Audio Sermon: A Bride Adorned for the Bridegroom — Art Katz

The Church as the Bride of Christ

So we need an especial grace from the Lord for something that gives every appearance of women, especially theophany. It describes the church in her eternal configuration, not as a body of Christ overcoming man, but as a bride.

Isn't that remarkable? That the final and enduring designation is feminine, a bride. So we need to really be instructed and understand what it is for which we're attending. So Lord, we ask for the mercy and we continue to ask and to keep asking.

Be present with us, Lord. And if this phrase and concept is dear to you, for you have yourself invoked and established it, we ask a communication, Lord, that is appropriate to your own heart. And if we have resisted it for the one reason or another, overcome our resistance, open it to us in understanding, my God, that's appropriate and bless our time together tonight.

So we're following you, Lord, with us wherever you go it, session by session. And we don't know the one from the other until the time has virtually come. So come, my God, and lead us into places where we have not been here before and employ the body, employ the saints, Lord, to bring from this one and that an appropriate comment, a question, an insight that something might be formed from understanding.

Your blessing, Lord. Thank you, precious Lord, for tonight. We invoke the blood of the Lamb upon our heads and upon our house. The evening, the blood of the evening sacrifice, as it were. So come and sanctify our vessels, remove the debris and the clutter of the day, the residue of anything, my God, that has issued out of our humanity that will in any way dull us or make you in any way to recoil or to withdraw.

So have a chaste vessel, Lord, for your presence and your impartation, a chaste corporate vessel in that washing of the blood which we ask even now. Take from us any defilement or stain for we so covet your presence because the Spirit of God is the Spirit of truth.

And so come, Lord, and feel comfortable to be in our midst and to bring, my God, all of the preciousness that can only come through your Spirit. We bless you for your blood, for the Spirit, for the Word, all of the great provision, my God, that issues from you.

Receive our gratitude, Lord, and delight your own soul tonight. Worship and praise the Word. We look to you. In Yeshua's holy name. Amen. So we need to be yielded to what God is wanting to recognize our unyieldedness, our stiffness, our intractability, our stodginess, even over things that are right.

So somehow to be able to hold truth and not be fearful that you're going to lose it if the Lord is introducing something that stretches us to a new perception even of that truth. Someone said at the conference in Canada, a Scotsman got up and made a statement.

He said men who are fixed in a one-pointed truth, that becomes for them a rut. And if they resist the present truth, the rut becomes a grave. So I thought that that was a remarkable insight. Pathos, the word that has come up, it's like the Lord playing like a haunting refrain, comes up again and again.

A quality that moves one through pity and sorrow. Poignancy. Poignant. P-O-I-G-N-A-N-T. Do you know that word? We are supposed to be the guardians of language and be jealous over the maintaining of the integrity of words.

No one in the world should be more word oriented than the church. And so we love words and their meaning and we stand God over them. Because when words lose their meaning and become blunt and become a grunt, civilization is on its way out.

The way in which language is revered and employed is an index as to the condition of an age. So perhaps part of the church's failure prophetically is to be guardian over language itself. Not to allow its misuse and to have a greater sense of its meanings and the exquisite range of expression to be found in vocabulary.

Like the word poignant. Who can define that? Poignant. You know, the poignant speaks of and points to something that lies too deep for words. Poignant is standing at the place where the trade towers in New York City had once stood and looking over the cavern of a terrible flattened area and you're unable to express the mortification, the tragedy, what had happened.

That something was struck in a point of time that not only affects the geography of New York, but it's going into the nation and into the earth. That's irretrievable. It's like visiting Dachau or Auschwitz.

Standing at those places. What can you say? It's something poignant. As I described that German cemetery with those thick granite stones that are lurching and were not able to be thrown down by men and it's like a bizarre, strange configuration of stones.

Or going to Prague and visiting the oldest synagogue in Europe going back to the 12th, 15th century and outside of it are the gravestones and on each of the gravestones of the great and memorable rabbis of past history are stones set on top of the gravestones.

I don't know where this tradition comes from, but it denotes a visit that someone has come to commemorate the passing of some sage rabbi. And so you see these stones in the different postures with little stones on top of them and you get a sense of the passage of time, of life.

I went to the Jewish cemetery in Bombay, India and read the tombstones and the inscriptions. I remember still in the church in Singapore, Baptist Church, my first visit to that country and there were plaques all around the room of the missionaries who had come and had died in that country.

Esther Smith, born 1897, arrived in Singapore 19-something, died two years later from malaria. And you can just read the tombstones and get a sense of the roll call of God's saints and what has been invested.

And then the meeting begins and seven or eight hundred Chinese believers are singing the praises of God to the God of Jacob and the God of Israel. Do you have a word for that? If you are incapable of the poignancy of such a moment, you're not living in your full humanity.

And salvation means a salvation to the uttermost, that we are full-orbed men and women who are alive in the inner man and have a respect and an affinity with things by which we can be touched. Pathos is the ability to be touched and to be touched in those things that are too deep for words.

Basilia Schlenk and the Witness of a Holy Community

Well, that brings me to the little booklet on the Bride of Christ written by Basilia Schlenk, now passed on through the Lord. I think she died in her mid-nineties, about my mother's age, only within this last year.

I had the privilege of having her ladle gravy on my food at a meal where I was invited with my German interpreter and honored. One of the sisters came and recited a poem written in our honor, and mother Basilia ladled gravy.

Always took a personal interest in Ben Israel, Inga, what we are about. When I first visited that place and came through the gate in Darmstadt, Germany, I felt that I had entered heaven. There was something indescribable.

There was something so hallowed in the atmosphere that prevailed in that place that I was immediately touched. I learned later that when David Wilkerson made the same visit, after touring the property, someone told me, I think it's true, he flung himself upon the compost heap.

He felt so much the sinner, by contrast of the sense of holiness that prevailed in that place, that he threw himself on the compost heap. I didn't go that far, but I could well appreciate a man doing something like that.

Later on, that movement dispersed its sisters to different parts of the world, and that's why you'll find them today in Australia, and Europe, and different nations, Denmark even. I went to visit them in Cairo, and I thought, huh, one thing to maintain the kind of sanctified atmosphere that you have established in Germany, because Germany lends itself to that.

There's a whole history and tradition of celibate communities of men and women that are Protestant, and who are married to the Lord, so to speak, that is outside of our American experience. So I can understand that your movement will have a conducive environment in Germany.

By the way, the movement was born in 1945, at the end of World War II, when Darmstadt was ruthlessly bombed. Without any apparent reason, it had no longer any military or strategic value. Like Dresden, the city famous for its China, both of them were demolished at about the same time with firebombs, armadas of Allied bombers flying overhead, so that tens upon tens of thousands died from suffocation.

The fires were so intense that the air was sucked up. People were mired in the asphalt. Their feet were stuck in melting asphalt, and they perished. And the way in which Vassily Ishchenko responded was that this was God's judgment upon Germany for its brutal mistreatment of the Jew.

It was a movement born in repentance for Germany for its conduct toward the Jew. That was its very inception, and they have, I believe to this day, maintained that character. So when I went up to Cairo to visit them, I thought, ha, one thing to maintain this atmosphere in Germany.

Let's see you maintain it in one of the most congested cities in the world. 14 million people, donkeys, camels, asses, roads that have lanes for two cars have four cars, and people drive by censor, not by white markings.

You guys don't know what the world is like. And they honk their horns continually so as to know whether somebody's on the right or the left and front or the rear. And the noise is day and night, as is the stink, the smell, the garbage, the filth, the congestion, the animals, the poverty.

It's overwhelming. Let's see you be spiritual in an environment like that. One thing in Germany, but let's see you do it in Egypt, in Cairo, where people spit with their phlegm. It's vile, it's Islamic, it's poisonous, it's corruptive.

And I was in its hospitals in 1964 with an ear infection and hepatitis because I ate their food mindlessly. I almost died. The Jewish community paid my medical bill. You'll read about it in Ben Israel.

So I went up this flight of stairs where these sisters had their apartment, expecting that they would be adversely affected by having to live in an environment of that kind. I know I could not maintain any kind of spirituality when everything in that society militates against it.

And the door opened and the same breath and sense of God's presence and sense of holiness, sanctity that had prevailed in Darmstadt was there also. And so the sisters showed me that we as believers can triumph over every adverse thing that is to be found in our environments.

And there can be an island of sanctity, sanity, the presence of God in the midst of turbulence. So it's a remarkable movement. I'm saying all that to heighten your appreciation of what I'm about to read, selections from her little booklet that I've had for years and never till now have picked up.

Because the subject itself is a little icky. This, what do they say, passion for Jesus. There's something about romanticizing this relationship that almost borders on a kind of erotic note. So how do you maintain what is properly bridal without it becoming disfigured into something sensuous or worse yet erotic?

Because these women are demonstrating to us what is the ultimate character of the church for which we are presently being fitted. One little chapter is called Suffering, Sharing Jesus's Sufferings in the End Times.

Sharing in Christ's Present Sufferings

A great blessing is granted to the bride of Jesus Christ in these end times on which vital souls in other centuries were not able to experience to such an extent. Apart from a few single out by the Lord to share in some measure in this fashion.

Today, a bride of Jesus should be not only a sufferance from Gethsemane to Calvary in her heart, but also his present day sufferance. They are the only movement that I know that speak about the present sufferance of the Lord.

We always think of it in past tense, the sufferance that accompanied his passion at Calvary. But that he has present sufferance, that there are present griefs, never occurred to me. But when you think on it, why not?

He's a man of sorrow still and his heart is grieved still. And who commiserates with him, who senses the ache of his heart and wants to be a solace and a comfort as any wife would be to a husband. To know that your husband is anguished in his soul and is bearing something and to be indifferent to that is not to be wifely.

So, today a bride of Jesus should bear not only his past, but his present day sufferance. Nowadays, Jesus is being crucified many times throughout the world. Hebrews 6 .6 Because of the falling away of thousands who were once consecrated to God.

Among them are souls who have betrayed their Lord and who in positions of Christian leadership are leading countless numbers astray. Jesus must witness a fallen humanity, wallowing in the most appalling sins that the world has ever known and the growing influence of Satan in many lives.

Satan is acknowledged as Lord, small l, with many consciously or unconsciously serving him. And so the earth increasingly bears the imprint of hell. Jesus is suffering immeasurably. His heart is almost breaking.

Well, how would you know that? Are you guessing or are you in such proximity to that heart that you sense it? This is pathos. This is what is too close, too deep for words. This isn't something that you obtain through analysis.

This is something that you obtain through intimacy and through union. They sense his heart. It is impossible for his bride to be indifferent. Love shares in the sufferings of the beloved as every bride knows.

Yet many who know the Lord confess with sadness, Oh, my love is still so small, the suffering of Jesus today ought to stir my heart more deeply, kindling in me the desire to share in his sufferings. Don't misread this or don't mishear this as if this is some masochistic delight in a kind of suffering.

I want to suffer like the great Russian actors. This is not that. Don't think that this is maudlin. M-A-U-D-L-I-N. Maudlin. Define that. Maudlin is a perverse kind of sentimentality that likes and enjoys a kind of morbid suffering.

This is not that. Don't misread this. This is pure. This is holy. This is different. This is not some enjoyment of suffering that one goes out of his way to experience. This is a suffering that inexorably comes by virtue of the kind of relationship one has with the man of sorrows.

This is the kind of suffering that comes when you know what will grieve him. Because you love what he loves and hate what he hates. That when he says it's an abomination for him, it's an abomination for you.

While all the world celebrates and loves the rap culture and the music and the metallic noise and so on, the person who has this affinity for the Lord shatters and knows that he has to look upon it and sees it more clearly than we.

For everything is transparent in his sight and nothing is hidden. Praise God for us. There is a certain protection. If we could see the whole condition of the world and the nation wallowing in what it does, I don't know that we could take it.

But he sees it all and has got to take it. And it's a grief because Satan is busy to mar and to distort all that is made in his image. He wants to take a delight in marring creation itself, in uprooting it, in disfiguring it, in raping it.

So the Lord is watching as all of this takes place, this traffic, this commercialism. Children themselves are now objects of merchandise. It's interesting that at the end of Zechariah, it says there's no longer a Canaanite in the land or in Jerusalem.

And the word for Canaanite is a merchandiser. That the spirit of merchandise has been taken out in the city that has been made holy. So much merchandising is taking place in our religious world and allowing ministries to prevail and succeed.

And we ourselves, suckers, are responsive to that. Full-color mailings and four-color this and in the mailboxes. I don't want to... I'm walking on thin ice here. Mention the name of the ministry, but it is symptomatic of many of the biggest main ministries in our nation today.

Where I was given the red carpet tour, not because I deserve it, but because a bishop from Singapore, whose son or daughter is enrolled in the school established by that ministry, was given the gold, the red carpet tour because he's a principal donor.

And because I was chaplain, so to speak, for that group, I went in with him. And I saw the great banks of computers, like nothing I had ever seen, filling a vast football field-sized building with, I don't know how many employees, sifting the letters that had come in in response to the telecasts and to the sowing of seed faith.

And that the answer was already programmed on the machine in which the data had been factored in so that the name of the person could be in the letter which they receive and something of their prayer request acknowledged so the person would get a letter back.

Dear Sister Smith, I have read your letter and have taken it before the Lord and we pray that your mother's ailment will soon be healed. Thank you for your contribution of $12 .50. To learn that the man who signs the letter had not even so much as read that letter and that the reply is already calculated electronically and automatically.

And so tens of thousands of replies can be factored. And there are women, full-time employees who are not Christians, opening the letters, taking out the check, sending it on a conveyor belt in one basket and then the rest on another.

It was horrible. I don't have a word to describe it. And the young man showing us around was boasting in it and saying, even if our founder dies, he said, the system will still go on. And boasting in that, the Lord sees all that, dear souls, and anguishes.

And the poor soul who had sent $12 .50 from her social security check receives that letter with the great man's name who calls me by my first name and that he acknowledges my prayer request and that he's praying.

Her heart is uplifted. It's deceitful, dubious, what's the word for it? It's merchandise. And they make millions a month, millions a month. Their income is astronomical because it works on the principle that if you send out a sufficient quantity and get only 2%, 3%, 4%, or 5 response, it will more than pay for the mailing and add greatly to your comforts.

And so these great ministries have found the world's principle and are practicing it. So we have a suffering Lord. Jesus is waiting for his bride to respond to his suffering. For a true bride wants to share the innermost burdens or concerns of her bridegroom.

Jesus wants to show his bride what is on his heart and impress it on him. Lord, what's on your heart for your people Israel at this very historic moment? What's on your heart for the New York Jews? What's on your heart for the people in Israel and their increasing calamity?

What's on your heart knowing that they're moving irresistibly, ineluctably, inexorably, catch the language, to disaster, to catastrophe for which there'll be no remedy? What's on your heart when you know that the church by and large does not even anticipate this and has made no preparation and will be itself taken by surprise and stunned in the suddenness of which this will come and be disappointed in you because how can you allow Israel again a second time within the same century to suffer a catastrophe of this magnitude?

Something is wrong with you. Something is wrong with the scriptures because we had believed that this Israel was the fulfillment of prophetic expectancy. So we are disillusioned and we might even just flake off and cop out from the faith and be among the great numbers that fall into apostasy as Paul has predicted in the last days.

Out of disappointment of expectations that were shallow and not tempered and not instructed and were convenient because of believers who wanted Israel to succeed as they want themselves to succeed as if the issue of success is the issue.

And so you think, well, isn't it? No. The issue is not success. The issue is glory. And have you ever known from scripture that glory should not first be preceded by suffering? Why then are we naive not to expect that a nation that will glorify God forever both in his judgments and dispersal and in their restoration and return should go through that without a suffering?

And that we should go through it without a suffering? That they should experience that and we should be unaffected? And be disappointed if it happens? And be disappointed in them? And even join the world's chorus saying, you got what you had coming?

What is in the present heart of the Lord? What is his innermost concern and burden? Jesus wants to show his bride what is on his heart and impress it on her so that she will become more and more intimately united with him as she shares in his suffering.

Suffering is not just external or physical. Maybe the most painful kind is that kind that is internal and within. As I often say, the worst sufferings I've ever experienced have not come externally. It's not from Jews who have spat at me or kicked me when I'm standing on a soapbox in Broadway and 72nd Street preaching the gospel.

The greatest affliction and pain that I've had to experience in 38 years as a believer has come from the church, from God's own people, from the brother with whom I broke bread and we went into the house of the Lord together.

I've experienced not only his betrayal, but his seeking to bring others to the same place as he himself. Jesus feels especially for his bride who has to live in these end times. Increasingly she is rejected by a society that promotes the triumph of evil because it is dominated by hellish concepts and methods, satanic music and idols.

It is a painful experience for the bride of Jesus to be ostracized even in Christian circles, which are often infiltrated or seduced by the deception of our times. Have you guys taken note of the Elvis Presley revival?

Talk about revivals. What they can do with a dead man is fast finding out. Who died out of being over-drugged has now become a new culture hero to a whole generation after the time through public relations machinations.

It's remarkable. And we were flooding to Memphis to see the mansion of the great figure and his music now being put in albums and selling by the millions. There's big money in this. And what is it doing?

The kids that are being sucked into this, and many of them are not kids, middle-class women, are tracing out their figure and look at the mansion-sized bed upon which the great figure had lain. Want to see his limousine?

I don't know. Or his bathroom fixtures. Or the toilet that he flushed. I don't know. Talk about idolatry. And how can their children come on Sunday to the Sunday school and listening to some well-meaning plotting servant going on and discussing Bible stories or trying to indicate something of the riches of Scripture.

How do you compete with that flash and glitz that is so powerful that men have never attained such mastery in the manipulation of human beings as we're now seeing in the world of merchandise. I cannot believe it's mere human unaided skill or intelligence that Satan himself, that wily serpent, is himself infiltrating and influencing men who are selling their souls in order to obtain fame and fortune.

And we live in that environment. How come we're not flinching? Why don't we wince? Why don't we grieve? If we lose our sensitivity to that and become dull and just accept it as normative, we have lost the keen edge and the world has prevailed.

So to maintain sensitivity to those things and an anguish over them, to write a letter to the editor, to complain, as I have done, about these giant cut-out figures from Star Wars that Pepsi-Cola advertised and paid $25 million or more for the right to use the Star War name in the public school in Cass Lake.

In the school breaks, maybe I'm just naive, I'm from another generation, in the 10-minute break, whatever it is, to go from one room to the other, the loudspeakers begin to play rock and roll music. They can't make it from the one class to the other except they have this kind of accompaniment.

So the world is becoming, called famed, of course, deadened in its spirit. And there is a generation being prepared who will be incapable of human sentiment and kindness. How does it say? Perilous times shall come in to become lovers of self, lovers of pleasure more than lovers of God, without natural affection.

That's what I'm looking for. That is to say, capable of cruelty without blinking an eye. Our murderers are already being prepared by this present culture. What about the dinosaurs? And what about the E .T. and all the monsters that kids cuddle and take to bed with them while they have it imprinted on their sheets and pillowcases?

What is the enemy doing but deadening the sensibility of a generation that will be our murderers by making them very comfortable now with demons and that they can cuddle and have an affection for more than they have an affection for us, I can assure you.

By the way, noise, tumult, confusion are intrinsic evidences of the activity of the enemy. You see it in the Psalms. I was just reading it today, Psalm 59, that the noise and the tumult of the enemy, I thought, how characteristic.

The enemy loves chaos, bedlam, noise, confusion, deadening of our humanity and our sensibilities. The Lord loves quiet. Be still and know that I am God. To find a place of quiet is an accomplishment in our generation.

And we have a whole generation of kids that goes back even to earlier times who can't do their homework without the TV set on or without the radio on, without something dinning in the background because silence somehow chills them.

Do you love silence? I love silence. I love quiet. And so when we break the silence to speak a word from God, the word will be so much more hallowed and choice because if we reveal silence, we will reveal the sound of the word when it comes.

But if we are deadened and have not a respect for silence, we'll have not a respect for words either. So keep your heart with all diligence in such a time as this and know that the word grieves when it looks down upon a world moving toward a Sodom and Gomorrah final collapse of all morality.

It's no longer the issue of morality versus immorality. What's worse than immorality is amorality. To become amoral is to lose any moral sense at all. And that's the deadening that is presently taking place that one cannot even say what is good or bad is not affected by what is good or bad.

You have become amoral, atheistic, amusement. The word, the prefix A negates the word that follows. So to become amused, which is great business today and unhappily many Jews are in the forefront of those businesses in marketing the rap thing and they're all about music, culture, so-called.

But to be amused is to negate musing. And the word muse means to reflect, to consider, to meditate, to contemplate. Isaac was a man of the tent. Abraham was a man of the tent. God is wanting the Japheth nations as you'll probably hear tomorrow or soon to bow to enter the tent of Sheol.

There's something about a tent and its mobility and quiet that is suggestive of contemplation. The contemplation of God. So to be amused is to negate the ability to reflect and to contemplate. We would be bored.

We need to have something visual, something auditory, something sensual. We need movement, we need motion, we need noise or we're distracted and we're bored. What will we do if the only source of our own enjoyment is the saints?

And we're cut off at the pass. We can no longer go into town or gas is not available and we're locked in with ourselves. So in these end time sufferings the heavenly bridegroom comforts her and endows her with his glory.

She undergoes these sufferings in union with him and in complete surrender to the will of God. Yes, he uses them to transform her into his image so that she stands out more than ever against her surroundings.

She's implying that it's suffering in union with the bridegroom that brings the very transformation of the believer into a vital state. I've never heard this thought expressed and it seems sensible and worthy of every consideration.

Where many faces today reflect the sin and darkness of our times, her face reflects Jesus. She is radiant with an inner beauty born of the deep suffering she has to endure in the end times. Just by virtue of the end times themselves, not necessarily the persecution but the character of the end times and its depravity.

Sharing in the fellowship of her sufferings increasingly refines and transforms her making her strong and radiant. Having to live in this satanic age does not have a depressing effect on the bride. Many others witnessing the devastation caused by sin grow discouraged or come under a sense of oppression.

The bride bears the pain in union with Jesus rather than alone. Her suffering is bound up with his. This is why the end times sorrows are incapable of driving her like some believers to despair. Her heart is filled with divine life and love which no suffering can destroy.

This divine life impels her to make the most of the short time left to express her love for Jesus by ministering to others in love and actively serving in his kingdom. So this is not some kind of retiring into some separate idealistic mystical union with the Lord where you're walking on eggshells and you can't touch the world or those that are suffering or are lost in it.

Quite the contrary. This kind of vital love compels you to come into the world and pluck the branch from the burning and to have a sense of the lostness that is in the world and the shortness of the time that remains.

So I'm happy for that note that she strikes lest we think that we ought to be encouraged for some kind of idealistic reverie of living in some kind of glass house and Jesus and me. The Lord is concerned for the world.

He so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son. So there's a cry in her heart. Divine judgment is about to descend. Judgment such as the world has never seen. The earth will be in a turmoil.

Mountains will tremble and fall. The oceans will roar. Large tracts of land will be submerged. Disastrous earthquakes will strike with growing frequency. Cities and entire areas will be erased from the map.

There will be scenes of untold devastation and misery. Many will lose their lives. In view of the coming judgment of God, a true bride of Christ is gripped with a consuming ardor. A-R-D-O U-R. Time is short.

I've got to do all that I can before it's too late. She takes her place beside the Savior as he rescues souls from the abyss of sin in which mankind lies today. Like an extended alm of the Lord, she helps to save those perishing in sin and misery through repentance, priestly suffering and prayers, as well as outreach.

Through repentance, priestly suffering and prayer. This is priestly ministry. What makes it priestly? And how will that affect reaching out to the lost in an age in which these severe judgments are falling and already falling?

It affects the whole character of it. It's the difference between brash evangelism. Are you a saved brother? You'll face hell if you're not as against a priestly ministration of the same message that is so fused and charged with a pathos and an empathy of God's heart.

For that one will be victim if they don't turn. Priestly is altogether something else. And if there's any value in our service and ministry of our own self-enhancement or our own enjoyment, like that man in Switzerland who picked me up at the side of the road, if there was something in it for him to put a notch in his belt that he has saved the Jew, I would not have been saved.

That very attitude and character, I would have instinctively recoiled. But that was not part of him. But what he expressed to me, now that I look back, was altogether priestly, which is to say personally disinterested.

There was nothing to be gained for him in his ministration to me. It was entirely unto the Lord. Israel has not seen that kind of ministry. I'm talking about the land of Christian Zionists who have come with a kind of sentimental concern, but it's not priestly.

There's something that returns to them in a kind of satisfaction and enjoyment that affects the character of the witness that goes forth. To be priestly is not to profit from your ministry, even psychologically or emotionally, and therefore you do not need applause and recognition, and therefore you can just as readily receive rejection.

It's a priestly stature, and that's what she describes as being intrinsic to the bridal makeup of pain in union with the bridegroom to the degree in which we share in his sufferings. I'm not saying thus saith the Lord about any of this.

I'm wanting to contemplate it, but I think that there are so few who have any insight like this. It's worth our hearing and testified by the reality of that movement insofar as I have been able to see it and know it over the years.

Her book on repentance, I think, is an all-time classic. Repentance, the Secret of the Joy-Filled Life. Many years ago, when the wall still stood, some brothers in publishing asked me, what one book would I recommend for translation and publication in Russian?

And I thought, and for a moment I said, Vasily Shlink's book on Repentance, the Secret of the Joy-Filled Life. So she has a or now she's passed on, had a depth of insight that did not flinch from the judgments of God and interpreted present calamity and disorder in the world as being already preliminary judgments sent from God as a mercy to alert those who would turn in order to avoid the ultimate judgments that subsequently follow.