Come Up Unto Me, And Be There

Thank you, Lord. So good evening, New Zealand saints, bless you, thank you for coming, and join me now as I look to the Lord for a final time. Before opening my mouth, Lord, take up all of the prayers that have gone up for tonight and bring your precious answer. Your blood be upon my head and over us all, sanctifying this vessel from any last moment's incursion of any distractive thing, Lord, comes that issues out of the world the flesh and the devil. Make this vessel chaste, that your word might go forth in an untrammeled, undistorted way, and let it bring forth, my God, the work that you intend. Thank you for this occasion. You've been so gracious, Lord, I'm afraid to push you any further. You've been so generous in these days that we ought to quit when we're ahead, and here we are even edging you a little bit more for one more night, one more morning. So come, Lord, and allow yourself so to be nudged and give us that additional punctuation underlining that these two occasions provide. Use them, Lord. Surprise us. And we thank and give you praise for the privilege in Jesus' name. Amen. Well, my text is in Exodus, old stuff about Moses, a text that I love because this is more than just antiquity. This is paradigm, pattern. This is something of an enduring kind that we need to identify that has to do with God's selection, preparation, appointment, use of a vessel called to be Israel's deliverer, to bring them out and into, out from bondage and into a land flowing with milk and honey and through a wilderness. This is a word I've used in these days, epochal, E-P-O-C-H-A-L. It's such a remarkable, massive act of God so that it has to be fraught with all kinds of instruction for us who are called to the end of the age. These things are written for us, an admonition and an instruction at the end of the age. There's something here that's applicable for us. There's some last days movement again, not only of the Jewish people but in the world and nations that has to do with deliverance, coming out, bringing in, and the character and preparation, the fitting of the man selected ought to obtain our closest examination. So there's one particular place that I think is utterly critical for all of Moses' subsequent obedience and service, and that is the invitation in chapter 24 of Exodus in verse 12 when the Lord said unto Moses, come up to me into the mount and be there. And I will give thee tables of stone and a law and commandments which I have written that thou mayest teach them. And Moses rose up, his minister Joshua, Moses went up into the mount of God. He said to the elders, taber you here for us until we come again unto you and behold Aaron and her with you. If any man have any matter to do, let him come unto them. And Moses went up into the mount and a cloud covered the mount and the glory of the Lord abode upon Mount Sinai and the cloud covered it six days. And on the seventh day, he called unto Moses out of the midst of the cloud and the sight of the glory of the Lord was like a devouring fire on the top of the mount in the eyes of the children of Israel. And Moses went into the midst of the cloud and got him up into the mount and Moses was in the mount 40 days and 40 nights. So how do you like that? Why was all that so necessary? 40 days and 40 nights, surely, the same transaction could have been made in a week or a much more abbreviated time. But God has other purposes beside the expediency of the giving to the man the tablets of the law. In fact, the whole thing is a calculated attack upon expediency itself. I can't think of anything more current and more valid for us in the age of expediency and utilitarianism than to be referred back to Moses and see the pattern of God with him, to break this inveterate sense that we have as men to get something over and get something done as quickly and as expediently as we know how. Well, we're willing to invest a weekend. How, what, move it together, what, four days? Hey, lavish. The whole world in the spirit of it is utilitarian. So much invested for so much obtained, which is entirely antithetical to the nature of God, who is extravagant, wasteful, and gives and requires great amounts of time in the transactions of those things that have such portent as sending a man into Israel with the law that he might be their deliverer, their instructor, their prophet. And the key word is come up unto me and be there, not just get there and there obtain, and then you can go down and you're equipped with the tablets of the law. The tablets now are secondary, but the first thing and the primary thing, both for Moses and for ourselves, before there's any activity in God's name and any service, however significant, is to come up unto me and be there. It's the one thing that we have not done. It's completely contrary to our whole three-month discipleship course mentality that fits men quickly for service. But what are they serving and what are they bringing? There's something that can only be obtained in God's own presence. Come up. And it's a coming up because everything is contrary to this call and design of God. The flesh, the devil, the world says stay down. Going up is against gravity and there are burrs and prickly things and you'll bloody your legs and no drink and no food. Forty days on the mount, forty is the number of trial, the number of testing. This is, if Moses does not come through this, there's nothing that will follow. Because to come down with the tablets of the law without having been in God's presence, you might as well be bringing down a plastic replica as those things inscribed by the finger of God. It's not so much the law that we need but the sense of God as he in fact is that has to be communicated to those who bear his word, his commandment to men. Come up unto me. Be there because we New Zealanders, Australians, Americans, and Westerners have lost the art of being. We're functional, we're much more comfortable doing than being. And if we have not been with God and been there, how shall we be with each other? That's why we're passing ships in the night and we only relate to each other and know each other in our function. So when I came to a Christian community in Canada but that could be repeated in many places, I was introduced to the pig man, the dairy man, the barn man, this man, every man according to his title and his function. We need to be aware, dear saints, that the world is not in harmony with God and we're like to have us fixated at the level of utility, function, and expediency. That's why our marriages are often so threadbare and that's why our sensitive and precious women feel so much like a soil piece of merchandise. They're used because we men in the brazen macho environment in which we have been shaped have brought to the marriage bed the same kind of utility and function that is everywhere about us in the world. We don't know how to be there. So this is God's heart for tonight and I love it. Who knows what was transacted? How long was he in God's presence? And look at the painstaking preparation before the Lord called him to himself on the seventh day. Don't take these numbers lightly, 40 is fought with meaning. Six days in the cloud, on the seventh day he called Moses out of the cloud and I want to tell you that the cloud was not marshmallows or cotton, it was smoke out of the burning presence of God that crested that mountain of flame that terrified Israel that beheld it from below. Six days in a cloud of smoke. I don't know that we could abide six hours, six minutes, but I'm so grateful to be able to tell you that the Lord has given me the privilege on one occasion of being in a smoke. When a building caught fire in our place in Minnesota where my wife had left her pocketbook on the kitchen counter and I a whole box of master tapes and at three o'clock in the morning about thereabouts crackling began and that thing went up like a tinderbox and we had to rush out of the house and watch the whole thing go up in smoke. And my wife said, why don't you go in and get my pocketbook, it's right on the counter. Oh, I said, sure, no sweat. Hey, I know that house like the palm of my hand. I'll just bow my head, I'll go into the door, the fire is not there yet, a bit of smoke and I'll retrieve it. I went down and went in through the door and when I got into that room, I was completely and totally lost. Completely humanly disoriented. Not only could I not find the kitchen counter, which was only four or five or six feet away, I couldn't find the door through which I had just entered. You don't know what it means, saints, to be in the smoke. And what's the reason for it? Why couldn't Moses directly come into God's presence? After all, we're talking about the prince of Egypt and a man of great Levitical origin, isn't he equipped? That's the very thing that has got to be smoked out. You with your brittle charismatic or evangelical understanding have only, what shall I say, paper mache counterfeit replica of the real thing. You don't know as you ought to know until you have received something directly out of God's own presence. And are you willing to get smoked out? Are you willing to be disoriented? Are you willing to be in a cloud of lostness and confusion where you don't know where you are, who you are? And all that you had that was so supportive of your understanding of God, the faith, the church is all of a sudden up in smoke. So why does God require that? Because something is going to be imparted of a kind and quality that far exceeds even what Moses understood as a son of Israel and a son of Egypt that can only be given as impartation in the presence of a God to whom we will come if we will be there. I tell you, dear saints, this is not just a little picturesque episode out of the past. This is definitive foundational design and requirement of God for any man in any church called to his ultimate and last days purposes. For however much we know, however brittle our knowledge, however clever our ability to perform, it will not affect the Israel below who themselves are already moving toward a golden calf alternative. So I love this. Come up unto me and be there. I'll be there in what I am as God, unfeigned authentic truth, the awesomeness of God as God, and you come up and you'll be there in all that you are as man. Let's get together eyeball to eyeball and fingertip to fingertip, the reality of what you are and the reality of what I am. Being is the issue of the whole of the salvific purpose of God for men is to teach us how to live, how to be rather than merely to do. We want to do witnessing for God. I remember the character, I hope he did not come from New Zealand, who was with us on a trip to Israel and had a little pull-off pad of scripture verses, and when the Israeli waiter bent over to serve the food, he slipped the verse in his pocket. I guess you can go home and say that he has witnessed two Jews or left the scripture behind in a phone booth. Doing has got to issue out of being, or it has no apostolic reality. It's a shallow facsimile thereof. The doing must issue out of the knowledge of God as he in fact is in himself, and he's not going to let you come running up into his presence and trailing your little brittle evangelical and fundamental categories that he might stamp at them with approval. He's going to divest you of those things that have been sufficient for you to save you from embarrassment that you could answer a question or two or seem to have some passing knowledge, but it's not sufficient to lead Israel out and into and through a wilderness to a land that flows with milk and honey. Got the picture? What if this message tonight, which I did not appoint, is not only just to give us a reminiscence of this past, but is in itself the call of God to come up and be there? How would you like that, that this is not a message merely to consider or prove I enjoyed that art? It's not given for your enjoyment. It's given for your call. You're going to find yourself stultified, deadly, narrow, limited, truncated, of no real significance in the purposes of God, for what shall you communicate outside your little brittle categories that are correct? What the world needs is more than categories. What the world needs is the sense of God as God. And we need men who have been in his presence and have come down the mount to us because they have gone up. That's why you're hearing me. I think I've spent my 40 years, it feels like, but I'll tell you what, it needs to be recurrent. We need that frequent communion of the sense of God as he is and to learn how to be there without fidgeting and without getting nervous, without looking at your watch and thinking of the multitudinous things that you need to do that are of great priority. Once you come with that distraction, you're no longer there. You may be there in your corpus, in your body, but you're not there in your person. You're not being there. You're only attending there, waiting to get what you want so as to facilitate your ministry and serve your purposes. You don't know what it means to be there. You've got to dismiss every utilitarian consideration, even of those things that are utility in God's own service because we hide behind those justifications. We use them and employ them to keep us from the necessary identification and union with God because we're busy, we're doing for God, doing, doing, doing. And what has it availed for New Zealand or the world or for Israel? I think that this is a current desire in God's own heart and a call to come up to me. Not because you're going to receive something, not because there's a benefit. See that's utilitarianism again and it's rife in the religious world. What do we have to do? How much do we invest in order to get a satisfaction, a benefit, an enjoyment, a blessing? So long as you have any ulterior consideration at all, however saintly, however spiritual, you are disqualified. You just don't know what it means to come up and be before God, not for any benefit that will accrue to you, but because God is God and deserves your presence, totally. And you don't know how to give it. And if you've not met him and given him that, what are you giving to your spouse? What are you giving to your fellowship? What are you giving to your community? Oh, I love this Lord, your wisdom, the requirement, 40 days lavish excess more than what we would think necessary. Six days in the cloud wasn't six hours enough? Six days, I don't think there was enough left of Moses after that to pick up with a blotter. The man was emptied, not of his defects, of his virtues, of his intentions for God, his noble intentions to be Israel's deliverer and every other grandiose, legitimate, spiritual intention that a man of Moses' stature would necessarily have. It takes six days to smoke all that up. Then, on the seventh day, the number of completion and perfection, God called him up unto himself. Well, you can go up by going down, tomorrow morning early, early while it's yet dark. Do you have every reason to linger in bed? After all, you've had a hard work week, and you need your rest, and you stayed up late Saturday night to watch the whatchamacallit match between Australia and New Zealand. Nevertheless, set your clock and get yourself up while it's dark and go up by going down on your knees, if not on your face, and be there. It will be the most foolish and ridiculous thing you've ever done. It's the contradiction of the whole ethos and temper of your nation. It runs right across the grain of New Zealand's mentality to do something as foolish and as seemingly impractical as getting up unnecessarily early and being before God without even feeling his presence. Can't I even get that much of a reward? No, because you're already much too sensual, much too sensate. Already to do it in order to obtain even the sense of God's presence and feeling of his presence is already a contradiction. You're no longer being there for him. You're being there for you. When you can be there without a sense of his presence and be smitten by the foolishness of the cold draft that comes off the floor and every logical thing telling you you're a fool in order to be back in bed and there's your warm wife waiting to remain in that place and be there. Oh, dear saints, oh, dear saints. It's not a program that New Zealand needs or an evangelistic crusade that's sound and fury signifying nothing unless those that conduct it have been so imbued with the requirement of God to do something that has come out of being. We need to reverse our whole mentality. It's a complete controversion of the spirit of New Zealand, its mentality that has resulted in such beautiful farms and economy and way of life because of the industry, the application and the doing in this beautiful, tidy nation. To contradict the temper of that and go back into something that is older than New Zealand, that is as ancient as the ancient of days, and seek him for himself without any consideration of the benefit or value received is a complete controversion of the whole temper ethos of your nation and it is utterly Hebraic, utterly godly. You'll do what you're doing will have a character of another kind. It will not be a nervous doing or a sweaty doing or a doing in order to be seen or acknowledged or even to justify your own being. The greatest reproach that we have ever had to face in the history of our community in northern Minnesota where for the first ten years, nothing, no program, no activity, no evangelistic outreach. What are you doing? Our critics wanted to know. What are you doing? Why are you there? What are you producing? And we had nothing to show and have to suffer the embarrassment with our faces sticking out of not even being able to give answer. We weren't doing. We were being. We were meeting with God and the intensity of our life together. Something was being imputed so that when the doing came, it was a doing of another character. The doing has got the issue out of our being or it's just sound and fury, self-justifying activity to feel that we're performing something for God and it alleviates our conscience. But what is the something? What are we communicating? What are we bringing? That is changing the lives of men, challenging them, but to come down from the mount out of the presence of God is to bring something ineffably valuable, the sense of God as God. Moses describes himself as the meekest man on the face of the earth. What an effrontery. Hey, shouldn't somebody else say that about you? Well, I wrote the five books of Moses. I had to include that. But my willingness to write that without any sense of self-exaltation, that I should announce that I am the meekest man upon the face of the earth without being an expression of vanity and itself a statement of humility, is an extraordinary observation. And that is the statement of the meekness that is obtained by being with God. Because it's God's own nature, it's God's own character. It's not an accomplishment of Moses. He wasn't the first in the neighborhood to get it. He didn't obtain it at a school. He got it out of being in the presence of God, who himself is lowly and meek. Moses was meek because God is meek. And when you're in God's presence, when you're being there, actually being there, something is transmitted and communicated, but let it not be your motive. You're not going up because you're going to get that or get anything. You're going up because there's a God who has said, come up unto me and be there. And I will give you. Not be there because I will give you, be there because I'm calling you. And I will give you. But it's not your motive for coming. He wants to break the power of earthly, worldly, carnal motives that will not go up or exert itself or bear the sacrifice unless there's a conscious, clear gain to be obtained. That's the spirit of utility, which is not the spirit of the kingdom, nor the spirit of God. And that's why our contemporary Christianity leaves so much to be desired. Once we are moved by utility, consequence, benefit, do this to get that, we're in commerce. Even our salvation message has been tinctured and painted with the benefit someone will receive if they call upon the Lord. Well, praise the Lord for A.W. Tozer, who is much alive to this question of being versus doing. The unfallen man would simply live from within without giving it thought. But man prefers to do rather than to be. It's the whole nature of our civilization, and we Christians cannot escape this question. We must discover where God puts the stress and come to the divine pattern. It's easier, he writes, to imitate than to originate. It is easier for the time being safer to fall into step without asking too many questions about where the parade is headed. This is why being has ceased to have much appeal for people, and doing engages almost everyone's attention. And those who are so engaged know almost nothing about the inner life. They are like a temple that is all exterior without any interior, color, light, sound, appearance, motion. These are thy gods, O Israel. Leonard Ravenhill, he quotes, English evangelist, says the accent in the church today is not on devotion but on commotion, noise, occasion, distraction, activity. I don't know how many times when I have to sit through these agonizing occasions where there's a whole temple of feverish activity, and then you're introduced and you're supposed to be the speaker like a runner coming out of the blocks and leap up onto the platform as God's man of faith and power, all ready to go, full of bright toothy smiles and message. I'm not in the mood. I can't be keyed into that. I can't be cued into that. I don't want to keep this temple thing going. What if I come up and I just stutter? What if I choke and gasp a little bit? What if I go silent? What if you're not going to hear right away something that will keep your attention occupied? Can you wait? Can you be patient? Does God have to keep it going? Externalism has taken over. The still small voice can be heard no more. The whole religious machine has become a noisemaker. The adolescent taste which loves the loud horn and the thundering exhaust has gotten into the activities of the church. What is the chief end of man is now answered. The dash around the world and add to the din thereof. We need a reform to challenge the validity of this externalism, this commotion, this din, this noise, this activity, this program, for fear that if we don't have it, God's people are going to be bored. We have to keep them occupied and entertained or they'll find some other place where the program will assure that. Not only do we keep them entertained, but we keep them fixed in immaturity. What a price to keep the thing going. Where is there a congregation who will wait? Where is there a congregation who esteems silence? Where is there a congregation that doesn't have to get revved up and is bored and broken? There God will have a purpose. There there will be an unfolding. There the people will be brought to such significant use as will turn the world again upside down. The desire to be dramatically active is proof of our religious infantilism. It's a type of exhibitionism common to children. We don't come to maturity. It's got to begin with responding to a God who calls us to come up and be there, not for any benefit, but for the honoring of a God who privileges us to be in his presence, whether it's felt or not. So he writes, at the risk of being written off as an extremist or a borderline fanatic, I offer as my mature opinion that more spiritual progress can be made in one moment of speechless silence in the awesome presence of God than even in years of activity or study. While our human powers are in command, there's always the veil of nature between us and the veil of God. It's only when our vaunted wisdom has been met and defeated in a breathless encounter with omniscience that we are permitted really to know. When prostrate and worldless, the soul receives divine knowledge. Like a flash of light on a sensitized plate, the exposure may be brief, but the results are enduring. We need to come up, saints. We need to be there. We need to communicate the sense of God as God, and it's not to be found in any other place. It's not in the place of convenience. It's in the place of sacrifice, in the place of going up and thinking of the risks that Moses took to leave the whole of the motley tribes of Israel with strangers below, knowing that in so long an absence, they'll become restless and turn to some alternative and even oppose God in their pagan revelry, which is exactly the condition in which he found them when he came down. He was willing for that risk. You've got to be willing for the risks. This is not cheap. There is sacrifice in the going up, and it's not the carnal things that will deter you. It's the legitimate things. What about the children? What about the family? What about the ministry? What about these practicalities that are cloying and continually beckoning you to come down and stay down? It's going to take a ruthlessness, not against your carnality, but even against your spirituality, even your sense of responsibility that you have so much to do and so much to attend in order to break the power of this earthly bonding to the earth that keeps us from the knowledge of God as God, or else, yes, we'll have the tablets of the law, but for all their effect and purpose, they might just as well have been inscribed on plastic as on stone. When Moses comes down, finally, with this holy law inscribed on both sides, and hears the noise of the music, which is not that of victory, but a coarse pagan religious celebration and sees them naked around this golden calf, which is being raised up in our generation everywhere, the hot indignation of God fills the soul of the man who is the meekest man on the face of the earth. And he dashes the stone's tablets to pieces and confronts this erring nation who could not wait, too impatient, needing something opulent to see, to do, and he ground up that golden calf and threw it into the drink and made them drink it. Drink your sin. You don't hear a single whimper from this rebellious nation who so often contested against Moses. We also are spiritual. You're not the only one. God has to bring fire. He has to open the earth to swallow them. Here, not a whimper, not an iota of opposition to a man who humiliates them by grinding up their calf and compelling them to drink it. How come they were terrified at the indignation that burned in Moses that is more than mere human discomfort? Only a man who is in God's presence and has been made meek by that can also by the same rule express the indignation of God, not as a human vexation, but God's own hot indignation and passion. And you know what? The world and even the church lacks both experiences. We don't know God in his humility and meekness and we don't know God in his indignation and wrath. We don't know God as we ought because we've never come up. We've never been called up. Maybe the Lord knew that we wouldn't bestow ourselves, but now you're stuck. You wanted a Saturday night service, okay, you got it, but now you're stuck. The word has come. It's not a little interesting survey of the past, it is a current now request and call of God to those who are called to his significant service to put aside your ambitions, your plans, your program, your activity, however well meaning your intention and desire because it's corrupt, because it's shot through with ambition, because it's reflective and imitative of other influences that are successful and you're trembling and need to be successful so you have to do. That will not avail for the last days. I'm calling you to leave all that below and come up unto me and be there. Learn what being means in body, soul, mind and spirit. Bring yourself in the totality of what you are, that you've never been wanting to face or deal with or meet or see, even your own deeps, you don't even know your own heart. You don't know yourself. You become a performer, an activist. You've been jerked and manipulated by strings. Your whole identity is in terms of what you do. You don't know who you are until you will be there with me as I am. The totality of what you are in the presence of what I am and then I will give you. Then you can be trusted. Then you can carry. Then you can communicate. Then you can bless. One of the greatest experiences in my believing life was our 10-day fast in community and prayer 24 hours around the clock. How did that happen? Well, I was preaching and I said the church was born in the upper room in 10 days of waiting on the Lord. That's clear. Some young convert came to me after the service and said, Art, in all of your travels around the world, including New Zealand, have you ever found a fellowship or a church that has waited 10 days on the Lord in our generation? Let me think now. I thought of the best and where I have been and I had to say, no, I don't know of any. Then the Lord gave me a little shot in the ribs and he said, how about your fellowship hot shot? I came home with the message, God is calling us to a 10-day fast and prayer around the clock. Oh, I was full of zeal and vim and vinegar to do it and so we elders began first. Well, we had to find first an opportune time because we're busy now, the phone is coming off the wall, this invitation, that activity. When it calms down and quiets, we'll find 10 days. We never found it. The kingdom of God suffered violence and the violent take it by force. We just declared, starting Monday of this week, this, that, that, that, we'll be commencing a 10-day fast and prayer around the clock and we elders will begin first with all of our noble intention and within the first hour, two hours, we'll be dozing off. The Lord showed us how to do it, three hour stints around the clock so that in 10 days, you have found yourself with any combination of souls in the community at four in the morning, at nine at night, 12 a.m., somewhere in the course of day and night, you're going to pass through the whole community in some combination of souls and we started with the bravest resolution, high spirited prayers until the second, third, fourth day, the prayers began to taper off, the hunger began to set in, the weakness, the prayers became more and more feeble until by the seventh, eighth day, it was like more a sigh and a groan than praying. Here's the point, saints. I don't know what day it was. Was it the eighth day, ninth day? To the very end, I was so totally depleted that I could not exercise my spirituality to do it. I could not pray. All I could do was be prostrate. I was prostrate before the Lord in the face of two, three, or four of other members of the community, so my dignity and status as the leading elder was contradicted before them. But when I was stretched out in that terrible impotence of not even being able to pray and just to be there in the prostrate piece of dust that I was, something came into my consciousness that has never left me and for which I am eternally indebted and grateful to God. I began to understand that I am a piece of dust and a piece of the creation before the almighty God who is the creator. Something, I'm not doing this just in a sense, something struck my soul of what is reality, what is the ultimate truth that underlies the whole of the world and what we are about, God who is the creator of the heavens and the earth, the magnificent and the awesome, the ineffable and the unspeakable, and myself, dust. I can't even pray. I'm before him with a sense of God that I never before had and I've never since lost. So I commend this to you. We need it. We're too brittle. We're too cocksure. We're too sharp. We're too modern. We're too groovy. We're too, we're too, but we're not communicating the God of the mount that is wreathed with fire and the sense of him and the fear of him and the awesomeness of him for which reason the world is dying and our God is held in very little consideration, if not content. The world does not know because we've not communicated him as he is. Moses is an apostle, a foundational man, and more than the law that he brings down is the sense of God as he in fact is, both in meekness and in hot indignation. The world needs that. The church needs that. There's not enough fear, not enough respect. Our children are not compelled. They're not persuaded that what we are about is worthy of their deepest consideration. They're going along. It's nice. It's, the music is good. So who is there who is hearing God tonight through this word as a personal call? Come up unto me and be there. Leave everything below. He's been waiting a long time. He wants to put the emphasis where it belongs, not on what we do, but what we are in him. So I want to pray for the Church of New Zealand because I can hardly expect it of my own nation, too caught up in their programs, their devices, their activities, their din and their noise. And I'm ashamed to say probably we have been too influential in moving you along the same lines because the church is imitative and wants to latch on to what is the current success, the model. But I have a hope, more in this nation than I would have elsewhere, that there are people who love God and want to be before God and want to be established in the reality of what it means to be before they do and are willing to leave everything below for that consideration. Is that you? Can I pray for that? Will you get up early tomorrow and be there? Know there's no benefit for you? And every voice of conventional wisdom will call you the fool? If you're receiving any benefit from me tonight, saints, it's not because look my no hands and doesn't ought have a wonderful way of speaking. It's because only to the degree that in the words and through them the doing has come a deeper underlay of being in a history with God to the degree that I myself have gone up and been there. Let's pray. So my God, open the inner ear of your saints. We have been praying for them through the day and asking that you would assemble and hand pick every soul that you would collect and gather before you tonight for this word, not knowing at that time what the word would be. Surely this is not a Saturday night entertainment, a little diversion. Surely the hour is late. The world is my God. In such pitiful, pitiful shape. The forces of darkness are having such an uncontested field day and have even invaded the house of God to bring their noise, their din, their activity, their clutter, their programs. What is the latest thing for us to imitate and emulate that we might enjoy something of that success while the world is dying for the want of the knowledge of God as God? And what is an apostle? What is a prophet? One who comes down to us from out of God's presence and brings not only the message but the sense of God in and through the message. For we need this Lord or we will become a brittle and shallow people. That employs your vocabulary but does not communicate your reality for we have not been there to obtain it. And you can see the effect upon our own life and family, marriages and children. We don't know how to be. So let your word go forth as a call. Let there be a response. Let there be a holy determination to break the power of doing and all of the voices that induce us and the work upon us to cue us in that we should also do, do, do, do. Have a congregation, my God, that can wait, that appreciates the silence, that doesn't have to be prompted by noise and hectic activity. That the still small voice of God can again be heard in the land. So do I bless these children and leave this word with them. Not my word, it's your word. Let it not fall to the ground. Let there be a resolve to come up, suffer the smoke, the disorientation of those things that are familiar and dear to us and are our security and identity. If we will not let go and lose that, we'll not hear his voice on the seventh day come up unto me. So who's here tonight? Who's hearing this and saying yes to God? None of you men in the back or you're too busy? Lord, you see this? You see this, Lord? One thing I have to say about New Zealand, I don't think that they make mock responses. I think that when they raise their hand, it's with trembling. With sincerity. Okay, Lord, tomorrow morning early and every morning thereafter, have men and women who will not commence their day until they have first come up unto you and been there. Before they do anything and all of the myriad things that that cloy and beckon us that they are so imperative to do, to do, to do. They shut their ear to that. They're ruthless in their opposition to it. However legitimate until they had first sought you and been there. Oh, my God. And let something radiate out from these saints who morning by morning are in your presence and it will affect what issues from them. Yes, there'll be a doing, but it will be of another nature and of another kind. It will be life giving, life imparting. The sense of God, the fear of God. For the whole nation. For the church that knows him and can set him forth. Bless these children, Lord. With this resolve, let it not pass away. Seal it. Hold them to it. Your call is holy. They've heard it. They're coming. Bless them. Bless the nation through them. Thank you for your jealous love that waits. How long have you waited, Lord? We're coming. For Jesus' sake. For Israel's sake. For New Zealand's sake. For the world's sake. In Jesus' name. Amen.