“I am hard-pressed as I stand here tonight to remember the last time I heard a message on the cross preached. The cross is no longer in vogue. I do not know that it ever was in vogue, and yet when you read the apostolic literature, when you read about the Anabaptists or any revival restoration of true Kingdom Church reality, you receive the centrality of the cross, the expectancy of suffering, and the jealousy for the glory of God as being central to the consciousness of the saints of that generation. They need to be restored to our own.
The glory is absent, the suffering is absent, and the hope is absent. Dynamic faith is absent. Faith has become somehow a formula, a genie lamp that we rub to obtain Cadillacs or other things that pertain to our personal benefit. Our faith is lost in the sense of being apostolically understood as a mode of life, a radical clinging to God, an utter trust, a dynamic. In that sense, hope is lost, and love is lost, or perhaps it has never been known in the sense of being self-sacrificing, utterly giving, and unconditional. The knowledge of the resurrection life is lost as well. The doctrine remains, but the experiential knowledge of the resurrection life has been lost, or it has never been known.”