South Africa Meeting 2000 - Part 1 — Art Katz

Well, bless the Lord. I had a precious time this afternoon reviewing last night. Trying desperately to justify myself before men and God. I think what it's really about is the strangeness, the uniqueness of the prophetic call.

So unfamiliar to the Church, however much that is presently being lauded, and many in the profession believe that, the experience for us is extremely rare. When it comes, I don't think it can help but be to some degree offensive, bright and threatening.

So I wish I could invite you to stand in my shoes, if I were wearing them. You need to believe me when I say that a man like myself has no knowledge of what is going to issue from him. He may have a precept of it, he may have a text that has been quickened, he may have some sense of a direction of how that is going to come forth, what mode of expression is implied out of his hands.

It's not just praying for the Word of God, it's praying for the mode of God, the means by which it's to be expressed. So when I find myself, as I did last night, cavorting and carrying on teasing and provoking, what shall I say?

Now, I don't know what we're going to get now. It might likely be totally other than last night. And tomorrow we have a difference still. These brothers who will be traveling with me will know that by the end of five weeks, it will be so variable that you could hardly believe it's the same man speaking in every place.

That's how much we are calibrated to and adjusted from on high to give the appropriate word of command in order to speak. Because the prophetic man bears for God's Word a substantial great responsibility.

So Lord, You know what kind of beginning we have had, and I'm willing to bear my responsibility in that aspect of last night, which was not Yourself, but me, and compounded, my God, the offense. Forgive me for that.

Courage me for that. But on each occasion, a yet purer expression of Your heart, Your voice, Your Word, Your Spirit. So even now, Lord, take us on. And we thank You for the abrupt beginning of creation, the culture conflict, the sharp thing that takes place when these things meet at a point in time, having been assembled and prepared in a remote northern Minnesota location and then being thrust into South Africa.

We thank You, Lord, for the tension between the prophetic and the pastoral, the necessity to guard and protect, the necessity to challenge and to stir up somehow to bear that tension and not inhibit or dis-annul the thing You have learned from it.

So we're coming to an end to it, but the process will drive. May this speaking now be a contribution to that great plan. Bless us together, my God. Have Your way be great in total possession of this vessel of Jesus' name.

Paul's Sermon in Athens and the Corporate Purpose of the Church

Amen. Amen. How many were not here last night with the same book? The same book. Oh, count your blessings. While we are in the Book of Acts in Chapter 17, Paul's sermon on Mars' King, an extraordinary statement not sufficiently examined by the church because he strikes such a note and such a theme in the ultimate place that Athens represents that I think is resonating still.

Paul brings his apostolic perception to bear as if reality as he sees it and perceives it is the definitive truth of God. He's not in the place of relativism where you have your opinion and I have mine.

He's absolutely in his own conviction. And feels an obligation to communicate that and bring his hearers to the same place of speaking and seeing that he himself endures. And he has only the one occasion and he says outlandish things that are difficult to be understood and most of which rests on a God who is a creator and who raises a man from the dead whom he has appointed to judge the world in a soon coming time and that he holds the nations accountable for failing to have sought God though he's dear to every one of us and has established the bounds of our habitation giving us life to seek and to find him.

And as I tried to make clear last night, not only for our purposes individually and personally but for our purpose as nations. So I want to encourage you to come increasingly into a consciousness of nations per se as nations.

What makes it so difficult is that we have been permeated by a very individualistic and subjective view of reality. We think only in individual terms which is probably the greatest obstruction to the bringing forth of the church as the corporate reality of God's invention.

We are so individual minded, Paul was corporately minded. The Godhead itself is a corporate phenomenon of Father, Son and Holy Spirit and a certain quality of relationship and deferring of the one to the other that makes God glorious.

And when that kind of reality is replicated in the earth by the body of God and all of its diversity deferring one to another, prophetic to the pastoral teacher, to the prophet, it will be about the glory of God in the temples and His witness in the hills.

The Royal Psalms and God's Kingship

Now this morning in my devotional time I read through the Psalms every day and the Psalm for the day and this was the fifth, but in the context of my reading of the Psalms it was Psalm 45 rather than Psalm 5.

Tomorrow I'll be reading Psalm 46 and 47 and so on. So I keep pace and I want to commend that to you how precious a literature the Psalms are and how neglected they are by the church and what a peculiar literature they are and a provision for the last days that will astonish you.

But the thing that struck me as I read in Psalm 45 and then I drifted on to 46 and so on, these are called the enthronement Psalms, the royal Psalms that have to do with the establishment of a king. The reference to God as king was central to Paul's whole apostolic mentality.

And as most of us, particularly Americans, the whole concept of king, royalty, is a distant and remote kind of consideration. We are Democrats, we're in a republic and the whole idea of something aristocratic and what's the word when something points to a hierarchical governmental structure is somehow offensive to our democratic temper.

But it was not to Paul. And I began to realize, where did Paul get the kind of thing that he was communicating in Warsaw? Where did he speak about it? And where did he get the idea of God as the creator of the heavens and the earth and all that is in them?

And that he has created the nations and all races and nations of men and has called them to seek him for his purpose for their creation. Where does he get all that? Where does he have this sense of a God who has appointed a day in which he will judge?

We need to get into the, not only into the rudiments of this apostolic mindset, but to its origins. We need to come to it in a certain sense in the same way in which Paul came to it. Namely, his investment of himself in Old Testament scripture and truth.

Particularly the book of Psalms, the prophets. So in Psalm, where was I? 45, 46, verse 6 of Psalm 45. Your throne, O God, endures forever and ever. Your royal scepter is a scepter of righteousness. You love righteousness and hate wickedness.

Therefore, God, your God, has anointed you with the oil of gladness, to be on your companions. Your loaves are all flavored with myrrh and aloes, from ivy-polished string of infants made for you. This is a remarkable conjecture, picture, and suggestive of the son, though he is not named, who is anointed beyond his companions because of his love of righteousness and truth, and that the center of his kingdom is righteousness.

Is that a word that frequently comes from yours? Righteousness? If you had to write a paragraph, did you find it good enough? What is it? And yet it's foundational to everything, and it is the distinctive of God's kingdom.

Certainly it's absent from the consideration of men and their nations. They are expedient. They look for the thing that's pragmatic, the thing that works to serve their purposes. But what politician or human statesman thinks in terms of righteousness, equity, justice?

These are the distinctives of God. This is the expression of his very nature, and one day, when his rule will pervade the earth, this will be its character. You love righteousness? More than you and your friends?

God seems to give an anointing in proportion to the love of that righteousness, because righteousness is God himself. So, oh, there's so much. Psalm 46, I couldn't help but look ahead. The first verse, God is our refuge and strength if every person held in trouble.

Therefore, I will not fear. Will the earth change? Will the mountains shake the heart of the sea? Will its waters run and fall? Will the mountains tremble with its toll? I will not fear. Because God is our refuge and our strength.

Now, this is either, what's the word? Poesy? Poetic? Literary kind of fanciful play on words, or it's the most upstanding truth that is to be found. God is our refuge and our strength. He himself is. That is so mind-boggling.

It's not that he's going to provide a help that will be a security. He himself is that security. He himself is that help. And a present help in time of trouble. Will you remember that? Will you remember it as just having a kind of an echo of something that you once read in the Psalms, or will you remember it with the same kind of conviction and certitude and confidence that will actually dismiss fear?

In a word, have you come to the same perception of God as that to which the Psalms has come? What does it take to come to a place where you know God in such a way as you can say, He is my strength. He is my safety.

He is my refuge. He is my power. A present help in trouble. The Psalms could only know that if he's passed through trouble. And you can be assured that if you have this kind of quest to know God in this way, you're going to experience trouble.

Because the powers that be in the world despise any saint who has this kind of desire to know God in this way. And will trouble him. But the very trouble that comes from the diabolical machinations of an enemy who hates the lovers of righteousness and of God, is the very ingredient that God employs to show himself as a help in that very time.

A psalmist. Wow. How do you come to this kind of consciousness of God that it actually constitutes your strength? Your safety. Your refuge. Not just under normal conditions, but pressing and ultimate conditions of distress and trouble.

He is a present help. That's why I say this is an end time book. We're going to come to a time when no other external thing, no other provision, no other physical, human, worldly, social, governmental thing will be our help.

If God is not our help, we will be helpless. We've got to move from a realm where God is a fanciful Sunday consideration to the sum and substance of what we are. We believe that we would have our name in Him.

God's Refuge, the God of Jacob, and the Nations

Paul says in Acts chapter 7. This is where Paul drew his heart, his understanding. We will not fear. The Lord's host is with us in verse 7. The God of Jacob is our refuge. Now, why does that have to be upended, the God of Jacob?

Isn't it enough to know that He's simply God? Do we need this particular identification? The God of Jacob? Yes. Because unless you know Him as the God of Jacob, you may be flirting with some other deity who, because your concept is abstract and general, it opens the door for any kind of self-refuge, like anything that appears to be God is accepted as God.

We've got to make sure that the God we're worshipping and celebrating is distinctively the God who is. And that's the God of Jacob. The God of Israel. The God of Abraham. God brings us back as Gentile believers increasingly and repeatedly to the reality.

And if you'll not accept me as their God, you might well question what kind of Jew I am. If you're Gentile, there's none that amenable to being reminded that God is the God of the Jews. You may find yourself flirting with another deity.

If God designates Himself as the God of Jacob, how then should we know? Do the Psalms help with that? I'll be back again with a binding of courage. That we would have like three days on the Psalms. I've never done it.

That would be glorious. Talk about it. Just to invest ourselves in the glory of this particular literature. So come behold in chapter verse 8, the works of the Lord in Psalm 26. See what resolution is.

He has brought on the earth. He makes force to cease at the end of the earth. He breaks the bow and shatters the spear. He burns the shields with fire. What? Is God being held responsible for conflict and their endings?

Is He that sovereign? Is He that implicit and involved in the wars and conflicts of nations and of mankind? And He makes them cease at the ends of the earth? Then what shall we gain at the negotiation table?

What shall be our profit if we give up the golden heights or make some other concessions? If it's God Himself who is the one who makes force to cease. What are we to be seeking Him rather than negotiation?

How come you have to pull that face over? Because you're the only ones who are in a place to know. You think they read the Psalms? You think that Jews are liberally literate? And if they do read, you think that they believe it's written in inspiration of God?

They think that this is a Jewish literature and our contribution to mankind of which we also donate. It's not enough to say that we know that God is sovereign. His word says so. We've got to demonstrate the actuality of that knowledge and that conviction in our whole life and world.

That's why it says, Be still and know thy God. Oh, and the Lord gave you a whole other insight into this. That even the key to knowledge is obedience. You want to know God? Stop your clamor. Stop your programs.

Stop your methodology. Stop your tactics. Be still. Bring it to a quiet of your devices, however well-meaning. And your very obedience to the word of God will release the moment. Be still. Really be it.

Quiet every fear and anxiety. Like even in these days, we were even praying, Lord, let those who were a little bit muffled yesterday, last night, hold steady. Don't let them act in their immediate pounding and this and whatever.

And quit. Hold. Be patient. Get the whole thing from God. Don't be quick to dismiss. Which is so contrary to the temper of our civilization that is so hasty, so pacific, so now-oriented. I'll tell you, to see yourself in the church and the Psalms is to experience an inward metamorphosis.

It'll bring change of a remarkable kind. It's another reality. And it is the distinctive reality altogether at odds with everything external and about us. And we'll have to make a choice of what reality it is to which we shall subscribe.

The thing that is visible, celebrated, acclaimed, by great numbers, that seems to be the prevailing mode. Or is it what the psalmist sees and expresses? That seems in every point to be at odds with what is external in the world.

Hey, if you take these Psalms seriously and invest yourself in them as if they represent the distinctive and definitive reality, it will make you unfit for that world outside. You'll be strange. You'll be a stranger, pilgrim, and a sojourner.

You'll be marked by your very evident difference. You'll look at your eyes and rejoice the way you dare yourself is marching to another beat and is reflecting another reality. Which is the reality, by the way, that will pervade eternity.

Why not enter it now? And while waiting, why not prepare ourselves for what shall be the continuing and abiding reality to which God invites us now through His Word. But it's one that threatens to put everything in disjunction.

It's not just a difference. It's an antagonizing difference. It will put us at odds with people with another set of values, another way of seeing what they think to be truth and right. And we'll experience some trouble.

But God will deepen the revelation of Himself accordingly. So we still know that I'm God, I'm exalted among the nations? Oh, yeah. Well, if not now, at least millennially and eternally. In fact, the exaltation of God over all the nations is the whole sum and substance of what our faith is about.

Did you know that? Reach onto it your own nature. How the nations rage and the peoples take flight against God and against His will. The nations presently and historically are in a rebellious posture against God.

They will not have this man to rule over them. The nations want to be autonomous and independent and do their own thing. Independent of Him who created and established them for His glory. But the Psalms are full and the Prophets are full that the nations will exalt God.

Every knee will bend and every front foot will confess. And that this will be the completion and the consummation of the whole of the divine strategy from the beginning. Is to bring rebellious nations back and under the curfew of the God who has created them.

Who have gone off each one to do what is right in His own sight. And they'll never come to that place until they come with a relationship to one nation which He Himself has chosen as the focal point and the pivot of His whole theocratic rule.

Guess who? One we wouldn't have chosen. They're not our type. They're too insignificant. And they're full of contradiction. God has set the stumbling stone in Zion. The law shall go forth out of Zion and the word of the Lord out of Jerusalem is not a piece of poetry.

It is a piece of graphic literal statement of God that He will fulfill. All the more because it was the world law. Because the world in its gentilic Greek mind does not want to defer to an anti-Greek nation.

God has not chosen them because they're distinctive. He's chosen them because they're the least. He's chosen them because He's a God who chooses. Because He's a God who elects. He's a God who appoints.

Because in that exercise and that authority and that might and that power, God is God. Amen. And so to oppose Israel and the choice of Israel as being the focal point of the whole confederacy of nations submitted to God, is to be an ox with God and sin.

The irony is that the nation that He's chosen does not even want to be chosen. You want to be like all other nations. Well, no matter what they want to be, because God has chosen them as appointed, they will be as God.

But not without God's permission. Amen. Stay tuned for tomorrow's mission. And I think the Lord will give you the subject of Israel. It wouldn't be for you. So, Psalm 47. The Lord most high is awesome in Jerusalem, a great king over all the earth.

Psalm 47 and the Supremacy of God Over the Nations

This is where Paul got it. That's why he's not intimidated with the glory of his Greece. He can see their pagan temples and all of the appurtenances and invisible evidences of the glory of that great civilization.

And yawn at it. He's not at all intimidated. He has an inward seeing of something that eclipses whatever men think to be worse, that is made with their hands. It's the God of Israel. Who is king not only over that nation, but over all creation for He has made it.

That's why He will go right into the midst of them. And say, this God whom you ignorantly worship, I declare unto you, He's king over all the earth. And that includes Athens. And you better know it. Because He's going to judge you in a day appointed for your unwillingness to consider that.

God has gone up with a shout and mercified the Lord with the sound of the trumpet. Sing praises to God. Sing praises. Sing praises to our king. Sing praises for God is the king over the earth. Sing praises with a song.

God is king over the nations. God sits on His holy throne. The priests of the people gather as the people of the God of Abraham. For the shields of the earth, the kings of the nations belong to God. He is highly exalted.

The issue of God's supremacy over His creation is the issue of God as God. What you're born to be a Christian, and it is hardly more than a son of successive services, is that because you have not Paul's Hebraic and apostolic view of what the whole purpose of creation and redemption is, is to bring all of creation under the wardship of Him who created it.

That He might be king over all. That every nation will pay homage to the living God who is also the God of Jacob. Right now they're in a state of rebellion. And they rage in front of God. The reason that Jews are despised, the reason for anti-Semitism beyond any way to understand the sociological, is this underlying and unidentified hatred of the nations against God and against His rule through that people in Israel.

Why will there be a future Holocaust? Why will Jews be hunted and pursued through every nation? And a future time that is not this one? Because if the enemy can annihilate every Jew from the face of the earth, he will have prevented God from establishing His sovereignty and rule from their Jerusalem, their holy hill of Zion.

To eliminate the Jew physically, bodily, is to remove and take from God the prospect of His theocratic governance of His creation. That's why we need to rage. That's what we will be pursuing. So rages the Lord and rages will be raged.

You know, I want to look here, backing up the God of Jacob. Islamist has somehow moved from his personal statement about himself to making it an inclusive statement of a plural kind. He's our refuge. There's more than himself involved.

There's a people involved. There's a congregation. There's an assembly. There's a corporate expression of that life that shares a common faith together that God of Jacob is our refuge. Are we going to believe that when violence increases in South Africa?

And that every kind of wisdom requires ourselves to be armed and to establish some kind of physical provision for safety? Will we believe that God is our refuge when threat is really imminent and casualties and fatalities have already taken place?

I don't know if I have the faith by myself to sustain that unless I have the encouragement of others with me who share the same precious faith that God is our refuge. Amen. This is not poetry, this is nuts and bolts provision for the United States.

And puts all premium on being part of a body that shares this precious faith. Because it will be weapons or psalms. Radical trust or human dependency. Hebraic faith for Greek humanistic confidence. You see that as the age becomes more dangerous and sharply issues now are coming to our door.

Things that we thought not likely and distant that happens to other people are now coming increasingly to our door. Threats and physical threats. How do we meet them? What does faith mean? Does it mean subscribing to a correct body of doctrine or trusting that God is our refuge?

Will he honor that trust? And if he doesn't then we die. Would we prefer to die believing that he will honor it and we should survive by pulling triggers? Why is all this heated up? Why are the issues becoming so radical and compelling us to a faith of a kind that we would not otherwise have sought?

And that we must find together or we will not have our refuge. You wonder if the stirrings that have taken place in society are not even coming from God's own hand. For the purpose of bringing the church to the place of the reality of the psalms and the prophets that we would have otherwise ignored or read only as a kind of Sunday literature.

When he comes will we find faith in the earth of this kind? So I wrote down at the bottom the psalms. Poetic delusion or ultimate reality. The hymn book of the church. Outdated, too soft-fetched, too unrealistic or the greater realism that we have not considered and not taken to heart.

What is it? It's the one or the other. Put up or shut up. We're going to have to get earnest about the word of God and what it means. What kind of confidence? These royal psalms were formative for Paul in his apostolic eschatology and cosmic view.

Why haven't they become that for us? Excuse the fancy language. Paul's eschatology, Paul's view of the end, was drawn from psalms that were already predicted of that end. Of the conflict between the nations and the final resolution to Israel's restoration and all nations being subdued and bowing and acknowledging the God of Jacob this time.

Paul knew the end because he saw the evidences in the Hebrew scripture. My question is, why haven't we seen it? Why haven't we had our mind formed apostolically by the same influences that were available to him?

We've not read the word, as he read it, nor taken it to heart. We've not seen ourselves in it. And we have celebrated rhetoric over Zion. Was Zion made to us and meant for him? Are we looking for the consummation of all things and the rule of God going forth in that one place of the earth that he himself has erected?

The holy hill of Zion. He's declared the decree, I have set my king on the holy hill of Zion. This day, I have given you the nations and the Gentiles for your inhabitants. Paul knew that. He steeped himself in that.

If you squeeze him, he squishes and issues forth a whole mentality, I say, that makes him the bearer of a whole reality that we call apostolic. And God says the church was built on the foundation of the apostles.

We have that foundation. And if not, what are we building? And is it leaping, what is it, tilting and swaying? To steep yourself in these realities and in these scriptures is to have opted for a certain reality that will put you at this juncture and at odds with the reality that purports to be revealed.

You'll be marked, you'll be strange. But inwardly, oh, the peace, oh, the rejoicing, oh, the confidence, oh, the trust, oh, the delight, oh, the joy in that God is a refuge and a present help and heart of comfort.

We need not fear. Thank you, Lord. Well, I just wanted to whet your appetite a little bit for the Psalms and to encourage you to make it your daily devotional reading every morning, early, while it's yet dark.

Resurrection, Judgment, and the Gospel in Acts 17

Let's turn then in the time that remains to Acts 17 again. Verse 30, God has overlooked the times of human ignorance. But now, who's this who commands? The king. That's his right, that's his prerogative.

See how Paul can speak out of the psalmist understanding of who's in charge. Because he has fixed a day in which he will have the world judged in righteousness. Here's that beautiful word again. By a man whom he has appointed.

And now this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead. The message to Athens, the message to Greece, the thing that makes it so foolish, so contemptible, so offensive to the Greek world is this central thing upon which everything is predicated, resurrection from the dead.

And listen, any Greek rationalist, any philosopher will tell you, uh-uh, no man is raised from the dead. Death is final. Death is irremediable. There's no coming back. Let alone a man appointed to judge because of the distinction that God has raised him from the dead.

And then it says, when they heard of this, of the resurrection of the dead, some scoffed. Others said, well, he'll hear again about this and he'll be assured they never did. At that point, Paul left them.

Nothing more need be said. The fact is in the fire. He's made a statement and it's predicated on the subject of a God who has raised a man from the dead. And then he left them. But some of them claimed unto him, and here it says, joined him and became believers, including Dionysius the Eurypida and a woman named Damaris and others with him.

And so the episode ends. A few who heard believed and claimed unto Paul. Others said, well, here again, kind of a respectful beep, but they knew that they were not. And others just turned away, scoffing and contemptuous of rejection.

Classic formulation. But it raises a remarkable question. How can Paul leave them with a statement of this kind? That is, seething over with imminent judgment of a God who is going to judge the world at an appointed day, which means including Athens.

And expect them to believe that. On what basis should they believe that? What were his credentials and what were his proofs invoking the absurdity of resurrection from the dead? We have a difficulty. The disciples had a difficulty in believing resurrection.

Remember? That they believed not yet unto joy, even after they saw Jesus in his resurrection body. They were still afraid. They were still questioning. They were still... It has touched me. The spirit has not questioned all this.

I have. There's something so resistant to the idea of resurrection. It's an ultimate scandal opposed to everything that men celebrate. As reasonable, enlightening, and intelligent. And Paul lays that, the foundation of his hope, a remarkable thrust.

And he leaves them. So I always ask my predictions. On what basis, how could Paul expect that a Greek philosophical audience, who have no background in scripture, no understanding of the Hebraic mindset, believe his statement charged with imminent judgment, resting on the reality of resurrection, and walk away?

How could they be expected to believe that? What background did they have? What preparation? Can you answer that? Your inability to answer is the most damning indictment of our own separation from the reality of resurrection.

This dear theologian, and my head of the world, plucked out of obscurity Adolf Schlatter's journey at the time when liberal theology was really sweeping the scene that became the God is dead theology.

He was one of the few radical, God, and painstaking in his examination of the word in his own images. Notice this about Lutheranism? It must have been such a slap on the face. He said, the Lutherans have contended themselves with the doctrine of salvation as if it constitutes the reality.

They have not been saved by the word of God that proclaims the gospel. They have substituted the belief and the acceptance of the doctrine about salvation. And it seems that in that, they have satisfied the requirement of God, or known the reality.

No wonder they became the power in a Lutheran nation that was nothing but a vacuum of a spiritual kind, through which the demonic forces could sweep like the hot knife through the earth and fire. It was not the reality, it was not the spirit reality of a people who knew God and the salvation of God, but had only the doctrine of God.

The propensity of the German mind to think and to make doctrinal and to study and discuss had lost and were never known to reality. And when I read this, boy, that's true. I know something about Lutherans, I've lived in that part of the world.

I've been in the Lutheran seminary and had my hands full. I think you have trouble with me. But the frightening part is, have we done the same with resurrection? Have we satisfied ourselves with the approval of the doctrine about, rather than the reality of?

Because of your inability to answer my questions shows that you don't know instantly that the reason that Paul could have a total confident expectation that his hearers would believe that the reality of resurrection was because he himself was the manifestation of that reality.

He was the man of the resurrection. His words were a resurrection proclamation. His words were not humanly contrived. They issued out of the life that had the total possession of the vessel who counted all things as done that Christ might be Lord.

It was the reality. To hear him and see him and his resurrection words was to leave no question that the thing in which he predicates the whole issue of judgment is unquestionably true. And I don't think that we can come to the Mars Hill of our generation until we come to that power, that life, and that reality.

Can you say to Paul, for me to live this Christ? You know about him, or are you living by him and through him? Little wonder that Paul, in closing his great statement on the mystery of Israel in Romans 11, breaks out into a doxology of such praise, all the depth of the riches, both of the wisdom and the knowledge of God.

And this bit is constant. Let's Paul see. He's getting so ecstatic. For of him and through him and to him are all things for whom be glory forever. If ever there was the genius of what this apostolic summed up in a few words, it's that glorious statement of grace.

Unto him be glory forever. You're going to be in apostolic sympathy, ladies and gentlemen. Here's the absolute requirement that the central object of your contention, your concern and jealousy is the glory of God forever.

Amen. Can you see why we have to be occupied with the things that offer, with the things that only turn? How shall we obtain His glory? And you know what the catch is? There's never been a glory that has not been first preceded by suffering.

You're going to take to yourself corporately that it should be glory forever? Well, it will not be without the suffering that we have to deal with. It's the only alternative to that egocentricism that is the curse of the church, by which we measure everything in terms of our benefit and our satisfaction of each other.

The only thing that can cancel out that deadly force that makes us the measure of our own satisfaction and how does the program... What did you say when you left here last night? How did you like it? How did you like the teacher?

How did you like the preacher? How did you like? How did you like? As if your liking is the ultimate solemn bond of the whole thing. That's how we've been trained. That's what we were in the world, and that's the mentality we were in the Kingdom.

It's powerful. Ego, centrism. Not only when it's common worldly, but even when it's religious and spiritual. What can save us from that deadly world? Let the preoccupation with something much greater than what we like.

The glory of God. The glory of God. And through Him, through Him are all things for whom we glory. If it's not of Him, it's not going to be of us. It'll be a human enterprise. It'll be something we needed out of our own scholarship program.