The Agony and the Ecstasy of Paul in Romans 9-11 — Art Katz

Praise the Lord. Good morning, dear saints. If I look in any way fresh, it's a deception. I'm altogether crumpled, tired, uninspired, uninstructed, feeling and finding my way, and yet cherishing this final occasion.

I can't tell you how deeply. Not to miss the mind of the Lord in any particular. The issue is not to find what is good, but to find what is perfect. There are a lot of good things tested, given things.

But what is the appropriate and intended word for the conclusion of these days, as if it were once and for all, and will not be given again? You would think that for that, a man would need a full night's sleep.

The marvel is, if I've had any, but that there's a necessity that I would stand before you in a kind of crumpled condition, because I can tell you that when you'll be called upon to give a climactic final moment of utter and eternal significance, you're not going to feel any better than I'm feeling presently.

And you'll have to be obedient in the want of vim and vinegar, strength and inspiration that you think you ought to have to the uttermost, because the moment is so critical, but you'll have at least. You'll have to be obedient in your weakness.

And so I'm required, as prophetic man, not only to speak, but to demonstrate the thing to which you yourself are called. Got that picture? So even here, we're talking in the car, what shall be said, and how shall we conclude, and what text?

And I'm not even sure now, though I'm moments away from having to open my mouth. So Lord, our confidence is in you. If we're jealous for this conclusion, for this finale, as if it will never again be our privilege, what ought to be spoken, Lord?

In your so great wisdom, who alone knows the end from the beginning, you know the destiny, my God, of the church and this expression in this city and in this nation. What ought to be spoken, Lord, and how?

Come, have all the more opportunity to express yourself because I'm in a condition of weakness, because my mind is fuzzy, because I can't humanly put it together. Exhibit, my God, your wonderful grace, that resurrection, power, and life for which these children will be called to fulfill in their weakness what it is that you're setting before them in mine.

We thank you for the mystery of it and your provision through it and your wonderful grace as one who has gone before in exactly this way, for you are crucified in weakness. So we thank you and give you praise for this conclusion now, Lord.

Let every word be a sword and a dagger, every piece of punctuation, your accent, your voice, the disposition of your heart and mind, that nothing, my God, will fall to the ground. We'll cherish it. We promise.

Romans 9–11 as the Heart of Paul's Apostolic Burden

And thank you for the privilege of it in Jesus' name. Amen. Well, it would almost be criminal to have passed through these days and not one time to speak to you out of Romans 11. Are you aware what Romans 11 signifies for the apostle Paul?

It is his very heart. Are you aware what the book of Romans signifies for the apostle Paul? It is the most systematic statement of his whole apostolic creed, of his whole perception of the faith and of reality.

The book of Romans is classic beyond all estimation. And scholars have rightly said that chapters 1 through 8 are the preliminary for 9 through 11, which is the heart, and that 12 through 16 is the aftermath, the working out, the application of what is spoken as the centerpiece, which is Romans 9 through 11, the subject of the mystery of Israel and the church.

Can you imagine what a statement it is of God's wisdom that the church that is Gentile would take to its heart this great burden and this great mystery, not just as an aspect of its consideration or concern, but the very heart of its purpose, call, and being?

That a Gentile church should be preoccupied with the destiny and fate of a Jewish nation is a remarkable statement to the principalities and powers of the air who preside over mankind in that premise that men are only goaded and provoked by their self-interest and will only seek what pertains to themselves, their pleasure, their security, and all the rest.

God wants to bring that false wisdom down, not only to contradict it, but only to destroy it, because it has made of captive nations and races of men who live for number one, for themselves, their security, their self-interest, their satisfaction, as an unspoken premise that this is the principle for life, that if you have any kind of reason, you know that you take care of number one first.

And if you have anything left over, you might consider a bit of philanthropy and altruism. But God contradicts all that and says that the utterness of the divine wisdom is a consideration other than yourself, contrary to yourself, that not only does not promote your self-interest, but threatens it.

And so I can tell you with confidence, anyone who will take up Paul's burden of the mystery of Israel through the church in the last days makes himself a special candidate for suffering. The powers of darkness will hate this determination on your part, not only because you're Gentile, but because you're Chinese, because you're Oriental, because you're Asian, which is to say, you're the least ones from whom anyone would expect some kind of identification with that Semitic people in the other part of the world whose representative is standing before you.

Why should you have any affinity for the Jew? Any interest in the destiny of that nation? All the more when its track record stinks, when the Lord himself acknowledges that you have blasphemed my name in every nation where I have sent you, where I have cast you in judgment.

And now in these last days, you're even doing it in the land that you presently occupy. And you'll continue to do it until I bring that final last day sifting a judgment by which the great majority of you will not survive.

And the remnant will constitute the redeemed nation who returns to Zion with everlasting joy upon their heads, sighing and mourning, passing away. So will you take my word for it, you dear saints? I know that this is a strange subject.

You're not acquainted. But I want to introduce it. I want, by the grace of God, to sound a theme there's no way that we can begin to develop this. This takes a three, five day seminar, at least, to dwell upon this and draw this out.

What I'm hoping for in the brevity of time, which means shortness, that the theme will so be sounded that it will ruin you, that it will haunt you. It will come back into your thought, your consciousness, Israel.

Why should we be preoccupied? It's as distant and as remote a subject and a concern as could ever be put before us as Asian Christians. And yet, if we don't take it up, we will contradict the very mystery that was at the heart of the great apostle's consideration, that to remove this from Paul is to remove Paul.

And what are we if we do not reflect and take to our heart what was central to him? What is the church if it's not built upon the foundation of the apostles and the prophets? So we want to probe and feel and identify and grasp what pulsated in this great apostle's heart?

What was given to him as revelation over which he was a steward of the mystery? And nowhere else does he say, brethren, my desire is that you should not be ignorant of this mystery lest you become wise in your own conceit.

There's no other place where he warns that the loss of the mystery will have any negative consequence except here. To lose this mystery, not to obtain it, opens you to consequences that are undesirable and change and threaten the entire character of the church itself.

He said, I would not have you to be ignorant of this mystery lest you become wise in your own conceit. Something pompous, something inflated, some swelling up of your Christian egotism will necessarily follow the absence of the lack of this mystery.

This mystery is calculated to temper you, to humble you, to bring you into a sense of God in the majesty of his mind and will, because Paul ends this remarkable statement in Romans 11 with three verses that are the most magnificent, poetic paying of praise to God stated anywhere in the whole corpus of the Bible, Old or New Testament.

There's no greater ecstatic statement that stretches language to breaking than Paul's spontaneous eruption at the end of his final statement in Romans 11. Oh, the depth of the riches, both of the wisdom and knowledge of God.

The man is staggered. He is reeling. His breath fails him. Oh, the depth of the riches. What has he seen that he would exclaim something so ecstatically that it defies language to comprehend? 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. You dear saints, if you trifle with this, if you think that Paul is employing only a little piece of flourish and rhetoric, some stylistic thing to end his remarkable statement in Romans 11 with the glory of God forever because it has a nice lofty sound, you are condemned.

You're shortchanging God. You're crippling yourself. You're losing the heart and nub and genius of apostolicity itself is the issue of the glory of God forever. Don't you understand? And then if we miss what Paul is saying and why he's ecstatic and why he concludes like that, we turn the word glory into a piece of traffic.

We make it a little piece of convenient verbalism that we can write, put into our choruses, our songs, talk to pray, but we don't know what it means. It doesn't pierce us through. We don't understand the ultimacy of the word glory, which is at the heart of church that is church.

It's very purposeful being beyond any and every other consideration of any benefit that it derives from believing is the purpose pertaining to the glory of God. If I can only make that point, if I can only sink that home, if I can only drive it into your corporate consciousness and into your deeps, I will heave a sigh of relief and fear that I have discharged my obligation toward you.

The church that is not jealous for the glory of God is ipso facto not the church. It can call itself that. It can have services and programs and all the rest, but it has lost its apostolic distinctive.

It has lost its reason for being. And how do we understand this? The glory of God? The phrase itself defies every concept. We can't even summon humanly an understanding, let alone an appropriation of a phrase like the glory of God forever.

So I want to tell you flat out that there's no way that you can even aspire to it or consider it unless it is given you by the grace of God. Isn't it a remarkable contradiction that we can't live for the jealousy of the glory except that God himself communicates something of the substance and spirit and meaning of that word, that we're dependent upon him even to catch some sense of the thing which is to be central to our own reason for being?

That's why he says, for of him and through him and to him are all things to whom be glory forever. I'm pleading with you to wrestle with that, that Paul is not just going on a flight of fancy and getting poetic to bring a nice, lofty-sounding conclusion to a great epistle.

This is the heart, the genius of what is apostolic, because it recognizes that the remarkableness of our call, the ultimacy, is so beyond our ability even to understand it, let alone to fulfill it, because it's of him.

It's not from our cats or any man, however clever. This is of him, this mystery that no man could have conceived that there is a relationship in God's wisdom between the Jewish people, that nation that is despised, and even now, stirring the hatred of the world toward it, which will increase in torrents.

It'll be an anti-Semitic inundation worldwide. They will be the most hated and despised of all peoples, like the Lord before them. And you're going to be identified with them in those last days? It'll threaten your future.

It'll mock you. It'll make you an object for persecution, because whoever hates them and wants to drive them into the sea and to obliterate them once and for all and blame them for every malady and failure of world and society will bring upon you some measure of that same vitriolic hatred as upon them if you are seen to be in any way sympathetic toward them or identifying with them or willing to extend yourself for them when they are universally hated and despised and looked upon as the enemies of mankind.

Got the picture? That you should yet be willing to suffer that risk and counter-privilege to identify with the people who in no way have ever done anything for you for which you have received the benefit, and yet you're willing at the sacrifice and peril of your own life and family to be so identified with them, whom you've never even seen in the flesh?

That's a mystery. That's an extraordinary phenomenon that can only be understood out of the counsels of the wisdom of God, which Paul, being the apostle that he is and the steward of his mysteries, has seen.

Not to see it, dear saints, is to condemn us to charismatica, is to condemn us to predictable services oriented for our enjoyment, our pleasure. They're good. It's biblical. It brings a dimension of something that is desired, but it falls short of the glory, for of him, this mystery, only God could have conceived it in the divine mind, this reciprocal relationship between not only two different kinds of people, but peoples who have been in historic enmity throughout the whole chronicle of the ages, the Jew and the Gentile.

I know you don't know anything about that. Will you take my word for it? That I grew up as a Jewish boy in a Jewish home with a Jewish mother, who when she was a kid in London, England, and they had to take swimming, her Gentile teacher threw her into the pool and said, sink or swim, you fat Jew.

My mother in her 90s still remembered that and never forgave that Gentile insult. Jews carry with them a history of the enmity of the Gentile world against them. Where have they been safe? In what nation in the world where there have been aliens and cast out?

At what moment would the bottom fall out even when they achieve a measure of security? And then suddenly something turns as in Germany and they become the object for annihilation. You can't understand how deep and savage has been the history of enmity, fear, suspicion between Jews and the Gentile world.

And yet God says in his mystery that there's a necessary relationship between a Gentile church and this people, so necessary that if you don't enter it consciously and willfully, even though there are a few Jews in your midst to whom you can demonstrate this presently, you forfeit the possibility of the fulfillment for yourself as church.

The issue of what you are as church is altogether related and totally identified with this people. You cannot even understand yourself as church or fulfill your purpose as church if you have not the consciousness of the intended relationship with that people.

Nor can they come to the fulfillment of God's intention for them independent of you. And that's humbling for any Jew who wants to make it alone and independent and show himself morally in every way superior.

God in his wisdom has created these differences that requires a reconciliation, a union, an identification, which only he can affect. He calls us to the impossible. With man, this is impossible, but with God?

So then why cats are you bursting your jugular vein to communicate this if it's but God? Do we just lean back and sit and wait for the magic of his performance? No, there's a required participation of a conscious, willful kind.

It's an agreement to pay for this and sacrifice because what is the first verse after Romans 11? Brethren, therefore, I beseech you, make of your bodies a living sacrifice as an altogether proper worship unto the Lord.

What is he saying? This is not gonna be fulfilled by sitting on our haunches. This is going to require ultimate sacrifice, which is your proper service, or it cannot be fulfilled. And how many times have I used now already the word ultimate?

How many times have you ever used it? I would bet dollars to donuts, American idiom, that there's hardly a soul in this room who has ever once breathed the word ultimate or has spoken about ultimacy. And yet the prophetic heart cries out for that word especially, because if we will not be ultimate in the intention of God, we will be predictable, ordinary, mundane, mediocre.

And that is a contradiction in terms because unto him be glory in the church, not mediocrity. Got the picture? You would sink into a necessary mediocrity of predictability of religion as a Sunday addendum where your first purpose is really the success of your career and the attainment of your education and the finding of a wife or a husband and having family and a nice home and car, et cetera, et cetera.

You would necessarily go the way of all flesh if God in his mercy had not just called you to religion, but to ultimacy, to things beyond your ability that requires an ultimate sacrifice, an ultimate determination, an ultimate understanding, an ultimate jealousy for the glory of God, which itself is an ultimate subject.

And the heck of it is this, you can't even perform that by yourself. It is of such a nature and kind that it requires corporate fulfillment or no fulfillment at all. That's why he had you out here on the floor the other night, you young ones, because unless you are incorporated in those purposes and come early to the recognition of the ultimacy of your call and destiny in him, we older ones cannot fulfill it without you.

We're in something together. Those that believe we're together is more than being alongside each other in chairs, looking up at a platform and enjoying the service. The whole issue of the church is the issue of this mystery, its comprehension and its fulfillment, which is of him.

But if it's of him, it must necessarily be through him. All of your well-meaning intention, all of your brittle ability, well-meaning, clever. You did well in school, now you'll do well in church. You'll fulfill this mystery out of your capability.

No way. This is so requiring, so ultimate that has been conceived of him that it can only be fulfilled through him. That's why I'm in my crumpled condition this morning, because the speaking itself of the mystery cannot issue out of human expertise and ability, not even human energy.

It's got to be through him or not at all. Even the proclamation of the mystery, the setting forth of it has got to be through him, through his life, through his power, through the resurrection reality, which is at the heart of the whole genius of the faith, and not just the expediency by which Jesus was removed from his tomb and elevated to the right hand of God.

Resurrection through him, which means that you are now under obligation to move from the mere acknowledgement of the truth of resurrection as doctrine to the appropriation of resurrection as the, the Germans have a good word, they always do, the ursprung, the motivation, the animation, the spring of life itself.

But I know that I know there's hardly one of you in the room that have ever tasted that reality. Though you thought you had done God's service by acknowledging the truth of it as doctrine, you've got to live through the resurrection.

You've got to live through that life, through that power, through its enablement, which has given all the more opportunity in weakness, which is to the human flesh, humiliating. Everything that is human in this wants to strive on the basis of our ability, our strength, our clarity, our clear headedness, we've got it together.

God will never allow the greatness of his mysteries to be fulfilled even so much as an iota from that which springs out of man himself. With man, it is impossible. That's why it's to the glory of God, you dear saints, that he should triumph in the fulfillment of this extravagant vision to resurrect a nation being brought to a death as the consequence of its own sinful rejection of its own God, the breaking of its own covenants, that has every reason to be forsaken of God and cast away and discredited.

That's why the first question that Paul takes up in Romans 11, has God cast away his people whom he has foreknown? The church thinks that he should have. By every reckoning, they've had their opportunity and blown it.

Now let the church take over and be the Israel of God. He says, God forbid that you should think that. That would be your natural tendency to replace Israel as if they're finished and have had their chance and have blown it and have full opportunity because that's total human worldly reasoning.

But God is God when he extends mercy to whom he will extend mercy, not because they're deserving, but all the more because they are undeserving. Because what does mercy mean? It's not something that is obtained on one's merit.

It's exactly to those who have no merit, have no deserving because when God extends mercy, he's being who he is in himself. I am that I am and I will have mercy upon whom I will have mercy. I will elect whom I will elect.

And the way that in which I show myself in the utter sovereignty of my own will that can never be conditioned by man or by need is by choosing a nation which least deserves this consideration. And in that do I display the genius of who I am as I am that I am.

And if I can do this with Jews, with Israel that has blasphemed my name in every nation, failed again and again in covenant faithfulness, and even now a totally secular nation that is not even willing to consider me in view of their impending destruction, then there's hope for any people and any nation anywhere.

The issue of Israel is the issue of God and it's the issue of the communication of that which alone can be hope for the nations who will observe both Israel's judgment, uprooting, casting out and restoration and return by the mercy of God.

That's why he says in Romans 11, by your mercy, they may obtain mercy. How many of you dear precious Chinese saints have mercy to extend? Where will you find it? It's not a commodity. It's not an abstract aspect of our credo, but there's got to be a palpable substantial mercy which is the very character of God exuded by Chinese Singaporean Asian saints to Jews who will be coming into your midst in greater numbers than you can ever imagine who have been uprooted from nations elsewhere in the world and will find their way here somehow in the mystery of God because he says in Amos chapter nine, I will sift you through all nations and not the least of the reason for that sifting is to sift you.

What will you do if you will find them in your midst uprooted, disheveled, unkempt, cast out, broken in spirit, absolutely disheveled and not knowing what hit them because when it comes, it will come suddenly and what are they doing in your part of the world?

How did they get here? By some process of God, God knows. He said, I will sift you through all nations so that in the day of my judgment, I will separate in the nations, the sheep and the goats over one question, what did you do with the least of these my brethren?

I want to announce in whatever measure authority I have as a prophetic servant of the most high, that this will be your test. This will not be an abstraction and it'll come in your generation and your time.

The conditions for it are already working and it is at the door. They themselves don't know it. There's going to be an upheaval of a kind that could hardly be imagined after the Nazi Holocaust that will eclipse the Nazi Holocaust and bring the devastation greater than that by which 6 million Jews were systematically annihilated in Europe.

But now the extent of this, of which Jesus spoke in Matthew 24, that there's coming a trouble for the nation such as exceeds anything that they have ever previously known nor will again know. And if that time we're not cut short, no flesh will survive.

But for the elect's sake, for the surviving remnant, that time will be cut short, whatever that means. I want to tell you, if I know anything, if I am anything in God, that is future. But it's a near future.

And I think the only thing that prevents its eruption now is your unpreparedness. Everything is in place for Jewish catastrophe. But the church is not yet ready to receive them and to extend mercy that they may obtain mercy because the church only knows mercy as a category, only as an abstraction, only as an article of faith.

It does not know it substantially as a palpable reality. So how can it extend it? You know what's happening to me right now with my headache and condition? I'm experiencing the mercy of God. Can you see it?

I should be in bed or some other place where you put old withering men. But if you're receiving anything and it's so critical that you will, or you will be doomed to being just another expression of church as it is conventionally known, but performing it a little better than your neighbor.

God has a greater destiny for you or I would not be here. I would be someplace else. I'm here because his eye is upon you, because he has seen the investment, the preparation, the intention, because you're ready and prepared for a word now for what by which you can come of age.

God forbid that you should only be a successful Christian work. God forbid. He has greater intention than that you dear saints that touches the issue of forever. How does Paul end? That of him, through him and to him are all things to whom be glory forever.

So I don't know about you Chinese because there's something about ancestor worship, are you better prepared than Caucasians, than Occidental to understand eternality of things that lie beyond time, beyond the present moment.

And that the present moment, though it seems so engaging and so total is only a transient thing and a time of preparation for that which is eternal. Brother Art, you sound like you're right out of the middle ages.

Isn't that what they thought? That this life is a veil of tears and a time of preparation. And it's all for that which is future and eternal. Yes, and they were right. It's you moderns who are all wrong.

You've bought a bill of goods from the wisdom of the world that has its origin from the pit that says this life is what it's all about. Success now, your life, you only live once. Your marriage isn't happy.

Well, dump her and try, try again. Because there's only the one life that you have now. This is the now generation, instant. Boy, have you been deluded. So the word forever needs to come into your consciousness, not just as a category, but as a pulsating central consideration that brings the now moment into its present perspective that is appropriate in God's sight.

Or else you will be slaves, victims, jerked, manipulated, palpitating for a Toyota or something even a little better. Why not? This is only the one life. And how is it measured? And how is it satisfactions obtained?

By what you possess, what you own, what you use. The only thing that will free you from the power of now is the consideration of that which is eternal. You'll never be a great expression of the body of Christ until eternity has come into your heart as pastor himself spoke and prayed this morning.

And how do you obtain it? Even the consciousness of it? Only in conjunction with the mystery of Israel and never independent from it or apart from it. God and his wisdom has locked you in. You're doomed to be merely charismatic and only successful unless you take into your deepest consideration what Paul took into his.

The mystery of Israel and the church in the last days. You cannot be eternally minded and glory forever conscious independent of that mystery. It's all wrapped up together. He'll not allow you to have it separately except as vocabulary.

But if you're going to have it actually and existentially it's only in conjunction where he has set the mystery himself. Am I getting too fancy? Sorry about that. But you'll have the tape to ponder and the pastor and others to elaborate the foundational premises that must come to you through prophetic man because it has to do with your foundations.

Paul's Sorrow for Israel and the Mystery of the Church

Well, let's begin with the beginning of Paul's great mystery, chapter nine. Just to show you the remarkable sweep of this that ends with an exclamation of unparalleled praise. We need to begin where Paul begins with unparalleled sorrow.

Dump, dump, dump. You think this is accidental? You think Paul plotted this? No, he was only writing to the church at Rome. He never thought it would be in the Bible. And not only is it in the Bible but it's a text central to the consideration of the church of every age and every location especially the church of the last days.

Are you that church? Are you last days conscious? Do you think that we're moving toward the end? The consummation of the ages? Are you expecting apocalyptic fury of the powers of darkness who know they have but a short time and will ventilate it in the earth and seek to destroy this people?

Why? Because if this people succeeds after ages long apostasy of a return to Zion and to the God of Jacob, then the king who is contained in the heavens in Acts 3 .21, waiting for the restoration of all things spoke by the prophets since the world began is released to be the king at Zion on the holy hill where God says, I have set my king on the holy hill of Zion and I've given him the nations and the heathen for his inheritance.

Where am I quoting? Psalm two, the great eschatological psalm that speaks of a very literal kingdom and rule in the one place in earth where it is appointed, which we would not ourselves have chosen. And that one place is Zion.

That one place is Israel, not as it is presently constituted, but as it will be when the Lord will restore them and renew covenant with them in an everlasting way and give them his holy spirit and forgive them their iniquities in the day of their restoration.

After they have been rescued and saved out of death by the mercy that they have received through you. There's no, isn't remarkable just as there's no greater exclamation of praise. They call it a pagan, P-A-E-A-N of praise.

And at the end of Romans 11, 33 through 36. And if you provoke me, I'll sing it. That'll be memorable. But isn't it remarkable? That's something that ends with this ecstatic statement that where Paul is beside himself in joy, in the depth and riches of what he has seen of the wisdom and knowledge of God, because he has seen something more than Israel's own restoration.

What has he seen that makes him flip out? He has seen the transfiguration of the church, a bride prepared for the bridegroom through the conditions that will bring the church to its final maturity and preparedness for its own eternal destiny as the bride of the lamb by the crisis brought to it through Israel.

Don't get scared. I'm not expecting you to understand me, but I am under obligation to speak this. Later on, it will come into your consciousness and into your understanding. Now you can just look bewildered.

This is the prophetic predicament, which itself is a suffering and a cross and a form of death because what speaker does not want to be gratified by being understood? But after 40 years, I still have a wife who's scratching her head.

And what kind of husband has she got who never wanted to marry a preacher? And if she had to, why can't you tell jokes like the others? So there's always a necessary suffering that precedes a glory, but we need to give at least a few moments.

The remarkable way in which Paul opens the heart of the book of Romans for which everything now from chapter one through eight was preparation and now commences the elaboration of the great mystery from nine through 11 and ends with this ecstatic outburst of praise.

But it begins with the most pathetic cry of sorrow for his people to the point where he would wish himself accursed. I say the truth in Christ. I'm not playing acting. I'm not putting on a performance.

I'm not getting dramatic. Paul is saying, I lie not my conscience or also bearing me witness in the Holy Ghost. God knows he's looking upon me. I'm not affecting something. I'm not getting sentimental schmaltzy.

I'm not getting emotional for effect. This is deep in my apostolic consciousness and needs to be so in ours that I have great heaviness and continual sorrow in my heart. For I could wish that myself were accursed from Christ for my brethren, my kinsmen, according to the flesh.

Listen, dear saints, unless the issue of Israel begins with this cry, the rest cannot follow. There cannot be the great climax or the depth of the riches of joyous exclamation unless it begins with the depth of the sorrow.

And this saves you from shallowness. You're such candidates for shallowness like I've not seen anywhere. What is it about you in this Singaporean culture and civilization for which I am the antithesis that is calculated for your shallowness, for your reduction, to make you either objects of commerce and trade, employment to fit into the economy?

As I was being told yesterday, so many places for those who will become engineers or lawyers or doctors according to the need of the society. I said, how many Singaporean students take liberal arts as their major, philosophy, English, literature, ethics, morality?

I'll bet there's not one in 10 ,000 who would misspend a university education for the luxury of a subject realm that has nothing to do with personal success. You're on a train, you're on a track, you're being groomed for use, for exploitation, to fit into the economy, to produce it and to buy it.

And shallowness aids in that purpose. It's a society that doesn't want you to be reflective and contemplative, let alone that you should experience sorrow. It may mean that you'll not be effective on the job or your computer will get gummed up.

I'm almost saying, hey, better than this, return to Confucius. Better that you should become shallow Christians, at least become Confucian in an attention to philosophy if it'll save you from inevitable shallowness.

God didn't call you to be one-dimensional cutouts, papier-mâché saints. He's called you to reveal his glory in the breadth which is of God himself, in our emotion and our thought and our conduct. So it's no accident that the great apostle begins with the deepest expression of sorrow, which is unpleasant to experience.

Or you say, well, that's Paul. Of course he's Jewish. Of course he's going to feel sorrow for his own kinsmen, according to the flesh, but that saves me from any necessity because I'm not Jewish. See how simple you are?

You think that Paul is crying out because he's Jewish. You've not understood. He's crying out because he's apostolic. It's his apostolic heart that is full of sorrow for the condition of his people that he would wish himself accursed for those who happened to be his brethren, but he would be equally as grieved and sorrowful if it were pygmies that God had appointed to be the people of his choice and the fulfillment of his kingdom.