K-484 Discipleship — Art Katz

Jewishness and Discipleship

Well, I think the topic this morning is Jewishness and discipleship. I'm so happy for the session that we had yesterday afternoon where many voices were raised and disconcerted voices as we were groping for the definition of these very weighty words.

I've learned long ago that there's no easy recourse to dictionaries when it comes to the seeking of definitions, but that they have to be wrought in the heart and out of the experience. And I know that God gave us a fit title for these conferences, and yet in the coming here I thought to myself, how would I define the meaning of the word discipleship where I called to speak upon it?

It's no easier to do than to define the meaning of the word holy, or the meaning of the word love, or truth, or God, or any other such great word. And so we have to probe and feel and reach in the scriptures, and I have a sense that somehow the words Jewishness and discipleship are synonyms, that when we shall come to the meaning of one, we shall come to the meaning of the other, for they're truly one and the same.

And I'm just going to take a rambling survey through the scriptures. I hope you'll just loosen your spiritual tie and relax. I really want to take my time in this and not feel pressed to have to discharge my soul in an hour, and I'm just going to begin in 1 Corinthians, the second chapter.

The Wisdom of God Versus Human Eloquence

I'm so glad that it's Paul who wrote these things. Great towering intellectual, if ever a man were endowed with great natural endowments of intellect and character and natural spirit, it would be Paul.

And yet he, I think more than any man, recognized that except that it come out of a battered piano by the glory of God, it is nothing. So in the second chapter of 1 Corinthians, we read, and I, brethren, when I came to you, I came not with excellency of speech or of wisdom declaring unto you the testimony of God, for I determined not to know anything among you, save Jesus Christ and him crucified.

And I was with you in weakness and in fear and in much trembling. And my speech and my preaching was not with enticing words of man's wisdom, but in demonstration of the spirit and of power, that your faith should not stand in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God.

How be it we speak wisdom among them that are perfect, yet not the wisdom of this world nor of the princes of this world that come to naught. But we speak the wisdom of God in a mystery, even the hidden wisdom which God ordained before the world unto our glory, which none of the princes of this world knew.

For had they known it, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory. But as it is written, I hath not seen nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man the things which God hath prepared for them that love him.

But God, but God, but God hath revealed them unto us by his spirit. For the spirit searches all things, yea, the deep things of God. For what man knoweth the things of man, save the spirit of man which is in him?

Even so the things of God knoweth no man but the spirit of God. Now we have received not the spirit of the world, but the spirit which is of God, that we might know the things that are freely given to us of God, which things also we speak not in the words which man's wisdom teacheth, but which the Holy Ghost teacheth, comparing spiritual things with spiritual.

But the natural man receiveth not the things of the spirit of God, for their foolishness to him, neither can he know them because they are spiritually discerned. But he that is spiritual judgeth all things, yet he himself is judged of no man.

For who hath known the mind of the Lord, that he might instruct him? But we have the mind of Christ. The scriptures are a great embarrassment for any man who presumes to think that he is insightful or eloquent or any other such foolish nonsense, because the scriptures speak themselves.

We have only to recite them, and they eloquently preach themselves. If we could just let this word lift off the page and through our voices and just resonantly reverberate in our hearts and minds and the full weight of them pierce our souls, we would be done in, stretched out on the floor, our eyes glazed and rolled back in our skull and the spittle falling from our lips.

This is glory. This is unspeakable glory. The world has never known such a thing, and even we, children of God, have yet to understand what it is that this speaks. And I'm not going to attempt to exposit.

This isn't even my text. It just sounds, what can I say, the tenor of the thing which is on my heart this morning. When Paul says, for I am determined not to know anything but Christ and Him crucified, in that is compacted such wisdom in such unspeakable depth, because in one phrase, the two Judaism's are expressed.

The Judaism that prides itself in the excellency of mind, the Judaism that boasts in the caliber of its rabbis, that looks to its human commentaries and is replete with the words of Rabbi Akiva or other such sages, continually quoting, and that's what the whole substance of the Talmud is, but the brilliant commentaries of men.

In the last analysis, flesh, brilliant flesh, but flesh. And here's a man who is groomed in that tradition and equipped, naturally endowed, to brilliantly continue it, but he says something very resolute.

I have determined not to know anything but Christ and Him crucified. He's passed out of the one Judaism and in to the greater. And I tell you, we Jews, whatever it is that we are, and we've taken centuries to ponder it and yet don't understand, but whatever usual endowment we have by zeal or intensity or intelligence, I tell you that speaking for myself, these things have not enhanced my spiritual walk, they've been an encumbrance, and I speak especially of mind.

For the first year of my life as a believer, I got nowhere thinking to bring to the Bible the same skills and abilities that I honed to a sharp edge in my academic career, what I was going to do with the Word of God, what I had done with Shakespeare and Dreiser and other such writers.

And I did, I spun fanciful things, very lovely, and it would have enhanced any kind of coffee time hour, but spiritually it meant nothing, it was nothing, there was no life in it, and my first year was spent totally spinning my wheels.

I think we Jewish believers, in the passing from the one Judaism to the other, and understand now, I'm not speaking in necessarily religious terms. I was an atheist for 35 years, but in a certain sense I was a deeply religious Jew in the deepest traditions of our Judaism.

What tradition is that? It's the tradition which exalts the human mind, which has its confidence in flesh and knows not God by the Spirit. Many of us are required now by an act of will to determine not to know anything but Christ and Him crucified.

That foolish, battered, rejected and despised Christ, whose back hung in strips and the blood poured down, that visage that was marred more than any man in that scrap heap, in that dump outside of Jerusalem called Golgotha.

He's the only one with to know what He represents in His blood and the cross upon which He lay out His life. That's it. It's the Son, the substance of all things, the two Judaisms. And I can go on where Paul talks about the wisdom of men, the power of God, but we speak the wisdom of God in a mystery, even the hidden wisdom which God ordained before the world unto our glory.

The Coming Crisis and the Need for Spiritual Discernment

Children, what an hour is this? We're just merely on the threshold. I can't begin. Two hours? I need four hours. I need a day. I need an uninterrupted week to pour out what I have in my heart, the impressions, the sense I have for the condition of the world and where we stand, how bizarre and grotesque things are yet to become, and however shocked and horrified we are by the fantastic changes which have been wrought in our culture and our life in less than a decade, we're only yet at the beginning.

We're in for such things, such defilement, such pouring out, such a bilge of dark spirits, such a confusion, such a breakdown of the apparatus of civilization that men will quest for a glass of pure water, air to breathe, the most elementary things to sustain their lives.

We're coming to such a place, confusion as you cannot understand, and men are going to be groping for answers and stumbling about as in a great darkness. And isn't it interesting how in certain microcosmic things, like a little episode, an exchange, a conversation, God can reveal the great macrocosm?

It was in Kansas City that I led a Jewish man to the Lord, he and his son together in my living room, and they came from one of the most influential families of that great Jewish community. In fact, the father of that man was the president of one of the leading temples, and he himself, university educated, wealthy, the head of a great advertising company, a real swinger, was paralyzed.

His life was done in. He was a psychological mess, an alcoholic, and he had been through AA and through other devices and seeking spiritual answers, and that night in my living room he received the Lord.

And for a season he flourished, and then unhappily he fell back again. And I think in this I can't speak on without pausing to say that there's a very great attrition rate among Jewish believers. I don't know what it is, whether Satan with great uncanny zeal seeks more to destroy these than any other, and especially is the attrition rate great among Jewish ministries.

Well, this man did not last long. He got sucked up again in lusts and things of that kind. Well, I came recently through Kansas City, and I tried to see him, and I could not. He wouldn't see me. He was afraid to see me, and I finally got him on the phone, and his voice was shrill and hysterical and full of trembling.

I never heard such confusion and brokenness and disorder, and the upshot of our conversation was this. He was seeing a Jewish psychiatrist. And I put it to him like this at the end of our conversation.

I said, Brother, you have a choice between two Jews. This Jewish psychiatrist was to me, and I'm sure to him, kind of what can I say, the symbolic expression of all that stands in the world that represents wisdom, answer, all that the world has to offer to bring reconciliation and wholeness meaning into the life of men.

It was this man's last desperate clutching hope, and I was trying to persuade him to let go of that psychiatrist and all that the psychiatrist symbolized and fall wholly into the hands of the living Christ, to abandon himself to the resurrected Christ.

You know what this man said? I'll never forget the way it was like a cry. Hardy said, you're dangerous. Hardy said, you're dangerous. And all of a sudden, something struck my soul, and I realized he's right.

I'm dangerous. Why I'm so dangerous that the day is going to come, and soon, that men are going to seek to slay me and claim that they're doing God a service, because I'm not just offering men a religious alternative for a desiccated and impoverished Judaism.

I'm calling them out of one kingdom and into another. I'm calling them from one wisdom and into another, from one way and into another. And I tell you, if that other way does not work, it's curtains. We're not just playing with religious alternatives.

We're playing with all of which life consists, an answer to the minds of men and the hearts of men and the bodies of men and the totality of all they are and all that they hope for in this life and the life to come.

Can you see that? And men are going to tremble and be chagrined and gnash upon us with their teeth. Have you ever understood why it is that seemingly religious men gnashed upon simple disciples like Stephen with their teeth and killed him?

Have you ever sought to understand why it is that when the world had its opportunity to lay its hands upon God, they practically rent Him limb from limb? The world is at enmity with God. It despises God and all that He stands for.

It cannot abide His wisdom, for to it, for to them, it's utter foolishness. Their wisdom resides in the power of intellect, in human solutions, in stratagems, in political programs, in devices to free the air of pollution.

Can you understand that we're coming to a showdown and everything that touches upon our technology, our politics, our sociology, the whole sum and substance of our life is coming to one great crossroad and over it lurks a great question mark.

How will men solve the final and utter ultimate predicament of their human existence? There are only two ways. One shall be the solution of men trusting in the arm of flesh, and the other is the whole and utter abandonment to the foolish wisdom of God, which is known and revealed by God, by His Spirit.

It's a fearful thing. The world has long tolerated so-called Christianity because the stakes were not high and no one understood. And even up until recent times, the whole controversy between Judaism and Christianity was just a kind of a foolish prattle, hardly any more in character than the foolishness of the competition and rivalry between Catholicism and Protestantism or various other denominations.

Just men's foolish pride. It wasn't the issue at all. The real issue is not Christianity and Judaism, as I've said so many times. The real issue is between Judaism and Judaism. The Judaism out of which Paul was lifted by the grace of God that exalts the mind of men and has its ultimate confidence in flesh, and the Judaism to which Paul was drawn, which is a mystery and is revealed, made known, by God, by His Spirit, unto us who believe.

Joseph as a Model of Discipleship

I just want to take you through a tour of the scriptures because we desperately need models. I've long recognized that we desperately need models. It's one thing to speak about discipleship. We need to see it.

I want you to start with me this morning in the book of Genesis, the story of Joseph. And I would to God that we had all kinds of time to begin at the very beginning and explore this enormous life. Talk about the quintessence of Jewishness.

I would happily rest in that Jewishness. If I were as Jewish as Joseph, I would not want for more. And what a strange one he was. Maybe that's something also about the nature of Jewishness. Not unusual nor hard to understand that he was despised of his brethren because he was a dreamer.

And they hated him not only for his dreams but also for his words. There's something about the nature of a Joseph that always will enlist from men or elicit from men a reaction of scorn and reproach and hatred.

The world despises a dreamer. Oh, I'm not talking about one who has ecstatic revelries. But I'm talking about that one who walks by another beat. Have you ever seen such a one? He's in the world but he's not of it.

He's a dreamer. His inspiration comes not from the counsels of men or their flattery or their sophistication or their verbiage or their concepts. But he seems to hear another beat and by that beat does he truly walk.

He's a dreamer and the world despises him for his dreams and more for his words. And they manifest that hatred. And they cast him into pits and seek to kill him. And so will it ever be. Those that live godly lives in Christ Jesus will suffer persecution.

I don't say that because I'm a masochist and have any natural delight in being worked over by the world. But I just understand only too well that the reproach that was upon him must of necessity be also upon us.

Because we walk by his beat, the mystery of God, the offense, the spirit, and the world will always rise up and enrage, gnash its teeth upon it. So in the 39th chapter of Genesis we read a fantastic first utterance.

And Joseph was brought down to Egypt. That's the real beginning of his story. And Joseph was brought down to Egypt. What is it about the wisdom of God that has so to do with being brought down? What is it with the wisdom of God that speaks continually to us that he who exalts himself shall be abased, but he who humbles himself shall be exalted?

What is it about the understanding of God that requires us to be drawn up out of dungeons? I can't express it. And I just pray that the spirit of God is breathing something in between these lines that will persuade you of a certain logic which many of you are going to experience before you pass out of this life.

I can spiritualize being brought down to Egypt and spiritualize being cast into dungeons or being brought up out of pits. And there's great meaning of that and many of us have already experienced that in our lives.

Being broken before God, prostrated, stretched out, how God uses the natural circumstances of our lives needfully to break us of our pride and the various things which clutter us that he might bring us up and out.

But I believe that this is not only spiritual, it shall also become literal and is already literal for many believers right now on this earth in places where to believe in the Lord Jesus Christ is to bring upon you the whole wrath of a society who calls you insane, clutches the children from the bosom of their parents, throws you into cells and brings husbands back to their wives three days later in caskets with rags stuffed in their mouths and when the rag is removed to find that the tongue has been ripped out.

These things are happening now and shall happen in greater measure not just behind the Soviet Union but everywhere in the world because it's the same world ruled over by the same prince at enmity with God and God has called us to a generation where the veil is going to be taken off and the issue revealed in its total nakedness and whatever mask of respectability and tolerance the world has worn toward the three great faiths and other expressions of that nonsense, it shall show forth its hostility and its bitterness and many of us shall be cast into pits and into dungeons.

Why does the Lord allow us? Joseph was brought down to Egypt but the Lord was with Joseph. There was something necessary in that experience in the preparation of one who was to become the Savior of Israel.

You say, Art, what are you talking about? Joseph was not the Savior of Israel. Oh, is that so? Had he not survived, had he not allowed himself to be humbled at the hand of God, had he not resisted the chastening which God wrought through his own brothers, he would not have been in that place and in that time and in that condition to have been the instrumentality by which God saved the same brothers who had cast him into the pit and out of whose loins and seed was to come the generations of Israel and that one out of Judah who is Judah's lion.

And so his master saw that the Lord was with him and that the Lord made all that he did to prosper in his hand and Joseph was a goodly person and well-favored, and in the seventh verse we read, and it came to pass after these things.

Isn't it fantastic? You think you've gone through it. You've survived your dungeon experience. You've been brought down and humbled at the hand of God and he's lifted you up. But then there's something that yet awaits you.

You're blessed for a season, but it's only the beginning of things. It came to pass after these things that his master's wife cast her eyes upon Joseph and she said, lie with me. Precious children, if ever there's going to be a theme struck by the spirit of this world and resounded again and again and again in increasing volume and crescendo, it's going to be the cry of Potiphar's wife, that succulent babe of Egypt, lie with me.

I tell you there's a brand of temptation and invitation to the exercise of the senses in this generation such as the world has never seen. Temptation of such a fierce and burning variety that few shall be able to resist it.

Orgiastic practices and devilish things concocted out of hell and disseminated not just in dark places of the earth, but in the midst of flowering civilizations to bring them to their knees within a generation.

I've seen it already having lived a year in Scandinavia. What kind of filth Satan can pour out and break civilizations a thousand years old. What then shall it be for us who are Johnny-come-lately's on the scene celebrating our declaration of independence, just a few centuries old, when these enormous temptations, these great things shall reach right into the pit and nook and cranny of every vestibule and home and school and street.

We'll get it out of our television tubes and out of our radios and our conversation. The very atmosphere is going to be charged with, come, lie with me. What is the essence of discipleship? It's the same as the essence of Jewishness, and it's in Joseph's answer, but he refused.

Joseph's Refusal and the Holiness of God

I thank God that I'm a theological simpleton. I know nothing about theology, and God has not allowed me to know. And I know that there's a great issue that has been raging through the centuries about Arminianism and Calvinism, about free will and determinism, whether all is the sovereignty of God or whether all is the free will of men.

I don't understand it, and I don't want to know, but this I know. He refused. Paul determined not to know anything but Christ and Him crucified. There's something required from us, our will. But he refused and said unto his master's wife, Behold, my master doesn't know what is with me in this house, and hath committed all things he has to my hand.

There's none greater in this house than I, neither have they kept back anything from me but thee, because thou art his wife. How then can I do this great wickedness and sin against God? I have to confess, people, with great embarrassment and shame, that I had no conception whatsoever of the meaning of the word sin right up and through and beyond the time of my own salvation.

I didn't come to the Lord as a broken sinner. I came to the Lord as one who recognized that He's the way, the life, and the truth, and that I could not, being a Jew and a man of integrity who respected truth, turn from Him.

It was subsequent to that that the Spirit began, in very gracious stages, to reveal to me what my own nature in life is. And I don't think I've yet come to a place where I have the horror of sin that I ought.

Many of us have been completely disheveled and have not been able to understand how it is that God could have asked of Abraham that he take Isaac, the son whom thou lovest, and make of him an offering in the amount that I shall show you.

And it says that he rose up early in the morning and saddled his ass and took his servants and his son, and he went. No ifs, ands, buts, and hows. Well, we know that God had been grooming him in the art of obedience, but even that doesn't fully explain it.

Until I came to a statement by a writer by the name of Myers, and he said something like this. He said, even the filthy Canaanitish peoples, who were contemporaries of Abraham, knew something of the horror of sin and that a holy God must be requited.

Why is it that the world has not been able to understand that God had to send his only begotten son and make of him a sacrifice and atonement for our sin? The problem is this. They have no understanding of the horror of sin.

No understanding of the offense against a holy God. We make a mistake in preaching Jesus prematurely to a Jewish people who yet have no need. And I don't know whether I'm rewriting the book on Jewish evangelism or contradicting the methodology of Jewish missions, but I believe that our first thing, and I think it's consonant with the scriptures, is to bring men to a place of repentance.

It's repent and believe the gospel. Believing is a function of repenting, and Jesus makes no sense to a man who's self-sufficient, fully assured, and completely persuaded that he's absolutely righteous and has no need.

Men's souls must be broken first of the understanding that they've offended against a holy God. So something needs to be exuded from us that there is such a God. Something, a presence needs to be created by those of us who believe that men coming into it shall break and sob and fall on their faces for things that are inexplicable and for which they cannot identify and find themselves within a few minutes calling upon the name of the Lord, which name was a bone in their throat which they could not even have uttered all through their lives.

How about this Joseph when he cried out, How then can I do this great wickedness and sin against God? Four centuries before God thundered the law from Sinai, this Jewish man knew that adultery was a great offense against God.

Here we are on the other side of Sinai. We've had thousands of years to live with the Ten Commandments, and the world can recite its provisions glibly, and we even have gone beyond that. We who believe by the Spirit of God and yet have not the sense of sin and offending against the holy God that Joseph had.

How then can I do this great wickedness and sin against God? I think it's going to be incumbent upon us to have this great conviction that Joseph had both of the nature of sin and the nature of the holiness of God for the two go together.

If we're going to stand in an hour and a day when the Spirit of Potiphar's wife is going to reach out into every aspect of life and come and daily cry, Come lie with me. Well, we know what the outcome was that on an occasion when he was about his business doing his master's business in the house, and there was no other servant there that he clutched at his garment and again tried to persuade him to lie with me.

And we read in the 12th verse, he left his garment in her hand and fled and got him out. Faith is always an act. Do you know that? Whether it's an act of speech or something of volition that results in some manifestation through result of human energy, and in this instance, leaving.

I don't know how many times the Lord has brought me to peculiar places where a precious young Christian couple will come and say, Art, will you pray for me? We're engaged, or we think it's time to be married, but we're having a terrible time lusting after one another.

Pray for me. So I say, well, what point? I'll pray for you, and then you'll continue to see each other privately and alone and in a car. And if you'll make provision for the lust of the flesh, you shall surely experience them.

The prayer is in vain. He fled and got him out. And I think that God shall bring us to such situations where something shall be required of us by an act of volition and will to flee and to get out. This is the meaning of Jewishness, and this is part of the meaning of discipleship.

And you know what the consequence is going to be? Because of your virtue, because of your whole commitment to a God who is holy, holy, holy, because you cannot do this great wickedness and sin against him, you're going to be lied against and reviled against, and you're going to suffer for Christ's sake.

Because what happened? The wife told the husband just the reverse, that this servant tried to take advantage of me in your absence. And the husband was enraged, and Joseph was cast again into a dungeon.

The consequence of obedience to God in this world is persecution. It was for Jesus, it was for Joseph, and it is and always shall be for everyone who shall follow God in complete obedience. The master's wrath was kindled, and Joseph's master took him and put him into the prison, a place where the king's prisons were bound, and he was there in prison.

Joseph, Daniel, and the Spirit-Given Revelation

But the Lord was with Joseph and showed him mercy. I think that Richard Wurmbrand, how many of you know of him? This Jewish brother, 13 years in communist prison camps, three and a half years in solitary confinement, banged out of shape and extended beyond anything that the human mind and psyche can take, and yet in the depth of what he had to receive at the hands of the world, God was with him.

And I've heard this great saint of God out of his own lips say, I would never exchange that experience. He came to such an intimacy and knowledge of God as available to only those who know him in the fellowship of his sufferings.

But God was with Joseph. The Lord showed him mercy and made to prosper again many things at his hand. And he received favor while he was again in prison. And we know what happened, that he was able to interpret the dream of two men, the pharaoh's baker and butler.

And as a result of that, in time, his fame came to the attention of the pharaoh at a time when the pharaoh himself was in great extremity and crisis. He had a dream, and in the 41st verse we read that in the 8th verse, it came to pass in the morning that his spirit was troubled, and he sent and called for all the magicians of Egypt and all the wise men thereof.

And pharaoh told them his dream, but there was none that could interpret them unto pharaoh. People, we've come again to that hour. There's no man so brilliant, there's not a man wise enough in all Egypt that can unravel the mystery of the complexity of this civilization.

We stand at the ultimate crisis. And men are going to be beside themselves with fear and with terror. And there's not going to be a computer maid or a man so brilliant, a wise man in Egypt, that shall be able to interpret this dream.

But someone's going to be brought up out of a dungeon, out of obscurity, out of foolishness. A banged up piano, a thing that has no promise in its outward appearance, a foolish Hebrew shall be brought up out of a dungeon, and his face shall be washed, and his head shaved, and clothing shall be put upon him, and he's going to be brought into the court of the pharaoh.

And look at the answer when pharaoh begins to look upon this Jew. And remember how despised the Hebrews were by the Egyptians. They looked upon as lowly sheep herders, a secondary race of men, not worthy of their admiration.

The 16th verse, Joseph answered Pharaoh saying, It is not in me. God shall give Pharaoh an answer of peace. It's not in me. I came not in human preaching and eloquence, but in demonstration and power by the Spirit.

The answer is not in me. And so Joseph, by the Spirit, was able to interpret the dream of Pharaoh, which all the wise men of Egypt were not able to do. And because of the ability to interpret that dream, and by that to make provision both for Egypt and ultimately for Israel, a people survived.

I often think to myself, what would have happened if Joseph had failed to correctly interpret that dream? You see, guys, this is no light business. This is no kind of a thing like trial and error. Well, if you make it great, but if we miss it, okay.

The Lord is preparing us now. And I think of the question that came forth yesterday afternoon by the fellow who was sitting by that side of the room. Well, how do you know there's still a small voice of God?

How do you know what the will of God is? How do I know that it's God's voice? How do I know what He wants? And many answers went forth about the bat that learns by experience, by continual bumpings of its head, finally to discern the sense of space and things.

And out of our own experience, how we catch it one time and miss it another, God is preparing us and training us. The discernment of the spirit is not a thing easily obtained. And Brother Paul spoke about the thing that comes by practice.

And I think that this is one of the great virtues of being in the body of Christ, that in our small body situations, relating one to another face to face, we can attempt to raise our eaglet wings, we can dare in God and be bold in God and seek to express ourselves in the spirit.

And it shall not be a pure stream, especially at the first. But as we go on trying ourselves in that situation, where we can afford to take such risks, we can come into a larger situation like this, where believers have come from different parts of the country, and when we feel the prodding of the spirit and we sense that discernment to speak forth the thing of God.

And even then we shall not hit it perfectly. But what shall happen when we shall come later this year in Dallas and have a great convocation of all of the Messianic Jews of this country and all of the Jewish charismatic ministries and want to hear exquisitely and perfectly the word of God for this hour to lead us, then we can't afford to miss it.

We've got to know exactly when to stop playing the piano, when to stop singing, when the speaker must speak, when it is that we're hearing a true prophetic word, when it is that hands are to be laid on, when it is that we're not to speak at all.

I'm not sure that there should have been any preaching at all last night. The glory of God was so manifest, I knew it as soon as I came to this pulpit, that nothing was required from flesh, that God was wanting the priests out of the sanctuary, out of the Holy of Holies, that His Shekinah glory could have filled it, that we would have seen the fire fall and we would have fallen on our faces and cried out, the Lord, He is God, the Lord, He is God.

We've got to know, and I can't think of any more precious gift of the Spirit than the discerning of spirits, the interpreting, if you will, of dreams, the ability to understand when all the world is confused and is desperately groping like blind men staggering in darkness for answer, that a lowly Hebrew raised out of a dungeon can speak perfectly the wisdom of God, discerning by the Spirit what the will of God is, and give Pharaoh answer.