You're stiff this morning, it's because I am
stiff.
I have a very sore neck.
That came in the same week as my
48th birthday.
Is God trying to tell me something?
Ha, ha, ha.
I'll get him.
As I said to my wife with dramatic
concentration, when there's a pain in the neck,
the whole body is affected.
Hint, hint, hint, hint.
Ha, ha, ha.
Well, I've just come back from Minnesota yesterday.
Tumultuous and significant days for us, and I
think even for Kansas City, which I'll not
have an opportunity perhaps to talk about, but
this left me without any real opportunity to
prepare.
But I have one thing in my heart,
there's a certain portion of scripture, and I
may end up reading every rendering of it
to be found in the Gospels.
I think all of the Gospels describe this
one episode.
And it's got eminently to do with the
kingdom of God.
In fact, I would say it's at its
heart.
And I'll tell you how God began to
underline this theme in my understanding.
Someone once said to me, how do you
prepare for your overseas trips?
You'll get a newsletter, you'll read an account
of the most recent overseas trip.
England, Yugoslavia, Germany.
And they're usually very significant days and lasting
five to six weeks.
Like this morning, usually without preparation.
Always full of untoward events and things that
cannot be anticipated, that have to be met
at the moment by the Spirit of God,
by the life of God.
The very things I've been speaking in these
few weeks.
And only the Lord knows what is accomplished
in them.
Usually there's not very much visible to be
seen that one can point to.
And someone said, how do you prepare for
these trips?
And I thought about it, and the answer
is not very well.
It's not because I'm slipshod or negligent, it's
just because it's pleased the Lord to give
me a very crowded life.
And I don't have the luxury, often times,
of preparation.
I think this is what we're going to
find ourselves as in that last day.
If I haven't used the phrase, the end
of the age or the last days, let
me use it now.
And let me say that I believe it
with all my heart, devoutly, that these are
the last days.
And they're different from all the days which
have preceded them.
And they're going to be days of enormous
conflict, enormous crisis.
Paper mache Christians will not be able to
stand in that day.
I think there's a God who wants us
to do more than just teeter-totter our
way through the age and hang in there
grimly.
He wants us to raise a standard and
to show forth His glory.
If there has ever been an hour that
has demanded the maturity of God's people, individually
and corporately, this is that hour.
And when you knit the way that I
knit, both Jewish and spiritually, and you open
up the Kansas City Star or the Times,
I forgot which it was, and see in
the first page a little inset in a
box that tells you what to do in
the event that the fuel shall fail.
What to do in severely cold weather when
the fuel supply shall fail.
How to take all of your carpets and
how to hem all your family into one
room and close off all the other rooms
of the house.
How to lay down the carpets, the blankets,
and seal the drafts.
How to operate economically a wood-burning fireplace
if you have one.
In a word, how to survive in Kansas
City.
Did you ever think that we would come
to such a day when such a statement
would be found in the first page of
a city's newspaper?
And I'll tell you, dear children, it's only
the beginning of things.
I'm not saying this to frighten you.
I'm saying this to alert you.
There's a God who is speaking words of
preparation to those who have ears to hear.
The great lament of Jesus to the Jewish
people of his own generation was, if only
you knew the hour of your own visitation.
And probably the same thing could be cried
now to the spiritual Israel, the body of
Christ christened them.
Well, getting back to how I prepare.
I said to this guy, well, about a
half hour before I have to run off
to the airport, I take my $3 suitcase
that I got at the garage sale and
I just throw a few things in that
I think I'm going to need and usually
something to read beside a few Bibles.
And I'll just pick up something by the
nightstand that my books have been accumulating that
I never get read.
And so I found myself on a couple
of trips ago opening up my suitcase and
just sticking my hand in to find what
I brought to read.
And I pulled out a little kind of
booklet that was cheaply printed with one or
two page essays by a man of whom
I had never heard.
And my eye fell upon the title of
one of them and it said, The Humility
of God.
Does that ever happen to you when something
catches your eye and is a spiritual boing?
The Humility of God.
I can't tell you how much I was
arrested by that title.
I knew that God expected for men to
know humility, but that God himself was humble
was a mind-boggling concept.
And that was the beginning of the opening
of a new train of thought and understanding
which now so possesses me that I can
stand before you today without preparation and our
only problem will be just to watch the
clock when the Lord will just have to
put the scissors in just that much of
the row or it will go on and
on and on.
Dear children, humility is the way of God.
And you're looking at a Brooklyn specimen who
walked in exactly the opposite spirit for 35
years.
He was Mr. Arrogance.
And there's even a Jewish word for it,
chutzpah.
And we pride ourselves in it and give
our little darling smart little slaps on the
backside and say, son of a gun, chip
off the old block.
His first day in school and he told
the teacher, what for?
The world admires the very qualities that God
abhors.
In case you've never noted it, it says
in Luke, the 14th chapter, that which is
esteemed of men is abomination in the sight
of God.
There's a precious little book which I'll commend
to you by Andrew Murray called Humility, the
Beauty of Holiness.
And I hope that we'll have sufficient time
this morning for me to quote a few
things from it.
Maybe I'll start with one quotation.
Jesus came to bring humility to earth, to
make us partakers of it, and by it
to save us.
How do you like them apples?
How many of us have ever thought that
salvation was to be brought out of the
kingdom of arrogance and entered into the kingdom
of humility?
That that is salvation.
And that it was brought from heaven to
earth.
Do you know that?
I'll tell you why it had to be.
Because there's not a cotton-picking man on
the face of the earth who could ever
have invented it.
It is just inimical to human nature.
It's opposed.
There's not an atom in our nature or
makeup that could ever have conceived what humility
is.
So the very trip when I threw those
haphazard things into the suitcase, and P.S.
there's nothing haphazard in the kingdom.
Did you know that?
Wouldn't you believe it that I had opportunity
to visit again the sisters of Mary of
Darmstadt?
How many people know that work?
Raise your hand.
Oh my.
Overwhelming ignorance.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha.
Children.
Hey, we're just going to have to file
a petition for a two-hour Sunday morning
session.
This is just too great.
Your need is too great.
But you've not heard of Vasily Ishchenko?
One of God's greatest end-time oracles, and
this work in Germany, which, by the way,
we're going to visit on our tour to
Israel on the way back.
Israel and Germany.
I can't tell you how pure and holy
a work it is, and you come onto
exalted ground when you put your foot there.
And it began out of the rubble and
devastation of World War II when the city
of Darmstadt was leveled in 20 minutes, and
tens of thousands lost their lives.
And out of that rubble and smoke and
ruin came a bunch of charred women who
recognized in one fell swoop that antiseptic and
anemic Lutheranism somehow was insufficient for the age.
May I say that I hope it will
not take that to persuade you that Presbyterianism
in and of itself is not the answer
for the age either, or any other ism
but the way of God and the knowledge
of Him in spirit and in truth.
But out of the repentance of that ruin,
and this, by the way, is what I
believe God is bringing upon the earth, His
judgments are not the expression of some malicious
God who loves to pound men to pieces,
but who recognizes that their pride and their
stubbornness and their arrogance will not permit of
any understanding except that they first come to
a place of brokenness through actual conditions.
If this were not so, I wouldn't be
standing here.
I would still continue to be Mr. Arrogant.
But it was out of brokenness and the
devastation and the rubble and ruin of my
own life that I heard for the first
time a still small voice, which I had
until my 34th year, scorned.
Are you willing to see your little empires
come down and your securities devastated and the
foundational things which you have counted so sure,
air, water, terra firma under your feet, heat,
fuel, the most elemental aspects of life jeopardized?
That's the love of God to shake the
earth in the last days that all things
that can be shaken might be shaken, that
we might come to the knowledge of Him.
And I'll tell you in the same breath
we're dying for the absence of that knowledge.
We may have a lot of religious cleverness
and know how to quote a scripture or
two or present prepared faces on Sunday, but
that's not going to save us.
Only the way of humility is going to
save us.
And you know what the heck of it
is?
You can't learn it.
Praise God for His genius because He knows
how Jewish we are and we'd love to
learn it.
Hey, how do you become humble?
You mean if I read Andrew Murray I'll
get it?
No.
See, this is what the Jews are all
about.
Great Talmudic scholars burying their heads in books
and stroking their whiskers and memorizing and imbibing
the wisdom of the sages of times past
and living in unspeakable ignorance and darkness about
a God whom they profess to know because
the deep and the hidden things of God
are revealed by His Spirit and cannot be
digged out by human cunning or effort.
When God smells sweat, He runs the other
way.
Jesus came to bring humility back to earth
to make us partakers of it and buy
it to save us.
Remember how He brought it down to earth?
Unto us a child is born and unto
us a son is given.
And if you've forgotten the humiliation of infancy,
can I remind you?
Remember all that stuff you made in your
diapers?
Remember you had no control over your bowels?
Remember you had to be changed several times
a day?
Remember that you were continually bawling and utterly
dependent upon those in whose arms you were
placed for everything?
How'd you like to do it today?
You're so proud of yourself and so sufficient
so able to rule over every situation and
that's the very antithesis of God's Spirit.
The essential characteristic of God's children is humility
and that's why He's been as silent as
He is.
He's just that courtly, He's just that gentlemanly.
He doesn't shout.
His voice is not heard in the streets.
A broken reed will not break and a
smoking flax will not extinguish.
But we're loudmouths, we've got clever things to
say.
We pound the tables, we make demands, we're
full of striving and exertions.
Even as Christians, the only way to have
humility is to have Him.
It's got to come down from heaven as
it came down in the first and it's
got to be received in the same spirit
in which it's sent or you can't have
it.
And that's why God says to this man,
I will look.
He who is of a broken and contrite
spirit who trembles at my word.
This is a closed book until we meet
this requirement of God.
Not because He arbitrarily sets such requirements but
because He knows that it's patently impossible to
receive anything spiritually so long as you're walking
in the spirit of arrogance.
To be humble is to be open, to
be yielded, to be supple, to be available
for the things that God speaks.
So I went to Germany in the same
period of time when the Lord put that
thing in my suitcase and it was around
the Christmas season.
And I'll tell you if there's anything icky
to a Jew is those Christmas displays.
Yuck.
The whole thing ought to be shoved into
the dustbin.
The whole pagan claptrap, the whole celebration, the
whole buying and spending and having and getting.
Why, even the Japanese celebrate it and do
a better job of it than we.
It's an orgy of parties and boxes and
tinsel that you want to gag.
But they had a little display that strangely
attracted me.
Under a tree, some talented sister of their
fellowship had put a terracotta figurine of the
infant Jesus.
And I'll tell you that I couldn't take
my eyes from it.
And I'm not a sentimental type as some
here know.
There was something so compelling about that infant
it looked absolutely cherubic.
And its little hands were extended up to
heaven in complete helplessness.
And I looked closely at its face.
I can't describe the face.
It was an expression of such repose, such
trust, such utter rest, such innate joy.
And then I began to reflect that God
not only lay aside his deity to take
upon himself the form of a man, and
that's humiliating.
And God has found wonderful ways to remind
me of it continually.
I remember once after a powerful message, deeply
anointed of God, where the walls were shaking
when it was over.
People sat stunned in their seats.
They had heard out of the mouth of
God.
And some kid with great saucer eyes came
to me and said, How do you keep
humble when God uses you like that?
And the moment that he asked that question,
I was suffering from a condition that is
remedied by appointment H, is it?
Are you allowed to say that?
Can you discuss this in Sunday school?
And I looked at him in a kind
of patronizing way.
I said, Dear boy, God has ways.
To be reminded of your humanity is to
be reminded of humility.
It's humbling to be a man.
And God could have found any number of
ways in his genius to have solved the
problems of elimination than the way that he
decided to do it.
So no matter how great we are, we
have the same requirement as the lowest bum.
It's humbling.
I think one of the things that saved
me as a teacher of American history was
always to visualize the great giants of history
in their DVDs.
But I'm not just making little clips this
morning.
Here's my point.
If it's humbling for man to be man,
how much more for God?
And not only a man, but a man
to be rejected.
A man to be despised.
A man to hear from his own people,
whom he called to be a nation of
priests and a light unto the world, that
he was the azelbub, and that they identified
him with Satan, and that they plucked his
beard and smote him, painfully rejected him and
taunted him even in his death.
That's humiliation, children.
And on that same trip, not only to
see this terracotta figure of Jesus the infant
and to be reminded of these things, but
to be brought again to Colmar, France, Alsace
-Lorraine, and go to that museum that I
visited 13 years ago as a Jewish atheist
at the recommendation of a German artist to
see one painting, The Crucifixion of Jesus, of
all of the sloppy sentimentality that has been
heaped on the themes that pertain to Jesus,
all of those pictures that have been totally
unconvincing from which we Jews have turned with
contempt, of the Jesus of the receding chin
and the milky blue eyes and every little
blond wispy hair in place, utterly unrecognizable as
a Jew, let alone as suffering servant, to
stand transfixed before that painting and to see
the most horrible depiction of suffering humanity that
the Holy Spirit has ever driven a man
to paint.
It's the ugliest picture that I have ever
seen.
And you have to time yourself how long
you can endure to gaze upon it.
You never saw a more gnarled figure with
grotesque fingers and the paroxysms of death stretched
up to heaven than the hands of Jesus
with the spikes through.
White lips, and all of the evidence of
suffering written right in his face, and the
figure so brutally distorted and grotesquely extended you
wonder if you're looking at a man.
It looks almost like an animal.
All the more because the figures around him,
of his mother and John and others, are
just painted in beautiful symmetry and proportion, but
his figure is obscene.
And as I stood watching that painting, 13
years after I had seen it as an
atheist, certain thoughts came to mind which probably
could not have occurred on the first seeing.
I noticed that the convention that Renaissance artists
had adopted of always putting a loincloth on
Jesus, of course this one was tattered, and
it was bespotted with blood, but nevertheless he
was afforded the most elementary dignity of covering
his private parts even in death.
But you know as I stood there that
day, although the scriptures say nothing about it,
there's no word that his enemies afforded him
that grace, I thought to myself, maybe this
is just a convention of artists.
Because our thoughts are not his thoughts.
And we always fall short of the truths
of God.
We always impose our human understanding.
We've never understood the things of God.
Or we would have gasped long ago and
smitten ourselves and struck our breasts as Jews
do and cried out, Oy vey, woe is
me, I'm undone.
There's not enough cry of anguish, of understanding,
of seeing things as God sees them because
we're not spiritual beings.
Everything is tainted and tainted and touched by
our own human understanding, even religiously speaking.
Or there'd be far more cries than the
earth.
Or we would know how to pray as
we ought.
Or there'd be deep gas and sucking for
air.
But you know I just want to suggest
that it may be that Jesus left the
world as he came into it utterly naked.
What do you think of that, folks?
From the beginning when God brought humility down
to earth and from the end when he
raised it up again, it went and it
left naked in utter humiliation.
And that is the way of God.
I want to read to you the one
portion of scripture which the Lord has quickened
to me.
I may read it in all the Gospels.
It's called the triumphal entry of Jesus.
How many people know what that triumph is?
It's when Jesus came four days before his
death into Jerusalem riding on the back of
the colt of an ass.
Just to show you how far our understanding
is from God.
The words that God signifies triumphal entry.
The passion of Christ.
His glorification has eminently to do with humiliation
and suffering.
But when we think of passion, we can
wipe the slobber off our chins because we're
thinking of some orgiastic revelry that has to
do with deep gratification of self.
When we think of glorification, it's getting a
raise or some acknowledgement from our profession, from
the world, some human exaltation.
When we think of triumph, it's when our
ship has come in.
But when God thinks of it, it's a
man despised of his people astride the back
of the colt of an ass.
Not even a full-grown animal.
Some weak animal, some newly born thing with
spindly legs, feet of tottering under the weight
of this burden.
Entering into Jerusalem.
Can you ever imagine a more ungainly picture
of a man whose legs are astride that
animal almost touching the ground?
You don't know whether to laugh, or to
cover your mouth, or to cry.
That's how the king entered Jerusalem, children.
And I'll tell you what, we're not going
to enter Jerusalem in any other way at
the end of the age.
There's a city to be taken.
There's a messianic ministry and mission to be
fulfilled.
But it's not going to be done, except
it's conducted in the name of the Lord.
Which is to say, in the same character,
and the same spirit, and the same humility.
And it came to pass when he was
come near to Bethpage and Bethany at the
mount called the Mount of Olives, he sent
two of his disciples saying, Go into the
village opposite you, in which at your entering
you shall find a colt tied, on which
yet never man sat.
Loose him and bring him here.
And if any man ask you, Why do
you loose him?
Thus shall you say unto him, Because the
Lord hath need of him.
And they that were sent went their way
and found even as he had said unto
them.
And as they were loosing the colt, its
owner said unto them, Why loose ye the
colt?
And they said, The Lord hath need of
him.
And they brought him to Jesus, and they
cast their garments upon the colt, and they
sat Jesus upon it.
And as he went, they spread their clothes
in the way.
And when he was come near, even at
the descent of the Mount of Olives, the
whole multitude of the disciples began to rejoice,
and praised God with a loud voice for
all the mighty works that they had seen,
saying, Blessed be the King who cometh in
the name of the Lord, peace in heaven
and glory in the highest.
Blessed be the King who cometh in the
name of the Lord.
May I say this?
If the King was required to come in
the name of the Lord, and I don't
believe that that's some patsy formula in the
name of Jesus, that as if we recited,
we have found it.
A name always betokens a character.
If the King had to come in the
character of God in his entry into Jerusalem,
shall we come in any lesser way?
I'll never forget the first time I heard
that message preached from a platform of a
Pentecostal church.
Two men were in that kind of a
tandem ministry playing music, singing, and speaking, and
while the one guy was proclaiming how they
cut down branches and threw them in the
way, and others lay their cloaks on the
path, this guy was adjusting his cuffs and
his cufflinks and fixing his sartorial appearance.
And I thought to myself, I'd like to
see him lay his cufflinks and his fancy
shirt in the way of that ass, or
strew it over the back.
Maybe we have three categories of Christians.
Those who would do it and take the
thing most dear, even if it would leave
them naked, for the honor that that beast
upon which the King sits will ride over
it.
And those who can't quite bring themselves to
that measure of sacrifice, but recognizing still the
exalted moment and wanting some way to participate,
will cut off branches and strew them in
the way.
And others will be totally indifferent to the
thing altogether and not understand the glory of
what God is above.
Children, there are kingdoms in collision.
Do you know that?
There are kingdoms in conflict.
If the issue was not Judaism versus Christianity,
that's kid stuff.
The issue is this.
The kingdom of this present world, based on
power, greed, human ambition, human skullduggery, striving, effort,
manipulation, versus the kingdom of God.
And the very spirit and heart of it
is the way of humility.
The King coming, riding on the back of
the colt of an ass.
It says, The multitudes that went before and
that followed cried, saying, Hosanna to the Son
of David.
Blessed is he that cometh in the name
of the Lord.
Hosanna in the highest.
A certain man who visited Kansas City some
weeks ago, whom I consider also to be
an orator, said about the importance of the
Jewish people believing on Jesus, that it is
the final and last and most significant peace
to be concluded in God's holy purposes.
That until the Jewish people as a people
and as a nation will say, Blessed is
he who comes in the name of the
Lord, our salvation is still nigh.
How many of us in this room or
in Christendom altogether are waiting on the second
coming of the Lord?
When, for God's sake, are we going to
start getting honest, which has also got to
do with the kingdom, and say that we're
not in any particular rush?
I mean, it's pretty groovy, and who wants
to terminate our stay?
We've just got that new hi-fi and
things are relatively comfortable, and yet we speak
all of the unctuous clichés about the coming
of the Lord, as if we were some
bitterly oppressed minority besieged and facing the most
horrendous conditions, and looking to the skies from
whence our salvation cometh.
Baroony!
But I'll tell you this, if you'll hang
in there, the hour shall soon come when,
if you'll not fall away, you'll be such
a one.
It will be a tiny minority that is
besieged and oppressed, looking to the skies from
whence cometh their salvation.
I'll never forget the horrendous response of the
Jewish community to Key 73.
How many of you remember that pitiful little
bleat?
Hardly more than a hiccup.
But it cost millions, because men felt that
they ought to do something evangelistic.
And so millions were extended, and ah, the
most innocuous kind of business that was hardly
more than a beep, that had that so
little effect.
But if you'll listen to the Jewish community,
you would imagine some great monolithic machine crunching
through cities and streets and yanking Jewish children
out of the bosoms of their families.
We Jews have a tendency to overreact.
But don't be deceived.
Nothing that I'm speaking before you is an
overreaction or over-exaggeration.
If anything, I'm being subdued.
I remember a remark a rabbi said.
He was very offended and very upset.
And he saw dangerous political implications in what
seemed to him to be a growing coalition
between conservative political forces and this fundamental Christianity
that talks about a salvation that cometh from
the heavens.
You want to know, children?
At the last day, there's going to be
two classes of people.
And the distinction between them shall not be
measured in terms of whether they're Jewish or
Gentile, but only in this.
One that shall look down toward men who
shall seek their salvation in their IBM machines
and their computers and in the corporate wisdom
of men which shall fail them.
You ever see a computer work when electricity
has failed?
Worthless hunk of junk.
And those, a much smaller number, who shall
be looking to the heavens for their salvation.
Let me ask you a question this morning.
How many of you are already walking in
such a way, habitually looking to the heavens
for your salvation?
How many of you would have dared to
come into this room today with a crick
in your neck and hardly no more than
five minutes preparation to believe that God will
not abandon you, but in your futility and
helplessness and humiliation if you should fail?
And who wants to face that?
That the same God will succor you and
speak out of your mouth necessary wisdom.
Would you believe that?
And if he chooses not to, are you
willing to suffer the humiliation that would necessarily
follow?
Oh, children, I can tell you I've experienced
glories of God.
I told you last week I'm a glory
monger.
My Jewish heart will not consider anything less.
And that's why I'm not running off to
start some little cutesy thing to the Jewish
people in Kansas City, though I could probably
do it as well as anyone now going.
I'm waiting for that thing which cometh down
from heaven.
I'm waiting for that thing which is perfect,
which has its origin only in him and
comes perfectly in his time.
It has nothing to do with anything haphazard
or chance.
That's not some kind of appeasement or placating
or that has something to do with giving
us some opportunity to do something that we
might feel that somehow we're requiting God for
his goodness.
Nothing tinged with flesh.
Nothing tinged with human ambition.
No building of religious kingdoms.
But I'll tell you that if you're going
to wait for the glory of God and
that's a crown, you need first to wear
another.
It's made up of thorns and it's painful
and sometimes leaves you bleeding and it's called
humiliation.
And I have tasted both and that's why
I'm equipped to speak to you about kingdoms
in collision.
I know both intimately well.
And I can tell you about the times
when I've seen the glories of God.
So devastating, so awesome.
Such fullness, such a presence.
Your scalp tingles with the presence of God.
Coming to Harvard University on a Friday, your
fast day, weak, beggarly, bereft of anything to
say.
Hardly able to remember your name, completely washed
out.
Hoping against hope that it'll be the smallest
possible audience that you'll escape with a minimum
of embarrassment and humiliation.
Only to find when you enter the room
that it's jam-packed with a carnival crowd
of Coliseum-spirited students who have come for
the sport to jeer and to make fun
and to wreak havoc with this Jewish freak
who believes in Jesus.
And when you see their faces, the glint
in their eyes, you despair.
I remember taking off my corduroy jacket, crumpled
as I was and throwing it on a
table and looking out and taking that kind
of breath that a man takes when he's
faced a firing squad and saying something like
this.
I had hoped to prepare something clever for
you knowing your reputation.
But my condition is such tonight that you're
going to see only one of two things.
Utter human fiasco or the glory of God.
May I ask you a question before I
go on?
How would you like to predicate your life
entirely only on these two radical options?
You've been doing a good job.
You're so Jewish.
Living by your own wit and your own
abilities and getting by handsomely.
But we have all sinned and fallen short
of the glory of God.
And until the Jewish people see that glory,
they're not going to cry out Hosanna in
the highest.
Blessed is he who comes in the name
of the Lord because they've not seen anyone
coming in the name of the Lord.
They've only seen religious practitioners like themselves with
just another vocabulary, less comely and less appetizing
and less to be understood than their own.
Getting by just will not do it.
Only the glory of God will.
And so with that I opened my mouth
expecting the worst and guess what happened?
Out of my abject emptiness, out of my
total nothingness, I heard a dissertation from God
come forth with such power, so acute, that
I watched men absolutely riveted to their seats.
I saw men so stunned that their jaws
were agape.
I heard a statement about the human condition
that was so airtight that there was not
a place for a man to hide.
And for the first time in my university
speaking experience, which began, by the way, at
the University of Kansas eight years ago, when
I went in the same faith and the
same hope, not a single student had a
question to raise after that statement.
There wasn't one wise guy who had a
quip to make, one wise alecky comment, or
one sardonic question.
They were stunned and they were speechless.
And I myself didn't know what to do
in such a condition.
So I said, Jesus said that his sheep
would hear his voice.
And I'm going to invite as many of
you who came here tonight to jeer and
to make sport, to bow your heads and
follow me in a prayer for salvation if
you've heard his voice through my Brooklyn accent.
And I bowed my head and I began
to pray, a sinner's prayer.
And I thought, well, there would be maybe
two, three, four, five out of those hundreds
who have heard his voice and would pray.
But I heard such a crescendo of voices
that it must have been hundreds.
And when I finished praying and lifted up
my head and my eye just spanned the
room, I could see the evidences of salvation.
When the Spirit of God has just been
born, when that infant thing has come into
the heart of one who is contrite and
broken and humbled.
Gasps and sputterings and men still with their
hands over their mouths or stricken looks in
their faces or the tittering or the giggling
that sometimes take place with the impartation of
the Spirit of life.
Hey guys, salvation isn't just some airy, phantasmal
phrase.
It's something absolutely real.
It's the entering of a new kingdom by
a new spirit.
When you're willing to let go the spirit
of arrogance and the spirit of the world
and the spirit of striving and be utterly
naked to receive from heaven the spirit of
humility which is salvation.
And from that time forth, cast all your
cares upon him.
You can't do it as a proud man,
but pride has no place in the kingdom.
I don't know how many were saved in
that meeting.
Stunned and speechless as they sensed a new
presence in their lives.
And I didn't know how to go on.
I just said, well, let's praise the God
who has saved us.
And would you believe it that the guys
who came to give me this were giving
God this?
And that the glory filled the room as
the praises went up to heaven?
I can't tell you how thick was the
presence of God and the Christian kids like
stunned in front of the speaking stand like
they hadn't bargained on this.
They thought they were going to hear some
clever human presentation, some witty kind of, I
don't know, Jews for Jesus type thing, but
they got the glory of God.
One woman came up to me with a
copy of my book wanting me to autograph
it and saying, Mr. Katz, will you bless
me?
And I felt like some ancient Hebrew patriarch.
I said, what kind of blessing do you
want?
She said, she wanted the blessing of the
Holy Spirit.
How many of you want that?
You want to be more deeply enrolled in
the humilities of God?
Ask for that blessing.
Someone once said, what is the evidence of
the baptism of the Holy Spirit?
And a person wisely answered, trouble.
Those that are laughing know that it's true.
So I said, will you believe God that
as I lay my hand on your forehead
that you'll receive what you ask even as
we pray?
After that night she could believe anything.
And the moment I touched her I had
hardly begun praying.
These 15 students lined up in front of
the speaking stand.
Among them stunned Jewish intellectuals.
This woman broke forth in a scream of
speaking in other tongues that absolutely pulverized them.
There was no question of the utter supernaturalness
of what came forth out of her mouth
right on the spot.
That's the glory of God, children.
So I've tasted of the glories if you're
willing to come spent, wasted, without human inspiration
and self-humiliation that will follow.
But I want to tell you this.
That the way of the kingdom is no
guarantee that you're going to always taste the
glory.
More likely it's the crown of thorns before
the crown of glory.
And if you're unwilling to wear the one
neither shall you have the other.
And what we have chosen for ourselves is
a little course of Christian respectability that is
neither abject shame and humiliation nor glory.
And the world has suffered for our compromise.
We are not a salt unto the earth.
We're just another religious institution that has already
choked the earth with dross.
We've accepted cowardly compromise unwilling to suffer humiliation
and therefore we have not made manifest the
glory.
But just to balance it out and just
to show you that both are part of
this life and this kingdom I came again
to another university this time in New York
85% Jewish.
It was the first gospel outreach in the
history of that school City College of New
York.
And it's a deep bastion of Jewish orthodoxy
and intellectualism.
And if you've had any contact with Jews
of that kind they are terrifying.
They have also an anointing of their own.
It's the spirit of arrogance and human contentiousness
and striving which so blinded the Jews of
Jesus' own generation that they could never conceive
that that one who came into Jerusalem on
the back of an ass was indeed the
king.
Now I tell you children that there's no
difference between the kingdom and the king.
The kingdom is only the king writ large.
God had called us to that meeting.
We were there months before speaking to a
small Christian group of students and the spirit
of God fell.
We were broken.
We were weeping.
God showed us that we would have this
outreach.
This wasn't something that was born in the
minds of men.
I would never have dreamed to undertake it
if it were.
Months of prayer.
Months of fasting.
Months of preparation.
Months of investment of energy and money and
all kinds of things for this.
We had grandiose visions of what God was
going to do there that day.
How the fire of God was going to
fall.
How Jewish kids were going to fall on
their faces and cry out to God for
mercy and call on the name of the
Lord.
For there is no other name given under
heaven or on earth whereby a man may
be saved.
Whosoever shall call on the name of the
Lord shall be saved.
And I'll tell you when I tried it
12 years ago I choked and I sputtered.
It took heroic effort to come out of
that proud throat out of which had come
such invective such revolutionary slogans such seductive phrases
to call on the name which had been
poisoned and polluted for Jewish consideration.
It took something to call on that name.
But we expected it that day when they
saw the glory of God.
If God could do it at Harvard what
could he not do at City College?
85% of his kinsmen there.
And so I was up the night before
at Boston University.
We had a wonderful meeting and I was
up until 4 o'clock in the morning
talking with the Jewish brother who had arranged
that he had not yet come into the
baptism of the Holy Spirit and persuading him
about what was available in the kingdom.
Not taking any thought that I needed rest
because I know that his strength was made
perfect in my weakness.
He's demonstrated it again and again.
It's not me who is going to confront
those Jewish people the next day.
It's the Lord himself.
Do you believe that?
I mean not do you believe it here
sitting in Second Presbyterian Church.
Will you believe it at City College?
The judge shall live by faith.
Not just talk about it.
And faith is on the firing line.
And if it's a matter of life or
death it's not a matter of faith.
That's why we're so weak and flabby.
Because we've not allowed God to put us
in such places of extremity.
I remember being picked up at the airport
and driven to that meeting.
If I was a mess at Harvard you
should have seen me that day talk about
crumpled and out of it.
And I came into the room and the
meeting had already started.
It was jammed to the rafters.
There was a spirit in that room of
such antagonism and bitterness you could cut it
with a knife.
The place was alive with electric and hate
and bitterness.
And I've been called by Jews worse than
Hitler.
Who only sought to destroy their bodies and
I'm seeking to destroy their souls.
And I'm a Jewish missionary and all of
the other filthy epithets and the things that
have to do with their understanding.
And there's no way to explain.
Many times you just only have to stand
there and receive their hatred and their bitterness
to compound it for 2,000 years.
The Spanish Inquisition and the pogroms and forced
conversions and exiles and baby skulls smashed on
the Easter and Passover season.
And there's no way to explain that you
have nothing to do with that but that
you represent the kingdom.
If it's taking me five weeks to explain
to you how am I going to explain
to them when they don't even give me
a word edgewise.
But God.
Right?
So I came and I stood and I
opened my mouth and I spoke about the
holiness of God.
And from the moment I opened my mouth
I knew I was finished.
I never heard anything more lame more pathetic
more anemic.
It was just a dribble.
It fell out of my lips and fell
to the ground clunk and it lay there.
It was uninspired.
It was unanointed.
God simply was not in it.
And as I was speaking I knew it.
I didn't know why.
I searched my soul.
Was there a hidden sin in my life?
Had I failed to pray or to fast?
Had I done this or that?
Why wasn't the Lord with me?
Didn't the Lord know this was D-Day?
Why was he absent and so far from
my calling?
Looking at those faces with the Van Dyke's
beards and the venom and the hatred pouring
out of their eyes shifting in their seats
wholly indifferent to the weak and anemic words
coming out of my mouth waiting for their
opportunity to clobber me.
And it came soon enough when in my
customary way I opened for questions and answers.
Mamma Mia.
The first one to stand up was the
rabbi of the Hillel group.
Polished, urbane, multilingual deeply educated.
He made me to look like the most
inane jackass like some dolt who doesn't speak
Hebrew which I don't who came with a
King James Bible which I did.
Offending the sensibilities of these intellectual Jews with
old wise tales that go back to antiquity.
What an offense.
And he tore me up one side and
down the other.
I'll tell you that the mafia couldn't have
done a better job.
And when he finished and every word was
like a knife and he stalked out of
that room his heels clicked on that floor
the room shook and he slammed the door
we were stunned by the attack.
That was only the beginning.
Then another Jew got up to pick up
where he left off.
One more clever than the next.
And another and another and another and I
could not answer them a word.
How come aren't you clever also?
Hey, don't you have answers?
You've been around for a while?
I could not answer them a word.
Remember what I told you about Watchman Me
how he went to correct a brother and
he had the mandate to do it in
the scriptures and he came to his door
and he raised his arm to knock and
that's as far as it got.
The life of God was not in his
knocking.
How much of your activity is by the
life of God?
And if God were to remove his life
how much of it would continue?
How much of Christendom would continue?
How much of our activity in our Sunday
folder rolls and our campaigns and our evangelism
would continue if God were absent?
You know what I think?
A great deal.
Because it was begun without his participation and
it goes on by human and animal energies
and it continues without him.
I think for 95% of it he
never had part.
How would you like to live a life
like his life that you might say with
Paul for me to live as Christ?
And if his life is not in a
particular moment it could be very embarrassing.
You're not clever.
You have nothing to say because God has
nothing to say.
You're not witty because God is not witty.
You have no wisdom because he's not supplying
it.
You're just with your face sticking out.
Suffering the humiliation and not being able to
give an explanation.
You want to live that kind of life?
That's the kingdom children and few there be
that have any stomach for it.
But Judaism is their love by whatever name
because it leaves your pride intact.
And just go to any synagogue and see
the flattery that is poured out on men
and see the pews with the inscriptions and
the brass plates of the donations.
The whole filthy system is predicated on human
pride and flattery.
It can't understand the king riding on the
back of an ass.
Well if you think that I described the
worst of my humiliation I haven't come to
it yet.
You say what?
They tore you to pieces?
They left you bleeding and raw?
You were crucified by the mouths of men?
Their words were like knives?
They cut your flesh?
You had not an answer and you suffered
wave after wave of attack before the eyes
of many?
And that was not the height of the
humiliation?
No.
Or the depth of it?
You know what it was?
It wasn't from the enemies.
It was from the friends.
It was from the Christians that the worst
humiliation came.
Not that they said anything.
Maybe that was it.
But their faces spoke volumes.
You know what their faces said?
You blew it, cats.
Hey, fella, we thought that you were some
kind of an anointed messenger.
We thought that God had called you to
university ministry, that you were an encounter specialist.
We heard of what had happened at Harvard.
What's the matter, fella?
Ain't you prayed up?
Got hidden sin in your life?
That's what their faces were saying.
And you know what I had to say?
Nothing.
Because I had no answer.
I didn't understand, and God was not explaining
to me why it pleased him, after what
he had done at Harvard, not to do
also the same at City College.
Are you willing to live with such a
God?
And to walk with him?
And it has nothing to do with your
understanding?
How many of you live continually preempting God
and determining every judgment and every decision and
every act of whether you think and you
approve of what God says?
When it fits your circumstance, do you realize
what you're doing?
You're exalting yourself above the most high.
Yes, the word says so and so, but
in my circumstance and situation where it's not
quite appropriate, then surely there must be some
room for exceptions.
I went home like a wounded dog, and
I sulked for three weeks, licking my wounds,
not understanding.
And I think that the greatest glories of
God are going to come without our understanding.
What does our understanding have to do with
it?
And about three weeks later, I got a
phone call one night from a woman with
a thin little raspy voice.
Mr. Katz, I read your book, and I'm
a Jewish woman, and I got some questions.
Can I come over?
I said, look, lady, I can't answer anybody.
Don't come to me.
I'm blind and I'm nothing.
But if you want to come, all right.
So she came.
She had questions.
You should have seen that woman.
Sunken eyes and the veins and all of
the signs of fatigue and being battered from
pillar to post.
A victim of the world, crunched in a
system of arrogance and pride and left for
dead.
Just a little palpitating heartbeat left, and she
read my book.
There's a thin line of connection that maybe
God might be God.
A compulsive chain smoker blowing her fumes in
my face as she's asking the questions, and
I'm trying pitifully to answer them.
And when she ground the last cigarette into
the filled ashtray two hours later, her last
question was, what must I do to be
saved?
And I told her.
And she bowed her little anemic neck with
the veins sticking out, and she followed me
word for word.
You know, I've seen some brilliant Jews follow
me word for word.
Men with degrees on their walls and all
kinds of human attainment and flashy pinky rings
and all of that stuff.
But when it came time to pray, they
didn't know how, but they were willing to
follow me word for word.
God's kingdom has everything to do with humility,
except you come as a child, you cannot
receive it.
She followed me word for word and passed
from death to life.
I remember putting the coat on her frail
shoulders as I saw her out the door
that night.
I said, by the way, I said, how
is it you came to me?
How is it you got my book?
Oh, she said, didn't I tell you?
I said, no.
She said, my son brought it home from
City College three weeks ago.
He was there at that meeting and he
came home so excited.
He said, a man came to school today.
She said, a Jewish man.
And he stood and he gave his simple
convictions and the moment he finished, he was
mercilessly attacked and he didn't answer his accusers
a word.
His mother said, I had never seen such
a demonstration.
And he insisted that I read the book
and I came today with these questions.
One thin Jewish soul.
Dear children, which kingdom are you in?
From which life are you living?
Do you really celebrate the king who came
in his triumphal entry, a stride, a jackass,
ungainly and jerking and halting, its little legs
buckling under the weight?
I can't think of a more pathetic, almost
obscene scene and God calls that triumph?
And that battered and limp, gangrenous form that
was on the cross depicted in that painting,
that's the glorification of Jesus and his passion?
Listen, something is grievously askew.
Either God is all whacked out of shape
or we are.
Which kingdom are you in?
And how many of you would follow the
king?
That's how you enter and walk in his
humility.
It begins with the bowing of the head
and the giving up of a fright and
saying Lord from this day forth I forsake
the kingdom of this present world.
I forsake the way of arrogance and pride
and striving and even exertion and will of
doing my thing and the awards and flattery
of many and I'm willing to walk in
a way of humiliation and I know that
you're going to take me in my word.
You're going to empty me out.
You're going to leave me limp and for
dead.
The things that are going to take place
in my life that will be inexplicable but
I'm willing to show forth your glory out
of my humiliation that a Jewish people and
a dying people at the end of the
age might say Hosanna in the highest.
Blessed is he who comes in the name
of the Lord.