Holiness or 'Blessing' — Art Katz

Mike from the state of Washington over there who will be tending a little book table where you have opportunity to obtain my extraordinary books. You think I'm joking. They are blessed, anointed, rich.

This is the most recent, the Spirit of Truth. It will take indomitable courage to read it from cover to cover. But I assure you, you'll be transformed before you get to the end. It's for the church called to be the ground and pillar of truth and will break through every pretense calculated.

The other is remarkably anointed, four principal messages, not the least of which a message on Elijah given from a platform in Jerusalem where I did not want to be the speaker and was stopped in my entry to the country to find my name on a blacklist and forbidden to enter.

And after a lot of squawking in Hebrew over the telephone, they let me in and so I realized I had nothing to hide or to preserve my identity in some secret way for some future use. And the speaker that they had employed in my refusal to be a speaker, wanting another Jewish speaker, took sick.

And so as they came to the end of the conference, they had not yet heard from a Jewish speaker and I was asked if I would share for seven minutes, which hardly gives me time to clear my throat. But I agreed and that morning at 3 a .m., something like this morning, I was wakened by the Lord and in the bathroom, not to wake my wife, the Lord gave me a message on Elijah.

It's in here, dynamite. Not a message that could be spoken in seven minutes, but by the time I got up to speak, they said take 15 minutes. And while I was speaking, a note came up to me from the co-author, now passed on to be with the Lord, Jamie Buckingham, of my first book, Ben Israel, saying take 45 minutes.

I thought, wow, they must recognize the anointing on this message. It was so anointed that when a board of rabbis reviewed the film in New York City after its production, the one thing that offended them and that they required to be omitted was me.

That's how anointed it was. Well, after I finished that message and sat down, feeling myself somehow very strange and loathsome, I had, I realized that the note did not say take 45 minutes, it said take 4 -5 minutes.

So here I am, 20 years later, still suffering from the reproach of being a maverick and doing my own thing. But as you read the message, you'll realize God was in my misreading that note. Well, I trust he's going to be in what issues from me this morning.

I'm very curious to hear it. It's something welling up in me over the course of these weeks and months, and someone should not have given me a copy last evening of a magazine called On Being, on the article on the inspirational man who has triggered the whole Toronto Blessing phenomenon.

What's his name? Rodney Howard Brown. And somehow after reading that, although I did not read anything unusually different, it was not even a critique, merely a description. In fact, some young girl wisely said, a critique is not possible.

The Toronto Blessing and the Need to Test Religious Phenomena

But I do believe, dear Saints, that if we have a jealousy for the Church that bears the name of the Holy One of Israel, we ought to be critiquing, and not mindlessly nodding in assent, let alone giving ourselves over indiscriminately to phenomena of an extremely dubious kind in the name of blessing.

You know there's such a thing as paying too high a price for blessing, and if that price is the denigration of God and his name, that's too high a price. Find your blessing elsewhere. In fact, preferably in your own prayer closet.

You don't have to go as far as Toronto. God is omnipresent. So do I have your liberty to just follow on and see where the Lord will lead, beginning with where I started this morning in Psalm 18? Today is the 18th, is it not?

So I read the Psalm for the day. What? Do I want to come forward? Okay. No, this is right to the edge here. Okay. Let's pray, huh? Precious God on high, put a God on this mouth. Let not a word, a syllable be emitted that does not have its origin in you.

Lord, we don't give a rap to hear a man's opinion, however clever or interesting it might be. We want to hear your heart. What do you have to say, my God, about what is taking place in your Christendom, and why have you appointed this morning for that purpose?

So Lord, we just, our hearts are open, and take your full liberty. Give us ears to hear not only your speaking, but even between the lines. And if it's a statement beyond this church that somehow will go out through the tape of this, or just the word that by which prophets often begin, hear, O heaven, and give ear, O earth, for the Lord has spoken, then let it be that.

But do speak. We thank you and give you the praise for our privilege to hear from the living God. In Jesus' holy name, amen. Well, I read the psalm for the day, and I love this Psalm 18. I'm just going to take some portion, because it evokes a sense of God that I think that we desperately need.

The Holiness and Majesty of God in Psalm 18

The sense of God is all saints, and it's, what is the church without a sense of God, and the holiness of God? And if we lose that, what do we have? If we have everything else and lose that, what have we and what are we, and what is our witness, and how shall we ever move Jews to jealousy?

So there's nothing more to be coveted, more to be cherished, more to be preserved, more to be watched over, than the sense of God as he in fact is, and not as we may have thought him to be. It's maybe a lifelong quest, this pursuit of God, and everything in the world, even in the religious world, conspires against that knowledge.

Even our own religion, even our own enthusiasms, even our own desire for successful meetings might ironically oppose and be the greatest detriment to the knowledge of God. If you can't understand me, you have no sense of irony or paradox implicit in the faith.

I'm very fond of a statement by Karl Barth, the Swiss theologian, that nothing more reveals our pathetic humanity than seeking to serve God or to celebrate God or worship God out of it. The contradiction is so apparent and so painful, and so it's an injunction to be the people of the resurrection, sons and daughters of God, who have risen above mere human religion, mere human enthusiasm, mere soulish excitement, and to come to the place in the Spirit and to maintain that place that might require, ironically, not more sound and more noise, but more silence.

So in Psalm 18, verse 7,. Then the earth shook and quaked, and the foundations of the mountains were trembling and were shaken, because he was angry. Smoke went up out of his nostrils, and a fire from his mouth devoured.

Coals were kindled by it. He bowed the heavens also and came down, with thick darkness under his feet. And he rode upon a cherub and flew, and he sped upon the wings of the wind. He made darkness his hiding place, his canopy around him, darkness of waters, thick clouds of the skies.

From the brightness before him passed his thick clouds, hailstones and coals of fire. The Lord also thundered in the heavens, and the Most High uttered his voice, hailstones and coals of fire. And he sent out his arrows and scattered them, and lightning flashes in abundance enrouted them.

Then the channels of water appeared, and the foundations of the world were laid bare at thy rebuke, O Lord, at the blast of the breath of thy nostrils.". Isn't that yummy? I know it's anthropomorphic, and a skeptic can dismiss God being described with nostrils and smoke and all of that, but I love what is being conjured up.

I think that we desperately need it, because God is in danger of being made a commonplace. We're fashioning him in our own image, and we're not even aware of the unconscious thing that we're doing. We need to be reminded, or perhaps we have never ever known, the mightiness of God.

He's other than what we ourselves are, and maybe I'm speaking ancestrally as a Jew, and something in my gut remembers God's lament with us that you thought I was such a one as you are, that the knowledge of me is taught by the precept of men was not God's compliment, but his enjoinder.

It was an insult. You have fallen so low that the knowledge of me is taught by the precept of men. How then should it be obtained? Some other way. Once you have resorted to precept, it's no longer God.

It's about God. It's principles, but it's not God himself. So I think it's clear the fear of God is absent from the church. There's a rather slack atmosphere, a kind of, I don't know what, a go-along with it, and matter-of-factness, a blase, or is it that Australia?

A complacency that we're sensing in your country that has even infected the church. You have to contend for the faith, once and for all, earnestly given the Saints, and if you think that that means it's doctrines, you have another think coming.

The doctrines are kid stuff. I love the doctrines, but that's not our problem. It's the faith. It's the apprehension of God as he is, that fear and awe, the sense of God that tempers everything, and if it's not to be found in the church, what shall we hope for in Australia?

And little wonder then that these phenomena that come down the pike find such ready acceptance. What a bunch, what a ready-made audience looking for novelty, needing a lift, needing an experience, needing a blessing.

Well, sure, your church has become so predictable. Your Christian life is hardly more than a succession of predictable Sundays. You do need something, but unhappily what you're grasping for is not what you really need, and in fact will probably move you further from the obtainment than you might know.

So I'm really concerned for the church this morning, just for its own sake, let alone that I know that there's no other agency given in the earth by which Jews are to be made jealous, and if we fail in that, we fail in all.

And though Paul does not articulate and define what it is that we're to do to make Jews jealous, it's evidently something we've not yet done, and probably it's not without doing, but more without being, that they should come into our assembly and stop and gasp and throw their hands over their mouths or hold their chest for the sense of God that is present with us, who is holy, holy, holy.

I don't think there's any more awesome demonstration to an unbelieving Jew than the light that lightens the Gentiles, which is also the glory of the people of Israel. That's why I'm here this morning.

I should have been dead how many years ago, 32 years ago, except that I saw as an atheist, a dark atheist, and a vehement enemy of the faith, breathing threatenings and murderings against what I consider to be a deterrent to human progress, the Church.

But I saw in the face of an unsuspecting piece of innocence, a transparent little American girl on vacation in Switzerland where I was hitchhiking, looking for philosophical answers, the light that lightens the Gentiles and the glory of the people of Israel.

I don't think that Israel is going to see that glory except in your light. So just before we leave this psalm, in verse 25, with the kind thou dost show thyself kind, with the blameless thou dost show thyself blameless, with the pure thou dost show thyself pure, and with the crooked thou dost show thyself astute.

The margin says twisted. I think that that's a remarkable statement, that somehow the apprehension of God is very much affected by our seeing, by what we bring to him. It's not a matter of God in what he is objectively, but how we perceive.

And therein lies the problem. We're bringing a distortion out of our own subjectivity, out of our own twist. We see God out of a prism of our own being. And I'll tell you that the way some people are seeing God is quite cheap, as if he's some kind of a lackey or errand boy, or providing the convenience of meetings by which offerings can be taken, that we can leave the nations that we exploit with millions, and that somehow there's not a blush, let alone a twitch of contradiction, because God is somehow compatible with all that, and part and parcel of all that.

And I'm sure that they're laughing all the way to the bank, and thinking that they're doing God and God's people service, to require something from us to perceive God rightly, with the pure thou dost show thyself pure.

If you have any kind of controversy with God this morning, the problem is not he, but yourself. You're projecting something on him. You're becoming guilty of Israel's sin. You thought that I was such a one as you are.

The thing that we need is to be transformed in his image, and not to project our image upon him. He is not a convenience. He's God. He's the Creator. He is the Almighty. I don't have words and adjectives.

I think those words have lost their cogency. We maybe have said them too often, and it's become a catechism, or an invocation of a mechanical kind. Unless you know him in the place that is too deep for words, do you really know him?

Until there's a gasp and a splutter, until you find yourself prostrate, and stretch out as dead, do you really know him? And how many of us will go through an entire Christian lifetime without that knowledge, and be perfectly content, and think that we're doing God's service, and that we know him, and that we can communicate him.

27, verse 27, for thou dost save an afflicted people, but haughty eyes thou dost abase. Wow, just a haughty look. God despises haughtiness, human self-exaltation, religious pomp, hot-shot ism, the man of the hour.

And when I see those videotapes of those characters, that's what I see, the swagger, the hitching up, the calling some precious little old lady dearie. Where do you come off with a snotty remark like that, when that woman should be respected?

She's not your dearie, and don't think you're gonna blow her down by your breath. It's a carnival, dear saints, and I don't care what measure of supposed blessing is being obtained, God is being denigrated.

Irretrievable loss for the name, and the reputation, and the honor of God, who does not lend himself to carnivals. We're in the last days, these are solemn and awesome days, and he's waiting for the fulfillment of mandates and callings that are so monumental, it requires a people of apostolic and prophetic stature, not clowns to perform.

He hates haughty eyes, he hates that pomp of men who can move their little finger, and numbers fall in the process. Well, brother, then, if that's not God, by what power are they falling? I'm glad you asked that.

You should have asked it long before, and you need to continue asking it. For thou dost light my lamp, verse 28, the Lord my God illumines my darkness, for by thee I can run upon a troop, and by my God I can leap over a wall.

Well, I just needed to read that, just to wash my own soul. I just feel somehow gritty, and before I can get into anything else, I just need a little washing of the water of the Word. But I would direct your attention to Ezekiel, chapter 22.

Separating the Holy from the Profane

Maybe let's start first with Jeremiah, chapter 15. Yeah, 15. This is on my heart this morning. I asked my brothers to, if they could find it. I didn't have it in my concordance. In verse 19 of chapter 15 of Jeremiah, therefore, thus says the Lord, if you return, then I will restore you.

Before me you will stand, and if you extract the precious from the worthless, you will become my spokesman. I think other versions read, if you remove the sacred from the profane, or the vile, then you will become my spokesman.

I think we need to be about this. There needs to be a separation. We need to disengage ourselves from the things that are profane, because the whole world is profane. There's a process of proclamation taking place everywhere.

There's something that is cheapening and degrading in television, in language, and in street conversation. My own country worse than yours, but how long before you'll catch up? If the church is not jealous for the sanctity of words and of language, I'm not, and I'm not even talking about biblical language.

I'm talking about language per se. I'm talking about the exquisite privilege of being made in God's image that allows us to speak, and to cheapen that, to make our small talk really small, to trivialize our life, to not hold dear the things that sanctify us and make us human in God's image, is to enter the process by which everything is being made profane.

Now you're called to be a nation of priests, and the priest has the obligation even to teach the people and to teach the nation the difference between the things that are holy and the things that are profane.

And how shall we teach what we ourselves don't know, and what we ourselves have not extended ourselves to find out and to preserve and to keep alive in our own consciousness and before our own children?

Maybe there's no way that we can pursue this and move in this way except we take the TV set out of the house. It's not enough just to shut it off. I used to keep it for the news, but I tell you that the news is becoming as vulgar and obscene as anything else.

And in between, I don't know about your TV in America, there are the advertisements of other programs and a commercial, and by the time you've watched the news, you have become polluted. It's not worth it to find out what's going on in the world if that's the price we have to pay in having our own spirits being made sodden and dulled.

And then we try to come into the Scriptures, and we find that we're not profiting. It's dull, and we don't enjoy, we don't have a time of devotion that is a delight. Praying is a kind of a drudgery at best, mechanical requirement.

Our spirits are being made dull. We're being profaned because we have not separated the sacred from the profane. We've not kept it at a distance. We've forgotten that we have a God who says, don't mix linen and wool.

Don't harness an ox and an ass together. Why? Don't they pull? Doesn't it work? Isn't it expedient? Isn't it efficacious? That's not the question whether it works. Sure it's going to work. Linen and wool will probably make a lovely garment, but it's a mixture.

It's an adulteration, and God said, thou shalt not mix. Thou shalt be separate and holy unto me. There's a lot of mixing going on, and we haven't been careful to separate the precious from the vile. Then you will become my spokesman.

Oh, praise God. When's the last time you've heard one? We hear a lot of preaching, a lot of words, but a spokesman is one who bears the message and the burden of the Lord. I think there's a famine already in the land for the Word of God.

In the midst of a wealth of cassettes and tapes and ministries that are profuse, where are the spokesmen of the Lord? This is their requirement to separate the cheap, the trivial, the trite, the commonplace from the things that are holy and the things that are sacred, lest the holy thing become swamped and becomes trivialized itself.

What hope, dear saints, if God should become trivialized? What hope for anything? What standard for anything? To what shall the world repair if there's no standard in the Church? Ezekiel 22 speaks of that, of Israel's pathetic condition, and I think we ourselves are moving toward it as the Church.

Wouldn't it be a remarkable thing that at the end of the age, God has a remorseful Israel and a remorseful Church. Both have fallen short of the glory of God, and both require the mercy of God, that he'll comprehend both in his mercy.

He says in chapter 22, verse 26 of Ezekiel, her priests have done violence to my law and have profaned my holy things. They have made no distinction between the holy and the profane. They have not taught the difference between the unclean and the clean, and they hide their eyes from my Sabbaths, and I am profaned among them.

And further, in Ezekiel 44, verse 23, moreover, they shall teach my people the difference between the holy and the profane, and cause them to discern between the unclean and the clean. Well, we are the royal priesthood, and the priesthood of all believers.

There's no room for any of us to be slack. We all need to be vigilant in our priestly obligation, not only to know ourselves and to separate the profane from the holy, but to communicate and to teach that to men.

Can I quote a little bit from a newsletter article that I've written? By the way, if anybody is becoming endeared to me through this morning, strange soul that you might be, and wants to have some continuing contact, we publish this four times a year, and we have a small overseas readership.

We would be happy to put you on if you give us a clearly printed address. And this is called, Some Cautionary Thoughts on the Present Revival. I felt an obligation as a prophetic and priestly man to say something.

Discernment in the Present Revival

And here's the something that I say, just in part. We are not in a position to categorically condemn as deception the ostensible benefits to which many testify. God is always free to bless whom he will bless.

I think that may well be happening, that naive souls and simple faith coming to those places and coming with an expectancy can be met by God, despite the questionable thing that is taking place. But I wouldn't say that that blessing that is received confirms or validates the entire thing that's going on, because that's exactly what makes deception a deception, because it's mixed, because it contains elements that are dubious and suspicious, and at the same time there seems to be apparent blessing.

Who has the acumen and the discernment to see through of priestly stature, whose discernment has been increased by the exercise thereof, and who can discern that which is good and that which is evil, that which is profane and that which is holy?

The mere invocation of the name of the Lord has become a cheapie. Everyone can vocalize that. Does that sanctify it? Does that make it official? Does that make it God's? That's exactly the thing that is profane, is the employment of the name of God to somehow validate the human and religious thing that we are promoting.

I'll tell you, you can pray for me, as a young Jewish believer, this is now 32 years ago, my most painful entry into the church was to see the glib frequency with which Gentile Christians took the name of the Lord to their lips.

I don't know if you know this, Orthodox Jews, still in darkness, never having had the revelation of the Messiah, will not even spell the word God. It's G-D. You don't vocalize, you don't take that word so frequently to your lips, or you'll find yourself cheapening it.

Lord, Lord, Lord, Lord, Lord, Lord, Lord, Lord, Lord, Lord, Lord, until we forget what Lord means. And I quite appreciate the revival that came to Argentina when a certain pastor, Carlos Ortiz, had a gutful and forbade his congregation to employ the word at all.

A moratorium on the word Lord. No speaking until he became Lord, in fact. Lord of your pocketbook, your attic, your spare room, your car, your bank account, your retirement, your benefit, all those things.

Until he's the Lord over all, he's not the Lord over anything, and he wasn't going to allow that word to be bandied about in apparent contradiction with what was the truth of the condition of this congregation.

Oh, praise God for a man like that. I pray that he is yet that man, but I'm a little bit apprehensive seeing that he's gone onto the staff of the Crystal Cathedral in California, and there's a little disquiet in my soul.

Lord preserve him in his integrity and blamelessness, because you don't automatically maintain that without a daily moment-by-moment vigilance. So I'm not knocking blessings that some may authentically be receiving, but our point is that if the enemy can succeed in bringing the church to viewing benefit as the determinant by which something is judged to be of God, we may well have been brought to the very ground of deception itself.

Is that all it takes to persuade you that you receive a benefit, or a blessing, or a release from some personality disorder? Is that all it takes? Then Satan is well able to provide that. There's something more important than benefits.

There's something more important than release. It's the holiness of God. It's his name. It's his honor. It is who he is in himself, and benefit of a dubious kind is too high a price to pay if it is going to throw any shadow upon his great name.

We will have lost everything in the name of benefit. In fact, even the desire for benefit is itself suspect. I have often been astonished when the appeals for healing come. Almost everyone comes out of their seat.

I've never seen such a sick church everywhere, and I think that we will continue to be sick so long as we live egocentric lives, even spiritually speaking. And what will be the first statement and question that you raise when you leave this room this morning?

What did you think of the speaker? Did you like? Did you like? Isn't your like the center of your being? So you've shifted from carnal centrality to spiritual centrality, but you're still the center. No wonder you're sick.

No wonder you need continually to be healed until you make God the center. His glory, his honor, his name, and his eternal purposes. We will continue to be sick. That's why we're sick. We have a false center, and it is in ourselves, in our church, in our denomination, our, our, our, our, my, my, my, my.

So for myself, I would choose to keep my distance from such phenomena, trusting that whatever I might be missing is not greater than what I am protecting and cherishing, and that the Lord is not offended by a carefulness that would rather err in a jealousy for his holiness than to risk subverting what has already been given as pure and true.

Do you know, do you know, do you know this, dear saints? That there's no such thing as coming out the same. You're either going to suffer loss or obtain gain. If you allow yourself and submit yourself to come into an environment of a certain kind, and even to receive the blessings and the laying on of hands, I want to be very careful who lays hands on me, because with every laying on of hands is a transmission of the condition of that one who is extending his hands.

It's amazing what people will open themselves for, and some of these characters have said, we know that this is a mixed bag, but we're so desperate for something to happen that even if Satan is getting in on the act, and even if flesh is exhibiting itself, at least something is happening.

My God, they've never read Psalm 18, or any of the texts that I'm quoting today. You know what I'm saying here? We need to be jealous to God what has already been given. I want to ask you, dear saints, do you have a residue of God?

Do you have a precious accumulation of something that has been worked in your inner being, in its depths, in communion with God over the course of your spiritual history? Do you have a history? How shall you be an overcomer, but by the blood of the Lamb and the word of your testimony, and love not your life unto the death?

Do you have a testimony? Do you know God in the kind of knowledge that has to do with his sufferings? The kind of knowledge that comes through trials, through stretchings, through breakings, and through dealings, which many would shut ourselves off from because they're painful.

I cherish all the residue of the knowledge of God that has come that way. And you know how I test whether something is of God or not? I still my soul, see, because they want you to be engaged by your soul.

The noise, the amplifiers, the music, the motion, the activity, everybody moving and getting into the act. And you're like a lump, a painful disjuncture. You're out of it. And it's not pleasant to be out of it when everything is tugging at you to be one of the boys and to go along.

But there I'm standing like a lump, not measuring by my soul. I've shut that off. In fact, can you even distinguish between your soul and your spirit? Or is it one big blur? And I wait to see if my spirit is hospitable to what is being mediated so that I know it is compatible with my already existing knowledge of God.

And if it is not compatible, they can stand on their heads, they can run all over the platform, they can climb the flagpoles, which they do, and every other kind of madness. And I am completely imperturbable and unmoved.

I will not give myself to it at all. I need to guard my sanctity. I need to guard my integrity in God. Or else you, this morning, would be getting something less than other than what you're receiving.

And so all Australia, in our weeks of travel, and the Philippines, and Japan, and New Zealand, and every other place where we go, you would be getting something much less than other if I allowed myself to be sucked in and influenced and taken up and affected by the current trends.

Knowing God Through Suffering and Corporate Life

Keep your heart with all diligence, for out of it are all the issues of life. You say, Brother, the way you talk and carry on, is there time enough for that kind of Christian living? You make it sound like a full-time occupation.

I only have time Sunday for an hour or two, and I might even come to a midweek service. But the way you're talking to maintain your spirit and guard yourself and grow in the nurturing of faith and all these obligations, you make it sound like that's the whole purpose of our being.

Exactly. Exactly. What did you think this was, a Sunday supplement? Hey, we're coming to the end of the age. God has great purposes to consummate through the church that knows him and will do great exploits out of that knowledge, and that knowledge only.

And it's not cheap, Saints. It's dear, but it's precious. Paul says, Oh, that I might know him in the fellowship of his sufferings. There's a knowledge of God there that is so exquisite, and it's not to be obtained in any other place.

Come on, you sissies. Are you willing to suffer a little, or have you been inducted into the minds of the world, the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain, protecting your life, your privacy, guarding yourself, lest there be any threat, any injury, any pain?

No wonder the church is hardly more than a conglomerate of individualities living their privatistic lifestyles. Where is the church of the apostolic kind, where those who believed were together, and with power, great grace was upon them all, and with power gave the Apostles testimony of the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

There's going to have to be some snap, pop, and break between yourself and your Australian culture and mindset, and the English overtones that have come in, that put up your brick walls and the sanctity of your separation and privatistic life, contrary to the ethos and the character and the genius of true church.

True church is a suffering before it's a glory, just by what we are ourselves together in the intensity of that life, and until we'll go that way, we're not moving anybody to jealousy, certainly not Jews.

The Word of God Versus Experience and False Revival

They say, well Art, you know, don't be so critical, don't think that this is a carnival and these guys are clowns, though they look and act like it, and men are in a stupor, who are ministers of the Word of God, and stand there and splutter and repeat themselves insanely and then collapse, and that's God honoring?

And then they make statements like, I've seen more blessing now, under this blessing, than ever was obtained through the preaching of the Word. I'll tell you, dear Saints, I may not be much, but I am jealous for the Word, and when I see a phenomenon touted as revival, by which the Word of God is conspicuously absent and denigrated as not being the source of God's greatest blessing, but that experience has replaced it, my alarm goes up instantly, and so also yours.

Oh, well Art, they're doing a lot more preaching now. Sure they are, because they're sensitive to the criticism that has come, but what kind of preaching is it? The most commonplace blah, that any stoop can put together out of a few scriptures and call that a message.

Even the prophets that are being celebrated are not speaking prophetically, and we don't even know enough to require that. If they can tell us a few personal things about ourselves, that's all we need, all we want.

We need to be confirmed that God knows us, and look, this prophet was able to say something about us. Where's the prophetic Word? Where is the oracles of God? Where is the waiting thing that we need to hear for the church in the last days, in all of the precarious things that are going on?

That's the prophetic Word. Where is it? The Word has been rudely shelved and has declined, and if something is just even biblical, that's enough for us. Well, if this is not the lying signs and wonders that we have been warned would characterize the last days, when those lying signs and wonders do come, how will they be substantially different in form and appearance from what is now presently taking place?

And how will we then exercise discernment that we're now incapable of exercising? The church needs to be stirred up saints. We need to be called to a maturity. These are the last days, and if this is not that of which you have been warned, when that comes, that is the lying signs and wonders, will we recognize it?

Because it will be a wonder, there will be miracles, there will be demonstration, there will be benefit, but they will be lying signs and wonders, and if we're only concerned with the benefit and not all that much with the source, will we discern it?