Month: January 2025

Tozer Talks

Post author By pshappard
Post date January 26, 2025

“Whom Having Not Seen Ye Love”

Whom Having Not Seen Ye Love

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

October 4, 1953

I want you to notice verses 7 and 8, again, of 1 Peter 1, where the Holy Spirit says, verse 8, I believe, and verse 7 we’ll pass as having examined that to our satisfaction. In verse 8, whom having not seen, ye love, in whom though now ye see him not. Now that is what we’re interested in this morning. Whom having not seen, ye love, and in whom though now ye see Him not, yet believing, ye rejoice with joy unspeakable and full of glory.

Now, we have these two expressions very much alike, except in their tense. Whom having not seen, and now, ye see Him not. Having not seen has to do with any possible seeing him in the past, and now ye see him not, has to do with any possible seeing him now. And these Christians, these elect brethren, who were God’s by sanctification of the Spirit and sprinkling by the blood of Christ, were believers in that which they had not seen, and that that they were not seeing.

This is contrary to the current, and I suppose universal, proverb that seeing is believing. Believing that must depend upon seeing is a kind of believing, for it is a conclusion drawn from the testimony of the senses. But believing that depends upon seeing is not New Testament believing at all, for New Testament believing is a believing of a report about things unseen. And that is the difference between real New Testament faith and every other kind of so-called believing.

Now, I say they believed in the invisible, that’s another way of stating it. And this brings it close to Hebrews 11, 27, where it is written of the man of God Abraham that he was able to endure because he was looking at the things that were invisible. If you and I could see, actually see the invisible.

Now let us put it like this. Being what we are, we pretty much trust what we see, humanly. And if we could see all around us the wonders, the invisible things of the creation, we would never be lonely for a moment, and we would never doubt for a moment. But the invisible things are there, but they’re simply not seen unless you have faith. And Abraham had faith and was able to carry on because he could see that which was not seen and could not be seen.

And it says here that in so doing, these Christians experienced the invisible so vividly and so satisfyingly that they were able to rejoice with joy unspeakable and full of glory. I suppose that outside of our seeing, there is no time when we’re as dishonest as we are when we are praying.

We sing songs that are so dishonest that I hesitate to sing them, and yet I don’t want to be a speckled bird altogether. I have speckles enough on me now that I don’t want to become clear off my rocker. But the average song, when we sing it, if God Almighty were compelling us to be entirely 100 percent realistic, we just couldn’t sing it because it’s not true of us.

It was true probably of the man who wrote the song, My Faith Looks Up to Thee, Thou Lamb of Calvary, Savior Divine. That’s a beautiful song. And the man who wrote it said, the last line, oh, bear me safely up a ransomed soul. And the man who wrote it said, I was so moved by what I was writing and what I was thinking about that the last verse was written in a flood of tears. Now that man meant it. But I wonder how many of us mean it when we sing it today. My Faith Looks Up to Thee, Thou Lamb of Calvary. It is only by a charitable adaptation of the truth that we are able to sing most of the hymns that we sing at all. Love Divine, All Love’s Excelling, is another one of the hymns that we sing with very little meaning.

But I was thinking especially of a camp meeting number. I don’t know whether we ever sing it here or not, but we’ve all sung it at some time. The waves of glory roll, my shouts I can’t control, when comes the love of Jesus sweeping o’er my soul.

Now I can easily believe that the old brother who wrote that was so lost in the grace of God that when he said, the waves of glory roll, my shouts I can’t control, that he was literally telling the truth. But how many of us have sung that song? The waves of glory roll, my shouts I can’t control, and if the devil had a sense of humor, I am quite sure that he had both hands wrapped around his stomach to keep from exploding with laughter. For a lot of us who sing my shouts I can’t control can control our shouts easier than we can control our lusts. We can control our shouts easier than we can control our temper.

If the average Christian were to sing the waves of glory roll, my tongue I can’t control, he’d be telling the truth. But to say my shouts I can’t control is to lie to the face of God Almighty. And yet we do an awful lot of it.

Now I don’t want to work against Brother McAfee here and suggest that if you can’t feel it, don’t sing it. Rather, let’s compromise it and let’s put it like this. Let’s sing it, sing in our hearts, Oh God, it isn’t true, but I want it to be true. It isn’t so, Lord, but please make it so. Then I think God will understand, as when we sang this morning, our souls, how heavily they go to seek immortal joy. Some people have made great fun of that song, and they have said, How could it be?

Well, how could it be that we could sing a song like that? We grovel here below, fond of these earthly toys. Isaac Watts wrote this song, and he says, Look how we grovel here below, fond of these earthly toys. Our souls, how heavily they go. Some editor got to this and spoiled it, but Isaac Watts wrote, our souls, how heavily they go to reach eternal joys. I’ve heard that made fun of and satirized and lampooned by holiness preachers.

But brethren, if we are absolutely honest, the average Christian will sing, see how I grovel here below, fond of these earthly toys, rather than sing the waves of glory roll my shouts I can’t control. For the average man can control his shouts better than he can control his love of these earthly toys.

Now, the invisible. They saw the invisible and believed in it and rejoiced with joy unspeakable and full of glory. I don’t know how to tell you to get that. I only know they got it. They got it by believing in what they couldn’t see. And I suppose that’s the only way you and I’ll ever have a joy unspeakable and a shout that we can’t control.

Now, I want to call attention to this, that it’s characteristic of a Christian, that he believes in things that he cannot see. That is, he’s a believer in the invisible. He believes that there is a real world coexisting with this world, touching this world, and accessible to this world. I want you to get those three qualifying words, that there is a real world. I repeat, that there is never any contradiction between spirit and reality.

The contradiction is between spirit and matter, never between the spiritual and the real. So that the believer accepts and believes in a real world of which God is the King, an eternal kingdom, an eternal world, a spiritual and invisible world, coexisting with, touching, and accessible to this world.

Heaven is not so far away that we must take a jet airplane and continue through light years of speedy travel to get to heaven. That’s what the average Christian thinks of heaven, as being so far away. And it’s only again by accommodation that we sing about heaven being near and glory coming down our souls to greet.

The fact is, brethren, that the eternal world of which God is the King, which is inhabited by immortal spirits, and which has taken our dead Christian loved ones for a little time out of our sight, that world is as real, in fact, more real than the physical world at which we are so very familiar. And it coexists with our world. There is not a great vacuum gap between. As the stars in the heavens, there is a star. Then there are a few million light years of space, and then another star. No, my brethren, that is not the way with heaven and earth, but that the world you and I now see, and the invisible things of Him, are coexistent with each other.

Now, I said yesterday on the radio, maybe a couple of you listened, but I said yesterday that two things of equal density could not occupy the same place at the same time. And that is so widely and commonly known that I almost apologize for quoting it. But here is something we must remember on the other side, that two things that are not of equal density may coexist in the same place at the same time.

For instance, if you’re sitting in front of your fireplace, nobody does anymore, but if you should be sitting in front of a fireplace with a fire on, there would be two things coexisting for you. There would be light and heat. They are not of equal density, they’re not mutually exclusive, they’re mutually compatible. And they are the two things that are coming out of that fireplace.

Or change the figure to the sun in the heaven above. We have two things coming from the sun at the same time, coexisting with each other, heat and light. We’re warmed by the sun and were lighted by the sun. And light and heat do not exclude each other, they’re compatible, they intertwine each other and live together.

So, the world that God has made, we call nature, and the world that God has made, and he calls the heavens, are coexistent with each other. And not only coexistent with each other, but they touch each other. And they’re accessible to each other so that God could put a ladder up on the earth and have its top reach the sky, and angels ascending and descending upon that ladder.

The one world was accessible to the other world either way, the gates swung both directions, so that God could send His only begotten Son down, and He could carry Stephen up, and our prayers can go up and the answers can come down. The two worlds touch and are coexistent with each other and accessible one to the other.

Now, the believers in 1 Peter, that Peter wrote about there, were believers in that. They believed in the world that was real, the invisible world. And this distinguished them from every kind of materialist and materialism. Materialism has fallen on evil times in our day, so that the newspapers and magazines and radio commentators are all over on the side of the spiritual rather than the material, that is, in a carnal kind of way.

So, the materialism is not now the problem it used to be, but it’s still a problem. And it recurs and has a recrudescence every once in a while, of interest, that all that we see is simply made of matter, and that’s the end of it, that matter is all. We still run on to people that believe that, and if we live and the Lord tarries another twenty-five years, it’ll probably be back in the saddle, because materialism and spiritism chase each other in and out off the throne over the centuries, and Christians keep right on believing, no matter who may be on the popular throne, the materialists or the spiritists.

But a Christian is sharply distinguished from all kinds of materialism and all sorts of materialists. He does not believe that what he sees is of any great value. He does not believe that what he is able to touch with his hands ever is really worth very much. He endures as seeing the invisible, the immaterial, the spiritual in other worlds, not ghostly and phantom, but the spiritual, that which has real existence but is spirit instead of matter.

And a Christian believes that and lives in the light of it, and that distinguishes him forever from all of brands of materialism. But it also distinguishes him from all kinds of superstition and idolatry, for the idolater believes in the invisible too.

But the difference is that a Christian is one whose faith in the invisible has been corrected and chastened and purified by divine revelation, so that a heathen in Africa can kneel down before a stone, and if he’s an intelligent heathen, you say to him, why do you worship that stone? And he answers, I don’t. I worship the deity resident in the stone.

The Greeks used to kneel in front of Mount Olympus, and if you said to them, why are you worshiping toward Mount Olympus, they said, we do not worship a mountain, we worship the gods in the mountain. And even today, there are those who kneel before statues in churches, and if they’re instructed in their own beliefs, and you say to them, why do you worship that image? They say, we don’t worship that image. We worship God, of whom that image reminds us.

So that it’s possible to be a believer in the invisible and not be a Christian. But it’s not possible to be a Christian and not be a believer in the invisible. It’s possible to believe that there’s some kind of a spooky world somewhere that we’ve got to placate with rabbits’ feet and chestnuts and strange sayings and chains around our neck and medallions and all sorts of things.

That’s a belief in the invisible, but it’s a pagan, erroneous belief. But when Jesus Christ came and brought life and immortality to light through the gospel, and He stood upon His feet or sat down and opened His mouth and taught us, He corrected that false and sinful belief in superstitious things and told us what the real world really was. The only one who’d ever been there to come back and tell us.

Abraham died and sleeps, his body in the cave of Machpelah and his spirit is with God, but he’s never been back to tell us what it’s like. But Jesus had been there from eternity, and when He came, He told us of things of heaven and chided us because we didn’t accept what He said when He told us of things above.

So, the Christian is not a materialist, believing in the validity of all material things, and he is not an idolater but just believing vaguely in the existence of another world. He is a Christian who believes in what he was taught by the One who had been there and come across the threshold into our world, smelling of myrrh and aloes out of the ivory palaces, fragrant from the presence of the eternal King.

Now, not only does the Christian believe in the invisible world, but he figures on it. He acts and plans and lives as one who counts on the reality of the invisible. The businessman doesn’t. That is, the unsaved businessman. The man of the earth doesn’t believe in, or if he believes in, in the sense that he nods dutifully toward the belief in another world, he doesn’t let it change his plans any. He acts just the same as if there was no other world. He lays his plans precisely the same as if there wasn’t any invisible world, and he continues to live as if heaven was a myth and didn’t exist.

But the Christian counts on the other world, so that the invisible presence of Him, God and His eternal kingdom, and the spirits of just men made perfect in the holy Church of the Firstborn and the Holy Ghost and the invisible world, actually influences his life, actually shapes his plans, actually determines his habits, and as well as comforts and consoles and supports him.

It is a comforting thought that there is God near us. It is a comforting thought that there are invisible worlds near us, and it consoles us to know that when Jesus prayed in the Garden of Gethsemane, there came a legion of angels, or there came angels, to comfort him. And He said He could have had legions of angels by His side.

Now, nothing has changed, my brethren. The angels keep their wanted places. But it is we, it is we who have failed to see it. It is our unbelieving hearts that have missed the many-splendored thing. The angels are still here. There is a world, and that world, God and the presence of God and the Spirit of God and the inhabitants of that world into which really you and I have entered in our spirits, for we live in that world, too.

We live, as Thomas Kelly says, on two planes. We live on the plane of the natural, and we live on the plane of the spiritual. And that is why a Christian is such a wonderful and weird and strange and puzzling creature, because he is both animal and spiritual, and he insists upon living for the spiritual while he is down here in his mortal body. And that makes a Christian a funny fellow.

Oftentimes two men living on the same street together at 1631 and 1633, side by side, one of them is a good-natured, easy-going, relaxed, downright old sinner on his way to hell and doesn’t believe it, and is easy to get along with, and nobody bothers nobody, and he is friendly and waves when he goes down the street. He is a sinner, an Esau, a good-natured rebel on his way to hell.

Alongside of him there lives a Christian, one who has been born again and who has been given the blessed Holy Ghost as the wedding ring, and he has his troubles. He weeps when there is apparently nothing to weep about, he is moody when apparently there is nothing to change a mood at all, preoccupied when somebody else or the man next to him is all wanting to talk, he is preoccupied.

When the man next door can’t keep his radio off, he is worried about whether them bums will win the series. This fellow may put his Bible under his arm and start off somewhere to a street meeting or to a prayer meeting. He is not as comfortable a fellow as the sinner. He doesn’t act quite the same. Why? Because the sinner lives on only one plane, the physical, and the Christian lives on both. In his body he is down here in the flesh, but in his spirit, he is up yonder with God. And the result is that he is not as comfortable a being to be around, maybe, as he might be. I have always said that prophets are never comfortable people to have around, but they are indispensable if we are not going to rot.

Now, the Christian is also, it is characteristic of him, that he is preoccupied with the invisible, but I think I’ve said enough about that. Now, I would speak briefly about the invisible and the Lord’s Supper.

What is a sacrament? A sacrament is that wherein the invisible meets and touches the visible. The eternal meets and touches the temporal. Water baptism we call a sacrament, and there, material water and material river, material tank, is made to body forth an invisible and spiritual truth. The Lord’s Supper is another sacrament wherein we use the material as a thin garment to disguise the spiritual. Wherein we use the temporal as a plate upon which we serve the eternal. That has always been the belief of the Christians.

Now there are two schools of thought about the Lord’s Supper, the sacrament. One is that the elements actually become visible, the invisible becomes visible, and that when you take the cake from the tray, you are touching consciously and lifting the very body that Mary gave to Jesus. That seems to me unworthy of a serious answer.

There is another school of thought, and that is that the invisible is present in, underneath and behind the visible, and I believe in that. I believe that wherever faith has eyes to see, there is the smiling presence of the Son of God. I believe that in the Lord’s Supper, the bread and wine, we can trace it, we know where it came from, we bought it, there is nothing magic about it. It could be fed to the birds, it could be drunk by any sinner, there is nothing magic about it. But it is an object lesson. It sets forth in material terms the spiritual. It sets forth in temporal terms the eternal. And wherever faith is present, we touch and handle things unseen.

Now, Paul rebuked the Corinthian Christians because they failed to discern the Lord’s body. What did he mean by that? He meant you have been engrossed with the material, and you have not recognized the spiritual. He meant that you have drunk the wine and enjoyed it, eaten the bread and been full, but in doing it you have not had faith in the invisible. You have not discerned the Lord’s body. You are materialists, he said, and your eating and drinking at he Lord’s Supper is a carnal thing, and it will condemn you. And some of you actually will die early because of it. You will get sick and sleep because you have grieved God by your materialistic thinking.

He said, don’t you know that this is the approach to the invisible, that this is the doorway to the spiritual? And when you take the Lord’s Supper by faith, you recognize that you’ll receive the spiritual, though you know what the elements are, and the chemists could tell you. Nevertheless, it is through the gateway of the material that we reach the spiritual in this instance. So that the spiritual and the invisible and the eternal are right here. Faith recognizes it. Unbelief waits until the service is over and thinks it is too long.

Now, said the man of God, now do we touch and handle things unseen, exquisitely said. Now do we touch and handle things unseen. If he had meant, now do we touch the bread, now do we touch the wine, he wouldn’t have said unseen. Now do we touch and handle things unseen.

And Jesus said, I have meat to eat that you know not of. Here was the tired, dusty, weary Jesus, hungry from a long day of travel and fasting. And when they came to him, He said, don’t worry about Me, I have meat to eat that ye know not of. He was feasting on the invisible. Be known to us, the man of God prayed, be known to us in breaking bread, but do not then depart. Savior, divide with us and spread thy table in our heart. Then sup with us in love divine, thy body and thy blood, that living bread, that heavenly wine, be our immortal food.

Some of the old Saints called the sacraments the food of immortality. Why can’t we believe it today? Not believing superstitiously in the magic of words, not believing ignorantly in some woozy, ghostly ideas of another world, but believing with clean, sharp belief in the revealed truth that Jesus Christ brought. And believe that heaven is not far away only, but nigh at hand. That the eternal God is not in some Olympia, hidden in clouds, but is accessible to the human heart wherever faith is. That ought to transform our simple Protestant communion service into a heavenly service.

Now, Father, we would repent before Thee this morning. Lord, rather than just pray, we would repent before Thee, O Lord, for our materialistic minds, thinking in terms of this world, judging, weighing, measuring, valuing as men do. Father, this is wrong, forgive us.

And Father, our preoccupation with earthly things also, we would repent this morning. As a people, we would repent for our absorption in the things that pass away. O Lord, forgive us, cleanse us, wash us, so that as we quiet our hearts and in silence hear a voice, we may not have on us the ragged, lint and dust of unconfessed sin. That our garments may be white this morning, pure, shining, that we may receive as unworthy but believing people. Break the bread of life this morning, O Bread of Life, break it, Wine of the Soul, spill it, feed us, till we want no more. In Jesus’ holy name, Amen.

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Messages

Tozer Talks

Post author By pshappard
Post date January 19, 2025

“In Hope of Eternal Life“

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In Hope of Eternal Life

Pastor and Author A.W. Tozer

January 26, 1958

At the young people’s hour tonight and the senior young people, I expect to be present and will give a short message. I want all my young friends to be there to hear what I have to say. I want to give a practical talk on how to make the most of your present spiritual privileges and means of grace. And then I’d like also to accent the family night, Wednesday night, 7:45, this Wednesday night. It will be Family Night, Reports Lecture.

Now, we are in Titus, where Paul says that he is a servant of God and apostle, sent to declare the faith of God’s elect and acknowledging of the truth, the promotion of the truth, which is after godliness, in a hope of eternal life which God that cannot lie promised before the world began. Now, I think that’s probably as far as we’ll get.

I talked last week on this phrase, in hope of eternal life, now, which God that cannot lie promised before the world began. If you people who don’t preach want to know how humiliated we preachers feel, why, I’ll whisper something to you. That an apostle, inspired by the Holy Ghost, can write a letter to a church or to a man and pack it so tight with truth that four or five words will be enough for us. That’s rather humiliating. I’d like to think that I could paddle right along beside Paul, but Paul has to wait for me to catch up, wait weeks, months for me to catch up with him. So, he said, in hope of eternal life, and that was last week, which God that cannot lie promised before the world began, that’s this week.

Now, we look at that, God that cannot lie, of course we know what God it is, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, whom Paul has said to be the only God. We have one Father, one God. And he told us here of the hope of the promise. We have the hope of eternal life, we have eternal life now, and we have the hope of eternal life in its broader aspects in the world to come. Now, we have this as a promise. We have this as a promise. And I would rather have some people’s promise than to have other people’s gifts.

A long time ago, a great preacher was in this city, I think one of the greatest preachers of the first fifty years of church history, Paul Rader. He said that a man, a businessman that he personally knew to be rather windy, and not too much given to fulfill his promises, who allowed his imagination to run away with his ability to produce, promised him he was going to give him, I think, if I recall, a hundred thousand dollars for missions. Rader said, have you got a dime? He said, Sure. He said, could I have it now for missions? He said, yes. Now he said, Thank you. He said, I know God will get this. But he wasn’t sure about that promised hundred thousand, but the dime, he knew God would get that.

Well, that was his half-humorous but profoundly meaningful way of saying that some people’s promises are not too valuable. And I would turn it around and say that I would rather live by some people’s promise than by other people’s gifts. And here we have a promise, not yet that full eternal life, but the promise of eternal life.

And always remember this, that a promise is only worth whatever the character is of the man who made it, so that the God that cannot lie, promised, and this promise is worth just as much as God, no more, no less. All truth rests down upon and begins with God. A promise is only as sound, I repeat, as the one that made it. It is amusing, if it were not so obviously painful, to see people struggling to have faith, on their knees struggling and writhing to have faith.

A frantic struggle to believe only indicates that the person who is thus struggling has lost sight of God and has got involved in God’s promises. God’s promises are made by God, and they are as good as God and as sure as God, and they are to us whatever God is, and they cannot be less nor more. They are whatever God is. And when a person is struggling to believe a promise, it’s obvious that he has detached the promise from the God who made it and is for the time in a state of mental confusion.

Remember, you only have to ask who made the promise, and if you can get a satisfactory answer, who made the promise, then you’ve gone a little way. Then if you say, what has the record been of this person who made the promise, and if examination shows the record to have been 100 percent sound, that he always came through the promise, if further investigation shows that this person has never been known to be anything but honest and true, and if further investigation shows that this person is able to make good on the promise, then why worry about the promise? Think first about the man who made it. You get a letter promising you something, and you say, now, Lord, help me to believe this. Help me to believe this. Oh, I want to believe this, Father. Help me to believe this.

Well, you don’t want to believe it if it isn’t so. If a man wrote me a letter and said, Mr. Tozer, I’m going to give you a Cadillac. Well, I don’t, my wife, I guess, could learn to drive it, but if somebody gave me a Cadillac, or was going to give me a Cadillac, first I’d look whose signature was at the bottom of the letter. And I would then quietly decide, or try to find out, whether the man was used to making promises.

One dear little old brother who’s long ago gone to heaven, who used to be in our church years ago, and whose mind began to break, and I never noticed it, never noticed anything wrong until one day he came up to me and said, did you get the car? And I said, what car? And he said, why, I have given 40 automobiles to missionaries and preachers this last month. And he said, I wonder if you got yours. And I shook his hand and said, no, not yet, and I knew. Dear little old brother, he, not long after that, he went off to be with his Lord. His mind was breaking. And what do they call it, blood shut off from the mind and it doesn’t function? Some great men, including Emerson, and Dr. Simpson, and Dr. Zemmer, and many others have gone that way. Their minds wouldn’t work toward the last.

Well now, if I investigated and I found that this was simply a kindly promise by a man who was beginning to slip, then I’d smile it off. But if I looked at the bottom of the letter and I knew that that letter was signed by a man who not only had always kept his promises, but was fully capable of keeping them, why, I wouldn’t worry about it. I’d be looking up on which lever to pull to start awaiting the curb, because I know I’d get it. And it’s this way with the promises of God, God who cannot lie promised.

Now that’s all you have to know. Grant me God and the promises are all right. The struggle to believe promises, I insist, is psychologically and mentally off. It’s not sound, because it is a wanting a thing to be true, but not being sure that it is and trying to make yourself feel that it is. That’s not the way to approach it. Who made the promise? Is he able to make good on it? Is his character such that he will make good on it? Find that out. And when you’ve found that out, your promise is as sound as the throne of God.

God that cannot lie promise and all truth begins with God and rests down upon God. So don’t struggle to believe God and don’t insult God by asking, help me to believe thee. God, that’s saying, help me to have confidence in thy character, O God. Help me to stop thinking that you’re crooked. Help me, Lord, to believe that you’re honest.

Well, that would insult your father if you’d go to him and say, Dad, you promised to see me through college, but I can’t believe you. Help me to believe you. Well, your father would say, have I lied to you in the past? And you’d say, never. And have I always made good on all my promises? Yes. Well, why do you doubt me now? And he’d feel bad about it because it would be a reflection on his fatherly kindness and his basic honesty.

God that cannot lie made these promises, this promise of eternal life. And I, for one, don’t intend to lie awake nights wondering if he can keep it. I know God will keep it all right.

Now, Paul here uses a negative, I want you to notice. He said, the God that cannot lie. Saint Dionysius said, we know God more perfectly by negatives than we do by affirmatives. That is, we can know what God is not better than we can know what God is seeing that the name of God is secret, and the nature of God is so infinitely removed from ours that we fallen men find it very difficult to visualize what God is like, but we can know what God is not. And the theologians have always had to follow that more or less. To understand God’s perfections, they have to go to negatives.

For instance, if you were preaching on the self-existence of God, you’d say God had no origin, and I don’t know how else you would say it, because human language won’t go any further than that. That’s it. God had no origin. Everything else had an origin, including the very seraphim and archangels, but not God. Therefore, if God had no origin, therefore, He must exist in Himself.

And so, we get the positive by means of the negative. If you wanted to preach on God’s self-sufficiency or meditate on it, you could say God has no support, and if God has no support, if nothing holds him up, then he must hold himself up. Therefore, He must be self-sufficient.

And so, by a negative, you would have arrived at a positive. If you wanted to think on the eternity of God, you’d say God had no beginning, and if God had no beginning, he always must have been. And if he always must have been, therefore, he is eternal, and you’d have the eternity of God.

If you wanted to meditate on the immutability of God, you’d say that God knows no change, and if God does not change, He always must have been what He is now. And if He always was what He is now, it’s easy to reason that He will always be what He was and is. And infinitude, if you wanted to meditate on God’s infinitude, you could say God has no limitations.

Well, if God has no limitations, then it can only mean that there is no boundary anywhere, that God is limitless. This is, of all thoughts, the most difficult to grasp, so we’ll skip over it pretty fast. And if you wanted to think on the omniscience of God, you’d say, well, God cannot learn. God cannot learn. Why? Because he already knows all there is to know. Knowing Himself perfectly and containing all things, He knows all that can be known.

That is the negative. So, Paul used it here, God that cannot lie. And the Scriptures, not only the theologians, but the Scriptures also follow this method. He says in Isaiah about Himself, the Lord fainteth not, neither is weary. And He says, I, the Lord, change not. And He says, He that keepeth thee will not slumber nor sleep. And He says, He cannot deny Himself. And He says, with God, nothing is impossible. And He says, with God, it was impossible for Him to lie.

So, there we have all these passages from the Scriptures showing that we can know God by what He is not. And so Paul used it freely and said, God that cannot lie. If he had simply said the true God or the God of truth, you could have figured that out, all right, but it’s more powerful put negatively.

And the gentleman who believes in positive thinking might learn a lesson here, though he never will. That sometimes you can back into the station better than you can pull ahead in, in this terrible day. And this is true, that sometimes God is able to tell us what He is by telling us what He’s not, better than by telling us what He is.

So this hope of eternal life was promised by this kind of God. What are you going to do? Go home and sweat it out and wonder if it’s true and pray for faith. No, get acquainted with God and be at peace. Acquaint thyself with Him and you will not worry. And then he says He promised before the world began. That is, other versions say before eternal ages He promised.

Now, if He promised before the world began, He must have promised somebody who was present. And if He promised before the eternal ages, He must have promised somebody who was before the ages were.

Now to whom then was the promise made? Well, I wouldn’t have thought of this myself, but there lived about 200 or more years ago, a brilliant and godly Presbyterian preacher by the name of John Flavell. I’ve always called him Flavell, but I see that the dictionaries of biography call him Flavell. John Flavell, he was an English Presbyterian preacher.

And when I was a boy on the farm, for the sheer paucity of reading matter, I read everything I could get a hold of from the time I can remember, calendars, anything, railroad schedules, anything, even the writing material or printed matter on cereal boxes. I read everything. And we had nothing around there to read, nothing. We didn’t even take a daily paper. I couldn’t read that, nothing. My mother borrowed a book occasionally and I’d read that.

And somewhere there fell into my hand a book of sermons by John Flavell. Now, John Flavell was an old Puritan, old Presbyterian Puritan type of preacher. And though I was only a boy, maybe 12, I read his sermons. And I remember to this day after the passing of the years, some of the brilliant and wonderful things John Flavell said.

And he was preaching in one sermon on the text, therefore, from Isaiah 53:12. Therefore, I will divide him a portion with the great and he shall divide the spoil with the strong. And he was preaching on that text, therefore. And he said, this indicates, this indicates that the Father made a covenant with the Son before the world was and before man was, and that the covenant rests not upon poor man, but upon God. That man’s salvation was a compact made between the Father and the Son. And incidentally, John Milton puts that same thing into Paradise Lost. We’ve forgotten to read Paradise Lost.

Well, my brother, I think we ought to read Flavell and Milton. I believe we’d get more out of it than we would out of reading Moon Mullins. And he says that the Father made a compact with the Son, back there, and therefore shall He divide a portion with the great and divide the spoil with the strong. And he went on brilliantly to set before his readers in heavy language without illustration and without any side remarks. They weren’t supposed to have illustrations and side remarks. They had gone to church in those good old days, or the “Kirk,” they called it in Scotland. They went there, not to hear stories, but to hear theology, an hour long, two hours long.

And John Flavell’s sermon on, therefore, from Isaiah 53, that God made the covenant with the Son before eternal ages. With whom else could He have made a covenant before the worlds began? Before there was a seraphim to stand by the throne of grace or the sea of fire, before there was an angel, before a man ever breathed, with whom did He make His compact and to whom did He make His promise? He made it to His Eternal Son, who later became flesh to dwell among us, so that the God who cannot lie promised before the world began.

Now your certain hope for the future rests upon this kind of God, this kind of God, the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, and the promises depend upon the covenant, and that’s why you don’t have to worry. Your certain hope for the future absolutely rests in God, and I want to say this to you. It’s independent of anything you can see or touch, independent of anything you can see or touch, this covenant, anything that you can see, touch, taste, smell, hear, anything that is sensible, that belongs to the senses, is completely divorced from the things we tie it up to.

We try to tie Christianity up to democracy, civilization, politics, financial conditions, and all the rest. Never, never, never, never. Your hope for all the ages doesn’t rest upon democracy. What do I think about democracy? Do I think that democracy is a good way of life? Yes, I do, but I don’t think it’s the best, but I think it’s a good way of life.

I think the best government is theocracy. When Jesus Christ comes back to rule the earth, that will be theocracy, the rule of God over the world, that’s the best. I think second best is democracy, the rule of the people.

And I am quite satisfied with our republican form of government, our American way of life, and I have nothing to say but good about it. But I would only say this, that Christianity has flourished under every sort of political system. It flourished in the court of Caesar. It flourished in the Middle Ages, in the days of chivalry and the days of manors and lords of the manor and serfs and slaves. It prospered in the day when men were slaves, as Paul said he was a slave of Jesus Christ, drawing an illustration from current society.

It flourishes now in Korea. It flourishes now under Chiang Kai-shek, out on that little island of Formosa. It flourishes in tiny little places in some of the hard, tough countries of South America. And Christianity rests upon God and it antedates not only all political systems, but all politicians, all statesmen and all men. And it goes back before eternal ages and links itself like a mighty chain to the very throne of God. Therefore, political systems don’t change anything. But you say, well, political system can soon stamp out Christianity.

That’s what we think, my brethren, but I don’t believe it for a moment. I am not, I am not for these Russian and other church men who come over here and try to pull our legs and tell us that they have religious freedom in Russia. I know that they don’t, but I also know that the Holy Ghost hasn’t permitted the seed of God to die in Russia.

I heard the other night on FM a beautiful, beautiful choir. It was a Russian choir. The recording was made in London, and it was made recently. It was sung by Russian voices. I lay in my bed after I’d gone to bed. I lay and listened to the FM, to this wonderful music of the Russian choir. And in my heart, I had an indignation. I said, people like this, that have genius like this and ability like this, that have the warmth and the emotion and the feeling of passion that they have, that they have to be ruled by those devils in the Kremlin. That these fine, warm-hearted, friendly, religious-minded Russian people have to be ruled over by these communistic, atheistic devils.

In my heart, I’m indignant that it should be so. And I pray that the day may come, even in Russia, when God will destroy this octopus and will take from the hearts and brains and bodies of the Russian people the chains that are there. For all you have to do is destroy the ruling classes in the Kremlin and destroy communism. And you have the finest and most emotional and passionate and friendliest people.

Now, don’t misunderstand me and go ahead and say Tozer made an impassioned speech in favor of Russia. Never in favor of communism. It is the breed of the devil. It is the vomit of hell. It is the seepings from the sewers of limbo. And I hate it with everything in me. And all of its sneaking devilishness and all of its evil chicanery. I hate it. But I pity the people upon whose hearts and minds it’s been clamped down like a vice. They’re better than that. They don’t deserve it. But you say, then, why don’t they rise and throw it off? They tried that in Hungary, didn’t they? You know what happened there. Only God can deliver them.

So don’t you believe for a minute that the ancient seed of God that was planted in the minds of the common, plain people is dead in Russia. There are still Christians. They are operating under difficulties, but they’re still there and they’re still in China. Don’t think that the 40 or more years that our Alliance missionaries labored and sweat and struggled and suffered in China is for nothing. There are still Christians. The God who cannot lie promised before the world began and He promised before Marx and Lenin and He promised before Mao Zedong and Khrushchev.

Well, some others would say, well, Christianity must go along with civilization. No. Civilization is simply a combination, application of science to man’s life. And it’s given us this we call civilization. Christianity, philosophy, and science are combined. That is the top froth of Christianity that’s combined with science and philosophy to create this civilization that we have now. That civilization can disappear, and we can go back to the ox cart. And still, it won’t change anything in heaven yonder. It won’t change anything inside of men. It won’t change the covenants of God and the God who promised His Son in holy compact before the ages began. He will not fail us if our civilization is destroyed. It goes back to the Constitution of the United States.

I believe in this constitution of the United States. I hold it to be one of the greatest documents, as the English said, ever struck off by the hand of man. For all these years it has kept us free, the freest people in the world. And I grieve when I see Supreme Courts interpreting the constitution so as to shield the communistic vermin that crawls in Washington. But nevertheless, before the Constitution of the United States was written, the cross stood high above all time.

And so, it doesn’t depend upon it. It doesn’t depend on politics, nor wars, nor financial situation, nor space travel, nor churches, nor denominations, nor the Christian and Missionary Alliance. God that cannot lie promised before the world began. And there is our hope. God never does anything new, said Meister Eckhart. By that he means that God never does anything suddenly or impulsively.

He says, behold, I will do a new thing, and I make all things new. But he’s talking about our new. He only talks from our side. He said, behold, I will do something that from your standpoint will look new. Behold, I will do something that to you will seem new. But He does nothing that He hasn’t covenanted to do with His eternal Son before an angel wing trembled by the sea of fire.

He never does anything new. And the old German theologian is right. God never does anything new. And if He blesses you today, He promised it before the world was. And if He saves you today, He does it according to a covenant He made with His Son before the eternal ages. And if He answers your prayer, He answers it according to a compact He made with His eternal Son before the world was.

So, God never does anything new. God never adds any codicils to His will. When God made His will, He made it and sealed it in blood and settled it in the God who cannot lie, swore by Himself because He could swear by no other. And He never adds any codicils. Our assurance is in Him.

Let me read 2 Timothy 1.9, and we’ll close. Who has saved us and called us with an holy calling, not according to our works, but according to his own purpose and grace, which was given us in Christ Jesus before the world began. Maybe we could read yet a little passage from Ephesians 1. To the praise of the glory of His grace, wherein He hath made us accepted in the beloved, in whom we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of sins, wherein He hath abounded toward us in all wisdom and prudence, having made known unto us the mystery of His will according to His good pleasure, which He hath purposed in Himself, that in the dispensation of the fullness of times He might gather together all things in Christ, both which are in heaven and which are on earth, even in Him in whom also we have obtained an inheritance, being predestinated according to the purpose of Him who worketh all things after the counsel of His will, that we should be to the praise of His glory who first trusted in Christ.

Ah, my brother, you don’t have to worry about the promises nor about the God who made them. All you have to be bothered about is whether you are living as you should live, whether you love Him as you should, whether you are living as clean as you should live and as right and as good, and whether you are as useful and as fruitful as God wants you to be. You can think about that and pray over that all you want to, distrust yourself all you want to, never insult the Majesty in the heavens by doubting Him. For He is the God who cannot lie, and He promised eternal life before the world began. And we who have believed Him become part now of that eternal compact which He made with His Son for eternal ages. Amen and amen.

Tags Eternal Life

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Tozer Talks

Post author By pshappard
Post date January 12, 2025

“How We Can Know the Will of God“

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How We Can Know the Will of God

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

December 9, 1956

The book of Isaiah, 48th chapter. Isaiah 48, verse 17. Thus saith Jehovah thy Redeemer, the Holy One of Israel, I am Jehovah thy God, which teacheth thee to profit, which leadeth thee by the way that thou shouldst go. Now the words, the word Lord in capital letters, twice used here, Jehovah of course. I am Jehovah thy God. I teach thee to profit. I lead thee by the way that thou shouldst go.

Now I said that I would tonight talk to you about how to discover the will of God for your life. And this is one of two of most asked questions. When a new man comes, an evangelist or a Bible teacher goes somewhere and appears before an audience, and people come to him and say, I’d like a word with you. You can be sure, or at least it’s very probable, that he will ask, how can I be filled with the Holy Spirit? Or how can I be sure of God’s will for my life? Sometime again I’ll come back around to talk on that first question. How can I be filled with the Holy Spirit? But tonight, I want to talk about how I can be sure that I have the will of God for my life.

Now the text is very plain, and the embarrassment of getting a text or choosing a text to talk on this matter is that there is so much Scripture, so many passages of Scripture, that you are embarrassed for the abundance of them rather than for the absence of them. And in the text it says that Jehovah is God and He teaches us to profit, and He leads us in the way that we should go.

Now the first thing that I will say to you is that you’re going to have to start believing something. And one of the things you’re going to have to believe is that God is willing to lead you and teach you, and that it is for your eternal profit this side of the grave and beyond. God doesn’t do things halfway. He has in mind our present and our future. And He leads us and teaches us to profit for our good in this side of death and on the other side. And that’s the only two sides there are.

Now this is basic to successful Christian living. You see, you’ve always got to be fighting your tendency, as I have, to plunge into paganism and think as a Christian in a pagan manner. For we have absorbed from paganism the notion that God is a testy and exacting God. Jesus used a word about it, austere: very hard and logical and legal and tough to get along with.

And we have absorbed this from paganism, American paganism, that God is testy and churlish and that He enjoys seeing us squirm. The whole idea of penance is built on that, that God enjoys seeing us squirm, that God is altogether such a one as we are. God complained about that once. He said, thou thoughtest I was altogether like you.

And that’s wrong because God is exactly the opposite from that. And we have absorbed the idea that God will punish us sternly and that he will somehow beat and chasten and flail the badness out of us. And our sense of guilt helps this and makes us feel this, because our sense of guilt makes us bring in a verdict that we ought to be punished.

And the man is not of what we call under conviction for sin until he believes that he ought to be punished. The man who doesn’t believe he ought to go to hell will never go to heaven because it is one of the requisites of repentance that we believe that we ought to perish except by the mercy of God. And because we have this guilty feeling that we ought to be punished, why, we won’t forgive ourselves and we’ll not really believe that God has forgiven us. We punish ourselves. The psychologists have names for these things, and to some degree theology has also.

But the refusal to forgive yourself, the idea that you ought not to be led, that you’re not the one, that this is all right for saints, but you’re not the one because you ought to be punished. Well, of course you should. But as Eckhart says, this notion, that is, I want to quote him on one sentence, but he says about this notion that God is testy and exacting, he says, the Lord wants His friends to be rid of such notions. I think he’s perfectly right.

The Lord wants his friends to be rid of such notions, for the truth is that God is all goodness and mercy and delights not in punishing but in being good to us. And He never delights in punishing us. The Lord never took any pleasure in the death of sinners, and He never takes any pleasure in the chastisement of his children. Never. And the Lord never takes any pleasure in humiliating us.

Now, there is a school of thought, it isn’t really organized, you just hear it here and there, it flutters about like a sour butterfly, but it lights here and there, and you will find it getting into the language of the preachers, that God loves to humiliate His people. Stories are told of how God brings somebody down until he whimpers and trembles and blubbers, and then the Lord forgives him, and all is well.

Well, the Lord humbles us, but he never humiliates us. The devil and the world and sin will humiliate, but God made us in His image, and God is not going to humiliate His image. He’s going to humble sin, but He’s not going to humiliate us. The Lord never wants us to get to a place where we lose self-respect, and that’s of course what humiliation is.

Now, God delights in our profit forever. He delights in our holiness, in our health, in our happiness, in our fruitfulness, in our profit and in our reward. God delights in this. If you could only go out with this one thought in your mind tonight, God delights in my prosperity, it could change the whole weather, all the climate of your life for all time to come, if you could go out with that idea in your mind. And because God delights not in punishing, but He delights in our health and happiness and fruitfulness and reward, He leads us in the way that we should go.

Now, I want to show you that there are three dimensions here, and these dimensions are, he leads us in a way that will honor God, profit us, and bless others. Now, those are the three dimensions, and you can’t get away from them. There is no place else you can go. Of course, you’re in a world as big as the universe, but it’s a three-cornered world. It is a three-dimensional world at any rate.

In God, everything that you do, God wants it to have three reasons and three motives, back of it, or at least three to eventuate in three results. To honor Him, profit you, and bless everybody else. That’s the will of God. Now, how does God do this? And this is what we’re concerned with tonight.

Now, if you want to, you can start taking notes right here. I will say one thing tonight, everything else I’ll say, probably you have heard before. But I will say one thing tonight, and I’ll point it out when I come to it, that if you believe, if you dare to believe, and if you will go home believing, and if you will write it in your heart and across your mind, and in your thinking, and in your praying, if you’ll have this one thing, it will give you guidance for all the rest of the days. I’ll point it out when I come to it. But leading up to it, let me point out to you that to get a leading from God, first of all, the lead of God requires that we be his children indeed.

Now, there’s a sharp line drawn in the Bible between the children of Adam and the children of God. Religion, just religion, Christian religion as we know it, what we call Christendom. I never liked the word. Christendom doesn’t draw that sharp line. We gloss it over for politeness’ sake and for tolerance sake. We gloss it over. And if a fellow is decent at all, he doesn’t beat his wife and curse his children, why, we’re willing to believe that he’s in the kingdom or partway in the kingdom. And if he gives a hundred dollars to Hungarian relief, we’re willing to believe that he must be a wonderful fellow. And if he appears at church on the average of three or four times a month, why, he’s in.

Now, the Bible makes a sharp distinction between the children of Adam and the children of God. It isn’t a question of righteousness, it’s a question of birth. And to ignore it for any reason, tolerance or politeness, is to violate the Scriptures and to go contrary to the teaching of Christ and of the apostles and the historic church.

Only the children of God can profit by what I’m saying to you now. And only the children of God can take the text, I am Jehovah, which teacheth thee to profit and leadeth thee in the way that thou shouldest go.

Now, another thing is, we must be dedicated to the glory of God. There is an evil emphasis today, and it’s getting stronger and stronger all the time. It is to use God and bargain with God and go into partnership with God, and even give your money in order that you might invest it in God and God get a return back on it, like going to the First National Bank. You give your tithe, or you double your tithe, and then you tell the story with shining face, I doubled my tithe last year, and so I doubled my profit. It’s wonderful how God blesses me.

Now, that is the Christianity of the day. It’s not the Christianity of those men and women who hid in caves in the rocks, and who took the spoiling of their goods joyfully. It’s not the Christianity of Him who had nowhere to lay his head. It’s not the Christianity of the apostles who gave up everything and followed Christ. It is not the religion of the fathers who were slain, who were sawn asunder, who were thrown over cliffs, or who were sewed up in sacks and drowned in the sea, who were thrown into the arena and chewed up by lions, and who lost all.

It was not their Christianity, but it’s ours. It’s today. It’s to use God. Get what you can out of Him. You’ll find question-and-answer columns and a little column on the editorial page of the newspaper with some reverend writing and telling you how you can use God, and it’s on the air sometimes, how we can get a profit out of God, and how we can bargain with him, like old Jacob. Oh God, if you’ll bless me, I’ll give you a ten. God had to change Jacob’s name. He was ashamed of it. He changed it to Israel and got rid of that business.

And then we accept earthly success as a proof of heavenly favor. Now, that isn’t positively any proof at all. You can go bankrupt and still have the smile of God on your heart. You can make millions and have the frown of God on you because of your sin. Now, God will never lead anybody for his own glory.

Now, I think I ought not to lean over backwards the other direction. I don’t mean that if you’re having a profitable year that therefore you’re backsliding. No, we do not equate backsliding or profit with backsliding. We only say that whether it’s the will of God that for a given year you should make money or lose, it is always the will of God that you should profit for now and for eternity. But it’s not financial profit.

You never can tell how well off a Christian is by looking at his bank book. Never. You never can tell the spiritual status of a Christian by looking at the size, model, and year of his automobile. Never, never, because there’s no relation there. God prospered Israel in earthly things, but he profits His church in spiritual things. But God will never lead us except for His own glory. And He will never lead anybody for his own glory.

And then, we must be fully surrendered to Christ. So, when I say a little later, how can we get the will of God, remember that if you’re not fully surrendered to Christ, you cannot be sure you have the will of God. Because it requires that we do be dedicated to the glory of God and surrendered to Christ Himself.

Now, let me warn you, don’t imagine that if you’re dedicated to a church, everything will be all right. There are people who have lived a lifetime in a church. They’re part and parcel, they’re part of the furniture in a church. They’re old deacons who have watched a generation come and go down. And we say, oh, he’s dedicated to the church, he’s surrendered to the church. Never, never, never. To be surrendered to a denomination or even a local church like this, no, never.

Then there are others who are all whipped up over a doctrine. They have just discovered that immersion is the right mode, or a pouring is the right mode. Or, they have just discovered that there will be a seven-year period between the first and second coming, or that there isn’t going to be two comings. So they get all whipped up over a doctrine. You can go vastly astray if your consecration is to a doctrine, however right the doctrine might be. The Lord never says, surrender yourself to the doctrine. He says, surrender yourself to Me.

And then there are those who are all surrendered to a project. Somebody decides that God has called him to paint a Scripture text on rocks along the highway. And he gets himself a paintbrush and an old Ford, and sweats and labors and works hard and lives on hamburgers in order to get that done. He’s got a project on. Somebody else’s project is something else. Christians are all divided up into projects. They used to say we’re divided into sects, but now we’re divided into projects. And it’s this project and that project.

Come up some, oh, say Wednesday to my office and I’ll show you some mail. They want you; I don’t know where they think we got the money, but everybody has a project and he’s dedicated to that project. He lives and dies by it. Never make the mistake of dedicating yourself to a project, neither foreign missions or evangelism or Jewish work or anything else. Do those things and serve in those things. They’re all in the will of God. But surrender yourself to Jesus Christ and not to a project and not to a plan, but to Jesus Himself.

And always remember that a shepherd can’t lead a self-willed sheep. If you’re not surrendered, you can’t be led. I am the Lord that teacheth thee to profit and leadeth thee. But of course, He assumes that they can be led. God cannot lead a self-willed Christian.

And then we must give the right place to the Holy Scriptures and to the Holy Spirit. As many as are led by the Spirit of God, they are the children of God. And so, the Spirit is sent to lead us, and we must give complete surrender to Him. And we must have Him. The Christian who denies the Spirit, quenches the Spirit, grieves the Spirit, rejects the Spirit, doesn’t need to expect to be led. He’ll have to go by the book, the Constitution. He’ll have to take down what they call naively the minutes. And he’ll have to go according to the black Book.

Sometimes when we’re no longer able to get the leadings of the Lord, we organize, get a constitution, bylaws, and regulations. And then after that, we don’t need God. We just get along by looking at the book. If a question comes up, we turn to page 298, Article 3, Section 4, line 5. And we know where to go from there, and we don’t need God. But remember that I’m talking now to Christians who want to know how to be led. I point out, you’ve got to give the Holy Spirit His right of way, and you’ve got to give the Holy Scriptures their right place.

Now there are three possibilities. We make a heavy burden out of being led of the Lord when it’s one of the easiest things in all the world. A praying, Bible-loving, Spirit-conscious Christian ought to find the guidance of the Lord very easy. And yet they do not, or at least people do not. Maybe it’s because they’re not praying Bible-loving, Spirit-conscious Christians. But a lot of people write in to me, and I’m only one, a small one of thousands. Or they come to me, and they say, I want to know the will of God.

Well, it ought to be a very easy thing. If you’re a praying Christian, if you’re a surrendered Christian dedicated to the glory of God, and you’re truly a Christian, and not just a church member or a professor, but you’re truly a Christian, then God could lead you very easily.

Now here’s one mistake we make. Put this down at least in your memory, that some people refuse to be led in any other way than by a wonder or a miracle. If it isn’t wonderful, they don’t believe God did it. Now, don’t require God to do a miracle to lead you. He said that He would guide His children, but He didn’t say that He would guide His children in a miraculous manner or even a supernatural manner. He just said He would lead us in the way that we should go. So don’t require God to do some wonderful thing.

A silly sample of this is the man who said, I said to God, this happened down in the state of West Virginia, where such things often happen. The young man said, I was walking down the railroad track, and I was wondering if I was called to preach or not. And I said, oh God, if I’m called to preach, have that bird over there light on my shoulder. And he said, the bird lit on my shoulder.

Now that’s making God do it the hard way. And that is insisting that the Lord do something that I’d be rather embarrassed about it, because I don’t think that God is going to use a bird to help call me. He might use a rooster to bring an apostle to repentance and a jackass in order to rebuke the madness of a prophet. And I suppose the Lord could use a bird to call a preacher. But knowing that preacher, I think the bird called the preacher instead of the Lord.

Now my brethren, about some things, there just isn’t any use to ask guidance. Hear me now, about some things, there’s just no use to ask guidance. Don’t think you’re pious every time you go to your knees and pray. Don’t think that. There are sometimes when prayer can be a sin, or when at least can be unnecessary, superfluous, and out of order.

So about some things, there’s just no use to go and ask God’s will because God has already said an emphatic, no. And about the things that are here in the Bible to which God has said an emphatic, no, you just waste your time going to God and asking God to guide me.

Now suppose that I ran a store, and a man backed a truck up and offered me at a very great reduction a fine shipment of something that I sold, say cornflakes. Well, if I knew that those cornflakes had been hijacked out on the highway, there wouldn’t be any use for me to say just a moment, I’ll go in the back room and then drop on my knees and say, now Father, should I or should I not? Why, you’d insult God by going to Him and asking Him to guide you about whether you accept stolen goods. That’s an emphatic, no. The Christian is to be honest if he starves to death. The Christian is to be clean and right and true and honest. And so, there isn’t any use to go to God to ask Him whether you ought to buy stolen property.

And there isn’t any use for you to go to God and ask whether you ought to bet on a horse. There isn’t any use to go to God and ask if you ought to run off with another man’s wife. There isn’t any use to go to God and ask whether you should do the wrong thing. God has declared, no, with a loud voice.

Well, then there are some things about which God has said just as emphatic a, yes. And there isn’t any reason to go to God about that except to thank Him sometimes. Read your Bible. Here you will hold in your hand the Book. And I think we grieve God because we read Life magazine more than we do the Bible, a lot of Christians do. And they read the box score and the standings of the clubs, and they know them, but they don’t know what’s contained in the Book of Romans. Then when they get in a pinch, they say, O God guide me.

Well, we haven’t gone to the Book to find out what God has said, and therefore we don’t get guidance because we’re not familiar with the Scripture. Everything else and all else being equal, the most perfectly guided man is the man who knows his Bible the best. But in the Scriptures, there are some things about which God has said an emphatic yes.

And it isn’t a pious nor spiritual thing to go to the Lord and ask Him, Now, Father, should I do this? Please guide me. And call up that Brother Tozer and say, you pray for me that I’ll have guidance on whether I ought to give a tithe or not. You don’t ask God about that. To do so is to insult God. Of course, the Bible declares a man ought to give. And somebody says, Will you please pray that I might be guided?

There’s a widow down the block and she’s been sick in bed, and she’s run out of groceries and her check won’t last through. And should I take her basket? Don’t bother God about that, mister. Don’t go to God at all and don’t call up the parsonage because you know you ought to do that. The Scripture says, do good unto all men, give and it shall be given to you, shaken down and running over.

He has scattered abroad yet given to the poor and His righteousness remaineth forever. And the whole sweep of the Bible teaches us that we ought to do those good things. So, we only waste our time and confuse our mind and practice a kind of mental hypocrisy when we go to God and ask Him whether we ought to tithe and whether we ought to serve and whether we ought to help people and whether we ought to be baptized.

Somebody says, will you please pray that I might have guidance? No, I won’t pray that you will have guidance. I will pray that you’ll get some faith and good sense, but I won’t pray that you’ll have any guidance because the Bible is very plain. It says, teaching them, making converts of all the nations and baptizing them in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost and teaching them. That’s plain.

And then you, somebody has had a row with you and there is no forgiveness and you’re in trouble. And you say now, God, please teach, show me whether I ought or ought not to forgive that man. Why, of course, you ought to forgive that man. Doesn’t the Scripture say, forgiving even as God has in Christ, for Christ’s sake, forgiven you. There’s no use to pray to God about that.

And there’s no use to pray to God whether you ought to pray or not. Somebody says, please pray that I’ll be guided about my prayer life. There’s only one way to pray, mister and dear sister. Only one way to pray and that’s to pray.

I often think of dear old Dr. Adam Clark, that godly, saintly old man of God who wrote the commentary. He got up at four o’clock in the morning to work and pray, that is, pray and work at his writing and preaching. And some young man went up to him and said, Dr. Clark, I understand you get up very early in the morning. How do you do it? Do you have some rule by which you get up? No, I just get up. And that’s the only way to get up, just get up. Don’t make a production out of it, just get up.

And so it is with praying. You pray for me that I’ll have guidance about my prayer life? No, I’ll pray that you’ll be obedient, and I’ll pray that the Lord will enlighten you, but I won’t pray that you pray because you’ve been told to pray. Pray without ceasing. We have the example of everybody from Abel down. And we have the commands of the Scriptures and the examples of the saints and therefore nobody needs to pray whether he ought to pray or not.

And then some say, would you pray for me that I might know whether I ought to witness or not? Doesn’t the Bible say, ye are my witnesses? Doesn’t it say ye shall be filled with His Spirit and shall be witnesses unto me? Of course you ought to witness.

So there are some things that you just don’t pray to God about. Some things God has said, no, these are not for my children. Other things and then many more he has said, yes, these are for my children.

And then there is a third set of things and here’s where everybody gets in trouble. Now this is the point that you’ve probably never heard said before, a thing you’ve never heard said before, and that is this, that for the blood-washed, obedient, surrendered child of God, there are a hundred things that come into his life that God doesn’t care which he does, that he can be perfectly free and relaxed and not worry himself nor do more than simply send up a little thanks to God that he’s free. But you don’t have to go to God for everything.

Now, my brethren, I say that most of our lives, almost everything that touches not all, but so many things that touch our lives are like that. The Lord lays the principle down and He says, now I’ve given you intelligence and common sense. I’ve given you experience and history back there. You’ve got your Bible and now you’re free. You don’t have to consult me on every detail.

Now I am your Lord and I’ll be ready when you’re in a jam and I’ll always be with you and communing with you. But as for the details of your life, you don’t have to worry about them. The shepherd leads the sheep. And Jesus said that he would lead His people as a shepherd leads his sheep. But you know how we sheep try to make it out. We want the Lord to show us which tuft of grass to nibble on at a given time.

Now, let us suppose that this is a shepherd. We won’t smile about it when we think about our heavenly shepherd, but earthly shepherds for a minute. Here is an obedient sheep. And he said to the rest of the sheep of the flock that morning, now I am an obedient little sheep, and my shepherd has promised to lead me. And I’ve been praying that he would lead me.

And so, all day long, I’m going to have my shepherd lead me. And so, all day long, he’s in a state of frustration and borderline nervous breakdown. He’s always saying, oh shepherd, should I nibble on this one? And the shepherds say, yeah, nibble on that. And so, he nibbles that one down. And then he says, now, could I go over here and nibble here? And so, the shepherd says, yeah, you can nibble over there. And pretty soon you’ve driven the shepherd crazy and the sheep crazy.

My brother, the Shepherd says He leads His flock, but He leaves the individual tuft of grass to the intelligence of the lowly sheep. And He’s out ahead of them, leading them, keeping the way clear, driving off the lions and the bears and seeing to it that they’re led by the still water. But He’s not going to tell each sheep how many gulps of water to take. And He’s not going to tell each sheep how many times to chew each bunch of grass. He leaves that to the will of the sheep. What kind of mechanical men would we be if we expected the Lord to go into all the details of our life?

Now, here’s the part you think is unspiritual, but it is just the thing that’s going to free you from a whole world of worry if you listen to me. There are some things to which God has said, no. There are some things which God has said, yes.

And then there’s a whole world of common living to which God hasn’t said anything. He just has given you common sense and intelligence and says, now, honor Me, love Me, put yourself in My hands, and I don’t care which you do.

Now, let’s illustrate a little bit. One of my faults as a preacher is that I don’t tell enough stories, I guess. I’ve got to buy me a book, One Thousand Stories for Preaching. All right, get me that for Christmas, and I’ll use it to hold the window up.

But God gives a man a watch, and God says, all right, now this is a watch. I’m giving it to you. And it’s an excellent watch, and it’ll keep time perfect, with perfect precision, for the rest of your life.

Now, do you think we honor God then by going to God every five minutes and inquiring the time of day? Why, I think not. God says, I’ve given you a watch, son, can’t you read? There’s the time of day. If you want to praise me and you want to pray, pray continually. If you want to intercede for others, all right, I’m ready to hear your prayer. But don’t bother me about the time of day, because I’ve given you a watch. And all you have to do is consult the watch, and it’s a precise watch. It’s mine, I gave it to you. And by trusting your watch, you honor me and my gift.

Or a sailor out on the sea with his compass, or with his wheel. He’s a pious sailor. He’s been to a Bible Institute, and he carries a big Bible weighing 12 pounds. And he’s a real Christian. And he wants to be led of the Lord. And he’s read booklets on how to be led of the Lord. So, he kneels down by the wheel and says, Lord, should I turn it to the left or to the right? And the Lord said, just a minute, son, what’s that right ahead of you there? That’s a compass. Well, I gave you the compass, and it always works. Go according to the compass and relax.

And that’s exactly where we Christians make our mistakes. We want God to pick out everything for us, and we’re not satisfied unless He does. We read some biography of some Christian, some praying Christian who had a wonderful experience, and we want one just like it.

Bud Robison was a great preacher in his day, and he was a happy old child of God. He wasn’t always old, but he got old. And sometime during his life when he was just learning, he heard a remarkable testimony about a man who had gone to sea, and the ship was sinking, and he prayed, and the Lord delivered him, and a miracle took place. It was wonderful.

And Bud, his lips stuck out, and he pouted and went home and got down on his knees and said, God, I never had an experience like that. You never saved me from a watery grave. After he had prayed himself out and whimpered a while, a still, small voice said, Bud, have you ever been to sea? And he said, no, I’ve never been to sea. Well, then said the still, small voice, how could I save you from shipwreck when you’ve never been off the land? Bud smiled and got to his feet and said, thank you, Lord, I get it. I see it.

Now, it always seems to be very spiritual to go to the Lord about every little detail, whereas actually, God doesn’t care. Now, shall we illustrate some more? Suppose you’re going to buy a car, and you’re in the Plymouth, Ford, and Chevrolet bracket. You know that by just how much you make and how much it costs to live, and you say to your wife, well, we’ll get a new car, but it’s got to be one of the lower priced cars. She agrees. It’s all right. You’ll get the family around, nice cars.

So, you start downtown. O Lord, lead me as to which one I should choose. Lead me, Lord. The Lord says, son, don’t do that. I don’t care. They’re all good. Go ahead and buy one. I’ll bless you. I can take care of a Ford as well as a Plymouth, and if you should by any chance like a Chevrolet, buy that. I don’t care.

You see, brethren, the will of God is that we should put ourselves in His hand, expect Him to lead us, and then relax and act naturally. But to expect the Lord to go downtown with you and choose the model and the color and the year, well, that’s silly. But you say that sounds unspiritual. I always pray the Lord will show me which street to take to work. Why don’t you pray for the Chinese or the Koreans or the Hungarians or somebody while you’re wasting God’s time and yours, praying for the Lord. Don’t you know the way to work? God’s given you a watch and God’s given you a compass. Use them. But you say the Scripture says, lean not unto thine own understanding. Sure, the Scripture says that.

The carnal man who has his own understanding and rejects God and rules God out, why, he’ll not get anywhere because God will turn his back on him. But the man who has given God his understanding and it’s been redeemed and renewed and sanctified and Spirit-filled, that man needn’t worry. That’s not his own understanding, that’s the understanding God has given him.

Somebody goes into a restaurant, and they bring him what is a bill of fare. And here it is, lamb chops, white fish, hamburger under a very florid and beautiful name. I’ve discovered about 12 different names for hamburger. And there they are down the line, small steak, whatever, all down the line.

Now, are we going to have a prayer meeting and ask God which to choose? No, God says, you honor me by relaxing and choosing whichever you like. Whatever you like, take it. It’s all right with me. Eat what’s set before you and ask no questions, for conscience’s sake.

Oh, my friends, the leading of the Lord is a beautiful thing if we didn’t make such a tough job out of it. If you shouldn’t do it, it’s written in the Book. If you should do it, it’s written in the Book. And then all in between, there’s a whole world of perfectly natural and good and right and common things that you and I can do or not do. We can have or not have; we can do it this way or do it that way. But you and I like to put up an either or and say it’s got to be this or this. And God says, no, son, it can be this or this or 12 other things. And you’re right no matter what you do.

Somebody will come and say, Mr. Tozer, will you pray whether I ought to go to Moody, Northern Baptist, Bethel College, Taylor, Nyack, or Asbury? Well, I’ll pray for you, but I don’t think that you’ll go wrong no matter where you go if you’re in the will of God. That is, if you put yourself in God’s hands and will then let God’s providence and circumstances and your own personal feelings about the matter decide where you’re to go.

Now, it could be an instance where somebody is so totally ignorant, he never heard of Moody’s. Could be that somebody in the world somewhere is so benighted that he never heard of Nyack. The oldest of such schools in the world, any of you students from Moody’s, I’d be glad to tell you that. But it could be.

So, the Lord may have to do an unusual thing, but He only does an unusual thing when you’re haven’t faith enough to let Him do the usual thing.

So, brother and sister, God doesn’t care whether you take lamb chops or a hamburger with a Latin name, just so you thank Him. The old here old brother Compton used to say, return thanks over a soup bone and it’ll go a long way.

So, thank God that’s all. He doesn’t care which street you drive down. Now, there could be a situation once in a lifetime where you didn’t know and where you were in real danger. Then the Lord by his providence would prevent you from getting into that trouble. But that’s once in a lifetime. It’s not the way to live. To insist on living on that tension all the time, it makes people neurotic and then they think they’re spiritual. When they get neurotic and all blub-blub-blubby, then they say, that’s near to God. No, you’re not near to God. You’re a big baby and God has to lead you around.

Now, to lead a little fella around, I wouldn’t mind. I wouldn’t mind leading that little girl with all that hair that we dedicated this morning. I guess she can’t walk yet, but as soon as she gets through, she can. I’d like to lead her. But when she’s 14 years old, she won’t want me to lead her. She’ll be able to get around on her own steam long before that.

And so, if I insist upon being a carnal baby and always worry about whether I’m in the will of God or not, I suppose the only thing God can do will be to take me by the hand and toddle me along. But he doesn’t want me to be like that. He says, you’re still children. You’re children yet. Grow up into a mature man in Christ Jesus.

Now, just a minute or two more, the unusual situation. You say, ah, that’s me, Mr. Tozer. I have an unusual situation. And I can’t get information about it. I don’t have information. My watch won’t work on that one. My compass is out of order on that one. I just haven’t the information.

Well, let me give you some Scripture. If, let me read it to you right out of the King James Version, then you’ll know it’s inspired. Now, listen to this. If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God that giveth to all men liberally and upbraideth not, and it shall be given him.

Notice how he’s liberal and not upbraiding. And we think he’s stingy and churlish. He gives to all men liberally and upbraideth not, and it shall be given him. But let him ask in faith, nothing wavering, for he that wavers like a wave of the sea driven with the wind and tossed, let not that man think he shall receive anything of the Lord. Let him ask in faith for wisdom, and then let him do whatever he thinks and believes after quiet thought is the right thing to do.

And don’t be afraid to make a decision. If you make the wrong decision, the Lord will providentially guide you into the right one. If you’re surrendered, if you’ve given up to Him, if you’re happy in Him and will do anything He says, you can’t go wrong. And anything you’ll do will be right.

The young lady says, should I be a nurse? Should I be a secretary? Should I do none of those things? Should I try to be a physical instructor, a culture instructor in the college? Just what should I do? Well, I’ll pray for you, but I don’t think you can go wrong if you’re in the will of God. Put yourself in God’s hand and then trust His providential dealings. That will be your wisdom.

But you want a big miracle, do you? You want a production. You want the Lord to come down and light the candles and put up the colored balloons and give a fanfare and say, look, this is my child. Isn’t he wonderful? You know what would happen to you? You’d backslide in 24 hours.

The Lord is not going to do it that way. The Lord is going quietly to lead you. And he often leads you without your knowing He’s leading you in order that you won’t be proud of the fact you’re being led.

Listen to this. And I will bring the blind by way that they knew not. You can’t write any book on that, you know.

If you’re crossing a bridge and it breaks and in a wonderful way you’re saved from destruction, you can write a tract on that. But I will bring the blind by a way that they knew not and lead them in paths that they have not known. That’s too humbling. Nothing to do there but just look up and smile and thank God in a kind of a shamed-faced way and say, Lord, I’m sorry I was so dumb. I will make darkness light before them and crooked things straight. These things will I do unto them and not forsake them.

That is Isaiah 42:16. I will bring the blind by the way that they knew not. Never read that in a tract, never read that in a book, no counselor ever helped you there. You didn’t know which way to go, and you were totally blind for the moment on that one.

So you went to the Lord and said, O Father, lead me. And God said, all right, I’ll lead you. And go ahead, just walk, just walk and trust me. And so, you walk and trust Him. And after a while your sight comes back, and you look down the road and bless my heart you’ve never been an inch out of the way all the way down. And you didn’t know where you were, but you’re trusting God. Abraham went out not knowing where he was going, but as their brother said, he knew who was going with him. And that’s all you need to know.

Well, the trusting child of God will never go astray no matter what he does, provided of course it’s right. I’m talking about a series of choices. Mostly we make it one thing and a possible alternative, but God says maybe a dozen things.

I wonder why God raised up so many good schools, so that people could go to anyone they happened to be near to or knew somebody there or found a catalog or their mother-in-law graduated there or their father. Or, in some way or other a web of providence led them to that school. And then they say, oh, I’m sure God led me here. Sure, God led you there. But by another set of circumstances, you might’ve been a Nyack or Taylor. It doesn’t make any difference, son.

You’re driving a nice new 57 Chevrolet with a back wing swept wheels or whatever they are. All right. Very nice. Very nice. Somebody happened to get to you, or you happened to pass by a window when they had the lights on. So, you bought that one. You might just as well have been driving a Ford. And the Lord wouldn’t have cared if you’d been driving a Plymouth.

The New York Board, I’m going there tomorrow, you know, the leaders of the flock, bless them, everyone, me included. And one day they, they said, we’re going to buy, we’ve got to buy a station wagon to transport Christian missionaries around up at Nyack. And, uh, we want either a Ford, Plymouth or Chevrolet. And things were kind of dull. So, I got up and said, Mr. Chairman, who’s to decide whether we take a Ford, Chevrolet or Plymouth? Well, while they were waiting around, why I said, Mr. Chairman, I think I have a quotation from Longfellow that’ll help you to decide. Well, they waited. I said, Longfellow wrote, did he lay there in the forest by the Ford across the river? And, uh, I said, I think that’s it.

Well, if you didn’t have a sense of humor, sometimes you’d die of frustration. But, uh, all those dignitaries let down their hair, what there was of it, mostly, mostly to get on that board, you don’t have any hair, but they let it down, laughed, and I left the room for a little breather.

Now, my friends, seriously, for this is a serious talk, while you are yielded and confident, you can’t go wrong. And whether you have a sharp, clear leading or not, you can’t go wrong if you seek God’s will. It is only when you resist God’s will that you go wrong. You can’t go right while you’re resisting God’s will, and you can’t go wrong while you’re yielded to it.

So, no matter what city you live in, where you buy a house, what car you drive, what job, what school, who you marry, put yourself in God’s hand, and then relax and act naturally. And you’ll have lots of time then to be thankful.

Instead of begging, begging, you’ll have lots of time to be thankful. And all the time, the Lord will be leading you and guiding you to His glory and for your profit and for the blessing of mankind, and you’ll not go astray, and you’ll not make a mistake.

And if you should blunder and make a mistake, while your kind Heavenly Father knows you meant well, He’ll correct it for you. We have a word for that, and it’s “overrule.” You used to hear the dear old Saints, O Lord, overrule any mistake. That’s good praying, brother. God will overrule things if you make a mistake accidentally. If you set your teeth and make a mistake, you’ve got judgment coming. But if you’re surrendered to the will of God and you make a mistake, God will overrule it, and there won’t be any final lasting mistake at all.

So now the text again. I wonder if we could turn to it and read it, and that’ll be all for tonight. Isaiah 48:17. Everybody, thus saith the Lord thy Redeemer, the Holy One of Israel, I am the Lord thy God, which teacheth thee to profit, which leadeth thee by the way that thou shouldst go. Do you believe that? Amen.

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Tozer Talks

Post author By pshappard
Post date January 5, 2025

“Spiritual Action – God Working Through Us“

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Spiritual Action – God Working Through Us

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

December 14, 1958

Well, tonight I am to talk on some spiritual axioms. I know that’s the way to get nobody to come, is to announce a subject like that, because that sounds terribly dull. But I want to read three verses from the Bible. John 5:17, But Jesus answered them, My Father worketh hitherto, and I work. Philippians 2:13, For it is God which worketh in you, both to will and to do of His own good pleasure. First Corinthians 12:46, Now there are diversities of gifts, but the same Spirit. The differences of administration, but the same Lord. Diversities of operations, but the same God, which worketh all in all. You will notice the Trinity there. Diversities of gifts, but the same Spirit. Differences of administration, but the same Lord. Diversities of operations, but the same God. There we have the Trinity.

Now as is generally known, my method in preaching is, and has been many, many years, to extract from the Scriptures certain basic spiritual principles, and then to turn those spiritual principles into axioms, stated truth. And they are valid everywhere, anywhere, at all times, always.

Tonight, I want to talk about God working. And I extract what I have to say from the Scriptures, as I have read to you the texts. But for the statement of two or three of these axioms, I would acknowledge my indebtedness to a lady who has been dead 600 years. She called my attention to this, 600 years after she had stopped living in this world and gone to live in another, in a better, and she put it down in that amazing little book I have referred to quite often called The Revelations of Divine Love.

Now the first axiom, it might be good for you to take these down, because you will forget them if you don’t. The first axiom that I want to note is that God does everything. That is, that God does everything, creative and constructive. He does not do evil.

Sin is a work of temporary rebellion against God, and the explanation is yet concealed. Sin is concealed. That is, the reason and the how that the great God can be working and still sin can be in the world, it’s concealed from us. We don’t yet know. We call those concealed things mysteries. People don’t like the word, but it’s a good Bible word, and it’s a word that we ought to learn to live with. For the world, everything around us, is shrouded in mystery, that is, in things concealed. And I saw, she said, not the creature doing, but I saw God doing in the creature.

Now here is exactly what the Bible says, both in the Old Testament and in the New. Remember that when the Lord would work through Gideon, he did what in some versions says he clothed himself with Gideon. He took Gideon and put Gideon on and worked through Gideon and in Gideon to do his mighty work. It wasn’t Gideon that was doing it, but it was God working in the man Gideon.

Then we come to David and Goliath in the Old Testament, and we notice that the upholding of this principle, that God does everything that is constructive, God does it, not people or men or creatures, but God. This is the reason there was no armor.

Now, I don’t suppose, I really don’t, and I don’t want to sound humorous, but I really don’t suppose that there would have been a committee or a board anywhere in Israel that would have gone along with David and allowed him to go out and meet the great, overgrown Goliath with his mighty sword as big as a weaver’s beam. He couldn’t have sold that idea to anybody. He could have argued and pleaded and written, but he couldn’t have got anybody that would have allowed him to go out there without armor. And even he, for a little bit at the first, put the armor of Saul on, it was too big for him, he took it off and said it wasn’t his armor.

But if he had to go through a committee or a board to get this armor off, he never would have got it off. They would have sent him out there so loaded down with hardware that he couldn’t have moved. And of course, Goliath would have simply pushed him over and tramped on him. But he didn’t go out that way, he had no armor. Why did God send a man out against a giant without any armor, though the giant was all covered with armor? Because God wanted to say, God doeth everything. He wanted to show that it is God who worketh through you to will and to do of His own good pleasure.

Why did he send David out against Goliath when there was such a vast disparity in size and strength? There was a vast difference, you know, in size and strength. This man, Goliath, was a huge Carnera, and David was an ordinary sized man, I’m not even sure that he wasn’t a little undersized. And yet God pitted the two against each other. Why? It was that David might never boast about it anywhere. David never boasted about this. David never said to one of his wives, if she got a little out of hand, you remember what I did to Goliath? Because he knew he hadn’t done it, God had done it.

And then there were the unequal weapons. The man David had simply five smooth stones, little marble-sized pebbles that had been made round by the water, the rolling them, the water rolling them along, and that was all he had with a slingshot. Now it wasn’t a rubber slingshot such as boys use now, rubber hadn’t been invented, it was made out of leather thongs.

But can you imagine now, God sending a young undersized fellow out without any armor, and without any weapon properly, against a huge, oversized giant of a fellow who had proved his strength? Why, it’s preposterous, but God did it because it is God that we’re given you.

I want you to notice here the difficult passage in that Corinthian passage, 1 Corinthians 12:4-6, I’ve already read it. God is telling how the Holy Spirit, how God works in people and through people there in 1 Corinthians 12, and he says that God has a work to do, and he does it himself in and through his people by the gifts of the Spirit. The same Lord, though there are differences of administration, the same God, though there are diversities of operation, the same gifts, though there are diversities of gifts, it’s the same Spirit.

Now the point is that mortal minds can’t think immortal thoughts. If we could only know that, there would be a lot of crawling to board meetings instead of coming assured that we had the answer. There would be a lot of us who instead of answering all questions would begin meekly to ask them. Mortal minds can’t think immortal thoughts. God has to think immortal thoughts through us, or our thoughts are mortal thoughts. And mortal hands can’t do immortal deeds. That’s a total impossibility. God does his eternal works through the hands of men, yes, but it’s the work of God in us.

Now God doesn’t give us a reservoir of wisdom and power. Here is something that most people don’t know, and I suppose that we’ll learn it and forget it, but God doesn’t give us a reservoir of wisdom and power. If He did, it would very soon become stagnant. If it’s wisdom, say, God comes to a man according to the way we think about it, and He pipes him full of wisdom, and He says, now, if you get in any trouble, come see me or call me up and pray, but in the meantime, you have a whole cistern full of powers of wisdom here. You draw on that wisdom because it’s yours. God never did it that way.

God gives to a man a word of wisdom, and He gives to a man power, but He is power in that man. He is the word of wisdom in that man. It is God working in the man, and it is not the man working, if we could only remember that. God becomes wisdom to us, and He becomes power to us. That is why Christians blunder so pitiably. If it is, say, a baseball player, and he plays, say, twelve years in the league, big leagues, we say, well, he’s skillful, he has learned, he has caught on, he knows. The same with anything people do. They learn by experience. They learn how to do things by doing them.

But you know, in the kingdom of God, it’s completely other than that, completely otherwise. A man can be seventy-five years old and have served God most of his lifetime, and yet make such pitiful blunders and be so ignorant and untaught. It’s because if God isn’t working through the man and in the man, the man himself is right back where he was when he started. It is God that worketh in you.

Did you ever have the experience of having some seeker come to you and want help, and to your chagrin you had no help for the seeker? I told you about my foray into pastoral counseling a year or so ago, a couple of years ago. Some people came, they had heard of me, and so somebody sent them, I don’t remember who, maybe Moody, I don’t remember who it was. They sent them to me, they said that they thought I could give them some pastoral counseling, that is, family relationship counseling, and to a man and his wife, who were about ready to divorce, came to see me. It happened the same twice. They came in, I talked it all over with them, and the result was that both of the women left hopping mad at me. The husband admitted that we got no place.

Well, now God didn’t send me out to be a marriage counselor, He sent me out to preach the gospel, and if He gives me a word for somebody, it is His word and it will help people. But if I think that I can, out of years of experience, tell people how they ought to live, I am only making a fool out of myself.

And there is a great deal of this kind of fool-making going on in the church of Christ in the name of Christianity. We forget that we have no wisdom for anybody unless God wants to give us the wisdom at the moment. Take no thought, said Jesus, by one instance, what ye shall say, for the Father will say it in you.

I have heard old gentlemen preach, and they had everything all worked out very carefully, and they had little statements, little proverbs which they kept repeating all the time, but they never got anywhere because God was not speaking in them nor through them, but they had learned little things to say, and they were saying them.

So that is the first that I would lay down. It is true everywhere all the time. We extract this from the Scripture as always being true, that every creative thing, every eternal thing, God does it. God is doing it. Man is not doing it. God is doing it. If we were to strip the churches from all that man is doing and leave only what God has done and is doing, we would trim the average church back down to a nubbin. There would not be enough left to have a decent service.

But almost all of the churches are running on their own steam. They have learned how, they have gone to school to find out how, and we have written books on pastoral psychology and pastoral theology, which means how to do it in ten easy lessons. The answer and the result is that we just do not know. We count on our reservoir in place of on our Lord.

My friend, if you talk to, oh, let’s say a Christian Scientist or Roman Catholic on Wednesday, and you have an amazing success with them, and perhaps even maybe win one of them to God, and then on Friday you try the same way, you can fall flat on your face, because God is working in you on Wednesday, but you were looking to what God did on Wednesday, expecting to work on that same thing on Friday. You may even write a book about it. I have seen books on how to win Roman Catholics and what to say to Christian Scientists and how to answer Jehovah’s Witnesses.

Well, you can answer one on Monday and answer successfully, and try it on Wednesday and he’ll put the half Nelson on you and throw you to the mat. It takes the Holy Ghost to work in a man. Always keep that in mind. God doeth everything, and I saw that man is doing nothing, it’s only God that is working. Remember that it is the Eternal Lord who is creating a new generation and a new creation.

Just as Adam didn’t create himself, and just as the angels did not create themselves but God created them, so He is building His church. People are not building the church. It’s impossible. God is building His church. He isn’t building his church; you’d simply have a religious organization.

And the second thing that I would say to you is, that God does all in His foreseeing wisdom. Now, all that God is doing and does, He is doing in His foreseeing wisdom, so nothing is done by happenstance or by adventure. Would you write that down? That everything that God does, He does in His foreseeing wisdom.

God knows our tomorrows, He knows our day after tomorrow, He knows all about us down the years, and it’s all been planned before time was. The only reason I’d like to live any length of time yet is that I’m curious. I’ve always have been a very curious person, almost unnaturally or excessively curious. And I’d like to know what they’re going to do with this time and space deal. I’d like to know. I’d like to hang around long enough.

I’ll tell you this, though, if Jesus tarries, some of you young people now listening to me will see the day when they’ll be sending men off to planets and heavenly bodies far removed from this earth and bringing them back again. I’m busy, that is, I’m curious to know these busy people, time and space, long before there was any space, God had planned what He’s doing now, and God isn’t all mixed up.

You know how they do in Washington and London and Berlin and all the rest? You know how they do it? They play by ear. Nobody ever plans anything and says, now here’s the way it’ll go. They play by ear. And whatever Khrushchev says, then we counter him. We’re always counter punching. All the Western nations are busy counter punching. Nobody punches out there solidly and leads, but they’re always counter punching.

When some big rumbling burp comes out of Moscow, a result of vodka and egotism, then everybody in Washington runs in circles and begins looking at each other and saying, did you hear that? Did you hear that? Yes, I read that. Then they try to counter-punch. And they’re playing by ear all the time to change the figure.

My friends, God Almighty never does it that way. All that is now happening was foreseen in the wisdom of God before any space stretched out yonder or before any star was out there. Long before there was matter or motion or law, God had foreseen it all. You’ll either believe that or you’ll be frustrated and miserable all the time. It’s taught in the Bible that God does it all in His foreseeing wisdom. He foresaw it all and He isn’t allowing anything to happen.

The world isn’t a truck running downhill with the driver having a heart attack at the wheel. No. The world is moving toward a predetermined end and God Almighty standing in the shadows is seeing it go and watching it and guiding it.

The nation of Israel and the nations of the world and the great worldly church we call Christendom and the true church that He hides in His own heart, God knows where they all are at all times by His infinite and perfect wisdom and He’s running everything according to plans which He made before Adam ever stood up on the earth. Before there was an Abraham or a David or an Isaiah or a Paul, before Jesus was born in Bethlehem’s manger, God had this all planned out.

Now I don’t want you to think of God sitting down with a pencil and working it out the way you and I would have to do it. God thinks and it’s done. He wills and it comes to pass. God doesn’t have to work with a pencil and a slide rule and a compass and a square the way architects and builders do. No. And He doesn’t sit and follow an agenda the way conventions do. He thinks it done, He speaks it done, and it’s done because He thinks, and He speaks. In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God and all things were created by Him. Without Him was not anything made that was made. How is that? Why, it’s He was the Word and He spoke it done.

So, you’re a Christian, all right, and something very, very unusual, very, very bad has happened maybe, and you wonder, you wonder, why did God let this happen to me and how could this? This must have been a huge mistake somewhere.

Well, there’s only one possibility, of course, and that is that you have not trusted and obeyed because what I am saying is valid if we trust and obey.

If we rebel against God, then of course we can get into all kinds of trouble. And we may bring on ourselves happenings that are temporarily not in the will of God. But even then, if the root of the matter is in us, God absorbs this and turns it into victory.

There was Jacob, when Jacob fled from the face of his angry brother and was in the waste howling wilderness. He saw that ladder standing up on the earth and I’m still wondering whether Jacob would ever have seen that ladder if Jacob hadn’t been on the run. If Jacob hadn’t been back home in good company and staying around the house helping his mother with the dishes, as the Bible says he did, or most says he did, it says he was his mother’s helper. And the other, his brother. His brother was out running around and hunting and bringing in savory meat. But if Jacob had never had any upset here, Jacob never would have seen that ladder. That’s just as sure as you live.

So, I’d like to suggest one thing. Remember that sin is always wrong, and if we insist on rebellion against God, we’re going to get ourselves into real serious trouble. But remember another thing, that if you are God’s and you do belong to God and you have learned the art of true repentance, God will turn even your defeat into a victory.

And a fleeing Jacob will see a ladder and a Jonah that has disobeyed God may be swallowed by a fish and thus saved. And look at Saul, Saul was breathing out threatening and slaughter there and suddenly he stands and sees, he sees Stephen die, but he starts away from there and as he goes away, on his road on the road to Damascus, he sees the Lord high and lifted up and he hears a voice and he’s a converted man.

I wonder if Saul would ever have been converted if he’d been a quiet professor in Gamaliel’s university and had simply said, well, there’s no use to get excited about it. No use to get excited. Everything will work out all right. If he had said that there would never have been any Paul, the mighty servant of God. But Saul was a man, the root of the matter was in him, but that was about all. And so, God had to even absorb the man’s wrongdoing, turn him around, start him right and then begin to work in his life.

Now I give you the third thought here tonight. It is that much that God is doing looks to us like an accident or a mistake. Much that God is doing, I say, looks like an accident or a mistake, but you know that is due to our blindness and our ignorance. We don’t know why God is doing the way he’s doing and so we begin to fidget and wonder if God does really know.

My friend, God sees tomorrow, and we see only today. God sees both sides and we see only one side. God knows what we don’t know, and God has all the pieces to the puzzle. You and I have only a few of the pieces. Did you ever put together a jigsaw puzzle? Half a dozen times, I guess, over the year I have been inveigled into sitting around a table and trying to put a jigsaw puzzle together. I don’t know why anybody, with a world so full of miseries as it is, should ever invent one.

You know, just sit right down and invent one. With a world full of trouble, problems to solve and all kinds of worries and frustrations and then invent one, actually invent and create one, sell it. I don’t know why anybody would buy it, but I have tried it a few times and usually wandered off before we got the first square, first corner finished. But you see, we don’t have the pieces.

Incidentally, I have almost always, much to the good-natured disgust of my boys, my daughter and sometimes my wife, insisted that piece and pieces were lost. Oh, where are they? And I’d look under the table and say, well, those kids have lost them. But they weren’t lost, I just didn’t know where they fitted.

But you know, you and I are like that. Here’s our pattern of life and how we like to see it bloom into a beautiful picture there, everything in place, but it’s all scattered around. And I don’t know where the pieces are, nothing fits, and you, do you ever try that? Do you ever do this? Two pieces look as if they belong together, but they don’t, and so you try to force them in place. You ever try that? Force them in place, and then you break an edge off, and then you’re worse off than you were before.

But we take the work of God, and we try to push pieces together. I’ve spent a good part of my lifetime trying to shove pieces that don’t belong together and trying to separate pieces that do. It’s ignorance, and we forget that it’s God that gives us the wisdom, it’s God that works in us, and if we’d only know it, if we let God do his work through us and in us. That’s why I believe in the gifts of the Spirit, brethren.

I don’t think that I have done myself any good, that is along with the fundamentalist hierarchy, by coming out as I have and always have, only in belief that there ought to be all the gifts of the Spirit ought to be in the church today, the same as they were back yonder at Pentecost.

I read in the newspaper the other day a long, about six-point type, very small and hard to read, I read about the gifts of the Spirit, and this fellow says the gifts of the Spirit all ended, all ended, and he’s a fundamentalist, too. Well, he’s just plain wrong, R-O-N-G. He is wrong. The gifts of the Spirit did not end. He even goes to quote 1 Corinthians 13, I don’t remember who he was, fortunately, and I wouldn’t advertise him if I did. But he says, now abideth faith, hope, and charity, of these three, but the greatest of these is love, and says all these things will be put away, knowledge will cease and vanish away, and everything will cease, and so he says all these things ceased. Doesn’t he know that they ceased by fulfillment, they did not stop being, and so we cannot get rid of faith, hope, and love, and we cannot get rid, we dare not say that the gifts of the Spirit are no more. They are.

God is working through his people, and what God works will last. What God doesn’t work won’t last. And I don’t care how much personality a man has; he can’t do immortal work because he’s a mortal man. He can’t think immortal thoughts because he’s got a mortal mind. But if the Holy Ghost works in him and through him, distributing to every man severally as he will, and it’s the same Father working in us, and the same Son working through us, and the same Spirit working through us, then God will do his work.

Well, these accidents that you and I think we’re in, we’re not in the accidents at all. If a man follows the Lord with anything like reasonable faithfulness. He’ll not find any accidents. He’ll find that God is working his life out for him.

You know what I wish? I wish that the psychologists and the counselors and all these experts would let people alone. When I was in my teens, what seemed like a couple hundred years ago, nobody had thought of that fool thing yet. And I actually grew up from 12 to 20 without knowing that I was in a period that was the most deadly, the most dangerous, the most unheard of, the most unusual, the most miserable, the most frustrating, the most confining, the most harmful period possible, and that I just needed somebody to tell me every move to make. I just came through the whole business doing what came naturally.

You know, you just came through the whole thing doing what came naturally. And I didn’t have a psychiatrist to help me, nor a psychologist, nor a youth counselor, nor a panel discussion. Didn’t have a thing. I just lived right through. When I was halfway through in the middle, I got converted. When I was 17, a little over, I was converted. And after that, it was easier than before. Fortunately, I hadn’t been told that I was unique, different, that my mother was against me, that my father was jealous of me, and that my brothers were down on me. And the result was I didn’t develop any complexes, and didn’t get any mother fixations or father complexes. I just lived through it.

But now they won’t let the poor kids alone. God bless you young people. You have an awful time now. Every religious magazine you pick up wants to try to dissect you and take you apart. You know what teenage is? It’s just when you’re past 12 and haven’t come to 20 yet. Just forget. Relax and go right on. You’ll be all right. You’ll come through without a scar.

Well, I don’t know how I got over on that. I didn’t have that in my notes really, but I wanted to say that because if they’d just let people alone, you’re living, living with your wife, getting along all right, and everything’s okay, and then you pick up a magazine, and you read an article in the magazine, and you begin to look out of the corner of your eyes at your wife. And they create suspicion. They create suspicion. Young people are friendly and get on fine with their parents. Then they read an article, and after that they’re suspicious of their parents. They’re sowing suspicion in our hearts, friends. I wish they’d let us alone.

I sat on a committee one time not long ago where a fellow had applied for service in the Christian Missionary Alliance, and they said that he had gone to college and had specialized in psychiatry. But during the meetings in New York last fall or October, he’d come down to the tabernacle of the Alliance Church there where Brother Reidhead been a pastor, and he’d heard some of us, and he was pastor of a church that was a denominational church, and he’d gotten under blistering conviction.

So, I got up and asked if he’d been delivered from his psychiatry. And they said he had, that he’d gotten delivered from it, thank God. Because I consider the average psychologist is just an educated witch doctor. And if you think that’s because I’m ignorant, I was studying psychology when you weren’t even born yet, some of you. You know that? I was reading Freud and William James and Jung and many of the great psychologists when you weren’t even born yet. So don’t think it’s ignorance. I know what they teach.

But experience and further knowledge of God and watching them operate has left the impression with me that I don’t need them at all. Let nobody come to me peddling spare heads. I’ve got one. I don’t need a spare head. I’ve got one. It’s getting very good, and it’s becoming slightly bald. But I still have it, and I’m not going to need a spare. Let them let me alone. I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus, and I don’t want these people bothering me.

You trust God, my friend, and God will bring you out all right. There won’t be any accidents. There won’t be any accidents. The accidents I thought were accidents back down the years were simply God helping me through when I didn’t know He was doing it.

Well, another one I want to give you, and I borrow this one now and I’ll quote it. God changes never His purpose, nor never shall world without end. God changes never His purpose, nor never shall world without end. That doesn’t sound to me as if that had been written 600 years ago, but it was. But here it’s part of the truth, it’s the Word of God. The gifts and callings of God are without repentance. God never loses heart. I’d like to have you know that.

Religious people lose heart. I have seen some good godly people that had gone into a tailspin, an emotional tailspin, and they were so low, there was no describing how low they were. But God never gets low, because God sees the end from the beginning. And to God all the things have already happened. They’ve already happened. If you knew you had to die tomorrow, I suppose you’d feel a little low tonight for a while, then you’d get elated. If you’re a real Christian, you’d get elated.

But God never gets up and then down and then up and then down, because everything has already happened with God. God isn’t going around watching dials and looking at gauges and seeing if everything’s all right and testing to see if you’re on the beat.

Oh, no. God doesn’t have to do that, because God changes never His purposes, no, nor never shall the world without end. He’s moving toward a predetermined end, which He purposed in Christ Jesus before the world began. When the angels sang over Bethlehem’s manger, they were not announcing anything new. It had been known back to the Garden of Eden, and it had been known to the heart of God before there was an Eden or a Garden or an Adam or an Eve.

So, God changeth His mind never, no, never shall be. Jonah, go up and preached in Nineveh. And Jonah bought a ticket in another direction. God changes not His mind, no, never shall. So the way it ended up was, Jonah was up preaching in Nineveh. And so it’s always that way. Israel sinned against God. God didn’t change His mind. He just punished them and disciplined them, and they’ll yet be where God said they would be.

There’s a lot of difference of opinion now on prophecy, but I’ll tell you what I believe, holding this holy book in my hand. I believe that the seed of Abraham shall yet walk upon the mountains of Israel. I believe that God shall yet have his people back there. He’s not changed His mind, no, nor never shall change His mind. If when He sent His Son to die on that cross or sent His Son to save the world. If He had gotten discouraged when He saw how they received His Son, He wouldn’t have been God. So in knowing what He had in mind, Jesus walked quietly to the cross and died.

You know, things may seem helpless, and conditions hopeless. You read Bible history. A man asked me one time, a young fellow, he said, why didn’t God condense the Bible? He said, oh, that old, dry history. You know what that old, dry history teaches? The old, dry history teaches that God is working providentially through men. That history are the footprints of God, or the footprints of God are history. And the way God worked with Abel and Noah and Abraham and Lot and all the rest down the years. That’s why I refer to these men so much. Because it’s the way God works, and He’s not changed his mind.

Well, then I’ve got one more yet, and it’s this. That God never lifts His hands off His work. He leads all things to an ordained end. He never lifts His hands off His work.

When Michelangelo died, they say that he had a big backyard, and the whole backyard was stacked full of partly done statues. Now, Michelangelo was an Italian, and was in addition to having the high, hot Latin temperament, he had a double charge of genius. He wore the five crowns, they say, of genius in his day. And when he wanted a statue to change and be the way he wanted it, he wasn’t fooling.

You know, he was like the farmer that cut five holes in the barn door, and they said, what’s that for? And he said, it’s for the cat and her kittens. Well, he said, wouldn’t one be enough? No, sir. He said, when I say scat, I mean scat. He wasn’t going to fool around having them go out one at a time when he said scat, there were five holes for five cats.

And that was Michelangelo, you know. When he said to a piece of rock, become something, he wasn’t willing to wait around. And he got disgusted, and he had a whole backyard full of statues that he’d started and lost heart on, and it wouldn’t work fast enough, and so he quit and threw them back there and started on something else. He had done an amazing amount of work, but there was an amazing amount of work he was too impatient to finish. If he’d just had given it another day, it might have turned into what he wanted it. Instead of that, he threw it out in the backyard, and after they’d buried him, they found his backyard full of half-done pieces.

Well, God never lifts his hands off his work. Now, I believe that. I don’t care what happens. I believe it. I said something about the fact, here at our recent board meeting, that Alliance people say they believe in healing, but don’t. They say they believe in it, but they run for help as soon as the temperature goes up half a degree.

And dear Brother Kopp, he’s been here and preached, you know he is often quoted. He’s a Dutch farmer from out in Pennsylvania, but I consider him a kind of a rough-hewn saint. He said to me afterward, he said, Brother, I’m going to preach healing and anoint people and pray for them if I die surrounded by doctors and nurses with a syringe needle in each leg. He wasn’t going to be fooled. He wasn’t going to be discouraged. He’s going to preach and teach what he thinks. God sent him to preach and teach. I’m for him.

God never lifts His hands off His work. And when God says, you do this, He means you go do it and I’ll work through you and I’ll not be discouraged. You may be discouraged, but I won’t. He leads all things toward a preordained end. Satan and Israel’s foes and those who crucified Christ have all tried to stop us.

You know, I think sometimes it’s a mistake to think Communists are smart. If they were as smart as they think they are, they wouldn’t advertise their intentions, would they? Wouldn’t they be wiser if they didn’t advertise their intentions? They’re always blowing off, saying, we’re going to do so-and-so. And so we brace ourselves and say, you and how many others? I don’t think they’re as smart as they think they are. I never thought Hitler was smart.

They said Hitler was such a genius. I thought he was a great big bumbling fool. Because he tipped his hand, he told in advance. He even wrote a book telling us what he was going to do to us. Yeah, he did. He wrote a book telling us what he was going to do. He called it Mein Kampf. And they translated it into English, and we read it, and we found out what he intended to do, and we stopped him. I didn’t have much to do with it, but anyhow, we stopped him.

And I think the Communists are the same, and you know I believe the same of the devil. If the devil was as smart as he thinks he is, he wouldn’t allow us to catch on to his plans. You know, there’s an old saying, the higher up the ape goes, the more his tail shows. And the devil rises up there and starts, you look, and you’ll see it hanging. You’ll know it’s the devil.

And if the devil only knows one thing, that if you hit God’s people hard enough, they brace themselves. All you have to do is to get after God’s people just enough, and you bring out everything that’s in them. And everything’s going all right with me. I’m one of the laziest, easy-going persons you ever saw in your life. But when things start against me, I back up a few steps, and then suddenly I see, well now hold on here, and the very intention of the devil to drive me back has exactly the opposite effect.

And I believe the same is true with Christians everywhere. God doesn’t take his hand off his work, he’s moving toward a preordained plan. And if we work with him in that plan, Satan’s effort to stop us can only cause us to snap our teeth shut and say, in the name of God and in the strength of Jehovah, we’re going forward. And for this church, that’s my message. God never takes His hand off His work but leads it forward to a preordained end by the same wisdom and power and love by which he created everything in the first place.

You’re no accident. Don’t think you are. You’re no accident. God made all things by preordained purpose, by foreknowing wisdom. And when you came into the kingdom, you weren’t an accident. We think we went and knocked on the door, and God said, go see who’s there. And an angel came and said, it’s Jim Docherty. All right, Jim Docherty, the Irishman knocking on the door of the kingdom. He wants to get in. God says, isn’t that wonderful? We’ve got a new applicant.

Now, don’t let’s think about God like that, brethren. God knew Jim Docherty long before his grandmother ever made an eye at his grandfather. God knew them long before they were ever born clear, back to Adam and back to the beginning when there was nothing but God and vacuity, emptiness and God. God knew all about that, knew all about him, knew what sins he’d bring with him when he came, knew when he would come, knew what he would say. God never lifts His hand off His work. He does it by wisdom and power and love. There’s no less wisdom, no less power, no less love now than there ever was.

Now, this is hard for us to understand because, you see, we can’t see it. You see, we can’t see. But we must believe, and believing is a kind of seeing, you know. Believing is a kind of seeing. And if I believe what God has said, I am seeing in a sort of way. But I’m not seeing down on my human level. And so, you know, it’s the humanity that gets in trouble.

I heard a man preach a sermon one time years ago. I never heard anybody else talk about that, and I’ve never done it myself, I think. But he said the Christian has three men inside of him. The old man, the new man, and the hu-man. He said those three men, there’s the old man. And that’s all there is until he’s converted, and then he gets the new man.

Oh, I mean, there’s the hu-man, of course, all the time. And the hu-man gets us in so much trouble. So much trouble. Even that long after you’ve gotten victory over the old man. The hu-man, you know, just plain you. You know, the thing your wife loves about you and can’t stand. You know what I mean. Yeah, that thing, just you, you know. Just you, you fellas. Just you.

The hu-man, you know, you inherited it, and it’s an unpalatable mixture of genes. You come down the years and got bumped around, you know, down the centuries. But here you are, and it’s what makes you, you. That’s the hu-man. And that’s the part that gets blue.

And the part that gets carnally happy over things and gets carnally gloomy about things. The old man is to die in order to live in the power of the new man. And the new man keeps the hu-man sort of under control.

Maybe I told you this before. I have a friend down in Brazil. I never saw him. His name is Ernest Michaels, or Michaelis. I don’t know which they pronounce it. He writes me. And he sends some of the things I’ve written all over the world to the people. And he sends me stuff from other people. And he’s quite a correspondent.

He wrote a very complimentary thing to me here some time back. Very glowing with compliments. And I wrote him back, and I said, Brother, I’m afraid you don’t know me. You’re highly complementary and you’ve got so many things to say. You don’t know me. And then I went on to tell him what kind of a mess I was. I thought that probably ended the correspondence. But instead of that, I got a better letter than ever. This time he said, oh, you don’t know something we know. He said, the very thing you deplore in yourself is what puts an edge on you and makes you such a blessing to fellows like me. I kind of liked that. It helped me. It was a place to hide my bad disposition.

But if we don’t remember that now and get a hold of it, that God does everything, and he does everything in his foreseeing wisdom. And while much that he does looks like an accident to you and me because we don’t know enough, God never changes His plans and never will, and never lifts His hand off His work, but goes forward toward a preordained purpose using even such people as I and you.

Tags God at Work