Apostolic Vision - Part 3 — Art Katz

I must be serious, I have three full pages here. And tonight I believe that the Lord's heart is on the subject of conversion. I'm very fond of saying, many saved but few converted. And I've come to a realization after two nights that to continue along the lines that we have would be vain unless there has in fact been a radical crossing over to the other side.

I can't think of anything more cruel or a greater delusion than to speak about apostolic things when we are spiritually incapacitated or incapable of walking them out. Because something foundational of our own relationship with God has not yet been effected.

Conversion as the Foundation of Apostolic Life

The things that are apostolic that pertain to his glory can only find fulfillment in a people who are utterly abandoned to God. If we're not and we embrace the vocabulary of apostolicity, we engage in the final and last and cruelest of all deceptions.

Let's talk about anything else and use any other kind of language, but let's not embrace this language unless we have an intent to fulfill it. So, I think that somehow we need to pause in the course of what is being unfolded in these days and raise the question about the truth or the authenticity of our own conversion.

Can you understand, and maybe you'll understand better, that it's possible somehow to be saved and even born again of the Spirit, even be filled with the Spirit, and yet not be converted in the sense of utterness toward God that apostolic reality requires.

And seeing that we're doting on Paul in these days, I want to read one of the three accounts of his conversion in Acts chapter 9. Evidently it's of sufficient note to God that in the book of Acts there are three expressions or recordings of that conversion.

And maybe it's not untoward to say that the apostolic life that followed was altogether proportionate to the kind of commencement or beginning that it had in its origin. Or to say it another way, maybe we can't exceed or go beyond what is the point of our beginning.

And some of us may need a day of new beginnings or a beginning that has never in fact been made, which if it's not made would condemn us to being fixed at a certain plateau of Christian response with the Lord himself.

I'm going to ask that we all stand tonight and ask the Lord's blessing. Before we read these scriptures, I don't know where that came from, but somewhere in the course of the day I just had a sense of us standing to pray.

And I just want to invite you to call on the Lord even now. No lengthy prayer from any one saint, but just a terse statement of inviting God to pull out the stops, to ask him for something of an extraordinary kind.

I'm always believing the Lord for something historic, once and for all. And if you feel something like that, an impetus like that in your spirit, just sound out from where you're standing, and then I'll just conclude and then we'll go into the word for tonight.

Hear the things that are unspoken, the cries of our hearts, my God, that yearns for an utterness of reality with you, a distinction of service, my God, in the days that are appointed to us, that will obtain for us, my God, an eternal recompense of joy.

Lord pull out the stops, take your sword out of your sheath, don't spare us, my God. We thank you for that kind of love. We're not accustomed to it, and we welcome it. And come, my God, and let your word perform a work tonight for which we shall be eternally grateful.

Thank you that we've come to an hour in which you are more earnest than ever we have heard you or known you or understood you. Thank you for that. Thank you, my God. Bring us in to the spirit and mood of your own heart, Lord.

Thank you for hearing us. Thank you for your great ability to give answer beyond all that we think to ask and to pray. Indeed, make this night historic. Make it pivotal. Make it something, my God, beyond what we call memorable, a release, a corporate release, a release, my God, for individual souls, a calling, a revealing, a precious work that only you can perform and for which we are helpless and wait and ask that it might please you, my God, so to give it that this all might read down to the eternal praise of your glory in Jesus' name and whose name we ask it.

Amen. So, reading from Acts, chapter 9. And Saul, yet breathing out threatenings and slaughter against the disciples of the Lord, went unto the high priest and desired of him letters to Damascus, to the synagogues, that if he found any of this way, whether they were men or women, he might bring them bound unto Jerusalem.

And as he journeyed, he came near Damascus, and suddenly there shined round about him a light from heaven, and he fell to the earth and heard a voice saying unto him, Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me?

And he said, Who art thou, Lord? And the Lord said, I am Jesus, whom thou persecutest. It is hard for thee to kick against the pricks. And he, trembling and astonished, said, Lord, what wilt thou have me to do?

And the Lord said unto him, Arise and go into the city, and it shall be told thee what thou must do. And the men which journeyed with him stood speechless, hearing a voice, but seeing no man. And Saul arose from the earth, and when his eyes were opened, he saw no man.

But they led him by the hand and brought him into Damascus, and he was there three days without sight, neither did eat nor drink. And there was a certain disciple at Damascus named Ananias, and to him said the Lord in the vision, Ananias.

And he said, Behold, I am here, Lord. And the Lord said unto him, Arise and go into the street which is called straight, and inquire in the house of Judas, for one called Saul, of Tarsus, for behold, he prayeth.

And hath seen in a vision a man named Ananias coming in, and putting his hand on him, that he might receive his sight. Then Ananias answered, Lord, I have heard by many of this man how much evil thee hath done to thy saints at Jerusalem, for here he hath authority from the chief priest to bind all that call on thy name.

But the Lord said unto him, Go thy way, for he is a chosen vessel unto me, to bear my name before the Gentiles and kings and the children of Israel, for I will show him how great things he must suffer for my name's sake.

Thank you, precious God, for the light that shone upon an enemy and deeply converted him, my God, from murderer to the chief apostle of the church. What a work, my God, that comes down from heaven in the moment that you appoint, even in all of our opposition.

And we pray that tonight speaking, my God, might be for us who have not yet fallen to the earth, and who are still proceeding from our seeing, and not yet yours, that we will be brought down that we might be brought up, that we might also learn what great things we must suffer for your name's sake, whom you will bring before Gentiles and kings, and especially in these last days, the house of Israel.

Come and speak to us out of this text, my God. We thank you and praise you for the privilege of a word about it that might be for us the event of it. In Jesus' holy name, amen. The inception of the apostolic life greatly determines its end, Alpha and Omega.

The Gospel’s Inadequate Beginnings and the Need for New Birth

And many of us are malfunctioning or not walking in fullness because of inadequate beginnings. And I can go off on a long dissertation on the inadequacy of our contemporary gospel, more a kind of formula for salvation than it is an induction into the most holy faith.

And how the pagans in Thessalonica who heard an apostolic proclamation of that gospel were saved from their idols to serve the living God, and to wait for his son who comes from heaven and will save them in the day of his wrath.

Evidently, they heard a much fuller and powerful presentation of the gospel than most of ourselves. And therefore, right from the inception of their conversion, a quality of things were released that made that church distinctive.

They reflected their beginning. And we reflect ours. But praise God that if our beginnings have been faulty and inadequate, there are ways in which God can give us a new beginning. So whatever it is that is false or inadequate or impoverished will certainly affect all of our subsequent walk, many saved, but few converted.

And I see in this a kind of parallel with Israel in the great crossing over that they were required to make with Joshua, there's a Jordan, which means actually literally descent into death. Those that had stumbled about in the religious wasteland for 40 years, where many cadavers had been left behind, who had not the fullness of heart of a Caleb, or who is the other?

Joshua. Caleb itself, meaning wholehearted, that only two out of an entire generation had the privilege of being welcomed into the land of promise and participating in the taking of that land. And we stand at a kind of a crossroad akin to that in this New Testament hour.

It's time to cross over. That sense of crossing has been heavy in my heart in all of the days that I've been here and even the days that have immediately preceded it. But did you know that not all of the house of Israel crossed?

That a portion of the tribes of Gad, Manasseh, and Reuben chose to remain on the other side. Because there the ground was lush and the grasses were high and they were cattle breeders and they recognized something of an immediate value.

They were unwilling for the risk of faith, what would be found on the other side. And they pleaded with Moses and got what they wanted. And they were allowed to remain on the wrong side of the Jordan and have been subsequently lost to the whole history of Israel ever since.

The only melancholy reminder that we have of the tribe of Gad who lingered on the wrong side are the Gadarenes of the New Testament time who raised pigs and were unwilling even at that time for the deliverer to come because it was expensive for their flesh and would much prefer to sustain their herds than to welcome him who cast them into the sea to perish with demon spirits.

So what a commentary on what the consequence is for an unwillingness to cross over, for a languishing on the wrong side. And I think that the reason is always the same. Because it is conducive to the flesh.

Because there we will have a security for things that pertain to herds. So there is now as then a necessity for crossing over, lest our own carcasses be found on the wrong side or we descend into the melancholy thing that I'm describing as was true for the tribes of Gad and Manasseh that refused to go over and to remain for their cattle's sake.

And we have just reviewed what the land of the Gadarenes became by the time of Jesus centuries later and are lost even now to any kind of historical remembrance let alone value. So the conversion of Paul and our conversion is critical and it begins with the phrase as he journeyed.

I think there is more hope for an enemy of God journeying in full sincerity even in his error than there are for those who purport to be the friends of God and have long since ceased journeying and are just kind of treading water or occupying a kind of stale place.

There's more hope to convert an enemy who is in motion however grievous his error and the error is the consequence even of an intensity for God however misunderstood than there are for those who are safely ensconced with their correct credos and doctrines who are not moved.

Saul’s Journey, Divine Light, and the Relinquishment of Self

There is something in my spirit that rises up in the words that we read and as he journeyed. You wonder if there would have been a conversion if Saul would have been content to rest on his leaves and to be satisfied with the conventional categories of orthodox Judaism that satisfied many of his own contemporaries.

But suddenly there came a light and I'm wondering if that's a condition for that light for us as well that when the Lord sees, the Lord sees a questing, there's more prospect of being arrested by the light of God than if we're merely treading water and satisfied with the spiritual status quo of our lives.

But until that light shines, until something comes down upon us from above, we're fixed in the place that we are. Everything is from the great sovereign hand of God whose eye roves to and fro over the face of the earth seeking that one whose heart is perfect toward him.

And if that were not so, I would not be speaking to you now, I would not be in the faith, I would be a dead man long before. But even as an atheist and as an enemy of God and pouring out threatenings and murderings against the church 30 years ago in the same kind of vehemence and opposition of a soul, I was arrested.

And probably for the same kinds of reasons that even in my error and even in my opposition to the church and to the faith and unable even to passively mouth the name of Jesus except as a blasphemy and a curse, God yet saw a heart that was desiring truth, that was willing to be on the way journeying.

And I think that that is a disposition that is characteristic of saints even after the encounter with, the initial encounter with God. And I love the way that the Lord encounters Saul after he had fallen to the earth and heard a voice saying unto him, Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me?

And I think that if we're examining the anatomy of conversion and what it is that needs to be radically turned, it's this fatal error which if it's allowed its final expression will result in the persecution of God and the church.

And the error is this, it's putting our vow before, why persecutest thou, celebrate and put your self-interest, however sanctified you think it is, before me. And here's where I just have to trust the Holy Ghost that lies too deep for words and show us what the crux of, we are not converted until his me, the tragedy is we can go an entire lifetime with our thou, for there's something that needs to be wrenched and radically altered, radically corrected, the one thing before the other, his me before our thou.

And if that does not take place, be assured, in one form or the other, while we purport even to be laboring and serving in his interest, isn't that exactly the picture of Saul? This was not some calculated atheist indifferent to God, this was a man zealous for God.

But the error that led to the persecution of God's own people and God himself in his people was a religious man in error because his thou, however well-meaning, was yet before God's me. How does it stand with you tonight?

If that kind of fatal and basic error is possible for a man of religious zeal with every right intention so much to serve God as to seek out opportunity to round up these heretics and bring them back to Jerusalem, how much then also are we capable of exactly that same and fatal error?

Why do you put your thou before my me? It's the nub of the matter, so long as we have made ourselves central and prior before him. And that I think is characteristic essentially of the church today, even in its best charismatic form.

It is still our thou. It is still how are we affected and our interest and did we enjoy and do we like. That stubborn, egocentric thing that can only be dislodged by profound conversion, for that in fact what conversion is.

We can be saved, we can be filled with the spirit, and yet this central thing can remain unattended until there is a light that shines down upon us from heaven and brings us down into the earth. So have we not even in these nights fitted his word into our already existing categories by which we affirm ourselves by the very things given by God to unseat and even to devastate us?

Receiving the Word Without Self-Protective Categories

I'm glad that this is going on tape. I'll say that again. How many of us in the hearing of the word of these very nights have taken that word in through the prism of our own subjectivity and fitted it in to the already existing construct of our life, our categories, and finding a way in which the word would be amenable to our view of ourselves and our spirituality and our call.

In a word what we're doing, even unconsciously, is elevating ourselves above the word and determining how it's to be fitted in comfortably in a way in which it can be related to our already existing categories that we approve.

Instead of allowing the word to devastate and to demolish our categories, we stand or sit above it as arbiters over it and fit it in so that it neatly can be taken in and even celebrated and acknowledged as the word of God and applaud the speaker for having brought it.

Can you see why we need to be converted? The depth of this egocentrism is unspeakably deep and not anywhere more so than in the religious and the spiritual realm. What greater affront to God, what greater expression of putting our thou before his me than the way in which we even hear and receive the word.

Entirely an unconscious process and we've been doing it for years and therefore not receiving the value and the intent of God who gave it. I have to say that last night I left depressed. I left dejected.

My spirit had sunk. I was slumping. I felt a tremendous exhaustion, a tiredness not only of body but of soul. Like somehow that's what had happened last night. The word was good. The word was precious in God's intention but somehow the time it had become transmuted to the hearer and the way in which the hearer had received it and even responded or did not respond was already showing that our thou was before his me.

That's why the Lord is saying tonight, halt. I'll go no further. I'm not going to share the holy things of the apostolic faith to a people who are going to take it and internalize it and mediate it and fit it into their already existing mindsets by which they somehow even find a way to exalt themselves when the word was intended to devastate themselves.

In fact we set ourselves above his word determining to what degree we allow it credence and acceptance. What measure we intend practically and we determine by what measure we intend practically to implement it.

Do you realize that that's going on? This is a holy God and he's pouring his heart out to us and we are there consciously or unconsciously calculating to what degree we are really going to realistically receive such a word with the intent of doing it.

And I think that in this one thing I have described the malaise of the church of why it is that it's so stale. Why it is that it's not going from faith to faith and glory to glory. Why it is that our services are punctuated by sermons rather than the word of God that by its very nature requires response and change and demand.

We're not hearing with the intent of doing. We're hearing with the intent of approving if it's biblical or if we enjoyed it. Can you see that we bring a whole kind of mindset that stymies the very preciousness of the word and the intent of God for if we will not be changed by the word by what else shall we be changed?

But are we receiving it in an open and naked way and letting it have its full work? Are we willing to say Lord let it be unto me according to thy word. I don't know what the consequence will be. It may mean the eradication of my home and my lifestyle, my whole mode of being that I have labored so long to obtain and has nothing intrinsically wrong with it in itself.

But I don't know what that's going to mean. But until you have come to the place where your heart is continually saying in the hearing of the word let it be unto me according to thy word, it no longer becomes the word of God.

It can no longer function and perform the work of God by the word. It becomes a sermon that we approve or for Mary to say let it be unto me according to thy word. It meant receiving a pregnancy that could not be explained to a pious and orthodox generation totally prepared to stone to death on the doorstep of her father that woman who had an inexplicable pregnancy.

And to this day the Talmud and the writings of the rabbis make a shaded reference to Mary's pregnancy as having come from a Roman soldier. For how else shall inexplicable pregnancies be understood? And when Mary said let it be unto me according to thy word, she meant I will receive the full consequence of receiving this word even if it shall mean my death in disgrace although I am a virgin of Israel.

When God will find a heart like that there is no limit to the extent of the work that can find its inception. When I think of the potential in this room for the works of God in the last days, not only in this community but beyond it, in a world that is rocked and racked by violence and filth and muck and perversion and corruption of every kind waiting for men that will come to it sent by God.

I sense the frustration of God who cannot even perform that until there is a people who receive his word in that same virginal disposition of spirit willing for its full consequence whatever that consequence might be.

Let it be unto me according to thy word. And you will save yourself a lot of unnecessary aggravation wondering what the outworking of that word will be in its particular application if you have reconciled yourself with the fact that it will inevitably lead me to the place of death.

And once you have made that reckoning what difference by what form it comes? Stoning at the doorstep of your father's house or disgrace or the rejection of men or their hostility or their misunderstanding or their catcalls or their shrieks or their reproaches and all of the kinds of things moral physical hazards of all kinds.

God is yet waiting and has never had any other inception for his works than one who will say let it be unto me according to thy word. And what was Saul's answer when he was confronted by the Jesus who said Saul you celebrated and elevated your vow before mine me?

Came that one great apostolic statement that underlay the whole of the great career that would follow. Lord what would you have for me to do? I want to say that every invoking of the word Lord for which we have been guilty without also following that with the balance of Paul's statement is a playing with a holy thing and even taking the name of the Lord in vain.

“Lord, What Would You Have for Me to Do?”

I want to ask you dear ones when was the moment that you transacted with God something of the utterness with which Paul commenced his apostolic walk with one question that subsumes and includes every and all other questions.

Lord what would you have for me to do? No ifs even for illumination or for understanding or for explanation. If the Lord is Lord we have but one posture only to be down on the earth before him with this cry resonating throughout the whole balance of our natural lives Lord what would you have for me to do?

We say it once but we live forever in the echo of that question or we do not live apostolically at all. That is not the least of the reasons why we are hearing tonight what we are hearing because I did not come with a briefcase.

Well I did and there are many choice things in it but I am not at liberty to cite or to employ any one of them however much I would be delighted in the promulgation of the precious holy seed that God has given me.

But speaking my every service like yours needs to be conducted in a resonance of one question only one. Lord what would you have for me to do? And how many apostolic careers are in abeyance tonight? How many prophets are there in this room?

How many evangelists and teachers and pastors? How many women of prevail and intercession? How many callings in God hanging and waiting for the one question for which God is yet waits to hear that has never been sounded in his hearing with every stop removed and with all qualifications?

It is the statement of utter apostolic abandon and until the Lord hears it he is not going to tell you what you have to do. But that there are things to do is beyond question but they can only be performed in the power given to those to whom it can be entrusted.

The spirit given without measure as to sons who have no purpose for themselves and no life unto themselves but live by one question only and this indeed is living. Lord what would you have for me to do?

Anything less than that is deprivation. Anything less than that is contraction and inadequate life. It is being seized with fears and doubts and vacillations and all the kinds of things that cripple and stymie and knot us up.

There is a release when we have finally come to that place where with full integrity we say and put before God that thing for which he waits that he cannot command or compel and must be freely and utterly and totally given and he is not Lord until it has been given.

What would you have for me to do? And I think that the answer is always the same though the forms of the fulfillment of it may vary. I will show him how great things he must suffer for my namesake. No wonder we don't ask the question.

How wisely we intuit what the necessary answer must be. But I will tell you dear saints if you don't know it that for every suffering that comes as the consequence of obedience to the Lord is glory unspeakable, is reward eternal, is joy even in the now in the midst of the suffering and the pain and the distress and the misunderstandings of men and the reproach and all that follows and obedience to a God who would have us to do.

You need to ask yourself has there ever been a point in the whole of my Christian life where I have asked God, Lord what would you have for me to do? With the full intention not just of giving answer to something that would be spoken in that moment but living in the light of that question ever thereafter.

There will be no apostolic church until that question is both asked and consistently maintained. Well Art you don't understand I'm a professional. I'm a doctor. I'm not some off the wall Jesus freak like Saul.

He didn't have much to lose. You have to realize I have responsibility. Saul was the prized student of the Rabbi Gamaliel. If there's any man who committed religious suicide by the raising of that question and forfeited an entire career that would have won him a celebration to this day in Jewish orthodoxy, it was Saul.

But he forfeited all that and counted it as done as we know by raising the only question, the right question that any creature can raise before its creator. What would you have for me to do? Whatever the consequence, whatever the loss, you're Lord and if you're not the Lord of that question then anything that I would presume to speak in that name is a mock and a travesty and a religious exercise at best and falls short and must of the glory of God.

And the ironic thing is and mark my words that if you continue in that in the last days you'll find yourself not among the persecuted but the persecutors as the centrifugal thing continues to work that radically brings us into the one orbit or the other.

Into that which is apostolic or into that which is apostate. For the love of many shall grow cold and the last days are marked by the great apostasy and the falling away of many who could not bring themselves to follow the Lord whithersoever he would lead them and found themselves in the vortex of a religious kind less than that which is apostolic and being offended by those who are and finally ironically opposing and persecuting them.

Such is the end of those whose thou is yet before his me. Mustn't we ask with Saul who art thou Lord and receive the answer I am Jesus whom thou persecutest. Lord give me grace. I don't know how to say this.

I've been trying to say it for two nights. Who art thou Lord that even the revelation of the Lord as Lord so much waits on our pulling out the stops that he's not going to squander and give us such treasure of the revelation of the knowledge of himself in truth until he sees a people in truth who are willing to serve him in truth.

So we're laboring under the truncated and inadequate understandings of God and if we really recognize that it's crippling our spiritual life. We can't rise above this inadequate version of a Jesus whom we have internalized for our own purpose and we need to say really truly who art thou Lord.

I've been guilty of mouthing that word glibly and in a facile way but I have to acknowledge in the light that is shining down on me from above tonight. I really don't know as I ought to know. Who art thou and the answer is I am.

I am that I am that I am. I will be who I will be. I am Jesus. I'm not your buddy boy. I'm not the one to help you in the way and patch up your marriage though. I do all those things. I'm above your need.

I am Jesus. And unless that revelation comes and comes with our faces on the ground, what kind of apostolic service can we perform? For it cannot exceed and must reflect whatever our knowledge of God in truth is.

And that's why we ourselves are the victims of inadequate ministries. That's why we have been invited to accept the Lord and to recite a prayer and praise God for the measure that he honors even that call.

But look how stultified our lives have been and banging about and divorced and remarried and all of the kinds of things that are the consequence of not having had a true beginning from the first. We never knew him as we ought and yet we're singing his praises.

Well think we are. The powers of darkness brooding over Truckee relishing the continuation of just such a kind of thing that causes them no perturbance at all. There's nothing here that alarms them. Go ahead, continue your round of services.

Continue your programs. And in no way jeopardizes or threatens the kingdom of my darkness. Because you cannot rise above and you cannot exceed your inadequate knowledge of God. Even your use of his name is a piece of nomenclature and a formality or a shallowness that does not invoke much.

Only that one who is deeply converted, only that one who has gone down on his face and has to be raised up from it as blind and who can see no man and be led away as a child is the one who has the potential to threaten the kingdom of darkness.

And how many of us want to be led away by the hand? Great Saul, the prized student of the Rabbi Gamaliel who could quote you yards of scripture with rabbinical interpretation, utterly blind and utterly devastated.

We need to come to a place where we see no man, even our own man, even our own seeing. And that's why Paul could say, follow me as I follow Christ. Without an iota of egotism, of audacity. And it's you who think that he's egotistical because you project upon him the ego in which you still are, not having come down on your face upon the ground and been blinded by the light of God to see no man.

You project to him what your own man is and assume that he must mean by that some kind of egoistic statement because you cannot understand a man who sees no man and in which the element of ego is not a factor.

It does not have to be recognized. He can be despised, he can be cast out, he can be the off-scouring of the world and without so much as blinking at it for he sees no man. The light that has come down has blinded him once and for all to that last crippling seeing even of ourselves that makes us spiritually self-conscious and therefore compromised.

And he trembling in astonishment asked, Lord, what will thou have me to do? I'm a little suspicious even to give an invitation tonight and say, now you need to say, Lord, what would you have for me to do?

And of course you'll say it, but you'll leave unchanged because it needs to be said with astonishment and with trembling. God forbid we should make of this the last and the worst and the cruelest of all deceptions in an alter call that we can glibly fulfill.

Aren't we doing that already with our so-called repentances and confessions and other kinds of things that are just a little too easy for us to pronounce? You'll know it's authentic when you die a thousand deaths in the making of it.

Beware of anything that's facile, that's easy, that's glib, however correct, because what is the cruelest delusion of all? And to find ourselves a lie in the thing that's correct. With astonishment and trembling that we need to say, Lord, what would you have for me to do?

And you can know that if you'll say that tonight, the God who inspired this word is the God who will also hear your word and take you at it. And your life will be changed from this night and from that speaking.

Things will be released that have been held in abeyance, waiting for that pronouncement that must come from you, but must rightly come if it's to be true and not just a religious reflex. With astonishment and with trembling.

Absolute Surrender and the Crossing Into the Kingdom

This is the point of crossing. And many of us have said, Lord, what would you have for me to do? But only in a particular moment of distress and need. But who of us have asked it foundationally in a once and for all way?

In utter abandonment of something not ever again to be taken back. Once you say this, these words are irretrievable, saints. Something has been registered and recorded at the annals of heaven and it's been heard in the hearing of witnesses and before the principalities and the powers of air.

It's a once and for all. It's an utterness that nothing in this world has prepared us to perform. This is the world of relativism. This is the world of easy come and easy go. This is the world of maybe, I guess, and I suppose.