K-472 Walking in the Rest of God — Art Katz

God’s Call to Perfection Amid a Declining World

Walk thou before me, and be thou perfect. I used to wonder, now, Lord, are you goading us? Or is that some vague standard toward which we should aspire? Or do you actually mean that we ought to be perfect as you are perfect?

Well, as I get older, Lord, I believe it's the last. Nothing less than sheer perfection. And isn't it ironic that it comes at a time when every standard is falling about us? As the world becomes increasingly slapdash, haphazard, vague, approximate, and every kind of standard declines, and every service is beginning to break down, and anything goes, God insists on His perfection.

So as the world grows darker, we grow brighter. I've come back recently from 30 days in Europe. I've never seen days so crammed full. Beginning in Germany, and going on through Yugoslavia, and concluding in Switzerland.

Vision, Delay, and the Purposes of God

I have to say that it all began with a vision which the Lord imparted to me and a German brother about four or five years ago, which I had quietly kept in my heart, waiting for the hour that the Lord would begin to fulfill it.

One of the lessons that I'm learning is that because God gives a vision, it does not mean that it's to be immediately realized. Among the other reproaches that we experience in this day is the accusation, Oh, you cats, you're a dreamer.

What about your vision that you said this was going to happen? Didn't you say that God gave you a conference at Columbia University, and He gave you the explicit name Shekinah, Shekinah 74, the same university where the student rebellions broke out some years ago, and that the glory of God was going to fall on the day of Pentecost, Shavuot, the Jewish holiday, and Orthodox Jews would be sitting in that audience, and they'd be overwhelmingly zapped by God, and fall on their faces and cry out to the Lord, He's God.

Didn't you say that was the vision that God gave you? Yes, I said that. How come then it wasn't realized? Well, it wasn't. But just before the conference concluded, we were instructed that we would have another conference in 75, and another one in 76, and unbeknownst to us, it was not to be a one-time thing, but an annual event.

I don't think that Paul ever did see that Macedonian. Remember that one who said, come over and help us? He saw a woman at a riverside, and he saw a demoniacal woman, and he saw a prison keeper and a scroungy bunch of inmates, but he never did see the man revealed to him in the vision.

So I'm learning a thing or two about God's visions. We need not expect its immediate realization, or even its literal fulfillment, but if it suffices to initiate us in a course of activity that shall bring about the fullness of God's intention, that's all that matters.

A Burden for Germany and Reconciliation

I hope I'm not speaking in mysteries already. God gave me a vision, a burden, pertaining to Germany. The same people whom I could not look straight in the face when I was sent there as a GI almost a quarter of a century ago.

In the Korean War, when men were being hacked to pieces on Asiatic battlefields, where I thought that I myself would end my absurd life, because my name was Katz and it came from the middle of the alphabet, I went with others whose names began with, in that portion, to Germany instead of to Korea.

And that began a love affair with the people whom I thought I would despise. I couldn't help it, though I tried to avert my gaze, I saw the fantastic resemblances between Jewish and German life. Our Yiddish and their German language, their Gemütlichkeit and our zett, for good food, good talk, and all the things which they themselves also celebrate.

In fact, strange enough, I felt more at home in Germany than I had ever felt in Brooklyn. In America, I felt as a man without a country, some kind of a kooky character, a man out of joint in time and place.

But in medieval Germany, with the cobblestones worn smooth by the passage of feet over the centuries, in the shadow of ancient cathedrals, in towns that are redolent, reeking from life, in that unbroken continuity, there I felt at home.

And so if you've read Ben Israel, you know where the first chapter begins, at Dachau, where I went on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, which I thought to be a fit way to observe an important Jewish holy day, though I myself was a vehement atheist and would never have found myself in a synagogue.

And there, a God whom I did not know began to drub my heart and save me from stereotypes and simplistic notions of good guys and bad guys, and begin me on a succession of steps that was to culminate in my salvation about a decade later.

I've had a long-standing love affair with Germany, and the thing that God spoke to my heart about five years ago is this, that the same people which Satan had used to cast the Jews into the physical fires would be the same people that he would use to keep them from the fires of his eternal judgment.

As Ingers says, how do you like them apples? Well, that lay quietly in my heart, and I loved it, because it was so in keeping with what I understand to be the character of God, just like him, to take the most vicious and untoward events and acts of Satan and turn them to his glory.

I could think of the unspeakable celebration of Jews around the throne of the Lamb through endless periods of time, rejoicing together with German saints who had occasioned their salvation by their prayer.

My mother to this day can't speak the word German. It's so loathsome to her consideration. And yet, if this realization is true, she may well be saved by some German saint supplicating and groaning in the Spirit for her, though they may never see each other on this side of eternity.

So I couldn't wait then when the Lord would begin to fulfill this. We lived for a year in Denmark, and we traveled on a few occasions into Germany, and not a single door opened, and I myself was not going to press one open.

Someone came to me the other night and said, Boy, did I ever enjoy this service. Terrific preaching, brother. I'd love to hear you speak on prophecy. I said, well, very likely you'll never have that occasion.

How come I don't have a single message on prophecy? The guy was absolutely flabbergasted. You're a Jew, and you don't have a single message on prophecy? No. God has not opened that door. So you can live in and near a country, and God has given you a burning vision, and not a single door will open, and it pleases God to keep you in obscurity and hiddenness until the moment of His perfect choosing comes.

How would you like to submit to that condition? That seems to be the pattern in all Scripture. And Elijah kept in hiddenness and obscurity until the moment of God's choosing. Then he brings them forth to the central stage.

Elijah, Hiddenness, and Spiritual Timing

If I know anything about a Jewish prophet, did he have zitzvah? Did he want to go, go, go? And he saw all of the prophets of God slain day by day in the increasingly filthy condition of the apostate Jewish people, and he had to keep himself silent?

I know what an itch he had to leap out and say,.

Oh, how long do you remain in this condition?

I don't know what else he would have said, but not a word. I've recently had an experience like that. Hebrew University. I watched a crowd of 300 students come together to watch a dancing and singing ensemble from a Christian Bible college in Wenatchee, Washington.

Gentiles would never so much as lay eyes on a Jew before they met me. Come to Israel completely uninstructed and do more work in four days than decades of conventional missionary endeavor. And God opened doors at the Hebrew University, Hadassah Hospital, a home for convalescent soldiers from the Yom Kippur War, and a street meeting in Tel Aviv, where the presence of God was enormous.

When I saw this crowd form, my immediate impulse was to leap into the midst of them in the first lull and say, Brethren, the God of our fathers, and go on. But the Lord went, Zip! And I'll tell you, for those of us who are called to walk in the Spirit, the hardest thing may be the obscurity and the hiddenness and the silence until the moment of God's perfect choosing.

Then He brings forth His Elijah, His Joseph, His Jesus. And what He does in moments after that, shakes the earth. The timing of God is exquisite. You say, Art, how did you get to the Hadassah Hospital and to the Hebrew University?

Did you write letters and make arrangements and wheel and deal? Not a stitch. We went without any plans, any communication, nothing. Believing God that somehow it pleased Him to send us, and we were not tourists.

And so we sat at the Rome airport on the hard concrete floor. The plane was delayed. And I was giving these young Bible college students some orientation toward Israel. And I noticed we were being observed by some of the passengers also waiting for the delayed flight.

And so when we were called, we started to walk up the gangplank. And one of these men came somehow alongside me, and we got into a conversation. And he told me how enormously impressed he was looking at these young people.

He said, they look as if they've come out of the 19th century. I knew what he meant by that. There was an innocence about them. They somehow were different from other young people in the world. I said, if you're impressed with them silent, you ought to hear them singing, see them dance.

He told me by that time he was a professor at the Hebrew University. How would you like to arrange something for them at the Hebrew University? Oh, he said, that would be fine. I got his phone number.

I used to call him three days later. He used to make all the preparations. I called him and said, I've done everything in my power, impossible. Since the Malat Massacre, this would take months to arrange.

The security measures are so extraordinary. Well, I said, I'm just sorry. I said, but listen, what if they just came noontime and took out their instruments and began to sing and dance, and if anybody wanted to listen, they would stop and listen.

He said, well, sure, try that. We came that day with three busloads and were stopped at the gate with guys with Tommy guns, machine guns. They wanted to see our certificate, our pass, our permit. So they sent from us a hotshot to explain, and I said, we don't have one.

What are you doing here? Well, we were invited by a professor, so-and-so. No good, you still have to have an official permit. I said, look, my best Yiddish intonation. Look, I said. They've only come to bring mitzvah.

I think I even used my hand a little bit. They've only come to bring blessing. Oh, okay, he said. And we let in the three buses. These kids unpacked their instruments and began singing at noon. And within five minutes we had 300 Israeli students with their jaws agape listening to the goyim, gentiles, praising the God of Israel and singing the songs of faith and joy.

Ministry at Hadassah Hospital

We had been that morning earlier at Hadassah Hospital, and the kids had been talking about wanting to plant trees and leave something behind rather than take something out of Israel. And I saw a sign on the wall that said, blood donor.

And something in my heart went, click. And the guy went, how would you like to give your blood? Yeah. And so I went up to the official. I said, we have 30 Christians who want to give their blood for Israel.

And the official went, eh, cluck. An occasional Jew, maybe, well padded. But 30 Christians want to give their blood? Never heard of such a thing. We came back that afternoon after the Hebrew University.

And they took us five or six at a time. The rest of us waited in the hallway. And they were just overwhelmed. And one of the kids said to me, Arnie, do you think they would mind if we sang in the hallway?

I said, I don't know. I'll ask this doctor. An American Jew who was looking at me clearly like, cats, what are you doing here? Cats aren't, you know. I said, listen, these kids want to sing. Do you think it's okay?

He said, we're so grateful for what you're doing today. We've never had such a response. The hospital is yours. Do what you want. So they began to sing. And I'll tell you that with their voices, they went in a fulgence of the glory of God through the corridor.

And it was only a matter of moments I heard the loud clicking of heels. And there she came, a woman doctor with a white gown on. I knew it, I knew it. She said, you can't do this without going up to our floor and singing also.

And so she sent down a student nurse. And when we had finished giving our blood, up we went. And we went from room to room, ward to ward, floor to floor, hours. Praising God, singing through the hallways, laying hands on the sick, worshipping God in the spirit, praying for healing.

The glory of God. My scalp, like six inches high off the top of my head. Embracing and weeping and grey, disconsolate faces, hopeless and doomed. Beginning to break forth into smiles of hope and expectancy.

Praying for infants that were doomed to die. Just the glory of God moving through the corridors. Never seen such a work. And so it was that the hospital with the multiple amputees, beautiful Jewish boys with one eye and one arm left, hacked to pieces, grey, disconsolate, broken.

And the doors burst open and come these Christian kids, praising God and the beauty of His holiness, singing the songs of faith and joy. And they begin to blink their eyes and what's this? And falling on them with kisses and love and expressions of affection.

It was the presence of God coming to comfort His children. And when we left, I draped my arm over one mutilated, hacked to pieces, beautiful Jewish boy. I said, dear brother, take this occasion of seeming tragedy to seek the face of the God of your fathers that He might convert it to joy.

In and out. Pow, pow, pow. Street meeting in Tel Aviv. No preaching. Not one word. Living epistles. And I was holding back the crowd. We made room for these dancers. You never saw more spiritual dancing.

Dancing to the Psalms. Can you believe that? And a couple of Israelis next to me were saying in Yiddish, Are these missionaries? I said, no, these are Goyim, whose heart is the Ruach HaKodesh, the Holy Spirit.

They've come to express their love for Israel and for the Jewish people. Oh, they said, okay. And you could see their faces just relax. And when they heard the singing and saw the dancing, they were just overwhelmed.

And when that was over, they pressed right into these young people and began to talk with them, ask them questions, take them to their homes for tea, for food. And until the wee hours of the morning, fantastic, deep, rich ministry of sharing and witnessing all around in Tel Aviv.

We ended up ourselves in the street, one o 'clock in the morning, hand in hand with Israeli soldiers and young college-aged kids. One or two of them had even lost members of their own family in a recent massacre, an attack from the sea, from a rubber dinghy boat.

And I said to them, look, guys, have you ever considered Israeli geography? What kind of a God is it who has left us so defenseless, so open to the attack of our enemies from every direction, even from the sea?

Is that the same kind of a God who would not allow us to look to the arm of our own flesh for our defense or to natural barriers, but look to Him? You know, these guys have studied the Bible as their curriculum, and they think that it's a collection of myths and fables and history.

I said, do you remember when Jehoshaphat stood on the steps of the temple? And he said, oh God, we have no might in ourselves, but our eyes are set upon thee. And they stood together with their wives and their children.

And the Spirit of the Lord spoke into the congregation by the priest Jehoshaphat, and he said, O Israel, the battle is not mine but yours. Faithful Lord, go out against them tomorrow. You know how we ended praying, hand in hand?

O God, if you're real, and you're the same God that heard the prayer of that king and gave answer, we ask that you would reveal yourself to us in this Yeshua HaMashiach, of whom these Gentile students speak and sing.

It was a night of glory. I didn't plan to share that part. But you know there's an axiom that the way to a man's heart is through his stomach. What would you say about a God who would say that the way to Israel's salvation is through Germany?

And not through a face-to-face witness, but through a deep ministry of supplication and groaning in the Spirit for the lost sheep of the house of Israel. And so God has led us in a succession of steps now to the realization of this vision.

German Believers and the Reconciliation of the Church

Our first contact was with a wealthy, elderly German in a city called Wuppertal. We lived in Berlin through all the war years and had many Jewish friends. And I said, but dear brother, what did you do in the early 1930s when you looked out your window in your apartment in Berlin and saw the Nazi youth pulling the beards of the old men and breaking the store windows and lighting the epithets and beating up the Jewish kids?

What did you do then? Well, he said, I looked and I pulled the shade down and I walked away. God had me to say to the same man early one morning, only a few weeks ago, God has given you another opportunity to be an instrument in the salvation of these Jews.

Don't pull the shade down a second time. But he did. We thought he was going to give us his house as a center for Jewish discipleship where God was going to be using Jews to effect a reconciliation in a divided body of Christ in Germany.

You think you have problems here? They have animosities and splits and divisions that go back almost a century. Fierce contention, rivalries coupled with German pride, German arrogance, German stiffness.

You can't believe what a knotted mess it is. Only a sword can cut through that Gordian knot. And God is saying, send a band of Jewish believers. Maybe they can compel an audience from Germans who will not give it to anyone else, even Billy Graham.

And maybe they'll be reconciled and there will be one spirit and one accord that my work can be effected that they might cry for the salvation of Israel. So we had a conference at Columbia University and I thought, well the Lord is going to show me who these disciples are to be that will send.

And the first night there came the call for the fornicators, gross sinners, liars, hypocrites, and I'll tell you the aisles were full. They came pouring out down the aisles, down the front, weeping, sobbing, choking, spluttering.

And I saw that mess and I said, Oy vey. Is that the condition of the Jewish believers? Evidently the Shekinah glory of God is not going to fall as quickly as we thought. And so this year's conference, which the Lord is leading us now to have, is going to be on the shaping of godly character.

And there's a place which God has given us. First a 95 acre camp and now a 160 acre farm across the road from it. Not unusual to have 30 degree below zero winters where men are going to be called to be shaped for these end time ministries.

And if they're not willing to tend the physical sheathing we have, well there's 75 and there'll be more, in sub-zero weather, together with their brothers and sisters in these severe conditions, how then shall they minister in Germany?

How then shall they react to the latent anti-Semitism which is still there on the part of German Christians? How shall they respond when they'll be unseen, unrecognized, unapplauded, unheralded, and have some way to win their way between the charismatic, the Pentecostal Germans, the evangelical, the state church?

It's a very severe calling. But God in his wisdom is putting together something that spans continents and is a most beautiful unfolding. I went to see that man on this most recent trip and God waked me 3 o 'clock in the morning with this burning vision I was telling Paul today.

I prayed till 5 and tried to get out of the house and found myself locked into the house. I said, Lord, what's this? And God said, you're the spirit of life, a picture of the spirit of life locked into Germany in a fearful, insecure people who do not know me as they ought.

I didn't get out of the house till 6 in the morning and finally had to be let out by the housewife, the front door, the foyer, and out the front the gate 50 yards away and gave me a key to unlock the gate that didn't even fit.

I had to leap over the gate into the street and walk down the street looking for someone to inform me how to get downtown and had a conversation with a man waiting for a bus who was a Muslim, a Turk, a foreign worker and began to witness to him about Jesus as the one hope that can reconcile Arabs and Jews in the streets of Germany.

Baptism, Shared Life, and Unexpected Open Doors

Then another day later in Bonn, Germany, a home meeting. Ended up baptizing nine Germans in the bathtub of that apartment. The next day to a German community near Frankfurt where we thought we were just going for a social visit.

The Lord began speaking one night over the coffee table by the spirit and these men pushed aside their cups and saucers and put aside every consideration and two days later God had done such a work by his spirit of an exchange of life, of money, of substance, of concern that it would take me the rest of the night to describe the complexity of what God has done.

These men, who had never before laid eyes on me are paying the down payment to enable us to get into the farm in Minnesota and the house which we thought to sell in New Jersey that would finance the farm is now going to be retained for their use as their first outreach in the United States.

An extensive collaboration with the purest work of God I've seen on the face of the earth who have also the same burden. They have Germans, this is how I met them, in Jerusalem where they've sent a team of German believers living very quietly and working very obscurely to effect a reconciliation among the divided body of Christ of Jewish believers in Jerusalem.

God sends Germans to Jerusalem to reconcile the Jews and he sends Jews to Germany to reconcile the Germans. His ways of testifying are not. Then other ministry through those days, I can't begin to tell you the variety of places.

Prophetic Ministry in Army Chapels and Yugoslavia

Germans, Americans, army chapels, I came to one army chapel in the course of those days Potluck Sunday night. Chicken, bawling kids, not-nosed babies, the whole works, noise. One stocking up, one stocking down.

The chaplain was a careerist. Hail fellow, well met, back slapper. My heart just went clunk, hopeless. And I was going to get a half hour on the program before they showed the film in the midst of the fried chicken and the whole works.

I went upstairs and I prayed with some of these German brothers. We came down and they called on me. God gave me Isaiah 6 about the holiness of God. And the moment that I began speaking, a hush fell over that room.

Not a single baby whimpered. I think even the noses dried up. When I gave an invitation, 13 people stood to their feet and among them was a Jewish GI who had never before heard the gospel who was saved in the moment of his standing.

Not even a prayer for salvation. Absolutely done in, staggered. And then picking up stray men in ministry, singular lonely men, unrelated to others, bringing them to a place where they can be related, encouraging them in their ministries, and then to Munich to do such a work for two American boys who were living there and struggling independent of each other.

Things that can't even be shared. And then on to Yugoslavia where I was invited by a Yugoslavian brother with whom I had gone to Leningrad a few years ago. He heard me speak in Germany on my last visit.

He said, Artie said, these Yugoslavian ministers need to hear this end time message. I said, well, you think so? Arrange it. He did. And I came to this conference of the leading Pentecostal denomination in Yugoslavia, preceded by another speaker, a fine German brother, not knowing their need, couldn't speak their language, and in four days God reconciled a denomination about to explode.

God did a work that when I was driven to the airport four days later, they said God sent us the living word. In the moment of our greatest crisis and need, at the point when we threatened to explode, God sent a prophet with the living word.

And I did not even know the situation. And I would go to the meetings out of my hotel room, not knowing ten minutes later from the room to the pulpit what to speak. And after four days, looking back, I could see the continuity of God, how he had laid the foundation line upon line, precept upon precept, stunning these men, breaking, weeping the wonderful, deep, rich work of God.

I could say, without exaggeration, in touching this key denomination, at the moment of its greatest crisis, the only instrument available to God in that nation, he had touched the nation. And I flew from Yugoslavia to Zurich to spend one night there with German brothers from that same fellowship who had an outreach there.

Remembering Salvation in Zurich

I needed to take a walk. And we took a walk through the streets of the city, and all of a sudden I remembered, this is where it began 11 years ago. I hadn't been back to Zurich in 11 years. It was in these same streets that I met that American girl who was on vacation, who was willing to spend that time with me, and whom I was querying, why are you willing to be kind?

And she kept saying, it's the love of God, it's the love of God. And finally, at the end of my exasperation, late that afternoon, I asked her, how do you know that God is? And she gave me that answer that exploded my heart and arrested my life for God.

It happened in the streets of Zurich. And the very next day when I left Zurich, hitchhiking, on my way, I met this constantly broken Jewish bum, intellectual, frenzied, trying to understand the perplexity of his life.

I was picked up by that Swiss man. When he found out that I was Jewish, he took me to that coffee house. And at the end of pouring out my soul to the stranger, he asked me that one question. He said, do you know what it is that the world needs?

And I had my arms folded over my chest with that fixed, cynical expression on my face, what? And he spoke that one line from which I had not yet recovered. He said, what the world needs is for men to watch one another speak.

That was the first night I ever heard the gospel in 34 years. It happened in Zurich. And all of a sudden, I had just come back from Yugoslavia and Germany, trailing clouds of glory, God-touching nations, God-affecting this, God-spanning continents, God-working His end-time purposes for Israel.

And I was reminded where it all began 11 years ago, when God picked up off the streets of that city a broken hulk and led me step-by-step to salvation in Jerusalem, and about a decade later had fashioned an instrument by which He was affecting these things.

Paul’s Spirit-Led Ministry in Acts 17

I want you to turn to the book of Acts, and the 17th chapter. Oh, I didn't tell you, and there are so many things I can't tell you, and I'll forget, and I won't have time. While that conference was taking place in Yugoslavia, in a city I had never before heard, we were walking in the streets one day, and we asked a woman for instructions.

And she was just about to get up on a trolley car, and I said to my Yugoslavian brother, stop her, she's Jewish. Oh, Artie said, how do you know she's Jewish? I said, brother, don't argue, stop her. He stopped her just before she got on, and indeed, she was Jewish.

And she walked us back to the hotel, and before she left us that day, I had the names and addresses of two other Jews in that Yugoslavian city, whom we had gone to see, and before we left that city, in the course of those four days, we had visited nine Jews, a remnant of the previous Jewish community that existed before World War II, and in fact went to this synagogue one afternoon, now abandoned, and had one of the most melancholy experiences of my life, with the plaster hanging down, bricks falling out, no electric, no illumination, floor creaking.

We walked into this old building, having such an eerie impression, and I came and I felt around in that half-darkness, and walked up on the platform to the ark where the Torah is kept, the scrolls of the law, the Star of David now faded, and I opened up the ark, and there was nothing inside.

It's something of the same stunned shock as a surgeon opening a chest and finding no heart in it. And that night I came to the conference, and the scripture that God gave me, standing on that creaking synagogue floor, and your house shall be left to you, blessed one.

And I said to these Yugoslavian ministers, if you will not be reconciled in Christ, if you will not lend yourself to the building of God's end-time house, and overcome your divisions and strives, and the things which have divided you, I shall come again and find that your house is desolate.

You will be as foreboding a sight as the synagogue which I have seen today, and God will leave you with your plaster ceiling hanging, bricks falling out, your house shall be left to you, desolate. And that's how God was using the circumstances of those days.

To fish for Jews, to reconcile the body of Christ, to seek out the lonely individual ministers who need to be comforted and strengthened and exhorted, to go into army chapels and speak about the holiness of God, and to do the variety of works which would please God before German audiences, American audiences, unsaved Jews, from day to day, following in the course of God.

And that, dear children, is really the substance of the thing that's on my heart tonight. There's a beautiful illustration of this in the 17th chapter of Acts, where a guy by the name of Paul, caught up in the purposes of God, we read in the 14th verse that his brethren sent away Paul to go as it were to the sea.

Here's a man in service to God, no preconceived notion or plan. If we return to the previous chapter of the 16th chapter, who was successfully establishing the churches in Asia, and was arrested by the Holy Spirit that forbade him not, and redirected by a vision, and was sent to Greece, and now by a succession of steps into Macedonia and to Berea, and now on his way to Athens, the brethren sent away Paul.

They conducted Paul and brought him unto Athens in the 15th verse. And so we read that in the 16th verse, while Paul waited for them in Athens, his spirit was stirred in him when he saw the city wholly given to idolatry.

I hope this means to you what it means to me. I can almost salivate as I read these scriptures. You know why? It's so undramatic. It's so ordinary. It has nothing to do with great bombast or voices ringing from heaven.

It has only to do with a man who is led by the Spirit. A man caught up in the purposes of God. Variable and instrument to speak to Jews, to contend with intellectuals, to be in this city or that, in Asia or Europe, it matters not.

A man on course with God, by God, who says, for me to live is Christ. There's not a situation that he's going to find that will face him. There's not an untoward event for which he is not prepared. My last day in Switzerland, at the very end of those 30 days, the next to last day, I was at Youth for the Mission in Lausanne.

Some of the greatest ministry that they had ever recorded on their video. And Peter Van Vorden, you can say that without boasting, Peter Van Vorden, the son-in-law of the nephew of Corrie ten Boom, came to hear me.

As he was driving up the driveway, the Lord said to him, Take art to see this Armenian millionaire. And so he told me that after the service, I had heard of this man. I said, why don't you call him, see if he's available.

He called him only to find out that this man was deathly sick, terrible case of flu, can't see anyone. I said, well, and yet I didn't feel good about that, as if Satan was stealing something God intended.

I said, look brother, how about if we just go and raise him up right out of the sickbed to know that God has sent us. Yeah, he said. And we drove out to this man's place, right near Labrie. And when we got there, the man was sitting up in his drawing room.

That afternoon, while in his sickness, the thought came to him, What am I doing in bed? I ought to be out. And he lifted himself up and the sickness broke. We found him fully clothed, alert and well, on the phone, trying to find us and make contact with us.

And here we were, knocking on his door at the same moment. He said, God has sent you. He didn't know for what. I didn't either. But we both knew that this was a divine encounter. You don't have to know for what.

The same God who sends you, we'll shortly explain. And I gave that man a two-hour expression of the burden that God had given me, because he had an enormous concern for Israel. And I said, except that you're a man of the Spirit, you're going to miss this.

It has nothing to do with bombast. It has nothing to do with wonderful evangelical designs of winning the Jews. It's an unseen, invisible, slow, quiet work of God beneath the surface. And he was a spiritual man and he saw it.

When I finished that, he said, Artie said, I can't contain this. Will you write me a statement that I might study it and prayerfully consider what God will have me to do in this venture, which I have since done.