And Mike, from the state of Washington over
there, who will be tending a little book
table, where you have opportunity to obtain my
extraordinary books.
You think I'm joking.
They are blessed, anointed, rich.
This is the most recent, The Spirit of
Truth.
It will take indomitable courage to read it
from cover to cover.
But I assure you, you'll be transformed before
you get to the end.
It's for the Church, called to be the
ground and pillar of truth, and will break
through every pretense calculated.
The other is remarkably anointed, four principal messages,
not the least of which a message on
Elijah, given from a platform in Jerusalem, where
I did not want to be the speaker,
and was stopped in my entry to the
country, to find my name on a blacklist
and forbidden to enter.
And after a lot of squawking in Hebrew
over the telephone, they let me in, and
so I realized I had nothing to hide,
or to preserve my identity in some secret
way for some future use.
And the speaker that they had employed in
my refusal to be a speaker, wanting another
Jewish speaker, took sick.
And so as they came to the end
of the conference, they had not yet heard
from a Jewish speaker, and I was asked
if I would share for seven minutes, which
hardly gives me time to clear my throat.
But I agreed, and that morning at 3
a.m., something like this morning, I was
wakened by the Lord, and in the bathroom,
not to wake my wife, the Lord gave
me a message on Elijah.
It's in here, dynamite.
Not a message that could be spoken in
seven minutes, but by the time I got
up to speak, they said, take 15 minutes.
And while I was speaking, a note came
up to me from the co-author, now
passed on to be with the Lord, Jamie
Buckingham, of my first book, Ben Israel, saying,
take 45 minutes.
I thought, wow, they must recognize the anointing
on this message.
It was so anointed that when a board
of rabbis reviewed the film in New York
City after its production, the one thing that
offended them and that they required to be
omitted was me.
That's how anointed it was.
Well, after I finished that message and sat
down, feeling myself somehow very strange and loathsome,
I realized that the note did not say,
take 45 minutes.
It said, take 4-5 minutes.
So here I am, 20 years later, still
suffering from the reproach of being a maverick
and doing my own thing.
But as you read the message, you'll realize
God was in my misreading that note.
Well, I trust he's going to be in
what issues from me this morning.
I'm very curious to hear it.
It's something welling up in me over the
course of these weeks and months, and someone
should not have given me a copy last
evening of a magazine called On Being, on
the article on the inspirational man who has
triggered the whole Toronto blessing phenomenon.
What's his name?
Rodney Howard Brown.
And somehow after reading that, although I did
not read anything unusually different, it was not
even a critique, merely a description.
In fact, some young girl wisely said, a
critique is not possible.
But I do believe, dear saints, that if
we have a jealousy for the church that
bears the name of the Holy One of
Israel, we ought to be critiquing and not
mindlessly nodding in assent, let alone giving ourselves
over indiscriminately to phenomena of an extremely dubious
kind in the name of blessing.
You know there's such a thing as paying
too high a price for blessing?
And if that price is the denigration of
God and His name, that's too high a
price.
Find your blessing elsewhere, in fact, preferably in
your own prayer closet.
You don't have to go as far as
Toronto.
God is omnipresent.
So do I have your liberty to just
follow on and see where the Lord will
lead, beginning with where I started this morning
in Psalm 18?
Today is the 18th, is it not?
So I read the Psalm for the day.
What?
Do I want to come forward?
Okay.
No, this is right to the edge here.
Okay.
Let's pray, huh?
Precious God on high, put a guard on
this mouth.
Let not a word, a syllable be emitted
that does not have its origin in you.
Lord, we don't give a rap to hear
a man's opinion, however clever or interesting it
might be.
We want to hear your heart.
What do you have to say, my God,
about what is taking place in your Christendom?
And why have you appointed this morning for
that purpose?
So, Lord, we just, our hearts are open.
And take your full liberty.
Give us ears to hear, not only your
speaking, but even between the lines.
And if it's a statement beyond this church,
that somehow will go out through the tape
of this, or just a word that, by
which prophets often begin, hear, O heaven, and
give ear, O earth, for the Lord hath
spoken, then let it be that.
But do speak.
We thank you and give you the praise
for our privilege to hear from the living
God.
In Jesus' holy name.
Amen.
Well, I read the Psalm for the day,
and I love this Psalm 18.
I'm just going to take some portion, because
it evokes a sense of God that I
think that we desperately need.
The sense of God is all saints.
And it's, what is the church without a
sense of God and the holiness of God?
And if we lose that, what do we
have?
If we have everything else and lose that,
what have we and what are we?
And what is our witness?
And how shall we ever move Jews to
jealousy?
So, there's nothing more to be coveted, more
to be cherished, more to be preserved, more
to be watched over, than the sense of
God as he in fact is, and not
as we may have thought him to be.
This may be a lifelong quest, this pursuit
of God, and everything in the world, even
in the religious world, conspires against that knowledge.
Even our own religion, even our own enthusiasms,
even our own desire for successful meetings, might
ironically oppose and be the greatest detriment to
the knowledge of God.
If you can't understand me, you have no
sense of irony or paradox implicit in the
faith.
I'm very fond of a statement by Karl
Barth, the Swiss theologian, that nothing more reveals
our pathetic humanity than seeking to serve God
or to celebrate God or worship God out
of it.
The contradiction is so apparent and so painful.
And so it's an injunction to be the
people of the resurrection, sons and daughters of
God, who have risen above mere human religion,
mere human enthusiasm, mere soulish excitement, and to
come to the place in the Spirit and
to maintain that place that might require, ironically,
not more sound and more noise, but more
silence.
So in Psalm 18, verse 7, Then the
earth shook and quaked, and the foundations of
the mountains were trembling and were shaken, because
he was angry.
Smoke went up out of his nostrils, and
a fire from his mouth devoured.
Coals were kindled by it.
He bowed the heavens also and came down,
with thick darkness under his feet.
And he rode upon a cherub and flew,
and he sped upon the wings of the
wind.
He made darkness his hiding place, his canopy
around him, darkness of waters, thick clouds of
the skies.
From the brightness before him passed his thick
clouds, hailstones and coals of fire.
The Lord also thundered in the heavens, and
the Most High uttered his voice, hailstones and
coals of fire.
And he sent out his arrows and scattered
them, and lightning flashes in abundance enrouted them.
Then the channels of water appeared, and the
foundations of the world were laid bare at
thy rebuke, O Lord, at the blast of
the breath of thy nostrils.
Isn't that yummy?
I know it's anthropomorphic, and a skeptic can
dismiss God being described with nostrils and smoke
and all of that, but I love what
is being conjured up.
I think that we desperately need it, because
God is in danger of being made a
commonplace.
We're fashioning Him in our own image, and
we're not even aware of the unconscious thing
that we're doing.
We need to be reminded, or perhaps we
have never ever known, the mightiness of God.
He's other than what we ourselves are.
And maybe I'm speaking ancestrally as a Jew,
and something in my gut remembers God's lament
with us that you thought I was such
a one as you are, that the knowledge
of me is taught by the precept of
men, was not God's compliment, but His enjoinder.
It was an insult.
You have fallen so low that the knowledge
of me is taught by the precept of
men.
How then should it be obtained?
Some other way.
Once you have resorted to precept, it's no
longer God.
It's about God.
It's principles, but it's not God Himself.
So, I think it's clear.
The fear of God is absent from the
Church.
There's a rather slack atmosphere, a kind of,
I don't know what, a go-along with
it, and matter-of-factness, a blase, or
is it that Australia?
A complacency that we're sensing in your country
that has even infected the Church.
You have to contend for the faith, once
and for all, earnestly given the saints.
And if you think that that means it's
doctrines, you have another think coming.
The doctrines are kid stuff.
I love the doctrines, but that's not our
problem.
It's the faith.
It's the apprehension of God as He is,
that fear and awe, that sense of God
that tempers everything.
And if it's not to be found in
the Church, what shall we hope for in
Australia?
And little wonder, then, that these phenomena that
come down the pike find such ready acceptance.
What a bunch, what a ready-made audience
looking for novelty, needing a lift, needing an
experience, needing a blessing.
Well, sure, your Church has become so predictable.
Your Christian life is hardly more than a
succession of predictable Sundays.
You do need something.
But unhappily, what you're grasping for is not
what you really need, and in fact will
probably move you further from the obtainment than
you might know.
So I'm really concerned for the Church this
morning, just for its own sake, let alone
that I know that there's no other agency
given in the earth by which Jews are
to be made jealous.
And if we fail in that, we fail
in all.
And though Paul does not articulate and define
what it is that we're to do to
make Jews jealous, it's evidently something we've not
yet done.
And probably it's not without doing, but more
without being, that they should come into our
assembly and stop and gasp and throw their
hands over their mouths or hold their chest
for the sense of God that is present
with us who is holy, holy, holy.
I don't think there's any more awesome demonstration
to an unbelieving Jew than the light that
lightens the Gentiles, which is also the glory
of the people of Israel.
That's why I'm here this morning.
I should have been dead how many years
ago?
32 years ago, except that I saw as
an atheist, a dark atheist and a vehement
enemy of the faith, breathing threatenings and murderings
against what I considered to be a deterrent
to human progress, the Church.
But I saw in the face of an
unsuspecting piece of innocence a transparent little American
girl on vacation in Switzerland where I was
hitchhiking looking for philosophical answers, the light that
lightens the Gentiles and the glory of the
people of Israel.
I don't think that Israel is going to
see that glory except in your light.
So, just before we leave this psalm, in
verse 25, With the kind, thou dost show
thyself kind.
With the blameless, thou dost show thyself blameless.
With the pure, thou dost show thyself pure.
And with the crooked, thou dost show thyself
astute.
The margin says, twisted.
I think that that's a remarkable statement, that
somehow the apprehension of God is very much
affected by our seeing, by what we bring
to Him.
It's not a matter of God in His,
what He is objectively, but how we perceive.
And therein lies the problem.
We're bringing a distortion out of our own
subjectivity, out of our own twist.
We see God out of a prism of
our own being.
And I'll tell you that the way some
people are seeing God is quite cheap, as
if He's some kind of a lackey or
errand boy or providing the convenience of meetings
by which offerings can be taken, that we
can leave the nations that we exploit with
millions, and that somehow there's not a blush,
let alone a twitch of contradiction, because God
is somehow compatible with all that and part
and parcel of all that.
And I'm sure that they're laughing all the
way to the bank and thinking that they're
doing God and God's people service.
So it requires something from us to perceive
God rightly.
With the pure, thou dost show thyself pure.
If you have any kind of controversy with
God this morning, the problem is not He,
but yourself.
You're projecting something on Him.
You're becoming guilty of Israel's sin.
You thought that I was such a one
as you are.
The thing that we need is to be
transformed in His image and not to project
our image upon Him.
He is not a convenience.
He's God.
He's the Creator.
He is the Almighty.
I don't have words and adjectives.
I think those words have lost their cogency.
We maybe have said them too often, and
it's become a catechism or an invocation of
a mechanical kind.
Unless you know Him in the place that
is too deep for words, do you really
know Him?
Until there's a gasp and a splutter, until
you find yourself prostrate and stretch out as
dead, do you really know Him?
And how many of us will go through
an entire Christian lifetime without that knowledge and
be perfectly content and think that we're doing
God's service and that we know Him and
that we can communicate Him?
27, verse 27, For thou dost save and
afflicted people, but haughty eyes thou dost abase.
Wow, just a haughty look.
God despises haughtiness, human self-exaltation, religious pomp,
hotshot-ism, the man of the hour.
And when I see those videotapes of those
characters, that's what I see, the swagger, the
hitching up, the calling some precious little old
lady, deary.
Where do you come off with a snotty
remark like that when that woman should be
respected?
She's not your deary.
And don't think you're going to blow her
down by your breath.
It's a carnival, dear saints.
And I don't care what measure of supposed
blessing is being obtained, God is being denigrated.
Irretrievable loss for the name and the reputation
and the honor of God who does not
lend Himself to carnivals.
We're in the last days.
These are solemn and awesome days.
And He's waiting for the fulfillment of mandates
and callings that are so monumental it requires
a people of apostolic and prophetic stature, not
clowns, to perform.
He hates haughty eyes.
He hates that pomp of men who can
move their little finger and numbers fall in
the process.
Well, brother, then, if that's not God, by
what power are they falling?
I'm glad you asked that.
You should have asked it long before.
And you need to continue asking it.
For thou dost light my lamp, verse 28,
the Lord my God illumines my darkness, for
by thee I can run upon a troop,
and by my God I can leap over
a wall.
Well, I just needed to read that just
to wash my own soul.
I just feel somehow gritty.
And before I can get into anything else,
I just need a little washing of the
word.
But I would direct your attention to Ezekiel
chapter 22.
Maybe let's start first with Jeremiah chapter 15.
Yeah, 15.
This is on my heart this morning.
I asked my brothers if they could find
it.
I didn't have it in my concordance.
In verse 19 of chapter 15 of Jeremiah,
Therefore, thus says the Lord, If you return,
then I will restore you.
Before me you will stand.
And if you extract the precious from the
worthless, you will become my spokesman.
I think other versions read, If you remove
the sacred from the profane or the vile,
then you will become my spokesman.
I think we need to be about this.
There needs to be a separation.
We need to disengage ourselves from the things
that are profane because the whole world is
profane.
There's a process of proclamation taking place everywhere.
There's something that is cheapening and degrading in
television, in language, in street conversation.
My own country worse than yours.
But how long before you'll catch up?
If the church is not jealous for the
sanctity of words and of language, and I'm
not even talking about biblical language, I'm talking
about language per se.
I'm talking about the exquisite privilege of being
made in God's image that allows us to
speak and to cheapen that, to make our
small talk really small, to trivialize our life,
to not hold dear the things that sanctify
us and make us human in God's image,
is to enter the process by which everything
is being made profane.
Now, you're called to be a nation of
priests, and the priest has the obligation even
to teach the people and to teach the
nation the difference between the things that are
holy and the things that are profane.
And how shall we teach what we ourselves
don't know and what we ourselves have not
extended ourselves to find out and to preserve
and to keep alive in our own consciousness
and before our own children?
Maybe there's no way that we can pursue
this and move in this way except we
take the TV set out of the house.
It's not enough just to shut it off.
I used to keep it for the news,
but I tell you that the news is
becoming as vulgar and obscene as anything else.
And in between, I don't know about your
TV in America, there are the advertisements of
other programs and a commercial, and by the
time you've watched the news, you have become
polluted.
It's not worth it to find out what's
going on in the world if that's the
price we have to pay in having our
own spirits being made sodden and dulled.
And then we try to come into the
Scriptures and we find that we're not profiting.
It's dull.
And we don't enjoy, we don't have a
time of devotion that is a delight.
Praying is a kind of a drudgery at
best, mechanical requirement.
Our spirits are being made dull.
We're being profaned because we have not separated
the sacred from the profane.
We've not kept it at a distance.
We've forgotten that we have a God who
says, don't mix linen and wool.
Don't harness an ox and an ass together.
Why?
Don't they pull?
Doesn't it work?
Isn't it expedient?
Isn't it efficacious?
That's not the question, whether it works.
Sure it's going to work.
Linen and wool will probably make a lovely
garment.
But it's a mixture.
It's an adulteration.
And God said, thou shalt not mix.
Thou shalt be separate and holy unto me.
There's a lot of mixing going on.
And we haven't been careful to separate the
precious from the vile.
Then you will become my spokesman.
Oh, praise God.
When's the last time you've heard one?
We hear a lot of preaching, a lot
of words, but a spokesman is one who
bears the message and the burden of the
Lord.
I think there's a famine already in the
land for the Word of God.
In the midst of a wealth of cassettes
and tapes and ministries that are profuse, where
are the spokesmen of the Lord?
This is their requirement, to separate the cheap,
the trivial, the trite, the commonplace from the
things that are holy and the things that
are sacred, lest the holy thing become swamped
and becomes trivialized itself.
What hope, dear saints, if God should become
trivialized?
What hope for anything?
What standard for anything?
To what shall the world repair if there's
no standard in the Church?
Ezekiel 22 speaks of that, of Israel's pathetic
condition, and I think we ourselves are moving
toward it as the Church.
Wouldn't it be a remarkable thing that at
the end of the age, God has a
remorseful Israel and a remorseful Church, both have
fallen short of the glory of God, and
both require the mercy of God, that He'll
comprehend both in His mercy.
He says in chapter 22, verse 26 of
Ezekiel, Her priests have done violence to my
law, and have profaned my holy things.
They have made no distinction between the holy
and the profane.
They have not taught the difference between the
unclean and the clean, and they hide their
eyes from my Sabbaths, and I am profaned
among them.
And further, in Ezekiel 44, verse 23, Moreover,
they shall teach my people the difference between
the holy and the profane, and cause them
to discern between the unclean and the clean.
Well, we are the royal priesthood, and the
priesthood of all believers.
There's no room for any of us to
be slack.
We all need to be vigilant in our
priestly obligation, not only to know ourselves and
to separate the profane from the holy, but
to communicate and to teach that to men.
Can I quote a little bit from a
newsletter article that I've written?
By the way, if anybody is becoming endeared
to me through this morning, strange soul that
you might be, and wants to have some
continuing contact, we publish this four times a
year, and we have a small overseas readership.
We would be happy to put you on,
if you give us a clearly printed address.
And this is called, Some Cautionary Thoughts on
the Present Revival.
I felt an obligation, as a prophetic and
priestly man, to say something.
And here's the something that I say, just
in part.
We are not in a position to categorically
condemn as deception the ostensible benefits to which
many testify.
God is always free to bless whom he
will bless.
I think that may well be happening, that
naive souls in simple faith, coming to those
places and coming with an expectancy, can be
met by God, despite the questionable thing that
is taking place.
But I wouldn't say that that blessing that
is received confirms or validates the entire thing
that's going on, because that's exactly what makes
deception a deception, because it's mixed, because it
contains elements that are dubious and suspicious, and
at the same time, there seems to be
apparent blessing.
Who has the acumen and the discernment to
see through the dimension of priestly stature, whose
discernment has been increased by the exercise thereof?
And who can discern that which is good
and that which is evil?
That which is profane and that which is
holy?
The mere invocation of the name of the
Lord has become a cheapie.
Everyone can vocalize that.
Does that sanctify it?
Does that make it official?
Does that make it God's?
That's exactly the thing that is profane, is
the employment of the name of God to
somehow validate the human and religious thing that
we are promoting.
I'll tell you, and you can pray for
me.
As a young Jewish believer, this is now
32 years ago, my most painful entry into
the church was to see the glib frequency
with which Gentile Christians took the name of
the Lord to their lips.
I don't know if you know this.
Orthodox Jews, still in darkness, never having had
the revelation of the Messiah, will not even
spell the word God.
It's G-D.
You don't vocalize.
You don't take that word so frequently to
your lips, or you'll find yourself cheapening it.
Lord, Lord, Lord, Lord, Lord, Lord, Lord, Lord,
Lord, Lord, Lord, until we forget what Lord
means.
And I quite appreciate the revival that came
to Argentina when a certain pastor, Carlos Ortiz,
had a gutful and forbade his congregation to
employ the word at all.
A moratorium on the word Lord.
No speaking until he became Lord, in fact.
Lord of your pocketbook, your attic, your spare
room, your car, your bank account, your retirement,
your benefits, all those things.
Until he's the Lord over all, he's not
the Lord over anything.
And he wasn't going to allow that word
to be bandied about in apparent contradiction with
what was the truth of the condition of
this congregation.
Oh, praise God for a man like that.
I pray that he is yet that man.
But I'm a little bit apprehensive seeing that
he's gone onto the staff of the Crystal
Cathedral in California, and there's a little disquiet
in my soul.
Lord, preserve him in his integrity and blamelessness,
because you don't automatically maintain that without a
daily, moment-by-moment vigilance.
So I'm not knocking blessings that some may
authentically be receiving, but our point is that
if the enemy can succeed in bringing the
Church to viewing benefit as the determinant by
which something is judged to be of God,
we may well have been brought to the
very ground of deception itself.
Is that all it takes to persuade you
that you receive a benefit, or a blessing,
or a release from some personality disorder?
Is that all it takes?
Then Satan is well able to provide that.
There's something more important than benefits.
There's something more important than release.
It's the holiness of God.
It's his name.
It's his honor.
It is who he is in himself, and
benefit of a dubious kind is too high
a price to pay.
If it is going to throw any shadow
upon his great name, we will have lost
everything in the name of benefit.
In fact, even the desire for benefit is
itself suspect.
I have often been astonished when the appeals
for healing come, almost everyone comes out of
their seat.
I've never seen such a sick church everywhere.
And I think that we will continue to
be sick so long as we live egocentric
lives, even spiritually speaking.
And what will be the first statement and
question that you raise when you leave this
room this morning?
What did you think of the speaker?
Did you like?
Isn't your like the center of your being?
So you've shifted from carnal centrality to spiritual
centrality, but you're still the center.
No wonder you're sick.
No wonder you need continually to be healed
until you make God the center.
His glory, his honor, his name, and his
eternal purposes.
We will continue to be sick.
That's why we're sick.
We have a false center, and it is
in ourselves, in our church, in our denomination,
our, our, our, our, my, my, my, my.
So for myself, I
would choose to keep my distance from such
phenomena, trusting that whatever I might be missing
is not greater than what I am protecting
and cherishing, and that the Lord is not
offended by a carefulness that would rather err
in a jealousy for his holiness than to
risk subverting what has already been given as
pure and true.
Do you know this, dear saints?
That there's no such thing as coming out
the same.
You're either going to suffer loss or obtain
gain.
If you allow yourself and submit yourself to
come into an environment of a certain kind
and even to receive the blessings and the
laying on of hands, I want to be
very careful who lays hands on me because
with every laying on of hands is a
transmission of the condition of that one who
is extending his hands.
It's amazing what people will open themselves for.
And some of these characters have said, we
know that this is a mixed bag, but
we're so desperate for something to happen that
even if Satan is getting in on the
act and even if flesh is exhibiting itself,
at least something is happening.
My God, they've never read Psalm 18 or
any of the texts that I'm quoting today.
You know what I'm saying here?
We need to be jealous to God what
has already been given.
I want to ask you, dear saints, do
you have a residue of God?
Do you have a precious accumulation of something
that has been worked in your inner being,
in its depths, in communion with God over
the course of your spiritual history?
Do you have a history?
How shall you be an overcomer?
But by the blood of the Lamb and
the word of your testimony and love not
your life unto the death.
Do you have a testimony?
Do you know God in the kind of
knowledge that has to do with his sufferings?
The kind of knowledge that comes through trials,
through stretchings, through breakings, and through dealings, which
many would shut ourselves off from because they're
painful.
I cherish all the residue of the knowledge
of God that has come that way.
And you know how I test whether something
is of God or not?
I still my soul, because they want you
to be engaged by your soul.
The noise, the amplifiers, the music, the motion,
the activity, everybody moving and getting into the
act, and you're like a lump, a painful
disjuncture.
You're out of it.
And it's not pleasant to be out of
it when everything is tugging at you to
be one of the boys and to go
along.
But there I'm standing like a lump, not
measuring by my soul.
I've shut that off.
In fact, can you even distinguish between your
soul and your spirit?
Or is it one big blur?
And I wait to see if my spirit
is hospitable to what is being mediated so
that I know it is compatible with my
already existing knowledge of God.
And if it is not compatible, they can
stand on their heads, they can run all
over the platform, they can climb the flagpoles,
which they do, and every other kind of
madness, and I am completely imperturbable and unmoved.
I will not give myself to it at
all.
I need to guard my sanctity.
I need to guard my integrity in God,
or else you this morning would be getting
something less than other than what you're receiving.
And so all Australia in our weeks of
travel, and the Philippines, and Japan, and New
Zealand, and every other place where we go,
you would be getting something much less than
other if I allowed myself to be sucked
in and influenced and taken up and affected
by the current trends.
Keep your heart with all diligence, for out
of it are all the issues of life.
You say, Brother, the way you talk and
carry on, is there time enough for that
kind of Christian living?
You make it sound like a full-time
occupation.
I only have time Sunday for an hour
or two, and I might even come to
a midweek service.
But the way you're talking to maintain your
spirit and guard yourself and grow in the
nurture and the faith and all these obligations,
you make it sound like that's the whole
purpose of our being.
Exactly.
What did you think this was, a Sunday
supplement?
Hey, we're coming to the end of the
age.
God has great purposes to consummate through the
Church that knows him and will do great
exploits out of that knowledge, and that knowledge
only.
And it's not cheap things.
It's dear, but it's precious.
Paul says, Oh, that I might know him
in the fellowship of his sufferings.
There's a knowledge of God there that is
so exquisite, and it's not to be obtained
in any other place.
Come on, you sissies, are you willing to
suffer a little?
Or have you been inducted into the mindset
of the world, the pursuit of pleasure and
the avoidance of pain, protecting your life, your
privacy, guarding yourself lest there be any threat,
any injury, any pain?
No wonder the Church is hardly more than
a conglomerate of individualities living their privatistic lifestyles.
Where is the Church of the apostolic kind
where those who believe were together and with
power, great grace was upon them all, and
with power gave the apostles testimony of the
resurrection of Jesus Christ?
There's going to have to be some snap,
pop, and break between yourself and your Australian
culture and mindset and the English overtones that
have come in that put up your brick
walls and the sanctity of your separation and
privatistic life contrary to the ethos and the
character and the genius of true Church.
True Church is a suffering before it's a
glory just by what we are ourselves together
and the intensity of that life.
And until we'll go that way, we're not
moving anybody to jealousy, certainly not Jews.
Well, they say, well, Art, you know, don't
be so critical.
Don't think that this is a carnival and
these guys are clowns, though they look and
act like it.
And men are in a stupor who are
ministers of the Word of God and stand
there and splutter and repeat themselves insanely and
then collapse.
And that's God honoring?
And then they make statements like, I've seen
more blessing now under this blessing than ever
was obtained through the preaching of the Word.
I'll tell you, dear saints, I may not
be much, but I am jealous for the
Word.
And when I see a phenomenon touted as
revival by which the Word of God is
conspicuously absent and denigrated as not being the
source of God's greatest blessing, but that experience
has replaced it, my alarm goes up instantly,
and so ought also yours.
Well, Art, they're doing a lot more preaching
now.
I'm sure they are, because they're sensitive to
the criticism that has come.
But what kind of preaching is it?
The most commonplace blah that any stoop can
put together out of a few scriptures and
call that a message.
Even the prophets that are being celebrated are
not speaking prophetically.
And we don't even know enough to require
that.
If they can tell us a few personal
things about ourselves, that's all we want.
We need to be confirmed that God knows
us.
And look, this prophet was able to say
something about us.
Where's the prophetic Word?
Where is the oracles of God?
Where is the waiting thing that we need
to hear for the church in the last
days in all of the precarious things that
are going on?
That's the prophetic Word.
Where is it?
The Word has been rudely shelved and has
declined.
And if something is just even biblical, that's
enough for us.
Well, if this is not the lying signs
and wonders that we have been warned would
characterize the last days, when those lying signs
and wonders do come, how will they be
substantially different in form and appearance from what
is now presently taking place?
And how will we then exercise discernment that
we're now incapable of exercising?
The church needs to be stirred up saints.
We need to be called to a maturity.
These are the last days.
And if this is not that of which
we have been warned, when that comes, that
is the lying signs and wonders, will we
recognize it?
Because it will be a wonder.
There will be miracles.
There will be demonstration.
There will be benefit.
But they will be lying signs and wonders.
And if we're only concerned with the benefit
and not all that much with the source,
will we discern it?
I know that there's a gift of discernment,
but I know that there's also an exercise
of discernment that is corporate, that somehow is
the reflection of the stature and quality and
the maturity of the corporate people of God
together.
Are you able to discern not only the
things that are evil but the things that
are good?
I want to tell you that it's the
things that are good that are most likely
to trap us.
It's good to go here, and it's good
to do this, and it's good to take
care of that need.
It's good that will be our undoing, because
evil will be so blatant and evident.
But it's the good thing that will be
the most difficult to discern unless your discernment
has been strengthened by the exercise thereof.
Is good good enough?
Unless we have a priestly jealousy for that
which is perfect, good is going to do
us in.
So has God changed, who is the same
yesterday and forever, who said that his priests
must mount a ramp and not go up
by steps?
Do you know that?
That's in Exodus 20, verse 26.
He did not allow his priests to step
up to the place of ministry by steps,
but only by a ramp.
You say, that's a peculiar requirement.
How come?
Because in lifting your leg to go from
one step to another, there might be a
slight possibility of revealing your flesh.
And the ramp was the more secure provision
that no flesh be revealed in God's presence.
If that's not the God who is God
now, then shoot me and get me out
of my mystery.
But it's the same yesterday, today, and forever.
It is only we who have changed.
On man's flesh, he says, of the holy
anointing oil, it shall not be poured, neither
shall you make any other like it.
Be careful not to counterfeit this.
Don't fabricate.
Don't turn up your amplifiers.
Don't psych up.
Don't hype.
Don't create an atmosphere, an environment.
Don't make any other like it.
Wait for the holy anointing oil, for God
will anoint what he appoints and not what
we establish for our own satisfaction or enjoyment
or the assurance of a good service.
Oh, be jealous for the holy thing, the
holy anointing oil.
It makes all the difference.
It's life-giving.
Let's not make any other like it.
And upon man's flesh, it shall not be
poured.
You know that in the Welsh revival, they
wouldn't even allow musical instruments?
Have you read Watchmenny's book, The Latent Power
of the Soul?
Find a copy and study it.
He talks about the laughing phenomenon in the
1920s, and he warns about the use of
musical instruments and its soulish power to bring
deception.
And that was before the advent of amplifiers
and our musical technology, that today.
You don't only hear, you feel it.
And in the same issue where I read
the article about the leader of this revival
was an article on something now called The
Rave, which was taking place in Great Britain
when I was there and is now finding
its way to Australia.
Christian dancing of a rock kind, but the
lyrics are Christian.
There's one movement in England, a house church
movement, that beat sticks on the floor and
create a kind of an atmosphere, and they
say that that is communicating Jesus.
I'm afraid we've crossed the point of no
return already, and maybe what God is wanting,
and I'm happy for the gray heads in
this room, is for us to pray for
the condition of the church, the lamentable condition
of the church, that it is even open
and susceptible for the kinds of things that
are now taking place.
Talk about dancing about a golden calf.
A whole generation being raised up that has
never known the holiness of God.
And talk about God prolifically, loosely, and glibly,
and easily, but which God?
I'm wondering even if these central personalities have
covenanted with someone other than God and don't
even know it themselves.
And in some Faustian way, are receiving a
power to affect bodies and lives that they
thought is coming from God, but their own
knowledge of God is so sparse and so
utterly questionable that it may well be that
they've been covenanting with some other thing that
parades as light and that responded to their
cry for something to happen, and they think
that they're communicating with God.
You know what, I'll end with this.
My heart goes out to you.
You have to hear me.
It was not too long ago, in a
church much like this, that in a moment
of time, the thought came to me, you
don't have to be a Mormon or a
Jehovah's Witness or subscribe to some sect or
some cult to be deceived.
You can subscribe to correct Christian orthodoxy and
be as effectually deceived in the correctness of
that creedal statement as if you were embracing
false doctrine.
And in fact, that kind of deception is
the most devious and most powerful of all
because you think yourself correct.
There's a need to know God's saints, desperate
need to know God, and he's waiting to
be sought, and he distinguishes that people, that
generation that will ascend the holy hill of
Zion in Psalm 24 with clean hands and
a pure heart, who have not given their
soul to vanity by running to Toronto, as
those who will ascend the holy hill and
throw the bolt that opens the gate that
the king of glory might come in.
And he says, this is the generation of
them that seek thee, that seek thy face,
O God of Jacob.
You don't have to go to Toronto to
seek him.
Right here where you are.
Make room, be ruthless against yourself in finding
time, in sending the kids out, in getting
those clamoring legitimate things that are cloying at
you always away.
Lock yourself in a room, throw the key
away, do something, but seek God and be
found of him.
That's his promise.
If you will seek for me with all
your heart and all your soul, you shall
be found of me.
And when you obtain that knowledge, maintain it
or you'll lose it.
So let's pray for the church.
In this critical hour, deception is rampant.
My Jewish people are perishing.
Where is that witness that moves them to
jealousy?
They are everywhere about us totally unimpressed.
With our best charismatic demonstration, untouched, they need
to come into a place that is holy,
holy, holy, that knows God as he is
and not as men think him to be
and can make him known.
So Lord Jesus, precious God, holy one, our
hearts go out to you, Lord.
We apologize for the way in which you
have been slurred, for the blasphemy that takes
place everywhere.
Not by the worldlings, but by your supposed
ministers.
The use of you, the exploitation, the employment
of your name to sanctify cheap carnival things.
Lord, forgive us that we have been saps,
that we have gone along with it, that
we have paid for it, that we have
underwritten it and have not been jealous for
your name and your honor for your person.
Because we have to say that we ourselves
don't know you as we ought.
We have not been diligent to know you
and to seek you and to retain that
knowledge and to be jealous over it and
to be willing like Paul to know you
in the fellowship of your sufferings.
We have preferred guarded private lives.
And though we have sung the brave choruses,
the real testimony of our heart is this
far and no further.
We don't want to go all the way.
That's fanatical and upsetting and threatening.
We want a measured Christian life, singing the
choruses bravely, but having no intention of doing
it.
And Lord, we ask your forgiveness.
It's not true.
It's a posture.
It's an appearance of something that is not.
And we enjoy that appearance, and we even
have persuaded ourselves that it's true of us.
Lord, help us.
Help us in your mercy and your great
love for the church that was birthed out
of your bleeding side.
Wash us with the water of your word.
Grant us, my God, the gift of repentance.
And if we don't need it for ourselves,
may we repent for the church in our
identification with it.
Come, Lord, stir our hearts, and don't let
us get away.
Hold us accountable for what we are hearing
this morning.
And may we be of that generation that
seeks you, that seeks your face, O God
of Jacob, is our prayer in Yeshua's holy
name.
Well, do you need an invitation of some
kind?
Anybody?
Stand to sit, to come forward, to do
something?
Is there a response that ought to be
made?
Praying out of your seat aloud?
How embarrassing.
Now everyone will know that you identify yourself
with this word and see yourself in that
need.
Humility is the key to the kingdom.
Is there anyone who loves God more than
their own self-esteem, who would pray aloud
this morning, where you sit, in something being
prompted in your heart by the Spirit?
It'll set you free, out of your own
mouth.
It'll break bondages.
It'll loose you from constraints.
It'll put you on the path to holiness.
Break out of that passivity, that safety of
anonymity in the pew, and say something before
God in the hearing of the saints, and
it'll be a day of new beginnings for
you.
Anybody?
Go ahead.