Well, I think the topic this morning is
Jewishness and discipleship.
I'm so happy for the session that we
had yesterday afternoon, where many voices were raised
and disconcerted voices as we were groping for
the definition of these very weighty words.
I've learned long ago that there's no easy
recourse to dictionaries when it comes to the
seeking of definitions, but that they have to
be wrought in the heart and out of
the experience.
And I know that God gave us a
fit title for these conferences, and yet in
the coming here I thought to myself, how
would I define the meaning of the word
discipleship where I called to speak upon it?
It's no easier to do than to define
the meaning of the word holy, or the
meaning of the word love, or truth, or
God, or any other such great word.
And so we have to probe and feel
and reach in the scriptures, and I have
a sense that somehow the words Jewishness and
discipleship are synonyms, that when we shall come
to the meaning of one, we shall come
to the meaning of the other, for they're
truly one and the same.
And I'm just going to take a rambling
survey through the scriptures.
I hope you'll just loosen your spiritual tie
and relax.
I really want to take my time in
this and not feel pressed to have to
discharge my soul in an hour.
And I'm just going to begin in First
Corinthians, the second chapter.
I'm so glad that it's Paul who wrote
these things.
Great towering intellectual, if ever a man were
endowed with great natural endowments of intellect and
character and natural spirit, it would be Paul.
And yet he, I think more than any
man, recognized that except that it come out
of a battered piano by the glory of
God, it is nothing.
So in the second chapter of First Corinthians,
we read, And I, brethren, when I came
to you, I came not with excellency of
speech or of wisdom, declaring unto you the
testimony of God.
For I determined not to know anything among
you, save Jesus Christ and Him crucified.
And I was with you in weakness and
in fear and in much trembling.
And my speech and my preaching was not
with enticing words of man's wisdom, but in
demonstration of the spirit and of power, that
your faith should not stand in the wisdom
of men, but in the power of God.
Howbeit we speak wisdom among them that are
perfect, yet not the wisdom of this world,
nor of the princes of this world that
come to naught.
But we speak the wisdom of God in
the mystery, even the hidden wisdom which God
ordained before the world unto our glory, which
none of the princes of this world knew.
For had they known it, they would not
have crucified the Lord of glory.
But as it is written, I hath not
seen nor ear heard, neither have entered into
the heart of man the things which God
hath prepared for them that love him.
But God, but God, but God hath revealed
them unto us by his spirit.
For the spirit searcheth all things, yea, the
deep things of God.
For what man knoweth the things of man,
save the spirit of man which is in
him?
Even so the things of God knoweth no
man but the spirit of God.
Now we have received not the spirit of
the world, but the spirit which is of
God, that we might know the things that
are freely given to us of God.
Which things also we speak, not in the
words which man's wisdom teacheth, but which the
Holy Ghost teacheth, comparing spiritual things with spiritual.
But the natural man receiveth not the things
of the spirit of God, for they're foolishness
to him, neither can he know them because
they are spiritually discerned.
But he that is spiritual judgeth all things,
yet he himself is judged of no man.
For who hath known the mind of the
Lord, that he might instruct him?
But we have the mind of Christ.
The scriptures are a great embarrassment for any
man who presumes to think that he's insightful
or eloquent or any other such foolish nonsense,
because the scriptures speak themselves.
We have only to recite them and they
eloquently preach themselves.
If we could just let this word lift
off the page and through our voices and
just resonantly reverberate in our hearts and minds
and the full weight of them pierce our
souls, we would be done in, stretched out
on the floor, our eyes glazed and rolled
back in our skull and the spittle falling
from our lips.
This is glory.
This is unspeakable glory.
The world has never known such a thing
and even we, children of God, have yet
to understand what it is that this speaks.
And I'm not going to attempt to exposit.
This isn't even my text.
It just sounds, what can I say, the
tenor of the thing which is on my
heart this morning.
When Paul says, for I am determined not
to know anything but Christ and Him crucified,
in that is compacted such wisdom in such
unspeakable depth.
Because in one phrase, the two Judaism's are
expressed.
The Judaism that prides itself in the excellency
of mind, the Judaism that boasts in the
caliber of its rabbis, that looks to its
human commentaries and is replete with the words
of Rabbi Akiva or other such sages, continually
quoting, and that's what the whole substance of
the Talmud is, but the brilliant commentaries of
men.
In the last analysis, flesh, brilliant flesh, but
flesh.
And here's a man who is groomed in
that tradition and equipped, naturally endowed, to brilliantly
continue it.
But he says something very resolute.
I have determined not to know anything but
Christ and Him crucified.
He's passed out of the one Judaism and
in to the greater.
And I tell you, we Jews, whatever it
is that we are, and we've taken centuries
to ponder it and yet don't understand, but
whatever usual endowment we have by zeal or
intensity or intelligence, I tell you that speaking
for myself, these things have not enhanced my
spiritual walk, they've been an encumbrance.
And I speak especially of mind.
For the first year of my life as
a believer, I got nowhere thinking to bring
to the Bible the same skills and abilities
that I honed to a sharp edge in
my academic career.
What I was going to do with the
Word of God, what I had done with
Shakespeare and Dreiser and other such writers.
Well, and I did, I spun fanciful things,
very lovely, and it would have enhanced any
kind of coffee time hour, but spiritually it
meant nothing.
It was nothing.
There was no life in it, and my
first year was spent totally spinning my wheels.
I think we Jewish believers in the passing
from the one Judaism to the other, and
to understand now, I'm not speaking in necessarily
religious terms.
I was an atheist for 35 years, but
in a certain sense I was a deeply
religious Jew in the deepest traditions of our
Judaism.
What tradition is that?
It's the tradition which exalts the human mind,
which has its confidence in flesh, and knows
not God by the Spirit.
Many of us are required now by an
act of will to determine not to know
anything but Christ and Him crucified.
That foolish, battered, rejected, and despised Christ, whose
back hung in strips, and the blood poured
down that visage that was marred more than
any man in that scrap heap, in that
dump outside of Jerusalem called Golgotha.
He's the only one with to know what
He represents in His blood and the cross
upon which He lay out His life.
That's it.
It's the Son, the substance of all things,
the two Judaisms.
And I can go on where Paul talks
about the wisdom of men, the power of
God, but we speak the wisdom of God
in a mystery, even the hidden wisdom which
God ordained before the world unto our glory.
Children, what an hour is this.
We're just nearly on the threshold.
I can't begin.
Two hours, I need four hours, I need
a day, I need an uninterrupted week to
pour out what I have in my heart,
the impressions, the sense I have for the
condition of the world and where we stand,
how bizarre and grotesque things are yet to
become, and however shocked and horrified we are
by the fantastic changes which have been wrought
in our culture and our life in less
than a decade, we're only yet at the
beginning.
We're in for such things, such defilement, such
pouring out, such a bilge of dark spirits,
such a confusion, such a breakdown of the
apparatus of civilization, that men will quest for
a glass of pure water, air to breathe,
the most elementary things to sustain their lives.
We're coming to such a place, confusion as
you cannot understand, and men are going to
be groping for answers and stumbling about as
in a great darkness.
And isn't it interesting how in certain microcosmic
things, like a little episode, an exchange, a
conversation, God can reveal the great macrocosms.
It was in Kansas City that I led
a Jewish man to the Lord, he and
his son together in my living room, and
they came from one of the most influential
families of that great Jewish community.
In fact, the father of that man was
the president of one of the leading temples,
and he himself, university educated, wealthy, the head
of a great advertising company, a real swinger,
was paralyzed, his life was done in.
He was a psychological mess, an alcoholic, and
he had been through AA and through other
devices and seeking spiritual answers, and that night
in my living room he received the Lord.
And for a season he flourished, and then
unhappily he fell back again.
And I think in this I can't speak
on without pausing to say that there's a
very great attrition rate among Jewish believers.
I don't know what it is, whether Satan
with a great uncanny zeal seeks more to
destroy these than any other, and especially is
the attrition rate great among Jewish ministries.
Well, this man did not last long.
He got sucked up again in lusts and
things of that kind.
Well, I came recently through Kansas City and
I tried to see him, and I could
not.
He wouldn't see me.
He was afraid to see me, and I
finally got him on the phone, and his
voice was shrill and hysterical and full of
trembling.
I never heard such confusion and brokenness and
disorder.
And the upshot of our conversation was this.
He was seeing a Jewish psychiatrist, and I
put it to him like this, and at
the end of our conversation I said, Brother,
you have a choice between two Jews.
This Jewish psychiatrist was to me, and I'm
sure to him, kind of, what can I
say, the symbolic expression of all that stands
in the world that represents wisdom, answer, all
that that the world has to offer to
bring reconciliation and wholeness meaning into the life
of men.
It was this last, this man's last desperate,
clutching hope, and I was trying to persuade
him to let go of that psychiatrist and
all that the psychiatrist symbolized, and fall wholly
into the hands of the living Christ, to
abandon himself to the resurrected Christ.
You know what this man said?
I'll never forget the way, it was like
a cry.
Artie said, you're dangerous.
And all of a sudden, something struck my
soul, and I realized, he's right.
I'm dangerous.
Why, I'm so dangerous that the day is
going to come, and soon, that men are
going to seek to slay me and claim
that they're doing God a service.
Because I'm not just offering men a religious
alternative for a desiccated and impoverished Judaism.
I'm calling them out of one kingdom and
into another.
I'm calling them from one wisdom and into
another.
From one way and into another.
And I tell you, if that other way
does not work, it's curtains.
We're not just playing with religious alternatives.
We're playing with all that, of which life
consists.
An answer to the minds of men, and
the hearts of men, and the bodies of
men, and the totality of all they are,
and all that they hope for in the,
in this life, and the life to come.
Now, can you see that?
And men are going to tremble, and be
chagrined, and gnash upon us with their teeth.
Have you ever understood why it is that
seemingly religious men gnashed upon simple disciples like
Stephen with their teeth, and killed him?
Have you ever sought to understand why it
is that when the world had its opportunity
to lay its hands upon God, they practically
rent Him limb from limb?
The world is at enmity with God.
It despises God and all that He stands
for.
It cannot abide His wisdom, for to it,
for to them, it's utter foolishness.
Their wisdom resides in the power of intellect,
in human solutions, in stratagems, in political programs,
in devices to to free the air of
pollution.
Can you understand that we're coming to a
showdown, and everything that touches upon our technology,
our politics, our sociology, the whole sum and
substance of our life, is coming to one
great crossroad, and over it lurks a great
question mark.
How will men solve the final and utter
ultimate predicament of their human existence?
There are only two ways.
One shall be the solution of men trusting
in the arm of flesh, and the other
is the whole and utter abandonment to the
foolish wisdom of God, which is known and
revealed by God, by His Spirit.
It's a fearful thing.
The world has long tolerated so-called Christianity,
because the stakes were not high, and no
one understood.
And even up until recent times, the whole
controversy between Judaism and Christianity was just a
kind of a foolish prattle, hardly any more
in character than the foolishness of the competition
and rivalry between Catholicism and Protestantism, or various
other denominations.
Just men's foolish pride.
It wasn't the issue at all.
The real issue is not Christianity and Judaism,
as I've said so many times.
The real issue is between Judaism and Judaism.
The Judaism out of which Paul was lifted
by the grace of God, that exalts the
mind of men, and has its ultimate confidence
in flesh, and the Judaism to which Paul
was drawn, which is a mystery, and is
revealed, made known by God, by His Spirit,
unto us who believe.
I just want to take you through a
tour of the scriptures, because we desperately need
models.
I've long recognized that we desperately need models.
It's one thing to speak about discipleship, we
need to see it.
I want you to start with me this
morning, in the book of Genesis, story of
Joseph.
And I would to God that we had
all kinds of time to get to begin
at the very beginning and explore this enormous
life.
Talk about the quintessence of Jewishness.
I would happily rest in that Jewishness.
If I were as Jewish as Joseph, I
would not want for more.
And what a strange one he was.
Maybe that's something also about the nature of
Jewishness.
Not unusual, nor hard to understand that he
was despised of his brethren, because he was
a dreamer.
And they hated him not only for his
dreams, but also for his words.
There's something about the nature of a Joseph
that always will enlist from men, or elicit
from men, a reaction of scorn and reproach
and The world that world despises a dreamer.
Oh, I'm not talking about one who has
ecstatic revelries, but I'm talking about that one
who walks by another beat.
Have you ever seen such a one?
He's in the world, but he's not of
it.
He's a dreamer.
His inspiration comes not from the counsels of
men, or their flattery, or their sophistication, or
their verbiage, or their concepts.
But he seems to hear another beat, and
by that beat does he truly walk.
He's a dreamer, and the world despises him
for his dreams, and the more for his
words.
And they manifest that hatred, and they cast
him into pits and seek to kill him.
And so will it ever be.
Those that live godly lives in Christ Jesus
will suffer persecution.
I don't say that because I'm a masochist,
and have any natural delight in being worked
over by the world, but I just understand
only too well that the reproach that was
upon him must of necessity be also upon
us.
Because we walk by his beat, the mystery
of God, the offense, the spirit, and the
world will always rise up and enrage, gnash
its teeth upon it.
So in the 39th chapter of Genesis, we
read a fantastic first utterance, and Joseph was
brought down to Egypt.
That's the real beginning of his story.
And Joseph was brought down to Egypt.
What is it about the wisdom of God
that has so to do with being brought
down?
What is it with the wisdom of God
that speaks continually to us, that he who
exalts himself shall be abased, but he who
humbles himself shall be exalted?
What is it about the understanding of God
that requires us to be drawn up out
of dungeons?
I can't express it, and I just pray
that the Spirit of God is breathing something
in between these lines that will persuade you
of a certain logic, which many of you
are going to experience before you pass out
of this life.
I can spiritualize being brought down to Egypt
and spiritualize being cast into dungeons or being
brought up out of pits, and there's great
meaning of that, and many of us have
already experienced that in our lives.
Being broken before God, prostrated, stretched out, how
God uses the natural circumstances of our lives
needfully to break us of our pride and
the various things which clutter us, that he
might bring us up and out.
But I believe that this is not only
spiritual, it shall also become literal, and is
already literal for many believers right now on
this earth in places where to believe in
the Lord Jesus Christ is to bring upon
you the whole wrath of a society who
calls you insane, clutches the children from the
bosom of their parents, throws you into cells,
and brings husbands back to their wives three
days later in caskets with rags stuffed in
their mouths, and when the rag is removed
to find that the tongue has been ripped
out.
These things are happening now, and shall happen
in greater measure not just behind the Soviet
Union, but everywhere in the world, because it's
the same world ruled over by the same
prince at enmity with God, and God has
called us to a generation where the veil
is going to be taken off, and the
issue revealed in its total nakedness, and whatever
mask of respectability and tolerance the world has
worn toward the three great faiths and other
expressions of that nonsense, it shall show forth
its hostility and its bitterness, and many of
us shall be cast into pits and into
dungeons.
Why does the Lord allow us?
Joseph was brought down to Egypt, but the
Lord was with Joseph.
There was something necessary in that experience, in
the preparation of one who was to become
the Savior of Israel.
You say, Art, what are you talking about?
Joseph was not the Savior of Israel.
Oh, is that so?
Had he not survived, had he not allowed
himself to be humbled at the hand of
God, had he not resisted the chastening which
God wrought through his own brothers, he would
not have been in that place and in
that time, and in that condition, to have
been the instrumentality by which God saved the
same brothers who had cast him into the
pit, and out of whose loins and seed
was to come the generations of Israel, and
that one out of Judah, who is Judah's
lion.
And so his master saw that the Lord
was with him, and that the Lord made
all that he did to prosper in his
hand, and Joseph was a goodly person and
well-favored, and in the seventh verse we
read, and it came to pass after these
things.
Isn't it fantastic?
You think you've gone through it.
You've survived your dungeon experience.
You've been brought down and humbled at the
hand of God and he's lifted you up,
but then there's something that yet awaits you.
You're blessed for a season, but it's only
the beginning of things.
It came to pass after these things that
his master's wife cast her eyes upon Joseph,
and she said, lie with me.
Precious children, if ever there's going to be
a theme struck by the spirit of this
world and resounded again and again and again
in increasing volume and crescendo, it's going to
be the cry of Potiphar's wife, that succulent
babe of Egypt, lie with me.
I tell you there's a brand of temptation
and invitation to the exercise of the senses
in this generation such as the world has
never seen.
Temptation of such a fierce and burning variety
that few shall be able to resist it.
Orgiastic practices and devilish things concocted out of
hell and disseminated not just in dark places
of the earth, but in the midst of
flowering civilizations to bring them to their knees
within a generation.
I've seen it already having lived a year
in Scandinavia.
What kind of filth Satan can pour out
and break civilizations a thousand year old?
What then shall it be for us who
are Johnny-come-latelys on the scene celebrating
our Declaration of Independence just a few centuries
old, when these enormous temptations, these great things
shall reach right into the pit and nook
and cranny of every vestibule and home and
school and street.
We'll get it out of our television tubes
and out of our radios and our conversation.
The very atmosphere is going to be charged
with, come lie with me.
What is the essence of discipleship?
It's the same as the essence of Jewishness
and it's in Joseph's answer, but he refused.
I thank God that I'm a theological simpleton.
I know nothing about theology and God has
not allowed me to know.
And I know that there's a great issue
that has been raging through the centuries about
Arminianism and Calvinism, about free will and determinism,
whether all is the sovereignty of God or
whether all is the free will of men.
I don't understand it and I don't want
to know, but this I know.
He refused.
Paul determined not to know anything but Christ
and Him crucified.
There's something required from us.
Our will.
But he refused and said unto his master's
wife, Behold, my master doesn't know what is
with me in this house and has committed
all things he has to my hand.
There's none greater in this house than I,
neither have they kept back anything from me
but thee, because thou art his wife.
How then can I do this great wickedness
and sin against God?
I have to confess people with great embarrassment
and shame that I had no conception whatsoever
of the meaning of the word sin right
up and through and beyond the time of
my own salvation.
I didn't come to the Lord as a
broken sinner.
I came to the Lord as one who
recognized that he's the way, the life and
the truth and that I could not, being
a Jew and a man of integrity, who
respected truth, turn from him.
It was subsequent to that that the Spirit
began in very gracious stages to reveal to
me what my own nature in life is.
And I don't think I've yet come to
a place where I have the horror of
sin that I ought.
Many of us have been completely disheveled and
have not been able to understand how it
is that God could have asked of Abraham
that he take Isaac, the son whom thou
lovest, and make of him an offering in
the mount that I shall show you.
And it says that he rose up early
in the morning and saddled his ass and
took his servants and his son, and he
went.
No ifs, ands, buts, and hows.
Well, we know that God had been grooming
him in the art of obedience, but even
that doesn't fully explain it.
Until I came to a statement by a
writer by the name of Myers, and he
said something like this.
He said, even the filthy Canaanitish peoples who
are contemporaries of Abraham, knew something of the
horror of sin and that a holy God
must be requited.
Why is it that the world has not
been able to understand that God had to
send his only begotten son and make of
him a sacrifice and atonement for our sin?
The problem is this.
They have no understanding of the horror of
sin.
No understanding of the offense against the holy
God.
We make a mistake in preaching Jesus prematurely
to a Jewish people who yet have no
need.
And I don't know whether I'm rewriting the
book on Jewish evangelism or contradicting the methodology
of Jewish missions, but I believe that our
first thing, and I think it's consonant with
the scriptures, is to bring men to a
place of repentance.
It's repent and believe the gospel.
Believing is a function of repenting.
And Jesus makes no sense to a man
who's self-sufficient, fully assured, and completely persuaded
that he's absolutely righteous and has no need.
Men's souls must be broken first of the
understanding that they've offended against the holy God.
So something needs to be exuded from us
that there is such a God.
Something, a presence needs to be created by
those of us who believe that men coming
into it shall break and sob and fall
on their faces for things that are inexplicable
and for which they cannot identify and find
themselves within a few minutes calling upon the
name of the Lord, which name was a
bone in their throat which they could not
even have uttered all through their lives.
How about this Joseph when he cried out,
how then can I do this great wickedness
and sin against God?
Four centuries before God thundered the law from
Sinai, this Jewish man knew that adultery was
a great offense against God.
Here we are on the other side of
Sinai.
We've had thousands of years to live with
the Ten Commandments and the world can recite
its provisions glibly.
And we even have gone beyond that, we
who believe by the Spirit of God and
yet have not the sense of sin and
offending against the holy God.
That Joseph had.
How then can I do this great wickedness
and sin against God?
I think it's going to be incumbent upon
us to have this great conviction that Joseph
had both of the nature of sin and
the nature of the holiness of God for
the two go together.
If we're going to stand in an hour
and a day when the Spirit of Potiphar's
wife is going to reach out into every
aspect of life and come and daily cry,
come lie with me.
Well, we know what the outcome was.
That on an occasion when he was about
his business, doing his master's business in the
house and there was no other servant there
that she clutched at his garment and again
tried to persuade him to lie with me.
And we read in the 12th verse, she
left his garment in her hand and fled
and got him out.
Faith is always an act.
Do you know that?
Whether it's an act of speech or something
of volition that results in some manifestation through
result of human energy.
And in this instance, leaving.
I don't know how many times the Lord
has brought me to peculiar places where a
precious young Christian couple will come and say,
Art, will you pray for me?
We're engaged or we think it's time to
be married, but we're having a terrible time
lusting after one another.
Pray for me.
So I say, well, what point?
I'll pray for you.
And then you'll continue to see each other
privately and alone and in a car.
And if you'll make provision for the lust
of the flesh, you shall surely experience them.
The prayer is in vain.
He fled and got him out.
And I think that God shall bring us
to such situations where something shall be required
of us by an act of volition and
will to flee and to get out.
This is the meaning of Jewishness, and this
is part of the meaning of discipleship.
And you know what the consequence is going
to be?
Because of your virtue, because of your whole
commitment to a God who is holy, holy,
holy, because you cannot do this great wickedness
and sin against him, you're going to be
lied against and reviled against, and you're going
to suffer for Christ's sake.
Because what happened?
The wife told the husband just the reverse,
that this servant tried to take advantage of
me in your absence.
The husband was enraged, and Joseph was cast
again into a dungeon.
The consequence of obedience to God in this
world is persecution.
It was for Jesus, it was for Joseph,
and it is and always shall be for
everyone who shall follow God in complete obedience.
The master's wrath was kindled, and Joseph's master
took him and put him into the prison,
a place where the king's prisons were bound,
and he was there in prison.
But the Lord was with Joseph and showed
him mercy.
I think that Richard Wurmbrand, how many of
you know of him?
This Jewish brother, 13 years in communist prison
camps, three and a half years in solitary
confinement, banged out of shape and extended beyond
anything that the human mind and psyche can
take, and yet in the depth of what
he had to receive at the hands of
the world, God was with him.
And I've heard this great saint of God
out of his own lips say, I would
never exchange that experience.
He came to such an intimacy and knowledge
of God as available to only those who
know him in the fellowship of his sufferings.
But God was with Joseph.
The Lord showed him mercy, and made to
prosper again many things at his hand.
He received favor while he was again in
prison.
And we know what happened, that he was
able to interpret the dream of two men,
the pharaoh's baker and butler.
And as a result of that, in time,
his fame came to the attention of the
pharaoh at a time when the pharaoh himself
was in great extremity and crisis.
He had a dream.
And in the 41st verse, we read that
in the 8th verse, it came to pass
in the morning that his spirit was troubled,
and he sent and called for all the
magicians of Egypt, and all the wise men
thereof.
And pharaoh told them his dream, but there
was none that could interpret them unto pharaoh.
People, we've come again to that hour.
There's no man so brilliant.
There's not a man wise enough in all
Egypt that can unravel the mystery of the
complexity of this civilization.
We stand at the ultimate crisis.
And men are going to be beside themselves
with fear and with terror.
And there's not going to be a computer
made or a man so brilliant, a wise
man in Egypt that shall be able to
interpret this dream.
But someone's going to be brought up out
of a dungeon, out of obscurity, out of
foolishness.
A banged up piano, a thing that has
no promise in its outward appearance.
A foolish Hebrew shall be brought up out
of a dungeon, and his face shall be
washed, and his head shaved, and clothing shall
be put upon him, and he's going to
be brought into the court of the pharaoh.
And look at the answer when pharaoh begins
to look upon this Jew.
And remember how despised the Hebrews were by
the Egyptians.
They looked upon as lowly sheepherders, a secondary
race of men.
Not worthy of their admiration.
The 16th verse, Joseph answered Pharaoh saying, It
is not in me.
God shall give Pharaoh an answer of peace.
It's not in me.
I came not in human preaching and eloquence,
but in demonstration and power by the Spirit.
The answer is not in me.
And so Joseph, by the Spirit, was able
to interpret the dream of Pharaoh, which all
the wise men of Egypt were not able
to do.
And because of the ability to interpret that
dream, and by that to make provision both
for Egypt and ultimately for Israel, a people
survived.
I often think to myself, What would have
happened if Joseph had failed to correctly interpret
that dream?
You see, guys, this is no light business.
This is no kind of a thing like
trial and error.
Well, if you make it, great.
But if we miss it, okay.
The Lord is preparing us now.
And I think of the question that came
forth yesterday afternoon by the fellow who was
sitting by that side of the room.
Well, how do you know there's still a
small voice of God?
How do you know what the will of
God is?
How do I know that it's God's voice?
How do I know what He wants?
And many answers went forth about the bat
that learns by experience, by continual bumpings of
its head, finally to discern the sense of
space and things.
And out of our own experience, how we
catch it one time and miss it another,
God is preparing us and training us.
The discernment of the Spirit is not a
thing easily obtained.
And Brother Paul spoke about the thing that
comes by practice.
I think that this is one of the
great virtues of being in the body of
Christ.
That in our small body situations relating one
to another face to face, we can attempt
to raise our eaglet wings.
We can dare in God and be bold
in God and seek to express ourselves in
the Spirit.
And it shall not be a pure stream,
especially at the first.
But as we go on trying ourselves in
that situation where we can afford to take
such risks, we can come into a larger
situation like this where believers have come from
different parts of the country.
And when we feel the prodding of the
Spirit and we sense that discernment to speak
forth the thing of God, and even then
we shall not hit it perfectly.
But what shall happen when we shall come
later this year in Dallas and have a
great convocation of all of the Messianic Jews
of this country and all of the Jewish
charismatic ministries and want to hear exquisitely and
perfectly the Word of God for this hour
to lead us, then we can't afford to
miss it.
We've got to know exactly when to stop
playing the piano, when to stop singing, when
the speaker must speak, when it is that
we're hearing a true prophetic word, when it
is that hands are to be laid on,
when it is that we're not to speak
at all.
I'm not sure that there should have been
any preaching at all last night.
The glory of God was so manifest, I
knew it as soon as I came to
this pulpit, that nothing was required from flesh.
That God was wanting the priests out of
the sanctuary, out of the Holy of Holies,
that His Yerkinah glory could have filled it,
that we would have seen the fire fall
and we would have fallen on our faces
and cried out, the Lord, He is God,
the Lord, He is God.
We've got to know.
And I can't think of any more precious
gift of the Spirit than the discerning of
spirits, the interpreting, if you will, of dreams,
the ability to understand.
When all the world is confused and is
desperately groping like blind men, staggering in darkness
for answer, that a lowly Hebrew raised out
of a dungeon can speak perfectly the wisdom
of God, discerning by the Spirit what the
will of God is and give Pharaoh answer.
I'll tell you that Joseph's answer was so
right on that the Pharaoh was stunned and
all the wise men of Egypt with him.
And we read in the 38th verse the
kind of compliment that the Pharaoh, the very
symbol and type of Satan himself had to
make for this lowly Hebrew.
And Pharaoh said unto his servants, can we
find such a one as this, a man
in whom the Spirit of God is?
This is the definitive Judaism of God.
This is true Jewishness.
This is discipleship.
Can we find such a one as this
in whom the Spirit of God is?
And Pharaoh said unto Joseph, for as much
as God hath showed thee all this, there
is none so discreet and wise as thou
art.
Paul spoke in Corinthians about the mystery of
God, the wisdom of God revealed by His
Spirit unto us.
It's foolishness to the world and boggles their
minds and confounds them and drives them to
a fury.
But it's the way of God and it
has ever and always been the way.
And when Jewish people say, are you trying
to convert me?
Are you trying to bring me into some
new thing?
I believe in the traditions of Judaism.
I've got something sacrosanct, something old, something tempered
by generations.
Something redolent with antiquity where when we sing
in our synagogue and this great heritage goes
forth.
Well, it's beautiful, but there's something much richer.
There's something much deeper, something much more profound,
something that's life-giving.
It goes back to the beginning of time.
Abraham knew it, Isaac, Jacob, every man who
has ever walked with God.
Joseph knew it.
Can we find such a one as this
in whom the Spirit of God is?
This is an hour of restoration and God
is calling men and women, both Jew and
Gentile, back to his original Judaism in whom
the Spirit of God is.
There is none so discreet and wise as
thou.
And Pharaoh himself had a change, Joseph's name.
And it says in the 45th verse that
he called him Zaphnath-pa-aneah.
And in the margin it reads, the translation,
a revealer of secrets.
A man to whom secrets are revealed.
Oh, precious people, accept that we walk as
Joseph walked.
Accept that we know the holiness of God
by intimation because we know him who is
holy because we're in the same relationship that
Joseph was in because we have an affinity
with him by the Spirit and we have
his Spirit and walk by that Spirit.
We shall not be able to reveal the
things which must be discerned for our generation.
We shall not be able to resist the
clutching cries of the Potiphar's wife that says,
come lie with me.
I want to just jump from Joseph to
Daniel.
Same God, same Jewishness, same discipleship, same way.
The first chapter of Daniel, isn't it interesting
that it says that Joseph was a goodly
person and well-favored, that Paul with whom
we began was a man of great natural
endowments.
Daniel himself, we have the sense, was also
well-favored with natural endowments.
But these men did not live and act
out of these things.
In fact, put these things aside.
They were holy men in whom the Spirit
of God was.
It was the glory of God always being
manifest and not themselves.
Here was Daniel who was favored and found
a position of esteem even in exile.
But we read in the eighth verse of
the first chapter, Daniel purposed in his heart
that he would not defile himself with the
portion of the king's meat nor with the
wine which he drank.
Therefore, he requested of the prince of the
eunuchs that he might not defile himself.
People, I don't know what to say about
this verse.
My spirit knows and my heart knows but
my mind is yet unfruitful.
I can't express it.
There's something in that so weighty, so meaningful,
so charged with meaning that you must lay
it upon your heart.
Because there's a world ever about us conspiring
to say, here, taste this, drink of this,
eat that, have a ball.
It won't hurt you.
Come on, don't be so stuffy.
Be groovy.
You could have all this in heaven too.
Daniel purposed in his heart.
Here's that volition, that will again.
He would not defile himself to eat from
the king's table or to drink his drink.
He requested of the prince of the eunuchs
that he might not defile himself and satisfy
himself with simple fare rather than he should
eat from the table of the world.
We're just scratching at the meaning of this
verse but except that we enter into the
spirit of its meaning in our own experience,
people, we shall not be a Daniel nor
a Joseph nor a Paul to our generation.
No wonder that God loved these men so
and favored their lives so by his spirit.
And in ninth verse you read, God had
brought Daniel into favor and tender love with
the prince of the eunuchs.
And the 17th verse, as for these four
children, God gave them knowledge and skill in
all learning and wisdom and Daniel had understanding
in all visions and dreams.
Another one, just like Joseph, a discerner, not
because of his own brilliance or his own
ability.
God gave them knowledge.
God is the giver of every good and
perfect gift.
The father of lights in whom is no
shadow nor variableness of turning.
And this is why the world despises God's
way.
I'll never forget one time speaking at a
college in California and some of you may
have heard this episode related.
And I finished speaking and several people came
up to me and among them was a
professor from the school with his wife, professor
of psychology.
The man was trembling from head to foot.
Mr. Katsy said, as you were speaking tonight,
he said, I just felt the breath of
God on my neck, he said.
And in so many words, his question was,
what must I do to be saved?
I told him, believe on the Lord Jesus
Christ and thou shalt be saved.
And right there on that gymnasium floor, I
gave him an invitation to call upon the
name of the Lord and be saved.
And I looked at that man's face, why
it was horrified and stunned.
He was so utterly disappointed.
And I knew in a moment what he
wanted.
He wanted me to say, well, you go
out and write a paper a dissertation on
the anatomy of the conversion experience and its
psychological ramifications and nuances.
And if you'll get an A from God,
you'll be saved.
Men want to do, they want to show
themselves.
They want to enter into their own glory.
But God, but God, but God gave them
knowledge and skill in all learning and wisdom.
There's a God who is wanting to make
available to us all things, who the fullness
of the God, of the Godhead bodily is.
And we are made complete in Him.
And we can experience this the moment that
we're ready to empty ourselves of the things
that we want to do for God and
how we want to serve God out of
our own flesh, out of our own skill,
out of our own ability.
The world has had a long exposure to
that.
And it's availed nothing.
Well, that man would not receive the salvation
of God that night.
He was disappointed.
But there was a tugging at my sleeve.
And it was his little wife who had
not said a word.
She stood there in complete silence.
And she said a little troubling words.
Mr. Ketchy said, I'll have it.
She was a little bad at piano.
But she said, I feel self-conscious in
the middle of this, this gymnasium, the Holy
Spirit said, can't we go outside?
I said, okay.
We went right outside.
It was pitch black outside that building, right
on the sidewalk.
I think she was a Methodist or Presbyterian,
something like that.
But never knew the Lord, never had his
spirit.
The world could not say of her one
in whom the spirit of God is.
And in fact, she said, I don't even
know how to pray.
She said, you pray and I'll follow you.
So I just recited a very simple prayer
for salvation.
And she just followed me word for word,
very simply, just like a child.
And the moment we finished, I felt the
pressure of a hand come down on my
scalp.
And I heard that voice.
It said, thou art my servant in whom
I am well pleased.
It was well pleasing unto God.
A simple woman, crying out, not even knowing
how to pray.
But God gave her his spirit, his salvation,
as he's the giver of every good and
perfect gift, but God.
And so in the second chapter, we see
that Daniel was brought to a situation much
like Joseph.
Again, a dream that the wise men not
only could not interpret, but they could not
even describe.
And the Chaldeans in the 10th verse answered
before the king and said, there's not a
man upon the earth that can show the
king the matter.
Therefore, there is no king, lord, nor ruler
that asks such things that any magician or
astronomer, astrologer or Chaldean.
That's the place where we've come in the
modern world.
There's not a sociologist or a physicist or
a psychologist or a Freud or a Karl
Marx that that's brilliant enough to help us
out of our ultimate predicament.
And it's a rare thing that the king
requires.
While there's none other that can show it
before the king, except the gods whose dwelling
is not with flesh.
I'll tell you, my heart is all the
more pierced when I hear men who are
unsaved speaking in prophetic wisdom.
Have you ever had that experience where sometimes
some completely spiritually unleaded person who knows not
God inadvertently will say something that will tear
your heart to pieces.
They have stumbled upon some truth of God
as these magicians, these astrologers and wise men.
They knew intuitively only God can give answer
to this whose dwelling is not with flesh.
People, that is the fixed principle of God.
In a sense, he dwells.
Of course, it's true in earthen vessels, but
his dwelling, his presence, his power, his wisdom
is not with flesh.
Even the priests had to come out of
the holy of holies, though they were clothed
in white vestments and were ordained so to
do.
Yet the Shekinah glory of God could not
fall until all flesh was out.
His dwelling is not with flesh.
And what is God doing with us through
these days from the very first night of
the beginning of this conference without any preaching,
with just the simple leading of the spirit
who spoke one word, introduce.
And one by one, we came up and
we introduced each other and the spirit of
God just began to come over us like
billows.
And we ended up that night, several of
us on our faces, broken and heaving and
sobbing before God in that room, breaking us
in the deeps, flushing out, cracking, cutting, taking
away flesh for his dwelling is not with
flesh.
And so Daniel came before this great ruler
that desired explanation.
And we read in 19th verse.
Then was the secret revealed unto Daniel in
a night vision.
And Daniel blessed the God of heaven and
Daniel answered and said, blessed be the name
of God forever and ever.
For wisdom and might are his and he
changes the times and the seasons.
He removes kings and sets up kings.
He giveth wisdom unto the wise and knowledge
to them that know understanding.
He revealeth the deep and secret things.
He knoweth what is in the darkness and
the light dwelleth with him.
I don't want to be any more Jewish
than Daniel.
God takes from me every Yiddish kite, every
flourish, every kind of synagogue enhancement.
But let me be a Jew as Daniel
was.
Let me understand who God is.
That he is the giver of every good
and perfect gift.
He's the revealer of secret things.
The light dwelleth with him.
Every true Jew knows in every fiber and
atom of his being that God is the
source of all.
And the great work of God with us
Jews who have been 15, 20, and 30,
and 40 or more years in the world
operating out of our own flesh, out of
our own ability, out of our own zeal,
out of the very endowments which God has
given us to serve him, to bring us
out of the one Judaism and into the
other.
And it begins by determining not to know
anything but Christ and him crucified.
The 28th verse, there is a God in
heaven that revealeth secrets and maketh known to
the king Nebuchadnezzar what shall be in the
latter days.
The 29th verse, he that revealeth secrets maketh
known to thee what shall come to pass.
And so it was revealed.
And when we find the reaction just like
the Pharaoh in the story of Joseph, here
this king in the story of Daniel, and
in the 46th verse of the second chapter,
then the king Nebuchadnezzar fell upon his face
and worshiped Daniel and commanded that they should
offer an oblation and sweet odors unto him
the way that men almost sought to worship
Paul and thought verily that he was a
god.
And almost in a sense he was because
it was no longer he that lived but
Christ who lived in him.
It was Christ they saw through that earthly
tabernacle and they were ready to worship the
Lord of glory in Paul.
He was ready to worship the Lord of
glory in our brother Daniel.
They were so one with God that to
see them was to see God.
That's why Jesus could say to his own
disciples, have you been so long with me
that you don't see the Father?
If you've seen me, you've seen the Father.
I and the Father are one.
And precious people and those of you who
know me, my heart's cry is that the
day will come when my people will look
at me and not give me this business
and chuck me under the chin because they
see a Jew whom they recognize as a
kinsman with themselves or they'll be impressed, say
this art, he's really a talker and wonderful
natural endowments and gifts but they'll be stunned
unto silence because they'll see through this earthly
thing, this piece of clay, the God of
glory.
Of a truth it is, the king said,
that your God is a God of gods
and a Lord of kings and a revealer
of secrets, seeing thou couldest reveal this secret.
I'll never forget when I spoke at the
University of California, Santa Barbara, the power of
God was so manifest, the glory of God.
And the moment I finished speaking, a Jewish
man got up to count to me who
was a professor of psychology and an Israeli
and he took me to task.
I was never so stripped bare before men
in my life.
He didn't like the way I spoke.
He didn't care for my addiction.
He didn't like my personality.
He certainly didn't like my message.
He said it was an intellectual embarrassment.
It brought him back into the Middle Ages
that if he had known that that was
what I was going to speak, he never
would have come.
And he went on and on like that
and he just left me stripped.
And I remember concluding the meeting that night,
I said, Jesus said that his sheep would
hear his voice.
And I've been told that I'm not allowed
to pray publicly.
It's against the rules of this institution but
I just want to commend a prayer to
you for your availability.
And I just breathed a prayer for salvation
and then we closed the meeting.
And when it was over, some people started
to come forward and the first one was
a dark haired girl with dark eyes.
I took one look at that face, Jewish
from the word go, beaming with light and
rimmed with tears and trembling.
I said, sis, I said, you're Jewish, aren't
you?
She said, yes.
I said, something has just happened to you.
Yes.
She said, you said, Mr. Katz, you said
that we were not allowed to pray, it
was against the rules.
She said, but when you prayed that prayer,
she said, I prayed under my breath and
something happened.
And that in that group was another Jew
trembling, a Jewish guy.
He was trembling.
He said, man, he said, you are some
speaker.
The power, he said.
I said, brother, that was not me.
It was of God.
Oh, he said, if that's God, he said,
what can you tell me about myself?
I said, you're a massive, you're a compulsive
masturbator and a slave to your lusts.
They go, I never saw a man so
thoroughly pinned to the wall as that man.
He was wholly disarmed and the air just
went out of him.
The guy was trembling.
I could just, demon spirits had such sway
in that life.
I said, I'm just going to pray for
you.
May I?
Well, he was Jewish enough to want it.
And I just took authority over those spirits
and I commanded them to be still in
the name of Jesus and not to interfere
with the working of God's spirit.
And then in two or three minutes, this
man who thought he had seen a demonstration
of something human, followed me in prayer and
received the Lord and came to a perfect
peace and left that place saved.
We need to be a revealer of secrets.
We need to be discerners by the spirit.
And I tell you that I'm waiting for
the hour which shall come when there shall
be no flesh.
For God does not dwell with flesh.
When some rabbi or some Meir Kahane or
some Mark Tannenbaum or some Jewish leader of
the community who has raged against us and
thought that we're men who are seeking our
own purposes shall face us in a face
-to-face confrontation and we should just stand
in a perfect peace of God and speak
something revealed by the spirit discerned about that
man's life and say something that shall break
him wide open and he shall fall at
our feet and say, surely God is with
thee.
Of a truth, your God is the God
of gods, a Lord of kings and a
revealer of secrets, seeing that thou couldest reveal
this secret.
Oh, people, I'm constrained.
We're in a battle.
This is a war.
Lives are at stake.
We're not playing games.
We don't need the gifts of the spirit
to add extra luster and sparkle for meetings
and to services.
God has equipped us with the magnitude and
the power and the glory of his spirit.
Can we find such a one as this
in whom the spirit of God is that
we might go forth in a world that
has exalted in its own strength, in its
own flesh, in its own power, in its
own mind and reveal the things that shall
set them free?
I want to end today in the New
Testament.
Same discipleship, same Jewishness, same way.
It's never changed.
And my example here, and I could have
chosen from many, but I just feel especially
kindred in the book of Acts to the
disciple Stephen.
Surely the Lord spoke of him prophetically last
night.
The sixth chapter of Acts were introduced to
this Jewish man.
Was there ever a more inauspicious introduction?
Was there ever a more battered piano used
of God?
A crummy waiter on tables.
Here are we, bachelor's degrees, master's degrees, PhDs,
many of us.
God delights in choosing foolish things.
They chose Stephen, we read in the second
verse, to serve on tables.
The third verse of the sixth chapter of
the book of Acts, Wherefore, brethren, look ye
out among you, seven men of honest report,
full of the Holy Ghost and wisdom.
Can we find such a one as this
in whom the Spirit of God is?
Full of the Holy Ghost and wisdom.
Fifth verse, and they chose Stephen, a man
full of faith and of the Holy Ghost.
And in the eighth verse, and Stephen full
of faith and power, did great wonders and
miracles among the people.
The tenth verse, and they were not able
to resist the wisdom and spirit by which
he spoke.
The fifteenth verse, and all they that sat
in the council, looking steadfastly on him, saw
his face as it had been the face
of an angel.
And we know that Stephen was brought into
confrontation with the wisest men of his generation.
Men schooled in the law, great Judaistic debaters,
men full of human counsel and wisdom and
eloquence and gifts.
God brought this foolish battered piano, this lowly
waiter on tables into confrontation with the mightiest
men of his day, and put such words
in his mouth as they could not gainsay.
Seventh chapter, fifty-first verse, you stiff-necked
and uncircumcised and hardeneers, you do always resist
the Holy Ghost.
As your fathers do, so do ye.
Which of the prophets have your fathers not
persecuted?
You know, we think being led of the
Spirit of God automatically means that necessarily we're
going to be gracious, kindly, soft.
I'll tell you my own experience.
I've experienced that.
I marvel at the stillness which the Spirit
of God brings me to, and the soft
answer which will occasionally be emitted out of
my mouth, or no answer.
And many of the time that students will
come up to me after a fiery encounter
on a campus when men have nodded their
fists in my face and called me fanatic
and madman, and practically gnashed at me with
their teeth, and hurled such insults at me
as flesh could hardly bear.
And men will come up, all the Jewish
men after me, and say, brother, I didn't
believe, agree with a word you said, but
how did you stand in the midst of
that storm and take it?
I don't understand it.
That's the thing that impressed them.
There's a Spirit of God who will give
us a peace in the eye of the
storm.
There's a Spirit of God that will give
us a soft word that will still the
wrath of human hearts.
But I'll tell you that there's a Spirit
of God that spoke through Jesus and cried
out to Pharisees, hypocrites, whited sepulchres, dead men's
bones.
Say, oh, that's not loving.
When the Spirit of God gives utterance, that
is love for that moment.
And I've long ago stopped deciding whether to
speak softly as a lamb or to roar
like a lion.
When God will have us as lowly waiters
of tables who have laid aside their human
accomplishments and endowments, when we'll allow God to
bring us to places out of pits and
out of dungeons, broken, when He shall exalt
us who are humbled, when there shall be
no flesh dwelling with God, we shall also
find ourselves by the Spirit of God moved
on some occasions to bleat like lambs and
on other occasions to roar like lions.
He knows.
It's His wisdom.
It's His power.
He's all in all.
We are complete in Him.
What's the reaction to our obedience to that
Spirit?
Ever and always the same.
When they heard these things in the 54th
verse, they were cut to their heart and
they gnashed on Him with their teeth.
But He, being full of the Holy Ghost,
looked up steadfastly unto heaven and saw the
glory of God and Jesus standing on the
right hand of God.
And they cried out with a loud voice
and stopped their ears and ran upon Him
with one accord and cast Him out of
the city and stoned Him.
59th verse, And they stoned Stephen who, calling
upon God, saying, Lord Jesus, receive my Spirit.
And he kneeled down and cried with a
loud voice, Lord, lay not this sin to
their charge.
And when he had said this, he fell
asleep.
When Joseph was cast into the dungeon and
the Lord was with him.
And when Stephen died by inches, the stones
crunching into his flesh and his nose and
into his eyes and the blood running into
his eyes and down his mouth and down
into his body, dying by inches.
He yet spoke by the Spirit with a
sweet voice and a transcendent posture before men
and before God.
The heavens were opened and he saw things
which are not afforded to all men to
see.
Fernbrand said, I will never exchange my years
in that concentration, in that camp.
The proximity of God, the closeness of him,
the fellowship of his sufferings, the last utterance
out of God's men whom the Spirit of
God is, not anger, not recrimination, not saying
you're going to get yours.
He kneeled down and cried out with a
loud voice, Lord, lay not this sin to
their charge.
And when he said this, he fell asleep.
There's a Jewish man there by whose feet
the cloaks of those who stoned this Jewish
martyr rested.
Brilliant man, full of great human endowments, towering
intellectual, prized student of the Rabbi Gamaliel, ticketed
for stardom, priding himself in his Jewishness, Hebrew
of the Hebrews, full of zeal according to
the law, looking at this lowly Jew, a
waiter on tables, dying magnificently and saying, Lord,
lay not this sin to their charge.
There's no adherence to law that could ever
raise such an expression of equanimity and poise
and love for one's persecutor as Stephen spoke
that day.
I speak especially right now in these concluding
moments to my Jewish brothers and sisters because
we know each other better than anyone in
the world.
We're a hard people.
We're a stiff, naked people.
We're a proud people.
We're a gainsaying people.
We're unusually endowed and we've exalted in our
endowments.
What is it going to take to save
such a people as this?
How many times have we come away licking
our wounds, frustrated, defeated, having seen no result
of our endeavor to speak to our own
kinsmen to induce them to believe on the
Lord Jesus.
I see this pole as a kind of
a symbol, the, what can I say, the
embodiment of all that is traditionally Jewish.
Not just the synagogue goers, but the quintessence
of Jewishness of which I practiced being an
atheist for 35 years, never darkening a synagogue
doorstep and yet utterly Jewish as anyone who
most regularly goes to synagogues because the essential
Judaism of our people is this, a confidence
in faith.
A trusting in the arm of flesh, exalting
man and not God.
For all its religious vocabulary, this is its
ultimate dependency and its ultimate condition.
Full of Yiddish kite, but just strip that
bare and what do you see?
An exaltation of the things which are of
the world, the flesh and the devil.
Paul saw this lowly waiter on tables dying
magnificently by the spirit even as he lived.
So did he die.
And his last prayer was for God's mercy
for those who were killing him.
No wonder later the Lord Jesus when he
spoke to him out of that blinding light
said, soul, soul, why do you kick against
the pricks?
From that day forth there was something that
was registered in his soul and heart and
mind from which he could not turn.
He saw a demonstration as King Nebuchadnezzar of
old, as the Pharaoh before him, of something
that is not with flesh.
It was a manifestation of the glory of
God.
Nothing else can explain it.
This is definitive Judaism.
This is true Jewishness.
This is true discipleship.
Discipleship is nothing but the continual dependence upon
God through Christ for all of life.
For we are complete in him.
The continuous in-breathing and working of the
Holy Spirit is the essence of that life.
Can we find such a one as this
in whom the Spirit of God is?
And Stephen, full of faith and the Holy
Ghost, full union and utter dependence upon the
ultimate Jew, the root Yeshua HaMashiach, Jesus the
Christ.
To be Jewish is to be in him.
He's the ultimate Jew, people.
In him we live and move and have
our being.
Jesus Christ, Yeshua HaMashiach, the wisdom and the
power of God.
What is discipleship?
Whole separation from the world.
It's a Daniel who will not eat nor
drink at the king's table.
It's a Joseph who will not lie with
her but refused.
It's a selflessness and utter recognition that God
is all.
The answer is not in me.
God will give you answer.
But God.
It's purity of motive.
It's love for and intimacy, relationship with God,
knowing him by his person.
That even before the law is thundered, we
know that it's a great offense against God
to do this great wickedness in his sight.
God is bringing us to such a relationship,
people.
The law was a substitute for relationship.
God had to give men by edict and
by postulation and by dictum what we should
have known by intuition.
And when you'll find that rare marriage, when
a husband and wife can look at each
other and know what it is that pleases
the other.
He doesn't have to ask us, sweetie, do
you need a drink of water?
He looks at the face and he gets
up and he goes and he brings it.
That's the relationship to which God is bringing
us and is working in our hearts and
lives.
Because I tell you people that God is
bringing us to such an hour when no
edict, no thing which is expostulated is going
to suffice.
We're not going to be able to operate
by the numbers.
But in such situations, Mike said to me
last night up in my room after the
meeting was over, he said, Artie said, I
was flustered.
I've never been in such a situation like
this where I sense the glory of God.
He said, I was not even myself.
I didn't know even how to speak.
That's why I stopped short.
And he said, the lights distracted me from
the camera.
I said, Brother Mike, if you can't operate
with lights distracting you from the camera, what
shall you do when you shall be in
a thick of a howling mob and men
shall be ready to gnash their teeth upon
you and will you be distracted then?
God is grooming us to a time when
we shall be in such places that we
cannot turn to answers by the numbers.
We cannot think, well, what did I do
in a situation like this last time?
Or what does it say in the scriptures?
Or as someone said last night, yesterday, where
will I find the biblical principles?
In that moment, there's going to be only
one leading by the discernment of the Spirit
of God to those in whom the Spirit
of God is who are full of faith
and the Holy Ghost.
And I'll tell you, when you'll be obedient
to operate by it, you know what it
shall bring upon you.
Reproach, suffering, persecution, and death.
Utter abandonment, whole commitment, trust in God, even
unto that death.
Yea, though you slay me, yet will I
trust you.
It's going before the Pharaoh.
It's going before King Nebuchadnezzar and giving answer,
trusting that this is the Spirit of God
speaking.
Because if you miss it, it's going to
be...
But being prepared to miss it because you've
wholly cast and utterly abandoned your life upon
him.
It's the willingness to suffer what we must
because we know that he is a reproach
in the world against its way and against
its spirit.
And to the degree to which he has
the possession of our lives and makes himself
manifest in through us, the world shall react
to that as it reacted to him.
And all this in a consistent daily walk
by the Spirit.
This isn't a prescription for the great and
heroic moments.
This is the prescription for the everyday.
In our relationship with each other, in the
great naturalness and ease and flow by the
Spirit, when we shall at the kitchen table
and breakfasting one with another and raising our
spoon to our lips, hear coming forth a
word of wisdom to set a brother free.
The ministry of the Spirit for the body
or being in relationship with our Jewish people,
giving them a sermon by the Spirit, a
revelation of their own need and the character
and life that shall bring them to their
feet, to their knees before the Holy One
of Israel.
In a word, people, discipleship is Jewishness and
Jewishness is discipleship.
God told me that last night.
It's one and the same.
To be a disciple is to be Jewish
and to be truly Jewish is to be
a disciple, one in whom the Spirit of
God is.
Let's bow our heads now, shall we?