K-007 the End Time Man of God — Art Katz

The End-Time Man of God

The phrase that I've always loved is man of God. To be called man of God says everything. I just want to share with you something that God is burning in my heart without ceasing about a man of God that I think is going to become increasingly as we press deeper into the end times, an image and a type of what the man of God shall be for our own generation.

A prophetic man, a man standing alone, a man besieged by heavy opposition, a man who is not going to receive the applause from the world or even from his brethren necessarily for his obedience to God.

But he shall be told, are thou he who troubleth Israel, a man who can command the elements and invoke fire from heaven, routing out the false prophets of Baal, Elijah the prophet. Let's bow our heads this morning that God might write something in our hearts that we might be reminded in a ceremony like this, ordaining men for ministry and for service in the end time, what God's picture of the end time man of God is.

Precious holy God, Lord, you've ordered this day and all the days that have preceded it and all the days that shall follow, almighty God, we don't have words to express our gratitude, precious God, for the great process at your hand, the shaping and the making and the breaking and the molding to prepare for yourself instruments for use in the end time.

Speak to us out of your own heart this morning, Lord God, of what it means to be a minister of God, a servant, a man of God for the end times by your spirit and out of your word and bless this people.

Bless us also. Put something in our hearts that shall not cease from burning, that we might be flaming ministers of God for our own generation. In Jesus name we pray, amen. First Kings 17, I think it ought to be a great encouragement to us to recognize a certain pattern of God.

Elijah’s Obscure Preparation and Sudden Calling

Of the great ministries that God brings out of complete obscurity and on to the stage at the moment of his pleasing. You wonder where such great men were that such a magnitude and such a power can be kept in obscurity until that moment.

But it pleases God not to say a word of all that went into the formation of his Christ, his anointed one until that 30th year when Jesus was brought up out of a wilderness and came in the power of the spirit to the familiar synagogue that had never before given him any regard and all eyes were upon him as he spoke.

The same thing is true of the prophet Elijah. There's not a word that proceeds this chapter 17 about such a man as this until this moment. Where was he? And why hasn't God chosen to tell us what went into his making?

There's a very discreet silence on God's part and I think that it's fitting. Nobody can know the breakings and the poundings and the circumstances and trials and temptations and all the things which the Lord allows to come into the life of that one that's being prepared for ministry.

If we understand but this, how much better prepared we are to receive such things from the hand of God, to know that when we have submitted to the process in that 10th year symbolically speaking, at the completion of those days, God will bring us up for his use for a Shekinah 74 or for whatever it is that pleases him.

But I'll tell you, is there ever so glorious a verse in all the scriptures to introduce a man of God? As the Lord my God liveth before whom I stand, there shall not be due nor reign these years but according to my word.

What a fantastic statement. As the Lord my God liveth, spoken in an age of such filthy apostasy, very much a picture of what the end time shall be, of which the scriptures speak, when the Lord comes, shall he find faith upon the earth?

Great backslidden masses calling themselves by the name of Christ and being guilty for what we Jews have experienced in Elijah's time, continuing to play with outward forms of religion, inconvenient forms of Judaism, but halting between two opinions.

And only a few shall be able to make such a statement as this, as the Lord my God liveth before whom I stand. Such a statement is not born in a moment. It's the testimony of an entire life lived before God.

And the thing that concludes that statement proves it. It shall not reign nor due but according to my word. We Jews have a word in Yiddish for such statements as that. It's called chutzpah, brass, arrogance.

How does any man dare presume to speak like that and think piece of flesh that he is and mortal clay that he can command the elements? And yet it did not reign nor do for three and a half years according to the word of Elijah.

I tell you, it was not an act of presumption. It was not a statement of arrogance. Quite the contrary. It's only the statement that can come out of a life so thoroughly broken that has not a vestige of arrogance or self-love or conceit left.

A life that is no longer its own. It was not Elijah speaking, but one who had the whole possession of him. I can tell you people that such a thing is a process. I came to God 10 years ago because in a bookstore in Jerusalem at the end of a weary 14 months of hitchhiking as a disillusioned Marxist and atheist and a lost modern man, I found myself on a bus going nowhere in a place I did not know and walked in and asked for instructions in that bookstore to find that they sold Bibles and New Testaments and Christian commentaries and looked into that woman's Jewish face and said, what is this place?

And she said, why, we're a congregation of Jewish believers in the Messiah Jesus. And this is our bookstore adjoining our chapel. Something immediately clicked in my heart and I heard a still small voice.

I would have said, if any man hears such a voice or claims to hear such a voice, there are places for such men. But in the first hearing myself, I knew instinctively and immediately, this is the voice of him with whom I have to do.

I've heard that voice many times since, and I don't have the time to tell you of the painful acts of obedience to which I have been called in these 10 years by the hearing of such a voice. Inger said to me last night or this morning, she said, I don't understand this.

You mean you're going to come up on the platform and just say a few words and you're going to be ordained when other men have to go to school for four years before they can become ministers? What are you trying to post, she was hinting, a quickie?

What kind of slipshod practice is this? But I'll tell you people that you'll just have to read between the lines and understand that God has sent me to another kind of school. Acts of obedience so humiliating that to say that you're called from faith to faith or obedience to obedience doesn't even begin to describe what it means to follow after the still small voice.

It's acts of faith unto death, unto utter humiliation and utter mortification, not only before the world, but sometimes even before your own brethren and sometimes even before your own wife when she's not in a position to understand.

And I'll tell you that God is speaking these things this morning, not that we should commemorate an individual in history by the name of Elijah, but that we should remember and prepare ourselves to be part of that Elijah band, that corporate Elijah coming in that same fullness and same power by the Spirit to make the way straight before another corporate entity that's coming in the fullness of God, in the power and the authority and maturity of Jesus Christ, that he might come into the familiar synagogue and say, the Spirit of God is upon me.

The Lord has anointed me for end time ministry. This is not a mere historic reminder. This is a pattern of what it means to be the man of God in the end times, individually and corporately. I can't speak the kinds of things that God has called us by the hearing of a still small voice, but I'll tell you that the pattern is always consistent.

Hearing and Obeying the Still Small Voice

His speaking is always brief. Like us, he's not given to undo an unnecessary expression. He says only what needs to be said. It comes without explanation. It's always in the form of a command. It's always direct.

It's always personal, and it calls you by name. And never once in all of these speakings has it ever called me to an act of convenience. Always quite the contrary, again and again to the way of the cross.

And if I'm standing here by any virtue this morning, it's not because of expertise or knowledge or sophistication or having had the advantage of biblical or theological training, but by the simple practice of being this Jewish that when I hear the still small voice of God, I endeavor with all my heart to obey it.

And such acts of obedience always bring blessing. The first time God spoke to me, he called me by name in Jerusalem. Ought, he said, you are not to leave. No ifs, ands, buts, whys, hows, no explanations.

But I had a choice in that moment to reject that voice as indigestion or exhaustion or some other kind of natural phenomenon or choose to believe that it was the same voice heard by my father, Abram, who was also called away from convenience and familiarity to follow him to the land that he would show him.

And I chose to believe and to obey. And four days later, after being exposed to a very intensive Bible course by Jewish believers who still bore on their arms the tattooed numbers from concentration camps, but did not hesitate to stretch those arms before God in praise and worship and prayed for me and with me and told me of God's plan of salvation, I'd never heard of anything more icky and foolish and unintellectual and went to sleep that last night, whacked out of my skull and unable by my intellect to be saved, that God in my sleep had to bring the pieces into place.

That that next morning I woke with peace and calm in my heart for the first time in my entire adult life and said to the Jewish woman with whom I'm still in contact, Rina, I believe I understand, to find to fall out of her seat on her face before God, praising and worshiping him because her prayer that night was Lord, we've done everything for this stubborn man.

You make him to understand as the Lord, my God liveth before whom I stand. It shall not rain nor do, but according to my word, how God has led me by that still small voice. I guess maybe he had to. How well should a child adult like me know what to speak in the places and the occasions to which God has brought me, except that I hear by his voice and I used to receive invitations and the day that I received the invitation, I would hear from God what it was that was required to be spoken.

And then that practice ceased. And then as it came closer to the engagement, I would hear from the voice of God what it is that needed to be spoken. And then that practice ceased. And then the very day of the meeting, I would hear from God.

And then that practice ceased until I came sitting on the platform and trembling, knowing that the issue is life and death, as it always is when we open our mouths in God's name before God's people and before the world.

We're not called to entertainments, but eternal things are being transacted and life and death is always hanging in the balance. And we can't go by Jewish intellect or presumption or self-confidence or any such thing.

Lord, ever and always, what would you have for me to do? And God keeps us suspended and every man behind me knows the process in fearful tremblings and rumblings of bowels and knocking of knees, wondering to the last moment what it is that we shall speak.

And he used to give it to me on a platform, and then that ceased. And then I came right to this spot, knees banging furiously, although to every outward appearance a picture of perfect, what can I say, composure.

And then God would speak. But I'll tell you, precious people, I am not hearing so much, the still small voice. Oh, Brother Katz, shall we pray for you? Are you getting carnal? No. I think, if I could say it, I'm getting more spiritual.

And that God, what can I say, is weaning me away, even from that necessity for a reliance on that outward, still small voice. And I have more and more to believe, as we heard from the balcony this morning, that he is in me to will and to do his good pleasure, and that my thought is his thought, and my word is his word, and my hunch is his hunch, until the day that shall come in that moment when it shall please God to bring us out of a total obscurity, and we shall stand before the Ahabs of this world, and a word shall come out of our mouths, as the Lord my God liveth before my stand.

It shall not rain, but according to my word, and that word is his word. Oh, precious people, that's a far different walk from thinking that somehow God is outside us and needs always to prompt us and to give us instructions and to encourage us and give us a little shocker from the back that we might get with it.

Christ in us, the hope of glory, and is a God working to bring his people to such a place that he might have such utter possession of us that we might stand before the Ahabs of this world without trembling, and open a mouth out of which God speaks, even to command the elements.

Elijah Before Ahab and the End-Time Conflict

Staggering, staggering, and the one question that is immediately raised by this understanding is, what does it take to be brought to such a place as that? There's a process, people, and it's not necessarily a pleasant process, such an emptying out that God might have such possession of us to stand before King Ahab, who is not just an ordinary king of Israel, but a despised despot, filthy, wicked, apostate, backslidden, raising up false altars, an abomination in God's sight, and the husband of Jezebel, who is single-handedly seen to the execution of all of God's prophets.

A wicked marriage between politics and power, and a kind of religion that has at its heart fornication and vile, erotic sexual practices in the name of religion. What a picture of what the end-time world system is going to be.

And God is going to ask us to stand before that power, fearful at enmity with God, having slain all of God's prophets, and yet without trembling to say, as the Lord my God liveth before whom I stand. We had best begin now to hear that still small voice that calls us ever and always to acts of inconvenience and obedience, from faith to faith, from death to death, that when that moment comes, that we can stand.

And I'll tell you, precious people, we shall not just stand as an individual, but as a corporate Elijah band. My Jewish people practicing their religious ceremonies, their Passover, year after year, the very last aspect of which is when the youngest son goes to the front door, and everyone stands with Elijah's cup in hand, because there had been a place set for him at the Passover table, a setting and a cup, hoping that this Passover, this Pesach, despite the failure in every previous Pesach, that when the door is opened, the prophet Elijah is going to be there, the one who has to come before, the soon-coming King, the Messiah, the Anointed One, and that door has opened year after year, and they've waited with their breath suspended, and there's no one been standing in the door.

But I believe that when the door is going to open in the end times, they're going to see a corporate Elijah, and they're going to be stunned and surprised every bit as much as those Jews were in the synagogue of Nazareth, who had seen Jesus many times before, but never seen him like that.

And they shall say of this Elijah, as they said of him, is not this Joseph's son? See, aren't those the people who went to Evangelistic center? Aren't these those harmless Christians who had that innocuous Sunday pastime, who never bothered us, they were just a trifle no more than a fly buzzing about our noses?

How stunned they shall be to see a corporate band made up of people who were everywhere about them, the true believers walking in the power of the Spirit of God in obedience to him, to make the way straight for the soon-coming King.

And the word of the Lord came unto him, saying, Get thee hence, and turn thee eastward, and hide thyself by the brook Sherith that is before Jordan. It shall be that I shall drink of the brook I have commanded the ravens to feed thee there.

Uh-uh, there's Satan. See what his strategy is? Get that prophet off into the wilderness, and there's not going to be any stream, there's not going to be any ravens, and he's going to die from starvation, and we'll have removed God's instrument for the end times.

But we read, So he arose and went. And it raises a tremendous question. How did he know that that was God speaking? It sounds so much like subterfuge, it sounds like the kind of thing that Satan might say.

But there wasn't an iota of doubt or apprehension or delay in the response of an Elijah. I'll tell you people, there are great questions raised here. How did he know that that was the voice of God? He knew because he was familiar with the accents of his Lord and God.

And such familiarity is not born in a day. God is going to bring us up out of obscurity for a day, for one significant ministry in the end times, and in such a moment as that, we dare not miss the leading of God by that still small voice.

If we start then to be amateurs and to play and to trial and error methods, we shall not make it. Now is the hour of preparation. He knew the familiar voice of God. I remember that I was speaking at a university meeting in the open air, and my theme was hearing the voice of God.

And when it was over, the radicals came up, and they were irritated and vexed and wanted to know, how do you know whether it's God's voice or Satan's voice? I'll tell you that the world is asking better questions than God's people.

And I rubbed my chin. I had no clever answer, as I didn't have a little book in my jacket this morning about appropriate messages for ordination ceremonies. I didn't have an answer then, and I've never had clever answers.

Only that one who has made unto us wisdom. And while I was rubbing my chin, looking out into the crowd, there was a big shaggy mutt wending its way through the crowd. I said, you see that dog? In all of this crowd and all of this noise and all of this tumult and all this many voices, he has heard his master's voice and is going.

A lowly mutt. Can you pick out the voice of your Lord and your God in all of the tumult, the voices that shall shout upon us in the end times? Fanatic! What's the matter? Conventional religion wasn't good enough for you?

That's no way to treat your family. Such neglect. You call that obedience to God? God would never require this, etc., etc. To hear the still small voice of God. Elijah was not only familiar with the voice, he was familiar with his way, because God said, I have commanded the ravens to feed thee there.

He didn't say, but Lord, ravens, why, that's a garbage can bird. That's a scavenger. That's one that eats carrion and rotting things. That's the last instrumentality to be trusted to feed God's prophets.

So he arose and went because he knew not only the voice of God, but the way of a God who always chooses the foolish things. Do you know that, God? I'll tell you, precious people, to know him is not going to be a luxury, but an end time necessity of the greatest magnitude, to know him in his way that we do not miss him when lives and a whole Israel shall be hanging in the balance, who are halting between two opinions.

He arose and he went, according to the word of the Lord, and we know that the streams light up. Are you familiar with that aspect of God, too? Oh, how we trembled seven years ago when God called us out of the teaching profession.

My wife was pregnant for the third time. High school dropout had made good. My mother was boasting in Brooklyn to her Jewish friends, my son the professor. I had tenure and could not be fired. I had a master's degree.

I had annual wage increments. We had retirement benefits, health insurance, a four-cylinder Chevy II car, an $11 ,000 home with one closet. We had a white picket fence, and in the Assemblies of God church, who could ask for anything more?

But God said, arise and follow me, and we trembled to leave that security. And I'll tell you that even my own pastor, and many whose voices I respect, said, Art, don't do this. You'll just become another professional, and who will hear you then?

There's lots of missionaries, but how many fine Christian teachers do we have who can challenge their students as you've been doing it and witness to their colleagues? That was my first great decision, and life and death was hanging on the line.

A pregnant wife, two children. On the day that we left Oakland, California to come to New York to enter this work, we were borne up by angels, and I can feel the breath of God upon my neck. The joy was so great.

We left our little home and our little security and moved into a home twice as good, gave up our little four-cylinder Chevy car, and they supplied us in time with an air-conditioned station wagon when we came out to Kansas City to begin our work here.

And Roy Kahn took us to his house and said, Do you think that this will suit you? That split-level, fantastic house, centrally air-conditioned in Johnson County? We weren't looking for such things, people, but there's a God who has been leading us from streams, from ravens, and when the streams have dried up, and he said, Now come, I've commanded a widow woman to feed you.

We have obeyed, and God has not yet failed. We came back from Israel almost two years ago, kicked out from the Ulpan, the Center for Immigration, where we had gone to establish the principle that though we were believers in Jesus, yet were we Jewish.

And untoward things happened which we had not expected. People were getting saved and baptized in the Jordan and healed at that Ulpan, and the word got around and finally cost us our place there, and we had to leave.

We came back to America, two Jewish families, three children apiece, nothing, not knowing what, where, how, and two years later, 17-room house, two cars. Our income last year was $100 ,000. No organization, no connections, no salary.

Where has it come from? Where did God provide that television program of over 30 half-hour Ben Israel color telecasts, the first Hebrew Christian program of its kind? How did all those conferences get established for the Jewish believers?

Where did the subsistence, the sustenance come from? Where did God give words and wisdom and utterance in the places to which He brought me, well over my head? I've commanded the widow woman to feed thee.

What a precious God. And I came to Kansas City after so many years of absence, just a few months ago, and didn't even know that I would be remembered. We had been wet behind the ears here, green, didn't know which end was up, and finding our way before God and so many things in marriage and in ministry.

And when we came just a few months ago, God showed us the friends that we have here, the people who still remember us, the people, in fact, who somehow were miraculously ministered to by us, though we were young in the faith, and who have since risen to places of importance and significance in the body of Christ in this city.

And within a few minutes, God said, establish your ministry here. Ben Israel Ministries Foundation is now a fact. I never wanted to be incorporated. We're now incorporated in Kansas City with an executive board of which Roy Kahn is one, and another dear brother here is another, and several others whose names I can't immediately speak from this city.

God is doing something fantastic. And now this morning, this ordination also in Kansas City. Arise. I have commanded the widow woman to feed thee. So he arose and did according to the word of the Lord.

And I'll tell you, precious people, that many times it will have nothing to do with our choices and our preferences. I never wanted to have an organization. I never wanted to be an ordained minister. I like to be a kind of a loner.

I like to be just God's man doing his thing, but God is not allowing me such a luxury. He's tying my life to other lives. He's laying a sure foundation. He's establishing the work. It has not to do with my preference.

It has only to do with my obedience. But I'll tell you that if you shall have anything to do with my burial, and such a thing is not so absurd a question in the age to which we're moving. I just ask you to inscribe one thing on my tombstone.

So he arose and did according to the word of the Lord. Hallelujah, precious people. Let my Jewish people pull their hair and pound their chests and debate and contemplate what does it mean to be Jewish?

We've been vexed by this question for centuries, but I think that the answer lies here. To be Jewish is to hear the still small voice of God who calls us to foolishness, to absurdity, to embarrassment, to mortification, to obedience to death, and to do it.

And every time that we shall be obedient, not only shall we be blessed, but life shall go forth to others. And it went forth that day to that widow woman, and you remember the condition in which Elijah found her?

She was just looking to find some sticks to make one last meal, and she was going to cook it for her son, and they were going to die. I'll tell you that that's a picture of more than a woman who's hungry.

That's a picture of a woman who's shattered, a woman disillusioned and dejected and despondent. It's a picture of a world that has had affluence and comfort and luxury, and every kind of modern world can heap to find that all of a sudden the rug has been pulled out from under and the entire world has collapsed and the services have failed, and there's not only no gas, there's no oil, there's no power, there's no food, there's no services, there's no government, there's no order, there's nothing.

Scarcity, Crisis, and God’s Provision

And that's the kind of world to which we're quickly being drawn. God is arising to terribly shake the earth, and we've got a preview of things to come with the recent gas crisis, the gas shortage, men fighting each other over the pumps, hitting gas station attendants over the head with wrenches because they couldn't continue in their private practice of Sunday leisure driving.

What then shall we do when we shall have to fight for crusts of bread, when every service shall fail, and we shall see the fulfillment of the visions which some are already receiving of affluent middle-class people in the backyards of their homes, trembling as the husband blows on coals trying to make a fire to brew a pot of soup from the herbs and greens that he's plucked out of his own garden?

Can you believe that we should be reduced to such a thing as that? I believe it's coming in the whole modern world, that Jacob world is going to be shaken to its foundations, and it's to this world in the last days that God is going to bring us, utterly disillusioned, utterly dejected, just wanting to die.

That's where God brought Elijah, and he said that your meal shall not be wasted nor your oil fail till God bring rain upon the earth, and the word of the Lord was true in his mouth. But it wasn't sufficient to win this woman's conversion.

Have you ever come home from speaking to a friend as I've come home from speaking to my own kinsmen and fling myself down in a chair, exhausted and spent and utterly disgusted and say to myself, what does it take?

What does it take? Ten years old in God, and my mother is not yet a believer. The same woman who applauded me as a Marxist and an atheist, for whom I was some kind of an idol and an intellectual hero, was also the same woman ten years ago to slam the door in my face and call me mad, and then subsequently to say, this too shall pass.

It's not yet passed, but she's not yet saved, and the summer is almost past. The harvest is almost past. And how many times have I cried out, what does it take? What does it take? What does it take? I'll tell you it's going to take something more than groovy little stickers on the back of our bumpers.

It's going to take more than snazzy little t-shirts with a finger sticking up and junk jewelry around our necks and happy little slogans. Even the slogan that Christ is the answer is not going to save the world.

No slogan ever yet saved the world, and as a former Marxist and left-winger radical, I know the value of slogans. We need something more than slogans, even Christian slogans. This widow woman, this dejected, broken, despairing world, is going to have to see power and a miracle of great magnitude, and that's indeed what she saw.

Because we read in the 17th verse, it came to pass, after these things, that the son of a woman, the mistress of the house, fell sick, and his sickness was so sore that there was no breath left in him, and she said to Elijah, what have I to do with the other man of God?

Are thou coming to me to call my sin to remembrance and to slay my son? An untutored woman who knows nothing about spiritual things, a Zidonian who came from the same country from which Jezebel herself came, and yet in the moment of extremity and crisis she knew that what had befallen her son had to do with her spiritual condition.

I know my Jewish mothers, and I suppose that they're not unlike other mothers in the world. For their own sake they'll perish, and therefore God has got to put his finger on that thing more precious even than their own lives.

And I'll tell you, my God is arising to shake terribly the earth, not because He's a mindless God who seeks a vendetta and a vengeance on a world that has burnt Him, but because He recognizes far better than we that there's going to be an eternal shriek and a wailing and a gnashing of teeth of those who are living in a groovy civilization and who will not hear and will not turn.

And therefore whatever it shall require, to pluck as it were a branch from the fire, He shall do it. God will not spare putting His finger upon that thing which is most dear if that alone is the last thing that shall bring a person to the knowledge of Him.

What then shall He do for His own children, for His own people? I've just come back from Europe and my heart is torn. Divisions, enmity, strife, confusion, historic divisions. You can't believe how the body of Christ is separated.

And even in a little country like Holland, one of the great issues separating the body of Christ is the issue of Israel, spiritual Israel versus national Israel. And here are Christians looking at each other like enemies while an entire generation is going to its doom.

God is not going to tolerate such conditions. And He's going to put His finger upon those things which are most dear to bring us to a place of understanding and repentance, both ourselves and the world.

Crisis Reveals Spiritual Character

Have you come to call my sins to remembrance, He said? Poor Elijah, can you imagine his embarrassment? God had been speaking to him by His full, small voice, go here, do this. But He hadn't spoken to him about this.

No word in advance, no preparation, no understanding. Something hit him by surprise, and this is where the real character of a man is revealed. Precious people, what we are today in this room is one thing.

But what we shall reveal when we're caught between floors in an elevator, when the power shall fail and we shall be plunged into a black darkness, that is the revelation of our true spiritual condition.

It's one thing to shout amen and hallelujah now and sing the happy choruses when we're well fed and warm and in the company of the saints. But what shall we do when we're faced with extreme pressures, undue circumstances, unanticipated events, crises of great magnitude, great shakings, unparalleled things?

That shall be the revelation of our true condition. And I'll tell you something about the nature of the end times. It is eminently an age of revelation. Crisis reveals and absolute crisis shall reveal absolutely that veil shall be lifted off the world, which has played that hokey game of three great religions and exchanging pulpits on Mother's Day and Thanksgiving.

And we shall see the deep-seated hatred of a world that despises God and God's people. We shall see fangs bared and men gnashing their teeth upon us as has not been seen since the days of the apostles.

There shall be a revelation of the true condition of the world toward God, but there shall also be a revelation of the true condition of God's people. Many of us shall be found with our faces sticking out with hollow amens and hallelujahs, able to sing and to go through motions of religion and even seeming worship under happy circumstances.

But I'll tell you that worship is true, which came out of the mouths of Paul and Silas when they were bound in fetters and cast into an inner dungeon, and their backs hung in strips in extreme and cruel pain, smelling the stink of urine and the scurrying of rats and filth and vermin.

But at midnight, Paul and Silas prayed and sang praises unto God, and the prisoners heard them.". Hallelujah. God is teaching us the fundamentals of praise now. Not that our churches should be more exciting, but that when that moment comes of utter humiliation that we shall have to face for Christ's sake, that we shall like Paul and Silas also, in the moment of extremity and suffering, be able to sing praises unto God.

What God is going to reveal to us about Elijah in this moment is the true Elijah. What shall he do, taken by surprise without advanced information? Shall he grunt and groan and murmur under his breath?

Did Paul and Silas do that? Oh God, we were obedient to the heavenly vision, and how is it that this has happened? Nothing like that. Elijah said, give me thy son, and he took him up out of a bosom and carried him up into a loft where he abode, and laid him upon his own bed.