Franz Kafka

 

Anybody assessing Franz Kafka's life , like his Dad , would most likely assume he was a waste of space .

He was ofcourse a fourth quartile ...a St John type .

His Dad was so concerned that he was single that he organised a trip to a prostitute .

I felt pretty rock bottom when my Dad asked me if I was gay . The trip to the prostitute didn't go well for Kafka .

And it wouldn't if you are fourth quartile .

The woman doesn't love you . She's providing her body mechanistically like a paper cup .

Matthews Marks and Lukes probably get off on that , but Johns feel every internal perception to the max ....and it's a turn-off .So his Dad was even more convinced that Franz was useless .

Johns go through this feeling of uselessness . Most Lukes go through this on the football field . Marks go through this in public speaking .

I often write about Red Arrows members trying to explain what they do as they go round Tesco's.

The occult have engineered a slavery society to supply themselves , built on artificial pyramids of Matthews Marks and Lukes , and people like Van Gogh or Picasso dwell in dingy dark Garret rooms....except Picasso needed more light than that and Van Gogh went south .

Kafka's importance is that he described the total fake bodged infrastructure we live inside .

His Dad couldn't see what he was doing .

7 billion still can't see what Kafka was doing even though the rich are about to kill us all off .

That's the meaning of the Castle you daft twits .

That's the meaning of Kafkaesque you idiots .

That's the meaning of the Beetle narrative you wasters .

That's the meaning of the artist stuck in a cage with people treating him as a sideshow you nutters .

That's the meaning of the Trial and the Penal Colony.

But it's now too late , because the rubbish bin to take you away is outside your doors .

The Quartile

Below is one of Franz Kafka's tales .
they are exactly midway between a Jesus parable and the detail of a short story or novel. In linear terms they are midway between a Jesus type  brevity of the line drawings in the The Good New Bible 1960s and the caricatures in Punch magazine which were often mini paintings.
Jesus always said the Kingdom is like....
He didnt say in a parable the Kingdom is.
Don't take the story below and think
Haha!!! The Emperor IS Jesus who died, because this Emperor never resurrected, which would have had to be the case if the "Message" was the gospel message.
We have just been in the Hapsburg Palaces. That is Kafka's context of Emperor and enormous palatial rooms with huge staircases where elite throngs of nobles and their partners can fill halls. Of cities where the castle is in the centre of cities surrounded by the ordure and trappings of normal life outside the palace. It is the period of revolutionary throngs cramming out cities with their gatherings and protests during the last European decades.
So NOTHING is exactly anything in Kafka. And nothing in Jesus parables is exactly anything either.

One hundred years after Kafka, what was Kafka actually doing? Don't know. But this is somewhere in the mix:

There are four personalities that write the gospel.
If Matthew is all out Kingdom, legal rights,geneologies, about the announcement of Kingdom and WILL in the sense of administrative will
If Mark is all about action, and written by a serving pragmatic sort who likes to get things done, a people person and WILL in the sense of BULLOCK like determination to see something through
If Luke is about sweating out the details, and planning, and the mind, and what actually happened in the nerdy sort of attention to detail thing like a train spotter
Then John is about recording everything from an internal topographical viewpoint. We enter the Kingdom by being born again. We have to learn and experience the "ways of the Water of God" this new way of living and flowing in the Spirit, of going where the Spirit leads, like John 7. But also NAILING the bottom line of the gospel in John 6....it's not about an outside God answering daily needs, nor a healing crusade.
It's about EATING Christ as opposed to living in Genesis 3 delusion.

IF largely the three other writers are writing in the external realms of "Some say it thundered". John is writing in the realm that says God spoke from heaven and said " Behold my Beloved Son in whom I am well pleased.".

Now if the whole population are 3/4 outer people , and they were designed that way so we could live in an outer world, then it seems to indicate, like Kafka, like poets, like caricaturists, like artists and musicians, like futurologists who advise kings and institutions like Patrick Dixon then there is a quarter of us who deal with the "Arriving on Platform 3/4" but not yet here department. Or in terms of bad things.....this is actually appearing from within right now inside mankind but it hasnt fully manifested and taken over yet.....
Bonhoeffer and Hitler
Or the prophet type rabbit in Watership Down.

The Hunger Artist by Franz Kafka is another such tale about "the artist in society" as bigwhigs at universities like to say.

It's the struggle to communicate what is actually on its way as a spontaneous move to an Empire run in heirarchy.
In this tale the Emperor is giving the message from the top, but it clearly isnt the sort of message that he would normally pass down a heirarchy, or why invite such a man from nowhere to be the envoy?

But this is the essential problem that all societies have lived with since Genesis 3 when the first heirarchy order virus seized the planet. All information comes through heirarchy, so who exactly are these nobody upstarts, this quarter of society without proper linear accreditation to give very critical information that will change our manner of life?
And that continual misunderstanding of why God even created this quartile continually impedes their journey.

HERE IS THIS MORNING'S THOUGHT.
Supposing that very impedance in the will of God is part of the process that all of us make......the messenger in the sheer struggle, similar to a wife in labour then giving birth,....and the VISUAL of a struggling Hunger Kuenstler or Hunger Artist to the rest of the public, that is actually part of the process of a whole community learning to turn inward, away from heirarchy living to inward based living which is Galatians 2.20 and the actual arrival of the Kingdom of God like a cloud the size of a man's hand.

Perhaps the arrival of the Kingdom of God is a man's hand doing the simplest of things like giving, and not letting the other hand even know, but out of consciousness and not of a sick orphan Genesis 3 appeasement.
Just a thought.



This is Mark Harman's 2011 translation
from his blogpost on New York Review of Books
https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2011/07/01/message-emperor-new-translation/

A Message from the Emperor

The emperor—it is said—sent to you, the one apart, the wretched subject, the tiny shadow that fled far, far from the imperial sun, precisely to you he sent a message from his deathbed. He bade the messenger kneel by his bed, and whispered the message in his ear. So greatly did he cherish it that he had him repeat it into his ear. With a nod of his head he confirmed the accuracy of the messenger’s words. And before the entire spectatorship of his death—all obstructing walls have been torn down and the great figures of the empire stand in a ring upon the broad, soaring exterior stairways—before all these he dispatched the messenger. The messenger set out at once; a strong, an indefatigable man; thrusting forward now this arm, now the other, he cleared a path though the crowd; every time he meets resistance he points to his breast, which bears the sign of the sun; and he moves forward easily, like no other. But the crowds are so vast; their dwellings know no bounds. If open country stretched before him, how he would fly, and indeed you might soon hear the magnificent knocking of his fists on your door. But instead, how uselessly he toils; he is still forcing his way through the chambers of the innermost palace; never will he overcome them; and were he to succeed at this, nothing would be gained: he would have to fight his way down the steps; and were he to succeed at this, nothing would be gained: he would have to cross the courtyard and, after the courtyard, the second enclosing outer palace, and again stairways and courtyards, and again a palace, and so on through thousands of years; and if he were to burst out at last through the outermost gate—but it can never, never happen—before him still lies the royal capital, the middle of the world, piled high in its sediment. Nobody reaches through here, least of all with a message from one who is dead. You, however, sit at your window and dream of the message when evening comes.

Franz Kafka on Truth

"Truth is seen in the grimace on the Face of a retreating Lie." Franz Kafka

Written in the context of a German speaking Jew in Prague (Bohemia)
What does it mean?
You can see truth in two ways. In all its gloriousness, boldly in your face.
But also in a kind of reverse double negative in the crumbling edifice of Darkness posing as SUBSTANCE.
I studied Kafka at Exeter University. He was a part of the contemporary (1920s)EXPRESSIONIST Movement which sought to expose the HIDDEN DRIVES and AGENDAS that up until then had been plastered over with the veneer of civilisation. It was contemporaneous with Freud who began to open the inside psychology of the human condition.
Why mention it?
Because many of you of sunny disposition, and not a few of you used to Christian settings, will find many of my statuses very dark indeed, and some have doubted that I have the Holy Spirit at all.
Anybody read the psalms lately? Anybody read phrases like "And even if I make my bed in Sheol then YOU ARE THERE."
By outlining the very edges of conspiracies and dark histories I am doing two things. I am saying everything is purposed in God. Even the dark underweave is doing something.
But secondly , if you stare hard enough, you see the cracks in the joins of Satan's fake constructions. These things, that were meant to be the foundation of our opposition to God, the base upon which we curse God....now become the HUGE WINK.as we see God peering over Satan's shoulder, showing that these are small black boxes of Satan's own construction, that far from meaning there is no God, now show us the sort of balsa constructions, painted black, that Satan has to come up with to trick us, since GOD ACTUALLY IS IN EVERY SQUARE INCH OF HISTORY AND THE CREATION. It is like the moment in the Wizard of Oz when the curtain is torn aside, and this huge powerful god like figure turns out to be a small elderly man with lots of loudspeakers and gizmos and light effects.
Juri Lina's book Architects of Deception is a potted (still 600 pages) summary of recent history....and "how the devil pulled it off".
I hope, rather than see me as this forlorn bowed figure forever rooting around the poisoned extremities, you will see I have a delighted grin....GOD IS IN ALL THIS RETREATING LIE.......the KNOWLEDGE OF THE (ALREADY PRESENT) GLORY OF THE LORD SHALL COVER THE EARTH AS THE WATERS COVER THE SEA!!!!

Everything until now is just a mere self-install programme

The article below began as a status on Facebook that never made it. Very like the subject matter itself, it continued to unfold itself so it was already too big for a regular Facebook status, or even one of my enlarged ones. To help you understand where the kernel thought came from I'll take a few lines to explain.

One way to understand the tabernacle in the heavenlies, of which Moses tabernacle in the wilderness is a copy, is as a kind of machine, like a carwash.  Unlike the devil's operation where you might say we are being "engodded".....he would tell us we move from insufficiency to be made into  "gods".....
the Truth is it's more like a stripping process like the almond rod of Moses which is one of the items in the Ark of Testimony....WE ARE BEING STRIPPED BACK...or CIRCUMCISED.... back into the image that both Francois DuToit and Andre Rabe describe....OUR ORIGINAL image as designed by God the Father, which already is MORE THAN SUFFICIENT for carrying the Image of God. The devil tells us lies and says we are not sufficient at all. We have to "be something different".

Next I thought in terms of a computer programme and how it too instals in a 3fold process. So really I just  superimposed the two ideas. The idea of the Tabernacle as a processing machine to take a fallen man right through to being a full incarnation of God's Life, together with the idea of installing a programme.
The Outer Courts
We receive the computer programme of God's complete package in His Son as a zipped up computer file.

We have absolutely everything from the moment that the Spirit of Christ comes into our spirit.
The Holy Place
We need the Holy Spirit to unzip the file for us, and self-instal the programme which is Christ's own Life.
We HAVE ABSOLUTELY NO ABILITY to instal Jesus's Life, that's why it is a self-instal programme.The LIFE ITSELF instals itself by GRACE. The Holy Spirit alone is given to lead us into all truth and to show us all the things freely given in Christ. Note all the things are already given and part of the package, BUT WE DO NOT KNOW WHAT WE HAVE GOT!!!!!
The Holiest Place
Once the Life of Jesus is fully installed, it is now fully up and running, and we receive a commissioning from God of what TO DO WITH IT. cf. (John Bunyan Pilgrim's Progress...after the Cross which is some time after Christian joins THE WAY,Christian puts on the full armor and goes into battle)

But my next thought was about how God's Word works through history.

Psalm 12:6 The words of the LORD are pure words; As silver tried in a furnace on the earth, refined seven times. Think of God's Light. His Word. As a self-install programme which forms a programme which then in turn becomes a self-install programme for the next full programme. Beginning to make your brain ache?

Well think of subatomic particles rotating around atoms, which then combine as molecules, which then form substances we see, which is all part of the Earth, which goes round the sun,whose solar system forms part of a galaxy of suns, which all form an innumerable number of galaxies, which make up the universe....and watch this space!!!!!     I make no apology for all this. This is the universe you live in, and this is the nature of the enormity of Word that we're a part of.
EVERYTHING WE HAVE EXPERIENCED UP UNTIL NOW IN GOD ON EARTH IS JUST A SMALL SELF-INSTALL PROGRAMME FOR THE MAIN PROGRAMME WHICH IS JESUS CHRIST IN A MULTI-MEMBERED BODY.

My next thought was "What triggers the changes?"
Song of Solomon says "Stir not up love nor awaken love until it please"

So what triggers everything is the Divinely awakened human heart crying out for more. (See Cry of the Human Heart by Juan Carlos Ortiz) So what if each sequence of Word as it unravels in the Earth is meant to provoke the next inward cry to trigger the next part of the programme? Hmmm....supposing this is also how the human body forms itself in the womb? (I throw that in)
This , then is the article:

Supposing the Word is like a whole series of Self-Install programmes

You're gonna have to have a Max Escher or Franz Kafka brain to get this one...but here goes.

What if God's computer programme called Light comes not only with its own DNA to self-install once...but the programme that is self-installed becomes the self-install to the next programme. So the first man, say , Abraham sees enough Light to give birth to a self-install revelation called "I AM the God of Abraham ,Isaac and Jacob", which itself becomes the self-install revelation for a nation, called after Jacob's new name. And what if the experience of the new nation actually births the self-install of the first bit of God's full programme, which is Moses and the Law. And what if a nation living under the Law gives birth to the anguish of failure necessary for the new self-install operation which fooled the whole nation, because it bypassed the whole previous programme. It was born direct from heaven but through a girl Mary from the previously installed programme  . What was born was human....and not being LAW shaped, but being human shaped, Jesus fooled everyone.

(Let’s take a pause there and just consider.....
Up until now, not having anyone to tell them otherwise, the Israelites knew that God had given a  “numerical” promise through Abraham about stars, and sand on the seashores. So they thought in terms of fulfilment by birth. Interesting, they forgot about the “star” bit.  The “from above “ bit.
Then the other main strand came through a man called Moses who they knew should have died on a mountain while fasting from both FOOD and DRINK for 40 PLUS 40 days. The Revelation he had was LAW. A Law so advanced, with supernatural insight into all activities of men, including the science of bacteria which would not be known for another 3,300 years  (1446BC- 1850s).
So they knew about destiny. And they knew about people’s relation with an external thing ....a thing “out there” you took on board called THE LAW.
The Prophets and the Psamists saw more.
But at this stage, they were glimpses.

Jeremiah 31:31 The New Covenant

Psalm 22, Isaiah 53 The Suffering Servant
Isaiah 7:14 A Virgin with child???? Whaaaaat?
Not enough for most people to recognise the brand new “Self-install” Programme)

And what if when Jesus said "The Kingdom was at hand " to 12 other men He was launching a new self-install programme, which in its failure, would need a whole new programme, also only directly available from heaven, called the Mystery of Christ in you.

But what if the initially individual version of the  programme had to self-install, run its course and die much like the natural nation of Israel did. So a Church largely of individually conscious Christians had to run its course right through the middle Ages until Luther who again got revelation direct from heaven.

And what if this Lutheran Reformation was just the self-install programme for the beginning of a Melchizedek corporate programme run entirely from heaven. And what if in its first two main phases, the evangelical movement and the pentecostal/charismatic phases were just the self-install programme for another completely different operating system whatsoever.....ANOTHER RUDE AWAKENING as Big a Shock, if not Bigger still than the Jews had when they realised that the next phase was not in the shape of LAW...but a human being...Jesus Christ the only Son of the Living God?

How do you mean Chris?

(Well, let’s take another pause, because we have reached another equally big jump, and look at a strange Old Testament scripture.

Zechariah 4;7 Youngs Literal Translation “Who art thou, O great mountain Before Zerubbabel -- for a plain! And he hath brought forth the top-stone, Cries of Grace, grace -- are to it.'”

We’ll come back to the first bit concerning the mountain.
So we’ve had ONE Huge shock already with the arrival of Jesus Christ. Which took us completely away from salvation by our own efforts to adhere to LAW. He broke into the whole system, suffered and died under the old system to demonstrate that salvation begins apart from the Law altogether, by BELIEVING ON HIS WORK.

And this we call Grace.
The grace of complete and utter forgiveness of sins....for all time.
Well, that was the first major interruption.
But now we’re having the second BIG SHOCK.

You see there is a second GRACE.....and without the second grace the topstone, or completion of God’s work here on earth cannot be accomplished.
Before coming to that let’s go back to the mountain.
There is a particular mountain that has been being built according to the words of Psalm 2.
1  Why do the nations rage, And the peoples meditate a vain thing?

² The kings of the earth set themselves, And the rulers take counsel together, Against Jehovah, and against his anointed, saying,
³ Let us break their bonds asunder, And cast away their cords from us.
⁴ He that sitteth in the heavens will laugh: The Lord will have them in derision.
⁵ Then will he speak unto them in his wrath, And vex them in his sore displeasure:
⁶ Yet I have set my king Upon my holy hill of Zion.
⁷ I will tell of the decree: Jehovah said unto me, Thou art my son; This day have I begotten thee.
⁸ Ask of me, and I will give thee the nations for thine inheritance, And the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession.
⁹ Thou shalt break them with a rod of iron; Thou shalt dash them in pieces like a potter's vessel.
¹⁰ Now therefore be wise, O ye kings: Be instructed, ye judges of the earth.
¹¹ Serve Jehovah with fear, And rejoice with trembling.
¹² Kiss the son, lest he be angry, and ye perish in the way, For his wrath will soon be kindled. Blessed are all they that take refuge in him. end of passage.

The Kings of the earth are building an alternate mountain. And it is very clear from Psalm 2 that it is opposed to God’s self-installing Programme  whose whole Name is Light  here on Earth. The Light of the glory of God. In the Son Jesus. The kings of the earth even constructed a country to help bring in this alternate mountain. It is called the USA, and they even drew a rival picture to Zechariah 4 on the back of their dollar bill.  Most Americans weren’t ofcourse in any way involved and will be shocked to learn this. But the race is on for two topstones.

The pyramid topstone or capstone of a whole Order which attempts to utterly exclude God, and instal its own King.....the King of Tyre, as described in Ezekiel 28.

Why the King of Tyre?  Yes , he was an historic figure. But where is Tyre?

In the Bible, Tyre and Sidon are often mentioned in the same breath.  The same chapter prophesies of a kingdom whose name is Sidon. Where is Sidon? Tel Aviv.

And this city is the one that rules the present kingdom called Israel. But the Bible makes it clear that the present Kingdom does not resemble the Kngdom which is ruled from Jerusalem later in the chapter.

So why the King of Tyre? Because the main representative of Satan here on earth, which is referred to over and over again in the prophetic books scattered right through the Old and New Testaments, may well come from that region, or be crowned there.If not, it is a reference to how a human being can be so given over to Satan that he perfectly rules representing this fallen angel.  It has been the plan of the ages. The one that was interrupted at Babel. At Babylon. At a number of geographical regions since.

So all the while that a NEW HOLY TEMPLE is being built in the Earth made of countless people who all have God’s LIGHT programme unfolding within themselves, a horriffic Satanic counterfeit is doing its best to piledrive its foundations into every aspect of  the world’s nations.)

I was in a Facebook discussion with a man I know a little from my own church who has moved to a Portsmouth church.  The things I am writing seem so unnecessary to him. It comes as a complete shock to him that

EVERYTHING

EVERYTHING

Even what we know of Jesus Himself so far as churches

IS ONLY THE SELF-INSTAL PROGRAMME for the full Programme that is busy being installed through vehicles such as Facebook right now.

What is that Chris?

I have just heard of a Word given by Mark Stibbe about the Father heart of God giving birth in the Church to REFORMATION.

Bear in mind I was around in the 70s when Gerald Coates, George Tarleton, John McLaughlin, John Noble, Nick Butterworth and Mick Inkpen were producing Fulness Magazine, which posited not only that people get baptised in the Spirit, but that this would lead to a whole new way of living which would become a Reformation, bigger than that which followed Luther.

But that is what I am saying.

We’ve ARRIVED at the SECOND GRACE Message. The One that completes the Capstone here on Earth.

And just as it was for the Jews a complete shock to have a Person, a human being, God’s Son Himself, invade their salvation programme...

SO IT IS IN THIS DAY in our very own churches.

Because the second GRACE message only comes after horrible failure while trying desperately to live the Kingdom Life. This failure we are calling Romans 7. The very same experience that Paul wrote and himself experienced.

The Grace of the discovery in our brokenness of a complete replacement. A complete divine Exchange at the Cross. Not just forgiveness of sins through the shedding of Blood..... BUT A COMPLETE REPLACEMENT at our innercentre, already accomplished at the Cross, but taken by faith into experience in our own lifetime.

Paul wrote in Galations 2:19,20 Youngs Literal Translation

for I through law, did die, that to God I may live;

²⁰ with Christ I have been crucified, and live no more do I, and Christ doth live in me; and that which I now live in the flesh -- in the faith I live of the Son of God, who did love me and did give himself for me;

This “self-installing”  LIGHT programme that has been ever working and unfolding from generation to generation

ONLY really works as people cry in frustration as the previous systems do not “fully work”. Yes aspects are good. In general, each revelation God brings gets fuller and fuller.....but HIS REST can only fully come as we get the WHOLE PACKAGE of this self-installing programme.

It is nothing less than the BIRTH of JESUS CHRIST HIMSELF in our spirits, soul and body.

And THIS IS WHY IT SAYS

1 John3:2 YLT  beloved, now, children of God are we, and it was not yet manifested what we shall be, and we have known that if he may be manifested, like him we shall be, because we shall see him as he is;

Adam gave birth to sin and death from the inward to the outward some 900 years later.

St Paul knew fully that he was doing the same in reverse with the new seed, and fully expected that it would manifest in his body. In his case, he was murdered before it fully did.

Tamla Motown,Norman Grubb and Franz Kafka part 2

So that's where things were in 1990. I'd done a load of tracks of Early Harvest CD1 already and in 1989 I'd produced the tape message I'm now calling "Third Level Christianity - Recorded Live before a Future Audience", both of which contain just about...just about, but not quite...what you have been reading here so far.






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Now one of the most intriguing authors writing in German that I'd read on my Exeter German course was Franz Kafka. Both Christine and I had tried for Cambridge University and for different reasons did not quite make it. For my part,I'd had an interview with a Professor, who discussed the themes in Kafka. Not quite understanding the principle of "cut and thrust" in Cambridge argument, I'd done what I thought was the Christian thing and simply agreed with the Professor whenever he'd made a good point. Hmmm....this "Christian" stuff is not always the way to go...which is why you read in Ecclesiastes..."Do not be overly religious or pious". This simply means now in third level lingo that you have to do what Christ is doing through you at any point. Sometimes it's shouting, sometimes it's being quiet....it's not a religion...it's following the Person who lives within you.

So while on the one hand, Kafka cost me Cambridge, I have to say that many of his little stories have grown in meaning as the years have passed by. Such that on my early Harvest CD alone are two references.
Most people know him by the phrase "Kafkaesque", which refers to things like bureaucratic impenetrability, to purposes being frustrated, to distant authority figures changing your fate with a flick of their fingers....etc etc...

And apparently, bookshelves in university libraries bow under the weight of the tomes which try to delve into the possible meanings of his short stories, sayings and novels.The Cambridge Professor told me that there was even a Marxist version that sought to explain imagery in terms of the Communist Dialectic. Certainly Kafka's work was pretty concurrent with the works of Sigmund Freud, and the Movement known as Expressionism. Edvard Munch's "The Scream"is probably one of the best known paintings of the period.





The irony is this. Kafka takes on more meaning ,not less,the further we delve into Third Level living. Please understand that I am not according this secular Jew the status of scripture, but what I am saying is that secular professors of leading universities who have gained their positions by left-brain fact collecting, find themselves stalling at some of Kafka's writings particularly for just this reason.



He is writing, in part at least, about spirit.

About the internal workings of a human being, which Freud had tried to reduce to mere animal leanings. What I am saying is this: If you have asked Jesus into your heart, which is probably the most anti-Cambridge sentence for a start....but if you have...then you will understand one thing immediately about Kafka, that a billion professors feted on every side in all the universities, yet won't have a clue about...not one scrap of a clue...because they have spent their lives living the opposite in the English gravy train...

It is this. At least one thick strand of Kafka is the graphic external depiction of the inward reality of intercession. Of labouring to see something created. Something come into being. Yes, in the manner of an artist, I think Cambridge has twigged that one. But more than that, he describes the spirit processes that are in fact too deep for words. The Romans 8 groans that really only come to the fore once people are baptized in the Spirit, and/ or speak in other tongues mysteries to God.

The very instant you ask Jesus into your life you are involved. You are involved with the centre of history. The plan of the ages, which is the ever unfolding revelation of Jesus Christ in flesh.

You begin to die. So you may live.And in your deaths,(your many death experiences) you co-labour with Christ to form something here on earth out of that which is unseen.

The poor Christian. He hasn't a clue what's going on in him. There's scarcely a church that will warn him, or that can even articulate what the poor guy just did in the crusade at the altar rail.

So poor is our understanding in this country, that many a young toddler in Christ is prayed with for 5 minutes, given a Bible and maybe some other simple literature, then told to go to church each week. Nearly nobody knows that that new believer has just done a thing not too different from Mary when Gabriel came to visit her, and she simply acquiesced with the faith words "Be it unto me according to Your Word." So there she was, with Jesus growing inside her. And this is what now happens to the new believer, if those dreadful English Christians don't get to him or her first.
(Who out there thinks that I have little time for Christians in this country?)

So for me these next examples explain perfectly what it's been like trying to get the third level message out, to churches either drunk on their supernatural gifting or praise, or churches that have retreated snail-like into their shells of English cynicism and disappointment when the initial headlong rush into church building and training young people just didn't go according to plan. This isn't like Bob Mumford or Ern Baxter said!
The First is a story by Kafka, the second is John Stevens' Motown example which he sent through in today's email.

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A Message from the Emperor - Franz Kafka

out of Wedding Preparations In the Country.

The Emperor – so the story goes – has sent a message to you, the lone individual, the meanest of his subjects, the shadow that has fled before the Imperial sun until it is microscopic in the remotest distance, just to you has the Emperor sent a message from his death-bed. He made the messenger kneel by his bed and whispered the message into his ear; he felt it to be so important that he made the man repeat it into his own ear. With a nod of the head he confirmed that the repetition was accurate. And then, before the whole retinue gathered to witness his death – all the walls blocking the view had been broken down and on the wide high curve of the open stairway stood the notables of the Empire in a circle – before them all he empowered the messenger to go. The messenger set off at once; a robust, an indefatigable man; thrusting out now one arm, now the other, he forces his way through the crowd; where he finds obstacles he points to the sign of the sun on his breast; he gets through easily, too, as no one else could. Yet the throng is so numerous; there is no end to their dwelling-places. If he only had a free field before him, how he would run, and soon enough you would hear the glorious tattoo of his fists on your door. But in­stead of that, how vain are his efforts; he is still forcing his way through the chambers of the innermost palace; he will never get to the end of them; and even if he did, he would be no better off; he would have to fight his way down the stairs; and even if he did that, he would be no better off; he would still have to get through the courtyards; and after the courtyards, the second outer palace en­closing the first; and more stairways and more courtyards; and still another palace; and so on for thousands of years; and did he finally dash through the outermost gate – but that will never, never happen – he would still have the capital city before him, the centre of the world, overflowing with the dregs of humanity. No one can force a way through that, least of all with a message from a dead man. But you sit by your window and dream it all true, when evening falls.

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Half poetry, half dream it justs ends there in the futility of it all...or is it a dream of hope? But whatever, this is what it feels like when nobody wants to know, and worse than that,because of their own non-reception, they begin to call into question your function in the earth. Cheek!So what exactly do you do?they ask peremptorily. Well errrrm. I guess I'm errrrrm a piano tuner then!!!!(Secretly mouthing into my cupped hands.....well until about the time that you realise that I gave up the idea of leading Exeter University CU as President, gave up the entire course at university which I was very good at, then gave up any idea of functioning in leadership in some middle-ranking housechurch network because I could see if we couldn't even produce more than the merest handful of marriages that lasted longer than about 5 years, what in heaven's name was the value of the gospel training we were giving to young people! There had to be more!!!! It no way, no way resembled anything in the New Testament. And ofcourse through my own failures I discovered there was a whole lot more- But nobody- nobody - nobody- wants to know- or even cares.....) So yes I'm a piano tuner. Good day to you brother (smile sweetly).

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John Stevens email on Tamla Motown and Norman Grubb

Interesting couple of hours yesterday evening. Popped onto facebook and discovered your (fairly prolific!) additions. I read the Norman Grubb piece and found myself shouting Amen! I almost pinged you an email a few weeks ago about one-ness but couldn't quite get it organised on the page and busyness bubbled up. But I needn't have bothered. It's been rumbled before by Norman Grubb. Also greatly enjoyed your little paragraph about what the kingdom looks like from the inside and the outside.(ACW-Inside the Kingdom looks like this: you ask Jesus into your heart. On the outside the Kingdoom looks like this: it is built in the second mile by people who are lame but are getting healed. It is financed by widow's mites, after the bailiffs have already left! And it is all held together by a Cornerstone that has already been trampled underfoot and considered useless by every single nation on earth. Ready to join? )Don't know about you but I probably would have read that a few years ago and scratched my head but that was the second Amen of the evening. So I was warming up. The finishing uppercut came in the form of an excellent programme about Tamla Motown! I hadn't realised that Stevie Wonder, the Supremes, The Miracles all shared the same bus and travelled around Britain performing to half empty halls in London, Bristol, Manchester etc etc in 1962 ish. And that Motown had become the principle influence on The Beatles and to some extent the Stones. So there they were. Wonder was 19. They were the real deal. Sharp suits. Close harmonies. Stage step routines. The beat. The song writing. It was all perfected in 1962 and yet black artists were not shown on TV and only Radio Luxembourg played Motown. In the States even in Chicago they suffered opposition and in the South they were shot at and banned. But all the time the msic kept coming and the audience kept growing. The pressure behind the dam and building until in 1966 Motown artists shared number one slots alternately with the Beatles for a while. Epstien made a few introductions, Dusty Springfield bravely hosted the touring Motown artists on TV and the dam burst. From walking in and out barely noticed they spent the '66 tour escaping the venues in the back of ambulances. One could argue that the breakthrough came 1959/60 when the foundations were laid well off-stage. The actual visible breakthrough came later. Think you can sense the parallels I'm alluding to? John