Good morning, dear saints.
If I look in any way fresh, it's
a deception.
I'm altogether crumpled, tired, uninspired, uninstructed, feeling and
finding my way, and yet cherishing this final
occasion, I can't tell you how deeply, not
to miss the mind of the Lord in
any particular.
The issue is not to find what is
good, but to find what is perfect.
There are a lot of good things, tested,
given things, but what is the appropriate and
intended word for the conclusion of these days,
as if it were once and for all
and will not be given again?
You would think that for that a man
would need a full night's sleep.
The marvel is, if I've had any, but
that there's a necessity that I would stand
before you in a kind of crumpled condition
because I can tell you that when you'll
be called upon to give a climactic final
moment of utter and eternal significance, you're not
going to feel any better than I'm feeling
presently, and you'll have to be obedient in
the want of vim and vinegar, strength and
inspiration that you think you ought to have
to the uttermost because the moment is so
critical, but you'll have at least.
You'll have to be obedient in your weakness,
and so I'm required as prophetic man, not
only to speak, but to demonstrate the thing
to which you yourself are called.
So even here we're talking in the car,
what shall be said and how shall we
conclude and what text, and I'm not even
sure now, though moments away from having to
open my mouth.
So Lord, our confidence is in you.
If we're jealous for this conclusion, for this
finale, as if it will never again be
our privilege, what ought to be spoken, Lord,
in your so great wisdom who alone knows
the end from the beginning, you know the
destiny, my God, of the church and this
expression in this city and in this nation,
what ought to be spoken, Lord, and how?
Come have all the more opportunity to express
yourself because I'm in a condition of weakness,
because my mind is fuzzy, because I can't
humanly put it together, exhibit, my God, your
wonderful grace, that resurrection power and life for
which these children will be called to fulfill
in their weakness what it is that you're
setting before them in mine and we thank
you for the mystery of it and your
provision through it and your wonderful grace that
as one who has gone before in exactly
this way for you are crucified in weakness.
So we thank you and give you praise
for this conclusion now, Lord, let every word
be a sword and a dagger, every piece
of punctuation, your accent, your voice, the disposition
of your heart and mind, that nothing, my
God, will fall to the ground, we'll cherish
it, we promise and thank you for the
privilege of it in Jesus' name, amen.
Well, it would almost be criminal to have
passed through these days and not one time
to speak to you out of Romans 11.
Are you aware what Romans 11 signifies for
the Apostle Paul?
It is his very heart.
Are you aware what the book of Romans
signifies for the Apostle Paul?
It is the most systematic statement of his
whole apostolic creed, of his whole perception of
the faith and of reality.
The book of Romans is classic beyond all
estimation and scholars have rightly said that chapters
1 through 8 are the preliminary for 9
through 11, which is the heart, and that
12 through 16 is the aftermath, the working
out, the application of what is spoken as
the centerpiece, which is Romans 9 through 11,
the subject of the mystery of Israel and
the church.
Can you imagine what a statement it is
of God's wisdom that the church that is
Gentile would take to its heart this great
burden and this great mystery, not just as
an aspect of its consideration or concern, but
the very heart of its purpose, call, and
being.
That a Gentile church should be preoccupied with
the destiny and fate of a Jewish nation
is a remarkable statement to the principalities and
powers of the air who preside over mankind
in that premise that men are only goaded
and provoked by their self-interest and will
only seek what pertains to themselves, their pleasure,
their security, and all the rest.
God wants to bring that false wisdom down,
not only to contradict it, but only to
destroy it, because it has made of captive
nations and races of men who live for
number one, for themselves, their security, their self
-interest, their satisfaction, as an unspoken premise that
this is the principle for life, that if
you have any kind of reason, you know
that you take care of number one first,
and if you have anything left over, you
might consider a bit of philanthropy and altruism.
But God contradicts all that and says that
the utterness of the divine wisdom is a
consideration other than yourself, contrary to yourself, that
not only does not promote your self-interest,
but threatens it.
And so I can tell you with confidence,
anyone who will take up Paul's burden of
the mystery of Israel through the church in
the last days makes himself an especial candidate
for suffering.
The powers of darkness will hate this determination
on your part, not only because you're Gentile,
but because you're Chinese, because you're Oriental, because
you're Asian, which is to say, you're the
least ones from whom anyone would expect some
kind of identification with that Semitic people in
the other part of the world whose representative
is standing before you.
Why should you have any affinity for the
Jew, any interest in the destiny of that
nation, all the more when its track record
stinks, when the Lord himself acknowledges that you
have blasphemed my name in every nation where
I have sent you, where I have cast
you in judgment, and now in these last
days you're even doing it in the land
that you presently occupy.
And you'll continue to do it until I
bring that final last day sifting a judgment
by which the great majority of you will
not survive and the remnant will constitute the
redeemed nation who returns to Zion with everlasting
joy upon their heads, sighing and mourning, passing
away.
So will you take my word for it,
you dear saints?
I know that this is a strange subject.
You're not acquainted, but I want to introduce
it.
I want, by the grace of God, to
sound a theme.
There's no way that we can begin to
develop this.
This takes a three, five-day seminar, at
least, to dwell upon this and draw this
out.
What I'm hoping for in the brevity of
time, which means shortness, that the theme will
so be sounded that it will ruin you,
that it will haunt you.
It will come back into your thought, your
consciousness, Israel.
Why should we be preoccupied?
It's as distant and as remote a subject
and a concern as could ever be put
before us as Asian Christians.
And yet if we don't take it up,
we will contradict the very mystery that was
at the heart of the great apostle's consideration,
that to remove this from Paul is to
remove Paul.
And what are we if we do not
reflect and take to our heart what was
central to him?
What is the church if it's not built
upon the foundation of the apostles and the
prophets?
So we want to probe and feel and
identify and grasp what pulsated in this great
apostle's heart?
What was given to him as revelation over
which he was a steward of the mystery?
And nowhere else does he say, brethren, my
desire is that you should not be ignorant
of this mystery lest you become wise in
your own conceit.
There's no other place where he warns that
the loss of a mystery will have any
negative consequence except here.
To lose this mystery, not to obtain it,
opens you to consequences that are undesirable and
change and threaten the entire character of the
church itself.
He said, I would not have you to
be ignorant of this mystery lest you become
wise in your own conceit.
Something pompous, something inflated, some swelling up of
your Christian egotism will necessarily follow the absence
of the lack of this mystery.
This mystery is calculated to temper you, to
humble you, to bring you into a sense
of God in the majesty of his mind
and will, because Paul ends this remarkable statement
in Romans 11 with three verses that are
the most magnificent, poetic paean of praise to
God stated anywhere in the whole corpus of
the Bible, Old or New Testament.
There's no greater ecstatic statement that stretches language
to breaking than Paul's spontaneous eruption at the
end of his final statement in Romans 11.
Oh, the depth of the riches, both of
the wisdom and knowledge of God.
The man is staggered.
He is reeling.
His breath fails him.
Oh, the depth of the riches.
What has he seen that he would exclaim
something so ecstatically that it defies language to
comprehend?
Who has been his counselor?
Who has given to him?
And it shall be given again for of
him and through him and to him are
all things to whom be glory forever.
You dear saints, if you trifle with this,
if you think that Paul is employing only
a little piece of flourish and rhetoric, some
stylistic thing to end his remarkable statement in
Romans 11 with the glory of God forever
because it has a nice lofty sound, you
are condemned.
You're a short-changing God.
You're crippling yourself.
You're losing the heart and nub and genius
of apostolicity itself is the only issue of
the glory of God forever.
Don't you understand?
And then we'll, if we don't, if we
miss what Paul is saying and why he's
ecstatic and why he concludes like that, we
turn the word glory into a piece of
traffic.
We make it a little piece of convenient
verbalism that we can write, put into our
choruses, our songs, talk to pray, but we
don't know what it means.
It doesn't pierce us through.
We don't understand the, the ultimacy of the
word glory, which is at the heart of
church that is church.
It's very purposeful being beyond any and every
other consideration of any benefit that it derives
from believing is the purpose pertaining to the
glory of God.
If I can only make that point, if
I can only sink that home, if I
can only drive it into your corporate consciousness
and into your deeps, I will heave a
sigh of relief and feel that I have
discharged my obligation toward you.
The church that is not jealous for the
glory of God is ipso facto, not the
church.
It can call itself that it can have
services and programs and all the rest, but
it has lost its apostolic distinctive.
It has lost its reason for being.
And how, how, how do we understand this?
The glory of God, that the phrase itself
defies every concept.
We can't even summon humanly an understanding, let
alone an appropriation of a phrase like the
glory of God forever.
So I want to tell you flat out
that there's no way that you can even
aspire to it or consider it unless it
is given you by the grace of God.
Isn't it a remarkable contradiction that we can't
live for the jealousy of the glory, except
that the God himself communicates something of the
substance and spirit and meaning of that word
that we're dependent upon him even to catch
some sense of the thing, which is to
be central to our own reason for being.
That's why he says, for of him and
through him and to him are all things
to whom be glory forever.
I'm pleading with you to wrestle with that,
that Paul is not just going on a
flight of fancy and getting poetic to bring
a nice lofty sounding conclusion to a great
epistle.
This is the heart, the genius of what
is apostolic because it recognizes that the remarkableness
of our call, the ultimacy is so beyond
our ability even to understand it, let alone
to fulfill it, because it's of him.
It's not from our cats or any man,
however clever.
This is of him, this mystery that no
man could have conceived that there is a
relationship in God's wisdom between the Jewish people,
that nation that is despised.
And even now, stirring the hatred of the
world toward it, which will increase in torrents,
it'll be an antisemitic inundation worldwide.
They will be the most hated and despised
of all peoples like the Lord before them.
And you're going to be identified with them
in those last days?
It'll threaten your future.
It'll mock you.
It'll make you an object for persecution because
whoever hates them and wants to drive them
into the sea and to obliterate them once
and for all and blame them for every
malady and failure of world and society will
bring upon you some measure of that same
vitriolic hatred as upon them if you're seen
to be in any way sympathetic toward them
or identifying with them or willing to extend
yourself for them when they are universally hated
and despised and looked upon as the enemies
of mankind.
Got the picture?
That you should yet be willing to suffer
that risk and count it privilege to identify
with a people who in no way have
ever done anything for you for which you
have received the benefit and yet you're willing
at the sacrifice and peril of your own
life and family to be so identified with
them whom you have never even seen in
the flesh?
That's a mystery.
That's an extraordinary phenomenon that can only be
understood out of the counsels of the wisdom
of God which Paul being the apostle that
he is and the steward of his mysteries
has seen.
Not to see it, dear saints, is to
condemn us to charismatica, is to condemn us
to predictable services oriented for our enjoyment, our
pleasure.
They're good.
It's biblical.
It brings a dimension of something that is
desired but it falls short of the glory
for of him, this mystery, only God could
have conceived it in the divine mind.
This reciprocal relationship between not only two different
kinds of people but peoples who have been
in historic enmity throughout the whole chronicle of
the ages, the Jew and the Gentile.
I know you don't know anything about that.
Will you take my word for it?
That I grew up as a Jewish boy
in a Jewish home with a Jewish mother
who when she was a kid in London,
England and they had to take swimming, her
Gentile teacher threw her into the pool and
said, sink or swim, you fat Jew.
My mother in her 90s still remembered that
and never forgave that Gentile insult.
Jews carry with them a history of the
enmity of the Gentile world against them.
Where have they been safe?
In what nation in the world where there
have been aliens and cast out?
At what moment would the bottom fall out
even when they achieve a measure of security
and then suddenly something turns, as in Germany,
and they become the object for annihilation.
You can't understand how deep and savage has
been the history of enmity, fear, suspicion between
Jews and the Gentile world.
And yet God says in his mystery that
there's a necessary relationship between a Gentile church
and this people so necessary that if you
don't enter it consciously and willfully, even though
there are a few Jews in your midst
to whom you can demonstrate this presently, you
forfeit the possibility of the fulfillment for yourself
as church.
The issue of what you are as church
is altogether related and totally identified with this
people.
You cannot even understand yourself as church or
fulfill your purpose as church if you have
not the consciousness of the intended relationship with
that people.
Nor can they come to the fulfillment of
God's intention for them independent of you.
And that's humbling for any Jew who wants
to make it alone and independent and show
himself morally and in every way superior.
God in his wisdom has created these differences
that requires a reconciliation, a union, an identification,
which only he can affect.
He calls us to the impossible.
With man this is impossible, but with God?
So then why cats are you bursting your
jugular vein to communicate this if it's but
God?
Do we just lean back and sit and
wait for the magic of his performance?
No.
There's a required participation of a conscious willful
kind.
It's an agreement to pay for this and
sacrifice because what is the first verse after
Romans 11?
Brethren, therefore I beseech you make of your
bodies a living sacrifice as an altogether proper
worship unto the Lord.
What is that?
What is he saying?
This is not going to be fulfilled by
sitting on our haunches.
This is going to require ultimate sacrifice, which
is your proper service, or it cannot be
fulfilled.
And how many times have I used now
already the word ultimate?
How many times have you ever used it?
I would bet dollars to doughnuts, American idiom,
that there's hardly a soul in this room
who has ever once breathed the word ultimate
or has spoken about ultimacy.
And yet the prophetic heart cries out for
that word, especially because if we will not
be ultimate in the intention of God, we
will be predictable, ordinary, mundane, mediocre.
And that is a contradiction in terms because
unto him be glory in the church, not
mediocrity.
Got the picture?
You would sink into a necessary mediocrity of
predictability of religion as a Sunday addendum where
your first purpose is really the success of
your career and the attainment of your education
and the finding of a wife or a
husband and having family in a nice home
and car, et cetera, et cetera.
You would necessarily go the way of all
flesh if God in his mercy had not
just called you to religion, but to ultimacy,
to things beyond your ability that requires an
ultimate sacrifice, an ultimate determination, an ultimate understanding,
an ultimate jealousy for the glory of God,
which itself is an ultimate subject.
And the heck of it is this, you
can't even perform that by yourself.
It is of such a nature and kind
that it requires corporate fulfillment or no fulfillment
at all.
That's why he had you out here on
the floor the other night, you young ones,
because unless you are incorporated in those purposes
and come early to the recognition of the
ultimacy of your call and destiny in him,
we older ones cannot fulfill it without you.
We're in something together.
Those that believe we're together is more than
being alongside each other in chairs, looking up
at a platform and enjoying the service.
The whole issue of the church is the
issue of this mystery, its comprehension and its
fulfillment, which is of him.
But if it's of him, it must necessarily
be through him.
All of your well-meaning intention, all of
your brittle ability, well-meaning clever.
You did well in school, now you'll do
well in church.
You'll fulfill this mystery out of your capability.
No way.
This is so requiring, so ultimate that has
been conceived of him, that it can only
be fulfilled through him.
That's why I'm in my crumpled condition this
morning, because the speaking itself of the mystery
cannot issue out of human expertise and ability,
not even human energy.
It's got to be through him or not
at all.
Even the proclamation of the mystery, the setting
forth of it has got to be through
him, through his life, through his power, through
the resurrection reality, which is at the heart
of the whole genius of the faith, and
not just the expediency by which Jesus was
removed from his tomb and elevated to the
right hand of God.
Resurrection through him, which means that you are
now under obligation to move from the mere
acknowledgement of the truth of resurrection as doctrine
to the appropriation of resurrection as the, the
Germans have a good word, they always do,
the ursprung, the motivation, the animation, the spring
of life itself.
But I know that I know there's hardly
one of you in the room that have
ever tasted that reality.
Though you thought you had done God's service
by acknowledging the truth of it as doctrine.
You've got to live through the resurrection.
You've got to live through that life, through
that power, through its enablement, which is given
all the more opportunity in weakness, which is
to the human flesh, humiliating everything that is
human in this wants to strive on the
basis of our ability, our strength, our clarity,
our clear headedness.
We've got it together.
God will never allow the greatness of his
mysteries to be fulfilled even so much as
in I order from that which springs out
of man himself with man.
It is impossible.
That's why it's to the glory of God,
you dear saints, that he should triumph in
the fulfillment of this extravagant vision to resurrect
a nation being brought to a death as
the consequence of its own sinful rejection of
its own God, the breaking of its own
covenants that has every reason to be forsaken
of God and cast away and discredited.
That's why the first question that Paul takes
up in Romans 11, has God cast away
his people whom he has foreknown?
The church thinks that he should have, but
every reckoning they've had their opportunity and blown
it.
Now let the church take over and be
the Israel of God.
He says, God forbid that you should think
that.
That would be your natural tendency to replace
Israel as if they're finished and have had
their chance and have blown it and have
full opportunity because that's total human worldly reasoning.
But God is God when he extends mercy
to whom he will extend mercy, not because
they're deserving, but all the more because they
are undeserving.
Because what does mercy mean?
It's not something that is obtained on one's
merit.
It's exactly to those who have no merit,
have no deserving, because when God extends mercy,
he's being who he is in himself.
I am that I am, and I will
have mercy upon whom I will have mercy.
I will elect whom I will elect.
And the way that in which I show
myself in the utter sovereignty of my own
will that can never be conditioned by man
or by need is by choosing a nation
where you, which least deserves this consideration.
And in that do I display the genius
of who I am, as I am that
I am.
And if I can do this with Jews,
with Israel that has blasphemed my name in
every nation, failed again and again in covenant
faithfulness, and even now a totally secular nation
that is not even willing to consider me
in view of their impending destruction, then there's
hope for any people and any nation anywhere.
The issue of Israel is the issue of
God, as the issue of the communication of
that which alone can be hope for the
nations who will observe both Israel's judgment, uprooting,
casting out and restoration and return by the
mercy of God.
That's why he says in Romans 11, by
your mercy, they may obtain mercy.
How many of you dear precious Chinese saints
have mercy to extend?
Where will you find it?
It's not a commodity.
It's not an abstract aspect of our credo,
but there's got to be a palpable substantial
mercy, which is the very character of God
exuded by Chinese, Singaporean, Asian saints to Jews
who will be coming into your midst in
greater numbers than you could ever imagine, who
have been uprooted from nations elsewhere in the
world and will find their way here somehow
in the mystery of God, because he says
in Amos chapter 9, I will sift you
through all nations.
And not the least of the reason for
that sifting is to sift you.
What will you do if you will find
them in your midst, uprooted, disheveled, unkempt, cast
out, broken in spirit, absolutely disheveled in not
knowing what hit them, because when it comes,
it will come suddenly.
And what are they doing in your part
of the world?
How did they get here?
By some process of God.
God knows.
He said, I will sift you through all
nations so that in the day of my
judgment, I will separate in the nations the
sheep and the goats.
Over one question, what did you do with
the least of these, my brethren?
I want to announce in whatever measure authority
I have as a prophetic servant of the
Most High, that this will be your test.
This will not be an abstraction, and it
will come in your generation and your time.
The conditions for it are already working and
it is at the door.
They themselves don't know it.
There's going to be an upheaval of a
kind that could hardly be imagined after the
Nazi Holocaust that will eclipse the Nazi Holocaust
and bring the devastation greater than that by
which six million Jews were systematically annihilated in
Europe.
But now the extent of this of which
Jesus spoke in Matthew 24, that there's coming
a trouble for the nation such as exceeds
anything that they have ever previously known nor
will again know.
And if that time were not cut short,
no flesh will survive.
But for the elect's sake, for the surviving
remnant, that time will be cut short, whatever
that means.
I want to tell you, if I know
anything, if I am anything in God, that
is future.
But it's a near future.
And I think the only thing that prevents
its eruption now is your unpreparedness.
Everything is in place for Jewish catastrophe.
But the church is not yet ready to
receive them and to extend mercy that they
may obtain mercy, because the church only knows
mercy as a category, only as an abstraction,
only as an article of faith.
It does not know it substantially as a
palpable reality.
So how can it extend it?
You know what's happening to me right now
with my headache and condition?
I am experiencing the mercy of God.
Can you see it?
I should be in bed or some other
place where you put old withering men.
But if you're receiving anything and it's so
critical that you will or you will be
doomed to being just another expression of church
as it is conventionally known, but performing it
a little better than your neighbor.
God has a greater destiny for you or
I would not be here.
I would be someplace else.
I'm here because his eye is upon you,
because he's seen the investment, the preparation, the
intention, because you're ready and prepared for a
word now by which you can come of
age.
God forbid that you should only be a
successful Christian work.
God forbid.
He has greater intention than that, you dear
saints, that touches the issue of forever.
How does Paul end?
That of him, through him, and to him
are all things to whom be glory forever.
So I don't know about you Chinese, because
there's something about ancestor worship.
Are you better prepared than Caucasians, than Occidental
to understand eternality of things that lie beyond
time, beyond the present moment, and that the
present moment, though it seems so engaging and
so total, is only a transient thing and
a time of preparation for that which is
eternal?
Brother Ott, you sound like you're right out
of the Middle Ages.
Isn't that what they thought, that this life
is a veil of tears and a time
of preparation, and it's all for that which
is future and eternal?
Yes, and they were right.
It's you moderns who are all wrong.
You've bought a bill of goods from the
wisdom of the world that has its origin
from the pit, that says this life is
what it's all about.
Success now, your life, you only live once.
Your marriage isn't happy?
Well, dump her and try, try again, because
there's only the one life that you have
now.
This is the now generation, instant.
Boy, have you been deluded.
So the word forever needs to come into
your consciousness, not just as a category, but
as a pulsating central consideration that brings the
now moment into its present perspective that is
appropriate in God's sight, or else you will
be slaves, victims, jerked, manipulated, palpitating for a
Toyota or something even a little better.
Why not?
This is only the one life, and how
is it measured, and how is it satisfactions
obtained?
By what you possess, what you own, what
you use.
The only thing that will free you from
the power of now is the consideration of
that which is eternal.
You'll never be a great expression of the
body of Christ until eternity has come into
your heart, as pastor himself spoke and prayed
this morning.
And how do you obtain it?
How even the consciousness of it only in
conjunction with the mystery of Israel and never
independent from it or apart from it.
God in his wisdom has locked you in.
You're doomed to be merely charismatic and only
successful unless you take into your deepest consideration
what Paul took into his, the mystery of
Israel and the church in the last days.
You cannot be eternally minded and glory forever
conscious independent of that mystery.
It's all wrapped up together.
He'll not allow you to have it separately
except as vocabulary.
But if you're going to have it actually
and existentially, it's only in conjunction where he
has set the mystery himself.
Am I getting too fancy?
Sorry about that.
But you'll have the tape to ponder and
the pastor and others to elaborate the foundational
premises that must come to you through prophetic
man, because it has to do with your
foundations.
Well, let's begin with the beginning of Paul's
great mystery.
Chapter nine, just to show you the remarkable
sweep of this, that ends with an exclamation
of unparalleled praise.
We need to begin where Paul begins with
unparalleled sorrow.
Don't you think this is accidental?
You think Paul plotted this?
No, he was only writing to the church
at home.
He never thought it would be in the
Bible.
And not only is it in the Bible,
but it's a text central to the consideration
of the church of every age and every
location, especially the church of the last days.
Are you that church?
Are you last days conscious?
Do you think that we're moving toward the
end, the consummation of the ages?
Are you expecting apocalyptic fury of the powers
of darkness who know they have but a
short time and will ventilated in the earth
and seek to destroy this people?
Why?
Because if this people succeeds after ages long
apostasy of a return to Zion and to
the God of Jacob, then the king who
is contained in the heavens in Acts 321,
waiting for the restoration of all things spoke
by the prophets since the world began, is
released to be the king at Zion on
the holy hill, where God says, I have
set my king on the holy hill of
Zion, and I've given him the nations and
the heathen for his inheritance.
Where am I quoting?
Psalm 2, the great eschatological psalm that speaks
of a very literal kingdom and rule in
the one place in earth where it is
appointed, which we would not ourselves have chosen.
And that one place is Zion, that one
place is Israel, not as it is presently
constituted, but as it will be when the
Lord will restore them and renew covenant with
them in an everlasting way and give them
his holy spirit and forgive them their iniquities
in the day of their restoration.
After they have been rescued and saved out
of death by the mercy that they have
received through you.
Isn't it remarkable?
Just as there's no greater exclamation of praise.
They call it a paen, p-a-e
-n of praise at the end of Romans
11, 33 through 36.
And if you provoke me, I'll sing it.
That'll be memorable.
But isn't it remarkable?
That's something that ends with this ecstatic statement
that where Paul is beside himself in joy,
in the depth and riches of what he
has seen, of the wisdom and knowledge of
God, because he has seen something more than
Israel's own restoration.
What has he seen that makes him flip
out?
He has seen the transfiguration of the church,
a bride prepared for the bridegroom through the
conditions that will bring the church to its
final maturity and preparedness for its own eternal
destiny as the bride of the lamb by
the crisis brought to it through Israel.
Don't get scared.
I'm not expecting you to understand me.
But I am under obligation to speak this.
Later on, it will come into your consciousness
and into your understanding.
Now you can just look bewildered.
This is the prophetic predicament, which itself is
a suffering and a cross and a form
of death because what speaker does not want
to be gratified by being understood?
But after 40 years, I still have a
wife who is scratching her head.
And what kind of husband has she got
who never wanted to marry a preacher?
And if she had to, why can't you
tell jokes like the others?
So there's
always a necessary suffering that precedes a glory.
But we need to give at least a
few moments.
The remarkable way in which Paul opens the
heart of the book of Romans for which
everything now from chapter 1 through 8 was
preparation and now commences the elaboration of the
great mystery from 9 through 11 and ends
with this ecstatic outburst of praise.
But it begins with the most pathetic cry
of sorrow for his people to the point
where he would wish himself accursed.
I say the truth in Christ.
I'm not playing acting.
I'm not putting on a performance.
I'm not getting dramatic, Paul is saying.
I lie not my conscience, also bearing me
witness in the Holy Ghost.
God knows he's looking upon me.
I'm not affecting something.
I'm not getting sentimental schmaltzy.
I'm not getting emotional for effect.
This is deep in my apostolic consciousness and
needs to be so in ours that I
have great heaviness and continual sorrow in my
heart for I could wish that myself were
accursed from Christ for my brethren, my kinsmen
according to the flesh.
Listen, dear saints, unless the issue of Israel
begins with this cry, the rest cannot follow.
There cannot be the great climax or the
depth of the riches of joyous exclamation unless
it begins with the depth of this sorrow.
And this saves you from shallowness.
You're such candidates for shallowness like I've not
seen anywhere.
What is it about you in this Singaporean
culture and civilization for which I am the
antithesis that is calculated for your shallowness, for
your reduction, to make you either objects of
commerce and trade, employment to fit into the
economy?
As I was being told yesterday, so many
places for those who will become engineers or
lawyers or doctors according to the need of
the society.
I said, how many Singaporean students take liberal
arts as their major, philosophy, English, literature, ethics,
morality?
I'll bet there's not one in 10,000
who would misspend a university education for the
luxury of a subject realm that has nothing
to do with personal success.
You're on a train, you're on a track,
you're being groomed for use, for exploitation, to
fit into the economy, to produce it and
to buy it.
And shallowness aids in that purpose.
It's a society that doesn't want you to
be reflective and contemplative, let alone that you
should experience sorrow.
It may mean that you'll not be effective
on the job or your computer will get
gummed up.
I'm almost saying, hey, better than this, return
to Confucius.
Better that you should become shallow Christians, at
least become Confucian in an attention to philosophy
if it will save you from inevitable shallowness.
God didn't call you to be one-dimensional
cutouts, paper mache saints.
He's called you to reveal his glory in
the breath, which is of God himself, in
our emotion and our thought and our conduct.
So it's no accident that the great apostle
begins with the deepest expression of sorrow, which
isn't pleasant to experience.
Or you say, well, that's Paul.
Of course he's Jewish.
Of course he's going to feel sorrow for
his own kinsmen according to the flesh, but
that saves me from any necessity because I'm
not Jewish.
See how simple you are?
You think that Paul is crying out because
he's Jewish.
You've not understood.
He's crying out because he's apostolic.
It's his apostolic heart that is full of
sorrow for the condition of his people that
he would wish himself accursed for those who
happen to be his brethren, but he would
be equally as grieved and sorrowful if it
were pygmies that God had appointed to be
the people of his choice and the fulfillment
of his kingdom.
Am I threatening your insurance policy?
Okay.
I have fallen off of platforms.
Listen, you dear saints, are you following me?
If you have no intention for apostolic reality,
if you're content with mere religiosity, I'll shut
up right now.
Why listen to this spectacle unless you have
an intention that is ultimate?
It'll save you from being merely Chinese and
Singaporean.
Ultimacy will save you from being one-dimensional
predictable cutouts who say the right thing and
sing the right thing but are not the
right thing.
This is not going to be a sending
nation and the Antioch to the world and
to Asia unless there are those who can
be sent from a sending body.
That's the genius of the word.
Apostolos has sent ones but not sent from
predictability or mediocrity or ordinariness, sent from a
vibrant community of believers who are jealous for
the glory of God and have taken to
their hearts a mystery for which there's no
natural explanation that they should even be interested,
let alone absorbed.
There'll be no sending.
There'll be no Holy Spirit saying separate unto
me unless you have come to a reality
of a kind that Paul describes in his
epistles and he was in himself.
For the apostolic man as the prophetic man
is the thing in himself.
It's not an affectation.
It's not an overlay.
It's not a professionalism.
It's not learning a new lingo, a new
vocabulary, new phrases to show yourself pert and
clever.
It's ultimate reality.
Do you know why?
Because the high priest of our confession is
also our apostle.
He's the chief apostle of our confession because
he's also the high priest.
And his glory is when he is replicated
and expressed in the corporate body that shows
forth the same mercy, magnanimity, breadth of understanding,
jealousy for the will of the Father, the
glory of God unto sacrifice, unto death.
It's his intention through the church.
I almost wanted to say, if you have
no heart for this, please leave now.
Let's not clog up the works with too
many bodies.
Let's reduce the church to the church that
is the church, God's remnant people who are
serious about his glory and honor and name
and know that it's got to cost something.
The loss of career, the loss of marriage,
the loss of body like who knows what
in what form.
The last days are going to be tumultuous
in the clash of kingdoms.
There will be casualties.
Martyrdom is not the rarity of something that
falls upon a few that we cluck our
tongues and heave a sigh of relief, it's
not me.
Martyrdom is the normative intention of God for
all the church.
If the church is not a martyr church,
it's not the church.
It doesn't matter how we actually end our
lives.
Martyrdom is not a conclusion that comes unhappily
in a way that we would try to
avoid.
It's the logic of a life lived in
a certain way that is sacrificial and martyr
in its very composition, mentality, and genius.
Lord, Lord, grace, grace, Lord, that my faith
fail not.
As I look out on these precious faces
that are looking at me in unbelief like,
what is that man saying?
Here's what I'm saying.
You don't have to be Jewish to sorrow
for Israel.
It's not because Paul is Jewish that he's
having this deep sense of grief.
It's because he's an apostle.
He's expressing his apostolic heart, which is to
say the heart of God.
The apostolic heart is God's very heart of
concern and anguish for this people.
And if we'll not have it for them,
for whom will we have it?
Do I have to indict you as I
did those German students a few days ago
when my first statement was to them after
hearing their Christian choruses and they got it
all together?
You lack a tragic sense of life.
I don't see in you any disposition to
sorrow.
You're shallow.
The range of your emotion is happy, happy,
happy, and maybe you'll have a bad day,
but you don't know the depths of the
anguish of soul of a Paul.
How then shall you be able to recite
with meaning the glory of the conclusion or
the depth of the riches?
The two are profoundly connected.
One is the beginning, the other the end.
You cannot come to a place of joy
without beginning in a place of sorrow.
Are you willing to know grief, pain, sorrow,
the heart of God, which is painful to
experience?
But if you don't begin there, there'll be
no ending of that kind.
And it's the mystery of Israel that brings
you in.
This is your privilege.
This is the mystery itself to save you
from being merely Singaporean.
Can you see it?
This is why the church is so distinctive
an entity in the world because it expresses
the range and magnificence of very God himself
in its capacity both for pain and sorrow
and grief and exclamation and joy and ecstatic
reverence.
That's living, saints.
That range of response is living, and anything
less than that is falling short of the
intention of God for our humanity.
And the heck of it is, as history
shows, if we'll not come into the fullness
of this apostolic intention, we will become instruments
not of life but of death.
The great nation of Germany, however unequaled the
level of its civilization, became the brutal, bestial
engineers of factories of death through which Jews
were passed.
Isn't that remarkable?
That if we'll not be the one, we'll
be the other?
If we'll not extend mercy, we'll deprive them
of mercy?
If we'll not be larger than life, we'll
be less than life?
And it is all centered in one mystery,
the issue of Israel, the Jew, the despised
nation who have no sense of their own
calling and don't even know that the gifts
and callings of God, as Paul says in
Romans 11, are irrevocable.
They'll not be taken back.
It's without repentance.
What does that mean?
That God is obliged to fulfill it.
That even though they want to be the
Hong Kong of the Middle East, God has
a greater intention, to be a nation of
priests and a light unto the world, despite
and against their own unwillingness even to consider
such a destiny.
Can he succeed with the people who are
not even willing?
Yes, because he's God, because he's powerful, and
because he's willing to bring them down that
he might raise them up.
Because he said to their father Abraham, that
from your seed I'm going to form a
people who will bless all the families of
the earth.
You think you're blessed now?
You ain't seen nothing yet.
When this nation will come into its destiny
as a nation of priests and a light
unto the world, it will disperse over the
earth, art catses in every place.
You call that blessing, brother?
There is a quotient, there's a dimension you're
receiving.
You're too young and innocent, maybe too dumb
to know it, but it's still being expressed.
So unique, you don't know how unique.
After I'm gone, you'll appreciate it.
Send me a note.
Now you're too young.
Nevertheless, it's being expressed.
We branches who have been broken off, Jewish
atheists, ex-Marxists, radical, anti-God, were saved
by the mercy of God because one of
my students and her mother were praying for
this atheist teacher.
And the hound of heaven pursued me for
14 months through Europe and the Middle East
as I'm looking for philosophical and ideological answers
for a broken life and revealing himself by
every believer who picked me up off the
side of the road and the one who
put the New Testament into my hands to
which God gave me a revelation in the
first reading.
I'm grafted back into my own root, saints.
And Paul says, how much more when they,
the natural branches, are grafted back into their
own root and God is able to graft
them in again.
You'll not appreciate that unless you realize what
Paul is saying when he describes you as
wild branches that were grafted into our root.
Did you know that?
All you would have been capable of is
chop-suey places and, you know, commerce if
you had not been grafted in.
Now something new is flowing out of the
sap of life from that root that gives
you a larger vista for the use of
your life than you would otherwise have had.
You would have been unhappily Chinese all to
Chinese, human all to human.
But now you're grafted in to a remarkable
tree that has a Hebraic history.
The patriarchs, the prophets, the psalmists, the apostles
and whose roots are in God and the
sap that issues from the roots and come
up into the trunk and branches is the
very life of God.
Or else you would be pathetic dum-dums.
And I'll tell you what, you're only enjoying
that life to the degree that you're conscious
that you've been grafted in to somebody else's
tree and you're grateful for the privilege.
It'll only flow to the degree of your
acknowledgement and your gratitude.
But if you're only merely Christians who got
saved and don't realize the dimensions of that
salvation because salvation is of the Jews.
How did you get in to the act?
The greatest, I always will remember my very
first experience in Singapore years ago.
I forgot what church it was.
Maybe you can identify it as I describe
it.
It was a large building and there were
700 or 800 Chinese believers singing the praises
of the God of Israel.
I came undone.
Chinese people are celebrating my God and celebrating
him with meaning and real devotion in a
Hebraic way that would bless his soul to
hear and does.
And on the walls were the plaques commemorating
the death of the missionaries that had come
to Singapore.
Mary Jones arrived 1903, died 1907, malaria.
John Smith arrived 1912, died 1915.
Malaria, yellow fever, typhus.
There was a roll call of the death
of missionaries who expended their lives that you
should not be Chinese dum-dums and outside
the purposes of God and fitted only for
commerce.
But he brought you into his eternal purposes
that you should not regret a misspent lifetime
given over to servitude to things but called
into the majesty of the knowledge of the
God who is God, the creator of heavens
and the earth, the God of Israel and
of Jacob and to be the very salvific
agent for their return.
For he is able to graft them back
in again.
If he was able to graft you in
who were wild branches and fruitless, is he
not able to graft them in who are
natural?
And when he does, Paul says, it will
be nothing less than life from the dead,
a nation of priests and a light unto
the world.
We are living beneath the intention of God
in our own society.
That's why it's all commercial, why it's all
things, why it has not an ethereal and
spiritual content and richness is because a people
who were called to bring you to that
priestly dimension are yet presently out of it.
But Paul says, the great apostle, the gift
and callings of God are irrevocable.
If he has called them, let them spit
out their guts, let them be more commercially
minded than you and accomplished in every field
other than their calling.
I will restore them to the calling to
which I've called them because I have spoken
it.
It is a promise and they call, and
if I do not fulfill it, how then
am I God?
And Paul says in verse 25, and so
all Israel shall be saved for the deliverer
shall come out of Zion and take transgression
from Jacob according to the covenant that I
have made with them as it is written,
when the fullness of the Gentiles be come
in.
How can you read an apostolic statement and
not choke and gasp and fall before the
magnitude, the richness?
Who can understand it?
Language, it stretches language to breaking that despite
ages long apostasy, despite the fact that we
Jews have turned to every other field and
given the world Karl Marx and communism and
Sigmund Freud and psychiatry and every kind of
malicious alternative to the redemption of men in
God through Christ, we're foremost subversives.
Despite all that, God will restore us to
our calling because the issue of the nations
is at stake, including yours.
You need a prophetic and priestly intrusion.
You need someone to blow the whistle on
those things that you have accepted as normative
and thought that that was life was all
about.
That comes from priestly men who see through
the apparent things and whose hearts palpitate for
the glory of God and know that there's
a sinister world that conspires against truth, against
reality, against eternity.
This is the priestly function to show things
as God himself sees them to those who
would otherwise be mesmerized and live their lives
fruitlessly in any kind of significance and die
that way.
Your involvement in being the agents of Israel's
restoration will bless all the families of the
earth, including your own.
But it won't be an easy and a
cheap role for you to play.
And you'll not play it at all unless
you understand that what is at stake here
is the issue of God's glory forever.
So I'm quoting as I'm being led out
of Romans 11, and I just read the
genius and heart of it.
Verse 25, I would not, brethren, you should
be ignorant of this mystery.
Listen to you, dear Chinese saints.
Do you have a heart for mystery?
Do you have a disposition for mystery?
Or are you all factual, analytical, critical, mathematics
and statistic oriented?
That very preoccupation spoils and inures you against
mystery.
And yet the heart of the faith are
the mysteries of which Paul was steward.
And at least you should have a sensitivity,
a disposition, an appreciation for mystery.
Or else how can you appreciate the prophetic
man who speaks strangely and not systematically and
is all over the landscape saying this, that,
and everything as he's being prompted.
There's mystery.
You need a sense of mystery.
There are things that lie too deep for
words.
Things cannot be reduced to system.
God forbid that that should characterize the church,
that it's been reduced to system, to manipulation,
as it so unhappily is everywhere.
There's mystery.
There are things where you stop speaking, where
you choke, where you splutter, where you can't
go on, where you feel and don't know.
You have to intuit and not analyze.
Paul was the steward of mysteries.
You need at least to appreciate the word
who says in apostolic authority, I would not
rather you should be ignorant of this mystery.
You can't afford to be ignorant of this
one, lest you should be wise in your
own conceit.
You'll become inflated and pompous.
You'll say the kingdom now, you're going to
take over society, you're going to replace Israel.
All of these are presumptions of the vainest
kind that inevitably will follow those who do
not know the mystery.
The mystery saves you from what would otherwise
be inordinate conceit and being puffed up.
Because if you become a puffed up and
conceited church, you're no longer the church.
You're no longer reflecting and revealing the character
of God who at its essence is humble.
Learn of me, for I am lowly and
meek.
The king shall come to you lowly and
meek, riding on the back of an ass
upon which never man sat.
That's our king.
He was born and came into a flesh,
lay aside his deity, took upon the form
of an infant that had to be breastfed
and have his diapers changed.
Our God will reduce himself to that humiliation
and live a life of obscurity and die
as a criminal, the most painful, grotesque of
all deaths, nakedly, came into the world nakedly,
went out of it nakedly.
His whole life is a statement of the
humility of God.
What is the church that doesn't reflect that?
The church that becomes pompous and inflated and
we got it together and look at our
numbers, look at our program, we're number one,
we're this, we're that, is no longer the
church that reflects him, it's no longer the
church.
It's an institution, it's a culture, it's a
blessing society for itself.
And that happens if you miss this mystery.
This mystery is calculated to keep you humble
because it shows that God has elevated a
people to a place of prominence and significance
over you, Israel, and has chosen as the
center of his theocratic kingdom, not Singapore, which
you would have thought the hub of all
the world, but Zion, the holy hill, it's
not even a mountain, it's a pimple.
That's why he's chosen it, because he chooses
the foolish things and the weak things to
confound that which purports to be mighty and
wise.
There's a drama here, saints, there's a statement
that God is wanting to make of essential
truth as he knows it that needs to
come into all mankind through the fulfillment of
this mystery that blindness in part has happened
to Israel until the fullness of the Gentiles
come in.
Well, maybe I'll talk about that in part
two at the next service, but I can
tell you this, it's not only numerical, it's
also actual.
There's a fullness that is the key to
Israel's restoration that must come to you, not
just in number, but in quality.
And when it'll come to you, you know
what happens?
You've lost your Asian cast of character and
you've become Hebraicized, not Judaized, Hebraicized.
You've become like the sweet singers of Israel.
You've become prophetic.
You've become like the psalmist of old.
You're infused with the things that are Hebraic
of a special quality and kind that saves
you from the narrowness of your own racial
and genetic origin.
Not only you, but even we Jews need
to come into that largeness and into that
fullness which God Himself infuses us as we
take up His mystery.
And when it comes, He will take care
of Israel.
Israel will not take care of herself.
She'll be down and out, incapable.
And so it is written, Israel shall be
saved, all Israel.
There shall come out of Zion the deliverer,
shall turn away ungodliness from Jacob, for this
is my covenant with them when I shall
take away their sins.
I don't even wait for their repentance.
I will take the initiative.
I will take away their ages-old transgression
and sins, even the crucifixion of my son.
I don't even wait for them to understand
or be sorry or repent.
I will.
I'll take the initiative.
So soon as the fullness of the Gentiles
come in, I'll act upon Israel.
So the issue of Israel is not Israel.
The issue of Israel is you, your fullness.
That's the mystery.
And so Israel is delivered and you've come
to a place of the fullness, which is
the whole purpose of your salvation.
Because when you exit this world and this
life, it's not to play a harp on
a cloud.
It is to administer the kingdom that has
come.
And some of you will rule over five
cities and some over ten, based on your
excellence in this life and the maturity and
disciplines that you yourselves have submitted.
This is preparation, dear saints, for the eternal
kingdom, which is a gift and a reward
for the righteous, for which you need to
be in conscious preparation.
God will have a restored nation, but he'll
have an exalted church, glorified and administering and
overseeing from the heavenly realm, displacing those fallen
angels, the administration of his theocratic rule over
all creation.
It will not come to it, except we're
trained up by it in embracing this mystery
and giving ourselves to it.
By the mercies of God, as a living
sacrifice, holy and acceptable unto God, because we're
jealous that his covenant should be fulfilled, that
his promises should be fulfilled, that what is
written should be fulfilled, because if God will
not be fulfilled in the things which he
has written and spoken and promised in covenant
and in writing, how is he God?
The issue of Israel's restoration is the issue
of God as God.
And how can we be the church and
not be jealous over that fulfillment and give
ourselves as living sacrifices to the attainment of
it?
So I want to pray for such a
church here.
Lord, encourage my faith.
I believe, help my unbelief.
Everything in Singaporean society and Chinese ancestry, all
that is Asian, is counter to the Hebraic
genius of apostolic and prophetic faith.
They would have to be transcended.
They would have to come out of themselves.
They'd have to become larger than life.
They'd have to break the power of this
world that wants to fit them into a
system.
And so many doctors, so many lawyers, so
many accountants to fit the purposes of society
and fall short of the purpose of God
unto glory forever.
Lord, break that power.
Loose these captives.
Give them ambitions and intentions beyond economic success
and my own this and my own that.
I, I, I, me, me, me.
Let them be jealous for the glory of
God that alone will liberate them from such
a puny consideration to succeed merely at the
level of profession.
Take their place in the anonymous sea of
peoples who are fitted in to a system
in the world that has no eternal consequence
whatever and is doomed for judgment and will
pass away as dust.
Lord, I bless this congregation.
My God, use this foolish speaking, Lord.
My God, to awaken something, to stir them,
to wake them from their sleep, to raise
them out of their graves, to give them
intentions greater than anything that they have ever
considered and waits upon the consideration of that
mystery alone.
The issue of Israel and the church in
the last days.
Give them a heart for this, Lord.
Open their understanding.
Bless their ministers and pastor as they seek
and dwell upon these remarkable verses in Romans
and are given the capability to expound and
make them known.
Ruin this people, Lord, by the magnitude of
the mystery and that to which we're called
as privileged and we thank you and give
you praise in Jesus' name.
Amen.
And God's people said, Amen.