A Call to the Apostolic — Art Katz

The Meaning and Urgency of Apostolic Reality

I feel led to share something that the Lord only rarely on occasion takes out, kind of a Magna Carta of apostolicity. What are the quintessential elements, what are the constituent elements that comprise apostolic reality?

If you can't understand the title, how shall you understand what follows? I have it here on free sheets, it deserves an entire seminar, and may the Lord give me grace to condense it in one speaking, but to leave it on file and on record, so that later on when you come of age, you're not there now, you'll be able to appreciate and receive the benefit of a statement that I need to make now, because if I don't make it now, it will not ever be made.

You'll not hear it from another man, and I'm not sure that I'll ever be back here, or any place that I'm going in these days. I have a sense like once and for all, and so Lord, whether or not I will is up to you, but I'd rather believe soberly, wisely, that this is a once and for all occasion that will not be given again.

And I see it that way, I ask you to see it that way, and Lord, you know the difficulty of the topic that's before me, it doesn't lend itself to easy statements, it makes demand upon the hearer, and I'm supposing that most of what will be shared will be incomprehensible, and the congregation will look at me blankly, but put it on record, Lord, see to the recording of it so that later on, when the time is right, they will have access to a statement that was made in time, and that would not have otherwise opportunity to have been expressed, that will be invaluable for the ongoing call of the church that bears your name in this city and this nation, for the word apostolic comprehends everything, and it's a word like all the great words now presently suffering not only abuse, but threat, that they might become familiar and have casual meaning that misses the meaning, so Lord, show us what comprises this word, what are the quintessential elements that constitute apostolicity, the apostolic reality to which we're called, and if we don't attain, we forfeit the whole identity and calling which is ours as the church that bears your name in these last days.

We're needing a special grace, and we're asking it, Lord, for their sake and for your name's sake, in Jesus' name, amen. So one of the first things that will denote a church that can be rightly called apostolic is that it enjoys a radical anticipation of the end.

Apostolic Anticipation of the End

It has an anticipation of the end, which is to say that it's a church that is eschatologically minded. It knows that it's moving not just to a conclusion, but to a consummation of an ultimate kind that had its origins at the very commencement of the redemptive, salvific work of God from the beginning.

Because it has a mind and a consciousness that we're moving toward an end, it is aware of what was the beginning and is in connection with that beginning. It sees itself in an unbroken continuum with everything that comprises the true apostolic and prophetic past of the church.

It's not a present now, independent of that past, and it's one that absorbs and takes that past to itself in unbroken communion and continuity and is looking toward the conclusion. Something that is caught up in that statement about the invisible cloud of witnesses that are overhead and are not complete without us, to whom does that make sense?

Who cites that? Who expects that? Who anticipates? Who knows that what they are about in God is of such moment and such consequence like today, right now, that there is in fact an invisible cloud of witnesses overhead in Singapore and overhead in this church?

And who are they that comprise it? Those who have suffered, sacrificed, died for the fulfillment, the conclusion, the reality, the consummation of that for which they sacrificed and are not complete without us.

So they're looking on with more than a casual interest. They're looking on because they realize that we are in unbroken communion with them and that somehow that we have received the baton and we are bringing it to the place of completion and finish, which if we don't attain it, they are eternally and perpetually disconnected and shorted of the thing for which they sacrificed.

See, it's a certain mentality, saints. It's a certain apprehension of things invisible, eternal, that had an origin and a consummation and we are in process toward that end and the inheritance of that which preceded us.

That's a deep apprehension of spiritual reality and I'm saying that unless that distinguishes the church, it cannot rightly be called apostolic. Those that are looking down upon us as the invisible cloud of witnesses are more than just observing.

They're actually bringing a quotient and a dimension from the other realm, from the heavenly realm into our proceeding now, without which we could not continue or have the full-bodied intention of God expressed.

You know, when you begin to think like that, it's not long before you'll be saying with Paul, who is sufficient for these things? If what you are about art right now is a point of time which God not only knew from the beginning of creation, but was in his thought as works to walk in that were established before the foundations of the earth were laid and need to be consummated and fulfilled this morning through the piece of dust that you are, who has had a lousy night's sleep and is shabby and worn out and at odds with himself physically, and yet that requirement has come.

The moment is now. It's full of eternal portent, there's a good word, P-O-R-T-E-N-T, full of eternal significance and it has come to rest right now in this moment and it will not ever be given again.

It's once and for all. How do you like to live like that? Not just because it's this morning, but tomorrow will be exactly the same for tomorrow. That is to say, apostolic view of reality is always sensing the utter significance of what it is about in every moment of time.

There's nothing casual. There's nothing light. Everything is altogether significant because it encapsulates the past and it points to the future and it has everything to do with the consummation of the whole salvific history of God, his name, his honor and his glory and it's got to come out of you at a time when you're not at your best, when you're feeling especially weak and fuzzy and out of it.

That's when he makes the greatest requirement. This is a lifestyle. This is a mode of being. This is a certain kind of consciousness that the world would condemn and maybe even take those people who subscribe to it and put them in mental institutions as being out of touch with reality because they have such a heightened sense that the moment that they are about is of ultimate and eternal significance and yet the remarkable thing is that that is definitive reality and definitive sanity and the other thing that thinks that this is just a transient moment, one like another, one Sunday like another, that is irregular, that is insane, that is unhealthy, that is unapostolic which is to say unreal because the synonym for the word apostolic is authenticity, what is ultimately real issues from God as God himself sees it, knows it and performs it.

Authenticity is the name of the game, not play acting, not a facsimile thereof and the greatest danger right now is over the two great words apostolic and prophetic for there are men who are very adept at creating the facsimile thereof and enjoying widest acceptance who if they were here today would not have a cotton picking notion of what the heck I'm talking about.

Nor can they have it because they're not the real thing. Because the distinguished mark of prophet and apostle is that they are the thing in themselves. It's not that they've learned to acquire an appropriate and new vocabulary.

They are the thing through and through. It's the word made flesh. It's truth personified. It's not an affectation or a religious show and that kind of reality is not produced in a moment. It's the work of a lifetime when a man is subjected because he has that call which he has not appointed for himself from the God who has given it and therefore is required to pass through experiences of a formative kind that have at its heart the cross having to do with radical separation, the dealings of God in order to attain this kind of mode and framework of understanding and live and move and have his being in it consistently.

The Apostolic Foundation and the Threat of Counterfeits

So imagine a church of this kind because it has this foundation. The church is built on the foundation of the apostles and the prophets, not some glib men who have plagiarized Paul and are able to apply it to present church conditions as problem solvers and are called apostolic or are franchising whole geographical territories and appointing certain ones to preside as being the apostolic representative of their ministry.

And how is the ministry occasioned? Some false prophet prophesied that he who was once a professor in a seminary is now an apostle and so the assumption is founded on a false prophecy and they validate one another.

I don't want to say more than that. I'm already getting a little heavy but I just want to identify for you the kind of critical hour that we're in because the enemy knows more than we how the issue of what is authentically apostolic and prophetic is the issue and anything that can be done to dissipate, change, alter, warp that understanding and offer some facsimile thereof that is not the thing in itself authentically, the powers of darkness will promote.

So I'm pleading with you to be jealous over the two great words and to know that they're not easily understood let alone demonstrated and yet it's your call. If you're not that, what are you? If God is giving you an elaborate foundation that can only come exclusively with those who are apostles and prophets, what then are you expected to be?

Why would he give that investment, that extravagance of men who have been nurtured and formed at the cross in privacy and hiddenness unless he intended for you to be raised on that foundation and that the superstructure of what you are as church is exactly in keeping with that foundation in character and kind and that will glorify him forever and fulfill his eternal purposes and the mysteries for which we are called to be the fulfillment.

So I'm just, I could have begun anywhere, I'm beginning with that. A church that is apostolic has a radical apprehension of the end and an anticipation of it, it's consciously moving toward that, therefore its church services are not a mere succession of Sundays, they are a preparation for that and consciously and willfully and the pastors and leaders and teachers are not afraid to make requirement of their congregations and they'll be specific and pointed and they'll name names and they'll identify things and call for an obedience and a discipline because we're moving toward something of great magnitude that requires maturity and we want to get away from that man-pleasing Christianity that speaks in generalities to people who are lost in the multitude of the congregation and can hide.

Spiritual Warfare and the Church's Public Witness

So the powers of darkness seeing a congregation with this kind of intention even before it even comes into that reality will oppose it. They'll be marked in the consideration of the powers of the air as a dangerous entity who before that time they could safely ignore and they could say Jesus we know and Paul we know but who are you?

The Church of Singapore who? One thing about the powers of darkness and by the way are you aware of the powers of darkness or are they some kind of mystical ephemeral realm that is lost somewhere in the world of spirit and has not any substantive reality let alone the most formidable reality against which we're called to contend for we wrestle not against flesh and blood but the principalities and powers of the air, the world's rulers of this darkness you dear saints.

We're having a field day with Singapore because they've not been recognized because there's not a church yet that has the keenness of discernment to recognize their presence and to see their wiles and their manipulations and to blow the whistle on their fraudulence and save those that are captive by them to be brought to a freedom.

It recognizes there's a spiritual battle and a struggle on and it's over the issue of what in fact is reality? What in fact are true values? For what should men live? What is the purpose for our being?

To be consumers? To have a position in the economy that produces the goods that others might consume them and we ourselves and that our whole life is given to having and spending, laying waste our powers and little we find in nature that is ours and A for the day of anyone here who can recognize the poet from whom I've just quoted.

You're not too conversant with poetry? That's your problem. You're not poetic enough. You're too matter of fact. You're too mechanical. You're too legal. You're too statistical. You're the kind of thing that the system wants that will be efficient because the reason for being in this system is efficacy to produce goods and distribute them and see to a certain prosperity because it has no concern for that which is ultimate or eternal and doesn't realize that this lifetime is a preparation for that same.

Got the idea? No one has told it. No one has shown it because to persuade the world that this life presently is transient and preparatory for that which is eternal and abiding requires people who come down from that place who are in the world but not of it and exude eternity and not just possess it as a category.

They're timeless and they're eternal in the reality of what they are in themselves and therefore they can move through the world and through society and culture and it's water off the duck's back. They never are jerked or manipulated or self-conscious or fearful or intimidated or threatened by any such thing.

Once you are in the realm of eternity and eternal value, that which is in time comes into its proper focus whereas the enemy wants to exaggerate its importance and by that make you captive. A church that is the church sees these things and is so effectually delivered from them that it lives in a kind of remarkable and transcendent freedom that the very observation of such a church makes those that are captive aware for the first time that they are captive, that they are the products of a time and age and they're being jerked and manipulated and their life is being stripped from them for merchandise.

In fact, we know in the book of Revelation that the souls of men will be made merchandise so we need a presence in the earth of those that are really free from the influence of these powers and are marching by another beat and have a sense of those things that are invisible and eternal and know the eternal weight of glory that makes the present affliction both momentary and light and in fact they can expect present affliction because they are that kind of saint.

If they were just ordinary pure occupiers faithful to attend services through a dollar collection plate, they'll never be bothered by the powers of darkness but once they imbibe and catch vision and have a sense of these things that are eternal and recognize the conflict with the invisible realm of principalities and powers over domination of the earth and who it is that's going to call the shots and define what is reality, when the powers recognize such a one, they will begin to oppose them and so they'll experience afflictions and the remarkable thing is that God allows it.

He did not save Paul from the consequence of being Pauline, from the consequence of being an apostle and inviting the devastation of the powers that opposed him, men vowing that they would neither eat nor drink until he was dead because he was not fit to live.

What about Paul that was so onerous, another good word, O-N-E-R-O-U-S, I'm doing wonders for his vocabulary, that men would vow that Paul was not fit to live. Isn't it remarkable? The man who shows forth more powerfully than any the genius of God because what is an apostle but the expression of what is intrinsic to God himself, who is the high priest and the apostle of our confession.

Paul is only the continuation of Jesus Christ, I say only. Everything that he says and does is what the Lord himself would have performed and expressed had he continued in his own body because when Paul says for me to live as Christ, he's not just making a liberal statement of a poetic kind, he's describing the definitive truth of his life.

So don't you applaud him for being a Jewish celebrity and that his attributes and the things that distinguish him are his intellect or his courage. No, that was all dung. His rabbinical inheritance was all dung that he might win Christ and know him in the power of his resurrection and that's why he's so much the perpetuation of Christ and living in the power that raised Jesus from the dead.

That's why he said, I've labored more diligently than you all. So Paul is more than just an object of our curiosity. He is the emblem. He's the personification of the very thing to which we're called and the heck of it is we don't even have Pauline intention.

We don't even have apostolic intention. We're content to be charismatic, which isn't bad, but it falls short of the glory. At its best, it's only a transitional thing, but it does accentuate the issue of the Holy Spirit, baptism of the Spirit, gifts of the Spirit, which in the charismatic context falls short and that's why it has run out and has lost its currency.

God never intended gifts of the Spirit as a mere adornment. He intended it as nuts and bolts provision for an authentic church fighting for its life against the powers that contend against it and are the key to the salvation both of Israel and its own generation.

Gifts of the Spirit are a life and death provision for an earnest people who are on the firing line being opposed by the powers of darkness unto death. When we make of those gifts a kind of denominational distinction, an option of you could or you couldn't, it's not all that important, we're already out of the picture.

Spiritual Gifts and Apostolic Discernment

So a church of this kind will be distinguished by its acknowledgement and awareness of the struggle, by its necessity to be profoundly established in the realm of Spirit and can trust the expressions of Spirit as not just something to liven services but a life and death provision of God for wisdom for situations that cannot be anticipated and for which all previous experience does not fit us.

See, I'm saying so much, how can you hear this? How can you receive this? What am I saying? We can anticipate in the last days radical requirements, life and death situations that will affect many that we could not have anticipated nor prepared for and for which any previous experience will not now help us.

So unless we're hearing right now from the Spirit of God, this is the way, walk in it, take this direction, do this, do that, anticipate this, we will have lost the moment. The gifts of the Spirit, prophecy, tongues, interpretation are critical life-serving enablements from God and we have trafficked in that whole dimension and made it a kind of charismatic adornment to improve our meetings.

If in fact it is even that much today, it has fallen into such disuse and such a lack of esteem even by those who call themselves Pentecostal. But when we begin to become apostolically minded and see ourselves involved in a remarkable continuum of an unbroken kind moving toward a consummation and conclusion that the powers of darkness dread and are fighting furiously to retain their usurping influence in the earth, we'll need every gift of God and we'll need to hear prophecy from those vessels whose character we know and with whom we can have confidence that they're not speaking out of the flesh, that they could be heard or be admired.

That is to say that we have come into a configuration of relationship by which we know one another's character and we're not strangers lost in the obscurity of the congregation of hundreds. But there's face-to-face relationship, there's things that are tested because if we're going to receive the call of the Holy Spirit, separate out unto me this one and that from the congregation that I want to send to Malaysia or wheresoever and lay hands on them that they might be sent forth by the Holy Ghost, I want to know whose hands are being laid on me.

What were they doing with those hands the night before the day of my being sent? Were they twiddling the dial of a TV or even giving themselves to worse practices? Because when you lay hands on someone, whatever is in you and composite in you is made manifest into that vessel.

And yet Paul and Barnabas can receive that prayer in Acts 13 and God says, and so they being sent forth by the Holy Ghost went. God equates the prayer, fasting and laying on of the hands of men and women as being equal to ascending of the Holy Ghost.

It waited for that meant anti-archal congregation to come to a maturity and a quality of life and relationship that was so authentic and true that a piece of it could be separated and sent out into the world and sent out by the blessing of those from that sending base by the laying on of their hands that did not confer evil or questionable things but things that were holy and righteous because they lived in a relationship intensive enough and intimate enough to know whose hands were being laid on.

Our modern Christianity has moved away from that model and now we have mega churches where you don't know who the guy is behind you or alongside you and you take communion, what you hold a plastic cup and a little piece of waffle and a certain instruction you'll eat and drink when he eats and drinks and the guy's complete stranger to you.

How is that communion? Well once a month is sufficient for that until you come into the configuration of God's intention of earnest saints relating together as the community of God's people, once a month will not be enough.

Communion, Community, and the Reality of Shared Life

I was sick and tired of my Pentecostal once a month communions. I gulped it down, it had no effect whatsoever. It even made me feel uncomfortable but when the Lord called us into community and life together in a rugged environment in northern Minnesota in hardship where the saints become trying and the best of the charismatic darlings show another face when they're living together intensely day after day and week after week they become unraveled and it's amazing what they're capable of and how disappointing and disillusioning and that you yourself are the most shocked by the revelation of the truth of yourself that you had not seen until you were brought into that intensity of relationship and I'll tell you what and you're going to be kind and nice and patient and forbearing and loving maybe the first week depending how nice a guy you are.

You're pretty nice guys but by the second week you have run out of human well-meaning intention and magnanimity and you need God. So when you come to that communion table you're not just sucking up a little grape juice and a piece of flat bread.

You're taking the substance and spirit of the living God who has imputed himself into those elements as a covenantal meal for the inner man that we can show forth to one another real patience, real love, real forbearance.

We need the provision of God which has been reduced to a triviality because our Christian life has become equally trivial. You start getting serious with God about your apostolic calling and the necessity to live together with one another in more than just Sunday services and you'll be rushing to the communion table and you're believing for something more than an emblem.

By the way I take communion every morning by myself because I'm up early and have a time of devotion with the Most High or you wouldn't be getting very much now because what a man expresses publicly is what he in fact is privately before God.

You're receiving the benefit of all of my unknown and unrecorded daily times with the Lord that are not distinguished by great senses of his presence but by faithful attention to the book of Psalms, the book of Proverbs, other scriptures to which I'll be directed, the remarkable writings of Oswald Chambers, of Spurgeon morning and evening, outstanding devotional material and waiting on the Lord and praying as the spirit inspires and then I conclude by taking my own communion.

I carry a little sack with me with matzo, with unleavened bread and a little flask of wine and if we don't have wine we'll take water but every morning I need the fresh impartation of the Most High. I need to be strengthened in the inner man and I have a faith to believe that what I am taking is more than just what it is as natural elements and certainly much more than symbols.

As your faith is so be it unto you and all of that begins by just recognizing that there's an end toward which we're moving and everything needs to be a contribution toward that end and that that opens you to the attack of the opposing powers of darkness who will ventilate their spite upon us and brings us to a place where we are in a felt disjuncture with the world.

Separation from the World and Apostolic Authenticity

Wow that is a mouthful. When you begin on a course of conduct and mentality like that how long will you be one of the boys? How long will you be good fun and acceptable and a nice guy and a Christian too?

You will find yourself in a conscious and growing disjuncture with the world. You're no longer as comfortable in it. In fact now you're beginning to see through it and those things that purport to be ostensibly good are for you more apparently evil than evil itself.

You have discerned, you have developed discernment because it's easy to discern what is evil but to recognize that good that often motivates us out of sentiment because it's nice and acceptable and makes people feel good is likely more inherently evil than evil itself if it keeps us away from the obedience to God in truth.

You're able to see through what purports to be good and recognize that in what the world endorses as good and the church also sanctifies and condones is the most vicious evil of all if it satisfies us with some superficiality by which we get by and lose our apostolic significance.

You know you go on like that, you'll feel like a stranger and a pilgrim and a sojourner in the world. It's strange to feel strange and there's something in us that is human that wants acceptance, wants a nice pat on the back that we're one of the boys.

You're Christians but you're acceptable also. We don't want to come to a place where we're so abnormal in our attitudes and our perceptions and our eyes are filled with things eternal and we're not motivated and moved by the kinds of things for which others are laboring diligently that we will be looked upon as strange.

One of our Jewish brothers whom we brought to community, his mother not only had him to meet with rabbis but with psychiatrists because he had lost his Jewish distinctive. He was no longer concerned with his success and she was sure that he was mentally deranged.

How could he be a nice Jewish boy and not be concerned with his success? Because he was taken up now with a whole other realm of concern that was transcendent and eternal that in his Jewish mother's eyes was an alarm.

He had changed so that he had to be sent to a psychiatrist. The man was out of his mind. He was walking by another beat. He had another set of values. But what he represented was definitively real and her alarm was predicated on what is essentially false.

And I'm asking you, you want to be apostolic? It's not a cutesy little game that you play by taking on a nice vocabulary. You will be at odds with the world. You will be in disjunction. It will not mean to you what it means to others.

You'll feel uncomfortable and you'll make others uncomfortable just by what you are in yourself. Who want you to confirm them in their relationship with the world but your very indifference to their values and success makes them to be threatened and therefore the way for them to solve the dilemma is to get rid of you one way or the other.

And the whole history of the true apostolic church, that unbroken continuum, is the history of persecution unto death not by the world but by religious bodies that cannot stand the apostolic reality because it blows the whistle on its fraudulence and shows it to be synthetic and false and only superficially religious.

And the way to get rid of that threat is to get rid of them. So the Hutterites and the Mennonites and all of these radical wings of the Reformation, their whole history is filled with violence, with rejection, with persecution, being cast out and moved to other countries because their presence could not be tolerated by religious bodies who wanted to enjoy a status quo and did not make any requirement of its believers and whose religious leaders were flunkies and public officials who baptized them and gave them certificates of citizenship.

But here were earnest believers. They were called in German, die stille im Lande, the quiet ones in the earth. No noise, nothing conspicuous, but the quality of their life. Look how they love one another.

No man thought that the thing which he had was his own. They had all things common. Those that believed were together in a real togetherness that was more than sitting alongside each other in pews and retreating back to their privacy when the service is over.

They remained. They were in community. They had a lifestyle. There was a mode of being that was heavenly. And those that are in the earth religiously cannot abide the presence of those people. And the only answer is to get them out or to burn them at the stake or to take the young girls and tie them back to back and dump them into the rivers that flow for the city Zurich and expunge their presence because their presence blows the whistle on the fraudulence of the religious profession that calls itself Christian.

Martyrdom as the Logic of Apostolic Life

You know what I believe? We're going to see the reiteration of that again in the last days. Are you prepared for martyrdom? Why me? If that's your attitude, you're not prepared. But to count it privilege and you don't have to go out and look for it.

It will be the logic of a truly believing life. As for me, I'm not expecting to die in bed. In fact, this may well be my last trip going to Malaysia and Indonesia, where a Jewish Christian and American head would be a trophy.

And if not there, then somewhere else. But the logic of a life truly lived in God invites martyrdom. And it's not some masochistic thing over which we become Maudlin, M-A-U-D-L-I-N, which is falsely sentimental.

The remarkable thing is that should that be the conclusion of our life, the logic of a life rightly lived, we count it privilege. We obtain a crown which would be able to lay at the feet of the Lord in eternal honor because we're living in the realm of what is eternal.

And the momentary suffering that by which our death has come as martyrs is counted privilege and not fate. The true church is a martyr church. Not that we will necessarily have to suffer such an abrupt extinction, but we're living in a particular way.

Martyrdom is a lifestyle by which your life is not your own. Isn't that what it says in Revelation? They overcame him by the blood of the lamb, the word of their testimony, and they did not love their lives unto the death.

That's definitive Christianity, you dear saints. How close are you to today? How close are you willing to come and be fitted to stand in that dimension in the last days and not be among those who dwell in the earth?

They'll either be the heavenly minded or the earth dwellers. And the earth dwellers will not be able to stand the prophets, few though they may be, whose words torment them. And when these prophets are killed, they give each other gifts because they're rid of the nuisance of such men whose indictment they could not bear.

There's two classes of people at the end of the age, earth dwellers and the heavenly minded. Paul had his citizenship in heaven. What does that mean? That's just not where he was registered. It's where his thought had its origin, his purpose, his understanding, his inspiration, his values.

His life was essentially lived from that place and from that center. Such a heavenly minded man has got to be irrelevant in the earth. That's how much you know. The fact of the matter is, because he's heavenly minded, he will be the more relevant in the earth.

Who is it that gives the church counsel on how to take communion, how to deal with the erring sinner, how to restore such a one back to the faith, what to do with the widows, what to exhort slaves. Paul is full of practical, immediate counsel, all the more because he has his citizenship in heaven.

The Kingdom Orientation of the Church

And I have to say, in all love, you guys are not sufficiently heavenly minded. The earth is too much with you. And I've never seen an environment in my travels all over the world, less conducive to heaven than Singapore.

This is a tidy little society that you have here. It's nice. I mean, the housing, the sections, even the great apartment buildings, the shopping sections, the apartment department stores, the traffic, the cars.

Is there so much as one bruised, battered, rusty vessel, a vehicle in the whole of Singapore? Is every vehicle flashy and new and shining and resplendent? My God, is this make believe? Is this for real?

Is there any tragedy around here? Is everything comfortable and cozy and nice? And this is either the best of all worlds or the most deceptive. So, brother, what's the alternative? Get your eyeballs into the apostolic scriptures.

Be imbued with that reality that is timeless and be suffused with it so that when you look out on Singapore, it has lost its its glow and its radiance. It doesn't seduce you. You can take it, leave it.

You can walk through it as one untouched because your eyes, your being, your thought, your whole purpose for being is caught up and identified and fortified by what is in the holy writ of the things that are yet to come, the things that were.

You're connected with that past and you're aiming for that future and that consummation and conclusion. And because you are, you're out from this world and you'll look at and people will know it and no one will be more offended than other Christians who think you're going too far now and you're too radical now and you're not the fun that you used to be.

You're so serious now and occupied with something that can't quite be expressed or defined, but it robs you from being one of the boys, one of the nice guys that used to be counted on as fun. And you're willing to pay that price.

Such a people who are not, who are in disjunction with the world and at enmity with the world that is at enmity with God, who know, who see its systems as false and whose values are discerned and are consciously repudiated, therefore become a statement of the kingdom to come.