In this sermon, the speaker shares a personal experience of being the subject of a meeting where young people prayed and fasted for two days before facing him. Despite being twice their age, the speaker captivated their attention for an hour and gave an invitation for salvation, which was followed by an anointing with oil to seal the young people to God. The speaker also received a prophetic word for each individual. The sermon emphasizes the importance of humility and uniqueness in preaching the word of God, contrasting it with religious and human ability. The speaker highlights the need for believers to live in freedom from the influence of worldly powers and to rely on the power of the Holy Spirit.

I hope it's what I think it is, my requirement to demonstrate as well as proclaim that out of our weakness, His strength is perfected. I'm sure you're going to find occasions just like this where you feel strung out, achy, and uninspired. And yet, you're on. The hour has come, the requirement is there, and we cannot defer to our feelings because we are the products of a sensate world, a feeling-oriented civilization. I feel like it or I don't feel like it is truly the foundation of the Church rather than that which is apostolic. So whether I feel like it or not, I know that there's an hour that has come that the Lord wants to redeem. So Lord, we're cast upon your mercy, and if there's no resurrection, we of all men are most to be pitied, and we're asking for a demonstration of that power to encourage your saints and to show them what is the foundation by which they will be last day's overcomers and fulfill the purposes of God. That it's not to be predicated upon the frailty of our humanity or whether we're in the mood or feel up to it or not, but simply that your life is consistent, it's undiminished, how does it say it in Melchizedek, on the basis of an endless life. The priestly life is on the basis of an endless life, indestructible, eternal. So Lord, let that be demonstrated tonight in communicating a subject that is difficult and powerfully resisted by the powers of darkness that don't want any revelation of who they are lest they be found out and lest they be revealed. So altogether, my God, redeem this night that you would receive the total glory, the praise, the acknowledgment of your saints for being such a living God, an encouragement for their own souls, for themselves, as they take to themselves, my God, their calling, to your honor and glory in Jesus' name. Amen. Well, what better place to begin than 1 Corinthians 2, one rather, verses 26 through 28, for you see your calling, brethren, that not many wise according to the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble are called, but God has chosen the foolish things of the world to put to shame the wise, and God has chosen the weak things of the world to put to shame the things which are mighty and the base things of the world and the things which are despised, which are insignificant or lowly, God has chosen, and the things which are not, to bring to nothing the things that are that no flesh should glory in its presence. Believest thou that, that that's what God has chosen? Why has he chosen that? Because it controverts all that the gods of this world celebrate as power, might, force, prestige, influence, the things that are visible, that are intimidating, that constitute what the world runs after, but God has chosen everything contrary and opposite, that which is weak and that which is despised. I wonder if you know a verse, you don't have to turn to it, in Luke 16, you can make the notation and look at it another time, what is highly esteemed among men is an abomination in the sight of God. God is other than what man is and what the world is and even what we think he is. He is altogether other. He's so other that when he visited this earth, he did it in such a way, in keeping with what he is in himself, that two thousand years later, Jews are still stupefied and are unable to recognize that an infant born in a stable could be not only the king of Israel, but the God of Israel. And except it be revealed, that's what Jesus said, except the father draw you, no man could come unto me. You'll never come to me on the basis of logic, analysis, religious understanding, because I defy every religious category. I blow to smithereens every conventional wisdom. A German theologian has rightly said about the cross that true faith begins where the atheist thinks it should end. Whenever you get to Europe, now I'm getting a little Holy Ghost chill, praise the Lord, I'm being raised from the dead. I began by faith as a dead man. When I was an atheist, and was I ever an atheist, the one book I wish I had to put out there, which is out of print in English, I can get it for you in Russian, French, German, I think it's in Finnish and Swedish, but it's not available in English, is my first book, The Journal of an Atheist. The actual journal that I carried thirty years ago, knocking around with a pack on my back throughout Europe, looking for philosophical answers, a disillusioned, cynical, arrogant, conceited piece of Jewish masculinity whose life had come apart at the seams. My marriage to a German woman was failed. It takes a colossal Jewish egotist to think it could succeed. All of my presumptions, all of my categories, humanist, ex-Marxist, the chaser after radical causes for brotherhood, every kind of harebrained thing that Jewish idealists pursue, I was into. The one thing that I despised was religion, and of all religions, Christianity. I wasn't your little village atheist that you can give a little pat on the back in a condescending way. I was breathing out murderings and slaughterings against the Church. I looked upon the Church as the obstruction to the progress of mankind. How long will men continue to go on believing old wives' tales? And it's not just a harmless Sunday culture, but an obstruction to progress. Better that it be removed. That was my frame of mind. So you need to read that book to see how God apprehended me. Why did I bring that up? The Scriptures speak about God as, oh, on the course of that trip, we Jews with our love-hate affair for Germans, and German culture and civilization. Do you know anything about that? Do you know that the greatest geniuses of the 20th century that have shaped the world that you occupy were German-speaking Jews? Can you name me one? I'll give you the first name, you give me the other. Albert. Karl. Sigmund. A for the day. Well, a B-plus because I helped you. You take just those three men out of the 20th century, and you'll not recognize it. Everything that has subsequently come, even in physics and relativity and the social implications of that in relativism, have been morally destructive. The atom bomb, physically, and the relativism that says, who can say whether something is right or wrong? It depends. It's relative on the situation. One of my fiercest encounters was at a Baptist liberal arts college where I had to take issue with those who believed that anything in the backseat of a car is okay if it's love. It's relative. These were Baptists. Well, I met on the course of that trip a German artist, and he said, In the art you must see the Eisenheim Altar. It's a masterpiece, and it's in France. Huh? No, it's not in the Louvre. It's in that German-French section of France that has swung back and forth between those two nations in two world wars. What is that area called? Alsace-Lorraine, and the city is Colmar. C-O-L-M-A-R. It's worth going to Europe for this one thing alone. It's a holy ghost masterpiece, and it's larger than life. It's massive. I don't know how high, 12 feet, something like that. It's like in three panels, and it went behind the altar of the Catholic Church. That's why it's called Eisenheim Altar, was the location. The artist was a man by the name of Grunwald, and it shows Christ crucified. Well, I've seen pictures. I've seen crucifixes. What Jew does not occasionally glimpse things like that if you go to a museum or you visit some Gentile friend's home and they have a satin pillow sequined with Jesus or you see something dangling from someone's neck. It's all utterly unrealistic and utterly un-Jewish. There's nothing in it that compels our Jewish understanding. But when I stood before that masterpiece, my jaw dropped, and I was aghast. I went silent. It was so unbelievably horrible. It was not your ballet dancer on a cross looking very life and slim with, you know, a nice little garment around his private parts. It was a picture of a man horribly devastated. In fact, you wondered whether you're looking at a man or some grotesque, some animal. The feet were twisted, and the fingers, they're spittle running from the corners of the mouth. The whole hue of the body was green and ganglionish and pieces of something sticking out from the flagellations and just a heart... I was transfixed. To say that that's the Messiah of Israel or the Lamb of God or God himself. Years later, again in Germany, Germany has so much to do with my life, sitting in the office of an American chaplain while his mother-in-law was sewing my torn pants I was looking in my DVDs at his bookcase and there a title leaked out from the bookcase, The Crucified God. And when the moment I saw that title, I resolved in my heart, I am leaving with that book. If I have to walk over that brother, I am not leaving without that book, and I did not. The kingdom of God suffered violence, and the violence take it by force. I later sent him another copy. I had to have it. It was by Jürgen Moltmann, a German theologian who had gone through World War II, had been incarcerated, had been imprisoned, and then he entered seminary, and that generation of German thinkers wanted to understand the war, the Holocaust, the whole devastation of civilization, and so he wrote this probing book, God Crucified. You know, as much as we think we understand it, there's something that has to happen to arrest us. It was God crucified, not just a victim or a piece of humanity. God suffered that devastation. And so later on, I understood, in fact, I think the quotation is from the book, the true faith, not your happy faith and your neat faith and your humanly established faith, but true faith begins where the atheist thinks it should end, where your categories are blown to pieces, what you thought religiously. This can't be God. This beggars your whole understanding of God. Now you're in a place where you can begin to understand that God is other than we thought him to be. I think that the whole lightness that is in the Church, particularly in the charismatic movement, the shallowness, the frivolity, what's that word for lightness? Levity. Levity. Who said that? Oh, bless you. I need your help tonight, guys. I'm only hitting on two cylinders. The levity that's in the Church can be directly attributed to the lack of the knowledge of God as he in fact is. We are suffering greatly for that true knowledge. Well, I praise God for what was on the other side of that crucifixion. It's the resurrection. And as I was staggered on the one side, I was equally as staggered on the other. The artist, it must be a Holy Ghost masterpiece. It's beyond human skill. Shows Jesus coming forth out of the tomb and the Roman centurions falling over, their helmets toppling, their spears falling out of their hands at the revelation of that power that raised Jesus from the dead. And every place on the crucified side where there's holes and the flesh has been gouged and there were bruises, out of every place where the body had suffered assault, beams of light and glory were pouring out. You confront a Jewish atheist with that, and he's got to pause. No one had confronted him with the Lord as he in fact is. So this God, whose life ended in nakedness, if you think that he had that little piece of satin around his loins that is depicted in the paintings, you're mistaken. That is a Renaissance convention or tradition. They cannot bring themselves to the astonishment that God, who is also in his humanity an Orthodox Jew, would be naked before the gaze of men. The humiliation of that public nakedness, as well as that suffering, and stretched out on that cross, and all of the agonizing pain that the experts say that there was never, ever a crueler form of execution than being crucified, came into the world naked as an infant, in complete dependency. God, you know... Do you mind if I ramble tonight? Part of my frustration as this intense, idealist, intellectual Jewish type, before I was saved, was the frustration of the limitations of my humanity, my finiteness. This is why we cheat on our wives. This is why we have to have another affair, another experience where we're always open, why we can't be satisfied in that one thing. There's something that wants to be as God in two places or three at the same time. Imagine my frustration as a kid in Brooklyn going to the library. All of these tens of thousands of books, and where do you begin and what do you take? I checked out with regularity six books a month, the limit that was given. But the frustration of hearing a little snatch of conversation about the name of a French artist, for example, Cezanne, Van Gogh, the Impressionists, or someone about a thinker or philosopher. And it was like a whole world out there. Where do you begin and how do you embrace it all? What do you do when you're faced with two paths, and of necessity you can only take one? What's on the other? What have you missed? I felt the extreme constriction of my finiteness as a man. Well, that's one thing for a man to feel that. How is it for God to feel that? God was restricted to a human body. He's restricted even now to our corporate body, and he will not do anything outside of it. He's still the God of self-imposed restriction. He's the God of humility and the God of humiliation. He stands at the door and knocks. If any man hears my voice and opens to me, I will come in. He has every right just to kick that door down. He's, after all, God. But what is his intrinsic character? I remember one day, I'll never forget it, a scrap of something. Either it was Xerox from a larger book, or there it was. It was entitled, The Humility of God. You know, if I almost fell into a faint over the title, The Crucified God, what will I fall into at the statement, The Humility of God? Well, I knew that we were supposed to be humble, but it never occurred to me that God is. That's his nature. Your king shall come to you lowly and meek, riding upon the coat, the foal of an ass. And that's how you'll know him, because what he does is what he is. He's consistent all the way through, and not like us. We say one thing, but we do another. The tendency to be a hot shot, to have our egos elevated, to obtain a degree. I mean, what minister in Charisma Magazine today is not a doctor, who I don't even think graduated high school? Where do they buy those? What man exalts or esteems, God is abomination in God's eyes. He is other. The humility of God. Being willing to be confined, not only into a human body, but to be born into it as an infant. Thirty years of obscurity. In Nazareth. Have any of you guys ever been to Nazareth? I've been to Israel more times than I can count. The one place I always want to circumvent is Nazareth. Even to this day. Can anything good come out of it? It's so sleazy. It's so cheap. There's nothing about it that's quaint or impressive. There's a big Catholic thing there, over the place where Mary was addressed or something. I don't like the town. And that's where Jesus spent his youth. Remember when at the age of 13, they went up for the feast of the Passover, and they were all set to go back, and they had already started the journey, they couldn't find him, and they asked around, and he wasn't anywhere to be found. Did the relatives or friends? They had to go back. Because there he was, disputing with the doctors of the law. And he was so astonished that they were concerned for him. Don't you know, he said, I have to be about my father's business? Don't you understand that? And they didn't. And they upbraided him. Jesus, the Son, we've been looking for you all over. Your father has really been aggravated. But don't you know I have to be about my father's business? They didn't know. And then the next verse says, And so he went down with them to Nazareth, and submitted to them, and grew in grace both with God and with men. He went down with parents who didn't have a cotton-picking notion of what he was about, and submitted to them, though at the age of 13, he was already confounding doctors of the law. He went down into Nazareth, and submitted to parents who didn't have the full understanding. But because he did, he grew in the spirit and in grace, both with God and with men, by going down. In Romania, in the city where the revolution broke out, I always forget the name of it, in an unscheduled meeting, where God gets me in unscheduled ways, a pastor who has come back to Romania after 14 years in the States with the American model for church success. In fact, on the platform, the model of the new church building was already there. And he knows how to raise the funds. He's been in the States. He's going to bring the American mentality and technique to Romania. It just happened to be, what do you call that Sunday where you screw the branches? Palm Sunday. What was my message? Jesus going down the precipitous slope of the Mount of Olives into the city of Jerusalem. And they had strewn their branches and their garments and cried out, Hosanna to the King. Salvation in the name of the Lord. Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord. Blessed is the King who comes. And I was just reviewing that. It preaches itself. And for the first time, it occurred to me, Jesus said to his disciples, now go into yonder village and there you'll find a donkey or an ass with its foal, its colt. Unloose them. And if anyone stops you, tell them that the Lord has need of them. You want to know what humility is? The two men who went. Supposing the Lord said to you, now go into Phoenix and in this neighborhood, there you'll find a Cadillac or a gleaming Mercedes and just take it. If anybody stops you, just say the Lord has need of it. Sure thing. You'll be right in the clink. You know, Jesus' prophetic reputation was at stake that those animals would be found there. And that when those men said that, those animals would be released. And his disciples trusted him in that and did it. But the question is, why did he need two animals? Why did he need the ass and the colt or the foal of an ass? And if he had access to both, why didn't he take the one that was tested, that was mature, and that was qualified to bear the weight of a grown man, particularly going down this tricky, precipitous thing. If you walk down the Mount of Olives, you almost have to walk like that. It's foolish even to walk, let alone to ride on a little thing upon which never man sat. Which did he choose? And why did he choose? Why did he say, take them both? You'll find the ass and the colt, the foal of an ass. Take them! And says that the Lord has need of them. But why does he need them when he can only ride on one? And why, if he rides, does he ride on the weaker of the two? Because he despises what men esteem and esteem what men despise. Oh, dear saints, we will never meet the test of the principalities and the powers of the air except in the wisdom of God, which is the way of God, which is the nature of God, which is the character of God, as God. It says that on the cross he gave himself without spot unto God by the eternal Spirit. He didn't die out of human courage, but by the eternal Spirit without spot unto God. Because dying by the eternal Spirit is the revealing of God. The eternal Spirit is God. And what is the nature of that Spirit? It is the nature of sacrifice. He gave himself by the eternal Spirit. And wherever the powers of the air see that demonstrated, they freak out and they flee. They cannot stand the revelation of God as God. So God has chosen the foolish things and the weak things. You know what it says in Psalm 8? Verse 2, Out of the mouths of babes and nursing infants you have ordained strength because of your enemies that you may silence the enemy and the avenger. Not out of the mouths of PhDs, although I respect those who obtain them by their labor, but out of the mouths of babes and nursing infants you have ordained strength because of your enemies. Because what do the enemies exalt? What is their character? What is their wisdom? What do they display? On what basis do they succeed? To what in man do they appeal? Power? Force? Race? Nationalism? Pride? Prestige? Influence? Wealth? Things that are visible and external? That's what the gods of this world celebrate and seek to seduce and to influence the inhabitants of the earth to pursue. And therefore they are captives. They are under the bondage of those things. What will set them free? The demonstration of a people who live in an entire freedom from the influence of those powers. They are impervious to titles, to prestige, to influence. They'll never succeed on the basis of getting something through by strength or force. They believe in the god who says, not by might, not by power, but by my spirit, sayeth the Lord. Why do I come tonight in such a condition that it was an actual, I won't say agony, that may be too strong. It was painful for me to have to stand through the worship time. I was so weak. It's humiliating to be in that condition. We'd much rather be all ready to go and come on out when the gun goes off and shoot out of those blocks and win the prize on the basis of strength, power, human ability, pride. God says that he's chosen the foolish and the weak things. What have you chosen? Have you chosen what he has chosen? No one is more susceptible and in greater danger and temptation than a young, gifted minister. Whew! You guys pray for this fellow because there's every allurement to get into the mode by which others have obtained religious success. He has all the earmarks, all the qualifications. But to resist that and not move that way, nor be responsive to that, and even to prefer hiddenness, obscurity, no reputation, to desist even from manipulation of any kind. I know what it means to stand from this place and we know that even just the affecting of our voices playing upon a heart string, a moving and fetching illustration, the tone of our voice, the appeal, we can manipulate men. And it's very gratifying even after you preach to see response. And there's almost something unspoken that works in the religious realm. And don't think that the principalities and powers are not in the religious realm. In fact, of all the realms, I would say that it's in religion that they are the most prominent and powerful. That is the final and the most weighty dominance of the powers of the air is in the realm of religion. Hierarchies, religious organizations, denominations, competing, rivaling religious factors, to resist that and to choose the way of foolishness and the way of obscurity. I'll tell you the kind of guy I am. You know that everyone now is falling in the spirit? And sometimes I pray for people and I begin to see... they're beginning to... I hold them. I hold them up. I don't want them to be a domino because it's very gratifying to see bodies stretched out, but if that's not God, we've opened the door to a counterfeit that we will later learn to regret. Everywhere we face the temptation of using manipulation. Men who pout, wives who pout, who know how to get to their husbands and we play a game with one another in order to affect a certain response. Well, what is it? So what, Arch? So give her ten bucks and let her get a hat. You see how far back I go in time. You know, manipulate, affect something. What does it matter? Here's what it matters. You may have won the evening and you may have smoothed something over, but you have come onto another ground, which is the ground by which the powers of the air employ. What ground do we occupy? What ground do we allow them? Do we come onto their ground and play their game? Because there's always the temptation. On this very trip, I'm getting so anecdotal with you guys tonight, giving you such personal things. At the end of a remarkable evening at a vineyard church in Reno where I prayed for almost 200 high school kids, they had told me, Now, Arch, go easy. These kids only have a ten-minute attention span. They were riveted in their seats for an hour. And I gave an invitation for salvation. Everyone who was not saved stood and followed. And then I felt impressed to anoint with oil on the foreheads to seal these kids, knowing the temptations and the powers that impinge upon them in this age in which they're chewed up and spit out as merchandise, that they would be sealed unto God, unto holiness. And so they found me oil, and the kids lined up for the whole length of the church, and the Lord gave me a prophetic word for every single one of them. And that's not my thing. That's how much God was so precious there. Talk about fatigue. By the end of that night, I could barely stand. And then a woman came up to me and sang to me in the Spirit a song from the Lord for me. The nape of my neck, the hair was going right up. And then she sang it again in English. And I don't even know if it's even right for me to share holy things. It was the Lord's love song to me. God, I love you. I love you. I watch you. I see your labors. I know that you chose hiddenness. I know that you chose obscurity. Because you know who Moshe Rosen is, head of Jews for Jesus? I was trained by him. I was brought out of high school teaching, and my ministry started at the age of 38 or so as a missionary to the Jews. He said, you are the finest candidate I have ever had. And before you're 50, you will be the Jewish Billy Graham. That was 16 years ago. I'm still not, and I don't think I ever will be. There's a choice. It may well be that this whole meeting, this time is for my brother, and you guys are just listening in. And because of your love for him, I know the religious world, powerful, and the allurements. But let there be a man who will resist and choose that which is foolish and suffer the reproach and the rebuke from other religious men who say, you fool, you could have had such a career for yourself. You had such qualities and such giftings, and you could have, you could have, you could have. And look what you've allowed yourself to be hidden with a small band of souls in a location, and what have you to show for it? The most intimidating thing that can be said to us is, and what are you doing? And what can you show? I could tell you guys things that are going on right now. The reproach that I'm catching now, and I'm not saying this, any of this, in any way to enlist your sympathy. Do you understand that? These are just the realities of what's going on in the whole religious realm. That in obedience to God, to speak a word that needed to come to a man with whom I'm related, I won't even tell you who, you may even know him, and he was so insulted that I was slamming his work, that he's now publishing my name across the country as having a religious spirit and various other things. And one of his outcries is, and it's okay for you to kick the barn down, but where's your barn? Where's your work? And what have you accomplished? And what have you built? What have you got to show? After 30 years, I picked up a recent issue of Christianity Today, the leading evangelical Christian magazine, started by Billy Graham, and in it were three men that I knew from the beginning, and now they have risen. We all started, in fact I started before some of them, and I knew them when. One has major campaigns overseas with 50,000, and another has a chair of theology in one of the leading seminaries in America, and I forgot the third one, and I thought in a moment of self-pity, and what have you got? And where are you? And who knows you? And what have you accomplished? I'm saying all that to say this, saints, the eternal purpose of God is the reason for which God has created all things, that a demonstration might be made through the church of the manifold wisdom of God to the powers of the air. And that demonstration is what God is in himself, now displayed by his people, who have chosen humility, meekness, weakness, and all those things. Because God has chosen, you have chosen, the thing that is foolish, the thing that is weak, the thing that is not mighty. Though you have every opportunity to have access to things as everyone else. And that's why Jesus had to have two animals. Take them, if any man asks you, tell him the Lord has need for them. What's the need? One to sit on, and the other to demonstrate by not employing. That's why. He did not use the tested thing. He did not use the animal that was accustomed to a man's weight and that could do a credible job of maintaining the dignity of a king coming into his holy city. He chose that upon which never man sat. And as I'm preaching this in Romania, you can see the visible agitation of the pastor, and especially the pastor's wife, until I struck a note where she cried out, and I stung her. Because she wants to succeed on the basis of the American religious model. What was the question with which we ended last night? How far are you wanting to go? What's the depth of your intention for God? Success? No sweat. But fulfilling the eternal purpose of God? Where is there a people who will take that to their hearts? Because God's purposes have got to be fulfilled by God's means. His means have to be consistent with his ends. He will not employ something that is in contradiction to his character and to himself. We can't use the world's techniques, its methods, its manipulations, to obtain success. And how much do we do that and justify it as being done for the Lord? You see what the end is when men embrace the wisdom of the gods of this world that celebrate power, threat, intimidation, force, greed, ambition. Look at the baseball strike. It's a scandal because of greed. Look at Yugoslavia. It's a bloodletting. I just came out of that country just before that war started, and I thought, you know, it'll be a little thing with pop guns with corks. What do these guys know? Little did I know that there was deep-seated religious and ethnic hatreds of such compacted bitterness that when that lid came off, we saw horrors that exceeded anything that the Nazis had done in World War II. For the first time, systematic rape as a weapon of demoralizing the enemy and not stopping at girls that are 10 or 11 or 12 years of age. Unbelievable horror and expressing the wisdom of the powers of the air. Violence, force, threat, intimidation, terror. We really need to understand how powerful these forces are though they are disarmed because it says in 1 Corinthians 2.16, Yet we do speak wisdom among those who are mature, wisdom, however, not of this age, nor of the rulers of this age who are passing away, but we speak God's wisdom in the mystery, the hidden wisdom which God predestined before the ages to our glory, the wisdom of which none of the rulers of this age has understood, for if they had understood it, they would not have crucified the Lord of Glory. Which rulers is he talking about? The same ones that are spoken in Psalm 2. See how the heathen rage and imagine a vain thing and the kings and the rulers take thought against the Lord and against his anointed. What does it mean the kings and the rulers? Isn't that an unnecessary repetition? Isn't that saying like the kings and the kings? The kings are the earthly and visible administrators, but the rulers are the invisible realm that manipulate them. And they so manipulated both the Sanhedrin and the Romans that they crucified the Lord of Glory. They have the power to kill. Do I dare just leap into something I haven't thought that comes to my mind right now that shows what the end of this whole mystery is? You'll never have me back and I've never heard anybody ever preach it. It's completely contrary to how we think the powers of the air are going to be defeated. I'm so appreciating your patience tonight that I can just talk like this. The thing that got me in trouble with the man who's now accusing me nationally of having a religious third and that I slammed his conference was that I sat in that conference as an observer and my spirit was completely untouched. There was such frantic activity going around me, people toppling out of their seats, running up on the platform, waving banners. There was music and sound turned up to such decibels that you wondered if your hearing would ever come back to normal again. I don't know about here. No, it's not here. But if you travel around and have the privilege that I do to visit different places, there seems to be such an increase in loudness. Loudness is power and it's manipulative. When they turn the thing all the way up, it's not enough to hear it, you've got to feel it. But God is the still, small voice. Wouldn't it be remarkable that tonight everything is so conversational? It's not even preachy. There's nothing rah, rah, rah that would please the Lord to take an unaffected word of unleavened bread. Have you seen much? Because it's predicated on the notion that the powers of the air will be defeated through militant worship. Now, I don't know about you, but here's the kind of simple sap that I am. The moment that you begin to employ worship for purposes other than worship, it no longer is worship. You, dear ladies, know the difference, you married ladies, between lust and love. You know when your husbands are acting out of witch motivation. And God knows it also. He knows when a worship has no strings attached, it's just simply the adoration and the devotion that God deserves because he's God. But when we make of it a manipulation and a tool toward an end, even a religiously desired end, it is no longer worship. See what I mean? We're on another ground. We're on the enemy's ground. We're employing an expediency to obtain an end and still calling it worship. We need, of all of the, if I say, institutions of the world, we, who are the church, need to walk so circumspectly and so carefully and lean the other way, even if there's any threat of somehow even inadvertently employing a worldly technique, a worldly methodology, a worldly mentality, shun it and trust God who chooses the foolish and the weak thing to obtain the things that pertain to him. We have a little summer convocation. You're all invited in northern Minnesota Labor Day weekend. And I had gone out of my way for two summers to find a way of reconciliation with a brother from whom we had been separated for almost 12 years over a discipline to which he had not submitted. And he could not be talked to. He could not be instructed. And somehow I was impressed just to be in relationship with him anyway. And out of the relationship the Lord could then bring the correction. Unhappily, it didn't work out. And in the second summer, after he gave a perfect message, it was so perfect, my own son came forward in the invitation weeping. Never did that to any preaching of mine. But in the perfect message, for the first time, I caught a glimpse that it was humanly perfect and religiously perfect. But it was not out of the life of God. It was affective. It could affect the emotions of men. It could bring them forward in tears. But I don't expect that it would have any enduring redemptive possibility. And I finally caught a flash of what God was after in this man. By now he has a church of 1,500 and an expansion program of $3.5 million budget. He's on his way because he's a master at ability and human ability and religious ability and skillful things. He makes me just to look like I don't have a word for it. He's full of graciousness. I'm crude. I'm clumsy. I get out of the vehicle and my Bible falls out of my lap on the ground. And I pick over to pick it up and my glasses fall on the bed. Away with such a one. He's not fit to live. But the Lord gave me a message on that next morning, the final morning. It was for him. And I naively thought in the hearing of that word he would fall right on his face, but he did not. Others did, he didn't. But when he got the microphone I was publicly berated and reproached, rebuked. And why did I tell you that? Okay. Because of this whole emphasis on revival and worship as warfare as somehow overcoming the powers of darkness and that this is the way the victory will be obtained. Isn't that great? No stoop, no fuss, no bother. No suffering, no self-denial, no sacrifice. Just the most vigorous kind of worship that waves banners and will show the powers of the air that we have the victory. Bring me back to this because I just had another flash. You know what it means to be a prophetic servant? It's to be in Australia. It's amazing how many things happen that are not scheduled. And to be invited while I'm there which was part of my original program to speak at one of its most successful charismatic works. And there I was on the platform and these people were having a time of worship and praise and if ever I saw a congregation that has arrived, this was it. They were the epitome of having it all together. But as I'm looking there came a moment of time when the Lord froze the scene and right through their external and apparent joy and victory I saw doubt, defeat, insecurity. You know that Australia is predicated on men who are taken out of debtors' prisons and they've never gotten over it? They have a national inferiority complex to this day and that's why so many of their brutes have tattoos and they crush beer cans. They have to affirm their masculinity because deep down, going back to the origin of the nation, it's predicated on insecurity and that we were the dregs and we were forced to go out there, out of the prisons. And that's what I saw. That over the truth of the condition of this people, their yet still unhappiness, their unreconciled things, their insecurities, there was a gloss of charismatic rejoicing. And then I'm just looking at this and I'm hearing my name called upon to preach and I have a choice. Do I speak on the basis of what the Lord has shown me in a moment of prophetic insight as to the truth of their condition or do I go along and respond to their cues? C-U-E-S and don't think that they're not there. There's such a manipulative thing that goes on in the religious realm of how to be one of the boys and how to say and do the right thing. I'll give you another illustration but bring you back to Australia. This one in Texas. My greatest value to men like this is my history. There's not many that have it because I've sought to maintain integrity before God without concern for acceptance or success. And I came to another church, a young pastor, a split off, a splinter church of people who left another one for one reason or another and there was something in my spirit that was disquieted. I went around to different Sunday school groups, I was listening in, my spirit was not comfortable that this was not authentically a work of God but a piece of religious ambition that men can perform in this country. You can get incorporated, just get a lawyer and start your own. And so I was sitting on the platform and he was taking an offering, a high-powered, high-pitched offering and he gave me my cue. Brother Katz, will you pray for the offering? So I got up and I said, only on these conditions that if this is not a work of God, instead of your being prospered, the Lord will bring it down and if it is a work of God it will be prospered and it will endure. I didn't become Patsy and play one of the boys, I gave a condition and now he was stuck. Oh yeah, sure, go ahead. And that's exactly what I prayed when I prayed for the offering. If this is not a work of God, Lord, we're inviting you to bring it down and if it is your work that you've established for your purposes, you'll prosper it. I don't know how many weeks or months later, gone, out of existence because I would not respond to the cues. So there I was in Australia and the tension was there. Are you going to tell these people that they're not overcoming, that they're not rejoicing in the Lord, that they're not having a blast and that their real condition is insecurity, that they're not yet deeply convinced that they're accepted in the beloved and that they're striving and making a charismatic fantasy land that they've learned to believe in and you can hype it up with your equipment and sound? I had a choice and I spoke according to what I saw by the Spirit. It was like somebody throwing on the brakes and the whole place began to convulse and shake and they had a moment of truth come to them and they had to decide either to stone the man who dared raise the questions about the truth of their condition or fall before that truth and go back to square one and start all over again in truth and not religious make-believe and I want to say to the glory of God they opted for truth. Pray for them. I've never been back there again. They received the moment of truth and they broke over it and said, yes, you have really described our condition and the Church is the ground and pill of the truth and we're not going to phony it up. I'll tell you where I come from, saints. In our little community in Minnesota, we made a covenant with the Lord that our choruses and our worship would never exceed the quality of our life together. When you come to visit us bring your earplugs. I mean, it is off-key, off-kilter, it's cracked, it's where we are and if it'll ever become angelic, it'll be because we have become angelic because we're not going to allow the one thing to exceed the other. Can you see why we're feared by the powers of darkness? Can you see why there's a price on my head? Why a man in a conference who had gone down on his face when I preached the day before, when he preached he called me up to the platform and he said to the people, who will stand with this man? This is one of Satan's ten most wanted men. And people got up to that invitation very tremblingly to stand for me and with me in prayer. The powers of hell despise this authenticity and the greatest paradox is that that one institution on earth that is called to be the ground and pillar of truth heavenly in its character and meek as the lamb who is its head is so shot through with play-acting and performance and unreality that it's the most terrible of all contradictions. We may have to go down before we go up. We may have to just be utterly real with one another. We may have to turn the chairs around that we see each other face to face and on that basis we go from glory to glory. We may have to welcome a plurality of elders and though we might be the most brilliant administrators and the man of God and faith and power for the hour say, I don't want to be in that condition. I want to submit myself to other men. I want the safety that comes from a plurality of men of responsibility and the government of the church. I don't want to go the way of the most successful churches where the buck stops here and I'm the pastor and the Moses of this congregation. I want the way of humility and meekness. Do you want to know what happened to me before I started this trip? I've never had a service like this. This tape is not going out of this room. I'm in a little community with about 25 souls. My own son is there with his wife and two children and they told me, can you make it for Saturday for a three o'clock meeting? I said, sure, I can arrange my schedule. I thought, well, I'm leaving the following week. There's probably a planning session for this coming summer. You know what the meeting was about? Me. I was the subject. And these kids, I'm twice the age of the oldest of them, prayed and fasted for two days before they would face me. Now, Dad, you know that sometimes when you speak, you say something, you let an instant in there, you can be very cutting or you fail to be sensitive to this condition or there's a certain arrogance. One by one, they all had something to say in their observation of me. You know what I said to them? If one of you had come to me, I would have dismissed you. I would have said, well, that's your subjective seeing. But when you all see it, though I don't, I go down before the truth of your seeing and repent. Because I will not base my position on my subjectivity because it's the very thing for which I'm blind. Every one of us has a blind spot that there's no way that we can identify except someone else identify it for us. It says, beware the deceitfulness of sin lest there be in any one of you that deceit which is in its first form is to not reveal itself as sin. How does a great world evangelist and a televangelist personality chase prostitutes? And after he's apprehended and cries great slobbery tears over national TV, broken... It's only a matter of weeks before he's again in the same thing. Where were the men who were close to him who must have known his eyes wandering or something about his spirit or something in his voice that is becoming professional or ministerial or affected or becoming a kind of a performer personality? You know what I think? There should be no difference in the way we speak and the way we preach. We are what we are. We're God's men. And the moment that you begin to note in us a little certain inflection that was not there before a little studied mannerism a little playing on personality and don't tell us then that will deepen that will become part of our personality and we move farther and farther from reality and become religious and become of no consequence to the powers of darkness. We need you. We need you to speak the truth to us in love and not spare us as these kids did to me. This is the most precious trip I've ever made because we came to such a bonding because of their willingness to risk speaking the truth to me who has a 30-year history in the Lord. I've been all over the world in such hairy followings of the Lord in obedience to the Spirit and yet I had to hear what these kids had to say in the truth of their observation of me. The powers of darkness that day suffered a devastating defeat because God's way is the way of humility. He came on the back of an ass upon which never man sat and the world could not contain its voice they cried out, Hosanna for the King! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord is not a catchphrase the name of the Lord is the character of the Lord and there's a humanity tonight waiting to cry out in Phoenix and my heart goes out for black people I don't know why that is they're shredded as a race in this country they're robbed of their humanity they had the highest homicide rates suicide rates one out of five would not even live to maturity they're crunched before they begin where's the King coming to them that they can cry Hosanna the American Indians wounded by a history of radical misappropriation of their lands and casting them out that Chippewa nation that is with us in Minnesota that is not their native habitat they were originally in the east coast but they were pushed back back, back to the least desirable territories so that the white settlers can get their choice lands and build their farms their industries and they were forced marched they died in the way, they were impoverished they were raped, they were destroyed a good Indian is a dead Indian and now they're on alcohol we have the highest suicide rates they die in drunken automobile accidents death where is the King that they can shout Hosanna for him who comes in the name of the Lord blessed is the kingdom that comes in the name of the Lord they've seen evangelizations they've seen Christian denominations they've not seen the King who comes down on the back of an ass upon which he never kneels to embrace this King and to walk in his way in Phoenix, Arizona in one of the most lustrous towns on the face of the earth I was just joking as we had a pastrami sandwich and we were sitting by the window every car that came in was another Mercedes, another Mercedes I've never seen so many gleaming beauties I don't see a piece of rust anywhere in Minnesota, their bodies are just falling apart, they're hanging together with wire and chewing gum everything here is lustrous shining, resplendent, glorious intoxicating, impressive suave, smooth, influential prestige, authority, power wealth where there are people who will choose the back of an ass upon which an obscurity and hiddenness and will not go on the ground of the enemy by manipulating even so much as their voices that their marriages are free of manipulation none of the stuff that goes, you know how we do it or the children nagging and we finally condescend to placate them because they've learned to play the game already and are already not only manipulating but running families. His kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven. We need to choose what he chooses and we need to despise what he despises and esteem what he esteems. That which is esteemed in the sight of men is abomination in the sight of God I put in two hard years in a Lutheran seminary in a season of death where the Lord dissolved our community and had me to go to the last place I would have chosen. I never got the degree. I took all the courses and I suffered much from feminists witches. I was almost thrown out of school because I called God he and that's using sexist language. Can you believe the environment that I was in daily? A brother came with me to school one day and the moment I walked into the room he said I felt these women bristle the vibes that issued out of them and you hadn't yet said a word and when I did say a word the threats, the intimidation you don't deserve to be here. You'll be thrown out of school. You're a sexist. When we came out the brother said well of course not. What do you expect? It's Elijah and Jezebel all over again. I suffered things and I'm grateful for how God sifted me through it but I never got my degree. All I had to do was submit one more paper on the Holocaust but I couldn't do it as a requirement. The Holocaust was too holy merely to crank out a paper I could have done with my eyes shut just to get the degree. It was too holy. It is yet waste to be written. The brother said to me I don't think God wants you to have the degree. The purposes for which you sent have been fulfilled. You don't need another degree after you leave. It takes a willful refusal to condescend to the world that is run by the gods of this world. They are powerful. They jerk and manipulate races of men and nations and the religious realm as well. To say that we are embracing the eternal purposes of God is nothing less than to say we are embracing the cross in order to be separate from that world and not so much as to touch the unclean thing. For a man like this to give up what could be a lustrous career and a climb in the religious world and choose to be hidden and obscure and let the Lord do what he will do is dying. The temptations will be everywhere. To come to a place where your own people can say to you who are half your age we've noticed this is about you and that about you, you need to pray and repent is a dying in humiliation. But God exalts the humble and he sang me a wonderful love song in Reno I can't even describe it. That was worth everything. I want to pray for you saints. There wasn't a smidgen of energy in me tonight, I was just. And we're even talking about maybe we shouldn't have another meeting tomorrow. But the Lord is after something here. He is. He is. This is beyond meetings. There's a jealous God brooding over us and he knows that there's this eye ropes to and fro over the face of the earth. Where does he find the man of God and a people with him who choose what God chooses the foolish and the weak things to confound that which is mighty and wise in the eyes of men. So Lord, we're just praying. We don't want to have any eternal regret. We want to meet you my God with joy in our hearts and not a reluctance that we had fallen short of the glory of God. That we had chosen the lesser thing. We chose success. We chose to make a name for ourselves rather than embrace the eternal purposes of God that would glorify you forever. Lord, put eternity in our hearts so much tonight that we'll say it's worth it. It's worth it for a lifetime of obscurity and hiddenness, of reproach and of rebuke, of humiliations that when you come and you bring your reward with you we shall have a reward. That you will esteem our faithfulness and grant us a reward that will astonish those who thought that they were cutting quite a figure for you whose works won't even pass through the fire and they themselves only barely saved. Whose works were hay, wood and stubble. So Lord, I'm praying blessing for these children. I can't conceive that in Phoenix, in this most prosperous city, wealth and prestige and influence and shining everything, houses that knock your eyeballs out, that there will be a people who will be indifferent to the things that are seen and choose the things that are invisible and eternal. Who will be ruthless with themselves in their own marriage in not manipulating or allowing themselves to be manipulated. They'll not allow it with their children, they'll not allow it with each other. Ministers that welcome the truth spoken in love by the saints who will say, I just noticed that the last couple of weeks there's something in your voice, the inflection that seems to be professional. Thank you for that. Lord, bring up the people as unto yourself in the way of the Lord. Who will cause more consternation for the powers of darkness. Who will constitute more of a threat to the unchallenged sway of powers over the city than the biggest and most impressive works that are swarming over the platforms and waving their banners and think that they're obtaining a city. I bless these children, Lord. Seal the things that you have shared with them that I would never have dreamed to speak and instruct them by it. Bless my brother David, Lord, you've given him a precious name. He's rightly named Beloved. He's beloved in your sight. You're jealous over him. You don't want him to go the way of all flesh. And we're asking you, my God, to keep him under your wings. Hide him, my God, and use him for the things that are exquisite, the things that are chosen, the last days works of God that will bring reward, my God, that cannot even now be imagined. Break the power of anything, my God, that has sought to find a place in his heart of ambition. May he be the man who chooses that upon which never man sat. Your own man, not made in anyone else's image, and not reflecting anyone else's style, who can bear his heart before his people as much as I have done tonight, and tell them that tonight I just feel limp. Pray for me. I have no energy. I'm not inspired. And maybe we won't have any preaching tonight. Let's just pray. Just let's rejoice before the Lord and just wait that he doesn't have to perform. Oh, Lord, bring reality. Reality, my God, the hope of glory. And bless these children. Give them a taste of it even tonight. That will never let them go. Thank you for the most holy faith. Once and for all, give him the saints. That is more than just standing for his doctrines. It's a way. It's the way of a king who came down on the back of a colt, the foal of an ass, upon which never man sat. And when men saw him, they cried out, Hosanna to the king. Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord. Blessed is the kingdom that comes in the name of the Lord. Let it come here, we pray. As salvation, my God, for multitudes of those who would otherwise be caught up and chewed up and spit out and their ruthless, relentless merchandising of souls that is taking place by the gods of this world. Bless this church and bless it, my God, to the despairing. In Jesus' name I pray. Just pray out of your seat. Let's make up a little bouquet to the Lord. Something out of your own heart. Just to dot the I's across the T's. A little statement of a yes to the Lord. However... Oh, we bless your name. We bless your name, my Father. Let the decree be declared. This day have I begotten you. This is my Son in whom I am well pleased. And I will give you the heathen and the nations for your inheritance. Hallelujah. Thank you, Lord. Precious God. Help us. Help us. Help us, my God. We are people for your name. Thank you, Lord. Precious God. Precious God. Precious God. Lord Jesus. My God. My God. My God. My God. Help us. Break the powers, my God, of death and of hell. Of temptation, of seduction, of deception. My God. Bless your faithful women, my God, who are hanging in and waiting and trusting, my God, whose husbands have gone bonkers. Come, my God, your will able to snap your fingers and break the power of their deception in a moment. And we pray that you will to restore sanity and bring men back to themselves in a true place in God that you might be honored and glorified forever. Oh, precious God. Precious God. Bless your people, great Redeemer and Holy One. The church. The church. The church. That through the church the manifold wisdom of God will be demonstrated to the principalities and powers of the earth. A true church. A corporate people. Thank you, my God. Oh, we bless you. Perform it. Lay your foundations, my God, deeply. Send shafts, my God, into this earth that will not be moved. Precious God on high, we love you, Lord. What a high calling in Christ Jesus. How can mere religious success even begin to touch it? It's holy, holy, holy. The holy apostles and prophets of old to whom these things were revealed. Least of all saints. Oh, my God. May we be one with them. I believe that they're here tonight in an invisible cloud of witnesses who are not yet perfect without us brooding invisibly in this room waiting to see the disposition of our hearts, whether we will be in conscious continuing with them, choosing what they have chosen, knowing that what came upon them will likely come upon us, and counting the privilege. Thank you, Lord. Oh, precious God, let something be worked tonight that's historic, that is registered in the annals of heaven, though it's low key. That it did not employ any kind of religious enablement. It is something, my God, acceptable in your sight. Thank you, Lord. Oh, bless these children. Take the world from them and its influence. Give them a discernment to see what is operating behind the scenes. Sports, music, culture, film, TV, the filth, the viciousness, the vileness of it. My God, Lord, help us to be separated unto you. Holy. Thank you, my God. Oh, Shammarachordia, rakamia suryariachor, greatly to be blessed. Holy, holy, holy. Bless you. Thank you, my God. What a freedom not to have to put on an act, to put on a false face, to appear to be what we are not. What a freedom just to be where we are and what we are at this moment by your grace. Thank you, my God. To know that we can find acceptance and love from the saints who don't need to be impressed. Thank you, my God. We can even enjoy the silence together. We don't have to be clever and witty or humorous. We bless you, Lord. Fellowship that sticks to the ribs because it's true, it's real, it's loving, it's in the spirit. Thank you, my God. Oh, we bless you. Give us such a taste, my God, that will loom us forever for anything less than other. Thank you, Lord. We bless your name, Holy One. Shammarachordia manasseh. Oh, holy, holy, holy, holy, holy, precious God. Thank you, my God. Let your roots go down deeper. Let people that shall not be moved. Thank you, Lord.