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A Famine for the Hearing of the Word

The thought strikes me that the famine is not so much for the lack of speaking as the lack of hearing. I have had the increasing impression that God’s people do not know how to hear the word of God. Or, unlike the Thessalonian converts from paganism, they do not believe that the word they are hearing is indeed God’s word. Therefore, the word is received casually if not indifferently as the word of man, that is to say, without effect.

A Message for the Nations

“The earth is the Lord’s, and everything in it, the world and all who live in it (Psalms 24:1).  How blessed are the people whose God is the Lord (Psalms 144:15).” It is remarkable, when one reflects upon it, how little deference or consideration is given to God by the nations as nations.  Somehow their […]

An Expression of Loving Concern

A message given by Art Katz to a closely-knit group of community/fellowships known as “The Move” (The Move of the Spirit) in 1988, Lubbock, Texas.  It is a message given in the context of a movement that celebrates the Holy Spirit while, at the same time, essentially ignores some of the classic doctrines of the […]

An Insight into the Mystery of Christ

Paul speaks of a mystery in Ephesians 3:6: [T]o be specific, that the Gentiles are fellow heirs and fellow members of the body, and fellow partakers of the promise in Christ Jesus through the gospel, of which I was made a minister, according to the gift of God’s grace which was given to me according […]

Cautionary Thoughts on the Revival Phenomena

I venture out with some trepidation to raise some questions about a “revival” phenomenon that is already perplexing many. Unlike such previous moves of God as the Welsh Revival, noted from its inception for its unmistakably holy character, the present revival generates mixed reports from unequivocal enthusiasm to those that are dubious, critical and utterly rejecting. Some suggest there is more than one stream with a fleshly counterfeit paralleling the God-given and authentic. Via video tape of the principal and evidently original stream, I have been able to observe things that I find entirely repugnant. Ministers of the word were ostensibly so drunk in the spirit that they were unable to be coherent, railing finally into a collapse from their stupor. I found this entirely unbecoming to the dignity of their professed call, and felt the preached word to he denigrated by joking references to the feeble results obtained by it in comparison to the results procured now by the experiences of the “power” to which they were testifying. In watching some helplessly convulsing in laughter, I sensed that they had been gripped by something beyond their control and was actually causing them a physical pain? Can those manifestations be described as “holy”? On the contrary, they appeared to be irreverent if not indeed demonic and hellish.

Counsel to a Distressed Wife

From a letter of counsel for a wife in time of distress and estrangement from her spouse. I suspect that there are circumstances in your past that affect how you perceive things that could exaggerate your fears and heighten your insecurity.  That is true for all of us.  Over a process of time, the Lord […]

Deep Calling Unto Deep

I have long suspected that the deepest issues that are at the root of strife and division in the Body of Christ are not at the level of doctrine. Doctrine is often employed as the subterfuge beneath which the real issues of fear, insecurity and mistrust are too often concealed.

Esteeming the Presence

I have for a long time been secretly irked in my inner man with the growing preoccupation of many of God’s saints to desire the ‘presence’ of God.

Eye for an Eye, a Tooth for a Tooth:

While it is true that Jesus enjoins us in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:38) not to requite others who have requited us, and that while we must not require ‘retaliation,’ may God for the purposes of righteousness and cosmic justice not require it of Himself?

Gleanings from Psalms 18 in the Light of Current Revival Phenomena

I am going to take look at portions of Psalms 18 because this psalm evokes a sense of God that I think we desperately need. The sense of God is the only all-important reality. And what is the church without a sense of God or the holiness of God?

God as a Factor in the Secular Affairs of Men

I don’t know if anyone has noticed lately, but God, so long restricted to mere Friday through Sunday religious acknowledgment, is threatening to become a factor in the more serious affairs of men where He is usually excluded.

God’s Preliminary Judgments?

As I write this (January 1994), some 20,000 victims of the recent California earthquake suffer in improvised and inadequate tent shelters, in abysmal conditions, totally unfamiliar to their accustomed and normally privileged lifestyles. A soldier-enforced curfew seeks to prevent widespread looting, but no legal restraint impedes the greedy from charging exorbitant prices for the simplest amenities, even water.

Is Death the End? – The Reality of Hell

The reality of Hell needs to be anguished over, and to be understood as a terrible and eternal calamity.  Once your life ends, there is no turning back; there is no second chance; there is no way to make amends when you realize that what you have spurned all your living days in those who […]

Message to a Secular University Audience

You may think that Christianity is derived from a Jewish foundation in religion, and that it is some narrow faith restricted to those who are Jews or Westerners, but that is not true.  There is only one God, one faith, and one way for all men and for all nations.  Let’s begin in the Gospel […]

Naïveté: The Tragic Beheading of Nicholas Berg

In essence, what cost an individual his head and life, a naïve idealism totally unrelated to the historic realities of the Arab-Islamic world, may corporately cost the USA the same. If we continue to reject the truth of God and of man as revealed in Scripture, and in God crucified, our every consideration is warped and awry

Nathaniel – A Key to Breaking the Power of our Predictable Christianity

In the gospel of John, there is a strange statement that Jesus makes to a man by the name of Nathaniel.  I sense that Nathaniel is typical of a disillusioned man both then and now.  Perhaps he could be likened to someone who desires something beyond an inadequate, conventional Judaism or conventional Christianity, with things […]

Nightclub Disaster: A Parable of Hell

In a moment, suddenly, the very plastic and synthetic trappings that encouraged a false gaiety, a pseudo excitement, are turned by a pyrotechnic spark into an inferno of relentless and devastating flames.

On Composing Papers

As believers, each one of us ought to be compiling papers.  We ought to have a growing stack of articles and papers on things that the Lord has made alive to us.  There ought to always be something “on the stove.”  It is like an artist working on several canvases at once.  He is working […]

On Denying Reality: A Formula for Madness

From the perspective of faith, that is, seeing things as God sees them, the denial of Christ, [His Advent, Crucifixion, Resurrection and Ascension] nay, the unwillingness to grant Him even scant attention, has got to be the greatest anomaly of all times.

On Interpreting Scripture

The Bible is another kind of literature.  It is utterly unique.  I have been a reader all my life long, but there is nothing like the Scripture for conveying depths of meaning in so few words.  The scriptures are terse, compact, and intense, and that puts a great demand upon us to draw out the […]