South Africa - 2000 - Part 2

I'm in the kind of mood that reminds me of the advantage that athletes have before they enter the ring. They have 15 minutes or a half hour in the dressing room to warm up and get the adrenaline flowing. But we don't give speakers the same privilege and consideration. We just expect it to boom your arm. So Lord, give me the equivalent by your spirit and get the juices running, Lord. Stir and remind me of the delight that I have myself in the great subject, Lord, that I've been asked to speak on this evening. And bless your saints. Make it memorable, Lord. Make it significant. Make it foundational. Make it worth everything. Let it have consequence, rich Lord, for time and for eternity. I thank you and give you the praise for the privilege of being the mouth for your speaking. Come now as the high priest and the apostle of our confession who doesn't need any warm up at all. You are instant, my God, in season and hour. Thank you. Give you the praise. In Jesus' name. Amen. Well, Gary has asked me to speak on what is apostolic or the genius of what is apostolic. Very great subject and very dear to me that deserves several speakings. There's a book coming out. You want to see it now. It's already on our website. And that's www.thenisrael.org. And up comes the burning bush. And I don't know how it's listed in the books or topics or what, but apostolic foundations. And that's a transcript from some spoken messages of a dozen or so years ago at a YWAM conference in Lausanne, Switzerland, where I spoke on apostolic foundations. Apostolic character, apostolic perception, principality of the powers of the air, the church, apostolic proclamation. What are the unique attributes and distinctives that make something apostolic? You like that word? I'm not talking about the name of the denomination. You know that one. I'm talking about the foundation that Paul himself speaks of in Ephesians. I think it's at the end of chapter 3, the foundation of the apostles and the prophets. Jesus Christ himself being the chief cornerstone. So there's something so dear and ultimately precious about what is prophetic and apostolic and foundational. That we need to be reminded and need to aspire to it and to respect and to respect and expect. If it has not been a feature of the life of the church in recent history, I believe God is restoring it. And that we'll see something of the same glory of that apostolic calling at the end as was true in the beginning. So if you turn to the book of Thessalonians, the book seems to have directed me that way. A lot of the text of the book of Lloyd. Just pick out a few of the highlights that will give us an insight into the genius of what is apostolic. The root we know is the Greek word apostolos. Apostolos is something like that, that means sent one. So that's the technical and Greek word, but it doesn't tell us enough. Sent for a reason and sent out of a sending body to communicate and to perform and to have an authority of a particular kind. And this kind came to the pagans in Thessalonians. Paul says in verse 5 of chapter 1. Well, we have enough right there to spend the rest of the evening. Just to begin with, our gospel. For Paul, the gospel is not nomenclature. It's not three steps or five steps on how to get saved. It's a precious body of understanding and something to be transmitted. It's an all-inclusive statement about God and about his call. It's not just a reduced formula on how to get saved. It's our gospel. It's not only rich, but it's personal. It's something that's dear to Paul and it communicates that that's something more than a formula. It has been reduced to a formula in our generation. But we need to revive and restore the rich complexity of what the gospel is. That is more than just how to get saved. And it did not come in word only, but also in power. And in the Holy Spirit and with full conviction. Just as you know what kind of men would prove to be among you for your sake, what has that got to do with the proclamation of the gospel? Why does he mention in the same breath what kind of men would prove to be among you? Evidently, if something is apostolic, the message is not some abstract thing, something out of a vital life of the man who bears it. And the character of the man is somehow a signature and a validation of the message itself. You can't separate the man from the message. And therefore he mentions, it seems immodestly, what kind of a man he proved to be. So something was demonstrated to his hearers. That they would not argue with the statement that he makes about himself. That he proved to be a certain kind of man, bringing a certain kind of message. Because that message is antithetical to the whole pagan world. It's not going to be a message of convenience. It's going to be a message of profound inconvenience. Because he says in the same chapter that they are already suffering the affliction of the gospel for having received it. So how does a man come and bring something that is at variance with the mentality, the style of life, the mode of being, the value system in which these people have lived their lives for generations. And come in crashing and evoking a ghost who yet remain in it. And for that reason it will come at a price. Follow me? This is no small thing. This is a major divine penetration from heaven to earth. That upturns everything. That brings radical requirement and is implicit with suffering. Because the speaker himself is a suffering message. And he bears the signs of his apostleship in his own body. And they know therefore if they are going to receive a message from a man who suffers this for bearing it, what will the implication be for receiving it? Therefore, it's no ordinary communication. Can you see how far we are removed from things apostolic? So the man is the message. And therefore Paul, by the inspiration of the spirit, makes the issue of his character relative to the message that he brings. And he's so assured of the kind of man that he is that he says, we prove to be among you. It's not something hypothetical. Take your guess. How do you see it? It was so demonstrable what the man himself was in his character as was the message itself. And Paul, so to speak, boasts of it. And he goes on further. You also became imitators of us. No. Paul is either a piece of arrogant humanity boasting in himself and identifying himself so with the Lord that if you follow him, you're following the Lord. And not only that he's following, but if you follow me, you'll follow him. That's either embarrassing arrogance or authentic humility. What do you think? Would you be embarrassed to say that? There's a remarkable selflessness about Paul. He's totally unconscious. Because he said, for your sake. There's no sense of himself. If he's saying something, it serves a purpose for them. It's not the issue of what he is in himself or drawing attention to himself. He labors for their sake and for the Lord's sake. As you know what kind of men, we prove to be among you for your sake. So there's something about the genius of what is apostolic that is divorced radically from religious self-interest and ambition. That's why we don't see it in our generation. Paul does not give a rap about his reputation. In fact, he didn't have much of one. And yet he says, you know what manner of man we prove to be among you for your sake. Evidently they recognized that also. That this wasn't a man seeking something that would redound to his benefit by bringing them this message. And perhaps that was so rare in their experience that they knew this is from God. They had not seen men promoting something in which their own self-interest is absolutely divorced. I don't know how old you are in the Lord and what your history is, but my observation is that the last place of refuge and hiding for self is in the realm of Christian service and spirituality. Don't ask me to prove it. I know it. I've seen it. Maybe I've demonstrated it. There's something about the nature even of legitimate work for God that gives self a last place to hide and find a kind of a guise and a covering of a spiritual kind. It's very rare to find someone so absolutely detached from himself that he seeks nothing. I mean one. He was a rarity. And this is the nature of what is apostolic. A man is so separated from ambition and self-interest that God can set him. Remember how the first apostolic hope came? In Acts chapter 13? Separate unto me, Paul and Bonibus, for the word unto which I have hope. That came into Antioch by the Spirit while men were worshiping God of a diverse ethnic and racial kind. Their differences, racially and ethnically, did not in any way uproot upon their worshiping God together. They had come to a transcendent place where nothing of the ancient world and its enmities and hostilities and fears which were rife between black and white, Jew and Gentile, Mediterranean, Roman, all of these volatile, am I getting translated the right way? How much, please speak the same language? Incendiary things that ignite men were there in Antioch as they were in all the ancient world. Historic enmities and fears and jealousies. But something had happened in the church at Antioch over a course of time to which we are not privy. God does not tell us. He just gives us the abrupt statement that when they were found ministering or worshiping the Lord together, the Holy Ghost said, separate unto me, Paul and Bonibus. So they laid hands on each other and went forth. The reason I think that the Holy Spirit could say that is because these men were separated. And separation is the name of the game. It began with Abraham. Get thee out of nation kindred and father's house and follow me in the land that I will show you. The first principle of apostolic faith is separation. Radical separation. So radical even beyond nationhood and one of the powerful identities that men have for which they fall at the mouth and will kill each other. The last separation and the most powerful and the most subtle is the separation from religious ambition itself. To have an apostle is to have one who can be sent because he has no agenda of his own to perform. He's absolutely selfless. That's why Paul could say, for your sake. And not just to play on words, but that the Thessalonians would say, amen. That's right, we know that. When we'll see men again of that kind, we'll have the souls again of this kind. And we'll see authority again of this kind and power again of this kind. Because God can't give, he can't dispel that measure of himself in so unlimited a way by men who still have their own agendas, their own intentions, their own ambitions, their own concerns, their own pride. They don't need to be recognized, they need to be applauded. Paul was separated. And where did that separation take place? At Antioch. So the genius of what is apostolic is not the uniqueness of some man who happens to have this call and look on no hands, here I am, but a man who has been prepared and formed in a body of an apostolic kind and is sent out from the apostolic body to convey to the world the realities and the transcendence, the freedom, the reality of God that has come to the entire body. The issue of what is apostolic has its inception in a body that sends, not just the one who is sent. If there were no Antioch, there would be no Paul. In fact, Paul was called Saul until he was sent. His name changes. He was a teacher and he became an apostle in the act of being sent. He had come of age, in a body that had come of age, whose sending established the apostolic fact. In fact, God goes so far as to say that they fasted and laid hands on them and sent them forth, so they being sent forth by the Holy Spirit went. I don't suppose there is any word in the house or in a can or something, or anything like that. Thank you. I shouldn't have... Here, praise the Lord. Great shall thy reward be. Okay. Okay. And so they being sent forth by the Holy Ghost went. Did you hear that? Men laid their hands on them and the Holy Spirit says in Scripture, they were sent by the Holy Ghost. God equates laying on of the hands of men with being tantamount to ipso facto, the same as being sent by the Holy Ghost. What do you think of that? Could we lay hands on someone tonight and send them forth out of this body and it would be in God's sight the same as being sent by the Holy Ghost? If we are going to move toward things that are apostolic, we need even to revive the sense of the significance of the laying on of hands and sending. Have you done that recently? Or would you be embarrassed to do it? It's the kind of thing you don't think about anymore. It has an antique flavor. Well, I'll tell you what. I would not be good enough except that I was sent forth by laying on of hands from northern Minnesota. Now I prayed this evening and I grabbed James's hand. We had a minute before we had to leave. I said, Lord, let it be something sent from one body of an apostolic kind to be received by another body in an apostolic way. We're not just talking about the subject tonight. I hope to some measure we're demonstrating it and we're not just about the subject but in the subject and some expression of the reality that must be moved forward before the Lord comes. How critical this is. If this is the foundation of the Church and we have not an authentic foundation, what then shall we hope for? But this is no Johnny-come- how do you say it? Johnny-come-lately? That's not what I want to say. This is not some easy thing. This is not some good thing. This is not a three-month course and you have produced an apostle or a prophet. This is an organic, creative wonder of God that requires a formative body of the same kind and character who are in such a quality of relationship that it didn't matter who was black, who was white, who was a Jew, who was a Gentile. Not that these distinctions were absolved but that they were transcendent and in that transcendence they not only had a message, they were a message. The kind of thing that I would say South Africa needs today. Are you getting there? Is it an intention? Do you have apostolic desire? Do you have an apostolic intention? Are you willing for the sacrifice and the suffering to obtain this reality? Do you have any feeling, any imagining for it at all? Or is it so void, so past tense, so irrelevant, so out of our present consideration that it's only a theoretical or a historical curiosity and not a present aspiration? Got the idea? So, I love this subject and I always say you'll not have it until the saliva runs out of the corns of your mouth. When you start to drool you'll know that God has finally registered something in the deeps of your being. Otherwise, it is only an abstract category, an interesting study. But you've got to salivate and wipe your chin then you'll know you're in love with the word, the genius of the word, and the reality of the word and you desire it so desperately that you're willing for any sacrifice to obtain it. I hope you're coming to that. So, you know what? The manner of man will prove to be among you for your sake. I don't know what Paul did or how he demonstrated himself but the word proved and takes it out of the areas of speculation like you guys looking me over tonight. Lord, how long must I suffer this? Every time and in every place that I must be looked over like should we or shouldn't we give this man a consideration and who is he and what is he about and I've got my doubts because look, he looks this way and he sounds like this. Do you think the day will ever come that we'll know each other in this world? That we don't need a long period of introduction and acquaintance? That I don't have to take a deep breath and wade through your looks? And that there's a sense of expectation from the first word and that the first five minutes are not lost in trying to touch spirit that we have it in an instant way? And that your suspicions are dissolved? That the man's not here for anything and we don't want to take an offering or anything else or sell our books? Though they're marvelous, every one of them. Why do we have to prove something? I don't think that Paul made a demonstration. He was the thing in himself. That's what proved it. Through and through the cooking he was the real thing. Because there are a lot of phonies around saying something I don't know if you've noticed. And I've been a believer now 35 years. And I don't know that I've seen a season where there are more prophets being exalted and acclaimed than men professing to be apostles and you couldn't know because they have it on their door than ever before. I don't think Paul needed that kind of external identification. He was the thing in himself. I love that. The Germans have a word for it. Ding an sich. The thing in itself. You squeeze him. You can test him. It doesn't matter where or what. The reality is thoroughly through the man. He's not just a mongrel in words. He doesn't learn a few pet phrases like the current crop of apostles who have lifted from Paul certain things and then apply it to church situations with a certain air of gravity and authority that gives the impression that they must be the real thing. Could you tell the difference? I'll give you a clue that will never fail you. The true thing is always meek. I was once reading a brother's book and I came to the phrase apostolic meekness and I was gone. Apostolic meekness. How do you say that? You're saying Paul was meek when he said follow me as I follow Christ and let me be your example? That's meek? Yes. Or have you been spoiled to think that humility is oh don't call me that, I'm not a public speaker, please read that. That self-effacing salesman's psychology. Meekness is just acknowledging what is true. Meekness is being totally obedient to God without letting and without hesitation. Meekness is not something you can learn or develop. Meekness is God. Meekness is the essential character of God himself. Learn of me for I am lowly. I am meek of heart, lowly. If an apostle is going to be meek it's because he'll be meek in proportion to the fact that he has learned of him and in fact is in him. The apostle is in union with God and the foundation that he brings to the church is not just his enormous understanding of the mystery of the church and the purpose of God through it but also, perhaps most profoundly, the sense of God with it. You know what I pray? Frequently, Lord, in this meeting please, if I ask you anything, communicate the sense of yourself. We're dying for the want of the sense of God. We've never had it, or if we've had it in any measure, we've lost it. Our meetings are destitute of any sense of yourself as God. We're correct as all get out and our doctrines are okay but the sense of God that causes awe, reverence, fear, we don't have. And if an apostle is a foundation he brings that foundation and only he can bring it. How come? Because his intimacy and his union with the God who is meek is the foundational truth of his own life. Paul said, I have my headquarters in heaven. That's why one of the topics in those initial talks on apostolicity was eternity. Paul was not just eternally minded. He lived and had moved and had his being in the eternal realm. How do you know that about him? Because he says in Corinthians that my afflictions, when I see my afflictions in view or in light of the, how do you say, the eternal riches, somebody help me, my sufferings are both momentary and light in view of the eternal weight of glory there is. His afflictions were momentary and light? My God, that man will bear through eternity marks in his body that we wouldn't begin to approach in a dozen lifetimes. How many times was he shipwrecked, beaten with rods, stoned to death? The sufferings of Paul are monumental. It's apostolic suffering written in his body, and the man says with all candor, he's not playing on words, my afflictions were both momentary and light in view of the eternal weight of glory. He was so suffused with the realities of eternity while he was yet on earth that he had the capacity to dull his pain and to diminish the sense of sufferings that might otherwise have overwhelmed him. He not only acknowledged eternity, he brought eternity into the present in such a way as to affect how he would perceive and experience apostolic suffering itself. How are you doing? You don't have to answer. It's visible. The world is too much with you. You're living in the present. You're too much South African and not enough heavenly. And there's no cheap way to obtain that. And I'm not talking about Paul's privilege being called up into the third heaven. I don't think that that's where his sense of eternity came from, or his union with God, or his sense of God, or his sense of that dimension. I think it probably had more to do with the grit of early morning times of prayer, of seeking the Lord, of devotion. He moved to live and had his being in God. And he communicated God, whether he spoke to Greeks or to Egyptians. He had an authority that came from God, was God, and came with the order of God. That's a lesson. Aren't you jealous? Aren't you, Lord, bring such a one again in our generation? Let there be one for our nation. Let me be one. Let me be part of an apostolic body that can be convivial and hospitable to bring forth, nurturing such a one that he might be sent out of our midst by the laying on of our hands. Let us be that entity. I mean, hey, you've got the ingredients here, but are you using them? Are you meeting with the frequency that Antioch, that more than some days in midweek Bible studies, are you open to the depth of God's sanctifying working, of which the Church itself is its own ingredient? Or are you always looking at the back of somebody's head? Do you have the interaction? Do you have the confrontation? Do you have the follow-up working with one another by which God sifts and refines and establishes these apostolic verities? Or are you just a conglomerate of individualities that need the services of somebody? Polite is all good, but non-apostolic. Got the idea? The issue of what is apostolic is the issue of what is the Church. The genius of the Church, according to God's intention, and not the institutional or charismatic model with which we operate, which is only unabandoned to our lives and not the first purpose of our being. There are only Sunday churchgoers. So how can it be an environment out of which that which is apostolic can issue? We've got to become a divided community, living on the sharp edge of faith, being buffeted by the world, knowing the oppression of the powers of darkness, in exact measure of the truth and reality of what you are about in God. As I said last night, and Gary said, please repeat this again, your jobs, your employment, your professions, your businesses are only the secondary enablement of God for the mere perpetuation of your bodily life, but not your first purpose. Your first purpose is the Church. Your first purpose is the Body of Christ. Your first purpose is the eternal purpose of God, the things that pertain to His glory, for which that can only be obtained and made manifest in a people who are joined in one heart and mind and will to those ends. Have I described your fellowship? No. If there's anything that can be said about an apostle, it's this, he's jealous, insanely jealous of the glory of God. Isn't that the way Paul ends Romans 9-11? When's the last time you read that? The mystery of Israel and the Church, where he, the last three verses, Paul is bye-bye baby, Paul is, he loses it, the language can't contain the ecstatic praise of issues for Paul that did not need the help of an overhead projector. Oh, the depth of the riches, both of the wisdom and the knowledge of God. Paul has seen something that we have not yet discovered. And if I'm around long enough, you'll discover it. It's got to do with Jews. Not sentimentally understood, not the affinity for Israel with an admiration for their pit squad ability and how exciting they are, that's another one. It's another kind of understanding, appreciation of what they represent relative to the kingdom of God, the coming kingdom, the theocratic rule of God, the actual establishment of God's political autonomy over nations through a piece of earth and a people whom he has elected and appointed called Israel, of which the present state in the Middle East is not yet the fulfillment, but only a preliminary step toward that end. The whole book of Romans is a masterpiece. Thessalonians is a masterpiece, all that Paul wrote, but the most systematic coherent statement of his apostolic mind is the book of Romans. And the centerpiece, it's not an asterisk, nor an addendum at the end, but everything leads from chapter 1 through 8 to present it, and then from 12 to 16 are the implications that arise from it. What is the centerpiece? The mystery of Israel, of which he says, Brethren, I would not have you to be ignorant of this mystery, lest you become wise in your own conceit. I'm seeing everywhere the exact fulfillment of Paul's will. Hotshot, inflated, pompous, presumptuous church that even thinks that it is the Israel that has replaced Israel. Has no consideration for the destiny of a people that when it is effected, Paul says, it will be to the glory of God forever. That's how Romans 11-33-34 success. All the depth of the riches, both of the wisdom and the knowledge of God. He's seen something about Israel, this failed people, this apostate people who have blasphemed the name of God in every nation to which they have been driven, and yet in the end, because of the mercy of God, independent of any qualification that they have, for they have no qualification, God will redeem and restore them, and give them not only a place, but the place of preeminence and honor before all nations. All the depth of the riches of God, not of Israel. To whom be glory forever. So there goes Paul again. He's glory minded, and he's forever minded. The two most conspicuous aspects of which we are devoid. Come on, confess up. You're not forever minded. You're tomorrow minded. You're next week minded. You're retirement minded. But you're not forever minded. You're living in the now. And it's a now that is impoverished, because God intended that eternity not be an abstract category for which we wake and enter when we die, but that we bring the glory of that whole understanding into our present. Because it's only the awareness of the things that are eternal that have the power to transfigure the present. Would you say that the present needs to be transfigured? We're dying, saints, from secularism. We're dying from everydayism. We're dying from monotony and boredom and predictability from the terrible, mundane, earthly life of the world. Devoid of that dimension for which this life is preparation. We do believe that. You see why you need apostles? See why I love Paul? I don't know where he got it, but I think that's available to us also. Wherever he got it, it's available to us also. If we have apostolic intention. This much I know. He didn't get it cheaply and without cost. And to the degree that you get it, to that degree you're a mark man. Right now, the powers of the air? Who? The church at where are we? Who? Jesus they know, and Paul they know, but the church at where are we? Malvern. Who? I'll tell you one thing about the principalities and powers. There are a lot of things you need to know. In fact, I'll tell you that you don't know anymore about the principalities and powers than you know about the mystery of Israel and the church. Two mysteries are related. You don't know anymore about the one than you do about the other. And I'm not talking about demon deliverance, however valid that might be. It has to do with individual deliverance. I'm talking about a much more massive and cosmic question of the powers of darkness that brood over every nation and every locality and jerk and manipulate races and nations to their own diabolical ends and are vying against God for the possession of creation. That's what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the cosmic conflict that has been going on since time immemorial and is coming to a final apocalyptic resolution in the last day, which, of course, you're expecting. And I'm looking toward it and expecting it in a way that it affects your present. If it doesn't affect your present, you have not yet apprehended eternity, and eternity has not yet apprehended you. That's why Paul can say in verse 9, where they report about what kind of reception we have with you and how you turn to God from idols to serve a living and true God and to wait for his Son from heaven, whom he raised from the dead, that is, Jesus, who delivers us from the wrath to come. Paul is both eschatological and eschatological. Two words that you must learn. Eschatological, the things that pertain to the end, that must come, the inevitability of the thing toward which we're moving. Our life, our Christian life, is not a succession of Sundays. It's a movement toward a conclusion and a climax of the most resounding kind. So Paul is eschatologically minded. He's tuned in for the things that pertain to the end. But he's also apocalypticly minded. That end does not come without judgment. It's the wrath to come, and it's the come of all nations. Therefore, there's an urgency in this proclamation. It's not, are you saved, brother? It's, be saved out from this unto a generation upon whom the judgment of God is going to fall. That's another gospel. It's the gospel of the kingdom. And when that gospel is proclaimed to all nations, then will the end come. So, let's take inventory. We're not eternally minded. We're not apocalypticly minded because we don't have a stomach for judgment. We don't want to consider the wrath of God. Not only because it's painful in the firing devastation that shall come, but also because it seems to contradict what we like to believe about God. He's a nice guy. And he's kind. And we like to believe that way. But a God who comes in wrath, there's got to be something wrong that is incompatible with what we understand about God. Or, our understanding is incompatible with God himself. Well, one of my books is missing tonight. I wish it were here. You need it desperately. It's called The Holocaust. Where was God? Where was God in the wrath that was poured out on Israel in the Hitler time? Where was God when his covenant people were systematically annihilated in the tomb of six women, one and a half million of which were children? Either he was asleep, or he was awake but indifferent, or he was moved but impotent and impotent and incapable of offering? Have you thought about that? I know you haven't. That's why the book is weak. To go to church to consider something that has come in our generation and is coming again in a holocaust more massive and global than the first, of which God himself is the author, and you're going to be in the place of threatening your faith, you might be among that number of which Paul said would be a sign of the last days, namely, a great falling away. You ever thought about that? What would provoke nice believers who fall away from the faith in numbers sufficient for Paul to call it a great apostasy, a great falling away? Evidently, it's going to be substantial. And my own suspicion is two disappointments. One is the failure of Israel to be established finally as the homeland of the Jewish people when that nation shall go up with a puff politically, militarily, and its inhabitants destroyed or cast out again into the nations. And you thought, according to Scripture, that that was the final fulfillment of their prophetic hope. So where is God? And how can you have trust in the Scripture? And the second disappointment, unlike unto it, is the rapture that does not take place where you find that you're still here while the going is rough. So, Paul had a different set of expectations. You know what the remarkable thing is? He's talking about the day of the Lord, the day of God's judgment, the day of God's wrath, as being imminent. And these Thessalonians were saved out of something soon to fall upon all nations. He communicated the sense that this is at the door. And we know that it's 2,000 years later and it's not happened yet. So Paul must have been all wet. He must have been all confused in his expectations. And God did not rebuke him or remind him that his timing is off, but allowed him to communicate to the church in every place the imminence of God's judgment as being at hand. How do you figure that? The only way that I can figure that is that God expects the church of every generation to have this expectancy and this sense of urgency. That the issue is not an issue of chronology of what year or what month or what day, but a sense of something approaching, something near, something urgent, that brings to the fellowship a dimension of high seriousness that cannot be obtained in any other way. It's not some psychological taking advantage or playing upon fears. It's a realistic anticipation of that which must shortly come to pass. Much more true now, 2,000 years later, and Israel hanging on the ropes, the key to which this whole judgment thing is going to be brought in. And yet, the ironic thing is, we who are closer to the event that Paul expected and communicated have the least of the sense of urgency that the Thessalonians had 2,000 years before. That's how far removed we are from apostolic reality. It's remarkable what kind of a gospel Paul must have preached because it turned these men to God from idols to serve a living and true God, not just to attend services. What the giving up of their idols meant, what it meant to their families and their neighbors, what price they paid for the repudiation of their whole culture and civilization. We can only imagine, and that's where the affliction came from, that they had to experience. It was a radical turning because of the radical message from a radical man with a radical sense that the time was now because God was at hand about the judge. You know what the stock human for the world is? You can see it in virtually any magazine is the cartoon of a man wearing a sandwich board with a sign that says repent for the world is coming to an end. That's the laughing stock of the world. There's that kind of a theme that they look upon as so absurd and having no basis whatever, no relevance whatever, that what is at the heart of the apostolic message is in the eyes of the world the ultimate absurdity. So much is the world at odds with God and God's people. If that's true, what would it mean for us if we subscribed to Paul's view? How would it affect our present behavior? What would we be communicating to our neighbors our colleagues at work who think that well, if you have this kind of preference and you like this kind of Christian thing okay for you. It's your Sunday, coach. I'd rather go to the cricket match. What would it mean for our colleagues if the way we look, the way we bear ourselves and the way we speak gives every indication that we think that this present world is coming to an end. In fact, the phrase this present world is itself an apostolic phrase. Peter speaks about how to conduct yourself in this present age. What does he say of this present? Because he knows it's passing. He knows there's one to come for which we're awaiting that even creation and nature awaits it. So Lord, deliver us from non-apostolic mentalities. Show us how much we need to be separated from the world and its mentality who right in the face of every evidence of the soon coming judgments that will fall upon the earth are still building their skyscrapers their towers and making plans into the millennium not an indication whatever that the time is short. Because there's not a church in its midst that in any way communicates that. You see where the man has to be the message? Are you just going to say that God is going to judge the world? Or are you going to communicate it by the fact that you're anticipating that imminent judgment and you're not making plans for your retirement or that this world is the best of all possible worlds and if it's not it will become that. What sense are we communicating to those around us? What sense do we have ourselves of the reality to which we're called as believers? And if we had these senses and these realities our church life would be much more urgent than it presently is. It would be much more than nice fellowship Sunday services biblical messages Bible studies. In fact I have said often that our Bible studies will radically be transformed when the day comes that we will be living in conditions of a kind to whom the epistles were first sent. They're only Bible studies for us because our lifestyle and mode of being is not the context to which those letters were addressed. So the gifts of the Spirit may become a denominational distinctive whether you're charismatic or Pentecostal if you're Baptist you won't need it. But those to whom those things were referred and expressed were on the sharp edge of faith battling against opposing forces and needed the full enablement of God. For them it wasn't the subject of a Bible study or a preference or a denominational distinctive it was the nuts and bolts realities of God to be a presence in the earth that is at enmity with God. The fact that we haven't experienced that enmity is because we did not threaten it. When we start to threaten the unspoken premises by which the world lives its life we'll see how long it will be before the sense of that opposition will be made real. Are you guys following? Boy, your expressions have changed. I don't know quite how to describe this appearance. You know, if you think that I'm promoting some kind of sophomoric excitement or radicalism I'm a Jesus freak, we've missed it. I'm about something so much more sober so much more real so much more organic so much more historic so much more in keeping with the origins of our faith for what God gave at the first must again be at the conclusion. Are we in a conscious and willful unbroken continuum with that which came before us? If I said, for example, and I have even prayed as I often do almost invariably that Lord, bring over us tonight a cloud of invisible witnesses of those who have gone on before us and who have sacrificed or died for the very things that they're looking to us to bring to conclusion. We need whatever assist that presence over us will bring because I know that they are not idle spectators. They bring a dimension from the other side. Do you think of things like that? Cloud of invisible witnesses. To how high-tech we are. I took a group of Swiss saints in Zurich on a tour of the places of monitoring of the early Anabaptist saints. I don't know if you remember I don't even want to ask you. I don't want to embarrass you. If you know what Anabaptist saints are. 16th century radical wing of the Protestant Reformation. So radical that they were persecuted by the Reformation itself. And we had a Mennonite guide because the Mennonites are one of the present day church groups that have come out of the Anabaptist tradition. They don't resemble very much the radical forefathers. But they do remember the places of their suffering and death. And he took us. He showed us a place in the woods where they had the meetings. They clefted the rocks where the children ran when the booty hunters came because there's a price on each one of their heads. Many of the Swiss Reformed churches were built on the monies and values of the properties that were left forfeited when these Anabaptists were required to free the persecution. There was an actual booty on their heads. They were tortured. I have been in the turret of Swiss castles and looked through the crack through which men saw daylight for 20 to 25 years in a cell so constricted that I could not stretch my hands out of the floor. The place that they had to rest on was their toilet as well as their bed. And they could have been released in any moment if only they would give up and forsake their strange apostolic mentality that somehow they are separate from the world and they cannot participate in the world's wars and take up swords because the Lord said that we should not live by the sword. If only they would relent on their insistence on adult baptism. They were called Anabaptists because it means second baptism. Why second? Because they looked upon infant sprinkling as being no baptism at all. It was only the induction into a church-state system by which the pastor who performed it or the priest was also a civil or civic authority who issued the birth certificate. So that anyone who was born in a Christian, Catholic or Protestant province and was baptized was, if so fact, a Christian. Well, these Anabaptists knew the difference. They were so radiant, so filled with the glory of God, so brave in their suffering that Luther was persuaded that they were filled with demons. This was demonic, he said, because how can they be so free of vile language? You never hear them curse. You never hear them insult. You never hear them rail against their oppressors. They're filled with joy. They love one another in a visible way, so they must be demon-ridden. Well, so we spent an entire day looking at the place of the river Emmat where the teenage girls were bound hand-to-hand, back-to-back, and thrown into the river of trouble, where the first ones were buried at the stake, where they were pursued into the forest where they had their meetings, where the kids had to flee. And the last meeting we had was in the Swiss Reformed Church, where the Reformer swingingly, in the great statue, holding his Bible in one hand and his sword in the other. He actually, I think, died on the battlefield. He was there persecuted. And here's what I said to those saints. I'll say it to you. How many of you choose to be in conscious identification with those who have perceived you apostolic? How many of you choose to see yourself in an unbroken continuum with all that is authentically apostolic and prophetic that has come before you? You know what happened that night? I lost all my Swiss friends who loved me until that invitation. Not one of them could say yes to me. Because to say yes to that in a conscious and willful way, to embrace that, is to make yourself a candidate with the same opposition and persecution that was visited upon them. And these charismatic Swiss Christians were not willing for that. Are you willing for that? Would you rather have Paul as a subject, apostolic as a subject, Bible study? I often ask the Church, how far are you willing to go? It may well be that the best we can do is learn about what was apostolic in the past, but not hope for it as a present reality. Because our hearts are not willing for the things that are pending. Well, you look at Thessalonians, Romans 9-11, the Epistle to the Ephesians, and draw out a remarkable portrait of the apostolic man, the apostolic mindset, the apostolic perception of reality, the way in which Paul was infused in the things that were unseen and invisible. And don't you have to say that a man who is so caught up in God, so talking about the weight of invisible glory, of eternal glory, has got to be, by virtue of that, irrelevant to the Earth. And the remarkable thing is, there's no man more practical, more solid, more nuts and bolts, more involved in the grit of the daily reality of the Church, than Paul. Being occupied with heavenly things does not make you irrelevant, though the world says so. There's nothing more relevant than eternity and heaven. Amen. It's the apostolic format, mode, of being and living, where Paul had his true sense. Chapter 2. Well, is it time to call it home? Huh? Keep going. Keep going. Well, just a few pointers. In Chapter 2, verse 3, our exhortation does not come from error or impurity or by way of deceit, but just as we have been approved by God so to be entrusted with the Gospel, so we speak, and none is pleasing men but God. You know, this is not only profound, it's literary, totally unselfconscious, and just the formation of the words themselves are compelling. Just the way in which Paul expresses himself, that there's a purity of communication, there's an economy of words, there's not a man just filling the air, there's not a lot of profuse verbiage, it's lean, it's direct, it's a mode of communication very much in keeping with the character and the force of the man's life itself. I'd love to see that for ourselves as the Church. Our exhortation doesn't come from error or impurity by way of deceit. What is he implying? There are others who are communicating where that could not be said. They're looking out for their advantage, they're using illustrations when they speak, they get cute, they tell jokes, they're manipulators, they have an end in mind that gratifies themselves. Paul said, none of that is true for me because we have been approved by God to be entrusted with the Gospel. The Gospel is no cheapie, it's not a commodity, it's not something that we seize and employ at our will. Paul was entrusted. It was a a a bestowal of something precious to a man whom God could trust with his message. So we speak not as pleasing men but God. Probably if we had to say one thing about the preponderance of Sunday sermons, it's exactly the opposite. They are framed consciously or unconsciously to please men, hopefully as well as God, but certainly to please men. There's very little speaking of a kind that does not take what a man would be pleased into his consideration and simply speaks the Word of God given no matter how it's heard, how it's understood, how it's received. That's apostolic proclamation and it's rare in our own experience. Because we are, by and large, men who please us. One of my classic messages given by the Lord is the fear of man. An apostle is separated from that fear. And don't think he had not gone further. Who was, this phrase, one of the most powerful factors that elevates and compromises man. Only the greater fear will deal with that. The greater fear of God not to proclaim His Word. So someone will come up to me after a message, where did you get the courage to say what you said? I remember a black, I spoke at a black church in the state of Washington. It was horrendous. I was sitting waiting to be called on and they went through their preliminaries because so much of the black church in America is a culture. And a woman got up and said, I just want to say that the Lord has been precious to me. It was as phony as it was awful. Yes, that's right sister. Praise God, Amen. And they went on like that. My heart was sinking. And finally I was being called on to speak. And the first thing I said was this testimony, I just want to say is absolutely phony. This is an aspect of your culture. This is not a heartfelt statement of reality. And I went on like that. It got worse as I went on. And the pastor's wife in the front row, her eyeballs were on her cheeks. Her jaw had, there was a gasp like can I be hearing what I'm hearing? I suspect it was something she's been wanting to hear all her religious life long. But she was hearing it. And the people who were with me, white friends, they said we did not expect to come out of that meeting alive. We think we're going to come to a power where that is a reality. You know, we're all speaking in such a kind. That meant either they're going to cry out, what must I do to be saved, or they're going to stone us. What happened that night was glorious. The Lord just broke through. The truth of God and the spirit of truth broke through a deep encased culture generations old. And the pastor was the bishop of the movement. And I'll never forget when I left the church that evening, alive, a hand reached out and grabbed my shoulder as I was scratching my head. It was the same woman. And she said, brother, she said, your word has set me free. Because it was God's word. Spoken with our favor, spoken with our concern. How it would be understood, how it would be received. Were you a pleased man, would it offend men? Also, I'm not a man pleaser. I don't speak as pleasing men, but God, who examines our hearts. For we never came with flattering speech, as you know, even tonight. Nor with a pretext for greed God has witnessed, nor do we seek the glory from men. Isn't it interesting that the same man who is suffused with the jealousy for the glory of God says neither do we seek the glory of men. The only way you'll not seek the glory from men is because you're seeking the glory of God. And that has got to be the principle moral, the well-spoken of any fellowship that's going to become the antioch of its own city and nation. That the jealousy for God's glory is the overarching or supreme concern that obliterates every lesser thing, and will enable to bear the measure of suffering, reproach, opposition from the powers of darkness. And at such dedication to this are you jealous of the glory of God? Have we seen the glory of God? Do we expect the glory of God? What is the glory of God? We've lived so long without it that we have not even the faith to anticipate it or to expect it. We don't know what it is. It's not the normative. And the world is dying for the Montenegrin glory. Had it been expressed in the church, I don't think we would see drug addiction and the various other curses that are afflicting our generation. Because man was built by God to live normatively in the presence of His glory. The absence of that glory has turned men and driven men to other satisfactions and lusts and the kinds of things that is bringing mankind, marring mankind and destroying mankind. For the one place alone from which the glory of God could issue is the church of an apostolic kind. So, can I pray for such a reality to come in this location in this Africa? I was asked tonight to have you argue, what do you understand about Africa, South Africa this time as against your previous exhibit a dozen or fifteen years ago? I said, well, I'm not happy. I don't have that ample an opportunity to examine but I think I know enough just from general report that this is a nation in crisis. Severe crisis. Maybe the crisis of its own continuance. And that its continuance is the issue not only of its own nation but the continent. So I know that the issues are great and I know equally that only a church of an apostolic kind can do that. So, let's pray for the other saints. I wish I could go on. There's so much more. Lord, here's what I'm asking tonight. I'm asking you to work because Paul said that we didn't get a chance to examine it. I praise God that when you heard the word of God through me, you received it for what it was. Not the word of man, but the word of God that performs a work in them that believe. And I'm asking tonight, Lord, that you, so much as this word is your word, that it will perform a work in them that believe that. That will not dismiss it as being some idiosyncratic thing that is just the man doing his thing. But it's God's word even though it comes through the Brooklyn accent. And to believe that is to perform the work. And Lord, here's the work that I'm asking. That you will break in to every non-apostolic thing that has found root and existence in the heart, life, consciousness, thought, and spirit of this people. Everything that is at odds. Everything that the world favors that is contrary to apostolic seeing. That you'll break in and through. That you'll show us, my God, our categories. That you'll bring them into review. That you'll show us how little we have considered the things that are eternal. How little we are motivated by the expectation of eternity, Lord. How little we are willing to bear the injuries and loss and sufferings that can only be recompensed by that reward. How much we have settled on our leaves. How much we're satisfied essentially with things as they are and want only improvement rather than transfiguration. Lord, I bless this people here. Flesh and blood, as was the church at Antioch, capable of being the same reality if only their hearts would desire it and see how much their profession, job, business, career, family, have escalated and taken a role and a value greater than you intend. Sufficient to obscure, if not to obliterate, their first calling to be the people of God together in the locality where you've called them. Lord, I'm asking the work that will communicate the sense of that which is apostolic. That will give to the church a new sense of seriousness, of urgency, of value, of something that deserves more than our Sunday attendance and midweek Bible study. That will break through the parameters of conventional church life to come in to the intensity and depth of relationship that produces an environment conducive to apostles. Lord, bless this people. My God, break in, I pray. Disturb us through the night, bring back things that were stunken. Stir them to look into the very text that we have only superficially begun to examine and reveal to them, Lord, the genius of what apostolic is. For what apostolic is is what God is, who is himself the high priest and the apostle of our confession. I would have a people for his name like him. Lord, let not this word fall to the ground as a knight's novelty, but as a sent word from a sent man from ascending body to create through the word itself, setting in motion those things that will establish the reality by which you will be glorified both in this present age and forever. In Jesus' name, I ask it. Well, as they say, don't lift your head. Don't be quick to call it a night.