So we need an especial grace from the
Lord for something that gives every appearance of
him, especially dear to him.
It describes the Church in her eternal configuration,
not as body of Christ overcoming man, but
as a bride.
Isn't that remarkable?
That the final and enduring designation is feminine,
a bride.
So we need to really be instructed and
understand what it is for which we're attending.
So Lord, we ask for your mercy, and
we continue to ask and to keep asking.
Be present with us, Lord.
And if this phrase and concept is dear
to you, for you have yourself invoked and
established it, we ask a communication, Lord, that
is appropriate to your own heart.
And if we have resisted it for the
one reason or another, overcome our resistance, open
it to us in understanding, my God, that's
appropriate, and bless our time together tonight.
So we're following you, Lord, with us soever
you goeth, session by session.
And we don't know the one from the
other until the time has virtually come.
So come, my God, and lead us into
places where we have not been heretofore, and
employ the body, employ the saints, Lord, to
bring from this one and that an appropriate
comment, a question, an insight that it might,
something might be formed for our understanding.
Your blessing, Lord.
Thank you, precious God, for tonight.
We invoke the blood of the Lamb upon
our heads and upon our house.
The evening, the blood of the evening sacrifice,
as it were.
So come and sanctify our vessels, remove the
debris and the clutter of the day, the
residue of anything, my God, that has issued
out of our humanity that will in any
way dull us or make you in any
way to recoil or to withdraw.
So have a chaste vessel, Lord, for your
presence and your impartation, a chaste corporate vessel
in that washing of the blood which we
ask even now.
Take from us any defilement or stain, for
we so covet, Lord, your presence, because the
spirit of God is the spirit of truth.
And so come, Lord, and feel comfortable to
be in our midst and to bring, my
God, all of the preciousness that can only
come through your spirit.
We bless you for your blood, for the
spirit, for the word, all of the great
provision, my God, that issues from you.
Receive our gratitude, Lord, and delight your own
soul tonight.
Worship and praise the word.
We look to you in Yeshua's holy name.
Amen.
So we need to be yielded to what
God is wanting to recognize our unyieldedness, our
stiffness, our intractability, our stodginess, even over things
that are right.
So somehow to be able to hold truth
and not be fearful that you're going to
lose it, if the Lord is introducing something
that stretches us to a new perception, even
of that truth.
Someone said at the conference in Canada, a
Scotsman got up and made a statement.
He said, men who are fixed in a
one point of truth, that becomes for them
a rut.
And if they resist the present truth, the
rut becomes a grave.
So I thought that that was a remarkable
insight.
Pathos, the word that has come up, it's
like the Lord playing like a haunting refrain,
comes up again and again, a quality that
moves one to pity and sorrow.
Poignancy, poignant, P-O-I-G-N-A
-N-T.
Do you know that word?
We are supposed to be the guardians of
language and be jealous over the maintaining of
the integrity of words.
No one in the world should be more
word oriented than the church.
And so we love words and their meaning
and we stand God over them because when
words lose their meaning and become blunt and
become a grunt, civilization is on its way
out.
The way in which language is revered and
employed is an index as to the condition
of an age.
So perhaps part of the church's failure prophetically
is to be guardian over language itself, not
to allow its misuse and to have a
greater sense of its meanings and the exquisite
range of expression to be found in vocabulary
like the word poignant.
Who can define that?
Poignant.
You know the poignant speaks of and points
to something that lies too deep for words.
Poignant is standing at the place where the
trade towers in New York City had once
stood and looking over the cabin of a
terrible flattened area and you're unable to express
the mortification, the tragedy, that what had happened,
that something was struck in a point of
time that not only affects the geography of
New York City but has gone into the
nation and into the earth.
That's irretrievable.
It's like visiting Dachau or Auschwitz, standing at
those places.
What can you say?
It's something poignant.
As I described that German cemetery with those
thick granite stones that are lurching and were
not able to be thrown down by men
and it's like a bizarre, strange configuration of
stones.
Or going to Prague and look and visiting
the oldest synagogue in Europe going back to
the 12th, 13th century and outside of it
are the gravestones and on each of the
gravestones of the great and memorable rabbis of
past history are stones set on top of
the gravestones.
I don't know where this tradition comes from
but it denotes a very visit that someone
has come to commemorate the passing of some
sage rabbi and so you see these stones
in the different postures with little stones on
top of them and you get a sense
of the passage of time, of life.
I went to the Jewish cemetery in Bombay,
India and read the tombstones and the inscriptions.
I remember still in the church in Singapore,
Baptist Church, my first visit to that country
and there were plaques all around the room
of the missionaries who had come and had
died in that country.
Esther Smith, born 1897, arrived in Singapore 19
-something, died two years later from malaria and
you could just read the tombstones and get
a sense of the roll call of God's
saints and what has been invested and then
the meeting begins and seven or eight hundred
Chinese believers are singing the praises of God
to the God of Jacob and the God
of Israel.
Do you have a word for that?
If you're incapable of the poignancy of such
a moment, you're not living in your full
humanity and salvation means a salvation to the
uttermost, that we are full orbed men and
women who are alive in the inner man
and have a respect and an affinity for
things by which where we can be touched.
Pathos is the ability to be touched and
to be touched in those things that are
too deep for words.
Well, that brings me to the little booklet
on the Bride of Christ written by Basilia
Schlenk, now passed on through the Lord.
I think she died in her mid-90s,
about my mother's age, only within this last
year.
I had the privilege of having her ladle
gravy on my food at a meal where
I was invited with my German interpreter and
honored.
One of the sisters came and recited a
poem written in our honor and mother Basilia
ladled gravy.
Always took a personal interest in Ben Israel,
Inga, what we are about.
When I first visited that place and came
through the gate in Darmstadt, Germany, I felt
that I had entered heaven.
There's something indescribable.
There was something so hallowed in the atmosphere
that prevailed in that place that I was
immediately touched.
I learned later that when David Wilkerson made
the same visit after touring the property, someone
told me, I think it's true, he flung
himself upon the compost heap.
He felt so much the sinner by contrast
of the sense of holiness that prevailed in
that place that he threw himself on the
compost heap.
I didn't go that far, but I could
well appreciate a man doing something like that.
Later on, that movement dispersed its sisters to
different parts of the world, and that's why
you'll find them today in Australia and Europe
and different nations, Denmark even.
I went to visit them in Cairo, and
I thought, huh, one thing to maintain the
kind of sanctified atmosphere that you have established
in Germany, because Germany lends itself to that.
There's a whole history and tradition of celibate
communities of men and women that are Protestant
and who are married to the Lord, so
to speak, that is outside of our American
experience.
I can understand that your movement will have
a conducive environment in Germany.
By the way, the movement was born in
1945 at the end of World War II
when Darmstadt was ruthlessly bombed.
Without any apparent reason, it had no longer
any military or strategic value.
Like Dresden, the city famous for its china,
both of them were demolished at about the
same time with firebombs, armadas of Allied bombers
flying overhead, so that tens upon tens of
thousands died from suffocation.
The fires were so intense that the air
was sucked up.
People were mired in the asphalt.
Their feet were stuck in melting asphalt, and
they perished.
And the way in which Vasily Ishchenko responded
was that this was God's judgment upon Germany
for its brutal mistreatment of the Jew.
It was a movement born in repentance for
Germany for its conduct toward the Jew.
That was its very inception.
And they have, I believe to this day,
maintained that character.
So when I went up to Cairo to
visit them, I thought, huh, one thing to
maintain this atmosphere in Germany.
Let's see you maintain it in one of
the most congested cities in the world.
Fourteen million people, donkeys, camels, asses, roads that
have lanes for two cars, have four cars,
and people drive by censor, not by white
markings.
You guys don't know what the world is
like.
And they honk their horns continually so as
to know whether somebody to the right or
to the left and front and the rear.
And the noise is day and night, as
is the stink, the smell, the garbage, the
filth, the congestion, the animals, the poverty.
It's overwhelming.
Let's see you be spiritual in an environment
like that.
One thing in Germany, but let's see you
do it in Egypt, in Cairo, where people
spit with their phlegm.
It's vile, it's Islamic, it's poisonous, it's corruptive.
And I was in its hospitals in 1964
with an ear infection and a hepatitis because
I ate their food mindlessly.
I almost died.
The Jewish community paid my medical bill.
You'll read about it in Ben Israel.
So I went up this flight of stairs
where these sisters have their apartment, expecting that
they would be adversely affected by having to
live in an environment of that kind.
I know I could not maintain any kind
of spirituality when everything in that society militates
against it.
And the door opened and the same breath
and sense of God's presence and sense of
holiness, sanctity that had prevailed in Darmstadt was
there also.
And so the sisters showed me that we
as believers can triumph over every adverse thing
that is to be found in our environments.
And there can be an island of sanctity,
sanity, the presence of God in the midst
of turbulence.
So it's a remarkable movement.
I'm saying all that to heighten your appreciation
of what I'm about to read selections from
her little booklet that I've had for years
and never till now have picked up because
the subject itself was a little icky.
This, what do they say, passion for Jesus.
There's something about romanticizing this relationship that almost
borders on a kind of erotic note.
So how do you maintain what is properly
bridal without it becoming disfigured into something sensuous
or worse yet erotic?
Because these women are demonstrating to us what
is the ultimate character of the church for
which we are presently being fitted.
One little chapter is called suffering, sharing Jesus'
sufferings in the end times.
A great blessing is granted to the bride
of Jesus Christ in these end times on
which vital souls in other centuries were not
able to experience to such an extent, apart
from a few single out by the Lord
to share in some measure in this fashion.
Today, a bride of Jesus should bear not
only his sufferings from Gethsemane to Calvary in
her heart, but also his present day sufferings.
They are the only movement that I know
that speak about the present sufferings of the
Lord.
We always think of it in past tense,
the sufferings that accompanied his passion at Calvary,
but that he has present sufferings, that there
are present griefs never occurred to me.
But when you think on it, why not?
He's a man of sorrow still, and his
heart is grieved still.
And who commiserates with him?
Who senses the ache of his heart and
wants to be a solace and a comfort
as any wife would be to a husband?
You know, to know that your husband is
anguished in his soul and is bearing something
and to be indifferent to that is not
to be wifely.
So, today a bride of Jesus should bear
not only his past, but his present day
sufferings.
Nowadays, Jesus is being crucified many times over
throughout the world.
Hebrews 6.6. Because of the falling away
of thousands who are once consecrated to God,
among them are souls who have betrayed their
Lord and who in positions of Christian leadership
are leading countless numbers astray.
Jesus must witness a fallen humanity wallowing in
the most appalling sins that the world has
ever known, and the growing influence of Satan
in many lives.
Satan is acknowledged as Lord, small l, with
many consciously or unconsciously serving him.
And so the earth increasingly bears the imprint
of hell.
Jesus is suffering immeasurably.
His heart is almost breaking.
Well, how would you know that?
Are you guessing or are you in such
proximity to that heart that you sense it?
This is pathos.
This is what is too close, too deep
for words.
This isn't something that you obtain through analysis.
This is something that you obtain through intimacy
and through union.
They sense his heart.
It is impossible for his bride to be
indifferent.
Love shares in the sufferings of the beloved,
as every bride knows.
Yet many who know the Lord confess with
sadness, oh, my love is still so small.
The suffering of Jesus today ought to stir
my heart more deeply, kindling in me the
desire to share in his sufferings.
Don't misread this or don't mishear this as
if this is some masochistic delight in a
kind of suffering.
I want to suffer like the great Russian
actors.
This is not that.
Don't think that this is maudlin, M-A
-U-D-L-I-N.
Maudlin, define that.
Maudlin is a perverse kind of sentimentality that
likes and enjoys a kind of morbid suffering.
This is not that.
Don't misread this.
This is pure.
This is holy.
This is different.
This is not some enjoyment of suffering that
one goes out of his way to experience.
This is a suffering that inexorably comes by
virtue of the kind of relationship one has
with the man of sorrows.
This is the kind of suffering that comes
when you know what will grieve him because
you love what he loves and hate what
he hates.
That when he says it's an abomination for
him, it's an abomination for you.
While all the world celebrates and loves the
rap culture and the music and the metallic
noise and so on, a person who has
this affinity for the Lord shatters and knows
that he has to look upon it and
sees it more clearly than we, for everything
is transparent in his sight and nothing is
hidden.
Praise God for us.
There is a certain protection.
If we could see the whole condition of
the world and the nation wallowing in what
it does, I don't know that we could
take it.
But he sees it all and has got
to take it.
And it's a grief because Satan is busy
to mar and to distort all that is
made in his image.
He wants to take a delight in marring
creation itself, in uprooting it, in disfiguring it,
in raping it.
So the Lord is watching as all of
this takes place, this traffic, this commercialism.
Children themselves are now objects of merchandise.
It's interesting that at the end of Zachariah,
it says there's no longer a Canaanite in
the land or in Jerusalem.
And the word for Canaanite is a merchandiser,
that the spirit of merchandise has been taken
out in the city that has been made
holy.
So much merchandising is taking place in our
religious world and allowing ministries to prevail and
succeed.
And we ourselves, suckers, are responsive to that.
Full-color mailings and four-color this and
in the mailboxes.
I don't want to mention the name of
the ministry, but it is symptomatic of many
of the biggest named ministries in our nation
today, where I was given the red carpet
tour, not because I deserved it, but because
a bishop from Singapore, whose son or daughter
is enrolled in the school established by that
ministry, was given the gold, the red carpet
tour, because he's a principal donor.
And because I was chaplain, so to speak,
for that group, I went in with them.
And I saw the great banks of computers,
like nothing I had ever seen, filling a
vast football field-sized building with, I don't
know how many employees, sifting the letters that
had come in, in response to the telecasts
and to the sowing of seed faith.
And that the answer was already programmed on
the machine in which the data had been
factored in, so that the name of the
person could be in the letter which they
receive and something of their prayer request acknowledged.
So the person would get a letter back,
Dear Sister Smith, I have read your letter
and have taken it before the Lord, and
we pray that your mother's ailment will soon
be healed.
Thank you for your contribution of twelve dollars
and fifty cents.
Know that it goes into the king...
to learn that the man who signs the
letter had not even so much as read
that letter, and that the reply is already
calculated electronically and automatically.
And so tens of thousands of replies can
be factored.
And there are women, full-time employees who
are not Christians, opening the letters, taking out
the check, sending it on a conveyor belt
in one basket, and then the rest on
another.
It was horrible.
I don't have a word to describe it.
And the young man showing us around was
boasting in it and saying, even if our
founder dies, he said, the system will still
go on.
And boasting in that, the Lord sees all
that, dear souls, and anguishes.
And the poor soul who had sent twelve
fifty from her social security check, receives that
letter with the great man's name, who says,
who calls me by my first name, and
that he acknowledges my prayer request and that
he's praying.
Her heart is uplifted.
It's deceitful, dubious, what's the word for it?
It's merchandise.
And they make millions a month, millions a
month.
Their income is astronomical because it works on
the principle that if you send out a
sufficient quantity and get only two, three, four,
or five percent response, it will more than
pay for the mailing and add greatly to
your comforts.
And so these great ministries have found the
world's principle and are practicing it.
So we have a suffering Lord.
Jesus is waiting for his bride to respond
to his suffering, for a true bride wants
to share the innermost burdens or concerns of
her bridegroom.
Jesus wants to show his bride what is
on his heart and impress it on her.
Lord, what's on your heart for your people
Israel at this very historic moment?
What's on your heart for the New York
Jews?
What's on your heart for the people in
Israel and their increasing calamity?
What's on your heart knowing that they're moving
irresistibly, ineluctably, inexorably, catch the language, to disaster,
to catastrophe, for which there'll be no remedy?
What's on your heart when you know that
the church by and large does not even
anticipate this and has made no preparation and
will be itself taken by surprise and stunned
in the suddenness with which this will come
and be disappointed in you?
Because how can you allow Israel again a
second time within the same century to suffer
a catastrophe of this magnitude?
Something is wrong with you.
Something is wrong with the scriptures because we
had believed that this Israel was the fulfillment
of prophetic expectancy.
So we are disillusioned and we might even
just flake off and cop out from the
faith and be among the great numbers that
fall into apostasy as Paul has predicted in
the last days.
Out of disappointment of expectations that were shallow
and not tempered and not instructed and were
convenient because of believers who wanted Israel to
succeed as they want themselves to succeed as
if the issue of success is the issue.
And so you say, well, isn't it?
No.
The issue is not success.
The issue is glory.
And have you ever known from scripture that
glory should not first be preceded by suffering?
Why then are we naive not to expect
that a nation that will glorify God forever,
both in his judgments and dispersal and in
their restoration and return, should go through that
without a suffering and that we should go
through it without a suffering?
That they should experience that and we should
be unaffected and be disappointed if it happens
and be disappointed in them and even join
the world's course saying you got what you
had coming?
What is in the present heart of the
Lord?
What is his innermost concern and burden?
Jesus wants to show his bride what is
on his heart and impress it on her
so that she will become more and more
intimately united with him as she shares in
his suffering.
Suffering is not just external or physical.
Maybe the most painful kind is that kind
that is internal and within.
As I often say, the worst sufferings I've
ever experienced have not come externally.
It's not from Jews who have spat at
me or kicked me when I'm standing on
a soapbox on Broadway and 72nd Street preaching
the gospel.
The greatest affliction and pain that I've had
to experience in 38 years as a believer
has come from the church, from God's own
people, from the brother with whom I broke
bread and we went into the house of
the Lord together and to experience not only
his betrayal but his seeking to bring others
to the same place as he himself.
Jesus feels especially for his bride who has
to live in these end times.
Increasingly she is rejected by a society that
promotes the triumph of evil because it is
dominated by hellish concepts and methods, satanic music
and idols.
It is a painful experience for the bride
of Jesus to be ostracized even in Christian
circles which are often infiltrated or seduced by
the deception of our times.
Have you guys taken note of the Elvis
Presley revival?
Talk about revivals.
What they can do with a dead man
is pass finding out.
Who died out of being overdrugged has now
become a new culture hero to a whole
generation after the time through public relations machinations.
It's remarkable and you're flooding to Memphis to
see the mansion of the great figure and
his music now being put in albums and
selling by the millions.
There's big money in this and what is
it doing?
The kids that are being sucked into this
and many of them are not kids.
Middle class women are traipsing out there and
look at the mansion-sized bed upon which
the great figure had lain.
Want to see his limousine or his bathroom
fixtures or the toilet that he flushed.
Talk about idolatry and how can their children
come on Sunday to the Sunday school and
listening to some well-meaning plotting servant going
on and discussing bible stories or trying to
indicate something of the riches of scripture.
How do you compete with that flash and
glitz that is so powerful that men have
never attained such mastery in the manipulation of
human beings as we're now seeing in the
world of merchandise.
I cannot believe it's mere human unaided skill
or intelligence that satan himself that wily serpent
is himself infiltrating and influencing men who are
selling their souls in order to obtain fame
and fortune and we live in that environment.
How come we're not flinching?
Why don't we wince?
Why don't we grieve?
If we lose our sensitivity to that and
become dull and just accept it as normative
we have lost the keen edge and the
world has prevailed.
So to maintain sensitivity to those things and
an anguish over them, to write a letter
to the editor, to complain as I have
done about these giant cut-out figures from
Star Wars that Pepsi-Cola advertised and paid
25 million dollars or more for the right
to use the Star War name and in
the public school in Cass Lake in the
school breaks, maybe I'm just naive I'm from
another generation, in the 10 minute break whatever
it is to go from one room to
the other the loudspeakers begin to play rock
and roll music.
They can't make it from the one class
to the other except they have this kind
of accompaniment.
So the world is becoming profaned, coarse, deadened
in its spirit and there is a generation
being prepared who will be incapable of human
sentiment and kindness.
How does it say perilous times shall come
men shall become lovers of self, lovers of
pleasure more than lovers of God without natural
affection.
That's what I'm looking for.
That is to say capable of cruelty without
blinking an eye.
Our murderers are already being prepared by this
present culture.
What about the dinosaurs and what about the
ET and all the monsters that kids cuddle
and take to bed with them.
They have it imprinted on their sheets and
pillowcases.
What is the enemy doing but deadening the
sensibility of a generation that will be our
murderers by making a very comfortable now with
demons and that they can cuddle and have
an affection for more than they have an
affection for us I can assure you.
By the way noise, tumult, confusion are intrinsic
evidences of the activity of the enemy.
You'll see it in the Psalms.
Just reading it today Psalm 59 that the
noise and the tumult of the enemy.
I thought how characteristic the enemy loves chaos,
bedlam, noise, confusion, deadening of our humanity and
our sensibilities.
The Lord loves quiet.
Be still and know that I am God.
To find a place of quiet is an
accomplishment in our generation and we have a
whole generation of kids that goes back even
to earlier times who can't do their homework
without the TV set on or without the
radio on without something binning in the background
because silence somehow chills them.
Do you love silence?
I love silence.
I love quiet and so when we break
the silence to speak a word from God
the word will be so much more hallowed
and choice because if we reveal silence we
will reveal the sound of the word when
it comes but if we are deadened and
have not a respect for silence we'll have
not a respect for words either.
So keep your heart with all diligence in
such a time as this and know that
the Lord grieves when he looks down upon
a world moving toward a Sodom and Gomorrah
final collapse of all morality.
It's no longer the issue of morality versus
immorality.
What's worse than immorality is amorality.
To become amoral is to lose any moral
sense at all and that's the deadening that
is presently taking place that one cannot even
say what is good or bad is not
affected by what is good or bad you
have become amoral, atheistic, amusement.
The word the prefix a negates the word
that follows so to become amused which is
great business today and unhappily many Jews are
in the forefront of those businesses in marketing
the rap thing and they're all about music
culture so-called but to be amused is
to negate musing and the word muse means
to reflect, to consider, to meditate, to contemplate.
Isaac was a man of the tent.
Abraham was a man of the tent.
God is wanting the J fifth nations as
you'll probably hear tomorrow or soon to bow
to enter the tent of Shem.
There's something about a tent and its mobility
and quiet that is suggestive of contemplation, the
contemplation of God.
So to be amused is to negate the
ability to reflect and to contemplate.
We would be bored.
We need to have something visual, something auditory,
something sensual.
We need movement, we need motion, we need
noise or we're doing or we're distracted and
we're bored.
What will we do if we are the
only source of our own enjoyment is the
saints and we're cut off at the pass.
We can no longer go into town or
gas is not available and we're locked in
with ourselves.
So in these end time sufferings the heavenly
bridegroom comforts her and endows her with glory.
She undergoes these sufferings in union with him
and in complete surrender to the will of
God.
Yes, he uses them to transfer, transform her
into his image so that she stands out
more than ever against her surroundings.
She's implying that it's suffering in union with
the bridegroom that brings the very transformation of
the believer into a bridal state.
I've never heard this thought expressed and it
seems sensible and worthy of every consideration.
Where many faces today reflect the sin and
darkness of our times, her face reflects Jesus.
She is radiant with an inner beauty born
of the deep suffering she has to endure
in the end times just by virtue of
the end times themselves.
Not necessarily the persecution but the character of
the end times and its depravity.
Sharing in the fellowship of her sufferings increasingly
refines and transforms her making her strong and
radiant.
Having to live in this satanic age does
not have a depressing effect on the bride.
Many others witnessing the devastation caused by sin
grow discouraged or come under a sense of
oppression.
The bride bears the pain in union with
Jesus rather than alone.
Her suffering is bound up with his.
This is why the end time sorrows are
incapable of driving her like some believers to
despair.
Her heart is filled with divine life and
love which no suffering can destroy.
This divine life impels her to make the
most of the short time left to express
her love for Jesus by ministering to others
in love and actively serving in his kingdom.
So this is not some kind of retiring
into some separate idealistic mystical union with the
Lord where you're walking on eggshells and you
can't touch the world or those that are
suffering or are lost in it.
Quite the contrary.
This kind of vital love compels you to
come into the world and pluck the branch
from the burning and to have a sense
of the lostness that is in the world
and the shortness of the time that remains.
So I'm happy for that night note that
she strikes lest we think that we ought
to be encouraged into some kind of idealistic
reverie of living in some kind of glass
house and just Jesus and me.
The Lord is concerned for the world.
He so loved the world that he gave
his only begotten son.
So there's a cry in her heart.
Divine judgment is about to descend.
Judgment such as the world has never seen.
The earth will be in a turmoil.
Mountains will tremble and fall.
The oceans will roar.
Large tracts of land will be submerged.
Disastrous earthquakes will strike with growing frequency.
Cities and entire areas will be erased from
the map.
There will be scenes of untold devastation and
misery.
Many will lose their lives.
In view of the coming judgment of God,
a true bride of Christ is gripped with
a consuming ardor.
A-R-D-O-U-R.
Time is short.
I've got to do all that I can
before it's too late.
She takes her place beside the Savior as
he rescues souls from the abyss of sin
in which mankind lies today.
Like an extended alma of the Lord, she
helps to save those perishing in sin and
misery through repentance, priestly suffering and prayers, as
well as outreach.
Through repentance, priestly suffering and prayer.
This is priestly ministry.
What makes it priestly?
And how will that affect reaching out to
the lost in an age in which these
severe judgments are falling and already falling?
It affects the whole character of it.
It's the difference between brash evangelism, are you
saved, brother?
And you'll face hell if you're not, as
against a priestly ministration of the same message
that is so fused and charged with a
pathos and an empathy of God's heart.
For that one will be victim if they
don't turn.
Priestly is altogether something else.
And if there's any value in our service
and ministry of our own self-enhancement or
our own enjoyment, like that man in Switzerland
who picked me up at the side of
the road, if there was something in it
for him to put a notch in his
belt that he has saved a Jew, I
would not have been saved.
That very attitude and character, I would have
instinctively recoiled, but that was not part of
him.
But what he expressed to me, now that
I look back, was altogether priestly, which is
to say, personally disinterested.
There was nothing to be gained for him
in his ministration to me.
It was entirely unto the Lord.
Israel has not seen that kind of ministry.
I'm talking about the land of Christian Zionists
who have come with a kind of sentimental
concern, but it's not priestly.
There's something that returns to them in a
kind of satisfaction and an enjoyment that affects
the character of the witness that goes forth.
To be priestly is not to profit from
your ministry, even psychologically or emotionally, and therefore
you do not need applause and recognition, and
therefore you can just as readily receive rejection.
It's a priestly stature, and that's what he
describes as being intrinsic to the bridal makeup
obtained in union with the bridegroom to the
degree in which we share in his sufferings.
I'm not saying thus saith the Lord about
any of this.
I'm wanting to contemplate it, but I think
that there are so few who have any
insight like this.
It's worth our hearing and testified by the
reality of that movement, and so far as
I have been able to see it and
know it over the years.
Her book on repentance, I think, is an
all-time classic, Repentance, the Secret of the
Joy-Filled Life, and many years ago, when
the wall still stood, some brothers in publishing
asked me, what one book would I recommend
for translation and publication in Russian?
And I thought, and for a moment I
said, Master Leo Schlinck's book on Repentance, the
Secret of the Joy-Filled Life.
So she has a, or now she's passed
on, had a depth of insight that did
not flinch from the judgments of God and
interpreted present calamity and disorder in the world
as being already preliminary judgments sent from God
as a mercy to alert those to be,
who would turn in order to avoid the
ultimate judgments that subsequently follow.
She's not some ivory tower saint who does
not see reality.
She lived through it.
The movement was born out of the judgment
that fell on Germany in the Allied bombings
that turned their cities into melted asphalt.
So through repentance, priestly suffering, and prayers as
well as outreach, she helps to draw people
out of the jaws of hell.
To this end, she sacrifices time, money, sleep,
and so on.
On her sacrifice may lie on a different
plane, the willingness to bear affliction, the trials
of everyday life, the collapse of her plans
or the thwarting of her will.
So there's different kinds of suffering.
Here she's mentioning the kind of suffering that
I think is a necessary ingredient in community.
You'll not have community unless there's a willingness
to bear affliction, the trials of everyday life,
the tensions that come with intensity of relationship
that is more than just Sunday services, the
collapse of personal plans, the thwarting of one's
will.
Such acts of dedication underline her prayers as
she battles her souls threatened by the powers
of darkness.
The bride's suffering with the Lord yields great
fruit, as suffering born in union with him
always does.
Yes, the end times, probably more than any
former era, create a special bond between the
bride of Christ and her bridegroom.
We enter the fellowship of his sufferings.
I've never heard anyone expound on that.
But there is a distinct fellowship of a
kind of those who will share in those
sufferings.
And you don't have to look for the
sufferings.
It's not manufacturing them or producing the circumstances
by which they will come so you can
enter their fellowship.
It will come of itself.
Be assured you'll be a candidate for it
by virtue of this disposition of intimacy toward
and for the Lord will itself provoke the
powers of darkness to see you as one
mark and one upon whom they will ventilate
their hatred against him.
Suffering that constitutes the fellowship will be the
logic of a life that is lived for
God totally.
You'll not have to look for it and
you'll not have to manufacture it.
It's not some masochistic desire.
It will come in and of itself just
by your obedience, by your service to the
Lord, by being willing to be identified with
his burdens and to express them to men.
This in turn is an incentive to even
greater love.
Jesus pours out his love and compassion.
You're going to say his pathos into the
heart of his bride and with whom he
is so closely united.
Pathos is not something that we have to
drum up or that we fabricate.
It comes from the God who is himself
compassion.
He is mercy.
And to the degree that we are in
union with him in a fellowship of the
sufferings through the school of obedience, he communicates
what he is in himself to those who
are in that kind of union.
It also is something to be derived in
the times of fellowship with the Lord in
the early morning times of communion.
I can't say enough about that.
That there's something of a profound kind lost
to those saints who cannot find time for
the Lord at the commencement of the day,
before they touch the world, before they leave
their homes, to have gotten up early enough
to seek him and to wait upon him,
not for the benefit that we hope for,
but because of who he is in himself,
deserving the first fruit of our day and
the first and best awake liveness toward him.
Something is communicated, whether you're conscious of it
or not.
And it comes out in the public time.
I don't know how to say this.
It comes out, you can hear it in
the prayer of saints.
You can tell from the resonance of their
prayer, the weight of it, the heft of
the prayer, their comments, their observation.
They're very daring that somehow this is a
statement of an interior private time and life
with God, of which no one knows, but
they and he alone.
So I'm happy that this is coming up
in my sharing to encourage you to that.
And I regret that I myself was not
encouraged in my early years to seek a
time of communion.
And now it is making all the difference.
Well, you who were here for the Sunday
message received the benefit.
I didn't have it Saturday night.
Where did it come from?
It came out of the Sunday morning time
of communion itself, because in that time is
prayer coming before the Lord at the acknowledgement
that we are nearest dust, that we have
nothing that compels him even to consider us
and that we cast ourselves before him in
his great mercy, which is new every morning
and then turn to the devotional materials at
hand, the Psalm for the day, the chapter
of Proverbs for the day, Oswald Chambers for
the day or other readings.
And it was in Oswald Chambers speaking about
the rich young ruler that instantly came alive.
And I went to the account in the
scripture and began to see things that I
had never seen before.
And then noticed what follows the episode with
the blind beggar crying out, Jesus, thou son
of David, and the juxtaposition of the rich
young ruler and the blind beggar became the
message given in the devotional time.
So there's much to be had.
God is waiting for those who are seeking
and seek him consistently and something is communicated.
In this case, it was a message, but
even when you're not conscious of it, something
of the Lord in whose presence you're waiting,
because he deserves to be sought, is communicated
in to your interior man, into the inner
man, whether or not you're conscious of it.
And it will come out, the cumulative times
before the Lord will come out in the
authority of the Lord and the character of
the Lord, the disposition of the Lord, because
you've had this time.
You're not seeking him for that benefit, but
it accrues to you because you've come to
him in a priestly way, not for the
benefit, but for what he is in himself.
So I commend that.
Will you believe that he is at 5
a.m. or 4.30 or whenever it
is, when all you feel is the cold
draft on the floor and there's no sense
of God's presence and your words feel like
lead that hardly reached the ceiling, let alone
ascend on high?
Will you believe that he is and that
he's a rewarder of those who diligently seek
him when there's no sensate awareness of his
presence?
A bridal believer does not need the confirmation
of the sensed, felt presence of God to
know that he is and that he's there.
And I think that the final testing of
us will come as it did for the
Lord at the cross of the sense, not
of God's presence, of his forsakenness.
My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken
me?
And that true love will believe for the
Lord in his presence, independent of the sense
of his absence.
And that's a bride adorned for the bridegroom.
But I don't think that we're going to
come to that condition in one fell swoop
in another moment if we are not progressively
and continually and consciously moving to that relationship.
You know what the remarkable thing is?
I can't even remember where I've suffered.
I don't remember.
Did I?
There's a remarkable forgetfulness.
You don't save up the episodes and relish
them.
They fall into the sea of forgetfulness.
Maybe they're recorded in the archives of heaven.
But I think that a bridal saint does
not take note of their afflictions and make
a case of it, or continually feeling their
pulse and what is their response or the
reaction.
And how do you feel when that happens?
I wasn't even aware how I felt.
I'm not concerned how I felt.
I'm not living in that subjectivity, that as
if my feeling and how it affects me
is the issue.
There's a remarkable senselessness.
I don't know if I've come to that
in a perfect way, but I think it's
God's intention that we would be beside ourselves.
And what did Paul say?
That who was stoned, left for dead, shipwrecked
in the sea day and night, beaten with
rods five times with the cat and nine
tails, 39 strokes that cut his flesh to
the bone.
He said, I count my sufferings as a
momentary and light affliction, seeing the eternal weight
of glory.
There's a perfect answer for you.
Who is more the sufferer than Paul?
And a true apostle must know apostolic suffering,
apostolic denial, apostolic rejection.
Maybe the rejection of his own people who
desired to see him dead and said that
he's not fit to live was a more
painful thing to bear than the lashing of
his back.
What about the weight of the church, his
problems and the failures, the disappointments?
How about the accusations that he was himself
a false apostle and some other hotshot was
the real thing.
He had to bear all of that.
And yet he said, I count my afflictions
as being both momentary and life.
That means they're fleeting momentary.
You forget it in view of the thing
that is invisible and eternal.
So here's a picture of the bridal Saint.
He's already envisioning the Lord and the eternal
union with him.
That is what Stephen saw.
How does Stephen bear his suffering?
When the blood was running down his face
and into his mouth and into his eyes
and the stones thudding on your nose, when
your flesh instinctively rises up in anger at
that one who dares abuse your flesh, you're
dying by inches and you have every reason
to cry out against those that are afflicting
you.
Lord forgive them for they know not what
they do.
His, his, his, how does it say it?
He saw the heavens opened and Jesus at
the right standing at the right hand of
the Father and the glory of God.
When you see that you don't feel the
stones, but I think it's, it can be
clear that that wasn't just a momentary provision
in a final moment of extremity.
It was a condition in which he had
long continued, which is the very reason he
was brought to the place of stoning.
He came to the attention of the Jewish
community because he was a conspicuous saint of
an ultimate kind who was radiant and his
face was like an angel and could confound
the doctors of the law with his greater
wisdom.
That's what brought him to that confrontation that
ended his life.
So the end was not a momentary grace.
It was an open heaven that he only
saw because he was filled with the spirit.
He was in union with the Lord that
the Lord got up to greet him and
to receive his expiring saint.
That's, that's the first description of martyrdom next
to the crucifixion of Jesus.
And I believe with watchmanly that what is
described at the first is a paradigm of
a pattern that will have a final expression
at the end.
Someone said today that maybe what the Jews
are needing is a church willing to beat
for them a Stephen.
That's what it took for Saul in his
inveterate hatred of this heresy and out in
his self-righteous religious indignation to expunge it.
He had to see a man die more
gloriously than ever he saw anyone live, who
was only a waiter on tables, had no
religious credentials, no distinction.
And Paul, once seeing that was not able
ever to spit that out.
He had to kick against the pricks.
The Lord said, why do you kick against
the pricks?
What, what were the pricks?
This Stephen to see that beatific expression on
a man dying by inches, who somehow unaware
that he's even a victim.
No self-pity, no anger, only concern for
those souls who were his victimizers.
You can't see that and not be a
candidate for the God who made Stephen, Stephen.
For what he saw in Stephen was God.
We can almost say, I hope I'm not
perilously close to heresy, God himself is ultimate
martyr.
He's the witness.
What does it say?
The first witness, Jesus himself is a word
that precedes witness.
He's the ultimate witness.
The word Greek for witness is materia, martyr.
Martyrdom is ultimate witness that God is God
for it reveals God as God, as the
one who is willing to give up his
life for another.
And so where is a bride adorned for
that bride group?
What some, some woman who's having hastily to
do something of a cosmetic kind to make
herself acceptable, who has not seen to a
quality and condition of life consistently, and that
cannot be made up cosmetically in the final
moment, whose character has been shaped and formed
in the school of obedience and suffering.
That's the bride.
What is it going to be some, some
hag, some loud mouth, some witchy female insisting
on her rights and to be an appropriate
bride for the lamb who is meek.
That's why Peter says in first Peter, let
your adorning not be the awkward braiding of
hair and so on and so forth, but
a quiet and a meek spirit, which in
God's sight is of great price.
So I often say to the women who
are ambitious for the ministries.
Well, have you considered your ultimate ministry for
which your present ministry may actually be a
distraction, a side alley that your true and
ultimate mystery is to depict to the church.
What is the church's own destiny as the
bride of Christ?
We need to see in you what a
quiet and meek spirit is, not quiet in
the sense that you clench your teeth while
inwardly you're seething for your rights and that
you can do it as good as any
man.
Of course you can, maybe even better, but
your willingness not to do it and to
give the man an opportunity to come out
from the shadows who is intimidated by your
superiority and be willing to die to your
ability and to relinquish it that you were
given it not to succeed in it, but
to give it up.
That he might come forth and you in
union with him as the one life together
so that his speaking is as satisfactory to
you as if you had spoken it.
Because you're no longer two separate entities who
are sharing the same facility and have your
own ministries, your one life, one calling, one
purpose, one being.
Because the wife has a quiet and meek
spirit and defers and yields, relinquishes and gives
up, is the very character of God.
So what is it that hinders us from
entering into this stature?
It is the self-life.
We are still dominated by our ego with
its wishes and demands.
We may be quick to take offense when
corrected, wronged or denied the recognition we think
we deserve.
In our hearts we may even harbor bitter
feelings and accusations.
Or perhaps we find it hard to accept
difficult, seemingly meaningless paths or times of spiritual
dryness when the Lord seems far away.
If we are dominated by our ego like
this, a barrier is erected.
We cannot reach his heart and our love
for Jesus cannot develop.
But if we pray for contrition about these
points and are willing to mend our ways,
the barrier will come down.
Jesus will allow us to share in his
sufferings, the greatest privilege there is since it
brings the deepest union with him.
The fellowship of Jesus' sufferings here on earth
will bring the bride wonderful fellowship with him
in the heavenly glory.
There she will see him and be united
with him in never-ending joy.
Yet even here, during the horrors of this
satanic age, the bride of Jesus has a
tremendous hope.
While she increasingly witnesses the advance of Satan,
she has the assurance of Jesus' final victory,
which she helps to proclaim and even usher
in.
Even amid the darkness of our times, she
sees it dawning on the horizon.
So in contrast to the most tangible manifestations
of darkness, a light all the more powerful
shines forth from the bride of Jesus Christ.
Suddenly her hidden life, her love and suffering
with God are revealed for all the world
to see, testifying of Jesus' divine life in
her, that inextinguishable life which defeated death and
hell.
Thus she helps to pave the way for
his resurrection victory to be manifested in his
coming kingdom.
She has oil for her lamp and when
the night call comes that the bridegroom is
at the door, she is ready.
Not only is her lamp trimmed and lit,
but she has an additional oil if there
is any delay in the bridegroom's coming while
the other virgins, equally waiting for the marriage
feast, are taken by surprise and they do
not have a supply beyond the moment and
need in that last moment the scurry to
find it and when they obtain it, the
door is locked and they cannot enter.
I don't know what this means but it's
sobering to consider and I think that the
oil is the life of God.
Someone in one of our conversations at the
breakfast table or lunch table, it had to
be lunch, the issue came up about anointing.
What is the phenomenon of anointing?
It's a holy thing, sacred.
Those of us who labor in the word
for the Lord and before his people cherish
the anointing.
I had an early experience.
I was a hot shot and a whiz
kid.
I had a testimony.
You could hear the proverbial pin drop when
the Lord had me to share that testimony
before hundreds of people.
The testimony itself was anointed and the one
time I was sailing along as if it
was me and for a moment the Lord
removed the anointing and I can't tell you
how horrific that moment was.
It seemed to last an eternity.
I chafed.
I went red in my face.
I was totally embarrassed that the Lord had
withdrawn something that I thought was with me
and when it happened, I knew instantly what
he was saying.
Don't presume that this is yours to command
or that you can invoke it at your
convenience at any time.
If I don't give it, you don't have
it.
It's from the throne of heaven and from
that time forth, I hope never again to
need that reminder of the holy unction without
which the most correct and best word falls
limply to the ground.
It must have that life-giving penetrating power
that the unction and anointing of God is.
In an interview that's on video that you
can have here called Timeless Interview, it is
timeless because the man who interviewed me had
nothing in it to serve for himself.
The questions that he asked drew out the
very heart of God and there was a
point where the subject of anointing came up
and I heard myself saying something that I've
never again spoken or spoken publicly and I
don't even know if I dare express it
now, but it had something to do with
this oil.
I said, I think that there's a residue
that comes into the deeps of a believer
with every instance of obedience to which he
or she is called by the Lord, all
the more and especially when that obedience will
provoke a reaction against yourself or you'll have
to suffer a degree of reproach for it.
Every obedience that entails a suffering somehow in
my imagining leaves behind a residue of something
of the oil of God and so by
the many such instances there's something formed of
an anointing of an unction in the entire
person and maybe that was the kind of
oil that these virgins had obtained, not just
for the moment, but even for the delay
while others did not have that supply because
they wanted the quality of relationship, intimacy and
obedience that the five wise virgins had.
So I'm just throwing that out as a
speculation because that's what a prophet does.
He's speculative and takes the risk of making
aspersions and allusions and suggestions that can't be
documented but are provocative and evocative and might
serve the purposes of God.
So take it in that sense.
I like to, I don't know why I
said that, it just came out in a
completely unrehearsed way, but now that I think
of it, the oil that these wise virgins
had in their lamps had somehow been obtained,
not where it is to be purchased but
to be given by the Lord whom we
serve in those instances of obedience where there's
a suffering that follows in the act of
it and in the consequence of it.
The Lord somehow, because that's the Lord, the
reunion with very God, that's the way he
himself is, that's his own character and when
you are with him in that act, something
is communicated that remains, I trust, as a
residue.
So when the call comes, the bridegroom is
at the door, though it be midnight, suggestive
of great darkness, trial and maybe the last
days kinds of affliction that will come, we
are ready to join him and to enter
that remarkable marriage feast and celebration and not
be shut out.
Despite the tangible manifestations of darkness, a light
all the more powerful shines forth from the
bride of Jesus Christ.
Suddenly her hidden life, her love and suffering
with God are revealed.
Do you have a hidden life with the
Lord?
I often say, do you have a history
of a hidden life with the Lord?
Do you have a history of a secret,
of a thing unknown to others that you
have nurtured and cultivated out of love for
him?
That comes forth, as Elise Link is saying,
when the darkness is the greatest.
What had been secret now becomes revealed publicly.
The light and radiance that had been accumulated
in all those quiet times of seeking the
Lord for his own sake, unbeknownst to others,
now somehow radiates out into that darkness.
And that will be a beam of light
for those who would otherwise be engulfed in
that darkness and perish.
It testifies of the divine life, the inextinguishable
life which defeated death and hell.
So this is what we see happening, not
just in individual bridal souls.
Today a whole company of bridal souls has
come into being as a clear sign of
the emerging dominion of Jesus Christ.
What a unique phase in divine history.
While Satan and his servants rage and blaspheme,
that Christ out to heaven, we are privileged
in our day to see the bridal host
of Jesus Christ crystallizing.
Don't think that this is an individual matter
alone.
This is a corporate matter.
The bridal company, the corporate expression of the
bride, is the new Jerusalem that comes down
from above of a bride that has made
herself ready.
It speaks in individual terms, but the genius
of it is corporate and it's being formed
now.
So sometimes without having ever met before, those
who love Jesus are automatically drawn together, united
by a common concern.
They speak out publicly against blasphemy and make
a stand for their Lord, one in their
love for him despite their various backgrounds.
So in the end times, we find a
whole group of people uniquely providing their love
for Jesus as they share in the fellowship
of the sufferings.
Precious God, save us from schmaltz, save us
from sentimentality, save us from from corrupting this
and demeaning it.
There's something holy here, Lord.
I praise God for a woman who has
a relationship and you've kept alive till she
was 95, 96 because she lived by that
life.
She was in communion and union with you.
She was wise to the day of her
death, remarkable the things that issued from her
of which this is not the least.
And who would dare even take up the
topic and dare to express themselves in it
who are just blunderers and coarse and dull
and have not even begun to feel for
a relationship like this.
So my God, what are you saying to
us?
That if we're to be to Israel and
to the Jew in the last days what
we must, we must at the same time
be this.
And in fact, the two are inseparable.
We cannot be to them what we ought,
except we are this to you.
And because we're this to you, we are
that to them.
And you'll see what they have never seen.
Something of yourself depicted in a bride adorned
for the bridegroom, having the character, the holiness
of God.
So Lord, this ends the age.
And we ask that you would give us
every grace that we would see our daily
occasions and opportunities to grow in this grace.
And that you will give us and draw
out our hearts to spend that time with
you, to seek you out and to meet
with you Lord and to have something imparted
and imputed that waits in fellowship, either the
fellowship of communion in communion in the early
morning times or the fellowship of sufferings in
the school of obedience.
But there's something of a mystery of what
that fellowship means that affects our eternal destiny,
configuration, and identity for which you wait a
bride appropriate for you.
Show me the bride appropriate for you.
And we're called to be it corporately.
So Lord, bless, help, give grace, draw out
our hearts, give us a desire to be
such and school us and bring us, my
God, into a daily, a knowledge of this
thing, a proximity, a closeness.
We bless you.
Thank you for sounding this note tonight.
Let it not be a last note.
If there's yet more to be expressed and
show us my God where we presently are
and where you would have us to be.
We bless you a whole church with a
quiet and the meek spirit, which is in
your sight of great price.
We're full of striving.
We're full of contention.
We have our pet categories and doctrines and
all of the rest.
So forming us, my God, your own essential
character of the lamb.
We bless you.
Thank you, Lord, for the preciousness of the
call in Jesus name.