Hearing God's Voice — Art Katz

I'm going to give you a special treat, a little quotation from P .T. Forsythe. It was not enough, but we just got our toes dipped in. But I was reading somewhere this afternoon, and there's a passage so remarkable, it may touch our subject, because it has to do with the silence of Jesus, the quiet of his own soul, and the absence in his sonship, in his life, from clamoring to have to know.

Stillness as the Condition for Hearing God

So I would just say off the cuff, one of the greatest impediments to hearing the Word of God is our own noise, is our own disquiet, our own agitation, our own insecurity. And so long as that is active, and we are interjecting or making any demand, even unconsciously, it impedes if it does not altogether dismiss the still small voice.

The sine qua non, no doubt Latin phrase, the absolutely essential condition without which the result does not follow, sine qua non, the absolutely essential condition is the absence of any determination on your part for anything.

You'll not hear the voice of God and receive his direction so long as you have already an agenda of your own, a thought of your own. You have got to be completely free of any necessity for your own end.

And I'm not talking about carnal ends, even spiritual ends. So a condition for hearing him is the absence of any clamor, noise, inward exercise of our own souls. That's why I never heard him until I was 35.

I had so many good opinions, and formidable, that until my mouth was shut by the collapse of my categories, I could not hear God. But once I was shut up and had nothing more to say, I began to hear God, even to the point where he called me by name.

Christ's Self-Emptying and the Renunciation of Knowledge

So P .T. Forsythe is so remarkable a spirit that he takes up aspects of things like this as I've never heard anyone do. So I'm just dipping in here. He says it was perhaps part of his work's perfect glory, speaking of Jesus, not to know, to be silent in the agony of knowing only the Father's will, and not even the Father's way.

His self-emptying meant self-limitation in knowledge, as in other things. Think on that, the limitation on knowledge, that when he emptied himself, he emptied himself not only of knowing, but the principle of knowing.

Which, if you strip that from any modern man today, you have brought him down. Men live by knowing. So when God called Abraham, follow me in the land that I will show you, it was already the issue of the cross.

That you're not to move by your knowledge, your predetermined understanding, your own counsel and will. Follow me in what I will show you. So Paul said, I'm determined not to know anything but Christ and him crucified.

For a Jewish man with an intellect like that, it required a determination. Had he not exercised it, he just would have been an impressive figure, but he would not have been a glorious apostle. He had to restrain his own knowledge, because the Greek axiom is know thyself.

Man is the measure of all things. Knowledge is a virtue. Seek knowledge. Knowledge of a kind that will advance your purposes. So for Jesus to empty himself, not only from knowledge, but the principle of knowledge as trust is really an emptying.

Because what is college about? What is university about? What is the world instructing us to know in order to make decisions and be rightly determined in the choices that we will succeed? The kingdom of God is the reverse, the antithesis of every principle that the world celebrates as good.

It emphasizes knowledge and your confidence and your knowing by which you make determinations, by which your success is obtained. The principle of the kingdom is not knowing, but trusting. And that Jesus himself exemplified this way of the Father.

Trusting God Through the Agony of Not Knowing

This repudiation of entire knowledge may well have been a vital element in the agony of the great act. It's not cheap not to know. Not to know can be excruciatingly painful. Because every corpuscle in our humanity wants to know, desires to know, wants to have its security founded on its knowledge.

To give up that dependency, that trust, that elementary consideration that the world applauds is painful. And he's suggesting that it's not the least of the elements that constituted the agony of Jesus.

Following the Father in obedience in acts in which he did not know their full meaning, the implication, or the requirement. And that he didn't need to know to render the obedience. That's what the Son is.

How do you proceed without knowing? The remarkable tension that the Lord bore, and that we're called also, and that is probably a vital element in the agony of the great act, of the great issue of the cross.

It drew on the spiritual resources of his moral personality. There he goes again, P .T. Forsythe. Everything in the last analysis is the issue of what is moral. His moral personality. It's not just some abstract personality, it's the heart of the man.

The moral constitution of the man had to do with the willingness to forbear and to proceed in the absence of knowing. That's a moral decision. You know, you learn what moral is by the references that are made to it and about it.

You don't learn it by going to it head on. Every time I've looked in a dictionary for whatever source for the word moral, I've never yet come to a definition that is satisfying. You'll come to it by apprehending it, not by defining it.

And so, Jesus is a moral personality. If the genius of Jesus is what he is in his moral personality, then we've got the sense of what that means. And he's saying that the willingness to forfeit knowing as a principle of life, and trust without knowing, is at the heart of the moral personality of Jesus, who is the patterned son.

In its superhuman obedience and trust, his silence may have been due to voluntary ignorance, to nescience, I've never heard a word like this, I guess it's the opposite of omniscient. Instead of an all-knowingness, it's a non-knowingness, by a holy and omnipotent consent.

It was perhaps the abyss of his self-emptying. The willingness to let go of knowing as a basis for his obedience, Forsythe is suggesting, is not just an aspect of his moral personality, but it might be at the very heart of it.

Because we need to assess how deep is that human desire and need to know, so that when he emptied himself, he emptied himself even of that aspect, and that it was the triumph of what constituted his humiliation.

His utter exercise of those self-imposed limitations, which made his incarnation, was essential in those things that pertain to redemption. It was perhaps his, I'm rephrasing here as I'm reading to make it more understandable, it was perhaps his power through positive trust to curb the passion to know.

It was perhaps his power through positive trust to curb the passion to know. His trust in knowing God, knowing the Father, was the power to let go of the need to know in fact. If he knows the knower, he doesn't have to know the particulars.

Isn't there a hymn like that, a church thing about knowing God, knowing the knower? Not needing to know the particulars, but you need to know him who knows. That's what he's saying. He had such a power of trust in him who knows, the father who knows, that he as the son did not need to know.

He knew the knower. How do you like to live like that? Are you getting nervous just hearing this? You ought to. It's either a wonderful freedom or a terrible insecurity. Not to know the future, but to know, how does it go?

Who holds the future. Jesus is the epitome of that kind of son. He did not need to know the particulars. He knew the one who holds the future. When he said, into thy hands I commit my spirit, that's not just a little frothy statement.

It's like when death comes and my consciousness is obliterated, and I'm powerless to affect anything, I'm trusting you to then affect my resurrection and whatever else is in your intention, in the supreme knowledge that you have as father.

To you I commit my spirit. He yielded up the ghost. That's the very point where the Roman centurion said, truly this is the son of God. He had never seen a man relinquish his life with so complete a trust as Jesus did in that expression, he gave up the ghost.

As he already had prayed to the father, I yield. So there's a confidence and a trust that does not require knowledge. How would you like to be a candidate for this, for your future? As a preacher, not knowing not only what the next message will be in a series of messages, but what the next sentence will be in a message.

Strange, you never get used to it. So it was perhaps his power through positive trust to curb the passion to know. His acquiescence by faith, his consent not explicitly to see how his mortal obedience expiated and redeemed, but his certainty only that it did.

That the holy father had need of it for his holiness, for his kingdom, for his sons. Had he seen all, he could have suffered but little. To have known in detail at that hour the whole meaning, power and effect of his sorrow could have been to quench, to quench it in the glory that could really only come with salvation.

The Cross, Silence, and the Mystery of Redemption

This is making a demand on you, to hear this and understand what Forsythe is saying. That this is no small issue, that the glory of redemption required the ignorance of Jesus that was willful. He chose not to know even the things that were being affected by his suffering and his death.

And that had he known, it would have removed some of the suffering that comes from a tension of trust and would have robbed the act of redemption of its full glory. That's how I'm reading this. Had he seen all, he could have suffered but little.

To have known in detail at that hour the whole meaning, power and effect of his sorrow would have been to quench it in the glory that could really only come with salvation. When he had sounded its darkness and risen on the other side.

You have to have a particular sympathy for Forsythe that is uncommon for Americans. Because he's poetic and lyrical and intuitive and he's not writing like a disciplined theologian. He's writing like stream of consciousness because he's dealing with mystery.

And he's just feeling his way through remarkable things about that he had sounded its darkness. Sounded means plumbing its depths and risen on the other side. The tree of knowledge is not the tree of life.

So even in the last and final act of Jesus there's the choice of trees and choosing not to know in the extremity of what he's even experiencing that has to do with the ultimate purposes of the father is the son who is repudiating Adam by not eating from that tree or looking to knowledge but rather to trust.

And so this silence was the draining of sorrow's cup. To see all would be to suffer none and to utter suffering is to escape some. To confide it is to ease it. To die alone is the death in silence. So it's going from knowledge to silence.

Jesus, well here's what I said before. So long as you're a jangle of making claims or demanding or having your own opinion you can't hear the still spring voice. So there's a silence in the final sufferings of Jesus who is not demanding to know, is not making any assertions, is not making any claims.

He's going through his final agony except for a few broken statements Father forgive them or the statement to John, your mother or I thirst. He went to his death in relative quiet. Silence is sorrow's crown of sorrow and can be more pathetic than death.

And the silence of the gospels reflects the Savior's true dying because we're not in other places saved. The gospels don't explain. They just describe or set forth the narrative. Jesus didn't explain his conduct or his meaning.

He just did it. There's a silence of God even about the great acts of God. And the silence reflects the awful silence the hiding of the Father and the last word of test of holy obedience, dying trust.

It was not the Father's anger but his holy love. Unspeakable by word or look to be uttered only by deed by resurrection. Quiet is broken not by an explanation but by a deed. And the deed is resurrection and quiet.

But that resurrection speaks volumes. That resurrection says that the sacrifice of this Son is acceptable to the Father. It constitutes the redemption of mankind. So God doesn't explain by speaking. The deed itself is the explanation but the deed itself takes place in silence.

Listen, we can afford to hear something like this. It won't hurt you. Christ's love could only speak silently at last in the act and mystery of dying. So God could only answer silently in the mysterious act of raising him from the dead.

And this was more than comforting him in death. It was raising him from death's utmost desolation from death comfortless, the deadliest death death's sharpest sting in utmost power deep calling unto deep and the will that died addressed and revoked the will that raised him up again in silent antiphony which is now the standing balance and order of the spiritual world forever.

Poetry as Intensive Theological Communication

I'm going to go over this. This is like reading poetry more than it's reading theology. But it's saying much because poetry is the most intensive form of communication. The brevity, the terseness of poetry is a remarkable art form.

So that in two or three verses you can say what would already take pages to describe in prose. So this man is almost a poet. And maybe every good theologian and Christian ought to be. Let me read this last part.

So in this act of dying in silence, and the father is silent the father doesn't answer the son when he cries out, my God, my God why hast thou forsaken me? Well here's why son, because don't you understand there's a requirement you've got to experience absolute abandonment so I can't be here now to give you the comfort of presence that you've known eternally.

Silence. He's dying in silence, the father is silent but the act of obedience to the father and what is being wrought by it speaks volumes. The resurrection the event of resurrection in silence is God's way.

He calls it a silent antiphony. It's like one silent corresponding to another silence. And that this is now the standing balance and order of the spiritual world forever. Where did he get that thought?

That what was communicated and demonstrated in the silence of the father and the silence of the son and a son who did not need to know and did not raise his voice inwardly even foreknowing and accepted in silence the work of the father without needing even explanation is not only what took place in that moment but what took place there is a pattern that thereafter shall always prevail and be the condition in the spiritual world forever.

So that silence needs to be considered anew. That if there's a silence required in this greatest single epical act between father and son that constitutes eternal redemption then this writer is saying that that was not just a happenstance but a demonstration of a principle that shall henceforth forever prevail in the world in the spiritual world.

That the great acts that will take place thereafter will also be in silence and where there is not silence but noise, clamor and contention striving there the spiritual thing is lost. It might be the ultimate statement of faith for any of us that our trust is of such a kind that we do not need to know.

Our souls are at rest our spirits are in peace and we can trust God for his outwork with us as Jesus trusted him for the outworking through him in the final acts of redemption. And the reason that we're not hearing God and that it's even raised as a question of how do you do it indicates that we're not on the right ground.

It's not what we have to do to hear, it's what we have to cease from doing in order to hear. We have to cease from clamor and contention even of an inward kind that makes a demand of God that he has to, he's under obligation to tell me show me, direct me.

You know that we're humans all too human? We're American all too American? We're modern all too modern? We have been trained programmed to know. And if one thing we can't stand is not knowing. We can't stand the uncertainty.

We want the security of a clear statement of this is that. And God is not giving it. I mean except on rare occasions. But even when he spoke on the top of the road here, Dominion End Time Teaching Center, he didn't say do it, he just announced what his desire for this property is.

The rest was drawing out the implication and a God who failed to spell it out in detail and to obey it. Be still and know that I am God. Isn't that a remarkable statement? That this is the sine qua non.

This is the essential requirement. To know God is to shut up. And that he's giving it to you not as an option but as a command. Be still and you will know God. I will reward your obedience when your clamor stops by revealing about myself.

You'll not obtain it by your exertion, your self-conscious desire because your motives are impure. But if you'll rest and be still you'll know. See how topsy-turvy the kingdom of God is and how opposite to the wisdom of the world.

Be still and know that I am God. So I appreciate these reflections and felt that they were so choice and unusual that however it would tie in with the request tonight for hearing God that it needed to be expressed quoted.

The church takes her moral bearings there. She discovers God's moral world and authority there in the example of Jesus. And that silence was not the least of the components that constituted the suffering of Jesus in his time at the cross.

Okay. Thank you Lord. Repeat he forsaith. Precious, rare, saint that he is. So what else about hearing God? Quiet is a very desired condition. We took a walk today, Troy and I, in the woods and I said I love walking in the woods.

I like to hear the silence. Isn't that a strange statement? Silence is not just the absence of sound. It's the absence of contention, striving, I don't know what to say. And it's a condition to be desired in a generation that has the earphones glued to its head day and night.

I think the kids go to bed with it and wash and get up and go to school and there's always something stuck in their ear and boom boxes and it's a world that's polluted by noise. So to come to a place of quiet without getting edgy about it is a condition to be desired.

And it has to do with trust. That whatever I need to know I don't need to know it as knowledge. I need to know it as obedience. And the Lord will direct. And I don't have to have an inward clamor. See, there's a silence that is inward.

Hearing God's Voice in Biblical Obedience

That you're not jangled and agitated in insecurity. There's an inward peace and an inward quiet and in that place there's still a small voice where the direction of God can be discerned or sensed. When you think of the great episodes of biblical history like Elijah at Carmel confronting the apostate nation with the sacrifice made by the false priests and prophets and himself.

How did he get that instruction? There's not a word that indicates that God said so. How about Abraham? When God said Abraham take thy son thy only son whom thou lovest and make of him a sacrifice in the place that I will show you.

Everything about that statement sounds like it's right out of paganism. Of immolating your own children, having them to walk through fire. It's the most dread and vile pagan practice. It's killing your own children to placate a God who's not truly God.

That command of the father to Moses to Abraham has that same content. But he rose up early in the morning cut the wood down his ass and took his son and he went. So my question to you is how was Abraham able to discern that this was God though the requirement made of him contradicts all that one would understand about God.

And yet if he had not performed that the whole of subsequent redemptive history would have been lost. Because what he performed was in its essence the same thing that the father performed with his son only his son was not saved by a ram caught in the bush his son became that sacrifice.

So the obedience of Abraham has implications throughout the whole of redemptive history. So how did Abraham know to rise up early? That this was God and not an imposter not a demon not Satan mocking and imitating to destroy the son of promise.

If it had been Ishmael it wouldn't have been so great an issue. But this is the son of promise that came after barrenness when Abraham looking upon his own condition was as good as dead. And now God says this son for whom you've waited and is the progenitor of the whole Hebrew race and the key to everlasting salvation I'm asking you to sacrifice.

A beggar's logic reason have you been stupefied over this? Have you choked and spluttered? If you haven't you're missing something in one of the great epical events in Old Testament history. So the question remains there's not an indication of any hesitation on Abraham's part like an immediate assurance this is God speaking.

You want to know how to hear the voice of God? It'll come to those who will obey him that have not their own agendas will not question and dispute and debate or weigh it up and see if it's convenient or what will the neighbors say or what will my wife say what will Sarah say so long as we have those considerations we'll not hear.

So my question is how is it that Abraham heard? How is it that Elijah heard that they should make two sacrifices. Abram get thee out of nation kindred father's house and follow me in the land that I will show you.

Having obeyed that voice with that requirement he was then in a kind of relationship by which he could hear a subsequent requirement. What could Abraham have said in the morning after the Lord required his son.

Could he have struggled with the same doubt the scriptures are silent but do you think he was just mechanically the Lord said. And he did he had three days before he came to the mount that God will show him where the sacrifice was to be performed.

And what do you think was running through his mind in those three. Could Abraham have doubted himself after all. Did he not go down to Egypt. Did he not require his wife to be a concubine in the court of Pharaoh.

Did he miss it on other occasions. Could he be missing it on this occasion. And is there ever a requirement of God in which there is not the issue of missing it. There is a way in which this kind of certitude can become close to becoming a presumption against God.

This kind of based on the principles that are true it can border on presumption. I'm wondering if anguish is a necessary element in the relationship with God in the coming to decision especially in those things which he requires because it wasn't the next day that the thing is performed.

It's three days later while you're treading through that heat and thought and the implications now are beginning to set in. What if I have missed this. What if the enemy who is a mocker and an imitator has so captured the tone of God's voice that I'm completely deceived and I will be destroying the very son of promise in what I think to be an act of obedience.

So we have to consider these are excruciating things and we don't feel something of the moral pang of it. We're not really understanding what is being called for. And that when he raised his hand with the knife the angel arrested him.

And God says now by this I know that you fear God. It's as if God himself had to wait for the free voluntary act of Abraham to consummate that sacrifice and not just play at it. Yes he knew there's a resurrection.

But still would you know that if you have to bring your own knife into the heart of your own child at that point your doctrines your theology, your correctness begins to quiver and tremble and it's an excruciating moment.

But the father of faith had to pass and God was waiting to see if he would. The God who foreknows everything had to wait on the actuality of Abraham's own obedience. That's one of the great episodes in the whole of Old Testament scripture.

And we need really to ponder what that means. Because in some measure if we're going to follow the same God of Abraham as sons of Abraham we're going to face excruciating requirements of decision before this life is out.

The weight of deciding rightly am I hearing God is enormous. When it's beyond the issue of your own life it would have been easier for Abraham to have been made the sacrifice. No sweat when it comes to his son that's God reaching for the very deeps of the man that we can miss it is exactly what constitutes the anguish that however mature we are, however great a history with God, however consistent the line of obedience is this very next instance might be an instance in which being a piece of dust and frail and susceptible to deception and even the secrets of our own heart we could miss it.

You have that tension is always present. Or else it would be a snap we have a total assurance. No sweat step one, step two. But there's that we can miss it even in our best intentions is always the threat that makes that tension an anguish.

The thing that is most apprehensive is about ourselves not in our carnality, in our spirituality. If we go back to the subject of silence this very anxiety which is valid and we all know in our own experience is exactly the thing that keeps us from the knowledge of the will of God that this is the noise this is the clamor, this is the jangling in the inner man that keeps us from that quiet by which we still know that I'm God.

We're not being still because we're apprehensive about our own prospect for failure. So maybe complete faith is a faith that believes that you yourself will not misguide you will not fail because actually you're crucified and dead and buried.

You're not even a factor that the man that you are is Christ resurrected and he doesn't make mistakes. He was always perfect. I'm talking off the top of my head but I'm listening to what I'm saying that the real answer for anxiety is death.

That so long as there's another man however well meaning however spiritual however dedicated there will be the doubts because that man is not to be trusted at his best. And so what is God's answer? That that man has to perish.

He's got to vacate. He's got to give up the ghost. That the only life is the resurrected and ascended one who as ever and always is obedient to the Father and cannot miss now. Is that just being fancy schmancy.

Is that just being hypothetical or playing loose with the principles of God. Or is this really the only safety and the danger of deciding rightly for God. So what's the answer for a predicament that comes not because you're carnal but becomes because you're spiritual.

Because you are concerned not to misguide. Because you are weighing up what the consequences of failed obedience might mean or premature act before the time or acting out of your well meaning intention and missing the time of God or the detail of God.

This is a remarkable tension. So what's the answer when you doubt your own self and your own hearing. Remember what we said about on the mount of transfiguration. They were in the cloud of glory that came down and the father's voice said this is my beloved son hear ye him talk about the subject.

And when the cloud lifted they saw no man but Jesus himself alone. And I quoted a writer who said they did not even see their own seed. That they themselves were taken out of the picture. That the cloud of glory the voice of the father dismissed anything that even comes from them.

So if men will not even see their own seeing can men not even hear their own hearing. Can men not even obey their own obeying. Can you come to a place where you as a subjective factor are removed through the presence of the glory of God and the voice of the father.

So that there's a pure seeing a pure hearing, a pure obedience. Talking aloud, we're thinking our way through something. Can we come to a place where the human factor at its best and most spiritual is itself removed.

And if we're not for that there can never be a safety in any decision because our best well-meaning intentions can pollute and corrupt it. You know I'm just thinking if what I'm playing with here in thought that the only safety is in crucifixion that the well-meaning man has got to die it's the last obstruction to the pure hearing and obedience to God that Jesus could render that obedience at the cross in quiet, without knowing because he was already crucified before he was crucified he was already the crucified son his own consciousness of his own sonship and whether he's missing it or with it has already been brought to death and therefore he can be quiet and just act out the thing that the father is wanting.

This anguish is a suffering. In fact it may be the most intense form of suffering. It's a moral suffering. And it could be that it's just not something that accompanies having to make decisions before God but that it's a required ingredient and a condition in making decisions and that the life with God requires this kind of an anguish intention and that somehow it works something in the believer and that the issue for God is not only the act of obedience but the willingness to bear the anguish that precedes and even follows the act because often you are not vindicated by the act.

The act doesn't necessarily bring the confirmation that there was, you have to wait and maybe eternity will show whether you were right in what you performed or not. And that something is rendered in the anguish that may be more important to God in the shaping of our moral personality than the decision itself.

We haven't factored in what's at stake here in the dynamic of what God is fitting and forming for eternity that is not going to be stamped off the production line in some kind of assurance of faith that knows that it knows and in that knowing, though it's correct it's wrong that no previous experience in knowing the voice of God and even being vindicated in your obedience is any assurance for the next time.

The anguish is fresh as if you had no previous experience, no history. This situation now is utterly and altogether new and unique and your past I seem to be contradicting myself because I'm talking about the necessity for history but the anguish is as if you have had no past experience and now this is coming to you fresh in a virginal way and makes a requirement to the uttermost, it would be wonderful if you could say well I'm experienced at this this is all to have, the Lord showed me and that took place, that took place now I can handle this, but this when it comes is as if nothing had ever come before.

But is your faith a faith in faith or is your faith a faith in God, we can have a faith in faith that is not a faith in a person and a trust that allows us to be silent and quiet in the inner man. That's a faith that Jesus not knowing and forsaking knowing trusts the Father into his hands, he commits himself without having to know so his trust is a sublime and ultimate faith in the Father, it's not a faith in faith about the Father it's the faith in the Father and the proof of it is the quiet.

So have we a faith of that kind and will God call us to decisions beyond our faith of the King Jehoshaphat when three uncircumcised armies are at the border of Israel ready to extinguish the nation and he calls a fast and the people congregate before him with their wives and their children.

I mean everything is at stake and in that waiting on the Lord a word comes to the prophet Jehoshaphat that battle is not yours saith the Lord but mine but go ye out against them tomorrow you'll have all night to dwell on this and so when the great dawn comes and you can visualize those three armies, you're pitifully outnumbered, there's no way you're going to come out of this alive.

Was that the word of the Lord. Wasn't that a man whose flesh and blood we know isn't he subject to error, maybe he's just trying to give us a pep talk and psych us up psychologically. But when we get out there we're going to be clobbered.

But the king calls for, he said who are the sweet singers of Israel. And the people indicated they knew them and he put them at the forefront of the army and they went out in obedience singing the praises of God.

When the enemy heard them, they were confounded and they destroyed each other. So here's another go out against them tomorrow stew in your juice anguish through the night hours because your women and your children are at stake, what does that mean.

If these armies defeat you, there's no one to defend the women and the children. When these invaders come they will be the object of rape and molestation and vile abuse and misuse of the kind that would make you cringe and die a thousand deaths over that you miss the Lord that you fail to defend your own families your own wives and daughters are now the victim of what you thought the Lord had said.

Isn't it remarkable that the stakes are so great. And it's all predicated on one man speaking who is named Jehatzio. But when they heard his prophecy they went down on their faces. They knew that that voice.

And that speaking coming from a human being and a human voice was God. It wasn't a pep talk it was the word of the Lord. The battle is mine not yours. Go ye out against them. There's a command and you know we read that as if we're reading a bible study material and we haven't vicariously identified with Israel and wet our pants in contemplating what this will mean if we miss God.

This is a precarious life. This is not something by the numbers. God forbid that we should reduce it to that. And we've got to know that we are vulnerable and that we are our own worst enemy not at our carnal indifference but at our spiritual best.

We can miss it. And that tension of that possibility is ever and always before us. So that when I gave the message on the holocaust at that theater in Kansas City in 1974 whatever that was before 2000 people after 5 days of fasting for one message and spoke that message in fast on a yellow legal pad that the Lord never augmented.

It was the dullest monotone speaking I have ever performed. And there was a deadly silence when I finished like you have missed it cats there's not a ripple of effect no one is responding. It went over like a loud thud.