The Knowledge of God in Actuality — Bryan Anthony

Lord, we desire you. We want to know you, not as men have set you forth, but as you are. So we ask this evening, Lord, that you would open up to us the scriptures. Open up to us by the spirit of understanding, the revelation of your son.

We ask, Lord, that the anointing oil would be upon the speaker and upon the hearer. We ask for the increase of the knowledge of God. Brood over us, Holy Spirit. Move upon us this evening. What would you have to say to the church, Lord?

What would you have to say this evening as we set our souls before you and before the scriptures with a jealousy for the knowledge of God? Lord, who is adequate for these things? Who is sufficient to speak of you?

But we have the mind of Christ. So we ask that you would open up the spirit of wisdom and revelation and the intimate knowledge of yourself as set forth in the scriptures. Speak to us this evening, Lord.

Your children are listening. All right, saints, if you could turn to Jeremiah, the fifth chapter, I said the sixth because we're actually at the very end of the fifth chapter. If you need a drink in between the message time, there's drinks in the kitchen.

So help yourself. Jeremiah chapter five. I have a particular burden this week. The second week in the five-week cycles that we're opening up the scriptures together, the subject matter is the very broad theme of the knowledge of God.

And in fact, the theme is more broad than we could ever know. But if you, just to give you an understanding of how these Friday nights are coming together, we have these five principal themes. The first, as we spoke on last week, is the man Christ Jesus and the gospel of the cross.

The second is the knowledge of God. The third is the mystery of Israel and the church in the last days. The fourth is, someone help me, anyone remember? My mind is drawing a blank. The fourth, I can't even remember.

I know the fifth is a gleanings from the great cloud of witnesses where we'll be giving a one-hour statement on the life of different saints from throughout church history. And the fourth is slipping my mind for some reason.

But anyhow, you can check the website on that. But what I wanted to say was, we have these general themes that in reality, you can't even begin to brush in one sitting. And so I'm not systematically laying out a teaching.

I'm just going throughout the course of my week with in the back of my mind that at the end of the week, a word needs to be delivered on the knowledge of God. And so whatever comes to me in my own devotional time throughout the week, whatever comes just throughout the course of life in that particular week, I'm seeing the Lord just tie things together.

So this week, at the beginning of the week, I knew that we'd be opening up the scriptures on some passage in relation to the pursuit of the knowledge of God, or just simply the knowledge of God. And at the beginning of the week, the verse came to me out of 1 Corinthians 15, which we'll get to.

The Knowledge of God and the Corruption of Sin

But the theme that emerged today in prayer was the knowledge of God in relation to sin. And so I'm particularly burdened. Last night, I found out that a senior pastor who's been a senior pastor here in Kansas City for 25 years of an evangelical congregation, a congregation of 5 ,000 members, fell into some kind of immorality with a gal that had been on staff there for years, married man, and he had to resign.

They didn't disclose all the details. I don't really care to know the details. But my heart was broken last night when I heard this. And 25 years of preaching in an evangelical congregation, 5 ,000 members.

After 25 years, he's resigning. I don't know what the result will be with his marriage. I hope for a recovery of his own heart in the Lord and a recovery of his relationship with his wife. And I hope, I have the highest hopes for full redemption, not necessarily in terms of ministry, but just in terms of his own life.

But my heart is broken because this passage came back to me when I heard that last night out of 1 Corinthians 15. And I'll quote it, but don't go there yet. We'll get to it. Paul is speaking his great, giving his great statement in 1 Corinthians on the resurrection of the dead.

1 Corinthians 15 is the magnum opus in the scriptures on the apostles' teaching of the resurrection of the dead. And he's bringing it up because the church at Corinth is actually, many of the saints in the church at Corinth are questioning the reality of the resurrection itself.

Was it a literal event that Jesus' resurrection really happened? Some are asking, is there going to be a resurrection from the dead, from the saints? That's the more prevalent question they're asking.

They're doubting what the apostles have already set forth. And that's the issue that Paul is addressing. But in the midst of that great statement on the resurrection where Paul is saying, if Christ has not been raised from the dead, and if there is no resurrection from the dead for us, then your faith is in vain.

All of our labors are in vain. This whole thing is meaningless. In the midst of that great statement on the resurrection, Paul gives this statement. He says, become sober-minded as you ought. Actually, he gives a little proverb from outside of the scripture.

He gives a quotation. It's a proverb which says, do not be deceived. Bad company corrupts good morals. And then he says, become sober-minded as you ought and stop sinning, for some have no knowledge of God.

And I speak this to your shame. He writes this to a group of believers at Corinth who are questioning the resurrection. Of course, they had other moral issues going on in their community. There's issues of immorality.

There are issues of strife and comparison, one with another, arrogance, and other things that are damaging that community, bad doctrine. But Paul gives this statement in the midst of his magnum opus on the resurrection of Christ and the resurrection of the dead.

Become sober-minded as you ought and stop sinning, for some have no knowledge of God. I speak this to your shame. Now, that statement from Paul itself seems archaic. It seems out of keeping with modern ministerial wisdom.

Why would you even speak anything to believers to their shame? Isn't that just, aren't you just giving something heavy, Paul? What is your issue? What is your problem? Haven't you taken the course on how to do counseling?

Why would you speak anything to a group of believers to their shame? Well, the reason is because the apostle is grieved over the condition of this church. In fact, in the second letter that we have record of 2 Corinthians in chapter 11, he makes the statement about all of his sufferings because they were comparing him to these men that Paul called super apostles.

They were men who claimed to have a higher and better gospel even than Paul. So Paul is challenging the saints at Corinth with his credentials as an apostle, which are not that he has a title or not that he has a large following, but that he has scars on his back and tear stains on his cheeks.

That's what Paul is bringing out. I have greater sufferings. I have labored all the more than these men. Do I not have a place at least for you to lend me your ear? You're discounting and questioning my own apostleship, but you've forgotten that the scars on my back bear testimony to the fact that you are my epistle in the Lord.

So Paul is giving a statement that what I have declared to you is foundational to such an extent that even if an angel appeared to you and declared another gospel than the one which you heard from me, it's a false gospel.

It's not to be received. Look at the scars on my back. Look at the time I've spent in your midst. Look at the fact that I've not only given you the gospel, but I've given you myself. Those are the kinds of phrases that he uses.

But he says in 2 Corinthians 11, not only do I have all of this accumulation of sufferings, which bear witness to the fact that I'm a sent one from heaven to you, not only do I have all of those sufferings, but I bear in my internal soul daily a grief over the condition of all the churches.

He says, in a sense, perhaps greater than all of the external sufferings that I've endured are the internal sufferings that I bear on behalf of these saints who are being led to, who are being led astray in various ways by strange doctrines, by immorality, by other issues that are causing them to deviate from the foundation of the knowledge of God as he is.

Returning to the Foundational Knowledge of God

While I was walking outside and praying this afternoon, I had a little phrase pop into my heart, the knowledge of God in his actuality. Who is he? What is he like? What have the prophets and apostles set him forth as being?

This is the most crucial question that the church must ask in these days, in an hour of strange gospels emerging and having such a heavy flow over the airwaves of extreme prosperity gospels of, what's the word?

Slipping my mind. What are the, not prosperity, what's the other prevalent thing? The emergent groups. Yeah, I don't know. My brain is a little slow this evening, but the emergent gospels, the taking back, one of the recent bestsellers, Love Wins, which gives such a distorted view of the love of God that it would discount judgment and eternal punishment altogether.

It's removing or diluting or polluting the foundational realities that the prophets and apostles have set forth. So when we ask the question of the knowledge of God, we must necessarily return to those foundational men upon whom those revelations came and whom the Lord entrusted for the pinning out of our scriptures.

I was with, when I was on the fire department, fancy that, when I was on the fire department, one of my drivers used to ask me, because at sundown, I would go into the back room and open up the scriptures and I would lay in bed.

It would be one of the first times at this particular company that I would get rest. And so I would lay on the bed there and read the scriptures and he would often make statements like this. Purtle, what is the deal with you in that book?

How many times have you read that anyway? I said, I don't know, I haven't counted. He said, but you've read it all the way through. I said, yeah. He said, what is it? Does the story change in between readings or something like that?

You know, what's the big deal with that book? He said, don't you know? And I said, oh, you have no idea. I said, this book transcends human wisdom. He said, yeah, whatever. He said, that book was written by men.

And I think he was expecting maybe a fundamentalist response from me along these lines. No, it wasn't, it was written by God. But my response instead was this. Oh yeah, I agree, it was written by men.

And he was a bit startled, he looked at me. I said, but they were men of an entirely different order and nature than you. And of an entirely different maturity and depth than me. I said, these men knew God as he is.

And that's why I read this book. It was written by men, but men of what kind? Men who heard the Lord, men who knew him as he is, and men who had a divine calling and responsibility to set him forth as he is, in a way that would be foundational for the whole history of Israel and the church and the whole future of redemptive experience for mankind.

Why am I saying all of that? Because I believe we've gone looking in every nook and cranny of the earth, within every movement and conference and new book that has hit the shelves in hopes of finding the knowledge of God.

But we've neglected the foundational men who actually had the knowledge of God. And not only did they bear it and have it, and not only were they possessed by it, but they were the ones ordained by the Lord to set it forth for our foundation.

The Church's Need for a Recovery of God's Holiness

So thinking of this minister who has just fallen into immorality after 25 years of pastoring a 5 ,000 member congregation and had to resign. And thinking also of a report that I received a week ago of a quite well-known charismatic leader who was in Europe to do a conference on revival and who went to a pub and got drunk out of his mind and was speeding 80 or 90 miles an hour down the road and crashed into another vehicle just within the last few weeks.

It's not a predicament of Baptist or charismatic. It's the condition of the church. And these days we are radically in need of the knowledge of God in his actuality. As he is, we've lost the fear of the Lord.

We've lost a love for God as the prophets and apostles have set him forth. And we're fancying for ourselves a gospel and a Jesus after our own liking that does not require what the apostles and prophets said he required of us.

Nor does he, nor does it promise what the apostles and prophets have promised in all of the joyous glory of who God is. Someone else, as Tozer said, a God whom our fathers knew not has set up camp in the house of the Lord.

And we need a recovery of the revelation of God as the prophets and apostles have set him forth. If it sounds redundant, I don't care because we haven't heard it enough. We haven't considered it enough and our lives testify to that neglect.

I'm broken this evening. My heart is broken. I've been weeping today over this man who has fallen. I have high hopes for him, but I've been weeping in recent months over men who are considered to be the primary leaders of the prophetic movement in the nineties who had fallen into gross immorality and sin.

And listen, this is not me sitting on a high horse and pointing a finger. This is what I feel is an identification with the brokenness of Jesus himself over his people, over the church that men who had perhaps many of them even authentic gifts of the spirit as did the church at Corinth could fall headlong into strange doctrines or gross immorality as a lifestyle is a statement that the knowledge of God, the foundational knowledge of God has withered in the church or in fact never been there in many of our lives.

Jeremiah's Burden Over False Prophecy

Jeremiah was bearing this grief over his people Judah in his day and we see it articulated in the fifth chapter. I wanna read it and I wanna open up something from this scholar that I believe will be crucial for us to hear.

Verse 31, verses 30 and 31. Some of the scholars I read today said that these two verses seem to jump in as out of nowhere, almost as if they don't flow in total continuum with the verses before. Well, they know more than I know about the original text, but all I know is these two verses are striking my soul these days.

Jeremiah 5, 30 and 31. William Holliday called these two verses, the prophets and priests reject their calling. It says an appalling and horrible thing has happened in the land. The prophets prophesied falsely and the priests rule on their own authority and my people love it so, but what will you do at the end of it?

For the prophet, what was happening in Judah was an appalling and a horrible thing. The prophets were prophesying falsely and the priests were ruling of their own authority. I wanna read from William Holliday, what he said about this, from this Hermonia commentary.

So just bear with me and we'll just trust that the spirit of the Lord can carry us through these passages. And I'm trusting that the Lord will bring a necessary grace for us to take this in, to recognize the hour that we live in, to recognize the condition of his people and to cast our hearts more entirely upon him for the attainment of the knowledge of God, which will be necessary for the saints to be the saints in these last days.

Great shakings are coming and even many are upon us already and it will require the virgins to be found as the wise ones and not as the foolish ones. The oil that they are to gather is not merely power for demonstration of miracles, though it is that the oil in the larger sense is the gathering up, the accumulation, the attaining of the knowledge of God by the Holy Spirit, that we would know him intimately, that we would walk with him day by day in the midst of prosperity and in the midst of poverty, that we would have an abiding knowledge of God so that the saints could be the saints in the earth.

We've lost our prophetic distinctive saints. We've lost the edge that is upon those who are hearing the Lord and who are speaking on behalf of the Lord and who are living and abiding in the Lord in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation.

The distinctive holiness that marked the prophets and apostles of old has left us, it's left us. And our preachers are dealing with pornography and our pastors after 25 years of laboring fingers to the bone in professional ministry are falling.

My God, we need a revelation of the Lord enthroned in his holiness. And the prophet Jeremiah was buckling and breaking under the weight of that burden himself because the prophets of Judah were themselves functioning.

They were living as prophetic functionaries, giving words about the future and saying peace, peace when there is no peace. Dr. Michael Brown translated that portion that to say that they were saying all is well, all is well when nothing is well.

I hope you can receive this as something more than just the rantings of a depressed individual or some kind of a heavy religious message. I believe the Lord is touching us with something of his own heart and asking us to enter into an identification with him in his anguish over Israel and over the church.

So this brother writes, one gathers that in Jeremiah's perception, the two wings of the religious establishment worked in parallel fashion and that the people were a kind of passive clack, content with the destructive leading of the establishment.

I know that was above your heads on some level. Let me break it down. He says, one gathers from this text that in Jeremiah's perception, what Jeremiah is seeing, the two wings of the religious establishment, namely the prophets and the priests, that those prophets and priests worked in parallel fashion and that the people were a kind of passive clack, a clack, C-L-A-Q-U-E, is a group of people hired to applaud a performer or a public speaker.

So he's saying Jeremiah was seeing the people of Judah, it appears, as a passive clack, a group of people who were applauding the false prophets and the professional functions of the priests in Judah.

Why? Why were they a passive group of souls applauding false prophets and priests who were functioning only on a professional level and of their own authority, not of the authority which comes from heaven?

Because as the scholar goes on to say, they were content with the destructive leading of the establishment. They were content to play the game. They were content so long as the prophets were prophesying what they wanted to hear, so long as the priests were doing everything in the manner that they desired it to be done.

They were content with that and even functioning as passive clacks, as a passive clack, a group of souls who were passive, who were resting on their leaves, who did not want their apple cart to be overturned, who did not want their lifestyles to be questioned, who did not want anything to change or alter except what was perhaps any measure of a suffering they might be experiencing.

Anything that was pleasant and comfortable, they wanted it to remain. Anything that they had the control of in their lives, they wanted it to remain. And as we know well, the true prophet reminds us that we cannot fit God into our agendas and our dreams and our theologies and that if we would have anything to do with him, we've got to cast ourselves into his kingdom and do things his way.

But this people, they were content, passive, comfortable, functioning on the grounds of convenience and utility and what was easy for them, even with regard to their faith and their religion. And here comes this wild character, Jeremiah.

Tear-stained cheeks, wrinkles on the sides of his eyes from sleepless nights, having wept over the slain of the daughter of his people, having poured out his soul in intercession on their behalf and they are not willing to hear one iota of what he has to say, though he is the one who has been sent by the God in whose name they claim to be functioning in their faith.

One gathers that in Jeremiah's perception, the two wings of the religious establishment worked in parallel fashion. What is he saying? They worked side by side, maybe not even consciously, maybe not even getting together and having a secret meeting and saying, let's present a false Yahwism.

Let's give a false version of the faith because Judah will be more likely to take part in that. No, out of their own lack of submittedness to truth and to the God of heaven, they were functioning perhaps even in something that they felt to be a true prophetic expression.

And the priests functioning in something that they felt was by all knowledge that they had a decent occupation and a good way of doing functions in the temple. Jeremiah comes along having not been appointed, having offended the elders of the community by raising a question about the validity of what they were doing, the validity of the prophecies that were being given and of the prophets themselves and the condition of the people of Judah in their day-to-day lives.

Broken Cisterns and the Church's Compromise

This people, he gives the word in the beginning of the book, have hewn up for themselves cisterns, broken cisterns that do not hold water. Could it be said of the church in our day that we in most places have hewn up for ourselves, broken cisterns that cannot hold the knowledge of God, the life-giving reality of a true and intimate union with our God who is a consuming fire and who gives us the ultimate call to be his spokesmen and his sons and daughters in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation.

But we've desired to jog alongside a crooked and perverse generation, even to fashion for ourselves expressions of the gospel that will be more palatable to them, but which will give us a blurry vision of the one who is on the throne and thereby diminish a true life of obedience, joy and faith that would actually be the witness that they need.

Jeremiah was carrying this grief. And I believe there's a string that runs all the way through the scriptures of a jealousy for the abiding life of God and the knowledge of God in the earth. It goes right through the patriarchs, right through Moses's prophetic and in a sense apostolic labor amongst the people of the ancient people.

As being one himself who cried out for the knowledge of God on the Mount, show me thy glory, not content only to have heard the voice, not content only to have seen different aspects of this great one, not content only to have encountered him in the burning bush.

He has that groan continuing in him, show me thy glory. But the people, when he descends from the mountain had fashioned for themselves a golden calf. The people were not willing to hear the living voice coming from the top of the Mount and ask Moses to speak on his behalf instead.

They wanted it to be filtered if it could be through humanity and through flesh because they were not willing to hear it as it comes from heaven. The same stream, the same string runs all the way through the history of the patriarchs, the prophets of old, as they give the call to the backslidden and hard-hearted people of Israel in the prophetic scriptures.

And all the way through Jesus's involvement as he speaks to his kinsmen who are the religious leaders of the established order. In his day, the same string is running through you. What does he say to the religious leaders?

Oh, you are mistaken or you are ignorant. What? Having not understood the scriptures or the power of God. It's the same string running right through Jesus's public ministry. And then you see the apostles carrying the same reality.

Paul saying to the church at Corinth, I've betrothed you to one husband. And yet the serpent might perhaps deceive you. I have one fear. The apostle was not afraid of getting hit in the face with stones.

He was not afraid of the antagonism of his kinsmen. He was not afraid of one brother that would stand up and challenge his apostleship. The apostle had no fear except for one, that you would be removed or that you would lose or betray the purity and simplicity of devotion to Christ.

That's his jealousy. Why is he jealous for that? Because he's jealous for the glory of God. Jeremiah was a like figure with a different ministry. He had the same jealousy, but running parallel to that string of jealousy throughout all of scripture is a string of the church's propensity toward straying away from the true knowledge of God and turning to lesser things.

Be it be a bold faced submission and worship of idols or a twisting of the gospel and a twisting of who Christ is and what his kingdom really is and represents to submit for people and for hearers something lesser than the true thing that the prophets and apostles gave.

God is jealous over his glory. And that's why he raises these kinds of men up. That's why at Paul's conversion, he says to Paul, go and find a man called Ananias. He will lay hands on you and you will hear from me all of the things that you must suffer for my namesake.

Right at the inception of his calling, the Lord is telling him, you're gonna hear everything that you'll suffer for my namesake. Forgive the paraphrase, you can find the passage later, Acts 9, but that's what the Lord said to him.

All that you must suffer for my namesake. The calling of Jeremiah is the same. The calling of Ezekiel is the same. I'm giving you a forehead like a stone because you must go and prophesy against the temple and prophesy against Jerusalem.

These people are a hard hearted people. Yet you've gotta go and speak. How's that for the prophetic mandate? The prophetic call has much less to do with visionary experiences and speaking about future events has much less to do with that than it has to do with setting forth God as he is to a people who have been unwilling to hear that revelation.

The Priestly Calling to Set Forth God as He Is

Let me read a little bit more from this brother. He says, the summary of these two verses is just this. The priests are rejecting their consecration. What does he mean? Does he mean the priests are rejecting 40 day fasts, their consecration?

No. Does he mean the priests are rejecting their willingness to die physically for the sake of truth, to go and be martyrs? No. We think of consecration, we think immediately of heroic endeavors for the sake of God, but we don't understand the inner priestly distinctive of consecration unto God.

And that's what he's speaking of here. The priests are rejecting their consecration. What does that mean? It means they are rejecting their distinctive calling to know the Lord as he is and to set him forth as he is amidst the people so that they will be able to distinguish the difference between the righteous and the unrighteous.

That's the priestly distinctive. And these men were rejecting it and the people were loving it. He sums it up by saying, it is the same old story, a religious establishment and a populace rejecting the hard work of judgment from, I'm sorry, rejecting the hard word of judgment from God.

The passage speaks of a time of reckoning and it is a theme with which the whole Bible is concerned. Let us remember then that the prophetic calling, the priestly calling, the calling of leaders within God's house and of the church as a whole within society is to set the Lord forth as he is, come what may.

You know, the Lutheran congregation that gathers two blocks from here now has the rainbow gay flag hanging beneath the American flag out in front. Two blocks from there is the Islamic mosque Orthodox.

Two blocks in the other direction is a nation of Islam mosque all throughout our neighborhood. There are philosophies and ideas about God peppered throughout. And we have a distinctive calling in our mode of being and living.

And because of that in our speaking to set forth the one God as he is. The church has that calling. The church is the only agency in the earth which has the capacity and ability to even begin to speak of God.

So what has become then of the nation when that one agency who has the calling to speak of him and the privilege of knowing him has shirked or set aside the distinctive role of seeking his face, of delving in deeply with hunger and anticipation and yearning and a love that cannot be described on human terms to come into the knowledge of God as he is.

And having found that knowledge, having received that knowledge to share it with all of humanity as we come into contact with them. What happens when a church has lost that? This is what happens. The religious establishment sweats and labors in something that is merely human and that has been created for humans and for their benefit.

And the humans then respond by functioning as if they're hooked up to some kind of a feeding tube religiously where they come to the temple for the religious functionary to do his thing because we're paying him to do it.

And we are like vegetables walking throughout life. One feeding tube stuck on this side where we get a religious fix and that feeding only comes once or twice a week. And the other feeding tube stuck to the other side of the stomach, which is a worldly feeding where we are drinking in the entertainment of the world, the disposition of the world, the attitudes of the world, the ways of the world.

And we are filled as a people then of something that is despicably absent of a true knowledge of God. And the church is the only agency by which the world has the opportunity to even begin to hear of this glorious one.

It's time for the cutting tubes to be cut and removed. It's time for the saints to have this severing, this consecration. It's not only a heroic religious endeavor, it's a setting apart of our lives as holy, holy, holy unto the Lord and unto the pursuit of him, unto the enjoyment of him, unto a delving into the scriptures and unto an obedience of what he speaks that we may experience life and that death may work in us so that life can work in those outside of the church.

Jeremiah was broken and aching over this, cognizant of the fact that his own people had a responsibility and a privilege to be a light to the nations. And they could not even come into first grade in that reality because they were feeding off of the false prophecies and the professional priestly functions of the priests.

And they themselves were not jealously pursuing the knowledge of God as he is. So he says it's the same old story, a religious establishment and a populace rejecting the hard word of judgment from God.

Well, is this fuel for the fire of the Westboro Baptist guys who wanna go to funerals and protest and say in the Psalms it says, God is angry with the wicked every day. So we'll protest the funerals of those in war.

We'll protest the funerals of homosexuals who died of AIDS. We'll give protest and we've got a word of judgment. We're like the Jeremiah's. Those guys are as far away from this reality as is a liberal theologian that claims homosexuality is okay.

It's totally removed from the wisdom of men in a liberal sin condoning side or in a rigid self-righteous word of judgment. Jeremiah is not in this place because of his religious categories. He's in this place because he is a man who has been devastated out of his communion with a holy God who has given a people a distinct calling as holy.

And Jeremiah can no longer run alongside those of his kinsmen who are willing to play the game. He's jealous for the glory of God. He's jealous for the calling of his people. So the word of judgment that they were willing to receive, that they were unwilling to receive, I'm sorry.

The word of judgment that they were unwilling to receive was not merely the self-righteous flying off at the mouth of some young guy in their community who was an extreme fundamentalist for Judaism. It was the heart cry of God himself, moving and speaking through a man who was broken.

You know, I asked Dr. Brown once, you know, when I went to get his commentary, I said, I said, hey, I'll order it from your ministry instead of Amazon if you'll write a one sentence summary of the nature of the prophetic call in the front of the commentary.

And he said, that's a deal. So I ordered it from their ministry. And so this is what he wrote in the front. Shattered, now this is his commentary on Jeremiah. So mind you, he's spent years laboring with Jeremiah in prayer, in exhaustive study.

He's literally dwelt with Jeremiah for a number of years. And this is his one sentence summary. So I think it's worthy of being heard. Shattered by the prophetic encounter with the Lord. Broken to pieces by the Lord and poured out for a dying world.

Shattered by the prophetic encounter with the Lord. Broken to pieces by the Lord and poured out for a dying world. The world is languishing. Shall I say the world is perishing and the church is languishing for want of a true knowledge of God.

The world is perishing. They need something more than our ability to build $5 million buildings, exquisite coffee shops in the foyer and beautifully packaged sermons that will keep their interest enough that they'll keep attending.

And maybe one of these days they might find redemption. They need to bump into that company of souls who have been shattered by the prophetic encounter with the Lord. Broken. Broken to their own wisdom, to their own dreams, to their own pursuits, to their own ambitions.