In this sermon, the speaker reflects on a conference in Berlin on Israel, where he witnessed contrived and engineered performances that claimed to be concerned for Israel but did not bring any benefit to Jews or Germans. He emphasizes the importance of waiting for God's authentic work instead of relying on man-made efforts. The speaker also highlights the discomfort and outlandish nature of a prophet, who is often out of joint and out of time. He concludes by referencing biblical prophecies about the future suffering and devastation of Israel, emphasizing the need for genuine repentance and reliance on God's timing.

We'd love to hear what is your current thought toward us, my God. So come and express it and receive now already our gratitude and praise in Yeshua's holy name and God's people said, Amen. Well, somewhere early in the early morning hours, the Lord reminded me of an experience that I had in Worcester, England. That's spelled W-O-R-C-E-S-T-E-R. But as the language that always confounds my Danish wife, you don't pronounce it phonetically. It's Worcester. And I went on a connoisseur's tour of the Worcester Royal Porcelain Factory. Me, Brooklyn boy, makes good. Well, I'm interested in art and stuff like that, but little did I know what an experience that was going to be. They took you from the place where the clay was formed, extruded, where the ingredients were carefully selected under certain temperature and conditions and moisture. And I learned that bone is actually part of the composition of the clay that goes into bone china. Bone china has special quality. You hold it up to the light that's translucent. And then they poured that clay into molds and they let those molds lay on shelves in dark and dank storage rooms for weeks, maybe longer. I don't remember the details until finally they were set sufficiently to be taken out of the mold and trimmed and put through a kiln, K-I-L-N, a furnace that had not abated in its temperature for three centuries. World War I and World War II never required the kiln of the Royal Porcelain Factory to be stilled. And then I learned as we went through the various processes that every hue, every color required another burning. I didn't know that. I thought you slap it all on at one time and you put it through and it comes out on the other side. Every application of any hue and color required another passage through this remarkable furnace. And then we came to a place where they did the burnishing of the gold. You know that these remarkable sauce bowls and gravy bowls and what they call the trays and all of that stuff, even the teacups and saucers have a gold rim, actual gold. But when it comes out from the kiln, it's the dirtiest brown that you've ever seen. It's totally discouraging looking in its color. And there were women who do nothing more but buff that dirty brown gold baked on trim until it gleams. There's a certain pumice, a certain grit of a very fine kind that they apply with a chamois cloth and they rub and they rub and they rub and they rub until all of a sudden that unpalatable unattractive color burst forth in the glory of gold. You know that you can get a couple of sermons out of a visit like that. But the thing that impressed me at the end was that the guide held up two plates that were totally identical and we couldn't tell which was the royal porcelain, the real thing, the authentic thing that had passed through all of these remarkable processes of hand detail and heat and passages through the kiln and rubbings and which was a cheap counterfeit that looked like but was not the same. And what he did was he took his finger and he held up the false plate and he gave it a thump and all it did was go thud, and then he took the real thing and he hit it again with his finger and it went I think it's reverberating still somewhere out in the celestial sphere. I think that in the old days when they had silver dollars to find out the counterfeit from the real they threw it down and had to make a certain ring as distinguished from a thought. Well, this is the Lord remind me of that tour of that factory all those years ago. If you want the tape, it's available. I called the brother who's in charge of that at home and it's called The Potter. It's a classic message that I gave coming back from that factory and sharing my impressions that night at a small British home fellowship. I'll never forget the sound that the real thing made and I know that I know that we are going to be thumped in the last days. And the issue is will it result in a thud or an eternal vibration that passes into the heavens itself will depend on our willingness to pass through the processes of forming the real thing that God will not hesitate to require if we will not hesitate to provide. If we want a cheapy thing will be it. If we want the real thing that will resonate unto God, we've got to be willing for all of the remarkable processes that begin first by being in a dull gray dank place on a shelf in a mold constricted waiting to set and form before anything can be done with that product. So you can see I'm still taken up with the issue of authenticity and that which is false, bogus, B-O-G-U-S, feigned. There's another word I was hoping to get a dictionary. Pseudo. P-E-S, is it E-U or U-E? D-O. Pseudo. I'm sure it's of Greek origin and I'm sure that there are dimensions of meaning in that that would reward our examination. Well, I have before me a little essay written by a New Zealand brother who was one of the first students in our prophetical school and is now becoming a substantial prophetic figure in his own country. And I picked up this essay written by him on my recent trip to New Zealand called The True Foundations. And in it he takes up the significant issue of apostles and prophets and Israel today. How we understand those three terms go a long way in revealing where we in fact are, not only in our understanding, but with God in our own walk and service. Because apostles and prophets are of course the foundation, Jesus Christ himself being the cornerstone. And there are some today who are suggesting that somehow the apostles and the prophets provide the foundation independent of the cornerstone. But more than I'm able to express, there is no foundation independent of that stone. He is himself the spirit of prophecy. The testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy. He himself is the high priest and the apostle of our confession. There's nothing foundational that is truly foundational that is independent or unrelated to him. He is that thing in himself. And if any true foundation is established, it's established by those whom he sends and to whom he has imparted his life and the distinctive qualities and attributes of that life so that we can tell the false from the real. I remember reading a book by the brother from Cranbrook, British Columbia, George Warnock, his first or the most famous. And I came to the phrase apostolic meekness. And when I read that, my spirit leaped. For I realized that in one fell swoop, I was given a key to understanding the true from the false. That which is apostolic must also intrinsically be meek. Because that's what the Lord himself is. It's what he is in himself. It's not a lay on. It's not an additional attribute separate from God. It's not an appendix. It's the thing in himself. It's his essential character. And the foundation of the church provided by these foundational men is not so much their expertise, their knowledge, but what they communicate of God himself in his character, in his essential attributes. And if you know anything about meekness, that's rain. You know that it cannot be famed. You cannot perform it. You cannot affect it. There's nothing phonier than seeking to imitate Jesus, seeking to imitate the essential distinctive of God himself in his own person, which the heart of which is his meekness, his humility. He goes on to speak about the church that has lost its connection with its Jewish roots and origins and that the church of the last days that will have a restored reality that will be the thing that is authentic must find and obtain again that connection. I would say not Jewish culture so much, which is interesting and attractive or even Israeli, but Hebrew. What is the Hebraic root of the faith, which is a lot more difficult to discover and to obtain than that which is merely cultural? So he asks, what are the essential hallmarks and attributes of the true apostle and prophet as distinguished from the external activity and achievements of such men? It's interesting that when the Lord speaks about sending, which is the root of the Greek word apostolos sent or sent one. If they receive you whom I send, they receive me. And if they receive me, they receive him who sent me. So there's an unbroken continuum with God, the father himself in those whom he sends. And yet he says that these true apostles and prophets elude all definition and expectation. In fact, I suspect that the true ones will disappoint our expectation as Jesus himself disappointed his own generation who failed to recognize him because they already had certain criteria and understandings of their own that were human, which he did not fulfill. And so we have the false and the true growing up as tares and wheat side by side right until the end of the age when the Lord himself sends his angels to separate the one from the other. It's not enough that one has gifts of an impressive kind, he writes. Hallelujah. I love rain, water. Thank you, my God. Luxuriate yourself over the earth and fill in every dry crack, both within the building and outside of it. Thank you, Lord. We would have been satisfied with something less than other than the high standard of God. It would have been sufficient for our meetings. It would have been okay for our programs. We would have had every other criteria for success, but the one that is the ultimate test of the truth of the church, of the authenticity of the church, the moving of Jews to jealousy. That's how I got saved. Saints, you're looking at public enemy number 137 years ago, the most avid, angry, anti-Christian Jewish atheist that can be found. I wasn't your casual village atheist. I was a professional. And there's nothing that I abhorred more than religion. And of all the forms of it, Christianity was the most reprehensible and objectionable. After all, the Holocaust had its origin in that preeminent Christian nation, Germany, that met the nation of the Reformation and Luther. So, the Lord had to do a number on me and did. 37 years ago, when I came to a place of distress in my own life, you can read it in the book that's available in the next building over, which is the journal that I carried as a hitchhiking atheistic Jew for 14 months looking for philosophical answers for the distress of my life. And I want you to know that God is preparing an entire people for that distress, that they might come to that same discovery. Well, I wasn't planning to speak on that, but it's all related together. That's why I'm so insistent on this issue of authenticity, because if we fail in this, we fail in all. So, we'll have an impressive Christian culture. So, we'll have enjoyable service. So, we'll have effective programs and buildings and all of the rest of the paraphernalia that every religion has of its own kind. But what will it avail if we have missed that dramatic and ultimate confrontation with the people from whom we have derived our faith after they themselves were broken off from their own tree? And if the issue of the truth of the church is the issue of its foundations, and the issue of its foundations are the issue of its apostles and prophets, then we have to be extremely jealous over that reality, or we have lost the whole game. One of the sisters asked me this morning, what does the word apostolic mean? Because my Jewish brother Bob yesterday made reference to apostolic authenticity. I forgot how he said it. I said, it's not a word that is quickly defined. It's a word that needs to be apprehended. You don't really have it until you salivate when you hear it. You've got to drool. The juices have got to flow. There's got to be a moisture that rises up when you touch this ultimate word of which Jesus is the high priest and the apostle of our confession. Prophet and apostle, the two ultimate categories and distinctives of the faith. And so this New Zealand prophet is asking, how shall we distinguish them? Because to miss this is to lose the game. How do we recognize the pseudo, the false from the true? These men might well exhibit impressive gifts, but is that the qualification? It's not the gifts he says that they exhibit, but the gift that they themselves are. That God sends them to be gifts from God to the church, the thing in itself, the reality in itself. And he says that as fearful a prospect as it may seem in the fine analysis, God's people are going to have to decide who's who and then live with the consequences. We will really regret every failure to recognize and reject the false or to honor and embrace the true. How far will you go in your jealousy for truth? Supposing that someone would have the audacity to suggest that the greatest moments of this morning's worship and celebration were not so much a statement of being in the spirit as being in the flesh. How would you distinguish and know the excitement that could be generated in your souls and enjoyed and experienced as worship that is not really an activity prompted by and conducted in the spirit? Well, my brother Tony and myself sat like two lumps on the log while you were having the time of your life with banners and exercises and dancing and leaping supreme, and our spirits were entirely unmoved. Maybe I shouldn't give us as example because we have a particular requirement to be very chaste and careful about anything that we admit into our being that purports to be an activity in the spirit and is not. Because there's something inward that needs to be especially guarded because once you open the gate and allow an infusion of that which seems to be and is not, you corrupt the integrity of what should be jealously maintained as spirit and finally allow it to be blurred and come to the place where you can't distinguish at all the difference between soul and spirit. And if we lose that distinction in ourselves, how shall we recognize men who purport to be apostles and prophets when we have lost the very faculty of discernment that we should have guarded at all costs and be very careful to preserve? That's how jealous I am. I know the difference. There's something after 37 years in the Lord that has been carefully nurtured and kept of those authentic times with God, and I'm not speaking solely about scintillating experiences, but those moments that are holy, holy, holy when unquestionably something is issuing out from the heart of God by his spirit. And I have retained and keep that as a kind of sacred deposit and got it. And so anything that comes to me in the realm of experience, whether a message, whether worship, whether anything that purports to be of God, however impressive externally and visibly and auditorily and emotionally, it has got to be compatible with that residue that I have jealously guarded till now. And if it does not meet that test, if my spirit is not touched, then I do not open myself to engage in that activity, for surely it will compromise and pollute, corrupt the measure that I have. How jealous are we for the truth? If men who make china make these exquisite plates and ceramic pieces of tropical birds with great fidelity to every nuance of tone and color and are not withholding the expense that every tint has again to go through the kiln and the furnace on a slow conveyor before the next coat is applied, how meticulous ought we to be to the quality and the condition of our life, seeing that we're more intended for something more than a decoration on a shelf, but the very reality of God himself. What is an apostle and a prophet? More than can be defined, but one in whom God has invested exquisitely in the formation of the character of the man in the school of obedience, in the school of suffering and requirement and dealings, because he's a mouth for God. He's got to address the things that others don't see and that don't care to have addressed. And he's got to be available and have no concern whatsoever for how well he'll be received or understood or congratulated or rejected. He's an object of rejection by very definition. That has been the history of the prophets of Israel, and it will be until the close of the age. So God puts them through the furnace. God is painstaking in the formation of himself in that servant. And what they bring as the foundation to the church, as I tried to mention before the reigns came, is not so much their expertise and special knowledge of a governmental kind to handle difficulties and work out relational things, however impressive and necessary that is. But the distinctive thing that they bring is the sense of God himself as he in fact is. That's the foundation saints. And if we lose that or have never obtained it, then we will be open for anything that seems and appears to be and have and has all the external qualities that will impress us and move us, for we are easy to be moved and to be manipulated. And the meekness of God is the ultimate criterion and character that cannot be emulated or imitated or feigned. There's nothing more patently false than seeking to appear to be humble. Because ironically, often apostles and prophets are required to act for God with such vigor and such strenuous obedience that will offend men. That is the is the last thing that we would think is the statement of humility. We have been trained by the world to understand humility as some kind of deference where you shuffle your feet and you draw back and only don't ask me to speak publicly. I'm not a public speaker. It's what a brother has called a salesman's humility. It's an act. It's a pose. It's fraudulent. It's bogus. It's ersatz, the German word. The real thing is the character of very God himself. And how do the prophets and apostles obtain it? By the communion with God in such intimacy and moments of obedience and requirement that are nothing less than death by which something of himself is communicated. They come and down to us from out of God's presence and breathe and communicate something of the essential character and quality of God, which is the foundation of the church. It's not cheap. So when I read about an apostolic movement. With what I call it, networking and all kinds of elaborate relationships established with men organizationally with tremendous facilities, and that that is now the apostolic movement, something akin to the prophetic movement. Right away, my alarm system goes off violently. I don't know if there has ever been or can be a prophetic movement. I think that there can be individual men who are shaped at the hand of God in exquisite preparation in the place of obscurity and hiddenness and brought forth in his time and for his purpose. But a movement, an apostolic movement. Well, Tony and I ran into it in Singapore where a lunch was arranged for us by a Jewish with a Jewish brother who is part of that movement. He submitted to so-and-so who was submitted to so-and-so who is considered now to be the ultimate a. Apostle over all called the man of God, with whom I shared one time some years ago, a platform together. He was promoting church growth in a Pentecostal Bible college in their annual conference, and I was promoting the return to the sawdust on your face and the last message the Lord gave. I can't remember what it was, but it broke through and repentance and confessions and depths of cry as you cannot imagine. And this man who is now the celebrated chief apostle over an enormous network of organizationally connected men sat on the platform like a lump while men were falling out of their seats. And the president of the school came up to the microphone to confess that he has been faking it for years and has never ever had a baptism in the Holy Spirit and wanted to repent publicly for his imposter. That was my last time. Well, I know it wasn't the last time I met this dear brother again when I was taken on a tour of one of the leading evangelical seminaries where he had been a teacher. And I was brought into his office and I said, Oh, do you remember me? Oh, yes. And gave me his hand, something like a limp dishrag without any affection, regard, remembrance, as if I myself was some kind of token of death. So I'm suspicious of this stream or movement, whether it's from denominational heads or councils who reinvent themselves as being somehow apostolic according to the book or manual which they themselves write. The church is robbed and enfeebled. This brother writes to the degree it will lose its inheritance in the acceptance of those who are not, in fact, sent of God and are themselves self-appointed and establish their office by prophecy because they are in some kind of symbiotic relationship with those who purport to be prophets and prophesy to them that they are called to be the man of God and the apostle of the hour and established this whole confederation of relationship and networking. So maybe at the root of the error is the issue of prophecy itself and prophetic statements of such detail with names and buildings and things of a kind that I have never experienced or known or heard expressed prophetically in my small history. Now, given an intricate detail to establish these men in their appointed offices. Well, what was the distinction of the apostles at the beginning? The distinction was that they had seen Jesus and had known him and had witnessed his resurrection. If an apostle is anything, he is a witness of the resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ. Paul was a post ascension apostle who had this revelation of the Lord on the road to Damascus. But maybe more than the personal experience or encounter or relationship with the Lord as they had in their privileged time is the exhibiting of the reality of resurrection. What is an apostle if he is not eminently or a prophet, the man of the resurrection who exhibits in his conduct and his service that reality. He cannot move, he cannot function, he cannot perform except by the operation of the life of God. I wondered myself after the rain ceased. Could I come out of that seat and take up again where I'd left off as if I could perform it at my will now that we have the better conditions? I wouldn't have wagered that I was able. I'm not even sure now because these men are utterly dependent on the operation of that life. They are not just those who applaud or confirm the truth of resurrection. They are themselves the living embodiment and the expression of that reality or else they cannot function, they cannot cease, they cannot serve. Their authenticity and their authority is the issue of the truth and the reality of the resurrection as they move and live and have their being in him. Well, I don't think the Lord would be offended as I invite him morning by morning to move and live and have his being through me, that I'm a dead carcass, that I'm capable of nothing, that I don't know how to put one foot before the other, that I have no wisdom nor ability of my own, and that if the Lord is not the life of my life and the speaking of my speaking and the thought of my thought and the wisdom of my wisdom, I'm a dead man. So every morning I invite again his possession of this vessel that he has obtained by his blood. I had a wonderful time with the Lord this morning. Too bad I couldn't have spoken right from that. It would have wowed you right out of your seat. Now, limp and faded expression over which I have no control, no ability. But do you have such times with the Lord? Is there a morning time, a communion, where you just give yourself over in prayer and being in the Lord's presence even when that presence is not felt? I would say all the more when his presence is not felt, because he's Lord, because he deserves the renewing of your life through him. You're telling him that you're a dead man, that you don't know how to come in nor to go out, except that he renews his life in you, telling you you're utterly dependent on the truth of that life that was raised from the dead and ascended on high. Give me your thoughts, Lord, for this day, for myself and others through me. Oh, we've seen resurrection miracles. Tony and I were on the way to the airport in the Philippines, and the American missionary brother who had arranged our meetings in that city and lacked something in the arrangements, his wife had asked me to pray for him the night before. I said, well, let me put it before the Lord. I'll pray tomorrow before we depart if the Lord gives me anything. And so on the way to the airport, this brother himself sitting behind me in the van, he said, the Lord spoke to me or I had a dream or a vision. I wish to be a wild man for God. And when I heard wild man for God, my spirit fell. And I turned to him like that and opened my mouth and out flowed a statement from the heart of God that which would forever change his life and his ministry. It was a moment given of God in a wisdom and insight, depth and authority that can turn a life instantly in that moment because it was given. You know, when you see occasions like that, it gives you every inducement to keep your mouth shut and not to initiate your own wisdom or your own counsel or even your own prayer until the life of God himself bids you speak. Those great ceramic objects and the exquisite pieces of royal porcelain begin their history on the shelf. A lot of us don't wait to get set. A lot of us would not tolerate shelf life. A lot of us would not condescend to being closed into a mold until it is opened by another. And we are extricated and trimmed and then sent through the furthest time and again until the exquisite process is finished. I'm just astonished at the popularity of prophetic things now. In my earlier time, I never heard about it. Now everyone is running to become or is or knows that one who is a prophet. This vogue, this new popularity surprises me. And when I speak to some of these brothers who are now riding the crest of this great wave, and I say, how is it that I'm not invited to your prophetic conferences? I was, after all, functioning in this call long before you ever made your public appearance. And the brother turned to me and he said, the reason that you're not invited is you're not, how do we say it, you're not an in-house prophet. You're not one who could be counted on. You don't go with the flow. You can't be trusted to move in conformity with that with which we all agree. So dear saints, will you believe me that I'm not saying anything with any intention to impress you with myself or to boast in anything of myself, but I'm struggling to find some way to express a reality that I know for which I want you to be jealous, you to God, you to preserve, you to pray for those precious men who are foundational to our faith that are not mass production items that look like the real thing. But if you thump them, you only get a thud. Of course, your prayers for men like myself will be no more effectual than your appreciation of what it is that we represent. If you're impressed with something flashier and are offended by the true, you're not going to be one who is going to uphold such a calling in your own intercession, which is that spasm and contraction of travail of prayer. Because I'll tell you, a prophetic statement is not just something that a man can perform. It is something that has to be birthed. And I'm wondering if last night speaking was something of that birthing. Because a young man came to us for prayer. He said at the end of the night, I don't know what's happened to me. As you were speaking, something was going into my inner man and into my spirit. I didn't understand a word you were saying with my head. But inside something, a strain, I don't understand it. What is that? I said, you dear boy, let me pray for you. Something was birthed in your spirit by the spirit of that speaking. Even though your mind was not fruitful, as the Lord will allow that to gestate and to be formed and to come up into your consciousness and understanding, you will have a grasp and an apprehension of a reality and truth that may have eluded most of the people who heard the same word, but only heard it cerebrally. Because the prophetic word and any true word of God, apostolic and prophetic, must have a spirit quotient. It must be a word of life. It does not just only communicate a meaning and an understanding, it communicates the life of God himself. But I want to say, dear saints, if we give ourselves to soulish bashes, we, what shall I say, we remove or we lessen the sensitivity toward the spirit that needs so jealously to be guarded. We have allowed the soul an opportunity to swell and to become enlarged and to substitute and allow us to be impressed by it because it's full of feeling and to tell us that that really is the spirit. So we need to be more discreet. The Lord just gave that instant witness, yes, go. And I went. I was the guest of a precious couple whom I've known for years, and it was hokey. It was New Age-ish. It was a mixture of evangelical and spirits and nature worship and all the kinds of things that are residual in North American Indian life to which the evangelicals in the room were conforming. One evangelical gave a message and the brother who had invited me stood up in standing ovation for that message. And when he sat down, I grabbed him by the arm and I turned to him and I said, you are deceived. The final upshot was a final night of repentance toward the North American Indian for all of the injustices perpetrated by us whites. And they had the microphone stationed through the room that people could come out of their seat and publicly acknowledge these injustices and ask for repentance and forgiveness. And I sat there like the lump that I was this morning, totally unmoved. What's what's wrong with you? Shouldn't it? Shouldn't you be enthusiastic at some attempt to find reconciliation between Indians and whites after the long history of abrasive conditions between these peoples? This is repentance art. Look, people cried and they were emotional. And the very woman who was my hostess, who was the descendant of some British governmental official who had adversely affected Indians, came and took the microphone and sobbed her confession. And I was untouched. It's tough to have to live with your face sticking out. But if you go along and look sympathetic and make some motion of accommodation, you are lessening your prophetic integrity. And it's something that we cannot afford to do, even for friends. And so we're driving home and I knew it was going to come and they turned to me and they said, what did you think of tonight, Art? I said, well, now that you ask, I was completely unmoved. But what about all these cries and repentant acknowledgements? I said, very impressive, soulishly. But it was the work of man. It was contrived. It was a setup. It was engineered to produce an effect of this kind. And you actually displaced the authentic thing that God might have performed if you had waited. The soul is always in rivalry with the spirit and always wants to be Johnny on the spot and quick to meet and recognize some need and attend to it before God himself will, by his spirit, do the same. When God does it, it is an event. When man does it, it's a passing of full phenomenon that needs again to be repeated and repeated and repeated and repeated. It's cathartic. You get a bit of psychological, emotional relief, but you don't really get to the heart of the problem. It's a bash. It's an indulgence. It's a substitute. So it's a suffering for a prophetic man to sit for four days in a conference in Berlin on Israel with Germans and listening to the hokey addresses that are coming from the most celebrated and respected men from different countries who are telling them that Israel need not suffer again, that the time of Jacob's trouble is past. Men who have made statements like that Jerusalem is a golden cup, a chalice in the hand of God that will not again ever be destroyed. When you know that, you know that you know that there's going to be a devastation, that even the book of Zechariah speaks of two-thirds of that generation in Israel perishing when the Lord himself comes and sets its feet on the Mount of Olives, and only one-third survive and pass through the fire. How can they speak about some kind of false security as if such a time will not come? And the Germans were loving it and endorsing these discussions. And one brother confronted me in the aisleway who's active in Israel. In fact, my greatest opposition are for men who are active in Israel and have ministries to preserve. And he put his finger in my chest. I mean, he really put it in. Tell me in one statement what you believe. Well, I couldn't tell him in one statement, but I gave him something to read. And at the end of those days, he said, well, pray with me that whichever of us is theologically wrong, the Lord will correct us. I said, gladly. The last night was again a night of public repentance toward Israel. You would think a Jewish guy like me would have loved it. But again, I was completely out of it and pained and agonized by this cathartic exercise of Germans gushing of forgiveness and repentance toward the Jew because they labor under such a heavy sense of guilt that they want a soul relief. I couldn't stand it. It was an agony, dear saints. See, if you're jealous for the authentic, this is the pain that you must bear. And the sword will be in your soul also, Mary was told. And it's in our soul also. If we have something to do with the bringing forth in our generation of that which is authentically birthed of God. I went back to the apartment where I was living at that conference and I sat down at the computer and by faith, I typed in true and false German repentance toward the Jew. And then my fingers, my two finger thing went flying over the keyboard. And when I finished, I had a statement. I fold it and put it in my Bible and went the next day to Nuremberg and spoke for the first of two nights where I've been several times before leading charismatic fellowship in the nation. And the second night, the Lord had me to take out this one page statement of true and false German repentance toward the Jew. And I spoke from it. And the wife of the pastor who was the worship leader. And it's what these worship leaders that are so often in conflict, except for this group that has come from Las Vegas. And she said, from the moment you open your mouth from the first word, it was the sword of the Lord. And down they went saints. They went down. I mean, I've seen people go down. They were broken. They were scattered over the room. You never heard such gush, such cries, such depth of things being summoned because the statement showed that their sin was not that they made a boo boo and missed it with regard to the Jews, but that they shared with the Jew in Germany, the renunciation of their own God and had made him a commonplace and a fixture in their commercial burger imperial design, a Sunday religion only. They lost the apostolic reality and induced Jews to do the same with their knowledge of God in the reform Judaism. They were collaborators together in a conspiracy against God that celebrated commerce, culture, and the state. And that is the root of the evil that needs to be recognized and repented of. And boo, down they... And I said, and nothing has changed. The fact that the Holocaust has passed and a half century later, the conditions by which the Holocaust came remain. They have never been recognized nor attended. And your cathartic exercise of a little self-affecting relief called repentance that is not true repentance will only make the way for the coming again of a comparable evil. Your skinheads and neo-fascists are already coming out of the cracks of your society and are the statement of God's judgment against the falsity of what you are about. Down they went, cries, depths, breakings. And out of that deep travail of soul, I began to hear some of the saints worshiping the Lord in the spirit. They experienced not just a moment's cathartic release, they experienced the deepest redemptive work of God who meets his people only on the ground of truth and not on that which is feigned. He will not play the game of giving us some momentary psychological and emotional relief. He's a deep calling unto deep. He wants the root and the radical heart of the matter. And when he gets it, there is the coming of God and the shalom of God that passes all understanding. And out of that came praise in the spirit that was not prompted by anyone. And when I heard the singing in the spirit, I said, now the powers of darkness over Germany are terrified. Nothing before has so much as even caused them anything but a yawn. And all of your German repetition of our American charismatic activity of taking cities through praise and worship has affected them not one whit. It's a game, but this spirit of worship that comes out of the redemptive experience of being met by God on the ground of truth that terrifies the powers of darkness. That was a prophetic statement, but it came out of an anguish of soul of having to sit for four days in the excruciating discomfort of whole audiences being led by polished performers in some operation that purports to be concerned for Israel, and in fact, neither brings benefit to Jews or to Germans. A prophet, dear saints, is an outlandish thing. He's the square peg in the round hole. He's out of joint and out of time. He's uncomfortable, and he makes people uncomfortable. He can't go along. There's some depth of cry in his heart for the reality of God, for the thing that's authentic, for the thing that will glorify God, that will really meet the condition of the church and the nation, and he will not be satisfied with some kind of play and substitute that seems impressive and is orchestrated by men. He cannot be consoled. He's waiting for the consolation of Israel and the true thing, and he'll be fierce and jealous for it, however much he's misunderstood. Are you willing for that? Because I'm not just describing God's call to a man. I'm describing God's call to the church, and if the church is not prophetic, what is it? If it does not have this as its essential character and disposition, if it cannot be the prophetic statement of God in its own community and nation, how shall the nation itself understand the meaning of its own life, its history, and its future? So when I was in Osaka, Japan at a YWAM conference for ministers, I said, if you think that the atom bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were military decisions or political decisions, you've got another thing coming, because they were the judgments of God for a nation that has been historically God-rejecting and has persecuted the missionary sent unto it. What I didn't know then is that the fatalities of Hiroshima, 300,000, was exactly the number of the Chinese dead in the rape of Nanking in the 1930s before World War II itself began. God is not mocked. Whatsoever a man will sow, whatsoever a nation will sow, that will they reap. And when I said, if you think that's a military or political expedient, you're mistaken. It's the judgment of God. A Japanese minister leaped out of his seat and he cried out, God, he said, make me a prophet for my nation. Our nation needs a church of this kind that can interpret its own history and its present and its future. We need to keep our souls, keep our hearts with all diligence, keep our spirits, be jealous for the thing that's true and that's real. Find that place in the knowledge of God, which is the foundation. Because I want to tell you, as I'm reading the material of these so-called purported self-appointed apostles, they're absolutely persuaded that the prophecies by which they justify their role and their organizational networking was from the Spirit. They believed that it was the Spirit. Well, every, maybe every bit as much as Toronto people falling or other like phenomena are persuaded that because there's a power and an effect and you get glued to the carpet, that that's God. I'm not saying that it cannot be God, but I want to say that not every demonstration of power is God. And if we're hungry for experience and we want to be confirmed because someone has spoken to us, the man of the hour has given us a personal prophecy that assures us that God therefore knows us, we are candidates for deception. There are spirits that we are supposed to try and to test. And merely because they exhibit some manifestation of power is not ipso facto to give them a blanket endorsement as if that is the Spirit of God. These men are persuaded that what they're getting is from the Spirit. My question is, what Spirit? I praise God for the Hebrew phrase, the Ruach HaKodesh, the Spirit of Holiness. Because even to speak it like that is to give us a respect for what we are referring to. But the Holy Spirit, the Holy Spirit, the Holy Spirit? So if men cannot even distinguish the Spirit of God and justify themselves by prophecy that they say has issued from that Spirit, where are we? I don't think God is that loquacious. I don't think he's that voluble. I don't think he says all that much. I'm even suspicious that we expect that frequency of speaking. I'm much more sympathetic to Oswald Chambers' view that unless there is a corrective from God, we who have our life in him and move and live and have our being in him can be assured that without the presence of a check of the Spirit, that what we are doing and thinking and are about to do is in keeping with God. But this continual dependency on hearing and expecting that he's going to tell us how to tie our shoelaces and when to blow our noses makes us candidates for such a dependency on a voice that can easily be mimicked and mocked by the powers of darkness to the naive and the unsuspecting and the simple that they could be directed from what seems to be a godly line to that which is subsequently veering further and further away from the truth of God and into corridors that might in the end be deathly. You need to have a certain security in God, a certain confidence in inward relationship that does not need constantly to be addressed or confirmed. And I'm talking as a man who was saved in Jerusalem 37 years ago when God called me by name and has subsequently spoken from time to time, but not all that frequently. And yet anyone traveling with me as Tony did five weeks in Southeast Asia and the eight weeks that preceded that in Russia, Poland, the Balkan nations, Holland, Germany, Scotland. How do you know, Art, what to speak nation by nation, night by night? Is God telling you? There's an inward knowing, there's an inward sense, there's a rightness, there's something alive in your spirit that has come from God and you speak that and He confirms it by your obedience. But you need a relationship, one that is carefully nurtured, where you give Him the prime time of your day at its beginning. Read the chapter from the scriptures that fulfills your religious obligation. You read so many verses. What do you want, a medal? A medal? Hey, stay with one verse. Read the psalm for the day, but read it, ponder it, and reflect upon it. Take it into your spirit. Let it lead you on an excursion through other verses. Put yourself before the Lord on your knees or on your face. Give Him your heart, talk to Him, wait. And I even take communion every morning. And out of that often something is gestated. Something like what I'm sharing now has got to have something to do with being wakened 3.30 this morning by the Holy One of Israel, not by any voice, any speaking, just a wakefulness and a desire to come instantly instantly into His presence. I wonder if that had anything to do with the fact that I was not able to enter into your early mornings activity. I wonder if you would be less able, if you had more preliminary time with God in His presence and come to the kind of knowledge that lies too deep for words, where something of the very attributes of God are communicated even in that time, though you may not be conscious of it. This kind cometh not out by fasting and prayer, Jesus said. And the kind that He was talking about are the kind that are going to take my Jewish people at the end of this age, as that man's son was taken in Mark 9, and rattle that son and lay him down as one dead. He'll be foaming at the mouth. Israel will be like a rag in the mouth of a mad dog, taking the life out of it, even when it's commanded to cease. And the disciples could not deliver that lad. And Jesus said to the father, how long has he been suffering this? Since childhood. What is this a vendetta? Yes, it's in a special campaign against this son, representative of Israel, not just to harass, but to destroy, to throw him into the fire and into the water. And your disciples could not deliver him. How come we couldn't deliver him? Because this kind, this ultimate kind cometh not out, but by fasting and prayer. Prayer beyond petition, prayer beyond the mechanical religious obligation, scripture reading beyond the number of verses that fulfill our quota for the day. It's the prayer that is communion with God after petition, in which something is infused out of that presence, which is God and which is his authority and commands those powers to let go. Because you're bringing to the point of confrontation, the reality that's greater, though invisible, which you have obtained by your consistent times of devotional fellowship with the Lord over the course of many days. Israel's deliverance in the last days through the church is not going to come through some hokey shouting and yelling and in the name of Jesus so much as the quiet knowledge of God brought with the confidence of one of those who have dwelt in that presence continually over long periods of time and are able to face the powers of darkness in their most rabid and offensive form and not be intimidated at all. So the true prophet will come, he says, with a weighty track record for slaking the thirst of the saints, for not just the word of the Lord, but more importantly, for the Lord of the word. He's not a prophecy slot machine, but rather bears and then articulates through his body and his soul and his spirit God's word in its season. That has got to be one of the most precious summaries of what prophetic proclamation is that I have ever read. I'll read it to you again. I'll try and express what I think it means, and then I'll close in prayer. The true prophet, why the true prophet? Because there are many counterfeit. We're told to expect them in the last days, false prophets, false apostles. The true prophet will come with a track record for slaking the thirst of the saints, not just for the word of the Lord, but more importantly, for the Lord of the word. They bring something in the word of the sense of God as he is in himself. That is the deepest slaking of the thirst of the saints for the knowledge of God. He's not a prophecy slot machine, but rather bears and then articulates through his body and soul and his spirit God's word in its season. The word of God is gestated in him. He bears it. He carries it. It's with him. It wakes him in the early morning hours or in ungodly nightly hours. It's something resonant, something that is working in his being. It's something that corresponds to his life, the reality of the circumstances. He's married to a Goma, his wife is immoral or he has other conditions of his life that brings the reality of what God has had to face in the apostasy of Israel into his own experience. The man is the thing in himself. There's an exquisite process that exceeds the bringing forth of Royal China, each one of which is numbered and has made a collector's item. God's preparation of the apostolic and the prophetic man and the church of which they are the foundation is a yet more exquisite preparation if we will stand still for it and give ourselves to it. You just take the word. It comes out of your experience, out of your life, out of your confrontations, out of your rejections, out of the grit of your experience. You're going to speak about Israel having to be expelled from the land. Then you have to experience expulsion from your land. Yes, we were expelled from our own community property in Minnesota. Every last soul of us and that brother who wanted to remain, who was an elder and was not willing to receive my prophetic interpretation that God wanted the entire property abandoned and vacated, the Lord said to him, if you'll not go, I'll kill you. He left for three years. Our property was open to the vandals and the severe northern Minnesota winter. It could have been 13 years or 30 years. The Lord didn't say in the course of which the Lord sends me to a Lutheran seminary filled with witches, feminists who hated my guts. And my every day in that school was a tension and a conflict with the Jezebel spirit against Elijah. That at the end of the day I was torn, bloodied, battered. But the Lord had provided a charismatic couple in whose basement I lived for those two years, who patched me up after I came back from the day facing the the feminists and the witches. Two years of that. Threats of divorce of my wife, loss of my children, the giving up of ministry, all kinds of things, they're saints. In order that the day might come when we can say to our Jewish kinsmen, when he has expelled them from their land, your God will restore. For we have experienced both expulsion and restoration. And it's the experienced word that is the prophetic word. The prophet is his message. The prophet lives his message. And so also the church that will be prophetic in its character. Because the thing that justifies all of the suffering and the exquisite preparation and pain is not Israel's success or the church's grandeur, but the glory of God forever. The distinguishing central passion of both apostles and prophets is the glory of God forever. And that's why they can never be candidates to go along. They can never go along with the expedient thing, the momentary thing, the successful thing. They have an inward passion that is greater than the issue of success, even the state of Israel success. And that is the issue of God's glory that will be the distinctive of Israel after a necessary expulsion and a suffering, a restoration and a return. Because the prophetic and the apostolic man knows that he knows that he knows that the glory is the ultimate and final thing to be desired, but it is always preceded by a necessary suffering and death before. He has tasted that death and he knows that suffering and he knows that his Lord was not exempt from it before he ascended to his glory and neither shall Israel be and neither shall the church that is the church. God's going to thump us and he's going to let the beast do it. In Revelation chapter 13 verse 7, he grants and gives power to the enemy that we might be overcome and defeated by him. I don't hear that sounded anywhere in the charismatic, groovy, prophetic and apostolic world that speaks about last day's revival and stadium filled with whole communities and men being raised from the dead and the TV cameras and that the apostles will be the public heroes of our generation. Where's the apostasy? Where's the falling away? Where's the last day's trials? Where's the thing of which revelation speaks and confirms of Daniel that when the power of the holy people is broken, why would God allow us to be overcome? Because when we are thumped by the evil one, as Jesus was at the cross, something is expressed out of that opposition, that persecution and that suffering, which is nothing less nor other than the resonance of God himself. So Lord, I pray for a church that is the church that will move Israel to jealousy by what it is in itself, in its intrinsic character, in its sensitivity toward God, in its jealousy and concern for the things that are true and authentic about itself. They will not condescend to questionable things and practices because it brings some momentary enjoyment of people who know the holiness of the Spirit of God. And unless they sense that spirit, that God, they do not make themselves open and accessible for anything that seems to be and does not. Lord, I pray that such a church, for such a church, and for the men who will be foundational to it, that this church will birth and bring forth and encourage such ones who do not grow on trees, that there'll be a loving acceptance of these men as they test their wings and take their first steps, and they are awkward and mixtures of themselves, of soul and spirit, but are not shot down. They're lovingly encouraged and corrected until they reach a place in the maturity of God in which they can be sent. For in sending them, He sends Himself. If they receive you, they receive me. And if they receive me, they have received Him who sends me. Oh my God, hasten the day, we pray. Whatever the cost, give us such a jealousy, an intensive jealousy for Your glory, that would make us patient for every requirement of being on the shelf, being inactive, being in the dark place, being compressed in a mold until You shall release us, until we're trimmed, until we're fitted, until we're put through the furnace, until we're given the hue and color and form that is of Your choosing and not our own, that when we are thumped, Lord, ascending right to heaven and reverberating still. For Jesus' sake, in His name I pray, Amen.