Apostolic Vision - Part 4 — Art Katz

Eternal Purposes and the Church’s Calling

Well, unless the Lord gives me a last-moment signal, I have something very practical, nitty-gritty, what do they say, where the rubber hits the road, their practical application of all the lofty things spoken, the eternal purposes of God.

You say, Katz, that sounds just like a continuation of lofty and ethereal themes. But I feel that that's the Lord's agenda for tonight, because you're now in a place which, because of last night, and because of the nights that have preceded it, now the Lord can express and speak into you the eternal purposes of God.

You could not have heard it before, you could not have received it before, you could not have fulfilled it before. It required the kind of consecration that was made last night, and now it should be foundational for your whole being and continuation as a body, and the church that does not recognize, understand, receive, and intend to fulfill God's eternal purposes is ipso facto, by that one forfeiture, no longer the church.

That's our whole purpose for being, is to embrace and to fulfill the eternal purposes of God. And I wouldn't even venture a guess of what percentage of those who are Christian who don't even know that such a purpose even exists, let alone what it is or how it can be fulfilled.

So Lord, I'm asking a grace, I'm asking the same kind of grace for speaking and utterance that my brother Paul asked, to make the mysteries known Lord, for it's a mystery and it's been concealed and is now being revealed, and I ask my God for that tonight for this dear people who are now fitted and ready to hear and to receive it.

So come and give it my God, just the expression that pleases you, and more than what words can convey, let something go like a shaft into our hearts, something my God, strike the very bedrock of our being, something sink into the deepest foundations of our corporate life, of our understanding that affects every other consideration.

That henceforth, because of tonight, that there'll never be a time or a question or a concern that we do not consider, except in the context and in the light of your eternal purposes for the church. Grant us my God, that eternal mindedness that transfixes, touches and affects everything.

We thank you and give you the praise for the privilege and the high calling of it, in Christ Jesus, in thy holy name we pray, God's people sing, Amen. Well just to see how bright you are, to what book in the New Testament would you turn for some exposition on the eternal purposes of God?

What? Ephesians, A for the day. And have you noticed that Ephesians has a character all its own? There's something about Ephesians, the rhetoric, the quality of speech, the loftiness, the phrasings, the concepts that seem so elusive, that strike such remarkable notes that we just tend to gloss over it.

The book that requires the most intensive apprehension in its practical meaning is the book that, unless we God ourselves, would most lend itself to being superficially mistreated. Well let's, for the want of time, we really should begin at the beginning, but just leap in.

Ephesians and the Ages to Come

Maybe into chapter 2, this wonderful language about the God in verse 4, who is rich in mercy for his love wherewith he loved us, even when we were dead in sins, hath quickened us together with Christ, by grace are you saved, and hath raised us up together, and made us sit together in heavenly places in Christ Jesus, that in the ages to come he might show the exceeding riches of his grace in his kindness toward us through Christ Jesus.

We need to pause just there for a moment. And you need to pause every time you come to the phrase, in the ages to come. This isn't some kind of esoteric reference to a distant thing that fails to have practical meaning for us.

It is our practical meaning. Unless we see our present activity in the light of the ages to come, we do not see it. Don't you understand that every issue that is being propounded and worked is not just to be spent upon our own generation, but its ultimate and eternal value is in the ages to come.

This is what marks us as peculiar. There is not another species on earth whose present is so vitally affected by not just something that is distant, but something that is eternal. That this age is a preparation for the ages to come.

That the issues that are being transacted affect the ages to come. And until that comes into our brain box and into our mindset, we become pitifully fixed in the present moment and inadequately prepared.

We become impoverished. So I'm just appealing and beseeching that we need to see everything in the context of eternity. And this is not some kind of a hype. This is not giving some kind of lofty embellishment to kind of sugar coat our present Christianity.

It's the normative intention of God. That except we are heavenly and eternally minded, we are no earthly good. That it's only because we are profoundly occupied with the ages to come that we are of significance and relevance in this age.

You got that? We lose that significance. We're just another burp in a heat cup. We're just another thing to be glossed over by the powers of darkness and the world itself. Until we deeply embrace and take into our foundational consciousness that everything is pointed and given for the ages to come.

And I'll tell you what, when that comes into your consciousness, you'll be far better fitted to bear the present sufferings. Because you'll see them in the light of eternity. You'll see the eternal weight of glory that makes your present afflictions both momentary and light.

This is not some psychological device and gimmick that God is giving us. This is normative apostolicity. Paul could bear the full weight of the church and all of the shipwrecks and stonings and beatings with rods and counted both momentary and light truly.

He wasn't psyching himself out. Because he saw everything within the present in the context of the thing that is eternal and pertaining to the ages to come. I plead with you to fight and to contend for this faith.

For everything in the world, the flesh and the devil militates against it. There's nothing that the power of darkness wants more than that you should be fixed in the present moment and consider everything from the perspective of 60, 70 or 80 years.

It's a distortion. It's not a valid seeing. It's an inadequate perception. Everything becomes changed when you see it in the context of eternity and in the ages to come. And in that case, then we can well understand why it takes a lifetime to be shaped at the hand of God.

Why he's a master craftsman. Why it is we have not come in one fell swoop to be the overcoming saints and the marvels of spirituality that we thought was going to be conferred with the baptism of the Holy Spirit.

My God, it's been a long struggle and we're still bumbling and fumbling still. And I'm a little embarrassed even for something of my own lapses last night. When you see it in the context of eternity, where our character is being fitted for an eternal relationship, an eternal service with God, then it makes a profound sense of what God will do in shaping and molding and forming a people in the light of eternity and the ages to come.

Grace, Works, and Eternal Reward

For by grace are you saved through faith, though not of yourself. It's the gift of God, not of works, lest any man should boast. We are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works. And that's another word that needs to come into your evangelical vocabulary.

Though you'll probably have to do a little battle with a residue of resistance to the word works. We're going to be judged by our works. The issue of our eternal salvation has been determined. It's the grace that was given.

We're saved eternally. But where we occupy eternity, in what place in eternity, in what proximity to the Lord and in what place in his purposes, we don't sit on a cloud plucking a harp. There's a ruling and reigning.

There's a millennial kingdom that needs to be established as creation for which our character in this life is preparation. So the issue of our works that pass the fire and are not consumed because they are hay, wood and stubble, but made of precious stones and gold and silver, is critical.

And we need to be asking, Lord, what are our works? And last night said something about the things that you must do. We are appointed for works. Not works that will constitute our salvation, but works that will constitute our eternal reward and our place in the eternal.

Gentiles, Israel, and the Mystery of the Church

Remember that you being in times past Gentiles in the flesh who are called uncircumcision, but that which is called the circumcision of the flesh made by hands, that at times you were without Christ, being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers from the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world.

But now, in Messiah Jesus, you notice that I'm just substituting the original Hebrew word, the Mashiach, for the transliteration of the Greek word Christos, for Christ, that we need to be reminded Jewishly of who it is and by whose blood we who are far off and without God and without hope in the world have been brought nigh into the commonwealth of Israel.

This is a remarkably important factor for our understanding and our consideration. We're not doing them a favor. They are not Johnny-come-lately's that we by our witness are going to save. We're grafted into their root.

We were distant, we were totally alienated from their promises and from their covenants. We would be drinking beer out of skulls to this day, if God in his mercy did not conscript us and draw us into their covenant.

And I'm not by that saying, you're Jewish, God forbid. Or, I would be destroying in that one slur, that one mistake, the very genius and the brilliance of what God is about in inducting Gentiles, not only into the commonwealth of Israel, but being grafted into their tree and their root and into their life and into their covenants, that something of the brilliance of the God of reconciliation would make of us too one new man, thus making peace.

Because this is the mystery of the church. Our purpose is more than a series of services and preachments. There's a mystery that must be fulfilled by us in these last days with them, who are presently so alienated and distant from the God of their fathers and who have been historically in rebellion and God is not loath to say in full candor, they are the enemies of the gospel, for your sake.

Who needs that kind of enemy? They're intimidating, they're threatening, they're intellectually sharp, they're intimidating in every way. And yet, except we be reconciled with them, except to be brought back into their own tree, by something that issues from us, the mystery of God remains unfulfilled and the Lord himself contained in the heavens and not able to come to his creation as king.

If you could just catch that last statement. How much is riding on the restoration of Israel through an essentially Gentile church that the Lord, it says in Acts 3 .21, is pent up in the heavens, waiting for the restoration of all things spoken by the prophets since the world began.

And we need to, again, to turn to the prophets, it's time now. For all of the purported interest in prophecy, there are very few believers turning to the prophets. Maybe if they did, those that call themselves prophets now would lose something of their luster.

But if you turn to the prophets, you'll see that there was one pre-possessing theme, namely, the restoration of Israel after millennia of alienation and the rejection of their own God and their own covenants, back again to him and to the land, that he might then again be their king forever, even David upon the throne of David from the hill of Zion in Jerusalem.

You know what we've done with these references as a church? We have spiritualized them away. We had so little belief and faith and desire to see such a restoration, we were so ourselves full of a kind of a conceit that displaced that people and saw ourselves as their replacement, that that today is called replacement theology, that we had no intention or expectation of their return, let alone that we should be the agent toward it.

And so we took very concrete, literal, and specific statements in the prophets about their restoration in the last days and have spiritualized them away, that the Zion is now the church and Jerusalem is a figurative term meaning God's people.

And I mean, that's a lovely way to make preaching points and for secondary purposes, okay, but don't let the secondary purpose displace the primary. You will find yourself with a totally new Bible when you, with an intention, read every reference to Israel and the prophets as being literal.

It will transform the word of God for you and as a matter of fact I will tell you now that it itself is the hermeneutical key to all the scriptures. Hermeneutical means the principle of interpretation.

When the church from about the third century and particularly with one of the church fathers by the name of Origen began to develop a method of interpreting scriptures of an allegorical kind, that it no longer means what it says, but it stands for something of a symbolic or an allegorical kind and led the church into lofty spiritualizations and away from the literal intent of God, we suffered a damage of such a magnitude that I have not a word to describe and that when we shall return to the literal word of God, likewise something of a magnitude shall be restored to the entire faith and to the church itself, which is at the heart of the very mystery of God for having created a church.

For have they stumbled that they should fall? Is God finished with them? God forbid! But throughout the Middle Ages and that the very name of Christ is so distasteful for Jewish consideration and yet God makes the key to their restoration the church.

But a church of what kind? I can tell you this, more than charismatic. We Jews are the toughest critics on the face of the earth and we long before knew the phoniness of your televangelist before you had to be awakened from your sleep by their fall into blatant sin.

We just click them on in a moment. We see right through the whole posturing. There's something about us, even in our unbelief, even in our darkness, that is, what's the word, unerring in discerning what is authentic and what is a myth.

Why does God say they should be moved to jealousy? Because he gives to the church a purpose that cannot be fulfilled at the resurrection life of Christ. You turn to the conclusion of that book in the New Testament that most sets forth this mystery, which is Romans chapter 11, actually 9 through 11, and Paul concludes his statement with these words, Oh, the depth 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? For of him and through him and to him are all things to whom be glory forever. Amen. Then the very next verse of chapter 12 says, Therefore, I beseech you, therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that you present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service.

That's the punctuation. Having set forth this inordinate requirement beyond any religious ability to fulfill, Paul then says, Make of your bodies a living sacrifice. I beseech you, therefore, in the light of what I'm setting before you, that it's not going to find fulfillment until you are extended before God to the uttermost of the kind that many of you last night performed.

Resurrection has got to be for us more than just a doctrine to which we give assent. For of him is this mystery, but through him is its fulfillment, that it might be to him. Now listen, church, unless your central purpose for being is the glory of God forever, you can forget everything else and make no pretense at even taking it up.

Israel’s Restoration and the Church’s Witness

Prophetic difficulty in every strain, in every trial, in every backlash, in every retaliation that comes to us from the world and its liberal churches and from the aggravated Jewish community itself that does not understand and cannot understand.

The only thing that will sustain you is the jealousy for the glory of God forever. You want something worthwhile for your life? Embrace the issues of God that have to do with his glory forever. Al and Paulette and Ing and myself, we are privileged.

God has saved us from merchandise and making a living, quote and unquote, and other kinds of things by which men would sustain their physical lives. We have the privilege of being occupied with the issues that pertain to the glory of God.

But who can proclaim them? Who can communicate them? Who can enlist the interest of God's people who are caught up with the subtleties of the world and the flesh and the devil and bring them out and into these purposes?

Who is sufficient for these things? Even the proclamation requires the supernatural power of God. Even this itself must be through him or it will fall dismally to the ground. I'll tell you that if I know and sense anything about God, this speaking tonight is not intended only as instruction, it is intended as event.

And that is altogether independent of your understanding and comprehension. Or it's good for you to understand and subsequently you may after you hear the tape several times. But whether you understand or not, the word tonight is going out as event.

It's going into your foundation. It is something given by God. A word that constitutes something that if it were not spoken, there's no way that you could attain to the realization of the eternal purposes of God or be set in motion toward their fulfillment.

Something must come down to us from above through, it may be for that reason that the Lord did not allow me any preparation today and even to keep me in suspense to a last moment, wondering indeed what his burden was and then to feel that yes it is the eternal purpose of God and yet not knowing how to proclaim it.

And even beginning to read a text I see that I'm stopped and I'm going off now from that into things I hadn't thought now yet to be speaking. I'm not saying this to direct your attention to me but to direct your attention to an understanding that you must have that what we are called to is so transcendent, so supremely beyond any capability of ourselves to fulfill that God is waiting to hear our gasp and our splutter who is sufficient for that can only be spoken in sincerity by those who take the mandate to them.

You see the paradox that we're in? There's a requirement of an extraordinary kind and yet it's beyond our fulfillment. And it must be so because everything about this is to his glory. Are you jealous for his glory, saints?

I'll tell you, to be jealous for his glory will make a fool out of you. You'll do things for his glory that you would never have done for any other motive and for any other reason. You'll be called a jerk.

You'll suffer reproach. People will castigate you. But there's something burning in your spirit that's a jealousy for the glory of God. You don't even know how to define it. But you know that somehow that this foolishness is related to that glory and will not be obtained without it.

And therefore you'll do it. This is more than some sentimental appeal that you know we should be doing something for the Jews. Didn't we get from them the Bible? Didn't they give us the prophets? And weren't the apostles Jews?

Don't we have an obligation to witness them? Peewee on that stuff. I'm not speaking to you from the level of sentimentality or the level of religious obligation. A pox on both things. Neither can succeed.

And those who are fascinated with Jews now and taken up with some kind of mystique of Israel will be the first to collapse and fall when Jews will profoundly disappoint us in the last days. Only a people will sustain a motive to be to them what they must whose motive is not the fascination with Israel but the jealousy for the glory of God.

There's the forever of God. There's throughout all ages. There's the issue of eternity. And yet it takes place in time. It's got to be fulfilled in the last days and yet the significance and what is revealed in that fulfillment is of such a kind that it redounds to and reverberates forever.

And we are called to affect that by something in ourselves as was there ever a call that required the church to be the church as this? And would we ever be it without this mandate and requirement? No.

We would have had other criteria for our success and we do. Numbers, programs. Do you like the services? Do you like the speaker? But this is calculated to bring us up into a transcendent which is to say apostolic place of consideration.

That the measure of what we are as church is not our delight in ourselves but whether we can move this obdurate, resistant people they would consider and embrace the gospel that heretofore and up till now naming some of the Jewish enemies of the gospel who have been so formidable that they have affected modern civilization and all mankind.

Not content merely to condemn God's messianic heilsgeschichte excuse the German phrase his redemptive purpose but even to supply one of their own. Give me the foremost man in modern times who has done that, who is Jewish.

Karl Marx. Marxism is a demonic messianic alternative to the messianic program of God. We Jews are uncanny in our ability to invent our own alternatives. We're at the forefront of everything that is secular everything that is harebrained schematic, colossal we've got that because we're a called and gifted people but it's not being employed for God but for his enemy.

I'll tell you dear saints that when you touch a Jew you're not just merely touching and confronting another ethnic minority you're fingering the whole nexus of an entire world system that is at enmity with God.

Now am I encouraging you to anti-semitism? God forbid. I'm just giving it to you straight. I want you to know that God has set a stage. God has established a drama of elements that are so phenomenal that what kind of a church can we think ourselves to be if we have not even the awareness of this drama let alone the determination to fulfill it.

And if we do not fulfill our mandate toward that nation that nation remains alienated from God there's no redemption of the people nor the land there's no city out of which the law can go forth and the word of the Lord out of Jerusalem the Lord remains pent up in the heavens the world continues to muck and do all of its filth and murder and violence and mayhem because the Lord is not upon his throne and never will occupy it until he is seated upon the throne of David in the holy hill of Zion in the city of Jerusalem in a restored nation that acknowledges him.

That will not happen without you. What will it take to move that people to jealousy? Whatever it takes it's going to be ultimate and it's going to be corporate because it's not a matter of the showing off of individual virtuosos but the church in its full corporate genius and splendor.

When my people can glimpse something in you in your totality the light of God the reality of God the truth of God where they can sense there's a love that is unfamed there's a faith unfamed there's a people who live sacrificially for one another and for them they'll be moved to a jealousy for which God waits.

Romans 11 is replete with references to the things that must come to Jews by the church or does not come that by your mercy they may obtain mercy and though I have not time tonight except I keep you up all the night I want to say if you can bear it that the hour is not too distant when Jews will be so harassed and persecuted in every nation over the face of this earth that except that a mercy be extended to them through the church of every locality through which they pass they'll not be one that will survive the ferocity of the last days diabolical hatred against them.

You're going to find Jews straggling right through these lands and you're going to find why it is that the Lord allowed you to build a house with so many thousand square feet of space far more than you should ever rightly need for your own lifestyle.

Every nook and cranny and attic and closet will likely be housing some Jew in flight and in distress and your willingness to do it will be at extreme peril to your own life and that of your children. Oh, Art, you're off the wall.

I mean, you're so ridiculous. You're so way out. That can never happen here. This is the land of mum and apple pie and red, white and blue and the dolphins and the Dallas Cowboys. Well, what about the land of Goethe and Schiller and Fichte and Hegel and Nietzsche and Schopenhauer and Brahms and Beethoven and Wagner and the great giants of culture and music and philosophy and ethics.

If Nazism could come as a demonic phenomenon and be established within a decade and devastate the Western world and six million of my people with a scientific precision what do you think of what we are not capable?

And when it comes, saints, it's going to come suddenly. And the issue that was before the church in Germany will be the issue before us. Will the real church please stand up? There will be a national church that goes along with the national consensus of hatred against the Jew seeing them as a threat to security and the banking system and the economy and I don't know what form this grotesque hatred is going to take.

It's already seething, it's already palpitating it's already something on the stove ready to billow over. All you need to do is receive the mailings from the Jewish Defamation League or Anti-Defamation League and other organizations the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles the panic that is coming to the Jewish community in the world and in this country.

Never a time there have been more incidents on college campuses Jewish synagogues being defaced with graffiti and tombstones being knocked over and a greater and greater boldness by skinheads and racists and the Nazi ilk.

That's how it started with Hitler as a cellar basement phenomenon with the perverts and the cast-offs and the scum of society and that's how it will also begin with us. And a German church had to decide whether it would stand with the nation now Nazi and its vile anti-Jewish hatred or be the Church of Jesus Christ and make itself candidates for the same suffering as the Jews in their midst.

We might well be faced with that same question and I'm telling you now well in advance that you might be prepared for it that it should not come upon you suddenly. Why do you think we're in Minnesota?

Because we like rural rustic retreat? We're there for that explicit reason. Because God 17 years ago the moment I set foot on the property said end time teaching center community refuge. And only more recently has he made explicit who the refuge is for.

And I'll tell you that it is hardly a place that I stop now that is not going to be some underground way in that whole network of things by which God is going to move Jews out of their great urban centers and down through a process of sifting them in wilderness remote places and out through Mexico and the Sierra Madre mountains and the seaport back to Israel that the redeemed of the Lord might return to Zion and mourning and sighing flee away for their last day's extremity will be drama ahead saints.

And I was not at liberty to share it with you. It would have been water off the duck's back except for last night. Last night was a decisive crossing over. Last night was a saying to the Lord yes. Last night means an opening now of the things for which you're called and determined.

End time teaching center community refuge. There'll be no refuge for my people in their knocked about distraught condition and the sudden uprooting that will come to them in great fear and flight except by a people who can bear the impact the onslaught of such and that means that we must be a community embrace ourselves to receive the weight of that spiritually, physically, emotionally.

And I can show you a text and several texts that shows that this is not some kind of makeshift provision of God to just get them through. This is his explicit stratagem not only for the sifting of them but for the sifting will the true church please stand up.

Will the church that can extend mercy and will extend it at the risk of their life please stand up. Where is the church that does not count its life as dear unto itself that long ago has said Lord what would you have for me to do.

That's the church that will reveal Israel's God to Israel in its hour of final extremity. As God said I will meet with them in the wilderness of the nations face to face and there I will plead with them and there I will bring them under the rod of my authority and into the bond of my covenant.

They'll return as the redeemed of the Lord but they did not commence their spiritual journey in that they found the Lord in the course of their flight by some kind of the revelation of the face of the Lord in the midst of their extremity.

I will meet with you face we Jews are very trying and that's in our best condition what will we be in that ultimate condition of our duress will be a real test to your sanctification and the truth of your spirituality and that's what God intends that it should be.

And can you see the mystery that Paul had a gasp he couldn't find words to express all the depths of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God. Why did he break out in that euphoric language that high praise that cannot even be contained by words because he saw something more than Israel's restoration.

What he saw was the church's transfiguration by virtue of the process of being to Israel what alone the church must be. It's the real church that will stand up and only the real church and I'll tell you what the church that can be to Israel the face of God in its extremity and the mercy of God in its need is the same church that could confound the principalities and powers of the air to battle against the heavenlies and be the apostolic cannot be the one without the other.

The Mystery of the Church and Principalities

Let's just because of time just leap into chapter 3 of Ephesians now that I've mentioned the principalities and powers chapter 3 verse 6 that the Gentiles should be fellow heirs of the same body and partakers of his promise in Christ by the gospel whereof I was made a minister according to the gift of the grace of God given unto me by the effectual working of his power unto me who am less than the least of all saints.

There's that remarkable Paul. This isn't self effacing false modesty. This is the same man who says follow me as I follow Christ an apostle by the will of God. And now who says I'm less than the least of all saints.

Is this grace given that I should preach among the Gentiles the insurgeable riches of Christ. And now we come to the punchline and to make all men see. This is tonight's purpose. What is the fellowship of the mystery.

Do you love the word? Does a little saliva, a little moisture begin to form? Do you begin to lick your chops? The mystery this is not the word as the world uses it. This is mystery the resonance of things hidden that are appointed in a certain moment of time something to be revealed something to be appropriated something to be fulfilled that has to do with the glory of God forever.

The fellowship of the mystery which from the beginning of the world has been hid in God who created all things by Jesus Christ to the intent that now unto the principality and powers and heavenly places might be known by the church the manifold wisdom of God according to the eternal purpose which he purposed in Christ Jesus our Lord patently impossible every skill or ability that men might have to exposit the word.

This statement is so compacted so intense it is so full of unspeakable meaning that it would take nights to open to explore to a revelation of the mystery. And isn't that the same word that Paul uses for the mystery of Israel?

I would not brethren that you should be ignorant of this mystery. Paul speaking about the Jew and the church lest you become wise in your own conceit the two great things that pertain to the calling of the church especially the church of the last days is called by Paul mystery.

And that word is as alien to us as eternity as the ages to come as heaven. And yet these words are so vital so central to our believing and our acting in this life that for them to be without cogent meaning is to rob us.

I invite you to open yourself for the revelation of the mystery of God hidden until man has created all things through Christ Jesus in order that whatever the basis for human society and civilization and all of its complexity and riches to sustain and support life is really for everything through the church, for the church is that not important in God's sight?

Well if it is Lord forgive us for failing to give to the church the same respect and apprehension and consideration that you yourself give it and for which you gave even your very life. Listen saints we have not adequately perceived the mystery of the church the body of which he is the head.

And the strange paradox is that the church that will embrace something as distant as ethereal and as cosmic as a demonstration to the invisible spirit realm of whatever the manifold wisdom of God is is the church most profoundly relevant and powerful now and presently in the earth.

You have an obligation it's incumbent upon you to search God and ask Lord, what is this wisdom? By what means is this demonstration to be made? It makes no sense to me I've been so habituated to practical payoffs to things that are expedient and are pragmatic that something invested for something gained but this, that you did not think it extravagant to create all things the whole cosmos the galaxies the earth, its orbit its ability to have vegetation to sustain life in order that upon it should be an entity called the church in order that it might perform something that only it can perform as the church and it cannot be performed by solo virtuosos but by the church in its entirety and totality once and for all.

Or it cannot make that demonstration for part of that wisdom is a church that can be one. Is a church that is whole. Is a church that is in union with each other in unfeigned love and real agreement and not some charismatic slipshod political ecumenical unity that is a pox and a counterfeit against the real thing.

And what are you slouches willing to do to obtain that? Hey, that means my privacy is going to be invaded. I'm not going to be able to put my feet up on the coffee table because it's likely that saints will again be going from house to house daily breaking bread.

This unity is not some kind of high brother and a little back slap and a full gospel bear hug. This is going to be real agreement but not first without working through disagreement through tensions through differences and all the kinds of things that make us up in our motley and divergent composition.

That's what makes the church the church. That's the genius of the church. That's why it's this eternal masterpiece. That's why Paul concludes Ephesians chapter 3 with saying unto him be glory in the church by Christ Jesus world without end throughout all ages.