Future Trends for the Body of Christ — Art Katz

What the Lord will make of this. We'll begin by asking his blessing, okay? I mentioned somewhere along the line today, I forgot at which meeting, that at a meeting before I came here in Nebraska, a young fellow got up in the church and he said at lunchtime today while we prayed over the food, I included a three-second prayer for the ministers who are ministering at this conference of which I was one.

And he said, the Lord sort of jabbed me in my heart that a three-second aside is not enough, and that we ought to assume more of the burden of the ministries that God brings into our midst. I don't know if you realize all that's involved.

There's a great deal of trembling and rumbling bowels and other things that can't be now enumerated. It's too much to ask single men to bear that alone. There's fatigue, both physical and spiritual. They're seeking God for his word for this hour, for this people.

Supporting Ministers Through Prayer and Fasting

It's an enormous responsibility of being an agent of life or death for many. That's too much for single men to bear. And so I hope that you'll be weaned from the practice of three-second afterthoughts for the ministers that come to your community, and that you'll give yourself more fully to supplication and prayer and fasting for the ministers, and feel that they're not virtuosos who have some kind of special talent, and that somehow, unlike you, they don't tremble before lights and before cameras and before people, and that you're in it with them, and not just called to be a passive spectator, and that somehow your responsibility is to undergird them, not just financially, but in your prayer and in the support by the Spirit.

I'm just going to ask you to participate in that now. Maybe we'll only take three seconds, but let it be an intense three seconds that we're all in this together, and we want to hear from God. We don't want a virtuoso performance.

We want to hear from God. So precious holy God, Lord, speak to us out of your heart. Mighty God, give us to understand the things that please you for this hour. Open your word to us, might it be a living, pulsating thing.

And mighty God, may we hear also the silences between the words. May the things that have been left out, that have not been articulated or punctuated, that pertain to our lives personally, where we are, where no man knows us but you alone, may we hear your voice speaking to that.

Lord, deal with us in the nitty-gritty of our lives. Shape us, mold us by what you're going to speak tonight. May it be nothing whatever to do with ceremony or Christian entertainment, but vital things that pertain to life.

And we'll thank you and praise you, because you're hearing us now, and that you're going to do it and receive all the glory for it, in the wonderful name of Jesus. Amen. Praise God. Well, chapter 3 of Joshua.

Crossing the Jordan by Following the Ark

And Joshua rose early in the morning, and they removed from Shittim and came to Jordan, he and all the children of Israel, and lodged there before they passed over. And it came to pass after three days that the officers went through the host, and they commanded the people, saying, When you see the ark of the covenant of the Lord your God, and the priests, the Levites, bearing it, then you shall remove from your place and go after it.

Yet there shall be a space between you and it, about 2 ,000 cubits by measure. Come not near unto it, that you may know the way by which you must go, for you have not passed this way heretofore. I believe with all my heart that the body of Christ in this moment is encamped along the banks of the Jordan, and we've been there long enough, and there's a spirit that's speaking to us, commanding us that when we see the ark of God being lifted by the priests and the Levites, that we should remove from our places and go after it.

I know that everything that's instinctive in our nature shrinks from moving. Poor Inga has just one woeful lament of moving time after time in her sojourn with her husband, from Denmark to California, from California to New York, from New York to Kansas City, from Kansas City back to New York, from New York to Denmark, from Denmark to Israel, from Israel back to New Jersey, and we're afraid that it's not over yet.

It's not an easy thing to move, and I know especially for women, there's just a wonderful natural thing that desires to be settled, but this is an unusual hour. I'll tell you that at the end of one of my speaking trips, in the kind of condition of exhaustion, both physically and spiritually, that I mentioned before, to which you're brought, I came to a meeting just before my return to Denmark.

I'd been three months in the States, and my spirit was really exercised, and some of you know me, that I'm the kind of guy made of God to come on hard, but you can believe that there's been a lot of tempering process since you've seen me last, and many times I'm given pause to pause and wonder, is it me or is it God?

My face is so flinty, and my word is so sharp and uncompromising, and I was sitting in that kind of tired dejection and body and spirit at this last meeting before I returned to my home in Denmark, and I was so tired I couldn't even participate in the service.

Praise God I wasn't the speaker. I was sitting in the back of the room, and when it was over, the man and wife in whose home that took place came over to me and laid hands on me and prayed for me, and God spoke a prophecy out of the mouth of this woman, and it said something like this, don't you think that I know how to speak more softly through you when I want?

And I went, thank you Lord that it was not me after all, that it was you, and then he went on to say, I'm going to speak even more fierce words than these in your mouth in these end times, and I'm going to beckon men through you to loose their stakes and pull up their stakes and their tents, and to follow on after me, and many there shall be who shall refuse.

By the eye of the Spirit, God is asking us tonight to see that there are priests and Levites who have lifted the ark of God, and it's about to be moved, but I'll tell you that we've been so long on this side of the Jordan that it's become a very familiar and groovy place, has many advantages.

In fact, it was so much so that for two and a half of the tribes of Israel, they never could quite get it all together and cross over to the other side. They were lost forever to the purposes of God and to the people Israel, Gad, Manasseh, and Reuben, and stayed on the wrong side of the Jordan.

Maybe there's a clue in this, in that I understand that there were great men with cattle, and that side of the Jordan had such lush verbiage and growth, and it was so well situated for grazing that they just couldn't quite bring themselves to cross over.

Maybe there's something about the crossing over of rivers that speaks especially to me, a Jew, because the whole history of my people has been nothing but a history of beckonings to cross over. I understand that the very word Hebrew, the root word Eber, has got to do with the meaning of crossing over, and except that Abraham crossed over that River Euphrates and left that Mesopotamian religious civilization and followed God for a wilderness to a land of promise, there would not be a Jew today.

There's always a radical invitation to the people of God to cross a river along which they've camped perhaps far too long and have become too comfortable and too well settled. There shall be a space between you and it about 2 ,000 cubits by measure, and some wise commentator on the scriptures suggests that that might even mean 2 ,000 years since the advent of the Lord.

You have not passed this way heretofore. This is uncharted territory. This is something scary, something frightening, and if I should just survey my almost 10 years in the Lord, it's been nothing but crossing after crossing after crossing in ways that I have not been heretofore.

And how the Lord has led me with great patience and kindness from the security of the teaching profession to the lesser security of a missionary organization, to the lesser security of being removed from that organization but still on salary, to the lesser security of being removed altogether from any connection and being entirely thrust upon him and God's people, which is my condition in this day, to places where we've not been heretofore.

Joshua said to the people, sanctify yourselves for tomorrow the Lord will do wonders among you. I want to suggest what it is that lies before us on the other side of the Jordan where we've not been heretofore.

New Patterns of Communal Christian Life

There are so many things that can be spoken, but the things the thing which the Lord has moved me to put down on this paper this morning has to do with new patterns of living. I've always been a man of very intense perception.

I've always seen things through a kind of peculiar view. I've always been rather simplistic in the way that I see things, and sort of so many moderating things are eclipsed, and I see things starkly in black and white, and I'll tell you that I have a very intense view of the way that we've been living up till this time, and the way I see it is this, that our living pattern has been absolutely bizarre, grotesquely distorted, and we've not even suspected it.

We've succumbed and submitted ourselves so well without flinching to the pattern of this world that we thought that this was altogether normal. But I'll tell you that our natures have recoiled against this pattern of private enterprise existence, of little separate domiciles with little families strangling in their separation, and living only unto their own selfishness, glued before TV sets, pouring over Sears Roebuck catalogs, and just living wholly unto themselves, broken only by an hour or two on a Sunday morning or a midweek service, with that occasional travesty called a potluck supper, and other such forms of fellowship.

This is not the pattern of God. God has called us to community, and I've never been so conscious of it as I am in this hour, and I speak as a man who temperamentally is constituted to be a loner, and I flinch and shrink by everything in me which is natural to coming into real relationships with other people.

I like to be the kind of guy that comes in like the knight on shining armor into a community and does his thing and rides out again, but the Lord is not allowing me such luxury. And I'll tell you people, I'm in a very Shakespearean mood, conscience doth make cowards of us all, and if we have to face the root reason why we've shrunk from true community, the answer is simple and not far to be found.

We're chicken. I'm afraid that if you saw me and anything more than my posture behind the pulpit and saw odd cats, so to speak, in his underwear with his knobbly knees sticking out, or his mask dislodged, or barking at his kids, or irritated with his wife, you would be deeply disillusioned, and indeed that's exactly what's required.

A brilliant man by the spirit, by the name of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in a book that's now occupying me called Living Together, isn't that a beautiful title? Written in the 1930s, well in advance of his time, but written for us now, he says in this book that we must pass through a necessary crisis of disillusionment.

Oh people, how we shrink from that. We don't want to be seen. We don't want our masks jostled. We want to continue our kind of religious posture and somehow we can get by for an hour with a backslap and a bear hug and all of the other accoutrements of so-called full gospel fellowship, but I'll tell you that something radically changes when we're under each other's roof in nitty-gritty living situations.

I wondered why it was that the Lord gave us a 17-room house when we came back from Israel broke. There's hardly a time that that house has been empty, and I don't mean that man who came to supper, staying just for a day or two.

I mean we've had one guest, a Danish minister, with us now almost four to five months, and that man has seen me in every aspect of my life bar none. Couldn't be helped. Talk about being given to hospitality.

There's a continual flow of hospitality at our home. We had a conference on Messianic discipleship at our own local congregation, and the Jewish kids that came from different parts of the country were taken into the families of the congregation, and it was one of the greatest blessings of the entire conference, face-to-face with Gentile people.

Beautiful, the things that the Lord transacted through those days under those roofs. We ourselves had over 30 people sleeping in our house, and Inger made dinner on Sunday for over 60 people, and the conference began Friday night at this little congregation with a matzah ball and traditional Shabbat meal made by Inger and some of the church ladies for over 150 people.

We're being compelled, even against our own reluctance, to be given to hospitality, and I tell you that I have a sneaky suspicion that if we'll not come to this free-willingly, there's a God who is going to use acute shortages to prompt it.

I think that we've been living in a criminal way, in our misuse of resources, in living as we have with affluence and comfort that would have boggled the mind of the richest potentate in times past, heated to such degrees that you are stuffy and uncomfortable in winter months, and cool to such degrees that you froze and chilled in the summer.

We're spoiled, we're soft, we've grown fat, and I praise God for the crippling shortages and the severity of the times that shall soon be upon us, and unlike those clever theologians who feel that somehow when it going really is going to get tough, that somehow we're going to be perfectly lifted out, I reject it as nonsense, and everything in my heart and my spirit and the conduct to which God has brought me in establishing conferences on discipleship for believers who are going to be on the front lines and facing guff and opposition contradicts that happy theory that somehow we're going to be lifted out and be spared any real trial and affliction.

I believe with all my heart, I don't know to what degree and to what length, but we shall face a great time of severity and trial, and it's going to do wonders for us. People, we need each other, and I'll tell you that among the things that are going to be poured out upon this earth, when men shall be beside themselves with frenzy, when their, what can I say, when their painful necessity to preserve their own lives, when their naked self-interest is touched as it has not been touched in comfortable America since, in our memory, we're going to see masks turned away and teeth bared and ugliness and a kind of conduct that we would not believe possible in the streets of our cities.

Men's hearts shall fail them for fear, and we're not going to see human conduct prompted by want of that kind, but we're going to see satanic and demonic spirits attending the frenzy of men. There's already a pouring out that you cannot believe because God has done such a superb work in this city to shield you and insulate you from some of the fiercer things that are taking place elsewhere, but I tell you that degrees of temptation, so uncanny, so fiendish, are going to be poured out on the civilized world and even penetrate the people of God where their defenses are down, as you will not believe.

There simply is not going to be any way that we can stand and survive in our own aloneness except that we cleave to each other. We're going to pass through a necessary crisis of disillusionment and face our lives as they really are, however threadbare, and begin from there before God in honesty and in truth.

We're going to learn what it means to confess our sins, our faults one to another, that we might pray one for another, that we might be healed, and I've always been a kind of a naive character, and from the first time that I ever opened the scriptures, I believed, and I remember that I came across those scriptures in James, confess your fault one to another, that you might pray one for another, that you might be healed, and I never saw an occasion in my young life as a believer where that was practiced in a church, and maybe some of you heard me give an account of this, but it's worth repeating, and some of you know the history of my relationship with my son David.

I've got three kids. He's the firstborn, and he's the most vexing. I'll tell you what it is about him that bugs me. He's just too much like the old man, the spitting image of art cats before he was saved.

Arrogant, hot shot, little egotist, always got to be in the middle of everything, and show off his his little cleverness, and it just makes me gnash my teeth in irritation, and he just has the most wonderful way to know how to spill the beans at the worst possible moment, and make me mad just before I'm going to a service, and going to present myself as God's minister.

Well, I remember one such occasion. It was time to go to the midweek service, and David pulled one of his boo-boos. I mean, it was a monster, and I just flipped my lid, and I let that kid have it, and I cracked him one, and then I had it out with Inger, who is very defensive about her son.

See, I'm the disciplined man, and she's the one who believes in going easy, and this is a source of continual friction and contention, and these are the kinds of things that we're gonna have to be resolved before God, because these are very real issues.

Oh, we love to discuss esoteric things. Say, is the temple going to be rebuilt in Jerusalem? I hear the stones are already cut and marked. How we thrill to such rumors as that, speaking about rumors, but when it comes to reconciling our differences with our wives, we're not quite as anxious to tackle that.

I've had a studied disinterest in prophecy, and I've been a disappointment to many. What? You're a Jew, and you have no interest in prophecy? Exactly, because it's a cop-out for far too many of God's people who love to occupy themselves with very distant things, full of excitement, and won't pay attention to the things which are at hand.

Marriage as Divine Refinement

Well, anyhow, there I went to the service that night, and the last thing I heard from Inga as the door slammed behind me with a loud thought, go tell them what a great man of God you are. I'll tell you that the eye of God rove to and forth over the face of this earth, and he wasn't satisfied till he found Inga in that little town in Denmark, and said, that's the one for him.

Oh, you thought your marriage was an accident, not made in heaven? You couldn't be more wrong. You thought something was amiss, because it's full of abrasive conditions and temperamental difficulties?

Exactly. Isn't the Lord perfect in his wisdom? She is so suited. I may make others cower, and others may give me grand introductions and acknowledgments, but to Inga, who's seen me in my underwear? So, I remember driving to that service that night.

My heart was like lead. I was so sick, sick, sick of these repeated episodes over David, how I couldn't control my temper over this kid, how he bugged me. He was my Achilles heel, and it always eventuated and resulted in an argument with Inga, and I was just driving like a dead man to that church, and I came in late, and the service was already in progress.

They were taking testimonies. You know the way we do? Yes, Sister Jones. Well, I just want to praise the Lord this week. He's such a wonderful Savior to me, and you know, I don't mean to disparage testimonies, but you know what I'm talking about.

There's so much in our life that's anxious, ceremonial, nonsensical. Far better we had stopped our mouths and had a service in complete silence before God, then we should go through such motions as that.

As a matter of fact, we had a minister come from Argentina, to whom God gave a revelation of what the church of God ought to be. He was a very successful pastor, and here's how he acted on his revelation.

He called a moratorium on all services for three months. That is that the congregation still continued to meet, but they stopped singing hymns, they stopped going through their unctuous prayers, they stopped hearing pretty sermons, and they waited on the Lord, and I'll tell you there's nothing more excruciating than silence.

He wouldn't allow his congregation to use the word Lord, because every time a speaker came to town, and they had a shop around for a place to put them up, people kind of wrinkled up their noses, and they complained that Aunt Susie was in town at the same time, or their kid had a cough, or the plumbing wasn't working, or something like that.

They called Jesus Lord, but the fact of the matter was that they were the Lord over their own homes, their own substance, their own cars, their own leisure, their own privacy, their own lives. He forbade them to use the word Lord until Jesus became Lord indeed.

There's been an explosion in that church since. There's been a revolution. There are people who will die for each other, who veritably will lay down their lives. There's no such thing as a man believing that his home is his own, or the things which he has are his own.

They have, they hold all things in common, and there's such a manifestation of the power of God upon this people, and God is adding to their number daily such as should be saved. Our life pattern is a bizarre distortion of God's original intention.

I can't tell you as a visiting man going from town to town at how many homes I've stayed, and can't even find a place to hang up my suit in the closet. It's so jammed full of goodies in plastic bags. People, there's a new pattern.

You've not been this way before, and it's going to require expanded families. It's going to require liberal hospitality. It's going to require not looking upon the things which we have as being our own, and be willing to give men the coats off our back, and the money out of our savings account.

I'll tell you there's been such a flow of money through me in this past year. I can't believe it, but it's not stopped there. It's just flowed, and a young couple of my acquaintance, a Jewish wife, and an Irish husband, spiritual believers, wanted to buy a house.

Poor kid struggling, didn't have the money for the closing cost, $1 ,000, like nothing. Odd cat's writing out a check for $1 ,000. Can you believe? Depression baby who used to pinch pennies and watch carefully to see that not too much toilet paper is taken.

I'll tell you that's kid stuff. It's only the beginning of things, and except that there's a flow of substance from God, from whom every good and perfect gift comes through us, we're going to be a source of grief to him, and impede the working of God in the end times.

I think we're going to see our living patterns radically altered. We're going to be thrust upon each other in ways we could never have anticipated. Many of us may be losing our homes when the economy is going to suffer a great contraction.

Maybe it'll be a loss of employment. Maybe we'll have to take whole families into our homes. Maybe we'll have to share with them, and feed them, and share our clothing, and present what we have. I'll tell you that at a recent conference, at the conclusion, we wanted to have a Lord's Supper in my hotel room.

It was a hot summer's day, and the air-conditioning had gone out, and to my, what's the word, consternation, more than the people who were invited came, and they came with their little snotty kids, and I was irritated, and the air-conditioning was out, and they were sitting on my bed, on the floor, by the doorway, in the bathroom, and it was rather uncomfortably crowded, and I thought, well, let's get get over with this, but I'll tell you, the Spirit of God began to move, and we went on and on in singing the hymns of the church, and praying to our God, in blessing one another, in speaking out of the Word, in breaking bread, and passing the cup, that we didn't want the hour to end, and when it was over, you know what I thought to myself?

I was irritated at first, because of the crowd. It wasn't something that I would have designed, but once it happened, I came not only to enjoy it, but to love it, and I was reluctant when it ended. God is going to radically change our living patterns, and we've not been that way heretofore, so I came to the church today, I was sitting at church, they're taking these testimonies, and in my heart, I heard a still small voice saying, confess your faults one to another, confess your faults one to another, and I try to put that voice down, you know, and finally, I found my hand going up, and I was getting hot spells, and cold spells, and my knees were knocking, and the pastor saw me, oh, Brother Katz, the Jewish believer, oh, he's gonna bless us, yes, Brother Katz.

I got up, I went purple, green, red, I said, since I came to the service tonight, I've been hearing one voice over and over, repeating, confess your fault one to another, confess your faults one to another.

I have to admit that I'm a simple believer, and I've never seen this done in any congregation, and I don't know when the propitious time is for such obedience, but I just feel that I have to confess a fault right now.

You could have cut the silence with a knife. That poor pastor was dumbstruck, and then I went on to tell him the unhappy incident with David, and I was really truthful. I told him it wasn't an isolated event, it was a repeated occurrence, and it was bugging me to death, and I was unable to do anything about it.

I said it was conduct unbecoming a father, and beyond that, it was conduct unbecoming a child of God, and beyond that, it was conduct unbecoming a servant of God. Would they pray for me? And I sat down, I would have hoped that the floor would have opened and swallowed me.

There was such a silence. It's the first time I ever saw the pastor not knowing what to say, and in that silence, finally, a woman got up on the other side of the congregation, and she confessed the fault, and I don't exactly remember what happened after that.

We were all kind of borne up by the Spirit, but we all found ourselves on our feet, praying one for another, and it was pure, undistilled glory. Oh, precious people, let's not be speakers of the Word only, but doers, and there's a God who's calling us in this hour to the nitty-gritty application of the Word to our lives, just where we live it.

We've not been that way heretofore, and we're going to be loath to pull up the stakes and follow after, but I tell you that the ark of God is being lifted by the priests and by the Levites. Are you seeing it by the eye of the Spirit, and will you be willing to lengthen your cords and follow after?

Please, don't be among the two-and-a-half tribes who just quite couldn't make it and were lost forever to the purposes of God. And you know what kind of a God we have? When does he tell us to cross?

Crossing at Flood Stage

We're supposed to cross at flood stage. In the 15th verse, we read, and as they bear the ark, they that bear the ark were come unto Jordan, and the feet of the priests that bear the ark were dipped in the brim of the water, for the Jordan overfloweth all his banks all the time of the harvest.

Dum-da-dum-dum. Say, what is it with this God? Can't he invite us to cross when it's just that little muddy stream, which it is just about almost every month out of the year but harvest time? Those of you who have been to Israel have seen the Jordan, have been profoundly disappointed.

It really is a muddy stream, and most times of the year you just roll up your cuffs and you tippy-toe your way through. But there's something about God, if you understand his way, that always requires the crossing of rivers of separation, not when it can be done tippy-toe, but when it's a foreboding torrent, and we're incapable of crossing in our own strength and will.

Therefore, he's got to go before and part the waters and make what is a river of death a pathway unto life, if we will follow after. And I believe that the Jordan to which God shall call us in this hour is going to be a river of seeming death in extremity and vexation and wrath that is going to be increasingly built up in a world which is at enmity with God in a period when the mask is going to be off in this age of radical extremity, and we're going to see unveiled the ages-old enmity of a world that hates God.

It's been concealed far too long in this hanky-panky game of the so-called three great faiths, but we're going to see men vicious against the children of God because they're no longer just a mild thing of indifference to contemplate who go for potluck suppers and attend services on a Sunday, but they stand as what they shall construe to be as obstacles in the path of civilization in an hour when it's struggling for its very existence.

Are you understanding what I'm saying? We're coming into an age of extremity and crisis, not only for the want of energy, but basic commodities for civilization for order. There's going to be turmoil and breakdowns at every hand, economic, political, social confusion and strife and every kind of vexation, and paradoxically it's going to come at the very time when we need leadership the most, and it's not to be found when our leaders themselves are suspect, and there's been a decline, a declension in authority.

To whom then shall we turn? And here are these foolish little people that are going to stand in the midst of this roaring torrent and say, Christ is the answer. I'll tell you, men shall gnash upon us with their teeth, and the attitude which now prevails in the Soviet Union shall prevail here.

We're going to be looked upon as dangerous enemies of society, given to superstition and fanaticism, men whose reason has deserted them and who don't realize that this age requires solemn solutions that have to do with economics and politics and IBM computers and talk about calling upon the Lord and seeking his face.

It's a river, a very fearful river, that God is going to ask us to cross. It's the river that was referred to when he said that we shall be hated of all nations for his namesake, and I'll tell you that as a Jew, I have a suspicion that a lot of the terror that has to do with this river of death will be brought about by issues pertaining to the Jewish people.

In a recent trip, I came to a town and a woman told me after meeting Archie said, I want to share something with you. I had a nightmare not long ago. I said, what was it? She said, I dreamt that there was a furious pounding on my door at something like 4 in the morning, a furious, insistent pounding, and the sound of it, she said, terrified me, and she said we hurriedly, the whole family came down in their nightclothes to see what this disturbance was, and we opened the door and men just brushed past us and knocked that door open, and they were masked, hooded men, and they demanded that we get dressed and we leave immediately with them.

We couldn't take a single possession, and then they bundled us and tied us up and threw us in the back of the car, and we drove off in the midst of the night, and she said I was paralyzed with fear, and I cried out to these men, why are you doing this?

She cried, and the answer was, you are among those who love the Jewish people. I believe that one of the phenomena of the end times is going to be a furious spate of anti-semitism, and we can see the delineations already.

The thing is beginning to form. Crippling energy crisis. Many countries already forbidding people the use of their cars on Sundays. Imagine should it come to River City, where we've long habituated ourselves to taking our car out any cotton-picking time we want to.

This is a free country, and all of a sudden to be told you cannot, it's against the law, and having the mumbling under our breath and being very churlish, and what are we going to say? Damned Arabs? No, we're going to hear damned Jews.

Israel is going to become a bone in the throat of the nations of the world, and I believe that this is going to be one among several factors of irritation in the world emanating from this difficulty in the Middle East, and other factors when there's economic crisis.

How do people's minds begin to gravitate? How should they look on prosperous Jewish merchants? And there's going to be a Satan who is going to work this to death for all its potential. Where shall you stand in that day who are kindly affectioned toward Israel now?

I'll tell you to stand with the Jewish people then is to mark you as a hated person as much as they, and a lot of you are going to cop out. It's okay now to palpitate in a schmaltzy way toward Israel, but how will you do it when it's going to cost you?

I'll tell you in the Nazi time, children betrayed their own parents out of fear for the authorities, and didn't so much as bat an eyelash when brown-shirted Hitler youth came and pulled the beards of elderly Jews and broke store windows and painted swastikas on apartment houses and beat up Jewish kids.

They pulled their shade and looked the other way. Self-preservation. There's a river that God is going to ask us to cross, a fearful foreboding river, and it's going to be at flood stage because it's harvest time.

And if we had time to follow out the scriptures, you would find in Jeremiah 12, 5 and 49, 19, that there's a reference that at the time of the overflowing of the Jordan, that the lions are out roaring.

There they were in the thickets, but when the waters begin to overspill the banks and these lions become restive and they begin to roar, it's a fearful thing, and many shall be intimidated and turned back from the crossing of this Jordan.

Oh, there are so many things that I could speak about what the Jew is going to mean in this end time. We've seen it already with Key 73, and the great outcries from rabbinical sources, and not rabbinical sources only, but liberal churchmen upbraiding us who call ourselves Christians and saying, do you call this Christian love?

Trying to persuade a Jew to become a Christian and forsake his Jewishness? Say, haven't they suffered enough in the Holocaust? And aren't they struggling to retain their Jewish identity in Russia? Are you two going to deny them their right to be Jews and make Christians out of them?

Anti-Semite? Boy, I can see the Adam's apples bobbling all over Christendom as the crescendo of fury and anger rises on the issue of bringing the gospel to the Jews in the last times. There's a fearful river of crossing to which God is bringing us, but I'll tell you that if we'll follow after our Joshua, our Yeshua, we shall go over as on dry ground.

It's interesting, the last verse of this third chapter, and the priests that bear the ark of the covenant of the Lord stood firm on dry ground in the midst of the Jordan, and all the Israelites passed over on dry ground until all the people were passed clean over Jordan.