Unless you, the great author and the finisher
of our faith, the great shepherd of our
faith, will lead us, my God, through the
tumult and even confusion and tension of these
days into green pastures and still waters by
which we may dwell.
So we're asking, Lord, again, unashamedly, in our
characteristic way, that your word would become an
event.
Surely it's called for.
The hour and the tension and the crisis
to which we have been brought calls for
a word of such a kind that if
it is to give answer to the crisis
that has been brought, it must itself become
an event, not for us only, but beyond
us and through us, to the greater church
at large, and ultimately to the Jewish community,
to Israel itself.
So, my God, who is sufficient for these
things?
How better do we understand Paul, continually palpitating
and continually crying out that repeated cry, Paul,
giant that he was, who is sufficient for
these things?
And we thank you, Lord, to be called
to such a faith for which we always
will make that cry.
It is ever and always beyond us, exceeds
our understanding, exceeds our ability.
It stretches us by God to breaking.
It compels us to come into such a
place in the knowledge of you that we
would not even have thought to sort, let
alone think to find, if you had given
us a manageable religion that we could perform
out of our own well-meaning intention and
ability.
We thank you for a salvation to the
uttermost that brings us beyond that pathetic and
inadequate place into the ultimate place with the
Lord himself.
Oh, Lord, precious God, may we hear your
voice today.
May we hear the words of your speaking
beyond time, now word, Lord.
I may then be rejoicing in heaven for
the proclamation of it as event that has
come in time and place into this earth.
I will not return to you void, but
accomplish every purpose we're on through this.
Thank you, Lord, for the privilege of gathering
this congregation to the historic moment, open our
hearts and our understanding and give us such
an acuity of hearing and receiving, my God,
as it has exceeded all past experience till
now.
For such a word requires it.
And once we come to that acuteness, shall
we ever go back to where we were
before?
We're stretched and we're stretched permanently.
And we thank you, Lord.
We desire that.
We need that.
We ask that.
We thank you, give you the praise for
this morning and this day.
Come gratify your own soul.
Have not as Lord, as the Jews say,
have satisfaction in your own soul, fell and
bubble over.
Let your cup run over Lord with the
joy.
As you look upon your inheritance, who are
coming now within view to the thing for
which you have given all, even your son
to obtain.
We bless you.
We give you praise.
Receive our gratitude now, Lord.
If this were the whole service, we give
you gratitude and joy.
We thank you for our so great privilege.
In Yeshua's holy name we pray.
God's people said, Amen.
Dissolve anything and everything that stands between us
and between you.
However correct it might be in itself and
however cherished, if it constitutes any kind of
an obstruction to the totality of union with
you, who alone is God, we invite that
dissolving.
That itself would be a great grace.
So we bless you, Lord.
Come from first word to last word and
lead us in the things that are upon
your heart this morning for all the church.
We bless you, Lord.
Great grace indeed in Yeshua's holy name.
Wonderful grace.
So the Lord is looking for a virginal
firstfruits company that will follow the lamb wither
so ever he goeth.
And I think that that wither so ever
is going in the last days to bring
us to places where we could never have
imagined and where we ourselves would balk.
Something like Peter saying, let this be far
from you, Lord.
That would have obtained for Peter the man
of the year award as being a statement
of such remarkable generosity and breadth of spirit
and compassion for his master.
And yet it would have impeded the cross.
Let it be far from you, John the
Baptist, of whom Jesus said there's no greater.
I have need to be baptized of you.
He had to be persuaded to perform the
wither so ever of Jesus, to baptize one
who patently had no need of repentance that
it might fulfill all righteousness.
This wither so ever is so remarkable.
It requires an uttermost abandon from that virginal
company in order to follow him.
And today's selection in Oswald Chambers is exactly
on that question, who
raises the question, have I ever yielded an
absolute submission to Jesus Christ?
We would instantly answer, of course, we have
ever been yielded, but there's an absolute and
an ultimate abandonment, which is total.
But I think few of us know what
all of us have been called to in
such an hour as this.
The word abandon, when you look up in
the dictionary, you'll find dimensions of meaning that
are always a surprise.
To give up the intent of never again
claiming one's right or interest, to give over
and surrender completely to any attempt at self
-control, quit, relinquish, renounce, vacate, resign, discard, forswear,
forsake, abandon, denotes the absolute giving up of
an object.
It's surrender to the mercy of something or
someone else greater.
Wouldn't it be remarkable if the object that
needs finally to be given up is not
some carnal thing, but a spiritual thing, a
correct thing, and a thing about the Lord
himself?
And the thing about the Lord is so
cherished that we will not relinquish it for
the Lord himself.
That's the ultimate irony of the last impediment
that stands between ourselves and him to be
that bridal company that follows him in the
river soever that he goeth.
It's not the wrong thing, it's the correct
thing, and a cherished thing.
And because it is, it is for that
reason most difficult to forsake or to abandon.
Whether to give up or to abandon or
to yield, carnal or material things are no
sacrifice at all.
But the abandonment for which the Lord waits
is clearly a sacrifice.
So the desire for or the interest in
or the protection of that which is correct,
even the desire to be right, the enjoyment
of rectitude, the wonderful feeling of being really
lined up with God, strangely and ironically can
be that impediment that that itself needs to
be forsaken.
But it's remarkable how few will.
And maybe it's for that reason that Jesus'
murder was inevitable, not by the apparently wicked
or evil, but the best of Israeli society
and religious life, because he seemed to constitute
a threat to what they held to be
as correct.
And they must defend it in such a
way as to crucify the Lord himself who
gave the truths which they cherish and defend.
Saul is the wonderful example of that.
In his zeal to protect the faith of
Israel, being inviolate from what appeared to be
a dangerous heretical sect, that he found himself
persecuting the Lord himself in the name of
his own zeal.
Maybe that's the ultimate thing to which the
candidate for apostolicity must come, that he recognizes
in the last analysis, the very zeal to
protect and to defend is the very thing
that will ultimately persecute and crucify the Lord
afresh.
So we must have no vested interest, even
in our correctness, that the Lord has always,
because he's Lord, to be allowed the privilege
of leading us where he will and contradicting
our categories.
And perhaps he'll test us in just those
areas.
And perhaps what is going on now with
us is that test.
Is the Lord of the Lord, unless we
allow him the right to set aside his
own categories, to alter his own truths as
we understand them, to bring a new dimension
of something that seems to threaten that which
is and is established and given of him
even, is he really the Lord unless he
has that prerogative and that right in our
sight to bring anything of his own choosing
that seems even to contradict himself.
We're not abandoned until we have abandoned ourselves
to that.
So there's no category so sacrosanct that the
Lord cannot alter if he's to be Lord
and the Lamb of God whom we follow
with us wherever he goeth.
And the last and deadliest hiding place of
self is not in our carnality, but as
I so often say, in our spirituality.
And until we recognize that and are open
to be dealt with in that place, we
will oppose the God, the Lord, even in
defending him.
The thing that killed him at the first
will kill him again.
The zealous intent of defenders of the faith
to protect the faith from seeming danger or
onslaught of prospective heresy.
And the great paradox is that in the
last days, the potential for heresy is never
more evident than now.
So how do we abandon and yet defend?
It is a remarkable quandary of an ultimate
kind, and it's these ultimate brain-breaking quandaries
that break us into a dimension of God
that we would not be required to find
or to enter, and that the psalmist in
Psalm 73 has been compelled to discover.
And that's my text for this morning.
I mentioned it yesterday briefly, but it is
one of the great psalms that touches this
ultimate quandary, and that is the experience of
a psalmist, sweet singer of Israel.
It may not be David in person, there
are others who have contributed to the psalms,
but they all share the Davidic mindset, the
Davidic heart, the Davidic spirit, the Davidic intensity
for God.
And that is the fulcrum of their quandary
and their perplexity.
If they were more casual about their faith,
they would not be forced into these ultimate
perplexities and tensions.
It's the very devotion that brings it to
them.
But the fact that something had to happen
to the psalmist to break him into a
dimension he had not known before shows that
however exceptional a saint, however great the devotion,
there was a realm that was not yet
in his experience that he could only enter
by virtue of the quandary, the perplexity, the
confusion, the vexation that came to him and
brought him to that frontier.
So let's look at this.
We can't read it all, we can't take
the time to read it all.
If you do it, you'll read of a
man who is described as upright, and it
describes God as upright for those who are
pure in heart.
And we believe and assume that the psalmist
has that heart.
And yet, as for me, my feet had
almost stumbled, my steps had nearly slipped, for
I was envious of the arrogant that I
saw the prosperity of the wicked.
Their bodies are sound and sleek, they are
not in trouble as others are, they are
not plagued like other people, therefore pride is
their necklace, violence covers them like a garment,
their eyes swell out with fatness, their hearts
overflow with follies.
They scoff and speak with malice, with complete
disregard for harming God or injuring his name
or his reputation as if he's non-existent.
And they prosper in that.
Their hearts overflow with follies, they scoff and
speak with malice.
There's no reticence to express themselves, and they're
prospering in all of that, that is apparent
contradiction to God.
And the psalmist is bugged out, he's vexed
beyond all speaking.
Where is the righteous God, who does not
cut these men down right on the spot
and allows them to profane and bandy his
name about in filthy jesting and disrespect and
disregard?
They speak with malice, lawfully they threaten oppression,
they set their mouths against heaven.
Imagine the audacity of that, and their tongues
range over the earth, and God does not
shut them up.
How then can he be righteous?
How can he be God?
Where's his power?
Where is his jealousy for his name?
Where's his honor?
Doesn't he know he's being discredited and defamed
and therefore deprecated and diminished in the eyes
of all the world?
The poor psalmist is beside himself with ultimate
vexation for the failure of God to be
God.
His every category of understanding is being stretched
agonizingly to breaking.
And the people praise these characters in verse
10 and find no fault in them.
They're celebrated, they're given places of distinction, they're
called the men of the year, they win
all kinds of awards, and they're looked upon
as even being religious and successful.
If a holy man will be galled, it
will be galled by that.
These phony apostles, taking to themselves such labels
and such titles, and merchandising and franchising the
world as if they have a mandate from
God, when they are so apparent a contradiction
to the very heart of what apostolic is,
and they're getting away with murder.
And the flocks, they run in great mobs
to these men and to these prophets to
hear a word from the great oracle and
all of that, and you want to spit
your guts out.
Is the whole world deceived?
Where's the church?
Where's their discernment?
Where's God?
And they say, how can God know?
Is their knowledge in the most high?
They dismiss even the prospect that God can
see and know and understand what they're pulling
off.
Such are the wicked, always at ease, they
increase in riches.
And in vain, as for me, I've kept
my heart clean and washed my hands in
innocence, yet all day long I have been
plagued and I'm punished every morning.
Hey, what kind of universe is this?
Where is the righteousness of God and his
creation?
That the evil and the wicked, the malicious,
the foul-mouthed, the self-aggrandizing, have a
ball and prosper, and the righteous look forward
to a program of being plagued and punished
every morning.
We're the ones who struggle.
If I had my way, I would even
go on in this talk in this way,
I would have been untruth to the circle
of your children.
I'm almost tempted to join them.
I mean, they're running away with the show.
They've got all the marvels.
They've got all the cards.
The world is running after their autograph.
I'll get in this act also.
Why not?
If it was not for your children, the
thing that keeps me is my obligation to
your people.
Otherwise, I'd be tempted to be an actor
and a performer also, and I'd make a
better show of it than them.
When I thought how to understand this, it
seemed to me a wearisome task until I
went into the sanctuary of God.
Then I perceived the end.
Well, can I take the liberty again of
suggesting that the sanctuary of God and the
house of God and the Zion of God
and the Tent of Shem are all one
and the same thing?
But it's a place, note this, that the
psalmist has not yet come.
Who of us have shared his vexation?
Who of us are so aligned with his
righteousness and so great a love for God
and the jealousy for his name and honor
that we have been stretched to breaking over
evils much greater than what he knew in
his generation and that are everywhere about us
and are called Christian, called charismatic, called apostolic,
called prophetic?
Where's our vexation?
Have we come to the righteousness and love
and identification with God as this psalmist?
And yet for all that, however he exceeds
us in authentic spirituality, he had not yet
entered the sanctuary of God.
And it's only his vexation that brings him
to it.
But we who are more ordered, poised, have
a handle on things, are not in any
sense anguished by the seeming contradictions about God
in the church and in reality and in
life, are never brought to that place.
There's a place sense that this psalm indicates
for which God waits, but it's not an
easy or an accessible place or place of
convenience.
You have almost to be driven by your
own vexation to seek for an answer that
all your categories, however correct, will not give
you.
Unless you see from that place, you'll not
see.
You'll misconstrue, you'll misunderstand, you'll be offended, you'll
take offense at even the things of God.
There's a true place of seeing that God
waits to enter.
And wouldn't the ultimate irony be that there's
no understanding of the Tent of Shem except
in the Tent of Shem?
It cannot be given to you from outside
of it.
You understand it at the point of entry,
but the point of entry requires you're being
provoked.
It's something like baptism.
Maybe in earlier years I used to wait
until a young convert would come to a
certain comprehension and understanding of the value of
baptism and then I would baptize him or
her.
But in the more recent years, instantly.
Why?
Because the very understanding of the knowledge and
the significance and the mystery of baptism comes
in the baptism itself.
The same thing with Jesus.
Come unto me, he said to his kinsmen,
because I am myself the key to the
understanding of me.
I am the interpretive key.
I am the hermeneutic of the faith in
myself.
Unless you come unto me and into me,
you'll not understand it.
You'll not understand it from outside the sanctuary.
I am the sanctuary.
I am the Zion of God.
I am the Tent of Shem.
Unless you come in, you cannot see nor
understand who I myself am.
I'm the key of my own interpretation and
understanding.
So you'll never get it from outside looking
in.
You'll be vexed.
Until I went into the sanctuary, then I
perceived their end.
Then he saw that though these guys are
having a field day, getting away with murder,
it's only a moment in time.
Their ultimate destiny in eternity is horrible beyond
all description.
God is just.
God is righteous.
And this life is not the end all
and be all.
It's only a fragmentary initial episode in which
the issues of eternity are being decided.
But he had to see the end.
And the end of the thing is the
truth of the thing.
And it's only to be found in the
sanctuary of God.
It's not only I saw the end, the
end of everything, the meaning of it, the
thing that disturbs us and that we can't
quite reconcile.
The understanding of that is to come in
that place.
Truly you set them in slippery places.
You make them fall to ruin.
They are destroyed in a moment, swept away
utterly by terror.
They are like a dream that when one
awakes, on waking you despise the phantoms.
Then he goes back to himself.
When my soul was embittered and I was
pricked in my heart, I was stupid and
ignorant.
I was like a brute beast toward you.
What a confession.
Now that I see their end, it's not
only I'm repeating myself, their end that I'm
seeing, I'm seeing all end.
And in the light of the end, looking
back upon myself, I realized I was as
a beast toward you.
I was so thick, so dull, so insensate,
so incapable of understanding.
I was opposing you in seeming defense of
your faith.
I was stupid and ignorant.
I was like a brute beast toward you.
And if we're like that toward him in
our unseeing, what are we like toward others?
Even others in the most holy faith.
If we're capable of this kind of attitude
toward the Lord in our best well-meaning
intention of what are we not capable?
And what are we not performing?
So I'm taking this very literally, that there's
a place in God of ultimate seeing.
We ought to stop our mouths and hold
ourselves in reservation about any judgment, any temptation
to quickly dismiss or conclude about something being
from God or not, or any of the
kinds of things that seem to be in
seeming conflict with what we understand, even the
understanding which is given of God.
There's always a dimension more.
There's always a further understanding.
There's always an ultimate light, but it's not
to be found outside the sanctuary, but within.
So if this psalmist prophet himself had to
be driven to that place, what shall we
say for ourselves?
This is the kind of dilemma to which
Jews will be brought in the last days.
Everything that attends the name of Jesus is
anathema for them.
They got a whole history of persecution in
that name.
And yet it's the only name given whereby
they may be saved.
They've got to pass through something that completely
configures and contradicts what they have been given
to understand, which they are absolutely assured is
correct.
So correct they'll die in refusing it, but
they have got to be brought to a
place of such perplexity that they are forced
through their own categories, which have been established
and understood and confirmed and into a place
of new seeing in the sanctuary of God.
And here they'll recognize that the name that
they could hardly pronounce is the name of
the Holy One of Israel himself, that what
they had been taught to reject is the
key to their own salvation.
So this psalm is remarkable in what it
represents.
And the benefit that comes to the psalmist
having entered that sanctuary, and once being spoiled
by that light, shall you ever again see
it the same?
You go back again to where you were?
Something has happened of a transcendent kind that
leaves an indelible mark and an acquisition of
a kind that changes everything.
It's an ultimate seeing, not only of the
issue that vexed you, but all seeing thereafter.
You're spoiled.
You have seen now from the light of
the sanctuary, and you'll never again yield to
being merely correct.
You'll be suspicious of your own correctness as
well you should, because there's a dimension beyond
that which is God.
And the last testing of our fidelity to
him and our abandonment to him is our
willingness to pass through the veil of our
correctness and into the realm where he is,
who alone is Lord.
And we seem to contradict himself, testing us
to see where our real devotion ultimately lies.
Does it lie in him or our convictions
about him?
Does it lie in him who is truth
or the truth about the truth?
See how subtle this is, and how close
that a miss is as good as a
mile.
Israel missed it right at that point.
In the very defense of what they thought
right, they persecuted and killed the Lord of
Glory, their own expected and awaited Messiah.
Don't think that we are not guilty of
the same, and maybe we have to come
full circle to perform the same in order
to come to a place of brokenness and
repentance by which we learn to distrust our
own humanity and our own correctness and say
the Lord is Lord.
That's abandonment.
Whatsoever he sayeth unto you, do it.
What?
Fill stolen water jars with water?
What's the sense of that?
Whatsoever he sayeth, whithersoever he goeth.
This ultimacy of abandonment and commitment is the
thing for which the Lord waits, a virginal
company.
And the great irony, I'm repeating myself again
and again, is the paradox that we're not
kept from it because of our canality.
We're kept from it because of our spirituality.
And so the man coming through this remarkable
experience sees himself as he was, as a
beast.
You can't find language more graphic than that.
Of course, it's hyperbolic language.
It's exaggerated.
But in view of the way I now
see and I now understand, looking back to
what I was before that crisis, I was,
I was as a dumb beast.
I thought that I knew, but I say
now, I didn't know as I ought to
know.
It required a crisis that you have precipitated
by allowing such seeming paradox and contradiction in
life and in the world, or I would
not have been brought by that vexation into
the sanctuary of God.
You allowed yourself to be dishonored.
You allowed yourself to be mocked by these
guys whose eyes are swollen with fat and
having a field day in their complete disregard
of you.
You were willing that your reputation should suffer
enormously, that by it and only by it,
I would be brought to such a place
of seeming contradiction and vexation that even my
mind and my sanity were at stake.
You allowed yourself to be defamed and need
to be stretched almost to the place of
ultimate breaking, almost to the temptation to forsake
the faith and become like them in order
that I should come into this place.
Is that place that important?
Yes.
It is the ultimate place.
And few there be of us that are
in it.
Few there be of us that even believe
that it awaits us.
Few of us that desire it and few
of us who really have so great a
love and jealousy that we are vexed by
the seeming contradictions to be brought to that
place.
And once you come, all seeing is affected,
even the way in which you view yourself.
Nevertheless, in verse 23, I am continually with
you and I'm with you in a new
way.
You hold my right hand.
You guide me with your counsel.
There's almost like a sense of limpness like
this man has been so broken at the
foundations of his own conceit and his own
religious rectitude that now he's like a child
having to be led by the hand.
I'll no longer presume to come in and
bring correction and I'm going to show you
that I'm led by the hand.
I dare not open my mouth.
Even when I mean well, I bring injury.
But unless we are this to Israel, how
shall they see their Messiah and their God?
So long as we're a hotshot, strident, rival,
competitive, clear, we've got the message, we have
the truth, we continue to alienate them.
They need to see a limp people, broken,
looking to the Lord, having the correct view
about yourself and my enjoyment of being correct.
That is earthly even when it's spiritual.
Who has been searched out by God to
that depth where they are willing to forsake
even the enjoyment of being correct about God
and have no nothing in the earth that
I desire other than you.
Not the doctrines about you, the truth about
you, you yourself and yourself as is now
being revealed that I had never seen how
far you will go.
That you will allow yourself to be defamed
and your name demeaned and dishonored and your
psalmist to be stretched to breaking to the
point of insanity because of the light of
the sanctuary and what alone is to be
found there.
It makes me to understand you in a
way that I've never understood you before and
to appreciate you in a way that I've
never appreciated you before and love you in
a way that I have never loved you
before.
It took this crisis and that you are
willing to allow me to be stretched to
the breaking of it shows me how great
your love is toward me or else I
would have died as a dumb beast.
I would have gone on into eternity applauding
myself and congratulating myself for being the great
defender of your faith only to find out
in the day of eternity that I was
a dumb beast, that my very rightness was
the very thing that threatened and intimidated your
lordship.
I thank you that you love me so
much that you allowed me to be vexed
to breaking while I yet had breath.
That has got to affect the way in
which I see you, appreciate you, and love
you.
My flesh and my heart may fail but
God is the strength of my heart and
my portion forever.
Indeed those who are far away from you
will perish.
You put an end to those who have
forced you but as for me it is
good to be near God.
Where is that place?
In the tent.
It's the tent of Shem.
Not a Jewish tent.
It's Shem's tent.
It's the God of Shem whose tent that
is.
It's good to be near you and in
that place I'm spoiled.
I've seen something from that place that is
not available from any other and it has
affected all my seeing.
I no longer will trust my own perception
or analysis or critique.
I'll always hold myself in reserve knowing there's
an ultimate place of seeing where you are
for there we see as you see and
in no other place.
And when we see as you see, the
thing that offended us and that we were
so alert to defend against, we find out
in the great irony was yourself and you
calling us to a deeper place and we
resisted it in your name.
So great is the want of that seeing
which is an ultimate seeing and to be
found in one place only and there we're
called to dwell.
To dwell in the tent of Shem while
we're yet in the earth.
I have made the Lord God my refuge
and here's the punchline to tell of all
your works.
Now I can represent you.
Now I can speak of you.
Now I can proclaim the things that I
myself did not before understand and proclaim them
in the light of this seeing.
Of course the commentator here has remarkable observations
that deserve our review and our enjoyment that
this incalculably difficult question, this thing that vexed
the psalmist, that raised bodily suffering to the
point of intolerability.
How far will God go?
You guys think you've seen something?
You call this dissension?
You call this a shaking?
You call this tension and the difficulty?
Kid stuff.
This is kid stuff against the kinds of
things that we are likely to experience increasingly
as we come into the last days.
My definition of a saint is one who
can bear the tensions of the faith.
These are only preliminary vibrations.
These are not tensions of the kind that
bring us to the point of intolerability where
our very sanity is at risk.
In this affliction, the sufferer took refuge with
Yahweh.
He came to the place of proximity to
God, the sanctuary.
We have trivialized and cheapened God to think
that that sanctuary, that tent is a place
that we can enter at will as if
we're on a tourist visa out of curiosity.
We'll lift the flap and peek in.
Nothing doing.
Holy, holy, holy.
It's the Zion of God.
It's Shem's tent.
There's a light in there of an uncommon
kind.
It's not for the curious.
It's not for the transient.
It's for those who enter in order to
dwell, recognizing that dwelling there alone is the
place of safety.
That is rectitude, and anything outside of that
place is less.
Here is the end.
Not the end of the wicked, yes also,
but the end of all things.
We must see in view of the end.
We must have an eschatological comprehension of things
to which things are tending, not because we
have it nailed down as doctrine, but because
we have apprehended and been apprehended by the
God who is both the beginning and the
end, and will give us glimpse of it
and the glory of it in that one
place alone where that light is to be
seen.
Otherwise, we're merely doctrinal.
We're merely correct.
We have an understanding that we can take
off, but it's not enough.
To follow the Lamb whithersoever.
It's the end that enables us to be
sustained now.
A real glimpsing of the end beyond the
issue of doctrine.
I don't want to demean doctrine.
Doctrine is truth, but there's something to which
doctrine points is he who is the truth.
The reality, the ineffable, unspeakable, and ultimate reality
of God himself.
God forbid that we fall short of that
glory and of that reality and that truth
because we are satisfied with the truths about
the truth, the truths about the end times.
Is there anything more brittle and doctrinaire than
some hotshot who's equipped with a knowledge of
the last days and condemns the church as
Babylon and celebrates an elite sonship and all
the kinds of things.
These are the evils that issue from merely
being correct in our brain box that have
not really seen because we have not really
entered.
And that entering, as I'm saying, is so
dear to God.
He'll not think it too extravagant to bring
us to the place of suffering of an
intolerable kind before we experience the joy of
the light of God in true seeing.
Don't fall short of the glory.
This is the fellowship of his suffering.
The quest for truth is a suffering.
Those who have to proclaim it who themselves
don't have a full comprehension and yet cannot
withhold.
And those who have to live with the
guy and respond and bear up what seems
to them points of remarkable collision and threatening
heresy.
Hey, bend Israel is a suffering before it's
a glory.
We have never had access to anything out
of that which is shallow.
Everything that we have received has come out
of a suffering, out of a collision of
having to be opposed and be opposing.
And because we can still hold together in
that framework of tension, ultimately, the Lord will
bring us to the true scene, but it's
a suffering for him who proclaims.
It's a suffering for them who have to
bear him.
That's the church.
So the end, the prophet, the psalmist is
able to proclaim and tell of all your
works, nothing withheld because now he has glimpsed
the totality and the utterance of God and
the end of all things.
I can proclaim them in that light.
Scaling through the experience of suffering, and as
asserted, he writes for all of life and
therefore for all future generations.
The great danger to the psalmist, the thing
that vexed him almost to insanity was the
fear of the loss of the knowledge of
God as God.
The thing that brought him to the brink
of disaster was that God himself was being
contradicted in his own understanding.
We can bear anything else.
And that's why the Holocaust book is so
remarkable a thing, because it raises questions about
God.
Why is a book called the Holocaust, where
was God?
Because no one has raised the question as
if there was not a God around to
see, to know, to observe, or he was
asleep that day, or he was indifferent to
the plight of his own people.
How can that be God?
That is so uncaring and watching his own
people, even in their apostasy, being systematically annihilated
by the millions, including 1,500,000 children
and infants thrown up and speared on bayonets
or shot in the air or thrown into
flaming tanks of gasoline.
A God who cannot see that and have
no compassion for that is ipso facto not
God.
Okay, so he saw it.
Well, then he was too powerless to do
anything.
What?
The creator of the heavens and earth, by
his word, was incapable of affecting and altering
that terror and that devastation?
Well, he's no longer God if he has
not that power.
Well, then how do we reconcile this?
We're afraid to ask the question.
We're afraid to look into that burning bush,
for we know that once we turn aside
to try and look into the fire that
continues to burn and is not consumed, we'll
not be able to turn back again to
our neat and convenient categories.
God is this, God is that, he's kind,
he's loving, he's never, never, never, never.
That reinforces our comfort zone and has him
nicely boxed in and packaged in keeping with
our bourgeois middle-class lifestyle.
But to see God in the burning bush,
the place of judgment, and begin to turn
to consider that is to open a view
of God to which you'll never be able
to turn back again.
You're ruined with a new kind of seeing
that touches not only the issue of the
Holocaust but all issues.
Who's willing for that?
The thing that we covet most and we
need most in our own personal insecurity is
a clear understanding about God from the framework
of the scripture and his doctrines and lines
up with what we understand and believe and
are able to serve good.
It's good, but it's not good enough.
And unless we're willing to abandon that good
in order to come to a greater apprehension
of that which we're forfeiting, we will not
follow the land with us.
There'll come a moment, maybe the moment is
coming now, where you'll opt out.
Something like Moses coming into the cloud for
six days before on the seventh day, the
Lord called him to himself.
The stark terror of that glory, that burning
glory on Mount Sinai, that people shuddered and
trembled, even viewing it as a distance.
Here's the man of God going into the
midst of that fire, waiting for six days
in the smoke.
Six is the number of men and what
happened in that smoke only God knows.
The prince of Egypt and the Levitical son
of God, who is to be the apostolic
deliverer of Israel, with all of his knowledge,
all of his categories, everything obtained in wilderness,
dwelling, and all of the things that were
constituent in the formation of his life, dissolved
in that smoke.
When he was called on the seventh day,
which is the number of perfection and completion,
there was nothing left of Moses in his
understanding, in his correctness, in his doctrines about
God.
Something more had to be imparted from God
himself in his presence.
What was at Sinai was that tent, that
Zion, that dwelling, that union, and that the
man could come down from the not just
with tablets, but the knowledge of the God
who gave the tablets, or else we are
legalistic even in our correctness.
Something had to be communicated to Israel beyond
legality, beyond the requirement of the law, but
the nature of the lawgiver himself, which few
of us know, or we would be speaking
about the law differently.
The way we speak of it, as if
it represents a mean and cheap legalism that
is God denying and life denying, is the
indication we've never been up to that mountain.
There's a place of union, whether you call
it the sanctuary, Zion, the dwelling, the tent,
you can't bow to enter, you can't come
into that and bring your categories with you.
Someone said, isn't it obvious?
You can't bow to enter the tent of
Hashem and bring your knapsack.
You've got to shock off, not vile things,
good things, because the good is ever and
always the enemy of the perfect.
Have we a confidence in God that if
we can have the courage to lay aside
what has constituted our spiritual security and understanding,
that he'll give us on that seventh day
a measure of the knowledge of him that
is beyond speaking and its pricelessness, that we
can communicate not only the essence of his
law, but the essence of the law given?
And that's what an apostle is.
He doesn't just bring correct doctrines.
He brings the sense of God as God
himself is.
And that's to be found in one place
only, the sanctuary, and our own correctness keeps
us from anything.
So poor man had to come to the
brink of insanity to finally come into that
place.
The turning point is reached, this German theologian
writes, in the sanctuary of God, the place
of the nearness of God.
God's sacred mysteries are in the area of
the sanctuary.
Into them the psalmist has finally entered in
order to receive an explanation in the abode
of God's own presence.
The final event that explains everything because it
sees the end of the things that were
previously veiled in the light of the reality
of God, something ultimate, something final in the
most profound sense of the word is revealed.
A truth that breaks through all disguises and
seeming contradictions of life and history comes in
this revelation.
The seeming contradictions, the seeming things that offend
and make us to recoil and draw back
are seen in a new light, in the
light of that sanctuary.
It's the place of ultimate revelation.
Now the knowledge which the sufferer has gained
is full of assurance no matter how they
had previously appeared.
Before the brightness of God's reality, the assured
life conditions of the evil enjoying the wicked,
enjoying prosperity, suddenly disappear for the psalmist has
received a revelation of God's final dispositions and
has seen that it's already accomplished.
He doesn't have to wait for that to
be experienced.
If he sees it in God, it's as
good as performed and therefore he's relieved.
He can come back again into the world,
still see the apparent contradictions but abide them.
He has glimpsed the end and the ultimate
thing in that revelation.
What in this world can no longer be
demonstrated empirically is cleared up prophetically.
Mamma mia, what a statement.
What could not be seen in the world
empirically could not be understood as knowledge and
demonstrated and proved because God will never give
the revelation there is seen in the sanctuary
prophetically.
And I don't think that that's an accidental
word.
That's the very genius of what prophetic is,
is the communication, the seeing of ultimate things
that have not yet been made visible or
tested or proved empirically in the world of
religion.
That cannot prove it.
And yet I run it apart and there's
a place for those proofs.
There's a place for the testing of the
faith.
There's a place for the testing even of
the prophet as came up last night.
But also at the same time the recognition,
ultimate revelation abides in that place.
I wrote at the bottom of the page,
the irony is that the question of whether
the subject of the tent of Shem is
of God is to be answered and found
only within the tent itself.
Isn't that remarkable?
We'll never prove it.
We'll never nail it down doctrinally.
It's an apparition.
It's an intuition.
It's a sense, a prophetic sense that perhaps
was given in that very place, but you'll
only have it confirmed and revealed in that
place, never empirically in the religious world.
That requires a certain relationship with the bearer
of that kind of vision.
And what we have understood that God has
given to the church, apostles, prophets, this is
much more than a technical acknowledgement of these
categories and titles.
It's the receiving of the strange and offensive
thing that the prophetic man is and his
seeing that our own calling puts us in
tension with.
We're not all prophets.
We have to be what we are in
the calling of God.
But ironically, it's that very calling that disqualifies
us from understanding and seeing what he has.
And maybe the church will not be the
church and move Israel to jealousy and fulfill
this remarkable mandate until somehow there's the deepest
reconciliation of these apparent contradictions and tensions.
Maybe we need to see all of these
callings in the tent and not to hold
them as technical nomenclature that God gave to
the church.
They're seeing and seeing there's knowing and knowing
not only God, but even the categories of
God.
And maybe that's the difference between a true
and false apostle and prophet.
One has it as nomenclature and technical vocabulary,
which is correct.
And the other has it as the revelation
that comes from the place itself.
Come unto me, Jesus said, and provided his
own generation with the key to the interpretation
of himself.
Unless you come unto me, you cannot see.
You can argue through the scriptures and how
can anyone come out of Nazareth?
Can any good thing come out of Nazareth?
The son of Joseph, you'll be defied in
every category unless you come unto me.
Come in because I myself am the interpretive
key of myself.
So long as you walk in and want
to cleave to your correctness, you'll miss me.
And the same issue that was Israel's undoing
is a prospect for ourselves.
We've come full circle.
In the sanctuary, in the place of the
presence of God, the psalmist becomes aware of
an unchangeable fact.
I belong to you.
You have taken hold of my right hand.
Yahweh has drawn near to him who considers
himself lost and forsaken.
He has let him recognize the certainty of
belonging to God and the saving way of
clutching him just before he was about threatened
to slip away even from his own sanity.
How far will we go and how far
will we allow ourselves to go to obtain
a reality and the knowledge of God beyond
our categories?
How far will we allow ourselves to come
close to slipping away, which is a threat?
But the church is slipping away at the
seeming prospect of heresy.
How far will we allow God to draw
us out into a place where the ultimate
revelation of himself and his truth waits?
If we cling to our correctness and to
the security of it, we'll always fall short
of that place.
And so the Psalm 73 is historical.
It's not hypothetical.
It's a narrative.
It's a statement of the experience of a
man, but it's a declaration of God for
all generations and for ourselves, especially the last
generation.
This is the very crisis through which all
that is Israel must necessarily pass with the
Jesus that confounds all their Jewish categories and
their bitterly negative history.
It will be the same trial for their
souls, the very key to their fulfillment.
That is that Israel itself has to pass
through this veil.
Everything is calculated against it.
All their categories are correct.
Their history of persecution by so-called Christians
confirms that this is error of the most
malicious kind, that this presumer was was a
deceiver.
Remember what they said?
Guard that tomb for this deceiver said that
on the third day he will rise again.
That's how they saw him.
And that's how they continue to see him
and will remain seeing him unless they are
brought by a vexation of such a kind
that cannot be reconciled with their categories and
with their history, a breakthrough into an existential
dimension of the appropriation of the truth, which
will require remarkable suffering.
Israel's suffering is for this revelation.
It will not come in any other way.
They're not going to be persuaded by step
one, step two, step three, four spiritual laws
or five spiritual laws.
They're going to have to come to an
ultimate vexation of soul, so ultimate that it
seems to contradict what they know about God,
that God would never do this.
God would never say that.
God would never come in the form of
flesh.
God would never be an infant.
God would never be crucified between criminals in
a dung heap outside of the holy city.
God would never offend against the Sabbath.
He would never allow his disciples to eat.
He would never take bread from the holy
table.
He would never, he would never, he would
never.
Our categories say they're impeccable and our rabbis
have confirmed them and our experience for the
centuries.
But now we're brought in the last days
into such a contradiction, such vexation.
What do we do with these Christians and
their willingness to die for us and even
by us and the kind of love that
they're demonstrating and they speak of it as
coming from our God.
They're forced to an ultimate contradiction that will
only break through in near insanity into the
sanctuary of God and they will see.
But we have to proceed them in that
seeing or we ourselves will not produce the
crisis for them by which they will see.
If we are only correct, we don't present
to them a crisis.
But having come from the sanctuary of God
and from the dwelling of God and in
union with God, the way that we will
deport ourselves and express ourselves contradicts all the
categories.
Maybe this is what the New York thing
represents, a first step, a first fruit in
following the lamb with us forever.
The very willingness to come, to write a
letter, to appear is already something that they
have to break their heads to consider.
It's outside their categories and that's where God
is, where he is ultimately is, where he
is profoundly is, is outside our categories.
Not that our categories are wrong, but they're
insufficient.
So also are theirs.
It's a suffering to go from the one
to the other, but the sufferer goes on
to meet his glorious destiny, ours and theirs.
The fulfillment that awaits this seeing, that revelatory
thing that is to be found in the
sanctuary of God, the light of his appearance
in glory, a miracle without equal that changes
all visible conditions of life.
For the psalmist, the new ultimate dispensation of
God is disclosed.
A union with Jehovah is awaited, which even
physical death cannot set aside or even interrupt.
Clearly, the psalm wants to emphasize that life
cannot be judged by the appearance of the
moment.
Praise God for that.
We have to look to the end.
What we call reality stands in need of
a new final review.
If the church is anything, you dear saints,
it is the statement of ultimate reality for
the want of which the world is dying.
It will not be saved by correct categories,
but by the communication of a reality that
lies too deep for words from which our
categories have kept us.
Reality.
Reality is sanity and the paradox is that
the man is drawn to a near insanity
in order to find it.
Do we love God enough for that?
Are we willing to suffer that kind of
anguish of soul where it seems like our
very faith is at threat and at risk,
is scandalously close to being violated or dismissed
or made heretical?
Are we willing to be stretched to the
ultimate place of breaking in a deepest kind
of anguish that exceeds mere physical suffering because
it's a moral anguish in the prospect that
God may not be God as we know
him, understand him and desire him to be.
That there's a knowledge of him beyond our
knowledge.
I'm not, you thought I was one like
yourself.
He's the other.
There's an otherness about God and that otherness
is reality and it's that for that want
of that reality that the world cannot define,
that is its salvation.
But who can communicate it?
But those who have been brought to that
place by their willingness to bear these remarkable
tensions.
We have to look at the end.
The end is the future.
The revealing of the emergence of God's final
activity.
Jehovah's Yahweh's final intervention and operation.
The futility, the seeming collapse of faith is
replaced by the fullness of communion with God,
which breaks up every final trace of wilderness.
I would go further and would say that
that communion with God breaks up every final
trace, not only wilderness, not only carnality, but
also of nationality, also of ethnic distinction and
gentilic pride.
It breaks up every last indefinable thing that
we could never have identified if we stood
in our heads and yet the elements of
it are with us and will only be
met in that ultimate and final place.
There alone is it broken up.
There alone is it dispelled.
Even when those people came forward in Canada
to the invitation to bow and enter the
tent of Shem, I found myself praying over
them that something would be removed from them
in that breaking because you can't take your
baggage in.
It would have to be left outside.
Its use in the future is up to
the God whom you'll meet now in new
union and even the baggage that constitutes a
sentimental affection for Israel, which impedes and stands
in the way of the authentic love of
God for Israel.
For a sentiment will go up like a
puff when Israel will increasingly disappoint us as
she is daily now doing and disappoint herself.
Many will fall away from their shallow Christian
Zionist identification.
And Paul speaks of the great falling away
of the last days, of which I believe
a disappointment in Israel and a disappointment in
God, both born out of shallow knowledge, both
of God and of the purposes of God
for Israel will account for a great apostasy.
Unless we're willing to forfeit that shallower thing
which we enjoy possessing and keeping and continuing
in, we cannot receive the authentic that issues
out of the communion with Shem himself in
his tent.
And I prayed, Lord, take out and divest
those counterfeit things which we clutch and so
enjoy, planting trees and going to Feast of
Tabernacles outings and giggling and titillating and pinching
the cheeks of Jews.
Our Gentile souls love it, but there's something
much deeper that needs to be imparted or
we'll never be able to bear with them
when they come to us in their flight
and in their desperate exile, broken and shattered
and stinking and in their rags and unkind
and mean-spirited and full of filthy epithets
against us and against the faith.
How shall we bear them?
Except by the invincible and unconditional love of
God that knows no conditions.
Sentiment will never stand.
You lose something when you bow to enter,
but you gain something and you gain something
of such a kind that will be salvational
for them in the last days and all
the world.
And it's only to be obtained then, I
believe, and so does this commentator.
It's a miracle without equal that changes all
the conditions of life.
What we call reality stands in the need
of a new final review.
We have to look at the end, which
is the future of God.
Here the final truth of God that overturns
everything is revealed to the psalmist who has
entered.
Everything that was made that had been relative
is now replaced by the fullness of communion
with God.
Nothing on earth stands in the way.
Here the final truth of God that overturns
everything is revealed to him.
He's intimately joined to God and looks forward
to the removal to glory.
The end has been glimpsed, which produces a
turn and a change of the aspects of
reality itself.
Beholding the end conditions the way in which
the present is seen and the past is
understood.
They're indivisible, but the end was not available
to the psalmist until he entered the sanctuary
of God.
It may have been available to him as
categories, as correct doctrine, but it was not
available to him as revelation.
Not only the revelation of the end, but
of the God of the end.
Once you see that and see him, it
affects the present, past, the future.
It's the reality.
It's ultimate reality.
It produces a change of the aspects of
reality which will be effective for Israel when
they come into the deeps of their despair.
We'll be able to communicate something to them
that can only have been seen from that
place.
Someone had asked, Art, what makes this expulsion
different from previous expulsions of God's dealings with
Israel as judgment?
What's to say that even when they return
as the redeemed of the Lord, they'll not
again be cast out?
When will they learn the lesson of expulsion?
When it shall be told them, when it
shall be prophetically explained to them with a
view and a light that the church has
never been able to communicate to the Jew.
It's not only that they're going to receive
in the wilderness physical sustenance, but explanation of
a prophetic kind that makes all of their
suffering and exile worthwhile.
It must come to us first before we
can communicate to them what ultimate reality is
and how far God will go for the
people Israel to be that blessing to the
nations of the earth, that it was not
extravagant to uproot them, put them in collision
with all of their trusted categories and bring
them to a place of such utter desperation
that when we speak the word of life
to them, they understand and return as the
redeemed of the Lord to Zion with everlasting
joy upon their heads.
They are brought into a completely different realm
of life beyond this one.
Death was no barrier to God's power because
the psalmist says, I will ever be with
you.
He has seen the eternality of God, which
is the greatest security.
And therefore we can bear anything seeing that.
It's the insecurity of fear that the loss
of our trusted categories will bring us to
a collapse.
But seeing the end and the eternality of
God, you come back into this life with
a remarkable framework of the deepest kind of
security that can bear anything.
It's a completely different realm of life beyond
this one.
So the church of the new covenant reads
and understands this psalm in view of the
fact that Jesus Christ is the place, the
Zion of God and the sanctuary of God
and the temple of God and the 10th
of Shem are all the one, the Lord
himself is that place, the place of God's
presence in whom the reality of divine grace
and divine judgment is obtained and made known.
He himself is the turn.
He himself is the final one, the ultimate
one whom all opinions of faith and life
one and obtained in the world are overturned.
In him, the Christian experiences the miracle of
communion with God, which overcomes all affliction, even
death.
So what is the last day's peril?
The risk of standing for God in such
a way as to oppose as to by
the good to oppose the perfect of the
defending of what is given against that which
is being given and so cherishing the wave
that has come so as to be threatened
by the wave that is coming of opposing
the future and the now present truth by
the past truth.
These are the perils of our generation and
of this moment that God is acting out
with us.
The danger of limiting the Holy One of
Israel by defending him.
If that's not paradox, I don't know what
is.
It was Israel's great sin and it was
done out of the best and well-meaning
intentions of correct categories.
So Lord, save us from the defenders of
the faith, but save us also from the
heretical innovators of the faith.
It's a double danger.
I'm mindful of that.
What keeps me from being a heretical innovator
and just coining something out of my own
mind?
What does God say about the false prophets?
I never sent them.
The vision that they have at the dream
of out of which they speak was their
own.
I never gave it and I never sent
them.
What's my safety is that I'm sent and
I'm sent out of a sending body and
that I'm in a relationship, not just an
occasional frequent, but a continual basis that sees
to the integrity and the truth of the
life, knowing that a true prophet can become
false and can move from the revelation of
things that are given to things that he
coins out of his own imagining or that
become dear to him as the doctrines become
dear to those who hold them.
We are in the faith is dangerous.
It's charged with landmines.
It's full of paradox, but it's our calling.
But this, the church as the church is
our safety.
And I'm so blessed in my soul to
hear from different ones who have observed our
tension and our conflict in these days that
they say, but we see that you love
one another.
Oh, do you see that?
I wasn't aware of it myself.
Do you see that?
Is it that visible?
Well, praise God for it.
It's our saving grace that we can hold
steady.
We've not been this way here too far.
And every element in this charge situation is
given by God.
I'm acting out of the calling that I'm
given, but they are acting out of the
calling they are given.
And out of the givenness of God comes
the contradiction and the tension, but out of
it also will come an ultimate resolution that
will transcend all of our callings and bring
us into that precious and ultimate place by
which we shall follow lamb with us.
So ever he goeth and not once spoke
by anything that is uncertain, unfamiliar, or seems
at the moment to be in contradiction with
what we know of God.
We will know the lamb.
We will know his voice and he will
lead us into green pastures and we'll lie
down by still waters.
So the firstfruits company, the distinctive of it
is to follow the lamb with us forever.
And so the issue before us now is
not so much the Tent of Shem, but
what its consideration is revealing of our secret
heart.
I'll tell you how far I think God
would go.
Maybe I'm all wet on the Tent of
Shem.
Maybe the Lord has allowed me to play
with something fanciful that I particularly enjoy.
Not so much because it's necessarily true, but
because it is calculated to produce a necessary
conflict and tension.
For had we not had that conflict and
not had that tension, we would not have
been brought into the place of the sanctuary.
In order to see, we would have been
vexed unbearably and even to the point of
the dissolution of the faith and of the
community.
How far will God go to bring us
to a place of transcendence and majesty of
the glory of what the church is?
Are we going to come to that in
some cheap and costless way or will it
be through a suffering?
So I'm not even making a case that
the Tent of Shem is the truth of
God.
Let's leave that aside.
Whether it's the Tent of Shem or some
other thing, Psalm 53, or that you've eaten
my people as bread, not being my people
Israel, but my people the Palestinian, I'll leave
to the realm of speculation.
Whether it's this or that, this much I
will say, God will not leave us without
issues.
He'll not leave us without tensions of a
very real kind that are produced not out
of our carnality or our humanity, but out
of our very calling.
We have each to act out of the
genuine distinction of that to which we are
called.
And in acting out of that, the conflict
is produced that compels us to a place
that we would not have desired, seen, or
obtained before.
And all Israel will be the beneficiary.
So I hope there's no one saying, well,
what do you expect God to say?
He's got to justify and defend himself.
I'm willing to allow that might be true.
I'm not conscious of it, but that doesn't
mean that it's not a possibility.
It might be the truth.
And part of the suffering is to bear
that prospect, not only of the indictment that
is false, but the indictment that might be
true.
Churches are suffering saints and we embrace it
as privilege because all Israel waits in the
back for a people who can explain to
it, its own predicament.
And in fact, what we are in God
will produce their predicament.
It will vex them unbearably.
They have us all categorized.
Churches, right-wing fundamentalists, they want to convert
us.
They only want to see Israel to succeed
because they believe that in Israel's success, the
Lord will come.
We are only an expedient element in their
doctrinal theology that their Jesus might come.
They have no interest in us for our
own sake.
What are they going to do with us?
What are they going to do with the
more virginal people who follow the lamb, whether
so ever, and who display and exhibit his
nature, character, and light?
It'll force them into a new perplexity of
an anguish because they want so easily to
be able to dismiss us, but they'll not
be able to spit it out.
They'll kick against the bricks as Saul did
with Stephen until finally the Lord in his
own appearing will bring them through to their
own apostolate.
But we must be that factor.
We've got to see the heavens opened.
We've got to see from within the sanctuary
of God.
And so pray and thank the Lord for
the crisis that he has given us in
his own wisdom, not so much of whether
it's true or not, but how it compels
us to break loose and to abandon the
things that keep us from the ultimate place
of God, both as prophets, apostles, teachers, or
whatever our calling.
Got the picture?
Well, there's more to be gleaned from this,
but it's enough for today to chew on
and to thank the Lord for.
The test of Abraham is the final test
that shattered all of his categories about God.
It seems so much to be an echo
of the pagan practice of the immolation of
their own children, which take that only son
whom thou lovest and make of him a
sacrifice in the month that I will show
you.
He had every reason to ignore that requirement
and believe that it came from the evil
one.
But he rose up early in the morning
and sat on his ass, cut his wood,
took his son, and went.
The ultimate test of an Abrahamic people is
to follow the Lord with his every even
when he seems to contradict himself.
What do we read in Proverbs?
Don't answer a fool according to his own
foolishness, unless you become engaged by him.
The next verse says, answer a fool according
to his foolishness that he might be saved
out of the same.
God says the one says the other.
What do we read in Amos chapter nine?
The eyes of the Lord are upon the
sinful kingdom.
I will destroy it from the face of
the earth, except I will not utterly destroy
the house of Jacob says the Lord.
I will destroy all except I will not
utterly destroy it.
Come on Lord, get with it, put up
or shut up.
Be clear, like us.
God is God.
The Lord is the Lord.
Precious God on high, expand our hearts Lord.
Forgive us if we have put you in
a box and we have limited the Holy
One of Israel in our correct understanding about
you.
My God, you're not to be confined even
by that understanding.
You're expansive.
There's no limit to the Holy One of
Israel and yet your truths, my God, are
enviable, sacred and holy.
What are we to do with that kind
of attention?
Help us with a grace Lord in the
very thing through which we're passing and we
bless you.
We bless you Lord.
Privilege, I don't know of any church or
any people who have been exposed and summoned
to crisis of this kind, but ourselves here
in these days and we thank you for
it Lord.
And to whom much is given, much is
required.
We thank you Lord.
Oh, precious God, what privilege.
We wouldn't want you to take anything back.
It was worth all the suffering, the misunderstanding,
the confusion, the dirty looks, the apprehension, all
of those kinds of things.
More painful when they come not from strangers
but those with whom you're daily and intimately
joined.
How can you blame them?
They're standing a safeguard.
And so my God, we bless you.
Thank you Lord.
Breathe whatever was spoken this morning that is
out of your heart and appointed for our
understanding.
God forbid so much as a syllable shall
fall to the ground.
Wherever we are wanting, wherever we have limited
you, we ask your forgiveness.
Myself and all this people, Lord, bring us
into that dimension, my God, for which is
that virginal bridal company that has no category,
no conviction, however dear that will in any
way impede or limit yourself.
We will follow you wither so ever, as
Abraham did because we know the voice of
our shepherd.
And we thank you, my God.
You're good altogether and precious.