Month: November 2024

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Messages

Tozer Talks

Through the end of the year, we will be digging back into the Tozer Talks archive for some messages that struck a responsive chord in many viewers.

November 17 – “Each of Us Matter to God”

November 24 – “What do we Mean by Accepting Christ?”

December 1 – “Prepare by Prayer”

December 8 – “Consider Your Ways”

December 15 – “The Kingdom of God Lies Not in Words”

December 22 – “The Theology of Christmas”

December 29 – “Take Heed How Ye Hear”

“The Reason for Paul’s Commandments“

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The Reason for Paul’s Commandments

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer
June 8, 1958

As most of you know, I am preaching a series of messages Sunday nights called The Angel Before Thee. And tonight, I want to talk about how to make your enemies work for you. I’d like to have you here and bring others here and learn, literally, this is not a trick sermon, this is literally true, and I shall develop it and show how it can be done, how I think I do it, make my enemies work for me. While they think they are getting me down, they’re getting me up.

Then don’t forget that next Sunday night, we’ll continue with it, next Sunday morning I’ll be present and then we’ll introduce the president of the Alliance Churches in the Philippine Islands, Mr. D. Jesus. But in the evening, I’ll resume my series.

And on Wednesday evening at 7.30 sharp, we teach for about 40 minutes on the Sermon on the Mount. The rest of the time is spent in prayer. We have fine discussions. It’s a class, which of course the teacher always ends up by being right, but we do allow discussion. I enjoy it myself; I believe others do, Wednesday at 7.30.

Now, the words of our text. You know I am going slowly through the book of Titus. A tightly packed little book is filled with theological meat, as a boiled egg is filled with meat. In verse 11 of chapter 2, there is the little word “for.” For the grace of God that bringeth salvation hath appeared to all men, teaching us that denying ungodliness and worldly lusts, we should live soberly, righteously, and godly in this present world, looking for that blessed hope and the glorious appearing of the great God and our Savior, Jesus Christ, who gave Himself for us, that He might redeem us from all iniquity, and purify unto Himself a peculiar people, zealous of good works.

Now, it would be a total impossibility for any man, I don’t care who the man might be, to treat this all in one sermon and do it any justice at all. So, I am not going even to try. I am going to allow my thoughts to wander a bit around the word “for” there, for the grace of God.

Now, that little word “for” is very important. I don’t go along with that type of Bible teacher that takes some unimportant verse, looks mysterious, and says, this is the key to the whole Bible. I have heard that so much that I have become immune to it. Immune to it would be a better word because I don’t believe it.

Some expositors take that 117th, isn’t it, Psalm, that shortest of all the Psalms, and they look very wise and say, undoubtedly this is the most important Psalm in the entire Bible. It says, O praise the Lord, all ye nations, praise him, all ye people, for his merciful kindness is great toward us, and the truth of the Lord endureth forever. Praise ye the Lord. And they want me to believe that that’s the most important Psalm and that all the rest of the Psalms center around that.

Well, I believe in faith, and I also believe in skepticism. I think a good hearty dose of skepticism is the only way to treat some teachers. So, I don’t want to fall into this trap and say that the most important word here is for, for it isn’t by any means the most important, but for my purpose this morning, it’s quite important in that I want to show you something here. This is, of course, a preposition, but theologically it’s a conjunctive here. It’s, it joins two great thoughts.

Now Paul had been saying above this, that aged men should be sober and brave and temperate and sound in faith and in love and in patience. And that older women should be, be as becometh holiness, not gossipers and not given to wine, teachers of good things. And that young women should be sober, love their husbands and their children, be discreet and chaste and good housekeepers and obedient to their husband. And that young men also ought to be sober and that Titus himself should show himself a pattern of good works, and that employees should be obedient to their masters and to please them and not steal from them and should be faithful to them. And that, that doctrine might be adorned.

Now that’s what he had been saying. Now we say, Paul, wait a minute here. We don’t believe in just being pushed into things. Uh, you want the older men to be grave and sober and righteous. You want the older women to be holy and good and pure and tight mouthed. You want the younger women to be good housekeepers, love their families and be an example to others. You want employees to work for their employers faithfully and well, and not be guilty of stealing little things here and there, but remember that stealing is wrong at any time. Now, why Paul, uh, this isn’t the way the Romans taught, nor the way the Greeks taught.

This isn’t the way the average American looks at things, Paul. Why, what can you say to us that will give us a reason for this? What’s the reason that you want us to live like this? Paul said, well, this is the reason, this is the reason. And the word for gathers up all of that.

It means this which I have previously required of you. The reason for it is this, that the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation to all men, or for all men, teaching us that denying ungodliness and worldly lusts, we should live soberly, righteously, and godly in this present world, looking for the blessed hope and the glorious appearing of the great God and our Savior, Jesus Christ.

When the Bible makes a statement or lays down a commandment without any reason being given, it is the immediate duty of all Christians to believe that statement and obey that commandment and wait to know why God made that, gave that commandment and made that statement. But it is very rare that God requires anything of His people that He doesn’t either before or after explain why. God knows we’re intelligent people and a Christian should be one of the most intelligent of all persons.

I have never accepted the implied creed that a Christian is one who, he’s retarded. And the Lord comes along and puts him in a home for retarded children, that the church is a home for retarded children. I never have believed that. I still don’t believe it. I well know that a wild intellect, uncontrolled and egocentric and filled with sin can be a very dangerous and terrible thing. I also know that a brilliant intellect filled with the Holy Ghost can be a very wonderful thing as David and Isaiah and Paul and John and Augustine and Luther and Wesley have taught us.

So, I believe in the intelligence. I believe the Bible is an intelligent book. It goes beyond intelligence. And that is one of the glories of the Scripture and one of the glories of Christianity, that we go beyond intelligence. We never go contrary to it, but we often go beyond it. The prophets of the Old Testament and the apostles of the New, heard and saw things which their intellects were never able to equate with anything else they knew or with anything taught by mortal man. They saw visions and dreamed dreams and looked into the face of the awesome God with a rainbow around His shoulders and they rose above the power of the mind to climb. But it was never anything they saw, never anything was contrary to good sound reasoning. It was above it, I repeat, but never contrary to it.

So, God has given us reasons for things and has said here, take this book and you’ll know not only that you should be good, but why you should be. Not only that you should believe, but why you should believe. It was Anselm that said, we think because we believe, not in order that we might believe. In the believing man, faith is always first. And the believing man believes and then he can think as deeply and intensely and widely and imaginatively as he wants to do it because he has faith to start with. And he never goes beyond faith and never rises above faith. He rises above reason, but never above faith.

So, Paul gave us the reason here. He had been exhorting. Paul didn’t do it that way usually. Usually in his epistles, Paul begins with heavy theology and lays the foundation down, good and solid, and then builds up on it exhortations and commandments and urgings that we’re to do this and thus and this and live this way and go there and do this and we’re to live in this way and that way in order or because these other things are true which were previously stated. Here Paul reverses himself and gives us first the commandments and then gives us the reason for.

Now he said, for the grace of God hath appeared to all men. I think it should read, for the grace of God hath appeared bringing salvation for all men. Now what does this mean? I find a very convenient and I believe helpful way of going about Bible study and Bible teaching to find out what a thing doesn’t mean. If you can’t know what a thing means, you can save yourself a lot of confusion by finding out what it doesn’t mean. And some people not knowing what this doesn’t mean, they have read into it meanings that it does not contain.

As a young Christian on attending a church over on Locust Street in Akron, Ohio, I used to pass by every Sunday, used to pass by a great expansive imposing looking church. It said Universalist Church. I don’t know whether they’ve changed their name, I haven’t seen a Universalist Church sign for years. But the Universalists weren’t wholly bad. They believed in the redemption which is in Christ Jesus. They believed that God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten son. They believed that Jesus Christ, when he died, paid the price for all men. At least I think this is a fair statement of what they believed.

But they took verses like this in this chapter, the grace of God hath appeared bringing salvation to all men. And they said, well, that just means what it says, that God’s grace is so vast and infinite and all comprehensive that it leaves nobody out and therefore everybody will be saved. They believed in universalism.

Now, I didn’t intend to tell you this, but it fits in so beautifully that I must. A man said that he was a Universalist preacher, and he said he went into a neighborhood and decided that he wanted to establish a Universalist church. So, he went around finding if he could find, looking about, seeing if he could find any Universalists of the Universalist persuasion.

He finally ran on to a man and he said, yes, I’m a Universalist. Oh, he said, that’s fine. Perhaps we can interest you. We want to establish a Universalist church. Well, he said, I think it’s fair to tell you though that I’m not quite the kind of Universalist that you are. He said, you are a Universalist, and your creed is that everybody will be saved. Now, he said, I’ve lived in the world a long time and I have mingled with men, and I’ve mixed with them everywhere, all out over the world. I’ve watched them live. I’ve had them lie to me. I’ve been cheated and skinned and sold down river and deceived and betrayed. And he said, I’ve decided that I believe in the universal damnation of all men. He said, I’m that kind of a Universalist.

Quite a shock, I take it, to the brother who believed in the salvation of all men. But the Universalists and others believe in the universal salvation of all men, grounding it upon such passages as this.

Well, I say they’re not wholly bad, but they’re not certainly right about it because this doesn’t mean it. You say, well, how do you know that it doesn’t mean it? I know it for this reason, that the Bible is to be understood not by what this verse says, but by what this verse and this verse and this one and this one and this one says. And when you get a dozen of them to agree on something, then you have Bible dogmatics.

And when these dozens agree, and then you find one you can’t understand, and if he doesn’t agree with these plain ones, then you say, well, we’ll put that aside as Gypsy Smith did with the bone when he was eating fish. You ask him what he did with the passage, he couldn’t understand. He said, the same as when I’m eating fish, and I ran into a bone. He said, I just lay it on the side of the plate.

And so, when you find a passage that seems to contradict the plain teachings of 25 other verses, lay that on the side of the plate because you don’t understand that. And always remember there’ll be some blazing-eyed fanatic rushing in and telling you that because you don’t know what that teaches, therefore he is now sent to enlighten you. And what he says it teaches is what 25 other passages deny.

So, I know this doesn’t mean that all men are to be saved, that the grace of God has appeared to all men savingly, and that the grace of God is working actively in all men. I know better than that, for the man who wrote this said, not all men have faith, and said that evil men and seducers should wax worse and worse until the end came.

And then I know also that it doesn’t mean that all men have heard of the grace of God. It’s appearing. The grace of God which bringeth salvation hath appeared to all men, and that would leave us with the false impression, if we don’t watch it, that everybody in the whole world has heard of the grace of God. I wish that were so. I wish that everybody that lives everywhere from the youngest inhabitant of the jungle to the oldest man in London or Paris had heard of the grace of God, but it just isn’t so.

And I might add that it is perhaps one of the great and serious crimes of all time that the church of our Lord Jesus Christ has failed so dismally to instruct the world that the grace of God has appeared bringing salvation for everybody that will take it. That we’ve had nearly 2,000 years to do it, and that we have succeeded not in doing it.

The revolution, the Bolshevistic revolution, came in 1917, and 31 years later, one-third of the earth’s population are under the hammer and the sickle. They did in 31 years what the church has not been able to do. That is, they did for the devil in 31 years what the church has not been able to do for God in 2000.

Now, it doesn’t mean that everybody’s heard. If it meant everybody had heard, Christ would have been back long ago, and this terrible nightmare we call history would have ended, and Christ would now be reigning from the river to the ends of the earth, and every man would be sitting under his own vine and fig tree, and no man should be wicked nor sinful nor harmful all over the earth. From sunrise to sunup, and from sunup to sunrise, no evil would be anywhere about. So, it doesn’t mean that.

What does it mean? It means that there has been a shining forth, epiphany, a shining forth. The word is used here for the shining forth of the sun, for the grace of God has appeared. This is the epiphany, the shining forth of the grace of God like the mighty sun in the heavens. It has shone forth around the person of Jesus Christ our Lord, shone forth in His love and pity and mercy, shone forth in His willingness to die for His enemies, shone forth. It was not a gleam of light, as some would say, but it was a shining forth, as the sun at ten o’clock on a June morning, shining forth in its glory all over the earth, wherever the clouds will withdraw and let the sun shine.

So, that’s what it means. The grace of God has shone forth like the sun, and this grace brings salvation, and that salvation is for all men everywhere that will receive it. That’s what this passage means. And the grace of God has appeared teaching us. I want to bear down a little on that. The grace of God has appeared teaching us.

Now, in what way can the grace of God teach anybody? The answer is that the word grace has at least two meanings, and two meanings here. It means an attribute of God, a quality in God, of love and mercy and kindness and goodwill that predisposes God always to be kind to those that don’t deserve it, and to be good to those that deserve only judgment, and to pour out Himself and His love and even the blood of His son for the salvation of those that deserve nothing but hell. That is a quality in God, a characteristic of the heart of God.

Now, I am conscious that both when I use the word quality and characteristic that I am humanizing God because we can’t rise to the elevation where we can talk about God in divine terms, we have to talk about Him in human terms. Actually, there’s no such thing as a quality in God or a characteristic in God. God’s unitary being has about it a unicity, a oneness.

And anything we say about God is simply our minds attributing things to God, for God dwelleth in light that no man can approach unto. But this is an attribute, this grace, and of course this can’t teach anybody anything. An attribute of God can’t teach a man down in Grant Park on a park bench anything. An attribute in God can’t teach a Doni in the Baliem Valley anything, or an Indian in Columbia. The grace of God as an objective thing, objective to us, outside of us, an external thing, cannot teach us anything. It can move God to act in our behalf, but as long as it’s outside of us it can teach us nothing.

But the grace of God has another meaning too. The grace of God means a divine influence upon the heart. It means an inward enabling; it means an active moral force. Remember in 2 Corinthians 12, where Paul told us how he had been praying that the thorn might be, he might be delivered from the thorn in the flesh which caused him great distress. He said he prayed three times about it, and on the third time the Lord said, Paul, my strength is made perfect in weakness, for my grace is sufficient for thee. He didn’t mean my attribute of grace which lies in me, in the great undulating infinite sea of the Godhead.

That would do Paul no good at that moment, but he said there’s another kind of grace, another aspect of that grace, which is an active working force that enters the heart of a man and does things for him. He said my grace is sufficient for thee. My grace, my active grace, this influence, this moral power within your bosom can lift you above the thorn which you’re trying to get rid of.

Paul caught it in a second. Paul was a spiritually intelligent man, and as soon as God said it, Paul added his own comment. He said, therefore, I will glory in my infirmities, that the power of God might rest upon me. And he knew the grace of God and the power of God were all one.

So, the grace of God is a teacher. It is a moral force. It gets inside the intelligence, gets inside the will, motivates the life, gets inside the heart and disturbs the emotions and excites them. So that’s what it means, the grace of God that bringeth salvation, teaches us, teaches us.

Now, my brethren, it was a low moment in the orthodox church when the word grace lost its second meaning and was forced to take only the first one. It was a low moment, I say, an awful moment in the history of fundamentalism when the word grace lost its second meaning, that of a divine power working within us, and was forced to be satisfied with its first meaning, that of an attribute of God flowing out of kindness and love and mercy which sent God’s Son to die for the lost.

So, the grace of God, for most people, remains in God. And it leaves the recipient of grace unchanged by grace. But do you notice that Paul taught that grace changed people? He said grace changed them. He said the grace of God has appeared teaching us, inwardly teaching us, that denying ungodliness and worldly lusts, we should live soberly and righteously and godly in this present world. It was a very slick trick of the devil indeed when he disassociated the two meanings of the word grace.

And everybody goes out now teaching, grace, grace, grace that is greater than all my sin. Do I believe it? Oh, with everything in me, I believe it. Do I preach it? Well, you know I preach it. Do I believe in the grace of God? Nobody, nobody can sing with a worse voice and a happier heart, amazing grace, how sweet the sound that saves a wretch like me. Nobody, nobody can sing it worse, and nobody can love it more. The grace of God that brings salvation has appeared to all men.

And that grace in God, that’s why we’re here, brethren. I’d like to prove sometime that everything God ever did since the beginning of time, he did out of grace. I’d like to prove, and I believe I can show you, that everything God does is grace, that God never did anything by law, never did anything by law, all is by grace.

The Psalmist used to pray, have mercy upon me and hear my prayer, be gracious unto me and hear my prayer. He knew that God’s willingness to hear prayer was God’s grace in operation. The very stars and sun overhead are the grace of God in operation. Nobody deserves anything from God. If they could only get that. One time more see the sovereignty of God, that God owes nobody anything and gives everybody everything, and therefore we owe him every gratitude in all the world. And all is by grace.

When God made the heaven and the earth, it was by grace. When he laid the foundations thereof, it was by grace. When He girdled the earth with the firmament, it was by grace. And when He made man upon the earth and blew into his nostrils the breath of life, it was by grace. And everything that God has ever done has been out of the goodness of His heart.

But if the grace of God was only a principle of which causes God to operate, it could never get to me. But the grace of God is more than that. The grace of God enters human hearts and other hearts, I suppose.

I believe that the very angels in heaven are motivated by the workings of God’s love and grace in their own hearts, although they never understand it quite as you and I will. The grace of God teaches us, enters our hearts and teaches us. But you know, the devil has, through false teachers and ignorant teachers and persons who will not think nor pray about things, disassociated the two meanings.

And we have only one meaning, and that’s the one I’ve been talking about here now for a few minutes. The wonderful goodness of the heart of God, which gave us everything that we have, which gave us His Son to die, and gave us eternal life without money and without price, gave us mercy, gave us forgiveness, and gave us a place in heaven itself, all this by grace. And you can’t overdo it.

You know, you can’t sing too loudly or too often of the grace of God. But here’s what you can do. You can misunderstand the meaning of it, and you can forget that it has its second meaning. The second meaning being, I repeat now for the third time, the divine influence upon the heart, the inward enabling, the active moral force working to teach us morality, spirituality, ethics, inward goodness. But anybody that talks the way I do now is attacked by these one-definition boys. They say he’s a legalist, or they say he’s seeking to be saved by works.

I read that passage once more, not by works of righteousness which we have done, according to His mercy He saved us. I read that, and I believe it. Or they say he’s mixing law and grace. No. I’ve never mixed law and grace in my life consciously, and I don’t think I’m doing it unconsciously.

You know, the habit is now to blame everything on the Schofield Bible. And I’ve said a few sharp things about some of the notes myself, but the Schofield Bible can’t be blamed for this. The Schofield Bible’s 100 percent right in its attitude toward grace. Let me read a note on 2 Peter 3:18. I don’t know who wrote it, of course, one of the half-dozen editors.

But it says under the caption, Grace Imparted, here’s what it says. It says, Grace is not only dispensationally a method of divine dealing in salvation, it is also the method of God in the believer’s life and service. Having by grace brought the believer into the highest conceivable position, God ceaselessly works through grace to impart to and perfect him in corresponding graces. Perfectly right. The grace of God that set him as high as it’s possible to set anything above the angels, ultimately, ceaselessly works in him to impart to and perfect him in corresponding graces.

Grace, therefore, it continues, stands connected with service, with Christian growth, and with giving. So don’t let’s blame the Schofield Bible for that one. The brethren have gone far beyond in separating grace from grace, the grace of God from the grace in man.

Oh, my friends, let’s not be satisfied to keep all God’s qualities in God. God wants some of His qualities to get into us. There are attributes of God which no man can share. For instance, His eternity, His self-sufficiency, His infinitude, His incomprehensibility. Those are attributes which belong to God, and God cannot share them with creatures. But there are other attributes that God can share with creatures, kindness, love, mercy, grace, goodness, wisdom.

Now I close, or rather just break it off here, and any preacher’s presence will know this is no way to close a sermon. But I’m going to close it this way, that we have every Scriptural reason to believe that if grace has saved us, it has also changed us.

We have every scriptural reason to believe that if we are not changed by grace, we are not saved by grace. For the grace of God that bringeth salvation has appeared, teaching us, denying ungodliness and worldly lusts. We should live soberly and righteously and godly, and I shall show in a succeeding sermon that soberly and righteously and godly takes in the triangle of man’s possible existence, God and man and self, and all the ethics of an Aristotle, or all the righteousness of a Moses. The holiness of a Paul can’t take the man out of that triangle. He’s there, but it’s as big and vast as the heart of God.

So, remember it, that if you believe you’re saved by grace, but there is not a corresponding working within your heart toward holiness and righteousness, I must in honesty tell you, you’re probably deceived. For the grace of God, when it’s received, when a man says, I accept salvation by the grace of God through Jesus Christ, God smiles and goes to work inside the man. If the man really receives God, He goes to work inside of him to produce the very graces that the New Testament is chock-full of.

And so, if a man says, technically, I am saved by the grace of God, and then goes his own way and isn’t changed, I believe he is a deceived man and completely deluded and will be lost at last. We’re saved by grace under good works. We’re saved by grace, and the same grace by which we are saved now becomes an active force working within us to make us pure and good and righteous.

May God grant that we’ll not miss this, that we’ll not go so far out on a limb in our committal to the one meaning of the grace of God that we forget there are any other meanings. There is at least one other. Let’s trust him. If He saved us by grace, let’s trust Him to save us in grace, and that grace may operate through us to make us the kind of Christians that will adorn the doctrine of Jesus Christ.

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“Ye Have Not Because Ye Ask Not“

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Ye Have Not Because Ye Ask Not

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

December 30, 1956

In the book of James, James, chapter 4, the latter sentence, Ye have not because ye ask not. That’s the negative. And then over against that, the very fine positive statement in chapter 5, last sentence, in verse 16, The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much.

Now I think that most of you know that I do not make too much out of holidays or anniversaries. I nod to them and blow them a kiss and pass on to something that lasts. Holidays have a way of passing. But I cannot escape the knowledge that in this Christian era, we have arrived at the, or very within hours of 1957 that we shall call the New Year. And I am not going to go over the past.

We have a way here of keeping reviewed up and keeping our self-examination current, so that I am not going to examine the past, because that’s been pretty well done, but I’m going to talk about the future. And in these texts which I have read, we have a word from the Holy Ghost.

Now, it is to our everlasting profit that we listen to this Word with meekness and with faith and obedience. When man speaks, just man, no matter who the man is, whether he be a king on a throne, or a scientist in his laboratory, or a philosopher in his study, when man speaks, we have a moral duty to question. We have a duty to doubt and examine.

But when God speaks, we dare not question, and there is no need to examine, and it is a sin to doubt. But we Christians, being yet somewhat in the world and having our old natures, tend sometimes to dull the edge of the Lord’s Sword and avoid the point of the Lord’s Word by what we call interpreting. If a text is too much for us, we interpret it, which means usually not that we’re trying to find out what it says, but that we’re trying to find out how we can get out of it.

But here is no place for interpretation whatever. There are two sentences, Ye have not because ye ask not. And the other one, the effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much. Now only exhortation is needed here, not interpretation, and certainly not question or doubt.

Now the Holy Ghost says here that some Christians are self-made paupers. Ye have not because. Some Christians suffer from self-imposed poverty. I have often thought in a half-humorous way, if we lived in the same kind of homes, or if we lived in homes commensurate with our spiritual state, we’d be living in the slums, most of us. And if we dress commensurate with our inner spiritual condition, we’d be taken off the street for vagrancy. Because too many of us are self-imposed paupers.

Now this is not a misfortune to call up sympathy, this is a sin to call for repentance. Ye have not because? Ye have not because you don’t know where to go. Every Christian should know where to go to ease his poverty and become rich. Ye have not because ye know not who to ask? Every Christian should know whom to ask. And ye have not because ye know not how to obtain? If we know not how to obtain, one half hour of the Bible will teach us. No, ye have not because ye ask not. Ye live in poverty even though you know you do not believe, and so you do not ask effectively.

Now this poverty of ours, which can be shrugged off as long as we’re in reasonably good health and have an income, and there’s no war, this poverty of ours brings loss beyond description. It is not only what we get into, but what we don’t get that’s tragic in the Christian life. In our hearts, in our homes, in our labors, in our churches and assemblies where we meet together, to our friends and to the lost and to the world, we are allowing time to go by and days to succeed days and years to pile up on years. It doesn’t seem like any time at all when I began my ministry here in Chicago over in the little old building, and I remember the first thing I said.

It sounds sort of piteously humorous now, although it certainly wasn’t intended to be funny. I got up and I thought I’d make a nice approach to a nice congregation, and I said I was happy to be here and to speak to you people, but I said possibly some people may take me rather lightly because of my youth. But I said if youth is a crime, it is a crime everybody has been guilty of sometime, and if you will give me a little time, I’ll atone for it. No prophecy was ever more fulfilled than that one has been.

But all down these years, I wonder how much we have lost that we could have had and how much that we didn’t get that was rightfully ours under the terms of atonement because we didn’t ask. Or if we asked, we didn’t ask effectively.

Now there is much unbelief about prayer, even secret unbelief among people who pray. There’s probably nothing in the whole field of religion about which there’s more hypocrisy than about prayer, and yet I feel I want to modify that rather harsh word. Hypocrisy because I do not think it’s deliberate, I don’t think it’s intentional at all, and it even springs from a rather high motive.

This unrealism is a better word, I think, a truer word. I don’t avoid the other one because I’m afraid of it or afraid of you, but only because I think unrealism is better. So, I’ll say that there probably is nothing in the whole field of religion about which there’s more unrealism than there is in prayer.

And this is because I think no one wants to grieve God or injure other people by admitting their doubt concerning prayer, even if they have secret doubts concerning it, they don’t want to admit them, because as David said when he was going through the dark valley of doubt, he said, if I speak thus, I offend against the generation of thy children. So, he kept his mouth shut until he got light on the problem. And I think that’s the high and rather pure motive that helps most of us or that leads most of us to live in this never-never land of prayer that doesn’t get answered. We don’t want to grieve God or admit to our own hearts or certainly to injure others by admitting doubt concerning prayer. So, we go on secretly having our doubts, even doubting our own testimony.

Now, this arises from several causes. The doubts people have about prayer arise from several causes. I’m not going to name sin because we take that for granted, but I think some people are benumbed a bit about prayer, hearing thousands of prayers made that are plainly not answered.

Now I like to be realistic up on a Christian level, and I’ll tell you what I’d do this morning if God were to enable me. I’m no Pope, nor am I anything but a simple preacher of the gospel, but if I had any authority to make any bargains with the Almighty, I would settle with God for 10%.

I would say, God, if you will, oh, I’ll do better than that. I will say, God, will you please answer 1% of the prayers that are made in the pulpits today, this Lord’s Day, the last of 1956. Just answer 1% of them, Lord, and shrug off the other 99. Do you know what would happen? There would be a revival that would change the texture of Chicago society from the top to the bottom or the bottom to the top, if just 1 out of 100 prayers were answered in the pulpits these days. But people don’t expect them to be answered, and so we go on piling them up, words, words, words. And we hear thousands of prayers made that are plainly not answered, and the result is, without wanting it, there comes a benumbing of our faith and expectation, and then there is a nibbling at prayer with no success that most people do.

A nibbling at it. We nibble at prayer in the morning and at table and at night, and on certain stated occasions. If they’re going to have a potato race, they want the pastor to be there to start it off with the prayer. And he asks for enough to bring revival to the whole wide world, just there under the tree. But nothing happens, we just nibble at it.

And then the misuse or the wrong use of prayer is also one other reason. We hear prayer used to get our own way and to crowd out a business rival and help us win the track race and all sorts of things. And everybody in his right mind knows God isn’t going to answer prayers like that, but we smile sentimentally and say that God answered my prayer. The fellow that’s lying on his back looking unseeing at the roof of the stadium, God didn’t answer his prayer, but the fellow who has his hand raised high in the air, he had his prayer answered.

Now everybody knows, that has the brains he come into the world with, that God had nothing to do with either one of them. So, we simply say to ourselves, well, don’t let’s be cynics, don’t let’s be like Tozer about this, let’s believe in it anyhow and get along somehow. And then another reason, another cause of doubt in prayer is seeing things attributed to prayer that prayer never caused. We have a way of doing that, but we’ll pass that by.

So, Christians blandly overlook their own failure in prayer. Ye have not because ye ask not, and ye ask not because ye doubt, and ye doubt because you have seen prayers that were not answered and have known praying people that were always in trouble. And a lot of your own nibblings never got you anything, and so you throw the whole thing overboard and say it is a fine, noble thing that nobody can attain to.

Now ye have not because ye ask not, and we’re self-imposed paupers, and the kindest thing I could ask God for today is that you, my dear people before me, should not suddenly have your external garments made to look like your internal life. I would be ashamed, and you would be ashamed, and the old torn jeans that I’d be dressed in and the old battered stained shirt you’d have on, we’d feel pretty bad if we were as poverty-stricken in our wardrobe as we are in our hearts.

But here the Holy Ghost says over against this, The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man avails much. Now that’s not to be interpreted in the light of the things that I have mentioned here, prayers that haven’t been answered and the unrealism in the field of prayer. This is to be believed, not interpreted.

The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much. I’m not sure that the man James could have got by on that sentence in the average schoolroom. They’d have said that he was tautological. Now tautological, in case you’ve forgotten your old definitions, means to say it twice, like saying a widow woman. Of course, she’d be a woman if she were a widow. That’s tautology, that’s saying it twice unnecessarily.

And I’m not sure that what James might be accused here of being a bit wordy by some when he said the effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man avails much because he could have turned it around and said the availing prayer of a righteous man is effectual. And it would have meant exactly the same thing. But the Holy Ghost was trying to get at us through the Apostle James and he was using such language as we have, not as he has, but as we have. So, he tells us in almost extravagant terms that prayer is effectual if it is fervent, and that it avails, and then God says, much.

Now the words, of course, are relative and they’ve got to be understood in their right context, and you’ve got to notice who uses them. If I were to say I heard a man, I often listen on the air to interviews, particularly when notable men are being interviewed in any field at all, I like to do that. I have an FM radio now and when I’m resting, I listen to these interviews in order to get a little education as I go along. And I heard a man some time ago and he was talking about something, what it was going to cost. Well, he said about six million dollars. You had to know who that man was in order to get your meaning.

If you’re going to put anything into it, I’m going to invest heavily, he might have said. Well, that for me would be fifty cents. But for that man it was six million dollars, if I recall. And you hear that often, they’ll say, well, we expect an income of about nine hundred thousand dollars this year, a little short of a million. Brethren, who was talking? Well, it depends altogether on who says much. The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man avails much, said the Holy Ghost.

Why, it would have been enough for the Holy Ghost to say little. For when God talks, God talks in cosmic terms. The God who says little or some or a small amount or a limited amount or much or many, that God holds the universe in His hands and the galaxies, and the far distant stars are His playthings. And everything that is belongs to Him. All matter, all mind, all life is His. And when God uses the word much, you and I ought to sit up and listen because we’re up in the six million class.

We’re listening to one talk who is infinitely rich beyond all description. And He says, you’re poor and you’re poverty stricken and your bones show through. That at your own fault. You’re not asking for.

Don’t forget that the effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man leads God to move in your direction and the result will be much. And when God says much, he battles the imagination. I say I’d settle for the word little there.

If God were to use the word little. If I used the word much, it would mean a few hundred dollars. But when the government uses the word little, they mean two or three million or maybe a billion. It’s got so they’re ashamed to use common thousands anymore in Washington. Nobody would be caught saying thousand around there. They’d feel ashamed. They only talk in terms of millions and billions.

And that’s the way God is. God has everything. And under the proper conditions, prayer is Earth’s mightiest force. There’s no question about it. Wesley is often quoted for saying things he never said. But I understand that he said this, God does nothing but in answer to prayer. And certainly, he would be a man who had a right to make that statement. God does nothing but in answer to prayer.

Meaning, I suppose, that before there were a need to pray, God out of His own heart moved to create His universe. But that now He has so geared the human race to prayer that God will not move but in answer to prayer. And our Lord Jesus Christ said, nothing shall be impossible unto you.

To whom was he speaking there? Nothing shall be impossible unto you, an angel?, as Milton painted, that when he lay down, lay across several hills. And that when he spread his wings, they went across vast landscapes. That kind of being, no. He was talking to people, even fallen people. Look at him there, he had just been born. And there his little red face. And they can’t figure out whether it’s human, but you had a human mother, so they figure it is. And they brand him and band him and take a footprint. And there he lies, all miserable looking. Can’t raise his head, can’t raise his hands or feet yet. And sleeps curled up the way he’s been for the last while. And there he is, so weak that he’d lie right there and die. If a lot of old nurses and people didn’t help him.

And God says to that kind of creature, nothing shall be impossible unto you. You say he grows, sure, see him a year later. Now with shiny eyes he’s learned to walk. And take a few steps over the smooth floor. Can’t make it if it’s rough, but he takes a few experimental steps on a smooth floor. And balances himself like a skier by holding his hands up. And there he is now. Push him and he’s gone. Weak little one year old. And the Lord’s voice is sounding, nothing shall be impossible unto you.

You say wait till he grows up, sure. Wait till he grows up. Here he is driving behind a car with so much out in front that he can’t possibly see who he hits. So, he drives on in a great big hunk of metal with roaring motors that makes up psychologically for the weakness he feels inside of himself. And when he steps down on the accelerator, the immediate response somehow gets into his system, and he feels that’s his response. I am an American. I live in the 20th century. I live in the period when we’ve conquered nature, he says.

And then an invisible substance from somewhere, so small that only the laboratory can discover it, a little thing they call a virus gets into him and he doesn’t even know where he got it. He doesn’t know where he breathed it in or if it was on the edge of a glass when he drank water. He doesn’t know what friend might have said good morning and breathed it on him. He doesn’t know. But all he knows is he says to his wife, I don’t feel good somehow. My head’s low and I’m aching. Pretty soon he’s down on his back, pale white, and so weak he has to be lifted up.

And two or three doctors and a nurse have to try desperately to keep him from dying. And a little invisible thing, so small and weak, that we’d pass it over without noticing it, has done that to that great big he-boy. With his big chest and his muscles, now he lies there whimpering, and his wife sits and puts cold cloths on his noble brow. But the poor fellow, we’ll hope he gets well. I’m just creating one out of whole cloth for the occasion. I haven’t anybody in mind. But I hope he gets well.

But anyway, there he is, and the Holy Ghost is saying to him, nothing shall be impossible unto you. See him a few years from now. See him when his chin meets his nose at night. But in the daytime, he’s quite normal looking, except that he is badly shrunken, and his voice has gone piping. And this strong fellow, now see him limp with the help of a cane down the steps to meet his grandchildren.

There he is, there’s that fellow to whom God said, nothing shall be impossible unto you. Was God playing with him? Was God simply being humorous? Must this be interpreted and understood somehow poetically or metaphorically? No. When the Lord said, Nothing shall be impossible unto you, write across the page in your Bible, you have the interpretation.

Here it is, because nothing is impossible with God. There’s why God can say to that little thing, red-faced and squally there in the bassinet, nothing need be impossible to you. That’s why God can say to the man lying in his bed, nothing need be impossible to you, because nothing is impossible to Me.

And so God invites us to omnipotence. He invites us to share his muscles and to have His riches and to live in His strength. The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much. If we would set ourselves to prayer, my friends, this year, habits could be broken that have cursed and blasted some of us for years. Temptations could be defeated that we’ve stumbled over for decades. Circumstances that have hindered us could be radically altered, for nothing shall be impossible.

And some of Satan’s captives that are now bound could be set free. And the wanderers could be restored and hard sinners could be converted and minds could be changed completely, and hearts cleansed and filled with the Holy Ghost. If we only dared to believe what our Lord said through the Apostle James, the effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much. Now, let’s face up to it. Ye have not.

Now, let’s not excuse ourselves. That’s the cheapest and easiest way out, but it’s also the way to deeper poverty. And let us not pity ourselves. Self-pity never helped anybody yet. So let us not say, ye have not, and then begin to sniffle. Ye have not, because ye ask not. Now, God can’t remedy this by himself. You and I are going to have to remedy it by remembering and putting into effect these other passages that nothing shall be impossible unto you.

My brethren, we have had two critical years in this Church, two critical years. I don’t know whether it’s the kind discipline of the Holy Ghost, or whether what it is, I’m not sure, I don’t know. But I do know this, that in this Church, more than any other that I’ve ever heard of, except in an Army camp, our personnel changes over. Just when we get going nicely, there’s a blow-up, and I don’t mean trouble, I mean that there will be as many as 8, 10, 12 families moved to parts unknown.

If I could have my congregation together once, brother, we’d have to rent a stadium. But they go, they go. They go to preach, they go to the field, they go marry somebody and become a preacher’s wife, or they move to California or Florida or Wisconsin or Michigan or Nebraska, Nebraska, or New Jersey, and we’ll lose them.

And just this last year we have had 50 of our regular people who would have been here this morning have gone and left us. And it looks as if our business was to sort of set people on fire and then say goodbye to them, sadly, and watch them go. And the only hope I have is that wherever they go, they’ll spread the fire.

But you know, although we have had some pretty heavy sledding, numerically, we haven’t had any heavy sledding financially. In 1955 we were third highest in missionary giving in a thousand churches in the United States and Canada. And I’m happy to tell you that for 1955 we had steadily along the largest prayer meetings that we have ever known in the years that I’ve been here.

Now, my friends, I want to insist in closing that prayer, the right kind of prayer, persistent prayer, sets up an irresistible pressure that nature won’t hold, that circumstances won’t hold, that it sets up an internal pressure. It’ll break through somewhere. Somehow, it’ll break through. Maybe not in the direction you face, but the effectual prayer of a man who’s righteous, that is, living right in the will of God, that prayer sets up an increasing pressure. And it’s going to explode, it’s going to blow, it’s going to get through somewhere. And I don’t know where always.

But I want to prophesy a little this morning. A man is quite a fool who’ll prophesy, but I am willing to be a fool for Christ’s sake and say this to you, that in the religious world, that is, in the evangelical religious world, for the Roman Catholic side of the Church, Christendom, and for the liberal side, I have nothing to say. To them I have nothing to say now.

I’m thinking about the evangelicals, the fundamentalists, the Bible people, the full gospel people. I want to tell you something which may happen within this year or within a few, very few years to come. There’s going to be a realignment of spiritual forces.

We are being taught now that religion is coming into its own because there is increased tolerance. The ecumenical spirit that takes in everybody that says Jesus and that opens his Bible and goes to church once a Sunday, or twice a year even, that religion is on the increase and on the way up. Now, I don’t believe that nor accept it for a moment.

I believe rather that evangelicalism is on its way out, but that as that woman stood— now, this is not the prophetical interpretation. It’s meant to be an illustration. As that woman in the twelfth chapter of Revelation stood and gave birth to a son, and that son immediately became the target for hell’s bullets, and God had to snatch him away to save him.

So evangelicalism is going to hive off, and there’s going to be a realignment of forces. Now you watch it, my brethren. There’s going to be a realignment of forces when God finds a few bold, courageous men who aren’t afraid of their paycheck and don’t care who likes them and dare to pray and then stand up and tell them what God said. And there’s going to be something new born out of this dying thing. And it will not be born around banquet tables. It will not be born around panel discussion tables.

It will not be born in any other way but in the way the man-child was in Revelation 12, the old-fashioned way. I hope I’m still going strong, if you would allow that last word to stand unchallenged, in the day when this realignment takes place. Some of us are going to be asked to stand up and be counted one of these times, whether we are going to follow the New Testament methods and morals and ways and techniques, or whether we’re going to claim evangelical doctrine and then invent our own idols and follow them.

The Holy Ghost will yet triumph, brethren, and I trust it may be in 1957. And I am telling you that if you will give yourself to prayer this year, if you will make prayer your career, and then not watch for little answers here and there, not pray that Peggy might pass her tests and then say, oh, say, God, you didn’t hear my prayer because Peggy got an X. Not that kind of praying, brethren. Not that kind of praying. That kind of praying is the cheap little grocery list praying. I want a package of pep and two bushels of eggs and a quart of milk and send a bill to Dad. Not that. That’s cheap praying.

But there’s another kind of praying, a praying in the Holy Ghost, a yearning that sometimes seems to have no object toward which it’s moving, but a yearning in the Holy Ghost. If you will give yourself to that kind of praying, there will be a pressure built up, and it will break over somewhere, not in the direction that we think, but in God’s direction at last, and the Holy Ghost will triumph. I believe He will triumph. I am not pessimistic. I believe He will triumph.

And this prayer pressure. And what do I mean by prayer pressure? Oh, really, brethren, I’m only using figures of speech because prayer in itself is nothing. Prayer is simply the means by which we bring God’s power into human affairs. That’s all. And it’s the power of God in human affairs that I’m talking about. Prayer in itself has no power. It is the power of God that prayer brings into human affairs. And it’s when God Almighty releases a little trickle of that mighty, mighty, flowing, vast, illimitable stream of energy into human affairs that the Spirit says, much!

So really it isn’t the prayer, it isn’t the length of time you pray, it isn’t how many times you pray every day, it is praying effectively so as to release that power into our Church and into your life and into your home and into your labors and love and business. And if we’ll only dare to believe this, we’ve been so poverty-stricken, so poverty-stricken.

You have not, because you have not asked. But if you’ll ask, the effectual, fervent prayer of a righteous man will do wonders, and it will build up pressure that it will break over into the work of God and the business of God, and we’ll see a realignment of forces, and we’ll see conversions that mean something, and we’ll see transformations that last.

So, shall we not determine, by the grace of God, that 1957 isn’t going to get by? You know what? It could easily be, and even probably will be, that I or Mr. McAfee, Brother Moore, or somebody else you’ve called in, may stand and talk in a low voice over the still form of some that now listen to me.

Time is wasting, judgment draws nigh, the Lord is coming, religion is festering at its root and rotting in its stems and branches. But there’s life, there’s life left yet, there’s life there, the root of the matter is present. And if God can find his praying people, his intercessors, who aren’t worried about little technical answers to prayer they can make a tract out of, but are ready to throw themselves out onto God like a traveling human and wrestle in the Holy Ghost with the powers of evil, until the pressure of the power of God is such that the forces of Satan are driven back and the pure thing is born, despised maybe and wondered at, but a pure thing will be born out of the writhing and prevailing of Christendom as we know it today.

I want to be, by the grace of God present, and I pray this church may be in on it. Ah, little Samuel, when God was going to do a terrible thing in Israel, called Samuel aside and whispered in Samuel’s ear. He couldn’t tell the old man, He had to tell the boy. And it came to pass just as God said it would. And that’s on the judgment side, but I’m interested in the other side. And I pray that when God wants to do something, he’ll tell me and I’ll tell you, or you’ll hear it and tell me.

And we’ll know that God is moving again as in the days of yore, moving to convert and purify and separate and moving to draw a line of demarcation sharp as a razor blade and wide as the gulf that separated Dives and Lazarus, so the church may be realigned and God’s ancient power may begin to flow again. And the muscle boys and the funny boys will take a back seat and watch the Holy Ghost do the work they futilely tried to do after the manner of man.

Shall we pray this year, brethren and sisters? Shall we call on God as we never have before? Maybe tonight we may have an altar service over this. I want to talk some more tonight. I want to preach tonight a sermon I preached eighteen years ago and got written into a booklet and I’ve been afraid to preach it ever since because I didn’t want to repeat it.

But I feel I must tonight re-preach a sermon I preached nearly about eighteen years ago. And I want you present. And perhaps God will break in on us and we’ll see him move to his own glory and our good.