True Apostolicity - Part 4 — Art Katz

Paul's Farewell Address and the Meaning of Apostolicity

Both my Bibles, and I'm tossed betwixt and between the King James and the New American Standard, there are desirable things in both renderings of the same chapter. The chapter is Acts 20. It's Paul's farewell address.

And I don't think that he himself was conscious that as he just summoned the elders of Ephesus to make his farewell, that he was aware of what an eternal statement he was giving. The statement is classic.

It doesn't mean because it's something ancient. It means because it's central, intrinsic to everything that shall ever be understood in the definition of the word apostolic. How many people here desire to be an apostolic people?

I won't ask for the number of hands who can define what the word means. As I've said before, I'd much rather see you salivate over it than be able to clinically define it. I don't know that it's definable.

It's too living. It's too palpitating. It's an ultimate word. It's an ultimate statement for an ultimate church built on the foundation of ultimate men. A church built upon the foundation of the apostles and the prophets.

Jesus Christ himself being the chief cornerstone. Jesus Christ himself, the apostles and the prophets themselves. Not just what they preach, not just what they teach, not just what they're able to minister, but what they themselves are, the totality of these men, this awesome phenomenon, an apostolic man.

You know what God wants at the end of the age? A church like that. And so I think there are certain wonderful things, as a summation for these days and this theme, that can be found in this 20th chapter.

It's almost criminal just to plunge in at any particular verse, but because our time is limited, maybe the 16th verse, For Paul had determined to sail by Ephesus because he would not spend the time in Asia, for he hasted, if it were possible for him to be at Jerusalem the day of Pentecost.

And from the latest he sent to Ephesus and called the elders of the church. And when they were come to him, he said unto them, You know from the first day that I came into Asia, after what manner I have been with you at all seasons, serving the Lord with all humility of mind and with many tears and temptations, which befell me by the lying in wait of the Jews, and how I kept back nothing that was profitable unto you, but have showed you and have taught you publicly and from house to house, testifying both to the Jews and also to the Greeks, repentance toward God and faith toward our Lord Jesus Christ.

And now behold I go bound in the spirit unto Jerusalem, not knowing the things that shall befall me there, save that the Holy Ghost witnesseth in every city, saying that bonds and afflictions await me.

But none of these things move me, neither count I my life dear unto myself, so that I might finish my course with joy in the ministry which I have received of the Lord Jesus, to testify the gospel of the grace of God.

And now behold I know that you all among whom I have gone, preaching the kingdom of God, shall see my face no more. Wherefore I take you to record this day, that I am pure from the blood of all men, for I have not shunned to declare unto you all the counsel of God.

Apostolic Urgency and Redeeming the Time

Paul was in a rush to get to Jerusalem. I know that that's contrary to some of the counsel that we've been hearing in these days, not to haste. But I think that we'll find in the course of our experience there are occasions that require it.

In fact, if there's anything that I especially appreciate about Paul, it's the continual redemption of the time. In this regard, he was a Hebrew of the Hebrews. He never let a moment go to waste. He never left anything undone that could be performed.

There always seems to be such a voluminous sense of activity of the most significant and eternal kind that flows from his life like a gushing fountain. He wanted to say goodbye to these dear men, the elders of Ephesus, but he could not allow himself the time to stop.

So calling to them from Miletus, he sent them a message that they should come to him. And to our utter amazement, we read,. And from Miletus he sent to Ephesus and called the elders of the church, and when they were come to him.

No ifs, no ands, no buts. No letters back to ask, well, what do you have in mind? What is so important that it demands our coming to you? I checked on the map, and the distance between Ephesus and Miletus is no miserly thing.

It's quite a substantial journey at a time when men did not have cars with automatic shifts and air conditioning and all the rest of these things. It was a wearisome journey, it was a dangerous journey, and yet it says, and when they were come.

No ifs, no buts, no hows, no maybes. He called, they came. I don't know about you, but my spirit leaps in anticipation of the day when God shall raise up men of such stature that when they call, we come.

No ifs, no ands, no buts. They recognized the authority that Paul so evidently had and raised not a single question. No matter what the difficulty or the inconvenience, they came. This is not something that can be organized.

This is something organic. This is something that operates by an anointing of God, an unction, and an authority that is demonstrable to men for which no question need be asked. And it's the heart and the genius of that which is apostolic.

Consistency in Every Season

What shall he say to them now that they have arrived? Is it going to be a little tear-jerky sentimental bash? Paul in his beautiful unselfconsciousness, in his mindlessness about himself, in summing up and reminding them of the things that they had observed together over those years, gives us a superlative statement of what apostolic ministry and what an apostolic man is.

When they were come to him he said, You know from the first day that I came into Asia, after what manner I have been with you at all seasons. That's a remarkable statement. From the first day to the last, you know what manner of man I have been with you in all seasons.

In the good weather and the bad. In the times peaceful and the times tumultuous. Under conditions of strain and stress and under conditions that were joyous, I have been one consistent thing from the beginning till the end.

That's an awesome thing that needs to be understood. Because this is far beyond any man's ability. It's not because he had a certain sanguine temperament that he was that consistent. The consistency is the statement of the life by which he lived.

From the beginning, from the Alpha to the Omega, from the beginning to the end, he was one consistent thing in God because he lived from one consistent life. Namely not his own, but another. He was eminently the resurrection man who could say with complete confidence and not as some kind of diatribe or cliche, For me to live is Christ.

And both the power, the variety of his abilities, the astounding thing that Paul was in all of his manifold brilliance, is a testimony to the fact that that was true. He was consistent from the beginning to the last.

One man of man in all seasons is a statement to the glory of the Christ who was his life. One day God is going to have a church equally as consistent. It shall not rise and fall with its fortunes. It shall not be a group of fair weathered sailors who can shout their amen and hallelujahs when they are well fed and abounding in prosperity.

But whatever their condition, whatever their season, they are consistently one thing because their life is drawn consistently from one person, namely the resurrected Lord. If the apostolic church is anything, it is eminently a resurrection phenomenon.

The New American phrases that yet in another way, and even in that phrasing there is a significant thing to be observed. When they had come to him, he said to them, You yourselves know from the first day that I set foot in Asia, how I was with you the whole time, serving the Lord with all humility and with tears, and with trials which came upon me through the plots of the Jews.

Here is what I want to draw to your attention. I was with you serving the Lord. I don't know if that tickles you, it delights me. I was with you at all times serving the Lord. You know there is a difference between serving men or as against serving God.

I was with you but my service was unto God. And that is an apostolic distinctive. Got that? I was with you but I was serving the Lord. And I'll tell you that there is no service that more redounds to the benefit of men than that which is a conscious serving of the Lord.

Serving the Lord Without Shrinking Back

That's why he can say in these same scriptures, I did not withhold from you any good thing. Your faces never intimidated me. I didn't just speak the things that were pleasing and that you liked, that spoke of the copious benefits that come from believing.

I also spoke to you of the hardships, the cross, the suffering. I gave you the total counsel of God. I withheld from you nothing because he was this kind of a minister. But as I was with you, I was serving the Lord.

May we be such also. How I did not shrink from declaring to you anything that was profitable. I don't know who we have here that are elders and leaders or men who will one day be. But there's always a tendency to shrink and to withhold.

Fearful lest if we bring that, we're going to alienate men, going to offend men, going to lose the esteem of men which we so much prize and cherish. To serve the Lord, to be with men and yet to serve the Lord, is not some kind of blithe waving of the hand.

It's an ultimate testimony of what an apostolic man and apostolic ministry is. It requires a selflessness and an utter devotion and consecration to God. That even when men will be pained by your obedience to him, yet you will not withhold any good thing.

Or shrink from declaring anything that was profitable. It's interesting that many of these things that are profitable are not always immediately recognized as such. Maybe later the profitableness of it will be revealed.

I like what someone has used as a definition for truth. Truth, this person said, is first painful before it becomes glorious. Men will not always recognize the gloriousness of truth, but they will be immediately affected by its pain.

But he did not shrink or withhold any profitable thing. Serving the Lord with all humility, solemnly testifying to both Jews and Greeks of repentance toward God and faith in our Lord Jesus Christ. I'll tell you that every statement he makes is so charged with meaning, with understanding.

Repentance Before Faith

How many of us have yet understood, however long we have been in the Lord, that repentance toward God must precede faith in Jesus Christ. That faith in Jesus is not some kind of intellectual process. And many of us are confronting men from the wrong angle, trying to bring them to a place of belief who have not yet come to a place of repentance toward God.

And I'm especially taken with this, knowing what kind of confrontation my Jewish people need. There's no need for them to consider Jesus as Savior until they have first recognized the necessity for a repentance toward God, even as they themselves narrowly understand Him.

For their chronic and historic resistance and rejection of that God, before they can consider and receive the grace which is a faith given of God in Jesus Christ. Paul had the right order. Repentance toward God precedes faith in Jesus Christ.

Faith is a function of repenting and not a function of intellectualizing. This is a tremendous summary, coming from a chief of the apostles, and it deserves our uttermost attention. And now behold, bound in spirit, I am on my way to Jerusalem, not knowing what will happen to me there, except that the Holy Spirit solemnly testifies to me in every city, saying that bonds and afflictions await me.

Bound in the Spirit

I have a precious intuition that being bound in the Spirit was not something that Paul was now going to face in this last leg of the journey that was to culminate in his beheading in Rome, but that his entire life was summed up in the phrase, being bound in the Spirit, I go on my way to Jerusalem.

This is an apostolic description. For every person, man or woman, who takes to themselves this chief name, apostolic, must eminently be one who is bound in the Spirit on their way to Jerusalem. Are you bound in the Spirit?

Do you know what that means? To be restricted and hemmed in by God? Your own desires overruled, or not even so much as considered? That the only way to attain to the Jerusalem of God is to go only in this manner and in no other.

Bound in the Spirit, I go. Not just in the final episode of his life, but in all of the episodes of his life, because you know how his life in God began? By the raising of a tremendous question, which many of us have not yet come to ask.

Lord, what would you have for me to do? Paul asked this at the inception of the light that broke upon his life on the road to Damascus, and he received an answer. Tell him what things he must suffer for my name's sake.

From the moment that the light broke, this dear Jewish man knew that his life was not his own, that he was to be bound in the Spirit, that he was not to seek the places to which he would go, or the things that he would speak upon arriving, that nothing was to be predicated on the basis of his own choice, but that one who broke upon him in overwhelming light on the road to Damascus.

Lord, he said with trembling and astonishment, what would you have for me to do? And he thereafter lived the totality of his life in the spirit of that question. How many of us who raised our hands to desire to be apostolic have not yet had the full courage to ask the same God that question with trembling and astonishment, lest we receive an answer that is disconcerting, unpleasant, or inconvenient.

Lord, what would you have for me to do? I'm continually amazed at the numbers of Christians who have made their own choice about career, about future, about the choice of university, or college, or training, or preparation, or ministry, or where they're going to go, or where they're going to live, or how they're going to spend their vacations, and not once have thought to submit the question to God.

This is an apostolic foundation. And the answer, however it comes in whatever form, you can be assured is this. You're going to be bound in the spirit. We are all, if we are apostolic, bound for the same destination, the new Jerusalem of God.

And there's only one way to attain it. It's to go, bound in the spirit, not knowing what awaits me there. I'll tell you, for a Jewish guy like myself, who has always prided myself in knowing, who has been trained by the world not to take a step without an understanding and a knowledge of where I'm going and what the consequence is, this is a total contradiction of all that the world celebrates as wisdom and sweet reasonableness.

And that's what I want to say about that which is apostolic. It completely contradicts the world in every point in particular, in that which it esteems as wise and right. How would you like to go, bound, not knowing?

I'll tell you, it strikes at the heart of our deepest insecurities. And to be apostolic is not for men who are riddled with insecurity. It is men who are sublimely confident that they are accepted in the beloved.

Who do not need to be shored up, they don't need to be assured, they don't need to have fleshly human confidences of what shall await them there. They can go bound now, not knowing. That's how we came to this place, not knowing.

That's how we came to community, not knowing. But we came because we were bound in the spirit and had no alternative. I want to say that it was not a grim business where we bit our lips and pursed our mouths and grit our teeth and wrung our fingers at the unhappy lament that somehow our lives were not our own.

There was somehow a joy in being obedient to a God who is not required to give us explanation. Nor did we ever ask it. How would you like to have put your foot over the chain that was at the top of this road about seven years ago when this property was bankrupt and for sale and to have the foot come down on the other side and the Lord to give you the name Dominion and to breathe into your spirit that this is going to be an end time teaching center and a nucleus for apostolic purposes of God and community of God and that you are to go ahead.

And you hardly understand what the word community means. You have only the faintest intimation of what end time teaching means. But you go ahead. Against the opposition of men. Against their very sage counsel.

Now caps, what do you want to do way out there? Your call to your Jewish people and your home presently is only 20 miles from New York City with two and a half million Jews. And you are going to go up in the boondocks and play cowboys and Indians?

Explain that I ask you. And you cannot. Do you know why? Because God has not explained it to you. You are bound in the spirit and you go not knowing. If you have no stomach for that kind of life, if that shatters your security, if you have to have some kind of confidences and guarantees of what your going means or you are not taking a step, you are disqualified from apostolic consideration.

I'll tell you there is a precious joy and a wonderful peace in going not knowing. I only have to know him who knows. I don't have to know the particulars. Paul went bound in the spirit, not just in the final episode of his life, but all the episodes of his life.

And so must the church be that is founded on such men as that who can move in God not knowing. Somehow they have a sublime inward confidence that does not require explanation for they know the God who summons them.

Not knowing what will happen to me there except that the Holy Spirit solemnly testifies to me in every city saying that bonds and affliction awaits me. That's true for us too. But I do not consider my life of any account as dear to myself.

How can you read through that hurriedly? But I do not consider my life dear to myself. I love the King James rendering, but none of these things move me. Neither count I my life dear unto myself. Well, if you don't count your life dear unto yourself, for whom else then is it dear?

If it's not dear for you, for whom then is it dear? For another. Have you made this counting? Have you made this reckoning, this calculation? It's foundational. You want to know what the foundation is of the Apostle and Prophets?

It's this. I do not reckon, I do not count my life as dear to myself. It's not to be lived for my purposes, but for another, so that I might finish my course with joy and the ministry which I have received of the Lord Jesus.

I don't know that God's going to give us an apostolic ministry until he first sees a heart that has come to this foundation. I count not my life as dear unto myself. Listen guys, do you know what the cancer is of modern Christianity, if I haven't told you now several times?

It's a terrible, inveterate, basic, interwoven self-centeredness that has merely moved from worldly and material and carnal things even into the realm of religious and spiritual things, but still has the believer at the center.

The benefits that accrue to him, the delight that he has, the enjoyment he has. I'm not being fed. And that's the justification for leaving and seeking yet another place. Because your feeding, your delight, your enjoyment, your satisfaction is the whole fulcrum upon which every question is decided.

It's filthy, it's despicable, it's egotistic and self-centered, no matter how spiritually it clothes itself. There's only one foundational apostolic position. I count not my life dear unto myself. It's not for me.

It's dear for another to whom I have given it in the day that his life broke. Have you come to that? There will not be an apostolic church worthy of that word until there's a people who have come to this foundational reckoning.

I count not my life dear unto myself. I'll tell you, the Lord is saving us from being a merely phraseological people who are glib in such speakings. And what he does is he provides you a 1950 airplane and puts you, I don't know what, 8, 9, 10 ,000 feet up in a blizzard somewhere between Chicago and Indiana where your plane is bobbing like a cork.

John was with me in Hawaii when in almost hurricane conditions we were again in another private plane bobbing like, I don't know what, sick, wondering if we were going to reach our destination, being flown by a man whose plane had crashed some earlier time and had lost his wife in that crash, passing over vast bodies of water, wondering if you'll reach your destination.

It's a wonderful time to reckon whether you're counting your life as dear unto yourself. That's why this Paul could stand before Jews and stand before Greeks. That's why he could not be moved. That's why his tremendous courage astounds us in his boldness, because he had come to a foundational reckoning to which many of us have not come who have made many trips to the altars, teary-eyed, and yet count our life as dear unto ourselves, as if it's ours to seek for its fulfillment and have not given it over to another to whom it really belongs.

The Gospel of Grace and the Cost of Security

In order that I might finish my course in the ministry which I receive from the Lord Jesus, and you'll come to that, you'll receive your true ministry in the Lord Jesus, to testify solemnly of the gospel of the grace of God.

None of these words are accidental. None of these are haphazard phrasings. For Paul, it was the gospel of the grace of God. Can you testify personally of the gospel of the grace of God? I think it's something that's reserved for the wretched.

Amazing grace that saved a wretch like me. Paul was a wretch. In all of his blindness, in all of his Jewish superiority, in all of his Pharisaical misunderstanding, in all of his religious expertise, that when the light broke and God revealed him to be the murderer that he was, he saw himself in such utter wretchedness and recognized and received the gospel of the grace of God to which he thereafter solemnly testified.

How well do you know that grace? Not just in the initiation of your salvation, but in all of your continuation with God. To what measure do you know his grace? How much do you trust him for his grace?

How much would you extend yourself? How much would you put aside the securities and the worldly and earthly things that shore you up and allow yourself to be stripped and even voluntarily give it away that you shall be solely and purely the recipient of his grace?

I'm sorry if I have to use illustrations out of my own experience. But what has happened in the course of our six years here has been that stripping. Coming to the situation with a salary, with an organization of which I was director, and one by one watching the things stripped away, which every man takes as his right, who is evangelically secure in the ministry which he has.

Life insurance policies, medical insurance policies, every kind of thing to hedge his life about with security. One of my colleagues, whom I knew in those early years when we first began here, said, Artie said, well if you want to put all of that property across the road in the name of Ben Israel, be the fool and do it.

But please take my recommendation and at least the plot where your own house is, put that in your own name personally. Because who's to say what's going to happen to Ben Israel Ministries? It may one day collapse, fall, stagger, people leave, things change.

But at least have the security of knowing that your house is in your name. But I could not. We rise and fall with the grace that God is going to meet out to the band of souls with whom we are joined. And if we lose the property, we all lose.

And then the Lord subsequently, as we went on, fingered everything else. The salary went, the life insurance, and the medical insurance. Even though my daughter has just come from an operation in Rochester that will likely run for thousands of dollars, which if we had only kept the life insurance, the medical insurance policy, we would not now have to face the painful question of how is this expense going to be met?

But I'll tell you that I have no pain over it because I can testify solemnly to the grace of God. I think God is going to empty us of our securities. I think God is going to make our life more precarious.

I think he's going to invite us to extend ourselves and to empty out our wallets and to put away the things that will establish our security that we might also be able in our own generation to solemnly testify of the gospel of the grace of God.

Do you not have a knowledge of that grace? It doesn't come without some measure of trembling. But when it comes, what a privilege to testify of a God of all grace. And now behold, I know that you all among whom I went about preaching the kingdom will see my face no more.

Therefore I testify to you this day that I am innocent of the blood of all men. Well, I guess we have to make just a little allowance for Paul. However impeccable and blameless he is, here's one thing that you can fault him for.

He's a bit maudlin. He takes himself a little too seriously. He has a little tendency for exaggeration. I'm innocent of the blood of all men. Come on, man. What are you trying to suggest? That your preaching is an issue of life or death?

That your ministry is life or death? That somehow if you fail God in total obedience and give men something less than what God intends, that the issue of life and death and eternity is involved? What do you think you are anyway?

I'll tell you what. I want to be accused of that kind of exaggeration. In fact, I already stand before you as a man completely conscious that every time I open my mouth, whether it's here at Dominion or overseas or any such place, the issues of life and death are always being propounded.

And if you don't see it as that and you think it's some lesser or lighter thing, do not think that you have a qualification for apostolic ministry. I'm innocent of the blood of all men. I'll tell you, if we felt that our preaching and our ministries were to affect the life or death or eternal destiny of men, we would approach the pulpit of God with far more reverence and much greater trembling than we now presently do.

And so ought we to do, and so will we do. Drunk from nothing, I have been bold and fearless because while I was with you, my ministry was unto the Lord. Can you see why it is that I'm so impatient with shysters and counterfeit apostles, with little, tinsy, cutesy guys who have a little apostolic vocabulary and think that they're doing the same thing and have not this stature?

Can you see why it's the man who is the foundation, the church built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, what they are as men in their depth, in their stature, in what is in wrought in them, in their whole view and vision of what they are and their purpose and the quality of their service and life is the very foundation of a church that is to be like them.

These are total men who are establishing and setting for us a standard of totality toward God. And behold, I know that you all among whom I went about preaching the kingdom will see my face no more. Have you preached the kingdom?

The Gospel of the Kingdom

And when the gospel of the kingdom shall be proclaimed in all the earth, then shall the end come. I don't know how much of a beginning we have actually yet even made. Oh, I know there's been a lot of gospel things going on, but which gospel?

Gospel of narrow personal salvation and self-interest and benefit that accrues by believing is not the gospel of the kingdom. Paul had a profound and burning kingdom consciousness. And I have a feeling that the gospel of the kingdom which he preached and proclaimed and demonstrated was a far more awesome, inclusive, extensive, profound gospel than what we have understood in modern times that only serves the self-interest of men.

Men were called out of something by that gospel and into something of a society that had its origin in heaven. And we need again to proclaim the gospel of the kingdom. You'll turn to the very last chapter of Acts.

Not now, at your own convenience. The very last thing that is spoken of Paul is that all who came to him in the quarters which he had in Rome, to them he spoke the things pertaining to the kingdom. It's another subject.

I don't have the time now to speak of it, but I want to say this. I am struck by the absence of kingdom consciousness in God's people. They think it's only some kind of airy and ephemeral phrase that points to some kind of vagary after one leaves this life.

They do not understand it as an apostle does of the kingdom as present possibility and reality here now. Thy kingdom come in the earth as it is in heaven is the Lord's own prayer who is the high priest and the apostle of our confession.

To the degree that you do not believe for a kingdom now in the earth, to that degree you're disqualified from apostolic consideration. Oh, I tell you, the elements here are golden. And the beauty of it is, it's spilling out of this glorious overflowing fountain of life which is the apostle Paul who had known conscious understanding that 2 ,000 years later some Jewish guy wet behind the ears would be using his farewell address as a statement, as a classic expression of the quintessential elements of true apostolicity.

I'll tell you, when you can pinch a man and get something like that out of him in which he's not even aware and conscious of the glories that are pouring out of him, you have something apostolic. For I did not shrink from declaring to you the whole purpose of God.

I wouldn't shrink from declaring it either except that I don't really think that I know it. Okay, brother, right on, you're close to the kingdom. Don't make any presumptions that you do because the whole purpose of God is not to be obtained by the hearing of the tapes of other men, however edifying that might be, or the gathering up of a library, or the scouring of your concordance.

The receiving of the whole purpose of God, the totality of the glory of all that that means is that which is given on the mount to the man whom God summons to come up and be here and I will give you the law that thou mayest teach it.

The knowledge of the whole purpose of God is not for amateurs. It's not for presumptuous claimants. It's for men whom God has called in God's own time to ascend the mount in the wilderness and to wait six days in the thick cloud to be emptied of all that is human, of all of your own vain notions, however correct.

If they are only correct humanly, they are not correct enough. And when you are finally emptied out and summoned up on the seventh day to be in communion with him who alone can give the law, then you may receive the whole counsel of God that thou mayest teach it.

That is an element of that which is apostolic. Men who have such a full-orbed sense of the totality of God's purpose as it has been revealed to them in deepest communion upon the mount to which they have been summoned by God in God's own time and not before.

I ask you, is there anything more tinny and more of a clank than to see some young hotshot mouthing concepts to which he has not yet attained in his own experience? Have you had that experience? Or have you been such a hotshot?

You know what I mean. It has the ring of truth in a sense. It is truth. It's technically true. It's positionally true. It's scripturally true. It's doctrinally true. But it's not yet true for that brother.

It has not been given him in awesome experience and in communion and in the dealings and trials of God. He has only gleaned it from others and is parroting something. And though it is technically true, it has no penetrating power.

It has no full power to convict. And it falls off our ear like the proverbial water off the duck's back. May God give us men who can give us the whole counsel of God who have received it from God on the mount to which they have been summoned in his own time.

I'll tell you what. I'm willing to wait for such men. We might even delay their coming because of our presumption that seeks to know things that the Lord has not yet himself given. So be on guard for yourselves and all the flock among which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers to shepherd the church of God which he purchased with his own blood.

I can just see Paul's sob as he spoke that line. Something caught in his throat which he purchased with his own blood. With the God that it should catch in my throat that I have to just pause before I can go on because just the very conjuring up, the reminding of ourselves again about the church of which he has made us overseers at the cost of his own blood causes us to pause.

And I'll tell you that if we don't pause and don't recognize the cost by which it has come, we're not likely to be the overseers that we ought. We'll be presiding over some other cheapy kind of thing, some tinsley kind of thing, a matter of mere succession of services and programs and not the church which he purchased with his own blood.

This needs to be rubbed into our souls. We need to understand this in the depths of our being if we're to be the apostolic overseers to which God calls us. And I know that after my departure savage wolves will come in among you not sparing the flock and from among yourselves men will arise speaking perverse things to draw away the disciples after them.

Guarding the Church Against Counterfeits

After my departure from among yourselves men will arise. I'll tell you what that speaks to me. When the apostolic thing goes the human thing comes. After my departure men will arise. Will you be jealous over the thing which is apostolic over the thing which is true over the thing which is apostolic and not allow it authentic not allow it to depart that men will arise?

Will you be jealous not to cede and give ground to men which can only come apostolically? Do you have such a sense for that which is authentic that which is true that you'll not allow men to arise and give any kind of counterfeit or seeming thing which is not authentically given of God?