God Is Other! — Art Katz

Strength Perfected in Weakness

I hope it's what I think it is, my requirement to demonstrate as well as proclaim that out of our weakness His strength is perfected. I'm sure you're going to find occasions just like this where you feel strung out, achy, and uninspired, and yet you're on.

The hour has come, the requirement is there, and we cannot defer to our feelings because we are the products of a sensate world, a feeling-oriented civilization. I feel like it or I don't feel like it is truly the foundation of the Church rather than that which is apostolic.

So whether I feel like it or not, I know that there's an hour that has come that the Lord wants to redeem. So Lord, we're cast upon your mercy, and if there's no resurrection, we of all men are most to be pitied, and we're asking for a demonstration of that power to encourage your saints and to show them what is the foundation by which they will be last day's overcomers and fulfill the purposes of God.

That it's not to be predicated upon the frailty of our humanity or whether we're in the mood or feel up to it or not, but simply that your life is consistent, it's undiminished, how does it say it in Melchizedek, on the basis of an endless life.

The priestly life is on the basis of an endless life, indestructible, eternal. So Lord, let that be demonstrated tonight in communicating a subject that is difficult and powerfully resisted by the powers of darkness that don't want any revelation of who they are lest they be found out and lest they be revealed.

So altogether, my God, redeem this night that you would receive the total glory, the praise, the acknowledgement of your saints for being such a living God, an encouragement for their own souls, for themselves, as they take to themselves, my God, their calling, to your honor and glory in Jesus' name.

Amen. Well, what better place to begin than 1 Corinthians 2, 1 rather, verses 26 through 28. For you see your calling, brethren, that not many wise according to the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble are called, but God has chosen the foolish things of the world to put to shame the wise, and God has chosen the weak things of the world to put to shame the things which are mighty, and the base things of the world and the things which are despised, which are insignificant or lowly, God has chosen, and the things which are not, to bring to nothing the things that are, that no flesh should glory in his presence.

God’s Choice of the Weak and Despised

Believest thou that, that that's what God has chosen? Why has he chosen that? Because it controverts all that the gods of this world celebrate as power, might, force, prestige, influence, the things that are visible, that are intimidating, that constitute what the world runs after, but God has chosen everything contrary and opposite, that which is weak and that which is despised.

I wonder if you know a verse, you don't have to turn to it, in Luke 16, you can make the notation and look at it another time, what is highly esteemed among men is an abomination in the sight of God. God is other than what man is and what the world is, and even what we think he is, he is altogether other.

He's so other that when he visited this earth, he did it in such a way, in keeping with what he is in himself, that two thousand years later, Jews are still stupefied and are unable to recognize that an infant born in a stable could be not only the king of Israel, but the God of Israel, and except it be revealed, that's what Jesus said, except the father draw you, no man could come unto me.

You'll never come to me on the basis of logic, analysis, religious understanding, because I defy every religious category, I blow to smithereens every conventional wisdom. A German theologian has rightly said about the cross, that true faith begins where the atheist thinks it should end.

Whenever you get to Europe, now I'm getting a little Holy Ghost chill, praise the Lord, I'm being raised from the dead. I began by faith as a dead man. When I was an atheist, and was I ever an atheist, the one book I wish I had to put out there, which is out of print in English, I can get it for you in Russian, French, German, I think it's in Finnish and Swedish, but it's not available in English, is my first book, The Journal of an Atheist.

The actual journal that I carried 30 years ago, knocking around with a pack on my back throughout Europe, looking for philosophical answers, a disillusioned, cynical, arrogant, conceited piece of Jewish masculinity, whose life had come apart at the seams.

My marriage to a German woman was failed, takes a colossal Jewish egotist to think it could succeed. All of my presumptions, all of my categories, humanist, ex-Marxist, the chaser after radical causes for brotherhood, every kind of harebrained thing that Jewish idealists pursue, I was into.

The one thing that I despised was religion, and of all religions, Christianity. I wasn't your little village atheist that you can give a little pat on the back in a condescending way. I was breathing out murderings and slaughterings against the Church.

I looked upon the Church as the obstruction to the progress of mankind. How long will men continue to go on believing old wives' tales? And it's not just a harmless Sunday culture, but an obstruction to progress.

Better that it be removed, that was my frame of mind. So you need to read that book to see how God apprehended me. Why did I bring that up? The scriptures speak about God as old. On the course of that trip, we Jews with our love-hate affair for Germans and German culture and civilization, do you know anything about that?

Do you know that the greatest geniuses of the 20th century that have shaped the world that you occupy were German-speaking Jews? Can you name me one? I'll give you the first name, you give me the other.

Albert. Carl. Sigmund. A for the day. Well, a B plus because I helped you. You take just those three men out of the 20th century and you'll not recognize it. Everything that has subsequently come, even in physics and relativity and the social implications of that in relativism, have been morally destructive.

The atom bomb physically and the relativism that says, who can say whether something is right or wrong? It depends. It's relative on the situation. One of my fiercest encounters was at a Baptist liberal arts college where I had to take issue with those who believed that anything in the backseat of a car is okay if it's love.

It's relative. These were Baptists. Well, I met on the course of that trip a German artist. And he said, Art, you must see the Eisenheim Altar. It's a masterpiece and it's in France. No, it's not in the Louvre.

It's in that German-French section of France that has swung back and forth between those two nations in two world wars. What is that area called? Alsace-Lorraine. And the city is Colmar. C-O-L-M-A-R.

It's worth going to Europe for this one thing alone. It's a holy ghost masterpiece and it's larger than life. It's massive. I don't know how high. Twelve feet, something like that. It's like in three panels and it went behind the altar of the Catholic Church.

That's why it's called Eisenheim Altar, was the location. The artist was a man by the name of Grunwald and it shows Christ crucified. Well, I've seen pictures. I've seen crucifixes. What Jew does not occasionally glimpse things like that?

If you go to a museum or you visit some Gentile friend's home and they have a satin pillow sequined with Jesus or you see something dangling from someone's neck. It's all utterly unrealistic and utterly un-Jewish.

There's nothing in it that compels our Jewish understanding. But when I stood before that masterpiece, my jaw dropped and I was aghast. I went silent. It was so unbelievably horrible. It was not your ballet dancer on a cross looking very life and slim with a nice little garment around his private parts.

It was a picture of a man horribly devastated. In fact, you wondered whether you're looking at a man or some grotesque, some animal. The feet were twisted and the fingers, they're spittle running from the corners of the mouth.

The whole hue of the body was green and ganglionish and pieces of something sticking out from the flagellations. I was transfixed. To say that that's the Messiah of Israel or the Lamb of God or God himself.

The Crucified God and the Resurrection

Years later, again in Germany, Germany has so much to do with my life. Sitting in the office of an American chaplain while his mother-in-law was sewing my torn pants, I was looking in my DVDs at his bookcase and there a title leaked out from the bookcase, The Crucified God.

And when the moment I saw that title, I resolved in my heart, I am leaving with that book. If I have to walk over that brother, I am not leaving without that book and I did not. The kingdom of God suffered violence and the violence take it by force.

I later sent him another copy. I had to have it. And it was by Jürgen Moltmann, a German theologian who had gone through World War II, had been incarcerated, had been imprisoned and then he entered seminary and that generation of German thinkers wanted to understand the war, the Holocaust, the whole devastation of civilization.

And so he wrote this probing book, God Crucified. You know, as much as we think we understand it, there's something that has to happen to arrest us. It was God crucified, not just a victim or a piece of humanity.

God suffered that devastation. And so later on I understood, in fact I think the quotation is from the book, the true faith, not your happy faith and your neat faith and your humanly established faith, but true faith begins where the atheist thinks it should end.

Where your categories are blown to pieces. What you thought religiously, this can't be God. This beggars your whole understanding of God. Now you're in a place where you can begin to understand that God is other than we thought him to be.

I think that the whole lightness that is in the church, particularly in the charismatic movement, the shallowness, the frivolity, what's that word for lightness? Levity. Levity. Who said that? Oh, bless you.

I need your help tonight, guys. I'm only hitting on two cylinders. The levity that's in the church can be directly attributed to the lack of the knowledge of God as he in fact is. We are suffering greatly for that true knowledge.

Well, I praise God for what was on the other side of that crucifixion. It's the resurrection. And as I was staggered on the one side, I was equally staggered on the other. The artist, it must be a holy ghost masterpiece.

It's beyond human skill. Shows Jesus coming forth out of the tomb and the Roman centurions falling over, their helmets toppling, their spears falling out of their hands at the revelation of that power that raised Jesus from the dead.

And every place on the crucified side where there's holes and the flesh has been gouged and there were bruises, out of every place where the body had suffered assault, beams of light and glory were pouring out.

You confront a Jewish atheist with that, he's got to pause. No one had confronted him with the Lord as he in fact is. So this God, whose life ended in nakedness, if you think that he had that little piece of satin around his loins that is depicted in the paintings, you're mistaken.

That is a Renaissance convention or tradition. They cannot bring themselves to the astonishment that God, who is also in his humanity an Orthodox Jew, would be naked before the gaze of men. The humiliation of that public nakedness, as well as that suffering, and stretched out on that cross and all of the agonizing pain that the experts say that there was never, ever a crueler form of execution than being crucified, came into the world naked as an infant in complete dependency.

God, you know, do you mind if I ramble tonight? Part of my frustration as this intense idealist intellectual Jewish type before I was saved was the frustration of the limitations of my humanity, my finiteness.

This is why we cheat on our wives. This is why we have to have another affair, another experience where we're always open, why we can't be satisfied in that one thing. There's something that wants to be as God in two places or three at the same time.

Imagine my frustration as a kid in Brooklyn going to the library, all of these tens of thousands of books, and where do you begin and what do you take? I checked out with regularity six books a month, the limit that was given, but the frustration of hearing a little snatch of conversation about the name of a French artist, for example, Cezanne, Van Gogh, the Impressionists, or someone about a thinker or philosopher, and it was like a whole world out there.

Where do you begin and how do you embrace it all? What do you do when you're faced with two paths and of necessity you can only take one? What's on the other? What have you missed? I felt the extreme constriction of my finiteness as a man.

Well, that's one thing for a man to feel that. How is it for God to feel that? God was restricted to a human body. He's restricted even now to our corporate body, and he will not do anything outside of it.

He's still the God of self-imposed restriction. He's the God of humility and the God of humiliation. He stands at the door and knocks. If any man hears my voice and opens to me, I will come in. He has every right just to kick that door down.

He's, after all, God. But what is his intrinsic character? I remember one day, I'll never forget it, a scrap of something. Either it was Xerox from a larger book, or there it was. It was entitled, The Humility of God.

You know, if I almost fell into a faint over the title, The Crucified God, what will I fall into at the statement, The Humility of God? Well, I knew that we were supposed to be humble, but it never occurred to me that God is.

That's his nature. Your king shall come to you lowly and meek, riding upon the coat, the foal of an ass. And that's how you'll know him, because what he does is what he is. He's consistent all the way through, and not like us.

We say one thing, but we do another. The tendency to be a hot shot, to have our egos elevated, to obtain a degree. I mean, what minister in Charisma Magazine today is not a doctor, who I don't even think graduated high school?

Where do they buy those? What man exalts or esteems God is abomination in God's sight. Humility of God, being willing to be confined not only into a human body, but to be born into it as an infant. Thirty years of obscurity in Nazareth.

Have any of you guys ever been to Nazareth? I've been to Israel more times than I can count. The one place I always want to circumvent is Nazareth, even to this day. Can anything good come out of it? It's so sleazy, it's so cheap.

There's nothing about it that's quaint or impressive. There's a big Catholic thing there, over the place where Mary was addressed or something. I don't like the town. And that's where Jesus spent his youth.

Christ’s Humility and Hiddenness in Nazareth

Remember when at the age of 13 they went up for the Feast of the Passover, and they were all set to go back, and they had already started their journey, they couldn't find him, and they asked around, and he wasn't anywhere to be found with the relatives or friends.

They had to go back, and there he was disputing with the doctors of the law. And he was so astonished that they were concerned for him. Don't you know, he said, I have to be about my father's business?

Don't you understand that? And they didn't. And they upbraided him. Jesus, the Son, we've been looking for you all over. Your father has really been aggravated. But don't you know I have to be about my father's business?

They didn't know. And then the next verse says,. And so he went down with them to Nazareth, and submitted to them, and grew in grace both with God and with men. He went down with parents who didn't have a cotton-picking notion of what he was about, and submitted to them, though at the age of 13 he was already confounding doctors of the law.

He went down into Nazareth, and submitted to parents who didn't have the full understanding. But because he did, he grew in the spirit and in grace, both with God and with men, by going down. In Romania, in the city where the revolution broke out, I always forget the name of it, and in unscheduled meetings, where God gets me in unscheduled ways, a pastor who has come back to Romania after 14 years in the States with the American model for church success.

In fact, on the platform, the model of the new church building was already there, and he knows how to raise the funds. He's been in the States, and he's going to bring the American mentality and technique to Romania.

It just happened to be, what do you call that Sunday where you screw the branches? Palm Sunday. What was my message? Jesus going down the precipitous slope of the Mount of Olives into the city of Jerusalem.

And they had strewn their branches and their garments and cried out Hosanna to the King. Salvation in the name of the Lord. Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord. Blessed is the King who comes.

And I was just reviewing that. It preaches itself. And for the first time, it occurred to me, Jesus said to his disciples, now go into yonder village, and there you'll find a donkey or an ass with its foal, its colt.

Unloose them, and if anyone stops you, tell them that the Lord has need of them. You want to know what humility is? The two men who went. Supposing the Lord said to you, now go into Phoenix, and in this neighborhood, there you'll find a Cadillac or a gleaming Mercedes, and just take it.

If anybody stops you, just say the Lord has need of it. Sure thing. You'll be right in the clink. You know, Jesus' prophetic reputation was at stake that those animals would be found there. And that when those men said that, those animals would be released.

And his disciples trusted him in that and did it. But the question is, why did he need two animals? Why did he need the ass and the colt or the foal of an ass? And if he had access to both, why didn't he take the one that was tested, that was mature, and that was qualified to bear the weight of a grown man, particularly going down this tricky, precipitous thing.

If you walk down the Mount of Olives, you almost have to walk like that. That's foolish even to walk, let alone to ride on a little thing upon which never man sat. Which did he choose? And why did he choose?

Why did he say, take them both? You'll find the ass and the colt, the foal of an ass. Take them. And says that the Lord has need of them. But why does he need them when he can only ride on one? And why, if he rides, does he ride on the weaker of the two?

Because he despises what men esteem, and esteems what men despise. Oh, dear saints, we will never meet the test of the principalities and the powers of the air except in the wisdom of God, which is the way of God, which is the nature of God, which is the character of God as God.

It says that on the cross he gave himself without spot unto God by the eternal spirit. He didn't die out of human courage, but by the eternal spirit without spot unto God. Because dying by the eternal spirit is the revealing of God.

The eternal spirit is God. And what is the nature of that spirit? It is the nature of sacrifice. He gave himself by the eternal spirit. And wherever the powers of the air see that demonstrated, they freak out and they flee.

They cannot stand the revelation of God as God. So God has chosen the foolish things and the weak things. You know what it says in Psalm 8, verse 2? Out of the mouths of babes and nursing infants you have ordained strength because of your enemies, that you may silence the enemy and the avenger.

Not out of the mouths of PhDs, although I respect those who obtain them by their labor, but out of the mouths of babes and nursing infants you have ordained strength because of your enemies. Because what do the enemies exalt?

What is their character? What is their wisdom? What do they display? On what basis do they succeed? To what in man do they appeal? Power? Force? Race? Nationalism? Pride? Prestige? Influence? Wealth? Things that are visible and external?

That's what the gods of this world celebrate and seek to seduce and to influence the inhabitants of the earth to pursue. And therefore they are captives. They are under the bondage of those things. What will set them free?

The demonstration of a people who live in an entire freedom from the influence of those powers. They are impervious to titles, to prestige, to influence. They'll never succeed on the basis of getting something through by strength or force.

They believe in the God who says, not by might, not by power, but by my spirit, sayeth the Lord. Why do I come tonight in such a condition that it was an actual, I won't say agony, that may be too strong, it was painful for me to have to stand through the worship time.

I was so weak. It's humiliating to be in that condition. We'd much rather be all ready to go and come on out when the gun goes off and shoot out of those blocks and win the prize on the basis of strength, power, human ability, pride.

God says that he's chosen the foolish and the weak things. What have you chosen? Have you chosen what he has chosen? No one is more susceptible and in greater danger and temptation than a young, gifted minister.

You guys pray for this fellow because there's every allurement to get into the mode by which others have obtained religious success. He has all the earmarks, all the qualifications. But to resist that and not move that way nor be responsive to that, and even to prefer hiddenness, obscurity, no reputation, to desist even from manipulation of any kind.

Resisting Religious Manipulation

I know what it means to stand from this place, and we know that even just the affecting of our voices playing upon a heart string, a moving and fetching illustration, the tone of our voice, the appeal, we can manipulate men.

And it's very gratifying after you preach to see response. And there's almost something unspoken that works in the religious realm. And don't think that the principalities and powers are not in the religious realm.

In fact, of all the realms, I would say that it's in religion that they are the most prominent and powerful. That is the final and the most weighty dominance of the powers of the air is in the realm of religion.

Hierarchies, religious organizations, denominations, competing, rivaling religious factors. To resist that and to choose the way of foolishness and the way of obscurity. I'll tell you the kind of guy I am.

You know that everyone now is falling in the spirit? And sometimes I pray for people and I begin to see... I hold them. I hold them up. I don't want them to be a domino because it's very gratifying to see bodies stretched out.

But if that's not God, we've opened the door to a counterfeit that we will later learn to regret. Everywhere we face the temptation of using manipulation. Men who pout. Wives who pout. Who know how to get to their husbands.

And we play a game with one another in order to affect a certain response. Well, what is it? So what, Arch? Give her ten bucks and let her get a hat. You see how far back I go in time. Manipulate, affect something.

What does it matter? Here's what it matters. You may have won the evening and you may have smoothed something over but you have come on to another ground which is the ground by which the powers of the air employ.

What ground do we occupy? What ground do we allow them? Do we come on to their ground and play their game? Because there's always the temptation. On this very trip, I'm getting so anecdotal with you guys tonight and giving you such personal things.

At the end of a remarkable evening at a Vineyard Church in Reno where I prayed for almost 200 high school kids they had told me, now Arch, go easy. These kids only have a ten-minute attention span. They were riveted in their seats for an hour.

And I gave an invitation for salvation. Everyone who was not saved stood and followed. And then I felt impressed to anoint with oil on the foreheads to seal these kids, knowing the temptations and the powers that impinge upon them in this age in which they are chewed up and spit out as merchandise.

That they would be sealed unto God, unto holiness. And so they found me oil and the kids lined up for the whole length of the church and the Lord gave me a prophetic word for every single one of them.

And that's not my thing. That's how much God was so precious there. Talk about fatigue, by the end of that night I could barely stand. And then a woman came up to me and sang to me in the Spirit a song from the Lord for me.

The nape of my neck, the hair was going right up. And then she sang it again in English. And I don't even know if it's even right for me to share holy things. It was the Lord's love song to me. God, I love you.

I love you. I watch you. I see your labors. I know that you chose hiddenness. I know that you chose obscurity. Because, you know who Moshe Rosen is? Head of Jews for Jesus? I was trained by him. I was brought out of high school teaching and my ministry started at the age of 38 or so as a missionary to the Jews.

He said, you are the finest candidate I have ever had. And before you're 50, you will be the Jewish Billy Graham. That was 16 years ago. I'm still not, and I don't think I ever will be. There's a choice.

It may well be that this whole meeting and this time is for my brother and you guys are just listening in. And because of your love for him, I know the religious world is powerful and the allurements.

But let there be a man who will resist and choose that which is foolish and suffer the reproach and the rebuke from other religious men who say, you fool, you could have had such a career for yourself.

You had such qualities and such giftings and you could have, you could have, you could have. And look what you've allowed yourself to be hidden with a small band of souls in a location and what have you to show for it?

The most intimidating thing that can be said to us is, and what are you doing? And what can you show? I could tell you guys things that are going on right now. The reproach that I'm catching now. And I'm not saying this, any of this, in any way to enlist your sympathy.

Do you understand that? These are just the realities of what's going on in the whole religious realm. That in obedience to God, to speak a word that needed to come to a man with whom I'm related, I won't even tell you who, you may not even know him, and he was so insulted that I was slamming his work that he's now publishing my name across the country as having a religious spirit and various other things.

And one of his outcries is, and it's okay for you to kick the barn down, but where's your barn? Where's your work? And what have you accomplished and what have you built? What have you got to show after 30 years?

I picked up a recent issue of Christianity Today, the leading evangelical Christian magazine, started by Billy Graham, and in it were three men that I knew from the beginning. And now they have risen.

We all started, in fact I started before some of them, and I knew them when. One has major campaigns overseas with 50 ,000, and another has a chair of theology in one of the leading seminaries in America, and I forgot the third one, and I thought in a moment of self-pity, and what have you got to find?

And where are you? And who knows you? And what have you accomplished? I'm saying all that to say this, saints, the eternal purpose of God is the reason for which God has created all things, that a demonstration might be made through the Church of the manifold wisdom of God to the powers of the air.

And that demonstration is what God is in himself, now displayed by his people, who have chosen humility, meekness, weakness, and all those things. Because God has chosen, you have chosen, the thing that is foolish, the thing that is weak, the thing that is not mighty.

Though you have every opportunity to have access to things as everyone else. And that's why Jesus had to have two animals. Take them, if any man asks you, tell him the Lord has need for them. What's the need?

One to sit on, and the other to demonstrate by not employing. He did not use the tested thing. He did not use the animal that was accustomed to a man's weight, and that could do a credible job of maintaining the dignity of a king coming into his holy city.

He chose that upon which never man sat. And as I'm preaching this in Romania, you can see the visible agitation of the pastor, and especially the pastor's wife, until I struck a note where she cried out, I stung her.

Because she wants to succeed on the basis of the American religious model. What was the question with which we ended last night? How far are you wanting to go? What's the depth of your intention for God?

Success? No sweat. But fulfilling the eternal purpose of God? Where is there a people who will take that to their hearts? Because God's purposes have got to be fulfilled by God's means. His means have to be consistent with his ends.

He will not employ something that is in contradiction to his character and to himself. We can't use the world's techniques, its methods, its manipulations, to obtain success. And how much do we do that and justify it as being done for the Lord?

The Powers of the Air and the Wisdom of God

You see what the end is when men embrace the wisdom of the gods of this world that celebrate power, threat, intimidation, force, greed, ambition. Look at the baseball strike. It's a scandal because of greed.

Look at Yugoslavia. It's a bloodletting. I just came out of that country just before that war started. And I thought, you know, it'll be a little thing with pop guns, with corks. What do these guys know?

Little did I know that there was deep-seated religious and ethnic hatreds of such compacted bitterness that when that lid came off, we saw hollers that exceeded anything that the Nazis had done in World War II.

For the first time, systematic rape as a weapon of demoralizing the enemy and not stopping at girls that are 10 or 11 or 12 years of age. Unbelievable horror, and expressing the wisdom of the powers of the air.

Violence, force, threat, intimidation, terror. We really need to understand how powerful these forces are, though they are disarmed. Because it says in 1 Corinthians 2 .16,. Yet we do speak wisdom among those who are mature, wisdom, however, not of this age, nor of the rulers of this age, who are passing away.

But we speak God's wisdom in a mystery, the hidden wisdom which God predestined before the ages to our glory, the wisdom of which none of the rulers of this age has understood. For if they had understood it, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.

Which rulers is he talking about? The same ones that are spoken in Psalm 2. See how the heathen rage, and imagine a vain thing, and the kings and the rulers take forth against the Lord and against his anointed.

What does it mean, the kings and the rulers? Isn't that an unnecessary repetition? Isn't that saying like the kings and the kings? The kings are the earthly and visible administrators, but the rulers are the invisible realm that manipulate them.

And they so manipulated both the Sanhedrin and the Romans, that they crucified the Lord of glory. They have the power to kill. Do I dare just leap into something I haven't thought, that comes to my mind right now, that shows what the end of this whole mystery is?

You'll never have me back, and I've never heard anybody ever preach it. It's completely contrary to how we think the powers of the air are going to be defeated. I'm so appreciating your patience tonight that I can just talk like this.

The thing that got me in trouble with the man who is now accusing me nationally of having a religious spirit, and that I slammed his conference, was that I sat in that conference as an observer, and my spirit was completely untouched.

There was such frantic activity going around me. People toppling out of their seats, running up on the platform, waving banners. There was music and sound turned up to such decibels, that you wondered if your hearing would ever come back to normal again.

I don't know about here. No, it's not here. But if you travel around and have the privilege that I do to visit different places, there seems to be such an increase in loudness. Loudness is power, and it's manipulative.

When they turn the thing all the way up, it's not enough to hear it. You've got to feel it. But God is the still small. Wouldn't it be remarkable that tonight everything is so conversational? It's not even preachy.

There's nothing ra-ra-ra that would please the Lord to take an unaffected word of unleavened bread. Have you seen much? Because it's predicated on the notion that the powers of the air will be defeated through militant worship.

Now, I don't know about you, but here's the kind of simple sap that I am. The moment that you begin to employ worship for purposes other than worship, it no longer is worship. You, dear ladies, know the difference, you married ladies, between lust and love.

You know when your husbands are acting out of witch motivation, and God knows it also. He knows when a worship has no strings attached. It's just simply the adoration and the devotion that God deserves because he's God.

But when we make of it a manipulation and a tool toward an end, even a religiously desired end, it is no longer worship. See what I mean? We're on another ground. We're on the enemy's ground. We're employing an expediency to obtain an end and still calling it worship.

We need, of all of the, if I say, institutions of the world, we who are the church need to walk so circumspectly and so carefully and lean the other way, even if there's any threat of somehow even inadvertently employing a worldly technique, a worldly methodology, a worldly mentality, shun it, and trust God who chooses the foolish and the weak thing to obtain the things that pertain to him.