I don't think that we can pray that
until we are ready.
Yeah, that's what I mean.
But the church is then permitted also, having
the authority to pray, that the judgment is
held until the church is ready.
Is that true, too?
Yeah, it will not be a consideration until
we're ready, until we ourselves have passed through
it.
So the invitation to pray is really the
invitation to set in motion those redemptive things
that will enable us to pray lightly.
It's not an invitation to a cheap verbalization
that dismisses obligation.
It's a prayer that opens the door to
God to bring into our own life, corporately
as the church and into our lives privately,
those redemptive dealings that will help make us
to recognize what, therefore, is necessary for Israel,
and to pray appropriately for them as we
do for ourselves.
I think we need to see our failed
marriages, the collapse of family, children, and rebellion,
various things that we have seen as isolated
phenomenon as being somehow coordinate with this whole
redemptive program of God to get us in
the right place.
And for any of us here now, and
I know increasing numbers personally, of marriages that
have gone asunder almost in a moment, after
a quarter of a century, if you had
the option of getting back to where you
were, reconciled with your wife, and enjoying the
conjugal benefits of marriage, and the certain kind
of harmony, would you prefer that, or would
you rather wait for God to work through
redemptively at that deeper level that requires judgment,
that when there is a reconciliation, you will
enjoy the shalom of God, the peace that
passes understanding, and the marriage that has become
not only a joy rather than a pleasure,
but a glory to God.
We need to put this in, folks.
The issue of the peace of Jerusalem is
not just that Israelis should enjoy it, it
is the ultimate glory of God when that
peace comes.
It's the statement of the conclusion of His
great redemptive work through the church that will
glorify Him forever.
There's got to be a motive for our
peace beyond the benefit that comes to us
in enjoying it.
Can you follow that?
But the temptation, the desire of the flesh
is peace at all costs, absence of conflict,
marital harmony, so to speak.
It's not the issue of God being glorified
through that marriage.
That will require devastation and judgment before it
becomes a glory and peace.
We have to have a stomach for this,
and I would say that only a pilgrim
will have such a stomach.
Only those who are going up.
Because this is what going up means.
If we're satisfied with something less, if we're
satisfied with a mere succession of Sundays, if
we're satisfied with the form of things, with
prayer as a kind of a duty or
a cathartic experience, it's not an ascent.
We're called to a pilgrim walk, and the
end of it is Israel.
Only pilgrims will be able to pray the
Peace of Jerusalem.
Others will either be opposed to that peace
or will ceremonially displace it with a prayer
that is hardly more than a beep.
Either where our prayers are trite, predictable, mechanical,
humanly formed, or we don't pray at all.
We're bereft of inspiration.
We let somebody else do it.
That ought to put us on alert.
Something is rotten in Denmark.
Something is at mishear.
Because the capacity to pray is the statement
of the truth, I'm repeating myself, of where
we in fact are in God.
And if you have not first had your
own devotional time before the Lord in personal
prayer, before you come to the place of
corporate prayer, how then can you sense the
mind of the Lord and the heart of
the Lord to pray with the saints?
Most of us do not come out of
the prayer closet and then into the place
of corporate prayer.
And so we make the place of corporate
prayer to stand for both, and it fails.
We're not going to be capable of public
corporate prayer if we have not a valid
place of personal and devotional prayer in our
own closet.
And I count myself privileged in one of
my visits to London to visit the house
occupied by John Wesley and to see his
literal prayer closet.
He actually had something built.
I can't tell you how it was.
Maybe the size of the broom closet there,
only it was kind of horizontal rather than
vertical.
Barely enough for a man who weighed about
145 pounds to find a place to put
himself before God at the commencement of the
day, which began for him for 65 years
at 4 o'clock in the morning.
But he was also a man who went
to bed for 65 years at 9 o
'clock at night.
He did not dissipate the hours away the
way we do, watching the TV, making small
talk, bumbling around, doing this, getting occupied until
late hours.
When it got dark, he went to bed.
When the sun rose, he got up, and
he began his day with God.
I'm going to be speaking...
I thought to begin with another message.
Maybe it will come tonight or tomorrow.
You can read the text in advance.
Some of you have heard it as I've
spoken it publicly in other places.
It is a paradigm, it's a classic message,
something like Ezekiel 37.
Mark 9, the epileptic boy who was thrown
into the fire and into the water, foaming
at the mouth, whom the disciples could not
deliver and were surprised at their failure, and
who were reprimanded by Jesus, O ye of
little faith, how long must I tolerate you?
And finally, he delivers this young man in
an instant, where they failed.
And then they turn to him and say,
how is it that we could not deliver
him?
Oh, he said, this kind, this ultimate kind,
cometh not out but by fasting and prayer.
We're going to take up that text and
try to understand what Jesus himself was saying
of what is the requisite thing in the
last days for ultimate deliverance, not of an
individual epileptic, but of an epileptic nation, Israel
itself, thrown into the fire, left for dead.
So this issue of prayer, you know what
scares me?
It's becoming a methodology and a technique, like
church growth.
There's a mentality that has its origin in
America, from California, interestingly and significantly, that is
now spreading out to the world, and they're
all looking at us with admiration on how
to do it.
Prayer as methodology, worship as technique, church growth
as statistics.
When Jesus said, this kind cometh not out
by prayer, he was not talking about the
kind that you can learn by a method.
He's talking about something ultimate.
Prayer is the ultimate statement of where we
are in God.
Don't measure yourself by any other reckoning.
Your feelings, your sense of the Lord's presence,
how easily you can break up into tears,
how you're moved by worship, these are all
precious things.
The accurate and unsparing measure is your capacity
for real prayer that pierces through the ceiling
and reaches and touches heaven and obtains answer.
That he hears, that moves him.
It's in accord with his own heart.
There's an agreement between heaven and earth that
brings release.
Prayer of that kind is exceedingly rare, and
until it comes, we will not be able
to cast out that ultimate demonic spirit.
So, pray for the peace of Jerusalem because
those who pray for it may prosper who
love you.
So just let me suggest that this is
not only Israel's deliverance, but our own.
We prosper in proportion to the effectiveness of
our own prayer for Jerusalem.
The church itself will prosper.
Those who love her, and what is prayer
if it's not inspired by love?
What is prayer if it's only antiseptic, mechanical,
compulsory, obligatory?
There's got to be a quotient of love,
but it's not sentimental schmaltz.
It's a loving of Jerusalem because it's the
chosen city of God.
It's because it's the sanctuary and the dwelling
place of the Most High.
Because His honor and His name has everything
to do with the day that will come
when His law shall go forth out of
that city and the word of the Lord
out of Jerusalem.
That's why we love her.
Because He has chosen her.
Because His honor and His glory rest with
her.
And therefore, our prayers, like our faith, work
by love.
But God forbid that that love should be
some kind of sentimental blather.
This is informed love.
This is instructed love.
This is love that comes with the awareness
of what Jerusalem is of God's own choosing.
And we will prosper who love her and
pray for her.
I believe that Israel is the key to
the unity of the church itself.
That every other attempt is a false ecumenicism
based on subduing or removing actual issues of
doctrine as if they no longer count the
issues of truth and finding some basis for
mutuality and accommodation by turning our back on
the truth of God and the faith of
God for which men died and were burned
at the stake.
As if the Protestant Reformation was a needless
exercise and that we could attain now with
Catholicism what somehow they were unable to obtain
in the 16th century and were ready to
die for and call that the unity of
the body of Christ.
That's what we ought to do with that.
I don't think we're going to have a
unity of the body of Christ until we
prosper.
That will be the prospering.
We will be brought together because we are
together over the issue of the city of
God and the restoration of the people of
God and the issue of the glory of
God and that will go forth when peace
prevails in the city of peace.
The word prosper I think has a connotation
of shalom too.
Say that again?
The word prosper there has a connotation of
shalom as well.
Right.
You know it brings peace.
It's an abounding.
It's flourishing to flourish like a healthy plant
and like the lily that was described to
us that came out of the stink of
human sewage to prosper to the shalom of
God.
So deep.
Well, we're fighting for something guys.
We're fighting for words.
We're fighting for meaning.
What does faith mean?
What does prayer mean?
This kind cometh not out but by fasting
and prayer.
What do you mean by prayer?
What do you mean by peace?
Pray for the peace of Jerusalem.
What do you mean by Jerusalem?
Israel is helping us and saving us from
what would otherwise have been an inevitable shallowness.
We would have become non-church in the
midst of our hollow amens and hallelujahs if
it were not for the earnestness of the
issue of Israel in our obligation as the
church that cannot be met on any other
basis or ground than the resurrection life itself.
I say it again.
True prayer is resurrection prayer.
Have you ever heard a prayer out of
your mouth of which you have not been
the author?
And how many of us rehearse our prayers
before we speak them to make sure we
got it all together before we express it
publicly so that we will not be embarrassed?
Have you ever let go and just open
your mouth and let the Lord bring forth
something that will even astonish and surprise you
even though you stumble and choke?
You may have heard me a few times
already these days stumbling over prayer.
I've launched out, but I've not yet reached
the other side.
And I can't quite find the right word.
My spirit knows it, but I can't articulate
it.
But I prefer that than some little smooth,
complete thing that I can articulate and that
doesn't count at all.
I'll tell you, God is more blessed and
more responsive to choke splutterings and gasps for
air and embarrassing inability to find our way
through a prayer than something that is smoothly
spoken that emanates from us.
And as your prayer is, so also your
walk, so also your life, so also your
relationship.
And what are we going to read in
the Psalms?
Where the psalmist says, You are my strength.
Is he being poetic?
He's come into such a relationship with God
as an Old Testament saint that he can
say what we have not yet even dreamed
to aspire.
God has become his strength as well as
his fortress and his high tower and his
peace.
Saints, we're living beneath the glory of the
faith as the called out ones, as the
elect that were predestined.
And it's Israel that is showing us the
disparity between what we are and what we
ought to be.
And until we come to that reality, it
will languish in violence, in corruption.
I can't tell you what Israel's present condition
is.
Prostitution, unpaid foreign labor for people who used
to be occupied with the issues of social
justice.
There are 250 to 500,000 foreign workers
in Israel who have no social security, no
official recognition.
There are no social services.
They are a cheap source of labor for
Jews who don't want to get their hands
dirty.
Other injustices, violence.
Israelis now are becoming terrified over their own
police force in demonstrations.
The horses come riding down on them.
They're beaten with clubs.
They're stupefied that this could happen, that Jews
would inflict this upon Jews.
Corruption in the Knesset.
250 satanic witch covens in Israel attended by
middle and upper class Israeli youth who are
bored.
Shocking statements in the Ministry of Culture of
youth that love films that have to do
with dismembering and torturing and bowels being cut
open There's a whole degradation increasingly day by
day in Israeli civilization and culture.
When you're praying for the peace of Jerusalem,
it's not some icing on the cake to
make nice.
There's got to be a death of God
that brings all of that down and out
and raises up something that will be to
the eternal praise of his glory.
And at the same time it will prosper
us who pray for that peace.
We're wanting in prosperity.
We're anemic and malnourished, lacking in maturity, lacking
in unity.
We're like hitting on only a portion of
our cylinders.
Because God is reserving our prosperity with their
peace.
We're tied in with them.
We cannot have it independent of them.
And those churches that think that they can
are a farce and a hoax.
And they turn up the amplifiers and they
give other seeming indications of prosperity, but it's
not the prosperity of God.
That waits for the same people who will
pray for the peace of Jerusalem.
And those who love her may prosper.
We're caught together with these people.
Their peace is our prosperity.
And our prosperity is their peace.
You can't get away from it.
So I'm accused by significant men in the
church, you've gone off on a tangent Katz.
You've forgotten Christ and you're occupied with Israel.
Yes, there's a place for Israel but not
the central momentous thing that you make it
to be.
I just look at them and I don't
even know how to answer.
The issue of Israel is the issue of
the church.
The issue of the church is the issue
of God's glory.
Inextricable and bound up together.
And that's where most of the church is.
There can't be fervent prayer unless we become
one man.
Unless we become Christians and love the Jew.
We can't have fervent prayer for them.
Those here assembled know the Jew and love
the Jew.
But so many in the church don't know
the Jew.
They don't love the Jew.
Like you said, God chose him.
God chose the Jew.
And maybe that's the reason they don't love
him.
I don't know.
You know what I suspect?
What I suspect is that their love for
God is no greater.
It's one and the same.
That the love of the Jew who are
an obnoxious people, I'm one of the few
exceptions, is the statement of the love of
God that tests our love and its truth
and its authenticity.
If you could love them in the unconditional
love of God, it's only because you love
God and the love of God has should
have been brought in your heart by the
spirit of God.
Any other kind of love is a sham.
And if it's a sham love for Israel,
how do we purport to think that we
have an authentic love for him?
It's one love.
And the test of it is not the
euphoric feeling that we get in choruses, but
in the cold grey dawn, what is our
attitude toward people who are obnoxious, who become
increasingly despicable, and especially when they're going to
be cast out of their nation and pushed
through the nations and be upset, they're going
to be in their least attractive condition, their
most agitating condition, which has always triggered an
unhappy response in Gentiles.
So our response to them will be the
measure of our love.
And our love will be the measure of
our knowledge and love of God.
I'd just like to say that this is
not a statement of the church that if
they find Israel such an offense, that also
the cross ultimately becomes the offense, which forms
such doctrines as the rapture, which leaves the
church lifted out and yet again Israel to
take the full wrath of God.
But ultimately it's not the statement of the
church.
But what is the church?
What is the cross but the revelation of
God?
Where has God been more accurately revealed than
at the cross?
And the Jewish ignorance of God that has
condemned it, its Judaism, to a monotheism of
the most arid kind, stems from the rejection
of the revelation that was ultimate of God
in His righteousness and His mercy exhibited at
the cross.
The issue of the cross is the issue
of God.
And to reject the cross is to reject
God as He has chosen, again, chosen to
reveal Himself most accurately in His suffering and
bearing the judgment He Himself has prescribed, which
He bears in His mercy for others and
reveals Himself in the very act.
Jesus at the cross is God ultimately.
Well, let's take a little break.
Lord, thank You for this exploration.
Just to get into a verse, pray for
the peace of Jerusalem, which had become a
cheap cliché and a glib and easy thing
to perform, has now become for us an
ultimate consideration.
And praise God that it should.
So Lord, thank You for helping us to
break into something, to open it, to examine,
to understand its implications.
What does it mean for us as the
people of God, the pilgrim people of God,
who choose to go up?
Give us now, Lord, more after a break,
when we catch our breath and begin to
ponder, reflect on these things and receive from
You, my God, the conclusion to this portion
that You're putting before us today, for which
we are grateful.
In Jesus' name.
Amen.
Reggie has asked for a few minutes to
share something that the Lord has prompted in
his spirit, so we'll begin with that and
then I'll continue again.
Okay.
Pray for me because I'll have to feel
after this again to even revive the contemplations
that came while I was speaking.
For the most part, this is just a
discussion starter to basically engage your own thoughts
and input around what was just shared.
But as I was speaking about the issue
of prayer, I was moved to think what
kind of church is it that can pray
after this kind?
just the revelation, the recognition rather, that something
is required of the church, that the church
is indeed the key to all that follows.
Of course, God is the catalyst for all
that will press the church into this obedience.
It's as though we require to be straightened
into a corporate obedience and brought to a
place of corporate I ask the question, will
the church, does the church yet have a
death of a corporate kind that's ahead of
her?
So to be identified with Israel requires the
church to come into something.
It brought to mind Peter's words, the judgment
must begin first at the house of God.
Now, that could be looked upon as a
general principle.
But I'm willing to believe that Peter had
this very apocalyptic scenario in mind when he
made that statement.
He recognized the church was the key to
the redemptive drama coming to its conclusion.
And so, in view of what we've heard
in recent days, especially last night, we have
received these great and precious promises.
The church sees itself as largely as those
who have already passed through a judgment and
a death.
And indeed they have, otherwise they would not
exist as the church or the house of
God.
But what then could be said if we
received such great promises as we were reviewed
last night?
What is ahead and required of the church?
Can someone who has received such promises exist?
Come to such a place of travail that
something is birthed that brings them to a
whole new realm that they have never come
to before.
And so as Art was speaking about this
and made reference to the incident in Mark
chapter 9 where the demon-possessed son Jesus
said, This kind goes not out but by
prayer and fasting.
I was reminded about the many passages that
some, I think, declare explicitly but many intimate
that the church will come to something of
a corporate travail and there will be a
depth of intercession very much in analogy to,
say, Daniel when he prayed in Daniel chapter
9 and fasted for 21 days and the
opposing angel that resisted Daniel's prayer if you
recall the story in Daniel chapter 9, from
the very first day that Daniel began to
set his face to seek the Lord and
pray and fast already the prayer was answered.
But as it was sent on its way,
the answer was sent on its way, it
was opposed by heavenly mediaries that were evil.
We get from this our whole view of
the principalities and powers.
So these things are being opposed.
Jerusalem is something of the high ground.
It's like, you know, how Caleb took the
high ground or David, the Jebusite city.
It's an armed fortress in the heavenly.
To liberate Jerusalem requires the church to go
into something of a death and about an
identification of a priestly kind with Israel.
And it's this identification with Israel that alone
can induce the church to the kind of
corporate travail that will bring about a birth
of something in the church, a church come
of age will come to a fullness of
stature that will release something in the heavenly
that will cause the great it will precipitate
the great time of crisis and trouble for
Israel, but it will eventuate in the kingdom
of God itself.
So if the church is called to that
role of intercession, the question that comes, what
kind of church?
And what are the things that God has
ordained to press the church to that ultimate
obedience?
I know that when I come up against
some great crisis or even when I just
feel urgently and utterly after God, it's only
then that I feel the depth and the
roots of my own unbelief.
I see the inadequacy of my faith and
I find myself crying out to God, though
I've partaken of many of his graces and
benefits, it's as though I've never known him
as I yet require to know him.
And I find myself crying out to God
for something that is nothing less than resurrection
from the dead, nothing less at all.
And it's a liberation of freedom.
And it makes me know that I have
not adequately known the truth, because if I
had, the truth would have made me more
free than I presently experience.
And so the question is, is the church
in?
And it's assumed that we are in, so
we're just to pray and so on, or
yet we have to come in, we have
to go in and possess the land.
So, those are some of the thoughts.
And Paul speaks about this this displacement in
the heavenlies of this opposing angelic, what do
you call it, this whole principalities and powers,
that the church has got to penetrate that
so that even though Satan himself would be
cast out of the heavenlies, in order for
this final drama to be placed in motion.
And so I believe the Lord is bringing
judgment to the church.
To, very much what he said to Peter,
when you were young, you girded yourself and
went wherever you would.
But when you come of age, another will
gird you and take you where you would
not have gone.
I believe the Lord is going to so
orchestrate matters upon the earth as it will
press the church into a final crisis.
So that there will be, as it were,
a mountain of opposition.
The church will know that that mountain has
to be removed in order for the kingdom
of God to come and for Israel.
I believe that the church must travail before
Israel will travail.
And it's a mysterious passage in the last
chapter of the book of Isaiah that talks
about two kinds of Zion.
One whose travail is completed before the others
even begin.
So the church will have to travail and
come to a birthing of a kind that
will even bring about the release into heaven
for not only the church, but to come
into this ultimate obedience of faith.
So that their word is very resurrection itself.
And that will set in motion the final
sifting and judgment of Israel.
That will then in turn bring about Israel's
final liberation.
So that Jerusalem will be appraised in the
earth.
So Jerusalem is in every way the high
ground.
And this is the kind of price that
the church is reckoning on paying.
Anytime it prays, thy kingdom come, thy will
be done on earth.
It's requiring us to come up to something.
And to come into a corporate travail, an
intercession that is really nothing less than an
ultimate heave of spirit.
That will literally displace Satan from his entrenchment
in the heavenlies and release the revelation of
the final conflict on the earth that will
complete itself in Israel's ultimate redemption.
So just to garner some of your own
sense and feelings about that, we are not
there.
We must come there together.
It's not enough that a few Caleb's take
the high ground.
Indeed, there may indeed be a remnant, a
Caleb remnant, something of that kind.
But something is going to come and press
the church into a place that it would
not have been able, however well-meaning and,
you know, however earnest and sincere, it would
not have been able to come into that
kind of ultimacy until it was pressed to
it.
I think a true illustration is Peter being
girded by another and taking him where he
would not have gone.
Of course, we know for Peter that was
a cross.
And it will be nothing less for us.
Well, it's clear that the church is inextricably
joined with Israel.
This is the design of God.
And something transfigures the church when it itself
will consciously come into that identification.
To put it another way, if you want
to find one single thing that would explain
the destitution of the church today, the anemic
condition of what's the conference we had years
ago?
The malaise of the church has been the
absence of the centrality of Israel in the
church's own consideration.
It has not seen itself in relationship in
the way that God intends.
And even to interpret that relationship sentimentally is
to have some kind of affinity or interest
does not do it.
There needs to be a recognition of the
other as being oneself.
We are together, the Israel of God.
This is the prodigal son who's returning who
is our flesh and blood.
And we don't resent his return, we share
the joy of the father in his return,
for it glorifies the father in the mercy
that is given to the son.
We're not resentful.
We're not fearful that we're going to lose
some measure of the father's affection that will
now be given to the returning son.
We know the breadth of the father's love.
We know that we are accepted in the
beloved.
We don't have to be reminded by him
that you know that everything that I have
is yours.
We know it.
And therefore we can with largesse, with extravagance,
not only welcome Israel back into the purposes
of God, but at the sacrifice to ourselves
be willing for that return.
In a word, the church is called to
play second fiddle.
You know what that means?
In every symphony orchestra there's a first violinist.
Then there's a second violinist.
The choice solos are played by the first
violinist.
Nobody wants to be second fiddle.
Fiddle is a unicism for the word violin.
The church especially wants the prominent role.
We see that today.
Kingdom now.
The church is going to take over society.
The church is going to bring the kingdom.
The church, the church, the church.
Grandiose ambitions, even the thought that the church
is to evangelize the world and save nations
is a gross distortion of its actual calling.
That happens to be Israel's own function when
Israel is restored as a nation to the
nations.
The church's function is a people from among
all nations for his name.
So even there there's an exaggeration, going beyond
the parameters of God and taking for itself
a larger role.
Such a church would not be willing to
play second fiddle, to come under, to be
the instrument for the bringing forth of another.
So for a Gentile church to pray for
the peace of Jerusalem has such an existential
power that transforms the church and saves it
out of its Gentile ism.
Paul says in Romans 11, when the fullness
of the Gentiles be come in, so all
Israel shall be saved as it is written.
I know that that means something numerical, but
I think it means something qualitative.
I put it this way.
When the church is no longer Gentile, when
it's no longer characterized by a non-Hebraic
posture and mentality, where it's no longer goyish
in its taste and in its conduct and
its televangelist and celebration of personalities, its love
of things big, when it has its Hebraic
root and character manifest, all Israel will be
saved.
All Israel will be moved to jealousy.
For what a profound revelation of the genius
of God as when it is revealed in
Gentiles, who have by the fact of the
faith itself been transformed into Hebrews.
Remember what Paul said?
We're all Gentiles.
Abraham was a Gentile.
He became a Hebrew in the act of
obedience by which he crossed over the river.
Hebrew, the word Hebrew root means one who
crosses over.
So we're being called to being Hebraic, not
in any kind of shallow ethnic, cultural sense,
but in the sense that what is Hebraic
is of God.
This is the mindset of God himself.
This is the disposition of God.
This is the God who loves the things
that are small, hidden, obscure, the cave, the
cross, the hill.
We think as he thinks.
And what is there that God gives that
will break the deep power of our Gentilic
hearts?
It's the ability to pray for the other.
To pray for Jerusalem, to identify with Jerusalem,
to pray out of love has a power
that enables those who love her to prosper,
to come into the fullness of God's own
intention for themselves.
So if you're following me where Paul says
in Romans 11, have they stumbled that they
should fall?
Is God finished with them?
God forbid, he says, you should think that.
But through their fall, salvation has come to
the Gentiles so as to move them to
jealousy.
That in the genius of God, Israel has
been allowed to fall.
Not some accident of a virtuous nation that
would otherwise have succeeded.
Its fall is implicit in its own sin.
But it's not a finish for that nation.
It's opening up a way for Gentiles to
come into the faith that would have been
blocked for them.
And now they have a purpose for their
salvation beyond themselves.
Namely, to move Israel to jealousy.
Take a moment to reflect on this.
This is a saving grace for Gentiles.
For the cancer of the modern world is
self-interest.
And we bring that even into the church
in being preoccupied.
Our meetings, our ministry, our fellowship, our program.
That same deep-seated egocentricity is a cancer.
What is God's provision?
That by their fall, salvation has come to
you.
Not that you should enjoy it as a
thing unto yourself and for yourself alone, but
so as to move them to jealousy.
There's a purpose for your salvation beyond yourself.
It's for them.
And unless you see that and do that,
you're not going to enjoy salvation.
Your salvation is going to be limited and
restricted.
It'll be a mean and narrow salvation.
The expansive thing that enables you to prosper
is when you extend yourself to them.
Your salvation is for them.
And who's the them?
The despised people of the earth who have
no attractiveness in themselves and will become increasingly
unattractive in the last days.
In fact, they will become so that they
will be hated in every nation.
They will be globally despised, globally persecuted.
Not the least of the reason for Hitler's
success in the annihilation of European Jewry is
that he was able to persuade the German
nation that Jews were vermin.
They were sub-human.
And it was not like killing a man.
It was more like destroying a cockroach.
It was more like putting away some detestable
and vile thing that was eating at the
organ and life of German nationalism and culture.
Well, that's easier to do if people are
reduced from being men to becoming worms or
vermin, despicable insects.
That's a preview of what's going to come.
Jews will be despised as being virtually non
-human.
And that will release a flow of atrocious
conduct against them that would not otherwise have
been possible.
At the same time, the church, while the
world is hating these people and not even
recognizing them as being human, then the church
is called to recognize them and identify with
them as being the people of God and
the chosen people of God who will soon
be honored and celebrated and exalted beyond all
nations.
In a word, God is calling from the
Gentile church something totally impossible and contrary to
its own nature in being Gentile.
The willingness and the ability to embrace this
and be for them and to pray for
them in love and to stand with them
in identification is the saving grace for us.
It saves us from being Gentile, from being
the church as a culture, as a Sunday
phenomenon.
It is the breaking and the loosing and
the bringing of us into the fullness of
God's intention.
He will prosper them who love Jerusalem.
This is our prosperity.
We will then be embracing the same persecution
that they're receiving at the time.
We'll be just as much as they are.
Because we are that.
We are one with them.
And the people of God is what is
hated by the enemies of God.
Do you want to sign without sugar?
No, I like it sweet.
Okay.
I'm fully persuaded about what I'm saying.
My question is, are you understanding what I'm
saying?
Are you seeing the genius of God?
What made last night so staggering?
We saw the genius of God.
What was set before us was all the
depths of the riches, both of the wisdom
and the knowledge of God.
Who has been his counselor?
Who has given to him?
Who shall be given again?
For of him, and through him, and to
him are all things to whom be glory
forever.
This is another piece of the same.
This is the grandeur of God.
This is the genius of God.
This is the salvation to the utmost.
For the church itself that comes only in
its union with this despised people.
But if the union is only sentimental, if
it's only at a level that gratifies us,
we like to make trips to Israel or
attend conferences, or we think they're cute, there'll
be no redemptive benefit at all.
It's only in the identification to which God
calls us which is utterly profound and brings
us up and out of ourselves.
We cannot pray for the peace of Jerusalem
in a significant way and still be in
our same condition.
The very ability to pray that calls for
transformation, compels transformation, all the more when it's
a prayer of love.
He will prosper them who love her.
And it's not this shabby sentimental love that's
romantic but it's, as we said, the love
of Jerusalem as the city of God, the
pinnacle, the center, the locus of his world
rule in which he will be honored and
glorified and acknowledged before all nations.
That's the love that God has for us.
Do you have any impressions of what will
trigger this outpouring against the Jews as they
seem to be in a very comfortable position
in most nations?
Do you have any thoughts on what events
will...
Any number of possibilities, like for example the
2,000 year computer glitch which can easily
be construed as being conspiratorial.
Jews are always guilty of a conspiracy of
Zionist takeover.
You know the famous anti-Semitic booklet on
the protocols of Zion, which Gentiles have believed
without question and clearly a forgery but there's
something in the Gentile heart that is conducive
to conspiratorial theories.
We always want to find the culprit.
Who's really behind this?
Who's responsible?
And the Jews being a minority and an
indigestible lump out of place in the Christian
civilization have always been the object of that
suspicion.
So for example in the Middle Ages, the
Black Plagues that swept millions to their death
not one Jew died of it.
So who was responsible?
The Jews who poisoned the wells.
The fact of the matter is what saved
them from the Black Plague was that they
kept kosher.
They salted their meat, they took the blood
out of it, they washed before they ate.
And the dum-dum Gentiles who were eating
pig's will and flies and suffered the consequence.
The Jews were saved by their religious practices.
But how did the Gentile mind consider this
conspiracy to take over?
So whether it's the 2,000 year computer
glitch, the collapse of the world economy, the
stock market.
Somebody prayed this morning about where was it,
Indonesia or Malaysia that the Prime Minister was
accusing Jews of financial...
It's the name of the game.
It's the natural thing.
That's why Jesus wept when he looked over
Jerusalem and he said, Alas and Alack, you
missed the day of your visitation.
And now there's ahead of you such consequence
for that failure as it will take centuries
to unfold.
Tragic beyond all contemplation.
And it will require a holocaust.
It will eventuate.
Because you will be cast out.
Judgment will come.
The temple will be destroyed.
The Holy City will be leveled.
You will be cast into the nations as
an indigestible lump.
You'll never fit in.
You'll always be the irritating round square peg
in the round hole.
You'll never go along.
And when they have their Easter celebrations, they'll
be reminded that you crucified Christ and it
will release anti-Semitic outbursts.
The blood will flow in the streets of
every German city in middle Europe because of
this tragedy that you failed to know the
day of your visitation.
Something will be set in motion by it
that will make you the object of derision,
of fear, of intimidation, of threat, that you'll
always be seized upon as the excuse for
anything that goes wrong anywhere.
And this will be visited upon you.
That was the ultimate provocation will be the
controversy of Jerusalem itself.
Which will be the burdensome stone for all
nations.
And what more likely to create that than
the Jewish intransigence, kind of holding a hard
line on the issue of Jerusalem itself, if
the world saw Jewish intransigence as bringing them
to the brink of and bringing on an
international world conflict, they would be despised for
that, as well as the cumulative factor of
these other things now mentioned, that that would
reach its head over the issue of Jerusalem
itself.
Let me add that we're not going to
give them sufficient ammunition to give credibility to
their theories.
We Jews are in principal places.
I tremble for every appointment that Clinton has
made.
The head of the Department of the Treasury,
Rubin.
The head of the Federal Bank, what do
they call it?
The Reserve Bank.
What's his name?
Greenspan.
There are numbers of Jews in the Clinton
administration in critical roles as it touches finance.
And so in the bottom classes, what should
we say about our culture?
Who are the filmmakers?
Who owns Time Warner Corporation?
Who are the great Wall Street banking houses?
Jews.
And so there's enough there of credibility to
add the fuel to the fire.
Okay.
Now here's a point I want to make.
I'm saying that the transformative thing given by
God that saves the Church from being a
mere Gentile culture is its identification with this
hated people.
To such a place that they would love
the stones of Jerusalem and cherish its dust.
And that they would pray for the peace
of Jerusalem in a faith that works by
love and God will prosper those who love
them.
But it's not just any shabby love.
It is the foremost primary and predominant love
of the Church by which its own love
for itself is secondary or not at all.
Got that?
Okay.
This is not one love among other loves.
This is the love.
The principal love.
The foremost love.
And the reason for our being is Israel's
redemption.
For Israel's redemption is God's glory.
His coming and His kingdom.
So that means priority.
Our foremost love and purpose for being.
Not just a love alongside of several others.
The love for the nations.
The love for this.
The love for that.
It's the supreme love.
It's the uttermost expression and foremost identification.
See what God is calling for?
When you've come to that, you've come of
age.
When you've come to that, you're a son
and daughter of Zion.
When you've come to that, the Church has
moved from mere charismatic affinity with Israel to
an apostolic union and relation.
But to come to that is nothing less
nor other than the cross itself.
And not the least thing that needs to
be brought to the death of the cross
are the shabby substitutes for that love.
Namely, our sentimental affinity.
There's nothing that we want to keep more
than the feeling that we have for Israel.
And the kind of emotional and affectionate thing
that we enjoy having.
Now, if I'm not telling tales out of
school, the best thing that I did for
Paul while he was here that will change
his and bring his remarkable ministry into fullness
is a little thought that I was able
to observe to say, Paul, you're in a
place now like I've never seen you before.
You've gone from teacher to preacher.
You're rich, powerful, but the one thing that
keeps your presentation from priestly majesty and only
makes it impressive rather than glorious is your
own love and enjoyment of your own speaking.
When you can get beyond that, where you
can present the word of God, where you
yourself do not have a vested interest in
its own promotion and in its own enjoyment,
you have come to the priestly place of
self-detachment.
You have no vested interest for yourself in
yourself for the service you're performing for God.
That's why last night was the best of
what we had from Paul because he heeded
that word and instantly recognized the truth of
it when I gave it.
How come I was able to give it?
Because I know the same thing in myself.
And why am I saying all that?
Because what is God after?
That final ultimate subtlety of soul that is
not carnal, that is not sensual, that is
even spiritual, in which there is yet a
vested self-interest of something that returns to
us.
In the language of psychology that's called symbiotic.
S-Y-M-B-I-O-T-I
-C That is to say, you're doing something
for someone, but what are you getting back?
Why are you doing it?
Because you enjoy it.
It gives you a feeling of self-righteousness.
You like to see people being helped, and
you like to be seen helping.
And you like to receive the acknowledgements.
And yet the world will love that.
The world will applaud that.
The world will honor such people and give
them Man of the Year awards.
But the priestly service of God that will
save Israel must be free of that last
subtle tyranny of soul by which we must
get something out of it for ourselves.
So the love that God is waiting for
that will give our prayer credibility and power
is this selfless love.
We love Jerusalem not in any sentimental way
because we have some idealistic picture, but because
we know that we know that we know
God's glory is at stake here.
This is His dwelling place.
This is His sanctuary where He will dwell
forever.
From this place, from this city, from that
hill of Zion, His law and His word
will go forth to all nations.
They'll not study war anymore.
They'll not make weapons of warfare.
There'll be shalom in the world because there's
shalom in the city of peace itself.
Oh, the depths of the riches both of
the wisdom and the knowledge of God.
Nothing less nor other than the issue of
Israel and the Jew could have brought us
to this place.
We could stand on our head.
We could go to schools of discipleship.
We could believe for this, for that.
But only this, that the genius of God
draws us out.
That they had stumbled that they should fall.
That because of their fall we should obtain
salvation so as to move them to jealousy.
I praise God that there's a purpose for
our religious spiritual being beyond ourselves and outside
of ourselves.
For if it was only in ourselves, we
would have consumed ourselves with our spirituality as
a cancer.
The good thing would have killed us and
it kills every church that does not have
this thing, this purpose for its being, outside
of itself that Israel represents.
And our message as the prophetic men and
women of our generation is to call to
the church to this identification which they will
resist with might and man because they want
to be the thing in themselves.
It's opposing themselves in their own ignorance.
So maybe before we pray for the peace
of Jerusalem let's get practiced up on praying
for the church.
Let's see if we succeed there with breaking
in and opening the church to these considerations.
That's a monumental task and will not be
accomplished without real prayer.
So bless the Lord for intercessors who groan
and travail for the church that the church
can subsequently groan and travail for Israel.
The church first.
The church is the key.
That's why Art you moved away from New
York City and two and a half million
Jews and you came out to La Porte,
Minnesota there's not a Jew for miles around
Indians.
How does that serve the purposes of God?
I couldn't answer then but I begin to
suspect now more things are being propounded in
La Porte, Minnesota that will affect Jews and
Jerusalem the world than ever any proximity to
New York or Jerusalem itself would have obtained.
The church is the key.
And as Reggie has said but a church
of what kind?
The ultimate kind.
The apostolic kind that has moved from charismatic
and sentimental affinity toward Israel which it enjoys
to this union with God that recognizes the
necessity for the judgment and the suffering that
precedes the glory and knows that when it
prays for the peace of Jerusalem it's inviting
that judgment first.
Because that's how the church has obtained its
peace, its real peace its real shalom.