Good morning, Saints.
Believe me, I'm more scared than you are.
This has got to be the most frightening
obedience to which I have ever been required.
And I have had some hairy requirements over
the years.
Well, we sometimes joke we're living in community
on a farm in Northern Minnesota with a
Lord brought us 25 years ago, making clear
that we're to establish a place of refuge
for Jews in flight from persecution in the
United States of America.
How's that for an opening line?
And it's been a searing experience to be
in community with God's people.
I'm a Jewish believer, former Marxist, atheist, left
-wing, radical history teacher who came to a
place of disillusionment 35 years ago.
With a failed marriage with a German wife
whom I had met in the service there.
And it set me on the road to
salvation.
I put a pack on my back and
went back to where I was as a
high school dropout at the age of 16,
where I didn't leave school because I was
not interested in knowledge and truth, but because
I was.
Can you understand that?
And truth was only a truth.
School was only a place in which careers
were obtained for split level success.
I had no appetite or interest in that.
And not only were the answers not forthcoming,
but the questions were never asked that are
real questions.
So I was a high school dropout at
the age of 16, a merchant seaman, subsequently
became a Marxist, left-wing radical, embraced what
they call Marxism as a worldview until I
came to a time of disillusionment.
I've gone through a succession of gods with
a small G.
And in my final disillusionment in the, I
was then a high school history teacher, graduate
of the university of California at Berkeley.
I took a year's leave of absence from
the teaching profession, put the pack on my
back again and set forth once more to
somehow find the truth that I would leave
no stone unturned through Western Europe, where, of
which we Jews are essentially the architects of
the modern world.
We've given the world that's basic contour with
Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Albert Einstein, Steven Spielberg.
It's amazing.
If you, but knew the Jews who influenced
your thinking, your mode of life.
And I wasn't looking for God.
I didn't know there was a God to
be found.
I was looking for philosophical, ideological truth, but
in the course of it, God was looking
for me.
I had one of my students, a little
Gentile girl with a snubbed nose and freckles,
whom her mother said to me, my daughter
used to come home from school.
She said, weeping over you, knowing that you
were an atheist and a radical.
And since that day, she said, both my
daughter and I have been praying for you.
And the Lord nudged me in the ribs
and said, she's the one whose prayers have
entered you into the kingdom of heaven.
So I'm in grad.
I'm grateful for snubbed nose, freckle faced Gentiles
haven't always been, but especially when they're the
key to your salvation and can pray fervently
because they're righteous and God hears that prayer
pursued me as the hound of heaven for
14 months throughout Europe.
I kept the journal in those days, which
subsequently became my first book out of print
in English, but I can get it for
you in Russian, French, German, Hebrew, Swedish, Finnish.
It's called Ben Israel.
That means son of Israel, odyssey of a
modern Jew.
It's a remarkable existential saga of a modern
man.
That's what we Jews are in search and
apprehended by the God whom I was not
seeking.
Well, life was too earnest after being saved
to go back to anything less than the
continuing pursuit of truth.
And it wasn't long, maybe three, four or
five years into my new faith, having traversed
evangelical fundamental Christianity, charismatic full gospel movements to
realize that something was still grievously missing that
we could not be to the Jews what
we, what we ought until we were somehow
back into the vitality, texture quality that characterized
the church at the first in apostolic way,
that somehow the issue was lifestyle and that
we had to find our way back to
community.
And that's how the Lord brought us to
our place for 25 years in community, Northern
Minnesota, 40 below zero winters, nine months out
of the year.
And that intensifies every question.
So, um, I often joke and say that
there's an invisible saying over the entry to
our property, you know, to the concentration camps.
It was our bite mocked Fry work makes
free course.
They weren't coming to be free, but to
be released by death after exhaustion or extermination
over our property.
I would have said, all you do enter
here, abandon hope of retaining any kind of
fleshly self-esteem or any kind of mirage
or any kind of illusion, because you're going
to be ruthlessly dealt with.
Not because anyone has that as their intention,
but it's the very nature of community, the
intensification of all of the issues of life
that become brutal.
I've been accused in that place of being
an enemy of the gospel by my own
people.
After, uh, sacrificially pouring myself out that they
might have a place to come of that
kind.
So someone said, you have to give a
little introduction, a description of yourself that people
might know where you're coming from.
I jokingly said, maybe it's not too much
of a joke at the Sunday school hour.
You can see why the church desperately needs
Jewish believers.
You guys left to yourselves as a formula
for deception and disaster.
You bring a wonderful balance to our intensity,
but without our intensity and insane jealousy, you
would go the way of all flesh and
not even know it.
So, uh, God intended a body in which
these remarkable elements, Jewish and Gentile would kind
of counterbalance one another and be sane and
right and true and real, so you're going
to get a little taste of what you're
missing.
And maybe they thank God that it's only
a periodic visit that we don't have someone
of this kind continually in our midst.
You know what it says of these prophets
that lay in the street for three and
a half days before the resurrected, these are
they who torment those who dwell on the
face of the earth with tormentors.
Well, some of my books are out there.
They're probably already all gone in the few
that were left to be made available.
I, but I want you to know their
existence.
And I've asked one of the ladies in
the congregation to put a sheet out there
that you can request them by filling out
your name and address, giving the money for
the book and for the mailing.
We'll mail it to you because it's exceptional
literature.
Reality is my second book for principle essays
or themes of an inspirational kind.
The message on Elijah is worth the price
of the book alone.
And that's in several languages, French and, um,
I don't know, Russian and so on.
A more recent single message, apostolic conversion.
Was given in California where I was to
speak for four days.
And after the second day, I despaired.
I could not go on.
I cried out to God.
I said, Lord, these people ostensibly have it
all together.
This is a groovy, swinging, charismatic fellowship.
But why then do I feel like I'm
up against a brick wall?
I can't go any further.
They, the word is coming back into my
teeth.
It's as if these people have silently covenanted
to go this far, but no further.
Of course, we were living in a home
of, I don't know how many thousands of
square feet.
Uh, many of the people were wealthy and
contractors and cars and double and triple garages
with boats that must've had something to do
with the fact that they could say this
far, no further.
And so we spent the day in fasting
and in prayer.
The Lord gave this word that night.
This is the actual verbatim transcript of that
spoken message.
When you read it, you'll marvel.
You would have thought that this was months
in preparation.
It is articulate.
It is ordered.
This is a divine logic as it flows
out from page to page, just spontaneously on
the spot, but when they heard this word
down, they went, Alan spoke about going down
twice in his life.
This was one of those going downs.
Probably one of the fraudulent things about our
Christianity is both the frequency and the shallowness
of our altercals.
There are times when I almost want to
call a moratorium and say, that's a no,
no.
If we're not going to be changed by
our coming forward, if we're going to return
to our seats and the condition in which
we left them better remain where you are.
And we can't play with God.
So these people went down and when they
got up, I knew that they were changed
and that change has remained through these years.
The pastors preaching changed the third, the church
left.
They were plunged immediately into a financial crisis.
So, you know, there's something happened.
And that this little booklet now is in
Danish and in Dutch and in French and
in German, no, not German yet, Russian.
It deserves to go around the world.
It will, you must get this.
And then the most recent book, the Holocaust,
where was God?
How many of us have asked the question?
I can't believe that a phenomenon of this
kind has taken place in modern times and
especially that it has taken place in modern
times and that we should somehow sweep it
under the carpet, that we should not wrestle
with the ponderous questions that the systematic annihilation
of 6 billion Jews creates for modern men
throughout the world.
Maybe it's so painful.
Maybe we're so fearful of what the answer
might be if we leaped into the grave
with these bones that we avoid it.
You know that the world has a wonderful
talent to sweep things under the rug and
for history to lose its cogency.
I shared this morning how if you went
to the concentration camp Dachau today, where I
went in 1952, where the original barracks stood
with the stink of death and whipping posts,
places of torture and the gold fillings from
teeth that were kept in the hair and
the ovens with the bones and the ashes
in, you would have one impression.
But if you went there today, it's all
nicely tidied up.
It's all nicely landscaped.
They've removed all of the stink of death
and put up one barrack according to specifications.
That's the German mind.
So there's something in man that is escapist.
We don't have a stomach for hard things
and for truth.
And that's pitiful for mankind at large.
It'll lead to a life not rightly lived
and to an eternity that will be shameful
to consider.
But for the church to be evasive, for
the church to be escapist, for the church
to have no stomach for truth, for the
church to be a kind of a get
by phenomenon that goes on from Sunday to
Sunday with predictable services, that is inexcusable.
All the more in the last days, I
have to assume that we're closer to the
end than we know.
If what was given me from one third
of this morning till 430 was the Lord,
I'm willing to run the possibility that it's
my flesh and pay the price for it
because you know that we men who stand
before God's people are under a double obligation.
This is no small thing.
We're not little professionals doing our cute thing
and grabbing the honorarium and running.
We have an obligation before God and what
we bring to God's people and what we
think he has put into our hearts to
share.
So I've shared that already because I've written
out four pages, unusual for me, with Allen.
And if he did not witness that, I
was ready to call it quits then.
But he has encouraged me, so I'm going
to go on.
The final book and the subject of today
is the subject of truth.
It's much more than just a mechanical thing
or just an approximation of things that are
externally true or even doctrinally true.
The truth to which God calls the church
is the spirit of truth, the intangible, indefinable
essence of something through and through, not just
its external ramifications.
It's the whole truth.
And I recommend this to you so you
can order any or all of these books
on the sheet back there.
They're all seven dollars each, except the slim
one for three and throw in a little
something more for the mailing.
And as soon as I get back, it'll
be sent out and you'll be blessed for
the having of them.
Well, I'm tired physically.
I was tired before I came to Georgetown.
I'm more tired now, having been up since
1.30 and disturbed sleep.
And I jokingly said this morning in the
seminary class, I am not alert enough to
be what's the word, careful about my speaking,
to be discreet.
I'm too tired to exercise that kind of
watchfulness.
So I just have to blurt out somehow
what the Lord has given.
And you will see that it is extremely
personal.
You say, would God go that far to
name names, identify things that are known to
the congregation or perhaps should be known?
And will he go that far?
Couldn't he say the same thing in general
terms?
Evidently not, maybe at an earlier time when
the last days were not as imperative and
the issues as grave, he might have spoken
generally, I don't know.
But now, if nothing more, this will scare
us to say if God is in this
and willing to go that far and to
risk this kind of embarrassment, how earnest must
the issues be that he's willing for that
cost?
So, Lord, if there's some way that the
floor could open up and conveniently swallow me,
I would welcome it.
But if the time has come, a moment
of truth and I'm the appointed one to
deliver it, you're full.
And what you what I have from one
thirty on this morning is actually from you
that I'm asking that the spirit of truth
should be so invested in these statements that
however much they pinch and even stab, that
we have to acknowledge the truth and the
God of it and bow before it and
let it perform its work.
Lord, it's either going to require a violent
rejection or a prostration before you.
I can't conceive that there's any middle ground.
So speak, Lord, as if this is a
moment of truth that has arrived and we're
not to be spared.
The issues are too great and we thank
and give you praise for such a love
and such a jealousy that will not let
us go and requires this in Jesus name.
Amen.
Well, I was wakened with two words.
What if?
What if what we understand and think to
be true and even from God that sanctions
and condones and blesses is not so and
that there's another way to understand and perceive
some of the things that we have assumed
that need to be brought into question, I
would say, I can't think of a healthier
posture for any true segment of God's people
that can rightly be called the church and
the apostolic meaning of that word than to
periodically have a reality check and to raise
the question about all of its categories in
the sense of what if what if we're
wrong?
What if we're mistaken?
What if we're deceived?
You don't think you're a candidate for that?
I can't think of anything that would more
facilitate deception than to think that you're exempt.
The best of us, the Lord has saved
me from deception, I'm so grateful for the
experience, not out of some carnal thing or
some ambition for ministry or anything like that
that might have been the format for deception,
but out of very spirituality itself.
I mean, I was saved by the correction
that came to me by the youngest and
weakest member of our community, newly saved, high
pitched, cracked voice, pimple, old knees and elbows
and the most awkward thing you can imagine.
And in this high pitched voice and cracked
voice, I said, well, you know, Art, that
we have agreed that that the ministry flows
out of the life and the life out
of the relationships.
And if you're disconnected from the life, then
what ministry?
Of course, the Lord had already developed something
in Kansas City where I had gone for
an excursion with Jews that I hadn't sought.
And it was so profound.
And Kansas City is the heart of the
nation and God is doing this with prestigious
Jews.
This must be God and a reason to
stay there, not to come back to the
boondocks of northern Minnesota where they only wanted
me because of the insecurity.
The Lord corrected me, I went there to
straighten them out, flew in with two Jewish
brothers and the Lord straightened me out through
the weakest and youngest member of the community.
The moment those words came, it went right
into my kiskis, my gut and my head
fell on my chest.
And I knew that I had been in
error and I was deceived.
I came back.
What if the Lord, who is truth?
If.
So through our pretensions as being unimpressed, our
assumptions and confidences in which we boast as
being false, vain, pretentious and apostolically insignificant, what
if?
What if the best of what we boast
in and exalt ourselves in is seen by
God being actually the opposite and the antithesis
of what we presume it to be?
What if?
Doesn't the scripture say that his thoughts are
not our thoughts?
And that his thoughts are as distant from
our thoughts as the heaven from the earth?
The heart of deception is the presumption upon
God that assumes because we think something godly
or increase of church or enlargement or building
a program that he necessarily comes along to
sanction, condone, bless and approve.
What if he doesn't?
What if he's allowing us to prepare for
our humiliation and our failure, and out of
that will come a reality that will be
significant for this community and not the hope
for building that we thought would once we
provide the room, of course, God will fill
it.
What if?
Will we welcome the sort of the spirit
to pass, pierce through and lay bare and
reveal our emptiness?
Would we be willing for a reality check,
which we ought periodically to take, which we
would not allow our cars to avoid after
so many thousands of miles to put to
put to certain tests because we have to
have a confidence that when we're on freeways
and going 70 and more miles an hour,
that we know that the brake system works,
this works, that works.
Reality check for cars.
And we don't allow it for ourselves and
require it for ourselves periodically.
Are we willing to go back to the
drawing board?
Are we willing to, for example, suffer the
stigma of an unfinished building to haunt us
as the statement of our pretension and presumption
that God was never in it, even though
we were able to raise the money to
bring it that far.
But the Rotarians could have done that.
And the Eagles and other human societies, that's
not necessarily an evidence that God is in
something.
What if he's not in it?
See, the issue of truth is the willingness
to bear the what ifs, and in the
Sunday school class, I quoted from a script
in Jeremiah of the Lord's rebuke of Israel,
who was not valiant for the truth.
And I raised the question, what's a synonym
for valiant?
And I was rightly informed, courageous, courage.
Truth requires courage, saints.
And because it's going to be painful often,
if not invariably, before it becomes glorious.
So even the willingness to bear a what
if requires a courage, the what if of
being wrong, the what if of being mistaken,
the what if of being vain, conceited, presumptuous
about God and willing to go back to
square one.
Truth requires something.
It's not just the mental acknowledgment, but it
might require a very costly adjustment, maybe even
the acknowledgment that tens of thousands of dollars
may have been misspent or other kinds of
things.
Truth is not a cheapie.
And the church is called to be the
ground and pillar of the truth.
I think that the Lord could lay at
the doorstep of the church in the world
and in this nation, the full accountability for
the condition of the world about us.
We are God's plumb line.
We are the statement from heaven of what
reality is.
And if we are not that thing, not
that we approve it or even speak it,
but are the thing in itself corporately as
well as personally, what hope for the world?
No wonder they're deluded.
No wonder they're vain.
No wonder they're there.
They're on some Alice in Wonderland trip in
which there's no eternity, no judgment, no day
of reckoning, no day of the Lord.
Until when it comes, they shriek with a
horror and cry for clefts in the rock
to hide because no one had warned them.
No one had lived in such a way
before them as to make even the issue
of the of eternity a reality, let alone
the judgment, the apocalyptic judgment that comes in
the suddenness of that day.
Oh, I believe that, brother.
I believe that.
Oh, yeah.
Well, you're not living as if you do.
How come you don't give the impression of
that in the way you deport yourself and
carry yourself and conduct yourself?
You're living as if this is the best
of all worlds.
And if it's not, it could be made
better.
You're making plans for your vacations and, and
all the other kinds of things as if
the world will go on in an endless
way.
And we, and we have plenty of time
and there's no urgency.
There's no apocalyptic expectancy in you.
There's no sense of an end to which
we're moving that is of a grave kind,
which was, if we deeply understood it and
subscribe to it, it would change our whole
atmosphere.
There would be a high seriousness of what
we are about and our jobs and our
careers would be recognized for what they are.
Mere secondary provision from God to keep body
and soul together for the principal purpose of
being the church of God in this locality
and making known the reality of to which
the world is otherwise blinded, not only by
what we say, but what we in fact
are in ourselves.
Got the picture.
So you're willing to go back to the
drawing board square one to repent of the
whole verbal masquerade.
Listen, guys, I've been around a long time.
I'm a wordsmith myself.
I'm an author and an eloquent man who
loves the English language.
I'm a student of language.
You know what I realize that the church
is a phraseological phenomenon.
It's like an extension of what I knew
as a as a high school teacher, that
if you say something verbally or can master
the statement, you think you have the corresponding
reality.
They used to put my grades up on
the board first and then the rest of
the class.
I broke the curve.
But when it came to teach the things
in which I was a plus student and
I had to stand before flesh and blood
kids, you know what I found out?
I didn't know as I ought to know.
I was able verbally to give back the
information given sufficient to pass the test, but
that is does not constitute knowledge that is
of a life changing kind.
I had to go back to the drawing
board.
I had to relearn my subject.
I had to learn it with my students
and blood, sweat and tears day by day.
Well, much of our Christianity is merely phraseological,
verbal, it's a game's playing.
And we think that because we can intone
and invoke words like apostolic, prophetic, body of
Christ, kingdom of God, that somehow we have
the awesome realities to which they point.
We need a reality check unless we find
ourselves empty symbols and bumbling characters who say
the right things without the corresponding reality.
Do you know that a great revival began
in Argentina because one man of God called
a moratorium on one word.
He refused to allow his church to speak
the word Lord.
With the God I had that authority.
First of all, I think the church would
be called to a silence for a few
months and not be allowed to say anything.
But you know what he recognized?
The word Lord had become a cheapie.
It was like a reflex action, like a
beep, a hiccup, Lord this, Lord that, Lord,
Lord, without realizing that the scripture says there'll
be a day when some of us will
stand before him and say, Lord, Lord.
And he'll say, depart from me, you workers
of iniquity.
I never knew you.
Anybody can say, Lord, Lord.
But is he Lord, in fact?
I said to the people in San Antonio
that if you're going to be the body
of Christ and an apostolic entity in your
locality and a lifesaving provision from God for
Jews in distress in the last days, you're
going to have to become an integral body
that submits to the authority of God in
that body.
And that is not established by credentializing or
by office, but by the anointing and the
authority that God implants.
And that you autonomous Christians who do your
own thing, who think you're doing God's service
to come come to a Sunday morning or
put a buck in the plate, make your
own decisions continually.
About a vacation, with whom do you confer
about leaving the body of Christ to which
you have been joined for some significant number
of days without conferring if it's going to
cause any kind of significant loss or disjuncture
or or that it could not be permitted
at that time.
Who is anyone who is going to tell
me when I take my vacation, it's my
vacation.
I've got the right.
Oh, yeah.
Not if we're a militant company, an island
of of sanity besieged by a hostile world
that has got to act in concert.
And we can't we can't be the sum
total of subjective decisions made on the basis
of our convenience and will.
Or else it's not the church, it's just
a culture of a Sunday kind that requires
nothing of any real consequence and allows us
to continue in the thing that we really
are about our own pleasure, our own security,
our own self-interest.
The Sunday thing is a gloss and we're
singing all of these rapturous songs of worship.
It's a lie.
So we're complimenting ourselves and having it together
when, in fact, we think ourselves rich and
have need of nothing, complimenting so we're on
the cutting edge.
Listen, we'll look to our vocabulary.
We must be look how we speak of
it and the assurance that the Lord is
in agreement with our own self-assessment and
endorses it, that our five point plank enjoys
a ringing amen and approval from heaven.
It's not that the five point plank is
in itself in error or unscriptural.
No, it's it's compatible.
But is it given?
Has it come down from above?
Is it just a kind of a verbalism
that gives us the sense of being about
substantial things when, in fact, we don't have
the deepest part of intention of fulfilling it?
See what I mean?
A whole thing can become a gamesmanship and
we're not even aware.
What if he sees and now I'm not
saying that he does, I'm not saying thus
saith the Lord about anything that I'm saying,
I'm only just raising the question, what if
he sees it in that way?
What if he sees the pastor's Ph.D.
as being vain, as being insubstantial, that there's
not a recognized theological institution in America that
would validate that Ph.D. or doctor of
ministry or whatever it is as being valid,
that has come from some kind of a
diploma mill that makes it credible by requiring
some kind of a paper and certain kinds
of things that are far beneath any kind
of standard of requirement that an authentic institution
of theology in America or the world would
require?
And what if it's an ego thing?
What if it's a vanity?
What if it's something that the congregation itself
likes as well as the minister?
Because it gives an aura of a certain
kind of solidity and decorum and weight which
it in fact does not bear.
That's called a lie.
Got the picture?
Now I'm not saying that that's the case,
but what if it is the case?
Do we have the guts, the courage to
consider that it might be and even to
forsake it?
What if our so-called liberality and openness
toward God in which we would permit almost
anything to take place in our congregation is
really not so much as a statement of
our generous spirit, but rather a statement of
our default, of our inability or unwillingness to
exercise real discernment and requirement in which we
let anything go?
If it's making sounds like animals or writhing
like a snake on the floor, well, that's
the nuts that go with the fruit.
Well, where does the scripture talk about nuts
and fruit as if somehow both are valid?
Talks about that which is of God and
not of God.
But when we use a vocabulary of that
kind that seems to be so generous and
liberal, can it actually constitute a default of
responsibility, both the exercise of discernment to distinguish
between what is godly and ungodly and not
allow the ungodly thing a place in the
house of God?
Following me?
It isn't remarkable.
I don't think I've had two hours here.
I mean, last night going out for dinner,
I was not very conversational.
I was already whacked out and tired and
so on.
But if we're living a lie and a
sham and going through motions and playing a
word game in the day of eternity, whether
it's by death or the Lord's appearing, we
will at that moment see all things as
they in fact are.
Too late to remedy anything.
That's the agony, the wailing and the gnashing
of teeth.
All of a sudden truth has come that
we have been blinded to or unwilling to
see, but it's come now too late to
rectify.
Would to God that he had sent someone
earlier to sound the alarm and to cause
us to go through a reality check and
to examine what we're saying and doing when
it can be rectified rather than we should
be caught short at that final moment and
have to live eternally with the mortification of
a life not rightly lived in God.
And a church that has been going through
motions, however much we have enjoyed it.
What if the whole premise of our building
program, that a larger capacity would somehow assure
a larger congregation, is not the Lord's premise
at all?
And that whatever measure of success we have
had in obtaining funds, et cetera, is what
any human organization might have obtained and is
not necessarily the statement of his approval, let
alone his blessing.
What if I wanted to live with that
possibility?
Are you willing to seek the Lord over
such a question and suffer the reproach that
it may well be his view?
What if a pastor's wife states what pastor's
wife's statement that he can go to Mexico
and start a church if he wants, he
raised that as a possibility.
But just make sure that the check comes
every month.
What if that's not from the Lord somehow
to check him from the direction that the
Lord doesn't intend, but is rather the actual
statement of the fear and concern for security
above and beyond any issue of a spiritual
kind?
And that we have not understood it as
that, but have interpreted it in a way
as to make it sound as if it's
the Lord himself providing a check when it's
a condition at the heart of the fellowship
that needs to be understood, examined and repented
about and prayed through.
What if that the wife's comment is not
necessarily the Lord indicating through her that this
is not his will for her husband, but
rather the deadly, serious insistence of her financial
security as the non-negotiable fact of where
she, in fact, is spiritually and whose involvement
with the work has been nominal and is
unimpressed with what the husband necessarily is saying
or the church doing and incandescently goes along
so long as the real issue, security, lifestyle,
the things that are really of primary concern
are not altered or threatened.
What if that's not only her condition?
What if that's the condition of most of
us and it's not recognized as a
condition and we swallow it down or look
the other way as somehow not affecting the
fabric, the character, the texture of the fellowship
itself and its very truth, because at the
heart of it is something else, more in
keeping with the spirit of the world and
its values than that of the kingdom.
And we even boast in that as somehow
being God's provision to keep us from having
made an error of judgment and will.
What if the pastor himself is involved in
an occupied with a merely verbal games playing,
you know, the kinds of games that men
play.
There are two ways that we can conduct
a safety check, a reality check.
One is our wives.
Are they really impressed or they just, you
know, let him go along with his harmless
blather, doesn't affect anything real anyway, and he
enjoys it and it's important for him.
And okay.
The second is our children.
Are they impressed?
You know what I said to the people
in San Antonio?
You'll know that you're on apostolic ground when
you will have persuaded your own children of
the earnestness and the seriousness of what you
are about.
And who don't go to your services reluctantly
and dragging their feet because they got to.
There's something both in children and in wives
that is intuitive and often unerring in sensing
that which is serious and authentic.
We would do well to hear them or
else we go on playing our games and
the sounds good, but it does not affect
anything significantly and even keeps us by that
very verbal games playing from the things that
are authentic that would be consequential.
So we can talk about projects and things
that will facilitate the kingdom, but it's almost
like toys that men play with.
You see, we're living in a world that
billions upon billions are expended in space travel,
in getting to Mars and bringing back a
stone in the hope that they might find
that there really is organic life on another
planet, which would discredit the Bible.
And we're paying for that now taxes to
the tune of trillions of dollars.
It's an insanity in a world in which
children are dying by the tens of thousands
daily for the want of the most elementary
nutrition.
We think it justifiable to send off these
rockets and men and escapades in space.
It's that the games that grown men play
when they've got the finances to provide it,
it's tragic in the world, but for the
church to emulate that at its own level
with its own games is more tragic still.
So our wives will humor us because so
long as the real thing is not threatened.
Okay.
But it robs ourselves in the church of
a real seriousness and the issue of what
really constitutes truth in the last analysis lifestyle
is not understood or examined.
And I'm not in any of these things
saying, let's say it, the Lord, just thinking
out the what ifs that might be a
possibility.
The question for you is, are you willing
to put them before the Lord?
And the chance possibility that his seeing is
different from our seeing and other than our
seeing and that his thoughts are not our
thoughts and that even if you are correct
in every question raised this morning and that
everything that I have sounded as a possibility
is not a possibility.
You have been jealous for the truth.
You have been zealous for the truth.
You have been valiant for the truth in
your willingness to consider the possibility of a
what if.
And this is not some strange aspect of
church life.
This is definitive.
This is normative.
The only thing that strikes us is that
it's strange is that we're unaccustomed to it.
When Paul enjoined Timothy to preach the word,
he wasn't talking about biblical sermons.
He was talking about exhortation, rebuke and correction.
Preach the word.
That's the word to people right in their
face, right between the eyes, right in the
kisser, right in their teeth.
Let them know their need.
Let them know their condition or the church
is going to become some flabby kind of
cultural entity that the powers of darkness will
yawn over and say, Jesus, we know and
Paul, we know, but the church in Georgetown,
who?
I tell you, dear saints, your foremost consideration
and the index that what you are about
in God is right is that you have
caused the powers of darkness that brood over
this locality to fear you.
And they're only required to acknowledge one thing
only authenticity.
They see right through sham.
They see right through pretense.
You can turn your loudspeakers up until you're
deafened.
You can enlarge your building.
You can have every kind of worship and
program.
Oh, but let them see a small body
of saints who are walking in the truth
and are jealous for the truth and desire
the truth and to be examined and corrected
and reproved by one another, that they might
be maintained in the truth.
And those powers of darkness will cringe and
be in terror over your very existence.
But to come to that is painful.
It's called the cross.
It should not be that foreign to us.
So even if everything that I'm raising this
morning is not really a legitimate fear, the
willingness to examine those things is the issue
of truth itself.
If we're willing to pause, reexamine our suppositions,
check our foundations, test our reality, and rather
prefer to err on the side that these
things might be true than to stiffen and
go on with a business as usual attitude
as if they could not be true.
And to be complacent invites deception, even in
the midst of our amens and hallelujahs.
And the reason that we don't want an
environment and an even in the
midst of our amens and hallelujahs.
And the reason that we don't want an
environment and an atmosphere that would be confrontive
and challenging and asking is because it's painful.
It's troubling.
We want something soothing on a Sunday.
After all, we've had a hard week and
we don't have we don't want to have
our essential lifestyle called into question.
And so you know what we constitute a
conglomerate of individualities, little islands of self-will,
of subjective interest, doing their own thing, coming
together for Sunday in a midweek service and
enjoying the provision of the facility.
But it's not a body.
It's not an integral body.
It's not an organic people who are joined
living sacrificially with a discipline because they know
that there's an end in view, that the
stakes are high, that the powers of darkness
will have but a short time, that they
have issues before them and mandates to fulfill
that can only be fulfilled as a body
that is a body in the truth.
That doesn't have to wait for some freaky
character to come from out of God knows
where on a Sunday morning because you yourself
are performing the functions that he otherwise has
to take up in the strange arrangements when
there's a free Sunday morning and the Lord
has placed him there.
You shouldn't have to wait for the Lord
to send one.
You yourself are performing that prophetic function one
with another.
So the truth, as any child, as I
said this morning, used to be able to
tell you and no longer can is the
whole truth and nothing but the truth.
When we were kids, we used to say
that in Brooklyn, the whole truth is the
truth is the whole truth and nothing but
the truth.
It's an axiom because it's the nature of
truth that if it's going to be true,
it's got to be true through and through.
If it's only a partial truth, it constitutes
a lie.
And the whole way in which the Lord
got me on that book, Spirit of Truth,
as I shared with the Sunday school group
this morning, is a man takes me to
his church to hear his pastor, who's an
extraordinarily gifted and eloquent man, and I'm really
going to hear the word of God.
Oh, I couldn't wait.
My God, there's a famine for the word.
And so I ran tripping to come to
that service.
And when I was sitting up there in
the balcony and that word began to go
forth, my mind was saying, amen, and my
gut was going haywire.
Everything was freaking out.
The fuses were blowing and I couldn't reconcile
while my mind was approving in the one
hand and my inner man was violently torn
asunder to the Lord made clear to me,
you see what's happening on his word is
technically true.
Can't be faulted, but what his spirit is
saying to the congregation is cool it, don't
panic.
No one is asking you or requiring you
to take this word seriously.
This is just a Sunday sermon.
Remember the agreement that we have, the unspoken
agreement?
I'll give you a good biblical word every
Sunday.
You see to my parsonage and my security
and we'll get along famously.
No one's going to rock the boat.
What the Lord showed me was that unless
the spirit of the speaking is in perfect
agreement with the word of the speaking, it's
a lie because it's only a truth in
part.
How would you like to go back to
apostolic days when who was that couple that
sold the property and gave only a portion
of the proceeds and made it to stand
as the whole?
They were carried out feet first.
And I'll tell you that the young men
who carried them out and buried them learned
more in that the suddenness of that death
and that burial because it threatened the truth
of the church.
God cut them down just like that, though
I'm sure that the amount of money that
they were making available was impressive.
Peter saw right through it.
You know why?
Because he was living in the spirit of
the truth.
He saw the deception and he said to
them, why have you allowed yourself to lie
to the Holy Spirit?
If it was your own, did you have
to bring it?
But if you did, why do you make
it the part to stand as the whole?
Dear Saints, that's more a statement of us
today than we know.
We're making a part to stand as the
whole.
We're not the whole thing through and through.
We're not just called to admire the truth,
acknowledge the truth and love the truth, but
to be the truth.
We have got to be the thing in
itself through and through.
And if we're spending more time in front
of the mirror, squeezing our pimples and licking
out our complexion or wondering what we're going
to wear or whether our breasts are sufficient
and admirable as being of a greater consequence
than the kingdom come, our life is a
lie.
Got the idea?
God sees right through all of that, but
we don't see it as if somehow we're
allowed the luxury of this kind of contradiction.
A partial truth is a lie.
The whole truth and nothing but the truth,
or it's not the truth.
Brother, what a requirement.
My God, I'm gasping for air.
Who can live like that?
This is going to require a moment by
moment vigilance of what we say and do
in our thoughts and attitudes and our commitments
and our money and our time and going
in and out.
Who can live like that?
Only the church.
That's the church.
Because when he came as truth, he came
full of grace as well as truth.
He'll give you the grace for the truth.
If you have a heart for it, notice
he doesn't say those who respect the truth.
That's not enough.
Those who love the truth will be saved
from deception.
And you know what the test of love
is?
The willingness to be inconvenienced by it.
The willingness to suffer its requirement and its
demands.
The willingness to be confronted when someone will
raise a question as I have been confronted
in my own fellowship and been accused of
being an enemy of the gospel, my God,
or after finishing a great statement on the
Holocaust before 2000 people, an address of such
a kind, someone will come up and say,
I'm sent of God and I'm a prophet
and a Jewish prophet to tell you that
you have missed the mind of the Lord
and that you have done grievous damage to
the body of Christ and you need not
to go back to the microphone and recant
your message.
You're like, oh yeah, really?
Well, listen, I fasted and prayed for that
message.
So don't tell me that I missed the
Lord.
You know what I experienced?
The knife right up to the hilt, right
into my heart.
You know why?
He could be right.
I've been at this over 30 years since,
and you know what I have to say
to this very day, I always have to
live with the possibility that he could be
right.
I have to live with this morning.
I'm going to have to eat the sacrifice.
The priest has got to eat the thing
that he has made bloody by cutting.
And if I've missed it, what an accountability
before God, but I'll tell you what, I
would rather miss it believing that God has
wakened me at one 30 with two words,
what if, and these thoughts, then I should
miss it by swallowing, swallowing it down and
preaching something that you would have loved and
would have obtained such an admiration and invitation
to return.
If I have to air, let me air
in believing that what I'm speaking has been
given of God, although I have to live
with the possibility that I might have missed
it.
That's what I call the prophetic anguish.
And it's something you have to live with.
Also, you know, that church is painful before
it's glorious.
This isn't the vacation.
This isn't the Sunday supplement.
This isn't an Island of apostolic reality in
a sea of sick schizophrenia that floods the
world.
We're supposed to be sane and healthy and
true and righteous all together.
And that can only be our condition.
If we love the truth to the point
that we're willing to suffer for it to
be misunderstood, listen, I, as a, hey, you
know, I, I, I, I, I, I, I,
I, I, I, I, do we have to
go back to the house again today?
Can we go on to the next meeting?
No, we're staying there overnight.
Oh, what?
I'll tell you, saints, don't, don't be deceived
about your supposed love of the Lord.
Don't be carried away by the euphoria of
your worship.
That's somehow you love the Lord.
I'll give you a much more accurate way
to assess whether that's true.
To what degree do you love truth?
Really love truth.
You drool just when you hear the word.
You cannot stand the lie.
It's abhorrent.
That's your love of God.
You know why?
Because the spirit of God is the spirit
of truth and God himself is truth.
And your love for him is no greater
or other than your love for truth itself.
You've got to love it.
And you've got to submit to its painful
requirement to walk in the truth and not
merely to acknowledge it.
So the church as the Bible tells us
is the ground and pillar of the truth.
That's not the church.
It could call itself what it will.
It could have its programs.
It is not an apostolic entity if it
is not the ground and pillar of the
truth.
The love of the truth that alone saves
us from deceptions of the entity of times
will leave no stone unturned, no confidence unexamined,
no visiting speakers, troubling message ignored.
Please, whatever you do, don't tell me on
the way out.
I really liked your message.
It is ever and always open to the
possibility of a what if however painful and
costly the consideration, it keeps its corporate and
personal heart with all diligence.
You know, this statement in the book of
Proverbs, keep your heart with all diligence for
out of it proceed all the issues of
life, keeping your heart as a full time
activity because the heart is deceitful, desperately wicked.
Who can know it?
We allow those vagaries and thoughts and things
that to pass.
We're already being dulled.
See, we've got to be honed and stay
honed.
I'll tell you what happens.
When you hear a word that is only
technically and biblically true, but is not spoken
in the spirit of truth, any word that
is a true word of God, invariably and
always requires something.
Any word that does not require is only
a sermon and we've been sermonized to death.
What was I going to say about that?
Oh, it's not.
Well, I've heard a sermon.
I filled the Sunday hour and I've had,
you know, a little, an enjoyable time and
a good sound biblical message.
You're actually dulled by that.
It's not that you have not gone on,
but you've fallen back.
Unless you have blown the whistle, unless you
have called something to account, unless you have
required something, unless you have said, Hey, well,
what's the implication of this?
What are you really saying?
What are you requiring?
Or I sense that this is just a
soporific kind of a thing to carry us
through the morning and it's not earnest, unless
you have said that and contended for the
truth, you will be dulled by the very
same thing and the next time you're less
discerning, you're less able to pick up and
to quit and to understand the sensitive issues
of truth until finally you come to such
a state that it's all the same, all
fruits and all nuts.
So we have to live with the dangerous
possibility of a, what if, however painful, however
costly, it's the consideration that keeps our hearts
with all diligence, knowing that in this sinister
age of deception, no one is exempt and
that out of it proceed all the issues
of life.
So I'd like to end with a prayer.
I wrote a, made a whole list of
scriptures before I pray in third John with
the apostle says, well, I rejoice greatly when
brethren come, came and testified of the truth
that is in you.
Listen to that language just as you walk
in truth and tell me, can you take
a step to the kitchen, to the pulpit
or to the bedroom?
That's not a walking.
There's a lot of lies that goes on
in bedrooms where wives know how to make
the appropriate size and gestures as if somehow
they're being ecstatically affected when actually they're gritting
their teeth, it's painful because the relationship is
not a kind that would have made this
the blissful ecstatic thing that the husband would
like to believe.
And no one has the courage to address
the question.
I'm not talking about lives in the world.
I'm talking about lives in the church.
Truth has got to come into the bedroom
as well as to the pulpit.
And that's why John says, I rejoice when
I see my children walking in the truth
because wherever your feet will take you, truth
is a requirement about the coming of the
lawless one and second Thessalonians with all power
signs and lying wonders and with all unrighteous
deception among those who perish because they did
not receive the love of the truth that
they might be saved, saved out of deception,
saved out of gamesmanship and play acting of
going through the motions, the love of the
truth will save your saints.
And that's what I want to pray for.
So Lord, in Jesus name, we're quick to
acknowledge that with all men, even at their
very best, we do not know as we
ought to know.
I thought I knew about the Holocaust, the
bad guys and the good guys.
We Jews were the victims and the Germans
were the culprits until I actually went to
Dachau, until I went to Auschwitz, until I
put my hand on the chimney.
Out of which the ashes of my kinsmen
had gone up and something broke in me
deeper, too deep for words that I realized
I didn't know as I ought to know
and that this tragedy, this systematic annihilation implicates
us all in its guilt.
There are no good guys and bad guys.
We are all bad guys, but we don't
know as we ought to know.
Grant us a fresh, the love of the
truth above every other consideration, call a moratorium
on our singing and our choruses that use
words like adoration or holy, when in fact,
there's not a corresponding reality, even when we
sing it, do what the Ben Israel people
have done covenant with God.
Lord, don't let our singing and our worship
exceed the truth of our condition.
And if you had come into one of
our court worship services, you would have put
your fingers in your ears until our life
was relative to what we can produce with
our voices.
That's walking in the truth.
It's being the whole thing through and through.
So Lord, we're inviting you to pierce into
the deepest and most secret hidden crevices of
our life.
We need brothers and sisters who will find
us out, who will address that blind spot
that we cannot see for ourselves, or we're
not wanting to see and bring the light
of God, the light of your life into
that place.
Save us, Lord, we pray from eternal mortification
and shame that we should have to enter
into eternity and see them where we have
been unable or unwilling to see now too
late to remedy or correct anything.
White more like now when change can be
made, then we should go on with our
imagined reality that is more imagined than it
is real.
And the Lord's just reminding me of an
episode in our community life when our dogs,
which we had enjoyed privately as pets, I
had a beautiful German shepherd.
He was, had a more distinguished lineage and
ancestry than me.
And mine isn't bad either.
Noble German shepherd that used to sit and
look up at me with adoration and pant.
But what was privately allowable became a threat
corporately.
And the dogs had formed a pack and
we had found a dead goat and I
didn't want to face the evidence that it
could have been the dogs or my dog.
Well, maybe someone hit it with a car
or some of the, you know how we
we're escapists, we don't want to bite the
bullet and see what's before our noses.
Until one day in the prayer meeting, the
kids were shouting, the dogs are chasing the
calf and we opened the door and came
out and sure enough, there was my dog
leading the pack with a blood flecked mouth
biting at this calf and having sport once
they taste blood, that's it.
Well, I tried desperately to call someone.
Do you want a German shepherd?
Couldn't get through there.
We had to go out in the woods.
Every dog was dragged with a rope around
its neck that we would kill.
My dog followed me without a rope and
I dug his grave and as I'm digging
and I'm a tough man, my face was
a mask of tears.
It was a waterfall.
I love that animal.
I don't think I could have cried for
any member of the body of Christ and
the depth with which I was feeling the
loss of this animal and no man spoke
more eloquently about the body of Christ than
me.
You see how false we are?
We can say it and believe it and
full of conviction, but when it comes to
where your tears are, that's where you are.
And so I dug the grave, but I
couldn't bring myself to pull the trigger, but
there was a brother available only too willing
to do it with whom I was in
an unspoken resentment.
He would gladly do it.
I gave him the gun bang, bang.
And I saw the blood shooting out of
my precious animal and I quickly pulled him
into that grave and covered it over.
But when we came back to the community
that day from the woods, you want to
know something?
My arm was around the shoulders of the
guy who had killed my dog and his
arm was around me.
Something had happened to that death of soulish
mess that released us to be to each
other.
What we couldn't have been before.
It took a ruthlessness to the thing that
was most dear to us in order to
come to the place spiritually that was truth.
So I invite you to that ruthlessness and
God's grace will be sufficient for you.
Lord, I bless this congregation.
I leave my piece behind in their house,
help them, give them every grace to go
back to the drawing board, to examine everything
that needs to be examined.
Those things that were unspoken, that we were
afraid even to bring up in conversation, wanted
to look the other way.
The time is too short.
The issues are too urgent to go on
like that.
It's a deception.
We have got to face the truth of
our condition and our life and make what
alignments and changes your grace will permit.
If we're going to be a body that
counts for something in this locality and not
just be another one of tens of thousands
of quote churches, sound and fury signifying nothing
that do not affect anything really, and just
our perpetuation of their own self-interest, let
it not be for this people.
I know that my time and my use
of you Lord is too precious.
You would not have brought me here if
there were not a people who could hear
and receive words of this kind.
So I ask your seal upon what was
spoken and your grace for these children who
will have to live with this word and
consider this word and sift this word through
their corporate and personal life.
Let there be a rejoicing in the house
of God, full of glory for the love
of the truth, and may there be such
a consequence for this day, both in time
and eternity for which we shall be eternally
grateful for the God who broods over us
with such a jealousy who will not let
us go.
Thank you, Lord.
Keep with us.
Keep on with us that you might yourself
be honored and glorified by this people and
by your church forevermore.
And we thank you for that love and
that truth in Jesus name and God's people
said.
Amen.