Demonstrate him and the demonstration was of such
a kind, I had to leave the platform
and the auditorium because everything in me was
going haywire.
Now I don't like the way my voice
is sounding.
It's too empty, it's too cavernous.
I guess that we can't help it, huh?
But you can hear okay.
I'm hard of hearing so I'm sensitive about
how a voice is heard.
Well, that was a remarkable message when I
came back on that platform and I felt
like what did I do wrong.
My poor wife was on the platform with
me and went virtually hysterical because I was
offending many people including my publisher and my
co-author Jamie Buckingham who has since gone
on to be with the Lord.
All of the charismatic big shots were on
the platform but a voice rang out from
the platform.
This is the word that I've called you
to hear.
Not the sugar candy that has been so
far been proffered but this is the word
and I'll tell you that the anointing was
so great.
They made a film of that conference and
then they submitted it to a board of
rabbis because they had hoped to circulate it
through the Jewish community as well as the
Christian community and the rabbis loved it except
for that one man at the end, me,
and so they scissored me off.
I went down on the cutting floor.
That's how great the anointing was and I
found out later that the prophetic word that
came from the platform was repeated in several
parts of the auditorium at the same time
the identical word because there were 4,000
people in the auditorium and of course I
didn't hear that I found out later.
People who stood to the invitation, I've met
them over the years since 1974, it's about
a quarter of a century, they said their
life was changed by that standing.
That message is in this book.
It's a hundred dollars today, a special.
This is even more devastating but it's not
for, well, I say it's not for the
young.
It'll mature you fast.
It's an attempt to explain the holocaust.
You know what my astonishment was?
I was a history teacher.
I'm a depression baby born in 29 and
when I came to high school teaching I
was going to be a savior for my
students.
I was going to be for them what
no teacher had been for me in the
struggle of my adolescence to find meaningful life.
You know what I found out?
I was standing before a generation that didn't
give a rap about meaning and I had
come to them from another planet and that
I spoke strangely and I was completely out
of tune with that generation.
I had to go back to the drawing
board to square one to find out how
to find a basis for communication and I
labored for four years in a great struggle
at the same time being married to a
German lady, schizophrenic and a former member of
the Hitler Youth who in her the paroxysms
of her schizophrenic agony she was a victim
of the war, surviving it physically but carrying
the moral and the emotional strains into a
marriage with a Jewish man.
That's how God prepares a Jew for conversion.
I'm speaking like a fool this morning.
You don't mind, do you?
You don't have much choice in the matter
but all of that combined to break down
my humanistic categories, the deep idealism that many
of us Jews carry and the hope for
mankind predicated on human intelligence and human goodwill
independent of God.
So I found in the struggle as a
teacher that I could raise great and ultimate
questions but I could not answer them.
I found in my marriage with a German
woman who was really the great love of
my life that however well-meaning my intention
I could not respond to her schizophrenic torment
finding the one place where I was vulnerable,
my Jewishness and react to that with kindness.
See what I mean?
It broke me down in all of my
categories and the things in which I trusted
as a humanist and so my crisis became
so serious that in my 34th year I
took a year's leave of absence and I
should have recorded all of this.
A year's leave of absence from the teaching
profession.
Maybe this is on.
Is this on?
It is on.
Oh it was on all the while?
Oh praise the Lord.
Thank you Lord.
We didn't miss anything.
The Lord outwitted me again.
And I spent 14 months traveling through Europe
and the Middle East looking for philosophical answers.
I had been a high school dropout at
the age of 16, a merchant seaman at
the age of 17, a seeker after truth,
finally the US Army, the GI Bill.
What do you think they sent me during
the Korean War?
Not the Korea, Germany.
So we Jews have a long-standing love
-hate relationship with Germany.
There's so much I could tell you.
There's so much beyond your present understanding, so
much that you need to understand because the
Jews are so predominant a factor at the
conclusion of the age and the church's own
call, the identity, the recognition of itself and
I may not even speak that this morning,
but sometime between now and my departure, I've
got to say something, maybe tonight, that you
need to understand something about that because you're
going to be faced by them.
Do you know what Yiddish is?
It's a Germanic language that the Central European
Jews adopted from the German language, became a
kind of lingua franca, a language of commerce
that Jews would speak because Hebrew at that
time was not a language for street purposes.
It is today in Israel.
It's their national language.
Yiddish was for street purposes.
Hebrew was for liturgical purposes.
So the German language, German culture, German civilization.
Did you know that Karl Marx was a
Jew?
Did you know that Sigmund Freud was a
Jew?
Did you know that Albert Einstein was a
Jew?
Do you know that Steven Spielberg is a
Jew?
Do you know that Rubin, who was the
head of the Department of the Treasury and
who's the head of the Greenspan and Jews,
Jews, Jews, Jews everywhere, but especially of German
origin, have been a remarkable influence in Western
civilization.
So when the Holocaust came, you know what
my astonishment was as a history teacher?
These kids didn't know what the Holocaust was,
that they were born after World War II.
Why didn't I realize that?
They were non-compassmentists.
It had no comprehension for them.
Here I'm bursting at the seams over these
great epical events of modern times and these
kids are totally impervious.
A lot of them black and out of
Oakland, California, the place of the Black Panthers,
they had other things to preoccupy them than
the issue of Jewish tragedy.
You see, like two ships passing in the
night, but all of that conspired to bring
me to a final pre-predicament where I
had to take this leave of absence from
the teaching profession.
I couldn't go on asking questions I could
not answer.
I couldn't go on with a failed marriage
and a failed philosophical principle of life.
I had to find answers and there was
a God looking for me because one of
my students had been praying for me.
I probably ridiculed her faith as a strenuous
atheist, not the village kind, but the professional
kind, who not only looked upon religion as
the opiate of the masses and an obstruction
to the progress of mankind, but of all
the religions none more nefarious than Christianity itself.
Why?
Because we Jews were persecuted by Christians.
Did you know that?
Christians of a kind with which you would
not identify, you would say they were unregenerate
and indeed they were not.
They were.
Crusaders with white crosses on their tunics or
the Spanish Inquisition or the Catholic Church.
But the fact of the matter is that
Jews who have suffered that persecution and have
learned of it and taken it in with
their mother's milk cannot distinguish between born again
Christians and those that are institutionally Christians.
To them that's Christianity.
My mother thinks, God bless her, pray for
her, 94 years old, Hitler was a Christian.
Why?
Because he's not a Muslim, he's not a
Jew.
What else?
So we suffered at the hands of Christians
and we're going to suffer again.
This book not only seeks to explain biblically,
and I don't know of anyone else who
has attempted it, the reasons for the Holocaust
in view of God and his word, that
this was not an aberration in history, some
mystical event that cannot be explained, but rather
the fulfillment of God's predictive word that such
an event would take place in the latter
days, that we have not received it as
an event coming from God's hand to precipitate
a national repentance means that we're going to
experience it again in your lifetime and probably
within this decade.
There's a second Holocaust coming greater than the
first, will eclipse the first, and not a
Jew presently alive in the world today will
survive it.
The majority will perish in it.
Only a remnant will survive, and they'll survive
only because of you.
That's the church's mandate, the church's call to
extend mercy, that they might receive mercy at
the hour of their final extremity.
When if you have only the doctrine of
mercy or of grace, or you know it
only as an article of faith and not
a palpable thing that can be extended, they
will perish.
Boy, that's a statement.
You know what I'm saying?
If you're only a doctrinal Christian, Jews will
perish.
They'll only survive if you're really a saint
and know the mercy of God.
And I'll tell you what will bring you
to that knowledge, having to be to them
what God will call you to be.
You'll cry out for mercy and you'll receive
it.
This is a remarkable book.
I think this month it's coming out in
German and in French, and it'll probably find
itself in other languages.
Most of these books are in other languages.
Spirit of Truth is in French, Lithuanian, I
just came back from Lithuania, it's published there,
and the pastor, the largest evangelical work in
that nation that meets in a great tent,
thought I was going to speak on the
subject, instead I spoke on the issue of
the church and the Jew, and he was
disappointed.
You know why I did that?
Because Lithuania, together with Poland, are the two
most anti-Semitic nations of Eastern Europe.
The fact that he was displeased that I
made this a subject rather than this may
actually be an indication that that anti-Semitism
is more latent and more real than even
the church itself recognizes.
How are we doing for communication?
Yeah?
I speak English well, and I love words,
so you have to listen in for exacting
meaning.
We've already been praying for you for that,
that God would give you a grace to
hear, as if I know what I'm going
to be speaking.
You know why I don't have a message?
Because a message will not suffice for today.
What you need is a Weltanschauung.
Anybody here who's German?
That means Welt is world.
Anschauung is a view.
What you need is a worldview.
You need a cosmic perception of the faith
and of the destiny and the call of
the church.
That is more than any message, and I
don't know how the Lord is going to
bring that, but I'm willing to be squeezed
out before you that something of it will
be communicated, and whatever I miss or the
Lord will choose not to express orally, you'll
find it in these books.
Gary was very insistent that this be made
available.
This is a gem.
Single message, but what a blockbuster message.
What does it mean to be converted?
Do you think you are?
Is conversion and salvation synonymous?
I opened the question by asking the question,
or making the statement, many saved, few converted.
Conversion is a profound state of being that
actually might follow on the heels of your
salvation, but is not automatically part and parcel
with it.
This is a single message that brought an
entire congregation down on its face.
I've seen people go down, but when they
went down and went into the woodwork, I
knew that this was a very special word,
and they would change thereafter, and so it's
in Dutch, it's in Danish, it's in Russian.
All of my books are in Russian.
In fact, I have more books in Russian
than I have in English.
There's a book on our website called Apostolic
Foundations.
It's coming in English, not yet, but you'll
find it on the web.
We have a book on the website called
Prophetic, The Prophetic Call, 12 juicy chapters.
You need to know the Jewish word for
juicy, which is the same as the German
word, because is the word for juice in
German.
When we say, when we do say something
is, it means it's resonant, and if you
squeeze it, it's going to so they're all
up there.
They're expensive.
It's all get out.
I don't know.
Adam says eight.
I say seven dollars, three dollars for Venezuela.
We don't charge, but be generous, and then
there's a newsletter that comes out about three
or four times a year.
If you, after hearing me, want to be
in touch, put your name somewhere on a
piece of paper nicely printed with a zip
code, and we'll put you on a mailing
list.
The letter is also on the website, if
you prefer to receive it that way.
Okay, also a tape catalog and a description
of our books.
Let me pray, okay?
So Lord, this is it.
The moment that you have ordained, we're here,
we're waiting, and we have a sense of
the gravity of the hour.
The time is short.
Great ponderous things.
The clouds are already forming.
There's a darkness beginning to billow, my God,
over the land and over the nations.
There are great things that yet need, my
God, to be affected before your coming and
before your kingdom.
What shall we say, and what shall we
speak, my God, in view of that to
these precious people, my God, this nuclear body,
and that will go even beyond them through
this tape?
So remember, Lord, the prayers that went up
from the earliest morning hours till this moment,
and now give your answer.
We thank and give you praise that you
are the high priest and the apostle of
our confession.
How we need you, my God, in that
category, in that definition.
Who's more jealous over your church than yourself?
Who knows better what it needs?
Whose wisdom is more precious and deep?
Whose ability is greater to address us than
yours?
And we pray that you will give us
open ears, Lord, and require of us.
We know this is not going to be
a cheapie, that when you speak, my God,
it's not just to titillate, but to require,
and we want to be required of.
It's a privilege, and it leaves us changed.
We can't go back to where we were
before you have spoken, and so take your
full liberty, my God, and redeem this time
in full, and receive already our gratitude and
our praise as a God who speaks.
We thank and give you the praise, the
honor, the glory, in Jesus' name, amen.
Okay, so we had dinner last night with
Gary and Cindy, and dear brother was expressing
his heart and his qualms and concerns, and
about the kingdom of God, and feeling it
go up in his way, and I thought,
well, that's a great subject, and in fact,
it's only of late that the Lord has
begun again to stir my heart over the
subject of the kingdom of God.
There was an earlier time when it was
a predominant message in my repertoire, and then
it kind of faded.
Now, here's what happened.
I was in East Germany again on my
last trip to Europe, and visited two pastors
whom I had known 20 years ago, and
very precious men.
They were Lutherans, which is what you almost
have to be in Germany, Lutheran or Catholic,
anything else is considered a sect or a
cult.
Hitler did not recognize even the Baptist church,
let alone the Pentecostals.
Only the Catholic and Lutheran were the official
state churches.
Well, these were Lutheran clergymen, but they were
spirit-filled men, precious, and living under certain
duress, certain pressure, under a communist system, and
it was exciting to visit them and to
speak.
In those days, when I would come, there
was an excitement.
Now when I come, well, you're just one
of many Western speakers, because the wall is
down, and East Germany has now been taken
back into the whole of Germany, and their
economy is being revived, and so the special
conditions that prevailed 20 years ago no longer
prevail.
Then they were an island of sanity and
faith in a sea of atheism and unbelief
and communist propaganda and every kind of strain.
The one pastor was actually threatened with a
prison sentence if he continued to speak about
Israel, and he wasn't speaking dangerously radical things,
but even the mention of the word was
considered so offensive to the communist authorities that
he was serving continually under the risk of
prison sentence.
All of the men of God in that
nation lived in that tension, and there was
an excitement.
There was a dynamic when you came to
their churches, and they waited for the word
of God because they needed to hear from
God.
They were on a sharp edge of faith
as an island of belief in a sea
of atheism and hostility.
Now the wall has come down, and so
I'm seeing them after 20 years under Western
conditions, and everything has changed.
The dynamic is no longer there, and they've
become like Western churches in any place.
There's a kind of a, what's the word,
a torpor, t-o-r-p-o-r,
kind of a benign calm where one service
is like another.
The radical requirement has gone with the end
of the communist system, and so I raised
one question with both pastors.
What have you seen or found to replace
the dynamic of challenge that existed when you
had to survive and serve under a communist
regime?
And they looked at me like, what are
you talking about?
They didn't know.
For one of those families, 20 years ago,
I prayed for the pregnant wife of the
pastor who had been told by the medical
authorities that she needed an abortion, that that
child could not survive their own life, and
health was at risk.
What do you think, God?
Well, I thought that she should have that
baby, and prayed for her, and she believed
for that, and had the baby, and now
I'm seeing the baby as we drive up
to the house, now 20 years old, with
spiked hair, tinted blonde, and I don't know
if he had a nose ring, at least
he wasn't wearing it, but he's certainly a
candidate.
He was, what is the word, a punk
rock, you know, I'm out of this.
I don't know the terminology.
I only know the recoil.
This is what I prayed for?
This is what this woman risked her life
for?
A punk rocker in the home of a
pastoral family?
It was a statement, a symbol of a
departure from the radicalness of the faith that
evidently, even within the ministerial home, let alone
in the congregation, there was not enough that
was compelling to engage this young boy, 20
years of age, to be part of that
faith, but instead he was going to the
discotheques, and into the whole rock thing, and
the family was just, of course, agonizing over
his condition, but living with it.
And so I said to these two pastors,
what has replaced the dynamic of the challenge
of living as a Christian and serving as
a minister under communist authoritarian rule?
They had no answer.
I said, what about the kingdom of God?
They looked blank, and I said, what does
the kingdom of God mean to you?
And they gave me the conventional and traditional
answers.
Well, it's the kingdom of God that's within,
or we're living by the principles of the
kingdom of God.
What they were expressing was the way in
which most Christians view the kingdom subjectively and
personally as some kind of an interior fact
that comes with believing.
But they did not understand the kingdom of
God in the sense that I'm being instructed
to understand it, that the church has historically
lost and must recover if it's going to
have the dynamic that the church had at
the first, and the expectation of that kingdom
come, not as some interior or subjective or
personal thing, although it is that, but as
a theocratic thing.
That is the question.
The kingdom of God is the issue of
rule.
We know what democratic is, and it stinks.
It's a lot better than autocratic, like the
self-rule of dictators.
Democratic gives some possibility of grassroots participation.
I appreciate that.
But Clinton and who is the guy in
Serbia?
Milosevic shows how arbitrary, mindless, spineless, characterless, democratic
rule can be.
That is as much a gateway to hell
and death and devastation as an autocracy.
Demo is the Greek root for the word
people, demos.
Cratic is the Greek suffix for rule.
Democracy is the rule of the people.
Autocracy is the rule of self.
There's other forms of it, I can't think.
So what is theocracy?
Theocratic.
Theo is God.
Theophilus was the one to whom Luke wrote,
was it the book of Acts?
Because he was, he's a lover of God.
Theophilus.
What's theology?
What would that be?
The study of God.
Theo is God.
So what is theocracy?
What does it mean in the kingdom of
God to think of it theocratically, to think
of it as the rule of God?
And we don't think of that enough.
And because we don't, we're missing, I think,
not a profound, but perhaps the most profound
point of perception of understanding the faith that
God intended as normative.
When you start to consider theocracy, you must
necessarily then consider the coming of the Lord
as king.
It's no more the coming of the Lord
as an escape that is going to take
us out of something, but the word parousia,
the Greek word that many have interpreted as
being taken out from a troubled world, actually
means in Greek to meet a coming dignitary
and to escort him to his place of
prominence and rule.
We will meet him in the air and
we shall always be with him, but where
will he be?
He's going to be not only in the
earth, but get this, a place in the
earth that he has designated and of which
many so-called hotshot Christians are contemptuous because
they say he's not interested in real estate.
God doesn't have any specific intention for any
place in the earth.
Oh yeah?
The scriptures are full of a particular place
that God has designated from which his rule
shall emanate, and if it doesn't take place
there, it will not take place anywhere.
Where is that place?
Is it Geneva?
New York City?
The place of the United Nations?
You'll never guess what God would have chosen,
not because it's impressive, but because it's weak,
foolish, contemptuous, has a lousy track record.
God has chosen Jerusalem, the city of peace,
Jerusalem, Sholem, Sholom Aleichem, peace be unto you,
is going to be the locus of the
rule of God, which will be the peace
of God because it's the righteousness of God
for all nations.
Now how do we know that?
Because there are several texts to tell us
that, can you think of any?
Like for example, Isaiah chapter 2, that the
law shall go forth out of Zion and
the word of the Lord out of Jerusalem.
Let's take a look at that.
It's one of the rare texts that's repeated
identically word for word in another prophet altogether.
Micah chapter 4, verse 1 says exactly the
same thing, and they didn't whisper to each
other.
You know how Micah got it?
The same way Isaiah got it, by the
transmission of God by the Spirit, but that
God would repeat it twice through different prophets
indicates that there is a enormously significant that
text is.
So it's the word in chapter 2, which
Isaiah, the son of Amos, saw concerning Judah
and Jerusalem.
I mean, the prophets saw this.
It was made visual for him about Judah,
which is that the Southern kingdom and Jerusalem.
So right away from the very beginning, God
is designating a very literal place.
You know what we call this?
This is the scandal of specificity.
People don't like it when God chooses.
They like a God who is more amorphous,
more general, more undefined.
They don't like the specificity of God, but
you know what Paul says of him or
what he says of himself?
I will elect what I will elect.
I will choose what I will choose.
I will have mercy upon whom I will
have mercy.
So in the ways that I would love
to take the whole rest of this time
to celebrate and to make clear to you,
the God who chooses is the God who
is God.
And in fact, the fact that he chooses
is the very distinctive of God.
And who does he choose?
Israel.
Who does he choose?
What city?
Jerusalem.
What in Jerusalem?
The holy hill of Zion.
What King?
David.
What Messiah?
Jesus.
What church?
Us.
He will choose what he will choose.
The question for the church is in the
last days, will we agree with his choices?
Will we celebrate his choice?
It may not have been our choosing.
In fact, a Norwegian theologian, Mo Winkle, whose
book I found in a second-hand bookstore
in no place, a little village in England,
says that God's choice of Israel, God's choice
of the Jew, God's choice of Zion is
the very stumbling stone for the church.
It's the stumbling stone set in the path
of the church that is essentially gentile and
would not have chosen what God would have
chosen.
It would have chosen not a hill, it
would have chosen a mountain, a Mount Olympus,
or New York City, or Geneva, or another
nation.
The issue of God's choosing is the issue
of God and the issue of our submission
and surrender to the wisdom of God and
to his choice.
You can't believe how important that is.
It tests and reveals our secret heart, because
in most gentiles, if they are not deeply
established in God and in the spirit of
God, being gentile, being non-Jewish, would recoil
against and be irritated by God's choice of
the Jew.
It really tests us to see to what
degree our own heart is aligned with his.
So, this is what the prophets saw
concerning Jerusalem.
It will come about in the last days
that the mountain of the house of the
Lord will be established as the chief of
the mountains and will be raised above the
hills.
This is typical poetic and metaphorical language that
a prophet employs.
Well, I'm sounding like a lecturer.
You know why prophets have to use language
in that way?
Why they are poetic?
Anybody who took English 1A here?
Why is poetry the most coveted, precious expression
of language?
Why is poetry to be desired even over
prose?
What's the difference between the two forms of
the use of language?
What is special about poetry as against chapters
of prose?
It speaks to your heart.
It speaks to you more distinctively.
Every word means something.
Right.
Fewer words, more pointedly addressed, requiring a greater
skill to say in fewer words what prose
would have given you, what prose would have
required chapters to express.
Poetry condenses and states in the most intense
and penetrating form in the space of a
few verses.
To be a poet is an ultimate form
of expression.
And most, if not all, of the prophets
were poets.
This is poetry.
And when Isaiah uses the word mountain, he's
using a symbolic language.
What mountain refers to biblically is form of
government.
Mountain is something elevated.
It has to do with rule itself.
But this mountain of the Lord is going
to be the house of the Lord and
be established as the chief of the mountains
and will be raised above the hills.
All that presumes to be in competition with
or have an authority equal to will have
to be less than this mountain for all
the nations will string to it.
Now, listen, you guys.
The issue of God's rule is the issue
of the nations.
The Lord gave Israel a king and gave
Israel a kingdom.
But the kingdom of Israel is unique in
that it's not intended for itself alone but
for all nations.
God is jealous over his creation and over
the nations.
And at your own leisure, take a look
at one brief mystical reference that I've never
yet heard anyone ever speak on, Deuteronomy 32
.8, where just to paraphrase it now, it
says something like that when God appointed the
nations, he did so in terms of the
numbers of the sons of Israel.
There's some kind of a conjunction in the
mind and wisdom of God between Israel and
the nations.
You need to know that because Israel itself
does not know it.
You know what they say now in the
present state?
We want to be like all nations.
And God says, you're the tail, but I
will make you the head of the nations.
And in fact, in this very text, as
well as in Zechariah 14, it says nations
will come up to Jerusalem at the Feast
of Tabernacles to honor the God of Jacob.
Israel will be central to the nations in
the conception of God for his rule over
his own creation.
That's why the nations rail against Israel, and
that when the Lord comes again, he will
come as Israel's deliverer at a time in
Zechariah 12, when all the nations of the
world will come against Jerusalem to destroy it.
Why?
Because they do not want the establishment of
his rule in that Jerusalem over their nations.
Can you think of another place where this
is cogently expressed in one of the greatest
kingdom statements in the whole of Old Testament
scripture?
Psalm 2.
So put a little marker there.
We'll hopefully come back to Isaiah 2, but
it's a convenient way to remember Psalm 2
and Isaiah 2 over the issue of the
kingdom and the nations.
I'm giving you a Weltanschauung.
Remember that word?
A world cosmic view of the faith.
I want to give you a context in
which you can understand your call.
The place of the church, the meaning of
your salvation, the thing to which we're heading
is the consummation and the conclusion of all
this at the end of the age.
One final paroxysm of opposition by the nations
to defeat God's intention by doing what?
By destroying Israel, by destroying the Jewish people,
by genocidal...
what do they call that word when you
eliminate an entire race?
That's genocide.
Annihilation.
The spirit of Antichrist and of the powers
of darkness will be calculated for one last
thing for which they had opportunity through Hitler
50 years ago and almost succeeded in annihilating
the whole of European Jewry.
Had they won the war, kid cats would
not be speaking to you today because they
would have caught up with me in Brooklyn
or in California with every other Jew because
they were literally hell bent on the annihilation
of world Jewry.
There's no way to explain that sociologically.
Yes, we Jews are troublesome.
Yes, we're irritating.
Yes, we've had great influence in culture.
There's a reason why we could be resented.
But a program of annihilation, even to the
point where the military historians cannot even to
this day understand why Germany diverted material manpower,
wealth to the systematic annihilation of Jews that
they should have used for their own preservation
to the very last days of the war.
That's how the fury of a spirit of
darkness had seized the whole apparatus of state
and nation bent on one thing, the annihilation
of the Jews.
There's no way to explain that if you've
never read Psalm 2, having read Psalm 2,
the light will come on.
And you know why I'm taking pains about
this sense?
It's not over yet.
What does it say that he shall be
cast out to Satan from the heavens and
come into the earth and know that he
has but a short time left and his
fury shall be unimaginable and the church shall
experience much of that opposition and persecution in
the last days.
To think that we're going to be raptured
out is one of the most mischievous, perverse,
I don't have a word for it, has
left the church totally emasculated, totally unprepared not
to embrace ourselves and and to hear the
cry of God that we be the people
of God in a corporate way, really bonded,
really joined, really integral, not just a conglomerate
of individualities that are willing to come together
for the purpose of a service, but a
people who are the family of God, the
people of God, the body of Christ is
more than just a piece of nomenclature.
It's not just a title.
It's a phenomenon and it doesn't come easily.
It comes with blood, sweat, and tears.
The cross is at the issue of the
of people coming from a privatistic lifestyle of
Sunday services to an integral people who go
from house to house daily, breaking bread, whose
intercessions and prayers are calculated to pierce the
heavens for they're real and they reveal in
themselves the whole mystery of the Godhead, Father,
Son, and Holy Spirit who themselves together were
a company.
Nothing will drive us to the reality that
to which we're intended unless we understand what's
at stake here.
The whole coming of his kingdom is at
stake and the issue of his kingdom is
the issue of his rule because it says
that when he comes and the law shall
go forth out of Zion and the word
of Jerusalem, nations shall study war no more.
Oh, I can't wait for the day.
And they'll turn the swords into spears, pruning
hooks and their spears into the implements of
peace, not war.
And what about the whole NASC?
What is that space program?
Is it because I'm Jewish that I can't
bear it?
How many billions did they expend and they're
not even getting a beep back from Mars?
You know, you know what undergirded, you know
what they're real search for?
You know what, why all those billions are
being expended?
They wanted to find moisture because if they
could find moisture in space on another planet,
they would have the possibility of a theory
of creation that does not require God.
And we're paying the bill for boys, men
playing boys games with expensive toys at the
time when there's a mankind bleeding, when the
streets of Buenos Aires and the Latin American
cities are peopled with kids that live in
the streets and Indian and in India, people
are living on cardboard mats and have never
seen an indoors.
There are people dying from poverty and want,
and we're expending billions for space programs, for
armament development.
The United States is the single greatest producer
of armaments.
I don't know, was it $40 billion a
year of sales?
And Israel is second to third.
My people are in the arms business.
It's hot money, it's profit.
And I went to the factory, boy, I
don't know how many hours I'm going to
keep you today, where they make the F
-16 only because there's a Christian brother who's
an engineer and I got a tour.
I'll never forget it.
You know what the word the Lord gave
me when I looked at these employees?
It was Saturday, they were getting time and
a half and they were sleepwalkers.
They went from one place to another like
that and they screwed it in ever so
slowly and they turned because the clock was
running at time and a half or double
time at our expense.
The Lord gave me the word gnomes, G
-N-O-M-E-S.
They were not human.
They were pot bellied, beer guzzling, pornographic looking
characters who are in the armaments business making
big bucks to produce F-16s and they
were all going out to Thailand and to
Indonesia.
Countries that have the sparsest budget must have
an F-16 or a fleet of them
because it's prestige, because it's status.
Because if the other neighboring country has it,
you have to have it.
It's the world, saints.
It's the world's wisdom.
It's corrupt.
It's filthy.
It's vile.
It's destructive.
It's death.
It's death for those men working there morally
and humanly, let alone spiritually.
It's death.
When the Lord goes forth out of Zion,
when the Lord is seated in his sanctuary
on the holy hill of Zion, which only
he can occupy as a descendant of David,
because it's the throne of David from the
holy hill of David, or else the Lord
shall not go forth at all.
How come the powers of darkness know this
better than you?
What kind of a church is it that
doesn't know this, that has not read forever?
Luke chapter one, the very first angelic pronouncement
to Mary, taken by astonishment.
Do you mean me?
I'm a nothing.
Yes, you.
This one who's going to be born out
of you is holy.
He's the coming king of Israel and the
father shall give unto him the throne of
David, the Davidic throne, the tabernacle of David,
and he shall rule over the house of
Israel forever.
The first angelic pronouncement.
Do you know what the word Christ means?
Jesus the Christ king, anointed king.
Kings were anointed.
The Christ is an anointed one to rule.
This is the rule of the anointed, the
Lord's anointed.
And where will you be then?
In the day that the Lord comes as
king to take his rightful place of authority
over the place designated by God in the
city of Jerusalem and over a restored Israel
from the holy hill of Zion and from
the throne of David.
When he'll be ruling, what will you be
doing?
If you're an overcomer, you'll be ruling and
reigning with him from the heavenly places formerly
occupied by a whole fallen angeology who are
today's principalities and powers of the air.
Am I giving, saying too much too soon?
Oh, bless you.
My great cry to God was Lord, how
can I communicate this in one day?
Who's ruling today?
Yes, the Lord is at his throne, but
who is effectually jerking and manipulating nations?
How do we explain the annihilation of the
Bosnians in a program of ethnic cleansing conducted
50 years after the Nazi regime right in
before the face of the whole world with
impunity that it took a massive air attack
day after day to finally bring a partial
ending of that conflict with the Albanians having
perpetrated a genocidal program on the Bosnians?
That was Milosevic, that was Serbia, Yugoslavia and
the very cities in which I myself administered
only some months before those bombs came.
What about Rwanda?
What about the genocide between black tribes in
Africa?
You can multiply the instances of perverse rule
in the nations that is violent, that is
racial, that is contemptuous of men, that is
destructive of humanity.
That's present human rule.
And you know what?
They want to continue to remain in office.
Have you ever seen anyone who has found
office and obtained the prerogatives of the privileges
of office who had been willing and voluntary
to give it up even in American politics?
How do we explain Bosnia and the Albanian
things?
And now what's happened?
They pushed this Milosevic back into Belgrade and
they have a United Nations army to maintain
peace in Kosovo.
Now the Albanians are persecuting the Serbian minority
in the same bloodthirsty and violent and destructive
way in the use of torture and death
that had been previously inflicted upon them.
You know what we ought to be saying?
Come Lord Jesus, thy kingdom come in earth
as it is in heaven.
Let there be righteousness on earth and equity
and justice as only you can perform it
because men are corrupt, they're self-seeking, they
want their own ways, they don't give a
rap what it takes and whose mankind is
going to be destroyed.
Even rape has become a systematic form of
the intimidation of your enemy, no matter at
what age.
We're not talking about a light question here,
saints, but one that is grieving the heart
of God.
And when we say come Lord Jesus, we
need to think come and rule, not come
and take us out of this.
Why are the nations in an uproar and
the peoples devising a vain thing?
What's the vain thing?
That they're seeking to perpetrate and to continue
their usurping false rule, trying to keep at
arm's length the coming of the God who
alone is the just and righteous ruler over
his own creation.
What gives Jesus the right to rule from
the throne of David beside being a descendant
of David or that God himself should rule
over the nations because he's the creator of
the nations?
You remember Paul at Athens and Mars Hill
speaking to those philosophers who every day think
looking for some new thing?
He said, don't you guys know that God
has made of one blood all manner of
men and established the bounds of their habitations
and their nations that they might seek after
God if they might be found, happily be
found of him?
Don't think that your nation is your little
playground.
Don't think it's yours to do with what
you will.
God has created it.
God has created races and nations and established
the bounds of the habitation that they might
seek after God.
And he's winked in times past, he's allowed
you to make it your playground, but the
day is coming when he will judge all
men by that one whom he's raised from
the dead.
He's going to judge the nations for what?
For their misuse of their own nationhood.
Japan.
My Lord, you ever been to Singapore and
seen the monument that has four strands that
goes all the way up representing the four
races oppressed by Japan in the World War
II.
The Singaporeans, the what's that nation that's just
north of Singapore?
Kampala, what's the name of that capital city?
Those kids who come from Bemidji State that
come to my house to eat.
They're all from that nation.
It's a race.
And the Chinese and the English.
Did you know that the Japanese were racist?
That they thought that the sun rose on
them and that the Japanese empire would extend
over the face of the earth and that
they were a superior race and even God
men and that the emperors were deities?
Did you know that?
Did you know that the same number of
lives were lost in the atom bombing of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki as in the rape of
Shanghai?
You don't even know about the rape of
Shanghai.
That when the Japanese took Shanghai, the Chinese
forces surrendered on the grounds that the that
the military would lay down their arms and
be treated as prisoners with respect.
You know what they did?
They murdered them in cold blood.
They raped women, right and left women, girls.
They buried people alive.
330,000 Chinese died in the rape of
Shanghai and 330,000 Japanese died in the
atom bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Don't tell me there's no God and righteous
judgment.
It's amazing how little conscious we are of
history, how little aware we are of the
significance of nations, of how little we understand
the cosmic struggle over nations and over the
rule between the usurping false powers of the
air that influence Serbia, influence Japan, influence Germany
to be destructive and violent because that's the
nature of these false rulers and they want
to retain that rule.
And they are devising a vain thing that
can't work.
The kings of the earth take their stand
and the rulers take counsel together.
Is this redundant, the kings and the rulers?
Is that like saying the kings and the
kings?
The kings are the visible human magistrates.
Who are the rulers?
Who's behind the scenes really ruling through Clinton,
through the magistrates, through Hitler, the invisible principality
and powers of the air, that whole spectral
realm of fallen angels who have revolted against
God and followed Satan are the factual rulers
of this world because their Satan and their
king is the prince of this world.
Jesus called him that.
The prince of this world comes, but he
has no nothing in me.
The final showdown is between two princes and
the church is in the middle of that
struggle.
The rulers take counsel together against the Lord
and against his anointed.
Let us tear their fetters apart and cast
away their courts from us.
But he who sits in the heavens laughs.
The Lord scoffs at them.
He will speak to them in his anger
and terrify them in his fury.
And his answer is, as for me, I
have installed my king.
Do you have another word for installed?
Set my king upon Zion, my holy mountain.
Is Zion a mountain?
Have you ever been to Jerusalem, the hill
of David, the city of David?
It's not a mountain, saints.
It's a pimple.
But God calls it a mountain because she's
not impressed with physical sight or size or
dimension or number.
The fact of the matter is that God
will choose exactly the opposite of what men
revere and esteem who are who are moved
toward glorifying size, number, prestige, stature, wealth, power.
He'll choose what is weak, what is insignificant,
what is foolish to confound that which is
mighty and wise in the sight of men.
Did you know that?
That's why he chose us.
We're a bunch of foolishness.
We're nothing.
We're just a handful of nothing.
And yet, and you'll read in Ephesians chapter
three, he created all things in order that
through the church, this nothing, he might demonstrate
to the powers of the air the manifold
wisdom of God.
Our king chooses foolish things.
I'm sorry.
He said Mount Zion is like a little
bitty.
Yeah.
Mount Zion is not really, it's a hill.
The holy hill of Zion is chosen because
it is insignificant.
God says to Israel, I didn't choose you
because you were mighty.
I chose you because you were few.
You were a stinking slave nation building fortresses
and fortune cities for Pharaoh.
You were nothing.
You lived on leeks and garlics and preferred
that.
And I chose you.
He'll choose the foolish and the weak thing.
He'll choose a stable rather than holiday in,
in which his king is born.
Unto this day there shall be born unto
you in the city of David, a Messiah,
the Lord.
Where is he born?
In a manger.
That's where the animals salivate when they eat
and drop their drool in into their food.
That's where they laid him.
And where was the, the, the kingdom of
David conceived and first formed in a cave.
And who was the king?
Who is this David who feigned madness and
drooled in his beard and scribbled on the
doorposts so that the Philistines would, would not
pursue him.
And, and he's the prototype of the Jesus
to come the great king.
Yes.
Yeah.
And who's his spokesman?
High school dropout art cats.
You know, he chooses the things.
In fact, it says in Luke that that
which the world esteems is an abomination to
God.
You know why Jews have not surrendered to
Jesus where they've not recognized him as the
Messiah, the anointed, the, the in Christ and
one, the kingdom of Israel, because he didn't
come in pump.
He didn't come with a motorcycle cavalcade and
a whole, what do they call it with
a fleet of, of armored cars and, and
limousines.
He came on the back of an ass
in fulfillment of Zachariah chapter nine, your king
shall come to lowly and meek upon the
back of an ass, the cult, the full
of an ass.
And those Jews who knew their scriptures and
saw this Jesus coming down a month of
olives on the back of an ass upon
which never meant sat cried out Hosanna to
the king and blessed is the king and
blessed is the kingdom that comes in the
name of the Lord.
It'll always come when it comes on the
back of an ass.
Hmm.
And he said to his disciples, go into
yonder village and there you'll find an ass
and it's a cult, it's full, it's offspring
and take them.
And if anyone interferes, tell them that the
Lord has need of them.
And so they found it.
Imagine Jesus's whole prophetic stature and reputation was
at stake.
If, if those animals were not found, there
they were and they bought them.
And instead of taking the donkey upon a
mature animal prepared to bear the weight of
a strapping six foot carpenter, he takes the
offspring, the full, the cult upon which never
man sat.
And on that, he comes down the most
precipitous descent that amount of olives is.
If you ever were there, as I have
been many times, you cannot even walk down
and maintain your dignity.
It's just too steep.
I mean, you look foolish, you know, but
you imagine coming down on this week, a
little animal upon which never man sat.
You don't know whether to laugh or to
cry.
That's your king coming in glory into his
holy city in preview of his coming at
the end of the age to the very
city where he was crucified in the most
cruel torture and agony of body and soul
and outside the city of the dump between
criminals with a sign in three languages, Jesus
of Nazareth, king of the Jews is exactly
where he's coming to be.
That isn't just like God.
You know what I'm saying?
You know what I'm thinking sense?
You don't know God as you ought, unless
you know these things.
It's the revelation of Jesus as king and
the revelation of the kingdom and the beauty
of the king that brings the Lord and
God, the father into a perspective of understanding
and celebration and majesty that nothing else will
provide.
You know why our worship is so hokey,
why we need the overhead projectors, why it's
strained?
Because we have not the sense of the
majesty of God and the genius of God
and the glory of God that is nowhere
revealed more profoundly than in his kingdom and
his kingdom.
When you say thy kingdom come, you're not
asking for bluster and bravado and motorcycle cavalcades,
you're asking for the kingdom of a God
himself who came down into his city on
the back of an ass to die the
death of a criminal.
That's our king, that's his kingdom.
My kingdom is not of this world, else
would my servants fight.
My kingdom is another thing altogether, it's another
quality, it's another wisdom, it's exactly in opposition
to, in every point in particular, to the
kingdoms of this present world.
You know what I'm realizing?
Having been a believer now 35 years and
been around a little bit in the world
and in Christendom and in the charismatic realm,
where that kingdom is not understood, not celebrated,
not recognized, not sought, invariably other kinds of
petty kingdoms will fill the void.
Call them what they will, the ministry of
this one, that one, this denomination, that movement
is a cheapie that must necessarily surface in
the absence of the centrality and the recognition
of that kingdom, which is the kingdom of
God.
If we are not kingdom conscious and kingdom
waiting and kingdom seeking and kingdom living, we'll
find ourselves candidates for false kingdoms.
So I had to say to these East
German pastors, what has replaced the dynamic that
came when you used to be under persecution?
And they had, nothing has replaced it.
I said, what about the kingdom?
Huh?
Well, the kingdom is something personally, Jesus said
the kingdom of God is within you.
Yes, but what did he mean by that?
There's a sense in which that's definitely true,
but does that exhaust the larger and deeper
reality of what the kingdom is and what
we ought to expect and be laboring for
and knowing the conflict that's going to come
because the nations rage and you think their
rage is over or we haven't seen it
yet.
There's a mask of civility.
Saints, you've got to see it.
This is why they're elders in the body
of Christ, because we've lived longer and we've
seen more and we understand we've seen through
the pretense.
Yeah.
High school dropout now has a couple of
master's degrees from the university of California, Berkeley
and the Lutheran seminary in St. Paul.
And I had opportunity to see through the
civility, the decorum, the propriety, the amenities of
civilized institutions of learning and theology to the
jungle that they really are.
When that mask is taken away of civility
and the teeth are bared and you see
the truth of the world and its lust
and its power and its desire to perpetuate
itself at whatever cost, you will have looked
into the face of Satan.
There's a war on and the end of
the age will be that final conflict.
And we're not going to make it as
a superficial Sunday service attending people, congregations.
I have set my king on the holy
hill of Zion.
Today I have declared the decree.
Thou art my son.
Today I have begotten thee.
Ask of me and I will give you
the nations as your inheritance.
That's poetry, but it's also literal.
Don't think that that's a play on words
any more than the nation that the mountain
of the Lord's house will be above the
mountains and hills of the world and that
the nations will come up to Jerusalem and
that they'll beat their swords into plowshares and
study war no more.
That's literal.
It's intensified.
It's compact.
It's poetic, but it's speaking of very real,
very actual things in the world and things
that we ought to be coveting and praying
for, because the world is misusing its wealth
and producing forms of death.
The whole world is sick.
We stayed in a motel, was it night
before last, and we got the complimentary newspaper.
We, both of us were so upset.
We were so, our spirits were so jarred
and there was nothing in them that was
flagrant, but ads for Christmas shopping.
That's enough to do it for me.
The world, the system, profit, seduction, fascination, stars,
personalities, glitter, while a whole generation is being
ground to powder and our own children are
being made merchandise.
The souls of men being made merchandise.
That the children themselves constitute a multi-billion
dollar market who know brand names and want
this kind of gene and that kind of
gene and that kind of shoe.
And if they don't get it, they're miserable
and they'll make you miserable.
The whole, the system has got us.
It's another kingdom.
You got the idea?
We have, once you start putting on the
spectacles of the kingdom, it's remarkable as how
you begin to perceive the false reality that
purports to be reality, that is everywhere, bringing
its victims into death, into mental institutions, into
nervous breakdowns, into tumors, into heart failures, into
all the kinds of things that the bodies
of men can't even bear because it's not
in keeping with truth and with integrity and
with righteousness.
But when this kingdom comes, oh, it'll be
a mechaya.
That's from the Hebrew word meaning life.
It'll be a relief.
We'll have shalom.
We'll have peace.
Not because of some pseudo kind of a
thing affected by men, but because it issues
from righteousness and right relationship and truth and
equity and justice, because our king is impartial,
because he doesn't have to butter up anyone,
because he doesn't have to line his pockets,
because he doesn't have to worry about reelection,
because he doesn't have to be everybody's popular.
He can rule with perfect righteousness and equity
as God.
And then the trees will spring up the
fruit of the earth.
I mean, nature itself will rejoice that is
now even under bondage.
To be kingdom minded is to become eschatologically
minded.
And the church that is not eschatological is
not the church.
I'm using a fancy word, eschatology, the study
of the things pertaining to the end, the
conclusion of the age, the end of human
history, the coming of the kingdom, the advent
of the millennium.
Come on, you guys.
Tell me that you're millennial, millennially minded, except
in the sense that Y2K.
Where is our millennial anticipation?
Where is the sense of what is going
to come and the joy of it and
that creation itself is going to rejoice?
The early church that was the church was
eschatologically minded.
Paul speaking in Thessalonians to the Thessalonians, newly
saved out of paganism and idolatry, who were
saved by his word.
He said, I read, I praise God that
when you heard the word of God from
me, you received it for what it was,
not the word of man, but the word
of God that performs a work in them
that believe and has turned you from your
idols to serve the living God, not just
get saved, serve the living God and to
wait for his son who's coming from heaven
and will save us from the day of
his wrath.
What a message.
Who's preaching like that today?
Who's, who's telling people they're being saved from
a wrath to come that the Lord is
coming and in judgment that there's a wrath
and a fury against the nations that have
blasphemed his name and the church that has
mocked him in the pursuit of its own
petty kingdoms.
Who's hearing a message like that?
That's apostolic proclamation that saves men from the
idolatries to serve the living God.
That church was eschatologically minded and to be
eschatologically minded is to be equally apocalypticly minded.
Both Greek words, eschaton, the coming of the
Lord, the end, but apocalyptic in judgment.
Where's the fear of the Lord in the
church?
We're a bunch of flakes.
It's a cheapie.
I mean, what we get away with is
horrific because there's no fear.
We prayed about this.
I don't know what hour of the morning
for the fear of the Lord, the awe
and the reverence of God to come into
the church.
What is a church without it?
But a culture, a Sunday phenomenon.
We have not that sense of the fear
of God because we have not the sense
of God.
We have not the sense of his coming.
We have not the sense of his kingdom.
We have not the sense that he's coming
in judgment.
And the fact of the matter is, if
we're scratched deeply enough, we're offended by a
God who will judge.
That's why this book on the Holocaust is
devastating.
A man wrote to me, said, my whole
view of God has exploded.
I'm seeing a sense of, I've never considered
because to exclude judgment from God is to
exclude God.
You can't separate out his attributes.
Oh, I like his goodness.
I like his mercy.
I like his love.
I like his, what about his judgment?
His judgment is his righteousness.
And when his judgments come in the earth,
the world shall learn righteousness.
He's not some arbitrary, capricious God who just
comes to destroy.
His judgments are redemptive and altogether wise and
needful.
When we say, come Lord Jesus, we're saying,
come in judgment.
When we say we pray for the peace
of Jerusalem, we're not hoping for some magical
wand to be passed over troubled city, but
for judgment that must come and a chastisement
that must come before they can be the
restored people of God.
We don't even know what we're praying because
we have omitted the most significant aspect of
God as God in judgment, because we're not
eschatologically minded because we're not apocalyptically minded and
we're even offended.
And we want all things to remain as
they are in the hope of amelioration and
improvement.
We're progressivists, we're humanists and not apostolic in
our anticipation and it shows in our character,
our relationships.
We're casual one Sunday like another.
We've lost the intensity and the purpose for
our being that makes us the people of
God only in the context of the kingdom
of God, not as a subjective and personal
thing however precious that might be, but in
the sense of the theocratic rule of God
over the nations from the place that God
has designated through a nation yet to be
restored through the mercies of the church in
the last days.
In the latter days, Isaiah said concerning the
division of Jerusalem, the mountain of the Lord's
house will be higher and above and all
nations shall flow into it to the God
of Jacob.
Got the picture?
You're getting the picture?
Hallelujah.
Well, let me pray a little prayer.
This God of Jacob, if you don't know
him as the God of Jacob, do you
really know him as you ought?
I came back from Nuremberg, Germany, out not
far from Wagner country in Bavaria and I
went out to a Jewish cemetery that survived
the Nazi time.
The gravestones were so thick like that that
the Nazis could not topple them and the
Hebrew was effaced because they went back to
the 1400s.
You can barely discern some of the Hebrew
on one side, German on the other side.
I'm always so moved.
I always go out of my way to
find Jewish cemeteries where we are distributed throughout
the world and where we have died for
one unkind reason or another.
And I came back to that meeting to
address a German congregation, charismatic.
And I said, Hey, my Jewish people have
been here since the 1400s.
There's no place in Europe where they've been
longer since the destruction of the temple in
70 AD.
They came to the Rhine and were merchants
before Germany even came into its national identity.
It was the Holy Roman Empire, but it
was Germanic.
And we've lived that long with you and
never got saved.
How come that you never told us that
the God that you're celebrating in Jesus Christ
is the God of Alphabets?
And do you even know today that the
God whom you ostensibly worship is the God
of Jacob and the God of Israel?
And you should have seen their jaws drop.
Not only did they not know it, they
did not want to know it.
Their God was somehow Christian, separate, unrelated to
Israel.
And that church that chooses that posture, that
mindset, that separation is ipso facto, not the
church, certainly not the church of the last
days.
It's only the church and its recognition of
its identity with that people and with that
people's God and with his coming King.
That's why Jesus stopped when he was going
through Jericho and a blind beggar cried out,
Jesus, thou son of David, have mercy on
me.
They tried to shut him up.
He couldn't, they couldn't contain him.
Jesus, thou son of David, have mercy on
me.
He stopped.
Who's that?
A blind beggar knows my truest identification.
I'm the son of David.
And that's my qualification to rule on his
throne forever in the day when I shall
come with the wounds that were the evidence
of what I have received in the house
of my friends.
This blind beggar knew it.
And you Pharisees and teachers of the law
did not know it and could not recognize
me as your King and would not have
me to rule over you.
It's going to cost you.
And it has.
This kingdom of God is the kingdom of
heaven, but it's the Davidic kingdom.
It's the raising up again of the tabernacle
of David, the ruins of it, that his
rule might go forth over Edom and over
the nations.
I have given you the nations for your
inheritance.
We're involved in that cosmic drama and what
an involvement and what a requirement it is.
We cannot afford to be patsy Christians.
We cannot afford to have as our standard
of measure the success of our meetings, the
enjoyment, the program.
We've got to be involved in the anticipation
and the preparation of the coming of that
kingdom, knowing that it's going to come apocalyptically
in violent collision in the last days, for
they will not let go and relinquish their
false rule.
They'll rail against the Lord against his anointed.
And they know better than the church that
the king will not come.
That is contained in the heavens in acts
321, waiting for the restoration of all things
spoken by the prophets since the world began.
You know what the prophets all spoke about
Isaiah, the psalmists, Hosea, Micah, the minor prophets,
the major prophets.
What was the last days restoration that permits
the king to come the restoration of Israel
itself, because how shall he rule from the
holy hill of Zion if it's not holy?
If it's a place of merchandise where you
get your Gucci leather goods and where they
come from Jordan to do their expensive shopping
in Jerusalem, the king's coming to that?
No, no.
That present Jerusalem shall turn to rebel saints.
There shall be devastation, widespread judgment on all
the present cities of Israel.
They'll be cast out again into the nations.
There'll be one final chastisement, then sifting of
the time of Jacob's trouble, and they'll perish,
except that you know they have a destiny
and that a remnant of them must return
to Zion with everlasting joy upon their heads
and mourning and sighing fling away.
And you're willing to extend mercy at the
risk of your own life at a time
when anyone who will extend themselves to a
Jew puts his head on the block, just
like Corrie ten Boom.
Are you going to be willing?
What, for a Jew?
Why should you?
What did they ever do for you?
Unless you see yourself in identification with them
as the people of God, of the God
of Jacob and the God of Israel, who
is your God and your coming king through
their restoration.
And whatever measure of sacrifice, inconvenience, suffering, the
greater your rule and reign with him when
he comes and brings his reward with him
to give to everyone according to their works.
See how eschatological?
See how the church needs to labor in
anticipation of a future event and the reward
of sacrifice for that?
That is the church saints.
Anything else is a kingdom of another kind.
So Lord, Precious God, how could anyone message?
And you've given me gorgeous messages.
I love your messages.
I would to God I had the liberty
to preach a message, not a Weltanschauung.
But these children need a cosmic view.
They need an overarching construct to understand their
call in these last days.
And you've given us a sketch.
You've given us the rudiments, my God, and
there's much to be filled in.
But I pray that not a syllable of
the sharing shall fall to the ground, that
even what was not explicitly spoken, but insinuated
throughout between the lines will be communicated into
their hearts by your spirit and that you'll
birth in them a jealousy for your kingdom
that is more than a vague generalization of
some kind of interior and subjective thing that
we have within us.
But they'll have also the sense of the
reality of the political rule of God who
deserves that rule because she's the creator of
this earth and these nations and that it's
that kingdom that we shall desire and labor
to obtain.
Bless these children, Lord, as the ambassadors of
your kingdom.
Give them the high seriousness that only the
awareness of the kingdom brings and the willingness
to sacrifice that only the kingdom justifies.
Let them be co-rulers with you and
share, my God, from your throne to the
measure of that sacrifice and that service in
this earth and in this nation and among
the nations in these last days.
Call your sons and daughters even now to
heroic participation and willingness, whatever the cost, that
when they say thy kingdom come, the only
prayer you ever taught your disciples, pray this,
but our father, which art in heaven, hallowed
be thy name for nothing else will hallow
your name than your kingdom come in earth
as it is in heaven.
Give these children a kingdom-mindedness that eclipses
and minimizes and makes trivial all that is
in the world that seeks to clutch at
them to gain their loyalty, their energies, their
interest.
May they see it for the cheap, shallow
thing that it is that can only be
seen in that way in the light of
your kingdom.
Bring kingdom consciousness, my God, to your church,
we pray, even the kingdom of David and
that great David who will establish his throne.
Thank you, my God, have us to palpitate
for the righteousness and equity and justice that
will issue from that one place that you
have appointed and we bless you for you're
the God who is only God and the
God who chooses.
We agree with your choice.
Bless these children, bless this word, set things
in motion by it that would not have
taken place without it and we thank you
and give you the praise for the jealousy
that broods over us and will not let
us go.
Thank you for my young brothers agonizing, trying
to to struggle through to come to an
understanding of how all this fits together and
I pray that he'll be the chief recipient
of this word today, that it'll go click,
click, click, click in his soul, things would
fall into place as it did for me
and all of the things that constituted the
baggage of my faith came into a comprehensive
unity when you inserted the key of your
kingdom.
So we bless you, Lord, and we thank
you.
Turn it in our hearts that you might
perform it.
Thank you for the Holy Spirit without which
it could never be obtained.
Thank you for the resurrection of Jesus that
raised him from the dead, that declared the
decree this day I set my king on
the holy hill and that there's a resurrection
for us that is our day that will
that you can say this is my son
because it's only in that power and in
that authority that we shall be for you
what we must in these last days.
To say thy kingdom come is to say
through thy resurrection and thy resurrection alone that
you might be glorified.
It's not enough to approve it as a
doctrine.
I bless these children, Lord.
Trouble us with your word.
Let it percolate in our soul and in
our spirits.
Let it drive us into your word to
search out the prophets and the allusions to
your kingdom and in the psalms and in
the many places that you make your profound
hints.
Bless this congregation, bless this work.
Thank you, my God.
Lay its foundations in the kingdom of God
that are removable.
We thank and give you praise in Jesus
name.
Thank you.
Don't don't lift your head.
Transact something with the Lord.
I'll tell you something about the kingdom.
It's entirely voluntary.
No man will be conscripted into the kingdom.
It's going to come through the voluntary sacrifice
of saints who are jealous for it because
they know that the issue of the kingdom
is the issue of God's glory forever.
And they're willing for the sacrifice in this
life, whatever it is to obtain it.
You let the Lord know right where you're
sitting, either audibly or out of your heart,
preferably audibly that the powers of the air
will take note that you want to be
observed and to be feared for you've made
a kingdom declaration.
You're not content to be merely charismatic.
You have intentions beyond the success of your
own fellowship in your own numbers that you're
a kingdom saint and you're willing for the
cost of it in this life.
And it will cost you'll be marked.
Let him know thy kingdom come Lord is
at the heart of my whole identification of
myself as a saint.
Thy kingdom come not my career, not my
ministry.
Thy kingdom come.
It might even take the sacrifice of my
ministry, the sacrifice of my vested interests to
obtain it.
But let your rule of my life, my
family be upon your shoulder for unto us
a son is given, a child is born
and the government shall be upon his shoulder.
The government of the church first, and then
also Israel.
And then also the nations, wherever we are
still independent, self-willed, calling our own shots,
making our own plans for the future, making
our own determinations, our own ambitions that have
not consulted.
You have not recognized your Lordship and your
kingship.
Forgive us and we surrender.
We give all of them.
I got every interest.
Your kingdom come.
We have no right to determine our retirement,
our leisure, our whole, our saving our, our,
our, our, our, thy kingdom come whatever it
requires from this day forth in Jesus name.
Let the Lord know it.
Let the powers of darkness know it and
everything will change.
Somebody make a verbal declaration for yourself, for
this congregation.
Come God in my heart, my life, my
family, of all places in Atlanta.
Thank you Lord.
My own discernment and my own perception.
Oh God.
I'm asking.
Oh God save.
Thank you Lord.
You come Lord, come God, come.
Yep.
My children, my house, oh God.
As for me and my house, Lord God
I serve the Lord.
Oh God let me serve, oh God and
not dictate.
Oh God rule, oh God.
Rule over this family, rule over this church.
Amen.
Come oh God, come and rule.
Be the son of David here.
Yep.
Oh God.
That's right.
Reign in us, oh God.
Reign with us.
Give us a, oh God, a kingdom vision.
Yep.
Thank you Lord.
That Atlanta should not be known for its
Coca-Cola, for its Braves, for its football
teams, for its sports, for its productions, for
its promotions, but for your kingdom in this
very place that so exalts the petty kingdoms
of men.
We ask that your kingdom shall come crashing
in and bring to smithereens, my God, the
presumptions of men to exalt their industries and
their businesses and their sports and their pettiness
and to leave you as a Sunday supplement
only.
God forbid.
Bring Atlanta, my God, to a place that
glorifies the king.
Thank you my God.
Correct, my God, its faulty values, its imbalance.
Thank you my God.
Thank you Lord.
Its high presumptuous towers, its city landscape, all
of the pretense and presumption of men that
relegates you to the dustbin of insignificance as
a Sunday supplement only.
Come my God, be glorified in this great
city.
Yes.
Let it be great for the right reasons.
Yes Lord.
In Jesus name.
Thank you Lord.
Oh Holy Spirit.
Thank you.
Thank you Lord.