K-530 Jacob Wrestling — Art Katz

I guess the only subject I can speak about tonight is wrestling, but praise God that there's a wrestling match that's described in the Bible that I think is fantastically significant. And I've always had a very deep respect for wrestling myself, not that I wrestled to a chicken I guess, or not a physical type, but I remember as a high school teacher, I had kids in my class who were, I want to say zombies, there was nothing I could do to get a rise out of them.

Can you hear me in the back? I used to dance on my head and do pirouettes and leap across the desk and every dramatic stunt that I could think of. I was trying to persuade these kids that it just wasn't a history class, that this had to do with life and reality and death, and still they sat like zombies, they never batted their eyelashes.

And I remember one time in my desperate frustration, I said, if you'll not believe that what I'm trying to convey is real, that I'm going to take out this revolver from my desk drawer and blast my brains and my blood all over your mod clothes.

And still I looked up and, uh-huh. But you know, I had an amazing revelation one day. Every Friday some of us old crocs used to go to the gymnasium and work out. And I saw some of the same kids who were zombies in my class come alive on the wrestling mat.

Wrestling as a Picture of Total Commitment

It was fantastic, the transformation. The same ones that didn't stir or blink an eyelash with my profundities in the classroom. On the wrestling mat, I saw these guys alive to the extremity and to the fingertips.

And I've always had a deep respect for wrestling and I think that the Greeks probably recognized that it was the supreme sport. Because I don't think that there's a sport that takes more of the totality of what a man is than a wrestling match.

I mean, it's not just your physical strength, and it's not just your skill, it's not just your determination, but I mean it's every last iota of your being and all that you are. And as we Jews say, right out of her tiscus.

It's deep unto deep and eyeball to eyeball. And if there's anything that tests a man in the extremity and the totality of its life, it's wrestling. And I haven't planned to speak on wrestling tonight, but...

They say that there's an answer in the book for every situation. And there's a wrestling match that's described in this book that I think is fantastic. And it's something that's reminiscent of my life, and I think for that reason I'm rather partial to it.

It's a wrestling match that a man had with a stranger one day by the name of Jacob. And you know, there's something about Jacob that has its counterpart in the modern world. There's a certain Jacob spirit in the world.

Jacob is a well-meaning guy. He's even a guy who appreciates spiritual things. But he's a bit of a wheeler and a dealer. He's a guy who lives always, in the last analysis, by his own resources, his own wits, and his own determination.

And isn't that really the epitome of what modern life is? And for a wheeler, do you know what that means? He's a god unto himself. And guys, I wish we had a lot of time tonight, but we don't. And I'm going to have to be very brief.

I'm going to ask you to be students as you've never been it, and ask you to extend yourself and read between the lines of the things that I'm trying to suggest. And here's what I'm trying to suggest. That this is an age in crisis.

This is an age of extremity. And I don't know if that's as pointed and as understandable in North Carolina as it is where I'm living in Denmark, or some of the places that I've been in the world, in great cities, and seen a growing tide of filth and obscenity and perversion, Satanism, witchcraft, rebellion, and death.

If you don't know these facts now, I can assure you that these are going to be the essential facts of your generation. And it's everything that the scriptures have been telling us, if we have ever disposed ourselves to read them, that in the last days, perilous times would come, and men would be lovers of self and lovers of pleasure more than lovers of God.

It doesn't say that the world would be devoid of religion in these last days. Quite the contrary. There even is going to be a kind of a renaissance of religion. But praise God, I'm not speaking to you tonight about religion.

You see, it's very easy for a Jacob to be religious. It's very easy for a man who is a God unto himself, and living for the pursuit of his own pleasure and his own gratification, to throw God a bone on Sunday or the Shabbos or the high holidays or Christmas and Easter.

And I would say that about 9 out of 10 people in this room fit that category, and you come out of families which I have perfectly described. You're Sunday Christians or Easter or Christmas Christians, so-called.

And if someone asks you, are you a Christian? You say, well, yes. What else? I'm not a Moslem. Jacob was a superficially religious man. And it's interesting that he had two encounters with God before he came to a very real showdown.

And although our speech might have a lot of approximate terms and many vagaries, and we say, yes, but, maybe, I'll tell you something about the Word of God. It's very sharp. It's very lean. It's very sparse.

There's not an extra syllable or a piece of superfluous utterance or a comma or punctuation that's out of place. I really commend it for you to read it and see how that thing goes right through your heart like a knife.

Jacob's First Encounter: The God of Abraham and Isaac

And the two encounters that Jacob had with God, and I'm talking about the God of Abraham, Isaac, the God of Israel, there's no other God, that when God introduced himself to Jacob when he had a vision, a dream at night, with his head on a rock in the wilderness, and he saw a ladder with angels ascending and descending, and the Lord was at the top of it and spoke to him, he said, I am the God of your father, Abraham, and the God of your father, Isaac, and the land whereupon thou liest, to thee will I give it.

You know, sometimes we have to read the Word of God not only for what God says, but for what God leaves out. I'm the God of your father, Abraham, and the God of your father, Isaac, and he stopped right there.

He didn't say, I'm Jacob's God, because he was not. And that's the point, guys. He's nobody's God, automatically. He's nobody's God by virtue of birth, by virtue of being Jewish, or circumcised, or bar mitzvahed, or necessarily baptized, or sprinkled, or confirmed, or any of the thousands of religious things which we do as part and parcel of our religious or cultural tradition.

What it takes to make a Jacob, to make the God of Abraham and the God of Isaac the God of Jacob, was a wrestling match. No holds barred. Gut to gut, and eyeball to eyeball. And it's interesting how God patiently brought Jacob to just such a place as that.

And my prayer for every one of you precious young people tonight is that you won't have to wait too long for that encounter. As a matter of fact, it's available tonight right where you sit and where you stand.

And I pray that you won't have to wait as this Jacob waited, and as long as my God waited for me to come to the end of my conceit, and my arrogance, and my self-assurance, and my Jacob life, until in my 35th year, I wrestled with exactly that same person that my forefather Jacob wrestled with, with the exact same result.

I want to describe that wrestling match. It came at the extremity of Jacob's life. What does it take, guys? Do you have any idea of how eminently superficial we are? Do you have an idea of how phony we are?

How shallow? How casual? How indifferent? The thing that brought me to the end of myself in my 34th year, and fantastically, it came at a time when I finally arrived, when I was finally a success. I who had been a high school dropout at the age of 16, and a wandering Jew, and a bum, and a merchant seaman, and a drifter, and a guy who tried his hand at every vocation, and relationship, and girl, and cause, and ideology, was finally a high school teacher.

And my mother was throwing out her chest with pride in Brooklyn, speaking about my son, the professor. I tell you, she had every bit of exaggeration coming, because I had given that poor woman so many great hairs, and she had made so many trips up to the principal's office, what her son had done this time.

And now she could say, my son, the professor. And I was being applauded by my students and by my colleagues, and isn't it fantastic, in the very year of my success, when I finally attained that in which I had been striving all my life, I realized what a failure I was.

We Americans say that there's nothing that succeeds like success, and I want to tell you that that's completely wrong. There's nothing that fails like success. Because once you've arrived, you realize just how hollow you are.

Your victory is ashes in your mouth. And which are the nations today that are dying, who are the ones that are cheating on each other's wives, attempting orgies, drugs, and every kind of harebrained and erotic, stupid kind of contrivance to fill the hollowness of our lives, but we who are affluent and successful.

And God had to wait for Jacob to come to the end of himself, and he had to wait for me, and he's waiting for you. He's waiting for the modern world to come to the end of its games playing, the end of its shallow religiosity, the end of talking about religion, whether you call it Judaism or Christianity or whatever, but still effectually being lords unto yourself.

And Jacob came to that place that I came, and I came because I thought that you guys were my hope. Oh, I believed that young people were uncorrupted and unsainted, and somehow in a classroom that we could develop a pattern of life which we could offer to the world of true brotherhood and compassion and blah, blah, blah.

That's what I thought. But you know what I learned? You guys are not one width different than anybody in the world. You're just a bit younger, but you exhibit the self-same nature, the self-same Jacob nature that's pitting nation against nation and class against class and race against race.

And you say, but Art, no, I'm not that way. I'm really humanistic. Well, that's what I thought I was. At the root, guys, we're selfish. You know what I was made to say? Oh, my kids could cry a tear for Biafra and for Vietnam, and they could adopt my humanistic rhetoric and my slogans, but I saw where they really lived and where they really trembled, in the kishkas.

And if you don't learn anything else from me tonight, you're going to learn what kishkas mean. It means in the gut, in the deep center and the inner man, that's where we live. Out of the heart, God says, proceed all the issues of life and not at the surface.

And many of us have not found God because he's not to be found at the surface. He's a deep calling unto deep, waiting for us to come to the end of ourselves and mean business and engage him and not let him go except that he bless us.

Although my kids could speak the same kind of humanistic vocabulary as I, I saw where they really trembled and lived. And I saw that it was a more paralyzing predicament for a girl to be flat-chested than for millions to die in Biafra or Vietnam.

Yes or no? I saw that for a guy to be stood up on a date or to be dejected or rejected and not to have the horsepower that he thinks his car should, was for him the real issue of his life. And it's fantastic that no matter what we profess with our mouths and no matter what handsome rhetoric we can speak, our real tremblings and the real fluctuations of our heart give us away.

And if there are some adults with us tonight, don't you think that you're any more superior. All you've done is graduate to other kinds of toys. And I don't care whether it's missiles or getting to the moon.

It's the same stupid games playing. It's the same evasion. It's the same rude selfishness and self-gratification. And I don't care what religion you garnish your life with, you still are lords unto yourself and you do not know me.

And so God waited for Jacob to come to the extremity of his life as I came in my 34th year as an atheist. I'd been an atheist from the age of 14. I had done my religious thing. I had gratified my mother.

I went to Hebrew school. I swam in all that jazz. And I never docked in a synagogue doorstep again because I was not looking for religion. I was looking for life and for reality and for truth. And it was not to be found there and in any Gentile equivalent to my Jewish religion.

A Fourteen-Month Search for Transformation

When I came to the end of myself, I was led by God in a step-by-step encounter, which this book describes, that was held up to you tonight. A journal which I kept eight years ago in a 14-month trip, 30 ,000 miles with a pack on my back over Western Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, Egypt, and the Holy Land looking for philosophical answers to the predicament of my life, knowing that I was a man at the end of himself and at the extremity.

And that although I had been a Marxist and pragmatist and existentialist, that those things were just vain vocabularies that could not transform the world because I needed transforming and it wasn't to be obtained by mere words alone.

I knew I needed to be a new creature. I needed to be something genuinely compassionate and loving and I couldn't rev that up by any exertion of my own flesh. I needed a transcendent answer, but where was that to be found in a world without a God?

No real God had ever been displayed to me. And we read that in that same crisis to which Jacob came in the 32nd chapter of the book of Genesis, that in that crisis Jacob sent over all that he had, his two wives, his children, his possessions, all that he had striven for all of his life.

He knew now that none of these things could save him. He had to face his brother Esau who had had 14 years to nurse a spirit of resentment and Esau was coming with an army of 400 and to do him in. And his wits this time and his cunning and his well-meaning intentions were not going to save him.

And we read in 24th verse, and Jacob was left alone. That's the only way to meet guys, meet God guys, is alone. Wrestling match is between two personalities, two persons, you and a stranger who's been waiting for you.

It's not you with your rabbi or you with your priest or you with your minister or your mother, your father or anyone else. Either you're going to meet him alone face to face on this side of eternity or you're going to meet him in exactly the same way on the other side.

And I tell you, if I could take my heart out of my body and wring it out before you, I would plead with you and beg you and induce you in any way that I can to please meet him now. It says, Jacob was left all alone and there wrestled a man with him until the breaking of the day.

And when he saw that he prevailed not against him, this man, this stranger, he touched the hollow of Jacob's thigh and the hollow of Jacob's thigh was out of joint as he wrestled with him. And he said to Jacob, let me go before the day breaketh.

And Jacob said, I'll not let me go except that thou bless me. You know, whatever we can say about a Jacob, he's a guy who appreciates the opportunity when he's got it. He's making the most of it. And whoever this stranger is, whoever this man is, he recognizes that this man has some unusual capacity, some endowment, some power, some authority to confer blessing.

And he said, let me go before the day breaketh. And Jacob said, I'll not let me go except that thou bless me. And the stranger said to him, what is thy name? And he said, Jacob, you know, there's something wonderful about God.

He always asks Socratic questions. He always draws us out of ourselves. Either when he said in the form of Jesus, who do men say that I am? Or when he came into the garden of Adam and Eve and he said, Adam, where are you?

Of course he knew where he was. What is your name? As if he didn't know. Jacob said, Jacob. That name means deceiver, supplant, conniver, shrewd article. And guys, don't misconstrue anything I'm saying to suggest that this is any kind of anti-Semitic message or that I'm laying bare the anatomy of a Jewish personality.

Not at all. I'm laying bare the anatomy of the modern world. The Jacob spirit of the modern world. And it's just as much the possession of Gentiles as it is of Jews. What is that spirit? It's the spirit of self-sufficiency and independence from God.

That's sin. That's the very essence of sin. That's the root of sin. And it makes us gods unto ourselves, no matter what vocabulary we employ, no matter what our liturgy, no matter if we can speak Hebrew, no matter what religious notions we go through, until we've come to God and met him face to face, and had him touch us and bless us, and change our nature and our name and our character and our walk, we're still Jacobs.

And God is seeking for people that he might call Israel. He wants to change our name. And he said, Thy name shall be called no more Jacob, but Israel. For as a prince hast thou power with God and with men, and hast prevailed.

And Jacob asked him and said, Tell me, I pray thee thy name. And the stranger said, Wherefore is it that thou dost ask after my name? And he blessed him there. At this time in the revelation of God in the book of Genesis, God couldn't say, Jesus, what would that mean?

God, of course, is always a God of progressive revelation. But I want to suggest to you that that stranger who wrestled with me seven years ago in Jerusalem, who picked me up off the side of the road in Switzerland, and would not let me go, the stranger who put a book in my hands aboard the deck of a tramp steamer, which I had never before read and was contemptuous of as an atheist and a so-called intellectual, was the same stranger.

Meeting Jesus as the Messiah of Israel

And the stranger who put me on a bus at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and allowed me to get lost, and I staggered out of that bus and walked into the first store that I could find, to ask directions and to find out that I had walked into a bookstore that sold Bibles and New Testaments and Christian literature, and I looked at that Jewish woman's face and I said, What is this place?

Oh, she said, We're a congregation of Jewish believers in the Messiah Jesus, and this is our bookstore adjoining our chapel. And something in my heart went click, and I heard a still small voice. Guys, you're going to have to believe that.

No joke. Very important that you believe this, because God has said, Art, be a witness to every creature. If they receive you, they receive me, and if they receive me, they receive him who sent me. I tell you that I'm a man in my right mind.

I got a master's degree from Berkeley, and I was a man who had been a lifelong atheist, and who laughed and ridiculed and lampooned, any references to God, heaven, hell, devil, and all of those categories, who has learned that the very things which I rejected in school are really the ultimate and most awesome realities of our life, though they're invisible.

And I tell you that in that moment, in that bookstore in Jerusalem seven years ago, I heard a still small voice, and it called me by name. Art, it said, you are not to leave. And I'll tell you the kind of Jew that I am.

When I hear that one voice alone, there's only one God, guys. There's only one voice. There's only one still small voice that's ever been seeking us, waiting for us to shut our Jacob mouths, and our contention, and our striving, and our hot shot opinions, and be still and know that I am God.

When I heard that still voice, you know what I knew? That's the one voice alone that has the authority and the right to command this Jewish life. I stayed four days and nights with those Jewish believers.

Notice I don't use the word Christian. I think most of you can understand why. Because my Jewish mother said that she was pelted by stones on her way to school in London when she was a little girl, that were thrown at her by Christians.

No, ma, not Christians, Gentiles. My mother thinks that Billy Graham, and the Pope, and Adolf Hitler are all Christians. Never Gentile is a Christian. The Spanish Inquisition was the work of Christians.

The pogroms in Russia and Poland were the work of Christians. The Holocaust, the work of Christians. And I was on TV today. What channel is that, 24? 28? Tune in tomorrow night at 645 and listen to that 15-minute interview, because I began by picking up your school newspaper today, where it said, Art Katz converted from a Jew to being a Christian.

A pox on that headline.

The truth is this, guys.

Art Katz graduated from being a Jew by circumstance of birth to a Jew in spirit and truth. To a Jew who knows the God of Israel, and in whose life that God's spirit dwells, who loves him with all his heart and soul and mind and strength, and serves him.

That's what it means to be Jewish. And they got that thing all wrong. God isn't asking any of you Jewish kids to convert to Christianity. Heck no. Who needs that arrow-bloodless, one-dimensional, egg-rolling-in-Christmas-tree, grotesque culture?

I tell you that our Jewish culture is a lot more attractive and rich and deep, and God isn't asking you in any way to sacrifice it. He's only asking you to put at the center the God around whom it originally developed, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

And the only way to do it is to make that God your God. And you've got to come to him the same way Abraham came to him, by hearing a still, small voice and obeying it. And you've got to come to him the same way Jacob came to him, in a face-to-face encounter in which you will not let him go except that you bless him.

And I tell you, guys, that when I wrestled with Jesus, in that bookstore and aboard the deck of a ship or a tram steamer when I opened that New Testament, and one utterance from the lips of Jesus penetrated my mind and my heart and went through me like a shockwave and left me a trembling heap aboard that deck, I was an atheist the moment before, and a moment later I knew there's a living God, I'm reading his book, and Jesus is the Messiah of Israel.

But I didn't receive that revelation because it wasn't convenient. In fact, it was the most embarrassing and mortifying truth to which I had ever been exposed. And my first cry was, what am I going to tell my mother?

Because I knew she was going to be pained. I knew the way she would interpret this, and what was I going to tell my intellectual colleagues in California where I was the leading faculty radical? Why, they would laugh me to scorn coming back telling them that I believe that this book from Genesis to Revelation is the revealed will of God and that Jesus is the Messiah of Israel and all the world, that I've been made of him and that his spirit is in me.

Why, they'll tell me that I've gone off the deep end and I need a psychiatrist, which is exactly what they told me. They told me that my first night back when I was sitting in the perfect peace of God and these agitated, restless, broken, adulterous, fornicating wives.

Every one of them, every one of them seeing a psychiatrist telling me who was enjoying the peace of God that I'd gone off the deep end. Yes, guys, intuitively they're right. The only way to know God is to go off the deep end.

He's not a God of convenience. He's not a casual God. He's not a God who shed his own blood and laid out his own life that we might have a Sunday culture. He's a God who died, who poured himself out, who suffered the abuse of men, rejected and despised of men, a man of sorrows.

He had no comeliness that we should desire in him. He gave his beard to the pluckers and his back to the smiters that we might have life and that more comeliness. He doesn't want us to be zombies. He doesn't want us to be somnambulists, sleepwalking through life and going through motions of career and marriage and society.

He wants us to be alive to the extremity and to the fingertips because we've met him gut to gut and we wouldn't have let him go except that he blessed us and he alone who had the power to bless and to touch touched us as he touched Jacob and forever changed his nature and his name.

Peniel: Dying to Jacob and Walking with a Limp

And I think it's most revealing, it says in the 30th verse and Jacob called the name of that place Peniel for I have seen God face to face and my life is preserved. Who is the stranger? The man with whom our father Jacob wrestled.

A lot of us are very clever in our theology and say oh God I can't believe in Jesus God can never take on himself the form of a man. Oh really? With whom did Jacob wrestle gut to gut all through those night hours in the most existential encounter of his life who touched him and had the power to bless him and to change his name and his character and his nature and Jacob says of him I have seen God face to face and my life is preserved.

I think what Jacob really means is that a new life had been given because the scripture says no man can see God's face and live and that's true. Jacob never survived that wrestling match. A Jacob died praise God it's the only place where Jacob but something was born in Israel.

That's what happens when we meet God face to face and I don't know if you noticed but I'm lame and limp and halt and just as it says of Jacob and he passed over that river Peniel and the sun rose upon him and he lived upon his pride.

You know how you can know that you've had this encounter with God? You'll never walk the same way again. I haven't been walking the same way these last seven years as I walked the first 35 years of my life.

I'll tell you what happened instantly seven years ago in Jerusalem when I went to sleep that last night I stayed four days and nights with those Jewish believers and I saw Jews pray with such power and with such authority that they suggested to me that they really knew God and this wasn't just a ritualistic thing out of a sitter or a prayer book and I saw my Jewish people praising God worshipping Him with their hands above their heads with joyous countenances and beaming faces and weeping however stupid I was I know that you don't learn that and you can't fabricate that there's nothing famed about that it's an authentic expression of a people who have met God and know Him and love Him and can worship Him.

Isn't it interesting that of all the things that Jesus said he said to a woman at the well that God the Father how many gods are there? He is seeking those who will worship Him in the spirit and in the world that's dying.

Worship in Spirit and Truth Rather Than Religious Formalism

It's dying from secularism. It's dying from the wealth of goods. We're dying from the pollution of our air and our morality. We're dying at every hand and I'll tell you why. Because God is effectively absent by His presence from our lives from our universities from our communities from our cities and from our nation and from the world.

Lots of religion lots of shemot and lots of practices and empty ceremonies. But where is the presence of the Holy One of Israel who when He comes into a person changes His speech His conduct His manner His demeanor His posture His relationships.

No man is ever the same who once meets God face to face and is touched by Him. He walks with a limp and isn't it interesting that where He touched Jacob was in His thighs. I remember when I was a student of history and someone described Teddy Roosevelt as a man who fought from his thighs masculine.

This is where the power is our bravado and our gusto and our presumption and our pride. No man, me, think is ever going to come to God in that spirit. But God says to us in the prophet Isaiah upon this man will I look.

He who is of a broken and a contrite spirit will tremble at my word. God wants to touch you in your thigh. He wants to touch you in your arrogance and your conceit and your self-assurance and your bravado and your bluster.

He wants to leave you lean, weak, lowly taking on even the nature of Him who it is who wants to wrestle with you despised of men loving merciful the very attributes for the want of which this world is dying.

I'll tell you the beautiful thing guys the same one who wrestled with Jacob and the same one who wrestled with our test is right in this balcony tonight waiting to wrestle to touch to bless and to change the life of any man or woman who will come to Him in the only way that He'll receive us stripped naked bare our pretenses our concealment our bluster and bravado gone sending over all that we've had all alone willing to meet God face to face and not let Him go God has given.

From Intellectual Questions to Faith in Jesus

I almost forgot to mention this in that last night in Jerusalem. I went to sleep on the front seat of a chapel agitated out of my skull. I had tried by the power of my intellect to understand what God was trying to tell me.

I couldn't reconcile how the God of Israel was calling me to be a Christian and asking me to forsake my Jewishness although the scriptures had been opened to me and they showed me the many, many prophecies of a Messiah to come fulfilled by the Jesus of the New Testament.

And in my sleep that night independent of my brain God by His mercy and by His Spirit put His truth in my heart. And I woke up that next morning with the most wonderful peace and calm that I had ever enjoyed in 35 years.

I came to a breakfast table and I said to this Jewish woman Rita, I believe I understand. And that woman rode right off of her seat onto the floor and she was there on her knees with her hands above her head tears rolling down her face because her prayer that night was Lord, we've done everything with a stubborn neck you make them feel the same.

God showed me that He had taken me by the hand as a child for 14 months and led me step by step in a wrestling match to this growing realization of who Jesus is who had spoken to me out of this book and out of the faces and the lives of those Gentile believers who had picked me up off the side of the road and now it was put up or shut up wrestle to the end or walk away and never be able to say that I'm a man of integrity who loves truth or let alone that I'm a Jew.

However many unanswered questions there still were. There was one question about which there was no doubt Jesus is who He said He is that same woman at the well said well, when the Messiah comes she said, when the Messiah comes He'll teach us all things.

Verily, verily, Jesus said unto her He says unto you I who speak unto thee. Jesus touched the eyes of a blind man and he was made whole and he saw and they dragged him to the synagogue and they interrogated him who was this who gave you sight.

And he said well, if you're asking me I don't know too much but this man named Jesus always a man, see. And they cast him out and discussed and Jesus found him in the street and they had a chat and Jesus spoke to him about the Lord.

And this Jewish man said who is he that I might worship him. Jesus said, he who speaks unto thee and he look guys, let's get real. Are we students or aren't we students. Do we value the written word or don't we value it.

God has called us to a wrestling match tonight from which we cannot turn. He's not called us to indifference nor to neutrality. We're not going to be able to walk away from this match. The man who speaks like this and allows Jews to fall at his feet and worship him and call him Adonai, Lord and receives that as tribute is a Jew to be reckoned on.

A Jew who forgives men their sins and blesses them and raises them dead is a Jew that's got to be reckoned on. And I say tonight that if we're any kind of students and men and women of integrity we've either got to conclude that this Jesus is one of the most exceedingly blasphemous and megalomaniacs that will eclipse Hitler or truly the Son of God.

Conversion as a New Creation by the Holy Spirit

That morning, seven years ago I bowed my head and I chose to believe the latter thing and I called upon him and something happened. It was the most awkward thing that had ever come out of my mouth. And something immediately happened.

Something went out of my life. Bitterness, resentment, lust anger, contention, strife. My whole Jacob nature went like air out of a tire and something came in which is also air. It's a spirit. It's the Ruach HaKodesh the Holy Spirit of God.

And you know what happened immediately? When God came in and touched me my speech changed. I walked with a limp. I could not blaspheme from that moment on although every sentence of my adult life had always been dosed with heavy sprinklings of G-beans and other blasphemies.

And that spirit is within me tonight. And it's in the heart and life of every person in this room Jew or Gentile who has wrestled with this stranger not let him go and is called on the name of the Lord and God, the same God the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob the specific God who is always called upon meant specifically by a still small voice and he became the God of Abraham and he became the God of Isaac and he became the God of Jacob wants to become your God tonight if you'll let him always by that still small voice have you heard it?