What we had thought to do was to
have a discussion based around some of the
statements of what I consider to be an
enormously significant book, written by a young man,
I think I made some reference to him
earlier in these days, who went from the
seminary to the establishing of a community in
the inner city in Washington, D.C., to
test the reality of the Gospel, to see
if the kingdom can be a present reality
in the thick of a black ghetto of
hopelessness and despair.
Out of their experience that God has tempered
in them has come this little book and
a magazine which they produce called Sojourners.
You can almost start from the first page
of this little book and read your way
through it.
I've just marked places throughout the book.
But I just feel like leaping in to
a statement that he makes on page 36.
And by the way, I think you ought
to take the title and get yourself a
copy and circulate it around your own fellowships
and chew on it.
You'll not find everything digestible.
He has a kind of social concern that
doesn't seem to be characteristic of many of
us, but he has also an insight into
the reality of the kingdom, the meaning of
the church.
The name of the writer is Jim Wallace,
W-A-L-L-I-S, and the
book is called Agenda for Biblical People, published
by Harper and Row, so it should not
be difficult to obtain.
Jim Wallace, W-A-L-L-I-S,
Agenda for Biblical People, Harper and Row.
I don't think that I'm exaggerating too much
to say that it's almost something like the
Magna Carta of the Body of Christ or
the Communist Manifesto, so to speak, for the
believers of our generation.
I've not read anything more pointed, more challenging,
about the meaning of our faith than what
this young man has expressed.
You know the way God has a manner
of putting something in your hand at the
propitious time.
It seems that just as our hearts were
becoming kindled for the reality of the kingdom,
bang, this book came.
I had just returned from weeks overseas with
one powerful conviction that the gospel of the
kingdom of God needed to be proclaimed in
the church first before it's proclaimed in the
world, that the church does not understand or
know the gospel.
And probably one of the most stunning observations
that came to me through the course of
those weeks, staying in the homes in different
countries of ministers, was the shock to see
that when they made their decisions and their
fundamental choices, they were made on exactly the
same basis by which the world makes theirs,
that there was enormous disparity between what men
preached on Sunday and what was the actual
constitution of their life, that when it came
to the security of their family or their
future or the future of their children, they
made their decisions as any solid middle-class
burgher would make it anywhere.
In a word, they did not make their
decisions on the basis of a kingdom.
It showed that their lives were really effectually
lived in the world and that their Sunday
religion was some kind of an appendage, something
tacked on, a kind of a ceremonial something,
a word game, and not really the platform
or the foundation of their actual lives.
I think that's a description not only of
ministers, but by and large, Christendom, for which
reason we have not had the impact in
the world that God intends.
Here's what he says, The environmental facts of
our life have become more determinative of our
style of life than our identity as Christians.
This problem is most crucial, for in a
situation of widespread social conformity, the lifestyle of
those in the churches becomes evidence for the
view held by many that the gospel does
not transform people's lives, but is a mere
appendage which provides religious sanction and justification to
lives really lived on other grounds.
I have to look at your faces to
see if you're comprehending.
Some of these statements deserve and require second
and third repetitions.
Okay.
The environmental facts of our lives have become
more determinative of our style of life than
our identity as Christians.
I think I'm in a better position to
perceive this, perhaps, than you.
Because you know what I notice in my
travels?
Whether I'm in Yugoslavia or Germany or Denmark
or Holland or England or the States, the
nationality of the believers has more to do
with their lifestyle and character than the fact
that they are Christians.
They are Dutch Christians.
They are German Christians.
They are English Christians.
And the fact that they are Dutch, German,
and English has more to say and more
to do with their effectual lifestyle than the
fact that they are Christians.
For example, the English are very parsimonious.
That means stingy.
You'll come to an English household as a
guest for dinner and they will serve you
the plate.
They will put on the plate the portion
of meat, vegetables, potatoes, and so on and
serve it to you.
That's it.
Very different from our lifestyle, which is more
or less everything is on the table, you
help yourself.
And I notice that when it comes to
offerings and love offerings in response to speakers,
in some churches we got like $30.
And that was a matter of fact.
Their whole style of life is scaled down.
They're very parsimonious, stingy.
Everything is measured by teaspoons because English society
itself is conducted in that manner.
Whereas conversely, in America, we're accustomed to a
much more freewheeling and commodious style of life.
The kind of square footage, for example, that
we think that we need for adequate space
for living is maybe twice that which is
required in England.
In England, if you've got a cubicle in
which you can put a couch and a
chair and have a table in which you
can put your teapot, that's adequate.
Here's my point.
Neither is the parsimoniousness right, nor the largesse
of American life, if the determination has been
the culture in which those things are enacted.
But the question is, what is the culture
of the kingdom of God?
None of us have ever asked the question
or thought that there is an alternative to
being English, German, French, or something else.
And I think that God is wanting to
bring us to a place and to a
situation that wheresoever we travel in the world
and meet others of the same kingdom, there
is an immediate and instant identification that transcends
the culture of our given localities.
If you understand what's being said here, it's
an answer of the deepest kind for the
things that have brought profound division between God's
people because they happen to be black or
white, northern or southern, rural or urban, American
or English.
I believe that what God wants as a
final testimony in the earth is a transcendent
culture that is visible, demonstrative, tangible.
It can be handled.
Remember what John said, the word of life
which we have handled.
He wasn't some ephemeral ghost that you glimpse
from afar.
They handled him.
As we say in Yiddish, he was zaftik.
He was juicy.
He was pulsating.
He was something.
He was phenomenal.
He wasn't just a spiritual entity walking on
eggshells.
He was a total man.
And God is calling us also to a
total and a transcendent kind of culture that
very much is incorporated in the cry, repent
for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.
I hope I'm not going to weary you
by my repetitions, but this has the power,
the burning meaning of that apostolic cry is
so with me that it has ruined me
for Jewish evangelism.
I just can't get excited for Jews for
Jesus and B'nai this or that or
all the other cutesy approaches to Jews that
is affected by the wearing of stars of
David and other kinds of little gitchy goose.
I mean, it's cute.
And maybe you'll win a peripheral Jew so
long as you'll assure him that there's no
risk in the loss of his Jewishness.
I want to assure them that there's every
risk.
Not only of their Jewishness as they've known
it, but of their very life.
That God is calling them to something that
transcends and that the key to it is
to follow him in death and burial and
be raised with him to newness of life,
to ascend up to the throne and to
have the actuality of our being established there.
You guys can think me maniacal if you
want, but I am absolutely persuaded that Paul
was serious when he said that he had
a citizenship in heaven.
You know, Paul is something else again.
When you read Paul, when you get the
sense of his personality, you don't get any
sense of a rabbinical man.
Somehow, however deeply ensconced he was one time
in that Judaic culture, and he was, however
great his future in it might have been,
he was so profoundly converted that the apostolic
giant that comes forth out of the pages
of the New Testament is not in any
way characteristically Jewish as we have ever understood
that word.
He's a new kind of entity altogether.
He's larger than life.
And therefore we see a man who can
enter the synagogues and dispute with the Jews
and is equally comfortable and at home on
Mars Hill with the Greeks.
There's nothing for which he was out of
place because he was the citizen of another
kingdom.
This problem is most crucial for in a
situation of widespread social conformity.
The lifestyle of those in the churches becomes
evidence for the view held by many that
the gospel does not transform people's lives but
is a mere appendage, something tacked on, which
provides religious sanction and justification for lives really
lived on other grounds.
When Paul was at Athens, it says that
his spirit winced as he saw the city
wholly given to idolatry.
Therefore disputed he in the synagogues with the
Jews and in the marketplace with the devout
persons who came unto him.
What are devout persons doing in the marketplace?
And why is a man who has been
cut by idolatry dispute with Jews in the
synagogues?
Because it is a statement of a whole
world and a system ruled over by a
prince of darkness which is in utter opposition
to another kingdom.
And if you want to come to the
crossroads of that system, you'll find it in
the marketplace and in the synagogues of the
Jews.
You'll find it in the universities and in
the places of culture and refinement.
Not only in the synagogues of the Jews,
as I said the other day at the
university, but the synagogues of the Gentiles.
One and the same.
I'll tell you that the Jewish ministers and
the Presbyterian ministers and Methodist ministers and all
of the others of that ilk are virtually
interchangeable.
You can swap them and their congregations would
not even look up and note the difference.
They're all equally as antiseptic.
They're all equally as removed from God.
They're all equally religious functionaries providing a minimal
service for people who want religious cop-out.
And we have not impressed the world that
the church is anything else but that.
That's the point he's making here.
We're a mere appendage.
Something packed on.
A Sunday afterthought.
But our lives are really lived not on
gospel grounds, but on other grounds.
Let me just give you a contrast out
of the book of Acts in the fourth
chapter, 29th verse.
Here's a band of believers whose life is
so lived on other grounds that they are
incompatible with the world about them, with the
Jewish society out of which they were converted.
Remember what Peter said on the day of
Pentecost?
Repent, how do they say it, and save
yourself from this untoward and perverse generation.
How many of us have the powerful conviction
that this generation is untoward and perverse?
In fact, one of the first things that
God is doing with us is cleansing us
from our own perversities.
He's going to have a holy people, sinless
and unblameable.
The fact that we have not been alarmed
by the world shows that we ourselves have
been too accommodated to it.
Unlike Paul, our spirits have not winced because
we've been watching the box too much and
endorsing its values too much.
This apostolic band was something else.
They experienced almost an immediate persecution.
And I think that persecution, there's a phrase
in Latin, the sinquanon, how do you say
it?
It is the essential necessity, a requisite of
true faith.
I don't think that persecution is an accidental
happenstance or it's reserved for those behind the
Iron Curtain.
The moment that Paul and Silas cast out
the demon spirit in one who made her
masters much gain, in that same moment they
were brought into the marketplace before the magistrates
and the rulers and were publicly disrobed and
beaten.
And it says the whole mob rose up
together against them.
Dear children, if I can just deposit one
conviction in your souls this morning, you know
what it would be?
That there are two kingdoms in absolute and
uncompromising collision.
We need to sense that and to realize
that.
Although the conflict is often masked and subdued,
that we don't see it in its true
proportions, though it is always in opposition and
collision.
And at the very end of the age,
that mask is coming off and the sparks
are going to be struck and it's going
to be teeth again gnashed upon believers and
great vexation and distress and anger and bitterness
when the gospel shall become the controversy that
it indeed is and ought to be before
all men.
And that's a mamby-pamby little kind of
thing that is a polite appendage to our
culture and takes the rough edges off and
gives us a little polite Sunday experience to
which all our children should be brought for
Sunday school.
If Satan can't destroy something by actual opposition,
he'll destroy it by widespread acceptance.
Circumcision is a profound act of cutting that
is mortifying, humiliating, and draws blood and was
the seal of a radical covenant with God.
And today, the whole world accepts it as
mere hygiene.
If you can't beat him, join him.
Well, he was a persecuted band who could
not be joined because no man dared join
himself to them.
And the awe of God was so great
upon the church.
It wasn't a little Sunday club thing that
you might consider filing your membership or that
you entered by accepting Jesus.
You entered it by dying to everything.
To enter this was to sign your death
warrant.
You were finished.
And for what reason then should you clutch
your possessions, your homes?
You had cast your lot with the people
of God to suffer what they will suffer
in anticipation of the hope and the glory
of his coming.
By the way, may I ask this?
How many of God's people today are living
in anticipation of the hope?
Isn't it strange to consider that those that
were 2,000 years farther removed from the
hope lived in its expectation and those of
us who are 2,000 years closer and
even mild the platitude, that's what it's become,
of the coming of the Lord, the soon
coming of the Lord.
He's coming soon.
It's become a platitude.
Are not actually living in the hope.
You say, how do you know that?
Well, if we were, we would be palpitating
less over our clothing, over our summer vacations,
over our security, over our orange juice, over
whatever it is that occupies our lives.
We'd be living in the hope.
And that's another kind of living.
I hope you're not getting the impression that
you're being bawled out this morning.
See how much nicer we were eating bagels
at the same time.
Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.
Acts 4.29, And now, Lord, behold their
threatenings and grant unto thy servants that with
all boldness they may speak thy word by
stretching forth thine hand to heal and that
signs and wonders may be done by the
name of thy holy child Jesus.
And when they had prayed, the place was
shaken where they were assembled together.
I just challenge you to study the word
together.
From the first verses of the book of
Acts and right through, just study the word
together.
And I want to say this just to
help you in that study.
It doesn't mean what we think it means
in colloquial present-day English usage.
Together is more than physical proximity.
Together, in the biblical sense, is a profound
state of being so unparalleled in the experience
of near-earthlings that it cannot be known.
And it's a condition that can only be
affected by the very power and life of
God and by the Spirit.
That's why the room was shaken.
They had come into a profound new condition
of being which is called together.
First thing that God has got us to
do with us is to get us together.
Get it together, cats.
Get your whole life reconciled.
Become the full-aught man, mind, body, soul,
and spirit flowing together by the Spirit of
life.
End your own disharmonies and your own internal
warfares and your own conflicts where flesh and
spirit are in contention.
Get together.
Then you get together with those whom God
has joined you, being knit by the Spirit.
And as you've heard last night, I think
as much was said that was intimated and
left between the lines as was actually spoken.
I enjoyed last night enormously.
Wood to God that it could have gone
on for hours and hours and there was
that much to say.
And everyone that got up to speak, I
thought to myself, wow, if people only knew
the whole story.
And our experience is yet relatively brief.
The whole history of the community is three
to four years old and as you heard
from someone, they've been on here a year,
two years, three years.
But the depths of God's dealings, what it
has taken.
And who's to say that we've arrived?
We're not yet together in the sense that
our presence will cause the room to be
shaken.
But we're moving that way.
And I can tell you it takes something
to bring people to the place where they
are together.
And that something is the cross of Christ
Jesus.
That something is pain.
That something is suffering.
That something is disappointment and the deepest kind
of disillusionment.
How I have disillusioned people myself.
You know what the worst disillusionment is?
Yourself with yourself.
Seeing things you would never have glimpsed if
you had not been thrown on a daily
basis into the most intense experience of life
with other souls.
That's why the kingdom cannot be affected on
Sunday.
I just want to make a flat pronouncement.
If you have an intention for the kingdom
of God, you might as well forget it
if you think that it's going to be
established by mere Sunday fellowship.
They went from house to house daily breaking
bread.
I can just say, and being broken.
I tell you it's the episodes over the
orange juice and the little mundane trivialities that
are really the sand and the grit of
God that is used to make us into
a people that can be together.
What you did not hear last night seeing
our beaming faces were the crises to which
God had brought us when we were not
beaming.
When our chins were scraping the ground.
When we were so utterly discouraged and downcast
and depressed that we couldn't even go on.
And that if there was any way out
we would have taken it.
But where shall we go?
He had the words of life.
We were trapped.
He had us.
And because there was no place to go
and we had nothing to do but to
just eat this death.
Out of ground zero, out of utter despair.
If you can picture some of the same
people you heard last night on their faces
before God for 13 hours in a living
room together.
You'll have a picture of what was our
final condition.
So out of it, so bereft of anything
to say or do or to be clever
or religious or spiritual or to play at
the body of Christ that all we could
do was occasionally whimper or groan.
We were talked out.
We were prayed out.
And then God began to do something.
In a day a nation was born.
The same people who dreaded to be with
each other in the morning by that night
did not want to leave each other.
God did it.
Together is something that God does when there
will be people who will yield themselves to
him willing that he should break all of
their earthly ties and connections bringing them out
of the culture of this present world into
his.
When they had prayed the place was shaken
where they were assembled together and they were
all filled with the Holy Ghost and they
spoke the word of God with boldness till
we all come.
Either we're going to come all or we're
not going to come at all.
This has been a trial of my patience
because I'm constituted to be quick and impetuous
and want to get to the heart of
the matter.
That's the way God has made me.
It was an agony last night to get
two elders together with me in a room
to speak to another family.
Just to get us together in that room.
How they traipsed their way so slowly down
the aisle and stopped off to see this
one or that till we all come.
But you know I recognize, except that we're
all there nothing can be transacted for God.
And I think the most profound revelation that
God has given us in the depths of
our experiences in Minnesota is this that despite
our brave vocabularies despite the spiritual sophistication that
many of us had in being able to
articulate with conviction and sincerity the principles of
the body of Christ and submission and authority
and all that when it came to the
actualities of our life there was a shriek
and a howl that came up from the
deepest places of our being that were testimonies
to our individualism and our independence of spirit.
Self-willed, proud hearts that would not condescend
to be submitted to men.
Maybe if we could see as God sees
the reason it takes us to get down
the aisle to a room is for that
very reason.
Maybe the way we shuffle our feet and
drag is an unspoken expression of a subtlety
of rebellion that we have not recognized.
But this kingdom is holy.
It's clean through and through and it's true.
And such subtleties are dealt with and removed
in the process of God's people grinding together
daily.
It's easy to say thy kingdom come but
this is what it's going to take to
effect it.
And the multitude of them that believed were
of one heart and of one soul.
The multitude of them that believed were of
one heart and of one soul.
We've had some enormous adventures testing God whether
he had the power to have us as
a multitude be of one heart and of
one soul.
I wondered if Art was going to call
me last night.
Here's what I would have shared.
How there came a time when a very
radical suggestion was made that the Katz family
should leave the community and have a sabbatical
of their own in another city hundreds of
miles removed from our Minnesota community at a
time when families were coming to join us.
It was so absurd.
It almost sounded suicidal.
There's no kind of human or religious logic
that could have approved it.
And I said, of course I'll not do
that.
Other families are coming and we should leave?
I'll not do it except that God will
give a witness to the entire fellowship.
Guess what he did?
The very next morning he gave a witness.
Everybody was in agreement to the most radical
proposition that they ever had to contemplate which
could have cut their own throat and could
have been the death of the community.
And on the basis of the unanimous witness
that the whole multitude was of one mind
and one soul, we left.
We were gone something like nine months in
Kansas City and I think it was a
turning point in the salvation of my own
marriage, which is to say also the salvation
of our own ministry, which is to say
also the salvation of our community.
It was a critical step in which we
dared not miss God.
And I was amazed that not only was
the whole multitude of us agreed, but three
beautiful prophecies came that morning.
The one that I remember best is where
the Lord said that if you'll submit to
this pruning, I'll make you exceedingly fruitful.
It was a cutting.
It was a pruning.
Well, you know what happened in Kansas City?
I wasn't looking for any ministry to the
Jews.
We were there on a sabbatical to attend
to the family, but this Jewish person needed
help and this lawyer was coming to me
at 7 o'clock in the morning for
a little scripture help and this one needed...
And I said, well, finally, I just let
them all come together one night of the
week and it turned out to be a
kind of regular weekly Bible study.
And before you know it, a Jewish work
was beginning to commence and the believers were
getting excited and interested and, hey, look what
God is doing.
So finally, by the time the nine months
had gone, it reached such proportion that it
was quite clear to me that this was
really the purpose of God.
And then the brothers were coming to me
and saying, ah, it's time for you to
return.
Well, I didn't have that witness.
Look what God was doing.
This was God.
I wasn't seeking for this Jewish work.
God himself was doing it and he was
unfolding a new pattern that really could be
something that could go beyond Kansas City of
apostolic proportion.
What am I going to do, go back
to Minnesota and twiddle my thumbs in the
woods?
Come on, fellas.
I remember four of them came down in
a car driving 700 miles each way to
seek to persuade me that it was time
to return.
They had fasted and prayed and that was
their unanimous witness, but I did not share
it.
And, by the way, I'm no babe in
the faith and I'm a man led by
the Spirit of God and God has led
me in sensitive things, so exacting and you
can't believe, so if I don't have any
witness, you know...
Well, finally it was evident that I would
have to go up to Minnesota and straighten
them out.
LAUGHTER So I took two prominent leaders from
the Kansas City Jewish-believing community, who many
of you know, really tested them, the pure
men of God, who agreed with me.
And we flew up to Minnesota and we
were going to really straighten this thing out
once and for all.
I remember we assembled the entire community in
the living room of the house and I
recounted to them the whole story of how
it is that we were brought to Kansas
City by the ordination of God, what has
happened in the months that we've been there,
and the significance of what is happening there,
the foolishness of returning now in the light
of these things and what God is evidently
doing, and I rested my case.
Out of the mouths of the babes of
the community, Jeffrey was one of them, I
remember that, within the space of less than
five minutes, God shot me down and let
me to know that I was wrong and
that they were right and that I was
to return.
And that ministry flows out of life and
life out of relationship and that if I
were to be severed any longer from that
life and from those relationships, there would be
no ministry and that it was time to
return now.
My head fell on my chest and I
said, yes, Lord, I was saved from deception.
I'm not ashamed to tell you that big
boys like me can be deceived.
And the saving grace was the truth of
God expressed through the body of believers with
whom I was in real and actual commitment.
It'll save you every time.
We're not playing a little game about submission
and authority.
It's no little system that we're practicing.
We're not giddy little kids who got a
box top and sent it in for a
Junior D-Man set and we're playing Body
of Christ.
These are vital things, life and death for
ourselves and for those to whom God will
bring us.
And you know what we found?
That when the commitment is real, when you
trust God that He can bring you together
and that the multitude can be of one
soul and one mind, He'll do it.
The same God that sent us returned us.
And so it continues to this day.
Are you in that kind of commitment?
Are you willing to be?
Are you willing to have your life submitted
to men?
And maybe your own self-interests will be
violated?
You can't believe how independent we are because
we have drunk too long and too deeply
from another fountain.
I want to say that the spirit of
individualism is utterly satanic.
It has its origins in the pit of
hell.
It is an appeal to the egoistic hearts
of men and wholly contrary from the spirit
of the Kingdom of Heaven which is a
society of men and a corporate glory.
One of the favorite phrases that I heard
from a precious brother, Ern Baxter, was that
God Himself is a sweet company and He
wants a sweet company on earth just like
Him.
As submitted one to another as the Son
is to the Father and the Spirit to
the Son that we might be one.
I am so suspicious of these hokey full
gospel type shindigs and themes of unity and
ecumenicism with big banners of the dove with
glad-handing and back-slapping and hugging as
if in so cheap and easy and glib
a manner is that this kind of true
togetherness is going to be established.
It's established at the cross.
The multitude of them that believed were of
one heart and of one soul.
Neither said any of them that ought of
the things which he possessed was his own
but they had all things common and with
great power gave the apostles witness of the
resurrection of the Lord Jesus and great grace
was upon them all.
Christian lifestyle begins with a break with the
world situation and its givens.
It is a choice of a path which
leads the Christian out of conformity to the
world.
Therefore it is the choice of a path
moving in a different direction from those who
persist in conformity and uniformly with the patterns
and structures of the world system.
What we're learning in our community situation is
that the community is much more than a
religious entity.
We're having a new kind of economy, a
new kind of political order, a new kind
of a social order, a new kind of
society.
Our culture is being changed and our tastes
and something is being shaped and formed which
is neither gentile nor Jewish which somehow is
removing us from the power of Sears Roebuck
and Ward catalogs and the necessity to walk
through shopping malls if you can get a
cyclic fix for the relief that comes from
being able to go out for a night
on the town.
One thing we pray is that he doesn't
take away our ice cream.
I mean have you realized have you realized
that buying is far more than the obtaining
of commodities?
You know that, don't you?
Buying is a psychic orgy.
Even window shopping will give you a fix.
When I heard out of my own ten
-year-old son, can we go to a
shopping mall?
I began to realize that even he had
been affected by the fever.
He had no intention of buying.
He's tight-fisted but he wanted to see
the merchandise.
I'll tell you that merchandise has never been
more cunningly displayed than in this generation.
There's a whole psychology of display that has
to do with color and arrangement.
The very principle of the supermarket.
Listen, I go back almost 50 years and
I can remember the little corner grocery store
where all you saw were a few scroungy
shelves and if you bought a quarter pound
of butter he cut it out of a
tub and dipped the milk out of a
container.
Contrast that with our present supermarkets in all
of their splendor cunningly designed by artful men
who know the valences of color and sound
and display.
And you see merchandise stacked up on shelves
in great volume.
It has an overwhelming capacity to affect your
soul and to influence your choices.
How many of us are buying more than
we need?
And how many of the things that used
to be called luxuries have now become needs?
Why there are men right now breaking their
brains.
The most powerful of human personalities the most
prepared and trained whose one function it is
is to find new ways to tempt and
tantalize and to seduce people into merchandise.
You know that there's only one reference in
all the scriptures to hallelujah being cried out
in heaven?
You know when it comes?
When Babylon is destroyed in a day.
When those who pander after delicious merchandise cry
because their city has gone up in smoke
and it's merchandised with it.
That's delicious from heaven hallelujah.
What it needs to elicit from us now
is hallelujah.
And not to wait for that final day
of the Lord but let it be a
day of the Lord now for us.
How would you like to see your merchandise
sold in smoke?
And your wardrobe?
And your high fives?
And your books?
I'll tell you I see libraries of individual
saints that deserve to be public libraries.
The reference volumes and thousands of dollars when
different displays of books of which I myself
am not altogether innocent.
It's amazing how that stuff accumulates.
And almost invariably when I set up a
few days in this trip the shock and
the contrast of coming back from Holland and
England where everything is reduced one third in
scale the size of the houses the amount
of food in the portions and then being
thrust into this sprawling American lifestyle with the
square footage and the food and the luxury
and the comfort and the luxury is really
an adjustment.
But in every house that I stayed with
the exception of perhaps one or two when
it came time to hang up my one
or two things in the closet I could
not find room.
It took Herculean effort to push back the
overflow of their garments in the guest room
in order to get up my couple of
things when I hung it.
Let's face it guys our culture has had
more to do with defining our lifestyle than
the kingdom of heaven.
The most profound experience that I had in
Holland I have to share it with you
now and I've shared it individually was an
overnight visit to a community of believers founded
and built around the men who at one
time had been one of the impressive evangelical
roost kids of Holland who was going places
and God brought him down into the dust
of death and shattered everything.
It moved him to the place of obscurity
and on a two acre parcel of ground
there are 65 souls living.
Two acres.
You would call that a ghetto congestion.
And I remember walking into the building and
when I saw all of the bodies immediately
I sensed the discomfort of crowds.
But after I sat down for a couple
of minutes I began to realize that it
was only an instinctive reflex action but that
I was not experiencing that discomfort longer but
I was experiencing conversely a profound peace out
of proportion with the physical number of bodies
present.
There was a marvelous peace that prevailed in
that place.
And this brother was saying to me you
see that one art?
And I saw a woman looking perfectly whole
knitting and joyous and people kissing each other
and hugging and talking and chatting in just
the most wonderful warmth of the heavenly environment.
He said he was a hopeless schizophrenic.
This one attempted suicide last week in a
mental institution and she came to us.
This one was a hopeless drug addict.
This one is a notorious criminal who cannot
get back into his own country.
You know what I saw?
The scum and the off-scourings of society.
I saw the rejects and the neverses.
By the way, if you don't know what
the word nevers means that's what it means.
The helpless, the awkward, the ungainly for whom
the world is not worthy.
Who are the victims of a world whose
system is satanic and whose values run counter
to the organic life for which God has
created us.
I want to tell you that God has
made us to dwell in a kingdom of
heaven.
Our minds and our nervous systems and our
bodies are made for a certain quality of
living that is true and unsane and joyous
and fervently loving.
And when we're submitted into conditions of unreality
you know what happens?
We crack up.
The marvel is not that our mental institutions
are jammed with victims.
The marvel is that there are countless millions
walking this street that presume to have some
semblance of sanity whose life is really insane
and unreal.
What God wants is for there to be
islands of sanity and reality and truth and
love that the distressed and the soul-sick
and the hopeless can see and enter on
the basis of repentance.
Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at
hand.
See?
Here it is.
Repent, give up your filthy lifestyle and your
mucking about and your vicious, egoistic pursuit and
the accumulation of your merchandise and your ego
trips and your competition and enter this kingdom.
There'll be no cry for repentance until there's
a kingdom at hand as an alternative to
which men can come.
So here I am in Holland seeing this
precious environment.
About 10 o'clock that night they had
crosses.
Precious how they served each other.
Remarkable.
The love and the way they served each
other.
You know it's the little things that are
everything?
Whether you eat or you drink, do it
as unto the Lord.
How many of us serve each other like
that as if it's unto the Lord?
I'll tell you that these little graces change
the whole complexion of all of life.
But again, we're schooled by our society to
not slap down the ketchup bottle in the
milk container and slide it across the counter,
find yourself a fork feeding your face.
Yeah, but eating is more than feeding your
face and your gut.
Eating is more than a gastronomic activity.
Eating is an art and a grace and
a breaking of bread and a communion.
I'm spoiled because I've eaten at Darmstadt, Germany
with the Sisters of Mary and they set
a table for me folks.
It would not have shamed the Lord himself
if he sat there.
They took blue crepe paper and they made
a star service on the entire table.
And I've never seen silverware more green in
all my life.
Nothing more white.
Dishes more bright.
And the whole thing set in such architectural
splendor in such symmetry that you wince even
to see food come on the place and
spoil it.
Kingdom of God is how you keep your
bathroom.
And what your linen closet looks like.
And another German sellership that invited me in
for a meal in Jerusalem in the old
city living in the basement of the Redeemer
Lutheran Church.
And I came in all hot and sweaty
from the bus and I said, do you
have a towel?
She said, sure.
And she opened the linen closet and there
I was absolutely transfixed and speechless.
I was more ministered to in that moment
looking at the linen closet than any dozens
of times sitting in churches at services and
listening to sermons.
It was a spiritual experience to look at
the linen closet.
I mean, these were towels that were so
bright and so precisely folded and stacked in
such symmetrical order that it took your breath
away.
It was the suggestion of another kind of
culture and another kingdom.
And as my eye went from that linen
closet to the table, to the room, to
the furnishings, and to the people themselves, it
was all the same.
They were not German so much as that
they were the representatives of another culture that
is transcendent and heavenly.
Thy kingdom come is going to take some
elbow grease and application.
I remember visiting the home where the people
had a love for the Jewish people.
I mean, a really sincere concern and pray
and occasion to have Jewish visitors and I
had to use their bathroom.
I almost prayed after using their bathroom that
Jewish people would not come into their house
because I know Jewish people.
These Jewish housewives boast about whose floor you
can eat from.
And if they were to come into a
sloppy and slovenly place and see the caked
crust in the bathroom, whatever you said to
them in the living room will be unknown
right there.
We've got to do something more than say.
We've got to be the incarnational expression of
another kingdom.
The words made fresh and dwelling among them.
Thy kingdom come.
When he showed me these broken people, thought
this one was a schizophrenic, this one's this,
this one's that, I couldn't get over their
sanity, their wholeness.
When they had that little Bible study at
the end of the evening, you know they've
been two years in the letters to the
Corinthians?
Sometimes they don't get beyond a word.
They're marched by another beast.
They're living by faith and they're being sustained
somehow.
They will not take any aid from just
society.
And they could qualify because they're rendering a
social service.
And these European countries are very generous in
terms of underwriting social services.
They will not take anything from the world.
Their holy chastity upon God.
This man took me up later to see
what he says.
First of all, his own children are living
in the dormitory with other kids.
They have not an independent little home of
their own.
He showed me his room.
It was large enough only to accommodate his
bed and his wife and himself and a
chest of drawers and a chair.
That was it.
They're as happy as lark.
They're having a joy that's unspeakable.
They're the fathers and mothers of a community.
And when he began to say the word
that night, I couldn't understand it being in
Dutch.
I never saw such attentiveness to the word
of God as these former inmates of prisons
and mental institutions were given.
They hung on the word as if it
was very long.
And the thing that blew my mind was
when it was time to go to bed
and they all got up and left.
But not a soul left before they kissed
each other.
And I have never seen holy chastity as
God had meant.
I was sad in the heart.
How we have leaned over backwards to avoid
any kind of intimacy and physical expression and
I think we've made a mistake.
Where's our confidence in God?
And haven't we yet come to a sufficient
maturity and purity that we can again embrace
the saints and give a holy kiss and
open the door that will loose our hearts
and our spirits and our minds and our
souls to be made whole and to be
freed from our insecurities and our fears and
our hangups?
I'll tell you that holy kiss did more
therapy for those broken victims than shock treatment,
drugs, medications and even Christian therapy and counseling.
Notice what he told me?
He's a brilliant man.
He said, I don't counsel any of them.
Only the very minimum of actual counsel we
get out of the way and we let
go.
He said, all we do is provide an
atmosphere of love and acceptance and we let
the spirit of God directly heal these people.
I'll never forget the experience.
And I'm anxious to get back home and
start kissing.
It's another culture.
The path of obedience to Christ brings a
break in the human situation made possible by
the inclusion of the gospel as the new
factor which breaks the dominance of the old
factors of the world.
The gospel signals the end of the unconfessed
dominion of principalities and powers of the world
over people's lives.
All this has been brought about by the
inbreaking of the kingdom.
Only our daily decisions and choices can show
the reality of our relationship with Jesus Christ.
The kingdom is a daily thing.
It went from house to house daily breaking
bread.
It's a moment by moment thing.
It's how you set the table.
It's how you greet the saints.
It's what you do with your arms.
The proclamation of the New Testament is the
gospel of the kingdom.
A gospel of a new order, a new
creation, a new world, a new age.
The gospel presented in the New Testament is
a scandal to the values and standards of
the world.
The absolute authority and dominion of the destructive
forces and structures of the world has been
ended by the inauguration of a whole new
order in human affairs called the kingdom of
God.
I didn't say it before, I want to
say it again, that there's a difference between
the gospel and the gospel of the kingdom.
You never see the word gospel standing nakedly
by itself in the scriptures.
John the Baptist came preaching the gospel of
the kingdom.
Repent for the kingdom of heaven is at
hand.
Jesus, from the beginning of his ministry, preached
the gospel of the kingdom.
And the apostle Paul, with the last breath
that was in him in the final stage
of his life in Rome, proclaimed the gospel
of the kingdom of God to all who
came unto him.
There's a difference between the gospel of narrow
salvation and personal self-interest and the gospel
of the kingdom of heaven.
That gospel is a scandal.
The gospel of the kingdom of heaven is
a contradiction to the world in every point
and every particular.
And it will bring the reproach and the
persecution of the world upon those who proclaim
it and demonstrate it.
Talk of pragmatism, respectability, and methodologies dominates the
conversations of contemporary religions.
But the New Testament speaks of the abandonment,
insecurity, persecution, and exile that come from seeking
first the kingdom.
How many of you know the history of
the Mennonites and the Hutterites and all of
the Anabaptist troops who were drowned by the
thousands and burned at the stake and roasted
on the spit and were allowed to rot
in dungeons?
You know why?
They returned to the kingdom.
And you know who killed them?
Catholics and Protestants.
Ha, ha, ha, ha.
They will kill you and claim they are
doing God a service.
It is a picture of persecution that comes
not from the world so much as it
comes from religionists for whom you have gone
too far and lost the boat.
The New Testament speaks of the abandonment, insecurity,
persecution, and exile that come from seeking first
the kingdom.
A church of comfort, property, privilege, and position
stands in sharp contrast with the biblical description
of the people of God as aliens, exiles,
sojourners, strangers, and pilgrims.
So I've got a few things to say.
I had a conversation last night with a
young brother outside sitting on the steps.
He's been listening to a lot of tapes
on the faith message.
What do you think about the faith message,
I guess it's good I said, but the
kind of faith that really excites me is
not the kind that believes the Cadillacs, but
it's the faith that is written of the
roll call of the giants of faith of
whom the world was not worthy, all of
whom died not having seen, who saw themselves
as exiles and sojourners and strangers looking for
a city not made by him.
It says that they confessed that they were
pilgrims and strangers, not nearly acknowledged it.
Let me ask you the question this morning.
How much are you a pilgrim in a
sense?
How much are you ill at ease in
the culture of this present world?
How much do you shake in your business
world or your professional world or in the
neighborhood?
How much do you feel out of joint
and out of place and out of time?
Where do you feel more comfortable?
With the saints or in the world?
You don't have a sense of freakiness and
strangeness about your life.
There's something wrong with your values.
I'm getting increasingly freakier, becoming an embarrassment.
But I'll tell you what it's like.
It's a freaky man walking into the office
of the chairman of the Department of Philosophy
at a college in New York and stunning
him right out of his wrist.
The word of God so powerful and sharp
and clear that in a few massive strokes
that man is taken right out of his
thin striped suit and left sitting in his
DVD naked and revealed once and for all.
He's had a confrontation with a freak.
And this is a man who is privy
to the religious counsels of Christendom because he's
sick in the midst of ecumenical activity with
all kinds of Christian bodies and archbishops and
clerics and all of the whole panoply of
the religious world in the conferences of Christians
and Jews.
And the first thing I had to say
to him was, look here, buddy, don't equate
me with them.
I'm not in that flow at all.
I leap over that and go back to
something much older and earlier and original that
had to do with Paul and the fathers
before him.
I'm not in this murky ecumenical business.
And a man who thought that he came
to exchange pleasantries about our differing religious perspectives
found himself utterly devastated and confronted by God
in a way for which he shall be
held eternally responsible.
I heard myself saying to this man with
such authority, former high school dropout, saying to
the chairman of the department of philosophy, you
have no fundamental respect for truth.
A child would know that except that there's
a foundation of truth, whatever you shall build
after that, whatever that superstructure is, shall lean
and be out of filter and subsequently come
down the tenet stairs.
Talking to a man with a wall loaded
with honorary degrees and certificates and diplomas as
if he were a little child, that could
be the confrontation always between those who are
strangers and pilgrims and forgerners, who march by
another gate and they confront anyone in this
world because their reality is other.
Their reality is based in the world and
the call of God to become citizens of
another kingdom.
I'm so fond of saying now that when
the world encounters us on a bus, a
train, a plane, an airport, a waiting room,
wherever, they should rub their chins after we
leave and scratch their heads and wonder, was
that a man or an angel?
On those same days in New York on
a subway train, what a picture of hopelessness
in this world, going into these exhaust tunnels,
bodies jammed together like sardines, being curdled, they
know not where and for what, lives tragically
misspent and wasted, trying to take a few
pictures to show the folks back home what
life in New York is like because I
think God is calling us to have a
greater involvement in His purposes here.
The trains are loaded with graffiti and all
kinds of filthy inscriptions and writings and as
I was trying to take a picture, a
kid with his anthropology books under his arm
said, hey mister, what are you doing?
I said, I'm taking the pictures of natives
to send the folks back home.
I said, I might even send a picture
to Samoa, show the folks in Samoa how
they live in New York.
You know, the classic in anthropology is coming
of age in Samoa, so the kid shuffled.
We had a few words and I had
to get out at the next stop and
just as the doors opened and about to
leave, I found myself turning and I said
to him, I said, by the way, there's
only one culture that's worth any consideration at
all.
Oh, he said, what's that?
I said, it's the culture of the kingdom
of God.
And he walked out and the doors closed
and the train went on into the tunnel.
It doesn't take much if you're the representative
of another kingdom.
Oh, children.
Yeah, hallelujah.
The Bible sees change as coming about primarily
through the presence of the people of God
in history.
A city on a hill, a demonstration of
what human life can be in the love
and the power of Christ.
I think the best thing and the favorite
thing I've ever heard from Paul is when
he said one day as we were running
along and he had his coffee cup in
his hand, he said, you know what the
gospel is all about?
I said, what?
He said, it's just to teach men how
to live.
And something went, That's great.
That's what the gospel is all about.
To teach men how to live.
And that's what gospel people are all about.
To teach the world that is dying in
their distorted and perverse values what free living
is.
A demonstration of what human life can be
in the love and the power of Christ.
That's what you saw here last night at
the same.
People learning what life can be.
If they let go of their security, their
material possessions, their love of privacy, wanting to
keep themselves concealed and hidden, clutching the things
that have been dear to them, and let
go and let God thoroughly work in these
things.
That nitty-grittiness of being thrown together with
the saints of God daily will be able
to show a world what human life can
be.
The new community of God's people exists as
an alien force in relation to the old
order and is intended to be an outcropping
of the new order, a presentation to the
world and to the very powers of the
world of the possibilities of a new order
that has come and that has already taken
root in the life of the world through
the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
Now listen guys, we have to grow up.
The resurrection is not given to us simply
as a doctrine in which to believe.
It is our life for we of all
people are most to be saved.
We may have been able to conduct Sunday
Christianity on the basis of our natural endowments
and sincerity and well-meaning religious intentions, but
we cannot conduct the kingdom on that basis.
What you saw last night is the result
of eternal
consequence in two hours than many Christians have
experienced in a lifetime of Sunday, one two
-hour session, going from house to house daily.
I think the single greatest reason why we
have not had a visible kingdom on the
earth has been that there is not a
people who have been willing to divest themselves
of their own meager life to trust Him
for His and to move and live and
have their being in Him and test the
reality of the resurrection in their own life
and their relationships together on a daily basis.
It's everything that God was saying yesterday in
the opening chapter of the book of Acts.
Is it now time for you to receive
a kingdom?
Listen, cool it.
It's not that kingdom at all that God
is even interested in.
But you shall receive power that you may
be witnesses unto me and to be a
familiar to the utmost corners of the earth.
That's what it's all about.
You shall receive power.
You're not going to be able to do
this on your own.
This is not by your amiability or your
temperament or your nice guyism.
That will be shattered within a matter of
days.
This is on the basis of my life.
If you'll come together, I'll fill you with
my life.
I'll send down my glorified spirit that has
been tempted through suffering and death and now
has the right and the privilege to be
ascended on high at the throne of my
father David.
And I'll send down that spirit that you
might be able to be a kingdom unto
me, a witness unto me, and show people
who are dying how to live.
A new order, a presentation to the world
of the possibilities that have come and taken
root in the life of the world through
the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
The powerful biblical metaphor that compares the church's
life to that of a physical body is
now almost completely foreign to most congregations, which
are little more than voluntary associations of autonomous
individuals.
Whew!
He's right.
Comparing God's people to a body is a
foreign identification for most Christians, the body of
Christ, who are a voluntary association of autonomous
individuals.
You have a totally different perspective when you're
a minister and you look down from platforms,
from church to church, congregation to congregation, than
you have sitting in them.
You know what you see?
You see little isolated ions.
You see little particular communities of self-interest,
but you don't see a body.
They're autonomous, independent entities unto themselves.
They are not that joined corporate expression animated
by his life or his purposes.
You know what it takes to go from
the individual autonomous life to that corporateness which
reveals the glory of God?
Something has to go, a crack, snap, and
pop, in this deep sea of individuality and
self-worth, that we might flow together as
a people before God, not just giving up
our arms due to the reluctance of experience,
setting the table for each other as if
it were for the very Lord himself.
You know how that Dutch fella took eight?
I had two meals with them and their
meal is bread.
In the morning it was bread and jam
or bread and butter or bread and a
thin slice of cheese and cheese.
When they came to lunch, which I thought
was really going to be the meal of
the day, it was bread again.
Only they substituted thin slices of bologna for
what was in cheese.
And that's it.
I never saw people live more simply.
I even wonder whether three meals a day
was ever written in heaven, plus the after
-meeting snack.
I know I'm skating on thin ice.
I'll probably cancel my ice cream for tonight.
To begin by speaking of, it wouldn't be
nice to have bagels for dinner.
I can go on, but I think that
we have gotten this point.
I don't think it's too much of a
joke to say that maybe we ought to
examine some of the unquestioned predicates of our
life, like three meals a day, like doing
business as usual, like having our wardrobe stuffed
with clothing, like the time and the attention
that we give to awkward things and to
obscene, like the superficiality that characterizes our congregations
where we are the economic singularity.
In a word, what we need to do
is to submit the whole of our present
life to the light of God, with the
cry, Thy kingdom come, willing that he should
severely, if he will, cut away that which
is not compatible with his kingdom, that there
might be established in the corporate-ness of
God's people a distinct lifestyle whose origin is
unmistakable.
It's heaven.
The description that R.T.B. gave last
night of these men in Illinois, these wealthy,
charismatic farmers, beautiful fellowships, and just in the
space of two days we found these men
at the very end, broken, whimpering on the
floor.
You can't believe what God was beginning to
suggest to them.
And we came without any design.
Men who are actually in competition with each
other, of who has got the most recent,
brand-new banking combines and harvesters, which, by
the way, now cost about $45,000 apiece.
The first thing that these brothers will do
when you visit their homes is to show
you their machinery.
Who gets the seed in the ground first?
Whose rose is greater?
Whose harvest is more abundant?
Who's made the killing in the market this
year?
Who's able to buy himself a new car?
Well, we began to suggest to them that
they need to submit not only their religious
life, but the totality of their life to
the kingdom.
We watched grown men cry.
But we've got to have our own machinery,
because it's only a short season, and if
you don't get your harvest in, your crops
can be ruined.
Seek first the kingdom of God and His
righteousness, and all things else will be evident
to you.
You know, guys, the gospel is a radical
premise.
And I just suggested, not being a farmer,
who knows that the God will, through you,
sustain the harvesting season, that you might bring
in all of your crops together and not
be cutting your own throat and competing with
your own brothers and be loading upon yourself
such indebtedness because each one has to have
his own equipment.
Who knows if God will not meet you
in a kingdom way and stretch the harvest
season.
We feel ourselves as a community to be
on the threshold of a new dimension in
time and faith relationship.
God is stretching things and opening up a
new order.
One would have thought that if you're away
from the community for two months that that
could be injurious or perhaps fatal.
Nothing like that.
One would have thought that your family would
suffer if you're a long absence.
We find our families flourishing.
We're entering into a new kind of thing
where you don't compensate for your absences necessarily
by taking your kids fishing.
That there's something that is transacted in the
heavenly where God himself ministers directly to the
needs of a family and a community when
you are in the place of obedience and
faith relationship.
That somehow we're not to measure as the
world measures.
Not to think as the world thinks.
Not to make their values our values.
But we're to enter into a new realm
of seeing and believing and acting which is
heavenly.
It will extend your harvest season.
It will give you new ways to do
new things.
New enablement.
New provisions.
You really have your citizenship.
In heaven.
Do you believe that?
And would you be willing to perish if
it's not true?
Yea, though he slay me.
Yes, like that thing.
Yes, if my harvest doesn't come in and
my crops are ruined and I can't make
my payment and I have to foreclose my
property I'm still willing to seek to be
a farmer in the kingdom manner than in
the American cultural way.
You know what God told these farmers?
That American agriculture is predicated upon gambling.
You see a fancy word for it?
Yes, it is.
Speculation.
What will the price be of the thing
that they're planting now when the time comes
to bring their crops?
And how long can they keep their crop
in storage waiting for the optimum market price?
It's not based on need.
It's based on profit.
It's not based on the kingdom.
It's based on speculation for the hope of
greater gain.
You know why that elevator crane collapsed and
failed though it was the business of an
elder of a Presbyterian church?
And he had me for dinner and he
was trying to pull out a cart and
explain to me what went wrong?
I said, here's where you went wrong.
Why did you enter that business for the
hope of greater gain?
Because that's where you went wrong.
That is not a kingdom motive.
Because we're hearing a gospel like that today.
You can even measure your spirituality by your
affluence.
But it is not the gospel of the
kingdom of heaven.
Your children were required to march by another
group.
You have another purpose.
You have other values.
They're established in heaven.
And if you seek it first, all things
will be evident.
Thy kingdom come is the cry of God
now as it was at the beginning of
the earth.
There'll be no salvation for the despair in
you until there's a kingdom of heaven which
is at hand.
Willing to give yourself to that in Raleigh
and in Durham and Paris and the places
where you enter?
Willing to go from Sunday Christianity punctuated by
the Middle East Bible studies into a kind
of gritty, daily relationship with God's speakers with
everything he's up for grabs, he doesn't want?
Willing to open yourself to the intrusion of
otherwise hungers?
Willing to have your privacy violated?
Willing to have your secret phantom revealed?
Willing to be found out and revealed for
your weaknesses and your defects?
Willing to suffer the humiliation of such revelations
that God can purge you and establish you
in his love together?
Whom is Satan with who assembles together?
Great grace is upon them all.
With power do they customize the revelations of
Jesus Christ.
Those that believe love together.
Hallelujah.
Let's pray thy kingdom come in North Carolina.