A Call to the Church (The Spirit of Truth) — Art Katz

The title of this tape, The Spirit of Truth, delivered by Art Katz, founder and director of Ben Israel Ministries, author of the book, Ben Israel and Reality. Art is a well-known Jewish Christian used by God in the United States and Europe to bring timely messages through his unique ministry.

Precious God, Lord,.

What is man, Lord, that thou art mindful of him? And we don't understand, Lord, why it is that you come to send to us and use us yet as vessels in thy house, Lord. I ask, Lord, as much as it is possible that we might be beside ourselves tonight, that truly it is the messenger of the covenant who speaks, Lord, the Holy One of Israel, the angel of the Lord, even the Spirit of Truth, thank you for such a night as this, Lord, for such a taste of thy glory.

Make it holy as thou art. Change us by it. We'll thank you and praise you that you have ordained it. Fulfill now your own heart in it, Lord, for your kingdom and for your namesake. In thy holy name, Jesus, we pray.

Amen. Well, I don't know if I can explain to you why it is I'm dissolving. When I first saw some of the promotional material for this weekend and that the word prophet had been used, I had a suspicion that it was used as a gimmick, a flourish that might intrigue people to come and hear who would not otherwise come.

Whether that was the motive or not, I doubt it, but I believe that God is honoring that reference. And I have such a sense of the magnitude of this day and of this night as being holy history, that God is speaking not only into this congregation but beyond it, because blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord, and blessed are they who receive him who comes in the name of the Lord.

If you knew how close we came to missing this and the somewhat panicky, concerned phone call from your pastor back to where we were, wondering if we had gone sour because of some of the reports that had circulated, and then the necessary cancellation of my coming here some months ago because of a true spirit of submittedness to those to whom my life is related, and I winced over that because I wanted the opportunity to assure the pastor that there was no real need for alarms and that I was not going to have it.

But I just had to trust the Lord that as we allowed that commitment to fall into the dust of death, he would resurrect it in due season, and he has. The word that came before out of the congregation about changing us into his image was virtually syllable for syllable the very word that we prayed at the back of the platform before coming out tonight.

Everything is so lending itself to the unfolding of the purpose of God for this night. And what is on my heart to speak has to do with the spirit of truth. And I want to turn to two texts tonight. One is an Old Testament text in 1 Samuel 15.

Saul’s Partial Obedience to God’s Command

The Lord sent me to anoint thee to be king over his people, over Israel. Now therefore hearken thou unto the voice of the word of the Lord. Do you love that beginning? Do you love the word hearken? Doesn't it have a ring to it in something so Hebraic?

It goes beyond mere listening. It's not just an auditory experience. Hearken thou not just to the word but to the voice of the word of the Lord. Such a calling. Thus saith the Lord of hosts, I remember that which Amalek did to Israel, how he had laid wait for him in the way when he came up from Egypt.

Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have and spare them not, but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass. I'll tell you children that at the reading of this one verse we ought to fall flat on our faces.

This is either some grievous typographical error or it is an insight into the depths of the nature of our God that shatters every saccharine sentimental distortion, every projection of Him in our image, that we just have to grovel on the floor and let our eyes roll back into our skull and spittle form at the corners of our mouth and say that we don't understand such a God as this.

Do you understand what he's calling a king to perform? Wholesale and unremitting slaughter? The God of mercy? The God of love of a Canaanite-ish people? Every impulse in us would shriek in protest to be obedient to such a requirement as this.

So Saul gathered the people together and numbered them. The fifth verse, Saul came to a city of Amalek and laid wait in the valley. Seventh verse, Saul smote the Amalekites from Havilah until thou comest to shore that is over against Egypt.

And he took Agag, the king of the Amalekites, alive and utterly destroyed all the people with the edge of the sword. But Saul and the people spared Agag and the best of the sheep and of the oxen and of the fatlings and the lambs and all that was good and would not utterly destroy them.

But everything that was vile and refuse, that they destroyed utterly. May I just make the statement that the Lord breathed upon me in the car coming down tonight? Partial obedience is disobedience and a partial truth is a lie.

And if you can sense the spirit of God that is hovering over this congregation tonight, the absolute God, the radical God, the God of all totality, even the spirit of truth which the world cannot receive.

You can hear the cry of God calling us to His holiness and to His impeccable standard. If you can see in the wavering vacillation of a king, partially obedient only, a picture of God's present people, from whom the kingdom was wrenched, you'll be brought more nearly to the place to see as God sees.

And I'm eternally grateful for the definition of truth which was given by Jesse Penn Lewis. Truth is everything as God sees it. And there is no requirement for us more pressing for this hour than to see as God sees.

Let's let this, the word of the Lord and the voice of His speaking sink into our hearing. How would we have responded to so devastating an invitation to be ruthless in utterly destroying and spare not?

All we might have considered with our rational minds that the men and women would have to be destroyed. The cup of their iniquity was full. They were given to the most gross kinds of erotic sin in the name of religion and of God.

But why the infants and the suckling? Surely they're innocent and were not stained by the sin of their parents. Surely there's some redemptive hope for these children. But this is the God who is not required to explain.

At what age is a child no longer an infant? And if we by our own judgment had to say, well, if a child is five, six or seven and had sight of these filthy and erotic practices and somehow the leaven of that corruption had already passed into his being and he would in turn communicate that to the children of Israel, it needs be that he be slaughtered.

But how about at the age of four? And if not four, how about three? And if not three, two? Where do you draw the line by human thinking? And God says, utterly destroy and spare not. Okay, Lord, men and women, infants and sucklings, but camel, sheep, oxen and asses, Lord, I love animals.

Surely they could not have been corrupted by the practice of these human beings. To hear the cry and the bellow of these dumb brutes as we lay the axe and the sword to them wrenches our very hearts, Lord.

Why the necessity for that? God is not required to explain. He's only an absolute God. And maybe if we want to conjecture, we could say that many of these animals were used in these filthy sexual practices.

But it's not for us to examine. It's only for us to do. It's interesting to review then the obedience of the king that began in the ninth verse with the word, but. I wonder in how many instances of our life and our obedience before God it begins with the word, but.

But Saul and the people spared Agag and the best of the sheep and of the oxen and of the fatlings and lambs and all that was good and would not utterly destroy them. But everything that was vile and refuse that they destroyed utterly.

Then came the word of the Lord unto Samuel saying, It repenteth me that I have set up Saul to be a king for he has turned back from following me and hath not performed my commandments and it grieved Samuel and he cried unto the Lord all night.

And Samuel rose early to meet Saul in the morning. It was told Samuel saying, Saul came in Carmel and behold, he set him up a place and has gone about and passed on and gone down to Gilgal and Samuel came to Saul and Saul said unto him, Blessed be thou the Lord.

I have performed the commandments of the Lord. I guess then as now, Saul had the batting average mentality. Listen, if a man comes up to bat and he gets three hits out of ten, he's a candidate for the Hall of Fame.

I've obeyed the commandments of the Lord. I've done most of what he has asked. Not a sense of a grieved conscience. Not a sense of the failure to obey God. Even a kind of self-exaltation and flattery and self-congratulatory spirit.

I've obeyed the commandments of the Lord. How much like us who are not in any kind of grievous sin and are more or less hitting three out of ten or five out of ten. May I say nine out of ten who would be staggered and stopped in our tracks to be reminded in James that if we have failed in one point of the law, we have failed in all.

Praise God that the revelation of the meaning of that came from a holy man who reminded us that nine times out of ten the will of God may have been perfectly coincident with our own. We wanted to do what God wanted, but there came one time when we did not and there we refused obedience and elevated our opinion and our desire above his.

Therefore, we all along were rebels. We were all along disobedient. We were all along reserving to ourselves a final judgment of whether we would obey or disobey the requirement of the Lord depending on whether it suited our fancy.

And it was not revealed to us because nine times out of ten we happened to agree with him. It's total obedience, children, or it's disobedience. Partial obedience is disobedience and partial truth is a lie.

I have performed the commandments of the Lord. Samuel said, What meaneth then this bleeding of the sheep in my ears and the lowing of the oxen which I hear? Oh, I can't describe to you the ungainly experiences that men like myself have coming up to varieties of pulpits.

Today was easier than most. You're a blessed and you're a beautiful congregation of God's people. That's not always so. And sometimes we'll come up on a platform and look out at the sea of faces and groan the overwhelming grayness of God's people, what their faces betray unbeknownst to them, the corporate and collective personality which congregations have, the pall that is over many of the so-called spirit-filled congregations of God's people.

It is the visual expression of the thing which the Prophet Samuel acknowledged. It's the lowing of the oxen and the bleeding of the sheep. It's the evidence of the disobedience registered in the faces and the corporate spirit of God's people.

It's the truth which is partial and not absolute. I want you to turn to the book of Acts. It's the fifth chapter for a strange apostolic episode which we might find it hard to understand in our generation.

Ananias, Sapphira, and the Holy Spirit’s Demand for Truth

Same God, the same yesterday, today, and forever. It is only we who have changed. It speaks of a certain man named Ananias who with his wife Sapphira sold a piece of property. And with his wife's knowledge and connivance, he kept back and wrongfully appropriated some of the proceeds, bringing a pot only and putting it at the feet of the apostles.

But Peter said, Ananias, why has Satan filled your heart that you should lie to and attempt to deceive the Holy Spirit? And should in violation of your promise withdraw secretly and appropriately to your own use part of the price from the sale of the land?

As long as it remained unsold, was it not still your own? And even after it sold, was not the money at your disposal and under your control? Why then is it that you have proposed and purposed in your heart to do this thing?

How could you have the heart to do such a deed? You have not simply lied to men playing false and showing yourself utterly deceitful, but to God. Upon hearing these words, Ananias fell down and died. And great dread and terror took possession of all who heard of it.

The same God who wrenched a kingdom from a partially obedient king is the same God who executed a man in an apostolic hour who submitted a thing in part to make to stand for the whole. If you can sense the hour in which we stand and where we are in God's holy history and that we are being restored and returned to the apostolic standard described in the book of Acts and that the speakings of God which we heard today and hearing now are a preparation for this restoration.

If you could understand that. And I would ask you in the same breath, how many of you have a heart to see this apostolic standard returned? How many are groaning, waiting to see again the manifest demonstration of the glory of God?

Of the signs and wonders that shook cities, of multitudes both of men and women who were added to the church daily without so much as a single gimmick or bumper sticker. How many of us would be wanting to live in a sense of awe and dread and fear at the holiness of a God who does not keep from slaying those who seek to deceive the Holy Spirit?

Where are the fishermen of our generation, untutored, who immediately discern the spirit of a lie? And how many of us in a like situation, if someone came to bring the handsome proceeds, even in part, would readily fall upon their necks and hug them to our bosoms and install them as deacons and elders for so magnificent a gesture as that?

And not one wit discern what Peter, the fisherman, discerned. Jesus said he's going to send us a comforter, even the spirit of truth which the world cannot receive. And John the Baptist was told by the Father that that one upon whom he would see the spirit descending and abiding as a dove, he it is who is the Messiah and the Holy One of Israel.

He was not to know him by the flesh. And God is waiting again, lo, these two thousand years, for a Son to emerge out of the waters of absolute separation from the world and its spirit, before whom the heavens again can part, and a spirit descend and abide as a dove, and a voice swing out again from heaven, saying, This is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased.

Note that that statement was made before Jesus ever did anything. Character before charisma. I don't know about other birds, children, but I'm told that a dove is a very peculiar bird. It doesn't have the peripheral vision of other birds.

It is single-eyed only. It will not roost and rest in any old place. And we know that when God's judgment came on all flesh and he poured out a baptism of death upon the earth, that Noah sent out two birds and one never came back.

It was a raven that can roost on any kind of crut, anything that floats, any flotsam and jetsam is okay, thank you. But not so the holy dove of God. May I share a little Holy Spirit suspicion? All of the celebration of the dove in our charismatic generation, all of the banners on platforms, all of the euphoric and good things that are spoken in the name of the unity of body of Christ.

I'm just wondering sometimes which bird that actually is and whether it's not actually a dove at all but some other kind of pigeon dropping and making its droppings on the cross. May I say that if there is no abode and dwelling place for the holy dove of God, that it's not only the spirit of power that departs and the spirit of love but also the spirit of truth and that this one spirit is preeminently and foremost and firstly the spirit of truth before it is the spirit of power.

When it goes, everything goes. When it abides, everything abides. All the leaden experience, the memory of the distaste in our mouths when we have come from services and various other kinds of Christian activity in full gospel sense and have had some kind of instinctive and intuitive sense that we could not articulate that in the absence of the holy dove of God men have gesticulated and pounded pulpits and sung weary chorus after chorus seeking to fabricate and to create some sense of the presence of the things that only the dove of God himself can bring.

A half hour later the wife of Ananias came in or three hours it says not having learned of what had happened then Peter said to her, Tell me, did you sell the land for so much? Yes, she said, for so much.

Then Peter said to her, How could you two have agreed and conspired together to try to deceive the spirit of the Lord? Listen, the feet of those who have buried your husband are at the door and they will carry you out also and instantly she fell down at his feet and died and the young men entering found her dead and they carried her out and buried her beside her husband.

I have a suspicion that until this generation maybe even this hour the church of God more than it has realized has already been carried out feet first and it shall not be raised to life in the apostolic grandeur and power of that first generation until the spirit of truth can find a place to rest in the lives of God's people.

If partial obedience is disobedience then partial truth is a lie. Something that is offered in part only to be made to appear as the whole is a lie. If the whole truth and nothing but the truth oh it's a lie.

Religious Performance Versus the Authentic Presence of God

I have not yet recovered from the experience of a Sunday morning only some months ago one of those strange occasions when I have a Sunday morning off and I was taken by a Jewish brother to hear his pastor of whom he was so proud being a spirit-filled pastor in a staid denomination.

I remember sitting up in the balcony and as is my custom I take a look at those about me notorious people watcher that I am and I had such a despairing sense that as I looked at the married couple sitting side by side that the better word to describe their relationship than marriage was truth that there was some kind of unspoken agreement you don't push me, I don't push you let's share these common facilities and make the best of a sorry situation.

Where was the glory of God? And as my eye traveled up to the farthermost reaches of the auditorium there were their kids wearing the hip-hugging clothes and the shirts unbuttoned to the navel the chokers and jewelry around the neck long-haired, stringy, creepy-looking kids jiving each other and poking each other in the ribs with their elbows and having a ball wholly indifferent to what was going on below pagans in the house of God and my spirit within me winced and then finally my eye traveled down below to the man at the pulpit carrying on baptized in the Holy Spirit.

I had the strangest experience I don't know quite how to describe it my ear was hearing technically true words but my spirit told me it was a lie you say, ah, how can that be? Was the message scriptural?

Yes. Was it doctrinally sound? Yes. Could it be faulted in any way? No. How then can the truth be made a lie? Easy. Because while his mouth was quoting scriptures his spirit was saying cool it, don't take me seriously don't worry, don't get alarmed, don't panic.

No one's expecting for you to do this. Don't you remember our unspoken agreement? I don't push you, you don't push me. This is our ceremonial Sunday hour. This is my requirement to give you some kind of a sermon and that's your requirement to hear it.

But no one intends that you should be changed by it. So don't panic. The spirit of the speaking was a lie. Oh, I can give you multitudinous illustrations just in the course of these days in an assembly church where please the Lord to have me which was not on my schedule sitting on the platform groaning over what was before my sight in that congregation despairing of any prospect of true communication.

We might have come from opposite planets. And the young youth minister was called upon to pray in the opening of the service. And when I heard his prayer, my spirit sank. You say, what was wrong with it, Art?

Only this one thing. It was a performance. It was a grand prayer in the Pentecostal manner. But it was not true. I don't know about you, but I'd rather have someone who chokes and splutters is awkward as all get-out who croaks and groans and gets something out of his heart and spirit something limp and feeble in terms of human eloquence but let it be authentically true than the most masterful performance of men in the grand Pentecostal manner.

Oh, children anything that is offered to appear to be something that is not is a lie. How many times have our spirits cringed at so-called charismatic functions. When we have sensed a spirit of manipulation when men coax and goad and move audiences soullessly and psychically so determined for a happy meeting and a successful meeting that will have every appearance of being somehow a night filled with the splendor of the spirit.

That you think that you're in some kind of three-ring circus. Oh, for the pain of watching men leap from their seats to get to the microphone for fear that if there'd be one moment's silence between the one leaving and the one coming that somehow the audience will be bored and distracted.

No accident that I've used the word audience rather than congregation. The Holy Spirit as a dove is waiting to find the sun upon whom it can abide. And the spirit of manipulation is eminently a lie. It is the antithesis of faith that trusts God.

That in our foolishness and in our weakness and in our nothingness that whatever it pleases the Lord to perform by His Spirit shall be done. And if it pleases Him for His glory not to be revealed we're willing to suffer that disappointment than any human substitution.

Oh, children the spirit of the world is the spirit of a lie. And nowhere is it more painful than in the Church of God. God gave me a depth of revelation one night not too long ago in Germany in Bavaria in the hotel used by Hitler for his headquarters when I went to sleep that night utterly cut to the core where down below was the most farcical charismatic kind of meeting that one can imagine.

I thought I was at some kind of high school pep rally. It was gross and manipulative every kind of human substitution for the Holy Dove of God. I was then in my sixth week of absence from home, wife and family.

And may I make a true statement it gets a little hard around that time for God's mobile servants. There's a craving and a yearning for which Satan has been waiting and he has sharpened his knives and we are cruelly sought after.

And I had a night of such gross reveling in desire and lusting that made my soul sick that I was capable of that kind of reverie. I hated it but I couldn't leave it. I despised it and I loved it. Are you being disillusioned?

Good. It was a terrible darkness. And in the midst of that darkness and that sweat and gritty night there broke forth a little tincture of light in the abyss of darkness. And I believe that God showed me something about the anatomy of lust.

That lust is not merely sensual gratification that is only the cloak in which something far more devious hides that our filthiest reveries the power which we have been unable to break that has affected and corrupted our marriages and our lives and harbors in our imaginings is not mere sensual gratification but the desire to manipulate another.

It's the last refuge of the scoundrel who wants to assert self and see someone crumple by the imposition of that power. It's the spirit of manipulation and it's alive. I can't tell you the emancipation that has come to my life of marriage since God has shown me this the release the heat and God has continued to unfold both to my wife and to myself.

The degree to which we were using manipulative practices in our own marriage and life. By innuendo, by suggestion by the look of one's face by the inflection of a voice we can manipulate the other as by streams to get them to accommodate our desire.

I knew well how to pout. Well how to look like a stricken and disappointed husband. Well how to give an appearance of woundedness in a way that I know was calculated to bring a certain desired effect in my wife's behavior.

And what God showed me is that that spirit has penetrated through and through Christendom that we have become masters of manipulation and have learned by a word and by an inflection by syrupy crescendo of our voice to move and to manipulate the people of God as a substitute for the work of the holy dove of God.

It's an appearance that's made to stand for something which is not and the only alternative is a terrifying, radical cleaving to God by faith both in our marriages and in its intimacy and in our congregations.

Trusting the dove of God to bring the path to things that are true that are authentic that are real. Truth is everything as God sees it. Our gestures our faces the manipulative tones of our voices the right things with the wrong motives.

It's right in part but it's a lie. It's got to be the truth and the all the truth. Or it's not the truth at all. And how many of our evangelistic activities and organizations who have true callings and true purposes use devious means to obtain them.

My God if I shall see one more newsletter felt tipped underlined I shall shriek and be destroyed. One more crying of wolf in order to elicit and to jerk from God's people another dollar for a good cause.

The world and the spirit of the world which is the spirit of a lie can mix its ends and its means. But not so the people of the kingdom must be in accordance with Him ends. And I say this not as any kind of boasting but as a description of what God is beginning to do in some portions of the body and shall require increasingly of us all that He has had us to desist from.

Including in our seasonal four time a year newsletter a return envelope. You say, Art, what's wrong with that? Don't you list your needs in your newsletter? No. Do you have needs? You better believe it.

Fifty degrees below zero. We're in a life and death situation. And I said to those children in Minnesota do you guys realize what you're doing? Every ministry uses envelopes. It's a convenience for God's people.

Yes, they said, Art. But it's also a subtle manipulation. If the spirit of God will bid them give they'll exert themselves to find and to address and to stamp their own envelopes. Thank you. And if they will not we are prepared to perish.

And may I say, children that if you'll not die for the truth we're not going to have it. Truth is costly. Do you love the truth? So much that you would die for it and suffer for it and experience reproach for it and misunderstanding for it.

Will you speak the truth in love? He has given us every provision for godliness and life. And we have been cowardly to use it. Speak the truth in love. Confess your faults one to another. And we bottle it up and suppress it and keep it down.

And make a brave appearance of a spirituality which is not yet ours making a pot to appear as a whole. We've been carried out more than we realize it. Feet first. I remember as a young believer excuse me for being so anecdotal.

And you may have heard this before. It bears repeating how I had such a troublesome son. My son David, my firstborn. What a chip off the old block. What an egotist. Always at the center of things always got to be seen.

Always that little show of I would have been such a saint if I didn't have a son like that. Or is it that I will be such a saint because I have a son like that. That bugger boy how he knows to mess it up.

His timing is exquisite. Just before I'm getting prepared for a service I'm getting all groomed and revved up spiritually getting sanctimonious and preparing my spirit to be God's man to deliver God's word.

And pow he blows it and pow goes my temper and pow he gets cuffed in the puss and I go grumbling and letting hearted trying still to hold together the shambles of my life and be God's man. May I say something.

I think God has winked in times past. Isn't he gracious. Such love such long suffering patience toward us. I think there was a recent hour when God allowed a disparity between our lives as ministers and as men.

But increasingly and in this hour he's insisting that the messenger and his message are one. The ephod and the holy breastplate was bound to the body of the priest. It was no easy put on and take off for convenience sake.

You are one thing at the pulpit and another thing with your feet up on the coffee table watching the box with your tie loosed. The man increasingly is the message. Well I remember going to a service at the assemblies church that I was attending in those days in New York being trained for Jewish missionary work.

And sure enough my David pulled his little shticklach his little stunt and he got under my skin and I let him have it. Pow. And the last words I heard as my wife crashed the door behind me go tell him what a great saint you are.

Pow. And I remember driving to church letting hearted justifying myself. Well he had it coming. He needed this. And he's been cutting up too often. And if she'll not discipline him I'll have to. And but my heart was like lead.

And I came to the service. It was late and I took a seat in the pew and it was testimony time. And yes I want to praise the Lord this week. And I want to say remember those times. And the moment I sat down in the pew I heard a still small voice Art.

Confess your faults one to another. Confess your faults one to another. Confess your faults one to another. I began to break out in a sweat. I had hot spells and cold spells. My knees were knocking. I said but Lord.

But but. And finally despite myself I found my hand going up and there was my precious pastor. Oh brother Katz. Yes he'll bless the congregation. Yes brother Katz you are super saint. I choked and spluttered and I said pastor excuse me.

But since I've come to the church tonight and I've been sitting in the pew I've been hearing a voice repeating again and again confess your faults one to another. Confess your faults one to another. And I've never seen this done in the church as long as I've been a believer.

I don't know where it's supposed to be done or when it's appropriate but I feel that I must confess a fault. What a silence came over the congregation and I told them that I had been behaving toward my son in a way that was unbecoming as a father let alone as a child of God let alone as one called to his service.

It was utterly humiliating. I wished that the floor could have opened and swallowed me as I changed colors and I perspired and my voice broke and creaked. And when I finished for the first time and as long as I had known that pastor he was silent and didn't know what to say hallelujah.

And as we waited in that terrible quiet another woman at the other side of the congregation got up and she confessed a fault. And I don't remember what happened after that. I think that we went to prayer and the glory of God fell.

I don't know how long we were lost in God in such a glorious sense of his presence. There never was a message that night. And when it was over and the pastor again found his voice he said look what happened when two were obedient to the word of God.

We experienced the spirit of revival. Look to God. We were all obedient children who also said unto Saul the Lord sent me to anoint thee to be king over his people over Israel. Now therefore hearken thou unto the voice of the words of the Lord.

Restoration Through the Spirit of Truth and Apostolic Power

Children hearken thou to the voice of the words of the Lord. There's a spirit of God that is brooding and wanting to dwell and to abide with us even the spirit of truth which the world cannot receive.

And that same spirit is also the spirit of power. And little wonder that in the same book of Acts in the fifth chapter when the whole church was appalled and great awe and terror and dread seized them and all others who heard of these things by the hands of the apostles numerous and startling signs and wonders were being performed among the people and none of those who of their not of their number dared to join and associate with them.

But the people held them in high regard and praised and made much of them and more and more were being added to the Lord. Those who believed and acknowledged Jesus as their Savior crowds both of men and of women so that they even kept carrying out the sick in the streets and placing them on couches and sleeping pads in the hope that as Peter passed by at least his shadow might fall on some of them.

What an age. What splendor. What glory. Where there was the discernment and the razor edge awareness of the spirit of truth in the church. This is the standard to which God seeks to restore his church.

Last verse of 1 John 5 says. And we know that the Son of God has come and hath given us an understanding that we may know him. That is true and we are in him that is true. Even the Son Jesus Christ. This is the true God and eternal life.