My thought is that I'm to speak to
you on righteousness exalting a nation.
So Lord, that precious word, so deep in
your own heart, so riveted in your word,
we ask for that liberty, my God, and
the exposition, the quickening, the interpolation, the adding
of thought and memory that will fill out
and make a remarkable statement for this congregation,
some if not many of whom are fated
for other nations.
So let them have a sense, my God,
of what your answer is to poverty and
all of the consequences of unrighteousness that now
mars those nations.
Give us a love for righteousness itself, the
word, and may the juices begin to flow
in our mouth when we hear it.
May we be conscious of every seeming minute
violation when we offend against it.
As you gave me to see on the
very day of my departure for the trip
to Mexico, barking at the precious spinster who
was driving me to the airport because she
wasn't quick enough to note the parking space
that I would have seized in a moment
and drove by it.
And I said, stop.
But the way I said stop was imperious.
You guys do speak English.
Imperious.
You know what that means?
The root of imperial.
It was man.
It was unrighteous.
That's what it was.
And I smarted a bit and made that
my first message in Colorado Springs.
And I sat with a circle of a
dozen men who understood only too well how
easy it is to miss the standard that
we commend to others when it slips upon
us in ways that we could not have
foreseen and takes us unawares and exhibits that
that great sanctity that we thought we were
now approaching after 41, 42 years is yet
not complete and that given sufficient provocation, you're
human, all too human.
And then the paradox of recognizing the truth
of your condition and then having to speak
to the subject.
So, Lord, I'm asking you a special mercy
that nothing would be lost to this because
of any demerit on my part, which is
much, but that they would get the sense
of your great heart and the theme that
needs to be taken up by the church
and believed and broadcast and made real, implemented,
and authenticated.
For there's no other answer for the poverty
that haunts the nations but that righteousness, that
prosperity, what the word means to exalt, righteousness
exalts a nation, means to prosper it, not
in the chintzy way in which we have
used that term, but the substantial ways that
alleviate the low conditions of life to which
whole masses of mankind are subject, whose rulers
are impervious to their condition or their need
and need to be made aware by a
church of conscience that will not let them
get away with it, but insist on righteousness
in palpable ways as I shall have occasion
to share with these children tonight.
Bless it, Lord.
Make it significant.
Let it circulate beyond even the immediate audience,
and we thank you for the privilege of
taking up such a theme in Jesus' name.
Amen.
Well, in this year, I've been in four
African nations, Kenya, Uganda, where we have been
several times in the past, and for a
first time in Cameroon, Central Africa, French Africa,
Belgian Africa, more oppressive than those colonies whose
origins are British, and then into West Africa
itself, Burkina Faso, and the yet more primitive
conditions.
The night before my departure from Sydney, I
was naive when I looked at the globe,
and I saw, look how short the distance
is between Australia and Africa.
I might as well go over.
It's just a short hop, little knowing that
there's no such thing as a flight from
Sydney, Australia, to Nairobi, Kenya, because who's going
to go?
So in order to get to Kenya from
Sydney, I had to fly to London, and
from London to Kenya, and then realized how
arduous and exhausting and full of strain that
little thing was, and I hadn't thought to
consider.
But at any rate, in my last night
in Sydney, I was at the home of
an apostolic man whose background was in high
finance, and he had traveled to Africa, and
he knew it.
I said, surely you must have considered, what
is the answer to African poverty, ignorance, and
disease?
You're a man with a business background.
You're a man of moral and spiritual stature.
You must have some thoughts on the subject,
because I don't want to go merely to
propagate nonsensical things that affect nothing.
I want to address this issue of the
African economy and condition, and I have no
answer.
I have no clue.
And so he showed me a chart.
I don't know how these businessmen do it.
It's a flow chart.
Is that what it is?
And how the finance would do this and
that, but I was not affected.
I was not impressed.
I went to bed somewhere in the night
hours.
The Lord quickened the verse that is our
theme tonight.
Righteousness exalts a nation, and that's the message
for Africa.
And so I came with it.
It's one thing to conceive of a word
in the luxury of an apartment of Sydney,
Australia, but then to come into the circumstances
of that poverty and of their governments that
are, what's the word, unjust and more tyrannical
than any of the colonial powers that had
preceded them.
The fact that they have upseated white rulers
has not guaranteed new righteousness, but that their
own leaders, once in office, once ensconced, are
very difficult to extricate.
And once they get their hand in the
till, it's almost impossible to obtain any kind
of justice or rectitude.
And there's a whole ruling gang, a cliche,
a whole, you see it, even at the
lower levels of bureaucracy, just going around in
the neighborhood, walking up in the hills because
the hills are a little better elevation, the
air is better, and there you see the
stuccoed towers of many palaces that have their
barbed wire fortifications and a paid guard outside
to protect their little enclave, while down below
the great multitude sweat and meet conditions that
are so degrading that it dishonors the church
who has an obligation to stand for what
God has made in his image.
Did you get that last part?
That's the nub of the whole subject.
The church has an obligation to stand for
what God has made in his image and
not to allow conditions to remain unchallenged or
unaltered that destroy human dignity and bodies for
the want of such simple expedience as we
Americans would never blink even to notice as
a traffic light.
It finally struck me when I came to
Cameroon that every time we had to go
out to a meeting we had to pass
through certain intersections and when you came to
these intersections and traffic is coming in from
four or more directions and each one is
edging to find his position and advantage, meanwhile
swallowing remarkable amounts of smoke and what is
it, smoke, help me, emissions, yeah, and people
on motorcycles drinking it up and inching and
fighting and contending just to get a few
meters of ground so as to be able
to make the turn where they want to
make it and it's been going on like
that since their colonial history.
So my message to the church was you
need to form a committee of conscience and
go before the legislature and demand these simple
and elemental provisions that are at the foundation
of what we call civilization so that when
men come to an intersection there's a sense
of order that can be understood, observed, and
honored and then you pass through without having
to fight each other and drink up each
other's exhaust.
Are you following me?
Does this sound like majoring in the minors?
Human personality that has got to meet conditions
like that daily is degraded so that God's
image in men is being marred by the
neglect of such simple things as would provide
conditions of life that are amenable to human
dignity.
The only problem is that some of the
journalists have had to flee the country for
taking up issues less than this and that
there's a fear and a silence that pervades
their society where you don't dare criticize, let
alone come into legislatures and demand the amelioration
of conditions that they can well afford to
do if they were not giving into their
own pockets and took a sense of responsibility
for the government that they're called to administer.
So I'm telling the church that righteousness exalts
or prospers a nation and I'm telling it
in a church, in a nation, where there's
no other prospect for prosperity or for alleviation
of these conditions to believe that God's word
says, Seek first the kingdom of God and
his righteousness and all things else will be
added unto you.
Well, how many of us are taking that
seriously?
Predicating everything that God said that if we
seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, all
things else will be added, knowing that his
righteousness is not ours.
It's not a little variation on our theme.
It's radically different, other, far more requiring and
radical than anything that we could equate humanly
with the word righteousness and we're to seek
it because it's not that evident and seek
its application in places where it's not even
considered and that if we do, God will
honor it and add all things that we
would have sought first as our priority but
taking his radical statement, we have disavowed following
conventional wisdom and we have made his kingdom
and his righteousness the first principle and believe
that by doing that, God is going to
fulfill his word and add all things that
are other.
Well, I'm not encouraged looking at you that
you're understanding or believing or sensing how radical
a proposal that single verse is for churches
and nations that are historically poverty stricken, suffering
disease and ignorance and every other relative condition
that they should believe that God will honor
righteousness and that there will be a prosperity
that is not proportionate to their skilled manpower
or their natural resources or any other factor
that by which prosperity is obtained in other
nations and that the inexplicable prosperity that will
take place is simply and clearly a supernatural
answer of God to a church that believes
for that and will exhibit to the world
that Africa is not the dark continent but
the bright hope and maybe at a time
when our economy will collapse which is not
too distant, they'll be sending missionaries to us
and preaching this message, seek first the kingdom
of God and his righteousness.
When all your social institutions have collapsed and
Uncle Sam can no longer pay the bill,
your righteousness will be the saving issue of
your life personally and corporately.
But try preaching that in a country where
taxis are stopped every marked distance.
There's a cop by the side to get
a bribe.
Bribery is a way of life in Africa.
And if they don't stop and they don't
pay, they will receive tickets or their driver's
license be removed or their source of income
and livelihood be threatened.
And so bribery, payola under the table by
anyone who has any authority to demand it
is a mode of living.
I'm saying to the church not that it
should require bribery but it should not participate
in bribery.
It should trust God that if it doesn't
bribe, he will see to it that you'll
reach your destination.
You see guys, you're only so, you're too
American.
You don't know.
Just to get from place to place in
Cameroon is an adventure of faith where you
have to shift taxis because they're not legitimated
to go to this district having come from
that district.
And you can spend two hours or more
before you finally reach your destination if you
indeed reach it.
It's a laborious anguish of complication and sweat
that it's so easy if you pay a
little payola, a little bribery to smooth the
way.
So I'm saying all that to say this.
To say no to bribery as a way
of life in Africa is a piece of
gospel heroism of a kind that exceeds anything
to which you have been required to yield
in your Christian life in America.
So when I got back from the trip,
I sat down at the computer and I
wrote, Righteousness exalts a nation.
Some thoughts upon the return from Africa, May
29, 2005.
And that's what I have here.
It begins, How prohibitive of any faith and
hope for change is there in the oppressive
realities that prevail in Africa?
It's one thing to talk about righteousness and
God's answer in environments where if it doesn't
come directly, it comes indirectly, and if it
doesn't come at all, we're not stretched out.
But to speak that in nations that are
destitute and say this is the answer.
If there's an answer for Africa, it'll not
come through technology.
It'll not come through United Nations.
It'll not come through philanthropic institutions of aid.
It will come because a nation has determined
to take the word of God seriously and
believe for it, that when their prosperity comes
as an exaltation, not only they but the
world itself will be astonished, for there's no
other way to explain the increase of the
standard of life and the greater civility and
conditions amenable to human dignity, but that God
himself has done it.
Have you got a faith to believe for
that?
Have you got a faith to commend that?
How's your righteousness doing tonight?
Are you keeping tabs?
Are you assessing?
Do you see the issue of righteousness as
an issue?
If I had spoken at 4 o'clock
here today, I think I would have shared
on the significance of the word moral, which
is virtually absent from the language and the
consciousness of our generation, your generation.
Who thinks in terms of moral?
What is that, anyhow, a little icing on
the cake?
But I can't tell you what it means
to me, and that I tell when the
Lord will quicken the theme, that to strip
man or to deny the acknowledgement and the
esteem for what is moral is to rob
man of his very humanity.
If you remove the moral dimension from man,
you have an animal capable of anything, as
was shown us by the behavior of the
Nazis in World War II.
They had no moral component to their social
life or their Lutheran Christianity.
Moral, put it, make a note in the
margin, write it in your heart to be
jealous over that word and to take it
off into your lips and to consider it,
and you'll not be satisfied with any definition
in a dictionary.
What is moral?
What is this moral sensitivity?
Who sees all the issues of life through
a moral, what you would call a filter?
How conscious a factor is that in our
American and Christian civilization?
Africa would discourage any such consideration, because I'll
be going in March to Malaysia for several
weeks, and then into Europe.
I was telling Mike I'm going back to
the very place in Sicily, Catania, where I
came as a merchant seaman 60 years ago.
A 17-year-old Jewish nut nose looking
for excitement and adventure on the high seas
came to Catania in Sicily, where the dogs
were hanging in the butcher shop windows, and
very fine middle-class girls took on the
entire ship's crew in prostitution, while the parents
outside counted the revenue.
Can you imagine an idealistic Jewish boy from
Brooklyn never having to face realities of that
kind being plunged suddenly into a world 1945
-46?
The war's end, ships sunk in the harbor,
widespread poverty, black market was the only mode
of economy, and we seamen who had access
to cartons of cigarettes was a more viable
currency than anything in which men could trust.
And we can buy and sell the world
if we had a carton of cigarettes, including
women, children.
We were met at the pier by dwarfs,
seven, eight, nine-year-old kids who spoke
fluent English and could lead us to their
sisters or to whatever we would want in
exchange for cigarettes.
You know what I realized, young idealist that
I was?
That morality is a luxury that only we
middle-class Americans can afford.
And it is quickly given over when destitution
and need is stark.
So I'm going back to that same seaport.
I've been there again some years ago, and
on my last day there, while the elders
were downstairs waiting to say goodbye, and I
was looking to the Lord for a final
word, the Lord gave me several statements to
make to the leaders of the church.
Number one, oppose the Mafia, because the Mafia
has strangulated your nation.
The Mafia has turned a great Italy into
a second-rate power.
It's corrupt through and through, and it rules
by fear and oppression.
And the only presence in the nation that
should not be ruled by fear of death
but has overcome death is the church.
And the church needs to confront Mafia in
that greater knowledge, that greater is he who
is with me than he who is in
the world.
And you're not to abstain and keep yourself
from the involvement in the cancer that is
bleeding and draining the nation of its virility
and its importance, that the church has a
moral obligation to be a factor in its
own locality and nation and not to be
silent.
I even recommended that they clean up the
litter in the streets in front of the
church, because many of those whom I'm addressing
were unemployed.
So what stops you from voluntarily cleaning the
street, especially around the church?
Because there's something about cleanliness, there's something about
order that is against the spirit of chaos
and the powers of darkness that will be
set in motion by this voluntary labor on
your part.
Well, if you don't learn anything more tonight
than this, you need to pray for this
eccentric fellow.
He's off on strange little...
that is not where the action is.
He's occupied with street cleaning and confronting the
mafia.
Well, when I was in East Germany and
the wall was up and the elders were
waiting again for final word, you need to
go to the communist authorities and tell them
that this campaign of 40 years of Soviet
-German friendship is a patent bald lie.
There is no such friendship.
There's only hatred, fear, intimidation.
Your women were raped when the Russians came.
Your factories have been stripped.
There's an undeclared, unannounced hatred that permeates your
society, but your propaganda campaign talks about German
-Soviet friendship.
And I believe that it's related to the
fact that the highest rate of alcoholism in
East Germany had to do with living a
lie daily.
At every billboard, at every bus station, at
every public place, there was the proliferation of
these propaganda lies.
And I'm saying to the Church, you need
to confront the authorities and tell them you
have an obligation to stand in behalf of
what God has made in his image and
bring an end to the campaign of lies
that is reducing the nation to alcoholism.
Just a few more years, I'll be retired,
St. Sue.
Don't think that they quickly rose to the
occasion and were ready to go the next
day and confront the communist authorities.
And Art, what success can we have?
These men are atheists.
They hate the Church.
They hate Christ.
I don't know that we would even be
heard.
I said, that's not the question.
The question is not your success.
The question is not their conversion.
The question is not even whether you'll be
properly heard.
The question is that you, as the Church,
have an obligation not to be silent in
the face of that that is destructive to
human personality and dignity.
Ah, you're getting the message.
Amen.
So wherever you go in the world, you're
going to find opportunity to express something like
this.
But to what degree can you express it
with conviction?
Or to what degree would it only be
a kind of curious suggestion that you would
make not being part of that civilization and
culture?
I've just come back from Mexico, and that's
where I got all my souvenirs and my
legs and arms.
How can we tell them, as Whitey, whose
standard of living and the amenities of our
life are so apparent and available and different
than their own, that they should seek righteousness?
Unless we ourselves are seekers.
And it may require that if we're to
be earnest seekers, we have got to turn
our back to the availability of amenities that
close out receiving from God all things else.
You know, I'm talking like a fool.
In other words, to receive the promise of
God that if you seek first his righteousness,
all things else will be added unto you,
you've got to see to it that the
all things else do not come through your
human and personal opportunity.
That you are as dependent on God's answer
in your own situation or nation or community
as the African would be.
And only then can we speak to them
with an appropriate conviction.
Got the idea?
Are you majoring in righteousness?
Are you savoring the word moral?
Are you chafed, as I was, to find
that you're capable of barking at a spinster
who couldn't stop fast enough at an available
parking spot, and you were embarrassed later to
see how involuntarily this imperious, dominating authority was
expressed against this defenseless woman who's only trying
to get me to the airport.
And if you're capable of that, cats, of
what else are you capable?
And what then is your message?
And with what conviction can it be spoken
if you yourself are capable of being imperialistic
and overbearing and demanding with the helpless?
Because the issue of morality, here, there, or
anywhere, is how one treats the helpless and
the weak and the impoverished.
So it's going to take a real faith
to believe for God's word and God's answer
that he will prosper righteousness.
It waits that day in which we shall
ask in his name for whatsoever true faith
and relationship with the Lord occasions.
We can't ask beyond the actuality of our
faith and the statement of the relationship which
we, in fact, have.
This is not something to be reduced to
a formula.
This is not going to be a new
clever gimmick.
And once we circulate this and men can
promote it and parade it, it's going to
obtain results.
See what I mean?
That would be Americanizing a radical statement of
truth and requirement of God that has not
been taken seriously in our generation.
I just accused my own fellowship on the
Sunday morning of our departure of moral cowardice.
I began the session by saying, Court is
in order.
They thought I was joking.
But we never went to any hymns or
psalms.
I went right into an indictment of their
failure the night before to take God seriously
when he gave opportunity for public confession so
that we would not enter the new year
bringing the leaven of the old into the
new and that we could spit out and
purge the uncleanness and the defilement and the
violations of the last year in speech and
deed and thought that was common to us
all by the humiliation of public confession.
Only one or two barely made some acknowledgement
in a way that did not embarrass them.
One brother spoke that he's repenting that his
early morning devotions lack this or that.
I had a sneer on my face from
ear to ear.
That was not a legitimate response to a
legitimate opportunity being given by God.
That's how we ended the new year.
But Sunday morning when I woke up on
the first day of the new year with
the words, moral cowardice and that was the
message.
You're a bunch of moral cowards.
You have no intention of taking God seriously.
You're just willing to be verbal and phraseological
and say the appropriate things or nod or
amen or sing so long as your deepest
and truest self-interest is not violated.
Who are you playing with?
Who's this God to whom you subscribe that
goes along with this?
Certainly not true deity but a God of
your imagining that is not offended by this
clear deceitful practice of people who have no
sincere intent to take seriously the opportunity of
public confession because where the humiliation in that
public confession is there is the death and
there is the release.
And I want you to know, I said
somewhere along the lines, don't think that this
message today is some aberration.
Prepare yourself.
This is what you're going to hear from
me consistently.
Every message is going to be an indictment
as God will give it and everything will
call us to an integrity and sincerity of
real concern for truth and righteousness or we
can just shut down this whole Ben Israel.
What are we preserving here?
A little rustic retreat in the woods?
So they were shattered and confronted.
God's authority was there.
God's chastisement was there.
But it didn't come in a heavy-handed
overbearing and imperious man.
It came in the remarkable grace of the
fatherhood of God.
So I want to give you guys my
best and most current thought and concern and
it's this, the issue for moral rectitude, the
issue of righteousness, the issue of loving it
and hating iniquity and being able to perceive
through the facade of that which purports to
be good as being more viciously evil than
the most blatant and vile exhibitions of evil
that are equally to be observed.
What really makes my ire rise is that
which purports to be good on TV or
movie or advertisements or magazines or newspapers but
what it is really saying and what it
is really postulating is vile and evil and
contrary to God, to truth and to righteousness.
It's phony, it's false and it's being accepted
so widely.
So I don't think anything like the love
of righteousness and the hatred of iniquity is
automatic.
It is that which distinguished Jesus as a
son more than any single thing else and
that God honored such a son as that
with an anointing of gladness above his brethren.
The Lord did not come to it automatically.
He came to it by the same process
available to us, a daily watch care over
his own heart and an awareness unseen through
the duplicity of men and addressing it or
else we have no message for Africa which
is to say for the world.
This thing really calls the church to be
the church.
We cannot promulgate this, we cannot speak this
except to become a chaotic you know what
that word means?
Who is the guy who charged windmills?
Don Quixote in a pointless, misconceived, self-assumed
role of doing good, charging at windmills.
That's how chaotic we will be to sound
the theme of righteousness and to encourage the
church of Africa or Asia or anywhere to
believe that if they consciously and willfully seek
righteousness in the everyday issues of their life
and society God will honor that.
Can you understand what a single traffic light
will do at intersections that have been congested
for the last 30, 40, 50 years with
the increase of traffic and the swallowing up
of smoke just to establish a principle of
order?
Are you aware that the enemy is the
God of chaos and God is the God
of divine order?
And if you start with a traffic light
however modest a provision that is what will
be next?
What is the next thing that God will
quicken as being appropriate to the men who
are made in his image and are suffering
everyday defamation, poverty, disgrace, they're without hope.
If the church does not take this up,
who will?
And it has got to take it up
at whatever risk taking it up means.
This is more than the carnal imagining of
lustful men who think they can arbitrarily summon
what they will having seized upon an apparent
formula.
Oh, we got it now.
Oh, we do this and then we get
that?
Never work.
You've got to appropriate this invitation seeking first.
The kingdom of heaven and God's righteousness can
never be reduced to a formula.
It's a mock.
It takes an entirety of trust by those
who themselves have come to such totality that
banks everything on the word of God whose
character is intimately known and sublimely trusted.
Are you writing little papers like this when
you come back from your trips and then
realize later how good they are?
This is a remarkable statement.
Anyone who's going to take this mandate seriously
to seek first the kingdom of God has
got to have a character in keeping with
the God who requires that seeking and an
ability to believe him because their faith is
relative to what he's requiring.
This is not some formulistic thing that can
be performed by people who are in a
lesser place.
So it's calling the African church and the
African believers to such a rise of stature
in faith, in the knowledge of God and
their own conduct as ministers who are more
time service and careerists than anything else.
Oh, you should have seen their black faces.
When I had to address them in Burkino
Faso I said, I feel like a white
cork bobbing in a black sea.
I had come from all different places expecting
another sharp American advocate of prosperity and church
growth and blah blah blah and how to
do it and they were already lulled to
a certain kind of sleep before I came
down from the hotel and when I came
down the acoustics were horrible because the building
was designed by the French.
What do you expect?
Remarkable style but not having a cotton picking
thing to do with real reality such as
hearing.
I said, I'm not speaking.
I'm not going to go through mock words.
I had already passed up the opportunity on
African prayer day to address the nation of
Cameroon in a big open field.
I was the elected speaker and I had
this message but the time they got to
me hours had gone by.
People were wilting.
This speaker, that pastor, this guy had to
have his moment and the band and the
music and the noise that finally when I
was called and I came to the microphone
I said, I had a prophetic word for
you for the nation but I cannot bring
it because the atmosphere that you have created
and to which you have given yourself is
totally unamenable to what I have to speak
and I stepped down.
That's righteousness, saints than to go through something
because you're under obligation or appointed if it's
not going to be heard.
What's the point of mouthing if we're not
going to be heard really heard by people
whose senses have been numbed by the din
of their so-called worship band on that
platform.
The Lord gave the opportunity the next night
and it was recorded and videotaped and in
fact the pastor of that church said, every
word that came out of your mouth my
heart was burning and when we went to
eat at this place I said, thou art
the man you're the one that needs to
go before the legislature you're the one that
needs to take the initiative and round up
a committee of conscience that's why we
come back with souvenirs from Mexico of the
kind that I have on my arms and
legs that the Veterans Administration Hospital will take
five weeks to diagnose and can't understand any
natural reason for what I'm suffering in my
body.
How do you like finishing up in Morelia,
Mexico and taking out to eat and your
arm is up and all of a sudden
you feel a remarkable strange sensation.
You pull your sleeve back and your flesh
is like an apple hanging off of your
elbow stark red and full of pain and
that's what happened from arm to leg so
I think that the powers of darkness suffered
some kind of setback and the Lord allowed
them some way to ventilate their irritation with
this Jewish man who dares take this audacity
and you know what, it's a small thing
to bear for a true word that will
come to a nation so I said to
these Africans who were really lulled when we
met with them in this French conference hall
and we rearranged the seating that they sat
up against the wall so that the word
would not reverberate away and my first statement
was I'm a sent man with a sent
word from heaven.
It was like BOOM!
Their jaws dropped their eyeballs fell on their
cheeks and right from that moment a new
seriousness had come into Africa of a new
kind of word and a new kind of
authority and a new kind of call than
they had ever before known but you've got
to be a sent man from the throne
of heaven or the mere announcement is a
parody and a burlesque but God so honored
it with authority and unction that I went
on to speak with bottles of water one
after another the sweat gushing from me, the
towels to wipe me off but the word
never faltered what they got was timeless and
when I was taken to see the successful
megachurch in the capital city I listened to
the converted Muslim who now had a congregation
of several thousand it was droll and deadly
the man must have used at least six
texts for one Sunday morning message I thought
will I ever get a chance to bring
a word of correction to this man and
so after the service they gave us the
tour we ended up in his office I
took my heart in my mouth and I
said dear man you need to know that
spiritual energy is dissipated and the force of
your words is lessened when you bring text
after text after text in a single message
you would have served the purposes of God
better had you stayed with one text and
exposited and exegeted and drawn out its meaning
and brought its application clear to the thousands
that were before you then you should give
them a performance of what you can do
just helter skelter running through the Bible going
from one text to another that night a
dozen ministers came to our hotel and I
had been grieving all the day over what
I saw that morning and that night the
Lord spoke on how to speak how to
bring the word and one thing do you
lack and until you have yielded up that
one thing which is your stylistic device and
anything upon which you are counting to be
popular or to be found acceptable they are
not going to get a true word it
was holy holy holy it's the kind of
night and significance that after it's over you
want to retire and anybody think that I'm
boasting in myself or just giving you an
example of what an apostolic journey is when
the issues are urgent and life and death
and they need to hear something not from
Minnesota or New York but from the throne
of heaven of what is God's current heart
and mind and thought that his people take
seriously the seeking of his righteousness and if
they do he will honor them despite any
presence of natural resources or anything else in
which prosperity can be deduced he himself will
supernaturally honor the economy and the culture of
a nation whose people essentially will seek first
the kingdom of heaven and God's righteousness so
the greater concern is not with the alleviation
of poverty per se but the glorification of
his name that is obtained thereby that's a
statement where did that come from in other
words if you're only employing the scripture to
obtain the desired response it's unrighteous oh I
know this is over your head right now
but it's being recorded if you're willing to
use the formula in order to obtain the
result which is all things added unto you
your motive is unrighteous and self-seeking it
is using and exploiting God and his word
because the only motive that is righteous is
the one that wants to see that word
fulfilled that he should be glorified and thereby
see how deep is the issue of righteousness
and how little we consider that and that
the sovereign character of Christ is tested by
our own statements Christ is the answer is
not the lifeless cliche it has become for
us in America but the desperate answer of
faith for which the dark continent itself is
constituted you hear how mad this man is
he's even saying that the continent is dark
by the intent and will of God it's
not circumstantial or inadvertent it's a necessary historical
and present condition that can only be alleviated
by the demonstration of his righteousness that all
the world may see that the nation that
was called the dark continent is now exhibiting
a condition of life that is not to
be explained in any natural economic terms and
that their poverty and their historic condition was
in the sovereignty of God in order to
reveal his greatness can you see that?
can you believe that?
do you have that kind of faith?
understanding of God's sovereignty that he will allow
a people to know servitude and poverty and
all the things in their history that a
moment might come by which he will be
glorified through the church and that the dark
continent itself was constituted dark until that end
be obtained and here's the last thing, I
know you've been so patient Africa is going
to be a highway of holiness for Jews
yes from Cape Town to Cairo as I
told the South African saints whose eyes bulged
at me with anger these Christian Zionists that
their precious Israel one day is going to
hit the skids and be reduced and even
perhaps be removed as a nation and that
there will be a global uprooting of Jews
throughout the world and that you need to
consider that the Jewish populations of Pretoria and
Johannesburg with your back to the sea there's
no outlet but to go north through darkest
Africa in order to reach the land of
promise what's that got to do with all
this art?
what are those Jews going to find when
they move through the dark continent in people
who are impoverished and don't want to yield
up their last cup of flour and oil
who want to make one last meal and
die except that God's Jewish people are at
their door unless they love righteousness more important
than their own subsistence or their own preservation
those Jews will perish but in the act
of righteousness of giving up a last measure
of those things that were coveted for their
own preservation being poor God will see to
it that the meal does not fail nor
the oil that's righteousness you guys that the
issue of Jewish survival through darkest Africa is
the issue of a nation that takes the
word of God seriously now and loves righteousness
and seeks righteousness and receives the answer of
God's righteousness that when the crisis time comes
they'll not be threatened or falter it will
be a revelation of the God of righteousness
to his own people who have not known
him, sought him, or considered him until they
see him reflected in the faces and the
conduct of the blackest of God's people how
do you like them apples?
you like them apples?
I love them myself that he would choose
the despised and the ignored and the rejects
of the world to be the very vehicle
of the revelation of himself as salvation through
them to Jews in their untoward condition of
the last days who receive mercy by people
who can hardly afford to extend mercy you
know what Jesus says to those who extend
that mercy in Matthew 25 while the others
who said, Lord, when did we see you
naked, thirsty, and hungry?
he says, depart into the fire prepared for
the devil and for his angels but you
who have extended it he says, inherit the
reward for you righteous inherit the kingdom, the
reward for your righteousness righteousness is the name
of the game and we better start being
serious about it and noticing when we violate
against it when we bark, when we're impudent
when we're, what's the word imperial, imperious when
those little things that are revealed that we
would pass as a little thing except that
we have become increasingly conscious of what is
moral and what is right in the little
things that constitute righteousness and need daily to
be guarded so let me pray release you
from this agony Lord, precious God on high
who in our time speaks of righteousness we
hardly know what the word means let alone
your righteousness we don't have, my God, a
moral sensitivity we don't cultivate, we don't nurture
it we've been numbed by the way in
which the church at Ben Israel was numbed
by refusing to take you seriously when you
gave them opportunity for public confession and they
only talked about the failure to maintain their
early morning devotional time because anything more serious
than that would have been embarrassing and we
don't love righteousness enough that we should be
embarrassed so Lord, let there be a revival
of righteousness, of moral concern of a jealousy
for your word that can believe that nations
are constituted to exhibit a great light in
their darkness when you will honor their faith
and add to them all things else that
is not to be obtained by technology or
aid or any such thing bless a church
that can go into those places and speak
these things with conviction we thank and give
you praise in Jesus' name God's people said,
Amen