Preaching - a Sacred Responsibility - Part 1 — Art Katz

Prophetic Proclamation and the Responsibility of the Bearer

Is the bearer of the Word of God. So, prophetic proclamation is something that deserves our attention. In a way, what Daniel spoke to Nebuchadnezzar was a proclamation. It doesn't matter whether it comes to one or to many.

There must be certain distinctives that characterize both the speaking and the man. If it's to have the kind of consequence, whether it's for kings or nations or individuals. So, I have before me an article by another German.

Isn't that remarkable? It's more than a coincidence. And he's the author of one of my favorite commentaries on the Psalms, Hans Joachim Krauss, in an address that he gave in a visit to America, but it's about the church in Germany.

It was given in the early 1960s while the war and the post-war time was yet fresh in his experience. And he expresses a certain discouragement about the condition of the church in Germany as not having benefited from having passed through the great crisis that World War II and the Holocaust was.

And yet he makes remarks that are applicable for the church worldwide and especially the church of the last days. So, I feel it might be a springboard. The Lord might take us into areas that will please him as we review this statement that he makes.

The Decline of Preaching and the Elevation of Worship

And the first of it is the fact that with the authority of preaching declines, the attempt to make worship liturgical increases. The word liturgical, we can put in brackets and put another word in its place.

But I think the heart of what is said here is a really unusual insight that where the word of God is in declension, the issue of worship experiences some kind of elevation, maybe not of a good kind. Rather than being a compliment to the word, as I have so often increasingly experienced it, it becomes an obstruction.

And that worship teams and worship leaders have become a kind of vested interest in themselves. There's a whole new prominence given to worship that is totally new in my experience as a believer. And so it may bear out what he said in the 1960s.

He's seeing it in the context of the German state church, not the charismatic setting. But the point is interesting and worth considering that somehow there's a relationship between the word of God and the phenomenon of worship.

And that where the word of God declines, worship somehow is elevated, maybe in a way that is beyond God's own intention and becomes the focus of the church rather than the word. It's interesting that when Shelley became pastor of that church in Scottsdale, it was originally an Anglican charismatic work where the altar was the centerpiece.

For that tradition celebrates the Lord's table over and against the word of God. And one of the first things that Shelley did was to push the table on the platform back to the wall and to bring the lectern or the pulpit forward.

So he gave a new prominence to the word of God as against the ceremonial issue of communion. Not that that's not valid and important because we have been celebrating that ourselves, but the word of God is first and foremost.

What shall we say is taking place in our present charismatic generation, but that the word of God is being pushed back to the wall and experience or worship is being elevated. It's interesting that if this is in any way indicative, that the Lord used me to bring a word of apostolic vision to a fellowship in Great Britain.

It changed everything for them. It radically upturned everything and set them on a new course. It was exciting. When I came the next time to visit, the whole thing had gone into a downspin because they had all run off to the laughing phenomenon then current both in Toronto and had been brought to England.

Well, I had no chance to assess the laughing phenomenon myself. I was horrified with other members of Ben Israel. We saw a tape of one of its leading proponents ridiculing the word of God and taking in a special delight in bringing to the microphone ministers who were drunk so-called with the spirit and could hardly put two words together.

It sounded more like gibberish and they were so intoxicated. But what they were saying with one voice is we've been preachers for many years and our word has never been effective. And there's more now to be gained by this experience than the preaching of the word has ever obtained.

I saw the word of God being denigrated in favor of experience. And though the author of this article is writing long before this event, I think he's touching the critical thing that needs to be brought to our attention that the word of God will come into eclipse if something else even from God is elevated above it because God has exalted his word even above his name.

How then shall we exalt anything, let alone make it competitive to the word? On another occasion, Reggie was with me. The word was quickening. I should speak on the millennium. I had never ever spoken on the millennium.

And you can imagine what it will take for the first time to bring forth some sense, to communicate some sense of what that ultimate glory will be toward which all things are tending. But before I could speak, I had to sit through the worship time.

And the time that worship time was finished, I was so stripped and done in that I was incapable to introduce an experimental word never before spoken. I knew it would be a total and patent collapse even to attempt it.

And so I just brought forth something of another or lesser kind. I could not speak this holy thing that was pulsating in my spirit because the worship time had thoroughly drowned it. And I even looked at that worship leader, and he was looking at me.

Am I imagining things? Am I some kind of psychotic who imagines? But the way I interpreted his look was, I'll show you who's really running the show. I'll show you where the action really lies. You're just the guy who's carrying the word, but I'm the worship leader.

So there is a reason. I think I'm not exaggerating some of the tendencies that have taken place and that this German sensitive brother is already seeing the conjunction between the decline of preaching and the elevation of worship.

He calls it liturgical, an increase. But we can use other words to describe it in the light of our present experience. He goes on to talk about the charismatic gifts of the congregation, that in the early church, the leadership in the church encouraged and employed such gifts to bring the congregation itself to action and that we need to regain this basic aspect for the presiding task of leadership in the church.

Whereas in German Christianity, the pastor's office becomes hierarchical and everything kind of rests with that direction that is inimical and imposed to the moving of the spirit as gifts through the congregation.

I'm reading, I'm taking off from his statements to fit in with my own thoughts that would be appropriate for us. And that the office holder sits as the sole director of the worship performance. Well, Paul was with me in Oakland, California when the service was stopped.

And the people cried out, let him continue, let him continue. The woman passed. I couldn't understand what had hit her. Well, first when Paul spoke before me, she kept needling me. You should have him to stop.

I said, why? He's speaking something precious and fresh. No, you should. But she let him go on. Then when I went on, I had hardly spoken 10 minutes. The woman came alongside me and called the entire service to a halt.

I was speaking on the subject of worship. The Lord had given me the message that very morning on my knees. And before 10 minutes of it had elapsed, I was being stopped. Great cries came up through the congregation, let him continue.

And then a whole controversy ensued that we had set conspiratorial Ben Israel disposed members in the congregation to cry out like that. And you know that the controversy has not yet been resolved? But one thing I remember from that day, it's a very musically minded congregation with a complete orchestra, dancers, the whole works.

But there was a telephone on the platform next to this sister. And she was picking up the phone and giving out directions from the command post about worship and about this and about that. And this is exactly what this brother is fingering.

Where the head of the congregation becomes managerial and directs from the platform those things that ought to be the spontaneous expression of God through the congregation. One more example, then I'll shut up on this subject.

Some of you here were at the occasion when we had one of the earliest prophetical schools at Bemidji State University. And I had invited a worship team from another city in Minnesota to provide the worship.

And these guys and especially its leader became very presumptuous and went far beyond worship. He began involving himself with the congregation and facing and confronting. And there came a point where I came to the microphone at the beginning of the session and I said, I'm calling this worship team to halt.

And people laughed and thought, oh, what a joke. I said, no, I'm really doing it. And that was the end of their participation. And then I said, let's give the Lord, I forgot, something like, let's give the Lord praise.

And out of the congregation came one swelling chorus after another of all of the ancient time tested hymns of the faith. How great thou art. It sounded like the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. And we had never rehearsed once.

It was glorious. As if God was saying, yes, it was right for you to cut that short and to disapprove that. They had gone beyond my intention. And now to show you that, I'm going to bless this congregation that has never sung a cappella before together and make it sound like the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.

It was heavenly. It was transporting. So this issue of worship and the issue of the word and the role of leadership and the conduct of the church and of its services is something that this man is already sensitive to in the early 60s for Germany.

And perhaps it's much more acutely the issue for us in our generation. And then he says, our churches learn nothing from the catastrophe of the last war. What layman has the nerve to mount the dizzying heights of the pulpit or enter that sacrosanct atmosphere?

Religious Formality and Congregational Lightness

What he's saying is that the church has gone back again into its stodgy solemnity. If you have ever been to a state church, a Lutheran, Reformed, Protestant church in state church countries like Germany, it's absolutely dead.

Parishes that have thousands of people enrolled because the pastor or the priest also issues the birth certificates and the death certificates. They play a civil function. They have gained their education in state universities.

They receive their salary not from the church but from the state. Everyone pays a state tax for the church whether you attend or not. And you bring your children for their sprinkling and that's the last time that you need bring them until it's time to be buried.

And so they have empty cathedrals with a little handful of a few old women and some man sonorously carrying on with no one to hear him. And so what this brother is saying is we've learned nothing from the catastrophe of the last war.

Maybe what we need to learn, that the catastrophe of the last war is altogether profoundly connected with the church in that condition. For a church in that condition can in no way affect the nation and will certainly allow to set in motion spirits of another kind that will take over the state and make it an engine of death.

The church is not a little supplement. The church is God's vital factor from heaven to affect the society in which it is placed. But what he's saying is that this false religious solemnity prohibits anyone from thinking that they should mount the dizzying heights of the pulpit or enter that sacrosanct atmosphere.

It's for the professional to do, not some man who has a burden and who wants to give the word of the Lord. Loss of vital participation by the congregation is the price paid for religious solemnity. We only need to find the equivalent to this statement.

Our problem is not solemnity. You know what our problem is? It begins with an S. It begins with an L. Lightness. Solemnity is a fixed religious posture that German Christians would think appropriate to the sacrosanct aura of the church and of God.

Our problem is not that. We don't come out of a tradition like that. Our problem is lightness. It's the other side of the same coin. Both falsity in a solemn religious expression and an atmosphere that's like a graveyard, like a burial center, is as offensive to God as the lightness that characterizes our gatherings.

And in the great event of Judah's deliverance in 2 Chronicles 20, when three uncircumcised armies were ready to pounce upon a defenseless nation, King Jehoshaphat called the people for a fast. They came with their women and their children.

And out of that crisis of need, the Spirit of God spoke to the prophet Jehoshaphat, the battle is not yours but mine. Go ye out against them tomorrow. And the people fell on their face when they heard that prophecy.

It was the word of the Lord. And the next day they went forth. But not before the king went to the people and asked who are the sweet singers of Israel. They were not professionals, but they were among the people.

What was he asking for? People who can praise God in the beauty of His holiness in the face of uttermost crisis that seems like sure devastation. You don't come to that kind of faith and praise except out of an uncommon relationship that is more than musicality.

See what I mean? And we have not been that insistent nor that jealous. Now, music has a great power. And no one has warned us of that power as Watchman Nee in his book, The Latent Power of the Soul, telling us that the last day's deception will come to us in the form of music.

And that's in 1926 before the use of amplifiers and things. If you could see what we have now, where you don't only hear the music, you feel it, that the decibels are so raised that you can feel the very shaking of it.

That's power, and that power needs to be questioned. The most authentic and moving worship experiences of my life have not come in such context, but have come at one of the buildings down at the lakefront in the early years.

We were just sitting around as the dusk was coming upon us and one brother was strumming on a guitar, John McDonald, and we were just singing softly in the spirit, and we were just transported. My deepest worship experiences have come with quiet and with saints with whom I have relationship and where we're praising God out of an experience of His redemption that we have enjoyed together through trial.

To substitute for that, a worship that can come through musicality and to bring onto the platform newly saved converts who happen to play guitars. As I have observed in an Assemblies of God church in Houston, where they were cracking gum and winking to one another and carrying on looking at the girls while they were playing all of these worship courses and actually dominating the service, and the pastor was captive to their stronghold because he did not raise a question about their primacy.

After all, they're newly saved, they're young people, it will turn off the congregation. And I realized the whole church was captive to a bunch of young punks, newly saved, if saved at all, because they know how to play the guitar and plug in the amplifier.

So if you can call that, maybe I'm giving an exaggerated answer that there are more authentic and pure expressions, but let it not come by our mastery of instruments, but out of His mastery of our life.

Let not the skill exceed the spiritual qualification or be a substitute for it. Let there be skillful players, but let them first be worshipers. Let them be people who know God and have a history with Him and have something to express that comes through their music rather than those who are just skillful.

It's an enormously sensitive question. We know that the first use of the word is in Genesis, the Book of Beginnings, when Abraham takes Isaac up as a sacrifice on the mount, the lad and I will go up yonder and worship, not play choruses.

So we need to be reminded, because the first use of anything in the Scripture is almost invariably a definitive statement, and we have lost this sense. I have often suggested in the preaching of Acts 13, the first apostolic sending, and when he found them worshiping together, the Holy Ghost said, I said, what would you think that he found them not in the midst of their choruses, but he found them in the midst of their silence?

Silence, Stillness, and Knowing God

Can you be in silence with other saints that it constitutes a worship yet more sacred, more ethereal, and more profound than if we had actually lifted our voices? It's not in competition with that, but it may be that in silence and the ability to bear a silence together, not twiddling our thumbs, waiting for the monotony to be broken, because as we see in modern services, it's first this, then that, then the speaker comes to the microphone like a sprinter out of the blocks, that there should be one moment of silence that people might be bored.

So maybe to worship God in silence and together in silence may be the supreme and ultimate expression. So it's something to consider. Well, you see, we're our generation of kids. They can't do the homework unless there's a radio on, TV on, or have their earphones, and now it's come right into the public place, buses, trolleys, airplanes, airports.

You're continually being bombarded by sound as if if it were absent, we would crumble in boredom. I love silence. I'm a strange duck. And I think until we consider silence exquisite, we will not rightly appreciate sound or speaking.

And the drums, there's a brother here who plays drums. I said I'd just come from a fellowship where the drummer was so superb, I had to compliment him. He played a solo on the drums that was a worship.

But what made it so precious was not just a continual rum-a-dum-dum, but a bang, a hit, a cymbal, silence. And then he'd start up again like a staccato, then stop and silence it. It was such an interfusion of silence and percussion that it took your breath away.

So may God restore the dimension of silence, the respect for silence, which we will be able to esteem and to perform if we are not bored, if we know God and know that he's a still, small voice and who says to us, be still and know that I am God.

And many of us have not that knowledge because it comes from God in response to our obedience to be still. And so long as we're moving with our mouths and with our instruments, he's not going to give us this ultimate knowledge of himself.

Be still and know. We don't know how to stop and when to stop. And Paul's going to demonstrate that right now, in knowing when to stop after he makes a significant comment. That brings us right into the subject for today for which everything for now was preliminary, which is the preaching, the sermon, bringing the word of God.

The Sermon as the Center of Worship

So the same brother says, the sermon is the central point that influences all parts of worship. So that kind of relates to what Paul is saying. Rhetoric and emotional appeals become mechanical tricks if they are used consciously.

Maybe we would add not only rhetoric and emotional appeals but humor even. Ingrid has often asked me why I can't be more funny like other speakers. So anything wrong with humor? Not in itself, but if it's used consciously as device to win attention or acceptance, it's a manipulative device, a mechanical trick if it's used consciously to that end.

It is strange fire he writes on God's altar. Confident speech is no proof of the spirit and power of the gospel. What he means is self-confident speech, bumptious, self-assertive, high-blown, slamming the pulpit to underline the importance of your statements.

If your statements are important and are God-given, even a conversational tone will carry them with uttermost authority and conviction. You don't have to raise the decibels to obtain the authority. It's implicit in the word of its gods.

So he says, the passing decades have forged fetters from which the church can hardly escape. We've come into such a framework of hearing preaching of a certain kind that we think it's almost normative, if not definitive, so that the issue of the preached word needs to come into reexamination.

If we are to be the prophetic bearers of the word, to kings, to rulers, to men, to nations, it's got to be a pure word. So we're not just talking about preaching as performance. We're talking about any proclamation of the word that will have weight and conviction has got to be free of our devices, self-conscious devices, because the sermon is the central point that influences all parts of the worship.

It influences everything. So what makes, therefore, the real issue of a real word? He says, it's the vital interrelation to the content that is decisive for the message, and nothing else is. I'll repeat that.

I'm using this for a springboard because not many are writing on a subject like this the vital interrelation to the content. What does that mean? You can preach a word that's perfectly correct and biblically and doctrinally sound, but what is your relationship to that word and to that content?

Are you preaching it because you have clever insight and because it makes a nice set piece and will be impressive? What is your own inner relationship to that word? How much is it the statement of the deeps of your own conviction and passion over the truth that is being communicated?

Or is it just something to which you have only a casual... Yes, you approve it, it's true, you commend it, but it's not a word that is at the heart of your own life. So I like the way he's saying it here.

The vital interrelation to the content is decisive for the message. So you can tell when you hear someone, however correct, what resonates with that word. Is the man just a promulgator? Is he an able commentator giving us a correct word?

Because that will be forgotten. But the word that becomes an event for us issues with a different timber, a different quality that's penetrating. Even long after we forget the content, the reality that was communicated with the content remains and has performed or is continuing to perform its work.

So the relationship of the man to the word, the passion, the identification, the fire... What did Jeremiah say? Your word is fire in my bones. And if it's not that for Jeremiah, it will not be a hammer upon the rock for the hearer.

It's got to be the one for the speaker if it's to be the other for the hearer. And we have been too accustomed to men who are not passionately involved in their own message for the fact of the matter is it's not their message.

It's not their personal message. It's something that the concordance and familiarity with the text or an ability has given them to proclaim, but it goes up like a vapor, has no lasting influence. So we need to be jealous for the vital inner relation to the content.

And that's no small thing. And that's why the dealings of God with proclaimers of the word and with prophetic men is the most searching and the most demanding. If it says, let not many of you desire to be teachers, for you have the higher accountability, what shall we say about not let many of you desire to be prophets?

There the accountability is yet even greater. And Paul and Adrian were at my first speaking on the subject of Israel after a 14-month sabbatical silence that came in Sacramento, California in that season of death that you probably don't even know about when the Lord required the entire Ben Israel community to be dissolved and that not one last soul could remain on those grounds.

And the one who thought that he could, the Lord said, if you don't leave, I'll kill you. And without explanation, this property, the whole ministry, marriage, everything was put into death. And in that season of death, the Lord also had a particular requirement for me.

I was forbidden to speak publicly. No explanation. And in fact, I had no source of livelihood. What's an old crock like me going to do when he's suddenly thrust out of community and has no skill, no trade, no profession?

I couldn't even get a job as a dishwasher. The fact that I had written books or accounted for nothing in a world that does not applaud those things. It was a humiliation unto death. And in that time, the Lord sent me to a Lutheran seminary to compound the death.

But in the time of the seminary, the Lord began to quicken and open the revelation of the mystery of Israel for the church in the last days. And when that thought came to me, wow, what the Lord is revealing to me, not because of my professors, but the inadvertent things that come by being in a seminary environment, the library, the books, that this needs to come to the attention of the church.

At that moment, the phone rang. And a pastor from Sacramento was saying, you don't know me, Ott, but we're praying here in Sacramento that you should come and speak to us a seminar on Israel and the church in the last days.

And exactly that phrase, it was as if the Lord snapped his fingers to say, your sabbatical season is over. Now, you tell me why I was required to desist from all speaking before that speaking. Is the Lord wanting to clear the decks?

Is he wanting to say that this subject that you are now going to be bearing at Sacramento and from thence to other places in the world is of such moment and such consequence it requires a preliminary and preparation of uttermost silence.

From even my other subjects, which I have communicated to you, I have blessed you, my people, you're not allowed to speak anything in preparation for this. It's holy, holy, holy. And in order to speak it, I had to have a certain vital interrelation to that content.

And that interrelation continues and abounds to this very day. So I appreciate what this man is saying and seeing because you know how it is, when you hear something or read something, what you knew in your spirit crystallizes and comes into your consciousness, and yes, that's right, amen.

But this is not just information for me, it's information for all who are called to be proclaimers of the word, especially in the last days, because that word is going to be resisted. The world is not wanting to hear it.

Even the church would rather interpret the tabernacle of David as meaning worship than government because if we understand it as government, the issue ahead for us, the promulgation of that is martyrdom, where if it's worship, the issue ahead for us is enjoyment.

These things are unconscious. Our word is going to be gang-set and contended against, and if it's only an abstract and academic word, however correct, it will fall limply to the ground with a thud. We have to bear some relationship to the word, and so I'm speaking this not only to men who have calling, I'm speaking this to the church that has a calling, for the whole church per se, as church, is a prophetic entity in the world, and though we won't all be speaking, we'll all be lending ourselves to that speaking that issues from us, very much like Peter on the day of Pentecost, rising with the eleven and speaking that message that brought thousands into the kingdom.

Eleven men could not speak at one time. One was the appointed spokesman, but he could not speak with authority of the penetrating kind to turn Israel on its ear with one word and sweep thousands into the kingdom unless there was an agreement, a jointedness.

He rose with the eleven. I don't think they all got up at the same time, but they bore him up. They were with him in that word, and the man at the Gate Beautiful who was born lame, seeing Peter and John, fixing his eyes on them, Peter said to him, silver and gold have we none, but that which we do have in the name of Jesus we give you.

He was the spokesman, but the phenomenon that was being expressed was the unity between these brothers. So I'm saying this for the church. The church itself per se, as the church, has a prophetic call.

It needs to celebrate, respect, give reverence to the phenomenon of the proclamation of the word. And we need, therefore, in that love and jealousy for the word to bring correction to our preachers. And as I have warned congregations many times, if you don't tell your pastor that his voice is becoming professional, how will you know?

Something happens when men lose their conversational tone and begin to slip into some kind of mannerism of oratory that they think is more impressive, but they're losing reality, and they don't even know it.

It's a process. But who's telling them? Only that one who's jealous for the authenticity of the word to say, brother, I don't know, but these last few weeks, there's something that doesn't quite ring true when I hear you, and your voice sounds to me more and more professional, as if you're trying to affect a certain kind of tone.

I loved it better when you were just natural and relaxed and the word had much more penetration. Oh, thank you. I didn't realize that I was slipping into that. I'll see to my condition before the Lord.

So we're in something together. The preacher is not some professional. It's a cold man with a sacred responsibility. The word of God is not merchandise. The issue is not his reputation, nor the entertainment, nor the satisfaction of his ears, but the transaction of God with men, where the issue is both time and eternity and is once and for all and will not be given again.

You don't want to miss it ever, ever, because it will not come again. So when you stand up, as I did in Salmon, Idaho, before a thousand or more people on a Sunday morning, and it was my turn, what do I speak?

And how do I speak it for all that was represented before me on that one occasion? To miss it is to miss it once and for all. So to have that word, to know what God has wanted to open your mouth and to speak, with this identification with the word that makes it a living word and a penetrating word, is no small thing.

And for that, God will bring a death to an entire community. God will enroll you in seminaries loaded with witches and fierce feminists out for your blood and will call you to long seasons of silence and to much more, for so sacred in God's sight is his own word, for he has exalted it above even his own word.

And if we have not that respect and are not willing for the dealings of God to make us the bearers of such a word, we will see the decline of the word and the celebration of things over and above it, which is the way this brother's statement begins.

When the authority of preaching declines, the attempts to make worship liturgical increase. Somehow, it's an automatic reflex action. If the word comes into decline, something else is going to be celebrated above it, even given of God.

The Living God Communicated Through Preaching

So the personal being of the living God emerges from the true word, speaks to man, and creates the encounter which occurs in a preaching that has authority. What a statement. God himself, the living God, the person of God, emerges through the word that speaks to man and creates the encounter.

There's a creative something, a happening, when the true word is going forth before men. God, the creator, is expressing himself and giving not only a content and an information of a subject that might be significant, as, for example, the subject today is preaching itself, but in the subject, he himself is being communicated.

And I believe that when Paul says, when Paul speaks about preaching Christ, he's not meaning that every word must literally be about Christ or use the name of Christ, where some of us want to load up our proclamations with the name of Jesus as if just the multiplication of his name is going to invest our message with a greater blessing.

But you can speak a word and not even mention Christ, and yet it can be so Christ-filled as to communicate dimensions of him even without the explicit mention of his name, for his name is what he is.

And when what he is is being communicated through the word, his name is being communicated even when it's not sounded. Are we preaching Christ, no matter what the subject? Are we communicating God? For how is the knowledge of God to be brought to his people if the sacred heart of the congregation and its holy time together is the word?

If we don't receive it in the word, where then shall we receive it? Worship can bring us into a mood and a sense of God, but the distinctive communication of God as God, as he in fact is in himself and not as we thought him to be, is going to come through the proclamation of the word, that is his word, and brought truly by a man who is identified in himself with that word, the vital interrelation.

The personal being of the living God emerges from the true word, speaks to man, and creates the encounter which occurs in a preaching that has authority. What's the encounter? The encounter is a challenge, some kind of confrontation, some kind of requirement, so that I'm fond of saying, if it's the word of God, it will always require something from the hearer.

The word of God is never something to be enjoyed for itself. Although it's a great enjoyment and a great delight, it will invariably require something from the hearer. It's the process by which we're brought from faith to faith.

Tom was sharing with me yesterday, in a time of crisis and disillusionment of his own life, someone gave him a sack of old tapes, and he reached into the sack and he grabbed one that said, the two Judaisms by Art Katz, and he put that tape on, and it was bye-bye baby.

Everything from that point on was changed. Everything was affected. Everything was brought into new consideration because it was the word of the Lord, and it was communicated in the cassette. And so every word ought to have that capability, that capacity.

And the issue is the man who's proclaiming. So it is the function and task of the whole congregation, here he brings it into the context, to pray and to plead God that this will take place. Lord, give us a word that constitutes an encounter, that brings confrontation, that makes requirements.