Sowing and Reaping — Art Katz

After this afternoon's session, I was ready to secede from the Union. I was going to submit my resignation as being superfluous and out of keeping with the tenor and the atmosphere that had been struck, and anything that I could say would be some pipsqueak minor note.

But I'm in that class that the brother described as those who read and study and speak the word, that pitiful, pitiable class of Christian ministers who don't perform great works of miracles and wonder, so tolerate this little thing.

A Choice Between Prophets, Mentalities, and Spirits

And in fact, should the Lord succeed in what's in my heart, it will be a greater wonder and a miracle than any of the things that were described to us of healing and deliverance that we count as power.

So Lord, lest I go already beyond what I should, enable my mouth to be impeccable and prudent, restrained but not evasive. And if I have to be explicit, for the church's sake, let it be. Because this people, in my understanding, do not realize what, in fact, was struck this afternoon and what I represent afterwards.

And so far as I can understand it, and I may be wrong, it's a choice between prophets. It's a choice between mentalities. It's a choice between spirits. It's a choice between how to perceive and understand the faith.

So my God, who is sufficient for these things, come in your great jealousy for the church, for the faith, for truth, and for those precious words, apostolic and prophetic, that you guard more jealously than we could ever know, and rightfully so, being the high priest and the apostle of our confession, and also that your testimony is itself the spirit of prophecy.

Come and instruct these children, and beyond them, through the tape, the church at large. And we thank and give you praise in Jesus' name. Amen. You can turn with me to Psalm 126. Very brief. When the Lord turned again the captivity of Zion, we were like them that dream.

Then was our mouth filled with laughter and our tongue with singing. Then said they among the heathen, the Lord hath done great things for them. The Lord hath done great things for us, whereof we are glad.

Turn again our captivity, O Lord, as the streams in the south. They that sow in tears shall reap in joy. He that goeth forth and weepeth, bearing precious seed, shall doubtless come again with rejoicing, bringing his sheaves with him.

Sowing Precious Seed Through Tears

Amen. Well, in the first computer that I ever owned, and I did not turn on for three days, looking at it suspiciously, and knowing that it operates by demons, and not wanting to be compromised by its technology, I finally began.

And I asked whoever was the technician in those days to insert this verse that we have read tonight, so that every time that computer comes up, I would read they that sow in tears shall reap in joy. He that goes forth and weepeth, bearing precious seed, shall doubtless come again with rejoicing, bringing his sheaves with him.

Why did I ask that? Because I had experienced that. After three years of exile and banishment from our own property, our own Ben Israel in northern Minnesota, more than I want even to go into the detail, but after ten years of remarkable community life, and weathering much of its storms and all of their travail and aggravation that can only be compounded and experienced within the church itself, the Lord made us to forsake the property, to abandon it, and the one brother who refused to receive my prophetic interpretation that God wanted everything brought into death persisted in remaining.

I had already gone, the other elder had gone, many had gone, but this one elder remained who always wanted to live in a rustic environment, and had a little nucleus of souls yet remaining with him that he could have continued in the property.

And so we had numerous discussions, and I poured my soul out, the Lord did not tell me why this exile and banishment had to take place, why we had to abandon the property to the vandals and to the severe elements of northern Minnesota, why we had to lose our 501c3 status and identity, and the ministry itself.

My marriage was threatened, so many things. My children vowed never to return, and I pleaded once more with this brother, but no, he couldn't see it. And so we had a final elders and wives meeting, and we went to our beds, the next morning was the final breakfast and departure, and when this brother came to the breakfast table, he was white as the proverbial sheet, and I said to him, what happened to you?

My memory is the least of my faculties, and none of my faculties are that impressive, but my memory is the worst, and yet I remember every word of this moment of conversation. What happened to you? He said, when I went to bed, he said, I prayed, and said, Lord, if I'm mistaken, you show me, but I think that he wasn't expecting to hear from God because he was a man so confident in himself that he was really mistaken.

And the Lord said, if you'll not leave, I will kill you. He left, and the property was abandoned, and we didn't know for how long, we gave it over to another Christian organization, we left, we lost all control, and the Lord of all things had me in that remarkable season of death to attend a Lutheran seminary, a liberal Lutheran seminary, 65 of the faculty being women, and I think 100 of them were feminists or witches, I actually heard a talk brought by one of them on witchcraft, not to alert us to its dangers, but to commend it to us as being acceptable and, what's the word, and conformable to the Christian faith.

Suffering in a Hostile Seminary

I went up to the professor afterwards, and I said, if Luther knew that an institution bearing his name had been given over to what we have heard this afternoon, he would turn over in his grave. Oh, he said, well, we need to be informed.

I said, that's too high a price to pay for information. So for two years in that institution, I was bloodied and knocked about and picked upon and threatened with expulsion because I dared call God he, which according to these women was sexist language, and that they were going to correct Christianity and the Bible itself because the Bible had been written under male dominance, and therefore they had it all wrong.

God the Father has to be preceded by Mother Goddess of the Earth. Can you imagine what an Elijah man would suffer from those Jezebels day in and day out? There's a brother with us here today who visited me while I was at that school, and as we came into the room, you could feel the tensions rise, and it was electric.

And sure, it was not long before these women broke out in their threats, and I don't think I had yet opened my mouth. And when we came out, he said, of course, Art, you know what this is? This is the old conflict, Jezebel and Elijah.

Well, I didn't plan to tell you all that except to say that out of that season of suffering of an exquisite kind that can only come to a man like me in an environment that is totally hostile and antithetical to all that is truly prophetic in its institutional configuration with these women, having lost the property, lost the ministry, lost my wife, lost my children in that great season of death that was tasted and experienced, the Lord began to open the revelation of the distinctive message that we bear for the church all over the world, namely the centrality or the significance of Israel's redemption in the last days through the church.

Silence, Revelation, and the Call to Israel

Well, the Lord, on top of everything else, had me on a sabbatical silence. All of this was without explanation. I just knew that I was not publicly to speak and I had to honor that. It lasted 14 months.

Can you imagine a man who lives by his mouth being compelled to a silence? And people would ask me, why don't, why can't you share it? I'm forbidden. Well, here's how the silence was broken. After the first quarter in the seminary and the Lord began to reveal to me the remarkable depth of this mystery lost to the church, I thought, what is the implication of the issue of Israel for the church in the last days?

And I had no longer, no sooner come to that thought than the phone rang. It was a pastor from Sacramento, California saying, Art, you don't know me, but we have been praying here at the field that God wants you to speak to us a seminar on Israel and the church in the last days.

The exact phrase. And when that phrase came, I knew that I knew my sabbatical silence was over. I'm only asking you to consider how sacred is the subject that God would require that much of death, not abstractly or academically or doctrinally, but in actuality to proceed the first expression of a mystery that has been lost to the church in modern times and until now that he would not allow any speaking of any other kind until this virginal word would first go forth.

So you know what it means not having spoken for 14 months and feeling like a creaky old gate that needs to be oiled and wondering whether God would be there. Would I enjoy the kind of unction and anointing that I've known in times past because I'm not a teacher.

I'm a prophetic man and I was, what shall I say, charged and overflowing with remarkable sense of this mystery that I had never publicly have been required to express. I didn't have notes or an outline.

I just had to stand before a congregation that paid $35 each, I believe, to come and all had their tape recorders poised to catch every jewel that would fall from my lips and then to begin by beginning.

Prophetic function is an anguish and I'm suspicious of anyone who enjoys it. It's death, multiple deaths, and the matter that makes it so painful is that silence is not an option that you can choose when God requires your speaking.

Like tonight. Tonight, I wish I were any other place. Tonight, I wish I had any other subject, but I have no choice in the matter. The Lord himself has set the stage and he's wanting something from me that I'll not know what it is in substance until I hear it out of my mouth.

So don't desire to be a prophet. It's anguish, death, suffering. But here's the scene that I want to describe for you, 14 months not having spoken and having just now recently returned to the property by myself.

Loneliness, Weeping, and the Return to the Property

Note it means to come to 160 acre property where 55 souls had lived in the intensity of daily community and to have the property totally abandoned for three years and suffering neglect and waste and vandalism.

I painted my house yellow. Two brothers came and sprayed my house in a yellow bizarre paint that I found in some return of a mixture at Kmart. You never can imagine an uglier yellow than what I chose.

It was bizarre, but it was bold and anything to relieve the grayness of a property that had sustained 55 souls and was now abandoned into death was a welcome relief. So I'm living in this house by myself and it's time now to go to Sacramento.

I had my suitcase in one hand and my attache case in my other with notes and things from my reading and study. It was about 6 p .m. and the sun was coming down in that eerie light that is almost indescribable.

I had left the house and I walked to the barn and for some reason I turned and I looked at the house. It was so melancholy. It was so pitifully sad. The emptiness of it, the haunting sense of the lack of life, the family departed and deserted, the ministry gone, who knows what this speaking would be.

I can't sum up the strange sense of loneliness and desertion and all the kinds of things that a man could feel in a critical moment like that who is especially Jewish. Norwegians would not have experienced it.

As I looked at my house in that pale yellow light of dusk, the eeriness and the melancholy of the whole abandoned property and the mystery of God bringing us to these deaths without explanation broke upon my soul.

And tough Brooklyn boy that I am, I wept. I broke and I wept. And as I wept, the Lord quickened this very verse to me. They that go forth bearing precious seed, and I had precious seed, and sowing it with tears shall doubtless return, bearing their sheaves with them.

The Call to New York and the Jewish Community

Well, I'll tell you the sheaves that I'm about to gather. Just 10, 12 days ago, in a visitation from the Lord as profound as what happened at Antioch in chapter 13 of the book of Acts, the Lord came down in a morning prayer meeting at our revived, restored, resurrected community and made clear, and he repeated it two days later, that I was to diminish all activity to the church.

Don't expect me back. And I've been telling saints, don't expect me back. But I thought because of other commitments or old age, but now don't expect me back because the Lord has made profoundly clear I'm to go to New York and live there and confront the Jewish community of New York City full time.

That's a call. I don't know how much you can understand it. When I shared this only a few days ago in Phoenix, if I could tell you where I have been just these recent days and in how many countries, how many places and with what intensity, you would wonder that I didn't yawn more this morning.

I've been to every country that my brother mentioned in Africa, Zaire, Uganda. I've had adventures in all those places. Most recently, I've come back from Chile and Brazil, and 12 days in Israel, three days in New York City.

And before that, Albania, Germany, Holland, Austria, Innsbruck, where Jacob Hutter was burned at the stake, whose name you don't know, know what he represents, but whose tradition I'm consciously in union with, an Anabaptist persecuted by both the mainline Protestants and Catholics.

I went to the very place where he was burned at the stake. So I've been busy and traveling and tired. I know what it means, three hours and four hours sleep and waiting in planes and nine hour flights and four or five hour layovers until you're 24 hours going from the place of ministry to the place of home and then arriving with choked up, what do they call it, nasal passages and bronchial inflammation, something then that lingers for weeks and weeks and weeks.

And just as you're about to recover, it's time for the next trip. I'm not saying any of this as an appeal for sympathy of any kind, but just to know you, to let you know that when a brother yawns who wants to be polite, it's because of a chronic exhaustion for past trips that will not be made up because future trips will yet bring new dimensions.

Tears That Come From the Lord

So what's the significance of this going forth, sowing seed with tears? One thing we need to understand that the tears cannot be self-pity, they cannot be indulgent commiseration for ourselves of what we're sacrificing for God or we're rejected or we're not understood.

Any tear of that kind will never eventuate in harvest. It's tears of another kind. And I would say they are the tears of the Lord. It's not something that we raise up or affect emotionally or sentimentally, but as some identification with the Lord, the sense of his own sorrow, his own grief, as he looks over the condition of the world and of the church and of the people Israel, and knowing that even though you're going to confront them in New York City, don't expect results.

Don't expect gratitude. It's rare enough to find it in the church. You're not going to find it from your embedded kinsmen who have been turned off historically for centuries against Christianity as some kind of noxious Greek philosophy of a God in three persons that is patently wrong and that Jesus could never have been the Messiah because he did not honor the Shabbat and beside the conditions that would come with the Messiah of peace and reconciliation, the world has not yet come.

So in every hand and in every estimation, he's false and you're going to come to New York and proclaim him. Not only am I to come to New York, but the Lord more recently said, why are you there? Why don't you work on your PhD?

You'll be calling me Dr. Katz one day. But that's not because I need some prestigious addition to my name, but because to seek that gives one a legitimate function and allays the suspicion, who is this man?

He might be a missionary, but to be a doctoral candidate at Columbia University and accessing other seminaries that are in consortium with that school is a very legitimate thing and a renowned and respected thing, especially by Jews.

And who do you think are the heads of these departments with whom I will have to do? To penetrate the academic world of New York City is to penetrate the Jewish community and to penetrate the Jewish community in New York City is to penetrate the world.

We're not just talking about a little ethnic minority. We're talking about the seat of power and influence under the domain of principalities and powers of the air that have never been arrested, challenged, threatened, or recognized.

I'm going right into that thing, but I'll tell you what. I would not be going into it if it did not start 15, 20 years ago with the abandonment of the property, the forms of death, and all of the pathetic things that began with looking at a yellow house with the sun going down on it and breaking in tears and weeping.

The harvest now has got to do with the tears that were sown. And I would say this, every harvest has to do with tears that are sown. Harvest that is eternal. So long as the tears are not self-pitying, but the very sense of God's own sorrow, knowing that you're going to go to a people and who will oppose themselves in their own ignorance, will reject your word and knowing what the consequence of that rejection will be for them in suffering and in death.

How long will it be before suicide bombers will be going off in New York City and in places that Jews frequent and institutions and banks and maybe the very school that I'll be attending, Lord willing.

Don't think that this is a phenomenon confined to the state of Israel. There are fanatical Muslims everywhere in the world and well-placed in the United States that will one day bring Jewish terror and fear to such a pitch that they'll not be safe in any place.

The Holy Seed and the Messenger as Message

So that's the environment that I'll be going into. But I better not go into it dry-eyed. I better not go into it clinically. I better not go in being correct and having it all laid out and telling them step one, step two, step three, are you saved, brother?

What do you think of Jesus? If someone had approached me 37 years ago in exactly that way, I would have turned on my heel in contempt and walked away and be dead. Praise God that when it came time for my salvation, the men that God put in my path and the women were not dry-eyed, clinical, and correct.

They had not reduced the gospel to a formula, are you saved, brother? But they spoke in such a way I was pierced through. Because they had seed to sow that was holy. And you can't buy it in a five and ten cent store as a little packet.

It's holy seed, not a formula for salvation. And it has to be nurtured in the vessel that bears it. God forbid that we become so slothful, lazy, and mechanical that we have reduced the holy gospel that Paul says, my gospel.

It's like a love affair with a message, but it's more than some formulaic reduction on how to get saved. For Paul, it was the cosmic breath of God that eventuates into salvation to the uttermost that he jealously nurtured and brought forth in love both to the Greek and to the Jew appropriate to his audience and to his hearer in the wisdom of God.

That's if we need seed and we need tears. And may well be that the seed is not just the message, but the messenger himself. If he's brash, a hot shot, meets the Jews on their own ground, likely to be without effect.

But let them meet the meekness of the Lamb. Let them meet the Holy One of Israel who comes in a unsuspecting frame, who has also his origin in Brooklyn, but the way in which the man speaks conducts himself.

His demeanor, his mode is altogether other than they have ever seen in Jews of any description. It's the Lord. The seed itself is the man. The man is the message. And that kind of thing is incubated, is not formed in a day, but comes through a process of God, of suffering, of requirement, of obedience, of things passing into death, of wives threatening divorce and suicide, of children leaving, of all the kinds of things that the Lord knows how to orchestrate in order that when you go out with the precious seed, you go out weeping.

Coming Out of Babylonian Ambition

So if we go out in any other manner, we ourselves need to have our captivity turned. If we go out in the manner that is Babylonian, that is brash, hot shot, arrogant, super confident, we ourselves need to come out before we can go forth.

We have to wait until the Lord turns again the captivity of Zion. And there's nothing that alarms me more today than to see the sudden rise in popularity of apostolic and prophetic entities or ministries that have an overnight success and have it all reduced to a formula, to mode, to methods, and to system, centering usually in a conspicuous personality who does not in any way appear to me to have the stature, the weight, the breadth that one expects in an apostle or prophet.

They're not just sharp characters who have learned to extrapolate verses from the Bible and make application to show churches their error or to correct them in their way. What they bring more than anything else is the sense of God himself.

That's the foundation of the church. God as he in fact is, and not as men think him to be. For if we are in error about God, we're in error about everything. If we can be appealed to on the basis of soul, soulishness or manipulation, where are we?

And what in fact then can we communicate? So the most foundational thing that only these men can bring because they have a special schooling in God that's not a quickie and an overnight, but a long process of multiple deaths is the knowledge of God as he in fact is, as they know him in the fellowship of his sufferings.

So I'm very jealous, not so much jealous as God himself for the great words prophetic and apostolic, and to see that there seems to be a new novelty of men now taking up that vocabulary and that language and seeking to institute it and having whole systems.

So I recently got something in the mail from a young man who purports to be a prophet in Minneapolis advertising his prophetic program, and in the corner of the mailing is approved by the dash, dash, dash international something or other apostolic ministry, the seal of approval.

He's kosher because he bears the name of this renowned figure who has been acknowledged to be somehow the apostle of our time. It's frightening. So I like the Lord turns to captivity when the Lord will.

As much as we desire it, we know that it has to issue from him. And if we seek to ourselves initiate something in advance of the time by our own well-meaning activity and conduct, what are we doing but deepening the whole issue of Babylon itself?

Instead of delivering, we come more deeply into the Babylonian elements that are brash, that are human, that are self-initiated, that are egotistical and vain, and it doesn't deliver anyone. So those who doubtless come again with shouts of joy bearing precious sheaves with them must first of all, as the scripture says, have gone out.

He that goeth forth weeping bears precious seed. And this evening just looking over the text, a thought occurred to me. This going forth and going out is not only the issue of leaving Minnesota to go to New York City, but it's a coming out and a going forth from ambition, from concern for your ministry, for acceptance and success, for all of the kinds of things if they become central to our interest become forms of manipulation, adjusting our voice, taking on certain manner of delivery, knowing how to affect response among God's people, how to build and how to employ, which is itself all of the essential elements of Babylon.

There's got to be a going out and a coming forth out of one's own ambition. Ambition. Not that the ambition is wicked. It's ambition for God, but we are subtly insinuated in that ambition also. Before the Lord can send you to sow seeds with tears by which you'll reap with joy a harvest and a sheaves, there has got to be an expelling and a dealing and a coming out of those subtleties that remain that most Christians can't even detect because they are in some measure still in it.

Ambition, pride, voice as manipulation, soulishness, artifice, manipulation in a self-conscious way. That's why God had to wait before he could say in Acts 13, separate unto me Saul and Barnabas for the work whereunto I have called them because they had first been separated from their own Jewishness, from their own ambition, from their own desire.

You'll know that you're separated, that you've come out and come forth when you have no desire to go. When it's all the same to you, whether you remain in Antioch or Minnesota or go. God has dealt with those subtleties of soul that if they still linger and remain will bring a corruption and a defilement with you and not bring an eternal sheave.

You might see some responses, you might see some result, but not the sheaves that are groaning with fruit of an eternal kind. So please consider that, that those that sow in tears, that go forth, have gone forth even from themselves, even from their own ambition, even from the subtlety of their own hearts.

Corporate Life, Correction, and the Formation of the Seed

And that cannot take place except in the true fellowship of the saints. There's got to be an Antioch. There's no amount of critical self-analysis by which you're going to finger and touch those subtleties of soul that compromise you.

It's the work that takes place in the authentic relationship of saints, one with another, where you're free to adjust, to correct, to raise questions in love about the manner, the voice, the style of a brother.

Style is a no-no. Style is already something self-affected, something employed for effect and it's a calculation. Anything that's calculated is Babylonian. We have got to be artless. We have got to be as innocent as the lamb, as mindless about how we speak on the one occasion as we will on another.

And you know what we will find? That if we're truly the lords, there are times when we will bleat like a lamb. We will be the most inoffensive of men and other times we will come on like gangbusters with such severity and confrontational boldness that you wonder it could issue out of the same vessel.

The thing that prevents the lord's total possession of the servant is his own design for himself of how he thinks he ought to speak, conduct, and be in order to obtain what he thinks are justifiable ends.

So long as we're in that frame, we're still in Babylon and we need the deliverer to come to us and we could be assured that in that condition, even if we go forth, it will not bring eternal sheaves. It's probably more a self-originated sending than the call of God himself.

He knows when we are separated from race, from ethnic identity, from religious ambition, from ourselves. And maybe not the least of the weeping is the recognition that it's in this very area that we have been presumptuous and premature and arrogant and have failed for those very reasons and we repent and we're tearful at misplaced energies and presumption upon God of which we were fully confident that it was he and now know the better that it was something was self-initiated and self-activated.

So these tears can have complex origin. So the man is the message, the seed that to be sown and it's to be sown onto a hard ground. I don't know if you can imagine what New York means. What do they say?

It's the graveyard of evangelists. David Wilkerson has been a conspicuous success, but he himself has said to me that New York is a Jewish city. It is the Jewish city. It is the effectual Jerusalem of the world.

The writers, the thinkers, the media men, the bankers, the financiers, all of the things that influence our society and our civilization has its nexus there. He says it's a Jewish city and we'll never take New York by circumventing this people, but we don't know anything about them, you teach us.

This is going in to the heart of the matter. This is ultimate confrontation and we've got to go in the auspices of God in the moment of God's choosing, which came only 10, 12 days ago and has been confirmed again by the Lord since that time, but only because there's a preparation of a longstanding kind.

He's not going to send you as a novice into the lion's den and that preparation included, as I've shared with you, those seasons of heartache and heartbrokenness and dismay without explanation that God requires us to experience that we might bear the precious seed and indeed be it.

So, it's not the matter of how gifted we are with our mouths or how carefully and scripturally formulated our messages are or how stylistic, but the tempered and engrafted word out of the anvil of real life situation in the body, in the corporate life, a history with God and with men.

And it's out of this that I believe the precious seed is formed. It's interesting that those many today who are purporting to be prophets and apostles have not this foundation or this history. They have come out of the blue.

There's no history in the body of Christ. There's no formative thing by which they could have been tempered and passed and been sifted and refined before being released and sent out into significant places.

So I see this as critical. This seed corn, this holy seed can only be formed in that earnest life which is corporate and with God's people and humbling because the man himself, not only his word, is that seed that needs to be sown into a very hard and inhospitable and adverse earth.

Laboring Without Immediate Results

And the Lord does not give us some grand machinery to break it up, but our hands, our own weakness. It's remarkable that the world has all of the marbles. I was recently visiting a Hutterite colony and they had John Deere equipment that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to lease.

So electronic, so remarkably sophisticated that they set the dials and make the readings and sit back in an air-conditioned and air-cushioned cabin and the thing will plow the straightest lines that have ever been seen and know exactly when to stop to turn.

The whole thing is remarkably technologically formulated. But the work of God, bare hands, brute tools, nothing sophisticated, but sweat, labor, and no apparent success. Can we labor in a field where we're not going to see gratifying results, but angry stares or angry words or worse?

But God says, and this is our basis for hope, nevertheless, you shall doubtless return. You'll go back again to the very place where you thought your labors were vain and there you'll garner the harvest and there you'll come back bearing sheaves with rejoicing over the singing.

Christ Reaps Where He Has Sown

Jesus himself is a wonderful example. He labored for three and a half years with his own nation and crucified in his own capital city and mocked with a sign over his head, Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews, listening to the scorn of those he came to save while he's dying in agony on that cross.

And taken in death, but soon to come as King of the Jews. And at the very place where he was despised and mocked and ridiculed in that place, he will rule out of Zion from the throne of David as a son of David and the word shall go forth out of Zion and the law of the Lord out of Zion and the word of the Lord out of Jerusalem to all nations.

He's going to reap in the very place where he has sown. His, his sowing of the seed seemed fruitless, only a remnant. But out of that investment of tears and anguish of soul, he wept over Jerusalem. It's going to be a harvest that will affect all the world.

And in fact, the psalm itself that we're reading says so. Because the remarkable thing about the psalm is that the heathen in verse two say the Lord has done great things for them. The heathen means Islamic nations.

It means superficially Christian nations. It means Hinduistic and Buddhistic and Native American and every other kind of a variety of religious themes. The heathen are going to say the Lord has done great things for them.

Why will they say it? Because they cannot help but deny the greatness of what God has done. He has come out of Zion to deliver the captives, to turn the captivity of Israel after 2 ,000 years, perhaps in response to those who have gone as sent ones to break up that ground and sow that seed.

But the nations must acknowledge it. The Lord, they don't say God, they say the Lord has done. It's an acknowledgement of the identity of the one who has so conspicuously revealed himself in Israel's deliverance that they have no alternative hereafter but to acknowledge that the God of Israel and the God of Jacob is a lone God.

With all due respect to what was shared this afternoon about nations and government and men being affected, yes, but the true turning and acknowledgement of God waits not on individual ministries, but rather what God will have done for Israel before the face of all nations.

Then shall the heathen say, the Lord has done great things for them. And when they acknowledge that the Lord has done it, how do you come to that kind of an acknowledgement without yourself coming to the conclusion that it requires?

How do you make that recognition about the Lord having done and not accept him as Lord? This is not an idle acknowledgement of the nations. This is their salvation. And it'll only come in this way and this way alone.

It waits for Israel's deliverance and Israel's deliverance waits for those who go forth like me and others like me and the church itself in weeping for this people, knowing that our word will be rejected, that they'll oppose themselves in their ignorance and we'll get back our word in our teeth.

We're not going to have the gratification that is to be desired when you give yourself in ministry. And yet we're willing to go because the Lord has says, doubtless, you shall return to the very place where you seem to have been defeated with a very place where there's been no acknowledgement, no hope of success in that place.

You'll come back with rejoicing with sheaves of eternal fruit. God has said so. So one who goes forth rests everything on the word of God because he says, doubtless thou shalt return. No doubt about it.

And because he says that we can labor now incessantly and fully without having to see a gratification that would sustain us and enable us to go on. This is an unusual kind of service, but it's the kind that eventuates in a harvest of an eternal kind.