Month: October 2025

Tozer Talks

Post author By pshappard
Post date October 26, 2025

“The Spirit’s Gifts and the Church’s Duty“

The Spirit’s Gifts and the Church’s Duty

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

October 7, 1956

Over the next few Sunday mornings, the Lord willing, I want to talk on a chain of topics or ideas which the church of God needs very badly. And I’m going to read this morning, or rather, I’m going to let Paul talk to us and give us the Scripture, out of which later, over the next few Sundays, I expect to draw some truths.

Now I’m not going to tell you from where I’m reading, because I’m reading from Weymouth’s translation, a very old and honored translation, deliberately this morning. I rarely do it, but I want to today.

The man of God is talking to us. He says, Now, about spiritual gifts, brethren, I would not have you ignorant. We can go astray as easily by being uninformed as we can by being wrongly informed. We have no right to be either.

You know that when you were heathens, pagans, that is, Americans, you went astray after dumb idols. By dumb he means idols that couldn’t talk. Paul wanted his God to talk. And what disgusted him was that the gods of the heathen couldn’t talk. Jeremiah and Isaiah had something to say about that too. A dumb idol is no good. Dumb gods, no gods at all.

And he said, for this reason I inform you, that no one speaking under the influence of the Spirit of God says, Jesus is accursed. That is, it’s quoted. Nobody says, and the quotation is, Jesus is accursed. And that no one is able to say, in quotes, Jesus is the Lord, except under the influence of the Holy Spirit. That is, I assume, he means, no one is able really to say. You can mouth anything. But nobody can actually say and believe that Jesus is the Lord except by the power of the Holy Spirit.

Now, he says, there are various kinds of gifts, but there is the same Spirit. Various kinds of official service, and yet the same Lord. Various kinds of effects, and yet the same God. Notice you have the Trinity here, the Spirit, the Lord, and God. The same God who produces all the effects in each person, but to each a manifestation of the Spirit has been granted for the common good.

God never gives a gift to anybody except for the common good. To one, he says, the word of wisdom has been granted through the Spirit. And we can use a little of that now.

And to another, the word of knowledge by the will of the same Spirit. And to another, in the same Spirit, special faith. And to another, various gifts of healing in the same Spirit. And to another, the exercise of miraculous powers. And to another, the gift of prophecy. To another, the power of discernment between Spirits. To one, varieties of the gift of tongues. To another, the interpretation of tongues. But all these results are brought about by one and the same Spirit allotting to them each individually as He pleases. For just as the body is one and yet has many parts, and all its parts, many as they are, constitute one body, so it is with Christ. In fact, in one Spirit all of us, whether Jews or Greeks, slaves or free men, were baptized to form one body. And we all are imbued, or were imbued, with one Spirit.

Now, he writes to a different group and says this. To each of us individually, His grace was given, measured out with the munificence of Christ. For this reason, Scripture says, He ascended on high, He led a host of captives and gave gifts to man. And he puts in parentheses this explanation. Now this ascended, what does it mean but that he had first descended into the lower regions of the earth? He who descended is the same who ascended again far above all the heavens in order to fill the universe.

And He Himself, which is Jesus of course, appointed some to be apostles, and some to be prophets, and some to be evangelists, some to be pastors and teachers, in order to fully to equip His people for the work of serving, for the building up of Christ’s body, till all of us arrive at oneness in faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and at mature manhood and the stature of full grown men in Christ.

So, we shall no longer be babes, nor shall we resemble mariners tossed on the waves and carried about with every changing wind of doctrine; according to men’s cleverness and unscrupulous cunning, it makes use of every shifting device to mislead. But we shall lovingly hold to the truth and shall in all respects grow up into union with Him who is our head, even Christ. Dependent, he says, on Him, the whole body, its various parts closely fitting and firmly adhering to one another, grows by the aid of every contributory ligament with power proportioned to the need of each individual part, so as to build itself up in the Spirit of love.

And he wrote to another, not a group this time, but to one of his boys. He wasn’t going to be around too long, and he wanted to get everything straightened out, so he said, now, begins now, doesn’t he, about every time, says, Now the Spirit speaketh, or expressly declares, that in later times some will fall away from the faith, giving heed to deceiving spirits and the teachings of demons.

Paul, obviously, had not been taught not to offend. This is offensive language, that some people are listening to deceiving spirits and the teachings of demons, and this through the hypocrisy of men who teach falsely and have their own consciences seared as with a hot iron, forbidding people to marry and insisting on abstinence from foods which God has created to be partaken of with thankfulness by those who believe and know the truth.

Paul wasn’t married, but he was determined that nobody was going to lay the yoke of celibacy upon anybody. They could marry if they wanted to, as far as he was concerned. He told them that they would have double trouble, but he said, If you want to get married, it’s natural. He told them that somewhere else.

And then he was a man who wasn’t a great eater. He was a frugal, careful man, practicing fasting in long cryings and tears, but he was determined that nobody was going to lay compulsory fasting on anybody. So, he says, these false teachers are forbidding people to marry and insisting on abstinence from foods which God has created to be partaken of with thankfulness by those who believe and know the truth.

For everything that God has created is good, and nothing is to be rejected if only it is received with thanksgiving. It is made holy by the Word of God and prayer.

Now he said, If you put this to the brethren, you will be a good servant of Jesus Christ, nourished on the lessons of the faith and of the good teaching which you have faithfully followed. But profane stories, fit only for old women, have nothing to do with them. Train yourself for godliness. Exercise for the body is not useless, but godliness is useful in every respect. Physical exercise helps you, a little, but godliness helps you in every way, possessing the promise of the present and the future life.

Faithful is this saying and deserving of universal acceptance, and this is the motive of our toiling and wrestling that we have our hopes fixed on the living God who is the Savior of all mankind and especially of believers. Command this and teach this. Let no one think slightingly of you because you are a young man. I don’t need that. But in speech, conduct, love, faith, and purity, be an example to your fellow Christians. Until I come, pay attention to public reading.

Now what do you suppose he wanted them to publicly read? Scriptures. Exhortation and teaching. Whether that says public reading or not, I don’t know. We’d have to look it up in the Greek, and mostly it simply says reading. But he says public reading in this translation.

Do not neglect the gifts with which you are endowed, which were conferred on you by prophetic indication when the hands of the elders were placed upon you. Practice these duties and be absorbed in them, so that your progress in them may be evident to all. Take pains with yourself and your teaching. Persevere in these things, for by doing this you will secure your own and your hearer’s salvation. Well, now, of course, I read from 1 Corinthians 12, from Ephesians 4, and from 1 Timothy 4.

Now, it is my duty and my high Christian privilege first to pray for this church. No man has any right to talk to a crowd he hasn’t prayed for. No man. So, it is my duty, if you want to allow the word “duty” in your Christian thinking, most people don’t. I think the old word duty might well come back again.

A colt out in the pasture field knows no such word as duty. But his well-trained, hard-working mother in the harness, pulling the wagon of the plow, she knows duty. The colt only knows freedom, but the mother knows duty.

And I wonder if our inordinate desire for freedom and our strange fear of duty, may not be one thing that’s wrong with us now. But it is a duty nevertheless, but a privilege, certainly a high privilege, to pray for this church. And it is another, though perhaps not such a high duty and privilege, to preach to the people who foregather here. And by church I do not mean this organization. Strictly speaking, you cannot organize a church, and the church is not a church by organization.

We live in society and we live under laws, and therefore, being what we are, it is necessary for us to organize. I believe in organization, a free, loose organization. I think it’s necessary. Paul told Titus to set things in order and to appoint men. That meant organization. It could have meant nothing else.

But I say you can’t organize a church, the same as you can’t organize a ball club. You can have a ball club which has a captain and so many pitchers and so many catchers and so many outfielders and so many infielders and so many basemen, but that doesn’t make a club as a certain Chicago club proves. It’s just an organization. And so, you can’t organize a church.

You can have your pastor, elders, deacons, deaconesses, and all the rest, and under law, a constitution, but you don’t have a church. The church is something else altogether. The church is within that organization, maybe, but that organization is not the church. The church is the assembly of the saints. And wherever the saints meet, you have the church. And wherever they habitually meet, then you come to name the church, maybe, and thus you have a church, such as this one or some other church.

And so, it’s a joy to preach to those who have over the past years and who do now and who will preach or foregather in this place, and it’s a privilege to preach to them and to guide and to plan for the future.

Now I try to see the church whole. I want to see you as a part of something vastly bigger. I’d like you to think of yourself as part of something bigger than you are. You know, the sociologists and psychologists talk about the need for belonging. They say that a rejected child is, maybe, developed dangerous mental or nervous traits because he has no sense of belonging.

And they explain the clubs of youngsters, the wolf packs that tramp our streets, as those who in the main come from homes where they have been rejected, where the father drinks, the mother too, and where they’re out nights, and where they’re not loved after they’re five years old or six, and where they feel they don’t belong to anything, and they want to join something in order to feel that they belong. There’s strength, there’s human strength in a sense of belonging to something. That’s why we have secret orders.

Men who are pushed around by their wives and pulled off by their bosses until they get the feeling, they have no soul they can call their own, not a tattered shred of self-respect is left, they go join a lodge. And as the cartoon had it, the wife is speaking to her husband, and she says, the high exalted potentate can’t go tonight because I won’t let him.

And they become high exalted potentates and name themselves big names, but the point is, little men want to belong to something. And that is not a bad thing, that’s a good thing, because we’re gregarious by nature. We’re not wolves to go alone or travel in narrow packs which break up immediately, but we’re sheep to travel in flocks that stay together a lifetime.

So, when I talk about the church, I talk about the whole church. Unless I say this church, because I want you to know that this church is a part of a great church. I can imagine how lonely, now I’m talking in the presence of a young soldier who’s just back, and he may contradict me for this good-naturedly afterward, but I don’t think he will. I can imagine how lonely a soldier would feel in a foreign land among a people whose language he can’t speak except for his uniform, that identifies him with a vast crowd of such fellows all over the world, and particularly with his homeland and his flag.

The sense of belonging is necessary. The young fellow somewhere in some remote corner of the earth wearing an American uniform received a cable or word somewhere from the commander-in-chief that he’d received a dishonorable discharge and was no longer a part of the army. I can imagine what an utter collapse it would be to him, psychologically he’d break down, and half his manhood would leak away from his broken heart.

Belonging to something is what matters, my brethren. Belonging to something that’s going to last, and something that’s worthy, something that’s valuable. I couldn’t belong to a man-made society; I couldn’t possibly do it.

Imagine me getting on my knees and swearing to follow the order of this and that lodge. God made my knees hard to bend, and my American upbringing has made them impossible to bend, unless God bends them. Now imagine that I could ever do that, I never could, but I want to belong to something.

No man is ever individualistic enough to go it alone, no man. The man who does is sick, the hermit is sick. A man who lives alone in his attic, and who refuses even to answer the door, and who sneaks out in the dark, and buys something at a delicatessen, and sneaks back, that man’s sick.

He’s not a normal man. A normal man, good or bad, sinner or saint, wants to walk out and look around at others of his kind and say, I belong. This is my race. These are my people. This is my language I hear spoken there. That’s my flag flying there on top of that school building. I belong here.

That is necessary to our welfare, necessary to our health, our mental health. And that is why rejection, unwanted children, and persons who feel themselves rejected, can sometimes develop very serious and dangerous trends. I want to think of this church then as its relation to the whole church of Christ.

That’s why I like to sing songs about the church, the church of Jesus Christ, which He purchased with His own blood, part in heaven and part on earth, and of every color and tribe and nation and tongue around the world, as the Bible says. And we’re a part of that.

We didn’t begin when Dr. A. B. Simpson organized the Society for Christian Missions back in New York in 1884. If I thought that for a second. I’d never finish this sentence. I’d break off with a semicolon, and I’d close this Bible and leave and resign, and find the church that went back to Pentecost.

But I believe that we’re a part of that which does go back to Pentecost. I believe in the apostolic succession. And I believe that it’s not a succession of bishops and men with names and organizations. I believe it’s a group, it’s a living organism. Just as I believe that my organism goes back to my great-great grandfather Adam, and that I’m a part that the living stream floated down the centuries, and ties me organically and racially and vitally with the first man.

So, I believe that this church is organically and vitally a part of the true church of Christ that began when the Holy Ghost fell on a body of believers and made them one, and baptized them into one body and made them God’s people in a way that no people ever had been before. And therefore, every Christian is a part of us, and we’re a part of every Christian group around the world.

When I hear a good thing or read a good thing that’s said or done by some great man or good man or good woman anywhere in the world for Christ’s sake, I have a good feeling in my heart that’s part of me. That’s part of me. That belongs to me, and I belong to that. And whether I ever meet that person on earth or not doesn’t matter. The church of our Lord Jesus Christ is one. She’s one around the whole earth.

So, I want to think of her that way, and I want to think of you as belonging to the great Church of our Lord Jesus around the earth. And I want to think of you and your relation to God first of all. Your relation to God first of all. A man got into the papers here the other day by starting a little campaign to get all of his people to vote. Whether you vote or not is your business. I expect to. If you do or don’t, I’m not going to needle you about that.

I’m only going to tell you that every country has the kind of leaders it deserves. But I’m not concerned so much with whether you’re a Democrat or for a Republican, or I’m not concerned so much for whom you’re going to vote. But I’m deeply concerned about your relation to God. That’s first. That’s first.

Before there were any Tories or Whigs or Democrats or Socialists or Republicans or what have you around the world, there was God. Before man ever knew the privilege of the ballot, there was God. And your relation to God is absolutely first.

And then your relation to others is very important too. And your habits and your tastes and your service, all this is very important. And so, we’re going to think about what a church must do and what it’s our privilege to do and what God will give us power to do, and the gifts of the Spirit and all this over the next weeks. And to do all this requires itself a gift of the Spirit.

Now, back in the book of Isaiah, if I can find it without keeping you waiting too long, in the book of Isaiah there’s a passage which I love very much. There shall come forth a rod out of the stem of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots. Now that, of course, is Jesus.

And the Spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him, the Spirit of wisdom and understanding, the Spirit of counsel and might, the Spirit of knowledge and of the fear of the Lord, and shall make him a quick understanding in the fear of the Lord. And he shall not judge after the sight of his eyes, neither reprove after the hearing of his ears, but with righteousness shall he judge the poor, and reprove with equity for the meek of the earth.

Now, that’s said about Jesus, but that’s true, or ought to be true of the members of the body of Christ. For just as the oil was put upon the high priest’s head, and it ran down to the skirts of his garment, and cleared down to his feet, and gave fragrance and sweetness to his whole body, so the mighty power that was poured upon the head of Jesus must trickle down and flow down to every member of the body. And so what was true of him can be true of his ministers. The Spirit of wisdom shall rest upon him, and the Spirit of understanding, and the Spirit of counsel and might, and the Spirit of knowledge and of the fear of Jehovah and shall make him a quick understanding.

And he shall not judge after the sight of his eyes. The curse of modern leadership is looking around and getting your bearings from what you see. Neither shall he reprove after the hearing of his ears, listening carefully to see which way things are moving, and then judging accordingly. No, he’ll never make that mistake.

But with righteousness shall he judge the poor, and with equity the meek of the earth. And righteousness shall be the girdle of his loins, and faithfulness the girdle of his reins. And he’ll always be right in his spirit, and right in his wisdom, and right in his judgment. And he’ll not be judged, nor allow himself to be judged by what’s going on round about.

Now, my dear friends, I’m going to break this off here within five minutes. This is Communion Sunday, and I’ve got lots more to say developing this thesis, perhaps until Brother Reidhead comes. But it takes a lot of patience and a lot of persistence and a lot of courage in this day in which we live to find the will of God and to take it.

And I believe that God wants to help us. I believe that He wants to do something new for us here in this church, in our fellowship, I believe it. He’s doing something new for me, and I can’t see why it should not flow out and down and over and up and around until we’re all swimming in it. And I can’t see why God should omit any of us in the breaking of the bread nor in the pouring of the oil.

You and I stand here and mingle together here and foregather here as an assembly of the saints, with all of the obligation resting upon us that rested upon them at Pentecost. It has not diminished one little bit, and there is not anywhere one sentence of Scripture to be found, nowhere is there any proof or a line that could be twisted nor tortured into teaching that the organic, living, vibrating church of Jesus Christ, just before He comes, won’t have every obligation and every privilege and every right and every power at her disposal that she had when she first was born in the early part of the book of Acts.

You know, there is such a thing as being tough about this, my brethren. There is such a thing as saying to God and to yourself, and at times maybe over your shoulder, to the devil, that you’re not going to give up to the times. And that you’re not going to give up to the ways of the world, or even to the common ways of religion round about you. And that you’re not going to judge yourself by others, and you’re not going to allow your Church to be judged by others. And if it looks a little better or a little worse, then worry about it or be glad.

But you’re going to take the New Testament’s standards as your standard. And just as sure as God sits in His high heaven, unless Christ comes within the next twenty-five years, unless He comes within the next twenty-five years, the Christian Missionary Alliance and all such groups as we are, fundamentalists generally, are going to have to recall and have back upon us a revival that will eventuate in a new moral power, and a new separation, and a new cleanness, and a new bestowment of the mighty enablings of the Spirit, or God will have to raise up from somewhere a new group to carry the torch.

Now, I prophesied twelve years ago about something, and it came to pass that my only mistake was I didn’t go far enough in what I said. I’ll tell you about that next Sunday, if you honor me by appearing here, or honor your own soul by coming to the house of the Lord. And I’m prophesying this without fear.

If we do not do something, if the church doesn’t do something, if we don’t make a hard swing back to the roots of Christianity and beginning over again to seek the face of God, God is going to pass us up, as a farmer passes up, eggshells that are empty, throws them out and buries them. As you throw away tin cans that have been emptied and their contents taken, and they’re thrown out to be carried away in the refuse. As we bury dead men whose spirit has left them, and who can no longer stand up or talk or hear.

We reverently lay away the shell where they were. There was a day when Israel, believing in the perpetuity of her place in the sun, said to Jesus, we be not born of fornication, we be the seed of Abraham, and this temple is the temple of God. And Jesus said, they are the children of Abraham who do the works of Abraham, and as for this temple, there’ll be a day when not one stone will be upon another.

And that came to pass literally, and the Roman emperor sent his plows and plowed the foundation with plows. To fulfill, he’d never heard it said, and he didn’t know Jesus had ever said it. But Jesus said, not one stone will stand on another. And they plowed up the foundations after knocking every stone down level with the ground. The very sacred temple, God will leave it when it ceases to fulfill His purpose and do His will. There isn’t an organization in the world God won’t desert.

The Salvation Army, the Christian Missionary Alliance, the Nazarenes, the Mariners, Christian Businessmen’s Committee, any group anywhere, God will desert them in the hour that they cease to fulfill His will. There isn’t a denomination on this wide earth anywhere, you can’t make your robes long enough, nor your chains heavy enough, nor your titles long enough to say the church, when once she ceases to fulfill the will of God. There isn’t a group anywhere, God will raise them up in 1884 and desert them in 1964, unless they continue to fulfill the will of God.

There isn’t a group like this anywhere, my brethren, unless we follow on to know the Lord and humbly and meekly follow Jesus Christ in fear and godly reverence and in faith and in love and charity. There isn’t a church, I say, anywhere that God won’t turn away from and go to some colored mission or some group somewhere of simple-hearted people that don’t know too much and don’t have too much, but that do love God and want to obey him. I say, God will desert a crowd anywhere.

It doesn’t mean the individual members of that group who are Christian people will be deserted, but it does mean that the cloud will lift from that assembly. Dear God, I pray that if it ever lifts from this church, God will tell me twenty-four hours before the tragedy occurs, for I want time to get out of town. I want time to get away where I don’t have to stand and look at the despoiling of a church.

Only when the cloud is there and the fire, only when the Holy Ghost is present, and the Shekinah glows is a church a true church. And then if you lack everything else, you still have a true church. Now I’ve read from Paul about the possibilities, the privileges, the obligation, the commission that is ours, the job we’ve got to do, our future, what we’ve got to do right here and to the ends of the earth.

I’ve read to you about the power that God gives to enable us to do it. Then I have read of the strange teachings that come in from everywhere to spoil that holy oil. So, over the next weeks we’re going to talk about it, God willing. But that will be all for now.

Tags Spiritual Gifts

Messages

Tozer Talks

Post author By pshappard
Post date October 19, 2025

“A Call for a Return to God”

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A Call for a Return to God

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

July 29, 1956

Now I hold in my hand a book, and it says Holy Bible on it. And this book has so many virtues, that no one can ever say, this is the virtue of the Scriptures. It has so many crowns on its head, that no one can point to one and say, this is the crown. It has so many functions, that no one can say, this is the function of the Scripture. You can never say this, that, always it’s they, because there are so many.

So, I would say tonight and using for the subject matter that 30th chapter of Isaiah which we read, that one mission of the Holy Scriptures, is to find us. It’s to find us. When the Bible says a man is lost, it is exquisitely accurate in what it says. We’re lost. People are lost. The world is lost. And we don’t know where we are.

Once in the city of Pittsburgh, I was staying at the Roosevelt Hotel, and if you’ve ever been in the Golden Triangle, it’s a golden labyrinth to me. I got lost. And I couldn’t find my hotel. And I told them afterward about it, that I wasn’t lost, the hotel was lost. But somebody was lost there that day, all right. And it’s easy to get lost in the world and not know where you are. Not know what times you’re living in. Not know what events mean. Not know the mood of the hour or the spiritual temperature of the hour.

Now, the one mission of the Word of God is to find us. It is to locate us and to identify us and identify our times. And it’s to show us what’s wrong with us and also to show us what’s right with us. And I’d like to stop there and accent that, that mostly in our eagerness to make things better, we’re inclined to overlook what is right with us. And this is never good. Always we should acknowledge anything that is right with us, that God says is right with us. And whereunto we have attained, there abide, when cast not away your confidence, which hath great recompense of reward.

There is no virtue in digging at yourself all the time with a pick. There is no virtue in always condemning yourself, because the Word of God shows us what is right with us as well as what is wrong with us. Now, I say us, meaning Christians, because it is well known that there is nothing right about a sinner. There is nothing right about a lost man. There is nothing right about a rebel.

And I think it’s safe to say that there is nothing right about popular religion as we know it today. But the Word of God is very quick to say, I have not found so great faith, no, not in Israel.

And I saw His eyes shining as He pointed to that man and said, well, look at this man. And when the woman, the woman of Sarepta came to Him, He said there were many, many lepers in Israel in the days of Elijah, and yet to none, to none did faith come. This woman, this foreign woman had faith.

The Lord always approves whatever He sees that He can approve. But, of course, the technique of the evangelist who is not led by the Spirit is to go into a church assuming that everybody, from the pastor to the janitor, is a thoroughgoing scoundrel, and then begin there with that presumption. But that’s not the way the Word of God does it. The Word of God always finds you.

The business of a good doctor is not only to tell you what’s wrong, but to slap you back and tell you when you’re all right. And so, the business of the Word of God is not only to tell me when I’m wrong, but the business of the Scripture also is to tell me when I’m right, and say, well done, and go ahead, you’re My child.

Now it finds us, it locates us, and it brings our time into focus, so that we can, or God can, pronounce upon us either judgment or a proof. And there is a unique felicity in the Word of God, a wonderful ability to find parallels, moral parallels, and spiritual parallels. I am somewhat delighted as I get around a bit, and read the mail, and meet and talk with people, that the old ironclad, rigid, dispensationalism that put every verse in one pigeonhole, another verse in another pigeonhole, and said do not disturb until Christmas, is pretty well passing away.

While we all believe in the dispensations of the Scripture, there is coming from everywhere onto the church of Christ, the fundamental element, the evangelical element of the church of Christ, a feeling that while we recognize the dispensations, we do not allow them to draw iron curtains around us, but that the Holy Spirit, through the Scriptures, draws parallel, moral and spiritual parallels, between different dispensations, between peoples, and times, and situations, and dangers, and opportunities.

For instance, the New Testament parallels the Old, so that when you read the Old, and then read the New, you begin to find yourself. And then, when you look at your own times, you will find they parallel the Old Testament and the New Testament. So that regardless of, and going across, the dispensational lines, there are the moral and spiritual parallels, the deep principles that underlie all dispensations, and all the works of God, so that we can locate ourselves, and know where we are.

And brethren, I’d like to say to this little congregation tonight, that you could do yourself a wonderful world of good, if you would take some time out, just as you take a week or two weeks out for a vacation, to sort of get hold of yourself physically, and get off the strain. If you’d take a little time out, and it wouldn’t hurt you if you missed a meal, some of you are worried about calories.

I ate breakfast with a man this morning, a very handsome young man, and he said, I’ll take the 400-calorie breakfast, please. And he worried, the people worry about their calories, and worry about their weight. And that’s good, I suppose, but brethren, there’s something that’s more profounder than that, something profounder than our health. And that is our relation to God, where we are in God’s will for us, where we are at this moment, in the overall purpose of God for our lives in this day.

And I say it wouldn’t hurt you at all, if you were to take a day off, and perhaps miss a good dinner, and get a little lean once, and let the things of this world kind of fade out on you and get a little empty. You’ll feel bad, and your stomach will protest, but it won’t kill you. Nobody died from missing a meal. I’m not a faster, and I’m not pushing that on the people, but it might be a good idea sometimes, take a day or so, and examine yourself in the light of God.

Now introspection, if it’s carried too far, becomes a hindrance to the very thing we’re trying to do. Everlastingly digging up the corn to see if it is growing, is one way to be sure we’ll have no corn. And everlastingly digging at our own spiritual life, to see if we’re making progress, is one way of arresting all progress, and bringing it to a dead stop. So that I do not recommend a continual digging at ourselves, but I do recommend that since one mission of the Holy Scriptures is to find us, locate us, take our pulse, settle on our spiritual health and a pronounce on it, and prove or condemn or command or warn or encourage.

I recommend that between now and, say, the next ten days, or between now and the next two weeks, take a little time out before God, not just the hasty morning devotions, but take a longer time out, and search the Scriptures and read them, and get on your knees and put all commentaries aside, and all these, what do you call them, marginal notes, and get a plain text Bible, and get on your knees and let the Holy Ghost talk to you.

You know, brethren, it’s possible even to have too many translations around, possible I got so many that sometimes I get bored with them, and they bother me. Just get a good one, it doesn’t make too much difference which one, but the King James is always a good, safe one, and with plain text, just read the Word of God and let it talk to you. And it’s wonderful how it’ll find you.

Now, the New Testament, I say, parallels the Old, and the Old and the New find a parallel in the day in which we live. Israel’s condition in 700 B.C., as sketched here in Isaiah 31 to 33. Notice the condition they were in. Now, we read all this, so it’ll be familiar and fresh in your mind. They were in a state of rebellion. They rebelled against God, and rebelling against God is like walking against a cold, fierce wind. Always walking against a cold, fierce wind. Going ahead against the will of God is like flying a little, light, one-motored plane against a tempest, hardly making any headway at all, barely staying up and getting nowhere. Rebelling against the will of God, going one way and God wanting you to go another.

Now, search yourself tonight and think this over. Is there any rebellion in your heart? Do you want something which you’re afraid, if you sought the will of God, you’d find He wouldn’t let you have? Or do you want to avoid something which you know and have reason to believe God wants you to have or do? Well, now that’s rebellion, and rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft. Let’s not take it lightly. Let’s take it seriously.

The will of God is the health of the universe. The will of God is the harmony of heaven. It is the peace of paradise. The will of God is salvation itself. The will of God is life. The will of God is everything a moral being can want, and bucking the will of God even on anything, even on any little thing, and in trying so hard.

I heard today about a man. I personally know that that man has gone against the will of God, tragically and shamefully. He has flouted and violated the will of God, not and repented of it, no, but is living in it and has crystallized it and hardened it so he’ll never get out of it. And yet they say, I heard only today, that that man is present at the pre-Sunday school Bible class. He’s present at the Sunday school. He’s present at the morning service. He’s present at the evening service. He’s trying desperately by being present and searching the Scriptures and being pious to make up for the fact that he has violated the will of God against his own life and that he’s bucking the cold, tempestuous wind of the will of God.

My brethren, the will of God is the health of your life. It’s your safety, and we’re not safe any other place. And if you are anywhere in a controversy with God, on any line, holding anything against God, then remember this, that all your Bible reading and all your prayers and all your faithful attendance at church won’t mean a thing. It won’t mean a thing. It’s simply whistling by the cemetery. It is simply talking big to hide our shameful fears.

Get right with God, and you can sleep another hour. Get right with God, and you can relax. Get right with God, and peace will come to your heart.

But they were rebellious in that day. It says they were rebellious people, and they were self-confident people. They trusted in themselves, and they were a people who misplaced their confidence, and put their confidence somewhere else. And they were seeking advisors and counselors and having conferences, and they had their princes and ambassadors running all around but finding no help. And God said tartly that they were ashamed. They found no help at all.

Now, I don’t want to enter even close to that deep, dismal swamp of politics, but it sounds a little like a parallel with the United States of America here, all of this self-confidence and rebellion against the will of God, and this, seeking advisors and counselors and Secretaries of State and plenipotentiaries and having conferences and princes and ambassadors traveling about.

If everybody would ground himself for exactly ten days and think and get straightened out and give his soul a chance to settle and the dust a chance to settle and the fumes of burning gasoline a chance to settle, we’d find the air would begin to clear and we’d find the will of God.

But conferences, Will Rogers used to say that peace conferences were the direct cause of war, and if we could stop all peace conferences, we’d end wars. Of course, he said it with tongue-in-cheek as Will would, but there was more to it, you know, more than there was a certain amount of sly truth in his humor that peace conferences, people are conferring too much, and there you can’t flip your dial anymore on the radio, but there’ll be somebody on their asking somebody else questions.

Questions reminds me of the Irishman’s definition of metaphysics. He said it’s a blind man in a dark basement looking for a black cat that isn’t there. And metaphysics has its parallel in the modern effort to find peace of mind. If a man can hit a home run, we promptly interview him and ask him what he thinks of the international situation. And if he can sing and so, as to bring the teenagers to their knees with rapture, why, we ask him what he thinks of the atom bomb.

And we’re interviewing and conferring. There are too many conferences, brethren. When God Almighty made the heaven and the earth, it didn’t come out of a conference. And when Jesus Christ died on the cross, it wasn’t by any action of a council.

Now I know that a certain number of conferences have to be held, I suppose, just the same as there have to be certain visits to the dentist and certain banquets and after-dinner speakers. I know that. We have to shave, and nobody likes it. There are certain things that have to be.

Oh, my district superintendent is here. I forgot. But I must go on anyhow and say that these things are necessary. Board meetings are necessary, I know.

But brethren, after all, if we get to God first, we could cut down the length of time it takes to find that we don’t know anything about it anyhow. A committee, you know, is a group of people which singly can do nothing. But when met as a committee, can officially vote that they know not how to do it. That’s the difference.

Now, brethren, I believe in committees and conferences and boards, and we never fail here to have our board meeting and I go to all conferences except I miss one once in a while. But remember this, dear friends, that if the members of the conferences and board meetings and young people’s groups and all the rest who decide on how things go would get to God first, we’d have some light when we get to talking with one another. But we meet without light and pool our darkness and then go away again. That’s often the way it is in these conferences, these political conferences.

These political conferences, if Secretary of State would stay at home, we could push war years into the distance, into the future. But if he continues to run around, he’ll get his in it yet. He’s a Republican too, God help him. But if he continues running around and shooting off, we’ll get into it, somebody will get mad and assassinate somebody and then hell will break out on the earth.

God says, you’ll find no help wherever you go. You’re looking for help and you’re holding your political conferences and you’re running about and you’re asking questions of people who don’t know and then they ask you and you don’t know.

A Episcopalian rector that I spoke of this morning came to me over to Highland Lake. He said, there are some questions I want to ask you, Brother Tozer, or two of them. So, he asked me the first one. He said, how do you resolve that problem? Well, I said, Brother, I don’t know how to resolve the problem and to answer the question, I don’t even have the problem. I haven’t yet got far enough along. I don’t even have the problem, not let alone the answer. Well, that was a dry well. He came to a dry well that time.

Then he asked me a second question and he was on my territory, and I had the answer, but not the first one. The first one had to do with the relation of time and eternity, how Christ could step out of eternity into time and the historic, all that old neo-Orthodox stuff. And Brother, I don’t even have the problem, let alone the answer. But there are answers, and God has the answers and we’ll not find them running about asking questions because bpeople don’t know.

And so, God says now here, put this in the Book. Put this in the Book. Think of the irony there. Write this down, He says. Put this in a Book. Put this in a Book that my people are rebellious people, that they want My protection, but they don’t want My will. They want My blessing, but they don’t want to obey Me. They want My heaven, but they don’t want My walk on earth.

And put this in a book that they’re an untruthful people, that they’re a lying people, an untruthful people. You know that there must be an awful lot of liars among evangelicals. I don’t know any. Now remember that. I’m not accusing anybody and I can’t think of any except those who say they have 1,000 when the church seats 208. But outside of that I don’t know where the liars are but there must be because I hear things about myself. Never happened in the wide world.

I heard at Highland Park that I had done something that was all right and I don’t know nothing wrong but something that I was supposed to have done, Billy Graham, and I hadn’t seen Billy Graham in five years so what couldn’t have happened, yet somebody started that it had happened. Somebody told a lie to their brother. I don’t know who it was but somebody. My people are untruthful people, My people, and unbelieving as well. And they insist on hearing religious talk.

I have a note which I want to write on sometime. I learn more from myself by the grace of God than I do from anybody else. And when I get an idea it pops into my head when I pray or when I read about it I take a note on it and then later on I develop. Maybe it will lie three years.

And I have a little note that says this. Why is it that some Christian people are always at the church, always at the prayer meeting, always asking prayer requests, always carrying their Bible, always eager for orthodoxy, always ready to defend the truth, and yet they’re the sourest, grouchiest, and meanest, and nastiest, and hardest to live with people in the world. Now I haven’t settled that question yet. Can you help me, Brother Thomas? I don’t know why.

I asked old brother M.A. Dean. Do you remember old M.A. Dean? Ma Dean they called him. M.A. Dean. I asked Brother Dean about that. And Brother Dean said, young fellow, and I was a young fellow then, he said, young brother, it’s like this. He said, some people are spiritually cross-eyed. And he said, they look two directions and they’re looking one way and going another.

Now he said, that’s the way I’ve resolved it. I doubt whether that would be accepted out in Fuller Seminary among the great brains there or in any other of the great seminaries where great minds are. But it seems to us simple people to be the truth that people are just spiritually cross-eyed. And they’re untruthful and they’re unbelieving and yet they’re some of the most pious people in the wide world. And they insist on hearing religious talk all the time. And yet there’s no humility there. Humility is a beautiful thing. Simplicity is a beautiful thing.

I told Brother McAfee about a Latvian woman. Now my brother Bill is here, Petlov. He’ll know about Latvia. I don’t know where Latvia is exactly. I know it’s one of those middle European arrangements there that’s always a kinder box. But there was a woman at Highland Lake, maybe 35, though I would have not told her that, but she’s probably 35, a blondish, high cheekbone, the typical Slav type, you know, square-faced.

And she came so modestly and said, Mr. Tozer, there is something I would like to ask you. And I said, all right. She said, I am a Latvian refugee. I was a teacher in my own land and I fled before the Russians and I’m here in the United States and I am a Christian. I have been born again and I’d like to ask you a question. And I said, all right.

She said, you talk about a spirit-filled life and the question I want to ask you, she said, is the spirit-filled life for plain people like me? Isn’t the spirit-filled life for apostles and great evangelists and great people like that that need it? She said, do you think that a simple woman like me, she was not a simple woman, she was a brilliant woman, had been a teacher in her own land and spoke English except for she couldn’t get the diphthong, beautifully.

Well, here she was, humble and meek and so humble that she was willing to forego the full walk in the Holy Spirit because she just thought it wasn’t for her. God looks on people like that and loves them, don’t you think? The Lord may surprise her by giving her a Christmas present and giving her that which she feels she’s not worthy to receive.

Ah, brother, humility’s a beautiful thing wherever it is found, and pride is just as heinous wherever it is found. And yet there’s the religious talk all the time. People are wanting to hear religious talk and more religious talk and more religious talk and yet never hear the real voice of God. Isn’t this an ironic thing here? Sometimes I get blamed for being a bit sarcastic but, brother, the Word of God is so sarcastic sometimes you can shave with it. It’s so sharp.

Listen to this. He says, if I can find it here now, he says, they say, prophesy not unto us right things, speak unto us smooth things, prophesy deceits. He says, don’t tell the truth to us, prophesy unto us smooth things and prophesy deceits. Do you know what I would do if I were a layman, if I delivered milk or dug ditches or ran a streetcar or was in any other profession and wasn’t a preacher? Do you know what I’d do when I entered a church and I sensed the pastor was giving me smooth things? I would get up, scoop up my hat and leave the building. And as I went, I’d scrape both feet and get out of there. I’d never want to stay in that church where men speak smooth things.

If I go to a doctor, I don’t want that doctor to lie to me. I want to know the worst that I can prepare for. And I don’t want to be cheered up. I want to be told the truth. Speak unto us smooth things. Men make reputations of being old smoothies. You can ask them a question and you don’t know. It says about Paul, thou hast fully known my doctrine. But there are a lot of people that you ask them a question and you don’t know when they’re finished, whether they believe or don’t believe.

They start in and talk all around and when they come back you still have your question but you don’t have the answer. And you can’t say whether they’re for it or against it. Paul says, you’ve fully known my doctrine. He delivered his soul. He wasn’t afraid of people. He told everybody what he believed.

Now what was the sentence on all this smooth deceit? This religious talk. This rebellion. This lying. This unbelieving business. This running to Egypt and trying to get help there. Running to psychiatry and getting help there and running to somewhere else for help.

Well, God says, the sentence is that you’re going to go down like a wall. You’re going down like a wall. And being a farmer, I’ve seen walls. And I know what it is for a great wall to go down. And as it goes down, rodents run every direction that have been hiding in it. And the dust begins to rise. But your wall is down. He says, you’re going down like a bowing wall. You’re going down like a potter’s vessel that will be smashed on the cobblestones.

Now what about we and our times? I wish, I wish that I could tell you the truth and tell you that I believe that we are in times of great revival. I wish that I could tell you that I thought things were looking up. I wish. But I cannot. Not for a moment can I.

A brother who runs Highland Lake Conference in his mighty praying reminded me of Leonard Ravenhill in his intensity of prayer. And as he prayed, he said, O God, the evangelicals have a God that is no God. And they don’t know the true God much anymore. And the young people have been cheated and sold downriver. We must see again the glory of God for this generation. And the burden of his prayer was, O God, this poor generation deserves to see Thy glory. Show us Thy glory once more.

Now, there is a remnant that according to the election of grace, and if we parallel the rebellion and the self-confidence and the misplaced confidence and the seeking of counselors and princes and ambassadors and dashing about and looking for things and not listening to God, then how are we to escape this sentence, ye shall go down as a bowing wall and fall as a potter’s vessel? I don’t think we can.

Remember that it’s not good exegesis to go through the Bible taking all the blessings and giving all the curses to Israel. Remember that it’s not good exegesis to underline all the promises and ignore all the warnings. Remember it, and yet it’s been done. A whole generation has grown up on that kind of thing. A whole generation that never put a line under the warnings but tenderly underlined all the promises.

If you’d take the average fellow’s Bible and reprint only the underlying passages, you’d think that God was a soft, spongy, spineless, moral Santa Claus who was just as full of self-pity and had no justice or judgment in his nature at all. That’s because we choose the passages that please us.

A heretic, as you know, is a man who selects That’s what the word means. He selects. He selects the passages that he wants. And if you go through your Bible selecting the passages that cheer you up, why, you’re a heretic in that measure. Not you’re teaching false doctrine, but you’re not giving the whole Word of God a chance at you. It’s like living all the time on upside-down cake. You’ve got to have some other things or there’s something going wrong with you.

Now, I want you to notice over here, though, that the goodness of God came in and saved Israel and pushed judgment away 100 years. The good grace of God, even though they deserved all this. The good grace of God came, and in verse 18 he says, The Lord will wait that He may be gracious unto you, and He will be exalted that He may have mercy upon you.

For the Lord is a God of judgment, and blessed are they that wait for Him. And he says, you shall hear a voice, and He will be very gracious unto you at the voice of thy cry, and your teachers will not be removed into a corner anymore. And you will hear a voice saying, This is the way, walk ye in it, when you turn to the right hand and when you turn to the left.

I wonder now if we can’t parallel this. I wonder if evangelicalism, and we, starting in this church, can’t parallel this. Can’t we listen for a voice? Do you notice that it doesn’t say you’ll hear a voice ahead of you? Why? All these other times it says He goes before his people and leads them. When He putteth forth His own He goeth before them, and the voice of the Shepherd is ahead.

Why is it? Can anybody tell me? Answer me back. Why does he say you shall hear a voice behind you? Why? When you turn to the right hand or when you turn to the left, you’ll hear that voice. Why? Because the Lord never leaves the path.

And as long as you’re behind Him and He’s ahead and you’re following Him, His voice is ahead of you. Calling you along, come on sheep, come on. But as soon as you turn away from the path, then the Voice is behind you. No matter which way you turn, the Voice is behind you. You shall hear a voice behind you saying, this is the way, come back here, you’re off the way, this is the way, come on back here.

And I pray that to fundamentalism and to all others there may come a willingness to listen, for God is waiting. We’ve deserved. What have we deserved? We’ve deserved judgment. We’ve deserved it. We’ve deserved to go down in a welter of dust and rubble. But God said, I won’t do it now, I’ll wait, I’ll be gracious. I’ll exalt myself and show mercy upon you.

This church has done enough. We’ve committed enough sins here to bring the building down on us. And our society has committed enough sins. Evangelicalism has committed enough. But God says, I’ll wait, that I might be gracious. I’m going to judge you, but I’ll wait and give you a chance and you’ll hear my voice saying, this is the way, walk ye in it.

Then he says these encouraging things, that in these days there shall be upon every high mountain and upon every high hill, rivers and streams of waters in the day of the great slaughter when the towers fall. Isn’t this the day of the great slaughter? And did we not go just now through, a few years ago, one of the most disastrous and bloody and deadly wars in history? And have we ever had an hour when the guns weren’t shooting?

They celebrated the end of the Korean War, but there’s never been a moment the echo of a gun hasn’t been heard somewhere around the world. And we’re still hearing it in this terrible day when everything that is good and all that we’ve stood for has gone down and the nobility of manhood and the purity of womanhood and the dignity of childhood and the desirability of integrity in government and patriotism.

The patriot used to stand beside the flag and preach God and country and the people wept, but now a man doesn’t dare have a flag. They call it flag-waving. And patriotism has become a corny thing for young people to laugh at.

And young people in, I think, Brooklyn the other day, girls, mind you, girls, girls, a group of girls fell on other girls and beat them until they had to be taken into the hospital and when a policeman came to rescue the girls that were being beaten up, they beat him until he was wounded. We have produced a generation like that, a smart aleck, fresh, self-assured, rebellious, sarcastic generation. Everything good is corny or square.

My friends, the only hope we have is that God says I’ll exalt myself, I’ll lift myself up, not to throw a thunderbolt but to show mercy on a poor, miserable people. And I wonder if we can’t begin to listen. It’s happening. It’s coming. I hear it. It’s coming.

I talk to this one and that one, Reformed church man, Episcopal man, Baptist people. I hear them all around and they are saying pretty much the same thing. They’re saying we’ve been sold downriver and over the last few years Christianity has become a show, and we want God back again. We’re sorry we went along with it and we want God back again. And you’ll hear it everywhere. And people that used to be so sure of themselves come tenderly.

I remember one time hearing Dr. Jatterquist. He said, Dr. Jatterquist, he said, now I recommend this book, this so-and-so’s book. He said, now I don’t believe every degree with everything in it. He said, if I agreed with everything in it, I’d have to have written it. And he said, furthermore, by the time I wrote the last page I might not be so sure of something I’d written on the first.

Well, I know how he meant it and everybody else did, but one young preacher present, he rushed up to me and he said, did you hear that? And he was positively, he was steaming hot. He said, did you hear that? What kind of talk is that? What kind of talk is that? Why, he said, Mr. Tozer, I haven’t changed my mind on a thing in ten years. He probably hasn’t yet and that’s been ten years ago. He’s static. He’s probably frozen. He’s frozen. But I don’t mean change your mind about Bible doctrine, but I mean go ahead.

But you know that spirit, that spirit of surefire dogmatism is pretty well lifting. And I find, and I don’t say it because this brother’s a Baptist. I would have said this and did say it in Highland Lake and I’ve said to my friends, I find probably the hungriest people now in the North American continent are Baptists. They’re eager, tender people. I find them, all sorts of Baptists too. And they’re eager, they’ve got that sound, solid, fundamental doctrine.

But please don’t all even go to the Baptists. Maybe I don’t mean to lose my church here. But I am saying that I find that that happened to be a Baptist pastor that told me that. I haven’t changed my mind in anything in ten years, he said.

But his kind is sort of fading away. And people find that their doctrine isn’t enough, that their doctrine’s got to lead them to God. And if it doesn’t lead you to God, it might as well be Mohammedanism. If the doctrines you hold don’t lead you to God, then they are no doctrine to you. And I find a tenderness coming on people.

I find Bible church brethren calling me up, coming to see me, asking me if I’d seen such and such an old book. Eager, hungry people all over. And if we can get together, Dr. Maxwell calls it, the order of the burning heart. You know that? I thought you and I invented that. We called it the fellowship of the burning heart. And we don’t care your denomination, but the fellowship of the burning heart.

Those who love the Lord speak often one to another. And God says that in that terrible day when out in the great world the towers are falling and it’s the day of slaughter, there shall be upon every high mountain and hill, rivers and streams of water. Rivers on high mountains? They don’t belong up there. They belong in the valleys.

Well, God said if they muddy the streams in the valleys and my people pray and hear my voice, I’ll put rivers up on the mountains for them. And I’ll put streams up on high hills for them where they don’t belong. I’ll do a miracle for my people. And my dear friends, it is yet to be known what God will do with us here and thus in our society and with evangelicalism if we’ll only believe God.

And he says in verse 26, Moreover, the light of the moon shall be as the light of the sun seven times. And the light of the sun shall be sevenfold as the light of seven days in the day that the Lord bindeth up the breach of His people and healeth the stroke of their wounds. In that day, God will make our light brighter than it ever was before. We have been, this society, this missionary society, fifth largest now, I think, in the world with three million dollars and over for missions in a year’s time, going in where nobody else goes and all of that.

And we’ve criticized each other a lot, but I wonder, I wonder, Brother Thomas, if we listen for the voice, we won’t yet hear a voice saying, come on, you’ve slipped a little, but this is the way and I’m waiting. And I’ll give you rivers and high places and I’ll give you streams on high hilltops where you didn’t know they could be. And I’ll make you brighter in the world of religion seven times brighter than you were. And I’ll make your day seven times as bright, and I will multiply seven days on one. I’m hearing, I’m waiting, wondering if we won’t hear this from God. And I wonder for our own church.

Not more than about a month ago, I came back from the East. In fact, I even talked seriously about a home in Mount Vernon, New York, and thought maybe that it might be in the will of God that I should leave here and leave the pastor and go to writing and editing. And I said, God, if you’ll show me over the next weeks a sign, a fleece, a light, a bit of light in the darkness in my church, I’ll take it that that isn’t Thy will for me yet. And we’ve never had better meetings, and we’ve never had warmer, warmer meetings and better times, even in this hot summer of vacationing.

And I wonder if God isn’t saying to this church, all right, church, dear Brother Jones, I don’t know whether he’s here this evening or not, but he wrote me, oh, on vacation, he wrote me a letter and marked it personal. I’m almost done, marked it personal.

And he said, you were talking about the ministry of this church, and I just sat down and went over the records and he said, I wrote up, and then here it was. He said, now here are the old people that have gone. And he mentioned them. Many of them, Brother Snapp and Mrs. Snapp used to know. The Gramlichs and the Moors and oh, he named a great many of them. He said, they’ve gone by reason of age.

And then he said, there are others. And then he named a whole list and they’ve gone because they’ve moved. And he said about 40 families have left this church in the last few years.

I think he’s low on count, about 40 families to move to all parts of the country, east and west, west and south and north. And a great many have gone out as preachers and gone to the far parts of the earth. Missionaries from here and preachers from here probably running up to 50, all told 29 missionaries.

Well, brethren, a few weeks back, I wondered maybe if the old, if the light wasn’t moving, but I’ve heard the Lord say, the light of the moon shall be as the light of the sun and the light of the sun shall be seven times as the light of seven days in the day when the Lord bindeth up the breach of His people and healeth the stroke of their wounds.

Now, there’s only this question, two of them I want to ask briefly. One of them is, on whose side are we in this day? Are we on the side of take it easy, easy believism, or are we on the side of those who have been found and located and prophetically situated so we know where we are? We found ourselves and we’re looking away from the poor dead churches and poor dead entertainmentism, away to God and expecting that we shall see, this church shall see, rivers where they hadn’t been and streams where they hadn’t been before and the light multiplied seven times.

I don’t know for you, my friends, but I’m not dead yet and for myself, I want God to multiply me seven times to His church, not only to this church, not even only to the Alliance, but to His church throughout the whole earth seven times yet before I die. I want God to let something happen that He can use me seven times. If it’s a book or whatever it is, I have a prayer in my little prayer book that I carry, Oh God, I have been the worst of men, therefore let grace triumph to the chief of sinners and make me the most useful of men.

And I said once across the table, I think at a Chinese restaurant, to Brother Thomas, Brother Thomas, I want to love God more than any man in my generation. And Brother Thomas said, all right, but if you do, prepare yourself for a lot of suffering. And he’s dead, right? I don’t know that it’ll be suffering that we hear so much about.

The house burns down, or somebody gets killed. I don’t know. God never has been able to do much with me that way. He wounds my heart. That’s the way I suffer. He wounds my heart. He wounds my heart and I grieve and bleed over things, over things maybe that are none of my business, His business and so mine.

And so, I want God to wound me, wound me. The man in the East who said, Brother, I walk around with a wound. I’m happy in Jesus, but I walk around with a wound. I want that wound and thus the multiplication of the ministry.

What about you? What about you? This church, it’s not the biggest church by any means, but I think it’s an important one. And what about you? Can’t we yet ask God and expect God to come on us with a new wave of power? Those rivers will begin to trickle down from the high places where we didn’t think they were and that light that we thought was getting dim will begin to blaze up like a beacon and maybe the 29 missionaries we have out now will be multiplied twice and maybe the over 40,000 we gave to missions last year can be 75,000 in a couple more years. Do you believe that? Are you ready for that kind of thing? Or do you want to take it easy? Do you want to take it easy? Are you ready for that thing?

Well, it’s time to quit and I want everybody present here tonight that says, Mr. Tozer, I’m willing two things. I’m willing to take on me the judgment of God. I have been rebellious. I haven’t been all I should have been, and I have been cold, and I have kind of muddled along and been careless, but oh, I want to admit it. I do admit it tonight.

And then I’m willing to believe with you that God will be gracious to me and hear my voice and that he will be willing to multiply my testimony and my spiritual abilities yet seven times before the end, before the Lord returns. And I’m going to ask Brother Thomas to come up to pray and we’ll have a closing prayer. Are there such who will say, I take both the judgment and claim the promise for a new thing in my life? Will you stand where you are? Come on up, Brother Thomas, please.

Well, everybody stood. Maybe I’m not clear or else maybe you’re better people than I thought you were. But anyway, oh, may God make this real to you while our brother leads us in prayer.

Now, Lord, if we know our hearts tonight, we do want thee. We want God. We want to walk in thy way. We want not only Thy blessing, but we want Thee more than anything in this life. And as the man of God was exhorting us tonight, Lord, this thought came to me.

Here we are bound with the mechanics of running the church and the work of God. Here we are in the straitjacket of laws and bylaws and rules and regulations and methods and traditions until, Lord, we stand stiffly bound and with no power to reach out and spread our wings because we are in the straitjacket of all of these things. We would, O Lord, that thou wouldst unwrap us even as Lazarus of old was able to cast aside the grave clothes. He was loosed and let go.

Lord, help us to know how that we may be loosed from all of the things that are holding us, whatever those things may be. And let us once more know a gracious visitation of the Holy Spirit’s presence and the very God Himself, not only upon us, but within us. And give us a new sense of the heartfelt love and compassion and urgency and all that accompanies the coming of God upon His people.

Let us experience Thee once more in this age before Jesus doth return. Lord, we’re thinking of these places of the ends of the earth, especially the places where we so recently have been, out there where the need is so great and where the message must be given. Lord, here we are, handcuffed, as it were, with our feet in chains, our spirits locked up because of the many things that we’ve already mentioned.

O God, deliver thy people and visit us again with thyself. Visit us even, Lord, as we have never been visited before. And come upon us and move within us. As has been mentioned, there’s a ministry that the church here may have. There’s a ministry this great District across the vast expanses of seven states may have. There’s a new ministry that the society can have. Lord, let us have that ministry. We don’t want to be selfish, but we want God. And we feel that we’re bound.

Lord, loose us, we pray, and let us go. This we call upon thee for in earnestness tonight, Lord, in all sincerity, in heart hunger, in our soul, and in sincere desire.

O God, like the locust that comes out of its shell, spreads its wings and lifts itself and goes, Lord, let us, let us, let us in the sunshine, under the sunshine, the evaporating and the drying out of the sunshine of thy very self and the penetrating power of the Holy Spirit, just dry off all of these things with which we’re bound, Lord, and let there come about a new sense of liberation and joy and freedom in the Holy Spirit and new love to God and new sense of thy Spirit upon us.

O God, don’t allow us to get any farther complicated with the complexities of life. Deliver us, we pray, in Jesus’ name, Amen.

Tags Surrender

Messages

Tozer Talks

Post author By pshappard
Post date October 11, 2025

“Laying Up Treasures“

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Laying Up Treasures

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

June 3, 1956

The sixth chapter of Matthew, verses 19 to 21. Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth where moth and rust doth corrupt and where thieves break through and steal. But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt and where thieves do not break through nor steal. For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.

Now we hear a voice here speaking to us who are His professed followers. There are many sounds, many sounds abroad, not only the sound of the motors of cars but of planes overhead and the squeal of the jet plane leaving its vapor trail through the skies, barking of dogs and the laughter of children, and the noise of traffic and the bellowing of the radio. These are all sounds.

But the alert mind, the alert man and woman whose mind is keen, will be conscious that they are trying to get through to us, that there are many voices trying to get through to us. They want to communicate with us. They want to reach us and control our thinking and change our habits and bend our wills and capture our loyalties and shape our tastes and fix our values.

But there is a fraud behind all this, and your love and charity must not make you blind to the fact that there is a fraud back of it. That after these whose clamorous voices are being heard everywhere in print and on the air, after they have attracted us and used us and exploited us for all the market will bear and gotten rich off of us or gotten elected by us or gotten the offering from us or advanced by means of us, then they have no further use for us.

This week I have been hearing another kind of voice altogether, and I want to talk to you about it a little. I have part of it here in the text. For you see, this clamorous effort to make us listen, these people don’t care what happens to you at last. When you no longer can advance them, you are in a position where you can’t do them any good. When you can’t buy from them, nor support them, nor vote from them, nor sponsor them, then they will leave you and nature and death and the worms. They have no interest in you beyond what they can get out of you.

But here, my brethren, in the text this morning, is the voice of our great unselfish Friend. He doesn’t want to get rich off of us because it’s written that He was rich and for our sakes He became poor, that we through His poverty might be rich. He doesn’t want to advance by means of us, for who can advance Him who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God, but made Himself of no reputation, and humbled Himself, and was made in the form of a servant and the likeness of man, and being found in fashion as man, He humbled Himself still further and became obedient unto death, even the ignominious death of the cross.

How can you advance anybody that has taken a low place from the world and the heavens’ highest place? And He doesn’t want to sell us anything. The Lord Jesus Christ has nothing for sale, He only wants our love, and He doesn’t need our support. The politician kisses our baby and probably disinfects himself afterwards because he doesn’t love the baby, he loves the vote of the father and the mother.

But our Lord Jesus doesn’t need our support. All power is given unto Me in heaven and in earth, and He is the head over all things to the church. And in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was with God, and all things were made by Him, and without Him was not anything made that is made. And He upholdeth all things with the word of His power, and in Him all things consist.

Now you ask how He needs our support. He doesn’t, so let’s imagine for a moment it’s an unhealthy frame of mind to conceive of Jesus standing by the highwayside with His arms stretched up like a begging friar of the Middle Ages, wanting something from you and me. My brethren, you don’t have anything He wants. Only as He might want to separate you from that which is hurting you, He doesn’t want anything you have except your heart. My son, give me thine heart is the only cry that God has ever made to mankind that of anything that He wants.

He wants our love, but that’s all He wants. And so, what He says is all for our good. His was the loss, and ours is the gain. His was the pain, and ours is the peace, and His was the dying, and ours is the life eternal. So, I want you to listen to that voice today, not to mine, because I can be mistaken, I can be prejudiced, and no doubt I am. I can be partial, and no doubt I am, though I strive very earnestly not to be as you do. But we can be mistaken, we can be partial, we can be prejudiced, but here is One who speaks only for our good, and the man who will die for me can talk to me.

The man who wants to exploit me, I’ll resist. The man who wants me to buy his goods, I’ll dismiss. And the man who wants to use me, I’ll dismiss. But the Man who will die for me has my confidence, and that is the Voice I am hearing today, that long Eternal Voice which began before the world was and continues vibrating through all the universe.

And the wise are hearing it, and those whose ears are opened, and those who have been touched by the Holy Spirit, they hear. And that Man has my confidence, and He has my loyalty without asking for it. If He will die for me, He can have my loyalty.

I never was much for demanding loyalty. I never was much for getting up and saying, now you owe it to your denomination to do so-and-so. It’s a pretty low-grade love that has to be demanded, and it’s a pretty low-grade worship that we have to demand.

My brethren, the only loyalty I want is the loyalty I may have without asking for it, and the only loyalty He wants is the loyalty He may have without asking for it. Can you be loyal to a politician? I can’t. I have every reason to believe that he has sold out a part of his manhood to get his present job. Can you be loyal to any one political party? I couldn’t.

I have a predilection and a bent toward one of the major parties, but I couldn’t be loyal to it if it went wrong. I couldn’t even subscribe to that famous or infamous statement, that my country may she always be right, but right her wrong, my country. It is not a proof of great patriotism to say, right her wrong, my country, for to support your country when she’s wrong is to aid and abet her evil. It is the business of a patriot to love his country and try to make her right, so my loyalty is with right, and not with this or that political party, and not even to a flag when the flag goes wrong.

It was the necessity for Martin Niemöller and many others to rise and say, God is my Fuehrer, in the day when they were demanding loyalty. And if our leaders only knew it, they would make patriots out of us by making our country such a country that we could be proud of it and loyal to it without being demanded that we should.

So, I can’t be loyal to people, loyal to a denomination, loyal to the Alliance. There are those who say, if they want to dismiss a man, really want to get rid of him, they say, why, he’s not Alliance, as much as to say he’s never seen the face of God. Well, there are a lot of good people that are not Alliance, and there are a lot of Alliance people that are not good. I’m working with a society, get along all right with it, but it’s a long, long way in my heart from saying, why, whatever the Alliance teaches, that is it.

My brethren, if we teach the Bible, that is it. But if we vary from the Bible, I have no loyalty to error, regardless of where it emanates from. The man who will die for me doesn’t have to ask me for my loyalty, he can have it without asking. The man who will die for me has a right to counsel me. Now, there are counselors abroad. In fact, we’re developing a whole army of counselors. People are going to school now to learn how to be counselors, and they sit and counsel you.

Well, all right, but brethren, the only one who has a right to counsel you now, if you want to buy a camera, well, then you go to a man who knows cameras, and you say, I’d like to have a little word with you. I want to buy a camera, and I’d like to know what’s a good buy today. If you want to paint your house, you have a right to go to a painter and say, would you give me a bid on my house, I’d like to have it painted. If you are sick and you want to go to a doctor, you want to go to a good one and he’ll counsel you on diet and all the rest. That kind of counsel is one thing.

But I’m thinking about moral counsel and spiritual counsel. Counsel that has to do with my moral life, my spiritual life, and my life with my family, and my life with my country, and my life with my people. Nobody has a right to counsel me unless he is ready to give his all for me. And this Man was, this Jesus.

And so here’s what He said. Now, I want you to hear that, Voice. Remember that there’s no reason for you to resist nor brace yourself and say, I won’t hear that because it isn’t coming from me. And it isn’t coming from somebody that wants to sell you anything. The smooth, soft, velvet voice of the man who wants to sell you toothpaste.

No, don’t resist yourself now. Don’t resist this nor brace yourself because this is Jesus, our unselfish friend who was rich and became poor, who was in the form of God and became in the form of a corpse for our sakes and ours only. His was the pain and our is the joy. So, He says, lay not up for yourselves treasures on earth.

Now, what is a treasure? Well, a treasure is this. It’s whatever has your attention when you’re free to give attention to whatever you will. Now, you say my job gets my attention, but it’s not my treasure. Well, you see, it gets your attention because you have to give it to it. But your treasure is that to which you give attention when you’re not forced to.

The mother and her baby, for instance, she’s away on vacation, say, and she doesn’t have to. Her baby’s been left in the hand of a babysitter in good, good hands, and he or she’s safe. But before she sleeps at night and early in the morning and all during the day, her mind goes back to her treasure, her little treasure. It’s that that gets your attention when you’re free to give your attention to what you will. And it is that which gives you pleasure and satisfaction. That’s your treasure. And it is that by which you live. And it is what you think about when you’re alone.

Now, if you will just check on yourself sometime when you’re not being influenced by somebody, a radio on or something, and you’re alone, and for a little time it’s still, and then check on your thoughts. Whatever you’re thinking about is likely to be your treasure, unless you’re scared, and you’re thinking, or fear has hold of you, or jealousy. But if your mind’s running free, then whatever it gravitates to with pleasure, that’s your treasure too. Pleasure and treasure rhyme, and they are together because the one gives the other.

And your treasure is what you fear most to lose. What is it you fear most to lose? That’s your treasure. It’s whatever masters you, and it’s whatever gives you a feeling of confidence and well-being. Now, it may not do all of these things, but it does some of these things, and probably most of these things. So that is your treasure.

It may be money and property, or it may be any source of confidence and assurance. It may be anything that your heart gravitates to. It may be anything that gives you trust and delight. It may not be money only, but it may be whatever is precious to you and whatever you love the most. That is your treasure.

Now, where is your treasure? That’s the next question. Well, Jesus said, where your treasure is, there your heart will be. Find out where your heart is, and you’ll know where your treasure is, for your heart is always with your treasure.

Now, somebody says, but Mr. Tozer, I am a mother, and my treasure is my child. I am a young man, and my treasure is my wife, is my fiancé. I am a young woman, and my treasure is my husband. Well, you’re going to say that I can’t have any pleasure in my baby or in my wife or in my husband or in any nice thing I have. No, I’m not saying it, because, you see, treasures are relative, and there are treasures in degree.

For instance, I have a knife here that I’ve carried for a great many years. It is pure Swedish steel, and it has the Swedish coat of arms on one side. It was given to one of my boys by a Swedish politician, and he gave it to me, and I’ve carried it, chiefly because it’s quite a nice little thing, very beautiful to look at, but also because I need it occasionally, and I carry it.

Now, that’s quite a treasure, and I often show it to people and say, do you ever see one like that? That’s a treasure, but then that’s a long way from what I think about when I’m free to think about anything I will. That doesn’t give me a source of great delight or joy. I’m glad I have it. My son Wendell gave it to me, and I appreciate it, but I could lose it, and I probably wouldn’t weep, and I have no great source of pleasure here, no great confidence. I have some other treasures, too.

I have some books that I treasure. I have relatives and close people that I love and cherish, and you are perfectly free to have that kind of secondary and relative treasures, because God has said, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine heart, soul, strength, mind, and thy neighbor as thyself. There is your secondary treasure. God allows that, but he’s talking here about your primary treasure.

Now, what is that which you live for? If a man’s business keeps him from church, then he’s put his business first and his church second. He may treasure his church, but he treasures his business most. If his relatives come to visit him and he skips a prayer meeting to stay home with them, then he may treasure his church, but his relatives are above his church. If a man skips his job and ducks out of responsibility in the house of God to do something that gives him pleasure somewhere, then the house of God is second and the other thing first. Lay not up for yourselves treasures.

If you have few diamonds as I have here in your pocket, they are treasures. But Jesus didn’t mean that, because my mind doesn’t run to those diamonds I have in my pocket. There are secondary treasures, relative, down the scale. They don’t mean anything. But the treasure, the final supreme treasure, what is it? I say that it is whatever gets your major attention, gives you the most pleasure and satisfaction, gives you a sense of well-being and assurance, and draws your mind to it.

And finally, it masters you. That’s your treasure, for where your treasure is, there will your heart be also. You can know, then, where your treasure is.

Now, it’s vitally important that I know where my treasure is, because where my treasure is, as I’ve said, the heart will be also. Did you ever stop to think that to the man whose treasure is on earth, dying will be a kind of hell, because he will be violently torn away from his treasure. To the actor who loves the footlights and the applause, when he dies, he’s torn violently away from that which he lived for and gave him his highest enjoyment.

To the musician who lives for music and nothing else, the dying musician who dies out of Christ will be and suffer a kind of permanent bereavement, a kind of perpetual misery, because that which he enjoyed the most he is being torn away from. Never to hear a harmony where he’s going, never to hear the sound of singing, for there’s no singing in hell. There was singing when the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy, and God laid the foundations in the deep.

But there’s no singing in hell. There’s singing yonder when the Saints come marching home and when the beasts and elders and all the ransomed gather and join their voices in saying, Worthy is the Lamb. But the only picture of hell we have shows it without a song.

There cannot but be melody in heaven because God has made this a musical universe. He has built it upon mathematics and music is built upon mathematics, and out of it flows and comes the music of the spheres.

And so, the harmonious musical God, the composer of the universe, heaven is bound to be a place of music because it’s a place of harmony. And there can be no music in hell because it’s eternal dissonance, it’s eternal disharmony, it’s eternal discord, and there can be no music there. So the musician who has loved and lived for his music, it’ll be bereavement without end when he dies and leaves it.

The man who’s lived for his money will not take it with him, and so at the last moment he’ll die surrounded by evidences of his wealth, but he’ll be ripped away from it, torn from it like a ligament’s torn loose, and he’ll leave it. And so I say perpetual misery and permanent bereavement, if a man’s heart is one place and he’s forced to go another. But to the man whose treasure is in heaven, dying will be a joyous fulfillment, for it will be going where his treasure is. It will be perpetual delight because where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.

I have often quoted the old preacher, or the preacher now old, whom I heard testify some years ago, and he said briefly this. He said, there was a day when I had so much on earth that I loved it, but he said, now I have so much over there and so little down here that my biggest stake is over there, and so it’s easy for me to keep my face set that way.

And the man who has his treasures piled up above is going to go where his treasures are. Now please don’t let’s ruin this wondrous golden truth by thinking about stacks of money or a high pile of gold yonder. Who wants gold in heaven when he’s walking around on streets of gold? Who wants strings of pearl when the gates are made of pearls? Who wants jasper when the walls are jasper? Who wants silver pendants when silver and gold and all the diamonds and all the precious stones make up the four square city? Don’t think of that kind of treasure, please, for the treasure we lay up above is another thing altogether.

And so you must see to it, I must see to it, that my treasure is laid up in heaven. Lay up in heaven treasures for yourself. The only place where it won’t be torn away from us or we torn away from it. The man who is going to heaven but has sent his treasure ahead will rejoin his treasures there, and what will they be?

I see the Roses down in the congregation. They’re working up in that hard, hard field. I think they’ve said there’s not been a convert there, but there will be one of these times. The groundwork is being laid, and one of these days they’ll learn how to say Jesus died for sinners in the language of those aborigines. And somebody, somebody will have a flash of light from God, and it’ll be said in the New Book of Acts, the Lord opened her heart, and she’ll believe; that’ll be a treasure.

And that man who lies on the hillside out yonder, never even have been able to take his body down, broken remnant of what was a fine, happy man once. He’s lying out there with his machine on the hillside, but because he lived and flew his plane, there are people in New Guinea that believed in Christ, and there will be those who will. And my brethren, those are treasures, the people that helped.

I don’t like to talk about it, for I certainly don’t want to know my right hand to know what my left hand does, but I’m thinking about a little girl over in Germany. Irene Trattner is her name, and I took her when she was a wee little doll of a thing. Now she’s big enough to stand up and have her picture took to send back to the man in America, that’s keeping her. I never saw little Irene, I don’t know her parents, but I only heard of her, and so every once in a while, I send her the amount that keeps her.

Oh brother, I’ll never meet little Irene. She’s probably four now, and a fine-looking, high-cheeked, bone-slavic type, but a pretty little girl. I’ll never see Irene on this earth, likely. But don’t you suppose that the little it takes, it doesn’t take much. Ten dollars a month, you know that? You can keep a little one somewhere all over the earth, and almost anywhere for eight to ten dollars a month. They can live and have their clothing and grow up, and she even had a rag doll on her arm.

Well, brethren, those are treasures, and those are things you send ahead. Everybody that ever got down on his knees and said, thank God for Sister Smith, thank God for Brother Jones, thank God Father that you ever sent Mr. So-and-so or Miss So-and-so to me. That’s your treasures, brethren. That’s your treasures.

Those with the strange names and funny eyes and strange complexions all over the earth that you’ve helped, and those who are saved because you lived and were a medium through which God could work, those are treasures. Lay up your treasure above, and it may be money, it may be time, it may be your abilities, it may be your power in prayer, it may just be your affection. I don’t know what it may be with you, but whatever it is, see that God gets it. Above all things, see that God is your treasure. Jesus Christ is your treasure.

I read this text years ago in Isaiah 33.6, the fear of the Lord is his treasure. For days, and I think as I recall, weeks, that kept coming back to me as a wonderful illumination. To fear God is your treasure, to fear God. My brethren, the fear of God, the love of God, the worship of God, the desire to help humanity, that’s the treasure we lay up above. And though we may die poor as a church mouse, we’ll take our treasure with us above.

Could I tell you this story? It will take me two minutes, and then we’ll be through for the morning. I’ve told this in a sermon maybe five or ten years ago, but I want to repeat it this morning to close this little word. There lived in a town, a small town somewhere in the United States years ago, maybe a generation or more ago, a very rich man, and he owned the town, as George Jost just about owned not only the town, but everything around it, in the little town where I came from, La Jose, in Pennsylvania.

Well, he owned about everything, and one night he had a dream that he was going to die at midnight. But there was another man in that town, too, and he was known as Brother John, and he lived in a tar paper shack by the railroad track. And he did odd jobs and gave out tracts and talked to people about God and sang as he went along and patted babies on the head and cheered people as they were dying and helped the widow in her distress and then went back to his little shack, slept overnight and spent another day doing the same thing. Everybody knew Brother John and liked him.

But everybody, of course, knew and respected, if they didn’t like, this great tycoon who won’t have the town. But one night this irreligious man in love with his money had a dream. At midnight he said, I’m going to die, and was it so vivid. But the angel had said to him this, the richest man in town will die at midnight. And he said, that’s me.

So, he went down and said to his wife, I’ve had a terrible dream. He couldn’t eat breakfast. It’s a horrible, disconcerting dream. The richest man in this town, it can be nobody but me, to die at midnight, and I’m not ready.

Well, she tried to wave it off and laugh it off, but no laughing at all. And the day went by, and as the sun set, he grew more terrified. He tried his best, nobody could help him apparently, and his wife didn’t know how. And as he grew nearer to the midnight hour, his face was gray and his hands were tense, and he clutched the arms of the chair until his knuckles were white. And it was the angel’s voice had been so real, and he knew, though practical man that he was, this was too real to doubt. The town’s richest man would die at midnight.

And finally, bong, bong, went the old-fashioned clock, and he jumped like a man in the electric chair, but his heart still beat on, and he was still breathing. He looked around and waited a little until it struck itself out and gone on around past twelve. Then he began to breathe for the first time quietly, and said to his wife, I guess I was a fool, I guess I was a fool.

Well, he went back to bed and slept. Oh, how he slept for the first time since that awful night when the rich man was to die at midnight. The next morning the sun was shining brightly on his great big front porch, and he was standing out snapping his suspenders back in the old groove again. The world was his oyster. He owned it all.

Somebody went by and waited and said, good morning. He said, did you hear the news? He said, No. He said, Poor old brother John has left us. The old man said, when did he die? He said, just as the clock struck twelve last night brother John smiled and went away. The old rich man bowed his head and went slowly back into his house.

The angel hadn’t failed him. The richest man in town had died at midnight, but he lived in a tar paper shack beside the railroad. But the man who had the biggest bank account had the heaviest heart. And if he lived on, unsaved, once he was ripped away from all that and went where his reputation didn’t amount to a hill of beans. While he lived in his town, he was the big man. When he went out into eternity, he was one more speck of dust in the universe.

Brethren, hear the voice of the kind, selfless Jesus. Lay not up for yourselves treasures on earth but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven. For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also. Amen.

Tags Treasures

Messages

Tozer Talks

Post author By pshappard
Post date October 5, 2025

“God and Man–The Duality of Jesus Christ“

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God and Man–The Duality of Jesus Christ

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

March 27, 1955

The 11th verse, and the 17th and 18th, where our Lord Jesus says, I am the Good Shepherd. The good shepherd giveth his life for the sheep. The good shepherd giveth his life for the sheep. Verses 17 and 18, Therefore does my Father love Me, because I lay down My life that I might take it again. No man taketh it from Me, but I lay it down of Myself. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again. This commandment have I received of My Father. Let us pray.

Dear Lord Jesus, Thou art the Good Shepherd. In ancient days Thou didst lead Israel and Joseph like a flock. And Thou art the same unchanged Lord. And Thou art leading them that trust in Thee. We pray that tonight Thou wilt add at least one sheep to thy flock who is lost now but will be found.

O Lord Jesus, encourage us on the hard, heavy, rough way. Make the clouds to roll back and the skies be a little brighter, our hope a little sharper, our faith a little brighter. Help us tonight. Bless these friends who have come out here this cold winter night and will now listen while thy word is being expounded. O Lord, Thou hast said, preach the word. We pray thou grant that we might rightly and worthily expound Thy truth this evening. In Christ’s name, amen.

Here in these verses, we have wonderful, lofty truth. Truth that is beautiful and inspiring, but we also have profound difficulties for the intellect. But I do not apologize, nor do I admit that there is any problem for faith. There is none. I remember the little stanza by Faber when He says, How thou canst love me as thou dost, and be the God thou art, is darkness to the intellect, but sunshine to the heart. What is darkness to the intellect may be sunshine to the heart. The effort to simplify and explain all the profundities of the Christian faith, are ill-timed and ill-considered. There will always be that which is blindness and darkness to the mind, but joy and sunshine to the soul.

Now the difficulty lies in verse 17. Therefore, doth my Father love me, because I lay down my life that I might take it again. Now there is the difficulty. That God’s love for the Son arose and arises from His willingness to lay down His life for His sheep. Because you remember that our Lord Jesus also said in praying to His Father, Thou lovest Me before the foundation of the world, back before time was, the Father loved His Son. Then, therefore doth the Father love Me, because I lay down My life for My sheep.

Now there lies the difficulty. You might simply pass that over, but if you’ll do a little bit of thinking, and certainly if ever there was a time when God’s people ought to think, now is the time. If ever there was a time when we ought to consider deeply the things pertaining to our faith, now is the time. If we think deeply, we would say, well, how could it be that if the teachings of the Christian faith are right, how could it be that God loved His Son only because He was willing to die on a cross and rise again? Well, it’s darkness, or rather it’s twilight to the intellect, but I do not think that it’s beyond our explaining.

You see, my friends, the Christian faith teaches, because the Bible teaches, the two natures of Christ. Christ is not two persons, but the two natures of Christ. This is taught in Christian theology. It has been taught down the years in Christian theology that Jesus has a divine and the human nature. Let me read to you from the ancient creed.

You that are of Dutch extraction and know something about the Dutch Reformed Church, the Dutch Reformed hymnal, you will find this somewhere in the back of your Dutch Reformed hymnal, and you’ll find it also very many other places. It says this in a long explanation of the mystery of the Trinity. It says this, furthermore, it is necessary to everlasting salvation that we also believe rightly the incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Now remember, this dates back to the fourth century and is called the Athanasian Creed. This is part of it. For the right faith is that we believe and confess that our Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is God and man. God of the substance of his Father, begotten before all worlds. Man of the substance of his Mother, born into the world. Perfect God and perfect man, of a reasonable soul and human flesh subsisting. Equal to the Father as touching his Godhead, inferior to the Father as touching his manhood. Who, although He is God and man, yet is He not two, but one Christ. One, not by the conversion of the Godhead into flesh, but by the taking of the manhood into God. One altogether, not by the confusion of substance, but by the unity of person. For as the reasonable soul and flesh is one man, so God and man is one Christ.

Now that is the teaching of the Church. Down the centuries she has believed that Jesus Christ was born or begotten of the Father before all worlds but born of the substance of His Mother into the world, being perfect God and perfect man. Equal to the Father as touching His Godhead, inferior to the Father as touching His manhood.

Now we’ll explain that as we go along, because that says it for us. You know, part of learning is not getting new information, but having somebody that’s smarter than you say things for you that you wish you would have said. That’s part of learning, brethren. It isn’t that you get new information so much as you get it said for you so you can get right hold of it, so it fits into your head and into your heart.

This says for me what I never could have thought of if I lived to be 118 years old, I never could have said it. But now that somebody smarter than I am said it for me, and I realize that it’s Scriptural and fits the word of God to a tee, I can quote it and say, Now I wish I had said that. That’s it.

Now, the two natures of Christ, that’s where we find the explanation here. That He was a man and that He is man is not hard to prove. He was born as other men are born. That is, He was born of a woman. He was baby-sized when He came into the world. I don’t know how much He weighed. I don’t know how much Jewish babies weigh, but I suppose they weigh average, maybe eight, nine, six, eight, nine pounds, boys a little more than girls. But I guess maybe, say that this man, Jesus, say weighed eight pounds. Let’s say He weighed eight pounds, nine pounds, when He was born of a Jewish mother into the world.

And as soon as He was born, He began to eat and cry and grow. And He drank, of course, His mother’s milk. And when He got older, He drank the milk that they provided Him and ate food. And He worked in His supposed father’s shop and He slept. And they had to wake Him in the morning and imagine come and pull Him out of bed as they do little boys. For He was a boy among boys.

Remember it always. He was a man. And sin accepted, He lived like other men. Sin accepted. And the weaknesses contingent upon sin, He had none of them. But He was a man. And I’m sure that Mary, His mother, had to come lots of times and wake Him twice. I never knew a boy to get up the first time. The boy that gets up the first time he’s waked, unless it’s Christmas morning, never was born. And so, huh? Never, never. Nobody, no boy ever gets up. And I don’t think any girl when they’re first waked.

I mention this not to cheapen our conception of Christ, but to humanize it and to show you that this Jesus was born a baby and cried like a baby and ate like a baby and was looked after like a baby and grew like a little boy and ate and drank and worked and slept and finally died. He was a man.

And He called Himself the Son of Man. He loved that title. He was the only person that ever called Himself that. I do not think that, if I think I’m right, that anybody in the New Testament ever called Jesus the Son of Man. But He called Himself the Son of Man. Just as Abraham never said, God is the God of Abraham, but God said, I am the God of Abraham. And Jacob, surely Jacob never would have said, God is the God of Jacob, but God said, I am the God of Jacob.

So, nobody ever said, thou art the Son of Man, but Jesus said, I am the Son of Man and talked about Himself as the Son of Man. And Pilate, when the great old judge there or king, when He saw Him standing before Him the day before the crucifixion or the morning of the crucifixion, He said, ex homo, behold the man. There’s the man. He was struck with the manhood of the man Christ Jesus.

Now we know that He was a man. I don’t think that anybody would doubt that. Our Jewish friends admit that and say that He was. And some of their leaders say that He was the flower of Jewish manhood. So we all agree, Jew and Gentile and Catholic, on this, that Jesus was a man.

Now that He was and is also God is also shown in the Scriptures. He said, for instance, before Abraham was, I am, and I am is the name of Jehovah. Therefore, when He said before Abraham was, I am, He was using the same words, title, I am, as Jehovah had used, though Jesus was not Jehovah, but the son of Jehovah by eternal generation.

And He said, I saw Satan as lightning fall from heaven. Now that was before the foundation of the earth. And therefore He said it, and He must have been God. And He said, destroy this temple and I will raise it up the third day. And He said, the Son of Man has power on earth to forgive sin. And He said, the dead shall hear the voice of the Son of Man and they that hear shall live. And He said, He that has seen Me has seen the Heavenly Father. And He said, whatever ye ask the Father in My name, the Father will give you. And He said in prayer, the glory that I had with Thee before the world was, and Thou lovest Me before the foundation of the world.

So, He claimed here that He went back of creation, claimed that He went back before the world was, claimed that He had such power that the Father would give anything in His name, claimed that He had power on earth to forgive sin, claimed that He had power to raise the dead, claimed that if they destroyed His body He would rise again the third day, claimed that He antedated Abraham and saw Satan in the ancient beginnings fall from heaven.

Now there’s what He claimed for Himself, this Man of whom I’ve spoken. And I say bluntly to you, my listening people, that He was either God or lunatic and there is no middle ground. We do Him no honor and we do not complement our own intellects when we say that He was a good man only. If He was but a good man and not God, then He was a frightfully deceived man to the point of being psychopathic. He was either God or He was lunatic.

Now let us pick out the best men that the world ever knew and let us put in their mouths the words that He spoke so quietly, so calmly. For remember this man Jesus was not a raving maniac. He was not a flaming-eyed, long-haired dreamer that walked about a demagogue rousing the multitudes. He did not lift up His voice nor make his voice heard loudly in the streets, but He walked quietly among the people and only His deeds of power and His wonderful quiet words made Him any different from other men.

He looked so much like all the other Jews that walked up and down in Jerusalem that the very Roman soldier did not know which one He was. The only way they could know which one to crucify was if Judas planted a kiss on Him. He said, I know him. I have been with Him three years and I will kiss Him and then you grab Him. That will be the one.

So, He was betrayed with a kiss. If He had stood out a noble, strong, tall, shining face, beautiful one, they would not have had to go to plant a kiss on His cheek to tell which one He was. There was no beauty in Him that men should desire Him. He looked like other men. And yet the things that He said put in the mouth of any other man that ever lived would turn that man into a blasphemer and a lunatic.

Let us imagine Abraham or Moses. Let us take Moses, the lawgiver. Let us hear Moses say, Before Abraham was, I am. Well, do we know He could not have said that? We know the mother of Moses, and we know that Moses was in descent from Abraham and Isaac and Jacob. We know that Moses would have been a lunatic if He had said, Before Abraham was, I am.

Let us imagine David saying, destroy my body and I will raise it up the third day. Imagine Daniel saying, I have power on earth to forgive sin. Imagine Paul saying, The dead shall hear my voice and they that hear shall live. Imagine John saying, He that has seen me has seen the Father. Imagine Augustine saying, whatever ye ask the Father in my name He will give it you. Imagine Martin Luther saying, the glory that I had with thee before the world was. Imagine it if you can. It would make lunatics out of those men.

Not a one of them dared say it. Not the sweet singer of Israel, not the mighty harpist Isaiah, not the strong seer Ezekiel. No man dared say it, and no man could say it. And the man who said it was either right in saying it and therefore was God, or He was wrong in saying it and was mentally deranged.

But now I ask you, my brethren, could a man who thought He was God and who thought He had seen Abraham and before Abraham was, He was, who thought He could forgive sins only and was deceived, who thought that if He died He’d rise again, who thought that He had been with God before the foundation of the world, who thought that He had power in His name that prayers could be answered, who thought only that the dead should hear His voice and should rise. Suppose He only thought that, and it wasn’t true?

How then, I want to ask you, could He have done the wonderful deeds that He did? Why did the mothers bring their baby to have Him bless them? Why did the poor harlot crawl to His feet and be forgiven? Why did the publican and sinner come to Him and receive words of mercy? Why did that group, that group composed of the finest, some of the finest of the Jewish nation, why did they turn their eyes upon Him and love Him and see Him go into heaven and hear Him say that He would come back again? And why did they rise and in His name go forth to preach Him to the nations?

And why is it that wherever He is preached, men are better for it? You cannot preach a lunatic and make men better. You cannot go to Skid Row and tell a drunkard, here, believe in this lunatic, and the drunkard believes and gets free from his drunkenness. You cannot go into a death cell and preach a lunatic and have that man ready to die, die happy and singing hymns. You cannot go to a man who is bound in the throes of drink and gambling and say to that man, here, believe on this lunatic, and have him get up and believe in that man.

You cannot sit down at the bedside of a dying man and read to him out of the letters of a lunatic and that man smile and raise his feeble hand and mutter the sweet name as he goes off into the next world. You cannot take the name of a lunatic to Borneo and have them turn from head hunting and head shrinking and cannibalism to be hymn singing, joyful, happy people loving each other and living and working and doing fine deeds for other men. You cannot go to the depths of Africa and there among the mud huts and the thatched roof shacks, talk to people who eat their own relatives or eat those of other tribes.

You cannot go and preach to them a lunatic and have them stop their cannibalism and stop their idolatry and burn their idols and turn their eyes toward God in heaven and believe and stop their drinking and stop their taking of drugs and live good, happy, restful, blessed lives. No, no, my friend.

You cannot preach a lunatic and for two thousand years have people come from every clime and nation and tribe and tongue and people around the world and come and give of their substance to help the church. You cannot preach a lunatic to a young man and have him go and give up all and go to the ends of the world for nothing, for a cheap, poor little salary that you couldn’t live on in America one month. No, no, no.

These are not the words of a lunatic. Before Abraham was, I am. All a lunatic can do is make other lunatics. All a man who is a psychopathic case can do when he talks is make other people like himself.

But this quiet, peaceful, peace-loving, loving Man makes others like Himself. And the man of bad temper quiets down, and the man who beats his wife stops beating his wife, and the man who gambles begins to spend his money for groceries and good furniture, and the man who lies around drunk comes home now nights and sleeps in his own bed, and the thief stops stealing, and the liar stops lying, and the drunkard stops drinking, and the jealous person begins to hate his jealousy and seek to be freed from it. And the mean man starts being sweet-tempered, and the evil woman starts being friendly and kind.

This Man does it, and He does it because He is God. He does it because He is of the substance of His Father begotten before the world was, and of the substance of His mother born into the world. A reasonable soul and human flesh consisting, who though He is both God and man, yet is He not two but one Christ. One not by the degrading of His Godhead into flesh, but by the lifting up of manhood into God.

Oh, the nobility of this kind of truth, my brother. You don’t have to apologize for this. You don’t have to go among men looking down at the ground and wishing you were a modernist. You don’t have to go anywhere in the world and take a back seat and say, I’m sorry, but I want the lowest place because I’m just a poor Christian. The noblest, loftiest truths that ever crowned the mountain peaks of thought are found in the New Testament.

And He says, Therefore doth my Father love Me because if the Father had loved Him without any cause from the foundation of the world, if He had been with the Father before a star shone or a mountain reared its head, if He had been with God before there was an angel or a seraphim or an archangel by the sea of God, why did He have to say, Therefore my Father loves Me because I laid down my life for the sheep?

There were two natures there, my brethren. Equal to His Father as touching His godhood, less than His Father as touching His manhood. When He talked about Himself as God and equal with God, He spoke these wonderful words. But when He talked about himself as man, He humbled himself and spoke meekly as man.

Now let’s give you some examples here to illustrate what I have in mind. His two natures are here. He spoke sometimes of His godhead and sometimes of His manhood. When He said, I and my Father are one, He spoke of His ancient and unborn godhead. When He said, My Father is greater than I, He spoke of His manhood. When He said, Thou lovest me before the foundation of the world, He spoke of His godhood. When He said, therefore doth my Father love me because I lay down my life, He spoke of His manhood. When He said, all men should honor the Son as they honor the Father, He spoke of His godhood. When He said, The Son can do nothing of Himself, He spoke of His manhood.

So, the Son is God in Himself, but not God of Himself, but of the Father alone. So, there’s the darkness of it, but I think there’s a little light in that darkness.

A man wrote me a five-page letter and accused me, among other things, of being too metaphysical. He heard me preach once and said He didn’t like it. But He accused me of being metaphysical. I don’t know whether He called this metaphysics or not, but I know that it has gotten into our hymnbooks, and we have sung it, and the simple people who don’t know what the word metaphysics means have sung it. Little, black-robed ladies down the years and noble bearded men as well as fine young people have risen and sung of the deity of Jesus and of the wonders of God. They have sung the psalms of David and the golden sentences of Paul set to sweet music by a Bernard or a Montgomery or a Watts or a Wesley.

So we have here the Good Shepherd. So, when you read in the Bible and it sounds humble and lowly, and He disclaims any credit or any power or any wisdom or any goodness, no, He’s talking about His manhood.

And then when wonderfully He speaks boldly as though He were God—remember He’s speaking about His Godhood—who though He be both God and man, yet is He not two but one Christ, God that He might represent God the Father, man that He might represent us, and that He might unite God and man in one holy Person, that He might take God by His right hand and man by His right hand and clasp them together and acquaint them one with another and introduce the wandering sheep to the Heavenly Father. And He said here, the Good Shepherd giveth His life for His sheep. No man taketh it from Me. He was not a martyr.

Let us not listen to those who paint a picture of Jesus as a good man who went too far, a good man that was so extreme and so zealous that they finally slew Him and He became a martyr to a noble idea. He said, No man taketh it from Me. Not all of Jewry could have done it. Not all the armies of Rome could have done it. In the Old Testament we read of Elijah, and they sent out fifty men to take Elijah. Elijah looked up casually and said, look down there, God. He said, Fifty men. Fire came down and destroyed those men. It was repeated over and finally one man came crawling on his hands and knees and said, Please, Elijah, please.

He said, don’t burn me. How much more could this man? He said, If I wanted to, twelve legions of angels would come to My help now. Legion, they tell me, a thousand. He said, these could have come to my aid. No, no man taketh it from Me. Because He could say, Before Abraham was, I am. Destroy my body and I’ll raise it again. I have power to forgive sin. I will speak and the dead shall rise. I will sit on the throne of My great glory and before Me shall all nations come for judgment.

No man could have taken His life away from Him. A Stephen they could kill. A James they could kill with the sword. But Jesus they could not have touched. No man taketh it from Me. He wasn’t a martyr. The man who wrote about the martyr and the maid and all, He was wise enough to begin with Stephen and not with Jesus. He said, that martyr first whose eagle eye could scan beyond the blue.

That was Stephen, not Jesus. Jesus was not a martyr. No martyr lays his life down. They take away from him. But He said, I lay it down of Myself. He was a sacrifice, not a martyr. John the Baptist said, Behold the Lamb of God. And the Lamb is dear to the heart of every Jew, dear to the heart of every Jewish family from the days of Moses and the Passover. The Lamb, the Passover Lamb, they all had the Lamb. And I still guess in some Jewish circles they still do have the Passover Lamb or go through some kind of ceremony that dates back there.

But when John saw Jesus, He said, Behold the Lamb. It wasn’t a Gentile that said, Behold the Lamb. It was a Jew that said it. And He didn’t say it about a Gentile. He said it about another Jew, for Jesus was a Jew. Behold the Lamb of God. So, He was a sacrifice, not a martyr.

Now, it was by the covenant between the Father and the Son. I have power to lay My life down, and I have power to take it again. This commandment have I received of my Father. There was the covenant and the full agreement between the Father and the Son. He came from the heart of the Father to take flesh by the agreement of the Father and by the agreement of His own heart in covenant with the Father that He might die for His sheep.

Now, the Shepherd has three offices. The Good Shepherd, John 10:11, we’ve talked about, dies for His sheep. And the Great Shepherd in Hebrews 13 lives for His sheep. And the Chief Shepherd in 1 Peter 5 comes for His sheep. Notice that Hebrew passage, a very wonderful passage. It says, Now the God of peace that brought again from the dead our Lord Jesus, that Great Shepherd of the sheep, through the blood of the everlasting covenant, make you perfect in every good work to do His will, working in you that which is well-pleasing in His sight, through Jesus Christ, to whom be glory forever and ever. He is here called the Great Shepherd of the sheep. What is He as a Great Shepherd doing? As a Great Shepherd He is at the right hand of the Father, caring for His sheep, praying for His sheep.

Arise, my soul, arise, we sang tonight. Shake off thy guilty fear as the Bleeding Sacrifice that in thy behalf appears. Who is that bleeding sacrifice? The man, Christ Jesus.

That Great Shepherd is a good, faithful, loyal Shepherd. He voluntarily laid down His life for His sheep. And you know He laid down His life for you, whether you believe it or not. He laid down His life for you, whether you knew it or not up to tonight. He laid down His life for you, whether you ever do anything about it or not. He did it. He put you everlastingly in debt, this shepherd, by laying down His life for the sheep. And if you turn against Him and smite the very cheek that was once dead on a cross for you, it’s still true. The Shepherd laid down His life for the sheep, the good, faithful Shepherd.

Now the Great Shepherd, above all man’s hate, and above death, and above sickness, and above time, and above space, and at the right hand of the Almighty God, He sits and advocates above, the Savior by the throne of love. And on His hands are the names of His people, and on His shoulders and cut into His bosom, like the high priest of the ancient temple, He carries the names of His people. My poor little name, so little known in this world, but there engraven on the stone carried by the great high priest, Jesus Christ, at the right hand of God, the Good Shepherd, the Great Shepherd, the Shepherd of Israel, and the Shepherd of His people.

So, He’s there, the Great Shepherd. But that’s not all. First Peter 5 says, feed the flock of God which is among you. You see, He had this in mind. Peter had heard this 10th chapter of John spoken by Jesus himself, and so He said, feed the flock of God which is among you, taking the oversight thereof, willingly, not for filthy lucre’s sake, but of a ready mind, neither as being lords over God’s heritage, but being ensamples to the flock.

And when the Chief Shepherd shall appear, ye shall receive a crown of glory that fadeth not away. Here He’s called the Chief Shepherd. As the Good Shepherd, He dies for His sheep. As the Great Shepherd, He lives for His sheep. And as the Chief Shepherd, He comes for His sheep.

Brethren, the next major event in the history of the world will not be the dropping of a cobalt bomb on Moscow or New York. It will not be the defeat or the victory of Russia. It will not be common commercial supersonic travel. It will not be any of the scientific wonders that will certainly develop within the next few years. It will not be any of those things. The next major event in the history of the world will be when the Chief Shepherd appears to crown His faithful people and take His flock out of a dingy, sin-blasted world to take them to be with Him. That’s the next major event of the world.

Now, I don’t know when it’ll happen. Don’t you dare to interpret what I say as being that I teach that the Lord will come tonight or tomorrow. I don’t know when He’ll come. I’m not that close to the secret counsels of the Almighty. I only know that there’ll never be an event as major as that event when He does come. If it’s a thousand years or a hundred or ten or five or one, when it comes, it’ll be an event second only to His first coming.

When the Chief Shepherd appears, then He shall crown those who have been faithful to Him. There’s a motive, you see. There is an objective. There’s something to drive at. There’s a reason for being a Christian.

I want to close now by asking, He is the Good Shepherd and He died for you. And He is the Great Shepherd and He is pleading for His sheep. And He is the Chief Shepherd and He’s coming for His sheep. But I want to ask you, are you one of His found sheep? Are you one of His found sheep? The Good Shepherd.

I heard the voice of Jesus say, come unto me and rest. Lay down, thou weary one, lay down thy head upon My breast. I came to Jesus as I was weary and worn and sad. I found in Him a resting place and He has made me glad. I heard the voice of Jesus say, I am this dark world light. Come unto me, thy morn shall rise and all thy days be bright. I came to Jesus and I found in Him my star, my sun. And in His light of life, I’ll walk till traveling days are done.

Have you heard His voice calling you home? Have you come? Will you come? Will you come now? The Good Shepherd who claims you by right of life laid down. If He wanted your money or wanted your vote, I wouldn’t represent Him. If He wanted to make you a victim and a blind follower, I wouldn’t represent Him. But He proved that He had nothing to claim from you by giving you all He had. He poured out His life for you, wonderful love.

And when the Good Shepherd gave His life for the sheep surely, He wasn’t out to get anything from the sheep. He doesn’t want anything you have; He wants your love. Remember that the shepherd-sheep relationship is a relationship of faith and love, not a relationship of law, but of faith and love and loyalty and trust.

So, you can right now, where you are, turn your faith and love to the Shepherd of the sheep. And right where you are, you can this minute believe and put your trust in the great Good Shepherd who died for you. And from the right hand of the Father, He’ll be your Great Shepherd. And when He comes as the Chief Shepherd of the world, He’ll receive you and take you to Himself. Are you, His sheep?

Oh, I think of myself as being a pretty scrubby sheep. Sheep come in with cockleburrs in their wool and Spanish needles and chunks torn out where they sneaked under a barbed wire fence, and bruises where they carelessly batted up against a sharp rock. But they’re still sheep, and they’re still recognized by the shepherd, and they’re still known by him, and they still know his voice.

And that’s what He meant when He had David write, The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures, and He leadeth me beside the still waters, and He restoreth my soul. What does that mean, He restoreth my soul? Why, his soul got bit out of quack, and the Great Shepherd restores his soul again.

And He anointeth my head with oil, and only one person out of ten thousand knows what it meant. He anointeth my head with oil. But the old Jewish shepherds used to call their sheep in at the cool of the day, when the night birds were beginning to croak in the dark shadows of the trees, when the first stars were appearing.

As He stood in the door, and they passed by him, and He grabbed each head and pulled it up and looked down at the face. And if there were any scars or rather new, fresh wounds where maybe they’d gotten bumped or some old sheep had batted them or they had bumped into a rock or had gotten scratched, He had a horn of oil, and He carefully poured this oil and rubbed it into the sore. The next morning it was beginning to heal, and in a day or two it was all right. He anointeth my head with oil.

My cup runneth over, and how many know what that means? The shepherd not only had his horn of oil for the sheep that had a bruised head, but He had a bit of water there for the sheep that had been too slow or too stupid or too stubborn. When the Lord let them beside the still water, the sheep was too busy and didn’t get a drink.

And so, when the shepherd looked at him, He notices he’s thirsty, and so He has some water for him. My cup runneth over. He gives him a cup of water, not a little stingy, grudging cup, but runs it over. The sheep gets all He wants.

Well, all I want to know is, tonight, is He your Shepherd? If He isn’t, this would be the night, the very night.

Tags God Man, Jesus Christ