over his head his accusation written, this is
Jesus, the King of the Jews.
Then were there two thieves crucified with him,
one on the right hand and another on
the left.
And they that passed by reviled him, wagging
their heads, saying, Thou that destroyest the temple
and buildest it in three days, save thyself.
If thou be the Son of God, come
down from the cross.
Likewise also the chief priests, mocking him with
the scribes and elders, said, He saved others
himself he cannot save.
If he be the King of Israel, let
him now come down from the cross, and
we will believe him.
He trusted in God, let him deliver him
now, if he will have him.
For he said, I am the Son of
God.
The thieves also which were crucified with him
cast the same in his teeth.
Now from the sixth hour there was darkness
over all the land until the ninth hour.
And about the ninth hour Jesus cried with
a loud voice saying, Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani,
that is to say, my God, my God,
why hast thou forsaken me?
Some of them that stood there when they
heard that said, This man calleth for Elias.
And straightaway one of them ran and took
a sponge and filled it with vinegar and
put it on a reed and gave him
to drink.
The rest said, Let me, let us see
whether Elias will come to save him.
Jesus, when he had tried again with a
loud voice, yielded up the ghost.
And behold, the veil of the temple was
rent in twain from the top to the
bottom, and the earth did quake, and the
rocks rent.
And the graves were opened, and many bodies
of the saints which slept arose, and came
out of the graves after his resurrection, and
went into the holy city and appeared unto
many.
Now when the centurion and they that were
with him, watching Jesus saw the earthquake and
those things that were done, they feared greatly
saying, Truly, this was the Son of God.
My thesis tonight and in these days is
that the root of our ills, our divisions
and strife ambitions, our fears, our spirit of
independency, our jealousies, are the results of the
failure to radically apprehend God.
We don't know him as we ought.
And because we have failed in that apprehension,
we don't know ourselves either.
Because the two revelations are always joined.
And it's beautifully set forth in the sixth
chapter of the book of Isaiah, when the
prince of the prophets is given an occasion
to glimpse the Lord high and lifted up.
And in that he cries, Woe is me,
I am undone.
If there's going to be a rectification in
the way in which we perceive ourselves, we
need first to rectify the way in which
we perceive God.
And I have a sneaky suspicion that there's
a great deal of subjective musing, and viewpoints,
and projection of things human unto God.
I don't know how kind conscious we are
that there's a degree to which we make
God in our own image.
And to whatever degree that image of God
is distorted, so are we also.
Another thing that brings us to the cross,
beside the place in which to glimpse God
radically and ultimately, is that here too is
found the power to liberate us from vanity,
from ambition, from power, from fear.
Because here's a glimpse of truth, suffering ultimately,
and therefore here also is the profoundest capacity
to set men free.
I don't understand the mystery, but I know
this.
There's something about the nature of suffering that
has the greatest capacity to reveal truth.
I've read recently of an account of a
Jewish psychiatrist, a Viennese, who was the victim
of years in a concentration camp.
And in it he gives the account of
how he used to muse.
In days past when he enjoyed the prosperity
and the advantage of his culture and position
of attending the theater in Vienna, he would
then go to a sidewalk cafe with his
friends, and over coffee and torta, they would
examine the play.
They thought that that was ultimate reality.
I speak that wistfully because there was a
time not so past that that was my
own life.
But he said, in the light of my
present experience in the concentration camp, in the
unspeakable torture and agony of my life, in
the continual threat of the question of survival
day by day, he said, looking back on
that time, I perceived that I was a
man utterly deceived.
And that what I thought to be reality
was utter deception.
And now in the fierce conditions of my
life, stripped to the utter bone, hanging on
to every breath for the question of survival
daily, I am beginning to perceive what are
the ultimate questions that constitute reality.
There's a reason why an unbenighted Gentile, a
Roman soldier, standing at the base of the
cross and glimpsing the ultimate suffering of Jesus,
cried out, truly this was the Son of
God.
Something happened.
He saw something.
He glimpsed something that revealed the reality about
Jesus, which somehow was lost to his own
religious Jewish kinsmen.
I think there's a necessity for us to
return to that place of the cross and
the issue of suffering because it contains also
the issue of reality.
And as I travel in the small places
that God gives us to serve him and
see the painful instances of the division and
brokenness and fragmentation of the body of Christ
in Israel, in Yugoslavia, Germany, and places like
that, as well as our own country, I
know that if answer comes and reconciliation comes,
it must come on the basis of the
gospel of Jesus Christ and at the cross
of Christ Jesus.
Somewhere in this book, the writer says the
church must demonstrate what it really believes and
hopes about the man from Nazareth who was
crucified and rose again.
And I believe myself that now more than
any other time in modern history, the issue
of the crucified Christ is the issue of
God is the issue.
That's not a little fanciful play on words,
but I don't know of another time in
history when God has surfaced in such proportion
as now, when God is no longer a
Sunday matter, when secular issues have become spiritual
issues, when the questions that pertain to Israel
for the first time can be resolved if
the leaders of nations will turn to what
God has written pertaining to it by men
professing to be believers, both as heads of
the state of Israel and the head of
the state of the United States.
We're coming to a conclusion of the age
and a God who has hidden himself is
somehow insinuating himself now in all of the
issues.
And I think that if you'll understand this,
and I don't have time to speak more
about it, you will see why it is
that we shall be increasingly despised for his
namesake in the earth.
Where those who tolerated us in times past
as some kind of idol minority that has
its clinics and its conferences and in Sunday
Christianity will constitute a threat to the status
quo, a very dangerous group of irrational human
beings who somehow look to the heaven for
their salvation in an age of increasing crisis
and trial.
And yet most believers have no awareness of
this whatsoever.
Most Christians are fixed still or fixated at
the salvational level and have not progressed beyond
first principles.
What is needed is a revolution of concept
of God and a deep comprehension of the
crucified Christ in the light of his resurrection.
And the biggest hindrance to this, in my
opinion, is our antipathy, our unwillingness to face
the issues that pertain to suffering, even as
a subject.
I don't think that there's any accident that
that's true of God's people at the same
time when prosperity has never been more lauded
among them.
And where they're encouraged and in fact told
to look for the signs of affluence as
the very evidence of God's blessing for their
lives.
So suffering is not a pretty subject and
it's not a popular subject.
And because we have not a disposition to
face it, we have shrunk also from considering
the cross.
And I think that this is tragic and
scandalous because there's a terrible disparity between the
things that would profess as believers and what
is the actual content of our lives.
I'm stunned and amazed even to learn that
in ministerial homes and families that one thing
can be proclaimed from the pulpit and yet
another kind of logic and another kind of
reason prevails in their actual important decision making.
Even in this trip where we've been in
Israel, Yugoslavia before coming here, I've heard out
of the mouths of such ministerial people things
that you would expect to hear from bourgeois
middle-class folk when it comes to the
security or the well-being of their own
children and their hopes for their own future
and their success.
I think this too is a reflection of
the fact that we have drifted away from
the cross, that such a terrible disparity should
exist.
It's interesting that we can give a certain
appearance of spiritual comeliness and well-being in
an atmosphere like this, in the beautiful presence
of God and the spirit of worship, but
how long will it take before the grace
feels back into our faces or the true
condition of our life surfaces that has to
do with such mundane things as the way
in which our own children behave.
Our professions are one thing, but little children
tyrannizing our households are another.
And we have not the power or the
savvy or the maturity to deal with such
things as that, yet find ourselves quite able
and even eloquently to speak of things that
pertain to the gospel and to the charismatic
life.
God is after a consistency in our life,
and we shall not attain to it short
of a deeper knowledge of the cross of
Christ Jesus.
Because though I'm a fool and couldn't give
you explicit reasons for the things that I'm
saying, I know that the issue of disorderly
children is the issue of the cross, because
the issue is not the children but the
parent, who somehow cannot bring themselves to exercises
of discipline because of a disposition to self
-indulgence in themselves, and are unwilling to face
up to something that is difficult and painful.
The issue of pain is the issue of
suffering, is the issue of the cross, is
the issue of the gospel.
And it's all linked together if we are
to face it maturely and come to a
reality in God in which we can set
forth a kingdom by which men can be
called unto repentance.
If you've understood what I've just said, you
can say amen.
Oh, hallelujah.
Thank you.
It's interesting, though, that we shrink from the
issue of suffering, yet the world goes on
and suffering increases.
Not only the suffering of the saints, which
was alluded to tonight and for which I'm
grateful, but the suffering of mankind on a
massive scale.
And we know that the only answer to
such suffering is the gospel of the cross,
and yet we who proclaim it shrink even
from the consideration of suffering as an issue.
This German theologian writes, unless it apprehends the
pain of the negative, Christian hope cannot be
realistic and liberating.
We desperately need the revolution of all religious,
cultural, and political values which proceed from the
true apprehension of the crucified Christ.
The cross is the test of everything which
deserves to be called Christian.
There's a word that I love in the
Christian lexicon.
It's the word apostolic.
I don't know why it is, but every
time that I sounded or hear it sounded,
I salivate.
And our brother Derek spoke about restoration as
the theme of this age, and I know
that that is true.
And the restoration for which my own soul
cries is the restoration of apostolic reality, which
cannot be found independent of the cross.
And the failure to have that quality of
life and reality has already resulted in monstrous
casualties among our youth and in broken marriages
and families, in fallen ministers and rebellious wives,
and in a spreading blight of weary indifference
that is to be found today in Christendom.
Our Christianity is degenerating into a middle-class
culture, a folklore, a comfortable nostalgia, a vacuous
praise club in the avoidance of the cross
of Christ Jesus.
The failure to move into this fullness, this
apostolic reality, must eventuate in a stagnant faith
with the likelihood of eventual unbelief.
Only God knows the actual number of professing
Christians whose lives and families are lived as
effectual atheists now.
I've already given you an illustration that when
it comes to the effectual issues of our
life, on what basis are such issues made?
That determines whether in actuality we're living as
believers or as atheists.
For many of us, our religion is a
kind of a cultural preference, but there's no
substantive difference in our lives from the lives
of those lived in the world about us.
I don't know that I'm exaggerating, but you
weigh what I'm saying.
I may well be understating the ills of
present Christendom, but there's something in my heart
that says that when the answer is to
be found, it'll be found at the cross
and at no other place.
In this terrible spiral downwards, where the sacred
can no longer be distinguished from the profane,
more and more manipulation is required to provide
some semblance of life against the gray weight
of such numbers as I'm describing in the
congregations called Christian churches.
That's one of the reasons why we're seeing
increasingly a kind of manipulation in our religious
life.
Desperate men somehow having to face gray congregations
and whip up or produce in such contexts
something that will make an hour on Sunday
passable.
Another symptom, in my opinion, this increasing spirit
of religious manipulation that reflects the absence of
the knowledge and the life and reality of
God's people.
Another phenomenon that we see increasingly is the
legalism of God's people.
As I said recently, I think to a
congregation in Yugoslavia, a Pentecostal congregation, you don't
have to be Jewish to be legalistic.
In fact, the great irony is that so
many of us professing to be new covenant
people live under a quality of law and
are not even aware of it.
If your religious life has something to do
with your own activity before God as a
basis for your justification before him, that's legalism.
And if you can have an eye to
see and a sense to perceive these kinds
of realities, you can see them working even
in Pentecostal congregations where there's something cathartic in
what is called worship, something emotional, people getting
a kind of relief, something being obtained on
a Sunday night that somehow needs to pacify
or to stand in the stead of a
weak properly lived in God.
It becomes a kind of a labor, a
weary sweating and a striving, which is another
name for legalism and the very antithesis of
what God died to save us from.
All of these things, in my opinion, pointing
to a need to restore the knowledge of
the cross of Christ Jesus for our generation.
In the fundamental churches, therefore, one is likely
to find in the phrase of this theologian,
biblicism without liberating preaching.
In Pentecost, the reiteration of its own distinctives,
things that pertain to the Holy Spirit long
ago abandoned in their own experience.
I think one of the most melancholy things
of the present Pentecostal movement is its nostalgia
and its references to the past and its
efforts to seek to recapture something of the
sense of things that have gone by, but
are no longer the realities of their present
life.
In the charismatic realm, a tendency toward sing
-song superficiality and human system making.
I don't know how much to say about
that, but there is a cry for reality.
And many of us who have not found
it in our Pentecostal churches or our fundamental
churches have been intoxicated and drawn to what
seemed to us the hope of reality under
the name of community or relationship or discipleship
or submission and authority.
True, blessed, holy, sacred principles of God, which
in our enthusiasm and in a field to
obtain, we have gone about to a great
degree in our own effort to perform.
And it has not brought the desired reality.
Not that God is against the principles, but
I believe that they need to be fulfilled
by the operation of its own life organically
in that which springs forth by the principle
of death working unto life at the cross
of Christ Jesus.
I've almost come to a point where I'm
suspicious to enter a room now where the
banner of the Holy Spirit is its predominant
decoration.
It's as if we have copped out the
banner of Christ and have sought to find
in the birds every kind of solace, comfort,
and answer which God intends fundamentally first and
foremost to be found in the cross.
But for some reason it's easier to come
to the dove than it is to the
cross.
And I don't want to posit the one
against the other, but there's a priority and
a centrality of the cross, which if we
escape and sidestep, we make of the precious
dove of God, which is the spirit of
truth, a kind of a companion piece to
our life, a utensil, a utility, and not
the holy thing which it represents.
All of these unhappy things are taking place,
in my opinion, in the church at a
time when the church should be preparing itself
for an hour, when it should rise up
as the visible place of refuge in a
soon coming age of distress.
So these are not light questions, but significant
for God's people to consider.
Well, if there's some measure of truth to
what I'm saying, how is the cross then
to be approached that we might have some
reasonable knowledge about what's represented there?
My God, my God, Jesus cried out, why
hast thou forsaken me?
I've never understood that cry, and I don't
know that I understand it now.
But in the mystery of the cross, there's
something about the abandonment of God that somehow
pertains to us also.
And if we are to come to the
cross with knowledge, understanding, and obtain from it
reality and change, there's something that needs to
be first abandoned in us that has to
do with self-justification, self-affirmation, and even
the deification of our own lives in some
of the hokey and sentimentalized notions that we
have about God and about the cross.
Sometimes I see the crosses in Europe of
Jesus stretched out on them.
He almost looks like a ballet dancer.
There's something aesthetic rather than agonizing which is
depicted there.
And somehow, I don't know why it is,
there's a propensity in us which is human,
all too human, which tends to blunt or
minimize or dull or sentimentalize and somehow invalidate
the ugliness and the horror and the pain
and the suffering of what God wants to
register upon our consciousness that was experienced by
him in the cross and to which, in
some measure, we ourselves are invited.
This writer says, in the cross, God justifies
the godless and justifies them alone.
One must become godless oneself and abandon every
kind of self-deification in order to recognize
the God who reveals himself in the crucified
Christ.
We've had some remarkable experiences in community, in
life together.
God has sent us precious saints, many of
whom would look to be models of charismatic
perfection.
But it's amazing what the stresses and demands
of our life together have revealed.
One precious young one who is living in
my own house now, a Japanese young lady
who was an elementary school teacher, was for
the first weeks of her time with us
just a picture of everything that could be
desired in a precious believer.
I never saw her out of sorts.
I never saw any kind of distemper.
I never saw her ruffled.
She always maintained the sweetest appearance, was always
the epitome of a saint who was overcoming
and dwelling continually in the victory of Christ.
Until the day came that she threw a
shoe at my wife and came completely unglued,
and that lovely little porcelain face cracked.
I wonder how many of us are wearing
porcelain faces.
I wonder how many of us are living
out a Christian life under some self-assumed
notion of what we ought to be as
saints, of how we think that we ought
to walk, of what we think would be
decorous or polite or spiritual.
How many of us are all sweetness and
light on the surface of our porcelain lives
when beneath is all kinds of tumult and
disorder, savage passions, and every other kind of
unresolved thing which we don't like ourselves to
acknowledge, let alone to confess.
I'll tell you why I'm saved today, folks.
I wasn't looking for God.
I was the fiercest kind of atheist, but
I was seeking for reality and truth.
And the God of reality and truth found
me.
And He's the God of reality and truth
still, who has painfully and expensively poured out
His life and His blood that we might
enter such realms with Him in spirit and
in truth.
And I can't think of anything more cruel,
more of a trespass on the blood of
the Son of God, than we should live
some kind of mock pseudo-spiritual life, impressing
one another when inside is another kind of
reality because we have not come truly to
the cross of Christ Jesus.
I believe with all my heart that this
is an hour of restoration and that this
must be raised first for the saints of
God.
Maybe you've noted the character of our modern
evangelism, which has so little to do with
the appeal to repentance, but has very much
to do with self-gratification and the egocentric
interests of those to whom it appeals.
If you accept Jesus, it will go well
for you.
You need this, you need that.
Financial security, husband, wife, bodily health, accept Jesus.
I'm not disparaging the precious blessings and gifts
that God gives, but I don't think that
ought to be made the appeal and the
basis for which one is invited to become
a Christian.
It's the cross, folks.
This precious Japanese saint has been brought to
an existential crisis, and a crack has run
right through her porcelain exterior.
I'll tell you, for the weeks that followed,
she was not easy to live with.
It was painful to live with this gray
lump who once shone forth a kind of
effervescence and light, and now was somehow growing
her way through in some kind of desperate
valley of decision in coming to a confrontation
with the stark cross of Christ.
I want to tell you it was worth
all of the agonizing and the groaning.
It was worth all of the pain and
the discomfort because she's coming now into reality,
which is an unspeakable glory and a true
showing forth of His light.
I can't somehow block this experience out of
my consciousness, and I have to wonder to
what degree, to what extent, how many among
us are there who are living porcelain lives
that have not yet cracked, have yet to
enter into the realities of God.
This writer says, to restore Good Friday in
all its horror and godlessness, it is necessary
for Christian faith, first of all, to abandon
the traditional theories of salvation, which have made
the way the cross is spoken of in
Christianity a mere habit.
I don't know how it was with you,
but in the earliest days of my Christian
life, as I learned the curriculum or the
theology or the catechism of atonement, somehow it
was not quite real for me.
I was taught and I was instructed and
I saw it in the scriptures, and I
know that one had to die and I
knew that there was a requirement for the
shedding of blood, but somehow the reality touched
me not.
And I wonder if that's been true for
many of us.
We've been inducted into a kind of cerebral
understanding of what was worked at the cross,
but existentially, actually, deeply, truly, we've not yet
come to a true apprehension.
And because of that, our entire Christian life
has suffered.
There's a horror and a godlessness about the
cross.
That somehow we have been spared from seeing,
which I think that we need to confront.
Christianity is eminently the religion of the cross,
and yet even among religious Christians, many were
astonished that his visage was so marred more
than any man and his form more than
the sons of men.
I wonder how many of you have seen
the famous painting that the Sisters of Mary
so celebrate called the Eisenheim Altar, the Grunwald
painting of the crucifixion of Jesus.
It's available at their book display.
I saw it first as an atheist 15
years ago, hitchhiking around Europe with a pack
on my back, seeking for answers to my
desperate life, and went there at the suggestion
of a German artist whom I encountered on
the way, and stood transfixed before the ugliest
painting upon which I had ever set eyes.
I have a debt of gratitude to that
German man that I'll never be able to
pay, because that painting was a distinct contrast
from all of the depictions of Jesus, which
I had seen as a Jewish young man
growing up in New York.
All of the soppy paintings, all of the,
I imagine, every hair wishfully set in place,
that never conveyed to me any reality that
would challenge me as a Jew, was in
one stroke dissolved when I stood before this
Holy Spirit masterpiece to behold the ugliest thing
that I had ever gazed upon, wondering whether
I was looking at a man on the
cross or some kind of deranged animal so
grotesquely broken and distorted.
White lips and eyes sunk in their orbits
in dark circles, and all of the grimace
and paroxysm of pain written in death in
that face, pieces of wooden metal stuck in
the flesh from the flagellation, encrusted blood and
spittle, and it was a horror.
But I was transfixed and my consciousness was
arrested.
As I think that all of our consciousnesses
need to be, or we will somehow fall
short both of the meaning and the ministry
that God has for us through what he
suffered there.
The cross has always been an unappetizing subject.
It has always been unrespectable and perverse.
The Romans always disdained it and felt that
the idea of a crucified God to whom
veneration and worship was due was totally inappropriate
to God.
And I wonder how many of us unconsciously
have adopted that Roman mentality, that at one
level we give assent to the doctrine, but
in the deepest level where our life is
really lived, we feel that the horror of
what was worked on the cross is somehow
inappropriate to God.
It's unrespectable, perverse, un-aesthetic.
Judaism found it so.
The idea that a condemned blasphemer had risen
from the dead was bound to conflict with
the righteousness of God that was revealed in
the law.
How it must boggle every mind.
What a contradiction to our every human view
of what God ought to be and what
true religion ought to be and what walking
circumspectly before God ought to be.
I think God in his great genius established
something at a point of time outside the
camp in Jerusalem 2,000 years ago that
was calculated to boggle and to stagger every
human mind and to destroy every human concept.
That no man could come on the basis
of his own reckoning or rationality or understanding.
He had to come devastated and brought only
by the revelation of the Holy Spirit to
what was worked on that cross because he
was one to whom God could show the
meaning of that horror, being of a broken
and contrite spirit that will not let me
go.
I have a sneaky suspicion that nothing less
than the same kind of revelation of the
mystery of suffering is going to reveal the
Son of God to my own Jewish people
in a dying world in the last generation.
Bumper stickers are not going to do it
and campaigns and rallies, but there is something
about the nature of ultimate suffering that reveals
ultimate reality and truth.
Have you made your own peace with the
scandal of the cross?
I think that it is patently impossible for
anyone to do it except they be a
sinner.
Somehow those who are perverse never had difficulty
in comprehending the meaning of the cross.
Only those who are Judaistic or whose lives
were established in a Roman cultural perspective.
The only way to apprehend the cross is
as a sinner.
Have you made your peace with the scandal
of the cross and would you suffer expulsion
and death in your identification with it?
Until the cross ceases to be in modern
times a harmless symbol and common decoration and
returns again to being an offense, we will
hardly be more than a Sunday supplement to
the world.
That's cat speaking, not the author of this
book.
I want to repeat that.
Until the cross ceases to be in modern
times a harmless symbol and common decoration, even
the world now dangles it around its neck
and returns again to being an offense, we
will be hardly more than a Sunday supplement
to the world.
The cross celebrates weakness, helplessness, pitiful abandonment and
contradicts and threatens all conventional values.
That everything that the lords of this earth
despise, everything that crosses the grain of their
own wisdom and understanding and the values which
they uphold, even in Jewish life with which
I'm so familiar, talks about the values of
this life and preferment and advancement and a
life well lived and enjoyed and things that
have to do with creature comfort and the
advancement and the development of intellect and the
attaining of position.
All of these things are in direct collision
with what is expressed in the mystery of
the cross in weakness, helplessness, pitiful abandonment.
The question is that we call ourselves Christians.
To what degree is our mindset and our
true world view Judaistic, celebrating the values that
are humanistic and worldly rather than what the
cross itself celebrates and holds for us?
Can the cross become the foundation for true
faith until it is seen and received in
its full meaning?
This writer says that the cross is the
utterly incommensurable factor in the revelation of God.
We have become far too used to it.
We have surrounded the scandal of the cross
with roses.
We have made a theory of salvation out
of it, but that is not the cross.
The Christian faith which once conquered the world
must also learn to conquer its own forms
when they have become worldly.
We have sentimentalized and distorted and taken the
sting out of death, negated the centrality of
suffering, and maybe we need to be exhorted
again as Jesus exhorted his own disciples upon
his resurrection.
Ought not the Messiah to have suffered before
he ascended to his glory?
O fools and slow of heart!
Somehow there was something in them, I think
more as men than as Jews, that staggered
at the understanding of a suffering that precedes
a glory.
I think that we too share something of
that mentality.
There is a must, there is an ought
of a suffering that precedes the ascending up
to glory which somehow we are slow of
heart to perceive.
We have sentimentalized and distorted and taken the
sting out of death and negated the centrality
of suffering and need in a revolutionary way
to remember the crucified God.
We must recall the event and make it
for ourselves event and the event by which
our faith originates.
Somewhere in this book he says that true
faith begins in the place where the atheist
thinks that it ought to cease.
That's the cross.
This pitiful picture of the God of glory
hanging in complete helplessness and unspeakable suffering in
a sky that has gone dark, surrounded by
an audience of mockers and taunters and jeers,
crying out the abandonment of my God, my
God, why hast thou forsaken me?
And yielding up the ghost has got to
be a picture that contradicts every possible human
view of what a foundation for religion ought
to be.
And until we have God's view of what
that foundation is, which is given only at
the cross, in my opinion, we can never
have a correct view of our own selves
and our own life.
Reality begins at the cross.
Faith begins at the cross, at the place
where the atheist suggests that it ought to
cease.
Is that the place where your faith has
begun?
Of all the subjects that God has ever
given me to proclaim, I know that there's
none more difficult than this, that God's people
who can be rapturous and moved by other
subjects somehow find it difficult to respond to
the cross.
There seems to be a haze of unreality
that surrounds this subject that is difficult to
pierce.
And I think for good reason.
But I believe there's a God intent upon
piercing it.
There's a God intent in this last hour
upon having a true people whose exterior is
not made of ceramic and who are not
leading some delusory Christian life based on their
own subjective impression of what they ought to
be or how they ought to carry themselves.
But they've come to such a breaking, such
an utter pouring out of themselves, such an
abandonment of every view and every notion which
is available only in confrontation with the crucified
Christ, that they have a place of beginning
which is true and real and can eventuate
in apostolic reality.
This is the first of three messages, so
don't feel that tonight you have to come
pouring out of your seat.
But God is sounding a theme and he's
going to continue it, I believe, in these
next two speakings.
Is that the cross where our faith substitutes
break down?
Our shallow amens and hallelujahs.
Wisdom is abandoned to folly and here God
is non-God.
Here is the triumph of death, the enemy,
the non-church, the lawless, the blasphemer.
Here Satan appears to triumph over God.
Our faith must be born of nothingness.
All our human categories and projections abandoned, even
as he was himself abandoned.
All must go dark for us and become
a night in the daytime of our comfortable
religious understanding.
Isn't that a picture of Jesus on the
cross?
And a darkness covers the earth from the
sixth to the ninth hour.
And I would raise a question with you
tonight.
Word to God that I was speaking to
the entire body of Christ.
How many of us have a sufficient disposition,
a willingness to suffer darkness that we would
allow it to come upon our lives in
a sense of a radical emptying out of
our notions, our understanding, our walk, our categories,
what we think discipleship is or submission or
commitment.
That when the darkness ceases, it ceases by
the light and the glory of God that
triumphs out of that death.
How many of you would be willing to
suffer what this Japanese girl has suffered?
How many would prefer to retain the measure
of religious reality that they have?
How many of you would invite God to
apply the deepest application of the cross to
your own life, your marriage, your family, your
ministry, your walk.
And that stark symbol that is at the
heart of the reality of God would flush
out and destroy because the cross is first,
the place of death before it's the place
of life.
Every unreality and every famed and posed thing.
Maybe it's because I have advantage in my
calling, not only to travel in different places
in the world, but from church to church,
congregation to congregation, denomination to denomination, body to
body, that I'm concerned for the degree of
imitation that I find in the present church.
You hear men that sound so much like
a certain model.
There was a season even where it became
so sickening that there were so many male
imitations of Kathryn Kuhlman, you could gag.
And I see in some of these pastors
and ministers a certain kind of seeming humility,
a new kind of approach to reality, one
of the boys type of thing, lower tone
of voice, which I know in my spirit
is pure manipulation and put on.
Our God is the God of reality and
truth.
And there's a world that's dying for the
want of it, freaking out because it cannot
glimpse anywhere an alternative to its own dying
society.
And there's a God waiting to hear again
that apostolic cry, repent for the kingdom of
heaven is at hand.
Here it is.
See, it's visible, tangible.
You can touch it.
It palpitates.
Look at the reality of it.
Have you ever seen such faces?
You can hear it in their voices and
the resonance.
Look at the way they walk and conduct
themselves.
Look at the fearlessness of their lives.
There's nothing faint.
There's no false humility or timidity.
They're bold in God when God is bold.
They're meek like, they're lamb-like, they're true,
their love is fervent and not put on.
The kingdom of heaven is at hand.
I tell you that we shall not attain
to that until there shall be many porcelain
dolls smashed at the cross of Christ Jesus.
Faith in the crucified Christ is a contradiction
to all conceptions of everything that men have
ever conceived, desired, and sought to be assured
by the term God, and therefore also all
conceptions of the righteousness, beauty, and morality of
men.
He saw the Lord high and lifted up,
and he cried out, Woe is me, I
am undone.
We shall never see ourselves truly until we
glimpse him truly, and we shall never glimpse
him truly except at the most radical revelation
of his truth in that place of ultimate
suffering unto death which came at the cross.
It is the suffering of God in Christ
which qualifies Christian faithless faith.
I want to end where I began, with
the centurion at the cross.
A Roman hack, a professional lackey, an insensitive
lout whose profession was to nail men to
wood, who's seen countless victims so killed and
was utterly unmoved.
A man who was schooled in a Roman
mentality that celebrates pomp, grandeur, pageantry, and that
divinized men and made of their emperors Caesars
and gods.
Men who came through triumphal arches in splendor
and arrogance, whose lives were lived for sensual
gratification, for lust and for power, and they
were deified as gods.
Saw a pitiful human wreck a spectacle who
yielded up the ghost, who saw the antithesis
of everything that was celebrated by Rome in
pain, suffering, humiliation, and death, and cried out
truly, this was the Son of God.
This writer says that the death of Jesus
is a statement of God about himself.
This death expresses God.
You want to be cured from sentimentalizing God,
or having a distorted notion of him?
Here, in this moment, in this ultimate moment
of suffering, he can be glimpsed most accurately.
The death of Jesus is a statement of
God about himself, for ultimate suffering reveals ultimate
reality, and the substance of a man's entire
life can be revealed in his dying moment.
Maybe this sounds alien and strange to our
ears.
I don't know about our brother with the
ministry in Eastern Europe.
It would be not so strange to him.
But have you ever considered that all of
our life, and all of our walk, and
all of our preparation in God may be
for a moment?
That somehow we're being prepared to die, and
Jesus, who celebrated the woman who broke the
alabaster box upon him, said that this is
for my burial, for my body.
Though she poured it on his head, this
is for my body being prepared for burial.
I wonder if in the ultimate design of
God, the final revelation, and chance, and choice
to a dying world, to recognize the incarnation
of God in flesh, is to have one
more peek at the body of Christ in
extremity and in suffering, not gnashing its teeth,
and twisting, and trying to anguish itself to
get off, but in sublime faithfulness to the
God that has called them to share in
that sufferance, in obedience, revealing the glory of
God in humiliation and in suffering.
Because that is God's nature, humility.
The crucified Jesus is the ultimate image of
the invisible God.
This is God, and God is like this.
Here he has acted in himself.
Jesus was taunted on the cross.
Let him now come down from the cross,
and we will believe in him.
If thou be the Son of God, come
down from the cross, and maybe the final
irony will be at the end of the
age, just the opposite.
If this is the Son of God, if
this is the body of Christ, if this
is the revelation of the mystery of God
incarnated in flesh that shall prove the truth
of that one who came two thousand years
before, not to invite him to come down
from the cross, but to ascend up upon
it and to remain, and we will believe
on him.
I'm waiting to hear a cry, not from
a Roman centurion, but from my own Jewish
people.
Somehow we have failed to demonstrate to them
the reality of God in Christ.
We somehow can't seem to touch that Jewish
mainstream by biblical demonstration.
They have not an ear to hear, nor
to see, to consider.
But the mystery that is revealed in suffering
may be a key.
Those that are suffering redemptively for their sake,
who will not come down from the cross,
may evoke from them the same words, truly
this is the body of Christ, truly this
is the Son of God, truly my God
lives, for I see the mystery and the
meaning of his life revealed in them.
Maybe we have subconsciously intuited these things, and
that may be a reason why we have
shrunk from considering the cross.
Because we who are called by his name
ought to walk even as he walked.
We have a sneaky suspicion that if there
was an ought and a must for him,
could it be that there's an ought and
a must for us?
Children, I just invite you to consider the
cross of Christ Jesus in these days.
Pray for revelation and be willing for a
time of darkness to come over everything that
is false, postured, imitative, sane in your own
life.
Meet him in a place of abandonment, but
meet him truly that there might be an
authentic apostolic reality in the earth again, to
which men might be called to repentance, for
the kingdom of heaven is at hand.
Will you pray with me to the measure
that you sympathize with this, see the need
for it or agree?
Pray for what shall follow, the two speakings
that I have left.
Hallelujah, Lord, gracious God.
You know, precious God, what has been invested
in the speaking.
With greater pain and carefulness, Lord, than I've
approached any other thing that's pleased you to
speak through my mouth, and the prayer and
the travail and the self-denial and the
things that have been invested in the bringing
forth of this word.
If there has been some human admixture and
some exaggeration and distortion, which has somehow been
the projection of myself beyond your own intention,
I ask you utterly to dissipate it, wipe
it out, but to leave in the heart
and mind and spirit and consciousness of every
believer in this room, in the place of
hearing, who has heard your divine deposit.
Establish a resonance, Lord.
Sound the theme.
Start something rumbling in the depths of the
inner man that will not let us go.
Something that will search us out through the
night hours, that will bring back phrases to
our consideration.
Mighty God, give us such a divine appetite
for the reality of God in heaven.
Give us courage also to approach near to
the thing to which you are beckoning us.
Bless what you've been pleased to express in
this first speaking, Lord.
Fit us for the continuation of the conclusion.
We just thank you and praise you with
words that are so pitiful and inadequate, that
you've given us something more than a subject
matter for messages, a catechism or a theology.
You've given us something so unspeakable, so expensive,
something so difficult to apprehend and lay hold,
that it would take your spirit, Lord, to
impart to us its meaning.
Give us the heart and the courage to
suffer the pain of understanding, and the changes,
the radical changes that it must bring in
our lives, in our bodies, in our fellowships,
in our congregations.
We thank you and praise you for a
God of love who will not let us
go.
In Jesus' holy name.
Amen.