The New Bereans

I pray that God would send another revival to our generation similar to this, yet new in His end-time purposes.

“The word of the LORD came unto Abram in a vision, saying fear not, Abram: I am thy shield and thy exceeding great reward.”  – Genesis 15:1

To be one who would seek the eternal king only for the blessings he can procure, would be nearly criminal.  The trial of which would be held before the very creation that groans, as only earth, space and stars could groan.  Such things groan, shatter, collide and quasar, in eager expectation of one solid permanent edifice of reality to protrude beyond the limitations of itself.  That thing is the revelation of God’s Sons.

The sons of God will be those who, like their Father Abraham, recognize and believe that their heavenly father is far more than just being some cosmic blessing dispenser.  Our Lord told us that the very definition of eternal life was to, “Know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent.” John 17:3

In Hosea 7:13-14 God laments, “Woe unto them! For they have fled from me: because they have transgressed against me: though I have redeemed them, yet they have spoken lies against me.  And they have not cried unto me with their heart, when they howled upon their beds: they assemble themselves for corn and wine, and they rebel against me.”

Do we gather to ask of the Lord for mere provision of the things of the flesh?  Or do we gather that his kingdom would come?  That his will be done?  In earth as it is in heaven?  And from this right posture of desire do we then recognize that the purpose of our daily bread is to bolster and follow the desire for every word that proceeds from the mouth of God?

“…hope that is seen is not hope.”  -Romans 8:24b

Every day it is there, lurking behind every turn of a corner, hiding under every spoken syllable I hear, whispering with every breath of a shifting wind.  Behind the promise of every rainbow, and at the flailing capitulation of every weary, summer spent leaf.  Every time an exultant and radiant sun erupts against the atmospheric, crenellating wave of a blackened storm front.  Every conversation, every glance to the distant side, every time my daughter raises her arms in expectation of my lifting her into my embrace, when I feel, yet again, awkward in a social setting, and with my insatiable desire to direct even the most mundane of every single conversation I have in life toward something deeper and more meaningful.  Whenever I see the sunlight reflect off of my wife’s beautiful hair, and every time she looks at me with her deep love, even when she asks me what I am thinking, and love compels me to put my morass of complicated thoughts into a tangible linear string of verbal sense.  If I read a news article, or hear some lament, it is always there…

It is an insatiable, ravenous, all consuming, and unrelenting hope, and the things which I do see are constantly reminding me of its presence echoing beyond every instance.  All these things and many more are reminding me, by the very nature of how they make me see past them, to something I cannot explain with words, something that I desire with such a hunger that there is no simile with which to describe it.  For if I was to put it into words by analogy or metaphor that would be to limit it.  To attempt to quantify the depth of, weight of, width of, or consistency of this desire would also limit it, or place bookends on it, if you will.

It is this hope, in that which none of the things I can visually comprehend are capable of satiating, that can only be matched by what will eventually satisfy that hope.  Just as the hope within me cannot be measured, quantified, or rationalized, neither can that which I am hoping in.  For whom I am hoping in is the immeasurable, infinite, immense, and eternal. He that is so far beyond even the vastness of our known universe, which is nearly irrational to our minds in its own scope, yet His hand spans it with ease.

And yet, beyond all imagining, that inexhaustible, maddening-to-comprehend vastness condensed Himself into an infinitesimal and displayed to all history, humanity, and creation just how vast he really was on a simple, unimportant, dusty, sun-baked hill, in an annoying, back-water nuisance of a Province with nails in His hands and his blood splashed all over the place.

It is Him that I hope for; it is His eternal presence, and the radiance of who He is…

“Whoever loves transgression loves strife.” -Proverbs 17:19 (ESV)

The tendency to want to argue, strive and debate with people about things is symptomatic of a direct linkage to the love of transgression.   All throughout the scriptures, the word transgression is linked to the idea of sin, but it is more specific.  Transgression is to purposefully rebel.  In other words, when we know something to be the right thing to do, but instead we rebel against that and do the opposite, we are transgressing.

So when Solomon says that those who love transgression, in turn love strife, what can we then say about our strife?  I love how the bible does not bandy about with words, or make excuses.  Instead it just simply says that if you love to strive and argue and wrangle with people, you love transgression.  Is there anything simpler to understand?

Love of Argument = Love of Transgression

It amazes me how people, Christians especially, can find all sorts of justification for arguing their pet doctrines in such a manner that they are only manifesting this exact problem.  It is no wonder John the Apostle spent so much time telling us to love one another.

I guarantee you, if God has not done a true changing of your heart through the power of his Spirit, and you are not changed from the inside out, you will find every justification you can possibly find in the bible to be a total jerk.  Jude admonishes us in his Plutonium-charged weapons-grade epistle that the false prophets are the kind of people who, “Speak evil of those things which they know not: but what they know naturally, as brute beasts, in those things they corrupt themselves.” (Jude 10) We know a tree by its fruit, and we are to discern that.  I am finding more and more that debating and wrangling over petty doctrinal issues it is a huge distraction.  The fundamental issue’s are a persons character, and the way they think they are representing Christ, far more than the specificity to which they adhere to every jot and tittle of correct doctrine.

If you have the love of Christ in you, by all means, correct, exhort, preach and certainly call a spade a spade.  But if you are false in your character, so also will your words be false.  Even a true word becomes wormwood in the mouth that is rotten . . . I have finally understood a false teacher for what a false teacher is.  He/She is simply a person who in themselves is false.   And you do not have to be a pulpiteer to be false in your representation of the true Messiah.   Look at Ananias and Sapphira, they never uttered a false doctrine that is recorded, but they were slashed from this life through their wicked falsehood.

One of the reasons that people will not inherit the Kingdom of God will be because they love “Emulations, wrath, strife, seditions, and heresies…” (Galatians 5:19-21) and I think the order there is important.  Oh we love to talk about how adultery is bad, how fornication is bad…but how many hate it when Christians strive and be seditious and cause division over things that are unimportant?

“Those who trust in the LORD are like Mount Zion, which cannot be moved, but abides forever.”

-Psalm 125:1

A mountain is strong, and no mountain more strong than the mountain the Spirit says will abide forevermore.  Solid with the ancient rock and dust sifted through the movement of the creation.  If God cares deeply about the mount of Israel, the mount of Zion whose steeps David conquered, whose rocks housed the temple of Solomon, where many have called it the navel of all creation.  To this sturdy lasting edifice, one must look no further than see an illustration of what value trust in God has.

This mountain has been trampled by the feet of many men.  Its humble peak been redolent with the fragrance of crushing throughout the tests of weathers time.  Hammer upon her, pave her, build foundations upon her…she will not be moved.  Neither will those whom trust in God.

Oh but how the wicked one would desire to ascend above her, scale the sides of the north and exalt himself above the most high…The Lord shall prevail, he will cast down and annhilate all hope of such wicked imaginings.   By God’s grace we will be more than conquerors, through faith…be as a mountain, be sure, be steady.

Ohhhh the desire to live a crucified life…may God wake us up to this truth as if we were waking from a dream of death into a world of life and true color.  For the life uncrucified is not a life raised into true life, but only a paltry shadow of wraith-like existence.  May God grant his church more men and women of this life.  Thank you Bravehearted Gospel and Art Katz Ministries for this clip.  This is one sermon everyone needs to listen to.

This is just a portion of the sermon of  the century.  If you have not heard this yet…you need to listen to the whole thing.  However I though this was a great snippet from the sermon.  God save us from flesh ran ministries.  God save us from ourselves.  I have nothing to add to this message, I can only pass on what I think needs to be heard and heeded.

“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.  The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep.  And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.  And God said,  ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light.  And God saw that it was good.  And God separated the light from the darkness.  God called the light Day, and the darkness he called night.” -Genesis 1:1-5a

Why must the Spirit of God deem it noteworthy to tell us that light came out of darkness?  Is this a physic’s technicality?  Is this merely history? Should we even care?  It seems to me that light cannot be defined apart from darkness.  Light, from the first few verses of Genesis, was set in contradistinction to darkness.  God then separated the two into phases of night and day.  We can hardly understand light except by its absence.  Surely we also know now that darkness is really nothingness, for it is simply the lack of light.  This is a common way the bible defines words that are hard to understand.  The physics of light is amongst some of the most difficult concepts in nature to grasp, being both a particle and a wave, many physics students have groaned when trying to grasp this antimony, I know because I was one of them.  In its most simple terms however, darkness is the absence of light.

Peter used this same tool of contrast to define another complex word, “Whoever desires to love life and see good days, let him keep his tongue from evil and his lips from speaking deceit; let him turn away from evil and do good; let him seek peace and pursue it.  For the eyes of the Lord are on the righteous, and his ears are open to their prayer.  But the face of the Lord is against those who do evil.”  I Peter 3:10-12.  Righteous here is defined through its contradistinction to, “those who do evil.”  In essence, they will be the opposite of this.  Do you do evil?  Then there may be a question as to whether or not you are among those to whom the Lord looks.  Is God’s face hidden behind a veil of mystery for you?  Is he lost amongst the conflagrations of your sins?  Surely saints do sin, we fail, but we are not defined by a life of sin.  The apostle John boiled these two concepts of light and righteousness together to present a wonderfully simple statement.  “But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin.” I John 1:7

Remember, the next time you see the sun rise out of the darkness of the deepest night, the Son of God has commanded, by the life he lived, for you to come out of darkness and walk in the light.  May the Day Star arise in your hearts.

If you have ever been caught in a back-eddy, after having been tossed from a raft, then you know the terror of struggle, and the panic you feel when all of your effort is required to get back into the current again.  Metaphorically this is the same result as a conversation between believers that I hear not infrequently.  Without fail there will be a brother or a sister who is grieving over the current state of things in the church and they will lament that we need to get back to the way things were during Christianities formative years.  The more “mature,” wineskin will respond to this requiem cynically by asking, “Which early church would you like to get back to…the Corinthian church with all its carnality…or how about the Galatian believers with all of their legalism?  Or what if we were more like the Thessalonian church; they were a bunch of louts and layabouts…”  Bla bla bla, around the death eddy the conversation swirls until hope is suffocated and the old wineskin cavorts away, skipping with glee, while his twin daggers of discernment and rebuke reflect a glimmer of pale light as he twirls and sheathes them.

With all of the precision and diligence of a grammatical Samurai, Arthur Katz dashes headlong into this vicious circle of puerile reasoning, hacking its foolish carnal logic to tatters.  The issue, he tells us, is with the term Apostolic, a term which was little more than an entitlement to me before I read this book.  Men like titles, so by nature when we see one, we automatically think in terms of hierarchy.  It takes a few hundred pages, but once done, Brother Katz has completely waylaid all misconceptions you may have had about this hierarchy whatsoever.

Early on in the book he says, “There is no man more qualified than the one who believes in his deepest heart that he is without qualification.  The whole preliminary work of God is to disqualify us before we can be qualified.₁“ He would then go on to point out that Moses was at a pinnacle in life when at 40 he had everything going for him, God would have nothing to do with it though as brother Katz would go on to say, “and yet God does not think it lavish, wasteful or extravagant to give Moses another forty years of waiting in the wilderness until he is completely emptied out–and then He calls him.₂”

You may be thinking…uhhhhh wait, Moses wasn’t an Apostle, and what does he have to do with the term Apostolic?  Everything!  Art had great concern that people today have no idea what it means to be sent by God, rather than sent by themselves, or their own efforts.  In a world of fast food, fast love, and quick religion, the joy of patience and the glory of Godly contentment has been lost.  Brother Katz takes off his kimono and drops the sword in favor of playing a violin with a rose in his teeth as he romances deeply with the idea of being patient for God’s calling.  Taking every discipline the Father sends for the joy that it itself is worth.  He asks, “Will we be willing to submit to waiting and to conditions of trial and preparation for true service when the whole religious world clamors for action?₃”

While ruminating upon Leviticus 8:15-17 he points out that: “God is not interested in the outer hide and the flesh; He counts that along with the dung.  The inside, in the inner man, worked by Him in the hidden places, born of inward wrestling, are the offerings of a sweet and pleasing savor before God.  We have been guilty as contemporary Christians of offering our personalities, our winsomeness and our fleshly abilities to God, simply because we do not have the inward parts to offer, never having learned to rest or wait before God.  We have despised the suffering, reproach and obscurity in which alone the sweet offerings are formed deep within us.  We have not esteemed such things as God esteems them, and have preferred to do without them.  We need the obedience and vision that will enable us to take our hide and flesh outside the camp and to exclude it from the holy place, as well as from the pulpit.₄”

If you have read many of our posts, you can obviously see that this man is right up our alley.  I have to thank sermonindex for first placing a sermon from Arthur Katz on my iPod.  After nearly having to pick myself up off of the floor because of the forcefulness and earnestness of his message, I soon started reading all that Google could muster about this man.  I bought his autobiography, “Ben-Israel, Odyssey of a Modern Jew.”  Having read it in only a day or so, it left me pacing to know what happened to him after he was born again.  Apostolic Foundations answered that question for me. I would suggest that this was probably his Opus.  Not having read any of his other books, I find it hard to believe this book could be topped.

There is no way this book could have been written, had it not been lived.  I am suspicious that Apostolic Foundations was only a perpetuation of what Arthur lived out.

I definitely recommend “Apostolic Foundations” to anyone at all who has a care to serve God in any capacity.  I would also suggest placing this book into the category of revival.  I do not know if that was exactly his intent, but I see revival written on every single page.  I was sent to my knees in prayer so many times reading this book that it took me a month to read.  I could hardly get through a paragraph without having to repent and ask for God’s grace to help me overcome.  I hope this review will inspire even one person to purchase this book and pray for its application.  Arthur Katz was a burning man with a precise vocabulary.  May his words catch others on fire. You can order the book here.  I only wish I had had the opportunity to hear him preach in person before he went home…

1.)    Arthur Katz, Apostolic Foundations, Burning Bush Publications, Third Printing: January 2002 © 1999 by Arthur Katz page 12

2.)    Ibid page 12

3.)    Ibid page 14

4.)    Ibid page 29

Clive Staples Lewis

As soon as I was able to crack the spine of a book with legitimacy and authority, based upon the virtue of the fact that I was going to imbibe the words contained within it, I found myself consuming, “The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe.”  My mother must have put me on phonic steroids when I wasn’t looking, because I remember reading it when I was between kindergarten and 1st grade.  My mother was always faithful to make sure I had plenty to read and for her persistence, I am eternally grateful.

In my last year of High School, I became gripped with a terrifying doubt about the validity of Christianity.   Post modern reasoning wormed its way into my brain and began to create a mash of my faith.   I do not remember how many nights I wept while my mind raced through all the maddening scenarios that would occur in my life should I choose to disbelieve.  Sleep, in those days, was like a long distance relationship to me, and I could hardly afford a calling card.  Most of the tears I cried flowed from fear and loneliness while the nature of my doubts were not really relatable to anyone I knew.  These doubts were so ghastly to me; in fact, I hesitated to talk to anyone about it for fear that I would infect them with the same plague that dominated my every waking thought.  If I ever did, God please forgive me.

Eventually, by God’s grace, I was granted the gift of faith and all my doubts washed away, but that is jumping ahead a bit.  Before the gift was granted however, my weak colander of faith was filled over and over with the thoughts and musings of C.S. Lewis.   He was not able to answer all of my questions, but many of the things he said in Pilgrims Regress, Mere Christianity, and Surprised by Joy kept me tethered and sane.  Every time I began to slip into the terrors of my doubts I would remember something he said which would counteract my dark brooding.

If I am granted the privilege of meeting him in the after, I think it will be difficult for me to respect British propriety, for I suspect I will hug the wind from his lungs.  He was a Father who nurtured me into true faith.  As he would have worded it in: “The Great Divorce,” he blew on the little glimmer of a coal within my soul till the heat of life began to spark.  I have had many teachers in my life, but very few Fathers (1 Cor 4:15).  I suspect that his writing, combined with my Grandmother’s prayers, and the passion my Mother instilled within me for the written word, (God’s sovereignty notwithstanding) granted me the right environment where God eventually flooded my doubts with the light of Hebrews 11:1.

As a belated thanksgiving post, I offer gratitude up to the Father of Lights, who has blessed me over and over again with the writings of this powerful thinker.  I was heavily reminded about it all as I read “The Great Divorce” last weekend in one interupted sitting and was gripped all over again and lead to weep in a new way because of his writing.  During this second foray into his real solid land I was confronted by the depth of my sin, and overwhelmed by the Grace of Jesus Christ.  These tears were much more welcome, praise be to God, who is able to keep me from falling.