The Apostolic Church — Art Katz

The Holy Spirit Is Not a Tool for Religious Convenience

Now, Lord, thank you for giving me this occasion to dot the I's and cross the T's and add a little afterthought, which I ask that you will make foundational for all the Church. And this statement will be demanding of your people.

It will stretch them in the hearing. They'll hear conceptual things that are over their heads. I'm not expecting that they're going to be able to receive and understand this word in its first hearing, but I thank you for the recording equipment and pray blessing upon it and those who are operating it that later on they can go back and hear again or see again and ponder and reflect upon that which they could not obtain in the first hearing.

Bless this word, Lord. Bless the spirit of the speaking. May your voice be heard in this piece of earth and your word go forth that shall not return to void. And we thank and give you the praise in Jesus' name and God's people said, amen.

Well I have here a little something that I wrote up at the impulse of the Lord. It began as a statement on what is the context by which God intended the operation of the gifts of the spirit. Of course I have had a long and haunting sense that the charismatic age was somehow not quite the context of God's intention.

When men spoke about reviving denominations or wanted the operation of the gifts of the spirit to make their meetings more exciting, I knew that this was something other and less than God's intention and that it deprecated the spirit of God.

It made God a utility for our purposes and if the spirit of God is demeaned, what shall we say of God himself? Maybe the whole absence of the sense of God, the fear of God and the awe of God is not the least of the consequences of our callow, charismatic generation that was so easy with regard to the Holy Spirit where you could have left out the designation holy.

It became a kind of convenience for man. But I like the Hebrew, the ruach ha-kodesh, the spirit of holiness, so we mustn't traffic in that nor must we make merchandise of this holy thing that God has given for holy purposes and not the convenience of men nor their religion.

The Marks of an Apostolic Church

So this outline started as that, but then as it went on, I realized I was writing something much more. It could almost be considered a summary of what are the distinguishing and distinctive features of that church which can be called apostolic.

I've tried to define or begin to grope and feel for how do we discern true prophets and apostles? What is the distinctive? What is the unmistakable mark that makes a man a prophet or an apostle? And now this morning I want to take up what are the distinguishing marks that characterize a church that is really the church, which is to say the church that is apostolic.

What are the constituent elements? What must be its mindset, its heart, its service, its conduct, its attitude? So this has become a kind of a magna carta of apostolic faith, a manifesto, a statement that begins with the radical apprehension of the end marks and identifies such a body as to be opposed by the powers of darkness as a threat upon whom its vicious spite is to be ventilated.

Such a body finds itself in felt disjuncture and enmity with the world, its systems and false values, which are discerned and consciously repudiated and therefore to that degree a harbinger, a foretaste, a statement of a kingdom already come in such proportion and reality as to emancipate and deliver its deceived victims.

You know what I mean? You're not going to get this in one hearing. I'm going to go back over the entire statement. How does it begin? What distinguishes the church that is the church? The apprehension, the radical apprehension of the end.

We are a peculiar people because we have a profound beginning, a profound origin, a profound history in the forebears of our faith, the patriarchs, our inheritance, whether we're Jews in faith or Gentiles in faith, it's our inheritance.

Our identity would be diffused and lost if we were not conscious of what has preceded us. And in fact, we have lost that consciousness. And the attempts now to refine our Jewish roots is something of a knee flex reaction of a people who are conscious that we have lost the continuity and contact with the things that are our inheritance and give us the essential content of our faith, which is Hebraic.

Because you dum-dums who were lost and without God, without hope in the world, drinking beer out of skulls and fornicating like jack rabbits in all of your pagan idolatries and all the kinds of things in which you would still be presently active, have been brought nigh by the blood of the Messiah Jesus into the spiritual commonwealth of Israel.

And though present Israel doesn't know beans about its own inheritance, you have become the possessors of their history. Father Abraham is your father. The patriarchs are your progenitors. The Psalms are your treasure.

Are you reading them? Reading is hardly the word. Are you luxuriating in them? You dwell in the Psalms every morning. You cannot begin the day except you read the Psalm for the day. And if you're reading it like blah, blah, blah, blah, you better not even attempt it.

This isn't how many verses and how many chapters you've read to fulfill your religious obligation. This is a love. This is, what shall I say, an embrace. This is the privilege of peering into the Psalmist, the Davidic mind and heart of the great Hebrew saints of old who knew God in a way that makes our present charismatic pretension shabby.

If we knew God as they knew him, we would not be getting away with the kinds of things that are being perpetrated in Jesus' name even today and perhaps even in these very days in this very place. The knowledge of God is all.

Oh, if we could know him as the Psalmist to cry out and you would, they're always crying out for the Lord's intervention because their lives are at stake. They're in jeopardy, their enemies, the wicked who are opposed to the righteous are out for their life.

There's something about the Davidic life that the powers of darkness, particularly as it is to be found in the religious realm, cannot tolerate its existence. Saul will always hate David and that distinction will characterize the conflict of the true church, the Davidic church at the end of the age.

You notice the word Davidic? You like it? Davidic. It has a resonance of something Davidic of David himself who was beloved, who was the sweet singer of Israel, the Psalmist and the great king whose government was like a dew refreshing the earth and not some heavy handed activity.

David is something else. And you know what? The church is not the church until it's Davidic, until it has found this character, this essence, this indefinable something that God so loves because it is so like him.

Where are you going to obtain it? If you do not consult the Psalms, you're going to find it an experience and excitement. Much better to have an early morning time perusing and immersing yourself in this indescribable literature of which there is nothing like it and it's kind.

You don't love God until you love the Psalms for the Psalms are filled with the love of God and the understanding that the faith of God is not some narrow and provincial thing intended for one nation Israel alone, but through Israel to all nations.

God wants to Hebraicize the earth and he wanted one nation who would demonstrate what a relationship with him means that would be visible to the nations that they might also enter into the praises of the God of Jacob.

So what is an epistolic church? One that radically apprehends the end because it has also radically apprehended the beginning. Unless you know, dear saints, that there's a beginning and an end that we're moving toward a conclusion and a consummation, you are then trapped into a kind of succession of Sundays that are going nowhere.

A spiritual roulette hoping for an interesting sermon, one that will wake you up on your Sunday morning topper, T-O-R-P-O-R, that is the consequence of lingering too long before the television set on Saturday night and trusting that George will do it on Sunday morning.

After all, you're paying his salary. That's what he's supposed to do. You're not going anywhere. You have no sense of direction. You don't even know what the word consummation means. End is not an end.

It's a new beginning of a millennial and glorious kind for which the last instances of history are filled with apocalyptic tension, climactic engagement and confrontation and blood and sweat and tears and violence and death and tribulation and trial.

How will you face it when it comes upon you and you are unsuspecting because you didn't know that this characterizes the end, for which therefore the present ought to be preparation. Therefore our every sermon, conference, ought significantly to be imbuing us with that understanding that aims us and fits us toward the end and the conclusion and the triumph of Christ in the age.

So much so that you will count your martyrdom a privilege and don't think martyrdom is only for Indonesians. We're going to face it right here. I'm the last one who's expecting to die in bed and I think when my end comes, it's not going to come so much from an enraged world as it will be from those who will kill me and claim they are doing God a service, the radical apprehension of the end.

The Apostolic Church as Eschatological and Prophetic

I'm saying that the true apostolic church is by definition eschatological. There the word is out of the bag. You're stuck. It's about time too. An apocalyptic end, apocalyptic, I know it means the revealing, but revealing of what?

The wrath and judgments of God, the final upheavals in the earth, the cosmic disturbances in the last messianic throes before the coming of the King who comes in wrath and in judgment and also to be the agent of Israel's deliverance when all the nations of the world have come against Jerusalem to destroy it.

And if all the nations includes the United States, where will you be? Are you going to sanction that or look the other way or go along? Are you going to be faced with the same kind of perplexity that the German church had to face with the advent of Hitler and the land of Goethe, Schiller, Fichte, Hegel, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer and Kant?

I know you don't know one of those names, but you should. At least one, Kant, K-A-N-T, the great ethicist. That means one who occupies himself with ethics, that's German. And we Jews love so much German philosophy and ethics and literature and poetry, music, that we could not conceive that the gutter scum at the bottom of the barrel who met in beer halls and basements would one day take possession of the whole range of government and set in motion our annihilation.

Of course, it can't happen here. We are apple pie and mother and the Seattle Mariners and the Minnesota Twins. I mean, it can't happen here. It could happen in Germany, though their culture was so eminently beyond anything that we have even begun to understand.

And within a decade, it came down like the deck of cards. The church, government, education, the university, some of the greatest Old Testament commentators became Nazis. Kyle, what's the New Testament, do I have that name right?

Hill? Kittel! That's the one I want, Kittel. Kyle and Delitzsch, Kyle was a Messianic Hebrew Christian. And if you haven't read their commentaries on the Old Testament, you are missing something magnificent.

The great commentators of the 19th century, read some of these names, David Barron, Hebrew Christian commentator, and who was his mentor? The names escaped me. Anyhow, there's a rich literature out there, saints.

Here's what I'm saying. The collapse of German civilization with the church at the advent of Nazism and the annihilation of the Jew is a textbook for us of the last days. And if a civilization as rich as that went down like the proverbial deck of cards, what will happen to us when the same anti-Christ spirit comes over this nation?

How many will be able to resist it? How many will be able to stand against it? How many of us will go to concentration camps with Jews and our identification with them rather than look the other way in the face of their suffering?

Because I want to stand here and say today, with all the authority that I have in God, such a time is coming. You're naive if you haven't understood that. If you think that Israel is going to get better and improve, you're mistaken.

It's on the way to catastrophic devastation in the time of Jacob's trouble, wherever Jacob is, and that includes the United States. Hey, listen, you guys. We have been 26 years in Northern Minnesota, in the boondocks, in the Arctic blast, in the coldest temperatures of the nation, because we were brought there by God 26 years ago to establish a place of refuge for Jews in flight in North America from persecution.

Can you see why I can't enter into your fun and games? There's too much in me that's sober in anticipation of that which is to come. I know something about the end and the kind of preparation that should be coming to the saints who are going to walk this out, or there'll be no Jewish survival at all.

Because the issue of Jewish survival and the return of the redeemed of Israel to Zion is the issue of the Lord's coming as king. It's the issue of his kingdom. Therefore, you need to understand Israel, not in some sentimental context that these people deserve a homeland, etc., etc., after all that they have suffered, but that the issue of Israel can only be rightly understood apostolically in the context of the kingdom of God.

Israel is the hub and the nub of God's theocratic intention for his rule over creation. The law must go forth out of Zion and the word of the Lord out of Jerusalem, not as it is presently constituted.

Now it's a pitiful, sinful city. I can't bear even to visit it. It's an anguish even to visit. The prostitution rings and the extortion rings in high schools, violence in the Israeli high schools is one of the most troubling phenomena of present Israeli society.

But so is violence everywhere. More women are bashed by husbands in Israel than in any other land. More abortions in Israel than in any other land. We're secular to the hilt and you want them to succeed in that condition by getting better?

Did you hope for that for yourself or did you need a profound conversion of death that eventuates in resurrection unto newness of life? And if you needed it, what do they need who are going to be the nexus of God's kingdom?

Not anyone who clutches the skirt of a Jew knows that he can take us to God. Something drastic has got to afflict them before they can be brought into that ultimate destiny that God foresaw through Abraham, that his seed would bless all the families of the earth.

If this is not part of your consideration, maybe central to all of your consideration, you are outside the apostolic faith. Your Christianity has degenerated into mere culture. You need to apprehend the end radically.

But I can understand why you have been slow to do it. Because it means suffering, trial, difficulty. If they're going to experience Jacob's trouble, what are we going to experience if the powers of darkness hate their guts and want to annihilate the entire race so that there'll be no return to Zion and no king coming of the descendant of David to sit on from the throne of David and rule over them in the world?

How shall we be perceived by those same powers? Because after all, aren't we in the same commonwealth with them? Haven't you been brought into their covenants and promises and hopes by the blood of Messiah Jesus?

Aren't you grafted into their tree and sucking life up out of their root? Or are you lifeless? Because unless you're conscious of this remarkable metaphor of being grafted into Israel's tree, how then can you derive the benefit of the life that flows up through its root?

Lost to them who are broken off branches, but you should be bearing their fruit. By that sap, the divine life. So as to move them to jealousy. Lord, I'm still in the first paragraph, but we've got all morning long.

I will even skip lunch. Or we'll eat it while Art's talking. Are you understanding, dear saints, that I'm not saying any of these things because I'm Jewish. I didn't know them as a Jew. I'm saying all of these things because I'm God's prophetic statesman.

Because he's put these words in my mouth. Because he's given me an opportunity to make an insertion this morning that will justify all of these days together. It will be absolutely foundational for all the future of the church.

And there are not many who can proclaim these kinds of things. And that's how you'll tell the phony from the true. These conferences, prophecy conferences, and not one mention of Israel in the whole duration of them, that's prophetic.

And it's got to do with fun and games and personal things that they can tell you your social security number and your aunt Anna's hangnail and blah blah blah and someone's got a... And they call that prophetic?

And you run with glee and delight that you might be the one who's called and receive a personal prophecy? If there's any subject compelling in the heart of God, foremost for the consideration of the church who knows nothing about it, even in their present affinity and disposition toward Israel, that's kindly.

It's this subject. And if it's not proclaimed and set forth by foundational men, how shall it be understood? You'll not get it from your pastors. After they get it from the prophet, after the ground has been broken, after it's been opened up, after you have considered Romans 11, the apostolic genius of what Paul sees that is climaxed by the greatest effulgence of praise in all scripture, Romans 11, 33 through 36, all the depths of the riches, both of the wisdom and the knowledge of God, who has been his counselor, who has given to him and it shall be given again.

Where did God get this? For of him and through him and to him are all things to whom be glory forever. You dear disqualified saints who have never once reflected on this glorious conclusion of the most significant, massive statement on the mystery of Israel given in all scripture by the great apostle Paul, which he received by revelation and of which he enjoins us not to miss this mystery, lest you become wise in your own conceit and we have missed it.

We've not sought it. We've not desired to know it. And I praise God, it's a mystery. One that you're not going to find an explanation through any cerebral activity of your own. If it doesn't come revealed, it doesn't come.

And how shall it be revealed? By some character like me, who takes 45 minutes instead of four to five minutes and gets on platforms where men, if they knew better, would never have allowed him. But they thought he was going to be a Jewish novelty and cute, but alack and alas, he's turned the house upside down and kept Catherine Kuhlman waiting.

When you'll hear it from a foundational man, you've heard it. I only wish that I had the luxury of giving you that statement that we have given in the Philippines and other places in Southeast Asia and all over the world that take four to five days, but you'll be forever changed.

But look it up. Ask the Lord, Lord, I need this central component, this key, the centrality of Israel, not in some sentimental regard as a political entity that needs to succeed, but the national, the intent for the nation in your theocratic intention to make of them the locus of your world rule.

I need to know that because it's not, it's more than a mere piece of idle curiosity. I need to know it because unless I know it, understand it and apprehended by it, how shall I beat to them what I must in their time of final tribulation where the church is God's exclusive and intended salvific agency.

If any of them survive, it's because of you. But of course, if you're raptured and not available, what are you going to do? We'll explain to them that the Lord had a, an escape route for you while they have to suffer in the earth.

There's nothing that more puts the death knell on this noxious novelty called pre-tribulation rapture that has less than a two century history and began with some hysterical woman called a prophecy than the proper understanding of the issue of Israel in the last days that requires the presence of a church of an ultimate kind in the earth, or there'll be no Jewish survival at all.

It's the purpose for your being, but you'll not be able to fulfill it as a bunch of sappy saints. You'll only be able to fulfill it as an apostolic and prophetic entity, which is why God is pouring out his soul this morning to sink that word into your foundations.

Even if your mind cannot grasp it, the spirit of the word will go in and will not return to him. The church that is the church that is apostolic radically apprehends the end. It is eschatologically minded for eschatological means the things pertaining to the end, and it's not afraid that the end is clothed in violence, smoke, judgment, wrath, the final dealings of God, the culmination of the nations and their long opposition to God and your place in it.

Spiritual Warfare and the Corporate Life of the Church

And when the powers of darkness see that you understand these things, you are mocked for a first time. Up till now, they said, Jesus, we know him, Paul, we know, but the church of Salmon, Idaho, who? Or Timbuktu or wherever you're from, Kansas City, who?

You have no consequence. We you on at your profession that you're going to take cities for Christ through praise and worship with the God. It was so simple and effortless and without sacrifice. And we can do it musically.

Hey, listen, we've got all the apparatus and hi-fi and speakers. Well, that's how you do it. Of course, that was not available to Paul, so it has to wait for your generation and your technology. The principalities and powers of the idea of saints are the critical subject for the church's consideration of the last days.

Mere demon deliverance of an individual kind, however beneficial and grateful we are for that activity, is only skimming the surface of a much greater subject. The greatest subject is not the issue of individual bondage.

It's the issue of a ruling and geology that are fallen and have influence to jerk and manipulate entire nations and races. Oh, yeah. Where do you see that in history? What do you think Nazism is? You can't explain Nazism sociologically.

It's a spirit phenomenon. And the powers of darkness that fomented it in the land of Gerda, Schiller, Fichte and Hegel prevail still in the realm of the air over that nation, waiting their next opportunity.

You know what I've observed? Only that believer who has a apprehension of the mystery of Israel has equally with it an understanding of the mystery of iniquity and of the powers of darkness and knows what it will take to unseat them.

The two things go hand in hand. Well, I'm telling you that if you move in the direction of which you're being encouraged this morning, you're going to become mocked. The powers of darkness who formerly yawned over your most strenuous activity that you thought was taking cities now will regard you with a new concern and caution, if not fear, for now you're on the right track and now you constitute a threat.

And because of that, you can expect their opposition. And because of their opposition, you'll know that you cannot face this press alone and you need the coordinate strength of the body of Christ, who equally recognizes that they are in a contest of an ultimate kind and need each other's prayer, encouragement, and not to give the enemy any advantage by speaking those things that are corrective for us, which we welcome as being the act of love itself.

It makes the church the church. We have to turn the chairs around and look in each other's faces and confront what needs to be confronted. If God has given us a discernment and a key, but in such solicitous love that the person knows that you're not nailing them because we're in something together and we're concerned for the condition of the body altogether.

You see, the whole thing becomes tightened up, the slack goes out, the church becomes the church with a new seriousness and a new depth and quality of prayer, which has never gotten off the ground because true prayer cannot exceed the truth of the relationships of those who are praying.

Prayer, like worship, is not a technique or a methodology. It's a spiritual statement of the truth of the reality of your life together. Intercession is a corporate travail by people who are living corporately and are not the aggregate of individualities that come together for the purposes of a conference.

Got the picture? And it all started with the subject Israel, and here we are into the subject of the church, and that's the way God intended it. Because you have neglected the one, you have forfeited the other, and the powers of darkness are totally unimpressed.

Turn up the amplifiers and they'll continue to yawn. So what do I say here? Such a body is one to be opposed by the powers of darkness as a threat upon whom its vicious spite is to be ventilated, but such a body finds itself in felt disjuncture with the world.

The Church’s Separation From the World

And when you read that these high school grads are given eight and a half million dollars as a bonus to sign a contract that will earn for them 25 or 52 or some other astronomic amount of millions of dollars for the next ten years as a contract for a baseball player, you are automatically revolted.

You're anguished in your soul. You see in that the demise of all value. It's a corruption that will pervade all the lump. And you lean back and smile and, hey, and this kid's made it big, and he's only 18.

What do they pay, $50 ,000 for a pitch? The rise and fall of the American empire and the corruption of its values because of the church of dum-dums upon whom this has not been registered and will even go along and pay the bill.

No moral discernment, no anguish of soul for the anti-Christ thing that was already prevailing in our culture. We are not in a felt disjuncture with the world. We are in the world and with the world and using its promotions, its mentality, and all the kinds of things to augment our religion that augment the sales in Wal-Mart.

All you have to do is flood the mailboxes, Oral Roberts knows that, and you'll get a certain percentage back that will far exceed anything that it cost you to send out that enormous mass mailing and finance everything, even a lifestyle that you can live as a robber baron and be celebrated as the great hero of faith.

You think the powers of the air are impressed with that? Jesus they know and Paul they know. They know whom to fear, whom to recognize. When they see authenticity, or when they see a fluke, fake, counterfeit success based on the world's model, using manipulation, they yawn.

We need to be so, how shall I say it, sensitive as to not to condescend to anything in which the world majors, choosing to be foolish pilgrims, strangers, and sojourners in the earth rather than we should in any way accommodate them in response to their advertising, to their lures, to their seductions.

We would hate it. Our souls should be chafed like righteous lot rather than condescend and be in the whole system of merchandising together with everybody else. Paul, when he woke up that morning in Athens where he had not intended to be in flight from persecution and he saw the city wholly given to idolatry, he was chafed and grieved in his soul.

Therefore, confronted he the devout Jews in the synagogue and in the marketplace where idolatry has its most profound forms. There was a therefore that set Paul on an apostolic journey in Athens because the spirit within him grieved when he saw the city wholly given to idolatry.

Where's our grief? The true apostolic church will be grieving. It will be at disjuncture with the world. It will not be one of the boys. It will not embrace a Christianity by which it could think itself Christian at the same time enjoy the acceptance of its neighbors as being nice guys.

You'll no longer be fun. You'll no longer be invited to the barbecue. You're too solemn. You're too serious. There's a strange look in your eye as if you see beyond the apparent and see the things that are ultimate and eternal that makes you unfit to be fun and one of the boys.

You're willing for that? You want to be a pilgrim and a stranger or you want to be accepted even as a Christian? First time I ever preached on pilgrim strangers and sojourners, I had to leave. Well, the brother threw his passport down on the floor that night.

He'd just gotten a visa to go somewhere and he was so convicted that he was so much part of the American landscape. He threw his American passport on the ground so much as to show where his true identity is to be found in heaven and the next morning I had to fly out but I was a standby and I watched all of the passengers with the tickets getting right on and I stood by and watched them go by hoping my name would be called and people looked at me like you pitiful object.

You're not in the flow. Are you willing to bear that continually? Not just in the world but in Christendom and in the church where all of a sudden you've become too radical, not the fun that you used to be even as a Christian.

You have strange preoccupations now. You're even coming, taken up with the Jews and you've lost your center which used to be Christ, now it's Israel, the kind of thing of which I'm accused when actually the fact of the matter is to be taken up with Israel is to be taken up with Christ for he is their king and he comes with their restoration.

Can you bear misunderstanding? I'm called now a Christian anti-Semite. Why? Because I'm speaking of a dire future for present Israel and Jews worldwide. Of course, if you loved Israel, you wouldn't say things like that.

You would make nice. You would give them comfort now even if it's a false comfort. Well, when you get my next newsletter now being prepared, you'll see the announcement of a new correspondence school for Jewish evangelism called Apocalyptic Evangelism looking for Christians who can be schooled to do with Jews what I would do if I had your opportunity.

You'll be able to face them and confront them in ways in which they have never been confronted by speaking to them of the things that pertain to their future and you're going to alert them and tell them that according to your knowledge of scripture and prophecy, there's a time of Jacob's trouble that's future of which they need to understand or they will be victim like their Jewish forebears in Germany.

Can you do that? And don't think they're going to sit down and take that nicely without anger, without irritation. How can you say that? If you will easily, you're out of the game. If you need their approval, you're out of the game.

If you're a soft sap that needs to that says, I know Jews that are more Christian than Christians, you're disqualified. If you're impressed with the external qualifications and impressiveness with which we Jews are very impressive and don't understand what the word of God says about all men everywhere that there's no man good known, not, there's not a righteous soul upon the earth to do with good and sin.

If not, no matter how much they appear good, civil, they don't bark at their wives like as we do. They have nice awards and are mannerly and cultured and have several university degrees. They don't need your Christ until you make that need known to them.

Jewish evangelism is the ultimate test of the church and we have wisely avoided it and let Moshe Rosen and the Jews for Jesus do it. Parachurch organizations, but we have forfeited the intrinsic call of God of which Paul says, I'm not ashamed of the gospel of Jesus Christ, which by the way is the gospel of the kingdom, the Davidic kingdom and it's coming for it is the power of God is the salvation to everyone who believes to the Jew first and also to the Greek.

That's God's priority since and we have nicely circumvented that requirement. You know why? We're cowards because we know Jews are tough because we're intimidated because we barely got through high school because our English is lacking because we think that they have some superior knowledge and ability.

We circumvent them. We compliment them when we should be challenging them. We have forfeited the priority of the Lord and the powers of darkness know it and they say this is a church that we're required to be to fear when they themselves choose at random which of God's requirements they will observe and which they will disallow.

To miss the issue of the Jew and the priority of God is to miss God and to bring ourselves of being of no repute before the powers of the air. As I told the Filipino pastors, better that you should be known by the powers of darkness than you should be esteemed by man.

You think that's an easy statement? You know, these Filipino pastors, they're up from poverty and now they're finally finding a place of some measure of success and life and respectability and acceptance and you're saying, if you're going to count for God, it would be better if you were feared by the power of darkness than to receive the esteem of men.

And they nod and they say, yes, that's right, Art. I said, okay, now you're not going to be feared by the powers of darkness unless you first forfeit your desire for the esteem of men. How many of you will stand and say, this day I forfeit.

I'm unwilling to consider. I shall not seek to be acknowledged, respected, esteemed by men. I choose to be marked and acknowledged by the powers of darkness. Oh, I didn't think I was going to give you any of that.

Okay. Oh, you're getting serious, you guys. Praise the Lord. Lord, mark this because I know the powers of darkness are marking it and they're trembling over Salmon, Idaho and what has been convened here that is exceeding the intention of those who have established these days.

Let this be historic, my God. And let these children take back to their fellowships and their communities this new resolution, better to be marked by the powers of darkness as one to be feared than I should enjoy or seek for that seductive acceptance of men.

I'd rather be misunderstood and I will be misunderstood and I'm willing to be a reproach. Strange wasn't it? Now, Lord, thank you for giving me this occasion to dot the I's and cross the T's and add a little afterthought, which I ask that you will make foundational for all the church.

And this statement will be demanding of your people. It will stretch them in the hearing. They'll hear conceptual things that are over their heads. I'm not expecting that they're going to be able to receive and understand this word in its first hearing.

But I thank you for the recording equipment and pray blessing upon it and those who are operating it that later on they can go back and hear again or see again and ponder and reflect upon that which they could not obtain in the first hearing.

Bless this word, Lord. Bless the spirit of the speaking. May your voice be heard in this piece of earth and your word go forth that shall not return to void. And we thank and give you the praise in Jesus' name and God's people said amen.