Paul the New Covenant Man — Art Katz

Transcript Opening Prayer and the Model Son

Hallelujah. Precious holy God, thank you for a pure, unadulterated, and holy word that came from your heart this morning to ours. Establish it, mighty God. Write it, mighty God. Write into the heart of our being, Lord.

Maturity, Character, and the Revelation of Crisis

And in this world, mighty God, of increasingly stunted and caricatured men, bring forth your model son. Out of this assemblage, precious God, of Jews and Gentiles, of black and white, of every shape and size and description, bring us increasingly, mighty God, into your maturity, into your reality, into your depth, into your oneness, into your life.

Shape us into the image of your son. Thank you for these precious days and this precious speaking. Bless now, mighty God, whatever modest portion you'd express through me. Bless these children. Thank you for speaking so to our hearts.

We covenant, Lord, not to allow a syllable to fall to the ground, but to do it for Jesus' sake. Amen. Bless you. Please be seated. If it were not that he who is joined to Christ is one spirit with him, I would tremble to have to get up and to speak after what we've just heard.

But I believe that the author of what I'm to speak is the same author of what our brother Charles has spoken. This is the last of a three-part message on apostolic character or the character of the end-time man.

And I spoke about something of a definition of what character is, a sum of traits conferring distinctiveness, an attribute or quality or properties which serve as an index to the essential or intrinsic nature of a thing or a person, the totality or the aggregate of distinctive moral qualities belonging to an individual, the sum of qualities or features by which a thing is distinguished from others, a person's essential peculiarity.

I think of the word peculiar when God says about Israel that I have called them as a people unto myself, a peculiar people. I don't think that he meant an eccentric people. He meant a distinctive people, a holy people, a nation of priests.

And praise God that he's given us the model and also the enablement. God is shaping and forming in our life his character. It's a process, as I've tried to suggest, and every time that we defer to God in particular moments of our life, in that moment his life is being formed and expressed through us.

Character is something you find you have when you come to be about 40 years of age and you find that there's a certain distinctive mode of thinking, being and acting which has been shaped and brought forth over the course of your years of walking, and that's what you are.

Character is what a man is. And as I continue to remind audiences, our spiritual maturity or character is not to be measured by how we feel or perceive ourselves in audiences or times such as this, but what shall be revealed in moments when there shall be, for example, a power shortage, we shall find ourselves caught in elevators between floors, in choking darkness and suffocation, compressed with strangers in a little box and every instinctive thing in our flesh crying out for our own well-being and safety.

What you are shall be revealed then. The end times is eminently going to be an age of increasing polarity and crisis and revelation. And those of us who know from our college days the axiom in political science, power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely, I'm very fond of saying that crisis reveals and absolute crisis shall reveal absolutely.

What shall be revealed of our character both individually and corporately in the crisis of our end time condition? God is speaking to us now that when that revelation shall come, we shall not be found wanting.

There's a process, children, and I'm so conscious of it as I've just concluded my first decade with God, a precious sojourn, hallelujah, not altogether peaches and cream, lots of grindings and crushings and untoward events and cries and shrieks and tearing of hair and pounding of chest and holding my hands up and not understanding the dealings of the Most High God.

But you know, as I look back and survey the course and the process and the place where I now find myself, I say, Gott sei Dank. Thank you, Lord. Hallelujah for the process. Hallelujah that you took a kind of a derelict, a bum, egotist, sensualist, living as a god unto himself and running amok and grinding to powder every unfortunate victim who happened to come in his way.

And a decade later, there can be seen the first rudiments and the modicum of godliness through this life. Hallelujah to you be praise and glory forever. I can count the times that I've cried on the fingers of one hand in the first 35 years of my life.

The first pastor that I ever had said to me, You're the hardest man that I've ever met. And I was already born again. And the five times I think that which I cried in the first unhappy segment of my life had never to do with a human being, always and invariably with a dog.

An injured dog could move me to tears, a lost dog, a dying dog. But a dying mankind, I could turn in complete indifference. But I'll tell you, children, I've given up counting the crying since. Not saccharine tears and little gushings and that kind of business.

I mean the deep breakings, the convulsive sobs and shakings that rack a man to the foundation of his nature, where you've used up every Kleenex in your pocket and your handkerchief and the tablecloth and you're under the table at a banquet and you've just decomposed in tears.

Praise God for every such holy encounter that we cry out with our prophet Isaiah, Oy vey, oy vey, woe is me, I'm undone. I'm a man of unclean lips and I live in the midst of a people of unclean lips. There's a process by which God finds the unregenerate man and saves him.

And then he becomes for the first time man because it takes God, children, to be a man. There's no manliness, there's no manhood without the deposit of the sublime and holy God in us by His Spirit. It's the very beginning, the foundational requisite for manhood.

You're not a man. You're a debased and deformed and caricatured, stunted, anthropomorphic, grotesque, until the Ruach HaKodesh has found His place in your heart. And that is only the beginning. Unregenerate man, man.

And then as you continue to walk with God, maybe a decade or so later, you begin to see the first configuration. You can say, godly man. But you know what the end of the whole process is? The God-man.

It's no longer easy to perceive where man has left off and where God has begun. You can stand as the Elijah of your generation and say to the Ahabs and the filthy potentates who have wedded the Jezebels of our age, as the Lord my God liveth before whom I stand, it shall not reign nor do, but according to my word.

And that, children, is either the most unspeakable act of presumption or a man who has become so one with God in his character, in his life, in his purpose, that his word is God's word. You tremble to contemplate the glory to which God is bringing us.

Paul’s Call to Macedonia and the Quietness of Acts 17

And you shrivel and wince when people speak about Judaism and Christianity as if they are two religious alternatives. A pox on every filthy misunderstanding of what true religion is. Now, I want you to turn with me this morning to the book of Acts and the 17th chapter, a chapter which I have long ignored as my dear brother Charles has ignored the Gospels.

I'll tell you why I ignored it. I've loved the book of Acts. I was so naive from the moment of my new birth that I believed that God had called us to continue and to conclude the book of Acts. Can you imagine?

I came like a row bounding to my first New Testament fellowship expecting utter honesty and candor and shared lives and open hearts, powerful dealings of God in the community through us and the persecution which must invariably follow and found not a wit of any of these things but some kind of cozy Pentecostal club.

I loved the great acts of God made manifest through his Gospel heroes, the Pauls and the Silases and the Barnabases of that apostolic generation. The great shakings and the earthquakes and the cell doors bursting open and the manacles falling from limbs and everyone was set free.

But the 17th chapter passed me by. No bombast, no drama, no great electric events. It was one of the most low-keyed, modest episodes. It's almost like a lull between the great events. What's happening to me, children, I don't know.

Is this maturity? That somehow I have more of an appetite, a spiritual appetite for the things that are quiet, for the things that are unseen, for the things invisible, for the things not lauded than for the things that are bombastic, dynamic, electric and easily acknowledged.

And I'll tell you there's something to be seen in this 17th chapter that we dare not miss. Let's pick this up in the 14th verse, trying to remember now the pattern of God's leading for Paul who had been first in Asia and the Spirit commanded him and forbid him to continue there.

And a vision came to Paul in the night of a Macedonian beseeching him, come help us. And immediately when he had received the vision, they assuredly gathered that the Lord had called them to go unto them.

The Unity of the Body in Philippi

What a fantastic teaching there about the unity of the body of Christ and the oneness between the apostolic man of God and those whose lives were knit to him. And they went. And the end result of their obedience was backs torn to pieces, public humiliation, thrust into dungeons and the stench and the reek.

But the final upshot was that in their praise, in the midst of their suffering, by a God who inhabits the praises of his people, in direct proportion to the authenticity of their praise and the degree of their suffering, came a burst of his holy presence.

Because where the Spirit of God is, there is liberty. And everyone's manacles fell from them and the doors burst open in the cell in which they were imprisoned. And the prison keeper, holding the keys, waiting for his social security retirement, wanting to keep his nose clean and be a respectable Christian, who thought that the prisoners had fled and would have killed himself, was saved by a gift of the Holy Spirit when Paul down in the dungeon saw the man outside by the Spirit and cried out to him, Kulit, we're still here.

No sweat. We were never prisoners to begin with. Because to be free in Christ is free indeed. And if my God has led me by a holy vision into a cell in Philippi, I'm more free than you who stands outside with the keys.

And so, out of that ragtag collection, to use Charles' phrase, of a fearful prison keeper, motley collection of prisoners, a cellar of purple and a former demoniacal woman was born the body of Christ in Philippi.

Divine Guidance and Paul’s Arrival in Athens

And then these same precious apostles went on to other cities in Greece and came finally, it says, in the 14th verse, when the brethren had sent Paul away as it were to the sea, and they that conducted Paul brought him unto Athens and received a commandment unto Silas and Timotheus to come to him with all speed and they departed.

Here's a man who was not even in control of his own steps. He didn't determine to go to Athens. He didn't sit down and say, man, wouldn't it be groovy to have some kind of evangelical outreach at the center of the intellectual heart of the Western world.

Hey, listen, so long as I'm in Greece anyway, and I'm this close, maybe I ought to send a few letters in advance and see if I can make contact, and I'd love to get myself up to Mars Hill where the action is.

You want to know something, children? For this piece of flesh, who was such a wheeler and dealer for 35 years and always had to be on top of the situation and pull strings and coerce and exert influence, I've not lifted a finger in this decade for anything.

These two kind of conferences were not born out of the will of men, but by the will of God. These are holy convocations. It has not to do with the promotions of the ministries of men nor any other purpose than to give God a platform by which he can express to us the burden of his heart for our generation, to minister to our Jewish kinsmen, to establish them in the faith, and to proclaim the vision of God's end-time purpose for Jew and Gentile at the conclusion of the age.

No man needs strive to reach the Athens of his generation. There's a God who is in us to will and to do of his good pleasure. Let's give him a chance and get out of the way. The apostle Paul was led by other men.

They conducted him and brought him unto Athens. And in the 16th verse, while Paul waited for them at Athens, his spirit was stirred in him when he saw the city wholly given to idolatry. You know what I love about that?

His spirit was stirred in him. He's not some automaton. He's not some spiritual tin saint stamped out on God's assembly line. There's something human in the life of Paul commingled with the holy substance of the living God.

There's a mystery, and God works through the humanity of that man to perfect his holy acts. His spirit winced while he was waiting in Athens when he saw the city wholly given to idolatry. I love the human responsiveness of the apostle Paul.

Paul as a Whole and Fully Human Man

He wasn't a word, a mensch, body, soul, and spirit, and he had it all together. He was not some effete, spiritual saint trilling with his voice and walking on eggshells. Jesus! And making with his face religious postures of the kind that we do on communion Sunday.

He was a well-rounded, full-orbed human being. Children, it takes God to be a man that we might all come in the unity of faith to the fullness and stature of Yahshua HaMashiach unto a perfect man. He saw, he winced, he responded when he saw the city wholly given to idolatry.

And if Paul saw that in Athens, what ought we to say who are here in the greatest Babylon of all times on the earth, New York City? When shall our spirits wince by his spirit? Because I tell you, children, that is ever and always the beginning of everything.

Every good and perfect gift cometh from above. And every holy act has its inception in heaven out of the heart of God through the heart of his children. A lot of us are busy knocking on doors and distributing tracts and full of evangelical striving, so busy that our hearts have not been available to God that he might wince through them and begin his work if we would leave off our own.

Idolatry, Religious Substitutes, and Spirit-Led Witness

Therefore disputed he in the synagogue with the Jews. Hey, Art, what is that? How does he go from idolatry to the synagogue? Easily. You know what idolatry is, children? It's not some pagan beating on tom-toms or drinking the blood of animals and other kinds of things.

Of course, those are expressions. Idolatry is that form of religion which affords men a psychological relief valve and allows them by some cursory and cheap out, like a dollar in a collection plate or a Yom Kippur service, to think that they have requited God.

Idolatry is any form of religious exercise that keeps men from full commitment to God and enables them to have some modicum of religious, psychological, and aesthetic satisfaction feeling that they have fulfilled their religious requirements.

Paul winced in his heart, and the very next step, led by God, he finds himself in a synagogue. So ought we to be, and not Jewish synagogues only, but synagogues of every description, both Jew and Gentile.

Therefore disputed he in the synagogue with the Jews and with the devout persons, and in the market daily with them that met with him. And you know what, children? I don't have any doubt whatsoever that every single person who met with Paul in the marketplace was there by the divine arrangement of God.

This is a man caught up in the purposes of God, moving by his spirit in God's place at God's time, without striving, without exertion, performing holy acts. We said to the Jewish professor who came again last night and sat in the presence of that heavenly glory through that concert, authority on the New Testament and the Pauline epistles, Orthodox Jew, he may be in our audience again this morning, whom we love.

I said, did you think that you were here by accident, that you stumbled in somehow yesterday or the day before by accident? Divine encounter with God. We didn't have to advertise lavishly. There's a God who knows very well what is taking place here, and whose eye roves to and fro over the face of the earth, seeking that one whose heart is perfect toward him.

Paul’s Mars Hill Address and the Unknown God

Then certain philosophers of the Epicureans and of the Stoics encountered him, and some said, what will this babbler say? Others some, he seems to be a set-aforth of strange gods, because he preached unto them Jesus and the resurrection.

And they took him and brought him unto Arapagus, saying, May we know what this new doctrine whereof thou speakest is? For thou bringest certain strange things to our ears, we would know therefore what these things mean.

For all the Athenians and strangers which were there spent their time and nothing else but either to tell or to hear some new thing. Then Paul stood in the midst of Mars Hill. They took him. If he had strived and turned himself inside out and upside down, if he had written letters to every kind of evangelical contact, I don't know if what he had done to get himself at Mars Hill, it would have availed not at all.

But they took him and brought him to the chief place where the intellectuals met, where the shapers of society had their confrontations. There Paul stood in the midst of Mars Hill, and he said, You men of Athens, I perceive that in all things you are too superstitious.

For as I passed by and beheld your devotions, I found an altar with the inscription to the unknown God, whom therefore you ignorantly worship. Him declare I unto you. As my wife Inger says, How do you like them apples?

How would you like to begin a significant, eternal confrontation with an insult? I perceive that in all things you guys are just too cotton-picking superstitious. To whom is he saying this? But the leading intellectual lights of their day who esteem themselves for their rationality and their logic.

And Paul begins his first words coming to the place of eminence and confrontation with, Slap! I'll tell you there's not a mission organization today that would likely have hired him. He blows every qualification, and he doesn't even know the simple ABCs of how to witness.

Hey, you know, you've got to be nice, and you've got to rep, you know, and be winsome. Paul neither bleeded like a lamb nor roared like a lion, according to his choosing. But there was a God who had so the possession of him, who knew how to speak the electric words that would command the attention of men and open them for life-giving truth.

Ministry in Europe and Spirit-Given Reconciliation

I was not too long ago come back from about 30 days of activity in Europe, Germany, Yugoslavia, and Switzerland. And I would say that they were the most jam-packed, fruitful, significant days of my life of service with God.

It's not immodest, because to God be the glory, to recall the phrase that the Yugoslavian brothers spoke in the car on the way to Belgrade, after some days of meeting at their minister's conference, unbeknownst to me, torn by strife and divisions of every kind, where God brought healing and reconciliation by a living word in those days out of the mouth of a Jewish man, younger in the Lord than they, wholly removed from their circumstances, without any natural way to understand what their need was, leaving the hotel room and walking from the hotel to the place where the meetings were to be conducted, not knowing from the time I left at the hotel to the ten-minute time later when I would arrive what it was that I was to speak day by day by day, to hear from these men at the end of those days, at the moment of our greatest crisis, God brought us the living word.

He sent us a prophet. My heart burst to hear men speak that of me, and flew from Belgrade, Yugoslavia, to spend one day in Zurich to visit some German brothers, pure and holy, and so restless, not from any human or natural thing, but from the glories that God had been performing, that I had to walk the streets of Zurich that night, and as I walked the streets of Zurich, you know what I remembered?

This is where it all began 11 years ago. This is where God picked me up as a hitchhiker with the back on my back. This is where God had me to meet that Gentile of the Gentiles, that lily-white middle-class wasp, Protestant from the Midwest, who bugged me no end, telling me that it was the love of God, the love of God, that enabled her to be kind to me, and whom I thought I would crush in my arrogant atheism when I asked her that one question that no Christian had ever been able to answer for me in all my 34 years.

How do you know that God is? And this little thing turned up that face, brimming with the light of God, and said, in a way from which I've never recovered, I know that God is art. He lives in me. Pow!

And one great hulk came crashing to its face, crying, Oy vey, woe is me. I am undone. The very next day, not yet having recollected my senses, still stunned, shattered by that divine encounter through a little middle-class girl, I was picked up off the side of the road by a beautiful man who didn't just wait, give me this business, hurry up, fella, I'm doing you the favor, but got out of the car and greeted me by the side of the road as if I were some exalted guest with a smile on his face from ear to ear to arouse my suspicions immediately to think that he was a homosexual.

Who else shall take such delight in picking up the likes of me? You know that God is preparing a whole generation of men to become broken and disconsolate, utterly lost and know it, to be standing by the sides of the road of our world, waiting to be picked up with one with a beaming confidence who shall make them to feel as exalted guests in the front seats of our cars.

This is what it's all about, children. And that man looked at me as we drove off and saw that I was no high school kid out on a lock. It was well past the tourist season. Why are you traveling like this, he asked me in German.

And so well as I could in my butchered Deutsch, I told him I was a modern man whose foundations was broken. I was looking for the deepest answers to life and before I could stop myself, I heard myself blurting out that I was Jewish.

I thought, cats, you've really blown it now. Man, that's not the information you just tell any old body. I turned cautiously to see what this man's reaction might be. Would he murmur, would he be agitated, would he burst out, would he be silent?

And I couldn't believe when I saw his face. It was just a glory of joy and a pane of light at the knowledge of the fact that he had a Jew in his car. He was more excited for my Jewishness than I was because he understood its meaning, and for me it was only an enigma and a predicament.

He insisted we stop for refreshments at his expense, and we had a conversation, children, which I treasure above all conversations and the long life of speaking. And he said not a word. I was the one who was pouring out without let and hindrance.

I was sharing with this Gentile stranger the entire burden and content of my life, the anguish of soul, my desperation, my futility, my frustration for a world that was on collision course and dying and for which there was no answer, hopeless.

And finally when I spit out all my grief, my inability to live with a German wife, the failure of my humanism and my goodwill and my intelligence, which is the failure, therefore, of all mankind and all modern men, I looked at this man who was not much to look at and thought to myself, what is he going to say to me?

Marxist, existentialist, pragmatist. There is nothing new under the sun. Belong to all kinds of organizations on the attorney general's list. Left-wing, radical. What is he going to tell me? Some ideology, philosophy?

Odd, he said to me in a very soft voice, in that beautiful German way, do you know what it is that the world needs? I thought to myself, if he doesn't have the answer, he sure knows how to ask the question.

I had my arms fixed over my chest with my cynical face that was a hard mask. The man who had not cried more than five times in 34 years, hard, obdurate, a rock, knocked from pillar to post, could take anything and not whimper or wince.

What, I asked him? Double dare you to tell me anything new. Odd, he said, what the world needs is for men to wash one another's feet. There went my heart. Pow, stunned, speechless, and a vision on the spot of all of the hot-shot, angry men of my generation bending themselves to wash the feet of the lowly and the despised and me in the midst of them.

All of us who are going to save mankind and can't save our own marriages. And something broke forth in my heart, a silent eureka, and I knew that this was it. We don't need programs. We don't need socialisms.

We don't need legislation and groovy new ideas and education. We need a new spirit, the spirit of humility and love. And I began to salivate. Is that a Jewish reaction? And as I was gagging on my own juices, this man went on to speak to me in German, in the Gospel of Yeshua HaMashiach, the words of truth and life.

You never saw a more devastated Jew in your life than when I was finished with that man that day. And now 11 years later, after experiencing the greatest glory in which God had ever used me, in such tumultuous days, in such a variableness of requirement of life, in army chapels before staid Germans, speaking to millionaires, human, civil, individual confrontations before massive audiences, in season, out of season, always the choice and ready word by the Spirit of God, and now to this denomination of the most significant group that God can use in that iron curtain country, and He had healed them.

And in the hours in between the meetings, God had used me to cull out and to fish and to find nine of my Jewish people in that inconspicuous city of Yugoslavia. It had nothing to do with my striving. I was as rested on the last day as I was on the first.

It's the Father who doeth the works. Art, how did you find those Jews? I tell you children, I didn't even know they were there. Wouldn't have even occurred to me to look for them. Except that we were in the street one day and we asked a woman for directions and she was just about to get up on the streetcar and I said to my Yugoslavian brother, stop her, she's Jewish.

He said, Art, how do you know? I said, don't argue with me, stop her. And he just got her in time before she stepped on that streetcar and was lost to obscurity. She was Jewish. How did I know? It wasn't by her conspicuous or countenance.

Holy Spirit of God. Walked us back to the hotel. One of the last of the survivors of an earlier Jewish community in that city. And he gave us the address of two other Jews and they gave us the address of others that before we were finished, we had been in their homes having wine and cookies, meeting their Catholic wives, survivors from the concentration camps, soul survivors, into the remnant and the pathetic shambles of the building that had once been their synagogue with its creaking floors, dust and death and decay everywhere and loose bricks and loose plaster and opened up the ark to find the Torah and my heart failed within me when I saw an empty box and nothing.

And God spoke to my spirit and reminded me, your house shall be left unto you desolate. Wondered, shouldn't I be in the hotel preparing for tonight's message? This is the last night. This has got to be significant.

God has been building something. Shouldn't I be seeking His face instead of sightseeing in Jewish synagogues? I came, children, unprepared to that meeting, so to speak. I had no other preparation than what God has invested in me in 11 years at His hand by His precious holy dealings.

That's all I had. No other preparation. And God spoke that night to these Yugoslavian ministers. If you shall not be made one with each other, if you'll not put away your resentments and the grounds for your separation and be reconciled one to another and be the corporate expression of the life of God in your nation, when I shall come again and see you, I shall find you as a house that is left unto you desolate.

You shall be like that synagogue with the plaster coming off the lathes and the bricks falling out. We shall open up the ark on the platform and you shall not have a heart. One of the men said to me in the car as Edwin and I drove to the airport on that last day, crammed in in a three-cylinder, 12-year-old German car with suitcases and four burly men, he said, I saw one of the elders last night weeping whom I had not seen broken in 11 years.

Paul’s Matured Character and Culturally Aware Preaching

Children, what preparation need we to have except that which God invests in the life of those who will receive the fullness of his dealings? Character is not born in a day. And the Apostle Paul was not some groovy Jesus freak with a heavy star of David around his neck and a yarmulke on his head ready to do for God.

He was a seasoned, tempered man, full-orbed, matured, shaped at the hand of the living God, caught up in the purposes of God and found himself on Mars Hill. No accident that. I perceive that in all things you're too superstitious.

For as I passed by and beheld your devotions, I found an altar with the inscription to the unknown God. You know what I love about this? His eyes weren't closed. He wasn't so spiritual that he could not take note of the culture that was about him.

He didn't speak to men out of a sound chamber. Thus saith the Lord. He was alive and human. He saw, he witnessed, he observed and he used this existential material with which to speak to men in whose culture it was.

And that's why you've seen only a peripheral Jew like myself in the kingdom in these recent years. Struck off and flying like loose flotsam and jetsam and stumbled their way into the kingdom. No thanks to those who call themselves Christians by and large.

You've not sought to come to us and to express the living truth of God in a context and culture and way that we might have had our hearts and attention arrested. We find one little thing and however it had its beginning in God we make of it a formula.

Therefore everything has to be with sawdust invitations, cliches. I'll tell you the phrase that Christ is the answer can become the most pathetic cliche. And I'll tell you that scriptures themselves if they are not uttered and born and inspired by the spirit of God in a particular moment can themselves become pathetic cliches.

God understands what I'm speaking. I pray you do too. To think that we're glib and can quote John 3 .16 or four spiritual laws and that this is going to do the work is a pathetic statement of the fact that we've not come to the place that God had Paul in the chapter that we're now reading.

Paul’s Philosophical Address and the Living Word

As I beheld the inscription to the unknown God as I passed by I perceived I praise God for a man wholly alive in God. And then he goes on to say God that made the world and all the things therein seeing that he is Lord of heaven and earth dwells not in temples made with hands neither is worship with men's hands as though he needed anything seeing he giveth to all life and breath and all things and hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth and hath determined the times before appointed and the bounds of their habitation that they might that they should seek the Lord if happily they might feel after him and find him though he be not far from every one of us for in him we live and move and have our being as certain also of your own poets have said Hey Paul you're dangerously trafficking in the world.

What are you doing? Quoting poetry? I'm concerned for your condition. You're getting carnal. I thrilled when my brother Charles admitted that he had been to a movie and God has given me one of my greatest messages sitting in front of my own TV tube watching an English production of Shakespeare's play Julius Caesar.

You know children the world is not wanting to see emaciated religious types gray, barren, toothless old things haggard and bent croaking out their little crochets having their little religious meetings their few groans and screeches.

You know what the world is waiting to see? There's a word for it in Yiddish a mensch. They want to see a real mensch. They want to see a man full orb, rounded, mature, solid, established grounded, alive.

Who's not averse to quoting poetry if it pleased God to impress him by his spirit with it as certain as your own poets have said. You know what we've just read children? In these verses of Paul's statements which God has included in the Holy Writ we read a philosophical exposition.

Hey isn't that worldly? Paul spoke to philosophical men philosophically. And he said more in those four verses than they had been able to understand in a lifetime of squabbling and hair splitting and all kinds of inane philosophical reckonings.

He spoke to them clearly and philosophically. What is the end all and be all and purpose of our human existence? Bang! Then he goes on to say for as much then as we are the offspring of God we ought not to think that the Godhead is likened to gold or silver or stone graven by art and men's device.

And the times of this ignorance God winked at but now commandeth all men everywhere to repent because he hath appointed a day in the which he will judge the world in righteousness by that man whom he hath ordained whereof he hath given assurance unto all men in that he hath raised him from the dead.

Do you want to know something children? He has not yet actually mentioned the name of Jesus. He has not yet quoted one scripture. Ought are you trying to suggest that this is the way to witness? What I'm trying to suggest is that there is no one given way to witness.

And among the times that God's servants want to just shrivel up and die is when after pouring out your heart before an audience of God's people knowing that you have the Rima of God by the Holy Spirit that men have heard from the living God himself is to find out later that there was someone in the audience who went to complain to the men who had arranged the service that this Jewish man who spoke didn't mention the name of Jesus once ipso facto unkosher.