K-027 the Fear of Man — Art Katz

The Fear of Man in Christendom

If there is a phenomenon that has pierced my heart through, that seems endemic and prevalent throughout the whole of Christendom, and particularly in ministerial ranks, it is that thing which is called the fear of man.

And it's on that theme that I believe God wants to speak tonight. It's been a cumulative thing, cumulative thing working in my heart, and it began only a Sunday or so ago in a Canadian Baptist church, where when I had the Sunday morning off, I was brought by a Jewish colleague to that church which he attends to hear a pastor called Spirit Filled.

I don't think I've recovered from the experience. I wrote down some quick notes on the back of the bulletin, and as is my manner, I like to observe the faces about me, catch the atmosphere, sense what is being said and done, and try so much as I can to dissolve into God that his heart is my heart, his perception is my perception.

And here's what I wrote down, looking at the faces in this Baptist congregation. And all you need do is substitute Methodist, Presbyterian, and a whole host of varieties of other names, including Pentecostal, and can we even dare suggest Charismatic, to see what is, I think, a universal phenomenon.

I wrote hard obdurate faces, bare truces in marriages and families. You say, Cat's Boy, that's Jewish chutzpah. That's really presumption. You can look at a couple sitting in a pew, and you can suggest that their marriage is a bare truce?

Yeah. What can I say? It's my mode of operation. God has so honed my intuitive faculties, I apprehend situations. Because he juggles my life, day and night, from place to place, and I find myself plunged instantly from one environment to another, one nation to another, one religious category to another, and have almost immediately to discern what is there, that God might have a mood, a temperament, and a spirit by which to address it.

And I don't think that I'm amiss here to suggest that looking in the faces of many of those couples, I saw hardly anything better than can be called a truce. I saw in faces indifference, unrelatedness, and I listened to a lot of religious gobbledygook.

And yet I can say in the same breath that the message was perfectly correct, scripturally sound, and was even on something which we charismatics should applaud. It was on praise and worship, and yet I say in the same breath, it was religious gobbledygook.

Are your own faculties sufficiently honed to know that just because something is doctrinally correct and scripturally clean, that it can still be a bunch of nonsense? Have you seen by the eye of God what is going on over Christendom for lo these many centuries right to the present day?

Of people sitting on Sunday hours like wooden Indian sticks, listening mesmerized by some kind of ceremonial incantation that has no sense, no relevance to their lives, and they fulfill their hour and are discharged to continue for the rest of the week being the lords of their own lives.

The minister feels he has fulfilled his function, the religionist feels that he has fulfilled his, and the filthy truce goes on week after week in the name of God. And I want you to know there's a cut, bruised, and bleeding heart that is viewing this scene since time immemorial.

It's very God himself, and I think he's had a gutful, gray, sullen, despondent lives, incapable of praise. For that congregation to be addressed on the subject of praise was as nonsensical and as irrelevant as the nomenclature of an M1 rifle.

It was just pure ceremony. The pastor studded his message with the references to the beloved. Beloved, he would say, beloved. But there was nothing beloved or loving, either in him or them. That, too, was part of the posturing.

In the back rows were the tittering teenagers, dressed in the most mod fashions, serving their time, waiting to be dismissed, wholly indifferent what was going on below, having their own gossip and their own tittering and shrieks and laughter all the while.

Sleeping adults, and the manner of the pastor, the voice, man-pleasing, oily, condescending, inoffensive, irrelevant, unreal, though the sermon was technically good, scriptural, correct, and quote and unquote, sincere.

God was giving me my afternoon message by being in that service that morning, and I invited that pastor to come. I said, I think that God has something for you personally if you'll come. And it had to do with this man-pleasing thing of a pastor who had a baptism in the Holy Spirit but doesn't want to rock the boat and is continuing with great so-called sensitivity and prudence week by week, nowhere.

Why, his human reckoning determining what he thinks is prudent for his congregation. But what he is really reckoning are those things that will not be allowed to happen that should jeopardize his existence, his security, his well-being, the applaud, the laudits of men.

Idolatry and the Fear of Waiting for God

So I want you to turn with me with that introduction to Exodus, the 32nd chapter, and join your hearts with me in prayer because God himself is going to have to put this together. Let's pray. Gracious holy God, great Jesus, we ask mighty God that the spirit of truth would abide with us this night.

Gracious God that you might attend to your own word with such an unction by your spirit that our hearts will be deeply penetrated, our eyes of understanding opened, that you might speak out of the depths of your heart Lord, what has long harbored there and prepare us for the understanding of what shall be increasingly the sickening realities of our own age.

Precious God, may the truth set us free. Speak now without let, without hindrance, not allowing a syllable to fall to the ground. Fully vent your own soul and have your way out of this piece of clay and we'll thank you, praise you for this occasion which you have ordered for this speaking, for your glory and for the establishing of your true kingdom.

In Jesus' name we ask it. Amen. The 32nd chapter of Exodus describes the unhappy episode of a people who could not wait for Moses to come down from the mount and who descended into idolatry in the most filthy and pagan way.

And what you would think is an episode so removed and so unrelated to our own age I think is far more pertinent than we can realize. So by the help of God I just want to just call again and bring forth now what I believe that the Lord was showing me through these afternoon hours.

It begins when the people saw that Moses delayed to come down from the mountain and I'm reading from the amplified edition. They gathered together to Aaron and said to him, Up, make us guards to go before us for as for this man Moses, the man who brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we do not know what has become of him.

I think there are some rudiments and some elements even in this first verse that should not be ignored. It begins when the people saw and I suppose that is always a very poor beginning and is always going to eventuate in unhappy conclusions.

We're told that we should live by faith, walk by faith and not by sight. When the people saw living by another faculty than the faculty of faith for the just shall live by faith. And I can't tell you how much that scripture is etched into my heart increasingly in these days.

But just like so many other scriptures, they have become like truisms or they've lost their cutting edge. They've become banalities, things to which we have given consent and acknowledged but have not lived.

The just shall live by faith. I don't know how we're doing in Minnesota. 30 souls, unsalaried, but somehow we're eating, we're clothed, we're housed, we're learning about a living God who has called us to fulfill the scriptures in spirit and in truth.

When the people saw is always an unhappy beginning. They saw a Moses who delayed to come down from the mountain which shows a disposition not to wait. And if you're asking what is God doing in Minnesota, He's building in us a disposition to wait.

He's teaching us such elementary things as patience and waiting on the Lord. And I'll tell you children, if that has only been a phrase, the actual experience can be in itself excruciating. I find myself in the same predicament more day by day now, choking and stumbling over my own tongue, wanting to express so much that God has inserted there and finding that if I had a zipper to zip down my chest and take my heart out and ring it, I would have a far better way of communicating than just by this pathetic method of speaking.

Patience, waiting on the Lord, living by faith. The things which we have heard and quoted and recited are the very ground and foundation of our being and life. And God is preparing some of us now in remote places and more of us shall be brought to such places.

Wave after wave as we shall see the world increasingly deteriorate all about us. And these verses shall either save us or we shall perish. We shall either have learned to live as the saints of God or we shall die mumbling spiritual incantations that cannot sustain us.

Waiting on the Lord is survival technique. And I don't have the time to tell you how the Lord is teaching us what that means in very painful ways. They could not wait. There's always an itch in the human heart that cannot wait for God to come down from the mount.

And therefore, the necessary conclusion is make us gods. Give us some alternative. It may not be as lustrous. It may be a shabby alternative. But we need something tangible now. Isn't this the now generation?

Fly now, pay later. Immediate gratification now. My mother must be some kind of archaic relic, something to be laughed at or riley to be acknowledged that coming from Europe as a young woman and desiring household furniture and not having learned about fly now, pay later, she went into the furniture store and indicated to the man what she liked and gave him what amounted to a kind of a down payment.

But instead of obtaining the merchandise, it remained in the store until month after month after month of laborious and careful payments had been completed. Then she obtained the thing desired. What an archaic echo of an age now dead.

The whole spirit of this age now. Gratification now. Make us gods. We read in the sixth verse, they rose up early the next day and offered burnt offerings and brought peace offerings. For the people sat down to eat and drink and rose up to play.

Interesting about the phrase rose up early. To conduct their little religious carnival around the golden calf. It's exactly the same phrase that God describes Abraham doing when the word came to him, Abram.

Take now thy son, thine only son, whom thou lovest and make of him a sacrifice in the mount that I will show you. So it says, so Abraham rose up early in the morn. You know what I think, children? And call me a simpleton if you will, but I think in the last analysis at the end of the age, there are only going to be two alternatives for men.

Both requiring a rising up early. One to rise up in pagan reverie. To eat, to drink and to play. Or the other to rise up early to make of our Isaac a sacrifice to the living God. In a word, I want to suggest that in the, at the end of the age, which is not too far from us, there are only two options for men.

Idolatry or martyrdom. You say, Katz, that's very strenuous and very extreme. But dear children, I believe with all my heart, those are the only two true options. And I'll tell you what, it has ever and always been so.

There are a lot of us vacillating somewhere between the one and the other. But the very nature of the age in which God has called us to conclude our life and conclude the age is so radical that there shall not be any midway position.

We shall find ourselves rising up early to dance and to play or to take our Isaac and make of him a sacrifice. Of Moses, God says that he chose to suffer affliction rather than to enjoy the pleasures of sin for a season.

It was true then and it's true now. We'll choose either iniquity or suffering affliction with the people of God. Don't say he never told you. These are the true final and ultimate options. And I think that God is wanting to prepare a remnant now, a small number now, to steal their hearts and make a conscious and mature choice of which of these alternatives they will choose.

One has to do with gratification to a people who have an itch who cannot wait, who are moved by their senses and their faculties rather than by faith, who want something now, gratification, and the other by a people who have inured themselves to gratification and have learned the way of denial.

And by that, I only mean the way of suffering. By that, I only mean the way of the cross. And that, dear children, is a message so infrequently spoken that it arrests our attention when we hear so much as a passing allusion to the cross.

And I want to be on record to say that I believe that the omission of the cross, particularly the prevalent omission in the things which have become groovy and popular in modern-day religion and especially in the charismatic ranks, is a most decisive and significant omission.

I believe that men are attributing to the Holy Spirit such offices and functions and things which God can render only at the cross. And as much as I love the heavenly dove and would not for a moment want the Holy Spirit to be parted from me, I am unwilling to consider that it should be that instrument by which only the cross can bring the true things of God, true love, true unity, true reconciliation.

The Cross, True Unity, and False Spirituality

There's something growing in my Jewish heart, and I'm not by nature suspicious, and that is a growing apprehension of the increasing deception and darkness which is not only coming upon the earth, but is particularly coming upon the people of God.

There's nothing groovier, more seductive, more easy to be spoken, more quick to justify every kind of Christian activity than something done in the so-called name of unity. There's nothing closer to the heart of God, and there's nothing that Satan seeks more quickly to emulate than the same devoutly-to-be-desired goal.

Will you be suspicious with me of all of the kinds of functions and conventions and conferences and ecumenical wingdings and get-togethers that we're going to see in the name of unity? Unity is not something that is established by the Holy Spirit.

Unity, true reconciliation, true love is the work only and ever of the cross. Be careful and be suspicious of the easy, facile, and continual references to the dove and the Holy Spirit, under whose generous banner anybody and everybody can get together for the unity of the so-called body of Christ, a pox on the pseudo-synthetic, fake imitation of the true working of God at the end of the age.

We're going to rise up early in the morning for one thing or the other to make a sacrifice of our most cherished Isaac, the ultimate denial or the practice of idolatry. And I think I ought to give you a little on-the-spot definition for idolatry, lest you think that that has to do only with naked carnivals around golden calves or something pagan and utterly unrelated to modern-day practice.

Are you ready? Taking notes? Idolatry is any form of religious exercise or activity which requires only a modicum of response from men and gives, in turn, a sufficient religious or psychological or emotional sense of religious satisfaction that one might think that they have fulfilled their religious obligations and are free, effectually, thereafter to be the lords of their own lives.

You just got a mouthful. I don't know if you understand that. Shall I run that through again? I'm going to have to take off my jacket, okay? Praise God for Jews. And I'm not being an ethnic, whatchamacallit, or a racist or anything like that.

But I believe that He has some special purpose for them in the body of Christ. And that is a jealousy for the sanctuary of God, a reverence for the things that are holy, and a concern for those things that profane the sanctuary of God.

Something in me winces at any kind of religious undertaking that seems to emulate things that are godly but are not, seems to give men a modicum of religious satisfaction and doesn't at all require them to come to the cross.

There is no true Judaism of God, no true calling of God except at the cross of Christ Jesus. The cross, the cross, the cross. And as we all know, theoretically, and theologically, it is the place of ultimate sacrifice, it is the place of shame, it is the place of humiliation, it is the place of death, it is also the place of resurrection.

The world's religion is any attempt to give men some kind of psychological and emotional religious satisfaction independent of the cross of Christ Jesus. And I'll tell you what, you can do that in Christian churches.

A dollar in a collection plate is just as effective a substitute as an Israeli bond or endowing a pew or any other kind of building program or religious vent, a valve, that allows men to continue being the lords of their own lives without having come to a true place of submission unto God.

Abraham's Obedience and the Cost of Submission

You know when that true place is reached? When God shall speak to you by a holy voice and say, Take now thy son, thine only son, whom thou lovest, and make of him a burnt offering in the mount that I will show you.

So Abram rose up early in the morning and saddled his ass and took his servants and he went. No ifs, no ands, no buts, no whys, no how. And I'll tell you that three days later when he saw the mount, it wasn't the day in which the execution was to take place, it was the day of resurrection.

Because the moment that God's voice spoke, Abraham, the man of faith, which is to say, the man of obedience, slew his son already in his own heart. Dear children, have you put the knife to the Isaac of your life in your own heart already?

Because if you have not, you are going to defer to men. Your voice is going to become squealy and full of kind of personality unction. You're going to say right things, but without the penetration of God.

You're going to conduct services and other forms of religious activity and feel that you're discharging religious obligation without effect. You're going to be a man pleaser rather than a God pleaser.

So long as there's one Isaac left to whom you defer before God. And that Isaac could be a son, it could be a brother, it could be a father or a mother, it could be a friend. And I tell you that God is going to bring us to such a fearful place in the soon coming days that many of us are going to have to make such choices.

When Moses came down from the mount with the tablets of the law, he heard already raucous noise. It says in the 17th verse, when Joshua heard the noise of the people as they shouted, he said to Moses, there is a noise of war in the camp.

But Moses said, it's not the sound of shouting for victory, neither is it the sound of the cry of the defeated, but it's the sound of singing that I hear. Hallelujah, Hallelujah. Excuse me, children. I don't want to be disrespectful, but if our meetings sag, we can always trot out the good old choruses.

And I said to a young discipleship group last night whose music was extraordinary, watch out. Read The Latent Power of the Soul by Watchman Nee and recognize that there's nothing that has the greater capacity to emulate and to feign, synthetically give the appearance of unction, anointing and presence of God, joy and all these other things than that which is induced by music.

The true disciple is that one who will break his guitar over his knee and let God give it to him back together again. Oh, I know the function of music. Do you understand how I'm speaking and why I'm speaking and the hyperbole and the exaggeration that God must use to make his points?

It wasn't the sound of victory, nor was it the sound of defeat. It was the sound of singing that they heard coming down the mount. Because these children of Israel were not engaged in warfare either to win or to lose.

They were engaged in fun and games. And that, dear children, I'm afraid, is what many of us are engaged in. Are we still friends? I think that so much of our religious life is gamesmanship. Fun and games.

Discipleship community. Submission authority. We're the first in our neighborhood to have one. Look at me. I've learned submission. I can quote Watchman Nee. I'm the spiritual person. And I think a lot of the strife and a lot of the things which have been engendered recently and still continue in the charismatic movement for which there was a conference in this city are the result of that gamesmanship spirit.

Men who have found shiny new toys with which to play. Playing the games. The only pity is that there are real lives involved. I said to a dear brother, let me offer you one of two choices. How would you like to be a member in some kind of dreary Pentecostal congregation?

Dead as a doornail. The Holy Spirit has departed long since. Singing the songs. Going through the numbers. Listening to the pretty sermon. Going out. Relationships unreconciled. Marriages as truces. The whole bit.

Gray, dismal, lifeless, inert. Or would you rather be in some kind of snazzy, charismatic home fellowship group where they're learning the principles of discipleship or community or submission. But it is not from God.

Men, in their cleverness, have appropriated true principles and are manipulating and making and establishing whole networks of relationships and systems which is a mishmash and a mess. Which would you rather have?

I said to this brother. He said, give me the Pentecostal thing any day. I'd rather languish in that until the real thing comes. I was an embarrassment to my colleagues. Everybody knew about the body of Christ except art cats.

Man, it was on everyone's lips. Everyone could give the snazziest definition of the body of Christ. They had all learned it. But me. I'm sorry. I cannot learn it by precept. I cannot learn it by principle.

I only learn it when God hammers it into my very corpuscles and being in my relationship with anger. Thank you. I learned the body of Christ in the agony and the wrestlings and writhings of my own marriage.

I saw the mystery when I struggled and suffered through it. You know what God's great lament over Israel was? The knowledge of me is taught by precept. You say, well, what's wrong with that? We're swimming in tapes and teaching aids and books and every kind of thing of which I suppose I myself am something of a culprit.

But that's the last way to apprehend the truths of God. God wants them appropriated in our life and experience in due season. In Him was life and His life was the light of men. And I tell you, children, I am very cautious about any other light than the light which emanates from His life.

I'm a cross-centered man. His life comes out of death. And the light that comes from that is a glory. But there's a lot of other light which may be even a bit bedazzling, but it's not as authentic and as life-giving.

I'm speaking like a fool because I'm in the family of friends. And I won't say, thus saith the Lord. I will say, listen, open your heart, ask the Lord, sharpen your discernments, chew the meat, spit out the bones.

But I've got to open my mouth and express what I'm saying. Well, now we're coming to the heart of what I have to share with you. And as we say in Brooklyn, it hoits. Moses came down with the mount and saw the frolic around the golden calf.

In the 25th verse, it says in the Amplified, when Moses saw that the people were unruly and unrestrained, for Aaron had let them get out of control so that they were derision and to their shame among their enemies.

I think in King James it says they were naked. Then Moses stood in the gate of the camp and said, whoever is on the Lord's side, let him come to me. And all the Levites gathered together to him. And he said to them, thus says the Lord God of Israel, every man put on his sword on his side and go in and out from gate to gate throughout the camp and slay every man his brother and every man his companion and every man his neighbor.

And the sons of Levi did according to the word of Moses and there fell of the people that day about 3000 men. And Moses said to the Levites, by your obedience to God's command, you have consecrated yourselves today as priests to the Lord, each man at the cost of being against his own son, against his own brother, that the Lord may restore and bestow his blessing upon you this day.

Consecrated Priesthood and Choosing the Fear of God

Now, dear children, do you want to be a priest of God? Do you want to render holy ministry unto the Lord to the end of the age? These Levites who were positionally and technically priests were not consecrated until the day that each man put on his sword and went into the camp and slew each man, father, brother, friend.

And God said, by this, you have been consecrated to the priesthood today. I have never before seen it. But the consecration of priesthood comes in a bloody, fearful, pitiless, ruthless way. It's interesting what the word consecrate means.

It means with your hands filled, the Hebrew meaning. And you know what it's filled with? It's filled with blood. If you have an eye of pity that shall spare a brother or a father, remember what Jesus said, your mother and your brothers are without?

He said, who are my mother and my brothers but those that do the will of my father. This is one of those awkward moments when a man is going through a message for the first time to find what he wants to find.

It says in the Gospel of Matthew in the 10th chapter, several references to fear. In the 26th verse, the 28th verse, the 31st verse, Fear them not therefore, for there is nothing covered that shall not be revealed and hid that shall not be known.

The 28th verse, Fear not them which kill the body but are not able to kill the soul, but rather fear him which is able to destroy both body and soul and hell. Fear ye not therefore, it says in the 31st verse, Fear not, fear not, fear not.

And I'll tell you children, as I said, there are two options at the end of the age, idolatry or sacrifice. There are two choices of fear also. You're either going to fear men or you're going to fear God.

That same Baptist pastor said, well, he said, we've had first principles about fearing God but now we can go on from there. And I felt like standing up and shouting, hold it! What do you mean going on?

You've not yet come to the first principle. There's got to be a choice of fearing God or fearing men. And I don't think that you face that choice and have ruthlessly, spiritually, come to what God is calling us until you have put your sword on your side and have gone into the camp and are willing to slay father, brother, friend.

Jesus said in the 32nd verse, after all these fear nots, fear nots,. And I'll tell you children, every act of deferring to men rather than to God, every act of man-pleasing, every subtle thing in which you allow that oily unction into your voice when you're speaking the correct things and disarming the truth at the same time so it shouldn't step on anyone's toes or cause any severe reaction is putting men before God.

Fear not. Fear not. Fear not. And I tell you that you shall fear until the day that you shall take your Isaac, that thing which is more precious than your own life, your closest relationship, father, brother, friend, and be willing if God shall call you in your ordination for priesthood to slay them with the sword.

Cats, are you counseling real bloodshed? Not actually, but a heart that is ruthlessly determined to put God before men to the point where it hurts. Maybe I had practice which some of you were not allowed to enjoy.

In my first decision twelve years ago in the God who revealed himself to me aboard the deck of a tramp steamer in the first reading of the New Testament, in that one phrase that came out of the mouth of Jesus, let him who is without sin cast the first stone, something pierced my eyes and brain and heart and I was left a trembling leaf aboard that ship just knifed right into by the sword of the Lord.

And the first thought that came to me was, Cats, what's your mother going to say about this? Oh, dear children, I don't know if you can believe it, I was the apple of my mother's eye. And as we say in Yiddish, she hasn't had too much nachas.

She hasn't had too much satisfaction in her life. Like so many Yiddish mamas who have ringed their fingers and have gone to school to hear what the principal has to say about their erring son, high school dropout, you know, all that stuff, who became a teacher and my mother could say my son's a professional.

I knew that this was going to cut my mother's heart to the quick. I knew that there was no way that I would be able to explain to her. I knew that she was automatically going to conclude that I had joined the enemy's camp.

I knew that she could not distinguish between a Gentile and a born-again believer. They're all Christians. Every Gentile's a Christian, including those who threw stones at her on her way to school in London as a girl.

I knew she was going to slam the door in my face and call me mad. But you know what else I knew? That I loved truth above every other consideration. And what God was showing me is that truth is God. Children, God is going to call you this night and in these days to put the sword on your side and go into the camp and ruthlessly to separate yourself from the fornicators, the idolaters, those that jump and make lock and sing around the golden calf that you might be a holy priesthood, sanctified and consecrated unto God in blood.

Rejecting Ecumenical Imitations of Unity

Whoever shall deny me before men, him will I also deny before my Father which is in heaven. And that's a lot deeper than those who say, yeah, I believe in Jesus. Day by day, we're making continual decisions by such subtleties of action as the tone of our voice and the quality of our witness and our forthrightness before God and men, which either denies him or affirms him.

But whosoever shall deny me, him will I also deny. Think not that I am come to send peace on earth. I came not to send peace, but a sword. For I am come to set a man at variance against his father and the daughter against her mother and the daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law and a man's foes shall be they of his own household.

He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me and he that taketh not his cross and followeth after me is not worthy of me.

The cross, the cross, the cross. We're going to be increasingly invited, children, to happy ecumenical fun and games as we go on in the days ahead. Wonderful and groovy convocations on precious themes such as the unity of the body of Christ.

And my prayer for you and myself together is that we might have the discernment of very God by the Spirit to discern that which is of men, man-pleasing and groovy and accommodating in happy, airy kinds of phrases about unity of the body of Christ which is not true unity, about love of God which is not true love, about reconciliation which is not true reconciliation because it omits the cross of Christ Jesus and is an idolatrous substitute.

I wonder if it is an accident that I'm just now reading the memoirs of Jessie Penn Lewis, a little description of her life and teaching who was the chronicle of a legitimate revival that came to Wales in the early part of the century.

Soon followed by what seemed to be worldwide Pentecostal outpouring of which she was inordinately suspicious that it was satanic counterfeit and in time obscured, eclipsed and did away with the thing which is real.

I had never before heard anybody suggest that what we have long acknowledged as the legitimate Pentecostal revival might itself to a large part have been indeed some kind of ersatz and satanic substitute foisted upon men who were not too quick nor concerned to discern the difference and enjoyed the aura and happy feeling of ecumenical unity and what seemed to be a new touch of life for the church and for the denominations.

I wonder if a generation later we're not being victim again perhaps of the same thing. There is a unity of God. There is a great cry out of the heart of God for the building of the body of Christ. But somehow, God forgive me, I am not impressed and can't get enthusiastic when I see the platforms of ministers with the turnaround collars and all of the other ecclesiastical trappings with their full gospel bear hugs and backslaps and that is supposed to be the picture of the unity of the body of Christ.

Too cheap. Too quick. Too easy. Too facile. Too glib. The work of the so-called Holy Spirit in the absence of the work of the cross I want the thing that's real. Can you imagine my responsibility speaking as I am?

And can you understand how I ask God virtually at the bedside at Pete's house Lord, blot me out. Lord, rend me silent. Put me out of commission. Let me not be an instrument of confusion or just sounding opinions peculiar to myself.

But, if it has pleased you in the choosing of foolish things to have this kind of a voice around and this kind of a discernment and intuition and hunch and expression then speak it for the edification of your people.

Speak it for the love of truth. Speak it to sound the alarm and the caution. Speak it that we be wary and on guard. Speak it that we be able to distinguish the thing which is true from the thing which is false.

God help us in an age in which the scriptures have clearly told us that deceptions of such magnitude are going to come upon us with lying signs and wonders that even the very elect will be deceived. I'm not impressed because people use the word unity.