September K-008.
Art Katz speaking on the subject, Intimate Union.
This is a young couple who, we use
that phrase, living by faith.
This is for real.
I marvel at what God can do in
so few months.
But He's doing a very quick work everywhere.
Enormous, this hour.
I stagger and I reel and I can't
keep up with my God.
We just had in Turley's town of Charleston,
West Virginia.
I spoke in the Episcopal Church.
They wouldn't let us go.
I said, well, I could tell you a
story.
Tell us, tell us.
And that night I was given the name
of a Jewish man who owned a radio
station.
So I called him up and I invited
him to that meeting.
If he had come, his life would never
again be the same.
God was there.
He said, well, I can't come, Mr. Katz.
He said, but I'm sorry, I'm busy.
I was just about to hang up and
I heard myself say, well, could we have
breakfast together tomorrow morning?
He said, yes, if you'll come 8 o
'clock in the morning.
I said, oh.
So I was there at 8 o'clock
in the morning.
He said, I want to know right away
so I can't give you more than 15
minutes.
Half hour later, he had that strange look
in his face.
He said, what time is your plane leaving
today?
I said, about noon.
He said, could you come back at 1030?
At 11 o'clock in one of the
rooms of his building.
He said, Artie said, if I receive this
Jesus, he said, would that be disloyal to
my Jewishness?
I said, brother, this is the supreme act
of Jewish commitment.
Is to receive the promised Messiah of Israel
according to the Jewish scriptures.
And with that, he bowed his head and
followed me in prayer and the spirit of
God came down.
My scalp was tingling.
When he finished praying, he said, oh, he
said, oh, what's the strange feeling in my
chest?
Other Jewish people have said to me, are
you trying to convert me?
I said, no, God is only seeking to
make a mensch out of you.
Because you can't be a man, that's what
mensch means, without God.
It takes God to be a man.
And the world is dying for the want
of the knowledge of God.
To know God is everything.
And I'm telling these university kids who are
so brittle in their knowledge, so intellectual, so
contentious, ready to change the world.
You know all kinds of things, you're filled
with knowledge and trivia and details and data.
That's the kind of knowledge that deadens and
innovates.
But there's a knowledge that brings life.
It's not the knowledge about God, it's the
knowledge of God.
And that's a knowledge and a knowing to
be experienced, right?
How many people know that the deepest kind
of knowledge is something that isn't merely cerebral?
It's the kind that you experience.
When I was a kid growing up in
Brooklyn, full of anguish and bewilderment, I knew
that the great words had to do with
life.
What does truth mean?
And life and death and love and righteousness
and compassion.
I didn't know what those words meant.
And I knew that you couldn't go to
a Western dictionary to find out.
Those words have to be experienced.
And there's a word that has to be
experienced to be known.
It's the word that was made flesh and
dwelt among us.
To know God is everything.
And you know that the word to know
God in Hebrew is the same word as
to know a woman.
Abraham knew Sarah, Adam knew Eve.
It doesn't mean that they had a casual
kind of relationship where they learned little brittle
facts about each other.
Born in such and such a place, IQ
and so on.
They came into one another in such a
way and received from that intimate interrelationship such
a knowledge of each other that passes words.
And I'm so happy for this church that
I can speak this thing that God has
given me without any fear that it's going
to be misunderstood.
It's sometimes a lonely thing to be a
man of God and a messenger in this
hour.
I can't think of an hour in which
we need a deeper spiritual discernment than this
hour.
We're liable to condemn the message and messengers
of God as somehow trying to sell us
strange new doctrines and miss what the Spirit
of God is speaking.
And you know it's interesting that at the
very end of the ages there's a showdown
between the two great spirits, light and darkness.
And we read in Revelation of that spirit
of Satan, that hua, manga that brings the
whole world into huadam and into infidelities and
fornications.
And a few verses down in that same
19th chapter of Revelation we speak of one
who has come for his bride to bring
that bride to a wedding supper spotless and
attired in heavenly garments.
It's going to be one of the two
things.
It's going to be a marriage such as
the world has never known in such holiness
or it's going to be people steeped in
such huadam in such infidelity and such fornications
as the world has not seen either.
Isn't it interesting that Satan always seeks to
emulate, imitate, grotesquely caricature and deform the things
of God.
God intends marriage.
He intends sacred relationship.
He intends sex as a most beautiful and
fulfilling experience and an expression of intimacy.
And Satan seeks to corrupt and to destroy
and to ravage and to make of it
mere lust and obsessive kinds of things and
the kinds of things that are grotesque.
We're seeing both these spirits poured out on
earth.
So I want to speak to you for
a few minutes tonight about knowing God in
the only way that he can be known
intimate union.
And isn't it interesting as a Jew as
I surveyed the history of Israel the sad
tragic history of Israel that God speaks about
their apostasy as having gone a whoring after
other gods.
And God said that you broke my covenant.
You broke my wedding contract though I was
a husband unto you.
And God suggests to us that the relationship
that we have with him is akin to
the relationship that he intends for us to
have with each other.
And I tell you that the quality and
depth and character and honesty of the relationship
that we have with each other is no
greater nor more honest nor more deep than
the relationship that we have with him.
And I tell you that you have to
live with a girl like Inga.
She's tremendous.
Just when you think you know something she
asks you a question and you gasp and
you sputter.
And one day she said to me that
scripture says that Jesus was tempted in every
point like as we but he was never
married.
How come?
See I know my wife.
You have to read between the lines.
What she's really saying is he never had
to put up with one like you.
So how can the scripture say he was
tempted in every point like as we?
You know it's a tremendous question.
And I really began to ponder that and
I believe this is the answer that the
Lord gave me.
Truly Jesus was never married but he knew
relationships.
Marriage is the name given to one set
of relationships.
It's the most profound set.
It's the deepest relationship and every one of
us knows it when we enter into it
that more is required of us in this
than any other relationship in our lives.
But I think that what God wants to
suggest to us is that every relationship has
exactly the same basic constituent elements.
Whether it's the relationship between a flock and
a pastor between races between parents and children
between the family of God and a church.
Relationships are relationships.
And I want to speak to you about
some of the basic ingredients of relationships that
we might understand what it means to know
God.
This isn't a desire to shock or to
be controversial but I think that we do
need a fresh apprehension of familiar things.
And I think we're going to hear God's
voice speaking in more and more radical ways
in this last day.
There are ears that have been grown gross
from hearing and have not heard.
And God is speaking to us in a
new way to cut right to our hearts
that we might understand.
So what are these constituent elements of relationship,
of intimate union?
For they're exactly the same with Him as
it is with each other.
And I'm going to be very simple and
speak with great clarity of speech.
Well, first of all, it requires two persons.
You say, ah, just how fundamental can you
get?
Well, I tell you, I'm getting more and
more fundamental.
I used to take relish in intellectual and
cultural things and I'm getting so simple and
so narrow I mean, it's pathetic.
I'm an embarrassment.
I'm getting to that place where I desire
to know nothing but Christ and Him crucified.
Yet, intimate union is only possible between two
persons.
You say, ah, well, that's evident.
Oh, is it really?
It's not possible between a person and a
denomination.
It's not possible between a person and a
body of tradition.
It's not possible between a person and a
God who is a concept or an abstraction
or an impersonal force in the universe.
Intimate union is only possible between two real,
authentic persons.
And I tell you that that relationship is
no more real than the reality of those
two persons.
And there's no question about his reality but
very often there's a question about ours.
This is a cardboard, synthetic, plastic age full
of corruption, full of dishonesty, full of deception,
full of slick things.
And I think a lot of our personalities
are trying to be formed, at least the
advertisers are trying to persuade us by the
kinds of things that we dab under our
underarms and put on after our shaves.
There's a lot of people in this world
that have no sense of identity and no
sense of who they really are.
And that's our big Jewish hang-up.
What does it mean to be a Jew?
And I tell you, until we come into
that intimate union with Him, there's not a
way of knowing.
And as honestly as we'll come, as real
persons with Him, that will redound to the
beauty of the relationship to which He's calling
us.
He's calling us to an intimate union, an
interpenetration between two persons.
And you know we've lost the sense of
that, people?
The spirit of whoredom and infidelity and fornication
is already being heaped out over the earth.
And marriage has become so trafficked in and
so broken in its original meaning that there
are probably many people in this room who
can speak out of the experience of their
families, out of broken homes and divorce, and
I more than you all.
And there are many who come into marriage
with this thing already in the back of
their mind.
Well, if it doesn't work, there's always an
out.
What more convenient thing than divorce?
And I remember with my history kids in
California, when we discussed the issue of the
Civil War as a divorce between North and
South, they were fully persuaded that if a
woman is not happy, she has every right
to break the relationship.
I mean, isn't the pursuit of happiness in
the Bible?
No.
It came the same place where the rite
of revolution came from, out of hell.
And I'm talking as a former American history
teacher.
God hasn't called us to a pursuit of
happiness.
He has called us to know and to
love our God with all our heart and
all our soul and to follow Him in
the way of the cross.
It's not happiness as the world knows it.
It's joy.
There's a sense in which marriage was understood
as people holding themselves in reserve, keeping themselves
chaste and untouched for that union that was
going to be permanent and enduring and eternal.
The idea of the lost virginity was something
of great shame because we were unique personalities.
There was never one like us before.
God had created us.
His image was in us.
We were to keep ourselves for that one
whom He intended for our lives.
And when those two sacred, unique entities came
together and interpenetrated, that was to be for
time and for eternity.
How different is the spirit that pervades the
idea of marriage and relationships today.
Even the idea of keeping yourself and waiting
for that one relationship to come has been
entirely lost.
It was only a generation ago that a
Jewish girl would wait for her husband.
The guy struggled to come out of the
slums of the east side.
His parents were from the old country.
He went to night school and worked night
and day to get through and get a
degree.
And then he went to medical school.
And then he had to be an intern.
He struggled.
And finally, maybe when he was 30 or
32, he finally put up his shingle.
Then he got married.
And she waited, and they waited, and waited.
They held themselves.
Self-denial.
Delayed gratification.
Completely opposite in the spirit of the stage,
which is the now generation.
Now.
Gratification now.
Fly now.
Pay later.
And a lot of us are paying later
and paying bitterly.
And I tell you that the relationships into
which we've come, much broken and much disfigured,
are just exactly the same as the relationship
that the world has with God.
Broken and disfigured.
We're just as casual and just as glib
and just as indifferent with Him as we
are with each other.
The one is a symptom of our condition
with the other.
Real marriage requires a holding yourself in reserve
for that one.
A sacred union in which you're going to
allow that thing that you are to be
interpenetrated by another.
And why should you allow it?
Because you trust Him.
Because you come lovingly.
Because you come with expectation.
Because you know that you're not going to
be violated or exploited or abused or misused.
You confidently open yourself to the interpenetration of
the other whom you know is your lover.
And you've got to come with that trust
and with that confidence and with that abandonment.
But how many of us come with gripped
teeth?
With bitten lips?
With a distaste?
With doing our mechanical duty and going through
rote mechanical motions?
Thinking that we're discharging our obligation?
Oh, how sad and how pathetic and how
inadequate.
And oh, what a caricature for the joy
which God intended to be for those who
come in love one to another.
A lot of us are coming to God.
The world, if it comes, it comes to
God with gripped teeth and with pursed lips.
Giving Him an hour on Sunday or throwing
Him a bone or a scrap.
It's not with loving abandonment to come into
that union which is knowing.
And I tell you to come, you've got
to come naked.
There's no other way.
You've got to come without concealment.
You've got to come trembling.
You've got to come hearing the call of
deep unto deep.
And if we come with so much as
a covering, what kind of a relationship and
what kind of intimate union is that going
to be?
We've got to come not just once but
continually, periodically.
It's not a drudge.
We're coming for a renewing.
We're coming for a reenactment of a loving
union.
It's never the same.
It's not erode.
It's not mechanical.
It's not dull.
It's unique.
There's no limit to the knowledge of God.
There's no limit to the penetration of the
depths of His infinity.
And every time you come to Him in
that loving abandonment, you touch and sense new
depths in that relationship with Him and in
yourself.
There's never a falling back to where you
were.
You're raised from height to height in that
loving relationship with Him who bids us come.
It's something alive and creative.
It's dear and it's every time new.
It begins in hopeful expectancy and it goes
on in deepened confidence to new expectancies and
to new confidence from time to time to
time in that relationship, in that knowing with
God and with each other.
It's an interesting thing about this intimacy that
God has ordained.
For every other creature it may be different.
For us, it's face to face.
And I praise God for that, to be
required to behold the face of the lover.
Jacob said, I've seen God face to face,
yet I live.
It's something to look into the face which
is that symbol, that expression of the uniqueness
of that personality with which you're coming into
intimate union.
Have you seen God face to face?
Have you turned your face up to Him?
I tell you, it's joy.
You can never again return to any previous
aloofness, any detachment, any being alone or any
solitariness.
It's a losing of one self from the
other, a kind of coming together and mystical
merging that's deep and tense and personal and
total.
And you know you can see it on
the face of one who's a lover.
We don't see it too often.
It's a rare thing.
But every once in a while you find
that pair who are really lovers, so caught
up in each other, so fulfilling each other's
hearts and lives.
Their faces beam with light and with gratification.
And there's simply no room in their hearts
for anyone else.
Quite different from those quote unquote bachelors in
the office and that we see around us
who are married and wear a band and
have some kind of a technical certificate.
But they're bachelors in their spirit and their
eyes are continually roving and hearts filled with
lust because they're hearts that are empty, unfulfilled,
seeking for gratification in the world, some excitement,
an experience, a passing thing.
There's a God who wants us to know
Him in a deep, intimate union that will
so fill our hearts and souls that there'll
be no room in our heart for any
of the blandishments of the world seeking to
put its hooks in us.
Our faces will tell the story we're lovers
of the living God.
What are the enduring results of a relationship
such as this?
I've just mentioned that fulfillment that frees us
from anything in the world that would seek
to seduce us.
And the other is that in such love
as that, coming back time and time again
for that renewing and for that reenactment, you
begin to take on the coloration, the aspect,
the character, the personality, even the appearance of
the loved one.
And many of us have noticed this in
people that are married 20, 30, 40 years.
They tend to resemble each other.
Have you ever seen that?
It's happening now.
I'm only married seven years and you couldn't
talk about two more dissimilar people.
She's nodding her head there.
Right.
There's this dark Jew from New York full
of contention and intellectual and all that stuff
and a hot shot.
And this simple little girl from a village
of 500 in Denmark who had barely gotten
through the school at the age of 14
or 15 who murders her own language, let
alone English.
Simple little thing.
And how is God going to bring you
and this Gentile together?
But I tell you, there's something that happens
in intimate union.
I'm becoming less clever every day.
I look at my wife and I blink
my eyes and I marvel.
She's getting so smart.
She's the family treasurer.
She's the financier.
She takes me by the hand like an
idiot and watches over me.
And she says, of all the Jews, I
had to get you.
And the Malachites will tell you, she's getting
good looking.
She's taking driving lessons now.
I mean, what God is doing in this
girl's life is something phenomenal.
This is a girl who slept with a
light on all her life because she was
afraid of the dark.
Who twice attempted suicide in her adolescence.
Ravaged with fear and dark things.
And now in the light.
Gloriously breaking forth.
And oh, oh, oh, how God could bring
together such lives as this.
And I saw her taking driving lessons and
they came up with the car and I
saw behind the wheel, she had her hair,
she looked so beautiful and confident.
I said, is that my little finger?
We're getting to look like each other.
Pray for her nose, will you?
I'm joking, but I know that you understand.
It's a precious thing.
It's a wonderful thing.
God has called us to real relationship.
He's called us to real intimacy.
I think we're doing our young people a
disservice to go shh, shh, shh.
As if we're not supposed to speak about
this thing and maybe it's dirty.
When they have an intuitive sense in their
hearts that this is at the very heart
of life itself and it's the most profound
experience that's open to them.
Yes, it is.
Just as profound as that experience to which
God calls us to know Him in intimate
union.
Again and again.
It's life.
It's very life.
Where God isn't calling us to a religion.
He's not calling my Jewish people to be
converted.
To be introduced as former Jews.
He's calling us to union with our God
who is holy and righteous and just and
loving.
And I think one of the greatest compliments
that's been paid me on this trip.
I just came from Buffalo.
And a woman said, she said, I hope
you'll understand when I say this.
You've changed.
She said, I heard you two years ago,
she said.
And I appreciated your testimony.
I knew a guy had his hand on
you.
But there's something more tender about you now.
You're more loving and there's something much softer
in your nature and in your voice and
your life.
And I always want to turn away and
cry.
Praise God to take a piece of granite
like this, a hard, battered man and to
work and to conform him to the image
of His precious Son.
Every time I come to Him in abandonment,
naked, stripped, bare, delighting to see His face
and opening myself to the penetration of His
love.
I'm never again the same.
And He bids me come time and time
again.
And the rest in the arms of Him
who was coming for His bride without spot
and without blouse.
Hallelujah.
And is it not written that David dwelt
two full years in the city of Jerusalem?
And there was his son that saw in
his face not for a period of two
years.
And so the heart of my God yearns
for His and for their fellowship and for
their communion.
And He would cry unto thee by the
Spirit and would impress thee on the cry
and the yearning of His heart for His
people.
Think not that He is overwhelmed by thy
amount of activity and that that can satisfy
His deepest longings.
For the deepest longings of God can only
be met by the love of His people
and the time that is spent alone with
Him.
I have placed this word in the mouth
of my servant and I would speak to
thee tonight that there is a cry in
my heart for you and I would draw
thee.
Yea, I would permit thee to come before
me.
And in my presence thou shalt know this
union that has been described before thee tonight.
Pride not thyself in what thou hast done
but ask of thy God that you might
know Him in increasing intimacy.
For to this thou hast been called before
the foundation of the age that you would
know Him and take on His features and
the expressions of His own inner heart.
Oh, how...
to be spoken to by the living God.
You say, Art, what's the problem?
Why don't, why don't we just come to
the altar?
Why aren't the wedding bells pealing?
Why don't we hear the strains of the
organ?
Here comes the bride.
Why aren't there those who are eagerly coming
to such a wedding as this and such
a knowing as this and such an intimate
union as this?
I'll tell you that there's a little difference
between this wedding and the weddings that the
world knows.
No kosher catered affairs here.
No flash bulbs popping in faces here.
No best gobs and gowns here.
No stacks of wedding presents here.
There's only one place to be married to
the bridegroom and few there be that are
willing to come.
It's the cross of Christ Jesus.
It's Calvary.
And to perhaps the necessary circumstance of being
united with Christ really offends the world's taste.
After all, a dunghill of Calvary, a rude,
blood-spattered cross, a battered, despised bridegroom with
a visage marred more than any man will
hardly attract many away from the seductive world
to a union with him in his crucifixion,
in his death, in his burial, and in
his resurrection life.
Little wonder we see so little evidence of
those who live with him for there are
so few who are willing to die with
him.
But when we do, when we come to
that cross, every plastic, rigid, encrusted thing of
our heart and life snaps and breaks and
pops.
Out comes that flow of love, that resurrection
life, that ointment that God wants to pour
forth into the world to bring healing and
deliverance and salvation that the world might see
in our face the signs of the lover,
that light that comes, that gratification of a
heart that overflows from the love of him
because we've joined him in that one place
alone where he's to be met and where
we're to merge with him in his cross,
in his suffering, in his shame, in his
reproach, in his pain, in his death.
The hour is late, children, and the stakes
are too high to mistake our natural sociability
our natural gregariousness, our accidents of personality to
be somehow the expression of Christ in us.
There's a great deal of back-slapping in
Christianity, in full gospel circles and bear hugs,
but so too do the Rotarians and the
Elks and the American Legion.
We need something more authentic than that.
We need the love of him who is
love and who will transmit that love in
us and through us if we're willing to
come and be wedded to the Son of
the Living God.
How many of us are willing even to
open our own lives to each other?
How many of us are willing to sacrifice
leisure and privacy and reveal our secret lives
to each other, let alone lay down a
life for a friend?
How many of us can turn the other
cheek to each other, let alone to the
enemy?
And I've had many a sad experience in
the course of these weeks of speaking in
Pentecostal and other churches to see resentment, jealousies,
fears, every kind of separating influences in cold,
rigid churches where people are afraid to go
out of the same door for fear they'll
rub elbows and end a 15-year resentment.
God has called us to union, to an
openness one to another, to an interpenetration of
our lives and not to a Sunday potluck
supper Christian culture.
He's called us to intimacy and union and
life with Him first and then with each
other, walking in the light as He is
in the light.
There's a place of intimate union waiting for
each of us tonight.
It's the place of suffering and shame of
which we sing so often but cling so
rarely.
There's a God who's waiting for us to
join Him in a wedding.
Many in the world have called themselves by
His name and they have a technical certificate.
They were baptized in such and such a
time.
They belong to such and such a denomination.
But their lives betray them.
Their eyes are full of whoredom.
They fornicate in their hearts.
Their eyes are roving at the seductive and
blandishment things of the world.
They haven't affirmed with a hearty I do
their marriage vows.
They're not living like married men.
They're like those men who begrudge their wives
to take them to a movie and out
to a restaurant and give them ten bucks
for a hat and feel that maybe they
fulfilled their marital responsibility.
We can't treat our God in such a
way.
He hasn't called us to a hit and
miss and put a notch in our belt.
He's called us to a continuing, deepening, intimate
union and relationship with Him on the cross
of Christ Jesus.
I want to read in conclusion tonight just
these simple words.
The third chapter of Philippians where there's one
who speaks who knew this union perhaps better
than any man.
I am crucified with Christ, Paul said.
For me to live is Christ.
A man so caught up in the bridegroom,
he had no life unto himself.
He had no impulses unto himself.
He had no concern unto himself.
He doted and waited on and meditated and
contemplated and had a heart sensitive to wait
until here to receive the leading of the
Spirit of Him to whom he was wedded
on that cross.
And therefore, it was that life that was
poured forth to establish the churches in the
Western world.
It was that life that came through that
personality to give us half the New Testament.
And we read in the third chapter in
the eighth verse, I count all things for
loss for the excellency of the knowledge of
the knowing of that intimate union with Christ
Jesus, my Lord, for whom I have suffered
the loss of all things and do count
them but done that I may win Christ
and be found in Him.
I stand at the door of your heart
and knock if any man hear my voice
and open to me.
I will come in.
None of this superficial stuff of lives gliding
off one another.
In, penetrating in a permanent, continual presence of
merging lives, interpenetrating one with the other.
And attend first that I may know Him
and the power of His resurrection and the
fellowship of His sufferings being made conformable unto
His death.
There's a God who's called us and is
calling us in this last hour to a
union of such intimacy, such depth, such love
that can come only on the cross of
Christ Jesus, only in the fellowship of His
sufferings.
Have you heard the call of the bridegroom?
Have you heard that heavenly appeal?
Here comes the bridegroom.
There's a God who's seeking for those who
will affirm their marriage vows this night.
They've not come to light flirtation.
They've not come to mere technical relationship.
They've been called to a union, to a
coming again and again in a vital joining
and a merger with that one who is
the off-scouring of the world.
The world's reproach, the shame, the one who's
waiting, that battered bridegroom, visage marred more than
any man, to those who will embrace Him
and be joined with Him in His suffering,
in His crucifixion, in His death, in His
burial, and in, praise God, His resurrection.
I'm going to ask my brother Charlie to
come and sing the song that breaks my
heart every time I hear him sing it.
I heard him sing it first as an
unbeliever, and it was the cry of a
man whose heart was hungering for some kind
of union with the ground of being and
with the God of all this world.
He sings the same song now, but it
comes out as the song of one who's
a bride, one who has come into that
infinite union, who knows Him and who loves
Him.
I want you to hear that song tonight,
and I want you to hear it as
a wedding invitation, a wedding march.
We hardly have any room here at the
front.
I don't know what to do or how
to invite you, but I just ask you
maybe just to, as you hear this song
being played and you've heard the voice of
the Spirit of our God calling us to
intimate union, you want to affirm your wedding
vow this night, even unto death, even unto
the fellowship of the sufferings.
Will you just stand up and find a
place to the front of this room, stand
by the sides of the wall, stand in
the aisles, stand for the invitation of the
bridegroom, the soon-coming King, who will come
for a bride without spot, without blemish, who
will give us that reward, that heavenly wedding
supper, with Him, for all eternity.