Thoughts Upon Waking in Berlin

June 25, 1999


The fear of terror, the strickenness of heart as the realization breaks upon it that the time here is finished, that all is to be left behind, forsaken, not again to be retrieved.
The memorabilia, photographs, albums, paintings and prints, coveted books (dog-eared and marked, a stub or slip of paper inserted to a place where one hoped to return for further reflection), prescriptions that will not again need to be refilled, extra glasses that will no longer be needed. The kitchen utensils and gadgets that crushed garlic, extracted juices, withdrew corks...familiar, dear, accessible - to be left behind. Dead sentinels. Letters, parchments, degrees, the saved programs of memorable concerts, lectures, synagogue events - rarely turned to - but whose known presence is warmly comforting. The suits, custom-tailored, hardly worn, saved for special occasions forsaken together with the jackets and coats, the scarves, and hats of  everyday use. Fifty kilos, one suitcase. What to take - and leave behind. It tears one's guts out. What value to any stranger but so much disposable glut?
How long before the dread pounding at the door? The abrupt rude entry and harsh manners of the booted goyim, coarse illiterates, lumpen proletariat, armed with authority to sweep off the shelves the leather-bound collected works of Goethe, Graezel's History of the Jews (two volumes!), art portfolios, the great masterpieces, contemporary masters, the World Atlas, Schiller, history, philosophy, thought...The phonograph albums, Mozart, the great symphonies, Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, memorable arias of classic opera, the great tenors, lyric lieder of the romantic light operas...that together with a good wine graced many a Saturday afternoon. An end to Sunday strolls? Alpine walks concluded with a zesty fondue, a good beer, coffee, torte. The glow of contentment for a secure and well-ordered life, the security of sound investments, of a faithful pension, the daily newspaper and the weekend supplements on books, theater and travel falling to the carpet around the comfortable stuffed chair as one falls off into a weekend afternoon doze.
Who will visit now the gravesites? Light the jahrzeit candles of remembrance? Care for the graves of the bubbas and zadehs who preceded us? The stillborn, the children who died suddenly and tragically? The place set aside for ourselves? A final monument to a life lived in hopeful significance and righteousness toward society and men? Who will leave a small stone on the gravesite to mark a visit in remembrance of the dead? What will be my own end now? Where will I be buried? Remembered? How can all this be happening? Take place so suddenly? Who could have thought? Ever imagined? Unthinkable in the best of all worlds, most beloved of all nations, most respected of all ancient peoples?
O the loud shouts. The banging doors! The heavy tread on the steps. It's here - the strident knock - no time to think. It's here.

'In a Given Moment
By His Wisdom'

I was invited to speak at a Pentecostal meeting one night, and I had nothing. I sat on the platform in what should have been a hospitable environment for a spirit-filled man. But, I’ll tell you that it was more painful to sit there than it had been in a Baptist church earlier that morning where I laid out a succession of biblical verses that included the words ‘to fill’ or ‘to be filled.’ It was a line-by-line exposition with no fanfare. At the end of it, people were strewn on the floor in deep repentance. But that night with Pentecostals, as I listened to what was purported to be praise and worship, I closed my eyes and would have thought I was in some kind of barnyard where animals were penned up and making noises. My spirit winced within me, only to hear next the young whiz-kid of a pastor come up to the microphone and say: ‘Isn’t it wonderful to worship God in the Spirit?’ I said, ‘Lord, either there is something so devastatingly wrong with me, and I am the most ungainliest of freaks, or this is an utterly deceived people who are so removed from the purity of your spirit and are so soulish and carnal that they construe that to be praise unto God. Lord, I have not a word for such a people. Open the floor and swallow me.’ But he did not. There was no exit to which I could run. I was stuck.
I reviewed the times at Harvard University and other places where God had bailed me out gloriously – and riveted those glib and cynical characters in their seats, stunned. Students who came for radical confrontation, agitated, who were ready to shake their fists at God, ended up giving God praise with their hands lifted.
But, now in Germany with all the chaos around me, I said, ‘Lord, however faithful you’ve been, I don’t know what you can do now.’ And, finally, my name was called. It was the moment of utter foreboding. I came and leaned against the podium, and I opened my mouth and I heard myself saying: ‘As I listened to your worship tonight, I would have thought it was the noise of animals.’ And, the word went POW! And there came a silence over that people. And I continued, and I became more absurd, more foolish, more extreme. But at the end, people were laid out on their faces before God in such deep convulsive breakings and gasps and sobs, as I cannot describe. And, the pastor himself was stretched out like a dead man on the platform.
God is going to bring us to confrontations in which our techniques shall not avail, our well-meaning methodologies, and all other kinds of things which we in our dear desire to do good have seized. Only one thing shall have sufficed then and ever. And, that is what emanates from the life of God in a given moment by his wisdom.

- Kansas City, 1977

'This profound

contradiction'

There’s a reason why there has been an absence of righteous acts. Because we have been incapacitated, incapable and self-immunized to compassion or even concern. We talk about our burdens for a ‘lost’ world – but it’s a vocabulary. It’s not accompanied by ringing conviction or something inward, because it is inward that something is wanting, namely the righteousness of God: In the place of righteousness there is wickedness.

I know that is certainly true for me. Outwardly, I have been capable of serving God, and even on occasion impressively. But, it is amazing the contradiction between the outward and the inward. That in places that are not visible to others, known only to yourself, to God, and to the victim of the inward unrighteousess, as for example, one’s own wife and children, there is this profound contradiction. And, until it is resolved, reconciled, healed and made right, we can forget about outward righteousness as deeds in the world. Because anything that flows out of us, being marred, being contradicted, is just some kind of empty act, a self-righteousness rather than the righteousness of God.

Within and without, we have got to be one whole thing.
- Dallas, Texas (1993)

'I'll be in the cloud, looking down on you

and watching to see...'

I think our tendency is to be superficial with the word of God. And to read it. And make one or two comments, and then pass on.

You can always tell an immature or ill-prepared preacher by his invoking too many texts for one message. As if to say, ‘I don’t have any real insight, but I’m giving you the scripture.’ And then, he’ll go on to another scripture, and another and another. So, in the end, the people don’t receive anything of value. He would be better off – and you would be better off! – to choose fewer texts, maybe even one! And really burrow into that, and extract and bring out its meaning and its life-giving quality than jump from text to text to text just to fill the hour.
So, just superficially, just to give you an idea – and I haven’t prepared myself – it begins with a reference to ‘so great a cloud of witnesses.’
Who in the world, in the church today, so much as has a consciousness that we are encircled by a cloud of invisible witnesses? Who?!
For most christians, and even most pastors, such a reference would be dismissed as fable or myth or just poetic use of language and is not intended to convey any literal and actual meaning! Well, the church is finished before it begins – if that’s the attitude of its ministers!
Would you believe that as humble as this building is and as ordinary as we ourselves are, that this morning we have above us a cloud of invisible witnesses? That, in God’s sight, this occasion is that important that the Captain of the host orders his spiritual troops, so to speak, and marshals them for the magnitude of the event that is at hand. And, he would not consider it extravagant to gather up select saints who have gone before us. They’ve passed on, they’ve died in faith, they’ve died in service, they’ve died violently or of old age – it doesn’t matter. He knows them. They’re with him. And they have an investment; they have a vested interest in what is taking place here. They probably have a history in Africa, probably a history in Uganda, maybe even the bishop that we saw when we visited the Archbishop of Kampala yesterday on the way here. He showed us the portraits of the bishops that have preceded him. And, he said ‘this one died violently at the hands of Idi Amin.’ He might be in the cloud this morning.
Because we’re told they are not complete without us. ‘God, having provided some better thing for us that they without us should not be made perfect.’
Listen, dear saints, we are in an unbroken continuum with every saint of the past with the great work of God from its inception in time and history to this present moment! There is an unbroken continuum of what has gone before us and what is yet future about which we need to be conscious. Or else, we are sticks in the mud, fixed in our little location and in our little moment of time, and we lose the entire breadth of the magnitude and the glory of that to which we have been called and have part…
We cannot lack this compass of times and eternity future, of which we are a present factor adding to those who have gone before who are not out of the picture. They’re looking on! Why? Because they’re not complete without us. That for which they strived for and died was not accomplished. But it was a contribution, and they’re waiting for the completion and consummation that will justify their sacrifice and their labors and prayer by what happens to us. And the day is not distant when we’ll be in the cloud if the Lord does not yet come.
I’ll be in the cloud, looking down on you and watching to see if you have hearkened to what was spoken when I was with you and that you’re going on in it.
It’s remarkable how little we are told about this! But, the little that we are told should be registered upon our consciousness – deeply!

-Zimbabwe, 2005

Woods outside of Kaiserslautern, Germany

Poignant remembrances

'Therefore Seeing We Have This Ministry'

Light more light.The haunting death gasp of the great German writer, Goethe, has somehow been brought up out of long-buried forgetfulness and will not let me go. 'God is light and in Him is no darkness at all'

My spirit is preoccupied with light. I know that I cannot speak on anything else this night, though I have not spoken from that text before; it is vague, tenuous, unformed. It will be one of those awkward, peculiar, chokey nights, trusting the Lord to assemble and shape His own utterance in the moment of the speaking. It is clear that the test of walking in the light is not any subjective estimation we may have of our own spirituality, but the concrete condition of our actual relationship with each other. 'But if we walk in the light, as He is in the light, we have fellowship with one another.'

There is that strange sense of detachment while being driven to the meeting tonight: the weather is dreadful, heavy rain and penetrating chill. Perhaps the turnout (hopefully) will be small. It's an impromptu, hastily arranged final night's meeting in Germany before departure home tomorrow after six weeks overseas. Upon arrival, one finds the opposite is true; a large crowd is gathered at the Air Force chapel and there is a definite spirit of expectancy in the air. Various fellowships have canceled their individual prayer meetings to come and several distinguished ministries in Germany are represented by their directors. To add to it all, German friends have come from a distance at some expense and inconvenience, having learned of the meeting. In the hallway one meets with utter surprise, the daughter of a devoted friend of the ministry. Her husband, we had heard, is alienated and indifferent to spiritual things. In a moment it clicks. This is his base. He has come to the meeting willing to hear. Oh no!

All is calculated for humiliation. An untested message in its first expression and the stakes are high. Still, this utter calm and strange aloofness as if I myself am not involved. It has not to do with my desires, my abilities, and my condition.

'But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellency of His power may be of God, and not of us.'

Have we trusted the Lord through all these past weeks, proclaiming (and demonstrating) the realities of His Resurrection Life in every place- worn saints in Yugoslavian hamlets, critical German audiences, a Danish meeting (arranged despite us) on a final night in that country (Theme: 'Why do you walk as mere men?') In places scheduled and unscheduled, in major addresses and spontaneous sharings, before few or many, in vital energy or drained, in overflowing inspiration or dispirited (drab) emptiness…have we trusted God?

Trusting God for His Life to be the light of men, trusting God to watch over the family and all the dear ones at home, trusting for needs met, for the long-delayed newsletter to get out, for the responses of God's people, for the rightness of the March tour to Israel, for decisions, for commitments, for the future, for…TRUSTING GOD.

How rich and profuse has been the outpouring of His Life through these weeks; pulsating themes of God - Acts 13: 'The Church that was at Antioch'; Ezekiel 44: 'The True Priesthood of God'; Matthew 27: 'Ultimate Suffering as Ultimate Redemption,' personal ministry, encouragement, counsel, admonitions, times of fellowship, deepening of ties, new contacts and friends, the fasts, the feasts, the sudden sickness at Stuttgart (totally dissipated on the third day!), the calumny and reproach (reports of being described as a false teacher to the saints at Yugoslavia), the lavish reception and honor heaped upon us by Mother Basilea and the Sisters at Darmstadt…TRUSTING GOD.

'Always bearing about in the body, the dying of the Lord Jesus, that the life also of Jesus might be made manifest in our body.'

The song service, special music, announcements and preliminaries are over. I am hearing myself being introduced…moments of silence looking out on God's people…the lighting is murky…strange expressions on faces as the words begin to form…feeling and looking peculiar…speaking mystically…groping…felt…random…a radical word…stronger…a cry…reality…Truth…a call to the LIGHT…silence…they come…they break…it was a word that changes EVERYTHING…GOD!

So do we trust that it will be God in Israel with 130 who are going with us from all over (about 30 from Germany), the meetings with the saints there, the visit to the kibbutz that has recently opened, the Yeshiva (Orthodox Rabbinical Academy) whose doors were also miraculously opened to us. We trust that it will be God at the Army Charismatic Retreat at Berchtesgaden, Bavaria, sharing the burden of ministry with Derek Prince; that it will be God for all 12 days in Denmark that follow (especially the day-long seminar with Pentecostal pastors in Jutland that is being planned), and the concluding five days throughout Holland (through the arrangements of dear friend, Jan van der Hoeven) till our return home again.

Will you pray us through these days? Pray that cities be shaken, the Cross uplifted, His kingdom advanced, the sleeping churches shaken? Pray that our foundation at home be made sure, our families knit, our writing responsibilities pursued, our obligations met. You have blessed us through your faithfulness. May the Spirit of God impart to your souls beyond these meager words and descriptions that which is being wrought for eternity in these days, in the little place where we labor, because you trust us in Him.

- Kaiserslautern, Germany (Spring 1978)

'Unless we are groaning presently...'

So, if we agree that the world is hopelessly evil, and that God’s righteous people are afflicted by the ‘ruler of this world’ and that the ‘whole world lies in the wicked one’ who afflicts the righteous by his demonic and human agents, then we agree that they are soon to be overcome and that evil rule ended by the direct intervention of God who will create an entirely new, perfect and eternal age under his immediate control, ‘a new heaven and new earth wherein dwelleth righteousness.’

And, one thing that will save you from being a merely phraseological Christian, that subscribes to the correctness of this view, is if you are now already presently groaning over the evil that is in the world, that your soul, like righteous Lot, is already presently vexed, that you cannot stand to flick on the television or to walk into a home that happens to have it on and to see an advertisement or commercial, as I did, for these contests with these monstrous cars with the giant wheels where the announcer promised there would be devastating collisions like you’ve never seen before, and that the impact will be astonishing and more crashing and crunching than ever before!
And, you don’t gag when you hear that? That you don’t bend over? You don’t feel the puke rising?
I want you to, and God wants you to hate what he hates and love what he loves. He wants you to hate iniquity and to love righteousness that will make you a marked man. Unless we are groaning presently for the vile things that are already spreading over the earth, how shall we have the blessed hope of the church that expects the alleviation of these evils and the establishment of the righteousness with his coming? God forbid that this should become for us only ‘doctrine’ because that is exactly what will characterize the apostate church! They will give verbal expression for exactly the same things, but they will not hold them dearly. They will not believe them. It will just be a mere phraseological Christianity, and they will be strangely irritated by those who do. The words ‘fanatic,’ ‘heretic,’ or worse, will begin to describe the strange enmity that will come forth from that religious body against the smaller.
But, that has ever and always been the case. How much more so at the end and consummation of the age will be the persecution of the one by the other? And if you but knew that this is not something that happens when God’s back is turned, and that he is fully cognizant of the entire process, and that he himself is the one that set it in motion by giving us a foolish gospel to believe and a hope to expect but that the suffering that is inflicted on the saints for their unwillingness to enter ecumenical, global world order – and to suffer! For that releases the very thing for which God is waiting that consummates the age, that there is something in the suffering of the saints that is something more than is doleful and mournful and needs patiently to be borne. It’s a release, a demonstration of something that breaks the last vestiges of the power of hell and the usurping principalities and powers of the air and releases captive mankind!...
We’re coming to an hour when we will have no alternatives. Even though we’re nice and believe in balance and moderation and neutrality and we have no stomach for radical extremes, I want to say that I don’t believe that we’re going to have any other alternative than to be either radically and apostolically committed – or find ourselves radically apostate. There will not be any neutral ground.
This is a cosmic conflict and always has been, and we are privileged to be the agents of God at its conclusion.
And the world has done everything to dupe us and to domesticate us and to rob us of the apostolic content of our life and our calling by giving us a format of Sunday services and mid-week bible studies and privatistic lifestyles and homes and detachment and all kinds of other things that are terribly incompatible with the kind of people that God calls us to be in the community of the saints.
If buying and selling is the privilege only of those who take upon themselves the mark of the Beast – and taking that mark upon you means to violate any relationship with the Lord and to destroy your integrity and to make you a candidate for His eternal judgment – how then shall we live?
I tell you, folks, it makes good sense to begin to contemplate those questions now. And, especially if you live in an area where there is some possibility for the attainment of land of a rural kind where we can learn again how to raise food, how to sustain life, how to provide shelter, how to keep ourselves alive – if the ‘system’ becomes such that we are cut off from access to it by virtue of our unwillingness to take upon ourselves its mark. Or, that the ‘system’ itself will collapse with such debilitatingly global consequence that if we’re so tied into it that we’ll have no alternative but to perish – or cry ‘uncle’!
I’m presently living in Minnesota and was brought there for the purpose of establishing an agriculturally-based community. And people have looked askance at me and think that’s the delight of men who have that kind of peculiar interest. I want to say I don’t have that delight, naturally speaking. I’m a very private man. I’m the kind of man who would be happy with an attic somewhere in which just to enjoy a book. But to be in the thrust of a band of life in daily intensity and intimacy and demand which community is – well, that is not my natural propensity. But, I tell you, it will be a life-saving provision from God, not only for our bodies but for our souls. It has a wonderful sanctifying effect to be ‘found out’ in the immediate intentions of the daily life lived together. You can’t sweep the unhappy things under the carpet. They are there for all to see.
And, of necessity, we have to go through painful periods of disillusionment and shock with the conditions of the saints – and our own.

- New York, 1989

'We Americans are already seeing signs. Our economy is on the way out. We will become a Third World country'

But how about present Kenya? How about righteousness and justice now in this land by what God raises up through resurrection power?

This is not for our academic interest of what will be in the Millennium. God’s heart is for now, as for then, for exactly the same thing. What will make the Millennium ‘the Millennium’? Righteousness and justice by the power of God in the land… But how shall it come now in Kenya? Or Uganda? Or Africa? The climate, the political climate, the culture is opposite to this. It doesn’t celebrate justice and righteousness. It seeks political advantage through corruption. That’s the way of the world.

But, God is wanting something to spring up in the land. He loves righteousness. Righteousness exalts a nation.

In a world that does not seek justice, does not desire righteousness – but merely does what will get by… Africa is notorious for this, rigged elections, force and intimidation to keep the same political tyrant in power. In Zimbabwe, the recent election, totally rigged so the present dictator wins by an overwhelming majority. People are afraid to go to the polls where these goons might beat you up up, or you’ll be denied a measure of corn or maize [for your vote]. People have been reduced to near starvation by casting out the white farmers from the land and destroying the entire economy so that a man can remain in power who is almost eighty and cannot be dislodged! This is Africa. Typical Africa. Zaire. The Congo. Poverty. The needs. Starvation. The conscription of children to be in the army, required to kill their parents or their own brothers and sisters, or be shot to death themselves. Girls are raped – wholesale! This is Africa. Unjust. Unrighteous.

Can you imagine what it would mean at just one place, one African nation, one portion of that nation [if] righteousness would spring up – and justice?! What is the word for the church in Africa? Poverty and disease, and tyrants who cannot be ousted, violence, children who are ruined before they begin... Lord, what’s the answer? What’s your answer? What program? What can we do? What can we offer? What can we say?

And then, it came at one-thirty in the morning in Sidney, Australia – the gospel is the answer. Faith is the answer. Hope is the answer. The reality of God is the answer. God has made every provision for godliness in life – but have we availed ourselves? Have we appropriated the great gift of Christ? Not just for a succession of Sunday services, but for a branch of righteousness to be raised up in this land, in this Kenya, in this Africa. Can it be that Africa is reserved for this? A testimony to the world? That, where the world expects it least, there God will demonstrate most that his kingdom, that his scepter is a scepter of righteousness, and that it will affect the daily life? The hidden manna will be an extra energy? Because God says righteousness exalts a nation? And will even be a key to an end to poverty? Not because of economic reasons. But because of godly reasons. Because God says righteousness exalts a people, a nation, a ministry, a congregation.

He loves righteousness. And whoever walks in it – God will prosper!

What an answer for Africa! What an answer for poverty in the continent! Instead of requiring the loans of billions of dollars in economic programs! What happens to those billions? They go into the pockets of the dictators. So that when I was in Switzerland and we were driving by a gorgeous estate, so expansive. I said, ‘When does this come to an end? All for one man. All this massed wealth.’ I said, ‘Who owns that?’ I was told the president of Zaire. Our programs have not helped poverty in Africa. We have enriched tyrants while people continue to suffer poverty and disease. It’s not going to come through money and men. God says, righteousness exalts a nation… So-called ‘dark’ Africa will be the greatest light to nations now prosperous through corruption…

We Americans are already seeing signs. Our economy is on the way out. We will become a Third World country ourselves, and we’re not prepared for this. Who will teach us how to live?... You’ll save us in that day by your example. Africa will be a key to the nations when He raises up a righteous branch. So, I want to pray. For Kenya, for Uganda, for the nations that I’ve mentioned in Africa. Now, they are a world scandal, infested with corruption, bribery, rigged elections, men who use force to remain in power, disease, lies. They don’t even acknowledge the rate of AIDS in Zimbabwe! Even in South Africa they call it ‘tuberculosis.’ They hide, they disguise. Unwilling to acknowledge the truth. Lies. While the people are PERISHING!'

- Nairobi (2005)