Month: March 2025

Tozer Talks

Post author By pshappard
Post date March 30, 2025

“The Voice of the Holy Spirit“

The Voice of the Holy Spirit

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

June 14, 1953

I would speak tonight on the Voice of the Spirit. I want to read some Scripture, John 16: 7 down to 11. Nevertheless, I tell you the truth. It is expedient for you that I go away. For if I go not away, the Comforter will not come unto you. But if I depart, I will send him unto you. And when He is come, He will reprove the world of sin and of righteousness and of judgment, of sin because they believe not on Me, of righteousness because I go to my Father and ye see Me no more, or of judgment because the prince of this world is judged.

In Revelation 2 and 3, I’ll not read them, seven times the text is repeated. He that hath an ear, let him hear what the Spirit is saying unto the churches. Then in the last chapter of Revelation, verse 17, the Spirit and the Bride say, come. And let him that heareth say, come. And let him that is athirst, come. And whosoever will, let him take of the water of life freely.

Let us pray. Our Father, in us, in our flesh dwelleth no good thing. In our minds dwell no power of persuasion. Without Thee we can do nothing, but with thee we can do all things. So now, Father, we turn away, as though we were taking an axe away from a little boy and giving it to a man. As though we were shoving aside an amateur and letting a master sit down to the instrument. We shove aside the man that men know, and we invite the man Christ Jesus to speak and to effectively confirm the word by the Holy Ghost. Help us tonight, Lord. Tomorrow may be too late. We ask it in Jesus’ name. Amen.

Now, let me say again that the world we inhabit is a lost world. And the inhabitants of the world are lost. The inhabitants of the world are lost, not in any poetic sense of the word, but they are lost by a mighty, calamitous visitation of woe too grave, too terrible to describe.

And to make it worse still, this lostness is inside the heart. You see, there are two ways of getting lost down here. There is the way that a child may sometimes get lost in the city, go around the block and cross the street and forget where it is. It is geographically lost or physically lost, but it knows it’s lost, and its lostness is external.

Then there is the confirmed amnesia victim that is lost in his mind. He does not remember who he is, how old he is, where he was born, what he did, does not remember anything up to a given moment yesterday or the day before.

That is a worse kind of lostness than the lostness of a child that wanders down the street and can’t find his way home. For a dozen policemen will help with the child, and the child will advertise to high heaven that it’s lost. But the amnesia victim doesn’t know that he’s lost. And his closest and dearest friends, his own wife, can come and speak to him, and he’s courteous but completely detached and indifferent. He’s lost inside. And to add still to the terror of this situation, the inhabitants of the world are not only lost, and not only lost inwardly, but worst of all is that they scarcely know that they are lost.

Now, that’s the state we’re in. And yet there are voices that are entreating us, and it gives me great pleasure to say, and this is basic to the Christian message, that while the world is a lost world, it is not yet a forsaken world. God is speaking in many voices, and there are voices that entreat us because God has not forsaken His lost world. He said, and cried, Adam, where art thou?

You’ll find all through the Bible the voices of entreaty, of invitation, of alarm. Ho, every one that is thirsty, come ye to the waters. And he that hath no money, come ye, buy. Wine and milk without money and without price. Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden. And I will give you rest.

Now, those are only samples of the many hundreds of verses that are sounding and echoing through the Scriptures. But the clearest, loudest, most easily distinguishable voice is the voice of the Spirit. And His voice gives grave and serious meaning to any other and to all other voices.

For if it were not for the presence of the Spirit uttering His voice through the consciences of the world, no other voice would have any significance whatsoever. It would all be sounding brass and tinkling cymbal, giving forth no meaning, for Jesus our Lord, tells us here of the Holy Spirit’s work in the world.

And He says in the text, when He is come, when He is come. When the writer wrote the song, The Comforter is Come, he set in fairly good hymnody one of the great facts of the world, that the Comforter is here. And the Comforter came to confirm Christ’s words and Christ’s works and Christ’s person.

Now, the words of the Lord Jesus Christ were words so lofty and so astounding as those of no other religious teacher. Christ was not the only religious teacher. We have had the great religious teachers of the East and we have them still on down to Mrs. Eddy and Father Divine.

There have been christs saying, Lo here and lo there. There have been men saying, I have the voice of God, I am speaking for God. And they have established their religion, some major, some minor, some long forgotten, some still going strong throughout the earth.

But the words of Jesus were in a class by themselves. The claims that He made, brand Him immediately as being God or an idiot. The claims that He made outclassed and outstripped the claims of all the other religious teachers in the world. Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up, He said, of His own body.

I saw Satan as lightning fall from heaven. Before Abraham was, I am. Then shall they see the Son of Man coming in the clouds of heaven and before Him shall be gathered all nations. And He shall separate them as the sheep from the goats.

Those are but a sampling of the astounding words of Jesus and the claims that He made. If you believe not that I am He, you shall die in your sins. And God has given all judgment into My hand. Marvel not at this, for the day will come when they that are in the graves shall hear My voice and shall come forth.

Now nobody ever talked like that. And many who heard Him did not believe Him. But He said when the Holy Ghost is come and the Holy Ghost came as a silent, penetrating, immediate witness.

Now there is no contradiction here when I say that the Holy Spirit’s voice entreats us. And then I also say He came as a silent, penetrating, immediate witness. For silence is sometimes more eloquent than sound. And the penetrating stillness of the Holy Ghost is more terrible than the loudest shout from the housetop.

And the Holy Ghost is here confirming the words of Jesus. That is why the critics are all in confusion. That is why when a man becomes a doubter and begins to pull the Word of God apart, God makes a fool of him immediately, puts long, hairy ears on him and turns him out to pasture. And he writes himself some books. And standing solemn faced as a barn owl, he says things to students in his classes that would bring hell down in roars of laughter.

And yet he doesn’t know that he’s being funny. For God has withdrawn from him the inner light and he is speaking as a fool speaks. Because the silent, penetrating voice of the Holy Ghost is not heard in his words. He hears it no more.

But the Holy Spirit is here to confirm to the consciences of men the truth of the words of Jesus. And the works of Jesus. There was no denying that a mighty miracle worker had been there. He did raise the dead. He did heal the sick. He did cleanse the leper. He did turn the water into wine. He did make the bread, a few pieces of bread to feed the multitude.

He did do these wonderful things and there was no denying it. The Pharisees didn’t try to deny it. They could not, seeing the man that was healed standing among them. They couldn’t say anything. You cannot deny a fact that stands and stares you in the face, that you can touch and feel and push around and investigate.

You can’t possibly deny such a fact and they didn’t try it. They simply said, He does His works in the power of the devil. Somebody was doing miracle works there and when He has come, the Holy Ghost came that He might confirm and verify the divine quality of the works of Jesus and prove Him not to be one more miracle peddler but indeed the very God who had made the world and could make it do what He pleased for it to do.

And then there was the person of the Lord Jesus Christ. The most significant, the most telling person that ever lived in the world was Jesus. I think that could generally be agreed among all peoples of the world. Even the Mohammedans might admit that. And certainly the great religions of the East would admit it. That He was, that He stands out in history. Head and shoulders as above all the great.

And now how are we to dispose of Him? What’s the world to do with Him? What are religious minded people to do with this mighty person that stood taller than the tall pine tree at the beginning of the Christian era?

Well, the Holy Ghost came to do a confirmatory work, and He raised Him from the dead. And now since the Spirit has come, this mysterious witness has come. Christ is no longer on trial. And it’s no longer a question of was Jesus the Son of God? All that is beside the point and irrelevant.

And there’s never any such thing anymore as a sincere question, was Jesus the Son of God? The Holy Ghost has taken out of the realm of polemics the idea of Christ’s deity and has put it in the realm of morals. And this silent, immediate witness, this penetrating voice in the consciences of men tell us that this person was indeed the very Son of God.

It was very noticeable, wasn’t it, that as soon as Peter was filled with the Holy Ghost, he immediately rose and preached what he had never preached before. Namely, that this man whom ye crucified is the Christ of God.

That God raised Him from the dead and He is the Lord and the Christ of God. And as soon as Paul was filled with the Holy Ghost, you will find that Paul in the ninth chapter of Acts went doing exactly the same thing. He reasoned and proved from the Scriptures that Jesus was the Son of God. That the coming Messiah was to be the Son of God and that that man was Jesus. So that the Holy Spirit’s witness is a witness to the lordship and deity of the Son of God.

So my friends, remember this, that Jesus Christ needs no more of your defense. Jesus Christ needs no more books written to prove that he was God. Jesus Christ is no longer on trial. He needs no advocate pleading His cause before the unfriendly court of the world. He needs no witness to rise and say, I know He was the Son of God. He needs no reasoner with his fine logic to prove it by history that Jesus Christ was the Son of God. The proof of the Sonship of Jesus has been removed from the realm of the intellect and placed where it always has belonged in the realm of morals.

And the Holy Ghost has put it there. When He has come, when He has come and He came and He is here and He may be grieved and He may have to withdraw Himself partly from some places, but He is here and He is here as a silent Holy Witness, more eloquent than all the noise of the world, saying this Man was indeed the Son of God. I say that Jesus Christ is no longer on trial before men, but men are now on trial before Him.

And strange and wonderful as it may be, He who once stood before Pilate now makes Pilate to stand before Him. And He who pleaded His cause before the unfriendly world now sits and judges that same world. And He’s transferred the religious question to the heart.

There is a throne where one sits where never a man can come. And there is on that throne a Man–wonderful paradox. The long claws that stretched out to get Him and take Him to the cross can never reach as high as that throne where He sits.

And yet He sits there in the form of a man so that we would recognize Him instantly in the shape of a man and know that this is a Man and He’s there invested with full authority and full power and with full right of judgment. And there is a holy witness present Who in all things speaks for this Man who sits on the throne. It is expedient for you that I go away. For if I go not away, He will not come. But if I go, I will send Him unto you. And when He is come, He will convince the world concerning sin and righteousness and judgment.

And now I think that we ought to remember that however we treat the Holy Spirit’s warnings, we treat Jesus Christ himself. However we treat the Spirit’s presence, we treat the Lord Himself. We ought to get that in mind. Christ the Lord is not some faraway being, but He is mysteriously, wondrously present now in our midst in the person of the Holy Spirit. When He is come, He will convince the world concerning. And He is here now convincing the world.

And the fate of the individual man does not depend upon historic evidence. Now with all my heart, I believe in the historicity of the Gospels. This is not a subterfuge to hide away from the belief in the historicity of the Gospels. I believe they’re historically correct. I believe that they can be confirmed in the format of history. I believe everything that’s here is historically true.

But let me point out something to you, my friends. If faith depended upon a man knowing enough history in its right and proper context and being familiar enough with the writings of the historians of the world to arrive at a scholarly belief in the deity of Jesus, then there could only be a relatively few people anywhere in the world saved.

If in order to believe in Jesus Christ, I had to know the historic facts of Rome and Greece and Palestine and Syria and Egypt, and if I had to be able to go to the great tomes and search for myself and discover the historic truth, and then having discovered that historic truth, I had to know enough of the laws of evidence to know whether it proved him to be the Son of God or not, then I would have to be a scholar, a logician, and a lawyer to arrive at belief in the deity of the Lord Jesus Christ.

But the Holy Ghost came to take the deity of Christ out of the hands of the scholars and put it in the consciences of men. The Holy Ghost came to lift it out of the history books and put it on the fleshy tablets of the human heart. So you can go to the jungles where men cannot read and write, where they wear nothing but a G-string, and you can begin to preach Jesus Christ and sin, and the Holy Ghost will witness to sin and righteousness and judgment, and He will confirm the truth of Christ’s words and works and Person to the most ignorant jungle heathen. And that heathen never heard of Rome, never heard of Greece, never heard of Pilate, never heard of Caesar, never knew the city of Rome ever existed, doesn’t know that Palestine exists, doesn’t know where Jerusalem is, never heard of David, never heard of Abraham, knows nothing about the Reformation.

And yet you can go, a missionary and simply tell the story, and they’ll begin to tremble and sweat with the knowledge that they’re sinners, and they’ll believe in Jesus Christ. And having believed, they’ll be transformed and turned inside out, and made honest and good and clean and humble and right, and they’ll learn to read and they’ll begin to sing the simple Gospels, they’ll form themselves into a church.

And the great, strong, elemental fellows born of the jungle and the wild winds and the stars will become deacons and elders and preachers in that church. And they have no scholarship, no knowledge of history, no ability to weigh evidences. They know nothing about relevance and irrelevance and the laws of evidence.

No, when He came, He took polemics away from the scholars and gave it back to the human soul, so that now my faith in the deity of Jesus does not rest upon my ability to comb through history and arrive at logical conclusions concerning historic facts. The Holy Ghost blazes in on me like a lightning flash, blinds me with the wonder of it. If ye are willing to do His will, ye shall know the doctrine whether I speak of God or not, said Jesus our Lord, when the Holy Ghost has come. And He is here. I think that this is one of the most important truths that can be taught in the world today.

And yet, so far as I know, I’m the one single lone individual who is preaching. There may be others, and certainly in the spirit of it and in the whole weight and drift of it, my friend Ravenhill agrees with me on this. We’ve talked over these things and we’re one in it. But we’re one or two or three at most in the midst of a vast cloud and sea of witnesses that are prepared to make the deity of Christ rest upon historical evidence when the Holy Ghost has taken it away from that realm altogether and has put it as a burning point in the human conscience.

So the problem today is a moral problem altogether. It’s not an intellectual problem at all. Now don’t let’s be too humble here. Don’t let’s, like a lot of poor misguided people do, admit with a wry face that we’re a bunch of dumbbells and barely know our letters. Augustine was not a dumbbell. Luther wrote his theses first in Latin and then in German. He wrote to the Pope, and wrote it first in Latin for the Pope and then wrote it in German to give to the people.

No, no, you don’t have to pump your head out so it’s a blessed vacuum in order to be a Christian. And there’s much use for the human mind, so keep yours. There’s much use for the human brain, so take care of it, keep it cool and educate it all you can. There’s lots of use for it.

But I repeat, the use for it will not be in the realm of divine evidence. The Holy Ghost takes care of that. And the Holy Ghost is here to confirm the person of Jesus. And whatever the Holy Ghost says, stands forever. And whatever He does now, the judgment will approve and confirm.

We come into a church like this, oh, we get here some way. If we got here, maybe got here to meet a girl or a boy. Maybe we came here hoping we would. Maybe we came here to get our parents off our neck. Maybe we were just wandering by and wondered what it was all about. Maybe it’s just a habit. Any one of the 25 reasons might be dredged up out of our memory right now. And we think we can just come in and go away again and there’ll be no harm done, like going to a PTA meeting. Well, I’m a little bored, but I’ll sit through it. What’s it all about? And when it’s all over, you go neither better nor worse.

My friends, a concept like that ignores one of the most vitally important facts in the world. And that is that wherever the Lord’s people meet, the Holy Ghost is there, confirming the Word and the work and the person of Jesus and demanding moral action, so that a man never knows when he goes to a gospel meeting. He never knows when the last shred of excuse will be stripped from his naked, trembling conscience forever. For the Holy Ghost is not fooling. Sometimes preachers are.

I heard this terrible thing recently, this terrible thing. A man, and I think he was a minister; he had a good sense of humor. And he, knowing the Bible, he learned how to make the Scriptures always say the right thing. Payoff line, as we say.mAnd when there’d be a conversation on, he’d turn it around so that a flip of the verbal tail that made people laugh was always a Scripture quotation.

One day, he came to die. And they said to him, well, you must find great comfort in the Scriptures. And they began to quote the Scriptures to him. And he said, don’t, don’t, don’t quote it, don’t quote it, don’t quote it. There isn’t a verse you can quote that I haven’t made the subject of a joke. And now, when I need it, it means nothing to me.

The Holy Ghost isn’t joking. People may be, and it’s gotten in this country now, in evangelical circles, where a man without a sense of humor can’t get to first base. He’s got to be funny. Let’s go hear that jaybird, he’s funny as a crutch. The very fact, said Dr. Buswell, you can call a preacher a jaybird proves he’s lost his character.

And men may play, but the Holy Ghost is in dead earnest. Jesus Christ went away in dead earnest. And He sat down in utter, solemn sincerity by the presence of the Majesty on High. And He sent that wave of silvery light, containing in Himself all the essence of the Father and the Son. Down He came in the form of a dove.

And then as fire sat upon each of them, and they knew that Jesus was the Son of God, they knew it instantly. They didn’t know it while He was among them, but they knew it then. They didn’t know it for sure, but they knew it now. And the Scripture says that when He has come, He will convince men concerning.

Now, the Holy Spirit will not witness to minor matters. Another important thing I’m saying here tonight, that you can’t get the Holy Ghost involved in minor things. Let’s reach up and pull out a grotesque illustration out of the air. And let’s put it like this. Let’s imagine last fall when two great and good men were running for the presidency. I insist upon them both as great and good men, Stevenson and Eisenhower.

And these two men were running against each other for the presidency. Suppose that in their speeches, suppose that Eisenhower had insisted upon attacking Stevenson’s baldness. And let us suppose that Stevenson, paying thousands of dollars for time on the air, would get up and in his brilliant witty way, would have spent a whole half hour talking about Eisenhower’s wretched taste in ties. Neither man could have been elected. They would have elected at Chinaman by a write-in vote.

For in serious and important matters, you deal with basic principles. And they both tried to do it. And they dealt with domestic problems, foreign relations, taxes. They dealt with problems that go to the roots of American living.

Do you suppose the Holy Ghost is any less wise than politicians? And yet we want the Holy Spirit to help us while we talk about trivialities.

That’s why I scorn to debate over things that don’t matter. That’s why they’ll never get me concerned with the little niceties of prophecy. And that is why though we have baptized by immersion, we’ll never condemn those who don’t believe in that mode of baptism. That is why I will not engage in controversy over eternal security. And that is why you cannot get me involved because I want the Holy Ghost to help me, and He won’t help me fool. He’ll only help me when I’m serious. And the Spirit of God is here.

Now a lot of people try to escape by pretending. They pretend that they are seekers. They say, I’m a seeker after light. Could you look in the glass and say, I’m a seeker after light? When He has come, He will convince. And then you say, I’m a seeker after light. Your problem is not lack of light. Your problem is a moral problem.

And yet men try to hide and escape by pretending. They say, I don’t know which form of baptism. He did not say when the Holy Ghost has come, He will convince that the Baptists are right. Nor did he say when the Holy Ghost has come, He will convince the world that infant baptism is correct. He said when the Holy Ghost has come, He’ll talk about three vital things, sin and righteousness and judgment. And he insists on moral sincerity.

As I rode along tonight on the bus coming up here, I thought this radical thing to myself. Modified it a little, even in my own head. But I thought, I’m not sure that God hasn’t got more respect for a sincere devil than he has for an insincere religionist. If a devil is a devil and he hates God and loves sin, and he’s sincere about it, God will reject him forever from His presence, but He’ll say, there goes somebody at least I can respect. He means what He says. I would thou art hot or cold, because thou art lukewarm, and neither hot or cold, I’ll spew thee out of my mouth.

I say a sincere devil stands higher in moral things than an insincere Christian or religious person. I’m not sure about baptism. When I’ve settled on what mode of baptism I want to be baptized with, I’ll become a Christian. Liar. You might as well know it. That’s insincere. That’s hypocrisy. That’s pharisaism. That’s dodging the issue. There’s no truth there.

Some say if I knew what church was, which church is it, Mr. Tozer. Tell me now. Write me a letter. Write me a letter and say, now Mr. Tozer, which church is it? The Roman church, Greek church, Protestant church, Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian, Nazarene, Pentecostal, what church is it? Have they never heard the Voice? Have they never been still enough to hear the mysterious witness that penetrates to their conscience and says, sin and righteousness and judgment? If they had ever heard the Voice and had ever been sincere in response to it, they’d never have any reason to ask such questions.

Now, these three vital things, He presses them home, for they’re critical and they’re eternal and they’re important. These three vital things, sin and righteousness and judgment, and sinned because they believe not on Me. The one belief is the sign and the proof of sin.

Now let me say this again from a little different angle, that faith is also a moral thing. I’ve said this before and you that know me will have heard me say it before and probably wonder why I’m saying it now. But if you wonder why I’m saying it now, then you didn’t know what I meant when I said it before.

I believe that we are where we are in evangelical circles because of a basic misunderstanding of faith. We think that faith is a conclusion drawn from a fact. And out in the world that is so, but in the realm of the Spirit it is not so. Saving faith is not a conclusion drawn from facts presented. Saving faith is a gift of God to a penitent man.

And there’s where we are. The young fellow will get down on his knees, anybody will do that. Go anywhere and you can get them on their knees. Go down among the rattlesnake handlers in the mountains and you’ll find them there. Go over to Arabia and you’ll find them down five times a day on a prayer mat. Anybody will go to his knees if you don’t make any demands of him. It’s a simple matter to get people forward, it’s a simple matter to get them to their knees.

So while they’re on their knees, somebody rushes in with a marked testament and sticks a text under their nose and says, who said it? He says, God. Do you believe God? Yes. Well then do you believe the text? Yes, I must because I believe God. Well then get up and testify. And he gets up with an intellectual faith that has not saving in it or any saving quality. That’s where we are now. It takes three works of grace to put a man in this day where the first beginnings of salvation used to put him in olden times.

Well, He’ll convince the world concerning sin. When I was growing up, they were telling me this little thing. Oh, how I thank God I’ve been a rebel all my life and a skeptic all my life. If I hadn’t been, I might have been pastor of a big church and no heart in it. I could have been. You know, I don’t hurt anybody and I don’t make any moral demands on them, kiss the babies, pat everybody, eat cake with them, drink a proper amount of English tea and don’t hurt anybody’s feelings and thunder against modernism.

And take a man dead 50 years and rip him to pieces and prove that he was a scoundrel because he didn’t believe the margins of the Schofield Bible. I could have had a big church, brother, ridden in a caddy. Sure, I had sense enough to know that way back there. But I thank God I’ve been a rebel all my life and still am. And I’m in rebellion against that kind of teaching that would pick chickens out of their shell and let them die and against that kind of practice that would take over the work of the Holy Ghost and crowd Him out and retire Him.

This is the age of the superannuated Holy Ghost. We’ve retired Him and said, thanks, we have our Bible, a good King James translation, and we won’t need You till the millennium. And the Holy Spirit is a marginal annotation and is taken care of by a few proof texts and forgotten. But He won’t be forgotten like that. He holds your faith in His hand.

They used to say, the problem today is not that sin question, the problem is the Son question. And if you will believe in the Son, why the matter of sin is all taken care of.

I heard one man who had better been doing something else the time, I recommend hoeing in the garden. But he said this, he said sin has no more meaning to God. On Calvary, sin beat itself to death and perished. And now sin has no meaning to God since Calvary. He ought to have been raising tulips, and not preaching the gospel. For he was a good man talking like a blooming idiot.

The problem never has been the Son question. The problem has been the sin question from the day he stretched forth her hand in an evil hour and gave also to her husband and he did eat. And when the sin question is settled, the Son question comes leaping in, happily solved. And if you will be willing to do the will of God, you shall know that Jesus is the son of God. And you won’t have to read long books to prove it. It’s all there.

Now, not only sin but righteousness, the voice of the Holy Spirit. Righteousness because I go to my Father. And the fact that He went to His Father is conspicuous proof of the world’s condition. For there was one righteous Man in the world and He couldn’t stay. There was one righteous Man and He had to leave. He was too good to stay. They hounded Him out of the world.

And today, the more we become like Him, the less welcome we are in society. To make Christianity socially acceptable is an effort that’s worse than wasted. To make out of the cross a symbol and relegate its nails and thorns and blood and terror and ostracism back to the hill above Jerusalem and forget that that same cross is alive today wherever the Gospels preach is to commit a theological error as deadly as Russellism. And yet it’s what we hear most of the time. After all, believe me, we know better now; they don’t crucify people now.

They don’t crucify people now because they can get along with them too easily. There’s too much collaboration between men who claim to follow the Crucified One and the people who don’t believe in the Crucified One. Wherever they can catch a Christ-like man, they’ll run for the nails and the hammer.

And what we need, I don’t pray for it. I haven’t the courage to pray for it. But I’m here and I’m at God’s disposal. But what we need in our day is to have some more Christians crucified. We need more persecution. We need a social situation that makes it dangerous to be a Christian. But it isn’t dangerous now. It’s quite the popular thing.

They use a preacher now for almost anything. They can’t cut a tape. They ought to have a preacher there to cut the tape. They can’t break ground for anything. The latest dog pound at what reverend has to be there to say a prayer and break the first shovel full while he looks up, smirks at the camera. The ladies can’t begin their campaign to drive all the ground moles out of Cook County except they have a pastor there. He’s got to be there to mumble a few words, smile, and look religious. But nobody crucifies the old boy. They get along with him, get along with him.

But there was one righteous Man, and He couldn’t stay. Their faces went as black as canes, and their countenance fell. And they said, we won’t be made moral fools of by this man. And they nailed Him on the cross.

And the Holy Ghost is here to convince the world concerning that unpardoned act, that act of crucifying the world’s only holy Man, that is, holy in the final absolute sense of the word who was holy without being made holy. There may be holy men now, and there may be righteous men now. But they’re righteous men because they were made righteous by the One who never was made righteous. Jesus Christ never was any less righteous than He is now. He never had to be washed nor cleansed, and His baptism was never a baptism for cleansing.

And when the Holy Ghost came upon Him, He came upon Him as a dove and not as fire. And there was no need for purgation. And the Bible never says Christ was baptized with the Holy Ghost. It says He was anointed. Baptism was symbolic of cleansing. Anointing was symbolic of office. He was anointed without cleansing, for He never was anything but clean, the spotless Lamb of God.

And He was the one spotless Man, and He was the man that couldn’t stay. They hounded Him out of the world. Jesus said to the Pharisees when He lived among them, ye have killed the prophets. Now you build their monuments, but you’re still guilty of killing them.

And so we’re now talking nice about Jesus, painting His pictures, saying nice things about Him. We have His blood on our hands as a race. He will convince the world of sin and righteousness and judgment. Now the prince of this world is judged, Jesus said. And the voice of the Spirit speaks of a day of reckoning.

I was thinking how much better it would be if we could have a choice. If God could give us a choice and say, now you’re going to die within the next 12 hours, I’ll give you your choice. Do you want to rise again, or do you want to stay forever in the state of blessed unconsciousness and never rise again? That’s sheer imagination. That could never happen. For God has ordained that all men should rise, some to righteousness and some to everlasting condemnation.

But if a man could have a choice, every once in a while, we read of somebody in a fit of self-pity and a variety of other sins, will get a gun, kill his wife and two or three children, then kill himself. They can’t get at him. Police can’t get at him. You can’t punish him. A coward ten times over. So cowardly that probably hell won’t even admit him until he’s washed a bit.

But if you could give that man an opportunity and say, listen, do you want to rise, or shall we fix it so you’ll never need to wake while millenniums spend themselves? Oh, what a relief for that man. What a relief for that man. My God, my God, he’d cry. I died with the sound of the gaspings of my wife and children in my ears. I died fleeing from it, and I haven’t been able to get away from it. And I hear it yet and hear the sighings and see the blood. Please, please let me go to sleep and never wake again.

It would be a mighty convenient thing if sinners never had to rise from the dead. If they had all, Hitler and Caligula and Mussolini and some more of them had it in their power to stay dead, it would be convenient for them. But they that are in the graves shall hear the voice of the Son of Man.

There’s a judgment. I believe in that judgment. I believe it. They have taken it away from us in the hour in which we live, and they’ve said it’s ridiculous, that God isn’t a bookkeeper, and we can’t conceive of God putting entries in a book like a common clerk. John Jones, 321 West 44th Place, June 14th, 1953, did commit the below-mentioned sins. They say God’s no clerk. God isn’t writing books, debit books.

Oh, how ignorant can we get and still not drop dead? Of course, God isn’t keeping that kind of books. Of course, God isn’t a clerk. But every deed that ever has been committed or ever will be committed from the beginning to the world till the last man is instantly now present before the eyes of God.

And God needs no clerks and no pens. The omniscient God sees perfectly all that ever was and all that is and all that ever will be. And without raising his eyebrows, He knows every man’s heartbeat and every man’s thought and every man’s deed.

So, judgment will be very easy for God. Judgment won’t be difficult for God. Of course, He puts it for us to understand that books were opened, and the dead were brought forth and so on. All that’s to convince men. But God doesn’t need any help like that. God already knows, judgment, sin, and righteousness.

Now the Spirit of God will persist. He’ll keep on. That penetrating, silent, eloquent Voice until the Voice can no longer be heard or until we listen and return. And you know it still works. A man who hears the gospel message and believes it, really believes it, really turns to the Lord Jesus Christ, there’s still transforming power in it. You don’t see much of it, but you see some of it.

I won’t mention names, but I’m thinking of a young fellow. I think he may be present here tonight. He was this morning. You know, nobody looked at him twice. He was just one more boy, young fellow, all good-looking and all that, but just one more young fellow in the millions. Trotted down the aisle here some, maybe two months ago, and something happened to that boy. And the whole life is transformed. His whole life is transformed. His face looks different, better looking than ever. The tone of his voice is different. Everything is different.

Now he says, I’m going to quit my job and get a job where I can be at church. My job’s all right, but it takes me out of church. I’m going to get a job where I can be at church. What happened to the fellow? Only what could happen to everybody that listens and hears the Voice and believes and turns.

Jesus Christ is still the miracle worker. He still raises the dead Lazaruses out of the grave. He still raises the consciences of men out of the deep mud of their past. He still converts. He still regenerates. He still transforms. He still makes Christians out of dead clods. He still does it.

It’s tragic that He doesn’t do it more frequently. It’s tragic that we hide from Him in the caves and dens of the earth. It’s tragic that we hide among the trees of the garden. It’s tragic that we keep our hearts so hard we can’t feel and so deaf that we can’t hear. It’s tragic that there aren’t more.

But wherever the gospel is really tried out, it has its own transforming power still. And you need not apologize for the word of God or the message of the cross. It’s still the same old message. And somehow, we short-circuit it by making out faith to be an intellectual exercise. And we have not converts, but proselytes.

Then comes the death of the heart. You know, dying isn’t a very pleasant business. I read of old Socrates drinking the hemlock when they compelled him to do it because they’re a way of killing him in Greece, in Athens. And he lay down on the bench, his friends around him in tears. He’d taken a long, deep draught of the poison hemlock. And he kept talking. He was in possession of himself, very calm. He kept saying to Crito and the other friends around him, kept describing how he was dying.

Well, he said, my feet are getting cold. He said, they’re so cold. And he tapped them. He said, I have no feeling now in my feet. He said that cold feeling is creeping up my legs now. He lay there and felt himself die and intelligently explained how it was going on.

Brethren, there are people, and you don’t have to be a hundred years old. Some of you are very young. You have poisoned your conscience. You have drunk of the poison of sin so deeply that you’re dying. You’re dying. There’s still some feeling left in you. But for the most part, you’re insensitive and insensible. There’s no feeling there. Little by little, you’re dying.

I’ve seen them come up in this church, stay around a while, listen, maybe make an experimental trip to the altar once or twice, and then slowly lose interest, and then go. And way out there in the world someplace, disappointed, sulky, sullen, bitter, they wait for the Grim Reaper. But they died a little at a time before they ever left the church.

He that hath ears to hear, says the entreating Voice, he that hath ears to hear, let him hear. And the Spirit and the Bride say, come and whosoever will, let him come and drink of the water of life freely. Humble thyself, and the Lord will draw near thee. Humble thyself, and his presence will cheer thee. God will not walk with the proud nor the scornful. Humble thyself to walk with God.

Now the Holy Spirit is entreating you. God’s love entreats. The blood of Jesus Christ eloquently entreats. The Spirit of God entreats. The world is lost, but the world is not forsaken.

The voice of Jesus Christ calls now, and He calls you. Are you hearing Him at all? Have you been hearing Him tonight at all? Are you listening? Have you heard? Will you do something about it? You say, I wish it could be made easier. I wouldn’t make it easier if I could. I wouldn’t make it easier.

Listen, friends. If hell is what God says it is, if sin is what God says it is, if Jesus Christ had to die to save the sinner from hell, and you can’t as much as rise and let a congregation know you’re turning from sin, it’s a strangely mixed-up business. Jesus Christ never taught that His people would sneak in an easy way. Never taught that they would creep in like vermin into the kingdom of God, crawl unobtrusively through the cracks. Never.

He said, if ye deny Me before men, I will deny you before My Father which art in heaven. And he that will come after Me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow Me.

We cannot crawl like a thief into the kingdom of God. Jesus Christ, if He’s your Savior, He has a right to your bold and fearless witness. And if you will not dare to rise and say, I’ll follow Jesus, I’ll follow Jesus. Here I come, Lord Jesus. If you’re not willing to do that, you’re too big a coward to go to heaven. For the fearful and the unbelieving shall have their part in the lake that burns with fire.

The man who’s afraid to rise and say, I will follow Jesus, is too big a coward to escape hell. God doesn’t make it easy. On sinking ships and burning buildings, etiquette is forgotten. It’s not made easy. The word of the Lord is not easy, but it saves. Let us pray.

O God, our Father, God, our Father, this night, the world has grown old, and the judgment draws near. Kingdoms have risen and waned. Nation has risen against nation, kingdom against kingdom. And as it was in the days of Noah, so is it now in this day. These are solemn times.

We appeal to Thee, O Lord, we appeal to Thee. Help us in this hour. Help us now. We beseech Thee, O Lord, for the cringing sinner, for the frightened, cowering sinner who hasn’t the courage to get up and follow the Lamb, but who’s trying to get in, somehow, through some window or back door.

God, have mercy, we pray Thee, this hour, through Jesus Christ, help us in this moment of decision. We ask it in Jesus’ name. Amen

Tags Holy Spirit

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Tozer Talks

Post author By pshappard
Post date March 23, 2025

“The Voice of God’s Love“

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The Voice of God’s Love

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

May 31, 1953

Strangely enough, we go back to the book of Jeremiah for the first text on this series. In the book of Jeremiah, the thirty-first chapter, verse three, the Lord hath appeared of old unto me, saying, Yea, I have loved thee with an everlasting love, therefore, with lovingkindness have I drawn thee. Yea, I have loved thee with an everlasting love, therefore, with lovingkindness have I drawn thee.

So, I begin tonight a series of sermons to be called Voices That Entreat Us. And I wonder why it should be necessary for the voice of entreaty to be heard at all in the earth. It can only be because we are out of the way. The world we inhabit is a lost world. There are reasons to believe that the earth itself upon which we ride is a lost planet. Hints of this are found through the entire Bible, and I believe that through the anointed intellect, such traces, such evidence, may be found also in nature.

Back in the book of Genesis, God said about the planet, cursed be the ground for thy sake. Thorns and thistles shall it bring forth unto thee, until thou return unto the ground, for out of the ground was thou taken. Thus thou art, and unto thus shalt thou return.

Now, why were these words ever spoken? I believe that they were spoken to describe the planet upon which we ride. It is a lost planet. I quote from the writings of the world’s profoundest intellect.

I believe that it might be generally conceded that the profoundest mind that ever set a pen to paper was the Apostle Paul. Quoting from the Williams translation, that is the British Williams translation, these words from the book of Romans, the eighth chapter. This world of nature was condemned to be without meaning, not by its own will, but by the will of Him who condemned it, in the hope that not only mankind, but this world of nature also, might be set free from bondage to decay, to enter the glorious liberty of the sons of God. For to this day, as we know, the whole world of nature cries out in pain like a woman in childbirth.

Now, this world of nature was condemned to be without meaning. That is vanity. And it’s strange that the very words that the philosophers like to use are used here by the sacred writer, that nature is without meaning. And not only mankind, but this world of nature is to be set free from bondage to decay. It is a sick, fallen planet upon which we ride.

Now, worse than this, the inhabitants of this planet are also lost. The Bible declares this very plainly. But for any whom I doubt it, does it seem reasonable to you that beings like us should be given each one his little turn at bat, just one time, beings like us? There is a theology, or a color of theology, a pattern of theology, that squirms uneasily as soon as you say anything good about mankind. They’re prepared to say that you’re liberal, or a modernist, or a borderline liberal, at least, if you say anything good about mankind.

My brethren, except for sin, it would be very difficult to overpraise human beings. When you consider what we are, and what we know, and what we can do, our memories, imaginations, artistic abilities, and all that we have as human beings, when you consider it, you can’t justly and properly sell mankind short.

Sin, God knows, is like a cancer in the heart. It ruins the man and damns him at last. But man is not all sin. Man was made in the image of God, and while sin has ruined him, and condemned him to death forever, unless he be redeemed through the blood of Jesus. Yet mankind is a being only one degree removed from the angels, and in some ways, superior indeed to the angels themselves.

And does it seem reasonable to you, if this were not a lost world, that such a being as man, such a being as a Shakespeare, or a Churchill, or an Edison, or any of the great writers, or artists, or engineers of the world, should it seem, does it seem reasonable to you that each one of them should, like a little kid, be given his one little turn at bat, and then told to sit down while the ages roll on?

Does it seem reasonable to you that a being so godlike as man is, should take all of this marvelous equipment of his toward the grave? That he should carry his memory, his brilliant imagination, his artistic creative powers, and all that we know that makes a man a man, that he should carry it toward the grave? That God should waste his time on such a being as he made man to be, and say, I’m just fooling around with a man, I’m just making this marvelous creature just for a day, I’m just having some fun, it doesn’t seem reasonable to me.

Does it seem reasonable to you that this being should consistently live beneath his own ideals, that he should everlastingly be beneath what he knows he ought to be, and always be frustrated by living below his own ideals, and should be doomed to go to the grave, frustrated and disappointed at last, never having attained his ideals? It does not seem reasonable to me. And that he should dream of a shining world, and yet not know the way there. Lord, we know not whither thou art going, how can we know the way? No truer words were ever uttered by any man than that we don’t know the way there.

That shining world of which men have dreamed, that every man secretly believes is somewhere there before him, is nevertheless lost to that man, or he is lost to it, so that the human race is a lost race. That is only reason talking now, but sacred revelation declares plainly that the inhabitants of the earth are lost. They’re lost by a mighty, calamitous visitation of woe, which came upon them somewhere back there and is still upon them.

But it also tells this glorious fact that this lost race has not been given up. There is a voice that is calling them, there is a voice that is entreating them, there are voices that are entreating them. As the shepherd went everywhere searching for his sheep, as the woman in the parable went everywhere searching for her coin, so there is a voice, there are voices that entreat us, that call us back. If we were not lost, there would be no voices behind us saying, this is the way, walk ye in it. If we were not far from home, there would be no father’s voice calling us back home. I say that we have not been given up.

That is plain from the book of Genesis, where when Adam fled from the face of God among the trees of the garden, the sound of God’s gentle voice was heard saying, Adam, where art thou? And that voice has never died out. The echo of that voice is sounding down through the years and has never ceased to reverberate and echo and re-echo from peak to peak and from generation to generation and from race to race and continent to continent and off to islands and back to continent again. All down the years, Adam, where art thou? Now there are many voices I say, but it’s only really one voice.

Did you hear about that little two-and-a-half-year-old girl that was lost in the woods over in Michigan? I think it was only last week and there were bears loose there and some of those bears that were known to be man-eaters. And for a couple of days or longer, this little, was she two and a half years old, girl that was lost there. You hear about that every once in a while, a little one slipping away from a picnicking party and getting lost.

And they organized parties; whose back of that? Who does it? Is it not the throbbing distraught heart of the father and the mother? Who is it that organizes these parties to hover overhead with helicopters, to send out sound trucks, to organize soldiers and boy scouts and friendly neighbors, always calling, calling, calling, calling, calling in a soothing voice, always calling.

It may be the voice of a soldier here, it may be the voice of a boy scout around there, it may be the voice of a friendly neighbor over there, it may be a sound truck from the highway there, it may be a helicopter from up here, but always it’s the same voice, it’s the father’s voice. Though there may be a dozen or two dozen voices calling, oh, they’re only inflections of one voice. They’re simply the overtones and undertones of the same loving father’s voice that’s organized it, that’s backed it, and whose distraught heart is calling for his lost child.

So, there are many voices calling us, calling this lost planet, calling the inhabitants of this lost planet, and there are many voices, but it’s all one voice. And whether it be the voice of God’s love, or the voice of Jesus’ blood, or the voice of conscience, or the voice of the dead, or the voice of the living, or the voice of the lost, or the voice of the saved, whatever the voice may be, it’s all the inflection of the same voice. It’s all one voice. It’s a distraught heart of God seeking his lost race, calling them any way that he can call them, calling them from above or from below, calling them from around the bend, or down the road, or beside the river, or on the plateau, calling them, but always calling them; the voice of God as in treating us.

Ladies and gentlemen, with everything inside of my beating heart, chastened and criticized by everything inside of my mind, I believe in the voice of God sounding in his world, calling men. The planet’s lost, lost to such a degree that the holy writer says that it’s lost its meaning, it’s full of vanity. And even the world around us is so lost that it is crying like a woman in travail, waiting as it were to be born back into the liberty of the sons of God and saved from decay and corruption. The race that inhabits it, the human race, is lost, and always this voice of God is sounding, always it’s sounding.

Now I speak tonight of the voice of God’s love, and I repeat that when it’s all been said, all the voices are the voices of God’s love, whether it be the voice of conscience, whether it be the voice of fear, the voice of the pastor, the voice of the traveling evangelist, the voice of the teacher, the voice of the Sunday school superintendent, or the friendly neighbor that may be a Christian, whether it be the voice of reason or whatever it be, it’s all one voice. It is the distraught, heavy-hearted voice of God calling his lost race back. Now he says here, yea, I have appeared of old unto you, saying, yea, I have loved thee with an everlasting love. Therefore, with loving kindness have I drawn thee.

The voice of the love of God is calling a lost race, and we members in particular, can hear that voice tonight if we would listen. Now let me say a few things about the love of God that you probably won’t hear anywhere else that you go, at least rarely will you hear it said, but let me point out that God being who he is, God must love Himself first with a pure and blameless and perfect love.

Now don’t go out and say Mr. Tozer didn’t mean that. That’s just exactly what I meant, that God being God, not being a creature but being an uncreated being, deriving from nobody, owing nothing to anybody, and being himself underived and uncreated, this holy God who is Himself the fountain of all the love there is, must love Himself forever with pure and perfect love.

This is the holy and blameless love which the three persons of the Trinity feel for each other. The Father for the Son, the Son for the Father, the Father and the Son for the Spirit, the Spirit for the Father and the Son. Divine Trinity in perfect and blameless and proper love, love each other with poured out devotion. Three fountains pouring into each other out of the same boundless, shoreless, depthless sea, bottomless, that is the eternal, infinite God.

And these three upspringing fountains always pouring up and mingling with each other in perfection of bliss and love. This is the love of God for His own holy self. And God being what He is, God is Himself the only being He can love directly. There is nobody else that mingles with those three fountains. No other creature, not an archangel, nor a seraphim, nor a cherub, nor a man. Everything else that God loves and everybody else that God loves, He loves for His own sake. He loves Himself as the Father loves the Son and the Son, the Father and the Father, and the Son, the Spirit and the Spirit, the Father and the Son, without referring that love to any other being, for God is God.

But when it comes to creatures, that perfect love cannot fall directly upon any man. It must come to God mediated through God Himself. God must find something of Himself there in order that He might love it. For God can only love Himself and that which is like Himself.

Do you hear me? God can only love Himself. And God being what He is cannot love anything unlike Himself. If God should love anything unlike Himself, it would be equivalent to a pure and holy woman loving a gangster. God must love that which is equal to Himself and like Himself. And so, when God looks at the mute creation that the writer here, the translator calls the world of nature, He loves it because it reveals to Him something of His own Godhead and glory and power and shows something of His own wisdom.

So, when God looks on His sun and His moon and all the stars that He has made, and His lakes and His rivers and His mountains and His seas, God loves them because they remind Him of His own wisdom and power and Godhead that gave them being. And when God looks at the seraphim and the cherubim and the holy angels before the throne, He loves them because they remind Him of His own holiness. They’re holy angels and their holiness is derived from God. And God loves in them that which came from Himself. God loves them because they’re holy beings. And He can properly and with moral propriety, He can love holy angels because they’re reminding Him of Himself. And when God looks at a man, He loves in them, the fallen relic of His own image.

Now here again, there’s going to be people that nobody’s ever said it to me in person, but they’ve written me and abused me and said that I am a liberal. And I insist I don’t have education enough to be a modernist, but they say now that he’s a liberal. I’m not a liberal, I’m a Bible believer.

And the Scripture says that God made man in His own image. And when Jesus Christ was incarnated, He was incarnated in the body of a man without embarrassment and without change. Why could it be so? It was so because that man was an image of the God that created him said and said, let’s make man in Our image.

But fallen man has another element there, a foreign element that has crept in. It is sin. It’s the sting of the serpent that stung his bloodstream there in the garden, and that’s sin. So that man, made in the image of God, is now a dying man, sick unto death, because sin, like the poison of the adder, has gotten into his flowing moral veins. But extract that sin and take it out and you have the image of God again. And Jesus Christ was the image of God because He was a man without sin.

There’s no modernism there, no liberalism there, just Bible there. And the man who denies that fallen man bears upon him something of the fallen ruined Reich of what he once was is no true friend of the Bible. He is himself guilty of taking liberties with the Holy Scriptures.

And when God looks on a sinner and loves the sinner, never while the stars burn in their silence can it be said that God loves the sin in the sinner. Never can it be said that the Holy God loves an unholy thing, and yet God loves sinners. Why does He love sinners? He loves them for that which He sees in them of His lost and fallen image. For God can never love anything but Himself directly, and He loves everything else for His own sake.

So, you’re loved of God, friend, but you’re loved of God for Jesus’ sake. You’re loved of God, but you’re loved of God for the sake of the Holy Son, Jesus, who is the Godhead incarnate, who is the second person of the Godhead incarnated. And God sees in Jesus Christ what you would have been. That is, He sees in His perfect humanity, not His deity. You and I never can be divine in that sense.

So, God loves lost men. Loves them not because He excuses their sin, loves them not because He’s careless, loves them not because He’s morally lax, but loves them because He once stood and said, let us make man in Our image.

Let’s put it like this. A man and woman meet, fall in love and marry. They have a son, and they kid each other and play about that boy, and each one says it looks like the other, and then they change it around and say it looks like this one and then looks like that one, and they have a lot of fun, but that’s their boy. And they try to see each other in that boy.

Then he grows up, and the hour comes when he breaks with society, chooses to go outside the law and become an outlaw. He drinks, he gambles, he lies, he steals, he cheats, he murders. He’s a fugitive from justice. He becomes snarlingly vicious and cruel, becomes a killer, cold-eyed in his own right. Mercifully, the father dies, and then the boy is caught and thrown into prison. The mother goes to see him. No hope, no chance. A thousand witnesses, fingerprints everywhere, evidence of every kind, direct and circumstantial. They’ll get him. He’s finished. Half a dozen murders, he’ll pay for them.

The mother looks through the bars, and there’s her boy standing now, full-grown, the man. Can she love his outlawry? Does she love his gangsterism? Does she love his cold-eyed cruelty? Does she love his murders? Does she love his robberies? No, she hates them with everything in her good heart.

But when he stands up there needing to shave a little bit, she sees the man’s no longer with her. And she says, God, if he’d only been a good boy, he was the spitting image of his father. When I first met his dad, that’s what he looked like, and she pours her heart out in tears. She loves the boy, but she doesn’t love one thing in him that made him an outlaw. She loves an image of a man she once loved and gave herself to, and promised to follow till death did separate.

God looks down at the human race and sees us in our awful sin. The deeds of the flesh are seventeen in number, according to Paul, the works of the flesh, and that’s only the beginning. It would take several sheets of paper to write down the sins man has been capable of and has done and is doing, and God looks. And you think that God loves jealousy, deception, lying, gluttony, uncleanness, impurity, outlawries, cruelty.

Do you think God loves sinners, carelessly, foolishly, loves them and says, I don’t care, I love them anyway. I don’t think it for a second. I think He loves them because He sees in them the image of what Adam was and what Christ is, and loves them for Adam’s sake, but loves them now redemptively for Jesus’ sake, who was incarnated of the Virgin Mary and became a man without sin.

So, the voice of God’s love is sounding. I say you won’t hear that probably in very many places, but it’s so true it needs to be told again. It will deliver us from pride. Let no man go out and strut down the street and say, I’m a fundamentalist, God loves me.

Careful, Sonny, our sins have violated and lost to you every right you ever had to be loved by God. But God sees that you are of the loins of the man who once stood up on the earth, and looked about for a helpmeet for him, made in the image of God and wasn’t ashamed of him. And He sees an image of the Man who went to the tree and died between heaven and earth, His only begotten Son. And He loves you for other reasons than yourself. Therefore, humble yourself, it’ll pay. Thank God for the love that comes to you, mediated through the man Christ Jesus. That everlasting love that is everlasting, not in its object, but is everlasting in its own quality.

Now God must love and will love man until hell has erased the last trace of the remaining image. Men are lost now, don’t forget it, but they’re still loved of God, because the blackest man, the deepest man, is still dear to God for Jesus’ sake.mJesus who died on the tree for that very lost black man. I mean black morally, not racially, in his skin. I have loved you with an everlasting love, says God.

I say that love is everlasting not because of its object, but it’s everlasting because it’s the everlasting God that loves. God no longer loves the devil. There was a day when God loved the devil as He now loves the angels and archangels, because He saw in the devil traces and proofs of His own wisdom.

Thou art the covering cherub. I have made thee so. I have set thee to guard the stones of fire. Thy wisdom and beauty were created in thee in the day thou wast created. God loved that being because it was an image, not an image of Himself in the sense man is, but a reflection of what God could do and an evidence of His artistry, His moral artistry and His omniscient skills.

The devil sinned, and the devil sinned in a way not quite like man sinned. He sinned in some way that erased forever everything of which God could be proud and in which God could rest, so that God no longer loves the devil. He sent no redeemer for him. There isn’t anything in Satan that could remind God of himself.

The last trace of that which might have reminded God of himself has been washed out in the filthy bilge water of iniquity while the centuries have added to centuries. So, God no longer loves the devil.

Now I confess to you, friends, this is speculation, and I want to brand it speculation right here. What I shall say in the next minute is speculation, and if you don’t agree with me, let’s not fall out over it. These are the things I’ll stand by. This is speculation.

I believe the time will come when God will no longer love lost men. I believe that God now loves lost men, all lost men, lost men in prisons and penitentiaries and insane asylums, lost men in saloons and houses of ill-faith. God loves lost men because the last trace has not been erased, and he still remembers them and remembers His Son on the tree that has a body like theirs. He still remembers that the Second Being, Person of the Divine Being, was incarnated in a Man who has a body like that man without sin. The day will come, let him that is holy be getting holier still, and let him that is filthy be getting filthier still. So says the Bible.

And therefore the day will come when lost man will no longer be loved by God Almighty. For God, I repeat, cannot love anything directly. He must love everything for His own sake if He continues to be God. And when a man has sold himself out to sin and the transfiguring power of iniquity has wrought to make him to be a devil and not a man, God will no longer love the lost man. So let us not imagine for a second that God will be pining over hell and grieving in His heart over a lost man in hell. It cannot be true.

God grieves over lost men now because man can still pray and believe and hope and dream and imagine and aspire, and there’s still something that reminds Him of the Man who died on the tree. But when that is all gone, there will be nothing left for God to pour out His love upon. There will be no one to receive that love, and therefore the love of God, though it’s everlasting in its source, will not light anymore upon fallen men.

And hell, wherever hell is, filled with lost men and the devil and lost beings, shall roll on through the cavernous recesses of some underground world forever and ever and ever, and there will be no love lost in heaven and no grief in the heart of the man Christ Jesus. For God can only love that which is like Himself and reminds Him of Himself.

Now, let me point out to you, brethren, that wherever there is love, there’s bound to be goodwill. Nobody ever willed anything bad about anybody they loved. Sometimes a man will kill a woman because she looked at another man. He says, I loved her so that I killed her. The big billy goat, it was lust that led him to kill her. He wanted her for himself, and he was too much of a billy goat to allow himself ever to dream that anybody else could dare have that woman. So he killed her, not out of love for her, for altogether other reasons.

No, love never kills anybody. Love never wills ill nor evil to anybody, never. It’s impossible. Love can’t do it. Love can no more do it than light can be darkness or God can be unclean. Love must always have goodwill, and God is inflamed with goodwill. He’s inflamed with goodwill. That means that whether God is near or far, and he’s always near and always far, but however we think of him, God’s always inflamed and thinking about us.

My friend Bob Battles, who wishes he’d been my son, but I’d have had to been married at 13 to have arranged it. But my friend Bob Battles, who loves me very much, and I him, he was in California with us where I got this cold that I have now, in California incidentally. I’m getting better since I came to Chicago, but Bob and I were out there together, and we were walking along, Bob said, well, it’s 10 o’clock back in Orlando, 10 o’clock back in Orlando, and my five boys are all in bed, and Olive, that’s his wife, Olive is presiding all alone over the mass.

My boys, he said, we walked along. I grinned to myself. He was inflamed with goodwill. He was busy, you know, running around carrying a portfolio, you know, and being chairman of this, and he was awfully busy, but he was all inflamed with goodwill. If anything, if just let a phone call come through and say, I got to have you, he’d have hopped on a plane without saying goodbye.

Love always has goodwill with it. Love always is full of goodwill, and the love of God is no different, and when the angels sang their song or uttered their marvelous chant, it was goodwill to men. I know some translators say to men of goodwill, goodwill to men, the will of God is good toward us brethren. Be sure of that.

It’s basic, it’s basic, you must believe that, that goodwill is in the heart of God for you. Now, that’s very hard to believe. It’s hard to believe because our moral conscience doesn’t agree with it.mWe love each other because they’re good things we love in each other. We say, oh, he’s got such a sense of humor, I love the fellow. Well, that’s loving somebody for some assignable reason.

A young man will come in and say, one young Texan called me, Wilkins Wynn, he says his name. He used to come here to church, you know, a good Baptist boy that went to church here while he was attending Moody. He called me one day. He was always so spiritual and always talking about the Lord. You couldn’t get him to talk about anything else.

One day he called me. He said, brother Tozer, he said, you know that song that says that, that, that I love thee so I know not how my transport to control. I said, yes. Well, he said, I have found a girl and that just exactly described my feeling toward her. And he said, what do you suppose I ought to do? I love her so I know not how my transport to control. I said, Wilkins, there’s only one thing to do and I recommend it. And he did.

Now they have nice, he’s, he’s pastor of a Baptist church down in Texas and they got a nice little boy. Well, that you see, don’t you, that, that, uh, that love is like that. And, and there’s, there’s the, the yearning. And, uh, he, he loved this woman because there, there were reasons for it. He talked to me afterward.

My, she must’ve been a paragon of beauty. To say nothing to be so intelligent that Einstein better watch out. Formed like the Venus de Milo. And she had all that. And he loved her for that reason. You know, you know, he, he, he’d had it. That’s all. He had it. She wasn’t like that. I suppose she’s very lovely young, probably good looking young lady, but then he’d had it. That’s all. He was that way.

Well, you see, we love people for what they are. And when somebody comes and says to a sinner, God loves you and is inflamed with goodwill for you. He’s inclined to say, I don’t believe it. Why? Because he’s measuring the love of God by his own love.

And he says, I know better. God is the moral God. The Bible says He is. God can’t love me. I’m a low-grade center. I’ve lied.mI’ve cheated. I’ve stolen. There isn’t a sin. I haven’t committed either overtly or in my heart. I’m worse than my friends know. I’m worse than my wife knows, worse than anybody knows. And God can’t love me.

But you see, he’s right. And he’s wrong. He’s wrong because he fails to see that God doesn’t love him directly for his sin’s sake. God loves him for His own sake. And therefore, God can love anybody no matter how sinful for His own sake, for His Son’s sake.

But you know, that takes some theology to make people see that they don’t see it. They imagine God loves them because they’re good. Some little old bespectacled fellow, you know, that never did anything worse in his life but drink a half glass of Coke, you know, and that uses perfect English and always puts his shoes away at night, makes his bed in the morning, helps his mama with the dishes. He believes God loves him, the big sissy. Because he says, well, mama loves me. And the teacher says that I’m the best student she ever had. And therefore, I can see how God could love me and I’m going to be a fundamentalist.

Better watch it, better watch it there, my boy. Because God doesn’t love you for the fact that you make the bed and never cause your mama a minute’s trouble in all your life. He loves you for another reason altogether. He loves you because He sees even in you, if not some trace of manhood, then some trace of womanhood, he sees in you that which once walked in the garden but got into sin and was poisoned and bitten with the virus of iniquity, lost and ruined by the fall and on your way to hell.

And He loves you for His own sake and not for your sake. But the man who’s such a sinner and knows it is inclined to doubt God’s love because he judges God love by man’s love. That’s never any way to judge love. God’s love is unique in the universe. And God loves us for His own sake.

Now, my brethren, where there’s love, there’s not only goodwill. Where there’s love, there’s yearning, yearning. Therefore, with loving kindness have I drawn thee. And always drawing us toward the object, He draws us toward Himself, a lost race in a lost world.

And from God there is a clear call. And there isn’t anything that can stand in the way, not character, reputation, past, nothing can stand in the way except our own sins. From God there’s a clear call to consider Him. Will you stop and consider Him? There are so many things now in the world that we just can’t consider anymore the serious things. There are just too many things in the world.

But God calls you to stop and consider. Won’t you think on God now? Think on God. This God whose love is everlasting. This holy God who loves Himself and loves you for His own sake. Give attention to God. And He calls you to believe about Him. Start believing what the Bible teaches. Believe what I’m telling you. Believe what you’ve heard other men say. Believe what we sing in our hymn books. Believe what we read in our Bibles. Believe what the church teaches. That God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son. Believe that. Start believing it. He calls you to that. And He calls you to turn to Him. He calls you to turn around, turn to Him, and to begin to make a moral about-face, and stop things, and change things. And to throw yourself on his mercy.

Will you do it? No defense. Don’t come into court with a lawyer. Don’t come into court with a lot of alibis. Don’t come into court with a lot of witnesses for your character witnesses to tell God how good you are. Come as the prodigal came back home. He didn’t bring a lot of character witnesses.

Can you imagine if that prodigal had been like that? Like some people. He’d have gone back to the father’s house. He’d have stopped and had his dirty old pants pressed somewhere down the road. And he’d have brought along a couple of fellas to tell his father that that smell that he detected on his garments was just a flower that had been in the far country, and it was rare. And there wasn’t anything to get worried about. It smelled like pig but it wasn’t pig.

He’d have had his story, but he didn’t. He didn’t try anything like that. He didn’t bring any character witnesses with him to tell his father that he was a better boy than he thought. He said to himself, my father will remember me the way I used to be. And I know my father and I know that as long as I look like him and look like Ma, my father will never stop loving me. So, I’m going to throw everything, I’m going to risk everything on one shot. I’m going to go home and say, Father, I have sinned.

And you know, it worked. It worked. And it was the only thing that would work. It worked. He said, Father, I have sinned. The old man who’s getting old and lumpy and full of lime, you know, and couldn’t get around much anymore and his heart bothered him.

But sir, he jumped around there like a 21-year-old. He gave orders here and gave orders there and gave orders there and pretty soon that boy was all fixed up and bathed in the finest bath salts, perfumed and dressed in good shoes on his feet and a ring on his finger, the seal of his father’s approval. They were all sitting around thanking the father and shouting the praises of this dad who loved his boy.

The elder brother stuck a sulking sour face in the door and went away and sulked behind the barn. They sent out for him, and he said, can you imagine it? Treating my wicked brother like this and I’ve always been a good boy. You know that story too well. He was pleading his own character, and the boy had none to plead.

So, throw yourself on his mercy. That’s the safest place. No man ever dies when he throws himself on the mercy of God. Was it John Bunyan, that wicked, doubly wicked man who got under conviction and wished he was a dog? He said, there goes a dog. Oh, I wish I was that dog, and then I could die and be no more. But I’ve got to die and rise to judgment. I wish I were a dog. And God didn’t change him into a dog, but he kept conviction on his soul and he went on praying.

So, one time he said, all right, God, you said that if I’d confess, you’d forgive me and I’m going to stand on that promise. And if I sink down to hell, I’ll sink on a promise. You can’t go to hell on a promise, brother. It doesn’t go down. That’s all. It goes the other way.

So, John Bunyan became the great John Bunyan by the grace of God because he couldn’t die on a promise. He couldn’t perish on a promise. The great German silk weaver wrote, Thou hidden love of God, whose height, whose depth unfathomed no man knows. I see from far thy beauteous light, inly I sigh for thy repose. My heart is pained, nor can it be at rest till it find rest in thee.

Do you tonight catch glimpses of the beauteous love of God, hidden to the world, but there so beautiful? And is there something in you that’s like a pain? He says, O God, O God, I am pained, and I never can be anything else but pained until it find, my heart finds rest in thee. Thy secret voice invites me still, the sweetness of thy yoke to prove. And fain I would, but though my will seem fixed, yet wide my passion drove. Yet hindrances strew all the way, I aim at thee yet go astray.

Does that describe you? You hear the secret voice inviting you still. And you want to, but you can’t. And you seem to want to, but yet your passions rove like a stray dog. Hindrances are all the way along. You aim to do right, and yet you go astray. Each moment draw from earth away my heart that lowly waits thy call. Speak to my inmost soul and say, I am thy love, thy God, thy all. To feel thy power, to hear thy voice, to taste thy love be all my choice.

Would you say that tonight? Would you ask Him to draw your heart from earth away and let you hear that call as you wait lowly before Him? Speak to your inmost soul and tell you once more, I am your love, I am your God, I am your all? Would you do it? Would you want to do it? Do you? Will you do it?

O Love of God, so strong, so tender. It’s the voice of God’s love that I hear tonight entreating me and entreating you. Let’s not trample on it. You can’t, can you?

Do you find it morally possible to turn on such love and say, God, I don’t care. I’ve got sins out there I’ve got to go do. I have my iniquities planned and I’m going to go do them. You can’t, can you? Surely not. Over the voice of God’s love that entreats you, that mighty love that’s equal to God Himself entreating you home, back to the Father’s house, back to the cross, back to the fountain that was opened.

Will you come? Will you come? Will you half-saved Christians tonight? Come. Oh, your heart is pained, nor can it be at rest till it find rest in thee. You’ll never find rest, Christian, half-saved Christian, worldly Christian. You’ll never find rest till you find it in God’s heart.

Won’t you come this evening? Voices that entreat us. And this voice of God’s love is the first and the loudest. And all the others, though real, grow out of this great voice of God’s love. Let us pray.

Father, we feel so deeply tonight and so keenly thy wonderful love for us. We feel as if we’d like to go down and stand in a seat and then get up and walk down the aisle and say, I do. Here I come, Lord. Thou art my love, my God, my all. As though we would like to feel as though we were coming all over again.

But, Lord, we’re already here, so we can’t come where we’ve already been. But, oh, we pray Thee for the lost. We pray Thee for the half-saved. Pray Thee for the confused and the puzzled and the bewildered and the wandering. O Love of God, so rich, so free, so measureless, so strong.

We beseech Thee that Thou would give ears to our hearers tonight, that they may hear that Voice and follow until at last they find Thee, their everything, their all. And old things pass away and all becomes new, and sins go down under the washings of the blood. And everything becomes new in Christ Jesus.

Grant it, Father, for Christ’s sake. Amen.

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Tozer Talks

Post author By pshappard
Post date March 16, 2025

“Be Ye Holy for I am Holy“

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Be Ye Holy for I am Holy

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

December 13, 1953

Now, the Apostle here exhorts us. I like, exhort, better than command, though it is a command. He here exhorts us to holiness of life, and he bases his exhortation upon two great facts. One is the character of God, and the other, the command of God. He says simply that God’s children ought to be holy because He is holy. That’s the character of God. Then he says God’s children ought to be holy because he commanded them to receive this in the Spirit, which you could not now understand or receive, things being what they are.

Now, that’s a paraphrase of what our Lord said, certainly, but it’s a fair statement of the meaning of His words. And now Peter comes along in obedience to and in line with these teachings of our Savior, and among other things, he commands us to be holy. And because this is an apostolic injunction, we who claim to be apostolic Christians dare not ignore it.

And when I use the word, dare not, here, I do not mean that I forbid it. How could I forbid you to do anything? I do not mean the Church forbids it. How could this Church forbid anybody to do anything and make it stick? I only mean that morally we do not dare ignore this commandment, be ye holy.

We have to deal with it some way or other. We dare not ignore it. Ignoring it is the way that it is dealt with by most Christians. We read it and then ignore it. But we dare not, and we dare not accept it as optional. It is not that we go to the Bible and say, now I am going to look this over, and if I like it, I’ll buy it, in the language of the day. But if I don’t, there’s no harm done. This is not something optional which I may do or not do at my own choice.

This is an apostolic injunction to commandment, to holiness of life, and I dare not overlook it. Then it is not something which I can judge the wisdom of, or the appropriateness of, and then weigh it in my own balances and decide just how far it applies to me. It doesn’t have to apply to me. I can walk out on it. God has given us all and each one the right to make our own choices. So we don’t have to bow our neck to this yoke, and we don’t have to apply it to ourselves. If we don’t like it, we can turn our backs on it.

Once Jesus said to his disciples, except ye eat my body, my flesh, and drink my blood, there is no life in you. And they looked at each other and walked away from him. And He said, will you also go away? And Peter gave the answer that I must give this morning. Peter said, Lord, if we wanted to go away, where would we go? Thou hast the words of eternal life. Those were wise words indeed by the man of God.

So, I say that we do not need to listen to the apostolic injunction. We do not have to obey it. There’s only one place where the Bible is, but there are a million places where it isn’t. And you can always find a place where it isn’t. There’s only one kingdom of God, but there are lots of other places. And if we don’t like it, it’s always possible for us to reject it.

But I say, Lord, how could we reject it? Where else would we go? If we refuse these words, where will we turn? If we turn away from Thy authoritative word, to whose authority can we turn? Eisenhower’s? The Pope’s? To where shall we turn? What great man, and I do not speak slightingly of these great men, but any great man in whatever field, could we turn to him? Who is he? He’s a man with his breath in his nostrils. Would it be to some great school of learning? Could we go to the university down here on the midway and say, I’m looking for a professor to show me the way, to help me? He couldn’t help you; he must be himself, helped.

So, I say, therefore, we dare not ignore this. And I have explained what I mean by dare not. We dare not accept it as optional, and we dare not judge of the wisdom of it and make our choice as to whether it’s worthy of our obedience. To do so is to jeopardize our souls and to earn for ourselves severest judgment to come.

Now, I want to point out to you that the doctrine of holiness has been wounded in the house of its friends. Whenever Satan has reason to fear a truth very greatly, he counterfeits it. And wherever he can, puts it into such a bad light that the very persons who are most eager to obey it are frightened away from it.

I think it would not be hard to make a case for that statement and to prove it if I wanted to do it and show how he was afraid of the virgin birth, so he has done everything possible to reduce Jesus Christ into one more, being one more man. He was afraid of the bodily resurrection, so he has done everything he can do to take the weight and pressure off of the doctrine of the bodily resurrection. He will allow Jesus to rise from the dead in spirit, but he’s afraid when we say he rose from the dead in person and in body.

He’s afraid of the second coming of Christ, so he has done everything he can do to becloud the doctrine of the second coming of Christ, and so with every doctrine. The ones he fears the most are the ones he parodies, and pawns his parody off as the real thing, and frightens away the serious-minded saints.

Now in evangelical circles, the doctrine of holiness has been identified with a specific school of theology. Having their own terminology, and their own system of metaphysics, and their own phrases, they’ve copyrighted the term holiness and claimed it exclusively. And it has been thus betrayed by its friends. Because I hesitate to say that some who call themselves by the name of holiness have allowed the doctrine to harden into a theory which has become a hindrance to repentance. And they invoke this doctrine to cover up frivolity and covetousness.

I have had occasion to mingle somewhat with those who have taken out the copyright on the word holiness. And while I have found some good people among them, I have found just as many good people among the fundamentalists, and the Calvinists, and those who don’t believe what they believe quite. So that they are what they are, obviously, in spite of their copyright doctrine, not because of it.

While there are few that are, I believe, worthy, I have found a great deal of frivolity carried on in the name of the deeper life, and a great deal of worldliness that has been sanctified, accepted, taken in, and given a place in the sanctuary. And the results, of course, have been that honest, serious persons have shied away from the whole thing.

Someone told me of hearing a man stand in a pulpit the other, some while back, and said, I was sanctified 15 years ago, and I want to tell you, my friends, that I have never sinned since. Now maybe he hasn’t, but if he hasn’t, he’d be the last one to know it. If he was a holy man, instead of a holiness man, he’d never have made a crack like that. Maybe he never sinned since. That could be possible, I suppose, theoretically. But he would not find it out. Other people might be saying it, but he would never have said it. He would rather have knelt and said, thou art in heaven, and I am on earth. Oh, God forgive my confusion of faith. He’d never have said, I haven’t sinned in 15 years.

So that some serious-minded people have been driven away from the whole idea of holiness by those who have claimed it, and then have lived frivolous, worldly, and conceited lives. But we dare not be frightened away by this. We are under the holy authority of the apostolic seed.

We have been told by a holy man of God, and we have been ordered by God himself to be holy. And therefore, regardless of how badly wounded the doctrine of holiness has been, we must not let it die, and we must not assume that we have no moral obligation to this truth. The doctrine is highly important to God.

It must be highly important to God, because I have personally counted in an exhaustive concordance and have found that the word holiness occurs 650 times in the Bible, or the word holy, holiness. Then I have not counted in my, the King James, the other word sanctify and sanctified, which is the same word, exactly, only in our English different, so that the count would no doubt jump up nearer to a 1,000 than 650 times.

Now, this word holy is used to describe the character of angels, and of heaven itself, and even of God. It is written that the angels are holy, and those angels who look over the battlements to gaze down upon the scenes of men, mankind, are called the watchers and holy ones. And it’s written that the angels are holy, and then heaven itself is said to be a holy place, and that no unclean thing can enter in. And God is described in the term by the adjective holy, Holy Ghost, and Holy Lord, and Lord God Almighty, Holy Lord God Almighty.

Those words are used of God throughout the Bible, showing that the highest adjective that can be ascribed to God, the highest attribute that can be ascribed to God is that of holiness, and that in a relative sense, the angels and heaven itself partake of the holiness of God. And then again, its absence is given as a reason for not seeing God. I know the grotesque interpretations that have been given to the text, without holiness no man shall see the Lord, but because some people, in order to support their patented theory, have misused the text, that is no reason for my throwing the text out.

Holiness, without which no man shall see the Lord; that does mean something, and what it means ought to disturb us until we have discovered what it means. And then having discovered what it means, we have met its conditions.

Briefly, I want to tell you the meaning of the word. In the Bible it means moral wholeness, actually means, kind. Holy, means kind, merciful, godly, pure, blameless. It means kind. It means merciful. It means godly. It means pure. And it means morally blameless. But in all this, it’s never to be thought of in the negative–never. It’s always to be thought of in a positive, white intensity of degree. For it is written that God is holy. It means that God is kind, merciful, pure, blameless, in a white, holy intensity of degree.

And when used of men, it means the same, certainly not the same degree as God, not absolute holiness, but it means an intensity of a degree of holiness that is not negative, but positive, and it means that it can be tested and can be trusted. A holy man can be trusted, and a holy man can be tested. Some people’s piety will not stand up under tests. Some of us are afraid.

Once when God was taking Israel through a certain section, he went ahead of them and warned them. He said, now don’t take them this way because there’s a fight on over there, and they’re so green that they’ll run away if they see the fight. The Lord steered them around a battle, lest they all get excited and flee in disorder into the wilderness. He knew their weakness and steered them around it.

So, there are those of us who are holy, but we’re afraid of the tests that will prove whether we’re holy or not, and we can’t trust ourselves. But a holy man can be trusted, and a holy man can be tested. And wherever there is a breakdown of holiness, there is a proof that there was never any real degree of holiness there in the first place.

Now, not only this moral wholeness, there is one great religious thinker who’s just gone, a German, a Lutheran man, who’s dealing with the question of holy, and the idea of the holy has greatly intrigued me, and I believe also instructed my heart.

And this man says that the word holy, as originally used in Hebrew, did not have, first of all, the moral connotation. That is, when it says that God was holy, it did not mean, first of all, that God was pure. That was taken for granted. It did mean that later. It did come to mean that, as I’ve explained. But that he says the root, original meaning of the word holy was something other than, something that lay beyond, something strange and mysterious and so different from, and awe-inspiring. And that is in the Word too. You’ll find it there. So that when we talk about the holiness of God, we talk about something heavenly and awful and mysterious and fear inspiring.

Now, this is supreme when it comes to God, but it is also marked in men of God, deepened as men become more like God. This sense of the other world, this mysterious something that rests on men, that is a holiness.

Now, if they should have that and not be morally right, then I would say it was a counterfeit of the devil. But when they are morally right and are walking in all the holy ways of God, and then in addition to their good, righteous living, they also have this mysterious quality that they had come down from another world and carried upon them the fragrance of a kingdom that is supreme above the kingdoms of this world, then I’m ready to accept that as being of God. Moses had it when he came down from the mount, you’ll remember. He had been with God forty days and forty nights there in the wilderness.

And as the colored preacher said in that sing-song oratory that they love, he said, Moses went to nobody knows where Moses had gone. And Moses was away forty days and forty nights, and nobody knew where Moses was. And Moses came back and then everybody knew where Moses had been.

Now, that’s what I mean. He would have been on the mountain, and nobody knew where he was. But when he came back, everybody knew where he had been. He came down with this heat lightning playing over his countenance, this strange something that you couldn’t pin down or identify, but it was there.

Now, that mysterious quality there has all but forsaken the earth in our day. The philosopher I refer to that theologian had to invent a term for it, he called it the numinous. And that word numinous has now gotten into all the books. But he invented it to mean that overplus of something that is more than righteous, but is righteous in a fearful, awe-inspiring, wondrous, heavenly sense, and glowing with a mysterious fire.

Now, I say this latter quality has all but forsaken the earth. God has been reduced to our own terms. And we are now told to gossip the gospel and sell Jesus to the people. And it’s been reduced, I say, to a place where men may be righteous. I don’t say that they’re not, but I say that we miss and lack that quality, that overtone of something.

Now, this mysterious fire was in the bush, you’ll remember. Fire doesn’t frighten people. A small fire doesn’t frighten people. It’s only when it gets out of control and your loved ones or other humans are there that it becomes a portentous and fearful thing. No one’s afraid of fire.

And yet here was a man who knelt beside a bush where a small fire burned and hid his face, for he was afraid. And there was that quality that was mysterious. And later in the mountain yonder, I repeat, when, with the voice of the trumpet, Moses shook until he said, I am fearfully afraid and quake.

And then that Shekinah that was over Israel, of all the figures in the Bible—and this is more than a figure, it’s a symbol—of all the symbols in the Bible, I know no other that is so satisfying, so deeply satisfying as the symbol of the Shekinah. I use it often and often refer to it in my preaching and praying because it to me sums up wonderfully this holiness of God present.

There was that cloud hanging over by day, plainly visible, that mysterious cloud not made of water vapor, not a shadow cast somewhere, but a mysterious cloud. And at night, as the light of the day faded away, that cloud began to turn incandescent. And when the darkness had settled, it shone brightly like one vast light hanging over Israel.

So, every tent in that diamond-shaped tent city was lighted fully by the strange Shekinah that hung over. Nobody had built that fire, nobody put any fuel to that fire, nobody stoked that fire, nobody controlled that fire. It was God bringing himself within the confines of the human eye and shining down.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have lived then, to take your little baby by the hand when he was big enough to toddle, and say, I want to show you something wonderful, I want to show you something, look, look at that, and have the little lisping fellow say, what is it, mama? And you say, that’s God, that’s God.

Moses, our leader, saw that fire in the bush. Later Moses, our leader, saw that fire in the mountain. And now since we’ve left Egypt, that fire has hovered over us now all these years, maybe ten, maybe twenty, maybe thirty years, that fire is there.

But how do you know there’s a God, mama? There’s the fire. There’s that mysterious over-plus from another world that has no connotation of morality, particularly, that’s all taken for granted. It has only a connotation of the reverent and solemn and awe-inspiring and terribly different and wonderful and glorious.

And that was there, and then it was in the temple when they had built the temple, when Moses had built the tabernacle and when the temple was built, and then when the fire came down at Pentecost, it was that same fire again, and it sat upon each of them, and it rested down upon them with an invisible visibility, a visibility that was yet not exactly visible and certainly would never have photographed if they’d have had cameras, but it was there. It was a sense of being in or surrounded by this numinous, this holy element. And so strong was it that in Jerusalem the Christians went on Solomon’s porch, and the people stood off from them as wolves, they say, stand off from a bright campfire, and looked on and it said they durst not join themselves to them.

Why? Had there been any prohibition? Was any man standing there with a sword saying, don’t come near? No, they were praying people, humble, harmless, undefiled, clean, and completely harmless as far as the crowd was concerned, but the crowd couldn’t come. They didn’t rush in and trample the place down. They stood away from Solomon’s porch because there was a holy quality there, they couldn’t come up to.

And when Paul was explaining the mysterious fullness of the Holy Ghost in the book of Corinthians, he said, some of you, when you meet together and you obey God and God speaks, there is such a sense of God’s presence there that the unbelievers fall on their faces and go out and report that God is with you indeed.

Now, that emanates from God, as all holiness emanates from God. My dear people, if we are what we ought to be, if we may see to it that our conversation, the whole sum of our lives, beginning with the inner life, becomes becoming more and more God-like and Christ-like, less and less like the things of this world, more and more like the things of the world above, I believe there will be upon us something of that.

I have met a few that have had this on them, and I don’t hesitate at all to say to you that it has meant more to me than all the teaching I’ve ever had, all the Bible teachers that I ever have thought, and I thank God for every one of them. I stand indebted deeply to every Bible teacher down the years. But they did little but instruct my head, but the brethren who had this strange thing on them instructed my heart.

Some weeks ago, there appeared an article called “The War of the Ages” in the “Alliance Weekly.” It was sent to me by the widow of my friend Emil Sywulkaof East Africa. I knew Emil Sywulka when I was a young fellow. I have mentioned it before, certainly in my preaching I have not overlooked it. But I knew him, a long, lean, rather homely, serious-faced man who smiled infrequently, but when he did it was like the coming out of the sun after a storm. He had this in marked degree.He had it so completely that he was the dean of his field.

Over in Keswick I talked to three missionaries. Day after day I talked to them, as we ate and as we walked together and as we had our services together.These missionaries knew this man, and they told me of this serious-minded, long, lean fellow with the unpronounceable name, who walked with God so perfectly that there was something on him. They said there was something different, Mr. Tozer, and now say what you will, this man had something different.Personality? Absolutely none. He was without it.

But now in his seventies, on an old motorcycle, he’s chugging over the rough way, and suddenly the motorcycle goes out of control and Emil falls beside the way, and they picked him up.He died shortly after of a heart attack. It wasn’t an accident, but he died in the harness, died with his face toward the light. He took with him that old, tired body, I suppose, and they laid that away in Africa, and his spirit went to God.

But he left behind him a sense of the numinous, a sense of this mysterious, awe-inspiring presence that comes down on some people and means more than all the glib tongues in the world. I’ve gotten so I’m afraid of a glib tongue.

I’m afraid of the man that can always flip his Bible and answer your question. He knows too much. I’m afraid of the man who has thought it all out and has a dozen epigrams that he can quote; that he’s thought up over the years and settled everything spiritual. Brethren, I’m afraid of him.

There is a silence sometimes that’s more eloquent than all human speech. Sometimes there is a confusion of face and a bowing of the head that says more divine truth than the most eloquent preacher can say. And so, he says, Be holy, as and for I am holy.

First bring your life morally into line that God may make you holy, and then bring your spiritual life into line that God may settle upon you with the Holy Ghost, that there may be upon you that quality of the wonderful and the mysterious and the divine. You don’t cultivate it, and you don’t even know it, but it’s there. And it’s this that the Church of our day lacks.

Oh, that we might seek to cultivate the knowledge of God, that we might seek to become more God-like, and then without cultivation and without seeking, there would come upon us this that gives our witness meaning, this sweet, radiant fragrance.

Haven’t you noticed that in some churches it’s felt very strongly? But you say you don’t go by your feelings, do you, Mr. Tozer? Sure. Quote me on that if it’s worth it. Feeling is an organ of knowledge, and I don’t hesitate to say so. Feeling is an organ of knowledge.

Define love for me. You can’t define love. You can describe it, but you can’t define it. And a person or a group of people or a race that had never heard of the word love and didn’t know what it was, all of the dictionaries in the world couldn’t teach them what love is. But just let some old freckled-faced boy with big ears somewhere and his hair a bit awry, let the feeling of it come to his heart, and he knows more than all the dictionaries can tell you. Love can only be understood by feeling it.

And so, it is with the warmth of the sun. Tell a man who had no feeling it’s a warm day, he wouldn’t know what you meant. But take a man who is normal out into the warm sun, and he’ll soon know it’s warm. You can know more about the sun by feeling than you can by description.

And so, there are qualities in God that can never be explained to the intellect but can be known by the heart. So, I do not hesitate to say that I do believe in feeling. I believe in what the old writers called religious affections. And we have so little of it because we’ve not laid the groundwork for it. The groundwork of repentance, and obedience, and separation, and holy living.

And if we lay the groundwork, thus you will find there will come to us this sense of the otherworldly, this presence of God that will be wonderfully, wonderfully real. So that when sometimes as a religious prayer cliche, we pray the little expression, O God, draw feelingly near, we’re not too far off.

Some would wave us off on that and say you’re off the track. I’m not sure. O God, come feelingly near. He came feelingly near to Moses at the bush. He came feelingly near to Moses on the mount. He came feelingly near to the church at Pentecost. And He came feelingly near to that Corinthian church when the unbelievers went away awestruck to say God’s in the middle of them. God is with them. Oh, how we need this in our day.

Let’s pray. O Son of God, Most Holy, that Holy Thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God. O Holy Thing, born, crucified, risen, enthroned, we beseech Thee that Thou would rebuke all the unholiness in us that would grieve Thy Spirit from us.

Rebuke, we beseech thee, all of the flesh and of the mind that is even negative, and that thus hinders the operation of the Spirit. Oh, we beseech Thee, let the Shekinah be seen today. Let it hover over each habitation, showing that the Lord is nigh.

We beseech thee, may we go away from this place, serious, if need be; perturbed, bothered, until we have done something with this injunction, and have sought to be holy as Thou art holy, and have tried by surrender and faith to purify our hearts unto obedience. Grant, we beseech Thee, to answer all this through Christ our Lord. Amen.

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Tozer Talks

Post author By pshappard
Post date March 9, 2025

“God’s Abundant Mercy“

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Gods Abundant Mercy

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

June 28, 1953

Just a little morsel from 1 Peter, that third verse of the first chapter. Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, which according to His abundant mercy hath begotten us again unto a lively hope by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. Last week I talked on this, blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Today I would speak on, according to His abundant mercy. Now Peter, just before he said, according to His abundant mercy, had blessed God the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. Now we find there was a clear reason for the outburst. He blessed the Father because the Father had blessed us. If the Father had not blessed us, we could not possibly bless the Father. And if we had not been begotten again unto a living hope by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, there would be no possibility of our blessing the Father. So, he said, blessed be the God and Father of Jesus Christ because He hath begotten us again, and He begot us again out of His abundant mercy.

Now I have pointed this out in order that we might see that there is always a clear link between one truth and another in the Bible; that if an apostle breaks out into a doxology, he wasn’t simply having himself a spiritual time. Look what went before, and look what follows, and you will find there were clear, logical reasons for the doxology.

And it is always so with New Testament Christians. The Spirit-led life is a clear, logical, and rational life. I must repeat what I said last Sunday night in a different context, that you and I must have the courage that belongs to our sound Christian faith, and we must stop this ignoble apologizing and cease to take this whipped Spaniel attitude out in the world. There is no reason why we should, like a paddled, cocker Spaniel, look sad and dreary and apologetic and cringe and crawl before the world. The world has nothing we want, and we have no cause to apologize to the world.

We are believers in a faith that is as well authenticated as any solid fact of life. And what we believe, and the links in the chain of evidence, are clear and rational. So that instead of apologizing, we should boldly assert, if we believed in ourselves and in the faith, we hold, with the fanaticism that the Communist believes in his devil-inspired doctrines, the Church could go off the defensive and go over to the offensive. Communists never apologize. Christians always do. And that’s why we’re where we are.

I’m glad that Brother McAfee had the ecclesiastical courage to announce and join in singing a song that’s an Easter song. I think that it’s time we rescue some of these great songs from one Sunday a year, give them back to the Church where they belong. The Church has a right to rejoice. Christ the Lord is risen today, and our Son sets in blood no more. Marvelous imagery, marvelous scriptural imagery that Wesley wove into that hymn. And if we half believed it, we’d go off the defensive and go over to the attack.

And so instead of crawling before the world and apologizing in low, subdued tones before the learned world, we would frankly and boldly assert that Jesus Christ is risen, and what are you going to do about that great fact?

I say that Peter blessed the Lord God, but he wasn’t simply letting himself go like an old lady in a camp meeting. There were particularly sound theological reasons for saying, Blessed be the Lord. He blessed Him because He had begotten us again, and because it was through His abundant mercy that He did it. And the hope He had begotten us to, was a living hope, not a dead one.

I point out that the Spirit-led Christian life is not according to whim or impulse or a caprice, and yet I know Christians who feel you cannot be spiritual without being capricious, and that the more impulsive you are, the more spiritual you are.

I remember years ago, I haven’t heard of him now for a long time, he petered out the way they all do, but he was a very popular healing evangelist, and he just oozed in or tumbled in to his meetings, just tumbled into them, never knew what anybody was going to do. And he was too busy running around to ever plan anything, so he just sort of tumbled and stumbled into the meetings and muddled through them.

And because he was like that, they advertised him as a man of lightning changes. Why, they said, this brother is just as likely to get up and take the offering before they sing the first hymn, or he’s just as likely to get up and preach the sermon and then have a hymn. You never know what he’s going to do.

Well, brother, I don’t know. These men of lightning changes. Sometimes it’s a cover-up for laziness and poor planning and lack of thought. Sometimes it’s simply temperament. They’re usually no good in the Church of Christ, and they wouldn’t be any good if they worked for Ford or General Motors either.

Imagine if you will, a fellow who would say to the boss at General Motors, no, Mr. Jones, I’m one of these impulsive fellows, you never know what I’m going to do, I’m a man of lightning change. Someday I may be out at seven in the morning, and other times it may be three in the afternoon. Sometimes I may go to my machine, and another time I may push another fellow out and take his machine. I just follow the leading of the Spirit. You know how long he will last? He just lasts long enough to get his pay and get out of there. You can’t run things on these impulsive, changeable, and constantly changing men of lightning changes.

There was nothing like that among the apostles. They were Spirit-led, and they were likely to do always what God wanted them to do. But somehow or other, it so turned out, as it properly should, that what God wanted them to do perfectly fit in with the total scheme of redemption and the whole will of God in the New Testament. So that there was no place for the temperamental, whimsical fellow.

Peter was no good to God until he got over being whimsical and temperamental. As long as he was temperamental, scolding the Lord of glory for this or that, he was no good to the Lord. He was a pest. But when he got filled with the Holy Ghost and got a vision or two and got suffering a little and kicked out of a few places and leveled down, then he became the great apostle, second only to Paul in the New Testament. But God had to take lightning changes out of Peter and settle him down into the harness where he could work for the Lord.

I say there are those who feel that if it isn’t queer, it isn’t spiritual, if it isn’t capricious, it isn’t of the Holy Ghost. But I notice a clear, logical link between everything anybody said in the New Testament and the reason they said it, always. So that we are not victims of caprice, neither are we victims of the weather, nor are we victims of the state of our health. Mr. McAfee coughed all night last night, but he’s still around. And occasionally I feel tired, but I’m still here. And I don’t like sticky weather, but you have to go right on, brother. You can’t show up at the house of God just when it’s 70 and the humidity 31. You got to go to church no matter. And it’s the same with prayer. You have to pray.

One man said that you’re supposed to go to God and be honest with God. He said, when you go to prayer, you go and be honest. I said, tell God the truth. One other man said, when you go to prayer and you feel that the whole thing bores you, he said, don’t hide it, tell God frankly, God, I’m bored with this whole business. He said, God will forgive you and bless you and straighten you out and get you started right. But the main thing is, be honest and pray no matter whether you feel like it or not.

So that was the way Christians did things. They didn’t, they weren’t victims of moods. And if you knew the whole truth, there are very few Christians whose moods are entirely up on a high level and sustained level.

Sometimes people come to me and they say, Brother Tozer, they call me up and say, could I have a half hour with you? It usually turns out to be an hour and a half and two hours, and I say, sure, come on over. So, they’ll come over. He’ll say to me, Brother Tozer, I believe I’m a spirit-filled man, I’ve been filled with the Holy Ghost, I’m all on the altar, I’m consecrated, but there’s one weakness I’d like to have you tell me how I can correct. I don’t always have the same degree of feeling and spirituality. Sometimes I’m up and sometimes I’m a little down, and there doesn’t seem to be always that high level, what can I do about it?

And I say, I wish you’d tell me, because I don’t know either, and I haven’t read a biography that I can think of, unless it was Francis of Assisi. I might except him, but outside of him I don’t know any honest Christian that ever can get up and say, I live a consistently high level, I fly at an altitude of 16,000 feet all the way.

Now, if any of you would get up and say, Mr. Tozer, I have lived for 19 years now and never have ceased that high level, blessed art thou, and I honor you, but I have never reached there, pray for your pastor, because there are times when my liver’s out of order, and there are times when I come to my study with no more desire to pray than a horse, but a little while with the Scriptures, and a little while with the hymn book and you’re back in prayer habit again.

And I don’t mean to leave the impression that you are always up and down, because that does not accord with what I said at first, but I only mean to say that we are men and women who live according to the high logic of spiritual truth, not according to our feelings.

The old writers talked about what they called a frame. They would put an entry in their diary, it was a very happy frame this morning, praise the Lord, and maybe two weeks later there’d be an entry, it was a very low frame this morning, it felt very depressed, but nothing had changed except their frame.

And one hymn writer says, I dare not trust the sweetest frame, but wholly lean on Jesus’ name, and I’ve gone before audiences now and again and said, now please, anybody who knows, stand and tell me, I’ll give you a minute to tell me, what does the writer mean when he says, I dare not trust the sweetest frame, and I’ve never found anybody that knows? Well, we say it a little differently, we say frame of mind, it’s the same thing. Say, oh, he was in a happy frame of mind this morning, wasn’t he? Say, she was in a very sad frame of mind. And the writer says, I dare not trust the sweetest frame of mind, but wholly lean on Jesus’ name.

So you see, brethren, you and I live according to a wholly high spiritual logic, and not according to shifting frames of mind. Amen? Now, that’s very unspiritual doctrine, some people don’t like that. They say, oh, you’ve got to be blessed all the time, happy, happy, happy, happy.

But if they would just quit lying and tell the truth, they’ll have to admit there are days when they’re not so happy, happy as they were the day before. But don’t let it get you down, just read your Word and pray and sing a song and take the means of grace and you’ll be as happy today as you were yesterday.

Now it says here, and this is what I want to really get at, according to his abundant mercy. Whatever God did and whatever he’s doing is according to his abundant mercy, and we have the adjective abundant here to modify the word mercy. It describes God’s mercy.

And you know that word abundant comes from a Greek word which at least has these associated meanings. It means largest number, it means very large, it means very great, it means much, and it means many. Now it can mean all those things. According to his largest number, his very large, very great, much, many mercies, God has begotten us again.

And let me give you a note here on that word, abundant, that everything God has is unlimited. That is, God being infinite, everything about Him is infinite, which means that it has no boundary anyplace. Now that’s hard for you to think.

I remember I preached on the infinitude of God here one time, and only one man, and that was Brother Kramer, came down, congratulated me and told me he’d gotten my sermon. But so far as I know, everybody else just wrote that one off. But you and I need to get hold of that, and even if it hurts your head, you need to get hold of that. It’s good for you to know that God is infinite, unlimited, boundless, with no posts anywhere saying this is the end. There’s no such posts in the universe. God Almighty fills it and overfills it, and He is infinite and unlimited.

So that we do not need any enlarging adjectives. When we say God’s love, we don’t need to say God’s great love, although we do say it. When we say God’s mercy, we don’t need to say God’s abundant mercy, though we do say it. And the reason we say it is to cheer and elevate our own thoughts, not to tell that there is any degree in the mercy of God. There are no degrees in the mercy of God, there couldn’t be, for God is degree-less, limitless and infinite.

Therefore, when you say God’s mercy, you’re talking about that which is so vast that the word vast doesn’t describe it, because it has no limits anywhere. Its center is any place, and its circumference nowhere.

Now, these adjectives are useful when we talk about earthly things. We talk about the great love of a man for his family. We talk about little faith, or great faith, or much faith, or more faith. We talk about wealth, and we say he was a man of considerable wealth. But if he has a little more tucked away somewhere, we say he is a man of great wealth. But if his bank account is still larger, we say he’s a man of very great wealth. And if he really owns it, we say he’s a man of fabulous wealth. So we go anywhere up and down the scale from considerable to fabulous.

Do you know where you belong on this, in this scale, because wealth, human wealth, is that which may vary up and down the scale from practically nothing at all to so much you can’t count it. But when we come to God, there is no such degreeing of things. When we say that God is rich, God’s riches, we include all the riches there are. God isn’t richer, or less rich, or more rich, He’s rich. So He isn’t more merciful, less merciful, He’s merciful. For whatever God is, He is in fullness of unlimited grace.

But you say, then, why does the word abundant occur here? Why does it say His great love, wherewith He loved us? Those adjectives are put in there for us, not for God. It was in order to elevate our minds to the consideration of the vastness of the unlimited mercy of God, that Peter said it was abundant.

Now, God’s mercies are equal to God. And for that reason, all comparisons are futile. God’s mercy is equal to God. And if you want to know how merciful God is, then you will know, just see how great God is, and see God, and then you’ll know how merciful God is.

I remember Brother Kopp telling us, missionary to Africa, telling us about a deacon in the church in Congo, a great, big, fine fellow. And he, of course, had the job of disciplining these converts. And one young convert hadn’t gotten all the devil out of him yet, and he inclined to break the rules and do things he shouldn’t.

And they disciplined him and disciplined him again and again, and finally this big, strapping Christian deacon called in his erring brother. And he said, Now, brother, you have been failing us and disappointing us, disgracing your Christian calling about enough. Now when we started with you, we had a bottle of forgiveness. But I’m here to tell you, young man, that bottle is just about empty. And we’re just about through with you. The missionary got a chuckle out of that. He thought it was a very quaint and picturesque way of explaining that they were about done with that fellow.

But you know that bottle of forgiveness that God has, has no top nor bottom to it. And God never says to a man, never, and never has said to a man, now, the bottle of my mercy is about empty.

God’s mercy doesn’t run out of a bottle. God’s mercy is God acting the way He acts toward people, and therefore we can say that it is abundant mercy. And I might point out something here which you may have overlooked, that every benefit God bestows is according to mercy.

You know, there’s a sort of a pardonable heresy abroad that God deals with some people in mercy and some in justice. But God deals with everybody in mercy. If God did not deal with everyone in mercy, we would all have perished before we had time to be converted. We float on a vast, limitless sea of divine mercy. And it’s the mercy of God that sustains the worst sinner. If we have life, it is according to the mercy of God. If we have protection, it is according to the mercy of God. If we have food, it is God’s mercy that gives us food. And if we have providence to guide us, it is God’s mercy.

David said, Have mercy upon me and hear my prayer. Was he just using words? No. Again, a sound, clear, logical statement of theological fact. According to Thy mercy, hear my prayer. Mercy even enters into the hearing of prayers. Mercy must enter into the holiest act any man can ever perform.

And it is a constant mercy on the part of God. The fact that I’m sane instead of somewhere committed to an institution is an act of mercy on God’s part. The fact that I’m free and not in prison is a mercy of God. The fact that I’m alive and not dead is God’s mercy over me. And the same for you, and the same for every man, Jew and Gentile and Mohammedan, whether they believe it or not.

So, you and I float in a sea of the mercy of God. I admit it’s when we enter the sanctuary. I admit it is when you come across the threshold into the kingdom of God that mercy becomes sweet, and we identify it and recognize it. And it’s certainly intensified and pointed up, and it’s through His mercy that we’re begotten again, but that same broad mercy of God kept that sinner through maybe fifty years of rebellion.

My father was sixty years old when he was born again. Sixty years! He had sinned and told dirty stories and sworn and lied and cursed, and then he gave his heart to the Lord Jesus Christ and was converted and is in heaven.

And the mercy that took my father to heaven is a great mercy, and we celebrate the mercy that took him there. But it is no greater than the mercy that kept him and endured him sixty years.

I’ve told this story before, but it perfectly fits here. An old Jewish rabbi in Old Testament times, a man came to his door and asked to stay overnight. It was dark, and he was a traveler, and he said, I’ve made it to your house, could I stay overnight? The old rabbi said, sure. He said, you’re a very old man, aren’t you? He said, I’m nearly a century old. He said, all right, you can come in and stay overnight.

The old man came in, they sat around and talked, and the rabbi said, what about your relation to God? What about your religion? Oh, me? He said, I don’t believe in God. Well, he said, I don’t have any faith in God at all, I’m an atheist. The rabbi rose and opened the door and said, get out of my house. I won’t keep an atheist in my house overnight. The old man got up and hobbled to the door, and the door was shut again.

The rabbi sat down by his candle and his Old Testament, and a voice said to him, son, why did you turn that old man out? He said, I turned him out because he’s an atheist, and I can’t endure him overnight. And God said, son, I’ve endured him nearly a hundred years. Don’t you think you could endure him one night? He leaped from his chair and rushed out, took the old man in his arms and brought him back in and treated him like a long-lost brother. It was the mercy of God that for one hundred years nearly, had endured that old atheist.

So, the mercy of God endured my father fifty years, and the mercy of God endured me seventeen years and then has endured me all the years since. So, let’s get away from this semi-heretical idea that God deals with some people in mercy and deals with others in justice. He deals with everybody in mercy. Everybody is dealt with in mercy. The Bible plainly declares it, it says here that His mercies, the Lord is good to all, and His tender mercies are over all His works, 145th Psalm. God never violates mercy.

I can see the more I pray and read my Bible and think, the more, I’ve got to write my book on the attributes of God. I got to do it. I hope God will let me live that long. But this idea that God works according to one facet of His nature one day and according to another facet and another is all wrong, God never violates any facet of His nature. When God sent Judas Iscariot to hell, He did not violate mercy. And when God forgave Peter, He did not violate justice.

But everything God does He does with the full protection of all of His infinite attributes. So, when a sinner, though he lived to be a hundred years old and sinned against God every moment of his life, he is still a partaker of the mercy of God. He still floats on a sea of mercy, and it is from the mercy of God that he is not consumed.

Now there will be a day when the sinner will pass out from the realm where God’s mercy supports him, and he will hear a voice depart from Him, I never knew you, ye that work iniquity. And hell will be the just desert, justly apportioned to those who refuse redeeming mercy. But there has been a providential mercy that has kept the sinning man all his lifetime.

So we Christians, we didn’t come in through the door of mercy and then live apart from that door. We are in the room of mercy, and the very sanctuary is a sanctuary of mercy. And God has had mercy upon you all your life, sir. We must not become self-righteous and imagine we are living such wonderful lives that God blesses us because we are good. That’s not so. God blesses us because of his abundant mercy which He bestowed on us, and not because of any goodness, though He is busy making us good.

I do not believe that even heaven itself will ever permit us to forget that we are recipients of the mercy of God. The very angels that are around the throne are there because of the goodness of God. The very seraphim with their six wings are there because of the goodness of God.

So, you and I will never be permitted to forget Calvary. A little old morbid song says, lest I forget Gethsemane, lest I forget dark Calvary, but there’s a modicum of truth in it at any rate.

We must never forget that we live because God is merciful. We are recipients of the mercy of God. I am here this morning because God has been merciful to me, not because I am a good man. Although God wants His people to be holy as He is holy, He does not deal with them according to the degree of their holiness, but according to the abundance of His mercy. Honesty requires us to admit this. I pray that we may all be perfectly honest and admit it.

Now, the unjust man will soon pass from mercy to judgment. A hundred years the old atheist sinned against his God, and God was willing to bear with him overnight yet. But the day will be when the old atheist will die and pass from mercy to judgment.

So, I believe in justice, and I believe in judgment. I believe that the only reason mercy triumphs over judgment is that God, by a divine omniscient act of redemption, fixed it so man could escape justice and live in the sea of mercy. The just man, that is, the man who believes in Jesus Christ and who was born anew and who is a child of God, lives in that mercy always. The unjust man lives in it now in a lesser degree, but the time will come when he will not stand in the judgment, nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous.

For the Lord knoweth the way of the righteous, but the way of the ungodly shall perish. For the unjust sinner, though he is kept by the mercies of God, kept from death, kept from insanity, kept from disease, kept a lifetime through the mercy of God, yet he will violate that mercy, turn his back on it, and walk into judgment. And then it’s too late for the man, for the ungodly shall not stand in the judgment. But in the meantime, you and I stand in the mercy of God.

So, remember, when you kneel down to pray, don’t do like the man who went to the altar. He said he got down on his knees, he was under terrible, blistering conviction, and he had learned the Ten Commandments when he was a younger fellow. He got down on his knees there and he began to talk to God about his sins. He had them numbered, I mean, the Ten Commandments numbered. He said, Now, Father, now, God, remember, I admit I have broken number one, number four, number seven, but remember, Father, I kept number two and number three, number six. How foolish, how unutterably foolish. We should go to God and dicker with him like that. We should go to God like a storekeeper and portion out our goodness.

I’d rather follow old Thomas Hooker, the old Puritan saint. He came to die, and he’d been a man elevated way above the average in his spiritual life and holy living. They said, Brother Hooker, you go to receive your reward. No, no, no, he said, I go to receive mercy. Brother Hooker went out, although he rated high up in the level of holy men, he went out not to look for his reward, but to look for still more of the mercy of God.

So, blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who according to His abundant mercy, oh, I think that’s about enough, the sun shines on the just and on the unjust, and we float along in a glorious, shimmering sea of the limitless, boundless, infinite mercy of the Lord our God. How wonderful is God’s mercy.

I remember years ago I preached on the text, Thou, God, forgivest sin. Thou art a God who forgivest sin. I didn’t know it, but a woman was present, and some long time afterward she told me. I got it somehow through a letter, telephone conversation, or some way. She said, That night, that night, as you repeated the text, Thou, God, forgivest sin. That night I believed God, and my sins were pardoned, and I’m a Christian now.

What could I say more than this? Thou art a God of abundant mercy, so don’t look in at yourself, look away. Fennelin said, trying to straighten yourself up and fix yourself over? No, it won’t do. Come as you are.

With this I close. Paul Rader told about the artist. He wanted to paint a picture, for some reason he had in his head, to paint a picture of a tramp, a real tramp, a bum off the street. We’re talking about all the time down here in Skid Row.

So he went to Skid Row, and he hunted up the most disreputable, run-down-at-the-heel, frayed, dirty, disheveled, ungroomed bum that he could find. And he said, I’d like to have you come to my studio. I want to paint you. His face brightened up, his old, baggy, bleary eye took on a new light. He said, you mean you want to put me in a picture? He said, Yeah, I want to paint you into a picture. Would you come? He said, yeah. How much will it mean to me? Well, he said, I’ll tell you. I’ll give you a good fee. He said, I’ll want you to come several times. He said, I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll give you $25 now, and here’s my address. You show up there tomorrow morning, and I’ll tell you what to do.

The next morning the doorbell rang, and the artist went to the door. Here stood a fine-looking fellow with a white shirt on, clean tie, haircut, new hat, and his pants having a reasonable facsimile of a press. He said, good morning, what can I do for you? He said, don’t you know me, boss? He said, I’m the set from a picture this morning. The artist said, are you the fellow I hired? He said, yeah. He said, I didn’t want to come to your fine place looking like a bum, so I spent this $25 getting myself fixed up. The artist said, I can’t use you. He said, goodbye. He dismissed him. He wanted him as he was.

Two men went up into the temple to pray, and one said, Here I am, God. I’m all fixed up. Every hair is in place. And the other one said, O God, I just crawled in off a skid row. Have mercy upon me. God forgave the skid row bum and sent the other man away hardened and unforgiven. Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who according to His abundant mercy has begotten us again.

So come just as you are, friends, and God will show you what to do. He’ll straighten you out. There’s no contradiction there in the slightest between what I’ve said now and all my preaching on repentance. For God does require repentance, as I’ve said many times. But that’s something else again. And when the human spirit comes to God feeling that it’s better, more acceptable, it automatically shuts itself out from God’s presence.

But when the human spirit comes to God knowing that anything it gets will be mercy, then repentance has done its proper work. God will forgive and bless that man and take him into His heart and teach him that all God’s kindness is through mercy.

You go out on the sidewalk; mercy lets you stand there. You greet your friend with a sane mind and a clear voice, mercy gave you that. You go sit down to a good meal; mercy gave you that meal. You rest on a nice soft couch this afternoon, take a little nap, mercy gave you that. You get up and go to your work, mercy did that for you. We’re all recipients of the mercy of God. The Christian knows it and has taken that mercy and used it, so to speak, to assure his abundant entrance into the kingdom of God.

The sinner is a recipient of God’s providential mercies, too. But he tramples it under his feet and prepares himself for an endless hell. Which are you doing?

Father, we pray, bless thou this truth, O God, thy mercies are abundant. Are not thy mercies full and free, and have they not, O God, found out me? We thank Thee for Thy mercies, Thy many abundant, full mercies.

Now we pray that Thou wilt help us to lean back upon Thy mercy and trust and not be afraid, hate sin and love righteousness, flee from iniquity and follow after godliness. But always know that in all that we do, mercy is around us like the air underneath us as the earth, above us as the stars.

And we live in a merciful world to serve a merciful God, and live and swim and move and have our being in the abundant mercies of the triune God. Graciously grant us, we pray thee, properly to understand this and to apply it to our hearts. And we’ll give Thee praise through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen

Tags Mercy

Messages

Tozer Talks

Post author By pshappard
Post date March 2, 2025

“Christ Foreordained Manifested for You“

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Christ Foreordained Manifested for You

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

January 10, 1954

In 1 Peter, the first chapter, verse 19, speaks of Christ, a Lamb, in verse 20, who verily was foreordained before the foundation of the world, but was manifest in these last times for you, who by Him do believe in God that raised Him up from the dead and gave Him glory, that your faith and hope might be in God.

Now, this passage of Scripture is a gem let down like Peter’s sheet right out of heaven, and it would be just as applicable to any group of Christians anywhere in the world as it is to this group. It would fit into the needs, the eternal needs, of a church in Korea or among the Zulus or among the Indians of South America, or among the Jews or Gentiles the world over, because it is not timely truth, it’s timeless truth. It speaks only of three persons, God and Christ and us.

Now, as a Protestant in a free America, I am at liberty to discuss any topic I might find myself capable of discussing. I might this morning discuss art. I could bone up on that at the library, and talk or two about art, maybe literature. I’d like to talk about Milton, because I’ve enjoyed him so much in my years. I couldn’t talk about music. I might give my ill-informed opinions on politics, world events.

And I suppose that if I were real careful, and you were very patient, some benefit might come to us by my so doing. But I don’t mind telling you that now more than ever in my life, I find myself smitten with something I think is nothing less than a divine stroke. Eternity is before my eyes while I talk, and increasingly before my eyes while I pray, and even while I think on religious subjects.

I am seized upon by a thought, a thought that becomes an oppressive thought. It is that the earth is growing old, and the judgment is drawing near. And that a wink of God’s eye, just a wink of God’s eye, will clear the earth of everyone now living on it. Everyone now living on the earth imagines himself to be vastly important in the cosmic scheme. But a wink of God’s eye only, a flick of God’s lash, and everyone now living, the most important and the anonymous and unheard of, altogether shall go the way of the earth.

And that nothing, not one thing, of these now so important things will matter at all in a very short time. And that all now listening to me, and all now on the earth, will stand very shortly in awful silence and see the record of their lives exhibited before them. And that all distinctions then of race or color or money or social level will all disappear. And God will not see our diplomas, nor our bank accounts, nor the color of our skins, but will look at us as human beings only, beings made in the image of God, having sinned, then redeemed or not. That is, redeemed, but whether saved or not, will lie with us.

So, with this upon me, always upon me, always as a background to everything I say, in conditioning and determining the tone as well as the choice of my material, I would talk to you then about God and Christ and you, as in the text here. And the sermon will simply be a repeating of the phrases that make up the text, plus what I hope may be one or two thoughts on each phrase.

Now, he says here that Christ, the Lamb, was foreordained before the foundation of the world. Most or every version has it, foreknown before the foundation of the world. Now that foundation of the world expression can mean either the bringing into being of created things, or the ordering of the vast wild forces into an ordered universe; or it can mean both. Sometimes it means one in the Bible, sometimes it means the other, sometimes it means both, sometimes you don’t know which one it means.

But before God brought into being, time and space and matter and law that now make what we call the world, Jesus Christ was foreknown and foreordained. And before He took the vast wild forces that moved through His worlds and ordered them into a universe, an ordered universe like a watch, as though a watchmaker were to take the pieces of a watch scattered all over the top of a table. And through His knowledge and skill, so arranged them that they now are all compact and beautiful in a case, tell the time of day to the split second.

So, God somewhere took all these vast forces and this illimitable matter that He had formed and within the framework of space and time He ordered it into the world, and that’s sometimes called the foundation of the world. And before this, Christ was our foreordained Savior.

Now I point out that God did not rush in to apply first aid when man sinned. Sometimes in our instinct for direct statement we forget, and we allow the impression to get out that when man sinned God looked around for a remedy, but this is not the case. Before man sinned, the remedy had already been provided. And before paradise was lost, paradise had already been regained. Because Christ was crucified before the foundation of the world, and in the mind and purpose of God, Christ had already died before he was born. And in the purpose of God, Christ had already died before Adam was created. In the purpose and plan of God, the world had already been redeemed before the world was ever brought into being.

So that paradise lost did not drive God to some distracted action and bring about redemption. But paradise lost was foreseen before the world was and before paradise existed, and God had already preordained and foreknown the Lamb that was without spot and blemish. And this purpose in eternity lay in the mind of God.

Now it says that this was manifest in time. It was foredetermined before time, but it was manifest in time. That is, man’s sinning was done in time and space. And therefore the Timeless One came to time and space in order that He might undo that which was done in space and time by man, the One who was pure spirit. Because there were creatures who had sinned in the flesh, He Himself became flesh in order that He might put to death that which was destroying the human race.

So, the Spaceless One came to space and the Timeless One came to time, and He who was pure Spirit above matter, took upon Himself a material body and came. And so that man’s sinning was done in the material body, and Jesus Christ redeemed us in a material body.

Now that sounds as though it might be simply a repetition of truth already known. But brethren, if we ever lose the ability to wonder at this, we are in grave need of soul-searching and spiritual revival. If we ever lose the wonder out of our hearts just to hear these words, Christ foreknown before the foundation of the world, but manifest in time for you. If those words ever cease to move your heart, then your heart is hard.

I was telling our friend McAfee the other day something that I had read of old Saint Bernard. There were two Bernards, Bernard of Clairvaux and Bernard of Cluny. It was Bernard of Cluny that wrote so many of the songs that we sing in our day. It was Bernard of Cluny that wrote The Celestial City, from which we get the song about Jerusalem the Golden.

But this was old Bernard of Clairvaux that has been canonized and called a saint, though he was a saint before he was canonized, and he wasn’t any more of a saint after he was canonized. Let’s get that straight.

But old Clairvaux was an old godly saint and a teacher, and he had a young fellow under him that he thought a great deal of and taught and prayed for and helped along. The young fellow outstripped his teacher and was pushed upward, and pretty soon he became Pope. And Clairvaux wrote him a letter, and he said, now you’re Pope. But he said, don’t think that that affects me. He said, love doesn’t know office, and love can never be put in awe by any man’s position.

Now he said, the reason I’m writing you is this. He said, once when I knew you, you had a warm heart, and you served God. But he said, now you’ve got a big job and everybody’s around you and you got a lot to do. Now he said, what I’m afraid of is that your heart will get hard. He said, if you want to know what a hard heart is, don’t ask me, ask Pharaoh. He knows. And he said, the very fact you think you don’t have a hard heart is plenty evidence that you have it already.

I like to hear a man talk that way to the Pope. In fact, I like a man to talk that way to anybody. I would thank any man for reminding me that it’s entirely possible even for a man who in those early days, for many of those men, did and were Christians and did walk with God. And this old saint of God saw what was happening and warned his younger pupil.

And I would thank any man for warning me as I now faithfully warn you. If these old-fashioned, simple, conventional statements of Scriptural truth do not move you or in some degree affect your inner inwardly when you hear them, then it is time for you carefully to rethink your condition and search your own heart to see if perhaps that has already taken place. That hardness of heart which Bernard spoke of, and if you are flippantly sure that it has not taken place, then on the authority of that good man, I would repeat that it has already taken place and very greatly needs your attention.

Now it says here that He was manifest in time, for you. Now I like that, those two little words. If you’ll read your New Testament, you’ll find them. For you. For you. What was the purpose of it all? Well, it was, for you. Why was He born? It was, for you. Why did He die? For you. Why did He rise? For you. Why is He at the right hand of God? For you. And for whom is He now making intercession? It is, for you.

Now in public service I try to be dignified and not embarrass people with any too intimate personalities, but when I’m with God by myself I have no hesitation at all in becoming just as intimate as my faith will allow me to.

So, when we come to the words, for you, I don’t hesitate to write that right into the Bible. I go over some of my own Bible, my old Bibles that have gotten so badly banged up I’ve had to replace them and retire them and put them out to pasture for the next generation, if anybody’s interested. But I find in some of those old Bibles some things that almost embarrass me now with the simplicity of them and the intimacy of them that I put myself in there. Salvation was not for the whole, round world.

I remember the first prayer I ever made in public. It was at a church meeting. We met to eat in that church, and they asked me to pray. Now, I had never prayed in public before. So, I stood up and said, Lord bless the missionaries, amen. That was my first prayer. And I suppose that a great many people are so general, as general as that prayer. I didn’t tell God what missionaries, no I didn’t tell him, request anything particular, I was just getting out of a jam.

And I suppose that it’s possible for us to think about redemption as being so general that there’s nothing particular about it. Brethren, I repeat that you can get so general that nobody gets any good out of anything.

I remember hearing of the young pastor who was very intellectual and very studious and just out of school. But he was also very orthodox and pressed upon his hearers the need of being born anew. And he summed up an eloquent passage with this statement. He said, I tell you, if you don’t get saved on general principles, you’ll never get saved at all. And I’ve often thought of the brother and his general principles. You can get your principles so general that they never touch you at all.

Now, it says here, for you, for you. You, is a pronoun of course, standing instead of a noun, and that noun is you. So, if you just put your name in there, that’ll mean you, so that all this preordination, all this before time purposing of God, this coming of this Spotless Lamb into the world, and the shedding of His most precious blood, it was all done specifically for you.

Now, it was done also for the whole world, but it was done for you. A thing can be for the whole world and nobody can get any good out of it. So, while we believe in the universal atonement of his blood, we also believe in the specific atonement which means you and me. Our name, our number, our size. We, ourselves, we can be identified. So it’s done for us. It says, for you who through Him believe in God.

Now, there can be no true believing in God apart from Christ. There is a great deal of believing in God. I wonder what’s happening to this country. The newspapers and the Saturday magazines like “This Week,” and the bestsellers, many of our bestsellers are religious books.

It’s astonishing how the bestsellers are religious books now, many of the bestsellers. Quite a number of them, “Peace of Mind” and “Peace of Heart,” and “A Man Called Peter,” and “Mr. Jones Meet the Master,” and a number of other religious books have become bestsellers. Thomas Merton’s “Seeds of Contemplation” are now sold 25 cent editions, copies, anywhere in the drugstore you can buy them. And it’s religious, it’s old-fashioned mysticism. And the publishers are saying that a wonderful new something is taking place. People are interested in religion.

This Week magazine last evening had in it, by somebody, the thesis developed that the world could be saved by religion, and then it gave the various religions, and Christianity was one of them.

Now, if this is God’s book, and Peter was God’s apostle, and this New Testament is divinely inspired, then I am led to conclude that real belief in God can come only through Christ. That any other kind of faith in God, or belief about God, is spotty, imperfect, perverted, and very often erroneous.

Some things we can know about God certainly. We can know His eternal power and Godhead. And the Indian that stands on the shore of the lake and raises his arms to the Great Spirit and invokes the help of the Great Spirit on his hunting trip, as they used to do in America before the white man drove them out, that was approach to God of some sort, and that belief in God was some kind of belief.

Edison, saying he believed that God was force, and that if he could live long enough, he believed that he could invent an instrument sensitive enough to detect God, that was some kind of belief in God. And the belief of the deists, such as Voltaire and others; deists who were not atheists. But deists, their idea of God was that God was a great principle, but he was not a personality, that was some kind of belief in God. And the heathen in their blindness, every place have some kind of belief in God.

And I suppose in the long run, any belief in God is better than no belief in God. That’s open to question, but at least I, for the moment, give you my tentative statement that I suppose it’s better to believe in God in a vague, shadowy way than not to believe there is a God. But oh, how much better to say, you who through Him do believe in God.

You believe in God not as a pagan, not as an Indian on the shore of the lake, not as a yogi looking at his nose and controlling his bodily forces. You believe in God as the one who raised Christ from the dead and gave Him glory. That’s also in the text.

And you will find back here what that means in John, Father, said Jesus, I will that they also whom Thou hast given Me may be with Me where I am, that they may behold my glory which Thou hast given Me, for Thou lovest Me before the foundation of the world. And the glory which God had given Him before the foundation of the world, God restored to Him when He raised Him from the dead and gave Him glory. And then it says, and all this was that your faith and hope might be in God.

Now, hope is a beautiful word, but it’s also a treacherous thing. Because it’s possible to hope invalid hopes, hopes that have no foundation underneath them at all. For instance, a condemned man who is supposed to die next Friday, one minute after midnight, never ceases to hope. He believes to the very last that his sentence will be commuted, or it will be, he will be pardoned. And every knock on his cell door, his eyes brighten with the hope that this means the governor has halved the sentence or at least taken the sting of death out of him. But that condemned man goes on to die.

Haul and Heady went to their death in the Missouri gas chamber, probably convinced to the end that they couldn’t die, that somehow there would be hope, but that hope failed them. And there’s been many a mother, God knows many a mother, who has hoped through to the end that her boy would return when all the time her boy was lying, his physical body gone back into decay in some far hidden corner of some burnt-over battlefield. The hope that she’d see her boy failed her. It was a treacherous hope. The condemned man’s hope is a treacherous hope.

And we can hardly go on here without remembering at least Tennyson’s famous and touching illustration of the young woman who expected her sailor lover back from the sea and who knew just when he was supposed to arrive at her cottage and who dressed for that occasion. And he tells in tender, cheer-bringing language of how she stood before the mirror and turned every way and did the last little touch that she knew he’d love. And he said, poor girl, she doesn’t know that already his lifeless body is being tossed and heaved on the billows following the wreck.

Hope may be a deceitful thing and a treacherous thing, but real faith never disappoints, because that faith is in God. It is grounded on the character of God, the promises of God, and the covenant of God, and the oath of God.

Now, remember that an oath, a covenant, and a promise, any of them or all of them, would only be worth as much as the character of the one who made them.

There is, they tell me, a couple of men. We’re going to write them up a little in the Alliance Weekly. There are a couple of men running around claiming to be friends of the Alliance, and they are simply bums and robbers. One Christian brother took such a man in, and he got up in the middle of the night, robbed him of everything that wasn’t nailed down, and disappeared.

Another fellow calling himself Tom Leslie. Now I don’t know whether that’s his right name, maybe he made it up for the occasion. That’s kind of a nice name. I know lots of nice Toms, and I know some nice Leslies. But he combined the names, and he’s going about telling that he’s a friend of Dr. Schumann, and he knows the missionaries and can quote them by name. Then he gets all he can get and disappears.

Now a promise from a man like that, how much would that mean, brother? He could stand on a pile of Gideon Bibles and swear, and I wouldn’t believe him. He could write with his own blood on a piece of paper, and he’s still a liar. A promise is only worth the character of the one who makes it. Even an oath is only worth the character.

That’s why I’ve never been too strong for a belief. This has no place here, but it’s accepted as an illustration, that certain teachers should be made to swear an anti-communist oath. My brother, you can’t pin a communist down with an oath. He’d swear on two bushels of Bibles and then turn around and sneer and sell out his country.

So, a character has to be there before there can be promise and oath and covenant. And the Scripture says, this Jesus Christ the Lamb led us to a faith in God so that our hope might be in God.

So, if God is God, then our hope is sound. And we Christians can walk around absolutely sure that everything is all right, because we have God back of us. His oath, His covenant, His blood support me in the whelming flood. And God, because he could not swear by any other, swore by Himself. He by Himself has sworn, I, on His oath depend, I shall, on eagles’ wings upborne, to heaven ascend.

So, let’s sing together in closing, that song that contains these words from the hymn “The God of Abraham Praise,” signifying that because God has sworn on His own name, we can fully trust in that promise and will be carried to heaven as a result. Amen.

Tags Salvation