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“Obeying the Truth, Love One Another“

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Things Permitted by God for Growth in Grace

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

September 28, 1958

Outline

The Bible and the nature of the world.

  • Disciples appoint leaders to manage daily ministry, prioritizing prayer and preaching.
  • Tozer desires to be a liberal preacher, imagining headlines like “Khrushchev converted to Russian Baptist Church” or “Walter Reuther apologizes to General Motors.”
  • Tozer laments the absence of biblical preaching in modern Christianity.

Church conflicts and sin in early Christianity.

  • Tozer argues that conflicts often have deeper causes than apparent.
  • Tozer: Early church faced sin despite Pentecost, miracles, and redemption.

The Presence of Sin in Religious Settings.

  • Tozer argues that holiness cannot be assumed based on outward appearances, even in a church setting.
  • Satan targets those closest to God, not those far away.
  • Tozer argues that Satan hates prayerful people and tries to trouble them, but God loves them and delivers them.
  • Tozer advises against praying and instead suggests living a lukewarm life to avoid trouble but acknowledges that this approach may lead to hell.

Sin and its presence in the church.

  • Tozer emphasizes the importance of standing up for freedom and truth, even if it means facing opposition.
  • Tozer argues that sin will always act like sin and can only be dealt with through redemption or hell.
  • God uses evil to polish the good, as seen in the Bible and in the life of Paul.

God’s use of suffering to perfect believers.

  • Tozer: God uses suffering to polish and perfect those in His bosom.
  • Tozer argues that God uses difficult situations to perfect and cleanse believers, citing examples from the Bible.
  • Tozer describes a community where men would physically punish a wife beater, breaking his spirit and shaming him.

Facing and dealing with sin in the church.

  • Tozer: Shame can be a means of spiritual growth, as God allows us to be publicly corrected and humbled.
  • Tozer warns of unconfessed sin in the church, urging separation and spiritual maturity.
  • A.W. Tozer emphasizes the importance of being oriented towards the spiritual life, facing the right direction, and being prepared to jump into action when trouble comes.
  • Tozer uses the metaphor of a church being like a battlefield, with wounds and weaknesses, but also with forgiveness and growth towards maturity.

Message

In the Book of Acts, in the sixth chapter of the book of Acts, in those days when the number of the disciples was multiplied. there arose a murmuring of the Grecians against the Hebrews because their widows were neglected in the daily ministration. Then the twelve called the multitude of the disciples unto them and said, it is not reason that we should leave the Word of God and serve tables. Wherefore, brethren, look ye out among you, seven men of honest report, full of the Holy Ghost and wisdom, who we may appoint over this business. But we will give ourselves continually to prayer and to the ministry of the Word. And the saying pleased the whole multitude, and they chose Stephen, a man full of faith and the Holy Ghost, and Philip, and Prochorus, and Nicanor, and Timon, and Parmenas, and Nicolas a proselyte of Antioch: And these they set before the apostles, and when they had prayed, they laid their hands on them. And the Word of God increased, and the number of disciples multiplied in Jerusalem greatly. And the great company of the priests were obedient to the faith. And Stephen, full of faith and power did great wonders and miracles among the people.

I want to make a confession this morning. I wish I could be a liberal preacher. I wish that I didn’t have to tell the truth. Oh, just for a little while, maybe, not long. I’d probably get tired of too much sweetness and light. But I’ve thought about what I’d like to do if I could write my own headlines. If I could write my own headlines, I’d have one of the most wonderful newspapers ever published since man scratched on a rock and left it for some other man to figure out.

For instance, if I were editing that paper that I’d like to edit tomorrow morning. I had to have a headline saying, Khrushchev has been converted and has applied for admission to the Russian Baptist Church. Now that would be a headline, and blood pressure would go down all over the world. And then I’d have another headline, say, Mao Zedong and Chiang Kai-shek, went fishing together and kissed on each cheek when they parted. Then I’d quit worrying about the Formosa Straights. Then I’d have another headline saying Walter Reuther apologizes to General Motors for bitter things he said about them. And then I’d have another headline saying, 48 hours since a crime has been committed in the United States. Nobody has been killed on the highway since last Wednesday.

I can fix myself up a newspaper that would be something, now I tell you, and it would sell if I could follow it with anything. But of course, I’d have to, on the last line down below in red ink, I would have to write “April Fool’s.” Because that isn’t the kind of world we live in brothers and sisters. We live in a miserable, fallen, upset, hate-filled, God-defying world. A world where the spirit of wickedness works in the children of disobedience. And so that isn’t the kind of headline we get. Look tomorrow morning and see, find any of those headlines or anything approaching them.

Then I’d like to be able to preach for a while, announce a series of sermons and never have to acknowledge the presence of anything wrong with anybody. Start out with everybody 100% sanctified and cleansed and indwelt by the Holy Ghost, loving each other and in great fellowship; and great grace was upon everybody. And the devil was chained, and we were surrounded by the presence of beautiful angels. I’d like to preach like that for a while to be released.

But you know, you can’t find Scripture to support that kind of preaching. Some are trying it. And I don’t know how long they’re going to be able to keep it up. Some of them manage to find something to talk about and still keep it up for a long time. But you know, whenever you open your Bible, you run into two things, the grace of God and the sin of man. And no matter where, just close your eyes and flip it like this and see what you find, 2 Chronicles. Well, there you find trouble. And Solomon did thus and thus. And flip it over again. You find in the Psalms; God be merciful unto us and bless us. Well, why did you have to pray God be merciful? Because we’re a bunch of sinners. Find your Bible, open your Bible, wherever you will, and you will find trouble and grace, grace and sin, mercy and judgment, goodness and severity. You’ll find it throughout the entire Bible.

Now, all this is preliminary to saying a few words which I trust will be helpful. About this passage I just read to you here in Acts the sixth chapter. It says there arose a murmuring among the disciples about the Grecians against the Hebrews.

Now, the occasion was simply this, that certain people believed that the widows, certain widows were being neglected. They said, there is segregation being practiced here. And these Grecian Jews, who were Hellenistic Jews, Jews who had been brought up and trained in Greek schools in contradiction to those who had been trained and brought up in Hebrew schools. And when they got to Jerusalem and got converted, they naturally, the ones that were Hellenists and had been brought up in Greek schools and had been taught Greek, spoke with an accent. And the ones who had been brought up in Palestine, spoke the language of Palestine and had no accent. And the result was that the ones with the accent, said that their widows had been neglected. They said, you are showing partiality towards the ones that don’t have the accent. You’re practicing segregation here.

Now, the apostles, of course, were Palestinian Jews, and they were accused of favoring the Palestinian widows, very, very normal for the Hellenistic Jews, the Grecian Jews to imagine. Now, the cause of it was much deeper than that. Always remember one thing, when there’s a fight, the reason for the fight is never what you thought it was. Two men meet and start calling each other names, and then finally end up in a bloody brawl. And when they get dragged into court, the judge says, what caused this? And then one says he called me a name. And the other one says, Yes, but he called me a name first. That wasn’t the cause of it. That was the occasion for it. But the cause of it was deeper than that. And so it is with every trouble everywhere all the time. The real source of the trouble is always deeper than we think.

So, the cause laid deeper, the hidden presence of uncleansed sin was here. You know, we’re romanticists, you and I, and extremely inclined to be romantic. And we like to look back upon the church and talk in glowing terms about the church that was. There never has been a period in history when the church was all it should have been. And there never has been a church that was all that it should have been. I have quoted here before the little proverb that says he lies well who comes from a far country. And if you can find somebody that can come far enough that he knows that nobody can check on him. He’s likely to describe the spiritual conditions where he came from in glowing terms. But the simple truth is, if you went there, you probably would find that there were troubles there too.

Well, the cause lies in sin. And in the sixth chapter of Acts only a little while removed from Pentecost, what does it say here in the margin. It leaves it the same year. According to this, I don’t know how far you can trust these marginal dates. But according to the marginal dates here, it was the same year. And not yet one year removed from Pentecost, they were having troubles and accusing each other of partiality. So, you see, even that early church was human and the sin was there. And right in the presence of the apostles, here was the sour spirit expressing itself, expressing itself in dark looks and complaining and concealed whisperings and discontent.

And see the seriousness now of all this. God had become flesh to dwell among them. And they called Him Emanuel, Jesus the Savior and He was made Lord and Christ, and the Holy Ghost had come. After He had been slain and raised from the dead, the Holy Ghost had come. Redemption was an accomplished fact. And the Spirit had come as fire and sat upon them, and many were converted, and miracles were being done all around them. And yet, right in the very presence of it, there were murmurings and complaining. You see, this points up a well-known fact that sin is such a rash and unreasonable and rebellious thing by nature, that it will include itself even into the sanctuary.

I’d like to believe that when the Father puts on his black robe and gets his clerical collar on, and the little bright, freshly scrubbed altar boys get their robes, and everybody comes in still and quiet and the incense is smelt and the organ is heard and the bells jingle, I’d like to believe that that means everybody there is holy. And I’d like to believe that in an Alliance Church when everybody comes stumbling up the stairs and talking out loud, down to the front, and all the noise and ugliness that attend our services. Sometimes when we’ve all gotten together, I like to think that means simplicity, artlessness childlikeness, and that when we stand to sing and preach that that meant absolute holiness.

But you know, you can’t be realistic and believe any of those things. You can’t believe they would take a fellow that smokes and drinks and gamble’s and loafs and put a black robe on him and have him stand up and jingle bells. That doesn’t make him holy. And it doesn’t make a man holy who loves money and loves to eat a five-pound steak and go to bed at night and tell jokes until one o’clock. It doesn’t mean that when he gets up and preaches an evangelistic sermon that you’re hearing a holy man. As sin intrudes into the sanctuary, brethren, and it follows right to the prayer meeting. There are those that imagine that a banquet, or say, religious ballgame, that that’s where the devil; the devil never attended a religious ballgame yet. He didn’t need to. The devil attends the prayer meeting. He works where the people of God are trying to be a holy. A doctor doesn’t work on a man who had just been pronounced 100% healthy. He works on the fellow that’s likely to die.

And so, Satan doesn’t work on the man or the woman that isn’t close to God. He’s works on the ones that are so close he’s afraid he’s going to lose them. So, he follows around into the sanctuary. It was when the angels of God appeared before the presence of the Most High, as it was there that satan appeared. Satan appeared among the angels. You’ll look for Satan in a saloon.

The cartoonists have all showed Satan in a saloon, or in a halfway house somewhere, sitting on the front porch with half dressed women. He never attends any such places. Satan never attends a theater. Satan’s never found in a gambling den. Satan never goes to a saloon. Satan isn’t anywhere near Skid Row. If he sees a fella start for a mission and thinks he’s going to get converted, of course, he will send a demon to work on him. But as long as the fellow just lies around Skid Row, he doesn’t bother him. He knows he’s got him. The chicken raiser doesn’t bother when the chickens are inside the pen. But when one flies over the fence that he goes out and gets worried.

Now it’s right in the presence of the Holy One, right in the presence of God, sin comes. It’s so brazen and rash, that it follows right up to Pentecost and right in among the apostles and right where the saints of God are in prayer. My friends, we want to remember that. Some of you go to prayer and you say, I have a hard time in prayer. Well, if you don’t want to have a hard time, quit praying. If you don’t want a hard time, stop praying. You won’t have nearly as hard a time if you stopped praying as you will if you do.

But you say Mr. Tozer, I’ve always been taught the opposite. Well, then you’ve been taught wrong. Because it’s the praying man that gets himself in trouble. It’s the praying man that satan hates. It’s the right living man, satan hates. God loves, but Satan hates the praying man, the good man, the man who’s escaping, the man who wants to be right. The man who gets on his knees, He’s the One God loves, but satan hates. And so, Satan is going to trouble the man. It was one of the problems of the book of Psalms, one of the problems of the book of Job, why did the good people have such a tough time of it? It’s because Satan hates them.

God loves them, and Satan hates them. And they are in trouble because they’re prayerful people. So if you don’t want trouble, don’t pray. If you want to go to hell, why then, don’t pray. But if you want to have a relatively easy time and get along with your neighbors, don’t pray. Try to get along with everybody and go the way they go. And if they want you to drink, drink a little, but don’t drink too much. If they want you to dance, dance a little, but don’t dance too much. They tell dirty stories that makes your wife blush, laugh, guffaw and then apologize to your wife and say, that was kind of raw, but I had to laugh. Live like that and you stay out of trouble. Get on your knees and you invite trouble. Go to God and ask God to delivery you and set you free and make a holy man out of you, and you invite trouble. But it’s a wonderful kind of trouble, wonderful kinds of trouble.

I don’t quote Franklin D. Roosevelt very often. But he made a speech one time in which he said something that every American molecule inside of my body from my balding head to the bottom of my feet responded with an amen. He said we Americans love freedom and we’d rather die on our feet than live on our knees, meaning by that, we’d rather die fighting for freedom than to kowtow to a totalitarian big wig. And I, for my part, any day of the world at my age would rather give my life and die and have it over, to be a free American and to walk around looking over my shoulder for fear of Khrushchev or Mao Zedong was going to hear something I said. I’d rather die fighting than live a slave.

It’s the same way in things of the Spirit. Long ago I had to make up my mind. Are you going to be an easy, smooth preacher and get along and having everybody love you and celebrate your birthdays and bring you flowers and just carry around on a chip as we would say on the farm? Or are you going to be a prophet? And I said, God you can have the flowers and the other boys can have the gifts and memorials and I’ll take the power and the insight and the prophetic discernment and truth and the warfare in the fight. After a while you will likely smell the smoke. But I confess this morning that I’ve had on just about enough smoke. And I’d like to preach something nice and smooth and sweet. And I’ll do the best I can tonight.

But this morning, I’ve got to talk to you about this. And it isn’t sweet at all. It shows sin right in the presence of praying people, rationed rebellious. And now until it’s been destroyed, it will always act like itself. You can always be sure of that. It will act like itself. And sin can never learn good, and it must always be itself, even at the gate of heaven. Sin must always act like itself. God always acts like God and He can never act any other way. Satan sometimes tries to act like an angel of light, but that in itself is sin. So, the devil always acts like the devil. And God being holy, can’t possibly act any other way but like God. Satan, being unholy, can try to act like an angel but only succeeds in acting like a devil infinitely more devilish.

So, sin will always act like sin. And it can be dealt with only in two ways: by redemption or by hell. Either by confession and deliverance from it or by the certainty of hell after a while for it will go. And sin will be the fuel to keep the fires burning.

Now, why does God allow this? Why does He allow it among his children? Why? Well, He allows it for a number of reasons. Because He’s merciful, and a lot of people that were making trouble here in the book of Acts, the Bible just passed over them. They were making trouble, but later on, they saw their mistake and they went on to know God better, and they were ashamed of the way they had lived.

Haven’t you? Can’t you remember back, maybe some years back when you were sharp, and maybe you gossiped about somebody or said something hateful to somebody, and now you’re deeply sorry? And if God had judged you right then, sharply and harshly, he would have lost you. But He was patient and now you’re sorry, and you’re living a better life than you did. So, God in His mercy allows sin even to enter into the sanctuary.

And then it acts as an abrasive to polish God’s saints. God wants His saints to be shining saints. And God uses acids to make them shine, and to determine which ones are real and which ones aren’t which is gold and which is only imitation gold. The presence of evil in the world, and even crowding itself brazenly into the sanctuary, it’s the sharp switch God uses to chasten His children. And later, they’re to be thrown into the fire. Don’t forget it. He says, let the wheat and the tares grow together until the harvest. And then He will garner the wheat into His harvest. But He will throw the the tares into the fire.

Now those should be terrifying thoughts. They’re terrifying thoughts. It’s a terrifying thought to me that God uses the rejected to perfect the accepted. That’s a terrifying thought, that God uses a man He’s rejected to polish the man He’s accepted. He uses the woman He’s rejected, to punish and polish the woman He’s accepted. He uses the evil to help polish the good. If you don’t believe it, read your Bible. All the way through it was like that, tribulations and troubles and woes and jail sentences and lashings and all that Paul had to endure. They were that he might be a better man.

And Jesus learned obedience, how? By the things He enjoyed, no. He had learned obedience by the things He suffered. And the Pharisees and the scribes and Herodians and the lawyers and the rest of them that made life miserable for Christ, they were the abrasives polishing Him to make Him, even though He were God made flesh. They still taught Him something. He learned obedience by the things that He suffered.

Now, He never sinned. Let’s keep that straight. It’s necessary that we should. If He ever sinned, then sin had a claim on Him. He never sinned, so sin had no claim on Him. And when He died, He died not for Himself, but for us. And there lies the glory of atonement. But something He had to learn as a man, and that thing He learned as we are learning it in the same way.

Well, how the apostles met this. Do you notice how the apostles met it? I don’t know whether I’d ought to go on and talk about how the apostles met it or whether I’d better close here. I think maybe I’ll just close here and point out that God is using things and people that He is never going to receive to His bosom, to polish and perfect those whom He has in His bosom.

In the olden days, a man who loved his children very well, used to hire school masters and governesses. And they turned over to those school masters and governesses, the care of their children. And they were permitted to punish them; corporal punishment was permitted. And while the parents were greatly careful to get the right person, they did allow them to punish their children.

Now, God allows us to be punished. And it’s something we don’t like. We don’t want it. We wish it didn’t have to be so. We wish that everything could be sweetness and light. We wish that we could just live on syrup and lie down deep in green pastures, all day long beside the green pastures. We wish that, but it doesn’t work that way, my friends, God uses a tough, brutal husband to perfect and cleanse and sanctify a wife who’s obedient. And sometimes he lets her turn and say things back. And then he punishes her for saying it, even though the ugly husband to whom she said it, deserved that 20 times compounded. But that she dared to say it, God punishes her and makes her sorry, and she has to repent. And the good woman has to go to a bad man and say, I’m sorry. I’m to blame when it’s just the other way around. And so, it is God is using the troubles we have in this world as polishers and abrasives to wear away and take off the rust and to remove the impurities.

And this is one of the ways that God works. In the book of Hebrews, you know, it is so plain, that I don’t know why we escape it. It says in that 12th chapter of the book of Hebrews, that we must remember that the author, Jesus, is the author and finisher of our faith. And that for the joy set before Him, He endured. For the joy set before Him He endured.

And what did He do in the shame? You know, that’s one thing we can’t stand. We can stand pain, but we can’t stand shame. That’s one thing. That’s why I believe if corporal punishment were reintroduced. No, I’m not bloodthirsty, but I think that in the day, you know, when a big rough brute of a man beats his wife and beats up everybody he meets in a drunken brawl. Nowadays, they give him a suspended sentence.

But there was a day when men around the neighborhood, after a fellow out in our country, after a fellow had done this a few times, he’d beaten his wife a few times, or beaten his children until they come to school with black eyes.

He got a little note from the farmers around the neighborhood, signed by fellas around the neighborhood. And they said, now, we’ve had enough of this. Then the next time he got a little too much liquor and beat up his wife, several fellows appeared, too many for him to handle and said, come on, you might as well go quietly. And he knew what was coming.

So, they took him out, stripped him to the waist, and switched him like a kid. Switched him. And after a fellow had had a good licking, he never could lift his eyes again. If they’d come and tried to fight him; if they’d simply come and given him punishment for the body, he could have taken it.

But after he’d been taken out and whipped, it broke his spirit. He lost face. After that he had no face left at all, just a head. And every place he went, the people would smile. After that, he was a pariah, an outcast. Shame, often drove men like that out of the neighborhood. They just couldn’t stand it. They’d been licked like a kid. And they were so proud of the fact when they flex their muscle, a great big watermelon came up here, proud of their muscles. But after they got licked, they hadn’t anything left to be proud of. Shame is a terrible thing, brethren.

And the Scripture says here that he despised the shame. The shame He endured. He despised it and is now sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. And so now, you remember, that the Scripture says, my son, despise not thou the chastening of the Lord. The very chastening we sometimes get from God, that very chastening is itself shameful. He allows us to be publicly put down a notch. And with shame, we hang around wondering if we will be received by the company.

I have never forgotten the missionaries telling about the Congo. A church member there who has been received into full fellowship, backslides, and commits any act he shouldn’t commit, and makes him sit in the penitential form for six months. There are special select box seats over here to the left of the pulpit. And if two or three fellas appear there with the shame of face and sheepdog look, they’ve been caught doing something good Christians shouldn’t do. And the old elder sentences them to sit in that box for six months, every Sunday twice until they have proved they’ve lived right, and then they can get out. It’s a tough way, a tough way, but it works. People are happy to keep right and live right in order that they might not get put out there on display. And Paul, in one of his terrible self-disclosures said, we have been made as the off scouring. We’ve been made a spectacle, the shame of it.

Well, it’s too bad, but it has to come, and it’s always brought upon us because somewhere there’s unconfessed sin, not necessarily ours, not necessarily yours or mine, not necessarily in among the people of God at all, except it has come in among them, and it’s not part of them. So instead of our seeing the headline, Khrushchev converted, Mao Zedong spends all night in prayer, we’re going to read Khrushchev insults Ike, Mao Zedong threatens to take Formosa. We’re going to hear, so and so dragged in an alley and murdered on the north side.

We’re going to hear that sin is present in the world. Sin is here and we’ve got to face it. And we’ve got to learn how to live with it but learn to live apart from it. And we’ve got to learn to live in a religious community, which we call the church, that isn’t perfect. And after all, suppose somewhere, there were to spring up in Chicago, a perfect church. A church where they had no carnal people at all. There wasn’t any flesh left, it was all crucified. Everybody was saintly. They were all Tom Hares. Everybody was as sweet and as pure as a dear old lady in Pittsburgh where I was last week. Ninety-nine years, nine months and 18 days she was, one of their old saints, she slept away and went to heaven.

Well, you fill a church full of people like that. Do you think you’d feel at home there? I don’t know whether I would or not. But you’ll never find one like that. You find one, two, or three or five or ten, but you won’t find a church full.

We’re growing up. We’re maturing. We’re fighting. And always where there’s a battle, there’ll be some people wounded. The only army that has no wounds is an army that has never smelled the smoke. And the only church that has no flaws and no weaknesses is a church who lives on Shakespeare and book reviews. They have no reason to have any troubles. They just come and go. But all of us who are seeking to know God better, we’ll have our troubles.

Now somebody says, trying to think this out and says, is Mr. Tozer slyly trying to get at some trouble in the church? No, there’s no trouble in our church. If there is, I haven’t heard of it. Everybody’s happy as far as I know. And we know and forgive each other and realize we’re not all we ought to be and not all we’re going to be. But there’s no trouble that I know of. This, simply, I preach it because it’s here, it’s in the book.

And it’s well for us to be informed. They call that oriented now, that is, orientated. It’s the same word. It means facing around in the right direction, so you’re squared off to where you’re going. Unless we know these things we’ll never be oriented to the spiritual life. You’ve got to get you squared off and face right.

I read somewhere a fellow said, never park with your wheels twisted. He said never back in, then leave your wheels turned left. If you do when you start. you’ll forget and you’ll leap out into the traffic. He said, always square them straight ahead so when you start, you won’t suddenly find yourself out in traffic.

Well, that squaring away. That’s what I like. I like to preach the Word of God so His people can, if they will be squared away facing the right direction. And from whatever direction trouble comes, and if they’re suddenly forced to jump, they’ll jump in the right direction, because they have been instructed and informed and orientated. Now, I think that’s all for this morning. And we’ll sing a closing hymn.

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“Obeying the Truth, Love One Another“

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Obeying the Truth, Love One Another

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

January 17, 1954

Outline

Biblical logic and love.

  • Tozer emphasizes the importance of ordering one’s thoughts in preaching.
  • Tozer emphasizes the importance of understanding the logic of the Bible, which moves with precision and follows beautiful reasoning.
  • Tozer highlights the New Testament’s reason-based demands, never giving whimsical commands without a sound reason.

External vs. internal religion.

  • Tozer argues that many religions begin with external practices, hoping to change the heart through actions, but this is opposite to the New Testament’s emphasis on internal change (heart matters).
  • Tozer contrasts Jesus’ approach with that of the Pharisees, who focused on external practices to change the heart, while Jesus emphasized the importance of internal change (the heart) for spiritual transformation.
  • Tozer argues that external religious change is insufficient without an internal transformation of the heart and soul.
  • Hindus attempt to purify their souls through bathing in the Ganges River, but their efforts are futile due to the river’s impurity.

Spiritual purification and the importance of obeying truth.

  • Tozer: Seeking right in wrong way, erroneous journey despite honesty and good intentions.
  • Tozer argues that many people are traveling in the wrong direction spiritually, despite appearing to make progress.
  • Tozer argues that some Christians focus too much on activity and forget about the importance of inner renewal and belief in the Bible.
  • Tozer suggests that both faith and obedience are necessary for spiritual purification, like the two wings of a bird.

Faith and works in the Bible.

  • Tozer argues that faith and works are interconnected, citing examples from the Bible such as Abel, Enoch, Noah, Abraham, and others who demonstrated both faith and works in their obedience to God.
  • Tozer emphasizes that faith without works is dead, and that works are necessary to demonstrate true faith, citing Hebrews 11 as a “works chapter” that highlights the importance of both faith and works in the life of a believer.
  • Tozer argues that true love for others is not feigned, but rather unfeigned and based on a genuine transformation by the Holy Spirit.
  • Tozer criticizes politicians and union leaders who feign love for the people they serve, while actually pursuing their own power and profit.

Genuine love and its cultivation.

  • Tozer: Real love isn’t always fawning, but can be tough & honest (John 1 John 4:18)
  • Tozer emphasizes the importance of cultivating love in the heart through prayer, obedience, and humility
  • Tozer warns against half-heartedness and double-mindedness, emphasizing the need for a unified and wholehearted commitment to love
  • Tozer emphasizes the importance of being filled with the fullness of God, rather than settling for half-hearted faith or half-baked spirituality.
  • Tozer encourages listeners to purify their souls and demonstrate genuine love for their brethren, rather than feigning affection.

Sermon

In the first chapter of 1 Peter, 1 Peter 1:22, the 22nd Verse. Peter continuing his exhortation to the Christians scattered abroad says, seeing ye have purified your souls in obeying the truth through the Spirit, unto unfeigned love of the brethren, see that ye love one another with a pure heart fervently. Now, that’s as far as we’ll go because the other, with the privilege the apostle claims for himself, switches on the word “being” to something else altogether. So, we’ll stay by verse 22.

Those of you who preach or teach or address groups of any sort, will note that there is one thing that you must be able to do if you’re going to address an audience at all, and that is to be able to order what you’re saying. The average Christian knows enough to preach all night. But he couldn’t do it because he is not skilled in ordering what he has to say. So that sermon preparation as far as the homiletical angle of it is concerned, simply consists of ordering what you’re going to say so that you won’t talk in circles and meet yourself constantly running around the circle.

Now, this 22nd Verse, to my mind, is one of the most perfect verses for a sermon, not that there will be the most perfect sermon, I promise you that. But I mean, a sermon outline here, something that you could get in your head or heart and be able to give it. He says, you have purified your soul, point one; by obeying the truth, point two; through the Spirit, three; unto unfeigned love of brethren, four; see, therefore that you love one another, five; out of a pure heart, six; fervently, seven. And it even has the good fundamentalist seven. One of my dear brothers won’t preach at all unless he can get seven points in his sermon. I never allow myself to be hemmed in by mathematics. If there aren’t seven there, I’m not going to put another one in. If there are less than seven, I’m not going to add one merely to make it look good. But there are seven here.

And starting out with this, we notice a peculiar phrase, or two of them: seeing that, see that. You Bible students might put a line under this. Now, incidentally, in studying the Bible, never try to spare your Bible. The Bible that was given to you 25 years ago; it was a wedding present and is still in perfect shape. They might just as well have given you Barton’s Almanac because it’s not doing you any good. Wear your Bible out. Mark it up. Thumb it. And then when it’s gone, get another one. Retire it honorably and get yourself another one. Work on your Bible. And so, I don’t hesitate to say, if you want to do a mark on, so that seeing that, see that.

Now, there is the sweet logic of the apostolic teaching. The older I get and the more familiar I get with the Scriptures, the more I’m pleased with the logic of the Bible. It moves along with beautiful precision. It marches like an army. Occasionally, the holy writer or the writer who spake as he was moved by the Holy Ghost, will take the liberty of a digression. Paul is full of them. They call them ellipses. The scholars call Paul’s style elliptical. He will start to say one thing, and then he’ll look over and see something else and lose the thread of his thought and dash over and say something better. They call it elliptical.

But Peter did the same thing here and you will find that in the Bible. But you’ll also find that wherever there is a complete statement, it always follows beautiful logic. So he says, seeing that therefore, see that. Now seeing that ye have done this one thing or seeing that this one thing is true of you. Therefore, see that this something else is true of you, based upon this other thing that is true view. Now, that is clear as I’m afraid it isn’t.

So, we have it here, the Bible never breaks in; comes ripping through to your heart with a command, but always precedes it with a reason for it. That is, the New Testament always gives biblical reasons for what it demands. There’s never anything whimsical about the Holy Ghost. There is imperious, a command, but that command always grows out of some sound, plentiful reason why it’s perfectly natural and right that it should be so. So, he says, seeing that you have purified your heart, therefore, love.

Now let’s look at the seven divisions here. And don’t brace yourself for a long talk, for I promise you it won’t be. He says, you have purified your souls. And the man of God begins with the word “souls” inside us. Most of the great religions of the world begin with externals. In fact, I am at the moment unable to think of any that do not or does not begin with the external. They begin with diet or dress or aesthetic practices or the celebration of days. And then they hope, and do hope indeed, that somehow by the performance of external acts, they will be able to work in on themselves to their heart. That by beginning in the fingers, you can work through to the heart. Beginning at the toes, you can work up to the heart. That’s the religions of the world. Buddhism begins externally; and the great religions that make so much of dress and of ascetic practices.

It would be amusing if it were not too significant of a trend, to see how such groups as the Hollywood actors and the nightclub boys and all the rest, are going in big for yogi these days. Everybody wants to be yogi. Well, the yogi, of course, is one who begins outside. And by certain body practices, by even body postures. He manages to control his breathing. And then, after he’s got his breathing under control, he controls his thoughts and slowly he works it in to his inner man. And the hope is that he’ll change himself and purify his soul by something he does on the outside. Now that is exactly contrary to the Scriptures, to begin on the outside and work into the center is unknown to the New Testament.

And that was the area of warfare between our Lord Jesus Christ and the Pharisees. The Pharisees were externalists. Jesus Christ was and is an internalist. They believe that by practicing external things, they could work in to the center and change the internal through the external. Jesus knew better and fought them as long as He lived on earth, and died and went to glory to prove them wrong and to prove that He alone knew that it was the heart that mattered. It was the internal that mattered and when the internal is right, the outside falls into line perfectly. That is also the difference between modernistic doctrines and liberalistic religions that begin by training and make much of religious education.

Now, religious education at best is the training of the man to think right and act right. And certainly, it’s not to be decried. It is to be desired. But without the secret and mysterious internal change, all of this outside change will be found to be wasted at last. He says, you have purified your souls.

Now I conclude from my study of the Bible, that the faith of Christ begins in the center and works out to the externals, conduct, and that we are safe in concluding that if a heart has not been reached, any religious profession is vain, completely vain. If the heart has been reached, the religious profession then takes on meaning. But if it has not been reached, all religious profession is vain. Does it sound like an old bromide, or religious cliche for me to repeat what you hear so much from the average evangelist? And he’s right in it, that you can join all the churches in the city, be baptized by every mode known and celebrate every holy day in the Christian calendar, and still be lost, if you are not changed on the inside.

You have purified your hearts, your souls, he says. And so, the soul is the inside of a person, the essence of the one, the person that which matters. That which makes you. That which is you. For the word soul here certainly can be, and is extended to mean the whole interior man, since synonyms would be the heart of the man or the reigns of the man. But it’s the whole interior man, and this man has been purified. There is a purification of the deep inner life that is required before we have any right to believe that our religious profession is valid. Now that’s one, you have purified your souls.

Now, the next question is how? Purification of the soul by bathing in the river Ganges is the method practiced by the Hindus. But the catch is that all they ever get is external bathing. And they tell me those who’ve seen the Mother Ganga, that it isn’t much, because Mother Ganga is too dirty to ever cleanse anybody. But we do not smile at them, nor do we look down our holy noses at them for the simple reason that they’re trying, erroneously, to do a right thing. They’re seeking a right in a wrong way, and they’ll never reach it, just as a man might erroneously start to drive to Detroit but turned his car in the direction of Omaha. Now he might be ever so honest. And some of you may smile quietly inside remembering the time you did that very thing. You thought you were going the wrong direction.

A man told me once this. He said he was a truck driver and worked with two men; their systems they had two men on the truck. And they had a little bed up there as they have, and one would sleep while the other one drove and then they would spell themselves that way, so they always had a fresh driver. I don’t know if they always do that, but they do that, some trucking companies.

Well, this man told me that he was driving once on a truck and his copilot was sleeping in the little bunk back of the driver. And he said, he came down this way, say, going east, saw a filling station, swung completely around, made a U turn and parked. He got some gasoline and woke up his friend. He said it’s your turn. It’s time for you to drive a lot.

So, he climbed up in the bunk and went sound asleep. 25 miles later, the new driver found that he his friend had turned the truck around. Now he was perfectly honest, but completely erroneous. It was a mistake. He had 50 miles to make up because of an error. You might say, but he’s such a good man. The difference is, he’s going the wrong way. But he pays his debts and he just loves his wife. It doesn’t make any difference. He was traveling the wrong way. And he will never get to the terminal going the wrong direction. But he’s so handsome. And a man with hair like that couldn’t make a mistake. He did. He made the mistake and nevertheless, but he belongs to the Masons and he’s a church member, but he’s gone the wrong way. And no matter who’s going and how nice he is nor how bushy his hair, if he’s going the wrong way his personality won’t get him going the right way.

Now, there are 1000s of people that the devil has turned their vehicle around and they don’t know it. And they’re pushing it right down to the floor and they’re going along beautifully. And they imagine they are going where they want to go because they’re making a good bracket and getting up some speed, but they’re not going the right direction. The yogi who gets his breathing under control and can properly manipulate his abdominal muscles, and who can hypnotize himself and draw in his thoughts and all that, he is making progress all right, but he’s traveling in the wrong direction. For he’s assuming the validity of an erroneous doctrine, that the heart is made pure beginning from without, whereas the Scripture says, the heart is made pure first and then everything else comes of itself. Ye hath purified your heart.

Now, how do you purify your heart. It says, by obeying the truth. Now, by obeying the truth, I don’t want you to be shocked by that word, obey. It’s not popular in the day in which we live, but it’s a good word, obeying the truth. Now, there are two sides, obeying and believing. In Acts 15:9, the Holy Ghost says, God purifying their hearts by faith. And in our text, the Holy Ghost says, purify your souls by obeying the truth. So we have faith and works, one by Peter and the other by the Spirit and the apostles in the book of Acts. Now, is there any contradiction here? No, here’s where our critics come along and say there’s a contradiction here. There’s no contradiction whatsoever.

Suppose that I was talking about, oh, a seagull, and I was making a great deal over the seagull’s beautiful right wing; and I said that seagull has one of the most graceful right wings you ever saw. Now, watch him. And he extended that right wing and push it out there and shook it off. And it was so graceful, an artist would run for his pencil just to outline the symmetry and beauty of that wing. So, we teach the validity of flight by the right wing of a seagull. But another man comes along and says, have you ever noticed the left wing of the seagull? It’s simply beautiful. But the first man says, heretic, and legalist, that you would dare mention that a seagull has a left wing. Why our whole church is built on the doctrine that has a right wing.

And the critic stands off and says, listen to that argument, they’re contradicting each other. Well, anybody ought to know that a seagull can’t fly with one wing. He’d only flapping a circle. He’d never get off the ground. And also, anyone should know that a seagull can’t fly with a left wing. He would fly in a circle only. He’d be spinning the other direction. If he tried to fly with his right wing, he’d go counterclockwise. And if he tried to fly with his left wing, he’d go clockwise, but he’d be where he was after he was done flapping.

Now there is the trouble in our churches. Some go out and get busy. Just as soon as you join the church, they give you five jobs and the chairmanship of a committee. And away you go. And people just wear themselves out flapping their left wing. But talk to him about the new birth. Talk to him about cleansing on the inside. Talk to them about the renewal of the soul and they don’t know what you mean. But our crowd, we specialize on right wings. And we don’t believe much in activity. We just believe in believing. And we’re both wrong and we’re both half-right.

But if you’ll believed the Bible instead of believing half-truth and see that when one man says you are purified by faith, and another man says you are purified by obeying, they’re not contradicting, they’re simply giving you both wings of the bird, that’s all. Faith has to have works, or it flaps in a circle. And works have to have faith or they’re dead. So, by works and faith, we go along.

Have you ever noticed that eleventh chapter of the book of Hebrews? I was just looking at it here this morning. Have you ever noticed how that’s called the faith chapter, isn’t it? It says, by faith, by faith, by faith, by faith. But have you ever noticed it’s also a works chapter? By faith Abel offered unto God a more excellent sacrifice than Cain. He offered it by faith, but he did offer it. And he offered it in obedience to some revelation God had given him. By faith Enoch was translated, but also, Enoch by works walked with God until he was no longer.

By faith Noah built an ark. And by faith and works, he built an ark. So that it took works to build the ark. If Noah had sat down on a wooden horse and piled his tools beside him and said, I’m a just to believing, he’d never have gotten the ark built. But he called in his carpenters, laid down the blueprints and went to work. And somebody came along and said, you hope to save yourself by building an ark? You are not a New Testament Christian. You are a legalist. You’re mixing works with faith. No, no, Noah might have replied, I’m obeying my faith by doing what I’m told. So, he built himself an ark.

Go on down the line to you come to Abraham. By faith Abraham went out, but he did go out and by faith. Who else down here in a hurry, Gideon? Gideon did things by faith, but he also did them by works. He actually girded on the sword and went out.

Then there was Barak and Samson. Samson could have sat sublimely by and gazed at the heavens and said, I am believing in the Philistines, and would have swarmed around him. But he grabbed a jawbone of an ass and slew about 1000 Philistines. And then there was Jephthah and David and Samuel. You can go right on down the line. So, the the 11th chapter of Hebrews is not only a faith chapter, it’s a works chapter, too. God never makes a whole chapter of one wing. He puts the other wing in, even if it isn’t so visible. So, they’re both there.

Now again, through the Spirit. But you say, that is teaching the power of the human character to do good. No, it isn’t, because he says,”through.” The Spirit of God never commands righteousness without giving the power to be righteous. So, it is through the Holy Ghost. The real Christian who has been renewed inside and purified in his soul. He’s got no confidence in the flesh. He knows the flesh will never get him anywhere. But in Romans 8, we have that the works of the law might be fulfilled in us who walk in the Spirit and not in the flesh.

Now, the fourth point is, unto unfeigned love of the brethren. What does this all lead to, unfeigned love of the brethren. You see that word “unfeigned” here. Unregenerate society feigns its love, mostly. Politicians feign their love; they will kiss your baby. They’d even kiss your hand. They used to send garden seed. I haven’t got a package a garden seed in years. Has anybody around here got a package of garden seed? They used to send out garden seed, hoping that you would plant their garden seed and vote for them the next senatorial election. But they smile, they visit, they traveled around, they make whistle stops, they wave the flag, they quote Lincoln, and they’re all doing it to get your vote. They love you so much. When they make their speeches, they refer to you in drooling affection. But the reason they refer to you is that you have the sovereign power to put an X after their name.

And I suppose I shouldn’t say it here, but I often think how some of these lugubrious tears that union leaders shed over the poor, exploited, downtrodden proletariat. I think they’re crocodile tears made out of plastic, because those boys, call them in, call them out, call them in, call them out and make fools out of them. Treat them like puppets. And they’re riding in Cadillacs. Well, unions are good things, in a way, if they’re carefully run. I’ve always believed that. I also believe that they can become curses when they get into the hands of men who only claim to love the public but love only their own pocketbook and their own power.

And then there’s that salesman. He comes in, bless him. I used to sell books myself. That is, I went around trying it. I never sold much, because I was too honest and too timid. But a salesman comes in and he finds your name next door, and it’s Mrs. Jones, he says. How nice to see you. He found out next door who you are. Also he’s inquired about your family. Did Jim get back from the war yet? He wants to sell you something. The unregenerate world feigns its love for the most part except for its own tiny circles. But the Spirit implants real love, unto unfeigned love of the brethren. And the love of a Christian is not a feigned love.

I have had it said of this church, that it’s very friendly. And I have also heard it said of this church, that it’s quite unfriendly. I think perhaps a happy medium would be the truth. You will find friendliness here if you smile and look friendly. You will probably be passed up if you will look as if you didn’t want to be a friend. But I have been in churches where they just fawned over you. Haven’t you?

I remember years ago visiting a church. I just sat back there look straight ahead.

Pretty soon the pastor came around, and he fawned over me. You’d think I was Eisenhower’s twin brother they didn’t know he had. He didn’t know who I was. It wasn’t because of me. It would have been anybody else the same. He said he was so happy I had decided to look in on them. I hadn’t. I just had gone to church, but I didn’t quite accept that. It was a little too much. When you love me too much, brother, I’m worried about you. Love me enough, and it’s all right. Don’t love me at all, and I’ll pray for you. But when it gets to be fawning love, it’s feigned love.

Now, the Holy Ghost gives us love that is real. It’s real love. And you know that real love isn’t always fawning over its object. Real love sometimes rebukes. The sharpest book in the New Testament, you know what it is? The sharpest book in the New Testament is 1 John. The apostle of love also could wield a paddle more vigorously than any other apostle. So, the loving John could lay it on when he needed to. He that loveth his son whippeth him betimes, Scripture says. And God loves us and whippeth us betimes. And if we love each other, it doesn’t necessarily mean that we love them with the meek, harmless, fawning love, but we love them for their soul’s sake. And we love them in God, unto unfailing love of the brethren.

Then he says see now that ye love one another. Obviously then, this love is not a wild plant that will grow of itself. It is there in the heart by a divine planting, but it must be cultivated. Dandelions will grow without cultivation. Love must be cultivated. The human heart must be cultivated. We must work on it. We must pray, search the word, and obey and believe and humble ourselves and open our minds to the incoming Holy Ghost, so that we may cultivate and see that we love one another.

Then he says, out of a pure heart. And I can only pass that by for time’s sake and say that no other kind of heart can really love purely, because the heart to love purely, must love unselfishly. Unselfish love does not exploit its objects, and it doesn’t ask anything in return. That is so lofty that the modern world knows little or nothing about it. But it’s out of a pure heart.

Then he says, fervently, and I close by reminding you that God hates everything that’s halfway. He hates half-minded people. Ye are double-minded, He said. Now, a double mind is a mind that’s half one way and half the other. And God hates the double mind and says no man who prays with a double mind need expect to get anything. Have some kind of mind. Settle for one, but let it be all one thing. Don’t let it be a divided mind. But that’s what a double mind is.

They used to call them Sunday Christians in the country. They said they had Sunday religion. And they used to say quaintly that they hung their religion up with their new suit in the closet when they got home Sunday night and never put it on again till the next Sunday morning. Now that’s being double-minded. And God hates all double mindedness because it isn’t real. He says we are to love fervently out of a pure heart, fervent love, fiery love, fervid love. And God says that Ephraim was a cake not turned and you know what that is. I might ask for a show of hands, how many had cakes for breakfast this morning? I was brought up on buckwheat cakes. And I know what a half-turned cake is. It’s a half-baked one. And the Lord hates half-baked things. He wants it to be baked all the way through.

And then he talks about the lukewarm. Now, I want to ask you this question and send you home with this metaphysical problem on your mind. Is a bottle half full of something, half full or half empty? I don’t know myself. And is lukewarm water, half warm or half cold? Tell me Tom after church. Incidentally, I got a long, five-page letter from a brother in California, vigorously taking me to task for saying that Tom Hare was Irish. He declared he’s nothing of the sort. But I’ll talk about that later.

But what I wanted to say was that what God wants here is not a half anything. What I started to say is, is a half Christian a half-sinner, a half-Christian. I don’t know, but I do know this, God will sweep the whole business out together. He’ll have nothing to do with half stuff. He says that we are to be filled unto the half-fullness of God—never! For God to say a thing like that, He wouldn’t be God. Filled unto the fullness of God, he says, not unto the half-fullness. God has nothing to do with half-full things. He gives us a whole day, not a half day. He gives us a whole personality, not a half personality, a whole mind, not a half mind, a whole salvation not a half salvation. And He expects our love to be a whole love, fervent, and not half cold.

Well, that’s a little outline. You’re welcome to it. Think it over. Seeing now that you have purified your soul by obeying the truth through the Spirit unto unfeigned love of the brethren. Now see to it that that love goes to work, and you really love each other out of a pure heart, fervently. That’s Peter’s exhortation. I pray that it may be taken to our hearts and may do us good.

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“The Moral Implication of the Resurrection of our Lord”

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The Moral Implication of the Resurrection of our Lord

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

April 10, 1955

I cannot let this day close without pointing to the moral implications of the resurrection of our Lord. And that would be the topic I would assign myself tonight, “The Moral Implications of the Resurrection of our Lord. And we’ll continue to think about this 28th chapter of the book of Matthew. In the end of the Sabbath, that is, not at night, but in the morning, as it began to dawn toward the first day of the week, came Mary Magdalene and that other Mary, to see the sepulcher. I suppose they hadn’t been asleep all the night. And as soon as there was any hope of light, they appeared. And behold, there was a great earthquake. For the angel of the Lord descended from heaven and came and rolled back the stone from the door and sat upon it.

It would be very easy for a vivid Christian imagination here, to introduce a lot of things that are not in the text. Why did the angel from heaven sat upon the roll back stone? I think I know. If God had said to me, now you go down. My Son is in the grave. And I want you to go down and roll back that stone. He is coming out to be alive forevermore. He will never die again, but He’ll stay in life forever, a mortal life forever. Go down and confound hell and glorify the Father. And I think I know where I would have set when the stone was rolled back. I think I’d have sat where the angel did. Now that might not be the reason the angels sat there, but it looks all right to me.

Then verse three, the countenance of this angel was like lightning and his raiment white as snow. And for fear of him, the keepers did shake and became as dead men. And the angel answered, that is, answered the unspoken inquiry of the women and said, fear not ye. For I know whom ye seek. It is Jesus which was crucified. But He is not here. For He is risen as He said. And if you are doubtful about it, come and see the place where the Lord once lay, but lies no more.

Now, there are two thoughts here, the magnificence of this angel that rolled the stone away, this messenger from God and the warm love of these two Marys that came to the sepulcher to mourn their Lord. And then, the annunciation, He is not here. He is risen. Come and see the place where the Lord lay. And then in verse eight it says about these disciples, that they departed quickly from the sepulcher with fear and great joy and did run to bring His disciples word.

The fear that was here was not the fear that they had once felt. Not the fear that keeps men in bondage all their lifetime, that is, fear of death. The fear that they felt was another kind of fear. It was a fear that was replete with joy. That is, it was reverence. It was the sense of being suddenly found in the presence of the supernatural and the heavenly, and to know that the Lord had risen and was out of the grave. This brought a sense of the heavenly-ness upon them, a sense of another world, the sense of mystery and life and well-being and the presence of God.

And so, there was the fear of it there, and it was a fear mixed with joy. And they departed from the sepulcher. Someone said, I don’t recall whom I was talking lately, that religion lies in the prepositions. And here we have religion lying in another preposition. They departed quickly from the sepulcher. “From” is a preposition. It is a word of direction. They had come to the sepulcher. That was their religion that they had before they knew Jesus had risen from the dead. The direction was toward the sepulcher. They came to the sepulcher. There you have a preposition. The direction is toward the sepulcher.

And as soon as they heard the joyful news that He had risen from the dead as He said, and that you could actually see the place where He lay. Then the Scripture said, they departed from the sepulcher. They changed their preposition from to, to from. The direction was now not toward the grave, but away from the grave. Not toward the end, but the end was past and now it was toward endlessness. And they departed quickly from the sepulcher and did run to bring the disciples word.

And then verse sixteen, the eleven disciples went away into Galilee, into a mountain where Jesus had appointed them. What a wonderful thing for a man to do. He appointed to meet these disciples before his death, apparently, and said, I will meet you. I’m going to die tomorrow, and in three days, I will meet you; make an appointment for three days after He was to die. That’s what He did alright. And so they came and they found Him there. Verse eighteen, Jesus came. They saw Him and they worshipped Him. But being like you and me, there were some that were wondering about it all. It says, doubted, here.

In verse eighteen, Jesus came and spake unto them and said, all power is given unto Me in heaven and in earth, all power. He had died in weakness. And they had seen Him limp and cold and dead on the cross. They’d seen Him taken down and removed and placed in a grave. Now, they heard Him say, all power is given unto Me in heaven and in earth. That might have been hard to believe except for one thing. He was there to prove that His words were real. If He had said that and not come through, and they had been looking down on His dead face and they had remembered that he said, all power is given unto me, they might have shrugged and looked at each other and shaking their heads and walked sadly away. For it would have been speaking, and not making good on your speech.

But there He was, keeping an appointment three days after death. There He was, present, in His own warm, living, pulsating, immortal person. And He said, all power is given unto me, in heaven and in earth. Now, how could they deny it? If a man just makes talk, you have a right to doubt him. But if a man stands before you risen from the dead, then you have a right to listen to him.

And when Jesus said, all power is given unto Me, He was there out of the grave, alive, to give weight and meaning, finality to what He was saying. And the church has believed that, that all power belongs to Jesus Christ our Lord. He doesn’t exercise it all yet, but He has it all. He can command the armies of the world any moment. He can change the course of nations with a wave of His hand or word of His mouth. He can raise the dead, for they shall hear His voice and come forth from their lowly graves. All power is his, all authority, the authority of a raised and living Savior, the authority of a dying Lamb, the authority of a King, the authority of a High Priest forever, the authority of the second person of the Trinity, it’s all his authority and it’s all His power.

So, He said, all power is given unto me in heaven and earth. That is why I for one, cannot as the old writers would say, I cannot away with, it means I can’t tolerate this pitying kind of religion. It’s pitying the Lord Jesus Christ all the time. Come weep with me awhile. Come, weep with me awhile. Let us kneel down by the cross and let us weep a while. Come weep awhile as though the Lord were a victim, a martyr, a victim of his own zeal, a poor pitiable man with good intention, but that found the world was too big for Him and life too much for Him. So, He sank down in the helplessness of death. And now, when we weep for a while beside His tomb and grieve awhile beside His cross and walk around in black.

No, no my brethren, He says, all power is given unto Me in heaven and in earth. Here is the mighty Jesus, the mighty Christ, the mighty Lord. At Christmas time I said, the power doth not lie in the manger. And now I say to you that power does not lie at the cross. Power lies in the glory. The man who died on the cross died in weakness. The Bible says so. But He rose in power. And if we forget the resurrection and the glory and the fact that He is seated at the right hand of God, we lose all the meaning of Christianity.

Power does not lie with a babe in a manger. Power does not lie with a man helpless on a cross. Power lies with a man who died on that cross and went into a grave and came out the third day and rose to the right hand of power. There is where power lies. And the Savior that we serve is not a Savior to be pitied. And our business is not to mourn and weep awhile beside a grave. Our business is to thank God with tearful reverence that He ever went into that grave. To thank God, with joy, that He ever went to that cross. To understand what that cross meant and means and understand what that burial means, and then understand what the resurrection means that placed a glorious crown upon all His sufferings.

So, at His Father’s right hand, He sits in absolute majesty and kingly powers, sovereign over all the world. But you say, Mr. Tozer, isn’t that just big talk? If He is sovereign over all the world, what about Russia? What about juvenile delinquency? What about atom bombs and hydrogen bombs? If He is Sovereign over all the world, why is the West at the throat of the East? And why is there an armament race? Because, He has a prophetic plan that He’s working by.

And His plan calls for the nations of the earth to play themselves like checkers over the face of the world as over a checkerboard. And it calls for the return of Israel to Palestine. And it calls for the king of the north, to beat himself out. And it calls for the West to evangelize the world. And He’s waiting, waiting, though He has all the power, He’s waiting to exercise it. He exercises it in a limited way now through His church and would exercise it with unlimited power if His church was ready to believe that He would and could do it. All power is given unto Me in heaven and earth.

Now what are we to do? What are the moral implications of it? The answer is, go ye therefore. Therefore, is the word that means, as a result of what I just said, that all power is given unto Me in heaven and earth. Go ye and disciple all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son of the Holy Ghost.

Now, my friends, I want you to see here that Easter did not come and end. It’s not something to be celebrated each year as a something in itself, that began and ended in itself. It was but a beginning of some vaster and grander thing. I am out of the grave. I’m alive forevermore. All power is given unto me. Go ye therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost, teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you. And then the rest of it says, lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world.

You know how tenderly we take the knife of bad teaching and separate that little passage from the rest, as you might take a rine off an orange. We peel it off and put it on our mottos and on our calendars and in the back of our book or draw a line through it, lo, I am with you always even unto the end of the world, but He didn’t say that. Don’t make him say something He didn’t say. Lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world. He didn’t say that. He said, and lo, I am with you alway. That conjunction is not there by accident. He said go ye therefore and lo, I am with you always.

There’s the point. Easter did not come to give you and me a chance to smell sweet flowers. And you can’t imagine what a circle of fragrance there is around those lilies, beautiful, and I’m a flower man. I don’t know one from the other, but I love them. I do know that’s a lily. And I love all that goes with it. I’d whisper to you ladies that I even like the color that comes with Easter in the clothing. I don’t mind it at all. I’m not such an old fuddy duddy and just frown upon color. I like color. God made color. He made all in color there is. The devil never invented a color yet. He doesn’t know how. He can’t do it. He can’t make anything pretty. God makes the pretty things, and the devil makes the ugly things.

But Easter isn’t a time for us to smell flowers only, not a time for us to buy the new clothing only. And certainly, God knows it’s not a time to be the proudest fellow in the Easter parade. It’s a time for us seriously to consider the moral implications of the resurrection. If this is all true, if this is not more Santa Claus stuff. This isn’t simply more sentimentality and poetry. If this is history. If this is real. If this happened, and this church is founded upon the belief that it happened. And I stand tonight upon the faith that it happened. This is historically true.

Then if it is true, was does it mean to me? Does it have any bite in it? Does it get hold of me? Does it mean anything to me? Am I to listen to a cantata and sing, up from the grave He arose, smell the flowers and go home and forget it? No, it has a moral application. It lays hold upon us with all the authority of sovereign obligation, and says, go, you. You go. Everybody knows the grammatical construction here. You is the subject of that sentence. Go is the verb go. You, you go and teach all nations. Or as the margin has it, make disciples among all nations, or make Christians in all the nations.

So, the moral obligation of the resurrection of Christ is the missionary obligation. It is the obligation to carry the message and to tell the story and to be a financial and personal and praying part of this great commission. There are those who so rightly divide the Word of Truth wrongly, that they put this great commission in what they call the tribulation days and say it doesn’t belong to the church of Christ.

The devil is slicker than the communists. Communists are dumb. Every time they try to pull a fast one. They’re so dumb that it’s amazing how they can get along at all. If they didn’t have so much brass, they couldn’t. They cover their ignorance and stupidity with brass. But the devil isn’t so stupid. And he well knows that if he can succeed in getting us to be satisfied with a celebration, and say, oh, He’s risen from the dead. Let everybody say amen.

I even heard a man last night on the radio as I was sampling the station to see if there was anything worth listening to, comparing Jesus Christ to a baseball player who died when he was 38, Lou Gehrig. He said, Lou Gehrig, he was 38 years old when he got leukemia and died. He said he was a wonderful fellow, and incidentally, he was, a wonderful young man, a prince among young men from all I can learn about him. But he died when he was 38, and said, the unctuous voiced announcer, he died at 38, and come to think of it, Jesus died about that time. But look what Lou Gehrig accomplished, and look what Jesus accomplished.

And so, if we can get all soft voice and dewy-eyed and talk about Jesus and Lou Gehrig, the devil will be a happy boy. He’ll say, that’s what I want them to do. I want them to talk about Easter. I want them to have cartoons about Jesus rising from the dead. I want them to put on cantatas and sing great anthems and preach sermons about Him. But I always want them to think about Him as being just like any other big hero, a Lincoln, a Lou Gehrig, I don’t ever want them to remember for a minute that He is now seated in the place of power, and I’m a poor frightened fugitive. The devil never wants that, He wants us to think about Easter and buttercups and the bluebirds coming back.

But he doesn’t want us to remember that his Lord is at the right hand of God now and can put him in hell when the time comes. He can send him there and chain him and hurl him down the moment He wants to do it in the prophetic plan. He doesn’t want anybody to remember that. He knows he can keep the Christians mourning a while. Oh, mourn with me a while and weep with me beside the tree. He knows he’s got us. And he knows that he’s got a bunch of sentimental blubberers.

But if we can see that He is risen, and that He’s no longer dead, no longer mortal. Not even mortal, to say nothing of being dead. He can’t die anymore. Death has no more dominion. And that He has all the authority in heaven, earth and hell, and holds the keys thereof. Then we get our chest back and begin to look and think and feel differently about things. And it’ll be no more a celebration once a year, and no more mournful thinking about a pitiful Jesus that went out to die. But we’ll understand what the cross was for.

Next Saturday on the radio, I’m going to preach on, what did the cross mean? And as soon as we get a hold of that and we know the meaning of the cross and the meaning of the resurrection, then power begins to move in, and we take the offensive and become the aggressors. And our witness and our testimony become positive and final, and we’re to spread this all over the earth. I wouldn’t be pastor five minutes of a church that wouldn’t be a missionary church and wouldn’t have missionary interests, missionaries clinging around and missionaries going out sometimes and missionaries coming back, because that’s the obligation.

That’s the moral obligation of our Lord’s resurrection. It is that we surrender to His Lordship. All power is given unto me. It is that we obey His command, go ye therefore and teach all nations. It is that we believe His promise, lo, I’m with you alway even unto the end of the world. But let’s not separate them. Let’s not refuse to have anything to do with the going or the sending. Let’s not forget the nations and then say, lo I’m with you. He didn’t say it. He said, you do what I told you to do and lo I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world. Amen.

Well, next week we begin our 33rd missionary convention. Next Sunday night I’m going back to John again. I’m still in John. I’m going to preach a missionary sermon out of John following Brother Notson’s missionary message. And then I’m going to pray, and I know you will and do everything possible to see whether we can’t push up our missionary offering another $10,000 this year from whatever it’s been before.

Then, in addition to that, we have a crop of teenage young people now coming up in our church. Now, what’s it going to be for them? Where are they going? Are they going to mature, marry, settle down, get old, quick thinking, get into a groove and wear it deeper and deeper as the years go by as so many, many have done, or are they going to hear the voice of God speak to them? Are they going to listen to this voice spoken, O earth, hear the word of the Lord, says the Holy Ghost. And here it is. I am no longer in the grave. I am out and here I am, He said. And My power is all power there is. It’s mine. Heaven listens. Earth listens. Hell listens. It’s all mine. Now because it’s all mine, I can protect you. I can support you. I can go ahead of you. I can give you effectiveness and meaning and efficiency.

You therefore go and make disciples out of all the nations of the world, all the nations, and I will be with you. I will be with you. The American soldier goes out. He has the goodwill and the good wishes and the prayers and the love of his people behind him. But he may be caught somewhere in a foxhole all alone. And all 160 million Americans and all the unthinkable power of our American military, can’t help him at all. But there was never a Christian caught in a foxhole alone. Never. Paul said, my friends all left me, but nevertheless, the Lord stood with me. Hear that? He remembered that the Lord stood with him. Nobody, nobody’s ever been deserted by the Lord yet.

Twelve to fourteen years ago, a great big handsome fellow used to play with my boys. Oh, they were big enough now, 17-18; but they still played and fooled around there. They used to come over and I’d see him, a round-faced, handsome big fellow full of smiles; a very close friend to one of my boys. He became a flyer over Germany. He went out one night, and I think over the English Channel if I remember. Some of the mates, some of those who were with him in the squadron flying, saw his plane take fire and start to spiral downward and plunge. And I don’t know if they have ever found the body yet after all these years. Nobody could help him then. 160 million Americans back here, untold power, flew the air and floated on the sea and marched on the land, Marines, Air Corps, WACS, WAVES, Army, military power untold, but a handsome, young fellow, too late, spiraled down into the sea with the rest of his crew. And they have never been heard of since.

But no soldier ever went out yet for the Lord Jesus, ever went anywhere yet by himself. Never could be said yet of a man, a missionary, or a messenger of the truth. Here he is, all alone. Jesus Christ has all the power there is, but he’s way yonder and the man is alone. Poor fellow, it’s too bad, Jesus couldn’t get some of that power to him, too bad.

No, no, nobody ever said that that had sense in his head. For you said, lo, I am with you always even to the end of the world. And there never was a martyr yet on a mission field of the world, never a missionary that laid down his life in a cannibal jungle. Never a missionary that perished shooting the rapids or going over the falls, never a one, but the Lord Jesus Christ didn’t have him by the hand and lead him triumphantly victoriously through. Lo, I am with you always. But that itself is based upon the obligation, understood and accepted. Go ye therefore and teach all nations.

I hope that this church and all of us here and myself and these pastors and all of you friends, I hope that we’ll all see that Easter is not a time for celebration only. It’s a time for obligation. It is a time for moral implications. It’s a time to understand that if He rose, then we’ve got to do something. If He rose, then we can’t sit. If He rose, then we can’t settle back down in religious apathy. If He rose, and all power is His, then there’s something for you and me to do!

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“I am Crucified with Christ“

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I am Crucified with Christ

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

September 20, 1959

Having read most of the story of Saul and the prophet Samuel from 1 Samuel 15, I’ll refer to it only as an illustration, but I want to take a text now from Galatians, the second chapter. Paul says, I am crucified with Christ. Nevertheless, I live. Yet not I, but Christ liveth in me. And the life which I now live in the flesh, I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me.

Now, what I want to say tonight, will not be new to you, and it certainly will not be new to me. I want to sum up what I believe on a certain important phase of Christianity. I have said this. I have weaved it in here and there, as a weaver might weave in a favorite color into almost every tapestry that he created. But I want to sort of concentrate tonight and speak from the Lord. I don’t know what you will do about what I say.

And I’d like also to say this, that I will not teach anything that isn’t believed by every fundamentalist in the world. Every fundamentalist in the world believes what I’m going to preach tonight. But the difference is this, that most of them seem satisfied to teach it and hold it as a doctrine. But I insist that if it is true, then it is too important to let lie quiescent. It ought to be detonated. It ought to be set off and allowed to explode; and then, after the smoke is cleared, see what you have left. And if you don’t have anything left, you didn’t have anything left to start with, anyhow. If you do have anything left, it will be eternal.

These words by the man Paul are a very strange verse. So strange, that the man might be accused of deliberately confounding or confusing people at least. He said, I am crucified with Christ. And of course, the tense is, I have been crucified with Christ; and a man who has been crucified isn’t around anymore. So, it’s very odd that a man should say, I have been crucified. Nobody else has ever said it. A man might say, I am to be crucified. He might say, I am being crucified, but nobody ever put it in the past perfect and said, I have been crucified. He’s dead, he couldn’t talk.

But here’s a man talking. He said, I have been crucified. Nevertheless, I live a strange kind of crucifixion that, and he apologizes and says yet, I don’t mean that I live. What do I mean? I mean that Christ lives in me. And yet, Paul, you’re alive and you’re among us. We hear your voice and we see your little body, wearing it’s old fashioned toga. You’re among us, you’re alive, yes, I know. But the life which I now live in the flesh, I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave Himself for me. There’s only one conclusion here. The man who said I have been crucified. He had a resurrection, otherwise he couldn’t have said this. He had to explain that I was crucified and the fact that I’m alive here. I’m no ghost. I’m living now by the faith of the Man who loved me and died for me and rose for me.

Now, that’s what Paul said, and I haven’t added anything. I’ve just tried to explain a little bit. And I insist that if this kind of life was an apostolic life, if this is true, then you and I ought to be greatly disturbed about the way we’re living. And we ought to do something about it. Because you see, Paul here gives us the way of God. This is the way of God; the way God does things. God sets life and death over against each other and they’re eternal opposites.

You’ll find in your Bible, that there are opposites always standing against each other. Musical directors, and even pastors sometimes, in conspiracy with the musical directors, set up a service in which everything in it is like everything else. The pastor is going to preach about heaven. They sing about heaven, read Scripture about heaven. The soloist sings about heaven, and the offertory is “Jerusalem, the Golden. And it gets saccharin, because it’s all one thing. But life isn’t like that. Life is two things, always two things. One thing stands over against something else, totally opposite. We call the other sex from us the opposite sex.

Human life exists because there are opposites. If the whole world was made of men, we would last one generation and die. If it was made of women, one generation. But there’s the negative and the positive, life and death. And God sets them over against each other–eternal opposites. And do you know what death is? Death is the enemy, always the enemy. Death is the enemy and yet God makes it the gateway to life–strange. It’s here though. Paul said it. Life speaks of blessedness and peace and happiness and love and fulfillment. And death speaks of darkness and loss and eternal negation. And yet, strangely because we’re in the fix we’re in.

Now, mark you this, my friends, if we hadn’t fallen, all that I’m saying, would not need to be said. And if we hadn’t fallen, it would be foolish to say it. There are so many things that are tentatively true. That is, they’re true because of the fix we’re in. But as soon as the Lord comes and glorifies His church and sin is no more, that won’t be true anymore. I said a while ago, a man had to be stubborn, to serve God. That’s because we’re in a world surrounded by enemies. But five minutes after the Lord comes, I couldn’t say that and tell the truth.

In heaven, nobody is stubborn. Everybody lives in the will of God, smoothness and sweetness, and so will it be in that glad day when the Lord comes and glorifies his people. And then so many things that are true now won’t be true then. They won’t need to be true then. Take up your cross and follow me. Give up all. Leave your family and come and follow Me. It won’t have to be so then. Nothing like that up there. It’s down here true, but it’s not up there true.

So, here’s death and life, and they stand over against each other. And the reason for it is because the human race is bad, we’re bad. And we’re so bad that you can’t make us good. That’s the doctrine that Paul teaches. That’s the doctrine that Jesus taught. That’s the doctrine that the Old Testament story taught. Were so bad, you can’t make us good. God doesn’t try to. He doesn’t want to. It isn’t His plan nor His purpose to do it. We’re so bad that He doesn’t try to make us good. We’re so bad, the only way we can be made good is to be killed. There are some people so bad that the society pronounces a death sentence on them, and they die because they can’t be made good. They’re considered to be beyond salvation, beyond hope, beyond reclamation.

And the whole human race before the eyes of God is so bad, it can’t be made good. God can’t patch it up. He never meant to patch it up. He never came into the world that you and I should learn to think lofty thoughts and dream high dreams and learn etiquette and ethics and all the rest. He came into the world in order that He might fix it so a certain number of people could die with Him and rise with Him to a new life.

Paul never said I’m good. Paul said I died. Paul was so bad that the Lord couldn’t patch him up, couldn’t fix him up. It’s no use. There’s only one way to deal with Paul and that was crucify him. But a crucified man is of no account. He’s lying out there dead. So, the next thing, if God wants to use him at all, or to have his mouth filled with praise is to raise him from the dead a new man. The kind of man he ought to have been in the first place and wasn’t.

Now, what am I teaching? I am teaching Keswick doctrine, if you please. I’m teaching that which the Sunday School Times was founded on, the victorious life. I’m teaching that which gave birth to the Christian and Missionary Alliance. And yet, there are hundreds of thousands of us Christians who know this doctrine who’ve never made it work in our own lives or done anything about it. Now, I say it’s the way of God in this world in which we live. Put life over there and say there is life. Now, that’s what you want. When we start out for life and God said, no, you don’t get it that way. You get it by going the way of death. That’s the way of God. But it is the way of man to try to do the opposite. He wants to engraft the new life on the old life. That is my criticism of modern evangelism and a great deal of modern evangelicalism.

We don’t understand Paul, and we don’t understand the teaching of Christ and the cross. And so we take men and graft life on them. God never did it. He never meant to do it. He never tended to do it. He never planned it. He never ordained it that way. But we do it. We take the old life and then graft some new life on it. And we graft life in one hand and death in the other hand. We will not pass the judgment of death on ourselves; we just won’t do it.

We will save face. We acknowledge our sin. We admit our faults. We lose face and we get chagrined, and we get humbled, and we apologize, but we never pass the sentence of death on ourselves. Paul did. We curb the grosser manifestations of the flesh and count that enough. So, you see, the ways of God and the ways of man are contrary, the one to the other. And in the church of Christ, they are contrary, the one to the other. We get a fellow to admit that he’s accepted Christ, and we graph new life on him and get him fixed up. And pretty soon he gets so he can talk in public. And then after that, he gets on the board. And pretty soon he’s in a position where he’s exerting his authority and his weight in spiritual things. And he may be a good man and well-intentioned, but he’s had life graft on. He’s never understood what Paul meant when he said, I die with Christ. I have died. I’ve been crucified.

And so that man is trying to live like a man who had died when he hadn’t died. He’s trying to live like a man who had risen when he hasn’t risen. So, He’s halfway in between the old death and the new life, caught in the middle. Paul told us about it in the seventh chapter of Romans. Read that again sometime, that miserable, wretched seventh chapter in Romans.

Yet, the great man Paul said he was in that position. Such a man as I’ve described, won’t go all the way with God, but he won’t go all the way with the world either. He won’t go all the way to the cross, but he insists on going part of the way to the cross. And He says, I have been partly crucified with Christ. And so, he would have to admit, I nevertheless, I partly live. Because he’s partly dead, he partly lives, and that’s the kind of Christianity we have in our day. Partly dead and partly alive, everywhere, everywhere you go, it’s the same.

But the life, the victorious life, the life, the new wondrous life stands beckoning there, just on the other side. Not of an artistic gate. No artist ever painted that gate, that lovely, beautiful gate, not that. But it stands on the other side of a cross. And God says, if you want new life, then you will have to know death. Know death of what now? What kind of death are we talking about? Do I mean you’re going to have to die and go into the grave? Some people have foolishly interpreted it so. They say that we’re going to die and rise again; when we arise, then we’ll be good people.

Well, I want to talk about some of the things that have to be crucified and point out that God sent a man by the name of Saul, and said, these Amalekites aren’t fit to live. And I as the sovereign God who gave them life, now I want to take it from them. I have a right to do that. And I want you to go, and I want you to take an army and terminate them from the earth. Kill everything. Destroy it all, including their king and all of their fat cattle and sheep. And Saul said, I’m willing to go and he started. And he destroyed everything that didn’t do him any good. Everything he couldn’t use, he destroyed. But he thought it would be a nice mantelpiece to have around, to keep that king around to show him off.

And also, he wanted the cattle and the sheep. So, he kept the best of them. The old swayback heifers and the old lock horned steers, he killed them. But he kept all the fine-blooded cattle. The old wearied, dragged tailed sheep, that couldn’t keep the cockle burrs out of their wool, he let them die. The fine, young lambs and ewes, he kept. God had said destroy these enemies, and Saul decided that he knew better than God knew what to do with enemies. So, he made a distinction between enemies and enemies.

Now, what are the enemies that require the sentence of death? You and me? What are those enemies that keep you from growing in grace? Some of you haven’t grown in grace for years. You haven’t gotten any more spiritual in years. Why? What is it?

Well, first I’ll say that you can’t slay these enemies yourself. You can only pass sentence on them actually. You can only pass sentence on them. We call that slaying them because the slaying must be done by the cross of Jesus Christ our Lord. But I just wanted to point out a few of them to you; and one of them is self-righteousness. And now, self-righteousness, believing that we are in some measure righteous and not as bad as they say we are. We deny our self-righteousness in our creed, but we defend it in our conduct. We permit it to be felt in our hearts. Drunkenness and impurity and dishonesty in business affairs and lying out right and gambling, we say, oh, those are bad. Those are the vile things, and we get rid of those vile things. But self-righteousness can become a very beautiful thing. It can be artistic.

Then there’s self-confidence. And you know, self-confidence can be compatible with all the language of humility. We can feel deeply self-confident while at the same time we’ve learned the language of humility. We’ve learned the testimony and we’ve learned to weave into our sermons how humble we are when at the same time, we can be quite confident in ourselves.

And there’s self-sufficiency in life and in heart and in service. And there’s self-love, which indeed, is the source of all other evils, I suppose, the source of all hurt feelings. Hurt feelings do in the church of Christ, what certain diseases do for children.

You know, they say that children’s diseases are not injurious, not harmful. I know better than that. One of our boys can hear out of only one ear, because when he was a lad he had scarlet fever. It wasn’t the fault of his parents. We went to a child specialist. He didn’t know what he had. He told him to go back to school, let him go back to school because he was able to stagger. Then the rest of them got it and got it, and pretty soon we found what we had. We had scarlet fever. So, we imagine that these children’s diseases don’t hurt our children, but they do. They affect the eyes. They affect the ears if we don’t watch it.

So, self-love, is like it brings about hurt feelings, and hurt feelings in a church. They’re the children’s diseases for all the immature Christians, all the childish Christians that haven’t grown up yet. They get their feelings hurt because they’re subjected to it because they’re filled with self-love. They love themselves.

And they wear their feelings on their sleeve and they’re ready immediately to take umbrage if anybody said anything against them. And then those hurt feelings get into the church and then gets into the choir and then gets into the board and into the Sunday school, and pretty soon, you find that that little flare up of hurt feeling that you thought wasn’t anything, was a disease that has injured the body of Christ in that locality. And it all comes out of self-love.

We quote, I am crucified with Christ, but we haven’t been. We say, but we’ve crucified drunkenness. Yes, we’ve crucified gambling. Yes. We’ve crucified lying. Yes. We haven’t crucified hurt feelings and so we get it, and churches die of it. This thing goes on and on in churches until it divides whole sections of the church against each other. I never had it happen under my ministry. God’s good hand over these years has never allowed a division ever to happen under my ministry, and any hurt feelings, we got rid of very quickly. So, I’ve never seen it. But I’ve listened. I listened no later than a week or two ago to a long recital of a man who was sick inside because of what he’d had to go through in a certain church with hurt feelings, self-love, self-confidence, self-righteousness, self-pity. The source of all resentment is self-pity, so we pity ourselves.

God says this has to die. Go slay the Amalekites, and we say Lord, I used to smoke. I don’t smoke anymore. God said, I didn’t tell you to slay filter tips only, I told you to slay self-pity. You say, I kept that Father. I wanted to keep that around. I didn’t think that would be so bad. It’s a luxury to pity yourself sometimes.

Many a man, the only time he feels good during the day is when his wife bawls him out in the morning and he leaves home feeling he’s a martyr and goes off to the bus or train, feeling real good. He enjoys himself. If my neighbors only knew what I have to endure. I am a good man who makes a good living. I’ve been true and faithful and kind and look at the way she treats me. He enjoys shall self-pity. He picks up his newspaper down at 95th, 107th or 111th or wherever he lives and reads, family of six wiped out on highway 90. He reads it casually, never pities them. Too busy pitting himself. Self-pity, I say, is the source of all resentment; and resentment in the church is like another kind of disease in a family.

Then there is self-seeking. The source of much religious activity is self-seeking. If we could only know how often we serve God out of self-seeking and how often we serve God out of a desire to glorify God. I admit, I admit that bothers me sometimes. I admit that I have periods when I have to go to God and get light and help on it so that what I am doing that seems so good and right and all, won’t turn out to be self-seeking gone underground. The self-seeker can go underground and gnaw from underneath, and we’ll never know he’s there. The grass grows over him and we can’t hear him under there but he’s there, like a mole burrowing in the lawn. Many a book, many a sermon, many a song, many a school, many a church, gets their inception in self-seeking.

And there’s self-indulgence, not in low evil things of course. I am amazed when I go about and find how God’s people live. Maybe I was brought up wrong or brought up in a situation. I was brought up in a home where five cents was something you carefully laid on a shelf and reminded Mother it was there and you didn’t spend it without permission. And if you got candy, it was one penny’s worth. And if it was really a big day, was two pennies worth.

So, when businessmen take me out to lunch, “have a steak now Mr. Tozer, have a steak.” Six dollars and a half.  No. But, have a steak, we want you to have it, have it now. I look at the right-hand side of the column and whatever it says is the cheapest I take, even though it’s being paid for. I can’t bring myself to indulge myself like that. Maybe that’s a form of self-aggrandizement or self-confidence or self-righteous? I don’t know. But what I started out to say was, that I’m astonished at how people pamper themselves in the name of the Lord. They put up at the best hotels. We have everything, the very best, and never seem to ever think of money long as they’ve got it. They can talk about God continually over a six-dollar and a half steak. And for $2, they could have had a hamburger. And there’s just as much nourishment in a hamburger as there is in a steak. Anybody knows that, Brother.

I don’t want you to think I’m after you, brother, just because you’re bigger than I am, doesn’t mean you eat $6 steaks, but I’m just trying to say that God’s people are so self-indulgent. We don’t take dope. But we indulge ourselves other ways. Self-aggrandizement, everything has to advance me, advance mine.

I talked to preachers, and I can’t talk to them five minutes, not one minute until they’ve taken off, revved up their motors and gone off into the wild blue yonder. And for the rest of the meal, I have to sit and listen to what they did, who they are, what they’ve written, where they’ve been, how they’ve traveled, self-aggrandizement. Poor people at home paying the bills while they go all around over the world and collect stories. I don’t like that kind of stuff. I never did and I can’t and I’m not any near to it now than I was when I was much younger.

Now, there is a path. There’s a path to life and power, and it’s the path that Paul knew here. He said, I have been crucified. He said, I have gone to Jesus Christ and by faith of the Son of God, I have so identified myself with Christ that I consider myself to have suffered what He suffered, to be an outcast from society. I consider myself to be what he was, and by faith identify myself with Him as He identified Himself with me.

I said one time that Christ identified Himself with Christians in the incarnation, and a good Plymouth Brethren came down and he was right. I admitted it. He said, Brother Tozer, never say that. Never say that Christ has identified Himself with us in the incarnation. He identified Himself with us in the crucifixion. And he’s right. But that’s what Paul says. He identified Himself with the human race and the incarnation. He identified Himself with God’s people in the crucifixion and the resurrection. I am crucified with Christ, he said. I have been. Nothing had happened to His body, nothing like that. He wasn’t even present when our Lord died it isn’t supposed. But he said, it’s by faith of the Son of God. I have gone to Jesus Christ in faith, and I have so identified myself with Him that I have learned to suffer along with Him, and I cease saying “I,” he said in effect.

Now we say, yes, Lord, I have put away these things, Lord. I have put them away, Lord. But what meaneth then the bleating of the sheep. The man Saul didn’t know that the sheep would bleat at the wrong time. If he’d had any sense, He would have known that sheep bleat continually. Any flock of sheep anywhere, are bleating all the time. Cattle, except when they’re feeding, are lowing all the time. These are not all at the same time lowing. They’re not all at the same time bleating, but there’s always one of them. The fine, thin voice of the lamb or the heavy authoritative voice of the old ram or the plaintiff, appealing voice of the ewe calling her lambs in, but they’re bleating.

And Saul overlooked that fact. He overlooked that these sheep would bleat just at the wrong time. If they can only shut them up just at the right time, he might have got away with that dirty deal, for a while. But, just when he was saying most eloquently, and being a Jew, I suppose he was using both hands, saying, oh, but I have done what you told me to do.

About that time, “Baaaa” was heard over there. He said, what’s that I hear? Oh, well, he said, excuse me, but that’s a few that my people insisted on keeping. He said, I know you, you’re a tyrant and when you want a thing you get it. You’re responsible for those sheep. About that time, an old cow let out a trombone blast that echoed down the hills. He said, What’s that? He said, there we are again. I’m sorry to have to tell you but the people insisted. And Saul said, I know you, you liar. You claim to serve God but you won’t obey Him, and God has cast you out, taking your kingdom from me and he’s given it to a neighbor better than thou.

I wonder how long the church is going to have to go on like this. I don’t mean this church, but the church of God. You say we believe in Christ. We’re saved from sin. We have eternal life and can’t lose it. Everything will be alright. One of these days the Lord will come and take us from one kind of fun to another kind of fun. He’ll take us from being happy down here to being happy up there.

Believe me what He’ll do to those liberals and moderns. We’ll lick up our chops when the Lord will trample those moderns under His feet. It is awful easy for us of the orthodox persuasion to talk like that, friends, forgetting that right while we’re making our pious protestations, the bleating of the sheep and the bellowing of the herd may be coming across the meadows to say to God they’re not telling the truth, Father. They think they are, but they’re not. What about you?

I’m supposed to come and preach at Keswick again this year. What does Keswick teach? Only this, that’s all, only this. Sometimes I think even Keswick gets you dead and doesn’t get you alive again. Dr. Maxwell, “Born Crucified” and some of his other books, that’s what he teaches. What do they teach, and Turnbull teach and the Sunday School times? What did Dr. Simpson teach of this? Dr. Simpson taught that when you rise again in newness of life after letting your evil nature die with Christ, you can be anointed with power to go out and do the will of God and live in the fellowship of God and the power of the Spirit. That’s why the Christian Alliance ever was born in the first place. It will be a bad day for us when we forget that. It will be a bad day for us. But how about you? You can’t help what 1100 churches will do, but you can help what you do. You can’t even help what this church will do, really.

But you can decide what you will do. What about it? The Lord says, put that self-righteousness to death. Pass sentence on it. Identify yourself with Christ on the cross and let that self-righteousness die. Let that delicious self-pity that you like to lick on, let that die, stop pitting yourself. Stop seeking aggrandizement, your self-advancement, stop seeking it. Humble yourself under the mighty hand of God and He will exalt you in due time. Up out of our stony grief of humility, God will raise us to newness of life.

Somewhere I preached, I don’t remember where, in fact it was in Brooklyn a couple of Sundays ago. And I told them there that if they would put themselves in God’s hands and ask God Almighty to set a chain of circumstances in motion in their lives, He would lead them to be nothing and God to be everything, that they’d be surprised, that’s what will begin to happen. And then I had to tell them this as I tell you tonight, the strange thing will be that as you get better, you won’t know you’re getting better. As you get more powerful, you won’t know you’re getting powerful. As you get more God-like, you won’t know you’re getting God-like. For it is a strange contradiction that the most god-like man is the man who feels least like a God-like man.

And the most powerful man is the man who feels less power. It’s not the little fellows with their light up ties that think they’re bad. It’s the Spurgeons and the Augustines and the Pauls and the Simpsons and the Wesleys, who say, I’m no good. I’m no good God. I’m no good. The little guys with the light up ties, they say, God and I just had a little huddle together. And God said to me, son, let’s do it this way. That kind of Christianity is a million miles from the faith of our fathers. The further you get into the Kingdom and the closer to the cross of Christ, the further you’ll feel away and the less you will trust yourself.

And the more trust God can put in you, the less you’ll put in yourself. And the more trust you put in yourself; the less God will trust you. And the more you seek advancement, the less God will advance you. And the more God, out of your humility advances you, the less you will feel advanced. It’s a strange contradiction, a strange anomaly, but it’s there; power where death was, peace where turmoil was, life where weakness was. This is it, brethren. I guess it isn’t any wonder that this kind of preaching doesn’t bring mobs around here. But it does excite people all over the continent who want to hear about it. Small groups here and small groups there, and people who will gather in and make large groups and say, come and talk to us about this. I suppose I’m the poorest example of it there is on the North American continent, but at least I’ll do my best trying to tell people this is the way of life.

Wesley said to Peter Bowler, Peter, my heart hasn’t experienced grace. What will I do? He said preach it till you do experience it. Preach it because it’s in the Bible. Then when you experience it, preach it because you have it. And Wesley went out and did it. It wasn’t very long until he experienced grace and set the world on fire.

Let’s pray. We are assembled here tonight, Lord Jesus, as Thy disciples. Thy servant has tried from the New Testament and from the Old to explain the way of power and life. Now, Lord, Thou knowest how much easier it is to stand up here and explain it, than it is to go out tomorrow and live it. And yet, it’s possible to live it, otherwise Thy word would be confusion and more confounded. We pray, O Christ, while the church goes on without power, without holiness, without radiance, plugging along, we thank Thee, Father, for everyone that’s plugging along.

Thank Thee, Father, for everyone who says any good thing about thy Son. Thank thee for everyone whose testimony, however hollow, still may be on Thy side. We remember Thy servant who said, I thank God that Christ is preached regardless of how He is preached. So, we’re glad for everybody, but O Lord, we mourn. The weakness, the carnality, the selfishness that’s in Thy church among Thy people. We mourn that we don’t grow up, that we don’t advance. We stay little when we could be great Christians. O Lord, help us now.

Before we conclude our prayer, dear people, how many would say, Mr. Tozer pray for me that God will teach me the meaning of this text, this doctrine, this truth which has been so wonderfully taught and lived by so many of God’s saints down the years. I want it in my life. Would you pray for me? Would you raise your hand? Yes. Yes. Who else? Yes. Who else? Yes, I see your hand back there. Others, who would like us to pray?

Father, we pray for those who have requested it. Thou hast said, pray one for another. And there’s a reason for Thy saying that. So, we pray Thee for these who have said, pray for me, men and women. We pray for them. We pray that they may tear themselves loose if they have to do it, do it by violence from the green briars and the barbed wire and get themselves out of all that, and escape the snares and traps of the flesh and follow Christ. And by faith, put themselves with Him on a cross and see themselves rise with Him into glorious light and freedom. Grant this we pray. Lead these dear friends on. Put the right books in their hands. Lead them to the right Scripture. Help them to find time during the day or night that they ordinarily don’t have, to settle some of these things privately. Grant it we pray.

And let this, we pray Thee, spread not only here to these who raised their hands but all among Thy children. Begin we pray Thee, O God, soon to draw a line between the swaggering, smiling, self-assured, self-confident, bold, Christians and the lowly and the meek and the humble and the merciful who deny self and follow Thee. Let the Holy Ghost come upon some people, the humble, the lowly, the crucified, that they may rise to newness of life to shine and be an example to the ones that aren’t. Let it be so, we pray. In the name of Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

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“The Chief Cornerstone and Us as Stones”

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The Chief Cornerstone and Us as Stones

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

January 31, 1954

As you are aware, I am bringing sermons from First Peter every Sunday morning. We are now in the second chapter. I spoke last week on laying aside all malice and guile and hypocrisies and envies and evil speaking. As newborn babes, desire the sincere milk of the word that ye may grow thereby. Then he continues without pause: If so be ye have tasted that the Lord is gracious. To whom coming, as unto a living stone, disallowed indeed of men, but chosen of God, and precious ye also, as lively stones, are built up a spiritual house, a holy priesthood, to offer up spiritual sacrifices, acceptable to God by Jesus Christ. I think those three verses will be enough for the morning. Beginning with, if so be ye have tasted that the Lord is gracious.

Now, what he has to say, the following, rests upon the, ‘if ye have tasted that the Lord is gracious.” One great error that we make in coming to the Bible is to assume that because a thing is true, it’s true of us. If it is in the Bible, it is true. But the error is to assume that it is true of us. It is not necessarily always so, even that which follows the truth of God, Peter conditions upon the little word “if” and says, if ye have tasted, then what I say from here on, is applicable to you. But if you have not tasted, then you should go back and taste before you go any further.

Now, this is required of us to be called New Testament Christians at all, that we have tasted the good Word of God and the powers of the world to come. That we have tasted that the Lord is gracious. And I want that word “tasted” to mean what it means in the Bible and not what it means when we mean we experiment. We mean that we test a thing by putting it to the tongue as a woman tests her cooking. They used to. I don’t know whether they still do, but they used to test their soup with a little spoon, taste of it, to see if it was salty enough and was all right. I suppose that’s ordinary.

But that’s never what the Bible means, to test the thing to see if it’s all right, with no intention maybe of eating it; maybe never going on to eat it at all, but at least knowing what it’s like. Now, that is not what the Bible means. We have only to look it up in its original and find that the word taste here means experienced, lived through. To in order that a thing may be real to us, and everlastingly ours, it must be experienced. It must be lived through.

Now that same word “tasted” that Peter uses here, the precise word is used about our Savior in the book of Hebrews. It says that Jesus was made a little lower than the angels, that He, by the grace of God should taste death for every man. Now those who teach the tasting doctrine ought to give this some attention here. If the word taste in the New Testament means tested with the tongue to see if we like it or not, then that’s all Jesus did with death. For the same word is used that He tasted death for every man.

So, you see, my brethren, the word taste here does not mean experiment–try it by a touch–but it means experienced, gone through, encountered, past into and through. And that’s exactly what happened to our Lord when He died on the cross. He did not experiment with death and see whether He liked it, taste it to see whether He dared go on. But He threw Himself recklessly out and gave Himself to die; and experienced death in the fullest sense of that word.

Now these believers had experienced, and they had experienced not the grace of God only, but that the Lord was gracious. I do not want to split hairs. I never was much of a hair splitter. But where there is a difference, we ought to note that difference and distinguish things that differ in the language of Paul. And here I do know the difference. He does not say, if so be that you have tasted of the grace of God. But He says, if so be that you have tasted that the Lord is gracious. There is a difference between testing or tasting or even experiencing the Word of God or the grace of God and experiencing the gracious God.

There is a difference there, my brethren. We never should separate a gift from the source of the gift. We never should say, I have forgiveness. We should say, God has forgiven. We never should say I have eternal life. We should say God has given me eternal life. And Christ is my life.

The point there is that God does not divorce Himself from His gifts. He gives Himself in whatever He gives. If a man has been forgiven, what has happened to him is that God, the forgiving God, has touched him and thus forgiven him. But it is God that matters more than the forgiveness. If a man has eternal life, it is that he might know Jesus Christ, God the Father and Jesus Christ, whom He has sent. That word “know” is experienced there again.

So that we must be very careful that we do not divorce God’s gifts from God Himself. I think that is what’s wrong with this in our day. We have the gifts of God, but we forget the God of the gifts. There’s a difference between noble, strong, vigorous and satisfying spiritual experience and the other kind of spiritual experience, which takes the gifts of God but forgets the Giver.

An example of that, a most ignoble example, is found in the gospels where 10 lepers came to Jesus and were healed of their leprosy. Now, they did receive healing and they were delivered. The old spots went away. The old sores disappeared. The old symptoms were gone. They were 10 healthy men, and with this new gift of health, they all started away. And nine of them kept right on going, satisfied with the gift of health, but the 10th one happened to remember that he had received a gift from the Giver and his eyes went from the gift to the Giver. And he came back humbly and thanked the Lord Jesus. And Christ said sadly, where are the nine? The others were satisfied with the gift, but one came back to get better acquainted with the Giver.

It was Campbell Morgan that said, we ought never in our gospel preaching to offer men peace. We ought never in our gospel preaching to offer men repose from their conscience. We ought never to offer them anything short of life. And I repeat, that we should never divorce any gift we offer to men, we never should divorce it from the Giver. We should hold it for the Giver as we sing. So that, he did not say, ye have tasted the grace of God, though they had. But he said, you have tasted that the Lord is gracious. And that’s quite something else again.

Our selfish praying, when we come to God with a long grocery list and petition God to do this and do this and do this and do this. And if God answers our prayers, then we cross it off and go on down to the next list, and so on we go. It seems to me that it’s very saddening to the heart of God to be thus used as a convenience.

It seems to me that the Lord Jesus must be very heavy hearted, be times, when He finds His redeemed people more taken up with the redemption than they are with the Redeemer; his forgiven people more taken up with forgiveness than they are with the Forgiver, His living people with whom He has given life, more taken up with the life than they are with the Life Giver. We ought in our preaching and teaching and personal experience, to make a strong return to God himself, to the person of God. In fact, I am not sure but we could condense everything that we want into sentences beginning with God, or having God in it somewhere. God is. God is present. God loves. God’s Word, that God’s Holy Spirit, God’s Messiah, everything belongs and begins and ends and continues with God.

Now, he said, if you have tasted and experienced that the Lord is gracious. Your experience has been with the gracious Lord unto whom coming. Now this was true of them as it’s true of all real Christians everywhere. I give you four prepositions. I am not unmindful of the fact that I sometimes poke good-natured fun at the prepositional preaching. But I give you four prepositions, inconsistent or not, as you like.

You know what Emerson said about consistency. He said, It was the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. So, we’ll throw it aside and point out for prepositions here. First, they came out and then they came away and then they came together, and then they came on to. Now, not in that order, probably, and they didn’t do it together. They might have come one at a time or two at a time. But taken all together, these four things can be said about these Christians.

First of all, they came out of the world. We are now trying to take the world into the church, sanctify it, baptize it, anoint it, and try to hide its skulls and crossbones. I preached last night to a Baptist Men’s Fellowship on the North Side with 408 men were there, and I talked to them about coming out and separating ourselves from the world. Not this sermon, certainly. But I did introduce the idea there, and I repeat it to you now that there must be a coming out.

Israel had to come out of Egypt before she could come in to Palestine. Always Abraham had to come out before He could come in. And so, with everybody else, there must be a coming out. And any kind of Christianity, however orthodox it may sound, that does not major on the doctrine of coming out, that is, coming out of the world, is inadequate and imperfect.

And then after the word out, we have the word, away. They came away from the old life, whatever that old life might have been. To one person, it’s one thing to another, it is another. But whatever it is, the old life, we come away from, when we come to Jesus Christ. To taste the good grace of God and that the Lord is gracious there must be a coming away from the old life.

And then naturally, there is a coming on to Christ. That after all is–it’s what the gospel is–it’s a coming unto Christ. And then there is the word, together, a coming together. That is, they’re coming on to each other. As we gather unto Christ, naturally we gather unto each other. And the nearer we get to Christ naturally, the nearer we get to each other, so that the way to get Christians together is not to form some kind of a political united front. The way to get them together is to bring them close to Jesus Christ. Just as if we had something down here at the front of the church, some curio or missionary exhibit, and I wanted to get you all together, closer together even than you are now. And I invited you to come down and see it. Well, as you came onto it, you would come unto each other, and the closer you got to it, the closer you would be to each other until finally, shoulder would touch shoulder, and you’d be pushing close together to see this exhibit.

And so, when we come unto Christ, it’s automatic that we come unto each other. That is what I have never been able to understand this, monkish errormitic, if I might. I don’t know if there is such a word. There ought to be, and there is now. But this word that covers the idea of going off by yourself to be a Christian. There are people like that. They’re antisocial, or rather unsocial in disposition, so they do not like the fellowship of the saints. I remind you, my friend, that if you have heard, Jesus is, you’re surrounded by Jesus’ people. And therefore, we ought to make the fellowship of the church the biggest thing in our lives.

And I’d like to say right here at the risk of hurting somebody, for that isn’t too important after all. It may hurt a little, but it may do some good, that the important thing in the world today is the presence of an invisible spiritual entity called the church. And the Holy Ghost never works outside that entity. He works through that entity in some manner or other. That is why I’m a church man. I’m going to preach this week at a Bible school or Bible college, it is now. And I believe in them, of course. But I remember a Bible school president that once smiled good-naturedly and sort of kiddingly to me and he said, you’re church minded. You’re not school minded.

How could a minister of the church of Christ become school-minded? A school is simply an instrument with a temporary value which may for time serve a purpose. But it is not the school he said. I did not say on this school I will build my church. Or take the very many laymen’s organizations. I do not say but what they have some value in the world. I believe they do. But remember, they get their value from the church. And if God works in them at all, He works through His church. It is the church, that group that comes together unto Him.

And whether they’re red or yellow, black or white, whether they lived in the first century or the 20th, the coming together unto Christ makes the church. It’s a called-out assembly. So, those four words, they came out of the world, they came away from the old life, they came unto Christ, and they came together relative to each other.

Now he says, you’ve come unto Christ as unto a living stone. Now, this is a frequent Bible passage or a Bible figure, this stone or rock as it’s sometimes called. And it almost invariably, if not invariably, refers to a building. I think there may be a few places where David uses it as a great craggy rock where he hides. But for the most part, the figure has to do with a building. And because the Jews were a God-conscious people, their thought ran to a temple building. I should think somebody ought to write about this or talk about it, for the church, and make the people of God see that the Jewish nation, above all nations of the world, were a God-conscious nation.

America is not a God-conscious nation. We’re a secular people. We have what the Bible calls a profane mind. And even those who may toss God a sop when making a political speech, to get the votes of the religious-minded people. If you probe in far enough, for the most part, you’ll find that our leadership is composed of secular-minded people. I don’t use the word in a wrong sense, but in the sense that Esau was secular-minded. This world was the the point of interest for the man. And that’s all right, provided that we have another and higher interest. But Esau didn’t have it, and the nation of America doesn’t have it much.

But Israel had it. Israel, in fact, had nothing else. Have you forgotten that Israel had no civil laws at all? There was a day in England when she had two sets of laws, the ecclesiastical laws and the civil laws. Whether that’s still true, I don’t know. But they did for many centuries. And a man could be tried before the civil law and then turned loose and tried before the ecclesiastical law. The church could try a man for certain offenses and the civil law for certain other offenses.

And there were two kinds of officers, civil officers and ecclesiastical officers. And there were two worlds within, worlds mingling there, wheels within wheels. But not so in Israel. Israel had no civil officers. Israel had no civil law. Israel had no code, no code of jurisprudence. Israel had no statutes on her books, except those that were of God. The Bible was her code of law, and her priests and scribes were her officials, and her high priest, her leader and her king anointed of God was her ruler. So that Israel was a sacred nation. A people who were God conscious more than any people that have ever lived in the world. And never has been a nation as a God-conscious as Israel, so that Israel’s science was all God-founded.

We turn a telescope into the heavens now and we look at the stars. And we separate the stars from the God who made them, and we have astronomy. We dig in the rocks, and we have geology. And we monkey with the little flying, microscopic or sub microscopic matter, and we have physics. So we separate nature from God, but Israel never knew how to do that. God was everything. If an Israelite looked at a hill, it was God’s Hill. If he looked at a tree, the tree clapped its hands. If he looked at it raining, it was God who sent the rains.

So, a Jew never complained. He said, it was miserable weather, isn’t it? God sent that rain, and God was in everything. So that when a figure of speech occurred, it was a divine figure speech. And when they talked about a rock and a stone, they were talking about a building that was a temple building. Now, they had a temple building there, of course, but it was composed of dead stones, laid one upon another. They were hewn out, and then laid one upon another and joined to each other by cutting and mortaring.

And that was a dead temple. And God knew it was a dead temple. And the only living thing in it was the Shekinah that dwelt between the wings of the golden cherubim. The temple itself was a dead thing. And our Lord knew it. He pointed to its stones and said there will be a time when everything all that you see will fall to the ground and be no more, passed over; and they even plowed the place where the temple had been. That’s because it was a dead temple.

But this new temple unto which we are come, this new temple is composed of living stones and is a living temple. And its cornerstone is Christ, and its stones are redeemed men and women who are alive by the gift of eternal life. He says, ye also are living stones.

Just a side here, not a part of the sermon, but just for your ecclesiastical education, I might point out that this King James Version, which is supposed to be always inerrant, makes a cute little mistake here. It says that ye are come unto Christ, the living stone, and you are lively stones. Now I wonder why the translators did that because in the Greek, it’s exactly the same word. Both words mean living. But when the translators were translated in 340 some years ago, the word living and lively almost meant the same thing, but they don’t now. Lively means, you know, what your boy is, hopping around, never in one place twice. Like the Irishman who was sent out to count the chickens. He came back and said there were 37 and one that he couldn’t count. It traveled around too fast. And that’s what the word lively means. It means moving about so rapidly you can’t get it in one place long enough to count it.

But that word lively has lost its meaning. It doesn’t mean what it meant back there. It says the same thing about the church member as it says about the head of the church, Jesus Christ. He is the Living Stone and the members that make up the great temple are also living stones. There is a plural and a singular, but there is no difference in the adjective itself.

Now, Israel had a dead temple. And because Israel had a dead temple made of dead stone, she couldn’t use a living stone when she found one. And for that reason, He was disallowed indeed of men. And Israel could not use Jesus Christ when He came. He was the headstone, the living headstone of a new kind of temple, not one more stone to go in the old temple, but the headstone of a new kind of temple. And they looked at that stone, and the builder shook their heads and said, He doesn’t fit anywhere. We’ve got our temple. There it stands, stone upon stone, tear upon tear, stone upon stone, stone joined to stone. And it’s got a top on it and it’s there and it is set with beautiful jewels.

And they said, where does this man fit in? Jesus Christ could not fit into Israel. And so, Israel rejected Him and crucified Him because He wasn’t shaped right. He was the stone that was to be, the Guiding Stone for the new temple to come. And He didn’t fit into the old temple at all. But nevertheless, God says that He was chosen and precious. Look at this Stone. I think that it begins way back there when Jacob had that sleep in the wilderness. I will never know. I suppose until I die, and I am able to question Jacob himself, why he wanted a stone for a pillow. He took up of the stones of that place and set them for his pillows. I don’t know why he would use a stone for a pillow, but he did.

And when he saw that vision, he waked out of his sleep and turn that stone over, stood it on end and anointed it and it was called Bethel, the house of God. Then when Israel had come out of Egypt and had gone into the wilderness and were traveling about those 40 years, that same stone says, the Holy Ghost followed them. If it was not exactly the same chunk of rock, it was at least the same symbol, the same figure following through.

So, one day, they were thirsty, and Moses smote the rock and they all drank out of that same rock, at least symbolically, upon which Jacob had laid his head, and which he anointed and called Bethel.

And then when our Lord came, he said that if you fall upon this rock, you shall be saved in a word to that effect, but if it falls upon you, you will be crushed to death. And that was the same stone. And he said, on this rock, I will build my church. And let men say that’s Peter if they want to, but every figure, every type, every symbolism, every suggestion, every simile in the whole Bible indicates that that rock was none other than Jesus Christ Himself.

And then in Daniel, we read of the rock, or the stone that was cut out of the mountain without hands. That’s the second coming of Jesus, when He comes back to put down communists and fascists and all the rest, and to rule in the earth. So, there is our Savior, the Rock.

Now, what is the function of the house which is built around this new rock? It contrasts, I’ve said, with the Old Testament temple, in that the Old Testament temple was made of stones that were dead, and the New Testament made of spiritual stones that are live. And the priests of the old temple, walked into the temple and performed the functions of their office. But the priests of the New Testament are the temple. There is the difference. We have a movable, portable temple, a temple made of living human beings, and every one of those human beings, a priest in his own right.

And we have a great high priest at the right hand of God. And this temple of which we are a part is a temple of priests so that we do not need to have anybody run interference for us when we go into the presence of God. We can come straight to Jesus Christ ourselves. They tell us poor misguided friends, that Jesus is too great and wonderful. We can’t go to Him. But we can go to his mother, and she can go to Him. We don’t have any pull with Jesus, but she has. And if we get to her and get her ear, she’ll go and have a talk with Jesus and then it’ll be all right. We don’t need her, my brethren. She has performed her function, this lovely little Jewish lady. She brought into the world the man, Christ Jesus, and gave Him a body which was later offered as a sacrifice on Calvary. And she did her function when she brought Him up and fed Him at her breast and looked after Him and loved Him until He was a man. Then she passed out of the picture and Jesus Christ filled the horizon of believing men.

So, we are priests, and we need no other priest to help us. This temple is a shrine where God dwells. And in that temple, we offer not goats, not lambs, not doves, but spiritual sacrifices, says Peter; loving service and praise and song and worship. You know, the critics call us song singers. They called the old Scotch people, they said, a bunch of sam-singing Scotsman.

Oh, my brethren, those sam-singing Scotsman have made their mark in the world, I’m telling you. And our forebearers who walked the rugged shores of New England, and who stamped America with their noble character once, they were sam-singers too. They met in little groups, log buildings, dedicated to the worship, and there they sung songs and offered the fruits of their lips, praises unto God. But they didn’t stop there, they shouldered their axe and went out and felled a forest and established cities and build a civilization the likes of which the world had never known, those psalm-singing Puritans.

God hears songs when they’re sung in His name and for His glory. We’re offering up psalms to our Lord, and songs and spiritual melodies in the Holy Ghost. And the critical, cynical world sees us come, close our eyes and talk to someone we can’t see and say, what’s it all about? We answer, this is a temple of God, dedicated to the God of the temple. And we, the priests of the temple, sing these songs to God, the Unseen. And make our prayers to God, the Unseen. Though unseen, He is real, and though unseen, He is nigh, and we’re not such fools as the world would make us out to be.

Now, I’m almost finished. He says that these praises and songs and spiritual sacrifices are acceptable to God. He accepted the Cornerstone. He accepted the living stones which are gathered to the Cornerstone to make a temple for the Holy Ghost. And He accepts the service that is wrought in that temple and performed in that shrine.

So, you haven’t wasted the morning, brethren. You haven’t simply followed a custom, like mistletoe and wreaths at Christmas. You’ve done an act. You’ve performed an act that God accepts through Jesus Christ. If you’ve really prayed this morning. If you really sung a true song this morning. If you have made your gifts out of the love of God this morning, you’ll go away and you have nothing to show for it, certainly. And the world laughs and says you have nothing to show for it.

But remember, not every precious thing shows the same time it’s received. Remember, there is a time when the invisible things will be the only real things. And the visible world shall dissolve in smoke and pass away and God will roll them up as a garment, and as vestures, they shall be changed. But the invisible things of God from the creation which we have in Christ Jesus, will continue as real as heaven itself, forever and forever. Now, if this is true for you, he says, if so be that you have tasted, if so be that you have experienced that the Lord is gracious. I repeat, a thing may be true but not true of me.

So the most vital thing to settle, you religious-minded people, the most vital thing to settle, is not the trues of the Scriptures, for these have been established beyond peradventure, world without end. The Scriptures are already established by two immutable things, by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead and the down-coming of the Holy Ghost.

Everything hinges on Jesus Christ. The truth of the whole Word of God rests on the shoulders of Mary’s holy Son. And if he failed us, the whole thing collapses round our ears. If He’s who He said He was and rises from the dead, then He supports all the rest of the Bible itself. That’s why I’m not afraid of modernists and critics and higher critics and fault finders and cynics. That’s why I’m not worried about Jonah and the whale. I never spent five minutes in my life trying to decide whether a whale could swallow Jonah or not. God Almighty could make a whale that would swallow not only Jonah but the whole ship and Nineveh thrown in.

The point isn’t whether Jonah was swallowed by a whale. The point is, what did Jesus Christ say about it? And he said, as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the whale, so shall the Son of Man be three days in the bowels of the earth. He tied Himself up with the truth of the Jonah story. Therefore, the Jonah story is true because the Truth said it was.

So, your business is not to determine whether the Bible is true or not. The resurrection of Jesus Christ and His ascension to the right hand of God, and the down coming Holy Ghost, forever takes apologetics out of the hands of men and puts it in the hands of the Spirit. And we know the Bible is true, not by long, painful reasonings. We know it is true by a flash of inspiration from the Throne and from the Holy Ghost who brings the flash. So, your big problem isn’t whether the Bible is true, brother. Your big problem is whether it’s true in you. It isn’t whether the Bible is true, but it’s whether these things are true in me.

The old German poet said, though Christ a thousand times in Bethlehem be born, if He’s not born again in thee, thy heart is still forlorn. If I were a poet, I’d add some more stanzas and I think he did. Scheffler, I think he added some more. I think Scheffer added some more which I can’t quote verbatim, but they run something like this, that if Christ die a 1000 times on a cross, if we do not accept and receive, He died in vain as far as we are concerned. And though the Bible be the very rock of God’s Gibraltar, if it isn’t true in us, it’s vain as far as we’re concerned.

So, what do we need to do today, brethren, is not to go home and overeat and sit around and look at television. What we need to do today would be to go home and eat modestly, and then some of us at least ought to go to our rooms, open our Bible, get down on our knees and say, O God, are these things true of me? You know, you can be an awfully nice person and still not be a true Christian.

I told my Swedish friends last night, my good Baptist friends; there were only four of us foreigners there that we knew of. Myself, a Scotsman, an Irishman, and another man, unidentified, I think, English. Outside of that they were all natives. But I told them that I like Swedes. They’re all nice people. But you can be an awfully nice person and not be born again. You can be an awfully nice religious person and never have tasted that the Lord is gracious.

Oh, my friends. Let’s not waste this holy day. Let’s search our own hearts. Let’s see for ourselves if these things be so in us. We don’t need to see if they be so. I repeat, a resurrected Savior and a down-coming Holy Ghost confirm forever the fact the Bible is true, but is it true in us? That’s the big question. And I want you to take it home with you. Search yourself and ask, in the light of God’s revealed truth, O God, I believe this, but is it true in me? If it isn’t, it can be. Faith and repentance can make it real in your heart.

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“Whatsoever He Shall Doeth Shall Prosper II”

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Whatsoever He Shall Doeth Shall Prosper II

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

March 4, 1956

This is to be the second of two messages given from the first Psalm. Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor standeth in the way of sinners, nor sitteth in the seat of the scornful. But his delight is in the law of the Lord. And in His law doth he meditate day and night. He shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water that bringeth forth his fruit in his season. His leaf also shall not wither, and whatsoever he doeth shall prosper. Now, verse three about the tree beside the water bringing forth fruit in season. The leaf never fading, and everything the man doing, succeeding.

I talked about that last week and said that it was the will of God that His people should always succeed as Christians; and then I suggested that we weren’t all successes. And I was not accusing anybody, but I was only pointing out that in the light of what we could be as children of God, what we are is a pretty disheartening thing.

Now we ought to face up to it, and ask ourselves why we’re not, and then see if we can do something about it. We may not have too long to do anything about it, when we consider the years that we have spent avoiding God’s eyes. When God tried to get our eyes, we looked everywhere but back into His eyes again; changing the subject when He tried to bring it up; putting off when he tried to get us to see. We’ve done this, and some of us have done it a long, long time. And some have done it so long that you have formed a habit of so doing, a habit that I wonder if you can ever break for the rest of your life.

Now, it is better a thousand times, to face up to a question than it is to pretend and to comfort ourselves. I never want to be comforted in wrongdoing. Neither do I want anybody to comfort me in failure. It is encouraging, of course, to have someone come to you and say that they have enjoyed what you’ve done and that they feel the Lord has blessed you in your doing. That’s all right. And as long as we are made the way we are, we’ll be like that, I’m sure. We’ll do it and it’s all right. I have no objection. I only say that if all the reward I get is the hand clasp of somebody who complements me, it’s going to be a very disappointing thing indeed.

And on the other hand, if in the Great Day, we find the Lord has been trying to get our eyes; that He has been trying to get us talking and thinking on a certain subject and we have refused, and put it off and changed the subject, and have not faced up to our spiritual failures, I’m afraid the little handshake and compliment we get down here isn’t going to be a very great reward in that terrible day. Better a thousand times to plead guilty before the fact and seek God’s face and correct our lives and conform to the Word, and where we’ve been failing, begin to succeed.

Now, if we’re not spiritual successes, we are in that degree out of the will of God, because it’s the will of God that we should be. And there are four principles laid down here, four things said about the successful man. Four things that make him successful, four things the Christian does that make him a successful Christian. And of course, it’s only reasonable and logical that if he is not a successful Christian, he must have flouted these rules of success. He must have violated these laws of success. Now here they are. The successful man walks not in the counsel of the ungodly. He sits not in the seat of the scornful. He stands not in the way of the sinner. But he takes his secret delight in the law of God and feasts in that law, day and night.

Now, there are only four things there. Let’s look at them. The successful Christian walks not in the counsel of the ungodly. There is room for at least ten lectures, ten sermons on the counsel of the ungodly. So, this is the hour of the ungodly. I think it is one of the most discouraging thoughts that the mind can entertain, that the modern wave of religion without Christ and religion without repentance, religion without penitence, religion without the new birth, religion without the blood, has so stamped itself upon the thinking of the modern American public as to completely overshadowed such churches as ours, and such teaching as ours and such teaching as the Bible gives. The counsel of the non-godly in religion has come in like an ocean and swept away a pond and covered it up.

And if we could consider our Bible teaching, simply a little pond full of the water of life. But the great, salty, brackish ocean of ungodly teaching has come in and swallowed us up until we hardly know where we are. Everywhere it is the same, religion, religion without God, religion without Christ, religion without purity, religion without repentance, religion without the cross, the counsel of the ungodly. Millions of dollars are behind it. Millions of dollars are behind it, putting forth the counsel of the ungodly as the very counsel of righteousness.

But the Christian man has eyes to see and ears to hear and a sharp nose to smell out that which is good, and that which is putrefied, and he pays no attention to the counsel of the ungodly. And if he is not succeeding, if the Christian is not a successful Christian, then it can only be because he is, in some measure, walking in the counsel of the ungodly. He is following ungodly advice. He is valuing what the world values and under-valuing that which Jesus our Lord valued.

Jesus, our Lord told us plainly that there were certain things which were very precious to God but were hated by the world and certain things which were abomination to God but were loved by the world. The values, the sense and scale of values of God and man are opposite to each other. And therefore, a Christian who is not succeeding in his Christian life must conclude, if he wants to be honest, that he is walking in the counsel of the ungodly. That he is listening to the advice, even religious advice it may be, even very purring, soft advice. The advice of the soft voice, non-godly religionist, to say nothing of the world. He’s listening to that advice and allowing himself to be affected by it.

I repeat, my brethren, a Christian must be as upright as the palm, and he must be as unbending as a steel beam. And the edges of his life must be sharp. And there must be a clear delineation between right and wrong. And he must stand out there, even though it is to be a target for rotten eggs and rotten tomatoes. He must stand.

I’m in the process of reading for the second time, a book by Chesterton. He’s writing on Thomas Aquinas and St. Francis of Assisi, and he’s quite a writer. He was of course a great secular, worldly writer, but he was also something of a Christian. And I read him mainly for his style, a brilliant, incisive style. Well, he has a remarkably penetrating mind and an ability to analyze situations.

And here is what Chesterton said about Aquinas in his day and St. Francis in his. He said they changed the moral climate of their days by virtue of the fact that they were in violent contrast to their day. And he said, it is one of the ironies of history, that every generation, if it’s converted, is converted by those who most violently disagree with it. And he’s perfectly right. There never was anybody that lived in the world that was in more radical disagreement with His times than Jesus Christ our Lord. And the church in its early time was in violent disagreement with the world, so violent that the clash meant bloody death for millions of Christians in the first 300 years of Christian history.

But the ungodly counsel, however they may quote Scripture, and however they may coo and purr and massage your back and make you feel good and smile. It’s the counsel of similarity. It is the counsel of agreement. It is the counsel of getting along with folks. It is the counsel of tolerance. It is the counsel of being like people and finding a common ground of agreement. The idea of violent disagreement never occurs to the modern Christian scarcely. But even a man, a worldly man like Chesterton could say that the reason Aquinas and St. Francis moved their generation was because they were in violent disagreement with their generation. And the reason Jesus moved his generation, among other things, was that he stood for something utterly unlike and other than they stood for. And though He died, His principles triumph.

Well, you’re maybe not succeeding, because unknown to you, you’re being brainwashed. You’re not seeing the way God sees nor thinking the way God thinks. You are up to a certain measure thinking along with God, doctrinally, but in your inner life, maybe you’ve been brainwashed by the counsel of the ungodly. Maybe the world has got to you. Maybe it has affected you by its palm-licking, ingratiating approach and rather than have any fuss, you go along with it. Rather than disagree, you agree. Rather than feel the needles of the cross, you allow them to give you a beautiful, painted cross with no nails in it. I don’t say it’s true, but I say that it’s true of those who are in any given instance. I don’t say it’s true, but I say it’s true of everybody that’s not profiting and not bearing fruit in season and not succeeding in the Christian life.

Then, the successful Christian sits not in the seat of the scornful. That means, of course, that he’s a reverent man, a basically a reverent, sincere man. The sneer is out of his life. If he’s not succeeding, then it must be that he’s doubting, that he’s slighting. He’s holding lightly some sacred thing, that he is scorning some holy things, some holy thought. That he is allowing himself to go along with the scornful, with those who curl their lip at holy things and smile condescendingly on the things of God.

No, my brethren, if God Almighty will help me, I will never smile at an off colored joke nor laugh at any joke involving the Scripture nor allow anybody to get away with any conversation in my presence that speaks lightly of Jesus Christ our Lord or the Bible or of holy things. And if it means that I get in trouble, then I must get in trouble. If they hated my Master, would they not hate His servants? And if they rejected the Master, would they not reject those who work for the Master? And I would consider it a great honor to be rejected by those who reject the Master.

A man wrote me a letter this week from out on the West Coast. And he said, I saw the other day where you had been taken apart by a certain fellow. And he said, I was taken apart by him some years back. He attacked me in print as he has you. And he said, he put me down with Charles Fuller and the editor of the Sunday School times and rejected us forthright. He said I felt rather honored to be in such good company, the company of Charles Fuller and the editor of the Sunday School times. Now I’m in it and he’s in it. That makes us four and we hope no more. But we are the rejectees of this brother who can write well.

My friend, if he rejects me for the parts that you see in me that you don’t like, I’m sorry. But if he rejects me because of my stand for Christ, I’m glad. God forbid, as the great poet Meyer said, God forbid that I should be guilty of the treason of seeking an honor that they gave not Thee. I have never had anything but sheer contempt for the American traveling abroad who will turn on his own country in order to make himself at home and ingratiate himself with, say, people in England or somewhere, will turn and speak against his own country. I say that’s a contemptible man, who in the foreign land will speak against his own land for the sake of getting along. No sir, better to be chased out and deported and sent home and come back an American. Better be abused for Christ’s sake and because you’re a Christian. Sit not in the seat of the scornful.

And he stands not in the sinner’s way. It’s odd. This is an ambiguous sentence as beautiful as it is in English, and as standard and classic as it has become. It is still an ambiguous sentence. He standeth not in the way of sinners. And I have found numbers of people who misunderstand that passage. They think it means they get in the sinner’s way. They interpreted to mean that this Christian is one who does not cause the other worldly man to blunder, cause him to stumble. That’s not what it means at all. It means standing in the sinner’s way means standing the way sinners stand. And standing in a sinful way, the way that is sinful. This Christian who is failing is found; he is allowing something that he ought to be disallowing. He’s excusing something that he ought to be condemning. He’s doing something that he ought not to be doing, or he is neglecting something that he ought to be doing.

Now, that’s what it says here, and I’m not adding anything. I’m only saying that if three and two make five, two and three, make five too. And I’m only saying, that if the successful man walks not in the counsel of the ungodly, and the man is not successful, he must be walking in the counsel of the ungodly. If the successful Christian sits not in the seat of the scornful, and some Christian is not succeeding, he must be sitting in the seat of the scornful, at least sometimes. If the successful Christian stands not in the way of sinners, and a man is not successful, he must be standing in the way of sinners.

And there’s the fourth proposition with which we’ll bring it to a close. And in the law does he meditate day and night. His delight is in the law of the Lord. Now, I have a number of questions to ask. Do you read your Bible? Second, do you delight to read your Bible? Do you relish it? Do you know, Christian people can get religious habits and do things that they don’t have much relish for at all.

You don’t like to wash on Monday or Tuesday, do you sister? You don’t like to do it. You don’t like to wash your car. Do you sir? You don’t like to do it but you have it to do. There are other things you don’t like to do. You don’t like to make a trip to the dentist every so often. And if you’re on a diet you don’t like to keep to that diet. But you do it because you think it’s worthwhile. There are some children that don’t like to go to school. After the first three days, I never saw one yet that wanted to go to school. The first three days they’re eager about it and then after that it tapers off and they can hardly wait till the last day. But there are some things you do because you have to do it.

But the Scripture here does not say that the successful man reads the Bible because he knows he should. It says he delights to read the Bible. In His law doth he meditate day and night. And his delight is in the law of the Lord. My brother and sister, in the long pull, you’re going to be what you delight in. In the long pull, you’re going to be what you delight in. And if you delight in the Word of God, then you’re going to be conformed to the Word of God. If you delight in prayer, you’re going to be conformed by prayer and transformed. But if you do it because you have to, it’s simply homework.

I had a long conversation with a Catholic priest one time on the train, a very lovely man. And we talked at great length. He finally admitted I was a Christian. He said I was. But I had interrupted him, and I saw a little book he had there and I said, well, Father, excuse me, I suppose I’ve interrupted your homework. And he laughed and said, no, no, it’s perfectly all right. I’ll catch up. So, I went away, and he got to reading. He may enjoy that, and I hope he does. But I’m afraid an awful lot of that is just homework. It’s just something they’re doing because they have to do.

And you can go to church regularly. You can read your Bible. You can even have family prayer. You can give your tithe and still not be a successful Christian, because the successful Christian delights to do these things. He doesn’t do them because he knows he must. He does them because there’s a delight in.

Well, there we have it now. And my dear friends, as I said, before, we can bring the sun up if we will. We’re Christians. Were alive, like the man, Lazarus, who was in the grave, dead and all wrapped up. You know how they wrapped him like an old-fashioned army puttee, wrapped from the knee down, round and round and round and round, bandaged. And they buried them that way.

And Jesus said, Lazarus come forth, and he, showing sheer willpower, came forth. And I still don’t know how he got out of there, because he was wrapped from head to feet. But he got out of there and stood up, a funny looking fellow with nothing but his face showing. He was alive all right, but he was all wrapped up. What could he do? He couldn’t travel. He couldn’t play an instrument. He couldn’t feed himself. He couldn’t help anybody up to their feet. He couldn’t work. He couldn’t move. He was wrapped with grave clothes, brown, grave clothes.

And Jesus said, loose him and let him go and then began this swift, excited unwrapping of that fellow, starting at the bottom and then he got his feet loose, and he could kick his feet. And then he got up and he could wiggle his hands and then pretty soon he could raise his arms. Pretty soon, he threw the whole thing off. He was a free man now. He had been alive before but bound by grave clothes.

And the Christian that is listening even a little bit to the counsel of the world, who sits even occasionally in the seat of the scornful or stands even occasionally in the sinner’s way or who reads his Bible with any other reason but relish and delight, he’s alive all right, but he still has grave clothes on. Oh my God, that we might be loosed and let go. Loose him and let him go.

Well, just as long as we think this weird looking bandage affair is a real Christian, we will never do anything about it. And there are those who write books and even write songs in defense of the wrapped-up Lazarus. Lazarus, he’s alive, isn’t he? Praise the Lord. And in the judgment day or the day of Christ’s coming, we’ll all get unwrapped. No, sir, Jesus said unwrap him now, unwrap him now. Loose him, let him go now.

It is not the will of God that His children should wear the old-fashioned wrapping they used to wrap babies in, swaddling clothes. No wonder the women in those bad old days lost about three out of five of their children. The old lady told her young daughter in law very sharply how she should raise her baby and she said, I ought to know, I’ve lost five.

And that was the way back in those old days. About half of them lived and the other half died, and I wonder how they could keep from dying when you consider that they wrapped them up like an automobile accident victim from head to feet and they couldn’t move hands or feet. I don’t think God wants His people to be wrapped in either grave closes or swaddling clothes. He wants His people not only to be alive but to have the use of their members–be free. And thus, to prosper and succeed in everything they do.

This is a wonderful time this morning for us to take stock, look ourselves over and pour out our confession. I don’t think that anybody ought to take communion without confession. And by confession, I don’t mean a confession to me or any other living man on this earth. Against whom have we sinned? Against God. All right, confess to God. If I’ve sinned against somebody, I would confess to somebody. But have I sinned against God? Why should I drag the third party and confess to him? I confess to the one I’ve offended.

If I have wronged My Lord by unsuccessful living and failure, then I ought to bow my head right now and be in communication with the One I’ve wronged. Say, have mercy upon me O God according to Thy loving kindness and according to the multitude of Thy tender mercies, blot out my sins. For against Thee only have I sinned and done this evil in Thy sight. I don’t believe in confessing to a third party. If I wronged McAfee, I’m not going to confess to Maxey. I have not wronged him I have wronged him. I confess to the man I’m wronged. So, bow your head and confess to the one you have wronged.

Against Thee only have I sinned and done this evil in Thy sight, O God. Tell God about that. Don’t carelessly, please, better skip it than carelessly receive the communion. Let a man examine himself and let him so take, said Paul.

So, let’s examine ourselves. Are we successful in our Christian lives? Are we bearing fruit in season? Is what we’re doing prospering? Are we free children of the resurrection? Are we God’s samples of God’s children and of God’s handiwork? If we’re not, something is wrong. And whatever that wrong is, let’s find it and admit it and confess it to God. The Lord will wash it away by the blood of His Son. Starting right this morning, we can begin a brand-new life in Christ. Amen.

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“While it is Today II”

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While it is Today II

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

February 27, 1955

I wanted to talk about our day where it says, while it is called today. I pointed out last week that the word “day “and related words, occur 2500 times in the Bible. The Bible makes a great deal of the day. A very young man who would always find it easy to find that one great problem and name it. But, as we get older, we realize that life is not so simple as all that; it dovetails and blends. For instance, we never quite know when it’s day, because the night and the day have a period when they blend. We call it twilight. Usually in the evening, it’s called twilight, meaning two lights, the darkness coming on and the other light not yet gone.

So, it is with almost everything, they interlock, and they have their periods when we scarcely know whether it is morning or noon or evening. But let us think of the grown-up day now, of serious responsibility. The morning is the time when we make our start, and then comes on the day. The long serious day, I repeat, of grown-up responsibility. And the one great trouble with this, if I might thus call it one great trouble. The one great trouble is that the church is filled with retarded children. That is, children that have not developed. I think that to God, it easily could be and probably is as saddening to have a church full of retarded saints, as it would be for a man and a woman to have children that are retarded.

Many long years ago, and not a one of you will remember anything about this, but many long years ago in this city, this church touched a family. Nobody’s here now and so don’t please think I mean anybody present. But this church touched a family. And through one of our members and my own little ministry, we helped the family some that was composed almost all together of subnormal children. I think there was one out of a large family that was one wouldn’t have called subnormal if he was seen on the street. But the rest were retarded. They they didn’t grow. They didn’t develop. They were born into the world physically, and they grew physically, but they never grew mentally. That is, not much. There were some that were stopped when they were this age and some when they were that age, but the whole family, with the single exception of the one of which I knew of, were retarded.

Now, that must be a grief to parents. And it must be a grief to God Almighty to look at his church, his little household for which He has given everything and to which He gives Himself without measure and see that we just will not go on. We are retarded.

Now the difference is that a retarded child is not to blame. He is not to be blamed because he can’t help it. He did not retard himself. But the difference is that a Christian, if he’s retarded, is one who has retarded himself and he’s to be blamed for his condition.

And here we have in our churches these days, retarded children, who will not accept the long serious day. They will not accept spiritual adulthood. They will not accept grownup responsibility. They insist upon the drama of the morning. Now dramatic deeds are for the morning and the night. If you will look at your Bible, you will find that, say, Samson for instance. Samson had a very colorful life. But nothing is as colorful as his birth and his death. Take our Lord Himself. It was at His birth that the angels sang. And it was at His death, that the sun went down.

There was drama indeed at the beginning and at the close. And I will grant, that a young Christian starting out may be forgiven and understood, if not yet matured, and not yet up in the things of God. There may be not yet of the old man around that he expects and wants and insists upon something colorful and dramatic. And I will grant the man a right that once he’s gone through the heat and burden of the day and earned his spurs, earned his right to die, I grant that he has the right to call around him, as Jacob did, all his family, and bless them dramatically, and pull his feet into bed and sleep with his fathers. Every Christian ought to be born into the world with color.

And every Christian ought to go out of the world leaving something behind him that we could look back upon, as when a great oak tree goes down on the hillside with a crash and leaves a vacant spot against the sky. But between that dramatic beginning when we first see the light, and that last hour, when we go out of the world into the presence of God above, there’s an awful lot to be done that you just can’t pep up. That it just will not yield itself to colored lights and sound effects. It is the solid business of life; we carry on the hard, laborious work of the day.

Now that’s what God wants his Christian people to do and be, and that’s what we are not. The long day is for the heat and the burden. It is for the time of toiling and the time of traveling and the time of building and the time of cultivating, using four figures here to set forth the work of the Christian: toil like the laborer, travel like the pilgrim, build like the carpenter, and cultivate like the farmer. And whatever work you’re doing, Christian, you’re not going to be around to do it long.

And so, you’d better see that there are three qualities in the work you’re doing. You must see that your work is for God, with God and in God. Now I say for God, because there’s a great deal of religious work that isn’t being done for God at all. It’s being done for self or for the denomination. The loyalty of denomination holds some churches together. They are brought up from the time they’re little children to be loyal to a denomination, and they are loyal. But that’s not the quality that makes work eternal. That doesn’t put everlastingness in the fiber of my deeds, to be loyal to a dead man.

I heard once not so very long ago of an old fellow who had a very lovely and beautiful daughter. And the mother evidently was dead, and this daughter grew to her young teens and had developed into a fine and beautiful young woman, still a kid yet. And this old gentleman kept her, and they had a very poor kind of home, but he kept things together. And then one day, well, they missed her. She didn’t show up around. And some friends just casually asked about her, they could get nothing out of him. He wouldn’t tell anybody what had happened to her. And they finally went to investigate. And they found that she had died a natural death, but she had died. And something had broken in this old man’s head and heart. He had loved that young girl was such awful affection that he knew that if he said that she was gone, they would take her from me. So, every day he dressed her and every day he washed her face and her hands. And every day he talked to her and sat by her and talked.

And it was almost too much for tough policemen and social workers when they came in, and gently and carefully led the old man away weeping and protesting as they led him away. His love had bridged the gulf of death. And was true even in death, and his poor old mind couldn’t understand that the dead have to be as Abraham and Sarah said, buried out of my sight.

Well, that was one old man, loyal to the dead. But I wonder if it isn’t as grotesque and as horrible in the eyes of God when our loyalties go no further than some institution or denomination. Let that institution die, and let the spirit that once kept it alive, go from it and be there no more, and still retain our loyalty to a dead shell and sit and weep beside a corpse. I do not believe in it myself. And I believe that if, I, in my little brief day, I’m going to work in eternal work, I must work for God and not for my denomination or my society. I may work in it, but certainly when I work for it, it’s too late then, to hope to do any good. I must work for God that God might have my loyalty in God alone, not myself, not work for the promotion of myself. People almost kill themselves working for self.

We see a young man very devoted. His glasses get thicker and thicker, and the stoop in his shoulders gets more and more noticeable. And he walks more and more like an old man and he’s just a young fellow. He’s studying. He’s working hard. He’s half killing himself; getting scarcely any sleep. What’s he doing? He’s got an ambition before him. He’s going to be a civil engineer. He’s going to be a physician. He’s got an ambition before him there. And he drives himself and does extra work and studies long hours of the night, gets up half dead in the morning and goes, we say that fellow is sacrificing for an ambition. When we see that in the church, we want to paint a whole halo around the fellow’s head and say what a noble son of the Kingdom he is almost killing himself in the kingdom of God. But I’ve met Christians who have almost killed themselves in the kingdom of God for no higher goal than the exploitation of themselves.

It’s amazing what we will put up with and how much we’ll sacrifice, if at the end of the day, somebody claps his hands, and says, bravo. Verily, they have their reward. Watch out while you’re giving. Watch out while you’re praying. Watch out and take note that you may not be serving God with all your deeds. The long drag of the day when the sun’s hot and the dust is thick. And the freshness of morning is gone and the hope for evening yet lies long way out yonder, and there’s nothing to do, but as they used to say in the army, sweat it out.

You know, from the military comes sometimes, and from sports, comes from wonderful expressions that get adopted into the language. And if it wasn’t for the word “sweat,” I think that would soon be respectable English, and would get into the dictionaries. But what they meant was, there’s no hope, nothing to cheer it up, no salt to make it taste good, no music to march by, just sweat it out. And there’s a lot of that in the kingdom of God, brothers and sisters. Don’t think there isn’t.

If you are so carnal that you always want to march to a brass band, why, woe be to you. There are times when there won’t be a brass band within shouting distance, any direction, when you’ll have to go all by yourself with God, trusting and believing, rather than hearing the sound of the big drum. Well, we’ve got to be sure that we’re working for God.

And then, working with God. Oh, how wonderful it is to work with God. You know, working with some people is not work at all. Can’t you just now, while I’m talking, can’t you think of some people? Working with some people isn’t work. It is so delightful to be with them that it isn’t work at all. That if they’re around the burden of work all goes out of the work, and it’s a long hard drag, but isn’t so hard.

Take the young couple just recently married. They may not have much. Most young couples isn’t it odd, brothers and sisters, that when they’re young and can enjoy it, they don’t have much. And when they get so old, they can’t enjoy it and they’ve always got all they want. That’s the way life is anyhow. That isn’t part of the story. But, if you ever stopped to think how young couples, much in love with each other, can put up with almost anything at all, because being together is enough. They’re working together. That’s the way it should be anyway. And it is, I suppose, a great many times.

Now, working with God takes all of the drudgery out of work. If Paul had said to me, come along. I want you to go along with me. Do you suppose that I’d have complained to my wife that the trip was long and it was heavy and hard and the accommodations were too good? Just to get to go along with Paul would have been simply wonderful. Well, how much more wonderful to have God with us. Lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world. So, to get to go along with the Lord and work with God is a beautiful thing. And it takes all the drudgery out of the long burden of the day.

And then there’s work in God. Not only for God and with God, but in God. These are three requirements of the work. Now, I wonder, what about 90% or greater, what a high percent of religious activity, whether it is in God or not, we’ve invented so many things. God made the church upright, and men have sought out many inventions. And there are so many things we do nowadays. People can actually get old and die serving God and have no more relation to the kingdom of God. I mean, serving the church and have no more relation to the kingdom of God than a squirrel in a revolving squirrel cage has to the deep forest and the green branches and the sunshine. So, we must work in God, learn to work in God.

I read a little quotation from Dr. Simpson just recently where he said, that until we repudiate our own intelligence and take the mind of Christ, we won’t get very far. If the mind of Christ should suddenly descend upon the church of Christ today, there would be a scramble to rethink many of our activities. There would be a fleeing from some of the squirrel cage activities that we now engage in. And there would be a seeking of the few central, important strategic deeds that God is doing in the day in which we live. We must work with God, and we must work for God and we must work in God, otherwise, we lose it all at last.

So that’s the long, long day. And you know what, I’m not going to pity you at all. And I don’t want you to pity me. You’re going to have to get up when you don’t feel like it, go to church when you’d rather sleep another hour. Give when you’d rather have that money to pay for something you bought, or want to buy, and endure when you’d rather quit, and continue to be good and live with Christ, when your old Adam nature wants to do something else. And I’m not going to pity you at all.

Do you know what you’re doing? Oh, brother, pity the farmer. Pity the farmer that is out there with his corn. Pity that man in Iowa who has himself and maybe half a dozen hired men out there cultivating corn. Wait till the time when the great corn huskers go through and harvest it and the great ears of corn.

Do you know what a bang board is any of you men. Does anybody here know what a bang board is? Would you put your hand up?

Oh, you farmers, what a lot of you we got around here. Well, a bang board as I get it, is the board they put up on the other side of a wagon. You throw a big ear of corn that long, you know, and I don’t know how many, how much up against the bang board it hits and drops back down into the wagon again. When you see that farmer and his helpers, maybe a half a dozen or a half-grown boys, you see them out there working and perspiring. Through the heat and burden of the day, filling his big trucks or his big wagons full of golden corn. Do you pity him? Of course you don’t pity him. You say, I envy that fellow. Corn selling the way it is now, he can lay a nice nest egg up for the time to come.

I don’t pity the Christian that’s hard at work. Joseph Carroll, who was at Wheaton when you and I were there, Brother McAfee, and was our counselor. He took our choirs and dealt with them. Well, I think he’s an either an Australian or New Zealander, and I saw a letter he wrote the other day. What a letter. It was filled with joy and weariness. He said, I thought I would have time to come up for air and rested a little bit, but I just can’t rest and then he told why. Always more calls, more calls, more calls. He said, I can’t do it. So, he’s just too busy.

Now, there comes a time certainly in this physical body when we need to take a little time off. I proved that by taking a vacation once, but their does come such a time. But that’s a brief time and then it’s over. Even Jesus said, come and rest a while. That’s another matter and is not involved here now. I’m talking now about the long drag of the years. And we’d like to come up for air and say, Lord, isn’t it about time we quit? And the Lord says, I’ll blow the whistle when it’s quitting time. In the meantime, you go on and work, work in Me and work for Me and work with Me. And when it’s time to quit, I’ll tell you.

Paul wanted to quit, and wouldn’t, just wouldn’t and couldn’t, and said, I press onward for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus. And then one day, he heard a whistle. He listened and said, is that it? And finally, it came clear and sharp. He knew it was quitting time. He threw down his tools and he said, I have finished my course. I have fought a good fight. I have kept the faith. And now there is laid up for me a crown of righteousness which God the Righteous Judge would give me in that day. But he didn’t watch the clock and he didn’t quit until he heard the whistle.

So, I don’t know when the whistle will blow for you, my brother. But in the meantime, don’t expect me to pity you because you’re hard at work. I’m hard at work too. And every Christian worth his salt is hard at work. And there isn’t much music in it, maybe and there isn’t much color in it and not much drama in it. But it’s productive work. It’s the work of rearing children. It’s the work of producing fruit. It’s the work of building houses. It’s the work of making a journey. All that is yours. It’s a high privilege. It’s not a burden for us to pity a man because he carries it. It is a privilege that we should envy a man that he has the joy of caring.

Now, there comes the evening, the evening. That’s labor ended at last. Now, understand these figures are drawn from the farm or drawn from the country, here in the Bible, and they don’t take into account that we’ve turned night into day and day into night in our civilization. But this is the evening now, and the carpenters have knocked off, and the farmer has brought in his team, and it is now evening. And then comes the supper and the rest and the sleep. Rest that has been earned, and sleep that is deep and refreshing, because the long drag and heat and burden of the day have exhausted the tough, but hard-working brother. So, he sleeps well at last.

Old Samuel Rutherford said, I shall cease sleep sound in Jesus and in His likeness, rise. He expected to go and he did go and expected sound sleep, no dreams to frighten a man, Shakespeare said, to dream, to sleep, to dream, ah, there’s the rub. He was afraid to sleep because of the awful dreams that would come. But the man who dreams or sleeps in God, sleeps a dreamless sleep. It’s the sleep of the blessed.

Well, for the individual, you never know when our sun is going to set. It was said of one in the Bible, her sun is set while it is yet day. Her sun has gone down while it is yet day, so that we don’t know when the sun is going to set for you. But if the morning has been all right and your choices have been wise and good. And during the long day you worked for God and in God and with God, it doesn’t make too much difference when the sun sets.

Oh, I wonder if we couldn’t invent a little illustration. Suppose there’s a family, a man and his wife and four half-grown children. And they’re all going to move to Florida and live down there. I use Florida because California is too far away. And so, they’ve got their house already for them down there. It’s a nice stucco house and they’re surrounded by palm trees and citrus fruit groves. And they’re going to live down there now and everybody’s excited. And then father says, I’ve got to go. He said, you know, I’ll have to go down there and get the furniture in and get the lights connected and utilities on, and besides, my job begins down there. And she says, well, I can’t leave here now. You see, the children aren’t out of school. Well, he says, I’ll go. And so, they all kiss him, and he goes.

Now do they pity him? Not a bit of it. They say, he’s just going a little ahead and we’ll be there. And then high school closes, and the 17-year-old says, well, listen, I get out a week ahead of grade school. Why can’t I go now? Well, she says, if you want to. There’s nothing to keep you up here. Go down and help your dad. So off he goes. And he kisses them all goodbye. And they say, oh, you get a whole week ahead of us. And so, after a week or 10 days, she finally gets everything, and she takes the smaller ones, and they all go. But they all meet down there at the station, and all go out to see the new place. Well, do we pity those who went ahead? No, we rather envy them and say you’re going to get a week’s more sunshine than we got?

Now here we are we Christians in this church, here we are a family in God. And there have been a few who have gone off, not to Florida, but to a better place where the spirits of just men are made perfect and where the wicked cease from troubling and the weary be at rest. Why pity them and say poor so and so? He had to go. Poor so and so had to go where the sun never sets. Poor so and so had to go where there’s no sin, no gamblers, no drunks, no bums, no policemen, no keys, no sickness, no hospitals, no jails, no insane asylums. Pity him? No, you ought to say, oh, I wonder what he did that God was so good to him to take him off before the rest of us. And then somebody else goes and we have another funeral. And we get a lot of flowers and go through the funeral. And people say, poor lady. She had to go. Well, why say, poor lady, I repeat.

Children of God, don’t all go at once, but they do go. And we have been upside down in our viewpoint. When they go, we say, too bad. Somebody said about John the Baptist, he made himself a little imagination. John the Baptist one day had his head cut off. It’s very final and effective. And John was the only man in the world that preached his own head off; and he literally did. He preached until they cut his head off because of what he preached. Well, John, one day, they came to him and cut his head off and that old head rolled over onto the cobblestones and somebody said, poor John. The man with his imagination said, one day up in heaven, suddenly there came sweeping through in royal robes. And somebody said, who’s that? They said, that’s John. They said, well, blessed be John.

Well, you see, it all depends upon your viewpoint. If you’re standing beside your man in the prison court and his head rolls off you say, poor John. But if you’re up there when he arrives, you say, happy John. It all depends on where you are looking at and how you see it.

Occasionally, I hear of somebody whose mother died and they almost had a nervous breakdown. Actually, I’ve heard of this. A dear old Christian goes, and they almost die, and they can’t get over it. And days and weeks and months and years go by and still they’re in the dumps and doldrums because they can’t get over the fact that their mother died. Well, I say, with old Polonius. Of course, your mother died. But so tis with all nature. And we must all die and enter the kingdom of God by means of death, at least until the Lord comes and for the moment, we are not thinking of that.

So, I say, oh, why let it get you down. They’re going a little sooner to the land of sunshine. Why envy them and grieve about them and bring them back to the snow and the slush and the mud. Thank God, they’re where they are. Get your chin up and go to work because you’re going to go one of these times. Now, for us all who’ve served him, it will be rest for the toilers. It’ll be a victory for the soldier, and it’ll be journey’s end for the traveler, and it’ll be a reward for all.

I went upstairs after the service began because I remembered something I wanted you to hear. There used to be a song that they used to sing in the Christian Missionary Alliance written by a Salvation Army man by the name of Captain R. Kelso Carter. And they used to sing it in olden days, but now since we’ve adopted this world and accepted it as our home, I never hear it sung anymore. It runs like this. It’s called, The Blood Washed Pilgrim.

I wonder how many of you have ever heard it. Its copyright is 1886, The Blood Washed Pilgrim. I saw a blood washed pilgrim, a sinner saved by grace, upon the King’s great highway with peaceful shining face. Temptation sore besetting but nothing could afright, He said the yoke is easy, the burden it is light. His helmet was salvation, a simple faith his shield, and righteousness his breastplate, the Spirit’s sword he would wield. All fiery darts arrested and quenched their blazing fight. He cried, His yoke is easy and His burden it is light. Mid storms, and clouds, and trials in prison at the stake he leaped for joy, rejoicing, it was all for Jesus’ sake. That God should count him worthy, was such supreme delight, He cried, “The yoke is easy, the burden is so light. I saw him overcoming through all this swelling strife, until he crossed the threshold of God’s eternal life, The Crown, the Throne, the Scepter, The Name, the Stone so White, were his, who found, in Jesus, The yoke and burden light.

We used to sing that in the old days when going to heaven meant something. They would rather go to California now, or Bermuda. Then they had a chorus on this: Oh! palms of victory, crowns of glory, Palms of victory I shall wear and then repeat.

Did you ever hear that? Oh, brother, those were the days, and these are the days too. These are the days These are the best days in the world if we know what to do about it. For God is within speaking distance, and within touch, yay, dwelling within us. Let us turn to God and ask Him for strength for the day. For if the day has been good, the night will be all right, and sundown will be at pleasure. Now let’s pray.

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“The Forgiveness of Sin”

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The Forgiveness of Sins

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

February 17, 1957

Now in the book of Psalms 86, verse five: for Thou Lord are good and ready to forgive and plenteous in mercy unto all them that call upon Thee. Then in the book of Acts, there is a statement made by Paul: be it known under you, that’s 13:38,39, be it known unto you therefore, men and brethren, that through this Man is preached unto you the forgiveness of sins. And by Him, all that believe are justified from all things from which ye could not be justified by the law of Moses.

Now, I want to talk about one of the bluntest, most simple things, the forgiveness of sin. And while religion is in itself, naturally beautiful. Incidentally, I’d like to say that I don’t think in all of my Christian experience, I saw a more dignified, touching, and beautiful baby dedication in this one this morning, have you? There’s something about the simplicity of the direct approach that’s always beautiful.

And so, religion ought to be beautiful, not by ornate decoration, but by this that we saw, a direct, simple, unaffected approach to the things of God. But we like to fancify it and pretty it up and give it favor by identifying it with popular causes and give it a certain kind of beauty by identifying it with art and music and every kind of symbolism and give it respectability by relating it to learning. This we tried to do. And I think the reason for it is that simplicity isn’t present. We were not simple about it, because we’re frightened. There’s a deep shame of heart. We have known a painful, humiliating thing–that is sin. And this deeply disgraceful thing that we call sin, shocks and embarrasses and humiliates. And so, we tried to cover it up and make religion to be simply a seeking after God or a seeking after truth. And thus, we cover the fact that we’re sinners, that we need to be forgiven, just plain forgiven and cleansed by the blood of Jesus.

Now, the presence of our sin is one of the most shameful and embarrassing things in the world. And to save face, we have stigmatized certain sins and generally agree upon them. We agree to place the hand of infamy, or point the finger of infamy, upon certain great gross sins. And that makes us of course feel righteous by comparison. But all sin before God is a serious thing. God, being who He is and what He is, and we being what we are, and sin, being the filth of the human spirit as it is, we are able to endure our own consciences only by refusing to admit the infamy of our sins by excusing or blaming on others, or cultivating a brazen face like a tavern hostess, and so destroying our sense of shame.

But you will find a great deal in the Bible. In fact, if we wouldn’t take it out of the Bible, this thought that God forgives people, that God forgives people. People must be forgiven, and God forgives people. If you take that out of the Bible, you really don’t have much Bible left. It would be so thin that you would think that you had nothing but the covers left. The whole basis of the Bible, or the whole reason for its existence, is that there was a race that has fallen into sin. And that that sin is an injurious, harmful, degrading and destructive and alienating thing. And that it’s got to be dealt with.

Now, that’s the Bible. The Bible is full of it, the whole book of Psalms is full of it. And the prophecies of the Old Testament speak of it. And our Lord refers to it and the apostles. It’s throughout all the Scriptures. So, we must deal with this vital problem, or somebody must deal with this vital problem for us, the disposition of our sins. What am I going to do with my sin?

Now, this is so huge and so overwhelming–a disaster–this sin thing, that it demands a solution. Somebody is going to have to deal with this, this polio. They’re talking about polio. Only one in hundreds of 1000s are touched with polio; cancer, only one in many 1000s, perhaps, and other diseases, heart failure. They scared most man above 40 to death last week. It was heart week, and you couldn’t flip a radio or look at a paper but what somebody was yelling at you, look out for your heart.

And I’ve got all the symptoms, myself, listening to the to the fellows tell about it. And they tell us, look out for our hearts. Well, heart trouble is a serious thing. But friends, you can add up polio and cancer and heart failure, and you still have nothing compared with this one serious thing. This overwhelming disaster, which is come upon the human race, this thing we call sin, that is so huge and so vast and so crushing that it adds up too or is greater than all of the other disasters added together.

And so, I say it demands a satisfactory solution. We dare not, my Christian people, we dare not deal with it as some have tried to do. We dare not deal with it by renaming it. You can rename cancer, but it still kills. You can refuse to believe that it’s a heart, but the heart may still kill. You can call a gun by some other name, but if it goes off when pointed at you, it will still destroy you. And yet some have tried to do it. Rename it, rethink it, and buy a new nomenclature, that is, a set of names for things related to sin, we’ll hoped that we might have gotten away with it. But no, we haven’t. We haven’t disposed of it. It’s got to be satisfactorily disposed of. And either it must be removed from the soul, or it will remove the soul from the presence of God forever.

Now, this is true. This is true of you. It’s true of me. It’s true of my family. It’s true of those I love the most. It is true of all the good people, and it’s true of all the bad people. And it’s true of all the white people and of all the dark-skinned peoples. It’s true of the great men and it’s true of the forgotten, faceless multitudes who mill the streets. It is true of every individual. Either we must find a satisfactory solution for this sin problem, and it must be removed from our soul, or it will remove our soul from the presence of God.

Now, to the sincere man nothing else matters, I think. And yet, it’s evident that there are various ways of trying to get rid of it. There are those, as you know, in foreign lands who try every means of getting rid of sin, every effort. I saw a picture on The Daily News of a man who had stood up all his life. He won’t lie down. You saw it maybe. He wouldn’t lie down. He was a man I would judge to be 55 years old or older. And he’s never lain down since he entered the religious order. He stands up even to sleep.

Now that’s a touching thing, that that man knows what a lot of Christians don’t know. That the most crushing, destructive thing in the world is sin. The most lethal disease ever to visit the human heart is sin, and He knows he has it. And he thinks that if he stands up all his life, somewhere, a good God will say, well, we can’t punish that fellow, because he has stood up and tried to atone for his sin. How tragic that a man can stand up all his life, and yet not remove sin from his soul.

Now, I’m glad for David’s wonderful text. It’s so good to hear David say in that 86th Psalm, that Thou, O God, art good and ready to forgive and plenteous in mercy unto all of them that calleth on Thee. And I’m glad for the word in the New Testament, be it known unto you therefore, men and brethren, that through this man Jesus is preached unto you, the forgiveness of sin; to the most sinful age in the history of the world, that has succeeded in euthanizing its sin, so they don’t believe it is sin.

This doesn’t have the joyous meaning that it might have to those who first heard it, might have had. Let’s put it like this. Suppose that a man came down here in uniform and respectfully asked permission to speak a word. And he had the credentials of the government, and he arose and said, I am asked by the government to make the announcement that you are free. That you will not any longer be restrained by the government. You can vote as you please, go to church as you please, do as you please, work where you please. I am set to tell you that you are now free. We would look at each other and thank him courteously and wonder what had happened to him, whether he was real or not.

My friends, that’s because you’ve enjoyed freedom from the time you can remember. That’s because you have the freedom to criticize the very government that’s given you that freedom. The very country that has made you free, you are free to condemn. And so therefore, it can’t hit you. It couldn’t hit you as it would, say, in Budapest. Imagine now, in Budapest. Suppose that in some church there somebody were to arise and make such an announcement. Why there’d be an explosion that would rattle the windows. There would be tears of joy. They would turn and hug each other and cry and perhaps break into their national anthem. And thank God for that freedom which we have enjoyed ungratefully so long.

Now it’s exactly the same here. When we who have known about forgiveness so long and have heard of the grace of God preached about so much that it doesn’t reach us as it did, and must have, these early persons who first heard it. Be it known unto you therefore men and brethren, that through this Man is preached unto you the forgiveness of sins. And by Him all that believe are justified from all things from which ye could not be justified by the law of Moses.

Men and women who had born the long yoke and had worn their phylacteries and had performed everything told them by the rabbi’s. Now, they hear the joyous news that they can be forgiven through Jesus Christ so that all things which they could not be delivered from by the law of Moses, they are now freed from by this Man whom God hath made both Lord and Christ. Is it any wonder that that early church was a joyous church? Is it any wonder that there was an up springing of emotion that they could hardly contain.

Now, I know also that it was the presence of the Holy Spirit that made them joyful. But I believe that even that kind of joy can be psychologically analyzed, at least, in a measure. And so, the contrast, the wondrous contrast between the great heavy yoke that couldn’t do anything but make their neck sore and their hearts heavy was now tossed away, and the good news of Christ, the message that God was ready to forgive; a message that no pronouncement of science can equal. The most valuable message probably that this sin-ruined world can ever know. That’s what the Bible means by the gospel. That’s what it means. That’s the message of the gospel. And all the Bible adds up to this. And there certainly is much more, but this is basic.

Now, you say, how is this applied, and what can we do about it, and how do I make it real to me? Well, the Bible has been very, very explicit here, very explicit. First John 1:9. You know what it says. If we confess our sins, He’s faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.

I think that this is one of the most wonderful, and yet the most awful verses in the entire Bible. And I have never heard it really talked about. I have not even myself, though I have this conviction about it, have never said enough about it. If we confess our sins, He is merciful and gracious to forgive. If it said that, I would understand it. If it said that, I would say, well, that’s true, and that’s in line with the rest of the teaching of the Bible, because God is merciful and gracious, and therefore, when we confess, He mercifully and graciously forgives. But it doesn’t say that.

If it had said, If we confess our sins, God in His pity, will forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness, I would say that accords with the rest of the teaching of the Bible about the great pity which God has for suffering men. But he doesn’t say either, merciful, pitiful, gracious, kind. It doesn’t use any of those words. It says faithful and just did you ever think of that? Did you ever stop to wonder why those words faithful and just start there? If we confess our sins, God is faithful and just.

Now why when it looks to me as if faithfulness and justice would mean just the opposite. It would mean that we should be punished without mercy from the presence of God forever. A just and holy God could not receive sinners into heaven. No man can see God who is unholy. And the soul that sinneth it shall die. And all the nations that forget God shall be cast into hell. That’s the justice of God. That’s the faithfulness and justice of God. And it looks as if it should have said that the faithfulness and justice of God will refuse to forgive sin and will drive us from His presence forever.

But why did it say faithful and just to forgive? It is because one of our own race, one of our own people, Who was once held in the arms, as this little girl was held this morning, by an old man and prayed over. One of our race, who once walked on baby legs and grew long legged and bony and awkward when He was 12 or 13, and then grew on to a fine, symmetrical manhood, and grew in wisdom and in favor with God and men.

There was One of our race, completely responsible for us, and taking upon Himself all our iniquities. And He went and, in the darkness, did something which now places forgiveness of sin out of the hands of mere mercy, as we might say, and makes it a necessary thing for God to do. Jesus Christ, by His atonement made a covenant so that, God, to be just, has to forgive when sins have been confessed. God, to be faithful, has to forgive when sins have been confessed. I say this is one of the most astonishing texts in the entire Bible, that God forgives sin justly and faithfully. Why justly and faithfully? Because there sits at His right hand, One who went through the unspeakable hard agony on the cross, and in darkness, fixed things so God could not only show mercy, but even justice is on the side of the returning sinner. Even justice is on the side of the man who comes to God. Even God’s faithfulness is on our side.

If there had been no darkness, no cry in the night, no wound in the side, no nails in the hands. There never could have been anything for you and me and justice and faithfulness except damnation. But because the cry was heard in the night, Father, into Thy hands I commend my spirit. And because the sun refused to shine, and because a Man went in there into the darkness, and gave His all for people that hated him, and were his enemies. Now, God has it turned around so that God must forgive sin. He can’t do anything else, but that.

So, if you will confess your sin, we have covenant on our side, and we have justice then on our side. Isn’t it wonderful, my friends? I don’t often say that in sermons, isn’t it wonderful? I know that’s a rather cheap way to put it. But don’t you see the deep value and wonder of all this? That because there is an atonement made through this Man, through this Man, said the apostle: Be it known unto you therefore men and brethren, that through this Man is preached unto you forgiveness of sins. And by Him all that believe are justified.

And now justice is even on our side, not mercy, not only mercy, but also justice. And the faithful God can fulfill the text of the Old Testament that says: Thou God, art a God who forgives iniquity and sin. To me, that’s worth taking everywhere throughout the whole world. People often wonder why I don’t deal in baptism, and they write and ask me whether I believe in the pre-tribulation, or post-tribulation rapture. And they write and ask me what I think of this man or that man as though I wanted to tell them. And people are always wanting to get out on a limb, and I do it myself sometimes.

But brethren, at the beating heart of our message and of our Christian Fellowship is this. That the terrible calamity hit us, and not only did it hit us, but we brought it by our own sin. And we have no excuse in the wide world to offer. We did it, as David said, it’s our fault. We did it. And yet God in His great mercy has sent a Man. And that Man being God and man, has fixed it now so even justice is on our side.

So, I want to close by saying this to you friends. Don’t think of God being divided up in His attitude toward you. Never think of God’s mercy being for you and His kindness being for you and His pity being for you. And then His justice and His faithfulness and His Holiness being against you. Never think of it that way. It used to be maybe that way before the atonement was made. But it’s that way no more. All of God is for you. And all the attributes of God are over on your side. And everything God is, is yours. And there isn’t an attribute or a characteristic of the Holy God but is over on your side, because Jesus died and rose and lives and pleads. Now there’s the simple gospel. And yet it has been the throbbing heart of the gospel message during all these long years. So tell it friends, and keep telling it and tell it to everybody and tell it abroad.

Roy, go back and tell it. I know you will. And we Christians paid and prayed to help them to go and tell it, this wonderful message. To us, who are so used to things, I say, we have sort of lost the beauty of it. But, oh, to those that know it for the first time, how wonderful, how wonderful it must be. How wonderful.

Now, I think that tonight, I have reason to believe, tonight, will be one of the greatest meetings we’ve ever had in this church. And I want you to be here tonight.

We thank Thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that Thou didst not overlook us rebels, here in a dark, forlorn world. But Thou didst send us Thyself, Thy Son. We thank thee for the fountain which is opened in the house of David and is now open for all of us. We pray, that we may not through morbid humility or fear or self-hatred, fail to enter and be washed, but that we might enter, and be clean. And now, may the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the communion and fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with us all, forever. Amen.

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“A Sketch on Samson’s Life“

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A Sketch on Sampson’s Life

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

September 27, 1959

There will be more here, and there will be more local people present I think tool. And I want to talk about why the children of God have failed to be filled with the Holy Spirit, the power the Spirit, and why we don’t have it. But tonight, I want to address the preachers mainly. And I want to take a text, four chapters from the book of Judges; four whole chapters, but I am not going to read them. I’m going to assume that you have recently. I did recently and had refreshed my mind on some truth I gave years ago about a man by the name of Samson.

Let me read just these verses. The thirteenth chapter of Judges, verses 24 and 25. And the woman bare a son and called his name Samson: and the child grew, and the Lord blessed him. And the Spirit of the Lord began to move him at times in the camp of Dan between Zorah and Eshtaol.

There are parts of the Scriptures that I don’t understand, but the very sound of them, the reading of them, blesses me. This is one of them. The Spirit of the Lord began to move him at times in the camp of Dan. I would have traveled 90 miles to get to the camp of Dan, walking, if I had thought that there was a man there that the Spirit of the Lord was moving at times. Anyway, this man Samson, I just want to give a little survey of his life and apply it to us preachers.

You know, the beautiful thing about the Scriptures, one beautiful thing, they’re up to date. They are just as fresh and as new as the latest issue of any daily newspaper. You turn over these old, brown pages that have been printed many years ago, and the stories they tell go back hundreds of years. This particular one goes back, how far, 3000 years.

And yet, you see when you see the characters walking around. You see them on the streets of Chicago. You’ll meet them in conferences. You see them at Councils. You see them in Sunday schools. You meet them in churches. You meet these people, they’re here. The Spirit of the Lord picked out certain men and gave little vignettes, little thumbnail sketches of their lives, as much as to say, now, get acquainted with these men and you will know everybody else. Get acquainted with these and you’ll know yourself.

So, here is a man, and I just want to talk about him, giving a crayon sketch of the man, and see if you can find yourself here, or maybe somebody you know. Or, if you can’t find yourself here, you can find a warning here at least so you can escape the trap into which the man fell.

Now this man, Samson, had an origin. He wasn’t just an accident. He was born in answer to the prayers of godly parents. And I think of it, it is not an original thing to say that the children of godly parents have a running start on all other children. Children of godly parents may go astray. Samuel’s children did. Joshua’s children did. They may go astray, but they’re not as likely to. And the children of godly parents have opportunities to be right. And the likelihood that they will be right far surpasses that of any other children born into ungodly homes.

Now, God had a mighty task that he wanted done. And of course, he had to get a mighty man did do it. The man had to be as big as the task or just a little bit bigger than the task. If the task is 10, God doesn’t give him a man as much strength as would be 10 and say, here, 10 equals 10, and the job I want done is 10. And now, I’ll make the man just that strong. He gives him an over plus. If the power that’s needed is 10, God gives him 12. If it’s 20, God is likely to give him 25. You have got to have an over, a plus of power.

You remember that when David went to slay Goliath, he took five stones from the brook. And when he had killed Goliath, he still had four left. He could have killed four more giants if they’d have been around. Most of us merely hang on, saved by the bell. We merely have power enough to get us through the last meeting Sunday night, then we go panting off home. But the Word of God shows that God gives man more than he needs.

So, God had to have a man bigger than the job. And so to get him, He went back a generation. And usually, God does go back a generation if he wants a man to do a great job. And that generation, back to which God went, consisted of a good, wise, prayerful and practical mother, and a good, but dull and inferior father.

Now, the lesson we learn from biography, and you’ll learn it all the way along, really. You go into the Old Testament where men beget so and so, and so and so beget so and so, and died and slept with his fathers and all the rest. And his mother’s name was so and so. Well, you will find almost always, and I don’t know that almost needs to be there, that every great man had a great mother. I don’t know whether that is 100% true, but it’s so near to 100%, that for all practical purposes we may say, that when God wants a great man, he gets a great woman to have that great man and to bring him into the world. You will notice one thing, that no superior person was ever ashamed of his mother. Many a superior person has been ashamed of his father.

But nobody that has been great in the world has ever had a mother he needed to be ashamed of, because mothers you need to be ashamed of don’t have sons who would be ashamed of them. That’s a terrible thing. You see, you can’t decide who your parents will be. And you can’t decide what kind of parents you will have. But all you can decide is what kind of a son your parents will have. And that’s the part that you need to do. But nevertheless, it is true that the lessons of biography teach us science and history and experience, and the Bible agree to teach that the hope of the world lies with its women.

Now, I want to look a little bit at the greatness of this man and show you that he was a greater man than we imagined that he was. He was a great man, and he wasn’t a libertine. Some people put Samson down as a libertine; he was a wicked, vile, sex pervert. He was nothing of the sort. There has never been one time recorded anywhere in the Scriptures, that he did anything off color and that was one time when he went to Gaza and stayed all night when he should have been at home, but he did do that one wicked thing. But apart from that, there is nothing in the Scriptures that shows anything wrong with the man Samson.

Samson never took a wife when he had wife living. She died and then he took on another wife. But outside of the one break, we don’t read of anything wrong. He was not a libertine. And then the man judged Israel 20 years. And you can’t tell me that a common man could have done that. Israel was too difficult. Israel was an unbroken, wild colt of the desert. And nobody could possibly judge Israel 20 years and be an ordinary man. He had to be a big man. And the man had great faith in God, great faith in God.

And he finally gave all that he had in one last act of heroic devotion to Israel, and prayed, O God, avenge me of my two eyes and deliver Israel, and God delivered Israel. And God put him in the Hall of Fame, the 11th chapter of Hebrews. If you will read the 11th chapter of Hebrews, you’ll find Samson alongside of David and Jephthae and many another of the great. God didn’t bury ordinary people in His Hall of Fame. And he did put Samson there.

But Samson was not only great, but he was also a great failure. Look at some of the failures of the man. He failed to reach the expectation that his parents had for him. He failed to reach the expectation that God had for him. And he failed to realize the possibility of his own great nature. This is what bothers me, my friends. I see a young man today; I take a walk with Him. As a rule, I don’t run around with old men. I don’t know why. I go around with young fellows. When I hit a conference or a Council or anywhere, two or three young fellows will be with me. But you’ll never see an old man with me. They just don’t hang around me. I don’t know why exactly, but the young fellows do.

And I will see a young fellow today and five years later, I’ll see that young fellow. And I had hope for him. I saw a light in his eyes and a warmth in his smile, and I had expectation for him. And then later when I meet him, I find that he has settled down and gotten married and has two babies and an automobile and television set and a lawn and the lake where he goes to fish and a cabin. And he has made a compromise with the possibilities that lay in his great nature.

There is a man. I’m not going to tell you what part of the world he’s in, but he was a friend of mine many years ago. He’s about seven years younger than I. We were great friends. He was a great reader and we used to write letters and correspond a lot. I used to get encouraging letters from him and send them to him again; and we were great friends. I saw him come up and up and up and up. And I thought this is going to be an outstanding man. This will be one of our great preachers in this generation. Well, his wife died, and he married a blonde. Now, that was perfectly all right for him to marry again after his wife died. I’m sure that was all right. But he’s never amounted to anything since then. I don’t know why. Not because she was blonde. I don’t mean that. But he was just under her blessed little thumb. And he goes all around under her blessed little thumb. You can’t get anywhere but what she tags along. And the fellow, he just ran up against a snag. Now, she’s a good woman. She’s a pure woman. She’s a nice woman. She’s a useful woman, but she wasn’t any good for him.

What I’m trying to say is that it’s possible to fail to realize the possibilities that lie in your nature. Now we’re not all the same size. Don’t let’s imagine that. They tell us if you get filled with the Holy Ghost you’ll be like Spurgeon. Don’t you let anybody tell you that at all. God made one Spurgeon. And being filled with the Holy Ghost may mean that you will simply be a very godly bookkeeper, that’s all. It just may mean that you will be a wonderful, godly streetcar conductor like our good Brother Eckvol who has now gone to Florida.

It may just mean that you will be a godly person, but not known. You see, God gives to some people five acres, and He gives to some people 500 acres. And for me to tell a man who has five acres built into him, now, if you’ll get filled with the Holy Ghost, you’ll be as big as the man who has 500 acres is ridiculous. You can’t make a Packard or a Cadillac or a Rolls Royce out of a Volkswagen by by filling it with gasoline. And you can’t make a Spurgeon out of me by filling me with the Spirit.

So don’t let us all get all mixed up on this. We ought to be filled with the Spirit if we’re never heard of across the street. But this man Sampson had great possibilities. He was a vast man in many ways, but he never realized the possibilities that lay in his vast nature. He failed to live in character with his exalted birth. He was born in answer to prayer. His coming was announced by an angel that leapt on the flaming altar and vanished into fire. That was the way he was announced. But he didn’t come up to it. He failed. And he failed to finish his job, to finish his life’s work.

You know, Keats, in one of his wonderful little sonnets, talks about when I was going, I had fears that I may cease to be before my pen has gleaned my teaming brain. He had so much in him that he was afraid he would die before he could get it written. Well, he did. He died at 24. They say if he had lived to be 50, he would have been equal to Shakespeare or greater. But he died at 24. His fears came true. He never finished his life’s work. Samson never finished his. Samson was the unfinished symphony.

Compare him, if you will, with David, who served his generation by the will of God and then fell on sleep. And as I’ve said many times, nobody has any right to die until he has served his generation, nobody. And look at our Lord Who said, I finished the work which Thou hast given me to do; and Simeon that said, now Lord, let thy servant depart in peace, mine eyes have seen Thy salvation. And Paul who said, I am now ready to be offered. I have finished my course. I have fought the fight. I’ve kept the faith.

Those men finished their work before the whistle blew. But God blew the whistle on Samson long before it was time to quit. Samson never did his day’s work. And what I’m afraid of is that some listening to me right now, members of this conference, who had a good running start, brought up in a good home, prayed into the world, and then prayed up and then prayed into the Kingdom and then prayed off to school and prayed into the ministry. That like this man, Samson, you will fail to live up to the possibilities that lie in your own nature.

Well, now, this man failed, and I am going to talk a little bit about why he failed. And I’m going to assume that he wouldn’t need to have failed. There was no fate that said he should fail. He failed because his failure lay in himself. And I assume that if he had corrected himself, in time, he wouldn’t need to fail. Consider some character weaknesses that caused the failure of this man Samson, and then instead of snapping your suspenders and saying, that man Samson, he was a flop, say to God Almighty, O God, do I see in Samson my own picture.

The first thing about the man Samson that I noticed, was that he lacked maturity. He never became an adult. He was a juvenile all of his life. He was as big as a horse and as powerful as 10 horses or 20. But he never quite grew up. Do you remember his silly riddle? Here was a man anointed with the Holy Ghost, and yet he was so silly that he went among the Philistines saying, out of the eater came forth meat, and out of the strong came forth sweetness. You know, a riddle maker. And notice how he lied to Delilah. He lay his head on Delilah’s lap lying to her. She’d wake him up and say, the Philistines be upon thee and he’d shake it off. That’s in the 16th chapter.

Notice when he got mad at the Philistines at one time. He went out like a pouty, little boy and set fire to the foxes’ tails and turned them loose into the standing corn of the Philistines. Notice that. And notice how he had an unnatural attachment to his parents. He had a Oedipus complex before the term was invented, because when his wife insisted, tell me the secret Samson. Why, he said, I haven’t even told my mother. Should I tell you?

He didn’t remember that it says a man shall leave his parents and cleave unto his wife. He had forgotten that. And so he was a mama’s boy, a great big hulk. And he never quite grew up. And you know what makes the trouble in districts and in churches, it’s people that never grow up. You know, people that weigh 200; they’re overweight and all that. They’re big enough all right. If you judge them by the suit they wear, you would think they were mature. But judge them by the way they act and you know they’re not. This man wasn’t. He never was a mature man. I wonder if we can check ourselves against that. What kind of man am I anyhow?

Well, second, he lacked integration. He lacked integrated personality. He had great power, and he had great faith, and he had great loyalty to Israel. And he had a lot of great qualities, but they never hung together. The iron wouldn’t mix with the clay. He built with untempered mortar. And he never quite got, if you cut through Samson, you didn’t find him the same thing all the way through.

I like people that you can slice them four ways and find them all the same, all the way through. But I find so many of God’s people, that if you slice beneath the surface, you’ll find something else. If you scratch them even, you’ll find something else. They’re not what they seem to be. God’s people, we should be able to lay them out on the block and cut them four ways and find everything just as it seems to be.

Samson wasn’t like that. There was no integration there you see. He was a great man. But he wasn’t mixed right. He was lumpy. And His grace wasn’t sufficient to support his gifts. I have found men like that considered to be great leaders in the church, and they have big names, but if you get to know them, you’ll find that their gifts are far beyond their graces.

There was once a man named Holmes. He was a bishop in India, and he wrote a great book years ago that I got a hold of and got a lot of help from. And he taught this. I don’t know where he got his Scripture, but he taught this, and being a bishop, I suppose it’s partly true anyhow. He said, the grace of God operates two ways. It operates in a man, and it operates through a man. And he said, the grace of God can operate through a man to bless people and not operate in the man very much at all. Or it can operate in the man and not operate through the man very much.

Here’s an illustration of what I mean. Back in the hills of West Virginia where I preached when I was a boy, there had preceded me there, that is, he had come and left his mark and gone and I think had died. But it was fresh in everybody’s memory, and they were talking about him. His last name was Smith, and his first name was Syndicate, Syndicate Smith. I don’t know where mama got that name, but his name was Syndicate Smith.

Now, here’s what he used to do. He used to go into a town, put on a meeting, have an old-fashioned, knockdown and drag out revival meeting, get a lot of people converted, take an offering, and then go get drunk and stay drunk as long as the offering held out. Then when he needed some more money, he’d go to another town and repeat the process. And an old fella who had been converted in his meetings told me about it. I said, did anybody ever stick that got converted? He said, Brother Tozer, I’m one. He said, I went to his meeting prejudiced, determined that I would not have any part of that man. But he said when he gave the invitation something grabbed me and took me to the front, and I got down and repented and got converted and I’ve been walking with God ever since. He had converts, and those converts stuck.

Paul said, I thank God the gospel is preached no matter how it’s preached. Do you remember that? Now the grace of God didn’t work in Syndicate Smith. There was too much of a high alcohol content. It couldn’t work in him, but it worked through him. You say, you never heard before of God working through a man like that? Well, God worked through Samson, but he couldn’t work in Samson. He just worked through Him. And you will find lots of people. When you hear of men that have been used of God and yet you know something is wrong with him, remember that.

The grace of God works in a man or through a man. But it can work in a man and through the man, but it can work through the man without working in the man. And that’s why some people came to Jesus and said, Lord, Lord, did not we cast out devils in Thy name. Did not we in Thy name do many miracles? And He would say, I never knew you. Depart from me.

We preachers ought to spend a lot of time disillusioning our parishioners about how holy we are. We ought not to allow them to continue to have the mistaken impression that the average preacher is better than the average layman. It just isn’t so.

Father, we pray, that Thou wilt bless us through the Word. We thank Thee for this picture gallery which stood in front of this great big man, Samson. We love him and we pity him. What he might have been and what he was, are such sharp contradictions, and the warning to the centuries. O Lord, if we could never be as strong as he was, let us not be as weak as he was. If we never could be great, we pray Thee, help us that we might reverently cultivate the little plant that we do have. We ask it, in Christ’s name. Amen.

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“Be Ye Kind Tenderhearted And Forgiving As God“

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Be Ye Kind Tenderhearted and Forgiving as God

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

June 14, 1959

Everybody, The LORD reigneth, he is clothed with majesty; The LORD is clothed with strength, wherewith he hath girded himself: The world also is stablished, That it cannot be moved. Thy throne is established of old: Thou art from everlasting. He floods have lifted up, O LORD, the floods have lifted up their voice; The floods lift up their waves. The LORD on high is mightier than the noise of many waters, Yea, than the mighty waves of the sea. Thy testimonies are very sure: Holiness becometh thine house, O LORD, forever. Let us pray.

We would this morning, Father, join the psalmist and with 10,000 and thousands of thousands who worship Thee this morning, and with the spirits of just men made perfect, and with the General Assembly in the Church of the Firstborn, whose names are in heaven, we would unite and add our tiny little sound to the sound that’s like the sound of many waters, praising and worshipping, Thee, the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ who made us and who pitied us and Who sent Thy Son to redeem us, and who waits to receive us in the day when we shall have redemption completed in us and Thy work of glorification shall make us worthy to gaze upon Thy face.

Now our Father, we join to ask Thy mercy upon our world. We join to ask Thee, O God, to spare us, to spare the reckless, to spare the worldly and the careless, to spare those who today will not darken the door of any church, who have not thought one holy thought today, and will not, during the whole day. But who will indulge in everything the flesh can offer them and will have no thought of death or judgment or the world to come. We do not scold them, nor do we come before Thee and say we’re not as other men. We are just as other men, and we’re all like, O God. But Thou hast in great mercy found some of us and made us want to love Thee and made us want to be right and made us want to serve Thee in a world where the service costs us something.

Father, we pray that Thou wilt bless our country. Bless the land that Thou gavest to our fathers, who came from bondage beyond the sea to establish a church here that would be free. Father, we thank Thee for our land. We thank thee for our country and pray that Thou wilt bless it and bless those who are in authority in it.

We pray for the health of the people, the leaders of the church. We pray God for Bible schools and for seminaries and Christian colleges and missions and church schools and great churches and small churches, and celebrated pastors and evangelists and men who are obscure and little heard of, but who love Thee as sincerely and as truly as those whose names are on everybody’s lips. Bless Thou all over to Thee, Our Father. Breathe Thy breath of life-giving power and animating grace upon a church that’s fighting and struggling and having a hard time, but still is going on.

Bless behind the Iron Curtain. Bless behind bamboo curtains and all curtains where it’s difficult to pray. God bless Thou our Christian brethren who are caught in the terrible grind of communism. We pray, bless the church, Thy church and hasten the hour when Thy Holy Son shall return to glorify the living and raise the dead and make us like unto Himself. This we ask through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

I ask you to notice a verse in the Ephesians epistle, chapter four, verse thirty-two: Be ye kind, one to another, tender hearted, forgiving one another, even as God for Christ’s sake hath forgiven you. Be ye, even as God. Now without anywise doing violence to the syntax, we hear a man say to Christians not too long converted out of paganism, be ye even as God. God was tender-hearted, kind, forgiving. And be ye as God.

Then of course, there’s that well-known verse in the Sermon on the Mount: Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect. I know how we try to get around that one. We say that means mature. Be therefore mature, even as God is mature, which is nonsense. Maturity means the arrival at the full possibilities of a growing organism.

And you can apply thought like that to God. You’re thinking of some other god, but the God of the Scriptures. God just is. I Am that I Am. God never matures. His Son, the Man, grew up from birth to manhood, increased in wisdom and stature and favor with God and man; with maturity in Jesus, but that was the manhood.

The Godhead does not mature, as He does not grow. He is. I Am that I Am. Can you imagine how the steel beam would go out of the universe if God had said, I will soon be what I hope to become? That’s maturity, that’s maturing. No, no, that is simply a Greek teacher’s way of getting out of the point. Be perfect as your Father which is in heaven is perfect. God calls us to perfection, and we enter perfection, if we ever do, kicking and squalling and begging and saying it’s not so. I don’t mean to claim perfection, but I mean to claim that God says we are to seek to be perfect as our Father is perfect.

Now, this word, this verse, declares an most astounding fact, that we have as our example none other than God Himself. He says that we are to take the prophets, for an example, who suffered. He also tells us that we are to keep our eyes on good men and try to be like them. Paul, the man of God, would quote one, something good about one church in order to excite another church to seek to be good also like that church. That is all relative. The absolute and final model for men is God. God made us in His image first. We sinned and spoiled that image. He redeemed us in order that that image might be restored. Conversion does not restore it 100%

It gives us what all Dr. Bach used to call the root of the matter. It puts the seed at the beginning of things in us. And then the work of the Holy Ghost is to mold and fashion and shape us until the image of God is restored to us again. And Paul says, be imitators of God.

If I might quote again what I heard William Jennings Bryan said, you know the size of a man may be known upon him by the impression he makes upon you, having heard him only once. I can easily repeat a sermon I preached two months ago and most of you would not remember it, because I don’t impress you.

But this great man impressed me. And I heard him say that the difference between a born again Christian and an evolutionist was this. All the evolutionist had to do on Sunday morning was to go out to the zoo, stand in front of the baboon cage, and congratulate himself upon how far he had evolved upward from his fathers. But he said, the born gain Christian goes to church and sits and listens to the preacher tell him how far he has to go yet before he is perfect as his Heavenly Father is perfect. There’s the difference. Take your choice.

We are comforted when we look at the cage of monkeys, but we’re a long way from being comforted when we look at what we might become. And yet, I think I quoted this on the air yesterday and I’ll quote it again now. Browning’s words: What I aspire to be and am not, comforts me. A beast I might have been, but I would not sink in the scale. Thank God, you’re as far along as you are. And where unto thou hast attained, there abide and cast not away thy confidence which has great recompense of reward. But never mark a marker there nor drive in a stake nor stake a claim and say, this is where I live. There’s perfection yet before you, even as God is the astonishing thing here. We Christians have God as our example.

Now, godliness is attained by first having life. You might just as well try to be, say, Chinese without being born of Chinese parents, as to be a Christian without being born of God. A man may imitate a Chinese, but let’s suppose that he’s a Spaniard born in Chile, or let’s suppose he’s a Swede born in Stockholm. And he determines he wants to be a Chinese. And he learns the Chinese language. He shades his eyes to make them slant a little differently or seem to. And he slides around on slippers with no tops to them. And he does everything he can do to be Chinese. But the trouble is, he will live and die a Swede, because he was born one. And so, a sinner may try to imitate God, seek to be God’s child, try to be like God, but he’ll never be God’s child without being born of God any more than a man can be Chinese without being born of Chinese parents.

So, there must be life there. There must be a deposit of life there, given to us by faith at the time of our conversion to and trusting Jesus Christ our Lord. Then we have this deposit of life which Peter calls the divine nature. Then after that, there can be growth unto perfection, just as the Chinese baby born into the Chinese home, that’s granted, the culture in Chinese and educated in a Chinese home. By the time that baby is 20, 24 or five, he probably will have absorbed, that is, in the Old China it would have. I don’t know too much about this terrible modern China. But he would have learned the classics. He could quote Confucius and the rest of them, and would have learned all the niceties, social amenities, would be worthy of his parents. So, you and I are God’s children, born as God’s children if we are Christian, but not fully grown yet. And it is the work of God to make us like God.

Now, there are so many things that could be said about God; and I’m in the process of writing a book about God. But I shall say nothing here today that’s going to be in that book. You could pick out, I suppose, 100 qualities in God that you would want to imitate and try to be like and seek to be like, but I want to speak about one, and that is persistence.

Did you ever think about how impossible it is to discourage God? God goes right on persisting. He lays His plans and then He continues right on. So many of us don’t know where we’re going and if we got there, we wouldn’t know we were there because we didn’t know where we were headed for when we started. And when we left there, we wouldn’t know where we have been. But the great God who made the heaven and the earth moves according to preordained plans which He purposed in Himself before the world began.

Therefore, revolutions and earthquakes and tidal waves and floods and wars and intellectual and theological rebellion, don’t mean anything to God. He’s undisturbed in these affairs, as a poet said, and cares not what men do. The latest bit of mischief that we’ve gotten into, we young children of the house, this world we call this playhouse, we call Adam’s world, is to throw rocks up toward heaven. And we have gotten an affair that we can shoot them higher. We used to be satisfied just to shoot slingshots at birds, but now man is able to shoot rockets way up into the air.

I heard last night on the news broadcast that they’re going to have two or three monkeys now, I think, and one of them larger than the monkey. And they’re going to put them into a space capsule and shoot them up into the air. Really up there, not just 300 miles up and come back, but way out into orbit to see whether they can’t recover them. And then the next thing would be a man. Well, this has frightened some people tremendously and they’re worrying about it, but it never bothers me at all. If you were to see, if you were to be able to understand or comprehend, even slightly, how vast space is, though the little Sputniks and explorers and monkey capsules that we’re sending up on the earth, looked to God like dust.

There’s nothing, nothing. God is moving on. His plans are unchanging. His purposes are not in anywise modified. And there’s never an instance where an angel rushes into the Holy Presence and salutes and says, O God, you know what’s going on? You know what’s going on? They’re going to be able to go to Venus and Mars. God’s eyelids never flicker. The great God who keepeth Israel never slumbers nor sleeps nor does he worry about anything. He came down as a Man and suffered once. But He is in His holy temple. Let all the earth be silent before Him. He persists. He goes right on. And I believe that you and I ought to catch this from God.

The reason God can be so nonchalant is that He has eternity to work in. There will never be any whistle blowing nor any sundown. And God will never get old and never retire. And they’ll never be any stopping because there’s no reason to stop. My father worketh hitherto, and I work. And that’s how you and I ought to keep that in mind, that we have eternity to work in too.

I said to my friend, Paris Reidhead when he was here the last time. I said, Brother Reidhead, I don’t read as much as I used to read, that is, philosophy and all that. I said, you know, when you get along older, I wouldn’t have any use for it. Man, he said, how foolish. He said, you’re learning for eternity. This is only the kindergarten, and what I learn now, if it’s true, I’ll have it for eternity. I took the rebuke with a smile and was glad.

Then, the second thing is, well, I think I’d better bear down there a bit and say, that if you’re inclined to give up or be discouraged or quit or say, well, what’s the use? Remember that we are to be like God, in that, we have our plans before us, divine plans and were to persist in the carrying out of those plans. So, keep on believing,

Then there’s magnanimity. That means size. The world is filled with trifles, just filled with trifles. I said to somebody recently, that during the Great War they closed back there in the 40s, one of the things that used to discourage me, would be to ride on a train with soldiers. Now, I often did. In those days you were glad if you could get on at all. And sometimes you got on and stood the entire way halfway across the state, or all the way across the state.

And here were these fine-looking young fellas in their uniforms, the various uniforms of the services. And uniforms always make a fellow look better. I can understand why girls go wild over uniforms. They do improve a man’s looks. And here, there were fine looking fellows. But do you know what they were reading? Almost every one of them had a bunch of crumply, limp, wrinkled, badly beaten comic books. And they were young fellas anywhere from 18 to 25 or 30.

Think of the trifle. Think of a man who makes his living sitting down and making up nonsense and building that nonsense into fictitious characters and putting it in a comic book and then selling it to people. And they read it and soldiers read it, maybe on their way to die, but reading comic books. Now, I read Lil’ Abner sometimes. I’m not saying that I object if they’re decent, you know. I’m not that rough. But I only say that some never get any higher than that, never go beyond it. They live in trifle. Never get out of it. Never have a thought above it.

Dr. Wilbur Smith, one the greatest scholars and bibliophiles in evangelical circles conceived the idea of editing a library of books to be called the Wycliffe series. Moody Press published it. They brought out some of the finest books of the Puritans, the great books. Great masterworks. Do you know what happened? They sat on the shelf and gathered dust. And the last report I heard, it’s not the latest, but the last report I heard was that they discontinued them because they couldn’t move the books.

God’s people made for eternity, with eternity in their hearts, created to be like God, to move from galaxy to galaxy, to walk with broad-winged angels and stand in the burning presence of Seraphim, are satisfied with comic books and religious fiction, and the great books stand on the shelf and gather dust. We’re little, so little. Church quarrels are almost always over little things. I’ve never known a church division yet, ever, to be over anything big.

Years ago, several years before I came to Chicago, this congregation had divided. There wasn’t anger, but there was division. Part of them went one place and parted. And do you know what the difference of opinion was? It was where they should build the building. So, they divided. Part of them went one place and part of them stayed here, and I came to what stayed here.

I remember hearing of a young man. He was a very healthy young man. You can be religious and be healthy, you know. He was a very healthy young man, a young pastor. He went to a new charge, and he just felt so good, you know, that it wasn’t lawful. He would get up in the morning and eat and pray and chuck the baby under the chin and then start out for his study. And they had a low white fence in front of the parsonage.

And he felt so good that he had the habit of when he came to the fence, he never stopped to open the gate. He just jumped over the fence and went on whistling. And it wasn’t long until he was waited upon by the deacons and elders of the church. They wanted to know how it was, they said, now, Reverend and pastor, we love you and you’re doing good work, but we feel that we owe it to you to bring you this word of reproof for you’re young. Well, he said, what have I been doing? Well, they said, you have been jumping over your gate instead of opening it. Well, he said, I just feel good and it’s a low gate and I’ve been athletic.

And so, I just jump over the gate. He said, I haven’t thought anything of it. Well, they said, Reverend, we’re sorry, but we’d like just to ask you kindly to desist. And so, after that, even though he felt so good, he had to walk out there solemnly looking down at his feet, open the gate, walk out, turn around, shut it and go solemnly on to the study. They wanted that kind of fellow.

Well now, if he’d jumped that gate a few times after that, he’d lost his pastorate. Over what? Over jumping a gate. Now, he was a nicer man than I at his age. Do you know what I would have told those elders? I’d have told them to go climb a gate. And I’d have jumped what I wanted to jump, if I had the strength to do it. I don’t jump gates now. But it’s not religion that keeps me from jumping gates. I was 40 years old before I ever took all the steps on a pair of stairs. I always went up two at a time. They say that a man reaches middle age when what he takes two at a time is not steps, but pills.

Now, what I’m trying to tell you is that church quarrels come over trifles. I’ve known of churches that divided and had an ugly time of it, over whether they should take communion out of one cup or have several cups, so it go, whether they should paint a certain room blue or green–trivialities.

God is magnanimous. God is big. And the saints were big and understanding and raw, and you couldn’t lead them into quarrels over things that didn’t matter. The great souls knew what mattered and they were willing to fight to the death for what mattered. But there are only a few things matter after all really, only a few things. And if we find those few things that matter and major on them, we’ll get large inside. Everybody ought to be bigger on the inside than he is on the outside. Everybody ought to have space and time and eternity in his heart, even while he’s limited to a little body that’s running around down here on the earth.

Well then, there’s what is found in the text, forgiveness. Life is filled with mysteries, but the most astonishing mystery of all is, how can God forgive us? To hear a friend talk to the children this morning made me again take notice of sin–that everlasting, ubiquitous, persistent, perpetual devil that tags the heels of men. How can God forgive us? I don’t know. I only know that amazing grace, how sweet the sound.

Did you read that pathetic thing of the boy who had failed in school and was ill, shot himself and asked them, please sing Amazing Grace at my funeral. I only know that I don’t feel good about such things. My heart hurts; sympathy and pity there, the poor kid. I don’t know. God knows. Let’s leave him as the poet said, his frailties and his sins. Who is God? But let us forgive as God forgave. You know, a moral therapeutic that would do you more good than a Turkish bath and a Swedish massage this morning, just forgive everybody, if you just forgive everybody. If you could just start right now. Bow your head while we’re singing the closing hymn and say, O God, I hear by now and herewith forgive everybody in the world and set my heart to love them. You know, it would be like a new birth to you if you’ve got a little malice, a little grudge, a little hard feeling, a little edginess, it keeps you little. It keeps you morally sick. The moral therapeutic of forgiveness; I recommend it to you. Forgive everybody as God has for Christ’s sake forgiven you.

Then there’s pity. It is vicarious sorrow. In one sense, Jesus died of pity. He died of pity. It was pity that brought Him. It was love that brought Him. It was not only love, but it was love plus compassion. It was loving compassion; compassion and love that brought Him, and He died of pity. I don’t want ever to go through the world hard and not pity people. I pity people. I am sorry for how things are going in the world and sorry for those that suffer. When I hear of a little girl who was hit with a car, I’m sorry. You would go crazy if you went to every home and tried to follow it up all over the United States or wrote to everybody. You can’t do it. The world’s too big, and there are too many people in it. But nobody can keep you from grieving.

I’m sorry for lots of young people who jump over the traces and run away and die on the highway. Or go to the dog some other way. I can’t keep them from it. But they can’t keep me from grieving. Pity and sorrow of heart for others, God has it. God has it. I don’t know how God has it. God is perfect, and yet has pity. Philosophy would say that if God is perfect. He couldn’t have pity. I think Spinoza makes that claim. But I know two things: I know God is perfect and I know God has pity. I know two things, not just one. So, we will accept both and if one seems to be contrary to the other, we’ll wait until we know as we are known. And then we will understand how the great God can pity us and at the same time be the perfect God that He is.

Then there’s tranquility. That’s the last word. How we need tranquility in this terrible day. The world is like a spinning top. One out of every four hospital beds are occupied by somebody who is in the hospital for mental trouble. We have invented a juggernaut, a Frankenstein, modern civilization, commercial, materialistic, scientific civilization. And it’s busy pulling us, body and mind.

I read the other day there are several kinds of heart trouble and I don’t have any, but I wasn’t being morbid, but I just haven’t read about it. One of them was a strange kind of heart trouble, that you die suddenly, instantaneously, without anything being wrong with your heart. A pile up of electricity, they say. And there’s a sudden jump and you’re dead. And you are perfectly healthy, nothing wrong with your heart. But they said it was like sticking a needle into your heart, the job of electricity and you’re finished.

Well, the world is worried, sick, troubled, even American people. They don’t look happy. Go out on the street and see. People don’t look happy. You see people driving by in big cars and apparently, they’re well off and have comforts, physical comforts with it with a strained look on their face. But there remaineth a rest for the people of God.

See my attorney, you know, that’s the expression used by men who can afford lawyers. If anybody comes to them, they don’t even answer. They say, see my lawyer. There seateth at the right hand of God, One who has stooped to call Himself our Lawyer and our Advocate. And if you have learned to turn your problems over to Him, all those problems between you and God and those problems between you and men. Jesus Christ is your advocate above, your Savior by the throne of love and He takes care of all that. I suppose that if there were truth, I don’t know if things will never work out to the way I plan it, but I’d like to go all over the United States of America and tear down all the grave stones that have lies on them and put the truth there. I would, I’d like to do that just to startle the world and maybe bring them to their knees.

Here’s one with a little text on, and if I knew the truth, I would have it chisel on; here lies Henry Jones, died from being henpecked. And then over on across would be another and it would be Mrs. Mary Smith. Here lies Mrs. Smith, died of being brutalized by her gorilla husband. And here lies so and so, died at 32 from her burnt-out fuse. She drove too fast, traveled too fast, stayed up too late, got up at the wrong hours, ate the wrong things, tried to keep up with the Joneses and died of a burnt-out fuse.

I tell you, if all the gravestones of the world told the truth there would be a different face on history, but we don’t. We lie when we ask the man with the chisel and the hammer to go to work on the tombstones of our dead. They tell another story, not always, not always. Among the saints it’s not so. But out in the world it is.

Well, my friends, I’m telling you, so few things really matter. But I think we ought to get tranquil really, and without any tranquilizers, too, without any tranquilizers. Tomorrow is just a certain and safe as heaven is safe. We sang the church’s one foundation is Jesus Christ our Lord. She is His new creation by water and the blood.

And if He is our foundation, then He’s all we’ve got to think about if we’ve settled it that He’s made good and He’s what He claims to be. And He is victorious. You and I can’t help but be. We’re bound to be. So, let’s relax and be tranquil and rest. Let’s not get disturbed too much about what’s going to happen. Because we know finally from prophecy what’s going to happen. We know far, far beyond the scientific predictions. We know. He told us. Let’s rest in God and wait patiently for Him.

Now, I’ll read you this passage of Scripture from Isaiah 32, and that will be the close. Until the spirit be poured upon us from on high, and the wilderness be a fruitful field, and the fruitful field be counted for a forest. Then judgment shall dwell in the wilderness, and righteousness remain in the fruitful field. And the work of righteousness shall be peace, and the effect of righteousness, quietness, and assurance forever. And my people shall dwell in a peaceable habitation, and in sure dwellings. And in quiet resting places. Peace, I leave with you, my peace I give unto you, and that peace nobody can take away.