And I would not have been able to
give you this answer if we had not
in our own Bible study last night come
to the same issue in the discussion of
the death of this baby and the involvement
of these men in their falling out at
that moment of birth in the issues of
responsibility and sovereignty.
All orchestrated in a remarkable sovereign will of
God and yet every individual free to act
and to yield in obedience to what God
is performing and yet responsible and judged.
It's a remarkable thing and I'll tell you
what, if you really believe this and live
as if you believe it, you shall be
accounted as insane.
And it's for this reason that even now
babes are being plucked from the arms of
Russian believing parents by a state and a
society that says that they have no right
to bring up their children in this kind
of fanaticism and irrationality and superstition.
That they're not proper parents and therefore the
children need to be saved by the state
from coming under the influence of this kind
of insane view.
And I want to predict and say that
the hour is not far off when that
kind of mentality shall prevail in western as
well as in eastern countries.
It's increasingly believed now, especially by authorities of
government and we're seeing already an increasing tension
and disdain expressed through agents of government toward
the church for being somehow increasingly a vexation
and an irritation because of its inane, unrealistic,
supernatural or superstitious views.
The end of the age is going to
be a final collision between the Hebrew and
the Greek, between the secular and the sacred.
Those who profoundly believe the supernatural basis for
life and those who reject it.
Therefore we cannot afford just to have the
head knowledge.
We cannot afford just to subscribe to biblical
views because they're correct.
We eminently to be a resurrection people because
nothing less than this will prevail.
It's not just a mindset that God wants
us to have but a mindset that results
in acts and a whole mode of life
and being.
As a man thinks, so also is he.
And what is our deepest thought?
And in the unexplored areas of our life
where we really live are our premises spiritual
or secular?
Are we really in our hearts pursuing our
happiness or seeking God that we might be
fond of Him or His purposes?
Are we seeking His glory or our satisfaction?
Do we believe that our life was appointed
in moments of time and place for His
purposes or for our own?
Aside from what we say and our verbal
expression and what we say amen to on
Sundays, what is the truth of our ultimate
premises of our true mind?
Is it secular or sacred?
That's the issue.
And it's not just the issue for us.
It's the issue of those all around us
whose eternity is being determined by what they
observe in us and to what degree they're
being challenged by what they represent.
We can't pass without taking a look at
verse 29.
Being then the offspring of God we ought
not to think that the divine nature is
like gold or silver or stone an image
formed by the art and thought of man.
Do you know what the ultimate presumption is?
It's the complete reversal of what God gave
from the beginning.
In the beginning God formed man in His
own image.
Do you know what's happening in the end?
Man in his presumption and arrogance is forming
God in his own image.
And do you know that if we don't
realize that you can do that even in
the name of Jesus, you yourselves can be
candidates for deception.
Just because we all intone and speak the
word Jesus does not mean that we all
mean the same thing but the same speaking.
I'm not at all impressed when my mother
or Jewish relatives would use the word God.
I'm not persuaded that they're referring to the
same God that I know.
It's just a construct.
It's a three-letter word that suits their
convenience, that has a certain kind of spiritual
ring to it but it's the God of
their own making.
It's not a God who judges.
It's not a God who has appointed a
day in which He will judge all men
by that one whom He has raised from
the dead.
It's a God who is somewhere out there,
some distant abstract entity, some higher power that
somehow allows your fornication, your trafficking, your pleasure,
your devices.
It's a God of their own making.
It is the ultimate idolatry.
Not according, Paul says, by the image formed
by the art and the thought of man.
When you just see Paul brought to a
boil, this is the ultimate effrontery against God
that the creature who has been graced by
given a mind and even the powers of
imagination and having something of the aspect of
God in his ability to be creative has
used these things in a perverse way to
form an image of God which is not
God and serves as a substitute for the
living and the true God as an idolatry
that suits the purpose and the convenience of
men.
Paul would foam at the mouth of this
heinous and final effrontery and arrogance of men
against God and would not allow it to
go on without being challenged for a moment.
He's not impressed by their statues to the
unknown God.
You see, he's right through that fullness.
If you don't know God in Christ, you
don't know God.
He's specific.
He's the God of supernatural.
He's the God of resurrection.
And if you don't know that God and
that Jesus whom he's raised from the dead,
you do not know God.
There's no pluralism here.
In many pairs of truth, there's only one.
And woe betide the men who refuse to
be found of it.
And so he goes from there to the
judgments.
Therefore, having looked the times of ignorance, God
is now declaring to men that all everywhere
should repent.
I like the King James better.
God commands all men everywhere to repent.
No options.
He's winked in times past at your ignorance,
but now the time is up.
Whatever justification there might have been for your
ignorance, they're no longer as recent because now
there is a people in the earth who
not only proclaim but demonstrate the reality of
this resurrection.
And God is bringing them into all the
corners of the earth from Mars Hill to
Timbuktu to Cass Lake.
And he's bringing his word to your radios
and to your tape recorders if you're not
there in person.
He's commanding all men everywhere to repent.
If Paul believed that and it was true
2,000 years ago, what shall we say
now?
If the time is running out and the
historical drama is coming to its conclusion and
we're at the last stages of human history,
when the whole object and purpose of human
existence is being fulfilled, that men might seek
after God, if happiness might be found of
him, what should the church now be saying
to this generation?
And yet where do we hear that he's
commanding all men everywhere to repent?
Instead of hearing that, we're hearing, why don't
you accept Jesus?
He has a plan for your life.
These are the benefits that you'll receive.
We're not speaking apostolically.
And therefore men are not cleaving unto us
and believing.
I wonder if they're cleaving to a false
god whom they've named Jesus, who's going to
help them in the way that they want
to go and find for them a boyfriend
or girlfriend, help their finances or their health.
But it's not a god that can only
come to one through repentance.
It's repent and believe ye the gospel.
There is no way to believe the foolishness
of the gospel that God has calculated and
made beyond the ability of any man to
understand by his intelligence.
The natural man cannot perceive the things of
God, for they are spiritual.
It is repent and believe ye the gospel.
Repenting is the key and the release to
the supernatural grace of understanding which comes that
cannot be obtained through your own intellect.
He commands all men everywhere to repent.
To speak this with boldness to Greeks, we
just have to admire this, just have to
see Paul standing alone circled about by these
Greeks and speaking to them in no uncertain
terms, hey, you guys don't have any option.
You might have had an excuse before I've
come, but now that I've come, you're without
excuse.
Does your coming to men constitute that?
When they've heard you and have seen you,
are they without excuse?
I remember when we went to Israel years
ago as immigrants trying to keep our identity
as believers concealed and just as Jews seeking
to return to the land, we lasted three
months because something happened in the Umpon where
we were learning Hebrew with other immigrants from
Russia and other countries.
A kid was deathly sick.
He had a raging fever, 106, I don't
know what it was.
He was at the point of death.
The doctors could not even so much as
diagnose his illness.
And I looked at the Jewish brother who
was with me, he looked at me and
we knew what we had to do.
We just had to pray for this boy,
that's all.
We said to these Jewish parents, do you
mind if we pray for your son?
They blinked.
We looked like two secular Jews, modern American
Jews, and we're asking to pray for their
son.
The only prayer that they could ever conceive
of is the kind you pray in synagogue
out of a prayer book.
But they were so desperate they said yes.
And we came and we prayed for healing
in the name of Yeshua HaMashiach.
We just took authority, we rebuked that fever
and we commanded in the name of Yeshua
HaMashiach to cease and we prayed healing and
blessing in their life.
That kid was restored instantly.
That was the end of our days.
It wasn't long before the word got around,
who are these guys, what do they believe?
And we were trapped and finally we had
to be evicted.
I wanted to say something about that.
Why was I telling you that?
I've given you the illustration, I've forgotten the
point to which I was giving it.
Lord, bring it back if it pleases you.
Oh yes.
I said, does our presence compel men?
Are they left without excuse because they have
heard or they have met us?
In the course of the days and weeks
and months that we were there, I remember
we were invited to dinner by a British
Jewish doctor.
The epitome of culture and a man, it's
all that Jewish life can produce.
He's the finest humanist and professional and he
invited us to dinner.
And over the dinner table, I shared with
him my testimony, how I was an atheist,
a Marxist, an angry Buddha, vehement man, filthy,
vile, how I came to a crisis of
life and how I took a leave of
absence from teaching in the course of which
God was pursuing me as the hound of
heaven across the world and how the word
of God came into my hand in the
New Testament in the supernatural revelation of first
breathing and how God brought me to a
congregation of Jewish believers in Jerusalem and called
me by name and spoke into my heart
and commanded me to remain and how in
my first prayer four days later, calling on
the name of the Lord, the spirit of
God came into me as an anointment.
And when I finished the testimony, this man
said to me, oh, he said in his
nice British accent, oh, he said, well, he
said, that was fine for you.
You had a crisis.
But I, he said, I don't have a
crisis.
And something welled up in me and I
said, before I came, you had no crisis.
But now that I have come and I've
spoken, you have a crisis.
You have a crisis.
I'm really sorry to make these references to
my own life and experience, but I know
that what I have tasted is what God
wants as normative and definitive in the life
of all believers, that our very presence, our
very speaking, constitutes a crisis for those who
don't believe and think that they have the
option of other alternatives.
Because God is commanding all men, all men,
Jewish doctors, the self-satisfied, the smug, the
content, the morally righteous, outwardly, to repent.
For they have rejected the knowledge of God,
for which reason God has made of all
men one blood that we might seek after
him, if happily we might be found of
him.
And so, then he said, because he has
fixed a day in which he will judge
the world in righteousness through a man whom
he has appointed, having furnished proof to all
men by raising him from the dead.
I love a beautiful quotation that will always
be with me from a German theologian who
said that true faith begins when the atheist
thinks it ought to end.
Paul takes the most mind-boggling and offensive
doctrine, the resurrection of the dead, of a
particular man who should have no currency or
value to Greeks and makes that the pivot
of the whole issue of God and the
issue not only of God, but the issue
of judgment.
The issue of resurrection also becomes the issue
of judgment because God has resurrected him for
the day in which he will judge all
men.
It's offensive, it cuts against the grain of
modern thinking, but true faith begins where the
atheist thinks it ought to end.
In other words, Paul did not try to
present a scheme of God that would be
presentable and acceptable to the thinking of modern
men.
He just let them have it right in
the kisser.
This is the faith.
It's supernatural, it's offensive, it contradicts your categories,
your understanding, your rational beliefs, but this is
it.
Receive it or reject it at your own
peril.
And I don't think he stunned his nose
at them or that he was disrespectful.
I think that there was a great heart
of love that was continually pouring out of
him in every word that proceeded from his
mouth.
But I tell you, it was sharp, it
was challenging, and it was confrontational, but it
was loving.
He didn't soften the gospel, he didn't dilute
it, he didn't seek to adjust it to
their concept of their understanding.
He gave it to them as it is.
And I tell you what, that's why Paul
could say, I am not ashamed of the
gospel of Jesus Christ, for it is the
power of God unto salvation to everyone who
believes, the Jew first, and also to the
Greek.
And I have to confess that in my
earliest days as a believer, I was somewhat
ashamed of the gospel, of which Paul said
he's not ashamed, because I was an intellectual,
because I was a graduate of the University
of California at Berkeley, because I had a
master's degree in history, because I understand modern
men and their thought life, and so how
offensive this simplistic and foolish gospel would be,
that there was a God who lay aside
his deity, took upon himself the form of
a man, came and lived a 30-year
life in obscurity, and began a little simple
ministry for two and a half years in
a little locale in Palestine, and was taken
and crucified and slain, and it was believed
that he represents a once and for all
atonement, that by his blood and that faith
of believing, we're saved from our sins, we're
brought into a relationship with God forevermore.
I'll tell you what, that's not calculated to
appeal to intellect.
The opposite is true.
It is calculated to offend intellect.
It is calculated to oppose the thoughts of
men.
Therefore, the only way that one can come
to it, and believe it and receive it,
is by grace.
By grace are you saved, the same Paul
tells us, and that not of yourself.
And that by faith not of yourself.
Even it is the gift of God, of
what then shall men boast.
The gospel itself is the power of God
unto salvation.
And I wonder how many of you are
in this room now who are with me
at the University of Minnesota.
The last time we were there, in that
big meeting room, when I preached the gospel,
it was offensive as all get out.
And I'll tell you what, to stand there
and look out over that audience, and to
see their sophisticated and intellectual faces, and to
see some of the Jewish people that were
there the previous visit to the university, who
are bristling with indignation at you, and have
an opportunity to speak things that could be
clever, spiritually minded, sophisticated and challenging in a
certain way, but the Lord said no.
This speak, the foolishness of the gospel, and
of the issue of judgment, and of the
resurrection from the dead.
And in the audience was a man who
has a national ministry of evangelism at universities,
sitting there, listening to me for the first
time, whom I've known for years.
Everything was loaded.
Where you could either save face by preaching
or speaking something that was presentable, or putting
out all the stops and thrusting yourself on
the thing for which Paul was not ashamed,
the gospel of Jesus Christ, which itself is
the power of God unto salvation.
And that's what was preached.
And I'll tell you, there was an atmosphere
in that room that was heavy with God.
The words were penetrating.
There was such a presence.
We didn't see any visible crying out or
repentance or someone coming over to pray.
We left that work with God.
But the gospel went forth in the power
of the Spirit.
So he will judge the world.
I'd like to ask this question.
What would be the consequence for society if
men believed that?
If mankind really believed that God will judge
the world, if they really believed that, would
history have been the same?
Would men have acted in the arrogance in
which they have acted?
Would nations have caused the rivers of blood
to flow?
Would even today abortions be taking place wholesale?
And plots and assassinations and acts of terrorism
and all of the vain and stupid and
pitiful and hideous things that are going on
in the world if men really believed that
God will judge?
Paul said, He has fixed a day in
which He will judge the world.
No ifs, ands, or buts.
He will judge the world.
And my question is, if the world really
had believed that historically, would history have been
other than what it has been?
And my second question is, why have they
not believed it?
And we're going to be responsible.
The church is going to be responsible for
that question.
They have not believed it because we have
not really believed it.
And we have not lived as if we
believed it.
Are we daily living as if we believe
we're going to be judged?
Do we believe that God is a judge?
Not some ruthless tyrant that pulls the wings
from flies, but a God who rightfully has
the power and the right to deserve and
to require of us right living.
And when we're not observed and seen, what
do we do?
And when we have the opportunity to think
the thoughts that we want to think, what
do we think?
And to contemplate what we want to contemplate,
what do we contemplate?
As if God does not know our every
thought.
As if we are not entirely transparent to
Him.
We do not live as if we really
believe that God is judge.
Because if we did, our own life would
be other.
And the world is waiting to see it
in us that they might believe that God
also is judge.
I think one of the most difficult things
to persuade men is a judgment to come.
And if there's anything that has been the
source of humor in family and women's magazines,
it's some bearded character, Kanagir Stein, that says,
repent for the end of the ages at
hand.
The issue of judgment has always been foolishness
to the world.
And I think that there's something in the
way that Paul said it that was not
foolish.
He will judge the world.
So why is it that they have not
believed that?
And the next question, the last is, what
will it take that they will believe that?
What will it take that the world will
believe through the church that God will judge
the world?
You know what Paul said to the Jews
who are no longer here?
He said, your blood is no longer in
my hands.
He actually believed that he had a responsibility
before God, that the blood of men would
be upon his hands if he did not
speak to them the whole counsel of God,
which includes the judgment of God.
How many are we warning?
Do we live and conduct ourselves with a
gravity?
Is there a certain daring about us that
even when that's expressly speaking that subject, there's
something about our whole demeanor that implies and
suggests that we live in an awareness that
there's a day not far off when God
is going to judge all men.
These are exclusive statements, specific statements, supernatural statements,
from which there's no escape, no alternative, no
options, and everything about them is opposed to
the thinking of secular men.
Paul was offensive in every point in particular
because he preached to them the whole counsel
of God, and yet some clave unto him
and believe that God even mentions them by
name, Dionysius and Damaris, a woman.
And it's just a remarkable thing that Dionysius
means from Dionysus, the god of orgies and
revelry and sensual gratification.
A man who is named after that is
the one who clave unto Paul and believed.
That to me is more than happenstance.
It's just remarkably rich.
And as I mentioned last week, it's this
same one who is thought according to church
history and legend to be the one who
died in France, and he went also up
to a hill to preach to pagans the
gospel but did not come down from it,
which today is called the Hill of Martyrs
in Paris, or Montmartre.
So I want to say in conclusion, as
we come to the close of these days,
do we realize that if we have a
sacred mind, a spiritual mind, and live by
it and speak from it, that we are
going to be increasingly an offense to men
about us, that we're coming to a showdown,
a confrontation, and that there's going to be
a collision, and that we would be fools
not to recognize it and to anticipate it.
This brother writes, Where there is determinism, materialism,
or unregenerate humanism, there is heresy.
I love this writer.
No ifs, ands, or buts.
Where there is determinism, materialism, or unregenerate humanism,
there is heresy.
Heresy is an ugly word with an ugly
history.
It follows that any attempt to attain doctrinal
clarity and stability will bring to light a
mass of heresies that underlie contemporary thinking.
You start to press this point.
You start to speak this way.
You start to challenge men and warn them
of a judgment to come, and you're going
to stir up a whole host of things,
of heresies, all of the heresies that are
contrary to God that underline modern thinking.
Any educated Christian who examines some aspect of
our current intellectual inheritance with this end in
view will inevitably meet with fundamental presuppositions which
give a false account of man's nature and
destiny.
If he is honest, he will put his
finger on such errors as he decries, and
he must inevitably incur the obloquy specially reserved
for heresy hunters.
What he's saying is, you're going to catch
it.
Men are not going to take this sitting
down.
You're not going to prick their balloon and
sweep away the foundations of their false thought
and their heresies and get away with it
easily.
See, Paul came down from our cell, but
Dionysius never came down from his cell.
And I don't think that we ought to
ascend up to any hill without giving a
thought to the fact that we might not
come down to challenge men in their false,
anti-God heresies, because the love of the
truth is not in all men.
We're going to see two classes of men
increasingly as we come to the radical end
of the age, a small number who will
cleave unto us and believe and fall at
our feet and cry out, men and brethren,
what must I do to be saved?
We're going to find a greater number, I
think, who will be seeking to throw us
over the brows of hills.
We're going to experience contention and collision from
those who will be opposed to what we
say.
We're not speaking about an idle thing, about
a matter of opinion, but something that will
be cost to us.
The same writer in his other book on
the Christian mind writes, the collision between the
Christian mind and a solidly earthbound culture ought
to be a violent one.
I like that kind of a man.
It ought to be violent.
There's something terribly amiss that these different views
somehow can collage this side by side in
perfect peace and equanimity as if it's just
a matter of differing opinions.
Take what you like.
There ought to be a violent collision, he
writes.
In fact, the impact does not occur for
the Christian raised aside the presuppositions proper to
a supernaturally oriented personality.
When he steps outside the sphere of specifically
religious activity or of personal morality, he speaks
the language of secularism.
You know why this collision has not occurred?
Because we're Catholics, and once we come outside
the church, we adopt again, we pick it
up as if putting on our overcoats, the
secular vocabulary of the world, and we have
no point of difference with them in their
mind, their attitudes, and their choice of words.
Because we think that the sacred view only
pertains to our religious life or to our
personal morality rather than to all of life.
Paul brought the thrust of God into the
most secular place, and that's where it needs
to be brought again.
And when it will be, there shall be
a collision that is violent.
We ought now to be preparing and anticipating
those things.
The specific reference to the supernatural, to resurrection,
to judgment, are all calculated offenses to the
secular mind.
And because they're specific, they give no out.
They either require a yielding and surrender or
a rejection.
There's no neutral ground.
They are opposed to all that man desires
who is autonomous and against law and something
given from outside of himself because he wants
to be his own creator, even to the
point of creating God in his own image.
He wants to create his own utopia, independent
of God.
He wants to make his own boundaries and
use the world for his own purposes.
So we're not just talking about religious views.
We're talking about the very foundation and reason
for the whole purpose of being.
That's what the sacred view is.
It is not, quote, a religious matter.
It is a total matter.
And Paul, with the incarnation of all that
was spoken, is also a statement and a
foreshadowing of the apostolic church that God is
anticipating and looking for of an entire people
corporately who will be expressing to the world
in which they live in their generation what
Paul expressed individually to men in his generation,
either Jew or Greek.
And to reject that man is to reject
God.
To reject the messenger is to reject the
message.
To cleave unto him is to believe.
And then shall the end come.
One encounter with Paul is sufficient to leave
men eternally accountable.
One encounter with Paul is to leave men
eternally accountable.
It doesn't have to be repeated.
To meet Paul and to hear Paul is
to receive the whole thrust of God in
pointed words, anointed and convicting, because he's the
thing in himself.
The apostolic equation is that proclamation equals demonstration,
or demonstration equals proclamation.
It's not enough just to say the right
things.
They need also to be demonstrated.
It's the truth made flesh.
How is it that Paul was not afraid?
How is it that he didn't have a
moment to think, hey, I might not come
down from this hill.
I'm not just rubbing these guys or irritating
them a little bit.
I am vexing them unspeakably.
I'm going against the total grain of law
that they have thought and believed the whole
foundation of their life to this point.
I'm showing them that their whole life to
this point has been a mockery and a
fraud and something entirely false and men don't
want to hear it.
And that's why they put their fingers in
their ears and gnash their teeth against those
who bring them the word of truth as
they did to Stephen.
And how is it that Paul didn't have
the thought that, hey, this might be my
appointed moment for martyrdom as it was Stephen's
by speaking the truth to men who are
not wanting to hear it but to stop
their ears.
How is it he was not afraid?
That he could speak to them about a
God who will judge all men.
He was not afraid of men because he
was afraid of God.
That's why.
Because the fear of God, which is to
say also the love of God, constrains him
and will save us from the fear of
men.
The boldness of Paul was not some kind
of Jewish attribute.
It's the expression of the same life that
gave the power and the words which he
expressed.
The righteous are as bold as a lion.
And if God chose to take his life
that day on martyrdom, so what?
If God was finished with him and that's
where his life was to end in glory
in some final demonstration and articulation of the
gospel, would Paul have grieved?
Because he said that he was rising and
chafed by having to live in this earthly
tabernacle, in this tent, he would much rather
to be in the presence of the Lord.
But God had appointed him a certain length
in the earth until his purposes were finished.
There was no fear in Paul about the
time of his demise.
He knew it was appointed of God even
as Jesus knew it.
And the question is, do you know it?
When Jesus was submitted to Pontius Pilate, one
of the ultimate Roman authorities, and he said,
don't you know that I have the power
to spare your life or to take it?
And Jesus said, you would have no power
at all except it were given you from
above.
Because Jesus believed and Paul believed that this
is the God who gives all things.
Do you believe it?
And if you believe it, you'll go up
to any hill fearlessly.
Because the issue is not the hill and
the issue is not men.
The issues of life and death are with
God in his time because he's the giver
of all things.
And until the moment comes that he's chosen
to give, we can live fully to that
moment in the apostolic way, speaking and serving
according to what the life of God is
prompting from us.
Oh, my, my, my.
Paul and Marcel, I love him, I love
it, and I know that it's a timeless
word for God's church and a picture of
what God is preparing us for at the
end of the age.
Paul stood in the midst and said.
So let's just conclude with a word of
prayer.
The incarnate man, the apostolic man, the demonstrator
of the thing that is proclaimed, the supernatural
evidence before men, not just as a vague
generality, but as a mode of living and
being.
In him I live and move and have
my being.
Not only as your own poet said, but
as I'm demonstrating right in front of your
face and letting you hear right now.
Thank you, Jesus.
Lord, my God, we stand in such awe
of this masterpiece of apostolic man that Paul
was.
And we know, my God, that the grace
that was available to him is available also
to us if we choose also with him
to know nothing except Christ and him crucified.
If we choose to pull out the plug
and to forsake, my God, our own sources,
our own life, our own meager ability and
wisdom that enables us to get by, I
will radically and totally trust this glorious resurrection
life, the wisdom of it, the beauty of
it, the power of it, the truth of
it, the appropriateness of it, Lord, that we
might be before our own unbelieving generation what
Paul was to his, that their blood shall
not be on our hands.
And we just invite you, Lord, who has
chosen to speak this theme to us in
these days, to fit us, my God, with
a spiritual mind.
Again, we repent, Lord.
You're commanding all men everywhere to repent.
We repent to the degree that we have
yielded to secular views, worldly views, tolerant of
different opinions, that we're men of opinions more
than men of conviction.
And we somehow allow others to languish in
their opinions as if somehow if they're equally
as valid with ours.
And we don't want to be looked upon
as presumptuous or arrogant or contentious or dogmatic,
that terrible, dirty word, that we would be
somehow narrow and dogmatic and not broad-minded
and liberal or tolerant.
My God, give us the mind of Paul,
which is to say give us the mind
of Christ, and give us the grace, the
ability, the life, the power, fearlessly to express
it.
Wheresoever it shall please you to bring us.
Let it begin, my God, tonight and tomorrow
where we presently are, the area, my God,
that you've given us now to move and
to live and to have our beings.
May we trust you for words, trust you
for grace, for expression, trust you as the
giver of all things, the wonderful God whom
Paul proclaimed.
May we also proclaim him to a generation
that would prefer to have him unknown.
Thank you, Jesus.
Feel these things in our hearts, Lord.
Bring us to this place.
We'll thank you and praise you.
Bless, my God, the words of this night.
May they have a wide circulation to the
blessing and to the challenging of many, to
the awakening of many from their sleep, to
the raising of those who are dead to
God by the words and the life which
you've given.
We'll give you the praise, the glory, the
thanks, the acknowledgment in Jesus' holy name.
Thank you.