The Law and the Commandments — Art Katz

The Law and the Moral Requirement of God

Huh this on yeah, this is for recording. This is for recording. Can you hear me? Okay. Yeah I'm just gonna quote from two sources that are very dear to me and part of my. Well, the one at least is part of my daily devotional time my utmost for his highest by us will chambers.

Are you guys reading that daily? If you're not you're missing. So much. I don't have a word for it. I don't know another one who has the depth of insight and the felicity of expression as Oswald Chambers Piercing and I'll give you an example of what has inspired this morning's talk.

It's his devotional for December 1st called the law and the gospel. And he quotes always a scripture at the top this one from James For whosoever shall keep the whole law and yet offend in one point He is guilty of all and then he goes on to say The moral law does not consider us as weak human beings at all.

It takes no account of our heredity and infirmities. It demands that we be Absolutely moral. The moral law never alters either for the noblest or for the weakest it is eternally and abidingly. The same the moral law ordained by God does not make itself weak to the weak.

It does not paliate our shortcomings it remains absolute for all time and eternity as My wife says, what do you think of them apples? It's rare to hear anyone speak in such a way to have that kind of a conviction.

And I appreciated Hearing it reading it being reminded of it and all of a sudden with one fell swoop I was brought to a realization of the profound departure from any sense of the moral law as it affects even Christian society and civilization we have become law less.

We're not mindful of the moral requirement of God. And in fact, we have subscribed to the kind of subversive view Commended to us by psychologists and sociologists that we you can't help it or happen.

Is that how you say it in the South you drop the L can't help it and that we're victims of society. And I think especially of the black community Victims there's a victim mentality. We're living only a few miles from a North American Chippewa Indian Reservation and we see a lot of that there.

That we're seduced into believing that we're helpless victims and we couldn't help becoming Alcoholics or given to violence or the various things? The reason is that no one has impressed us with the absoluteness of the requirement of God about thou shalt not I Often in the My 35 year history as a believer and as the founder of a fellowship and so on and the various issues that have come up wondered how believers could have allowed themselves a certain line of conduct that would have Been met by an obedience to the Ten Commandments.

Doesn't matter what your background is or your heredity or your environment thou shalt not That the God that God has said that Overrides every other consideration and we're under obligation not only to acknowledge it but to do it and if we in our Intent in doing it and find ourselves inert weak and unable the Lord has then a solution in the cross of Christ Jesus.

But there has been a failure to apprehend the cross. Because we have not been driven to that cross by an earnestness that would have been born by our failure to take the moral requirement of God. Seriously and so the whole of society has become pluralistic Excusable sociologically minded and that mentality I think has come into the church itself and the ministers of the church are not as attuned as Oswald Chambers to the Absoluteness of God's requirement to make it known and we ourselves are cutting corners and taking liberties.

And that's what I hope to get into. Why it is that we ourselves as ministers are not as insistent in Commending the requirement of the law of the commandments of the moral requirement of God To our congregants.

What is it about ourselves? One of the phenomena of our time is the leniency of judges today. They find it very hard to pronounce hard sentences. I'm amazed. In our local community a man who was in charge of the finances for the local university and the running of their athletic program and their Gymnasium and the whole thing Wilford from those funds.

Something more than a hundred and forty thousand dollars and all that was required of him with the acknowledgement of his guilt was a statement of apology some kind of financial penalty to pay back some portion that he had spent and What was it?

Civil works or what do they call that? Huh? Yeah, some kind of community service. My god, is there no real penalty murderers get away with like five-year sentences three years. They're off on probation.

It's as if the whole severity of the law and its requirement has been greatly diminished. To the detriment of society itself and someone has suggested that the judges are lenient. Because they themselves are in sin because they themselves want to be absolved from the requirement of Society and of God and so it disposes them to be lenient with those who before them because they desire leniency for themselves.

That is to say they are not in a place of righteousness that they can perform and require righteous judgment. Because if their own life was on the line they themselves could not bear the verdict. The question is to what degree is that true of God's ministers today this Decision to obey and seek to obey the absolute requirement of God I believe will be honored by God that there's something implicit in the law and the commandment itself.

That gives the grace to do it if we have the intention and the seriousness to obey it. Something inherent in the law and in the commandment in the requirement is also a grace to perform it. But we don't take it seriously enough to consider it and they're looking back on my own conversion 35 years ago.

I myself Jewish Half-baked intellectual was a determinist. That is to say I couldn't happen. I was the victim of my environment. I was the victim of my heredity. What I was as a seducer as a An adulterer was just the consequence of factors to which I was born in which I have which of which I had no control you know when the first moment of realization came that I was not a victim and that I could choose and in fact the choosing of a line of conduct is Itself the birth of that which is moral and the absence of morality is the absence of humanity.

We're growing up a fearful generation of not only immoral youth and adults a moral not immoral a moral without any kind of Moral sense and that's why they can come into their high schools and blast away 12 or 15 students and think that they're doing their God service Without a twinge of conscience even taking their own lives.

Even suicide itself is not a fearful consideration because there's no concept of a God will judge or that there's an eternity in which that judgment will Take place. I like the German word for suicide self-mort self-murder.

Suicide is murder. The fact that you inflicted upon yourself Does not absolve you from the same penalty as if you had murdered another you're murdering a piece of God's creation. How is it then that these kids coming out of Christian homes can not only murder their students.

But murder themselves with impunity without even a twinge of conscience. Are we already seeing the fulfillment of the last days prophecies that in the last days? Not dangerous, but Perilous praise God in the last days perilous times shall come.

Why perilous rather than dangerous? Because danger is apparent perilous hidden. Perilous time shall come. Men shall be lovers of self lovers of pleasure. More than lovers of God disobedient unruly unthankful unholy without natural affection.

That is to say that with impunity they can kill they can rape they can loot. There's no moral sense at all. Certainly the church has got to be indicted in its failure to communicate that and the fear of God.

Traveling around the world as I do and churches of every variety and shape and hue I would say the most conspicuous lack in the contemporary church here and abroad is the absence of the fear of God. When you take away the moral requirement of God and the eternal penalty for violating it you remove the fear of God.

Which is to say God as God you continue to mouth phrases about him you can intone and invoke the name Jesus. But the God that you're in fact Celebrating or relating to is not in fact the God who is God.

Ministers, Confession, and the Reality of the Church

So I Thought I had left this back in my room to the praise God. I didn't because you see how I mock it up you guys do that. I Got suspicious in Czechoslovakia on my last overseas trip. When the man who came up to be my interpreter was one of the elders of the church fluent in English.

But when he opened his Bible I thought then This is not going to work. Why. Because first of all it was a small print Bible. How could the man even see it and find the appropriate scripture, and there was not a mark anywhere in any of its pages.

Nothing in parentheses nothing in brackets. No asterisks. No arrows nothing with a yellow marking pen. How can you read the scripture and leave it unmarked or read anything and leave it unmarked. I want to go back to my markings.

I want to see what it is that caught my attention at the first and See it yet again. So I'm glad I didn't forget This issue because the Lord has quickened some things I think for this morning to remove the moral basis for life is to remove our humanity.

We're growing up a stunted and perverse mankind because the moral quotient is Absent from their consideration and the church has not sufficiently registered that on the consciousness of its society. So how does that affect us?

Why am I sharing this with you this morning? Because we cannot require of others a standard which we ourselves have not met Nor intend to meet. Our predicament is that we ourselves remain bound in unconfessed sins for want of a confessor.

I Don't know any class of men more in this predicament than ministers. There's something about the professional mystique. The ministerial mystique by which a man comes up on the platform and people look at him with rapt admiration.

Because he's supposed to be God's man of faith and power our whole environment Is so false so artificial so synthetic that a man of God cannot be a man. He's got to be somehow of another species and kind that the congregation can admire at a distance.

But never hope to emulate. They don't know guys that you that you're struggling. They don't know that you have your ghost in your closet. They don't know that you are awake at night with dreams that are horrible even to remember and that you're capable of lust or worse Being men and that there's no one to whom you can go to confess your struggle or the issue of Fallenness or or any of the kinds of things that you're of necessity.

Bound to experience all the more as you come under the oppressive Attack of the enemy who wants to produce you and wants to bring you down. I'm often fond of saying that the church is not only God's provision for the sheep or for the shepherds also.

But it's only a church of a certain kind. It's certainly not the church whose model is institutional and whose platform is elevated and whose man is certificated and isolated from an actual Involvement and the unmasking of the truth of his own condition to his own people as an early believer.

35 years ago the golden moments that I remember is when the pastor broke on The platform and behind the pulpit and confessed and admitted the defects and the deficiencies and the weaknesses of his own life.

It's as if the Holy Ghost flooded the room. It was a spirit of truth. Our hearts were changed warm. There was an identification with the man making that kind of confession and because he could make it we in the pews could acknowledge that We also had our defects our sins our hang-ups and that the false piety that had prevailed.

Particularly in Pentecostal circles had been rent by a man who had the courage to express the truth of his condition and to cry out to the congregation for help not the picture. I Gave a message last summer.

Confessing Sins and Bearing One Another’s Burdens

We have a prophetical school up there in northern, Minnesota. On to whom shall we confess our sins? The scripture says confess your faults one to another that you might pray one for another and be healed.

To whom do we go to confess what one of our elders or board members God forbid. That he could use something at some future meeting to bring us down. Because he's imprudent and because it for him it will be an ammunition.

Where do we find a man appear? to whom we can let our hair down and take the mask of piety away and Show our weakness and defect and need and that that brother's prayer can actually heal us and deliver us.

We're living Unnecessarily with struggles and Crises of a moral kind that we cannot bring to resolution because we do not avail ourselves of God's own remedy. Confess your faults one to another one. That's a public thing necessarily.

But one to another one that he that that one might pray for us that we might be healed and delivered out of that Bondage or hang-up or whatever that crisis situation is. How does that relate to what to what I shared earlier, I'll repeat myself.

We are not emphatic about the absoluteness of God's moral requirement because we cannot face it ourselves. It's not our favorite subject. And if we do if we do make it our subject and our life is in is that odds or in disparity with that subject.

Then to preach it is to become merely professional blib. Able to speak something that is not integral to our own conviction or our own integrity. And you know what? I would say that condition is of all things most to be feared.

God forbid that we can come to a time when we can preach any subject whether or not it's consonant with our own Conviction and the truth and the integrity of our own lives and do a masterful and successful job of it.

If it's going to be apostolic and life-giving the man has got to be his message. And where there's a Disjuncture between the man and what he proclaims what we get is something synthetic artificial religious.

It doesn't affect anyone. They've heard a good biblical word. They leave unchanged and continue in their own liberty in Transgressing the moral requirements of God and falling short of the full humanity that the moral requirement brings.

Got the picture. So I want to spend the rest of my time Subject of to whom shall we confess our sins and our faults. Because when I finish sharing that at our Discussion table there in northern, Minnesota. There were at least a half dozen or more Kleenexes completely saturated with my tears.

I was not speaking academically. I was speaking out of the groaning of my own condition and need. To whom shall I confess? Who is there in my fellowship. Who is there with whom I'm in relationship that I could trust with with these private Aspects of my life who will not at some later time use it.

Who is there qualified to hear that confession. And how important is that confession? Because if it does not take place, there's a backlog there's a logjam. Something in our spirits and in our inner man is being hemmed up we have not the liberty the freedom the fullness to communicate to God's people the things that would bring life to them and Therefore the result is we become play actors.

Professionals who are able to put together a good biblical word. But it's not related to the reality of our life and therefore it cannot be spoken with the depth of conviction that it deserves the unreality of play acting of.

Becomes a kind of biblicism or sermonizing. I can't think of anything more pitiful than a church that is sermonized. And in fact that probably is the truth of most Sundays everywhere in America. You say well, what's the alternative?

It's the Word of God that becomes an engrafted word a Liberating word a life-giving word. There's all the difference between a mere sermon. However, biblical and the Word of God spoken out of the truth and condition of the life of the man consonant with that word.

So rather than a convicting word, it's merely a professional word a biblical word a sermon and We lose contact with reality with our own center with our own authenticity. I don't know if you guys have that problem.

You know, there's a time when I I brought a moratorium on my own speaking. I took a voluntary Sabbatical because I had come to the point where I was hearing myself Repeat myself. I had come to the point where things that were original and given of God were now so threadbare so well-worn that they were rising up in my consciousness and I was repeating what was originally given but was not now not being spoken by the same.

Authentic giving this of God as it was at the first and I knew that when I came to that place I needed to halt. Oftentimes, I'll get up to speak. I'll choke and splutter and Hem and ha what am I waiting for?

Why can't I just launch out immediately because I have not found my own center. The atmosphere in the room the worship that has preceded the message not always of the best kind and most conducive to the word.

In fact very often in opposition to the word has left me a bit discombobulated. I can't begin to launch out I I've got to make contact again with the center with the authentic root of my own life and God before I can open my mouth.

We ought to take more time for that. The world does not hesitate to give it to athletes. They don't go running out on the court or into the boxing ring. They have already warmed up in the dressing room.

They come into the ring sweating and then they still prance and dance and and limber up. Before the contest begins and we are supposed to be men. Instantly up on the platform and bang the gong rings and we're ready to deliver.

Naturalness Versus Professional Ministerial Performance

You cannot help but become professional Affective Ministerial a style and who is there in your congregation who's going to call that to your attention? And say brother Jim or whoever I just been noticing in these last few Sundays.

Your your word and the way in which you bring it is becoming somewhat stilted your voice is becoming Stentorian it's like a Rhetoric a professional delivery. You've lost your naturalness. I had to say to a Assemblies of God pastor somewhere in the Buffalo area my last time out.

He was full of gusto and bravado and sweeping gestures and he was the man of overcoming faith. And I knew that I knew that I knew that to see this man as BVDs. To see him as a real in fact is as a remarkable and radical distance from what he was representing to the congregation.

Everything was hyped up voice the manner and as I left the room and the Lord Dropped a bomb that Sunday morning. So at odds with the whole tone of what had been going on Sunday by Sunday in a word. Reality came in a moment of time and the people were stunned not only for the word But the manner in which was it was presented and natural and unaffected.

Tolerance and earnestness in reality. It was devastating for them in a good way. And I said to this brother at the door as he was saying goodbye. I said I beseech you brother. Please forsake this hyped up manner of speaking.

But Artie said there has to be a model of the overcoming, you know believer to encourage them to the same I said if you're overcoming it doesn't have to be expressed in this hyper way. The truth of it will be communicated even when you speak naturally.

But there's something false in the image that you're projecting. There's an unreality and if the church is unreal Saints, what can we hope for in the world? The world is dying from its unreality from its dream factories from its Star Wars from all of its Entertainment craze.

Consumerism, Entertainment, and the Church’s Silence

I mean, I've been alive long enough from a depression, baby to watch the remarkable radical consumerism that has swept American society and a great passion and appetite for entertainment for distraction for fantasy.

They love to see cities flooded with water and great upheavals and catastrophes and then go home chewing their gum. The heck of it is those catastrophes are coming and they're ill-prepared to expect them or to experience them.

Because they're living in a fantasy dream world by which the world is stuffing its pockets and the church is not crying out. Well, you know what I did. I Wrote a letter to the editor against Star Wars.

Against the promotion that I resent having to go into a market and find six-foot cutouts of these bizarre Demonic creatures that are the Star Wars Panoply of characters looking down on me if I take something off the shelf and I can't buy a can of Pepsi Cola without one of its images of a devil on it and This has gone too far that this is an imposition upon our freedom that we have no choice no matter it crowds in on us even in the stores in the marketplace the concessions the Franchises it engulfs us and I'm raising my voice in protest and crying out to the Christian parents who have allowed their kids to Go in their sleeping bags and sleep on the sidewalk outside the theater.

They'd be the first one with the doors open on the first day to see that film I said when when's the last time they ever did that for a Sunday service at the church? What is it? That's more compelling in that theater Than what we are offering in our churches that they're willing to spend a night out in the cold in a sleeping bag to be the first one in.

How many hundreds of thousands of employees were dismissed from work in order to attend the theater that thing that their companies recognized? It's too big for us to fight against. Hey Guys where our world is going sick, and we're the guardians of truth morality and righteousness and are silent.

We witnessed the princess Diana's funeral and didn't cry out. I was waiting to hear a prophetic statement from the church in England against the great travesty of the faith of celebrating this jet-setter in her Immoral affair with a Palestinian playboy that ended in violence as somehow deserving the highest form of recognition of Christian funeral in Canterbury Cathedral with the highest prelates and and Ministers of that church in tones of great solemnity as if this were a saint with the flag being flown at half-mast at Buckminster Palace.

And it took six weeks to clear away the tons of flowers That were heaped up around her home and the gardens and the walls and people signing the book. I'll tell you if anyone raised his voice that day against the Diana cult which by the way It has today become there are Diana cult churches in England where she's worshipped as a goddess.

If someone had raised the voice they would have stoned him as they would have stoned Paul for opposing the Diana cult. But not to raise the voice is to leave the church not only Disadvantaged but permanently morally crippled.

You see art what good would it have done to raise the voice to write a letter to the editor to sound some opposition? I don't care what good it would have done. I'm not expecting it's going to do any good.

You can't you know your little your lone voice is not going to counter this tremendous flood of Pap. But not to sound your voice Has implications for you that are irrecoverable. To be silent is to be condemned.

There's something that requires our speaking on these things as the guardians Appointed by God over the issues of truth morality and righteousness and our silence condemns us and our silence. What reinforces and condones those things as if we agree?

Prophetic Witness Against Untruth and Injustice

So I'm being reminded in these days of a time when I was in East Germany before the wall came down. I'm upstairs in my attic room and Downstairs are about half a dozen elders of the church of that East German city.

I've been there for several days and now this is a goodbye and they're waiting for a final word. For the church and its leadership and I'm upstairs looking to the Lord. And I'm writing on the back of an envelope and I come down with my envelope and I say to these men your first obligation is to confront the communist authorities and to oppose their Program their propagandistic program, which is a lie.

It is ubiquitous. You know that word like a phone booth on every corner. So is their science? German Soviet friendship for 45 years. Of alcoholism was the highest in all of Eastern Europe. Because I believe that God has framed us and made us to live in righteousness.

And if we are compelled to live in an environment that is unrighteous. That is untruthful our bodies our physiologies themselves will react against it. We'll be driven to alcohol to stupefy our minds because our minds are being Attacked in something that is the lie.

I said you guys have an obligation to stand for what is made in God's image and To go to these communist authorities and say In view of our call and our responsibility to stand for what is made in God's image.

We oppose this assault that has come upon the minds and souls of men in this relentless campaign of propaganda. And we ask you to stop it. What an insane request, you know that you're not going to be taken seriously.

You know that you might be opening the door to a concentration camp for yourself. Why do it? Because integrity. Righteousness and truth. And your calling in God as the ministers of God Requires an end to silence.

That's why it's not the issue of whether it's going to succeed. It's the issue that we cannot afford to be silent. Have you guys ever read Dietrich Bonhoeffer's life together? As we say in Yiddish mama Mia this.

This is superb. I just said to Adam this morning reading it again. That I would think that this would be required study in any seminary any Bible school that trains ministers. I just want to give you a little taste over the issue of the confession of our sins one to another the depth of insight that this dear martyr had is astounding.

The Church as Sinners Saved by Grace

He makes it really in fact the whole issue of the church as the church. That the final breakthrough to fellowship does not occur because Though they have fellowship one with another as believers and devout people.

They do not have fellowship as the undevout as sinners. The church is only the church when it recognizes itself as sinners being saved by grace. Not to acknowledge that and for its ministers to acknowledge that about themselves as well.

Leaves the church in a mentality and a state of being devout. It's a false artificial and pompous atmosphere where he says no one dares allow himself to acknowledge the truth of his sin, but the fact is that we are sinners and So we remain alone with our sin living in lies and hypocrisy.

Now he says you are a sinner a great desperate sinner. You know what they have you thought about Paul? I'm the chief of sinners. When did Paul make that statement? Is he referring to his pre conversion?

Or is he referring to his present condition as the chief apostle of the church? I think it's the latter. In fact if you have noticed as you've gone on in the faith that the deeper You come in the knowledge of God and of his way and of his understanding the issue of your sin becomes much more apparent.

No way is it more conspicuous than for the man who has to perform spiritual things. Maybe it's not as evident for the man in the world. But for the man on the pole on the platform and in the pulpit to have to deal and speak things of a spiritual kind shows yet more acutely the truth of our condition and That there's no accident that God calls The prophet Ezekiel son of man son of man can these bones live son of man prophesied son of man.

What is he doing? Does he have to remind the prophet that he's the son of man? Yes. Because the prophet has the uncanny paradox of having to speak not only the Word of God, but to speak the Word of God as Very God he is the mouthpiece of God while at the same time.

He's acutely conscious of his humanity. He sweats. He's weak. He's confused. He's doubtful. He's fearful. He's anxious. He's concerned for how he's going to be heard how he's going to receive. Oh son of man.

So There's no one more acutely or should be more acutely conscious of his humanity Than those who are called to proclaim from their earthen lips the words of God. That's why Paul saw himself as chief of sinners.

But there's an answer for God when we acknowledge that that is our condition. Because he comes as the sinner that you are who loves you who wants you as you are. He does not want anything from you a sacrifice your work.

He wants you alone my son. Give me your heart. This message is liberation through truth. You can hide nothing from God. It's astonishing. We were talking on this trip. What is the fear of God? How do you define that?

What is it so critical so essential to the truth of the church and I've never heard anyone really seek to define it. We talk about it and around it, but how much do we understand it? And I say one of the evidences of its lack is the liberty that we take even as ministers as if God were not God as if he were not Omnipresent as if he were not omniscient as if he did not only hear and see us in what we say and do.

But even hear the secrets of our hearts. Even understand and knows our thoughts. How then do we allow ourselves the liberty of thoughts that are incongruent and not in keeping with his holiness? It's ever it's an evidence that we don't really think that God is seeing and hearing.

That's the meaning of the fear of God. It's an ever-present awareness that very much affects not only our external behavior, but our inward disposition. We don't allow ourselves the luxury of thoughts and contemplations that are incompatible with God if we believe Who he is pseudonym so this message is liberation through truth and through him men could be saved As sinners and only so could they be helped.

All sham was ended in the presence of Christ. The H. M. Do you hate pretense? Do you hate duplicity. Do you hate play acting which is the meaning of the word hypocrisy putting on a mask? Giving the appearance of something which is not you have it all together.

God's man of faith and power while Inside and inwardly you're trembling you're aware and conscious of your weakness the contradictions of your life the difficulty of your own teenage children. The unhappiness of your own marriage.

The sexual problems all the kinds of things the fantasies the erotic things the temptations. You know all that, but you purport yourself and carry yourself in such a way as to give no evidence at all that's false.

And If we're not about truth and about reality, what are we about I? Would say the church is God's provision for a mankind. It's God's plumb line from heaven to show that there's another standard that makes the sanity and That we would not only speak this but we represent and depict this in the character of our own life and being.

And Who's more at the heart of this whole enterprise of God than his ministers? For us to be diligent toward the truth to keep our hearts with all diligence to be jealous about infraction. About play acting.

To be immediately conscious when we feel ourselves as drifting off and becoming a bit professional and Ministerial and instantly to despise that and cry out to God and come back again to the place of naturalness before God and before men.

To despise any Affectation that would give the appearance and the impression to those hearing us or viewing us that somehow We're made of different to other stuff than they. So the breakthrough comes in Confession.

It's the breakthrough to community the difference between church as an institutional Sunday setting and the Apostolic reality of a people whose life is together. The breakthrough comes in confession. Because in the darkness of the unexpressed the sin or the struggle Poisons the whole being of a person it'll it'll corrupt the whole being of a nation.

Confession, Community, and Apostolic Fellowship

I think it did that for Germany. It was not just German liberalism that made the way for the advent of Nazism. It was German piety it was German orthodoxy as well as liberalism. Both were phony and Flaky.

One was a liberal disregard of the Word of God and the other was a mechanical and external attention to Pietistic living but not to reality. And in that vacuum of unreality in the absence of apostolic verity.

In came the demonic thing of Nazism with a bang and corrupted and took possession of an entire nation. The advent of Nazism and the systematic annihilation of the Jewish people of European Jewry and the World War two that threatened the whole of Western civilization.

Can in fact be laid at the door of a church that was defunct even while it was either liberal in disregard of the Word of God or pietistic and orthodox technically correct, but whose life was not true.

We should learn from that history because I believe the issue is going to come to our own shores. So sin must be brought into the light the unexpressed must be openly spoken and acknowledged. All that is secret and hidden is made manifest.

It's a hard struggle until the sin is openly admitted. The last stronghold of self justification is abandoned. The sinner surrenders. He gives up all his evil. He gives his heart to God and he finds the forgiveness of all his sin in the fellowship of Jesus Christ in his brother.

Do you guys have a brother? Is there one in your congregation or one in your ministerial fraternity? Who's a brother to whom you can go? I've had a lot of activity in Germany. The German word is sales saga.

Which means concern for one soul. Everyone has a sales saga who is careful for their soul. The guy who's living in Frankfurt his soul keeper lives in Munich and they see each other about once every three months four months five months.

That's a cop-out that is exactly the kind of orthodox and pietistic Devices that brought corruption to Germany before if there's a man who's watching over your soul. He needs to be a man with whom you're in daily relationship.

Where he sees you in the various aspects of your life and stress and the reality of it and not just on some distant Sunday. Whom do we know and whom can we trust? To confess our sins with a brother who is really a brother on that bit daily basis the whole of our ministerial system Militates against it because it cultivates the ministerial mystique by which you're not to expose Your frailty and weaknesses to the congregation but be detached as if you already have it together.