Taken from
Decade of nineties - 8:40
http://artkatzministries.org/decade-of-the-nineties/
Preached some more than 20 years ago:
"In a word, I am anticipating that we are going to see in this decade the alignment of the religious forces that will prevail until the end of the age, the age may end by the year of 2000, but if it goes on a little before that or a little longer than that, be assured that what happens between now and that time, this ten year period will cast the major and basic formation of the thing that will prevail until the coming of the Lord.
You are going to required to choose, you are choosing even now, but you are not conscience of that, where you are going to end up in terms of the church, as the great centrifugal and polarizing forces are going to move us into one camp or the other.
We are going to be radicalized and there is not going to be any neutral ground for those of us who don't have stomach for that, who just want to be "Ordinary Christians", just get along, just be a Sunday pew-sitter, mind your business, not irritating anyone and just go on. I want to tell you, that that option wont be available to you.
To be an ordinary christian in this decade and the end of the age, will be to be apostate.
And God has never called us to be ordinary, He has called us to be extraordinary, he has called us to be apostolic.
It has always been God's intention for the church, from the beginning, how much more at the end.
A church of apostolic glory, of apostolic power, of apostolic integrity, of apostolic character, of apostolic service.
These are "they" that turned the world upside down.
These are also candidates for persecution and for martyrdom.
And we who have clucked our tongues at the reports of martyrdom that have come to us from distant places, "Iron Curtain" countries and Africa, need to embrace ourselves and to know, that that's not phenomena confided to the distant places.
It's a phenomena that will always take place, wherever God's people break in to a transcendent and real place with God that the world can not tolerate and abide. If we have got no way with it, it's a testimony to a our shame.
It's a scandal of western Christianity, that it has been so thinned, so inoffensive, so "going on with it's own Sunday business", that the world has not been required to take NOTE, let alone to OPPOSE it!
But I want to tell you that in a world that is coming to into consummation, in a SYSTEM that is OPPOSED to God, in it's very character and nature that is ANTICHRIST, those who will stand for Christ and refuse to take the mark of the beast, will find themselves candidates for martyrdom.
And if we cannot buy or sell, how then we shall subsist?
I think that we should now to begin to consider these things, and God is speaking these things now so as to prepare us and to feed us for the realities that shall shortly come to pass and are already working
I am not saying 'Thus saying the Lord' but I have suspicion that the issue of 'the mark of the beast' or 'the name of the Lord on our foreheads' is not the designation that is going to come to us in some final hour where we get stamped, but it is EVEN NOW being formed day by day and moment by moment in the transactions to which we give ourselves for convenience, for luxury, for security, in a SYSTEM that is that is increasingly HOSTILE and OPPOSED to God.
How much attenuated to luxury are we? How much do we need our security and how much we are willing to go with it?
As one who is possessed an American Express Card for about twenty years and paid my bills regularly, never paid the 18.5% exorbitant interest if you allow the debt to go beyond a month, I have finally broken it up and destroyed it.
Just felt constrained by the Lord to give it up, that there is something about it, that has .... a spiritual weight, a moral implication of a dependency on not upon God, but upon a SYSTEM established by men. I want to tell you something, it's a very naked feeling not to have that card in the wallet.
There is a whole intricate, complex SYSTEM that has been raised up in the world to which we have mindlessly subscribed!
And I suspect in my prophetic intuition that every time we get into that, we condescend to it, we go along with it, we buy and sell in it, we establish our security in it, we find our comfort in it, something is being embossed on our forehead and our hand, and the day of the Lord will reveal what number we bear!
You know what is apostate about the apostate church? It still continues to speak the vocabulary of the faith!
You still continue to use the terminology, you still call Lord, Lord, but the reality and the power have long ago disappeared, and not only that, it would be offended with that minority of the spirit that has not go along, and call them 'heretical'.
I am not saying these things to scare or to panic, but to prepare and to alert. We need to know what time it is, and it’s the Lord’s very mercy to speak to us in a such a way as to align ourselves with things as they in fact are.” And I am not saying things that non of us don’t know, but I putting it together by the grace of God to a such a way, that we might get a sense of totality of this in all inclusiveness of this and the direction toward which is going. You know many of us are Christians but are really humanists in heart. If we are scratched deeply enough we believe in inevitable progress, we think that the things will improve or the science has the answer. That is not the eschatological and apostalic sense of things as given into scripture. Scriptures indicate is winding down and coming to conclusion of an age that is helplessly and incorrectibly corrupt."
from:
http://www.sermonindex.net/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=46198&forum=34
