K-470 Signs of the Times — Art Katz

And what I'm going to share tonight really deserves a three-day seminar. I'm just going to trust the Lord to edit it and bring the most salient points forth for your consideration. And just to tell you that it's been my single and exclusive message since the return from the three-month trip overseas, during the very time when the nations were being toppled in the East, East Europe, where I've been many times and have not thought such a thing could happen, and happen with the suddenness with which they took place, that we would be foolish to think that these massive changes that came in the space of days and weeks that not only toppled regimes of such monolithic proportion, but their very ideology, that somehow the whole of Marxism, Communism, Socialism has come into kind of disrepute even with their own people.

The Collapse of Eastern European Ideologies

It has lost its biting edge. And something has happened. God has flicked the switch. And I was trying to sense in my spirit what these things mean. And what you'll hear tonight is a kind of prophetic commentary on the recent events and the shadow that they cast for the Church in the decade of the 90s.

This is not a forecast. I've never been that kind of prophetic figure that predicts. And I almost was forced by the Lord with a gentle nudge to even come up with the statement that you're going to hear tonight.

So it's a kind of an assessment rather than a prediction of events taking place in the world and places where I have traveled, knowing how abrupt, unshakable those great Eastern European Marxist places were, and what they signify, I think, for the Church.

Things to ponder and to consider, take into your spirit. Because the decade of the 90s, I praise God I've been around for a few decades, but this decade is absolutely formative and final. I'll say this with complete authority.

That if the Lord should not come by the end of this decade, by the way, we should live as if we expect that. But whether he will come at the conclusion of this decade or not, the issues will have been adjoined and will have been established before this decade is out.

The whole alignment that shall take place in the world, politically, socially, ecologically, economically, and religiously, will have been set in such a way as to be immovable. It's a time of choice and of decision and of alignment, because as you're going to hear from me tonight, that when the smoke clears, there's a centrifugal polarizing process taking place that will compel us into one radical camp or another, and there simply will not be a neutral ground to enjoy for those of us who do not have a stomach for radical alternatives.

That the very nature of this age and its conclusion, the consummation toward which we're heading, compels us toward radical choices. And the two radical choices for the Church will be apostasy or apostolicity.

Will either be apostate or apostolic. Will be radically out of the faith or radically in the faith. And just to say it in a word, we're going to be required at last to be saints. I mean for real saints.

Who really have it together, who are single-eyed and intent, who recognize the seriousness of the hour, and for some reason, as inoffensive as we are, we're going to be the object of a very calculated opposition and oppression and persecution unto martyrdom and death.

And that this should not take us by surprise, that these have always been the realities faced by that segment of the Church, which is indeed true Church. And that the forces are now released or loosed, by which in the final consummating hours of human history, the Church is going to be the one, the true Church, the one impediment, the one obstruction to a kind of design of an ecumenical and global kind for which we will be the ungainly round peg in the square hole.

The Emergence of a Global Political and Economic System

So I think the first thing that I need to say is that however wonderful now that the doors are open and the walls are down for a kind of evangelism to places where it has been difficult or opposed, that there's yet a more significant factor that we need to consider.

That though we knew that we were moving toward a European pact of nations, of a kind of economic confederation, what we need to see now is not a European pact, but a global pact. That the one single factor that has constituted the division in the world between East and West and democratic and socialist regimes is in effect nullified.

That though the sounds of it, the vocabulary of that ideology may continue, it continues only in a ceremonial way. That it is no longer the divisive factor that was once the impediment between a consolidation between East and West.

It has been removed. And it's symbolized by the unification of Germany itself. And having moved freely through the two Germanys over these last 10, 15, 20 years, it's a remarkable kind of consolidation.

And it's coming together just like that. We need to know that what is happening politically and economically are not just haphazard and circumstantial factors, but that God himself has removed the restraint that has kept the world in opposing camps and has himself laid the foundation by which there can be a global unification and a world economic system for which most of the worldlings, those who dwell on the earth, will celebrate.

Because it comes under the words of unity and peace. And who could not desire those two things in an age that has been punctuated by violence and disorder and confrontation and the threat even of atomic annihilation.

So it's a very seductive and powerful thing that will come to us in the name of unity and peace. The only reason for which we will resist it is that we have been forewarned in the apocalyptic scriptures in the book of Revelation and Thessalonians and such places that this is called the beast system.

And it's an anti-Christ system. Humanly contrived, opposed to God and opposed to God's purposes and seeking a kind of uniformity at the price of freedom and the issues of the faith, which is the whole purpose for our being.

It seeks to set in order something that will usurp or precede our God's own intention by which his creation and his globe is to be unified, namely the coming of himself and his kingdom. So this is an anti-Christ, not only opposed, but one like us seeking himself by his own human and governmental way to establish a system which most of the world will pant after and all the more, not only because of its desirability, but because this figure that will rise, and I don't know whether it's a single figure or a composite figure or what, will be attended by lying signs and wonders that will be for the unwary and the unspiritually sophisticated a final concluding sign that how can you resist this and who can make war with the beast.

Religious Ecumenism and the Deception of Signs and Wonders

Now we need to expect a parallel religious phenomenon. If the world is moving toward a political and economic unification, we should anticipate as well a religious global system of an ecumenical kind.

And Paul, who knows me through the years, and some of you, others who have followed, know that I have always had a churning in my spirit, a restlessness and a discontent and a suspicion about this whole charismatic renewal, sensing in it a kind of conspiratorial element largely motivated by and engineered by Catholic authorities, and I believe that this now is going to come into a full configuration and power.

And the interesting thing is that just as ideology is no longer the divisive factor and will be sublimated in the interest of world economic and political peace, doctrine will be sublimated and made to be a factor that no longer stands as the divisive element between the great Catholic and Protestant church bodies.

Those who think that doctrine is not a matter to be relegated to the dustbin for the conveniences and the expediencies of unity will find themselves embarrassingly irritating to those who pant after unity at any price.

So it's not at all an accident that in Revelation 6 -9 that those who were slain were slain for the word of God and for the testimony which they held. Doctrine is not some kind of antiseptic code. Doctrine is the word of God, the essential teachings of the faith that make the faith the faith, and that if they are removed you have some kind of husk of a semantic kind of Christianity but without the power thereof.

Those that will be jealous for the word of God and insist upon the word of God will find themselves candidates for the things that I've just read from Revelation 6 -9 to be slain for the word of God and for the testimony which they held.

There's going to be a new basis, I believe, for ecumenical unity. It will not be the word of God because that has been the divisive thing. That's what has separated Catholics from Protestants. The new basis will be signs and wonders.

The very same factor by which the Antichrist establishes his political and economic sway by the demonstration of his supernatural power will also become the persuasive factor religiously. And who can argue with signs and wonders?

And who has the discernment to distinguish between lying signs and wonders and those that have their origin in God and the fulfillment of his purpose? Any of us here tonight have come to that kind of sensitivity?

I'll tell you what, many of us here tonight and in Christendom at large are bored, restless, and discontent, looking for something. There's been something vacuous in our Christianity that for a season the charismatic thing seemed to fulfill, but now it's waning.

And that makes us all the more candidates for excitement, for diversity, for novelty. And many who are undiscriminating and lacking in discernment and looking for excitement will gravitate to signs and wonders which will be for them the confirmation that this must be of God.

You say, how can we come to that quality of discernment that saves us from deception? Well, I know that there's a gift of discernment and I appreciate that, but the discernment that I think that is wanting is that which is held by the Church as the Church corporately, a Church that is, that has come to maturity, that speaks often one to another in the fear of the Lord, not about gossip or petty things, but the things that are the issues that constitute our lives.

We have to start turning our chairs around. We have to start moving from looking at the back of our heads to speaking often one to another, iron sharpening iron, to distinguish and to discern the currents and the subtlety of all of the things that are already moving in our generation and shall be brought to such a pitch of power and persuasiveness that except that we are dwellers in heavenly places, we will be victims of deception with all those who dwell on the earth.

And you'll notice if you look over the book of Revelation that there seems a continual reiteration of two categories of beings, those who dwell on the earth, as against those whom the Lord will cull from the four corners of heaven.

And I want to say that I believe that you can abide, you can live in Raleigh, Durham, and either be an earth dweller or have your citizenship in heaven. You need to begin to understand that these are very real alternatives in categories and those who dwell on the earth, even those who call themselves Christian, but dwell on the earth, that's where their effectual abode is.

They look down rather than up. Those that look up are those who see an open heaven even when they're being stoned and see Jesus at the right hand of the Father and the glory of God. I'll tell you, I'm being forced because of the shortness of the time to compress, but this thing about Stephen, the first martyr, you know the first always prefigures the last.

Stephen, Heavenly Citizenship, and the Call to Endurance

The first is always a statement, it always is suggestive of things that are intrinsic principles that pertain to martyrdom as is in the case of Stephen. The fact that his face shone like an angel, the fact that he was in competition and contention with those who saw themselves as the doctors of religion, as the establishment and the men in places of authority, that there was a powerful antagonism by them against this man who was mere waiter on tables, a busboy.

That his face shone like an angel and that even when he was being pelted with stones unto death, he looked up. And I don't think it was the last moment's heroism or last moment's desperation, but I think that that was his habitual posture.

He was in the earth, but he did not dwell there. He looked up at heaven like Paul who saw the things that were invisible and eternal and made his present afflictions both momentary and light. Hey, this is not just little curiosities of history about the early church.

This is nuts and bolts survival requirement for us. Except that we are of the stature and of the same substance and stuff and disposition and mentality of a Stephen and a Paul, we'll find ourselves in the other camp that will oppose them unto the death.

Because we're moving to that final consummation where we'll be the one or the other. So I want to say a word about the social character of the world that we inhabit, what we can expect. The factors are already working.

It's just that they're going to become more pronounced. There's really nothing new, but that there's something inexorably working. Sorry for the fancy words. I'm even sparing you from saying ineluctable, which I've got written here too.

But what the two words suggest is this. There's an energy, there's a dynamism that is built into the very structure of the world itself that moves it in a compulsive way to a heating up to the things that are inflexible, cannot be altered, not to be overcome, which will eventuate in such filth, in such unmitigated evil, in such expression of violence and corruption as we would shudder now to contemplate.

I'll repeat that. Forces are working that make the world inescapably evil and corrupt. And we need to have an apocalyptic expectation. If we had a three-day seminar, one of the messages is on apocalypticism.

What was the mindset of the early church? It was apocalyptic. It expected a sudden conclusion to human history by the intervening, the coming of the Lord at a final moment of duress to vindicate the saints who remained.

That doesn't mean they just happened to be left over, but they have survived a bitter process of persecution that have put other saints asleep. Because those that are asleep in Christ will rise first.

Asleep doesn't mean you retire. Asleep means what happened to Stephen. That after he had said, Lord, lay not this sin to their charge, he fell asleep. The purposes of God for his earthly life were concluded.

And no man could have destroyed that life before that conclusion. We're going to find many falling asleep in Christ in that same way. I expect myself to be one. It's not because I'm melodramatic. It's the very logic, the inescapable logic of true faith invites opposition and persecution.

The fact that we have not experienced it is a statement to our shame rather than a compliment to our faith. And we have thought that persecution is a feature of Christian life in iron curtain countries or Africa shows how naive we are.

It is not a geographical matter. It is a spiritual matter. And you have only to come into the realities of the kind of faith that the world abhors where the darkness cannot abide the light to begin to experience the kinds of things that have historically affected true believers in every generation and will especially at the last.

Consumerism, Youth Culture, and the Loss of Reflection

We need to be warned for our own children's sake about the power of the subliminal and overt appeals for merchandise that will make of them merchandise. I praise God that I have the advantage of more than a half century's existence and have been a depression baby and watched the whole phenomenon take place that how the simplicity of our life has been altered and what was first submitted to us as luxury becomes within a very short time necessity.

And necessities of such a kind that if you don't have them you think you're going to perish. Our whole lifestyle has become invested with goods and buying and selling and having and getting and spending and this is the inexorable thing.

This is continually working. It cannot be pacified. It must always seek for fresh market, fresh investing, fresh manipulation, fresh extortion. And one aspect demographically of that market that increases because of the way things are constituted is our youth, our children.

Already victims that are marketed in. So we're going to see again this just unparalleled thing that ends up in making the souls of men merchandise as it says in the book of Revelation. These concerts, these sport figures, these multi-million dollar contracts for guys just getting out of college or a black boxer.

You say, well, these guys deserve it because look what they bring to the box office. That's exactly the point. It is so set up, of course, that it's enormously profitable. So they make 13, 15 million for a few minutes of work.

But what does that do to the whole value structure of the civilization that idolizes them for the particular ability that they have? We need to understand there's an enormous price being paid morally in the whole fabric of a civilization that pants after these glitzy superstars of the punk rock culture or sports or whatever it is and it's a powerful fascination for our own children.

How many times as I travel like this do I stay in the homes of ministers in the bedrooms of their children and look at the walls covered with the posters of the sport or music figures? And so we just need to be alerted and to resist it is going to require sacrifice.

But unless we will, we're going to find our children swallowed up and panting after idols that diminish the one whom they should adore and follow namely the Lord himself. And I just wonder about such kids in the high tech power of the equipment that these glitzy stars travel with going to one of these concerts and sound and sight and bombarded in their senses to come the next morning and sit in the church and listen to a pastor in monotone teaching Sunday school or giving a sermon.

Everything is stacked against us but we need to be much more conscious of the kinds of forces that are at play at the world and that calculate and encourage a kind of impatient desire for gratification that everything is being put before them for products for having and what would happen for example if the economy collapses?

What would happen if there would be a global economic distress? Or any other factor that makes gratification to be delayed? I think we're going to see an impatience that will express itself not only in anger but in violence.

I'm asking you to brace yourself and one of the factors at the end of the age and has always characterized civilization in the final act final death guests is unmitigated violence which already you can't pick up a paper without reading about a teenage kid who has blown out the brains of his parents while they sleep but we're going to see an increase of violence that is senseless, brutal vile, malicious and cruel of a kind that will become so commonplace that we can no longer be astonished by it because the vexation and the exasperation of impatience in a world that has encouraged impatience that cannot be gratified will explode in the competition for space, for jobs for security, for having in violence in such ways that anarchy will threaten the civilized world and the only answer to world anarchy is world despotism and so it will be another factor that will encourage a kind of global imposition a system of restraints which is called the beast system.

Cultural Illiteracy and the Rise of Anarchy

I woke up a couple of mornings ago with the word obliterate that's what I get when I caught a peek of a program that the son of the pastor was watching at whose home I was staying, called Robot Cop one of the most filthy, mucky, vicious explosive scenes.

Have you noticed that you older ones remember we used to read books like Gone with the Wind that it was nothing to read a book of four or five hundred or six hundred papers. I used to check out six books a month as a kid in Brooklyn, New York.

Every month I was a reader. There was no TV and then the age of the visible graphic thing came and reading began to decline because we're raising up a generation of culturally illiterate or non-literate people it's not that they can't read they can read manuals and the technical ability but they do not enjoy reading.

They do not delight in words in concepts, in meditation and in thought, which renders them non-composementic. It removes the very critical faculty that will be able to resist the enormous powers that this age will generate.

All these factors coming together at the final being brought to a boil and thawing over but I just noticed in the little exposure that I get like seeing this program it's so episodic they're episodes but they only last 10 seconds, 12 seconds, 15 seconds a confrontation between a man and a woman a dark, surly look, an angry word or a hug and embrace but there's a passionate this and that then the next scene is a violence then the next scene this, next scene, next scene until the final conclusion in cars cartwheeling and exploding and boom boom and it's over.

Where's the plot? Where's the storyline? Where's the development? Where's the character development? We do not have it anymore. It's just a bombarding of visual images of a violent and sensual kind to be brought to explosive conclusion.

That's it. No moral note. Hey, we're paying a price. Amusement. We need just to dwell on that word. Any word that is prefixed with the letter A means the negation of the word that follows. A theist is one who denies God as not being.

Amusement denies musing. It nullifies to muse. Well what does it mean to muse? To muse is to reflect. To muse is to think. To muse is to contemplate. The very thing that distinguishes mankind in its humanity has been stolen and we're not even alert and aware by a generation that has so emphasized amusement and always having to find a novel amusement and a more spectacular kind of thing that would catch the imagination and therefore it's on an inexorable downward corruption without remedy that becomes increasingly vile, vicious, evil and destructive.

An apocalyptic view that the church held 2 ,000 years ago much closer to the end than we presently are is that the world is irredeemably evil. And we who have taken liberal arts courses don't really in our heart believe that.

We think somehow that progress is inevitable or things will be made better. We need to line up with a biblical expectation for the end. And the two key words that will constitute the mentality of saints who will overcome is a proper eschatology and a proper apocalyptic view of the end.

The end is at hand and shall shortly come to pass. And if I have been distinguished in any way in the small kinds of audience and following that I can be said to have it's always because I've been looked upon as a kind of end-time spokesman.

And I want to tell you that I myself have never been so aware of the end as I presently am. Even end-time vocabulary can become another catch word. Another kind of cutesy religious vocabulary which we don't in fact really believe.

We will have an end-time mentality and a proper eschatological from the Greek word, the end, eschaton and a proper apocalyptic conclusion to the end of the age where we begin to live as if we believe that that's true.

And we'll not regret the loss of our high-fives or vacation or something like that. Lord, don't come yet. I need first to enjoy this. What we need to be saying is come, Lord Jesus. When I saw that filthy mucky episodic program on TV that other night where everything was obliterated and in the final conflict between the robot figure who was the hero.

Have we come to that? That a robot is a hero? As against these murky guys with their pigtails and their boom guns and they just aim it and pull the trigger? It doesn't just inflict damage. It obliterates the painful thing that is for them an irritant.

Like divorce obliterates. Like abortion obliterates. To remove, this is a disposable age. And we have not the patience and the fortitude and the stamina to see things through. As believers we won't stay in a fellowship if there's a problem and we'll look for an easier place.

Or we'll give up the marriage. What did Trump just say in New York? The multi-billionaire? It's just not working out. If ever I wanted to give a guy a knuckle sandwich Lord forgive me. It's just not working out.

Oh, tough. Well, I guess yes, that must be irritating. So what do you do? Scrap it! And dispose of it and obliterate it as a vexing problem. Because you can afford to do it. It only costs 20 million and a house in Connecticut.

We may not have those advantages folks but we have subscribed to that mentality more than we realize. To solve our problems through obliteration. Remove the fetus. Remove the marriage. Remove the fellowship or whatever it is.

Everything is calculated toward impatience and toward violent elimination of the problem just like the Jews in Nazi Germany. They are our misfortune. So what do you do with them? You remove them. I'm concerned for my own kinsmen in Israel that the problem of the Palestinian that they don't find themselves tempted to a solution of the same kind to obliteration.

Who has a penchant and a disposition for problem solving? For believing God? For seeking his grace and for his wisdom and his counsel? For seeing something through and believing for the resolution that God can bring however difficult the problem.

So are we dwellers in the earth or in the heavenly place? It's interesting that in Revelation 9 21 they repented not of their murders nor of their sorceries nor of their fornication nor of their theft.

The final opposition to God has this character. Violent murderers. Violence as the alleviation of frustration. Almost like a magical way of removal. To remove the consequences of problems that our carnality has created that we don't know how to solve.

Those that kill with the sword and with hunger and with death are called the beasts of the earth. It's not an accident that God calls it a beast system because it is. Opposed to God and to all that God intended for man in his image.

The Anabaptist Witness Against Religious Violence

I had the experience of being in Switzerland on this overseas trip and he took me one night to Zurich. I was in Zurich showing the saints there the places where the first Anabaptist martyrs gave their lives.

And if you don't know what the word Anabaptist is shame on you. This is the radical wing of the Reformation that were burned at the stake, drowned imprisoned because they were considered I don't know, it's a good question why could not the great religious Reformation bodies tolerate the existence of this radical minority of the faith who refused to take up the sword.

They were opposed to the use of violence. They could not sanction the state as being the kingdom of God. They looked for another kingdom and another city and another builder. His maker was God. And why could they be allowed to live their inoffensive lives?

They were industrious, they were neat but they were hounded, they were pursued, they were vexed, they were driven. And I took Swiss believers to the places where that had its origin in Zurich of which they knew nothing.

Showed them where they were first thrown into the river the first meeting that was held in a house outside of a church building where the adult baptism was first performed and so on. The caves where they had their meetings and had a special escape chamber that if they were accosted the children could at least find exit.

I went into a cell, a dungeon that still stands almost four centuries later and for the first time I realized that incarceration is torture. That actually it would have been a greater mercy to have been burned at the stake or drowned than to rot for twenty years in a cell where you could not stand upright, you could not stretch your arms out and just such a terrible repressive confinement and be allowed to rot there.

Because you held a quality of faith that even the Reformation religious bodies could not abide nor tolerate. And in that same Zurich that was the seat of this radical Reformation wing rooted out and extirpated by the father of the Swiss Reformation in Zurich, a man by the name of Zwingli, whose statue stands outside the church with a sword in one hand and the Bible in the other, who by the way died on a battlefield.

Social Collapse, Moral Compromise, and Totalitarianism

They have what they now call Needle Park and they took me there one night, it was like a descent into hell, I had never seen anything like it in all my travels, to see these precious kids from middle class homes, beautifully dressed with their leather jackets and stuff with their sleeves up looking for a place to puncture a vein and blood running down arms and legs in a park that is given over for their use, where the city of Zurich provides free hypodermic needles to the tune of seven thousand a night with a free AIDS testing station.

In some kind of humanistic logic that will save them from the increasing threat of AIDS by at least providing clean needles. I've never seen anything more ghastly, I saw two precious girls, one holding the mirror for the other, trying to find a vein that had not yet been used in the neck.

And all I want to say about that tonight is this, that I think that that is a precursor, it foreshadows and shows what is going to be the necessary condescension of western societies everywhere to provide free needles, free prophylactics, free AIDS testing, to save ourselves from teenage pregnancies, from AIDS and all these things.

It's society's last gasp, they don't know what to do in order to somehow quell or at least put some kind of lid on things that are burgeoning to epidemic proportion. But what happens when a society, particularly, quote, a Christian society, gives free needles and free AIDS tests, free prophylactics.

It may not be intended as such, but what it morally means is this, it's a condoning of the very evil that they're thinking somehow to repress. And that has a consequence for the moral fabric of society that further makes it a vacuum.

And ironically, because people cannot find a life of moral significance, which is what man, I think, made by God instinctively looks for, will find themselves in their desperation seeking a fix. So in a word, what society is on is a kind of paradoxical rat maze that whatever they do in their attempt to defend themselves from the issues of the day further compounds the evil and makes it instinctual.

I'm expecting widespread disillusionment and dejection, particularly perhaps in Eastern Europe, where now a whole generation has the opportunity to taste the advantages of democracy and freedom. But, you know, we need to ask, what has that meant for us?

And if the ultimate meaning of freedom is moral dissolution and decay and corruption, they're going to find themselves more depressed and more dejected at the failure of this hope than ever they did under the grayness of a Marxist ideology and regime.

And the thing that intrigues me about this is that the little bit that I know about the rise of Nazism is that the fertile ground for Nazism came in a Germany that had collapsed in its democratic aspirations that gave opportunity for the rise of Hitler in the condition of nihilism that pervaded that society.

N-I-H-I-L-I-S-M nihilism is a word that the sociologists invented to describe a 20th century phenomenon that never before existed in modern times and will be the pervasive factor at the end of the age that moved the whole world toward a global totalitarianism.

A dejection and a depression of such abject hopelessness that expresses itself in a violence that doesn't give a rat, a gata damerung, a fiery conclusion where everything is brought down in a people that are entirely without hope.

The skinheads that are rising up in our communities are already the first representatives of what will become global movement. What will this mean for the church if, and I'm not describing these things to cause panic, but how is the church going to fare in such a world of unmitigated evil and deepening moral crisis and corruption?

The Remnant Church and Radical Faith

I'll tell you what. In an age that was not as radical as that, most of us would have been content to remain in evangelical and charismatic situations and it would have satisfied basically our spiritual needs.

But the very radical process taking place in the world will make that kind of conventional church situation profoundly ungratifying. And we're going to find a shift in the movement, I sense, in which true believers, sensing their need to stand in such an age as that, will be looking for a deeper quality of faith and relationship than what they can find in conventional and appropriate church environments.

Those who have not the courage or the stomach or the desire or have not the need and don't see the need to come into a deeper quality of faith and relationship but can remain in such situations will find themselves irritated by those who are seeking a more radical quality of faith and even to the point where the one will call the other heretic.

Heretic. And will begin to feel an oppression, if not a persecution against us, till we will come to the fulfillment of the Scripture, of the statement of Jesus himself, I believe, that they will kill us and claim they are doing God a service.

If we go on to the radical quality of faith that we will need to stand in such an age as I'm describing. The emerging true church will finally grow sick of the hype and banal predictability of a merely phraseological Christianity.

It will seek the deeper reality of faith and relationship paying the cost and increasingly taking on the visage, the appearance of pilgrim, stranger, and sojourner in the earth. Would you say that describes us presently?

Are we strange? Do we like to feel strange? The fact of the matter is we have been looking for a Christianity that is comfortably orthodox and yet does not require of us such a thing as will make us to be strange from those around us in the world or in Christendom itself.

But I want to say that if we will go on to be the remnant and overcoming people of God, of very necessity, we will find ourselves taking on increasingly the very appearance of strangers, pilgrims, and sojourners in the earth.

We will not be able to go along with the muck, the filth, the violence, and the whole value reversal that will be taking place because it's already at work where evil becomes good and good becomes evil.

A whole total value reversal, it's an insanity, it's an Alice in Wonderland, that because you hold biblical principles or the Ten Commandments, and notice what it says in Revelation, and they died, they had the testimony of Jesus, and they held the commandments of God.

I believe that God's final people, and this would have been another message if we had had three times together, what are the definitive characteristics of the remnant church? People who hold the commandments of God.

Thou shalt not. In a world that says thou shalt, and that if you do not, you'll get a complex, and you'll do psychological damage to your kids, or after all, their alternative lifestyles and sexual modes of preference, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and if you call their modes of preference an abomination in God's sight, according to its description in scripture, you're going to find yourself in a very touchy place.

Because good is going to be called evil, and evil is going to be called good. What then will happen to those who stand for that which is good? Even today, we had a conference in San Francisco in the Principalities and Powers of the Air, in all places of that city, and a brother said, you know, any pastor in this city today will describe homosexuality, you know that even the word homosexual is a euphemism, that the word in the Bible is sodomy, and that if you identify it as that, and that God is the same yesterday, today, and forever, His values have not changed, He still looks upon it as abomination, and that AIDS is the judgment of God of those who have recklessly not considered the warnings of God about that indulgence, that your life will not be safe in San Francisco today.