Month: August 2025

Tozer Talks

Post author By pshappard
Post date August 31, 2025

“Eternity’s Values in View”

Eternity’s Values in View

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

March 3, 1957

It came to pass as Jesus went into the house of one of the chief Pharisees. Commentators don’t know whether this was a ruler of the synagogue or one of the Sanhedrin. But our Lord went into his house to eat bread on the Sabbath day, and they watched Him.

Then, verse 7, he put forth a parable to those that were bidden, when he marked how they chose out the chief rooms, that is, the closest seats, saying to them, when you are bidden of any man to a wedding, sit not down in the highest room, lest a more honorable man than thou be bidden. And he that bade thee and him come and say to thee, give this man place, thou begin with shame to take the lowest room. But when thou art bidden, go and sit down in the lowest room, that when he that bade thee cometh, he may say unto thee, Friend, go up higher.

Then, Jesus said, you will have honor in the presence of them that sit at meet with thee. For whosoever exalted himself shall be abased, and he that humbled himself shall be exalted.

Now, I talked about that last week. And the rest of this story is that while he thus sat at meet, he said also to him that bade him, that is, to the host, When thou makest a dinner or a supper, call not thy friends, nor thy brethren, nor neither thy kinsmen, nor thy rich neighbors, lest they also bid thee again, and a recompense be made thee. But when thou makest a feast, call the poor, the maimed, the lame, the blind, and thou shalt be blessed, for they cannot recompense thee. Then thou shalt be recompensed at the resurrection of the just.

Now, the presence of our Lord Jesus at this dinner did not imply that He approved everything that He saw there. He went as the custom was in His time, but His being present didn’t mean that He accepted it, fell into it in spirit, and took part in it in every way. Because, you see, having the dinner was not wrong, and His accepting the invitation, of course, was not wrong.

But nevertheless, in this social gathering, wrong was present, both on the part of the guests and the host. And our Lord pointed out to them, as we saw above and in last week’s sermon, why or where the wrong was among the guests. The guests accepted it as an opportunity to exploit their own fame and to show off. Now, Christ pointed to sin, even the sin of his host.

Now, I want to say something that I know will be shocking to some of you, because you just don’t think such a thing should be said, even though it’s true. And it is simply this, that in doing what He did at this dinner, our Lord violated one of the first rules of civility.

Now, my friends, the rules of civility, the hollow rules of politeness, forbade that a man should sit down to a dinner and yet, while sitting there, quietly expose the evil of his host’s motive in giving the dinner. Now, this transgressed all the rules of good manners and of good breeding. You see, my friends, Adam’s fallen race has not been able to live with itself except by practicing hypocrisy, insincerity and intellectual dishonesty.

And this intellectual dishonesty and this deep insincerity has been codified and made into rules of etiquette and put down in books as marks of good breeding and evidences of good manners. But this Jesus, being Truth itself and being holiness incarnated and thinking as God thought and seeing through the facade of culture and etiquette, dared to transgress one of the first rules of civility, that you don’t accept a host’s hospitality and yet expose the host’s sin.

Now, my brethren, according to society’s standards, Christ was not a gentleman. This is the shocking thing. A seeing man among the blind is never a gentleman to the blind. And an honest man among the intellectually dishonest is never a gentleman to the dishonest. And a bold man among the timid is never a gentleman to the fearful.

So, Jesus brought upon Him the odium here and all down the centuries of violating the taboo of the salt, the code of hospitality. But it was not God’s code. It was man’s effort to cover his sin. It was and is to this day a taken for granted and rarely written but sometimes written set of rules which enables us to get along with ourselves and to live in a twisted, dishonest world like ours with the least possible friction. And our Lord Jesus cared not at all about the friction and cared not at all about their codes. He had come from God and what He had saw and heard He spake and no man received His testimony.

Now, having said this, and you will understand that when I say Christ was no gentleman, I mean to say that Christ did not feel that in order to be right, he had to fit in to the artificial rules which had at the bottom of them dishonesty and hypocrisy. And the dishonesty and hypocrisy that is practiced in society today and even in the church today will burn as fuel in hell below and the Lord would have nothing to do with it and neither should we.

Now, he said this to the host. And of course, the host’s face reddened, and he knew that he had been seen through. Our Lord said, when thou makest a dinner, call not thy friends nor thy brethren nor thy kinsmen nor thy rich neighbors. Now, does this mean that I, under the Lord’s commandment, cannot entertain my relatives? Does this mean that when my son, Bud, comes in from Park Forest to have Sunday dinner with us, as they do sometimes, that I were transgressing these commandments of Jesus? Does that mean that when your relatives come in from afar and you go to extra and joyful effort to give them a nice meal, that this is forbidden by our Lord? No.

So, to believe would contradict the acts of Bible saints and Christ Himself often ate with His friends. Therefore, He could not mean that. You see, the easiest way to obey this is the wrong way. And that’s often true in the teachings of Jesus. The easiest way to duck out of it is just to obey it according to the letter.

Christ was never much of a letter man. He was all for the spirit of things, all for the spirit. And therefore, the easiest way is to do what you’re told according to the letter. As I said a year or so ago in preaching on John 13, that the easiest and less expensive way to obey the foot washing commandment is to wash your foot. The easiest way for me to do would be to wash my feet right after he’d carefully washed it and perfumed it. That would be the easiest possible way to get out of that commandment. And often to do literally what we’re told to do without a thought of the spirit of the teaching is the easiest way out. Tithe, give your tenth. That’s the easiest thing that you can do. And go to church and go home. That’s the easiest way and the least effective and the least meaningful.

Now, the easiest way to fulfill this would be to withdraw from your friends and relatives and show no love for them and renounce the tithes of blood and friendship and never invite your father-in-law or your aunt to a dinner and never show any interest in your kin and your friends and neighbors.

Now, our Lord never taught that here because He didn’t practice it Himself. And the saints haven’t practiced it and the holiest of them haven’t. And He taught hospitality back from the day of Abraham and they showed it from that day down. And the Lord placed His tender approval upon it.

Now, what is the true meaning and what did our Lord say? Well, you see, the Pharisees sought religious merit, and this was not a social gathering here at all. It’s entirely possible to have a social gathering and not expect it to be a religious thing, and not intend it to be a matter of reward or merit, and not expect a crown or recompense for it.

It’s perfectly easy for us down home to, when the doorbell begins to almost come off a wall or the chimes, why, to run and open the door and have a lot of kids bounce in and fall over everything, begin to yell, we enjoy it. And we love to have them, and it is not a question of religious reward or merit. Not a question of showing off or doing something with the smug belief that we shall be recompensed in the judgment.

No, but the Pharisees did it for that very reason. They sought reward and their dinner had religious meaning, and it was given to discharge the obligation of hospitality as taught in their Scriptures and they smugly and self-righteously believed that in doing this, they would get a crown and that there would be a reward and recompense come to them in time to be.

Now the catch, Jesus said, is here. He said the catch is, that if you throw a dinner that costs $100, over the next year, you will be invited often enough to eat up that so that actually, you will get as much out of it as you put in it and you’re back where you started from.

How simple that is. He said if you hope to have reward, $100 worth of reward in heaven, by giving a dinner that costs $100 and inviting people in that will give a dinner that will cost them $100 and so you’ll get recompense. He said if you expect that, why, you’re all wrong because you’ll get your reward right now. You’ll eat your reward at a half-dozen tables over the next two weeks, He said.

Now he said if this had been just a social thing, if it had just been simply a matter of friendly greeting, saying come over and have lunch with us, stop by and have coffee, that had been something else, but this was a religious thing, and they expected a reward.

So, here’s what Christ said in effect. Christ said in effect, you are to inhabit eternity and it’s unworthy of you to seek reward in time. It’s unworthy of you to do that, hoping for reward which doesn’t cost you anything, for you get out as much as you put in. And He said you trade gifts with only this world in view or if you expect reward in the coming time, you have already traded and bartered to a point where you get all you put into it.

Always remember that there has to be an over plus before there can be any reward or recompense. And He said, you must live for the resurrection of the just. Now unbelieving men are never willing to do this. You can tell where unbelief is because it is not willing to wait for the resurrection of the just.

What amazes me is the almost universal misunderstanding of Hebrews 11. Hebrews 11 is the Westminster Abbey of the Bible where God has buried His great saints, where their monuments are there with their names inscribed and a little bit telling why they’re there. They were all men of faith.

But have you noticed that the kind of faith they had was not the kind that gets the immediate answer? The only kind of faith that is recognized now among a lot of Christians is the kind that can reach up and pull down the apples of paradise, reach up in faith and pull them down, reach up and pull them down and have them and eat them and use them and use them up.

But in the 11th chapter of Hebrews it concludes by saying, just in case you aren’t familiar as you might be, it concludes by saying they were stoned, they were sawn asunder, they were tempted, they were slain with the sword, they wandered about in sheepskins and goatskins, being destitute, afflicted, tormented, of whom the world was not worthy. They wandered in deserts and in mountains and in dens and caves of the earth, and these all, having obtained a good report through faith, received not the fulfillment of the promise, God having provided some better thing for us, that they without us should not be made perfect.

Their faith, the faith that God honored in that magnificent 11th of Hebrews, was in every instance a faith that had no present evidence except the inner evidence of things hoped for and the evidence of things to come. It was all an inward matter. They looked forward to that hour when a just and faithful God should make up to them and make good on all his promises, but they died without seeing the fulfillment of those promises.

This, you see, is upside down and backwards to the modern faith, which, if you have faith, you get instantly what you want. Well, there is a kind of faith that’ll get what you want at once, and I believe, as you well know, in praying and getting answers to prayer. This building is a monument to the fact that you can drop on your knees and ask God for something and get it.

Once we had $5,000 due Monday morning, Monday morning, and we had nothing, nothing, and we called the friends together and we prayed, and when Monday morning came, we had our $5,000. Where it came from, only God knows. I don’t know. The people didn’t know much about it, only a few that prayed.

So I believe that it is such a thing as getting an answer now, but God loves more that kind of long-range faith that can look down the years and wait for the resurrection of the just and can live now with eternity’s values in view, to quote the song.

Now, He said, you must live for the resurrection of the just, and unbelief is always revealed by our desire to have it now, get the reward now. And that’s even true of religious people who talk much of eternity and write songs about eternity and talk much of heaven and all the rest, but heaven to them is a sort of a faraway, remote paradise, light years distance, which they expect sometime to inhabit, but living for now.

Well, Jesus said, that’s what’s the matter with you, Pharisees. He said, you’re hoping to get religious merit by throwing a banquet. But have you noticed, He said, that everybody here happens to be by some queer trick, somebody that can invite you back. And when they invite you back, you eat up your reward with your teeth.

And the Lord said, now a man of faith is deeply convinced that there will be a resurrection. So he counts on it. He counts on it. He’s deeply convinced that there will be a resurrection. And he gives up present recompense and lives for that Day. Spell it with capital letters. That Day. Paul talked about it, that Day.

Now, true faith, I say, is a firm conviction that God will perform His promises. If He’s promised it now, He’ll get it now. But He’s promised more in the world to come and at the resurrection of the just. And the man of true faith will not insist on getting his presents now, he will wait. And the man of true faith says, I shall awake. I shall awake to memory, to life and to recompense.

And all the liberals and all the modernists and all the false cultists and all the annihilationists and all the unbelievers in the world can’t shake the man’s faith. He can rise in the morning and say with St. Patrick, I awake today to a mighty faith, the faith in the belief in the Trinity. And he says, I shall awake to the memory. I shall awake to life. I shall awake to recompense. And so for that reason, I am going to see to it that my good deeds aren’t reciprocal. For where they’re reciprocal, they’re canceled out.

McAfee sometimes, before we come down, will reach up and grab a little sheepskin affair and rub my shoes. But I rub his sometimes. So, if he thinks he’s going to get any reward for brushing a prophet’s shoes, why, he’ll have to think again. He isn’t. I’ve brushed his.

So, if you do a deed and you know somebody will return it and reciprocate it, you might as well not have done it, at least as far as any merit is concerned. There’s no merit in reciprocation. And that’s what these were doing. And that’s why Jesus said, Now, you people, if you want your reward, don’t call your rich friends and the people that will call you again. Oh, who is it? The poor and the maimed and the lame and the blind. And these, He said, cannot recompense you again.

I think that’s a tender sentence there. These, He said, cannot recompense you again. And these cannot enhance your social standing. These may not be so easy to be around. The maimed man is not the easy man to be around, the lame man, the blind man. But Jesus seemed to love their company, and He tells us too.

So today, today we declare, we believe in a redeeming death. We do show forth His death. Today we declare we believe in a redeeming death. And we believe in the resurrection. We believe in His resurrection and ours. And because He lives, we shall live also. That’s what we mean.

Now you say, I don’t like the way you have your communion. Well, really, friends, Jesus didn’t tell us how to have it. That’s the odd thing. The Greek church thought it out one way. The Roman church thought it out another way. The Baptists do it one way and the Methodists did it another. And the different groups do it in different ways. Obviously, there was no rule of thumb telling us just how the communion should be observed. Only that we should observe it, and in doing it, remember His death till He come. That’s all.

So that’s all we’re asking this morning. It’s all we’re doing. We’re going to think of His being present, His death till he come. The man that’s dead isn’t coming anywhere. The man that’s dead isn’t coming. You couldn’t say, I put a flower on my dead husband’s grave until he come. Dead men don’t come. You can leave the light burning from now till the trumpet and he’ll not come back. Dead men don’t come. What did the apostle mean? We do show forth His death till He come. He’s not dead.

That’s what he means. He died, but he’s not dead. He liveth forevermore. And now is Christ risen from the dead and become the first fruits of all that slept and sleep, and we do show His death and take for granted His glorious resurrection and wait for His return. And in doing this, we believe in a resurrection, and we believe in the resurrection of the just. And we believe that all good deeds done on earth that can be repaid again will cancel each other out. They’re not bad deeds, they’re good deeds. But they have no merit for the day to come.

But we believe that if we, according to the teaching of Jesus, see to it that we serve those who can’t serve us in return and help those who cannot help in return, and help to feed those that can never even know our names, maybe, then He said, you shall be recompensed at the resurrection of the just. Oh, what strong words. You shall be recompensed at the resurrection of the just. Who said it? Jesus said it. Jesus said it. You shall be recompensed at the resurrection of the just.

Now, I hope I can be skillful enough in this that I may not that I may not embarrass anybody. But I heard something that I can’t let go. In our young people’s work, in our girls’ side of it, plans were made and carried through to, sort of as the old Methodists used to do, get somebody, some established Christian woman who would take into her heart and into her prayer life some little girl and sort of mother her. Not interfere, but just sort of mother her. Look after her. Maybe have her out to the house. Maybe pray with her. Maybe send her a little card and thus keep in touch with her. Now, that’s a very lovely thing and quite Christian in its spirit and quite right.

Well, of course, these girls had to be assigned. So, the lady in charge assigned to one certain woman in our church a certain little girl. And this woman called up the one who’s in charge and said, Mrs. Moore, you have assigned me such and such a girl.

Now, I’m paraphrasing this. I wouldn’t guarantee verbatim, but this is the gist of it. You have assigned me little Miss So-and-so as my little charge. And that’s all good except for one thing. She comes from a good home. She has good parents. She dresses well. She doesn’t need me. Would you please assign to me a little girl that doesn’t have any Christian background or any good home? A little girl that comes in Friday evening or Saturday, whenever it is, with torn blouse and dirty face. Would you assign that girl, some girl like that to me? Because that’s the kind I want to help.

I’ve preached the gospel since I was 19 years old. But before my God above, I know that with all my preaching of the deeper life that I’ve never risen to that height of pure spirituality. Brethren, that’s what Jesus taught. That’s what Jesus taught.

Let me help the one that can’t help me. And let me help the one who may be dirty when she comes to my house. Let me help the little girl whose parents probably drink and swear and smoke and look at television and cuss each other and fight and kick her out on the sidewalk to play.

And so, the little urchin off the street who comes in here. And that’s what’s happening here. They’re coming in and these good folks, Clara and Meryl and their helpers are looking after them. But this woman didn’t want a nice one that had a good home and came clean. She wanted one that nobody else wanted.

There is an illustration of what Jesus taught, brethren, that is it. In the resurrection of the just, there will be bishops and cardinals and reverends and pastors and reformers who will not have the reward nor the recompense that people like that have. A meek, self-effacing person who never pushes to the front but wants to help those who can’t help back.

The reward such persons will get will infinitely outweigh the reward that a man gets for merely standing up and doing what he likes to do best in the world, except pray. Best in the world, preaching to me I’ll never get any reward for preaching. In fact, I have long ago given up any hope of a crown because I’m doing what I love to do and would weep if I was forced to quit it.

But dear friends, shall not we, you and I, go to the Lord in tender prayer and ask Him to help us quietly to find deeds and people that cannot recompense us here. And with our money, and God knows we’ve got a lot of it these days of inflation and prosperity. With our money and with our hands, don’t buy your way out, use your hands sometimes too, help those who can’t recompense, who have no social standing, maybe no education, and maybe not the sanitary standards that you are used to, but who need you.

So said Jesus tenderly, these cannot recompense you again, but you shall be recompensed at the resurrection of the just. Amen.

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Tozer Talks

Post author By pshappard
Post date August 24, 2025

“A Lesson in Humility”

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A Lesson in Humility

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

February 24, 1957

In the book of Luke, the 14th chapter, beginning with verse 7 and going to 14, Luke 14:7 and following. And he, Jesus, put forth a parable to those which were bidden, when he marked how they chose out the chief rooms, saying unto them, when thou art bidden of any man to a wedding, sit not down in the highest room, lest a man more honorable than thou be bidden of him. And he that bade thee and him come and say to thee, give this man place, and thou begin with shame to take the lowest room. But when thou art bidden, go and sit down in the lowest room, that when he that bade thee cometh, he may say unto thee, Friend, go up higher. Then shalt thou have worship in the presence of them that sit at meet with thee. For whosoever exalteth himself shall be abased, and he that humbleth himself shall be exalted.

Then said he also to them that were bade, or to him that bade him. This was to the host, the other was to the guests. When thou makest a dinner or a supper, he said to his host, Call not thy friends nor thy brethren, neither thy kinsmen nor thy rich neighbors, lest they also bid thee again, and a recompense be made thee. But when thou makest a feast, call the poor, the lame, the lame, the blind. And thou shalt be blessed, for they cannot recompense thee, for thou shalt be recompensed at the resurrection of the just.

Now, there are two parts to this text, and one I want to use this morning, and the latter part next Sunday morning.

Now here, let me say that there is a Christian. A Christian is one who is not only saved by the Lord but taught by the Lord as well. I wish that we might take this carefully and know that words are not being used lightly, that a real Christian is one who has not only been saved by the Lord, forgiven of his past sins, but who is taught by Him as well, and who is identified with our Lord Jesus, now and forever, in everything, at any temporal cost, unto death.

Now this sounds terrifying, but this is Christianity, brethren, and anything short of it is not Christianity. That a Christian is one who is identified with our Lord now, to remain identified forever, in everything, and at any temporal cost, whatever it might prove to be, now and unto death.

So that, this being true, Christ’s teaching is first in importance and absolutely vital to the Christian. That Christ’s teaching is not vital to most professing Christians, only proves them to be professing Christians. But Christ’s teaching is important and vital to all Christians because the Christian, I repeat now, is identified with Christ in everything, unto death, to be taught by Him and led by Him.

And so, the Christian hears what the Lord has to say without question, and he obeys without question. As soon as he knows what the Lord has said, he obeys. If it raises any question, it is only on what did the Lord say. But he never raises any question about whether he should obey or not. That’s settled. That was settled when he became a Christian, if he did become a Christian. So now this morning, we’ll listen to the Lord and let him speak to us and tell us about something very important to us.

Now, in this story which I read to you, with the teachings of our Lord embodied in it, we find that truth confronts a real situation. You see, my friends, when truth confronts a real social situation, then our consciences get in trouble and the power of God comes, and we soon find whether we are Christians or not, or whether we plan at all to be Christians or not. Truth disassociated from practical life never raises any problems, and it never makes anybody angry, except a few theologians who will fight over theories. But the practical people aren’t much interested.

But as soon as truth confronts a real situation, as it did here at this gathering of a number of people at the home of a man who had called them for a dinner, and Jesus our Lord was there as a guest, and this one who was Truth, present there, saw the iniquity both in the host and in the guests. Iniquity that they never dreamed was present. They completely overlooked the presence of gross sin here at their banquet, and it never occurred to them so much as to dream that there was anything wrong here.

And the reason was that it was customary. Whatever is customary is taken to be all right. And when truth confronts the customary, and truth insists the customary conform to truth, then you will find the cross the same as you found the cross back there. And all down the centuries, the cross asserts itself; when truth confronts the customary and insists that the customary is wrong. And so it was here. Our Lord was present as a guest, and yet it didn’t prevent Him from giving His testimony both to the host and to the guests gathered there.

Now, we are in grave danger, my friends. Don’t think that we are not. The danger that hangs over our country is a grave danger, but the danger that hangs over us Christians is still greater, because the danger that confronts our country as a nation has to do with time, but the danger that hangs over us as Christians has to do with eternity. And the danger is that we shall accept the customary as being right, and never think to check with the Word of God to see whether we’re doing the right thing or not. The customary is supposed to be right when in God’s sight it may be flagrant sin.

There may be present there unsuspected by the people because they’re used to it. And I say that this would be a calamity beyond all description, to spend a lifetime in a church, a lifetime in an Alliance church, a lifetime displeasing God by simply doing what everybody thought was all right, and what was not condemned by the sociologists or the doctors or the police or the psychologists, not condemned at all and taken as a matter of course, and yet at the root of that conduct may lie a serpent, a deadly serpent, because in God’s sight sin may be there.

And the Christian may get converted, give himself to the Lord as he says, and yet conform to this, which because it is socially acceptable is therefore received as all right. And in our pure blindness we never see that it’s displeasing to God. Better please God if you have to displease a thousand thousand people, friends. Better please God if pleasing God means going contrary to the customary and breaking with the social customs.

Now, what was it here that Jesus noticed? He sat there among them, quietly looking them over, and here’s what He saw. And now in the first place there was a little protocol, which is perfectly natural. You can’t have anything, you can’t ride a streetcar, nor drive on the street, nor meet a half a dozen people anywhere, but what that you have to observe protocol.

And the protocol was simply something like this, that when the guests were gathering at the feast, the bridegroom sat at a certain place, or perhaps the man who had called the banquet, the host, whether it was the bridegroom or not, he was the host. And there were certain people who for that occasion were to be honored, just as we have our speaker’s table, you know, at our little banquets. And the guest speaker is given the finest place, and maybe the man who’s in charge of the little program has him next to him.

And so, it’s a simple thing, and it’s small, but it’s protocol. And Jesus noticed this, that as they gathered before they were officially seated, he noticed that some of the self-important fellows quietly and slyly walked over, and while talking and being casual, managed to seat themselves near to, if not indeed next to the host. They hadn’t seated them officially yet, they were just gathering and greeting each other and hanging up their coats.

But some of these fellows managed to slip in and sit down where it would be hard to move them, because they felt, no doubt they’d been told they were great, and no doubt that they felt that they were only doing the right thing.

And so, they sat down next to the host, and Jesus noticed that. Well, then this often happened, or it happened often enough that our Lord called attention to it, that when the official seating took place, when the host got up and said, well, now we’re about to begin, and I will ask so-and-so to sit here, and he noticed it was already occupied. He said, excuse me, but this was reserved for the guest of honor, would you mind moving down?

So, this fellow gets up, red face, and moves down. Now Jesus saw that, and it had just a sly, it seems to me, bit of humor in it, although certainly I think that our Lord had no such thought. It was very, very real to Him, and must have been very real to those to whom He addressed these words.

But always everywhere there are the vain and ambitious climbers, those who have been told by so many people that they are good, that they have accepted it as a matter of course, and they have built up in their own minds a little saga about themselves, a little idea of greatness which they have, and they have accepted it so completely that if they’re praised, they don’t even think there’s anything wrong with it. They think, well, that’s not so. That’s true. He said the truth about that.

And so they’re seeking. These are the ambitious climbers. And you say those are out in the world. They weren’t in the world when our Lord talked to them here. They were Jews. They were religious people, the most religious people then in the world.

Now this applies to us, my friends. This applies to you this morning and to me this morning. This itch to be honored, this itch to be known as somebody. Jesus gave us what I call a golden dictum here in the 11th verse, simply these words, whosoever exalteth himself shall be abased. And he that humbleth himself shall be exalted. These are the words of our Lord.

Now, the question is, is this important? It wouldn’t have been put here if it had not been important. And if this had not been contrary to the will of God and the ways of heaven, contrary to the ethics and the moral spirit of good men, our Lord would never have mentioned it.

But we take it so lightly that one almost has to beat the desk with his fists and shout to get attention these days to anything like this. This comes in our Sunday school class and we pass it over and go right back and sit down beside the host as we had been doing since we can remember.

Now I’d like to just drop this little word in your ear. There is no trick of justification that will guarantee a man’s being right in heaven who will not be right on earth. Now we have suffered from this over the past decades, that there is a justification that makes me right in heaven, even if I will not be right on earth. And if I refuse to be right on earth, this is not the teaching of the fathers. This is not the teaching of the apostles. This is not the teaching of our Lord Jesus Christ. A legal justification that makes me right in before heaven cannot be mine unless there is also a willingness on my part to be right on earth.

Now, I do not say that I am accepted in the presence of God and saved by my rightness on earth because we all have a long way to go and I maybe have the farthest. But I do say where there is a carelessness about the teachings of Jesus or where there is a stubborn unwillingness to obey him, there cannot be a justification before God. That is antinomianism which the fathers fought with such desperation down the years, this kind of thing that says Jesus Christ died not only for my past sins but for all my future sins.

I heard an Alliance preacher say that. He died for my past sins and he died for my future sins and therefore said this man is no longer with us. I don’t even have to confess nor repent if I do anything. It’s already done for. Christ kept the law for me to the end of my life and therefore I stand with the law perfectly kept and I stand before God as one who never broke the law because He kept the law for me and died for me and therefore, I don’t even need to repent or confess because it’s all been done for me.

Now, there is a heresy, my brethren. It is as much of a heresy as Jehovah’s Witnesses or the Voice of Prophecy from the West Coast which is Seventh-day Adventism or Christian Science or any of the other heresies who are basically wrong in their beliefs about vital matters.

I read a track lately on immersion in which a very good man pleaded that we immerse the candidates three times, put them in three times for the Trinity and I said to myself, well there’s no harm in that and the dear Lord certainly wouldn’t mind and if he thought that a man actually believed that, he could dip him in three times into the water instead of once, no harm would be done. I don’t think even a Baptist would care because if he’s baptized in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost it doesn’t make much difference.

I’ve had to on a few occasions put them down the second time because they got panicking, didn’t get all wet the first time. So, I wouldn’t quarrel over that, and I wouldn’t divide over that and let people have what views they want about such matters that don’t matter but I will say to you that when it comes to the vital, critical matters, you cannot afford to have fellowship with those who deny our Lord Jesus Christ.

John said if we receive them and bid them God’s speed, we’re partakers of their evil deeds. We are a collaborator after the fact. So with this heresy, that because Christ kept the law for me and died to give me a perfect covering, therefore nothing matters now on earth for me except that I believe that. I say that that is a heresy that’s as deadly as Jehovah’s Witnesses heresy. It’s a heresy that is as deadly as any false doctrine that you could imagine.

Now, there’s a necessity that we obey, my brethren, our Lord said this, not everyone that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven, but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven. Many will say to me in that day, Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in thy name?

I suppose there are two prayers that I have made more than any other during the last year, maybe 20 years. One is that I might have the spirit of the prophet and the other that I might be holy and Christ-like and support my prophesying, my teaching with a holy life. But here is a man who evidently had some kind of a prophetic power. Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in thy name? And in thy name have cast out devils and, in thy name, done many wonderful works.

We’d have given a man an LLD on this in any Christian college. He had prophesied in the name of the Lord, cast out devils in the name of the Lord, and done many wonderful works in the name of the Lord. I can just hear the citation. In fact, I could write one which would be read at the time of his coronation.

But Jesus never denied it at all. He didn’t say, Oh, you’re lying. You haven’t prophesied in my name or cast out devils. You’re talking like that to get in. He says, then will I profess unto them, I never knew you. Depart from me ye that work iniquity. Do you notice that it was not the good works that he tried to do, but it was the iniquity which he did?

Those works of prophesying in the name of the Lord and casting out devils and doing wonderful works in the name of the Lord might well have been accepted if he had obeyed the Lord, but he did not. He knew Him not because he was not an obedient follower of His. Therefore, whosoever heareth these sayings of mine and doeth them, I will liken him unto a wise man which built his house upon a rock. And the rain descended and the floods came and the winds blew and beat upon that house. And it fell not for it was founded upon a rock.

Now, what is the rock? The deity of Christ? No. What is the rock? The New Testament? No. What is the rock that he built his house upon? The commandments of Christ? No. What is the rock? It is obedience to the words of the Lord. The words of the Lord can lie there dormant and dead. And they’re not the rock, but obedience. He said, whoso hears these sayings and doeth them, I will liken unto a man which built his house upon a rock. The doing of them is the building.

Perhaps the rock would be the commandments if I might edit that last sentence a little. The commandments might be the rock, but the building was the doing of those commandments upon that rock. Then he said, and everyone that heareth these sayings of mine and doeth them not shall be likened unto a foolish man which built his house upon the sand. And the rain descended, and the floods came and the winds blew and beat upon that house and it fell. And great was the fall of it. It came to pass when Jesus had ended these sayings, the people were astonished at His doctrine.

Now, somebody says, Mr. Tozer, these words are not for us. These have been interpreted away and it’s not required that we keep these. Now, I want to ask you, I know this is said by some. I want to ask you; can you afford to trust an explanation based upon a theory and an explanation which was not held and a theory which was not accepted by the fathers down to Paul?

Can you afford to accept and let your eternal future rest upon an explanation and a theory and a so-called rightly dividing which takes this away from us? Can we afford to do it? And if we obey His words, what have we lost? Is it heresy to do what Jesus tells us to do almost in some quarters? Heresy to do what we’re told to do by our own Lord. He becomes our Lord and tells us that when we’re invited to a feast, take the low place, and then uses that as an illustration and lays down the golden dictum, whosoever exalteth himself shall be abased and whosoever abaseth himself shall be exalted.

Now, there’s the dictum that our Lord laid down. The other is only illustration. There’s the essence of it. Now, that’s in the Sermon on the Mount. Is that for us? Some say not and they’ve explained it away. My brethren, if you think it is and you observe this teaching, is it heresy to observe the teaching of our Savior? Has it become heresy to do what the Lord told us? Shall we be condemned if we, in our ignorance, keep the commandments and He didn’t expect us to?

If the Lord says, be humble and we’re humble, and it happens to occur in the Sermon on the Mount, and we humble ourselves, shall we in the great day of the Lord be sent down to hell or out into outer darkness or have all our rewards taken away because we, in our ignorance, obeyed the Lord? And if we do obey His words, what have we lost, I say? What have we lost? And if we do not obey them, what have we gained? And if we do not believe this dictum nor follow it, then we may lose everything.

For our Lord Jesus told us of the man who heard it and didn’t do it, and I don’t know why he didn’t do it. Maybe he was too stubborn to do it, or too worldly to do it, or too covetous to do it. Maybe he was too pleasure-mad to do it. Maybe he was too proud to do it, or maybe he’d been taught he didn’t have to do it. Maybe he’d had it dispensationalized out of his system.

But at any rate, he heard it and didn’t do it. Jesus said he built his house on sand, and everybody knows what building on sand is. The first storm that comes, the sand begins to melt away and shift, and pretty soon down goes the house. Now, some say we cannot obey, and I think this is the cutest trick of the devil of all, that we cannot obey. He that humbleth himself shall be exalted.

Now, I want to ask you, brother, do you dare go to the judgment seat of Christ with the excuse, Lord, I heard it, but I couldn’t do it? Do you dare go to the judgment seat of Christ and say, Lord, I heard thee say, take the low place, and he that takes the low place shall be exalted. I heard it, but I just couldn’t take the low place. Why can’t you? Who’s hindering you? This is the devil’s word, and Jesus is supposed to have told us things which we’re unable to do.

I tell my three-year-old grandson, Paul, Paul, go get me that picture. And he says, I can’t. Or I say to him, Paul, go lift that piano. He’s big for his age, but he couldn’t do that. What kind of a man would I be to command with sanctions and threats and warnings for non-obedience, a three-year-old child to lift a piano? And yet they tell me that that’s what our Lord did all down the years, that He commanded us to do things we’re not able to do. He said, humble yourself, and we say, Lord, I just can’t do it.

Why can’t you do it? If you’ve got a spirit that can’t humble itself, that spirit belongs in hell and not in heaven, and it’ll go there. If you’ve got a spirit that’s so hard and harsh and proud and bitter that you cannot humble yourself, that spirit will never go to heaven. Now certain Protestants have invented a purgatory to take care of that.

They admit that the Lord couldn’t allow a man to go to heaven on those terms, but they say that there’s an outer darkness, weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth, and that’s where the Lord purifies justified persons who are justified in heaven and sinful on earth. That’s purgatory, brother. Do you believe in it? I don’t.

As the tree falls, so it lies. After death, a judgment. And I do not believe in any purgatories, except as the Nazarene preacher once said in my hearing, he believed in a purgatory right now here on this earth by the blood of Jesus, and that’s the one I believe in. So don’t let’s say we can’t. Don’t let’s say it’s impossible, Lord. I wanted to, but I couldn’t.

Too proud to? Love sin too much. Then you’re so badly bound in sin, you’ll never get untangled. If you’re so loving pleasure that you can’t humble yourself and can’t obey the teachings of Jesus, then don’t call yourself a Christian. A thousand times better that you be honest in your sin than deceitful in your religion.

That’s why Christ said, you’re neither hot nor cold, and I’ll spew you out of my mouth. I would thou art cold or hot. No, no, my brethren, the teachings of Jesus are His easy yoke and His light burden. His yoke is easy, and His burden is light, and I’ve found it so, and I’ve found it so. And all Jesus taught in this lesson this morning is go down, go down, go down, and anybody can go down if you just let go. Let go and you’ll go down.

As the farmer shouted up on the haystack to his son who had piled hay on the stack all day, he said, Dad, how will I get down? He said, just shut your eyes and walk around. He’d get down all right. Gravity takes care of it, and so we’ll all come down. But if we’re unwilling to come down, that’s another matter. And a man who’s unwilling to come down is unwilling to follow Jesus. And if he’s unwilling to follow Jesus, there is no trick of justification that will make him all right in heaven.

Now I’m going to prophesy and tell you this, somebody is going to have to start saying this in Bible circles or another generation, if the Lord tarries, that which is now evangelicalism will be liberalism, for we’re moving that direction as a reaction from the kind of antinomianism that believes on Christ but accepts no moral responsibility nor obligation to obey.

I am trusting and believing that there may come back a reformation into circles or a reformation that’ll be like a lightning stroke that’ll divide sheep from goats right here in this world, and even in so-called gospel circles. And we’ll begin to obey our Savior again, for a Christian is one who’s not only saved by faith but who’s taught by our Lord Jesus, identified with Him in everything, forever, at any cost, clear down to the end.

And Christ is his teacher and his Lord and his instructor and his commanding officer and his princely leader. And if he in any weakness fails the Lord, he was only to tell the Lord in grief that he failed Him and the Lord will forgive like that, for He’s faithful and just to forgive us if we’ve sinned.

The idea that we’re supposed to accept sin as the customary and not expect to live a holy and separated life is the teaching of the devil. And in the name of Jesus Christ, I rebuke him who dares to teach it.

So, my brethren, the little dictum, remember it, whosoever exalted himself shall be abased, and he that humbled himself shall be exalted.

There’s a dear old brother, a Canadian man by the name of A.W. Rolfe. He and I were alike only in one thing, we had the same initials. He’s gone now, he gave to the world some excellent, Mrs. Bell, I think the missionary was his daughter, and Paul Rolfe was his son, and E.W. Rolfe was another son of missionaries, a dear old man of God. And he wrote a little booklet, I think it’s out of print, but the little booklet had this name, The Way Up Is Down. The Way Up Is Down. That was saying it differently.

Now may God help us today. Amen.

Tags Humility

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Tozer Talks

Post author By pshappard
Post date August 17, 2025

“Sinful Man–The Object of God’s Love”

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Sinful Man–The Object of God’s Love

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

August 3, 1958

But after that the kindness and love of God our Savior toward man appeared, not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to His mercy He saved us by the washing of regeneration and the renewing of the Holy Ghost which He shed on us abundantly through Jesus Christ our Savior. That, being justified by grace, we should be made heirs according to the hope of eternal life.

Now, the Holy Ghost describes us in verse three, and then He goes on into verse four, and verse four is like stepping into nice warm water. Verse three is like plunging into ice cold water. But verse three comes before verse four, and if we will not have verse three, we cannot have verse four. Verse three says, describing us, describing the nicest person here, we are all humble, and nobody would say that’s me.

A man would say that’s my wife, or a wife would say that’s my husband, or the child would say that’s my mother, or we always have somebody else in mind. I tell you frankly, I don’t think it fits me by nature. But the nicest person here has to accept this as a reasonable facsimile of his photograph; foolish, disobedient, deceived, enslaved to lust, pleasure-mad, living in malice, envious, hateful, and hating one another.

Now, that’s the description the Holy Ghost gives of us, and if we will not believe, or as bad as He says we are, we cannot believe that he’s as good as he says he is. So this is our photograph.

Then comes this little glorious word, so small with such a variety of meanings. This little simple word, B-U-T, but, and the whole thing is changed. But after that, the kindness and love of God our Savior toward man appeared. I think this little word, but, as it’s used by Paul, is one of the most powerful words in the entire Bible. It is repentance, it is rescue, it is deliverance, it is salvation, it is a thousand things, and here we have it coming between verse 3 and verse 4, rescuing those who are in verse 3 by the kindness and love of God in verse 4.

But, he says, and you know, I think that there will be scenes in heaven. I am very cautious in painting heavenly scenes. I have listened to some real oratory by men who know more about heaven, apparently, than John the Beloved did, and I’m very cautious about it.

Also, I’m very cautious about quoting God, unless I quote from the Scriptures themselves, or making dialogue between God and the soul. I am not sure that I know too much about the future life, since I know so very little about this life. But I think I could be nearly correct in imagining scenes that might be there in the days to come, when we meet somebody, we didn’t expect to be there.

We’ve gotten over and entered the celestial city, and we see walking toward us a man whom we recognize, because personality persists in the world to come, individuality is unchanged, our total being remains. Don’t think of yourself as a ghost or a strange zombie. You are going to be you, only glorified. You are going to be recognizable. You’ll have a memory. You will be able to call to memory things that happened below, just as Jesus, after he came out of the grave, remembered what he had told them while he was still with them before his crucifixion.

So, you’re going to remember, and you’re going to recognize this person coming toward you. And the last time you saw him, he was cross-eyed drunk, and you understood that he had lived and died that way. And the last you heard of him, he was somewhere in a coma, and there’d been little gaps, hiatus they call that, if you want to be real learned, little gaps in his history you didn’t know about.

And you’re going to say, are you here? And he’ll smile and say, yes, I’m here, and shake hands with you. And you’ll say, but how did you get here? The last time I saw you, you couldn’t even stand up. You were a total hopeless alcoholic, and you had 14 jail sentences behind you, and you knew every warden in the state of Illinois, and every cop knew you, and your picture was in the post offices.

Now, here you are. How do you account for this? And he’ll smile and say, but. But, after the kindness and love of God our Savior toward me appeared, something happened. Don’t you suppose there are a lot of people, a lot of Jews who didn’t know that man on the cross there, that repentant thief? Or a lot of Romans who didn’t know anything about it, later on heard the gospel, and perhaps never heard of this man, this repentant thief, for the gospels were not immediately written.

And it’s easy to imagine hundreds of Romans who believed in the gospel of Christ when Peter preached, and a little later as others preached, but who never saw, who had never heard of the story of the penitent thief on the cross. And the last they remembered of the penitent thief was he was hanging up there along with another thief, and that he’d been sentenced to die.

Don’t you suppose there’ll be many a Roman that’ll walk up and say to this thief, you here? Why, I remember when the newspapers came out and said that you’d been crucified for insurrection and thieving and all sorts of sins, and the thief would smile and say, but I was all you said I was, and worse, and I had been guilty of things the law never knew of and that I had never admitted. I was much worse than anybody here knows I was.

Only God knew how bad I was, but the kindness and love of God my Savior appeared to me, and by a flash of spiritual intuition I recognized Him as He died in the middle there between us two dying thieves, and I said, Lord, remember me. And He said, this day shalt thou be with Me in paradise.

So, I want to sort of tip you off, you people who will be in heaven before another century passes. I want to tip you off. Get ready for some delightful surprises, because you’re going to find some people there you didn’t know would make it. You’re going to find people there, now this is not a plea to throw our arms around all religions and all cults and all Christ-denying branches of Christianity, no. We’re going to have to come the only way there is to come, but some people come that way and we don’t know it. We lose track of them and that’s it.

Well, the kindness and love of our Savior toward man appeared. Now notice it says the kindness and love of God our Savior, and there’s nothing startling about that. There’s nothing there to bother anybody. If I said the ocean is vast, nobody would ever blink an eye. If I would say the rain that falls from heaven is wet, nobody would ever move. They’d wonder why I’d said the obvious. And if I were to say the sun is bright, nobody would say anything else. They’d say, I wonder what he’s getting at, because we all know the ocean is deep and vast. We all know that the rain is wet and we all know that the sun shines brightly.

So, when I say the kindness and love of God, nobody’s going to even bat an eyelid on that. We’ve heard that all our lives. We know it’s true. That’s nothing to wonder at, because that’s the kind of God God is. And incidentally, that’s why unbelief is so wrong. It refuses to believe that God is the kind of God He is. But here we say the kindness and love of God our Savior, and there’s nothing there to excite attention, because God is kind. God is love.

God being that kind of God, that’s what you would expect. A loving, kindly, tender, well-reared, cultured mother, you expect her to get up and look after her baby. And if you say Mrs. Jones gets up at two o’clock in the morning and gives her baby a bottle, nobody’s going to run and give her a medal. Of course, that’s the way she is. We’ve known her since she was little, and that’s the kind of woman she is. You could expect that of Mrs. Jones. That’s all right, we say. We know that.

But listen, it says here the kindness and love of God our Savior toward man. What kind of man? Why, a foolish man and disobedient man, deceived man, enslaved man, pleasure-mad man, malicious man, envious man, hateful man. That’s the one.

Now the love of God suddenly turns aside and flows in its fullness toward that kind of man. Put the two words toward man on there and you have a wonder of wonders. And you have the reason for and the source of many a great hymn such as Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound. Why did it amaze the man? Because God was gracious. No, God is gracious and nobody should stand amazed at God being love or God being kind or God being gracious.

But that the kind, gracious love of God should have as its object such a slavish, foolish, disobedient, deceived, lustful, malicious, envious, hateful person as I am, that’s where the wonder lies, my brethren. And that is why the hymn writers have never yet gotten over trying to get us to sing the wonderful love of God and the kindnesses and the love of God toward man. Toward man, I say. Hateful and hating one another hasn’t discouraged God, not changed his mind in the slightest about us.

What is man that thou art mindful of him, said David. And some of the scholars tell us that that word mindful means a fixture in the mind, that man is a fixture in God’s mind. Why, the only eccentricity of the great perfect God is that He loves mankind with a fixture that He can’t escape. He can’t shake it off. He loves mankind. Because God is the kind of God He is, we may expect Him to love us and we may expect Him to be kind to us.

And so, the “why” of His loving us, you see, is not in us at all. The why of His loving us is in Him. And the why of His being kind to us is in Him. And yet I would suggest three thoughts here that might help you intellectually, if it doesn’t spiritually, why God loves us.

Well, the one is that God is love and only does the thing that is natural to Him. It is natural for the sun to shine, we say. It is natural for birds to fly and fishes to swim. It is natural for that which loves to be love. And so we say God loves us because it’s the natural thing for Him to do. The second reason he loves us is that we’re His creatures and He’s pleased with everything he made.

When I was up at Glen Rocks, I took my bird book along, now don’t smile, and my field glasses and I discovered two new birds. I guess I know around eighty now, species. That’s not many, but that’s a few. And I said to somebody, I just was asking God whether after all the tents are torn down and the big woe is over and the battle’s done and we don’t learn war no more and men, his brothers all over the world, I wonder if God won’t let me spend a couple of centuries investigating his wonderful world. I love it. God made it. I can’t help but love it.

I love to tramp through the woods and see chipmunks dash out and Vesper sparrows mount a high tree and sit and try to sing. That’s the best you can say for a Vesper sparrow. He’s just doing his best, but he’s not much of a singer, but he’s lovely to hear him in the evening.

Well, God’s pleased with everything He made. And when sin came in and ruined it, then God started over to remake it. But He still loves it apart from sin and we’re a part of His creation.

But there’s a third reason. We’re made in His image. And I don’t make this as a statement, but I ask it as a question. Is the reason for God’s undiscouraged and undiscourageable love for us, His persistent love for fallen man, could it be that He loves Himself in us? Could it be that the great God who sinlessly and perfectly loves Himself sees the tattered fragments of His own image in the fallen man and loves Himself in the man and seeks to redeem the man because that man has a family resemblance? Don’t think I mean that he’s saved. No. We must be born again to be saved. We must be renewed, as it says here, to be saved.

But still fallen man has in him, even the rich man in hell, even that rich man in hell had something divine in him because he said, O Father Abraham, will you please let somebody go and tell my brothers that they don’t come to this terrible place? Why then I ask, why did he say that? He said it because there was yet compassion in his heart in hell, and compassion doesn’t come from the devil.

I wonder if He loves Himself in us. Don’t go away and say I said He did, but just say I asked the question, does He? Then he says, still quoting Paul, He saved us not by works of righteousness which we have done.

Why did He not save us by works of righteousness? Because there were none, and because there are none. But you say, was not that a work of righteousness when the poor man in hell wanted to deliver his brethren? No. That was a work of human sympathy which was given to the man by God in creation, but that same man willfully had rebelled against the Majesty in the heavens.

And remember that no king reigning by rights ever accepts the gifts of a rebel. And nothing that a rebel can do ever is accepted by the king against whom he rebels. And therefore there were no works of righteousness. The man who is in rebellion against God can never bring a gift to God. Cain tried it. Cain brought a gift to the God against whom he’d rebelled. And God turned his back on it, thought it was a beautiful gift, a gift of fruit and flowers, a beautiful gift. Any woman would accept it and smile and thank the man who gave it to her.

But God wouldn’t take it, for it was given to him by a rebel. If that rebel had repented and gotten right and been forgiven, God would have accepted his fruit and his flowers gladly. But he wanted nothing from a rebel. He saved us not by works of righteousness. Why? Because there were none and are none, but according to His mercy. There’s room for a whole sermon in itself. The salvation you have accords with the infinite mercy of God and not with any merit of yours.

I know that’s old stuff and it sounds very fundamentalist, and I’m a fundamentalist. But it’s true nevertheless. The infinite, limitless mercies of God. By how does He do it now? Does God suddenly become emotionally overcome? Does He get emotionally overcome and rush out and take us in? No, He doesn’t. He does it by the washing of regeneration and the renewing of the Holy Ghost. You see, even infinite kindness and love can’t receive an unregenerate sinner into heaven.

Even the infinite mercy of God, as limitless as human thought and beyond, could ever receive a sinner into the presence of the angels. Wisdom had to find a way to save that lustful, slavish, pleasure-mad, malicious, envious, hateful, lying man. It had to find a way to save the man, to justify him because God is just, and to cleanse him because God is holy.

No unjust person can enter the kingdom of God, so God has to justify the man. Love wants to do it, but justice forbids it, and wisdom knows how to do it, so wisdom sent Jesus Christ our Savior. This was through Jesus Christ our Savior, Jesus Christ our Savior. Notice it calls God our Savior in verse 4, and Jesus Christ our Savior in verse 6. And there is no incompatibility there. God the Father is our Savior, and God the Son is our Savior.

Old John Bunyan said that in his early Christian life he was very much worried about how Jesus Christ could be both God and man. He said, I wasn’t willing to accept it on anybody’s authority. God had to show me. I had to find it in the book, he said. He said, I got to reading in the book of Revelation, and it said, And behold, in the midst of the throne and in the midst of the elders there stood a Lamb. He said, The Holy Ghost showed me, in the midst of the throne there was His Godhead. In the midst of the elders there was His humanity. He said, Oh, I did exceedingly rejoice. Exceedingly rejoiced to see that He stood with God at the throne as God and with man among the elders as man.

So, He’s both God and man and was through Jesus Christ our Lord. He justifies and He cleanses and He washes and He regenerates and He renews and He does all these things through the mercy, through His mercy by the atonement in Christ’s blood.

We’re almost finished. Now notice it says “heirs” here. We are made heirs in verse 7, being justified by His grace, we should be made heirs according to the hope of eternal life. Heirs, that means we inherit everything God has. Heirs of God. You say, I can’t believe it. Do you know why? Because you won’t believe verse 3. If you don’t believe you’re as bad as God says you are, you’ll never believe you’re as well off as God says you are. Always remember, if you won’t believe you’re as bad off as he says you are, you’ll never believe that you’re as well off through grace. Because psychologically it can’t be done.

If you hold out on God as to how bad you are, your nature won’t permit you to take all the promises of God as to how good God is to you. You crimp yourself and crowd yourself. Be enlarged, O ye Corinthians, and see how bad you are in order you can see how good God is and how wonderful the grace of God is. Now we’re heirs, and I was trying to think about this. Heirs, an heir of God, that I am one of God’s heirs. You know we can’t take it in.

Let’s imagine a little boy who has lived in the slums of some great city, New York’s East Side, say, and he’s now eight or ten years old, and he’s had a very narrow life. He’s lived among ash cans and in alleys and stealing fruit from corner fruit stores and ducking policemen.

That’s the way he’s lived. He never had a new shirt on in his life, and his pants are hand down through four fellows up down to him, and his shoes, he never had a new pair on. And he’s never slept anywhere but in a corner, and suddenly somebody comes along and adopts him off the street corner. We’re one of the richest men in America, with yachts and outboard, or what do you call them, these big power motors, things that these rich men can run around.

I see them on the lakes, and estates of every kind, and utterly rich beyond the description. And we go to the boy and say, you know what, you’re an heir. This man has adopted you, and you’ve suddenly inherited vast ranches in Arizona, and great estates in Canada, and huge estates down on the coast in Florida. It’s all yours, to say nothing of money in the bank. The little fella doesn’t understand. He’d exchange the whole business for a popsicle.

Sure, because you see, he can’t think like that, and God doesn’t blame you for not being able to think like that. You’re used to poverty, spiritual poverty, anyhow. You’re used to locking everything, shutting your door and locking, and saying, did you lock that? You’re always used to living that way, living in the slums of the universe.

But there’s only one place worse than earth, and you know what it is? Hell. Hell, the earth is suspended halfway between heaven and hell, not yet forsaken by heaven and not yet committed to hell. Here we are, and that’s what we’re used to. And then suddenly we have somebody throw cold water on us and say, you’re an heir of God.

We shake our heads and say, well, I’m willing to believe it, but I happen to faint as a notion what you’re talking about. Read your Bible, study it, and pray, and keep on, grow and expand, and learn to think the way God thinks, and maybe sometime you’ll know a little bit. But if you don’t know here, you’ll know there. The heirs of God, heirs of God according to the promise of eternal life.

Well, we scarcely know what it is. I wonder if that’s why the Lord gave us the communion service, that we sort of might sort of get a hold of something we could see and taste. The ideal is that we be completely spiritual, but the Lord knows us too well to hope we can ever be completely spiritual as long as we’re walking around in this mortal tabernacle.

So, He made everything spiritual but the wine and the bread. He said, now you can have this and look at this and feel it, touch it, taste it. He said, I’ll let you have those two, no more. I’ll let you have those two emblems, those two elements, those two symbols and signs of my death and resurrection and glory is coming again. And you keep on, be different from the world. Every so often, he didn’t say how often, there’s difference of opinion among the brethren, but every so often eat the bread and drink the wine and say the words and sing the hymns and pray and remember me till I come, and you’ll become heirs of all that God has.

We Christians ought to be the happiest people in the world and the saddest, the saddest because we live in a heartbroken world and the happiest because we’re heirs of the most gracious God. And that was Paul. Paul said sorrowful yet always rejoicing. How do you figure it? Some of you people with adding machine minds that insist on getting everything down and added up at the bottom and then prove it four ways to show it’s correct. You won’t do, you won’t do.

God wants imaginative men and women that can intuit things, that the Holy Ghost can give flashes of understanding that you never can explain. And one of them is how a man can be rich and poor at the same time. Paul said poor yet making many rich, how did he do it? Can’t put that in an adding machine, feed that into Mr. X and it won’t come out.

Or how we can be sorrowful yet always rejoicing. How Jesus could sing a hymn and go to the Mount of Olives, there you have it, two peaks or a peak and a valley, the peak of song and the valley of suffering. We Christians are caught there, we never know from day to day whether we’ll be on the mountain peak singing or in the valley suffering, but it doesn’t make too much difference anyway because we’re heirs of God.

And when we receive the bread and the wine, we tell the whole world that is interested to know this is just a little reminder, like the ring on my wife’s finger, reminding, just, it isn’t the marriage, but it’s just a little symbol we recognize since we’re here on earth. And this is a symbol we recognize, perhaps it’s deeper than that, but it is that. It’s beyond that, but it is that. And it tells us that He died, that He rose, that He lives, that He pleads, and He’s coming back again. Amen? Amen.

Now we’ll have the communion service, and any persons that we say visitors, but really, you’re not visiting here, nobody’s visiting here. We use that, we call them guests, we have a guest card, and I guess it’s just the paucity of the English language, but really, I’m as much a guest here as you are. Nobody runs this church, this is the house of God, this is the body of Christ, or part of the body of Christ, and you have as much right at the table as I do. So nobody can shut you out.

Let me give you this little thought, and then we’ll have our communion service. In a Baptist church in Louisville, Kentucky, a closed communion Baptist church, the pastor was a very warm friend of, well, it was his brother-in-law, they pointed the church out and told me the story, his brother-in-law, who was a pastor in the Presbyterian church. And the brother-in-law, Presbyterian brother-in-law, was visiting the Baptist pastor.

He came Sunday, the first Sunday, and they had communion. What could this pastor do? His brother-in-law was out of the fold, and so he did his best. He said, my friends, if this were my table, I’d invite you to it, and I’d invite everybody to it. And there wouldn’t be anybody that I’d exclude, I’d invite everybody to it. He said, my brother-in-law is here and he’s Presbyterian, and I’d invite him to it if it was my table. But he says, since it’s my father’s table, I have no right to invite anybody. So, he said, but the children will know, and they’ll come.

That was an easy way out, or he thought it was. So, the Presbyterian pastor got up down front and said, could I say a word? And of course he had to grant him the right. He said, I agree with my brother-in-law. This is not his table. This is his father’s table. And since his father and my father is the same father, then this is my father’s table. And he said, if the pastor can’t invite me to my father’s table, he can’t exclude me from my father’s table. And he went up and got up and went and took communion along with the rest.

I think that’s just delightful, myself. I think it’s just delightful. I can’t invite you and I can’t exclude you. Let every man examine himself. Amen.

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Tozer Talks

Post author By pshappard
Post date August 10, 2025

“A Portrait of Jesus Christ”

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A Portrait of Jesus Christ

Pastor and Author A.W. Tozer

February 1, 1959

Please turn to Revelation 1 and we’ll begin at the 9th verse and read responsibly to the end of the chapter. You will help me in this. Reading, after I read verse 9, you read verse 10, and so on to the end of the chapter.

I John, who also am your brother, and companion in tribulation, and in the kingdom and patience of Jesus Christ, was in the isle that is called Patmos, for the word of God, and for the testimony of Jesus Christ. I was in the Spirit on the Lord’s day, and heard behind me a great voice, as of a trumpet, saying, I am Alpha and Omega, the first and the last: and, What thou seest, write in a book, and send it unto the seven churches which are in Asia; unto Ephesus, and unto Smyrna, and unto Pergamos, and unto Thyatira, and unto Sardis, and unto Philadelphia, and unto Laodicea.

And I turned to see the voice that spake with me. And being turned, I saw seven golden candlesticks; and in the midst of the seven candlesticks one like unto the Son of man, clothed with a garment down to the foot, and girt about the paps with a golden girdle. His head and his hairs were white like wool, as white as snow; and his eyes were as a flame of fire; and his feet like unto fine brass, as if they burned in a furnace; and his voice as the sound of many waters. And he had in his right hand seven stars: and out of his mouth went a sharp two-edged sword: and his countenance was as the sun shineth in his strength.

And when I saw him, I fell at his feet as dead. And he laid his right hand upon me, saying unto me, Fear not; I am the first and the last: I am he that liveth, and was dead; and, behold, I am alive for evermore, Amen; and have the keys of hell and of death. Write the things which thou hast seen, and the things which are, and the things which shall be hereafter; the mystery of the seven stars which thou sawest in my right hand, and the seven golden candlesticks. The seven stars are the angels of the seven churches: and the seven candlesticks which thou sawest are the seven churches.

Verse 9, I, John. I, John, says John. I wonder who wrote the book of Revelation, says the critic, I, John, says John. The revelation of Jesus Christ which God gave unto him, shall unto his servants the things which must surely come to pass. And he says, and signified by his angel unto his servant John. I wonder, says the learned man, who that could have been that wrote the book of Revelation. I, John, says John.

The conclusion I have come to, brothers and sisters, is this, that there are two ways to be ignorant. One is not to go to school at all, and the other is to go too long. If you don’t go to school at all, you are likely to be ignorant, because there hasn’t been any breakfast food invented yet that would instruct a man without some little intellectual quiver of his mental muscles. So, if you do not go to school at all, you are likely to be ignorant. But if you go to school too long, you are likely to get educated beyond your intelligence.

I am saying this because I have been reading about these men who say, I wonder who wrote the book of Revelation. I, John, says John. So, I’m going to accept that John wrote the book of Revelation. He says, the kingdom and patience of Jesus Christ, and the Word of God, and the testimony of Christ.

Now, what does this add up to? Here we have it, the kingdom and patience of Jesus Christ, and the Word of God, and the testimony of Jesus Christ. Do you know what that adds up to now? They tell us that adds up to a lot of prosperity here below. Kingdom and patience of God.

I’m a Christian, I’m born again, and I carry my Bible, and I make God my partner, and I witness wherever I go. And therefore, I get big contracts, and I have been patient in the kingdom, and therefore I get promotions. I was only once a stock boy, and now I’m vice president.

The kingdom and patience of Jesus Christ, and the Word of God, and the testimony of the gospel. What does it add up to? It means that once I was a bat boy, but now I’m in the big leagues. I’m prospering. Why, it pays to serve Jesus. It pays, doesn’t it, brother? Slap. So we go about that kind of Christianity has taken over the day in which we live. We slap each other’s back and say, you to be a Christian, boy it pays. I used to not give, and now I give.

Now I have more than I had before I didn’t give, or before I started giving. And that’s the modern Christianity, and of course that’s heresy. That’s just as much heresy as to teach that Mary was a virgin born, or that she had an assumption into heaven, or that there’s virtue in bones, or something. It’s just the same, only it’s Protestant. And it isn’t even old Protestant, it’s modern Protestant. It’s the gospel that’s in the hands of the vice presidents and the chairman of the board.

And so we have the adding up of all the witness and faithfulness and prayer and all the rest. We have a long car and a big home and prosperity, and we win at sports, and we get promoted, and we get along well in school, and we get all our blessing now. But what did this add up to back there? The kingdom and patience of God and the Word of the Lord and the testimony of Jesus Christ.

Why, it says, I was in the Isle of Patmos on the Lord’s Day. What was he doing in the Isle of Patmos? He’d gone over there on vacation. Had he decided that he was working a little too hard as Bishop of Ephesus and needed to bathe himself a little in the waters of the sea over there in Patmos.

No, he was over there because he was too hot to handle. They didn’t know what to do with him back in Ephesus. He was a Christian, you know, and his testimony was too hot, and his patience was too long. They tried to wear him out and found he was made out of vulcanized rubber. They couldn’t wear him out. He lived to be over a hundred, we’re told.

And so, they said, well, we won’t have him around here. Some of these Christians don’t harm us any. They just walk around quiet and half-scared and look down their nose and say little. But this man’s vocal. He’s got the testimony, the testimony of Jesus Christ. He’s always going around saying, God is love, and He sent his Son. We can’t stand it. So they put him on the Isle of Patmos. That’s what it added up to there.

But if John had had our Christian philosophy, John would have had his reward back home. He would have had peace of mind, prosperity, and the friendship of the great. But there never would have been any book of Revelation. There never would have been any visions. John no doubt would have played golf with Caesar, but he never would have seen the door opened in heaven and the One that sat on the throne. He never would have seen the vision of One standing in the midst of the seven golden candlesticks. He never would have seen the woman clothed with the sun and with the moon under her feet and her crown with stars around her head. He never would have seen the new Jerusalem, pure and white, coming down out of heaven from God. He never would have seen that.

And we’d have closed the book with Jude, and we’d never have had Revelation. He’d have had his reward all right, and he’d have written a tract, and we’d have left the tract behind, and he’d have written a testimony, and we’d have published it in the Alliance of Witnesses, saying this Christian businessman gave a faithful testimony, and he immediately started up the ladder.

Now look, he has two long cars, and he’s in who’s who. But we never would have had a vision, we never would have had a revelation, we never would have had this word portrait of Jesus Christ the Lord. I don’t know, I sort of want to string along with John.

I sort of want to go along with John. I don’t know whether I’d have his courage or not, you know, but I do know that I like his Christian philosophy better than I do this modern Christian philosophy. Well, going on, he says, I was in the Spirit on the Lord’s day, and now I want to tell you right now that here are two nails I’m not going to get hung up on.

You know, when you’re walking down the corridor through the Kingdom of God, there are nails in the wall, and sometimes you can tear your clothing on the nails, and some fellows get hung up there, and that’s as far as they ever get. Now the two nails are, what does it mean in the Spirit, and what does it mean the Lord’s Day? They argue about what does it mean I was in the Spirit, and they argue about what does it mean the Lord’s Day. Some say the Lord’s Day means Sunday, and some say the Lord’s day means the day of the Lord, the prophetic future.

Well, now, you’re not going to get me in a corner on this, brother. All I know is that there was a man named John, or if it wasn’t John, it was somebody named John. You know, they have a literary argument on about who wrote Shakespeare’s plays, and some say that Lord Bacon wrote them, and some say Sheridan wrote them, and others say somebody else, and Mark Twain said that he had the answer. He said it wasn’t Shakespeare that wrote the plays at all. It was a fellow named Shakespeare.

And so I’m going to accept it that John, the critics and the scholars and the learned brethren whose heads are filled with learned lumber, they say he didn’t write it. But we’ll say John didn’t write it, but a man named John wrote it, and he said he was in the Spirit on the Lord’s Day. Now, that’s all I want to know. And he heard behind him the great voices as of a trumpet.

And I’d like to inquire why it is that so many of the Lord’s people, when they hear the voice of the Lord, they hear it behind them. You know why? Because they’re going the wrong direction. John was facing the wrong way. Even John must have been facing the wrong way because he wasn’t facing toward the owner of that voice. Even John was turned a little round. And I believe that this is a very significant and important thing throughout the Scripture, if not here, certainly other places in the Bible, that we’re faced the wrong way and the Lord speaks. And when we hear the voice, we turn and then we see it.

I told Brother McAfee upstairs that I’m not going to preach on it tonight, but I’m willing to give any young preacher here a sermon outline. And I’m not going to deal with it, but I’d like to hear somebody preach on it, somebody who really knows how to preach the word. It says that I heard a voice behind me, and when I turned, I saw. Now, I believe that this is the whole history of mankind, brothers and sisters. I believe that you and I are going in the wrong direction and the arresting voice of God speaks. And if we’re wise enough to stop and turn around, we’ll see. I heard, and I turned around, and I saw. I heard a voice, and I turned around, and I saw a vision.

And that’s exactly what happened to John. John had been as stubborn as some of my friends. He’d have set his jaw and said, I don’t know who that man is behind me, but I am not turning around. Let him come around to me. But John turned around, and when he turned around, he saw. He saw a vision. I just recommend that, my friend.

Maybe the reason you’ve never seen anything is because you’ve never turned around. You will hear the voice and turn around, and I’m sure that there will be some kind of a spiritual vision there for you, some sort of deliverance or some sort of glory that God has for you.

Well, I heard behind me the voices of a trumpet, and when I turned around, I saw seven golden candlesticks. Now, of course, that means lampstands, but even I know that, and I don’t have to have new translation of the New Testament to find that out, because a lampstand was a receptacle in which a candle was placed, that’s all. It was made out of wood or metal or gold or silver or just whatever they happened to have around. The rich had some precious metals, and the poor had wood or clay, but its purpose was to hold up a candle, put a candle in, that’s all, and the churches here are called candlesticks or lampstands.

Now, you can remove a candlestick, and you haven’t hurt the light any, because the light and the candlestick are two different things. And so the church and the truth of the church gives forth two different things. The light is the truth, and the truth is the light, and the church in any given location, at 70th and Union in Chicago, say, is a candlestick. It’s a lampstand. It’s a receptacle, a human thing in which the light is.

Now, the candlestick can cease to bear the light and thus be useless, just a piece of material there, or it can continue to have the light. But always remember that the candlestick and the light are two different things. That’s why I don’t walk out and start another denomination. And that’s why I don’t believe that denominationalism is as evil as some people say it is, because you see a local church or group of Christians anywhere, they are the human candlestick. But the testimony they give is the light, and they are shining with their testimony, and the testimony is never theirs. It belongs to God. It is called the testimony of Jesus Christ. They give it, but it isn’t their testimony.

As soon as a church starts giving its testimony, that church is already halfway on the wrong track, and if they listened, they’ll hear a voice behind them because they’ve turned their face the wrong way. I know how we say, I gave my testimony, and what we mean by it, and I’m not criticizing that. I’m only pointing out that the only truth I have any right to preach is what’s given to me and shown unto the servant by His servant John or His servant Paul or His servant Isaiah or His servant Luke or some other servant.

I haven’t any right to manufacture a light, and I haven’t any right whatsoever to stand up here and to give out some kind of intellectual or moral or soulish light. I’m merely a candlestick, you’re merely a candlestick, a lampstand, a place where the divine light is put. There it is, that’s the church as we read later on.

And in the midst of the candlestick, seven of them, and I suppose the seven means perfection, I don’t know. That’s what they tell me must be true because it’s in the Schofield Bible, and I have no reason whatsoever to doubt it. So, we’ll accept it as being the number of perfection, and what the Lord meant simply was the churches, the churches you know.

And they were lampstands, and in the midst of these churches, and in the midst of all the churches, in the midst of His great church, there was seen someone standing. And that one that stood there looked like a son of man. Some say the Son of Man, and that’s exactly where He said He would be.

Do you remember that? Exactly where He said he would be. He said, if either two or three gathered together, I’m there in the midst. And He said, go into all the world and preach the gospel, and lo, I am in the midst of you, and I’m with you. And Paul said, while you’re taking communion at Corinth, and you’ve all forgotten that the Lord’s in the midst of you. Why, he said, no wonder you get sick and some of you die under the disciplinary judgment of God. Why, recognize the Lord. The Lord’s in the midst. Don’t you know that? Even the heathens said the Lord’s in the midst, and they got to fooling around and forgot about it. So, the Lord was right where He said he would be.

And do you know that He is here in this church tonight? He is where he said he would be. I almost stopped preaching when I think of this. That is, it almost shuts me up. How can a man stand in the presence of the Lord Jesus and talk? Well, he’s told to do it. And Augustine said, how can we speak? And then he said, well, if we don’t, there’ll be universal silence, and so somebody’s got to speak.

Well, it might as well be I tonight, I suppose. So, in the midst of the candlesticks, there stood one. Then we have a picture of Him here, and it says He was clothed with a garment down to the foot. And now here we have the brethren at it again. Some say that robe was a royal robe, and it’s His kingly robe. And others say it’s a priestly robe, and it’s the robe of His priesthood.

Well, since He’s a kingly Priest and a priestly King, why can’t we say it both? Why do we have to say either or? Why can’t we say both and, and get together and put our arms around each other? And instead of writing an angry book to show that this is not a priestly robe, this is a kingly robe, and another man writing a bitter attack to show that it’s not a kingly robe, it’s a priestly robe, why can’t we say He being priest and king wears the royal robe of both the king and the priest? Because He’s both priest and king, and there He is in the midst of His church. His job in the midst of His church, His function now is a priestly function. And He is the High Priest.

When He appears in the midst of His church, He’s the High Priest. And do you know when we see Him here, now this incidentally is the only real picture we have of the present Jesus. Artists have tried to paint Him and they’ve done their best. And they’ve tried to paint His humanity, but nobody knows what He looks like except as He has been given, we’ve been given this word picture. Here He stands in His majesty, clothed down to the foot. And as the king He rules and as a priest He’s there to represent God to us and represent us to God. That’s the business of the priest and the prophet, and He’s all three.

Now, He’s girded about with a golden girdle. Now this is the insignia of royalty without any doubt. This girdle around His belt here, which was always in the Bible, the sign that He was a traveler. They gathered their great robe up and bound themselves around and away they went. They girded themselves for the fight.

But what incidentally, this doesn’t belong to this sermon, but just struck me. What would a modern soldier do with a bunch of fellows in Mother Hubbards, back there in that day with ropes around their belts to keep them falling over the front end of their dress? They did it, they fought in those days like that, you know, done up in robes. And that’s outside, but I can imagine what a young soldier dressed, stripped, streamlined down and with his bayonet would do with a bunch of those soldiers then.

That’s the way they lived then, but not this Savior. We don’t see Him here with His loins girded. We see Him here staying. He’s not going anyplace. He’s in the midst of it. He’s here. It’s His place to be. He has a work to do. And He’s in the midst of His church, not girded with the intention of leaving, but round His breast with the intention of staying. The high priest had a royal girdle, you know, about him, but it was made of, I think, a number of things, and gold enwoven. But this was pure gold. This is royalty.

We have here Jesus Christ the King, girt about the breast with a gold girdle. And His head and His hair were white as wool, as white as snow. We were talking about snow blindness coming down, that up in the Northland or anywhere where there’s a great new fallen snow and men get on their snowshoes or even in cars, the whiteness of the snow with the sun shining down upon it slowly, slowly into the eye until men go blind. And some have been found wandering about in blindness because their eyes couldn’t take the whiteness of the snow with the sun shining on it. And here was one whose head and the hairs were white as snow, white as wool.

Now there are two views of this again. Some say that this pure whiteness is the whiteness and holiness of heaven, and others say that it is the stamp of age, that it means pure knowledge and solid judgment. And we have here a picture of the ancient of days. I do know that Christ never was gray and that He isn’t gray.

Christ died when He was 33 at the peak of His wonderful manhood, and I know that there is no death in Him there and no decay. But I also could see how that God could present Him as wiser than Solomon, wiser than the seven sages of antiquity, wiser than the wisest angel before the throne, standing in the purity of His white head and His white hair, there standing in the midst of the church.

Oh, my friends, listen. You need to go to Him. He’s called the Counselor. The Counselor. Oh, I don’t know. I get weary. I listen sometimes on the radio when I’m lying down and resting, and I listen to these programs where young people are asked questions and asked to discuss them.

Dear God, what do they know about them? There is a Man who is called a Wonderful Counselor, who has upon Him the Spirit of Jehovah and the Spirit of Wisdom and of might and the Spirit of Counsel and the fear of the Lord. He’s the One we go to. He’s in the midst of His church, and if you don’t know a thing, go to Him.

You know, we ask each other too many questions. We want to know. Somebody wrote me the other day and said, Dear Brother Tozer, we’d like to have you. My husband and I are Christians, and we live out here on a farm, and we’d like to know, could Jesus sin or couldn’t Jesus sin? I wrote them an answer back, and then I got an answer from them saying, Thank you. We thought we believed too. They wanted me to answer them, but why didn’t they go to the Counselor? He would have told them.

I went one time and got all tied up. When you give the commentators enough rope, they’ll not only hang themselves, but they’ll have you dangling there too in some lonesome valley.

So the commentator got me dangling on who the Prodigal Son was. He couldn’t have been a Christian because it says, this my son was lost, and the Christian couldn’t be lost, so he couldn’t be unsaved because he said, This my son. So, I got tired of the commentators and all other kinds, and I went to God about it. I spent a few hours in prayer about it, and I got my answer.

I have my answer, and that was many, many long years ago when this head was as black as a raven’s wing, and I have never needed to change my mind. I have never found any teachings any place. I know who the Prodigal Son was.

I’m not telling you tonight, though sometime I might preach on it. I went to the Lord about other matters like that. I remember down in Urbana some years ago, the InterVarsity Missions Fellowship and a lot of other people were met.

{See end of this document for the Mr. Tozer’s understanding of the Prodical Son he gave in his message “The Grace of God” from October 26, 1958}

There were a bunch of preachers around there, and Al Redpath of Moody Church and I were, well, you’d say the main speakers in that we’d jostle back and forth and preach. He and I had some others, and somebody among that learned crowd called attention to this. They said, did you stop to think that the two main speakers here never went to any theological school in their lives? Al Redpath never did, and I never did.

But that doesn’t mean that you have to be dumb or that you have to walk around meekly saying, well, I don’t know. There is Somebody here with hair as white as wool, and His name is Counselor, and He’s here in the midst of the golden candlesticks, and He has a mouth and a voice and words, and you have a perfect right to go to Him and find out things.

And my brethren, it’s not what I’ve read in books that gives any extra thrust, as they say, to my message, but it’s what God has given me. But I know it’s here in the book. I even go to the King James Version and get it, you know. I’ve read so many others that I know where the King James Version mistakes are, but I even go to the King James Version, you know.

Some people say, well, that King James Version is so old-fashioned nobody can understand it anymore. Listen, my brother, I was converted when I was 17 years old, and I merely had intelligence enough to find my way home if the moon was full. And I had no education whatsoever except a little in a white schoolhouse, and I began to read the King James Version and never had any trouble with it at all.

And I had never read anything up to that time except love stories that would lie around the house, you know, how John broke his wife’s heart and so on, and I read those gooey love stories. That’s all I’d read. And then Wild West stories, I’d read them.

So, my literary knowledge was very nil, and everything else was very nil. I was very modest, and as Churchill said about Attlee, I had an awful lot to be modest about. And I read it and I read it and I’ve understood it ever since, and I’ve never had any need to, if it says, cometh and goeth, why in God’s world don’t you know what cometh and goeth mean, brother? Do you have to have a new translation to know what cometh means? Cometh means come. He comes. And so is everything else.

Well, anyhow, the Lord’s the best teacher, He’s the best teacher, and I’d suggest to everybody in the theological school, going to school anywhere, listen to your teacher and then smile and ask God what it means. Because He’ll tell you what it means, and the teachers may not know unless they’ve gone to Him first.

Well, then He had eyes as a flame of fire. Ah, those eyes, those eyes as a flame of fire. How can we face those eyes? Looking through you, looking through you, and seeing everything. You know, Shakespeare said we can smile and smile and be a villain still, and I’ve met people who smile and smile, but they’re villains inside. But there are eyes in the midst of the church, and they see you. They see all through you. They see all directions. They know all about you. They see through your motives. They see through your purposes and tensions, those fiery flaming eyes of Jesus. And He has feet like fine brass, as though it burned in a furnace.

And all through the Old Testament that was judgment. So here we have somebody in the midst. Now he isn’t the tender, bearded weakling that the artists have painted, nor is He the mild, weak, and lowly lamb that some of the old made poets have painted, or have written about, painted with words.

But He’s got two things here, fiery eyes and feet like brass, and He’s here in the midst of the church. For you see, the church is a lot of things. The church is a group of candlesticks shining its light out to the world. The church is a fold where the sheep are gathered. The church is an armory where soldiers come in to get their weapons and out from which they go to fight the battles. The church is a hospital where weak and sick people are treated. The church is a farm where the great husbandman plows and harrows and sends the rain and the storms. The church is a little of everything, and here we have Him in the midst of us. Not to comfort and console us, there will be lots of time for consolation and comfort in the day to come, but He’s here with fiery eyes to judge us.

And you know you’ll be glad for that in that day, you’ll be glad for that. Because you want to know the worst about yourself now, don’t you? You want to know the worst about yourself now. What kind of fool would I be to seek consolation at any cost and then go to judgment with my life undisciplined, uncleansed, untreated, without penitence, without restitution, without everything done that I can do that I might obey my Lord and stand before him without shame? So I’m glad He’s here like that.

I’m glad that long robe tells me that He’s here as a priest, the Healing Surgeon, the priest, here to plead my cause before His God and to plead God’s cause before His people, but here also with fiery eyes to see all through me.

Ah, preachers get away with murder, don’t think they don’t, brother. They get away with murder. They can loaf all week, you know, and play around, and then get a verse and shout around and beat the pulpit and the poor dewy-eyed lambs will bleat on. And when he stands at the door, then they’ll say, wonderful, pastor, and the guy hasn’t put five cents worth of anything into it. But the Lord knows about that.

He knows whether they have or not. I have a conviction growing on me that nothing will ever come to birth without pain. I have a conviction growing on me that no seed will ever grow until the plow’s been there, and that there will be no victory until there has been battle, and that the man can get away with anything, fed chicken and given long cars and nice homes and sent to Florida and all the rest of it. It’s all right. You don’t want to suggest anything, but it’s all right. You can do those things.

But brethren, remember one thing. I don’t make my last reckoning to my official board. I make my last reckoning to the Man in the midst of us. Annual night, I read a report. The board meeting in New York, 27 saints gathered around there, I made a report. Buffalo next summer, May, I go if I still live, and I make a report.

I tell them what I’ve been doing to the magazine. But that’s not my last report. I’ve got another one. I’ve got one I’m not writing down and can’t write down, and it isn’t finished yet. And I have got to tell the Man in the midst about that. And He’s so kind that He died for me, but He is so severe that His eyes are like flames of fire and His feet like burnished brass. And I love Him for all of it. And I don’t want Him to be anything else but that. To have a weak effeminate Jesus with a big lap that every carnal skunk can climb up onto and get consolation, I don’t like that conception of Christ at all.

Christ has a broad lap, and He has a beautiful shoulder. Many is the saint that’s wept on that tender shoulder, for his own name is written. But He has eyes that see through and He has feet that judge. And a voice that is the sound of many waters. I don’t know what to say about this. I’ve been thinking about that voice, strong, majestic and deep.

And then I have been thinking about the piping voices of men and the raucous voices of politicians and the harsh, scolding voices of angry mothers and the bold, commanding voices of soldiers. And then I read of the voice like the sound of many waters, like when you come to the sounding of the ocean, down by the sound of the sea, wrote the poet. And in that little simple line, I think he has put as much of sheer musical poetry, down by the sound of the sea.

Isn’t that a beautiful phrase? Down by the sound of the sea. And here I hear it coming to me, the sound of many waters, so gentle, so healing, so restful, so completely poised, so sure of itself. It drowns out all the voices of men. And I’m glad, for I want to hear that, Voice. And in His hand are the seven stars, and they are the messengers of the seven churches.

I know some of you have been very distressed over the death of Melvin Lobston of this church. Our fine young friend, Melvin Lobston, one of our missionaries, got in an airplane, Air Jordan, they said it was, over in Jerusalem. He had just been there and was going away on a missionary trip, and the engine blew up a little way off the ground, and he was seven other Americans, eight others, two of them Americans, he was killed. And some have said, how could it be? Oh, I don’t know, but I do know one thing. Melvin Lobston was a messenger of the church. And I know that the crash of the plane didn’t take him out of the hand of his Lord. I know that.

And I know that a man who’s a true messenger, he’s in the hand of the Lord. Finney used to remind the churches they’d better be careful how they treat their preachers. He said, God let the preacher die, let him die, let you kill him, but He’ll judge you, and he’s right. For He holds them in His hands, seven stars, and out of his mouth went a sharp two-edged sword. And of course, that’s the Word we won’t talk about that, because everybody knows that, and His face as the sun shining in its full strength.

Somebody ought to preach on the face of Jesus. Somebody ought to. Oh, that face of Jesus. You know, when you look into that Face, you see anything you need to see? If you don’t predispose yourself to see something, if you don’t go with your mind badly made up about what you’ll see, you’ll see anything you need to see in that Face. If you’re frightened, you’ll see assurance. If you’re proud, you’ll see rebuke. And if you’re weak, you’ll see strength. And if you’re doubting, you’ll see courage. You’ll see it all in that face, that face of Jesus.

Does it mean anything to you that you’re going to look on that face actually sometimes? John turned and saw him. You and I don’t see him fully. That is, we don’t see him with our eyes, but we see him with our faith and our hearts. Does it mean anything to you? I don’t think it means much to anybody anymore that there’s a heaven. We have been so mixed up with eschatology the last 50 years that the old-fashioned idea of dying and going to heaven and seeing Jesus has sort of passed away.

You know, Longfellow’s village blacksmith, he wrote back there when people were just plain people. They hadn’t got so smart yet. He wrote one of the days when simple old, black-bonneted women, you know, would stand up in church and sing with tears in their eyes about looking over Jordan. Do you remember? We used to sing, they stand on Jordan’s stormy bank, I stand and cast a wishful eye where my possessions there, but no, not that anymore.

He wrote at that time, and he said about the blacksmith, he says he goes in Sunday to the church and he sits among his boys and he hears the parson pray and preach and he hears his daughter’s voice singing in the village choir and it makes him think of her mother’s voice singing in paradise and with his hard rough hand he wipes a tear out of his eye. All week long he’d swung the great ten-pound hammer, wham, wham, you could hear the music of the anvil ringing out for a mile in all directions. Rough it was and hard, but not so rough and hard that he couldn’t wipe tear out of his eye thinking of Mama yonder in paradise.

People don’t think with tears of paradise anymore much. They’re all mixed up and what’s going to happen in Jordan, what’s going to happen in Berlin, what’s Daniel’s bear mean, what’s Daniel’s leopard mean, and we’re so smart that we’re completely stupid. What we need to do is get childlike again and listen and look into the Face that shines like the sun.

You don’t have to know Greek to look into it, you don’t have to know Hebrew, they’ll both help you they tell me, and you don’t have to have gone anywhere to school, all that helps us all too. I talk like a fool because actually I’ve done an awful lot of reading and studying in my time and I recommend it, but I saw the Face before I saw the Book. I wonder if I’d seen a Book before I saw the Face, if I wouldn’t have been one of those smart alecks who knew more than was good for me. But I saw the Face first and then I got interested in the Book afterwards, and when the Lord regenerated my heart He woke up my head. But that Face with all that we need.

Well now, there he was standing and the effect of this, he said, I fell at His feet as dead. And I read almost the same thing in Daniel 10 through to 9. You see, Daniel and John and Isaiah and the rest of them, mystical bishops, they heard a Voice, and they turned and when they turned, they saw. We don’t hear the Voice, and if we do, we don’t turn and so we don’t see. We depend upon hearsay.

They heard a voice, they turned, they saw. And what they saw knocked them to their faces, knocked them to their faces. Oh how desperately, how desperately we need a crop of young men who’ve been knocked flat. How we need young people who’ve looked on a Face and a white hair and head and have seen a man with a sword coming out of His mouth and seen Him moving up and down in tenderness among the churches and have fallen flat and had to be helped to their feet again. You know, that’s what we need in our pulpits, brethren. That’s what we need.

Now we’re trying to get learned. And you get magazines so learned that if you can understand them, they consider they’ve failed you. That if you can understand what the article meant, why they say, well, we’ll have to do something about that, they understood it.

So they make it harder and harder and harder all the time. But we don’t need that kind of brain-weary, muscle-bound intellectual. What we need is a whole crop of intelligent young fellows who will study and work hard at it, but who’ve seen the Face. And because they’ve seen the Face, they’re never sure of themselves afterward, but oh brother, are they are sure of Jesus. They’re never sure of themselves. None of that brassy, I did this and I did that, it’s all gone. And in its place, there’s the tender certainty that God’s all right, but O Lord, I don’t know about myself. I need help.

There are two pictures of Jesus given in the Bible. This portrait here, this final portrait done in beautiful words by John, but there was another one once back there, maybe I can without too much trouble read it. Listen, behold my servant, said God, Jehovah, as many were astonished at thee, His visage was so marred more than any man and His form more than the sons of men, so shall He sprinkle many nations. His visage was so marred, so marred more than the sons of men.

There’s one picture of Him, that’s no more, that was the old photograph, the old picture. That wasn’t a pretty picture at all. Let nobody paint the cross beautiful, let nobody show a pretty Christ on a tree, let nobody by the use of form or color show a pretty sight there on a hillside. Gallows aren’t pretty, electric chairs aren’t pretty, crosses aren’t pretty.

So, God said people were astonished at him and turned their face away, for it was an ugly sight there, blue-lipped, fly-blown flies diving down to the blood, blood dripping off his toes, wasn’t a pretty sight. But don’t think of Him like that anymore, my brethren, no, no.

John said, I heard a voice, and it was a voice that sounded like a silver trumpet through the universe, and I turned, and when I turned, I saw. And he tried to describe what he saw, and I’ve gone over just weakly tonight, almost casually, what can a man say about perfection? How can you gild a lily or set a candle to the sun? How can you teach the nightingale to sing? And how can I add anything to what John has given us?

But there He stands, with a garment down to the foot, and a girth about the breast with a golden girdle, head and hair as white as wool, eyes of the flame of fire, feet like fine brass, voice as of the sound of the sea. In His hands, seven stars, and out of His mouth goeth the sharp sword and a Face of the sun shining in its strength.

There He is in the midst of us, Jesus Christ. They met the conditions, they saw the vision, they fell flat. We meet no conditions, see no visions, and imagine that we’re in lineal descent from the apostles.

How far can we go, Brethren? If the Romanists have gone off in that direction, we’ve gone off in the other. May God bring us all to the middle, so we can behold Jesus Christ as He is, Christ the Son of God.

Well, I recommend Him to you, my friends. I recommend Him to you. You need Him, and you don’t have to cross the street to find Him. You don’t have to come out to this church to find Him. You don’t have to make a long trip. We want you to come, but you don’t have to. You don’t have to do anything except, in your heart, when you hear the Voice of the gospel, turn. And when you turn, you’ll see. And when you see, you’ll fall. And when you fall, you’ll be lifted up again.

And I saw Him, I fell at His feet as dead, and He laid His right hand upon me, saying, Fear not, I am the first and the last. I am He that liveth and was dead, and behold, I am alive forevermore. Amen. And I have the keys of the hell and of the death, keys of hell and of death. Ah, all that walk the globe are but a handful to the myriad that slumber in its bosom. Death has ridden her pale horse around the world since the day that Adam ate the fruit and brought woe into the world.

But I look into the face of One tonight who holds the keys of death and of hell. I recommend Him to you, turn to Him, pick the Word of God, get the Gospel of John, get on your knees, read it. You need not that any man teach you. He’ll teach you, if you obey, if you repent, if you hate sin, if you love righteousness, if you have no confidence in yourself or in the flesh, he’ll take you over.

I’ve seen in this Church instances of young men who were converted and young women and blossomed out into the Christian life so fast that you’d think they’d been converted 25 years, and they’d only been converted a year. You follow Him, you look into His face, and all will be well with you.

O Jesus, Jesus, dearest Lord! Forgive me if I say, For very love, Thy sacred name. A thousand times a day Let us sing, Brother McAffee.

A.W. Tozer’s understanding of the Prodical Son from the sermon, “The Grace of God” October 26, 1958 https://tozertalks.com/tozer-talks-13/

Oh, a long time ago, I won’t say how many, but it’s a great many years ago; and I was in my earliest twenties. I had heard the prodigal son was a backslider. But I didn’t read it in the fifteenth of Luke. He couldn’t be a backslider and fit all the circumstances. I’d heard he was a sinner. But I couldn’t hear God say of a sinner, this my son was dead and is alive again. It didn’t fit the circumstances. So, I went to God and I said, God, will you show me. Then, I went to a place all by myself. I used to spend days and praying all alone. And I went there, and suddenly there flashed over me the understanding. And I have never had reason to doubt that this was God teaching me His Bible. I never heard anybody else say this, and I haven’t made a lot of it, but God said to my heart, the prodigal son is neither a backslider nor a sinner. The prodigal son is the human race. The human race that went out to the pigsty to the far country in Adam, and came back in Christ, my Son. For if you’ll notice, there were two other parables there, the parable of the lost sheep and the parable of the lost coin. The sheep that wandered away was the part of the human race that will be saved. And when he comes back, he’s the part of the human race that will be one that’s redeemed, and that will accept redemption.

So, these, all these, all these of every race and color around the world that have come back, they’ve all come back in Christ. And they’ve all come back in the person of that prodical. All that’s the redeemed human race coming back. And do you know what they found the Father to be like? They found He hadn’t been changed at all. Insults, wronged, his neighbors pitted him and they said, oh, isn’t that terrible the way that boy treated his poor old Dad. And his father was humiliated and shamed and sorry and grieved and heartbroken. But when the boy came back, he hadn’t changed at all. And Jesus was saying to us, you went away in Adam, but you’re coming back in Christ. And when you come back, you’ll find the Father hasn’t changed. He’s the same Father that He was when you all went out every man to his own way. And when you come back in Jesus Christ, you’ll find Him exactly the same as you left Him, unchanged. That’s the story of the prodigal son. He ran and threw his arms around him and welcomed him, put a robe on him and a ring and said, this my son was dead, and he’s alive again.

Tags Jesus Christ, Revelation, Worship

Messages

Tozer Talks

Post author By pshappard
Post date August 3, 2025

“Holy Ground-The Life of Worship After the Jordan”

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Holy Ground: The Life of Worship After the Jordan

Pastor and Author A.W. Tozer

August 17, 1958

Going on over into the book of Joshua, where the Lord said to Moses and Israel, “…and to bring thee into the place which I have prepared. My angel shall go before thee, and I will be an enemy unto thine enemies, and an adversary unto thine adversaries. And thou shalt not bow down to their gods, nor serve them. And ye shall serve the Lord your God, and he shall bless your bread and water. And I’ll take sickness away from the midst of thee, and there shall nothing cast their young. And the number of thy days I will fulfill. And I will send my fear before thee, and destroy all those to whom thou shalt come, and I will make all thine enemies turn their backs.”

We followed this, and we showed over in Joshua how this literally took place. And I said all the way through that while this was written to Israel as a nation on this earth, its spiritual principles apply to us now. And I believe this, and I have believed it for a long time. And I have seen God do some very wonderful things for people, for my own self. And now we followed Joshua across the river and into the land of promise. And two weeks ago, tonight I said that Israel had two things, there were two things, there were four that I wanted to mention, but I only got to mention two of them.

One was, Israel was circumcised after 40 years of wandering, and thus separation, which is always, always typical of separation in Scriptures. And then that there was the old corn of the land, and the manna ceased. The artificial manna, which came down from above, ceased, and they lived off the corn of the land. They became mature. I talked about maturity. And I said I would finish tonight and talk about this.

In the fifth chapter of Joshua, it came to pass, verse 13, when Joshua was by Jericho that he lifted up his eyes and looked and behold there stood a man over against him with his sword drawn in his hand. And Joshua went unto him and said unto him, Art thou for us or for our adversaries? And he said, I’m not a man on either side, I am here as captain of the host of the Lord. And Joshua fell on his face to the earth and did worship and said unto him, What saith my Lord unto his servant? He knew he was talking to God. And the captain of the Lord’s host said unto Joshua, loose thy shoe from off thy foot, for the place whereon thou standest is holy. And Joshua did so.

Now this will conclude my little series. And we begin something new and fresh for next week. A little later, perhaps not until school begins and our people get back and this summer business is over. But when that is over and we start all over again in September, early September, I want to preach a new series.

Now, there are two things here that I want you to note. The Holy Spirit, the man with the sword, and the worship. There was the man with the sword. I think that we will agree that this was the Holy Spirit. I believe that this accords with most Bible teaching, spiritual Bible teaching. And this angel here, this prince, I think the margin says, Joshua went, and the man said, as captain, that’s the word he used, prince, it says in margin, as prince of the host of the Lord am I come. And he had a sword in his hand. And it’s called the sword of the spirit in the book of Hebrews and of Ephesians. Now this angel, this comforter, was to go ahead and fight for them.

Now when we come to the New Testament, particularly in the gospel of John, we have the teaching of our Savior three chapters long about the Holy Spirit. My friends, this life in the land that I have preached about, you’ve listened to for these weeks, this life in the land, this crossed over life, this victorious life, is characterized by the presence and power of the Holy Spirit.

Now you have heard me say this many times, and I say it not only here, but wherever I have the pleasure of speaking. If occasion arises, I say that the church of today is gravely wanting in the power and Presence of the Holy Spirit. We have grieved the Lord by our sins, and there has been a withdrawing of the Presence, the lifting of the Presence.

We sang here, the Comforter is come. Not the Comforter came, but the Comforter is come. And this I believe with everything in my heart, that when He came, He came to stay, and He is come, and He is here. But it’s entirely possible to have the Comforter present in the church, present in a congregation, present on the earth, present in some measure in this church, and yet so grieve Him, so quench Him, so resist Him, and so ignore Him, that He cannot be to us the captain of the Lord’s host. He cannot be. He wants to be, but He cannot be.

We’re going to have to reverse ourselves in fundamental circles, and we’re going to have to do some prayerful, penitential rethinking of this matter of the relation of the Holy Spirit to his church. The Spirit of the living God was given to His church. We are baptized into one body by the Holy Spirit, that is true. And if any man have not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of His, and that is true.

But it is one thing to be a member of the body of Christ, and to be baptized by that mystic union into the body of Christ, that regeneration. It is quite another thing to live in the fullness and in the friendly communion and friendship of the Holy Ghost. And my friends, I will simply have to say that this latter is something that we do not know very much about.

I am very deeply concerned, because we have brought up a generation of young people that know practically nothing about what I am saying now. We have brought up a generation, even some of them present here tonight, good, clean, young, converted people. There’s no question about that, no question about it. But they have never crossed over.

There is not the separation that is meant here by circumcision. There is not the maturity that comes from the old corn of the land and the secession of the manna. There is not the conscious presence and power of the Holy Ghost. It just isn’t, it’s not here, it’s not upon the people.

And I’d like to say, partly this is because it’s impossible to isolate this church and separate it completely from the flow of quasi-evangelicalism that is abroad on the earth. It is impossible to escape the chilling influences of a teaching that denies that there is any such a thing as a fullness of the Holy Spirit.

I teach it here, I have taught it, and some have entered. But what I say can be neutralized by what you hear on the radio or what you read in your Sunday school lessons or what somebody says or what some friend talks with you about, and we level back to this chilly condition where we find ourselves.

But Joshua found this man, this invisible man. Now Joshua went forward after that, and we read no more about the man. But as long as Joshua kept his heels clean and walked with his God, he had victory. And Joshua conquered the land and gave it to Israel. And yet it was obvious here that Joshua wasn’t doing it. It was done under the leadership of the man who appeared once to Joshua and then withdrew into invisibility but did not withdraw, who was no longer seen by Joshua but was present wherever there was obedience and faith and courage shown by Joshua and the children of Israel.

Now, my friends, we are reaping in this hour the result of a terrible misunderstanding. We are reaping in evangelical circles the result of a frightful and frightening misinterpretation of biblical truth regarding the Holy Ghost. We are forgetting that our denominational fathers, who once planted their great churches on this continent, believed as we do and as I’m trying to teach you here, and not as the modern spirit-denying evangelicals believe.

Although I’m an evangelical, a fundamentalist if you like, but our fathers believed that a man ought to be filled with the Holy Ghost and they didn’t hesitate to say so. But there came up a group of teachers a generation or less ago that nullified that whole thing, and that by careful argumentation made it very difficult for anybody to push his way through.

They said, well, but you’ll become a fanatic. Well, but look at so-and-so and he went off into wild fanaticism. And they put up a scarecrow in the middle of God Almighty’s cornfield to scare away all of the children of the Lord. They put up a scarecrow in the clover field, so the children of God are frightened away. And so, we were forced to the necessity of two or three things. We were forced to go forward either by learning or by gadgetry.

And so, by learning and gadgetry we have tried to labor through, but we haven’t gotten very far and we’re so desperately in need of refreshing in the day in which we live. What the church of God needs to do, the whole evangelical church, is to call ten days of prayer and apologize to the Holy Ghost. We’ve wronged Him, we’ve retrenched Him, we’ve denied Him, we’ve interpreted Him away, we have resisted Him, we’ve been ashamed of Him, we’ve been afraid of Him.

And the result is, He has pulled the blinds down over the light and we are without much light. But instead of our saying, O God, we have sinned, we have sinned, the light has gone out, we look around for a way to get on without the light. We look around for eyes that aren’t God’s eyes, methods that aren’t God’s methods, ways that aren’t God’s ways.

So, the church is going on, stumbling forward and going on, but we’re not going on with very much lift, nor very much buoyancy, nor very much blessing. I tell you that I would rather see a select number of the Lord’s people filled with the Holy Spirit and living in the sweet oil of the Holy Ghost than to see great religious movements. If you could see both, it would be very good. But you can have one without the other. You can have the second without the first.

We can promote great religious movements and not have the Holy Spirit at all. We can learn how to do it, my brethren. And if we do, we make a tragic mistake. What art thou? Who art thou? said Joshua to this man. Who art thou? And the man said, Nay, don’t question me. As captain of the host of the Lord, I am come.

And so, I want to urgently, urgently press upon you that you, particularly you young people, search your own hearts and search your Bible and prepare to spend some time alone. You know, Christianity is a social religion. We are called sheep. We are not called wolves. Wolves travel mostly alone until they run to kill, and they travel in packs, but mostly they’re alone or in twos. We are called sheep because sheep always travel together if they can.

So, Christianity is a social religion. That is, it’s a social religion in this that we worship together. There is the assembly, the coming together of the people of God, whether it be half a dozen or half a dozen hundred. They are the people of God nevertheless, and they are together. And this is good. But it’s also possible to get so that you’re not spiritual, you have made your religion to mean that you’ve got to get somebody to talk with, somebody to lean on, somebody to chat with, and we do not meet God alone.

Some of you are leaving shortly to go to various schools of learning. And I want to say to you, if you accept the dead level of mediocrity that you find in your student body as the highest will of God for you, you will waste your time where you’re going, and you will not go on with God. You’re going to have to, by the grace of God, deliberately and purposefully and determinedly rise above those that are around about you. And when you rise above them, of course, they’re not going to like it. They’re going to call you holier than thou. They’re going to have cute names for you. They’re going to snub you. They’re going to think you’re queer or they’re going to find some category to put you in and get rid of you. And they’re going to dismiss you one way or another.

But brethren, you can’t dismiss a man full of the Holy Ghost. Now, I want to warn you. You can’t dismiss a man full of the Holy Ghost. And you can’t frighten him, and you can’t quench him and you can’t squelch him and you can’t stop him and you can’t block him. For God says, I’ll go before you and the angel shall go ahead of you, and I will drive out the enemy. But he didn’t mention this captain. But when the time came, the captain was there. The prince was there with his sword in his hand, the Word of God.

And so I say to you that if you accept the common level, if you pray a little and read a little and sing a little and then chatter a little and yak a little and joke a little and then the next week pray a little more and talk a little more, pretty soon you have equated spiritual Christianity with fun and amusement and all that. And the result will be that you will grow up and go on and mature physically and mentally, but not mature spiritually.

We are not a mature people spiritually, not even in this church where I have struggled and prayed and preached so hard and brought men who could help and supplement and teach as well or better than myself to help us along. But we’ll lean on each other, and we’ll look at each other as samples and Charles looks at Bob and Bob looks at John and John looks at Harry and each one says, well, I’m about like the other. And we accept each other as a sample of what a Christian ought to be.

Read the lives of the holy men of God. Read the lives of those who even in their youth and some even in their teens refused absolutely to accept the chilly Christianity of their day as normal. And they pressed themselves through and they were accused of being fanatical and they were even some of them deserted and some of them shown the door, but they went on with God, nevertheless. And now we write their biographies and sing their hymns and tell their anecdotes and build their sepulchers, but we’re careful not to follow them and live as they lived.

There is a land, my brethren. The Holy Ghost said, I’ll take you across into that land and it’ll be your land, and I’ll lead you. And I’ll send an angel before you and he shall go before you and he’ll drive out the enemy from before you. And the very things that are there to hinder you will become steppingstones for you to rise on your dead selves to better things. And that’s what God said, and He said it to His church, and He said it to His people.

Five years ago, ten years ago, as long ago as fifteen years ago, I saw a little turn for the better in spiritual things here and there. I’m speaking not only about church, I’m speaking about God’s people wherever I find them. I saw a little turn for the better, but now I see a little swing in the other direction. I see those churches, who at one time had very high standards for membership are now throwing the doors open and saying, while we sing number 39, the door is open for members. And so they come and join. This is a spiritual tragedy.

The plane that went down with 99 aboard, we were all horror stricken. But to open the church of Jesus Christ without discrimination to anybody that wants to walk down the aisle, and join is a tragedy infinitely worse than if all the airplanes in the sky tonight were suddenly to crash together. Because the worst the airplane crash can do is to kill the body. But when a church gets corrupt, it ruins the souls of men.

Now the second thing is, Joshua fell on his face to the earth and did worship. And the captain of the Lord’s host said unto Joshua, Loose thy shoes from off thy foot. We would say now, take your hat off, bow your head. The place where thou standest is holy.

The land of crossing over is the land of worship. In Genesis 12:7 and 8, the Lord appeared unto Abram and said unto Abram, In the land, he said unto Abram, Now look around you. This land I will give to you and to your seed. And Abraham built an altar unto the Lord who had appeared unto him.

And then later, Jacob, a grandson of Abraham, after he had sinned and was driven from his home, that is driven by a bad conscience and fear of his brother, driven from his home, he went out from Padanaram, or toward Padanaram, and he traveled to the middle of the night. And in the middle of the night, he came to a place and lay down in that place and took of the stones of that place for his pillow.

And it came to pass that while he slept, behold, a vision appeared, and a ladder was set up on the earth and its top reached to heaven. And the angels ascended and descended upon it and God stood above it and Jacob said, this is holy ground. Why didn’t he know that that was holy ground? Had not God said it to Abraham, but Jacob found it out. And so he awoke and he anointed the pillar and said, This is the house of God. And we got the beautiful word Bethel, the house of God.

Later on, after various skirmishes and backslidings and restorations, Jacob appeared at Genesis 35. And in the 35th chapter, when he returned to the land, one of the first things he did was to build an altar unto the Lord. The land of promise is a land of worship.

And in Joshua 5, we have the same thing. They had been out of the land a long time. Now they come back into the land again, the land where Abraham had built the altar, the land where Jacob had built it and anointed or had raised and anointed the pillar, and the land where Jacob had built the altar again after returning to the land. And then now they’re back in it. And one of the first things they do is to bow and worship. And this strange prince from heaven says, Loose the shoe off thy foot, for the place whereon thou standest is holy. This is holy land.

My friends, there is a place, a land here on earth for God’s people, a land where the soul anoints its pillar. There is a land where God appears to the soul. There is a place right here in the twentieth century amid Sputniks and automobiles and burning fumes and noise and confusion. There is a place where we can enter, where the soul anoints its pillar and where the heart takes off its shoes and where we worship as Abraham worshiped.

Let me take you back to this wondrous, mysterious passage. After these things, the word of the Lord came unto Abraham in a vision, saying, fear not, Abraham, I am thy shield and thy exceeding great reward. And Abraham said, Lord God, what wilt thou give me, saying, I go childless? And Abraham said, Behold, to me thou hast given no seed. And behold, the word of the Lord came unto him, saying, this shall not be thine heir, but he that shall come forth out of thine own bough shall be thine heir, the promise of Isaac. And he brought him forth abroad and said, look now toward heaven and tell the stars, that is, count the stars, if thou be able to number them.

And he said, so shall thy seed be. And he believed in the Lord, and he counted it to him for righteousness. And he said unto him, I am Jehovah that brought thee out of Ur of the Chaldees to give thee this land. And he said, Lord God, whereby shall I know that I shall inherit it? Here is one of the most wonderful mixtures of sharp reasoning and awestruck worship possible to imagine.

Here was a man who was using his head. He remembered the promise God had made. He remembered that things weren’t working out the way God seemed to say they would be. And he wasn’t going to give way to his feelings, and he was going to stick by the text. And he said, Lord God, but wait, you promised me, whereby shall I know? And God said, Take a heifer of three years old and a she-goat of three years old and a ram of three years old and a turtledove and a young pigeon. He took unto him all these and divided them in the midst and laid each piece one against another.

This was Abraham seeing Jesus’ day. This was Abraham by faith looking down the years and seeing a cross. Only he did only what he could do. He slew young animals and birds. And when the fowls came down upon the carcass, Abraham drove them away. And when the sun was going down, a deep sleep fell upon Abraham. And lo, a horror of great darkness fell upon him. And he said unto Abraham, that is, God said unto Abraham, know of a surety, Abraham, know of a surety.

Even here in the deep sleep of ecstasy, even here in the horror of great darkness, even here when your reasoning is staggering, reason is staggering because of the mystery and wonder of it, know of a surety, Abraham. I’ll make good in my promise, thy seed shall be a stranger in a land that is not theirs and shall serve them and afflict them four hundred years, and also the nation whom they shall serve will I judge. And thou shalt go to thy fathers in peace, thou shalt be buried in a good old age. But in the fourth generation they shall come hither again. And it came to pass that when the sun went down and it was dark, behold a smoking furnace and a burning lamp that passed between those pieces. And in the same day the Lord made a covenant with Abraham saying unto thy seed will I give this land.

Now here was the wonder, the mystery, the mystery of it. I don’t claim to understand this, I do not know. But here was God appearing to the man, here it was all interlaced with good hard promises, no visionary dreaming of things. Here were good hard promises, the word of God was there, and the promises were there, and Abraham was insisting on them. And yet there was an overtone of the mysterious and the divine and the wonderful and the heavenly and the beautiful. And Abraham went into a deep sleep and Abraham woke from his sleep and here was the fire moving among the pieces.

Oh, this was God, my brethren, this was God. And I say that it’s this sense of the otherness of Christianity that is missing now. Everything can be explained, everything. We’ve got it all worked out on charts. Busy young fellows who’ve studied Christian education. They’re busy telling us how to do the work of the Holy Ghost.

Ah, my brethren, there is a land where in this life, down here now, right in the middle of this generation of worldliness, while we’re salty believers in the Word and where we will insist that God keep his Word and where we stand by the Book and refuse to have anything that doesn’t check with the Book.

And yet at the same time, there comes down upon the soul that enters that land, there comes down a sense of something wonderful and something mysterious. It’s only God, it is God, why should I say only God? But it is God, and the soul anoints her altar, the soul anoints her pillar.

Now, where are we? What kind of Christianity is yours? There are several kinds I want to mention briefly. There’s the social Christianity of which I’ve already spoken. There are tens of thousands of Christians who couldn’t stay Christian one month. If they were cast by themselves, they have to have the support of others, those round about them. They haven’t pressed through. Abraham, all alone. Jacob, all alone. And it was in those lonely times that the Spirit opened heavens and revealed wonders.

And I have no hesitation in saying that what Abraham and Jacob learned in those brief, beautiful, bright times of visionary, glorious insight, I have no hesitation in saying that what they learned there was more to them than six years in a seminary could ever be to a man today. Social Christianity.

Then we have formal Christianity. I won’t talk much about that because I don’t think you’re guilty of that and I don’t think that you’re going to hide behind formality unless it is the ugly formality of the gospel churches. The Episcopalians have their formality, the Lutherans have their formality, and the Presbyterians and Baptists in some areas have gone pretty formal, but they have a beautiful form. They’ve worked it out. They know what to do. It’s lovely. It’s at least lovely. But in our gospel churches, we’re likely to become formal, but have an ugly formality that doesn’t have the ripe beauty of age on it.

When a Lutheran or an Episcopalian turns around twice and bows, everybody knows what he’s doing. Symbolism. He taps a bell or lights a candle; everybody knows what it is. There’s beauty in it at any rate. But we have a formalism that isn’t beautiful. It’s an ugly formality. Ugly formalism. Always we go the same way. Always we do the same thing. And because it isn’t beautiful, we think it’s spiritual. That’s what I call the cult of ugliness.

Well, then there’s a Christianity which is pure entertainment and nothing else. Oh, I wouldn’t say it’s nothing else. But I would say that it is so mixed up. It has to have an entertaining value, or you can’t sell it. You just have to have an entertaining value. Most all, most all of the churches have gone that way. Most all the colleges, most all. Most all have gone that way.

I’m not saying a word about Wheaton or Nyack, or Moody’s, but I’m saying that practically all, some people want to murder me because I don’t come out and name names, but I’m not going to name names if you don’t, if I lay the principle down and if I rub the lens real good and say, now look, and you can’t see it.

As the fellow said, if you have to ask, you don’t know anyhow. And you never would know. So, if you can’t see what I’m talking about, if the Spirit of God has not honored you by letting you see, then there’s no use to ask me. But everything has to have its entertainment value these days.

Then, of course, there’s theological Christianity. It’s purely theological, nothing else. Then there’s escapist Christianity. That’s the Christianity of the red-hot evangelists and the missions. It’s just escapist. Jesus Christ provides an escape hatch, some way to get out and rescue ourselves. And we never quit talking about the fact we were rescued.

Brethren, Christianity does make a way of escape. It is theological, and it is social, but it is also worshipful. And this is what’s missing in this hour in which we live. There is such a thing as divine rapture. We sing about it. Fanny Crosby taught us to sing it, and we sing it, but we don’t have any idea what we mean when we’re singing it. We sing it in our hymns and don’t know what we’re saying.

But there is a place where we worship, and the Church must find that place again. The Church must find it again. We must find it. We here must find it. We here must put away every sin until we find that place, so that when you wake in the night, a sense of His presence is there, that when by chance you hear a bar of music, a bit of a hymn on the radio, or sometimes when you’re not expecting it, tears come to your eyes, and when you hear vast spaces and all they’re talking about now, a sense of blazing wonder comes to your heart. This is my Father’s world.

Worship, brethren, is what we need. Worship. We should meet to worship. We should meet to worship. We should meet always to worship. Worship should be part of everything that a Christian does. If it’s a street meeting, he ought to go there in the spirit of worship. If it’s a mission meeting, he should be there in the spirit of worship. If it’s a meeting to sew a sheet for a missionary, it should be done in the spirit of worship. And it can be done. But it can’t be done unless we’re in the land, unless we’ve pushed across and gotten in. There is a place where the child of God can get in.

You say, is that what the Alliance teaches? Yes, it’s what the Alliance teaches, but it’s what 97 percent of us don’t have. But it’s also that which some people who aren’t in the Alliance have. I meet them here and there. I told you about one this morning, a pastor I heard pray. That man is in. And I have met a few like that. They come from the North and the South and the East and the West and they’re Arminian or they’re Calvinist or they’re post-millennialist or they’re pre-tribulation or they’re post-tribulation or their eschatology is all mixed up. But they’ve gotten in. They’ve gotten in. And you’ll always tell them. You can always tell them. You can tell them by their faces. There’s a timber in their voice that tells they’re in.

We’ve put rapture over to the coming of Christ and we’ve made an eschatological historical event out of it. And we have explained it as downrightly as you would explain just exactly what the Lord is going to do. And we’ve got the Bible to prove it. But the saints talked about rapture, and they didn’t mean the second coming of Christ. We push rapture to the coming of the Lord Jesus.

But it said here, take your shoes off your feet. And by an instinct the man went down on his face. The fact that we can enter the church of God and joke with each other. The fact that we can enter the church of God and sit down and look around to see who has the sack dress on. The fact that we can enter the church of God and begin to criticize in our hearts. I don’t like that song. Why’d they sing that one? There’s that old man again with the same old stuff. All right, maybe there’s a fault to be found. But the very fact that you can find it indicates something’s wrong or indicates there’s something wrong with all of us.

My brethren, God is in this place. Lo, God is here. Let us adore and own how dreadful is this place. I tell you; I tell you that I would shake hands with every friend and say goodbye to them all. Rather than give up even a little bit of this that I personally experience. This, this land of worship. This land where the Father is all. Shall we not obey God and go on to perfection? I believe you’ll want to, or I wouldn’t be preaching to you.

May God grant that together we may press on out into the deep waters, waters to swim in. All right.

Tags Victory, Worship