(Clip) Grieving Over The Spirit and System of the World — Art Katz

The Corruption of American and Christian Values

2018, what did I pay, $50 ,000 for pitch? The rise and fall of the American empire and the corruption of its values because there's a church of dum-dums upon whom this has not been registered and will even go along and pay the bill.

Moral Discernment and Resistance to Worldly Influence

No moral discernment, no anguish of soul for the anti-Christ thing that is already prevailing in our culture. We are not in a felt disjuncture with the world. We are in the world and with the world and using its promotions, its mentality, and all the kinds of things to augment our religion that augment the sales in Walmart.

Religious Marketing and Counterfeit Success

All you have to do is flood the mailboxes, Oral Roberts knows that, and you'll get a certain percentage back that will far exceed anything that it cost you to send out that enormous mass mailing and finance everything, even a lifestyle, that you can live as a robber baron and be celebrated as the great hero of faith.

Authenticity Versus Manipulative Success

You think the powers of the air are impressed with that? Jesus they know and Paul they know. They know whom to fear, whom to recognize. When they see authenticity, when they see a fluke, fake, big counterfeit success based on the world's model, using manipulation, they yawn.

Choosing Pilgrimage Over Worldly Accommodation

We need to be so, how shall I say it, sensitive as to not to condescend to anything in which the world majors. Choosing to be foolish pilgrims, strangers, and sojourners in the earth, rather than we should in any way accommodate them in response to their advertising, to their allures, to their seductions.

Paul's Grief Over Athens' Idolatry

We would hate it. Our souls should be chafed like righteous lot rather than condescend and be in the whole system of merchandising together with everybody else. Paul, when he woke up that morning in Athens where he had not intended to be, in flight from persecution, and he saw the city wholly given to idolatry.

He was chafed and grieved in his soul. Therefore, confronted he the devout Jews in the synagogue and in the marketplace where idolatry has its most profound forms. There was a therefore that set Paul on an apostolic journey in Athens because the spirit within him grieved when he saw the city wholly given to idolatry.

The True Apostolic Church and Its Separation From the World

Where's our grief? The true apostolic church will be grieving. It will be at disjuncture with the world. It will not be one of the boys. It will not embrace a Christianity by which it could think itself Christian at the same time enjoy the acceptance of its neighbors as being nice guys.

Accepting Rejection as Pilgrims and Strangers

You'll no longer be fun. You'll no longer be invited to the barbecue. You're too solemn. You're too serious. There's a strange look in your eye as if you see beyond the apparent and see the things that are ultimate and eternal that makes you unfit to be fun and one of the boys.

You willing for that? Do you want to be a pilgrim and a stranger? Or you want to be accepted even as a Christian?