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The Voice of the Saved

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

July 29, 1962

There is a difference between being lost and being damned. I have heard men in their eagerness and urgency of spirit refer to sinners as damned and invite them to come. It’s a total impossibility for a damned man to make any approach toward God. The fact is there is a difference between being lost and being damned.

Being lost is what everybody is who is not saved. But being damned is what the lost are after it’s too late, and there is no hope for them ever to return. We are not damned in this world. We are lost in this world. By, we, I mean people. Men can be lost in this world and lost finally or damned in the world to come.

So, men are lost, but they are not deserted. Scripture says, my Spirit shall not always strive with man. Those are our words, our burning words. My Spirit shall not always strive with man. But while they carry a finality about them like doom, they also carry hope in them because you could not say, my spirit shall not always strive except the spirit were striving. The fact that he puts the word always in there indicates that there is a time when the spirit is striving, and that time is now.

Now I would, if I were writing a book, put a little footnote in for by way of explanation, and I would say that it’s necessary to annotate what I have said and put this footnote in that there may be individual persons who have been deserted and with whom the spirit no longer strives. But now those are individual persons I’m talking about and not the great masses who are simply careless and sinning and not minding it.

Now, not only is it true that man is lost, but not deserted, but it’s true that God is entreating us, be ye reconciled to God, and His voice is sounding in many voices. I’ve talked about the voice of the lost, and I’ve talked about the voice of Christ’s blood, and the voice of conscience, and the voice of reason, and the voice of God’s love, and I could go on and on because there are so many more voices than I have been able to designate.

But tonight, I want to talk about the voice of the redeemed, and what I want to say is this, summing it up before I begin, is that the ransomed, the ransomed, have a voice, and that voice is sounding, and sounding not only now in the testimony of living men, but it’s sounding down the years. It is the voice of the ransomed, and they’re all saying the same thing. They are saying, be ye reconciled to God.

Now a little text, if I wanted to use a text, would be that one in Hebrews, wherefore, seeing we also are compassed about, with so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight.

Now Paul, of course, or whoever wrote the book of Hebrews, had in mind the old Roman amphitheater, where they used to meet, as they meet here in the Maple Leaf Gardens, or in Yankee Stadium, or wherever men do meet to put on games. Paul must have attended them sometime in his life, though I seriously doubt whether he ever bothered much with them after he got right with God. I doubt it. I don’t say he didn’t, but I say it doesn’t seem like Paul to write. Paul, an apostle of Jesus Christ, unto Timothy, my beloved son, meet me tomorrow morning down at Maple Leaf. I don’t think he would write that. I can’t conceive it, though I don’t say it would be wrong to do it. I just say I think he was too busy, but he did draw on his knowledge of the games, the Olympic Games, and so he paints a picture here for us.

I’m assuming Paul wrote the book of Hebrews I explained when I began my morning talks on the book of Hebrews, and nobody knows for sure who wrote it. But if it wasn’t Paul, it was somebody else, and my personal opinion is if it wasn’t Paul, it was a man named Paul. So, if I say Paul, you more or less have my opinion of what I think about it.

But whoever wrote this was used to the Olympian Games and knew about them. One thing that evidently impressed him deeply was tier upon tier upon tier of spectators all the way around. And the tracks down here and the wrestling arenas and boxing arenas and all the rest could be seen. And then tier upon tier upon tier from the person down here, as if it had gone into heaven itself, of people all the way around. And they were looking on, seeing therefore, he said, that we have so great a cloud, and they looked like a cloud. As you were down there looking out, they might look well, look like a cloud, seeing you have a great cloud of witnesses.

Who were these witnesses? We won’t press it too far nor try to go profoundly into exegesis here, but only say that these runners who were down here running, or anybody, athlete of any sort, but runners in that chapter, they were greatly affected by the people round about them. Every preacher knows he preaches better to a large crowd, and everybody that engages in competitive sports knows he does it better to a large crowd. And everybody knows, too, that if a man is competing in the games, he will do his work better if he knows that some of the old champions are present.

A fighter goes into the ring to defend his title or to try to take another title, and there’s just another Joe back there, another Mary, on the way up to the spectators all the way around. But if he knows back here there are men who themselves once competed in that same arena and won and were champions and wore the laurel and who know what it’s about and who bear the scars and bruises of the contest on them, I think that these athletes have a good deal more spirit when they go into the contest.

And so the man of God who wrote the Hebrews said, listen you people that are halfway in and halfway out, don’t you know that here were the old champions that competed in the ring of faith once, who fought, who ran, who boxed, who threw lance. These men of faith, don’t you know about Abel and don’t you know about Noah? And don’t you know that that old champion back there, Joseph and and Jacob and Moses, they all sit there. They won, they won, they were, they bear the marks and the scars of their combat on them. But they’re around you everywhere and their voices, even though you don’t hear them, the voices are there, the voices that are more eloquent than in the oratory, the voices of the redeemed who have made it through and who by the grace of God have laid down their cross and picked up their crown and are now safe from it all.

No more contests, no more tears, no more bruises, no more heartache, no more grief, no more being out of breath and ready to drop with fatigue, no more hunger, no more rags, no more nakedness, no more persecution, no more jails. They’ve made it through, the Saints of God, and they are saying to us and saying to everybody, come on, come on, don’t, don’t, the other fellow’s as tired as you are, give it another half mile, you can do it, come on. It’s the cheer that we get from other people.

Why do we like to meet in meetings like this? Well, you don’t have to meet like this to be a Christian. You’re a Christian because you believe on the Lord Jesus Christ unto eternal life. And you’re a Christian because He gives you power to become the sons of God when you believe on His name. That’s why you’re a Christian.

So, you’re not a Christian? Christianity doesn’t rub off from the elbow of the man that sits near to you. It doesn’t come out to you in a song. It doesn’t come to you by the talk and conversation of the people. But being a Christian, it’s great to be with other Christians, to be surrounded by witnesses who will say, I made it, you can.

That’s why I believe we make a great mistake when we draw too sharp lines between young people and older people in our churches. I’m not going to say we must abolish the young people’s societies, but I do say that we have made great mistakes down the years by drawing a sharp chasm between the old people and the young people. Do you know the young people need to be around the old people and the old fellow that has come up the hard way and lived and loved and served and walked with his God until the sun is shining on his old gray dome and everybody knows what kind of a saint he’s been.

The very fact he’s there will give to the young fellow more zip and more spirit and will urge him to prayer and will nudge him along to want to walk with his God a whole lot better if the young fellow sees the old fellow. But if we separate the church down the middle and say, oh, you young people who don’t know much about it, you worship God over here and the old saints over here, I think it’s a great mistake. I think that the old saints need the young people.

The old sheep need the sight of the lambs. And I think also that the lambs need the old sheep. And so the man of God says here, why you look around you, he says, these witnesses, they were only in their imagination, of course, because they couldn’t actually see from heaven above. I assume they couldn’t anyhow. I’d hate to think that some of the dear old saints who’ve gone to heaven would have to look down. I’d hate to think that the early Christian and Missionary Alliance people would have to look down and see the mess we’re in.

And I’d hate to think that the Methodists that started that great denomination would have to look down now on some things that are going on in that denomination. And so with all the denominations, practically all of them, I don’t know any of them, but what their founders would be grief stricken, if not downright ashamed.

So, I hope that God spares the saints the sight of what’s going on on the earth, but they’re there anyhow, their presence is there. A cloud of witnesses grating away into glory itself. And so every Christian that gets on his knees now and prays knows that he is in the way the Father’s trod.nHe knows that he has all holy tradition behind him. He knows that he has Bible history behind him. He knows that he has the call and hears the call and the voice of the saints who’ve made good. And he knows he’s being cheered on by men living and dead who walked with God and are walking with God.

Now these witnesses, a great crowd of them, I say, you’re not hearing their sermons maybe, nor hearing their songs because their tongues are silent now. And we’re not hearing John Wesley and John Knox and Martin Luther and Charles Finney and the rest of them. We’re not hearing them, but yet we’re hearing them too. We’re hearing their voices, the voice of silence, the voice of the knowledge that they did it, they went, they made it true by the grace of God. They walked with the Lord and are not for the Lord took them. And that to any Christian is a great source of encouragement.

The older Psalm writers of the Psalms used to say in the hour of their great distress and pressure of soul, they used to say they remembered the days of old, the years that were past and how God, what had God had done to their fathers and done for their fathers. And they said, O God, you did it for our fathers, do it for us. And they took courage from the fact that around them, grating away to the skies were great clouds of men and women who walked with God and sleep now waiting for the trumpet that shall wake the dead.

And so the voices of the saved are coming to us out of the world above. I don’t mean literally that if you cock your ear, you can hear John Wesley again or Martin Luther. I wish I could. I wish I could. I’d fast a week if I thought it would help me, but I know I can’t ever hear them again. I can read their works, but I can’t hear them speak because their voices are for a little time silent and yet they’re not silent. I repeat, they’re being heard. The fact that they ever lived is a voice. The fact that they walked with God is a reason why I can walk with God.

And so, lives speak with a loud voice to us, even though their tongues are silent. The fact that redeemed men have been here constitutes a powerful argument for the Christian faith. The fact that anybody has lived a Christian life in a world like this, there has been a good and holy man in a world like this, that in itself constitutes a powerful argument for the validity and authenticity of the New Testament and the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ.

So bad is the world, so deep in sin, so bad is human nature, so unutterably, incurably evil is human nature, that if there was not something supernatural in the gospel of Christ, nobody could be a Christian.

When I first became a Christian, I was converted, as you may have heard me say. I was converted in an old-fashioned, simple, old-fashioned way. I believed in the Lord Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior. I went and joined a church and got to work. That’s about all there was to it, but the transformation was complete, revolutionary, and final. It happened, and I know it happened.

Then later on in my life I began to read every kind of atheistic literature, the philosophies of the Romans like Kyrgios and the rest of them, who did not believe in Christ, the Greeks and the Romans, who did not believe in God. Some of them, this Lucretius, who wrote his Nature of Things, did not believe in God, nor in any world above. I read at least his Nature of Things, and I read as much or more atheistic literature as I did Christianity.

I used to get on my knees after I had read a book or read a chapter or two in a book, and he pushed me into a corner and proved that I couldn’t prove there was any God and that I was having hallucinations and all the rest. I couldn’t answer it because I wasn’t scholar enough to do it, but I would turn away from that book and get on my knees, and with tears near the surface I would kneel, and with joy in my heart thank God that I had found Him before I found that book, that I had found Him before I had found a book that said I couldn’t find Him, that I had been converted before I read the book that said conversion was a hallucination.

I knew what conversion had done for me. It had taken a high-tempered, sulky, angry, mean-spirited rascal of a young fellow and had turned him into a God-loving and Christ-honoring young fellow who wanted to do the will of God the best he knew how, so I knew he couldn’t argue me down because I already had what they said I couldn’t have. So the fact that any righteous man ever lived in the world is a good sound argument for Christianity because without this power of the gospel no man could be a good man.

And then the fact that any redeemed man ever lived in the world constitutes a convincing witness against sin-loving men and indifferent men and stubborn men who refuse to walk with God. If any good man ever lived, that man may long be sleeping in his dust, now be moldering along with the just. And still the fact that he ever lived is saying to every sin-lover, you ought not to love sin, saying to every indifferent man, you ought to wake up and do something about your soul. And it constitutes an eloquent entreaty.

Let us, says the Holy Ghost, see them by their hair, the old champions, the old champions with the withered leaves on their brows and the bruises and scars and marks to show where once in combat they fought or ran or wrestled. Now you’re in there. You can do it. Wonderful what a little encouragement will do for people.

Long ago I asked the Lord to give me the spirit of Barnabas. You know, Barnabas was called the man of good words. He spoke good, encouraging words. And a good, encouraging word to a Christian who is having a tough time of it sometimes will help them very greatly.

Well, now these voices, I don’t think I need to go into it in any great detail, but I think here about this man Abel that we’ve talked about before, he being dead yet speaketh, and his loyal obedience to God cost him his life. I suppose it did. I think he probably was the first martyr. He certainly was the first man murdered in the world, and his killing was the first fratricide, the first murder. And Cain killed him as the first murderer; Abel, the first man murdered.

But I would suppose from reading it, both in the Old Testament and the New Testament commentary on it, I would suppose it was his faith that cost him his life because he believed in Jesus or in looking forward to the cross. As we look back, he believed in God.

He believed in the efficacy of the shed blood, and so he brought a lamb and slew it. And God spoke His word of approval, and Cain heard it. And Cain got no approval, and so Cain became angry. And I would suppose there was the first time the flesh and the Spirit ever came together in hostile warfare. Later on, we see it plenty.

Later on, we see it in Jacob and Esau. Later on, we see it in David and Saul. Later on, we see it in Peter and Judas. Later on, we see it all down the centuries, the hostile conflict between that which is of the flesh and that which is of the Spirit. But this is the first indication of it, that there was Abel. They looked for him and found him buried out there somewhere, a shallow grave with the leaves pulled over him, and Cain trying to look innocent. But God said, I hear a voice. I hear a voice. It’s the voice of Abel. It’s the voice crying from the ground.

There is another voice, as this twelfth chapter tells us, that cries more loudly, and that’s the voice of Jesus’ blood, which cries not for justice but mercy. But the voice of Abel’s blood does cry, and it tells us, I made it. Now I would like to ask these men, I would like to ask these men if it were possible, Abel, you could have lived a long time.

Men lived a long time in those days, up to 969 one man lived. You might have lived upwards of a thousand years, Abel, but because you insisted upon praying and obeying God and living a right life and trusting in a bloody sacrifice, you got killed early when you were a young chap. If you had it to do over again, would you do it, Abel? You know what Abel would say.

Do you think for one second that Abel would sulk and say, I’m sorry? From his high place yonder, is he sorry? Ask the captain that brings his ship in through the roaring storm, and all battered and bruised, in her safe harbor, asking, Captain, are you sorry you brought her in? Are you sorry for the wind and the gale and the howling storm? And he’d smile and say, No. Now I look back and I enjoyed it. The main thing is she’s tied up safe and her cargo safe and her people are safe.

So, we ask Abel, Abel, are you sorry you had such a stormy voyage? And I’m sure he would smile and say, No. The voice of that redeemed man is saying to every one of you, get on your knees and do it and get right with God and straighten your lives out and quit fooling and quit trying to be a Western 20th century, civilized, educated, sophisticated, overstuffed Canadian American or whatever you are, and believe in God now and get right and streamline your life and strip for the race. That’s what Abel would say to us if he were speaking. I think he probably would say it in a good deal more refined language than I have, but he would say something like that.

Then there was Enoch who walked with God and God took him because he pleased God. Now if you asked Enoch, are you sorry about this? Do you wish it was some other way now? No. Enoch would smile and say, how could I, a man who walked with God and then was taken to be with God, a man who spoke in the power of the Holy Ghost and left my testimony among men? Do you think I’m sorry now? No. No, he’s not sorry.

Ask that soldier who, as the famous Canadian regiment did here at Dieppe—is that the way you pronounce that? French town? I never could pronounce it right. But the other day they had the anniversary of it here in the newspapers, and over the radio they talked about it. Canadian soldiers made themselves famous around the world. By that terrible fight, some of them came away. A great many of them sleep over there.

But some of them came away from that, walked away from it bloody but unbowed, came back after the war was over and went back into the shops and out onto the farm and into the stores and into the classrooms and went on their regular lives. Ask any one of them, are you sorry about that? Do you wish you’d been home cutting out paper dolls? Do you wish you’d been home teaching tatting and knitting in a school for children? Not a one of them, not a one of them, but would straighten his shoulders and snap to the old military bearing and say, I’m proud, proud of my people, proud of my regiment, proud of that hour.

And you ask Enoch, ask Noah, ask Abraham. Are you sorry? Were you sucked in by the emotional vortex? Did somebody get fanatical and win you? No, Enoch would say, I walked with God. No, Noah would say, I heard a voice, and I recognized it. No, Abraham would say, I’d never go back to my idol making, never back to Ur of the Chaldees. I thank God for the high privilege, he would say, of going down with my family into the holy land and becoming the father of the faithful. And from me proceeded finally the Messiah in holy lineal descent from my loins.

Nobody was ever sorry they served God when it’s all over and tent’s down and the wind has blown the dust away and the devil has gone to look for somebody else and the Christian feels around for his laurels. And though he’s won, nobody’s ever sorry about it.

Ask old Jacob, Jacob, are you sorry? The way you lived, sorry you got wrestled with that night on the bank of the river, Jacob would smile and say, no, that’s where I got my new name. Ask Joseph, Joseph, are you sorry that you saw the sheaves bowing down to you and the sun and moon stars bowing? Are you sorry, Joseph? Are you sorry for what you had to pay for your religion? No, Joseph would say, thank God. I praise him every moment for what He did. This is the cloud of witnesses, the old champions, the old, bruised champions.

Once in the early days of the church, about 324, maybe I’m wrong by a few years, there met the council of the church, the last, I would suppose, the last ecumenical council, the council of the church. And it was over the old matter of Athanasius, where they asked whether Jesus Christ was the son of God or not.

They came in. The delegates came in. They came in, not slapping each other on the back as the delegates do now when we gather in these hotels. They came limping in. They came in with one arm hanging loose in the sleeve. They came in with one eye out. Some of them came in with no tongue in their mouths. It had been torn out by pincers. Some of them came in with a foot off and some with a leg.

How did they get that way? The persecutions under the Roman emperors. The champions gathered there. Many of them had died. Millions of them had died, but a few had been tortured and turned loose. And these were the ones, many of them, not all, but many of them who came to that famous council and gave us that Athanasian creed, I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord.

They were the old champions. They had the scars to show for it. You suppose that after they had sat around there a few days and discussed theology and made their speeches, a young fellow just starting out who never knew persecution, sitting beside an old man with a silent tongue, the stub of a tongue, and couldn’t talk but the light of God in his face, you think that young man was ever the same again? You think that he went out pitying himself because he had to give up something? I think he went out with his chin up, saying, there’s a man whose tongue was torn out for his faith, and there’s an old man whose leg was burnt off for his faith, and here’s another man whose eye was put out for his faith. I’ll never complain again.

Brethren, it’s this kind of thing that I hear. I hear it in all Christian history. I hear it from the church fathers. I hear it in the voices of the patriarchs. I hear it in the psalmists and prophets and apostles. I hear these voices. They’re the voice of the ransomed, the voice of the victors, the voice of the saved, and they’re all saying the same thing. We made it. You can.

The blood of Jesus cleanses, the power of God enables, and God hears prayer, and He that’s in you is bigger than he that is in the world. You can make it through. Don’t get discouraged and pity yourself and weep on your own shoulder and get a crick in your neck from self-weeping. Quit it. Straighten up. You haven’t suffered yet striving against sin.

I think about the lady whose chauffeur had driven her out, two ladies, and the chauffeur was, they were driving along, and something went wrong with the car. And here was one of these black, lovely things with a little flowerpot and a flower in it, you know, and all the little telephone and all the rest. And while the man with the uniform and the cap was out trying to fix up the engine, she patted her two gloved hands together like a martyr and turned to the friend beside her. They were on their way to a religious meeting. And she said, Now I know what the apostles went through in their day. Sitting in the back seat of a luxurious car for five minutes while the tire or the engine gets fixed. I don’t think God laughs, but I wouldn’t blame an angel for chuckling. And I think the devil must hold his black sides down yonder when he sees such things.

Well, they speak all with one voice, and they say we weren’t compelled to suffer. Nobody put a chain around our neck and made us go. We wanted to do it. We wanted to do it. We followed the Lord because we’d chosen to follow the Lord. We wanted to follow the Lord. Both the suffering and the glory are ours by our choice. We wanted it that way. I think they all speak with one voice and say, you can serve God under any circumstances.

You can serve God in this terrible age in which we now live. You can serve God now. Circumstances may be various and different, each from the other, but you can serve God now. God will receive you and bless you and keep you, and so be reconciled to God. Don’t listen too avidly to your radio. Don’t sit glued as though you’re hypnotized looking at your TV. Don’t spend too many minutes going over your newspaper. Live clean from the world. Find out what’s going on.

I always listen at ten o’clock at night to see who’s going to shoot who and what Diefenbaker did and John Kennedy and the rest of them. But when that’s over, I’m thinking of something else. I don’t want to get so embroiled in it that I become a part of a society that I’ve repudiated, that I might follow the Lamb withersoever He goes.

Now, in closing, be ye reconciled to God, and to be reconciled, one of three things happens. A and B are alienated from each other. They seek a reconciliation. There can be a reconciliation achieved between A and B one of three ways. A comes all the way over to B, or B comes all the way over to A, or they each come halfway. Either A changes completely, B changes completely, or they compromise. Be reconciled to God.

What does that mean? That God is going to come over on my side. That’s the way it’s preached now. God is so nice and kind and old-fashioned and Hollywood-ish that he’ll come clear over on my side. No, He won’t. God the eternal God. I change not, says God.

If there’s any changing to be done, man, you and I have to do it. God is right the first time. You and I are always wrong, and the alienation is our fault, not His.

Thou art holy, O thou that inhabitest the praises of Israel. So, if there’s any coming to God, we must come to God. But you say, how can we come to God? We can come to God because Jesus Christ, who was Himself God by His blood and death, took away everything that can prevent the reconciliation.

Be ye reconciled to God. We can because seeing that He died He died once for all, and He died for all, and He took away all that was between us and God, and we can come now. So, the change must be on your part.

The reason you and God haven’t been getting on is you haven’t been right, and God isn’t going to change. So, if you’re going to be right, there’s only one way to do it, and that’s for you to make the change. Make the change by repentance and faith in our Lord Jesus Christ as your personal Redeemer and Lord. Will you do it?

New Christians that have dragged around and pitied yourself and lived half-out, God help you and pity you. There are a thousand voices from a thousand directions, right on this huge strip of territory from Hudson Bay to the border, from the Maritimes to Vancouver. If you could go back and know the history of the Saints that have lived right on this country, you’d straighten up and say to yourself, I can’t afford to be a half-Christian.

These great Saints set an example for me down in my land, I know her sins. I know her money. I know her entertainment. I know her sins. I know her sins better than you do. I also know that you can’t go into a cemetery from the rock-bound coasts of Maine to the slopes of California, but what there lies in peaceful silence the dust of some holy man or woman who lived and loved and served and suffered and rejoiced in triumph. And I can’t walk as I often have walked through these old cemeteries and not know that there lies the dust sacred to God, for it was once the dwelling place of the Holy Ghost and will be again when our Lord Jesus comes to raise the dead and rapture the living.

So, the voices of holy men and women of all ages everywhere are saying, get right with God, straighten out, come to God, read the Bible, pray, get family altar, start giving, start going to prayer meetings, start having personal prayer, and God will be with you. Let’s pray. It could be that somebody would like me to offer prayer for you.

Last Sunday night after service, a young man from another country who was a Roman Catholic came to me, said he had heard me twice, and he was concerned. I can’t recall word for word, but something to the effect that he was deeply concerned about his soul and his relation to God. Could I help him? I prayed with him, exhorted him, and then told him to read the gospel of John prayerfully, asking God for light.

Maybe he’s here tonight. I hope he is. He promised to keep in touch with me. Maybe you would like to have me pray for you. If you would, the simplest old-fashionedest way I know is just to raise the hand, so I’ll know who wants prayer. Would you raise the hand? Who would like to have me pray for you? For any need at all that might be in your life, any need that might be in your life, put the hand up. We’ll know that somebody wants prayer.

Dear Lord Jesus, we pray tonight that Thou wilt help us to hear Thy people. Oh, we thank Thee for that glorious Jerusalem the golden, with milk and honey blessed, where dwell the spirits of just men made perfect, and where Thy church will someday be.

We thank Thee, O Lord Christ, victorious, triumphant Lord Jesus. God hath made Thee both Lord and Christ, and hath set Thee Head over all things to the church, and hath made Thee heir of all things. Thou who art the shining forth of His glory, and express image of His person, in whom dwells all the fullness of the Godhead bodily, we love Thee, Lord Jesus.

We want to serve Thee. We want this church to be a Christ’s church, indeed. We repudiate the ways of worldly churches. We repudiate the psychology and philosophy of worldly churches. We insist we want to be a New Testament church. Make it so, Lord, we pray Thee. Bless these dear friends, for Christ’s sake. Amen.

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The Voice of the Soul

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

August 16, 1953

Now, next Lord’s Day, as Mr. McAfee has said, I will be, God willing, preaching in that part of the country they call the Land of the Sky, Ben Lippin, up on the hill above Asheville. Brother McAfee will be here, and our disorganized church will be back together next Sunday, too. We certainly came apart today, and the only service out of the whole 104 services during the year that we don’t have a choir. The choir will be here and rendering good music, and we hope you’ll be back and bringing your friends.

Now, let me read a passage familiar to you from the 12th chapter of Luke. And He spake a parable, verse 16, He spake a parable unto them, saying, the ground of a certain man, certain rich man, brought forth plentifully. And he thought within himself, saying, what shall I do? Because I have no room where to bestow my fruits. And he said, this will I do. I will pull down my barns and build greater. And there will I bestow all my fruits and my goods. And I will say to my soul, soul, thou hast much goods laid up for many years. Take heed, take thy needs, eat, drink, and be merry. God said unto him, thou fool, this night thy soul shall be required of thee. Then who shall these things be which thou hast provided?  Then Jesus draws this conclusion from, So is he that layeth up treasures for himself and is not rich toward God.

Now, this passage gains meaning from its setting, that is, from what precedes it and from what follows it. What precedes it was that a man came to Jesus, very much disturbed because he was afraid, he wasn’t going to get his part of the inheritance, saying, Master, speak to my brother that he divide the inheritance with me. And Jesus said to him, man, who made me a judge or a divider over you? And he said unto them, take heed and beware of covetousness. For a man’s life consists not in the abundance of the things which he possesses.

That’s what preceded this. And to point it up, he gave them this parable which I have read. Then he followed it by saying, Therefore, I say unto you, take no thought for your life which ye shall eat, neither for the body what ye shall put on. For the life is more than meat and the body is more than raiment. Here, between the inheritance which this man was about to lose and the goods of the world, the very great treasures of the world, our Lord Jesus places a parable concerning the soul, and He teaches us the eternal worth of the human soul as compared with or to any other thing.

Now, I suppose this sounds like a religious bromide or a series of cliches, and I wouldn’t blame you too much if you went out saying as some have said, thou speakest an undisputed thing in such a solemn way.

I have claimed that much in fundamental circles is the solemn repetition of an undisputed thing, and I do not want to fall into that snare. But on the other hand, I know the age in which I live, and I’m quite sure that this is the hour when the soul of man is getting less attention, perhaps than ever it did since at least the beginning and rise of revealed religion. The eternal worth of the soul needs again to be declared, and it must be declared as having worth over against all other human values, that there is nothing else that is to be compared with the human soul.

Now, I wonder whether I might seem to be putting up a straw man to shoot him down or a straw lion to slay it if I said that man has a soul. Now, this is assumed in the Bible and declared in the Bible. There are two things you see. The Bible has two ways of teaching things. It teaches by blunt positive declaration, and it teaches by assumption. And you can learn almost as much from what the Bible takes for granted as you can by what it states, as a matter of fact. Not as much, but almost as much.

Now, that man has a soul is assumed in the Bible, and it appears throughout the Bible, not in one book or one chapter. If it was only taught in one book of the Bible, we might be tempted to wonder whether we understood it correctly. If it was only taught in one chapter of the Bible, we might be tempted to wonder whether we had properly understood that chapter.

But it is assumed in the Bible, it is a common coin of knowledge, that man has a soul, that you and I have souls, is taken for granted in the Scripture, just as we take the dollar for granted. The validity of the dollar in our American monetary system gives value to all other coins and all values, so that a dime is valuable because it’s tenth of a dollar, a quarter because it’s quarter of a dollar, ten-dollar bill because it’s ten dollars.

The dollar is the monetary unit, and you don’t run around always talking about a dollar being worth a dollar, a dollar being worth a hundred cents. You take it for granted, it’s a common coin. It circulates freely and unchallenged throughout all the borders and confines of the United States and over into Canada, because the dollar is the common coin, it’s taken for granted. When you see a dollar, you don’t say, what is this? You give back the change, if there’s any change, usually there isn’t any. But you find that the dollar is the common coin, or the common unit of value.

So the Bible, with the soul, takes it for granted. It is not everlastingly asserting it, though it does assert it, but it takes it for granted, assumes it, and goes on from there. And just as if you take out the dollar and its value, if you devaluate the dollar to zero, you have no monetary system left in the United States. Nothing is of any value until we find ourselves again and declare some value.

So when you read your Bible, you read it in the full light of the declared and assumed fact that man has a soul, that this that we have, we see, is not all that we are. We have souls. And if you take that away, then you devaluate the man. If you doubt it or deny it, then you no longer have a man, you have a sub-man. You have something less than a man. The assumption or the declaration or the belief that man has no soul devaluates the man and reduces him to less than a man.

For God blew into man’s body the breath of life, and man became a living soul. And Jesus here did not assert that man had a soul. He took it for granted, did you notice that? Jesus didn’t say a thing here about a man having a soul. He didn’t say, no, I speak this parable unto you in order to teach you that man has a soul. He thought within himself and he said, soul, and he said, this night thy soul shall be required of thee.

Just as I reach my pocket and hand out a dollar and assume its value and don’t argue about it and take it for granted, He reached into the treasure house of understood theology, took out the soul and handed it out and said, here, I’m talking about a soul. Nobody challenged that because it was a common coin of knowledge in the time of our Lord as it is today.

Now, I hardly need to say not only that the Bible assumes and takes for granted a soul and weaves it in and out of its truth, weaves it in and out as a golden thread through all the fabric of theology, but it also declares it as a hard tenet of truth. It is more than an assumption because you see, if it’s only an assumption, then some barbarian can come to you and say, prove to me from the Bible that man has a soul.

And then if you do not have a positive declaration of truth, well, you’re put to it to answer him with chapter and verse. But all through the Bible, it is declared that man has the soul. And not only is it assumed in the Bible and declared in the Bible, but it is believed by all peoples and all races and all religions since time began. That is something people do not argue about. And the great religions of the world have taken this for granted.

The Egyptians and the Indian and the Chinese and all of the religions of the world, however far they might have been from revealed truth, they nevertheless took it for granted as a matter that needed no proof that what you see is not the man, but that there is an essential something in the man of which this we see is only the tabernacle and the dwelling place.

I say it’s believed by all the races of the world. Now that is a large order, but I believe that the history and the findings of men who made it their business to find out will well back up what I say, that all the races of the world have assumed that man has a soul. Now they have not thought about it in the same way.

I read in the question-and-answer department of one of our newspapers recently, someone wrote in and said, how is it that Catholic priests sometimes anoint a dead body after it’s been dead for a long time? And the answer was given objectively. It was given as being a belief that the soul may inhabit the body yet a while after it seems to be dead. And they didn’t say this, but this is the fact that they believe that if it can get the oil on the body before the soul leaves it, that it has some value.

But the point is they assume the soul is there. The Egyptians have in their book of the dead a weird idea that a soul hovers around over the body for a while and that that soul is there for I think it’s three days and they have to do certain things in order to woo the soul and hold it for a while.

Now it’s error, it’s tragic blindness, but it assumes something and takes for granted that which I say is the common property of all the races and all the religions of the world since time began. And there is not a people anywhere in the world that doesn’t have some idea of this. Man has a soul. Even superstition supports it.

Even the superstitious and false beliefs that men have as when they look in a mirror, the soul goes from them. When they break a mirror, they have shattered the visual image of themselves and so on. All of that, of course, is superstition, and it has no value except for this, that it shows once more that what is openly taught in the Bible and tacitly assumed in the Bible also is carried over from the dim beginnings of things and man has always believed that he has a soul.

Not only is this true, but one might almost say that the belief in the fact of the human soul is a test of our humanity and the rare one who denies it. Now there are some people that are just plain pig-headed, there isn’t any other name for them, and some of them become philosophers. Pig-headed philosophers they are. That is, they don’t have any particularly good reason for anything, they were just pig-headed. We used to say on the farm, bull-headed. But I like the word pig-headed better.

And there were one now and again, a rare pig-headed individual who insisted man doesn’t have a soul. But do you know something? That the man who comes forth declaring or throwing doubts upon the soul or declaring that man doesn’t have a soul is always a strained man. He’s always suspect.

And he’s always looked upon as something of a monster in society. And while he may get some publicity while he lives, they shrink from him and pull away from him as from a three-headed man or some other abnormality in nature. So the man that dares declare man doesn’t have a soul, as John B. Watson did and some others, he’s always looked upon as a monstrosity and a deformity in nature.

He has dehumanized himself and has sold out the value of himself as a human being and insists upon being something less than a man. For a man leads a dog down the street, if the man doesn’t have a soul, then the dog’s better off because the dog’s built better than the man and gets along better and isn’t easily killed and he’ll stand up under worse conditions and doesn’t take so much to eat and doesn’t have so many responsibilities and doesn’t have to pay income tax and doesn’t worry about the dead and death and the future and judgment.

And I say a man leading his dog down the street, if the man stops and talks to his friend and says, I don’t believe in the soul, he dehumanizes himself, makes himself less than the dog that he leads on the chain by his side.

Now, our Lord Jesus Christ took the soul for granted. I do not know anywhere in the entire New Testament where He said in so many words, Verily I say unto you, man hath a soul. He didn’t need to say it. The whole Old Testament taught it. The book of Psalms teaches it. And the man is admonished to be still and talk to his own soul upon his bed.

And we read about the souls of the righteous being in the hands of God. We read about the soul all through the Old Testament. So Jesus, when he spoke in the New, did not need to say, Verily I say unto you, man hath a soul. He took it for granted, and the soul in the mouth of Jesus, the soul is the endless part of the man. Often as not in the Bible, it is used synonymously with the spirit.

Now if you have a razor blade, a Gillette blue blade in your hand, and are in the habit of slicing theology very, very thin, and getting the word of God rightly dissected, dissected, or vivisected, then I will have to explain to you that the word soul and the word spirit are sometimes used synonymously in the Scriptures.

There would be those who would rush out and prove to me that that is not so. But you can prove so many things and yet not arrive anywhere. Sometimes the word spirit and the word soul are used synonymously as being the interior part of the man, that part of the man which is endless.

Now the body isn’t endless. The body is mere matter. Man, I repeat, fades as the leaf. And your body isn’t endless. When you’re 16 years old, you think it’s going to be. When you’re twice 16, you’re beginning to worry about it. And when you’re three times 16, you know it’s not going to be. And when you’re four times 16, you’re wondering how soon it’s going to dissolve. That’s about the size of it.

But we imagine that the body is endless until we think a little about it and look around us and then we know that it is not. The body has no life in itself. I never can get mad at the human body, as some people can, and blame it for everything. The Bible never blames the human body for anything. It’s a tabernacle. You might as well blame these four walls for what I say in it as to blame the human body for what goes on in it.

The human body is amoral. It’s neither good nor bad. It has no moral quality attached to it. The body is simply the tabernacle, the dwelling place. You might as well blame a Packard automobile for committing a murder because a man buys a Packard automobile and gets behind the wheel and goes out somewhere to shoot down someone. An automobile is simply amoral.

The man who gets behind the wheel gives for the moment its moral quality to it. And a Packard automobile being driven by a good man on his way to church is a good thing. An automobile, the same car being driven by an evil man on his way to a gambling den is an evil thing, and yet it isn’t either good or bad. It’s whatever the man in it makes it to be for the moment.

So, the human body can do evil, and it’s capable of evil. And yet it’s not capable of evil at all. It is the humble and helpless servant of the man who lives in it. You live in that body of yours, sir, so don’t you blame your body for anything. It’s absolutely guiltless. It’s not to blame for anything. It is what you make it to be.

That is why a man, when he gets converted, his old body lives a better life. It’s the same old body. God converts a bald-headed man. He doesn’t put a new thatch of brown hair on top of his head. He’s still a bald-headed man. God converts a one-legged man. He doesn’t give him two legs. He’s still a one-legged man. He’ll get a new leg when the Lord comes.

The Lord converts a man who has some difficulties or troubles, chances are, he’ll let him pretty much go on the same. You’ll recognize him on the street. You’ll see him going down the street there. You say, isn’t that Mr. Jones that lives across the street from me? Why, he was always on his way to the saloon. And usually he was taking in the whole sidewalk when he came back. But he’s got a Bible under his arm. What’s the matter? Same old Jones. You recognize him, but there’s a new man living in there. And the wheel has been taken over by a new driver, the soul.

So, the soul is the central part of the man; is the endless part of the man. The body isn’t endless. It’s going to dissolve and go back to dust as soon as the soul withdraws. Just as soon as the soul leaves it, it goes back to dust.

Now a poor, ragged and imperfect illustration might be what happens to a house when you move out of it. You ever go out into the country and see a house that nobody lived in for six months? Always goes to rot and ruin. Way to keep a house up to live in it.

Now that’s a poor illustration of a glorious fact that as long as the soul is the tenant there, as Bryant said, the soul comes from afar, a royal guest, to live for a little while in this tenement of clay. As long as it lives in that tenement of clay, why, you have a live body. As soon as it withdraws, you have a dead body.

It’s a solemn and almost eerie thing that when a doctor is forced to decide whether or not a man’s dead, he’s deciding whether the soul is left or whether it hasn’t left. He doesn’t know it, he has other terms for it, but that’s what he’s deciding nevertheless. When he runs and puts a stethoscope on a man’s chest, he’s trying to find out whether the soul is still in the tenement house, or whether it’s packed up and gone and left the house to decay.

I say the body is the least essential part of a man. It is simply, as one man called it, a concatenation of atoms. Just a group of atoms and molecules that have gotten together for a while, and you put a hat on it and go down the street and say, what a big boy am I. But you’re just a walking concatenation of atoms, that’s all you are. That’s another man’s way of saying it.

But the soul is the essential part, and just as soon as the soul decides to wing away, there won’t be anything there for you to put a hat on. The body will decay, depart. It is in the soul that memory lodges.

I remember years ago I preached a sermon that I called Memory, Treasure or Terror. That must have been a good sermon, I’ve never dared to preach it since. You can do lots of things when you’re young that you never dared tackle when you get older, you know. You don’t know as much as you did then, and you’re not as wise.

But I said that memory was either a treasure or a terror to a man. To be suddenly called upon to remember the deeds done in the body would be a treasure to some men, but a terror to other men. And intelligence, and moral perception, and moral responsibility, and everlastingness, and the hope of heaven, and of endless peace, all these repose in the soul, and that’s the essential part of the man.

That’s why a man can be a four, an amputee four times, have all his arms, his legs, everything gone. That’s why he can be by the terrors of war chopped to pieces, and still if we can just patch him up and hold him together long enough, long enough that soul can remain there, he’s still the man that he was, though crippled and hindered by the failure of his body to respond to the impulses of the soul.

My friend, you have a soul, and that’s the essential part of you. It is that that speaks when you say, I. It is that that prays when you say, O God, come to me. It is that of which Jesus spoke when He said, into Thine hand I commit my spirit. It is the essential part of the man. Theologically, there may be a distinction between soul and body, but for all proper human purposes as I speak now, it is the same. So, you do have a soul.

Now, the New Testament teaches something else. The New Testament teaches that man’s soul must be saved. It teaches that if a man saves his soul, all his being is saved. But it teaches that if he loses his own soul, then everything else goes down in ruin.

And Jesus our Lord said, what does a man gain if he, profit if he gains the whole world and loses his soul? He didn’t stop to explain that a man had a soul. He knew he had, and He knew that everybody to whom He addressed himself knew he had. And He knew that everybody that would read that word down the centuries would know that he had, so He didn’t waste any time. And He taught that a man must save himself. That there is the essential you, the everlasting you, the endless you within you, and that must be saved.

Now, if you’re as critical as some of my hearers sometimes are, you will say, I knew he was giving up. He’s a liberal. He said a man must save himself. Well, if quoting an apostle makes me a liberal, and I’m a liberal, Peter said, save yourself from this untoward generation, didn’t he? Save is the verb. Yourself is the object. And you is the implied subject, right? You save yourself, he said.

But of course, Peter wasn’t so foolish as to think that a man has any anodyne for his grief, that he has any panacea for his ills. Peter was not so foolish as to think that a man can forgive his own soul, or wash his own spirit, cleanse his own heart, he knew better. What he meant was, I preach unto you Jesus, the Redeemer, now take advantage of the opportunity. Go unto Jesus as you are and save yourself. And that’s what he meant, and that’s what I mean.

So, the Bible teaches that a man must save himself, in the sense that he must take advantage of the fountain that was opened in the house of David, that royal fountain for sin and uncleanness, that flows from Emmanuel’s veins. A man can cause his own soul to perish by neglecting it.

Now the soul has enemies. It would be wonderful if everything was geared to the salvation of a man’s soul. But everything is geared exactly the opposite. Fallen nature is not geared to the saving of a man’s soul. Think of the millions of people there are, in parts of the world that work from sunup to sundown.

Brother King the missionary tells us of those who never know what it is to have enough in their stomach from the time they’re born till they die. The man with the hoe immortalized by the French painter, and the American poet, whose brow slopes back, and whose brutal jaw hangs down. The necessity of making a living has brutalized him.

I’ve seen the tired old woman come out of the factory, or come in off of the farm, so fatigued that she was staring straight ahead, old before her time. She had no interest in her soul. She had no time to sit down. If she sat down to read the Bible, she’d fall asleep.

Too tired to do anything but push herself till she died. Fallen nature is no friend of God’s. Fallen nature is no friend of grace.

And the winds that blow through the corridors of this world, do not blow heavenward, they blow hellward. The streams that flow through the riverbeds of this world, do not flow heavenward, they flow hellward. And the dead fish goes downstream. And the man without anchorage goes the way the wind blows. Nevertheless, you have a soul to save and a God to glorify. A soul to save.

A lot of these theologians who don’t like that song, they don’t like to sing it. The sure divine my trust betray; I shall forever die. It bothers their conscience and confuses their theology, so they run a blue editorial, blue pencil through that line, don’t sing it. A soul to save, a God to glorify, a never dying soul to save, and fitted for the sky. One of the greatest theologians of the last thousand years wrote that hymn. And I go along with him.

God has given you your soul as a ship owner entrusted to a captain, a noble ship laden with fabulous cargo. He said, now bring her in. Bring her in. She’s ticketed for Liverpool or Dakar or somewhere else. Take that ship through and discharge your cargo there. Get your receipts. I want to know you’ve taken her through. That’s why the tradition of the sea is that the captain stays by the ship until the last man, and if need be, goes down with the ship.

That’s why that fine Swede or Norwegian, Carlsen, stayed by that ship until he knew there was no chance. He was only doing what the masters of ships have done for centuries. Because when a man walks to the deck, a captain, he has a charge in his hand. All that fine, noble, proud ship is in his charge, plus all of the cargo and passengers, if any.

And God has said to us now, here, you’ve got a soul. You have a soul. I’ve given you a soul. I’ve given you that essential part of you, that which is a treasure house stored with memories and imaginations and rich treasures. That bank vault stored with all the gold of Ophir; it all belongs to you. You see to it that you make that shore at last.

My poor old Dad, I repeat, 64, 62 at that time, maybe, years of age, used to sing, when the roll is called up yonder, I’ll be there. Used to shake his old head after he’d wasted 60 years of his time. Used to shake his head, and that tough hearted old man would cry like a baby and say, only that’ll be true of me.

Only that can be true, nothing else matters how wise he was. I think it was true of him. For he gave his heart to the Lord and lived four years. I believe he was saved and is in heaven tonight. God had given him that cargo. He said, now you discharge. You take it through because you’re accountable to me. And if in that day, when the roll is called, we can be there and answer to our name.

The old Song Camp meeting song says, I’ll be present when the roll is called. I’ll answer to my name. To be present and answer to your name. You say your body, no, no. Your body will long ago have been dissolved into dust. And will be rolled around in earth’s diurnal course with rocks and hills and trees. You’ll not take that body that you’ve got now with you.  But there’s an essential part of you that you’ll take, all right. That’s the part I’m interested in tonight. You say, what about a body?

A man asked me tonight for a book on what we’ll be like after death. I didn’t have at the moment such a book. But the Bible does not teach us that we are going to take this particular body to heaven. I’ve always been disappointed with mine. I want to weigh 185 pounds in my sock feet. And the best I could do for up until I was about 40 was 135. I’m really a heavy weight now, 152. But I’ve always been interested in fine bodies. And always had more or less to limp around with this smiling imitation of one.

But that isn’t going to go to heaven with me. Thou fool that thou sowest isn’t going to come up, but a new body such as God giveth it. It’s going to be somewhat like this one, only perfect and wonderful. But it’s not going to be the same old one.

Got the rheumatism, Grandpa? You’re not going to take the rheumatism to heaven with you. Don’t worry about that. Rest peacefully. Arthritis don’t go to heaven. You’re going to leave that in a hole in the ground someplace. God Almighty is going to call you up with the voice of the archangel and the trump of God and the shout of the Lord Himself. And when that shout comes, you’ll leave all those old lined up joints of yours and old hard arteries, you’ll leave them in that hole in the ground.

Thank God for those holes in the ground. There’s someplace to crawl away to rest while the Lord gets your mansion ready. You’re going to leave it down here. We’ll all be good looking up there. As good looking as Him who is the Lily of the Valley and the Rose of Sharon.

When He walked the earth among men with His deity disguised and wore the common garment of the peasant of Palestine, there was no beauty in Him that one should desire Him. And when they pulled Him and plucked out His beard and slapped His holy face and bruised His cheeks, He was marred more than any man and His visage more than the sons of men. And they looked at Him and He was not beautiful then, but He was the beautiful Jesus, nevertheless. And He is the Rose of Sharon and the Lily of the Valley.

Not all the stars that shine in their splendor, shine like His face. And we saw Him with His face shining like the sun and the beauty of Jesus. The beauty of Jesus will be upon all of His people. If they’re redeemed and cleansed and have walked in faithfulness and in the light and His name shall be on their foreheads. Some people think that God will write His name like some fella puts a big sign on Jesus only or Jesus saves on his lapel. That’s all right, do it if you want to, but that’s not what it means.

God isn’t going to write across your forehead and tattoo you with His name. It doesn’t mean that at all. His name shall be on their foreheads. What’s the forehead? It’s the first seen part of a man. As he walks along upright on the earth, the first seen part of a man is his forehead. And the name, the nature of God will be on that forehead.

Let the beauty of Jesus be upon me. Let the beauty of God be upon me, prayed Moses. And so, it is the beauty of God’s nature upon the forehead of the man, upon the countenance of the man. There is no need of the sun for the Lamb is the light thereof, and the beautiful, redeemed bodies like equivalent to and commensurate with the glory of their souls.

A good man doesn’t have a body commensurate with what’s in the body. It would be like putting several million dollars in royal crown jewels in a pine box and then letting the worms eat holes in the pine box yet. Letting the weather beat it till it turns gray. And there’s nothing beautiful about it. And you look at it and you say, is that anything valuable there? And a man says, valuable, jewels like King Solomon never saw, that’s what’s there. And you smile and say that old gray weather-beaten pine box with worm holes in it. Yes, sir.

People look at Christians, I think a dear old brother Tom Hare that sits over there. He isn’t there tonight. And He sits over there, red face and Irish. Getting old. He’s as handsome as the average man. I don’t mean he isn’t. But who’d ever dream to look at that old fellow with the jewelry of God that accumulated in that soul? Who’d ever imagine? Who’d ever imagine that in that weather beaten old frame somewhere hidden away in the real man there is that which looks like God and is beautiful like God? I say who’d imagine it? But it’s true. And it’s true with every saint of God.

There used to be in this church a little old lady named Mrs. Smith. Not the little Mary Smith down here. She’s still living. But this little old bent over lady. Remember she used to walk like this all the time. And she had lots of money. She gave money to the church in large sums. She had lots of money. She didn’t need any help.

But she was all bent over from an accident. And the only thing about her that looked really all right was that happy little face looking up from that bent over frame. People used to see her and pity her and give her money. She’d take it and give it to the Lord and laugh. They thought she was a cripple on the street because she was all bent over. She never could straighten up. She’d always have to way over here look up at you and talk.

Who imagined that the wealth of the Indies could not compare with what was in that little old bent over body? Will you imagine it? I often tell and repeat I suppose ad nauseum the song that I heard once by a little crippled girl years ago in the Grace Methodist Church in the city of Akron, Ohio. I never saw her before. I never saw her since.

I don’t know where, I suppose she’s in heaven now. She could be still living. But she was a hunchback. A real hunchback. Only about that high. And had that thin, sallow, sick face that such people get. And I heard her singing. Oh, cigarette smoking song. Singers were singing bass solo. Choirs that were as worldly as the devil and were singing delightful songs. They were worldly and all the rest. And the pastor would get up with his white hands and preach on the top of a thousand streams. And there wasn’t enough religion around there, you know, to save a mosquito even granted that he was salvageable.

One night in our Epworth League, Epworth League we called it. This little girl got up. They had her singing. There she stood about as high as the desk, but all hunched down and came out behind here on her back. And her face sat down on her breast. And there she stood, and she sang, My soul is so happy in Jesus. For he is so precious to me.

How does it go? For it is music to hear it. His face it is heaven to see. For I am happy in him. And she stood there and sang it. And here I was in an old backslidden Methodist church, in a backslidden Epworth League. And she went on. They say I shall someday be like him, a little hunchback. I never saw her again. I don’t know who she was. I don’t know her name. She was not much to look at, deformed. But she’d heard that someday she’d be like Him. Her cross and her burden lay down.

You show me anything better than that, brother? What has University of Chicago got better than that? Show me anything better than that. Take a fine-tooth comb and comb the world and come up with a diamond that shines like that. The hunchback and the cripple, the body eaten with cancer, and the thick-lipped black man among the Zulus, the slant-eyed yellow man, all of us.

When we come and the soul gets a tabernacle worthy of it shall have a body like unto His glorified body. What do you got that’s any better than that? What do you got that’s even worthy of being compared with it? There’s nothing in the world that can be compared with it.

One of the greatest preachers that I ever heard used to preach in the Alliance. But he went modernistic. And as soon as they go modernistic in the Alliance, they get out. That’s why we never have a modernist in the Alliance. It’s just not healthy. Nobody bothers him. He just freezes out and goes away. Or he, I mean, gets out somehow. And he’s a great preacher, this young man. One of the greatest preachers from the standpoint of ability to preach that I’ve ever listened to.

It came through the other day that he had said that we who preach the full gospel are preaching only a mutilated gospel. This is only a mutilated thing. And he was saying all sorts of unpleasant things. He said we had social implications. And that we were to preach social meanings to our gospel. Maybe so, but I’ll settle for that glorious truth. Let a little hunchback girl raise a happy shining face to heaven and sing. They say I shall someday be like Him, and know, it’s true. Don’t let the devil rob you of the glory.

But I got off there because I was saying that fallen nature isn’t geared to save your soul. Neither is fallen human nature. All around about you. The fallen human nature is determined that your soul shall not be saved. The fallen society is not going to allow you to be too good a Christian. No, no.  You want to join a church where you can do a new vena now and again and compact, compress your religion into certain hours. They’ll give you a place and they’ll say this is wonderful and they’ll invite you in. But if you want to be saved, they’ll reject you.

I say unto you that every Christian is a social spotted bird. And just as soon as he’s truly converted, he’s a spotted bird. I talk sometimes to liberals and men who hold other views. And I want you to tell it around, brother, if you ever happen to talk about me when you’re in company. I want you to talk it around. I want you to tell people, Tozer is an evangelical. No, no, no, no, a conservative. I am not a conservative.

I’m an evangelical. I not only believe in it all, but I believe that it ought to be activated and an engine put in the chassis and that it ought to be moving. I admit that my fundamentalist and evangelical friends sometimes make me ashamed. Just as there’s hardly a family that you don’t have a relative you’re ashamed of. You know, almost all.

We used to have somebody named Marianne in our family years ago. I never saw this old lady. But she must have been pretty bad because my father never would allow her name to be mentioned. There never, all the time that I was a young boy growing up until I was 15, I never heard my father mention my aunt or my great aunt, Marianne Tozer.

Now, she really must have been bad because her name was prohibited. Nobody mentioned it. And if the only reason I ever found out I had that great aunt or something, Marianne, was because they whispered to me, don’t ever mention her name. I don’t know what she’d ever done. I don’t know what she’s done, but she certainly must have been a tough one. She died and I don’t know where she is. By the grace of God, she might be in heaven, I don’t know.

But she was the member of the family everybody was ashamed of. She might not have been such a bad old soul if you’d get to know her. But my father and mother were going to see to it we didn’t get to know her. That’s all there was to that. Almost everybody’s got somebody in the family that you’re a bit ashamed of. And I have, you know, there are fundamentalists you’re ashamed of.

I heard somebody on the radio yesterday. I won’t tell you what radio or where it came from, but I was ashamed of him. What he was doing was just plain moronic, brother, that’s all. That fella like that drools at the chin and needs a kerchief 24 hours a day to keep from drowning. And you can’t tell me that he’s got any sense. Yet it came over a fundamentalist radio.

I’m ashamed of that. I’m just ashamed of the way some of God’s people act in the name of the Lord. But that isn’t going to scare me off, because I had an Aunt Marianne Tozer people didn’t like. I’m not going to change my name to Jones.

And because some fundamentalists insist upon having long ears and waggling them on slight provocation. I’m not going to stop saying that I’m an evangelical. I believe in the stream of Christianity that flowed from the wounded side of Jesus and comes down to this present day. The whole Bible for the whole world forever.

Now. I say society will make a speckled bird out of you just as soon as you start actually start telling the truth and living up to it.

Now the soul may be lost and about finished. The soul may be lost in numbers of ways. It may be lost by not knowing it can be lost. That’s some people’s fault. And some may lose the soul by not believing they can lose it. But most people lose the soul by neglecting it. Leaving it unplanned and unforgiven. There’s a word they used to use.

I don’t know they ever use it anymore. It’s the word shriven. S-H-R-I-V-E-N It’s the past perfect of the word, shrove. It’s an old Catholic expression. But I sort of like it somehow or other. A fellow went and got shriven.

Now I don’t know that it worked. I’m afraid some of these fellows that pretended to be shriven somebody, then it didn’t work, you know, and they left them, and they found them. But the point was, a man felt he wasn’t fit to die. And he had to have help. And he called in somebody to tell him the way. And he confessed his sins and posed to tell God what a sinner he was. And got assurance of sin forgiven. And got his soul cleansed. And his garments washed. And got ready to go. They call that being shriven.

Brother that’s a good word. I wouldn’t go to a priest to get shriven. But I’m willing to go to the high priest to get shriven. Take your poor old, battered soul. And your poor old, stained travel garments, covered with dust and torn by a thousand thorns. Take them to Jesus and get shriven. Go to Jesus and have Him cleanse your soul. And wash him and purify him and forgive the past and put it behind him. And say I’ll never remember it anymore. And get fixed up and ready. Ready to go.

The bride spends weeks getting ready for the wedding. Get ready.  Many a man loses his soul because he doesn’t believe he can lose it. Or because he carelessly fails to get it shriven. Washed and cleansed and purified.

So, I believe in the purifying power of the blood of Jesus. I believe in the best and dearest Father. I believe in the power of the blood of the Lamb to make a bad man good and a dirty man clean and an evil man righteous and a sinful man pure. I believe in it.

And as Moody said, he believes in instantaneous conversion. So, you don’t have to work at it for three weeks or six weeks or ten weeks. Instantaneous conversion. A man can kneel down impure and rise pure. By the blood of the everlasting covenant. Man has a soul. And amid all the creature noises, and how many there are. All the creature noises. They’re multiplying. Noise is every place.

There is the thin still voice of the soul, saying, be reconciled to God. That voice is still sounding from within the depths of your being. That’s the real you, under the camouflage. That’s the real you. The depository for all that is everlasting and endless. That’s the real you. It’s that you that you will take to heaven or hell. It’s that you that will slip away and out of that body of yours.

Shriven or unshriven. Saved or lost. Redeemed or damned. What can we do but look up and say, Jesus lover of my soul. Let me to thy bosom fly. Charles Wesley wrote that. This sensitive, godly John Wesley. His brother said, Charlie. I don’t like your hymn. He said, why John? He said, oh it’s too intimate. He said, it’s intimate. Jesus lover of my soul. He said, how can the congregation sing it, Charlie? It’s too intimate.

But 150 years have proved the wisdom of Charles Wesley’s choice. John could be wrong, you know, and he was at that time. In most everything he was right. But his sensitive soul couldn’t quite bring himself to sing before the congregation. Jesus lover of my soul. I don’t see anything indelicate about it, do you?

Suppose we just sing it tonight. No other church in the whole United States, in the evening would sing Jesus, lover of my soul. Let’s sing it anyhow and be different. Jesus, lover of my soul. And if you hear the voice of your soul crying within you, why, Jesus is your friend and your lover. And he waits to welcome you. Let’s stand as we sing.

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The Voice of the Lost

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

July 26, 1953

I resume tonight an interrupted series of evening sermons which I have called Voices That Entreat Us. I have talked of the voice of God’s love, the voice of Jesus’ blood, the voice of reason, the voice of conscience. Tonight, I speak on the voice of the lost.

Let me read the words of our Savior as found in Luke 16, beginning with verse 19. There was a certain rich man, which was clothed in purple and fine linen, and fared sumptuously every day. And there was a certain beggar named Lazarus, which was laid at his gate full of sores, and desiring to be fed with the crumbs which fell from the rich man’s table.

Moreover, the dogs came and licked his sores. And it came to pass that the beggar died, and was carried by the angels into Abraham’s bosom. And the rich man also died and was buried.

And in hell he lifted up his eyes, being in torment, and seeth Abraham afar off, and Lazarus in his bosom. And he cried and said, Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus that he may dip the tip of his finger in water, and cool my tongue, for I am tormented in this flame. And Abraham said, Son, remember that thou in thy lifetime receivest thy good things, and likewise Lazarus evil things.

Now he is comforted, and thou art tormented. And beside all this, between us and you there is a great gulf fixed, so that they which would pass from hence to you cannot. Neither can they pass to us that would come from thence.

Then he said, I pray thee therefore, Father, that thou would send him to my father’s house. For I have five brethren, that he may testify unto them, lest they also come into this place of torment. Abraham said unto him, they have Moses and the prophets, let them hear them.

And he said, Nay, Father Abraham, but if one went unto them from the dead, they will repent. And he said unto him, If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded, though one rose from the dead. Verse 31, If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded, though one rose from the dead.

This cuts across about everything that I have heard in evangelistic circles from the time I can remember. Deathbed stories are the stock in trade of the preacher. And if he can get a series of handkerchiefs out, and have it said there was not a dry eye in the house, he feels that he has done something. For there is a feeling that if the dead speak, and we could get somebody back from the dead, it would mean a great deal.

Our Lord Jesus Christ knew humanity better than we know humanity, and He said that there is more power in the Word of God to convict the human conscience than there is in apparitions, or ghosts, or dead men come alive, or miracles. So that the conscience that will not be persuaded by the Word of God, would not be persuaded if a series of dead men came back from the grave and told their horror stories.

Now that seems contrary to facts, but Jesus said it. So, let’s string along with the Son of God. That’s not my text, however. I felt I wanted to say that.

Now, in this series of sermons, I’ve had a single thesis. I have attempted to develop it variously by approaching it from various directions. My simple thesis has been that man is a moral wanderer, and God is calling him home, and that He is calling him home by many voices.

Now, man is a moral wanderer, venturing dangerously from a home in God, and unable, or, and unwilling to return. But I have used a generic word, man. And I think I know the treachery of the human soul well enough that I’m not going to let you hide there, behind that generic word, man.

I think one verse in the Bible that’s the easiest verse to hide behind that I know anything about, is the verse, all have sinned and come short of the glory of God. That is the prime favorite text for the Bible school student who is studying how to win souls in ten easy lessons. He falls back on that, and he attempts to bring conviction on a man by saying all have sinned and come short of the glory of God. One of the most comforting verses in the Bible. You know that now.

Think a little bit with me. One of the most comforting verses I know is all have sinned and come short of the glory of God. Because our reaction to it is, the universal reaction to it is, while it’s true, and in its context, it is right, the Holy Ghost put it there. But it’s a comforting verse.

For what everybody has wrong with them, nobody need to worry about. And we say, boy, sure I’m a bad man, but so is everybody else. Abraham, Gladstone, Theodore Roosevelt, Francis Havergal, and Florence Nightingale, and Hitler. It’s just a universal, you know. And then we laugh it off. It’s comforting to know that if you’re bad, everybody else is bad too.

But the Holy Ghost never meant it that way. And the Holy Ghost says, thou art the man. And when I say that man is a moral wanderer from God, I don’t want you to hide behind that and take comfort in it. I want you to know that you are.

And my friends, I call attention to something I’ve never heard mentioned before. In fact, I’ve never thought of it before. It just now pops into my head. Hell must have had a lot of people in it. Must have been a lot of people in hell.

But did you notice that when the rich man went there, he hadn’t a comforter any place. He was alone. As far as he was concerned, there wasn’t anybody else there. The only people he knew about or remembered were the people that were still alive. Hell has a way of singling men out and taking it from the general to the particular, robbing them of the comfort of the crowd, and pointing them and pinpointing them in the middle of a trembling eternity, and robbing them of all human supports, taking them out of the mass so they don’t comfort them anymore, that they are a part of a great lost world.

But they’re all alone in their lostness. All alone as if there’d never been anybody else. That soul there was as completely alone and unsupported and uncomforted as if there never had been in the universe anybody else but he. And he was the lone sinner in the universe, there was by himself.

So let me say that when I use the word man and I say, man is a moral wanderer venturing dangerously far from God and home and unwilling to return, don’t you say flippantly, well if I go to hell, I’ll have lots of company. The rich man didn’t have any company. He was doing his suffering by himself. God had pinpointed him in the universe, cut him out of the herd, and he was all alone.

The second part of my thesis is that God’s calling men back to himself while they’re still on the earth. And the third is that God entreats with many voices. Not one or two or ten even, or the number I’ve given, but many, many voices. He’s entreating and saying, O return ye unto me.

He entreats probably most perfectly in the revealed word of God. He entreats by the Holy Ghost. He entreats by general truth, that is reason and common sense. He entreats by the facts of life and the fact of death. He entreats by the facts of human history, which we all know little about. And he entreats by our own moral constitution. Spinoza, Kant it was who said, the wonder of life was, the moral law within and the starry heavens above. And the moral law within, that is our moral constitution, constitutes an eloquent, accusing, pleading, entreating voice saying, O return ye unto me.

Now the morally wise will hear this. Some would say, I have no doubt that Christianity is all right, but it’s never been tried. One man said that once. Christianity is all right, but it’s never been tried. And you hear illustrations every once in a while, cropping up about somebody said, soap is all right if it’s used, and so Christianity is all right if it’s used, but nobody’s using it. Don’t you fall for that. They are using it.

Don’t you for one split second think that the gospel of Jesus Christ is not having its effect, and that God hasn’t redeemed people. He has. As it was in the days of Noah, so shall it be in the days of the coming of the Son of Man. And don’t you think for a second the ark wasn’t effective because only eight people got into it.

I can imagine some wise old baby pulling his beard and saying, I believe that preaching about that man Noah. The ark is all right. Trouble is nobody applies it. Eight people applied it. They did apply it. Don’t let’s talk down the ark because only eight people got into it. The ark was all right.

And the eight people that got into it were all right. And they made fools of the millions that didn’t get into it. So don’t apologize for the ark. It worked. And don’t say it’s failed because nobody tried it. Eight people tried it and they found it worked.

And so with the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ. Don’t let’s say patronizingly. Oh, the gospel is all right, but nobody tried it. Nobody applies it. Yes, a few people have applied it, and it does work. So that the morally wise hear the entreating voices. They always have and they always will. And they do now, and they are now, hearing that voice. God Almighty doesn’t bellow to the wide universe and have it come back as an echo to His holy ears.

But He says the Word that goes forth from my mouth shall not return unto Me void. And the word that goes forth from God’s mouth always does produce. And it needs nobody to run around apologizing and thinking up illustrations in order to apologize and explain away the power of the Word. The morally wise hear the Entreating Voice, one kind or another.

You will remember that it was Augustine who was traveling in his wild dissipating days, was traveling with a friend and suddenly his friend was struck dead with lightning by his side. It was a rough, terrible voice; literally it was the voice of thunder, the hammer of Thor, was hurled down and his friend dropped dead by his side. Augustine turned to God with all the fury and energy of that mighty nature of his and became one of the greatest saints, greatest Christians of all time. That was an awfully rough voice, a thunderous voice, but the wise man heard it.

Nicholas Herman was walking one day in winter, and he saw a tree. And that tree stood stark and leafless against the gray sky. And the young man stood and looked at it and began to reason from it. The voice of reason began to talk within his ear and said, Herman, what will that tree be like in the spring?

And the young Herman said, in the spring that tree will stand green and beautiful again. And said the inner voice, if God can take that dead, leafless, stark thing standing there in its helplessness and kiss it with the wind and touch it with the sun and bless it with the rain and bring it out from its stony grief and raise it to fruitfulness and life, can’t he save you? And Nicholas Herman said, yes, thank God, He can.

Nicholas Herman gave his heart to the Lord Jesus. Several generations of Christians have thanked God that he did. For he wrote, “The Practice of the Presence of God,” perhaps the second most useful book for Christians that I could recommend or know anything about.

This loving man that lived in the heart of God every second and never got out of it and stood at the sink and washed dishes as a litany of devotion to Jesus Christ his Lord. The voice of reason sounded there. Now that didn’t get into the newspapers. And there wasn’t a great multitude that marched in his train, but he got in. And the wise man always hears and gets in. But the moral fool never does.

And when I use the word the moral fool, I’m not abusive. A fool is somebody that acts without regard to consequences. And the moral fool never hears any voice. He has ears to hear and he hears not.

I have a passage I want to read in your hearing. These terrible words of Jesus. And in them is fulfilled the prophecy of Isaiah, which said, By hearing ye shall hear and shall not understand, and seeing ye shall see and shall not perceive. For this people’s heart is waxed gross, and their ears are dull of hearing, and their eyes they have closed; lest at any time they should see with their eyes and hear with their ears, and should understand with their heart, and should be converted, and I should heal them. And then with a tender look at his few beloved around Him He said, But blessed are your eyes, for they see, and blessed are your ears, for they hear.

The moral fool never hears. To him there is no tongue in any tree, no book in any running brook, no sermon in any stone, and no voice in anything. He goes his way, comparing automobile with automobile, deciding how much he can make on the deal, and figuring close and cutting corners on his taxes, and wondering whether the Sox would win two or lose two, and if they did would the Yanks lose or win, and where would the standings be?

And is Ferris Fane the best infielder or the best outfielder? He’s having his time, he’s not a bad man, he’s just a moral fool. He never hears a voice. If he gets sick, he hears a voice and runs to a doctor, and if he gets financially in trouble he goes to Tallman or somewhere else.

But if he hears no voice from God, no voice, no tongue in any tree, heaven has no voice, no sound. He’s a moral fool. He’s living for this world. And if he can keep healthy, keep his hair on his head, keep his car with four wheels under it, rubber they call it. I’ve got a good rubber on my car. If he can keep good rubber on his car and keep himself reasonably in reasonable good shape, he’s satisfied. He’s a moral fool.

But don’t let’s imagine that because most of the world is like that, that we have to go pat Jesus on the back and say, poor Jesus, you’re an idealist and you did all right, and you certainly are to be honored, and your gospel certainly is a beautiful thing, but nobody tries it. He turned around and said, blessed are you, you tried it. Blessed are you, you heard, blessed are your eyes, they saw.

And wherever the gospel has been preached, all over the wide world all these years, the Lord Jesus Christ has some he can smile at and say, thank God for you, you heard it. He raised his eyes to heaven in the 17th of John, He said, Father, here’s the ones I’m praying for. He said, I’m not praying for the big old world, Lord, they wouldn’t listen, but here are these.

Do you see them here? Peter, James, John, Philip, Bartholomew, Matthew, Judas. Do you see them? Not Iscariot. He said, there they are, Lord. He said, they have heard Me, and they know that You set Me, and they believe that I came from the keep Thee, Holy Father.

So, let’s stop this apologizing and spinning illustrations, showing that the gospels never work. The gospel always works where it’s tried, and it’s been tried. Thank God it isn’t coming back void. The gospel ship, the Ark of God, is not a ghost ship floating on a sea. She has a full crew, and she has her passengers. They’re not as many as God wants, and they’re not as many as can get on board.

The college song used to be, get on board, little children, there’s room for many more. And there are, there’s plenty of room for many more, and we’re doing what we can to get more on board. Snap to attention when you see the sails of that mighty ship arrive over the horizon. Don’t apologize. Snap to attention. The holiest thing in the world is this ship of the gospel. Full man, full crew, the winds of the Holy Ghost in her sails, and a crew not of slaves, but of free men bound for a free port in a holy land.

Now, our Lord Jesus Christ, our Savior, did an unusual thing here in the text, an extreme thing. This Lord of all the worlds. Oh, I don’t know whether I want to go on or whether I want to talk to you about that phrase, the Lord of all worlds. If you could only see Jesus bigger, brother, your Christianity would begin to bloom and blossom. If you could only see Jesus bigger, the Jesus we have is a little Jesus.

And I told them out at Keswick that we’ve preached Jesus down and looked at Him through the wrong end of the field glasses until He’s a little Jesus, dressed in overalls, saving people, sure, but nothing to get excited about, nobody to fall in love with, nobody to excite your passion for rapture.

But if we would see Him as He is, Lord of all worlds, Lord of all beings thrown afar, thy glory flames from sun and star, center and soul of every sphere, yet to each loving heart, how near and how dear. Lord of all worlds and of life and of death and Lord of eternity, did a strange and extreme thing. He drew aside the opaque curtain and let us see and hear what had never before been seen by living men, only by the dead.

And He let us hear what had never been heard by the ear of any living man, only by the dead and the damned dead. He let us hear the actual words of a condemned man. He let us hear the actual words and see the actual form of a condemned man.

I’ve seen condemned men a few times before they died. I saw one once at Sing Sing with a handball, throwing it and catching it against a brick wall. I never forgot it. It’s been many years ago, but still, there’s in my memory the sight of a young man, like some of my boys, in that little pen of a place with a handball, tossing it. He’s been dead a long, long time. And he died in that chair that I sat in, that terrible chair there in Sing Sing. That I’ve seen, I say, and others, I’ve seen condemned men before they died.

But He lets us see a condemned man after he’s dead. And this is the only place in the Bible that I know where we see a condemned man and hear him talk. We’re told vaguely in the 20th Revelation that the dead sea gave up their dead and they all appeared and so on, but God never lets us see them.

Here he lets us look in his face. Here he lets us hear the quivering tone of his voice, this condemned man who’s already been executed. Strangely, wonderfully, this lost man becomes an evangelist whose voice tonight still remains a powerful entreaty. And by it the sovereign God shows that hell as well as earth and heaven are someday going to bow and own His right and own the righteousness of His ways.

Now let’s look at this story a little. I won’t be long. There are some conclusions I’d like to draw and the things I want to say are things that are not being said about this. I know what everybody’s saying and I’m avoiding them because I believe the message is deeper and further back than the average preacher shows.

Well, this beggar, I want you to notice, he was a poor fellow and he was sick, or at least he had sores. And he was so poor that he had to beg a crumb as he was able from the rich man’s table. The rich man, on the other hand, had plenty. There’s nothing bad about the rich man here. There’s nothing said bad about the man. You can’t make a rascal out of this rich man. He had plenty and he had gotten it, and the Bible doesn’t say that he stole it. He might have gotten it with all the honesty in the world. He just had it, that’s all. And he lived sumptuously. That is, he had plenty and that’s the way you and I do.

If we have it, we spend it, and if we don’t have it, we grumble. But if we have it, we spend it. The American people are throwing money right and left, basketfuls of it, constantly, millions, billions. We never use the word million much anymore. It’s a small word, billion now, which means a thousand million.

So, there wasn’t anything particularly wrong with this rich man. He fared sumptuously and was dressed in good clothing, but he had a right to be because he had enough. He had plenty of money and the beggar was a beggar.

And I want you to notice two or three things here. One of them is that the beggar was not saved because he was a beggar. There’s too much of that. The poorer the preacher is, the more eloquently he preaches on the beggar being saved and throws the emphasis on the fact that he was saved because he was a beggar, which just isn’t so.

Nobody ever yet was saved because they were poor. You can be poor as a church mice and bad as a church rat. You can be sitting cross-legged with a hat in your lap, begging dimes at the corner of 63rd and Halsted if they’d let you, and have a heart that’s so black that if you died sitting there, you’d perish in a moment.

Being a beggar never saved anybody and God never said he did. Poverty never redeemed any man. Rags never got anybody into heaven. It’s only poetic, religious nonsense. And if a man has had a good suit, God will rip it off of him and put on hair cloth. And if he’s had rags, God will rip it off and put on golden robes or linen.

Oh, there’s nothing like that in the Bible. It doesn’t say that. The beggar didn’t go to heaven because he was a beggar. If he did, then salvation would depend upon poverty and rags. And you could tell how near a man was to heaven by the bank account or the absence of it. And that would make religion a human thing, which it isn’t. And besides that, how many beggars do you know that are liars? And every liar shall have his part in hell.

How many beggars do you know that are thieves? How many beggars are unclean and deceptive? And how many beggars do you know that are hiding out from the police, sitting with dark glasses on? I don’t know them by name, but they’re there. So you can have rags and sores and be on your road to hell. But let’s get out from that sentimental and superstitious idea that if you’re a poor fellow, you’ll go to heaven, sure enough, and if you’re rich, you go to hell.

And the rich man did not go to hell because he had plenty. That would be to equate eternity with time and say, well, God is going to take all the rich people that enjoyed themselves down here and send them to hell through eternity. I venture to say, ladies and gentlemen, that it would not be the way God does things.

A man spends 50 years or 30 years, or 20 years here enjoying riches and then make him spend an eternity suffering hell because of 20 years of enjoyment of riches. It’s not the way God does things. The rich man didn’t go to hell because he had plenty.

Do you know many holy people? Lady Huntington used to say, smilingly, she was an ardent evangelical Christian in England years ago, and she was a lady. She used to say, I’m glad Paul had an M when he said, not many noble are saved. She said, I’m glad there was an M on there. If it had been A and Y, I’d have been out. She was a noble woman.

But he didn’t say, not any noble are saved. He just said, not many. So, we have Lady Huntington, Lord Shaftesbury, and we have William Wilberforce and Gladstone and perhaps Victoria.

And in our own country, the man who makes the green toothpaste, kids you with it, it never stopped bad breath since the world began, but they sell it. He’s dead now and long ago gone to heaven. Do you know what he did all his lifetime? He gave 90% of his income to the Lord and lived on 10. Made soap, toothpaste, and other things. They make our teeth rot and so on, but he was doing the best he could and didn’t know any better.

So, the Lord blessed him. And he unquestionably is in heaven. John Wanamaker kept his great Bible classes going. And the name of John Wanamaker is still a name to be revered in the city of Philadelphia and all over. We know men like Letourneau and other men, honest, simple-hearted Christian brethren who count their money not in thousands but in millions.

So don’t imagine that that rich man went to hell because he was rich, nor the poor man went to heaven because he was poor. Then that’d be the simplest thing in the world. Strip down to necessities and throw everything away and flap your wings and you’ll soon be in the celestial city. And God will punish everybody that has any money with hell. Oh no, no, no, that’s too simple and it destroys moral and spiritual values and ignores man’s spiritual nature.

Now let me tell you why the rich man went to hell. Let me tell you why the beggar went to heaven. The beggar went to heaven because he had a nature that belonged there. And the rich man went to hell because he had a nature that belonged there. That’s it and there isn’t anything else. The beggar died and he was carried by the angels into Abraham’s bosom.

What are those angels doing down there? They had all the vast universe to roam around in. Why did a couple of angels turn up on the curb stone when that poor beggar turned over and closed his eyes and said, Father, here I come? Why were those angels there? What are they doing there? Those broad-winged angels, messengers of God, full of wisdom and strength. What were they doing there?

They were drawn there by the magnetic attraction of a heavenly nature. A man was there lying in his rags who had a nature that belonged in heaven. And that nature was about to escape the sore body. And God can’t have a disembodied soul that he’s redeemed, that carries his nature in it, roaming like a ghost through the universe.

So, he sent his angels down and said, get down there, boys. He’s getting weak. Get down there. He’s getting weak. He won’t last much longer. Be near him.

So, when the last gurgle came into his throat and his old, sore-covered body writhed a bit and he died, the angels grabbed his soul and winged away with it to Abraham’s bosom. Why? Because it belonged there.

Remember this. Everything must be put in its place in God’s universe at last. That man can be living with that other man’s wife, but there’ll be a day when God will put every man where he belongs.

That man may have the widow’s property now, but the day will be when God will put everything where it belongs. In the valley of dry bones, there were bones all around, a little bone over here and a big bone over there, and a little bone by a big bone and a head bone by a foot bone. They weren’t in place.

The jackals and buzzards had worked them over for years, and they were all out of place. But when Ezekiel stood and preached the word of the Lord unto him, there was a great rattling, and bone came to his bone, and God put everything in order. And God always puts everything in order, always. Right now they’re out of order because we’re in a state of probation.

I shocked some people here not many Sunday nights ago when I preached on probation.

But I shocked some people, and they couldn’t. They said, one woman said, Brother Tozer, I went along with you that came to that word probation. Then she said, now I understand, but I was bothered there. She thought I’d gone off the deep end and become a heretic. I still believe in probation. And I still believe the world in which we live is a confused, mixed-up world.

And there are persons who get the headlines that if the truth were known, they’d get a striped suit. And there are persons who are ignored that if the truth were known, they’d be in the front of Time magazine next Thursday. God isn’t mixed up, though. He’s watching patiently. And he’s just sorting out the checkers, just sorting them out, that’s all.

And there are people strutting around with what they call the cloth. I’ve always sort of had a sarcastic enjoyment of that, that he’s a man of the cloth. Well, thank God, at least he is. He’d be rather an odd chap if he went down the street otherwise. But he’s a man of the cloth. Indeed, there’s many a man of the cloth that when God Almighty unfrocks him and takes the mask away, he’ll be a man terrified and shrinking.

And there’s many a man that receives the eulogies and plaudits of the world that will be, when the time comes, when God sorts us out and puts him where he belongs. So this happened here with simply God sorting men out, that’s all. He doesn’t sort them out down here. He didn’t even sort them out when his twelve disciples were with Him. Peter was a coward, and Judas was a lover of money and a betrayer. He didn’t sort them out, not till the last minute did he even mention it.

Then they didn’t know who was which. But as soon as Judas died, he was sorted out. He died and went to his own place. Remember that? Death sorts us out, brother. And we don’t go to heaven because we’re poor and we don’t go to hell because we’re rich. If we go to heaven, it’s because we’ve got a nature that belongs there, and God sorts out all the natures that belong there and takes them there.

And He sorts out all the natures that belong in hell and sees that they get there. That’s the story of Lazarus and the rich man. So, let’s remember that.

What kind of nature do you have? That’s all that matters. That’s all that matters. The rich man had been content with the things of this world, but so are we, more or less. There’s a bigger house or bigger car or bigger TV set or bigger anything, you’ll get it. And there’s nothing wrong. We can’t condemn it.

We can’t church anybody for using the money that circumstances has thrown at their feet. But don’t imagine that’ll send you to hell. It won’t. And don’t imagine that the bunch down on Skid Row will all go to heaven when they die, like a flock of birds at sunset. Not true. All over this wide universe, God has His saints washed in His blood, born of His spirit, begotten of the Word of Truth, saved by the miracle of redemption. And He’ll call them all home when the time comes.

In 1933, though I’m not sure, well, it might’ve been 34, when Franklin D. Roosevelt became president of the United States, in order to save the sinking bank situation, financial situation, we went off the gold standard, and he called all the gold in. Nobody dare keep any gold. Once in a while, you’d run onto a gold piece, a tiny little thin thing as big as a streetcar token worth $10. I used to see one once in a while. I think one or somebody gave me one once or twice in my early ministry.

But as soon as the call had gone out from Washington, the treasury saying, all gold must be called in, give it up. Everybody had to release their gold. And the treasury said, now, wherever you find a hunk of gold, get it, get it, call it in. Wherever there’s gold, call it in.

And in that heaven of heavens where our God rules, God’s word has gone out, call in all the ransom, call in all that’s like me, call in all that has a nature that belongs here, call them all in. Don’t overdo it now, don’t rush the gate. Some of them are still down there and they got to live a while and do some things for me. But as soon as they die, call them in. Ranks of angels wait and watch.

If it’s a 10-year-old boy converted the night before under a burning pine knot in the hills of Kentucky, if he dies, he’s taken where his nature belongs. And no matter if he’s able to afford a $35,000 wedding, some have, if he doesn’t belong there, he’ll go where he belongs. That’s the story.

Now, this man was a better man after he was dead than he was while he lived. While he lived, he didn’t give much of a care about anybody. Threw the crumbs to the poor man, but he didn’t think about it much. He was busy with these stocks and bonds and bay-faced cattle and all the rest. He didn’t think much about it. He didn’t have time much to think about other people. He didn’t have much sympathy for other people.

But when he was down there, he began to sympathize with his brothers. And he said, Father Abraham, send Lazarus back to my brothers, lest they come to this place of torment. He was an evangelist making an altar call from hell, only that it didn’t get through. An evangelist, a voice, a condemned man already executed, whose nature had gone like a plunk where it belonged. But he was a religious man.

I want you to notice, he was a religious man, this man. He called Abraham, Father, and Abraham did not disallow. He said, Son. For Abraham had sons according to the flesh, and he had sons according to the Spirit. There were sons of Abraham after the flesh, and they were the Jews. They’re the sons of Abraham after the Spirit, and they are those who believe with faithful Abraham.

And the man who said, Father Abraham, send Lazarus, was answered, Son. Remember, he was a son of Abraham’s flesh, a Jew. Here was a religious man, this rich man. This was a Jewish environment here, a Jewish context. The whole thing was Jewish, the most religious nation in the world. And he was able to say, Father Abraham. And Abraham was able to say, Son, remember.

And to further show that he was a religious man and came from a religious home, Abraham said, they have Moses and the prophets. He couldn’t have said that if they’d been Greek or Roman or Assyrian or Egyptian or Ethiopian. He could only have said it if they were Jews. They have Moses and the prophets. Let them hear them.

So, I ask you to notice that this man had been a religious man while he lived. And if you could hear them tonight, I have no doubt that there would be the voice of many a church member who’s walked up and down the aisles taking offerings. Many a church officer who has sat, oh, the horror of this, has sat in boardrooms and discussed holy things and given his voice and helped run the local church. But he’s dead now.

And there’s many a voice that one time was head elder in a church that would be sounding and giving an altar call from the lost world and saying wildly, frantically to this one or that one, I have two sons. I have a wife back there. I have brothers back there. Go back and tell the rest of that board, that elected us, trusted us with holy things, told us to carefully guard the interests of the Kingdom. And I sat and voted and decided on who would preach and how much we’d pay him and all the rest. And I am here.

And some of the boys I sat with once a month in board meetings are back there still meeting once a month. Go back and tell them lest they come to this place of torment. And your neighbor that died two blocks down, they found him dead on the lawn. He was a good man, but not a Christian. If you could hear his voice tonight, it might well be a voice saying, send somebody. Send somebody with the wise voice of God.

And Abraham said, no, there’s no use. There isn’t any use. A church deacon that can receive communion once a month and handle funds and lead in prayer and hear the word preached and still resist me, and I can’t get to him if I send a dead man back to put a sheet over him and mutter. He wouldn’t listen.

God knows the human conscience. And He knows that the most effective voice in the world is the voice of the Word. And if men will not hear the word of God, they won’t hear anything else. Though God speaks many, many ways and supplements, as I have said, do not mean any contradiction when I say that God speaks in His Word and speaks through His Word, but speaks also through reason, but never through uncanny methods, never. Spooks and ghosts and banshees and all the rest that superstitious old wives’ fables have given us mean nothing to God.

That’s why I never tell or rarely tell a deathbed story. I could only pass this on to you. It happened only a little while back in Keswick. They have a reclamation place there. They’re called the Colony of Mercy. They take men who’ve been beaten down by drink and dope, and they’re reclaimed, brought back. Men have been there who’ve had high positions in offices and in great concerns and went to the dogs. There have been doctors there.

In one case, a Catholic priest spoke seven languages. They went down to their gutter with dope and drink or dope or drink and came there. Beaten men, were converted, rehabilitated, went back to their families and to their jobs, got started in life again. Now they’re givers and supporters of the work.

One man who had been a very bad man, beaten down, whipped, defeated, counted out by dope and drink or dope and drink, came there, gave his heart to the Lord Jesus, marvelously saved, went back and tried to make right what he could make right, paid up what he could pay up, used the paying up of his old bills and the straightening out of his old life as a way of contact and testifying to men.

They began to get anonymous letters one day on this certain man, Charlie. These anonymous letters would say, do you know who that man Charlie is? And then they would give a list of things that he had done. They said, do you know who this fellow Charlie is? And this next letter would say he did thus and thus.

Mr. Ross went to Charlie, and he said, Charlie, I’m getting anonymous letters about you. They’re telling me that you did this, and you did that and you did that. And he said, Mr. Ross, I admit it, I told you I did. That was my old work, Charlie, but God’s converted me and I’m trying to make it all straight. And they’d get another anonymous letter. They didn’t know, of course, who it came from.

Then one day a woman said, Mr. Ross, my husband was the one who was writing those letters. He was determined he was going to get this man Charlie, that you say has been converted. I begged him to stop his letter writing. I begged him. He got in the car and was on his way over here to Keswick to expose Charlie and discredit him before the world and was instantly killed in an automobile wreck on his way here.

And that’s as near to deathbed stories as I ever get, but that’s fresh in my knowledge. They’re talking about it over there with hushed voices. You say, an accident, it could have happened any time. Yeah, sure. But brother, God Almighty operates with the precision of a Swiss watch. And when God forgives a man, don’t you write him. And when God pardons a man, don’t you dig up his past. And when God says he’s clean, don’t you call him unclean. That’s what happened.

Charlie’s still living and his detractor’s dead. And if that anonymous detractor who was only unfrocked or unmasked after he was dead by a grief-stricken wife, if he could preach from where he is tonight, what do you suppose he’d say? He’d say, Charlie, forgive me, I was a moral ass. Forgive me, Charlie, I was a fool.

Now talk to my brothers that they may not come to this place. Here’s your church member. Here’s your religious professor. Here’s your bead counter. Here’s your Sabbath keeper. Here’s your tither. Here’s your hymn lover. Here’s your elder. Here’s your deacon. You can be any of those things and still not have a nature that belongs in heaven.

You know, friends, even in a church like this, a middle-class church, there’s a little bit of a tendency to be snooty and snobbish, and we tend to fall into cliques. You know it? Now don’t deny it. We’ve got little cliques. We drink coffee together, and these cliques usually follow the income and the size of the house you’re having, whether your furniture is good or whether it’s tacky. Some people never get a look in, hardly a handshake, year in and year out.

How is it everybody is cultivated? I’m not sure God Almighty’s going to let us get away with that much longer, for I believe with all my heart that there are simple-hearted, shrinking violets of people who have natures that belong in the celestial city, and when they die they’ll be swished away there with the speed of light, whereas there are people who, because of certain sets of circumstances, are made a lot of in fundamental churches that have a nature that belongs below.

A missionary told me—I promise you I’ll never mention Keswick again—told me over there last week, a missionary said, Mr. George, I am off of evangelists. I said, What? She said, I was one who worked as a secretary, and my job was to give them dates, date them up and get their slates arranged and all the rest.

She said, I walked out on them in disgust. She named a great city, and she said, the man in that city, the layman in that city, whose job it is to arrange prayer meetings and evangelistic, union evangelistic service, is a scoundrel, and I don’t believe in him, and I don’t believe a word he says.

I know how he lives, but he’s the big shot in evangelistic circles in that town, that big American city. And if he died, there wouldn’t be a church that would hold the mourners that would come to say, there was a prince fallen in Israel this day. But if that woman’s right, I wouldn’t want to go where he’ll go. For she says he’s a fair going scoundrel, but he masquerades as the big evangelistic leader, Christian businessman fellow in that town.

Always remember this, friends. You can get away with murder down here, but when you die, you’ll go to your own place. Keep that in mind. Where does your nature belong? That’s the most important question I can ask you tonight. Where does your nature belong? Think a little. Last week, the week before, give your nature away. You did the things you were. You did the things you were, and what you did proved what you were.

Now, what you are, does that belong in heaven? What you did, what you are, does that belong in heaven? I hope it does. I hope it does, but if it doesn’t, and the only hope in the wide world for you is to have a rebirth, transformation, the impartation of a nature that belongs in heaven, and then they can’t keep you out.

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The Voice of God’s Judgement

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

July 5, 1953

This talk tonight will be number five in a series of talks on Voices that Entreat Us. And I have been speaking on the voice of God’s love, the voice of Jesus’ blood, the voice of wisdom, the voice of conscience, and tonight on the voice of judgment. In attempting to prepare this message for tonight, I searched the Word and found myself, strangely enough, unable to get past, or away from the house of God.

So I must speak tonight about judgment as it pertains to the house of God, to Christians, rather than to sinners. And I want to read a number of passages of Scripture, Romans 14:12, so then every one of us shall give account of himself to God. 1 Corinthians 3:13, every man’s work shall be made manifest, for the day shall declare it, because it shall be revealed by fire, and the fire shall try every man’s work.

1 Corinthians 4:5, therefore, judge nothing before the time, until the Lord come, who both will bring to light the hidden things of darkness and will make manifest the counsels of the heart. And then shall every man have praise of God. 2 Corinthians 5:10, For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ; that everyone may receive the things done in his body, according to that he hath done, whether it be good or bad, knowing therefore the terror of the Lord we persuade men. Now, that’s part of the Scripture that I shall use in speaking tonight of the voice of God’s judgment entreating us.

Now, let me begin by calling attention to a well-authenticated historic fact, and it is that religious people are prone to select a favored truth and to hold that truth at the expense of other truths. Now you say, maybe in your heart, I know that’s true because I know a man. No, I don’t mean that. I mean that we, the sheep of God’s pasture, the children of His love, the so-called orthodox people who believe the truth and hold to traditional Christianity, we, are prone to select and favor, say, one truth at the expense of the other truths that are in the Bible, and to overemphasize that one truth so as to obscure other truths which are just as important.

I can’t think of anything drier than this. A young fellow, Brother Sandrock’s boy, was telling me with much delight today, because the joke was on me, I mean Mr. Sandrock’s boy said, let’s go down to Junior Church. It’s not so dry down there. I admit it’s dry, but if you listen, you’ll get something.

And that is that the historic records show that we are prone to take certain truths and favor them at the expense of others, and by overemphasizing them, we obscure other truths which are just as important, so that they actually disappear for generations.

Now I want to tell you what I mean by disappear. I mean that they fall into disuse. Suppose that there was a key on the piano over here and let us suppose that it just didn’t play. It just didn’t play, that’s all. It didn’t play. It’s out. And now somehow our friend could get on in an evening, but if it was somewhere up near the middle of the keyboard where it’s often used, he’d have a time of it, and he’d always be wincing under the fact that he hit the key and that nothing happened. It wouldn’t be removed from there, and if you’d photograph the keyboard, you’d find it in a picture, and if you were to run up and down the scale, you’d find your finger would touch it, but it just didn’t play.

Now that’s what I mean by certain basic doctrines of the Christian faith that have been allowed to fall into disuse, so that they just don’t play. You don’t hear them. They’re not talked about. They’re there, and if you go to the book of discipline, the statement of doctrine, you’ll find it there, because it’ll say that we do firmly hold this truth, and they’ll have it number seven there in their creed, but it has fallen into disuse. It just doesn’t play, and it has no emphasis and no power because it is slurred over and forgotten.

Now, ladies and gentlemen, there are certain great Bible truths which fall into disuse because certain other truths which lie close to them have been overemphasized to the obscuring of those truths, and then those truths, the absence of them, begins to do its deadly work, and down and down and down we go until finally some prophet of God has to come and reassert those truths and emphasize them and trumpet them forth. And at first he’s considered a heretic because he hadn’t heard that for a generation or two; that hadn’t been heard since great-grandpappy’s time, and I didn’t hear it at camp meeting last year. I didn’t hear it at that Bible conference. I didn’t hear it over here at this convention. I didn’t hear it out at that council. I didn’t hear it at the playground of the Christian world. I just didn’t hear it. Therefore, it isn’t so.

But the prophet of God keeps on blasting and trumpeting until the church wakes and adopts that truth and does something about it, and then some kind of a life comes from the dead. What did Luther do? Invent a new doctrine? He did not. He dug a doctrine out which had fallen into desuetude and never was heard, and by sounding the trumpet blast of justification by faith, he brought about the Reformation.

What did Wesley do? Not invent any new doctrine, but by sounding forth a forgotten doctrine that it was possible to have purity of heart, he roused the church.

And so, with every man who has ever been used of God tremendously in any generation from Calvary down to this hour, they have not preached any new truth. They have simply had the anointed vision to discover truths that had been obscured by the overemphasis of certain other truths, and at first, they were considered heretics and stoned out of town, but after a while the church listened to them and began to wake up, and they that slept awake from the dead, and God gave them life.

Now that’s introductory to say this, that justification by faith has become such a doctrine as this. It has been emphasized to a point where it has obscured certain other close related truths, and we have lost the power of those truths because we have overemphasized one truth.

Now ladies and gentlemen, it would be very difficult for any man to be eloquent enough to overstate the vital importance of justification by faith. The man shall live by his faith, and it is not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to His mercy He saved us. And it is through faith that we come into this state wherein we now find ourselves. Therefore, being justified by faith, we have peace with God.

Now I say it would be very difficult to overstate the importance of the doctrine of justification by faith, because it delivers us from the fruitless struggle to be good. It delivers us from the bondage of the Pharisee and the bondage of the ritualist and the legalist who attempt by certain foods or by abstaining from them, by counting your telling beads so many times before breakfast and keeping certain holy days and certain feasts to make themselves presentable to God.

It is old Adam decking himself out in his best religious garments for the sake of impressing God Almighty and getting an in so that he’ll be taken in at last as having been a man who served the Lord faithfully all the days of his life.

Now that is the bondage some of our fathers fell into because the doctrine of justification was obscured. It was dropped out of the teachings of the church. And so, they had holy beads and holy water and holy everything, and the sacred hearts of this and sacred hearts of that, and days to eat and days to abstain from eating.

And they tried to make themselves acceptable to God by money and by all sorts of methods. Then along came a man and with no new truth, but digging up an old one buried and forgotten in the Bible, he said, it’s not by works of righteousness, but it’s by faith that we are pleasing to God. And immediately the Reformation was born and the Church of Christ got up out of her long sleep. And like the dry bones in Ezekiel’s vision, she walked and stood up a great army.

And then the doctrine of justification by faith has been emphasized until now. It has been thrown out of focus as badly as the opposite was before Luther’s time. So that as it is now understood and preached and emphasized and hammered on and twanged on by everybody and his brother up and down the country, here is what has happened. All responsibility has been thrown over upon God and we conceive ourselves to be happy little Christians without a responsibility in the wide world except to give out a tract occasionally. And all sense of accountability has been lost.

We no longer sing except with our fingers crossed a charge to keep I have because we have emphasized the automatic quality of faith to a point where if you believe and accept Christ, all responsibility goes off your shoulder for all time to come and all accountability passes from you to the Savior and you’re not accountable to God anymore. You simply get in the Pullman sleeper, pull down the bed out of the wall and wake up in the depot in heaven.

And also, all judgment has been bypassed. Christians aren’t thinking of judgment anymore. They’re not worried about judgment. The only thing I can ever get a Christian worried about is that he might lose what we call fellowship, that he might not be as happy tomorrow as he was the day or happy the day after tomorrow as he was yesterday. He wants to be happy, happy, sing it all together now, happy, happy, happy. He wants to be a happy little moron.

And so, the result is, that he says, now I’ve got to learn to keep my fellowship up, so I’ll be happy. But the idea of a probationary period, that there is a judgment to come, that he is accountable to God for the deeds done in the body according to these texts, has completely passed out of the theological thinking of the modern fundamentalist church.

And faith has become a kind of magic, having beneficial properties which accrue to the man who believes. And they accrue to him no matter what his state of life may be. They’re automatic. They accrue to him. He believes; therefore, it accrues. And regardless of the moral condition of the man, whether he’s obedient or not, how faithful he is, or what kind of Christian he is, he believes or has believed, and therefore the automatic benefits of this magic faith accrue to him now and in the world to come.

Now, this has obscured a Bible truth, the Bible truth that I want to deal with tonight. It is a true doctrine pushed out of focus. It is the doctrine of faith and grace and justification by faith alone, pushed by uncorrected logic to a ridiculous and grotesque extreme.

Now let’s talk about this doctrine of probation.  I say that we don’t hear this very often, and I admit that in standing before this intelligent audience tonight, Bible-taught audience, I feel very much like a heretic. I feel as if I should be branded and perhaps put in the stocks. Maybe I would have been in the early days of our country. But the Bible still teaches the doctrine of probation.

Now what do we mean by probation? We mean that this life is a preparation for the next, and that that preparation is not concluded when I believe on Jesus Christ for my salvation. There is a preparation that goes on beyond that.

We take the thief on the cross who believed in Jesus Christ and met him in paradise the same day, and we make that to be the criterion by which we judge the whole thing. And so we believe in Christ, and that prepares us. We are then prepared, and there is no such thing then as probation, as testing, as judgment to come, nothing like that now in modern theology.

And the man that will rise and declare it, may throw himself open to bitter attacks by persons who have forgotten the beginning of this sermon, the truth of it, that it’s possible to take a good doctrine and to push just as good doctrines out of the Bible with it.

That’s what happened in our day, ladies and gentlemen. I don’t think I’ll ever be the man to reform anything. I’m getting too old, and I’ve sinned too much against God in my time. I don’t think he’ll trust me with it. But I do say this, somebody may yet arise in America who is willing to be unpopular and to be thought a heretic and a fool, who will be willing to endure the heartache and agony and misunderstanding of daring to face out and stare down the hierarchy that has said that the doctrine of probation is not biblical, that we are, everything is taken care of by one act of faith, and there’s no such thing as a judgment nor an expectation of a judgment to come.

Now, I say that the doctrine of probation teaches that life is a preparation, this life is a preparation for the next, and that accepting Jesus Christ settles some things forever. It settles forever my past sins. It settles forever my justification before my Father. It settles forever that my name is written in the Lamb’s book of life. It settles that I am a regenerated man, and the seed of God is in me. It settles that. That’s what accepting Christ does.

But our mistake is that we forget that we Christians are on probation. All Christians are now on probation to prove character and to test us for the world to come, to see what we’ll do with the light when we’ve been given, to test our repentance, how real it is, to test our obedience, whether we plan to be an obedient Christian or not, to prove our faithfulness, to see what we’ll do with time and gifts and opportunities and money.

But because we have emphasized the doctrine of justification by faith to the obscuration of this doctrine, there’s practically nothing at all said anymore ever by anybody about the fact that you and I are going to have to give an account to God for our time, your years and my years.

We’re going to have to give an account to God with the gifts we have, for the gifts we have. We’re going to have to give an account to God for the opportunities, that is, the situations which enabled us to act that we didn’t take advantage of.

We’re going to have to give an account to God for the money we have. We’re riding high in America now. Our dollars, they just lie, just fly around like leaves in the fall. Everybody’s got money now.

I know a boy that wanted to get a little quick money in the summertime between semesters, so he’d go back to school. He got a laborer’s job in a factory. He worked overtime one day and made thirty dollars, which was two weeks’ wages in 1933. Thirty dollars in one day, a laborer.

Now, we’ve got all kinds of money, and most of us are overlooking this, that we are on probation, and God is testing us to see what we’re going to do with that money. Nothing to giggle about, boys. Nothing to smile about. This is a serious and grave situation, that God has given to us Americans more money than to any other people in all the world, in all history. And we have taken it as a matter of course and tossed it around as loosely as dandelions.

Now, there’s nothing I can do about that. I might just as well sit down and shut up, because I know you people, you’ll do as you please anyway. But you’re on probation, and God is going to hold you accountable for what you do with your money. And He’s going to hold you accountable for what you do with your abilities. Every man according to his ability, said the Holy Ghost.

And he’s going to hold you accountable for what you do with your time. You say, now Brother Tozer, you stay out of our business. I’ll do what I please with my time. Well, I know that. But I also know you’re on probation, and God is now testing you to find out if you have moral sense enough to know what to do with time.

Time is a creature gift which God has given you, but he hasn’t given it to you foolishly. He has given it to you to see whether you have moral wisdom enough to know what to do with it. And the result of that testing will be seen in the judgment of the great day. Now, I say that every Christian is saved, but on trial.

And every Christian is awaiting the final severe test. Look at this test. Every man’s work shall be made manifest, for the day shall declare it, because it shall be revealed by fire.

Now, he’s not talking about communists here. He is talking about born-again believers. He’s talking about his own children. He’s writing to the Corinthian church. And he’s even talking in this instance about the servants of the Lord who teach. And he says that every man’s work shall be made manifest for the day. Paul used that word as a solemn catchword. The day, he would say, the day.

One man said that Paul lived with one eye on the judgment seat of Christ and one eye on the perishing world. Only we’ve forgotten the judgment seat of Christ, and we’re so happy that we’re saved that we have forgotten that we are men and women on trial. Not for our sins, for our past record. That would damn us forever, too deep ever, to find our way out of the hell where we’d be placed.

But we’re on trial for whether we have moral wisdom enough and moral courage enough and faithfulness sufficient to be able to know what to do with this hour and these moments and this day and time and money and opportunity and the times in which we live. There’s a great deal of groaning and bemoaning the times crushed between the nutcracker of communism on one side, liberalism and Catholicism on the other side.

And I could spend the next five hours describing the dark side of the times in which we live. But they’re God’s gift to you, sir. God sent some Jews down into Babylon where they knew not the language, hung their harps, some of them did on the willows.

But there were certain ones that were tested there. Daniel and his brethren, they were tested men, and the times they lived in became the very acid, to test them and prove to God what kind of men they were. And I won’t be coward enough to wish for one minute that I lived in any better times than these.

I don’t wish for one minute that I lived in any better city than Chicago. I know it’s rotten. I know it. And I know that we’re a great top-heavy country, and we might come crashing down as other empires and nations have done. But I don’t wish myself in any other period of the world’s history. These times are God Almighty’s gift to me as a Christian, and I’m on probation and God is seeing what one of the least of his servants is going to do about the times in which he lives.

Justified and saved, but on trial, there’s where the Christian should hold himself. But we’re so eager to get out from under all responsibility, and like an unbroken colt, romp from one side of the field to the other, kick up our irresponsible heels in the sunshine, and snort our defiance of all judgment.

And ladies and gentlemen, we had better, while we can, listen to this rather pessimistic preacher, and be warned in time that you and I are on probation.

Now, you can get away with almost anything now. And the reason we Christians can get away with almost anything is that this is not a period of judgment, this is a period of probation. If this was a period of judgment, you’d sin and the Lord would let you down, the Lord would punish you immediately, the Lord would prove to you immediately that you weren’t worthy of his kingdom.

But this is not a day of judgment, this is a day of probation. This is the period of probation, and the Holy Ghost says, therefore, judge nothing before the time, until the Lord come who will both bring to light the hidden things of darkness and will make manifest the counsels of the heart. Then shall every man have praise of God.

So this is not the judgment day, this is a period of probation. If I were to put it around like this, this is not the trial, this is the preparation for the trial. This is not the last examination; this is the getting ready for the examination.

Now, doesn’t this sound like strange doctrine to be coming in a fundamentalist church in the city of Chicago in the year 1953 A.D.? For it is simply all out of harmony with everything you hear. Polly and the cracker. Polly wants a cracker, he says. And if you put a ribbon around his neck and teach him to say Polly wants the cracker in a high-cracked voice, you get a reputation of being somebody.

And the crowds will rush in to hear this Polly say Polly wants a cracker as no other Polly ever said it. You should come and hear that bird. You should come down and hear him, he’s wonderful. He says Polly wants a cracker in a tone and with an inflection you’ve never heard before, but he’s awful careful to stick to his one lone text, Polly wants a cracker. He doesn’t dare get out of that, he doesn’t dare change his text, he has to say the one thing that he’s been told to say and taught to say.

So, the idea of probation and a period of trial when God gets us ready to be judged in that day, not for our salvation, understand, I insist justification makes us justified and that settles that, but whether we’re fit to live in God’s heaven among God’s great, whether we’re morally and spiritually wise enough and good enough that you say we’ve got to be because we’re clothed in His righteousness alone. Yes sir, clothed in His righteousness alone, faultless to stand before the throne. And if it were not for that you wouldn’t appear before the judgment seat of Christ, you’d appear before the judgment of the great white throne and with the lost of all the ages be judged. But I’m talking about something else altogether.

Now, I admit that sometimes, according to the Bible, God’s people can get so out of hand that God has to precipitate judgment. First Corinthians 11th chapter says there, let a man examine himself for he that eateth and drinketh unworthily eateth and drinketh judgment to himself not discerning the Lord’s body for this cause many are weak and sickly among you and many sleep.

And if this teaches anything, it teaches that at the Lord’s table, at least at one time, things had become so sacrilegious, so irreverent that God did not wait for the day of judgment, the testing day to decide what to do. He precipitated the judgment and allowed some of these Corinthians to become physically weak and sickly and some of them to die before their time because they handled holy things in an unholy manner.

At the Lord’s table, they were irreverent and drunken. Because they were, God reached out and pulled the judgment in a little for them. I say sometimes God does that, but for the most part He does not. For the most part, He simply lets us go because we’re on trial, saved but on trial. This is a period of probation for the world to come.

But you say, Mr. Tozer, if I thought that, I never could be a happy Christian. If I thought that there was a time coming when my deeds were to be tested and judged, my life was to be examined by the eye of God, I never could be quite a happy Christian.

Well, there are two or three answers to that. One of them is that the Bible makes a great deal less of your being happy than it does of your being holy. The Bible doctrine is a doctrine of holiness, not necessarily a doctrine of happiness. And to my mind, one of the proofs of the infantilism, the spiritual infantilism of the church of Christ today, is that we insist upon being happy and let hell freeze over. We’ll be happy anyhow. We had better not seek to be happy.

We had better seek to discharge our spiritual obligations and then believe that in so doing God will allow an overtone of spirituality to accrue to us and the joy of the Lord will come.  Paul used to write his letters weeping and wet the paper with his dropping tears, and at the same time have a joy that wouldn’t stay down.

There’s your paradox, beloved friend. It’s possible to be solemn and serious and grave with the thought that I am in a period of probation, that I am a probationer, and that sometime I’ll stand before the judgment seat of Christ to give an account of the deeds done in the body, at the same time to have a well of joy springing up within my heart.

But the average Christian in our day trusts to what he believes to be the magic of faith that automatically fixes everything up for him for all time to come. So, he’s on board, streamers waving, whistles blowing, and the band playing.

No, that’s not Christianity, brethren. Read your Bible with the thought in mind that I’ve given you tonight. Read it. Try to think your way past all this notion that’s been funneled into our heads in the last few years and try to remember that a Christian is one who’s justified but on trial, who is saved but on probation. Are you following me?

You say, all right then, Mr. Tozer, are you saying that I won’t know whether I’m saved or not until the judgment day? If you still think that’s what I mean after all I’ve said tonight, you and I might as well shake hands and quit because I never can make you see it.

I have said boldly that that’s not what I mean. I mean that I am saved by faith and forgiven and justified and regenerated and protected by the Advocate at the right hand of the Father, all by faith. But at the same time, I’m a man on trial still.

For all shall appear before the judgment seat of Christ to receive the things done in the body, whether they be bad or good. And every man’s work shall be tested by fire, for the fire shall declare it. Now that’s in the Bible too, but we’ve obscured that doctrine. Our Plymouth brethren friends occasionally refer to it. They call it the Bema, the judgment seat. That’s, I guess, the original Greek, and they like to use occasional original Greek.

You know, we all do to make folks believe it. Well, anyway, this Bema business, you see, but you don’t hear it emphasized much. The average man isn’t worried as half as much about the Bema as he is about Life magazine and how popular he’ll be and how much money he’ll have and all the rest. But this bothers me. I don’t know about you, but it bothers me.

Now, this whole doctrine is set forth by our Lord in Matthew 25. He tells there the story of the man who went into a far country. Before he went, he called his servants in. He had just had three. He gave one of them five talents, he gave one of them two, and he gave one of them one, each one according to his ability. They couldn’t complain because one man had five talents worth of ability, one man had two, one man had one, each got what he deserved. Now he said, use these, I’ll be back.

The man that got five began to use them. The man that got three began to use them. The man that got one buried his. After a while, the Lord returned. This man returned and called his servants in.

Now, while he was gone, they could have done just as they pleased. They could have spent that money at a card table. They could have done what they pleased with it, and nobody would have judged them. They could have written books, led singing, sung solos, preached sermons, been on boards, run prayer bands, young folk societies, Sunday schools, edited magazines. They could have done all those things and still squandered their master’s money and foolishly betrayed his trust. Still, they could have been as religious as a cross between a Muhammadan and a Buddhist. But when he came back, he just called them in.

They were on probation during his absence. Two of them knew it and one of them didn’t. One of them, two of them, one said, I used your money wisely, here it is, with interest. The other one said the same. The other one said, I was afraid, and so I hid the money. And the Lord said to the ones that he approved, he said, well done, good and faithful servants. You’ve been faithful over a few things. I will make thee rule over many.

Now, those three servants didn’t know that they were on trial. He didn’t tell them that. He just said, here, use this, and went away. But they were on trial, and the [Lord] had promotions ready for those men. And when he came back, he promoted two of them and cast the other one out. What are you going to do with that passage?

Now, the ultra-dispensationalists, they have gotten rid of it by saying that Matthew doesn’t belong to us. I just as soon believe the modernist when he says Isaiah doesn’t belong to us, as to believe the dispensationalist when he says Matthew doesn’t belong to us.

I’m not going to have books of the Bible ripped out from under my nose just when I’m getting a stomach full of the green pastures by some dispensationalist who says, That’s not for you, brother, just a minute. You need not eat from Abraham’s book. Abraham and I are brethren, and he lets me come to his table and nibble with him? Sure.

And I don’t believe any dispensationalist needs to get excited for fear I’m going to get blessed on a verse that he has marked verboten. No, sir. Good German words, isn’t it? Oh, did I miss one? I thought I had.

But this verboten business, I forbid you to use that, brother Tozer. It’s not for you. Rightly divide the word of truth. Oh, get on out. I’ll take the word of God, and this book of God was given me. It’s not all about me, but it’s all for me. It’s one of the rules at Moody Institute, and it’s a good rule.

Now, I ask you tonight, brethren, whether this is not an eloquent voice. It is an eloquent voice to me. People say to me, why don’t you take it easy? Get rid of some jobs and take it easy. I can’t do it. I can’t do it. I’ve wasted so much of my time. People say, Oh, you’re such a busy man. If they knew how much time was wasted. I ask you if this is not eloquent, this voice, not mine, but the voice of probation, the voice of judgment.

And remember that there is not and there will not be one lonely friend. See, when we get under conviction now and get feeling low and feeling bad, we can run to our friends, a little religious talk, a little chitchat about the Church, about the evangelists and about this and that, pretty soon we feel better. But in that day, there won’t be a friend, for every man shall give an account of his own deeds. And there won’t be one lonely friend to go to for help.

In that hour, when our smiling but serious Father and our gracious and kindly faced but serious Savior call us to their feet and say, now, my redeemed children, I must have an account of the deeds done in the body since you were saved. I must now have an account.

What about the money that you got in your lifetime, and I gave you a lot of it. What about the abilities that you have, so many more abilities than lots of people? What about the times in which you lived, when you could shine as a star in the darkness? What did you do about it? What about it?

There will be no place to hide then, brethren. No running to a soda fountain and nurse on a malted milk while we laugh away and joke away the seriousness of it.

You can’t do it then, too late then. You can do it now. Some of you are going to do it just as soon as we’re over here now in the next few minutes. Maybe you’ll go home because it looks as if it’s going to storm, but normally you wouldn’t go home, you’d go somewhere and joke off tonight’s sermon. Because you’ve forgotten you’re on probation. You have tried to settle everything by one act of believing. You settle some things by one act of believing, I’ve insisted, but there are some that aren’t ever settled until death cuts us off or until the Lord comes.

Now, what is the way of all this? The way is the way of self-judgment. If we should judge ourselves, we should not be judged–self-judgment and obedience. I want to warn against one thing. I want to warn against the tragic moral error of always confessing and yet never making any change in the life.

When you confess a thing, it goes without saying that you intend to abandon it. So instead of forever confessing, I must confess and abandon it, if God is going to believe my confession, so self-judgment and obedience.

Oh, I say, we don’t sing anymore the song that has this stanza in it. Arm me with jealous care as in thy sight to live, and O thy servant, Lord, prepare, a strict account to give. Someone says, if I believed I had to give a strict account and serve in the eyes of God, I never could be happy. The man that wrote that was only one jump short of hysterically happy. That was Charles Wesley.

That man was so spiritually happy, that old Dr. Samuel Johnson, the English philologist and critic, said of John Wesley, he is the loftiest example of complete moral happiness that I have ever seen. And his brother Charles was happier still, if there could be any difference. Happy in God and in Christ, and yet he said, arm me with jealous care as in thy sight to live, and O thy servant, Lord, prepare a strict account to give.

He believed he was on probation. He could sing, arise, my soul, arise, shake off thy guilty fears, the bleeding sacrifice in thy behalf appears. Before the throne my surety stands, my name is written on His hands. He could sing that, but he could also sing, and O thy servant, Lord, prepare a strict account to give. We’re having ourselves a time that never came down from heaven. It doesn’t sparkle with the pure shine from the waters underneath the altar.

But we’re determined to be happy if we can burst a lung that we forget we’re on probation, and that your day-by-day service to God and your fellow man will be sharply scrutinized and severely judged before the feet of Jesus Christ in that day. To me, that’s an eloquent argument. What do you think about it?

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Week of April 13, 2025 “The Voice of Conscience”

The Voice of Reason

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

June 21, 1953

Tonight, we continue our talks on the voices that entreat us. I have now come to the voice of reason.  And I want to read a passage that you would know that I would be reading. I’m sure you’ve guessed it if you gave it any thought at all. From the first chapter of Isaiah. Wash you. Make you clean. Put away the evil of your doings from before mine eyes. Cease to do evil. Learn to do well. Seek judgment. Relieve the oppressed. Judge the fatherless. Plead for the widow. Come now, and let us reason together, saith the Lord. Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow. And though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool. If ye be willing and obedient, ye shall eat the good of the land. But if ye refuse and rebel, ye shall be devoured with a sword. For the mouth of the Lord hath spoken it.

Come now and let us reason together. Those are the words of the Holy Ghost through the man Isaiah. The word reason here is a verb as it occurs in this text. But it is also a noun, not here. But it is a noun, reason. We reason because we are reasonable, and then we have the adjective. And we think reasonably, and then we have the adverb. But here it is a noun. That is, in the definition that I want to give it.

And I’ve thought a lot about reason, and wondered how it might be condensed into a sentence that would say it, that would say what is to be said. And I think this may come near to it, that reason is a wise recognition of things as they really are.

Now if this is true, if reason is a wise recognition of things as they really are, then Christians are of all persons the most reasonable. And they are of all persons, the true realists. Christians are not visionaries, not dreamers, not persons given over to fantasies. But they are truly realists, because they insist upon stripping things down to their hard core of reality.

Now I repeat that there is no person, no kind of person, anywhere in the world that is as realistic as a true Christian. Scientists boast that they are realistic, that they do not deal in fancies nor dreams, but that they test everything and pull it down to its reality. And they are right as far as they go, but let us not believe that the Christian is an opposite to a scientist, because a Christian is a realist, a sounder, truer realist, than a scientist can ever be. Because a Christian insists upon knowing what really is true. He wants to know what is true about life.

A scientist wants to know what is true about life biologically, but a Christian wants to know what is true about life in its broad and everlasting human relationships. And the Christian wants to know about his sins, and he wants to know where they are and what has happened to them. He wants to know about judgment and God and his relation to God, and the future and the resurrection and eternal life and immortality. And he insists upon knowing this.

As a Christian, he insists that his position be realistic and sound, that it be according to reason. And if he is a real Christian, he will refuse to be petted or cajoled or chucked under the chin or told not to mind, and it will go away of itself. He insists upon the facts. He wants to know how about this. He wants to know about where they stand, the Christian does. He wants to know where he stands before God in the judgment. He wants to know about heaven and hell. And he insists upon knowing, and because he does, he is, according to reason. For reason is a wise recognition of things as they really are, not as they seem to be.

Now I charge it back upon the worldling that he is the unrealistic person, because he must pretend all his life. The unsaved man is forced to pretend all his life. And if I were to invent a phrase or term to cover the genus Homo, the human being, unsaved and out of Christ, I would say that he is the great pretender. He must pretend all of his life. He must, for instance, act as if he was not going to die, knowing all the time that he is going to die.

Now that’s not realism, ladies and gentlemen. That’s the fuzziest kind of phantasmagoria, fancy, you know, the dreamers of dreams. The sinner knows he’s going to die. I’ve wondered about this and thought about it, not only as a Christian, but thought about it just as a human being.

What’s the matter with us Christians anyway? I mean us humans, we all act as if we weren’t going to die, and yet everybody knows that he is. And the Christian has gotten all ready for it, packed up his grip and gotten all set to go. He’s a realist. And do you see him somewhere sitting on his suitcase, you know, in some little shanty someplace? Why, if you look around, you’ll see a pair of steel rails nearby. He knows the train’s going to pass by him. He’s a realist. He’s all packed and ready.

But all around about him is a whole world of busy sinners having fun. And they say, look at that dope sitting down there on his suitcase. He thinks that there’s a train coming. And he’s a dope, he’s a dreamer, he’s a visionary. He’s full of fancies and flighty ideas. And there is nothing in reality corresponding to this queer Christian fellow. He smiles and sits on his suitcase a while, because he hears the shooting of the train down the track away.

But the sinner goes on acting as if he wasn’t going to die, but he’s got to die nevertheless. Therefore, the sinner is the great pretender. And he is the unrealistic person, not the Christian, who lives according to reason, and according to things as they really are.

Now, all his lifetime, the sinner is forced to act as if he hadn’t sinned. Or if he wants to good-naturedly admit that he has, then he wants to make nothing out of it. And in his deep conscience, in his deep heart of heart, he knows that he’s sinned. But being a pretender, he has to act as if he hadn’t sinned, or as if sin didn’t amount to anything.

Therefore, he’s unrealistic, unscientific, and strictly unreasonable. And the Christian who says, I have sinned, but God has forgiven. He’s the realist. He’s got the facts there, and in his hands, he can test the thing. David called it a nail in a sure place. I believe it was Isaiah. A nail in a sure place. The Christian drives his nail in a sure place, and he comes back a hundred years later, she’s still there, because the nail is in the sure place. That’s realism.

But the sinner drives his nail in and comes back a few years later, and the termites have eaten the very post in which he drove his nail. But he pretends not to see it. He smiles and drinks himself another Coke, or listens to a hot record, and says, oh, these Christians.

I have a brother-in-law, he’s a Christian, and he prays and goes to church, the poor fellow, he’s not realistic. He’s a lovely fellow, and he’s a good provider, and you can’t find any fault with him, his wife’s crazy about him, his kids love him, and he’s job sure because he’s always on time and always honest, and there’s a lot good can be said about my brother-in-law. But when it comes to religion, he’s a dreamer and a fanciful visionary. Whereas the brother-in-law has his name written in the book of life and the nail driven deep in a sure place. He’s the realist. But the other fellow is a dreamer of deadly and fateful dreams.

So, all his lifetime the sinner is forced to close his eyes and pretend not to see. He’s forced to cover up and hide and dodge and twist and put on another face and put the best foot forward. And when he hears that his friend has dropped dead on the golf course, he swallows his Adam’s apple twice and then takes refuge in his masculine vocal cords and says, too bad.

But he was scared stiff when he heard it, because he didn’t know but he’d be next. Talk about realism. He’s no realist, he’s a hypocrite and a pretender and a liar. And he’s forced to go through life that way. His little kid twirls up in his lap and looks with little innocent eyes and says, Daddy, what is death? He coughs and clears his throat and changes the subject, but he’s scared to death.

Now, talk about realists and say we Christians are dreamers and visionaries. No, a Christian is one who deals with things as they are. And a sinner is one who is forced everlastingly to pretend that things are the way he wants them to be, knowing all the time that he’s lying to his own soul. Christians are not on the defensive. The world’s on the defensive, not Christians. We Christians have gone around with a hanged dog look long enough, gone around apologetically long enough. We ought to go over to the offensive and tell the world, you’re the pretenders and the hypocrites and the liars.

They say there’s a hypocrite in the Church. Of course there’s a hypocrite in the Church. Certainly there’s a hypocrite in the Church. Not only one, but more than one, many hypocrites in the Church. Jesus had his Judas, and Paul, or Peter, had his Ananias and Sapphira, and they died, strange they died, but they had many descendants.

And the Church, I know a lot of them that are in the Churches. But I also know that we need not thus for that reason be on the defensive. We must go over to the offensive and tell the world we Christians are realists. We have gone through and settled some everlasting facts.

Now, the Christian message is according to reason. Come now and let us reason together, because it takes into account all the basic facts that there are. It takes into account God and man and man’s relation to God. It takes into account sin and man’s relation to sin and responsibility for sin, and accountability to God under that responsibility. And it takes into account judgment and death and the shortness of life and the deceitfulness of appearances and the certainty of death. It takes all these things into account.

And a real Christian is one whose house is always in order. He has dealt with everything. He’s always in order. He doesn’t have to stampede heaven wildly and frantically if he finds he’s going to die. He only has to just do a few legal matters and settle a few legal matters. Say here that I owe this $10 to John Smith. See that he gets it. But as far as his everlasting relationships are concerned, he has realistically taken care of them because the Christian message is according to reason.

Now, God being who He is and what He is, there is in the Godhead and in man’s relation to God a transcendency that outstrips reason. But there is never anything that outrages reason. Again, we ought not to be on the defensive here. We ought to go over to the offensive. And we ought to push the sinner into a corner with all his learning and tell him, you can’t call me names anymore.

I am not an unreasonable man but a man who lives according to the highest reason there is. And therefore, I am not sitting quietly or lying down and allowing you to say that what I believe outrages reason. What I believe transcends reason but never outrages it. The Christian message is reasonable and altogether according to the facts and according to the sound judgment and recognition of things as they really are. So Christ entreats us with the voice of reason.

Now, this is a strange approach, I imagine. Some of you who have been in schools, even in high school, maybe you have read a little something else besides comic strip. And you have had it charged that reason says one thing and religion another. Whoever says that isn’t dry behind his intellectual ears yet. And he can’t go to sleep at night without a sugar tip, pacifier, to put him to sleep. And if you don’t know what that is, go back to Pennsylvania among the Pennsylvanians Dutch where I was brought up, and you’ll know what that is. It’s a little glove, finger that size, finger of a glove, stuff that with sugar, sew up the end and give it to the baby.

But a lot of people can’t go to sleep without something like that because they’re not grown yet intellectually, and yet they go about with their eyebrows raised in an arch of perpetual superiority and look down upon us Christians and say they’re unrealistic. And reason, I’m going to go on the side of reason, not on the side of religion. Religion is on the side of reason, gentlemen. And whatever is irreligious and unbelieving is on the side of unreason, and not on the side of reason.

Now Jesus, our Lord, bases his Entreaty upon reasonable considerations. Our lost condition, for instance. Now that’s a reasonable consideration. And the devil has put such propaganda abroad that people are not any longer accepting the doctrine that men are lost. They say it can’t be, we’re on our way up, we’re struggling upward.

Well, we’ve been at it a long time and we’re not up any further than we were before. You can’t fool me with that struggling upward business. We’re a lost people. Why have a lot of you fellows have very little hair on your head? What’s the matter with you? Did you get careless? No, your hair was lost because you’re a lost man. Why are some of you ladies, now my southern chivalry is coming to my aid, but why are you not quite so will-o-wish as you were a hundred years ago? You’re a lost woman.

Why do I have to duck upstairs when I’d love to go back and mill around and chat with you people and lie down and rest from a sermon? Because I’m a lost man. That is my physical self, I’m a saved man. But I mean I belong to a lost race.

Why did my friend Frank Weir, who gave me this Bible incidentally, in this Bible it says, To my friend Tozer, Frank Weir, Delta Lake Convention 1941. I’ve been preaching out of it ever since. Why did my friend Frank Weir go to a radio station to preach, sit down on a couch to wait his turn, slumped into a sleep and they said, Reverend Weir is asleep. They went to try to shake him awake when the cue came for him to go on the air and Frank didn’t get up. He was with the Lord Jesus Christ, looking on the vision beatific. Why did my friend Frank Weir die last week? Because he belonged to a lost race.

Why do we have a war in Korea and devils in the Kremlin and confused men in Washington and slick men in London and cops on every corner and jails and insane asylums? We’re a lost people, that’s what’s the matter. It’s a lost world we live in. And the Christian message takes that frankly into account and doesn’t listen to the propaganda of unreason that says we’re not lost. We are lost.

A nurse goes into a home or a patient is brought into the hospital. We’ll say it’s a ten-year-old boy. He’s running a fever of 105. His eyes are turned up. He’s flushed. His breath is coming in great heavy sobs. There are marks all over his body, strange marks, red marks. Is he struggling upward? Is the doctor going to say, Oh, it’s perfectly nothing, it’s just nothing. It’s not just nothing. Let’s play golf. It’s just nothing. Let’s go out and dream. It’s just nothing.

If they have the sense they’re born with, they’ll recognize a sick boy there. I couldn’t tell you what he had according to the symptoms I’ve given him, but I only know he’s a sick boy, that’s all. And anybody that doesn’t recognize that’s not realistic.

And so I say with Bridewell over here and the Goldbergs dying in Sing Sing, I’ve sat in that chair, Brother Kemp, where they died the other night, sat there and been strapped in. I got out, thank God. I never liked to get out anywhere so well in my whole life. A great big handsome blond boy, maybe 24 years old, with a grin that was just as disarming as Mickey Mantles. And I said to him, Are you one of the… Yes, he said, I’m one of the legalized killers. I said, What’s your job? He said, Wheel them out after they’re dead.

Why is that necessary? It’s the blotch on the body showing of the disease inside. That thousands of volts that ripped through their bodies was the fever of sin that’s in the world. And the Christian says where men are lost and we know they’re lost. So, the Christian message is based upon reason.

Now the lostness of mankind is not a dogma, it is a fact. And the Christian message is based upon the redeeming work of Christ which is made necessary by the lost condition of man. And it’s based upon the love of God in Christ Jesus and it’s based upon the power of the gospel. It’s based upon the fact that humanity is perishing. It’s based upon the abiding permanence of the will of God. It’s based upon the importance of a needed action. And it rests upon all these sound, realistic facts.

And if you came into this building with the eyebrow arched a little, feeling that you liked the old man, all right, and he said some interesting things, but he was hopelessly antiquated and was still naively believing in Christianity, let me tell you that you’re the one who must defend yourself, not I. That you’re the one who must give a reason for what lies in you, not we Christians, we know. We’re not dealing with fancies; we’re dealing with facts as hard and realistic as a brick that goes into the construction of this building.

Now, in the text which I have read there is the stern voice of exhortation and the gracious voice of promise, and these are joined, as the poet said, in reason’s ear. Listen, wash you, make you clean, put away the evil of your doings from before mine eyes. Cease to do evil, learn to do well. Seek judgment, relieve the oppressed, judge the fatherless, plead for the widow. There is the stern voice of God’s exhortation.

Come now and let us reason together, saith the Lord. Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow. Though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool. And there is the gracious voice of promise.

Now my friends, we do a great injury to mankind when we divide these two voices. When that which under God was meant to be a duet becomes a solo. When that which was under God meant to be two sides of the same coin, we split it edgewise and ruin both.

I have in my pocket here a half dollar. An eagle on one side, a lady on the other, with some flowers or something. And that says, in God we trust, 1944, and I hope they still do in 1953, half dollar, United States of America, E Pluribus Unum. Now there we have it. It takes both sides to be worth fifty cents. Get a fine saw and split it edgewise, and neither side would buy a one-cent stamp.

So, we go into the Bible and we’re adepts at the art of splitting texts edgewise and destroying both. If I go to my Bible and I read this, Wash you, make you clean, put away the evil of your doing, cease to do evil, learn to do well, seek judgment, relieve the oppressed, judge the fatherless, plead for the widow, period. Then I have split that coin edgewise and it’s no good.

If I go to my Bible and I skip the first part and read, Come now and let us reason together, says the Lord, though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be white as snow, and read nothing before, nothing after, I’ve split the coin edgewise, it’s no good either.

Yet we have whole schools of Christian theology based upon coins split edgewise. Texts ripped apart and divided asunder. No, the voices are here. It’s a duet, God Almighty. Reason is singing her two songs. The stern voice of exhortation and the gracious voice of promise.

Now I say, we do great soul injury to men by dividing these and trying to make out that we can have our sins forgiven and washed and cleansed without first turning from evil and putting it away from before God’s eyes, ceasing to do evil, learning to do good. You cannot.

And this great error has filled the churches with deceived members and helped to fill hell with deceived Christians, or at least with deceived souls. And there are many people who come into the church on a half text. Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be white as snow. They forget that that’s only half the text.

There are those that are driven away from the churches because some people preach only the first half of the text. Wash, you make you clean. And they say, dear God, how could I? How can a man as vile as I am ever wash me even if I had all the acids of the world? I could not cleanse my soul. And they go away discouraged because that’s only half the text. There are two halves of the text here.

Now, my brethren, it’s a great moral impossibility, this, of trying to be forgiven while persisting in sin. That’s a great error. It’s an impossibility and never can be done. And it does violence to the Scriptures, and it also violates moral reason.

Now, the voice of moral reason says that all pardon is conditioned upon intention to reform. Do you hear me? All pardon is conditioned upon intention to reform. Some people don’t like the word reform. I’ve heard people condemn that word reform and get up and crack their two heels together and say, I don’t believe in reformation, I believe in regeneration. I might just as well say, I don’t believe in the in-God-we-trust side of the coin, I only believe on the E Pluribus Unum side of the coin. They’re both there and they’re both necessary to make the coin worth anything.

And so, reformation and regeneration are not enemies, they’re friends, they’re Siamese twins. And forgiveness is based upon the intention to reform. Reform is another word for repent, do your first works, clean up, get right, straighten out. And it’s necessary that we take this into account.  They tell a story, I don’t know whether it’s true, I think it is true. It happened in the United States, one of our states.

They say that a governor, who was a very tender-hearted man and desired to do all he could to help the people in the prisons, went incognito to a prison. They didn’t know who he was, he didn’t tell them. And he strolled around talking to the men, and he got into conversation with a personable young fellow that he thought looked pretty good. What are you in for, he told him. How long, he told him. They chatted a while longer, the convict never dreaming that he was the governor of the state.

He said, suppose you’d like to get outside again. Oh boy, what I said, once more, outside again. Would I love to be free? Well, he said, it could be, you could be free sometime. No, he said, I don’t think so. He said, they threw the book at me, I don’t think so that I’ll ever get out of here. Well, could be, you know, strange things have happened, said the governor. Strange things have happened. Maybe you will get out sometime.

Tell me, what would you do if you got out? What would be the first thing you’d do? His face went black. The first thing I would do would be to cut the throat of the blankety blank judge that sent me here. Governor changed the conversation, tapered it off, went on down the corridor talking to somebody else, and that fella stayed in his cell.

If he’d said, oh, I’ll never get out of here, I have no hope. But if I ever do, if by any chance I ever should, the first thing I would do would be to try to straighten up the wrongs I did that put me here. First thing I would do would be to go back and admit I lied and get right with some of my friends that I made into enemies and I’d get a job and I’d try to forget all this and I’d try to be a good American and honor that flag that flies yonder on the top of that tower that I see through my bar, the bars. I’d try to be a good man again.

Do you know what would happen? The governor would have given him a pardon because he was fishing around, he wanted him to say that. But he didn’t say it. He said I’d cut to throw him a judge. He stayed in there because pardons are conditioned upon intention to reform.

Now you can’t save a man who insists upon continuing in the thing that caused him to be unsaved. Just as a lifeguard sees a man bobbing in the water and he plunges in, grabs him to drag him out and as soon as he lets loose of him he plunges back in again and keeps right at it. A lifeguard can’t save a man that doesn’t want to be saved.

A fireman goes to a building and hears somebody looking out the third story and they get a ladder up and they try to bring him down, and he scratches and fights and kicks and refuses to come out of the fire but they take him down anyhow and he runs right back up. You can’t save a man from a fire who insists upon running back into the fire again.

What a terrible, moral incongruity it is to try to teach forgiveness without intention to reform. To teach pardon and cleansing where there isn’t any intention to change the life. It would upset heaven and turn it into a moral insane asylum. And in a hundred years you wouldn’t know heaven from hell.

No, my brother. Here are the voices, the voice of reason singing its duet stern voice of exhortation and the gracious voice of promise and all stemming from reason. In reason’s voice here they all rejoice.

Now, another thing is that intention can be proved only by the changed life. That’s the only way of knowing. You notice there are nine active verbs here. Wash, make, put, cease, leave, seek, relieve, and plead. Nine active verbs. Do you know the difference between an active and a passive verb? Maybe some of you haven’t been to school so long you’ve forgotten about it. You went through that thing, and they forced you to learn what a passive and an active verb was. They made you learn voice. Passive voice, active voice.

Now, which is the passive, which is the active voice? And you flunked it. Or you learned it and forgot it just as soon as you could get around the corner. But while teachers, God bless them, have a way of making it look tough for you, really there’s something to that active and passive voice business.

The passive voice is a verb that receives the action. I just stand here and somebody does something to me. I passively receive the act. But if I do something that’s active, that’s a change of voice. I am loved. There it is. That’s the old familiar Latin. I am loved. That’s passive. Somebody loves me. I don’t know how realistic that is. But anyhow, that’s the receiving of the action. I receive the action. I don’t have to do a thing except stand here and look pretty. I receive the action. But I love. That’s positive. That’s active.

Now, the curse of religion today is that we’re in the passive voice. We’re receiving everything. It’s coming our way. But God puts nine active verbs ahead of the Word. If your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as snow. He puts nine active verbs there.

Well, nobody’s probably changed any because I have said this. Wash you. That’s active. I am washed. That’s passive. Pray for me. That I may hold faithful unto the end. I am washed. But the Lord says, Wash you. Put away the evil of your doing. The passive voice says, The evil of my doing has been put away. Somebody else did it. They just stood there and looked like St. Francis.

Now, I say the passive voice is the curse of religion. Everything is done for us and everything is done to us. There we are. It’s all done for us, and all done to us. We are spectators in place of participators.

Now, the promise of cleansing is here based upon and contingent upon our actively changing our way of life. Oh, thank God I can go on to this. No sin is too vile to be forgiven. All manner of sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven unto man. Whatsoever sins they sin, said Jesus, except one. And that is the unpardonable sin.

And we might as well skip that because the unpardonable sin is one committed by people who wouldn’t believe they had if you had told them. So as far as you’re personally concerned, you can dismiss the thought of the unpardonable sin from your mind because the man who’s committed the unpardonable sin can’t do anything about it because he won’t believe it and wouldn’t if he could.

So there, we’ll, without undoing violence to the Scriptures, we’ll simply put the emphasis here that all manner of sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven unto the sons of men. That which can’t be forgiven belongs in an area that is never affected by gospel preaching. Pharisees and those who are sure of themselves and walk the earth and utter self-righteousness, they’ve committed it. But if you can still feel sorry and worry about your sin, you haven’t.

And so, no matter, says the voice of God’s tender, gracious reason, no matter what the man himself thinks of his sin, and no matter what the public thinks of your sin, and no matter if it’s as intense as scarlet and as dark as crimson, all manner of sin shall be forgiven unto the sons of men, says the Bible. Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow, and though they be red like crimson, they shall be as white as snow. Some of our missionaries go to countries where they’ve never seen snow, and they’ve never seen sheep.

And so, when they come to this text, and it’s oh so necessary, they come to this text and others like it, they don’t know what to do when they translate the Scripture, they don’t know where to get a figure that people know, and all the white things they ever knew were dirty, you know, telltale grime. So they have an awful time trying to get something that’ll make the people see what it is to be utterly white.

I remember hearing of the washerwoman who was hanging her wash on the line, and a new snow had fallen, absolutely whiter than white. She was hanging up her wash. And the contrast between her very wonderful, lovely wash and the snow looked pretty bad for her. And a passerby, just good-naturedly kidding her, said, your wash doesn’t look so clean this morning, does it? And she said, oh no, what can compare with God’s whiteness? What can be compared with God’s whiteness? So wool and snow are white, but whiter than snow, David said.

Ah, brother, it’s wonderful that there’s this other part of the text. Wouldn’t that be terrible if God’s thunderous voice roared at us? Whoosh, you, make you clean! Oh God, how, how? What can I do? The other voice softens down and says, though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow. I thank God for the cleansing that cleanses the crimson and the scarlet.

And then he says this, if you be willing and obedient, ye shall eat of the good of the land. The willing and obedient Christian, or the willing and obedient person, shall eat of the good of the land. Oh, what a beautiful wealth of mixed metaphors and confused figures.

When God wants to show us how much He loves us, He makes the language groan under the effort. When He wants to tell us how white we can be, He takes all figures of speech and strains them to the breaking point. The blood of Jesus Christ cleanses from all sin.

Some of those old camp meeting songs tell the story. I was once a sinner, but I came. Pardoned to receive from the Lord. Now I am forgiven. And? I know. That? By the blood I have made whole. Yes, sir. There’s a new name written down in glory. And it’s mine, I know it’s mine. And the white-robed angels tell the story, a sinner has come home. Ah, the old camp meeting brethren who jumped over the benches and praised God with the loud voices, they were realists. They were happy because there was something to be happy about.

But the world is happy over deceptive appearances. Which side are you going to be on? If ye be willing and obedient, ye shall eat of the good of the land. Humble yourself. Will to do God’s will. Put some action in your repentance. Wash you. You say, how can I wash me? Well, really you can’t. If it means washing your own heart. But you can get rid of a lot of those dirty habits you’ve got now.

We preach that men ought to get converted in order to get rid of dirty habits. Borrowing two or three maybe, like dope and liquor. There isn’t a habit man has, he shouldn’t be able to quit like that.

My father was sixty years old. He had smoked and chewed from the time he could remember. One day he looked at that tobacco and he said, boy, that’s dirty looking stuff. He said, I’m going to quit it. And he did. And he didn’t even ask God to help him. He just quit it. Oh dear God, please help me to get rid of that dirty, smelly, rotten, foul, polluting pipe.

Help me, Lord. Jesus Christ died on a cross squirming like a serpent. And you haven’t got moral backbone enough to quit chewing dirty tobacco. Help me, dear Father, that I may quit going to the movies. God didn’t take you to the movies. You took yourself. Help me, Father, that I might quit lying. God never taught you to lie. Quit your lying. Help me to be honest, Father.

Well, that’s no prayer to make. If you’re not honest, you’ll go to jail. Somebody will get you. Help me, Father, that I may not falsify my income tax. Well, Sam will get around to checking you one of these days, and then we’ll come and sing for you. Have a meeting where you are.

That happened in one of our Alliance churches. Yeah, that happened. Two of the elders, mind you. Elders in the church in Canada during the World War. Two Alliance elders falsified their income tax. And only got off because they promised to pay up, and the scandal hit the newspapers.

Help me to be honest, Father. Dear God, what kind of sissies are we? Is it any wonder that we’re spineless and boneless and without any strength of character. We go through life, Christians unable to resist temptation, the world magnetically pulling us to it. We can’t pray. We can’t suffer because we’re passive Christians.

We think God ought to be doing it all. Forgetting it’s a two-way street. Forgetting that it is a reciprocal agreement. Forgetting that we are to obey, be willing and obedient, and we shall go to the land. I have a lot of sympathy for children. I have sympathy for sick people. I have sympathy for people who’ve been caught in one or two habits they can’t escape, such as dope. I have sympathy for those who are in jail and those who are insane. Sympathy for the bereaved and those who lost loved ones by desertion. I have sympathy.

Oh, God knows what sympathy my heart has for it all. But I can’t manage to drum up an awful lot of sympathy for some old rounder who has lived like the devil because he loved it and then says, I can’t quit. I can’t quit.

A woman came down to the altar and she wanted God to fill her with the Holy Ghost and she couldn’t say yes to God. Just couldn’t say yes to God. She screamed and let her hair come down. They wore hair in those days. Women did. And she, oh, it was a distressing thing and everybody pitied her, you know. Pitied all this soul. She’s really struggling. She’s really struggling. And inadvertently the feeling was God was being pretty tough on her.

So, after several nights of this writhing and groaning, she took a, nobly and heroically, stripped ring from her finger and tossed it to the evangelist and said, give it to missions, Amen, and she got blessed. The evangelist said, boy, this is a gem. This is a nugget. Will the missionary board be glad to get this? So, he went down the next day and had it appraised. The jeweler said, three twenty-eight. Give you $3.28 for it.

And she was struggling over that. Now, I can’t pity her. If she lost her baby, I could pity her. Then I could suffer with her for that. If her husband was killed in Korea, I could pity her until my heart ached. But I can’t pity that kind of cheap stuff, that kind of passivity. That kind of religious jellyfishism. I can’t pity that and I don’t believe God does.

It’s time that we Christians woke up and wound our backbone. Wound the thing up until it was tight. And said, now God, show me what to do. And got out there and got active. If ye be willing and obedient, ye shall eat the good of the land. Amen.

If you’re willing and obedient, ye shall eat the good of the land. But if you refuse and rebel, nothing but judgment lies before you.

What do you say tonight, friend? God is calling you and you are every sound reason why you should follow him. Every sound reason why you should be an all-out-and-out Christian, every sound reason. And not one lonely reasonable argument can be brought against either staying unsaved or staying half-saved. Not one reasonable argument. Every voice of reason cries not only that you be saved, but that you be fully saved. What about it tonight? Let us pray.

O Christ, everything seems so simple. And we, like the Jews, are looking for miracles. We, like the Greeks, are looking for wisdom. When it’s all so very simple. If you will amend your doings, and obey my voice, then I will cleanse you whiter than snow, and make you as white as wool, and ye shall eat of the good of the land.

Father, it’s so simple. We beseech Thee, help us to see it. We beseech Thee that we may not foolishly cast away these great gems of truth. We pray Thee tonight, our Father, that we may not fail to hear thee speaking to us when Thou art speaking so plainly. God bless this people. It’s hot here tonight. And we, the people, have listened with patience.

O God, Holy Spirit, we beseech Thee, drive Thy merciful arrows so deep into their hearts that they’ll not be able to pull them out ever until they come to Calvary’s fountain where they are cleansed and forgiven and healed and the old wound of conviction is drawn and cleansed and healed. Help us as we wait upon Thee.

We’re going to close pretty soon. Before we do, before I close my prayer, I’d like to know are there those, or how many there are, who would say, I’d like to be included, Mr. Tozer, in your prayer. Please pray for me. I’m not a Christian. I really truly know, or I’m afraid at least, that I’m not a true Christian. I’d like you to remember me.

Now, I won’t come back and talk to you. I just want to know that you want me to pray. I want you to stand right where you are. Would you do that? Would you stand? Would you stand up? I don’t apologize for this at all. A little thing like that is so small. Communists are standing up for what they believe. Jehovah’s Witnesses are down on the street corner giving out literature. Catholics are telling their beads on buses and streetcars. Everybody else seems to have courage. What’s the matter with us?

If you say, Mr. Tozer, pray for me, before you close your prayer, stand, please. How about the half-saved Christians? Marginal Christians? Christians that are on the edges of things. You say, Mr. Tozer, I believe you. Every reason is on the side of my becoming an out-and-out, consecrated, Spirit-filled Christian. Please pray for me.

Will you stand? Dare to do it where you are. Yes, stand. Stand and say, pray for me. I want to pray before we close. Before we finish our prayer. I think there are a good many Christians here that are consecrated Christians, all out and out for God, whose lives, whose testimony, whose day-by-day walk, whose generosity, whose long record of faithful praying and faithful living prove that they’re not half-Christians, but wholly, totally God’s consecrated, Spirit-filled Christians. I believe that.

But there are some, and they know who I mean, and they know that they have no such record of consecrated, Godly, faithful, consistent walk with God. They know it. So, I’m appealing. Would you like to stand and say, remember me? Just where you are.

Well, the dear God knows, Father, we thank Thee for every true Christian, and we don’t want to underrate one of them. And we don’t want to make a case for ourselves by preaching people down in order to get them back up.

We thank Thee for every true Christian, and we know a lot of them. They wouldn’t sin if they could know it was sin. They’re true and honest and faithful and right and good and prayerful.

But, O God, Thou knowest how many are carnal and yet sold unto sin, worldly and only marginal Christians. Great God, we pray for all such. Pray that there will come to us a revival that will sweep us like floods out of this condition and revive us again in the midst of the years. Grant it, we pray Thee, in Christ’s name. Amen.

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The Voice of the Holy Spirit

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

June 14, 1953

I would speak tonight on the Voice of the Spirit. I want to read some Scripture, John 16: 7 down to 11. Nevertheless, I tell you the truth. It is expedient for you that I go away. For if I go not away, the Comforter will not come unto you. But if I depart, I will send him unto you. And when He is come, He will reprove the world of sin and of righteousness and of judgment, of sin because they believe not on Me, of righteousness because I go to my Father and ye see Me no more, or of judgment because the prince of this world is judged.

In Revelation 2 and 3, I’ll not read them, seven times the text is repeated. He that hath an ear, let him hear what the Spirit is saying unto the churches. Then in the last chapter of Revelation, verse 17, the Spirit and the Bride say, come. And let him that heareth say, come. And let him that is athirst, come. And whosoever will, let him take of the water of life freely.

Let us pray. Our Father, in us, in our flesh dwelleth no good thing. In our minds dwell no power of persuasion. Without Thee we can do nothing, but with thee we can do all things. So now, Father, we turn away, as though we were taking an axe away from a little boy and giving it to a man. As though we were shoving aside an amateur and letting a master sit down to the instrument. We shove aside the man that men know, and we invite the man Christ Jesus to speak and to effectively confirm the word by the Holy Ghost. Help us tonight, Lord. Tomorrow may be too late. We ask it in Jesus’ name. Amen.

Now, let me say again that the world we inhabit is a lost world. And the inhabitants of the world are lost. The inhabitants of the world are lost, not in any poetic sense of the word, but they are lost by a mighty, calamitous visitation of woe too grave, too terrible to describe.

And to make it worse still, this lostness is inside the heart. You see, there are two ways of getting lost down here. There is the way that a child may sometimes get lost in the city, go around the block and cross the street and forget where it is. It is geographically lost or physically lost, but it knows it’s lost, and its lostness is external.

Then there is the confirmed amnesia victim that is lost in his mind. He does not remember who he is, how old he is, where he was born, what he did, does not remember anything up to a given moment yesterday or the day before.

That is a worse kind of lostness than the lostness of a child that wanders down the street and can’t find his way home. For a dozen policemen will help with the child, and the child will advertise to high heaven that it’s lost. But the amnesia victim doesn’t know that he’s lost. And his closest and dearest friends, his own wife, can come and speak to him, and he’s courteous but completely detached and indifferent. He’s lost inside. And to add still to the terror of this situation, the inhabitants of the world are not only lost, and not only lost inwardly, but worst of all is that they scarcely know that they are lost.

Now, that’s the state we’re in. And yet there are voices that are entreating us, and it gives me great pleasure to say, and this is basic to the Christian message, that while the world is a lost world, it is not yet a forsaken world. God is speaking in many voices, and there are voices that entreat us because God has not forsaken His lost world. He said, and cried, Adam, where art thou?

You’ll find all through the Bible the voices of entreaty, of invitation, of alarm. Ho, every one that is thirsty, come ye to the waters. And he that hath no money, come ye, buy. Wine and milk without money and without price. Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden. And I will give you rest.

Now, those are only samples of the many hundreds of verses that are sounding and echoing through the Scriptures. But the clearest, loudest, most easily distinguishable voice is the voice of the Spirit. And His voice gives grave and serious meaning to any other and to all other voices.

For if it were not for the presence of the Spirit uttering His voice through the consciences of the world, no other voice would have any significance whatsoever. It would all be sounding brass and tinkling cymbal, giving forth no meaning, for Jesus our Lord, tells us here of the Holy Spirit’s work in the world.

And He says in the text, when He is come, when He is come. When the writer wrote the song, The Comforter is Come, he set in fairly good hymnody one of the great facts of the world, that the Comforter is here. And the Comforter came to confirm Christ’s words and Christ’s works and Christ’s person.

Now, the words of the Lord Jesus Christ were words so lofty and so astounding as those of no other religious teacher. Christ was not the only religious teacher. We have had the great religious teachers of the East and we have them still on down to Mrs. Eddy and Father Divine.

There have been christs saying, Lo here and lo there. There have been men saying, I have the voice of God, I am speaking for God. And they have established their religion, some major, some minor, some long forgotten, some still going strong throughout the earth.

But the words of Jesus were in a class by themselves. The claims that He made, brand Him immediately as being God or an idiot. The claims that He made outclassed and outstripped the claims of all the other religious teachers in the world. Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up, He said, of His own body.

I saw Satan as lightning fall from heaven. Before Abraham was, I am. Then shall they see the Son of Man coming in the clouds of heaven and before Him shall be gathered all nations. And He shall separate them as the sheep from the goats.

Those are but a sampling of the astounding words of Jesus and the claims that He made. If you believe not that I am He, you shall die in your sins. And God has given all judgment into My hand. Marvel not at this, for the day will come when they that are in the graves shall hear My voice and shall come forth.

Now nobody ever talked like that. And many who heard Him did not believe Him. But He said when the Holy Ghost is come and the Holy Ghost came as a silent, penetrating, immediate witness.

Now there is no contradiction here when I say that the Holy Spirit’s voice entreats us. And then I also say He came as a silent, penetrating, immediate witness. For silence is sometimes more eloquent than sound. And the penetrating stillness of the Holy Ghost is more terrible than the loudest shout from the housetop.

And the Holy Ghost is here confirming the words of Jesus. That is why the critics are all in confusion. That is why when a man becomes a doubter and begins to pull the Word of God apart, God makes a fool of him immediately, puts long, hairy ears on him and turns him out to pasture. And he writes himself some books. And standing solemn faced as a barn owl, he says things to students in his classes that would bring hell down in roars of laughter.

And yet he doesn’t know that he’s being funny. For God has withdrawn from him the inner light and he is speaking as a fool speaks. Because the silent, penetrating voice of the Holy Ghost is not heard in his words. He hears it no more.

But the Holy Spirit is here to confirm to the consciences of men the truth of the words of Jesus. And the works of Jesus. There was no denying that a mighty miracle worker had been there. He did raise the dead. He did heal the sick. He did cleanse the leper. He did turn the water into wine. He did make the bread, a few pieces of bread to feed the multitude.

He did do these wonderful things and there was no denying it. The Pharisees didn’t try to deny it. They could not, seeing the man that was healed standing among them. They couldn’t say anything. You cannot deny a fact that stands and stares you in the face, that you can touch and feel and push around and investigate.

You can’t possibly deny such a fact and they didn’t try it. They simply said, He does His works in the power of the devil. Somebody was doing miracle works there and when He has come, the Holy Ghost came that He might confirm and verify the divine quality of the works of Jesus and prove Him not to be one more miracle peddler but indeed the very God who had made the world and could make it do what He pleased for it to do.

And then there was the person of the Lord Jesus Christ. The most significant, the most telling person that ever lived in the world was Jesus. I think that could generally be agreed among all peoples of the world. Even the Mohammedans might admit that. And certainly the great religions of the East would admit it. That He was, that He stands out in history. Head and shoulders as above all the great.

And now how are we to dispose of Him? What’s the world to do with Him? What are religious minded people to do with this mighty person that stood taller than the tall pine tree at the beginning of the Christian era?

Well, the Holy Ghost came to do a confirmatory work, and He raised Him from the dead. And now since the Spirit has come, this mysterious witness has come. Christ is no longer on trial. And it’s no longer a question of was Jesus the Son of God? All that is beside the point and irrelevant.

And there’s never any such thing anymore as a sincere question, was Jesus the Son of God? The Holy Ghost has taken out of the realm of polemics the idea of Christ’s deity and has put it in the realm of morals. And this silent, immediate witness, this penetrating voice in the consciences of men tell us that this person was indeed the very Son of God.

It was very noticeable, wasn’t it, that as soon as Peter was filled with the Holy Ghost, he immediately rose and preached what he had never preached before. Namely, that this man whom ye crucified is the Christ of God.

That God raised Him from the dead and He is the Lord and the Christ of God. And as soon as Paul was filled with the Holy Ghost, you will find that Paul in the ninth chapter of Acts went doing exactly the same thing. He reasoned and proved from the Scriptures that Jesus was the Son of God. That the coming Messiah was to be the Son of God and that that man was Jesus. So that the Holy Spirit’s witness is a witness to the lordship and deity of the Son of God.

So my friends, remember this, that Jesus Christ needs no more of your defense. Jesus Christ needs no more books written to prove that he was God. Jesus Christ is no longer on trial. He needs no advocate pleading His cause before the unfriendly court of the world. He needs no witness to rise and say, I know He was the Son of God. He needs no reasoner with his fine logic to prove it by history that Jesus Christ was the Son of God. The proof of the Sonship of Jesus has been removed from the realm of the intellect and placed where it always has belonged in the realm of morals.

And the Holy Ghost has put it there. When He has come, when He has come and He came and He is here and He may be grieved and He may have to withdraw Himself partly from some places, but He is here and He is here as a silent Holy Witness, more eloquent than all the noise of the world, saying this Man was indeed the Son of God. I say that Jesus Christ is no longer on trial before men, but men are now on trial before Him.

And strange and wonderful as it may be, He who once stood before Pilate now makes Pilate to stand before Him. And He who pleaded His cause before the unfriendly world now sits and judges that same world. And He’s transferred the religious question to the heart.

There is a throne where one sits where never a man can come. And there is on that throne a Man–wonderful paradox. The long claws that stretched out to get Him and take Him to the cross can never reach as high as that throne where He sits.

And yet He sits there in the form of a man so that we would recognize Him instantly in the shape of a man and know that this is a Man and He’s there invested with full authority and full power and with full right of judgment. And there is a holy witness present Who in all things speaks for this Man who sits on the throne. It is expedient for you that I go away. For if I go not away, He will not come. But if I go, I will send Him unto you. And when He is come, He will convince the world concerning sin and righteousness and judgment.

And now I think that we ought to remember that however we treat the Holy Spirit’s warnings, we treat Jesus Christ himself. However we treat the Spirit’s presence, we treat the Lord Himself. We ought to get that in mind. Christ the Lord is not some faraway being, but He is mysteriously, wondrously present now in our midst in the person of the Holy Spirit. When He is come, He will convince the world concerning. And He is here now convincing the world.

And the fate of the individual man does not depend upon historic evidence. Now with all my heart, I believe in the historicity of the Gospels. This is not a subterfuge to hide away from the belief in the historicity of the Gospels. I believe they’re historically correct. I believe that they can be confirmed in the format of history. I believe everything that’s here is historically true.

But let me point out something to you, my friends. If faith depended upon a man knowing enough history in its right and proper context and being familiar enough with the writings of the historians of the world to arrive at a scholarly belief in the deity of Jesus, then there could only be a relatively few people anywhere in the world saved.

If in order to believe in Jesus Christ, I had to know the historic facts of Rome and Greece and Palestine and Syria and Egypt, and if I had to be able to go to the great tomes and search for myself and discover the historic truth, and then having discovered that historic truth, I had to know enough of the laws of evidence to know whether it proved him to be the Son of God or not, then I would have to be a scholar, a logician, and a lawyer to arrive at belief in the deity of the Lord Jesus Christ.

But the Holy Ghost came to take the deity of Christ out of the hands of the scholars and put it in the consciences of men. The Holy Ghost came to lift it out of the history books and put it on the fleshy tablets of the human heart. So you can go to the jungles where men cannot read and write, where they wear nothing but a G-string, and you can begin to preach Jesus Christ and sin, and the Holy Ghost will witness to sin and righteousness and judgment, and He will confirm the truth of Christ’s words and works and Person to the most ignorant jungle heathen. And that heathen never heard of Rome, never heard of Greece, never heard of Pilate, never heard of Caesar, never knew the city of Rome ever existed, doesn’t know that Palestine exists, doesn’t know where Jerusalem is, never heard of David, never heard of Abraham, knows nothing about the Reformation.

And yet you can go, a missionary and simply tell the story, and they’ll begin to tremble and sweat with the knowledge that they’re sinners, and they’ll believe in Jesus Christ. And having believed, they’ll be transformed and turned inside out, and made honest and good and clean and humble and right, and they’ll learn to read and they’ll begin to sing the simple Gospels, they’ll form themselves into a church.

And the great, strong, elemental fellows born of the jungle and the wild winds and the stars will become deacons and elders and preachers in that church. And they have no scholarship, no knowledge of history, no ability to weigh evidences. They know nothing about relevance and irrelevance and the laws of evidence.

No, when He came, He took polemics away from the scholars and gave it back to the human soul, so that now my faith in the deity of Jesus does not rest upon my ability to comb through history and arrive at logical conclusions concerning historic facts. The Holy Ghost blazes in on me like a lightning flash, blinds me with the wonder of it. If ye are willing to do His will, ye shall know the doctrine whether I speak of God or not, said Jesus our Lord, when the Holy Ghost has come. And He is here. I think that this is one of the most important truths that can be taught in the world today.

And yet, so far as I know, I’m the one single lone individual who is preaching. There may be others, and certainly in the spirit of it and in the whole weight and drift of it, my friend Ravenhill agrees with me on this. We’ve talked over these things and we’re one in it. But we’re one or two or three at most in the midst of a vast cloud and sea of witnesses that are prepared to make the deity of Christ rest upon historical evidence when the Holy Ghost has taken it away from that realm altogether and has put it as a burning point in the human conscience.

So the problem today is a moral problem altogether. It’s not an intellectual problem at all. Now don’t let’s be too humble here. Don’t let’s, like a lot of poor misguided people do, admit with a wry face that we’re a bunch of dumbbells and barely know our letters. Augustine was not a dumbbell. Luther wrote his theses first in Latin and then in German. He wrote to the Pope, and wrote it first in Latin for the Pope and then wrote it in German to give to the people.

No, no, you don’t have to pump your head out so it’s a blessed vacuum in order to be a Christian. And there’s much use for the human mind, so keep yours. There’s much use for the human brain, so take care of it, keep it cool and educate it all you can. There’s lots of use for it.

But I repeat, the use for it will not be in the realm of divine evidence. The Holy Ghost takes care of that. And the Holy Ghost is here to confirm the person of Jesus. And whatever the Holy Ghost says, stands forever. And whatever He does now, the judgment will approve and confirm.

We come into a church like this, oh, we get here some way. If we got here, maybe got here to meet a girl or a boy. Maybe we came here hoping we would. Maybe we came here to get our parents off our neck. Maybe we were just wandering by and wondered what it was all about. Maybe it’s just a habit. Any one of the 25 reasons might be dredged up out of our memory right now. And we think we can just come in and go away again and there’ll be no harm done, like going to a PTA meeting. Well, I’m a little bored, but I’ll sit through it. What’s it all about? And when it’s all over, you go neither better nor worse.

My friends, a concept like that ignores one of the most vitally important facts in the world. And that is that wherever the Lord’s people meet, the Holy Ghost is there, confirming the Word and the work and the person of Jesus and demanding moral action, so that a man never knows when he goes to a gospel meeting. He never knows when the last shred of excuse will be stripped from his naked, trembling conscience forever. For the Holy Ghost is not fooling. Sometimes preachers are.

I heard this terrible thing recently, this terrible thing. A man, and I think he was a minister; he had a good sense of humor. And he, knowing the Bible, he learned how to make the Scriptures always say the right thing. Payoff line, as we say.mAnd when there’d be a conversation on, he’d turn it around so that a flip of the verbal tail that made people laugh was always a Scripture quotation.

One day, he came to die. And they said to him, well, you must find great comfort in the Scriptures. And they began to quote the Scriptures to him. And he said, don’t, don’t, don’t quote it, don’t quote it, don’t quote it. There isn’t a verse you can quote that I haven’t made the subject of a joke. And now, when I need it, it means nothing to me.

The Holy Ghost isn’t joking. People may be, and it’s gotten in this country now, in evangelical circles, where a man without a sense of humor can’t get to first base. He’s got to be funny. Let’s go hear that jaybird, he’s funny as a crutch. The very fact, said Dr. Buswell, you can call a preacher a jaybird proves he’s lost his character.

And men may play, but the Holy Ghost is in dead earnest. Jesus Christ went away in dead earnest. And He sat down in utter, solemn sincerity by the presence of the Majesty on High. And He sent that wave of silvery light, containing in Himself all the essence of the Father and the Son. Down He came in the form of a dove.

And then as fire sat upon each of them, and they knew that Jesus was the Son of God, they knew it instantly. They didn’t know it while He was among them, but they knew it then. They didn’t know it for sure, but they knew it now. And the Scripture says that when He has come, He will convince men concerning.

Now, the Holy Spirit will not witness to minor matters. Another important thing I’m saying here tonight, that you can’t get the Holy Ghost involved in minor things. Let’s reach up and pull out a grotesque illustration out of the air. And let’s put it like this. Let’s imagine last fall when two great and good men were running for the presidency. I insist upon them both as great and good men, Stevenson and Eisenhower.

And these two men were running against each other for the presidency. Suppose that in their speeches, suppose that Eisenhower had insisted upon attacking Stevenson’s baldness. And let us suppose that Stevenson, paying thousands of dollars for time on the air, would get up and in his brilliant witty way, would have spent a whole half hour talking about Eisenhower’s wretched taste in ties. Neither man could have been elected. They would have elected at Chinaman by a write-in vote.

For in serious and important matters, you deal with basic principles. And they both tried to do it. And they dealt with domestic problems, foreign relations, taxes. They dealt with problems that go to the roots of American living.

Do you suppose the Holy Ghost is any less wise than politicians? And yet we want the Holy Spirit to help us while we talk about trivialities.

That’s why I scorn to debate over things that don’t matter. That’s why they’ll never get me concerned with the little niceties of prophecy. And that is why though we have baptized by immersion, we’ll never condemn those who don’t believe in that mode of baptism. That is why I will not engage in controversy over eternal security. And that is why you cannot get me involved because I want the Holy Ghost to help me, and He won’t help me fool. He’ll only help me when I’m serious. And the Spirit of God is here.

Now a lot of people try to escape by pretending. They pretend that they are seekers. They say, I’m a seeker after light. Could you look in the glass and say, I’m a seeker after light? When He has come, He will convince. And then you say, I’m a seeker after light. Your problem is not lack of light. Your problem is a moral problem.

And yet men try to hide and escape by pretending. They say, I don’t know which form of baptism. He did not say when the Holy Ghost has come, He will convince that the Baptists are right. Nor did he say when the Holy Ghost has come, He will convince the world that infant baptism is correct. He said when the Holy Ghost has come, He’ll talk about three vital things, sin and righteousness and judgment. And he insists on moral sincerity.

As I rode along tonight on the bus coming up here, I thought this radical thing to myself. Modified it a little, even in my own head. But I thought, I’m not sure that God hasn’t got more respect for a sincere devil than he has for an insincere religionist. If a devil is a devil and he hates God and loves sin, and he’s sincere about it, God will reject him forever from His presence, but He’ll say, there goes somebody at least I can respect. He means what He says. I would thou art hot or cold, because thou art lukewarm, and neither hot or cold, I’ll spew thee out of my mouth.

I say a sincere devil stands higher in moral things than an insincere Christian or religious person. I’m not sure about baptism. When I’ve settled on what mode of baptism I want to be baptized with, I’ll become a Christian. Liar. You might as well know it. That’s insincere. That’s hypocrisy. That’s pharisaism. That’s dodging the issue. There’s no truth there.

Some say if I knew what church was, which church is it, Mr. Tozer. Tell me now. Write me a letter. Write me a letter and say, now Mr. Tozer, which church is it? The Roman church, Greek church, Protestant church, Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian, Nazarene, Pentecostal, what church is it? Have they never heard the Voice? Have they never been still enough to hear the mysterious witness that penetrates to their conscience and says, sin and righteousness and judgment? If they had ever heard the Voice and had ever been sincere in response to it, they’d never have any reason to ask such questions.

Now, these three vital things, He presses them home, for they’re critical and they’re eternal and they’re important. These three vital things, sin and righteousness and judgment, and sinned because they believe not on Me. The one belief is the sign and the proof of sin.

Now let me say this again from a little different angle, that faith is also a moral thing. I’ve said this before and you that know me will have heard me say it before and probably wonder why I’m saying it now. But if you wonder why I’m saying it now, then you didn’t know what I meant when I said it before.

I believe that we are where we are in evangelical circles because of a basic misunderstanding of faith. We think that faith is a conclusion drawn from a fact. And out in the world that is so, but in the realm of the Spirit it is not so. Saving faith is not a conclusion drawn from facts presented. Saving faith is a gift of God to a penitent man.

And there’s where we are. The young fellow will get down on his knees, anybody will do that. Go anywhere and you can get them on their knees. Go down among the rattlesnake handlers in the mountains and you’ll find them there. Go over to Arabia and you’ll find them down five times a day on a prayer mat. Anybody will go to his knees if you don’t make any demands of him. It’s a simple matter to get people forward, it’s a simple matter to get them to their knees.

So while they’re on their knees, somebody rushes in with a marked testament and sticks a text under their nose and says, who said it? He says, God. Do you believe God? Yes. Well then do you believe the text? Yes, I must because I believe God. Well then get up and testify. And he gets up with an intellectual faith that has not saving in it or any saving quality. That’s where we are now. It takes three works of grace to put a man in this day where the first beginnings of salvation used to put him in olden times.

Well, He’ll convince the world concerning sin. When I was growing up, they were telling me this little thing. Oh, how I thank God I’ve been a rebel all my life and a skeptic all my life. If I hadn’t been, I might have been pastor of a big church and no heart in it. I could have been. You know, I don’t hurt anybody and I don’t make any moral demands on them, kiss the babies, pat everybody, eat cake with them, drink a proper amount of English tea and don’t hurt anybody’s feelings and thunder against modernism.

And take a man dead 50 years and rip him to pieces and prove that he was a scoundrel because he didn’t believe the margins of the Schofield Bible. I could have had a big church, brother, ridden in a caddy. Sure, I had sense enough to know that way back there. But I thank God I’ve been a rebel all my life and still am. And I’m in rebellion against that kind of teaching that would pick chickens out of their shell and let them die and against that kind of practice that would take over the work of the Holy Ghost and crowd Him out and retire Him.

This is the age of the superannuated Holy Ghost. We’ve retired Him and said, thanks, we have our Bible, a good King James translation, and we won’t need You till the millennium. And the Holy Spirit is a marginal annotation and is taken care of by a few proof texts and forgotten. But He won’t be forgotten like that. He holds your faith in His hand.

They used to say, the problem today is not that sin question, the problem is the Son question. And if you will believe in the Son, why the matter of sin is all taken care of.

I heard one man who had better been doing something else the time, I recommend hoeing in the garden. But he said this, he said sin has no more meaning to God. On Calvary, sin beat itself to death and perished. And now sin has no meaning to God since Calvary. He ought to have been raising tulips, and not preaching the gospel. For he was a good man talking like a blooming idiot.

The problem never has been the Son question. The problem has been the sin question from the day he stretched forth her hand in an evil hour and gave also to her husband and he did eat. And when the sin question is settled, the Son question comes leaping in, happily solved. And if you will be willing to do the will of God, you shall know that Jesus is the son of God. And you won’t have to read long books to prove it. It’s all there.

Now, not only sin but righteousness, the voice of the Holy Spirit. Righteousness because I go to my Father. And the fact that He went to His Father is conspicuous proof of the world’s condition. For there was one righteous Man in the world and He couldn’t stay. There was one righteous Man and He had to leave. He was too good to stay. They hounded Him out of the world.

And today, the more we become like Him, the less welcome we are in society. To make Christianity socially acceptable is an effort that’s worse than wasted. To make out of the cross a symbol and relegate its nails and thorns and blood and terror and ostracism back to the hill above Jerusalem and forget that that same cross is alive today wherever the Gospels preach is to commit a theological error as deadly as Russellism. And yet it’s what we hear most of the time. After all, believe me, we know better now; they don’t crucify people now.

They don’t crucify people now because they can get along with them too easily. There’s too much collaboration between men who claim to follow the Crucified One and the people who don’t believe in the Crucified One. Wherever they can catch a Christ-like man, they’ll run for the nails and the hammer.

And what we need, I don’t pray for it. I haven’t the courage to pray for it. But I’m here and I’m at God’s disposal. But what we need in our day is to have some more Christians crucified. We need more persecution. We need a social situation that makes it dangerous to be a Christian. But it isn’t dangerous now. It’s quite the popular thing.

They use a preacher now for almost anything. They can’t cut a tape. They ought to have a preacher there to cut the tape. They can’t break ground for anything. The latest dog pound at what reverend has to be there to say a prayer and break the first shovel full while he looks up, smirks at the camera. The ladies can’t begin their campaign to drive all the ground moles out of Cook County except they have a pastor there. He’s got to be there to mumble a few words, smile, and look religious. But nobody crucifies the old boy. They get along with him, get along with him.

But there was one righteous Man, and He couldn’t stay. Their faces went as black as canes, and their countenance fell. And they said, we won’t be made moral fools of by this man. And they nailed Him on the cross.

And the Holy Ghost is here to convince the world concerning that unpardoned act, that act of crucifying the world’s only holy Man, that is, holy in the final absolute sense of the word who was holy without being made holy. There may be holy men now, and there may be righteous men now. But they’re righteous men because they were made righteous by the One who never was made righteous. Jesus Christ never was any less righteous than He is now. He never had to be washed nor cleansed, and His baptism was never a baptism for cleansing.

And when the Holy Ghost came upon Him, He came upon Him as a dove and not as fire. And there was no need for purgation. And the Bible never says Christ was baptized with the Holy Ghost. It says He was anointed. Baptism was symbolic of cleansing. Anointing was symbolic of office. He was anointed without cleansing, for He never was anything but clean, the spotless Lamb of God.

And He was the one spotless Man, and He was the man that couldn’t stay. They hounded Him out of the world. Jesus said to the Pharisees when He lived among them, ye have killed the prophets. Now you build their monuments, but you’re still guilty of killing them.

And so we’re now talking nice about Jesus, painting His pictures, saying nice things about Him. We have His blood on our hands as a race. He will convince the world of sin and righteousness and judgment. Now the prince of this world is judged, Jesus said. And the voice of the Spirit speaks of a day of reckoning.

I was thinking how much better it would be if we could have a choice. If God could give us a choice and say, now you’re going to die within the next 12 hours, I’ll give you your choice. Do you want to rise again, or do you want to stay forever in the state of blessed unconsciousness and never rise again? That’s sheer imagination. That could never happen. For God has ordained that all men should rise, some to righteousness and some to everlasting condemnation.

But if a man could have a choice, every once in a while, we read of somebody in a fit of self-pity and a variety of other sins, will get a gun, kill his wife and two or three children, then kill himself. They can’t get at him. Police can’t get at him. You can’t punish him. A coward ten times over. So cowardly that probably hell won’t even admit him until he’s washed a bit.

But if you could give that man an opportunity and say, listen, do you want to rise, or shall we fix it so you’ll never need to wake while millenniums spend themselves? Oh, what a relief for that man. What a relief for that man. My God, my God, he’d cry. I died with the sound of the gaspings of my wife and children in my ears. I died fleeing from it, and I haven’t been able to get away from it. And I hear it yet and hear the sighings and see the blood. Please, please let me go to sleep and never wake again.

It would be a mighty convenient thing if sinners never had to rise from the dead. If they had all, Hitler and Caligula and Mussolini and some more of them had it in their power to stay dead, it would be convenient for them. But they that are in the graves shall hear the voice of the Son of Man.

There’s a judgment. I believe in that judgment. I believe it. They have taken it away from us in the hour in which we live, and they’ve said it’s ridiculous, that God isn’t a bookkeeper, and we can’t conceive of God putting entries in a book like a common clerk. John Jones, 321 West 44th Place, June 14th, 1953, did commit the below-mentioned sins. They say God’s no clerk. God isn’t writing books, debit books.

Oh, how ignorant can we get and still not drop dead? Of course, God isn’t keeping that kind of books. Of course, God isn’t a clerk. But every deed that ever has been committed or ever will be committed from the beginning to the world till the last man is instantly now present before the eyes of God.

And God needs no clerks and no pens. The omniscient God sees perfectly all that ever was and all that is and all that ever will be. And without raising his eyebrows, He knows every man’s heartbeat and every man’s thought and every man’s deed.

So, judgment will be very easy for God. Judgment won’t be difficult for God. Of course, He puts it for us to understand that books were opened, and the dead were brought forth and so on. All that’s to convince men. But God doesn’t need any help like that. God already knows, judgment, sin, and righteousness.

Now the Spirit of God will persist. He’ll keep on. That penetrating, silent, eloquent Voice until the Voice can no longer be heard or until we listen and return. And you know it still works. A man who hears the gospel message and believes it, really believes it, really turns to the Lord Jesus Christ, there’s still transforming power in it. You don’t see much of it, but you see some of it.

I won’t mention names, but I’m thinking of a young fellow. I think he may be present here tonight. He was this morning. You know, nobody looked at him twice. He was just one more boy, young fellow, all good-looking and all that, but just one more young fellow in the millions. Trotted down the aisle here some, maybe two months ago, and something happened to that boy. And the whole life is transformed. His whole life is transformed. His face looks different, better looking than ever. The tone of his voice is different. Everything is different.

Now he says, I’m going to quit my job and get a job where I can be at church. My job’s all right, but it takes me out of church. I’m going to get a job where I can be at church. What happened to the fellow? Only what could happen to everybody that listens and hears the Voice and believes and turns.

Jesus Christ is still the miracle worker. He still raises the dead Lazaruses out of the grave. He still raises the consciences of men out of the deep mud of their past. He still converts. He still regenerates. He still transforms. He still makes Christians out of dead clods. He still does it.

It’s tragic that He doesn’t do it more frequently. It’s tragic that we hide from Him in the caves and dens of the earth. It’s tragic that we hide among the trees of the garden. It’s tragic that we keep our hearts so hard we can’t feel and so deaf that we can’t hear. It’s tragic that there aren’t more.

But wherever the gospel is really tried out, it has its own transforming power still. And you need not apologize for the word of God or the message of the cross. It’s still the same old message. And somehow, we short-circuit it by making out faith to be an intellectual exercise. And we have not converts, but proselytes.

Then comes the death of the heart. You know, dying isn’t a very pleasant business. I read of old Socrates drinking the hemlock when they compelled him to do it because they’re a way of killing him in Greece, in Athens. And he lay down on the bench, his friends around him in tears. He’d taken a long, deep draught of the poison hemlock. And he kept talking. He was in possession of himself, very calm. He kept saying to Crito and the other friends around him, kept describing how he was dying.

Well, he said, my feet are getting cold. He said, they’re so cold. And he tapped them. He said, I have no feeling now in my feet. He said that cold feeling is creeping up my legs now. He lay there and felt himself die and intelligently explained how it was going on.

Brethren, there are people, and you don’t have to be a hundred years old. Some of you are very young. You have poisoned your conscience. You have drunk of the poison of sin so deeply that you’re dying. You’re dying. There’s still some feeling left in you. But for the most part, you’re insensitive and insensible. There’s no feeling there. Little by little, you’re dying.

I’ve seen them come up in this church, stay around a while, listen, maybe make an experimental trip to the altar once or twice, and then slowly lose interest, and then go. And way out there in the world someplace, disappointed, sulky, sullen, bitter, they wait for the Grim Reaper. But they died a little at a time before they ever left the church.

He that hath ears to hear, says the entreating Voice, he that hath ears to hear, let him hear. And the Spirit and the Bride say, come and whosoever will, let him come and drink of the water of life freely. Humble thyself, and the Lord will draw near thee. Humble thyself, and his presence will cheer thee. God will not walk with the proud nor the scornful. Humble thyself to walk with God.

Now the Holy Spirit is entreating you. God’s love entreats. The blood of Jesus Christ eloquently entreats. The Spirit of God entreats. The world is lost, but the world is not forsaken.

The voice of Jesus Christ calls now, and He calls you. Are you hearing Him at all? Have you been hearing Him tonight at all? Are you listening? Have you heard? Will you do something about it? You say, I wish it could be made easier. I wouldn’t make it easier if I could. I wouldn’t make it easier.

Listen, friends. If hell is what God says it is, if sin is what God says it is, if Jesus Christ had to die to save the sinner from hell, and you can’t as much as rise and let a congregation know you’re turning from sin, it’s a strangely mixed-up business. Jesus Christ never taught that His people would sneak in an easy way. Never taught that they would creep in like vermin into the kingdom of God, crawl unobtrusively through the cracks. Never.

He said, if ye deny Me before men, I will deny you before My Father which art in heaven. And he that will come after Me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow Me.

We cannot crawl like a thief into the kingdom of God. Jesus Christ, if He’s your Savior, He has a right to your bold and fearless witness. And if you will not dare to rise and say, I’ll follow Jesus, I’ll follow Jesus. Here I come, Lord Jesus. If you’re not willing to do that, you’re too big a coward to go to heaven. For the fearful and the unbelieving shall have their part in the lake that burns with fire.

The man who’s afraid to rise and say, I will follow Jesus, is too big a coward to escape hell. God doesn’t make it easy. On sinking ships and burning buildings, etiquette is forgotten. It’s not made easy. The word of the Lord is not easy, but it saves. Let us pray.

O God, our Father, God, our Father, this night, the world has grown old, and the judgment draws near. Kingdoms have risen and waned. Nation has risen against nation, kingdom against kingdom. And as it was in the days of Noah, so is it now in this day. These are solemn times.

We appeal to Thee, O Lord, we appeal to Thee. Help us in this hour. Help us now. We beseech Thee, O Lord, for the cringing sinner, for the frightened, cowering sinner who hasn’t the courage to get up and follow the Lamb, but who’s trying to get in, somehow, through some window or back door.

God, have mercy, we pray Thee, this hour, through Jesus Christ, help us in this moment of decision. We ask it in Jesus’ name. Amen

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The Voice of God’s Love

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

May 31, 1953

Strangely enough, we go back to the book of Jeremiah for the first text on this series. In the book of Jeremiah, the thirty-first chapter, verse three, the Lord hath appeared of old unto me, saying, Yea, I have loved thee with an everlasting love, therefore, with lovingkindness have I drawn thee. Yea, I have loved thee with an everlasting love, therefore, with lovingkindness have I drawn thee.

So, I begin tonight a series of sermons to be called Voices That Entreat Us. And I wonder why it should be necessary for the voice of entreaty to be heard at all in the earth. It can only be because we are out of the way. The world we inhabit is a lost world. There are reasons to believe that the earth itself upon which we ride is a lost planet. Hints of this are found through the entire Bible, and I believe that through the anointed intellect, such traces, such evidence, may be found also in nature.

Back in the book of Genesis, God said about the planet, cursed be the ground for thy sake. Thorns and thistles shall it bring forth unto thee, until thou return unto the ground, for out of the ground was thou taken. Thus thou art, and unto thus shalt thou return.

Now, why were these words ever spoken? I believe that they were spoken to describe the planet upon which we ride. It is a lost planet. I quote from the writings of the world’s profoundest intellect.

I believe that it might be generally conceded that the profoundest mind that ever set a pen to paper was the Apostle Paul. Quoting from the Williams translation, that is the British Williams translation, these words from the book of Romans, the eighth chapter. This world of nature was condemned to be without meaning, not by its own will, but by the will of Him who condemned it, in the hope that not only mankind, but this world of nature also, might be set free from bondage to decay, to enter the glorious liberty of the sons of God. For to this day, as we know, the whole world of nature cries out in pain like a woman in childbirth.

Now, this world of nature was condemned to be without meaning. That is vanity. And it’s strange that the very words that the philosophers like to use are used here by the sacred writer, that nature is without meaning. And not only mankind, but this world of nature is to be set free from bondage to decay. It is a sick, fallen planet upon which we ride.

Now, worse than this, the inhabitants of this planet are also lost. The Bible declares this very plainly. But for any whom I doubt it, does it seem reasonable to you that beings like us should be given each one his little turn at bat, just one time, beings like us? There is a theology, or a color of theology, a pattern of theology, that squirms uneasily as soon as you say anything good about mankind. They’re prepared to say that you’re liberal, or a modernist, or a borderline liberal, at least, if you say anything good about mankind.

My brethren, except for sin, it would be very difficult to overpraise human beings. When you consider what we are, and what we know, and what we can do, our memories, imaginations, artistic abilities, and all that we have as human beings, when you consider it, you can’t justly and properly sell mankind short.

Sin, God knows, is like a cancer in the heart. It ruins the man and damns him at last. But man is not all sin. Man was made in the image of God, and while sin has ruined him, and condemned him to death forever, unless he be redeemed through the blood of Jesus. Yet mankind is a being only one degree removed from the angels, and in some ways, superior indeed to the angels themselves.

And does it seem reasonable to you, if this were not a lost world, that such a being as man, such a being as a Shakespeare, or a Churchill, or an Edison, or any of the great writers, or artists, or engineers of the world, should it seem, does it seem reasonable to you that each one of them should, like a little kid, be given his one little turn at bat, and then told to sit down while the ages roll on?

Does it seem reasonable to you that a being so godlike as man is, should take all of this marvelous equipment of his toward the grave? That he should carry his memory, his brilliant imagination, his artistic creative powers, and all that we know that makes a man a man, that he should carry it toward the grave? That God should waste his time on such a being as he made man to be, and say, I’m just fooling around with a man, I’m just making this marvelous creature just for a day, I’m just having some fun, it doesn’t seem reasonable to me.

Does it seem reasonable to you that this being should consistently live beneath his own ideals, that he should everlastingly be beneath what he knows he ought to be, and always be frustrated by living below his own ideals, and should be doomed to go to the grave, frustrated and disappointed at last, never having attained his ideals? It does not seem reasonable to me. And that he should dream of a shining world, and yet not know the way there. Lord, we know not whither thou art going, how can we know the way? No truer words were ever uttered by any man than that we don’t know the way there.

That shining world of which men have dreamed, that every man secretly believes is somewhere there before him, is nevertheless lost to that man, or he is lost to it, so that the human race is a lost race. That is only reason talking now, but sacred revelation declares plainly that the inhabitants of the earth are lost. They’re lost by a mighty, calamitous visitation of woe, which came upon them somewhere back there and is still upon them.

But it also tells this glorious fact that this lost race has not been given up. There is a voice that is calling them, there is a voice that is entreating them, there are voices that are entreating them. As the shepherd went everywhere searching for his sheep, as the woman in the parable went everywhere searching for her coin, so there is a voice, there are voices that entreat us, that call us back. If we were not lost, there would be no voices behind us saying, this is the way, walk ye in it. If we were not far from home, there would be no father’s voice calling us back home. I say that we have not been given up.

That is plain from the book of Genesis, where when Adam fled from the face of God among the trees of the garden, the sound of God’s gentle voice was heard saying, Adam, where art thou? And that voice has never died out. The echo of that voice is sounding down through the years and has never ceased to reverberate and echo and re-echo from peak to peak and from generation to generation and from race to race and continent to continent and off to islands and back to continent again. All down the years, Adam, where art thou? Now there are many voices I say, but it’s only really one voice.

Did you hear about that little two-and-a-half-year-old girl that was lost in the woods over in Michigan? I think it was only last week and there were bears loose there and some of those bears that were known to be man-eaters. And for a couple of days or longer, this little, was she two and a half years old, girl that was lost there. You hear about that every once in a while, a little one slipping away from a picnicking party and getting lost.

And they organized parties; whose back of that? Who does it? Is it not the throbbing distraught heart of the father and the mother? Who is it that organizes these parties to hover overhead with helicopters, to send out sound trucks, to organize soldiers and boy scouts and friendly neighbors, always calling, calling, calling, calling, calling in a soothing voice, always calling.

It may be the voice of a soldier here, it may be the voice of a boy scout around there, it may be the voice of a friendly neighbor over there, it may be a sound truck from the highway there, it may be a helicopter from up here, but always it’s the same voice, it’s the father’s voice. Though there may be a dozen or two dozen voices calling, oh, they’re only inflections of one voice. They’re simply the overtones and undertones of the same loving father’s voice that’s organized it, that’s backed it, and whose distraught heart is calling for his lost child.

So, there are many voices calling us, calling this lost planet, calling the inhabitants of this lost planet, and there are many voices, but it’s all one voice. And whether it be the voice of God’s love, or the voice of Jesus’ blood, or the voice of conscience, or the voice of the dead, or the voice of the living, or the voice of the lost, or the voice of the saved, whatever the voice may be, it’s all the inflection of the same voice. It’s all one voice. It’s a distraught heart of God seeking his lost race, calling them any way that he can call them, calling them from above or from below, calling them from around the bend, or down the road, or beside the river, or on the plateau, calling them, but always calling them; the voice of God as in treating us.

Ladies and gentlemen, with everything inside of my beating heart, chastened and criticized by everything inside of my mind, I believe in the voice of God sounding in his world, calling men. The planet’s lost, lost to such a degree that the holy writer says that it’s lost its meaning, it’s full of vanity. And even the world around us is so lost that it is crying like a woman in travail, waiting as it were to be born back into the liberty of the sons of God and saved from decay and corruption. The race that inhabits it, the human race, is lost, and always this voice of God is sounding, always it’s sounding.

Now I speak tonight of the voice of God’s love, and I repeat that when it’s all been said, all the voices are the voices of God’s love, whether it be the voice of conscience, whether it be the voice of fear, the voice of the pastor, the voice of the traveling evangelist, the voice of the teacher, the voice of the Sunday school superintendent, or the friendly neighbor that may be a Christian, whether it be the voice of reason or whatever it be, it’s all one voice. It is the distraught, heavy-hearted voice of God calling his lost race back. Now he says here, yea, I have appeared of old unto you, saying, yea, I have loved thee with an everlasting love. Therefore, with loving kindness have I drawn thee.

The voice of the love of God is calling a lost race, and we members in particular, can hear that voice tonight if we would listen. Now let me say a few things about the love of God that you probably won’t hear anywhere else that you go, at least rarely will you hear it said, but let me point out that God being who he is, God must love Himself first with a pure and blameless and perfect love.

Now don’t go out and say Mr. Tozer didn’t mean that. That’s just exactly what I meant, that God being God, not being a creature but being an uncreated being, deriving from nobody, owing nothing to anybody, and being himself underived and uncreated, this holy God who is Himself the fountain of all the love there is, must love Himself forever with pure and perfect love.

This is the holy and blameless love which the three persons of the Trinity feel for each other. The Father for the Son, the Son for the Father, the Father and the Son for the Spirit, the Spirit for the Father and the Son. Divine Trinity in perfect and blameless and proper love, love each other with poured out devotion. Three fountains pouring into each other out of the same boundless, shoreless, depthless sea, bottomless, that is the eternal, infinite God.

And these three upspringing fountains always pouring up and mingling with each other in perfection of bliss and love. This is the love of God for His own holy self. And God being what He is, God is Himself the only being He can love directly. There is nobody else that mingles with those three fountains. No other creature, not an archangel, nor a seraphim, nor a cherub, nor a man. Everything else that God loves and everybody else that God loves, He loves for His own sake. He loves Himself as the Father loves the Son and the Son, the Father and the Father, and the Son, the Spirit and the Spirit, the Father and the Son, without referring that love to any other being, for God is God.

But when it comes to creatures, that perfect love cannot fall directly upon any man. It must come to God mediated through God Himself. God must find something of Himself there in order that He might love it. For God can only love Himself and that which is like Himself.

Do you hear me? God can only love Himself. And God being what He is cannot love anything unlike Himself. If God should love anything unlike Himself, it would be equivalent to a pure and holy woman loving a gangster. God must love that which is equal to Himself and like Himself. And so, when God looks at the mute creation that the writer here, the translator calls the world of nature, He loves it because it reveals to Him something of His own Godhead and glory and power and shows something of His own wisdom.

So, when God looks on His sun and His moon and all the stars that He has made, and His lakes and His rivers and His mountains and His seas, God loves them because they remind Him of His own wisdom and power and Godhead that gave them being. And when God looks at the seraphim and the cherubim and the holy angels before the throne, He loves them because they remind Him of His own holiness. They’re holy angels and their holiness is derived from God. And God loves in them that which came from Himself. God loves them because they’re holy beings. And He can properly and with moral propriety, He can love holy angels because they’re reminding Him of Himself. And when God looks at a man, He loves in them, the fallen relic of His own image.

Now here again, there’s going to be people that nobody’s ever said it to me in person, but they’ve written me and abused me and said that I am a liberal. And I insist I don’t have education enough to be a modernist, but they say now that he’s a liberal. I’m not a liberal, I’m a Bible believer.

And the Scripture says that God made man in His own image. And when Jesus Christ was incarnated, He was incarnated in the body of a man without embarrassment and without change. Why could it be so? It was so because that man was an image of the God that created him said and said, let’s make man in Our image.

But fallen man has another element there, a foreign element that has crept in. It is sin. It’s the sting of the serpent that stung his bloodstream there in the garden, and that’s sin. So that man, made in the image of God, is now a dying man, sick unto death, because sin, like the poison of the adder, has gotten into his flowing moral veins. But extract that sin and take it out and you have the image of God again. And Jesus Christ was the image of God because He was a man without sin.

There’s no modernism there, no liberalism there, just Bible there. And the man who denies that fallen man bears upon him something of the fallen ruined Reich of what he once was is no true friend of the Bible. He is himself guilty of taking liberties with the Holy Scriptures.

And when God looks on a sinner and loves the sinner, never while the stars burn in their silence can it be said that God loves the sin in the sinner. Never can it be said that the Holy God loves an unholy thing, and yet God loves sinners. Why does He love sinners? He loves them for that which He sees in them of His lost and fallen image. For God can never love anything but Himself directly, and He loves everything else for His own sake.

So, you’re loved of God, friend, but you’re loved of God for Jesus’ sake. You’re loved of God, but you’re loved of God for the sake of the Holy Son, Jesus, who is the Godhead incarnate, who is the second person of the Godhead incarnated. And God sees in Jesus Christ what you would have been. That is, He sees in His perfect humanity, not His deity. You and I never can be divine in that sense.

So, God loves lost men. Loves them not because He excuses their sin, loves them not because He’s careless, loves them not because He’s morally lax, but loves them because He once stood and said, let us make man in Our image.

Let’s put it like this. A man and woman meet, fall in love and marry. They have a son, and they kid each other and play about that boy, and each one says it looks like the other, and then they change it around and say it looks like this one and then looks like that one, and they have a lot of fun, but that’s their boy. And they try to see each other in that boy.

Then he grows up, and the hour comes when he breaks with society, chooses to go outside the law and become an outlaw. He drinks, he gambles, he lies, he steals, he cheats, he murders. He’s a fugitive from justice. He becomes snarlingly vicious and cruel, becomes a killer, cold-eyed in his own right. Mercifully, the father dies, and then the boy is caught and thrown into prison. The mother goes to see him. No hope, no chance. A thousand witnesses, fingerprints everywhere, evidence of every kind, direct and circumstantial. They’ll get him. He’s finished. Half a dozen murders, he’ll pay for them.

The mother looks through the bars, and there’s her boy standing now, full-grown, the man. Can she love his outlawry? Does she love his gangsterism? Does she love his cold-eyed cruelty? Does she love his murders? Does she love his robberies? No, she hates them with everything in her good heart.

But when he stands up there needing to shave a little bit, she sees the man’s no longer with her. And she says, God, if he’d only been a good boy, he was the spitting image of his father. When I first met his dad, that’s what he looked like, and she pours her heart out in tears. She loves the boy, but she doesn’t love one thing in him that made him an outlaw. She loves an image of a man she once loved and gave herself to, and promised to follow till death did separate.

God looks down at the human race and sees us in our awful sin. The deeds of the flesh are seventeen in number, according to Paul, the works of the flesh, and that’s only the beginning. It would take several sheets of paper to write down the sins man has been capable of and has done and is doing, and God looks. And you think that God loves jealousy, deception, lying, gluttony, uncleanness, impurity, outlawries, cruelty.

Do you think God loves sinners, carelessly, foolishly, loves them and says, I don’t care, I love them anyway. I don’t think it for a second. I think He loves them because He sees in them the image of what Adam was and what Christ is, and loves them for Adam’s sake, but loves them now redemptively for Jesus’ sake, who was incarnated of the Virgin Mary and became a man without sin.

So, the voice of God’s love is sounding. I say you won’t hear that probably in very many places, but it’s so true it needs to be told again. It will deliver us from pride. Let no man go out and strut down the street and say, I’m a fundamentalist, God loves me.

Careful, Sonny, our sins have violated and lost to you every right you ever had to be loved by God. But God sees that you are of the loins of the man who once stood up on the earth, and looked about for a helpmeet for him, made in the image of God and wasn’t ashamed of him. And He sees an image of the Man who went to the tree and died between heaven and earth, His only begotten Son. And He loves you for other reasons than yourself. Therefore, humble yourself, it’ll pay. Thank God for the love that comes to you, mediated through the man Christ Jesus. That everlasting love that is everlasting, not in its object, but is everlasting in its own quality.

Now God must love and will love man until hell has erased the last trace of the remaining image. Men are lost now, don’t forget it, but they’re still loved of God, because the blackest man, the deepest man, is still dear to God for Jesus’ sake.mJesus who died on the tree for that very lost black man. I mean black morally, not racially, in his skin. I have loved you with an everlasting love, says God.

I say that love is everlasting not because of its object, but it’s everlasting because it’s the everlasting God that loves. God no longer loves the devil. There was a day when God loved the devil as He now loves the angels and archangels, because He saw in the devil traces and proofs of His own wisdom.

Thou art the covering cherub. I have made thee so. I have set thee to guard the stones of fire. Thy wisdom and beauty were created in thee in the day thou wast created. God loved that being because it was an image, not an image of Himself in the sense man is, but a reflection of what God could do and an evidence of His artistry, His moral artistry and His omniscient skills.

The devil sinned, and the devil sinned in a way not quite like man sinned. He sinned in some way that erased forever everything of which God could be proud and in which God could rest, so that God no longer loves the devil. He sent no redeemer for him. There isn’t anything in Satan that could remind God of himself.

The last trace of that which might have reminded God of himself has been washed out in the filthy bilge water of iniquity while the centuries have added to centuries. So, God no longer loves the devil.

Now I confess to you, friends, this is speculation, and I want to brand it speculation right here. What I shall say in the next minute is speculation, and if you don’t agree with me, let’s not fall out over it. These are the things I’ll stand by. This is speculation.

I believe the time will come when God will no longer love lost men. I believe that God now loves lost men, all lost men, lost men in prisons and penitentiaries and insane asylums, lost men in saloons and houses of ill-faith. God loves lost men because the last trace has not been erased, and he still remembers them and remembers His Son on the tree that has a body like theirs. He still remembers that the Second Being, Person of the Divine Being, was incarnated in a Man who has a body like that man without sin. The day will come, let him that is holy be getting holier still, and let him that is filthy be getting filthier still. So says the Bible.

And therefore the day will come when lost man will no longer be loved by God Almighty. For God, I repeat, cannot love anything directly. He must love everything for His own sake if He continues to be God. And when a man has sold himself out to sin and the transfiguring power of iniquity has wrought to make him to be a devil and not a man, God will no longer love the lost man. So let us not imagine for a second that God will be pining over hell and grieving in His heart over a lost man in hell. It cannot be true.

God grieves over lost men now because man can still pray and believe and hope and dream and imagine and aspire, and there’s still something that reminds Him of the Man who died on the tree. But when that is all gone, there will be nothing left for God to pour out His love upon. There will be no one to receive that love, and therefore the love of God, though it’s everlasting in its source, will not light anymore upon fallen men.

And hell, wherever hell is, filled with lost men and the devil and lost beings, shall roll on through the cavernous recesses of some underground world forever and ever and ever, and there will be no love lost in heaven and no grief in the heart of the man Christ Jesus. For God can only love that which is like Himself and reminds Him of Himself.

Now, let me point out to you, brethren, that wherever there is love, there’s bound to be goodwill. Nobody ever willed anything bad about anybody they loved. Sometimes a man will kill a woman because she looked at another man. He says, I loved her so that I killed her. The big billy goat, it was lust that led him to kill her. He wanted her for himself, and he was too much of a billy goat to allow himself ever to dream that anybody else could dare have that woman. So he killed her, not out of love for her, for altogether other reasons.

No, love never kills anybody. Love never wills ill nor evil to anybody, never. It’s impossible. Love can’t do it. Love can no more do it than light can be darkness or God can be unclean. Love must always have goodwill, and God is inflamed with goodwill. He’s inflamed with goodwill. That means that whether God is near or far, and he’s always near and always far, but however we think of him, God’s always inflamed and thinking about us.

My friend Bob Battles, who wishes he’d been my son, but I’d have had to been married at 13 to have arranged it. But my friend Bob Battles, who loves me very much, and I him, he was in California with us where I got this cold that I have now, in California incidentally. I’m getting better since I came to Chicago, but Bob and I were out there together, and we were walking along, Bob said, well, it’s 10 o’clock back in Orlando, 10 o’clock back in Orlando, and my five boys are all in bed, and Olive, that’s his wife, Olive is presiding all alone over the mass.

My boys, he said, we walked along. I grinned to myself. He was inflamed with goodwill. He was busy, you know, running around carrying a portfolio, you know, and being chairman of this, and he was awfully busy, but he was all inflamed with goodwill. If anything, if just let a phone call come through and say, I got to have you, he’d have hopped on a plane without saying goodbye.

Love always has goodwill with it. Love always is full of goodwill, and the love of God is no different, and when the angels sang their song or uttered their marvelous chant, it was goodwill to men. I know some translators say to men of goodwill, goodwill to men, the will of God is good toward us brethren. Be sure of that.

It’s basic, it’s basic, you must believe that, that goodwill is in the heart of God for you. Now, that’s very hard to believe. It’s hard to believe because our moral conscience doesn’t agree with it.mWe love each other because they’re good things we love in each other. We say, oh, he’s got such a sense of humor, I love the fellow. Well, that’s loving somebody for some assignable reason.

A young man will come in and say, one young Texan called me, Wilkins Wynn, he says his name. He used to come here to church, you know, a good Baptist boy that went to church here while he was attending Moody. He called me one day. He was always so spiritual and always talking about the Lord. You couldn’t get him to talk about anything else.

One day he called me. He said, brother Tozer, he said, you know that song that says that, that, that I love thee so I know not how my transport to control. I said, yes. Well, he said, I have found a girl and that just exactly described my feeling toward her. And he said, what do you suppose I ought to do? I love her so I know not how my transport to control. I said, Wilkins, there’s only one thing to do and I recommend it. And he did.

Now they have nice, he’s, he’s pastor of a Baptist church down in Texas and they got a nice little boy. Well, that you see, don’t you, that, that, uh, that love is like that. And, and there’s, there’s the, the yearning. And, uh, he, he loved this woman because there, there were reasons for it. He talked to me afterward.

My, she must’ve been a paragon of beauty. To say nothing to be so intelligent that Einstein better watch out. Formed like the Venus de Milo. And she had all that. And he loved her for that reason. You know, you know, he, he, he’d had it. That’s all. He had it. She wasn’t like that. I suppose she’s very lovely young, probably good looking young lady, but then he’d had it. That’s all. He was that way.

Well, you see, we love people for what they are. And when somebody comes and says to a sinner, God loves you and is inflamed with goodwill for you. He’s inclined to say, I don’t believe it. Why? Because he’s measuring the love of God by his own love.

And he says, I know better. God is the moral God. The Bible says He is. God can’t love me. I’m a low-grade center. I’ve lied.mI’ve cheated. I’ve stolen. There isn’t a sin. I haven’t committed either overtly or in my heart. I’m worse than my friends know. I’m worse than my wife knows, worse than anybody knows. And God can’t love me.

But you see, he’s right. And he’s wrong. He’s wrong because he fails to see that God doesn’t love him directly for his sin’s sake. God loves him for His own sake. And therefore, God can love anybody no matter how sinful for His own sake, for His Son’s sake.

But you know, that takes some theology to make people see that they don’t see it. They imagine God loves them because they’re good. Some little old bespectacled fellow, you know, that never did anything worse in his life but drink a half glass of Coke, you know, and that uses perfect English and always puts his shoes away at night, makes his bed in the morning, helps his mama with the dishes. He believes God loves him, the big sissy. Because he says, well, mama loves me. And the teacher says that I’m the best student she ever had. And therefore, I can see how God could love me and I’m going to be a fundamentalist.

Better watch it, better watch it there, my boy. Because God doesn’t love you for the fact that you make the bed and never cause your mama a minute’s trouble in all your life. He loves you for another reason altogether. He loves you because He sees even in you, if not some trace of manhood, then some trace of womanhood, he sees in you that which once walked in the garden but got into sin and was poisoned and bitten with the virus of iniquity, lost and ruined by the fall and on your way to hell.

And He loves you for His own sake and not for your sake. But the man who’s such a sinner and knows it is inclined to doubt God’s love because he judges God love by man’s love. That’s never any way to judge love. God’s love is unique in the universe. And God loves us for His own sake.

Now, my brethren, where there’s love, there’s not only goodwill. Where there’s love, there’s yearning, yearning. Therefore, with loving kindness have I drawn thee. And always drawing us toward the object, He draws us toward Himself, a lost race in a lost world.

And from God there is a clear call. And there isn’t anything that can stand in the way, not character, reputation, past, nothing can stand in the way except our own sins. From God there’s a clear call to consider Him. Will you stop and consider Him? There are so many things now in the world that we just can’t consider anymore the serious things. There are just too many things in the world.

But God calls you to stop and consider. Won’t you think on God now? Think on God. This God whose love is everlasting. This holy God who loves Himself and loves you for His own sake. Give attention to God. And He calls you to believe about Him. Start believing what the Bible teaches. Believe what I’m telling you. Believe what you’ve heard other men say. Believe what we sing in our hymn books. Believe what we read in our Bibles. Believe what the church teaches. That God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son. Believe that. Start believing it. He calls you to that. And He calls you to turn to Him. He calls you to turn around, turn to Him, and to begin to make a moral about-face, and stop things, and change things. And to throw yourself on his mercy.

Will you do it? No defense. Don’t come into court with a lawyer. Don’t come into court with a lot of alibis. Don’t come into court with a lot of witnesses for your character witnesses to tell God how good you are. Come as the prodigal came back home. He didn’t bring a lot of character witnesses.

Can you imagine if that prodigal had been like that? Like some people. He’d have gone back to the father’s house. He’d have stopped and had his dirty old pants pressed somewhere down the road. And he’d have brought along a couple of fellas to tell his father that that smell that he detected on his garments was just a flower that had been in the far country, and it was rare. And there wasn’t anything to get worried about. It smelled like pig but it wasn’t pig.

He’d have had his story, but he didn’t. He didn’t try anything like that. He didn’t bring any character witnesses with him to tell his father that he was a better boy than he thought. He said to himself, my father will remember me the way I used to be. And I know my father and I know that as long as I look like him and look like Ma, my father will never stop loving me. So, I’m going to throw everything, I’m going to risk everything on one shot. I’m going to go home and say, Father, I have sinned.

And you know, it worked. It worked. And it was the only thing that would work. It worked. He said, Father, I have sinned. The old man who’s getting old and lumpy and full of lime, you know, and couldn’t get around much anymore and his heart bothered him.

But sir, he jumped around there like a 21-year-old. He gave orders here and gave orders there and gave orders there and pretty soon that boy was all fixed up and bathed in the finest bath salts, perfumed and dressed in good shoes on his feet and a ring on his finger, the seal of his father’s approval. They were all sitting around thanking the father and shouting the praises of this dad who loved his boy.

The elder brother stuck a sulking sour face in the door and went away and sulked behind the barn. They sent out for him, and he said, can you imagine it? Treating my wicked brother like this and I’ve always been a good boy. You know that story too well. He was pleading his own character, and the boy had none to plead.

So, throw yourself on his mercy. That’s the safest place. No man ever dies when he throws himself on the mercy of God. Was it John Bunyan, that wicked, doubly wicked man who got under conviction and wished he was a dog? He said, there goes a dog. Oh, I wish I was that dog, and then I could die and be no more. But I’ve got to die and rise to judgment. I wish I were a dog. And God didn’t change him into a dog, but he kept conviction on his soul and he went on praying.

So, one time he said, all right, God, you said that if I’d confess, you’d forgive me and I’m going to stand on that promise. And if I sink down to hell, I’ll sink on a promise. You can’t go to hell on a promise, brother. It doesn’t go down. That’s all. It goes the other way.

So, John Bunyan became the great John Bunyan by the grace of God because he couldn’t die on a promise. He couldn’t perish on a promise. The great German silk weaver wrote, Thou hidden love of God, whose height, whose depth unfathomed no man knows. I see from far thy beauteous light, inly I sigh for thy repose. My heart is pained, nor can it be at rest till it find rest in thee.

Do you tonight catch glimpses of the beauteous love of God, hidden to the world, but there so beautiful? And is there something in you that’s like a pain? He says, O God, O God, I am pained, and I never can be anything else but pained until it find, my heart finds rest in thee. Thy secret voice invites me still, the sweetness of thy yoke to prove. And fain I would, but though my will seem fixed, yet wide my passion drove. Yet hindrances strew all the way, I aim at thee yet go astray.

Does that describe you? You hear the secret voice inviting you still. And you want to, but you can’t. And you seem to want to, but yet your passions rove like a stray dog. Hindrances are all the way along. You aim to do right, and yet you go astray. Each moment draw from earth away my heart that lowly waits thy call. Speak to my inmost soul and say, I am thy love, thy God, thy all. To feel thy power, to hear thy voice, to taste thy love be all my choice.

Would you say that tonight? Would you ask Him to draw your heart from earth away and let you hear that call as you wait lowly before Him? Speak to your inmost soul and tell you once more, I am your love, I am your God, I am your all? Would you do it? Would you want to do it? Do you? Will you do it?

O Love of God, so strong, so tender. It’s the voice of God’s love that I hear tonight entreating me and entreating you. Let’s not trample on it. You can’t, can you?

Do you find it morally possible to turn on such love and say, God, I don’t care. I’ve got sins out there I’ve got to go do. I have my iniquities planned and I’m going to go do them. You can’t, can you? Surely not. Over the voice of God’s love that entreats you, that mighty love that’s equal to God Himself entreating you home, back to the Father’s house, back to the cross, back to the fountain that was opened.

Will you come? Will you come? Will you half-saved Christians tonight? Come. Oh, your heart is pained, nor can it be at rest till it find rest in thee. You’ll never find rest, Christian, half-saved Christian, worldly Christian. You’ll never find rest till you find it in God’s heart.

Won’t you come this evening? Voices that entreat us. And this voice of God’s love is the first and the loudest. And all the others, though real, grow out of this great voice of God’s love. Let us pray.

Father, we feel so deeply tonight and so keenly thy wonderful love for us. We feel as if we’d like to go down and stand in a seat and then get up and walk down the aisle and say, I do. Here I come, Lord. Thou art my love, my God, my all. As though we would like to feel as though we were coming all over again.

But, Lord, we’re already here, so we can’t come where we’ve already been. But, oh, we pray Thee for the lost. We pray Thee for the half-saved. Pray Thee for the confused and the puzzled and the bewildered and the wandering. O Love of God, so rich, so free, so measureless, so strong.

We beseech Thee that Thou would give ears to our hearers tonight, that they may hear that Voice and follow until at last they find Thee, their everything, their all. And old things pass away and all becomes new, and sins go down under the washings of the blood. And everything becomes new in Christ Jesus.

Grant it, Father, for Christ’s sake. Amen.

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Be Ye Holy for I am Holy

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

December 13, 1953

Now, the Apostle here exhorts us. I like, exhort, better than command, though it is a command. He here exhorts us to holiness of life, and he bases his exhortation upon two great facts. One is the character of God, and the other, the command of God. He says simply that God’s children ought to be holy because He is holy. That’s the character of God. Then he says God’s children ought to be holy because he commanded them to receive this in the Spirit, which you could not now understand or receive, things being what they are.

Now, that’s a paraphrase of what our Lord said, certainly, but it’s a fair statement of the meaning of His words. And now Peter comes along in obedience to and in line with these teachings of our Savior, and among other things, he commands us to be holy. And because this is an apostolic injunction, we who claim to be apostolic Christians dare not ignore it.

And when I use the word, dare not, here, I do not mean that I forbid it. How could I forbid you to do anything? I do not mean the Church forbids it. How could this Church forbid anybody to do anything and make it stick? I only mean that morally we do not dare ignore this commandment, be ye holy.

We have to deal with it some way or other. We dare not ignore it. Ignoring it is the way that it is dealt with by most Christians. We read it and then ignore it. But we dare not, and we dare not accept it as optional. It is not that we go to the Bible and say, now I am going to look this over, and if I like it, I’ll buy it, in the language of the day. But if I don’t, there’s no harm done. This is not something optional which I may do or not do at my own choice.

This is an apostolic injunction to commandment, to holiness of life, and I dare not overlook it. Then it is not something which I can judge the wisdom of, or the appropriateness of, and then weigh it in my own balances and decide just how far it applies to me. It doesn’t have to apply to me. I can walk out on it. God has given us all and each one the right to make our own choices. So we don’t have to bow our neck to this yoke, and we don’t have to apply it to ourselves. If we don’t like it, we can turn our backs on it.

Once Jesus said to his disciples, except ye eat my body, my flesh, and drink my blood, there is no life in you. And they looked at each other and walked away from him. And He said, will you also go away? And Peter gave the answer that I must give this morning. Peter said, Lord, if we wanted to go away, where would we go? Thou hast the words of eternal life. Those were wise words indeed by the man of God.

So, I say that we do not need to listen to the apostolic injunction. We do not have to obey it. There’s only one place where the Bible is, but there are a million places where it isn’t. And you can always find a place where it isn’t. There’s only one kingdom of God, but there are lots of other places. And if we don’t like it, it’s always possible for us to reject it.

But I say, Lord, how could we reject it? Where else would we go? If we refuse these words, where will we turn? If we turn away from Thy authoritative word, to whose authority can we turn? Eisenhower’s? The Pope’s? To where shall we turn? What great man, and I do not speak slightingly of these great men, but any great man in whatever field, could we turn to him? Who is he? He’s a man with his breath in his nostrils. Would it be to some great school of learning? Could we go to the university down here on the midway and say, I’m looking for a professor to show me the way, to help me? He couldn’t help you; he must be himself, helped.

So, I say, therefore, we dare not ignore this. And I have explained what I mean by dare not. We dare not accept it as optional, and we dare not judge of the wisdom of it and make our choice as to whether it’s worthy of our obedience. To do so is to jeopardize our souls and to earn for ourselves severest judgment to come.

Now, I want to point out to you that the doctrine of holiness has been wounded in the house of its friends. Whenever Satan has reason to fear a truth very greatly, he counterfeits it. And wherever he can, puts it into such a bad light that the very persons who are most eager to obey it are frightened away from it.

I think it would not be hard to make a case for that statement and to prove it if I wanted to do it and show how he was afraid of the virgin birth, so he has done everything possible to reduce Jesus Christ into one more, being one more man. He was afraid of the bodily resurrection, so he has done everything he can do to take the weight and pressure off of the doctrine of the bodily resurrection. He will allow Jesus to rise from the dead in spirit, but he’s afraid when we say he rose from the dead in person and in body.

He’s afraid of the second coming of Christ, so he has done everything he can do to becloud the doctrine of the second coming of Christ, and so with every doctrine. The ones he fears the most are the ones he parodies, and pawns his parody off as the real thing, and frightens away the serious-minded saints.

Now in evangelical circles, the doctrine of holiness has been identified with a specific school of theology. Having their own terminology, and their own system of metaphysics, and their own phrases, they’ve copyrighted the term holiness and claimed it exclusively. And it has been thus betrayed by its friends. Because I hesitate to say that some who call themselves by the name of holiness have allowed the doctrine to harden into a theory which has become a hindrance to repentance. And they invoke this doctrine to cover up frivolity and covetousness.

I have had occasion to mingle somewhat with those who have taken out the copyright on the word holiness. And while I have found some good people among them, I have found just as many good people among the fundamentalists, and the Calvinists, and those who don’t believe what they believe quite. So that they are what they are, obviously, in spite of their copyright doctrine, not because of it.

While there are few that are, I believe, worthy, I have found a great deal of frivolity carried on in the name of the deeper life, and a great deal of worldliness that has been sanctified, accepted, taken in, and given a place in the sanctuary. And the results, of course, have been that honest, serious persons have shied away from the whole thing.

Someone told me of hearing a man stand in a pulpit the other, some while back, and said, I was sanctified 15 years ago, and I want to tell you, my friends, that I have never sinned since. Now maybe he hasn’t, but if he hasn’t, he’d be the last one to know it. If he was a holy man, instead of a holiness man, he’d never have made a crack like that. Maybe he never sinned since. That could be possible, I suppose, theoretically. But he would not find it out. Other people might be saying it, but he would never have said it. He would rather have knelt and said, thou art in heaven, and I am on earth. Oh, God forgive my confusion of faith. He’d never have said, I haven’t sinned in 15 years.

So that some serious-minded people have been driven away from the whole idea of holiness by those who have claimed it, and then have lived frivolous, worldly, and conceited lives. But we dare not be frightened away by this. We are under the holy authority of the apostolic seed.

We have been told by a holy man of God, and we have been ordered by God himself to be holy. And therefore, regardless of how badly wounded the doctrine of holiness has been, we must not let it die, and we must not assume that we have no moral obligation to this truth. The doctrine is highly important to God.

It must be highly important to God, because I have personally counted in an exhaustive concordance and have found that the word holiness occurs 650 times in the Bible, or the word holy, holiness. Then I have not counted in my, the King James, the other word sanctify and sanctified, which is the same word, exactly, only in our English different, so that the count would no doubt jump up nearer to a 1,000 than 650 times.

Now, this word holy is used to describe the character of angels, and of heaven itself, and even of God. It is written that the angels are holy, and those angels who look over the battlements to gaze down upon the scenes of men, mankind, are called the watchers and holy ones. And it’s written that the angels are holy, and then heaven itself is said to be a holy place, and that no unclean thing can enter in. And God is described in the term by the adjective holy, Holy Ghost, and Holy Lord, and Lord God Almighty, Holy Lord God Almighty.

Those words are used of God throughout the Bible, showing that the highest adjective that can be ascribed to God, the highest attribute that can be ascribed to God is that of holiness, and that in a relative sense, the angels and heaven itself partake of the holiness of God. And then again, its absence is given as a reason for not seeing God. I know the grotesque interpretations that have been given to the text, without holiness no man shall see the Lord, but because some people, in order to support their patented theory, have misused the text, that is no reason for my throwing the text out.

Holiness, without which no man shall see the Lord; that does mean something, and what it means ought to disturb us until we have discovered what it means. And then having discovered what it means, we have met its conditions.

Briefly, I want to tell you the meaning of the word. In the Bible it means moral wholeness, actually means, kind. Holy, means kind, merciful, godly, pure, blameless. It means kind. It means merciful. It means godly. It means pure. And it means morally blameless. But in all this, it’s never to be thought of in the negative–never. It’s always to be thought of in a positive, white intensity of degree. For it is written that God is holy. It means that God is kind, merciful, pure, blameless, in a white, holy intensity of degree.

And when used of men, it means the same, certainly not the same degree as God, not absolute holiness, but it means an intensity of a degree of holiness that is not negative, but positive, and it means that it can be tested and can be trusted. A holy man can be trusted, and a holy man can be tested. Some people’s piety will not stand up under tests. Some of us are afraid.

Once when God was taking Israel through a certain section, he went ahead of them and warned them. He said, now don’t take them this way because there’s a fight on over there, and they’re so green that they’ll run away if they see the fight. The Lord steered them around a battle, lest they all get excited and flee in disorder into the wilderness. He knew their weakness and steered them around it.

So, there are those of us who are holy, but we’re afraid of the tests that will prove whether we’re holy or not, and we can’t trust ourselves. But a holy man can be trusted, and a holy man can be tested. And wherever there is a breakdown of holiness, there is a proof that there was never any real degree of holiness there in the first place.

Now, not only this moral wholeness, there is one great religious thinker who’s just gone, a German, a Lutheran man, who’s dealing with the question of holy, and the idea of the holy has greatly intrigued me, and I believe also instructed my heart.

And this man says that the word holy, as originally used in Hebrew, did not have, first of all, the moral connotation. That is, when it says that God was holy, it did not mean, first of all, that God was pure. That was taken for granted. It did mean that later. It did come to mean that, as I’ve explained. But that he says the root, original meaning of the word holy was something other than, something that lay beyond, something strange and mysterious and so different from, and awe-inspiring. And that is in the Word too. You’ll find it there. So that when we talk about the holiness of God, we talk about something heavenly and awful and mysterious and fear inspiring.

Now, this is supreme when it comes to God, but it is also marked in men of God, deepened as men become more like God. This sense of the other world, this mysterious something that rests on men, that is a holiness.

Now, if they should have that and not be morally right, then I would say it was a counterfeit of the devil. But when they are morally right and are walking in all the holy ways of God, and then in addition to their good, righteous living, they also have this mysterious quality that they had come down from another world and carried upon them the fragrance of a kingdom that is supreme above the kingdoms of this world, then I’m ready to accept that as being of God. Moses had it when he came down from the mount, you’ll remember. He had been with God forty days and forty nights there in the wilderness.

And as the colored preacher said in that sing-song oratory that they love, he said, Moses went to nobody knows where Moses had gone. And Moses was away forty days and forty nights, and nobody knew where Moses was. And Moses came back and then everybody knew where Moses had been.

Now, that’s what I mean. He would have been on the mountain, and nobody knew where he was. But when he came back, everybody knew where he had been. He came down with this heat lightning playing over his countenance, this strange something that you couldn’t pin down or identify, but it was there.

Now, that mysterious quality there has all but forsaken the earth in our day. The philosopher I refer to that theologian had to invent a term for it, he called it the numinous. And that word numinous has now gotten into all the books. But he invented it to mean that overplus of something that is more than righteous, but is righteous in a fearful, awe-inspiring, wondrous, heavenly sense, and glowing with a mysterious fire.

Now, I say this latter quality has all but forsaken the earth. God has been reduced to our own terms. And we are now told to gossip the gospel and sell Jesus to the people. And it’s been reduced, I say, to a place where men may be righteous. I don’t say that they’re not, but I say that we miss and lack that quality, that overtone of something.

Now, this mysterious fire was in the bush, you’ll remember. Fire doesn’t frighten people. A small fire doesn’t frighten people. It’s only when it gets out of control and your loved ones or other humans are there that it becomes a portentous and fearful thing. No one’s afraid of fire.

And yet here was a man who knelt beside a bush where a small fire burned and hid his face, for he was afraid. And there was that quality that was mysterious. And later in the mountain yonder, I repeat, when, with the voice of the trumpet, Moses shook until he said, I am fearfully afraid and quake.

And then that Shekinah that was over Israel, of all the figures in the Bible—and this is more than a figure, it’s a symbol—of all the symbols in the Bible, I know no other that is so satisfying, so deeply satisfying as the symbol of the Shekinah. I use it often and often refer to it in my preaching and praying because it to me sums up wonderfully this holiness of God present.

There was that cloud hanging over by day, plainly visible, that mysterious cloud not made of water vapor, not a shadow cast somewhere, but a mysterious cloud. And at night, as the light of the day faded away, that cloud began to turn incandescent. And when the darkness had settled, it shone brightly like one vast light hanging over Israel.

So, every tent in that diamond-shaped tent city was lighted fully by the strange Shekinah that hung over. Nobody had built that fire, nobody put any fuel to that fire, nobody stoked that fire, nobody controlled that fire. It was God bringing himself within the confines of the human eye and shining down.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have lived then, to take your little baby by the hand when he was big enough to toddle, and say, I want to show you something wonderful, I want to show you something, look, look at that, and have the little lisping fellow say, what is it, mama? And you say, that’s God, that’s God.

Moses, our leader, saw that fire in the bush. Later Moses, our leader, saw that fire in the mountain. And now since we’ve left Egypt, that fire has hovered over us now all these years, maybe ten, maybe twenty, maybe thirty years, that fire is there.

But how do you know there’s a God, mama? There’s the fire. There’s that mysterious over-plus from another world that has no connotation of morality, particularly, that’s all taken for granted. It has only a connotation of the reverent and solemn and awe-inspiring and terribly different and wonderful and glorious.

And that was there, and then it was in the temple when they had built the temple, when Moses had built the tabernacle and when the temple was built, and then when the fire came down at Pentecost, it was that same fire again, and it sat upon each of them, and it rested down upon them with an invisible visibility, a visibility that was yet not exactly visible and certainly would never have photographed if they’d have had cameras, but it was there. It was a sense of being in or surrounded by this numinous, this holy element. And so strong was it that in Jerusalem the Christians went on Solomon’s porch, and the people stood off from them as wolves, they say, stand off from a bright campfire, and looked on and it said they durst not join themselves to them.

Why? Had there been any prohibition? Was any man standing there with a sword saying, don’t come near? No, they were praying people, humble, harmless, undefiled, clean, and completely harmless as far as the crowd was concerned, but the crowd couldn’t come. They didn’t rush in and trample the place down. They stood away from Solomon’s porch because there was a holy quality there, they couldn’t come up to.

And when Paul was explaining the mysterious fullness of the Holy Ghost in the book of Corinthians, he said, some of you, when you meet together and you obey God and God speaks, there is such a sense of God’s presence there that the unbelievers fall on their faces and go out and report that God is with you indeed.

Now, that emanates from God, as all holiness emanates from God. My dear people, if we are what we ought to be, if we may see to it that our conversation, the whole sum of our lives, beginning with the inner life, becomes becoming more and more God-like and Christ-like, less and less like the things of this world, more and more like the things of the world above, I believe there will be upon us something of that.

I have met a few that have had this on them, and I don’t hesitate at all to say to you that it has meant more to me than all the teaching I’ve ever had, all the Bible teachers that I ever have thought, and I thank God for every one of them. I stand indebted deeply to every Bible teacher down the years. But they did little but instruct my head, but the brethren who had this strange thing on them instructed my heart.

Some weeks ago, there appeared an article called “The War of the Ages” in the “Alliance Weekly.” It was sent to me by the widow of my friend Emil Sywulkaof East Africa. I knew Emil Sywulka when I was a young fellow. I have mentioned it before, certainly in my preaching I have not overlooked it. But I knew him, a long, lean, rather homely, serious-faced man who smiled infrequently, but when he did it was like the coming out of the sun after a storm. He had this in marked degree.He had it so completely that he was the dean of his field.

Over in Keswick I talked to three missionaries. Day after day I talked to them, as we ate and as we walked together and as we had our services together.These missionaries knew this man, and they told me of this serious-minded, long, lean fellow with the unpronounceable name, who walked with God so perfectly that there was something on him. They said there was something different, Mr. Tozer, and now say what you will, this man had something different.Personality? Absolutely none. He was without it.

But now in his seventies, on an old motorcycle, he’s chugging over the rough way, and suddenly the motorcycle goes out of control and Emil falls beside the way, and they picked him up.He died shortly after of a heart attack. It wasn’t an accident, but he died in the harness, died with his face toward the light. He took with him that old, tired body, I suppose, and they laid that away in Africa, and his spirit went to God.

But he left behind him a sense of the numinous, a sense of this mysterious, awe-inspiring presence that comes down on some people and means more than all the glib tongues in the world. I’ve gotten so I’m afraid of a glib tongue.

I’m afraid of the man that can always flip his Bible and answer your question. He knows too much. I’m afraid of the man who has thought it all out and has a dozen epigrams that he can quote; that he’s thought up over the years and settled everything spiritual. Brethren, I’m afraid of him.

There is a silence sometimes that’s more eloquent than all human speech. Sometimes there is a confusion of face and a bowing of the head that says more divine truth than the most eloquent preacher can say. And so, he says, Be holy, as and for I am holy.

First bring your life morally into line that God may make you holy, and then bring your spiritual life into line that God may settle upon you with the Holy Ghost, that there may be upon you that quality of the wonderful and the mysterious and the divine. You don’t cultivate it, and you don’t even know it, but it’s there. And it’s this that the Church of our day lacks.

Oh, that we might seek to cultivate the knowledge of God, that we might seek to become more God-like, and then without cultivation and without seeking, there would come upon us this that gives our witness meaning, this sweet, radiant fragrance.

Haven’t you noticed that in some churches it’s felt very strongly? But you say you don’t go by your feelings, do you, Mr. Tozer? Sure. Quote me on that if it’s worth it. Feeling is an organ of knowledge, and I don’t hesitate to say so. Feeling is an organ of knowledge.

Define love for me. You can’t define love. You can describe it, but you can’t define it. And a person or a group of people or a race that had never heard of the word love and didn’t know what it was, all of the dictionaries in the world couldn’t teach them what love is. But just let some old freckled-faced boy with big ears somewhere and his hair a bit awry, let the feeling of it come to his heart, and he knows more than all the dictionaries can tell you. Love can only be understood by feeling it.

And so, it is with the warmth of the sun. Tell a man who had no feeling it’s a warm day, he wouldn’t know what you meant. But take a man who is normal out into the warm sun, and he’ll soon know it’s warm. You can know more about the sun by feeling than you can by description.

And so, there are qualities in God that can never be explained to the intellect but can be known by the heart. So, I do not hesitate to say that I do believe in feeling. I believe in what the old writers called religious affections. And we have so little of it because we’ve not laid the groundwork for it. The groundwork of repentance, and obedience, and separation, and holy living.

And if we lay the groundwork, thus you will find there will come to us this sense of the otherworldly, this presence of God that will be wonderfully, wonderfully real. So that when sometimes as a religious prayer cliche, we pray the little expression, O God, draw feelingly near, we’re not too far off.

Some would wave us off on that and say you’re off the track. I’m not sure. O God, come feelingly near. He came feelingly near to Moses at the bush. He came feelingly near to Moses on the mount. He came feelingly near to the church at Pentecost. And He came feelingly near to that Corinthian church when the unbelievers went away awestruck to say God’s in the middle of them. God is with them. Oh, how we need this in our day.

Let’s pray. O Son of God, Most Holy, that Holy Thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God. O Holy Thing, born, crucified, risen, enthroned, we beseech Thee that Thou would rebuke all the unholiness in us that would grieve Thy Spirit from us.

Rebuke, we beseech thee, all of the flesh and of the mind that is even negative, and that thus hinders the operation of the Spirit. Oh, we beseech Thee, let the Shekinah be seen today. Let it hover over each habitation, showing that the Lord is nigh.

We beseech thee, may we go away from this place, serious, if need be; perturbed, bothered, until we have done something with this injunction, and have sought to be holy as Thou art holy, and have tried by surrender and faith to purify our hearts unto obedience. Grant, we beseech Thee, to answer all this through Christ our Lord. Amen.

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Gods Abundant Mercy

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

June 28, 1953

Just a little morsel from 1 Peter, that third verse of the first chapter. Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, which according to His abundant mercy hath begotten us again unto a lively hope by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. Last week I talked on this, blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Today I would speak on, according to His abundant mercy. Now Peter, just before he said, according to His abundant mercy, had blessed God the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. Now we find there was a clear reason for the outburst. He blessed the Father because the Father had blessed us. If the Father had not blessed us, we could not possibly bless the Father. And if we had not been begotten again unto a living hope by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, there would be no possibility of our blessing the Father. So, he said, blessed be the God and Father of Jesus Christ because He hath begotten us again, and He begot us again out of His abundant mercy.

Now I have pointed this out in order that we might see that there is always a clear link between one truth and another in the Bible; that if an apostle breaks out into a doxology, he wasn’t simply having himself a spiritual time. Look what went before, and look what follows, and you will find there were clear, logical reasons for the doxology.

And it is always so with New Testament Christians. The Spirit-led life is a clear, logical, and rational life. I must repeat what I said last Sunday night in a different context, that you and I must have the courage that belongs to our sound Christian faith, and we must stop this ignoble apologizing and cease to take this whipped Spaniel attitude out in the world. There is no reason why we should, like a paddled, cocker Spaniel, look sad and dreary and apologetic and cringe and crawl before the world. The world has nothing we want, and we have no cause to apologize to the world.

We are believers in a faith that is as well authenticated as any solid fact of life. And what we believe, and the links in the chain of evidence, are clear and rational. So that instead of apologizing, we should boldly assert, if we believed in ourselves and in the faith, we hold, with the fanaticism that the Communist believes in his devil-inspired doctrines, the Church could go off the defensive and go over to the offensive. Communists never apologize. Christians always do. And that’s why we’re where we are.

I’m glad that Brother McAfee had the ecclesiastical courage to announce and join in singing a song that’s an Easter song. I think that it’s time we rescue some of these great songs from one Sunday a year, give them back to the Church where they belong. The Church has a right to rejoice. Christ the Lord is risen today, and our Son sets in blood no more. Marvelous imagery, marvelous scriptural imagery that Wesley wove into that hymn. And if we half believed it, we’d go off the defensive and go over to the attack.

And so instead of crawling before the world and apologizing in low, subdued tones before the learned world, we would frankly and boldly assert that Jesus Christ is risen, and what are you going to do about that great fact?

I say that Peter blessed the Lord God, but he wasn’t simply letting himself go like an old lady in a camp meeting. There were particularly sound theological reasons for saying, Blessed be the Lord. He blessed Him because He had begotten us again, and because it was through His abundant mercy that He did it. And the hope He had begotten us to, was a living hope, not a dead one.

I point out that the Spirit-led Christian life is not according to whim or impulse or a caprice, and yet I know Christians who feel you cannot be spiritual without being capricious, and that the more impulsive you are, the more spiritual you are.

I remember years ago, I haven’t heard of him now for a long time, he petered out the way they all do, but he was a very popular healing evangelist, and he just oozed in or tumbled in to his meetings, just tumbled into them, never knew what anybody was going to do. And he was too busy running around to ever plan anything, so he just sort of tumbled and stumbled into the meetings and muddled through them.

And because he was like that, they advertised him as a man of lightning changes. Why, they said, this brother is just as likely to get up and take the offering before they sing the first hymn, or he’s just as likely to get up and preach the sermon and then have a hymn. You never know what he’s going to do.

Well, brother, I don’t know. These men of lightning changes. Sometimes it’s a cover-up for laziness and poor planning and lack of thought. Sometimes it’s simply temperament. They’re usually no good in the Church of Christ, and they wouldn’t be any good if they worked for Ford or General Motors either.

Imagine if you will, a fellow who would say to the boss at General Motors, no, Mr. Jones, I’m one of these impulsive fellows, you never know what I’m going to do, I’m a man of lightning change. Someday I may be out at seven in the morning, and other times it may be three in the afternoon. Sometimes I may go to my machine, and another time I may push another fellow out and take his machine. I just follow the leading of the Spirit. You know how long he will last? He just lasts long enough to get his pay and get out of there. You can’t run things on these impulsive, changeable, and constantly changing men of lightning changes.

There was nothing like that among the apostles. They were Spirit-led, and they were likely to do always what God wanted them to do. But somehow or other, it so turned out, as it properly should, that what God wanted them to do perfectly fit in with the total scheme of redemption and the whole will of God in the New Testament. So that there was no place for the temperamental, whimsical fellow.

Peter was no good to God until he got over being whimsical and temperamental. As long as he was temperamental, scolding the Lord of glory for this or that, he was no good to the Lord. He was a pest. But when he got filled with the Holy Ghost and got a vision or two and got suffering a little and kicked out of a few places and leveled down, then he became the great apostle, second only to Paul in the New Testament. But God had to take lightning changes out of Peter and settle him down into the harness where he could work for the Lord.

I say there are those who feel that if it isn’t queer, it isn’t spiritual, if it isn’t capricious, it isn’t of the Holy Ghost. But I notice a clear, logical link between everything anybody said in the New Testament and the reason they said it, always. So that we are not victims of caprice, neither are we victims of the weather, nor are we victims of the state of our health. Mr. McAfee coughed all night last night, but he’s still around. And occasionally I feel tired, but I’m still here. And I don’t like sticky weather, but you have to go right on, brother. You can’t show up at the house of God just when it’s 70 and the humidity 31. You got to go to church no matter. And it’s the same with prayer. You have to pray.

One man said that you’re supposed to go to God and be honest with God. He said, when you go to prayer, you go and be honest. I said, tell God the truth. One other man said, when you go to prayer and you feel that the whole thing bores you, he said, don’t hide it, tell God frankly, God, I’m bored with this whole business. He said, God will forgive you and bless you and straighten you out and get you started right. But the main thing is, be honest and pray no matter whether you feel like it or not.

So that was the way Christians did things. They didn’t, they weren’t victims of moods. And if you knew the whole truth, there are very few Christians whose moods are entirely up on a high level and sustained level.

Sometimes people come to me and they say, Brother Tozer, they call me up and say, could I have a half hour with you? It usually turns out to be an hour and a half and two hours, and I say, sure, come on over. So, they’ll come over. He’ll say to me, Brother Tozer, I believe I’m a spirit-filled man, I’ve been filled with the Holy Ghost, I’m all on the altar, I’m consecrated, but there’s one weakness I’d like to have you tell me how I can correct. I don’t always have the same degree of feeling and spirituality. Sometimes I’m up and sometimes I’m a little down, and there doesn’t seem to be always that high level, what can I do about it?

And I say, I wish you’d tell me, because I don’t know either, and I haven’t read a biography that I can think of, unless it was Francis of Assisi. I might except him, but outside of him I don’t know any honest Christian that ever can get up and say, I live a consistently high level, I fly at an altitude of 16,000 feet all the way.

Now, if any of you would get up and say, Mr. Tozer, I have lived for 19 years now and never have ceased that high level, blessed art thou, and I honor you, but I have never reached there, pray for your pastor, because there are times when my liver’s out of order, and there are times when I come to my study with no more desire to pray than a horse, but a little while with the Scriptures, and a little while with the hymn book and you’re back in prayer habit again.

And I don’t mean to leave the impression that you are always up and down, because that does not accord with what I said at first, but I only mean to say that we are men and women who live according to the high logic of spiritual truth, not according to our feelings.

The old writers talked about what they called a frame. They would put an entry in their diary, it was a very happy frame this morning, praise the Lord, and maybe two weeks later there’d be an entry, it was a very low frame this morning, it felt very depressed, but nothing had changed except their frame.

And one hymn writer says, I dare not trust the sweetest frame, but wholly lean on Jesus’ name, and I’ve gone before audiences now and again and said, now please, anybody who knows, stand and tell me, I’ll give you a minute to tell me, what does the writer mean when he says, I dare not trust the sweetest frame, and I’ve never found anybody that knows? Well, we say it a little differently, we say frame of mind, it’s the same thing. Say, oh, he was in a happy frame of mind this morning, wasn’t he? Say, she was in a very sad frame of mind. And the writer says, I dare not trust the sweetest frame of mind, but wholly lean on Jesus’ name.

So you see, brethren, you and I live according to a wholly high spiritual logic, and not according to shifting frames of mind. Amen? Now, that’s very unspiritual doctrine, some people don’t like that. They say, oh, you’ve got to be blessed all the time, happy, happy, happy, happy.

But if they would just quit lying and tell the truth, they’ll have to admit there are days when they’re not so happy, happy as they were the day before. But don’t let it get you down, just read your Word and pray and sing a song and take the means of grace and you’ll be as happy today as you were yesterday.

Now it says here, and this is what I want to really get at, according to his abundant mercy. Whatever God did and whatever he’s doing is according to his abundant mercy, and we have the adjective abundant here to modify the word mercy. It describes God’s mercy.

And you know that word abundant comes from a Greek word which at least has these associated meanings. It means largest number, it means very large, it means very great, it means much, and it means many. Now it can mean all those things. According to his largest number, his very large, very great, much, many mercies, God has begotten us again.

And let me give you a note here on that word, abundant, that everything God has is unlimited. That is, God being infinite, everything about Him is infinite, which means that it has no boundary anyplace. Now that’s hard for you to think.

I remember I preached on the infinitude of God here one time, and only one man, and that was Brother Kramer, came down, congratulated me and told me he’d gotten my sermon. But so far as I know, everybody else just wrote that one off. But you and I need to get hold of that, and even if it hurts your head, you need to get hold of that. It’s good for you to know that God is infinite, unlimited, boundless, with no posts anywhere saying this is the end. There’s no such posts in the universe. God Almighty fills it and overfills it, and He is infinite and unlimited.

So that we do not need any enlarging adjectives. When we say God’s love, we don’t need to say God’s great love, although we do say it. When we say God’s mercy, we don’t need to say God’s abundant mercy, though we do say it. And the reason we say it is to cheer and elevate our own thoughts, not to tell that there is any degree in the mercy of God. There are no degrees in the mercy of God, there couldn’t be, for God is degree-less, limitless and infinite.

Therefore, when you say God’s mercy, you’re talking about that which is so vast that the word vast doesn’t describe it, because it has no limits anywhere. Its center is any place, and its circumference nowhere.

Now, these adjectives are useful when we talk about earthly things. We talk about the great love of a man for his family. We talk about little faith, or great faith, or much faith, or more faith. We talk about wealth, and we say he was a man of considerable wealth. But if he has a little more tucked away somewhere, we say he is a man of great wealth. But if his bank account is still larger, we say he’s a man of very great wealth. And if he really owns it, we say he’s a man of fabulous wealth. So we go anywhere up and down the scale from considerable to fabulous.

Do you know where you belong on this, in this scale, because wealth, human wealth, is that which may vary up and down the scale from practically nothing at all to so much you can’t count it. But when we come to God, there is no such degreeing of things. When we say that God is rich, God’s riches, we include all the riches there are. God isn’t richer, or less rich, or more rich, He’s rich. So He isn’t more merciful, less merciful, He’s merciful. For whatever God is, He is in fullness of unlimited grace.

But you say, then, why does the word abundant occur here? Why does it say His great love, wherewith He loved us? Those adjectives are put in there for us, not for God. It was in order to elevate our minds to the consideration of the vastness of the unlimited mercy of God, that Peter said it was abundant.

Now, God’s mercies are equal to God. And for that reason, all comparisons are futile. God’s mercy is equal to God. And if you want to know how merciful God is, then you will know, just see how great God is, and see God, and then you’ll know how merciful God is.

I remember Brother Kopp telling us, missionary to Africa, telling us about a deacon in the church in Congo, a great, big, fine fellow. And he, of course, had the job of disciplining these converts. And one young convert hadn’t gotten all the devil out of him yet, and he inclined to break the rules and do things he shouldn’t.

And they disciplined him and disciplined him again and again, and finally this big, strapping Christian deacon called in his erring brother. And he said, Now, brother, you have been failing us and disappointing us, disgracing your Christian calling about enough. Now when we started with you, we had a bottle of forgiveness. But I’m here to tell you, young man, that bottle is just about empty. And we’re just about through with you. The missionary got a chuckle out of that. He thought it was a very quaint and picturesque way of explaining that they were about done with that fellow.

But you know that bottle of forgiveness that God has, has no top nor bottom to it. And God never says to a man, never, and never has said to a man, now, the bottle of my mercy is about empty.

God’s mercy doesn’t run out of a bottle. God’s mercy is God acting the way He acts toward people, and therefore we can say that it is abundant mercy. And I might point out something here which you may have overlooked, that every benefit God bestows is according to mercy.

You know, there’s a sort of a pardonable heresy abroad that God deals with some people in mercy and some in justice. But God deals with everybody in mercy. If God did not deal with everyone in mercy, we would all have perished before we had time to be converted. We float on a vast, limitless sea of divine mercy. And it’s the mercy of God that sustains the worst sinner. If we have life, it is according to the mercy of God. If we have protection, it is according to the mercy of God. If we have food, it is God’s mercy that gives us food. And if we have providence to guide us, it is God’s mercy.

David said, Have mercy upon me and hear my prayer. Was he just using words? No. Again, a sound, clear, logical statement of theological fact. According to Thy mercy, hear my prayer. Mercy even enters into the hearing of prayers. Mercy must enter into the holiest act any man can ever perform.

And it is a constant mercy on the part of God. The fact that I’m sane instead of somewhere committed to an institution is an act of mercy on God’s part. The fact that I’m free and not in prison is a mercy of God. The fact that I’m alive and not dead is God’s mercy over me. And the same for you, and the same for every man, Jew and Gentile and Mohammedan, whether they believe it or not.

So, you and I float in a sea of the mercy of God. I admit it’s when we enter the sanctuary. I admit it is when you come across the threshold into the kingdom of God that mercy becomes sweet, and we identify it and recognize it. And it’s certainly intensified and pointed up, and it’s through His mercy that we’re begotten again, but that same broad mercy of God kept that sinner through maybe fifty years of rebellion.

My father was sixty years old when he was born again. Sixty years! He had sinned and told dirty stories and sworn and lied and cursed, and then he gave his heart to the Lord Jesus Christ and was converted and is in heaven.

And the mercy that took my father to heaven is a great mercy, and we celebrate the mercy that took him there. But it is no greater than the mercy that kept him and endured him sixty years.

I’ve told this story before, but it perfectly fits here. An old Jewish rabbi in Old Testament times, a man came to his door and asked to stay overnight. It was dark, and he was a traveler, and he said, I’ve made it to your house, could I stay overnight? The old rabbi said, sure. He said, you’re a very old man, aren’t you? He said, I’m nearly a century old. He said, all right, you can come in and stay overnight.

The old man came in, they sat around and talked, and the rabbi said, what about your relation to God? What about your religion? Oh, me? He said, I don’t believe in God. Well, he said, I don’t have any faith in God at all, I’m an atheist. The rabbi rose and opened the door and said, get out of my house. I won’t keep an atheist in my house overnight. The old man got up and hobbled to the door, and the door was shut again.

The rabbi sat down by his candle and his Old Testament, and a voice said to him, son, why did you turn that old man out? He said, I turned him out because he’s an atheist, and I can’t endure him overnight. And God said, son, I’ve endured him nearly a hundred years. Don’t you think you could endure him one night? He leaped from his chair and rushed out, took the old man in his arms and brought him back in and treated him like a long-lost brother. It was the mercy of God that for one hundred years nearly, had endured that old atheist.

So, the mercy of God endured my father fifty years, and the mercy of God endured me seventeen years and then has endured me all the years since. So, let’s get away from this semi-heretical idea that God deals with some people in mercy and deals with others in justice. He deals with everybody in mercy. Everybody is dealt with in mercy. The Bible plainly declares it, it says here that His mercies, the Lord is good to all, and His tender mercies are over all His works, 145th Psalm. God never violates mercy.

I can see the more I pray and read my Bible and think, the more, I’ve got to write my book on the attributes of God. I got to do it. I hope God will let me live that long. But this idea that God works according to one facet of His nature one day and according to another facet and another is all wrong, God never violates any facet of His nature. When God sent Judas Iscariot to hell, He did not violate mercy. And when God forgave Peter, He did not violate justice.

But everything God does He does with the full protection of all of His infinite attributes. So, when a sinner, though he lived to be a hundred years old and sinned against God every moment of his life, he is still a partaker of the mercy of God. He still floats on a sea of mercy, and it is from the mercy of God that he is not consumed.

Now there will be a day when the sinner will pass out from the realm where God’s mercy supports him, and he will hear a voice depart from Him, I never knew you, ye that work iniquity. And hell will be the just desert, justly apportioned to those who refuse redeeming mercy. But there has been a providential mercy that has kept the sinning man all his lifetime.

So we Christians, we didn’t come in through the door of mercy and then live apart from that door. We are in the room of mercy, and the very sanctuary is a sanctuary of mercy. And God has had mercy upon you all your life, sir. We must not become self-righteous and imagine we are living such wonderful lives that God blesses us because we are good. That’s not so. God blesses us because of his abundant mercy which He bestowed on us, and not because of any goodness, though He is busy making us good.

I do not believe that even heaven itself will ever permit us to forget that we are recipients of the mercy of God. The very angels that are around the throne are there because of the goodness of God. The very seraphim with their six wings are there because of the goodness of God.

So, you and I will never be permitted to forget Calvary. A little old morbid song says, lest I forget Gethsemane, lest I forget dark Calvary, but there’s a modicum of truth in it at any rate.

We must never forget that we live because God is merciful. We are recipients of the mercy of God. I am here this morning because God has been merciful to me, not because I am a good man. Although God wants His people to be holy as He is holy, He does not deal with them according to the degree of their holiness, but according to the abundance of His mercy. Honesty requires us to admit this. I pray that we may all be perfectly honest and admit it.

Now, the unjust man will soon pass from mercy to judgment. A hundred years the old atheist sinned against his God, and God was willing to bear with him overnight yet. But the day will be when the old atheist will die and pass from mercy to judgment.

So, I believe in justice, and I believe in judgment. I believe that the only reason mercy triumphs over judgment is that God, by a divine omniscient act of redemption, fixed it so man could escape justice and live in the sea of mercy. The just man, that is, the man who believes in Jesus Christ and who was born anew and who is a child of God, lives in that mercy always. The unjust man lives in it now in a lesser degree, but the time will come when he will not stand in the judgment, nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous.

For the Lord knoweth the way of the righteous, but the way of the ungodly shall perish. For the unjust sinner, though he is kept by the mercies of God, kept from death, kept from insanity, kept from disease, kept a lifetime through the mercy of God, yet he will violate that mercy, turn his back on it, and walk into judgment. And then it’s too late for the man, for the ungodly shall not stand in the judgment. But in the meantime, you and I stand in the mercy of God.

So, remember, when you kneel down to pray, don’t do like the man who went to the altar. He said he got down on his knees, he was under terrible, blistering conviction, and he had learned the Ten Commandments when he was a younger fellow. He got down on his knees there and he began to talk to God about his sins. He had them numbered, I mean, the Ten Commandments numbered. He said, Now, Father, now, God, remember, I admit I have broken number one, number four, number seven, but remember, Father, I kept number two and number three, number six. How foolish, how unutterably foolish. We should go to God and dicker with him like that. We should go to God like a storekeeper and portion out our goodness.

I’d rather follow old Thomas Hooker, the old Puritan saint. He came to die, and he’d been a man elevated way above the average in his spiritual life and holy living. They said, Brother Hooker, you go to receive your reward. No, no, no, he said, I go to receive mercy. Brother Hooker went out, although he rated high up in the level of holy men, he went out not to look for his reward, but to look for still more of the mercy of God.

So, blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who according to His abundant mercy, oh, I think that’s about enough, the sun shines on the just and on the unjust, and we float along in a glorious, shimmering sea of the limitless, boundless, infinite mercy of the Lord our God. How wonderful is God’s mercy.

I remember years ago I preached on the text, Thou, God, forgivest sin. Thou art a God who forgivest sin. I didn’t know it, but a woman was present, and some long time afterward she told me. I got it somehow through a letter, telephone conversation, or some way. She said, That night, that night, as you repeated the text, Thou, God, forgivest sin. That night I believed God, and my sins were pardoned, and I’m a Christian now.

What could I say more than this? Thou art a God of abundant mercy, so don’t look in at yourself, look away. Fennelin said, trying to straighten yourself up and fix yourself over? No, it won’t do. Come as you are.

With this I close. Paul Rader told about the artist. He wanted to paint a picture, for some reason he had in his head, to paint a picture of a tramp, a real tramp, a bum off the street. We’re talking about all the time down here in Skid Row.

So he went to Skid Row, and he hunted up the most disreputable, run-down-at-the-heel, frayed, dirty, disheveled, ungroomed bum that he could find. And he said, I’d like to have you come to my studio. I want to paint you. His face brightened up, his old, baggy, bleary eye took on a new light. He said, you mean you want to put me in a picture? He said, Yeah, I want to paint you into a picture. Would you come? He said, yeah. How much will it mean to me? Well, he said, I’ll tell you. I’ll give you a good fee. He said, I’ll want you to come several times. He said, I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll give you $25 now, and here’s my address. You show up there tomorrow morning, and I’ll tell you what to do.

The next morning the doorbell rang, and the artist went to the door. Here stood a fine-looking fellow with a white shirt on, clean tie, haircut, new hat, and his pants having a reasonable facsimile of a press. He said, good morning, what can I do for you? He said, don’t you know me, boss? He said, I’m the set from a picture this morning. The artist said, are you the fellow I hired? He said, yeah. He said, I didn’t want to come to your fine place looking like a bum, so I spent this $25 getting myself fixed up. The artist said, I can’t use you. He said, goodbye. He dismissed him. He wanted him as he was.

Two men went up into the temple to pray, and one said, Here I am, God. I’m all fixed up. Every hair is in place. And the other one said, O God, I just crawled in off a skid row. Have mercy upon me. God forgave the skid row bum and sent the other man away hardened and unforgiven. Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who according to His abundant mercy has begotten us again.

So come just as you are, friends, and God will show you what to do. He’ll straighten you out. There’s no contradiction there in the slightest between what I’ve said now and all my preaching on repentance. For God does require repentance, as I’ve said many times. But that’s something else again. And when the human spirit comes to God feeling that it’s better, more acceptable, it automatically shuts itself out from God’s presence.

But when the human spirit comes to God knowing that anything it gets will be mercy, then repentance has done its proper work. God will forgive and bless that man and take him into His heart and teach him that all God’s kindness is through mercy.

You go out on the sidewalk; mercy lets you stand there. You greet your friend with a sane mind and a clear voice, mercy gave you that. You go sit down to a good meal; mercy gave you that meal. You rest on a nice soft couch this afternoon, take a little nap, mercy gave you that. You get up and go to your work, mercy did that for you. We’re all recipients of the mercy of God. The Christian knows it and has taken that mercy and used it, so to speak, to assure his abundant entrance into the kingdom of God.

The sinner is a recipient of God’s providential mercies, too. But he tramples it under his feet and prepares himself for an endless hell. Which are you doing?

Father, we pray, bless thou this truth, O God, thy mercies are abundant. Are not thy mercies full and free, and have they not, O God, found out me? We thank Thee for Thy mercies, Thy many abundant, full mercies.

Now we pray that Thou wilt help us to lean back upon Thy mercy and trust and not be afraid, hate sin and love righteousness, flee from iniquity and follow after godliness. But always know that in all that we do, mercy is around us like the air underneath us as the earth, above us as the stars.

And we live in a merciful world to serve a merciful God, and live and swim and move and have our being in the abundant mercies of the triune God. Graciously grant us, we pray thee, properly to understand this and to apply it to our hearts. And we’ll give Thee praise through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen

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Christ Foreordained Manifested for You

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

January 10, 1954

In 1 Peter, the first chapter, verse 19, speaks of Christ, a Lamb, in verse 20, who verily was foreordained before the foundation of the world, but was manifest in these last times for you, who by Him do believe in God that raised Him up from the dead and gave Him glory, that your faith and hope might be in God.

Now, this passage of Scripture is a gem let down like Peter’s sheet right out of heaven, and it would be just as applicable to any group of Christians anywhere in the world as it is to this group. It would fit into the needs, the eternal needs, of a church in Korea or among the Zulus or among the Indians of South America, or among the Jews or Gentiles the world over, because it is not timely truth, it’s timeless truth. It speaks only of three persons, God and Christ and us.

Now, as a Protestant in a free America, I am at liberty to discuss any topic I might find myself capable of discussing. I might this morning discuss art. I could bone up on that at the library, and talk or two about art, maybe literature. I’d like to talk about Milton, because I’ve enjoyed him so much in my years. I couldn’t talk about music. I might give my ill-informed opinions on politics, world events.

And I suppose that if I were real careful, and you were very patient, some benefit might come to us by my so doing. But I don’t mind telling you that now more than ever in my life, I find myself smitten with something I think is nothing less than a divine stroke. Eternity is before my eyes while I talk, and increasingly before my eyes while I pray, and even while I think on religious subjects.

I am seized upon by a thought, a thought that becomes an oppressive thought. It is that the earth is growing old, and the judgment is drawing near. And that a wink of God’s eye, just a wink of God’s eye, will clear the earth of everyone now living on it. Everyone now living on the earth imagines himself to be vastly important in the cosmic scheme. But a wink of God’s eye only, a flick of God’s lash, and everyone now living, the most important and the anonymous and unheard of, altogether shall go the way of the earth.

And that nothing, not one thing, of these now so important things will matter at all in a very short time. And that all now listening to me, and all now on the earth, will stand very shortly in awful silence and see the record of their lives exhibited before them. And that all distinctions then of race or color or money or social level will all disappear. And God will not see our diplomas, nor our bank accounts, nor the color of our skins, but will look at us as human beings only, beings made in the image of God, having sinned, then redeemed or not. That is, redeemed, but whether saved or not, will lie with us.

So, with this upon me, always upon me, always as a background to everything I say, in conditioning and determining the tone as well as the choice of my material, I would talk to you then about God and Christ and you, as in the text here. And the sermon will simply be a repeating of the phrases that make up the text, plus what I hope may be one or two thoughts on each phrase.

Now, he says here that Christ, the Lamb, was foreordained before the foundation of the world. Most or every version has it, foreknown before the foundation of the world. Now that foundation of the world expression can mean either the bringing into being of created things, or the ordering of the vast wild forces into an ordered universe; or it can mean both. Sometimes it means one in the Bible, sometimes it means the other, sometimes it means both, sometimes you don’t know which one it means.

But before God brought into being, time and space and matter and law that now make what we call the world, Jesus Christ was foreknown and foreordained. And before He took the vast wild forces that moved through His worlds and ordered them into a universe, an ordered universe like a watch, as though a watchmaker were to take the pieces of a watch scattered all over the top of a table. And through His knowledge and skill, so arranged them that they now are all compact and beautiful in a case, tell the time of day to the split second.

So, God somewhere took all these vast forces and this illimitable matter that He had formed and within the framework of space and time He ordered it into the world, and that’s sometimes called the foundation of the world.  And before this, Christ was our foreordained Savior.

Now I point out that God did not rush in to apply first aid when man sinned. Sometimes in our instinct for direct statement we forget, and we allow the impression to get out that when man sinned God looked around for a remedy, but this is not the case. Before man sinned, the remedy had already been provided. And before paradise was lost, paradise had already been regained. Because Christ was crucified before the foundation of the world, and in the mind and purpose of God, Christ had already died before he was born. And in the purpose of God, Christ had already died before Adam was created. In the purpose and plan of God, the world had already been redeemed before the world was ever brought into being.

So that paradise lost did not drive God to some distracted action and bring about redemption. But paradise lost was foreseen before the world was and before paradise existed, and God had already preordained and foreknown the Lamb that was without spot and blemish. And this purpose in eternity lay in the mind of God.

Now it says that this was manifest in time. It was foredetermined before time, but it was manifest in time. That is, man’s sinning was done in time and space. And therefore the Timeless One came to time and space in order that He might undo that which was done in space and time by man, the One who was pure spirit. Because there were creatures who had sinned in the flesh, He Himself became flesh in order that He might put to death that which was destroying the human race.

So, the Spaceless One came to space and the Timeless One came to time, and He who was pure Spirit above matter, took upon Himself a material body and came. And so that man’s sinning was done in the material body, and Jesus Christ redeemed us in a material body.

Now that sounds as though it might be simply a repetition of truth already known. But brethren, if we ever lose the ability to wonder at this, we are in grave need of soul-searching and spiritual revival. If we ever lose the wonder out of our hearts just to hear these words, Christ foreknown before the foundation of the world, but manifest in time for you. If those words ever cease to move your heart, then your heart is hard.

I was telling our friend McAfee the other day something that I had read of old Saint Bernard.  There were two Bernards, Bernard of Clairvaux and Bernard of Cluny. It was Bernard of Cluny that wrote so many of the songs that we sing in our day. It was Bernard of Cluny that wrote The Celestial City, from which we get the song about Jerusalem the Golden.

But this was old Bernard of Clairvaux that has been canonized and called a saint, though he was a saint before he was canonized, and he wasn’t any more of a saint after he was canonized. Let’s get that straight.

But old Clairvaux was an old godly saint and a teacher, and he had a young fellow under him that he thought a great deal of and taught and prayed for and helped along. The young fellow outstripped his teacher and was pushed upward, and pretty soon he became Pope. And Clairvaux wrote him a letter, and he said, now you’re Pope. But he said, don’t think that that affects me. He said, love doesn’t know office, and love can never be put in awe by any man’s position.

Now he said, the reason I’m writing you is this. He said, once when I knew you, you had a warm heart, and you served God. But he said, now you’ve got a big job and everybody’s around you and you got a lot to do. Now he said, what I’m afraid of is that your heart will get hard. He said, if you want to know what a hard heart is, don’t ask me, ask Pharaoh. He knows. And he said, the very fact you think you don’t have a hard heart is plenty evidence that you have it already.

I like to hear a man talk that way to the Pope. In fact, I like a man to talk that way to anybody. I would thank any man for reminding me that it’s entirely possible even for a man who in those early days, for many of those men, did and were Christians and did walk with God. And this old saint of God saw what was happening and warned his younger pupil.

And I would thank any man for warning me as I now faithfully warn you. If these old-fashioned, simple, conventional statements of Scriptural truth do not move you or in some degree affect your inner inwardly when you hear them, then it is time for you carefully to rethink your condition and search your own heart to see if perhaps that has already taken place. That hardness of heart which Bernard spoke of, and if you are flippantly sure that it has not taken place, then on the authority of that good man, I would repeat that it has already taken place and very greatly needs your attention.

Now it says here that He was manifest in time, for you. Now I like that, those two little words. If you’ll read your New Testament, you’ll find them. For you. For you. What was the purpose of it all? Well, it was, for you. Why was He born? It was, for you. Why did He die? For you. Why did He rise? For you. Why is He at the right hand of God? For you. And for whom is He now making intercession? It is, for you.

Now in public service I try to be dignified and not embarrass people with any too intimate personalities, but when I’m with God by myself I have no hesitation at all in becoming just as intimate as my faith will allow me to.

So, when we come to the words, for you, I don’t hesitate to write that right into the Bible. I go over some of my own Bible, my old Bibles that have gotten so badly banged up I’ve had to replace them and retire them and put them out to pasture for the next generation, if anybody’s interested. But I find in some of those old Bibles some things that almost embarrass me now with the simplicity of them and the intimacy of them that I put myself in there. Salvation was not for the whole, round world.

I remember the first prayer I ever made in public. It was at a church meeting. We met to eat in that church, and they asked me to pray. Now, I had never prayed in public before. So, I stood up and said, Lord bless the missionaries, amen. That was my first prayer. And I suppose that a great many people are so general, as general as that prayer. I didn’t tell God what missionaries, no I didn’t tell him, request anything particular, I was just getting out of a jam.

And I suppose that it’s possible for us to think about redemption as being so general that there’s nothing particular about it. Brethren, I repeat that you can get so general that nobody gets any good out of anything.

I remember hearing of the young pastor who was very intellectual and very studious and just out of school. But he was also very orthodox and pressed upon his hearers the need of being born anew. And he summed up an eloquent passage with this statement. He said, I tell you, if you don’t get saved on general principles, you’ll never get saved at all. And I’ve often thought of the brother and his general principles. You can get your principles so general that they never touch you at all.

Now, it says here, for you, for you. You, is a pronoun of course, standing instead of a noun, and that noun is you. So, if you just put your name in there, that’ll mean you, so that all this preordination, all this before time purposing of God, this coming of this Spotless Lamb into the world, and the shedding of His most precious blood, it was all done specifically for you.

Now, it was done also for the whole world, but it was done for you. A thing can be for the whole world and nobody can get any good out of it. So, while we believe in the universal atonement of his blood, we also believe in the specific atonement which means you and me. Our name, our number, our size. We, ourselves, we can be identified. So it’s done for us. It says, for you who through Him believe in God.

Now, there can be no true believing in God apart from Christ. There is a great deal of believing in God. I wonder what’s happening to this country. The newspapers and the Saturday magazines like “This Week,” and the bestsellers, many of our bestsellers are religious books.

It’s astonishing how the bestsellers are religious books now, many of the bestsellers. Quite a number of them, “Peace of Mind” and “Peace of Heart,” and “A Man Called Peter,” and “Mr. Jones Meet the Master,” and a number of other religious books have become bestsellers. Thomas Merton’s “Seeds of Contemplation” are now sold 25 cent editions, copies, anywhere in the drugstore you can buy them. And it’s religious, it’s old-fashioned mysticism. And the publishers are saying that a wonderful new something is taking place. People are interested in religion.

This Week magazine last evening had in it, by somebody, the thesis developed that the world could be saved by religion, and then it gave the various religions, and Christianity was one of them.

Now, if this is God’s book, and Peter was God’s apostle, and this New Testament is divinely inspired, then I am led to conclude that real belief in God can come only through Christ. That any other kind of faith in God, or belief about God, is spotty, imperfect, perverted, and very often erroneous.

Some things we can know about God certainly. We can know His eternal power and Godhead. And the Indian that stands on the shore of the lake and raises his arms to the Great Spirit and invokes the help of the Great Spirit on his hunting trip, as they used to do in America before the white man drove them out, that was approach to God of some sort, and that belief in God was some kind of belief.

Edison, saying he believed that God was force, and that if he could live long enough, he believed that he could invent an instrument sensitive enough to detect God, that was some kind of belief in God. And the belief of the deists, such as Voltaire and others; deists who were not atheists. But deists, their idea of God was that God was a great principle, but he was not a personality, that was some kind of belief in God. And the heathen in their blindness, every place have some kind of belief in God.

And I suppose in the long run, any belief in God is better than no belief in God. That’s open to question, but at least I, for the moment, give you my tentative statement that I suppose it’s better to believe in God in a vague, shadowy way than not to believe there is a God. But oh, how much better to say, you who through Him do believe in God.

You believe in God not as a pagan, not as an Indian on the shore of the lake, not as a yogi looking at his nose and controlling his bodily forces. You believe in God as the one who raised Christ from the dead and gave Him glory. That’s also in the text.

And you will find back here what that means in John, Father, said Jesus, I will that they also whom Thou hast given Me may be with Me where I am, that they may behold my glory which Thou hast given Me, for Thou lovest Me before the foundation of the world. And the glory which God had given Him before the foundation of the world, God restored to Him when He raised Him from the dead and gave Him glory. And then it says, and all this was that your faith and hope might be in God.

Now, hope is a beautiful word, but it’s also a treacherous thing. Because it’s possible to hope invalid hopes, hopes that have no foundation underneath them at all. For instance, a condemned man who is supposed to die next Friday, one minute after midnight, never ceases to hope. He believes to the very last that his sentence will be commuted, or it will be, he will be pardoned. And every knock on his cell door, his eyes brighten with the hope that this means the governor has halved the sentence or at least taken the sting of death out of him. But that condemned man goes on to die.

Haul and Heady went to their death in the Missouri gas chamber, probably convinced to the end that they couldn’t die, that somehow there would be hope, but that hope failed them. And there’s been many a mother, God knows many a mother, who has hoped through to the end that her boy would return when all the time her boy was lying, his physical body gone back into decay in some far hidden corner of some burnt-over battlefield. The hope that she’d see her boy failed her. It was a treacherous hope. The condemned man’s hope is a treacherous hope.

And we can hardly go on here without remembering at least Tennyson’s famous and touching illustration of the young woman who expected her sailor lover back from the sea and who knew just when he was supposed to arrive at her cottage and who dressed for that occasion. And he tells in tender, cheer-bringing language of how she stood before the mirror and turned every way and did the last little touch that she knew he’d love. And he said, poor girl, she doesn’t know that already his lifeless body is being tossed and heaved on the billows following the wreck.

Hope may be a deceitful thing and a treacherous thing, but real faith never disappoints, because that faith is in God. It is grounded on the character of God, the promises of God, and the covenant of God, and the oath of God.

Now, remember that an oath, a covenant, and a promise, any of them or all of them, would only be worth as much as the character of the one who made them.

There is, they tell me, a couple of men. We’re going to write them up a little in the Alliance Weekly. There are a couple of men running around claiming to be friends of the Alliance, and they are simply bums and robbers. One Christian brother took such a man in, and he got up in the middle of the night, robbed him of everything that wasn’t nailed down, and disappeared.

Another fellow calling himself Tom Leslie. Now I don’t know whether that’s his right name, maybe he made it up for the occasion. That’s kind of a nice name. I know lots of nice Toms, and I know some nice Leslies. But he combined the names, and he’s going about telling that he’s a friend of Dr. Schumann, and he knows the missionaries and can quote them by name. Then he gets all he can get and disappears.

Now a promise from a man like that, how much would that mean, brother? He could stand on a pile of Gideon Bibles and swear, and I wouldn’t believe him. He could write with his own blood on a piece of paper, and he’s still a liar. A promise is only worth the character of the one who makes it. Even an oath is only worth the character.

That’s why I’ve never been too strong for a belief. This has no place here, but it’s accepted as an illustration, that certain teachers should be made to swear an anti-communist oath. My brother, you can’t pin a communist down with an oath. He’d swear on two bushels of Bibles and then turn around and sneer and sell out his country.

So, a character has to be there before there can be promise and oath and covenant. And the Scripture says, this Jesus Christ the Lamb led us to a faith in God so that our hope might be in God.

So, if God is God, then our hope is sound. And we Christians can walk around absolutely sure that everything is all right, because we have God back of us. His oath, His covenant, His blood support me in the whelming flood. And God, because he could not swear by any other, swore by Himself. He by Himself has sworn, I, on His oath depend, I shall, on eagles’ wings upborne, to heaven ascend.

So, let’s sing together in closing, that song that contains these words from the hymn “The God of Abraham Praise,” signifying that because God has sworn on His own name, we can fully trust in that promise and will be carried to heaven as a result. Amen.