In this sermon, the speaker expresses his concern about the dissipation of spiritual energy and the lessening of the impact of the word of God when multiple texts are brought into a single message. He suggests that it would be more effective to focus on one text, exposit it, and draw out its meaning and application for the audience. The speaker shares a personal experience where he confronted a minister about this issue and later received guidance from the Lord on how to bring the word effectively. The central theme of the sermon is the exaltation of a nation through righteousness, which the speaker believes is the answer to the poverty and degradation that plagues many nations.

My thought is that I'm to speak to you on righteousness exalting a nation. So Lord, that precious word, so deep in your own heart, so riveted in your word, we ask for that liberty, my God, and the exposition, the quickening, the interpolation, the adding of thought and memory that will fill out and make a remarkable statement for this congregation, some if not many of whom are fated for other nations. So let them have a sense, my God, of what your answer is to poverty and all of the consequences of unrighteousness that now mars those nations. Give us a love for righteousness itself, the word, and may the juices begin to flow in our mouth when we hear it. May we be conscious of every seeming minute violation when we offend against it. As you gave me to see on the very day of my departure for the trip to Mexico, barking at the precious spinster who was driving me to the airport because she wasn't quick enough to note the parking space that I would have seized in a moment and drove by it. And I said, stop. But the way I said stop was imperious. You guys do speak English. Imperious. You know what that means? The root of imperial. It was man. It was unrighteous. That's what it was. And I smarted a bit and made that my first message in Colorado Springs. And I sat with a circle of a dozen men who understood only too well how easy it is to miss the standard that we commend to others when it slips upon us in ways that we could not have foreseen and takes us unawares and exhibits that that great sanctity that we thought we were now approaching after 41, 42 years is yet not complete and that given sufficient provocation, you're human, all too human. And then the paradox of recognizing the truth of your condition and then having to speak to the subject. So, Lord, I'm asking you a special mercy that nothing would be lost to this because of any demerit on my part, which is much, but that they would get the sense of your great heart and the theme that needs to be taken up by the church and believed and broadcast and made real, implemented, and authenticated. For there's no other answer for the poverty that haunts the nations but that righteousness, that prosperity, what the word means to exalt, righteousness exalts a nation, means to prosper it, not in the chintzy way in which we have used that term, but the substantial ways that alleviate the low conditions of life to which whole masses of mankind are subject, whose rulers are impervious to their condition or their need and need to be made aware by a church of conscience that will not let them get away with it, but insist on righteousness in palpable ways as I shall have occasion to share with these children tonight. Bless it, Lord. Make it significant. Let it circulate beyond even the immediate audience, and we thank you for the privilege of taking up such a theme in Jesus' name. Amen. Well, in this year, I've been in four African nations, Kenya, Uganda, where we have been several times in the past, and for a first time in Cameroon, Central Africa, French Africa, Belgian Africa, more oppressive than those colonies whose origins are British, and then into West Africa itself, Burkina Faso, and the yet more primitive conditions. The night before my departure from Sydney, I was naive when I looked at the globe, and I saw, look how short the distance is between Australia and Africa. I might as well go over. It's just a short hop, little knowing that there's no such thing as a flight from Sydney, Australia, to Nairobi, Kenya, because who's going to go? So in order to get to Kenya from Sydney, I had to fly to London, and from London to Kenya, and then realized how arduous and exhausting and full of strain that little thing was, and I hadn't thought to consider. But at any rate, in my last night in Sydney, I was at the home of an apostolic man whose background was in high finance, and he had traveled to Africa, and he knew it. I said, surely you must have considered, what is the answer to African poverty, ignorance, and disease? You're a man with a business background. You're a man of moral and spiritual stature. You must have some thoughts on the subject, because I don't want to go merely to propagate nonsensical things that affect nothing. I want to address this issue of the African economy and condition, and I have no answer. I have no clue. And so he showed me a chart. I don't know how these businessmen do it. It's a flow chart. Is that what it is? And how the finance would do this and that, but I was not affected. I was not impressed. I went to bed somewhere in the night hours. The Lord quickened the verse that is our theme tonight. Righteousness exalts a nation, and that's the message for Africa. And so I came with it. It's one thing to conceive of a word in the luxury of an apartment of Sydney, Australia, but then to come into the circumstances of that poverty and of their governments that are, what's the word, unjust and more tyrannical than any of the colonial powers that had preceded them. The fact that they have upseated white rulers has not guaranteed new righteousness, but that their own leaders, once in office, once ensconced, are very difficult to extricate. And once they get their hand in the till, it's almost impossible to obtain any kind of justice or rectitude. And there's a whole ruling gang, a cliche, a whole, you see it, even at the lower levels of bureaucracy, just going around in the neighborhood, walking up in the hills because the hills are a little better elevation, the air is better, and there you see the stuccoed towers of many palaces that have their barbed wire fortifications and a paid guard outside to protect their little enclave, while down below the great multitude sweat and meet conditions that are so degrading that it dishonors the church who has an obligation to stand for what God has made in his image. Did you get that last part? That's the nub of the whole subject. The church has an obligation to stand for what God has made in his image and not to allow conditions to remain unchallenged or unaltered that destroy human dignity and bodies for the want of such simple expedience as we Americans would never blink even to notice as a traffic light. It finally struck me when I came to Cameroon that every time we had to go out to a meeting we had to pass through certain intersections and when you came to these intersections and traffic is coming in from four or more directions and each one is edging to find his position and advantage, meanwhile swallowing remarkable amounts of smoke and what is it, smoke, help me, emissions, yeah, and people on motorcycles drinking it up and inching and fighting and contending just to get a few meters of ground so as to be able to make the turn where they want to make it and it's been going on like that since their colonial history. So my message to the church was you need to form a committee of conscience and go before the legislature and demand these simple and elemental provisions that are at the foundation of what we call civilization so that when men come to an intersection there's a sense of order that can be understood, observed, and honored and then you pass through without having to fight each other and drink up each other's exhaust. Are you following me? Does this sound like majoring in the minors? Human personality that has got to meet conditions like that daily is degraded so that God's image in men is being marred by the neglect of such simple things as would provide conditions of life that are amenable to human dignity. The only problem is that some of the journalists have had to flee the country for taking up issues less than this and that there's a fear and a silence that pervades their society where you don't dare criticize, let alone come into legislatures and demand the amelioration of conditions that they can well afford to do if they were not giving into their own pockets and took a sense of responsibility for the government that they're called to administer. So I'm telling the church that righteousness exalts or prospers a nation and I'm telling it in a church, in a nation, where there's no other prospect for prosperity or for alleviation of these conditions to believe that God's word says, Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness and all things else will be added unto you. Well, how many of us are taking that seriously? Predicating everything that God said that if we seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, all things else will be added, knowing that his righteousness is not ours. It's not a little variation on our theme. It's radically different, other, far more requiring and radical than anything that we could equate humanly with the word righteousness and we're to seek it because it's not that evident and seek its application in places where it's not even considered and that if we do, God will honor it and add all things that we would have sought first as our priority but taking his radical statement, we have disavowed following conventional wisdom and we have made his kingdom and his righteousness the first principle and believe that by doing that, God is going to fulfill his word and add all things that are other. Well, I'm not encouraged looking at you that you're understanding or believing or sensing how radical a proposal that single verse is for churches and nations that are historically poverty stricken, suffering disease and ignorance and every other relative condition that they should believe that God will honor righteousness and that there will be a prosperity that is not proportionate to their skilled manpower or their natural resources or any other factor that by which prosperity is obtained in other nations and that the inexplicable prosperity that will take place is simply and clearly a supernatural answer of God to a church that believes for that and will exhibit to the world that Africa is not the dark continent but the bright hope and maybe at a time when our economy will collapse which is not too distant, they'll be sending missionaries to us and preaching this message, seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness. When all your social institutions have collapsed and Uncle Sam can no longer pay the bill, your righteousness will be the saving issue of your life personally and corporately. But try preaching that in a country where taxis are stopped every marked distance. There's a cop by the side to get a bribe. Bribery is a way of life in Africa. And if they don't stop and they don't pay, they will receive tickets or their driver's license be removed or their source of income and livelihood be threatened. And so bribery, payola under the table by anyone who has any authority to demand it is a mode of living. I'm saying to the church not that it should require bribery but it should not participate in bribery. It should trust God that if it doesn't bribe, he will see to it that you'll reach your destination. You see guys, you're only so, you're too American. You don't know. Just to get from place to place in Cameroon is an adventure of faith where you have to shift taxis because they're not legitimated to go to this district having come from that district. And you can spend two hours or more before you finally reach your destination if you indeed reach it. It's a laborious anguish of complication and sweat that it's so easy if you pay a little payola, a little bribery to smooth the way. So I'm saying all that to say this. To say no to bribery as a way of life in Africa is a piece of gospel heroism of a kind that exceeds anything to which you have been required to yield in your Christian life in America. So when I got back from the trip, I sat down at the computer and I wrote, Righteousness exalts a nation. Some thoughts upon the return from Africa, May 29, 2005. And that's what I have here. It begins, How prohibitive of any faith and hope for change is there in the oppressive realities that prevail in Africa? It's one thing to talk about righteousness and God's answer in environments where if it doesn't come directly, it comes indirectly, and if it doesn't come at all, we're not stretched out. But to speak that in nations that are destitute and say this is the answer. If there's an answer for Africa, it'll not come through technology. It'll not come through United Nations. It'll not come through philanthropic institutions of aid. It will come because a nation has determined to take the word of God seriously and believe for it, that when their prosperity comes as an exaltation, not only they but the world itself will be astonished, for there's no other way to explain the increase of the standard of life and the greater civility and conditions amenable to human dignity, but that God himself has done it. Have you got a faith to believe for that? Have you got a faith to commend that? How's your righteousness doing tonight? Are you keeping tabs? Are you assessing? Do you see the issue of righteousness as an issue? If I had spoken at 4 o'clock here today, I think I would have shared on the significance of the word moral, which is virtually absent from the language and the consciousness of our generation, your generation. Who thinks in terms of moral? What is that, anyhow, a little icing on the cake? But I can't tell you what it means to me, and that I tell when the Lord will quicken the theme, that to strip man or to deny the acknowledgement and the esteem for what is moral is to rob man of his very humanity. If you remove the moral dimension from man, you have an animal capable of anything, as was shown us by the behavior of the Nazis in World War II. They had no moral component to their social life or their Lutheran Christianity. Moral, put it, make a note in the margin, write it in your heart to be jealous over that word and to take it off into your lips and to consider it, and you'll not be satisfied with any definition in a dictionary. What is moral? What is this moral sensitivity? Who sees all the issues of life through a moral, what you would call a filter? How conscious a factor is that in our American and Christian civilization? Africa would discourage any such consideration, because I'll be going in March to Malaysia for several weeks, and then into Europe. I was telling Mike I'm going back to the very place in Sicily, Catania, where I came as a merchant seaman 60 years ago. A 17-year-old Jewish nut nose looking for excitement and adventure on the high seas came to Catania in Sicily, where the dogs were hanging in the butcher shop windows, and very fine middle-class girls took on the entire ship's crew in prostitution, while the parents outside counted the revenue. Can you imagine an idealistic Jewish boy from Brooklyn never having to face realities of that kind being plunged suddenly into a world 1945-46? The war's end, ships sunk in the harbor, widespread poverty, black market was the only mode of economy, and we seamen who had access to cartons of cigarettes was a more viable currency than anything in which men could trust. And we can buy and sell the world if we had a carton of cigarettes, including women, children. We were met at the pier by dwarfs, seven, eight, nine-year-old kids who spoke fluent English and could lead us to their sisters or to whatever we would want in exchange for cigarettes. You know what I realized, young idealist that I was? That morality is a luxury that only we middle-class Americans can afford. And it is quickly given over when destitution and need is stark. So I'm going back to that same seaport. I've been there again some years ago, and on my last day there, while the elders were downstairs waiting to say goodbye, and I was looking to the Lord for a final word, the Lord gave me several statements to make to the leaders of the church. Number one, oppose the Mafia, because the Mafia has strangulated your nation. The Mafia has turned a great Italy into a second-rate power. It's corrupt through and through, and it rules by fear and oppression. And the only presence in the nation that should not be ruled by fear of death but has overcome death is the church. And the church needs to confront Mafia in that greater knowledge, that greater is he who is with me than he who is in the world. And you're not to abstain and keep yourself from the involvement in the cancer that is bleeding and draining the nation of its virility and its importance, that the church has a moral obligation to be a factor in its own locality and nation and not to be silent. I even recommended that they clean up the litter in the streets in front of the church, because many of those whom I'm addressing were unemployed. So what stops you from voluntarily cleaning the street, especially around the church? Because there's something about cleanliness, there's something about order that is against the spirit of chaos and the powers of darkness that will be set in motion by this voluntary labor on your part. Well, if you don't learn anything more tonight than this, you need to pray for this eccentric fellow. He's off on strange little... that is not where the action is. He's occupied with street cleaning and confronting the mafia. Well, when I was in East Germany and the wall was up and the elders were waiting again for final word, you need to go to the communist authorities and tell them that this campaign of 40 years of Soviet-German friendship is a patent bald lie. There is no such friendship. There's only hatred, fear, intimidation. Your women were raped when the Russians came. Your factories have been stripped. There's an undeclared, unannounced hatred that permeates your society, but your propaganda campaign talks about German-Soviet friendship. And I believe that it's related to the fact that the highest rate of alcoholism in East Germany had to do with living a lie daily. At every billboard, at every bus station, at every public place, there was the proliferation of these propaganda lies. And I'm saying to the Church, you need to confront the authorities and tell them you have an obligation to stand in behalf of what God has made in his image and bring an end to the campaign of lies that is reducing the nation to alcoholism. Just a few more years, I'll be retired, St. Sue. Don't think that they quickly rose to the occasion and were ready to go the next day and confront the communist authorities. And Art, what success can we have? These men are atheists. They hate the Church. They hate Christ. I don't know that we would even be heard. I said, that's not the question. The question is not your success. The question is not their conversion. The question is not even whether you'll be properly heard. The question is that you, as the Church, have an obligation not to be silent in the face of that that is destructive to human personality and dignity. Ah, you're getting the message. Amen. Amen. So wherever you go in the world, you're going to find opportunity to express something like this. But to what degree can you express it with conviction? Or to what degree would it only be a kind of curious suggestion that you would make not being part of that civilization and culture? I've just come back from Mexico, and that's where I got all my souvenirs and my legs and arms. How can we tell them, as Whitey, whose standard of living and the amenities of our life are so apparent and available and different than their own, that they should seek righteousness? Unless we ourselves are seekers. And it may require that if we're to be earnest seekers, we have got to turn our back to the availability of amenities that close out receiving from God all things else. You know, I'm talking like a fool. In other words, to receive the promise of God that if you seek first his righteousness, all things else will be added unto you, you've got to see to it that the all things else do not come through your human and personal opportunity. That you are as dependent on God's answer in your own situation or nation or community as the African would be. And only then can we speak to them with an appropriate conviction. Got the idea? Are you majoring in righteousness? Are you savoring the word moral? Are you chafed, as I was, to find that you're capable of barking at a spinster who couldn't stop fast enough at an available parking spot, and you were embarrassed later to see how involuntarily this imperious, dominating authority was expressed against this defenseless woman who's only trying to get me to the airport. And if you're capable of that, cats, of what else are you capable? And what then is your message? And with what conviction can it be spoken if you yourself are capable of being imperialistic and overbearing and demanding with the helpless? Because the issue of morality, here, there, or anywhere, is how one treats the helpless and the weak and the impoverished. So it's going to take a real faith to believe for God's word and God's answer that he will prosper righteousness. It waits that day in which we shall ask in his name for whatsoever true faith and relationship with the Lord occasions. We can't ask beyond the actuality of our faith and the statement of the relationship which we, in fact, have. This is not something to be reduced to a formula. This is not going to be a new clever gimmick. And once we circulate this and men can promote it and parade it, it's going to obtain results. See what I mean? That would be Americanizing a radical statement of truth and requirement of God that has not been taken seriously in our generation. I just accused my own fellowship on the Sunday morning of our departure of moral cowardice. I began the session by saying, Court is in order. They thought I was joking. But we never went to any hymns or psalms. I went right into an indictment of their failure the night before to take God seriously when he gave opportunity for public confession so that we would not enter the new year bringing the leaven of the old into the new and that we could spit out and purge the uncleanness and the defilement and the violations of the last year in speech and deed and thought that was common to us all by the humiliation of public confession. Only one or two barely made some acknowledgement in a way that did not embarrass them. One brother spoke that he's repenting that his early morning devotions lack this or that. I had a sneer on my face from ear to ear. That was not a legitimate response to a legitimate opportunity being given by God. That's how we ended the new year. But Sunday morning when I woke up on the first day of the new year with the words, moral cowardice and that was the message. You're a bunch of moral cowards. You have no intention of taking God seriously. You're just willing to be verbal and phraseological and say the appropriate things or nod or amen or sing so long as your deepest and truest self-interest is not violated. Who are you playing with? Who's this God to whom you subscribe that goes along with this? Certainly not true deity but a God of your imagining that is not offended by this clear deceitful practice of people who have no sincere intent to take seriously the opportunity of public confession because where the humiliation in that public confession is there is the death and there is the release. And I want you to know, I said somewhere along the lines, don't think that this message today is some aberration. Prepare yourself. This is what you're going to hear from me consistently. Every message is going to be an indictment as God will give it and everything will call us to an integrity and sincerity of real concern for truth and righteousness or we can just shut down this whole Ben Israel. What are we preserving here? A little rustic retreat in the woods? So they were shattered and confronted. God's authority was there. God's chastisement was there. But it didn't come in a heavy-handed overbearing and imperious man. It came in the remarkable grace of the fatherhood of God. So I want to give you guys my best and most current thought and concern and it's this, the issue for moral rectitude, the issue of righteousness, the issue of loving it and hating iniquity and being able to perceive through the facade of that which purports to be good as being more viciously evil than the most blatant and vile exhibitions of evil that are equally to be observed. What really makes my ire rise is that which purports to be good on TV or movie or advertisements or magazines or newspapers but what it is really saying and what it is really postulating is vile and evil and contrary to God, to truth and to righteousness. It's phony, it's false and it's being accepted so widely. So I don't think anything like the love of righteousness and the hatred of iniquity is automatic. It is that which distinguished Jesus as a son more than any single thing else and that God honored such a son as that with an anointing of gladness above his brethren. The Lord did not come to it automatically. He came to it by the same process available to us, a daily watch care over his own heart and an awareness unseen through the duplicity of men and addressing it or else we have no message for Africa which is to say for the world. This thing really calls the church to be the church. We cannot promulgate this, we cannot speak this except to become a chaotic you know what that word means? Who is the guy who charged windmills? Don Quixote in a pointless, misconceived, self-assumed role of doing good, charging at windmills. That's how chaotic we will be to sound the theme of righteousness and to encourage the church of Africa or Asia or anywhere to believe that if they consciously and willfully seek righteousness in the everyday issues of their life and society God will honor that. Can you understand what a single traffic light will do at intersections that have been congested for the last 30, 40, 50 years with the increase of traffic and the swallowing up of smoke just to establish a principle of order? Are you aware that the enemy is the God of chaos and God is the God of divine order? And if you start with a traffic light however modest a provision that is what will be next? What is the next thing that God will quicken as being appropriate to the men who are made in his image and are suffering everyday defamation, poverty, disgrace, they're without hope. If the church does not take this up, who will? And it has got to take it up at whatever risk taking it up means. This is more than the carnal imagining of lustful men who think they can arbitrarily summon what they will having seized upon an apparent formula. Oh, we got it now. Oh, we do this and then we get that? Never work. You've got to appropriate this invitation seeking first. The kingdom of heaven and God's righteousness can never be reduced to a formula. It's a mock. It takes an entirety of trust by those who themselves have come to such totality that banks everything on the word of God whose character is intimately known and sublimely trusted. Are you writing little papers like this when you come back from your trips and then realize later how good they are? This is a remarkable statement. Anyone who's going to take this mandate seriously to seek first the kingdom of God has got to have a character in keeping with the God who requires that seeking and an ability to believe him because their faith is relative to what he's requiring. This is not some formulistic thing that can be performed by people who are in a lesser place. So it's calling the African church and the African believers to such a rise of stature in faith, in the knowledge of God and their own conduct as ministers who are more time service and careerists than anything else. Oh, you should have seen their black faces. When I had to address them in Burkino Faso I said, I feel like a white cork bobbing in a black sea. I had come from all different places expecting another sharp American advocate of prosperity and church growth and blah blah blah and how to do it and they were already lulled to a certain kind of sleep before I came down from the hotel and when I came down the acoustics were horrible because the building was designed by the French. What do you expect? Remarkable style but not having a cotton picking thing to do with real reality such as hearing. I said, I'm not speaking. I'm not going to go through mock words. I had already passed up the opportunity on African prayer day to address the nation of Cameroon in a big open field. I was the elected speaker and I had this message but the time they got to me hours had gone by. People were wilting. This speaker, that pastor, this guy had to have his moment and the band and the music and the noise that finally when I was called and I came to the microphone I said, I had a prophetic word for you for the nation but I cannot bring it because the atmosphere that you have created and to which you have given yourself is totally unamenable to what I have to speak and I stepped down. That's righteousness, saints than to go through something because you're under obligation or appointed if it's not going to be heard. What's the point of mouthing if we're not going to be heard really heard by people whose senses have been numbed by the din of their so-called worship band on that platform. The Lord gave the opportunity the next night and it was recorded and videotaped and in fact the pastor of that church said, every word that came out of your mouth my heart was burning and when we went to eat at this place I said, thou art the man you're the one that needs to go before the legislature you're the one that needs to take the initiative and round up a committee of conscience that's why we come back with souvenirs from Mexico of the kind that I have on my arms and legs that the Veterans Administration Hospital will take five weeks to diagnose and can't understand any natural reason for what I'm suffering in my body. How do you like finishing up in Morelia, Mexico and taking out to eat and your arm is up and all of a sudden you feel a remarkable strange sensation. You pull your sleeve back and your flesh is like an apple hanging off of your elbow stark red and full of pain and that's what happened from arm to leg so I think that the powers of darkness suffered some kind of setback and the Lord allowed them some way to ventilate their irritation with this Jewish man who dares take this audacity and you know what, it's a small thing to bear for a true word that will come to a nation so I said to these Africans who were really lulled when we met with them in this French conference hall and we rearranged the seating that they sat up against the wall so that the word would not reverberate away and my first statement was I'm a sent man with a sent word from heaven. It was like BOOM! Their jaws dropped their eyeballs fell on their cheeks and right from that moment a new seriousness had come into Africa of a new kind of word and a new kind of authority and a new kind of call than they had ever before known but you've got to be a sent man from the throne of heaven or the mere announcement is a parody and a burlesque but God so honored it with authority and unction that I went on to speak with bottles of water one after another the sweat gushing from me, the towels to wipe me off but the word never faltered what they got was timeless and when I was taken to see the successful megachurch in the capital city I listened to the converted Muslim who now had a congregation of several thousand it was droll and deadly the man must have used at least six texts for one Sunday morning message I thought will I ever get a chance to bring a word of correction to this man and so after the service they gave us the tour we ended up in his office I took my heart in my mouth and I said dear man you need to know that spiritual energy is dissipated and the force of your words is lessened when you bring text after text after text in a single message you would have served the purposes of God better had you stayed with one text and exposited and exegeted and drawn out its meaning and brought its application clear to the thousands that were before you then you should give them a performance of what you can do just helter skelter running through the Bible going from one text to another that night a dozen ministers came to our hotel and I had been grieving all the day over what I saw that morning and that night the Lord spoke on how to speak how to bring the word and one thing do you lack and until you have yielded up that one thing which is your stylistic device and anything upon which you are counting to be popular or to be found acceptable they are not going to get a true word it was holy holy holy it's the kind of night and significance that after it's over you want to retire and anybody think that I'm boasting in myself or just giving you an example of what an apostolic journey is when the issues are urgent and life and death and they need to hear something not from Minnesota or New York but from the throne of heaven of what is God's current heart and mind and thought that his people take seriously the seeking of his righteousness and if they do he will honor them despite any presence of natural resources or anything else in which prosperity can be deduced he himself will supernaturally honor the economy and the culture of a nation whose people essentially will seek first the kingdom of heaven and God's righteousness so the greater concern is not with the alleviation of poverty per se but the glorification of his name that is obtained thereby that's a statement where did that come from in other words if you're only employing the scripture to obtain the desired response it's unrighteous oh I know this is over your head right now but it's being recorded if you're willing to use the formula in order to obtain the result which is all things added unto you your motive is unrighteous and self-seeking it is using and exploiting God and his word because the only motive that is righteous is the one that wants to see that word fulfilled that he should be glorified and thereby see how deep is the issue of righteousness and how little we consider that and that the sovereign character of Christ is tested by our own statements Christ is the answer is not the lifeless cliche it has become for us in America but the desperate answer of faith for which the dark continent itself is constituted you hear how mad this man is he's even saying that the continent is dark by the intent and will of God it's not circumstantial or inadvertent it's a necessary historical and present condition that can only be alleviated by the demonstration of his righteousness that all the world may see that the nation that was called the dark continent is now exhibiting a condition of life that is not to be explained in any natural economic terms and that their poverty and their historic condition was in the sovereignty of God in order to reveal his greatness can you see that? can you believe that? do you have that kind of faith? understanding of God's sovereignty that he will allow a people to know servitude and poverty and all the things in their history that a moment might come by which he will be glorified through the church and that the dark continent itself was constituted dark until that end be obtained and here's the last thing, I know you've been so patient Africa is going to be a highway of holiness for Jews yes from Cape Town to Cairo as I told the South African saints whose eyes bulged at me with anger these Christian Zionists that their precious Israel one day is going to hit the skids and be reduced and even perhaps be removed as a nation and that there will be a global uprooting of Jews throughout the world and that you need to consider that the Jewish populations of Pretoria and Johannesburg with your back to the sea there's no outlet but to go north through darkest Africa in order to reach the land of promise what's that got to do with all this art? what are those Jews going to find when they move through the dark continent in people who are impoverished and don't want to yield up their last cup of flour and oil who want to make one last meal and die except that God's Jewish people are at their door unless they love righteousness more important than their own subsistence or their own preservation those Jews will perish but in the act of righteousness of giving up a last measure of those things that were coveted for their own preservation being poor God will see to it that the meal does not fail nor the oil that's righteousness you guys that the issue of Jewish survival through darkest Africa is the issue of a nation that takes the word of God seriously now and loves righteousness and seeks righteousness and receives the answer of God's righteousness that when the crisis time comes they'll not be threatened or falter it will be a revelation of the God of righteousness to his own people who have not known him, sought him, or considered him until they see him reflected in the faces and the conduct of the blackest of God's people how do you like them apples? you like them apples? I love them myself that he would choose the despised and the ignored and the rejects of the world to be the very vehicle of the revelation of himself as salvation through them to Jews in their untoward condition of the last days who receive mercy by people who can hardly afford to extend mercy you know what Jesus says to those who extend that mercy in Matthew 25 while the others who said, Lord, when did we see you naked, thirsty, and hungry? he says, depart into the fire prepared for the devil and for his angels but you who have extended it he says, inherit the reward for you righteous inherit the kingdom, the reward for your righteousness righteousness is the name of the game and we better start being serious about it and noticing when we violate against it when we bark, when we're impudent when we're, what's the word imperial, imperious when those little things that are revealed that we would pass as a little thing except that we have become increasingly conscious of what is moral and what is right in the little things that constitute righteousness and need daily to be guarded so let me pray release you from this agony Lord, precious God on high who in our time speaks of righteousness we hardly know what the word means let alone your righteousness we don't have, my God, a moral sensitivity we don't cultivate, we don't nurture it we've been numbed by the way in which the church at Ben Israel was numbed by refusing to take you seriously when you gave them opportunity for public confession and they only talked about the failure to maintain their early morning devotional time because anything more serious than that would have been embarrassing and we don't love righteousness enough that we should be embarrassed so Lord, let there be a revival of righteousness, of moral concern of a jealousy for your word that can believe that nations are constituted to exhibit a great light in their darkness when you will honor their faith and add to them all things else that is not to be obtained by technology or aid or any such thing bless a church that can go into those places and speak these things with conviction we thank and give you praise in Jesus' name God's people said, Amen