Month: November 2025

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“The Doctrine of the Remnant I“

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The Doctrine of the Remnant I

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

December 1, 1957

I want to talk about a doctrine in the Bible that is very alarming. And I am afraid, I am very much afraid, that the Bible is a more alarming book than we know. I love this little number we sang tonight, but I’m afraid of it. That is, I’m afraid of what we’ll do with it. Thy word is like a garden, Lord, with flowers bright and fair, and everyone who seeks may pluck a lovely cluster there. Thy word is like a mine, for there are hidden jewels for searchers. Thy word is like a starry host, with a thousand rays of light.

All that is true. I like the song, I recommend it, I enjoy singing it, I enjoy hearing it sung. But I’m a little bit afraid that that is the attitude we take toward the Scriptures, that it is a beautiful jewel to wear around our neck or on our finger, or a corsage to wear to dress up occasions, that it is a star to shine on us, that it is fragrance, it’s all that. But it is something more than that. And in our sinful arrogance, I am afraid we’re not letting the word of God mean to us what it ought to mean.

Now listen to what Esaias said. That was the way Paul said it. Esaias also crieth concerning Israel, Though the number of the children of Israel be as the sand of the sea, a remnant shall be saved, for he will finish the work and cut it short in righteousness. Because a short work will the Lord make upon the earth. Though the number of the children of Israel be as the sand of the sea, only a remnant shall be saved.

Now here is the doctrine, and whatever the educators may be saying and whatever the current religious vogue may be, here is the doctrine clearly taught in the Scriptures, a doctrine which cultists and false teachers have misread and rested to their own destruction. For every cultist says that I’m the remnant, and every group that meets says we are the people.

But I refuse to reject a doctrine because somebody else has rested the doctrine. And I have no starry host tonight for you to admire, nor any posies for you to smell, but a terrible doctrine that hurts me and that bothers me and that makes me weak and be disturbed. It is the doctrine of the remnant.

And what is that doctrine? It is simply this, and it’s all through the Scriptures taught, that our blind, fallen, sinful world of mankind at any given time, that, I repeat, in our fallen world of mankind at any given time, the vast majority, the overwhelming majority, is lost. And by lost we mean not that they’ve missed their way or come short of the mark or been less than they wanted to be or failed to fulfill their dreams or any of that. By lost we mean alienated from God and enemy to Him. We mean by lost without pardon, without life, and without hope.

Now hear me because I am not repeating words but telling you seriously that the Bible teaches this, that at any given time the vast majority of mankind is lost, alienated from God without pardon, without forgiveness, and without hope. Yet a remnant shall be saved. That’s the other half of the doctrine. Yet a remnant shall be saved.

Now what does a remnant mean? It means a small fragment. It means a surviving trace. It means something that yet remains when the larger body is somewhere else. So that this is the alarming doctrine taught in the Scriptures, that in this hour, 1957, the closing weeks of the year, that the vast majority of mankind is lost, but that there is a remnant saved. The Romans text deals with Israel, but I take it because it sets forth clearly the doctrine as taught as applying to all the human race and to the Church too.

Now this was true among the nations before Abraham, that only a few were saved. It was true of Israel after Abraham, and it’s true of the Church since Pentecost. You see, we believe what we want to believe, and we don’t want to believe anything that disturbs us. When someone blows a fuse, we say he’s disturbed. Now that’s our word, he’s disturbed.

But the old Lutherans said faith is a disturbing thing, perturbing they called it. And to believe the Bible is not to wear a flower on your buttonhole, on your coat, but it is to be disturbed and alarmed. And I am alarmed, my friends, because it’s been true since Pentecost that of the vast number of people who call themselves Christians, the overwhelming majority are nominal and a remnant is saved. That of all the Jews who were born of the seed of Abraham, the vast majority is lost and a remnant is saved.

Now look at the examples in the Bible. Jesus said, in the days of Noah, and the flood was upon the world of ungodly. Now look, according to the Scripture, Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord. And there were seven members of his family, and Peter said that Noah, the eighth person, there were seven other members of his family, and they were saved out of that whole population. I do not know what the population was, but I know that at the time of the flood, there were eight persons saved out of a whole population. And I know that it is written as it was in the days of Noah, so shall it be in the days of the coming of the Son of Man.

And then frequently we find in the Scriptures where Israel is referred to, though the number of the children of Israel be as the sand of the sea, only a remnant shall be saved. But somebody says, don’t you remember, Mr. Tozer, you’re taking it too seriously. Don’t you remember when Elijah felt the way you feel? And Elijah crawled off and said, O Lord, I alone am left. And God said, cheer up, Elijah, I have news for you. Seven thousand there are in Israel that have not bowed the knee to Baal nor kissed his image. And that sounds like an awful lot. That would fill the biggest church. That would twice fill nearly Moody Church, one of the largest, if not the largest church in the city.

So, isn’t that encouraging to know that there were in Israel seven thousand true Jews who had not bowed the knee to Baal? Well, suppose the population of Israel at that time was seven million, and I think that’s a very, very conservative count. Suppose that the population of Israel was seven million. That would mean one-tenth of one percent had not bowed the knee to Baal, and all the rest had. It would mean one in a thousand. If you were to take at that time a thousand Jews, nine hundred and ninety-nine of them were weekly bowing the knee to Baal to keep out of trouble, and only one man stood bold in the one thousand.

But suppose for the sake of absolute fairness we cut the population of Israel in half and say there were only three million, five hundred thousand, half of that. Well, it then only means one in five hundred. It means that every time you saw a synagogue or a building with five hundred Jews reading the Torah or listening to the chant of the priest, that you had four hundred and ninety-nine of them that were secretly following Baal and one that was saved.

Now I’m not saying this. This is written the Book. One in a thousand or at most one in five hundred. And at Christ’s first coming, remember my friends, at Christ’s first coming there were only a few that recognized him. We take it for granted just as Israel did. Israel believed that when Messiah came, they wouldn’t know it.

They believed just what Samson believed when he went to sleep with his head in the lap of Delilah. He believed that he was well set for life and that he had had some experience in religion and therefore there was nothing to worry about. But when he woke up he found that he had been captured and his eyes were soon put out and he was grinding at the mill and was making sport for, in the name of Dagon, the false god. He took himself for granted, which always is a bad and dangerous thing to do.

We either take ourselves for granted and are at peace or we get disturbed and then pray through and find the peace. Most believers today take themselves for granted and have a false peace. Where if they did what the Bible, this doctrine alone would teach them to do, they would be bothered and alarmed about themselves, and then they would go to God with an open Bible and let the Bible cut them to pieces and put them together again. Then give them peace. And the peace they have when they have been chopped to pieces by the Holy Ghost and by the sword of the Spirit, that peace then is a legitimate peace.

There are two kinds of tranquility, don’t forget it. Well, maybe there are three kinds now. There’s the kind you buy in bottles, and then there’s the kind that you get from taking yourself for granted and believing good things about yourself that are not true. That brings a certain tranquility to the mind.

Then there is the tranquility that comes following a disturbance of the soul that shakes it to its foundation, that shakes it to its very foundation and drives the man or the woman to God with an open Bible to cry, O God, search me and know my heart. Search me and see if there was any wicked way in me and lead me in the everlasting way.

And then when God does that and gets done with it, then we have an experience in God that gives us tranquility that’s grounded upon the Rock. But most of evangelical Christians today, the leaders go out to bring them tranquility. They go out to bring them peace. And the Lord does not at first offer us tranquility at all. The Lord at first offers us deliverance and forgiveness and renewal and the making of things right.

And following that comes tranquility. But we are purveying tranquility now and selling it like soap and asking our people in the name of John 3:16, to come and get tranquilized. And so we have a tranquilized church that is enjoying herself immensely at her banquets and her times of fun and her coffee clutches and her fellowships. And then she’s singing about the Lord, the Word of the Lord. That’s like a flower garden.

Now I believe it and I hope we sing it every once in a while, but you got to know what it means when you sing it, my brethren, or it leads you astray. So will the Psalms for that in the words of Jesus and Paul. I only call attention to it because there’s danger that we make the Word of God to be something to give us tranquility.

Go into the churches and the little ones that are left open all day in the busy sections, you’ll find people come in and sit down. They do it to, as the poet said, to loaf and invite their souls and call in their thoughts that roam abroad and get still. Well, you know that businessmen do that, and advertising men do that. And mystics do that from India and from Burma. That getting a hold of yourself and getting still in the middle of the day, that’s not necessarily a Christian thing. It’s a good thing, but it isn’t enough. And we gear our services so to tranquilize people and paralyze them.

Well, we ought to be alarmed by this doctrine of the remnant. We ought not to allow ourselves to take ourselves for granted. We ought to be alarmed about it. And I ought to say, Tozer, does this mean you? Are you in this or where are you here? For there were 7,000 who didn’t bow the knee to Baal, which may have been only, I repeat, one-tenth of one percent. It may only have been one in a thousand. And if that’s true, then what about me?

But you say, I think, Brother Tozer, you ought to be satisfied and restful about the whole thing you preach. Paul says, After I have preached the word, I myself, I fear lest I be made a castaway. I’m not talking for the moment about eternal security now. I’m talking about what Paul said. Paul said he was afraid that he could preach and be a castaway. And I have known preachers preach a lifetime and end up dirty, storytelling, filthy old men. And it’s possible for us to teach Bible school, and be on boards, and sing in choirs, and take part in church services, and then find at last we’re castaways, and that we have never been of the remnant at all.

Now, brethren, that’s an alarming thing, and I don’t apologize for alarming you. I’m afraid that we’re not alarmed enough. We ought to be disturbed about this, for it is here, and it is summed up there in the text, Though the number of the children of Israel be as the sands by the sea, yet a remnant shall be saved, and a remnant means a small fragment, a surviving trace, shall be saved, just a little bit of the greater number.

Now, when Christ came to the world the first time, He found them taking themselves for granted. They said, we will know the Messiah when He comes. Are we not taught in the Scriptures? Have we not listened to the rabbis? Are we not of the fundamentalistic persuasion? Do we not know the truth? And therefore, when He came, they looked straight at Him and said, thou hast a devil. They looked straight at the One that they’d been reading about in their synagogues and said, this fellow has a devil. Not all of them said it, but a tragically high percentage of them thought things like that about Him.

Well, there were a few old friends of God. I’ve preached here and then on the radio about God’s aged friends. There were a few. But when you think that the population of Jerusalem alone at the time of the Passover was a million, and at Pentecost it was a million people in that city, every place was crammed full, wherever they could bed down and tents around, and 3,000 got converted. We say, what a vast harvest it was.

Well, 3,000 out of one million isn’t a vast harvest, I would say, my friends. And I wonder if there’s ever been a time when there was a really vast harvest.

I know there have been times, I know it was said of John Paton that he went to the New Hebrides and found not a Christian, and when he came away there was not a heathen. But I have always crossed my fingers when I read that statement, because it isn’t according to the doctrine of the remnant. For the doctrine of the remnant is though the number of the religious people should be as the sands of the sea, yet only a remnant shall be saved. It isn’t they couldn’t be. It isn’t that God doesn’t want them to be, but it’s just that they are not.

Well, when Christ came there were the shepherds and there were the wise men, and we’re going to be walking with shepherds and humping along over the desert with wise men now for another six weeks. And it’s all right, we do that once a year, and call it the Advent season. And we’ll hear about these friends of God, and there were a few of them, and we’re glad for them. But the point is they were pitifully small, as the world says, percentagewise.

Well, then, at the second coming of Jesus, listen, he says that because iniquity shall abound, the love of the many shall wax cold. Now, it doesn’t say the love of many only, but every student of the Greek will tell you the same thing. There’s an article, a positive, definite article in there, the, the love of the many shall wax cold.

And Jesus said, sort of flung it off from Him as a, shrugged it out of Himself, so to speak. Nevertheless, when the Son of Man cometh, will He find faith on the earth? He didn’t say He won’t find faith, but He said, will He find faith? So that at the second coming of Christ, it’ll be as it was at the days of Noah. And in the days of Noah, Noah the eighth person was saved by water, by the ark, and the rest of the population drowned.

And then, if you want still more support for the doctrine, read church history and see. A small fragment, a surviving trace always kept the faith, while the others took things for granted. You know what’s wrong with us as a church here? We’re taking ourselves for granted, that’s all.

We are assuming that which may not be true at all, which is founded upon wishful hoping and not upon sound biblical experience, in many cases. We have not been disturbed enough. We have not allowed God to plow furrows on our backs. We have not dared to go before God and have the examination made. We’ve been afraid of what God would find, and we’d rather wait and wait and wait and wait and wait. And so we’ve waited and settled down.

And there’s always been a small fragment, a remnant, and they have been in the midst of all the rest. And while the million worshipped with their lips, and there were always millions who worshipped with their lips, always, you don’t need to imagine that it’s any indication of vast spirituality or any high degree of holiness when you see a church door open and spill out multitudes onto the sidewalk. Follow them along, follow them a half a block, and see how they live. That’s the way to tell. For by your fruits you shall know them. Ask them to lead in prayer. Announce a prayer meeting and see where they’ll go. And then announce a banquet and see how they’ll come. You know, come and go, come and go, stop and go. In the church of God the stop-and-go sign is when it says go, it’s banquet. When it says stop, it’s prayer meeting. And the church of God follows it.

We smile about it, but it’s an alarming thing, my friends. And I don’t want to come up to the Lord having soothed and petted. We’ve got a big gray cat at home, and she’ll come and lie down in the middle of the floor and turn up wanting to tickle her tummy. She likes to be played with and have her ears scratched. Well, she just wants pleasure and wants to get fun out of living, and just soothed. And we preachers are sent out to soothe.

Oh, why do I preach like this? It was before I listened to the radio broadcast this afternoon, the religious broadcast this afternoon. I heard one preacher preach, and then I heard the rest. A free Methodist preacher had something to say, and he was talking about John Wesley and Charles. Outside of that, my brethren, I don’t believe it’s worth a while. Just save your wattage, because you don’t hear very much. I know Fuller preaches the Word, and I know Billy Graham preaches the gospel, and there are a few that preach the gospel, but I know for the most part it’s simply back-scratching and ear-tickling.

And we are simply petting the old cat instead of giving her 15 minutes to get out. Well, read Church history and see. Read Church history and see. See the fragment that lived in the midst of it all. Read about the Waldensians and the friends of God and the Brethren of the Common Life and how few there were, but how many went to church. Tread my court, says God.

Well, my brethren, it’s possible to worship God with our lips and not worship God with our lives. But I want to tell you that if your life doesn’t worship God, your lips don’t worship God either. In the most beautiful hymns in all the world.

Ray, do you know what I grieve over? Now, maybe you won’t like this. Ray and I don’t always agree when it comes down to music and things like that. We agree on hymns and church music, but he’s got a broader understanding than I have, and I’ve just got ignorance and a pugnacious disposition.

But do you know what I worry about? I’m worrying about so many people singing the Messiah over the next five weeks that won’t have the remotest notion what it’s about. They won’t know what it’s about. They’ll stand and sing, come unto him, come unto him, until you could cry, and they won’t know what it means.

And I’ve seen them stand great, vague, spangled, overstuffed, hard-voiced, contraltos. Behold, a virgin shall conceive and bring forth a child. That beautiful passage from Isaiah, while the very tone of the voice indicated she’d never been within shouting distance of the virgin’s Son.

Too bad, my brethren, too bad that we can sing the passion of Matthew and the Messiah in all the grand numbers. When Handel wrote it, I heard the other day, somebody was explaining over the radio about the great man Handel. He said, when I was through me what I saw heaven opened and all the angels of God gathered.

That’s how he felt, but you can sing it and only enjoy its music. We can come and sing hymns here in this church and only enjoy the dignity of the music as a relief from rock and roll.

Brethren, always remember there is a remnant in the earth. I’m just going to give you a little talk about the remnant. Next Sunday night, I’m going to talk about where is the remnant, who is the remnant. But tonight, I want to talk about the remnant just a little more.

Let me read you about the remnant once, back 900 years, 500 years, 600 years before Christ was born. He cried also in mine ears with a loud voice, saying, cause them that have charge over the city to draw near, even every man with his destroying weapon in his hand. Behold, six men came from the way of the higher gate, which lies toward the north, and every man had a slaughter weapon in his hand.

One man among them was clothed with linen, and had a writer’s inkhorn at his side. They went in and stood beside the brazen altar, and the glory of the God of Israel was gone up from the cherub, where he was, to the threshold of the house. And he called to the man clothed with linen, which had the writer’s ink horn by his side.

And the Lord said unto him, go through the midst of the city and through the midst of Jerusalem, and set a mark upon the foreheads of the men that sigh and that cry for all the abominations that are done in the midst thereof. And to the others he said in mine hearing, Go ye after him through the city and smite, and let not your eyes spare, neither have pity. But come not near any man upon whom is the mark, and then these terrible words begin at my sanctuary.

We say, begin in the Kremlin, O God, begin in the Kremlin, and destroy those godless wretches. God says, begin at my sanctuary. We say, go down to the corner where men in half-lighted rooms sit and slurp beer. Go down there, O ye with the destroying weapon in your hand.

God says, Begin at the steps of My church. Begin at My sanctuary. We say, go to the church where the pastor has nothing to preach but poetry. But God says, begin at My sanctuary. But he says, look out, watch for the mark on the forehead, that indelible mark.

He sent the man, the white-collar man first, the man with the linen. He sent him first with an inkhorn, indelible ink. He said, go mark him, mark him. And he said, which ones will I mark? The ones that stand and pray the longest? The ones that give the most to missions? No, no, he said, that’s not the test. Here is the test in a day, in a day of corruption. Here is the test, them that sigh and cry for all the abominations that are done in the midst of Jerusalem.

That’s all they have to do. Not for those that succeeded in stopping it. There are some things that are like a wave of the sea. You can stand and Paul himself couldn’t shout it back. It’ll engulf him. But you don’t have to get the mark of the remnant on your forehead.

You don’t have to succeed and you don’t have to be popular. You only have to sigh and cry for the abominations that are taking place in the earth. I can’t stop people from doing what they’re doing.

I can’t, I can’t get people to stop, but at least I can grieve because they won’t stop. And I’m going to do that. And I’m going to let my tears water the footsteps of those who go astray. And when they will not, they will not, the churches will not come back to New Testament standards and worship the Lord our God in the beauty of holiness. If I can’t make them, do it or persuade them to do it in this awful hour of crisis, at least I can weep because they won’t come. And I can sigh if I can’t weep.

I said Wednesday night, I’m not a weeping man. I wasn’t born that tears are not high up on my inside of me and it takes something to make them rise and overflow. But if I can’t weep, I can sigh. They cry and they sigh for the abominations that be done in the midst thereof.

It has become a positive burden to read the Saturday papers anymore and to notice what my brethren are preaching about and what they’re doing to try to persuade a few people to come to hear them preach.

Well, I don’t know what the future holds, but I know one thing, that rather than betray the sheep of God, rather than lie to them and deceive them and keep them agitated and stirred up with all kinds of popular topics, rather than take my material from Time magazine, I’ll preach the word to empty seats and sigh and cry for the abomination that is in the earth. So God says, begin at my sanctuary. Then they began at the ancient men which were before the house.

These young people are the trouble. These young people are filled with lust and wild ideas. Scripture says, begin with the ancient men which are before the house. These old bearded pillars of the church, says the Holy Ghost, begin with them. And they went forth and slew in the city, and I was left. And I fell upon my face and cried, O Lord God, wilt thou destroy the residue, there’s the remnant, wilt thou destroy the residue of Israel in thy pouring out of thy fury?

And he said, Iniquity of the house of Israel, and Jacob’s exceeding great, and the land is full of blood, and the city is full of perverseness. And they say, The Lord seeth not. And as for me also, mine eye shall not spare, neither will I have pity. And behold, a man clothed with linen, which had the inkhorn by his side, reported the matter, saying, I have done as thou hast commanded me.

Some people have the mark, and you say, who are they? I want to preach about who they are next week. I’m only going to tip my hand on one thing. I’m not going to tell you it’s this church. And I’m not going to tell you it’s the Christian and Missionary Alliance. After that, I want you to come because I do want to talk about this terrible doctrine of the remnant, which teaches that in every generation and at any given time, the vast, the overwhelming majority of the population is lost, alienated from God, unshriven, unforgiven, and without hope for God in the world or the world to come. But that there is a remnant according to grace, and that remnant is found with a mark on their forehead. A mark of success, not necessarily. A mark of sighing for the state of affairs.

Would you pray for me? They listen to me. They don’t come in vast numbers to this church, but they listen to me. And I can have entrée to almost any religious magazine published. And will you pray that the Lord will give me wisdom to know what to say and what to write, that there might be a stirring up and a perturbation and a disturbance, and that instead of thinking of the Word of God as a beautiful relaxer to read just before you slip away into slumberland at night, that we should begin to think of it as a disturbing book to drive us to our knees in tears and self-accusation?

If the evangelical church, if the fundamentalist believing church won’t accept this, then I can at least sigh because they won’t and cry to God because they don’t. So let’s pray, and let’s believe God together.

Now we’re going to close. When you go to the hymn sing tonight, don’t sing junk. I know, don’t think you do. But sing only that which warms your heart and makes Jesus Christ glorious. And then slip away home, and don’t waste your time telling jokes and making quips, and lose everything you’ve got today in the house of God.

Have dealings with God, won’t you friends? Have dealings with God before you close your eyes and slumber this night.

Father, we pray. First, we want to thank thee that we have light on this. We want to thank thee that in thine infinite mercy thou hast not let us go like cattle to the slaughter, not knowing where we’re going, and because we’re fat and sleek, imagining that we’re all right when actually we’ve been fattened for the slaughter. We thank thee, Lord, that we’ve got light on this. Now help us to walk in it.

Bless us, everyone. Take away all false hopes and all unscriptural expectations, and pull us back to the Word of the Lord. O Father, out as we go down the steps and onto the sidewalk tonight, mark the forehead of them that sigh and cry.

Great God, have mercy upon our America. Have mercy, we pray, upon our America. With its dozen of gods, at least a dozen gods, have mercy, Father, and help us to turn from idols to serve Thee and to wait for thy Son from heaven.

Dismiss us now, we ask in the name of Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

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Tozer Talks

“That We May Know Him“

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That We May Know Him

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

March 17, 1957

Now, tonight I want to talk about this, that I may know Him. In the first place, I believe that God created the heaven and the earth and all things that are therein. Everybody that believes it, would you risk an amen?

I believe that God made the heaven and the earth and all things that are therein. And I believe that He made all living creatures, and He made each one with a kind of life peculiar to it, with a kind of life which He chose for it. And then He adjusted that kind of life to an environment which He chose for it.

And as long as each living creature stays in its own environment and lives the kind of life God gave it, that creature fulfills the purpose for which it was made. And God being who He is, there can be nothing said of any creature higher than this. He fulfilled that for which God made him.

Now that’s all. You can’t go higher than that. You can put statues in the park. You can write their names on the walls of famous buildings. You can give them prizes of all sorts, Nobel Prizes and Pulitzer Prizes and every kind of prize. Or you can canonize them if you wish.

But when it’s all been said, you cannot say any more of any creature than this. God made him, gave him a certain kind of life, gave him an environment to inhabit. And he has lived in that environment and in relaxed confidence has lived the kind of life God gave him.

Now that’s all. The angels and archangels and seraphim and cherubim and saints and apostles and prophets can’t go any further than that. Now it says here that the angels, which kept not their first estate but left their own habitation, God hath reserved in everlasting chains under darkness, under the judgment of the great day.

And here we see a certain order of being, or a certain number of beings of an order that left their first estate. That is, they left the place for which they had been created. And anyone, anybody, any intelligent creature, any moral creature anywhere that leaves its proper sphere and estate will know only endless defeat and pain, because they’re not fulfilling the end for which they were created. Now that I say generally of any living being anywhere.

And incidentally, brothers and sisters, you and I are willingly poverty-stricken because we’re scared stiff. We’re afraid to use our religious imagination and we’re afraid to believe what the Bible teaches us. The Bible talks about angels and archangels, at least one, and seraph and cherubims and watchers and holy ones and principalities and powers. And you and I insist on people, that’s all. We are afraid to rise and let our faith-filled imagination encompass the wonder of the filled universe, filled with beings.

Now, God created man in His own image, and of no other creature is this spoken. I cannot find in the Scriptures where God said He ever created a seraph in His image nor a cherubim with all of his faces and his wings, nor an angel or archangel or principality or power.

But it says that God made man in His image. God said affectionately, let us make man in our own image, so in the image of God created he him. And blew into him the breath of life and man became a living soul. So that man, now hear this, you can take this out, misapply it, misquote it and make a radical out of me if you want to do it, but I’m sure you won’t.

But as originally created, man was more like God than any other creature that ever was created. As originally created, man was more like God because of no other creature did God say that he made them in his own image. And a wise old German Christian said this, there is nothing in the universe so much like God as the human soul.

Now of course he took for granted and meant that man’s soul was sinful and lost. And in that sense, sin is not like God and the soul that sinneth it shall die. But there is something basic in human nature and in the soul of man that can become more like God than anything else in the universe. I wish we could believe that.

I wish that we could accept that as a part of our creed to not be afraid that if we state it and say we believe it, somebody will charge us with believing man’s all right.

Man’s not all right. Man’s a fallen creature. Man went down like an automobile that left the highway at a curve and went over a gully down in among the rocks. And man is not all right. Man is lost.

Man is not damned. I heard a preacher this afternoon talking about my poor lost damned soul. No, no, never call yourself damned, brother. You’re lost if you’re not converted. You’re lost but you’re not damned. That’s another thing altogether.

But God created man to know Him and He created man to know Him in a sense and to a degree which no other creature can know God. The creatures that are in the presence of God may not know God as well as the man soul which God has made in His image. Don’t you see, don’t you see that there has to be a degree of life there which enables a man to know God.

Don’t you see that the cat there under your table or the dog there lying on the rug, you’ll put a record on. You put on something by Mozart or Beethoven, and he’ll never even open a sleepy eye because there’s nothing in that cat nature that can understand Beethoven or Mozart. Put on, as we have at home, some of the fine records of London, the great choir there singing Christmas carols.

Well, no dog will get up and go over and sit down and gaze in spite of that little ad. He knows his master’s voice. No dog ever looked into a phonograph. If he did, it was curiosity. He can’t appreciate it because he hasn’t got the kind of life that can appreciate it. But a two-year-old baby. . .

We thought at first that our grandchildren were unusual because when you’d play the music, they’d sway their little bodies and then we find out all babies do that, that everybody’s like that, that it’s built into them, they’ve got it in them to do it. God put them into the rhythm of the universe. And I’m not afraid of rhythm, I don’t go for Elvis Presley, but I’m not one afraid of rhythm because the beat of God, the up, down, north, south, east, west, it’s God the musician in His universe.

And so, the little babies are born into the stream of it, as a fish is born into the water, into the stream. And when they’re old enough to hear music, they’re old enough to smile and sway to it. Because it’s the dance of life, it’s God gave them that kind of nature.

Now, my brother, God made us to know Him in a way that no other creature can know Him. He made us to know Him to a degree that no other creature can know Him because no other creature has quite the capabilities that man has. Certainly, the angels have capabilities, they’re holy angels and they obey God. And certainly the seraphim around the throne shine in the fire of God and they know God.

But they don’t know God as man will know God when redemption has been completed. For God means that man should be higher than the angels. God made him a little while lower than the angels that he might raise him higher than the angels. And when it’s all over and we know as we are known, we shall rank higher in the hierarchy of God than the very angels themselves.

My brethren, man by his sin lost this knowledge. He lost it. I read about it over here in Romans, the first chapter, because that when they knew God they glorified Him not as God, neither were thankful, but became vain in their imaginations and their foolish heart was darkened. And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a reprobate mind to do those things which were not convenient, as one version says, to do disgraceful acts.

So that man by his sin lost this knowledge of God. So that now man, though he has the potentiality to know God in a way no creature in heaven can know God, he still doesn’t know God because his conduct is unworthy of his high origin and his heart is filled with a huge emptiness, if you know what I mean.

And so that’s what’s the matter with us. That’s why we have these crises all the time. That’s why the President was killed in Iraq and the newscasters are worried immediately lest the next man who is elected president will be anti-American and may turn out to be anti-missionary.

Well, what’s the matter with us? They told us that science and philosophy and psychiatry and psychology and sociology and all of this should make the world a better place in which to live, and we could all, men could all be their brothers, each other’s brothers. But we’re hating each other more than ever since the beginning, and there’s more hatred and more suspicion and more treachery and more spying and more espionage and more treachery and more selling out than ever there has been since the beginning of the world.

What’s the matter? It’s because man is filled with a vast emptiness. He was created to know God, but by his sin he chose the gutter and would like not to have God in his knowledge. And so man is like a bird shut in a cage or like a fish taken from the water.

And so, man instinctively craves for the image and misses it, misses the eternal being, misses the life, misses the light, misses the friend. And that’s what’s the matter with us, and we don’t know it. Why do fifteen kids get into an old banged-up car with pipes and hammers and go out on the prowl, looking for anybody, not anybody in particular, but anybody? Because down in the deep soul of them is the knowledge that sometime they’ve got to die, that this world isn’t enough, and there’s a longing they don’t understand. And so, it turns in on them and turns astray and becomes perverted. And like the alcoholic, they choose the gutter and love the gutter.

Now, what does the Bible teach about them not knowing God, the sinners? Well, it teaches that God can be known. It teaches that God has not abandoned the human race as He abandoned the angels that sinned. Why did He abandon the angels that sinned? Because they were never made in the image of God in the first place. They were made moral creatures, capable of moral and spiritual perception, but they were not made in the image of God.

Why did not God abandon man? Because man was made in the image of God. And so God gave man a chance and sent a Redeemer.

How does the Bible teach that man can know God? It teaches that in Christ and through Christ, He is the image of the invisible God, the brightness of His glory and the express image of His person. Our old Father said this about Him, I believe in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only begotten Son of God, begotten of Him before all ages. God of God, light of light, very God of very Gods, begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father, by whom all things were made. And this is what the Bible teaches. It teaches that everything the Godhead is, Christ is.

Don’t listen to the liberals who say God revealed Himself through Christ. Don’t listen to the liberals who say that Christ reflected more of God than other people did. Don’t listen to the liberals who say that as one piece of metal might be more radioactive than another, so certain individuals are tuned to God in a way that other individuals aren’t, and they are therefore religious geniuses, and that Jesus Christ was the supreme religious genius, catching and reflecting more of God than any other man.

Don’t listen to that, because all that amounts to is to insult Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ was not a reflector of deity only, though He was that. He was not a revealer of deity only, though He was that. He was, and is, and always has been, and never can cease to be, God, light of light, God of God, very God of very Gods, begotten, not created. And so that all that the Godhead is, Christ is.

And so to know Jesus Christ is to be back at the ancient fountain again, back at the ancient fountain again. I don’t say this is a result of advancing years, because I felt this way when I was converted at seventeen. I certainly didn’t have it developed as far, but I went back to the roots of my being.

And I tell you, my brethren, that we have pushed our way on into artificiality so far that it’s a wonderful thing by one wonderful swift act of our souls in faith and prayer to go back to the ancient fountain of our being and start over again. And there, know God for ourselves, all over again, back where Adam started, back beyond where Adam started, back beyond where the world began, back beyond where the angels began, back at that ancient, glorious, trembling fountain we call the being of God, the Triune God.

And in Jesus Christ we go back there. In Jesus Christ we leave all the environs and we go back to the ancient source of our being, fixed on this blissful center, rest, old John Newton wrote.

Now rest my long-divided heart, fixed on this blissful center, rest. And so back at the ancient source of our being we find the beginnings and start all over again in Christ. That I may know him, said Paul, that I may know Him.

Now my question tonight is why Christians know Christ so little and know God so little. Now I’d like to say to you this, that not all of the Godhead can be known. If this discourages any of you, it will be a most wonderful thing for you, because a real good shaking down is good for Christians sometimes, a shaking them back to where they belong. And if any of you have the idea that you know pretty well all that can be known about God, you’re just about to burst. Let me warn you, just about two more foot-pound pressure and you’ll blow. And when you blow it will take God a long time to get you back together again.

Brother, not all of the Godhead can ever be known, because that being that was capable of knowing all of the Godhead would have to be equal to the Godhead. Just as you can’t pour a quart of water into a vessel holding less than a quart, so you can’t pour all of the Godhead into an experience of anyone being less than God.

Now, I have quoted before what some of the ancient fathers said in arguing for the Trinity. They said, look at it like this, God the Eternal Father is an infinite God and His name is love and He is love.

And so, the very nature of love is to give itself. And He could not give His love fully to anybody that was not fully equal to Him. And so there we have the Ancient Son who was equal with the Father. And the Eternal Father poured out His love into the Son who could contain it and contain all of it, because the Son is equal with the Father.

And then said these wise reasoning old brethren, they said for the Ancient Father to pour His love out on the Son would mean that a medium of communication had to be there equal to the Father and the Son, and that was the Holy Ghost.

So, there you have the Trinity, the Ancient Father in the fullness of His love pouring Himself through the Holy Ghost who is in being equal to Him and to the Son who is in being equal to the Spirit and the Father. So not all of the Godhead can be known by man. The limitless infinite sea of being we call God, filling and surrounding and enfolding and upholding, but all that can be known of God is revealed in Christ. And when Paul said that I may know Him, that I may know Him, no, no, here’s not intellectual at all. You don’t know God as you know the multiplication table or know the Morse code.

When I was a kid, sixteen or so, I learned the Morse code, and I could send and receive messages or—not too well, but I was working on it for a while, anyhow. We’re over the old telegraph instrument. And like you can know almost anything, there’s practically nothing you can’t learn. But it’s intellectual.

When Paul said that I may know Him, he did not mean intellectually. He meant by experience, personally and consciously. He meant that I may know God personally, myself, spirit touching spirit and heart touching heart and conscious knowledge of God.

You know, the old Henry Suso, when I get to heaven, I’m going to hunt some of these old fellows up. I’ll be satisfied to sit and just gaze for a thousand years, but after that, if I get enough courage, I’ll go hunt up some of these dear old brethren. One of them will be Henry Suso. Henry Suso said this, there is a vast difference between hearing a sweet lute sweetly played and merely hearing that one has been played.

Now, it’s one thing to hear that there’s been a concert, it’s another thing to have heard the concert. It’s one thing to hear that there has been a planet suddenly discovered, but it’s another thing to have gazed on that planet. This describes almost all Christians, not all, certainly, but a great many, a too high percentage of Christians. They’ve heard there’s a sweet lute that’s been sweetly played, but they’ve never heard it themselves. They know God only by hearsay.

And I don’t want to be harsh and hard on people, friends, but it’s my conviction, a growing conviction with me, that that’s what’s the matter with us now, what’s the matter with the Church on earth, the Gospel Church, the believing Church, that we tend to know God only by hearsay. Some have never heard of Him except by hearsay, and others have heard Him and known Him, but only faintly. We’ve heard only faint echoes of God’s voice instead of ever hearing the voice of God.

You can always tell a man or a woman who’s been into the Presence and come out. There is a vibrancy in the testimony that you don’t find anywhere else.

I claim I can know as much about a place by reading about it as most people who go there. But everybody that goes and travels abroad and comes back, they always smile at that. If you’ve actually been there, you’ll know it in a way you can’t know if you’ve only read a book about it.

But most Christians have only read a book about God, that’s all. They’ve heard the faint echo of the voice of God, they’ve seen a reflection of the light of God, they’ve seen a photograph instead of God Himself, and their personal knowledge of God is very slight.

I don’t want to hurt your feelings, though I will if I have to, but I would say that I am afraid that a lot of us here, for all our reputation, we don’t know God for Himself very much.

Church attendance and fellowship and singing, we lean on each other all the time, and we have social fellowship and religious activity and all the various religious props and lean on each other. But that’s one thing, my brethren, that’s one thing. Jesus had that, He had His brethren, He had His work to do, He had His healing and raising from the dead and opening eyes and unstopping ears and answering questions and blessing people, He had that. But He also had a personal knowledge of God that was strong and real and individual, so that when He went into the mountain to pray and waited on God all night, He didn’t feel that He was alone, but God was there.

In our modern Christian service, it’s do this and do that and go here and go there, and the result is we know God only by hearsay, we hear of the sweet lute but we never hear it played for ourselves. We want things instead of God.

You see, God wants to give Himself, God wants to impart Himself with His gifts. Separated from God, every gift is dangerous, any gift is dangerous. If I were to pray for all the seventeen gifts in the epistles of Paul, the gifts of the Spirit, and I got them all, it would be dangerous to me, if in giving them God didn’t give Himself with them. God wants to give you Himself. Didn’t I say a while ago, and isn’t it true in the Scriptures, that when God creates an order of life, He creates an environment for that life?

And when God made man in His image and redeemed Him by the blood of the Lamb back to that image, is not God the environment of the Christian? The great sea we call the ocean is the environment for whales, and the air is the environment for birds, and the earth is the environment for the nightcrawler and the mole. But the heart of God is the environment for the Christian.

And God meant that we should live in that heart of God. And the great grief in heaven is that we want God’s gifts and don’t want God. And even in the Church today, even in the Church it’s the same.

And if God gives you a rose without giving you God, He’s giving you a rose with a thorn. And if He gives you a garden without giving you Himself, He’s given you a garden with a serpent. And if He gives you wine without giving you God, He’s given you that with which you may destroy yourself.

Now, God wants to give you Himself, and you and I, we’ve got to repudiate this modern seeking God for His benefits–what we can get out of God. You write a book—anybody can write a book now and sell it, anybody—all you have to do is write a book on “17 ways to get things from God,” and you’ll have immediate sale, “14 ways to have peace of mind,” and away they go by the ton. “How we can bring God to our service,” and the printers can’t keep up with the books. We want God for what we can get out of Him. And that’s the great blight that rests upon us, brethren, the great blight that rests upon us.

The Sovereign God wants to be loved for Himself, and He wants to be appreciated for Himself. And more than that, that’s only part of it and not even half of it. The other part is that He wants us to know that when we have Him, we have all the rest.

Jesus said it in another way, “Seek ye first the kingdom of heaven and his righteousness, the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you.” Why does God forgive sin? He forgives sin because sin is the shadow that stands between Him, God, and us. And if God is ever going to know us and we know God, the shadow has to be removed so God forgives sin.

Why does God pour out His Spirit on us when we trust Him and believe that He will? It’s in order that the Spirit, when He comes, will take the things of mine and show them unto you. Why does God answer prayer? In order that in answering prayer He might unveil His own face to us? And why has God given us the Scriptures, that through the Scriptures we might know God?

The Scriptures, my brethren, are not an end in themselves. You hear them talked about as though they were an end in themselves. No man can believe more fully in the verbal inspiration of the Scriptures as originally given than I do.

But verbal inspiration or any other theory of inspiration, when it makes the Bible an end in itself, is a dangerous thing, because the purpose of the Bible is not to lead you to the Bible. The purpose of the Bible is to lead you to God.

And the Bible is a lattice through which we look and see our beloved gathering lilies with the dew on his hair, as we read in the Song of Solomon. The Bible is the ladder, the Bible is the means of communication, the Bible is the entrance in, and the Bible is never an end in itself.

But the modern vogue is, use God, use God. Oh, that God would raise up somebody that could say this, that could make His church see it, that could make the orthodox church see it, the Bible people, the fundamentalists, the evangelicals, that he’d raise up somebody that could make us see it.

We’ve undergone for so long, indoctrination and brainwashing in a kind of creed that makes God to be our servant instead of our being God’s servant. And we write tracts on how, if we pray, God sends money, and He does. I’d have starved to death the first few years of my ministry if I couldn’t have prayed money in, my wife and I.

So, I believe God sends money, but it’s pretty cheap when we get all excited because God sends money. Somebody over in the Baliem Valley was praying for money to buy an outboard motor, they needed an outboard motor. Of course they were praying for it. Don’t you think they weren’t praying for it? And somebody over here heard them, and so we’re sending $350 to buy them a motor over there. I believe in that.

But that’s what you might say, that’s down on the level of the routine. There’s something grander and higher and finer and richer than that. And if God doesn’t give Himself over there along with the motor, they’ll wreck that motor themselves.

God wants to give gifts, but every gift He gives, He wants to give Himself with His gift. And that’s the wonder of it, my brethren. He wants to give Himself.

But nowadays, use God, use God, use God to get you a job. Use God to give you safety. Use God to give you peace of mind, and heaven at last.

All right, but God is searching for those who will say, God, I don’t know. My heart craves Thee, I want Thee. My heart is, my heart is pained, nor can it be at rest till it finds rest in Thee. And I’d rather have Thee and nothing than to have everything rolling in my way. You can’t be sure God’s making you a prosperous businessman. You can’t be sure at all. You’re prospering, you say, because you tithe. Well, go ahead and tithe, double it, it’s all right with me. I think you should. But your prosperity may not come from God at all. It may be the economic level of the day in which you live. It may be you’re pretty sharp, cutting corners.

It’s better to have God and a dime than have all the riches in the world and not have God with it. God is searching for those who will put beneath the cloud of forgetting. The brother said, all the things that ever God hath made, for he is a jealous lover, and he suffers no rivals. And he don’t want anybody to stand in there and take his place or even remotely take his place. He wants us to seek him, to seek God.

Incidentally, quoting Wesley, somebody asked him about seeking and he said, well, let me tell you something. If anybody comes preaching, telling you to seek any more than more love, don’t listen to them. Don’t listen to them. The only preaching you ought to listen to is that which says, seek more of God. Seek to know the Triune God. You can’t all know all the Godhead. You can know all the Godhead revealed in Christ to your soul infinitely more than you now know.

And if the church of Christ would come back to this and would get sober-minded and serious and stop fooling and would begin to seek for God Himself, then all the gifts of God would come along with God and all the blessings of God would come along with God. We want the fullness of the Spirit. We want clean hearts. We want a principle within. We want love divine, all love excelling. We want all of that.

But if we seek those things apart from God, we’ve only found a rose with a thorn. But if we find God, then we find all of these things too in God. And better I say a thousand times, know God through Jesus Christ intimately. But you say, I have accepted Christ and I’m converted. Oh, very wonderfully good. That’s good. But do you know Him?

The man Paul had been converted to, and he was one of the world’s great Christians when he wrote that, I may know Him. That I may know Him and the power of His resurrection and the fellowship of His suffering, being made conformable unto His death.

He was plowing on and plowing ahead, and it appeared to be that the knowledge of Jesus Christ, what he called the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus, my Lord, the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus, my Lord.

My friend, this is what you and I are here for. Somebody wants to know what the deeper life is. I almost withdraw from the term anymore. I almost shrink from hearing it because everybody’s talking about the deeper life, but nobody seems to want God. God’s the deeper life, Jesus Christ is the deeper life.

And as I plunge further into the knowledge of the Triune God, my heart moves out into God further, and there’s less of me and more of God, and the life becomes deepened and strengthened in God. So that this is the next step, that I might know Him, and anything that keeps me from knowing Him is my enemy.

If it is a friend that stands between Him and me, that friend is an enemy. If it is a gift that stands between Him and me, that gift is an enemy. If it is an ambition that stands between Him and me, that ambition is an enemy. If it is a defeat I had once, and I allow that defeat to get me down and stand between Him and me, I’m to forget that, forgetting all the things that are past, I plow forward and press on. And if it’s a victory that I had back there, that victory stands between me and the knowledge of God. I’ve got to put that victory behind me.

Oh, I suppose I might as well have stayed in bed. I don’t know whether anybody knows what I mean. Maybe by the grace of God you do, I think some of you do.

Dear friends, do you see what I mean, that all of this cheapening of the gospel by making God our servant, God running around with a basket, giving away presents, or throwing dimes like John D. Rockefeller, and we scramble for the dimes, shiny new dimes, and then write tracts about it. I found a dime that had the image of God on it.

Wonderful, isn’t it, but nothing compared with the deep knowledge of God Himself. To know Him, and you know this knowledge of God, nobody can argue out of you. Nobody can argue out of it. They can come and point a stiff, angry finger at you and call you every name the law permits. And when they’re through, you’ll feel bad about it, but you still know you know God.

They can come and argue with you and give you Scripture to prove you’re all wrong, and when they’re finished, you can say, well, you’re a pretty good expositor, but I happen to know God. You got to me too late. You’ve come to prove I can’t, and I met God before you ever came to prove it. So we can know God for ourselves, that I might know Him.

So, dear friends, some of you are finding Him, I know that. Some of you are plowing through. I’ve gotten letters, I’ve gotten phone calls, I have had personal conversations, and I know that some of you are finding the Lord in a new, rich, deep, and wonderful way over these last weeks, and I’m glad. But how about the rest? Shan’t we seek Him?

Now, let’s pray.

Now, before we do pray, why, we’re going to find out if there are those who would say, I want you to remember me. Your own longing heart is talking back to you, and the yearning within you is bigger than you are, and you’re not clear, maybe, quite about it all, intellectually, but your heart cries for God, and you want to know what Paul knew, and you want to know what God has revealed and given to the experience of his saints down the years, and you say, pray for me, Mr. Tozer, that I might have the spiritual courage and the faith to rise and put behind me and under my feet whatever it is, friendships, or ambitions, or hopes, or plans, or gifts, or victories, or anything that prevents me from knowing the Lord Jesus.

Would you raise your hand, and we’ll pray for you. Anybody here that would say, I do want you, Mr. Tozer, put their hand up, we’re going to pray, and say, yes, God bless you. And who else? You want to know Him, yes, back there I see you. And who else? You want to know Him, yes, yes, yes.

I’m glad for the hands that have gone up, now let’s have a little time of prayer.

Lord Jesus, Lord Jesus, in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. We thank thee, Lord Jesus, that when we come to Thee we go back to the beginning. We go back of Paul and back of Moses, back of Abraham, back of Adam. We go back to the beginning, the light that shineth and lighteth every man. And in Thee we see the Father, and through Thee we know the Father.

We pray for these who have requested prayer tonight. In the name of Thy Son, Jesus, we pray, Father, that Thou will take these young people and these older ones, and lead them in deep pastures and green pastures, and through ways that may be rough and hard and even painful and chastening, but lead them, Lord, lead them until all is behind them, everything’s behind them, and they’ve put behind them everything, everything, what they were and what they are and what they’re proud of and what they’re ashamed of and what the victories they’ve had and the defeats they’ve had and the mistakes they’ve made.

Oh, we pray Thee, lead these friends on and teach them how to look forward and not backward and seek Thy face.

We know, Father, that when we talk about these things, some come because they feel that they’ll be given a capsule which they can swallow or a text they can memorize or some one little trick they can do.

O Lord God, it is not thus received, but rather by the cultivation of the knowledge of God in Christ Jesus, by faith and humility and prayer and trust and confidence and obedience, and the pressing onward until at last the mountaintop appears in view, and up out of the mist we come to the sunlight.

Come, Holy Spirit, Heavenly Dove, come with all thy quickening power. Come, we pray Thee and shed abroad the Savior’s love that it may quicken ours.

We pray for all of these, and then we pray, Lord, for some who didn’t request prayer for anything, but who should have and who perhaps are this night without even salvation. And we pray for all the churches that are bringing their service to close right now or will be within half an hour or so.

Bless them all, Lord, and grant, we pray Thee, that every net may have fishes, and that every shepherd may find lost sheep, and every father see sons come home. Let there be victory in the Church of Jesus Christ this night. We pray Thee throughout all this area.

To Thee we’ll give praise. We ask this thing through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

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“The Relationship Between the Shepherd and the Sheep“

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The Relationship Between the Shepherd and the Sheep

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

March 6, 1955

Now, in that tenth chapter of John, Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that entereth not in by the door into the sheepfold, but climbeth up some other way, the same is a thief and a robber. But he that entereth in by the door is the shepherd of the sheep. To him the porter openeth, and the sheep hear his voice, and he calleth his own sheep by name, and leadeth them out. And when he putteth forth his own sheep, he goeth before them, and the sheep follow him, for they know his voice. And a stranger will they not follow, but will flee from him, for they know not the voice of strangers. This parable spake Jesus unto them, but they understood not what things they were which He spake unto them.

Now, here we have it again, this lovely picture of Christ and His followers, the Shepherd and the sheep. And of all the figures used in the Bible to designate our Lord and His people, to me there is none so charming as this of the shepherd and the sheep. It is certainly the most popular and best understood of all the figures. It is understood even among people who have never seen a sheep at all except in a picture. Those who have lived in places where sheep could not grow and do not grow nevertheless somehow manage to get a hold of this beautiful figure and understand it.

Now we deal here with the relation of the shepherd to his sheep, and I point out to you that it is a personal relation. And again, I repeat, that it is not as it is with the Western sheepherders. The Western sheepherder raises the sheep for profit. It’s a commercial proposition altogether. He doesn’t know his sheep. He only knows how many sheep he has, that’s all. He doesn’t know them by name, and there are many of them that will be born and grow up to the age to be sold or butchered, and he’ll never see them at all. Or if he does see them, he’ll stand on some knoll.

You know what a knoll is? Do you know what it is? A knoll? There are no knolls around here. Everything’s flat land, but out home we had knolls. A little bumpy hill, not much of a hill, an apology for a hill.

He might stand on a knoll somewhere and overlook his great flock of sheep and see them as a white undulating surface yonder and know they’re his, and know them, their number, and know their weight, and know their size, and how much wool they’ll produce, and how much meat he can get out of them. But he doesn’t really know them. He doesn’t claim to know them. It’s a commercial proposition. He lives someplace else and his sheep live maybe in another state.

But ah, not so with David and the eastern shepherd and the shepherds that our Lord knew. He hadn’t so many sheep, but what he could take care of them all personally. And he knew them all by name. He went to the trouble of naming all of his sheep, and they stayed by the shepherd. And while they were by him, there was confidence and acquaintance and affection. Confidence and acquaintance and affection.

But no, no western sheepherder, his sheep have no confidence in him. They don’t know he exists. And if he came out and yelled at them, they’d all run. But the eastern shepherd has; he’s brought his sheep up, and he knows them from the time they were born. He helped to get them started in this life, and nursed them, and held them on his shoulder when they went astray and taught them. And so, there’s a warm, personal there.

Now that is the beauty of Christianity. The faith that brings us into personal relation to the Lord Jesus Christ. We said in the song that our brother was teaching us here tonight, I forget how it’s worded exactly, but something that I have found a resting place, not in device nor creed.

Now we all believe in creed, of course, for a creed is what we believe. Otherwise, we couldn’t say I believe if we didn’t, the word creed, credo means I believe, so we do believe in creed. But our resting place is not in what we believe, but who we believe.

And what we believe has meaning only because of who we believe. If we believed a thing but didn’t know who said it, nor where it came from, nor how it got its being, we’d have a very cold and heartless and mechanical religion. But the beauty of Christianity is that it is not a code nor a creed, though it has its code and its creed, but that it is the religion of the Person.

Our brother down here said he was saved from a religion, and I understand, can understand how a man can react from the word religion. And from much that’s called religion, I myself react violently away from it all, because religion without the person is only a chain around the neck. The man who turns from unbelief to religion is exchanging a chain of iron and taking a chain of gold, but it’s a chain nevertheless, and it binds him as surely as the chain of iron bound him.

But the man who has Jesus Christ lays off all the chains, and he has no chain to bind him at all. Here it’s the personal religion, the person of Jesus Christ our Lord. I wish that all of the preachers might begin to preach the Person, the Person and the Presence, these two wonderful truths, the Person and the Presence.

It says here that he leads his sheep. Now, when he leads his sheep out, you know, they must leave their comfortable fold and go forth. Isn’t it a strange thing how we love in the mornings particularly to stay in bed? Back in the First World War, they had a funny little song the men used to sing. I don’t recall exactly all the words verbatim, but it was, Oh, how I hate to get up in the morning. Oh, how I’d rather remain in bed. And they’d sing that mournfully with a wry smile. They loved it. And then one fellow said that the time would come when he would murder the bugler and spend the rest of his life in bed. That was the funny song they sang in the First World War. Well, we love that. We love to bed down.

Now, it’s funny, nobody likes to go to bed, nobody likes to get up. And once you have bedded down, you hate to get out. And sheep are like that. They like to rest and stay in the fold, and it’s not until the shepherd’s voice rouses them that they get up at all and go.

But the Scripture says he leaded them out. It’s almost humorous, and it’s certainly pleasant to contemplate, though certainly it’s not a wise counsel to follow.

You remember those disciples in the early days of the Church when in the Book of Acts, they were all assembled in Jerusalem, all of them. And the Lord had said, Go ye into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature. And He had said, Ye shall be my witnesses in Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria and unto the uttermost parts of the earth.

Now, that was God’s formula for the evangelization of the world. But they stayed tight in Jerusalem, right where they had been born, right where the Pentecost had come. And they bedded down in the Jerusalem fold, and then the Lord sent along persecution in that eighth chapter of Acts.

And they were driven everywhere, and they went everywhere. And when they went, they went preaching the Lord. The Lord led them forth, but he actually had to send persecution to get them out of their warm, snug nest, and get them on their feet and get them going where they should go. So, the Scripture here says, The Lord leadeth them out.

Now, he leads them out for a number of reasons. There is no food in the fold. The food’s in the green pastures. And he has to get them up on their feet and lead them out to the green pastures that they may eat their fill and then lie down beside the still waters. Then they’ve got to have some exercise.

I believe that a church like this is likely to be pretty well fed, but I am not so sure about the exercise. We need exercise as well as food. The sheep that lies down in the green pastures and beside the still waters is likely to get very fat and very useless unless he takes some exercise.

So, the Lord leads them out in order they might get their exercise. And then there’s growth also, and experience. The sheep that would stay in the fold would have no experience at all.

Now, Christians also must go forth. They must go forth to work and to travel and to get experience. I said to Brother McAfee yesterday as we were traveling along, I said, Do you suppose… I was thinking about my trip to Virginia and how I hated to go. And I said, Do you think the time will ever come when I’ll not feel bad when I have to go anywhere? And he said, No, I don’t think so. The time will never come because I just don’t like to travel. I’d have made a good tree. Just plant me in the backyard and put a little fence around me and I’d have stayed right there.

But God won’t let it happen. He says, I’ll lead forth my sheep. And he didn’t say we were to be planted like trees in this instance. He certainly called it, said we were to be planted in the house of the Lord, but that’s another figure of another meaning. But we are to go forth and we are to travel about and do things and get exposed to things.

I don’t believe in an isolated and insulated Christianity. I do not believe in sanctification by insulation. I told them down at Urbana, and I repeat it tonight, I don’t believe that God will make us holy by keeping us insulated. And put the thick coating of moral and social insulation around us so we never bump elbows with anybody that doesn’t believe exactly as we do.

How do you know what you’ll do until you’re put into a situation? How do you know what you’ll do out yonder if you never go out yonder? So the Lord leads us forth that we may get tempted and that we may get experienced. And you wonder that I say that we might be tempted? Jesus being full of the Holy Ghost was led by whom? By the Spirit. Where? Into the wilderness. For what? To be tempted by whom? The devil. You didn’t follow me, but you should. Being full of the Holy Ghost, he was led into the wilderness to be tempted of the devil. And the same Lord says that as he is in the world, so are we in the world.

So, he takes us out of that snug place and takes us out into the world not to mingle with its pleasures, certainly, and not to do as it does. We are to be there as a protest and a conscience to the world, not to obey and follow the world, but to be there anyway. And we Christians, I say, we have to meet our enemies. They’re out there.

And then it says here he goeth before them. Now I want you to get that, that he goeth before them. And I want you to know that Christ is always there first.

I don’t know what your tomorrow may be. If I did know your tomorrow and I had it in my power to have you each pass by me and write a hasty prescription or a future for you, lay out your little horoscope, I wouldn’t give it to you, because it’s better to be in the dark and trust God from day to day than to know all the details down the years. That’s why I don’t ever recommend that any Christian ever go to a fortune teller or a necromancer or a seer or any of the rest of these madams. I wonder why it’s always women.

You never hear of a man telling any fortune. Have you? I wonder why it’s always the women that tell fortunes. It used to be back in the days of the Depression they had these phrenologists and dark-looking women, I don’t know what they were, Syrian or whatever it might be, but these dark women and they had the human head all blocked off into sections and you went in there and you sat down and for a dollar or whatever it was she told you all about your character and predicted your future.

I don’t want to know my future. One step’s enough for me. I ask not to see the distant scene. One step’s enough for me. You may be coming into a critical period in your life. Some crisis may be out yonder only a few days or weeks or months away and if you knew it was there you’d have weeks or months to worry. But if you don’t know it’s coming you’ll have your Lord and you’ll get through it all right.

So, I don’t want to know my tomorrows and I don’t want you to know your tomorrows. Only remember one thing, Christ is always there first. He does not sit back like a general in a comfortable tent and tell his soldiers to charge into the mouth of the cannon, but wherever he sends them he’s there before them. He’s not only there before them but he’s there with them.

Lo, I am with you always, and remember, He never asks you to go where He will not go and where He is not going. And He never asks you to do what He has not done and is not doing. And He never asks you to suffer what He has not suffered and will not suffer. We’re in this together, He and we.

And we are not alone even though we may think we are. We’re not alone, we’re in this together. When we threw our lot in with the Shepherd and we were his found sheep, we went in with Him so that it is now with Him.

There is that unity, that intimacy, that close connection, that close tie, closer than the tie of husband and wife, closer than the tie of mother and child, closer than the tie of patriotism or love of family, is this tie of the shepherd and his sheep. Now our Shepherd is present.

Oh, I don’t know what we can do to make people see this. Our Shepherd is present. He’s here in the place. And this is the most significant thing about this church, the most significant possible thing. Not that I’m here or that either one of these brethren are here. That’s not significant really. What is significant is that we are all sheep gathered around a shepherd and that that Shepherd is actually here in the midst.

Do you believe in what the Anglicans call the real presence? Of course they use it of the Eucharist. They use it of the Lord’s Supper. They talk about the real presence. But is anybody going to arrest me if I borrow their phrase and may give an application to it they didn’t intend? I believe in the real presence too. But I believe that real presence is not only in the bread and wine. I believe that real presence is in the fellowship, in the hearts of His people.

That is the most important thing here tonight, that our Lord, our Shepherd is here and we’re sheep of His pasture gathered around the Shepherd. That, you know, is the explanation. That’s the philosophy back of my bigoted narrow views of things that I’m supposed to hold. Tozer has missed the boat and he is living in another generation, they say, and that kind of thing. But I have good logical grounds for my position that when you’re in the presence of the Shepherd, you don’t perform and show off to the Shepherd.

Our little 18-month-old grandson, why, his father has taught him the cutest little trick you ever heard. He can get a job in some youth organization if he just gets a little older because he’s got the spirit of it. He’ll do some cute thing and then applaud to beat the band, applaud himself.

Well, applauding ourselves, I don’t think, I don’t think the Lord wants us to perform for Him and applaud ourselves and applaud each other. He wants us to lie quiet and like Mary, listen to His voice and hear what He has to say. And if there’s any applause, let it come from somewhere else, but certainly not from, from each other. And, and certainly we don’t expect the Lord to applaud us.

We’re in the presence of the Lord. Churches are not, they ought not to give performances at all. I never liked to hear anybody say our choir will give a performance. Trained monkeys give performances, but Christians, they, they minister to the Lord. There’s the expression, they minister to the Lord. But in our day, we give performances.

And then they say, this artist will be there in person. And he will be there in person tonight at the such-and-such Loggerhead Baptist Church. Is that so, brother? Were you expecting to be there in spirit or there by proxy? Of course, he’ll be there in person or else he won’t be there. This artist will be there. Why, he couldn’t sweep off the stage in Grand Opera. He couldn’t, he couldn’t sing at the funeral of the leading lady’s pet poodle. And yet he’s called an artist. And they say, our brother will be here in present, in, in person. This artist will be here in person. And he gets up and saws himself off a solo with a, with a steel saw. And everybody says, wasn’t it wonderful? Brethren, that’s not church to me at all. That’s not church to me.

Church to me is, is to get where the Shepherd is and all put our pride under our feet and, and get all our heads empty of what we know and forget our family background and who we descended from. I know who you descended from. You can’t fool me. That old scoundrel that you descended from, I know what he did. He sinned and fell and tumbled into the muck. And you and I are here because we descended from him. But I don’t, I don’t like that. I don’t like to throw this spotlight on men and on people.

The Shepherd is here. That’s the most significant thing that I know of. Jesus Christ our Lord is in the midst.

Here in the 13th of Acts, here was Paul and a lot of the others of them. It tells who they were. They were the big fellows of the church. Barnabas and Simeon and Lucius and Mannan and Barnabas, I didn’t name him, and Saul and the rest of them. And, but what do you suppose? Had they come to hear these men perform? No. As they ministered to the Lord and fasted, the Holy Ghost said, separate me Barnabas and Saul for the work whereunto I have called them.

And when they had fasted and prayed and laid their hands on them, they sent them away. And they being sent forth by the Holy Ghost departed under Seleucia and from thence to Cyprus and so on. Now that was it. They met and ministered to the Lord. They didn’t gather to Paul, they gathered to the Lord. And the only true church is a church that’s gathered to a Presence. The church, a group that is gathered to a man is a religious group. But a group that is gathered to the Presence is a church.

And so, our Shepherd is here. How can He be here and yet be at the right hand of God the Father Almighty? Ah, the mystery of the Godhead I cannot understand. The indivisible substance that you cannot divide the substance that He said, I will be with you. And He said, I will, the Father will send the Comforter unto you.

And so, we have the Father, Son and Holy Ghost in the midst. And yet we have the Father, Son and Holy Ghost at the right hand of the Father. We have the, we have the Father, Son and Holy Ghost in Africa and in South America and all wherever people are the indivisible substance, omnipresent and imminent.

Oh, the great doctrines of the attributes. I still owe you six sermons on the attributes. Remember a few years ago, I preached 14 sermons on the attributes of God. And I told you that I had six left to preach on, making 20. They say there are seven and I preached on 14 and have six more to go. So I believe that God has more than seven attributes.

I believe that the attributes of God are innumerable. And at least I can tell you of 20. And one of these attributes is the omnipresence, that He is everywhere. Another is imminence, that He dwells in everything.

Now that’s not Buddhism, that is Christianity. Buddhism says God is everything and everything is God. Christianity says no, God is separated in His essence, infinitely removed from everything, including the highest angel that exists. But that in His condescension, He deigns to make the universe His robe and dwells in it. As the bride dwells in her wedding garment, so the Father dwells in His universe as in a royal robe. And that’s His imminence.

I quote sometimes the old archbishop’s marvelous formula that God is above all things, beneath all things, outside of all things and inside of all things. He is above but not pushed up, He’s beneath but not pressed down, He is outside of but not excluded, He is inside but not confined. He is above presiding, He is beneath upholding, He is outside embracing and He’s inside filling. Our Father is everywhere, and this is God.

Ah, that’s Christianity, brothers and sisters, not belonging to the Christian and Missionary Alliance. That’s not Christianity. You can belong to the Christian and Missionary Alliance and be a lost man. You can be a Baptist and be a lost man and they’d be the first ones to say so. You can be a Presbyterian and be lost, but you can’t be a Christian and be lost. You can’t be a sheep of the fold and not be known by your shepherd.

So, the Shepherd is here, omnipresent and imminent meaning that He’s present everywhere and imminent meaning that He’s filling everything and dwelling in it.

Now David said the Lord is my shepherd. Can’t get away from David because our Lord Jesus Christ took David’s 23rd Psalm and carried it on and wove it into his 10th chapter of John here, how much follows as a consequence that the Lord is my shepherd. And have you ever noticed the difference?

I wrote in one of the chapters in the Divine Conquest about this and I don’t suppose very many people got it. I didn’t try to explain it. I only used italics which a writer, if he aspires to be a good writer, never uses except most rarely.

But I used italics there and I said we say the Lord is my shepherd instead of “the Lord” is my shepherd. I wonder if people understood what I meant when I said that. When we say the Lord is my shepherd, why we reduce the Lord to being our servant to lead us around. David never said the Lord is my shepherd. In other words, come on shepherd, lead me around here. I am the big guy and you’re my servant.

But in wonder he breathlessly exclaimed, look, “the Lord” is my shepherd. “The Lord” is my shepherd. And the emphasis was upon who was his shepherd, not what the shepherd was, but that who He was. The Lord, he said, well I’m the shepherd of this flock and Reuben over here is the shepherd of another flock and Levi over there the shepherd of another flock, but the Lord is my shepherd. Those wonderful words and what a difference it is. The Lord is my shepherd. Instead of flippantly saying the Lord’s my shepherd.

A Methodist preacher out in the East who has a habit of delivering himself of some pretty cryptic and marvelously wise remarks, said recently that in our time we have gotten to using the Bible to gain our own ends and having the Lord serve us instead of our serving the Lord. I think that came out in Time magazine, but wiser things have seldom been said than those things. That we tend to want to make the Lord our servant instead of being the servant of the Lord.

And the marvel of it is that if we’ll humble ourselves to become a servant of the Lord, the Lord in turn will take a towel and gird himself and become our servant. Good old Peter. Good old downright salty, frank, Peter.

When the Lord girded Himself with His towel and took the basin and started to wash Peter’s feet, Peter got up aghast and said, What? You wash my feet? Why I ought to be washing yours. Who am I that you should wash my feet? I’m on Peter’s side on that, aren’t you? He was a humble man and a reverent man, and it was too much for him to believe that what the great Lord should wash my feet. Jesus didn’t argue.

He said, that’s all right, Peter, except I wash thee, thou hast no part with Me. Oh, how wisely He didn’t say except I wash thy feet, but except I wash thee, you have no part with me. Then Peter understood and he humbled himself and he allowed his Lord to wash his feet, knowing that he wasn’t worthy of such a high honor. And here the Lord is my shepherd. The Lord is my shepherd, and He takes all the care and the responsibility.

Did you ever look at somebody that you had reason to believe? Now, I was going to read that, but I dropped it three times and I’m not going to read it now at all. I’m not superstitious, but anything that doesn’t want to get read that bad, you can have it.

What was I saying? Yes. Did you ever look at a person that was comfortably dumb and wish that you were like them? I have. I have met people, nobody here now, of course, but I have met people just so comfortably dumb. They’re just so happy and restful and relaxed, and here I am so tense I could bite ten penny nails any time in the morning. And these restful, comfortable fellows, just so friendly and easygoing, and their laugh is so restful, and they don’t know anything, and they aren’t much, and they’re just comfortably dumb.

And I’ve wished and said to myself, and I’ve never prayed that I’d be like that, but I at least have been guilty of a fleeting wish that I could be as restful and dumb as some of my good friends.

Well, I also have been guilty of wishing that I wasn’t really a sheep. It must be wonderful to not have a care in all the wide world. Not a care.

Mr. Chase, years ago, when Stanley was a little fellow, just a wee little tyke, six or seven months old, he used to come out the house and usually drive me home, and then he’d go in where Stanley was, and he’d pick him, pick up his hand and drop it, and then pick up his foot and drop it, call attention to how completely relaxed he was. He said, he’s not going to bone his body, just, just pick him up and he’d just drop. Perfectly relaxed.

If you try to pick me up, I’ll be clear out on the floor wide awake. But a little old Stan, he was just as relaxed as he could be, and you say, isn’t that wonderful to be relaxed like that? Well, a sheep could, if he only had sense enough, could be as relaxed as possible. Just relaxed because there isn’t a care, he doesn’t have a care in the world.

A shepherd charges himself with every care. If it is food, he’s responsible to find it. If it’s water, he’s responsible to find it. If it’s oil for a bruised head, he’s responsible to use that oil. If it’s the foal, he’s supposed to know where the foal is. If it’s an enemy, he’s supposed to know what to do with that enemy. And if the sheep only knew it. He hasn’t, doesn’t need to have a care in all the world.

Oh, I ought to preach this, that I could learn it and you could learn it with me. That we could stop this everlasting living two years in advance, living two months in advance, living way down the years. I said, we sometimes discuss this habit of mine of living so long ahead of time.

I argue, Brother McAfee, that sometimes I lie in bed and get things all figured out and then I won’t have anything to do the next day when I do them. And I guess I have a little Scripture for it. The Scripture says commune with your own heart upon your bed and be still. But I don’t think that scripture means lie there and worry. I don’t think it means that because if we’re the sheep of the Lord’s pasture, we haven’t got a single worry in the whole wide world. The Shepherd takes the responsibility.

And it says here, and this is the sheep’s own testimony. He restores my soul, of course, without which all else is useless. And he leaded me in paths of righteousness, three little words, four little syllables. He leadeth me. He and me with leadeth in the middle. The little ring that binds two souls together is the little word leadeth, He and me. He leadeth me.

Why, in my shelves I have the complete works of Plato, translated by Jowett, the finest in the English language. You couldn’t get anything as good anywhere else. And yet Plato never said anything in all of those eight volumes; He never said as much as David said in three words, He leadeth me.

And on another shelf, I have most of the major works of Aristotle. And yet Aristotle, for all of his wisdom, never said in all of his works as much as David the shepherd said, He leadeth me.

Ah, my friends, they call Christians dumb. And they say, I’ve just been reading a book recently on the cults and sects in America. And they call the Christian and Missionary Alliance a sect. But they admit in that book that it’s one of the broadest of the sects, and one of the most charitable, with a broader outlook toward all other Christians. That’s very nice of them.

But we know what we are anyhow. And the sectarian spirit, no, no, my brethren, we daren’t have it. We know what we believe, and we know that instead of being stupid, we’re wise, because we have found Him, and He’s found us, and we’re joined together by, leadeth. He leadeth me. David said that he leadeth me, and he leads me in the paths of righteousness. And this He will do for is own name’s sake.

You see, every shepherd was proud of his sheep, and he had a reputation. It’s funny how we get reputation for things. We once knew a woman in another city who was proud of the fact that her brother was the best-known junk man in the whole town.

And there are plenty of women who are proud of their cherry pies, and there are men who are proud of their low golf score, and others who are proud of other things. We all have pride in our handiwork. There’s something we can do.

An old fellow out home, he cut down oak, not oak, but ash trees, and hickory, and would make axe handles out of them. When the snow came and the streams were ice-locked and heavy snow lay on the ground, there was nothing to do. They’d make axe handles and hoe handles. They didn’t turn them out with a lathe as they do now, but made them by hand, and were proud of them. Oh, how proud they were. Every man is proud that he can do something better than somebody else.

The farmers out that way were proud of their horses. They were proud of their match teams. A farmer who really was proud of his farm, he wouldn’t have two horses hitched up together, one of them with a white nose to the right and the other with a white nose to the right, one of them with one, say, left rear foot white and the other one with the left rear foot. No, no. They had to be perfectly matched. They were proud of that, very proud.

The shepherd is proud of the fact that his is the best flock that roams anywhere over the hillsides. And the finer the sheep, the more honor to the shepherd. The shepherd had a stake in his sheep. And they, by being fat and relaxed and comfortable and well fed and obedient, reflected honor to the shepherd.

And so, Jesus Christ takes pride in His people. And if He has an obedient, good living, happy people, it reflects honor to His holy name. And it’s for His own namesake that He leads them out in paths of righteousness.

So, remember that He not only leads His flock for their sake, He leads His flock for His own namesake.

And that’s what the Scripture means when over and over it talks about His namesake. He does it for His own honor. He wants everybody to know what a fine shepherd He is and how glorious He is. And so, He keeps His flock, and He keeps His sheep.

Every mother knows that she will be judged by the kind of children she turns out onto the sidewalk of a morning. You see coming down the sidewalk or riding on the bus, a poor little pale face, thin, little girl with her hair obviously not combed that morning or maybe not for several mornings before. Her dress dirty, her stockings torn. You don’t blame the little girl. You pity the little girl.

But you say to yourself, I wonder about that mother. If that mother only knew it, her innocent little lamb is telling an awful lot about her, telling maybe that she drinks and lies around and smokes and watches television and reads love stories and lets her little girl go out dirty.

You say it’s poverty, Mr. Tozer. You shouldn’t speak against poverty. I grew up in poverty. And no man has any tenderer regard for the poor than I. Poverty is one thing, dirt is another. And the poorest mother with a ten-cent comb can comb her little lamb’s hair back and tie it with a cheap ribbon. And people are saying she’s a lovely little girl, not very well-dressed, but she’s been taken care of.

And I see other kids get on the bus, one little round-faced doll, about that high. I don’t think she was too young to go to school, but obviously she did. I think she went to a Dutch school over here, a day school, because she got off where that’s the only thing, I could figure she could be going to that Dutch school.

And she got on, she was lord of the little manor, she was in charge. She had her little suitcase along; I suppose she had some peanut butter sandwiches in there. Her mother led her out carefully, put her on the bus, waved goodbye, and the little girl went to school. Oh, she was taken care of.

Now, she might not have been rich, probably wasn’t. Where she got on, rich people don’t live. But her mother took care of her, and she did it for her own name’s sake. She said, I don’t want my pretty little girl to go with stringy hair, and unmatched socks, and dirty, unpressed clothes. At least she took care of her. I never saw the woman before, and I suppose I’ll never see her again, but I have a good regard for that woman. I say to myself, why, for her name’s sake, she took care of her little lamb.

So he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness, and looketh after me for his own name’s sake. For his own name’s sake. So for that reason I will fear no evil, enemies, snakes, bears, lions, robbers, even the shadow of death itself, and why, because thou art with me.

Did you know, the shepherd could have sent word to the sheep and said, hold the fort, for I am coming. And the sheep would all have fled in terror into the wilderness and been eaten by the lions. But he didn’t say, I’ll be there after a while. He said, I’m there now. Thou art with me, thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me. Goodness and mercy, these flow out of the shepherd’s heart, of course. And he says, I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.

Now, I just want to say a word about that forever, and I’m finished. You know, he’s the only person that could put that word forever on there.

We can laugh; Emerson in one of his ragged poems, for he never wrote a very finished one, but he certainly wrote some profound ones. And one of his beautiful but unfinished poems, he tells about the farmer and the landowner, and he quotes from the deed, you know, and the articles of possession that are filed in the courts. He quotes how it says to so-and-so and his heirs, forever and last. Forever, no, no, no.

When a couple gets up to get married, we don’t say in want or in wealth, in sickness or in health, from this time forth and forever. No, no. We say until death shall separate you. You don’t put forever in their wedding vows, marriage vows. Forever isn’t in the hand of a man.

And if you know what forever means, you don’t put forever in a deed. And you don’t write forever into your contracts. And when you get a job, you don’t sign a contract forever.

The boy who’s in Florida and signed his contract to play for the Cubs or the Soxies didn’t sign forever. When you go into the Army or Navy, it may seem forever, but it isn’t forever. There’s no forever in Uncle Sam’s contracts.

Jesus, Christ alone, can put forever in. I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever. He puts forever in there, the only Person who can do it. Moses couldn’t do it. Moses went up on Mount Moriah and Mount Pisgah and died. David couldn’t do it. David served a generation and slept with his fathers. Oh, how they loved to sleep with their fathers in those days.

God bless the dear old patriarchs, it says, and he gave up the ghost and slept with his fathers. Ah, we laugh at the quaintness and simplicity of it, and we reduce it now to a few lines in the paper that nobody reads. But in those days, God knew where His sheep were when they died. They were sleeping with their fathers. In the cave of Machpelah, maybe, or in the new tomb of Joseph. He knew where every sacred blob of clay rested, and He knows to this hour and this day.

Though the winds of heaven have dried up the clay that was once a temple of the Holy Ghost and have blown it to the four points of the compass, in the day when the Shepherd gathers all of His flock into the presence of the Father, He’ll have every one of them, because He puts forever in their hearts.

That’s why I can’t join lodges and mix, link myself up with temporary organizations and get all heated up about something that hasn’t got forever in it.

God put forever in their hearts, the Scripture says, eternity in their hearts. And if God puts eternity in my heart, then I demand something that’s got eternity in it. Scripture says that God made Adam and then he looked around him all the beasts of the field and couldn’t find a help meat for him worthy of him.

And so, He put him in this deep sleep and took out a rib and made a woman equal to him that she might be worthy of him, because not a beast was worthy of him. They named them every one and he named them according to their nature, but not a bit of their nature corresponded with his nature.

And he looked at the highest of them all, the anthropoids, and shook his head and said, no, nothing inside of me responds. This is not my kind. And God said, all right, I’ll get you one that’s your kind. So, he got him Eve.

And Eve was worthy of him because she was his kind. And what He had in him, God put in her the same nature and they knew each other and responded and became the father and mother of the race. So God has put eternity in the heart of every man.

And we look out on all the world. Radio parades its programs. Television parades its programs. Magazines pour out their stories. Politics pours out its talk. Business and art and professions and all the rest, all of them begging for our attention.

Something in my heart says what Adam said about the beast. No, they’re all right and we’ll use them and nice to have them around and they’re useful. But nothing in me leaps up and says, that’s my kind. That’s it. Because you’ve got eternity in your heart and the radio has time only. Business, time. School, time. And your heart says eternity, eternity. Something inside of me longs for eternity.

Forever is in me. Three months is a long time for a radio program. A man holds a job 40 years, why, he gets his name in the paper. 40 years is a long time for a man to hold a job. And yet that same man has forever in his heart. And he looks at his job and says, well, I’ll work, and I’ll be honest and I’ll make my living. But this isn’t it. Another man looks at fame, he writes, he paints, he’s a musician, he has, he has ability and he’s known. But that isn’t it because that’s got time.

A man said to Napoleon one time, Napoleon said to his secretary, he said, you ought to be a very proud man. He said, why sir? He said, you ought to be proud. You’re my secretary. You’ll go down famous in history as my secretary. And the secretary said, tell me, sir, who was Alexander’s secretary? Napoleon had no word to say. Not a word.

No, no, fame won’t do it. Fame won’t do it. And neither all the honor of all the wide world can rouse the sleeping dust. There’s something in me that demands it forever. And until I get forever, I’m a hungry vagabond and wander on the face of the earth, looking under every rock and searching behind every star, climbing every tree and plunging into every pool and looking, always looking, looking for that forever. Nobody else has it.

But God raised His Son from the dead and set Him at His own right hand and gave Him to be the author and fountain of immortality. So, I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever.

Listen to this. When I can read my titles clear to mansions in the sky, I bid farewell to every fear and wipe my weeping eye. There shall I hide my weary soul in seas of heavenly rest and not a wave of trouble roll across my peaceful breast. Old John Newton. God bless the old Calvinist. He knew what he was talking about.

So now I wonder, have you got a shepherd? Is he yours? Has he put forever in your toil and forever in your thoughts? Has he put forever in your hopes? If he hasn’t, then I recommend you take Jesus Christ now as your Shepherd. Let’s bow our heads in prayer.

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“The Church’s Greatest Need: Spirit-Filled Members“

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The Church’s Greatest Need: Spirit-Filled Members

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

November 4, 1956

This will be, tonight, the third and last in a series of three talks which I have been giving on the gifts of the Spirit. And I want to read some from the Scriptures, and if you will be so kind as to allow me to read the same scriptures again, because I want to keep refreshing your minds with the Scriptures.

You can turn to chapter 12 of 1 Corinthians, where the man of God says, there are diversities of gifts but the same Spirit, and there are differences of administration, the same Lord, and there are diversities of operations but the same God which worketh all in all. The manifestation of the Spirit is given to every man to profit withal. For to one is given by the Spirit the word of wisdom, to another the word of knowledge with the same Spirit, to another faith with the same Spirit, to another the gifts of healing with the same Spirit, to another the workings of miracles, to another prophecy, to another discerning of spirits, to another diverse kinds of tongues, to another the interpretation of tongues. But all these worketh that one in this self, same Spirit, dividing to every man several as he will. For as the body is one and hath many members, and all the members of that one body being many, are one body, so also is Christ.

Now I think I’ll read another passage. Ephesians 4. There is one body and one Spirit, even as you are called in one hope of your calling, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God, the Father of all, who is above all and through all in you all. And unto every one of us is given grace according to the measure of the gift of Christ. Wherefore, he saith, when he ascended upon high, He led captivity captive and gave gifts unto men.

Then he shows that it’s Jesus in verses 9 and 10. And he says He gave some apostles and some prophets and some evangelists and some pastors and teachers for the perfecting of the Saints through the work of the ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ, till we all come in the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, and to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ. That we henceforth be no more children tossed to and fro, carried about with every wind of doctrine by the slight of men and cunning craftiness whereby they lie in wait to deceive, but speak the truth in love, may grow up into Him in all things, who is the Head, even Christ, from whom the whole body fitly joined together and compacted by that which every joint supplieth, according to the effectual working in the measure of every part, maketh increase of the body unto the edifying of itself in love.

Then I want to read this also, just two verses, 1 Corinthians 12:31 and 14:1. 1 Corinthians 12:31 and 14:1 says, But covet earnestly the best gifts, and yet show I unto you a more excellent way. I realize that verse 31 has been a hiding place for a lot of carnel Christians. They say gifts, gifts, talk about gifts, love is better, but they don’t have love either. And then 14:1, follow after love and desire spiritual gifts.

Now, my method of dealing with any subject has been to tear right into it and say what has to be said. And so, I have been talking about the great need of the gifts of the Spirit back in the church. And what I have been saying is being echoed, not my voice, but it’s being echoed and re-echoed all over the world. I do not mean that they’re hearing me, but I mean that God is saying the same thing to many thousands of people around the world, every denomination. So that it seems to be that when God wants to do a thing, He doesn’t start only in one local place, but he says the same thing to various people in various parts of the world. And they find they know each other and harmonize.

When I was in Canada with the IFES, International Fellowship of Evangelical Students, which is part of InterVarsity, I there met a man that I had known of and corresponded with for some time, Dr. Martin Lloyd-Jones, who is the pastor of the great cathedral, or chapel they call it, I think, Westminster Chapel. It’s a vast church right under the shadow of Westminster Abbey. They have there a very large church, and I’d heard of this man.

And when I heard him preach, and he heard me preach, it was an astonishing thing how we harmonized. He had been a great reader, has been down the years, of the Puritan divines. Now, of course, he’s, first of all, a great Bible student. He couldn’t be anything else and be in the church that Campbell Morgan founded. But he had been a great reader of the Puritan divines, and he had arrived at certain conclusions regarding the Holy Spirit as a result of his reading the Puritan divines.

Well, he’s in London and I’m in Chicago, and we had never met before. And I had not read the Puritan divines. I know who they are, Bunyan and Owen and the rest, but I had never taken to them very much. But I had taken very strongly to the mystical divines, the mystical theologians, Augustine and Julian and Eckhart and the great number that have come from Spain, Scopoli and Molinus and Fenelon and Towler, and many others, and the great Scotch divine who is the only mystical Calvinist that I know about, Samuel Rutherford.

And I had read those books and he had read over on the other side, but we had arrived from two different paths at exactly the same conclusions, so that when I heard him, I thought I was listening to myself preach, only he did it better. And when he heard me, he felt he was listening to himself preach.

Now this is unusual, but it is God saying the same thing to men who will have their hearts open. And so, what I have said about the gifts of the Spirit, and shall say tonight, is not a private view of a little man who doesn’t know his way home after midnight. But it is the conviction arrived at by vast numbers of persons of the evangelical persuasion in many parts of the world in many denominations.

I have said also, and want to say very carefully, that what I’m saying to you is not a result of any contact that I have had with those good people who are called the tongues people. I have told you at great length why I could not go in with that group of people. There are many, many of them, the Church of God this, and the Church of God that, and the Church of God this, all over the country.

And they’re losing their testimony. The holiness people have long ago lost theirs, and the tongues people have lost theirs because they’re keeping quiet on the one thing that made them stand out. And the fundamentalists are losing theirs and are looking around for something better. And God, I want to say, is not leading in any direction. I have not changed my mind, and this is not a fine way of saying it was nice to know you. I’m going among the tongues people. I couldn’t possibly do it for the five reasons I gave you two weeks ago. Or maybe it was only a week ago. Two weeks ago, I guess.

Now, having said that, I want to tell you why the gifts of the Spirit in the church of Christ are not only desirable, but they’re absolutely imperative. Let me, in my usual fashion, begin a way back and move up.

Now, let me show you why it is absolutely necessary that we should have the gifts of the Spirit in the Church, and in this church. Because one of the results of the fall is a twofold blight, which we call temporality and mortality. Now, man, however brilliant he may be, and however wise, all men everywhere, has written across their hearts these two sentences: You must go, and you must die.

Now, those two sentences are written by the great God Almighty. Temporality and mortality. Temporality says, you must go, you can’t stay. And mortality says, you must die, you can’t live. Now, because this is true, then all the works that man does partakes of what man is. And the same blight that rests upon sinful, fallen man, namely temporality and mortality, rests upon every work that he does.

All the work of a man’s hand, however noble it may be, however inspired by genius, however beautiful, however wonderful, and however useful, and however inspiring, all the work of fallen man has these two sentences written across it. You can’t stay, and you can’t live. You came to go, and you came to die.

So that everything from a sonnet to an oratorio, to a great bridge, to a great canal, to a great painting, to a great poem, to a great novel, everything has on it this temporality and mortality. It’s got to die, and it’s got to go. Perpetuity and eternity are not in men, and they cannot impart it to what they do.

But God is bringing into being a new order. God is bringing into being a new order, and a new order which shall have exactly the opposite of temporality and mortality. That new order is to be of eternal duration and to be infused with eternal life. And this new order, it’ll finally show itself in the new heaven and the new earth. It shall show itself in the city that comes down from heaven as a bride adorned for her husband. And all this has in it eternal duration. It does not come to go, it comes to stay. It does not come to die, it comes to live.

Now, my brethren, of this new creation, Christ Jesus is the head, and the Church is the body. And individual believers are the body’s members. Now there’s a simple picture, anybody can see it, but there it is. The old Adam fell down and all of which he was the head fell down with him, and God wrote across it, mortality and temporality, you must die and you must go.

But the new man came and died and went and rose and lives in order that he might be the head of a new creation which has not upon it temporality but perpetuity, which has not upon it the mark of death but the mark of life forevermore.

Now, these believers are yet in their unredeemed body. I want you to hear me. Every believer, I don’t care whether it be the sweetest saint that kneels in prayer tonight, redolent of sweet perfume and incense, or whether it be the newest convert that blundered into some mission somewhere tonight and was saved, every believer has an unredeemed body.

Now, it’s potentially redeemed, but it’s not actually redeemed. And in case any of you might worry about my orthodoxy, let me read it to you. It says, for the creature was made subject to vanity, not willingly, but because the creature itself also shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God.

For we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now. And not only they, but ourselves also, which have the firstfruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting for the adoption to it. What? The redemption of our body, so that the saints of God live in an unredeemed temple. They live in an old body, and upon their brain is written two words, it came to die, and it came to go.

And upon their mind, the mind of the saints, is written, it came to die, and it came to go. And upon their nerves and faculties and powers, even redeemed men and women, they have within them the seed of God and eternal life, but they dwell and express themselves through this unredeemed fallen body. And the result is that upon their brain and mind and nerves and faculties and powers and talents and gifts, there God is saying, it’s got to die and it’s got to go.

Therefore, God can’t use them to do a permanent and eternal work. God can’t use a man who is impermanent to do a permanent work, and He can’t use a man who’s got to die to do a deathless work. The Eternal Spirit alone can do an eternal work. I wish you could write this across your heart. The Eternal Spirit alone can do an eternal work.

Now let’s look at the illustration for just a little bit. You know, we think our eyes do a work. The artist thinks his hand and his eyes do the work. And the musician thinks his fingers do the work. And the singer thinks his throat does the work. And gifted people everywhere think that their feet do the work, or their hands or their ears or their tongue or their nose. They think that the members do the work.

Well, there could be a greater mistake made anywhere than to think that your hands ever did any work, my brother. Your brain does the work through your hands. And if the brain should suddenly be cut off or die, your hands would lie helpless. It is the brain of a man that does the work. It is the brain of a man that plays that piano and the brain of a man that paints a picture. It’s the brain of a man that smells a rose. It’s the brain of a man that hears musical sounds. It’s the brain of a man or woman. It’s the brain that does the work, not the hands. They are simply the instruments through which the brain works.

Now that’s common physiology. You’ll learn that in high school. Any doctor knows that. Any common person knows it. You and I know that it is not the man’s members that do the work. Nothing originates with your hand. You crochet or you paint or you cut or trim or glue up or fasten your work; nothing originates with your hand. It originates with your brain. And your hand is the organ through which it works. The eye doesn’t see anything. The brain sees the eye. You might as well say when you put a pair of binoculars to your eyes and look across on the other side of the hill, you might as well say the binoculars are seeing.

No, they’re not seeing. You’re seeing through the binoculars. Your intelligence is using the binoculars as an organ through which you can see.

And so your eyes never originate anything. It originates in your brain. Your ears never originate anything. It originates in your brain. And your ears bring the sound in mechanically and your brain says that’s flat, that’s sharp, that’s beautiful, that’s raucous, that’s sweet. Your ear, your brain tells you that.

Now that’s the illustration Paul gave. I didn’t give it. I’m only expatiating a little, as the brother would say, on what Paul said. That the brain works through the organs. And that if the brain is not there, or if it stops functioning, then all the organs stop functioning too.

And the Eternal Spirit alone can do an eternal work because the Holy Spirit must do the work through the members. He must himself do it. There is a sense in which you and I can’t do work at all. There is a sense in which we are unable to do any spiritual work of any kind. The Bible says, it is God that worketh in you to will and to do. So that instead of my doing it, God is doing it and using me as the organ. Instead of my eye doing the seeing, my brain is doing the seeing through two binoculars called eyes.

And so, the Holy Spirit takes men and uses them as organs through which He can express Himself in the body of Christ. It is Jesus that does it through the Holy Ghost operating through the members.

Now, my brother, He can’t operate through ungifted members. For instance, here I have a pair of hands. They’re about average and a little large for my size. I figure I got that working on a farm when I was a kid.

But there is something about these hands that I must tell you. I can’t play a violin. They’re ungifted hands. I can’t paint a picture. They’re ungifted hands. I can’t play that organ. They’re ungifted hands. I can barely hold a screwdriver and I’m getting worse as I get older if I have to screw a screw in somewhere at home to keep the place from falling apart. So, I have not any gifted hands.

And no matter how much genius might lie in that brain, there doesn’t, but supposing just a wild shot in the dark that there did, these two ungifted hands lie helpless. They can’t do anything. The brain can’t call them up, can’t call them up. The brain says, Tozer, go down and play something on the organ. I say, brain, I’d love to do it, but I have ungifted hands. I can’t do it. I can’t do it.

The brain says, Tozer, go paint a picture. And I say, I’d love to do it, but I haven’t a gift. There’s nothing in me that responds. Color, I don’t quite get it. Form and outline and perspective and all the artists talk, I can’t do it. I have a pair of ungifted hands.

All right, my brethren. Now, if we allow that in the body of Christ, there is such a thing as living members who are yet ungifted members, then you can see how we slow God down in His working for to bring into being this everlasting new thing that must stay and that must live. There must be the gifts of the Spirit present. They are the organs through which the Holy Ghost works to do His work.

Now, religious work can be done by ungifted man. Religious work, I repeat, can be done by ungifted man. But it is only the human mind doing a human work. It is only a mortal mind doing a mortal work.

And every work that a man does, whether he builds a church or writes a hymn or a book or promotes a movement or plays or sings or prays or organizes, no matter what he does, how early in the morning he may be or how late he may be up at night working on religious subjects, doing religious things, it is only a mortal brain doing a mortal job. And across all of it, God will write, it came to die and it came to go.

Mortality and temporality are written all over the church of Christ today because men are trying to do in the power of the flesh, that is the power of their own genius, what only the Holy Ghost can do. Genius cannot do an immortal work. Genius can only do a mortal work. And don’t be fooled by the loose use of the word immortal.

We say Michelangelo painted his immortal paintings. That’s only a careless use of the word. There are no immortal paintings. There are no immortal sonnets. There are no immortal musical compositions. There’s nothing immortal but what is in God and what God is in.

So, we can do work. And I would guess if you were to ask me, this would be maybe a rash guess, but since I’m in the mood, I’ll tell you that I think about 90% of the religious work in evangelical circles is done by ungifted men. That is, men who know how to do things but have not the gift of the Spirit. And they’re operating through the gifts of nature. And it is not grace operating but nature operating. It is not the eternal workings of the Eternal Spirit but the mortal workings of man’s mortal mind.

Now we are thrown back upon psychology and aesthetics. And that’s what we have. And this makes the gifts absolutely indispensable. In order that God might do His mighty and mysterious work with permanence and eternity in His heart, I would rather do one little work and have it live forever than to be the Pope and have what I’m doing die.

The Bible says in a rather cynical smile, better a living dog than a dead lion. And I’d rather work the littlest poodle that ever waddled along the sidewalk and have it alive than to have the biggest stuffed lion there is in the zoo. And I would rather do a tiny little bit of religious work and be unknown and live and die unheralded and unsung and yet have God Almighty right across my little bit of work, this came to live and last; than to have some great big work going on and have God right across it, this too shall pass.

Brother, when the Holy Spirit working through a man does a work, as the brain working through an eye or a hand does a work, when the Holy Spirit working through a gifted member does a work, then God will say of that work what the Psalmist said of God, thou remainest. Thou remainest. The heavens shall be folded up like a garment and as a mantle thou shalt change them, but thou remainest and thy years fail not.

Now, that man can’t do anything is a great shock, comes a great shock to a lot of carnal Christians, to a lot of saintlets. The saintlings, you know, if a gosling is a young goose, I suppose a saintling is a young saint and a very young saint.

And so these saintlings that believe in Jesus Christ and have their New Testament with them but have never discovered that you can’t do God’s work in man’s strength, that have never found out that an eternal work can’t be done by a mortal man, and that a lasting thing cannot be done by a man who can’t last, that somebody else has to do it, and that somebody else is the Holy Ghost. And when we get to this, it glorifies God and humbles man. We like to think we can do something.

There’s many a mother-in-law who’s praying that her handsome son-in-law might be called to preach because he has such a marvelous pulpit presence. This brother, the fact that the Holy Ghost has to do work or it can’t last, rules out all men’s boasted gifts.

For instance, charm. This is the day of charm, and there’s a lot of charm in religion, but I’ve been tough enough and cynical enough to see it and recognize it and had enough of the gift of the Holy Ghost to know this charm stuff, this Liberace business with its candelabras and its beautiful stage presence. Dear friends, I love you all. And brother, this charm stuff, and then this pulpit presence. They say, oh, he has such a charming pulpit presence. The greatest man that ever lived, the man that God Almighty works through.

Now, I say, He works through it, had this said about him, his letters are weighty and powerful, but his bodily presence is weak and his speech contemptible. The learned Corinthians said that man Paul, they said, you don’t want to listen to him. He writes tremendous letters. All right. They’d been reading first Corinthians, and they said, say, that’s got stuff.

They said that he writes tremendous letters, but they said he’s a disappointment. They said, when the people come in back to place to see the man that wrote that letter, here’s a man whose bodily presence is weak and whose speech is contemptible. And here was the Holy Ghost doing an everlasting work through a man that had no pulpit presence at all and had no golden qualities in his voice. He would have flunked out if he’d have tested out for a radio announcer, nobody would have had him because he didn’t have the golden seductive and delectable qualities that should be in a voice to get the ladies to buy what he wants them to buy.

Now a personality is another quality. They say, well the man, the man’s personality simply sparkles. Down the years I have watched those sparklers. Do you ever notice what a sparkler does? How it excites every kid for four blocks around for one minute, and then you hold a hot stick in your hand that soon cools off and that’s your sparkler. And these fellows with the sparkling personalities that have come up and gone. Here I am an old codger, and I have lived to see a positive, Gorgeous George parade of lover boyniks who have come up and sparkled and gone down and sparkled and gone down.

Well, the Holy Ghost, my brother, is going to rule out all this sparkle and charm and pulpit presence and magnetism. That’s another word, magnetism and dynamism. Those are lovely words. And talent, but they don’t mean anything because the man that God worked through was the man who had contemptible speech and a weak look. Now I don’t say that God couldn’t take a handsome man and work through him, but he would not work through his handsomeness.

I do not say God could not take a man with a dynamic personality and work through him, but he’d never use his dynamic personality. He would work through that, beneath that, and beyond that, but he’d never use that. The Holy Ghost doesn’t need it.

What does the mighty Holy Ghost, whose breath brought the world into being, what does He need of your bright eyes and curly hair? What does He need of your vibrant voice or mind? He doesn’t need it. This is awful humbling, and we’d like to be able, we’d like, when we retire, to have people come around and say, look at all this that this man did. If he did it, it’ll die. If he did it, it’ll pass.

But if he was a humble organ through which the Holy Ghost did it, it’ll live and it’ll last, and hell can’t burn it up, nor time can wear it out, because it’ll have the qualities of Deity in it. Thou remainest, O God, thou remainest.

And you’ll get a lot of religious people well-fed and coffeed up, and get them in a warm room with a lot of good-looking women and bald-headed men and a good musical instrument, and you get them to going, and brother, they can move into the flesh fast. You’d think to hear and look and see and behold and all the rest, that as a mouse eats his way into a cheese and thinks it’s heaven, so a lot of us Christians are eating our way into the kingdom of God. Come and believe on Christ and let’s go eat.

And so, we’re busy eating ourselves, eating ourselves into the work of God. My brother, we all have to eat. Some of us ought to eat more than we do, I suppose, and get a little flesh on, but the work of God is something else altogether.

The work of God doesn’t depend on good social spirits. It’s another thing. It is the Eternal Spirit working through gifts which He has imparted, which are also eternal, to do an eternal work. And anything that falls short of it is simply religion and nothing more.

So, God gets all the honor and man stands reverently with his head bowed and says, thine be the glory forever and ever. Amen.

Now I repeat the critical need in the church is the church should have these gifts, these organs through which the Spirit can do His work. Because the gifts are so rare, now don’t think the gifts are not present in the church. They are.

There’s never been a time when there weren’t a few of the gifts present somewhere in the church, or the church could not have clung together. The fact that there is a consecutive link upon link and link upon link in a chain of spiritual Christianity down the years shows that the Spirit’s gifts have always been present in the church, even sometimes among those who didn’t understand or didn’t believe.

Now what does the Scripture say? The Scripture says, ye shall receive power when the Holy Ghost has come upon you. And it says, be filled with the Spirit. And it says, covet earnestly the best gifts. And it says, seek after love, but desire spiritual gifts.

Paul never meant to say to the Corinthians what a lot of fundamentalists have made him say. He never meant to say to the Corinthians that they were to choose between love and the gifts of the Spirit. He said, follow after love, but desire spiritual gifts.

And then he said, in case you want to know what gift I think is the most important, why rather that you might prophesy. And by prophesy he did not mean foretell events. He meant that God would put in the heart and the body and mind and throat and nerves of a man a strange, beautiful ability that would enable that man or perhaps that woman to speak with a strange quality of conviction and everlastingness.

Maybe it’s a housewife. Maybe it’s a man who sweeps the street. Maybe it’s a bishop. Maybe it’s an evangelist. Maybe it’s a humble pastor in a country parish unknown. Whoever it may be, he has a strange quality to speak with conviction and inspiration and lift that is not human, but divine. And the results, while they may not be best, for grace and size have a lot to do with it, they’ll be eternal and permanent.

So, it is not an either-or, either take Chapter 13, which is love, or 4:12, which is gifts. But the man of God said, both, both, covet earnestly the best gifts. And yet I show you a more excellent way, not another way to take in contradistinction to the way of gifts, but the way to make your gifts matter and mean something. That is love.

Now, somebody says, but what about, isn’t everybody, doesn’t everybody have the Spirit? Yes. And every Christian has. And in 1 Corinthians 12, we are told that. We’re all baptized into one body by one Spirit. And Paul says in Romans 8, that if any man have not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of his. And Christ dwells in you, except ye be reprobate, so that every Christian does have a measure of the Spirit.

But the same chapter in which Paul explained this, he said, I don’t want you to be ignorant about spiritual gifts and covet earnestly the best gifts. So if the fact that we have a measure of the Spirit when we’re converted was all Paul wanted to us to know, he’d have said that and quit. But he went on to explain at great length.

And all this is the Christian’s birthright. It’s not alone for the great. It’s the birthright of the humblest Saint. 1 Corinthians 1:18-29 tells us that the people that were Christians in those early days were simple people. He said, where’s the wise, where’s the scribe, where’s the disputer of this world? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of this world? But after that in the wisdom of God, the world by wisdom knew not God. It pleased God for the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe.

For you see your calling, brethren, how that not many wise men after the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble are called. But God has chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise, and God has chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things that are mighty.

We were talking, and when we were having our prayer yesterday, we prayed three times a week here, we preachers. That is our times of prayer, along with all the other prayer meetings that are here and there in the church and on Sundays.

But we were discussing that little girl, that 16-year-old girl in Wales, during the revival with Evan Roberts. She would sing solos, and they weren’t much for singing solos. They were more choral people, those Welsh, as you know. And they sang the Metrical Psalter, which didn’t lend itself to solo work very much.

But this girl, and I’ve forgotten her name, she was 16 at the time, she would rise and sing. And as she sang, it was not the lyrical beauty of her voice. No doubt there are singers today, a Lily Pond, or a Toboli, or whoever it might be, maybe better singers. But she was a gifted soul, and the Holy Ghost was singing through that girl.

And the result was that audience would melt, melt. And Evan Roberts would rise to preach, and there was not much to do but quote the Scriptures and add a little. She had melted them, and wherever she would go, it was the same.

Thank God they didn’t know enough over there to put her on the radio and spoil her. Thank God they didn’t start writing her life history. Thank God she didn’t write a tract, My Life, from the nursery to the pulpit. She didn’t know to do that. She was a simple spirit-possessed girl.

And when she sang, the Welsh people were melted like snow before the rising sun. And then it was an easy job for the preacher to preach. And not a music critic anywhere ever said she had a good voice. But she had something better than a good voice. God took the despised and weak things of the world to confound the mighty.

Now what shall we do about all this? Shall we freeze up and hide and say, I’m not going to go fanatical? Let me say to you, as far as I know you, brethren, you could move in the direction of fanaticism at sixty miles an hour for twenty-four hours and still be a hundred miles short of it. You hear me? There’s not much chance of anybody being fanatical around here. We’re stone cold, that’s our problem. We’re stone cold. It isn’t fanaticism we need to be afraid of, it’s frost.

What shall we do then? Now if you were in danger, I’d warn you. If there was anybody around here that would start back there and do handsprings down the aisle, I’d warn you and I’d say, watch that, that’s not God. Danger of fanaticism. But there is no danger of fanaticism here. I get a grunt now and then from McAfee and nothing from the rest of you. So there’s no danger of fanaticism around here.

What shall we do? We sang it, bring your empty earthen vessels. Now remember, you can’t all rush up here and stand around and look embarrassed and sing bring your empty earthen vessels and go out and say it wasn’t that wonderful. You might just as well have stayed at home.

To be filled with the Spirit is a most solemn and most searching and most sometimes at first painful experience to go through. The actual Holy Ghost is not painful, He’s the Gentle Dove of God. But getting ourselves ready, getting cleaned up, getting poured out, getting confessed out, getting forgiven out, getting straightened out with people, getting restitution made, that can be pretty painful.

So, I’m going to give you three D’s. I’m not an alliterative preacher, but I’m going to give you three D’s. And I’m going to tell you that the first two D’s won’t do you any good, except as the first two steps will take you to the third, so these two first steps will take you to the third. They are desire, determination, and desperation. Now you put those down back of your mind. Now you sleek, well-ordered, well-taught toters of big Bibles, you’ll never be filled with the Holy Ghost until you desire to be.

Second, you’ll never be filled with the Holy Ghost even if you do desire to be, until you become determined to be. And though you should be determined that you are going to go through, you will not be filled until in desperation you throw yourselves into the arms of God.

I wrote something and I preached something here a few weeks ago, in which I said, around the shining light which is God, there’s a zone of obscurity, and we can’t think our way into it. We have to close our eyes and make the leap of faith into the arms of Jesus. After they’ve been through instructing you, after the last verse you can remember hasn’t done their work, after every trick and every thing you know to move toward God has failed, and yet your desperate heart cries, fill me now, fill me now. And then you move into that zone of obscurity where the human reason has to be suspended for a moment and the human heart leaps across into the arms of God.

Then I say, man’s talents and man’s glory and man’s honor and man’s beauty and man’s favor all goes out into the darkness of yesterday and everything is God’s honor and God’s glory and God’s beauty and God’s favor from here on. We have been broken and melted. It will not do us any good to come down here and stand. It will not do us any good even to come down here and kneel.

I got a letter from old brother Nicholson. Remember the Irish evangelist that God used as he’s used probably no man in the last 200 years? I got a letter from him the other day. He said I had a good laugh when I read your editorial about the danger of personal workers coming down and using a text to try to get the seeker through, patting his back and saying amen and another convert’s been made.

He says it’s a trick of the devil, Brother Tozer. And he said, I’ve got to the place where I’ll scarcely even give an altar call anymore because that’s the way they handle the converts. He said they pat them on the back and give them a text and say, now tell it and the fellow gets up bewildered and confused and befuddled and goes out, and says, I’m a Christian because I wasn’t cast out and that’s that.

Brethren, we ought to have such holy conviction upon us that we’d leap into God’s arms past all personal workers and past all so-called helpers. Sometimes I think they’re Job’s comforters and find God and be filled with His mighty Spirit to such a degree that no man can change our minds.

When I was 19 years old kneeling in the front room of my mother-in-law’s home before I was married, I was baptized with a mighty infusion of the Holy Ghost and I’ve been up against everything: Jesus only, tongues-ism and holiness-ism and Calvinism and all the isms that there are. They’ve all tried to beat me down and some say I went too far and some say didn’t go far enough. But brother, I know what God did and any tiny work God ever did through me dates back to the hour when I was filled with His Spirit. And it’s for you.

Now it’s past the time to close and I’m simply going to pray and then we’ll close.

O Dear Lord, time is short, and the hour is late and we have such little time to go. And religion has gotten organized now, Thy religion, Lord Jesus, so that anybody can do it, anybody. We don’t have to have Thy gifts anymore, the tragedy and the terror of it all. But Lord, still men build their Babylon’s, call them by Thy name, but they go down and perish.

Oh, we want our work to last for soon we shall be where the wicked cease from troubling; and there the weary be at rest and only what the Holy Ghost does will last. We would yield our earthly vessels, we would bring our empty vessels, we would, if need be, come and ask Thee to begin to scrub the rust and the filth until our hearts are shiny clean, repositories for the Blessed Spirit. God bless everybody that listened tonight.

Now make us all see this, make us all understand it Lord how tragic it is to peter out at last and be cobblers in the kingdom of God and fool around and put patches on the roof and prop up the temple with sticks.

O God, and it’s everywhere men are doing it. We confess Lord God that we feel like being sick when we read the pages of the Sunday papers and some of those religious magazines. Adam’s brain is busy trying to do God’s work. We wonder Lord if it isn’t offering strange fire on the altar of God. We wonder if it won’t bring judgment in that day.

O Lord, save us from offering strange fire. Any fire we offer we want to be off the altar, Thy fire. Bless us now as we separate. Please don’t let us eat our way through a yard of pizza tonight and forget all about this. Great God, we pray Thee, give us gravity. That boy in his early teens here tonight with exuberance and nervous energy make him brave and serious.

When we think of thy 16 year old handmaid who yielded herself to the Holy Ghost and was the instrument in some places of the revival. We don’t excuse our 16 year olds. We don’t excuse the parents who think that their children ought to be permitted to just play when actually Lord God the crisis is on, the world is on fire and the judgment is drawing near and the coming of the Lord draweth nigh. My God, will Thou send us out brave and thoughtful to meditate on Thy Word.

Give us, we pray Thee, desire and determination and then push us on till we’re pushed over the cliff in desperation. And then, as a mother eagle stirs up her nest and then dives down and catches her young, Thou will catch us and fill us and get this and the work we do though it may not be vast will have eternity in its heart. Let us stand please.

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“Gifts That Build the Church“

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Gifts That Build the Church

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

October 28, 1956

In line with a series of truths which I have been bringing, I want today to speak on the gifts of the Spirit. And many of the things that I say will be repetition. That is, I will have said them at some time in my life, and maybe at some time in your hearing, the hearing of some of you.

But I will sum it up and bring it all together in one place this morning. In 1 Corinthians 12, once more let me read, there are diversities of gifts, but the same Spirit. There are differences of administrations, but the same Lord.

Diversities of operations, but the same God which worketh all in all. But the manifestation of the Spirit is given to every man to profit withal. For to one is given by the Spirit the word of wisdom, to another the word of knowledge by the same Spirit, to another faith by the same Spirit, to another the gifts of healing by the same Spirit, to another the working of miracles, to another prophecy, to another discerning of spirits, to another diverse kinds of tongues, to another the interpretation of tongues.

But all of these worketh that one and the self, same Spirit, dividing to every man severally as he will. Further on in that chapter, verse 27, Now ye are the body of Christ, and members in particular. And God hath set some in the Church, first apostles, secondarily prophets, thirdly teachers, after that miracles, then gifts of healing, helps, governments, diversities of tongues.

Are all apostles, are all prophets, are all teachers, are all workers of miracles? Have all the gifts of healing? Do all speak with tongues? Do all interpret? Those questions are what is known as rhetorical questions, and the answer, of course, is no.

Now, in the book of Romans, the twelfth chapter, we read this. After that famous, I beseech you therefore, brethren passage, which everybody quotes, then we come to this passage which scarcely anybody quotes.

For I say, through the grace given unto me, to every man that is among you, not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think, but to think soberly according as God hath dealt to every man the measure of faith. For as we have many members in one body, and all members have not the same office, so we being many are one body in Christ. And every one member is one of another, having then gifts differing according to the grace that is given to us, whether prophecy, let us prophesy according to the proportion of faith;or ministry, let us wait on our ministering: or he that teacheth, on teaching; or he that exhorteth, on exhortation: he that giveth, let him do it with simplicity; he that ruleth, with diligence; he that sheweth mercy, with cheerfulness.

And in the book of Ephesians, the fourth chapter, verse 8, wherefore, he saith, When he ascended up on high, he led captivity captive, and gave gifts unto men. Now that he ascended, what is it but that he also descended first into the lower parts of the earth? He that descended is the same that ascended, that is Christ, far above all heavens, that he might fill all things.

And he gave some apostles, and some prophets, and some evangelists, and some pastors and teachers, for the perfecting of the saints, for the work of the ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ, till we all come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, and to a perfect man, and to the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ.

Now let’s sketch something here that is known to us all, but in order to arrive at where we’re going, when you’re going into a new area, you always have to drive over familiar streets, the ones you know best to get where you’re going, if nothing else, just to get away from your house.

So, the doctrine of the body of Christ here, that the Church is the body of Christ, with Christ the head, and the true Christians are parts of that body. And that the Holy Spirit is to the body what our soul is to our body, the life, the union, that is what unites it, and the consciousness. Let the soul leave the body and all the parts of the body cease to function. The Spirit in the body gives to it life, cohesion, and consciousness.

And each member recapitulates the local Church, that is, every Christian, every human body, is an illustration. Paul uses it in three of his epistles and asserts it three different times in his epistles, not simply as an illustration to pass by, but something very carefully worked out and at great length. And each local church recapitulates the entire Church.

Now always illustrations break down, and parallels break down, particularly when we come to the sacred and infinite things of God. For a man’s body to function, it all has to be in one place. If you separate him and scatter him around, he’s dead.

But the body of Christ doesn’t all have to be in one place, because its unity is the unity of the Spirit. And therefore, the church is never all in one place. Some are in heaven.

I was wondering this morning what proportion of the members of the body of Christ are in heaven. I would suppose that ninety-eight percent of them might be in heaven, having two thousand years gone to die and go to heaven. But whatever the percentage, the largest number are in heaven and the remainder are on earth.

And not all are on earth at the same time, nor in the same place. And yet the body is not torn nor divided, because it is held together by the Holy Spirit, who is the life of the body. And each local group has all the functions of the whole group and recapitulates, that is, gathers up in itself and sums up all of the offices and gifts and workings of the entire church of Christ.

Now the members, according to Paul, we’re still on our familiar streets. The members, according to Paul, are designed for a function. He says the eye is designed to see, and we all know that. That’s what it’s there for. And the ear is designed to hear, that’s its function. The hand is designed for very, very many purposes, the foot for another purpose, the lungs for another, the heart for another.

And so all the parts of the body have their particular function. And they’re designed to cooperate and act in concert with each other. And in the body of Christ, the motto might be a good boy scout motto.

I thought when I was thinking of it here that somebody might say, well, this is a pep talk, because actually it can be summed up like this, all for each and each for all, for that is what Paul says. He says that the whole body exists for its members, and the members exist for the whole body, and that therefore God gives gifts that the body might profit with all.

And remember one final thing, and it is that all take direction from the head. Cut a head off of a man’s body and there’s no direction anymore. We’ve all seen the familiar country scene of a chicken having its head cut off and still imagining that it was called upon to fly away. So it fluttered all over the barnyard, but it wasn’t going anyplace, it had no direction. Its direction was taken away from it and it soon died. So, the body has its direction from the head, and the body of Christ, the church of Christ, gets its direction from its Head, which is Jesus Christ our Lord.

Now I’ve talked about the functions, or Paul has, and what are these various functions? Well, they’re abilities which are called gifts in the Bible, gifts according to the measure of faith, and gifts according to grace.mThey’re gifts, they’re grace, some variously called, and it says, having then gifts, differing according to the grace, that’s in Romans 12.6. Now concerning spiritual gifts, brethren, 12:1, covet earnestly the best gifts, 12:31, and when He ascended up on high, He gave gifts unto men, 4:8, and then in Romans it says, let nobody think of himself more highly, but everybody judge himself according as God has given him gifts.

Now I find that there are more than nine gifts in the Scriptures. I find that there are about nineteen, and I’ve marked down seventeen of them here, but in reading over Ephesians you come to two more, evangelist and pastor. But because in this Corinthian passage Paul develops it by saying that there are diversities of gifts, and then names nine of them, we say those are the gifts.

But brethren, if you will read the rest of the Scripture, and read what Paul says in the passages I read today, and then read what Peter says, you will find that there are more gifts than nine. And it could be that in saying there are nineteen, that I have made too many because it’s possible some of them are synonymous with each other.

So that if that’s the case, then of course, if you were naming your family and you had one named Billy, and you also called him Willie, and you were counting them and you said Willie and Billy, you’d get one too many, because he’s the same one. You’d give him a synonymous name. So that if you, we are counting the gifts of the Spirit as revealed in the New Testament, if we should by accident find, or we should find that the Spirit had designated one gift by two names, then we’d have to cut it down that much and say, well, that’s, I’m sorry, that’s just using a synonym for the same thing.

But now here are the gifts as are found in the passages I read. The gift of an apostle, which means an ambassador or a messenger or one commissioned to go. And it’s generally believed, I think, by all sound Christians everywhere, that the twelve apostles, as we knew them, had a particular office which has not been perpetuated. Because it talks in Revelation of the twelve apostles of the Lamb. Judas by apostasy fell away and Paul was added to make up the number of the twelve. And yet the word apostle is only a name. It’s a designation. It means an ambassador.

And here sitting back in our congregation this morning are two who have gone as ambassadors for Christ, there may be others, two missionaries who have gone as ambassadors for Christ and as messengers for Christ, as those commissioned to go.

So that I am not at all sure that while the twelve apostles certainly were a group in themselves and their offices have not been perpetuated, still I am not sure that it’s not proper and permissible, if we know how we mean it, to call a missionary of an apostle. Because we often hear people call the apostle to the Jews, the apostles to this or that. Maybe we might call one of our missionaries that went into the Baliem Valley the apostle to the Doni, meaning simply an ambassador or a messenger as someone commissioned to go.

The second is the gift of the prophet. Now the gift of the prophet in the New Testament was only secondarily a gift of foretelling events. In the Old Testament the gift of the prophet was to foretell events mainly and to warn and to plead and to call back erring men to God. But in the New Testament the gift of the prophet is not so much to foretell events inasmuch as the Bible has been written and the prophecy stands, and all events have been foretold that God wants to foretell. But the gift of the prophet in the New Testament is to tell forth and to see with an anointed eye and to give meat in due season, and not simply to be a mimicker, but to tell out what God has to say for a given time.

Then there is the gift of the teacher. Not everybody can teach, we might just as well admit it, and even of those that teach, not many can teach. There is a gift of the teacher. It is both a natural gift and it is a gift of the Spirit.

Then there is the gift of the exhorter. Let him exhort, says the apostle. Now an exhorter is not known in our day, but the old Methodists were wise enough that they had an office of an exhorter. They commissioned him, called him a lay preacher. He had a license, he couldn’t marry people, and he couldn’t give the Lord supper, but he could get up and burn up sin and tell how wonderful God was, better than most preachers can do.

It might be interesting to remember that it was a lay preacher, an exhorter, that won Spurgeon to the Lord. Spurgeon came in out of a snowstorm into a Methodist church and got up in the balcony and sat and listened, a young Spurgeon and an exhorter who wasn’t much of a preacher at all, but he had the gift of exhorting. He was exhorting the people. Spurgeon said he said, I believed in Jesus Christ right there and I could have stood up with the best and the oldest saint and sung, “There is a Fountain Filled with Blood.” He was converted.

Then there is the ruler. Now a ruler is used in the same sense as a ruler of the synagogue. He’s not a legal ruler, he’s simply somebody that takes some direction and reads the Scripture and teaches, and I don’t know whether he might be synonymous with a pastor or not.

Then there’s the gift of wisdom also, and the gift of knowledge, and the gift of faith, and the gift of healing, which a few people have had, and the gift of miracles, and the gift of tongues, and the gift of interpretation of tongues, the gift of discernment, the gift of helps. Whatever that is, I do not know, but I sometimes think some people are gifted just to be helpers.

Then there’s the mercy shower, which I’ve called for want of a better name, and this mercy shower appears to be someone who’s particularly gifted by the Holy Ghost to go about helping people that are discouraged, and helping the poor, and otherwise going about doing good, as it was said of Jesus.

Then there’s the gift of government, and that might be the same as the gift of ruling.

Then there’s the gift of giving. Somebody says, aren’t we not all to give? Yes, we’re all to give, just as we are all to have some wisdom. But there’s such a thing as a gift of wisdom.

We’re all to have some discernment, but there’s such a thing as a gift of discernment. We’re all to show mercy and be helpful, but there’s such a thing as a gift of helping and showing mercy.

And so, we’re all to give, but there’s such a thing as a gift of giving. And I believe that God enables some men, if they will allow him by the Holy Spirit, to sow, control, and run business, that they’ll be able to support the Church, and the cause of missions, and the cause of Christ on earth, and to help the poor in a way that we, the average people, can’t possibly do. Then there’s the gift also of the evangelist, and everybody knows that there’s a gift of an evangelist. We admit that today. Then there’s the gift of the pastor.

Now, I’ve named nineteen. Now, my brethren, these are gifts given by the Holy Spirit to individual persons, just as the gift of sight is given to my eye, the gift of hearing is given to my ear, the gift of smelling is given to my nose, the gift of taste is given to my tongue, and the gift of manipulation is given to my hand, and particular gifts are given to every member of the body, so God gives to his Church, of which Christ is the head, these gifts.

Now, the work of the Church is to be done by the Spirit working through these gifted members. Now, you hear me. The work of the Church is to be done by the Spirit working through these gifted members.

Now, I’ll go further than that. I will say this, that in the judgment, when we all receive the gifts for the deeds we’ve done, the rewards for the deeds we’ve done, and we know as we’re known, and that which is chaff and wheat and straw and stubble is separated from that which is gold and silver and diamonds, and all that that is of the flesh perishes and passes away, and that which is of the Spirit alone stands, you will find that not only does God design to do all his work through gifted men, but He does do all His work through gifted men.

Now, He doesn’t carry on all religious activity through gifted men.You don’t have to have a gift of the Holy Ghost to be a preacher. You don’t have to be a gift of the Holy Ghost to be a Bible expositor. We can be Bible expositors by reading commentaries and going to Bible school and learning what men say is true of the Scripture. And a man can get up and preach. A politician can get up and preach, turn from politics if he’s talking to a religious group and preach like a house on fire. You only have to be able to talk and know how to use religious phrases to be a preacher.

But if you’re going to preach so that it’ll stand in the day of the fire, then you’re going to have to speak by a gift of the Spirit. And any preaching that is not done by a gift of the Spirit is not the true preaching of God. For it’s written that Jesus Christ was anointed of by the Holy Ghost and went about doing good. And He said that He was, the Holy Spirit is upon me because He hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor, and He opened the eyes of the blind, and so on. Even our Lord Jesus Christ worked by a gift of the Spirit on His human nature.

And so if you’re giving and serving and working and it’s not by a gift of the Spirit, you may lose everything you’ve done, and everything that you’ve put into it may go down the drain in that day. And if we don’t have the gifts of the Spirit, then where these gifts are not present, then the Church is thrown back upon four or five things which I want to name. All of them should be talked about at length, but of course I can’t talk for two hours here. You wouldn’t stay, and I wouldn’t blame you.

But we fall now upon talent. We use the word talent. That is, some fellow can whistle through his teeth, or somebody else has a marvelous gift for impromptu composition of poetry. Somebody else is marvelously gifted in mathematics. You can give him a whole handful of numbers, toss them up, and by the time they’ve been said, he’ll tell you the sum of them. Now those are talents.

Some people are talented composers, some are talented musicians, and some are talented singers, and some are talented talkers, we might as well admit it. Some of you dear, honest, good, godly people haven’t opened your mouths in public because you just don’t have any gift for it, and it doesn’t mean that you’re dumb or ungifted, it just means that isn’t your gift. But some of the hollowest, most hopeless people in the world can run off at the mouth and talk like everything. So, talent. That’s the next thing. Talent.

And the talent runs the church, not the gifts of the Spirit, as God intended, but talents run the Church. Just as you can keep a body alive by a little while, or keep it functioning by, you know how Colonel Lindbergh and his name did? The man who wrote the great book about man? I’ve forgotten his name and doesn’t matter. But they took a chicken’s heart and kept it alive for a month. But it was being done by artificial stimulus from the outside, so the church can be run like that.

And then another method religion can carry on with is psychology. And a great many people are skilled master psychologists. They know how to handle people, really. They’re amazing how they know how to handle people. So, the church can be run, a new man comes in and the crowds come, and first thing you know you have what looks like an amazingly successful church. But that man is simply a shrewd psychologist who knows how to say Jesus in the right place and say tender things.

Then others, other religious work can be done by business methods. And a lot of it is being done by business methods today. And then some use political techniques and some use plain sales methods.

And so, with Christianity now, the church, this church, any church, can be carried on by the exercise of human talents without a touch of the Holy Ghost, by sharp use of psychology without a touch of the Holy Ghost, by business methods, by political techniques and by sales techniques that have not one trace of the Holy Ghost in it.

But I’m telling you and warning you, my dear friends, that when this takes place, we may not know it until the great and terrible day when our deeds are burned with fire and only that which was wrought of the Holy Ghost stands. Jesus said even now the axe lies at the root of the tree and whatever isn’t of God and wasn’t planted by my Father and doesn’t bring forth fruit shall be cast down. And much of the religious activity during the centuries has been an activity wrought by talent and psychology and business methods, political techniques and sales methods.

All right, you say, now Mr. Tozer, let’s be honest about this. If you say that the gifts of the Spirit ought to be in the Church, and I emphatically do, and that the people of God could have these gifts of the Church and could labor in these gifts, then why don’t we simply throw in our lot with the tongues people, the Pentecostal people, by various names. There are, I guess, seventeen or eighteen different splits and divisions of them. Why don’t we throw our lot in with them?

Well now, what I’m going to say now is going to hurt some of my friends. And God Almighty made me do it. He made me do it. And He makes me draw blood and hurt my friends. I don’t want to do it. I’d rather love them and have them love me and go around telling what a nice boy I am. But I must tell the truth, and so I have studied those who are of what we call the tongues persuasion since 1918. That’s about forty-one years, isn’t it? And in all love and charity, I tell you my findings. Not forty-one years, no, but whatever it is, my mathematics always leads me.

In all love and charity, and with complete Christian kindness, I want to say this. First, that there are some good, sweet Christians among our tongues friends. No question about that. I’ve met some of them. I’ve prayed with some of them. And some pretty nice songs, and no great songs, but say, Oh Sweet Wonder, for instance, came out of the Pentecostalism.

And there have been a few lovely songs, never any great songs, but a few good little sweet songs have come out of it, and some good people, and I have friends among them. And I’m not condemning, but I’m going to tell you this, that before I will become a part of a movement, or a school of thought, or a theological school of thought, or a church group, or a denomination, I am going to have to test them and see what have been the characteristics and the marks and earmarks of that group down the years.

Now, with the full understanding that there are many individual churches of which what I say is not true, and with a full understanding that there are individual Christians that are excellent, wonderful, godly, sweet people, then I say this, that the marks that have characterized the various splits and divisions of Pentecostalism since the turn of the century have been, A, a magnification of one single gift above all others, and that, the one that Paul says was of least value.

B, the unscriptural exhibition of that gift before the people like a boy with a toy on Christmas.

C, a tendency to place personal feeling above the Scriptures, which is always an insult to God.

D, an almost total lack of discernment, revealing itself in a predominance of women in their leadership, and sometimes women of questionable character. A credulity beyond belief, allowing them to be taught by little boy preachers, little girl preachers, religious racketeers, people back from the dead, they say, and allow them to adopt rock and roll music long before Elvis Presley, and that led them to splits and divisions.

E, free love, divorce and remarriage among their preachers to a shameful degree. E or E or whatever it is, unbecoming public conduct, not justified in the New Testament.

Now brethren, when a group of people say, we have the gifts of the Spirit, come and join us, then I want to see what cloud hovers over them. Is it a cloud of purity? Is it a cloud of sanity? Is it a cloud of sharp discernment that knows the flesh from the Spirit? Is it a cloud of moral living? Is it a cloud of cohesion and unity? Or is it a cloud of noisy flesh, and sex extravagance, and careless moral living? And if it is the latter, and it is, then I want nothing to do with it.

Realizing that there are among these brethren some good people, and some sweet people, and if they’re mad at me, I’ll grieve about it, because I don’t want them to be. I’m only saying what can be proved and would be agreed to by everybody that knows the facts. Well, so therefore we cannot help ourselves by going somewhere else.

Now I say we ought to have the gifts of the Spirit in the church. Every church ought to have. Well then somebody says, I believe what Tozer says, I’m going to go somewhere else. No brethren, I don’t know of a group or denomination or fellowship or communion anywhere in the world that realizes the Pauline apostolic doctrine of the body of Christ, with each member recapitulating the local church and the local church recapitulating the entire church, and that work as a team, and each one having a proper gift as God gave them to do, and work thus in the Holy Ghost.

Now I know denominations and churches where there are a few like that among them, but I don’t know denominations or groups or churches where that is the regular and general and common thing. So I’ll tell you this, you won’t help yourself by going somewhere else. We here now, in this present moment, this 1956, the 28th of October I think it is, we here and now can receive, this day before the sun sets tonight, we can receive an enduement of the Holy Ghost.

If we will pay the price, each one of us, any one of us, all of us, can receive a downcoming, an enduement of the Holy Spirit. And when he comes, he invariably brings these functional graces, which will enable some to have a sharp discernment.

Now you say, what gifts do you think that we ought to expect? And it says, covet earnestly the best gifts, and we have a right to pray for these gifts and covet them before our God that we might use them to bless His church and glorify His name.

You say then, what are the gifts that you would say would be the most needed in the Church today? I believe the gift of discernment is one of them. We have in fundamentalism ruled the Holy Ghost out, and because we’ve ruled him out, we have gone blindfolded down these decades, with the result that the church has traveled way over into entertainmentism, way over into rationalism, way over into worldlinessism, and the true church of Christ is scarcely to be found anywhere on the face of the earth. It’s not because men were bad, but because men had fearfully ruled out the Spirit, and so the gift of discernment was not there.

The mighty gift that can discern. Let me, I don’t think he’s here now but let me point out a man that I believe has the gift of discernment. Now I don’t think he knows he has, but I think your old praying brother Tom has a gift of discernment. It’s amazing how he can look at you and see through you and tell you all about yourself, and yet he doesn’t make anything out of it at all except to pray and help you a little.

And if this gift of discernment had been in our leadership, we wouldn’t be where we are today. We wouldn’t be locked up behind dispensationalism over here and entertainmentism over there and something else over here, but we’d be in the middle of the way going along. Pray that the leaders of the Church might be endued with the gift of discernment.

Second, I believe the gift of prophecy. That is, the gift of the prophet that can see his generation, know what’s going on, and tell it abroad and make folks listen in one way or another, and find the church in the middle of things and help the church through. I believe we need that gift. I believe we need the gift of faith. Everybody has to have some faith or he wouldn’t be saved, but there are those who have a peculiar gift of faith. And they come around when this church was being built, and we were trying to pay off the old one in the middle of things. There were a few people, I don’t know who they were all, but there were a few that had the gift of faith.

Twenty-eight years ago, when this Church, then the old building, meeting the old building, called me here as pastor. I wrote them back and said, thank you, very much, thank you, thank you, but I’m not coming. And they reported it properly to the church and to the board, that I was not coming, but there was a little woman in this church, still living, very old now, and she was a member of the prayer band. When she got up and said in her broken Dutch English, she said the Lord had shown her and answered her prayer and I was coming.

I said, don’t worry about it, that’s it. She said, this is all settled. I said, here’s the letter saying thank you, but I don’t feel it’s right, it’s not the will of God. She said, that’s okay. She said, the Lord showed me. I hadn’t heard it yet, but God had shown her. She didn’t write to me, that would have been a mistake for her to try to be a messenger boy to me. She just kept still and talked to God. Then shortly after that I began to feel it and sense it.

And that’s what I mean, that gift of discernment and faith that can get through to God when everybody else is excited, or everybody else is jumping up making speeches, let’s do it this way, let’s do it this way.

When the Bible school gets into difficulty, then the members of the board, and here’s one of them, not this one, he wouldn’t do it, he knows better. But members of school boards, and we’ve got another one back here, chairman of a school board or Bible college, and the members jump up and say, well, let’s call in a money-getting concern that for 29% of the proceeds they’ll raise the money for us.

Or let’s make a film of our church work, suppose we do that. Let’s photograph Brother Ruben Eglund in action, and let’s photograph Brother Chase in action, and wave your arms and hold your Bible high, and we’ll take that around among the churches and show that, and thus we’ll get the money. Oh, brethren, that isn’t the way it’s done.

Somebody sitting by will say, God has told me, He’ll look after us, and we don’t have to astute to that. And usually he’s voted down, but if he isn’t voted down and can have his way, God will honor that faith and bless that school. And somebody said recently that in all the Bible colleges and Bible schools, a great number, maybe not all in America, but vast numbers of them were examined, and there were only six of them that were going anyplace and increasing in numbers and making progress, and they were the ones that don’t use any business methods to get their money. They just pray. They have men on their boards that say to God, now here, God, you either do this or else the whole thing will blow up in our faces. And God does it.

I think I mentioned this briefly, that over in Highland Lake, last July, I spoke for a week there, and incidentally, out of that week, six young people went to the Bible school to become preachers and missionaries, out of that week. But anyway, this young man, Merrill Fuller is his name, forty years old, just when I got there, he had his birthday, and they sang Happy Birthday in the dining hall.

Well, this Merrill Fuller owns I don’t know how many hundred thousand dollars’ worth of property right around there, and over across the Pennsylvania state line, he owns another vast holding, which is going to make a Christian high school. He had no more idea how to run a Christian high school than I know how to run a B47. But he said, Mr. Tozer, a whole faculty came to me without my ever soliciting anybody, and said, I want a job, I want to teach. A whole faculty of Christian teachers, a whole high school faculty came.

He said, we were just praying, that’s all. They had me up at five o’clock in the morning praying. Boy, I never felt so old in my life. But I went up there and prayed, and we had a great time. Five o’clock in the morning, and then he said this. Every time he’d get up, he’d say,

Now, friends, we have put this whole business on a platform where it’s either God or total collapse. If God doesn’t hear our prayers and send in the money, we’ll all finish, and that’s the end of it, and we’ll close this place up and write Ichabod over it. He said, I am not going to pray and then do something in such a carnal manner that I won’t know whether God answered or whether my carnal methods worked. So he said, we’re going to walk out and say, Now, God, here I go. You either hold me up or I perish. Now, I ask him, do you think he’s going to fail? No, he’ll never fail. The man who trusts on God will never fail.

Well, the man of faith, we need some faith. Then I think we could use some people with the gift of showing mercy. We’re all so starry-eyed and long-distance in our piety, and we tremble about the Baleen Valley, but there are people within the neighborhood that could use a little help.

You say, why don’t you go do it? Brother, I’m already staggered to bed at night without what I have to do, and I’m not gifted anyhow. I’m not gifted to go to anybody and help them much, but certainly some of you could be, and maybe I could be, but we all ought to be gifted. I think a mercy shower would be a great help around here.

And then I think that God should bless some businessmen and give them a gift so that honestly and without cheating or without preying against a competitor, they could have money enough that they could keep God’s work humming along like a diesel engine.

All right, brethren, we don’t have to go somewhere else. God will not do anything for any church that He won’t do for this church. And He won’t do anything for any people that He won’t do for this people. And He won’t do anything for anybody that He won’t do for you. We here now can receive. Ye shall receive power, says the Holy Spirit, said Jesus about the Holy Spirit. And when the Holy Spirit comes, remember this, that he will bring not only the gifts, but the graces and the fruits of the Spirit.

So, it is my earnest hope and my earnest prayers, that we God’s children here, with the dignity and self-control that belongs to Christianity, with the calmness and sweetness that belong to Jesus Christ, but with the abandonment that belong to the Apostles and the early Christian church, might throw ourselves out on him with an expectation that He should come and endue us. Come Holy Spirit, heavenly dove, with all thy quickening power, come shed abroad a Savior’s love in these cold hearts of ours. I believe he’ll do it.

And He may easily come in great fullness to some people that you and I are kind of overlooking. And He may pass over some that we think are pretty bigshots. And some big shots may even look askance and wonder if it’s God. But I believe that the Spirit of God wants to do a new thing. I believe He wants to do a new thing.

Just about, I don’t know, maybe about the time my daughter was born, that’ll be seventeen years back. No, it was more recently than that. 1944, how long was that ago? Twelve years ago. God and I had something out. We had something out and settled. And God began to fulfill in my poor, ragged ministry what He had promised me so long that He would. And I believe He’s ready to do this for us all.

It wasn’t in 1944 that I was baptized with the Holy Ghost. That was when I was nineteen years old, I know that. But twelve years ago. And I have lived to see God do things He said he would do. I’ve lived to watch Him work and do the things He said He would do. Until out of this poor, humble, uneducated, and worthless preacher, God has influenced, and influenced in the right direction, men whose shoelaces I’m unworthy to loose around this world.

Brethren, we don’t have to go somewhere else. We can now and here have all the mighty outpourings of the Spirit. And wouldn’t it be a wonderful thing if to us in this Church would come that which came to the Moravians? And they could only explain it by saying, it was a sense of the loving nearness of the Savior instantaneously bestowed.

Now that’s what we want. A sense of the loving nearness of the Savior instantaneously bestowed. And then will come along with it, Scriptualness, purity, cohesion, dignity, usefulness, high moral living, purity of life. Because that’s the only kind of nearness the Holy Ghost ever brings. And the only kind of life He ever motivates.

So shan’t we now, brethren, as we sing a song of our brother’s choosing. I won’t choose. He does such an almost uncanny job of choosing the right song that I won’t choose one. I’ll let him choose it. We’ll sing it reverently. And as we do, shall we not be expecting something from God this day? All right.