A.W. Tozer Talks

“Three Faithful Wounds-Contrition, Compassion and Longing for God“

Three Faithful Wounds-Contrition, Compassion and Longing for God

Pastor and Author A.W. Tozer

August 30, 1953

I said this morning, and I will now repeat, that I think the Lord gave me a little word about a year ago. And I have never preached it here, though I have referred to it and quoted a little. I preached it in California, in New Jersey, and North Carolina. And I wanted to preach it to you before it joined a great company of sermons, the place nearer thereof shall know it no more.

Because I’ve got a lot of sermons that I never preach anymore, and I don’t want this one to go by until you have heard it. Because I feel that it’s probably one of the most important things I’ll ever say to you. I’m going to read the text in the book of Proverbs 27:6, Faithful are the wounds of a friend, but the kisses of an enemy are deceitful.

Now we’ll just cancel out the last phrase because we are not interested in it tonight. Faithful are the wounds of a friend. And in order that we might know who that friend is, the translators have done what they could for us, but in order that we may know who that friend is, let me read from Job 5:17: Behold, happy is the man whom God correcteth. Therefore, despise not thou the chastening of the Lord, or the Almighty, for he maketh sore and bindeth up, he wounded, and his hands make whole. Now that is God the Almighty who maketh sore and bindeth up, who wounded, and whose hands make whole again.

Now to introduce the little outline of this message tonight, I want also to introduce a woman who has been a great blessing to me over the past few years. She is none other than the woman they call the Lady Julian. Sometimes you hear it pronounced Julianna, but she was known as Julian, the Lady Julian. She lived more than 600 years ago in England, in the city of Norwich. She only wrote one book, and by the good grace of God, that book fell into my hands. She lived 200 years before Martin Luther was born, and yet she was in spirit a Protestant.

If she had ever met Luther, she would have shaken his hand and come over on his side. For she says in the little book which she has written that at one time in her life when she was praying, and you know the way they pray, with all sorts of gadgetry to help them along, she said the Lord feared to her, and the Lord said to her, you don’t have to have all this stuff to pray, that all God wants, and all God expects, is that you should believe in Him and love Him with all your heart.

So, she antedates Luther by a couple of hundred years in preaching justification by faith, and teaching that if you loved God with all your heart and believed in His Son, you’d be all right, regardless of how many of the various religious trinkets you had on at the time.

And then she lived 400 years before Charles Wesley and the Methodists. But this woman taught perfect love before Wesley was born. She believed that we ought to love the Lord until it became like the fire in the bush, a flaming thing, consuming and swallowing everything else up.

And then she was not only as a Methodist, a believer in perfect love, but this very dignified and proper little English lady was guilty at least at one time in her life of shouting a little bit. She said that one day she was meditating on the things of God, and she got to thinking about how high and lofty and wonderful Jesus was, infinitely exalted above the earth and above the heavens. And then she got to thinking what a poor little worm she was, and how far down and how lowly.

Then she said, I meditated how this infinitely high and lofty One should meek himself so low as to become so familiar with a poor worm like me. And she said, I shouted out, glory be to God, isn’t it wonderful.

And if she’d been in a Methodist camp meeting, she’d have felt perfectly at home, because they also had a great deal to say about the high Lord meeking Himself down to dwell in the heart of the common worm.

And then she lived also about 600 years or close to 600 years before A. B. Simpson. But she antedated Simpson and taught before he ever was born that Jesus Christ was everything. That it wasn’t creed or doctrine, but the Lord that was everything, and that creed and doctrine have meaning only because the Lord Jesus Christ is in them. And that when He gets out of them, or is left out of them, they cease to have any meaning at all.

Now she didn’t say it exactly like that, but that was the gist of what she had to say. Then not only did she teach that Jesus Christ was all in all, but she also believed in divine healing. She didn’t practice this, she didn’t preach it, but she practiced it on at least one memorable occasion. She became very, very sick, so sick, in fact, that she thought she was going to die, and everybody else thought she was going to die. So of course they began to cram for the examination, as the Christians do. They neglect, you know, until they’re brought to die, and then they cram for that last hasty and frantic preparation for the judgment seat.

So, they began to cram. They came from everywhere, and they put oil, I suppose, and water, and they did all sorts of things, and they gave her the works. They gave her everything possible to do, and still she kept dying. She said, finally she arrived at a place where she began to die, and knew she was dying. She said she was dying from the feet up, that her feet got cold and dead, and then her legs got cold and dead, and she was dying, and died, she said, clear to the waist.

She remembered telling the Lord, now Lord, I’m only 30 years old, and I’d hate to die and leave my work. She said, it’s now perfectly all right, if you want me to die, why, I’ll die. But she said, think about it a little, and see whether it wouldn’t be a good idea if I lived. For she said, I’m still young, and I’ve got a long time on earth in the natural course of things, and if I die, it won’t do much good.

So, she said, Father, just give that some attention, and she went on dying. Then she said, I began to dive my head down. She said, my head began to die, and I went blind. She said, there was a total darkness, and it began to settle down toward my heart, and I felt myself going. And just when I was about to breathe my last, she said, suddenly and instantaneously, I was perfectly well. She said, I know God did it, and it wasn’t nature, but grace, because it came so suddenly, and I was dying and knew it. And she said, I was instantly healed.

Now she never preached it, but she practiced it, and God delivered that woman marvelously and miraculously. I lay that little foundation as a sort of a little ramp from which we can take off.

And now I want to talk to you about the prayer she made. She said she conceived a strong desire in her heart for the Lord to give her three wounds there in her heart. She said she prayed to God that He would do her the favor.

Now imagine this, brethren, in this time of weak knees, spongy, soft Christians, who complain of the heat, and of the cold, and of the rain, and of the dry spell, and of everything else. Can you conceive of a woman praying this prayer? But she did it. She said, I prayed to God that he would give me three wounds in my heart, and she named them before the Lord. She said, I want thee to wound me with the wound of contrition, and then I want thee to wound me with the wound of compassion, and then I want thee to wound me with the wound of very longing after God.

Now God gave the little woman those three wounds, and she lived to be quite an old lady, and she was known throughout all the area. And they came to her from the north, and south, and east, and west. And she told them the way of love, and trust, and confidence, and the goodness of Jesus, who kneeled Himself down to a poor little worm, and the kind Father who gave His Son to die.

And she was literally a son in her generation, S-U-N, I mean, in her generation, shining upon all. And God answered her prayer, and gave her a great compassion, and a great longing after God, a longing that has imparted itself to everything she wrote, and is still alive in the earth, in the hearts of a multitude of people who know about it, and the wound of contrition she had also.

So, I want to speak of these three faithful wounds. Faithful are the wounds of a friend. And I want to point out that all great Christians have been wounded souls. And you’re pretty well conditioned to this kind of preaching, but the average rank and file run-of-the-mind Christian would think that I had lost my mind and needed to have the man with the white coat and gently lead me away where I could do myself no harm.

But you have been conditioned somewhat to this, but I don’t think you have what I’m preaching about, and I’m not sure I have too much of it myself. The fact that you have gotten used to this kind of preaching may be against you, because these three wounds are for us, and all great Christians have been wounded souls.

Now, it is a strange thing what a wound will do to a man. Here is a young fellow wearing the uniform of an American, or an Australian, or a Turk, and he’s fighting in the late lamented war in Korea. And he is at the peak of perfect health, strong and vigorous and self-confident. And though death is all around him, he’s bold and fearless and ready to crack jokes in the cannon’s mouth. And then a piece of shrapnel rips through his body and the blood begins to flow.

Instantly all the fight goes out of the man. Instantly all self-confidence goes out of the man. At once all of the old patriotic pride goes out of the man, all of the old Adam’s strength goes out of the man, and all his world shuts down and narrows in and becomes only as big as that wound.

It is bigger than the United States. It’s bigger than the world. It’s bigger than the universe to him. This sudden, brutal, sadistic, horrible, heartless, merciless thing that has ripped into his palpitating flesh and left a great hole that out of which pours his blood. And though he may get well again, as long as he’s the wounded man, he’s a defeated man, a beaten man, a child again.

Boys who have been thus hit, though they’re strong and tall and weigh 200 pounds, they have been known to cry for their mothers. The nurses and the doctors who work on such boys, it’s common to hear them revert to their childhood again, beaten back by the terror of that wound, till they think themselves in their pain, lying at home again, asking their mother to help them. The wounded man is the man out of whom all the carnal, self-confident fight has gone.

Now, you will go to your Bible, and you will have no difficulty whatever in identifying the wounded men of the Bible. We might begin with Abraham, one of my favorite characters. Abraham was the man from Ur of the Chaldees, an idol maker, history says.

And of course, I always think of him as being a big man, I don’t know why, but he was a big man in a great many ways, and a very sure man and a self-confident man. Then one day, God said, take thy son, thine only son, Isaac, whom thou lovest, and take him up to a mountain where I will show thee.

And Isaac took the wood on his back, and Abraham went ahead, and the servants came fearfully, close-mouthed, white-faced, following behind, for Abraham was taking his own son, whom he loved, who had gathered up all the love there was in the heart of the man Abraham, a doting, almost idolatrous affection that wound itself around the heart and life of the little Isaac, or the young Isaac. And Abraham raised a knife to slay his son.

You know the blessed, God-blessed sequel, how the Lord forbade him to slay his son, and said, I only wanted to know that thou wouldst indeed obey me. Or words to that effect. But Abraham never got over that wound. He was never the same man again. He was wounded by his friends, and he was wounded to save him from himself.

And that is always the reason God wounds men, to save them from themselves. We are weak when we are strong, and God can break that strength only by wounding us. Just changing it or bending it won’t do. It must be ripped into by a chunk of the cross, and there must be a gaping wound out of which human blood must flow.

And God wounded Abraham. And after that, Abraham was the great father of the faithful, and he has walked literally down the years. He sleeps somewhere yonder in a cave in Asia Minor. But the great spirit of the man has walked all down these years. But it was not the spirit of a Napoleon, or the spirit of a Washington, or the spirit of one of Adam’s earthly, strong, confident men.

But it’s the spirit of a man who was wounded by his friends, who was reduced to helplessness, and then thrown out upon the mercy of God as a baby is thrown out upon into the arms of his mother.

It might come on down to the man Jacob. His story is too well known to need repeating. As long as Jacob could get around unwounded, he was Jacob the supplanter, Jacob the crook, Jacob the bargain maker, Jacob of the ring-straight cattle and spotted sheep, Jacob who knew how to open a store down here, and in six years’ time, own a department store, and in 12 years’ time, own two department stores. That was Jacob. He was a Jew if ever there was one. And he was that kind of fella. He knew he was good. It wasn’t a question of being proud or vain. He just knew he was good.

And then one day God met him on the on the bank of the Jabbok River and wrestled with him into the night. And Jacob wrestled with the angel, and before the morning broke, the angel reached down and touched the thigh of Jacob and wounded him, and changed his name, and Jacob limped from that time on.

And I like to say that when Jacob went home, the sun was shining on his head because it said, the sun rose upon him. Before that, he had been in the shadow so much of the time that the sun couldn’t get to his old bald face. But when God wounded him so that he limped for the rest of his life, the sun shone on his head.

I say to you ladies and gentlemen, that the mere matter of a limp for the rest of your life is very cheap price to pay for the glorious benefits of a wound administered by the Lord Himself.

So the man Jacob was a wounded man, but he never was the same slimy, old, slick, serpentine Jacob that he had been before. His name was changed to Israel, the prince with God, for he prevailed.

And we come to the man Elijah, and I won’t tell you too much about him, but that man Elijah was not one of Adam’s brood. He had been born of the seed of Adam and had come naturally from the loins of a father.

But the man Elijah was a wounded man. He was a man who had gone into the presence of God. He was a man who had gone and stood before kings. He was a man who had stood on the hilltop and had put his life at hazard, and had loved not his life unto the death.

And then after that was over, and the great letdown came, and the nerves of the man were almost broken, Jezebel got after him, chased him into the wilderness. There he learned from God the story that it’s not by might nor power but by the still small voice of the Spirit. The man Elijah went a wounded man. God had gotten through to him and had wounded him deeply.

And there was Jeremiah. I once preached a sermon here in a series from Jeremiah, when I talked about the hurt of Jeremiah. He said, I am hurt for the hurt of the daughter of my people. You skip that over and say the King James Version isn’t easy to understand, is it? We ought to have a new version because the King James is hard to understand. I am hurt for the hurt of the daughter of my people.

It isn’t a low IQ or bad translation there. It’s lack of spiritual perception that makes that hard to understand. Whoever wants to can know that you were talking to a man who’d been wounded by the Holy Ghost, a man who called it a hurt. And he was hurt deeply, and he was hurt because his people had been hurt by the devil and sinned.

We come down to the man Paul, and I suppose there’s no theologian living or dead that quite knows what the man Paul meant when he said from henceforth, let me alone and don’t bother me. For I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus.

Every book written about it will have a different explanation. But I hold up the man Paul as a man who bore in his body the marks of the wounding. He had been wounded by his friends.

Now I could finish this sermon if I wanted to do it by coming on down the years and showing how there was hardly a man, hardly a woman anywhere in church history that ever amounted to anything until they had been wounded to death. Until God had caught them and beaten them and wounded them and made them helpless, then brought them back to life again.

Now let’s look at these three wounds. Here is the wound of contrition. They tell me that repentance is a change of mind. I wrote a little editorial one time, and I said, there is no regeneration without reformation. And I said that before anybody could be regenerated, he had to have repented. And repentance is more than a change of mind. Repentance is a reformation of life.

And I got a long letter this last week, beautifully written, nice, gentle, kindly letter, taking me to task and telling me there was nothing to that at all, that the only message the gospel had from Him is believe, believe, believe. I just as soon joined the Seven-Day Adventists, I just as soon joined the Buckmanites, as to adopt any kind of an unscriptural and false theory as that. The message of the cross carries with it the high imperative that I cannot accept it unless I’m willing to do the will of God.

To say that God has divorced the gospel message of forgiveness and life from the moral message of righteousness and true holiness is to put God at loggerheads with Himself and to bring confusion into the kingdom of God.

No, repentance is more than a change of mind. It is that, but it will not be effective until it becomes a wound. And the trouble with us in our day is that there’s no more wounds than repentance. There are no wounded men lying at the gate of the Kingdom.

They used to pray in the camp meetings, O Lord, bless thy servants, and may the slain of the Lord be many. I don’t know whether they quite knew what they meant or not. And it’s degenerated into a religious cliche, which an old lady could pray if she couldn’t remember anything else. But whoever prayed it first had something, and whoever prayed it with meaning had something. May the slain of the Lord be many.

But we have made entrance into the kingdom of God so cheap that nobody anymore cares whether he’s in or out much, because the price is too cheap, and nobody wants something that’s given away.

Our missionaries tell us that if they give away a gospel of John, nobody will read it. But if they charge the lowest piece of coin there is in the kingdom, if they charge what we’d say a penny for it, they’ll buy them and read it.

And we have made the kingdom of God so easy to get into that people scorn it. Very few people want to get into it anymore. But I say that we have not truly repented until our repentance has become a wound. Until that wound has captured us, and defeated us, and taken the moral fight out of us, and self-defense out of us, and wounded us near unto death.

Now I say that no man has repented until his wound, his repentance has been a wound, and he has not repented while he can reason about his sins. As long as sin is up in the head and we’re able to reason about whether it’s venial or mortal, whether it is one of those amiable sins that the seed of Adam may be forgiven for, or whether it is more serious than that. Just as long as we can reason about our sin, the wound hasn’t hit us yet, and we have not been enabled to repent.

But as soon as sin passes our reason and gets into the conscience, and we become conscious of the fact that we ourselves have killed the Savior, that our sins have nailed him on the cross, and it ceases to be reasoning about it, and becomes a biting, binding, horrible thing.

Some people will come and say, Mr. Tozer, there’s nothing in the Bible about tobacco. And therefore, I don’t want to be told that I can’t use tobacco because there’s nothing in the Bible about it. Whoever says that’s perfectly right, there isn’t anything in the Bible about it. Thank God there wasn’t any tobacco in Palestine where the Bible was written.

But I was south last week, and I saw a lot of it down there, and in case you think there isn’t any, turn on your radio to any station in Chicago but one. And that’s MBI. All the rest are trying to get everybody from a little kid up to use tobacco.

Now here’s the point. I have no doubt there are many people in heaven who use tobacco. I have no doubt about that.

Paul Rader said that a man who chewed tobacco could go to heaven, but he’d have to go to hell to spit. But I’m not bringing that in.

But I suppose there are a lot of people who use tobacco who went to heaven. I don’t doubt that at all. I think there are some people who drank beer who went to heaven. I have no doubt about that. And I think there are some people who drank wine who went to heaven. I have no doubt about that.

But the point is, just as soon as we begin to reason about it, we know it’s on our conscience. And just as soon as we begin to bring carnal reason or bring sin to the bar of carnal reason and argue for any kind of sin or any kind of bad company or the appearance of evil, we’re not penitent. And whether somebody went to heaven who smoked a pipe or not, I don’t know.

But I do know this, that if the thing bothers you and you still do it, you’re not a penitent man. And if you’re worried about a thing and still go on doing that and buy a book to prove you dare do it and go to hear a man who tells you it’s all right, you’re not a penitent man, you’re a moral dodger hunting a place to hide. And your sin has not wounded you and there’s no wound of contrition there.

And I say no man has repented until his sins have brought him to feel that he himself killed the Savior. And I don’t believe any man is repented who would rather be happy than holy. We’re living in the most gloomy age of the Church, and yet we’re living in the period when the Church is seeking happiness avidly and not finding it because she’s not looking for it in the right place.

As long as a man would rather be happy than holy, he’s an unrepentant man. For sin is of such a character that as soon as it hits our conscience, we don’t care whether we’re happy or not. We want to be right with God, but we need a conscience. We need to be hit with a conscience, smitten, wounded within, until contrition becomes a part of our life.

I’ve been telling around what Dr. Fleece told me about Mel Trotter. Now I suppose everybody knows Mel Trotter, knows about him. He was one of the great mission men of America a generation ago. I think he’s gone to heaven now. But he was preaching at a certain Bible school, and he said, God saved me. God converted my soul, he said. I got on my knees and said, God have mercy on me, a sinner. And God converted my soul.

As soon as the meeting was over, some old dispensationalist got to him. He said, Brother Trotter, don’t you know that you were dispensationally incorrect in praying, God have mercy on me, a sinner? Trotter had been around long enough; he knew those boys. Well, he said, brother, you may be right. But he said, if I was wrong, I didn’t know it. And besides that, he said, anybody that was in the shape I was, God would have saved him if he just said, Mary had a little lamb.

Now you know what I mean, don’t you? I mean that God doesn’t listen to words when you get on your knees. God looks for wounds when you get on your knees. He’s not caring whether you’re dispensationally right or not. He wants to know if your heart longs after God enough.

I told this years ago, here I repeat it now. In a certain camp meeting in the United States, maybe 30 years ago, an Indian woman came to the altar. She didn’t speak English, but it turned out she knew two words of English. She had evidently mingled with her converted Indian friends, and she was under blistering conviction. Her conscience seized and boiled and her heart ached, and she could scarcely keep the tears back. She listened to the sermon and didn’t know a word of it. She saw others going to the altar and getting up with a happy face. She decided if God would save them, he’d save her.

So, she got up and went down to the altar too, threw herself down there on her knees and her heart started to pray. Her reason got in the way and said, you know, God speaks English, and He doesn’t know your language. If you don’t speak in English, He can’t save you.

So, she only remembered two words and with tears overflowing her cheeks and her hands stretched up, she said, “O January, O February,” and the peace of God came to her heart, and she got up and converted a woman.

Now you say, what nonsense is that? That’s not according to Romans 10:11, and according to 1 Corinthians 15, 1-3. Oh brother, forget it. If you’d ever get on your knees and pray backwards in Latin and mean it, God Almighty would give you bigger answers than he’s giving you now with all your theological correctness. We’re so theologically correct and so infernally dead. And that’s why we’re where we are.

I told you this morning that I ran onto a Plymouth Brethren down at Ben Lippin that was the hottest Christian I’d met in a long time. Plymouth Brethren, if you please. And I hadn’t met anybody whose heart was so longing after God.

She was a blessed nuisance, going around over the pointing out how she met God and could know Him better. The Lord is looking for people that are hungry and have been wounded and that are through with sin and that feel it in within them.

Now, I quote you what a man said, and I believe it. He said, beware vain and over hasty repentance. And he said, one can tell a man’s spiritual age by the intensity of his repentance. Progress in the spiritual life brings a milder but deep sorrow that remembers the guilt. But because we belong in the gloomy, happy, happy period, no contradiction intended and none there.

We’re living in probably the gloomiest age of the church. When there are more heavy hearts and nervous breakdowns and sad faces and minor tones in the church of Christ than ever there has been. The radiance, the joy, the brilliance, the sharp bell tones that once characterized the evangelical church is found no more in her.

And because we don’t have the wellspring leaping up and tinkling with music, why we have to invent instruments of music, not like David, but instruments of music like the devil. We play everything that isn’t nailed down. Nowadays you go to church, and they’ll just play everything they can get their hands on, bottles and glasses and cups and doorbells and handsaws and just everything.

One fellow blew up a 10-cent store balloon and wet his hands and played on that by depressing it and compressing it and so on. Why he managed to get a change in pitch, you know, up and down the scale. God bless his moronic soul. There’s hope in heaven even for fools, I suppose, but I don’t recommend it.

But because we haven’t the wellspring from within, we hunt every old dry water tap and play music on it, but we’re a sad, gloomy bunch because we haven’t repented. And God is not going to give His joy to the impenitent heart.

And she prayed, O God, wound me, wound me with the wound of contrition. And she carried that wound all her life, and she didn’t care whether she was happy or not. And I have no doubt that Paul was wounded with the wound of contrition, for he must have been, because every time he got up to talk, he talked about how he persecuted the church and how the Lord saved him.

And in his epistles, there are frequent reference, or if not frequent, at least there are references made to how he persecuted the saints of God. And how he was the least of all Christians and the worst of all the apostles because of his sins. But in this happy, happy age, this age of cheap infantile giggling, we want to get repentance over with so we can have fun.

O my God, wound us, wound us with the wound of contrition so we’ll never quite get over it. So always we’ll carry around with us the knowledge that we’ve been sinning. Never forget it, we’ve been sinning.

The second wound is the wound of compassion. Now, compassion, of course, is to feel along with or suffer along with. It is emotional identification. Now Christ had this, of course, in full perfection. I want to point out to you, my friends, that Jesus Christ can never suffer again to save men. He never can suffer to save men again. For the Bible tells us that He cried, it is finished and gave up the ghost.

And the writers of the New Testament epistles tell us that death has no more dominion over Jesus. It tells us that there’s no priest offering a sacrifice now. That Jesus Christ was the last priest and that all the lambs of Old Testament times were summed up in Him. And He died once for all, the Just for the unjust, to bring us to God.

And in a hundred places it tells us that Jesus Christ will never die again. He died once for all to save men. And He can never suffer to save them again. He suffers now to win them.

There is a difference. Our Lord had two bodies. He still has two bodies. He has the body of His flesh which He got from Mary, that pure, perfect, holy body which the Virgin Mary gave Him. In that body He suffered on a cross to save men, composed of His ransomed and regenerated people. And in that body, He is suffering again, not as once to redeem men, but now to win them. And only the Compassionate Heart can win men. You can be sure of that.

So, this woman knew it and prayed, O God, give me the wound of contrition so I’ll always feel what you felt, and always feel the way you feel about people, your people.

Have you ever wondered about us? So sure of ourselves, so sharp, so doctrinally sound, so religious, but oh, with so little compassion. I think that if we were to go to God and say, now God, I’m a believer, but I’m a hard believer. I’m a Christian, but I’m a hard Christian. And I have the courage, Father, to pray that you will wound me with a wound of compassion that will identify me emotionally with Thy Son on the cross and with all for whom He died.

I believe it could be the beginning of a marvelous transformation in our lives, and a marvelous transformation in the lives of the Church. But it’s lack of compassion that hurts us. It’s religious hardness.

A man will come and say, Mr. Tozer, I’d like to ask you a question. Do you think that we ought to pray to the Holy Spirit or merely to the Father, or to the Father and the Son? What do you think about that? And so, we spend hours trying to settle the impossible question of whether we ever ought to pray to the Holy Spirit or not?

Do you know something, brethren? I’m so naive that until somebody asked me that question, it never even occurred to me that could be a problem to anybody. It never occurred to me; you know. Somebody came and said, should we pray to the Father in the Spirit, in the name of the Son, or should we pray to the Spirit?

And I tried to straighten him out. He was an Englishman, by the way, Brother Leonard, might have been the reason, but he came, and he wanted to know about that.

Now here he was, and all around him there were the dead and the dying. And all around him there were those who wouldn’t have a chance, sick people, poor people, bereaved people, weary people, displaced persons, homeless persons. And he was trying to settle a theological question of how many angels could dance on the point of a pin, and whether or not it was proper ever to pray to the Spirit.

And I said, Holy Spirit, faithful guide, ever near the Christian’s side. And I pray to the Spirit very often and have done it ever since I was a Christian. I’ve never been rebuked for it yet, and it never entered my mind that was anything wrong with it. And so, some theological hair splitter came and wanted to worry me about it. There we are, Brother. There we are.

So we go with our hard, compassionless message. We go to the world with it, and the world rears back on its haunches and says, so what and who are you? Then we go away piously and said, so persecuted they the prophets which were before us.

No, no, Brother. They weren’t persecuting prophets. They were merely rejecting pinheads. They weren’t persecuting prophets. They were reacting from ice water.

Oh, for contrition and compassion. But you know that the man who’s been wounded with compassion will never be quite a happy man. I want to repeat this for it’s in all of my three little points.

Brethren, we’ll never be where we should be until we cease to hunt after happiness and begin to hunt after holiness. We will never be where we should be as long as we’re irresponsibly desirous of being happy. I’m almost got to a point where I believe it wrong to be happy because the world is wanting it.

See, I just want to know my daughter’s happiness. Now that’s all I care about, my daughter’s happiness. Now I just want John to be happy. If I could just know that John would be happy. Do you think your marriage will last, Mabel? I’m not sure, Mabel. I’d like to have your marriage last because I want you to be happy. And the magazines are full of it, and the radio’s full of it, and everybody’s full of it, and its wind and confusion.

God Almighty never said, be thou happy. He said, be ye holy for I am holy. He said, flee from the wrath to come. And He said, rejoice with them that rejoice and weep with them that weep.  Laugh, and the world laughs with you, says the old maid poet. Weep and you weep alone. She was right about it.

So, we want to be the laughing crowd, painted masks of laughter on the hearts that have never repented, that have no compassion for anybody. If you think we’re a compassionate world, you’re wrong, brethren, we’re not. We toss a quarter to a blind man on the street, not to bless the blind man, but to get it off our own conscience. We send money to India not to help India, but to get it off our conscience.

But the Holy Ghost would have us to have compassion. That is, com-passion, fellow suffering, along with Christ.

I have a little prayer book. I thought I’d lost it, and I gave it up in despair, and it turned up in my coat. I’m not sure my wife didn’t find it and slip it in there for somebody else, but thought I’d lost it. A little prayer book, and one of my prayers is, dear Father, give me a compassion so that I can feel about people exactly the way you feel about them. Now, I don’t want to go all overboard and get all dribbly sentimental and spoil everything. We do that, you know.

A fine old Jew told me at Ben Lippert, he said, Brother Tozer, he said, you know, Christians habitually spoil Jews, because they get them converted and make so much out of them and so much over them, and they just pour themselves out on them and spoil them. But we don’t want to be treated like that. We want to be let alone treated like other people.

It’s perfectly right. It’s possible to go all out and get all sentimental. I don’t want that. Jesus never was. Christ could be as tart as a lemon and as sharp as honed steel, but always there was a big heart there that was going to die for a man. And to have a compassionate heart doesn’t mean to get the baptism of grandma-itis and sit around with a Cheshire Cat’s grin that never sees any evil or hears any evil or speaks any evil, but just sits around like the three monkeys.

That’s not compassion, brethren. That’s senility. Compassion is identification with Jesus in his love for lost men who would be perfectly willing to do what He did, if necessary, die for those lost men. But who, when occasion requires, can rebuke those lost men until they turn white with the terror of it? That’s compassion. The most loving character in the New Testament was John. And by all long odds, the fiercest book in the New Testament is 1 John.

I’m almost through. I am through, but I’m not going to stop yet. For I have another wound that I want to speak about, and that’s the wound of longing after God.

Now, I speak with great caution right here, because the flesh, disguised as the Spirit, makes cheap love to the Lord Jesus Christ. And I’ll have no part of it. We make cheap love to the Lord Jesus.

There used to be a famous preacher. I won’t tell you what sex it was, but she wasn’t a man. And she used to pray, O Jesus dear, and my eyes shuddered when I heard it. Nobody that’s ever seen the Lord, high and lifted up, will ever take liberties with Jesus. Nobody that has ever seen standing while one foot is on the sea and the other on the land and crying, the time shall be no more. Nobody will ever call Him nicknames or get cheaply familiar with Him.

The heart that has ever looked upon the holy face of Jesus will be caught between a holy fear and a holy delight. And there will be a reverence there, along with a great delight, that I would with a wave of my hand dismiss most of the songs that have been written in this century about Jesus.

For they’re all cheap, and they’re borrowed from Tin Pan Alley. And if you would merely change the name Jesus and put the name Frankie Sinatra or Clark Gable in, you wouldn’t know the difference. Same thing. It is the carnal unregenerated flesh trying to make love to God.

Having said that, I would say this. Still, great Christians have always been wounded with love for God, always been wounded with love and a longing after God. Charles Wesley called it a restless thirst, a sacred infinite desire.

And Faber, he says, the lack of desire is the ill of all ills, many thousands through which the dark pathway have crossed. The unction, the balm of predestinate souls, is a jubilant pining and longing for God.

It’s a great gift of God to live after our Lord, yet the old Hebrew times, they were ages of fire, when fainting souls fed on each dim-figured word, and God called men he loved most, the men of desire. So pine for thy God, fainting soul, ever pine. O languish, mid all that life brings thee of mirth. Famished, thirsty, and restless, let such life design for what sight is to heaven, desire is to earth.

And I believe that the two great evils of our day are also two great lacks. One is, I have already mentioned, it is the evil of impenitence. The other is the evil of having no longing after God. I believe that if we longed after God, even with as much longing as a cow longs after her calf, we’d be Christians ten times bigger than we are now. If we longed for God as a bride longed for her husband to come back from the war, we’d be greater Christians than we are now.

But our difficulty is a lack of desire after God. We’ve reduced this thing to a Sears-Roebuck and Company proposition. He died for me upon the tree. I believe in Him and get it over with. And all He did accrues to me, and I’ve got nothing to do but wait until the Lord comes and gives me a crown as big around as a wash tub. Brethren, there’s going to be some bitter disappointment in that day when we find that we’ve reduced this to a money-in-the-slop proposition. It’s nothing of the sort.

You know, the old Greeks were wiser than we like to give them credit for being. And the old Greeks called love, and said love was a wound. They had a little fellow. He had a little pair of chubby wings, too small to lift him, but he got around on them. And he never wore much around him but a ribbon. But he was a handsome little fellow, and he had a bow and arrow. And he used to pull that arrow back on the string and let go. And there was a ping, and somebody was in love.

Now we’ve dragged that down into the gutter so far that you’re embarrassed to talk about it. But it works like that. Here’s this red-headed country boy, chewing his straw and whistling, going down the lane to bring the cows home, six o’clock in the afternoon. And he’s thinking about trout fishing and the engine in his motorcycle, and a lot of other mundane and earthly things. And as he walks along, suddenly Cupid appears and sees him and says, you’re about old enough, you ought to be thinking about marriage, Junior. So little old Cupid pulls back that arrow and–ping!.

And you know what the young fellow does? He stops thinking about trout fishing and automobile engines and begins thinking about that girl next farm over. And you say that’s a poor little illustration. No, sir, that’s what makes the world go round. People fall in love.

And you say, well, but that, you can’t call that a wound. If you had had the people that have come to me, white-faced, had wept until no tears were left, dry-eyed, and chalky, and told me a story of disappointed love.

You’d know it’s possible to be wounded even with human love. Or go up on a higher level. Go to that mother who gave life to that boy, and loved him, and nursed him, and kept him, and brought him up, and educated him, and gave him everything.

And he grows up and gets to be 21 years old, leaves home, for cruelly forgets his parents, never writes, treats them like dirt under his feet. You tell me that doesn’t wound the parents? They’re wounded with a wound. And love is a wound. And the love after God, after Christ, can become a wound in the human breast.

Now, I want you to see these three paradoxes. To be happily forgiven, and yet be wounded with perpetual contrition. To rest in the finished work of another, and yet feel so sympathetic and compassionate as though the burden lay on your heart. And of finding God, and yet always pursuing God. Of having Him, yet always wanting Him. That’s the paradox.

Now, the day in which we live, of course, Christianity has gone over to the jingle bell crowd. And Jesus has to do all the dying. Nobody else wants to do any dying. Jesus has to do all the sorrowing. Nobody wants to take time out for the luxury of pity. We insist upon being happy. And we’re going to be happy if we have to invent ways to get happy.

And in this terrible hour, Jesus has to do all the loving. We forget the first and great commandment is, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God. It’s God that keeps us on the everlasting stretch, always pursuing Him, and never satisfied.

I say, whoever bears those three wounds, will know that it’s grace of the cross. And this cross will never be socially acceptable. And this cross will never be forgiven and never be tolerated. It will not be tolerated by the world of sinful men, neither will it be tolerated by the Church. And these wounds will stigmatize their victims.

I remember when a great evangelist came to A.B. Simpson and said, Mr. Simpson, you’re one of the greatest preachers on the continent. And if you give up one point in your doctrine, you could be one of the most popular preachers in America. Simpson dismissed it this way. He said, I want to keep the stigma of the cross upon my movement.

What a wise man he was. And what wise people we would be who call ourselves by his name, or the name of his movement, if we kept the stigma of the cross upon that movement still.

I point out again in closing, perhaps the second time I’ve closed, that the soul that has been wounded will always be something of a haunted soul, a lonely soul, a wandering soul, and something of a pilgrim.

Do you want to settle down in your nest, get your roots in deep, get a reputation, satisfy your ambition? All right, all right, brother. But the wounded soul is a haunted soul. He hears the cries that others don’t hear. He hears the wails that never bother other people. He will be a lonely soul because he’ll be forced to go alone a lot of the time. He will be a wanderer and a pilgrim on the earth, as Abraham was, as Jacob was, as Elijah had to be at last, as Paul had to be, and as every man and woman has had to be, has been wounded.

Now I close by asking you this, would you have the courage tonight to pray a prayer, O God, wound me with contrition, compassion, and love-longing after Thee at any cost? I want to warn you about one thing. Don’t try to wound yourself. If you try to wound yourself, you won’t get any place.

Faithful are the wounds of a friend, and it’s that Friend that does the wounding. And if you try to wound yourself, you’ll only give place to the flesh. But come to Him and let Him do the wounding.

Nobody can teach me this wound, and I cannot inflict it myself. I can only know there’s a Friend who wants to chasten us for His own pleasure and our own holiness. And who wants to put the arrow of repentance in our heart, and the arrow of sympathy, and the arrow of love.

Would you have the courage to say, Lord, I want you to do this for me? And then add, as Julian added, this I ask without condition. Do it, Lord, at any cost. Could you do that? When we talk about revival, this is the way to it. When we talk about the deeper life, this is the beginning.

So, I’m going to close in prayer, but before I pray, I wonder if there might be some who would say, Mr. Tozer, in general I go along with you on this, and I do want God to do something for me more than I have known. And I’m not satisfied with present conditions. I know there’s something wrong, maybe this is it. And I want you to pray for me, that I’ll have the courage to pray for myself, and to request from God these three faithful wounds. I wonder if there might be such. Would you stand where you are? We’re going to pray.

Is there anyone we’d like to say, Mr. Tozer, I pray God may give me these three wounds in my heart. Others? Are there those who would say, yes, Mr. Tozer, I do want to live that kind of Christian life. It means ostracism, misunderstanding, it means wandering lonely, it means that I carry upon me the stigma of the cross. It’s all right, it’s all right. I just demand something better. I demand God to do something for my soul.

If you’ll stand, and we’ll remember you. Let us pray.

Dear Lord Jesus, there are about twenty people who desire us to pray for them. We would unite our hearts and come as one, so we are all one. And I, Thy servant who is praying out loud, dear Lord Jesus, join myself to all these who stand. We would pray together tonight.

Lord, please do something in us and for us. Please, Lord, the flesh is so cold, and our hearts are so loveless, and the thought of sin is the calmest, and our longing after Thee is so weak. We’re ashamed all the way around.

And yet we see, Lord, that if we’re going to make any spiritual progress, we’re going to have to lay bare our chest and say, wound me, O Thou, lover of my soul, Faithful Friend. Wound me unto death and raise me in newness of life. We pray for these, for all who beseech Thee, Lord, that Thou will take these friends on with Thee, step by step, into the deep things of the Bible.

Make these friends, we pray thee, a core, a hard central core, a nucleus around which can be built a larger group that can catch from them the fever of longing after God. It can catch from them the compassion. It can catch from them the right attitude towards sin in their own past.

O Lord, we thank Thee for forgiven sin. We’ll never have to face it again. But we don’t want carelessly to forget, Father, we’ve been sinners, the wounded.

And we beseech Thee, give us compassion, that if it takes away our happiness, all right, Lord, we don’t care about being happy. We want to be useful and holy.

And then, Lord, our love-longing after Thee is jubilant, pining, and longing for Thee. Fill our hearts with it, O Lord, until all hours, whatever we’re doing, there may be in our hearts always the upspringing of loving desire.

Grant, we beseech Thee, that these persons who requested prayer may have this in such measure as will astound us and will make great, useful, powerful Christian out of us. Grant it for Jesus’ sake.

Let us all stand, please.

And now may the grace and mercy and peace come from the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Ghost, and be with all of us as we depart from each other and as we dismiss this meeting and go out from here. Amen.