Last week I prophesied that this class was
going to decline in attendance, week by week,
and so now that we all know what
my credentials are, let's pray for the mercy
of God.
Let's bow our heads and hearts and ask
God really richly to redeem the very brief
time that we have.
Precious God, Lord, thank you that prayer is
not mere ceremony, Lord, that you are listening,
God, that we acknowledge with all our hearts,
Lord, that we're small potatoes in the kingdom,
pathetic pieces of dust, Lord, in and of
ourselves.
But we ask, Lord God, because this is
in the heart of your will, that we
might be clothed upon by you, Lord, that
we might have the expression of your own
wisdom, your own heart, your own truths, your
own glory.
Give us hearts, great God, to receive the
things that I shall please you, Lord, to
express this morning.
Bless these dear ones who have come, who
are thirsty, Lord, for the knowledge of your
kingdom and the kingdom way.
May they enter in more deeply as the
result of this speaking and this hearing.
Altogether bless us, Lord.
We'll thank you and praise you for your
mercies and goodness toward us, because we've asked
it in Jesus' holy name.
And everyone said amen.
Well, sorry about the situation with the tapes.
Last week's opening session was something like the
turning over of the fallow ground.
It was the Lord putting in a sharp
plow and turning up deep furrows.
We started in the book of Genesis, which
is a good place to begin, it's the
book of beginnings, about the two trees in
the garden and how that these are still
to this day the two choices available to
men and that the great pity is that
though we call ourselves Christians and assume that
we are new covenant believers, our lives are
almost essentially old covenant lives, that we're still
living from the tree of the knowledge of
good and evil.
I try to suggest that there are reasons
why men prefer that to the tree of
life, that the tree of life is not
in itself comely, it's not attractive to the
natural eye, whereas the tree of the knowledge
of good and evil is very attractive.
Remember that it's said in the third chapter
of Genesis, when the woman saw that the
tree was good for food and that it
was pleasant to the eyes and a tree
to be desired to make one wise, she
took of the fruit thereof and did eat
and gave also unto her husband with her
and he did eat.
And in that beautiful verse, we see the
same things that are recorded for us in
the book of 1 John, where God says
that all that is in the world is
the lust of the eyes, the lust of
the flesh and the pride of life.
No accident also that the three things upon
which Jesus was tested in the 40 days
in the wilderness were exactly these three things.
And so I can tell you from my
own experience how you can know you're converted,
that when you're an atheist as I was
for 35 years, everything seems to be filled
with multitudinous choices, nuances, shades of grey, your
mind is continually harassed by the varieties of
choice and decision, the complexity, and we love
that, don't we?
And the incoming of the Ruach HaKodesh was
a great simplification of my life.
As a matter of fact, I became very
quiet.
All of the rancor and the noise and
the clamor was out.
All the necessity to speak or to be
heard was out.
As a matter of fact, when I returned
to California my first night back, at the
home where I was a guest, also Jewish
friends who were, as I had been, atheists,
radicals, worldly, and they invited a whole household
of people of the same kind, I found
myself completely out of the discussion.
And by midnight the fur was flying, the
spittle was flying, and I sat there like
a silent lump.
And someone turned to me and said, Oh,
she said, you're strangely silent.
She said, you're usually in the thick of
these discussions.
And I remember what the esoteric question was,
something about the definition of Jewishness and intellect,
some kazarai.
I'm throwing a little Jewish word to you.
Kazarai means garbage.
She said, you're strangely silent.
You're usually in the thick of these things.
I said, I can't help it.
I said, I just find this conversation completely
irrelevant to life.
Oh, she said, what do you think is
relevant to life?
And then it was I heard the first
of that sound, which I was to hear
through the years, dum-da-dum-dum.
And I was on the spot, and I
gave my first testimony, and all conversation ceased.
And they turned to look upon the phenomenon
who had been the leading faculty radical and
who is now a little lamb of God
with a book under his arm, saying Jesus
is the answer.
I lost all my friends that night.
You can't believe it that the same men
who applauded you as a communist or Marxist
or seducer or whatever your attribute was in
the world are the same men who turn
upon you with great scorn and anger and
bitterness and vexation.
It got so bad the next day with
the woman whose guest I was that I
had to get out of her moving car
in the midst of traffic in the street
because her language had become so violent.
That's how offended she was because I had
changed eating from one tree, and I had
turned to another.
Dear children, I want to speak in the
most fundamental way, if I can use such
a word, to give you a perception of
kingdoms in conflict, that you might understand what
is the call of God and have with
me something of a woundedness over the fact
that though God has made available to his
life, we still persist in living from a
much lesser source.
It's the source, by the way, that contains
the vexations, the bitterness, the ulcers, the frenzies
of mind, because it has to do with
choice, with volition, with thinking, the knowledge of
the tree of good and evil.
It makes one to be wise or to
appear wise, but the end thereof is death.
Now, with that resume of last week, I
want to turn now to New Testament text
this morning and the book of 1 Corinthians,
the second chapter.
Isn't it wonderful that we can talk about
Paul?
Because if there was ever anyone eminently qualified
to walk in the way of the world,
it was he.
He had a towering Jewish intellect.
He was skilled in the wisdom of the
world.
He was multilingual and sophisticated.
And all the things which men would pride
themselves as adornments, he counted as dung.
So in the second chapter, we read, And
I, brethren, when I came to you, came
not with excellency of speech or of wisdom,
declaring unto you the testimony of God.
For I determined not to know anything among
you, save Jesus Christ and him crucified.
Can I just pause there for a moment
and say, knowing the nature of the mind
and how it loves to have an independent
existence, and if you'll not feed it the
kinds of things that it has been accustomed
to in the world, it'll even be satisfied
with things religious, things theological, so long as
that it can continue to have some kind
of independent existence and rule and be at
the center of your life.
And I hope by these remarks that you
don't think that I dismiss mind or its
operation altogether, and that I'm suggesting that God
intends for us to be some kind of
stupefied saint.
I'm only trying to establish the centrality of
spirit over mind, the centrality of the tree
of life over the tree of the knowledge
of good and evil, trying to establish the
priorities of God, and trying to suggest that
there's a way to live by which the
spirit can be at the center of our
life and the mind be only its handmaiden
and its tool, rather than it should call
all the shots.
And I want to say that if you
have tampered your mind, as most of us
have for 30, 40 or more years, and
it has been accustomed to this independent existence,
that it's going to take an exertion of
will on your part to teach it and
to instruct it to take the place in
the life that God intends.
So this is not just a chance verse
where it says that Paul determined not to
know anything but Christ and Him crucified.
I think all of us are familiar with
the phenomenon that by our bedside, when it
comes to pick up something to read before
we go to sleep at night, and we
have the Bible and two or three other
books, almost invariably we'll choose some other book.
The Bible almost always comes to us as
a last choice, less attractive than some commentary
on the Bible, or some novel, or some
biography, or some religious literature.
And I'm not decrying religious literature, I'm an
avid reader of it, but again, wanting to
stress the priorities.
There are so many things that can be
said here, of what it means not to
come in the excellency of speech or wisdom,
and to determine not to know anything but
Christ and Him crucified.
In a word, that's humiliating.
When Paul has to divest himself of the
things in which he has long trusted, the
things that are familiar and dear, when he
knows that he can wow an audience on
the basis of the excellency of his own
speech, and to come, as it were, naked
and trembling, you come in quite another way.
There's a reason why we persist in eating
from the wrong tree.
There's a reason why we rather act from
our own religious wisdom and knowledge than trust
ourselves to the life of God.
And no accident, therefore, that the third verse
says, I was with you in weakness and
fear and in much trembling.
As my wife, Inger, says, how do you
like them apples?
How willing are we to suffer weakness, fear,
and trembling that the life of God might
have opportunity through us to be expressed if
we get out of the way the obstacle
of our own human wisdom, our own eloquence,
and our own speaking.
I don't know how to persuade you that
there is such an option, and that few
of us have tasted of it, and for
that very reason the world has not opportunity
to see the glory of God.
There's a difference between clever religion and well
-meaning religion, and ethical and moral posturing under
religion, and the glory of God.
And if you want, Judaism is par excellence,
the religion of the world brought to its
finest pitch, and carried on by human prowess,
independent of God.
And the fact that you have not discerned
it, and seen the emptiness and shame that
it is, is because it bears too great
a correspondence to your own religious walk.
You might say that Presbyterianism, or Methodism, or
any of the other isms, is Judaism, lacking
the qualification of the knowledge of Hebrew, and
the other Yiddishisms that are available to Jews.
Maybe you'll understand why I have a tape
that's called The Two Judaisms, by which I
contrast the singular Judaism of God, the tree
of life, the radical call of God for
the fullness of life in Christ, the cross
as the place of absolute separation from the
world and its spirit, as against the Judaisms
of men, by whatever name you call them,
attractive, commendable, polite, respectable, and I would say
that if there were no God, there would
be much to be desired.
But the fact that there is a God,
and that he has made available to us
his life, that this is the love of
God taught us, that he has given us
his only begotten son, that we might live
through him, that makes all of the other
Judaisms a travesty and a shame.
I haven't heard a single amen yet this
morning.
Do you read me?
Do you understand what God is trying to
say?
So I praise God for Paul because he
has entered into the mysteries and the glories
of God in so spectacular a way that
by it he has given us half the
New Testament.
By it he went into synagogues and contended
with Jews.
And if you haven't of late contended with
Jews, you'll realize that however sharp your own
natural endowments, they are wholly inadequate.
The courage, the boldness, all of the things
to which we compliment him, do not belong
to him.
They belong to the resurrected one, the holy
one of Israel, the light to lighten the
Gentiles, and the glory of the people of
Israel.
Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts.
The whole earth is filled with his glory.
And if I were to describe myself in
a word, I would say I'm a glory
monger.
Not that I seek glory for myself, but
I am jealous for the glory of God
and absolutely persuaded that nothing less than the
demonstration of it shall persuade my people to
set aside their shabby religious alternative and to
embrace the way of God.
Nothing less shall bring them to repentance.
And that's why the cry that began 2
,000 years ago needs again to be sounded,
and you are the key to it.
When again God shall raise up an apostolic
band moving in the power of God by
the Spirit, a little-perceived island of faith
who knows the fullness of God because they
live by it shall again sound to an
unbelieving world, largely Jewish, in all of its
configuration, in all of its wisdom, in all
of its values and rewards and no accident
that about five out of the seven of
the most recent Nobel Prize winners were Jewish.
We are living an essential Jewish lifestyle.
It needs to be challenged and to be
contested by the kingdom of God for there
is a clash of kingdoms.
And they need again to hear, repent for
the kingdom of God is at hand.
And it will not be at hand until
it can be demonstrated, made manifest, set forth
for their view and for their consideration.
They need to see it so clearly.
They need to see the glory of God
in the brilliance of the lives of God's
people, in the transparency of God's people, in
the lucid quality of their lives, in their
unspeakable devotion to truth, in true speaking, in
true living, in their faces, their gestures, their
mannerisms, their tones of voice.
Oh, I can go on.
I can't tell you the revelations that God
has given me of the duplicity and the
deception and the lies that corrupt our entire
religious world by sincere, well-meaning men who
operate by reason.
When I was taken by a dear Jewish
brother to hear his pastor in Canada, a
Baptist minister who had the baptism in the
Holy Spirit of whom he was so proud.
And I had a free Sunday morning, a
rare experience for me, and I sat up
in the balcony and looked around me, avid
people-watcher that I am, and studied the
Baptist faces and despaired.
It could have been a church by any
denomination and I would have despaired equally as
much.
Religion is horrendous.
Can you see it?
It is opposed to the life of God
in so many instances, however well-meaning its
intentions.
And if Satan can't snare us on the
things that are patently evil, because we're just
too basically decent to be corrupted in such
a manner, then he'll get us on the
things that are ethical or moral, and we
Jews know that game.
And I played it for 35 years.
And if that will not suffice, then he'll
get us on the things that are religious.
And I've even seen Satan trap men on
the things that are spiritual, because they seek
into self-conscious a way to be it.
We're the first in our neighborhoods to learn
about submission or discipleship.
And we titter about the tapes that we've
bought or the ones that we can quote.
Self-conscious spirituality, still being ruled by mind
rather than the effortless and spontaneous flow of
the life of God.
There's a great naturalness that God is seeking
upon his people, and another word for it
is true spirituality.
May God grant us the grace to taste
it and have a vision for it and
to enter into it.
So picture me in this situation, sitting up
there in the balcony of this vast church,
looking at these sticks of wood.
And I don't know whether it's because I'm
Jewish or strange or peculiar or it's the
operation of God's spirit, but as I looked
at their faces, I saw the overwhelming grayness,
the terrible deadness.
And I looked at the married couple sitting
side by side and I saw that that
wasn't the glory, it was a truce.
And I suppose if there's a great charge
that can be leveled against God's people, it's
this.
They're satisfied with too little.
Where is your divine discontent?
Why are you willing to satisfy yourself with
something good when God has called you to
a thing which is perfect?
And He's not goading us.
It's not an idle provocation.
He means it, that we might be perfect
as our Father in Heaven is perfect and
holy as He is holy.
By that standard, isn't everything else made pale
and eclipsed?
So I looked around at these faces and
I despaired.
And I looked up at the top row
and there were their children, wearing mod clothes
and hip-hugging fashions and nudging each other
in the ribs and giggling and tickling and
they were holy out of it.
It was an hour that they were required
to put in every much of their diligent
religious parents below.
The whole thing was a mock and a
travesty and a put-on.
And the worst actor of all, would you
believe it, was the man below preaching.
And as I looked upon him and I
heard the words pouring out of his mouth,
I said to myself, there's not a word
that can be faulted that issues from his
lips.
He was speaking about praise and worship and
it was technically perfect.
How many of us would have nodded approval
and have left and felt that we had
fulfilled our religious requirement for the day?
And yet something in my spirit was gnawing
at me.
That not only was it wrong, it was
terribly wrong.
All the more because it was technically true
and scripturally correct and doctrinally not to be
faulted.
And here's what was wrong, children.
Though the words were correct, the spirit of
it was wrong.
Though he was saying the right things, you
know what his spirit was saying?
Hey, don't take me too seriously.
Don't get excited.
Don't get frightened.
Don't get flustered.
I don't intend this to be taken to
heart and that you're going to live by
this.
This is a sermon, remember?
Listen, didn't we work this out?
You take care of my parsonage and see
to my security, well-being and prestige and
I'll see to it that you don't get
your feathers ruffled.
That's what his spirit was saying.
And everybody was nodding and saying in the
spirit, Amen.
Dear children, the kingdom of God has to
do with truth in life and in speech.
And the way we look and the intonation
of our voices and the whole panoply of
our coming and going and doing and being.
And if my Jewish people could once glimpse
this, what true living is, what true relationships
are, what true love is, free of schmaltzy
sentimentality, of gooey little kindnesses and sentimental things
that clod and corrupt and choke the way.
If they knew what true love was, they
would have heard the gospel long ago from
your lips.
But you didn't want to hurt their feelings,
right?
Because you're nice.
And Satan is just loving it all.
Because it's not the kingdom way.
Well, I didn't intend to say any of
these things, but that's a perfect illustration of
what I'm talking about.
What has this to do with my puny
and pathetic intentions?
It's glorious to hear what it will please
God to express at any given time.
The taste of His originality, His spontaneity, the
things that are in His heart for a
given moment.
I'll tell you, such a life is unspeakably
exciting.
There's not a child in the kingdom who
should ever know what the word boredom means.
I don't know what boredom means.
I've never seen life so full.
If you're living in the kingdom way and
eating from the tree of life.
So, I think that this determination is required.
Not to know anything.
And I can say this, in times when
I have striven to pick up a book,
or to augment my meager knowledge, or to
take care of some of the terrible gaps
in my religious understanding, it has availed nothing.
But what has pleased God to bring to
my attention a certain book at the propitious
moment, it has been life.
And I'll tell you, there's a world of
difference in parroting religious clichés, however appropriate for
the hour, about discipleship and commitment and submission,
or knowing them as life.
And we shall not enter into that until
we exercise the same determination not to know.
And be willing also, and here's where the
cross comes in, to suffer the weakness and
fear and much trembling.
Would you be willing to stand before a
people, or a Jewish person, or a colleague,
or members of your own family, and to
feel yourself utterly naked, helpless, weak, vain, uninspired,
without imagination, your mouth filled with sawdust, your
mind clogged, and to realize that what makes
the situation all the more dramatic, laden, weighted,
is that it's life and death?
Do you realize that the encounters into which
God brings us are always life and death?
And that every time that I stand before
God's people, or any place where he brings
me, I realize always it's a life and
death situation.
That the greatest of issues are being propounded,
and that I have to say again and
again, Lord, who is sufficient for these things?
That's exactly the point.
Not one of us is, if we understand
the magnitude of the things to which God
calls us, life and death issues.
Who has the wisdom, then, to speak to
a Jewish person, and to persuade them of
the foolishness of the gospel?
And if you think that I'm the one
who has labeled the gospel foolish, not so.
God himself tells us that he has intentionally
made the gospel foolishness to confound the things
of the wise and mighty.
And you're going to address a sophisticated Jew,
eminently rational, and tell him that the God
of his fathers lay aside his deity, and
condescended to take upon himself the form of
a man?
What utter humiliation.
And to come into the world as a
babe, utterly helpless and dependent, and to live
a life of obscurity for 30 years, and
then to suffer three years of total rejection
from his people in the most ignominious kind
of suffering and pain and death.
That if you believe these things, and somehow
by an act of faith appropriate to yourself,
the blood which we shed 2,000 years
ago, that somehow your sins are forgiven?
Oh, come on, get off it.
How many Presbyterians actually believe it?
Let alone Jews.
And as a matter of fact, it cannot
be conveyed or communicated except by the Spirit
of God that has a wonderful facility to
take the foolishness of God and make it
utterly profound for men.
We're going to see that in just a
moment.
So Paul said that he came with much
trembling in my speech and preaching were not
with enticing words of man's wisdom, but in
demonstration of the Spirit and of power.
I don't think that that meant necessarily that
there were fireworks, or that there were miracles
on the spot.
But there was something in his voice and
speaking that was a demonstration of the Spirit
and of power.
Have you had the opportunity of seeing that?
Of hearing that and noting the contrast?
Through how many respectable and correct sermons have
you sat?
All of us in our religious lives have
not been given assent and been unchanged.
But where have been the occasions that we
have experienced the demonstration of power by the
Spirit in the speakings of men?
And I think that those occasions would be
more frequent if men would enter into their
pulpits with fear and with trembling, willing to
put aside their own wisdom and their own
eloquence, trusting to the life of God to
bring forth the appropriateness of His burden that
day for that people.
That your faith should not stand in the
wisdom of men, but in the power of
God.
Howbeit we speak wisdom among them that are
perfect, yet not the wisdom of this world,
nor of the princes of this world that
comes to naught.
But we speak the wisdom of God in
a mystery, even the hidden wisdom which God
ordained before the world unto our glory, which
none of the princes of this world knew,
for had they known it, they would not
have crucified the Lord of glory.
Isn't it a staggering phenomenon that this brilliant
Jewish people, and religiously astute, and so well
versed, yet missed the Holy One of Israel
and were not only unable to discern who
He is, but accused Him of obtaining His
power from the Azeldub, and that they equated
Him with Satan rather than with the Father.
And you want to know something children?
Nothing has changed in two thousand years.
Nothing.
Because God's wisdom is different from men's wisdom.
And the wisdom of God is a mystery,
even the hidden wisdom which God ordained before
the world unto our glory.
And can I say this?
May I say this?
That except that we understand this wisdom, and
move and live and have our being in
this wisdom, we shall perish.
I want to sound a warning that we
are at the end of the age, and
maybe you've heard the phrase, the end times.
And I believe with all my heart that
we are in it.
And the phrase, the clash of kingdoms is
not some fanciful phrase just to titillate the
sensibilities of Presbyterians and to induce them to
come into a room on Sunday morning.
It's a warning and a sounding of God
that we are at the end of the
age.
And the age that began a great conflict
between light and darkness, between two trees, is
going to conclude and climax in the same
conflict.
There's going to be great sparks struck, great
cries, great shrieks as these two grinding kingdoms
come into ultimate conflict at the end of
this age.
It's a fight to the finish.
Are you prepared for it?
By which wisdom shall we live?
How shall we be sustained in such an
hour?
In shortages and failures, in a very earth
that shall be shaken.
For God promised in the last days that
everything that can be shaken will be shaken.
And only that which can remain will remain.
And by that he means those things which
are founded in the rock Christ Jesus.
How many of us already are beginning to
be shaken in our own marriages?
In our own careers?
In things in which we have long trusted?
I'll tell you children, you were fortunate, you
had a lovely marriage, you had the accident
of temperamental compatibility, don't count on it.
You're going to cry out in truth, where
is my God?
What's happening?
We've had this lovely marriage all these years
and all of a sudden this is going
wrong and that's going wrong.
It's not that God is absent, it's that
he's very present.
And he knows far better than you the
things that shall soon be upon us all.
And he's preparing us for these eventualities.
And teaching us that we have no basis
for trust in anything except in him.
Temperament, compatibility, human wisdom, expertise, all these things
shall fail.
But the wisdom which is given of God
never fails.
And we're going to find ourselves increasingly in
the kinds of predicament that can be resolved
only by that kind of wisdom.
Have you learned to operate in that and
to move in that?
Another illustration comes to mind once.
I've given this in some messages at one
place.
When we had breakfast at a certain cafe
outside of a town where I was visiting
some precious friends in the faith.
There were about eight of us around the
table and after the breakfast had concluded, the
check for the entire meal was laid right
in the middle.
Any one of us could have rightly picked
it up and paid it.
But a woman to the left of me
picked it up.
And without thinking, which is when I'm usually
at my best, I turned to her and
I said, did God have you to do
that?
How many people ever dream to ask such
a question?
Because after all, it was a good ask.
But I want you to know there's something
better than good.
It's the best.
There's something better than human good.
It's the wisdom of God.
We have all sinned and fallen short of
the glory of God because we have too
long habitually acted out of the things which
are good and the things for which no
one has ever taken us to task because
the whole world applauds the things that are
good.
And therefore have we been kept from the
things which are perfect.
Did God have you to do that, I
asked?
Oh yes, she said with a kind of
a tittering giggle, thinking that I would turn
to something else, but forgetting how Jewish I
was.
So I repeated again, did God have you
to do that?
This time she choked and slurred a little
bit and mumbled a little and yes, she
said and I asked her again the third
time.
Did God have you to do that?
Oh, she said, not really, but I thought
it would be a good thing.
And you say, Art, what's so wrong about
picking up a check?
Nothing, children, in itself, except this, that if
we make a lifetime of such practices, by
what wisdom then shall we act in the
ultimate predicaments and crises to which God shall
bring us if all along we have been
schooled in doing the things that are good
and have no knowledge of what it means
to operate by the Spirit.
We are called to the Kingdom of God,
which is the realm of the Spirit and
of His life.
And we're not going to, in a moment
of crisis, begin to learn to shift gears
and to adjust to that dimension.
It's now that we've got to know what
it means to move and live and have
our being in Him.
And we shall not switch from the one
kingdom to the other without much fear and
without much trembling.
Are you willing?
Are you willing to be something more than
correct Presbyterians, than people with ripe moral and
ethical and religious sensibilities?
Are you willing to be radically gods?
And I'll tell you, He'll bring you into
humiliation that you'll not believe in instructing you
in the way of the Kingdom.
But the end thereof is glory.
Now, I want to give an illustration in
the Scriptures of what I'm talking about in
Matthew, the 16th chapter, where a well-meaning
Jewish guy, full of religious juices, full of
the wisdom of the world, sought to do
something good and was reprimanded by the Lord
Himself.
It begins in the 16th chapter of Matthew
in the 13th verse, when Jesus came into
the coast of Caesarea Philippi, and He asked
His disciples, saying, Who do men say that
I, the Son of Man, am?
You know what?
I've never before noticed that it was at
this particular location that Jesus raised this particular
question.
And I want to say in the same
breath, there's not a thing in this book,
a syllable, a jot, a tittle, a piece
of punctuation out of place.
The enormous genius of God in everything that
is in this book.
It's a glory that He chose a celebrated
Roman resort replete with statuary and all of
the physical rudiments of Roman civilization that is
effusive with all the things that pertain to
mind and the things that men celebrate.
Roman virtues and valor and all of these
things, to ask a foolish question, Who do
men say that I, the Son of Man,
am?
Can you see the conjunction of the setting
and the question?
It couldn't be more perfect.
And they said, Some say that thou art
John the Baptist, some Elias, some Jeremiah, one
of the prophets, and they say it unto
them, but whom say ye that I am?
Who do you say that I am?
It's not enough just to raise the abstract
or the general academic question, but I love
the propensity of the Lord to put His
finger directly into our chest and say, Who
do you say that I am?
Children, when have you been asked that last?
Who do you say that He is?
Could you give an answer?
I mean an answer that is more than
pert or correct or doctrinally right.
Can you give an answer that abounds in
life because of your knowledge of Him by
experience?
That one of the greatest laments that God
has directed to the Jewish people and prophets
was that the knowledge of Me is taught
by the precept of men.
And every nine out of ten of us
would say, What's wrong with that?
Isn't it for that very reason that we
come to Sunday school?
God says that's the worst and the least
means by which the knowledge of Me should
be obtained.
That the knowledge of Me is taught by
the precept of men?
When the knowledge of Me should be obtained
by the things which are intimate, by sharing
the fellowship of my sufferings, by being brought
to places where there is fear and trembling,
where except that I am God, you shall
perish.
Have you ever been in such places?
Be willing to be brought in boats that
are familiar and secure and all of a
sudden to suffer tumultuous storms and boisterous seas
and to see some kind of a phantom
figure that says, Come.
But that's not the Lord.
At least not the Lord that I've known.
The Lord that I know has every blonde
hair nicely in place and aquiline nose and
chin and milky blue eyes.
Oh, yes.
Don't you just want to stamp that under
your heel?
All those sappy portraits and sentimental hogwash of
the things that pertain to God.
I think the truer picture of Him is
that one that we shall find in the
storm.
And you know what they said?
They said it was a ghost.
Are you willing to get out of the
boat of security and well-being, religious familiarity,
on the basis of one word spoken by
the Lord who appeared to you in an
unfamiliar way?
And if He be not God, you perish?
If I have any credential for standing before
you on these Sunday mornings, it's that I've
gotten out of such boats at the bidding
of God over these 12 years again and
again and again.
And I have no other qualifications but that,
that the knowledge of God and the intimacy
comes in such experience.
And how many of us would be willing
to pray at the conclusion of this hour,
Lord, whatever it takes to enter into that
knowledge, I want it.
You order my steps aright and bring me
to boisterous seas and tumultuous storms.
Bring me out of the boat of familiarity
and religious security.
That if you be not God, I perish.
Would you pray such a prayer?
Because I'll tell you, God will honor it.
So the question is very great.
Then and now, who do men say that
I am?
And Simon Peter answered and said, Thou art
the Christ, the Son of the living God.
And by the way, Christ derives from the
word, the Greek word Christos, is the translation
of the Hebrew word Moshiach.
Thou art the Messiah.
How many of us even know that?
I didn't know it when I was a
university graduate.
As a Jew, I never knew any Jewish
family by the name of Christ.
Not knowing that Christ was his title and
not his name.
And that it was the Greek derivation of
the Hebrew word Moshiach.
If I had so much as been told
that, as a Jewish kid in Brooklyn, how
much of my life would have been altered?
Thou art the Messiah, the Son of the
living God.
And Jesus answered and said unto him, Blessed
art thou, Simon Bar-Jonah, for flesh and
blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but
my Father which is in heaven.
You want to know something, children?
You're not offended if I call you children,
are you?
You realize it's not me calling you children.
It's not some Jewish squirt 12 years old
in the Lord calling you children.
It's the life.
It's the Father looking with his great eye
of compassion.
Children.
You want to know something, children?
That my second great burden or equal to
my own burden for my Jewish people are
the countless numbers of Christians to whom this
revelation has not come.
Flesh and blood cannot reveal that Jesus is
the Christ.
It cannot.
And how many brainwashed members are there sitting
like sticks of wooden pews Sunday after Sunday
doing the dutiful and expected things who have
never had this revelation and never will have
so long as they are willing to accept
the thing which is good rather than that
which is perfect.
God is only waiting to hear one cry
to say, Lord, I'll not have this anymore
except that the knowledge of you becomes real
for me by revelation from heaven, I'm giving
up this crap truck.
I refuse to go through the motions.
It makes my life a travesty and a
lie.
And if it's a lie at that foundational
place, what then shall the rest of it
be?
God has called us to more than just
Sunday religion.
It's more than just a thing afforded us
to take the rough edges of our personalities
and give us an alternative to an increasingly
corrupt world.
He's called us to the kingdom and it's
a kingdom of truth and it's not truth
known to men by the operations of their
minds because it has not to do with
human wisdom or the princes of this world
would have known who was crucified.
But it's the hidden, it's the deep wisdom
of God which is revealed by his spirit
and freely given to those who will receive
it.
The whole thing from beginning to end is
an operation of God by the spirit given
to those who receive it.
Flesh and blood has not revealed to some
people.
This isn't because you're an astute Jew or
because you're religious or any other such qualification
but my father in heaven has revealed it.
And also we should note, blessed ourself.
You want to know something?
Until the recognition comes of who Jesus is,
there's no blessing because blessing has eminently to
do with the kingdom just as curse, which
is the opposite has to do with eating
from the wrong tree.
Does that sound like a gross simplification?
And does that offend our sophisticated sensibilities who
love to believe that there are multitudinous and
varieties of choices?
God says there's only two, blessing or curse.
How do you like them apples?
And if we're not living in blessing we
are most assuredly living in curse.
And as I mentioned last week, what we
call calamity, God calls curse.
And how many of us would understand that
the things which are now coming on the
earth, which we call unseasonal weather patterns or
fuel shortages or political crisis or financial difficulty
or whatever, is the calamity of God, the
curse of God for a world that has
persistently refused to know him and continues to
choose to eat from the tree of death.
Blessed ourself.
I'm waiting for my Jewish people to be
blessed and if you're impressed with their moral
attainments and their intellectual attainments and their respectability
and their politeness and all of these other
wonderful human trappings, I am not.
And are you seeing by the natural eye
or are you seeing by the spirit?
Are you impressed with the outward man or
do you see the inner man?
If we're going to be the people of
the kingdom and are moving by the spirit
of God, we have to see as God
sees by the spirit.
And he sees through those things as so
many filthy rags.
He sees the putrid sores that need to
be mollified and bound up.
The corruption from head to toe.
He's not impressed with the politeness of speech
and the other kinds of affectations and worldly
things that's so impressive.
And until you see as God sees, your
heart is not going to groan, your spirit
burdens.
To speak to this people to repent for
the kingdom of God is at hand.
And this is why they've not been touched.
They need to be blessed.
And blessing begins with the true recognition of
who Jesus is.
And who is there in this room who
has not heard some Jewish lips?
The compliment that Jesus was a wonderful man
and an excellent teacher.
And you might find the Jew more liberal
than that.
Willing even to say that Jesus was a
great prophet.
You know what I say to such Jews
when I meet them?
For you, I tremble the more that you
shall acknowledge all these things and yet come
short of acknowledging that he is the Christ,
the son of the living God.
Far better that you accused him of having
his power from Satan.
Then you should pay him these kinds of
good compliments and fail to see who it
is who uttered the Sermon on the Mount
and gave sight to the blind and raised
the dead.
Can you see that?
Why haven't you said those things then?
Because you've been nice and good and been
accustomed to picking up the check from the
table.
But the Lord never directed you to do
that.
Eating from the wrong tree habitually.
Is he so great a simpleton that he
sees only two sources for everything?
Either above or below?
Is he trying to suggest that that which
does not have its origin from heaven has
its origin from below?
That every good and perfect gift cometh from
above, from the Father of light in whom
is no shadow, no variableness of turning?
And that everything else comes from below?
But Lord, we acknowledge that the drug menace
came from below, and orgies came from below,
and sinister and vicious evils came from below.
But are you trying to suggest also that
the things which we have called good, and
that we have equated with men, also come
from below?
Jesus rebuked him and said, Thou art an
offense unto me.
Get thee behind me safely.
For you savor, you smell, of the things
which be of men and not...
Let that sink deeply into your hearing.
Who move by the things which be of
men, which are applauded of men, and acknowledged
of men, and honored of men, but have
not their origin.
There is that which comes from above, which
is pure and holy, and that which comes
from below, which can take on the appearance
of good, and even be respectably religious, and
can even not only offend God, but be
the impediment of the fulfillment of the things
which he desires.
And which one of us sitting in this
room today, who knows the salvation of God,
this servant included, would have known it, if
Jesus had responded to the well-meaning intentions
of Peter, and had not gone to Jerusalem
to be tried by men, and to be
crucified, and to be raised again on the
third day.
Can you see that the good is the
enemy of the perfect?
And that God is trying to school us
in kingdom living?
And that when Adam and Eve were cast
out of the garden, God established cherubim with
flaming swords, to keep them from returning, lest
they eat from the tree of life, and
live forever in that filthy condition?
But I want to tell you children, that
the cherubim have put their sword down, and
that the return to Eden is open for
those who are in Christ Jesus, to eat
and to live again from the tree of
life.
This one life is both eternal and it's
abundant.
They're not different things.
I've come to bring you life, and that
more abundant.
He who hath the son hath life, and
he who hath not the son hath not
life.
But what is the virtue of it, if
we're not living by it?
And that's why in 1 Corinthians, in that
same chapter where we were, just before Paul
speaks about determining not to know anything but
Christ and Him crucified, Paul says in the
30th verse of the first chapter, But of
Him are ye in Christ, Jesus, who of
God is made unto us wisdom and righteousness
and sanctification and redemption, that according as it
is written, He that glorious let him glory
in the Lord.
I don't know of anything more radical than
what God has made available to men in
the sending of His Son.
And those of us who have stopped only
at the level of atonement, who have received
Jesus as substitution, have stopped grievously short of
God's full intention.
There is a full gospel, and it's a
lot more than back slaps and bear hugs.
It's got to do with this, that of
Him are you in Christ Jesus, who of
God is made unto us wisdom.
Not the wisdom of men, but the deep,
the hidden wisdom of God, revealed by God
and freely given to those who receive it,
and righteousness.
Righteousness has got nothing to do with being
nice.
It's got to do with fulfilling the acts
of God, which sometime may seem cruel.
Remember what Hamlet said to his mother in
that confrontation with Gertrude in her bedroom when
he came back from school to find that
his mother had married the very man who
had slain his father?
Some wicked oaf, filled with political ambition, and
his mother was such a mindless, sensate being,
thinking only of her gratification, that she married
even the murderer of this Hyperion and saint
that Hamlet had to open the locket around
her neck and shove it in her purse
and say, look here!
Look at these two men!
Look at this Hyperion, the saint, this giant,
now dead.
And look at this oaf whom you've married.
Filthy, ruled by passion, and ruled by ambition.
And all of a sudden it broke upon
her soul.
Oh Hamlet, she said, no more.
And as the world would say to us,
is that a way to talk to your
mother?
Is that nice?
You know what Hamlet said, and I believe
Shakespeare was inspired by God, sometimes one must
be cruel in order to be kind.
Dear Presbyterian saint, are you capable of that
kind of cruelty?
Isn't it beyond your temperament?
And I want you to know that kingdom
living is always beyond your temperament.
God is not going to be limited by
our temperament, our nationality, our culture, our habits,
the things that are polite.
He wants to have the full range of
the expression of his life, which is rich,
powerful, spontaneous, unique, and is always perfectly fitted
to the circumstances to which he brings us.
And the end thereof is always glorious.
Are you willing to put aside the things
that are nice, the things that are good,
for the thing that is perfect?
You can't do it without much fear and
much trembling.
And I want to encourage you to begin
to enter into that life by faith.
There's glory there.
And until that glory shall be demonstrated to
a dying world, how shall we call them
to repent for the kingdom of God is
at hand?
I want you to bow your heads with
me this morning.
This is not Sunday school class as we
have familiarly known it, but I believe that
is the deepest calling of God.
That this isn't just mild instruction, but a
God-calling for people themselves to repent, to
leave the kingdom of this world, however superficially
gilded it is with religious respectability, and to
enter radically into the kingdom of God and
trust Him for all of life, for your
wisdom, for your speaking, for your relationships, for
your witness, to be true mother, true wife,
true father, true husband, who can be it
except by His wisdom, His righteousness, His sanctification,
His redemption.
Precious God, Lord, let Your word be like
a hammer upon the rock.
And we acknowledge, gracious God, that we have
spent decades in being crucified and established in
certain mind and mentality and attitude for which
no one has ever taken us to task,
Lord, and for which indeed we have been
complimented.
But You're raising up a standard much higher,
the standard of the kingdom.
And I ask precious God that You shall
have from this room of people, people for
that kingdom who shall demonstrate the way of
the tree of life, that You shall give
them opportunities this week, in the places where
their life is, to come out of the
boats of religious familiarity and convenience and security,
in the midst of storms which You Yourself
shall brew, that they might see You in
a way that they have never thought ever
to see You, and to hear Your voice
calling in one word to obedience, come.
And may they, in the hearing of that
call, have the courage to respond, trusting You
that yea, though You slay them, yet will
they trust You, that they may learn, precious
God, out of fear and trembling, where Your
glory is.
Bless these dear ones, Lord.
Let every word of Your speaking be sealed
up in their hearts, and be the hammer
to beat incessantly upon that which is human
and worldly, that needs to be broken to
smithereens and be dismissed from their lives, that
they might be a kingdom people for Your
glory in the earth.
In Jesus' holy name, we ask it.
Amen.