Martyrdom — Art Katz

Martyrdom as the Normative Witness of the Church

Well, bless the Lord. It's great to come unprepared, and I hope you'll not misunderstand me, unprepared without a canned message, but utterly prepared in the Lord. We ought always to be abiding in him and to be instant, in season, and out.

And I feel especially abiding this morning, really percolating in the Spirit of God, which is probably more for your sake than for mine, considering the weight of the somber word that I have, which is at the same time both somber and joyous.

Only the treat that the saint can enjoy is the paradox of the faith. Something can be weighty, demanding, furious, solemn, and joyous at the same time. And the subject that's in my heart this morning by the Holy Spirit is just that.

It's the subject of martyrdom. And that's not just an academic subject. That's not something that ought to stir our curiosity as an historical phenomenon that has occasionally been the experience of a few saints here and there over the centuries, but as the normative and definitive experience of the Church in every generation, and especially ours at the end.

And one not to be contemplated with a shudder like, why me? But one that needs to be embraced with joy for the great privilege which is ours to obtain a crown, and not to come before the Lord on that day bareheaded.

So I want to just quicken the text that I very rarely look at, but I think he wants us to consider together. Acts 6 and 7, which is the description of the first martyrdom of a New Testament saint. Because the things that are at the first are also the things that are at the last.

I guess you're familiar with that, aren't you? That if you want an insight into the definitive and enduring things of God, Church, faith, we look at them as they were given at the first, where we have the pristine first clear authentic statement of that thing.

And we'll have a better apprehension of what will be also at the end, when all of the muddy things in between are taken away, and we come back again at the end of the things that were at the first. So what was at the first is not only original, but true.

So this is an hour of restoration, and I have this sense that we are on a collision course for such a climactic and glorious conclusion of the things that were signaled and indicated at the first. And that the issue of martyrdom is the very definition of the Church in its truest constituency and makeup.

And it's not how we perhaps will end our lives. It's not the issue of our final moment. It's the issue of all our moments. That the Church that has made its feet with this kind of a conclusion, and anticipates it, and lives in the view of it as a forthcoming reality, is not the Church that knows how to die.

It's the Church that knows how to live. It's how we live as martyrs that settles the issue, not how we, in one final heroic moment, give up the ghost. You understand, Saints? The final moment is the statement of all our moments, and all our moments are to be called to be lived in a certain kind of apostolic and prophetic, and that indeed is true living indeed and true witness.

When the Lord said, you shall be witnesses unto me, he didn't mean distributing tracts. He didn't mean button-holding someone on a bus. He meant, you shall be martyria, you shall be martyrs unto me, because to be a martyr is the final and the true witness.

Anything less than that is an incomplete and inadequate witness of him, who himself is the firstborn, and the first and the true martyr of God. And everything that witnesses to him witnesses to that. And the great Saints who have not loved their lives unto death were in that tradition, and I'm of such a mind this morning to believe that they're even around us invisibly, in this very service, who are not yet complete without us.

If we believed that and knew that and sensed that, how different would our services be? To know that we're moving toward something, and every teaching, every study, every proclamation of the word is a preparation for that end, which is both glorious and eternal in its consequence.

Stephen and the Apostolic Character of Ordinary Service

So who's the first martyr in the New Testament? A Jewish fellow by the name of Stephen, who was a busboy. And that should not be lost to our consideration, because we might romanticize and think that the great apostles and the great martyrs of the faith were men of gigantic and heroic proportions, and that we somehow are eclipsed, and that it does not mean us.

We need to really understand and know that they were flesh and blood, like us, in every way. Ordinary and yet extraordinary in the great genius of what the faith is. Stephen was a waiter on tables. Let's read that in chapter 6.

Can we turn off the fan or the air conditioning? I just suffer a little discomfort for this message. There's something contradictory about pondering martyrdom under the comfort of an air-conditioned room.

It'd be far more appropriate to sweat a bit, not out of fear, but just somehow that's it. Hallelujah. Why does my spirit always breathe a sigh of relief when man's technology is silenced? There's more in that thing than meets the eye.

We have paid such a price already for convenience that does not befit the noble theme of martyrdom, and does not prepare us for it. We need to declare war on convenience. We need to willingly embrace the things that are inconvenient, so all the world subscribes to them, and will give us every reason why we should not deny ourselves.

What does it say that for a want of a nail, the shoe was lost on the horse, and for the want of the horse being hobbled, the battle was lost, and for the want of the battle, the wall was lost, and it all went back to a nail.

The very issue of how we will act in a final and ultimate moment of trial is not going to be decided then, it's going to be decided now. Over the issue of air conditioners, an extra hamburger or sundae, and sensual indulgence that all the world sanctions as legitimate, may well determine whether we will stand or fall before pressure and tension and demand in a final hour.

All of our hours need to be seen in this context. All of our present living needs to be seen as pertaining to the end, or we are not properly living. We need to have an apostolic view that sees our present moment in the context of the whole, excuse the language, panoply of the faith, the whole tremendous extension of the things that were from the beginning and are to the end, or we don't see a right.

If we don't see like that, we will have a very narrow and culturally and nationally determined view of the present. We will be locked in time, locked in culture, and we will lack a witness, because we will be speaking to people from the very same vantage point of perspective by which they themselves see.

In a word, we will not be coming to them from eternity. We will not be speaking to them from their heavenly place. We'll be very much at their level, sharing their values, and the only difference is we have a particular vocabulary that's religious.

And you shall be witnesses unto me, is more than doing witness for me. It's a being thing. It's a quality of life. It's a condition. And out of that flows everything. But we Americans, God bless us, are so doing-oriented.

The doing is the easy part. The being is what is costly. And if our doing does not come out of our being, it's not apostolic, neither is it witness. So this is an invitation to being a witness, to being a martyr.

And it's a thing to which we need to give ourselves now. So in chapter 6, we read in the first verse that the number of disciples were multiplied, and there arose a murmuring of the Greeks against the Hebrews, because their widows were neglected in the daily ministration.

Then the twelve called the multitude of the disciples unto them, and said, It's not reasonable that we should leave the word of God and serve Cain. Wherefore, brethren, look ye out among you, seven men of honest report, full of the Holy Ghost, and wisdom, whom we may appoint over this business.

For we will give ourselves continually to prayer and to the ministry of the word. And when they saying, please the whole multitude. And they chose Stephen, a man full of faith and of the Holy Ghost. That's our introduction to Stephen.

I tell you, it gives us such a stabbing insight into the character of the early church, the apostolic church and the glorious church. That even something as ordinary and as mundane as the waiting on tables required men full of the Holy Ghost and of wisdom.

I tell you that if we had such men in our midst today, we would exalt them to such a high place in the purposes of God and of the church, rather than the waiting on tables. And I believe that nothing is small in the kingdom of God.

Nothing is ordinary, nothing mundane. Do you see that? The word mundane actually means earthly, ordinary, dirt, grit. But it's in the ordinary places that apostolic character is formed. How would you have liked to minister to the Greek and Hebrew widows who were murmuring with a sense of rivalry and competition that was already beginning to fester in the early church, and had it continued, may well have enervated and destroyed that glorious body.

That's all it takes is a little leaven to leaven them to lump, and for the Gentile widows to feel that they were getting shortchanged and that the Jewish widows were being much more handsomely treated by the Jewish church.

And that's all we need in a situation explosive with racial and ethnic differences to have done in the church from its very inception. And you don't have to imagine that the enemy was right there at the elbow, seeking every opportunity to sow dissension and to bring down the church, even at that level.

And that's why the apostles themselves for the wisdom of the Lord said, seek ye out among you men of good report and full of the Holy Spirit and of wisdom. Because this is more than just serving. Because the small things are the great things.

And because in the kingdom of God, there's no thing small. Everything is fraught with consequence. Everything has an eternal weight if we but can see it. The only reason that we're lax, anemic, and what's the word, complacent, that's it, is because we don't see ourselves at that level.

We don't see ourselves involved in the things that are eternal. We need to see things. And if Stephen was anything, he's a man who saw. Because when we come to the end of the chapter 7, we're going to see that he saw a heaven opened.

And Jesus standing at the right hand of the Father. He really saw. And I believe it was not a seeing of the final moment, but a seeing of all his moments. I'm such a civilized man. You can come up after the service and pinch me.

You know how civilized I am? I have been in East Germany many times. And I'll never forget the experience of meeting a saint there, maybe just an ordinary wife of a pastor. One of the areas, at least in Germany, most known for its occultic and witchcraft history and tradition.

And this woman, in my every conversation with her, always had her hand upon her heart. Her conversation was continually studded with references to God, to the Lord. And as she would say these things, shake it and look up.

I don't know if she ever looked at me. She was always looking up, always looking up. I wondered what she was seeing. When I looked up, all I could see was a cracked ceiling with peeling plaster. But evidently, she saw something above and beyond and through.

And she saw it continually, and she saw it whole. It affected all her feelings. I'll tell you, if you let this come into your spirit and sweep your eyeballs from apostolic texts like this, you'll be ruined, charismatically speaking.

We have made such a cheap merchandise of the Holy Spirit to improve the atmosphere at our meetings or our defunct denominations. The glory of the Holy Spirit, saints, is given from much more. And I'm wondering whether, indeed, we have received that spirit in fullness.

It's the very spirit of martyrdom. It is the eternal spirit by which Jesus himself gave his life without sight before God. What we have is something else and something other. I'm dubious about it, whether many times, indeed, it's even the Spirit of God.

Too glibly, too cheaply obtained, and the evidence of the projection of it does not seem to transform people and bring them to the proportion of the kinds of men that the Church insisted upon for the mere serving of tables.

They chose Stephen, a man full of faith and of the Holy Ghost. And in verse 8, Stephen, full of faith and power, did great wonders and miracles among his people. You know, I just want to say this for the first time, after being a believer over a quarter of a century.

The word full, are you underlining that in the text this morning? You'll see the frequency of the word full with reference to Stephen. It's as if that is the thing to which we must come. That not to be full, and just to have the Spirit of God in part, is to be somehow disqualified.

It's full or nothing. It's all or nothing. That it's when you're full that somehow the resonance of God and the power of God and the reality of God issues. Something about full. What's that mean? Take that word like a wine onto your lips and into your tongue, and don't be too quick to swallow it down.

Let it lay there and feel the prickly part of it, and then let it slip into your inwards, and to bring a quickening warmth full of the Holy Spirit. How come we're not full? Because there's always a competition between spirits.

There's the Spirit of the world and the Spirit of God. How many times have I enjoined young Christians to cut their hair and let go of a little thing at the nape of the neck, or to take that cruddy finger off and around their wrist that they call friendship bracelet, or whatever they call it, and the various other kinds of cultural adornments that somehow we have become so accustomed to that we don't even wince at the seeing.

I've even heard reports from a sister who took off a star of David, and I'm Jewish, and felt an enormous exhilarating relief and a rush of the Holy Spirit in the being. I'm very careful what goes on my neck and my body.

Touch not the unclean thing. Be you separate, saith the Lord, and touch not the unclean thing, and I will receive you and be a father unto you, and you shall be my sons and my daughters, saith the Lord God Almighty.

Dear children, if we're not full of the Holy Spirit, it's because it's to one degree or another that we have acceded and yielded ourselves to the Spirit of the world, and it's displacing the space that should be occupied wholly and entirely by the Spirit of God.

We need to periodically examine ourselves and see whether indeed we are in the faith. These things are written for our admonition. God forbid that we should think that a man like Stephen was some extraordinary giant of the Hillelot mold whom we could never think to be.

He was a flesh and blood man like you and me, but he was a sanctified man. He was a set-aside man. He was a separated man. He was full of the Spirit of God and of wisdom. And if he needed to be that merely to serve table at the commencement of the Church's history, what do we need at the end of that history, when the powers of darkness will clash with the powers of light in a final apocalyptic fury in which it says that the blood of the martyrs will swell the harlot of Babylon, and that the beheaded of God will cry out and ask, Lord, how long before we are vindicated?

This is the picture that the Scriptures give, both in Revelation and in the apocalyptic Old Testament book of Daniel, of what the end will be, where the saints will be worn out and overcome. And God gives the powers of darkness the right to overcome the saints.

That's what it says, saints. I'm not making that up. What does that mean, and why would God allow it? It's something that we ought to ask, because the time is not far off when those realities will be taking place.

Persecution, Radiant Witness, and the Apostolic Church

You know what I've been saying to the Church for decades in the Western world? Shame on us, the scandal of the absence of persecution. Shame on us that the quality of our Christian life is so timid, so predictable, and so inoffensive, that many of us can go through an entire Christian lifetime and never, ever experience opposition, scandal, reproach, persecution, or suffering.

The very nature of the true apostolic faith guarantees a recoil against us from the world, and the fact that that has not been our experience is an indictment to our shame. We are living beneath the apostolic standard, or we would have elicited and provoked that against us long before.

So I'm privileged to see East German women who are continually looking up to heaven, and I was privileged last year this time to be in Zimbabwe, Africa, and to be a speaker at the memorial service of 16 saints who had been hacked to death two years before in that place.

They would put you in the shade, every one of you, in terms of their beauty, their linguistic ability, their multiple skills, and professions, and qualifications of whom the world was not worthy. We're not talking about some ranchie ex-drug addict Jesus freak off the wall who has just come into the kingdom.

We're talking about people who could have made their mark in the world professionally, and chose to forfeit all of that to live in a remote section of the former nation of southern Asia, where it was troubled, and where, after an eight-year civil war, a black government has been formed, and most of the whites fled for fear of what would come.

But those whites that remained were essentially Christians, and they remained because they were moved by the Holy Spirit to and to work out the destiny of this nation, being willing to submit to a black government to take all the risks of loss of land and loss of life, while the tribe that was out of power was yet infiltrating the countryside, trying to bring down that administration regime, and particularly attacking white farmers.

And they moved into that area to establish a community of reconciliation, and to live unarmed, and to trust God for their safety and for their security. And we're doing a remarkable job after several years in that area—fish farms and chicken coops and lifting up the whole economic standard of an area that had been depressed economically for years.

And in that success, one night, abruptly—and that's the way it comes in. It comes abruptly. It comes when we expect it least. And how we respond and react in that moment that comes to us suddenly and without anticipation is what the whole space is about.

It's not our amens and hallelujahs today that is the statement of our condition. It's what we are in a final moment of extremity that will tell us, and that moment is all. How will we act when we're taken unawares, and suddenly, the great threat of our very life is upon us was that situation.

And not even the dignity of being shot to death, but being bludgeoned and cut to death by an axe, one at a time. Taken with their wrists, handcuffed and barbed wire, and brought into a building, and all through the night, all you could hear is the thump of an axe, with not one howl or screech or scream in pleading for their earthly existence.

I'll tell you that the black, militant, Marxist-oriented, racist radicals who did them in were witnessed to, ultimately. And not one of them will stand before God with excuse that they had never seen the glory of God in the faces of the saints.

It was my privilege to be again at that place for the memorial service to see the burned-out buildings where I had been years before, when I first met these people with whom I was in correspondence. And to know that the subject of martyrdom is not academic, that it had come this close to home, that I was in actual correspondence with those who had died.

And in fact, the report came to me when I was in New York City, casing the joint for God, feeling that I have a call in my life to my own Jewish kinsmen in the city of my own birth, the great Babylon.

And I said to a brother who was with me when we heard the report of their death, I said, the next reports will not be so distant. It will not always be coming from behind blind curtains, or in Africa, or in the so-called dark places.

We're going to have it right on the streets of Honolulu, and Manhattan, and San Francisco, and all the places where the filthy, fierce powers of hell cannot abide the presence of the glorious and radiant, sanctified saints of God.

I stayed in Johannesburg at the home of a wealthy Jewish doctor whose Christian wife was related to the family. One family had seven members wiped out in one fell swoop. And this man was unsaved and a leader of the Jewish community.

In fact, the very personification of all that the Jewish community exalts as being religious, and ethical, and moral, and accomplished, but unsaved. And he said that, you know, these people used to bug me.

One of my great, one of my best friends was among them, who before he was converted, was just a great fellow and great fun. And we used to go to the bar and knock back a few drinks, and he was a womanizer, and one of the boys.

But after he got saved, he became impalerable. He was always witnessing to me, and poking his finger in my chest, and, you need to be saved, and I couldn't stand it. And it irritated me, and I was sorry for the loss of the friendship.

But he said, toward the end, Art, these people were progressively changed. And he said, toward the end, their faces had become radiant. And they were no longer working on me the way they used to, he said, but even in their silence, they were much more convicting than in the earlier days when they used to needle me.

And when he said that their faces were radiant, I thought of this text, because it says in verse 15, and all that's done in the council, looking steadfastly on him, saw his face as it had been the face of an angel.

You want to avoid martyrdom? Just keep on looking the way you're looking. Which is nice, but it ain't radiant. You allow God to move you toward the place of having an angelic face, and you won't wait long to experience persecution and opposition.

There's a world that is still at enmity with God, and the darkness hates the light, and still wants to extinguish it. We really have a choice this morning about how far we want to go with God, and how full of his Spirit we really want to be.

And I'll tell you where the radiance of God is compounded and established in the faces of the saints. It's in the church. But not a church of the casual, sitting in pews. Not the church made up of individualists who come to send on Sunday to sit alongside one another.

It's the church of a people who are together. A church of a people who go from house to house daily, breaking bread. A church of a people who receive the word of God, the truth spoken in love, who will exhort one another daily, as well as yesterday, who reprimand and reproach and evict the word, and exhort and rebuke if they have to.

Because none of us, in this filthy world, where these daily appeals, this coming forth from Potiphar's wife, come lie with me. We've got it coming. None of us can resist that and stand before God, single-eyed and pure and clean, except by the strength, the encouragement, the exhortation, the prayer, the example that comes to us in the body by a like-minded people who are moving in the same way.

What kind of church do we want to be? And I want to tell you something. To move from mere Sunday services and midweek Bible studies to the kind of apostolic thing that I'm describing cannot be obtained without a suffering.

It itself is a suffering. It's a humiliation. It's a being found out. Though God does not explain how Stephen came to have a face like an angel, I want to tell you, Acts 6 and 7 is not the very next day after Pentecost.

Though it's only three or four chapters after the falling of the Holy Ghost on the day of Pentecost, we might be reading now of events that took place five, six, or seven years after the falling of the Spirit of God.

So the sanctifying work of God has been going on in the church and in the body to bring forth men like this to such a degree, so full of the Spirit of God and so full of heaven, that they look like angels.

Not sitting in the Sunday pew, but when they were being faced by their detractors and their antagonists who were ready to kill the very life out of them. There is faith shown like an angel. And this Reverend Johannesburg said, Ah, their faces were radiant.

I said, Oh, that's it. Now I know why they were murdered. We want to keep ourselves from the martyr's course. All we need to do is continue to be ordinary and to be satisfied with a Christianity that is a mere succession of services and enjoy a biblical word and some praise and worship and go home and live lackluster lives.

But if we want to glorify God and be a witness unto him who is going to allow the anti-Christ forces at the end of the age to overcome the saints, then we need to live quite differently now. Because it is in being overcome that we overcome.

It's what we exhibit in that final moment of extremity that is the whole issue of our faith, and that all of the years and days that preceded are moving toward this one end. Remember Jesus on the cross?

And that dumb centurion who was a professional murderer and had executed numbers of people on the cross standing by and watching Jesus in the final agony and paroxysm and suffering of his death? But he saw something in the ultimate extremity of that suffering that he had never seen in another.

That when Jesus yielded up his ghost, when he prayed for those who had brought him to the place of death, when he did not retaliate in kind to those of his own people to whom he had come who were taunting him and saying, come down from the cross and we'll believe you.

You've saved others, yourself you cannot save. That was more true than they knew. Himself he could not save. Could not. And would not. That when he died in this remarkable way, something was revealed.

That this dumb Gentile centurion who had never been to Hebrew school, never knew anything about the scriptures, or the Messiah, or God's plan of God, or his salvation, his redemption, cried out, even in his ignorance, at that glorious demonstration, truly this was the Son of God.

Now listen, Saint. We're very close to coming full circle. There's going to be one end of the age of demonstration of exactly this same phenomenon. But this time it's the church on the cross. This time it's the body of Christ following its master.

With us or ever he goeth, that leads us to the same place of final confrontation and suffering and death as what he experienced. And what we shall demonstrate in that extremity of the final moment is the whole issue of our life.

If we screak, if we howl, if we say why me and how come, and wring our fingers, it's lost. What did Stephen exhibit in his final moment? Let's turn the page to chapter 7, when he had reviewed the entire history of the Jewish people with the doctors of the law and his detractors.

He was giving them a summary of the whole meaning of the faith, and finally came in verse 47 and 48 about the house of God, and that God does not dwell in temples made with hands, as saith the prophet.

Who is he saying this to? Men whose whole religious life is staked in a temple made with hands. They are religious functionaries, thinking they're serving God, and actually ablating him because they think he speaks against the holy temple.

He was challenging and threatening their whole religious life, their place of preference, their prestige, their gratification. So will it be again at the end of the age, when the religious and political forces, symbolized by Jezebel and Ahab, come together in one final powerful configuration and will be challenged by us.

Not only by our speaking, but by our very presence, because who represents another kind of temple in which the Holy Ghost dwells in full. Heaven is my throne, and earth is my footstool. What house will you build me, sayeth the Lord, in verse 49.

What is the place in my rest, hath not my hand made all these things? And then something breaks out of him, terribly impolite, confrontational, not at all politic. He should have been wiser and not agitated these people to such a place that he almost guarantees that they're going to rise up against him in a bitterness and fury.

But you want to know a thing? He did not deliberate one word of what he said. Very much in the same way that I'm not deliberating any words that I'm saying. I'm trusting the Holy Ghost to bring forth his own burden without my deliberation.

And I've already been warned. You know where I'm going from here? What is Hawaii? There's only about a six-day interval in Minnesota. Israel. Fearfully respect upon nations. For ten days, you can pray November 15th to 25th.

I don't know that I'm going to come out alive. And I'm not just speaking about the possibility of a gas and nuclear war. I may not come out alive from just confronting the saints. I've already been warned prophetically in Australia on this trip.

It's going to be an exceedingly dangerous time. And I'll be standing before rulers and leaders, but not to take source for what I shall say. That God will be with me as he was with Stephen. Listen to these words, then, and understand it's not a man speaking, but very God.

Use stiff necks and uncircumcised and hardened ears, to whom it is being addressed. The proudest, loftiest men of the religious establishment will think that they have it all together. Coming to a moment of truth and confrontation, to hear something about their condition as God himself sees it.

Use stiff necks and uncircumcised and hardened ears. You do always resist the Holy Ghost. As your fathers did, so do you. Which of the prophets have not your fathers persecuted may have slain them, which showed before the coming of the just one of whom you have been now, the betrayers and murderers.

This guy's pulling out all the stops. Were they actually there in the hour of the crucifixion of Jesus? Were they actually there in the hour of the crucifixion of Jesus? Whether they were or whether they weren't physically, he's inviting them that there's an unbroken continuum of sin with their fathers, which they should and for which they have never repented.

That implicates them both for the death of the prophet and Jesus. And you know how come his statement is true? Because now they're going to be responsible also for his death. We need to see as God sees, and men need to see as God sees, that they're going to repent before his appearance.

We need to persuade men, knowing the terror of God. But I'll tell you what, unless our mouths are yielded to the Holy Ghost, to speak the things that he wants spoken, they're not going to be confirmed.

Looking for spiritual laws a lot easier than this. Are you saved, brethren? Do you know God has a plan for your life? The benefits that you'll receive by accepting Jesus? It's a lot easier to hear than you stiff-necked and uncircumcised of ears and of hearts.

How long do you continue to oppose and to grieve the Holy Spirit? I'm not saying that this is for us the necessary word. Here's what I'm saying. Whatever the word is, to the one before whom we stand, or the people before whom we stand, it needs to be God's, and not ours.

Does he have the full possession of our vessels? That he can speak without compromise, whatever is in his heart, no matter what the consequence is for ourselves. And I'll tell you what, that as pastors and ministers, if now we are afraid of the people of God, if we're cowardly in the church, if we're afraid to say something lest it offends, and we lose the favor of people in the congregation who might walk out and leave us and go to another congregation and take their tithes and offerings with them, how shall we stand before the enemies of God?

To stand before God and not before men is the posture of a martyr, not in a final moment, but in all of our moments. I'd like to tell you a story of what God has had to say through his mouth over the course of these years, for which I'm not invited back.

And often if men could, they would stone me for it. I'm not celebrating myself, thanks. I'm as ordinary as season. I'm a high school dropout. But I'm saying that the church of the end of the age must have this character, or else it will find itself another kind of church in opposition to this one, and it will be called apostate.

You don't remember a single thing else that I'm saying this morning. Will you remember this? That Cactus predicted that at the end of the age there's only going to be two kinds of Christian entities. The apostates, which is the greater number of those calling themselves Christians, who are content with mere predictable Christian services, and a much smaller remnant people called the people of God.

And the one will hurt, hate, oppose, and persecute the other, and kill us, and claim they are doing God a service. Dear children, hear me. I ought to give a rap what it's like outside today, and how beautiful Hawaii is, and how idyllic, and how romantic, and does not lend itself to these apostolic verities.

This is the truth of the matter, no matter what we see with our natural eyes, and we will be wise to live in accordance with it, rather than with the things that are visible. I'm predicting that if we will not give ourselves to the radical threat of God, to bring us daily, every bit more, to becoming the Stevens of our generation, we'll find ourselves with those who have stoned us.