flesh was capable. I never gave an invitation after that as I had given them before and was never persuaded that a believer is really responding until I hear his flesh screech and howl as much as I did the pig that day. So there are numbers of God's people who have never been that deeply converted and God's yet waiting to hear their screech and how it might come today. But if it doesn't come, here's a little booklet on the nature of true conversion spoken in California where the congregation went down on its face. And I knew this is a word that needs to be recorded because when they rose, they were not again the same. All of these books, by the way, are in several languages and I have not lifted my little pinky to promote any. It would be a great tragedy if I have to schlep back in the suitcase the same books that I brought at great strain, knowing the potential to touch lives and to bring a dimension that is not to be found in most charismatic publications. This is a more recent one, The Spirit of Prophecy. We have a website with an entire book called The Prophetic Call in which I draw from my over 30 year experience in that calling and someone, the brother said, ought to need is so urgent now with the celebration of profits to have a true word on what a profit is that you must put something in print now. And so this is the 50 page extract of that something in print on the subject of profits for which we're getting very great response in many places. More recently, Apostolic Foundations. You'll notice if you've ever heard me or have occasionally hear me more than once, the two words that come up most frequently in what I have to say are the words apostolic and prophetic. When I speak them, I drool. There's a little saliva that comes down the corners of my mouth and chin because I recognize that the church is built upon the foundation of the apostles and the prophets. And if these words lose their meaning and we become undiscerning and become an easy mark for anything that is called either apostolic and prophetic and is not, the church is for that reason doomed. So I have been jealously investing myself in what the meaning of these two great words is. And this book is devoted to an examination of the word apostolic, apostolic character. I appreciate what our brother had to say who preceded me about character. I was almost ready to run up on the platform and hug him. By the way, I'm not worthy to untie the shoes of such a gentleman or any of the other men who have preceded me who have a long, much longer history in God and more significant service. I'm amazed to find myself on the same platform. But this book, Apostolic Character, Apostolic Perception, Apostolic Proclamation, Apostolic View of Eternity, the Principalities and Powers of the Air, foundational concepts that have been lost to the church in modern times and need to be restored if we are to be the thing for which God has called us. And not last, and I'll be speaking from it, so I've kept it for last, though it's an earlier book called The Spirit of Truth. The church is the ground and pillar of truth. If it forgets that or has never known it or does not treat truth with the kind of deep respect, reverence, and love that it deserves, the church is a goner. It becomes a kind of wishy-washy, sentimental, easy go, easy come, easy go kind of collection of saints that have no real significance. And I believe it's not an exaggeration to say that every horror that is being perpetrated in our modern society can ultimately be laid at the door of the church for not maintaining the standard of truth, for not being God's plumb line. So there are very few who are able to read this through, but if you can and will, I assure you, you'll be different at the end of it than you were at the beginning. It's a very requiring book, as you'll hear now as I hope to speak something from it. I don't usually write out my prayers, but this afternoon or this morning, I can't remember when, I wrote out the prayer that I'm now going to pray. So I just ask you to join me with your spirit because I'm asking the Lord to use this speaking to discombobulate the foe, the cosmic alignment of powers over this city and the nations and those especially that have great sway in all the institutions that affect the life of men through falsehood, through lying deceptions that corrupt their values, rob them of eternal reward and honor and the honor and glory of eternity itself. And in the institutions, may you Lord especially penetrate and bring into disarray those powers that prevail through cunning and deceit in the most powerful of all institutions, namely religion. So let your word, my God, constitute an event in this speaking that expresses your apostolic and high priestly heart, a word that is appointed and on time that has to do with your glory, your power that raised Jesus from the dead and enabled him to ascend on high. For your eternal glory, praise and honor in Yeshua's holy name I pray. Amen. And so I had thought also today of a cloud of invisible witnesses. You see how we apostolically minded men think we take into consideration those things that are either unknown or too readily dismissed by most Christians, namely, and I'm believing that there's a cloud of invisible witnesses over this convocation even now. And what constitutes this cloud? I'm praying that every soul who has groaned, travailed, wept, has been stretched out before God and an anguish of soul for the purposes of God as it pertains to this city that has gone on before me and has gone on to be with the Lord will constitute through his selection a cloud of invisible witnesses over us now. I've been praying for intercessors. You see, if your word is more than an amusement, if you're trusting that it's a word of event that's on time and that God has provided a platform for its urgency, then you yourself prevail for the travailers. You know that such a word has got to be birthed more than it is proclaimed. And unless there's an anguish of prayer of groaning and travail that that cannot be uttered, such an event cannot take place. So I've been naming the intercessors I know and trusting to stir others in this nation and elsewhere for this very speaking and that the cloud of invisible witnesses in which I trust my Jewish mother is present, having been saved in the last week of her 95th year before her death is also looking down with approval upon her Jewish son, who is no longer considered to be an enemy, but one in whom she can have a rightful pride that he's serving the God of our fathers. So well, I've been around over 37 years and have been once a charismatic darling of a Jewish kind on Catherine Coleman's programs, full gospel circulation, many, many kinds of doors that have now since been closed. And the Lord brought me to an obscure place in northern Minnesota. And for many years, people who had known of me thought that I was dead and they were not far wrong because it was to a death to which the Lord brought me that I am immensely grateful and all that I see and understand and express now all over the world. I'll be going in a few days from this trip to Southeast Asia for six weeks, the Philippines, of which my brother spoke for 12 days, Japan, Singapore, Australia, of which he spoke, New Zealand. I've just come back from Poland, Russia, Ukraine, Latvia, Lithuania, Holland, Germany. There's no end of travel because a woman prayed for the teacher of her daughter who came home from school every afternoon weeping for this arrogant Jewish atheist that he might be saved. So I'll tell you what my perspective is. It's been an ache now for a number of years. There's a great corrective that is needed by the church, all the more by those segments of the church that are most applauded, where we think that we have it all together and have the chutzpah, you know that word? The presumption to think that we have a full gospel. And that corrective is the fact that distinguishes the church as the church because it pertains not to the needs of men, either their healing so much or even yet their salvation, however rightly desired these things should be, but it pertains to the glory of God realized in the coming of the king and his theocratic kingdom, which is the consummation of all the ages in these final and consummating last days. Am I glad this is recorded? You'll need to hear that. That's a mouthful. What I'm saying is that a church that is not preoccupied with the glory of God as its central and foremost consideration or has substituted the needs of men, however valid those needs are, is no longer the church that can be called apostolic. It's a church that can be called a culture or an institution or that accommodates and sees to the needs of men, but it has lost its central pivot, the preoccupation, the jealous guarding of that which pertains to the glory of God. And the glory of God is going to be realized in the coming of his kingdom. And, uh, well, we know so little about that and we have been so persuaded that the kingdom of God is within that we think of it almost exclusively as something personal, internal, subjective interior. But I want to commend to you the kingdom of God in its most awesome respect of which we have lost note, namely as a ruling entity over the nations. There's a God who's actually going to rule out of Zion. There's going to be a law that will go forth out of a literal and geographic Zion so that men will not study war no more or, and beat their swords into plowshares. And nations will come up to the God of Jacob in the place where he will have established his sanctuary, his dwelling, and the locus of his theocratic rule. A restored Israel, not the Israel of today that you're so fond to applaud and to take interest, but a people who will come out from that present people in a final and searing last days time of tribulation out of which only a surviving remnant will return to Zion. And in that return, and in that Zion, our God will rule. That you don't know this has great consequence for the church because this should be central to our every perspective, our every preoccupation with the faith, what it means. I can tell you as a charismatic or former charismatic who had a wonderful bag of rich things from God, the Holy Spirit, government, church, the word of God, that when the Lord inserted the critical key of an apostolic and prophetic perception of the centrality of Israel as being significant and foremost in the church's own consideration, all of these separate and isolated good things given of God came together in a new coherence that made the faith the faith. I'm praying that God will insert that key for you either because of the speaking or the provocation of the speaking that will compel you to do your homework and search the scriptures and find that which has been lost and needs to be restored. The centrality of Israel, that God has not forsaken his people, that his promises and his covenant intent will yet be fulfilled or how shall he then be God? Probably the greatest presumption of the church is its triumphalist assumption that it now is the Israel of God and that this ancient and original people have missed it and lost it and have no place of return or restoration in God's purposes. That has been so tragic an error as actually to disfigure the church and to render the church, what shall I say, something much less and other than the glory and power and significance of God's intention. The issue of Israel is central for the church's own recognition of itself as the church as much as the awareness of what is female or feminine and woman is central to a man's own perception of himself as a male. To remove this aspect from our consideration is to leave us lopsided and out of joint and subject therefore to every whim, every passing fad, every kind of thing that's going to alleviate our grayness, going to fill the void that we sense and need with some panacea, some thing that's current which only in time will fade and in fact which perhaps the entire charismatic movement has been an expression and in time is fading. We must restore the thing that God himself intends that is central to ourselves not because Israel deserves that consideration but because God has spoken, because God has promised, because God is the God of covenant and will keep it even when his own people will not because his mercy is greater than his judgment. So there's a glory of God because that kingdom is the kingdom of David. It must be established from the throne of David in Zion and these are not mystical romantic illusions. These are concrete and specific indications of the embarrassing specificity of God of a people and a place that must be the seat and locus of his rule over creation. That we are not jealous for that rule is an embarrassment to the church and I trust that our governments, our human governments, however much we may hope in them will invariably show their inadequacy until when we say, come Lord Jesus, we're not praying for escape, we're praying for righteousness to come into the earth through the rule of God from the place which he has designated and which will not be obtained except through the good office of the church to the Jews of this last day who will be a saved remnant through the grace and mercy which you will express to them and in so expressing will yourself be transformed. Oh, the depth of the riches, both of the wisdom and knowledge of God. My heart goes out to you, dear ones, especially the Catholic charismatic, dear ones who I'm sure don't understand the word of what I'm saying and I'm some kind of conundrum or strange phenomenon that will soon enough pass. I tell you, dear saints, every word is a thunderclap. Every word is a statement of searing truth and if you're having a difficulty in understanding me, it's not because I'm wanting inability from God to express but you have been so long neglected, so long disabused, so long kept from any awareness of the apostolic and prophetic dimensions of the faith that what I'm saying sounds to you as a strange gospel. So the crucial axis, the nub of the consummation of that kingdom is the millennial reign of Christ on the throne of David through a redeemed Israel obtained in a final time of cataclysmic judgment called the time of Jacob's trouble and the return from the nations wherein they are yet to be scattered, including this nation. So I'm putting you on alert that we are in northern Minnesota for 25 years because of an obedience to the same voice that called me by name in Jerusalem and told me when I stepped over a chain on a property that was for sale being bankrupt where we presently are, end time teaching center, community refuge. The Lord kept the word refuge on the shelf until the season of death in that community of about 15 years ago in which the Lord sent me to a Lutheran seminary to make that death real and in that course of time and in that season of death, the Lord began to reveal to me the mystery of Israel. I want to tell you, dear saints, that there's a world of difference from a condescending patronizing of present Israel and a kind of a sentimental desire for their success as against a recognition of the Israel yet to be established from the ruins of that present state and the cataclysmic judgment which is yet to come on Jews worldwide. It's almost a getting off the hook for us. It's almost a cheapie to have a mere mild sentimental concern and a desire for their success rather than the radical requirement that would come for us if we recognize the Israel that is yet to be redeemed because it will be redeemed through the mercy that will be extended to it by the church itself in all nations in which that people is yet to be scattered. If God is going to establish a place of refuge in northern Minnesota, in that nation which Jews have enjoyed the greatest success and freedom, prosperity, what shall we hope for in any nation in this time of Jacob's trouble in which God says in Amos chapter 9, I will sift you through all nations and where we're told in Romans, I'm sorry, in Revelation chapter 12 that when that woman flees, that there's a place prepared for her in the wilderness where she will be fed for three and a half years. If that place is not prepared, if there's no feeding both spiritually and physically, there will not be a surviving remnant that will come in its return to Zion with everlasting joy upon its head and mourning and sighing, fleeing away. You see my predicament? In one hour, I'm required to make up for the omission of ages and therefore I'm required necessarily to speak to you in mysteries and send out these stabbing statements that require remarkable amounts of elaboration which I'm not in a position for the shortness of time to give you, which is to say there's a great premium right now upon your own spirituality, upon just how filled with the spirit you are, just how much is the spirit the cogent factor of your life that you can even discern between the lines the things that I'm not enabled to say for the want of time and that these remarks come into your spirit with an impact of a kind that will require great alignment and adjustment because the issue is the life and death of the people and the establishment of the kingdom through their returning remnant upon whose head will be an everlasting joy after mourning and sighing has fled away. So this is accomplished through a self-sacrificing church that demonstrates the very mercy of its God and it takes place before the face of all nations so much that as to their acknowledgement that the God of Israel, the God of Jacob, the creator of the heavens and the earth is alone God to the eternal praise of his glory. The issue of Israel is the issue of God, not only the issue of the church, the issue of the nations for the nations have given scant consideration to our God. He's only a contending deity among the whole bewildering array. The God of Jacob is alone God and the demonstration of his mercy to Jacob after that of his judgment will persuade the world that he alone is God for they will witness both the expulsion and the return of his own people through their very nations for God says I will not do this in a corner but before the face of all nations. If this is the final and great concluding episode of the ages for which everything till now has been preparation and it's about to break as we can see from the tumult and chagrin of the conditions in Israel in so great a security, an insecurity that a recent poll in Israel had determined that 60 to 70% of present Israelis believe that they are without hope and they're right in that belief humanly speaking. God has engineered and brought together circumstances that will bring about such a cataclysmic devastation in that land and an expulsion again into the nations which gives us our opportunity to be to the least of his brethren that for which he waits and I can tell you that it's not going to be an easy requirement. So to speak of the church of the 21st century almost makes me either to smile wistfully or to cry because it implies that we have a century ahead and what is God going to do in the next century? What what ought we now to consider? Well I don't think we have a century ahead. I think this is the last days. We are at the end of the age. This is the consummation. We're coming to a conclusion, an end of the age. An anti-Christ time of great severity, challenge and devastation not only upon Israel but upon the saints. To talk about a 21st century gives us a kind of security and sense that this is the best of all worlds and if it's not it can be made better and what program or what ought we to do in conditions which we think will always prevail? What we lack and what was the distinctive of the first church and needs to be restored and has been lost in exact proportion as we have lost the significance of Israel is the eschatological and apocalyptic content of the faith which the first church knew who awaited the Lord's appearing and gave to the church a sense of urgency, a dynamic of great and high seriousness altogether the antithesis of the likeness that has characterized our charismatic doings. I'm sorry for the fancy words. Eschatological means things pertaining to the end. Apocalyptic means it will not come without judgment, violence and the devastation that God himself brings in his righteousness. To not have these components as vital center in our Christianity disfigures our Christianity and relegates it to the kind of harmless and innocuous culture by which the world knows us. The issue of Israel is the issue of the church but it's the issue of Israel rightly understood, rightly apprehended and not sentimentally dismissed. You can know that you have it when it costs you something. The turning point for the church will be the discovery of Israel in the sense that I'm describing not in the condescension of acknowledgement of the present state and the success for which we all hope but in the sense of the mystery central to God's redemptive glory and theocratic intention. A merely benign and sanctimonious approval of present Israel in no wise threatens our petty kingdoms and leaves them quite intact. The revelation of a redeemed nation resurrected out of the death of the present one shatters all our petty kingdoms, all our categories and requires and makes necessary anew the review of our understanding even of God as God. Will he go that far to bring again a devastation upon world Jewry that will exceed the Nazi holocaust? Well if we read Jesus rightly in Matthew 24 and Luke 21 the answer is yes, he will go that far. That there's yet a future catastrophe that will eclipse the Nazi time and the church sitting on the very threshold of this soon to break phenomenon has not the slightest awareness of its coming and has made no preparation either physically or spiritually to anticipate it. You see why we need the Holy Spirit? To bring a perception of reality and of understanding that has been so lost to us that cannot even be humanly communicated and that even Paul speaks of it as mystery and he said I would that you would not be ignorant of this mystery brethren lest you become wise in your own conceit. It's the only mystery of which Paul was steward in which he gave such a warning. We might miss some of the other mysteries but if we miss this mystery there's a consequence that is fateful for the church namely it will become wise in its own conceit, pompous, inflated, it will become the Israel of God, it will bring the kingdom of God, it is the kingdom of God, the kingdom now, it's going to change society, it's going to do this, it's going to do that. The fact of the matter is that God has called the church to a humbling and secondary role. We're not first fiddle, we're second fiddle. We're called as a proviso to bring back to himself a people who were broken off of the tree into which we had been grafted. Paul says in Romans 11, have they stumbled that they should fall? God forbid that you should think that, that God has permanently disallowed them but through their fall salvation has come to the goyim, to the gentiles so as to move them to jealousy. There's a purpose for your salvation beyond you and I don't know have you noticed what are we one or two speakers short of the conclusion of this conference? I have yet to hear any speaker with the exception of one make any allusion to Israel at all. That omission is more significant than you can know and has more to say about our condition than we can know and I have the privilege of seeking in the short time I have to bring a correction to it. So when we consider Israel rightly, we have to consider the God of judgment. We have to consider apocalyptic devastation. We have to consider people being dispelled again into nations in an exile and a return. We have to consider suffering and its significance. We have to consider the meaning of the cross. We have to consider the suffering that precedes the glory not only for Jesus but for that nation called in Exodus, I think chapter four or three, my firstborn son and that that son that has a destiny somewhat comparable to its pattern son and Messiah must in great measure also follow him in a road to Calvary. Look at present Israel. Look at its arrogance. Look at its pumptious conduct. Look at its disregard for the opinion of the world. Look at the violence to which they have been compelled. Look at every loss of every moral and ethical dimension in which we Jews once boasted now going down the drain and the kind of ruthless conduct that's required for our very survival. Is that a people who can bless all the families of the earth or is God forgetting his promise to Abraham? What will it require? A transformation of such a kind from the present character of that nation revealing its humanity in what God has always said is the human condition and which we would never recognize that there's no man good, no, not one. To be a people who will bless all the families of the earth, not impress them, bless them because the very character of that nation has been transformed having been required through suffering and apocalyptic last days judgments to pass both through death and resurrection. And unless there's a people in the earth, a company of sons, a son of man company who can prophesy to those bones that they can live, they'll remain a dry heap and will not bless the families of the earth for their restoration, their redemption out of death, their resurrection waits upon a people whom God can command and to prophesy to those bones that they might live. God forbid in that day that that prophecy is in any way reminiscent of the multitudes of prophecies that we have heard in our charismatic experience that have left us with no more than a yawn. That should have been rebuked had there been pastors who are more jealous for the honor and glory of God than the disturbance of their congregations and of the status quo. We've had so much dubious, carnal expression of so-called supposed gifts that I trust in that one historic moment that will come when God calls us to address those bones that the prophecy that comes forth out of us then will itself be an authentic resurrection phenomenon by a people who have themselves passed through death or they'll not be able to raise the nation. You see how imperative the whole issue of spirit is? For what is spirit other than the issue of the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead? What we have in portion and as a token is the glory of that power and that reality. For us to treat it lightly, mock it, make it a kind of an accompaniment to our present institutions to improve them or to renew them is to do despite to the great intent of God through the giving of the spirit of his life. There needs to be a charismatic repentance to commence the 21st century. However short-lived that century will be before the coming of the Lord. Oh, so there are many scandals that have followed in the absence of the realities that I'm describing in the sentimental dismissal of Israel that serves our purpose and allows us to pinch their cheeks and plant the tree but leaves our effectual lives unhindered and unrequired of. You can know that you have apprehended the issue of Israel rightly when it jostles and requires a complete re-enactment of your entire understanding and the forsaking and the foregoing of your own petty kingdoms. For the issue of Israel is the issue of the kingdom of God if you could but know it. So we have seen in its stead charismatic likeness for the want of the fear of God that should come principally by one means the recognition of God's historic, present and future dealings with that people who are yet the apple of his eye namely the severe judgments that have come in exile, dispersal and dealings by God with that people. Paul says, therefore fear consider the goodness and the severity of God and if God will not hesitate to break off that branch will he hesitate to break you off if you do not abide in faith? Therefore fear, there's a dimension lacking that despoils the church and accounts for its likeness the want of the awesome fear and reverence of God that would have only been known to us essentially by the recognition of how far he will go with that people. Too bad my other book is not on this table it's at the printer but you can request it. It's called the Holocaust, where was God? And I have the temerity to suggest that God was there and not asleep when six million of his people were systematically annihilated by the most brilliant quote Christian civilization in the world, Germany and that that judgment through Germany is ironic and necessary to a Jewish people who had so elevated German culture and civilization as being itself the messianic ideal and that the Holocaust coming through them was God's judgment both for their own sin and the sins of their fathers which had not been ever rightly acknowledged. That book was dismissed in its French edition from being exhibited at a book fair in Lausanne, Switzerland because it was considered to be something like the protocols of Zion an anti-Semitic book because it suggests the Holocaust as judgment for the sin of Israel. If God will take sin that seriously as to judge that people that tragically how well do we know him? And what Jesus is it that we are promoting and celebrating and feeling diffusive about and having palpitations and other kinds of emotions and effect is it in fact really the son of God who's going to judge the earth in equity and justice? Do we know God as God? And can we know him if we have dismissed that revelation of himself that is nowhere more accurately set forth in his full triune Godhead than it is dealing with the people Israel. It's made the absence of that has made the church light and frivolous open to the celebration of feeling and experience and excitement to the point where our souls have been so indulged that we can't even tell where soul ends and spirit begins. We can't even distinguish between the faculty of soul and spirit and have equated the one as the other. And we'll call the people of the spirit and our souls are being stirred through hype, through music, through loudspeakers through all of the various devices that betray a foundational emptiness in the church for the want of the centrality that God intended as normative and has been lost. I wonder if that's a kind of anti-Semitism. I wonder if there's a pride in the church that does not want to give to the Jew a place of last days and final restoration and return because they don't deserve it. Well, what did you deserve? If that invariably rises up out of your heart, is that not a statement that you give a scant and outward and external acknowledgement of God's grace as a aspect of your doctrine but where you really live, you measure by merit and performance. Not only Israel, not only the Jew, not only your neighbor, but yourself. No wonder there's the self-hatred and all of the disfiguring things that happen to human personality and Christian personality of which we have heard in these days. We don't know as we ought to know. Our religion has become an entertainment, inane, hypnotic laughter of a kind that, Lord help me, where men who are servants of the word are so affected by the so-called spirit that they are incapable even of speaking intelligibly. But what they finally croak out is that what they are experiencing now is greater than anything that they had ever seen performed through their preaching of the word which in fact implies that this experience supersedes the word and maybe their preaching was of such a kind that in fact it's true. But if it denigrates the word of God, where is the church and what is the gospel by which its mission is to be expressed if laughter and experience has come to prevail over the word of God itself and its own ministers faint, collapse and choke up and become an object of derision. In the testimony of what they have received quote from God. Well, in my book on the spirit of truth there's a chapter on Ananias and Sapphira. It's a remarkable episode of an incident that occurred in another age in an hour when the spirit of God prevailed in such magnitude and purity that the very same act which might well be applauded today resulted in that day in sudden judgment and death. What do you mean applauded? Yes, let someone come with a great contribution and we won't ask too much about its source or anything of that kind. We'll probably give such a person a place of honor and acknowledgement, the deacon at least, if not an elder. But the church that identified the lie and was not impressed with the sum is not the church that today is. It was a church then in its glory because it was alert to the issue of truth and deception because it knew that before the spirit of God is the spirit of power he is first and foremost the spirit of truth. And when truth is disallowed when truth is compromised do you think that the dove is going to be around to perform in expressions of power that serve our need and gratify our souls if we have forsaken him in his first designation and identity as the spirit of truth? There needs to be a jealous regard for the truth that Peter exercised and therefore was able to discern the fraud of a man and his wife giving a sum of money however impressive as to be the whole but it was only in part. Why have you allowed Satan to fill your heart and to lie against the Holy Spirit? Peter said, when it was yours and it remained was it not your own when it was sold? Was it not under your control? Why have you conceived this deed in your heart? You've not lied to men but to God and he heard these words and an eye fell down and breathed his last and great fear came upon all who heard it. Almost in the next breath we hear, and with great power did the apostles give testimony to the resurrection of Jesus Christ that they brought on litters the sick and the halt and the insane that so much that the shadow of Peter should fall upon them and be healed. That what follows this respect for the spirit of God as the spirit of truth is the spirit of God as the spirit of power. We have reversed it and we are going to reverse it we have celebrated the power the signs, the wonders and relegated the truth to a distant consideration if indeed any consideration at all and which of us has not played the game of giving a part and making that the stand as the whole? Well I remember as a kid even in Brooklyn that we used to say as the depression born in the generation that the whole truth that the truth is the whole truth and nothing but the truth or it's a lie. That's the distinctive character of truth. It's the whole truth or it's not the truth and any disqualification any cutting of corners anything less than what is whole and full converts what seems to be impressive into the lie. You say Art, why are you taking pains to dwell on this? Because it's a statement of the church today because we have the only given part what we call that part full full gospel full this, full that when it's only a part. We have not the reticence the modesty the humility appropriate to a church whose lord is the lamb and his meekness because we're full of hype and exaggeration and pompous ambition and activity and think that that constitutes the whole and the great part that's missing that would have made us whole is the part that I'm describing to you today namely the centrality of Israel in the church's consideration for itself as the church. If you think that I'm speaking these things because I'm Jewish you're wrong. I'm speaking these things because they're true apostolically true and prophetically true and need to be restored if the church is to be the church of the last days and be the very provision of God for the redemption of this people whose time has come for it is time now to obtain the kingdom. It's their kingdom not exclusive for the use or for their enjoyment but out of the nexus of their Jerusalem and out of their Zion shall those things go forth to all nations which can only go forth from them as the redeemed people of the earth from the throne of David and the promises that God has made to their patriarchs and to David and to themselves that must be fulfilled because it's the word of God and a deliverer must come out of Zion and take transgression from Jacob according to the covenant that I have made with them that I have written the issue of Israel's restoration despite their undeserving all the more because of their undeserving is the issue of God the issue of his mercy the issue of his word the issue of his covenant keeping character and we are jealous for this God and we're wooing and mooning and talking about being his bride and the love of Jesus and passion for Jesus what is it about this passion for Jesus that catches me in my gut that has romanticized something in a way that sounds icky and yet falls short of the celebration and the love of God that that one would think would characterize the church that is jealous for its glory his glory and knows it will not be obtained until he is recognized by his own nation and they shall see him whom they have pierced and mourn for him so we need to ask ourselves are we doing anything different from what Ananias and Sapphira did when we seek and expect the evidence of apostolicity or power while giving ourselves only in part while presuming to have given ourselves wholly we all want the semblance of these things the comfort of the spirit the intimate communion but we want it at the lesser price of experiencing it acknowledging truth as only being doctrinal where the issue of being correct rather than as the very summed substance the reality of our lives we want to speak truth but not to be true we want correct words we want to acknowledge truth but not to obey it we are bringing our partial phraseological truth and making that to stand for the whole as if we have the reality that we're describing omitting reference letting let alone any repentant acknowledgement of our own history with this people and can I say particularly our catholic history with this people in the inquisitions burnings at the stake the sufferings the rack the breakings that have followed the jewish people and not the jewish people only but every aspect of apostolic reality that has risen up historically before the advent of the reformation itself can we say that we're true and not take that history into our reckoning can we speak about the forgiveness of men for their sins and not speak about our own as an institution is that true there's a full truth that is truth alone and it'll be painful to acknowledge but necessary or else it will testify against us so to decide to tolerate one deceit is to violate the whole truth to be 99 percent true or mostly true and represent that as the whole truth is to lie utterly and to sin in one part is to sin in the whole the issue of belief of love of lordship depends upon the belief or love of submission we find easy to give but it's where we are most tempted to keep back for ourselves that the issue of truth really lies what one true last thing what one final issue what one reserve is the thing that keeps back from that utterness toward god that makes truth truth and brings to the to the church and to its fellowship the reality of his presence and his glory how true is true if we are still celebrating rome over zion as being the center of god's glory and rule you see the kind of alignment that the issue of truth will require in terms of our tradition our understanding that stubbornly waits consideration and for the want of which dislocations have set in and dispositions that have opened us for deception for pseudo revival for experience for emotion for the kinds of things that are questionable and dubious at best and may actually be demonic at worst there's something about the proper apprehension of the centrality of israel and the zion of god over every other consideration the law of god must go forth out of zion that somehow inures us to deception it puts something into our souls there's something about biting the bullet of the judgments of god necessary for israel that puts an iron in our souls that steadies us and keeps us from being subject to the kinds of things that would make for deception the proper recognition of israel is the greatest provision of god for the church than we can know and the loss of that provision has left us in a questionable condition that even the best of what we have known charismatically has not been the answer and what we have come to witness now as we come here and to the end of its history is a kind of melancholy of reminiscence about some of its high points and other times that which we benefited were moved and now we're witness to a kind of end of the story melancholy interesting to hear the anecdotes and experiences shared by our brothers but for me it sets up just a note of sadness that the glory has departed and maybe it could not be retained because we have not an adequate wineskin and i'm suggesting that the wineskin is not some institutional or other kind of correction that was wanting though i myself am in an apostolic community of saints face to face in the muddy and remote place to which god has brought us in northern minnesota but that the wineskin is more readily a wineskin of understanding of an apostolic prophetic way of perceiving the faith and the issues of it and for the want of that what measure of wine we have had has leaked out and dissipated and is going away and that the best that we can say and hope and encourage as we heard earlier today is that something would come in to affect our children to maintain the standard of life and virtue in a world that is increasingly evil that sounds very much like the hope for approval of and continuation of middle class values well i'm all for that but is that the best that can be hoped for and is that the purpose for which god has poured out his spirit is that the fitting of the church for its apostolic mandate is that a provision to endure us against the suffering and the opposition and persecution that will come for our identification with jews when they will be a hated people among all nations unless the spirit of god and the gifts of god are understood and seen in the context of the apostolic framework of god's intention as a besieged community of sanity in the midst of a sea of hostility and worldly hatred we make the spirit of god and its gifts serve a lesser and other purpose it accommodates us rather than god and you wonder if god is in that business providing that accommodation or that something else has come in its place and that we have not the discernment to recognize whether or not it is of god if it seems to bring a measure of excitement a measure of enjoyment a measure of relief a measure of healing that i'm sure the powers of this world can easily provide in order to accommodate us in a deception of that kind the holy spirit needs to be restored to the context of god's intention and that has at its center the restoration of a people who have not even the faintest notion of their eternal destiny or a desire for it and want only to be one among many nations nevertheless god's word toward them and the gifts and callings of god must be fulfilled for they are irrevocable and without repentance or god is not god let me try and conclude so to speak of a 21st century is to betray a complete loss of this eschatological and apocalyptic expectation the dynamic that made the early church the church and to substitute lesser excitements and to leave undisturbed and still prevailing over many nations the kings the rulers of the in the heavenly places who rage against god and against his anointed and seek to break their bands and sunder their final defeat and the release of the nations to that theocratic rule is the eternal purpose of god through the church to forfeit this calling constitutes a last day's apostasy the great falling away of which paul spoke however much we might be occupied with the benevolent concerns of men for to be occupied with the benevolent concerns of men their healing their deliverance even their salvation is to be occupied only in part rather than in whole it's the occupation with the whole that is the radically requiring aspect much more than the laying on of hands for the sick is the being to israel the most recalcitrant stubborn and opposing people of whom paul says in all candor they are the enemies of the gospel for your sake little wonder that we shun them and we would much rather minister to one another and even to hippies and to take up the central task of the church which is the reason for our salvation so as to move them to jealousy i ask you who have a history in the charismatic movement and it's in some proportion that i myself have it where have we ever seen even at our best that reality that would move unbelieving and cynical jews to jealousy in the observing of what we celebrate and delight on delight in as charismatic interesting that paul himself does not answer the question or give us an asterisk at the bottom of romans 11 to explain what it is that will move jews to jealousy but this much we know it's going to take more than anything we have been presently able yet to perform they're going to have to see something of a heavenly kind of a reality that's unknown to them and least expected in gentiles and they'll have to see it in our conduct not so much only with each other but in response to them especially at that time when they will be the least of these his brethren hated despised disfigured grotesquely cast out discombobulated altogether out of sorts not in their best and ungrateful for the mercy that you will extend and be quick to express it if you need their gratitude if you need their approval you'll not find it and if there's something in you that needs that and will be disappointed in not having received it or offended by those who betray your expectation for their being cute you're going to show forth a face other than the face of god you're going to show forth a disappointed face a the kind of face that jews expect to see when they look at gentiles but it'll not be the face of which god speaks in ezekiel 20 when he says to them i will meet with you in the wilderness of the nations face to face i'm a believer today saved because 37 38 years ago in my own wilderness marched through the nations with a pack on my back being uprooted not by persecution but by collapsed and fallen gods god revealed himself to me through snub-nosed freckled face sandy head gentile believers who picked me up from the side of the road spoke a word to me were kind gracious unfearful transparent and without guile i was moved to jealousy by something i had never seen in universities or marxist institutes and all the more powerfully revealed when it shines forth out of a face that we think gentile if the spirit of god has not brought you to that luster that radiance that glory in the church whose discipline and dealings affects your character so to reveal it we're falling short of the glory of god and the final test of it will be the test that they themselves will constitute when we will pass when they will pass through our midst in their last day's flight and affliction what face will they see then what face am i seeing now so in the unfathomable wisdom of god i believe that the issue of israel rightly prophetically understood as god's provision for an errant church because it alone provides this perspective by which the church itself is to be understood its origins is derived from israel for salvation is of the jews its continuation by being grafted into her tree and living by the life that that is expressed through her root the church's destiny as god's salvific agency for the restoration of that people in moving to them to jealousy and showing them the face of their own god which is full of mercy and unconditional in his love because out of that zion comes israel's deliverance for the fullness when the fullness of the gentiles come in this fullness this holy ghost full charismatica when it comes in and it will not come in short of the work of the cross all israel shall be saved as it is written for the deliverer shall come out of zion and take transgressing from jacob according to the covenant that i have made with them as it is written there's a zion out of which the deliverer must come you are that zion when you have come to that fullness of the gentiles and i'm wondering if our charismatica our our revivals our renewal our of celebration of personalities has promoted that kind of reality that kind of maturity or rather the soulishness that leaves us in the rather unhappy state in which we are that could not yet be the zion out of which israel's deliverance comes that's why paul was made the apostle to the gentiles that's why as a jew i'm speaking to you for the church is not the kingdom but an interim provision for israel's restoration for it is time now to restore the kingdom of david to that people on david's throne on the holy hill of zion or there's no kingdom at all the kingdom of god will either go forth from that place or it'll not go forth at all that means no war going forth to the nations that means the continuation in war the continuation in armaments the continuation in suffering the continuation in death the continuation in incest and every kind of vile rape slaughter mayhem that prevails over the world until the law of god can go forth from the one place designated by the nation redeemed for the honor of expressing it and whose redemption has come through a zion out of which their deliverer comes which is the church of the last days come to maturity come to fullness come to glory come to truth come to sacrifice come to the cross if we think that we could obtain this luster this radiance short of the dealings of god and the deaths to which we must be brought we are of all people most to be deceived one can almost suggest that maybe what was foundationally wrong with the whole charismatic movement was some attempt to enjoy the semblance of the spirit and its excitement without necessarily having to experience the cross we want the reality of the effulgence without the suffering that precedes that glory church itself is a suffering if you but know and until we come to it how shall there be a company framed from it who can speak with apostolic and prophetic authority to the dead bones that they might live the church is a means and not an end in itself but by being that means it obtains an end more glorious than that of the redeemed millennial nation itself we who are an old people as the church have become the people of god to move to envy that nation that has lost that very identity in the final frenzy that is now brewing that will mark the experience of jews in the last days in their own self-opposing ignorance they may likely regard us as enemies and the threat to their jewishness in the anti-semitic furor of the last day's time of jacob's trouble and we may have to suffer this this misunderstanding this failure to recognize that ours is a heart of love toward them and may even have to suffer at their hands as stephen did a martyrdom as a crucial necessity a sacrifice to bring by it if that alone is the final requirement the revelation of the lord that turns Saul from persecutor to apostle and will bring that nation from opposing god to its own apostolate to bless all the families of the earth this is more than you can grasp in this speaking you'll have to hear it again on tape so our coming under these purposes of god for israel's redemption this firstborn among the nations is calculated for our humility as we cannot expect their understanding nor gratitude for our sacrifice in their behalf and like christ dying for us as sinners yet dead in their transgressions we also must suffer for them while they are yet in their transgressions and in that mutuality and in that willingness to suffer them as he suffered us we show forth the face of their god the truth of our condition will be revealed in its depths and brought to a full sanctification that would not otherwise have been seen or met except by the crisis that the jews of the last days will bring to the church that is called to their redemption well i've said my piece inadequately too briefly i want to pray for it as i began and to end lord we need a mercy to understand what this strange man is trying to convey if it takes a mercy to understand it what will it take to perform it we're sensing lord we have lived beneath the standard of your glory we have substituted excitement for glory we have been shallow lacking in understanding self-centered in our christianity as it ministers to us and brings to us a gratification, a delight, an enjoyment for which we will come by the thousands but we lost the pivot and the access that there's a call for our salvation beyond ourselves and outside of ourselves and other than us toward a people whom we ourselves would not have chosen and for whom we have scant love or even respect now the jew what a wisdom of god to select them to reveal to us the truth of our condition that would not otherwise have been seen that sentimentalizes that transposes that takes the tabernacle of david and makes it to be a fanciful symbol for something other than the theocratic rule of god or for edom and of all nations to which that god has called we have taken liberties my god with your word and with the faith and with your spirit certainly you have an intention beyond renewing what is dear to us it's the issue of your glory and your kingdom and it will require the power of your life and those whose lives have been substituted have been sacrificed and brought to you in full nothing withheld nothing in part making to stand for the whole but the totality of god even that elevates zion over rome and every other adjustment that needs to be made in the light of these great eschatological truths so long unknown to us bless this people lord bless this tape bless this message let it only be a point of beginning let it set in motion an examination of romans 11 at least which the church has omitted from its consideration and from which the best of your charismatic speakers over the years have personally confessed to me have remained to them a mystery one that they have circumvented and omitted from their consideration yet it is central to paul's whole apostolic framework of understanding in the greatest of all of his epistles the book of romans my god let it set in motion an examination of chapter 11 alone that we might ask how is it that that chapter ends with the greatest paying of praise expressed in all scripture oh the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of god who has been his counselor who has given to him and shall be given again for of him and through him and to him are all things to whom be glory forever paul's celebration of israel is not because of a jew to his own ethnic kind but because he knew in his apostolic understanding that the issue of israel's redemption in the last days which is of god and through god and unto god is the issue of god's glory forever when you will know it the church will be the church it will not need movements it will remain steadfast in the truth and character that god intended from the first when it embraces the totality of its faith and has not omitted the center let it be lord i pray that it would not be an exaggeration that the entire conference this entire outing was a platform by which you could insert this needed word let it not fall to the ground i pray be jealous over it lord we thank you and give you praise for the privilege of the occasion and the sounding of it in yeshua's holy name and god's people said amen