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“The Valley of Dry Bones”

The Valley of Dry Bones

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

April 13, 1958

Quite a number of years ago, I got a sermon on the Valley of Dry Bones, an evangelistic sermon, and I preached it around over the country. I wouldn’t re-preach it here, but more recently I have been reading through Ezekiel, very carefully reading, and I saw a new thing in this chapter which doesn’t touch my previous sermon any, but it’s something different. I want to bring it to you tonight, and I particularly want to bring it, at the beginning of this missionary convention, to you, to the people of this church.

Let’s look at it together. Suppose you turn to Ezekiel 37 and suppose that we just read that together. Then if the sermon doesn’t turn out to be anything, at least we’ll have gotten the Word. Ezekiel 37, verses 1 to 10, don’t read beyond ten, and you come to that, and they stood on their feet an exceeding great army. There’s where we close.

The hand of the Lord, everybody, the hand of the Lord was upon me, and carried me out in the Spirit of the Lord, and set me down in the midst of a valley which was full of bones, and caused me to pass by them round about, and behold, there were very many in the open valley, and behold, they were very dry, and he said unto me, Son of man, can these bones live? And I answered and said, O Lord God, thou knowest.

Again, he said unto me, Prophesy upon these bones, and say unto them, O ye dry bones, hear the word of the Lord. Thus said the Lord God unto these bones, behold, I will cause breath to enter into you, and ye shall live, and I will lay sinews upon you, and will bring up flesh upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and ye shall live, and ye shall know that I am the Lord. So, I prophesied as I was commanded, and as I prophesied, there was a noise, and behold, a shaking, and the bones came together, bone to his bone, and when I beheld, O the sinews and the flesh came up upon them, and the skin covered them above, and there was no breath in them.

Then said he unto me, prophesy unto the wind, prophesy, Son of man, and say to the wind, thus said the Lord God, come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these things, that they may live. So, I prophesied as he commanded me, and the breath came into them, and they lived, and stood up upon their feet, and exceeding great army.

Father, we pray that Thou will take this old story and make it live in us today. Use it as a lever. Use it, we pray Thee, as a trumpet call. Use it as a signal light, we beseech Thee that we here, may tonight, get in communication with the same Spirit who uttered these words and caused them to be written. Breathe indeed, O Breath, upon us, for Christ’s sake, amen.

Now, the only fair thing to say would be that this prophecy is yet to be fulfilled. The restoration and salvation of Israel as a nation is yet in God’s agenda. He will yet bring it to pass. But its spiritual principles apply universally.

This is what so many of our brethren don’t see, that while a prophecy may have fulfillment somewhere historically yet out ahead, and while it may be pinpointed for accuracy as the prophecies that were fulfilled in Christ’s life were, the principles that underlie any prophecy apply anywhere, so with the Old Testament teachings. That is why Jesus, our Lord, and the Apostles did not hesitate freely to use the Old Testament in their teaching in the New.

Though they used prophecy and passages which the sharp-eyed expositor would say doesn’t belong to us, they used them freely. Apparently, they didn’t know they didn’t belong to us. They saw something that these expositors don’t see. They saw that God is the same God whatever dispensation he’s in, or whatever dispensation we’re in, and that whatever is a spiritual truth anywhere is always a spiritual truth anywhere.

Therefore, Christ and the apostles could, quote I say, freely from the prophecies of the Old Testament, or from Job, or from Proverbs, or from the Pentateuch, and applying it to the present kingdom of God, the church of Christ now, without in any wise apologizing, because they saw spiritual principles underlying.

Now, let’s look at this valley of dry bones. I went over it the other day on my knees, literally on my knees, and I had several versions propped around me, and I went from one to the other trying to see this picture again, and in seeing it I saw some things I hadn’t seen before. We’re all familiar with it. It was a kind of vision or a picture in the Spirit, for the man of God says, the hand of the Lord was upon me, and he carried me out in the Spirit of the Lord and set me down in the midst of the valley which was full of bones.

Now, I submit that that passage, being carried out in the Spirit of the Lord, makes this very difficult to find out whether this actually was a fact, a historic fact, or whether it was a vision, whether he was seeing something that would be. But, whichever, it doesn’t make any difference because this is God speaking and putting it before us is a kind of object lesson. And what he saw there was a valley. A valley, obviously a dry valley, and it was filled with bones. The bones must have been rather toward the center of the valley because the prophet was told to walk around them. He walked around them as Nehemiah once walked around Jerusalem.

God always wants his people to walk around the thing and look it over. I have been told, don’t pay any attention to circumstances. If you do, you don’t have faith. Just look at God. And I have had people pray and then say, Now, don’t pay any attention to symptoms. Just look to God. But God always wants us to take in the facts. God believes in a certain realism, and I do. I feel that until we have informed ourselves, our inspiration is very likely to be no more than emotion.

But when we have informed ourselves, have walked around Jerusalem and seen its tragic condition, or walked around the bones there in the valley, and to a Jew that was a terrible thing. And he walked around these bones, when the Bible says it’s almost comical if it was not in a very serious setting. And behold, they were very dry. That means, of course, that they were not the hard bone with the animal matter still in them.

But you’ve seen bones, no doubt. If you’re a countryman or have ever been much in the country, you’ve run onto bones that have been there so long that all the animal matter had gone out of it. Nothing was left but calcium and some other minerals that make up bones, and they’d all become porous. You’ve seen it, all porous. You used to see the skull of a beast lying, and we boys would kick it around, pick it up, light almost as a feather, and porous, so completely dry, that the only way to describe it is, behold, they were very dry.

And God said to the man, Ezekiel, can these bones live? Now, never in the experience of the man Ezekiel had there ever been a bone live. And of course, the answer would be no, but Ezekiel was a man of God. He had seen heaven opened, and he had seen the glory of God, and he had had the hand of the Lord laid on him until he felt it. And he had heard the word of the Lord whispering to him so clearly that he got every word of it. And Ezekiel, therefore, was, so to speak, not going to be caught unawares. So, he didn’t reply.

You remember when Jesus was on earth, He used to ask questions. And after His disciples had been with Him a while, at least if I’d been with Him a while, I’m sure I’d caught on that when the Lord was going to open up some new vest of truth, He turned and quietly asked a question. And He wanted to see who could get it, who was alert and awake there, ready to hear. He’d turn and say, Peter. And Peter would blunder out an answer, sometimes right, mostly wrong.

And this man of God was too spiritual a man, too sighted a man, to answer yes or no. If he’d answered yes, it would have been presumption. If he’d answered no, it would have been unbelief. So, he simply said, I’ll hand thee answer the question back. O Lord God, thou knowest.

Well, God said, thank you, Ezekiel. That warms my heart. Now I’ll tell you what to do. You begin to preach. In the beginning was the Word. Begin to preach. He upholds all things by the word of His power. He sent His Word and healed them. And when God speaks, there’s life and creative power in that word. So, he said, Ezekiel, you preach. And Ezekiel began to preach the Word of the Lord. And as he preached, there was a great rattling, and lo, bone came to his bone.

Now the difficulty before, you see, had been that they had lain there so long that the beasts had eaten everything off of them. And then the rodents had finished what the big beasts had left. And then the ants and the bugs had eaten what the little rodents missed. And then the microbes had rotted away what the insects had missed. And then they had been tugged and pulled by the jackals and lions. They’d been tugged and pulled till the bone was not to its bone. They were all mixed up.

And I used to preach about that as a picture of a sinner. And I think it is a pretty good picture of a sinner. It’s a picture of some churches. Bone isn’t to his bone. Everything’s confusion. We’re all mixed up. Big bone here, fastened to a little bone. And they don’t match. But when the word of God began to sound, bone came to his bone.

Now it’s hard to keep from thinking of this humorously because it was an odd and a strange sight. But all the little bones went where the little people were. And all the big ones where the big people were. And everybody got back to where he’d originally been.

And then that wasn’t enough. There they were. There they were, lying dry. Bones where bones belong. But they were still dry and dead. And the man of God went on preaching. And as he preached, he saw flesh begin to build up over those bones. Then skin began to pull up over the flesh. And he went on preaching and said, O Breath, breathe on these. It took the Holy Spirit to finish the work. And when the Holy Spirit had breathed on it, theologically sound, that’s getting your bones together. That’s theology.

And you know my friends, I can’t resist saying, though that’s not part of this sermon, that’s part of the other one. But I can’t resist saying that that’s the trouble with a lot of our churches that we’ve got our bones together and we spend a lifetime keeping our bones in the right places. theological bones, that is. We’re theologically sound. Bone gets to its bone. And we have men who spend a lifetime matching bones. And seeing that this text belongs with this text and this marginal reference here belongs here. And they write books and write hot magazine articles and all the rest. Getting bone to his bone.

But you know you can have a church that’s got its bones all right. And its bone is on bone and everything is all right. And God himself couldn’t improve it as far as its theology is concerned. And yet it can be just as dead as a graveyard. And it was. But slowly the flesh built up. But that wasn’t enough. They were lying there still dead.

And God said, oh, you preach a little more now. Preach a little deeper life this time now. Preach, O Breath of God, come and breathe. And when the Holy Ghost came and breathed on their theology and breathed on their organization then they stood up a great army and began to march.

Now that’s the principle. There it lies. That’s good anywhere. Old Testament, New Testament anywhere that’s good. Just as good in Vietnam. Just as good in India as it is in Chicago, around the world, the way God works. But I want you to know, here note; hear what God commanded Ezekiel to do, and this is really the sermon. What God commanded Ezekiel to do. He commanded Ezekiel to do an unusual thing, but that’s not enough. And then He commanded him to do an absurd thing and then commanded him to do an impossible thing. And these three things, these three adjectives, unusual, absurd, and impossible that lay before the man Ezekiel.

And here we are coming into our 36th missionary convention. And there’s no use to hide behind and say let’s not talk about it. We’ll talk up a depression. We won’t talk up any depression. We will just say that we’re having a recession. And we will also say that this church has undergone some tremendous blows in the last two years such as we never dreamed could happen to us in losses. Nobody got mad and walked out but they moved out. Moved away.

And when I see them, they run and grab me as if I was their long-lost cousin but they’re gone. This town or that town or somewhere else and we lost them by the scores. Somebody says well that church is in a mess of dry bones over there. It could be. But I’ve got a cure for it and I’m going to lay it before you tonight and I’m going to challenge you if you’re still challengeable. Now if you aren’t challengeable, I’d like to have you come around one at a time shake my hand and tell me so because I won’t waste my time on people that aren’t challengeable. But he said do the unusual thing.

Now mostly, God’s work follows a common pattern. You can get on to the way God works pretty well, usually you can, because God being God and God having a nature that dictates His, to use an awful word. I don’t like methodology, his methods of doing things. God is very likely to do two things in the same way and a third thing the same way he did the two. God’s work usually, is usual, if you know what I mean. But unusual conditions require unusual acts and Ezekiel faced the unusual.

Here was a valley full of human bones and they’d been lying there unblessed and unburied and un-coffined and unhealed. And they’d been lying there so long that they were so dead that, and so mixed up, literally mixed up, bone on bone, all mixed up, churned by the passing of time. It looked hopeless and yet God commanded this man Ezekiel after seeing if he was His man. If Ezekiel had flunked God’s test when God said, Ezekiel, can these bones live, that was his test.

You may be getting a test this week. I hope you don’t flunk it. God doesn’t say, now, next week, we’ll have a test and here’s what we’ll cover. God just slips in and gives a test as He did to Abraham and many another one, and they don’t know they’re being tested. Some of you may be tested this week by some little word one of these missionaries will say or some paragraph some sentence uttered by Dr. Alan Fleece. It’ll be your test. I only hope you’re alert and awake. I only hope that you won’t be asleep at the time, or mentally in a state of suspension.

So, this was an unusual thing and now it’s a great weakness on the part of religious people that we get used to the usual and we accept it as all-inclusive, and we expect God whenever He does anything to do it the way we had seen Him do it before.

I was talking to that great English evangelist Stephen Olford in New York City last week; we had lunch together. And he said, you know the trouble with us evangelists is, he took himself in on it, he said, we try to transplant a work of God from one country to another. He said it’s been done this way in Korea. It’s been done this way in England. It’s been done this way in Ireland Then they come from Ireland or England, and they try to superinduce that same kind of revival in America and it rarely works. I’ve never known it to work.

He’s one of England’s greatest evangelists and yet he admits, he said there’s no use. We were discussing a great Irish preacher that Thomas here could tell stories about him as I can and as most everybody can that ever heard of him, Brother Nicholson. He was the great evangelist in Ireland. But in this country, things didn’t go so well. You can’t enter an unusual situation and do the usual thing, and yet, we expect God always to work the usual way, and we reject whatever varies from it.

Now, this is one of the afflictions of advancing years. This is one of the afflictions of a society that starts to get old. The Christian Missionary Alliance is now an old society. We’re up in the 80s. Now, I learned in New York at the board meeting last week that we have to have 20 replacements, 20 new missionaries each year to hold our own. The reason for that is that our missionary society is old enough now so, that retirements and deaths and illnesses are so many that it averages out 20 a year. Just to keep our own, we’d have to send out 21 missionaries every year if we were going to even increase one a year. Now there’s nothing wrong with that. People do get old. Missionaries get old. They get old and have to come home because they’re sick and weary or else they just downright die.

Now, that doesn’t happen to a young society for the first 25 years of a missionary society, scarcely anybody dies unless they die as they did in our African fields of malaria. They don’t die or retire because they’re very young like a ball club. Some ball clubs I’ve been reading; I never attend the games, but sometimes I’ll read the sports page, and they say, well, Brooklyn is old. Brooklyn won’t make it because they’ve got too many old men on the team, and by old men they mean men your age, not 45 and 6, and they don’t mean old fellas like me. They mean fellas in their 30s, middle 30s. And they say they’re old.

Well, my brethren, a missionary society can do the same thing. It can get old and begin to die and retire. And churches can do the same. This church is about 36 about 38 years old now, and that means we’ve literally buried a generation of our people, literally buried a generation of our people, and we who are left of the older generation, that’s those of you whose silver hair or grey or white hair, I mean black hair has turned to silver. You’ve gotten used to things being done a certain way, and that you have equated with the Bible; and Dr. Simpson and John Wesley and everybody to a point where to vary from that is to be unbiblical and unspiritual.

Now that can become a dangerous thing. Churches die that way, my brother. Churches die that way. That’s why it’s always good to keep putting young blood into a church, getting young people in positions; getting people who see from a different angle. We tend to go to church and sit down and look at the same, from the same direction.

Now there’s some of you that have never occupied a different seat in the last 15 years. You sit in the same part of the church except on those rare occasions when your seat has been taken. Some of you have never seen the left side of my face yet. You sit on the right side, and you have come, you have come to feel that that’s the religious thing to do, and you have equated that with spirituality and New Testament doctrine.

Well, that’s what we call getting in a rut, and you know what a rut is, brother, it’s a circular grave. It is a grave in which you walk around until you beat it down until finally you can’t see over. And when you can’t see over, they usually retire. But it’s too we don’t retire before we get so far down in. That’s our problem now, rejecting what is not usual and fearing the unusual. And yet, here was God calling a man to do that which positively was not usual. The usual thing to do would be to bury those old bones, but the Holy Ghost had another plan. He wanted to resuscitate them, resurrect them, put flesh on them, skin on them, breathe in them, and have them start all over again, when the devil thought he had them.

Then the second thing was getting worse all the way. It was absurd there’s no question about it. This was an absurd thing, and yet I learned from reading church history that oftentimes God causes men to do things that seem ridiculous, they just don’t check, you know. We have rules in every society and church. We have rules in the Alliance that they’ve got to be a certain age and have a certain number of children. If you have more than a certain number of children, you can’t go. But I’m glad we still have spirituality enough to wink and break our rules when they get in our way.

We did it last week. Here was a fine young couple. They were going to one of our fields; they were all set to go. She was brilliant and he was just bordering on something unusual. We were going to send them; they had two babies and then they got a letter up at headquarters and said there’s another one on the way. What are we going to do? Does this mean that we won’t get to the field. Does this mean now that we’re sunk? And those men had enough spirituality to break the rules and appoint them to the field with three kids.

Now that looked absurd, I know. It does to send folks out there with a family so big that the mother has little else to do but to look after them. But I believe God was in that instance. It’s the same with age. We had an age, thirty years, and nobody goes out over thirty. It’s strange how we do, twist and wiggle calendars when people get up around. We want them on the field and God has honored it. The absurd thing: send anybody beyond thirty to a mission field looks ridiculous because after you’ve talked English for thirty years, your tongue is so Englishized and Americanized that it’s pretty hard to get it twisted around any other language. Yet, some of our greatest missionaries have gone out there when they were above thirty. We break our rules and thank God we still have spirituality enough to do absurd things now.

And then I remember some years ago, a woman applied to the Alliance to get out on the field, and they turned her down. She’s too old. I think she was forty some at the time. They always said, we can’t send old people to the field. And they supplied around here and there. Nobody wanted her, so she went anyhow. I forget that woman’s name. She went down to South America. Brother Thomas no doubt knows who that was, but she went down to South America. And though she was what would be called, middle aged, she got that language. And when I knew her, she was quite an old lady. And she’d had twenty or some years down there of wonderful fruitful service.

It’s absurd to send anybody to a mission field after a certain age, but sometimes the Holy Ghost says to some man, can these bones live. And if you’re a Bible student you tell God. But you know, if you’re a theologian, you tell God off right there, yes or no. You can tell, you know where the text is.

But if you’re a prophet you’ll listen and wait for God to tell you. And Ezekiel was a prophet, so he didn’t try to pin God down to the King James Version. He said O Lord God, you know I don’t know about these bones. You’ve been around longer than I have, God, the Heart from eternity, Thou knowest. And God says, yes, they can live if you will work with me, preach. So, sometimes God does absurd things.

I mentioned this morning about that man fifty-five or six years old that had a bad heart and diabetes, and his friend said, retire. And he said, I’ll retire. And he put on four more wheels and more and more tires and went on. That was Jaffrey.

And you will find God doing these things right along, absurd things. But what is an absurdity? It is that which doesn’t fit in with our pattern of thinking. But God says the gospel itself is absurd. He says the gospel itself is foolishness unto men. And all these modern intellectuals that are trying to show how reasonable the gospel is don’t know what the gospel is. The gospel is one of the most unreasonable things in the world, and yet in God, from God’s standpoint, it’s perfectly reasonable, but seen from our fallen world it’s an unreasonable thing. And those wise intellectual Greeks, they laughed at it. They said it’s foolishness. And the Jews with the theologians, stumbled over it, but Christ said it’s the power of God and the wisdom of God to them that believe. There’s nothing absurd about it but just looks that way.

Now, here we are 36 years, we’ve been around here. I have not been, but this church has been, and we’ve gone through the ringer. Somebody says, all right now, what are we going to do? We’re going to do unusual things this year, and we’re even going to do absurd things, and things that the world will look at us and say what a bunch of fools those alliance people are. That’s the best news I could possibly hear then, the impossible.

Now this was impossible, medical science; no science of any sort, anywhere, could ever have gotten those bones back on their feet. And the greater the work and the nearer to being impossible, the more pleasure God has in doing it apparently. The history of the church is replete with impossibilities, literally replete with impossibilities, God simply fills His history with impossibilities, because you know, ultimately the work of God is creative. Here was nothing. Here was nothing and God spake and there was something. And then here was darkness upon the face of the deep, and a voice said, let there be light, and instantly there was light possible. But there was light impossible.

There was light, and here was a maiden. They don’t know how old; some say fourteen or fifteen. I would judge she’d be older. I would think that the little Mary was older. I’d say she’s nineteen maybe. And she was there praying, looking up to her heavenly father and a voice said, Mary, don’t be afraid. I’ve come to tell you something you’re going to have a son, and she was shocked. She said, oh no, oh no, impossible. This is impossible. And God said in effect, don’t say it’s impossible. Behold, the Holy One, the Mighty One, the Spirit, trust God.

So, Jesus was born, and Elizabeth so old, and God appeared to her and appeared to the old man first, that you’re going to have a son. He said, how will I know these things are so? What a stupid thing to say for a creature, but that’s what he said, how will I know these things are so. And Gabriel leaned back on his dignity and said, I am Gabriel, why should you be asking me how can it be? You’ll be struck dumb until the baby is born and never opened his mouth again until the baby was born. And they named him when they said, what are we going to name him? He opened his mouth and said, John, and everybody said he’s seen a vision. And this is God.

Well, the whole Bible is full of impossibilities and God is the God of impossibilities. But I want to point out something else to you here. It is that on the part of Ezekiel, God can do the unusual and the absurd and the impossible, but on the part of Ezekiel, there had to be clear hearing and deep humility and raw courage and great faith. Now there’s a sermon if anybody wants it. You can have it. It’s not copyrighted.

But on the part of Ezekiel there had to be clear hearing When you’re expecting to hear a thing you don’t have to have such good hearing, if you’re expecting to hear it. Your decibel count can be very low, and you’ll still hear it, because you’re expecting to hear it. But when you’re not expecting to hear a thing, it takes a pretty sharp ear to get it. And Ezekiel had that kind of ear. He’d been in the presence of God and seen God lifted up and had heard God speak until his ears were tuned to hear God’s voice. And he had to know it was God’s voice and not some other voice, because there are all kinds of voices Paul said in the world. It had to be clear hearing and there had to be deep humility.

I’ve been struck as I read the Old Testament, Jeremiah, Ezekiel. I’ve been reading it devotionally again and going through it and I’ve got this. I go through my Bible that way all the time. But this time, I’ve been through Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel and Daniel and it’s amazed me how God has humbled most of his servants. He’s made them do things that look kind of ridiculous. And this was that ridiculous thing.

Now, if He had placed before Ezekiel a great congregation of men and said, Ezekiel, preach the Word to them, that would have been proper. Nobody would have been humbled. It would have been alright. But He took him before these bones and said, Ezekiel, preach. The bones there, wasn’t even an ear there. The ears had been chewed off long ago, dried away. And it took a lot of humility on the part of this man of God to do something that that was just plain silly, but he did it. And when he did it, God took over. It takes clear hearing and then deep humility to obey God.

Think of Elijah when God said to him, go down by the creek Cherith, and he preached and said there will be no rain. And God said go down by the creek and I’ll give you water from the creek. And pretty soon, the water began to dry up. Elijah had preached himself out of water for he had said there will be no rain, and the creek had to have rain to keep going. And the thing had to keep going to give water to the prophet and here was the prophet. What a confusion he was in. He wouldn’t have passed if he’d had to make a report to the Superintendent. It would have been a pretty bad report.

Why he would have said, excuse me, Mr. Superintendent, but this is an awful report. I said there would be no rain and God said you drink water, and now I have no water. And when he went down the last time and saw a red lizard sunning himself, for where the water had been, he looked up to Him and said, God, what about this? God said, Elijah, you’re too big. I’m trying to make you little, to use you. Elijah I’ve got to humble you. Elijah I’ve got to humble you. And this Elijah took his humbling, and then later on here this great, bony mountaineer from the heights of mountains, God said to him, go over to a certain village and a widow woman will feed thee.

Now, some people don’t mind living off a widow woman, but brother, you get out among the country people, and you won’t find them wanting to live off a widow woman. And I’m sure Elijah being the kind of man he was, was deeply humbled by having to go and ask for a crust from a widow woman. God made him do it. He made him do it.

I’ve always been so independent about financial things that rather than take a dime too much, I’d toss it back with a red face at a fellow. But you know, before I die, God may have to make me swallow all that. It could be I’ll be out with my hat and my wife. I don’t know, but I do know that God wants to take all of the pride out of you and he took it all out of the man Ezekiel.

Then he had to have a lot of raw courage. It doesn’t take very much courage to do what everybody’s doing. You know, a lot of these preachers and evangelists go around over the country, and they have learned the public pulse. They know how to approach the public. They just know about how much they’ll get in a given place. And they say they’re living by faith, and they’re not living by faith at all. They’re living by expectation based upon knowledge. That’s what it is literally. A fellow says, oh, I have no salary. I trust the Lord, but he takes his offerings when he goes to a town. He calls the right people.

When I go into a town, I wouldn’t call a soul, because I’ve got too much pride. But these brethren, they don’t. And so, they go in and they call somebody, and they say it’s faith. It’s not faith if I come back into Chicago, if I were to leave here and come back and call up Chase. And he’d come to the airport to get me take me out for five-dollar dinner, that wouldn’t be faith. That would be crust. And a lot of people, a lot of preachers just live on sheer crust. They’ve got no pride, just crust.

But it takes an awful lot of courage to do things when there’s no example and nobody around you can count on. You know, a preacher can beat his Bible till he breaks the binding declaring that he’s trusting God, amen, all the time. He’s got it figured out. He knows how much he’ll get, about how much, if it doesn’t rain of course. If it rains it ruins the offering, but he’ll make that up the next time. And we’ve figured out the public, and we run according to what we know the public will do, and then we call that faith. It’s not faith. I say it’s expectation based upon observation.

But Ezekiel hadn’t anything to observe. Nobody had ever done this before. Here was a man, talk about original. This fellow had to be original, because nobody else had ever been there before, except rats. And it took raw courage, I tell you, to do what God told him to do, without a single example or a friend or anybody anywhere. It took great faith. He had to expect an awful lot of God. No religious tricks would work here, you know. We learn religious tricks. I won’t use them. If I know that I’m using them, I won’t use them. But I see them everywhere.

People use religious tricks, you know, just how to lower their voice at the right moment, just what to say, just when to introduce a certain story. It’s worked before and of course it’ll work here but there weren’t any religious tricks among those bones there was nothing you could do; no psychology, no positive thinking, no calling in the mayor to make the opening speech. That’s the way we do now. We call in the mayor to make the opening speech, and then the chairman gets up and says the mayor sends his regrets that he was not able to be here, but he sent so-and-so. And then some alderman makes the speech and we’ve seen that happen so often.

But nobody could work any gag like that here. It was either God or complete defeat for a man to stand up there and practice preaching a sermon to a pile of bones without a precedent, without a friend, without anybody even to say, amen. Nobody to help him there. He stood preaching to bones. That took raw courage, and he had to depend on God an awful lot. Listen to me, in the beginning of a missionary society or denomination, the leaders are thrown back upon God by the hostility of the public and by the fact that they’ve had a spiritual experience. And the public throws them back on God then, when they go on and get organized and get going according to the rules of the game and get their little black books of regulations.

Then instead of turning to God, they turn to gimmicks. It’s happened in every denomination. You say, is it happening in the Alliance? Don’t look at me. Of course it is. I used to call a night of prayer and get through to God, and now we turn to gimmicks here and there. Ezekiel hadn’t a gimmick, not one. Nothing would work there; psychology, how can you work psychology on a bone?

Psychology, by the very definition of the term, has to have the mind and soul. There’s no soul there, no mind there, no place for a mind—bones. But the text I used the last two Sunday nights I preached here was the text, but wisdom is justified of her children, and I can use it again. Here all this looked ridiculous, and all this was a humbling of a great man, but it was justified in the outcome. Lo, they stood up on their feet, a great army.

Now, what I want to know tonight is, are you hearing anything? Have you been hearing anything, or must I make the application? Ezekiel is speaking to us here in this church now. Out of the past, Ezekiel is alive again speaking to us out of the past. Or better, the God of Ezekiel is speaking to us out of the eternal present and is saying, I’m the God of Ezekiel. I’m the God of Elijah. I’m the God of Daniel. I’m the God of the impossible. I’m the God of miracles.

Now, are we going to sit down and nurse our wound? Lick them, and each look at the other and shake a mournful head or are we going to look to God and go ahead. I believe we’re going to go ahead. And I call you, I call you to go ahead. I don’t mean I’m preaching to bones; I well know better. But I’m saying there are principles here that apply to this church, this thirty-sixth anniversary, thirty-sixth convention and we ought to apply it. As soon as you hear somebody say oh but wait.

But you say, wait a minute, the Lord God of Ezekiel is here. The Lord God of Ezekiel and there never was a bone so dry that the breath of the Holy Ghost won’t wake it up. And there never was a life so empty that the Holy Ghost can’t fill it. And there never was a life so impure that the Holy Ghost can’t cleanse it. And there never was a church that fought tough enough, that if they stuck together and prayed and obeyed God, God wouldn’t bring them out to victory. And He’ll do it for us. Not only this convention, but for the future that lies just before us.

So, let’s not worry. Let’s make our pledges. Let’s plunge in. Let’s do the absurd thing. Let’s do the impossible thing. For God Almighty specializes in impossibilities, and who are we but the children of God. And if we’re indwelt by the mighty Christ who commanded the waves to be still and the winds to be silent, He’ll carry us through. And if anybody tries to put a purple wreath around your neck, you toss that wreath away and say, I’m not wearing graveyard wreaths. I’m believing God and that the God who started us here 37 or so years ago, hasn’t left us yet, and He’s with us and we’re going forward, not back. Amen?

All right I want to ask our district superintendent who carries this work on his heart along with all other, to come down here. We’re going to stand. I’m going to ask our brother Thomas to lead us in prayer and to pray that God will so fill us with hope and faith and courage and expectation, that we’ll stand up and march, a great army.

Let us stand.

Tags Dry Bones, Ezekiel, Preaching

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“The Theology of Revelation”

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The Theology of Revelation

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

March 22, 1959

Have you noticed in the book of Revelation that we’ve been dealing with, have you noticed how much theology there is in it? Some people have the idea that the book of Revelation is a rather strange, forced book of odd beings and strange creatures, but have you noticed as we went along here how many of the great doctrines of the faith are here? They’re taught, they’re taken for granted, they’re assumed, they’re referred to, they’re interwoven, they’re built in, they’re here, the great doctrines of the faith.

Now in that fifth chapter, beginning with verse 7, it says, And He came and took the book out of the right hand of Him that sat on the throne, He and Him, He being the Lamb and Him being God the Father. And when He had taken the book, the four beasts and four and twenty elders fell down before the Lamb, having every one of them harps and golden vials full of odors, which are the prayers of saints.

And they sung a new song, saying, Thou art worthy to take the book, and to open the seals thereof, for thou hast slain and hast redeemed us to God by thy blood out of every kindred and tongue and people and nation. And hast made us unto our God-kings and priests, and we shall reign on the earth. And I beheld and I heard the voice of many angels round about the throne and the beasts and the elders, and the number of them was ten thousand times, ten thousand and thousands of thousands, saying with a loud voice, worthy is the Lamb that was slain, to receive power and riches and wisdom and strength and honor and glory and blessing.

And every creature which is in heaven and on the earth and under the earth, and such as are in them, heard it saying, blessing and honor and glory and power be unto Him that sitteth upon the throne and unto the Lamb forever. The four beasts said, Amen. And the four and twenty elders fell down and worshipped Him that liveth forever and ever.

As I have pointed out before, these two chapters are one. This section of Scripture begins, after this I looked, and behold a door standing open in heaven. The first voice which I had heard was the voice of a trumpet talking with me. It said, Come up hither. Immediately I was in the spirit, and behold a throne set in heaven, and One sat on the throne.

The whole universe is in view, as I have pointed out, and the three divisions of moral creatures is before us here. For moral creatures are divided into three sections, three divisions, the unfallen, the fallen and unredeemed, and the fallen and redeemed. These are the three sections. There are the unfallen creatures. They know nothing at all about sin, because they have never sinned. They know not the joy of forgiveness, for they have never been forgiven. But they are there, ecstatically happy in the presence of God, unfallen creatures.

Then there are the fallen ones that are not redeemed and never will be. Potentially they were. For I believe, along with the man who wrote the song, Lord, I believe, were sinners more than sands upon the ocean shore. Thou hast for all redemption paid, for all a full atonement made. But they take no advantage of it, and so they are fallen creatures and remain fallen.

Then there are the redeemed who were fallen but are redeemed and saved. They are ransomed and brought out from their fallen state. There are the three divisions of the world. You will never find any other kind of people or creatures anywhere in the universe. You will never run into any creatures anywhere that do not fall into one of those three categories.

Now, right at the center of all this is the Holy Trinity. The whole universe is there in view, and the Holy Trinity is in the center. In chapter 4, the Eternal Father is prominent as Creator, and that is as it should be, because the Bible begins with the well-known words, In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. That is repeated and told over and over again.

It is wonderful how the Bible says the same thing over and over again, and yet you don’t get tired of it. You find it said in a different way, and it is the same thing, but still, it sounds fresh and new. It is like a day. You don’t get tired of the day because the day shifts and changes. It is light, and then it is noonday, and then it is long shadows, and then darkness, and then the sky above, and then the moon and the sun, and later in the morning the sun rising, and the stars the next night, and clouds this day.

So, God keeps the same universe revolving around about us, our familiar little world that we know, and yet a man has to be pretty sick and pretty mentally dull to find the world dull. I don’t find the world dull at all. I find that this is a most interesting world, and you find the word like that. In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

Now, that ought to do, because that says that, and there it is, and God wrote that, and that settles it, and that ought to be enough, but not God. God likes to take the golden threads of truth and weave a thousand, thousand kinds of tapestries using the same threads but getting a different picture each time, and yet the pictures are very much alike. The Eternal Father is here, and it’s said that He created. Psalms 102, for instance, Thou of old has laid the foundations of the earth, and the heavens are the work of Thine hands.

And the church has celebrated the Creating Father. You know that old creed, I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible. And here in Revelations 4, here’s the picture, they’re worshiping the Eternal Father. It says, They rest not day and night. Why, we’ve gotten to a state in our country where people feel that if they go to church once a week it’s enough, and if they go to church twice a week, they ought to have a crown. But it says here, they rest not day and night.

You know, the world has missed it. It’s missed it all together. Lent is supposed to be long enough to be serious about religion, and when you die, when you get married, or when the baby’s born. Outside of that, we’re not supposed to take the whole thing too seriously. But they take it seriously all the time. They rest not day and night, and say, Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty, which was and is and is to come.

And here’s why they worship Him. Thou art worthy, O Lord. Now remember, that’s the Father. Thou art worthy, O Lord, to receive glory and honor and power, because Thou hast created all things, and for Thy pleasure they are, were, and are created. So, we have here the Eternal Father, prominent as the Creator, and the creatures of all kinds acknowledging this and celebrating it.

Then there’s the Eternal Son, prominent in redemption. Revelation 5, 7 says that He took the book, and they worshiped Him, and they said, Thou art worthy to take the book, for Thou wast slain and hast redeemed us to God. And the Church all down the years has worshiped the Eternal Son for redeeming that which the Eternal Father had created, but which in the wisdom and long suffering of the Father had been permitted to rebel.

And the Church has worshiped Him, and that same creed that I quoted goes on to say, And I believe in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of the Father, and continue to worship Him. And in the old Latin song that we have in English, it says, Thou art the King of glory, O Christ, thou art the everlasting Son of the Father. Thou sittest at the right hand of God in glory everlasting.

Now I want to tell you that it’s impossible to overpraise Jesus Christ. It’s possible to become a religious fanatic. It’s entirely possible to overdo something and get one string and twang on that until you lose your hearing. People aren’t listening to you, and they run when they see you coming, if you’re layman.

And if you’re a preacher, they just stay away in droves, because they don’t want to hear that. You say it too much, you repeat it too often, it becomes monotonous. But there is one theme that the Church has always majored on, and when she’s majored on it the most, she has been the purest. And when she has preached it the most vigorously, she has been the most active and most wonderful, and that is the glory of the Eternal Son.

It is impossible to praise the Lord Jesus Christ too much. You can go back into the Old Testament, and you find him there. You find Him before you have gone three verses into the book of creation. You find Him in Exodus as the Lamb, and you find Him in Numbers as the Star that shone on Israel and the Scepter that rose above Judah. And you’ll find him in every book of the Bible down the way through, even in the salty, stodgy book of Proverbs.

You’ll run on to Him there, rejoicing with the sons of men, being as ancient as the Father. And you’ll find Him in the Psalms, in Isaiah, in Jeremiah, in Ezekiel, in Hosea, in Daniel, in Amos, and all the rest, down to the end of the Old Testament when the man of God named Malachi saw Him coming, saw Him sitting as a—what did he call him there in the last of Malachi? Brother McAfee sings it sometimes. He says, He shall sit as a refiner and purifier of silver, and he shall purify the sons of Levi.

Behold, I send my messenger before thee, and who shall abide the day of His coming? He is found all down through the Old Testament, and He is found, of course, in the New. Try this sometime as an exercise in futility. Try reconstructing the New Testament with Jesus Christ left out of it. Just try that. Try putting the New Testament together and not having the Lord Jesus in it. Try finding only the Father in it. Try finding only history there. Try finding only philosophy there. Try putting the New Testament together.

Go through in your memory, in your mind, and think, now, let’s see, where could I start? And just for the sake of it, I’m going to rule Christ out of the New Testament. You won’t have any New Testament at all. Do you know that? You won’t have any New Testament. You will find either Christ is in it or there’s no New Testament there. It starts back there in Matthew, and in that very first chapter of Matthew, it tells us about him.

The very first chapter starts out by saying the book of the generation of Jesus Christ. One, two, three, four, five, six words, and then comes the name of Jesus Christ. And all the way through, it is the same. He’s everywhere. He’s in all of this. Nobody can write a letter. Nobody can make a speech. Nobody can offer prayer. Nobody can see a vision. Nobody can be caught into the Spirit, but Jesus Christ is there.

It’s Christ all the way through. It’s impossible to overpraise Christ. And the church that is dedicated to the glory of the eternal sun can go through hell and high water and terror and fears and storms and shipwrecks and still come through whole alive and clinging together and will find her feet and get on and get going again. She’ll never perish as long as Jesus Christ is in the middle.

It’s an ominous thing that when Jesus threatened to remove a church’s candlestick, he threatened it on the grounds that your love for Me is not as great as it used to be. He said, you have lost your first love. And everybody knows that doesn’t mean first in time, it means first in degree. They got so busy and so active and so theological and so social that they were doing everything but one thing, and that was they were losing, they weren’t keeping up their love for Jesus Christ the Lord.

So, if you’re going to be an extremist, be an extremist on the right thing. If you’re going to play one tune, get the right tune. If the church is going to go too far in anything, let it go too far in that, for you can’t go too far in glorifying the person of the Son. It’s impossible, I say once more, to overpraise him.

Well, then, the Spirit is also prominent here in these chapters, in front of this throne, for the three persons are of one substance and having identical attributes. What you can say about the Father and the Son, you can say about the Holy Spirit. You can say that the Father is eternal, but you can say that He’s the Eternal Spirit. And you can say that the Son is eternal.

You can say that the Father is uncreated, and you can say that the Son is uncreated, but you can also say that the Spirit is uncreated. You can say that the Father is holy, and you can properly say that Holy Thing which shall be born of Thee shall be called the Son of God. And you can also say the Holy Ghost. So, you’ll find the attributes that belong to the Father also belong to the Spirit and to the Son. So, the Spirit is here.

You have the Trinity before that throne, on that throne. You have the Trinity. And the acts of God are attributed to all three persons. This may confuse some people. I talked on the Trinity one time, and some Bible teacher told me I made it sound as if there were three gods. He was just tired, because I’m sure I wasn’t that dumb. I’m sure that I didn’t do it that badly. The truth is that there are not three gods, there’s one God. There is the Father, Son, and the Holy Ghost, yet there are not three Fathers, and there are not three Sons, nor three Holy Spirits, but One.

And if you notice in the creation that the Father is more prominent than the Son or the Spirit, but the Son is also said to create. In Colossians 1, Paul celebrates Jesus Christ, Who is the image of the invisible God, by Whom, that is, by Jesus, all things were created in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones or dominions or principalities and powers, He created them. But it had said the Father created them, of course.

And then you’ll find in the 102nd Psalm, Thou sendest forth thy Spirit, and they are created. So, we have creation attributed to all three persons of the Trinity. Is there confusion there? No, there’s identity, not confusion. The reason the Bible can say that the Father created the heaven and the earth, the Son created the heaven and the earth, and the Spirit created the heaven and the earth, is that the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit never work separately. They work together because they are One, eternally One.

And then there’s the incarnation. It says, The power of the Most High shall be upon you, the Spirit shall come upon you, and that holy thing shall be called the Son of God. The Father and the Spirit and the Son of God were at work in the incarnation. Again, in the baptism, I have pointed out before, in other contexts, that when Jesus was baptized, we have the Trinity simultaneously present.

It says that the Spirit came out of heaven, the Son came out of the water, and the voice of God spoke from above, saying, this is my beloved Son. So, we have in the baptism of Jesus all three persons simultaneously present. And you’ll find also in the atonement that the Scripture says that He, Jesus, the Son, offered Himself through the Eternal Spirit without spot unto the Father God. We have all three persons there working together.

The resurrection of Christ is attributed to all three persons of the Trinity. The Father is said to have raised His Son. This Jesus, whom he crucified, has God raised up. But it also, Jesus said, destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up. And it’s also written in Romans 1:4 that it was through the Eternal Spirit that He was raised.

And then in salvation, Peter tells us that the three persons work in salvation, that it’s through the election of God and through the sanctifying of the Spirit and the cleansing of the blood that salvation comes. And in John 14, it tells us of the indwelling. We will come unto Him and make our abode with Him. Don’t be afraid of a plural pronoun before the Deity. Jesus used it. Jesus said, I will send another Comforter, and He will be with you, and the Father will come, and We will dwell with Him and dwell in Him.

So, we have the three Persons here, the three Persons simultaneously present, working and laboring. And while the Father is more prominent in the creation, the Son and the Spirit are there also. And while the Son is more prominent in redemption, the Father and the Spirit are there also. While the Spirit is more prominent in conviction and regeneration, the Father and the Son are not absent.

Now, here we have in this chapter that I have read, the part that I have read, in you hearing the general assembly. Presbyterians have what they call the general assembly. I’m sorry they took it. I’d like to have that. You know, I’d like to call the brethren together and say, let’s have a general assembly. I like that expression. I like some of those big, booming, rumbling, musical, organ-toned expressions the church uses down the centuries. And one of them has been the general assembly.

Well, here is the general assembly, my brother, chapters 4 and 5. Here are the four living creatures, and here are the 24 elders. You know, your associate pastor and I don’t agree on who the 24 elders are, but we’ve not been fighting about it. He’s still been wheeling me around in that glorified kiddy car of his. We’ve been having a good time together, but he believes they’re the prime ministers of the universe.

And you know, I was sitting in Brother Brian’s study the other day over in Toledo while the preliminaries are going on, and I was hearing over the loudspeaker, the missionary talk, and also thinking of my sermon and also looking at books. I can do all three of those things.

And I pulled down a translation, and it said, you know what it said, and I reacted from that something terrible. It said, and when He had taken the book, the four beasts and the four and twenty senators fell down before the Lamb. Yeah? Senators. I’ve had enough senators, you know, and I don’t want any more of these senators. But somebody thought that they were senators, four and twenty senators. Well, it says elders here, and elders, those are good words, Old Testament and New Testament words, and they refer to the leaders of the redeemed.

And then there were angels, and how many angels? You notice how many angels it says, that there are ten thousand times ten thousand. There’s a hundred million to start with, and thousands of thousands, and every thousand, thousands of millions. And since it’s merely plural, and you can put as many ciphers or as many ciphers as you want to on there, there’s just no way of knowing.

But I, as my colored brethren say sometimes, I hear on the radio, they have a little saying. A preacher will be preaching along, and he’ll say, you know what I like about God’s this. And I kind of like that myself. I like that expression. It may not be, wouldn’t be irreverent if a learned professor used it. He’d be slanging, but for a good colored brother preaching away, that just fits. That’s the way he feels about it. He says, what I like about God.

And what I like about God is this, my brethren. I like the fact that God is big and generous, and there’s lots of Him, and that what He does, He does in big vastness and, and hugeness. So, that God isn’t, isn’t small about things. Now, let me, I didn’t intend to say this. In fact, it just struck me now.

But what I want to say now is that you got to watch you don’t get cheap and stingy when you’re serving God. Be awfully careful, awfully careful and watch it. Let’s watch it in this church. You know, we’ve endured. We’ve, we’ve gone through the gristmill and been chewed up here in the last couple of years by our people moving out of the city and the population changing and all that. But let’s watch that we don’t give up and panic. Let’s watch. Let’s keep generous because God is generous. And everything God does is big and generous.

When God makes rivers, he makes them 10 times bigger than they need to be. And when he makes oceans, he makes them 50 times bigger, 100 times bigger than they need to be. And God put leaves on a tree, puts enough leaves on one tree to do for 50 trees.

The average church, you know, with a poor little preacher and a small church board counting pennies would say, I think we can do with the leaf less here on this twig, don’t you? And they’d take that off and say that. Say, now this twig over here, I think you see five leaves. No use to go out on a limb here, excuse the pun, but we take that off. And you can keep trimming back and trimming back.

But God is generous, brother. God gives too much of everything, always gives too much of everything. Think of space. People are talking about space all the time. Think how much space God made. God could have packed all the heavenly bodies there are.

If He’d been careful and kept the tracts from crossing each other, He could have packed them in too. Why, you ever read astronomy and find out how many times, how many, how many earths could have been put in the sun? I forget how many, I always forget numbers, but it runs into millions of earths. You could toss them into the sun and the sun could rumble them around if it was hollow.

And we have too much earth. We got too much earth now. This idea you got to leave the earth in order to, you go off and to Venus. If the right people would go, I’m for it, you know. But the trouble is the right people aren’t going and some of them will come back. But it’s just a vast world.

God is big, but God’s bigger than we know He is, and He’s, He’s vaster. The immensity of God. I wonder if I shouldn’t, I wonder if I shouldn’t preach a sermon on the immensity of God and include that in my book on the attributes. Is immensity an attribute? I think it is. It ought to be because everything God does, he does big and, and immensely. It’s, he’s huge.

And I think it hurts God. God being God and being capable of emotion, I believe it hurts God when we get little. I think so. I believe it hurts God.

Dr. Brown says, you know, that the way to do, to keep God blessing you is when you get out of it–get right back in. Start something else and get right back in. I think it’s all right.

I read an article by a fellow out here in California who establishes churches, and he keeps them down to four to 700 and never lets them get any bigger. Now they start getting any bigger. He promptly goes up to a lot of his members and says, now you get out of here and get yourself a church started over across here. And so out of that one church, he started 10. God just keeps, keeps going.

When they, they could sit back and say, now, isn’t this wonderful? Everything is paid up and it’s just delightful. Absolutely delightful. But you got to keep in trouble if you want to keep blessed. So, I don’t know how I got off on that, but it’s a part of the sermon anyhow.

Now, my brethren, these living creatures, these 24 elders, these angels, a hundred million and thousands of thousands. He doesn’t mention other creatures. He mentions them elsewhere. He mentions them in the fourth chapter here. Each one had six wings about him. Why did they need six wings? And they were full of eyes within. But he said, why are they full of eyes?

A fellow came up to me, Toledo. He was very sincere and he was a sincere man, no question. He wanted to know about all those eyes. I don’t know, brother. I don’t know. But to me, it just means that God just fills them with eyes, that God’s just generous, that’s all. He liked that. Well, now there were harpers and there were crowns and there were golden vials of sweet incense and the hearts of all these redeemed ones and these unredeemed who hadn’t needed to be redeemed because they’d never fallen, these unfallen creatures.

Here they were and their hearts were so excited by the presence of the Trinity that their joy became so intense that it passed on to ecstasy. And it was a chastely, pure intoxication, a bliss so bright and so deep as to become uncontrollable. And so they threw their crowns before the throne and they fell down before the lamp.

And yet reason wasn’t dethroned, though they were tasting the purest, purest ecstasy, drinking deep of the fountain of intense delight, delight in which there was no impurity. Yet reason was not dethroned because their delight had reasonable grounds. They worshipped the Father because he had made the heaven and earth and all things, and for His pleasure they are and were created.

They worshipped the Son, that is the Holy Son, because He was slain and has redeemed us to God by thy blood out of every kindred and tongue and people and nation and we shall reign on the earth. They had grounds for their delight, though their reasons had passed to ecstasy. You see, there is a kind of Christianity that is so theological that it can give you ten reasons for everything it does and believes. But it never passes to ecstasy, quite. These brethren passed to ecstasy, these wondrous creatures. Their joy was so deep and pure, I say, their bliss so unalloyed that they were sent into spiritual intoxication.

But they had reasons, there were reasons underneath it all. This was theology on fire, this was reason incandescent. If we try to be happy without reasons, we simply become fanatics and beat our foot, you know, and try to get blessed that way, the way they do in rock and roll. But if we allow reason to rest on the Scriptures and then are filled with the spirit and meditate and contemplate and worship, I believe that we can taste some of this even now.

Now I know it’s possible to be saved and to live and to die and to go to heaven and be a very ordinary Christian and never go very far. I’ve also seen in a few cases and have read in a great many more, people that were lifted up in the spirit to such a degree that ecstasy took over.

I heard a man one time, a good, serious-minded, sensible, good man, father of a family and a good worker in the church. The man was in every way a man that you could trust, an honorable man, a good man, a sensible man, was never charged with any fanaticism or any being overheated in any way. And yet I saw him at the communion table one time, suddenly burst out into holy laughter.

And he tried to restrain it, but he couldn’t. He knelt and he tried to restrain it, but he laughed, and he actually reached his hands around him and hugged himself as though he would keep himself from coming apart with the ecstasy and the delight of it.

Now we have it here, and if God wanted to send a little taste of us to man here below, it was a man named Thomas Upham. Thomas Upham wrote The Life of Madame Guyon. And incidentally, Madame Guyon happens to be a writer I care nothing about. I read her works years ago, but I never read them anymore. But he wrote her life. She was one of the great mystics you know. But this man wrote a little book called A Night of Great Grace, and that was a testimony of the night God visited him.

And I quoted to you here what Pascal, the French philosopher and mathematician, had said. That wonderful, awesome night when God visited him, and he passed out from being a mathematician to being a happy, joyous Christian. And he tried to write it, but he could only write it in ecstatic phrases. He would say, fire, fire, fire. And he said, glory to God the Father, not the God of the philosophers, but the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, Who can be known only in the ways of the gospel. And he wrote joy, joy, joy.

And though here was a man that ranked easily at the top in all of the mathematicians of his time and great thinkers of his day, declared to be one of the three great thinkers ever produced by France, three greatest ever produced by France, yet that man folded that testimony up and put it here in his pocket close to his heart and wore it there until he died. Never did he forget that one night of glorious ecstasy. And after that, he took over and he wrote in defense of the faith of our fathers so wonderfully that he’s never been answered.

His tremendous logical argument about believing God, I won’t repeat it now, but why we should believe God is one thing nobody’s ever been able to answer down to this hour. And yet that man, with a mind such as only maybe a half a dozen have ever had in the history of the world, yet this man was carried out of himself until, like these creatures, rising like a fire, the heat of his joy, the winds of God played over the harp of his soul, and in the presence of the Lamb he was filled with joy and delight. Here they were, too, and they will be.

Now, I don’t say you must know that kind of spiritual experience in order to be converted or to be saved. I don’t say it. But I will say this, that a generation or two ago it was taken for granted that if a man believed on Jesus Christ and didn’t have some kind of a visitation that would confirm his faith, they wouldn’t believe he was converted. But nowadays we just get them in anyway, you know, just any way at all, get them in.

Well, now notice here what he says, every creature heard I saying, verse 13, Every creature heard I saying, Thou art worthy, Every creature heard I saying, Blessing and honor and glory and power. Every creature, John, what do you mean? Every creature in heaven he found that familiar.

John had walked with his Lord and had been many years since the cross now, and he found they in heaven He found that easy to understand. I heard every voice in heaven saying, Worthy is the Lamb. Then he said, I heard them on earth, and he certainly found that familiar because he had been a man and was a man and had been on the earth and was on the earth.

So, it was easy for him to identify the voices of them on the earth. But now he hears a strange sound, another sound. It isn’t heavenly and it isn’t earthly. It doesn’t belong to the ransomed. It doesn’t belong to the unfallen creatures there by the throne. And it doesn’t belong to the redeemed on earth.

To whom do these voices belong? This strange, raucous, dissonant, discordant choir. It’s the choir of the damned. Under the earth heard I them saying, Philippians 2, 9 to 11 says, Wherefore, God also hath highly exalted Him and given Him a name which is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow of things in heaven and things on earth and things under the earth. There’s the same division and that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father.

Remember, my brother, every moral intelligence will someday confess Jesus Christ is Lord. But not every moral intelligence will enter the bliss of the redeemed. God has said it must be now and it must be under His conditions. But John said, I heard not only the ransomed, not only those upon the earth who love the Lord, but I heard the strange sound of those in hell also. And they were forced to say, worthy, worthy is the Lamb that was slain.

Now I want to close with just a little word that seems to be maybe a little bit off the track. I’ve heard, I know what they say, never tack anything on a sermon, and I don’t want to tack anything on. But I will ask you to note here, who are these redeemed? Well, they’re the blood-washed. They’re the blood-washed, it says, of every kindred and tongue and people and nation. And I point out again that when Jesus comes, there will be nations and they will not be one nation fused together, one smoky colored nation made up of all integrated races. There won’t be.

There will be nations, it says. And when He comes, he’ll call the nations before Him. And we’ll never, no matter how the starry-eyed dreamers talk, there will never be a time when all the nations of the world will speak one language until Christ comes.

They tell us, you know, there’s Esperanto and there’s basic English. And I don’t know whether everybody’s getting ready to speak Russian or not, but brother, there’s one language I won’t talk; I’ll tell you that now. But we’ll never have a smoky race speaking one language around the world. There will be kindred and tongue and people and nations, not one superior to the other, but different from the other. And now the logic of their presence, here’s the logic of their presence, here’s how they got there. They were saved by faith, and their faith came by hearing.

And they heard because there were preachers, and they preached because they were sent. And there we have the logic of missions. There we have the theology behind missions. They came from every kindred and tongue and people and nation and tribe around the world, and they were saved by faith, and their faith came by hearing the gospel. And they heard the gospel when it was preached to them, and it was preached to them when somebody was sent to preach it.

Now, I want to tell you this, that I would never continue to be associated with any denomination or missionary society or local church that would let anything stand in the way of the carrying out of the plan of God. For there must be people before that throne out of kindred, tongue and people and nations. They’re not to be white people from Chicago, but they’re to be people from all over, and they can only be there if somebody preaches to them. And that somebody can only preach to them if somebody else sends them.

And therefore, we have the logic of continuing missions. You know, when the eagle gets old, he gets to be fifty years old, they say. He grows something on his beak here, a bony substance that he can’t get his beak open, and he can’t eat. When he’s fifty years old, he can’t eat anymore, and he begins to droop and get thin, and his feathers fall out, and he’s a mess to look at, and he’s too weak to fly, and he’s dying of starvation. Because he has a bony structure that’s come over his beak, and he can’t get it open, he can’t eat.

Well, nature takes over about that time and renews his youth. He shall renew his youth like the eagles. You ever hear that? What does it mean, renewing his youth like the eagles? That’s what it means. So, he hunts himself out on real rough, sandy rock, say, the naturalist, and he goes over there and he scrapes. And he works away there, he’s poor, weak head. Why didn’t we think of it sooner? That’s what I don’t understand.

But you know, we never do. We never do, you know. We never think of it in time. So he scrapes his beak there, and pretty soon that comes off and he can chew again. He looks around, there’s a mouse, and the mouse said, that old eagle, he couldn’t, he can’t even open his mouth, he couldn’t eat a baby mouse. So, he gets familiar around the eagle, but he forgets the eagle’s working on his beak. Pretty soon, the eagle gets his mouth open, grabs a mouse, and feels better.

Pretty soon, he gets something else and feels better. In a very short time, he renews his youth, gets a new set of feathers, and his eyes get bright again. And pretty soon, he’s screaming in the sun, and he lasts another 50 years.

How long have we been around here, some of you old timers? I’m sorry, I don’t mean old timers, but some of you people that have been here longer than these children have. How long has this church existed? Thirty, Mrs. Hines, 38 years, is it? You don’t remember that far back, but is it 38 years we’ve been here? I mean the church? About 38. Let’s call it 38 years. What’s year, give or take, year between friends? But say 38 years. It’s not quite 50.

But you know what I believe? I like to run down our list and see those 38 missionaries that we got on our list. Not all of them went up here, but most of them did. The others joined us, but most of them did. Now, what are we going to do? Are we going to say, weep on each other’s shoulders, and say, the time of my departure is at hand, and woe be to Zion for the foxes are running over the walls? Or are we going to say, listen, there’s been a hard lump going over our beaks here.

We’ve been pushing in all directions here, and everybody else has fled. We’re an island here all by ourselves, enjoying ourselves immensely, but we’re going to go. But listen, why can’t we scrape our beaks, feather out again, and send twice as many in the next 30 years, and if the Lord tarries. Twice as much money in the next 30 years if the Lord tarries. When kids now back there in the baby pen will be our missionaries. Why can’t we? I don’t think if you’ve got God, you ever have to give up to discouragement, ever start counting your pennies.

Now listen, God, I’m sorry, but you know we only have two nickels there, and here we’ll give you one. I don’t think God wants us to act like that at all. And I refuse to beg, and I’m not going to beg, and I don’t have to beg. You’ll never get me to stand up here and spend a half an hour begging. I’m not going to do it. God is on His throne, and Christ is at His right hand, and the Holy Ghost is here, and the truth is loose in the earth, and the eagle can scrape her beak and start over.

And I foresee the time, I see it in vision, when the 38 missionaries that we count on our roster will have 38 more beside them. There’s no reason why it can’t be so, because they’ve got to come from kindred, and tongue, and people, and nations. They’ve got to come.

Tibet, they haven’t come yet, and they’ve got to come. They’re over there fighting Russia, but they’ve got to come from there, and they’ve got to come from the valleys, and everywhere. And some of the doors that are now closed, God’s going to open wide until you can hear them when they bang back on their hinges. You can hear it around the world, you see. Don’t you think for a second that God is going to let that old boy over in the Kremlin close all his doors? He’ll do nothing of the sort. He says, I open doors and no man can close them. And I don’t think the Church is made up yet, and I don’t think they’re all in.

Now, I’ll say one thing more, and then I’ll be done for tonight. The cause of missions does not belong to the Christian and Missionary Alliance. It belongs to Jesus Christ the Lord. He is the Head of His Church, and as long as we serve Him, we’ll be part of that plan. But if we stop that and get interested in something else and get sidetracked, He’ll choose somebody else, but He’ll have people from tongues, and tribes, and nations.

And I never yet have listened to a missionary complaining about, if we don’t go, the Lord can’t do His work. The Lord will do His work. Jonah wouldn’t go, but Jonah went, and you’ll find it always so.

God, the Sovereign God, will have them there from every tongue, and tribe, and nation, but He won’t necessarily use you. He will if you let Him, and He’ll use me, and He’ll use this church. But if we fail Him, He’ll pick some little old Pentecostal Church down here, Baptist Church, or something else, and they’ll do the work we should have done, but God will do His work, because He says, I saw them there from every kindred, and tongue, and people, and nations, and they shall reign on the earth.

The Sovereign God will do his work, all right, but what I’m eager about is that He’ll let me have a little part in it, that He’ll let me help a little, and do my little part, and work through me. That’s what I’m eager about, and that’s what I’m eager that this Church should do, that we should never allow ourselves to become so ingrown that we forget kindreds, and tongues, and peoples, and nations, because He’ll have them, but I don’t want Him to have to say, I’m sorry, but I have to pass you up, you’re too preoccupied. We mustn’t be preoccupied.

We do what was before us, and we’re going to do it, and we’re going to get it done. But in the meantime, we’re not going to forget them out there, and we’re not going to forget the peoples, and tongues, and tribes, and nations. They’ll believe when they hear, and they’ll hear when somebody preaches, and somebody will preach when he’s sent. Believe it? Amen. Well, amen. I guess that’s all for tonight.

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“The Knowledge of God IV”

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The Knowledge of God IV

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

July 15, 1956

Now this will be the last of four sermons on three degrees of divine knowledge. And I have used the same text for all of them. And just briefly to refresh your memory, I said that there were three degrees of divine knowledge corresponding to the three divisions of the tabernacle in the Old Testament ritual: the outer court, which corresponds to reason. And the text I read was Romans 1:19 and 20. Because that which may be known of God is manifest in them. For God hath showed it unto them. For the invisible things of Him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead.

Then there is a second degree of knowledge, superior to the first, and that is, the knowledge that comes to faith. And I took for a text, though there are very many I might have chosen, Hebrews 11:3. Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God. And then. there is another degree of Christian knowledge which is the knowledge the Spirit imparts. And that corresponds to the Holy of Holies in the temple. And I read the Scripture, 1 Corinthians 1:9-14. I won’t read it all now, but only read this part. Now we have received not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit which is of God. That we might know the things that are freely given to us of God. But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God for they are foolishness unto him, neither can he know them because they’re spiritually discerned.

Now on three previous talks I have treated it like this. I’ve talked first about the knowledge of God. Then in my second sermon, two weeks ago, I spoke about what the old writers called natural theology, the knowledge that we may gain about God and heavenly things from nature itself; reason working on data furnished by reason. Then last Sunday morning, I talked about revealed theology, the knowledge received by faith through divine inspiration. Now today, I must talk about a knowledge that’s still more excellent, and that is the knowledge which Paul says, the Spirit reveals to our spirits. And this is so excellent that it belongs to heaven rather than earth. And is only given here as a little earnest of what will come.

Now, there are some things that God gives us that He just gives all of it to us, and there isn’t anything that He doesn’t give. But there are other things that he gives only in veiled measure and degree. And to this knowledge which is the more excellent knowledge, it is a heavenly knowledge and will be perfected and completed in heaven. And it belongs in heaven and is of heaven, but it is given here in small measure. And of course, the degree that we receive of it depends upon our response and our meeting the condition.

Now, it is so excellent this knowledge, this further-in knowledge revealed by the Spirit, that nothing more excellent awaits us in heaven than this knowledge, except that there it will be given in perfection, and here we have it only up to our imperfect capacity. There we will be enlarged and perfected to receive in full degree this knowledge of God. And John says, we shall be like Him and shall know Him. And the Revelator says that we shall look on His face and His name shall be on our forehead.

Now, this knowledge, this more excellent knowledge which I speak this morning, does not contradict the other two. Nothing ever contradicts anything else in the kingdom of God if we could only know it. It is only that we think it contradicts. Nothing in God ever contradicts anything else in God. There are no contradictions in God, so that when I say there are three degrees of knowledge, the knowledge given to reason, the knowledge given to the faith and the knowledge revealed by the Spirit, I do not mean that one contradicts the other, for they do not contradict each other and neither does one make the other unnecessary.

This last degree of knowledge of which I speak, the knowledge that flashed across the human heart by an afflatus of the Holy Spirit does not make the knowledge of reason unnecessary, for we are reasonable creatures. We’re logical beings though we don’t always live like it. And therefore, we cannot cancel out our reason. I do not believe that anything that comes by the Spirit will contradict reason, because reason is an attribute of God. And God can’t contradict Himself. Therefore, anything God reveals to us in our deep heart is bound to be according to reason, though it may go way beyond reason. And neither does it contradict faith. Now, there is nothing that the Spirit of God will reveal to the inner life of a man that will contradict faith. It will be according to faith and not contrary to faith. But it sets a crown upon reason and faith and leads them on to their perfection, but it does not contradict them, cancel them out, or make them unnecessary.

Now, what kind of knowledge is this? Well, this knowledge is by direct spiritual experience. You see, Paul very clearly mentions this here. He says, It is written in the Old Testament that eye hath not seen nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man the things which God hath prepared for them that love Him. But God hath revealed them unto us by His Spirit, for the Spirit searcheth all things, yea, the deep things of God. And thus, these things are divinely revealed by inward spiritual experience. An impartation of divine knowledge by a direct afflatus of the Spirit of God.

And this is what you don’t hear much about these days though it’s the common teaching of the New Testament, and it was the common teaching of the church fathers. And it is not heresy of any degree or kind. It is not a cult or a teaching of any cult, but the common traditional teaching of the fathers and the reformers and the martyrs and the mystics and the revivalists and the church leaders and the hymnists, all down the years. And I can take you to any hymnbook, be it Presbyterian or Methodist or Baptist or Moravian or Episcopalian or whatever, and I can show you everything that I’m saying this morning. We sing them, but we don’t believe them. Or, if we try to believe them, we don’t understand them. And so we sing truths which are scriptural truths, traditional truths, truths which have been believed by the fathers and written into the great books of devotion. We sing them and don’t know what we’re singing about, because we are so languorous and take things so for granted. But this impartation of spiritual knowledge by a direct afflatus of the Holy Ghost, is not contrary to reason I say, but it is immediate knowledge, not mediated knowledge.

Now, those are philosophical terms and I’m going to break them down for the young people. You older people know what I mean. But you know the difference between mediated and immediate, a thing that is immediate and the thing that’s mediated, that is direct or indirect.

Now, there is a knowledge of reason which is mediated to us. The heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament showeth His handiwork. What mediates that knowledge to us? Two things, the heavens and the firmament and our reason, so that we know the heaven and the earth and the firmament, mediated to us by the firmament and by reason. So that the knowledge we get of the heaven and the earth, all of natural theology, all that comes by reason and the human intellect is a mediated knowledge. It is not immediate, it is mediated. It comes to us more or less by gadgets and by means of faculties and organs.

Then, the knowledge that we receive by revelation is mediated to us through faith. The resurrection, for instance, who here knows anything about the resurrection? You know absolutely nothing by immediate experience of the resurrection. There was only one or two men that ever lived, that knew anything about the resurrection by immediate experience, and that would be Lazarus maybe, and the widow’s son maybe, and the little girl. They were raised from the dead, so they’d had an immediate experience of resurrection. But all you and I know about resurrection is what the Bible tells us, and that’s mediated to us through faith.

Did you ever sit down and try to visualize the resurrection? What would happen to you when you rose again from the dead? It’s an impossible task. You can’t do it, because you have not had immediate experience. But there will be a time when you can do it. You can tell the archangel Gabriel all about it, he won’t know anything about it except by faith. Gabriel never died to rise again. So that he only knows by faith about the resurrection, Christ knows by immediate experience, because He rose from the dead. You and I know by faith. It’s mediated to us by faith. And so our poor minds stagger along under the burden of a gorgeous and glorious truth too much for us. And we say, I believe in the resurrection of the dead, and so we do. And we stand at the graveside and look down as our loved ones are being lowered into their quiet sleep and we say to ourselves, I believe I’ll see him again. I shall see her again. We say I know that my Redeemer liveth and I shall see Him in that day. But that is a knowledge given to us by faith and mediated to us through faith.

And now let’s look at another kind of knowledge. How do you know you’re alive? No, I’m not trying to be humorous. I’m serious. How do you know you’re alive? That is an immediate knowledge. Reason hasn’t anything to do with it and neither has faith. You know you’re alive, and maybe some of you never thought about that. Have you ever thought about it? Sit down sometime turn the radio and the television off and fold the newspaper, and all of them, all the newspapers, fold them all up. Put Time Magazine under the desk and see whether you can’t think a little about this. How do you know you’re alive? Well, you know because your mother told you. Some of you never saw your mother. Maybe she died when you were born. Do you know because you read it in a book? How foolish to go to the library and get a book to discover and learn that you are alive. The knowledge that we are alive is not mediated to us through reason or faith. It is an intuition that is immediate and direct.

Then, how do you know you are yourself and not somebody else? Now, am I being silly? Not the slightest, my brethren. How do you know you are yourself and not somebody else? You know it by immediate intuition. If there were some friends of yours, were to pull a little hoax on you and in your asleep were to carefully transport you to somebody else’s bedroom, take all of your clothes and all, everything that belongs to you away and put you there and then put another man’s identification card in your wallet and in every way possible try to make you out to be somebody else. You’d wake up and you’d be confused and irritated, but you wouldn’t in anywise believe you were the other man. Because nobody can prove you’re another man and nobody can disprove who you are, because you have it without mediation, by argument or reason or faith or knowledge. You have it by direct awareness.

Now, that’s exactly what I mean by this higher degree of knowledge. This knowledge which is not by reason, and while it is by faith, it is the perfection and crown of faith in that it comes by direct knowledge. The Holy Spirit illuminates the human spirit and brings it into conscious experience of God. Do you know that Methodism taught that for 100 years in this country? Do you know that? Do you know that Baptists by the hundreds of thousands taught it on our continent? Did you know it? Do you know that Presbyterians used to preach that? Do you know the Salvation Army still does? Do you know that practically every holiness group and every deeper life group teaches it, so that I am not fanatical, neither have I suddenly gone berserk theologically. This is ordinary teaching, but it just happens that the kind of textualism which is in the harness right now, or which is in the saddle and riding a high right now, ignores all this. And I’m trying to restore it to you, not to teach something new, but to joyfully point to something that’s been hidden.

When I was a boy out on the farm in Pennsylvania among the hills, we had snow in those days, real snow. Nowadays, we get a spotty effort at it, and then it disappears in no time at all. I don’t know whether it’s the administration or whether it’s the atom bomb or what it is. But we don’t have the old snows we used to have. We used to get the snow there and would lie there all winter. And then, it would begin to melt away. And as the poet William Wordsworth said, the snow would fair ill on the top of the bare hill and the ploughboy would be shouting anon–anon.

Well, then I as a lad would begin to find things that I lost last fall. Did you ever have that experience any of you? I’d begin to find things that I had lost last fall, a toy, a ball, a toy gun, or some little thing that I liked, a little wagon that had gone down under the snow that had come maybe when I was asleep and buried everything, I’d begin to find those things. And for a while thereafter the snow got off the ground, I was a rich boy. Same old things, but I had forgotten about them and didn’t know where they were. And maybe I had asked for them and couldn’t find them and nobody knew where they were. They’d been covered all winter by the snow. Nothing fanatical, nothing heretical about that. They were the same old treasures, boys’ treasures not worth five cents in the market, but worth two million to me. And I would find them under the snow and I’d walk on air for a few days discovering my old treasures.

Now that’s all I’m doing here today; I am telling you that which has been snowed under by the deep cold snows of textualism over the last years in our circles. And I’m reminding you only of that which now the snow is beginning to melt and we’re seeing again. They belong to you. They’re your treasures. And they’re worth a million dollars to you. The Holy Spirit illuminates the human spirit and brings it into conscious experience of God and of spiritual realities, so you don’t have to ask somebody do you think I’m saved? Neither do you have to read a book on seven ways you can know your converted. You know by the impartation of knowledge immediately without mediation. It’s not contrary to reason. It is in line with faith. But it is so to speak when the altar flames and when the fire comes.

Now, I’m afraid to a great many people, God is simply the sum of what the Bible teaches about Him plus what we’ve heard about it, what evangelists stories, evangelists have told and tracts that we’ve read. And so we add God up and get a sum at the bottom of the column. And that is what God is to us. He’s the sum of what we’ve learned about Him.

Now, suppose, young lady, that you are just married. Suppose you’ve been married a month. And I don’t know your husband, never met him at all, and you come to me and begin to talk to me about your husband. And usually, it is a pleasant experience when they’ve only been married a month. And you tell me about him, and you show me his picture. And you tell me about his background, how many years he spent in service and where he was and all about him, and you give me his height and his weight and his characteristics, eye color and hair color and all the rest? Well, I add him up. And then you tell me about various facial features and his ears. Now, I couldn’t do it. But a good artist could draw a picture of that man. A good artist could do it. And particularly, he could do it if three or four people came and confirmed each other’s description and added a few details the other one had forgotten. Police reporters do that, police artists, after they’ve had four or five witnesses tell what a criminal looks like. They can draw a picture of the criminal that’s simply astonishingly like the man.

Now, that is the way God is to most people. He is the picture they’ve drawn in their minds as a result of various descriptions they’ve heard about God from other people. But they simply don’t know God himself. But now young lady, let me still address myself to you. You know him in a way that I couldn’t possibly know him. All I know about him is what you’ve told me and what I’ve added up. And your husband, your young husband, is to me the sum at the bottom of the column. But what is he to you? You don’t have to tell me. You don’t have to reply. He is somebody you know. You know him immediately. And I know him only mediated to me through description and conversation and talk and reason.

Now, that’s about all most people know of God, and almost all church people know of God. God is simply a sum at the bottom of the column. They learned from one evangelist that God one time got mad and killed the baby because the father wouldn’t go to the mission field. Well, they put that down. Then they learn from another one that God made a dog bark under somebody when Uncle Peter died in Keokuk and they put that on the column. And then they learned also that the Lord answered prayer for a fellow one time that wanted to beat another fellow out of a business deal. And they put that down. And then they learn maybe that God is very holy, and they put that down inconsistently enough. And after they have learned about all he can know about God from books and songs and sermons and illustrations, and superstition, they add that up and they’ve got their God at the bottom, and they call Him Father.

I wonder if we ought not to send some missionaries from the Baliem Valley to Chicago to tell us Christian peoples want what God is like. I wonder if this God of the rank-and-file church member, this God that has been mediated through bits of information, true and untrue. I wonder if that God isn’t as wrong a god and as surely an idol as the old bulls of Egypt, or the cats that they mummified and worshipped.

My brother, there’s something better than that. In the first place, you can have a proper theological knowledge of God from the Scriptures. And the second place, you can have a direct knowledge of God through the Holy Ghost. Our God is not the sum of what the Bible teaches about Him. God is a great reality Himself. And just as you and I must be satisfied to know that young man by description, and his young wife can know him by warm, living, personal contact and fellowship, so the church people seem contended to know God by description. And you and I can know God by acquaintance, if we only will.

Now, that corresponds to the last degree of knowledge in the last department or compartment of the court in that holy place, there is not even a candlestick. In that holy place, there’s only the Skekinah glory, that awful holy fire between the wings of the cherubim. Thou that dwellest between the wings of the cherubim said the old Psalmist. And the Jews of olden days worshipped Him. They worshipped not a fire, but they worship Him who dwelt there.

And when the high priest once a year went into that place, he knew that fire by its warmth and by its light. And he could look at his hands and see them illuminated by that mysterious fire that had no origin on earth at all. It was not the sun or the moon or stars, for they were shut out. It was totally dark in there. It was not a candlestick, for that was in the compartment they called the Holy Place. This is the Holy of Holies, beyond the second veil. And there only, the light of God shines out. He is light, and in Him is no darkness at all. And they knew God, the priest could know God, the shining out of God by direct experience. Do you think those priests were anything but awestruck. Do you think those priests ever came out of there with their chins down and gloomy? Never! They came out of there with faces shining and with eyes like stars. They had looked upon God, the awful, glorious God that fills heaven and earth, and yet, would shine out of the Shekinah between the wings of the cherubim.

Now, what are the conditions? I suppose I should break this up really, and make it a fifth sermon, but I won’t do it. I have kept you this far and I won’t push my luck, as they say. So I’ll talk about, about conditions and in 10 minutes be through. What are the conditions for thus knowing God? Well, of course, the first condition is to repent and be born anew. That’s the first condition. You cannot arrive at any such a deep knowledge of God by nature. The natural man does not know the things of the Spirit of God and to him they are foolishness. There must be a repentance from sin and a turning to God through Jesus Christ, and a believing on Jesus Christ so that your soul is renewed. That’s variously called regeneration, renewal, the new birth, but it’s all the same thing.

Then there must be a renunciation. As long as you try to carry water on both shoulders and walk the fence between heaven and hell, and pleasing God and mammon, and be half in and half out, you will never know anything about God except that which you reason to by logical conclusions. There must be a renunciation of everything that displeases God. There must be a turning to God in fullness of determination, to walk with Him and be His. And then there must be a separation from and a separation unto. We’re separated from everything that is unlike God, and we’re separated unto God Himself, and God must be all in all. Now am I teaching anything that’s too high? Flip your hymnbook open after I pronounce the benediction. Flip your hymn book open and go through the hymns and see whether you don’t sing it there and don’t know what you’re singing about. See if it isn’t there. Sure it’s there.

And then there must be complete confidence in the mediator. Now, there is no approaching into that holy place without the blood of the Mediator. You could approach into the first place by the light of nature. Into the second, only if there had been a sacrifice and into the third only with blood of atonement. So, there must be complete confidence in Jesus Christ, the Mediator. And there must be an anointing of the Spirit of God to illuminate us, and then a waiting on God with our open Bible. The Spirit can sometimes shine upon the Word and bring the truth to light. To cite precepts and promises afford a sanctifying life. That verse precedes the one we sang. Her glory gilds the sacred page. And who was that man? William Cooper, one of the greatest of the English poets, a great Calvinist, a great, I don’t know, Presbyterian, or maybe a Episcopalian, but a great teacher, a man who’s never been considered to be anything but sound in his theology. And he says that the Spirit of God shines upon the Word to bring the truth to light.

My brethren today, there must be, there must be an advance beyond this textualism that looks upon the cold text and says, I believe it. There must be an advance past that that says I believe it, and then moves on to a knowledge of God by the flash of divine light from God, so that I know within my heart and nobody can shake me. If you can be reasoned into salvation, a stronger reasoner can reason you back out of it again. If you know you belong to God by a reasonable conclusion, stronger reasons can cause you to conclude the opposite. But if by faith in the Mediator and the blood that He shed, you come to God and put away everything that’s unlike him and look into His faith with expectation, He will give you a knowledge of Himself and heavenly realities that nobody reasons you into and nobody can reason you out of.

And that’s what we’re missing today. That’s why we’ve got imitators instead of initiators. That’s why we’ve got men and women who follow like sheep instead of men and women who lead like shepherds. And God help us take our Christianity seriously. For me, as far as I’m concerned, it’s either a burning bush or I’ll walk out on the whole thing. No hodgepodge compound of Norman Vincent Peale and David for me. It’s either God everything or God nothing. And God turns around and says to us, either I must be your all or I won’t be your anything. Christ must be Lord all of all, or He will not be Lord at all. Think it over, brethren. It’s a serious thing.

Tags Faith, Holy Spirit, Knowledge

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“The Knowledge of God III”

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The Knowledge of God III

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

July 8, 1956

The Daily News will have a man here next Sunday morning, to look us over and write us up. They were already here and took some pictures. So, you’d better come dressed tomorrow, next Sunday I mean, in the morning, for the occasion. The brother will be here and they usually are pretty frank about what they say.

Now, these mornings, I have been talking about three degrees of Christian knowledge. This is the third message on the subject and there will be one more next Sunday morning. And I pointed out that there are three degrees of knowledge possible, corresponding to the three divisions of the tabernacle. The first being that of reason. Romans 1:19,20, because that which may be known of God is manifest in them. For God hath showed it unto them. For the invisible things of Him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead.

And then, faith, corresponding to the holy place. Through faith, we understand, Hebrews 11. And then corresponding to the Holy of Holies, the knowledge that comes by the revelation of the Spirit. Now we have received not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit, which is of God, that we might know the things that are freely given to us of God. Which things also we speak not in the words which man’s wisdom teaches, but which the Holy Ghost teaches. Comparing spiritual things with spiritual, for the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness unto him, neither can he know them, because they’re spiritually discerned.

Now, there we have it, that there are three degrees of knowledge, reason, the outer court, the light of nature; faith, the holy place; and the Holy Ghost, the Holy of Holies. And about the first I talked last week about that kind of knowledge which comes to us by reason, working on data, furnished by the senses: observation, research, experiment, discovery, or just ordinary, practical, common sense, looking around us.

Now, there is a knowledge more excellent than the knowledge gained by reason; and knowledge further in and nearer to God, and it is the knowledge offered to faith. And that is what I want to talk about today. Next Sunday morning, I want to speak about that spiritual knowledge, that knowledge, which is intuitive, which comes by a flash of the light of the Holy Spirit in the human breast.

But now, I point out to you that revealed truth is addressed to faith only. And when I say revealed truth, I mean the Scriptures. Holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost. And they gave us revealed truth, which we find in the Old Testament and the New. And it is revealed to faith only. There was an old man of God by the name of Anselm, they call him St. Anselm now, who lived way back in the early days. He was known as one of the church fathers and is a great theologian. And he taught that in religion, faith plays the part played by experience in the things of the world. What experience will teach you of earthly things, faith will teach you of heavenly things.

Now in experience, we know as a result of data furnished us by our famous five senses, by the things of sight and sound and taste and touch and smell. And then we make deductions from these, and we piece them out, and we put them together and we draw conclusions. And we build up philosophies and sciences and common knowledge, farmer knowledge, the knowledge of the farmer sitting on the fence chewing the straw. Or the knowledge of the scientist in the laboratory, the knowledge of the philosopher in the library. All of it is only knowledge which has been gained through the five senses and then taken and compounded and made into other knowledge, which we drew from that knowledge. And that sound badly confused, but it’s not so badly confused as we go along.

Now, for that kind of knowledge, no faith is necessary, absolutely none at all. Let us reduce it to its simplest form. A little boy feels in his pocket and feels that he has marbles there. And it suddenly strikes him, he wants to know how many. So he takes them out into the palm of his hand and laboriously counts them, and finds he has nine. Now, he has counted his marbles, and he knows he has nine. Now it doesn’t take any faith, and it isn’t guesswork. It’s just knowledge gained by observation. He has counted them. And he knows how many he has.

Or a jeweler will test to see whether that metal before him is gold or not. Or, whether that thing he holds in his hand is glass or diamond. He has certain tests which he puts them to. And when they have met those tests or failed to meet them, he knows exactly what he has in his hand, whether gold or something else, whether diamond or glass. And it doesn’t take any faith. It doesn’t call upon faith at all. He knows. He’s found out by reason. He’s tested it. Experience has taught him and he doesn’t have to believe anything or take anybody’s word for anything. It isn’t a question of character or promise, it’s a question of finding out for himself.

That is the knowledge which reason has, or the naturalist observes the habits of, say, the ringneck pheasant. And after he has spent half a lifetime, and some of them actually have, observing this or that bird, and writing their observations in a book, he doesn’t have to have faith, he knows. He’s watched them until he knows how they act. He knows all about them. Or the chemist analyzing some sort of liquid to determine what it is. Finally, after putting it to careful tests, will be able to write down on a piece of paper, the formula he knows what he has there.

Now that doesn’t take faith. The simple fact is the data that reason furnishes is not addressed to faith at all. The scientist doesn’t have to have any faith unless you want to actually stretch it thin and say that he has to have faith that everything will remain as it is. Well, if you call that faith, then that’s faith. But that isn’t what I mean when I say faith. I mean something else as I shall point out.

Now we are discovering more and more facts about nature. And to do so men have worked out more and more, and finer and finer techniques. And we’re getting to know more and more about everything. And faith is not called upon. A man who spends his lifetime examining and counting and weighing and measuring and analyzing. That man doesn’t have to have faith. He finds out. He could put it down. He knows. He tests it. What a man has, why does he have hope for it. And what he knows by observation, why does he have to have any faith? Why is he trusting in anybody’s character, yet he doesn’t. He doesn’t have to.

But now my brethren, there is a body of knowledge, and that body of knowledge is too high for the human mind to reach. There is no technique by which it can be gotten at. It is super sensible in that it cannot be reached by any of the senses. Simply stated, it cannot be smelled nor tasted nor touched nor heard nor felt. And why, because we cannot through our senses get any data about it naturally. There is nothing that we can do with it. It’s just out there. It’s beyond us. Otherwise, God would not have had to send holy men and say to them, thus saith the Lord. There would have had to be no divine revelation. There is that revelation to reason. It is the heavens which declare the glory of God and the firmament which showeth His handiwork. Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night showeth knowledge. It is the sun and the moon and the stars and all nature, they are addressed to reason. And so that is a revelation addressed to reason.

But the revelation addressed to faith is way above that and far beyond it and deeper down and further out and beyond so that reason cannot get to it. And that is the body of knowledge which we have no technique to discover, and which is addressed to faith alone. You either believe it or else you don’t. And there’s no way of proving it. Although men have labored lifetimes to try to prove it. But it is known to faith, and it receives its data, not by examination or research or observation, but by a direct statement of God Almighty. It is a revelation handed down and given. It is a statement made, or a series of statements made.

Now what are these data? What are these truths? I can’t hope to name all of them in one sermon. It would take two weeks to do it. But I can only, I shall name twelve if I get that far, just as samples and the major truths, but certainly not all of them. For instance, there’s the Trinity of the Godhead. Now, after we have had it revealed to us that God is a Trinity, then reason can go to work on that revelation, and can try to show that we knew it all the time. And there are philosophers and theologians who do that very thing. They try to show that the Trinity is revealed everywhere in nature. But until God Almighty revealed it in the Bible, nobody dreamed of it, which ought to be proof enough that it’s not revealed in nature. Nature revealed certain truths to reason, but the Trinity is not one of them. The Trinity is revealed to faith.

And it’s only by faith that we know there’s a Father, Son and the Holy Ghost. It’s only by faith that we’re Trinitarians and not Unitarians. It is only that we believe what God has said, that we can sing, praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, so that you either believe or you don’t. And you have no way of confirming it. We sometimes try to illustrate it so to understand it and break it down a little bit. And we show how water might consist of mist and rain and ice. And we show how man has his three dimensions. And we try to explain it, but we had to have it handed to us, ready made by divine revelation, or we never could have arisen to know it.

And then that man is made in the image of God. How could we know that? This is one of the sweetest doctrines in the Bible that God made man in His own image, in the image of God and likeness of God made he him. And I believe this with all my heart, but who would ever have thought of that? Who could have smelled that out, or thought it out or heard it or felt it or sensed or tasted it? How could it have yielded to the instrument of the scientist or to the prying mind of the philosopher? No, we had to be told that man was made in the image of God.

The Greek philosopher said that man showed that he was born to think and to practice virtue. And therefore, back of it all, there must have been a God who thinks and who is virtuous, but that’s about as close as reason ever got to it. That man was made in the image of God is a truth completely hidden to reason but gloriously revealed to faith.

And then there’s the fall of man. Now, how did we get here? Revelation tells us that we got here by creation of God as men, and then that we fell. Now, that’s the way God says it happened. And when we deny faith or have no faith, then we try to reason it out.

Some years ago, I read a book. What was this man’s name? He was a famous scientist. For the moment. I can’t recall. He’s gone now, but he was quite popular 20-25 years ago. {William J. Fielding} And he called it, The Caveman Within Us. And he denied divine revelation, but he began with reason. And he said, man, is two kinds of being. Now, I’m paraphrasing what he said certainly, but giving the gist of it. He said, Man is good and bad. He has in him so much of good, but he also is capable of being so terribly bad.

Now, he said, here’s the reason. We have come up from the beast by evolution. And we are slowly purging out the beast out of us, but we haven’t gotten rid of it yet. And the good in us is that toward which we’re developing, but the bad in this is the caveman, the beast, the animal that’s still there. And he said, now all of this growling and snarling and lying and violence and impurity and gluttony and drinking, he says, this is the result of the caveman. The old beast that hasn’t yet been purged out of us. But the love and kindness and mercy and patience and peace, that’s the good thing toward which we’re moving.

Now, isn’t it strange that he said the same thing that Paul said, only he said it upside down. Paul said that we were originally made in the image and likeness of God. Genesis says it and Paul accepts it, but that we failed because of one man’s sin. And that caveman within us is the fallen man inside of us. Not the man that crawled up but the man that fell down. But observation shows the same thing, that man is both good and bad. That he’s capable of love and kindness and self-sacrifice, or a nasty ill-tempered abuse and swearing and gluttony.

So, reason tries to explain it and comes up with a caveman. But revelation doesn’t explain it. Revelation sets it forth as a shining light and says, man sinned. And the day he sinned, he died spiritually, and that’s what’s wrong with him. And so, death came upon all men. And that caveman within us is no caveman at all. It’s simply the old fallen man. You’ve got to take your choice now my brethren, either try to reason it out or accept it by faith. I accept as a datum of knowledge that man is a fallen creature.

And then again, the doctrine that God so loved the world. How are you going to figure that out? Is it obvious to us? Is it obvious to reason that God so loves the world when the lightning will flash down and kill fifteen children picnicking? Is it obvious to us that God so loved the world, when the great ocean will swallow a ship with 900 people on it? Is it obvious to us that God so loved the world when the desert will swallow up a band of foolish travelers and let them die and be eaten by buzzards on the hot surface of the sandy desert?

Is it obvious that God so loved the world when that sweet woman, beautiful to look at, suddenly twisted out of shape with polio or cancer? No, reason doesn’t tell us that God so loved the world. Reason tells us that the God who made the world cares for it after a fashion. Reason goes that far. But reason never said, God so loved the world. That was a revelation from God, my brethren. You and I have heard this until it’s old stuff to us. And we imagine that everybody ought to know it.

You know, there are people, our good friend Ed may be in Baliem Valley today. He was in Hollandia yesterday, arrived there. And if he’s gotten into the Baliem Valley today, or as soon as he gets in, he will be trying to tell those people that God so loved the world. And at first, they won’t believe it, for they haven’t believed it. But when it slowly dawns on them that the God that made the world loves them, then we may be making some converts there among the Danis. But that will be wonderful news to them. To Ed, it’s just old stuff that he heard when he was a little kid. Little toothless Ed learned that when he was in Sunday school.

And so, it’s common to him and to you and me. But oh, what a revelation to those that never heard it before. God loves mankind. God loves the world. And in spite of the lightning and the sandy desert and the ocean and the wind and the flood, God loved mankind to give His Son.

That’s revelation, brethren. And that is a datum of knowledge which is given to our faith, not to our reason. Hymnology has been wondering about it ever since it was first revealed. How can it be? Oh, how can it be the hymns all cry? Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound? Oh, depths of mercy, can it be, God left that gated ajar for me? Brother McAffee and I have amused ourselves a bit in a spiritual way by looking at the old Methodist hymnal and finding out how many hymns start out, oh, and an. And can it be, and oh, the love of God. Why that’s revelation, my brethren. Reason never could get to it. You can’t smell that truth. No scientist can get that into his test tube. That’s a revelation from God to faith.

And then, that Christ was virgin born. I shudder deep in my heart when men talk about parthenogenesis and try to show how there are certain circuits possible in certain low levels of nature, to bring about offspring from a mother only as it is. Oh, my brethren, this is not something to be reasoned about. This is a burning bush to be knelt before. We get down on our knees and say, I believe in God the Father Almighty and in Jesus Christ His only Son, our Lord was born of the Virgin Mary. And we kneel there with our faces hidden and cry, holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty. But only the man who doesn’t understand, tries to understand. Only the man of unreason tries to reason in that holy place. There are times when reason is an affront to God Almighty. There are times when the brazen mind enters the sanctuary and tries to understand that which is ineffable and inscrutable. And when it enters there, it’s an insult to God.

So, the man who tries to explain the virgin birth, is insulting God Almighty. There’s only one thing to do before that miracle and marvel and mystery, and that is to cry, my Lord and my God, Thou knowest. And that Jesus Christ’s blood which was shed on the cross, saves men from sin. There is a revelation to faith, and we never should try to explain it. When men get up to preach about the chemistry of the blood, I want to grab my hat and get out of there so fast. Trying to explain how the blood of Jesus Christ can cleanse a man from sin. I sat one time and shuddered while a man preached on the chemistry of the blood.

Another man had written a book on the chemistry of the blood. One man is dead and the other still alive. And I wouldn’t hesitate to say bluntly that I don’t believe that any man ought to try to take it on himself to explain by natural processes, how the blood of Jesus Christ can atone for human sin. Never, never my brethren! The moment I can understand it, I can say I will arise and be like the Most High. I will exalt my throne equal to the throne of God. The devil tempted mankind when he said, thou shalt be as gods knowing. And the desire to know what was never intended to be understood, and to explain what can only be known by faith, has crushed the church from Augustine to the present hour.

So, how the blood of Jesus cleanses me, I do not know, but oh, I believe it. I believe it. In that hour, which may come to me as it may come to you, when everybody knows, and we know that we’ve only a little time. And tomorrow won’t matter because tomorrow we’ll be with God. On the eve of our coronation, we won’t say, get down that book and read the chapter about corpuscles. Get me down that book and read about the serum in which the white and the red corpuscles float. I want to have a little more assurance before I die. Oh no, no brethren, we look away from all man’s puny bird brain. And we look away to the Lamb of God who taketh away the sins of the world. And we’ll say the blood of His Son cleanses us from all sin. Thank God, I know it, I know it.

The old dying bishop, they said to him, Bishop, what have you to say? And he said, I have only this to say, that now that I’m about to go, my theology has been reduced to one text. Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners. That’s it, my brethren.

And that Christ rose the third day. I wonder why the children of God won’t let this alone, trying to prove the possibility of the resurrection. Trying to show how men can be raised from the dead, can never be. We possess no technique to prove that Christ rose from the dead. And even if scientists could get to a point where they could restore human life after death, there will never be, but granted for a moment, it might be. Still, it would be no proof that a man, 2,000 years ago, rose from the dead the third day. That’s not a doctrine to be defended, that’s a doctrine to be proclaimed. And the Spirit of God never witnesses to defense. He witnesses to proclamation. The gospel evangel is the gospel of assertion and proclamation, never, never is a defense or apology.

So, it is told to us by the great God Almighty, that this Jesus Christ who walked in Galilee was virgin-born and that He was God and that He died for our sins and His blood cleanses from sin. That He rose from the dead the third day, and that He now sits at the right hand of God the Father Almighty. There isn’t any way to prove that. Not all the illustrations, not all the science films, you can quote that if you want to. They know what I think of their science films, my good friends down at 108th, whatever it is. Not all your scientific films will ever prove anything except to reason. It’ll help you to have a little more knowledge out in the outer court, out in the light of nature, out where Mohamedans can be and Roman Catholics and all the rest. Out there where there is no Holy Ghost and no faith. For no proof ever helps anybody’s faith from the beginning of the world. Never.

And if tomorrow morning, if God should take me aside and surround me by the angels, and prove to my intellect that Christ had been risen from the dead, it couldn’t confirm my faith at all. I already believe it with everything inside of me. God said it and I believe it. It’s a datum of knowledge given to faith. And faith grasps it and says, amen.

Back to Anselm again, in religion, faith takes the place that experience takes in nature. Just as a scientist can measure a star and know exactly how large it is and how fast it’s moving–and that’s by experience–so I know that Jesus Christ rose from the dead and that’s my faith. I know my sins are gone. That’s a revelation of God to my heart, revelation of God to my faith. I know that, but I can’t prove it. It may be that it’s only gone underground. Reason would say, oh I know what’s happened to you. You got yourself all worked up and you had a psychological explosion and your sins went underground, and your sense of self-accusation and sin-consciousness just went underground. It’s still there in your subconscious. Not. That isn’t where it is Brother. I will bury your sins in the sea of My forgetfulness and will remember them no more against thee forever. That’s where they are. They have not gone underground, they’ve gone under sea, the sea of God’s forgetfulness. I believe that, and I can die with that. I can live with that. And I can face eternity with that.

A man’s resurrection from the dead. Go to almost any library and you can run onto a lot of books which aim to prove that there’s a life beyond this life. Some dear old widow, God bless her, she goes to Madame Zelia and they go through certain crossing of the palm with a nice bill and then a few eerie shrugs and the light goes out and Papa speaks from the other world. And it’s funny how dumb Papa always sounds. Everybody that dies gets so dumb, they always say the same thing. Do not worry. I am at peace. All is well. Then there’s a click, and the circuit is cut off. And they don’t hear from Papa, but she worries and goes back and pay some more, and he says the same dumb thing again. Nobody ever yet returns to say it’s hot here. Nobody ever yet said I saw Jesus. They always say, all is well. I’m at peace. Do not worry. It’s like flying to Florida and sending a telegram back to your worrying wife saying, we made it. Don’t worry.

Well now brethren, if you want to place your hope of immortality on that kind of silly business, you may. But I have something better than that. Listen, what I read about here. Listen, for our friend Paul, God bless him, he was just about to go. He’d finished his course, and here’s what he said. Jesus Christ was given us in Christ Jesus before the world began but is now was made manifest by the appearing of our Savior, Jesus Christ, who hath abolished death, and hath brought life and immortality to light through the gospel. That’s it. Then rest my long-divided heart, fixed on this blissful center rest and don’t bother Madame Zelia. She doesn’t know anything about it either. And when she comes to die, she’ll howl like a banshee and all her supposed knowledge will fail.

Man’s resurrection and Christ’s triumph and all of eschatology, all that lies out there. And that big ugly word eschatology, which mean future events. All of that I take by faith. I believe it will be. I believe that righteousness will triumph, that God Almighty will have his way. The sovereign purposes of God will be fulfilled. That Jesus Christ will sit and the earth will be His footstool and heaven will be His throne. And that the Jew will be back in Palestine. The church will be sitting as a bride of the Lamb. And the nations of the earth will be walking in peace and every man shall sit under his own vine and pick trees and none will make afraid for the earth shall be filled with the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea. I believe it. Do you? That’s a revelation to faith. Reason can’t enter there. There’s the candlesticks, burning brightly. That’s revelation. It’s not God, it’s revelation of God. And there’s the incense table that sends up spiral prayer. And there’s the shewbread which is the Lord’s Supper. That’s in that holy place. No night light of reason enters there, it is faith.

And so, Faith is an organ of knowledge. Remember, reason is an organ of knowledge. Faith is an organ of knowledge, and the Holy Spirit. It is hard to say an organ of knowledge, but the human spirit is an organ of knowledge that to which the Holy Spirit can impart what He wants us to know. Now, these are facts that are known. And all the efforts to harmonize science and the gospel message is a tacit proof that the attempted harmonizers are not believers at all. They’re reasoners. They are rationalists.

And there’s a school of thought which has sprung up in the last fifteen years in America, and they’re busy proving it that Christianity is scientifically sound and philosophically correct. I believe it’s all that, but we can’t prove that it is. And the moment we start proving it is, faith lies down and dies. God doesn’t have to prove to me that He’s true. He doesn’t have to. He tells me. I believe it. If a man trusts his wife, he doesn’t have a detective running around after her proving anything. He trusts her. I trust God Almighty. I don’t have to have the detective reason nosing around to see whether God is telling the truth or not. I know He’s telling the truth.

There is further-in knowledge, and we’ll talk about that next Sunday. I hope you can be back. It is the knowledge beyond faith. It is the direct knowledge which through faith, the Holy Spirit imparts to the human spirit. And I don’t think you’ve ever heard a sermon on that, probably in fundamental circles in your life, and yet it is the common belief of the church fathers and is written into our hymns and our books of devotion. So, I hope you can be back next week.

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Tozer Talks

Post author By pshappard
Post date September 15, 2024

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“The Basis for True Conversion”

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The Basis for True Conversion

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

September 26, 1954

Now please turn to the sixth chapter of the Gospel according to John, John’s Gospel, sixth chapter, verse 45. It is written in the Prophets, and they shall all be taught of God. Every man therefore that hath heard and hath learned of the Father cometh unto me, verse 44.

No man can come to me except the Father which has sent Me draw him. And then verse 37, all that the Father giveth Me shall come to Me, and him that cometh to Me I will in no wise cast out.

Now, this will be, I think, of all the sermons that I have preached and may yet preach on the book of John, this will be the most difficult. It will be the most difficult to preach because it deals with the deep profound of Bible truth. And it will be the most difficult to understand because it may sound self-contradictory.

And to use the language of Peter, it could easily be that the unlearned and the unstable might rest these words to their own destruction. But I notice that even though Peter said that he didn’t recommend that we forego reading Paul. He said Paul’s there and go ahead and trust God somehow that it won’t happen, but it’s potential dynamite for the people who come in the wrong spirit. I think the same thing might have been said about all the Scriptures, but it was said on Peter of Paul’s writings, and I would apply the same passage to the text before us tonight.

Now in what I want to bring to you, there will be many familiar truths appearing. But you know I think of the Bible like a loom with, say, about a hundred threads, each of a different color, each of a different color, shades of the same color, but distinct from each other in their shades and tone, about a hundred and no more than a hundred. And yet using that same loom and using no more than that hundred, and I might easily have cut it down to half a hundred; using no more than that hundred or half hundred threads, each of a different color, there can be produced in that loom, tapestries and rugs of the most exquisite beauty of shades and richness of tone, such as might make it worthy to hang in the palace of kings.

So, in the Scriptures, whether it be a simple pastor in some country church or whether it be some great world known preacher in some cathedral, if he is true to the scriptures, he has only about, I’ve said, a hundred threads to work with. They are the familiar threads of Christian doctrine. And no matter what he’s preaching on, and no matter to whom he’s preaching, no matter where he gets his text, and no matter what passage he’s expounding, he’ll always be using those same threads. But out of those threads, the Holy Spirit weaves the gorgeous tapestry that hangs in the church of the living God and makes it not only a safe haven for sinners, but a place of charming beauty for the saints.

Now, we notice here that nine times Jesus in the passages is read, nine times he refers to the Father. And He refers to Him in such a context as to present Him as Sovereign. And I want to talk for a little while about the Sovereign Father, the Sovereign Lord. For it always must be kept in mind that the Father was not incarnated. It was the Son who was incarnated. The Father and Jehovah are the same. Jehovah and the Son are not the same persons.

So that it is never proper to say, and right here I’m throwing a tiny little “zoop” bomb into the neatly made-up theology of the average fundamentalist, for I am myself a fundamentalist on the edges, and certainly an evangelical all the way through.

But there are those who say that the Jehovah of the Old Testament became incarnated in the New Testament, which is false. It’s bad theology. It isn’t so. The Father is the Jehovah of the Old Testament, but Jesus Christ is the Son, the second person of the Trinity. It was not God the Sovereign Father who became flesh and dwelt among us. It was Jesus Christ the Son who became flesh and dwelt among us. There’s a distinction there.

You say, how do I prove it? Well, take such a passage as this, Jehovah said unto my Lord, sit thou on My right hand. Find that in the 110th Psalm. Jehovah said unto my Lord, who was David’s Lord? Jesus. Who is it that sits at the right hand of the Father? Jesus. So that Jehovah said unto Jesus, sit thou on My right hand. Jehovah the Father said unto the Son, sit on My right hand.

That text alone ought to make it clear, but you’ll find it throughout all the Bible. You’ll find the Sovereign Father mentioned here, and it was the Son that became incarnated, not the Sovereign Father, Jehovah the Great I Am. And yet the Son was as much Sovereign and as much I Am as the Father. For as I have said over and over again from this pulpit, the Three are One. And what can be postulated about the Father can be postulated about the Son. And what can be said about the Father and the Son can be said also about the Spirit.

I received a letter this last week from a Presbyterian brother out somewhere on the California coast, and he ended up by saying something of this effect, God bless you and may the Lord the Spirit bless you and your ministry. I like that. I’d never had that in any letter that I remember, nor I’d never seen it in print except in the book of 2 Corinthians.

The Bible has no hesitation at all in calling the Spirit the Lord. He has no hesitation in calling Jesus the Lord, and he has no hesitation in calling the Father the Lord. For as the old creed says, the Father is Lord and the Son is Lord and the Holy Ghost is Lord, yet there are not three Lords but one Lord. This is also very wonderfully beautiful to me.

I preached one time in a Bible conference this summer on the Trinity, and when I was through, the man who ran the shebang said to me, shaking his head, he said, Brother, when you preach thus on the Trinity, it makes it sound as if there were three gods.

Well, I don’t understand how anybody can be so infinitely and exquisitely plain dumb as not to understand English when it’s preached in their presence, and when I have explained and explained that there is one God and that He is of three persons, the Father is God, the Son is God, and the Holy Ghost is God, yet there are not three gods but one God.

The Father is Lord, the Son is Lord, the Holy Ghost is Lord, yet there are not three Lords but one Lord. The Father is sovereign, and the Son is sovereign and the Holy Ghost is sovereign, yet there are not three sovereign gods but one sovereign God. That doesn’t sound like three gods to me. That sounds like one God in three persons. And so, we have the Father spoken about here, the Son is speaking about the Father, and He calls him nine times here, the Father, and calls Him and puts Him, I say, in the context of the sovereign, Most High Ruler, and God of heaven, earth, and hell.

Now, I want to talk a little bit about sovereignty.

I preached a sermon several years ago on the sovereignty of God, and if I ever get around to it and God ever delivers me from little duties that I can write my book on the attributes of God devotionally considered, I want to deal with the sovereignty of God. And when I do, I will have the Calvinists on one shoulder and the Arminians on the other pecking away at my poor, rapidly balding head. But tonight, I want to talk a little bit about the sovereignty of God and show you what it means as applied to God the Father.

Well, now I give you a definition. I like to give definitions, I like to define, because if I use a word and I mean it one way and when you hear it you mean it another way, I haven’t communicated with you at all. I might as well have been talking Sanskrit or Welsh. So that if I use a word and you don’t know what I mean by the word, not that you are not as well educated as I am, but merely that you may give a different meaning to a word. So when I use the word sovereign, I think it well that we define what we mean by the word sovereign.

So, I want to give it to you simply like this. I don’t borrow it from any book. It comes out of my own heart, and I trust out of the scriptures that God’s sovereignty is that by virtue of which He is free to do always as He pleases and fulfill all His goodwill without hindrance. That’s sovereignty. That turns God loose in his universe, free to do as He pleases in heaven, earth, and hell, and to have His final way and to carry out his eternal purposes to perfect completion in the time to come. Now that’s sovereignty. That’s what it means and that’s all it means or at least that’s an outline of all that it means.

Now God’s will, when I say that the sovereignty of God means that God is free to carry out His will, then we come to, what is the will of God? And I point out something to you here which you may not be familiar with or hear some places by oversight and that is that the will of God is on two levels. There is the primary will of God and the secondary will of God. The primary will of God is the sovereign purpose of God whereby He has His way always and always succeeds in getting everything He wills to have done. That’s the primary will of God.

Now, the primary will of God touches all of God’s eternal purposes. I’m a great believer in the eternal purposes of God.

They talk about our State Department. I saw a cartoon. You won’t think I’m getting political with you, but I saw a cartoon that while I don’t like the cartoonist, I had to admit he had something there. It showed a picture of Dulles, the Secretary of State under Eisenhower, our present Secretary of State, our peripatetic, traveling Secretary of State. It showed his desk there and here was he just disappearing on his way to catch a plane. He had his briefcase in his hand and one thing he had not, he had no head on. His head was still on his desk and his head was saying, well, you can’t blame a fellow for forgetting something sometimes. Here he was hustling off, but he lost his head.

Now that of course was the politicians, the political cartoonist way of saying that he was a no good and that he didn’t know where he was going. Brethren, I think he may be a good man, but you know, I wonder if he knows what it’s all about. And I think that these brethren, these men are all opportunists, and they are like a mother with 14 sets of twins trying to keep them in line. She never can predict what anybody’s going to do and the best she can hope is to block something when she sees it start. Junior starts over this way to knock over a quart of milk and she grabs him and blocks that and another one starts over here to wreck a mirror, and she grabs him, and she spends her blessed life just blocking, but she never knows ahead of time what she’s going to do. The best she can ever hope to do is to watch these, how many did I say, 14, that’d be 28 kids, to watch these 28 kids and get to them before they get it done.

Now brethren, my dear friends, without any political meaning whatsoever, that’s where dear Harold is. He has no more purpose in what he’s doing than the boy down the street, but he’s just hoping if he sees a commie jump out, he’ll block him and rush there and forget his head, but get to him in time and so we have a foreign policy of watch them and then jump and stop them before they get it done.

Ah brethren, if I thought God Almighty was like that, I’d fold my Bible, shake hands with my friend McAfee and leave the whole business and say what’s the use of being a Christian when all God does is stand up there nervously watching for the devil to make the next move and then blocking him.

Oh no, my brother, this is not a football game. God Almighty is the Sovereign Father and before the hills in order stood and received her frame, God had it all planned and in His primary will He is carrying it out and He will do His will and heaven and earth and hell someday will bow and declare that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God’s eternal purpose, the glory of God the Father.

So that’s why I can be as relaxed as I can ever get because I’m not worried about the future. I’m not scared because I know it’s going to work out all right. God has a primary will, and I can see now that I got two sermons instead of one but I’m hoping that maybe the people will hold on.

But brethren, God has a purpose for the universe. He has a purpose for the earth. He has a purpose for the human race. He has a purpose for the church, and He has a purpose for Israel, His people. And every one of those has a specific interlocking purpose which God Himself brought out of His own triune heart before the world was.

When there wasn’t a cloud in the sky nor drop of water in the ocean or the ocean bed there, nor a star in heaven or an angel beside the throne, when, as the poet said, thou didst live and love alone without creation. God had it all planned.

So never worry about God being afraid and rushing in and hurrying off and grabbing a long-distance phone and trying to get somebody blocked. Nah, God wouldn’t stoop to that kind of child’s play. His eternal thoughts move on His undisturbed affairs. And His primary will means that He is carrying on His purposes. That’s God’s primary will.

Then there’s a secondary will and that secondary will is that God has given people a will and He’s given them a right even to exercise that will even if one opposes the will of God. I wonder if we could illustrate it like this. I wonder if we could say that the primary will of God is like a great ship. It pulls slowly and majestically away from Pier 39 and starts out down toward the ocean, down the great mouth of the Hudson. Liverpool is its destination. The ship’s papers, the captain, whoever handles them, has the ship’s papers there, Liverpool. He’s responsible to get that ship in and have her pulled in and tied up at the dock in Liverpool in five days. About, I think it takes five days, does it? Or six for the great ships?

Well, all right. He’s going over there and he’s the captain in charge of that ship. So the purpose is that that ship should leave New York at such a day, pull into Liverpool at such a day. That’s the purpose. Now that purpose is going to be fulfilled. And the owner of the ship, all that are on board the ship in the capacity of crew and the captain and all the rest, that’s their purpose. And they’ll carry that purpose out.

But now in the meantime, there’s a great deal on that ship that doesn’t know a thing about that purpose. A little baby may be tumbling around over the deck and a weary mother may be lying out there trying to get a little sun. And a fat old boy that can barely see over may be playing the shuffleboard. And there may be rats running about the ship and sailors playing cards and people just naturally doing as they please. They’re not paying any attention to the purpose of the captain. He knows what the purpose is. His primary will is to get that ship into the dock at last.

But the secondary will is you can do as you please as long as you’re decent on board and I won’t bother you. So, God has a primary will. It is to bring the ship of his purpose to the ultimate goal, to the harbor. In the meantime, the rats run all over the ship. Brother, we’re alive with them today.

And somebody says, if God is God, why doesn’t He stop this? God knows where He’s taking the ship, and all of His purposes will be worked out. But in the meantime, His secondary will allows certain people to oppose His will, to be careless of His will, to be ignorant of His will, or to go directly against His will.

Now, if you were on board a ship and it was moving at so many knots an hour due east, and you decided to buck that ship and you’d start in the prowl, that’s the front of the ship, and walk to the stern. And you’d say to yourself, I’m not going, I’m not going, but you’d be going all right. Don’t imagine you wouldn’t. You’d just be getting some exercise. But even though you determinedly walked in an opposite direction, the great old ship would be carrying you there.

So, we have our Hitlers and our Mussolinis and our Stalins and all the rest of them, our Mao Zedong and our Zhou Enlai, we have them all. We have them all around over Chicago. They’re walking against the direction of the ship. But don’t you think for a second God won’t have his way with them at last. It’ll be heaven or hell. Heaven for those who do His will and believe His Son, and hell for those that don’t. God is in charge of His great purpose, and while He allows people to have a lot of freedom, He still will fulfill His purposes in that day.

Now, I want to give my definition again. I’ve given this definition in colleges and before people who are supposed to know the difference, and I’ve never had it challenged. Nobody’s ever come to me and said, how come? And yet I never read it anywhere. I don’t know whether it’s in print. It ought to be.

But here’s our difficulty, you see. If God is sovereign and has His will and can’t be thwarted, then how can man be free? There it is. You put a Methodist over here and a Presbyterian over here, and you ask a Presbyterian, how can it be? He says, Man isn’t free. God’s sovereign. Ask a Methodist, and he says, God isn’t sovereign. Man’s free, and they can’t get together. But I don’t think, I don’t see why they shouldn’t link up, because I believe in both the freedom of man and the sovereignty of God, and I’ll show you how it is.

God’s sovereignty is His freedom always to have His own way and to do His will. And man’s freedom is his right to say no to God’s will and to go the other direction. How then can you bring them together? You bring them together like this, that when God in his sovereign freedom created the heaven and the earth and all things that are therein and made man on the earth and put a soul within him, He said in His sovereign freedom, now to man I bequeath a limited freedom, and the right to oppose Me within limits. And I give you that right, and I hand it to you. Now use it. Use your own free will. I sovereignly declare that it’s My will that you shall have your will.

So, when man rises against God, he is exercising the free will which God sovereignly gave him. And when Judas Iscariot turned his back on God and sold the son of God for 30 pieces of silver, he was fulfilling this much of God’s will, that he was using the freedom God gave him, ladies and gentlemen. And so instead of canceling out the sovereignty of God, he was only using that limited freedom which God sovereignly had given him.

So, when I refuse to obey God, I am only doing what God has sovereignly given me the right to do. That’s God’s secondary will. He allows the rats to play over the ship and the winds to beat the across its deck, but He’s going to carry her through to the harbor, nevertheless. And that doesn’t mean that everybody’s to be saved. It only means that those are to be saved who are repentant and believe in Jesus Christ and are born again.

But it does mean that the overall purpose of God will be sovereignly fulfilled, and that man in his freedom has the right to make his own little choices on the little deck of that moving vessel. And if he makes choices that are contrary to the will of God, it’s because God said, son, you’re free to do it if you want to. I give you that freedom. So when a man raised his fist against God, he is not thwarting the will of God. He’s fulfilling God’s gift to him which made him free.

Now if that’s as badly confused as I’m afraid it is, come back next week and we’ll see what we can do. But I’ve never had that challenged. Nobody’s ever said, now wait a minute here, that isn’t true, it can’t be true. And I have given this little definition of mine before a great many people and before a great many theologians. So that’s what I mean when I say it that the sovereign Father is sovereignly carrying on His will.

Now, it says here, they shall all be taught of God. You see, men are in the hand of God and subject to the sovereign disposal of God’s primary will. Thine they were, said Jesus, thine they were, and Thou gave them to Me, and they have believed that Thou did send Me.

So, God deals with the men whom he has created. He deals with them as fallen creatures. And how does he deal with them? He deals by testing them and teaching them and instructing them.

They shall all be taught of God, Jesus said. And so, He teaches and tests and instructs. Now this is the Sovereign Father who does this, and He does it with these creatures by virtue of their creaturehood and His creator hood, not as Christians, but by virtue of their being creatures of His hand and beings whom He has created.

And so, God teaches and tests and instructs. They shall be all taught of God. How does God teach and test and instruct sinners? By the light of intelligence, working on natural creation, plus moral conscience, plus the mysterious presence of the Logos.

My brethren, I don’t know in all Christian theology anything that shuts my mouth tighter and makes my head bow more quickly and silences me when I am not forced to speak in the Lord’s name as I am now, but that makes me bow my head more quickly than the thought of the mysterious Logos, the Word that was in the world before Bethlehem, before Mary was born, before Abraham, before Adam, before oceans and seas, before stars and planets, that was in His universe. And when stars and planets and oceans and seas and creatures came into being, the mysterious Logos, the light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world was present, instructing, teaching. And wherever there is a moral creature, that Holy One is there. This is the light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world.

And in Romans 2 we are told of that strange light, that strange moral knowledge that men have who have never heard of the law of God as given by Moses or the Scriptures as given in the New Testament. And so, God goes among men. They shall all be taught of God. And God goes among men, and He tests them, I say, and they are tested in a hundred ways for their basic reverence.

Now, there was Esau and there was Saul. What is the matter with Esau? Find a bad thing Esau did. He never did a bad thing. At least, I can’t find anything evil that he did. He got hungry and sold his birthright, but that was a bowl of soup, no more immoral act there, a man of porridge. I can’t find anything bad that Esau ever did.

But God was testing Esau for basic reverence and didn’t find it there and found that Esau was akin to the red clay, and they named him Edom red clay. He had no side of his soul open to heaven. The window at the top of his soul was shut and the blind pulled. There was no window open toward God, no reverence there, nothing basically reverential. Look at Saul, great strapping tall fellow, and the beginning of his life was all right.

But there was something wrong with Saul in that he was not basically a reverent man. God, before he ever brings a man to Jesus, before he ever presents Jesus to a man, God tests man. Now this is the doctrine you don’t hear, but brethren, if it isn’t here, and you prove it isn’t here, I’ll buy you the best chicken dinner at Walgreens. It’s here all right. They shall all be taught of God.

I better read my text a few more times. They shall all be taught of God. Every man therefore that hath heard and hath learned of the Father cometh unto Me. No man can come to Me except the Father which has sent Me draw him. And all that the Father giveth Me shall come to Me. And him that cometh to Me I will unknow as cast out. And there you have the mysterious working of the Sovereign God over the souls of men.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is to my mind one of the most awe-inspiring thoughts in the Bible, that before I ever heard the name of Jesus, before the Holy Ghost ever presented Him to me as Savior, the Father was dealing with me, the Sovereign Father. They shall all be taught of God. And He was determining and finding out whether I was a basically reverent man, whether I was a greasy Esau, fond of the sticky, slippery red earth, or whether I was a man with the topside of my soul open so God could look down and I could look up.

And then God looks for humility in a man. The Sovereign Father goes among men, and as He’s going among you tonight, and looking for humility, and seeing if it is there. And He’s looking for that hidden something that I have said the topside of his soul is uncovered. I don’t say that saves any man. I know it doesn’t. But I only say that there are some people that God never preaches to.

It is a great mistake, ladies and gentlemen, to believe that every man who has heard the gospel has been evangelized. It is a mistake to believe that every man that has heard a Christian or heard a sermon has been talked to by God. There are some people to whom God can’t talk. Their ears hear, but having ears they hear not, and having hearts they cannot obey. They shall all be tested of God. They shall all be taught of God.

And the Sovereign Father who created them before He sent His Son to redeem them, as their Creator, is testing them to see which ones will go to His Son. And as many as hear the Father and are taught, they come to Jesus Christ, and He doesn’t cast them out, but He gives them eternal life, and no man can pluck them out of His hand.

Now, we make a mistake, and that is we urge the claims of Christ upon men that have never heard God. They are not prepared for Christ. They will not believe, and they could not if they wanted to. No man can come unto Me except the Father drawn. And he that has heard of the Father will come.

But, oh, the millions that hear the gospel without hearing the Father! The millions that hear the Truth without ever being affected by the Truth! But our trouble is that we rush in with our tract and try to ram Christianity down the throat of a person that has never had a moral preparation for it. There has been no evidence of humility there. There has been no repentance there. There has been no fearing and trembling there. There has been no willingness to break with the world and serve God.

But in our mistaken zeal, we try to make converts, and then we wonder why they backslide, or why the level of Christianity is so tragically low. It is so low because we have forgotten part of our Bible. We have forgotten that the Bible says they shall all be taught of God, that God deals with men as Creator before He deals with them as Redeemer. And that the light shines in the world.

Two men are riding in the same car, and they pass a church. They are both sinners, both lost and both on their way to hell. But one man looks up and sees the church, and instinctively something in him causes his head to bow a bit, and he is silent for a moment. The other man laughs as though it were a tavern and goes his way. Two women are playing cards together, both lost and both on their way to hell. The third person comes in and raises the religious question. One laughs it off, the other is strangely silent.

They shall all be taught of God, and the Sovereign Father that created them deals with them and prepares them. And as many as have heard the Father, they come straight to Jesus. And when they come, He gives them eternal life. Now, am I wrong on this? No man can come to Me except the Father which has sent Me draw him, and I will raise him up at the last day.

It is written in the Prophets, and they shall all be taught of God. Every man therefore that hath heard and hath learned of the Father cometh unto Me. Then He said, But I said unto you that ye also have seen Me and believe not.

And why have they not believed? Because they have not tested up, because there is no side of their soul open to heaven. They enjoy singing a fast chorus, I suppose, and they would enjoy a banquet, three-course banquet, five-course, ten-course banquet. They love religion all right. They like to be around where there is something nice going on. But there is nothing open to God in their souls at all. They hear the Word, but they don’t hear the Word. They have ears, but they hear nothing. They have not been taught of the Father. Then they get jockeyed into believing in Christ, and they make such poor, hopeless Christians. The reason is, that they are not Christians at all.

Every man therefore that hath heard and hath learned of the Father, he cometh unto Me, not that any man has seen the Father, save He which is of God, He has seen the Father. I am that Bread of Life, and this is the Bread which came down from heaven, that man may eat thereof and not die. I am the Living Bread which came down from heaven.

So, you see, my friends, there is such a thing as the mysterious workings of the Holy Ghost, of the Sovereign Father, through the Holy Ghost, before the Spirit ever presents the claims of the Savior to the soul at all. How different this is from our come when you want to, do what you please, think it over, and then decide. No, no, that is a modern heresy, and it is not Biblical, and there is no place for it in the entire Scriptures. No man can come to Me except the Father which has sent Me to draw him.

So, before God has tried and tested and proved, and at that hour then there is no impudent will of the man. The man has a will, and he knows it, but no more the impudent will that says, my will, my will, no more of that. There is conscience. The man that can’t sweat because he sinned can never repent, and the man who can’t repent can never be forgiven, and the man who can’t be forgiven must perish. And by sweat, of course, I don’t mean physical perspiration. I mean groan before God for his own iniquity. And I’ve said reverence and repentance and our general attitude toward God and the world above.

O Brethren, the Sovereign Father is here, and the Holy Spirit is exercising His right to select and test and try and prove and see and know whether we will or not; whether there’s anything here that can respond.

O Jacob, who would want to save you, you crooked conspirator? Jacob, you’re a wicked young chap, you’re a delinquent. Why don’t you be like your brother, a good, obedient fellow that smells of his work? The Bible says he did, says he smelled of the field which the Lord had blessed.

Esau was a good fellow. Jacob was a crooked, nasty little guy that you wouldn’t want to have lived around. But the difference was Esau loved Esau. And Jacob hated Jacob. Therefore, God hated Esau and loved Jacob. And though Jacob was deserving of death and damnation a thousand times, there was something inside the heart of Jacob that leaped to the voice of God, that leaped up.

The topside of Jacob’s soul was open to heaven, and he could look up, and God could look down. Esau was well thatched. He had no top to his soul. What top he had had no window in it. He was a pretty good man and a forgiving man and a nice, stodgy fellow, but he belonged to the earth. Jacob was a man who didn’t know where he belonged, but he was a miserable fellow, hated himself and his sin and all the rest, and he wanted to do God’s will and couldn’t and tumbled and fell. But all the time God knew he had a man.

So, no matter how bad you are or how crooked or what a sinner you’ve been, that doesn’t need to mean anything to you if you’ve been honored by God, if you’ve heard the voice of the Father. And in your spirit, there’s that basic reverence and a desire to do God’s will and a hatred, self-hatred for your sin, and you’ll want to come to the Lord Jesus. You’ll come, all right. They that have been taught of the Father, they come to Me, and them that come to Me I never turn away. I give them eternal life, and no man can ever pluck them out of My hand. They’re Mine because thine the Father’s they were, but He has given them to Me, and I have given them eternal life.

That’s how every Christian became a Christian, the mysterious working of God, conscience, repentance, and our general attitude toward the world above. Oh, how different from all this mechanical conveyor belt Christianity, this conveyor belt Christianity.

Do you know what I heard this last week, brother? You won’t believe this. I heard of a man, a soul winner so-called, who was too eager to make converts and to get the convert to say he believed in Jesus Christ, that he actually tricked sinners into saying, I believe in Jesus, but moved the conversation and got the conversation going around and got the fellow to moving and got him in a corner and jumped him, back on the checkerboard. And when the fellow finally admitted he believed in Jesus Christ, he said, there, you’re a Christian, there, I got you, you’re a Christian.

Now, that fellow, he’s supposed to be a Christian. I’m glad there aren’t very many men with ears that long in the world. We’d be worse off than we are. God knows we have hair enough on our long ears in a lot of places, but when they get that bad, brother, somebody ought to throw a net over him. But that kind of soul winning, I’ve heard that almost that bad; I’ve heard it talked from this pulpit on one occasion. It wasn’t my meeting, just a fellow in here preaching for some other organization, but I was present.

And I heard something almost that bad. You can trick a man into saying, I believe in the Son of God. All right, then, you’re a Christian. You’re a Christian, you hear? For the Bible says, he that believeth on the Son hath everlasting life. You said you believe you’re a Christian. Goody, goody.

But the Sovereign Father has never touched him. And the Holy ghost has never prepared him. And he’s never been taught of God. And he’s never heard of the Father. And the basic reverence isn’t in him, and basic humility isn’t there, and repentance isn’t there. But they’ve jockeyed him and tricked him into saying, I believe. And that’s why we’re as we are.

Oh, my brother, if God’s people would only pray and pray till the presence of God would become as thick as fog, holy fog, and men would walk around with a sense of reverence and fear and repentance on them so terrible that sin would become intolerable and the thought of hell and judgment and death would be unbearable, we’d get some converts that would come bounding out like a healthy child. But we jockey them and trick them and push them and massage them into the kingdom of God. And when they get in there, they don’t know what it’s all about.

How about you, sir? All that the Father giveth Me shall come to Me. He said, verse 37, all that the Father giveth Me shall come to Me. All I want to ask is, are you of the kind of moral material God can give to His Son? Is there any repentance there, any sorrow for sin, any grief at your wrongdoing, any fear in the presence of the great, mysterious God? Is there anything there God can handle or deal with and you’ll have reason to hope? Turn thou to Jesus Christ, God’s Son. He is the Bread of Life. And as I said last week, believing is eating. Just as you take the bread into your mouth by eating, you take Jesus, the Bread of Life; into your heart by believing.

So, you can come tonight, and you can believe tonight, and you can be saved tonight. And He says, I will in no wise cast him out. Now whether that means, various translations have it differently. Whether that means I will not turn him away when He comes, or I will not cast him out after he’s in. To me it means both, because if He takes him in, He has no reason to cast him out. So, there he is.

When I think of how many, many years ago it is now, I came up out of a pagan home, a father that had no knowledge of God, a mother who hadn’t been but two or three times to church in probably thirty years but was surrounded by ungodly people. Not bad evil people, because my mother managed to keep the moral standards very high, very high, so high indeed that not one of her three boys ever smoked or drank, and not one of her three girls ever did anything that you could consider evil, perhaps except one. Apart from her, Mother’s family was a high-living family. And they were all that on morals alone. They didn’t have to get born again to live right; they were living right on simple, sheer morals alone.

And into that home, to a seventeen-year-old, gangly, ignorant boy, came the Sovereign Father in the Holy Ghost and talked to my heart. And I had no help from anywhere else and talked to my heart. And fear and terror of God, and reverence and a longing to be right, and a yearning to sin, all played like shadows and light over my heart. And then one day I heard a man on a street corner say, if you don’t know how to pray, pray, God have mercy on me a sinner. I went to my mother’s attic, got on my knees, stretched my two hands up to God and said, God have mercy on me a sinner.

And God saved my soul. Then, after that, it was all like the opening of a flower, like the developing of a field. Jesus Christ became all in all to me. I trusted him perfectly, as I do this night. Why did God come to the worst member of the family? It was generally and publicly stated.

I’m not trying to be humble now. Everybody knew that. Mother knew it. Everybody knew it. I was the only one who would swear. I was the only one who would sass my mother. I was the only one who would disobey my father. I was the only one that was a little devil. Why did Jesus Christ find me and my brother, seven years older, a gentleman, walk into his presence, and he makes me look like a hillbilly, gracious, suave, friendly, knows when to talk and when to keep still, and never a spark. Never a spark. And I dealt with him and talked to him and preached to him and dealt with him until I gave it up. Never a spark.

They shall all be taught of God. And they that have heard and have learned of the Father, they come to Me, and I give them eternal life. So, if there’s the longing, the dream, the aspiration, the want to be good, the fear of sin, the future, you’re already one upon whom God’s hand has been laid.

Oh, how wonderful. More than the check for a million dollars, more than being elected President, that God has laid His hand upon you. That out of those teeming millions, God’s laid His hand on you.

How about it tonight? How do you feel about it? What’s your response? Anything there? Any live nerve there? Or are you another Esau without a live nerve? You can jab and probe and not a lot of response. No live nerve. But if God the Father has taught and tested and by the Holy Ghost convicted you of sin and righteousness and judgment, there’s a live nerve.

You can come. No man can come to Me except the Father draw him. But if you’ve got that live nerve that the probe of the Holy Ghost makes you wince, come unto Me, all ye that labor under heavy laden, and I will give you rest.

Will you do it?

Tags Sovereignty of God

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Tozer Talks

Post author By pshappard
Post date September 8, 2024

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“Abiding Elements of Pentecost”

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Abiding Elements of Pentecost

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

Speaking at the American Keswick Conference at Moody Church in Chicago, 1960

My topic tonight is the abiding element in Pentecost, and I want to read from the Book of Acts, Chapter 2. A very familiar passage, a very controversial passage, but I don’t intend to treat it controversially. Second chapter of Acts, when the day of Pentecost had fully come, they were all with one accord in one place. And suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting.

And there appeared unto them cloven tongues like as of fire and sat upon each of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues as the Spirit gave them utterance. And there were dwelling in Jerusalem, Jews, devout men out of every nation unto heaven.

Now when this was noised abroad, the multitude came together and were confounded because that every man heard them speak in his own language. And they were all amazed and marveled, saying one to another, Behold, are not all these which speak Galilean, so how hear we every man in our own tongue, for in we were born? Then skipping over the list of seventeen nations to verse 11, they said, we do hear them speak in our languages, the wonderful works of God.

Now here in this experience, as in every, or almost every, probably every valid religious experience, there are these elements present. There is first the external element, and because it is external it is variable. Then there is the internal element, which is of the Spirit, and so tremendously important. And then there is the incidental elements, which are of relative importance. And the fundamental elements, which are vital and eternal.

Now I want you to bring this analysis to what took place here on that day called “the Fifty Days,” Pentecost, and I want to point out some things that can never be repeated, although my sermon, I’ll break it down and toss it out to tell you in case I don’t finish it, you’ll know what I started to say. There are elements which can never be repeated, and some which, according to my knowledge of history, never have been repeated. And then there are elements which are eternal, and while they are not repeated, they are perpetuated. For I’d like to say this, that I do not believe in the repetition of Pentecost, but I believe in the perpetuation of Pentecost.

Now, what can never be repeated? Well, the physical presence of all the Church in one place. The members remained together in Jerusalem. They were all there and that never happened after that, because Saul made havoc of the church, and they were scattered abroad. And they have never been all together since. I started to say, thank God, I mean by that, that there are so many of them that there’s no building and no town that could house them, so many of the people of God. So that could never be repeated. You never can get all God’s people together outside of heaven, and that in itself may be a blessing.

Now, the second thing is that there are elements, there are things that occurred here that, in addition to one I’ve named, that never have been repeated, according to my knowledge of Church history.

A friend of mine said to me one time, when I get up and talk at conference, why don’t they listen to me? He said, because you have a habit of speaking ex cathedra, and sometimes there’s more ex than cathedra.

So, it is entirely possible that I could be wrong here, though I never am deliberately so, but what has never been repeated, so far as I know, is the sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind. Now, I’ve never heard that that happened. I’ve heard all sorts of things that were supposed to take place, but nobody ever said the whole house was full of a sound like wind.

Then I have never heard that the appearance of a great body of fire was seen by a company of people, dividing itself into flames like little tongues and resting upon the foreheads of each one. That seemed to be peculiar to that first coming of the Holy Ghost.

Then I have never heard that they all began, all the company present, began to speak languages which did not need to be interpreted, but which were understood by everybody present. Seventeen different languages of people there, and they understood it without an interpreter.

Now there’s a good logic back of all this, my friends. If these things had been necessary to the life of the Church, then they would have had to be repeated every time the Spirit filled anybody, or there was a company of people that was Spirit-filled. The Church couldn’t have continued without them. But if they were never repeated, then the Church must have ceased the day it was born, or at least ceased when the one who first composed the Church died.

Now those are the passing elements, the noise, the wind, the presence of everybody in one place, the sudden visitation of God in fire, visible fire that separated and sat visibly upon them, the out bursting of a joyous testimony in languages that couldn’t be understood by everybody without an interpreter. Now all this was there, but this is not the abiding element in this Pentecostal visitation.

What was, or what were the abiding elements? Well, we can discover them by going to the New Testament and finding what the Lord had promised that would come. He said, He shall send you another Comforter. And He said, when the Comforter is come, He will take the things of mine and will show them unto you. And He said, I tell you the truth, that I go away, and I send Him, and when He comes will convince the world of sin and righteousness and judgment.

And He said that ye shall receive power, and as every student knows, power means a moral ability to do. Now that, those are the vital elements in the Pentecostal outpouring, and these have been perpetuated to the Church and are ours, available to us as certainly as to them.

Now I want to illustrate this thing by showing you how when our Lord came there were certain phenomena which occurred, but which were never repeated in the ministry of our Lord.

You remember when Jesus was born in Bethlehem in the days of Herod the King, there came wise men from the east, and there was a star, and there were angels that chanted over the fields of Bethlehem, and there were the wise men, and there was the inn where the Lord was born, and the excitement, and later on the flight into Egypt.

Now, all these were external phenomena which surrounded the birth of the Lord Jesus, but they all passed because they were incidental and not fundamental, they were external and not internal, they were visible and audible and of the flesh, and not the invisible and inaudible deep workings of the Holy Ghost. There was a star out there, and there were angels, and there were wise men, and there was the inn, and there were donkeys, and there was the flight into Egypt, and all that.

But when all that was gone, the Lord Jesus Christ was still there, because the abiding element in Bethlehem was the presence of the Word to become flesh to dwell among us. After the wise men had gone back east again, and the shepherds had gone back to their flocks, and the star had gone wherever it went, and the inn had been forgotten, and the flight into Egypt was a memory, He was still there. He abode. He remained, and all that He came to do was perpetuated through his entire ministry and still continues.

That is an illustration, and I believe a valid one, of how it was when the Holy Ghost, the third person of the Trinity, came at Pentecost as the second person had come at Bethlehem. There were external and dramatic, colorful phenomena that surrounded the coming of the Holy Spirit, as there had been surrounding the birth of Christ. But when those external phenomena passed, the thing that God had wanted to do and had succeeded in doing, still abodes, still remains forever the same.

Now, what did God do there, as recorded in that passage which I read to you? Well, the Holy Ghost had come to dwell among men and had come to dwell in the hearts of His people to make His Church one and to forever inhabit the redeemed bosoms of those who believed on God’s eternal Son. Wouldn’t it have been a ridiculous thing if the people had heard about the phenomena that surrounded the birth of Jesus, and nobody would have believed that he was healed unless there was a star and a donkey and a hymn and a wise man and all of the external things?

The point is, God used all those things to get His eternal Son into human flesh, to get Him here. That was God incarnating His Son, and these things were external manifestations. But they all passed, and the Lord remained and healed the sick and gave eyes to the blind and unstopped the ears and drove out the devils and forgave sin and blessed mankind.

Now the Holy Ghost came as the Second Person came, and He came upon them in visible fire. He sat upon their foreheads; they broke out into languages that could be understood without an interpreter. It was a wind, or like a wind, that filled the building. But those, I repeat, were the external elements. The eternal element was that the Holy Ghost had come, the Comforter has come, we sing, and that’s what had happened there. That was the mighty truth.

Now, the meaning of it all is that the Holy Ghost now inhabits His Church in power. I’d like to point out that the word power there is ability, and it’s the ability to be and ability to do.

All the religions of the world that I know anything about, and I have made myself acquainted by reading the holy books, so-called, of most of the great religions of the world, and never could quite wade through the Book of Mormon. That was always a little too heavy for me, I began to nod about page 3. But most of the great religions of the East, I have read at least some of their books, and they are practically all the same in that they talk about what you do and don’t have very much to say about what you be. But the Scriptures talk about our being first and our doing second, and we do what we be.

Back in Pennsylvania where I grew up, they used the word be for do, and it’s a good word, it’s the verb I be, I am. God says that He was to give us ability to be, and because we have ability to be, of course it’s quite normal that we do. A bird has ability to sing because he’s a bird, and a Christian has ability to live like a Christian because He is a Christian. God has given him the power.

I want to analyze the power a little bit. We’re suffering in the day in which we live from two extremes. We’re suffering from the extremes of those who take the external phenomena of Pentecost and try to repeat it 19th centuries later, and nothing but trouble can come from this and nothing but trouble ever has; divisions and all sorts of things.

And then we’re suffering from another extreme just as bad, and that is that we’ve all gone into our holes and frozen over the entrance and sit back there blowing on our hands, afraid of the Holy Spirit. We’re afraid to preach about him and talk about him and pray to be filled with him, because some have gone to extremes.

They have misunderstood and they thought that the wise man and the star and the shepherds and the inn and we have to have all that. No. I don’t believe on a star to be converted. I don’t believe on a shepherd to be saved. I don’t believe on an inn or a donkey in order to be blessed. I believe on the One who came into the middle of all that and remains in mortal flesh.

So, I don’t believe on tongues, and I don’t believe on flaming fire on foreheads. I don’t believe on winds that fill buildings. I believe on Jesus Christ, and I receive the one who came in that hurricane of blessing to remain forever in the breasts of his people.

Now, I don’t hear any amens, but I love my own preaching, you know, I do. I enjoy preaching the truth, and if anybody says amen, he’s on, it’s all right. And if he doesn’t say amen, he’s either asleep or else he’s wrong.

Let’s break this down a little bit, keeping within our time. What is this power to be and this power to do? Well, there’s love, joy, peace. We talk about love. A fellow like I am, I couldn’t love anybody. Now, Stephen Olford, who will follow me, he could love anybody. He was born that way. He’s a lovable fellow, but nobody loves me for myself because there’s nothing here to love. And I couldn’t love anybody. But God gives you power to be and to do, and He gives me power. He can give me power to love people that just aren’t lovable.

And then there’s joy. Now, a fellow like I am, again I’m born gloomy. I see the dark side of everything. My friend McAfee, if you’re here, knows that. And if it is clears as a bell in the morning, I say that’s probably a weather breeder, it likely to rain by noon. I’m naturally pessimistic. And for me to have anything like joy and peace takes a power that isn’t in human nature, at least it isn’t in mine. But I enjoy quite a little bit of peace and joy because I have been given ability to be and ability to do.

Then there’s long-suffering. Now, long-suffering, of course, is the ability to suffer a long time. Everybody’s willing to suffer a little while but suffering a long time just to put up with things and ride them out and live them down and hope for the best and go on, it’s not natural, it’s not natural to me. I don’t think it’s natural to any American, really.

A Chinese person might because they’re a very quiet, slower people, but an American wouldn’t. And an American complains if he misses one section of a revolving door. So long-suffering, it takes something out of heaven to make a man suffer long and be kind, a disposition to bear injuries patiently.

Then there’s gentleness, which is the opposite of harshness and severity. Then there’s goodness. Now, I’m quoting, of course, from Galatians. There’s goodness, which is morally good. Now, here again we’re a victim of extremes because none is good save God. We’re unwilling to say he was a good man and full of the Holy Ghost. We’re afraid of the Bible itself. We run and hide from the words of the Scripture. We say nobody is good, nobody is good.

A friend of mine preached one time on righteousness. He preached that people ought to be righteous, and an old fellow came down the aisle walking fast, and he said, why do you preach goodness? Don’t you know there’s only one good and that’s God? You’re preaching legalism. He said, people can’t be good, they aren’t good.

This dear old brother was hurt so badly by the criticism, and I called him aside and I said, don’t worry, Doctor, God has his treasures in earthen vessels and some of the vessels are cracked. Don’t let it bother you at all. Some people are afraid of goodness, just sheer downright goodness.

Do you want me to say a radical thing? If all of you listening to me now were just ordinary, plain, downright good people, your testimony would be stepped up a hundred percent. Goodness is a virtue given by God to the human heart.

Then faithfulness, that’s ability to keep right on being faithful, opposite of instability, fidelity to a trust. And meekness, which is the opposite of arrogance and temperance, which is the opposite of intemperance.

I had hoped I might be able, while I’m here, to preach on discipleship, but it didn’t fall in the scheme of things that I should. But I believe that the Lord wants us to be disciples and learn from him and learn by the power of the indwelling Holy Ghost. He gives the power, and we give the willingness and the determination to be Christlike, and temperance is one of the virtues, living temperately, to be strong and masterful in control of ourselves.

Now, the will of God for us is that we should have all these virtues, that is, this power which God offered, this power which the Holy Ghost brought, this power which the Holy Ghost is. For I’d like to make it very clear that God never gives anything away. When God gives, He still retains what He has given, and He gives Himself along with His gifts.

It would be a tragedy from the highest, farthest out celestial body down to Moody Church; it would be a moral tragedy that would be vast and cosmic if God should shuffle off gifts and throw them to his people like Rockefeller used to throw dimes. Never does God separate the gift from Himself.

When God gives you a gift, He gives you Himself. When God gave us these precious virtues, He gave us the Holy Ghost who brought these virtues to us, and so it is the indwelling Holy Spirit that brings these virtues.

Don’t think for a minute tonight that I’ve read the Keswick program and that I’m preaching this because Keswick believes it. I preached this before Keswick ever reached Chicago. I preached it for years and continue to preach it because I believe it’s biblical, that it’s the indwelling Holy Ghost who came at Pentecost and enables all of His people in whom He dwells to be virtuous, to have love and joy and peace and gentleness and goodness and faithfulness and meekness and temperance. I believe that this is the secret of godliness and the secret of the victorious life.

Now this, I say, can only be done by divine indwelling. It’s impossible that this should ever be given to us from the outside. You can’t take a gorilla and put up a sign and say, Be human. In the first place, he couldn’t read. In the second place, if he did read, he wouldn’t know how to go about it. How could a gorilla be human? He can’t. He belongs to another world of life. He’s not. He can’t be human.

And so, you can’t say to a sinner, Be holy. That’s an impossibility.

A sinner can’t be holy any more than that gorilla can be a man. But if we had the power to say to the gorilla, I can extract the spirit of a good man from him and I can fill you with him, that would take care of the gorilla. Just as soon as the spirit of a good man entered the gorilla, say the spirit of Eisenhower entered the gorilla, he’d be a kindly gentleman and a man you’re proud of when he stands up. He’d be a man.

But as long as you can’t give the Spirit, the power to be and to do, you’ll still be a gorilla. You can put a bib on around him and put pants on him and teach him to eat with a knife and a fork. But when he begets his kind, they’ll be little gorillas. And he’ll be a gorilla until he dies. And when he dies, you’re putting him down in a gorilla grave, because gorilla he is, gorilla he’ll be forever, as long as gorillas last.

And I say now, my friend, you can’t take a sinner, no matter how well he’s an educated sinner. A Ph.D., for instance, a Ph.D., that’s a Doctor of Philosophy. You take a Doctor of Philosophy and say to him, Be holy, be Christlike, and he’ll look at you and he’ll be nice and friendly, because he’s educated, but he won’t know what to do. He just won’t know what to do, and it’s impossible that he would know what to do.

The flesh of Adam can’t produce holiness. The flesh of Adam cannot produce love and joy and peace and longsuffering and gentleness. It can produce all sorts of imitations and write books and sell books. And if you write a book on how to be loved and have longsuffering and gentleness and be good, you can sell them by the millions; people want to know.

But nobody has ever been able to produce Christ’s character in Adam’s flesh. The nearest thing is Stoicism, I suppose. I’ve been a great lover of the Stoics. But some people think the “stoic” is the bird that brings the baby. But they said the Stoic. But the Stoic was an old philosopher. But it’s no use, brother, you can’t do it. All it did was make zombies out of them. And they walked around hard and stiff.

When Socrates was dying in the prison at Athens of hemlock, they brought his wife in. She came in sniffling, and he didn’t even kiss her good-bye, he said, take her away. He was in control of himself, it was self-control, and they controlled themselves by becoming as stiff as icicles and just as unattractive and as cold.

And then there’s the contemplative religions of the East. You hear a lot about it now, Zen Buddhism and Yoga. Don’t waste a dime on it, but you hear a lot about it. But they haven’t done anything for anybody much, really. And if anybody does get any help from them, it’s because they’re pretty good people to start with. You know, as Adam counts people good.

But the fruits of the Spirit are only the fruits of the Holy Spirit and cannot possibly grow in unblessed, uncleansed and unfilled and unregenerated human nature.

So, most Christians, I think, and most Christianity; it’s only Adam at his best, really. You go to the average church now, even good churches, and it’s just Adam at his best. Everybody comes dressed up, looking out over his collar with a narrow tie on. And he looks all right, and he smiles and bobs his head, but you don’t know what he’d been doing the week before. He’s not necessarily a holy man because he’s in church. But as for being holy, that’s another matter.

When Pentecost was fully come, the Holy Ghost came into human nature to make people holy and to keep them holy, that they might live holy lives and reproduce in human beings the character that had been and is in Christ. That’s the abiding element in Pentecost.

It is not to be repeated, it is to be perpetuated. It is to be carried on from generation to generation, but we must tell the truth to the people and not let them down. Some people don’t believe in the Holy Ghost, nor believe they ever ought to be filled with the Holy Ghost at all. Some people say it’s just an ideal. He is not an ideal. No, no.

He’s no more an ideal now than Christ was an ideal when He walked around on earth. He was born in that dramatic setting, but when the dramatic setting was passed, He was still there healing the sick and raising the dead. The Holy Ghost came in that dramatic setting at Pentecost, but when the dramatic setting passed, He still remained and still remains, and He’s here now.

All He needs and wants is that His people should want Him bad enough and that they should yield to Him and let Him have His way, and He will reproduce all the essential spiritual and everlasting elements in us now that He produced on that historic day of Pentecost.

Tags Holy Spirit, Pentecost

Messages

Tozer Talks

Post author By pshappard
Post date September 1, 2024

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“Trials and Disappointments“

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Trials and Disappointments

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

September 26, 1954

Summary

A.W. Tozer’s sermon titled “Trials and Disappointments,” explores the concept that all events and circumstances in a Christian’s life, including trials, temptations, failures, and disappointments, are from God and part of His divine plan. He draws from biblical examples, such as Rehoboam, Joseph, and Peter, to illustrate how God’s hand is present even in adversity, shaping and guiding believers for their ultimate good and His glory. He emphasizes that Christians should view their challenges as opportunities for spiritual growth and trust in God’s sovereignty, understanding that even the most painful experiences are orchestrated by God for a greater purpose. Mr. Tozer concludes with the encouragement that what may seem like disappointments are, in fact, God’s appointments, meant to bring about His will in the lives of believers.

Message

In the book of 1 Kings, the 12th chapter, in verse 24, Thus saith the Lord to Rehoboam, Ye shall not go up, nor fight against your brethren, the children of Israel. Return every man to his house, for this thing is from me.” They hearkened therefore to the word of the Lord and returned to depart according to the word of the Lord. Rehoboam was the son of Solomon, and he had become king at the death of his father and had listened to the bad advice of his counselors and had taken certain political action which had alienated a part of the nation from him.

Jeroboam, an ambitious man, had taken part of the nation and had become, or was to become, the king. Rehoboam felt that he wanted to try to stop this by war. But he had just enough ability to hear God left, but he didn’t have much. But he had just enough ability left to hear God say, Ye shall not fight against your brethren, the children of Israel. Go every man to his house, for this thing is from me. That is, God had told Solomon that his kingdom would be divided. And now Solomon was gone, but God was working out his plan nevertheless, and it was taking place under the eyes of his son.

And his son was going to throw himself in to try to straighten out this tangled skein, and God said, don’t you do it, this thing is from me. Now that’s the historic circumstance that gave us this beautiful text. And the truth which lies hidden here in the text is one of the most liberating and consoling truths in the entire Bible.

And the thought suggested here is not alone, but it is developed and strengthened throughout the entire Bible, till in the New Testament it shines like a health-giving sun, bringing light and warmth and health to all of us. And it is simply this, we might condense it for our own use and good into these words, that whatever comes to a Christian is from God.

Now you and I know that the natural world is governed by natural laws, and these laws are administered blindly, and from all we know, impartially, so that the sun rises on the just and the unjust, and the rain falls on the good and the bad. Grain and the fruit of harvest come to the man of God and to the man of sin about alike. And sickness and pain visit not only bad people, but good people as well.

There is loss and there is sorrow, and the loss and sorrow come as certainly and as frequently perhaps even, to the Christian as to the sinful man. And even death finally visits the man of God, for it is appointed unto all men once to die. And all the good who have died in generations gone have gone to their death according to the law of cause and effect that governs the natural world.

And it looks as if we were pieces, helpless pieces. You know, this thought has given some sad and beautiful poetry to the world. Man has likened himself to many things. He’s likened himself to shadows. We are but shadow shapes that come and go, says one of the poets. We are but shadow shapes, a moving roll of magic shadow shapes that come and go. They’ve likened themselves to checkers, but helpless pieces of the game God plays upon this checkerboard of night and days.

Now, all this fails to take Christ into consideration, but we are thinking for the moment that there is a natural world filled with people, and that this world is governed by natural laws, and that an observer might well and accurately conclude that mankind is simply a roll of magic shadow shapes that come and go, or each being a checker which is played over the checkerboard of life. And that is accurate, not pessimistic, it is rather realistic.

And if we take our Lord Jesus Christ out of consideration, I do not see how any human being, if he has any realism in his system at all, if he has any mental or fiber or intellectual courage, can deny that we are but checkers to be played, that we are but a football to be kicked, that we are but corks to float and bob around on the moving surface of the water, but thus to be blown through the valleys of this world, and slaves to the law of cause and effect.

But my friends, I have very good news for you this morning. I have the news that a Christian does not fall wholly under this law. A believer has entered a new kingdom, and here all things are different. He may poetically describe himself now as a football, but he may smile wryly when he feels himself being kicked. But he knows that he’s being kicked toward a certain goal.

He may still feel that he is a checker being played over a great board, but in this new place in the kingdom of God, he knows that he’s not subject to the laws of chance. He knows that the great player in the heaven is playing a game for the glory of God and the good of mankind. He may feel that he is but dust, as the psalmist said that he was, but he knows now that he is being blown gently toward home and heaven and God.

He may feel that he is a cork and bob up and down in depression and boom, and in sickness and health, and in loss and gain, and in sorrow and joy. He may feel himself upon the undulating waves of time, and yet know positively that he’s under the watchful eye of God, and that though he’s a cork bobbing on a great surface and couldn’t find his way alone, that the Father knows the way and was taking him through.

Now my friends, I was thinking about that song, If I Had My Druthers. Did you ever hear any hillbillies sing, If I Had My Druthers? Of course, as you city people probably don’t know, druthers means rather, rather. If I had druthers, I’d rather had druthers. So, we say I had my druthers means what I’d rather have.

So, when the cowboy sings If I Had My Druthers, and twangs his harp or guitar, and puts a lot of tears in his voice, he is giving plaint to that which mankind has always wanted. He’s wanted the ability to lay hold of things. And the same poet I quoted a while ago said that, how does it run, oh could you and I with him conspire, and grab this sorry scheme of things entire, and break it down to its component elements, and then put it together again after our heart’s desire.

Now I paraphrased it, but that’s the way to run. And this is the same plaint that the cowboy wants when he says he wants his druthers. He’d like to have it his way. And when we want things our way, did you ever stop to consider, ladies and gentlemen, what a world we’d be in in 24 hours if God said, now I’m going to give everybody everything he wants. All he has to do is wish and he gets it. We all go back to Anderson’s fairy tales, and what a world we’d be in.

Well, Chicago weather, for instance. If it’s baseball season, they want it warm. If it’s football season, they want it cold. If a church is going to have a picnic, they want it dry. And the people who own lawns want it to rain. The farmer wants the calm, still, hot air to make his crops grow. And the city dweller with the fog and smog wants a wind to carry all the fog and smog away.

So, you’d never find people agreeing. The old man wants it quiet, and the young fellow wants it noisy. The young fellow puts two or three noise makers on his old jalopy and goes down the street sounding like the charge of the last brigade. And the old fellow would want everything set in foam rubber so there wasn’t a sound to disturb his tired old ears. You couldn’t get together at all for the simple reason we don’t know what we want. We only think we do.

The reason we don’t know what we want is that we don’t know ourselves, we don’t know the world around us very well. We don’t know the future at all, and we don’t know the past except sketchily. And we don’t know what’s good for us. And so if we had our druthers, it would be one of the worst things that could possibly happen to us because we’d all kill ourselves.

It would be like a three-year-old having his druthers when it comes to the meals. He would fill up on cake and suffer for the rest of the night. And he would never eat anything good, he’d never drink his milk, and he would never go to school when he gets old enough, he would never accept discipline, he would never grow up to be even an average kind of citizen, but he would be a little impossible hellion if he had his druthers.

You have to impose discipline and the grown-up who’s supposed to know what’s good has to tell the youngster what’s good for him until he finds out for himself.

Now that’s exactly where we are in the kingdom of God. Even though we’re Christians and born of the Spirit, we still don’t know always what’s good for us. So, God has to choose for us. It says in one place that he chooses our inheritance for us. I like that chapter, that verse of the chapter. He chooses our inheritance for us, and he chooses and sends us the things that we ought to have.

Now that doesn’t preclude prayer, because the Spirit can tell us what we ought to pray for, and thus we can help shape events by intelligent Spirit-inspired prayer. But if you think of your life in the long sweep of circumstance between the time you were converted till you die or the Lord comes, you’ll be glad somebody else is hunting out your inheritance for you, and you’re not forced to choose yourself.

And you’ll even be glad in the day to come that you didn’t get that prayer answered that God refused to answer for you. You’ll be glad then, but now you’re wondering and worried about it.

Now I have, I think, about seven. If time gets away, I’ll shorten it, cut out some. But I want to go to the Bible itself and show you about seven different things, circumstances, that have come to men. And we can write after every one of them, this thing is from me, for this is what God does. He picks out our inheritance, and when we look at it and say, I don’t want that, God says, son, this thing is from me, and blessed is the Christian who knows how to accept it.

Now, first, there’s temptation. People don’t want to be tempted. I get letters, and I get phone calls, and I get people visiting me personally, and they want to know how come. I’m a Christian, and I’m being tempted. How come? And I always feel, though I don’t do it, unless I know them very well, but I always feel that I’d like to answer in the language of the young officer who said to the rookie soldier who started to run when the bullets, he said, they’re shooting at me. And the young officer said, what do you think you’re out here for?

And so, when a Christian comes and says, why, pastor, I’m being tempted, I feel like saying, well, son, you’re a soldier now, you’re a big boy, and what do you think you’re here for, if it isn’t to get shot at? But notice, when our Lord was tempted in the wilderness, He was tempted cruelly, and His temptations were real, regardless of what some theologians may say, they were real and valid. And He was tempted there by the will of God, for two reasons that I know, that He might be perfected for His life work and learn obedience by the things that He suffered, and the second being that He might force approval, unwilling testimony even from hell itself.

For don’t think that Satan, when he gave up his, our Lord, his master, our Lord, when he gave Him up and found he couldn’t get Him to sin and sulked away into his cave, don’t you think the story of it didn’t go throughout all the nether regions, and that Jesus Christ was proof against the temptations of the devil, caused that same devil to lose face, and caused hell to shudder to her foundations? How else could God thus have given a testimony of hell and earth to Jesus if it had not been in temptation.

But when our Lord went forty days hungry and was in great anguish of body, and now weariness of mind, and was tempted so bitterly, don’t you think His human heart might have said, why must this happen to Me? And if it had, God’s answer would have been, this thing is from me. I’ve allowed this to come to you, you’re not alone, I’ve been with you, and you’re being tempted in My will.

Now that ought to encourage anybody, and if you’re being tempted, let me say to you as a company what I couldn’t possibly say one at a time, there’d be too many, that if you’re being tempted, cruelly even, and bitterly tempted, don’t let it get you down. They don’t tempt dead men.

I remember the colored brother who was hunting with his boss, and they were in a boat, and the colored man was a real Christian, and yet he was in trouble all the time. Something was always going wrong. His wife was ill, or his children, and they broke a leg, his cow died, something was always wrong, and the man, the white man with whom he was hunting, or with whom he was fishing in this instance, they were in a boat together, and they were hunting, as I recall, and it was a duck hunting arrangement, and they were in the boat. And the white man got to philosophizing, and he said, Sam, you’re a Christian, you go to church, you attend every prayer meeting, you never miss your chapter, you pray at table, you talk and testify all the time, and yet you’re in trouble all the time. And he said, me, I haven’t had any trouble for years and years, everything breaks my way, everything turns to money for me, I have friends, everything breaks my way.

He said, now how is it? You belong to God, and I don’t. You get the troubles, and I don’t. Well, Sam said, boss, it’s like this. He said, when you shoot at a duck and kill it, and it drops plop into the water and lies still, do you shoot at it again? He said, no. He said, which ones do you shoot at again? He said, I shoot at the ones that are wounded and are getting away. And Sam said, that explains it, boss. He said, the devil knows that he has you, and he lets you alone, but he sees me escaping, and that’s why I get a bullet every once in a while. I’m getting away.

Now, that’s it precisely, and it’s good sound philosophy. Temptations, this thing is from Me, says God. Now stop that worrying and abusing yourself, lashing yourself like the flagellantes, and saying, I’m no good, I’ll whip myself, I’m being tempted. Of course you’re being tempted. The servant is not better than his Lord, this thing is from God.

And there is persecution. Some people do get persecution, and then there was Joseph. You remember Joseph in Egypt, that passage back in the last chapter of the book of Genesis, tells us a wonderful thing. Joseph was sold, you remember, down into slavery into Egypt for a small amount of money, and went down there and was put in jail, and went through two years, or at least a long period of imprisonment.

And later on, when his brethren came down, and Joseph was second to the king, running all Egypt as sort of a prime minister, the brethren came down. He made himself known, and they wept, and he said to them, don’t weep, it’s perfectly all right. As for you, ye thought evil against me, but God meant it for good to bring to pass as it is this day, and to save much people alive.

If when poor Joseph was going through his persecution, he had thought it over as no doubt he did, he’d have wondered why God allowed it. He was being persecuted by his brethren. God says, son, don’t get excited, this thing is from me, to perfect you and save many people alive. So, persecution is from God, either directly or indirectly.

Then there is failure. I hesitate to say this, some people want to leap on me for it, but I believe in being real. And here was a man named Peter, and you’ll remember that he denied his Lord. And you’ll have to admit it was a failure. But long before Peter lied and used bad language and denied his Lord, his Lord had foreseen his coming failure and had said, Satan has desired you to sift you as wheat, but I have prayed for you that your faith fail not. The prayers of Jesus had been prevenient prayers, and they had been put up to heaven effectually for Peter before he was put into the sieve.

Our Lord Jesus saw Peter as a half bushel of chaff and wheat, and Peter saw himself as a half bushel of wheat. He didn’t see the chaff at all. And the devil wanted to destroy Peter. So the Lord said, all right, devil, you go ahead and shake him and sift him and blow on him a while. And the devil no doubt smiled one of his rare devilish smiles and said, I’m going to actually get at this prime apostle. I’m going to get at Peter.

So he got at Peter, and he shook him and sifted him. And Peter, in the middle of it all, got morally dizzy and denied his Lord. And when the sifting was over, the chaff was all gone and Peter was reduced to what he had been all the time, a quart of wheat and 50 quarts of chaff. Peter thought he was all wheat, and the devil thought he was all chaff. But Jesus knew he was part chaff and part wheat. So, he got rid of this chaff. This thing is from me.

Now I’m not talking, I suppose, to oh, a very few people. But what overrates yourself? We all tend to overrate ourselves. We like to brood over our successes and what people think of us and mull over our mail. Editors are tempted to do that. Occasionally somebody will write one that sort of take a quart of chaff out. But mostly they’re praising you for this and that. And you’re likely to get a notion that you’re more valuable. That’s not the way to put it now, really, because your value is infinite before God. But at least I mean greater than you are.

The only way God has to do, he can’t tell us. We won’t believe it. God comes and said to Peter, Peter, you’ll deny me. Peter said me? Deny you? Oh no. He said these others may, but not I. you’ll see. Peter wouldn’t believe it when the Lord told him he was one fifth-sixteenth wheat and fifteenth-sixteenth chaff. Peter didn’t believe it. He said, oh no, there’s a mistake here someplace, Lord. They’ve got, you’ve got, you pulled the wrong card out of the file. It isn’t I. So, the Lord smiled and said, this thing is from me, Peter. And when poor Peter had been loved back into fellowship with his Lord, he never made that mistake again. He found his right size.

There is such a thing, brethren, as stepping on a scale. Some of you growing youngsters want to believe you weigh more than you do. And some of you youngsters that were once youngsters but are now not anymore and are growing in the wrong directions. You want to believe that you don’t weigh as much as you do. I recommend a scale. Step on and stop arguing. You know how much you weigh after the scale gets done with you.

And so, this thing is from me. There’s your nice, lovely, streamlined scale sitting there in a corner. And you’ve got an inflated notion about yourself. You like to think you’re as willowy as the breeze-blown bush down by the riverside. And the scale says, this thing is from me. Step on. You step on and you’re instantly disillusioned. Then that’s what failure will do for us. I don’t think we ought to fail. And I think if we were spiritual, we ought to be. There’d be other ways to teach us, but it seems there isn’t. So, the Lord used Peter’s failure.

Now some of you have failed maybe this last week. I wish you hadn’t. I hope maybe you didn’t. But if you did, there’s no reason why you should wear a black armband for the rest of the month and say to yourself, oh, I’m no good, I’m no good. Of course you’re not. But you have one who thinks you are. And He thought it so fully that He died for you. And He made you the apple of His eye and He wrote you in His hands and in His heart and on His shoulders.

So, you must be worth something after all. And if you failed him somewhere this week, I’m sorry. This thing is from me. Now if you’ll bow your head and ask him to forgive you for failing him, you’ll know how small you are and how weak you are and how to trust your Lord better than you did.

Then there is bereavement. Look at this man, Lazarus. He died while Jesus tarried. And Jesus came way late. And when he got there, Lazarus was in the grave. And Jesus went to the grave and said, Lazarus, come forth. And Lazarus came forth. But he didn’t come forth alone.

Do you know what came forth out of the grave with Lazarus? The 11th chapter of John. When Jesus said, come forth, out walked Lazarus. And trailing close behind, out walked the 11th chapter of John. And the 11th chapter of John has set alight in more graves than you could count on a summer’s day. And has given hope and cheer to more people who’ve lost their loved ones and has made dying easy for the souls of a million Christians from that hour to this. Oh no, He didn’t come out of that grave alone, but that hopeful, cheerful, buoyant, vibrant 11th chapter of John came out with Him.

This thing is from me. I let you die, said Jesus, in order that this might be a ladder to coming race, coming ages to climb on. This might be a star of hope over the cemetery. This might be a light for all Christians.

And there’s tribulations. Paul had his tribulations. I read this morning about how the front part of the ship stuck on the sandbar and the hinder part of the ship, the stern, they say now, was caught in the waves and wind and broke into pieces. The ship went to pieces, and everybody fell out and grabbed a board and got ashore. Well, it was pretty tough. Paul had said two nights, 14 days and 14 nights, there hadn’t been a sun or a star. And they’d been practically without food and without hope in that little old-fashioned ship being tossed in the terror of the Mediterranean Sea. But God said, don’t worry, Paul, this thing is from me.

And what was the result? The result was that the light of Christianity reached to pagan Rome and all the lives were saved into the bargain. To Paul, it looked as if somebody was picking on him. But to God, it was all a part of a far-looking purpose. This thing is from me.

So, you’re in tribulation. You’re having your troubles. Things aren’t doing so well at home. Well, you can take it one of two ways. You can get out your crying towel and say, why does this happen to me? Or you can hear Him say, this thing is from Me. Hold still and wait. Watch Me. And then you will see the miracle.

And there’s illness. Now, I have an example or two from the Bible. There was a man born blind.

When his parents noticed that the little chap couldn’t see, I suppose their hearts grieved terribly over it. They said, our little boy can’t see. And when he began to stumble and fall and run into things and hurt himself, no doubt bitterness came to his parents’ heart. Or if they were good believers and God lovers, if it wasn’t bitterness, it was a wonderment and a puzzlement. Why was our baby born blind? But that same man born blind found Jesus Christ through his blindness. We haven’t any way of knowing, nor do we have any grounds for believing, that he’d ever have found Jesus if he’d been a seeing man.

If he’d been a seeing man, he might well have been out working when he was rather sitting by the wayside. But because he was not a seeing man but was shut up in the dark precincts of his own mind, his ears were sharp, and he heard the sound of passing footsteps. Who is it? It’s Jesus of Nazareth. And he cried, Jesus of Nazareth. Thou son of David, I think the language he used, have mercy on me. He found the Lord and rose and followed him in the way and became a disciple. And he’s in heaven tonight with both eyes bright and seeing. This thing is from me.

So, the sickness you don’t like, everybody would like to be as healthy as Carolina, what’s his name, Carolyn, that big football player here down at Notre Dame. Everybody would like to be in state of perfect health. I wish we all could be. That is, my human heart says, I wish you well. But I don’t know, but what maybe some of us are kept in the way because we just don’t have energy enough to get out. This thing is from me. Make something of it, please.

And there are disappointments, and I’m finished. Disappointments, oh, we want our own way. You know the acme of all disappointments? I’ll tell you. A 12-year-old boy, Saturday morning of the Sunday school picnic, when he jumps out of bed, 12 feet from the bed and lands, a foot for a year, and then looks out the window, it’s pouring it down. That is the acme of disappointment. What a time he was going to have that day. And suddenly the sharp bite, the sting of disappointment. I can’t, we can’t go. There’s no use even to call. It’s out. We’re finished. That disappointment to a 12-year-old, that’s pretty serious. And it can hurt like everything.

And when we get older, we don’t get any better, we just get tougher. We’re just as quickly and as easily disappointed later on. Mama, you were going to shop today, or not today, but maybe Tuesday you say. You’re going to go to Marshall Fields, Boston store. And if nobody’s looking, you may even sneak into Woolworth’s. And you’re going to, your husband has given you a check, and you’re going to stop at the corner currency exchange and have it turned into good green. And Tuesday’s going to be your day. And the baby comes down with an infected throat. And you can’t get out of the house now.

Don’t look at me honestly and tell me that doesn’t hurt you. Of course it hurts. You’re disappointed. You don’t like it. You say to yourself, I never get anything that ever goes my way. And you reach for the crying towel. And you begin to wipe it off. Wipe off the bitter tears that start, as the poets say.

Now that’s the way we are. You men, you got a golf game coming up. You’re just about to break 80, 82, 83, 84. You’ve been able to get around those 19 holes, 84, sometimes 90 when you’re not feeling too well. You’re after 80. And you’ve got a fellow who’s going to give you some tips, and he’s a semi-pro, and you’ve got a morning, oh I’m going out there and I’m going to learn today. And by next week it’ll be 80 and maybe even under 80.

And the next day your wife said, listen, it’s impossible. Look, look what’s got to be done. Look. And you give up. But you don’t give up gracefully. You say, but listen, I can only have the benefit of this man today, this semi-pro, who’s going to give me some tips. I can break 80. And she says, if you break 80 at the expense of the house, and the home, and the children, and the car, and the lawn. All right, he gives up, but he doesn’t talk much that day. Now, he doesn’t sulk. He’s a Christian. But you know, he’s just sort of meditating. He doesn’t say much. He just sort of meditates as he goes around doing what he doesn’t want to do.

Now those are only trifling disappointments, but dear people, there are other kinds of disappointments that you don’t laugh about. You laughed about the ones I gave you as an example, because they’re shallow. But there are disappointments you don’t laugh about. They cut so deep in and so deep down.

I’ve had women come to me, a few of them in my time, white, gray, chalk-faced, and sit and say, Mr. Tozer, my home’s finished. It’s finished. I have no longer any reason to believe that my husband has any regard for me, and it’s only a matter of days until the whole thing blows, and our children will be separated. You don’t laugh about that. That’s not surface. That goes way to the deeps of the being.

A man worked on me once, and I groaned, and he said, I’m sorry, but I couldn’t help it. He said, what you felt there is what surgeons call surgical pain. Surgical pain isn’t a skinned knuckle. Surgical pain goes clear down to Adam and shakes his teeth out, and you’re hurt into your ancient family tree, cleared down to the roots.

And there are disappointments that you don’t laugh about. It isn’t a skinned knuckle, a disappointed golf game, a picnic that didn’t come off. It’s a grief that wrings you like a towel. What are we going to do with it? The answer is, child of God, this thing is from me. You can’t believe it now but try to believe it. Believe it in your grief, and the day will be when you’ll believe it in your joy. Believe it in your tears, and the day will come when you’ll believe it with your smile. This thing is from me.

Somebody wrote a doggerel poem, which I’ll spare you, but in too many verses and too many lines, there is at least one thought embodied. It is this thought, that disappointment needs only to have the letter D taken off and the letter H put on, and you’ve changed it from disappointment to his appointment. What is disappointment to you may be God’s appointment for you.

And if you’ll remember what I told the Sunday school, if you want to be happy in the future, do now what you will in the future wish you had done. So, if you want to get the best of your disappointments; incidentally, there’s a Methodist preacher who is going to write a series of articles for the Alliance Weekly. He’s an evangelical Methodist preacher from the East, calling it with New Jersey, First Methodist pastor. And he’s going to write a series of getting the best of, getting the best of your illness, getting the best of your disappointment, getting the best of your losses, and so on. I look forward to reading them myself.

If you will want to get the best of your disappointments and tears and griefs and temptations and all the rest, then hear God say now what you wish you’d heard him say then. Hear him say now, this thing is from Me.

Tags Deliverance, Disappointment, Trials

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Post author By pshappard
Post date August 25, 2024

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“Be Ye All Of One Mind”

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Be Ye All of One Mind

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

April 11, 1954

Now though this is the Sunday, which is by the ritualistic churches called Palm Sunday, I see no reason whatever for changing the steady progress of our, to me very enjoyable, trip through 1 Peter. So in 3rd of Peter, 3rd of 1st Peter, verses 8 and 9, these words. Finally, be all of one mind, having compassion one of another. Love as brethren, be pitiful, be courteous, not rendering evil for evil, or railing for railing, but contrarywise, blessing, knowing that ye are there unto called, that ye should inherit a blessing.

Now he says here, finally. I never could discover why the Apostles put a finally in, every once in a while, when the preachers have a smiling joke about St. Paul bringing one of his epistles to a close three different times. Finally, brethren, he said three different times, then went on. And Peter says finally brethren and says that we are to be of one mind.

I want to talk a little bit about what it is to be like-minded. And Ellicott, who is the latest, the fine, the great commentator at Zondervan Publishers, has given back to the world again of English people. He says the word means unanimous. So, I want to ask you, or ask and answer, what did Peter mean when he said finally be ye all of one mind? Finally, be ye unanimous.

Well, I’ll tell you what it isn’t to begin with in order that we might discover what it is. Unanimity, spiritual unanimity, is not regulated uniformity. I could never discover, nor do I know to this day, how the churches have fallen into this error of believing that unanimity meant uniformity, that to be like-minded meant the imposition of a similarity from the outside.

Now this has been a great error, and people have tried to secure harmony in religious bodies by imposing uniformity. The very word uniformity, if you take the last syllable or two off, you have uniform. And uniform, while it is a descriptive word describing a certain situation, it’s also a very blunt noun referring to a garment or a series of garments worn by members of certain bodies, or groups, to show that they are members of those bodies or groups. We have the uniform of the United States Army, the uniform of the Navy, the Air Corps, and Marines.

We have various uniforms, that is, garments that are formed in one uniform, and it’s a uniformity imposed from the outside. But everybody that’s ever been in the United States service knows that under the uniformity there is a world of disagreement and grousing and definitely lack of uniformity. So, the putting on of a uniform does not in any sense make a body of persons one. And yet people have tried to achieve it, that uniformity, by putting on a uniform. They’ve tried to achieve it by all adopting the same tone of voice. For they have tried to adopt it or have adopted it by all reading the same books or doing the same things. That is imposed uniformity, and it is a great error because it assumes that uniformity is an external thing and can be achieved by imposition and forgets that the only valid unity is unity of the heart.

If you could conceive a regiment of soldiers, each one dressed differently, they might look odd, but if you could conceive of a regiment of soldiers that by some miracle had been tuned like several instruments all to one pitch pipe and were all alike inwardly, you’d have then perfect uniformity, and you wouldn’t need the uniform on the outside. But I suppose there is no particular harm in all dressing alike if in the first place everybody’s thinking alike and feeling alike on certain things. But the error I say, lies in believing that we can achieve inward unity by imposing external uniformity. Now actually, variety and not uniformity is the hallmark of God. Wherever you see God’s hand, you see not uniformity or always even similarity, but you see variety.

Paul says that a star differs from another star in glory, and if it would clear up some time, as I hope it may, and the ceiling lift, ceiling is a word we use for all the tobacco smoke and grime and smog that lies over the great cities. But if it would all lift some night and we could all see the starry city of God, you would note that there wasn’t one star exactly like another. They differ from each other in glory and God made them. If God had made all the stars in heaven to be the same size and the same distance from the earth so they presented a uniform appearance, it would look when you gazed up like the marquee of a theater and not like that mysterious wonderful heaven of God that you see when the skies are clear.

Everybody knows or can find out in five minutes that no two leaves on any tree are alike. They all differ, they’re somewhat alike, they may even be basically alike, but God allows them a certain, so to speak, freedom of choice. Anybody that gazes at a seascape, or better still, gazes at the ocean, will notice that even when the winds are high and the waves are running, they are no two waves alike. If you look carelessly, you’ll say they look alike and there’s a monotony and uniformity about them as they beat in nervously over the sand. But if you look a little more sharply, you’ll find that no two of them are alike and no one is quite like any other one.

And the artist who makes them all alike has imposed something out of his own mind upon God Almighty’s ocean, for the ocean is never guilty of stewing up 10,000 little billows, all the same size and shape and all the same angle. Each one differs from the other.

And it’s so with the birds. We say we hear a bird; we say that bird is a cardinal and that one I hear singing is a warbler and this one that I hear singing is a robin. But if you listen again and a little more closely, you will find that no two robins sing alike. Everybody that raises canaries knows that there is a basic likeness in certain, say, of the role or type of canary, but they do have different songs.

And it’s so with people, that’s too well known to need any explanation here; and Bible Saints are the same. We make a great deal of the similarities between Bible Saints, when actually the variety were still more marked in the similarities. Who can conceive of two men further apart than Isaiah and Elijah? Why, if they had been sitting in the same church pew or had been somewhere together, they would not even have been recognized as belonging to the same race, let alone the same faith. Their similarities were internal, they belong together inside, but they certainly were different outside. Or take a man like Peter and Moses and stand them up together or even stay within the little circle of Peter’s own little group, the disciples there.

Look at Philip, look at the lovely feminine John, almost feminine in his refinement, and then look at that noble, strong Elijah-like Peter. Altogether unlike each other, and yet their likeness was real because it was an internal likeness. They were alike inside, but they certainly weren’t alike outside.

When God gave his church to the world, he gave a church that was basically to be one, but He also gave a church that was to provide as much of a variety as a flower garden, so that they might present an attractiveness.

I used to a dear Black man of God by the name of Brother Collet. And he used to preach and say, God makes His bouquets, and He has all colored flowers in them. He said, if they’d been all your color, they wouldn’t have had any variety. So, God put me in there in order to give a little variety to it. He was perfectly right. God has his variety throughout all the Church of Christ, not only in looks, but in personality and tastes and gifts and all the rest.

And yet Peter says, be like-minded, be unanimous. What did he mean? He meant that we must all be alike in certain things. Did you notice what we’re to be alike in? Be alike compassionate, be alike loving, be alike pitiful, be alike courteous, and be alike forgiving. He names it. I didn’t put that in there. He said it.

Finally, be ye all one mind. This is the way to have one mind, and in these things have one mind, having compassion one of another, love as brethren, be pitiful, be courteous, and be forgiving, not rendering evil for evil.

So, there you have the uniformity of the man of God, the unanimity the man of God was looking for. It was an unanimity of compassion. All of God’s people must be alike in that. Unanimity of love, they must all be loving. Uniformity of pity, they must unanimously be filled with a pitifulness, that is a tender heart, and courtesy, and forgiveness.

Now let’s look at them then. Compassionate, and as you know, compassionate means a feeling with one another, that is a sympathetic understanding. Wherever one life touches another, because this is what unity means, it means a likeness at points of contact. We must agree wherever we touch, wherever hearts touch, wherever minds touch, there must be there an agreement, a loving agreement. And that was true of all the Bible characters.

They were alike in that they touched God, and where they touched, they were alike, but in all other things they were unlike. And it’s to be in the Church of the Lord Jesus Christ, that wherever we touch each other, there’s to be unity, but in all other things there can be diversity, and difference, and variety, and the variety itself is an artistic scheme that God has introduced to bring beauty into the body of Christ.

But dissimilarity that goes through to the heart, and differences that go through to the mind, and variations that touch the throbbing heart, is like throwing a piano out of tune.

Not all the strings are alike, but all the strings are alike in this, that they bow to a certain pitch. And so, the people of God are alike in that they bow to and recognize the one holy divine pitch to which they’re to be set and keyed and then after that they can be just as unlike and as free to be themselves, and be individualistic, and have complete freedom.

I suppose there never was a body of Christians that succeeded in being freer than the Quakers, and yet they did the best they could to kill it. They imposed a uniform, and they also imposed a certain address, a certain use of language. But in spite of that they had so much of that inner flame that they succeeded in presenting to the world a wonderful flower garden variety.

So, we must be alike compassionate, and that is sympathetic understanding wherever we touch, and agreement that we can disagree where we don’t touch, and where it’s nobody’s business. And we’re to have a feeling for one another, that’s compassion.

And then it says loving, that we are to love the brethren, and love is, oneness where hearts touch. And there must be, there is a unity, feeling the two have become one where there is love.

Now one man, I think if I recall, it was an old bishop whose name for the moment slips me, pointed out on this verse that unanimity was to be achieved not by freezing people together, but by loving them together. He said that you can get oneness out of variety by freezing it. You can do that, you know.

You all know how if a thing freezes hard enough and solid enough, it’s a unity. But it’s a frozen unity. And there are churches where nobody ever disagrees with anybody else, because they’ve started out by agreeing that nothing really matters anyhow.

There’s a church down on the south side, they’ve put out some literature, I suppose they all do, but I have gotten a hold of this, and they say that the basic tenet of their church is that there is no basic tenet, that you can believe anything that’s decent and still be a member of their church. Well, it’d be pretty hard to agree when you had started out by agreeing that you couldn’t disagree, because nobody believed anything anyhow. Now that’s what you call freezing together, you see.

You can freeze four fellows together, or you can bring them together by love, and one is divine and the other is the devil’s way of making people one. I don’t want to be on the side of any disruptive element, certainly, and all this emphasis on unity, it’s a strange and ironic joke that must have had its origin in the seventh hell down, that the generation that makes the most of unity is also the generation that has the greatest numbers of hates and suspicions and the biggest bombs and the largest armies. They can’t kid me.

I can smell them from a distance, however mellifluous they sound on the radio, brother. They still don’t fool me, because I know that there is no unity in the earth. There is division and hatred and hostility and borderline war. Yet they come and say, all men are brethren, there’s a brotherhood of man and a fatherhood of God, and we must all forget our differences and only feel to see if the lump is still on their hip there, that lump that means a gun.

Well, we Christians don’t pay any attention to the latest fad, which happens to be uniformity and everybody being like everybody else. We Christians know that there’s only one way ever to achieve uniformity, and that is by loving, by compassion, by the work of God in the breast, in the soul of man, and then there can be unity even where there is a blessed and free diversity. Now, we love each other, and I say love is unanimity where hearts touch.

And then we are to be pitiful, and that word means tender-hearted according to the Greek. Now, I might say that religion will either make us very tender or very hard. There isn’t anything that’ll tender us like religion.

I don’t like to talk about individual men, but it happens that one of my favorite people is Tom Hare, and Tom is a very tender man. I think he’s so tender he’s imposed on a lot by neurotic people, but nevertheless he’s a tender man. But being Irish, he wouldn’t have been a tender man, maybe, if God hadn’t tendered him. He has enough spirituality to make him tender. But the Pharisees had enough religion to make them hard. And religion will do one thing or the other. It will either make you very tender, or very hard. And it’s entirely possible to be very severe, to be indeed cruel, and do it all in the name of religion.

My rule is, whose side am I on, principle or people? Is it principle or people? Principle has been a hard, rough cross upon which human beings have been nailed through the centuries.

Principle, we say, and nail a Man up, and His blood and His tears and His sweat never affects us at all, because we pride ourselves. He’s dying for a principle. Any man who’ll die for a principle ought to have his long ear shaved. It’s not principles that hold the moral world together. It’s the presence of a holy God, and love for God and mankind.

Moral laws exist in the world. Nobody preaches that anymore with greater emphasis than I do. But to extract a principle from the holy loving heart of God and then nail man on it, and say, I’ll die for that, I won’t. I trust I would die for love. I trust I would die for those I love. I trust I would die for the Church of Christ. If I didn’t, I’d be ashamed. But I trust that I would give my everything to the love of God and the love of mankind. That’s one thing, but it’s quite another thing to extract a stiff iron principle and then nail a man on it.

The Bible says, be pitiful, be tenderhearted. And you know, Christ never talked about principles. He always talked about people. When He made His great little stories to illustrate, they’re called parables, never talked about principle. He always talked about people. There’s always some person there, somebody that was in trouble, or somebody that was astray, or somebody that was lost, or somebody that was sent out to bring in folks, always there were people there.

Jesus Christ didn’t come down from his heaven above riding on the steel beam of the divine principle, hard and stiff and cold, walk from the womb of the Virgin to the cross of Golgotha, upright as a ramrod, stiff as a beam, and die for the moral government of God. He did die for the moral government of God, but, oh brethren, He achieved His ends not by hardness and harshness, but by love, and by caring for people. It was the people he cared for. Back of it all was the divine principle, certainly. Back of it all was the moral righteousness of God.

The holiness of the deity must be sustained if the world falls. But our Lord walked in and out of that with all the sweet smoothness, the lubricated tenderness that never irritated nor scratched. Love lubricated His spirit, and He walked among men loving men, and loving people, and loving children, and loving women, and loving the low as well as the high.

We had a great President once. We’ve had numbers of great Presidents, certainly, and we never know for a generation or two whether they’ve been great or not. We all must admit that. But we had a great president once who was a man first and a president second. They called him Honest Abe. He had a big sense of humor and a heart that could cry easily over other people’s sorrows. But he had some generals who stood on ceremony and lived by principle.

And so, these poor boys taken out of the hills and away from the farms and out of the factories, conscripted and jammed without much training up to the front to fight. Being young fellas and still boys, some of them deserted. When the terror and the screaming and the dying and the blood and the sound of the gunfire got too strong, some of the boys couldn’t take it. So, they turned and fled. They caught those boys and sentenced them to die one after the other.

And all the time the war was going on between the North and the South, Abraham Lincoln was busy doing everything he could do to get those boys off. On one occasion, they came in and found him sitting sad faced, turning over papers off a file, writing at the bottom of them one after the other.

Somebody said, what are you doing, Mr. President? Oh, he said, tomorrow’s butcher day in the army, and they’re going to shoot my boys. And he said, I’m going over these papers once more to see if I can’t get some of them off. We love Abraham Lincoln for that. He was a man who loved people.

On one occasion, he had the sly, humorous effrontery to advance an argument to save a boy’s hide that I suppose nobody ever advanced before nor since. And some of those stiff, hard-hearted old boys that had a principal rammed up their back tied to it so they couldn’t bend, they thought he was a fool, a clown, for even advancing it. But he advanced this one time. He said, I don’t want this boy shot. They said, but he ran away under fire. Well, he said he couldn’t help it. He said he didn’t want to do it, but his legs ran away with him. And he actually tried to push that through as an argument. The fellow’s legs took him away.

Well, that was Lincoln, a combination of tenderheartedness and humor, and above all things, a great love for people. Now, I bring him in not because he was a great Christian. I doubt whether he was a great Christian. But he was a great man. And he had much that we Christians could borrow. And one of them was he was a tenderhearted, pitiful man who put people ahead of principle.

Then he says, be courteous. Now, that doesn’t mean etiquette. I know that Peter had never read a book on etiquette. I got a book on etiquette one time and started to read it. And I got so discouraged about halfway through that I put the book away. I don’t even know where it is now. I don’t know about etiquette. It’s just too much for me. Have Emily Post walking at the head of the etiquettical parade. I can’t even keep in step.

But there is what the world has called nature’s gentlemen. They are not bred to the palace, but they have in them a humble-mindedness and a desire to put the other person first. And they are courteous in the right sense of the term. I have been to the hills of West Virginia and of Georgia and of other states in the Union. I have gone up among the plain people, the old lady who had one dress and the half-grown daughter who had maybe one, and who went barefooted much of the time so she wouldn’t wear out her precious shoes.

And as she went barefooted, her feet got big, and when she put on her precious shoes, they didn’t fit, so she gave them to her smaller sister, and she ran it through the same process. That’s the way they had to live. I’ve slept in their homes, slept in their homes where several people had to sleep in the same room, and where one little room was living room, kitchen, everything.

And I am prepared to say to you, ladies and gentlemen, that I have never elsewhere found such perfect courtesy. They were courteous almost without a single exception, those hill people, those mountain people, for they were actuated, motivated by one thing, this man’s our guest, and we’ve got to please him no matter what it does to us. That’s courtesy.

That’s the kind Peter had. If Peter had been put down at a Washington function, he’d have disgraced the whole place because he wouldn’t have known what knife to use or what fork or what spoon.

Peter Cartwright, the great Methodist preacher, was a man of great courtesy with no etiquette. He was eating with the governor one time, and the governor’s wife said, Reverend, would you like a cup of coffee? He said that stuff scalds my stomach, I can’t eat it, or can’t drink it, no. And the friends around him were horrified. But the governor’s wife grinned, she knew it was Peter Cartwright. And they were having chicken, and the hungry little dog sat with his head off on one side and his ears cocked by the governor’s chair.

Peter cleaned each bone carefully and clipped the bone to the dog in the governor’s palace dining room. And everyone was blushing with chagrin except the governor and the other folks that were big enough to know they had a man on their hands who was in all essential things a courteous man, for he put everybody else ahead of himself. But what was a little thing like throwing a bone to a dog? Dogs and bones go together. Peter had never read the book. Emily hadn’t written yet when Peter lived. Be courteous.

So courtesy, then, is an unselfish regard for other people, even if it costs you something. And brethren, if we’ll ask God for that kind of courtesy, humble-mindedness really is what the word is, if we’ll ask God for that kind of humble-mindedness, you never need to worry too much about Emily.

Then forgiving, he says here, not rendering evil for evil, but blessing, in order that you might obtain a blessing. There’s the forgiving spirit. So now you see where our uniformity comes in, our oneness. It comes in in being all alike compassion, all alike loving, all alike pitiful, all alike courteous, and all alike forgiving. And after that, you can be just as different as the leaves on the tree or the stars in the sky. And it’s all right with God. He made you to be unlike other people.

Now, we come to the communion service, and we don’t shift mood, for it’s all of one here. Forgiving each other, not rendering evil for evil, but blessing, that you might bring a blessing. A like-minded people, unlike in a hundred ways, tastes that vary as wide as the whole scale of human thought, but all alike in being compassionate, and all alike in loving, and all alike in pity, and all alike in courtesy, and all alike in forgiveness. That’s being unanimous, rather. Not unanimous in prophetic interpretations, we vary on that, and I wouldn’t respect you if you agreed with me on everything. Not on modes of baptism, for there are differences of opinion amongst us. Not on interpretations always of all verses of scripture, but unanimous in forgiving, in pity, in loving, in compassion.

But if there is one negative vote, if there is in the fellowship one negative vote, one person who, when you say, who’s in favor, compassion, love, pity, courtesy, forgiveness, and there is one null, unuttered but felt in the heart, one negative soul, remember that the body is harmed and the spirit is grieved and the individual himself is injured beyond all description. I trust we may give to God the unanimous consent to be all alike in all these things.

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“The Enabling Power Of The Holy Spirit In Our Lives”

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The Enabling Power of the Holy Spirit in our Lives

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

April 1, 1956

Summary

A.W. Tozer’s sermon, “The Enabling Power of the Holy Spirit in Our Lives,” emphasizes the essential role of the Holy Spirit in empowering believers and the church to live effective, spiritually vibrant lives. Mr. Tozer outlines three distinct periods in the lives of Jesus’s disciples: before the cross, after the resurrection but before Pentecost, and after Pentecost. He parallels these periods with the current state of the church, arguing that many are stuck in a phase of instruction without power, characterized by aimless activity, intermittent fellowship with Christ, and a lack of spiritual vitality. He urges believers to seek personal and collective repentance, purity, and the fullness of the Spirit to move beyond mere religious activity and into a life of true spiritual power and purpose.

Message

After these things, Jesus showed himself again to the disciples at the Sea of Tiberias. And on this wise showed he himself. There were together Simon Peter, Thomas called Didymus, Nathanael of Cana and Galilee, the sons of Zebedee, and two other of his disciples.

And Simon Peter saith unto them, I go fishing. They say unto him, well, we’ll go with you. So they went forth and entered into a ship immediately, and that night they caught nothing.

But when the morning was now come, Jesus stood on the shore, but the disciples knew not that it was Jesus. Then Jesus said to them, Children, have you any meat? And they answered him, no, no, we haven’t. So, He said, cast your net over on the other side, and they did, and they got fish.

Now, I want to talk tonight about these opening verses here, and with this we’ll bring the talks on John to an end. The seventeenth chapter of John was considered some two years ago, quite at length in a series of sermons, so naturally we’ll not repeat that. And the story found in John 18, 19, 20, and 21 have occupied our thoughts over the last weeks, the arrest of Jesus and the death and the resurrection, so that there scarcely it would not be proper to continue through these chapters, having been dealt with quite extensively. So, with this tonight, we will leave this blessed book of John, often, often to come back to it, but not to preach any longer in this series.

Now, this has to do tonight with the forty days in Tyrium, which is covered in Acts 1:1-8. The former treatise, said Luke, the former treatise have I made, O Theophilus, of all that Jesus began to do and teach, until the day in which He was taken up after He had, through the Holy Ghost, given commandments unto the apostles whom He had chosen, to whom also He showed Himself alive after His passion by many infallible proofs, being seen of them forty days, and speaking of the things pertaining to the kingdom of God, and being assembled together with them, commanded them they should not depart from Jerusalem, but wait for the promise of the Father, which, saith He, ye have heard of Me.

For John truly baptized with water, but ye shall be baptized with the Holy Ghost not many days hence. When they therefore were come together, they asked of Him, saying, Lord, wilt thou at this time restore again the kingdom to Israel? And He said to them, It is not for you to know the times or the seasons which the Father hath put in his own power. But ye shall receive power after that the Holy Ghost has come upon you, and ye shall be witnesses unto Me both in Jerusalem, and in all Judea, and in Samaria, and unto the uttermost part of the earth. And when He had spoken these things, while they beheld, He was taken up, and a cloud received Him out of their sight.

That is Luke’s story that parallels John’s story here in the twenty-first chapter of his book, the closing chapter of his book. Now, this forty-day interim period after Jesus had been raised from the dead, but before He had sent the Holy Ghost, it was a time of instruction without power.

Now, there was power in the Instructor, but there was not power in the one instructed. And it is an axiom, I think, of theology that it takes the same degree of power to understand truth as it does to preach truth. So that Jesus was instructing the minds of His disciples, but they had not the power to grasp it fully. And it was a time of intermittent fellowship with Jesus our Lord. He had risen from the grave, but they were with Him only part of the time. At one place, Thomas was not present at all. And at another time, there would only be one. At another time, there would be two or three. In another case, five hundred. And James at one time saw Him, and Peter saw Him. And the fellowship with Jesus was real, but it was intermittent. And it was a period of considerable uncertainty for these disciples.

They were uncertain about exactly what they should do. They reached a period that was something of a vacuum. It was quite empty, because it was between the death and resurrection of Jesus and the coming down of the Holy Spirit. And it was a time of fruitless activity. You will notice in 21:2 that they were together aimlessly. It says here almost nonchalantly, aimlessly.

They were together, Simon Peter and Thomas called Didymus, Nathaniel of Canaan in Galilee and the sons of Zebedee, and two others of his disciples. Now, they were not together by the Lord’s appointment. They were just together. They were there rather aimlessly. And being aimlessly together, naturally they had to do something, so the strongest one of them suggested they do something. He said, I’m going fishing.

He had forgotten that he had left his fishing boat to follow his Lord three years before. But now his Lord was coming and going. He was there, and then He was gone. He was present, and then He was absent. He was visible, and then He disappeared. And Peter, being an active, strong, aggressive type of man, couldn’t take this inactivity and particularly this uncertainty.

So, he said, I’m going fishing. And naturally what he suggested doing was patterned after the old life. And the strongest one, having suggested something for them to do, the ones not so strong followed their leader. So, they went along with him. And of course, it was a waste of effort and time. Verse 3, they caught nothing. And when He asked them if they had anything, they said no.

Now, I want to talk to you a little about three periods in the lives of these disciples, and three corresponding periods in churches and in individuals. There was the period before the cross and the resurrection, after they had become disciples, but before Jesus had died. That was a period of our Lord’s flesh. They went about with Him. They heard Him teach, and He was preparing them, mentally at least, for His passion, as they call it, His death and resurrection, and for the coming of the Spirit. But He was the Lord after the flesh to them. That period, after they had become disciples, but before Christ had died and risen again, we call the first period.

Then there was a second period after the cross and the resurrection, but before Pentecost. That’s the period we’re dealing with tonight, Acts 1:1-8, and John 21:1-8, or for that matter, to the end of the chapter. Then there was a third period after Pentecost, when there came to them a power and a radiance and an enthusiasm and a success that they had never known before. Now those three periods, any church or individual may be in any one of these three periods.

The first one, knowing Christ after the flesh as those disciples did. They never quite understood Jesus. They knew Him after the flesh, but they never quite understood Him. He was telling them things always that they couldn’t grasp, and He said they couldn’t grasp it. He said these things that I’m telling you, you don’t understand now, but you’ll understand when the Holy Spirit has come. We can have this same kind of situation today as individuals and as churches. Know Christ after the flesh. Know about the rest, historically, of course. But put the emphasis on the manger and on good deeds and on moral teaching, but not experiencing the cross, not experiencing the resurrection or the triumph of our Savior.

Now there are churches that are in that condition. They know Christ after the flesh. I wish I never had to rebuke or protest. I wish that always that I could avoid that, but how can you avoid it? How can you possibly avoid it, when it’s perfectly obvious that churches know Christ after the flesh, but never seem to be able to grasp the Christ, the risen Christ, the Christ who had risen and been glorified and who had sent the Holy Ghost down, never grasp that Savior at all, never experience his cross, talk about it, put it on top of the steeple, wear it around the neck, but never experience that cross in their lives at all, and never experience the power of the resurrection, then smell the Easter lily, and go through all that we do to celebrate the resurrection, but still the only Christ we know is the Christ after the flesh.

Now that can be true of a church, I say. It can also be true of an individual. Then there’s that second period, which the disciples went through back there, and which we may go through now as churches or as individuals, to know Christ and know the cross and the resurrection, and believe in the finished atonement, and know the peace of sins forgiven, and believe in the bodily resurrection, and believe His promise to return, but never experience Pentecost.

Then there’s the third period that any church can go through, or any individual can go through, when they pass on through to the other period, when the promise of the Father is fulfilled in the hearts of individuals, and they are filled with the Spirit of God. A congregation of Christian believers can also know this.

Now I want to ask the question, where are we? Which period do we find ourselves in as individuals and as a church? I would first eliminate one period and say that the situation that the average fundamentalist church finds itself in does not accord with what we call that period between Christ’s death and resurrection and the coming of the Holy Ghost.

It accords not with that first period before Christ died, but with that second period after the resurrection. Let me explain it like this now. I said that that period, that interim period, before the Holy Spirit came, but after our Lord had risen from the dead, was a time of instruction without a power.

And we have that almost everywhere these days, theological instruction without power. In the case of Jesus, there was power in the Instructor, but no power in the listener. But in the case of many churches today, and I would say the majority of them, there’s neither power in the instructor nor in the hearer, but there is an effort to rationalize the gospel of Christ and to teach it.

I hear it sometimes on the radio, and I listen here and there where I go, instructing, but no power in the instruction. Nobody’s angry, nobody’s glad, nobody’s mad, nobody’s helped, nobody’s transformed, but it’s simply instruction without power and of intermittent fellowship with Christ.

Now I want to ask you if that does not describe the present situation–intermittent fellowship with Christ. The average Christian in our time does not have an unbroken fellowship with the Savior, but an intermittent fellowship. They’re with Him today and tomorrow they’re not, and tonight it’s very sweet and wonderful, tomorrow morning it’s gone, and two days later there is some sort of an experience, and then three days later that has evaporated. So, the experience, the fellowship, is intermittent. And then in the church of Christ today there’s considerable personal uncertainty.

I find this astonishing thing, that there are hundreds of people, hundreds, I suppose it runs into the hundreds of thousands if the truth were known, but my experience doesn’t cover that many, of persons who have had theological training but don’t know what to do. They don’t know what to do with themselves. They have gone to this or that Bible school, they hold a diploma from this or that theological institution, but they don’t know what to do with themselves. They’re in a state of personal uncertainty. They’re where the disciples were after Christ had risen from the dead, but before the Holy Ghost had come at Pentecost, and therefore they are running with other Christians, and much of their meeting together is aimless.

Now there were together Simon Peter, and Thomas called Didymus, and Nathanael of Cana in Galilee, and the sons of Zebedee, and two other of His disciples. There was a little meeting going on. I suppose strong Peter called that meeting together, and there they were anyway. I hear the announcements, let’s come and have a good time in the Lord.

We’re all going to meet at such and such a time, and such and such a place, and a good deal of our religious activity today consists of gathering all the sheep in one place, and then later, next week or next month, gathering all the sheep somewhere else. But never anybody quite knowing what it’s all about, personal uncertainty and fruitless activity.

Coming together aimlessly is the weakness of a lot of us Protestant Christians. We don’t know why we come together. We’re here, and we like it in a way, but just what’s it all about? And so the strongest one suggested they do something, but he hadn’t any orders from the Lord about what to do, so he scratched his fisherman’s head and said, now let me see.

The Lord’s here today and gone tomorrow. He appears now, and then He’s gone, and we’re not certain of anything, and we’re in this vacuum. We ought to be active, Christians ought to be active. We’re followers of the Lord. Let’s do something. But what was there to do? Well, naturally, he drew upon his experience of the time before he knew the Lord and said, let’s go fishing. And these weaker ones gathered around him.

Brethren, I’m describing fundamentalism today. I’m describing evangelicalism. It is where we’re unsure of ourselves. We have no afflatus. No voice has spoken. Nobody’s hearing anything. And so, the strong-willed ones are saying, let’s do so-and-so.

So, we gather over here, and we do that. And then a strong-willed one over here will say, well, I think we ought to do this. But the whole thing is uncertain. There’s no prophet to say this is the way we should go. This is what we should be doing. This is why we come together. This is the meaning of it all.

But we subscribe to magazines. We read books, and we go about here and there to conventions and Bible conferences. And usually some strong-willed fellow has said, let’s start this, or let’s do that. What do you say that we begin this?

And so, fundamentalism is a world of wheels within wheels within wheels within wheels. Ezekiel saw a wheel in the middle of a wheel. But Protestantism has not only one wheel in the middle of a big wheel, but has wheels within wheels within wheels, world without end.

But there seems to be a lack of specific direction in the thing. We turn out students from our schools, give them their diploma. They don’t know. Most of them don’t know what they went there for. A lot of them go to escape. Some parents send them there because they want to have them somewhere where they’re safe. And some of them go because their friends have gone. And some go because it’s romantic to do it. And some go to get out of the army. And some go because they’re lazy.

I heard Dr. Mosley say one time to a group of the students, if we learn, if we learn of one man who has come to this school to get out of the army, we’ll throw him out on his ear. But nevertheless, that does happen, and it’s because of the period we’re in spiritually.

We’re in a period after Christ has risen from the dead, but before the Holy Ghost has come. And we know He’s alive. We know He’s risen. We talk about Him on His throne. We expound Romans and Colossians and Ephesians. We know the truth all right. Historically, we know He’s at the right hand of God the Father Almighty and we repeat the creed and believe it, but our fellowship is uncertain. And today we see Him and tomorrow He’s gone. And we are not sure what we’re to do.

And so, we’re looking around, waiting for some strong-voiced fisherman who doesn’t know either, but who has a strong personality to say, I think we ought to do this. So, we form an organization and get a letterhead and a magazine and an office and a secretary, and we do this. I go fishing, said Peter, I go fishing.

The Lord had delivered Peter from the fisherman’s boat three years before, but there wasn’t anything to do. So, Peter normally did what there was to do. He did what he knew how to do. He went back to fishing. When the Lord God Almighty had called him to catch men, but there was a pocket there. They had reached a vacuum, and nothing was happening, and that kills some people. If they’re not busy at something, they’re not spiritual.

Brother Maxey told me about a dear woman down here somewhere. He preached about their tarrying and waiting and being filled with the Spirit. And a woman said afterward, Mr. Maxey, I have never heard this before. She said, I thought that the more active you are, the more spiritual you are. She said, honestly, that was my belief, that the more active you are, the more spiritual you are. She was perfectly willing to accept a change of viewpoint, but she was honest enough to say, that’s what I believed up to now.

Well, that seems to be the general belief, that inactivity, it’s unspeakable, it’s awful, it’s like those ten seconds with nothing going on the radio that Peter Joshua told us about, that awful dead ten seconds with nobody yelling and nobody running and nobody selling. And Peter, being a fisherman, couldn’t stand that. Well, he said, I go fishing.

Now, there wasn’t any sin in that. It was simply uninspired, undirected, and it turned out to be fruitless activity. Now, does that describe us or not, brethren? Does that describe us or not? Do we know why we’re saved? Do we know why we’re here? Do we know what it’s all about? Why is it necessary to hold all these discussions? Why is it necessary to put five ignorant people around a table and each pump the other one?

Why is it necessary for ten people to gather around a board, none of which knows anything about the guidance of the Holy Ghost, and then pool their ignorance in order to find out what to do? And of course, naturally, when they pool their ignorance, not having any divine gleam, not any divine call or upward tug or direction of the Spirit, they will pattern what they do religiously after what they have done out in the secular world.

And so we have a multitude of wheels within wheels, all patterned after the secular world, because Christ has risen, but the Holy Ghost has not come, because they know He’s alive, but they’re not able to keep contact with Him, and they’re afraid not to be active.

So, we have the religious jitters, and this is where we seem to be today, I’m afraid. We certainly don’t fit into that first period, when they knew Christ after the flesh and knew Him no other way. Certainly, we know Him in some other way. Surely, we don’t make the mistake in this church of putting the emphasis upon the manger. Surely, we don’t make the mistake in this church of laying the emphasis upon the moral teachings of Jesus or the good deeds of Jesus or the example of Jesus. Certainly, our Jesus is more than a human being, more than a man in the flesh. We’re not there. And surely, we are over into the Book of Acts, where they were all filled with the Holy Ghost and got up and went out to speak the word of God with power.

But we’re in an interim, and there’s a pocket in there, and there’s where most of the people are today. And brethren, much of the evangelism today does not lead people out of that uncertainty in a period of activity without leadership. It only creates more activity but doesn’t lead people into the fullness of the Holy Spirit.

And that’s why I can’t get all steamed up about making more converts to an effete Christianity. That’s why I can’t get all steamed up about going all around the world making converts to something that is only halfway in, and not all the way in. Jaffray and Glover and others went to South China, established their work in Wuzhou. They had this strange experience. They made converts, but they couldn’t get anybody to go on beyond that first initial conversion. And they multiplied their converts. Many people believed in Christ and accepted the Lord, as we say. And they became converts. They were baptized, and they joined the little churches there in China.

But Dr. Jaffray was not satisfied. He said, this won’t do. This won’t do. There’s something wrong here. Our Christians are carnal. They’re fleshly. They live after the flesh. Their fellowship with Christ is intermittent and spotty. They live aimlessly. They need something more from God.

And so those men of God got on their knees and prayed. And in those little churches, one church after the other, there came a mighty baptism of the Holy Ghost upon those Chinese Christians, and took them from this period, this interim period, this halfway-in period, took them on into the mighty fullness of the Spirit of God.

And I’m perfectly prepared to say, and base my conclusions upon the Scriptures, and believe that there is historic proof of it, that there would not be one shred nor trace of Christianity left in China today if they had not done that thing. There would not be one trace of Christianity left in China if Dr. Sung and the rest of them had not preached the word of God and had gone on to teach them that they ought to be filled with the mighty Spirit of God. But here we are.

What about you? What about your personal relation to the Lord? Now, I don’t think you’d be in this church if you only believed in Christ after the flesh. The newspapers only know Christ after the flesh. They publish the story of Jesus on the front page around Easter or Christmas, and they’re very sympathetic, and we’re glad they are, and it does help a little, but it’s Jesus after the flesh.

And Paul scornfully said, once I knew Christ after the flesh, but hence I know Him no more. Jesus that walked in Galilee is not the Christ that we have to do with now. That Jesus died on a cross. That Christ died and rose, and He’s the same Jesus, of course, but He’s a Jesus now in an altogether different position. That in Him which could die, died, And God raised Him from the dead, and He sits now at the right hand of the Father. And from there He sends down the blessed Holy Ghost.

I’m glad there are some people listening—not too many in this church, I suppose, but there are those listening—and we’re disturbed, greatly disturbed.

Somebody handed me this morning a magazine, a tear sheet from a magazine. I think the magazine’s a liberal magazine. But in it there was an article. What’s the matter with religion in our time? What’s the matter with this thing? And this young man, whose name happened to be Stanley Lowell—two of my boys’ names—Stanley Lowell, pastor of the Methodist Church. And this fellow with trenching analysis, says the trouble with religion now, the trouble with all this wave of religion that we’ve got is that there is no protest, that God sent the churches to stand as a fiery protest against wickedness and iniquity. But the churches have lost their power to protest. There’s no protest anymore.

But the great leaders are busy trying to be as smooth and suave as they can and stand against nobody and try to get along with everybody. And have friends among the big and the great and the very important persons.

This Methodist preacher, God bless the memory of John and Charles and Fletcher and Taylor and the rest of them. He’s got enough fire left in him, this young preacher, to cry and say, when is our prophet coming and from whence is he coming to teach the church not to get along with the world but to contest with the world and protest against the world; and to stand as followers of Jesus Christ the Lord and take the consequences.

The Methodist church would wake up and listen to this young man. They won’t. But if they’d listen to this young man, brothers and sisters, how wonderful it would be to go out not to try to find a common ground of agreement, not to prove that we’re just like the world, only a little bit better because we believe in Jesus, but to go boldly out declaring what we’ve seen and heard and take the consequences. And if they didn’t like it, let them persecute us.

The best thing that could happen to the church would be fiery persecution. If there had been a penalty attached to going to church, the churches in Chicago would not have been crowded to the doors this Easter morning with people with new hats. If there had been a penalty attached to going to church, they’d have stayed away in vast numbers.

I am not praying for persecution, but I’m not going for one second to pray that there shall not be persecution. For whenever the church dares to take the cross of Jesus, always remember this, brethren, that the cross is an instrument of death and negation. The cross is a denunciatory, accusative thing. And when we follow Christ and take up His cross, we can’t possibly go along with the rest. They can’t possibly ride along on the popularity of presidents and kings and the great of the world.

Not one of the world’s great would walk down the street with Jesus while he lived. And as soon as Paul was converted to Jesus, not one of the world’s great would dare to line up with him. And when Luther nailed his theses on the door of the church in Wittenberg, scarcely one of the great would dare to line up with him at first. They did later, but scarcely at first.

But because we’re afraid to protest, we’re afraid to be different, we’re busy trying to—I go fishing, we say. We don’t know what to do because the Holy Ghost has not come to our hearts, and all we have is the text of the Scripture and tradition. And so, there’s fruitless activity, personal uncertainty, intermittent fellowship, a gathering together without knowing why. And the strong leader says, well, let’s do it this way. And then the weak ones all say, all right, let’s do it that way.

And so, they go fishing. Children, have you any meat? No, we have numbers and names and offices and literature and printing presses and mimeograph machines and talk, but we don’t have any meat. Well, he said, they haven’t had any leadership, that’s why. You’re gathering together aimlessly. And this is the condition that we’re in today. I tell you this now, this is the situation that we’re in, and we’re waiting.

What is the further step? Well, let me read it to you. He shall receive power after the Holy Ghost has come upon you. You shall be witnesses unto me both in Jerusalem and in all Judea and in Samaria and unto the outermost part of the earth. And when the day of Pentecost was fully come, they were all with one accord in one place. And suddenly there came a sound from heaven as a rushing mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting. And there appeared unto them cloven tongues like as a fire, and it sat upon each of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, began to speak with other tongues as the Spirit gave them utterance. And they were dwelling at Jerusalem, Jews, devout men out of every nation under heaven.

And from there a fiery church went forth, filled with fire. She was like a flamethrower. She burst forth in a blaze of light. Nothing could stand before her. She stood in sharp contrast to the world in which she was. She was as separated from the world as Noah’s Ark was separated from the floodwaters upon which it rose.

She had two messages. She had a message of denunciation and protest, or protest, and she had a message of salvation and forgiveness through the blood of the Lamb. And for the first, they put her in jail. And for the second, after a while, with tears and sorrow, they turned in numbers and were converted to Jesus, Christ the Lord.

What is the greatest need in this church? That we should have a $45,000 missionary offering this year? No, I hope we get that. But that isn’t the greatest need. The greatest need in this church is that we as individuals and as members of a spiritual, social unit become so right individually and so right harmoniously toward each other that God can, without violating his nature, trust us with the baptism of the Holy Ghost. Brethren, that’s what we need.

I talked to Brother Parris Reidhead. I don’t know any man in the modern day that has a more penetrating, prophetic insight than Parris Reidhead. We sat and talked. I told him about the 102 missionaries the Alliance was going to send out this year. And this man himself, a missionary blazing with missionary fire, said, in a way, Brother Tozer, I’m sorry about that. And I said, why, Brother Paris, why are you sorry? We’re going to send out 102 new missionaries. He said, If we succeed in sending out 102 new missionaries and boost our personnel well over 800, it will set back for years any repentance, any rethinking, any reexamination of our position, and we will travel on our numerical success.

He said, that isn’t what we need the most right now. What we need the most right now is a heart-searching repentance and penitence, a revival within the individuals, a getting right and getting straightened out, and opening our hearts to the mighty down coming of the Holy Ghost. And he said, if we succeed in our present state of sending out 102 new missionaries without a corresponding spiritual rise of the tide, he said, I’m afraid that it’s going to do us harm and not good.

That was not said by a man who doesn’t believe in missions. That was said by a missionary who preaches missions in a way that I scarcely ever heard anybody preach missions. But he’s too wise to be taken in by numbers.

And brethren, what we need in this Church is not greater numbers. What we need in this Church is individual house cleanings, the gossiping, the criticizing, the carnality, the flesh, the selfishness, the extravagance, the cruel waste of life and money and time, the hardness toward each other, the flippancy, I’ll go fishing, I’ll go with you–the aimlessness. What we need is to get that all straightened out.

Don’t say, When the Holy Ghost comes, that’ll straighten out. No, no. The Holy Ghost will never come until it is straightened out. It’s a great mistake to believe that the Spirit of God came to make the people one. They had to be one before He came, being of one accord in one place. Brother McAfee, you know from the Greek that that oneness of accord is a musical term. It comes from music. It means a piano in tune.

Last week the piano was out of tune, and everybody said, What raucous sounds. And then a master came here last Thursday and crawled over the painting things and put it back in tune. Did you notice the difference Friday night? Harmony, harmony, the tune, the things in tune. And it says that they were all together in tune and then suddenly they were all filled with the Holy Ghost.

Don’t pray, oh, send the Holy Ghost to take the gossip out of us. Send the Holy Ghost to take away the bitterness. Send the Holy Ghost to make us one. Never waste your prayers until we get straightened out, the Holy Ghost can never come in any measure upon us.

The greatest evangelist whose feet ever touched the shores of America was Charles Grandison Finney. And Charles G. Finney said bluntly, don’t try to love each other. Don’t try to love each other. The Bible says love everybody. He said, don’t try to love everybody. You can’t love that which is unlovable. He said, get people right with God so they can be loved, and then we’ll love each other normally and naturally. He said, how can you love carnal men, gossips? How can you love critics and bitter fault finders? How can we love without hypocrisy? This great evangelist said, Let’s get straightened out. Come on, confess your sins. Get so people can love you, and you’ll be loved.

Now, that’s exactly backwards from all of this soft, old-maidish palaver that we hear these days. But that man proved that he was right by the fact that he had hundreds of thousands of converts, and the largest percentage of them stood with any man that’s preached since that time—more than Moody, more than any other man.

So, brethren, what we need is revival. What we need is a personal housekeeping. What we need is to use Easter as a ramp to take off from, something to bump us a bit, maybe, and get us started, and then go to our rooms with our Bible and with God. I have this to say to you, that I have read for more than forty years with great avidity.

There is hardly any field except higher mathematics in which I have not read and into which I am a stranger. But everything that God has ever used in me to help others, he has given me on my knees with my open Bible. God has been pleased to use the book, The Pursuit of God, far beyond the borders of the Christian and Missionary Alliance, selling now at the same rate it sold eight years ago when it came out. It is now translated into Chinese. I’ve seen it, some of it.

In almost every chapter, I got on my knees with God alone, seeking cleansing and power and purity and righteousness in my own spirit. Then with a notebook, taking down notes from that writing. Brethren, that’s what we need, more than we need anything else in the wide world. I hope we get forty-five thousand for missions this year, but if we get it at the cost of repentance and housecleaning and righteousness and the fullness of the Holy Ghost. If we get it only by the techniques of men, pressure methods, we’re better off without it.

I want God to give us spiritual ability to sustain anything He does for us, any increase in Sunday school, any increase in giving, anything. I want Him to give us spiritual power and ability to sustain it, stand up under it. Gifts without grace can be deadly, but for every gift I want grace to sustain that gift. That’s what I want for this church. That’s why I often preach to empty seats, as you know, because I will not fool. One of these times, nobody knows when it’ll be, I may fool you.

I talked to some fellow over the radio, and he said, oh, Brother Tozer said, we don’t want you to overdo, we want to keep you. Some preachers from the northwest side, oh, I said, I’ll probably be pallbearer for some of you fellows that are praying for me so hard. I don’t expect to die right away, but I don’t know, but I may. And you don’t know, but you may. Virus can hit you like that, and you’re gone. Brethren, we can’t afford to fool around.

Where are we in our spiritual lives? We’re not back there with the liberal friends talking about a Jesus after the flesh, or back there with our Catholic friends, talking about a Jesus baby in a manger. But surely, we’re not out with our Moravian friends, filled with power and the Holy Ghost, going forth as the greatest missionary impetus since Paul. Remember it, that what gave the impulse to modern missions was not a lot of fellows getting together and saying, I think we ought to go to the heathen, not telling touching stories about the heathen. Not looking at maps or consulting statistics.

What gave the impetus to modern missions and caused such societies like ours to be born were seventy-five Moravians present in a church at once, when they had confessed to each other and gotten right and gotten straightened out, and everybody was expectant, and suddenly there fell upon them a loving nearness of the Savior, instantaneously bestowed.

And they went out of that church hardly knowing whether they were on earth or had already died and gone to heaven. And under the leadership of that great Zinzendorf, they did more in twenty years than the whole church had done in two hundred. And out of it was born the Methodism, Salvation Army, Christian Missionary Alliance, China Inland Mission, you can name all the missionary activities, date their spiritual lineage back to that mighty hour, when only seventy-five people met God.

And they went out from there a happy people. Zinzendorf said, the happiest people in the world are these Moravians. He said, I don’t know anybody, there so happy that it’s wonderful. And they blazed forth. They didn’t do it after the technique of Peter, let’s go fishing. They didn’t meet together a half a dozen of them, and some fellow looked at a map and said, I think we ought to go over here.

But the mighty Holy Ghost came on them, and they went because they couldn’t stay in any place. They went because they had to go. They went led by the fire and the cloud by day and by night. They went all around the world. And they made converts of John Wesley and Charles Wesley. And out of that was born the great movements that have made America Christian.

Brethren, where are we? Where are you? Think about it, will you? Don’t get mad at me. Don’t say he’s getting gloomier as he gets older. I’m not. But I’m just wanting to be honest and wanting God to do something for us. Would you bow your heads in prayer?

O Lord, our Lord, thou knowest we are thy sheep in the mountain. We are thy little band of soldiers surrounded by the enemy. And we don’t want to waste our lives. We don’t want to waste our money. We don’t want to waste our time.

We don’t want to waste our gifts. Oh, we don’t want to be as Peter and Didymus and the rest of them were there, sympathetic, friendly, believing in Thee, believing that Thou art risen, but not knowing what to do, because the Holy Ghost had not yet come. We don’t want to simply follow some tall fellow who doesn’t know what to do either, but because he’s got a strong personality and good leadership, he said, let’s go do this.

We don’t want to waste our time and money and give up our precious, precious days following a man who’s doing something he hasn’t been sent to do. Lord, we’d rather join some little band of unheard-of strange people somewhere and live right and follow thee and be filled and be right, to ride in on the crest of popular religion. Bless these friends, Lord, who listen tonight. They’re here. They must want something. They wouldn’t have come. God bless them. Jesus, take each one by the hand and lead us knee deep, we pray, knee deep into succulent, juicy pastures. Lead us, we pray thee, to the still waters. Lead us, we pray thee, on to the fulfillment of thy promise, the promise of the Father.

Now, Lord, search us, search us. What we were, what we were yesterday or last year, that isn’t anything, Lord. We’ll start now. We’ll start clean now. We’ll confess to thee now. We’ll ask thee to pardon us now. Lord, thou hast heard today, criticism. Thou hast heard today, whispered things. Thou hast seen today, tight mouths and set jaws as people pass each other. Thou hast heard today and seen and beheld the pride and the carnality. O Lord Jesus, we don’t hide behind anything, and we don’t deny anything. We confess it. As a people, as a church, we would confess. We would ask thee to forgive.

We would ask thee to wash us whiter than the snow. And oh, that cleansing stream our sister sang about. That, that cleansing, that fountain, that overwhelming flood of cleansing power. Let it come to one after another of us.

Save us, we pray, from the suave, smooth get-along-with-everybody spirit. And help us to stand, we pray, with shiny eyes and with full understanding of what it means to be a follower of Jesus.

Bless thy people, O Lord, in this great city. Bless every good man of God who stands to declare the truth. Bless him up to the light he has. Bless all the churches up to the light they have. And for everyone, we thank Thee. For every poor sheep, we thank Thee. For every struggling, lame little lamb, we thank Thee. For everybody, Lord, that has looked longingly in Thy direction, we thank Thee, O Lord Jesus. But O Christ, thou knowest the endless rat race, the constant wheel in the middle of a wheel, the buzzing, everlasting squirrel cage of empty activity.

Come, Holy Spirit, heavenly dove. Come with all Thy quickening power. Come, shed abroad a Savior’s love, that it may quicken ours.

If we are not lovable, forgive us, help us to become lovable. Help us to become so people can love us without straining. Help us, Lord, so they won’t have to be hypocrites to say they love us. Bring us into a place where meekness and humility and tenderness and kindness and long-suffering shall prevail. Bring us into the thirteenth of First Corinthians, Lord. It may cost us a lot. It’s hard on the flesh. It’s humbling. But there we know the mighty Holy Ghost will come. There we know he’ll fall and keep falling and keep flowing down and in and out.

Gracious Lord, send us out of here tonight. Don’t let anybody crack a joke at the door. Don’t let anybody be so full of levity that they’ll forget anything’s been said. Send us out, we pray thee, to wonder about our responsibility to this very critical week that lies ahead of us. Mighty Lord, Mighty Lord, the end of the ages are upon us.

The world has grown old, and the judgment draws near, and kingdoms rising against kingdom and nation against nation, and evil men and seducers wax worse and worse, and the love of many waxes cold. And thousands say, Lord, Lord, but do not the things that thou sayest. Save this people, we pray thee, from that quagmire.

Save us, we pray thee, from that hole in the swamp. And float us above it like Noah in the ark, riding above the storm. We ask this in Jesus’ name, Amen.

Tags Holy Spirit, Power

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Tozer Talks

Post author By pshappard
Post date August 11, 2024

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“The Foundation of the Church“

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The Foundation of the Church

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

September 27, 1959

Summary

A.W. Tozer reflects on the significance of Christ’s resurrection and ascension as the foundational truths of the Christian Church. He emphasizes that the Church began with simple yet powerful declarations: “He is risen” and “He was taken up.” Mr. Tozer warns against reducing the resurrection to merely a spiritual or symbolic event, affirming the total resurrection of Jesus—body, soul, and spirit, encouraging believers to rejoice in the fact that they have a representative in glory who intercedes for them.

Message

Our Father, we are refreshed in mind and heart as we read again this true record and hear the words of the Spirit telling us that He ascended up on high. We thank thee for Christ Jesus, the Lord, our Savior, and we pray that thou wilt help us now that we may put away Adam’s way of looking at things. We have been with Adam this week.

We have been in the world. We have been in offices and shops and stores and everywhere where Adam is. Now, Lord Jesus, thou second Adam, we pray thou wilt help us that we may purge out of our thinking Adam’s ways of thinking and Adam’s psychology and that we may think as Christians, think as if this morning Christ had risen. Today, this was the morning that He rose from the dead and that He is now among us, alive, eternally alive. Death hath no more dominion over him. We pray that Thou wilt grant that around this living, risen, glorified Man who is also God, we may gather today.

We may gather in our thoughts. We may gather in our hearts and in all that we may feel and know that the Lord is with us and that we are not alone. That we are not trying to promote a service or manufacture one, but that we as the disciples of old simply gather around our Risen Lord.

Thou remember the poor and the helpless today and the sick and the distressed and help among the nations of the world, O God. Thou knowest we see fulfilled before us the strange dramatic pictures which Daniel wrote and painted for us, and we see and hear the words of our Lord being fulfilled when He told us of wars and commotions and rumors of wars and the hearts of men failing them for fear of things that are taking place on the earth.

Oh, we pray that instead of our being depressed by all this, we may rejoice because our redemption draweth nigh. Wilt Thou help us all over the earth? Wilt Thou remember Thy work, so badly hindered by the devil in so many places. We pray Thee, O God, Thou wilt help in Laos today. Help, we pray Thee, in Vietnam. Help, we pray, in Indonesia and in other parts where the political conditions make it dangerous and sometimes impossible for Thy people to work. They have almost to mark time waiting for Thee to open the door.

We ask That Thou will bless those out from this church on the many fields of the world and in many pulpits throughout the world and sitting at many organ consoles and standing to lead choirs and teaching in schools.

O God, bless Thou we pray, that stream of blessed humanity that’s gone out from this small church to all parts of the world over the last years. Help us to pray for them and keep praying for them. Now, Lord, bless us as we wait further upon thee. We ask this through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

I want to talk to you from the Scripture which was read earlier. And in the second verse of Acts 2: …until the day in which He was taken up, after that He, through the Holy Ghost, had given commandment unto the apostles whom He had chosen.”

Now, I wonder if you have ever stopped to think that the Church of Christ began as no other institution ever did. It began without any political philosophy at all. It had none. If there had been anyone present insisting that before this church could get going, they would have to take a stand on politics. There were many of them that would not have known what they were talking about. It had no economic theory about wealth or anything to do with money. Most of them hadn’t any.

And if they had had any ideas, they would have been academic because they had nothing to do with money. They were poor people. They had no thought about international relations, juvenile delinquency, any of the problems that are facing us now. Nobody said, we have the answer. We will fix it up. Come to us. Listen to us. We have the answer to the world’s problems. They didn’t say that at all.

The Church of God exploded into being. It began like a delightful, glorious, life-giving explosion. And the testimony of the Church can be put into two sentences, one of three words and the other of four. Before Hitler could get going, he had to write Mein Kampf, a great big thick book. And before the Communists could get going, they had to write yet another, thicker book. But the Church of God managed to get started on seven words. At least there are seven words in English. The first three were uttered beside the tomb. He is risen. And the other four are written here into the book of Acts, He was taken up.

Now I am not exaggerating or trying to oversimplify. I tell you frankly that these two great battle cries, these two shouts of triumph and victory gave the church their power. It was around this that they rallied. The triumphant joy cry of the church, He was taken up; and the cry beside the tomb, He is risen. It was this that made the church the church. Now our Lord is risen.

This is not Easter. I think it is a trick of the devil to confine the preaching of the resurrection and triumphal ascension of our Savior to Easter time, so we’ll only hear it once a year and hear it under circumstances that sometimes make it impossible to have it mean anything to us. But there never should be a sermon preached from any Christian pulpit in the world that should not begin and end with, He is risen, He was taken up. For this is it. This is it. There’s a little explanation in between which the Holy Ghost through the mouth of the Apostles wrote. But these are the springs that drive the great church of Christ. He was taken up. He made His triumphal entry.

Talk about the triumphal entry of Jesus into Jerusalem and it indeed was a triumphal entry when the children cried Hosanna to Him that cometh in the name of the Lord. But He made another triumphal entry a little while later after His death and resurrection. He made that the time that He was taken up his triumphal entry into His ancient position vacated when He came down.

In John 17:5, a prayer that our Lord had prayed a little while before He was crucified, He said, Father, glorify Thou Me with the glory which I had with Thee before the world was. He voided His glory when He came to be born of the Virgin Mary. He reassumed that glory when he was taken up. And all the glory, whatever that means.

Now I know that that word glory as Christians use it, it is an explosive, emotional word and sometimes means very little. I don’t know that I know what it all means, but whatever it means, the glory and all the glory that He ever had in the ancient beginning before the world was, He was reinvested with that glory when He went back to the Father again and He made His triumphal entry into full and eternal favor with God, the Father Almighty.

Now remember one thing, that the Eternal Son was never out of favor with the Father. It would be impossible for reasons which any theologian knows, for the Eternal Father and the Eternal Son to be anything but in perfect and holy, unspeakably holy harmony with each other. But Jesus was more, that is, He was something in addition as far as we’re concerned, to being the Eternal Son. He was the Eternal Son made flesh to dwell among us. And that flesh that dwelt among us because it identified Himself with mankind, identified Himself with all that we are and all the demerits we have and all that is against us, all that you see over the world today, every evil thing you read about or hear about, because He identified Himself in His manhood with our manhood.

I say then that when He rose from the dead, He was reinvested with all of the favor with God the Father. The Eternal Son had never been out of favor, but the Son made flesh. God had turned His back on Him on the cross and He cried, my God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me? But now the Father receives Him again into full favor and He sits down at His throne. And He made His triumphal entry into the lordship over creation and the headship over the church and the kingship over the earth. These are things we ought to keep saying. We ought to keep saying them all the time.

When one goes about preaching and he just says something like this, he just talks about God and Christ. And people come up to you and surround you as if you were a visitor at an orphan asylum, and the poor little love-starved, emotionally starved children couldn’t get enough of a pat on the head, so people would come and gather around you. Not because you preach well. I know better than that. I hear myself on tape and as I told Brother Platt, I wouldn’t go across the street to hear myself preach. But it’s what you’re preaching about, what are you talking about; you’re talking about three things. He is risen and He was received up. He ascended; He was taken up.

Now this is what the people want to hear and it’s a strange thing that we’re letting the church starve to death. For this is the food of the church. This is the pillar that upholds the church and yet we don’t tell them these things. But He was seen of them forty days and forty nights before He ascended up, a period of testing and verification.

And they saw and they heard, and they touched Him, and they ate with Him and they questioned Him and their eyes looked on Him and their ears heard Him and they knew that this was the very same Jesus. So, the Lord Jesus that walked among them was present in His total resurrection.

Now I believe in the total resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ, and I believe in the total resurrection of man. Unbelief has come in and nicely smoothed this over and said yes, I believe that Christ’s Spirit marches on. I believe the same thing about Socrates and Lincoln. I believe that Lincoln walks at midnight. I believe that Lincoln’s spirit of liberty and freedom for all men will never die.

I think that Lincoln lives on in the hearts of his admirers. Well now there’s a poetic sense in which that’s true. In everybody that loves Abraham Lincoln there’s a sense in which Abraham’s memory lives on. Lincoln’s memory lives on in the hearts of the people. But let us not yield to the blandishments of the devil and acknowledge that nothing but the memory of Jesus lives on. Jesus lives on, my brethren. He is risen. He was taken up. Not his memory, not gratitude in the hearts of His people. That’s there too. But Jesus Christ rose from the dead by a total resurrection.

The Bible, the early part of the early church fathers and the Bible writers would not have known what you meant if you had talked to them about the spiritual resurrection of Jesus. They knew that this same Jesus which went into the grave came out of the grave. This same Jesus that they saw standing among them, now is leaving them to be taken up.

And that same Jesus that is taken up will surely come again. Whatever they put into the tomb, God brought out of the tomb. He is not here. He is risen. It does not say His body is here, but His spirit is risen. It says, He is not here and the pronoun He, takes in body, soul, and spirit and all that had been Jesus and all that was Jesus and all that is the Lord Jesus. Crucified, buried the third day, He rose again says the creed.

Now it tells us here that this One who had risen from the dead. And before He was taken up, spoke to them of things pertaining to the Kingdom. That was about the greatest Bible conference of all.

Next Sunday I will be beginning at New York City at Brother Reidhead’s church on Times Square with Brother Reidhead and Brother McAfee in an eight-day conference. And I will be in a conference with Baptists before I leave there, and believe it or not, I’ll be preaching to a conference of Pentecostal preachers. I’m not particular, I just preach wherever they want to hear me. If the Pope would send for me, I’d go preach to him. So, I’m preaching to conferences.

But the greatest Bible conference in all the greatest of them, all must have been this one; when a few breathless disciples standing around Him in wonder listened to Him talk of the things pertaining to the kingdom of God. What did He say to them? Well, I suppose that what He said to them was an extension of what He had been saying to them like His previous teaching, very likely. We dare not introduce anything here.

A man said to me once, he set forth a certain doctrine and when I asked him where he got Scripture for it, he said, well it was one of those things which Jesus had talked to the disciples about after His resurrection. If you permit that method of approach, pretty soon that’ll be a basket into which the enemy can dump any kind of weird fanatical teaching in the world. You may be perfectly sure that whatever Jesus said after His resurrection accorded with the Old Testament and the New that was later written. For He was the Lord of the Old and He is the Lord of the New.

You may be sure that whatever He said you may find somewhere in the Psalms or the prophets or Moses or the Apostles or the Acts or the Revelation, I suppose that being the Eternal Son, He would talk about the Eternal Father. Being the Savior of men, He would talk about the atoning death which He had made. Being the Head of the church He’d talk about His church. Being the light of the world, He would talk about world evangelization. Being the anointed One, He’d talk about the gift of the Spirit. Being the One, He’d talk about His return. What he had to say was not different from what He had been saying, but perhaps an extension of it, which we got later in the New Testament when it finally got down to print.

Well, He is the Eternal Son, that is what I want particularly to mention here now. He is the Eternal Son and He is risen, and He was taken up. He is the Word of the Father. Hebrews 1:1-3 says that God has spoken unto us by his Son whom He hath appointed heir of all things by Whom also He made the worlds, Who being the brightness of God’s glory and express image of His person and upholding all things by the word of His power when He had by Himself, purged our sins, sat down on the right hand of the Majesty on high.

Now, He had equality with the Father, and when He was taken back on high, He was reinvested with all the equality which He temporarily veiled or laid aside. And that place He freely surrendered for us. For He did surrender for us that place in the heavens above. For it says in Philippians 2, being in the form of God, Jesus thought it not robbery to be equal with God, but He emptied Himself and took upon Him the form of a servant, and went on down to the cross. And at His ascension, the Eternal Son was placed no higher than before His resurrection.

Let’s remember that the Eternal Son was not elevated when He was taken on high. He could not be elevated. You cannot elevate that which is Itself elevation. You cannot raise higher that which is higher than the highest. And Jesus, the Eternal Son, the Word of the Father, the Ancient Logos, the Word of the Father, was before the world was, and you could not elevate that which was the pinnacle of all being, God.

But remember, He took on Himself the form of a man, not the nature of angels, but the seed of Abraham. And now, what is God going to do with man. What’s God going to do with this Man? Jesus became man and identified Himself with man so that He can’t escape it, not that He wants to. For He took upon Himself man’s flesh voluntarily. He assumed it because He willed to do it, and therefore He doesn’t change His mind and He still wants to be man. But He is there now as a man, forever a Man.

If you were to see Jesus now, you would recognize the form of a man. You ought to keep that in mind. Not a spook not a ghost, not a strange weird, white shape floating about. You would recognize a man, a man who could sit down, stand up, crouch down, stretch His hand out, raise His hand up, and kneel to pray. You would recognize a man, Adam’s man, Adam’s flesh born, except sin accepted and mortality accepted.

He became man to dwell among us. He became flesh so that at His ascension, the Eternal Son was not elevated but the Man was elevated. This is what the church told the world. This is it. The church said we have Somebody. We have Somebody in the greatest place in the universe. We have a representative there.

Don’t you think those Russians feel good. They look upon with all their boasting and bragging and condemning the United States. They look upon the United States as being the heaven, heaven itself and they’re troubled with a deep in sense of inferiority because they know that this is the greatest nation in the world, and don’t you suppose they’re wild with glee over there because they have a representative over here. I hate to mention him. I don’t want advertise him, but I’ll just illustrate him.

They’ve got a representative over here, somebody that stands for them and he did stand for them. You’d have to say that. Some of our Americans go over there and talk us down, but he came over here and wouldn’t say a good thing about us and said everything good about his own country, bad as they are. So at least you’ve got that in his favor. Even the devil, you know, works overtime. You can say that in his favor.

But we have Somebody. That’s the message of the cross. That’s the message of the Christ. That’s the message of the church. We have a Representative in the glory. We’ve got Somebody over there representing us. And that’s the message that the church took to the world. He is risen. He was taken up. He’s out of the grave. He’s into the heavens, and this is where the power of the church lies. And as soon as we lie down around the cross and begin to sob and moan and talk about His dying and try to go through all of His dying, we’ve forgotten that He died, but He’s not dead now. He is risen.

And when we go to the tomb and stand, as some of the songs say, that we learn how to die and we look in the tomb, that’s past. That’s history. That’s no more. He was taken up. And it’s the signal to all Adam’s race that everything’s all right now, if you’ll only believe. Everything’s all right.

A Rescuer came. A David came to slay your Goliath. A Moses came to deliver you out of Egypt. And if you’ll only believe it now and believe on Him, everything will be all right because there’s a man in the glory, a real Man, Christ, the God-man, has been exalted. God had always been exalted, but Christ the God-man is now exalted and humanity is invested with deity.

When He came down here, He took upon Himself humanity and invested His deity with humanity. But when God took Him to the right hand of the Father, He invested His humanity with all the prerogatives of deity so that there isn’t anything in the sovereignty of God that isn’t in the hand of Jesus Christ our Lord. God hath put all things in His hands. God hath put all judgment in his hands. God hath put resurrection in His hand. The Father hath life in Himself and He hath also given to the Son to have life in Himself. That was the cry of the church. Jesus is risen. Jesus is exalted.

Jesus is at the right hand of God. He was taken up after He had been seen and identified. And we know it’s Jesus He’s taken up. That was the cry of the church. We’ve bogged down. We’ve bogged down in modes of baptism and church polity, whether you should have deacons or elders or whether you should call them deacons or elders, whether you should call pastor a pastor or an elder. We’ve bogged down. We get all confused. But the church wasn’t confused, that early church. They looked up and they saw one great thing, I repeat, that He had risen and that He was taken up. The Man is exalted.

In second chapter of Acts, remember that Peter argued that way. He said, you men of Israel, hear these words. Jesus of Nazareth, a man approved of God among you by miracles and wonders and signs which God did by Him in the midst of you; Him being delivered by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God, you have taken. And by wicked hands you have crucified Him and slain Him. But God has raised Him up, having loosed the pains of death because it was not possible that He should be beholden of death.

Now, that’s what the Holy Spirit says here by the mouth of the man Peter, you men of Israel, why marvel ye at this? He is risen. He was taken up. This Jesus Christ made this man whole. He said this Jesus whom ye denied and crucified, God has raised Him from the dead.

Now I think we ought to emphasize this. I think we ought to bear down on it. I think we ought to sing more about it. I think we ought to testify more about it. I think we ought to get our minds slanted in that direction. I think we ought to let the winds of heaven blow across our heart and get this dust away and begin to think about the One who was risen again from the dead. And so, He stands. He stands.

One man said about this Christ rising from the dead and ascending to God’s right hand, he said this was mystery to the Jew, and it was produced by the Greeks. But it’s wonderful glory to the Christian, the church of our Lord Jesus Christ. He stands in the full possession of His manhood and in the full exercise of His Godhead and there isn’t anybody else like that in all the universe, nobody. There’s nobody that has the prerogative of God and prerogatives of man. Nobody in this world, this race that we’re part of, this sick race, sin-pocked race that we’re part of; had a head and it was Adam.

But the new race was born of Jesus Christ, born of the water and the blood; has a Head and it’s Jesus Christ who was God and man. You know that’s the great fact. Is it dramatic? I wonder why somebody hasn’t made a movie out of that. I guess they have. I remember seeing it years ago before I was converted. What did they call it? King of Kings, yes, King of Kings. I was a sinner sitting there, a little sharp-eyed sinner and I sat watching the thing.

And when it was over and they played Near my God to Thee and everybody was supposed to blow their nose around me and walk out, I walked out disgusted. I wasn’t even a Christian. I knew that couldn’t be God. I knew that this wonderful mystery couldn’t be acted by a man with breath in his nostrils. Even a sinner that I was, unconverted, I had spiritual sense enough to know that you couldn’t reduce this to tape, reduce it to celluloid.

This wonderful mystery, that Man stands there in possession of all that manhood is, and all that Godhood is. This is Jesus, this is our Lord, that’s the great fact. Our human Brother, exalted to equality with God, given all the authority of the Most High God, our human brother.

Somebody wrote me a letter and scolded me or scolded somebody who had written in the magazine for calling Jesus, brother. I don’t want to be more spiritual than the apostles. I’m satisfied if I can stand up to the knees of the apostles, black their shoes without swooping down. But I think He’s my brother. He is the human Brother, and He knows our frailties. Given all the authority of God, He can command obedience everywhere, anywhere, and at all times. He can command obedience. This is neglected truth, you know. Other aspects, as I said, take over. We are robbed of our rights, but we have a right to expect the Lord Jesus Christ to work from heaven as He once worked on earth.

Now the fact that some have carried that too far and have put on great dramatic meetings that have ultimately ended in glorifying men and not God, don’t let that scare you. We have a perfect right to expect that He shall work from heaven as He once worked on earth. Because He is exalted, we have a perfect right to believe that He will work in us as He once worked for us. We have a perfect right to believe that He will work for us above as He once worked for us below. And He will work through us to others as He once worked through others to us.

I don’t know why Christians are ever anything but delightfully happy. Really, I don’t. When you just think it over, just think it over like this, and it does something for me, I don’t know what it does for you, but it does something for me, just to think it over. Wonderful Man in the glory, my Man in the glory, our Man in the glory, God’s Man in the glory, risen up there and not standing in a state of uncertainty, but sitting. Men stand, but kings sit on thrones. And He sits at the right hand of God the Father Almighty. We ought to be the happiest people in all the wide world. I think we’ve been cheated of our birthright, my brethren. We’ve been sidetracked. We’ve been told other things. This is the gospel.

Why did A. B. Simpson hit the evangelical church like an explosion? Because he was a great preacher? He was a good preacher, sure. Because he was a great scholar? No. Why? Because he came telling them, believing what he told them. Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever he said. He’s the same yesterday, today, and forever. And they said, do you hear that man Simpson and said, that fanatic. And others said, let’s go hear him. Moody said, I want to go down to hear Simpson. He preaches to my heart as no other man can.

What could that all mean? Only one thing, that the church had lost for a little time the wonderful sense of His having risen. And they were busy preaching other things, how to reach the masses, and how to get on with your mother-in-law, all the trivialities. But he came saying, He’s risen, and reached the masses. He reached them, because he kept saying, He’s risen. And if the church of Christ would just believe this once more and expect Him to work from heaven as He once worked on earth.

We have the message. You don’t have to send to Ireland to get the messenger. You don’t have to go somewhere around to seek. The word is nigh, even in thy mouth. And we don’t have to circle the world to find a man to preach to us. If a man will come and say, He’s risen, He was taken up, you got Him. And if you keep saying that and keep saying that and keep saying that, the Holy Ghost will bless that and give power to it and fire to it and life to it, and dying sons of men will gather around that.

And some say it must be awfully hard on the church; you been there thirty years and now leaving. And I tell them, no, no it’s not. Because I never preached myself but Him. You’ve got Him and you’ll have Him if you have nobody else. And you’ll always have Him. I know there are lots of pleasant fellows that make everybody love them and when they go, people weep and all that. But what are we doing there? We’re simply loving a man. We’re gathering around a man. That’s patting a man. But I’m here to tell you He’s risen, and He was taken up and that’s it. And He sent the Holy Ghost to confirm the fact that He was risen and taken up.

And so, we’re not tied to any man. When Simpson died, the church went right on. When Wesley died, the church went right on. And so, it will be here, and so it will be wherever Jesus Christ is the center, the Source, the core of love and life and thought and prayer and hope and belief, Jesus, the sinner’s friend, Jesus, the Lord of Glory. So, let’s keep believing that. Let’s sing a lot of songs about the King Eternal, about the Lord of Glory, about the Savior marching on to victory.

Keep that thought before your mind, otherwise you will get awfully blue. If you get awfully blue listening to commentators and read newspaper accounts of juvenile delinquents murdering their streetcar conductors, you get awfully blue. But if you keep your eyes on the Man in the glory and recognize that He’s up there representing us. He’s up there representing us, mind you. Our names are on His hand, on His forehead, on His chest and shoulders. He represents us there.

There’s a great lawyer, if I was in trouble, and a great lawyer with worldwide fame said, I’ll take your case on. I’ll represent you; I’d go fishing. I wouldn’t worry about it, because if the man you’ve got representing you is great enough, you’ll get by, you’ll get through. Unfortunately, sometimes even when you’re guilty, if you get big enough of a man representing you, you’ll get through.

But in the glory, here Jesus Christ represents nothing but guilty men. He represents no clients but guilty men. And those who say, I’m not guilty, He dismisses them and says, all right, get somebody else to represent you. He’s up there representing guilty men. He represents you and me because we’re guilty, brother. We’ve been guilty before God, of sin, guilty before the world, and he takes on such cases. We say, I’m guilty. He says, that’s all I want to know. If you say you’re guilty, I’ll represent you. I am the Man in the glory, you know. He’s called an Advocate, an Advocate above.

Well, that’s all I want to say this morning. But I’ve just been thinking about this, thinking it over, thinking how wonderful it is that we have a Representative in the glory, and I thought I’d like to tell you that this morning. I hope it’ll do you some good. I hope you’ll go away believing it. If you do, everything will be all right. Amen.

Tags Church, Resurrection