Persecution

This is an excerpt from a message by Art Katz. You can listen to this segment along with other pieces of other messages by others by listening to this link. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UsaINMpnvww

 

The above link is definitely worth watching and is safe. Quote as follows; 

"The greater number of Christians will not be able to be satisfied with conventional Christendom. That merely to sit in a church that speaks a correct word or doctrine is not enough. Things that are merely correct are not enough. Merely to be phraseologically correct is not enough. There needs to be an awesome, a power, an authenticity in our words and in our life. And there is going to be a restlessness in many Christians who have been able to be satisfied this long in situations like that. But the very issues that are taking place in the world will be a factor that will move saints to look for a deeper quality of faith and relationship than what they now know in their conventional and predictable "Christian" situations. 

And so we have the very formative factors by which a minority of the Spirit will increasingly be called out to be the remnant people of God who are willing to pay the price of true relationship and true faith. Whereas the majority who do not see the need or have not the stomach for the cost and the sacrifice of it and who remain in these normative "Christian" situations will be increasingly deceived, having the words that are appropriate to the faith but not the power thereof. But what's more, they will be irritated by that minority of the Spirit who have moved on to a more authentic existential quality of faith and look upon them not only as being strange but perhaps even being heretical and even threatening to what is considered normal or a  normative Christian. 

In a word, we are going to see formed the very elements that make up the church that is persecuted and the church that is its persecutor. And we need to know now that we are moving toward the one or the other. There will not be as I said before a neutral ground. That the logic of true faith is persecution and that the Scriptures will be fulfilled that says "and they will kill us and claim that they are doing God a service". We are going to see the  re-enactment of the persecution of the Anabaptists in the 16th century, even persecuted by the major reformation churches. Again to be the distinguishing character of the struggle at the end of the age again. "