Month: January 2026

Messages

Tozer Talks

Post author By pshappard
Post date January 25, 2026

“Seven Dimensions of the Soul“

Secure Download Download

Tozer Talks · Seven Dimensions of the Soul

Seven Dimensions of the Soul

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

June 14, 1959

Now we have sung and quoted scripture and prayed and heard a testimony from an outgoing missionary and we’ve had a good meeting up to now and suppose we suppose we turn together to the 11th chapter of Revelation and read them read the first 15 verses responsibly and reading together the 15th and closing there, the 15th verse of the 11th chapter of the book of Revelation.

And there was given me a reed like unto a rod: and the angel stood, saying, Rise, and measure the temple of God, and the altar, and them that worship therein. But the court, which is without the temple leave out, and measure it not; for it is given unto the Gentiles: and the holy city shall they tread under foot forty and two months.

And I will give power unto my two witnesses, and they shall prophesy a thousand two hundred and threescore days, clothed in sackcloth. These are the two olive trees, and the two candlesticks standing before the God of the earth. And if any man will hurt them, fire proceedeth out of their mouth, and devoureth their enemies: and if any man will hurt them, he must in this manner be killed. These have power to shut heaven, that it rain not in the days of their prophecy: and have power over waters to turn them to blood, and to smite the earth with all plagues, as often as they will.

And when they shall have finished their testimony, the beast that ascendeth out of the bottomless pit shall make war against them, and shall overcome them, and kill them. And their dead bodies shall lie in the street of the great city, which spiritually is called Sodom and Egypt, where also our Lord was crucified. And they of the people and kindreds and tongues and nations shall see their dead bodies three days and an half, and shall not suffer their dead bodies to be put in graves. And they that dwell upon the earth shall rejoice over them, and make merry, and shall send gifts one to another; because these two prophets tormented them that dwelt on the earth.

And after three days and an half the spirit of life from God entered into them, and they stood upon their feet; and great fear fell upon them which saw them. And they heard a great voice from heaven saying unto them, Come up hither. And they ascended up to heaven in a cloud; and their enemies beheld them. And the same hour was there a great earthquake, and the tenth part of the city fell, and in the earthquake were slain of men seven thousand: and the remnant were affrighted and gave glory to the God of heaven. The second woe is past; and behold, the third woe cometh quickly. And the seventh angel sounded; and there were great voices in heaven, saying, the kingdoms of this world are become the kingdoms of our Lord, and of his Christ; and he shall reign for ever and ever.

Now, this is one of the most difficult of all the chapters in the book of Revelation. Difficult, but not impossible. There is a predictive element in it, as you know there is in this entire book, a predictive element, and it is said to cover a period of three and a half years. Twelve hundred and sixty days, forty-two months, three and a half years.

Now, in as much as it states it in three different ways, I am inclined to believe that it is trying to tell us that it is literal and that we are not to look around for a fanciful interpretation. If it had said forty-two months, maybe we could have found some reason to spiritualize it. If it had said three and a half years, we might have, but since it said it three different ways and all adds up to three and a half years, I believe that it is a period that yet lies ahead of us.

And in that period, there shall occur these items. The temple will be rebuilt, if not in that period, before that time. Jerusalem will be overrun by the Gentiles. Then there will be the appearance of the two witnesses. These two witnesses, of course, are the two personalities hard to identify.

I am usually cautious, but I am going to go out on a limb and tell you who I think they are. I think they are Moses and Elijah. I will tell you why I think so. It says that if any man will hurt them, fire proceedeth out of their mouth, and devoureth them, and they have power to shut heaven that it rained not in the days of their prophecy.

Now, there was only one man in the Old Testament times that was able to call down fire. It didn’t proceed exactly out of his mouth, but he spoke, and fire came down. That was Elijah, and he certainly had power to shut heaven that it didn’t rain. That would seem to identify a man as Elijah. Then they have power over waters to turn them to blood and to smite the earth with all plagues as often as they will. Only one man in the Old Testament ever had such power, and that was Moses.

Now, I have another reason for believing that these two were Moses and Elijah. They were the only two men in the Old Bible that I can think of that either didn’t die or didn’t die like other people. Remember that Moses, when he was 120 years old and still never had had an overhaul job, nothing wrong with him, not a rattle, his eyes were as good as ever, and his strength was not abated, and everything was as it had been. Suddenly, about the time he was expecting to go on for another term, God said, Moses, it’s time you come on up and die.

And I think Moses must have been very greatly surprised, if not downright astonished. Why he said, I don’t feel like dying, there’s nothing wrong with me. And God said, that’s all right, I have to take you out of here, you come on up. And he went up and died. And he is the only man that I ever heard of in the Scriptures that died completely well. You’re going to get something wrong, but not Moses, he was perfectly well.

So, since he simply quit breathing at the command of God, that would seem to leave something to be desired there yet. If it was appointed unto all men to die, and Moses didn’t die like other men, he just quit breathing because God told him to, and there was even a quarrel over his body. And God took away his body, nobody knew where it was, as though God were preserving it in a special way.

And of course, we all know that Elijah didn’t die, Elijah went up in a whirlwind into heaven, threw back his mantle, which Elisha picked up. We all know that story well. So, that would leave me to believe that the representative, the supreme representative of the law and the supreme representative of the prophets should now be testifying in the world. And they testified for a while until; and there are their pests, of course, and nuisances. A good man in the bad world is always a nuisance. Now, keep that in mind.

There’s an awful lot of romantic back-patting and cooing over men of God, but the simple fact is, if he’s a man of God enough, he’ll be a nuisance to the people who aren’t men of God. If he’s just a nice, soft, kindly, old stuffed grandpappy of a fellow, why, we can all love him. But if he’s living with God to such an extent that he frowns on our worldly ways and our carnal habits, then, of course, he’s a nuisance.

And these men certainly were. They were witnessing in a critical and extremely sinful hour, witnessing of heaven, and of course, nobody likes it. But they couldn’t do anything about it for a while, and then the beast had them killed.

Now, that seems to be the way it goes. After they’d been killed, God spoke to them again, and they rose up, and there was an earthquake, and there were many men slain, and there was a voice saying, the kingdoms of this world have become the kingdoms of our God and His Christ. And we’re going to let that rest there, because we’ve heard that taught so much, and I can’t add anything to it much.

But once more, I’m going to do what I’ve been doing in this book of Revelation, in the series I’ve been giving. I’m going to pick out a verse or a passage from the chapter which has meaning bigger than its prophetic meaning, and bigger than the period that it touches. It has meaning applicable to all worshipers everywhere, in the Old Testament, in the New Testament, to the Jew, to the Church, and to that temple which shall be in the days out ahead.

Now, the text would be then this one, rise and measure the temple of God, and the altar, and them that worship therein. Now, a great crisis time had come upon them, and there was a semblance of worship. A temple had been built. And don’t imagine that temple is going to grow there suddenly without an architect, and without builders, and without money, and without sacrifice. It’s not.

It’s not going to grow up like a mushroom. It’s going to have to be built. Somebody’s going to have to have zeal. Somebody’s going to have to have generosity to give to make it possible. Somebody’s going to have to work hard, and they will, and they have a temple there. And there is worship going on there, and will be worship, I mean, going on there. But something was wanting, obviously.

So, a mysterious hand was stretched out and gave John a rod, and said, John, take this rod, this reed, this yardstick, take it, John. And John took it. And he said, now go measure the temple, measure the altar, and measure the worshipers.

Now, I’ve checked this out very carefully to see whether this is actually what was said. One or two versions says, count them. But the major versions have it, measure them, and I’m going to stand with the large majority of translations, measure them, he said, measure them.

So, these worshipers that are here in this temple are going to have to have the apostolic test. They’re going to be measured. The apostle must measure them, John must measure them with a rod, not that he had concocted, but that God had given him. And all the worshipers have to have this apostolic test. And the result of the test is not published. There’s nowhere that I can find that any answer is given, but somewhere it was recorded. And there were consequences that followed the recording of the measuring of the temple and the worshipers therein.

Now, we live in a critical period. We do not live in that period. It would be extremely foolish to try to equate what will happen in that period of three and a half years with what’s happening now. They are not identical, although the Spirit is the same. They are not identical historically. They’re not identical.

So, we’ll not say that we live in that time, but we will say that we live in a critical period too. And there is great zeal and activity and even generosity. And there’s a great deal of building, and more churches are going up than you can imagine. And more people are going to church than ever were since the beginning of our country. A great deal of money is being given, more probably than ever was given before.

And this we must not forget that God is not looking at us as we look at ourselves. God never checks statistics. He sends an apostle to measure things and says, you’ve got to pass the apostolic test.

The church is founded upon the Rock, Christ Jesus, and the foundation of the holy apostles. And we got to measure up to the apostolic test. And we are being measured by the apostles. The New Testament is our measure. You can’t tell by how much money is given. You can’t tell by how big a building is. You can’t tell by how many people are present. You can’t tell that way because that’s the way human beings measure things. But there’s an apostolic test, a measurement of an apostle.

Here, John, take a reed, go lay it along the soles of the men that are worshiping there, and the women that are kneeling there, and then come back and record it. And John went, and John measured, and John came back.

Now, it’s relatively easy to measure the temple and the altar. It’s a very extremely easy thing to do. You can tell how many were in your Sunday school, and how much money you took in, and how much money went to missions, and how many went to school, Bible school or seminary from your church. That’s measuring the temple. That’s quite easy to do.

And then whether you have had or have not had, if you go to the altar or make a testimony of faith, that’s measuring the altar, and I suppose that’s relatively easy too. These are our specifications, you know, they’re ours. They have to do with size and cost and membership and the treasurer’s report. And that’s the external thing.

But then there is this terrible thing. I don’t know how these things affect you, but I’m affected by the Scriptures. I wince under it. And I wince under this: and measure them that worship therein. Now I wince under that, because the measuring of them that are there, the apostle lays a rod, you see, across our souls. And that becomes then tremendously important. If I don’t get it straight about the three and a half years, or if somebody else differs with me a bit about it, that isn’t important. But what is tremendously important to me is that if God measures me by the apostolic test that I measure up.

Now I’m going to ask you in a very quick close here tonight, how you measure up. Now there will always be, said one man, a real and a conventional, a true and a formal. There will always be the real and the conventional. There will always be the true and the formal. There will always be everywhere those who have a name to live but are dead.

But the apostolic test is there, and then the results of the test are recorded somewhere, and there are consequences that follow. And I’m interested in that, deeply concerned with that. I believe that our Father in heaven knows the times and the seasons, and He knows, and not even an angel knows, when our Lord shall return. I believe it will be soon, and I hope it will be soon.

But I also know that there’s a lot we can’t know, but there’s a good deal that we can. I can’t escape the words of the old devotional saint who said that he would rather know compunction and feel it in his heart than to know the definition of it.

And I say that I would rather be measured by the apostles and measure up than to know all the meaning of the revelation, though I am trying to place this before us, and I’m a believer in prophetic truth. But I want now to talk just a little about some of these measurements. You see, there are different dimensions.

We have several different dimensions. I’m going to mention seven of them. The dimensions of your soul, of your Christian life. May the Holy Ghost take this home to my heart and yours.

Now, first of all, there’s the dimension we call faith. And I wonder if it’s real or conventional. What difference has your faith made to you? Now, there was a time when you didn’t have faith, and now you say you have faith.

Now, I’m not challenging your having faith, but I’m asking you, what difference has the coming of this faith had? What are you now doing that you didn’t do before? What are you now not doing that you did do before? Has the coming of this faith made a specific change in your life? Is this faith dimension such that when the apostle lays the rod upon it, it will measure up?

Now, that to me is vastly more important to my eternal future than to be sure who the true witnesses are. I’m quite sure who they are. That’s one thing I’m dogmatic on. I’m quite sure I know who they are. I think they will come back and that they will stand as witnesses to the law and the prophets declaring God’s righteousness among men.

But if I should have missed the mark on that, if I have faith, and that faith is real, and the dimension when the Lord lays his rod upon my soul and finds that faith is there, real faith is there, I can afford to be wrong on the explanation of the text, but I can’t afford to be wrong when it comes to the apostolic test.

And then there’s a dimension that we call love. That’s another way God measures you. Just as a doctor will take a half a dozen different tests and then add them up and see how you are, how healthy you are, so there are these tests, these dimensions, there’s love. Now, we Christians say that we have love, but do you know I wonder how real our love is? John says, if a man says he loves and doesn’t love his neighbor, how could the love of God be in that man, if he doesn’t love his brother.

And Jesus said that after the love of God, the love of the neighbor was next. And that those two, the love of God and the love of our fellow man, they added up to all that a man had to be, to be pleasing to God.

Now, a love that lies supine is not biblical love and it will never stand the apostolic test. James wrote caustically about any kind of faith that did not do anything. And John wrote caustically about love that didn’t do anything. So, these two men are measuring us.

When you sit down to a great bulging, steaming Sunday dinner, did you ever stop to think of the not hundreds, not thousands, but millions of people who haven’t had enough to eat today?

One of the most shocking things that our superintendent, Mr. Thomas, brought back to us was in telling about walking through the streets of one of the Eastern cities early in the morning and having to walk gingerly, picking his way to keep from tramping on little arms and legs and feet and faces and hands and bodies of little boys and girls and babies sleeping on the sidewalk because they had no place else to sleep. To wake, to wake like grass growing up suddenly. There there were whole mobs of them when the sun woke them, not a bite to eat.

Now I believe that love that doesn’t do something to alleviate this is not love at all. And I believe that faith that doesn’t bind my heart to my fellow man is not faith at all. But I’m not saying that we don’t have it. I’m only saying, oh God, the apostolic test is here. The man of God is laying the reed like a rod, rod like a reed upon our hearts. And what does that dimension say, that faith dimension? Remember the Jews believed they had faith all during hundreds of years of their history, but found they had not faith at all, but were rejected because they had creed without true faith.

There were many widows in Israel in the days of Elijah the prophet, but to not one of them did Elijah go, but to a pagan woman of Sarepta. And she had the faith that the Jewish woman did not have.

The Sarah and the Rebecca and the rest of them named after the celebrated grandmothers and mothers of Israel. They were there by the hundreds, but they had not faith. And when God wanted to support a prophet, he had to send him out of the country and find a pagan woman.

And the Sarahs and the Rebeccas and the Hannahs looked down their nose at that pagan woman, but she had faith, and a miracle came to her home. So, it’s possible to think we have faith and not have faith, to think we have love and not have love.

Then there’s humility. That’s another dimension. Religion can be a source of pride. I was talking to a man who came to see me last week. He was here last Sunday night and asked for an interview, and he talked with me. He had been saved seven years, a wonderful Christian brother. I got a lot of help from him, and I hope he got some from me.

And as we were talking, he was telling me of his great yearning after God and his dissatisfaction with the Church he was in. He wasn’t criticizing, he was very kindly about it. But he told me that he said, just God isn’t there. And he said, in effect, I grieve because of all the foolishness and worldliness and nonsense and carnality that I see everywhere moving in and out of the Church, and I don’t like it. And I yearn that the Church should move toward God.

And I warned him, I said, watch one thing. You’ve only been converted seven years, and I believe that I can say that you’re among those whose hearts cry out after the living God but look out that Satan doesn’t slip around and remind you that you’re a superior Christian, that you’re crying out after God and these carnal church members around you aren’t. The further we go up into God, the more terrible the temptation toward pride. Spiritual pride is probably the most awful pride.

Suppose I put it like this. Spiritual pride is at the top as being the most damaging, injurious, and offensive of all kinds of pride, for that was the pride of the Pharisee. Next is intellectual pride, which is pride of intellect. There is only one other kind of pride that’s as nasty as the pride of intellect, the man who says, I am an intellect.

A man came to me before I preached somewhere one time not too long ago. I had preached Saturday, and then I had preached Sunday, and then I was preaching Monday at another place, and he was there. He came and said, Mr. Tozer, I heard you preach Saturday night, and I thought you lost a friend. I didn’t know what he meant. But he said, you recovered yourself nicely Sunday night.

And I still didn’t know what he meant. He said, you know, you spoke rather slightingly of the intelligentsia. But he said, Sunday night, you said something in favor of the intelligentsia. He said, I thought that you’d lost me as your friend. He said, you know, I’m an intellectual. He was an intellectual, a self-conscious intellectual. That’s the second worst kind of pride.

The third is pride of race. I’m a Swede, I’m a Dutchman, I’m an Irishman, I’m an Englishman, or I’m a mongrel. I am whatever I am, and the terrible part about that is the only thing we have to be proud of is all underground. They say that the man whose pride lies in his ancestors has got more underground than he has on top of the ground. That’s an offensive kind of pride.

And then there’s the pride, of course, that’s pride of our looks. Men, as a rule, aren’t bothered with that, but women are. Men are inclined to be more bothered by their biceps and their chest and the women by their looks; pride of person, that is. And then there’s, of course, pride of accomplishment. But the Holy Ghost lays a rod on our dimension we call humility.

I just wonder how humble we are. Stratton, after you’ve sung a good solo, do you ever catch yourself cupping your ear to listen, to wait for somebody to come and say, I enjoyed that?

Now, I’m not asking you, don’t raise your hand. That wouldn’t be fair. But that bothers me a lot. I hate it, too. I’ve done it, too. And after I’ve preached, particularly, you know, I’m used to it here, but if I preach somewhere where there are a lot of people present that I have reason to want to appear well before.

Do you know how I’ve settled that, brethren and sisters? You know how I’ve settled that? I go to God before I go into the pulpit. I did it twice in Buffalo in May when I preached there at our international council. And I say, God, let’s have an understanding. I’m willing to fail and disgrace myself publicly as a poor preacher if you’ll get more glory out of it. But if you can get glory out of my giving a good sermon, all right. But if not, then let me fail. And I know God knows I mean that, too. And I think that that’s one way to keep yourself down.

The preacher that preached the famous sermon on humility and how I attained it, is to be pitied because the man who thinks he’s humble isn’t. Humility is an unconscious thing, and it never knows it’s around. It’s transparent, and it has no smell, and you can’t see it, and you can’t hear it.

Humility cannot be detected. If it’s in a man, he doesn’t know it. And when you see a man do what I said I did, have to go and rub his nose in the dirt, he’s not too humble a man. God is measuring my humility to see how actually humble I am.

And then there is courage. Maybe somebody would say, but I don’t believe that courage is a dimension. Courage is such a dimension, so certainly one that the opposite of it consigns men to hell, for the fearful and the unbelieving shall have their part that burns in the lake of fire. Courage is that which gives you power to stand, and to be different and to be unpopular.

If you could just get a lot of people who are willing to be unpopular, who are willing to stand and be what they feel God wants them to be, and say what he wants them to say, and do what he wants them to do, whether the world likes it or not, you’d have a pretty good Christian. But if you had those who are willing to stand and do and be and say as God wants them to, whether the church likes it or not, then you have a better Christian.

You know, in fundamental circles there’s a hierarchy. They can’t put you in jail, they can’t excommunicate you, but they can frown on you and scare you. And the average young fellow who has gone through a school somewhere is so anxious to please his professors, and so anxious to please whoever happens to be the big evangelical raja in that neighborhood, that he’d shiver and scared stiff if he thought he’d uttered a word or made an interpretation that couldn’t be approved by the evangelical hierarchy. You’ve got to have courage to look into the face of God and do what God wants you to do if it means your neck.

How is your courage, my friend? Do you have the courage to be different? Do you have the courage to be unpopular? I hope so.

Then there is the carrying of the cross, we would call that self-sacrifice. it abideth alone, and there we have self-sacrifice. We’re here not to grow fat and to have much, we’re here to immolate ourselves. We’re here to offer ourselves.

Dr. Ironside wrote a devotional book called “A Continual Burnt Offering.” That’s what I mean. A continual burnt offering. It must be going up night and day on the altar of God.

Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone. Two different figures, but it adds up to the same thing. We’re not to have our way, not self-aggrandizement, but self-sacrifice. Not self-praise, but self-sacrifice. Not self-love, but self-sacrifice.

And then purity of life, deliverance from sin, perfection, deliverance, likeness to God in Christ, habits and tempers, sharp tongue, and just how far have they gone? Are we delivered from them? Are we free? You say, I heard the voice of Jesus say, rise and I rose, I’m alive.

But Lazarus heard that, but he was bound all around with grave clothes. And if we could get the grave clothes off of the people that had been called awake by the voice of God in the new birth, if we could get the grave clothes off, we’d have a revival on our hands that would spread around the world and threaten the iron curtain. But God’s children are satisfied to stand up all wrapped around with their yesterdays; habits and all the rest that they should be free from.

Then I would give you the seventh dimension, and that is integrity. How transparent are we? How candid, how completely honest. You know Bacon, Francis Lord Bacon, in one of his essays, draws a distinction between simulation and dissimulation.

Simulation is pretending to be what you’re not. Dissimulation is pretending not to be what you are. And it’s everywhere, everywhere. In fact, we’ve made a creed out of it in America. We’ve made a creed out of it. We cover things up, paint them over, smooth them over, put chrome on them, put grease paint on them. God wants a simple-hearted people.

Could I tell you again, in closing, a story I told you, I guess, maybe, oh, 10 or 12 years ago when it happened. I was walking around with a man who’s since gone to heaven, dear brother Robert Kilgore, of Seattle.

And we were talking, and I said to Brother Kilgore, I long after God, I long to be simple-hearted, I long to be humble, I long to be Christlike, and I don’t see much example around me in the churches, and I long to be candid and direct and honest and transparent. And I said, if I could find a people that were like that, I think I’d go join them. He said, no, you wouldn’t.

Well, I didn’t know what he meant, but he went on to tell me, he said, you know, I got among the people like that over in the state of Pennsylvania here last summer. He said, I took three weeks off to go and meet God in a cabin, he said.

Now, this very brilliant thinking brother, teacher in a school, he said, I took three weeks off to go up country, and he said, I got up close to a camp meeting or Bible conference. He didn’t tell me the name of the people; it sounds like they might have been Mennonites or something. But he said, you know, they were just like you’re talking about, just what you’re talking about. He said, simple, candid, honest, transparent, through and through.

And he said, Mr. Tozer, Brother Tozer, I met God up there. He said, it was a crisis in my life. I met God among those people. He said an illustration. He said, I slept in a room with an old bearded German fellow who was one of them. He said, I woke up in the night and had gotten suddenly chilly in the night, it was real cold. He said, I slept up on a good bed and my roommate, an old gentleman, slept down on a cot. And he said, the moonlight was streaming into the room, and I looked and I saw that the covers had slipped off of the old man. But he was still sleeping away. He said, I thought, oh, I’ll cover him up.

So, he got out of his warm bed and went over and got the blankets back on the old man. I don’t know whether he put the beard under or on top of the covers, but that isn’t important.

But he got him fixed up and he slipped back to bed. And he was congratulating himself that he had not wakened the old gentleman. Then he said he heard a man in a very thick German accent praying. And he said, O Jesus, he said, you’ve been so good to me. And he listened. He said, you’ve given me a nice farm and some cows and a good wife. And he went on enumerating. And then he ended by saying, and a nice man stuck me in when I get cold. He said, there he was.

He said, Brother Tozer, that’s the way they lived and that’s the way they thought. You know, no, no, none of this jive stuff, none that far out, you know, and it’s the most, none of that. Simplicity.

God is going to judge us by our frankness, our candor, our moral and spiritual integrity. That measuring is going on and the whole New Testament declares that it’s going on, but it isn’t published yet. And I don’t know where I belong in this thing. Do you know where you belong? I know in some measure, but it isn’t published. It wasn’t published there. He just had to measure it and then God kept the record.

And you know, soon everybody will know I can stand up here and look dignified as I am able and pass and get away with murder because I’m a minister and I’m called Reverend. And I can walk down the street looking stern and stuffed and everybody will say, good morning, Reverend. But I can’t get away with a thing before the apostolic measuring rod. And neither can you. Not one thing.

Friends, can write you and tell you you’re wonderful, you’ve helped them, but it doesn’t mean a thing when the apostle lays his rod on your soul. It isn’t published yet. Soon everybody will know. There’s nothing secret that shall not be revealed and there’s nothing done in secret that shall not be shouted from the housetop.

Soon everybody will know, but there’s only one thing that can silence that shouting voice. And do you know what it is? I believe it’s the voice of Jesus’ blood that speaketh better things than that of Abel. I believe that the blood of the Lamb speaks louder in my defense than my own sins can speak against me.

And the only thing that can silence the voice of the prophet or the apostle is if the blood is on my soul. To repent, to tell God we’re sorry, to seek His face, to get out from under this two-facedness, this simulation and dissimulation, to have our love and our humility and our faith tested and tried before God. This we can do, and we can in sorrow repent before our God and our Father.

And as we do, the blood of Jesus Christ, His Son, cleanseth us from all sin. And I said a while ago that we could not know. Now I wonder if I was quite accurate. I wonder if the teaching of the New Testament isn’t rather that God gives a witness, and you can know in your heart.

Other people won’t, but you can know in your heart. The proud man can know when he’s humbled himself till God smiles. The deceiver can know when he’s repented until God smiles. The loveless, hard man can break his own heart before God until God smiles.

And so, with all the other dimensions of the soul, shan’t we tonight, shan’t we ask God to search us? Search me, O God. Do you know that brother? We sang it, didn’t we? All right, could we sing it again? Search me, O God, search me and know my heart. Let’s do it now for just a moment while the brother leads us. It is not in the book, dear friends, but I’m sure it’s familiar to many. And we’ll sing it thoughtfully together.

Dear friends, don’t close your eyes and sleep tonight until you have settled it before God. We won’t press an invitation this evening but ask God to lay the rod of the apostolic test upon your life and measure you. And then meet whatever requirements, make any changes, any restitution, any amendment of life, and do it in faith and love, and you’ll be better for it.

O God, now we thank Thee for this evening. We thank Thee for the fellowship of the Christians. We thank Thee for the presence of the missionary. We thank thee for our friend, Shufelt.

We thank Thee and praise Thee for the Word and ask that as we go out tonight, we’ll go with a solemnity upon us, a cheerful solemnity and a seriousness, knowing that the results are not yet published before the world, but they will be.

So, help us to get to them before they’re published, bury them forever in the blood, and be clean to stand before God and man. Now be gracious unto us, lift Thy face upon us, and smile upon us through this week ahead.

In the name of Jesus Christ, our Lord, and all the people said, amen.

Tags Christian Life

Messages

Tozer Talks

Post author By pshappard
Post date January 18, 2026

“The Garments of Jesus“

Secure Download Download

Tozer Talks · The Garments of Jesus

The Garments of Jesus

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

December 21, 1958

Let us turn to the second chapter of Luke and read the familiar but still very wonderful story. Luke 2, we’ll read the first 18 verses responsibly and all join on the last verse, that would be verse 18.

Luke 2: And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be taxed. (And this taxing was first made when Cyrenius was governor of Syria.) And all went to be taxed, everyone into his own city.

And Joseph also went up from Galilee, out of the city of Nazareth, into Judaea, unto the city of David, which is called Bethlehem; (because he was of the house and lineage of David:) To be taxed with Mary his espoused wife, being great with child. And so it was, that, while they were there, the days were accomplished that she should be delivered. And she brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger; because there was no room for them in the inn.

And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night. And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid. And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, which is Christ the Lord. And this shall be a sign unto you; Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger. And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying, Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.

And it came to pass, as the angels were gone away from them into heaven, the shepherds said one to another, Let us now go even unto Bethlehem, and see this thing which is come to pass, which the Lord hath made known unto us. And they came with haste, and found Mary, and Joseph, and the babe lying in a manger. And when they had seen it, they made known abroad the saying which was told them concerning this child. And all they that heard it wondered at those things which were told them by the shepherds.

Now let us pray.

Dear Father in heaven, we thank Thee for this Scripture. It’s as fresh and as imperishable, more so than the stars that shine. Nothing, nothing is as imperishable but the throne, the throne around which the rainbow curls.

For this, this is Thee, this is Thee speaking. These words are Thy words. Thou hast spoken to us. Thou hast told us this most wonderful, most wonderful story. We thank thee for all that it means. We thank thee, Father, that if the world were to dissolve today, there would be a victory that the ages would hear because of all who have believed it and all who have been saved. And that great multitude that no man can number, ten thousand times, ten thousand and thousands of thousands out of every tongue and tribe and nation and people around all the world for all these centuries.

So, nothing Satan can do now can hinder. Nothing, nothing, Lord, can stop us. And if the cause of missions should end now and Thou should close and slam shut and lock every door, we thank Thee that the gospel has found its people and they have come out from all tongues and tribes and nations and have joined themselves unto the Lamb and they shall stand on the sea, by the sea of glass, and they shall wave their palm branches and sing and their song shall be worthy as the Lamb that was slain. And we can only say Thine is the victory, Thine is the Kingdom, Thine is the power, and Thine is the glory. And, O Lord, Thou shalt yet take unto Thee Thy great power and reign.

And we thank Thee, Lord, our eyes are upon Thee and we’re looking to Thee, Thou baby Jesus who became a man, Christ Jesus, and who died and rose and lives and pleads with love in all His words and deeds. And we’re victorious, we thank Thee we’re victorious, and Thy church is victorious, and Thy throne is victorious, Thou hast established Thy throne, O Lord. And the world and the things thereof and the sun from the rising to its setting tells the story.

And we bless Thy holy name that we are celebrating this hour, the coming of God to the world, the advent of Jesus Christ who is the Eternal Word and is now made flesh. And we know what it’s about and we’re not puzzled and we’re not caught in the whirl of it, but our feet are on the ground and our hearts in the heavens. And we can give account of why we feel like this about it and we can tell the people why we believe what we believe. And we have the solid theology of the Scriptures underneath our feet.

Blessed be thy name, blessed be the Triune God, the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. And blessed be all His will and His purposes and His plans and His desires and His everlasting predestination, having predestinated all things after the counsel of Thine own will. And all the mysteries of these things we don’t understand, but we can stand with our hands raised to heaven and cry, it shall be done. Thou art God and nobody can stop Thee. And we thank Thee for Thy son, Jesus, now on the throne.

Oh, we pray that we may worthily celebrate. And Father, we pray for those who have had hard times and troubles over the last times, the last hours, the last days. We pray Thee, the tatters, Lord, who’ve lost this wonderful, fine, godly, old gentleman from them who’s gone only ahead a little while.

Bless them all, we pray Thee, and in thy kind love, fill the vacancy until they shall gather at the throne. Thank Thee for that home, for these people, for the influence and the stream of spirituality and godliness that has come down from this patriarch who is now with Thee.

And we pray Thee for Dorothy Elder of this church and her home and her people, Lord, with her father having died. And we pray thee, Father, thy blessing upon that home, too. Bless them all most graciously, O God, and undertake, we pray thee, and let thy blessing be upon them and upon Dorothy and upon her sisters and brothers and the wife, the mother. Let grace be upon them all.

Keep thy hand upon us today, may we honor Jesus Christ, our Lord, in a manner worthy of Him. Bless our country, we pray, our God, this northern part of our country lying under the great heavy snows and with very great cold.

And we pray thee, Lord, Thou wilt help and bless again, we ask Thee, out on the highways and up in the air and wherever people are traveling, for many shall run to and fro and knowledge shall be increased. Lord, this is happening in our time, and we pray Thee for all who are traveling and all on the sea and all in the air. And let Thy blessing now be upon this service as we wait further on thee, in Christ’s holy name. Amen.

Now, I have a number of texts this morning, and I want to read them. Luke 2:7, She brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger. Mark 9:3, And his raiment became shining, exceeding white as snow, so as no fuller on earth could white them. Psalm 22:18, They parted my raiment among them, and for my vesture did they cast lots. John 20:6-7, Then cometh Simon Peter, following him, and went into the sepulcher, and seeth the linen clothes lie, and the napkin was about his head, not lying with the linen clothes, but wrapped together in a place by itself. Revelation 1:13, In the midst of the seven candlesticks, one like unto the Son of Man, clothed with a garment down to the foot, and girt about the paps with a golden girdle. Psalm 45:8, All thy garments, smell of myrrh and aloes and cassia, out of the ivory palaces. Isaiah 63:1, Who is this that cometh from Edom, with dyed garments from Basra? This that is glorious in his apparel, traveling in the greatness of his strength.

You will notice that each one of these verses which I read mention clothing. And I’d like to talk a little today about the garments of our Savior and let what I have to say revolve around this central verse, All thy garments, smell of myrrh and aloes and cassia, out of the ivory palaces. It’s one of my favorite verses, and no doubt I have quoted it very, very frequently and referred to it often in my preaching. But today I want to talk about seven garments which our Savior wears, or wore, and what they mean.

Now, in the text, all thy garments smell of myrrh, David is addressing one whom he calls one that is fairer than the children of men, and he describes him in radiant, beautiful language. He is fairer than the children of men. Grace is poured out by his lips. He is blessed forever. He has a sword girt upon his thigh. He is mighty and glorious and majestic. He rides prosperously in truth and meekness, and his throne is God’s throne forever and ever. And God has anointed him with the oil of gladness above his fellows.

Now, that’s the One who is described, and we know who that One is. It is none other than Jesus Christ, our Lord.

Now, garments, as you know, express two things. They express office and character. In the Bible we learn of the wedding garment. We learn of the white, spotless garment. We are told not to get our garments spotted, which is not to get our hearts soiled. We learn of the bride and her beautiful white garment, and we learn of the efforts of the sinner to make garments for himself, but they are filthy rags.

So, character is described here in the garment of Jesus, but there is more than character. There is office as well. For men dress as kings or as generals or as what they are, and so we see here in the garments of our Savior, His offices and His character. I’ll sing the character he wears and all the forms of love he bears exalted on his throne.

Now, this means then that His offices are many, for He’s the Infinite God, and that His character is perfect, and that He has an infinite variety of changes. Do not think that in talking of these seven garments, there are many more, that I am exhausting the possibilities, for He is an Infinite Savior, and being infinite, He has an infinite variety of changes.

Now, it says about His garments, all of His garments, no matter which ones, that they smell of myrrh and cassia and aloes. And in the Bible, we find that myrrh is used to describe bitterness and tears, and cassia is a healing herb that was medicinal in its use. And aloes, there was nothing about aloes that could heal, nothing about aloes that suggested character at all, but there was one thing about the little flower, it was fragrant and beautiful. No mortal can with him compare among the sons of men. Fairer is he than all the fair that fill the heavenly train.

So, we have these three fragrances, that of myrrh, which, while it is sweet to smell, has an undertone of bitterness, and cassia, while it is also fragrant, is used for healing, and aloes, which is just fragrant and beautiful.

Now, let’s look at these garments rather briefly, that our Savior wore, or that He wears, or that He shall yet wear. The first is in Luke, and she brought forth her firstborn son and wrapped him in swaddling clothes.

Now, the swaddling clothes worn by our Savior are emblematic of His true humanity, for our Lord Jesus was human, became human, and dwelt among us. He loved the title, the Son of Man. He loved it more, I think, than any other, because He referred to Himself in the third person often as the Son of Man, His favorite title.

Now, our Lord came clear down. I’ve often said, and I repeat now, that I am glad that we are redeemed not as a slumming project on the part of God, that God didn’t decide that we poor slum dwellers in the slums of the universe here in earth, that we needed help, and so he didn’t organize a do-good uplift organization, get them together and say, let’s try to help the underprivileged. But He came clear down where we were, and He took upon Himself all our limitations and took upon Himself all that we are except sin.

There was nothing that He did not take upon Him. He was born as we are born. He grew as we grow. He ate as we eat. He slept as we sleep. He developed and matured as we develop and mature. He stood on the earth. He watched the sun rise and set. He spoke the familiar language of His people. He wore the common garments of his people. Jesus, our Lord, was in every sense a human.

You see, the church has made two mistakes. She hasn’t meant to do it, but she’s made two mistakes. One is to talk too much of His deity, and the other to think too much of His humanity. We’ve got to keep them in balance.

We’ve got to remember that while He was God, He yet came to the world and was wrapped in swaddling garments to tell all the world, I was born into the human race. And I was immediately picked up and swaddled, covered over with the garments they call the swaddling garment.

And they took the little baby Jesus, and I don’t think there’s anything that’s quite so fragrant as a newly bathed and newly powdered and newly dressed little baby. And when they took the baby Jesus up after they had oiled Him and rubbed Him and washed Him and then had wrapped Him in His baby swaddling garments, if they had been as sharp and as penetrating, and probably there were some that were, they would have noticed a fragrance about His little baby garments that they had not put there. If indeed they had scented powders in those days, I know not. But if they had, they would have noticed three fragrances here. There was the smell of myrrh.

When we take a new baby in our hands, we don’t like to think of its future being sad or bitter or tearful or heavy. But when they picked the baby Jesus up, if they had had prophetic foresight, they would have known that this baby was born to suffering and to bitterness and tears.

But if they could have gone on and detected this other fragrance, they would have known that there was cassia there, for cassia was the medicinal herb, and aloes they would have seen and perhaps they did. I doubt whether they did at first, for the Scripture says there is no beauty in Him that we should desire Him.

I think therefore that our Savior did not show up until the time of His death any unusual marks of beauty. The only marks He showed were His moral beauty, and of course that in itself was wonderful. But just as they broke the alabaster box to release the fragrance that filled all the house where they were sitting, so when they broke Him on the cross of Calvary, they released to the world a fragrance like the aloes, a fragrance that was also a beauty, because you know it is possible that which is fragrant and that which is beautiful, they’re very closely related.

I have said to you in times gone by that when I was young, I don’t know what’s happened to it, maybe it’s atrophied since, but I used to be able to see color in music. When I heard an organ or an orchestra or anything, I heard not only the music but saw the color of it. And I thought it was just one more eccentricity on my part, until I learned that they can transmute the, what do they call it, across, the little impulses across, and that actually they are the same. Actually, all the five senses are one.

I thought that out when I was a young chap, and then later on I found out I had been right about it. That’s always comforting, but I had that the senses are all the sense of touch. They all go back to the sense of touch.

Something touches the olfactory nerves, and we smell. Something touches the ear, and we hear. Something touches the eye, and we see. Something touches the taste buds, and we taste. It all goes back to the sense of touch, and it can all be reduced to this one thing.

And so, when we say fragrant and beautiful, we are saying one thing. For we are saying that Jesus Christ is to the heart of a man that which fragrance is to the nose, which beauty is to the eye, which sweet sound is to the hearing. So He is that, and all this was in His clothing, if they could only have known it, when he became a babe and dwelt among us.

But then I ask you to note the second one, and that is in Mark. And his raiment became shining, exceeding white as snow, as no laundry, no fuller on earth can white them. Now here were His lustrous garments, the insignia of His very Godhood. If His swaddling garments were the emblem of His humanity, then His lustrous garments were the emblem of His true Godhood.

Would it be out of order if I quoted again that which I guess I have quoted once a year for the great many years, that glorious form, that light unsufferable, and that far-beaming blaze of majesty wherewith he was wanted heaven’s high council table to sit in midst of Trinal Unity, he laid aside and here with us to be, forsook the courts of everlasting day and chose with us a darksome house of mortal clay.

And this far-beaming blaze of majesty got out of hand only one time while He was on earth. He had become man so completely and so fully and perfectly did His humanity veil His deity that it never got out of hand but one time.

Once up yonder on the mountain where Peter, James, and John were with Him, He prayed. And as He prayed, His raiment became shining, exceeding white as snow. And the result, you remember, on Peter and the rest of them, they spoke not knowing what they were saying.

And they said, let us dwell forever here, build us three tabernacles, and bring back Moses and Elijah, and let’s live here forever. As soon as the lustrous glory of His Godhood shone forth, they wanted to stay where He was. And so, Jesus, who is man, is also God.

We must hold these two thoughts in careful balance. We must remember His swaddling garments. When we seem so poor and weak and human, we must comfort our hearts by remembering that He once wore our baby clothes. And when we become too bold and sure of ourselves, we ought to take a quick look at the mountain where He shone forth in His lustrous garments, whiter than any fuller on earth could make them.

So, He is not only man, but He is God, very God of very God begotten, not created. He was at home among the angels, and He was at home among men.

If we had sent a man to heaven to try to see God and intercede for us, that man wouldn’t have been at home there, for earth is his home, not heaven. If He had sent an angel to earth, the angel wouldn’t have been at home here, for heaven is the home of the angels, not earth. But Jesus, being God and having His home in heaven, and being born in the form of a man, thus could have earth as His home, we have united in the two, heaven and earth–God, God and humanity reconciled.

So now we have the two garments, and even yet if you could have seen or they could have gotten control of their faculties and could have remembered a little there His lustrous garments, they’d have noted they would smell of myrrh, because though He were God, He was not going to finish His redeeming work without tears and bitterness and sorrow. And, of course, cassia, for that’s why He came, and aloes for all the beauty of His wonderful nature.

Can I ask you to note John 19:23, His seamless garment? We read about that in the Old Testament, they parted my raiment among them and for my vesture did they cast lots. We have that garment of Jesus, that garment that was woven. It wasn’t woven as a piece of cloth and then sewn together leaving seams. It was woven or knitted in some manner so there was no seam, all one piece.

You women are familiar with that kind of thing. I guess they do that with sweaters and other garments that are knitted to the general shape they want and thus have no seam.

So, this was the seamless garment of Jesus, and this was the only garment He had. When our Lord went on a trip, He did not take a suitcase. When He went on a journey, He did not take a bag with Him. They had no need for He wore His total wardrobe on His back. And wherever He went, He carried all He owned with Him. The foxes have holes and the birds have their nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.

Think of it, my friend, his seamless garments were the emblem of His voluntary poverty, for He could have robed Himself in light.

You know, if Shakespeare had written this story, how different it would have been, or Aeschylus, or any of the other great dramatists, how different it would have been. He would have come down like some planet from afar, blazing round the earth and startling the world. But instead of that, He divested Himself of light and He laid aside His glory and came down with us.

He might have robed Himself in light. He might have had the sun for His covering. He might have had the moon under His feet and the stars round Him as a crown round His head. But our Lord came down and had but one seamless garment, the emblem of His voluntary poverty. And when He went to the cross, He didn’t even take that garment along with Him.

Think of it, my friends, this we don’t often talk about. And the artists, when they paint Jesus, out of common decency, manage somehow to drape over His holy form some ribbon of cloth to shield Him from the naked gaze of men. But actually, Jesus died naked. As He was born naked, He died naked. He died on a cross naked. They took off from Him all that He had.

And so, He died, and atonement was made. If those Jews or those Roman soldiers that took His last garment, his seamless garment, if they could have had the sense of smell that a prophet had, they would have smelled myrrh, and they wouldn’t have had to argue about that. The bitterness and the tears and the blood were there in evidence. But they would have smelled cassia, too, for that seamless robe smelled of cassia, the symbol of healing and of aloes, the fragrance and beauty.

Nobody looks good when he’s going out to die. They said of the man who was executed last Friday, last Thursday night at midnight, six minutes after midnight, they said of him that he cut a ridiculous figure as he walked with shaven head and with these trousers cut off a little above his knees as he walked and was guided, blindfolded to the chair.

Nobody going to die, put to death by society, can ever do it with any great dignity. And you’d have had to have the spiritual insight of an apostle to have seen any beauty there, any beauty there, as they tugged off of His warm body, the last garment He had and exposed Him to the sneers and leers of the public and flung Him down flat on His back and nailed Him on a cross and raised the cross and put it like a telephone pole into a hole with a jar, a sickening, shocking jar, and there He hung in nakedness. And the modest women looked aside, and the men grinned and little boys tittered, and God died.

And He died there in darkness and in thirst and in nakedness and in poverty. He died in darkness though the stars were His and all the trillions of suns and galaxies that lie out there, He had made them by the word of His power and all the shining light from all the multiplied heavenly bodies could have been His to light Him out of the dark.

And yet He died in darkness voluntarily and the garment that was had been His, smelled of myrrh and aloes, myrrh for bitterness and cashew for healing and aloes for fragrance. He died in thirst and cried out, I thirst, and the seven seas were His and all the rivers and all the waters in the world and yet He died in thirst. He died in nakedness and in poverty though the cattle on a thousand hills and all the beasts of the forest and all the metals hidden away in the hills and the mountains, and all the wealth of the universe was His.

He might have spun himself a robe out of sunlight. He might have made Himself a garment of stardust for it was all His, all His. But in voluntary poverty He went down as far as He could go.

They say some are poor and we hear of the poor and they tell us of the poverty that are in other countries and even when visitors come here from England, or from any of the more fortunate and advanced countries of the world, almost always when they’re being interviewed or when they’re making speeches, somewhere they put in the bracket, a little word saying, we were getting on fine in our country, of course nothing like America.

So, we’re very rich here but not as rich as He could have been. They could have brought Him orders from Edom, gold from Ophir, peacocks from Africa, singing women and playing men and choirs, all that Solomon had before him He could have had multiplied into infinity. But He died in poverty and blood.

The next is John 20:6,7, I read that to you also. And came Simon Peter following him and went into the sepulcher and he saw the linen clothes lying in a napkin, not lying with the linen clothes but wrapped together in a place by itself. I’m not going to go into detail here, but every Bible student knows what this means.

It means that Jesus Christ did not get up like another man and undress. It means that He came out without disturbing the garments. It means that the metamorphosis, the marvelous transfiguration, the change that came over the dead Man as He lay in the tomb, put Him where He was both matter and still non-material. Put Him where He weighed something and yet could slip through closed doors as though they were open. This wonder I shall never be able to explain. I only know that God did not allow an angel to come down and roll the stone away to let Jesus out.

Therefore, if He had, the angel would have had part of the glory. Somewhere in heaven there would have been an angel. And when the earthly choirs composed of the red and yellow, black and white, round the whole world for all human history, when they got together in a great hymn sing, to hymn the Lamb, it was slain but that had risen again.

Somebody would have pointed to an angel and said, there’s the angel that helped Jesus get up. There’s the angel that rolled the stone away. But when they rolled the stone away, they found He was already out.

And if they had sent someone to unwrap Him after He was dead, they wrapped Him in the garments of the dead. If they had sent some archangel to unwrap Him and let Him go free, as they had unwrapped Lazarus before Him, always when we celebrate in yonder glory, somebody would have remembered and said, there goes the archangel that unwrapped the Savior and let Him get out.

But just as nobody helped Him die, so nobody could help Him rise. He dismissed His spirit, and He rose from the dead. And His garments showed it. Lay a dead body down, wrapped in certain ways, and then take it away without immaterialize it and take it away and you have your garments where they were before, as though the shape of the body is there, but the body is gone.

So that was Jesus. What does that mean? Those burial garments, lying as they were lying, they are symbols of His triumph. He conquered all that men now deny.

We try to get on with ourselves and stay reasonably comfortable by denying the very ghosts that haunt us and the very dragons that threaten us but, Jesus Christ denied nothing. He denied not the devil. He said there’s a devil. He denied not sin. He knew there was sin. He denied not man’s lost condition. He knew man was lost. He denied not hell. He spoke of hell. He denied none of that which was against Him.

But He conquered it, and that’s a different thing. That’s quite a different thing. Instead of denying it and trying to dissolve it in thought, He met it head on and died under the impact of it, but God raised Him from the dead the third day. And because He came out so completely triumphant, He met and conquered all. And now we can say the three sad days are quickly sped. He rose in triumph from the dead. Hallelujah!

Well, then there is Revelation 1:13. John said, I turned, and when I turned, I saw. To see the voice, I saw seven golden candlesticks, and in the midst of the seven candlesticks, one like unto the Son of Man, clothed with a garment down to the foot, and girt about the paps with a golden girdle.

He goes on to describe them, and what are these garments? They are the garments of His priesthood, and insignia of His priesthood, for the priest offers and prays. And this One who was born into our flesh, now is at the right hand of God, our Priest, offering Himself, not offering the blood of others, but offering His own blood. And He bears our names in three places: on His hands, and on His breast, and on His shoulders. On His hands, emblematic of work, and on His breast, emblematic of love, and on His shoulders, emblematic of strength. And the government shall be upon His shoulder, singular.

I’ll never forget when Dr. H. L. Zimmer was still preaching in the apex of his power, that great German voice of his boomed out once, and he preached, says, the government shall be upon his shoulder. Then he asked the rhetorical question, why do the governments of the world rest upon one of His shoulders? Then he lowered his voice and smiled, and said, so I can rest upon the other. He carries the world upon one shoulder, and His people on the other.

And then, for I must be brief, there’s His wedding garment, I’ve read about that, emblematic of His relationship to His people. You will find in that psalm, her garment and his garment. His garments smell of myrrh and aloes and cassia, and her garments, very, very beautiful they are. The king’s daughter is all glorious within, that is, she sits within, all glorious. And her clothing is of wrought gold. She shall be brought unto the king in raiment of needlework. And the virgins, her companions that follow her, shall be brought unto thee.

There’s the wedding garment. Let us not get bogged down in politics. Let us not limit our thinking by the conquest of space. Suppose they do, and they will. Suppose they do visit Mars or Venus or the moon. Suppose they do.

There was a day when America seemed as far from Italy or Spain as the moon seems now from the earth. They’ll get there one of these times. Never say they can’t do it, they’ll do it.

I know one fellow won’t be on board when they go, but they’ll do it. But my brethren, when they do it, don’t let that bother you. Don’t let the voice of a president speaking out of outer space bother you.

There is one coming, wearing a wedding garment, with His sword girded on His thigh, and He’s coming not from Venus or Mars or some far galaxy. He’s coming from the throne of God, wherever that is. And I do not care geographically or astronomically where that throne is.

He is coming from there, and when He comes, He will be wearing His wedding garment. And His wedding garment will smell of myrrh. What? You mean that when He stands with His bride and presents her to the Father in great glory, that there can be a faint trace of myrrh on that garment? For myrrh stands for bitterness and suffering and woe.

Yes, it’s there, my brethren. All thy garments smell of myrrh. And in the hour of her triumph, His bride will remember with a tear that won’t hurt and with a sigh that won’t be sad and with a sorrow that isn’t grief, that she was there because He was there.

She wore her golden robes because He wore His cotton ones. That she stood before the throne because He stood before Pilate. And she’s infinitely rich because He was tragically poor. But she’ll never suffer again because He suffered beyond description. She’ll never quite forget that. Any of you that want to go to heaven and get where you’ll be happy, all happy, always happy, happy, happy, happy.

If you want to go to heaven so you’ll never remember the cross, I don’t think you’d better plan on going. For I’m sure that when they sing, worthy is the Lamb, to every redeemed mind, there will come the picture of a bleeding Lamb. But there’ll be no sadness anymore, no tears, and nobody will cry. But rather they will break out loud and laugh, laugh with holy laughter, to know that the Bridegroom by their side is the same One who once was wrapped in swaddling bands in poverty.

Last of all and I’m finished. His garment dipped in blood, that’s in Isaiah, the 63rd chapter.

Who is this that cometh from Edom? The dyed garments from Basra that this that is glorious in his apparel traveling in the greatness of his strength. I that speak in righteousness mighty to save I am he. Ah then the question wherefore art thou red in thine apparel and thy garments like him that treadeth out in the wine fat? Then he replies I have trodden the wine press alone and of the people there was none with me.

Understandably this verse has been misinterpreted and we talk about Christ on the cross treading the wine press. No, no. He trod no wine press on Calvary’s hill. How could he? His two feet were nailed there on the tree, and they were treading Him, not He them. I will tread them in mine anger and trample them in my fury and their blood shall be sprinkled upon my garments and I will stain all my raiment. Ah my brother, the garment dipped in blood is a symbol of His ultimate conquest.

The world with all its ocracies, its dilemma. Nobody’s good enough or big enough or strong enough to rescue us. But He is coming to rescue us. He’s the only one who has the right. He’s the only one who took on Him all our sorrows.

If there could rise in the world whether he be red or yellow, black or white or whatever race, if there should arise a man with a heart so big and great and wonderful that he could take into that heart all that’s wrong with us, all that’s wrong with us.

All our hates and our jealousies and our malice and our bitterness and our lusts could take them all into his heart and say I suffer with you. I suffer with you. Whether he was an American or an Englishman or a Vietnamese or a Chinese, I’d say there’s your man. There’s your man. I’d follow him. I’d vote for him if you could vote. There’s your man. I’d smell of myrrh. He knows my grief.

But politicians and kings and leaders and prime ministers and all the rest, they want power. They want authority. They want to go down in history. They’re not trying to help us. They’re trying to help themselves. And there’s nobody in the world that can take into his heart my grief, my weakness, my sorrow, my sadness, my loss, my terror. Nobody can do that.

There was One that did it and his name was Jesus. And He could do it because He came as a man. He’s the only one that has the right and he’s the only one I’ll vote for.

So, you needn’t fear to come to Him for He knows more about you than you know about yourself. And one of these times He’ll come back. I wish it were not so. That is, I wish it didn’t have to be like this. But He’ll come back and when He comes to reign, He’ll not fool with summit conferences. He’ll not fool with ultimata, ultimatums. And He’ll not fool with kings and ministers and diplomats and ambassadors and other liars. He’ll walk down and demand His right.

And the meek shall hear His demand and fall at His feet. And the proud and the God-hating shall feel the weight of His mighty brazen feet as He treads the winepress alone and sets up His own throne, King of Kings and Lord of Lords on this earth.

So, we can only close by reminding you that in the 18th of Revelation there is that passage where someone shouts out, take unto thee, take unto thee thy great power and reign.

He’s going to do that one of these times. I don’t know how far God is going to let the world go. I don’t know. I don’t know. I’m not wise enough to know how far God will let us go. But I know that one time soon He’ll get enough.

But even when He comes and tramples down the world in blood and reigns in peace over a peaceful earth, if you come close, you will smell myrrh. For He purchased that right in darkness and blackness and bitterness and tears and blood. And you will smell cassia, for He does it to heal the whole world.

Wonderful if we could wave a wand and heal the whole world. Wonderful if that Pullman car that’s flying around up there 17,000 miles an hour could diffuse healing to all the nations. And as it whistles by, every nation could be healed. All the hospitals empty, all insane asylums, all the old folks’ homes.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if when it passes around the world it could diffuse healing to all below? I’d go down and help shoot them up, wouldn’t you? I’d go down there and help shoot them up if I did nothing but carry water to that scientist in order to get them going around this world to heal all the poor world. I’d send him over Russia. We wouldn’t have any trouble with him then. I’d send them everywhere and heal the world, but we can’t do it.

But when He comes to reign, He’ll do it. He’ll go like lightning flash around the world and His goings forth will be for the healings of the nations. He will do it.

Blessed be God and blessed be His Son, Jesus Christ our Lord. All His garments smell of myrrh and aloes and cassia out of the ivory palaces.

Tags Garments of Jesus

Messages

Tozer Talks

Post author By pshappard
Post date January 11, 2026

“The Anti-Christ“

Secure Download Download

Tozer Talks · The Antichrist

The Antichrist

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

June 21, 1959

Now please turn to Revelation 12. We’ll read it. It’s quite a good-sized chapter. We’ll read the chapter. Pray that the Spirit of God may open our eyes even as we read. Suppose that we read as we usually do responsibly. The chief value of that method is to keep us from reading too fast. And then we’ll all read the last verse together. Revelation 12.

And there appeared a great wonder in heaven, a woman clothed with the sun and the moon under her feet and upon her head a crown of twelve stars. And there appeared another wonder in heaven, and behold, a great red dragon having seven heads and ten horns and seven crowns upon his head. And she brought forth a man-child who was to rule all nations with a rod of iron, and her child was caught up under God into his throne.

And there was war in heaven. Michael and his angels fought against the dragon, and the dragon fought and his angels. And the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent called the devil and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world.

He was cast out into the earth and his angels were cast out with him. And they overcame him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony, and they loved not their lives unto the death. And when the dragon saw that he was cast unto the earth, he persecuted the woman which brought the man-child forth.

And the serpent cast out of his mouth water as a flood after the woman, that it might cause her to be carried away of the flood. And the earth bowed to the woman, and the earth bowed to the man. And the dragon was wroth with the woman and went to make war with a remnant of her seed, which keep the commandments of God and have the testimony of Jesus.

Now, I note here that this chapter begins by saying, there appeared a great wonder in heaven. Of course, it was a sign, it was a wonder with significance. And I might begin by saying to you that we live in a world of wonders, if we only had eyes to see.

We live in a world of wonders, and I believe they are not only wonders, but they are signs. The poet you know said there were tongues in trees and books in the running brooks. He was only a poet, but sometimes the poet blunders into saying things that are very true, and that is one truth.

I wonder how we’d feel if we saw the sun come up for the first time, or if we saw the stars out for the first time. Imagine how the first man felt who looked for the first time at Niagara tumbling over the rocks, or the great Grand Canyon yawning there in its terrible beauty. The world is full of wonders, but if the earth can show wonders, how much more can heaven? There was an Englishman by the name of Lord Dunsany, whom I read a great deal when I was a younger fellow. He wrote a book called the “Book of Wonders.”

But the Book of Wonders had already been written. This Book of Wonders I hold in my hand, this Book of Wonders. It is not a book spun out of man’s imagination. It is a true account of actual events before they happen. You hear what I say? This book is an account of things that have happened, and a true account of things before they happen.

The prophetic past, I saw, and I saw, and I saw, and yet, to us, it’s a way out in the future. But that which is to be already has happened in the sight of God. And the man John, from his high lookout in the spirit, sees that which is to be as though it already had been.

And this Book of Revelation is a drama of wonders. It is unique in time. It tells us of things that never happened before and never will happen again. Some things God has repeated. We may see them today and wait and see them again tomorrow. Some things happened a century ago and will happen in the next century and the next.

But there are some things that only happened once. As, for instance, when our Lord told us of that terrible period which this twelfth chapter takes in, when nothing like it ever had been before and nothing like it ever was again.

So, this John, from this high lookout, sees the procession of the skies of heaven and earth and hell, and he sees here a woman.

Now, there are several views of this woman. I might mention them and pass on. One of them is that this is the Virgin Mary, and this glory in which she is clothed with the moon under her feet and clothed with the sun and the crown of stars about her head, that this is a picture of Mary. But we know better than this, and we dismiss this, because we do not believe that it has any support from anywhere else in the entire Word of God.

Then there is the view that this is Israel, and then there is the view that this is the Church. I believe there is only one view that is tenable and that can be supported by the Old Testament prophets and by other passages from the New Testament, and that is that this woman that appears as a sign in the wonder in heaven, clothed with the sun and the moon under her feet and the stars about her head, is Israel. I cannot see anything else.

And I ask you to behold then the nation of Israel, a nation as men see her, humble from the beginning. Israel has always been humble. Her glory has never been the glory of Rome or Babylon or England. She came from a simple man who came out of her of the Chaldees and was a nomad traveling south. Her history is known, and she’s been in more trouble than she’s been out of, and she’s had more feet on her neck than we can imagine down the years.

She’s been humble, I say, from the beginning, often in exile and often in captivity. She’s been robbed and spoiled, but she’s been subjected to pogroms and assassinations even down to the present day. And she has been a snare and a curse and a hissing and a byword down to this hour. That has been Israel. That’s the woman as man sees her. But behold, a nation in the eternal purposes of God.

Oh, if we were only wise to be able to see as God sees and see what God sees, we might look at a little child, if we could see as God sees, and behold in that little child a receptacle for the glory of God for all the ages to come. But we see only a little freckled child who has a genius for getting under your feet. We don’t see as God sees.

It’s the same with the church. We see otherwise than as God sees. We ought to pray day and night for the anointed eye that we might see as God sees, that we might have God’s values of things, that we might look upon the world and see it as God sees it, that we might look upon little things and see them as big as they are in the sight of God, and upon big things and see them as little as they are in the sight of God.

This woman as man sees her is nothing. Go down on Maxwell Street and you’ll see her there. But as God sees her, a nation invested with light, the sun and the moon and the stars, crowned and crowned with the stars and clothed with the sun and the moon under her feet.

Now it says that there was a great red dragon there. And I call attention to the glory and the tragedy of being a moral creature. I can perfectly understand why John Bunyan, when he was under blistering, terrible, devastating conviction for sin, why he looked at a dog loping down the sidewalk and looked up and said, O God, I wish I were a yonder dog, for that dog can die and remain dead, and I, a man, have to die and come again to judgment.

The creature without moral quantities and qualities, that creature we can write off and dismiss. But the terror and the glory and the tragedy and the wonder of the creatures who were made in God’s image with progression and regression, degeneration and transfiguration, this we see, this great red dragon.

Now we have him pictured here. We know who he is. We don’t have to be great or profound scholars to know that this is the devil. This is that terrible beast that was once the covering cherub that has come to destroy men.

And some who stand on Mount Zion there, in the 14th chapter, later on in Revelation, they were at one time simple people that nobody, nobody ever dreamed that someday they would stand on Mount Zion. But there was the sun of the morning, that creature that was created by God to overshadow the fiery seat of God there, the throne and the stones of fire. That creature fell, and oh, how he fell and how far down he fell.

What does that teach you and me? It ought to teach us that no matter how far up we may go, it’s possible to descend tragically, and no matter how low down we are, it’s possible to rise in the will of God by the grace of God and be made new creatures in Christ Jesus. That’s the thought I throw in here about this great red dragon. And then here was the man-child.

Now, this man-child, you see, there are also two views about this man-child. I wish that sometime, I imagine when we get to heaven, there’ll only be one view of things. But almost everywhere you’ll find, always find two views.

And if I’ve had illumination on it and God’s spoken to me on it, and if it has to do with things that matter, I usually come down hard and have one view. But where you can believe either side and still be a good Christian, I’m a little more cautious, and there are more than one side.

We used to have a man in the Alliance by the name of William T. MacArthur. He was the father of the MacArthur who runs a big printing house in Oak Park and publishes the paper out there, Oak Leaves. He was the father of Charles MacArthur, the playwright. But he was a godly man, and he had a view, more or less, all his own about this.

And he says that this woman was the church, and that this man-child is that part of the church that’s ready at the coming of Christ. And that the great church in her glory that’s not prepared for the Lord’s return, she gives birth to the small church within her that is prepared. And that was his view.

And he got away with it, and it was all right, I guess. Not very many people followed him in that view, I guess. But I hold to the view that this man-child could be nobody but Jesus Christ, our Lord, and the church seen in one view. Christ Jesus the Lord in the church, Christ Jesus the Lord.

And here we see this woman, Israel, giving birth to the man-child. And of course it was Israel that gave birth to the man-child. And when she gave birth to the man-child, she also automatically gave birth to the church, for it was from the wounded side of Jesus that the church was born.

And here was this red dragon waiting before the man-child to destroy him. You well know that when he was born in Bethlehem, that Herod immediately sent out to destroy him. You know how he was hounded on down and killed another Roman pilot, had him taken out and crucified. You know the enemy, Judas, and you know how Rome persecuted the church.

Now this man-child was caught away. He was taken away and a cloud received him out of their sight. That was said of the head of the church. But you know every head has to have a body, just as everybody must have a head. And Jesus Christ was the head of the body, the church. So when we see the great woman here in her glory, seen as God Caesar, giving birth to the man-child, we see her giving birth to Jesus, the head.

But we also see her giving birth to the church, which is the body of Christ. And so, both that Christ was caught away to the right hand of God the Father, and his body will be caught away to the right hand of God the Father.

You know, my friends, it’s good to continue to believe some things. We have shifted, as I have had occasion to say several times during my talks from Revelation, we have shifted over the last years from the old-fashioned Scofield Bible view of prophecy. I mean, the fundamentalists and the evangelicals have shifted until they’re all mixed up among themselves. They won’t invite a man to come and preach on prophecy anymore without their first asking him what he believes.

I had some Jewish brethren come here one time to see me. They asked me what I believed about this and what I believed about that. And when I told them what I believed, then they cautiously invited me to their conference. They were going to have a world conference of religious or Christian Jews in the Calvary Baptist Church in New York. And there were to be, I think, twenty-three speakers at that. They were all to preach on prophecy.

And they had gone around and called them all out so every man would say the same thing. Well, you know what I did? I didn’t accept that invitation at all. They announced me that I, I said, no, I never told you that I would come, and so I didn’t show up. I didn’t go because I didn’t want to be told what I was to say. I wanted to have views of my own.

But it so happens that with all the study of the Bible that I can do, and all the praying, and looking at world events, and reading as widely as I can, I still believe that Jesus Christ is coming back to the world again, and that he’s going to catch away his church. The body has already been, the head has already been caught away to the right hand of the Father, and the body is going to be caught away.

You can’t separate the bride from the bridegroom. You can’t separate the body from the head. You can’t separate Christ from his church, and so there’s going to be a glorious rising to get out of it all, and to get away from it all.

And so I’m, I’m not going to go along with the brethren who argue with each other about details. There are enough details in the book of Revelation to keep man preaching from now until the next Democrat’s elected president.

But I am not going to go into details. I’m not going to do it. I’m only going to pass it over lightly here, and to say that there’s the great wonder, Israel, the nation of God, and the great dragon, that devil and Satan, who is determined to destroy not only her, but to destroy the man-child born of her, and destroy the church, which is His bride, and destroy every good thing. The devil hates every good thing that’s of God, everything that God blesses, Satan hates.

And now there was war in heaven. Have you noticed this, there was war in heaven? This is one of the astonishing sayings of the Bible. We could have understood it if it had said there was war in hell, because wherefore comes wars and fightings among you, if they come not even of your lusts, but war in your members.

And if the word had said there was war in hell, we could have understood it. And if it had said there’s war on earth, we could have understood it, because there’s hardly one of us alive that’s lived during some war or other. There’s scarcely been a period of one whole year and centuries that there hasn’t been war, big ones or little ones, somewhere among men. And yet they tell us that we’re righteous, basically, that we’re good, basically. And if we’ll only accept a few pointers from the psychologists and the sociologists, we’ll all brothers be for all that and all that.

But the simple fact is, we’ve never been able from the time Cain slew also his brother, we’ve never been able to get along together. Do you feel bad when somebody swears at you from the rear with a horn? You know, they manage to make these horns so they can swear with them.

I have ridden in many an automobile and heard some fellow swear behind you. He didn’t with his own voice, but they managed somehow to play a bunch of curse words on a horn. I’ve heard, just stand where there’s any red light changing to green and hear them. And so why should you worry? Why should you worry if you can’t get along with the neighbor next door, if he just won’t be decent? He’s human and that’s humanity.

So, if it had said there was war on earth, we’d have said, yes, how sadly true. Has there ever been a time when there wasn’t war on earth? And lately there’s been war in the sea and the sky because we’ve taken war down into the dips of the sea and up into the air. And we’re threatening to take it to the planets that revolve around and the satellites that girdle our earth.

But look at the words, there was war in heaven, the brazen effrontery of Satan. Whoever stopped to think what an insane genius this is, this Satan, what a rabid dog of the heavens, what a sin crazy outlaw we’re dealing with here, that he can take war to the very gates of heaven, that he can enter the very circle of Jesus’ disciples and enter a man. And Satan entered into him, it said of Judas, that he can follow Christ into the wilderness and up into the tower and tempt the very Holy Son of God.

There’s an old saying of which I do not believe one word, it is, tell the truth and shame the devil. To shame anybody, they have to have a sense of shame. The devil has no sense of shame. The devil can’t be shamed. The devil has nothing in him that can respond to shame.

He’s a shameless, morally insane, rabid, sin crazy being that hates God, and for God’s sake hates everything that God loves. And he’s against you, and he’s against this church, and he’s against every church in Chicago, and he’s against every praying man and woman, and he’s against the conversion of your family, and he’s against the solidity and cohesiveness of your family. He wants to scatter every good home and destroy every good church.

I remember when Dr. Philpott was pastor of Moody Church. He was preaching in one of our conferences, and he read that passage where Satan’s seat is. And he said, where is Satan’s seat? In the saloons? No, he dismissed that. Where is Satan’s seat? In the gambling dives? No, he said. Where is Satan’s seat in Chicago? And then he shouted in that great voice of his, “Moody Church,” he said. And that wasn’t because he thought Moody Church wasn’t a good church. That was because the better you are, the more you have to fight the devil.

The more you hold true to the faith, the more you have to fight the devil. And it so happens that Moody Church has stood true to the faith through these years. Wherever you go liberal, wherever you don’t care, wherever Shakespeare takes the place of and Browning crowds out Paul, Satan’s busy somewhere else.

But wherever the word of God stands as true and wherever Christ occupies the center of the hope of that church, that’s Satan’s seat, that shameless, conscienceless dragon. And so he carried war to the gates of God. Satan is there permitted to accuse the brethren, accuse the brethren.

You know, the devil can only blackmail you when he’s got something on you. The devil is a blackmailer, and he’ll blackmail you if he can get something on you. He went before God and tried to blackmail Job. But Job happened to be decent enough, though he needed a little bit of trimming up and God gave it to him. He happened to be good enough so that the devil couldn’t do anything with him.

We never have to be afraid of the devil telling on us if the blood has covered our hearts and God’s forgiven our sin. The devil can’t even utter a forgiven sin. Sin that’s been forgiven, God won’t even let him get his mouth open. He can only accuse us by lying and God knows better. I’m not worried much about the devil. I’ve never been particularly devil-conscious preacher, really.

I’ve had preachers in this pulpit that made your flesh creep. We’ve had a few of them here, good brethren. But they were so conscious of the presence of the devil that they preached and preached so much about the devil that I got hives listening to them, you know, almost. You know, actually your flesh creeps after they’ve talked about the devil crawling in and out of your body and all that kind of stuff. I get, I get jeebies.

Now, I don’t believe that we need, I don’t think we children of God need to worry about the devil like that. He hates us, he hates us, he’s after us, but they overcame him by the blood of the Lamb and the word of their testimony. Just as the angel of death passed over Israel and passed over every house where there was blood, Satan stands back and growls, but he can’t come near the heart where the precious blood of Jesus. Let’s make an awful lot of the blood of the lamb.

We’re hearing a lot about Christ incarnate now in liberals. We’re hearing a lot about God being in Christ. We’re hearing a lot in learned religious circles about God coming into history. We’re hearing about God manifesting himself in time. All that sounds big and expansive and philosophical, but I still like to sing the dying thief rejoiced to see that fountain in his day and there may I though vile as he wash all my sins away. I still believe in the fountain, still believe in the blood.

Somebody took that song and tore it apart and said it’s bad song, it’s not a good song, it’s not literary song. There is a fountain filled with blood, said that’s terrible. But oh, how many people are up there in heaven now that once sang there is a fountain filled with blood drawn from Immanuel veins.

How many sang it under their voices when they long ago lost power to vocalize and couldn’t sing so they could be heard but sang it in their hearts as they went away to be with God. And how many will yet all around the world there’s a fountain filled with blood. They overcame him by the blood of the Lamb and the word of their testimony, and they loved not their lives under the death.

Those people that were left, who are these people that were left down here? Churches gone, who were these people? Well, I think either they’re people that are converted during that period or they’re people that didn’t go when the Lord came. Now that’ll shock some of you, but I don’t know. I don’t like this automatic idea that automatically everybody goes.

I wish that were so and I’d be happily glad if it was so. I’d be glad if it was true, as one celebrated evangelist said, that when the Lord comes there’ll be holes in the roofs of body houses and saloons where the children of God suddenly go zooming through. That isn’t the way I heard it, brother. Is it the way you heard it? I didn’t hear it like that. Ye have not so learned Christ is what I hear.

No, I don’t think God is going to go, I don’t think he’s going to send anybody combing through the honkytonks and bawdy houses looking for saints. I don’t believe the saints will be there, brethren. I don’t.

You say, what does that make you, an Armenian? No, it just shows I got some sense is all. It just shows I won’t allow a theory to lead me into gross nonsense. Children of God never did inhabit body houses and saloons and gambling dens and places of iniquity. Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor standeth in the way of sinners, nor sitteth in the seat of the scornful.

But the evangelist, and it’s not Billy Graham, now don’t think I’m mocking good old Billy. He didn’t say that he’d know better. This man did. And he said that there’ll be holes in the roofs where the angels of God went looking for the saints.

Well, all I can say is if God sent me after the saints, I’d go elsewhere, wouldn’t you? Wouldn’t you? The Lord said, Knighton, go look for the saints. Where’d you go? Saloon? Gambling houses? Would you? Neither would I. Oh, you know, one might wander in there by mistake.

We had a fellow here one time, he wanted some food. And so, some of the brethren gave him two dollars. He started out. We had a man there, he’s not with us now, he lives in Grand Rapids. Brother Valentine, he was one of the practical, down-to-earth, James kind of Christians, you know.

And he suspected that the fellow didn’t want food, he wanted liquor, so he followed him down. Sure enough, he went into the saloon, and Brother Valentine went in after him. And when he slapped his dollar bill down on the moist bar and said, I’ll have a whiskey, he said, that’s what you think. And he took the money away from the fellow and left him there.

And if the Lord had come just at that time, there might have been a hole in that saloon, because Brother Valentine was in there, you know. And the Salvation Army girl selling the war cry in there, you’re giving them away, she might go out of there. But in other words, saloons aren’t the habitation of the just.

They’re bawdy houses and they’re gambling dens. All else being equal, the children of God are to be found where good people are. You don’t look for sheep down alleys and in dumps. You look for sheep where the shepherd is, and he never leads his sheep into the alleys. He always leads them into the green pastures.

Well, Satan accuses, but Michael the angel archangel stands to fight him. And there was such a battle as never had been before and there never will be again.

I had a book, have a book, that I read years ago called “Fifteen Decisive Battles of History.” Great battles, the Battle of Saratoga, the Battle of Waterloo, the Battle of Marathon, the Battle of Hastings, the great battles that have been fought.

But this battle, nothing like it has ever been before, nothing like it will ever be again. The gray dragon was cast out, that old serpent called the devil, and Satan, which deceived the whole world, he was cast out into the earth and his angels were cast out with him.

And I heard a loud voice saying, in heaven now has come salvation and strength and kingdom, the kingdom of our God and the power of his Christ. For the accuser of our brethren is cast down, which accuses them before our God, day and night. Woe to the inhabitants of the earth. We imagine the things are just about as bad as they can get, don’t we? No.

Suppose electricity went off in your house and you have a deep freeze and a refrigerator. And suppose it went off in August with the temperatures in the nineties and stayed off for a week. Can you conceive of how your house would smell and what kind of house it would be in a matter of twenty-four to thirty-six hours? You couldn’t live in it. It takes refrigeration to keep corruption down.

And in this terrible world of ours, there are still restraining influences. There are still children of God. In every neighborhood there are children of God. Every church that stands like this on the corner tells the world as they pass by, there is another world than this. There is a God and a judgment day and a Savior.

Even though not all the Christians going to that church are good Christians, there is still enough salt left in the earth and still enough to change the figure, refrigeration left to keep the world from rotting.

But when Satan is cast down on the earth and the saints of God go away, what will be left but corruption? And there is no imagining how morally corrupt we can get when the restraining influences are taken away.

Jack Mabley writes for the Daily News, and I like to read what he has to say there on the third page of the Daily News. And he told the other day, I think it was he, it was in his column it appeared, of pornographic literature sold to eight-year-old boys. Pornographic literature. The vileness, the corruption, the putridity, the spongy, fetid mass of corruption that is the world.

When I listen to the McClellan committee and find out how many high authorities and how many big men in a community can go rotten, I suspect everybody. But I know not everybody is bad. I know that there are still some decent, good, honest people left in the world in spite of all the corruption. The church is still here. The body of Christ is still in the earth. There will be Antichrist when Satan is cast down.

Don’t ask me about Antichrist. I believe Antichrist will be a Jew. I don’t think he will be Mussolini, resurrected as some have said. I believe he will be born of a woman as Christ was born of a woman. I don’t believe it’s Khrushchev or any of the rest of these mafia gang. He knows better. Antichrist knows better than to come into the world like that. It’s God that sees him as a great red dragon. But he knows better than to come to the world, flaking his tail and snorting as a great red dragon. He knows better.

So, it comes a learned gentleman with religious words on his lips. He may become one of the most popular preachers of the day, but he’ll be Antichrist, nevertheless. And just as Mary bore the Christ, an incarnated God to be the Christ, so someone somewhere will bear an incarnate devil. And he will finally show himself to be what he is after he has brought all the world under his feet. Bloody persecution unto death begins, and the nation of Israel will have to take it.

Israel has always been the punching bag of the nation, always been the whipping boy that has caught the lash of the nation. She’s got to take it one time more, at least one time more. Well, this dire event can happen.

Now I’m going to read a passage of Scripture to you that I sometimes do like to read before a congregation. We’d like to get this all fixed out so we know we’re safe. But listen, I want to read this to you.

Take heed to yourselves, lest at any time your hearts be overcharged with surfeiting and drunkenness in the cares of this life. And so that day come upon you unawares, for as a snare shall it come on all of them that dwell on the face of the whole earth. Watch ye therefore and pray always that ye may be accounted worthy to escape all these things that shall come to pass and to stand before the Son of Man.

What is the sensible position for the Christian? The sensible position is to say, O Lord, my brethren tell me that all born-again Christians will go when thou dost return. And I want to believe it, and I hope it’s true, Lord. But O Lord, I want to be morally worthy to join that band.

So please make me holy. Please help me to be separated and clean. Please help me, Lord, though by some act of the grace of God in redemption it could be that even if I were stained and even if I were not ready, I’d go. They tell me so. Still, Lord, I’m not trusting in that kind of interpretation. I want to be prepared. Make me worthy to go, Lord, and help me and make me count me worthy to escape all these things that shall come to pass and to stand before the Son of Man.

Let’s have an illustration. Two brethren, two men, two Christians, members of the First Baptist Church of Kickapoo, Wisconsin, or Chicago, Illinois. They’re Christians, both of them. They love God. One of them is so convinced that there wouldn’t be any possibility of any Christian missing the rapture that he gets careless. He’s so convinced that all has to be done has already been taken care of. His insurance is paid up, and he’s all ready to go.

The other one says, Brother, I hope that’s right. I kind of sneakily believe maybe it is, but you know something, I am going to live every minute as if Christ were coming an hour from now. I am not going to rest on theories. I’m going to trust the blood of the Lamb and keep the word of my testimony bright. I’m going to sacrifice myself so I love not my life unto the death.

Who’s the wise Christian there? If it’s true that all the ransom goes soaring away, certainly the man who tried to live so as he was ready, he’ll go all right. But about the other one, if there’s any doubt, he would be the one on whom the doubt would lie.

So, my urgent suggestion is tonight that you watch always. Be not like the man who said, My Lord, delayeth his coming, but be ready at all times, at all times, be ready. By the blood of the Lamb, by the word of your testimony, by a surrendered life, by the trust in the book, then no matter what comes on the earth or when it comes, it will be all right with you. And the Lord will take you to his Father’s house with rejoicing. And you need not be afraid that you will be ashamed at His coming. Let us pray.

O Dear Lord, when we stand outside of ourselves and think as the world thinks, how foolish is a talk like this tonight. How different from politics and philosophy and psychology and sports and entertainment, labor and capital and industry, and the rest. Thou hast called us, O Lord, and enlightened us, called us to thyself and given us information.

And our language sounds strange and remote and unlike the world. Nothing like this is found in newspapers or magazines, for the world doesn’t know a thing about it. The world is going on its way, doing the best it can.

O Thou hast called a people for thine own possession, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, peculiar people, a cross-carrying people who love thy holy Son, who call thee Father, who believe the prophets and the apostles, who believe the book of Revelation, believe what John saw in the Spirit.

Oh, that we might be among them. Oh, that we might be counted as that blessed group that would not only be ready in that day, but are ready now and will be ready and continue to be ready and will labor to get others ready and struggle and fight and pray and give and push and carry on the work until the story has been told around the world and the globe is girdled with the gospel, at least one time, so that red and yellow and black and white around this whole world can know that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures and that he rose again according to the scriptures.

Help us now, Father, we pray. Now we’re going out into a week that promises to be hot and it’s going to be busy, noisy, there’ll be irritations, hostility and trouble, weakness, physical discomforts and pains. Oh, enable us to rejoice in it all, to be glad and to thank thee and to keep full of praise and to meet every trouble with praise.

Help us to keep praised up and prayed up. Help us to put behind us everything that would hinder us and lay aside every weight and the sin that does so easily beset us and run with patience, the race said before us. This we ask through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Tags Anti-Christ, End Times

Messages

Tozer Talks

Post author By pshappard
Post date January 4, 2026

“Clouds of Concealment“

Secure Download Download

Tozer Talks · Clouds of Concealment

Clouds of Concealment

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

March 3, 1957

Now you have been listening to me over these last weeks, and again we ask, what is the pastor advocating? What is this that he’s preaching? Well, I’m concerned that it be nothing else but Christ, because anything anybody offers you that is not just more of Christ is false. I am concerned that in doctrinal foundation it be the Scripture, and in its whole spiritual mood it be apostolic, and that it be in harmony with the best in the historic church, the best in devotional literature, the best in hymnody, and the best in biography. And yet, why does this preaching sound different? Why does it sound strange when compared with much so-called, and true, gospel preaching?

Well, I want to tell you this before I enter in really to the message for tonight, but I want to tell you that about a generation ago, textualism captured the gospel church. By the gospel church, I mean the fundamentalist church, the gospel church, those who believe in Christ as Savior and accept Him as such. And the scribes and the lawyers took over and set up a hierarchy in schools and Bible conferences and churches, and they all went over to it, and the rule became a rigid adherence to words.

Now, it so happens that I believe and have never believed anything else in my entire life, but in the plenary, that means full, verbal inspiration of the Scriptures as originally given. Now, you’ll be honest with me, and if you have reason to quote me, quote this, that I believe and have always believed as a responsible Christian teacher and believer in the plenary, verbal inspiration of the Scriptures as originally given.

But the problem was, and still is, that by school I don’t mean any particular school, I mean a school of thought. The verbal inspiration, the doctrine of verbal inspiration; rigor mortis set into it, and with the result that the religious imagination was stultified, the religious yearning was choked down, the religious aspirations slapped down, and the longing, aspiring wings of the children of God were clipped like a hen in a hen coop, and we were told to shut up and like what we had, that this was it.

Brethren, do you know what happened to this? The result of this thing, with the language of the New Testament persisting and the spirit of the New Testament grieved, do you know what happened? Well, I’ll tell you. There came about a revolt, a revolt against the scribes in two directions. The masses of evangelicals revolted without knowing they were revolting. They didn’t know it. It was the gasping of a fish in a bowl where there’s no oxygen.

The masses revolted into religious entertainment until the gospel churches are now camping on the doorstep of the theater, and then over against that and on the opposite side, some of the more intelligent fundamentalists and evangelicals revolted into evangelical rationalism, which is already busy making its peace with liberalism, and the result is that we just don’t hear what this that I’m speaking about.

It sounds strange to hear anyone preaching as I preach because on one side we have the masses saying, I’ve accepted Jesus, whoop-dee-doo, let’s go and have fun, and on the other side, serious reverent men thinking their way perilously near to the borders of liberalism. And the New Testament message, objectives, and methods have been allowed to lie dormant, and in the name of the lordship of Jesus, which is lordship in name only, we have introduced our own message, our own objectives, and then have thought out our own methods for achieving those objectives, which are in many cases not scriptural at all.

Now, my brethren, I want to ask you, is it heresy to yearn and pray and long after God? Is it heresy? Does it constitute a radical mind to yearn and pray and fight? Do you remember what I read the first night? The great prayer in the “Cloud of Unknowing,” God, I beseech thee so for to cleanse the intent of mine heart with the unspeakable gift of thy grace that I may perfectly love thee and worthily praise thee.

To long perfectly to love God and worthily to praise Him, and to mean more than words when you say it, mean if it costs you everything, is that heresy? Should they put a man in jail for it? Should he be ostracized for it? In the light of our hymnody, in the light of our devotional books back to Paul, in the light of the biography of the saints? No, I think not.

Now, I want to read to you just a brief little thing here from Nicephorus, from a book called the “Philokalia.” He starts out, he wants to help us Christians forward to know God, to do what “The Cloud” called being one with God, united with God. Now, I want you Bible Christians to ask yourself the question, could I go along with this?

Now, this Nicephorus Nicephorus was a Greek Christian. That is, he was over on the Greek side. He wasn’t a Protestant, and he wasn’t a Roman Catholic and he wasn’t a Martoma and he wasn’t a Coptic nor a Nestor. He belonged to over on the Greek side, but he was a saint. And he wrote a little book to help people to go on with God. And he said, you who desire to capture the wondrous divine illumination of our Savior, Jesus Christ. Do you believe in this, and who seek to feel the divine fire in your heart?

Now, here was a scholar and a saint and he wrote it into a book in the, I think, 16th century, which is a classic and is recognized as such. And he dared to use the word, who seek to feel the divine fire in your heart and strive to sense and experience the feeling of reconciliation with God. Who, in order to unearth the treasure buried in the field of your heart and to gain possession of it, have renounced everything worldly. Who desire the candles of your soul to burn brightly, even now, not in the future.

We have become so dispensationalistic-minded that we’ve pushed everything into the future, everything into the future. But this man says, you who desire the candles of your soul to burn brightly, even now. And Peter said, in this present world, and who for this purpose have renounced all this world, who wish by conscious experience, conscious experience, you’d think he was a modern psychologist, to know and to receive the kingdom of heaven existing within you. He said what I’m teaching all the time, that Christ dwells in the heart of every believer. Know ye not that Christ is in you except ye be reprobate. And if a man have not the Spirit of Christ, he’s none of his. And the riches of the minds lie potentially there.

But we have been forbidden to believe it or forbidden to say so. And we have been choked down and the oxygen cut off and our wings clipped and our longings chilled. And that’s why when I say sounds different and strange and people say what is this new doctrine, it’s no new doctrine at all.

Now my brother, I want to talk a little bit tonight about the cloud of concealment. Now Christ has made full atonement for us. Let’s start there. Christ has made full atonement. Christ has for sin atonement made, what a wonderful Savior.

Would you like to hear it said for you by somebody else that could say it better than the theologians? Little Lady Julian, here’s what she said. The precious amends or satisfaction our Lord hath made for man’s sin, turning all our blame into endless honor. Could it be said sweeter than that? The precious amends our Lord hath made for man’s sin, turning all our blame into endless honor. Paul said a little differently. He said where sin abounded, grace does much more abound, turning all our blame into endless honor.

Now God’s face is turned toward us. I want you to think like that tonight. Don’t let the devil cheat you. Don’t let doubt assail you. Don’t let anything I say or anybody has ever said cheat you from this glorious knowledge, that the face of God is turned toward you, and as a Christian the smiling face of God is turned toward you.

Why then do we not enjoy, now to use these words again, why then do we as Christians not capture the wondrous divine illumination of the Savior Jesus Christ? Why do we not feel the divine fire in our hearts? Why do we not strive to sense and experience, or why do we not sense and experience the feeling of reconciliation with God as well as the knowledge of it? And why do we not gain possession of it? Oh, I know they dismiss it by saying it, your position and your possession, but that can get so cold as dry ice.

Why is it that the candles of our soul do not burn more brightly even now? Why is it that we do not have the conscious experience and know and receive the Kingdom existing within us? Well, I’ll tell you why. Because there is between us and the smiling face of God a cloud of concealment.

Now my friends, there is never such a thing as a day when the sun doesn’t shine. In some of the cities, I think it’s Atlanta, Georgia, maybe I’m wrong, but one of the southern cities offers, a newspaper offers, that they will give all of that run, that day’s run to the newspaper free of charge if the sun doesn’t shine somewhere. Is it Atlanta? St. Petersburg? Well now let me tell you something, that the sun shines every day and there never has been a day from the hour God said, let the sun rule the day that the sun hasn’t shone. But there are dark days and misty days and cloudy days and days that get so dark you have to light the lights and days that get so dark that in the country the chickens go to roost. I’ve seen it.

Now there are dark days and yet the sun is shining just as brightly as on the brightest clearest day in June. Why then does it not shine on the earth? Because there is between the sun and the earth a cloud of concealment. The sun is all right, the sun is up there grinning broadly and just as bright and just as hot and just as radiant as ever. But he doesn’t get through to the earth because there is a cloud of concealment.

Now what is this cloud my brother? You know what it is from the standpoint of the weather but what is it as applied to Christians? Why? What’s the matter? Well it’s the cloud of concealment, a cloud that we allow to be over us as Christians.

And what is this cloud? Atonement has been made, there’s nothing to do for it’s all been done. Not a drop of blood needs to be shed, not a spear needs to enter a holy heart, not a tear nor a groan nor a drop of sweat, not a moment in agony. Death hath no more dominion over Him, it is done, it is finished, it is forever done.

And the face of God shines down upon us. And even upon Christians there’s that cloud, or above Christians there’s that cloud of concealment betwixt thee and thy God as the Brother says. Now what is that cloud? Well, it’s a cloud, it may be one thing, it may be many things.

There is the cloud of pride for instance. You are your father’s child and heaven is your home. And yet for a lifetime you may go without the wondrous divine illumination of the Savior Jesus Christ, without feeling the divine fire in your heart, or sensing or experience the feeling of reconciliation with God, and without the candles of your soul burning brightly, because you allow a cloud of pride to be over your head. And the devil says, well God hates you, God has turned His back; the devil lies. The back of God has never been turned to a child of God nor to a repentant sinner since the hour Jesus groaned and died and said, it is finished.

The face of God has turned our way. But we allow this cloud of pride and the cloud of stubbornness. There are some people that are just plain stubborn. They will not bend, they will not yield, neither to man or God or to anybody except the law and death, they will not. And so this cloud of stubbornness, God complained about Israel. He said your neck is brass and your forehead is hard, and He couldn’t get them to yield.

And then there is the cloud of self-will. Now self-will is a very religious thing, and it may become religious and get converted and enter right with you into the church when you join and with you with the chamber when you pray. Yet it’s self-will, and self-will, you’ll note, is good-natured only when it’s getting its own way. And it’s grouchy and ill-tempered when it is crossed. Now you think about that. Is your surrender to God sufficient so that you can be spiritual even when you’re cross?

And then there’s ambition. And you know there’s even religious ambitions. There are people that are religiously ambitious for something perhaps that isn’t in the will of God or that’s for self-aggrandizement. And the result is that it’s a cloud above them between them and their God.

Now there’s a little proverb, and in the Knox translation it reads like this. It rather amuses me because it’s so true and it is such a perfect picture of the human heart. He says, tripped by his own folly, a man eats his heart out, finding fault even with God. And you find Christians like that. Tripped by their own folly, they eat their heart out, finding fault even with God, having what God calls, a controversy with Me.

And then everything I claim for myself. Now this is the one thing I’ve been preaching I suppose that’s hard to grasp. That I’ve got to give up everything, that this pastorate that I have here, must go on the block, and I must be ready at any moment to give it up and let it ride away on any sermon I preach or any position I take. I dare not stick to it. My job as editor of the weekly, my position in the religious world, everything has to be on the block and ready to go.

If I own it, it is a cloud over my head and it becomes a cloud of obscurity that nothing will penetrate. And people try to pray through it, but you can’t pray through it, nothing can penetrate it. You try to fast through it. There are people that fast for days out of nothing but stubbornness. You know that. The history, I won’t go into politics, but over the world in the last 25 years, you remember that there were some who fasted and died for political reasons, just sheer downright stubbornness.

And there are those who try to fast their way through. You can’t do it, brother. The cloud of concealment, if it is something that you say is yours and you won’t give up, you think you do, but you don’t, it’ll put a veil over it. And if there’s any sun, it will not be very bright. It’ll be a cloud, and you can’t pray through it, this idea that if you pray long enough, everything will be all right.

Why, God got some people up off their knees and told them to quit. Two different instances, the Lord stopped prayer meetings. Did you know that? He said, it’s no use. There was the man Samuel, l and he was praying and praying. God came and put His hand over his mouth and said, Samuel, don’t pray anymore for Saul. He’s through. He said, don’t pray for him and shut him up.

And then there was another instance where Joshua was lying face down praying. We’d have written a tract about him. We’d have said, oh, what a saint. But God says, what’s the use of lying there on your stomach? I don’t honor a man for lying on his belly. Get up off your feet and deal with the situation in your crowd and then I’ll bless you and save all that lying around groaning.

So, remember, that this modern idea that if you pray long enough, everything will be okay. It’s not right, brother. The saint of God loves these long seasons of prayer and God gives an answer to prayer and prayer is the soul’s sincere desire and the breath of the saint and all that I believe, and I think practice in some measure. But the idea that I can hang on to things and then pray the cloud away while I’m hanging on to the cloud. No, no, you can’t do it. And that’s the trouble, so nothing will get through it.

And then there is fear. Fear is always a child of unbelief. No matter what you’re scared about, whether you’ve got cancer or whether your child’s likely to have polio or whether you’re likely to lose your job or whether Russia will send a guided missile and destroy Chicago, remember always that fear is a child of unbelief. And fear over your head is a cloud of obscurity and hides that smiling face from you. It doesn’t turn the face away for the blood of atonement keeps His face forever turned toward his people and toward repentant sinners.

And then there is self-love, self-love. We make a joke out of this, but we never should make a joke out of it, because self-love is a cloud of concealment, a cloud of obscurity. And even the Christian who has offered himself to Christ and has believed and is converted, that Christian can keep a cloud of concealment over him simply by loving himself. And to fall out of love with yourself is an accident. That is, I mean a hurt. It hurts you like falling off of something.

And then self-gratulation and self-admiration. These self-sins, they’re there and as long as they remain there, and then, the odd thing about it is that the scribes have excused these and proved that they should be there, and you can’t do anything about it. And yet we cry within us, oh, that the candles of my soul might burn brightly even now.

Oh, that I might know the divine illumination of my Savior Jesus Christ. And we groan with the groan that goes back to Paul in Philippians, it goes back to David in the Psalms, that we might come into a warm, personal, present, lasting fellowship with Jesus Christ that lifts us and irradiates our hearts. And yet we can’t because we admire ourselves and we’re not going to have anybody disturb us. And we congratulate ourselves or we love ourselves.

And then there’s money. Money these days gets between, betwixt thee and thy God, as the Brother [in Cloud of Unknowing] calls it, gets betwixt thee and thy God.

Some evangelist years ago in my hearing pointed out that you can take two dimes and shut out a landscape. You can take two dimes with you to the Great Smoky Mountains and go clear to the top knob of the Great Smokies and with two dimes shut out all the glorious, green, rolling, blue-capped vista of the Great Smokies. Just put them in front of your eyes and put them close enough. That’s all it takes. The mountains are still there smiling in the sun, but you don’t see them because there’s a dime in front of each eye. It doesn’t take much money.

We who don’t have much money are always taking snide remarks at the rich man. But brother, you can be rich and only have ten dollars, because if it is between you and your God, then that cloud is concealing God from you.

And then there’s people, just plain people. The Lord tells us that we shouldn’t be afraid of man with his breath in his nostrils. And yet there are people who are Christians, who have a cloud of fear above them, constantly a cloud of fear. They want to fit in, gear into society. And the sociologists tell us we must do this, that we must adjust to society. And the schools are busy instead of teaching the history and writing and reading and arithmetic and all the rest, they’re teaching the children to adjust so as not to be queer and to get along well. Well, if you’ve got that as your goal, you have a cloud over your heart, my Christian friend.

And then there are our friends. And then there’s the position we hold, whatever it may be. And then there’s loved ones. And this is the tenderest and perhaps the hardest. But that’s all got to go. You say, then what do I do with this? If this cloud is over my head as a cloud of concealment and my Father is smiling at me and I can’t see His face, what shall I do? Well, the old Brother suggests, and I borrow it and suggest to you as a beautiful illustration, he calls it, a cloud of forgetting. He said, put this cloud that’s above you under your feet as a cloud of forgetting.

And Paul said exactly the same thing, forgetting those things which are behind and reaching forth under those things which are before. You see, the things which were behind Paul were a cloud. And if they’d been in front of him, they’d have shut out God, but he put them behind him. His defeats, his mistakes, his blunders, his errors, his wrongs, the times he’d fallen on his face and the time the Lord had to rebuke him for his pride and all this, he put them behind him and under his feet as a cloud of forgetting.

And the old man of God says, put them under you and have them not betwixt thee and thy God. Right so put a cloud of forgetting beneath thee, betwixt thee and all the creatures that ever God made. We’ve got to get that cloud of forgetting under our feet. And of course, that’s the job of the Christian.

And that’s why I’m preaching like this. And some are understanding and are going to do something about it. Others are not. Others have come up to Kadesh Barnea once a week for years and have turned back into the wilderness and wonder why there’s sand in their shoes. It’s because you would not go on at Kadesh Barnea. Right so put a cloud of forgetting beneath thee. And all this that had been a cloud of concealment now becomes a cloud of forgetting.

Now the face of God I repeat is smiling still and not all the clouds I’ve mentioned and not all the clouds the devil can blow up there, and the devil can blow up a storm and put it between you or betwixt you and the face of your God experientially. But remember that God is waiting within the veil or to change the figure he’s waiting for you to move up, to move up.

I remember getting on a plane at LaGuardia Field in New York some years ago. It was about I would say three o’clock in the afternoon. And the smiling, relaxed, friendly pilot came out and made a little speech. He knew that old duffers like me would worry about because it was a raining miserable day like as we get here sometime, just plain miserable. And he said, now we are leaving in a moment. And he said the situation is this, friends, in 15 minutes we’ll be in the sunlight. In 15 minutes, we’ll be in the sunlight. And he says the weather reports show that it will be clear from here to Chicago, and sure enough it was.

You had experiences like that. And so we got into that plane almost feeling our way there through the smog and the mist. And in 15 minutes we’d put the cloud under our feet and the bright shining sun above. And as we rose even the cloud became white beneath us.

You who’ve flown a lot have had the experience of seeing that gray, great billows of whipped cream that are underneath you, white as whipped egg. And when you were underneath them and looked up they were a misty, miserable, smoggy thing that shut out the sun. But in 15 minutes you put them under your feet. And oh, brother, isn’t it nice to take off in the smoke and rain and fly all the way 900 miles in the sunshine.

Now that’s what I mean. You’re going to have to put this under your feet. You’re going to have to get busy about it and do something about this. And more than sit and take in some more, you’re going to have to work on yourself. And yet I wonder if you are? I wonder if I’m not contradicting myself.

For he says, he wills thou do but look on him and let him work. I wonder if it isn’t better more accurate to say that if you’ll consent to put the clouds under you, he’ll put the clouds under you.

What does a man do in an airplane? Now I, being of the nervous type, I help the pilot. I keep balancing the thing as we turn. Now really, I do. But what help am I giving to the pilot that great big, good-natured fellow sitting up there grinning. What does he care about a little fellow weighing 159 in the summer and a little less in the winter. What can I do to that great big four-engine monster. Not at all, but I help him the best I can.

But he gets you up there into the sunshine. Look on him and let him alone. That’s all.

But you’ve got to be willing that cloud get under your feet. I know a lot of people that’ll never go up. A lot of them. Oh, they have every excuse in the wide world but they’re just not going up. They’d rather stay right down here in the smog. And they do. The sun shines brightly and they think the sun isn’t shining when it is.

Now put it under you, my friend. Put it under you. What is it? Well, I’ve said money, people, friends, position, loved ones, fear, all that I claim and call my own, ambitions, pride, stubbornness, self-will, and anything else the Holy Ghost may point to in your life, only you know what it is. He is a jealous lover and he suffereth no rival. And whatever rival there is, is a cloud between thee and thy God.

Now, I don’t say that that you’re not joined to Him. I do not say that you are not read justified. I say that this we’ve talked about, this wondrous divine illumination, this ability perfectly to love Him and worthily to praise Him, that has been choked out and smitten down and taught out of us for a generation.

This, this we lack, and we lack it because we will not put under our feet the cloud of obscurity. We let it rise between us and our God. My brethren, if you will put it underneath you, why you will find that it hides all the past and all that has bothered you and that that shames you and worries you and grieves you. It’s down there and it’s out and it’s gone and there’s nothing but the clear sky above. But if you have put the cloud under you, then he wills thou do but look on him and let him alone.

Simpson wrote a song that nobody ever sings anymore for two or three reasons. One is the tune’s bad, the second is nobody experiences it much. It is, I take the hand of love divine, I count each precious promise mine, with this eternal counter sign, I take, he undertakes. I take thee, blessed God, I give myself to thee, and thou according to thy word dost undertake for me.

Christ doesn’t have to die again. No cross needs ever to be erected again. No value needs to be added to the atonement. The face of God smiles on His people, but the cloud’s hiding Him. Your cloud, my cloud. But you say that’s true of sinners, that’s true of backsliders, but that couldn’t be true of good gospel people. It is true of the masses of the people.

And because that cloud has been above them, and because they’ve been taught they can’t rise, they’ve rushed to get a little heartbeat from the theater, rushed to get a little bit of warmth, the feeling from hillbilly ballad singing, religious songs, and theatrics, and all the rest. I don’t blame them. They’ve been cheated, and the lawyers [textualists] have wronged them, as in the days of Jesus. Jesus walked among men in that day with His eyes bright and His vision keen, and He said to them, whatever they tell you, do because they’re theologically right, but don’t be like them. And they said, we’ll kill that man, and they did kill that Man. But He rose the third day and sent down the Holy Ghost into the world, and He’s mine and yours, our sweet possession. And don’t you let anybody tell you how much you can have of Him. Only God can tell you how much you can have of Him.

Don’t you let anybody take you aside and tell you now not to get excited, and not to get fanatical, that you’ve got all that there is. And brethren, don’t you let any of that happen to you. Just as sure as God lives, now hear me, just as sure as God lives, if we continue in the direction we’ve been moving in evangelical circles, gospel circles, that which is now fundamentalism will be liberalism in a short time.

We’ve got to have the Holy Ghost back, and we’ve got to have the face of God shining down, and the candles of our souls burning bright, and to sense and feel and know the wondrous divine illumination of Him who said, I’m the Light of the World.

Now does that make a fanatic out of you. Come on, let’s us little fanatics just go and be joyful in the Lord. If that’s fanaticism, what a sweet fanatic it makes out of a man. What a happy wonder it is to be a fanatic.

No, no, that’s not fanaticism. It’s fanaticism when you revolt against the Scriptures, imagine things, go do weird things, and misinterpret the Word of God, but you can’t show where one line of the Word of God has been misinterpreted by what I say. Not one line. It’s all here. The doctrines of the faith, the faith of our Father’s living still.

Well, what about it? I take, He undertakes. Now, if you put in, if you’re willing tonight to put that cloud of self and cloud of self-love and cloud of fear and cloud of stubbornness and cloud of pride and cloud of greed and cloud of ambition under your feet, then there’s nothing for you to do. Nothing.

For all has been done, nothing for you to do. You can’t climb to heaven on a rope ladder. There’s nothing for you to do. I take the hand of love divine. I claim each precious promise mine with this eternal countersign. I take, He undertakes. I take thee, blessed Lord, I give myself to thee, and thou according to thy word does undertake for me.

Ah, do you want Him to undertake for you? Some of you dear Christians have been walking around under a cloud for a long time. You can’t get above, you just can’t. Because you’ve tried to pray your way above it, you’ve tried to believe your way above it, but it doesn’t work that way. You can’t. You’ve got to put it under your feet and rise above it and put all these things betwixt thee and all the creatures God ever made. And look away to the sunlight. And then you relax for there’s nothing you can do.

What can a man do? He can’t fill himself with the Holy Ghost. He can’t cleanse his own heart. You can’t crucify yourself. You can’t. God has to do it. And He’ll do it. And He waits to do it. And He waits optimistic and friendly and, on your side, wanting to help you, willing to do it, anxious to do it, if we could use the word anxious as touching God.

But we sit back, and we’re discouraged and we’re blue. And we’ve been to so many altars and we’ve read so many books and we’re all confused. And still the sun shines and still the cloud hovers. And still, God’s poor people won’t crowd it under their feet. Into the sunshine in 15 minutes, said the boy. Into the sunshine in 15 minutes, says the man of God to you tonight, if you’ll put it all under your feet, dare to put it under your feet and look away to the Lord Jesus. Not trying to tell Him what to do nor how to do it, but look on Him and let Him work.

And over the next hours and days and weeks, you will move upward into a place of spiritual restfulness and power, such as you never knew before. And you’ll have a marvelous deliverance from bondage, a marvelous freedom. You’ll believe in the Scriptures. You’ll believe in the Word of God and its verbal inspiration, its full, plenary authority. You believe in it and yet out of it, there will come a fragrance and a radiance and illumination that you never dreamed of before.

Are there those here that can say, amen, that know what I’m talking about? Amen? You know it’s so. But it isn’t talked about very much. And so that’s why we’re where we are.

Now, what about you this evening, dear friend? What about you this evening? Now, I’m not and cannot do the work of the Spirit. And I do not want to intrude any human effort, however reverent, into the work of the Spirit. For it must be the Spirit’s work. But what could be better and nicer and more scriptural and more restful and logical than that a company of believers should pray together about things?

Well, don’t you think that’s all right? You think that, could there be any objection to that raised by anybody? If I thought anybody could raise a valid objection, I wouldn’t ask. But it seems to me the New Testament teaches the Lord’s people met and prayed together, doesn’t it? And they prayed for each other. And the strong ones prayed for the weak ones. And the ones that had fallen, the others prayed for them and helped them. And in one instance they met and prayed together and the place was shaken and they were all filled with the Holy Ghost.

That was in the Book, too. That’s in the Bible. It was until they ruled it away and said it couldn’t be for us. And the blessed Holy Dove was forced to fold his wings and be quiet while the saints that believed it in years gone by, they radiated in the joy of it. But we’ve been slapped down and said, now you shut up. We scribes will tell you what to believe about this. But our hearts tell us the scribes are wrong. And our longing souls tell us that the hymn writers and the devotional writers and the persons whose biographies we read, they were right.

Paul Rader, years ago, preached a sermon on,” Out of His Belly Shall Flow Rivers of Living Water.“ Two men took him aside afterwards and said, Mr. Rader, you’re all wrong. It was a good sermon, but you’re dispensationally incorrect. He sat and listened. And they said, we, we thought you’re, we know you’re a good preacher and you’re a good brother, but you’re wrong in your interpretation.

And they were eating. He said, he noticed one of them bow his head over his meal. Pretty soon he saw the tears come off the end of his nose. His shoulders, big shoulders, shook. He said, Brother Rader, we have the interpretation, but you have the rivers.

You see, stick to your interpretation, brother. But at any cost, some people want God and they want all God wants them to have in this generation, now, right here on this earth. What about it, friends?

Tags Hindrances