I Would Not Have You Ignorant — Art Katz

Let this earth hear your voice, my God. Give us your appointed word, what is upon your heart, your understanding, that's on time for your people. Keep us, my God, from erring against you, even in our best intention.

So we thank you. You're powerful enough even to inhibit us from that error. And we trust you, therefore, that your regard for this time, this hour, is more jealous than our own, and you'll not allow us to trespass.

Come, my God, and be perfect. How can it be otherwise? That's what you are. And we thank and give you praise for the great privilege of hearing from the living God. Thank you, Lord, for your wisdom, your heart, your knowledge, your understanding.

Change us by it, we pray. Be glorified through a church so changed. In Yeshua's name, we ask it. Amen. So it's only a matter of time before I have to speak on the subject of the mystery of Israel and the church.

The Mystery of Israel and the Church

The time has come, because I am indebted to the Lord for a remarkable perception of that mystery that requires a stewardship. And no mystery is susceptible to mere human intelligence. Mysteries can only be understood through revelation.

They're given by the grace of God to those who receive them. And the mystery of Israel and the church, what shall I say of that? It is an exaggeration to suggest that every present defect of the church, its carnality, its ambition, its exaggeration, whatever is at want, in the last analysis, can be reduced to this, the failure to have been apprehended by this mystery.

It is central to the church's own perception of itself. To miss this is to assure that the church will be warped, losing its center and be out of whack, turning to itself or taking to itself ambitions and designs God never intended.

It's the one mystery of which Paul warned that there would be a consequence if we fail to apprehend it. I would not have you to be ignorant of this mystery, brethren, lest you become wise in your own conceit.

This is the penalty. You miss this of necessity. You're going to become inflated, pompous, conceited. Your understanding of the church will be exaggerated. You'll take to yourself things God never intended.

You yourself will become the Israel of God. You're bringing the kingdom of God. You are the kingdom of God, the kingdom now. Every kind of sloppy, nondescript thing that has characterized our present Christianity, I think in the last analysis, can be understood as stemming from the omission of this mystery.

The character of the church itself, which is to say, in keeping with that of its God, who is meek, lowly and mild, requires the apprehension of this mystery. The church needs to be tempered by the understanding that it has a purpose for itself that is beyond itself, that is even other than itself, namely to be the salvific agents of God for the restoration of another, namely Israel.

What makes it all the more remarkable is that the church is essentially Gentile and the Jew is different other than that which is Gentile. And in fact, the whole history of mankind is nothing other than the friction between that which is Jewish and that which is Gentile.

All you need to do is grow up with a Jewish mother to know that. Them, the other, the goyim, the Gentiles, the enemy. So God is not just making some peace, some resolution. The great glory of God will be revealed by forming a Gentile church whose essential purpose is not its own, but the restoration of the Jew.

Totally unnatural that a church should take to itself such a purpose, and that's what glorifies God. It is so unnatural, it cannot be attained except by the grace of God so that in the last analysis, the wonder of this accomplishment, not yet obtained, will redound to the glory of God forever.

Romans 11 and the Glory of God

Wow, what an initial introductory statement. Did you get that? And who speaks of this in this way, that this is the issue of the glory of God forever. None other than your friend and mine, the Apostle Paul, who warned the church in Romans, you should not be ignorant of this mystery, and ends the book of Romans with the most glorious outburst of praise to be found anywhere in Scripture that almost stretches language to the point of breaking.

Oh, the depth of the riches, both of the wisdom and the knowledge of God, who has been his counselor, who has given to him, and it shall be given again. For of him and through him and to him are all things to whom be glory forever.

That outburst is the heart of the Apostle. It's the genius of the Apostle. It's, it's, there's no understanding of him independent of what that outburst signifies. He has seen something. And what he has seen is central to his own whole preoccupation with the church as the apostle to whom the stewardship of the mysteries of God are given.

And so the question is, how can anything have so preoccupied and filled the Apostle Paul's heart that he ends with such a statement that can barely be confined by language and that the church should be altogether ignorant, if not indifferent, if not hostile to the same thing that has provoked him to this uttermost exclamation.

And that's the condition of the church. I cannot fathom that this statement should conclude Romans 11 and that a church should go on with its entire existence, never ever understanding or seeking to understand, let alone share in the remarkable euphoric praise that poured out of Paul's own heart.

That such a church must of necessity be in error. Got the idea? So what are these three great chapters that Paul devotes to this theme? Nine through 11 in the book of Romans. And what is the book of Romans?

Paul's centerpiece. Paul is not a systematic theologian. He comes out from his seams. The great profundities of Paul that have enriched the church are hardly anything more or other than his practical counsel to the church in its infancy, how to conduct church, how to have communion, how to deal with recalcitrant members of the body.

He's a man answering practical questions for the church, but his answers have been the most lofty and noble statements of the church in its glory available for our edification. So the church asked him a question in Romans.

Is God Finished With Israel?

The Roman church is God finished with the Jew. They had every right to believe that as indeed the church has today. Look at the condition of Jews worldwide. Look at their indifference, if not resistance to the gospel.

Look at the genius that this people has for conceiving of alternatives to the gospel. Other messianic programs that have swept the world as, for example, communism. Communism authored by a Jew by the name of Karl Marx is an alternative schema to bring about resolution for mankind that they may live happily ever after without God through an atheistic regime that will employ force in order to subdue or eliminate the bourgeoisie, the class that exploits and lives upon the innocent proletariat, the working stiff, who has evidently some virtue of his own, some innate virtue that if you remove the oppression of this class conflict and release the proletariat, you'll have, what do you call it?

Not only peace on earth, you'll have kingdom come. And what has it in fact brought? Unbelievable bloodshed, devastation and devastation of the minds and hearts of men. I'm just learning from my own activity in Russia and the Ukraine where I have eight books in Russian.

What do you think of that? Never having lifted a finger for one of them. And then when I came on the last trip to Kiev, I found that I was a culture hero and people were falling on my neck and I was interviewed on TV because there was something in my books, unbeknownst to myself, that had touched the deepest heart of the Russian speaking church, namely a release to believe that they can sense God, know him, be led by his spirit, who had been so automated and so brainwashed by an oppressive hand over them that they had lost their confidence in their own humanity as believers.

So, so much for Marxism, Freudianism, and all of the other isms that have been coined out of the minds of Jewish geniuses who knew not God. And that's why Paul in the book of Romans chapter 11 says, they are the enemies of the gospel.

That's what I love about the candor, C-A-N-D-O-R, of the scriptures. God does not mince words. But how does he finish the statement? They are the enemies of the gospel for your sake. Who needs it?

We need it. They present a particular quality of opposition that is ultimate, but what are we to do with our enemies but love them and bear their sting and their opposition? Because unless they are returned to their God, and their God returns them to their land, the Lord has not a place designated by which he will rule over his creation, for the law must go forth out of Zion.

Believers of this, you uninducted church, who are the victims of a Christianity that has been bereft of this centerpiece, that the issue of Israel is the issue of the kingdom. Didn't you know that the kingdom is of David and that it must be enacted and the rule must come forth from the throne of David?

And that that throne can only be located at one place, the holy hill of Zion in the city of Jerusalem in the land of Israel. And that gives to Israel a particular prominence and significance beyond being merely another ethnic group that needs to be saved.

The Kingdom of David and Israel's Prominence

And that explains to us why this child from his inception was under the attack of the enemy for his destruction. For the gods of this world are the prevailing rule over creation and will continue to be until God's ordained rulers take their seat, the Lord himself in Zion, in a restored nation that will be supportive of and express that kingdom.

And in the heavenlies, a host of co-rulers who rule and reign with Christ, who have overcome in this world every opposition directed by those same powers, so that some will rule over five cities and some over ten.

You don't even know your destiny as the church. How shall you know Israel's? Or to put it the other way, how shall you know your destiny unless you know Israel's? And to put it another way, how shall you obtain your destiny except by and through Israel?

It is your sacrifice in in being the agent of God for Israel salvation that brings the discipline and the relationship with God and with each other that qualifies you to rule and reign with him in heavenly places hereafter.

Have mercy on these people. They can't take it. They have not been prepared to take it. You see what happens? All you have to do is drop this pebble in the pool and the ripples go out through the whole circumference.

Once Israel is rightly inserted in the context of God's redemptive purposes, the ripples touch every aspect of the totality of all that is included in the faith. Nothing is exempt. Everything has got to be seen anew, examined and understood in the light of this remarkable mystery that is at the heart of God's whole redemptive saga.

The redemption of Israel after thousands of years of apostasy to such a point where God says you have blasphemed my name in every nation where I have driven you so that he has every right to permanently dismiss them from any consideration.

They have forfeited it by their terrible track record is what we would think. And what the Roman church thought is God finished now with the Jew. Not only have they stoned every prophet sent to them, but they crucified the Lord of glory.

They're so removed from any place taught from God that they can't even recognize him whom he has sent and was so offended that they would not be satisfied with anything less or other than his death. Isn't that the evidence that God is now finished with them once and for permanently?

And we, the church who had been grafted into their tree, we are now the Israel of God and we will now inherit their promises and we will be, we will, we, we, we, we, and Paul says, uh, God forbid that you should think that I'm not a Greek scholar.

I'm not a scholar at all, but I understand that in the Greek Paul's phrase, God forbid is the strongest exclamation of warning that can be given in that language. Don't begin to think that by any means he's finished with them.

Their fall is only a stumbling. It's only a temporary being out of the way, let it, though it has been 2000 years, but there's a purpose in it of a strategic kind that through their fall, salvation has come to the Gentiles.

So as to move them to jealousy. Then there's a purpose for your salvation beyond yourself and beyond any benefit you receive from it. It is for them who have been cast out momentarily by their own sin, their own rejection, but they will be brought back through envy.

When they see the marvelous expression in Gentiles of what they themselves have forfeited in losing their covenant relationship with God. So now after 2000 years of the church, has that mystery been fulfilled?

Not at all. Well, Art, you're saved and there are numbers of Jews being saved now. Yes. What does Paul say? That even though the word had been rejected yet in every generation, there is a remnant and elect according to grace.

And most of us Jews have not been saved because of the church, but almost in spite of. Through personal revelation, dealings of God and the faithful prayer of here and there, a saint or a witness that has turned us.

The nation itself still remains to this day outside and opposed to the purposes of God. And all you need do is consult the nation that is called Israel in the Middle East and look at its conduct and this attitude and the way in which it is governed and responds even to the greatest threats to its existence.

For what a man will do and what a nation will do when it is in extremity and required to strain for its own preservation and survival is the indication of where it is. So have you heard that Sharon, what's his first name?

Ariel Sharon has called for a day of fasting and prayer. That we should that the nation should seek should seek to the God of its fathers, that he might yet be a living God and that the God who has answered the cry of his people in times past will answer this cry.

Not so much as a sin killer. It is absolutely absent from the consciousness of the world's most secular nation. Therefore, the Air Force, therefore, the IDF, the Israel Defense Force, therefore, the bombings first time since 1967, jet bombers bombing Palestinian targets with great precision.

But God help us. They should not miss and hit a residential area and they would be the scandal of the world so desperate that the only way they know how to respond to a terrorist blowing himself up at the entrance to a mall is to bomb.

And so we're going to see this continuation of reprisal through terror and then reaction through force, through reprisal, through force, through reprisal, till the whole thing will go up because they have no alternative, not knowing God.

The Until of Israel's Restoration

And yet the age cannot end without the restoration of this nation. And so turn to Romans 11. And we'll fasten on one verse how Paul says this is going to take place. Verse 25. So he says that you should not be inflated or conceded in some pompous exaggeration of yourself to the exclusion of Israel.

I want you to understand the verse 25, this mystery, the hardening has come upon part of Israel until there's an until this is not God's final statement. It will be ended when when the full number of the Gentiles has come in.

And so all Israel will be saved as it is written out of Zion will come to deliver. He will banish ungodliness from Jacob. And this is my covenant with them when I take away their sins. Is that a remarkable statement?

Now, you who are dozing off, I don't know what to recommend to you. Take a walk, get an air. Don't miss this. Don't miss this. An afternoon session is always a peril. But here's the Lord trotting out one of the deepest mysteries of God unknown to the church, which is not only the key to Israel's restoration, but the key to the church itself.

The church must necessarily remain defunct, out of order, out of balance, warped, having a false center itself until this mystery of Paul is restored to its consciousness. And I'm not talking about an admiration or a sympathy for the present state of Israel.

That's something else that's sentimental. That's nice. What I'm talking about, something much deeper for the church to apprehend and be apprehended by, for when it will, it will require the adjustment of the church in every point in particular about itself.

It could no longer after this be an auditorium-fashioned theater looking up to an elevated platform and a performing minister who is credentialed, whose salary is being paid in order to conduct a service.

That will be a no-no. It will be a contradiction. It will be an apparent deviation from what will really be needed is a return to the apostolic beginning that when you assemble together, Paul said, each one has a tongue and interpretation, a hymn, a psalm, a revelation.

The church must, of necessity, go back or find again the pattern where God was in his glory in the early church when the church, before the advent of Constantine, moved into its theater-like architecture, its elevated platforms, its credentialed clergy, and losing the whole character of the reality that the church knew at the first when the house was filled with the glory of God and no man thought that the thing which he had was his own.

The Apostolic Pattern of the Church

When the apostles performed mighty wonders, how does it say it? Great grace was upon them all and with power gave the apostles testimony to the resurrection of Jesus Christ. We should not look upon that wistfully as something out of the past from which we have moved and never can return, but something that must again be found and appropriated because unless we come to that configuration, we cannot be to Israel what we must.

And in fact, does this scripture that we just read hint at it, that Israel's deliverance comes out of Zion? Paul is quoting from Isaiah that somehow when the full number of the Gentiles come in, so all Israel will be saved, as it is written, he is the apostle cleaving to the expressed word of God and believing that though he's quoting from Isaiah, there's yet a fulfillment of that in the last days.

As it is written, out of Zion will come the deliverer. Well, the deliverer is the Lord, but what is the Zion out of which he comes? Is it a geographical, physical place? Is it a condition? If it's the church itself being referred to in Isaiah before the word church has had its advent and introduction, then whatever Zion is, if that's us, has got to come through the until.

Something has got to happen for the deliverer to come out from Zion, not something that comes out of Israel. Israel is to be acted upon. Israel will be dry bones. Israel will have no ability in itself to affect its own restoration, and this must necessarily be the case.

Why? Because Israel is man. Israel is human prowess honed and perfected. Israel is the Jew who in a half century can take a malarial swampland and turn it into one of the high tech civilizations of the world and among the leading military powers with atomic arsenal.

That's man. And that is not how God's word to Abraham shall be fulfilled, that his descendants will bless all the families of the earth. Can you follow that? Am I going too fast, too much, too far? He will banish ungodliness or take transgression from Jacob.

Israel Transformed by God's Covenant

Dear saints, we've got to become Bible scholars. I'm sorry about this. I know you're spoiled. I know you're lazy. I know you're indifferent. I know you're slothful. I know you don't study. I know you read casually.

You're waiting for someone to tell you that's what you're paying for. You have got to become exegetes. You've got to draw out the meaning. God is going to banish ungodliness from Jacob. God is going to take transgression from Jacob.

Jacob is to be acted upon. He's not to go through a reform movement. He's not to learn to improve his ways. He cannot. He's got to be transformed. He's got to be turned from Jacob to Israel by God's action, not his own.

God will banish. God will take away as it is written. And if God does not do it and it is written, what does that say about God? He's a loud mouth and a braggart who makes promises he's unable to fulfill.

So the issue of this fulfillment of the word spoken in Isaiah through the inspiration of the spirit is the issue of God. If this is not fulfilled, I'm not talking about the benefit that comes to Israel.

I'm talking about the issue of God in the world. He has made himself a non-God by his own inability to fulfill his work. And if an apostle is anything, he's jealous, not for Israel so much as for the God who speaks and it is written according to the covenant that I have made with them must be fulfilled for God's own sake.

Where is the jealousy of the church like that for God? That's why we're a bunch of, I don't know what we are. We're a bunch of exploiters where we're using God, we're using the scriptures, we're using the songbook for ourselves.

Where is the heart of the matter that distinguishes the church as the church, which is to say that is jealous for the name, the honor and glory of God. If you lose that, you lose all. I don't care what you do.

I don't care what your programs are, what you profess to be concerned about these ethnic groups and you're going into admissions and you're having this program. If you have not this apostolic jealousy, you are ipso facto, not the church.

You're a social phenomenon, you have services, you perform things, there's somebody being blessed, but you are not the church in any apostolic definition of the word. Unless you have Paul's jealousy for the name and honor of a God who honors covenants that he makes and keeps them, who gives words to his prophets Isaiah and will fulfill them and all the more gloriously through a people who don't give a rap, who have no interest in being chosen, who don't want to be Zion.

They only want to be the Hong Kong of the Middle East. Don't you know? And that if you squeeze them, their real statement is we want to be like every other nation. We want to have a ball. We want to have malls.

We want to have Gucci shops and the latest word in merchandise, which in fact we do so that wealthy Jordanians can come into Jerusalem, not to worship the most high God, but to go to the Gucci shops and get the most exquisite merchandise available.

That is our ambition. That is our intention. We don't even know that God has purposes for us and we don't even want to know. Can God find a more obdurate, resistant, unwilling people for the fulfillment of his will and glory?

No. That's why he's chosen Israel. Not because of our virtue, but because of our obstinacy, stiff-necked, unwilling, self-centered so that if he succeeds with us, it's through the eternal praise of God's glory for ever.

God has stacked the cards against himself and put all of his eggs in one basket and says, I'm going to fulfill this through the church. Lord, come on. It's difficult enough just with Israel, but through the church, have you seen it lately?

Are you kidding? Can you believe for that? They can't even stay awake. To him be glory forever. It's going to take eternity of eternities to praise God for the magnificence of the fulfillment of his brilliant design and intent.

Resurrection, the Nations, and the Church's Eschatology

That can only be fulfilled by the power of his risen life. If there's no resurrection saints, and that was a sleight of hand and Jesus was just groggy and doped up on the cross to look dead because who can believe that God can actually raise the dead.

Then we of all men are most to be pitied. When Jesus said it is finished, he meant this. He meant all of God's redemptive design, the great saga of redemption, over creation, the restoration of nations who are in active rebellion against God, whether it's polite or hostile.

The fact that we begin sessions of Congress by praying by swearing an oath on the Bible does not disguise the fact that the nation itself is at enmity with God as all the world all of the nations do their own thing.

The rule is the powers of the air are the ones that really jerk and manipulate them. And until every nation shall bend its knee and confess with its mouth that Jesus is Lord to the glory of God, the father, he has not yet succeeded.

That's why when you read the Psalms and the sweeping statements that his praise shall be to the ends of the earth, the psalmist knew what it was about, but the church doesn't know. Local, most narrow design and ambition from Sunday to Sunday, one Sunday being like another, no movement, no direction, no consummation, a church without an eschatology.

That means without any consideration of the end to which it should be moving. A church without an apocalyptic expectancy, which means the actual direct divine intervention of God in the affairs of men in judgment and in restoration is not a church.

It's a social club. It's a Christian culture. It's a nice Sunday addendum, but it's not the church in any sense of that which God intended from the first. But if God can succeed in Australia, then there's a hope.

And the fact that we are here, I hope this doesn't sound immodest, indicates to me he has that intention. You know why he would not squander us in some place where there's not going to be the acceptance of his word and the acting upon it.

He sends us to those places where there's potential for response or we would not be sent. We're not at the big conferences. We're not charismatic darlings. I'm not your cutie Jewish messianic personality, but to the remnant people of God, God is speaking.

Okay, if you don't get, if you don't ask us some good questions over this, I'm going to pout. If tonight or some other time we open for questions and you have no questions, you're going to see the most dejected man slumped before you.

How can you not have questions? My God, we're sweeping through a whole remarkable saga of redemption, touching the enormous highlights that you've never before heard nor considered. And you have no question that God has chosen the church as he has chosen Israel in a reciprocal relationship by which neither the church nor Israel can come in to the fulfillment of God's intention for each independent of each other.

The mystery is that the church is locked in with Israel, with the Jew and cannot obtain its own fulfillment without the embrace of the thing to which it is called toward a people which it would never have chosen.

Because they are unlike you, different and other, because there are deep-seated and lingering resentments against Jews, because the normative condition of every Gentile by nature and by birth is to be anti-Jewish.

Gentile and Jew in the Redemptive Purpose

I finally have seen that on my last trip to Europe, especially in Poland, Lithuania, of the Baltic nations, there is a resident and innate anti-Semitism in every Gentile. The only way that it can even be identified, if you suggest it, they say, oh me, never.

The only way that it can be healed is by the recognition of what lingers and the work of God's blood, word, and spirit to meet it. That's why when a Gentile believer has an authentic love for a people that he should by every reckoning despise or reject, you know God has been at work.

It's not a natural thing. It is supernatural. And I received my baptism in the Holy Spirit 35 or more years ago with a small group of believers on a sloping farm floor, not in my Pentecostal church, but a small group who were distinguished by the fact that they were studying Hebrew, that they loved Israel, they were caught up with prophecy pertaining to that fulfillment at the end of the age, and with them in the atmosphere conducive to the Holy Spirit's presence, the Lord baptized me in the Holy Ghost.

God has made us Gentile and Jew exactly to reveal His glory in the same way that He has made us male and female exactly to fulfill His glory. He delights in pitting opposites and requiring them not just to get by, but to come into a union of a transcendent kind by which He can be glorified.

Merely to be compatible is to miss it. There's struggle, collision, contradiction, opposition, not because you're mean, but because you're female or male, or Jew or Gentile, or black or white. God Himself has so formed these tensions that unless He has been invoked and brought in, with His great redemptive power, we cannot move through these staggering oppositions and fail in the divorce court, or run to another church, or have a fight with another nation, or even within the nation, like the American Civil War, or the recent genocide between tribes in Africa, Rwanda.

This is man. God has set the stage, or stacking all the cards against Him, that when He shall succeed, it will be to the everlasting praise of His glory. And unless that's your motive, you will end in the divorce court.

I'm speaking symbolically and actually. Unless your motive is more than your personal happiness, and your accommodation, and your satisfaction, you will fail. That is to say, the glory of God has got to be the foremost singular motive for being, whether it's marriage, church, or society.

Then you're able to bear the suffering that precedes the glory. Listen, I've been at this for over 35 years, and we have not come through yet. But I'm not breaking it off, because I'm a covenant-keeping man.

And I know that God is the God of covenant. And He's the third chord in the threefold chord. And though it seems hopeless by any measure, and even inhibits the success of my ministry that would do so much better if I had a raven-haired Jewish woman as my partner who's in agreement with me, and recognizes my calling, and lends herself to it, I'll still stick with that Danish, Gentile, snub-nosed, sandy-haired, freckled-faced woman who doesn't have a notion of what anybody sees in her husband, because what he speaks and does is a complete mystery to her.

And why don't I tell jokes like the other speakers do? You think that such a union is an accident? Or is it the most perfect expression of God's intention for the perfecting of a servant, and bringing about a reconciliation in a marriage that is symbolic and representative of the mystery of the church of Gentile and Jew made into one new man?

And 35 years is nothing. It's a vapor, it's a moment, it's a blink of His divine eye. And you'll only bear it and be patient for it if the issue is more than compatibility. And you still have your looks, and get rid of the bum, and start over again.

You deserve happiness. That's the world, and its wisdom, destroying what God has created. We're a spongy, easy, soft, quick-to-quit church, because we have not taken to our heart the jealousy for God's glory, and have not understood that the issue is not compatibility.

He's the master of incompatibility, in order that His glory might be obtained in a resolution that is not just a truth, but a transcendent and heavily breakthrough that only He can affect. And the holiest piece of furniture, in the holiest place of all, and the temple of God, is the Ark of the Covenant.

The Ark of the Covenant. With a mercy seat, and in that cabinet, not much bigger than this, the scroll of the law, the pot of manna, the rod of Aaron that budded, made of pure gold, which is all God. Gold is divinity.

But it's wood encased in gold. And what kind of wood? Acacia. It's a desert shrub, and it's gnarled, and twisted, and somehow fitted into the gold, or it would not be glory. Pure gold, without the wood, is not glory.

God, independent of His church, is not glory. God is glorified in and through His church, or He's not glorified at all. And what's on the top of this mercy seat? Two angels, cherubim, with wings at each end, hammered out of the same piece of gold.

But both are hammered out of the same piece on either end, and whose wings are made to touch. And they are made to look at each other, right eyeball to eyeball, and at the same time, look down through the place of mercy to the righteous requirement of God in the law.

God said to Moses, build this according to this pattern. He said, and here I will meet with you. Above the mercy seat, and between the wings of the cherubim. And there I will give you an instruction and commandment for the sons of Israel.

Where do you find God? You find Him in the tension of opposites, right in the middle, between the two, each representing different interests, male, female, Jew, Gentile, black, white, Israeli, and Palestinian, what Tony and I represent.

But brought to a place of looking each other in the face. Glory is not by escape or looking away, it's by seeing things as they in fact are. Hard things to see, painful things, not only about the other, but what is revealed in yourself because of the other.

See, I would have been a great saint if it were not for my wife. But in this relationship with her, this demand and annoying interruption and contradiction, I have had to see through it things of myself that would not otherwise have been revealed.

I needed that opposition, and you need it also. You know what a saint is? Are you taking notes? A saint is one who is willing to live in the tensions of the faith and not give up. Because a tension is a suffering.

But it's not a tension that is endless. It's a tension that will finally be resolved and consummated to the glory of God forever. In this life, humiliation, reproach. What, you're a minister and you don't have your marriage together?

How come? Can't you buy her chocolates? Don't you know how to take her out? Okay, why don't you do this? Why don't you do, do, do? Why don't you manipulate? Why don't you come, you know? You poor sap.

I'm not in something for accommodation and compatibility so that I'll have my sex life fulfilled. There's something greater at stake. It's the glory of God and it's not going to be obtained with a box of chocolates.

It has to wait upon Him who is a covenant-keeping God, although He takes His sweet old time about it. You see what I mean, saints? Rightly understanding Israel opens whole dimensions to the most intimate aspect of one's life as a person in your marriage.

Covenant, Marriage, and the Glory of God

And the issues with your children. The issue of authority in your household is the issue of the church, which was before never considered. We, we, we look over that. We hope for a spiritual roulette on a Sunday morning that does not touch these problems and areas of discontent and, and then we go home to the problems.

Because we only want an evasion. We want a momentary surcease. We want a blessing. We're not realistic. We're not dealing with the realities to which God has called us. And why are the kids in that surly rebellious condition with their rings through their navels as well as their ears?