Good morning, young believers.
One day you'll be in this position and
you'll be coming up to a platform with
tremblings.
Lest you think that this is some professional
exercise that one can learn and master and
turn on and off at will, however, I
don't know how it looks from there up,
but from here down, it's another story.
It wouldn't be bad if the church, how's
the sound?
Am I coming out okay?
Yeah.
If the church learned to appreciate the preached
word and to recognize what a phenomenon it
is in itself as absolutely holy and utterly
supernatural.
We need to elevate our appreciation of the
preached word as being the word of God
and not of men.
And the man who speaks needs to have
the faith to believe that the word that
he speaks is the word of God and
not the word of man.
The remarkable phenomenon is this, you dear saints,
that God performs this through an earthen vessel.
It's an astonishment.
You know what it is?
It's the genius of the mystery of incarnation,
which we don't adequately understand or appreciate either.
But that's what takes place when a true
word is preached from the Holy Pulpit.
Incarnation, God in the flesh.
And the remarkable, he's humbling himself to allowing
himself to be contained in a vessel and
to be articulated and expressed through the limitation
of that vessel, except for the grace that
he imparts.
And he's even willing to allow his voice
to suffer a Brooklyn accent.
So, because the issue of the preached word
is the issue of the church, and the
issue of the church is the issue of
Israel, and the issue of Israel is the
issue of the kingdom, and the issue of
the kingdom is the issue of his glory.
It all goes back to what proceeds from
this place.
Little wonder that Paul says, who is sufficient
for these things?
So, Lord, I acknowledge, certainly, I'm not sufficient,
especially to bring a conclusion to these three
days.
Only you, who are the Alpha, are also
the Omega.
Only you, who gave us the beginning, is
appropriate to give us the end.
Because you gave that beginning in anticipation of
the end.
You knew the end from the beginning, which
we didn't.
That's why we're uncomfortable.
That's why we feel the frailty of our
humanity and uncertainty.
Should I?
Is this the text?
Is this the theme?
We don't want to miss it.
Do you know why?
It's once and for all.
What do you mean, Art?
You'll be back next year, won't you?
Who's to say?
If there'll be a next year for a
76-year-old crock, or the Lord will
take me up, or direct elsewhere, who knows?
It is altogether appropriate, you dear young saints,
to understand that every true speaking is a
last.
This is the final time, and it's once
and for all.
It will not be given again.
And of all of the remarkable things that
I could speak, I'm so privileged in what
God has given me over the years.
What shall I speak?
What is to be selected from that panoply
of themes and insight and revelation, any one
of which is calculated to bless you?
But what do you need most?
Shouldn't it be something on the explicit theme
of Israel itself?
One of the great classic messages, Ezekiel 37?
Well, if it is, God should have quickened
that, but he hasn't.
So I'm under constraint just to share, to
attempt to express burden of another kind.
That seems to be a minor key.
But as we know in the kingdom, nothing
is minor.
I lost an entire Russian audience in the
same city where I bought this $40 suit.
When I opened up with the subject of
Paul's statement on widows and slaves, when they
heard that that was my subject, boom, they
never came back again to another meeting.
They lived downstairs in the basement of the
church in the dormitory and would not come
up for any single meeting that followed because
they were grossly disappointed that I began on
a minor key.
Paul's statement on widows and orphans.
Read it sometime.
It's a little pinhole next to the breadth
of Paul's apostolic understanding.
But even that pinhole emits the most powerful
light.
Pity that they didn't stay for it.
You know what they wanted?
American hotshotism.
Here's a guy who's going to tell us
how to do it.
Big church mega.
He's American.
And were they ever disappointed?
So, Lord, precious God, a pinhole from you
is a door and a window to everlasting
glory and understanding.
We welcome a pinhole or just the finest
intrusion of light if that's what you select.
So come and again express your great heart
in your esteem for this body and your
understanding of its future.
And the appropriateness of your wisdom and love.
Speak, Lord, for your servants are hearing.
In Jesus' name I pray.
Amen.
Okay.
You know that the cross did not start
at Calvary.
It culminated at Calvary in its overt, physical
and violent expression.
But the cross is intrinsic to God.
The cross sublimates and subsumes the wisdom of
God, the way of God, the understanding of
God, the nature of God, the cross is
not a little fixture.
It's God.
And Jesus experienced the cross before he even
came down to earth.
How do you figure that?
Because to be separated from the Father, to
leave the province that he had occupied from
his inception in the unspeakable privilege of intimate
fellowship with the Father in heaven and to
come down to this marred earth, this sewer,
and to traffic in men and suffer their
abuse and to be confined in a human
body that has humiliating requirements of having to
go to the bathroom, that experiences hunger and
all that, to leave that heavenly dimension to
come down to earth was already the cross
and it was freely chosen as the cross
itself was.
It was not obligatory or it not be
the cross.
The cross is ever always the free givingness
of God to men and ourselves in our
own giving.
So for some reason I have been occupied
with Jesus in the garden since arriving in
Singapore when he travailed and groaned and prayed
at Gethsemane.
Do you know what the word Gethsemane means?
Hebrew.
It means olive press.
Do you know what an olive press is?
It's not some little hand contraption.
It's a great device with heavy stones, one
upon the other, turning on a kind of
a spindle with a great lever where one
man on one side and one on the
other move around and bring those two stones
closer and closer till they finally touch and
crush the olives that are pressed between so
that the substance and the oil can be
emitted.
He chose an appropriate place, don't you think?
Because his prayer and his intercessions and his
agonizings were an exact statement of that press.
He put himself into the press.
I want to say true prayer is dying.
I want to say true prayer and true
intercession is suffering.
I want to say that true prayer is
the cross.
True witness is the cross.
True service is the cross.
It's a suffering, it's sacrifice, it's extension.
It's allowing yourself to be pressed out, which
is happening before you this morning in my
speaking, if you have eyes to see and
to understand.
So, interesting that he should agonize in the
garden.
I looked up the word agony or agonize.
Do you go to the dictionary?
Right next to your Bible, that's where it
should be.
Dictionary is one of the great gifts of
God and Webster was a Christian.
And it's surprising sometimes what you find in
definition of a word that you think you
already understand.
None of us understands as we ought in
anything.
You know what agony means?
Jesus agonized in prayer and sweated clots of
blood that fell to the earth.
The first bleeding of calvary, the first bleeding
of atonement, the first shedding of blood was
not extracted by man.
It was extruded by God.
There's a difference between extracted and extruded.
Extracted is something inflicted in brutality, but extruded
is something that comes from within out.
By the constraint of your own agonizing and
press before God, because you're about something earnest
that requires a communication with God that is
soon to be consummated at a cross at
Calvary.
The whole issue of evil is going to
be met head on.
The prince of death is going to be
defeated through death by one who will voluntarily
bear that death, not just the death of
the mortality of his humanity, but death as
anguish, death as suffering, death as torment, death
as humiliation, death as the excruciating conflict with
darkness and with evil in the garden.
So interesting that the great redemptive drama begins
in a garden with Adam and Eve and
a serpent in the garden.
Beautiful place, but that's where you have to
be on guard.
It's beauty that is seductive.
And not the least things that Jesus had
to wrestle against in finding communion with the
Father.
Have you tried that lately?
It's no snap.
Earnest prayer is no snap.
Oh, I mean, we can mouth our little
banalities and unctuous official prayers and the polite
prayers.
That's nothing.
That requires nothing.
That's not from your gut.
That's just something that you can mouth and
speak out of your own head.
It transacts nothing.
It does not contact God.
It does not transact.
It does not obtain.
He doesn't hear it, I don't believe.
Prayer is communion with God.
And here I am, a believer for 41
years.
You think that I know as I ought
to know who God is?
You think that I have, at least in
my experience, a sufficient sense of God as
God, as holy, as an object and subject
of awe and reverence?
Have you yet come, cats, to the place
of adoration?
And I'm making a public confession.
You need to pray for me.
No.
In fact, my earliest irritation as a Jewish
believer saved by a God whom I was
not seeking is to come into the Pentecostal
assembly in Oakland, California and hear these Gentiles
sing about adoration.
And instead of enjoying that, I was chafed,
irritated, vexed by people taking a great word
and trafficking in it and making it something
light and other than what, in fact, it
ought to be and is.
Adoration.
Let me be on record.
Adoration is the ultimate posture of man toward
God that issues out of the deepest recognition
of the majesty of God and who he
is in himself that elicits and evokes a
rapturous emotion of deepest love and esteem that
is called What's the word?
It just went out of my head.
Adoration.
To adore, to adore God, that's going to
take contact.
But have you noticed that the heavens are
as brass?
Have you felt that your prayer could hardly
go through the ceiling?
Have you felt that there are layers interposing
themselves between us on earth and him in
heaven?
That it's no easy thing?
That it's going to require an agonizing to
break through these remarkable layers of spiritual opposition
out of darkness?
And most of us cease prayer at the
time when we ought to really be beginning.
We've made it a little curtsy, a little
initial thing and then go about our business.
Jesus was not doing that.
He never did that.
The whole genius of Jesus and his ministry,
his power and his authority was not some
magical source that he brought with him from
heaven.
He lay aside his deity.
He came stripped as a man and a
slave and a servant and as a Hebrew
and a son of Abraham and David.
He chose an ill-chosen race.
He chose a despised people in a little
corner of the earth in Nowheresville.
What a humiliation for the great God to
come down to that.
So anything that he accomplished which was great
and mighty, raising the dead and healings and
his remarkable statements was something that he received
from heaven, from the Father in communion, in
prayer, in relationship.
Because he said the words that I speak
are not my words.
Remember that?
Did you believe that?
And the things that I do I have
only seen from the Father.
Nothing originates from me in and of myself
or out of my humanity.
It's totally from above.
My whole posture as a son is to
glorify the Father who has sent me.
And if he doesn't give, I can't perform.
If he doesn't inspire, I cannot speak.
If he doesn't authorize, I cannot perform miracles.
I'm helpless, hapless, and utterly dependent on him
who sent me.
So he was in prayer oft in the
early morning hours while it was yet dark.
He was up at the mount or he
was in the garden seeking his Father, not
just for instruction.
What about today, Dad?
What have you got on your agenda?
But it's not recorded for us.
It's too private.
It's too precious.
It's too holy for us to intrude and
gawk and understand what he was actually praying.
But we can surmise and intuit that it
wasn't just the putting of petitions to the
Father in order to fit him for the
service of the day the way that we
pray.
It was communion.
It was a son speaking with his father
and waiting on his father and gaining afresh
the sense of his father, which was now
more difficult to maintain being in the earth.
It was one thing to be in proximity
with him in the heavenly realm, but now
on earth in all of the tumult and
controversy and opposition that he had to face
with Israel in its apostate sinful condition to
break through that weight upon his spirit and
find contact with God in a pristine, pure,
original, and holy way to be refreshed at
the throne in the knowledge of God and
then to face the world required agonizing, required
a press, required a deep calling unto deep.
Why did he do that?
Because he wanted to set for us an
example of what it means to be a
son of God because he's calling many sons
to glory.
And if you'll not rise up and out
and come forward from your present stale, predictable,
and ordinary religious and obligatory prayer, you'll not
ascend to sonship.
Hey, where'd that come from, cats, from above?
Where everything else has come from that I've
been speaking so far.
Believest thou this?
Prayer is the issue.
It's not a technique.
It's not a methodology.
It's not a religious obligation that we have
to discharge and then go about our business.
Prayer is the issue of our faith, of
our relationship.
Spurgeon said you can know a man and
a minister by hearing him pray because what
you hear publicly has had its origin in
that which is private and unseen.
He has a history, has a relationship of
a devotional kind in the early morning hours
before the light breaks.
And when you hear him publicly, you're catching
the echo and the substance and the authority
that he has received in that communion.
So this last time in Gethsemane, which was
a favorite place of his, a beautiful garden.
It's one of my favorite places in Israel.
You've never been?
Pray about it.
I'm not calling you to be a tourist,
but the highlight for me, the place where
Jesus suffered, the house of the high priest,
I forgot his name, Caiaphas, and you go
down a stone spiraling place right down to
the basement and you can see the places
in the wall where the iron fastenings were
where he was strapped so that he could
be flagellated and whipped.
It's an eerie, awesome place.
It's holy.
There's a hush from God.
It's the place where in the courtyard Peter
betrayed the Lord three times before the cock
crowed.
And my other favorite place is Gethsemane.
Oh, they have built a remarkable Catholic church
over it.
That's the pity.
Maybe it preserves something.
I don't know.
But you have to fight through the mosaics
and the architecture because in the middle with
an iron grill around it is a rock.
And you know what kid cats did?
Don't tell the authorities.
I stepped over the grate and I went
right onto the rock itself, face down like
a dead man, and I gushed.
This is the place where we have to
take our young people when we consecrate them
to the Lord for service, at that rock.
Prostrate yourself on that rock.
Gush to God on that rock.
Exude something out from your inmost depths unto
the Father at that rock.
That's the place of consecration and sacrifice.
And it's in the garden.
So let me not miss the point.
Do you know what the word agony means
in the dictionary?
To contend.
I was so surprised that the word agon
in Greek, the root, means to contend or
to contest something.
Are you in a contest?
Or do you think that the issue is
already all solved and the ball game is
all over and it just requires now a
last shout?
Oh, you dear, naive saints.
We're in a contest, a struggle, a contention
against uttermost odds for the issue of what
is going to prevail over this creation.
Darkness or light.
Which prince is going to prevail?
What wisdom will go forth to mankind in
this earth and the nations is the struggle
to the end that there was in the
beginning right to the end, the contention between
darkness and light, the prince of darkness, the
prince of light, and ultimate combat and contest,
which is an agony.
How dare we then be at our ease
and be at our leisure and lean back
as if it's all done and made and
all we've got to do is learn a
few phrases.
There's a struggle, and it's a struggle for
Singapore as to what wisdom is going to
prevail here because the other guys seem to
have all the marbles right now.
And if you'll allow my impression as a
New Yorker and living in Minnesota in the
rustic far reaches and having traveled widely in
the world, I would say Singapore is one
of the uttermost cities of beauty to be
found in the world.
It's tranquil.
There's a remarkable sense of order and beauty
and cleanliness.
It gleams with brand-new cars.
I'm looking in vain for one dented, rusted
old heap, and I can't find it.
I don't have to look far in Minnesota
or New York.
They're everywhere.
I myself own one, but try and find
one in Singapore.
No way.
Everything is new.
Everything is up to date.
Everything has a luster.
This is a smart, snapping little society here,
and this is a garden.
And though not the least things to be
contested and contended against is the garden itself
because it impedes communion with God, and it
says in its silence and in its prosperity
and lush quality of life that this is
what's real.
This is what really counts, what you see,
what's visible, what men are striving for and
owning and possessing and enjoying.
This is life.
This is reality.
Oh, yeah?
What about eternity?
What about the glory of God?
What about the kingdom of God?
What about the things that Paul saw that
were invisible and were the eternal weight of
glory?
Well, that's just a bunch of hokum.
That's just religion.
This that you see that is everywhere about
you and for which men clamor and pant,
this is reality.
You need to fight against the garden.
Not only do you need to struggle and
contend against darkness to reach God in prayer,
but you need to know that the very
environment in which you live is seeking to
snuff out your spirituality and have you succumb
to a lie that what it represents constitutes
reality and the things that men ought to
seek and give their energy and life to
obtain.
I said to you, dear pastor, just a
comment in passing, I said your function as
a preacher is to introduce and to persuade
your hearers about an alternative society.
And if you succeed, and it's going to
be a struggle because everything will oppose it,
you will have turned your hearers into pilgrims,
strangers, and sojourners in the earth.
And who wants to be a stranger?
Especially you young guys.
You want to be accepted.
You want to be popular.
You want to be a Christian and be
liked also and show that you're one of
the boys.
That because you're a Christian doesn't mean you're
not fun anymore.
Got the idea?
Who wants to be a pilgrim and a
stranger in the earth?
It's a remarkable anomaly.
Excuse my language, it ought to be on
the screen.
Anomaly.
Contradiction.
That I'm a stranger and a sojourner in
the world and yet I am comfortable in
any and every place to which God brings
me.
Not only am I getting by in those
places, I feel like a giant amongst pygmies.
I stride the earth as one who is
joined with its creator and its soon coming
king.
I'm not intimidated by skyscrapers.
I know they will crumble.
Gibraltar will crumble.
Some of the old songs are really great.
And I've got to fight against it because
they want to seduce my soul.
So, you guys have a special problem in
Singapore that we don't have to face in
New York or Minnesota, but we have our
own problems.
Your problem is the beauty of your garden,
the seductive power of your environment, the false
wisdom that has been promulgated as being truth
and reality.
The thing for which you've been prepared in
school is to fit yourself and to function
in its economy and to obtain its rewards
and to eclipse and make marginal your Christianity
as if that's only a Sunday supplement, which
for too many of you it is, because
where were you last night and the night
before?
Okay.
Jesus was groaning and agonizing, sweating drops of
blood.
I love that, that the first bleeding and
the first drops that constitute our atonement were
not extracted by men through violence, but freely
and voluntarily given.
What's the word that I used before?
Extracted or extruded out from the agonizing of
his deeps calling unto deep.
It required and expressed itself in blood.
And I wonder what it means in the
New Testament when it says, have you resisted
sin unto blood?
Have you ever tasted blood?
Not physically, but something comes up in your
mouth through some kind of vexation or a
remarkable challenge of a moral kind where you
can taste it.
I've seen a lady, I happen to be
married to her, who was so confronted by
issues of truth of a moral kind, I
dare not make this confession public, that unable
to face the requirement of it, having so
long hidden that she hemorrhaged and bled for
about a week internally.
There's something about blood.
Jesus sweating great drops of blood was not
some kind of cosmetic, skin-deep thing.
It came out from the gut.
So as much as I have, what's the
word, that lampooned you and pricked you and
prodded you, I have to confess I'm jealous
for what you have when I see you
before the Lord at the end of a
service, weeping.
I think, is that Chinese, Lord?
Is there something with these people that they
have racially?
Because I love what I'm seeing.
There's a depth there.
Their drops are falling to the floor.
This is an earnest crying.
This is not some superficial saccharine thing.
This is deep.
This is out of the heart.
And here I am reproving them and reprimanding
them and spoofing them for their shallowness.
Keep it up.
Let it deepen.
So the issue of true prayer is the
issue of true faith.
It's the measure of it.
Should it become weak, inept, vain, so equally
will be our faith, our witness, our testimony.
P.T. Forsyth, whom I'm commending to all
the church, an English writer, saint, pastor, theologian
at the turn of the century, who is
hardly known and deserves to be widely known,
he says, all forms and views of religion
have their test in prayer.
Lose the importunity of prayer.
You know what it means to be importune?
It's to not stop.
It's not to pray once or twice and
give up.
Jesus prayed three times the same prayer, having
to go back to his disciples to find
them sleeping.
He went back again to that rock and
prostrated himself and cried out again, let this
cup pass if it can.
Nevertheless, not my will but thine be done.
He prayed the same prayer three times and
the father was not bored by the monotony
and the repetition.
It's a prayer that needed to be repeated
in agony because he knew what he would
face in drinking that cup.
So to importune God is that widow woman
or the man who had company and needed
three loaves of bread and had to wake
up his neighbor, or the judge who said,
no, it's too late.
He didn't stop.
Jacob didn't stop.
I will not let you go except you
bless me.
I don't care how long it takes, how
long I must wrestle, how long I must
agonize in physical contest with very God himself.
I will not let you go except you
bless me.
I'm tired of being Jacob.
I'm tired of being a schemer, wheeler, dealer,
a supplant, a living by my wit, and
it's catching up with me.
I worked for seven years for a wife
and I find myself in bed with the
wrong woman and got to start all over
again.
I can't live by my wit.
I need to come into the relationship that
my fathers knew, Abraham and Isaac.
You're the God of my fathers, but you're
not yet my God.
We've not yet touched.
We've not yet been joined in spirit.
I need something from you, and I'm wrestling
to obtain it.
If there's anything that could be said for
Jacob, it's this.
Oh, I love that spirit that contends, that
will not cease at the statement of the
former heavyweight champion, Ali.
What's his name?
Muhammad Ali.
In his last heavyweight fight, title fight, I've
got it written in the back of my
watchman's knees, Love not the world.
Why there?
Because in the last chapter of that book,
Nii says something like this.
It's one thing to pray for evangelical work
and for witness and the various other activities
we have as Christians, but when it comes
to contending against the powers, that kind of
prayer will not suffice.
There, something of the uttermost is required, or
your conduct and activity is vain.
That's what Jesus was combating in the garden,
the powers, and they are our mortal enemy
as well, disarmed but yet active, and their
final defeat will come through us, and the
final release for Asia and China, Singapore, will
come when they are dealt with from prevailing
in the air over these cities and countries,
uncontested and uncontended against, because the only agency
that God has given that could both recognize
them as evil and contend against them in
the realm of spirit and triumph is the
church.
But what a church.
It's a church that agonizes.
It sweats blood.
It will not let him go except he
bless us.
God forbid that prayer should be reduced to
formula, to method, because how long after that
will worship equally be reduced, and how long
after that does the faith itself just become
consensus and acquiescence to certain doctrinal truths?
How long after that do we become totally
apostate and actually find ourselves opposing God and
killing men like me and claim that you're
doing God a service?
It doesn't happen in one fell swoop overnight.
It's a process of neglect, of erosion, of
allowing the most holy and apostolic church to
become a commonplace, a burp, a peep, a
kind of a cheap reflex action prayer and
choruses.
And when that happened in Germany, Nazism came
in with a bang.
When the land of Luther had reduced its
faith to a kind of mechanical formula of
middle-class piety and lost its virility and
power and connection with God, in that spiritual
void came the powers of evil to completely
take over the most civilized, civil, philosophical, and
ethical culture of nation in the world and
make it an engine for the devastation of
civilization and the elimination of the Jewish race.
You need to read your history aright and
guard your faith and keep it and grow
in it and deepen in it and know
what prayer means in vital contending against darkness
and against the very God in itself.
And to pray not only singly, solely and
individually, but corporately in a circle and with
others face-to-face in intense wrestling against
the powers of darkness and evil which Jesus
stripped but did not eliminate.
He left them around for you to finish
them off in the realm of spirit.
Is it time to conclude?
Stay around for round two.
It will be a little different but it
will be related.
So let me just finish with P.T.
Forsythe.
Are you going to go find his books?
You can find little booklets.
One is called The Soul of Prayer.
I have it with me in my briefcase.
Treat yourself to a copy of The Soul
of Prayer by P.T. Forsythe.
Hold it up, Simon.
See, it's come out in this inexpensive edition.
It's not going to be easy to read.
You'll have to study it.
You'll have to be strained and stretched in
understanding the sublime mind and heart and depth
of this saint whom I'm now quoting.
All forms and views of religion have their
test in prayer.
Lose the importunity of prayer.
It's insistent, driving, Jacob quality, and it's reduced
to soliloquy.
What's that, Art?
That's talking to yourself.
Thinking that you're talking to God.
You're only talking to yourself and justifying yourself.
God forbid.
It loses the real conflict of will.
You lose the habit of wrestling and the
hope of prevailing with God and make it
mere walking with God and friendly talk.
Precious as that is, you tend to lose
the reality of prayer at last.
And if I can add my little cat's
-ass punctuation, not only do you lose the
reality of prayer.
You ready for this?
You lose reality.
Dum-da-dum-dum.
And then you come to believe that Singapore
is real, that the garden is what it's
all about because you've lost reality and you're
open, therefore, to the seduction which is so
compelling.
You need to contend for the faith once
and for all, given the saints, which is
more than just a body of doctrines to
believe.
It's a way.
It's a mode.
It's a reality that is reality.
Though it's eternal and invisible, it will one
day prevail in the earth because of such
a church.
And when it's time for us to move
from this earthly abode and into the heavenly,
it will be no sweat.
It will be a minor transition because we
are already living in the heavenly reality here.
Contend for it.
Believe for it.
Find it.
Maintain it.
Because if we're not real, what are we?
If we're not real, what are we as
the church?
A culture?
An entertainment?
A Sunday diversion?
The world is dying, you saints, for reality,
don't you know?
That's why men are drugging themselves and shooting
needles and everything that they can do to
find some kind of a thing that supposedly
gives them a sense of being and of
reality.
And, of course, it's a delusion.
They'll not find it.
Their condition will worsen.
Reality is God.
Reality is heaven.
Reality are the things that are invisible, unseen,
and eternal.
Reality is the moral truth of God and
righteousness.
Don't lose reality.
Find it.
Maintain it.
The loss of reality begins with the loss
of prayer.
In principle, you make it mere conversation instead
of the soul's great action.
If you can write one sentence like that,
you can retire.
You make prayer mere conversation instead of the
soul's great action.
Are you jealous over your soul?
Your inward being?
The truth of yourself as a distinct personality
that God has created and shaped and formed
for calling and destiny?
Are you jealous over your soul?
Or are you a non-entity?
You're one of many.
You're in the faceless masses, even as Christians.
To be jealous for your soul is to
be able to express the soul's great actions,
which is prayer, which is service, which is
true witness, which is extending yourself for the
Jew in the hour of their greatest extremity,
when no one else will have a thing
to do with them because they'll have no
beauty that any should desire them, and when
they'll be knocked down and out and rolling
in their own blood, looking like a beat
-up Christ at the cross and being scorned
and expelled, and you are there.
God has brought you there or brought them
to you, and you stretch forth your hand
to lift them up, to wipe their brow,
to take the blood out from their eyes
and wipe their face and give them water
and hug them and embrace them in love.
It's nothing less to them than the revelation
of God.
That's how I got saved, you dear saints,
former Marxist.
I got saved because I saw God in
Gentiles.
I saw the light to lighten the Gentiles
as being also the glory of the people
Israel.
I didn't know that we had such a
glory until I saw the light of that
glory that lightens the Gentiles.
Do you understand?
There's nothing more powerful for Jewish consideration than
the light of their God and his glory
in a Gentile face where we least expect
to find it, especially the face that is
looking down on us with compassion and mercy
and wanting to pick us up and clean
us up and feed us and comfort us
and tell us why it is that we're
suffering what we are but that your God
will vindicate you and he'll restore you to
Zion.
In order for you to do that, you
know what doing that is?
It's expressing the cross because for you to
bend down and extend yourself, you might get
detected and caught because there will be spies
by the government and other agencies looking for
those who befriend Jews and see to that
they go to the concentration camps with them
and the Jew knows that and when he
sees you extending yourself to express mercy and
love when all the way else they're hated,
what they're seeing is God because your action
and conduct is in the spirit of the
cross.
It's giving for another without any thought of
the consequence for yourself which will likely mean
peril and suffering, imprisonment or death.
That's the cross and they'll see it through
you and as I said last night, to
see the cross is to see God for
nothing more profoundly reveals him than that cross
and if your prayers fail and become minimal
and be turned only to a little conventional
faith to assent to the correct doctrines if
you lose the power of the cross and
of the soul how shall you be to
my people what you ought which is the
whole reason for your coming into the kingdom
because he'll be glorified by their restoration and
he'll be the king who will come to
rule over them and all nations through them.
It all starts with prayer.
You know when it started for me this
morning?
4 a.m. not 3.59 or 4
.01 I went to bed from the service
last night I thought I would read a
little study maybe the Lord wants to quicken
something for today I tried, my eyes closed
in the first I put it down I
shut the light I was out without knowing
what today's message would be could you go
to sleep like that?
and 4 a.m. my eyes opened I
quickly looked at the clock, exactly 4 and
from 4 o'clock on it has been
nothing but the Lord in prayer, in prostration
in communion with another brother and actually taking
the body and the blood the bread and
the wine to be infused afresh with the
life and the vitality of God to serve
you today in that power and to find
the inspiration and mind of the Lord that
he wants to express and then to speak
of believing that this is his will huh?
this is the faith saints I'm just a
layman thank you Lord, precious God oh holy
one the privilege of prayer save it from
mere religiosity mere obligation to some deity who's
up there whom we hardly know and don't
know as we ought and think that we
can pacify him with a little passal of
words of a little unctuous formula and then
go about our business, we've done our duty
Lord, we don't know you as we ought
we don't worship you as we ought we
don't adore you as we ought we're not
praying to you as we ought as the
God who deserves not just to hear our
petitions but to hear our communion that we'd
love to be in your presence and wait
upon you and give you the day and
confess afresh that without you we can do
nothing that we're nothing but weakness and frailty
and dust, my God whose frames you know
and how do we dare stand before your
people in one of the most cherished churches
and bodies and fellowships on the face of
the earth and speak to them appropriately on
a final day what wisdom what human determination
can ever lead us to select a word
that is right but to pray to believe
and to have something formed and grow in
our hearts and thought about Gethsemane the olive
press the drops of blood the first bleeding
was not compelled, it was freely given it
was voluntary, it was extruded through the excruciating
prayer that would not let the father go
that knew that there was a cup that
had to be quaffed while his disciples slept
who were soon to betray him my God
my God, I bless this church these young
people, Lord put something in their souls infuse
something, the sense of yourself that cannot be
satisfied with a little cheapy prayer that are
willing to wait until they learn that there's
a difference between their prayers and the prayers
that God himself will give to pray to
pray God's prayers is such an exquisite treat
and most of us have never known it
we've just muttered our own little formula we've
not waited long enough we've not believed deeply
enough for the prayers of the God which
is true prayer so Lord help us, precious
God for the statement of our prayer is
the statement of our faith and the statement
of our faith is the statement of the
church come my God bring us to that
desired place that you demonstrated in your own
life and suffering which was the cross from
the beginning even before you ascended it and
we thank you and give you praise for
the privilege of being joined to such a
God as you are hear our prayer even
now Lord, even where we sit that where
we tell you we're not satisfied with ourselves
as we are in you we're not satisfied
with the measure that we have that we
want to be like Jacob of old and
we'll not let you go except that you
bless us and your strange blessing is to
touch us in the socket of our thighs
and to cripple us and make us lame
that hereafter we'll walk with a limp we'll
be conspicuous, we'll be a crippled people but
to be weakened is to be strengthened by
the Most High and we're willing my God
for that strange blessing that leaves us lame
because it's the lame who take the prey
so we bless you Lord come and converse
with your children right in their seats, they're
talking to you right now, hear them my
God, their precious young hearts who have hardly
been able to follow this strange Jewish man
but their spirits have been stirred they know
that this is reality he's talking about something
deep that I need to know and to
appropriate meet them Lord, the time is short,
the hours are urgent, the stakes are great,
there's not a luxury for them to take
their time to grow up and come to
maturity, something is being required early and now
sainthood sonship authority, stature weight in God, true
prayer true service, true worship truth for Jesus
sake, whose name we pray