Dvd 28 Authentic Spirituality — Art Katz

And I slipped into the john and had my Bible and paper and pencil and on the toilet the Lord gave me an outline on Elijah. I said, well, I'll speak seven minutes worth. And then they said, take 15 minutes.

And then as I was speaking up came a note from my co-author now gone on to be with the Lord of Ben Israel. Take 45 minutes. I thought, oh, praise God, they're recognizing the anointing on this word. And I took 45 minutes.

Israel’s End-Time Calling and the Demonstration of God’s Power

A Jewish son was brought forth out of death and therefore great life came into the world. And now we've come the end times and there's a Jewish son again that God would bring forth out of death. How many of us have had our hearts to pound with love and fascination for the Jewish faces that are everywhere about us?

How we've fallen in love with our bus drivers and our guides and our sleep is disturbed at night and their faces come before us and we see the beauty of their lives and their character and their integrity.

And we hear them speak their many languages and see their intensity and their passion and their character and their nature and our hearts come at them for the kingdom of God that they might be an end time people of God proclaiming his salvation throughout the earth.

How my heart beats to hear my Jewish people cry out, the Lord, he is God. The Lord, he is God. But they shall not cry it except there be a demonstration of fire from heaven. Keeping Katherine Kuhlman waiting in the wings and when she came out and the flashbulbs popped and the catchers fell under the power where she would reach behind the person being prayed for to catch her and down went the catcher and the people were hilarious.

It was a carnival because she came up with the boast, well, we've heard about the Holy Spirit but now I'm going to demonstrate him. And it was an agony for me. This is the first time I have ever publicly confessed this but I think it's time.

I had to leave. I could not bear to stand four feet away from the ostensible display of power where bodies were falling left and right in the complete sense, absence of any sense of the presence of God.

You want to know what anguish is? It's seeing external demonstration of power without the intuited and sensed presence of the living God. And it was more than I could bear. I yanked my poor wife off the platform before 4 ,000 people and she went hysterical.

It was enough to be married to a man like me but to be publicly humiliated before 4 ,000 without explanation and she carried on on the sidewalk as we were waiting for a taxi cab while other Jewish observing the condition of my marriage.

Prophetic Rebuke, Suffering, and the Cost of the Word

This is the message the Lord gave. When I came back after speaking it and sat on the platform, everyone turned their shoulder away as if I was some pitiful piece of refuse. What did I do to offend? Then I learned that I had taken 45 minutes when the note said take four dash five minutes and I didn't see the dash.

Well, what can you do? It was my sight then, it's my hearing now. So get what value you can from this enfeebled and aged veteran. But a prophecy did ring out as soon as I sat down. Somebody on the platform cried out, this is the word that I have called you to hear.

Not the sugar candy that has so far been given but this word and it went on like that. I found out later that that exact prophecy was spoken four other places in the auditorium before the audience of 4 ,000 people.

And I don't know what you think of Basilia Schlink and the Evangelical Sisters of Mary. Do you know this movement? She has recently died. She is an oracle. She was an oracle. She's the 20th century voice for the Lord whose great book on repentance, The Secret of the Joy-Filled Life, is one of the great classics of contemporary Christian writing.

Some of the sisters from her movement were in that audience and they said later, this was the word of the Lord. It's in this book, but the price has just gone up. So because you were late and indifferent, now it's going to cost you more, but it's worth it.

If you paid $100 a book, you're not overpaying. It's priceless. And this is my first book, just republished in English. It's available in Hebrew, German, French, Russian. I don't know how many languages.

It's being prepared in Chinese. Of an ideological Jew who had been brought to a place of disillusionment in his 34th year with a broken marriage to a German woman. Doesn't God know how to bring us Jews down?

He gives you a wife who had belonged to the Hitler youth and is schizophrenic. And in the fury and the intensity of her psychological and emotional condition, how did she ventilate her disturbance, but finding the one place in this stolid piece of rock where I was penetrable, my Jewishness.

Is my language too fancy for you? Come up here and be there. I'm elevating the whole level of Christian literacy. And it's long overdue. It's about time you crack your dictionaries. And loved words and their meanings.

Or you're just a bunch of pappy soft touches that affect nothing. Language. That's our prophetic responsibility to God to cherish and to employ. And where do you read this language? This is a book written by an atheist.

This is not a retrospective book. What does that mean, Art? Retrospective means when someone looks back and writes something of their memory of it. This is not that. This is the journal that I carried as a hitchhiking Jewish atheist through Europe, the Middle East, and Israel, looking for philosophical answers.

And how I was apprehended by the living God. Hodder and Stoughton, which is the most distinguished English publishing company of Great Britain, published one edition of this book in the 1970s. And I later met the head of the religious books department who approved it.

He said, when your book came across my desk, I realized it was the finest literary work I had ever read by a contemporary Christian. And because of its quality, I knew it would not be a commercial success.

Nevertheless, I felt an obligation to print it. You, dear saints, this is not only a stirring book of the mercy of God that pursues a man because he's prayed for by one of his ex-students and her mother, roly-poly middle class Christian woman, but because it's the template and pattern of God's future salvation for the lost sheep of the house of Israel, where they, like me, will be uprooted from their places of security and affluence and success in America and all the world, and will be again exiled and in flight through the nations.

And that's how God apprehended me, through the nations. It was the consistent witness of Christians picking me up off the side of the road as I lived for 14 months with what was on my back, and expressing to me the love, the mercy, the tender concern of God, because I was a rabid anti-Christian.

And yet, I could not easily dismiss this species of mankind that was neither Jewish nor Gentile. They were something else and other. And because of them, when a New Testament came into my hands for the first time, can you imagine?

Almost 35 years old, a teacher of history, skilled and trained in the analysis of documents, commending to his students to go to the primary source, and I had never gone to the source. Either the Old or the New Testament.

They were books for the weak. But in the first reading of the New Testament, in the Gospel of John, in one statement out of the mouth of Jesus, I got zapped, and I've not recovered yet. So Lord, let there be a rush on the books, and let them serve every purpose for which you have intended them, because not one of these books have anything to do with my promotion.

I haven't lifted a finger for any one of them. I have had to be pursued by publishers, for the Lord himself, in his own sovereign way, has brought these books out in his time and in the many languages in which they are in print.

It has not to do with human promotion or self-seeking. It's a provision of God in the multiplying ability of God to use media and books to put into the hands of saints, those things intended for their edification.

I'm not a man to listen to tapes, but I like a book. I like something where I can read, write, mark, underline, and put asterisks.

One of these books, Reality, I don't know about the others, it's translated to Hebrew, and they are just distributed for free in Israel, just to let you know. And I was really blessed by this book. I read it in Hebrew.

And we don't buy it in Israel. We get them for free. So just to get an idea. You got it for free? You can see me later.

He read it in Hebrew. Then Israel is also in Hebrew. When I came to the Ukraine and Russia on my last visit, people were stopping me on the streets and plastering my face with kisses. I found that I had become a culture hero because people's lives were changed by apostolic foundations in Russia, spirit of truth in Russia.

People who had lived under communist bondage for seven decades were freed by these books, which were so expansive a statement of the liberty of God in the spirit. So I praise God for books. 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 this 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. We thank and give you the praise in Jesus' name.

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.

The Holy Spirit and the Apostolic Church

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.

So this outline started as that, but then as it went on, I realized that 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.

And apostles, what is the distinct? What do they need? We're going to be the nexus of God's kingdom that 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. And we'll 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. 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, 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 will be forever changed. But look it up. Ask the Lord. Lord, I need the 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 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 be 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 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 void. 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, final dealings of God, the culmination of the nations and their long opposition to God, and your place in it. 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 and Paul we know, but the church at Salmon, Idaho, who? Or Timbuktu or wherever you're from, Kansas City, who? You're of no consequence. We yawn at your profession that you're going to take cities for Christ through praise and worship.

But to 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 air, dear 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 angiology that are fallen and have influence to jerk and manipulate entire nations and races. Oh, God, where do you see that in history?

But 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 Goethe, 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.

The Corporate Body, Prayer, and Spiritual Warfare

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. 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 did 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. 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 10 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, 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 as a 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 Walmart.

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, 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 allures, 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 his 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 willing for that? Do 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 had 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 used 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 wilt 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 says, I know Jews that are more Christian than Christians, you're disqualified. If you're impressed with the external qualifications and impressiveness of 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, there's not a righteous soul upon the earth who doeth good and sinneth no matter how much they appear good, civil, they don't bark at their wives 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, para-church 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 unto salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek.

That's God's priority, saints, 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 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 wasn't giving you an invitation. Well, 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, stranger, sojourner in this earth, but to serve the purposes of God that consummate and conclude the age in glory in your coming.

For Jesus' sake, in his name, amen. You may be seated. Hey, I'm still on the first paragraph. How much more can you take? So, okay. Remember, he said that, and he's an authority. You know, dear saints, we are involved in a cosmic drama, C-O-S-M-I-C, and the awareness of that will break up the provincial, narrow parameters of your present faith and understanding.

Cosmic Conflict, the Cross, and the Coming Kingdom

Yes, you're in a locality. God has planted you there, but what is being worked has an ultimate and cosmic significance. It touches the end of the ages. It brings God, who is the creator of the heaven and the earth, into his own creation to establish his rule and to prevail over the rebellious nations.

It ends the powers of darkness that suffered their initial defeat at the cross and experience their final defeat in another people who, in the body of Christ, again, suffer their opposition and bear it with the same magnanimity and grace as their Lord before them.

That's why it is given to the beast to overcome the church. But in being overcome, something is displayed that would not otherwise have been expressed or revealed, the character of God in patient forbearance and suffering unjustly and with rejoicing, knowing that it signals the end of the age and that those who bear this have obtained for themselves an eternal reward that shall not corrupt nor rust away a crown.

That's eschatological, and I know it's not part of your present thinking and needs to be, for it's the anticipation of the Lord who comes and brings his rewards with him to give to every man according to his works.

That is the greatest incentive for those works that will pass through the fire and not be burnt up. I've got works, dear saints. I've got to spare. But what do you have? I'll tell you something about the works of God that will not be consumed.

He has to be the author of it. It'll never be comfortable, and you're not able to perform it out of your own human and religious ability. Anything that you can perform by your ability is ipso facto disqualified as a work of God, like this morning, this speaking.

You think you're looking at some virtuoso? Look, my no hands. If the Lord ever ceased in a moment to be the life of my life and the speaking of my speaking and the wisdom of my wisdom, I'd fall flat and shrivel up before you like nothing.

This is a work this morning. This isn't a message. This is a work, and it shall be enduring and have consequence for both time and for eternity. And when you are engaged in labors of that kind, day and night, from country to country, you have to say with Paul, who is sufficient for these things?

Listen, you dear saints. You are, every one of you, living beneath the glory of God. You are, every one of you, living on the level of your human and religious ability and doing a nice job of it. So long as you remain at this level, but once you kick in the gear and shift into the apostolic realm of engagement with the powers of the air and the issue of Israel and being God's salvific provision for them in their last day's extremity, you'll recognize you cannot perform it.

That the resurrection has not been given to us as a doctrine to approve, but as a mode of being and living to enjoy. Is that the picture? You're living beneath the resurrection, which means you're living beneath the glory.

And your contemporary Christianity, even in its so-called charismatic Pentecostal forms, has not required it. Put the centerpiece back into the faith, Israel, the last days, powers of darkness, the end, cosmic conflict, and you'll have to become prophetic and apostolic, which is to say, you'll have to live by God.