Well, good morning you dear saints, you gluttons
for punishment.
My messages are delayed action bombs, so I
trust that something will go off after a
process of time.
And this morning, I feel impressed to share
with you a new word that has come
in the recent days in Mexico that I
think is going to be a significant arrow
in the quiver.
I'm not even sure of all that it
means.
It has all kinds of resonances and hints
of import.
You can get from it what you will,
or you can get nothing.
Or later on, all of a sudden, it
will spring to life as God deals with
you.
The text is from Isaiah 6, which is
familiar to us all.
So I was quite surprised when the Lord
quickened this and underlined new ways of perceiving
that text that I had never before considered,
and the effect upon the Mexican hearers was
profound.
So I think we're on to something that
you need to hear.
And if it doesn't fit right now, don't
set it aside.
Set it, how shall I say, on a
shelf, being prepared to take it down and
consider it as you go on.
But I think it's going to be one
of those seminal messages that come forth every
now and then, the rhema, word of God,
that isn't always immediately understandable to all to
whom it comes, and yet it needs to
be expressed in point of time.
So Lord, grace, my God, grace, to open
that precious text.
And if they'll not receive any other benefit,
let them catch a glimpse of what opening
a text means, that you'll save them from
the characteristic mentality of American believers who run
through the scriptures as if it was gone
with the wind, and what it means to
hesitate and to dwell and to luxuriate in
the language of a text, and to exegete
and open and consider its implications in such
a way, Lord, that if they don't get
anything from this text, but the methodology, the
hermeneutic of interpretation of how to read and
ponder and weigh, let that be of sufficient
value in itself that we can cast away
one service without waste.
So we bless you and we thank you,
and we look to such application and use,
my God, as it shall please you now
to give this classicus locus, this classic text
smack dab there in chapter six suddenly and
pivotal for all of the prophet's future and
Israel's destiny.
Teach us what these things mean.
We thank and give you praise in Jesus
name.
Amen.
Did you say amen?
Did you have a sense of ominous weightiness?
Okay, I'm probably more at home in Mexico
than I am in Kansas City.
So, in the year that King Uzziah died,
I saw the Lord sitting on a throne
high and lofty or high and lifted up,
and the hem of his robe filled the
temple.
Seraphs were in attendance above him.
Each had six wings.
With two, they covered their faces.
With two, they covered their feet.
With two, they flew.
And one called to another and said, Holy,
holy, holy is the Lord of hosts.
The whole earth is full of his glory.
The pivots on the threshold shook at the
voices of those who called, and the house
filled with smoke.
And I said, Woe is me.
I am undone.
I am lost, for I am a man
of unclean lips, and I live among a
people of unclean lips.
Yet my eyes have seen the King, the
Lord of hosts.
Then one of the seraphs flew to me
holding a live coal that had been taken
from the altar with a pair of tongues.
The seraph touched my mouth with it and
said, Now this has touched your lips.
Your guilt has departed.
Your sin has blotted out.
Then I heard the voice of the Lord
saying, Whom shall I send, and who will
go for us?
And I said, Here am I.
Send me.
And he said, Go, and say to this
people, Keep listening, but do not comprehend.
Keep looking, but do not understand.
Make the mind of this people dull, and
stop their ears and shut their eyes, that
they may not look with their eyes and
listen with their ears and comprehend with their
minds, and turn and be healed or be
saved.
Then said I, Lord, how long, O Lord?
And he said, Until cities lie waste without
inhabitant, and houses without people, and the land
is utterly desolate, until the Lord sends everyone
far away, and vast is the emptiness or
the forsaken places in the midst of the
land.
Even if a tenth part remain in it,
it will be burned again, like a terebrant
or an oak, whose stump remains standing when
it is felled.
The holy seed is its stump.
Amen.
What thinketh thou of such a text as
this?
Isn't it monumental?
Are you guilty with me of having too
eerily dismissed it as some kind of mystic
vision of the Lord high and lifted up
with his train filling the temple?
It must be some hyper state of the
Lord's glory, but why would it affect the
prophet so much that he would say that
he's undone?
So I began to perceive it anew, and
I'll share that with you.
I believe that what the prophet saw was
the king and the greatest moment of his
majesty, when all that he is is brought
to a point of such expression that anyone
who contemplates that moment rightly has got to
be altogether devastated and undone.
At what point do you think that is,
being high and lifted up?
My own opinion is it's the crucifixion of
the king, because nothing reveals the majesty of
God than the depth of his suffering, experienced
and born for us as atonement.
Well, how could Isaiah have seen that six
or seven centuries before the historic advent?
Well, that's a typical Kansas City question.
That's the limitation of your mentality that thinks
in that kind of order.
It hasn't happened yet.
How can he see it?
Forgetting that the Lord was slain from before
the foundations of the earth being laid, that
the crucifixion is such an event that it
has escaped your attention, and therefore you'll be
marred and limited if you continue in this
short end of the stick, minimal comprehension of
the crucifixion as a body of doctrine to
which you must submit or agree, but you've
not seen the glory.
You've got to see the glory, or there's
no sending.
This is not just an episode in the
life of a prophet.
This is a paradigm.
This is the unfolding of a remarkable pattern
of a sequence of events by which the
prophet who already had a ministry and was
already cautioning and warning the nation of its
sin from chapter one of his book through
chapter five now enters a new dimension, and
his subsequent ministry after this as one sent
is no longer merely to warn or to
caution, but to judge.
His word will now constitute judgment.
They'll not hear.
They'll not see.
Their hearts will be dulled because the prophet
has spoken to them in a new depth
of urgency and weight and authority as one
sent, and at this point we should take
a time out because I don't know where
you are, but do you dwell on the
word sent as you ought?
Do you understand the significance of the difference
between one who went and one who is
sent, that most of the activity of our
time and generation, however well-meaning, is self
-initiated, committee determined, that we don't know what
it means to be sent from the one
who is enthroned, and that that is the
root of the word apostolic.
Apostolos means a sent one, but I know
you only too well.
You're American only to American.
You itch to go and to do and
be seen and cut a swath, but we're
not seeing sendings of the kind that initiated
the church's history, from Antioch being sent, but
those that were sent turned the world upside
down.
So you do err because you do not
sufficiently honor and esteem the phenomenon of sending,
nor do you understand the difference between the
consequence of the work that results from one's
sent as one who is self-initiated and
is going, and furthermore, you're not all that
assured that the world needs to be turned
upside down.
Maybe it needs to be modified.
Some of its excesses may be reduced, but
essentially you're quite compatible.
It's a world that you enjoy.
You just want to fit into it in
some way to bring some measure of significance,
but you certainly don't want to overturn it.
You don't see it as being as evil
as art sees it.
You're not chafed by its, not its immorality,
its amorality.
You've learned to live with it too long,
and you've, you know, you don't have that
prophetic jealousy and basis for comparison that would
be yours if you saw the Lord high
and lifted up.
See, I know I'm talking off the top
of my head, but don't miss a word
of it.
Everything hinges upon seeing the Lord as the
Lord, because after 41, 42 years in the
faith worldwide, examining and evaluating and touching its
best forms, I suppose that you would be
included there, I would have to say that
the greatest grief of the condition of the
church and its leadership and its prominent ministers—are
you ready for this?—is that they do
not know God as God.
They do not know him as he, in
fact, is.
And once you have gotten away with the
true knowledge and have some specious counterfeit that
is much more in harmony with your own
ambition and intentions as the God who approves,
there's no fear.
There's no awe.
Therefore, you take liberties and initiate conduct that
was not sent from heaven.
Everything rests on seeing the Lord high and
lifted up and enthroned in his majestic glory
that was brought to perfection in the moment
of his most excruciating suffering at Calvary.
That's what this prophet saw.
And he cried out, I'm undone.
I'm a man of unclean lips.
But listen, you dear saints, the problem is
not the unclean lips.
The problem is I'm a man.
Let that sink into your Kansas City, Olathe,
Midwest, charismatic mentality.
I'm a man.
So you're much too deeply humanistic than you
know.
You're much too friendly.
And at peace with man, you don't see
the inveterate evil.
You don't see the intrinsic nature of man
that is opposed to God.
You don't see the ambitions, the self-initiated
activity as being an act of direct rebellion
against God.
You don't see our impatience and unwillingness to
wait to be sent as to being any
particular offense.
See what I mean?
What Isaiah saw was himself.
Woe is me.
I'm undone.
I'm a man.
And if I'm a man of necessity, my
lips are going to be defiled, even though
a prophet.
It's intrinsic to being a man to speak
unwisely and to harangue women who take you
to the airport if they missed the parking
space.
Here's what I want to say.
Until we agree and come to this low
appreciation or estimation of ourselves, we will always
suffer the loss of the high exaltation of
God.
The two things are inextricably joined.
You cannot perceive the truth of yourself.
Many of you are living in la-la
land.
You have self-estimation and self-celebration and
appreciation of yourself because you're pretty or you're
clever or what that is far out of
proportion to the way in which you really
need to see yourself.
And the reason that you were able to
indulge such exaltation is because you had no
basis for comparison.
You saw yourself only in comparison to others
and in that way you saw your superiority.
But when you see yourself in comparison to
God, you're dead and that's the way we
need to see it.
I'm not commending this because I'm morbid.
I'm commending this because this is the way
of sanity.
This is truth.
This is reality and it's at the foundation
of any true sending.
Why would God send a half-baked Kansas
City-ite anywhere in the world?
What are they going to communicate?
They can't communicate anything that exceeds where they
themselves are and what they themselves understand.
Or you may bring some palliative, some measure
of good, but you're not going to turn
anybody's world upside down.
You're not going to confront two or three
hundred black men who have traveled that sacrifice
and distance and tell them in the first
speaking that you're one sent from the throne
of heaven with a sent word and that
you're not speaking that for effect.
But it's a statement of truth that rivets
those men in their places and brings a
jerk to their whole posture to say this
is something else and other than what we
have known in the visits of white men
from America.
This man is not a white man from
America.
This man, strange phenomenon that he is, is
beyond what we can understand naturally and his
true origin and center is not America but
heaven.
He's sent from the throne.
So listen, you guys.
You think I'm just beating up at the
air?
Do you understand this?
Either this sounds like the most flagrant egotism
or the deepest humility.
To be a sent one is not something
which you boast.
You're sent because he has elected you in
your foolishness and your terrible paradoxical weakness and
all your highfalutin consideration of the issues of
what is moral and righteous can be contradicted
by you in a moment if a woman
drives by an available parking spot and you're
found out.
So listen, dear saints.
Forget about any sending, any going of any
consequence because it is consequential because one who
is sent from the throne bears the authority
and the unction and the anointing of that
one who sends.
Who will go for us?
The word who haunts me.
It's like, is there a candidate anywhere in
this audience of hundreds?
Is there a candidate for sending who has
risen above the culture, the commonplace mentality, the
correctness of his doctrine and knows God as
God, sees God as terrifying, stupefying vast and
sees him in his greatest act not as
an object for sentimental pity but the revelation
of the nature of God in his suffering
and death which had ever and always been
his nature.
The only thing that the cross did was
reveal what God always was and is.
Got the picture?
God's a servant.
He's a sent one himself for the father.
And what did it mean for this sent
son who had lived eternally in the presence
of the father in an exalted condition of
relationship that defies any ability on our part
even to begin to imagine having to forsake
that and leave it to come down to
this crusty globe and take upon himself the
form of a man of flesh, be imprisoned
in a body, begin life as a helpless
infant laid in a manger and suffer all
of the kinds of things that taking upon
himself an earthly human existence as a Jew
and as a son of David, son of
Abraham, son of Adam so to speak was
requisite.
We don't know the humility of God until
we have rightly pondered what it meant for
the son to come down into this earth.
It was the crucifixion before the crucifixion.
Every instance of it, every act of it
is the issue of self-denial, is the
issue of compassionate concern for others at the
expense of oneself.
You think I'm happy with what I'm saying.
I'm not saying it right.
But who can?
But we need to probe this more than
any other consideration in all of our end
time fancies and wanting to become sophisticated in
understanding the last days movement of the Jews
and the church and the excitement of it.
We need to go back to this.
Who shall go for us is a piercing
question as if it implies you can look
far and wide but you're not going to
find many candidates.
The only one who can go is the
one who has seen and having seen comes
to such a place of repulsion for himself
that he is undone.
And we're not talking about Joe Blow.
We're talking about Isaiah the prince of the
prophets.
So what shall you say?
If the prince of the prophets says I'm
undone at the seeing of God as he
really is in his glory, what shall you
say?
And until you say it with the same
shriek and heart-piercing cry that God waits
to hear that he can remedy, how are
you a candidate for going?
See how archaic I am?
You follow a guy like me, there's not
going to be happy occasions and large scale
activity.
There may not be any activity at all
until we are grounded in this revelation.
But what does it wait on?
Being the Bible student that you are.
How does the text begin?
In the year that King Uzziah dies.
Lord, what are you saying?
Are you just giving that as a historic
index that we could date something because we
know the lifespan of this king and would
have an approximate way to date the event?
Or does the death of the king have
something to do with the revelation of the
prophet?
What would you suspect?
I wish this were interactive.
The death of the king is an inextricable,
ineluctable factor that sets in motion the entire
episode.
That's my opinion.
Where does it say that?
It doesn't.
It's left for us to surmise, to interpret.
So what does that have to do with
anything much?
That somehow a death has got to precede
a revelation of this magnitude because the revelation
issues in a call and the call issues
in a judgment to Israel in which the
prophet goes forth in a new authority now
having been sent.
Now hang on to this.
Right to this moment.
This judgment in Israel is still extant.
It is still valid.
It is still in motion.
Israel is bound.
Its eyes are closed.
Nationally speaking, its heart is numb.
It cannot hear, cannot see, cannot understand.
You can spit your guts out and they
don't know what you're talking about.
They're civil and gracious on any of the
subject, but on this they become impenetrable because
the judgment has been decreed.
Well, how do you fit in, cats?
I'm a peripheral Jew.
I'm not the nation.
I'm just a little bit of the offscouring.
The nation itself stands this moment under this
judgment.
You still want to be a prophet?
Did you think that once you're sent to
speak that that means necessary blessing for the
hearers?
What if it would mean necessary judgment for
the hearers as may actually be true for
you here with me last night and today?
Some measure of judgment goes forth in the
prophetic proclamation that is designed to bring to
death areas of the flesh that are impudent
and untrained and undisciplined and need this judgment.
So it's not a pleasant task.
And only those who are dead and see
themselves as woe is me are the only
ones who are capable of going and functioning
in that kind of judgment.
And it's all the same to them whether
their hearers are blessed or their hearers are
judged.
The issue is obedience to go and say
to them, your ears shall be shut, your
eyes shall be open.
Are you guys following me so far?
We're talking about a massive central episode of
the salvational history of mankind and of the
people of Israel.
Having been warned for five chapters, God now
lowers the boom and speaks to the prophets
words that will not just exacerbate or warn,
but judge.
For that you need to be sent.
And it takes the authority of the one
who sends in order for that to be
affected.
Now why am I saying all this?
Because if it took ascending to give to
the prophet the authority so to speak as
to judge, what will it take to relieve
this judgment?
Because even the prophet says, how long Lord?
He can't believe that God's last word is
irremediable judgment.
And the Lord says until cities are laid
waste, left without inhabit, until there's a cataclysmic
devastation that comes upon the land of the
kind that Jesus will find in his return
when two-thirds have already been have perished
and the women have been ravaged and one
-third are brought through the fire.
So we're moving toward this finality, this conclusion.
Israel is under judgment through a prophetic word,
but the judgment needs to be reversed and
the people be released by another sending.
If it took ascending to bring the judgment,
it will take ascending to end the judgment.
There needs to be a prophetic company who
have seen the Lord and know him in
his majesty high and lifted up and are
stricken to death of their own presumption about
themselves and their own vanity that they are
as good as dead.
And unless a call comes from off the
altar of God, they cannot speak.
Have you noticed in this text?
God does not in any way placate the
prophet and say, don't get carried away, buddy.
Your reaction is much too exaggerated.
I'm not saying that you need that you
are what you say you are.
But God's silence and the sending of an
angel with a call from the altar clearly
implies that God is in complete agreement with
the prophet's own estimation of himself.
Are we going on too long?
No?
Why do you look like we're going on
too long?
Because every sentence that I'm saying is so
conceptually loaded that if you're not used to
it, you fog up and you can only
take so much.
So I'll try and bring this to a
close, although the text is inexhaustible.
The important point is the reaction of the
prophet to the revelation of God seen in
his resplendent majesty as crucified, evoking such a
sense of his own shame.
Because Karl Barth, my favorite theologian, should become
yours, B-A-R-T-H, the great
German Swiss thinker, says the reality of sin
cannot be known or described except in relation
to the one who has vanquished it.
I know that's over your head, but let's
go over it once more in patient condescension
to Midwest America.
What does the great theologian say?
The reality of sin.
I'd like to just take a quick poll.
How many people here think they know the
reality of sin?
Raise your hand if you think you know
the reality of sin.
I want to tell you this.
If you don't know the reality of sin,
you don't know nothing.
If you don't know that reality, you have
no reality.
For the reality of sin is the pervasive
foundation of all reality.
And if you don't have it, all of
your highfalutin nonsense about redemption and the cross
and all the kinds of things that you
think you believe are only just a vapor.
They're just sound and fury.
It's just something reduced to a nomenclature, to
a body of doctrine.
That's not knowing.
Don't you understand?
That's not knowing.
That's only cerebral agreement with certain evident truths
that changes nothing.
And why should God send you in that
condition?
Has there nothing better to do, no better
candidate that he's got to send you with
that shallow notion that falls short of the
acknowledgment of his glory and of what atonement
means and what God has paid to obtain
it because you knew the terror of sin?
Paul says, knowing the terror of sin, I
persuade men.
And I'm sure I can bet you dollars
to donuts, dear sister, you do not know
it.
But you need to put it as an
object of high priority.
How do you come to know the reality
or the terror of sin, realizing that that
is the underlay of everything?
Because what did Jesus do or perform that
was so consequential and worthy of our admiration,
let alone our adoration, if we don't understand
what problem he met in his death?
Are you guys following me?
Prove it.
My faith is fainting.
This is reality, saints.
And as we Jews say, oy vey, if
what prevails in the church is the measure
of reality that needs to be communicated to
the world, the world is dying for reality.
It's out of whack.
It has no foundations.
It's oblivious to eternity.
It does not know what sin and judgment
and hell are.
Jesus can be dispensed with as a peripheral
nothing celebrated at Christmas time to give the
apartment stores the occasion for our orgies of
buying, that even Japan has a Christmas, that
the world has produced the birth of the
advent of the son who met the sin
problem in his death and turn it into
a culture for commerce.
How is it then that you're not wounded,
that you don't ache over that, that you're
not chafed, and that, in fact, you can
go into those stores and indulge yourself as
much as any, rather than boycott the event
itself?
Got the idea?
Oh, listen, you guys, I'm not coming back
again.
I'm on my way out.
So I want to be as insulting as
I can get.
I want to stab you.
And if my impression is erroneous to you,
just let the Lord stab me, because I
can't believe, looking upon you and watching your
polite yawns, that you really know what the
terror of sin is and, therefore, are able
to persuade men.
You certainly have not persuaded Jewish men, even
here in Kansas City or any place where
you are.
So they look upon you as just a
harmless, Gentile equivalent of their Hanukkah, and their
Hanukkah is as much a false piece of
bologna as your Christmas, and the world goes
down in death while these things are celebrated
as being somehow real.
No wonder our kids are freaking out.
Let me repeat, Karl Barth, the reality of
sin, which is the sine qua non, you
know the Latin phrase?
That absolutely essential requirement without which nothing else
follows.
The sine qua non is the reality of
sin.
Cannot be known, not maybe it can, cannot
be known or described except in relation to
the one who has vanquished it.
There is no way to estimate sin independent
of Jesus.
To sentimentalize Jesus or to let that Australian
character get away with his movie that just
celebrates the flagellation and the physical abuse and
is a Catholic distortion of the great atonement
is to trivialize God.
To miss it here, saints, is to miss
it everywhere.
We need to call a moratorium.
There needs to be a great cry going
out from Christendom that we have missed it,
and that the only way to see it
and perceive the great central event of history,
the advent of the Son from heaven who
takes upon himself the form of a man
and that of a Jew and suffers death
as the consequence for the sin of mankind
in order to appease the honor of his
father who has been disgraced by the sinful
covenant breaking humanity.
Until that has broken on our souls, until
we have seen that in the context of
the suffering, the humility, the anguish of soul,
let this cup pass, we have not the
knowledge of sin and therefore ever everything will
suffer in proportion.
The knowledge of atonement, the church, the subject
of Israel, the last days and times, everything
will suffer the want of this foundation that
is rooted in the phenomenon of sin.
You guys know what evil is?
Oh, you're much too nice.
Evil.
You know how vile evil is?
How vicious, how inveterate, how intrinsic to man
and to his nature.
Not just when he's doing the most malicious
things, but even when he's acting at his
best.
Like Donald Trump, who has now become a
fashion icon.
Did you know that?
There are Donald Trump suits and Donald Trump
shirts and Donald Trump ties and that the
men's fashion leaders are astonished that overnight this
nobody has become the head of men's fashion
wear.
How come?
Because there's something with which he's identified that
men want to adopt.
The prestige, the mysticum of success, having several
wives and that's evil saints.
There's a prevalent evil.
I watched, what was I watching?
The World Series and in the halftime, which
was boring, I just flicked around the dial
just to see what else was on.
And there was one program about young girls
becoming models and they were all minority girls,
just full of excitement at the prospect that
they're on TV and maybe this will start
the recognition and a career.
And one girl had to be posed near
a car and she had tight pants on
and the guy stuck his hand right on
her behind and lifted it up onto the
fender of the car in order to show
it the greater advantage.
I went through the ceiling.
You probably wouldn't even have blinked an eyelash.
And then at the end they had a
little discussion on fashion and there was the
filmmaker and one of the girls and there
was a guy who had, he was black,
but he had the huskiest voice, but he
was dressed like a woman.
He was a transvestite having a legitimate place
on the panel talking about modeling as if
his opinion was to be desired and the
fact that he is a transvestite who lives
in complete travesty to the design of God
who made them male and female is not
in any way an impediment to his use.
In fact, it probably ensures his greater use.
You understand?
Listen guys, this world is evil.
This world is vile.
This world is vicious.
This world is anti-God.
This world is at enmity with God.
So you can believe that it's going to
sentimentalize the cross.
That's Catholicism.
And in some way keep us from an
apprehension of the reality that the cross alone
reveals.
And I wrote at the bottom of the
page, to have an inadequate sense of sin
is to have an inadequate sense of God.
Got that?
It all goes together.
You have a low estimation of sin.
How then can you exalt God?
And I wonder what is it that keeps
us from adoration?
I've been toying with the word.
I myself have not yet come to that
place of adoration, but I suspect that when
I do or when we will, we will
have come to the ultimate place of relationship
with God that is transcendent and breaks through
in realms of worship and praise that cannot
be imitated or affected in lesser places and
that releases the authority and power of God
by those who have come to such a
place of worship because they can be trusted.
I'm speaking as if this is a last
occasion.
Have you noticed?
I'm not even looking at the clock, knowing
that if you don't get this from me,
you're not going to get it probably from
anyone.
I'm going for broke for your souls, for
your future, for the day in which you
will esteem the word sent as being the
root of Apostolos sent one, that you're willing
to wait, that you know you're presently unqualified,
that you have nothing really to communicate in
the sense that would turn the world upside
down or that God should impart you an
authority that you would need in facing nations
or peoples who are intrinsically hostile or indifferent
to your message and the only way they'll
hear you is if they recognize that indeed
you're a sent one in the authority of
God bearing a sent word.
You think those black ministers wanted to hear
me?
They wanted to learn how they could augment
their ministries and come to greater measure of
success in their own self-esteem.
They're careerists.
The fact that they're Africans doesn't save them
from human ambition.
It's all the more reason to employ ministry
as a way to out from the deadening
poverty that afflicts the entire nation.
Now you have an income.
Now you have a suit on your back.
Now you have a reason for being.
These men were all careerists and wanted to
remain so.
All they wanted to hear was what technique
or method that you've developed in America can
we employ that will enhance our quote ministry.
They didn't want to become undone.
Let me repeat what I'm suspecting God is
wanting to communicate in this text.
Israel's present condition as a nation is to
be condemned to judgment because a prophet came
who was sent and spoke and performed it.
And nothing has happened from that day to
this.
The until has not yet come and when
it comes it will come in apocalyptic devastation
and ruin in Israel.
But when that happens I'm suspecting that the
judgment that had come by prophetic speaking needs
to be relieved by prophetic speaking.
But where are the Isaiahs of our generation?
Where can we conceive of a corporate sending
of a corporate Isaiah who could be sent
who's speaking now will open eyes rather than
close them.
Open hearts rather than close them.
Save rather than condemn.
It's waiting for those who are sent which
is waiting for those who have seen the
truth of their condition and have cried out
over it because they have seen the Lord
as he is high and lifted up.
But what precipitates everything the year that King
Uzziah dies.
So let me end with this you patient
saints.
What is the Uzziah of your life?
Still alive with whom you are in some
kind of relationship of symbiotic relationship of fascination
or esteem because the Uzziah is not necessarily
an evil person.
King Uzziah was one of Israel's better kings
except that he lapsed into leprosy by presumption.
But evidently there was a relationship between the
king and the prophet that however much it
may have served the prophet in the course
of his own walk and growth was now
an impediment.
Do you know of anyone who holds a
role like that?
It could be your own children, it could
be your ambition for ministry, it could be
a known leader.
One man fell out of a seat when
I was speaking like this, a precious minister
from El Salvador.
I said who was the Uzziah that God
revealed to you?
He said it was me, I myself.
Something has to die saints that precedes the
unfolding of this whole thing of revelation and
sending and call.
Uzziah, we don't have to wait for the
termination of a natural life, we can bring
it to death.
We can choose the death of that favorite
thing that may have meant something in the
past but your clinging to it keeps you
from the fullness of the revelation of the
Lord high and lifted up.
I'm just talking off the top of my
head.
I don't know how else to describe what
King Uzziah must have meant for the prophet
and why his death was critical to everything
that subsequently followed.
Now listen to this you Christian Zionists, what
if your Uzziah is the state of Israel
itself?
The very thing that you want to see
succeed and God says unless you allow that
to come to death, you'll not see me
because it's in the death of Israel as
in my own death that the greatest revelation
of the truth of what I am as
God is revealed.
But if you're unwilling to relinquish and want
to hang on to Israel as he presently
is hoping that whatever her defects, there'll be
an amelioration and an improvement, you're being kept
from the revelation of the Lord high and
lifted up.
How will I know that the revelation will
have come when you can say with the
seraphim, holy, holy, holy is the Lord of
hosts and that the whole earth is full
of his glory.
When you come to angelic seeing, not just
in general but over the sovereignty of God
that takes your Uzziah, when you acknowledge the
rightness of that death, of bringing that to
a death or God will actually do it
through physical death and that it's not mere
accident but the divine strategy, the divine will
and that you can in the face of
it not just acknowledge it, not just swallow
it down and learn to live with it
but exalt God because of it.
Hey, I'm getting right to the punchline now.
When you can exalt God in his judgments,
when you can see in God his glory
and greatest revelation of himself in those things
that seem to be the fiercest contradiction of
God, what, he's going to raise up the
state of Israel and then allow it to
be reduced and the land made desolate and
everyone is cast far away?
That contradicts your very understanding of God, his
mercy, his kindness, his goodness, which is exactly
what needs to be contradicted because it's your
humanistic view of God.
It's your nice way of seeing him that
you can walk with this God of your
imagining that reinforces you in your own status
quo.
When you can say holy, holy, holy is
the Lord of hosts and that the whole
earth is full of his glory, not just
in triumphal moments but in the moments of
death and disappointment and what seem to be
the severest contradictions of God, you have arrived.
You have come to the knowledge.
You have seen the Lord and you have
seen yourself and he'll purge you and he'll
send you.
So I want to pray now that if
you don't know who Uzziah is for you,
the Lord will show it.
And I don't know with the various forms
that it could be a person, a thing,
a ministry, your own ambition.
Lord, quite a morning, quite a, how do
they say it, a discursive, wide ranging sweep
from one text and that if you didn't
shut Art up, he could have still gone
on for another hour and drawn out and
found other implications that are inherent in that
text.
My God, we have quoted that text.
We've used it as sermons.
We thought we knew and understood it.
We were playing with it like a toy
and we ourselves were not affected and didn't
even understand the supremacy of one sent from
the throne of heaven.
Where from what other source shall one be
sent?
And we were so alive to our own
itch and our own ambition that we didn't
have to wait for that.
Just let some door of opportunity open because
there are needs everywhere in the earth that
would welcome high spirited and bright fuzzy tailed
young believers from the Midwest to bring blessing.
But the earth then yet remains in its
curse and still needing to be turned over.
So my God, Lord, let what you have
shared with us not suffer any loss that
we will not limit the Holy One of
Israel because we can only take so much
conceptual speaking at any one time and that
therefore what you have spoken will not fall
to the ground but that you'll continue to
allow it to seep into our deeps and
search us out and reveal to us who
that Uzziah is, likely someone who is presumptuous
in the realm of ministry and try to
usurp the function of priests because he was
a king and we admired that one and
wanted to be identified with that one and
share something therefore of his own presumption and
therefore he has to die for us and
we have to die for him if we're
to see the Lord as he in fact
is high and lifted up.
So Lord, let this message sink deep into
the very foundations of all that is represented
in this room and continue to unfold it,
explicate, show my God its meaning and even
now have its effect on as many who
are being touched and can see an application
that they need to acknowledge and to repent
about in preserving Uzziah rather than willing for
his extinction for we do not see his
angels Lord and we don't see the earth
full of your glory we see only the
present moment.
Come and bring us into that agreement with
the seraphim that qualifies us to be sent
ones that do not bring a merely cultural
time dated perspective but the timeless view of
the angels of God who forever perceive the
glory of God that's in the earth.
Bless this American audience Lord and help it
because it's American and bring it to an
apostolic and prophetic place for Israel's sake needing
to be freed from the judgment that has
been imposed upon it by the speaking of
a prophet by a fresh and new speaking
of a prophetic company who can be sent
who's speaking to open the blind eyes, open
the deaf ears, open the closed hearts that
they might be saved.
What a destiny for the church Lord at
the conclusion of the age.
Thank you for the preciousness of the call,
the holiness of the text in this day
in Jesus name.
Amen.