Anotich, Apostolic, Sending and Setting — Art Katz

Come and inhabit and possess your possession, and altogether express your great heart, wisdom, understanding. May your voice be heard together with your words, Lord, the familiar accent of our God, the disposition of your Spirit.

And we thank you, Lord, for the remarkable privilege, Christ in us, the hope of glory. Come my God and move your saints to envy that they should not look at the Speaker as if he represents some phenomenon unavailable to themselves that they can only admire at a distance, but to know that the prophetic man not only proclaims but demonstrates the very thing to which the Church itself is called.

Raise us up, my God, lift our understanding, our expectation, our appropriation, for surely the demands of the last days require it. We thank and give you praise in Jesus' name, amen. Praise the Lord.

What didn't notice that was a resurrection prayer. What do you mean by that, Art? I mean by that that it was entirely uncalculated. It's one thing to pray religiously where you form your prayer in your own mind and thought so that it will be acceptable not only to God but to men.

It's another thing simply to open your mouth and trust and to be surprised by what you hear being expressed through you. So I know that that was not my prayer. And I pray equally that these are not my words and that what the Lord prompted somewhere around 4 a .m. this morning is indeed His burden out of Acts chapter 13, the first apostolic sending.

That deserves particular attention because I'm in complete agreement with Watchman Nee on virtually everything, and especially when he says that if you want to understand the things at the end, find their first expression in Scripture, that there's a conjunction between beginnings and ends, and that the first usually contains the paradigm, the pattern that will come to fruition or fulfillment at the end.

So we should have a special interest in the very origins of that which is apostolic. Everybody of course knows that the Greek word means send. An apostle is a sent one. But sent by whom and under what circumstances and to whom ought to be of profound interest for us if we have an intention beyond that which is evangelical, charismatic, and Pentecostal.

I hope we have that intention. For all of those, however precious their history and however much God has had opportunity to express Himself through those, fall short of the glory of God. So I was a discontent Jewish believer by the age, by the time I was five years old in the Lord, I had already passed from a Baptist church.

Why that? Because when I came back from Jerusalem 37 years ago, saved, I was completely wiped out financially having spent everything for the 14 months of travel and went to the first the closest church to which I could walk, which happened to be Baptist.

But when I realized that the pastor not only wrote out his sermons but his prayers and that he had a Bible study group called the Seekers that were yet looking for some truth outside of the faith discussing comparative religions, I sensed I was in the wrong place.

So I went from Baptist to Assemblies of God. I became in due season a charismatic Jewish darling, which I no longer am. And so I've traversed evangelical, Pentecostal, charismatic, full gospel. I've gone through the whole spectrum of modern day movements, and at the end of it, still a deep discontent, a sense that something is yet profoundly absent, maybe even the key.

And could it be community? Could it be that all of these Christian forms still are essentially configured in the world's model and we have only to see the architecture of their churches to recognize that they're set up in auditorium fashion, facing an elevated platform where an overworked and credentialed professional is hard at it, where the people are only too happy to pay the expense that absolves them from the responsibility of their participation.

So far from the pattern of Paul expressed in Corinthians, that when you come together, each one has—look at the faith of Paul—each one has, he knows it, a tongue, an interpretation, a prophecy, a revelation, a hymn.

We come and each one does not have, each one has not sought to have, each one is content to look up to the platform and enjoy the anonymity and escape from responsibility. Such a people are already disposed, then, to escape.

And so when the rapture theory comes along, only of less than two centuries old, it finds such lodging, such acceptance in Christendom that it becomes virtually sacrosanct and unchallenged. Even to raise a question about the validity of a pre-tribulation rapture, which the Church Fathers never expected and has become so widely understood and received as being the very tenet of the faith, shows how disposed the Church is to escape.

I didn't plan to say any of these things. That's when I'm at my best, when I have no plans. So can you see that we need to have a particular interest in that which is called apostolic? I knew something was wanting, and until that something is supplied, the Church could not be to Israel what it ought.

How shall it move Israel to jealousy if what we have is predictable and something equal or less even than what Jews are able without the Holy Spirit? Their Sabbath services with eloquent rabbis and Hebrew liturgy and the various other things that they enjoy equal or exceed what we can produce.

So it's not going to be our services, per se, that will move Israel to jealousy. But leave it to Paul to make these astounding comments and give no explanation at all. So we're still looking for what it is that could conceivably move Jews to jealousy, of whom Paul says, they are the enemies of the gospel for your sake.

They're not just indifferent, they are actually hostile. My mother is a wonderful case in point. God bless her. Thirty-seven years of active hostility against the faith that had transformed her son. Stubborn, unwilling to see, look here, proudly Jewish.

She would die a Jew. Well, she did, but she died a believing Jew. Only ten days before her death in her 95th year. But what it took to get her to call upon the name of the Lord, that her first prayer after that was, God, if I've done anything wrong, forgive me.

My mother's last year was spent in the Christian community, Ben Israel, in northern Minnesota. We abducted her from Florida in the month of December and brought her to northern Minnesota, which is our winter, which is madness.

We could have been sued, thrown in jail, but it was the Lord. She balked and kicked all the way, but we got her there, we fixed up a place for her, and in the last couple of months of her life, living with oxygen, she required around-the-clock care and the ladies of our community provided it.

And I was next door, available at her beck and call at any time. And somewhere between two and four o 'clock in the morning, ten days before her death, I was called, and, Lord, come quickly, your mother is almost hysterical, there's a battle on for her soul, she's seeing demons.

I came down, and sure enough, she was in that condition, and out of me poured one messianic prophecy after another. I didn't know that I knew all of those verses, all of those scriptures, one after another.

My mother was inundated in the Word of God about the Messiah, until finally she had no alternative but to call upon His name, and did. And then lived for ten days to give evidence that something very authentic had taken place, because the very next day she said, the way is extremely narrow, what about the others?

And then the next day she said to me, do you know how much you're loved by God? And then when I had to make my overseas trip, eight weeks in Europe, Russia, and those places, I went with my mother's blessing for a first time.

So I know something personally, I've been a missionary to the Jews, that's how the Lord brought me out of teaching and into full-time ministry at the age of 39, was to be trained as a missionary to the Jews, and became in my fourth year the director of this Baptist mission to the Jews in New York City, today called the Chosen People Ministry.

So in my own home city, I knew what it means to be near and yet far. I knew what it meant to be in the midst of two and a half million Jews, and that New York City is the effectual Jerusalem of world Jewry, and yet not have access, yet to be stopped at the door by the doormen, and that the Jewish community is well-insulated, well-protected.

It's not like the days of old, where an Apostle Paul could come into a synagogue and be in vited to share. If ever I have occasion to speak to Jews, it's at universities, and I've been to many of them, including my own, where Jews are always to be found out of proportion to their number in institutions of learning, because we are motivated, if not driven to success, and know that that's the route.

And so when they see a speaker advertised by the name of Katz, one of the honored names indicating Levitical origin, priesthood, speaking on the gospel as an ex-Marxist radical, it brings them out. And so I've had a history with my own people.

Do I ever know them? And I have been one and am one. My first thirty-seven years was the classic prototype of the modern Jew, antagonistic to Christ, not just mildly indifferent, but actively antagonistic.

I thought as an atheist, I ought to be doing something to rid the world of these old wives' tales and fables and myths, so that they can face the reality and know that this is a world in which we have to make it for ourselves and by ourselves.

So, praise God, that one of my former students and her mother prayed for this servant with tears, knowing the mother said, you're an atheist and a radical, and my daughter came home every afternoon from school weeping over you.

So a woman who had never met me nor seen me prayed in such a way that the hound of heaven pursued me for fourteen months with a pack on my back when I had come to a final crisis of a moral and ideological kind where my gods, with a small g, had failed.

Marxism had failed. The Soviet Union was not, what's the word, utopia, but a prison house and numbers had been slaughtered in the programs of a Stalin, and all of the revelations that came out of the horror of that system in the early fifties and sixties led to the disillusionment of men like myself ideologically.

And then the Lord knows how to bring us Jews down. He gives you, for example, a German wife who was a member of the Hitler Youth that I met while a G .I. in Germany who was also schizophrenic, living on the other side of the moon and completely outside the realm of what is rational, what is ordered, that has to do with common sense, good will.

It was an entirely new phenomenon for me. As intractable as the Islamic world is for Israel, so was my German wife for me. Good will and intelligence was not going to save us. It was a horror of unbelievable conflict because in the frenzy of her schizophrenic disorder occasioned by World War II itself, the way in which she expressed that frustration was against me in the one place I was hot as a rock, in the one place where I was vulnerable, my Jewishness.

So I had enacted under my own roof something of the anti-Semitic thing for which my people had been recent victims of Germans, now taking place under my own roof with a German wife, and I was not able to respond kindly.

There's where my confidence in man and good will and reason was destroyed. So here I'm asking all of these students ultimate questions of meaning, and I'm unable myself to answer any. And in that crisis to which world Jewry is being progressively brought, I was brought 37 years ago and forced up and out from California, my profession, my place of comfort and security, and thrust out into the nations with a pack on my back, living for 14 months with what I could carry.

And that opened up a whole dimension of reality that would otherwise have been lost to me. It's one thing to travel first or second or even third class. It's another thing to travel by the side of the road as a beggar waiting to be picked up by whomsoever will, and carrying with you the last traces of your humanistic assumption about human brotherhood.

But where is it when you need it? And waiting in the drizzle and the rain, forlorn, angry at a world that has failed, and is not only not going anywhere, but going toward its doom and its destruction.

Because you knew that the atomic annihilation, the breakdown of values, the corruption, collapse of society was inevitable, and you had no answer. Your ideologies, your philosophies were valueless, because if you couldn't solve the paradox of your own marriage, how are you going to save the world?

See how far God will go with us, Cubists? But I was picked up by you know who? Remarkable saints. And I'm trying to find one in particular now for 37 years from Switzerland, and I've never been able to find anybody who ever heard of him or knows of him, and I gave them all the information that I had, whose address I carried in my wallet, which wallet I lost when I got to Egypt and was pickpocketed my first day on a bus.

I've never been able to find Edwin. Remarkable man, who knew about the artist Durer, D-U-R-E-R, who was an architect, artist, he knew about the psychologist who was the son of a minister, a Protestant minister, whose name now escapes me.

He was, that is to say, he was not a narrow, cardboard, cut-out Christian. He had an expanse of knowledge and breadth of understanding of art, of literature, of the world. Remarkable man, and in conversation with me at a crisis moment after he had drawn out my entire heart of frustration, futility, and hopelessness, and I looked at this Gentile who was not in any way impressive to look at with my arms folded over my chest, coming to a final end of myself, thinking, what can this man say?

And he said, Artie said, do you know what it is that the world needs? I thought, well, at least he knows how to ask the questions. But what can he answer that I have not already seen or dealt with at universities or Marxist institutes?

There's nothing new under the sun. So I'm waiting to hear some conventional reply that I would walk away from completely untouched and die, and he said, in that one moment of time when time stops and a word comes, Art, what the world needs is for men to wash one another's feet.

And down I went. Art, did you literally fall out of your chair? No. I continue to sit there like this, giving no impression that I was in any way affected. And you need to know that because in the confrontation you are going to have with Jews, and I'm not speaking about the present nuclear Jewish community here in this city, but those that will come, don't be disappointed if they seem to be unaffected by what you say or even react angrily or in a hostile manner is not the evidence that you failed but that you've succeeded.

Don't look at their faces. We Jews are so intimidating. But what the man didn't know was that while I sat there overtly unmoved, inwardly, my spirit had fallen out of my body and was whimpering and weeping on the floor.

Because in a moment of time when he said that, I had a flash of inspiration of all of the arrogant hot shot art catchers of the world that are ready to save it and end up by bringing it into rivers of blood.

And that this washing of one another's feet, of which I had never heard, how should I have heard of it? I had never read a New Testament. The fact of the matter is, university graduate teacher, I had never read an Old Testament.

You say, well, Art, weren't you a bar mitzvahed? Yeah, at the age of 13. And I chanted my little piece out of the prophets appropriate to that Shabbat selection, but I didn't understand a word of it. We didn't learn something to understand it.

We learned something to perform it. So I'm hearing, wash one another's feet. What a devastating concept. And I saw somehow by the eye of the inner man, the proud men who are going to save the world bending and washing the feet of the enemy.

At that time, it would have been teachers washing the feet of administrators, parents, children, their parents. Today it would be an Israeli washing the feet of a Palestinian. I realized in one moment that spirit of humility would save the world without any program, without any shedding of blood.

And before I could recover from the enormous impact of that one statement, this man went on to speak to me about the gospel of Jesus Christ in German. So because of the inadequacy of my German and the limitation of his English, the few words were yet more cogent and powerful, so powerful that when he finished with me, I wanted to protest and say, hey, that's for the Gentiles.

We have our God, you have your God, we have our book, you have your book. I had no voice. I could not register complaint. And I knew that I knew I was hearing the words of truth and life. Well, you can buy that book, and it's soon to be published in Chinese.

Why? Because I think there's a whole generation in China who have come now to a place to which I had been brought 37 years ago, ideological disillusionment, who are now open to consider an alternative, even the unthinkable alternative, the reality of God himself.

And what makes that book so powerful is that it's not a retrospective book where a man thinks, well, 20 years later, 30, I'll write what I remember. It's the actual journal that I carried 37 years ago, making my entries of a man picking me up off the side of the road.

It's an extraordinary book. And the literary quality of that book is so unusual that the publisher in England, Hotted and Stoughton, the three-century-old distinguished publishing house, told me, the editor of the religious books department, when your book came to my desk, Art, I realized that the literary quality of that book was so unusual, it would never be a commercial success, but that it required one edition from us, and they published it.

So when I later came to New Zealand, Australia, other places in the British Commonwealth, the book had preceded me. So I praise God that it will come out in Chinese, which may well be a door of opening for this servant into that nation at some future time when they're ready for my kind of word.

So bless the Lord. You love the word apostolic? I say until it evokes saliva. You don't love it sufficiently. You've got to drool over the word. And I know that you Chinese are too circumspect to be that abandoned to anything, but I'm asking you to cultivate such a love, such a jealousy for this word that lies beyond definition, that is the summation of the glory of the faith itself, that Jesus, being the high priest and the apostle of our confession, bears that designation.

Any church that is less or other than what is apostolic necessarily falls short of the glory of God. And until the church that bears his name is apostolic, we will not move Israel to envy nor defeat the principalities and powers of the heir that still continue, though having suffered an initial setback at the crucifixion of Jesus, still continue to be the usurping false rulers of this world and the gods of this age.

Only a church that has come to apostolic maturity and authority can recognize and discern this invisible spirit reality and have the authority to defeat it. So it's remarkable that the same church that has come to a place that can move Jews to jealousy is by that virtue the same church that can defeat the powers of the heir.

And in fact, meeting Israel and the Jew in the last days is the defeat of the powers. For why should a Gentile church extend itself sacrificially for Jews who have not only not necessarily done anything for the Gentiles but have been the object of their envy or displeasure or resentment?

This is totally to be unexpected. It's unnatural that a Gentile should be willing to bear sacrifice, even the possible loss of life, for a Jew. But when a Gentile will be brought to such a place by the operation of God through the Spirit, the end of the age has come.

Because not only will that Gentile believer be willing for such sacrifice but bear it ungrudgingly and even rejoice over it as being privileged. If you can understand that and understand me, really an impressive congregation.

But, it's being recorded and we'll come back to some of these statements that I'm making and I'm just throwing it out as the Lord gives it. So, I'm saying all that to say this, let's roll up our sleeves and get in to the text.

Let's become competent exegetes, which means rightly dividing the Word of God, drawing out its meaning, comparing Scripture with Scripture, looking upon every nuance of the Word. Why does God choose this Word rather than another?

Why does He take a certain Word and repeat it two or three times? Nothing is haphazard in the Word of God and we have been reading it much too casually if we have been reading it at all. As a matter of fact, we have been reading it only as Bible study and not reading it with the urgency and desperation of a people living on the sharp edge of collision with the world and its opposition and persecution for whom the Scriptures were originally intended.

Those to whom these epistles came or are described in the Book of Acts were not receiving material for Bible study. They were receiving instruction for life under hazard and oppression. And when our circumstances will again be comparable to theirs at the end as it was at the first, the Scriptures will come into a new dimension of cogency and significance that they do not now have for us.

As we say in Pentecostal circles, can you say amen? Okay. That's about the most elaborate introduction to a message I've ever given. It's so elaborate, it's a half a dozen messages already in itself. Okay.

Acts chapter 13. Now, in the church at Antioch, you can read Singapore. Because this was the thought with which I was awakened at four this morning. There's a correspondence between Antioch and Singapore.

As you'll see as we read on. Antioch is not Jerusalem. Jerusalem is an exclusively Jewish church. Antioch is cosmopolitan. Antioch contains a myriad of nationalities, ethnic groups, racial origins. And that's all the more profound because it's one thing for Jews as Jews to come to a place of agreement.

But the diversity of races and nationalities and ethnic origins that had been historically at each other's throat in ancient and biblical times for them to constitute a church together is all the more significant.

That's why I think there's hope for Singapore. Now, in the church at Antioch, not at the church, in the church, see how a little two-letter word is full of meaning. These were not casual attendees coming to a place for services.

The church was their life. Their professions and occupations and businesses were mere secondary enablement. Their place in the church was the purpose for their being and their salvation. That's the difference between being at the church and in the church.

And until you're in, in that kind of fullness and recognition that this is the purpose for your life and being, you're only at, and therefore Antioch inwaits. We're in the church. Who? Prophets and teachers.

Barnabas, Simeon, who was called Niger. Lucius of Cyrene, Menaean, a member of the court of Herod the ruler, and Saul. Wow. What a spectrum. Just look at the nationalities that are represented there. Barnabas and Saul are Hebrews.

Simon, who was called Niger, is evidently an African because the word means black. Lucius of Cyrene, one of the Mediterranean ethnic nationalities. Menaean, a member of the court of Herod, might even have been a Roman or a mixed bag person.

Why does the Scripture give us these details? Why is it important that God inspires Luke, who is the careful author of the book of Acts, to let us know the diversity of nationalities, races, ethnic groups that compose the church?

Because that's the genius of the church. That's what makes the church an apostolic setting, that anyone who is sent forth from there represents the reality that is there. And when God says, it's time now to send, separate unto me, it's men who reflect and bring to the world what has been obtained at Antioch, namely, an agreement, an unfamed love, an authentic unity that is not ecumenical or polite.

Why? How do you know that, Art? Because it says, while they were worshiping the Lord and fasting. It does not mean singing choruses with the overhead projector. I like that. But here, worshiping has a much deeper significance.

Because if there was unresolved difficulty, if there were yet a residue of animosity and unreconciled racial or ethnic differences, or fear, black and white, Jew and Gentile, their worship would have been stunted.

It would have been artificial. It would have been synthetic. It would have been choruses. Worship is a deep statement of agreement with God and with men. That cross has a horizontal member as well as a vertical.

You know the great legend of Columbo, who was the missionary to Scotland, when Scotland was nothing but a pagan jungle of warring factions? And even to this day, something of that remains. And Columbo was the missionary from Ireland, long before the Protestant Reformation.

And it says, according to legend, he came with a group, a company of believers, and they lived for two years off the coast of Scotland on an island. And at a certain time, evidently, the Lord moved upon him then to come to this mainland, and there was a double-thick fortress, a bastion, impregnable against any penetration coming from outside.

And according to the legend, Columbo made the sign of the cross. And when he made that sign, the gate fell down or opened by itself. That the key of entry was the authentic sign of the cross, not as a little religious genuflection, but as a statement of the authenticity of what is represented when you point up to the Lord and point this way toward men.

There was something in that band of souls with him that was tempered and true. The horizontal member was as authentic as the vertical, and in fact, the one will drive you to the other. If you're earnest about the relationship with each other as saints, you'll find out in short order that your patience and goodwill, sympathy or other human qualities that are okay for a Sunday service are not sufficient for the kind of depth of relationship that distinguishes the Church as the Church, and that we need God for grace, patience, wisdom, long-suffering, for who is more a trial than a fellow believer?

My greatest distresses and vexations and opposition and suffering has not come from unbelieving Jews. That's nothing to get kicked in the shins or be spit at. My greatest suffering is in the Church, in the naivety, the immaturity, the subjectivity of the saints, each one having their own opinion and scriptures to support it.

It drives you to madness. Where is reality? Where is objective truth? This one sees it this way, that one sees it that way, and you've got to live with that, not just on Sunday, but Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, for those that believe, we're together.

Until we are in that kind of relationship, saints, that will take more than Sunday services, more than 10 ,000 Sunday services to obtain, there will be no proper vertical alignment with God, for it's the desperation and need that is provoked by earnest living together that drives us to God and an intensity and depth by which we would not otherwise have sought Him.

Are you following me? I'm enjoying the English language this morning. Every word is precise. There's no fat on this. There's no flab. This is lean. So I hope that you've been schooled and prepared to follow such communication.

For example, one of the things that was painful for me in my Pentecostal earlier time was the monthly communion in which we were all given a little plastic cup and a little wafer and waited for the signal when we would eat and drink together.

Well, we may have gestated and taken in something at the same moment, but it was anything but together. Alongside, yes, but together. Those that believe we're together is a much deeper statement than the proximity to one another in pews.

So there I'm sitting with a stranger on one side, a stranger on the other side, holding my cup and wafer. It was an ordeal, not a blessing. But when we came to community, it wasn't once a month. It became daily, as in fact is my practice even now.

Daily communion. Why? Because we needed the impartation afresh of the life of God expressed in the bread and in the wine, which are much more than symbols. Symbols will never nourish you. But the life of God in the substance of the bread and the spirit of God in the substance of the wine mediates, brings something for me, as your faith is so be it unto you, that was necessary and vital because we found out that being nice guys was not enough after the first two weeks.

We could be nice guys for the first week or two. After that, we ran out of patience, sympathy, love. We needed all of the attributes of God to be to each other what we must in the intensity of what church is when it becomes community.

And until you become that, you'll not be able to receive the Jews that come. It may well be that the Jews that come is God's provision to compel the church to an apostolic mode of being that it would not otherwise have sought.

Because frankly, we prefer privacy. We prefer anonymity. We prefer merely to be alongside than to be together. They worshipped the Lord together with fastings. Not only were they different in their racial and ethnic origins and their histories of those things that had characteristically divided men, and now they were so unified that they could worship together, but they were also different in their callings, prophets and teachers.

And if you think that those callings are compatible, you don't know. A teacher has scarce patience for a prophetic man. A prophetic man sees the large picture, the significance, the hidden things, but very careless in terms of line upon line, precept upon precept.

And the teacher, so painstaking in his fidelity to the world, can't see beyond his nose. One is lost in the details, the other in the larger view. And that is the very nature that God himself has created and intended in those callings.

So how do these two worship the Lord together is as much the question of how being Jew or Gentile worship the Lord together. There needs to be a basis for reconciliation even in the callings of God. That can only take place at Antioch, not because of its geographic location, except that being where it was geographically, it reflected and brought in the whole composition of diverse races, ethnic groups, nationalities that gave the church its genius.

The first apostolic sending is not out of Jerusalem, it's out of Antioch. And so I need to ask, where are we here? This is Singapore. Is Singapore an Antioch in the intention of God? I know in the intention of men it should be a great commercial center, but in the intention of God, what does he intend for the diversity that is represented here, ethnically and nationally?

Does it have the potential again to configure in such a way a reality of authentic union that is not, what's the word, ecumenical, that is not religiously polite, that has not come cheaply nor easily without men first bringing to light and to the surface the deep and hidden things that they have taken in with their mother's milk?

I can't believe that Chinese believers have forgiven the Japanese, maybe politely, but in the deeps, without some first bringing out even things more deep than you yourself recognize. Do you know that there came a time when I met with Jewish believers, all of whom were in ministry, in Brooklyn, New York, we had a time of seeking the Lord together, and the Lord showed us that without exception, every one of us still bore deep-seated resentment and hostility against Christians and against Gentiles.

Be grateful that the Lord bore deliverance in that day. Or the words that I'm speaking to you today would be the same, only they would be barbed. There would be a hook in them. I would be unconsciously expressing through the words a hostility still resident against Gentiles and against the Church.

It took a deliverance. I didn't realize how deep was this animosity. Why should it be otherwise? My mother only spoke about them, the goyim, the Gentiles, them, the enemy. They are different. Other. And even though I could shun that off in my liberal view of tolerance for all men, still, the spirit of it, you hear it, you drink it, you take it in with your mother's milk, with the air.

There are deep things. Ecumenicism is a fraud. It's a political, religious hoax. It's altogether superficial and cheap that we're going to hug someone with a turnaround collar and that will affect a real statement of agreement.

God's after something much deeper. You know what he's after? He's after the same reality of relationship in the Church with each other in their diversity as the Godhead enjoys with each person of the Godhead, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, that we should have in ourselves the same quality of relationship, forbearance, love, and deference as the persons of the Godhead have one to another, the Father to the Son, the Son to the Father, the Holy Spirit to the Son.

God wants to see replicated on the earth the genius of what he is in heaven. As someone said, God himself is a sweet company. I want to tell you, dear saints, you don't come from polite religiosity and tolerant acceptance and ecumenical union to this reality without pain, without a suffering, without the cross.

God is the God of truth and not feigned and superficial imitation. The Church is the ground and pillar of truth, not only in its doctrine, but what it is in itself. It's a suffering before it's a glory.

That's why we prefer ecumenical. That's why we prefer privatistic lifestyles. That's why we prefer alongside rather than together. I've even raised the question of whether the spirit that has been celebrated in this charismatic generation is actually the same that was poured out on Pentecost, because I don't see the corresponding depth of change wrought in contemporary believers by their charismatic experience.

It does something for them personally. It improves, perhaps, the atmosphere of their meetings. But where are the economic statements where no man thinks that the thing which he has is his own? Those that believed were together in an economic and social quality of life that did not require for society to bring care.

There was not one among them that had need. Those that had sold it and laid the proceeds at the feet of the apostles. There's a generosity, a magnanimity, an ability to be remarkably gracious that came with the baptism in the Holy Spirit that I do not see in a corresponding way in what has been celebrated in this charismatic generation.

Because what is the Holy Spirit but God? It's the ruach, breath, ha-kodesh of holiness. It's what God is in himself. He's an expansive, magnanimous, outpouring, generous, gracious God. So to see a church that is, as we say in America, living close to the vest, watching jealously for its own self-interest, living guarded lives and not open to one another, even in their marriages, let alone to those in the congregation, how is that the expression of his spirit?

The quality of life known in the early church was so other than what Jews had ever known that a Greek word had to be employed to describe it, koinonia. It was a quality of fellowship, of sharing, of profuse abandonment, of a givingness, of an outpouring that distinguished the church, that even the world around them had to acknowledge, look how they love one another.

It was visible. That's what prevailed at Antioch. And when that prevails, then God can say, separate unto me a piece of this that I can send it out into the world and replicate the reality of Antioch in the places where I send these men, who will then turn the world upside down.