K-144 Magna Carta of Apostolic Faith — Art Katz

The Call to Recover Apostolic and Prophetic Faith

I'm going to share something with you that was given in Houston, also about 1 .30 to 3 or something like that, that the Lord, I think, is wanting. Maybe He prepared me at that time. I only had a chance to barely touch this with that Houston group, but I think this is the real formative occasion to share this.

I'll just give you the history of it, and then we'll pray. It's unusual for me to be invited to a Baptist church, and that has a whole history of how that took place in Houston. Actually, I was refused as a speaker.

Someone suggested me, but they wouldn't hear of it. But nevertheless, I was available on a Sunday morning coming back from Guatemala, as I'm doing this time also. And the sister whose church it was took me on the free Sunday morning.

Nobody else would have me. I was available free. And we got there in the sanctuary in time for the pastors and elders and so on, the deacons, whatever they're called, to be in prayer for the service. And just one minute before that time was to be dismissed, the Lord quickened one thought and one word for me, something about the sense of God as He in fact is, so absent from the church and even the consciousness of its ministers.

And so I just breathed out that one line of prayer. And when it was over and we stood, they wanted to see who was it who prayed that. It was the man they didn't want. And I ended up in the Sunday school class of one of the pastors.

And subsequently, they invited me back for another Sunday morning. That brought the church on its face. And when I came back this time, they didn't want me because of the commotion that had been stirred the last.

Nevertheless, one of the associate pastors, who is now leaving the Baptist framework to go into home fellowships and really has a precious heart, he had me as his house guest and I shared with his Sunday school class.

He was teaching on the gifts of the Holy Spirit. And the church is teaching on the gifts of the Holy Spirit. Like a weather marker, something when Baptists are talking about that, to legitimize and make acceptable what had all along been offensive and kept at a distance, troubles me.

In fact, when I heard the kind of teaching that is taking place, I said to the brother as we left the church in the afternoon, presentation made by the pastor, would to God that you would leave the subject alone.

Would to God that you would keep your conventional and traditional stance of opposition to the things that have always offended you rather than you should legitimize them and domesticate them and make them acceptable and rob them of their content, their glory and their power.

That's what's happening today in the church sense. So, the Lord wakened me early. Thoughts Upon Rising is the title of my statement. And what the Lord gave me was the divinely intended milieu for the operation of the gifts of the Spirit.

Milieu is a French word that means the environment or the atmosphere appropriate to the operation of the gifts of the Spirit. And then, as I looked it over again, I retitled it, A Summary of the Distinguishing Characteristics of an Apostolic Body.

And sometime early this morning, I retitled it yet again, A Magna Carta of Apostolic Faith, of Apostolicity Itself. Anyone who knows me knows that I drool over that word. The two key words for which you need to salivate or you're already outside the faith and apostate is apostolic and prophetic.

See, I appreciate Jim because he appreciates apostolic. And I'm assuming that he has conveyed something to you that has made this morning, last night, and tonight appropriate in the Lord's timing. These are critical words.

If the church loses the distinctive sense of them, it loses the church. We become a purveyor of services. We provide a commodity that's acceptable, pleasant, and blessed. But we lose the genius of the church, the thing that gives it its vibrancy, its power, its significance.

So, we need to guard these words. The church is built on the foundation of the apostles and the prophets. So, it's not just a matter of a word that's relevant to someone who may be in the congregation, who has an apostolic call.

The entire church has an apostolic call. The entire church is called to be an apostolic and prophetic entity in the locality where it is. So, what the Lord is wanting to do this morning is to ring me out before you.

I've been steeped in this for, I don't know, the last quarter of a century. As a Jewish believer, having gone through the evangelical, full gospel, charismatic ranks, and even being a darling to some extent that once had some hope of promise, I learned early that something was wanting.

I could not put my finger on it, but I knew that until that thing was found, we have no real witness to the Jewish people. We cannot move them to jealousy. They're not impressed with our charismatica.

In fact, charismatica is the employment, ostensibly, hopefully, it could be something faint and false that seems to be the gifts of the Spirit in the environment that God did not intend. Namely, that it should be something to improve our meetings, bring a certain luster, or quicken our denomination that is sagging and needs some hopeful thing that the charismatic gifts are going to bring.

That is not God's intention. That's travesty. That's apostasy. And so I say, keep your hands off. Don't invoke my God to sanctify or legitimate something that is so wanting as if you can bring a hue that that's not God.

This is holy stuff. The gifts of the Holy Spirit is the Holy Spirit. It's the Spirit of holiness. It's God. You don't traffic in that. You don't employ that to save you from triviality. And we need to shriek and howl and blow the whistle.

Let's all function when that kind of travesty takes place. For if the church allows it, it's the leaven in the entire lump that will bring us spiraling downward. We need to contend for the faith. We need to be jealous over these critically important words and functions.

An Apostolic Body Must Recover Eschatological Faith

So, here's my statement. I'm going to read it. Then I'll go back. It wouldn't hurt you to take notes. That is to say, not the whole thing. It'll be recorded. It'll be taped. But maybe a phrase or a word that clicks in your spirit.

What is he saying here? This really agitates me. This digs me. And I want to come back to that point. And I don't know if we'll have an opportunity today or tonight to come back to it. But this is something that we need to ruminate over.

So, a Magna Carta, a statement of the genius of what an apostolic body is that has been lost to our contemporary consciousness because we have as models something far less than other. We think that that which is apostolic is only historic.

It was once upon a time, but is no more. I can't think of anything more to be desired, to be restored, than that which was at the first. And the age will conclude as it began with a church of this kind of glory, this kind of stature, this kind of quality, this kind of witness.

And I believe that you're the candidate, so I wouldn't be here and I'd not be speaking it. So, thoughts upon rising, that the consideration of the gifts of the Spirit outside the context of an apostolic and eschatological faith.

Don't panic. Sorry about this. There are a few words that you are required to learn. Eschatological and apocalyptic. Eschatological refers to the things that pertain to the end. And what I'm saying here is that if your faith is not eschatological, it's not faith.

It's not apostolic faith. Apostolic faith, as I hope to persuade you, always looks toward the end. It always is moving toward a conclusion, or else you're not moving. If there's not an end, or a consummation of an ultimate kind, of a glorious kind, then your Christianity is condemned to a succession of Sundays.

Mere Sundays. Predictable Sundays. So a church that is a church, that has the apostolic faith, has also the eschatological faith. If you don't have it, seek it, and you'll know you have it when you begin to salivate.

The drool test is the litmus. If you don't salivate, if your mouth is dry, and these are just terms and words and vocabulary, then you're still on the phraseological kick. The only thing is that you've changed your vocabulary.

You've gone from evangelical to an apostolic vocabulary, but you have not yet the reality. In fact, I can't think of anything more to be feared than to have the vocabulary without the corresponding reality.

Like, I was not the first in my neighborhood to have the body of Christ. Everybody else had it. Like, when I was a kid, this was way before your time, when we listened to the radio in the Lone Ranger or the G-Man or whatever, you can send away for something with a bottle cap or a box top and be the first in your neighborhood to have it, like humility.

If somebody wants to get me some water, there's a great reward for you. So what was I saying? To be the first in your neighborhood to get the body of Christ. Well, it became so current. It was the vogue.

It was the fad. Everybody was saying it. But where was the corresponding reality? I'm the kind of guy who was in agreement with that Argentinian pastor, whose name I forgot, who became a world-renowned figure because he declared in his own congregation, which was Pentecostal, a moratorium on the word Lord.

He refused to allow his people to speak it until it was in fact so. And I don't know how long that silence reigned. It went on for months before finally, when the reality began to emerge that corresponded to the word, they could then speak it.

Listen, saints. You're not going to be an apostolic body if not also prophetic. And that means to say you need to be jealous over words themselves. We are the guardians of language and of meaning, and we cannot give ourselves to light speaking and frivolity and words that blah, blah, blah.

We need to watch over them with a jealousy and a passion of the sacred and the important words that when we speak them, we speak them with cogency, with meaning, with significance, or we don't speak them.

Got the idea? In fact, less speaking altogether wouldn't hurt us. A greater respect for silence. I'm continually amused or irritated, I don't know which of the words, by saints who just don't know. And they'll be driving you to a meeting.

You've just come in off of a plane. You've been up half the night. You're all whacked out and fagged out and sagged out. And they continually are jabbering in your ear and trying to engage you in conversation.

And you're wanting to hold your peace because within an hour you're going to be on a platform and your words have got to be life or death, not mere instruction. And if you dissipate that energy by words that are just speaking, that when you get up, it'll be a blah.

So that's why I say, someone said to me last night, they wanted to take me home. I said, don't, I'm lousy company. Those who have had me as a house guest know, I say very little. Name, rank, and serial number.

Because I'm a man who lives by my mouth. But it's got to count when I open it and I can't afford to dissipate it with trivial and casual things. I think that would be good for the whole of church to have an attitude of that kind.

And that we don't have to be entertaining. And that even in silence we can be appreciated. I appreciate Jim if he's not saying, but he's always saying. But even if he were not saying, there's a timber in the man, there's a quality that resonates God and you just appreciate being in that presence.

We don't have to prove something, demonstrate something, win something. Be engaging. Okay. I haven't even gotten to my statement. So the consideration of the gifts of the Spirit outside the context of an apostolic and eschatological faith, that is to say, a radical anticipation of the end, marks and identifies a body as one to be opposed by the powers of darkness as a threat upon whom its vicious spite is ventilated and which finds itself in disjuncture with the world.

This is the kind of thing you write when God wakes you at three in the morning. It's not an organized and well-structured statement that's full of spasms and spits and spurts. So I have to go over this with you.

A body that is eschatologically minded signifies to the powers of darkness that it's a body of whom they need to fear and upon whom they will ventilate their particular spite you will experience a degree of opposition that perhaps has not been your experience till now.

Jesus we know and Paul we know, but who are you? What little I know about the powers of darkness, and by the way, it's a very significant area of knowledge, the principalities and the powers of the air are not hobgoblins for Halloween.

They are powerful, tyrannical, invisible spectral forces that jerk and manipulate nations and the whole earth. If you want a recent example in history of just how real an entity they are, examine Nazi Germany.

The land of Goethe, Schiller, Fichte, Hegel, Nietzsche, Wagner, the geniuses of Germany, the depth of its culture was swept away in less than a decade by the powers of darkness that not only were content to jerk and manipulate the nation but to possess it.

That's the picture of the last days when those powers will be released in full. I can't think of anything more imperative for an apostolic church than an apostolic awareness of the cosmic conflict with these powers that was from the first and concludes the age in a fury of opposition for which we need to come to full stature as a people corporately together as a body.

The issue of the body of Christ is not a little flim-flam of we got it and we're the first in the neighborhood to have it. It's a statement of a heavenly kind that is intrinsic to the Godhead himself.

A brother who's passed away, a very precious godly man, he said, God himself, he said, is a sweet company. That the Godhead itself is the genius of the plurality and corporality that should also be revealed in his body.

Understand? The body of Christ is not a phrase. It's a painful reality to obtain. And it's more than just the casual conglomerate of individualities that are willing to share a facility for the enjoyment of a service or a certain satisfaction on a Sunday morning.

It's a people who have weathered something, cuffed something out, have learned through terrible disillusionment what the condition of the other brothers and sisters are. And in fact, the worst of it is the revelation of our own condition that would never have been revealed except through brothers and sisters because of the intensity and the frequency of our relationship together.

Mere Sundays can never obtain this. If we're not a community of believers, we're not a body. And if we're not that, we will have no significance at all for Israel in this last day's trial which I will come to in a moment, which is part of the mandate of an apostolic body.

So, that church that is not trifling in the Holy Spirit, that is consciously chosen to be an expression of that body, that has an eschatological sense of the end and the impending issues and the conflict that mark the end, that require the people that have come of age, when you come to that consciousness and willfully have accepted that as what describes you, you know what happens?

Your job, your security, your profession, and even your family are no longer the first and foremost objects of your consideration. It's not that you become impervious or indifferent, you just have your priorities established rightly.

Namely, that your very life, physically, biologically, and your salvation was for this purpose, to be consciously a part, not integrally, of a body that receives this mandate and this call and sees it as its foremost purpose for being.

Got that? So, when the powers of darkness see that you see, and that you have affirmed this and chosen this, you now are an object to be opposed. And they will ventilate their spite in the way that they have a unique ability to perform, which even itself is an incentive then for our prayer, our intercessions, and provokes even maturity.

It serves the purposes of God, though it's not a light thing. And so, a mentality of this kind also puts us in disjuncture with the world. All of a sudden, the world is not some innocuous thing that we can touch or handle in our superior spirituality, but it's a thing to be despised and hated.

You recognize what you should all along have known, it remains at enmity with God the Father. The world as system, I'm not talking about nature. I'm talking about a system of values, about an unspoken wisdom, about assumptions and premises by which the world lives its life.

Even written into the Declaration of Independence, the pursuit of happiness, which we say, oh yeah, of course. Of course what? That's not a biblical premise to pursue happiness. Happiness is not the object of pursuit.

It's something that comes as a consequence of something else, namely, living rightly related to God. But when you make it the object, it's an idolatrous thing, and a detour, and it'll never end up being gratifying.

That's one of the premises. Oh, I could tell you so many stories, and every one of them have been painfully learned. He's right. How was I introduced to the whole thing about principalities and powers?

By shattering my kneecap in Minnesota, baptizing Lutherans in the YMCA swimming pool, and on my way back to the locker with my Bible in my hand whistling Dixie, there was a puddle on the floor, and the next thing I knew, I was upside down in the middle of the air, holding my Bible in a frozen moment of time, and saying, cats, what are you doing here?

And down I came with a thunderous crash, right on my kneecap. But man, God's man of faith and power. That night, the thing was swollen like a football. I was still preaching and speaking. The next day, the brothers wouldn't hear anything about it.

They took me to a hospital. Jewish, what do you call a man who works with bones? Orthopedic surgeon. And he's showing me the x-rays. He says, you haven't just fractured. He says, this is smashed. It needs to be wired.

An operation. I said, well, when can you perform it? He said, Thursday. I think it was Tuesday. I said, no. I have to be in northern Minnesota. The Lord is giving us a property. He said, the who? The Lord.

And as he has his hands on my knee, his eyes begin to roll back. He says, something's happening in your knee. He said, the pieces are coming into place. If I put your leg in a cast, you'll not need an operation.

You can keep your appointment. And that's what he did. So that night, I had my leg up in a cast. Well, here's where it gets interesting. The nurse came in with a hypo to assuage my pain. I said, I'm sorry, sis.

I don't need that. She said, but you must have it. I said, no, I don't need it. I'm only mildly discomfited. She said, no, you must have it. I said, no, I refuse to have it. I don't want to have my consciousness in any way affected by drugs.

I'm strange that way. She stormed out in such a huff and came back two minutes later with a pill. I said, look, sis, you don't understand. I'm not afraid of hypos. I was in the army. And we walked down a corridor with guys on both sides with bent needles dripping to puncture us like a pincushion.

I'm not afraid of needles. I don't want the drug. I don't need to be drugged up. I'm not in excruciating pain. But you must. The last thing I remember, two nurses and two doctors in my doorway jabbering and just aghast.

And I realized what was happening. I had unconsciously touched an unspoken premise by which the world lives its life. It's the wisdom of the world, the avoidance of pain, and the pursuit of pleasure. And I was bucking the system because I could bear a measure of pain by the grace of God that is in me.

That was the introduction that there are invisible, spirit, spectral forces that are influencing mankind in the wisdom that is unique to themselves that is opposed to God. And when the church will recognize this and oppose them in those places, and a whole congregation lives in independence from that influence, it's amazing what it releases in the whole locality where such a church is.

The Church as a Visible Witness Against the World’s False Values

Okay. This is more than the issue of demon deliverance. In fact, I even suspect that the enemy will allow us to be engaged totally to think that that's the whole issue, when there's a much greater cosmic issue in both the recognition and the opposition of the powers of darkness, not only by what we say but what we are in ourselves in the reality that subscribes to another wisdom, the wisdom of God.

The symbol of which is the cross. So, these false values are intrinsic to the world. You should have heard me last night about Lockheed, that corporation that makes F -16s. I don't know if they'll ever survive my outburst.

I think the stock market dipped. So, the whole world lives a lie. It's in the father of lies. It's a system of false values that needs to be consciously recognized and repudiated by a people who live freely and independent from them and who are already the harbingers or the statement of a kingdom to come.

We represent something in our corporality of another kingdom. We are the evidence of something. And the very evidence of that, the visibility of that can set captives free who didn't recognize that they were captives in another system of false values until they see your freedom.

It's a kingdom already come visible in the Church and able, therefore, to emancipate and deliver other of the world's deceived victims. And if this is not the context for the play of the Holy Spirit with us, then we condemn the gifts of the Spirit to a charismatica played out harmlessly and irrelevantly to the cosmic drama whose conclusion the true Church feels as imminent and whose theocratic consummation is anticipated as being at hand.

What a statement. Take the rest of the morning just to review that. Let me just take a shot at it. The Church knows it's involved in a cosmic drama. Conflict between darkness and light from the beginning.

And that these powers in the last days will have but a short time and will ventilate their fury all the more. And that we're moving, therefore, toward a conclusion of the age which is imminent, which means that it's at hand.

It doesn't require us to be chronological. We don't have to have the actual day, date, month. But we know that something is close. And that gives to our corporate life a sense of high seriousness, of urgency, that there are things that are being brought to conclusion in which we are the principal agents and actors for God, corporately.

That consciousness changes the whole atmosphere of what we are about and changes the Sunday morning service to just not another succession of something, but to some vital thing that God is going to communicate, seeing that we're close to the end and must be mediated through what will be spoken.

You see what I mean? We come with another anticipation. There's another corporate atmosphere. You will know that you have attained it when the children reflect it, when they themselves sense, though they cannot identify it, that my parents are about something of an utterly serious kind, that this is not Sunday culture for them, and they will reflect that.

When we can impress our teenagers, we have apostolically arrived. So, look to them as the index. Otherwise, we're just playing a verbal game, a phraseological game, with impressive vocabulary, but it has not impressed them.

We've not yet hit the authentic existential reality, and they know it. So, and then there's a theocratic consummation. There's another word for you. Theo is God. You've got it up here in one of your banners, here.

And kratik is rule. Demo is Greek for people. The rule of the people. Democracy. Democratic. Well, I want to say there's a higher and ultimate form of rule. It's the rule of God. And it's not some ambivalent thing or ethereal thing.

It's an actual thing. The government shall be upon his shoulder. And of the increase of that government, there shall be no end. And of its peace, well, first with us, and then with nations, with Israel, and the world.

God is coming as king. He's going to be seated on the holy hill of Zion in the throne of David because he's the descendant of David and the root and offspring of David. He's got the credentials and the qualification.

And when he is seated with Israel's restoration, that's why the powers of darkness will oppose not only Israel's restoration, but Israel's existence. We're going to watch them ground to powder in our generation within the next five to ten years or sooner.

And not one of them will survive except by the mercy that we extend. Why this relentless hatred? Because the powers of darkness know better than the church that the restoration of Israel, I'm not talking about the Zionist thing that is now in place since 1948.

That is going to be brought down and out. But the true and final restoration that God himself will effect by his own power after a final sifting of this people in a time of Jacob's trouble, when the redeemed of the Lord shall return to Zion with mourning and sighing fleeing away and everlasting joy on their heads, that the powers of darkness fear more than anything.

For he who is king is contained in the heavens in Acts 3 .21 waiting for the restoration of all things spoken by all the prophets since the world began. The Lord's coming is contingent upon and related to that restoration.

But, of course, if they are annihilated then there's nothing to be feared about their being restored and the king can be postponed and kept in limbo indefinitely while the powers of the air continue to jerk and manipulate nations like our own.

So the true church that is the church has this understanding. It senses an end that is imminent and that we're moving toward a theocratic consummation and it's at hand. In this context the operation of the Spirit and the Spirit's gifts is given as an urgent provision to such a people who are a besieged and militant presence in the midst of a sea of hostility against it.

I don't experience any hostility. Well, you're not yet that presence. You become it and you'll see how you feel to be an island of sanity truth and reality and the whole world and everything that is in it contends against you.

And I can say that it's very realistic to anticipate that in the last days unforeseen things that cannot be calculated are going to come upon us with suddenness where life and death decisions have to be made virtually in a moment.

And unless there is an operation of the Spirit of God through prophecy through tongues through interpretation to guide us to direct us in what to do in crisis moments we will be lost. We cannot play this game by the numbers.

This is not fill in the space and paint your way through to the Lord's Supper by Leonardo da Vinci. This is a people through whom the Word of God can come through a prophetic presence whose character is known whose word is authentic because He'll say go ye out against them the battle is yours say the Lord mine and not yours but go do it tomorrow morning when the excitement and the heat of the prophetic word has dissipated in the cold grey dawn there are three uncircumcised armies ready to do you in and go out against them then on the basis of the prophetic word that came the night before it's going to be life or death for us the accuracy and truth of that word the dependability of the vessel through whom it's spoken.

The clear realization of the character and worth of its members. Because we know each other well enough because we've gone from a mere succession of Sundays to that frequency of relationship that makes church church.

Because we put away the TV set because we don't have to be someplace until Saturday night but with the people of God and not to miss what God is saying which many of you did last night because you had other things there's an urgency that revolutionizes everything changes your priorities and how you spend your time.

And what humiliation you're willing to experience at the hands of your brothers and sisters that is not to be given in any other place. I've been kicked by Jews. I've been spit at I've been mocked. I've been cursed.

Nothing nothing against the heart rending and real death that you experience from God's own people. The church is the place of suffering saints before it's a glory. Don't be confused about that. Ok. So the operation of the gifts is God's nuts and bolts provision for a people besieged in the sea of hostility in the last days that need the direction of God that comes explicitly through a prophecy through a tongues interpretation and the operation of faith and other gifts that are critical for our direction our survival and our use.

We have an end time task that is urgent. And it invites rejection from the world. A fierce opposition by the powers of darkness as I've mentioned who recognize the unmistakable authenticity of a body of that kind as a serious threat to themselves.

They'll no longer say Jesus we know and Paul we know. And who are you. They'll know you only too. Well. So for myself I'm not so much concerned for how popular I am or well received. I would much rather be recognized by.

To what degree do the powers of darkness know me. To what degree do they fear me. To what degree am I a serious object of their apprehension and concern. That's the index of the truth of your life in God.

Not your popularity nor your acceptance. But how do the powers of darkness view you. Are you a paperweight. Do they see through your verbiage. They're not impressed with your amens and hallelujahs because I believe that there's only one thing that they are required to acknowledge that is authenticity itself.

And that's why Jesus they knew and Paul they knew. But they see right through anything else that is only a masquerade a facsimile of the real thing. And I praise God for that. So we have an obligation to be the real thing.

And it's not cheap. So it's not accidentally nor unusually true that it follows that such a people live consciously and sacrificially as being also the salvific agents of God toward the people Israel.

Israel’s Restoration and the Church’s Apostolic Mission

Dum-da-dum-dum. It's not an option. Am I. Is my sound off here. Am I fading out. Have we got plenty of volume. I don't want them to miss a syllable. This issue of Israel is not for those who have a taste for it.

It's intrinsic to the church's call as church. And I don't know what I'll speak tonight. But if I talk about Romans 11 where Paul's apprehension of the mystery of Israel was so explicitly set forth and so remarkably unknown by the church he shows you the reciprocal relationship between the church and the Jew.

You cannot avoid it. They will never attain to their millennial destiny nor we to ours independent of each other. There's something. There's a rub there's a grit. There's a requirement that we constitute the one for the other and we would never have chosen the one for the other.

Gentiles with Jews historically they have been at enmity. They're antithetical. They're I joke about it because my wife is Danish Gentile snub-nosed freckle-faced light-haired and loves bric-a-brac and porcelain things.

And shelves and walls to put them and I like tents without walls. You know such a difficult people as that are our making. They bring a requirement of an ultimate and radical kind that is the making of the church that will recognize this mandate and take it seriously.

They're going to be brought through our midst. There's going to be a dispersal of Jews throughout all nations. He's going to sift them through all nations in the last days you can read it in Amos I will sift you through all nations as one sift wheat in a sieve and not a kernel.

So fall to the ground. That's why we're in northern Minnesota in the boondocks because we anticipate Jews coming in North America out of Canada maybe from Siberia. God knows where to find refuge with us in a community that is food producing and life sustaining.

And able also to communicate to them the meaning of their distress and their predicament that they might return to Zion as the redeemed of the Lord though they did not leave it in that condition. This is a whole other subject.

I'm just sowing that word to let you know. You have a mandate. Have they stumbled that they should fall? Paul says God forbid. You should think that God has finished with them permanently. They're only temporarily set aside.

They're broken out that you might be grafted in that salvation may come to the Gentiles so as to move them to jealousy. Have you ever noticed that? There's a purpose for your salvation beyond yourself and it has to do with them that you would not have chosen to move them to jealousy who Paul describes in the same chapter as being the enemies of the gospel.

My God what will it take to move enemies historically to a jealousy for a faith that they have so fervently rejected and look upon as anathema and robbing them of their Jewishness. It's going to take.

There's no footnote. There's no asterisk. There's no note in the back of the book. Hey Paul you know don't you number one two three and four. God has a plan for your life. Two. He leaves it to our Holy Ghost imagination.

But one thing we can assume is going to require a demonstration beyond anything that has yet been given or they would have been moved to jealousy. I was saved exuberantly by God not by any exercise of the church.

But I take it back here and there. A precious witness picked me up off the side of the road as the hitchhiking atheist Jew thirty five years ago and pierced my heart asunder by what they expressed and how they looked the peace that was clear and moved me to an envy because I knew it was not to be obtained at universities or Marxist institutes.

I had been to those places but by and large the church has historically failed. But we're coming to the end of the age when we must succeed for the restoration of Israel is the final issue that concludes the age and the church as I'm saying here is God's exclusive and ordained salvific agency.

So whatever you do make sure your freezer is full of bagels. That's if we'll have electric power to run the freezer. You know that we are a testy. T-E-S-T-Y people. We're factious. We're irritating.

We've rubbed the church the wrong way for centuries. Jim knows from church history that the greatest of its apostolic figures have collapsed over the Jew. Luther himself wrote the great textbook The Lives of the Jews that armed the Nazis four centuries later.