Month: May 2024

Categories
Messages

Tozer Talks

“The Saints Must Walk Alone“

PDF Download with Summary NotesDownload

The Saints Must Walk Alone

Pastor and author

April 29, 1956

Summary

A.W.Tozer explores the idea that many great souls have been lonely, citing examples from the Old Testament. He argues that this loneliness may be necessary for saintliness, as God speaks more deeply and intimately to those who are alone with Him. Tozer emphasizes the significance of solitude for spiritual growth, highlighting biblical examples of figures like Abraham, Moses, Elijah, and Jesus Christ who experienced aloneness in their ministries. He notes that solitude can bring healing and restoration, but also lead to loneliness and isolation.

Message

Now, I want to talk today on this topic: The Saint Must Walk Alone. And in this verse of Scripture, you will find two things mentioned that are, both of which were characteristic of Jesus. The phrase, the multitudes went right along with our Lord Jesus, because He ministered to the multitudes, because He did miracles and cast out their devils and gave sight to their blind and because He spoke simply to the plain people. He had around Him many who wanted to listen to Him, which the Bible calls the multitudes, we call today, crowds.

Now, that was characteristic of our Lord Jesus Christ. But strangely enough, and contradictory as it may seem–there alone–is also characteristic of Jesus, from the time that His parents thought He was with them and found He was not and went back to look for Him and found Him away from them talking to the doctors. On down through His ministry, He was there alone, describes Jesus, about as well as, He was surrounded by the multitudes. I suppose that He was the world’s loneliest man though He was surrounded by these very crowds.

Now, what I want to develop today is that most of the world’s great souls, if not all of them, have been lonely. Loneliness would seem to be the price that the saint must pay for His saintliness. And in order to back up that statement, I want to take you on a little trip through the Old Testament, starting back there with Enoch.

That pious soul, Enoch, who in the morning of the world, walked with God, or perhaps I should say, not in the morning of the world, but in the time of the strange darkness that settled upon the world shortly after the dawn of man’s creation. Enoch walked with God. And while it does not say so in so many words, the inference is very plain, that he walked apart from his contemporaries. That the path he took was a path quite alone and separated from those who lived at the time he lived. He walked to his God. If everybody had been walking with God, then why should the Bible have mentioned that he walked with God? The fact that it was mentioned at all would seem to indicate, and I think we can safely infer that it is implied there, that Enoch walked a path apart from his contemporaries.

And then there was Noah. And all the evidence shows that Noah was a lonely man, that while he had his family, and while he was surrounded, we would suppose by workmen. Well, the ark was a building, yet Noah stood so apart from the multitudes that God picked him out and he found grace in God’s sight. And Noah must have been a man apart, a lonely man. Then come on down the years to the man, Abraham. Abraham had Sarah. He had Lot. He had his herdsman, and he had his servants. All that is very true. But I think it is very plain that his soul was like a star and dwelt apart, as words were said of Milton.

Apparently, God never spoke to the man Abraham in company. Now that’s quite a significant thought that God never spoke to him in company. Apparently, there were those things which God wanted to say to the man Abraham which He could not say with anybody listening. And Abraham evidently had a habit of praying face down, lying in delighted ecstasy in the presence of the great God of his fathers and of the world. And there Abraham prayed and called on God, and he was calling on God face down. Now the innate dignity of the man Abraham, for had that he should have assumed that posture in the presence of others. He would certainly not have lain on his stomach in prayer if there were people around him. So, we suppose that Abraham must have been, very often at least, a lonely man.

I believe that there are things that God wants to say to us which He cannot say in the presence of other people, just as there are things you say to your family or to your wife which you cannot say with others around. I believe that God wants to speak to us, and that He speaks more deeply and intimately and wonderfully when he can get our ear all by ourselves.

Now there is a community of Christian worship, and it is taught throughout the Bible. The very word church means an assembly of persons call out. But notice that it has two meanings, called out and assemble. And the fact that the people that make up the church are called out, speaks of loneliness. But the fact that they are called together, speaks also that there is in some measure an anodyne of medicine for that loneliness found in the fellowship of other Christians. But they are called out. And the man who is called out from his family as I was as a young fellow, called out when I was 17 years of age, to leave my family. And the worst part about it was, not called to leave them in body, but called to leave them in heart and live with Him and walk among them, and still be an alien to them.

And I know the language of the old man of God who said, I am become a stranger to my brethren and an alien to my mother’s children. That while you’re with them in presence, you are not with them in a heart, because your heart has been given to another, even the great God, and they don’t understand it, and so you’re called out. And there is the loneliness.

And then the other side of the picture is when you’re called together with persons of like mind, and for the time you’re with them. There is some healing medicine for your sorrow, but you’re lonely nevertheless. Abraham was and God gave Abraham the knowledge again that he was a man marked out, a man to receive divine grace, when Abraham was alone with his God.

Then there was Moses/ Something in the heart of the man Moses couldn’t stand the court of Pharaoh. It was the Vanity Fair. It was the Mome Cove. It was the Chez Paree, the Broadway, the Hollywood of the time. And the man Moses was there, and there by the providence of God for the time. He saved his life and took him there. And he was brought up and educated for a great job.

And God used Egypt, but Egypt had no affinity for the man Moses and nor he for it. For Moses was a Jew and his people were Jews, and the covenant belonged to him. And Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob were his ancestors, not the Egyptians. And the temple of God was to be, and the tabernacle was to be the center of his thought and life that was to come, not the pyramids and not the Sphinx and not the great buildings of Egypt.

There was a loneliness in the heart of the man Moses, even as a young man. There must have been, because he took long walks, and on one of those long walks, far out from any town, he saw an Egyptian and a Hebrew fighting together and came to the rescue of the Hebrew. And then of course, he had to leave Egypt and flee, and he did.

And for long years, he was alone in the desert. And it was in the loneliness of the nighttime when the birds were out. The day birds were going to rest, and the night birds were beginning to croak, that he saw all by himself that burning bush. If Moses had been at a party, if he’d had friends, if there had been people gathered around him or if he’d been running with a multitude, God never could have showed him the wonder of the burning bush. One of the most solemn and awful and glorious things that ever took place in Old Testament times was that burning bush experience. And Moses never would have seen it if it had not been that he was alone.

And then that scene on Sinai. He left the multitudes far below and took with him only one man, Joshua. And then left him a little behind as Jesus later did, leave his three close friends to pray. And Moses went on into the fire. And there he watched in fascinated awe, that Presence, partly revealed and partly concealed in the fire and in the cloud and came down with his face shining. But he came down because he had been alone. And he went to the multitude and could talk to them with authority, because he had been to the Source of Authority. He did not poll them to find out what he should say. He went to the mountain to learn what he should say, and then told them what they should hear. And that is always the spirit of the true man of God, the prophet of God. He does not send out questionnaires to poll the multitude to find out what they want. He goes to God to find out what they need, and then gives it to them whether he talks to 10 or 5000.

Now, there was Elijah in later years, and all the prophets, these men were alone. Elijah was alone, as much alone on that mountain, more alone on that mountain, as if everybody else in the world had died. For there he was, surrounded by his enemies and with the prophets of Baal ready to slay him. And yet, there he stood a lonely man, absolutely alone in the midst of a crowd of hate-filled opposers. And God spoke to him there and later in the cave and later as he stood outside the cave and watched the mountains rock and saw the trees shake and go down under the roar of the whirlwind. God spoke in a still small voice to his heart and told him in the aloneness of his inner life that which he never could have said or told him if he had not been alone.

Well, carry on over to the New Testament, and there we find Jesus Christ our Lord, I repeat, probably the world’s loneliest man. A little hymn says about him, ’Tis midnight, and on Olive’s brow the star is dimmed that lately shone; ’tis midnight; in the garden now the suff’ring Savior prays alone.  ’Tis midnight, and, from all removed, the Savior wrestles lone with fears: e’en the disciple that He loved heeds not his Master’s grief and tears.

Now that was Jesus, not only in the garden, but very many other places. Forty days alone in the desert and on the mountain alone many times and on the shore alone after His resurrection, Jesus Christ died alone and rose alone. I repeat, there are some things too sacred for the eye of any but God to see. And when our Lord died, God pulled the curtain of the night down around the cross in order that He might die alone.

And when He rose again, He rose unseen by the eye of mortal man. I don’t know whether angels saw Him rise, but I know men did not, as though God were saying, His birth and His death and His rising again are secret, and only My eye can look upon these awesome and awful and glorious scenes. So, God brought Him from the dead unseen by the eye of mortal man, though afterward, He was seen of James and Cephus and Paul and 500 brethren at once, and they told abroad what they had seen. But at the moment of His rising, only the eye of God saw. My dear people, there are experiences with God that you can only have by yourself.

You say you have family prayer with your wife. All right, very good. But there are things God can’t say to you in the presence of your wife. And there are things God can’t say to you in the presence of the dearest and sweetest Christian brother or sister that you know. There are secret communications which God can only tell us when we’re alone. It was the old Meister Eckhart who said that when God gets the temple all to Himself, He whispers what He is to the human heart. Brother McAfee sings a song about in thy secret inner chamber, thou wilt whisper what thou art. God can tell me some things in the crowds, but He can only tell me what He is when my heart is alone.

Now, that’s the price most people will not pay. And I suppose I might as well make the sermon short, but there’s a long line of noble pilgrims. They didn’t march abreast and certainly they didn’t march as armies do, four to eight abreast. They marched alone, and the march was alone, and the gaps were wide between them. But you will find if you know church history and the biographies of the saints, you will know that there is a long parade of holy men and women who lived and loved and labored and worked and made the world a better place and won many, established hospitals and colleges, and built churches and orphan asylums, and left behind them a trail of goodness and mercy wherever they went. And yet they belong to the lonely parade. Their day didn’t recognize them. Or if they did, they didn’t know them well enough to know who they were.

Well, the conventional reaction to what I’m saying now, I suppose I will have to take note of, though I don’t like ever to introduce such matters in a sermon, but there’s a conventional reaction to this, and I hear it in the little chirpy songs. And I hear it in the little chirpy articles that I get. And in the little chirpy testimonies I hear from time to time. And it will all sound the same. And they’re obviously conventional. They are not the true expression of what somebody feels, but the expression of how some people think they ought to feel. And so, their response to a sermon on the lonely soul, is to say, why I’m never lonely for Jesus is my Savior divine. And He said, I will never leave you, and how can I be lonely? How can I be lonely when I have Jesus only to be my companion and my constant friend. So, I’m never lonely.

Now, brother, I don’t want to reflect on the sincerity of any man, but I’d just like to tentatively state here, that it’s my conviction, that that’s too neat to be sincere. That we’re saying what we think ought to be said, rather than what we ever feel in our hearts. Because the people who are always chirping about the fact they’re never lonely, mean that they have never let themselves get to a place where God could separate them from the crowd and talk to them alone. They have had to have companionship and the psychological lift of other people around them in order to keep out of the doldrums.

So, they deliberately forsook the cave and the mountain peak and the sands of the seashore and the holy places and have gone with the multitudes in order to be able to live with themselves. Then because they think it’s proper, why they testify cheerfully, I’m not lonely, Jesus is with me, but what they feel is not the awful, awe-inspiring presence of God in the burning bush. It’s the psychological, social help that they get from the people.

Well, the pain of loneliness results from the constitution of our nature, because God made us for each other whether we know it or like it or not. God made us for each other. And He meant that we should have fellowship with each other, that He meant that we should complement each other, that each could complete the other and that He meant us to be a people together. But sin came in and made God’s children, people apart.

The world isn’t lonely, because the world runs together. They have invented all sorts of inventions in order to keep themselves from being lonely. If the public was not lonely and didn’t have to run together to cure its loneliness, Bob Hope would be probably collecting garbage out here and driving one of the big yellow trucks. And these other entertainers who make more than the President of the United States, would be doing some honest job somewhere.

But because people must have each other in their sinful Vanity Fair, we give to our entertainers pay that we don’t give to our educators nor to our leaders and politicians and statesmen who carry on their shoulders the weight of government. So, people are lonely, but they cure it by running together. But when a man gets converted, where can he run? He sees through all of that, and he knows why they’re like that. And he therefore must be to some degree at least a lonely man. And his desire for human fellowship which God put in him and which is good and holy and right, that companionship, that desire for companionship, creates a pain within his own heart. Though he’s got to walk alone, because there are so few in any given area that walk with God.

You people who work in offices, now, if you work in Deerfield or Moody, or Scripture Press or somewhere where they’re Christians, that’s another matter. But you people who work in offices or factories or shops or go to schools where there’s nobody that knows your language, aren’t you forced to be somewhat lonely? I think so. You try to get along with people the best you can, but always you speak a language they don’t understand.

And always they’re thrilled about something that leaves you bored. And always you’re concerned with something that they don’t even understand. And there must be that loneliness and there is, the saint must walk alone. For loneliness is the price the saint must pay for his saintliness. But the man that knows God and knows himself, certainly is not going to find very many people that understand him.

Now, you’ll find a lot of companionship in religious circles without a doubt. There isn’t a place anywhere, I suppose, between here and the the Bahamas, where there hasn’t been least 1512 get togethers and rib roasts and ham consumptions over the last week, and all done in the name of the Lord. I was to one last night.

So, we do that and it’s all right, and I have no objection. But I am saying, my brethren, that there is beyond that thing, further in than that will take you, further on in behind the scenes than your kind fellowship that we have together, and I love it and don’t think I don’t, and I do. But I’m talking about the beyond, the going on in. I’m talking about going on in past where the commonalities, the simple expressions and the chit chat and the shop talk and the friendly banter is all left behind you and there you are.

The old world looks like an ash pile to you and heaven shines there and you look up and talk about it, and they claim you’re absent minded. Or they claim you’re anti-social or unsocial, or that you’re arrogant, that you are holier than thou. But my brethren, the man who knows himself can have the fellowship that comes, I suppose to a certain degree with religious activities. But as a man goes on with God, the hopes and the longings and the disappointments and the aspirations and the radiance that comes from the heart of Christ, all these things will not be understood. And a man will have to walk by himself. But I’m not complaining about it.

And I don’t want you to. For I know that this very loneliness throws us back upon God. God has to do this to bring us back on Himself. We would never, never seek Him if it were not that we see through the emptiness of man’s social fellowships. And to a large degree we see through the emptiness of man’s religious fellowships, and we don’t want to die like that. I don’t want to have to die in a crowd. Or if I do die in a crowd, I don’t want to have to have the crowd in order to die in comfort.

I don’t want to have to have anybody in order to die in comfort. I know how they do when you die, they surround your bed if you’re lucky enough to last long enough for them to get there, and some weep and some hope and some stand around. And we die in a crowd usually, at least a few people around. But God help the man that has to have help when he is dying. God help the man that has to be surrounded and cheered up and his hand held, and his brow patted in order to keep him from terror in the hour of his demise. God pity that man.

For just as you were born alone, you will die alone. And though you were surrounded by friends and helpers and doctors and nurses, and your mother was there and all the rest, you were born alone. And when you die, you will die alone. So, we’d better get used to a loneliness that isn’t a loneliness. Saint Paul said it back here in this last great book that he wrote. He’s said at my first answer, that is before Nero, his first trial, not his second, the second condemned Him. But the first trial, at my first answer, no man stood with me. But all men forsook me and I pray God that it may not be laid to their charge. Now here he was, he had just testified a few chapters on before that he had finished his course. He had kept the faith. He fought a good fight. He had won a crown. And now henceforth it was laid up for him the treasures of righteousness in the world to come.

That was the happy spiritual Paul, but the hungry-hearted human Paul, couldn’t even in his old age, and when he knew it was his last thing he would ever write, he couldn’t help but say, I can’t get over thinking about it, in that my first answer, no man stood with me. I had taught them to believe in Jesus. I had brought them out of darkness and showed them the Light. I had preached the gospel to them. I had hazarded my life for them. I’d gone hungry for them. I’d been poor and ragged for them. And I stitched tents way into the night that I might be free to preach to them.

But when I was before Nero, no man stood with me, but all men forsook me. I pray God that it may not be laid to their charge. But he said cheerfully enough, notwithstanding, the Lord stood with me and strengthened me. He was lonely, but he wasn’t alone. He was lonely because he wanted his friends around him there. But he was not alone, because the Lord stood with him and strengthened. So the lonely man is not alone. He’s just lonely. The lonely Christian is not one who is alone. A hermit could be alone and not feel lonely. But the Christian’s loneliness springs from his inability to find very many people who speak his spiritual language or have ever been where he’s been.

And then, his loneliness throws him back upon God. David said, when my father and my mother forsake me, then the Lord will take me up. Now, being forsaken by your father and mother is about as neat and as vivid a way of saying that you’re by yourself as it’s possible; when they lead you to the door and turn you out, why, you’re alone. But David said, when they do for Christ’s sake, then the Lord takes me up.

Now, the lonely soul ought not to be surprised, because he is a rather odd individual. He lives a strange life, this lonely Christian, man or woman, lives strange life. The things that make some people laugh; he doesn’t think are funny. And the things that some people will give their soul for he considers absolute refuse. And the desire for gain that some people have, he’s strangely unmoved by it.

My old dad, he said about two of his sons. He said, I have two sons. He had three. I don’t know why he didn’t count the younger one. He was still at home a boy. But he said, I have two sons, one of them makes all he can and keeps all he gets. The other won’t take anything and what you give him he gives away. And I’ve always rather cherished that as a rather disgusted but remarkable testimony to my brother and me. That my brother made all he could get and kept all he made. And I wouldn’t take anything and when I got it I gave it away. I hope that’s true in some measure yet, but it was when he uttered that testimony surely.

You’re an odd person when you’re like that, brother. There’s no question about it. The Christian is an oddity because he talks to somebody he can’t see and professors a loyalty to a kingdom that his eyes have never looked upon and seeks the praise and exultation of another and doesn’t seek anything for himself. That makes the Christian an odd being. And of course, being odd, he’s a speckled bird and being a speckled bird, he has shied away from by the rest.

But I’d like to add this before I close that the soul apart is not a holier than thou individual, satirized so bitterly by popular literature, because the soul apart, his very loneliness stirs him to pity for others. And do you know who it has been that has built all the hospitals or the Christian hospitals? Do you know who it’s been that’s founded the missionary societies? Do you know who they have been that have gone to heathen lands and like our good Dr. Crowell and built a little tiny hospital there. Do you know who they’ve been? They’ve always been the souls that have been rejected, and their father and their mother forsook them, so to speak.

And the Lord found them and their very yearning after humankind. And the fellowship with a world that rejected them and that they couldn’t fellowship because it was sinful; that very pain has very often driven them to poured out devotion and sacrifice. What was it that drove Livingstone way up into the heart of Africa? What was it that drove a sick and delicate Dr. Jaffrey all over the Far East? What was it that drove Simpson to walk up and down on the shores of the ocean out in New England and saying every pebble on the shore was a lost man to my praying heart?

What was it? What was it that caused men and women every place down the centuries to found the hospitals and to look after the old folks and take care of the children and have places for the insane to go where they could be cared for? Ah, it was always the separated man, the lonely soul, the soul that just couldn’t find what he wanted in the world. It just didn’t offer it. It wasn’t there. This odd number, this strange fellow, because he couldn’t laugh at their jokes. Why, they say he’s a sourpuss. And because he wasn’t interested in all of their silly chatter, they said that he was party killer and that he was dull and not interesting. But he walked with his God, and he left betrayal of luminous blessing behind him. And they’re all over the world. No, no, not holier than thou, not the arrogant, proud souls that walked with his chin up and tramps the people he considers to be beneath him.

Jesus Christ, the loneliest man in all the world, put His hands on the head of babies and smiled and blessed them and talked to their mothers and cast out devils and healed the sick and chattered with the poor and went away, leaving the eyes of the poor shining.

The priests and the rabbi walked in their robes with their phylacteries dangling, and in their pride called the multitude, these, this multitude that’s cursed, knowing not the law. But the lonely Jesus walked among them and was lonely while he healed them and blessed them and forgave them and turned their eyes upward and talked to them about the mansions above in the Father’s house. So don’t let anybody tell you that I’m preaching a withdrawn, monkish type of Christianity. I am not. I am saying that the very longing after human fellowship and the inability to find it much in the Earth makes men and women good workers and hard workers.

Well, because the lonely man is detached from the world, he’s able to help it. And because others are attached to the world, they’re unable to help it. The weakness of so many modern Christians is that they feel too much at home in the world. The simple little song people sing, that I don’t feel at home in the world anymore, the modern can’t sing except to smile and think it’s cute, because they do feel at home in the world. They avoid loneliness by adjusting and integrating and becoming a part of the very system they’re sent to protest against. And the world recognizes them for what they are and accepts them. And that’s the saddest thing that can be said about them. No, they’re not lonely, but neither are they saints. And they profess a name that they don’t know. They claim to follow a Savior that’s so far out ahead of them, they cannot even see the shadow of His holy back as he walks away.

My brethren, seek God in the loneliness of your own soul and see what happens to you. See, if all the truth you know won’t begin to glow. And the doctrines that have lain in your heart bedridden in the dormitory of your soul, Skullridge said, won’t take fire and begin to burn with a strange, luminous fire. And heaven will open, and you’ll see visions of God. Then like Moses and Ezra and the rest, you can come back to be a blessing to the very world you had to desert. But if you don’t desert it, you can’t help it. For the saint must walk alone.

Categories
Messages

Tozer Talks

“The Word of God is Quick, Powerful and Sharp“

PDF Download with Summary NotesDownload

The Word of God is Quick, Powerful and Sharp

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

July 26, 1959

Summary

In this message, Pastor A.W. Tozer emphasizes the transformative power of God’s Word in exposing and convicting individuals of their sinful nature, and the omniscience and omnipotence of God. Mr. Tozer shares personal experiences and biblical references to illustrate how God has protected and cared for him and his family, encouraging us to trust in God’s sovereignty and believe that He is always working for their good. Throughout the sermon, Mr. Tozer emphasizes the significance of God’s care and protection in our lives.

Message

Now, in the fourth chapter of Hebrews, verses twelve and thirteen: For the word of God is quick, that is, living and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart. Neither is there any creature that is not manifest in His sight, but all things are naked and opened unto the eyes of Him with whom we have to do. It takes the Holy Ghost to pack powerful words into short sentences. Notice, quick, that is, living, powerful, sharp, piercing, dividing asunder discerner, naked and open unto God’s eyes. These are the words of the text, and I want to talk a little bit about the Word.

Now one of the great realities, there aren’t very many, but one of the great realities with Whom and with which we have to do is God’s Word. I have been a great advocate of realities. I suppose I have kept myself back a little, in some ways before the eyes of men, by my stubborn refusal to fool with things that are not real, or to spend any time with them before a congregation. I have asked my congregations to confront reality. And I asked you this morning to confront one of the great realities, the living Word of God.

Now, the word of God is real. It doesn’t seem to be. There are lots of things that seem real, but actually they are not real at all. And there are things that are relatively important. They are important all right, but they’re not so important that if you lose them, the world will cave in on you. They’re relatively important. But the Word of God is a thing that is, and when I say the word of God, of course I mean the Scriptures, but I mean that which is a little more than the Scriptures. I mean the breath of God in the Scriptures. And when we read of the Word, we’re reading not only a written text, we’re reading of written texts, pulsating and vibrating with the life of God in them.

And here is a reality that we can’t escape. Men run away from things that they should take care of; and they run away for a lifetime, but there’s no escaping here, there’s no evading here. There is no possibility of compromise and there’s no bargaining, but God will reckon with this. The Word of God is. And we’ve got to reckon with this either now or later or at last.

Always, there are those three tenses for anyone who faces up to and confronts reality, or who is confronted by reality. They’ve got to reckon with it either now, not yesterday, that’s impossible, you can’t go back. They’ve got to reckon with it now or a little later, or at last. God in His patience allows us to insult Him and reckon later instead of now. But there will be a time when later will be last. And then we’ll find that it’s too late.

Now, the reality of which I speak, I repeat, is the Word of God plus the Living Word of God, the One who is called the Word in capital letters and that which is called the word in lowercase letters. Not a black book or a red book, not letters, not texts, not ink and paper, but the expression of the mind of God in revelation, the breath of God, the mighty breath of God, filling the world and taking shape in the sacred Scriptures, written by men who were moved by the Holy Ghost. Now, that’s the sacred Scriptures, and it’s God’s living thoughts.

Jesus Christ is God’s Living Word, but the Scriptures are God’s living voice. John 6:63, Jesus said, the words I speak unto you they are Spirit, and they are life. And they are addressed to fallen man for a judgment or salvation, or judgment and salvation, I’d better say, because there can be no salvation until there has been judgment. We stand before the bar of God.

I tremble when I read books written by men who have brought the Word of God before them for judgment. They bring what they call historical, critical techniques to the Word of God. And thus, they sit on the Word of God as though the sacred scriptures were judged by them. No, they are judged by the sacred Scriptures. And God brings every man, all men, fallen men, before the Word for judgment and or for salvation.

There is in the old apocryphal books that some people never read but that I get a lot of blessing out of, it’s called, the Wisdom of Solomon. When Solomon was there, or whoever wrote that book, I presume Solomon, was describing the children of Israel in Egypt and God Almighty leading them through, you come to these two verses. And I think they’re so beautiful and so wonderful, that I want to read them to you, though I do not claim them to be inspired in the sense that the Scriptures are inspired. Here’s what the old man said in telling another generation the story of Israel in Egypt. He said, while things were in quiet silence, and the night was in the midst of her swift course, thine almighty Word leaped down from heaven out of the royal throne as a fierce man of war into the midst of the land of destruction. Thine almighty Word leaped down from heaven out of thy royal throne as a fierce man of war.

This is the power of the Word of God. The most powerful force in nature, without any doubt, is the Word of God. If you will look back through the Scriptures, the Old and the New Testament, you will see how God had but to speak and things came to pass. He spoke to nothing and there came something. For it’s written in Hebrews 11 that the things that we are made, were brought out by the Word of God and were not made by the things which do appear. The things didn’t come from themselves, but they came from a living Voice.

And in Genesis one and two, God spoke to this order, and order came into darkness and the light came. He said, let there be light and there was light. He said, let the waters be gathered into one place, and it was so, and the dry land appeared. He spoke to the barren earth and fields became fruitful. In Exodus 14, He spoke to the sea, and it opened. And He spoke in Joshua to the river, and it opened, and to dry bones in Ezekiel and they lived, and then to death and Lazarus came forth bound hand and foot.

God has but to speak the living Word. I wish that you might see that you never ought to pick the Bible up without realizing, that while it’s only paper and ink, that God Almighty has breathed into the words there His own living breath. And those words can become like the release of atomic particles, tremendous either for destruction or for construction, either for judgment or salvation. And God has spoken and is speaking.

I could not, I couldn’t bring myself mentally to think of the Bible as God’s last letter to mankind; to think that God wrote the book and then died, or at least went away beyond into some far imperium, and now we have God’s letter. God did write the Book. He did breathe into man, and they did write the book. And He did end the Canon. And He did say that nobody add anything to this Book. But what I mean is that God did not only speak in the Bible, He is speaking in the Bible. It is a now voice. It is a present voice. It is as real as the voice that you might hear over the radio that you are tuned in now.

God spoke and is speaking and He’s speaking to human life. And when He speaks to human life, we know our mortality. We know that we’ve got to die. The living man knows he’s got to die. The voice of God there speaks to him and speaks to human conscience, and the conscience starts awaking. And the blind, insensible death conscience that lay for half a lifetime, full of self-pride and confidence and assurance, now suddenly sees and hears and feels and knows, because the living voice of God has waked that conscience up. And the voice of God is speaking to human sin, and it knows itself and it is naked.

You only have to listen to people praying at an altar and you will know that they have not been reasoned into their sin, you know that. You know that a Word has been spoken, that they’ve been confronted by the mighty Word of God, and that the Living Word has stripped their conscience bare, and they know that they are sinners, and they know that they are personally, individually guilty before God.

Now, I want you to notice that God’s Word in judgment brings not a charge; it brings a demonstration. The man is charged with a crime and taken up before a court that charge, that indictment they call it, is not synonymous with a guilty verdict. It’s only a charge. You are charged with .  .  . How do you plead? So, a man stands charged, but the Word of God is not a charge; Paul said, we have before proved both Jew and Gentile to be under condemnation. The Word of the living God is not a charge, it’s a verdict and a demonstration on lust and hate and lies and greed and pride and envy, and all other sins. And it distills like a living mist of vital essence wherever the Word of God is heard, wherever the human conscience confronts the Living Word. And the Living Word brings the human conscience before it as though suddenly there had come upon the man a living mist, a vital essence had descended, and the heart knows its own guilt.

Now, men may deny, because we’re very smooth reasoners, and they may cover, and they may resist. They may resent that the Word of God has given the mortal wound. And until the end, there will never be any deliverance, completely. There might be a temporary healing over and hiding, but there will never be full deliverance until He who is the Living Word pulls out the sword. Because the Word of God is quick and powerful, piercing even to the dividing asunder. And when the heart has been pierced by the Word of God, not the cold steel mind you, but the Living Blade alive and terrible.

And I, for my part, don’t want it any other way. I want the living Word of God to be just what it is. I want it to confront me, and I want to face up to it and I want it to do to me what has to be done. And I want to do what It has ordered me to do and believe what It charges me to believe in order that there may be no resistance and no struggle there but complete rest in God. The Word of God reveals, I say, it’s a great revealer. It strips the life bare before the eyes of God, this wonderful, this terrible thought. Man always thinks he can hide.

There are those Bible teachers who believe that the words of God to Cain, thy brother’s blood cries from the ground, indicated that Abel had been buried after he was murdered. At least the earth had been thrown over him hoping against hope this mad murderer Cain, this jealous man, that his guilt would not find him out. But God said that the blood of Abel cried out of the ground. And they found him and pinned it on him and marked him with a mark of the murderer.

So, the eyes of God see everything. You and I can hide from each other. We can do a lot of little tricks. Men who have only a little hair can let it grow long on one side and smooth it across. They imagine that that tells people that they are not bald, but it doesn’t. Everybody knows they’re bald, but they’ve got to try to cover it up. And women have a way of covering up. Drugstores prosper on women’s duplicity and man’s pride. We try to cover up. But we’re open before the eyes of God. God sees and there’s no fooling at all. There’s no secrecy. There’s no dissembling and there’s no distance that can make any difference for the man David said, if we should go to the uttermost parts of the sea, wherever that is, God would still see us there. And there isn’t any deed that isn’t known.

And that Word persists, persists. The words of God do not relax at death, but they are persistent out there where the dead live again and where heaven and hell waits. The words that I speak unto you, they shall judge you in the last day. We read in Revelation where the books are opened and the book of words and the book of deeds and the book of life, all these are open. And God’s Living Word is there. But that is only the negative side of it, my friends, only the negative side.

There’s no door that is closed. All doors stand ajar before the Word of God. All hearts are wide open before the Word of God and there isn’t a closed book anywhere. But all books are open, all before the eyes of God. And not a thought, not a thought that wears a garment, but all our thoughts are naked, naked and open before the eyes of Him with Whom we have to do. When men invented clothing he invented secrecy. And it’s right and proper up to a measure that he should, but he’s carried that secrecy to his thoughts, to his heart, to his mind, to his plans, to his intentions, to his guilt. The Scripture says no human thought wears a garment. Nobody can cloth his thoughts so God can’t see them.

There’s another side and I want briefly now to mention that and that is the Saving Word. I say that the sacred Scriptures, God’s living Voice are addressed to fallen men for judgment or for salvation, for judgment and for salvation. They must judge you first before they can save you. God never saved a man nor pronounced him innocent who came with a not guilty plea before the bar of the Scriptures. It’s only when we bring our, guilty, Your Honor, before the great God and throw ourselves on the mercy of the court for Jesus’ sake, that the Advocate above, the Savior by the throne of love rises and speaks for us and says, Jesus paid it all, all the debt I owe. Sin had left a guilty stain, but He washed it white as snow.

Here’s the saving Word, Psalm 71 says, thou has given commandment to save me. I’m glad that I get in trouble. That is, my heart gets in trouble. I am never really very much trouble. God knew that I being a sensitive person, am inclined to be more vulnerable than the average person. But I could get my troubles mainly from the inside. So, he didn’t send me all the miseries that he sent some people on the outside. Some fellows are always in trouble for getting kicked out of one place and into another. But I have never had that experience up to now.

But the Lord knew I didn’t need it from the outside, because I was so sensitive and vulnerable that He could trust me to get in lots of trouble inside my own heart and I have. And some of the times that I’ve been in trouble, God said to me, or I found these words, thou has given commandment to save me. And I like to think that the mighty Living Word of God has gone forth.

And the Christian man, the born man, the man who’s born of the Living Word, for it’s written that the Word of God is the seed out of which men are born. And that Word can never die, that it’s jot or tittle can never pass away, that the living man, the living woman who’s been born out of the life of God and is called a Christian, that person has been marked out by God. Just as God sent His fear into all the land of Canaan, and His fear went ahead and He marked out these strange people of another tongue coming out of Egypt, the Israelites, and the fear fell on them wherever they went. Some allowed the fear to make them arm and fight Israel and some surrendered. And some let them respectfully pass. But God said these are my peculiar, special people. Everybody that’s been born of the Living Word of the Spirit is a special object of God’s care.

And God tells all of His world, I’m saving this man. You keep your hands off of him. Do my prophet no harm. Lay not your hand on my child. Don’t imagine you can harm any child of mine. Old Job back there in the Old Testament, he didn’t know it, but he’d been living behind an iron curtain. God Almighty’s curtain had been all the way around him. A hedge is a better word, for that’s the word the Bible used. He was hedged in, and God Almighty had that hedge electrified and the devil couldn’t pass over until God allowed him, for a little while, to bless and benefit his man, Job. Then he sent him away again. Thou has given commandment to save me.

I haven’t a doubt in all the world but that there isn’t an atom of matter in this world, but what has been charged by great God Almighty to look after me and you and all of his children. We lay them away. We bury them out of our sight with grief and tears. But the Earth can no more hold them than the earth could hold the body of Jesus or of Lazarus. Thou has given commandment to save me. If you knew all that disease germs around you. And if you knew all the demons that were set to destroy you. But they can’t get to you. Because God has given commandment to save me. And He’s charged everything. He has charged the stars in their courses.

That’s why I smile at the Space Age and laugh at their Sputniks and their Explorers. Long before man invented the thrust that would cause a missile to escape the gravitational pull and fall into free space, long centuries before that, God Almighty had spoken to every star that shines and every planet that revolves, every angel before the throne, save these people. These are my people. My people marked by the blood of My Son, saved by my life, redeemed by the death of My Son. Save these people.

Physically I don’t like floating around in space. I flew out to Vancouver and down to Portland and back to Chicago, and you can have it. You can have it. I don’t like it. I never did like it. I thought maybe if it took that long, roundabout flight, I’d get to liking it. And I liked it less when I landed here in the airport than I did when I started. I don’t like it, but I do know this, that all space and all creation and the stars in their courses and the moon in its phases and the sun in its strength and the lovely earth and all the rivers and seas our mine. Thou has given commandment to save me. God’s Word, like a mighty armed man leaped out from the royal throne and commanded, no man can pluck you out of My hand.

I grieve that men have turned this doctrine into a hard-case, hardened shell of doctrine that divides the church. Do you believe in eternal security? Do you not believe in eternal security? All that believe, get over here and all that don’t believe get over there and glare at each other. I grieve at this because it’s making a doctrine out of what is a wonderful truth and not a doctrine at all. But God has spoken for His children, all of His children, my children, and they are dear to Him. They’re dear to Him because they belong to His Son because His Son gave His life.

In the war, the boys say, at least one of my boys told me, the hardest thing they had to do in the Navy Air Wing where he was for three years, a flyer. He said, the hardest thing we have to do is to come back home after when one of the boys have been killed and gather up his things and send them to his widow or to his mother. He said, they die, they die all around us, but it isn’t so bad until you have to gather up their things, an old wristwatch and a picture and extra clothing and an old watch chain, maybe that belonged to his dad and an old penknife with one blade broken. The few things that he couldn’t take with him out there but headed back and go get that and wrap it all up. Send it and then write a letter. He said, that’s hard. Don’t you think that when that package arrived. Thank God, this church, though we had during the Second World War about 75 of our boys in uniform, not one of them was killed, not one.

We had, my wife and I, five, and not one of them was killed. So, we never had to do, but don’t you think that when that package came back, that that would have been laid aside and cherished as long as memory kept verdant. I sometimes look up on, my wife has pictures everywhere, she doesn’t have flowers. And here, pictures all around there and I sometimes look at the picture of our boy Bud who was a Marine. All but lost his life. He’s still hobbling around, but he is able to make it alright. In the picture, a good-looking young fellow in his early 20s, grinning with that uniform, that marine uniform. And I said, if he died over there instead of coming home, wouldn’t this be a sacred thing? A sacred thing, for the sake of another, for the love of another, some things become infinitely precious.

And God looked down and saw the children that God had given to Jesus, saw that for the Christ’s blood had run, Christ had died. Christ had cried, Father, forgive them. Christ had said, why hast Thou forsaken me? And God said, whatever He sends Me. Whatever He sends Me will be dearer to Me than the apple of mine eye, dearer than the jewels that are on my throne, dearer than the unredeemed seraphim and cherubim, the burners that cry, holy, holy, holy before the Majesty on High. You are a blood-bought treasure, bought by the blood of Jesus Christ, and the Father loved His Son in death and loved Him in life. And for His sake, He loves you beyond all the Scripture.

Nobody knows how intensely, how deeply, how persistently, how perpetually, how everlastingly, God loves you. He loves you with an angry love. A love that’s angry with anything that would hurt you. He loves you with a tender love, if you belong to Him. The Living Word leaps down, leaped out of the throne of God like a man armed for a war, and God says, I will be with you, and I will go before you and I will keep you, and fear thou not, I am with thee. And no man can pluck thee out of my hand, and the foundation of God standeth sure. Ye are My sheep and know my voice. Goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.

The Word of God is quick and powerful, quick for judgment and salvation, judgment first, salvation second. Judgment for all those whose conscience start awaking before the Living Voice and who cry, my God, my God, I have sinned. Have mercy upon me. And for salvation for all such, the Voice goes forth. Save these people. They’re My people, precious to Me more precious than the apple of my eye.

Ah, yes, the Son of Man has power on earth to forgive sin. The Son of Man has power on earth to bestow life. The Son of Man has power on earth to raise the dead. The dead shall hear the voice of the Son of Man, and they that hear shall come forth.

Well, I want you to hear the Word. I want you to go to this Book reverently. Open its pages and read it and remember that while you’re not a bibliolater and you’re not worshiping a text, you recognize here, not the last words of a dead man, but the living voice of the Living God; the persistent, vibrant sounding Voice that’s still alive. And everything that God says, He is still saying.

You know, when you go anyplace to speak, they come and want your autograph. Now, not because it’s me, but just because it’s anybody. No matter who you are if you’re the speaker, they think that they’d like to have your autograph. So, I don’t know how many I signed while I was at Canby Camp, and I, just to save myself I think a little bit of mental exercise as much as anything else, I signed one Scripture verse on practically all of them I hope they didn’t compare notes. The same Scripture verse nearly on all I signed, a few I have varied to Galatians 2:20. But most all of them I signed, Jeremiah 29:11, God’s speaking. And God says, I know the thoughts that I think toward you says the Lord. Thoughts of peace and not of evil, to give you an end and an expectation. I know the thoughts I think toward you, saith the Lord, thoughts of peace.

God’s peaceful thoughts are coming down to us, peaceful thoughts. Not occultism, not spiritism, not Pealeism, but God speaking in the Word and in His Son, speaking thoughts of kindness and peace and good intention. And God is pleased when you are pleased, if you’re pleased with what He’s pleased with. Why can’t we be better Christians? Why must we drag on and drag on in an old bumpy wagon when God Almighty has the angels and spirits at our disposal and the Holy Ghost within us and the Word of God before our eyes.

Yes, the Word is quick and powerful and sharper than any two-edged sword. Let us believe it. Let us love it. Let us read it. Let us trust it. Let us live by it and let us die by it and all will be well. Amen.

Categories
Messages

Tozer Talks

“God’s Hidden Ones“

PDF Download with Summary NotesDownload

God’s Hidden Ones

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

December 14, 1958

Summary

In “God’s Hidden Ones,” Mr. Tozer emphasizes the importance of being a hidden people in God’s eyes, citing examples from Psalm 27 and Psalm 83. He highlights the significance of dissent in society and the importance of being a hidden people, even in times of great turmoil and destruction. Tozer also discusses the concept of God’s hiddenness and how it relates to believers living in a secular world. He concludes that God will reveal hidden believers in the time of trouble and will protect them from harm and encourages believers to remain hidden in God’s pavilion during times of trouble, trusting in His love and support.

Message

The New York office of the Alliance Witness sent out this telegram to Miss Betty Brown. Congratulations on again leading the Alliance Witness campaign in all our churches. The sustained record of the Chicago Alliance is remarkable. Your faithful work is deeply appreciated. Church, this the eighth leading churches throughout the country, and Canada that where our own church, Toledo, where William Bryan is pastor; New York where Paris Reidhead is pastor, Ottawa; Reverend Anderson; Vancouver with Irvin Brooks; Louisville with Reverend Epperson; Pittsburgh with Doctor Fraser, and Akron with Paul Kenyon. These are the eight leading churches. And this year we’re going to put some pictures in, and we’re going to have Miss Brown’s picture along with the lady who beat us out in New York, in percentages, but not in actual numbers.

Now, I want to talk a little while, not too long on, something that’s very wonderful and yet very, should I say, well known. But let me sum it up here as we gather near the close of the year. Psalm 27:5, in the time of trouble, He shall hide me in His pavilion. In the secret of His tabernacle, shall He hide me. He shall set me up upon a rock. And in Psalm 83:3, they have taken crafty counsel against thy people and consulted against thy hidden ones, thy hidden ones, Thou shalt hide me.

Now, the Scripture here sets forth the truth which is well known and yet is not too much appreciated. It is that in the midst of the earth, God has a people. In the midst of the earth, God has a people. At any given time, God has had a people, and God does have a people. God will have a people and they are never very large in numbers. In the time of the flood you remember, there were eight persons. In the time of Israel there was a remnant. When Christ was on earth, they could almost count them, at first at least.

And the Scripture says, few there be that shall be saved. And in the book of Revelation, there’s that troublesome passage, which is interpreted variously, but stands there bothering us. It is the saying that there are 144,000 who shall be saved. Various interpretations are made of this, but there it is out of the world’s masses. And then, these hidden ones know they are God’s and God knows they are His, but the world doesn’t usually know that they are God’s. These that are hidden in God’s holy place, in His pavilion, in the secret of His tabernacle, were called his hidden ones, are usually dissenters and non-conformists. You know, it’s possible to be a dissenter and a non-conformist just out of meanness. That’s entirely possible.

My brother, very much like me in personality is gone now from the earth. I went home many years ago. I went home, and about election time, that is, to the old home and I said, well, who did you vote for? He said, I voted for the socialists. You voted for the Socialists? Yeah. But why? He said, a protest vote. He said, I didn’t want him to be elected particularly, but I just wanted to protest. Well, it’s possible just to be a protester and vote for somebody you don’t want to elect just because you don’t want to vote for somebody, you’ll pray will get elected. I know that thing. God knows it. You know it. We see them everywhere.

So, it’s possible to dissent just out of sheer contrariness. But on the other hand, if 99% of everything is wrong and there’s one fellow that says he knows what’s right, he’s got to be a dissenter. He’s got to be a non-conformist. And if ever there was a time when we need non-conformism it is now. There are these people of God, these hidden ones of God, they’re non-conformist, and they’re usually unsympathetic toward the things the world loves. And they’re at odds with the world’s ideals and philosophies.

I listened to a little program last night. I usually listen at nine o’clock to the singing they have. There was a song, Jews, Catholics, Protestants on various nights, every Saturday nights have that on. So last night it was, I think, Protestant, but in it somewhere mixed up there was the United Nations. And they were reading the tenets of the United Nations with a ministerial solemnity and then singing in between the hymns and giving the impression that somehow God had taken up Alger Hiss and Stettinius and Truman, and a few more to the holy mount and given them the 10 words which eventuated in the United Nations. And I laid there, resting and listening. I wanted to hear the music, but I wasn’t ready to hear that.

So, I was lying there dissenting. And after it ended, I thought now, here you are, you don’t go along with this. What kind of fellow Are you? Isn’t it better to believe in human rights and better to believe in there being no war? Isn’t it better than not to believe in human rights, and I know that it’s true, but still am a non-conformist and a dissenter as far as any hope or possibility of saving the world through its own united efforts. It just can’t do it. We can’t do it and there isn’t any use to try. I honor a man, I honor that indestructible gentleman who got out of a hospital and got into an airplane and lit out for some part unknown, Mr. Dulles. I honor these men. I honestly do.

And I honor our very sincere and kindly President. And I honor those Englishmen and other men who are honestly, sincerely trying to bring peace on earth and goodwill to men. But when it comes down to accepting their methods, I have to be a non-conformist. They’ll never get it done. It’ll never happen that way. For the Bible tells us that until the end, there shall be wars and rumors of wars. A nation shall rise against nation and kingdom against kingdom. And when our Lord shall come, He shall come as a rock cut out of the mountain, hurled down onto the image, to destroy it.

So, I can’t go along with it and I shake it off. It’s soothing and soft and gentle and all the rest, but it’s false. It’s false. It’s based upon false premises. It assumes the validity of things that are not valid. It assumes the truth of things that are not true. And you can’t condemn individuals. You can’t be unkind, and you must speak with great charity as I’m trying to do. But you’ve got to be a dissenter. You can’t go along. It just doesn’t come that way. Democrats can’t bring us hope and Republicans can’t bring us hope. Nobody can.

Well, for the reason that we are dissenters, that God’s hidden people are dissenters, they usually draw the world’s fire; almost always draw the world’s fire. But they are secretly hidden and protected by none other than God Himself. He shall hide me in His pavilion. He shall hide me in His tabernacle. And they’re protected by the Lord Himself, not by withdrawing them from society. Withdrawing God’s hidden people from society would be the equivalent to drawing off all the salt from the carcass. There would be putrefaction and decay and a stench that would reach to the farthest space.

So, God allows His people to be scattered all around over the world, here and there. He doesn’t let them all be of one color. He doesn’t let them all be of one religious group, but they’re scattered every place. And they’re hidden, not by withdrawing, but by the protective providences of God. Notice how Moses was hidden in the cleft of the rock. Now, this hiding of Moses in the cleft of the rock wasn’t a type and isn’t a type, but it is a symbol that sings the song of the hidden life. The life is hidden with Christ in God. And though these hidden ones are visible and physical, yet there is something about them. They’re hidden because you don’t know they’re there.

The Ku Klux Klan tried to put on something like that a few years back. You know, I lived through the time when the Ku Klux Klan was riding so high that if you didn’t join them, you were condemned as not being a Christian at all. There are the days of the KKK. And I publicly, in the downtown where I was, they would come down the aisle with the bed sheet wrapped around them and a pillow slip over their heads with two peep holes. That was their garment. And they would come down the aisle and lay $500 on the table down in front of the pulpit. And of course, that bought the Preacher right there. They could have had him for $498, but they paid $500 for him. And after that he was on their side.

Well, I was right in the area where they were doing that. So, I got up one day and I said, now, the KKK may be walking in here some day and laying some money down here. But I said I have instructed the ushers to hand them their money back, lead them to the door, and physically expel them. We’re not for sale here. But you know, it wasn’t very long until the KKK had gone into a tailspin. But I didn’t know, why, if a preacher opposed them, they were bombing the preacher’s house or beating him up and I didn’t know what would happen. But I was a dissenter.

Well, what they tried to do is this, their power lay in their anonymity. Nobody knew who they were. They never published their lists. And when they appeared, they all appeared with their pillow slip over their head. Nobody knew who they were. They were supposed to be God’s hidden ones. Well, they weren’t God’s hidden ones. They were hidden all right but hidden I had thought rather flimsily behind a bedsheet.

But the power of God’s hidden ones lies right in this, that the world doesn’t know always who they are. Incidentally, the KKK has gone the way of all the earth. They said in that day, you can’t be a Christian and not be a member, and now the people say you can’t be a Christian and be a member. And I didn’t move either direction. I just stuck my ugly chin out and walked down the way. You’ve got a little of that to do, you know. Don’t carry it too far, you’ll get mean. But keep being non-conformist and God will help you if you’re charitable and loving.

Well, there was Moses and then there was Job. Job was hidden by a hedge, a hedge of God’s protective commandment, and Satan had to get special permission. And there again, it wasn’t a type, but it was an example of how things are. Satan had to get special permission to attack Job, and he has to get special permission to attack any of God’s hidden people.

Then when Jesus came to the world, He was hidden by the sovereign will of God. He was born in the manger and how many knew that he was born there. One of the greatest events, the greatest event in the history of the world up to that time, took place right there. And outside of the shepherds, the simple shepherds on the hills, the three wise men, who knew that he was born? Nobody knew it. Mary hid these things in her heart and Joseph just puttered around. So, nobody knew as much that He had come. He was hidden among them.

And when he grew up and ran around with them and played over the back lot with them, they didn’t know who they were bumping elbows with. They didn’t dream, they didn’t dream those boys of Bethlehem that played and raised about and played hide and seek, they didn’t know. Little Jesus taking his place along with the rest, the time he could spare away from helping his supposed father, sweeping up around the carpenter’s shop. Nobody knew who this was. He was hidden there; hidden right in plain sight. And that’s the way God hides things, always. He hides them right in plain sight.

And here was the Lord of glory walking around right in plain sight, and they didn’t know who He was. And they didn’t know, and they kept on not knowing until even when one of them would betray Him. He had to kiss Him in order to let them know who He was. And when He went to be baptized, that Dove had to descend on Him and rest before John the Baptist would know who he had been preaching about. He was preaching about an anonymous somebody that was coming, but he didn’t know who He was.

And when He finally came and was baptized, John looked at Jesus and said to himself, this, this is an amazing man here. Who is this? But he wasn’t sure. And he said, I don’t think that you ought to be baptized by me. Let’s reverse that. There’s something about you. Jesus said, suffer it to become all righteousness, so he baptized Him. And as he baptized Him, the Dove came down and John knew. John knew who he was, and John knew why that strange something had touched his heart.

But for the most part, nobody knew. He was hidden in plain sight. And it says, no man laid hands on Him, because His hour was not yet come. And they hated Him and didn’t know why. Because God had blinded them and confused them and frustrated them and made a fool of the whole world, because His hidden Messiah walked among men. He hid Him there in the womb of the Virgin. Hid him right in the crowds and among the multitudes. And hid him in Joseph’s new tomb, and now He’s hiding Him in the heavens. And when He comes back for His people, He will come back as a thief who always comes traveling incognito, always comes undercover and slips in and takes away treasures and goes again.

Well, now these are hints, I say, of a higher truth. And they hint at the truth that God has opened a way into His kingdom and into His heart. For the individual, that the individual may enter, we mustn’t forget that. And that while living right here below on this earth, people are in the heart of God hidden, in the midst of the heart of God even while they walk in the midst of life. And don’t you think we’re not in the midst of life, Brethren.

A man wrote a book called “In the Midst of Life.” Well, don’t think we’re not in the midst of life. You travel around a little and most of you do. You know we’re in the midst of life. Read your newspaper. Listen to your news broadcasts. And you know that the world is busy, very, very busy. And in the middle of this and walking up and down in the middle of it are people.

I went over to, after the board meeting in New York Thursday, I dictated some letters and then I went over and got my suitcases and went over to the Grand Central Station. And when I stepped into the Grand Central Station, I heard somebody singing, only believe, all things are possible, only believe. And I thought, I’m not hearing right. There’s something’s happened to my head, because they don’t sing like that in Grand Central Station. But I went on down and I searched around. Who is it? A high, thin, rather strident, but pleasant voice singing. And then I noticed up on the balcony here was a little boy about 11 years old and an old lady with a little organ. And she was sporting background music and he was standing.

He’d stop and turn the pages and then he’d step up to the microphone, raise his good-looking little face high and sing. And he sang, into my heart, into my heart, come into my heart Lord Jesus. And he sang, only believe and he sang some Christmas carols. And every time he’d sing, he would get applause from the great hundreds of people. You see, the airplanes, many of them being on strike and the weather being so bad and all the rest, the trains were loaded as I’ve never seen them since the last war. And of course, that meant masses of people milling everywhere waiting on their trains, just the time also when the suburbanites were going out, the commuters.

And they stopped. Everybody stopped and stood looking. I finally got their direction of sight and I saw the handsome little fella standing up there, stiff as a ramrod, about eleven singing in a voice that hadn’t changed yet, into my heart, into my heart, Lord Jesus.

Well, I didn’t ask what denomination he was. I didn’t find my way back up around there and say to the old lady of the organ, are you an Alliance woman? I knew she was one of God’s children. You don’t sing songs like that and not be one of the Gods hidden children. Not very hidden in that instance. But you know the Christmas spirit was on that dirty Vanity Fair we call New York, and so they applauded the little fellow loudly every time he sang,

Well, God has His people I don’t know where they came from. Maybe they were Pentecostal people. Maybe they were Southern Baptists. They could have been Alliance. Maybe they were from some mission and didn’t belong to any church. I don’t know. But I know a little boy there with his handsome little face up turned, singing in rapture and was telling the people of the great city of New York that the Lamb had come and He would come into the hearts of the people.

Well, God has His people, friends, and He has them everywhere. And they’re right down here in the midst of life. You may sit down beside one of them and they don’t all start talking religion to you. You know, some people tell you they all talk religion to everybody they sit down beside. Wilbur Smith told me one time he said, you know, I have an awful time with that. He said, I’m not friendly enough. He said, when I sit down in a train, I’m shy and I want to read. And he said, I don’t talk to people about their souls. I don’t do much of that either. So, lots of people have sat down alongside of me and didn’t know I belonged in heaven. And when you’re waiting around for the upward journey, maybe I should talk to everybody I meet, but I’d be a lovely nuisance if I tried it.

Well, while living right here below, you know, as I say, in the midst of life, you can belong to another kingdom, an eternal kingdom, and belong in another world. Maybe you may sit down somewhere in a public place alongside of a man and you don’t know who he is. Maybe you’re listening to a concert or something or riding on a train or in a subway, sitting alongside a man you don’t know. Maybe he’s an ambassador. Maybe he’s the big man in this country or from one of the one of the countries over there. They travel around like that.

So, we sit down beside a man, or a woman and we don’t know who they are. We know that if they use bad language, we know they don’t belong to God. But just generally we don’t know, because God has them hidden every place, belonging to another world and yet hidden in the midst of life.

Now, these same people have a secret covenant with God. You know, sometimes you sit down alongside of a communist and you don’t know it. That communist is a card-carrying communist. And he owns fearsome, furious, fevered allegiance to Moscow. And he’s sitting right there beside you and you don’t know it. He’s dressed like you. His suit is generally like yours and unpressed like mine. And he just generally looks like you, and you don’t know you’re sitting beside a man that only has the external shell of being an American. Inside of him, he hates every liberty we have and every decent thing that’s here.

He hates the sound of the church bell, the Christmas carol. He hates the name of Jesus. He is a dedicated, sold out, fanatic communist. I don’t know if you ever sat beside him, but you could because there are 1000s of them in this country. And you and he, why, Lazarus and others in the lower world couldn’t have been any different from each other than you and he. If you’re a Christian, a child of God, everything he’s dedicated to you hate, and everything you’re consecrated to, he hates. And yet, you ride together, pay your fares, get up and go up the same stairs out onto the street and go into the same store and shop. And yet, you’re both hidden.

You don’t know who he is, and he doesn’t know who you are. And it’s impossible that we should always tell them. Some people wear big badges in order to let everybody know. But I don’t know that always works. It may be all right, I’ve seen a few badges I’d like to wear, but for the most part I wouldn’t care for them.

Well, we belong to another kingdom, an eternal kingdom, a world that’s invisible, but real. We have a secret covenant, and our dedication is unto God above. And God says in the time of trouble, I’ll hide you, and we’re given over to the belief that we can know God. We can know Him in personal experience, beyond all logical conclusion and above all reason and reasoning. We can know Him through Jesus Christ the Lord who walked around on the earth. People say, I don’t see anything very saintly about you. Well, no, we eat like other people. We clean off the walk when it snows, and we do everything else just like other people.

But God has a people anyways. He has always had a hidden people, a people for His own possession, a peculiar people, Paul calls it; a royal priesthood, a holy nation composed of people. You say, who are they, Alliance people? Some of them are, thank God, some of them are. Some of them are. But not all of them are. They are scattered all around.

I may shock some of you terribly, but I think that there are Christians here and there, scattered in the Greek Orthodox and in the Roman Catholics. Ask me to explain it. I can’t explain it. I don’t know. As a Christian with the information and the light I have, I couldn’t possibly run around crossing myself and wearing chains and believing in the Virgin Mary. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t possibly do it. I couldn’t possibly believe in that jolly old gentleman that they crowned over there the other day in Rome. I couldn’t possibly do it. He’s a nice old fellow, there’s no doubt at all and very bright. But I don’t think he’s the Holy Father at all. He’s not married. But how could he be?

But I can’t believe in that, and I can’t take all that trash. But I am not going to say that nowhere in the midst of all this, that some of the old people didn’t find Jesus while they prayed. I believe they have. And I believe that some of us harsh, bigoted Protestants are going to find that out sometimes. Maybe the Lord will let us introduce one of them to us and let us blush just for our own sanctification in that great day. But I think the system is vicious and rotten. And I think the whole hierarchy from the kind old gentleman down is organically bad.

But I think that even in Sodom God had a few. And I believe that even in Rome, there may be a few. If they had the information, you have and the light you have, they’d come out. They don’t have it yet.

Well, the Lord has His people everywhere and they’re the hidden ones, God’s hidden ones. I was thinking this morning of the song, rock of ages, cleft for me, let me hide myself in thee. But that’s a prayer to be hidden. But this is a promise that we shall be hidden. In the time of trouble, He shall hide me in His pavilion. Is it a prayer to be hidden? Well, that’s legitimate. It is a promise that we shall be hidden. We are hidden, hidden in the Rock of Ages, hidden.

He’s hiding us from what? Well, I want him to hide me from my past for one thing. I don’t want the incarnation of the Tozer that once was ever to follow me into the world to come. I want to be where, if there’s such a thing, the ghost of Christmas past can’t find you. And the ghost of my yesterdays can’t haunt me. I don’t think there would be any such ghost. That’s all imaginary. The Bible says He will remember it no more against us forever. And if God doesn’t remember your sins, I don’t care much who else does.

So, God hides us from our past and he hides us from our failures, and He hides us from our tragic weaknesses. And He hides us because of our vulnerability. We’re so vulnerable and so easily killed. On the farm, turkeys are the most vulnerable things that I ever knew. If there’s anything else more vulnerable, we didn’t have them around where I was. The hen will sit four weeks on a great big pile of Turkey eggs as patiently and nice and tenderly and hatch them all out, and then take them out and in 24 hours have nine out of the 12 dead. She doesn’t know how to take care of her own babies.

They’re vulnerable. They get so many diseases. They pick up so many germs from the ground and die of pip and worms and I don’t know how many other things. And the people of God are vulnerable, you know. They’re just really vulnerable, sensitive and easily killed. I mean to say, of course, humanly speaking, actually that Eternal Life which was with the Father and which was made real unto us and which is in our heart. You can’t kill that. I don’t mean that. But I mean, that we wilt quickly, and we’re easily knocked out. God always has them carry us out and bring us to. But we’re easily knocked out. We knock out easily.

Then He hides us in His pavilion. He hides us in His heart. With all my heart, I believe that God’s children are as safe now, as if they were in heaven. I believe that. Somebody quoted me, before a district superintendent and a board and said, Mr. Tozer said if you didn’t believe in election, you were crazy. And the superintendent said, he never said that. So, they had an argument. I don’t want people arguing over me. But what I said was, I suppose that I believe in election, but I don’t believe in election, period, I believe in election as understood and interpreted in the light of the rest of the Scripture.

But I believe that God’s hidden ones are God’s chosen ones. And they’re chosen according to His eternal purpose, and they’re chosen according to His foreknowledge. That doesn’t mean that you have to come whether you want to or not as some teach; and it doesn’t mean that only certain ones can come. Anybody can come that will come. But they’re chosen in Him before the foundation of the world by the foreknowledge of God. I believe that. And they’re protected and kept and held in His blessed hand. You know, that if your salvation had depended upon your faithfulness, you wouldn’t have followed Jesus Christ one month. He kept you. He held you. You were hidden, hidden.

The baby born into the world is a helpless, vulnerable little thing which soon will die. My fifteenth grandchild came here about, I don’t know, two months ago, a month ago, I don’t know. It’s all happening so fast. I can’t keep up. But they said, oh, he’s home. He’s awful. They said, he’s all nose. But the other day, yesterday, we got the report that he had developed a chin and forehead to go along with his nose and becoming quite handsome. But I do know one thing, that he was unutterably vulnerable when he came. And all that they would have had to do would be to turn their backs 20 minutes and he would have been dead, but now he’s growing by leaps and bounds because somebody hit him, took care of him, nourished him, protected him.

God keeps His people; God is keeping you friend. This is a cold weather we’re having now. And a vicious wicked world we’re in. You never know when you listen to the news broadcast whether they’re going to say, Berlin was bombed, Formosa was attacked. You never know. You never know where trouble is going to start. But you do know one thing, in the time of trouble, He shall hid me in His pavilion in the secret of His tabernacle shall He hide me. I know that. God will hide us in His tabernacle, in His pavilion, and we’ll be God’s hidden ones, thy hidden one. That’s a beautiful expression. You and I ought to believe in it.

We’re having a bit of difficulties; everybody knows in our local church here. I don’t mean trouble. There’s nobody fighting anybody. Nobody’s enthusiastic enough to fight anybody else. You know, that’s trouble with us. We haven’t gotten enough energy to get in trouble. We all love each other and hope for the best. But we will have difficulty and some things are going to have to be changed. But in the meantime, would you keep one thing in mind, God Almighty, that planted this plant back there years ago, hasn’t withdrawn His kindly, loving smile from it. He’ll keep us and He’ll lead us through.

And few years from now, we’ll look back and say weren’t we a bunch of weaklings to worry, when God had His plan, all laid out for us. You keep believing, Brother and Sister, you keep trusting and don’t pay much attention to Santa Claus and keep your eyes on Jesus Christ, the Lord of Christmas and the Lord of the new year and all yours in the coming years. And you will come out all right and so will I and so will we and so will this church and so will our fellowship in the days ahead. Amen.

Categories
Messages

Tozer Talks

“Jesus Christ the Rock”

PDF Download with Summary NotesDownload

Jesus Christ the Rock

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

March 22, 1959

Now, Lord, we are before Thee again for another hour of worship, the reading of Thy Word, singing of the hymns of worship and praise, meditating together over the things that matter. We thank Thee for this passage that we just read. This tells us what is to be and what will come, prepares us mentally to receive it. We pray Thee then Lord, prepare us in our hearts because what we know with our minds, sometimes we don’t know really. And these things that are before us that are up there waiting, when we come into them, even though we know and could turn to the Scripture where they’re found, when they come, they’re shocking, terrible, and incredible.

So, we pray that Thou will give us faith. Give us steadfastness and give us that which Thou didst mean when Thou did say, they that endure unto the end. Lord, we won’t let anybody interpret this away for us. We won’t let anybody divide this and dispensationalize it. We stand by it. Here it is. They that shall endure unto the end they shall be saved. Lord, we would before Thee ask that Thou wilt help us that we may get our hearts ready for quiet endurance. And then whatever comes and whatever it means, we’re on the right side. Help us Lord to endure patiently whatever comes to us. We haven’t any of us Lord endured much yet. Certainly, we have not endured unto blood, striving against sin. Certainly, Father, we are among those who have to admit that we’ve been treated like spoiled children, and we haven’t much. We haven’t much to show, not many scars, Lord, and not many things that ever happened to us. But, O God, we pray that Thou will prepare us for our time. And prepare this church and prepare the people of it and prepare those that are here this morning for that hour when things will begin to move and the world will catch fire, and those enemies that we thought we had bottled up and that they were safe. They will break out and get loose on the earth and things will begin to burn.

And then, we ask Thee to help us Lord that we might know where the Rock is that’s higher than we are. That Rock that is higher than I which the Psalmist spoke and that the hymn pleads, to the Rock that is higher than I, let me fly. Lord, help us, and bless us this morning. Wilt Thou, we pray Thee, help us that our faith may lay hold on Thee, our hope may be cheerful and bright, our expectation may meet Thy promises, that our giving may be sacrificial, that our worship may be pure and inward, and that we may get great help out of this morning service.

Not only us, O God, but we think of the other churches. We pray for them all where the gospel is preached. Gracious Father, help the struggling churches. Help those, Lord, that are prospering, and the very prosperity may become a cause of their downfall. Help those that are struggling and let not their struggles cause them to give up. But keep us, all of us, all types and kinds where we meet in Thy name all over. Help us we pray, Our Father, that we may not fail to quietly endure. Now help us. Be with us. Send in all the funds that are needed to carry on Thy work. Bless the expounding of the Word and the singing of the hymns. We ask it in Christ’s holy name. Amen.

I returned yesterday from a very pleasant and very rigorous visit to Toledo where Brother William Bryan is the pastor, a little church where Brother Zeemer preached for many years. They had splendid crowds. Not because I was there, but because they just have them. They always have them, excellent crowds. They were pushing for a $90,000 missionary offering, hoping for it. Mrs. Constance of Colombia, Mrs. Notson of the Philippine Islands and John Vectral of Hong Kong were there and spoke at various times. I preached every night and once during the day.

There was a convention of engineers there. I don’t know what they were engineers of, but Friday night, they decided to blow the place up. So about 11 o’clock was when I had nicely tucked down for the night. They started drinking, singing, yelling, pounding on doors and generally acting like delinquents until four in the morning. So, four in the morning, I might as well have been with them because I was just as drunk as they were, only in another way. I was bleary-eyed and miserable so I got what little I could out of it from there on. But I’m still feeling it. There were women among them too, women, wives, I suppose. I don’t understand such things. I lay there in bed and composed a letter to the management which I never wrote and will never send.

But really, they weren’t to blame. They did their best. House detectives beat on the door and yelled, this is the house detective, quiet. But they might as well talk to the delinquents that they were. The next morning everybody was down in the breakfast room trying to look just as meek and nice and civilized as ever. If the engineers of Ohio are that kind of people, I don’t know what the machinery of Ohio is going to be when they get through with it. Outside of that it was a beautiful week that I had with the brethren.

Now you’ll excuse me if I approach another angle here. This is Palm Sunday. Christ rode into Jerusalem. But I want to read a passage here that our Lord spoke, for it’s practically all entirely what He said. Matthew, the 21st chapter, 42nd Verse and following. This followed His triumphal entry. This was spoken between the day He entered and the time He was crucified. Jesus saith unto them, verse 42, did you never read in the Scriptures, the stone which the builders rejected, the same has become the head of the corner. This is the Lord’s doing and it’s marvelous in our eyes. That’s the quotation. Therefore, say I unto you, Jesus went on, the kingdom of God shall be taken from you and given to a nation bringing forth the fruits thereof. And whosoever shall fall on this stone shall be broken, but on whomsoever it shall fall it will grind into powder. When the chief priests and Pharisees had heard His parables, they perceived that He spake of them. But when they sought to lay hands on Him, they feared the multitude because they took Him for a prophet.

There were always these Pharisees, chief priests, they were always caught just like the politicians are now. Always a little afraid of the public. They’re always wanting to do something nasty, but they’re a little afraid to do it because of the people. They despised the people, but they had them to deal with. They sought to lay hands on Him, violent hands, that would mean. But they feared the multitude because the multitude thought he was a prophet. And when a Jew thought a man was a prophet, the people, they weren’t ready that he should be crucified quite yet.

Now I want to talk a little about Jesus Christ, the Rock. This familiar figure, you come on it every once in a while, in the Scriptures. And it has certain qualities, as we all know, the qualities of strength. Solid as a rock, we say. And the quality of hardness, impenetrable. We have a word we call adamant. When a man is stubborn, refuses absolutely to yield, we say he’s adamant. That’s comes from a certain rock, adamant rock.

And then the permanence of a rock. I’ve traveled through the country, and I see gray mesas, they call them out West, great rocks, standing up, short mountains, great rocks. I muse over how many generations they’ve seen come and go. How many generations they’ve seen come up and go down, come up, and go down, come up and go down. Because a rock is a pretty permanent thing. Sailors know about the rock; they want to avoid them. Or they want to use them occasionally. And certainly, soldiers know, at least the soldiers of old days knew, they got behind rocks and they fought from behind rocks. Even in our own America, Indians used to get behind rocks and fight from there.

And the traveler knows about the rock. The shadow of a great rock in a weary land is word expression that comes from Palestine, where, when a man traveled over sandy ways until his tongue was dry, thick with thirst, he came to a rock and found the spraying and the shadow. And the cool moss growing there on the moist side of the rock, and he sat down. It was like being born physically over again. The builder knows about the rock. He chisels or hews it down and fits it into place and builds his great building. Now here, Christ quotes and applies the Scripture concerning the rock to Himself and to them. The stone He said, which was rejected by the builders, the same has become the head of the corner.

Now briefly, and I remember trying to explain this when I was in Peter back here, First Peter, that these religionists were builders, and they were busy erecting a temple. That is, they were not actually building a temple. It stood there in Jerusalem. I don’t mean that literally. I mean, that they were building a religious temple, composed of human righteousness and legal requirements and interpretations and texts and prohibitions and tradition, commandments. They were building themselves a building, but the trouble is that it was their building. They were building according to their blueprint instead of according to God.

That’s what I always am fearful of. When I hear men high pressuring, stampeding an audience, trying to get them to do this or that, or to give to this or that, I’m always afraid of it because I’m afraid that the young fellow may have a blueprint that God didn’t draw. God said to Moses, be careful that thou build everything according to the pattern shown thee in the mount. And these religionists of Jesus’ day, we’re building a temple composed of human righteousness, as I say, and prohibitions and traditions and customs and ways, and they were building after their blueprint, but they hadn’t consulted God. They thought they had but they hadn’t. It wasn’t God’s blueprint. So, they were putting stone after stone in, and it looked good what they were building and then they came to a stone that wouldn’t fit. There was one stone they couldn’t make work.

It wasn’t shaped so as to go along with their, the dimensions, the directions that their building was taking, and they couldn’t do anything with this stone. It was too hard to chisel. I don’t know what a stonemason calls it. What does a stonemason call it when he cuts an edge of a thing. Does he call it, chiseling it? Is that the word they use? I don’t know myself. So, I probably will speak like an amateur here, and I am not a stonemason. But whatever they do to stones, to chip the thing down and get the side off of it and get it shaped up. They wouldn’t work on this. They hit this stone, and they couldn’t do anything with it. It sort of was alive somehow.

And they fought back, and they couldn’t do anything with it. So, they just threw it away. They said this stone is no good. It didn’t fit into their plan, so they rejected it as worthless. But it happened to be the only stone God ever had anything to do with here. It happened to be God. But because they were building their building and this stone was God’s stone to be the headstone of another building, it didn’t work. And I don’t complain that Jesus Christ has no place in the average church. I don’t mind that at all. I don’t mind it because, why should He? Why should He?

They’re building their churches. I don’t mean buildings now, but their religious structures, their religious thinking, their codes of ethics, their plans, what they do; they’re building, and Christ doesn’t fit there. It is about the same way Socrates does and Benjamin Franklin, but He doesn’t really fit there. So, I don’t mind their rejecting, because why should they not reject Him. He’s not shaped for a lot of these churches. But He is shaped for the church of God, the church of God. So, they rejected Him as worthless. They threw him out and said, this rock, we don’t know what kind of a rock it is. We’re not familiar with it.

So, they threw it aside, and God responded by rejecting their whole building; picking up the Rock they’d rejected and setting it in the corner to be the chief cornerstone, determining the direction and size and shape of all the rest of the building. And they were out in the cold with their homemade building. And we’re still, by the grace of God, working on that vast cathedral of the sky, which God is building, His Son Jesus Christ being the Head of the corner. And that’s all Peter said about it, but Jesus said more. Jesus said, on whomsoever that stone falls, it’s ground into powder.

These are very sentimental times, very sentimental times; right this moment, this hour, because this is holy week starting today, isn’t it today? Yes, today. It’s Holy Week. I am not too much up on my church calendar. But it’s Holy Week, and everybody gets misty eyed in Holy Week. But we’re likely to overlook something here, that right here in Holy Week, the Man stood up and said, there’s a rock and on whomsoever it fall, it will grind him to powder. There’s a danger of forgetting that this Rock is not only a wonderful Friend, but He’s a dangerous enemy. The messianic prophecies of the Old Testament showed the duality about Jesus. It fits perfectly into the attributes of God, for it was said about God, the kindness and severity of God.

And you will find all through the Bible a kindness that’s incredible. God has been so kind and is so kind that it’s all but unbelievable. And He’s been so severe. I’m reading the book of Numbers again. And I find that God is capable of being tremendously, terribly severe. You will find the same all through here about the Messiah. Take that second chapter or take that second Psalm, why do the heathen rage and the people imagine a vain thing? The kings of the earth set themselves and the rulers take counsel together against Jehovah and against His anointed, saying, let us break their bands asunder. Let us cast their cords from us. He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh. The Lord shall have them in derision. Then shall he speak unto them in His wrath and vex them in His sore displeasure. Yet have I set my king upon my holy hill of Zion.

Now, in Jesus’ time when He walked the earth, whoever ran head on into Jesus, usually went away rubbing the said’s head. When they came to Jesus in trouble, they always got help no matter who it was, the Publican’s child, the poor fellow with leprosy all over his body. Anybody that came to Him humbly went away blessed. Any that came to Him arrogantly, went away whimpering and angry, because this was a Rock here. And I, for my part, am mighty delighted there’s a Rock somewhere.

There’s a black preacher in this town I often quote, who is marvelously Spirit-taught in some things. And he never preaches a sermon, but what somewhere in it he says, Jesus is my Rock. He’s known as the Rock among the colored folks, the Rock.

Well, Herod and the scribes and the Pharisees and the Sadducees and all the rest, found that this gentle Jesus, this Lamb of God most lowly, was also a rock when He needed to be. And I just would like to remind you that this Rock, this Stone, is going to be our Judge at last. And everyone who rejects, neglects, disobeys; the rich, the proud, the arrogant, the self-sufficient, are all going to have to deal with it. We’re in danger of getting so brotherly in our time, and so brotherly, everybody whimpers on everybody else’s shoulder and cries on everybody’s neck. We’re so kind, so nice, so brotherly, we’re likely to forget one thing, that Jesus Christ stood up, hard and solid, and said, who is not for Me is against Me.

I had the extreme pleasure; it was a pleasure, and I said it and mean it, I had extreme pleasure of preaching every night to a Hindu young man. Two degrees he has, an MBA and MA. He’s a consulting engineer of one of the big concerns in Toledo. He came to hear me the first night and after that they couldn’t keep him away. He told me the last night he was so tired, but he decided that he’d have to come because he had to hear me one more time.

He’s a Hindu, and he’s a devout Hindu, and he prays. He brought his Hindu books with him when he came. And quite to his astonishment, I knew about his Hindu books, and I had read them and I knew about his gods and could identify them and so on. Well, he talked about Jesus being a manifestation of God. He said he believed in Him. He believed in him since he was 10 years old. He’s a manifestation of God. And he’s such a nice man. I hated to push him. I wouldn’t make a good salesman because I like people and I hate to bother them. And I didn’t like to push him, but I thought I only had that one chance and sitting there in the hotel room, I decided that I was going to give him the works.

So, I pushed him, and I said, now, remember this one thing, what would you think of Christ? You heard Him say, not only am I a manifestation of God, I’m the only manifestation of God and thus sweep away, your Krishna and all the rest. What would you think of Him if He said no man cometh unto the Father but by Me? What would you think if you heard Him say, he that is not with me, is against me.

He said, I believe that. I believe that. I don’t know. You couldn’t do anything with him. We left friends, but he wasn’t converted. And I doubt whether he ever will be unless the Holy Ghost does a miracle in his heart, because he’s equated Christ with everybody else. And that’s the way it is, you see now. We’re so ecumenical and so brotherly and so tolerant, that everybody believes in everything, and so the result is, nobody believes in anything.

But here stands Jesus and says, the Rock, the Stone which the builders rejected. There it is. There’s the Stone. And everything that doesn’t have that Stone as the head of the corner gets thrown out. But He said again here, whosoever falls on this Stone shall be broken to pieces. Now that sounds terrible. He’s the Chief Cornerstone you say. What did He mean by that? He meant that He was the one everybody was judged by. And here’s a Stone, all every which way and they bring it to this Stone and cut it in line with that stone. They cut it in line with that Chief Cornerstone. The Chief Cornerstone is the shape that determines the shape of all the stones in the building.

And so, they have to be broken to fit. You have to break them, chisel them, drill holes in them and break them to fit. This is the doctrine that’s at large in the New Testament, very large. Blessed are the poor in spirit. He submits himself to be broken. He doesn’t come saying, God, I am the right shape. Well, let the church be like me. He doesn’t get up as the woman did in an Alliance Church over in Ohio and say, Mr. Chairman, I nominate my husband. I’ve been his backbone for 15 years. He doesn’t want anything shaped according to him, but according to the Lord Himself.

And that’s all large there I say. Blessed are the poor in spirit and blessed are the meek and blessed are the humble and blessed are the lowly. And Jesus said, let him forsake all and let him carry the cross and let him come and let him bend and let him be ready to be cut and chiseled and bored and shaped to the right shape. If he falls on this stone, he’ll be broken. If he comes to that Stone, he’ll have the whole shape of him changed. And this is the trouble with Christianity now. We want people to be converted with the least inconvenience to everybody concerned, you know. We want everybody converted but with the least inconvenience.

Miss Jones, we’d like to have you accept Christ. All right, I’d be glad to do it. Mrs. Carbuncle did it down here two blocks, and she seemed quite happy. Well, Mrs. Jones, three packs of happy, happy, happy melbury or whatever they are that you’ve been singing about. I suppose you’d have to quit that. And those cocktails, I don’t imagine that the Lord would let you go on with your cocktails, and chiseling on your income tax, that wouldn’t do. And stepping out on your husband, that wouldn’t do. And those long bridge parties, that wouldn’t do. And those cocktail parties and you come away staggering to your Cadillac, that wouldn’t do. Oh, well she said, in that case, I’m not interested. I’d like to have that happy, happy that Mr. Carbuncle had, but I don’t want any of these things to change in me. I want the least inconvenienced to everybody concerned.

A cross was never a convenient thing. They say nobody ever found a convenient place to have a boil. And having had a few, I can say that usually wherever they are, that’s the worst possible place. And I have never found anybody yet that would be willing to say that a cross is convenient. It picks you up, disregards you, and kills you.

He that falls on this stone, he shall be broken to pieces. God has broken them all down the years, the great, mighty Paul, Peter and down the centuries. But he will beautify the meek with salvation. And you will find all of those that came humbly to take His shape and be shaped according to Him, children, Mary and Nathaniel, Nicodemus and the Centurion, and Paul and the rest of them. They all came and they were shaped, chains were broken, broken.

People are afraid of that word broken. They don’t want to be broken. And the weary and the heartache and those with the heartache and sinful, were never turned away. Never. They find Him as soft and gentle as the arms of an adoring mother. They will come and be broken, yield and let Him change them.

Now, that’s what our Lord said. He said that in Holy Week. Isn’t that a strange time to be saying it. But He said it in Holy Week. Some people fear this expression, whoever falls on this stone shall be broken. Shall be broken, they’re afraid of that. But let me tell you something. Something is going to break you. I don’t care how tall you are and how much you weigh. I don’t care if when you go to a doctor, the doctor slaps your back and says, get out of here, you’re healthier than I am. I don’t care, something’s going to break you.

Sickness is going to break you. Age will break you. Sorrow will break you. Worry will break you. Time will break you. Toil will break you. I read just recently that they think that what ages people is radiation. If they keep on testing atom bombs, there’ll be a world full of old gray beards here on our hands in no time. That’s what does it. But they say it may be radiation that breaks you down, makes you get old. But it will come, just as sure as you live, something will break you. You’re the rock. You’re the granite. Your heart is adamant. No, my brother, you’re just a person. And Sister, you’re just a person.

And as a person, something’s going to break you. Now, it depends on whether you’re to be broken by circumstances or by the Lord Himself. And the only reason He breaks you is because he wants you to fit into his everlasting temple. He wants you to be part of that grand cathedral of the universe. That vast cathedral where choirs of angels will be singing the glory of God forever. For they will rest not day nor night, saying, holy, holy, holy Lord God Almighty. He wants you to be part of that, but he can’t make you part of it, the shape you’re in, morally and spiritually. So, he’s going to change that by breaking you and making you new.

So, in love, He fits us in. In love, He breaks us. In love, He changes our shape to fit His and with Himself as the model, He makes us after His own likeness. So that when He comes, we shall be like Him and shall see Him as He is.

A great ambition of the church of Christ ought to be to be like Christ. So, we can come, we can come to Him and come as little children, tramping on our own wisdom and our own goodness and all the rest and letting Him be everything. But it’s here and it’s good to notice that He said it in Holy Week. Whosoever shall fall on this stone shall be broken, but on whomsoever it shall fall, it will grind him to powder.

So, the thing to do then is to come and fall. The Pharisees took it wrong; you see. The Pharisees took it wrong. They perceived that He spake of them and they sought to lay hands on Him. Isn’t humanity a weird outfit? Go to a doctor, and the doctor looks over and says you have something, and you want to kill the doctor right away. You come to Christ and Christ says, the trouble with you is sin, and they want to lay hands on Jesus immediately. They always want to kill the doctor.

A fellow is found wandering around and he thinks he’s in Ohio when he is in Missouri. And the policeman drives up and says you’re not in Ohio. You’re in Missouri. And he gets mad at the policeman instead of saying, well, I’m awfully sorry. I’m a big fool. My compass must have misguided me. And going where he ought to be, he gets angry with the man who locates him. That’s the odd thing about humanity. Jesus walked around among the people telling him them about themselves, and instead of looking at themselves and saying, say that’s true isn’t it. I ought to do something about it, they wanted to kill Him. It’s always been like that.

So dear friends, let’s remember that this one who rode so meekly into Jerusalem and who died so humbly a week later, rose again from the dead, and He’s at the right hand of God, and He is the Rock. And if it’s necessary for Him to fall on the nation, He will do it. Sometime, He will do it. But all who come and fall upon Him shall be changed into His image and likeness, and shall be like Him, and shall see Him as He is. It’s wonderful, I think. It’s wonderful.

So, I go on instead of losing interest in all this. I’m gaining interest. I can see more and more that this is the only thing that’s worthwhile. This is all. Who is it, they said when He rode into Jerusalem? But we’d better find out, for a lot of people don’t know. We better find who is this? We better find out. He is God’s Lamb. He is God’s Lion. He’s God’s Rock. He’s God’s Great Physician. He’s God’s Shepherd of sheep. He’s God’s Healer of human wounds.

So let us think about Him today and let’s think about Him this week, and let’s let Him have his way with us. The highest ambition a human being could have would be to be like Jesus. And if a man attains, even in some degree, likeness to Christ, he’s wiser. And having done it, he’s wiser than all and greater than all of the great of the world.

Be like Jesus, this my song, Jesus, Jesus only. Tonight. I want to talk on that fifth chapter of Revelation, giving the closing out of that fifth chapter Revelation, where all the creatures worship and say, worthy is the Lamb. I’d like to have you come back and bring your friends along. We’ll have a great evening.