Month: November 2022

Tozer Talks

During the week of December 4, we are going to present three messages related to the Incarnation. The first of which is “The Personal Application of Christ’s Coming into the World,” A complete transcript as well as the original message audio is at https://tozertalks.com/tozer-talks-21/

“All Life’s Problems are Basically Theological”

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All Life’s Problems are Basically Theological

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

June 21, 1959

I have this morning, three texts in the book of Ephesians. Paul’s letter to the Ephesian Christians the fourth chapter, verses 21 to 24. If so be that you have heard Him, his Christ, and have been taught by Him as the truth is in Jesus, that you put off concerning the former conversation, conduct, the old man which is corrupt according to the deceitful lusts, and be renewed in the spirit of your mind, that you put on the new man, which after God is created in righteousness and true holiness. And Paul again, in Colossians, the third chapter, verses 9 and 10. Lie not one to another, seeing that ye have put off the old man with his deeds, and have put on the new man which is renewed in knowledge after the image of Him that created him.

Then in the book of Hebrews, which I think also that Paul wrote that we’re not certain. It doesn’t matter. The words of the writer to the Hebrews 12:9 and following. Furthermore, we have had fathers of our flesh which corrected us and we gave them reverence. Shall we not much rather be in subjection unto the Father of spirits, and live? For they verily, for a few days chastened us after their own pleasure, or as it seemed good to them. They didn’t enjoy it, but they felt they had it to do. They verily, for a few days chastened us as seemed right to them. But God for our profit chastens us that we might be partakers of His holiness.

And the longer I live, the more I’m convinced that all the problems of life are at the bottom, theological problems. That there aren’t any other kind, really. That all problems that psychology is trying to settle are at bottom, theological, really. And all the problems that industry, labor is trying to settle, could be settled if they were recognized as also being theological problems. Political problems and all social problems are at bottom, theological. I mean by that, this, that if you forget that God is and think of man just as being here, somehow, without any thought of his origin, then you have at least a dozen major problems on your hands. And the attempt to solve one upsets another. If you try to solve a social problem, you get yourself into a political problem and political problem upsets a labor problem, and labor problem creates an industrial problem.

And so we go mixing ourselves up because we’re thinking of ourselves apart from our origin. If we realize that God made us and made us in His image, and that our first responsibility is to Him. Then, if we went on through the truth revealed to us and settled that responsibility or met it, we’d settle our theological problems and automatically, the other problems would fall into place. It wouldn’t mean there wouldn’t be something to do, but it would mean that we had hold of the heart of it and that we could solve it without disrupting something else.

Out in nature it is the same. Down where we live in the poor section of Beverly Hills, we used to have birds. I remember even as much as last year, no longer ago than last year and the year before, we’d wake up in the morning or they would wake us up, but I never again have complained about being wakened up by birds, birds of all kinds singing. You never heard a choir sing as they sang. Now, we have two or three kinds. I heard a cuckoo this morning, and the ever-present jay, of course, and the robins. And of course, you can’t kill an English sparrow. But those are about the four that are left. What happened to the rest? What happened to the rest is this, that the elm blight came through the country, and the proper authorities decided to try to stay the elm blight and I am for them because I think that if we lost the elm tree from this section of the country, we would lose one of the most beautiful and ornamental trees that’s possible to imagine. So they sprayed the elm trees to get rid of the elm blight. Little worms ate the elm leaf or other things that were touched by this poison. It didn’t bother the worm, but the birds ate the worms and died. And they died by the hundreds of thousands.

Now, I use that as an illustration only. I don’t know who’s right nor who’s wrong. It’s very difficult because one thing upsets another and you get one thing straightened out and another one is on your hands. So it is in politics and society and in industry and everywhere. The attempt to settle one thing unsettles another, because we do not realize that God is and that God made us and that originally He made us in His image. Now that’s one of the great pillars of our faith, that God made us in His image.

A second great pillar of our faith, I’d scarcely call it a pillar of our faith, but it’s a fact necessary to the understanding of all other truths, that man fell. And that man who originally came from God’s hand, in God’s likeness, fell and lost that likeness, or at least had that likeness marred as a vandal might cut and smear and marr a great masterpiece in an art gallery. The artist, or the one who knows about such things might be able yet to find traces of the artistry of the master in that picture, but it’s yet ruined and nobody would buy it. So, it is with mankind. In mankind, there are traces of the image of God. Every mother that holds a baby to her in her arms and smiles down with love, is showing that there is yet remaining, there are yet remaining some traces of the image of God. But it’s a marred image. The vandal we call sin has slashed it and smeared it and ruined it.

Now, the third great truth that we must remember is that God sent His Son Jesus Christ to the world in order that He might undo the works of the devil and sin, and that He might bring back again the image of God to man. That’s what my text said first, that God meant to restore us again unto His image. God isn’t satisfied. If we could imagine a Rembrandt coming back from where we hope he is with God, and seeing where some vandal had used acid or some other thing to destroy one of his masterpieces, or had painted it over. And that artist, out of love and pride, should want to restore that picture until it was shining once more in all its early glory.

So, the great God who looks upon mankind and sees bits of His image there and knows it’s His handiwork, knows indeed that it’s His masterpiece. He sees also the filth and the slashing and the efforts of sin to destroy that masterpiece. And God, out of His own pride and for His own glory, sets out to restore that masterpiece again to His own image. And He does it through Jesus Christ our Lord. For the texts say that plainly here. We have put on the new man which is renewed in knowledge after the image of Him who created Him. And if so be ye have heard and taught to put off concerning the form of conduct of the old man and be renewed in the spirit of your mind, that you put on the new man which after God is created in righteousness and true holiness. This is the purpose of God.

And then in the Hebrew text it says that to do this, to restore this picture back to the image of God again, to make men like God, He has methods. And the first and primary one is of course, is redemption through the blood of Jesus Christ the Lord. But then granted that men are redeemed, Christians are His children. Then He works on those children as the eager, indignant Artist, loving Artist, loving because it’s His handiwork, indignant because it’s been marred, proud with His own reputation depending upon it, He goes to work to restore that masterpiece. So God goes to work to restore the masterpiece again. And the Spirit says that even as earthly fathers, in order that they might bring their children into some semblance of civilized decency and bring them up as they should, they chasten them. But God chastens us for His own profit that we might be partakers of His holiness. God is of course primarily holy, and the restoration of the soul to God is the restoration of that soul in holiness.

Now, I want to point out, if I were an old 17th century preacher, I’d probably have my point something like this: wherein we cannot be like God, wherein we can be like God, and the method by which God makes us like Himself. That sounds like least an hour and a half, but it will be shorter. Wherein we cannot be like God. I point out to you that though men are made in the image of God originally, and it is the purpose of God to restore us to that image, there are attributes which God cannot impart to a creature. Let me name some of them, self-existence for instance. No creature can say, I AM, and have a complete sentence. But God said, I AM, and put a period there. God is self-existent and self-sufficient. Only God can say I am, and make it stick forever without modifying it. God cannot give to His creatures self-existence or self-sufficiency, because His creatures depend every moment upon Him and He depends upon nothing and no one because He is God. Again, God cannot impart eternity to His children. There was a time when we were not and God’s spake and we came into existence. We can live forever, exist through all eternity, but we can’t turn the clock back and go back and start the beginning of eternity which has no beginning. Only God is eternal. And He gives eternal life, but eternal life that is, what would we say, unilateral, running one direction, only out into the eternal future, not into the eternal past. There was a time when man was not, but the eternal God was.

And God made man in His image and then man was. So man had a birthdate. Man had a time when he was created. God could mark it on a calendar of the eternal centuries and say, here is where man began. So, God can’t impart His eternity to us. He cannot impart His infinitude. Infinitude of course being limitlessness, boundlessness. We all have limits by virtue of the fact we’re creatures. The archangels around the throne have limits. The seraphim that burn beside the sea of fire have limits. The greatest geniuses that have ever graced our world in any field of human endeavor have all had limits. Any student of Shakespeare will run into passages that Shakespeare never should have written. And every critic, every man who studies a little will smile and shrug and say, well, that was Shakespeare at his worst. He had he limits.

I remember once being at a recital where they were singing the Messiah, and the song director we had here years ago, Mr. Marston Pierson, many of you remember, was with me. We had the score in front of us and were watching and looking on while the Apollo Club sang Messiah. And before we started, we were chatting and I said, Marston, I’d have one criticism of the Messiah. He said, What’s that? He smiled down with a big expansive smile of his and I said, it’s too long. Well, he said, I’ll tell you, Mr. Tozer, that would be a question of your judgment against Handel’s, and I’ll go along with Handel. And I smiled and admitted that he had a point. But after they began to sing, then I noticed that every once in a while they skipped a chorus. And they would skip another chorus. Then they would skip five or six pages. Then they would skip a solo. And they’d skip another chorus. And along toward the end I said, how’s this they’re skipping so much. Oh, he said, nobody ever does all of the Messiah. I felt better. I still think it’s too long. Even Handel had his imperfection.

And the finest composers that ever lived couldn’t escape themselves. I don’t promise always and I don’t want to be put to the test, but I think if you’ll put on a record, and if it’s Mozart, I’ll know it. He couldn’t escape himself. He had a happy, joyous disposition that wouldn’t go two bars until it started shouting, delighted to be alive, and it’s there and you can’t help it. Every man has his limitations. The angels of God have their limitations, but God has no limitations because God embraces in Himself in one effortless embrace all that there is. God can’t impart that to you. You’re limited. He is infinite. Again, God can’t impart His omnipotence. And he can’t impart His omniscience. You can know a great deal and you can know increasingly, but you never can know all. The only person that knows everything is a freshman in college. But as he goes on, he knows less and less until he gets his degree. And by the time he gets his PhD, he knows still less.

A man who just had his PhD degree, gotten it, wrestled it out of New York University, I was talking with him. And he said, you know what they did to me? And I said no, Harold, what did they do? He said, they examined me on things I hadn’t studied. And he said, when they had reduced me to blubbering incompetence where I didn’t know anything, they gave me the degree. They said that’s the way they did it. They gave a degree of Doctor of Philosophy to a man not because of what he knew, but because of what he knew he didn’t know. And I’ve said to many colleges where I’ve spoken, that if I was grading students, I would never grade them on what they know. I would grade them on what they knew they didn’t know. That would be far and away better because, if you’re graded on what you know, you never can pick up anything but a little sand by the seashore. But if you’re conscious of how much there is that you don’t know and that you’ll never know, you’ll have at least humility on your side. But if you’re graded by how much you know, you’re likely to have pride, and a pride that has no foundation. So you see, there are attributes of God that He cannot impart to us. What is it then that God would impart? In what does He mean when he says made in His image, restored to His image through redemption?

Well, there are attributes of character. These that I have named before, are attributes of being, and as attributes of being they belong to the uncreated God. But there are attributes of character that God can impart to His creature. What are they? Let me name seven of them briefly. First of them is love. Love is an attribute of character, not of being. An act of good will toward all creatures, not necessarily an emotional binge. We’ve degraded love in our day until we don’t know what it is. And the God who made Adam to love Eve, wouldn’t recognize this whimpering, psychotic stuff now that we call love. Love is active goodwill toward all creatures, the love that rejoices in the good of all. And God is love and supremely God has this quality of character and He would impart it to all of His children. That we also, I have no malice, no grudges, no hard feelings, no ill will, no evil wishes, but only a high goodwill toward all mankind with the wish and hope that everyone might prosper, forgive everyone and love everyone.

Then there’s righteousness. Righteousness is not an attribute of being but an attribute of character. And all the acts of God are in harmony with righteousness, and He would restore His people to righteousness. I have no confidence whatsoever as I said yesterday on the radio. I have no confidence whatsoever in any kind of Christianity that doesn’t make a man good. I know that a lot of us have a fear that we might emulate the Catholics and preach salvation by merit. We’ve gone so far the other way that the New Testament doesn’t recognize it. There’s a horrible incongruity in the universe. God redeems us unto righteousness. And the first way you should be able to tell a Christian is by the fact that he’s a good man.

Then there’s mercy. Mercy is an attribute of character, love operating toward all sinful creatures. Quality of mercy is not strange, it then falleth like the gentle rain from heaven upon the place below. And mercy of course we can all show. And there’s patience, long-suffering it’s called elsewhere in the Scriptures, long-suffering. I want to break down here and admit that all the years I’ve served Christ, this is my toughest one. I don’t know Brother whether you have any tough ones or not. But this is my toughest one. To be patient and to wait and to be long-suffering with people who ought to know better. That’s the hardest thing for me, and that’s temperamental. That isn’t because I’m good necessarily, that’s temperamental. I got that and I know where I got it. I can show you pictures of the man that passed that on to me. It was my English father.

But God is patient and long-suffering, and He waits and He waits and He waits. Think how long God waits? The ability to wait and keep sweet is a god-like virtue. And God would pass that on to us, but He can’t give that to us as you would give a man a dollar or ten dollars. That has to be wrought into the man, beaten into him as a woman beats flavoring into a cake batter, beaten in until it’s all thoroughly mixed, patience, long-suffering. And there’s gentleness, mercy operating toward the weak and the vulnerable. And there’s faithfulness, integrity toward every moral obligation, toward God, toward each other. And there is purity, holiness above all qualities. This is probably the one that takes the others all in, holiness of character, unmixed perfection. Now, all this is summed up in the phrase, of His holiness.

Redemption, I repeat, undertakes to restore the character of God to the character of a man. It undertakes through Jesus Christ, beginning with the new birth, to go on to perfect that man and make that man God-like in his character. I’m glad God is patient. If He were not patient, He would take His hand and wipe the church from the face of the earth, for we’re certainly a long way from being God-life. But, it’s the purpose of God in redemption to restore us unto His image. This is the ultimate purpose of God, conformed to the image of His Son it says in Romans 8:29. And the possession of this image is the bliss of heaven and the absence of this image is the grief of hell. And it’s imperfect possession in the church is the cause of all of our troubles. It produces discontent and unhappiness. It’s the cause of spiritual weakness. It’s the source of coldness. It’s the cause of quarrels and divisions among Christians.

So, the way of God in bringing to us His own image again, you can’t do it in an easy way. This is the time when everybody wants everything done in an easy way. They say now, no more mussy ice cubes. I can remember when ice cubes weren’t known. You had to saw your ice out of the nearby pond and put it in sawdust and keep it over winter. And we got refrigeration, and women thought they were in Utopia. Now, they’re calling it mussy. And they’re figuring on something else. I don’t know or remember what. I never listen to closely to the commercials. But I remember hearing that. The thing that ten years ago was the latest invention. Now it’s considered old-fashioned and you scorn it for something new. We want everything so that we put a nickel in the slot, pull the lever down and take it and go.

Religion has degenerated into that too. No, no, my friend. God doesn’t make things like that. God doesn’t put a few grains of dust on His hand and blow and there’s a flock of chickens. God has a hen lay an egg and then sit on that egg 21 days and then watch over what she’s hatched out for another month and a half. God doesn’t speak and the tree grows, but He lets a seedling get in there and swell with moisture until it suddenly burst. Then up comes the sprout. Winter follows Fall and Fall follows Summer and Summer follows Spring year in and year out until two or three generations of human beings have come and gone and then there stands a tall noble tree there. God works slowly and sometimes He works painfully.

And the more wonderful the object God is trying to bring into being, the more painful it’s likely to be, and the more trouble it’s likely to cause. Why doesn’t God whisper and have a baby born? Because He’s got something wonderful in mind. So, He takes it the slow, inconvenient, painful way. And after inconvenience and discomfort and trouble, comes what Jesus called the sorrows of a woman, then the baby. But is it all over? No, she spends the next fifteen years keeping him from committing suicide accidentally. Trouble, trouble, trouble all the time, because she’s rearing a man. She’s bringing up a man, a man-child, said Jesus, is born into the world.

And the more wonderful the creature is, the longer it takes God to bring it to maturity. So, it is with a Christian. He works on us and works in us and chastises us and corrects us and humbles us and encourages us and humbles us again. He chastises us once more and humbles us again and encourages us some more until we become a partaker of His Holiness. This is so vital, so vital, so critically important that He should restore the image of His Son again in us and we should be made back into the image of God from which we fell.

So vitally important it is that it should engage our painstaking attention, Bible searching, prayer, self-examination, cooperation with God, humbling of ourselves, self-sacrifice, meditation, every means of grace, the church, the sermon, the song. Every means of grace that God has placed before us we should use, that we might work with God and having His holy image restored again in our souls.

For remember, the imperfect image of God in the Christian soul is the cause of all of his troubles. And no image of God in the soul, is the terror of hell. And the image of God perfectly restored is the bliss of heaven. May God grant that we would be wise enough to work with Him in His slow and sometimes painful, but wondrous plan to restore again in the souls of His people, His own image that we might be like Him and someday might gaze without embarrassment on His holy face. Amen.

Tags attributes, God, Jesus Christ, Knowledge, Reason, Theological

Messages

Tozer Talks

Post author By pshappard
Post date November 20, 2022

“The Knowledge of God I”

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The Knowledge of God I

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

June 24, 1956

This will be the first this morning of a series of four messages on the knowledge of God or religious knowledge. I want to talk about the knowledge of God and the three degrees of knowledge which it is possible for us to have. And I will talk generally this morning about this and give an illustration which I want you to keep in mind for the rest of the four sermons, or three sermons that follow. And then I will talk about the three degrees, the knowledge furnished by reason, the knowledge furnished by faith and the knowledge furnished by the Holy Spirit. Those will be the next three after today.

I want to read a number of Scriptures. John 17:3, you know what that is, this is eternal life, that they might know Thee, the only true God and Jesus Christ whom Thou hast sent. Philippians 3:10, Paul said that I might know Him and the power of His resurrection and the fellowship of His suffering and be made conformable unto His death. We will simply take the line, that I might know Him. And life is that you might know God, and that I might know Christ.

Then there are some other texts which I want to read. One is in Romans 1:19, 20, Because that which may be known of God is manifest in them, for God hath showed it unto them. For the invisible things of Him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things which are made, even His eternal power and Godhead, so that they are without excuse. Then in Hebrews 11, this passage, now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. For by it, the elders obtained a good report. Through faith, we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God so that things which are seen were not made by things which do appear. Now, it’s through faith we understand this. And then 1 Corinthians 2:12,13. Now we have received not the spirit of the world but the Spirit which is of God, that we might know the things that are freely given to us of God. Which things also we speak not in the words which man’s wisdom teaches, but which the Holy Ghost teacheth comparing spiritual things with spiritual.

Now, we read in the John quotation, that eternal life is not a thing. Eternal life is a knowledge. This is eternal life that they might know Thee, the only true God. And I hardly need to say to you that when the man of God wrote this word “know” in here, he didn’t mean that we should gain the meaning from it, of merely intellectual cognizance. As when I say, I know Hamlet, I read it. I know Mr. Jones; I have been introduced to him. I know the multiplication tables, something that we receive into our minds. John didn’t mean that when he said that this is eternal life. Of course, it was Jesus Himself that said it, as if there were any distinction between the words of our Lord and the words of an inspired apostle. But to be accurate, Jesus said in His prayer to His Father, this is eternal life, that they might know Thee. That knowledge is a deep inner thing. And we want to talk about that over these days ahead, these Sundays before us, that deep inner thing, not the grasp of the mind, not the intellectual cognizance, but something profounder than that. But that is here, that this is eternal life, to know God and know Jesus Christ.

Then Paul’s sentence in Philippians, the third, where he sums up his life motto, that I might know Him. Now this is, I think it might be said, I don’t like to speak for another man who can’t be here to defend himself, but I think I would be safe in saying that those words, that I might know Him, those five words, probably more than any other words, sum up that which made Paul run. That was the motivating power in the life of the man. What an ignoble and base conception of Christianity, to believe that Paul’s interest in Jesus Christ was to escape hell. What a tragic and terrible breakdown in our spiritual thinking that we should imagine that Paul’s interest in Jesus Christ was that he might sit in the New Jerusalem or that he might pick flowers on the hillsides of glory, as somebody inelegantly called it.

Now, the knowledge of Jesus Christ does deliver us from the results of our own sins, and it does make heaven our future home. But these are byproducts of Christianity and not the center and the core of it. The core of the Christian faith is that I might know God. This is eternal life that I might know God. And this is the destiny and destination, the full future for my life, that I might know Him better. And so the perpetually increasing and everlastingly growing knowledge of God will be our heaven.

Some people might wonder why I don’t preach more on heaven. I don’t preach very much on heaven. There are several reasons. I don’t know very much about heaven as a location. I believe in it as a location, but there’s not very much said about it. But there may be other reasons that I don’t know of unhidden to me why I don’t preach more on heaven. But I believe that heaven will take care of itself, if our relation to God is right. And if our relation to Christ is right, we will need to worry about the matter of heaven or hell. And incidentally, I don’t preach very much on hell either. Fortunately, there isn’t much known about hell. Only we know it’s there, and we know it’s the end of a Christless life and the bottom of a Christless grave. And we know heaven is there and is to be entered someday. I wouldn’t say the end of the Christian life, but it’s to be at least within the framework it’s received. It’s there. It belongs to us, heaven is ours.

But the main business for you and me in God and in religion now, is not to know all we can about heaven, though you may do that. That’s good too, or know all we can about hell. But our main occupation in which we should be constantly engrossed as well as engaged, is that we might know God and His Son Jesus Christ. That we might know God the Father and Jesus Christ to the point of having eternal life, before we even join any church or claim that we’re Christians at all, or take upon ourselves the name of Jesus, or call God our Father. And then, not stopping there where a great many Christians do, but going on to make a career out of knowing Jesus Christ better.

Now, this knowledge that I have been talking about, the knowledge of God and divine things, have three degrees. And there are three degrees distinguished. There is the knowledge furnished by reason in the Roman’s text, the knowledge furnished by faith in the Hebrew’s text, and the knowledge furnished by the Spirit in the Corinthian text. Now, these correspond to a very beautiful illustration, or a very beautiful order in the Old Testament. It is an illustration maybe, rather than a type. You will notice that I don’t talk very much about types. I broke a set of teeth on types when I was a young fellow. And I’ve reacted a bit from types. I believe there are some types in the Bible all right. I don’t doubt that at all. I believe that there are certain historic facts, while they are historic facts, nevertheless, have been so placed there, that they mean something else beside what they mean.

Could I illustrate an illustration, if you will forgive me by saying this, that a diamond in a wedding ring, or a wedding ring on the finger is a fact. It is a reality. It’s an entity in itself. It is not an imaginative thing nor a poetic thing, it is a reality. You can take it off and hold it and weigh it and measure it and evaluate it and lose it and find it, and it is a reality. It’s a testable reality. But to the woman that wears it, it’s something more than that. To the woman that wears it, it has a secondary meaning that someone not familiar with the circumstances would not realize at all. It speaks of something beyond itself.

Now, in the Old Testament, there are some historic happenings which speak of something beyond themselves. That does not mean as some of our Neo-orthodox brethren would have us believe that that never happened historically, but that it is a beautiful figure, a story told to illustrate. Now, that did happen, everything in the Bible did happen. It is an historic entity. It is a hard thing that you can check and say, now this happened within a given day or year, under the sun, a certain hour of the day, in a certain historic and national and ethnic setting, this is reality. But by the good grace of God and through the mystery of the Holy Ghost, it may mean something more than that. It may, as the ring does, have another meaning lying beyond it and above it, which the wise will understand, and that doesn’t cancel out the historicity of the happening. It did happen, but it’s in the will of God it happened that we might see beyond it.

Israel coming out of being in bondage in Egypt for 400 years. Now that was a historic fact. But it’s set forth to the church ever since Calvary, it has set forth the fact that man in his bondage is in Egypt, and he’s a sinner in Egypt. And when he was delivered by the blood of the Passover, that was a historic fact. But the church of Christ has seen down the centuries that that was more than a historic fact. That was a historic fact with a high symbolic and spiritual meaning. So that to this day, we celebrate the Lord’s Supper and it dates back to the Passover and the shedding of the blood and the dying lamb and the sprinkled blood and the deliverance and the distraught people being delivered at night.

Now that’s what I mean when I say an illustration that couldn’t be a type. I don’t believe everything is a type by a long way. And I don’t read the Bible with types in mind. But when something sets forth as beautifully and as clearly a truth as this I now shall mention, why, I am not going to be like the man of whom it was said, so much he scorned the throng, that if the crowd by chance went right, he purposely went wrong. I don’t want to do it that way.

So, let’s look for a little at the Old Testament tabernacle, the Levitical order. In Hebrews 9 & 10 it tells us, that these things were a pattern of the things in the heaven, and that they were a figure of the truth and a shadow of good things to come. God built, and caused to be built into the Old Testament tabernacle and Levitical system, God cause to be built into it, this secondary thing, this heavenly thing, this thing that is divine and eternal. And so affixed its so, that it would illustrate and reveal as by light shining in, a truth that is so heavenly, you couldn’t get hold of it if you didn’t have an earthly illustration.

Now let’s look at that tabernacle. For instance, you could imagine a building without any roof on it, but with sides, with walls, and that building, an enclosure rather than a building, is 150 feet long and 75 feet wide and open to the sky. And there is no door in this enclosure, anywhere around, until you come to the east, and face to East always. And on the east side, there was quite a wide opening, a door, or a gate, a portal. And across that gate, that portal, there was a vail. And then inside, inside of this enclosure, there were three things observable as soon as you went in. One was an altar and the other was a laver. And on that altar, the priests slew the lambs and the heifers. And in that laver, the priests washed themselves.

But now, within that enclosure, there was a smaller enclosure, a smaller building, called rightly, the tabernacle. The other was the outer court. And that tabernacle of course, was much smaller than this enclosure, and it was divided into two parts. And it was entered by a veil. There was a veil that allowed them to enter. The first enclosure you entered and you saw just two things, the laver and the altar, and you saw also this building. But it was shut out by a veil, and you entered through that veil, and then inside there you saw a table upon which was bread for the priests. And you saw seven candlesticks shining light there, because there was no light that could reach it from above. It was completely enclosed. And then of course, there was the table, the candlestick, and the altar of incense, meaning prayer of course. And then, there was another veil there that invited your attention. But nobody dare pass through that veil. That was the veil that shut off the priests from the Holy of Holies, where dwelt only God. And in there, there was only one piece of furniture. And that was the Ark of the Covenant, or the Holy Ark. And in that ark, there was the Law. And over that ark, there was a mercy seat. And above that mercy seat, there were the wings of the cherubim. Between the wings of the cherubim, there was a flaming fire which was the Shekinah.

Now descriptions are always a little bit boresome. And I know you were bored by that, but I think from here on, we’ll be all right. That these three divisions correspond to the three kinds of knowledge, we keep that in the back of our minds while we talk about those three kinds of knowledge for the days ahead. There was the first, the court of the priests, the outer court. And they could worship there. and it was of God, all right, and God owned it. And God didn’t reject it. It was God’s doings. God put it there. And the sacrifice was made there. And the laver was there. But, it was the light of the sun by day and of the moon, by stars by night that lighted that enclosure. It was by the light of nature. And that corresponds to the first degree of divine knowledge, which is the knowledge that comes by reason.

Religion makes two mistakes. One of them, I think there are three mistakes maybe. One of them is, religion makes reason everything. The other is, that religion makes reason nothing. And the third is, that religion fails to understand what reason is. I think those are three mistakes. Fundamentalism tends to make reason nothing at all. It just isn’t anything. And all you have to do is to condemn a man to the seventh hell as to call him a brain, say, that man’s a brain. He’s a very intellectual man. And immediately the mark of Cain is on his noble, expansive brow, placed there by his brethren.

Brethren, that is a mistake, a great mistake. God Almighty made all the brains you have. And He is not apologizing for them. God isn’t going to any devil or any archangel and saying, I’m awfully sorry, I was busy with something else and I made a mistake. I put brains in a human head, and I’m awfully sorry. And if you’ll overlook this, I’ll try to be more careful. God never apologized to anybody for putting brains in a man’s head.

So that’s reason. Reason works on nature. Reason works through its senses, through the five senses, and through deductions drawn from the data of the five senses, so that we have this text, the heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament showeth His handiwork. Now, that’s pure reason. That’s the light of nature that comes down from above. There isn’t anything mysterious about that. It’s divine, but it’s not mysterious. You know certain things, and we do know certain things. There’s a Light that lighteth every man that comes into the world. And everybody knows something about God. And everybody knows something about divine things. Don’t think we don’t. We do. Everybody knows it. The heathen, the Danies in the Baliem Valley, know a little bit about God. They think they came up from the river and never were created. And at least they’ve gone that far. They know a little.

Everybody can know a little. We see the sun by day and the moon by night. We see the stars that twinkle in their far distance there. And we hear the roar of the wind, and we see the lightning strike the oak. And we see the mother kitten curl down and nestle up against her kittens. And we see the wonder and the beauty of nature all around about us. We know each other. And so we learn something. And we learn something of the God who made it all, as I learned something of Shakespeare from reading his play, or of Milton from reading Paradise Lost. I don’t see him but I learned something about him. Reason tells me something about the author when I see the book. Reason tells me something of the artist when I see the painting. So, when I look around on God’s world, I know something about God. That’s the light of nature. That’s reason. And you can know something about God through nature and through reason. Let’s not throw that out.

Back in earlier in more restful days, they talked about what they called natural theology, but you don’t hear anybody talking about natural theology anymore. Because if you do, they will think you’re a modernist. But I am not a modernist, nor am I a liberal. I am not now, neither have been a liberal. And I don’t have to hide behind any Fifth Amendment. I am frank to say that I am an evangelical, in that I believe all of the Bible, and I have only a friendly smile, and not too friendly a smile, for those who try to explain parts of it away. I know better. I know it’s all God’s word and it’s here. But I also know that God has given us His word and the things that are seen, the visible world tells us something about God’s eternal power and Godhead. We know at least one thing, that the God that made the world is a powerful God. We know that much.

And we know another thing about that God, He was free to make it. So, we know He is sovereign. And we know that it took a mighty wise mind to put this world of ours together. So, we know God has wisdom. We know God has knowledge. So, we can know quite a little bit about God by just looking around about you. Go on out. Come out our way and listen to the 17-year locusts. You will learn a little bit about God in a practical, salty, down to earth way, not in that dreamy, poetic way, that we hear about some times, but in a salty, down-to-earth way. You will know a good deal about God. Look up among the leaves and see the wonder of it all. On the one little branch, there’d be as many as 12 to 15 locusts.

And you say, I’m going to pick one off, and you pick him off and he’s not a locust at all. He just where the locust used to be. He’s been called out of It. And there, I don’t understand all that. Only I know that that didn’t happen like that brother. It just didn’t happen like that. There was a God who not only knows in a great broad, on a broad scale, but He knows all the details and He fixed it so every seven-year locust, 17-year locust will do exactly what he ought to do. And he fixed him so he didn’t even sing like the other locusts. You notice he’s got a different song if that is a song, whatever it is, he’s gotten different, it sounds different from the other locusts. God made him.

We talk about the integration and the difference of the races and we all ought to be one lovely brown crowd all mixed together in another generation or two. Have you ever stopped to think brothers and sisters that God made 125 species of warbler alone and put them on the North American continent. One hundred and twenty-five that can be identified, and not any two of them are alike. And they stay within their own bracket and breed within their own bracket and never fight and never fuss and never have racial difficulties. But they say, 125 different kinds of warbler, just warblers, to say nothing else of the other birds. And then they want me to believe that God wants the whole human race to be reduced to one brown human muddy looking and with no racial characteristics whatsoever. If he does, he went about it in a funny way. And it doesn’t seem to jive with everything else I can learn about God.

Well, now, that’s the outer court, the tabernacle, the knowledge by reason. You can draw your conclusions from reason. But you can’t get saved that way and you can’t get to heaven that way and you can’t get rid of your sins that way. You can’t know God that way to the point where you will be delivered and have eternal life, but you can still have a lot of knowledge about God. And the beautiful thing about it is, when you become a Christian and do come to know God indeed, you don’t have to murder this other part of your life. You can love it too.

We just sang a number here by Reginald Heber, The Brightest and Best of the Sons of the Morning. Well, Reginald Heber was a great soul, a bishop, a missionary to India and a great soul wrote, Holy, Holy, Holy and many other of the great songs. O Hosanna, Hosanna to the Living Lord, one of the most ecstatically spiritual songs ever written. And yet this man loved nature to a point where his hymns were all interwoven with the glories of nature. Take David, the man of God of whom Jesus said, God spake by the mouth of David, spake by the Holy Ghost. The mouths of David and the Holy Ghost were used interchangeably. The Holy Ghost speaking through the mouth of David. And yet you can read the Psalms of David and literally be lifted inside of you with the wonder and the glory of what David saw everywhere.

Well, now that’s, that’s one, that’s the outer tabernacle. And you leave that and you go through a veil and you come into the holy place. And there you have a candlestick and the bread and the altar of incense, but there’s no light from sun or stars. Reason comes in and kneels there. Reason says, thank you God, for there’s no roof on the outer court. And reason can look up and see the sun by day and the stars by night. Thank you, Heavenly Father, for what I see. Thank you for what I hear. Thank you for what my tongue can taste and my nose can smell and my fingers can feel. Thank Thee Heavenly Father for the outer court. Thank Thee for reason and thank Thee for deduction and logic and conclusions. Thank Thee Father for all that I’ve learned about Thee out in the outer court.

But reason kneels and worships inside because there’s no light of nature that can come there. There’s simply candlesticks and bread and an altar of incense, that is all. That is getting a little bit closer, because that is the knowledge furnished by faith. There, reason can’t check. Reason listens to the voice of God and looks at the symbolism there before him and believes. And so in the eleventh chapter of Hebrews, we learn that we have to believe certain things and accept them by faith. So that faith is another manner of receiving information from God and knowing and having knowledge of divine and spiritual things. The knowledge of faith is a legitimate and proper way of finding out things. You’ll never be able to get at them with your reason. You will have to believe and that is equivalent to faith, to know Him, because by faith, we know. By faith we know.

And then there’s the third, there’s another veil. The priests enter every so often into that holy place. But nobody enters into the Holy of Holies, because it’s shut off from the holy place. There there’s only one piece of furniture, the Ark of the Covenant, the Mercy Seat, and the cherubim and the shekinah, the flame of fire from which God speaks. Once a year, the high priest goes in there. Some said he took a sensor with him and that’s why it is mentioned in Hebrews 9, he went in there with blood of atonement and with great reverence. No light shone from moon or stars for no light was needed. He carried no light of his own because no human reconstructed light, not even a candlestick was needed. But the light in that holy place, that Holy of Holies came from between the wings of the cherubim. There was the Shekinah, the Presence, the Presence shining out there and filling all the room with a soft, deep glow.

And the high priest looked down and crept forward in a rapture of delight and sprinkled the blood there and then backed away in deep reverence, and Israel had been atoned for another year. And Israel’s sins could be forgiven now for the high priest confessed there in that awful moment, the sins of Israel. And then, he backed out. And several priests came and helped for it was so heavy, it took seven priests they said, to shut that veil back up again. That beautiful veil so carefully woven by men who had to be filled with the Holy Ghost in order to know how to sew beautiful enough to make that veil. And for another year until the next day of atonement, nobody entered in there. There was God’s presence. There with gold, there was the shining light. There was the mercy seat. When Jesus our Lord died on a cross, that veil that took seven men to move, was ripped from the top to the bottom. And now the book of Hebrews says, we can enter ourselves where the high priest is. Every one of us can enter into that place. There is the knowledge that comes by spiritual experience.

There are three degrees of knowledge, my friends, there’s the knowledge that God gives us through nature, reason. There is the knowledge He gives us by faith. He tells us certain things, we accept them. That’s knowledge. But that’s not enough. To that knowledge, we enter on in a little further yet and that is into the very Presence where we can hardly speak, and we’re alone with God there, we’re touched and reverent and hushed with devotion. There is knowledge by spiritual experience.

Now what is the difference between the kind of teaching that I try to give and that many others also, some others try to give an ordinary orthodoxy, ordinary fundamentalism. Ordinary fundamentalism passes by reason and will hardly believe in it at all. It goes on into the holy place and accepts everything by faith, and that’s good. The first is not good. The second is, but never goes on into the Holy of Holies where they’re silent with breathless devotion. There we call the deeper life. Nothing, nothing of pride can enter there. Nothing human can enter there except the redeemed human spirit. And there, kneeling in awestruck devotion, the soul waits on God, and sees God and feels God and senses God, and knows with the knowledge that comes by the Spirit. The Holy Ghost reveals and we know nothing contrary to faith, nothing contrary to divine revelation, but only and not even anything beyond it, but only that we have in reality what otherwise we would only know to be true by faith.

Now the inner core is ours. The inner life is ours. That inner life bears the same relation to faith, as the spirit of a man bears to the man’s body. The man’s spirit fits his body, I suppose it does. It’s not contrary to it. Both are of God, but the body without the spirit is a corpse. So the knowledge that comes by faith, theology doctrine, without the Holy Ghost is a corpse too. And that’s what’s happened to us in the last years. We have rejected reason. We haven’t harmed ourselves too badly there I suppose.

But I like to go out sometimes and stand between the altar and the laver and know the Lamb dies from a sin on the altar, and on the laver, I can wash the sin away. I can stand between the altar and the laver and look up toward heaven and thank God for the stars that shine. But I don’t stop there. Emerson stopped there. He didn’t even go that far. Whittie I think stopped there too, and lots of others. Oliver Wendell Holmes stopped there. That’s the reason I don’t like his hymns. A lot of men stop in the outer court and they never went on. The Christian goes on and receives by faith everything that God has to say to Him. By faith he believes it. He can’t understand it. Reason is outside looking up at the stars, but faith is inside looking up for God. But he doesn’t stop there if he’s a real Christian. Paul said, that I might know Him I press off, I press on. Was he thinking about pressing on past the outer court, past the Holy Place, past the holy, into the Holy of Holies? Was he by any means, that I might know Him?

So, that increasing knowledge of God, that progressive knowledge of God, that is the career of the Christian. That he might know God and know divine things and heavenly things with increasing awareness, with increasing intensity of consciousness. With increasing breadth and depth and width and height, on and on, until he sees Him as He is.

Now for the next weeks. I’m going to talk about the knowledge of reason. How valid is it and how far can it take us. I am going to talk about the knowledge of faith. Where does it enter? And, I’m going to talk about what is the knowledge of experience. And if you miss the others, don’t miss the last one. The glory of the immediate knowledge of the Presence.

Tags God, Jesus Christ, Knowledge, Reason

Messages

Tozer Talks

“Getting Glory Out of Gray Days”

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Getting Glory Out of Gray Days

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

January 8, 1956

Last Sunday, I began a message which I had preached more than 20 years ago to this church. And I would suppose only about a quarter or less than those who are present. It’s supposed to be a new year sermon on “The Glory in the Gray. But I found as I watched the clock and heard myself talk that I was only able to get halfway through it and said that I would conclude today, though of course, both sermons were units in themselves.

The text was, they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength. They shall mount up with wings as eagles. They shall run and not be weary. And they shall walk and not faint. And I pointed out that these three methods of locomotion, mounting on wings, running, and walking, corresponded to three phases in our Christian life. And remember, this is not a sermon on how to become a Christian. This is assuming that you’re already a Christian. And if you’re not already a Christian, then what I say cannot possibly mean you.

When a lawyer calls a number of persons in to read a will to them, what he says only has significance for the persons who are included in the will. If four or five others should crash the gate and sit in and listen, it wouldn’t have any significance for them at all, because their names weren’t there. They weren’t included. So, the sinner will not apply to himself anything that I say nor try to make this a thin philosophy for unconverted men. This is for Christians only, that life presents three phases which I called, life’s highlights, mounting up, and life’s dark nights, running in terror and fear, and walking, life’s gray days. The days when there isn’t anything much going on, when you’re not afraid of anything and you’re not particularly elated about anything, but you’re doing what you know you should do and paying little attention to your feelings. Those are the gray days of life, the common humdrum of life.

Incidentally, when I preached this sermon twenty years ago, I remember there was present a missionary, an old missionary, Brother Andrews from India. And I used the word humdrum. And we had six sons in our home at that time, and the oldest one I imagine was around fifteen. And Brother Andrews came up and said, Brother Tozer, I understand what you mean by humdrum. He said, in your home, I imagine there’s a little of both, hum and drum. That just came to my mind as being at least something I remember from that previous sermon.

Now, I said that I wanted to talk about how we could beat this gray day phase of our lives, how we could get out of it what God has in it for us, how we could live our uneventful plain, pedestrian, simple life. There would be those high moments of flying with wings as eagles. And we thank God for them. And I’m afraid there will be also a few of those days that are dark or those nights that are dark, or days that are dark as night. I hope not many, but there may be some. But mostly, there will be gray days when the sun doesn’t shine and it doesn’t storm. it doesn’t stir you, frighten you, disturb you, nor thrill you. Then it’s hard to be good, and it’s hard to be spiritual, and it’s hard to keep up faith, and it’s hard to remember who you are and where you’re going and what your plans are, what God’s purposes for you are.

Now, for the remainder of the time, I want to give you some, some points as the preachers call it, about how you can get the glory from the gray, and manage to get out of that ugly, drab field, very great fruit and grain. How you can get out of the ugly mountain there, the plain drab mountain, real riches. So, I give you these nine points, and you can take them or try to remember them, or do what you will with.

The first is that every Christian must begin by, after he accepts Christ, and that’s taken for granted, that he must accept the universe. You know, that we live in a world we didn’t make and we’re not responsible for it. The only thing I’m responsible for, is what I’ve put here by my deeds, good or bad. But the universe is here and I didn’t make it. I didn’t make the weather nor I didn’t determine that it was to be cold in one place and warm in another. I can’t help it about floods and earthquakes and storms. I can’t help it because it gets too hot in some places and too cold in others and rarely anyplace just right. I can’t help it that we’re here on a moving conveyor belt traveling between the cradle and the grave. I didn’t ask God and He didn’t ask me.

So, here we are in the middle of the world. There are some things we don’t like in the world, and I think we are tempted sometimes to say that we could improve on it. The great thinker and writer who was an unbeliever, Voltaire, said often, or at least he left the impression that this wasn’t much of a world. And he wrote a whole book “Candide” in which he showed this wasn’t the best of all possible worlds. And somebody said to him, well, how would you improve it? Well, he said, I’d start by making good health catching. And of course, that was very funny and I suppose he got a guffaw from the crowd about it. I don’t know why sickness is catching and good health isn’t. I don’t know that. But I do know this, that a Christian, when he comes to the fountain and is washed, and to the throne and is accepted, he must begin by accepting God’s universe and not trying to edit God’s volume. Not trying to amend God’s constitution. Not trying to add any lean-tos on God’s palace, and not trying to fix up or change any of God’s blueprints. He must accept the universe in which he lives, and say, this is my Father’s world. And I am not going to irritate my own heart by kicking against the pricks, and wishing it was otherwise that it was. So, that’s one thing.

Now, Brother, that’s a philosophical approach, but I think also that it’s quite a spiritual one, that we must begin to be thankful, be thankful for God’s world. The Book of Psalms is one radiant, sunburst of thankfulness for God’s world. The old man of God who wrote the Psalms or the men of God, for David wrote most of them. There were a few others that added some Psalms. Moses, for instance, one and two Hezekiah, some perhaps, and Asap wrote a few. They were men of God and they were radiant with thankfulness. They were glad for the world in which they lived. They said God made the world and who am I to kick against the pricks? Who am I to reply to the potter and say, what makest Thou? Who am I to reply to the man and say, what begettest thou? I will accept this as the best world pro tem that I could live in. That this is it now with its stormy winds and its sleet and hail, and it’s earthquakes, and it’s accidents and death, and with its diseases and graveyards and prisons. I accept it. I can’t help it.

There’s much that I don’t like. But apart from sin, I’m going to accept everything. And I’m going to thank God He made the world as he made it. And I’m going to believe, that in that day when it’s all over, I will look back and say, He has done all things well, and this is the best of all worlds possible. And that nobody could have thought any better way to do any thing. I believe that. I can’t prove that, but I believe that. This is God’s world and I accept it. And you will find there’s a lot of glory in it. And you will, if you trust God and believe and pray, you will find as you’re thankful for God’s world, that there will be a lot of glory come out of that world for you.

The second thing is, accept yourself. That is, you must not envy anybody, anything. Envy is a desire to be what somebody else is, or be somebody else, or have what somebody else has. That’s envy, generally. Now, let’s get rid of envy. Envy is a sin. And when God made you, he made someone different from everybody else in the world. Do you happen to think that there are 165 million people in the world and nobody else exactly like you? But you say, my son, why people say, you will never be dead as long as your son is alive. But you know, that’s idiomatic expression, don’t you? You know that that’s merely a way of talking. There are no two people alike, not even identical twins. So there’s nobody like you.

Now, I think it is an amazing and wonderful thought, that the great God Almighty is able to create new beings every day and continue to do it every day of every year, and every year of every decade and both decades and every score of years and all five score of years in every century, and keep on doing it for all the millennium and never make any two alike. So, I’m not going to wish that I was like somebody else. Now, you get that in your mind. You’re just what you and if God wanted you to be different, He would have made you different.

Now, of course I mean, when it comes to sin, that’s another matter. When it comes to sin, then I am not as I should be, and I must be different. And God has the remedy. It’s the Word and prayer and the blood and the fire of the Holy Ghost. But we’re not talking about sin now. We’re talking about who we are. You wish you were tall and blonde, and you’re little and dark. All right, thank God you’re a little, dark fellow. Or your little, or thin and tall and wish that you were short, where you wish you were heavy when you’re not, and you wish a dozen things. Stop wishing anything and thank God that you’re just exactly what you are. I think sometimes my friend McAfee wishes he was an Englishman. If you have a little English blood in you, he’d just run shaking your hand right away. He and I have a lot of fun about that. His wonderful love for the English.

Do you wish that you had the genius of a Beethoven or the brains of an Einstein? Do you wish you had the money of some great tycoon or the beauty of some great star? Stop that. Christians can’t afford to indulge in pensive wishing and dissatisfaction with themselves, murmuring about what they have in God or murmuring against what they have. No. Accept yourself, my friend. And be thankful for yourself. And that’s not egotism. That’s faith. Be thankful for yourself.

Well, I have little English blood in me, but I just have exactly the amount God wanted in me, no more, no less. There’s a lot of German blood and I don’t mind that at all. So, I’m just exactly what I think I wanted to be if I had had my own choice. Now, I believe in that. It’s possible that 10 million people in this country or 164,999,000, may be greater than I, but at the same time they’re not I. So, I’m not going to trade around with anybody. I wouldn’t change nor be anybody else than what I am. Now, I get a lot of glory out of living in a plain life in a plane drab world if I simply say, now this is God’s place for me, and I am just what God meant me to be apart from sin. I must be perfecting myself and cleansing myself always. But apart from sin, why, I haven’t a complaint to make in the wide world.

And then third, accept your times. And don’t bemoan your place or your times. This is the best time in the world if you know what to do it. These are wonderful times if you know how to handle them and how to approach them. We look back over the far points of yesterday, the far hilltops of yesterday and we say that must have been wonderful to live in a time of Finney. Or, it would have been a beautiful thing to live in the time of Augustine or of St. Francis. It would have been a wonderful thing to live when the Holy Ghost came at Pentecost, or when the church was starting her missionary work to the ends of the earth in those early days. Not one bit better than now. You would not have been any better a Christian then than you are now because times don’t make Christians. God makes Christians.

And some of the finest Christians have been brought into being at the times when they were the lowest. Look at St. Bernard for instance. St. Bernard was a Christian in an hour when the whole world was dark. And yet he was a great Christian. God makes Christians, not the times. If you can’t be a good Christian in 1956, you couldn’t be a good Christian in 35 A.D. If you can’t be a good Christian now, you couldn’t be a good Christian in the Millennium. So, the point isn’t what times I live in. The point is, do I live in faith? Do I live in Christ? Does the Holy Ghost live in me? And am I, an indwelt man. So, accept your times and stop bemoaning the good old days, some of you dear old people have that habit. You remember the good old days when you were young and everything looked wonderful to you.

I sometimes look back upon the little Alliance Church over in Akron, Ohio. And I am suspicious that I am overrating that church, because that was my first introduction to anything spiritual. That’s the first time that I ever knew spiritual singing and spiritual praying and the people knew God. That was the first time I’d ever come in contact with anything like that. And of course, I look back upon it now as being an oasis in the desert, a wonderful, little Millennium for me. But I have a suspicion now, that I know humanity better, that there was an awful lot of things wrong with that church that I in my young innocence didn’t know about. And you’ll find that there is a lot of things wrong back there in those good old days where you wish you were again. No, God will do anything for you now that he ever did for anybody, anytime, anywhere. Remember that. None of your father’s ever had anything you can’t have. God will fill you as full as He ever filled any man in the history of the world if you will meet His conditions. So, let’s not bemoan the times and grieve God by being sorry that we’re living in 1956. I’m not. I’m glad I’m living right now.

Well, accept your place in life. That’s point number four, if you please. Your place in life, God puts you in that particular place. You’re married to somebody or you’re not. Or you’re a certain age or you’re old, or you’re young, or you’re middle-aged, and you’re this kind of workman or that kind of professional man. And you wish you were something else. I think that humanity being what it is, there never was a man yet, whoever had a job or a profession or an occupation that somewhere he wasn’t tempted to wish that he was doing something else. Have you ever met a man that was absolutely convinced this was the only job for him? No. There never was a married woman yet, now don’t look at me, but there never was a married woman yet, that somewhere down the line, didn’t look pensively at the young single girl going on her way at the office and saying, boy, if I could quit at 4:30 and not have anything else to think about, I’d be a happy woman. But if you were the single girl going on your way to the office, she’d be looking in at you and saying, look at that lovely family there. Those pretty kids. I wish I had that. So, everybody wants what they don’t have.

I saw a cartoon one time that was supposed to represent humanity, or a picture that’s supposed to represent humanity. It showed an apple tree. And on the ground lying everywhere, obviously after a heavy wind, there lay great, juicy apples, almost piled on each other. And away at the top of the tree and off far to the left of the picture, hanging alone, was a little shriveled apple. And here stood a boy with a rock looking at that apple. And all around him were bushels of all luscious, juicy, sweet, succulent fruit. But that one lonely little shriveled apple was the one that boy wanted. The artists that drew that had a sense of humor and a little knowledge of humanity, for that’s exactly the way we live. We want what we don’t have and what we have, were not inclined to want.

Now, that’s Adam’s way and a sinner’s way, but it oughtened to be a Christian’s way. A Christian ought to thank God for his place in life and stop complaining. And then again, remember this, that that place you’re in and all this that comes to you in these gray, plain days, that’s the lot of all saints. I’ve pointed out before here many times that it helps us when we’re undergoing hard times, if we remember that we’re not alone in it. Other people are undergoing hard times, too.

So, if you keep that in mind, it’s the lot of all the saints. But you say, I read the life of St. Augustine and I know that he had high times. Well, you will have high times too. But Augustine had a few of those high peaks, but he had more valleys than he did peaks and more level plateaus than he did mountain tops. So did Paul. We read about Paul’s shipwreck and Paul getting stoned at Lystra. We read about his being knocked down on the road to Damascus and being filled with the Spirit when Ananias came to Him. We read about his being thrown into prison and about his going out to die. We read about those things and we imagine that Paul’s life consisted in one unbroken sequence of thrillers. Oh, no.

Why, Paul had long days. For instance. and he dwelt two years in his own hired house. That’s all there is to that. There are two solid years telescoped into one sentence. What happened during those two years? No highlights, no dark nights, just gray days. Paul had to go on living, preach the gospel and go ahead and do the best he could. And take a few bumps and have a few victories and go right ahead now. And that’s exactly the way you should do. And it’s the lot of all the saints. Again, remember this, that the workshop of God is never very brightly-lighted. It’s usually dimly-lighted. It’s not dark, totally. And it is not bright. It’s rather gray. And in that workshop God hews and cuts and chisels and builds and refines. And you’re the one he’s working on. So when you look around and you’d like to do something dramatic.

Do you remember when you were saved just in your teens, how you wanted to do something dramatic? I always did. When I would hear the Star-Spangled Banner, I’d get goose pimples on my wrists. I wanted to go out and die for my country, but I wanted to come home and hear the people praise me for dying from a country. It was an odd situation that I created. But we’re like that, you know. We want to do the big, thrilling thing. But we don’t do it that way. We don’t marry the princess. We marry little Mary Smith down two blocks down there, plain looking little woman who manages to look pretty well with a little help. And they get along all right, thank God. That’s the way we live. And we don’t, we don’t always have the big thrills. Gods workshop is dimly-lighted and their God in the half shadows, in the gray, is working and working with His people, always working.

I’ve often quoted and we quote brother McAfee and I often quote to each other and in prayer, what Fenelon said about the coal mine, and the gold mine. He said deep in the bowels of the earth, God is working; deep in the heart of the man, God is working like a miner in the bowels of the earth. Digging and refining and working away there. Nobody knows it, but God and the man. The man’s likely to forget it, so keep it in mind, you’re in God’s workshop and God’s workshop is not always lighted with the finest lights. It’s a little dim there. But the great God knows what he’s doing. He seeth in the shadows and He’s working there.

And then keep in mind also that there are rich treasures. There are more treasures in the plateau then there are up on the mountain peak. More treasures for you in living straight along and walking by faith, then there is an mounting up with wings, although sometimes you will mount up with wings too.

Could I tell again an illustration which I gave some years ago, of an old gentleman who had several sons. He noticed that those boys of his, as I think most boys, even as you and I, wasn’t exactly what you’d call, wild about work. So, he came to die and he called his boys in and he said, boys that orchard down there, in that vineyard, I buried a treasure there. He said, it’s buried there and it’ll make you all rich. I’m got to go now, goodbye. And so, he pulled his feet into bed like Jacob and died. Soon as the funeral was over and they could get to it, why, they got their heads together and said, father said he had buried a treasure. There’s a treasure buried in the vineyard. Let’s dig it up. So, they digged up the vineyard. They didn’t find a thing. It took them about all summer. They didn’t find a thing. They went over every inch and didn’t find a thing. By that fall when it came grape-gathering time, they had so many grapes, the neighbors remarked about it. So they harvested the grapes. They said, well, we’ll harvest the grapes next spring, we’ll try it again.

So they harvested the grapes, and to everybody’s surprise, they had made more money that year than they ever thought possible. So the next spring they said, well, we’ll get going on digging for the treasure, so they dug a little deeper. And that year, they had more grapes than ever before. And they said, well, this is this wonderful. Let’s harvest these grapes. So they harvested the grapes and sold them and banked the money. And they did that for three or four years, and never found the treasure they’d been digging for. And then at last, they began to look at each other and said, I wonder if the old man wasn’t slipping something cross on us. Then they began to grin and said, now we know what it is. We know. The treasure that we were supposed to dig for was the cultivation of our vineyard, our orchard. And the digging around the roots and the constant digging and keeping the soil digged-up has given us so much fruit that we’re practically rich and if we keep this up a few years, we’ll be rich men. They stopped their effort to find gold and silver and went on digging around the roots of the tree and went on to be rich men.

So it is with our God. God has buried treasures, brothers and sisters, but they are not the treasures that are in bags or boxes. It’s another kind of treasure, so that when you go ahead now, quietly living your life for God this year, God will make you rich. Not the way you expected but the way God has in mind.

And I would say, point number eight is that God put you here, and that is by providence. Our fathers used the word we seldom use, it is the word providence. We don’t believe much in that now. But providence is the secret, silent working of God to an end, in which He plays us over the board, as a man plays chess pieces over a board to a predetermined end. And when we look back, we will see how He worked in our lives. Now that is what I mean by providence. And God is working providentially to bring things to pass for you. God put you here.

And last of all is that Christ is with you always. If you will remember that you won’t worry very much about the light nor the dark. And when the gray day comes, you will remember the Lord is with me all the time. Lo, I am with you always even unto the end of the world.

So now, remember this, you can fly, but you can’t fly always. You will be called upon to run in the dark sometimes, but not very often. Mostly you will walk by faith. And it is the walking by faith that pleases God the most. Anybody can be happy in the hour of great elevation of soul. Anybody can pray in the moment of great tragedy. But when neither one comes along and you’re forced every day to live just as if you’re anybody else. There’s nothing to thrill you and nothing to excite you, and just go right straight ahead with God in your mind and Christ before you walking by faith. That’s something else again, but that’s what you called to do. So walk by faith.

Here’s a stanza of a hymn. I don’t care much for the hymn I admit. But the man did get something into this last verse. It was James Russell Lowell’s hymn called, “Once to Every Man and Nation,” and this is the way he closed it. He says, though the cause of evil prosper, yet tis truth alone that strong. Thou her portion be the scaffold, and upon the throne be wrong. Yet that scaffold sways the future and behind the dim unknown, standeth God within the shadow keeping watch above his own.

So, during this year and during all the years we have yet before us, you will find that right will be on the scaffold and wrong will be on the throne. And yet it’s not the throne where wrong sits that will determine the future, but it’s the scaffold. For righteousness stands with a rope around her neck. She’ll sway the future. And in the shadows is God keeping watch above His own.

Now that’s my faith, ladies and gentleman, that I believe in. We walk by faith and not by sight. So, if God wants to during these days ahead, if God wants to take me in a high flight, I’ll be glad to go. I’ll be glad with Paul to go to that third heaven and come down and keep my mouth shut about what I saw. And if God in His tender mercy sees fit to let me plunge into a dark night where I can’t find my way through, I’ll try to be patient and walk with him until the light returns. But in the meantime, I don’t expect too much of either. I expect an awful lot of humdrum. An awful lot of just plain keeping on and serving God and keeping faithful when there’s nothing to be faithful apparently about, as far as your feelings are concerned.

So, I recommend that you learn that song, May Jesus Christ be Praised, and sing it every morning when you get out of bed while you’re groping blindly and more or less somnolently for the alarm clock and wishing you had five more hours to sleep. Why, began to sing, when morning gilds the skies, my heart awakening cries, may Jesus Christ be praised. And all through the day and night and darkness and light, praise Jesus Christ. You will find you will have the glory that you never dreamed was there. The rich gold of God’s sweet reward will be yours because you trusted and weren’t afraid and walked and believed and honored God when you couldn’t see nor feel. You honored God and God in return will honor you and lift and protect and bless and keep you through the years. Amen

Tags Christian Life, Joy, Trust

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Tozer Talks

Post author By pshappard
Post date November 6, 2022

“The Believer’s Walk”

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The Believer’s Walk

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer
December 15, 1957

In the first of the two Thessalonian epistles, chapter four, Paul says, furthermore, we beseech you brethren and exhort you by the Lord Jesus, that as ye have received of us, how ye ought to walk and to please God so ye would abound more and more. For ye know what commandments we gave you by the Lord Jesus. For this is the will of God, even your sanctification. that ye should abstain from fornication. That every one of you should know how to possess his vessel in sanctification and honor, not in the lust of concupiscence, even as the Gentiles which know not God. Let no man go beyond and defraud his brother in any matter, because that the Lord is the avenger of all such. As we also have forewarned you and testified. For God has not called us unto uncleanness, but unto holiness. And he therefore that despiseth, despiseth not man, but God, God who hath also given unto us His Holy Spirit.

This is only a little section of a letter written by a man named Paul, an apostle to a church in the city of Thessalonica, a Greek city, to a new church, relatively new. And these persons to whom he wrote, were good Christians. That is, the church was good. There are seven things said about the church, said about the Thessalonian Christians by the man Paul. For Paul was always very careful never to deliver a 100% condemnation. He always wove into his condemnation some complimentary remarks about their spiritual lives. He knew that if you are too hard on people, you discourage them. If you’re not hard enough, you let them go to sleep. So he tried to keep them awake and still not be too hard on them. He said this about them, that they had abandoned idolatry. They were by nature, rather by culture, they were idolaters by religion. But they had now abandoned this. They had turned to God from idols, and they had turned to the true God.

I have said many times, I suppose I will not say anything this morning I haven’t said many times. I’ve said many times that God never recommends vacuum. If He takes you out of a place, it’s in order that He might take you into a place. He never takes you out and leaves you. If He says, turn away from that, He says that in order that He might say, turn unto this. So they had turned away from idols and turned to the true God. They were not left in the middle in a state of of unanimous indecision, I think I heard it call last week on the board. They were unanimous only in their indecision. But that would be a frightful place to leave a man. But they turned to the true God after turning from idols. And in their faith, they worked and hoped and loved and labored. And they received the gospel in power, Paul said, with much assurance, which he took as a proof of their election of God. And they were actively missionary-minded, for they send out missionaries and supported them. They had continued true under persecution, which is a good test of a Christian, and they were living in expectation of Christ’s return.

Now those seven characteristics of the Thessalonian Christians, were enough for them to get into any church in Christendom and to be taken further as an example of other churches. And still Paul was not content. He commended them for what they were, but he also urged the sacred duty of their being holy people, holy beyond the call of duty, holy beyond the current mores, holy beyond the standards of their time. And he warned them as I warn you, that nothing else is enough. If we do not seek and pursue purity of heart, which results in personal purity of life, nothing else is enough. Now, Paul said that he had taught this to them. And he had taught them what he called righteousness and true holiness. There is such a thing as righteousness that is not true holiness. But there is righteousness and true holiness.

Now, Christ personalized righteousness when He came. And He took it out of the realm of what we now call ethics, or have always called ethics, and taught that righteousness was simply to please God. We need not know what righteousness is, but we do need to know that if we please God, we’re doing righteousness. John said, that if we kept the commandments of the Lord, He would hear our prayers, and then added, and also if we do the things that are pleasing in His sight. Not that the keeping the commandments of the Lord was not pleasing in God’s sight, but it was not enough. There has to be an affection shown toward God.

It’s the same as rules in a household. The average household has rules and you keep those rules, and you see that the children do, and everybody takes it for granted. But that’s not enough. You could come, your children could come into your household and watch not to break the rules, and yet never do or say anything affectionate to show that they really loved you. It isn’t enough that I keep the laws of the New Testament, the commandments of Christ, that I am to do this and do that and refrain from this. That’s not enough. That must be, but Christ personalized all this and made it to be the result of a spontaneous, loving, relationship toward God.

And the church of Christ is righteous when she does those things which she knows to be pleasing in the eyes of her righteous Savior, and goes beyond mere keeping of rules, however important they may be. And Paul lays many of them down. We can talk about grace all we want to and freedom all we please. We’ve got to throw a lot of the New Testament out if we reject commandments and rules, for there are a lot of them here. But keeping to those rules is not enough. There must be added to this, or perhaps I should say, that we keep them because they are to us the mind of our Lord, that we do the things that are pleasing in His sight.

Philosophers analyze righteousness, but Christians obey and are righteous because they do the things that are righteous without knowing why they’re doing them. We’re now in time of analysis. Somebody referred once in my hearing to the paralysis of analysis. And now in seminaries and Bible schools, they analyze till they’re paralyzed. They stand halfway between two extreme views of things and can’t make up their mind which and split hairs and divide them until there’s no spontaneity left. We scarcely know which side we’re on at all. Well, that’s not a Christian’s approach. If a Christian knows that the Lord wants it that way, he wants it that way whether he knows why or not.

We might and I think it wouldn’t hurt us if we studied into the why of things. Why is it wrong to steal and why is it wrong to lie? There are good, sound philosophic reasons underneath it all. But that isn’t the reason that Christian stops lying. He stops lying because he knows lying displeases his Lord. He allows these scholastic hair splitters and casuists to write their long commentaries on why it’s wrong to steal. And if you steal with a certain high principle in mind you’re doing right, and why it’s wrong to lie. And in some quarters, they even have taught their their devotees that you can lie provided you say instantly afterward, Lord, I didn’t mean that. They even say that you can go to court and lie in court, if after you have told the lie in court you say to God, now God excused it, that doesn’t count. Now, that’s actually in print. I can show you where it is. That’s real. That’s real. That’s Jesuit casuistry. The hairsplitting of morals.

Is it ever wrong to tell a lie, or is it ever right to tell a lie? Is it always wrong to lie? Well, the hairsplitters give good reasons why sometimes a lie is a good thing. For instance, they’ve argued if you know that somebody is very sick and that a shocked would kill them, you can lie to them. I wouldn’t do it to save anybody’s life. But I wouldn’t shock them either. I believe God would help a man or woman out so that he would neither need to lie nor kill anybody by shocking them with the news of their friend’s death or accident. I believe it entirely possible to preserve the righteousness of truth and at the same time not give anybody a heart attack.

Well anyway, the Christians who teach morals from that cold standpoint, sit around and talk by the hour about, can you do this, or is it wrong to do that, and just how far can you go in this direction? That is a proof of the lack of spirituality. Paul said that we were to do these things in Jesus, because we do the things that are pleasing in His sight. And Jesus said, thou hearest Me always because I’m always doing what’s pleasing to Thee, pleasing in Thy sight.

Of course, we have rules at our house. We always had. When we were bringing up the boys, I used to say to them, now boys, if you were on a basketball team, there’d be certain things that you wouldn’t be permitted to do. There would be certain rules. And if you played on the Sox or Cubs, there’d be certain things that they’d say, now, you can’t do this. And I said, at home, it’s the same. There are certain rules that you keep, and that’s it. When we have our grandchildren out to the house now, there are certain rules or things they can’t do. We rarely ever have any trouble with them. But there are things they can’t do. But the beautiful part about it is, when they go beyond the call of duty and respond to your affection in a way. My little boy Paul, excuse the expression, for he laughs at me, whenever I mention the word Paul, he leans against the wall and says, now, I’m in for it because he knows what I think of this little blonde boy. But he’s a good little fellow and keeps rules more or less, but four years old. One day, I patted his little head and whispered in his ear, you’re a good little boy. And he patted my arm and said, you’re a good grandpa too.

Well, you know, I haven’t got over that yet. That’s been months ago. And that wasn’t keeping rules. That was a response. That was a response that was something out of the heart, spontaneous. Nobody had taught him to say that. And he didn’t have to say it. And it’s exactly so here. Righteousness and true holiness is the spontaneous response of the heart to the love of God. Of course, it takes certain directions, and so, Paul wanted to lay those directions down for us. And he pointed out the importance of a holy walk. He said, this is the will of God, even your sanctification, to be devoted to God’s uses. Of course, that’s one and the primary meaning of the word “sanctified.” But it also means to be cleansed for that purpose.

Those who don’t believe too much in cleansing, argue that sanctify means to set apart for sacred uses. But I have one question which I want to ask you. Can you conceive of God setting anything aside for His sacred use that wasn’t first cleansed? Can you conceive of a priest in the Levitical temple standing and singing or offering incense from a vessel that was dirty that needed to be washed? No. They believed in washings and washings says the writer of the gospels for the Jews will not eat until they have washed their hands. They’re always keeping clean. Their idea of a sanctified vessel was a vessel that was as clean as it could be made, and then dedicated to God. It had those two connotations. Not one, but two. I can’t think of a holy God using an unholy vessel. I can’t think of a holy God eating out or wanting his people to eat out of a vessel that’s dirty.

Now, this is neglected in our day, and we want to talk about it a little. It’s not denied I think, that Christians should be holy, but not too much has been said about it. And most I think, that most of our preaching after we’ve got the sinner in, we can’t be rough on him. But after we’ve got him in and he’s joined and got baptized, and has gotten into our fellowship, then after that, most preaching consists of telling them how nice they are. At least, that’s what I hear when I listen on the radio. Most all that is telling people how nice they are.

Well now, we want to do that, as I pointed out that Paul does and Jesus does in these seven letters. But they also, we must shout aloud, that He that saith, He abideth in Him ought also to walk even as He walked. That it is the will of God that we should be a holy people. And in this particular chapter, Paul talks about one kind of evil which our missionaries tell us sometimes creeps right into their churches and I’m afraid in our own churches, too. He talks about, he said that everybody should be freed and delivered from fornication.

Now, the damning effect of impurity will never quite be known in this world. We’ll never know until the judgment, until we know as we’re known, the ravages of impurity are greater than that of any disease, greater than the ravages of any of the great killers. And the victims of this, of these sins, are found by millions in hospitals and insane institutions and institutions for the blind. But the most deadly effect of sin is always in the heart of its victim. Never forget that.

A man may, as has happened some times, a man may get drunk and fall into fire. I knew a man that His neck was all burned. He said, years ago, he’d become a Christian. And he turned around and showed me the scars on his neck. He said, I worked in a factory where there were blazing fires. And he said, I’d get drunk and stagger around and even at my work and fall in and have to be dragged out. He said, that’s the result. Well now, that was bad because it had burnt him. It might have killed him, but it burnt his neck and left great, ugly scars there. But those scars didn’t represent the real deadly result of his sin which happened to be drinking. But something inside the man was suffering. Something inside the man was getting sore, shriveling, cracking, splitting, dividing, withering, dying. Thank God, our Lord Jesus Christ got a hold of that man and saved him, saved him, wonderfully saved him.

Incidentally, I might as well carry on that little story. This man was named Jim Terwilliger. And he was about that high and about that thick through. And I knew him when he was in his 70s. He had been saved when he was 56. And that dear man of God, here’s how he was saved. He was dead drunk lying on a couch. His wife was kneeling at his head, and his Christian doctor kneeling at his feet praying for him. He said, he heard a voice say, wake thou that sleepest and rise from the dead, then Christ will give thee light. And he stood and wept as he told his story. He said, I woke up completely cold sober and thoroughly converted and born again.

Now don’t ask me about how it happened. That’s not the way the little book tells you. That little book you get three for a quarter on how to win souls, and what to say to them and what to say next. That isn’t the way they do it in the little books, but that’s the way the Holy Ghost did it, brother. This man lived with a Christian wife, and he was drinking and disgracing himself, like an old pig. But she had gotten ahold of God and that physician had gotten ahold of God. And here was a man that came bouncing out of a dead drunk, cold sober and converted. From that time on to the end of his life, he did nothing but weep and sing and shout and praise God and testify to what the Lord has done for him. Don’t ask me to explain that. I can’t. That isn’t found in any of the books. That was just done.

Now, dear people, the worst part of any sin is what it does inside of you. A real estate man cheats a widow. The widow suffers. Her children suffers. But that’s not the worst. The worst thing is what happened to the man. Emerson said, the thief always steals from himself. And when I cheat anybody of anything, I’ve cheated my own soul and done my self harm. Always remember that the great evil of sin is internal, that it’s what happens inside.

Sometimes in an accident, there will come bearing on a stretcher, somebody in shock. And they will feel the arms, the legs and say, well, there are no broken bones, no broken ribs, but there’s internal injuries. And you die from those internal injuries, not from broken legs. And it’s the internal injury of sin, iniquity. What’s happening to these people? I don’t even get indignant anymore when I hear about them, these people that that live like animals. And their concept of home is like animals. I don’t even get angry anymore or indignant. The world is that way, and that’s the way it is until the Lord either comes and burns it with fire, or until He takes His people away or sends a revival or somehow changes things. But the terrible part is the cancer eating inside the heart.

Now, we live in in a Sodom today. Our American civilization is a Sodom. That is why when I hear speeches from in Washington talking about our American way of life and the free peoples of the world and all that. I know what they mean, and I know what they think they mean and don’t. There are no free peoples. And there are no righteous nations. And the best nations have, oh, so much for which to repent. If America hopes to be preserved on the strength of her righteousness, she might just well prepare herself for annihilation. No nation is righteous. We’re living in a Sodom.

I know it’s easy to make charges from the safety of the pulpit. I know that, and I know how hard it is to prove them because sin is a slippery as an oil eel. And I know that the attorneys for the defense are very, very many, and very learned. You can get books now showing that sodomy is perfectly normal, and that it is simply one person’s way of responding. That while naturally, and the majority don’t respond that way. Man falls in love with a woman. That’s that seems to be the majority, but occasionally, the Sodomite man falls in love with a man. Paul describes it in Romans 1. Back in Genesis, the city of Sodom was destroyed because of it.

Now, we have attorneys for the defense, teaching in our institutions of higher learning in the land supposed to be Christian, writing very carefully thought out and learned books to show that sodomy is not a sin, and that it ought not to be called a sin. We ought to stop that old 17th century view of it. It is simply another person’s way of responding to a situation. And though, God Almighty sent fire on Sodom, and though Paul warned in Romans 1 of the ghastly result of this kind of thing, our students in their universities now are hearing that it’s all right. Maybe not the most to be desired, but nothing wrong if that’s the way you feel about it.

Well, this Sodom can defend its ways all right. And those who would escape the fire though, they can’t stand on the street corner and argue. They can’t sit in a class or somewhere and read a book showing that Sodomy is all right. Escape to the hills said the angel. Escape to the mountain said the angel. Escape for thy life said the Holy Ghost. And Lot got up and escaped and went leading his wife. I’m thinking of the artist’s pictures of it. I suppose he led her. She looked back and he tried to drag her with him. But she said, I want to catch that late TV show. I can’t leave yet. So she turned to a pillar of salt, still back there.

Old brother Cout. Do you remember him?. Brother Cout, still the same old Bernard Cout. He’s got adenoids you know, and that old ex-missionary. God bless him. He’s one of the sweetest old saints I know. He said the other day in a sermon, two shall be grinding at the mill. One’s taken and the other left. Two shall be sleeping in a bed, one taken and the other left. Two shall be watching television, both left. Well, I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t press it like that. There was one in my hotel room in New York. And when I wasn’t busy, I watched it to see what was on. I wouldn’t go that far, but I think you ought to give that a bit of thought anyhow. That was the theology of good Brother Cout from up in the hills.

Well, Saddam can defend itself all right. And the thing to do is not argue or split hairs, but get out. Separate yourself severely and radically from sin of every kind, and regard it with horror and detestation, says the Holy Ghost. He that despises, despises not man but God that called us unto holiness. Any young man or woman that travels the sleazy way of borderline impurity does so at his own terrible risk. And whoever defends evil, defends what God has severely condemned. And whoever despises holiness, despises that upon which God places such high value.

And after all friends, spirituality isn’t what you eat or don’t eat, where you go or don’t go. Spirituality is thinking about things the way God thinks about them, seeing them through God’s eyes, appraising them with God’s standards, that spiritual spirituality. And holiness isn’t don’t wear gold, don’t wear a tie. I think you can doll up and look like a Christmas tree and hurt your Christian testimony. I don’t doubt that at all. That can be done. I think a lot of Christian women do it. And I think that preachers sometime get so much automobile out ahead of them. That it’s a testimony. It’s not for God, but for somebody else, and I think I know who.

But holiness doesn’t consist in having or not having doing or not doing. It consists of thinking about it the way God thinks about it. Judging it the way God judges it. Responding toward it the way God responds. Reacting from it, as God reacts from it. Loving it, as God loves. Hating it as God hates it. And doing the things that are pleasing in His sight. And surely that will include holiness of life and righteousness of walk, which Paul calls here, righteousness and true holiness. May God grant that we have more than the new birth. May God grant that we have more than the knowledge that we’ve been born again. Let us go on unto perfection.

And let us seek as the days go by, in our living, the way we handle our money, the way we treat our friends, the way we live in our homes, the way we conduct our business, the way we think when we’re free to think the way we want to think. That in all that we will be exemplars of righteousness and true holiness. For he that despises, despises not man but God. May God grant that the words of Peter be fulfilled in us, be ye holy, for I am holy, words spoken first by God and quoted by Peter, be holy, for I am holy.

A yearning to be holy is about all I’d want to know that anybody had, and I’d call him my Brother. Are you longing to be holy? I wouldn’t ask that you would know all the different views and the different theological hairsplittings. All I’d want to know is, within his heart is a great longing to be holy. That, it seems to me is more valuable than all the fine churches and all the well-bound Bibles. God grant that we have it. All right.

Tags Christian Life, Holiness