There's a remarkable indifference in the Earth to
the fact that this planet was visited by
God.
I don't know what it takes.
I think we just have to recognize that
we're in a kind of a sleepwalk, a
stupor.
That the God of this world has blinded
the mind, not only those who do not
believe, but those who only nominally believe.
And that the impact or the fact, the
significance that this planet was visited by very
God has not penetrated us to the depths
of our understanding.
I very much agree with the brother who
said, we're not yet ready for the second
coming of the Lord, because we have not
yet fully appropriated the meaning of his first
coming.
There's not a sufficient sense of astonishment, and
no one is really raising the electric question
of why it is that God would choose
in a point of time to visit the
Earth, and for what purposes did he come,
and what was affected by his coming, and
what is the significance to us who remain.
It's more than just a matter of historical
curiosity or interest.
It's amazing in the same sense as I'm
speaking now, this cosmic impersonalism of a world
without God, or even if it's a world
with God, what has he done but set
it in motion and abandoned it to men.
A kind of mechanistic universe that prevails and
perpetuates itself, in which God does not have
to be too seriously considered.
Therefore it's not at all surprising that in
the vital interest that affects the lives of
men and of nations, God is not invoked,
nor is he sought.
It's just remarkable to pick up a newspaper,
or a newsweek, or time, and to see
that the media is filled with the counsels
of men about the issues of war and
peace, and what ought to be done, and
what constitutes wisdom, but never once is there
any mention or reference to the fact that
there's a God who can be considered, whose
counsel can be sought, whose will can be
obtained, or who was here at one time,
and has spoken, and has left us a
body of statements that he intends to prevail
in terms of the conduct of nations and
of men.
There's a remarkable indifference toward God that amounts
to a rejection, and I hold the Church
responsible for allowing such views as these to
prevail, because when it comes to the effectual
circumstances of our own lives, though we believe,
the way that we conduct our lives and
make our own decisions is virtually in keeping
with exactly the way that the world makes
theirs.
God is not radically taken into our own
consideration, and we make our decision, whether it's
going to a college, or getting married, or
establishing a business, or any such thing, on
the same basis of appeal to reason, to
logic, to circumstance, to convenience, to advantage, as
by which the world makes its reckonings.
The world is indifferent to God, because we
who believe have not radically taken God into
our consideration.
The conditions have become such that any thought
of bringing God into the counsels of men
is considered a violation, and it's ironic that
it's the world who raises the issue of
the separation of Church and State, as if
somehow the State needs to be protected against
the Church, that somehow the Church is not
to have any voice, not to stick its
nose in, not to sound itself, not to
express itself, not to bring the counsels of
God into the secular affairs of men.
This would violate the separation of Church and
State, altogether forgetting that the principle, when it
was first invoked, was invoked to protect not
the State, but the Church, that God never
intended that there be the distinctions of sacred
and secular, which prevail today, and constitutes the
comfortable categories, not only of the world, but
of the Church itself.
In my opinion, God intended for the penetration
of the secular by the sacred, and the
Church is the agency and the instrument by
which the divine is to come into the
ordinary, and eternity is to come into time.
These things have been lost to us in
exactly the same proportion as the kingdom of
God has been lost to us, because, for
very fact, this is the kingdom of God.
This penetration of the world is a kingdom
come.
But in keeping with the kind of impersonalism
that prevails, and God only as a Sunday
object, the phrase, the kingdom, has lost its
currency, or has never been known.
It's a kind of airy phrase that refers
in some vague way to some distant thing
that perhaps is our experience after we die.
The Church has little expectancy for a kingdom
come in earth as it is in heaven.
The remarkable thing is that the Church has
allowed the world to define it, to define
its function, to define its role, to define
its activity.
I'm reminded of the condition of Israel in
its apostasy, and the people love to have
it so.
As I go on, I think you'll recognize
that the alternative to what is prevailing, namely
a Church that is kingdom-oriented, an active,
victorious, and triumphant Church, requires from its members
challenging things in the pursuit of which the
consequence is going to be, at the least,
reproach and persecution, and at the uttermost, martyrdom.
I pray that you'll stay for all three
speakings, because I want to conclude with the
theme of martyrdom, not as some kind of
rare experience for the very few, because they
were not wise enough to avoid the consequence,
but as the normative logic and result of
the faith as it is truly pursued in
a world that is not only indifferent, but
hostile against it.
The fact that we do not expect martyrdom,
and that we are not preparing for it,
is another statement exactly in keeping to what
statements I've already made, that the Church is
living beneath God's kingdom intentions.
We do not share the apostolic view of
the Church Fathers.
We do not share the apostolic view of
the radical Anabaptists of the 16th century, who
were burnt at the stake, tortured in dungeons,
bound back to back, because they saw as
the context of the drama in which their
own Christian life was set, two kingdoms in
inextricable conflict and clash, a kingdom of darkness
and a kingdom of light.
They had, as it were, a kingdom view,
and they lived out of that kind of
seeing, and therefore they had a radical impact
in the communities in which they were, and
the result was persecution.
Not so much from the world or from
the state, as from the prevailing religious bodies,
who saw their kind of Christianity as threatening
and intimidating, and going beyond the safe prescriptions
that they wanted to define Christianity as.
All these things have relegated the Church to
a nominal and secondary place, a kind of
an institutional adjunct to society.
The Church has been effectually domesticated, made tame.
Its role has been defined by the world.
It has given us the hour in which
we can safely conduct our services, without interrupting
the football schedules or the golf course, and
so long as we adhere to a schedule
of services and see the faith as a
Sunday continuum, a succession of services, and that
the Church keeps its nose out of the
world's business and recognizes and stays within the
confines that have been established for it, we
will be allowed our tax-deductible advantages and
the like.
The adherents of the Church constitute in the
world's sight a kind of fraternal order, or
a society sharing a quaint vocabulary and a
hymnology whose presence can be tolerated, so long
as it does not interfere in the things
of the world that really count.
Phew!
I mean, I'm staggered even as I'm reviewing
these things myself.
And you'll hear from me probably tomorrow, but
I just feel like saying it now.
Except that the Church introduced truth and righteousness
into the earth, there is no means by
which these things can be admitted.
Do you realize that?
Righteousness and truth are distinctives of the Church
alone.
Only the Church has the capacity to understand
the meaning of these words as they are
spirit words given from heaven and are understood
not by reference to the dictionary, but in
the living experience of the saints, whose God
would have righteousness to dwell in the earth.
And except that the Church makes truth and
righteousness visible through its conduct and through its
presence, there is no way for the world
to understand what these words mean.
The Church itself lives as the world, that
is to say, as if God does not
really exist, and that no practical import into
their daily lives is expected by virtue of
their believing.
I know that that's not true for most
of you, but I'm making a statement about
the Church at large, because your heart needs
to break, and you need to see and
understand the condition of the Church as God
himself sees it.
What am I saying here?
That those who bear the name of Christ
themselves do not believe that there's going to
be an existential consequence for their life by
virtue of their believing.
In other words, they expect to have cancer,
they expect nervous breakdowns, colds, flus, divorces, and
all the kind of malady and complaint and
misfortune that besets anyone in the world.
The fact that they believe does not effectually
touch the practicalities of their life.
And therefore we confirm the world in an
attitude toward the Church which is antiseptic and
relegates the Church of no consequence because they
see that it has no visible consequence for
those who profess the belief.
Instead of seeing transcendent men and women who
are living above disease and above calamity and
above disaster, they see them beset by the
same kinds of misfortune as those who make
no profession to believing.
Such things ought not to be.
And the reason that they prevail is because
the Church is not the Church until it
recognizes its kingdom mandate.
It always will live beneath the intent of
God in the transcendent and powerful place that
God intended for it until it lifts its
eyes to understand its kingdom call.
Its life is more than a succession of
Sundays.
Our salvation is intended to procure something in
this earth.
We're intended to affect nations and societies.
We are a light unto the world.
We're not just a fraternal society that has
its own peculiar vocabulary and hymnology.
As I said before, the decision-making of
most Christians is like the world, predicated upon
secular premises, reason, logic, need, self-interest, probability.
It is not assumed that God has a
will in such matters, that it can be
discovered and obeyed, or that it is indeed
His normative intention for those who call upon
His name.
And so long as we believe that...
See, what we believe is not what we
say we believe.
What we believe is what we demonstrate in
the actuality of our life.
And so long as that actuality does not
demonstrate a God whose will can be revealed
and obeyed, then the world has no obligation
to consider Jesus as both God and Lord,
or King.
So long as they see us predicating our
lives and making our decisions on secular premises
and not the consultation of God's will in
a faith that believes they can be revealed
by the Spirit because we have the intent
of obeying it, the world is under no
obligation to take the Church seriously.
And as we understand clearly, except that He's
the Lord of everything, He's the Lord of
nothing.
So long as that we have a mentality
that divides the great questions and the small
and consults for the will of God in
what we consider the great questions and allows
ourselves the prerogative of making our decisions in
what we consider the things that are small,
we ourselves are suffering from an inadequate view
of the King and the Kingdom.
For in the Kingdom of God, there is
no decision that is small.
There is no issue that is little.
He's totally the Lord, or He's not Lord
at all, and that's something that has got
to be more than just a piece of
our doctrine.
It's got to be demonstrated in the actuality
and the totality of all of our living.
Another demerit of the Church that reveals to
the world that there is no such thing
as a King or a Kingdom is our
attitude toward sickness, toward accident, and toward death
as being wholly arbitrary.
It just happens.
It's the way the cookie crumbles, or it's
natural, or it's a disease, or I caught
it.
The Church has little sense of divine causation,
little awareness of cause and effect, of things
that come from God as chastisement, as judgment,
or for the various reasons in which God
will allow things to happen.
And so we dismiss our things as the
world dismisses it, and therefore we pair to
the same remedies, whether it's aspirins or doctors,
without asking why it is that we're suffering
an economic setback, or a calamity in marriage,
or a failure in health, or the various
other things by which God is seeking to
probe and to touch us.
We do not have a Kingdom view that
sees the hand of God in our circumstances,
and therefore the world is not obliged to
see the hand of God in theirs.
Another aspect of this cosmic impersonalism, of not
bringing God vitally into the world which he
created, is a lack of awareness of the
invisible spirit world, which is greatly dismissed, and
is outside the consciousness of most Christians.
There is no practical knowledge of the wiles
of the enemy who manipulates his victims at
will.
The prevalence of Halloween, or jokes about the
devil, or pictures of him in magazines with
the tail and a three-pronged trident, and
all of these kinds of cultural things show
the complete dismissal of one of the most
awesome facts that constitutes the reality of the
universe, namely the existence of a whole spirit
world of principalities and powers and rulers of
darkness that affect the conduct of nations and
men.
And because the church has not sufficiently reckoned
on that, does not sufficiently believe it, and
does not walk and live as if it
believes it, the world has not been required
either to take it seriously into its consideration.
And therefore Satan is having an unparalleled opportunity
to jerk, to intimidate, to threaten, and to
affect the conduct of nations without the slightest
awareness that he is the source behind the
evil that prevails in the world in a
church that is too anemic even to indicate
the source, let alone to bring the remedy.
They have not understood the great conflict between
light and darkness that underlines all reality, both
in history, the things of the past, and
of the future.
This is a kingdom consciousness that needs to
be restored.
As a matter of fact, the church is
devoid of any sense of the past.
It does not have in its consciousness a
sense of the history of the church in
the vital way that it should.
It does not have a living sense of
continuum, of its antecedent conditions that go all
the way back to the apostolic church and
come up into modern times.
And because we are cut off from the
vital knowledge of the past, it's not an
accident to find that we have no real
regard for the future either.
We're lacking a sense of the things that
are imminent and are about to take place.
We're without a past, and we're without a
future, and therefore our present is emasculated.
We have no sense of real, eternal expectation.
And one of the earliest sources of pain
for me, as a Jewish believer, was to
hear as a cliché references by Christians to
the Lord's soon coming.
I could hear those statements, and I was
never once persuaded.
That is to say, people speak it as
a trite cliché, as a conventional kind of
burp.
But there's no real conviction, or passionate or
palpitating expectation of the soon coming of the
Lord.
This is as much lost to our living
consciousness as any regard to the past, and
therefore we do not see ourselves as the
successors or the inheritors of those who constitute
around us, even tonight, the cloud of invisible
witnesses.
We are cut off from both the past
and the future, because both these things are
elements in a true kingdom view.
And as we have no sense of the
past and no sense of the future, so
also do we lack a sense of the
glory of God.
You can quiz any number of Christians for
a definition of that word glory, and they'll
be hard-pressed to give you an answer.
And in a certain sense I sympathize, because
it's not a word that lends itself to
an easy definition.
But this much is true.
There's not a jealousy for the glory of
God.
There's not an anticipation of the glory of
God.
There's not an expectation that there's a glory
to be experienced or to be sought.
We have so long been accustomed to living
outside the glory of God as something visible
or felt or experienced, that we measure our
meanings by another criteria altogether.
Whether they were good, whether we enjoyed them,
whether it was well attended, whether the offerings
were successful.
When the only true kingdom measure of the
success of anything is how it pertains to
the glory of God.
I'm mentioning all of the factors that are
absent from the consciousness of the Church to
the same degree as is the absence of
the kingdom.
And therefore it's no accident that as the
sense of God's glory is absent, so also
is any reference to suffering.
Not only is suffering absent, it is avoided
and even despised.
And even theologies and doctrines have grown up
in modern times that have relegated suffering or
any anticipation of suffering as somehow being outside
the faith and needless in the experience of
most Christians.
But I want to go on record tonight
as saying that to the degree to which
we shun a necessary suffering in the pursuit
of apostolic faith, to that same degree will
we also miss his glory.
There's a place for suffering, and as I
intend to show tomorrow in conclusion, it is
a central place and it has everything to
do with the cross which has equally been
lost to our consciousness.
I am hard pressed as I stand here
tonight to remember when I have heard a
message on the cross preached last.
The cross is no longer in vogue.
I don't know that it ever was in.
And yet when you read the apostolic literature,
when you read the literature of the Anabaptists
or any revival, restoration of true kingdom church
reality, you see the centrality of the cross,
the expectancy of suffering and the jealousy for
the glory of God as being central to
the consciousness of the saints of that generation.
They need to be restored to our own.
The glory is absent, the suffering is absent,
hope is absent.
Dynamic faith is absent.
Faith has become somehow a formula, a gear
lamp which we rub to obtain Cadillacs or
other things that pertain to our personal benefit.
But faith in the sense that it was
apostolically understood as a mode of life, a
radical cleaving to God, an utter trust, a
dynamic.
To that sense, faith is lost, hope is
lost and love is lost or never been
known in the sense of being self-sacrificing,
utterly giving, unconditional.
And so also in this catalogue of things
lost is the knowledge of the resurrection life.
The doctrine remains, but the knowledge of the
life has been lost or has never been
known.
And one of my prayers for this very
seminar is that we do not only hear
speaking on these things, but you'll see the
very demonstration of them.
Because it's very clear to me, as I
sense what God wants to set before you
in the short space that we have together,
that the only way it can conceivably be
done is by the resurrection life of Him
Himself, by the wisdom that adheres in that
life, by the dynamic and the power of
that life.
We have really forfeited the doctrine of the
resurrection except that we are actually living in
it.
And it's interesting that one of the central
things for which the Anabaptists, the radical reform
wing of the Protestant Reformation was persecuted, was
their belief in the incarnate life of Christ
and the body of Christ.
That they should say with Paul, for us
to live is Christ.
This was considered scandalous in the ears of
Catholics and Lutherans who burned them at the
stake and were all the more persuaded that
these heretics must be of the devil because
they had the joy and the glory of
God even in the moments of their martyrdom.
They showed forth such a demonstration of the
life of God which was so unknown by
conventional religionists of their generation that the very
demonstration of that life was proof to those
who persecuted and killed them that they were
in heresy.
Or else they would have been just as
gray, just as lackluster, just as unbelieving, just
as cynical, just as full of self-apology
as those who persecuted them.
The prevailing mentality of the reformed church, whether
it was Lutheran, Zwingli, Calvinistic or whatever in
the generation that persecuted these radicals was that
I'm only a sinner saved by grace.
God knows I'm only human.
There was no expectation for perfection.
There was no expectation to obtain Christ-likeness
or the character of God or Lamb-likeness.
And those who made such profession and believed
that there was a way that it could
be obtained by union with Him in baptism
were considered so heretical as to be destroyed.
And I have an anticipation in my own
spirit that we're going to see that same
drama enacted again at the conclusion of the
age.
That there will be those who will kill
us claiming that they are doing God a
service.
That's not the world speaking.
It's religion speaking.
Because something so offensive has risen that cannot
be tolerated, namely a people who have an
apostolic faith and a kingdom view and believe
for a kingdom come on the basis of
the power of life that broke all fetters
of death when it rose from the dead
and can be fulfilled and enacted and expressed
through the body of saints who are in
the earth now.
I'm quoting now from a precious writer who
says Cosmic impersonalism is a way of banishing
personal responsibility from the universe.
It enables men to ignore the possibility of
final judgment in terms of a fixed set
of ethical standards.
Because if the world is just a random
accident, if God is not its creator and
therefore its Lord, if it just happened by
chance, then there is no fixed standard.
There is no divine ethic.
There is no requirement made of men.
Anything goes and therefore there is no judgment.
But it's interesting to see the kind of
view held by the apostolic fathers, the kingdom
view that believed that God had appointed a
day in which he will judge all men.
He will judge the world in righteousness, Paul
says in Acts 17, through a man whom
he has appointed having furnished proof to all
men by raising him from the dead.
I don't have time in the few occasions
that we have together these days, but I
invite you to look to the reference to
the day of the Lord, the judgment of
God.
God as judge, as being one of the
central factors of the consciousness of the apostolic
generation.
Completely lost from our own consideration for which
reason we are still fornicating like jackrabbits or
at least contemplating the possibilities.
The easy standard that prevailed in our charismatic
evangelical age is a testimony to the fact
that we, unlike the apostolic church fathers, do
not believe that God is a judge.
And we have not the faith to believe
that we are actually being observed.
We have not a living conscience which establishes
what our conduct is when we're not being
observed and determines what kinds of thoughts we
allow ourselves to think when we're free to
think what we will.
We do not believe with Paul really in
our hearts that God has appointed a day
in which he will judge all men for
all that they have done in their bodies,
both good and bad.
And because the church has not communicated the
sense of judge, the world is on a
reckless course of such abandon, of such apostasy,
of such total self-indulgence and gratification so
as to make the things that God looks
upon as abomination standards of behavior in our
own generation or at least alternate lifestyles.
Sodomy has become an alternate lifestyle because there's
no fixed standard, because there's no judge, because
there's no law word that God has given
which is common to every generation and that
has not passed because grace has come.
The world is in its very condition because
we have not lived as a nation of
priests before it to teach the world the
difference between the common and the profane and
have not communicated the sense of the fear
of God because we ourselves do not have
it.
Paul says, knowing the terror of God, I
persuade men.
And we have been notorious in our failure
to persuade men.
We may have enticed a few that God
has a plan for their life or the
benefit they'll receive if they make a decision
and accept Jesus, but we have persuaded very
few because we ourselves do not know the
terror of God.
We do not understand Him as judge.
We are not living as if we believe
that God has appointed a day in which
He will judge the world.
We do not believe that there's a standard
that God requires not only of the church
but of nations and of men, that righteousness
exalts a nation and that the coming of
God to earth was not just to bring
a certain body of truth for a church,
but to bring a revelation of God to
the earth.
We have not made the message known to
the nations.
I've just finished writing a letter to an
officer of the American consulate in a certain
African nation who called me long distance to
explain to me why it is that two
Africans whom we're desiring to come to us
here in Minnesota and to attend our prophetical
school cannot obtain their visas.
And in his explanation, he passed a thin
threshold, in my opinion, between being official and
being officious, that he was going to keep
them from having their visas on the basis
of certain opinions of his own, far beyond
what was actually required from him as an
official.
And I wrote him a letter.
We who have responsibility in government need to
be reminded that we're only magistrates, that we
have only a certain limited purview, a certain
area for valid activity, to bring a certain
sense of order and to uphold a righteousness
that is pleasing in God's sight.
And that we need to remember that the
earth in which our officialdom is being enacted
is really and ultimately the Lord's, that men
have a right to traverse the earth and
to move in the fulfillment of his will.
And I realize that as I'm writing this
letter to a highly articulate government official that
is an utterly secular man without the slightest
awareness of these things in his vital consciousness,
because it has never been put there by
the Church.
The earth is the Lord's and the fullness
thereof and those that dwell therein.
There's a righteousness which God is going to
hold both nations and men responsible and for
which he's going to judge them.
But this cosmic impersonalism allows men to dismiss
from the universe which he himself made, to
dismiss his judgments, to dismiss his standards, to
ignore the possibility of eternal punishment.
It allows man to reinterpret all facts according
to his purposes and ideals.
Because if there's not a God who created
the universe and set his purposes in that
creation, if it's not moving toward some fulfillment
in his will, then we have the obligation
as unaided men to provide our own purposes,
whether it's orgies or revolution, which is indeed
what men have done in the absence of
the knowledge of the purposes which are God's,
which have not come to them because the
Church has not made them known.
Man becomes the determiner and interpreter of the
universe.
And understandably, secular man prefers not to interpret
the universe in terms of God's categories.
He much prefers to live in the hypothetically
random universe which is posited by modern humanism.
Therefore, we need to contend for the faith.
This contending for the faith that was once
given to the saints is more than just
a little Patsy formula.
It is a total Weltanschauung.
It is a whole world view.
It is a cosmic sense of the purposes
of God that in here, in his creation,
and through the Church, which is the agency
intended for its fulfillment.
We need to contend for that faith and
we need to recognize that we are living
in a poisoned atmosphere.
Poisoned because it is secular, because it is
skeptical, because it is rationalistic.
The God of this world has blinded the
minds of those who do not believe.
And it is these people who are shaping
and influencing our culture and our civilization.
The world is becoming secularized and God is
being omitted from the considerations of men.
Therefore, we are rushing, tell Mel, to a
doom, which is the consequence of living a
life without the presence of God and his
counsel.
If we lived in the atmosphere of revelation,
which God intended, our every thought would express
the truth which is laid in the creation
of God.
Let the wicked man, it says, forsake his
way and the unrighteous man his thoughts and
return unto the Lord.
You cannot believe how much we need to
have our thoughts formed by God himself.
Whereas our thoughts have been so much influenced
by the world and the atmosphere that prevails
that we do not have these kinds of
expectancies or understandings because we have not the
cosmic sense of God's own thoughts.
It is the plan of God that gives
meaning and a fact is not truly known
or understood except to the extent that it
is related to God.
God needs to be so alive in our
consciousness.
Every fact of our circumstance needs to be
related to him.
Everything is seen in terms of what is
his ultimate purpose and intent.
And it is for the want of that
seeing that our life is so presently marred
and crippled and inadequate.
We need the view of the largest cosmic
sense of God's things to set our life
in the context that God intended.
No fact of the universe is independent of
God and his plan.
He is both creator and lord of the
earth.
And to the degree that the evolutionists have
been able to dismiss God as creator, to
the same degree has modern thought been able
to dismiss God as lord.
So in the same Acts 17, Paul's sermon
on Mars Hill, he says to these philosophical
and secular Greeks who embody the same spirit
that prevails today in the world, that the
God who made the world, verse 24, and
all things in it, since he is lord
of heaven and earth, does not dwell in
temples made with hands.
In the same breath and in the same
statement, Paul sets forth before secular Greeks that
the God who made the world is both
the lord of heaven and the earth.
There is a connection that cannot be broken,
that if God is the creator of the
universe, he is also its lord.
Therefore, there's a purpose because he's not a
mindless or an aimless creator.
And therefore, our life has to be related
to that purpose.
Or we are falling short of his glory
and we invite his judgment.
The random purposeless universe of the secularists ejects
God from his own creation and autonomous man
becomes his own God.
Man becomes the source of cosmic purpose and
the measure of all things.
The famous statement, the axiom, out of the
enlightenment from which the whole genius of secular
thinking has come is that man is the
measure of all things.
When the truth of the matter is that
God is the measure of all things.
But so long as we have forfeited the
field and have not made that God clear
and have not demonstrated him in the awesome
reality that we should, man has prevailed as
the measure of all things and asserts his
sovereignty and control over nature.
And that's why we have genetic experiments today,
abortion, economic planning, social elites, super states, all
of the phenomena of modern times that has
threatened the very life of man and the
planet itself, that has made it insane, that
has loaded our institutions, or has tortured untold
numbers of men, devoid of feeling, or has
permitted wars in their own self-interest, caused
them to let rivers of blood flow in
modern times is all the statement that man
is the measure of all things.
That he is sovereign and that he rightfully
should control, make his experiments, do his thing,
have his alternate lifestyles and make sodomy legitimate.
There's so much more that can be said
about how far man has gone and I
hope I'm not throwing a little wrench in
the works, but I can't help but speak
of the things that are pressed in my
consciousness at this particular moment with a daughter
who's about to graduate high school in her
senior year and is now filling out her
forms for college in terms of the requirements
necessary to become a nurse.
And I find that she has to have
algebra and chemistry and I forgot what other
kinds of sciences and math, which I doubt
in a million Sundays she will ever be
required to use.
I'm becoming conscious of a kind of elite,
a kind of academic elite where the sovereignty
of men prevail and where they arbitrarily determine
what are the criteria by which you earn
your diploma so that you can obtain a
certain mode of living and a certain income
and a certain entree to classes in society.
If God is absent and men themselves have
to fill the vacuum, they will define their
own criteria and make their own rules.
And the whole system has come to prevail,
that is senseless, time-consuming, wasteful, self-perpetuating,
because God is absent from the counsels of
men.
So if this is the case, what is
an alternative?
Christian cosmology or worldview?
First, that the universe was not established by
God and then allowed to operate mechanistically by
itself for the free exercise of men, but
that God gave a dominion mandate right from
the beginning to men, that is to prevail
in the earth, that is to fill the
earth, and that is to rule in the
earth, that is to be the sub-regent
of God in the earth, that the man
who is made in God's image also is
called to a purpose in God to prevail
over the earth which God has made and
to make that God known and his law.
The basis for order in society is a
personal relationship between God and men who are
in a covenantal relationship to obey his law
in love, to subdue the earth and to
rule over it as the regents, the sub
-regents of the creator himself, on the basis
of a righteousness that exceeds the righteousness of
the Pharisees and that exalts nations.
This is why I'm saying that you'll not
get this in one hearing.
I've not gotten this in one writing.
What is the alternative to a random and
aimless universe in which man does his own
thing?
It is to see that God is the
creator and also the Lord of heaven and
the earth, that he has given to us
a mandate in dominion that we, men who
are made in his image, shall have dominion
over the earth, and that dominion is to
be through the expression of his law and
through the counsel of his will.
And because we have not believed that and
have not consciously walked in it, nor sought
it, nor expected it, we have forfeited the
field to secular men who have no regard
for God and have done their own thing
and filled the earth with their own nonsense.
If I had a good blackboard here, and
I don't know, maybe I can do it,
I want you to see like two columns.
One is a theocentric view in which God
prevails and the other is a secular view
in which God is absent.
In one is a random world in which
man is free to do his own thing.
In the other, in which God is present,
there's a planned view.
There's a purposeful universe intended by God.
Therefore it requires a knowledge of God and
a knowledge of God's word.
For his word is a lamp unto our
feet.
And it's by his word that we walk
blamelessly before him.
And blessed are they who walk blamelessly before
him in all of his law.
God has spoken.
He has things to say about how we
should conduct ourselves economically and socially.
What should be the quality and the character
of our relationships.
How we should tend the earth.
What we should do with our first fruits
and our increase.
What we should do with regard to the
poor.
How we should enact justice.
What is righteousness.
There are practical things that God has given
us in his word.
And for the essence of that, we have
planned economies, social elites, state-ism, to the
point where men have exceeded the intention of
God for the minimum of government required to
establish order, where the state itself has become
a phenomenon that has become deified and requires
the virtual worship of its citizens.
It itself has replaced God, which we have
seen in the more extreme forms as the
Nazi state fascism in our past generation and
which we're seeing even in democratic states as
they become larger, more monolithic, more consuming and
requiring the attention, the energy, and the devotion
of its citizens.
Exceeding the function and the intention that God
intended for it and becoming itself an object
of worship and full attention.
In fact, probably no single factor has occasioned
the blood of the saints more and their
unwillingness to bow before the God of the
state, whether it was Rome or any other
in the history of the church.
That there's a Lord who is above the
state, that there's a loyalty and allegiance that
is above government, that the law of God
is of such a kind that exceeds the
righteousness of the Pharisees, that saints who walk
in the light of it far more than
exceed the minimal requirements of the secular law
in the nations where they live.
But they cannot worship the state.
Their allegiance is reserved for God himself.
And maybe it's my recent experience in Africa
where you see these issues really lodged in
nations that are in their formative stages whose
situation is like an open page.
They can move in any direction.
And though these presidents of these black nations
have had backgrounds in mission schools and have
some semblance of a knowledge about God, they
do not know him.
And therefore they've come more under the influence
of a Marxist, socialist and secular view by
which they themselves are required to be the
elite state planners and to determine what the
condition of the economy is going to be
or what is grown or by what means
is going to be produced or distributed, what
constitutes justice and so on.
Therefore there's no consciousness of God, no awareness
of why it is that drought is suffered,
no causal connection between conditions of drought or
social calamity or calamities in nature with the
fact that bribery, corruption and violence exist in
their nations.
These things are unrelated because they do not
understand the divine hand of God and judgment
which is already being expressed.
Men have a choice of either praying for
rain or crying out in repentance for sin
that has withheld rain or seeding the clouds.
And I take this like almost a quaint
and humorous illustration but it shows graphically what
are the alternatives and what is going to
be the clash of kingdoms at the end
of the age.
Those who are going to put their confidence
in what they call science and technology which
is to say the gods of this present
world and who think that they're going to
invoke rain by seeding clouds or those who
will commend to men the bending of their
knees and their supplicating of God and crying
out repentance for their sins.
We're coming to an inexorable clash of two
basic cosmologies, two basic total world views.
One in which God is very present and
who lives, who's the creator and lord who
can be sought, whose will could be known
and who can answer.
And another in which God is completely absent
and men have no alternative but by their
own chicanery and their own devices to procure
and obtain the things that they think constitutes
human happiness.
There's going to be a clash between these
views.
Those who believe in God will seek him
with fasting and in prayer for wisdom and
guidance and blessing.
I remember once right here in Cass Lake
I think the year or so when we
moved here, a year later when there was
a seething and rising condition of discord between
the Indians and the whites here and there
was a community meeting.
All kinds of suggestions were made for relief
of the situation.
And one committee after another was being formed
to discuss discipline in the schools or some
other secular, philosophical or rational way of addressing
the problem.
And I, like some jerk, rose at the
end of the meeting with faint voice to
suggest that I was willing to head up
a committee on prayer to as many as
would be willing to join me believing that
God needed to be invoked and brought into
that secular situation as the only true answer
to the distress between white men.
I think it's really indicative that there wasn't
a single soul that responded who believed that
prayer had any efficacy or that my suggestion
was in any way realistic.
There's a reason right now why in the
Soviet Union Christians are sent to mental institutions
and why it is that their children are
taken from them why they're considered unfit parents
because they're projecting to their children superstition and
irrationalities that are contrary to reason, to sanity
and to reality.
And if you think that that's going to
be confined only to that geography, you're mistaken.
Because I think as the crises of the
world heighten the issue is going to be
joined about what it is that really constitutes
reality what it is that really constitutes an
answer what it is that really constitutes sanity
and practical answer to the predicament of men.
And if the church will be the church
and will stand with conviction to point the
world to a very present God I don't
think that our presence is going to be
idly acknowledged.
I think once again we're going to find
the same kind of radical response to us
as was the response to the apostolic church
at the first and the response even to
Jesus himself.
Men sought either to throw him off over
the brow of the hill or fell at
his feet to cry out, my Lord and
my God.
Men either tortured, burned or destroyed the apostolic
generation or they came with trembling to cry
men and brethren what must we do to
be saved.
I think we're moving toward a polarity toward
a radicalization of all of the conditions of
life in which men are going to be
moved toward one extreme or the other.
As a matter of fact if we will
take God seriously in these very days and
begin to walk out and to do and
to be the kind of church he intends
we ourselves will be a factor in precipitating
a radical response to God either favorably or
against him.
The world is either going to move toward
bribery and corruption, favoritism and compromise, exploitation and
misrule or it's going to move toward equity,
righteousness, justice that does not regard persons.
But it will not unless it has a
church in its midst that is a model
of what it means to be without regard
of persons that does not favor some and
disregard others.
The church has got to be a living
example.
It has got to be the thing in
itself.
It has got to be the apostolic model
or the world is without any example to
which to bend its views.
The alternative to the exploitation of the earth
is its stewardship.
And what that means and how that's to
be exercised needs to be demonstrated by the
church.
That that is part of the dominion mandate
that God has called us to be stewards
of the earth and not its exploiters or
its destroyers.
What it means to be a servant.
What it is to have God's glory as
a paramount motive.
And the way in which these things are
pursued is with the spirit of humility, the
spirit of truth, the spirit of love, the
spirit of peace, the spirit of discipline and
obedience as against the world spirit which is
the spirit of arrogance, the spirit of deception
of lies, the spirit of hate, the spirit
of violence in which torture is justified.
There are two radical alternatives to living and
the church has not sufficiently shown God that
the world has had reason to be compelled
to turn from what it considers the rightness
of its way.
And if God is convicting me about anything,
it's about arrogance, it's about impatience, even in
small things.
Because if we have not the spirit of
humility and meekness in the small things, we
don't have it in the large.
Something is required from us more than Sunday
attendance.
God is wanting a character that exhibits his
own which is lamb-like.
The genius of God that was revealed on
the cross is the lamb that was slain.
This is the thing that broke the back
of the power of the enemy, controverted the
wisdom of the world in its arrogance and
its pallor and its hatred.
In a lamb-likeness unto death that needs
to be exhibited by the church in its
life.
It's one of the reasons why we commend
and see the connection between community and kingdom.
Because church as it is presently constituted with
a mere schedule of services has not the
framework to present an opportunity to men by
which their character can be attended and be
brought to the god-likeness that God intends.
Merely seeing each other Sunday by Sunday, being
physically present in pews does not provide the
opportunity for the redemptive working of God in
the church for the shaping of character and
life by which we can live in the
spirit of humility, truth, meekness, love, peace, obedience
and have a conscience that is without offense
both to God and to men.
The church needs to be a demonstration.
The thing in itself.
An expression already of a kingdom come.
Not for some future millennia, but now.
It's remarkable when you begin to pursue this
subject you see what a hash the church
has made in its millennial views of the
kingdom.
Because it could not believe that God intended
the Sermon on the Mount for now.
Because it's too radical in its demands.
Because we did not think that God really
intended we should turn our other cheek or
walk an extra mile or love our enemy.
It was relegated to some future millennial time
when the church itself would be absent from
the earth and the Jews that remain will
somehow fulfill the requirements of the sermon when
the Holy Spirit has been taken from the
earth.
It is an insanity.
It is a cowardice.
It's an apostasy.
It's a heresy.
God intends the fulfillment of these things now
through the body of Christ which is a
covenanted community of God.
This is more than the issue of doctrine
of atonement.
This is more than soul winning.
This is more than proper orthodoxy.
This is more than Pentecostal distinctives.
This is more than salvation as a private
experience.
This is corporate reality.
Something demonstrated by the church in its corporateness
in such a way as we can say
to an unbelieving world repent for the kingdom
of heaven is at hand.
One of the books in which I've been
reading in these days called The Community of
the Spirit written by a Mennonite states that
our social definitions and presuppositions inherited from the
previous century have largely blinded us to the
reality and dynamics of an organic or spiritual
community and it is precisely such a community
which is designated as church in the New
Testament.
The very fact that we think that community
is an option and for most of us
it's an undesirable option or a kind of
an experiment that maybe might be of interest
to a few shows how much we have
dismissed what God intends by church and the
only kind of church that can reveal the
glory of God and show an alternative to
men.
Our social definitions and presuppositions inherited from the
previous century have largely blinded us to the
reality and dynamics of an organic or spiritual
community and it is precisely such a community
which is designated church in the New Testament.
Because we have not believed for a kingdom
we have satisfied ourselves with the definition of
church which is other than and less than
God's own intention.
We have not been willing for the inconvenience
and the demand that is required in going
from house to house daily.
We have not given God his opportunity to
work the deep redemptive things in character and
life by which he uses us toward each
other in the frequency of daily relationships that
God intended for the church to live its
life.
The fact of the matter is we like
Sunday services and if we're sports we'll come
out on a midweek but we are not
willing for the more total and demanding requirement
of God by which church is church and
which makes it more a community of God's
covenantal people than a casual aggregate of souls
who happen privately and personally to be saved.
If we want a kingdom come this is
what is going to be required and I
hope to say something more about that as
we go on.
The church is more than an aggregate of
saved individuals.
The church is not intended to perpetuate itself
as a movement but to bring its purposes,
its realization within the whole social order of
which it is part.
It's not an entity unto itself fulfilling its
own requirements and seeing only to itself perpetuation.
It's intended to be a salt in the
earth and a light unto the world.
It's intended to permeate the world.
And I want you to understand this.
I'm only recently coming to understand though I
despise and I hate the world as a
system I hate the world system but God
wants us to be reminded tonight that God
still so loves the world.
The earth is the Lord's and the fullness
thereof and those that dwell therein.
We have a kingdom mandate and a dominion
mandate to the world and in the earth.
And the fulfillment of it is going to
require a quality of life and relationship and
commitment with ourselves to each other that is
beyond what has been presently understood as church.
It's a demonstration of the new reconciled order
society under the rule of God that needs
to be brought to the largest social order
that it might become a reality in the
life and history of the world.
And it's this that I think is meant
in the scripture making disciples of all nations.
Not just plucking a few brands from the
fire but expecting and laboring toward the conversion
of nations of bringing the divine perspective of
God to the attention of entire societies.
Not tolerating this sacred and secular distinction by
which we safely stay on our side of
the line and conduct our Sunday service and
let the world go to hell because it
has not a wisdom that can only come
to it from on high.
To those who embody institutional power and authority
the powers that be the church announces the
fact of God's rule and calls them to
fulfill their respective roles in submission to his
authority and plan.
The Anabaptists confronted magistrates with the biblical requirements
of their office conscious that the activity of
God was not limited to the church and
that his rule extends over all men whether
they recognize Christ or not.
All authority is going to be brought under
his feet from the very beginning of the
increase of his government and of his peace
there shall be no end.
No end.
There needs to be an increase and that
increase exceeds and extends beyond the borders and
the parameters of the church itself.
Of the increase of his government and of
his peace there shall be no end.
The church therefore rebukes dishonesty injustice, violence and
selfishness in the public administration of the social
order and it calls men and institutions to
follow the way of righteousness, love and peace.
If this were not so Paul could not
have made his statements to the Athenians that
God has appointed a day in which he
will judge the world in righteousness.
For what shall they be judged if there
is not a requirement for them even now
to live according to a certain minimal requirement
of righteousness, justice and peace.
Because God is the creator of the earth
which they inhabit and he's a purposeful God
and he's intended that righteousness exalt nations.
Isaiah 2 in which God speaks of the
nations coming to the mountain of the Lord's
house that the word and the law of
the Lord shall go forth out of Zion
that nations shall walk in the light of
the new Jerusalem.
These scriptures must not be dismissed for some
future millennial kingdom or spiritualized away into meaninglessness.
A glorious church is an active church and
one must be militant before one is victorious.
We can sing about marching on to victory
but unless there's an activity unless there's a
conduct unless there's an engagement of our life
unless there's a pursuit unless there's a battle
unless there's a land actually being taken there
is no triumph.
If nations shall not come up to the
mountain of the Lord's house to walk in
the light of the new Jerusalem what of
our locality is now?
If we cannot bring Chaos Lake and Guthrie
to walk in the light of the new
Jerusalem of God how shall we expect it
in New York City or Moscow or Paris
or total nations?
God says that nations shall walk in the
light of the new Jerusalem of the holy
city the heavenly phenomenon which is what the
church is intended to be.
That's not going to happen by some magical
sweep of a wand in some instantaneous moment
in the Lord's coming.
His coming is going to fulfill a kingdom
that has already been in preparation for Him
by which Guthrie and Cass Lake and La
Porte and Detroit Lakes and these communities have
already been swept into the kingdom of God
and know His righteousness and His requirement and
are walking in that light.
A glorious church is an active church.
God so loved the world and still does
it is not His desire to forfeit it
to the devil.
He's broken the devil's power.
He's made of him an open spoil.
And it's waiting for us as the church
to make manifest the triumph that has already
been wanted to cross.
Something has been left and remains for us
to fulfill the power of which was broken
at Calvary.
But if we ourselves do not believe it
and this is going to be my third
and final message the centrality of the cross
we're not going to fulfill it.
God has reserved for us the final demonstration
of the glory of the cross by which
the Satan's head was bruised but the destruction
of that head and all of the works
remains for the church in the final chapters
of time.
And even the demonstration through the church of
the manifold wisdom of God to the principalities
and powers and rulers of darkness in the
air is reserved for us.
There's a cosmic purpose that is reserved for
the church.
There's a mystery reserved for the church that
has more to do even with the earthly
fulfillment of things pertaining to nations and men
about which I've already spoken.
But you want to know something?
We'll not fulfill the earthly things.
We'll not touch, cast, rake or report unless
we both see and consciously seek to fulfill
the cosmic intention for the church to demonstrate
to the principalities and powers of the air
the manifold wisdom of God.
What that wisdom is and how that demonstration
is to take place I believe is going
to be revealed in persecution and in martyrdom
and I'll speak of that tomorrow.
It's not God's desire to forfeit the world
to the devil.
To occupy till he comes means the progressive
taking of the land from the usurper whose
kingdom was destroyed and power broken at Calvary.
It is for us to make manifest that
triumph that dominion, that godly authority and rule
in every area of life, thought and action.
It is for the want of a challenge
of this magnitude that the church is presently
asleep.
I see it so clearly.
I wish you could see it.
There is something wrong.
There is something grievously amiss.
There is something wanting for which the church
stumbles on in its lackluster matter-of-factness
from service to service punctuated by the novelty
of some visiting speaker or some other distraction.
And what is wanting is the largeness of
the mission and the task that God intended
for it.
Namely, taking the land fulfilling the dominion mandate
filling the earth with the knowledge of God
and His glory bringing the knowledge of the
righteousness of God and His law to nations
and demonstrating as a nation within the nations
what that means in terms of the actual
conduct and life of people who are living
outside of the world and above it in
a transcendent way even while they are yet
in the earth for they are citizens of
heaven.
It is the failure to see this, to
take it seriously and to do it that
explains why it is that our services are
so sleepy why our churches are so lackluster
why we can hardly manage the energy to
do our visitations.
We have not seen what is the mission
and our task to challenge the magnitude that
God has intended.
Our services, Bible studies, programs, visitations, prayer meetings
and their condition is the symptom of our
unfulfilled mission.
The church is conducting a holding action we
are hanging in there until we are raptured.
We are escapists.
We want to get by or we want
to get out.
We have no intention of remaining.
We have no stomach for suffering.
We have no desire to experience affliction.
We have no desire to demonstrate or to
prove.
We just want to hang in there until
we shall be conveniently relieved of any further
responsibility and escape.
It is amazing that that heresy which is
about hardly more than a century old and
was never understood by the church fathers has
become so sacrosanct today that even to question
it is to put yourself in the place
of being suspected of being heretical.
The hope of the church was not escape
in times past.
The hope of the church was a kingdom
come and a king coming to rule and
to reign in the earth with his saints.
And that hope needs again to be revived.
It needs to be restored as the true
hope which will bring to the church an
electric, a dynamic, an expectancy and an atmosphere
that God intended to prevail in our life.
I want to suggest there is a reason
why we take the millennial and theological views
that we do.
It's not because there are air-tight reasons
for it as given in the scripture.
But I think that in the last analysis
we choose that view that is comfortable with
our timidity, with our fear, with our cowardice,
with our reluctance, with our desire to avoid
confrontation.
It's not the love of the truth that
has determined why it is that we take
a millennial view of seeing some future kingdom
age that will take place independent of us.
We choose to believe that and we enjoy
subscribing to it because it absolves us of
present responsibility now.
Our cowardice has more to do with our
theology than our love of truth.
And we need to examine the theology or
the cosmology and the understanding of that which
prevailed with the first church fathers.
They had none of these notions.
They did not see millennial views.
They did not see dispensations.
They saw an unbroken continuum.
They didn't see a god of an old
testament and a god of a new.
They saw a god of law, a god
of justice, a god of righteousness, a god
who has been fulfilling his purposes in the
earth before the foundations of the earth were
laid and a lamb that was slain because
sin took place in the heavenlies before it
was ever manifest in earth.
They saw a cosmic purpose of God and
they saw the purposes of the church.
They had a view which we lack, which
needs to be restored, which we have cut
up into convenient pieces in little categories and
the sum result of which has unfitted us
to be a kingdom people for we have
no kingdom expectation.
It's some future thing and therefore it never
comes.
We have chosen convenience over confrontation and passivity
over proclamation.
We have preferred to be the church invisible
rather than the church triumphant.
We have surrendered the world to Satan so
long as our small portion goes unimpaired and
the things pertaining to our security and pleasure
are not threatened.
Just allow our Sunday services to continue, allow
the parsonage to continue, our income as ministers,
our lifestyle, allow those things to continue and
let all the rest go to hell.
We need to see how cowardly we have
been and how comfortably we have allowed the
world to define our circumstances so long as
our self-interest is not threatened and we
have sufficient by which we can justify our
conduct because after all we're bringing a Sunday
service and we're bringing a sermon and we
visit someone sick in the hospital.
We have fallen below God's kingdom intention.
We are not fulfilling our mandate.
We have preferred to be invisible rather than
triumphant, convenient rather than confrontational, passive rather than
proclaiming.
We have surrendered the world to Satan.
The writer says this is not Christianity, it's
Manichaeism.
That's an ancient heresy by which things are
divided into that which is spiritual and that
which is earthly and the earthly thing was
thought to be so beneath our content and
our interest that our view was solely taken
up with the thing that was spiritual.
That is a heresy.
God expects his glory in the earth.
Made visible through men and the practicalities of
their daily life in the earth.
That's the faith.
The other thing is a false spirituality.
It's a heresy.
It's more than a heresy, it's an apostasy.
It's a forfeiting of the faith.
Therefore repentance needs to begin in the house
of God.
God will judge the earth.
He will judge the church.
And it's out of our repentance that brings
the kingdom of heaven to hand.
So these are my first and opening remarks
just to give a sense of what the
prevailing condition is.
Why it is that we're without a sense
of the past or an expectation of the
future.
Why it is that the Holy Spirit has
been relegated to improving our services or to
renewing our denominations.
That we have not seen it in the
context in which God intended, namely as the
enablement for a kingdom come.
Why it is that we have dismissed martyrdom
as some historic phenomenon out of the past,
completely irrelevant to our life.
I want to end with a prayer as
I began.
That God will stir our hearts.
Break our hearts.
Show us how much our theology has been
conditioned by our cowardly hearts rather than a
love of truth and a desire to see
God's ultimate intentions fulfilled.
How quickly we have condescended to theologies of
convenience that have absolved us of responsibility.
So precious Jesus, save us my God from
a Christianity that invokes sessions of Congress by
platitudinous prayers.
Save us from being a bunch of patsies
that the world is willing to tolerate so
long as we do not threaten its interests
or press upon them a view that requires
them to acknowledge God in truth.
My God, enable us to be proclaimers because
we are demonstrators.
Show us to be kingdom men and women
because there is a king who is consciously
sought whose will prevails in things small as
in things large.
Precious God, bring us into your seeing and
into your view.
Bring us again to the cross.
Bring us again, my God, into the acknowledgement
of the place of suffering and the issue
of glory.
Speak to us and deal with us through
the night hours, Lord.
Break us up in the deeps.
Break up our little categories, our bitter views,
our notions, our religious understandings, the kinds of
things that have prevailed that have been conventional,
tame, insipid, unthreatening and without consequence in the
world.
Help, have your way with us in these
days, my God.
Change our minds.
We thank you and praise you for assembling
us and speaking and stirring our hearts, Lord.
Help us to take these things into our
hearts, to ponder them and prepare us, my
God, for all that you shall intend yet
to speak and to do.
We thank you and praise you.
May we leave this room and this hotel
at the conclusion of these days with the
ringing shout of faith, Thy kingdom come, Thy
kingdom come, in earth as it is in
heaven.
And a willingness to suffer, my God, to
see that realized.
And we'll thank you and praise you for
our privilege and for our calling.
In Jesus' name we pray.
Amen.