This is tape number K005, Art Katz with
the message, Confrontation with the Living God.
I feel a little absurd right now because
I've come armed with two Bibles and newspaper
articles and I don't know exactly what I'm
going to say.
I trembled over this yesterday and I just
came to the realization that I don't have
the wit or the experience or the depth
in God or knowledge of Scripture or knowledge
of your lives that I might adequately speak
to you.
Just believe God that He's the one who's
going to be speaking this morning.
I had a wonderful confirmation.
I met with this brother who had also
travailed for this chapel this morning and I
said to him on the phone yesterday, I
said, will you just choose the Scripture, let
God lead you in the choice of Scripture
and we'll see tomorrow morning whether there will
be any confirmation or correspondence between the Scripture
He's given you and the message He's given
me.
When he turned immediately to Jeremiah, I had
that confirmation that you're going to be hearing
from God this morning.
And I think it's rather proper that you're
hearing from a Jewish believer.
I'm feeling rather prophetic, not in the sense
that I'm going to foretell the future, though
there may be something of that, but the
prime function of prophets is to bring warning
and caution, is to bring some discernment and
illumination about the nature of the age in
which we live and some knowledge of the
God that we profess to serve and something
about the character of our own life.
I want to read first from a recent
newspaper quotation from the Wall Street Journal of
all papers, speaking about your generation.
It says, For all the purported saintliness of
turned-on youth, their subculture continues to be
haunted by violence.
Consider the grisly accusations in the Sharon Tate
murders or the public killing and repeating beatings
at a rock concert in California.
Let it be understood immediately we are not
about to charge hippies and their hanger-onners
with particularly violent instincts.
We see no reason to believe that they
are any better or any worse than the
general cut of humanity.
The problem is not their instincts.
It is that they and the adult publicists
who celebrate them are dangerously naive in their
attitude toward violence and more fundamentally in their
view of man.
If there's one great failure in our age,
and maybe it's chronic in all ages, it's
this failure truly to understand who we are
and with that, and it always goes together,
the failure to understand who he is.
Their community offers an ethic approving any act
so long as it feels good and doesn't
hurt anybody.
This profundity, the publicists suggest, is a liberating
advance on the Ten Commandments.
Specific guidelines and moral codes are outdated and
repressive in this liberated age.
Moral judgments, it is argued, are best left
to the individual instincts of each adolescent.
So long as we, quote, love one another
right now, unquote, all the age-old problems
of morality will be solved.
Just let every man do his thing.
These sentiments are wonderfully touching but also ignorantly
arrogant.
The solution is so simple, so obvious, so
elegant, what could all the great philosophers have
been agonizing about all those 4,000 years?
The answer, of course, is that moral philosophers
quickly hit on something like the essence of
the hippie ethic, say, do unto others as
you would have them do unto you.
But as only the barest beginning of morality,
the agony has been that left to his
own devices, the human beast will not consistently
behave in any such fashion.
Then in a recent Newsweek article on Arlo
Guthrie, a young folk singer, like most of
the Woodstock generation, Arlo was not interested in
political action.
Here they quote him, All political systems are
on the way out.
We're finally going to get to the point
where there's no more bigotry or greed or
war.
Peace is on the way.
And you don't seek peace, you use it.
In 20 years all that stuff will be
over.
People are simply going to learn that they
can get more from being groovy than being
greedy.
And when they find out, it's going to
be the biggest surprise party of all time.
Unquote.
Arlo and his friends laugh knowingly.
Arlo isn't going to change the world.
The world is simply going to come around.
Now hear the word of God.
Out of the Book of Ecclesiastes, speaking to
such generations throughout all time, including you this
morning.
Rejoice, oh young man, or young woman for
that matter, in your adolescence.
And let your heart cheer you in the
days of your full-grown youth.
And walk in the ways of your heart
and in the sight of your eyes.
But know that for all these things, God
will bring you into judgment.
Therefore, did you get the first part?
Just continue with this arrogant sense of which
that article spoke of having some inside track
into truth, looking upon those over thirty as
being archaic and out of it, latching on
to things that are groovy and hippy and
right with it.
Walk in your own way, according to your
own heart and in the sight of your
eyes.
But know this, that for all these things,
God will bring you into judgment.
Therefore, there's a warning and then here's some
counsel for you.
Remove the lusts that end in sorrow and
vexation from your heart and mind and put
away evil from your body.
For youth in the dawn of life are
vanity, transitory, idle, empty, and devoid of truth.
I think if someone had spoken to me
that way when I was in my late
teens or early manhood, or even up to
my thirty-fourth year, I would have drawn
myself up to my full stature and looked
with complete scorn at anyone who dared approach
me that way.
I was so utterly confident in my opinions
why if everybody could reach my state of
emancipation and self-realization and truth, we'd have
a ball.
All of the things that saddle mankind with
misery and wretchedness, pain, war and death, poverty,
injustice, why they'd be eliminated at a stroke
if all could be as me.
I like to collect articles about the nature
of our age and I just let them
grow thick in a folder and then once
in a while I just take them out
and I begin to scan them.
And when you read them in total like
that, there's a considerable impact.
I really was quite interested in the Tate
murder in Hollywood and I don't believe that
it's any isolated event.
I believe it's a very deep symptom of
the whole nature of our age.
And when the articles began coming out, they
were quite revealing that this Charles Manson, who
calls himself God and Satan, allows his followers
to call that, took these names to himself.
The Klan members felt that the stabbings and
the brutal cuttings would help release the souls
of their victims.
And one of the lawyers was told that
some of the girls obtained sexual gratification from
the stabbings.
One of Manson's followers spoke of black magic.
He believes that he and all human beings
are God.
There is no crime, there is no sin.
The women were the key to everything.
The whole thing was held together by black
magic, said Watkins, one of Manson's followers.
You don't believe it?
Well, it really exists and it is powerful,
Watkins said.
He believes that he and all human beings
are God and the devil at the same
time.
He believes all human beings are part of
each other.
You see what that means?
It means that human life has no value.
If you kill a human being, you're just
killing a part of yourself.
So it's all right.
But, said Crockett, by Manson's philosophy, you can't
kill an animal.
Not a bug, not a snake, nothing.
There were snakes all over the desert.
They got in the cabin and everywhere.
But you could never kill one.
They picked up snakes in the house and
carried them outside and turned them loose.
I think it's rather, I don't have the
right word, indicative about people that can butcher
human beings and get sexual gratification at the
butchery and yet have a very delicate concern
for snakes.
If you don't know what a snake signifies
or is the symbol of or the type
of, it's Satan, people.
I'm going to sound awfully fundamental this morning
and probably you're embarrassed for me.
And my only hope to sustain me is
that the fundamentalism of which I speak is
the truth of God.
And you'll either conclude at the end of
this hour that you heard some piece of
absurdity which you can readily dismiss or that
you were spoken to by a servant of
the Most High God and that it's His
message for this hour, for your generation and
for your life personally and that you'll contemplate
it and take it to yourself and even
be staggered by it and be turned by
it permanently and eternally affected.
And maybe it's because I'm a Jew that
I have that instinctive sense of the corroboration
of this age, its correspondence with an age
in which God poured out His fury upon
the nation Israel.
They too, once upon a time, were a
chosen people unto the Lord.
They were His instrumentality, His priests and His
light unto the world.
But they fell upon dark days.
And it didn't happen in a moment, I
believe.
It was like a kind of a progression
or should we say a disintegration.
A day by day falling away, probably little
small things at first, nuances, shades of things,
until the substance was so corroded and so
moved from God that they actually had become
His adversaries.
And He spoke to that generation through the
prophet Jeremiah, from whom we've already heard this
morning.
And that prophet was deeply stirred for the
condition of his people.
Oh, that my head were waters, he cried,
and mine eyes a fountain of tears, that
I might weep day and night for the
slain of the daughter of my people.
Oh, that I had in the wilderness a
lodging place of wayfaring men, that I might
leave my people and go from them.
For they are all adulterers and an assembly
of treacherous men.
And they bend their tongues like their bow
for lies, but they are not valiant for
truth upon the earth.
For they proceed from evil to evil, and
they know not me, saith the Lord."
I think the world is dying for the
want of the knowledge of the living God.
And doesn't that strike you as ironic?
In an age in which the word God
is so ubiquitous, there's not a word more
commonly spoken on the lips of every person
in every clime.
God.
Everybody making reference to God.
God as you know Him.
God as a higher power.
Well, my God is the thing that I
feel.
And that welter of gods, and that profusion
of gods, where is the living God and
the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob?
The God who sent His only begotten Son.
They're not valiant for truth, Jeremiah cries out.
You, you are students ostensibly bent on the
search for truth.
I don't know if you've noticed it as
yet, and I hope it'll be soon.
You have to be valiant for truth.
I remember a recent encounter at Greenwich Village
where God gave me an occasion to visit,
which is my hometown, New York City.
On two occasions out there at the Washington
Square Park and Fountain, God had me to
have an encounter with Jewish hippies.
One of these guys professed to be a
seeker after truth.
Oh, and immediately my heart was lifted up
because that's my kind of man.
Why, my whole life was bent on a
search for truth.
I even got so intense about it I
became a high school dropout because I knew
it was not to be found there.
I said, oh, you're a lover of truth,
are you?
He said, yes, sir.
He was a part-time hippie.
From Monday to Friday, he worked in a
bank, lived in the square world, and made
his bread.
And on the weekends, he literally let his
hair down and put on his bell-bottoms
and beads and went out to the village
and had a blast.
Living two lives, quite a moral.
I said, do you believe in God, brother?
Oh, yeah.
Golly, God's everywhere, he said.
Man, he just lit up.
He had that euphoric look in his face.
I said, is that so?
He said, yes.
He said, he's in nature and he's in
rocks.
Then he pointed his finger at the people
who were sitting at the rim of this
fountain.
I couldn't help but notice them because they
were a collection of the most degraded, broken,
what can I say, wretched human specimens upon
which I'd ever laid eyes.
And people, I don't speak this in any
contemptuous way.
I'm just giving a literal description of men
and women who had come to the utter
ends of themselves, so depraved, whose egos had
so become their lives that they were in
every state of dress and undress, every state
of wretchedness and squirming and writhing and noise
and raucous laughter, anything to gain attraction and
attention.
In fact, as I squinted my eyes a
bit and looked at them, I could almost
imagine that they were squirming, and that what
God was giving me was a kind of
a vision, a glimpse of a hell in
which this isn't just kicks for an hour
or an afternoon, but an eternity of utter
boredom, of being with others who are equally
bankrupt and barren and morally at the end.
He said, God is in them.
I should have had that confirmation in my
spirit.
I said, I'll tell you what, fella, you're
Jewish, aren't you?
Yeah.
You know that we Jews have a special
obligation to know the God of Abraham, Isaac
and Jacob.
And I'll tell you what, I just don't
want to bandy words with you today, but
God has sent me here to challenge you.
How would you really like to know the
living God?
There's only one, because we Jews, no matter
how bad we were, we knew the Shema
Yisrael, Adonai Eloheinu, Adonai Echad.
Here, O Israel, the Lord your God is
one Lord.
I said, how would you like to know
Him?
I don't mean as an abstraction or a
concept or some casual thing to which you
can refer, but still allows you the liberty
to live your life as you like it.
But I mean the God who created the
heavens and the earth, whose Bible I hold.
Right now on the pavement where we stand,
if you'll put aside your vanity and your
presumption and your pride and all the things
you think you understand and be willing to
follow me in a simple prayer, He'll actually
manifest Himself in your life and you'll know
Him.
Not just as a piece of head knowledge,
but as an abiding presence in your life.
This guy began to stroke his chin and
he grew strangely silent.
I said, by the way, are you still
a lover after truth?
He said, well, yeah, I guess.
I said, this truth is not going to
be convenient because you're receiving the one who
said, I am the way, the truth and
the life.
This is the kind of truth that's going
to make you make amends, seek the apology
of people, ask the forgiveness of others, turn
your life around, change the course of your
life and its conduct and its habits and
your character, even make you go to your
parents whom you despise and ask their forgiveness
and seek to love them.
Do you still want this truth?
Do you still love truth?
He stroked his chin, took a moment and
then he finally said, well, I guess I'm
not that much a lover after truth after
all.
You really have to be valiant for truth,
people.
Truth is often painful and compels us to
turn our lives around.
It elicits name-calling like fanatic.
But they are not valiant for the truth,
said Jeremiah upon the earth, for they proceed
from evil to evil and they know not
me, saith the Lord.
Or they may profess to know God, but
they don't know me, saith the Lord.
Proceed from evil to evil.
I just checked what evil meant.
Of course, we all think we know.
We have some inner sense of something utterly
vicious and degrading.
And of course, we're not involved with any
activity of that kind.
But it's interesting when you begin to examine
the root of the word that it actually
means producing sorrow, distress, calamity, mischief, injury arising
from bad character.
You know, if you forsake the living God,
if you're a coward and seek not the
truth, you'll proceed from evil to evil to
mischief and injury, inflicting sorrow.
How many of you have already done so
with complete indifference?
They will deceive everyone his neighbor and will
not speak the truth.
They have taught their tongue to speak lies
and weary themselves to commit iniquity.
Their habitation is in the midst of deceit
through deceit they refuse to know me, saith
the Lord.
I just have some fantastic experiences as a
missionary to the Jewish people.
I meet all kinds of very ethical and
moral people, really sensitive about life, loving nature
and love and human relationships.
You would think they would be the first
candidates to receive the living God when someone
would come and say, Brother, I can show
you the way unto life.
I know Him who is life and I
can show you the way unto salvation.
But you know what the strangest thing is?
The very people whom you would think would
be the candidates to receive this truth are
the very ones who draw themselves up and
begin to bite their lips and hips and
actually gnash their teeth at you and what
you represent.
I almost get the impression that they will
not hear.
I say to you, but give me a
half hour of your time.
Let me open some scriptures.
Let me tell you my experience as a
rank and adamant and arrogant atheist until my
34th year, completely indifferent to the things of
God, contentious of religion, both Judaism and Christianity
alike, who had come to the end of
himself, as we all must, and was traveling
for 14 months as a bum, drifting without
direction and purpose, and was found of the
living God.
I said, if you'll just give me a
half hour of your time, I'll tell you
what, you're a Jew and you profess to
believe in the God of Abraham, Isaac and
Jacob.
Will you at least call on him and
say, Oh God, what this man is suggesting
contradicts all I understand.
But nevertheless, aren't those two of the most
precious words in all scripture?
Master, we fished all night and taken nothing.
Isn't that a description of the majority of
Christian lives?
I would even say they fished, they've dabbled.
We've taken nothing, but nevertheless, at thy word,
I'll let down my nets.
I said to these Jewish people, if you'll
only call on the God of Abraham, Isaac
and Jacob, and say, but nevertheless, as much
as this confounds what I understand and contradicts
what I've been taught, if this is your
truth, I'm willing to receive it, no matter
the cost.
You know, I've lost track of the numbers
of conversations I've had with sincere, well-meaning,
righteous, ethical, and moral, intelligent, cultured Jewish people,
and have yet to find one who will
pray that prayer.
And my last shot is this.
I say, I'll tell you what.
The word of God says, I'll in no
wise cast out anyone who comes unto me.
Call upon the name of the Lord, and
thou shalt be saved.
I said, right now, God will take you
in your present condition.
You don't even need to have any background
in scripture.
You don't even have to peruse the New
Testament.
If you're really hungry for truth, and you'll
follow me in a simple prayer, and put
aside your vanity, and humbly open your heart,
my God will manifest himself, show himself.
Because he said that, you go ahead and
preach the word, and I'll honor that word
with signs and wonders following.
And the greatest wonder is the instant transformation
of anyone who comes to this God in
spirit and in truth.
And I've spoken at the University of Kansas,
where students came to heckle and to jeer,
and to make sport, thinking that I was
representing the establishment religion.
But I wasn't.
I was representing the cause of the living
God, which is the most radical cause on
the face of the earth.
I said, you've come to make sport, and
you've heard a foolish gospel preached, and it
doesn't commend itself to your intellect.
But I'll tell you what, just to show
you that I've not been representing a philosophy,
and that this is just another one in
the endless series of debates between conflicting philosophies,
each one seeming to have some grain of
truth, I challenge you who are radicals, who
think yourselves revolutionaries, who think yourselves seekers after
truth, to come out of your seat, and
come right down to this platform where I
stand right now, in this room at the
University of Kansas, and follow me in a
simple prayer, and I assure you most solemnly,
you'll not leave this room the same person
that you came.
Boy, did that room go strangely silent.
They knew they were being challenged.
You see, man can't make a challenge like
that.
It's a bunch of hokum, unless there's a
living God to sustain it.
And there was a real hot, and intense,
and earnest exchange for the first time.
Those who came to make sport, who were
victims of their own masturbation, and uncontrollable appetites,
and passions, and lusts, and not even a
possession of their own minds, freaking out in
one degree or another, wanted freedom, and they
wanted life.
And there was something in their heart that
flickered at this opportunity to know Him who
is life.
And after a real exchange, four of them
came out of their seats, and were willing
to be instructed, and to pray.
And God, true to His word, came into
those lives.
They left not the same persons.
There's hardly a way that you can miss
God, unless you willfully seek to avoid Him.
And God was speaking to a generation of
Jews who had come to that place.
And I think God is speaking to a
generation now who is rapidly coming to that
same place.
Thy inhabitation is in the midst of deceit.
Through deceit they refuse willfully to know Me,
saith the Lord.
Therefore, thus saith the Lord of hosts, the
God of Israel, not the God of your
own choosing, or the God of your own
making, or the convenient concept that you have
in your head.
Behold, I will feed them, even this people,
with wormwood, and give them water of gall
to drink.
And if you know anything of the history
of the Jewish people, especially in the 20th
century, you know that God was true to
His word.
And I believe that this generation will drink
wormwood and gall if they continue in a
stubborn and willful refusal to know the Lord.
I'm taking a moment here because oh, there's
so many things here.
This article about heroin addiction on the East
Coast, where a city official said that the
heroin use in Newark, New Jersey is now
the leading cause of death in the 15
to 35-year-old age group in New
York City.
I think that the leading cause of death
of college-age students is suicide in our
generation.
In another recent article, a man by the
name of Carl Haas, it says, Haas tweets
his black mustache and describes with pleasure how
scantily clad harem girls will entice customers into
his new shop.
We think the more skin that's showing, the
more sales we'll get, he says.
We're trying to create an orgy atmosphere.
In fact, promises in advertising for the store,
we may just add topless salesgirls to worship
at your feet.
As Americans become more and more accustomed to
the nude look via films, this article goes
on, fashion, topless, and now in California, bottomless
nightclub entertainment, sex, and the single salesgirl might
become as American as apple pie.
Well, I don't know what the equivalent was
for Sodom and Gomorrah, but I know that
they reached the day when this was standard
operating procedure and hardly one blinked an eyelash.
I wish we had unlimited time this morning
to read out of Jeremiah in greater length,
where God speaks of the people who have
lost even their capacity to know shame and
even their capacity to blush.
Now I'm going to my second Bible.
How many of you this morning are really
children of God?
You don't have to show me, people.
Do you really have that confidence and going
on as children of God?
How many of you are feeling somewhat sullen
and resentful at this kind of talk, irritated,
making light of it, jesting, taking glimpses at
your watch to see when this will be
over?
How many of you are children of God
is really a profound question.
In 2 Timothy, God speaks and said the
Lord knows those who are His and let
everyone who names himself by the name of
the Lord give up all iniquity and stand
aloof from it.
Those of you who were so quick to
raise your hand at the initial question, would
you have continued to hold your hand up
for the rest of that scripture?
He says if you name yourself by the
name of the Lord, give up all iniquity
and stand aloof from it.
So whoever cleanses himself from what is ignoble
and unclean, who separates himself from contact with
contaminating and corrupting influences, will then himself be
a vessel set apart and useful for honorable
and noble purposes, consecrated and profitable to the
master, fit and ready for any good work.
Then the next verse begins, shun youthful lusts
and flee from them and aim at and
pursue righteousness, all that is virtuous and good,
right living, conformity to the will of God,
in thought, word and deed.
How many of you would like to square
your week or your day or your routine
with the words that were just spoken?
Aim at that and pursue righteousness and all
that is virtuous and good and right living,
conformity to the will of God in thought
and word and deed, and aim at and
pursue faith, love and peace, which is harmony
and concord with others and fellowship with all
Christians who call upon the Lord out of
a pure heart.
How many of you this morning would be
willing to call upon the Lord out of
a pure heart?
How many would be willing to call upon
the Lord out of a heart that's become
impure and call upon him for cleansing and
for returning?
I don't know how many times you've heard
the scripture that I'm about to read, but
you know, people, we've become hearers and hearers.
We have auditory experiences and we hear familiar
words passing through the channel, but there's a
kind of hearing which few have ever come
to.
I call it a kind of an existential
hearing where it really bites into the soul,
not the indifference, bland tilting of the head
and letting the sound pass through.
I love that Old Testament word, and we
repeat it also in the New Testament, hearken.
Hearken diligently unto me, God says, for God's
sake.
Become a hearer.
Open your inner ear.
Hear what I'm saying.
I'm not banding loose words.
This isn't a performance.
I've not come for entertainment.
Really hear and receive the word of God
for your own life now.
Understand this, that in the last days there
will set in perilous times of great stress
and trouble, for people will be lovers of
self and utterly self-centered.
Haven't you seen that?
Aren't you aware of it in your own
life?
Lovers of money, covetous, King James says.
It's not just money, it's possessions and things.
It's even the possession of people and lives
aroused by an inordinate greedy desire for wealth,
proud and arrogant.
Listen people, I was an atheist for 34
years because I never saw any evidence for
the living God in Gentile America.
I was right to be an atheist for
the kind of God that was represented to
me, a figure on a cloud with a
white beard, looking down with complete satisfaction on
this innocuous antiseptic Christianity, people wearing bonnets and
calling each other brother and sister and having
potluck suppers while the world is dying.
But I had an instinctive sense in my
Jewish heart that if ever there is a
God, I knew that there was only one
place for me, flat on my face before
him.
I can't think of a message that America
and the modern world need more desperately to
hear than a message of repentance to turning
to God with a contrite spirit and a
broken heart.
And I don't care how powerful our intellect
or how astute our grasp of the nature
of things, how deep our insight and knowledge,
we see only in part.
We have not even the ability to perceive
ourselves according to the word of God.
And the only position that God can possibly
honor is one who is willing to be
humble and contrite and to acknowledge, I'm just
a piece of flesh, God.
I'm just a 1920, a 21-year-old
snot-nose.
I just possess 125 or 130 IQ.
I just know things in part.
I really, as a matter of fact, don't
even know what's right.
And yet I've been making all kinds of
judgments and I'm quick to condemn and to
be critical.
And I think because my heart palpitates that
I know what love is, when if I
were really more honest, I would admit it's
lust.
I'm quick to rationalize and justify my conduct
and behavior.
You ought to hear me in the backseat
of a car.
But I have to admit that I'm human,
all too human, and I've missed the way.
And I see myself amidst the people who
are lovers of pleasure and lovers of self
more than lovers of God.
You know why it is that God said
and gave this as his first commandment, Thou
shalt love the Lord thy God with all
thy heart and all thy soul, all thy
might, all that you possess, all your mind?
Not because he's a vain God.
He's egotistical.
He gave that for your sanity, for your
well-being, for your wholeness, that he should
be first and center in your life.
Because I tell you young people that if
he's not at the center, if you're just
sporting a religious vocabulary, if you're just bandying
the word God and know not me, saith
the Lord, really know him and really love
him, your life is lopsided, out of whack.
It's going to be perverse if it's not
already.
And every relationship in which you engage is
going to be out of kilter.
If you don't have that true vertical connection
established with God, every horizontal relationship between you
and man is going to be perverted and
out of whack and out of kilter.
You'll be drinking gall and wormwood, as God
says.
Lovers of money, aroused by inordinate greedy desire
for wealth, proud, arrogant, contemptuous boasters.
They will be abusive, blasphemous goffers, disobedient to
parents.
Oh my, how did that get in there?
Disobedient to parents?
How explicit God is in giving us one
of the gross symptoms of the malady of
our age.
And of course, if we can defy parents,
what's a teacher?
What's a cop?
What's a judge?
What's society?
Let's just everyone do his thing.
It's euphoric.
It's exhilarating.
At least for the first couple of hours
or weeks or months.
There's a way to seem it's right unto
a man, God says.
But the end thereof is, who knows the
last word, death.
They will be without natural human affection, callous
and inhuman, relentless.
Even those who profess to be lovers of
humanity.
Listen, I know that scene, people, because I've
been there.
I carried posters and I distributed placards and
I marched.
Oh man, my heart palpitated for mankind and
for my black brothers and all of those
that were exploited and the imperialists.
I drew myself up to my full self
-righteous indignation until God made me to see
quite clearly that I was something of an
imperialist myself.
I was quite capable at the same time
as I spoke, the liberal rhetoric and the
easy slogans of grinding my own heel in
the face of those who were close to
me.
And I tell you, unless you've had the
imperialist of your own heart ousted, stop being
the hypocrite.
It's the word you use for our generation,
right?
You know what that word really means?
If you look it up in the Greek,
play acting.
Going through the motions.
Professing to be concerned for humanity.
Palpitating over maudlin folk ballads and songs.
And all the while being just a container
of seething selfishness.
Give me a minute before you barge out
of here, will you?
This thing is worthy of confidence and sure.
If we have died with him, we shall
also live with him.
That's what Christianity is all about, kids.
It's not a religion.
It's not a culture.
That's what's turned us Jews off for two
thousand years, is the rolling of the Easter
eggs and the Christmas trees and all the
other bland things that bear the label Christianity.
It's a way of life, unto life, through
death.
And there's a Jesus who symbolized and exemplified
that meaning through his own conduct and life
and death.
And the offer is open to you.
Those of you who are wearing the label,
those of you who come from Christian homes,
even ministerial homes, to turn and come to
God in spirit and in truth.
It's death.
It may have to change your lifestyle.
People may look scornfully and say that you've
copped out.
They'll call you fanatic.
But you have a choice of choosing between
the things that please men and are tonic
and exhilarating to your ego, or the things
that please him, who is the author and
the creator of life.
Give up all iniquity and stand aloof from
it, we read this morning.
I want to give you an opportunity right
now.
I don't know if it's ever been done
in a chapel.
And I know that time is running out.
But I know that God has been speaking
to individuals in this group.
He's not been speaking to a mass.
He's been speaking to individuals.
And he says, when you hear my word,
harden not your heart.
Be not hearers of my word only, but
doers.
Those people who so quickly and glibly raised
arms and lips to acknowledge that they're children
of God before.
I want to ask you, those who are,
and those who want to be, truly, to
know God in spirit and in truth.
Maybe that you've never done this.
Maybe you've only been the label wearer.
The book has been dead in your hand,
prayer sawdust in your mouth.
You've never felt an urgency to communicate a
gospel, which for you is only a set
of dead doctrines to anyone.
I say to you right now, if you
want life, if you're willing to turn, if
you want to respond to the message that
God has given this morning, stand, he said.
Give up all iniquity and stand.
Will you stand right now?
Right where you sit?
Raise your seat and quietly stand by your
feet and follow me in a prayer.
This is no cheap bit about re-consecration
or dedication.
None of this shallow business of coming to
an altar and crying a few crocodile tears.
I'm asking something deeply humiliating to stand up
in the audience of these people who know
you and say, Him?
He's going to be a Christian?
Why, man, I know this guy.
What a put-on.
She?
Why, are you kidding?
Who is she?
What's this false piety?
Who is she trying to impress?
I'm asking you to stand up, even with
the knowledge that there are going to be
those looking at you saying those things.
And I tell you quite solemnly with the
same assurance that I gave those students at
the University of Kansas, that I gave to
that Jewish hippie on the pavement at Washington
Square, that if you'll respond to the living
God now and stand and follow me in
a very simple prayer, your life will be
turned this hour and this day and throughout
these days and throughout all eternity for the
living God.
Is there but one man in this entire
audience who's a believer in the God of
Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob?
God bless you, dear ones.
I hope you understand me when I say
that I'm a believer that I'm almost a
little concerned that too many have stood that
the pressure will be on the few who
remain in their seats to join the gang
just to be one of the boys.
But that's not the way you come into
the kingdom.
You come in freely and voluntarily and willfully
despite all evidences to the contrary, despite humiliation.
It's a kind of death that you might
know life.
Now, if you want to die to your
vanity, brother, and your pride and your egotism
and your shallow opinions and your conceit and
your lust, and don't tell me you don't
have it.
It's written all over you.
And you want to live a new quality
of life that's righteous and holy, that will
count for the kingdom of God in an
age when the world is freaking out and
needs to know that there's a God who
lives and can only know through your life
and the radiance of your face.
I challenge you in these last waning moments
of this chapel this morning to stand to
your feet and not harden your heart to
this challenge that God has given you, but
to join these precious ones who are standing
up for God.
Is there one more?
It means putting aside the lust, the vanity,
your own selfish desires, the things that you've
contemplated, and being all His and walking in
a way that's pleasing to Him.
You really mean that, brother?
You're going to be a new man, and
people will see it in your face and
in your life.
God will give you power to overcome.
Let's turn to the Lord now.
I'm going to call on Him and thank
Him for this response.
No man ever could have done it.
When I begin the words, Dear God, I
want you to pray aloud and follow me.
If you're afraid to confess Him now, He'll
be ashamed to confess you also.
And the more honest and open your confession
of Jesus now, the more the verification in
your life that this day He's received you
into life and truly renewed you and returned
you to Himself, and you'll be His.
Precious Holy God, I thank you that your
Spirit Holy God has taken the words which
thou hast given my servant to speak and
penetrated hearts and lives and convinced them that
you're a living God and that you're a
mighty God and that you don't look upon
this world with indifference.
And you see what's going on on the
face of this planet, and you see the
bilious hatred and the vile things that are
being poured out and the lusts and the
vanities and truly these are evil days and
men are becoming lovers of self and lovers
of pleasure more than lovers of God and
we're dying.
And Lord, I thank you that you've spoken
with such authority and power and I know
that your ear is tuned to us for
your ear always will hear the cry of
a repentant and contrite heart that wants to
transact eternal business with the living God.
Hear these dear ones, Lord, as they follow
me in this prayer of repentance, consecration, and
perhaps for many a coming to you in
spirit and in truth for the first time.
Dear God, repeat that.
Dear God, I ask your forgiveness for all
the things of my life, my conduct, and
my speech, the very inclinations of my heart,
which were displeasing to you, cleanse me now
by the precious blood that Jesus spilled.
Come into my heart and life truly.
Be thou my God that I might know
thee and love thee and serve thee.
Enter me this day into your eternal kingdom.
Make me thy child.
Forgive me if I have been yours and
turned away.
Renew me and put a new heart within
me.
I resolve in your hearing right now to
live from this moment on as your child,
to walk pleasingly in thy sight, and to
put aside all the things that have displeased
thee.
Bless my life.
Be my life.
And walk with me this day and forevermore.
And I thank you for receiving me.
In the precious name of Jesus, Amen.
God bless you, dear ones.