Author: pshappard

Tozer Talks

“The Voice of Reason”

The Voice of Reason

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

June 21, 1953

Tonight, we continue our talks on the voices that entreat us. I have now come to the voice of reason. And I want to read a passage that you would know that I would be reading. I’m sure you’ve guessed it if you gave it any thought at all. From the first chapter of Isaiah. Wash you. Make you clean. Put away the evil of your doings from before mine eyes. Cease to do evil. Learn to do well. Seek judgment. Relieve the oppressed. Judge the fatherless. Plead for the widow. Come now, and let us reason together, saith the Lord. Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow. And though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool. If ye be willing and obedient, ye shall eat the good of the land. But if ye refuse and rebel, ye shall be devoured with a sword. For the mouth of the Lord hath spoken it.

Come now and let us reason together. Those are the words of the Holy Ghost through the man Isaiah. The word reason here is a verb as it occurs in this text. But it is also a noun, not here. But it is a noun, reason. We reason because we are reasonable, and then we have the adjective. And we think reasonably, and then we have the adverb. But here it is a noun. That is, in the definition that I want to give it.

And I’ve thought a lot about reason, and wondered how it might be condensed into a sentence that would say it, that would say what is to be said. And I think this may come near to it, that reason is a wise recognition of things as they really are.

Now if this is true, if reason is a wise recognition of things as they really are, then Christians are of all persons the most reasonable. And they are of all persons, the true realists. Christians are not visionaries, not dreamers, not persons given over to fantasies. But they are truly realists, because they insist upon stripping things down to their hard core of reality.

Now I repeat that there is no person, no kind of person, anywhere in the world that is as realistic as a true Christian. Scientists boast that they are realistic, that they do not deal in fancies nor dreams, but that they test everything and pull it down to its reality. And they are right as far as they go, but let us not believe that the Christian is an opposite to a scientist, because a Christian is a realist, a sounder, truer realist, than a scientist can ever be. Because a Christian insists upon knowing what really is true. He wants to know what is true about life.

A scientist wants to know what is true about life biologically, but a Christian wants to know what is true about life in its broad and everlasting human relationships. And the Christian wants to know about his sins, and he wants to know where they are and what has happened to them. He wants to know about judgment and God and his relation to God, and the future and the resurrection and eternal life and immortality. And he insists upon knowing this.

As a Christian, he insists that his position be realistic and sound, that it be according to reason. And if he is a real Christian, he will refuse to be petted or cajoled or chucked under the chin or told not to mind, and it will go away of itself. He insists upon the facts. He wants to know how about this. He wants to know about where they stand, the Christian does. He wants to know where he stands before God in the judgment. He wants to know about heaven and hell. And he insists upon knowing, and because he does, he is, according to reason. For reason is a wise recognition of things as they really are, not as they seem to be.

Now I charge it back upon the worldling that he is the unrealistic person, because he must pretend all his life. The unsaved man is forced to pretend all his life. And if I were to invent a phrase or term to cover the genus Homo, the human being, unsaved and out of Christ, I would say that he is the great pretender. He must pretend all of his life. He must, for instance, act as if he was not going to die, knowing all the time that he is going to die.

Now that’s not realism, ladies and gentlemen. That’s the fuzziest kind of phantasmagoria, fancy, you know, the dreamers of dreams. The sinner knows he’s going to die. I’ve wondered about this and thought about it, not only as a Christian, but thought about it just as a human being.

What’s the matter with us Christians anyway? I mean us humans, we all act as if we weren’t going to die, and yet everybody knows that he is. And the Christian has gotten all ready for it, packed up his grip and gotten all set to go. He’s a realist. And do you see him somewhere sitting on his suitcase, you know, in some little shanty someplace? Why, if you look around, you’ll see a pair of steel rails nearby. He knows the train’s going to pass by him. He’s a realist. He’s all packed and ready.

But all around about him is a whole world of busy sinners having fun. And they say, look at that dope sitting down there on his suitcase. He thinks that there’s a train coming. And he’s a dope, he’s a dreamer, he’s a visionary. He’s full of fancies and flighty ideas. And there is nothing in reality corresponding to this queer Christian fellow. He smiles and sits on his suitcase a while, because he hears the shooting of the train down the track away.

But the sinner goes on acting as if he wasn’t going to die, but he’s got to die nevertheless. Therefore, the sinner is the great pretender. And he is the unrealistic person, not the Christian, who lives according to reason, and according to things as they really are.

Now, all his lifetime, the sinner is forced to act as if he hadn’t sinned. Or if he wants to good-naturedly admit that he has, then he wants to make nothing out of it. And in his deep conscience, in his deep heart of heart, he knows that he’s sinned. But being a pretender, he has to act as if he hadn’t sinned, or as if sin didn’t amount to anything.

Therefore, he’s unrealistic, unscientific, and strictly unreasonable. And the Christian who says, I have sinned, but God has forgiven. He’s the realist. He’s got the facts there, and in his hands, he can test the thing. David called it a nail in a sure place. I believe it was Isaiah. A nail in a sure place. The Christian drives his nail in a sure place, and he comes back a hundred years later, she’s still there, because the nail is in the sure place. That’s realism.

But the sinner drives his nail in and comes back a few years later, and the termites have eaten the very post in which he drove his nail. But he pretends not to see it. He smiles and drinks himself another Coke, or listens to a hot record, and says, oh, these Christians.

I have a brother-in-law, he’s a Christian, and he prays and goes to church, the poor fellow, he’s not realistic. He’s a lovely fellow, and he’s a good provider, and you can’t find any fault with him, his wife’s crazy about him, his kids love him, and he’s job sure because he’s always on time and always honest, and there’s a lot good can be said about my brother-in-law. But when it comes to religion, he’s a dreamer and a fanciful visionary. Whereas the brother-in-law has his name written in the book of life and the nail driven deep in a sure place. He’s the realist. But the other fellow is a dreamer of deadly and fateful dreams.

So, all his lifetime the sinner is forced to close his eyes and pretend not to see. He’s forced to cover up and hide and dodge and twist and put on another face and put the best foot forward. And when he hears that his friend has dropped dead on the golf course, he swallows his Adam’s apple twice and then takes refuge in his masculine vocal cords and says, too bad.

But he was scared stiff when he heard it, because he didn’t know but he’d be next. Talk about realism. He’s no realist, he’s a hypocrite and a pretender and a liar. And he’s forced to go through life that way. His little kid twirls up in his lap and looks with little innocent eyes and says, Daddy, what is death? He coughs and clears his throat and changes the subject, but he’s scared to death.

Now, talk about realists and say we Christians are dreamers and visionaries. No, a Christian is one who deals with things as they are. And a sinner is one who is forced everlastingly to pretend that things are the way he wants them to be, knowing all the time that he’s lying to his own soul. Christians are not on the defensive. The world’s on the defensive, not Christians. We Christians have gone around with a hanged dog look long enough, gone around apologetically long enough. We ought to go over to the offensive and tell the world, you’re the pretenders and the hypocrites and the liars.

They say there’s a hypocrite in the Church. Of course there’s a hypocrite in the Church. Certainly there’s a hypocrite in the Church. Not only one, but more than one, many hypocrites in the Church. Jesus had his Judas, and Paul, or Peter, had his Ananias and Sapphira, and they died, strange they died, but they had many descendants.

And the Church, I know a lot of them that are in the Churches. But I also know that we need not thus for that reason be on the defensive. We must go over to the offensive and tell the world we Christians are realists. We have gone through and settled some everlasting facts.

Now, the Christian message is according to reason. Come now and let us reason together, because it takes into account all the basic facts that there are. It takes into account God and man and man’s relation to God. It takes into account sin and man’s relation to sin and responsibility for sin, and accountability to God under that responsibility. And it takes into account judgment and death and the shortness of life and the deceitfulness of appearances and the certainty of death. It takes all these things into account.

And a real Christian is one whose house is always in order. He has dealt with everything. He’s always in order. He doesn’t have to stampede heaven wildly and frantically if he finds he’s going to die. He only has to just do a few legal matters and settle a few legal matters. Say here that I owe this $10 to John Smith. See that he gets it. But as far as his everlasting relationships are concerned, he has realistically taken care of them because the Christian message is according to reason.

Now, God being who He is and what He is, there is in the Godhead and in man’s relation to God a transcendency that outstrips reason. But there is never anything that outrages reason. Again, we ought not to be on the defensive here. We ought to go over to the offensive. And we ought to push the sinner into a corner with all his learning and tell him, you can’t call me names anymore.

I am not an unreasonable man but a man who lives according to the highest reason there is. And therefore, I am not sitting quietly or lying down and allowing you to say that what I believe outrages reason. What I believe transcends reason but never outrages it. The Christian message is reasonable and altogether according to the facts and according to the sound judgment and recognition of things as they really are. So Christ entreats us with the voice of reason.

Now, this is a strange approach, I imagine. Some of you who have been in schools, even in high school, maybe you have read a little something else besides comic strip. And you have had it charged that reason says one thing and religion another. Whoever says that isn’t dry behind his intellectual ears yet. And he can’t go to sleep at night without a sugar tip, pacifier, to put him to sleep. And if you don’t know what that is, go back to Pennsylvania among the Pennsylvanians Dutch where I was brought up, and you’ll know what that is. It’s a little glove, finger that size, finger of a glove, stuff that with sugar, sew up the end and give it to the baby.

But a lot of people can’t go to sleep without something like that because they’re not grown yet intellectually, and yet they go about with their eyebrows raised in an arch of perpetual superiority and look down upon us Christians and say they’re unrealistic. And reason, I’m going to go on the side of reason, not on the side of religion. Religion is on the side of reason, gentlemen. And whatever is irreligious and unbelieving is on the side of unreason, and not on the side of reason.

Now Jesus, our Lord, bases his Entreaty upon reasonable considerations. Our lost condition, for instance. Now that’s a reasonable consideration. And the devil has put such propaganda abroad that people are not any longer accepting the doctrine that men are lost. They say it can’t be, we’re on our way up, we’re struggling upward.

Well, we’ve been at it a long time and we’re not up any further than we were before. You can’t fool me with that struggling upward business. We’re a lost people. Why have a lot of you fellows have very little hair on your head? What’s the matter with you? Did you get careless? No, your hair was lost because you’re a lost man. Why are some of you ladies, now my southern chivalry is coming to my aid, but why are you not quite so will-o-wish as you were a hundred years ago? You’re a lost woman.

Why do I have to duck upstairs when I’d love to go back and mill around and chat with you people and lie down and rest from a sermon? Because I’m a lost man. That is my physical self, I’m a saved man. But I mean I belong to a lost race.

Why did my friend Frank Weir, who gave me this Bible incidentally, in this Bible it says, To my friend Tozer, Frank Weir, Delta Lake Convention 1941. I’ve been preaching out of it ever since. Why did my friend Frank Weir go to a radio station to preach, sit down on a couch to wait his turn, slumped into a sleep and they said, Reverend Weir is asleep. They went to try to shake him awake when the cue came for him to go on the air and Frank didn’t get up. He was with the Lord Jesus Christ, looking on the vision beatific. Why did my friend Frank Weir die last week? Because he belonged to a lost race.

Why do we have a war in Korea and devils in the Kremlin and confused men in Washington and slick men in London and cops on every corner and jails and insane asylums? We’re a lost people, that’s what’s the matter. It’s a lost world we live in. And the Christian message takes that frankly into account and doesn’t listen to the propaganda of unreason that says we’re not lost. We are lost.

A nurse goes into a home or a patient is brought into the hospital. We’ll say it’s a ten-year-old boy. He’s running a fever of 105. His eyes are turned up. He’s flushed. His breath is coming in great heavy sobs. There are marks all over his body, strange marks, red marks. Is he struggling upward? Is the doctor going to say, Oh, it’s perfectly nothing, it’s just nothing. It’s not just nothing. Let’s play golf. It’s just nothing. Let’s go out and dream. It’s just nothing.

If they have the sense they’re born with, they’ll recognize a sick boy there. I couldn’t tell you what he had according to the symptoms I’ve given him, but I only know he’s a sick boy, that’s all. And anybody that doesn’t recognize that’s not realistic.

And so I say with Bridewell over here and the Goldbergs dying in Sing Sing, I’ve sat in that chair, Brother Kemp, where they died the other night, sat there and been strapped in. I got out, thank God. I never liked to get out anywhere so well in my whole life. A great big handsome blond boy, maybe 24 years old, with a grin that was just as disarming as Mickey Mantles. And I said to him, Are you one of the… Yes, he said, I’m one of the legalized killers. I said, What’s your job? He said, Wheel them out after they’re dead.

Why is that necessary? It’s the blotch on the body showing of the disease inside. That thousands of volts that ripped through their bodies was the fever of sin that’s in the world. And the Christian says where men are lost and we know they’re lost. So, the Christian message is based upon reason.

Now the lostness of mankind is not a dogma, it is a fact. And the Christian message is based upon the redeeming work of Christ which is made necessary by the lost condition of man. And it’s based upon the love of God in Christ Jesus and it’s based upon the power of the gospel. It’s based upon the fact that humanity is perishing. It’s based upon the abiding permanence of the will of God. It’s based upon the importance of a needed action. And it rests upon all these sound, realistic facts.

And if you came into this building with the eyebrow arched a little, feeling that you liked the old man, all right, and he said some interesting things, but he was hopelessly antiquated and was still naively believing in Christianity, let me tell you that you’re the one who must defend yourself, not I. That you’re the one who must give a reason for what lies in you, not we Christians, we know. We’re not dealing with fancies; we’re dealing with facts as hard and realistic as a brick that goes into the construction of this building.

Now, in the text which I have read there is the stern voice of exhortation and the gracious voice of promise, and these are joined, as the poet said, in reason’s ear. Listen, wash you, make you clean, put away the evil of your doings from before mine eyes. Cease to do evil, learn to do well. Seek judgment, relieve the oppressed, judge the fatherless, plead for the widow. There is the stern voice of God’s exhortation.

Come now and let us reason together, saith the Lord. Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow. Though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool. And there is the gracious voice of promise.

Now my friends, we do a great injury to mankind when we divide these two voices. When that which under God was meant to be a duet becomes a solo. When that which was under God meant to be two sides of the same coin, we split it edgewise and ruin both.

I have in my pocket here a half dollar. An eagle on one side, a lady on the other, with some flowers or something. And that says, in God we trust, 1944, and I hope they still do in 1953, half dollar, United States of America, E Pluribus Unum. Now there we have it. It takes both sides to be worth fifty cents. Get a fine saw and split it edgewise, and neither side would buy a one-cent stamp.

So, we go into the Bible and we’re adepts at the art of splitting texts edgewise and destroying both. If I go to my Bible and I read this, Wash you, make you clean, put away the evil of your doing, cease to do evil, learn to do well, seek judgment, relieve the oppressed, judge the fatherless, plead for the widow, period. Then I have split that coin edgewise and it’s no good.

If I go to my Bible and I skip the first part and read, Come now and let us reason together, says the Lord, though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be white as snow, and read nothing before, nothing after, I’ve split the coin edgewise, it’s no good either.

Yet we have whole schools of Christian theology based upon coins split edgewise. Texts ripped apart and divided asunder. No, the voices are here. It’s a duet, God Almighty. Reason is singing her two songs. The stern voice of exhortation and the gracious voice of promise.

Now I say, we do great soul injury to men by dividing these and trying to make out that we can have our sins forgiven and washed and cleansed without first turning from evil and putting it away from before God’s eyes, ceasing to do evil, learning to do good. You cannot.

And this great error has filled the churches with deceived members and helped to fill hell with deceived Christians, or at least with deceived souls. And there are many people who come into the church on a half text. Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be white as snow. They forget that that’s only half the text.

There are those that are driven away from the churches because some people preach only the first half of the text. Wash, you make you clean. And they say, dear God, how could I? How can a man as vile as I am ever wash me even if I had all the acids of the world? I could not cleanse my soul. And they go away discouraged because that’s only half the text. There are two halves of the text here.

Now, my brethren, it’s a great moral impossibility, this, of trying to be forgiven while persisting in sin. That’s a great error. It’s an impossibility and never can be done. And it does violence to the Scriptures, and it also violates moral reason.

Now, the voice of moral reason says that all pardon is conditioned upon intention to reform. Do you hear me? All pardon is conditioned upon intention to reform. Some people don’t like the word reform. I’ve heard people condemn that word reform and get up and crack their two heels together and say, I don’t believe in reformation, I believe in regeneration. I might just as well say, I don’t believe in the in-God-we-trust side of the coin, I only believe on the E Pluribus Unum side of the coin. They’re both there and they’re both necessary to make the coin worth anything.

And so, reformation and regeneration are not enemies, they’re friends, they’re Siamese twins. And forgiveness is based upon the intention to reform. Reform is another word for repent, do your first works, clean up, get right, straighten out. And it’s necessary that we take this into account. They tell a story, I don’t know whether it’s true, I think it is true. It happened in the United States, one of our states.

They say that a governor, who was a very tender-hearted man and desired to do all he could to help the people in the prisons, went incognito to a prison. They didn’t know who he was, he didn’t tell them. And he strolled around talking to the men, and he got into conversation with a personable young fellow that he thought looked pretty good. What are you in for, he told him. How long, he told him. They chatted a while longer, the convict never dreaming that he was the governor of the state.

He said, suppose you’d like to get outside again. Oh boy, what I said, once more, outside again. Would I love to be free? Well, he said, it could be, you could be free sometime. No, he said, I don’t think so. He said, they threw the book at me, I don’t think so that I’ll ever get out of here. Well, could be, you know, strange things have happened, said the governor. Strange things have happened. Maybe you will get out sometime.

Tell me, what would you do if you got out? What would be the first thing you’d do? His face went black. The first thing I would do would be to cut the throat of the blankety blank judge that sent me here. Governor changed the conversation, tapered it off, went on down the corridor talking to somebody else, and that fella stayed in his cell.

If he’d said, oh, I’ll never get out of here, I have no hope. But if I ever do, if by any chance I ever should, the first thing I would do would be to try to straighten up the wrongs I did that put me here. First thing I would do would be to go back and admit I lied and get right with some of my friends that I made into enemies and I’d get a job and I’d try to forget all this and I’d try to be a good American and honor that flag that flies yonder on the top of that tower that I see through my bar, the bars. I’d try to be a good man again.

Do you know what would happen? The governor would have given him a pardon because he was fishing around, he wanted him to say that. But he didn’t say it. He said I’d cut to throw him a judge. He stayed in there because pardons are conditioned upon intention to reform.

Now you can’t save a man who insists upon continuing in the thing that caused him to be unsaved. Just as a lifeguard sees a man bobbing in the water and he plunges in, grabs him to drag him out and as soon as he lets loose of him he plunges back in again and keeps right at it. A lifeguard can’t save a man that doesn’t want to be saved.

A fireman goes to a building and hears somebody looking out the third story and they get a ladder up and they try to bring him down, and he scratches and fights and kicks and refuses to come out of the fire but they take him down anyhow and he runs right back up. You can’t save a man from a fire who insists upon running back into the fire again.

What a terrible, moral incongruity it is to try to teach forgiveness without intention to reform. To teach pardon and cleansing where there isn’t any intention to change the life. It would upset heaven and turn it into a moral insane asylum. And in a hundred years you wouldn’t know heaven from hell.

No, my brother. Here are the voices, the voice of reason singing its duet stern voice of exhortation and the gracious voice of promise and all stemming from reason. In reason’s voice here they all rejoice.

Now, another thing is that intention can be proved only by the changed life. That’s the only way of knowing. You notice there are nine active verbs here. Wash, make, put, cease, leave, seek, relieve, and plead. Nine active verbs. Do you know the difference between an active and a passive verb? Maybe some of you haven’t been to school so long you’ve forgotten about it. You went through that thing, and they forced you to learn what a passive and an active verb was. They made you learn voice. Passive voice, active voice.

Now, which is the passive, which is the active voice? And you flunked it. Or you learned it and forgot it just as soon as you could get around the corner. But while teachers, God bless them, have a way of making it look tough for you, really there’s something to that active and passive voice business.

The passive voice is a verb that receives the action. I just stand here and somebody does something to me. I passively receive the act. But if I do something that’s active, that’s a change of voice. I am loved. There it is. That’s the old familiar Latin. I am loved. That’s passive. Somebody loves me. I don’t know how realistic that is. But anyhow, that’s the receiving of the action. I receive the action. I don’t have to do a thing except stand here and look pretty. I receive the action. But I love. That’s positive. That’s active.

Now, the curse of religion today is that we’re in the passive voice. We’re receiving everything. It’s coming our way. But God puts nine active verbs ahead of the Word. If your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as snow. He puts nine active verbs there.

Well, nobody’s probably changed any because I have said this. Wash you. That’s active. I am washed. That’s passive. Pray for me. That I may hold faithful unto the end. I am washed. But the Lord says, Wash you. Put away the evil of your doing. The passive voice says, The evil of my doing has been put away. Somebody else did it. They just stood there and looked like St. Francis.

Now, I say the passive voice is the curse of religion. Everything is done for us and everything is done to us. There we are. It’s all done for us, and all done to us. We are spectators in place of participators.

Now, the promise of cleansing is here based upon and contingent upon our actively changing our way of life. Oh, thank God I can go on to this. No sin is too vile to be forgiven. All manner of sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven unto man. Whatsoever sins they sin, said Jesus, except one. And that is the unpardonable sin.

And we might as well skip that because the unpardonable sin is one committed by people who wouldn’t believe they had if you had told them. So as far as you’re personally concerned, you can dismiss the thought of the unpardonable sin from your mind because the man who’s committed the unpardonable sin can’t do anything about it because he won’t believe it and wouldn’t if he could.

So there, we’ll, without undoing violence to the Scriptures, we’ll simply put the emphasis here that all manner of sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven unto the sons of men. That which can’t be forgiven belongs in an area that is never affected by gospel preaching. Pharisees and those who are sure of themselves and walk the earth and utter self-righteousness, they’ve committed it. But if you can still feel sorry and worry about your sin, you haven’t.

And so, no matter, says the voice of God’s tender, gracious reason, no matter what the man himself thinks of his sin, and no matter what the public thinks of your sin, and no matter if it’s as intense as scarlet and as dark as crimson, all manner of sin shall be forgiven unto the sons of men, says the Bible. Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow, and though they be red like crimson, they shall be as white as snow. Some of our missionaries go to countries where they’ve never seen snow, and they’ve never seen sheep.

And so, when they come to this text, and it’s oh so necessary, they come to this text and others like it, they don’t know what to do when they translate the Scripture, they don’t know where to get a figure that people know, and all the white things they ever knew were dirty, you know, telltale grime. So they have an awful time trying to get something that’ll make the people see what it is to be utterly white.

I remember hearing of the washerwoman who was hanging her wash on the line, and a new snow had fallen, absolutely whiter than white. She was hanging up her wash. And the contrast between her very wonderful, lovely wash and the snow looked pretty bad for her. And a passerby, just good-naturedly kidding her, said, your wash doesn’t look so clean this morning, does it? And she said, oh no, what can compare with God’s whiteness? What can be compared with God’s whiteness? So wool and snow are white, but whiter than snow, David said.

Ah, brother, it’s wonderful that there’s this other part of the text. Wouldn’t that be terrible if God’s thunderous voice roared at us? Whoosh, you, make you clean! Oh God, how, how? What can I do? The other voice softens down and says, though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow. I thank God for the cleansing that cleanses the crimson and the scarlet.

And then he says this, if you be willing and obedient, ye shall eat of the good of the land. The willing and obedient Christian, or the willing and obedient person, shall eat of the good of the land. Oh, what a beautiful wealth of mixed metaphors and confused figures.

When God wants to show us how much He loves us, He makes the language groan under the effort. When He wants to tell us how white we can be, He takes all figures of speech and strains them to the breaking point. The blood of Jesus Christ cleanses from all sin.

Some of those old camp meeting songs tell the story. I was once a sinner, but I came. Pardoned to receive from the Lord. Now I am forgiven. And? I know. That? By the blood I have made whole. Yes, sir. There’s a new name written down in glory. And it’s mine, I know it’s mine. And the white-robed angels tell the story, a sinner has come home. Ah, the old camp meeting brethren who jumped over the benches and praised God with the loud voices, they were realists. They were happy because there was something to be happy about.

But the world is happy over deceptive appearances. Which side are you going to be on? If ye be willing and obedient, ye shall eat of the good of the land. Humble yourself. Will to do God’s will. Put some action in your repentance. Wash you. You say, how can I wash me? Well, really you can’t. If it means washing your own heart. But you can get rid of a lot of those dirty habits you’ve got now.

We preach that men ought to get converted in order to get rid of dirty habits. Borrowing two or three maybe, like dope and liquor. There isn’t a habit man has, he shouldn’t be able to quit like that.

My father was sixty years old. He had smoked and chewed from the time he could remember. One day he looked at that tobacco and he said, boy, that’s dirty looking stuff. He said, I’m going to quit it. And he did. And he didn’t even ask God to help him. He just quit it. Oh dear God, please help me to get rid of that dirty, smelly, rotten, foul, polluting pipe.

Help me, Lord. Jesus Christ died on a cross squirming like a serpent. And you haven’t got moral backbone enough to quit chewing dirty tobacco. Help me, dear Father, that I may quit going to the movies. God didn’t take you to the movies. You took yourself. Help me, Father, that I might quit lying. God never taught you to lie. Quit your lying. Help me to be honest, Father.

Well, that’s no prayer to make. If you’re not honest, you’ll go to jail. Somebody will get you. Help me, Father, that I may not falsify my income tax. Well, Sam will get around to checking you one of these days, and then we’ll come and sing for you. Have a meeting where you are.

That happened in one of our Alliance churches. Yeah, that happened. Two of the elders, mind you. Elders in the church in Canada during the World War. Two Alliance elders falsified their income tax. And only got off because they promised to pay up, and the scandal hit the newspapers.

Help me to be honest, Father. Dear God, what kind of sissies are we? Is it any wonder that we’re spineless and boneless and without any strength of character. We go through life, Christians unable to resist temptation, the world magnetically pulling us to it. We can’t pray. We can’t suffer because we’re passive Christians.

We think God ought to be doing it all. Forgetting it’s a two-way street. Forgetting that it is a reciprocal agreement. Forgetting that we are to obey, be willing and obedient, and we shall go to the land. I have a lot of sympathy for children. I have sympathy for sick people. I have sympathy for people who’ve been caught in one or two habits they can’t escape, such as dope. I have sympathy for those who are in jail and those who are insane. Sympathy for the bereaved and those who lost loved ones by desertion. I have sympathy.

Oh, God knows what sympathy my heart has for it all. But I can’t manage to drum up an awful lot of sympathy for some old rounder who has lived like the devil because he loved it and then says, I can’t quit. I can’t quit.

A woman came down to the altar and she wanted God to fill her with the Holy Ghost and she couldn’t say yes to God. Just couldn’t say yes to God. She screamed and let her hair come down. They wore hair in those days. Women did. And she, oh, it was a distressing thing and everybody pitied her, you know. Pitied all this soul. She’s really struggling. She’s really struggling. And inadvertently the feeling was God was being pretty tough on her.

So, after several nights of this writhing and groaning, she took a, nobly and heroically, stripped ring from her finger and tossed it to the evangelist and said, give it to missions, Amen, and she got blessed. The evangelist said, boy, this is a gem. This is a nugget. Will the missionary board be glad to get this? So, he went down the next day and had it appraised. The jeweler said, three twenty-eight. Give you $3.28 for it.

And she was struggling over that. Now, I can’t pity her. If she lost her baby, I could pity her. Then I could suffer with her for that. If her husband was killed in Korea, I could pity her until my heart ached. But I can’t pity that kind of cheap stuff, that kind of passivity. That kind of religious jellyfishism. I can’t pity that and I don’t believe God does.

It’s time that we Christians woke up and wound our backbone. Wound the thing up until it was tight. And said, now God, show me what to do. And got out there and got active. If ye be willing and obedient, ye shall eat the good of the land. Amen.

If you’re willing and obedient, ye shall eat the good of the land. But if you refuse and rebel, nothing but judgment lies before you.

What do you say tonight, friend? God is calling you and you are every sound reason why you should follow him. Every sound reason why you should be an all-out-and-out Christian, every sound reason. And not one lonely reasonable argument can be brought against either staying unsaved or staying half-saved. Not one reasonable argument. Every voice of reason cries not only that you be saved, but that you be fully saved. What about it tonight? Let us pray.

O Christ, everything seems so simple. And we, like the Jews, are looking for miracles. We, like the Greeks, are looking for wisdom. When it’s all so very simple. If you will amend your doings, and obey my voice, then I will cleanse you whiter than snow, and make you as white as wool, and ye shall eat of the good of the land.

Father, it’s so simple. We beseech Thee, help us to see it. We beseech Thee that we may not foolishly cast away these great gems of truth. We pray Thee tonight, our Father, that we may not fail to hear thee speaking to us when Thou art speaking so plainly. God bless this people. It’s hot here tonight. And we, the people, have listened with patience.

O God, Holy Spirit, we beseech Thee, drive Thy merciful arrows so deep into their hearts that they’ll not be able to pull them out ever until they come to Calvary’s fountain where they are cleansed and forgiven and healed and the old wound of conviction is drawn and cleansed and healed. Help us as we wait upon Thee.

We’re going to close pretty soon. Before we do, before I close my prayer, I’d like to know are there those, or how many there are, who would say, I’d like to be included, Mr. Tozer, in your prayer. Please pray for me. I’m not a Christian. I really truly know, or I’m afraid at least, that I’m not a true Christian. I’d like you to remember me.

Now, I won’t come back and talk to you. I just want to know that you want me to pray. I want you to stand right where you are. Would you do that? Would you stand? Would you stand up? I don’t apologize for this at all. A little thing like that is so small. Communists are standing up for what they believe. Jehovah’s Witnesses are down on the street corner giving out literature. Catholics are telling their beads on buses and streetcars. Everybody else seems to have courage. What’s the matter with us?

If you say, Mr. Tozer, pray for me, before you close your prayer, stand, please. How about the half-saved Christians? Marginal Christians? Christians that are on the edges of things. You say, Mr. Tozer, I believe you. Every reason is on the side of my becoming an out-and-out, consecrated, Spirit-filled Christian. Please pray for me.

Will you stand? Dare to do it where you are. Yes, stand. Stand and say, pray for me. I want to pray before we close. Before we finish our prayer. I think there are a good many Christians here that are consecrated Christians, all out and out for God, whose lives, whose testimony, whose day-by-day walk, whose generosity, whose long record of faithful praying and faithful living prove that they’re not half-Christians, but wholly, totally God’s consecrated, Spirit-filled Christians. I believe that.

But there are some, and they know who I mean, and they know that they have no such record of consecrated, Godly, faithful, consistent walk with God. They know it. So, I’m appealing. Would you like to stand and say, remember me? Just where you are.

Well, the dear God knows, Father, we thank Thee for every true Christian, and we don’t want to underrate one of them. And we don’t want to make a case for ourselves by preaching people down in order to get them back up.

We thank Thee for every true Christian, and we know a lot of them. They wouldn’t sin if they could know it was sin. They’re true and honest and faithful and right and good and prayerful.

But, O God, Thou knowest how many are carnal and yet sold unto sin, worldly and only marginal Christians. Great God, we pray for all such. Pray that there will come to us a revival that will sweep us like floods out of this condition and revive us again in the midst of the years. Grant it, we pray Thee, in Christ’s name. Amen.

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“The Voice of the Holy Spirit“

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The Voice of the Holy Spirit

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

June 14, 1953

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Tozer Talks

“The Voice of God’s Love“

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The Voice of God’s Love

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

May 31, 1953

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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“Be Ye Holy for I am Holy“

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Be Ye Holy for I am Holy

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

December 13, 1953

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tags Holiness

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Tozer Talks

Post author By pshappard
Post date March 9, 2025

“God’s Abundant Mercy“

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Gods Abundant Mercy

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

June 28, 1953

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tags Mercy

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Tozer Talks

Post author By pshappard
Post date March 2, 2025

“Christ Foreordained Manifested for You“

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Christ Foreordained Manifested for You

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

January 10, 1954

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Tozer Talks

“Thou Art Good and Doest Good“

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Thou Art Good and Doest Good

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

November 18, 1956

Tonight, I want to talk to you on this 119th Psalm, verse 68. Thou art good and doest good. Teach me thy statutes. The psalmist is talking to God, and he says, Thou art good and doest good.

Now, it may seem odd, but this is not a Thanksgiving sermon. That is, I had not planned to preach a Thanksgiving sermon. I’ll speak Thursday morning, but this fits in, and so since it fits in, I want to explain that this is not an effort on my part to wrestle up a Thanksgiving sermon. This has been on my mind for quite a long time, and I want to talk about the goodness of God tonight as being the ground of our hope. And if you will believe what I tell you, and if you will ask God to illuminate your mind, it could change your whole life tonight completely.

And I’m so convinced that this is true that I want to ask God yet that He’ll help us, because if I can’t say it right and you can’t hear it right, then we’ll not get it. And if we don’t get it, of course, it’s one more sermon that’s gone down the drain. But if we get it, it can change the whole course of our lives from tonight on. So, let’s pray.

Now, blessed Lord, by the energizing of the Holy Spirit, make the truth to be a living one. Lord, we pray tonight that Thou would open our minds. We’re here in this building tonight, the 18th of November, 1956, and all around us ebbs and flows the tide of modern civilization, overhead and all around us. And Lord, Thou knowest that those who will sit here tonight won’t be here very long. So, help us now that we may listen, not for passing days and changing moons and passing years, but forever.

Holy Ghost with light divine, shine upon this heart of mine, and shine upon the heart of these thy children and those who may be here out of the kingdom. And oh, we pray Thee that Thou help us to believe what Thou sayest about Thyself. We ask it in Jesus’ name. Amen.

Now the Holy Spirit here states a cardinal truth. He says that God is good. And though this is found in a psalm, I want you to notice that it is not a poetic flourish. It is a hard, sound statement of eternal truth. God is good. And it is therefore of critical importance to us all, and it is vitally important that we know what God means when He says about Himself, or has the psalmist say by the Spirit, Thou art good.

Now let’s do a little defining. That’s always boresome, but I hope we won’t be boresome with it. What the Spirit is saying here is not that God is righteous or holy, though God is both righteous and holy in infinite degree and in perfection. But that is not what the Spirit is saying here.

When we hear the words, God is good, we think that God is morally good, that He’s holy, that He’s righteous. He is all that. But that is not what the Spirit says here. He says something else altogether. It would not be particularly encouraging to us to have us told that God is holy, because it would only show what vast and all but infinite gulfs there are between us unholy creatures and a holy God. But when he says God is good, then there is encouragement there.

Now I’d like to toss that around a bit longer in order that we might be clear on it, so nobody will go out and say Mr. Tozer said that the Bible didn’t say that God was righteous nor holy, only that he was good. Suppose I was talking about some person of our acquaintance, and I said she is very intelligent. And somebody fired up and said hold on there now, she’s good looking. Well, I said I wasn’t thinking about good looks at the moment, I was thinking about intelligence, and I said she was intelligent, but I didn’t say she wasn’t good looking.

And so, when the man here by the Holy Ghost says God is good, he isn’t saying that God is not holy. He isn’t saying that God is not righteous. He just is not saying that God is holy or righteous, but he is saying that God is good. And thus you see that good here means neither righteous nor holy, though elsewhere it is taught that God is both.

Now that’s what it doesn’t mean. Now what does it mean? It means that God is full of kindness and favor and mercy, that God is good-hearted and of good will.

Now I looked up the word “good” here as it’s used about God to find out what the Bible did say, what this word does mean. And you know it is one of those words that is so full of meaning that it makes our English language stagger. It means that God is bountiful, that he is cheerful, it means that he is merry and glad and gracious and joyful and kind and sweet and ready.

Now all of those meanings are in the word “good” in Hebrew so that it takes all of those meanings to put it into our English. Thou art good and doest good. Thou art bountiful and doest bountifully. Thou art cheerful and doest cheerfully. Thou art merry and doest merrily. Thou art glad and dost labor in thy gladness. Thou art gracious and doest graciously. Thou art joyful and doest joyfully. Thou art kind and doest kindly.

Now it means all that and I suppose it means a good deal more, but it means that God is kind and favorful and merciful, that God has a good heart toward us, that he is a person or a being of good will.

Now back in the Old Testament, the man of God, Moses said this. He prayed, O God, show me Thy glory. Back in the 33rd of Exodus, and he said, I beseech Thee, show me Thy glory. And God said, I will make all My goodness pass before thee, and I will proclaim the name of the Lord before thee. Now we have a request for the glory of God to be manifest, and God answering by saying, all right, I will make My goodness pass before thee, and I will proclaim the nature of Jehovah. Now in the 34th chapter, Moses took up the stones into the mount, and the Lord descended in a cloud and stood with him there and proclaimed the name of the Lord.

Now this is the goodness of the Lord and the glory of the Lord. And the Lord passed by before him and proclaimed, the Lord, the Lord God, merciful and gracious, long-suffering and abundant in goodness and truth, keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, that will in no means clear the guilty, but visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, and upon the children’s children, and the third and the fourth generation.

In other words, all the happy, gracious, kind, merry heart of God can’t in any wise violate His justice. So, if people will not believe it and will not accept it and will not avail themselves of it, then God warns them also that a part of his nature is justice. But it is significant that when Moses said, show me Thy glory, he said, all right, I’ll show you my goodness, as if the goodness of God were the glory of God in a manner that nothing else would be.

Now you see, my friends, it all depends upon how you approach God and from what direction. To an angel in heaven, I suppose, the mercy of God would not mean as much as to a sinner on earth, for an angel in heaven does not need the mercy of God because he has not sinned. But a sinner on earth needs the mercy of God, and therefore, the glory of God to a sinner would be the goodness and the mercy of God, whereas the glory of God to an angel in heaven might be the holiness of God. God’s glory is what He is to somebody that needs Him, and so we people need Him.

Now God, I say, is full of kindness, and he’s bountiful, and even the word beautiful is here, and God is cheerful and fair. And it’s the nature of God so to be that is God is one of goodwill. Now I want you to hear me that there is no cynicism in God. There is never any sensitiveness and never any resentfulness and never any sulkiness in God. God is always good-hearted and friendly. God is never on the defensive. He is open and frank and candid and cheerful.

If we could always go to God with that understanding, it would change our whole lives, my friends. It would change our lives. It would put a different complexion on everything that happens to us. It would make our sicknesses tolerable. It would make distress and tribulation and affliction easy to bear. It would make prayer a great pleasure. It would bring us to God with a lot of difference.

You see, we read about sin and we get scolded for sin so much, and we ought to be. We get scolded for sin until we get a conception of God as being a one who is extremely hard to please and very sharp and somewhat inclined to be cynical, and that He’s quite sensitive and likely to be resentful if you don’t say it right, or if you don’t kneel right or if you eat the wrong thing or wear the wrong thing or do something that offends the Lord. Now, that’s just exactly opposite. God, it says here, is joyful and He’s cheerful.

So, you’re not dealing with a sulky, heavy-browed God. You’re dealing with a God who is kind, and then the word ready is in there. I don’t know what the word ready is in there for unless it means that God is there ready to be kind and ready to be gracious and ready to be bountiful. So, He’s a ready, God, and He’s benevolent and cordial and gracious. Now, that’s the way to come to God.

But you say, Mr. Tozer, you don’t know how bad I am and how evil I have been. Well, your evil doesn’t change God’s nature any. It changes yours, but it doesn’t change His. You see, what God is, God always was, because God is immutable, and therefore there never has been any change in God. God did not become bountiful. He did not become cheerful nor merry nor glad nor gracious nor kind. He always was merry and glad and gracious and kind, and He will never cease to be glad and gracious and merry and kind, because He cannot change. I, Jehovah, change not.

Change and decay in all around I see, but I see no change in God. It’s unthinkable that God should change. Therefore, if God ever was kind, God is still kind. And if God is kind now, God will always be kind, so that you may be certain of that.

Now you say, well, that’s true, and it’s true about good people, and God will be kind to good people, and he’ll be gracious to good people. Did you ever stop to think that that’s just exactly reversing the facts? God doesn’t need to be gracious to good people, if you were any. He doesn’t need to be gracious to angels. He only needs to be gracious to people who need grace.

And now, it isn’t something that God does, as a man goes on a vacation, or a woman bakes a cake, or a student goes to school. It isn’t something that God does. It’s something that God is. Thou art good, he says, and the result of what God is, He doeth good. And now, not only is God immutable, but God is eternal. He always was like that. He always will be like that, to time out of mind.

And then the kindness of God and the goodness of God are perfect. That is, there is no improvement possible. If all of the angels in heaven, the holy angels and seraphim, with their six wings and all the cherubs and all the watchers and holy ones, were to gather at what we’d call the summit down here, and were to pool all of their holiness and all of their goodness and all of their moral intelligence, there wouldn’t be even remotely possible that ever there should be an improvement suggested in God Almighty. Because God, being already perfect, can’t improve.

And God, being immutable, can’t get worse. That is, He can’t get less kind than He is, and He can’t get less gracious than He is. And then it’s not only perfect, but infinite. Now, all this goodness of God is infinite. What does it mean? It means that it has no limit to it anywhere.

A man is like a little field. A good man is like a little field. And after you’ve trampled around over him a little while, you have trampled over all of his, all there is of him. Because there’s a fence around a man where we’re finite.

But God, being infinite, there are no limits and no boundaries anywhere. All that God is, God is beyond all possibility of the human mind to conceive, and there is not a mind in the wide world that would be able to even grasp how kind God is, and how good He is, and how gracious He is to people, and how ready He is to be gracious and merry and kind to people, and open and frank and candid to people, and good-hearted and friendly. Nobody can conceive that because they have to work with finite minds.

It’s just like taking a pail to the Atlantic Ocean and trying to dip it up. You can dip up a pailful, but you can’t dip up the Atlantic Ocean. And so, we come to God and say, God, Thou art kind; how kind art Thou? And we take our little minds and dip into the goodness of God and say, how good art Thou? And we come up with a pailful, but it hasn’t taken any out that God can give and never lose. That’s the wonderful thing about God. He can give and still have it just as much as he had before. God can pour out mercy on the whole wide earth and still not lose any mercy.

If a man worth a billion dollars, if that man exists, if he’s worth a billion dollars and he gives away a million, he’s that much the poorer. If he gains a million, he’s that much the richer. But God can give away grace and still not be any less rich in grace. You can refuse His grace and still God won’t have any more grace because God can’t have any more grace than He has now because He has an infinite grace, which is boundless and limitless.

And there isn’t any way possible for God to have any more kindness than he has now. But somebody says, didn’t Jesus, when He died on the tree, didn’t that make God gracious and kind to us? No, it’s exactly the other way. Christ died on the tree because God was gracious and kind, not to make God gracious and kind.

When Jesus died on the cross, it didn’t make God anything. It enabled man to come to God, but it did not change God even in one particular. God was bountiful and cheerful and fair and merry and glad and gracious in order that Christ might die on a tree. And he raised him from the dead for the same reason. And he set him at his right hand for the same cause.

Now God’s goodness is the source of all blessing. You hear this, my friend, I said it can change your whole life. Why did God create? Why did He make us in the first place? He made us in the first place because He was bountiful and beautiful and cheerful and merry; because God had a good heart and was kind and friendly and wanted to see people. He wanted somebody He could look at that would reflect His glory.

And so out of His kindness, God made people and out of His grace. And why then did He redeem us when we fell? For exactly the same reason. There was no burden laid on God. There was nothing put on God from any direction, no pressure, no moral pressure. Even a president or a prime minister or a king or a queen, they have pressure put on them, political pressure.

Businessmen have political pressure put on them. And even though they’re relatively free individuals, they still have pressure put on, but never God. Nobody ever put pressure on God. It’s just impossible. It’s unthinkable. It’s totally unthinkable that anybody could come to God and say, now God, if you know what’s good for you, you’d better redeem these people. Why, God could snuff out creation as you could blow out a candle. God could hurl all the worlds down into vacuity and emptiness.

There was no pressure on God, but redemption flowed up out of the goodness of God. God was good and kind and cheerful and sweet and joyful and ready to help us and wanted to help us. And so, He thought up redemption for us. And why does God forgive people? Does He forgive them because of something they do?

I heard a sermon on purgatory today by a Father Flanagan, I think they called him. And he explained the position that some people take about purgatory. He said why it’s unthinkable that a man should continue in sin until late in life and then be forgiven of his sin and die and not have to be punished for his sin. Well, what he needs to do is to read a good Catholic translation of the book of Hebrews. That’s all I’d recommend for the brother; just read a good Catholic translation of Hebrews and Monsignor Knox’s translation of Hebrews and he’ll get the answer to all that.

But God forgives. Why does God forgive? Because you suffer? No, God forgives because God is ready and bountiful and cheerful and merry and glad and gracious and of goodwill and kindhearted. And there isn’t any sulking in God. And there’s friendliness in God and an accessibility and cordiality. That’s why God forgives. And it all flows up out of God’s heart. And none of it comes from you and me. Why does God wait for that? Why, the Bible says he waits that he might be gracious.

Some of you have waited a long time to become Christians and you think God was pretty slow. And you say, well, I must not have been too bad because God didn’t punish me. He didn’t send judgment.

That isn’t the way to look at it, brother. It was God’s kindness that didn’t punish you. For it says here in the book of Hebrews, the goodness of God leadeth thee to repentance. It wasn’t that you weren’t bad, but it was that God was infinitely gracious and kind.

And why does God keep his people? Oh, I wonder why it is necessary for us in order that we might believe we’re kept. I wonder why it’s necessary for us to invent doctrines and logic in order to have the doctrine that we’re secure. Can’t you believe you’re secure because God is good and doesn’t change? And that God being always friendly and candid and open and ready to help you and always having an infinite amount of mercy and kindness and grace that you’re kept for that reason. And it flows up out of God’s heart and it doesn’t flow from any other direction.

Now, the goodness of God is the ground of our expectation. That is, God being good, that’s the ground of our expectation. Some people say, well, repentance, that makes you fit so that God can save you. Well, that was never the teaching of the Bible and it’s never the teaching of the great evangelists and the great reformers, never. They never taught that repentance was a meritorious act or a series of acts which brought the mercy of God to you. They taught that repentance was a condition God laid down which you had to perform before the mercy and grace of God could reach you.

So, repentance is not a meritorious act. Remember that, that you could repent. Judas Iscariot went out and repented, but he died and went to hell to his own place. And all the repentance in the universe couldn’t draw anything out of God or make God any kinder nor any more gracious, nor any friendlier, nor any better hearted. God is already that. So let’s put repentance aside.

You say, do I not believe in repentance? I think you know I believe in repentance. Repentance is a condition which we meet in order that a God already wanting to be good to us can be good to us. And the man who loves his sin and hangs to his sin, the good, gracious God can’t be gracious to him because he hangs to his sin. He turns his back on God, and he can’t see God’s smile. And repentance means turning around and looking at the smiling face of God. That’s what repentance means.

But the man who hasn’t repented, has got his back to God. How can a man who’s looking away from God, see God’s invitation, got His hand up in invitation or see God’s smiling countenance. So, repentance is a turning around so that God, the good God can do what He’s wanted to do from eternity. But it doesn’t change God. It isn’t meritorious.

Well, somebody else would say, if we just prayed long enough, if we just prayed long enough, if we prayed all night or if we prayed till midnight, or if we prayed seven days or nine days, surely God would answer. Well, my friend, remember this, that the man who prays the most of anybody I know in this generation is Tom Hare. And Tom Hare says, I don’t believe in merit prayers. There’s no merit in prayer. The merit is in God. And he’s perfectly right. Prayer is not meritorious.

The Mohammedans pray and the Llamas over in Tibet, they pray, and people pray and pray and tell beads and pray, but there’s no merit in it at all. The merit is in the goodness of God, you see, my brother. And prayer is simply the opening of the hand to take what God is giving us.

Now, if we won’t open our hands, then God can’t give us what He wants us to have. Open your mouth wide and I will fill it. And prayer is merely the opening of the mouth. And the most wicked man in the world, if he’ll open his mouth and his hand, God will fill them. If he’ll turn around to God in repentance and open his mouth and his hand, God will fill them. Not because that man is good, for he is decidedly not, but because God is good in the sense in which we’ve mentioned it here.

And then, faith is not meritorious. Now, some people say, well, if I had faith enough, faith is meritorious. And there’s surely some merit in faith. And if God saw faith in me, why God would bless me. Well, now, faith is confidence that God is good. That’s the main thing that faith is. It’s confidence that God is good.

Suppose that I wronged a man. Suppose that I wronged him very profoundly, very deeply. Suppose I slipped up on him in the middle of the night and wounded him, injured him, hit him and hurt him and put him in the hospital. But I knew the man. And I knew that he was gracious and kind and would forgive and wouldn’t hold anything against anybody.

And suppose that I went to that man, had a little change of heart and said to myself, I’ve got to go to that man. I lost my temper and slugged him and put him in the hospital. And I’m sorry now. Now I’m going to go to him and ask him to forgive me. And knowing that man, I would go to him and say, please forgive me with full confidence that he would forgive. But would my going and asking for forgiveness be a meritorious act? Certainly not. The goodness would not lie in me. The goodness would lie in the man who forgave.

And so, faith is not a merit. It’s not a virtue. It is not something if I have 50 cents of faith, I can get 50 cents of blessing. It is not a value received proposition. Faith is confidence that God is good and will remain good and never was anything else, but good. And that God is bountiful and cheerful about it and glad and gracious and joyful and kind and ready to be all of those things to me. And so, the goodness lies in God and all the merit lies in God.

Now suppose that my friend that had been my friend for half a lifetime and that I, in a burst of temper, slugged him as he walked down the street at night, suppose that I went to him in the hospital and asked him to forgive me. And it turned out that he not only forgave me but held my hand and wept with delight and then prayed for me. Why, who’d get the praise? Would somebody say, wasn’t Tozer wonderful that he asked that man to forgive him? No. They’d say, wasn’t that man wonderful that he forgave Tozer?

And so, my brother it is. When we go to God for forgiveness and have faith that he forgives, the merit isn’t in the faith nor in us, the merit is in the good God. And through all eternity people will be singing songs and anthems to the God who is so kind and cheerful and cordial and friendly, that he’d forgive his worst enemy when he asked him to.

Nobody will ever say, wasn’t Saul of Tarsus wonderful that he asked God to forgive him? But they will say, wasn’t God wonderful that He forgave Saul of Tarsus? Nobody in heaven yonder will ever say, wasn’t Mel Trotter wonderful that God pardoned him? No, but they’ll say, wasn’t God good to forgive Mel Trotter? So, the merit lies in God, you see my brother, in the nature of the triune God, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.

So, when you go to God in prayer, why, don’t look at your lapels to see if there’s any dust on them, and don’t check your wheat to see if it has been perfect, because if you do, you’ll be looking to yourself for merit and virtue. And it’s never found there, it is found in the God out of whom it flows continuously. What does this mean to us? Well, it brings many a text out and makes it flower.

I’ve quoted, the goodness of God leadeth thee to repentance. That’s what the man of God meant when he said, the goodness of God; it isn’t that you’re good, it’s that God is good. And then in the Psalm 107, oh, that men would praise the Lord for His goodness and for His wonderful work to the children of men. And then especially that verse in Psalm 23:6, surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life.

Now, surely has two meanings. Surely means possibly, I hope so, as when we say, oh, surely, he’ll be there. Oh, surely she won’t fail us. Oh, surely that didn’t happen. Oh, surely it couldn’t be that way. That has a note of uncertainty in it, a quavering plaintive note of uncertainty. We’ll say, oh, surely that man will do so-and-so. That means I hope so, but I’m not sure.

But that’s not the meaning of the word here. The word here means of a surety, of a surety, goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life. Of a surety, the God who is beautiful, bountiful, cheerful, merry, and fair, and glad, and gracious, and joyful, and kind, and sweet, and ready to pardon, in whose nature there is no sensitivity nor sulkiness, who’s never on the defensive, but who’s always open, frank, candid, and cordial. Surely that God shall be with me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.

Now, there was a man who believed that he was secure, but he based his security upon the fact that the gracious, good God would be with him till he died. And he knew if He was with Him till he died, it would be all right after he died, and he wouldn’t have to go to purgatory either. For purgatory implies that there must be some virtue in me in order to bring the blessing to me.

But New Testament teaching is, and Old for that matter, that the goodness is in God, and I am just the poor sick man. The merit is in the physician, and the disease is in me. And all he wants is for me to come with my disease, and he feels bad if I don’t come with my disease. And if I don’t come with my disease, it’ll kill me, and He can’t help it because he’s given me free moral agency. And if I don’t want to come, I don’t need to come.

But if I come with the disease, we call sin, I can be delivered from that disease, and nobody will say, wasn’t that poor sick man wonderful tonight? But they will say, isn’t God wonderful that He delivered that poor man?

Now you see, don’t you? Now, I’m not sure I’ve made this clear. This is burnt on my heart like a glowing shekinah for several days. In fact, I should say three weeks. And I sat here wanting to preach that sermon so bad I was nearly blowing up while our brother preached that week. I sat back here and wiggled my thumbs and waited it out because I wanted to preach on the goodness of God.

Well, now about forgiveness. You, my brother, want to be forgiven. You’ve done something you shouldn’t do. And you, you want to be forgiven. Well, how are you going to be forgiven? Where is that goodness coming from? Where is it going to flow out of? You’re going to have to fix yourself up until you’re good enough for God to save you? In that case, eternity will swallow you as the ocean swallows a canoe. And you will never be forgiven. You will carry your disease down with you.

If you’ll say, God is good, and He’s never been anything else but good, and I’m sorry that I ever thought He was anything else but good and realize that forgiveness flows out of the goodness of God. And there isn’t anything, as Lady Julian says, that no heart of a man, nobody anywhere could even conceive how much God loves us and how tender God is toward us. And she’s perfectly right, as I’ve proved tonight from the Scriptures.

But you say, I was to blame, I was to blame. Why? The great Danish preacher, Kierkegaard, says this. He says that even if your sense of sinfulness is so acute that you not only admit you’ve sinned, but you feel in order to punish yourself, you want to help God find more sins that you’ve done. If you turn on yourself with ferocity and say, I want to show God what a sinner I’ve been. I hate myself so bad, I want God to know what a sinner I’ve been, he says it still doesn’t mean a thing. He says it’s the love of God that covers our sins. Love covers a multitude of sins. And so, Jesus, when He died on the cross, He died that He might forgive us out of the goodness of His heart.

And then there’s deliverance. Deliverance, what kind of deliverance? Well, deliverance for whatever kind of deliverance you need. Deliverance won’t come because you’re nice, it won’t come because you memorize Scripture, though I want you to memorize Scripture. It won’t come because you love great hymns, though I want you to love great hymns. It won’t come because you go to prayer meeting. Well, I want you to go to prayer meeting. Deliverance will come because God is eager to deliver you. It burns in God’s presence. God’s hunting you up. God’s following you. Surely, goodness shall follow you all the days of your life. Amen.

Tags Benevolent, Good, Kind

Messages

Tozer Talks

“He Came Unto His Own and His Own Received Him Not“

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He Came Unto His Own and His Own Received Him Not

Pastor and Author A.W. Tozer

November 8, 1953

I am to speak tonight from the eleventh verse of the first chapter of the gospel as given to us by the Holy Ghost through his servant John. The words are, He came unto His own and His own received Him not. That is only a single sentence broken by a comma. He came unto His own and His own received Him not.

Now I want you to notice first of all the words, He came. You know in the early part of the chapter we learn what He was doing before the world was. Before the creation came to be, before Bethlehem, we read simply in little, short words, He was, in Him was, He was with, He was God, He was in. Those are simple words, but they are at the root of theology. They are at the root of all truth.

Now in this verse, for the first time, we have a hint of the incarnation. He came, that’s the first hint. Before that, it had been in the eternal past, or it had been since the creation, but before the incarnation. In Him was life. In the beginning He was. In the beginning He was God. All things were made by Him. In Him was life, and He was the true light that light is every man that cometh into the world.

Now it says, He came. And I have been struck by the wonder of these words, He came. The story of pity and mercy and redeeming love are all here in two words, He came. All the pity capable, that God is capable of feeling, all the mercy He is capable of showing, and all the redeeming grace that He could pour out of His heart, all are at least suggested here in two simple words, He came. And all the hopes and longings and aspirations and dreams of immortality that lie in the human breast, all had their fulfillment in two words, He came.

I wonder if that should not suggest to us that simplicity is always best, and that you can say more with short words than you can with long ones. And that brevity beats the interminable pouring out of verbiage that we preachers are given to. It says, He came. And all the hopes of mankind, and man has always been a hopeful creature.

John Milton says, hope springs eternal in the human breast. And that eternal hope that springs always in the human breast, that like the lark at break of day arising, that hope finds its fulfillment here, He came. And all those longings and aspirations, I repeat, because man has always been an aspiring creature, even while groveling in the dirt, even while lying in the pigsty, he remembers his father’s house and says, what am I doing here? He may lie there and never get up, but he aspires, he remembers. And all the dreams of immortality, because all the human race has dreamed of immortality.

Nobody wants to think that when we say the remains, our brother tonight used the phrase so common, the remains will be at Lane’s undertaking establishment. Now there’s something in us that fights that. We fight that to the bitter end. Our minds will not accept it. You know you’re going to die, but you do not believe you’re going to die. Your mentality will not visualize it. You will not surrender, as Bryant said, you’re a universal being. You will not give it up to the clay. You have hopes of immortality and dreams of a life to come.

And all of this is summed up here in the two words, He came. I want you to know that these two one-syllable words occupy only seven spaces on a line. I suppose that’s the editor in me, but only seven spaces on the line, these words, He came, and yet what it tells us here is profounder than all philosophy. Now I’m not simply using words, and I’m not using superlatives carelessly. I realize that there is a danger that we should stress too much and underscore too much.

Sometimes I get articles from men who get their effects by everlastingly underscoring or writing them in capitals, and some even go so far as to write them with the red part of the ribbon. If they want to emphasize, they use the red part of the ribbon, or underscore or make capitals. You never, you don’t have to edit articles like that, you just have to fold them up and send them back. Nobody wants to read anything where the writer couldn’t think of anything to do except underscore. It is like the preacher that never can make a point without roaring. You heard that, that type, haven’t you? If the thing sounds good, they beat the desk and roar. That’s supposed to be spiritual, but it isn’t spiritual, it’s ridiculous. How’d I get on this?

But I was saying that I do not want to use superlatives, but there are some times when superlatives are absolutely necessary, you can’t escape them. And when I say that these two words in John, He came, contain profounder truth in all philosophy, that’s a superlative statement, but it is nevertheless a balanced and accurate statement. For not all the great thinkers of the world ever thought out anything that could even remotely approach the wonder and the profundity of the words, He came. And these words are wiser than all learning.

Not all the men who have ever gathered together the lore of the ages and written them in books have ever thought of anything as deep and wonderful and wise as the words, He came. These words, if they’re understood in their high spiritual context, they are more beautiful than all art and more eloquent than all oratory, and more musical than all music, and more lyric than all song, because they tell us that we, when in the darkness, were visited by the Light.

Oh, that that might strike us. I wish we could get as thrilled up about it as they were in those early times. I wish that when we sing the light of the world is Jesus, that we could get a look on our faces that would make the world believe we mean it.

Now, Milton celebrated the coming of Jesus into the world in one of the most beautiful odes that ever has been written that begins, This is the month, and this the happy morn, wherein the Son of Heav’n’s Eternal King, of wedded Maid and Virgin Mother born, our great redemption from above did bring; for so the holy sages once did sing that He our deadly forfeit should release, and with His Father work us a perpetual peace. That glorious Form, that Light unsufferable, and that far-beaming blaze of Majesty, wherewith He wont at Heav’n’s high council-table to sit the 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 that was Milton’s description of the incarnation. It says, He came, and I for one am plain childishly glad that He came. For one, I’m plain childishly glad about it. But we sit and take it as though we were bored with it, and I’m not sure that we are not. I am not sure that we are not, that we’re not bored with it. I’m not sure that we haven’t heard it so much that it doesn’t mean much anymore.

But He came, those wonderful, beautiful words. He came, and then it says here, He came unto His own. Now that’s going a little further with it. He came unto His own, and His own received Him not.

Now it’s a strange thing that the two words His own, His own, are the same in our English, and yet they are utterly and completely different as used by John. For, the first, His own, is translated, His own things, His own world, His own home. He came unto His own world, He came unto His own possessions, He came unto His own things. And one translation says He came unto his own home, but His own people received Him not. So that, His own, as used in the second place, does not refer to the same thing as used in the first place. He came to His world, and His own people didn’t know who He was, and didn’t receive Him.

Now, He came unto His own world, let’s let it rest at that. For this is Christ’s world. I wish you might know it. This is Christ’s world. This world we buy and sell, and kick around, and lord it over, and take by force of arms. This world is Christ’s world. This is His world, He made it, and He owns it all.

So that Jesus Christ made this world, and He made the very atoms out of which Mary was made. And He made and created the very atoms out of which His own body was made. And He made the very straw upon which He lay in the manger. Oh, I’d like to have seen the baby Jesus.

I dedicated a little redheaded girl here, and if I could have just buttered her, I could have swallowed her in one gulp. And I’d like to have seen the baby Jesus. I’ll never see Him now, because death has no more dominion over Him, and He’s a grown full-bloomed human, now glorified yonder, at the right hand of the Majesty.

But He was there nevertheless, that baby Jesus, lying on a manger. And He, the baby, had made the manger, and had made the straw, and had made the beasts that were there, and then had made this little town, and all that it was, and had made the very star that looked down, this one. He came unto His own.

Now, our Lord Jesus Christ is not a guest here. I wish we might figure that out. They say that a lot of people make a great deal out of God being their guest, or God being their senior partner. They run the business, and their name’s on it, but God’s their partner. Make a great deal of that nonsense. And the quicker we find it out, the better, and stand up on our two hind feet, and dare to tell people that we don’t want to patronize Jesus Christ. It’s time we stop it. They write nice books, and around Christmas time, even the newspapers come out with a fawning over Jesus Christ our Lord.

He doesn’t need your patronage, brother, and he doesn’t need your pity. He’s not a guest here. He’s the host, and we are the guests. We are here by His sufferance. We are here by His kindness, and we are here because He’s made us and brought us here. And this world is His world, and He can do what He will with His world, and no one can upbraid Him. He can do what He wills with life, and He can do what He wills in death, and He can do what He wills in nature, and He can do what He wills in that mighty cataclysmic overthrow that we call judgment.

He has a lot of apologists in the day in which we live. A lot of people are apologizing for the Lord Jesus Christ. I think we ought to start apologizing for the Lord Jesus and start apologizing for ourselves. He doesn’t need your apology, and he doesn’t need your defense.

And when I run onto a book where somebody is apologizing for the Lord Jesus Christ and proving he isn’t so bad after all, I always toss it aside. I won’t waste my eyes on it. Jesus Christ, who made the world in which we live, and whose fingers formed the crooked serpent and studded the stars in the sky yonder, made this solid ground on which we stand and upon which we build our temporary buildings.

He doesn’t need me to run around apologizing and rushing in, taking His part and saying, now just a minute, just a minute. He hardened Pharaoh’s heart, but it doesn’t mean that. He sent judgment upon Sodom and Gomorrah, but it doesn’t quite mean that. It means something else. It means exactly that, ladies and gentlemen. And when God Almighty turned Lot’s wife into a pillar of salt, it means exactly that. And when the Bible tells us there’s a hell where the wicked will go, it means exactly that. It doesn’t mean something else.

So, my business is not to apologize for the Lord Jesus, nor patronize Him, or talk down to Him, or go to an altar in order to come out and be loyal to Him. No, no. My business is to come crawling to His feet, a sinner, filled with sores, and say, touch me and make me whole.

Then I stand upon my feet, as I said over the radio yesterday morning, no longer to crawl like a spaniel crawling down the sidewalk on your tummy, but to stand up and look into the heavens and say, I was once a sinner, but I’m redeemed, and the Lord has saved me, and now I’m His child, and I can keep my chin up now, and both or three of them, or as many as I got, some of you, to one won’t be enough, but you can keep them up, because you belong to God, you belong to Christ.

But in the meantime, we’re not going to patronize Him. I absolutely will not apologize for Him. Here He is, He’ll take care of Himself. He made this world, He made the very bricks out of which this building is built, and He made the world in which we live, and so it’s His world. It’s my Father’s world, it belongs to the Trinity, and it’s not mine. And I live here by the good grace of God, and everything I handle, and touch belongs to my Father.

And these lovely flowers, they belong to God, they don’t belong to me. And all the air, and the winds, and the clouds, and the corn, and the waving wheat, and the tall noble forests, and the flowing rivers, they’re all his. He was, He was in, He made, and all things were made by Him. And He came unto His own world, and His own world received Him not. That is, His own people received Him not, but His own world, that nature received Him. His own things received Him.

It was the winter wild, while the heaven-born child all meanly wrapt in the rude manger lies; nature, in awe to him, had doffed her gaudy trim, with her great Master so to sympathize and we sang this morning about nature smiles and owns her King.

And so, when our Lord Jesus came, all nature went out to greet Him. All nature met Him. The star led the wise men from the east, and the cattle in the stall didn’t bother Him. As He lay, little eight or nine- or ten-pound baby Jesus wasn’t harmed by the beasts that nibbled straw from around His tender little legs and arms. They knew Him.

G. Campbell Morgan, in that great book of his called “The Crisis of the Christ,” points out that when Jesus went into the wilderness to be tempted of the devil, he was there forty days and forty nights and was with the wild beasts. Remember that. And Morgan said that there was wrong conception about that, Jesus being with the wild beasts, that we pitied Him and wondered how he could ever stand it to be with the wild beasts and think those wild beasts might have been wanting to attack Him, and he had to have angelic protection.

And Campbell Morgan said properly, no, it was not true. The wild beasts recognized their King, and they crept to his feet and licked them, no doubt, and lay down beside. They recognized their Lord and their Maker. And the very tawny lion shook his mane and kneeled beside his Savior. And the very bear that might have devoured another man knelt and whined at the feet of the man who was fasting forty days and forty nights.

So that instead of pitying Jesus for those terrible hours or days spent with the wild beasts, we ought to remember that he was perfectly safe there, for not a sharp claw would tear the skin of the man who was God, and not a fang would rip the body of the man who was God, for He came to His own and His own received Him.

And the wind blew for His pleasure, and He waxed and grew in body and in wisdom. And the very earth on which He trod smiled, and the stars at night looked down on His humble carpenter’s cottage. And the winds and the rain and the snow were all His friends. He was in harmony with nature.

I believe it’s entirely possible to be more in harmony with nature than we are if we were Christians as we ought to be. St. Francis was in harmony with nature, and the world has wondered at Him. And some have laughed, and others have scoffed, and others have raised their eyebrows and wondered if he was right in his mind. But St. Francis was so completely yielded to God, and so completely and fully taken up by the presence of the Holy Ghost, that all nature was his friend. And it says of Cicero that the stars in their courses fought against Him. And if the stars in their courses fought against the enemy, then the same stars in their courses fought in favor of the friend of God.

And I believe it is possible to be so tuned to God that the very stars in their courses are on our side. And nature smiles and owns her king. God, when He made Adam, said, now you be over the whole business. And sin came in and wrecked it all. And when sin is removed, and I can see why St. Francis could preach to the birds, and call the rain and the wind his friends, and the moon his sister, and live a delighted life, because the world, God’s blessed world, received Him. It’s only sin we have to be ashamed of, my friends, only sin. It is not this world that God made, it is sin. And if you were to take sin out of the world, there wouldn’t be a thing to be ashamed of, nor a thing to be afraid of. He took sin out of the world.

If sin could suddenly be extracted from the world, suddenly extracted from the world, all of it taken out, there wouldn’t be another sick man in all the wide world. There wouldn’t be an insane man behind any bars. There wouldn’t be a criminal in any jail. There wouldn’t be a polio victim crippling around on crutches. There wouldn’t be an old man of days bent with his cane waiting for the undertaker.

There wouldn’t be a man with a cold in his nose trying to preach. And there wouldn’t be sleepy people wishing he’d quit. And there wouldn’t be any evidence anywhere of evil. If we could take sin out of the world, you could leave your house unlocked. Thank God, go to bed and leave it unlocked. And you could carry your money around your pants pocket. And you wouldn’t have to put it in a bank behind bars with a cop to watch it. And you could walk anywhere in this city and not be afraid of getting attacked, if you could take sin out of the world.

So instead of apologizing for God and Christ, we ought to begin to apologize for humanity and apologize for our sins. But remember that He came unto His own and His own received Him. And Jesus was never sick an hour. And nothing was ever wrong with Him, but he carried a perfect body to Calvary.

Surely He bore our sicknesses, but they were poured on Him. They were poured on Him. God Almighty took all that swill barrel of bubbling, crawling sickness and poured it on the body of Jesus. Just as He took that swill barrel of vicious, venomous juice called sin and poured it on Him when He died. And He died under our sins, and He died under our sicknesses. But He never had any sin and He never had any sickness.

He came unto His own world and His own world smiled and ran to meet their King. The wind and the waves obeyed Him. You say that was a miracle. Well, maybe it was a miracle. It looked like a miracle from our standpoint, but it wasn’t a miracle for Jesus. He said to the wind, shh. And the wind looked up and saw who it was and shh. And He said to the waves, be still, and they saw who it was, and they got soft and still as a mirror.

It wasn’t any miracle; it was just God Almighty acting like God in a world that received Him. But when it comes to people, you have another story on your hands. His own people received Him not.

And that reminds us of the famous hymn that says every prospect pleases and only man is vile. His own people received Him not. Now there were the Jews, the nation of Israel, and they were of all people the best prepared to receive Him because they had the call in Abraham, they had the covenant with the fathers, they had the revelation, they had the tradition, they had the prophets, they had the temple worship.

They had their holidays and their anniversaries and their psalms and their prophets and they were of all people best placed to receive Him when he came. But they failed to recognize Him and that was the greatest blunder in the history of mankind without any doubt. The greatest moral blunder in the history of the world was when He came to His own world and the world received Him and He came to His own people and His own people rejected Him.

The very caterpillar on the leaf received his king. But the Jews turned Him away. Oh, the blindness of it all. And I read here in my Bible of that blindness. And God said go and tell this people, hear ye indeed but understand not, and see ye indeed but perceive not. And make the heart of this people fat and make their ears heavy and shut their eyes lest they see with their eyes and hear with their ears and understand with their hearts and convert and be healed. There was the blindness that lay upon them, and they didn’t recognize Him. It was a stroke of God Almighty upon them for sin. And they didn’t recognize Him.

Now why didn’t they receive Him? The world received Him because He was the world’s God. I mean the natural, the God of creation. But why didn’t humanity receive Him? I’ll give you about five reasons why they didn’t briefly. I’m going to cut this sermon short tonight.

First, to receive Jesus when He was here in the world would have meant possible financial loss. The rich young ruler is an example of that. If the rich young ruler had followed Jesus, he’d have had to lose every bit of his property for the Lord told Him to go get rid of it. And they wouldn’t receive Him because they loved their money more than they loved their God.

It would have meant a change in their way of living. And they refused to allow the pattern of their life to be disturbed. It would have meant a thorough inward housecleaning. For Jesus taught the pure in heart should see God. And the mourner should be comforted. And the meek should have the earth. And the merciful should be blessed. And it would have meant a thorough housecleaning inside of them.

And it would have meant an abnegation of self. He said let Him take up his cross and follow me.

And it would have meant faith in the unseen. They’d have had to throw themselves out on God. And that’s why they didn’t receive Him.

Now, in closing, it’s very satisfying for us to belabor the Jews. But I remember a word of Jesus, take the beam from thine own eye and then shalt thou see clearly to remove the moat from thy brother’s eye. And it’s very comforting for us here 2,000 years removed to preach about the Jews that received Him not.

And it’s a kind of a safety valve for us, a red herring that we draw across our trail to take God’s eyes off our own sins. And to solve our own conscience by reminding ourselves that the Jews received Him not. But I warn you against any kind of such self-deception as that.

Who more than you who listen to me should receive Him? You have 2,000 years of tradition behind you that the Jew didn’t have. You have a revelation that the Jew didn’t have. He had the Old Testament; you have the Old Testament and the New. You have information the old Jew didn’t have. You have light the old Jew didn’t have. You have opportunities the old Jews didn’t have.

And you have an urgency by the presence of the Holy Ghost the old Jews didn’t have. I do not think for one minute that we ought to spend our time belaboring the Jew, comforting our own carnal hearts by saying He came to His own world and the Jews did not receive Him. We would only be building the sepulchers of our fathers, as Jesus said.

And we would be as bad as they that slew the prophets. We had better look to our own hearts. Why do not we receive Him? The answer is, it might mean financial loss to some people if they receive Jesus. There are people in business in Chicago, that’s lucrative business, and if they ever received Jesus they’re going to have to get out of that business. But, you say I don’t think so. I think they can just glorify God where they are.

Well, I admit that there’s a lot of that going on now. No matter what you’re doing you just say I’m a Christian now and then you begin to testify where you are. I have suggested that if things keep on going from bad to worse in evangelical circles, the time will come pretty soon when we’ll print John 3:16 at the bottom of a beer mug so that and when a fellow drains it and looks at the bottom he’ll see salvation shining out at him. And halfway houses will have texts that the girls give out with their favorites. Pretty soon if we don’t stop somewhere if somebody doesn’t get a hold of us that’s what we’re going to do. And brother there are some things you can’t do and be a Christian and you might as well settle that now.

And the Jews knew it and so they rejected Jesus. They wanted to do what they wanted to do and they rejected Jesus because they knew they couldn’t do it if they received Him. And there are people with all this revelation and all this light and information and yet you will not tonight receive Him whom the very angels and stars and rivers received. Because they know they’ve got to give up something that could mean financial loss.

It’ll mean a change in your way of living and some of you people aren’t going to change your way of living. You’re going to go underground. I’m sure that’s all my preaching does to some people, it just drives them underground. I shell the woods occasionally, you know or somebody that has a bigger gun than mine, Brother Ravenhill or somebody will shell the woods. And you all pull your ears back and go underground but you don’t change your ways any and God knows you don’t change your ways.

They outlawed the Communist Party now they say they’ve driven them underground. But a communist underground, that is provided that you don’t mean actually lying under there in a coffin is more dangerous than a communist up on top of the ground.

And it’s just as bad to be an underground sinner as it is to be an overt sinner. You won’t change your ways I know it. And there must be a thorough inward housecleaning before He’ll come.

I’ll tell you one thing about that manger, brother, it’s clean. Be sure of that. Little Mary didn’t go and have her baby in a dirty manger. And be sure that one little thing was simple. It was plain, it was crude, but it was clean. They put fresh straw down for that event. Don’t you think they didn’t? Joseph never would have let her lie there and her little baby lie there in a dirty crib. That was a clean place. And Jesus never went any place where it wasn’t clean. He won’t inhabit any place that isn’t clean. Be sure of that.

Some people would rather have the dirt than they would to have the Son of God. They’d rather have the darkness than come to the light. That’s why they don’t receive Him. They’ve got the Old Testament, they’ve got the New Testament, they’ve got the hymn book, they’ve got churches, they’ve got radio preachers, they’ve got evangelists. They have opportunities, they have light, they have information, but they won’t receive Him. Because if they do they’re going to have to clean up. Some people won’t clean up, just won’t do it. They don’t want their houses to be cleaned.

A woman came to Dr. A.B. Simpson one time, and she said, Dr. Simpson, I am possessed of a demon. It’s a male demon. I’m possessed of a demon, and I want you to pray for me. And Dr. Simpson said, all right, sister, get down here on your knees. And when he prayed, they say sometimes when he started to pray, you felt that heaven was bending. And he began to pray, and in a commanding voice he began to order the demon to go out of her. She grabbed his shoulder and said, don’t, don’t, Dr. Simpson, I love Him. I love Him. I love Him. She was in love with a demon lover.

That’s the only example I ever heard of that. You ever hear anything like it? It’s not the most terrible thing I ever heard, I suppose. But there’s a lot of that going on. We’re in love with sin, and it’s inside of us. And if Jesus Christ comes in, He’ll run it out. And we’d rather have sin than have Jesus.

We’d rather have buzzards perch in our hearts than we would have the Dove to come in. But remember one thing, as long as the buzzards are there, the Dove will never descend. Remember that. As long as the world dirt remains in our hearts, Jesus Christ will never come in. He came unto His own, and His own people would not receive Him because they loved dirt. They loved inward dirt, moral dirt, respectability, sure.

You wear a Hart, Schaffner and Marx clothes, and Florsheim shoes, and drive a $2,200 car, and have a modern kitchen, modern bathroom, modern everything, and live by a push button. But inside your heart there is a filthy pool, and Jesus Christ won’t come in until you drain it off. He won’t do it. He came unto His own people, and His own people received Him not. And it’s the same thing today. We love our demon lover.

And when the Lord says, all right, I’ll help you, we’ll get rid of this mess, we say, no, Jesus, no, no, I love that mess. I was brought up in it. I want to be respectable, and I want to be outwardly clean, and I want my, the sepulcher of my life to be carefully polished and painted.

But I don’t want to get rid of the dead man’s bones. I love those dead man’s bones, and I don’t want to get rid of them. Some of you clean, respectable, well-groomed people will leave this church tonight, and you’ll take dead man’s bones out with you in the sanctuary of your soul. And you wouldn’t let Jesus Christ come in and cleanse the temple. You’d rather have the swine there.

Ah, how satisfying to blame the Jew. But think of ourselves tonight. Let Him take up his cross and follow me, and we don’t want to do that. Nobody wants to be that serious. Mr. McAfee was telling me about an Australian from New Zealand. Australian, who, a medical doctor, who preaches against communism, lectures against communism, and he knows his subject. He said he’s debated with communists, and they say to Him, Mr. Schwartz, you can’t understand communism until you get over into it.

He said they have to have a kind of a conversion into it. And I’ve been saying for a long time, long before I heard that, that communism is a religion. You don’t reason yourself into it, you get converted.

That’s why they do such extravagant, strange things. That’s why they obey to the death. They’ve given themselves over to a religion. They’ve been converted to communism. It’s the devil’s religion. And in a great many ways it parallels Christianity, only it’s on the devil’s side. And they become as fanatical and zealous, they give up their home, their family, and turn on their country and their friends and their very lives.

And here we have the Light of the world, the very Son of God, whose bright shining will burn as a leaf the devilish religion of communism. And we can’t get up enough steam or enthusiasm even to keep from looking bored when we talk about it. I wonder if we’ve been converted at all.

You can’t understand Christianity until you’re in it. You can’t stand back and look on and understand, you must be converted over into it by a miracle. Then you’ll understand Christianity. Then you understand God and Christ. But until Jesus Christ is received, in miracle-working transforming power into the light, there never can be any salvation or any understanding of the things of God.

All nature received Him. The very brown cutworm that crawls across the road. Stormy winds fulfilling his word. Praise Him all ye stars of light, says the Holy Ghost. Praise Him ye trees and forests and hills and mountains, says the Holy Ghost. The beasts of the field shall glorify me, says the Holy Ghost. And all nature sings to meet their Lord. And little, hard, selfish, sinful man rejects the Son of God.

Brethren, this is more terrible than atom bombs. This is more terrible than wars to death. More terrible than diseases. This is terrible.

What shall we answer Him? When very nature receives Him, and our hard little hearts say, no, I want that money, I want that girl, I want that fame, I want that job, I want that pleasure, I want, I want, always I want. And the Son of God stands outside, his own received Him not. It’s the tragedy of mankind, my brethren.

If some Shakespeare, some Aeschylus, some Goethe could write it, it’s the vast, illimitable, boundless, fathomless tragedy of mankind, that we loved our sin more than we loved our God. And the world around us sang when He came and will sing again when He comes in glory. And our hard little hearts say, no, this is the tragedy, I say.

No Faust, no Julius Caesar ever was as stark and as terrible as this. We rejected Him from our hearts, because we want our own way. You’ll have your own way, and Jesus Christ will park on the sidewalk outside, and the stars will sympathize, and the birds, and the worms, and the cattle, and you’ll let Him stand.

Oh, Jesus, you’ve stood outside so many hearts so long. You’ve stood outside so many homes and businesses so long. How much longer?

Dear people, we ought to do something about it tonight. We ought to be ashamed of ourselves. And we ought to open the doors of our hearts and let Him in. What about you? What about your soul? He came unto His own world, and it received Him.

But He came unto His own people, and they rejected Him. How terrible.

Tags Acceptance, Jews

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Tozer Talks

Post author By pshappard
Post date February 9, 2025

“Begotten Unto a Living Hope”

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Begotten Unto a Living Hope

Pastor and Author A.W. Tozer

July 26, 1953

In the first book of Peter, Peter the first epistle, and the first chapter, and third verse, Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, which according to his abundant mercy, hath begotten us again unto a living hope by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. And we’ll stop at that comma.

I spent nine days in the, what’s called the American Keswick in New Jersey as one of the speakers, and while there I had very warm and personal and friendly fellowship with David Clifford, head of Matlock Bible Institute in England, only 40 miles, I believe he said, or 70, was it, from Brother Ravenhill’s home.

Well, this man and I got along wonderfully together. He listened to me preach a while, and then he said, well, I’ve figured you out. He said, your method of preaching is not to preach words, but to find out the principles that lie back in the text and preach that. And I said, I guess you’ve hit it, that’s what I try to do. Well, he said, at that rate, you could preach endlessly on a book of the Bible. And I said, well, I just closed a year on the 17th of John. It can be done.

And in the book of 1 Peter, first chapter, third verse, I have already preached three sermons or two sermons from it, the one called, Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. And we dug around at the roots and tried to discover what he was saying about God when he said, blessed be God. We found that the same word in the original is that which we use when we say eulogize. He was telling us to eulogize God. If you want to eulogize dead men, you probably, when you know all the facts, will blush at your own eulogy. But if you want to eulogize God, you never can overstate the case.

Then I went on to this one, which according to his abundant mercy, and I stopped there and I talked about the abundant mercy of God. Today I come to this part, God who hath begotten us again unto a living hope by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.

Now, Peter, who wrote this epistle, he arrived at a major miracle of the New Testament.

Now I want to bear down and pause and walk around her bulwarks and behold her gates and walls thereof. This major miracle we call, begotten again, this, like a great many, almost all, Bible teaching, has fallen into cold hands. We feel as if we were in the mortuary, when instead of in the church of the living God. Instead of a man just having come fresh out of a tomb, we feel as if we were in the presence of a corpse brought fresh in from the street.

But born again has become a word that means precious little. It is used as a hyphenated adjective among us. We say, yes, he’s a born-again man, I’m born again, is he born again? And I revolt from it, I don’t mind telling you frankly that I revolt from it. I revolt from it not because I don’t believe it, but because I always shrink from hearing dead men talk about live subjects. And there isn’t anything, I have said, quite so chilling, and I think that a brother of mine said it not so long ago either, too, there isn’t anything quite so chilling, quite so disheartening, as a man without the Holy Spirit preaching about the Holy Spirit. And there isn’t anything any worse, I guess, than to hear the hyphenated adjective born-again tossed around by people with manufactured smiles heading to the nearest restaurant.

Now Peter talked about a major miracle, that of being begotten again, born again, a major miracle. And I don’t mind telling you that it is my earnest faith that all that is worthwhile in Christianity is a miracle.

I don’t mind telling you that the trappings and paraphernalia and outward dressings of Christianity I can get along nicely without. But there is a series of miracles that throb and beat within the true message of God and within the hearts of those who believe truly; and that’s all about all there is to the Christian faith. Supernatural grace has been the teaching of the Church from Pentecost to the present hour.

I talked with a gentleman this week who came to see me, two brethren, two preachers, and one of them told me an amazing story. It was the story of being forced out of a certain missionary society, forced out for no moral charges, no unethical charges, not even any doctrinal charges, but from throwing an emphasis where they claimed it didn’t belong.

And that emphasis was upon supernatural grace. These friends believed, they were fundamentalists all right, but they believed the whole thing was a mental thing. You believe mentally, you receive Christ mentally, and all that you do is a mental thing.

And a certain brother began to preach the supernatural quality of grace and said that if a sinner repents, it’s supernatural, and that if he gets under conviction, it’s supernatural, and if he’s unable to believe in God, it’s supernatural. And he taught supernatural grace, he was a Baptist preacher. And the whole town, fundamentalist town, rose against him because he was preaching the supernatural quality of the acts of God.

Now, I don’t mind telling you why I said to him that strange thing, because I’ve been preaching that ever since I can remember. This church is founded on it, we believe it. We believe in the supernaturalness of the things that God does for people. And we believe that religion is a continuous perpetuation of a major miracle. And we do not believe in the mental quality of things.

Now, mentality is here, and it’s a part of us, and God redeems it too. But the new birth is a miracle, a major miracle. It is a vital and unique work of God in human nature. Now, I believe that if this was taught instead of glibly hyphenated and tossed around, born again, I believe that if we’d stop and get underneath this to the divine principles that lie there and realize that a truly born-again man is a man who has undergone regenesis, supernatural regenesis.

As in the beginning, God generated the heaven and the earth, in the breast of a believing man he generates again. It’s regenesis. Just as surely as the work of God in calling the world out of nothing was a major miracle, so the work of God in calling a Christian out of a sinner, making a Christian out of a sinner, is a major miracle.

But in our day, we get them in any way you can get them in. And then after we get them in, we try to work on them. And we even have two works of grace because the first one was so apologetically meaningless and worthless that we try to have two.

I am not speaking against the two, but I am saying that what used to be done the first time a man met God, nowadays we’re having to invent some second or third or fourth or fifth epoch down the hill or up the hill to get what we used to get the first time they met God. I believe in the anointing of the Holy Ghost after regeneration, but I also believe that we ought not to preach down the new birth in order to find a place for that anointing of the Holy Ghost.

The old Methodist Christians were better Christians when they were just newly regenerated than any of these so-called deeper life people that I run into now, because a major miracle took place. And they wouldn’t believe if a major miracle hadn’t taken place. They wouldn’t accept this pale, inefficient, and apologetic believing. They insisted upon a miracle taking place in the human breast, so that Peter said he hath begotten us again unto a living hope, and he was preaching there a miracle.

Now this miracle was hinted at in the Old Testament. Create in me a clean heart, O God, renew a right spirit within me. There was at least a hint of a miracle within the human breast, not a reasoning yourself into a position, but something happening that could not be explained.

I might take time out right here to say what wasn’t in my notes at all, that just as soon as a psychologist can explain what happens to a believer, that believer has been unfrocked. Just the moment that a man’s experience in Christ can be broken down and explained by the psychologist, we have a Church member on our hands and not a Christian. For what happens to a Christian can never be explained by the psychologist. He can only stand off respectfully and say, Behold the works of the Lord. He never can explain it. But this work of God wrought in the breast of a man was hinted at, I say.

And then there are two passages in the Old Testament that I want to read that are hints of this. Behold, the day has come, saith the Lord, that I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah. This shall be the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel. After those days, saith the Lord, I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their heart, and will be their God, and they shall be my people. And in Ezekiel, and I will give them one heart, and I will put a new spirit within you, and I will take the stony heart out of your flesh, and will give them a heart of flesh, that they may walk in my statutes, and keep mine ordinances, and do them, and they shall be my people, and I will be their God.

Now that is a hint of what happens, a hint of our regenesis, moral new birth. But when we come to the New Testament, there is no longer any hinting about it, it’s boldly and openly declared. Our Savior said that if we came to him and were not born again, we could not enter the kingdom of God. We had to be born from above, John 3. In John 1.12, John said, As many as received him, to them gave he power to become sons of God, who were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God. There is a work that is a miracle.

Paul said in 2 Corinthians 5, If any man be in Christ, he is a new creature. All things have passed away, and all things have become new. You couldn’t make it any stronger than that. Then Peter says in the 23^rd verse, Being born again of the word of God, which liveth and abideth forever. James says in his first chapter, Of His own will begat He us, that we might be a kind of firstfruits of these creatures.

Now that’s as plainly as it can be stated. In other words, if you were setting out to teach a major miracle within the human heart, you would use those very words to express it. And if you wanted to make it very emphatic, you would use those words to express it. If you wanted to strip it down until it stood stark, unqualified before you as a strong, vital teaching of the word of God, you would use those words concerning it.

In other words, the Holy Spirit could not have said what he was setting out to say and he would not have used any other words. These express it. And they tell us that there is supernatural grace, that there is a work which we may call a major miracle.

There is a work which is as truly a work of God as was the first creation. It is the creating of another man in that heart where another man had been. It is the putting of a new man in the old man’s place, and we are born anew.

This draws a sharp line between those who have become Christians by any other method and those who have experienced true regenesis. I have claimed all the time that if we were securing examples of true regenesis, we would not have to be talking about revival so much. The Church would be a miraculous group in the midst of a hostile world, and she would be as separated from the world as a can of oil floating on the ocean. She would be in contact with it but she would not be of it. She would be separated from it. And we would be the most amazing people in the world, a whole group of true Christians.

There are several hundred people here listening to me now. And if every one of you had experienced fully the miracle of regenesis, we would be the most astonishing Church in the city of Chicago. They would come from everywhere to look at us and say, what are these people?

But we have watered down the miracle of divine grace to a point where you actually have to have a name on a record to know if a fellow is a Christian or not. There is a difference. And in that great and terrible day, there will be those white with shock when they find that they have depended upon a mental assent to Christianity instead of upon the miracle of the new birth.

Now he said we are begotten again. And we are begotten again unto a lively hope. And the word hope is one of the great words that Christ gave us. Have you noticed this about the New Testament? That our Lord Jesus Christ rarely introduced a word that wasn’t known before, not even a word construction that wasn’t known before to Bible readers, but that He almost invariably charged that word with a new and wonderful meaning so that we go back to the Savior and say He gave us that word.

Well actually, He didn’t. It was a word that was used in the Old Testament, perhaps in Greek literature, but it was a word which now receives a wonderful new meaning because the Savior took it into His mouth. So that word, hope, is a word we may properly say Christ gave us, though it is used 140 times in the Bible. And better than that, better than counting the number of times that it was used, better than finding a text where it is used, is this, that it is the drift and direction of the whole Bible.

Hope is the direction the whole Bible takes. It is the music of the whole Bible. It is the heartbeat, the pulse, the atmosphere of the whole Bible. That word hope, and it means a desirable expectation. It means a pleasurable anticipation, pleasurable anticipation. How many of us there are who pleasurably anticipate that which we’ll never, never receive.

Tennyson, in his wonderful In Memoriam, paints a picture so poignantly, sharply pathetic that it’s almost unbearable when you read it. He paints a picture in that smooth, musical English of which he was a master, of a bride waiting for, or soon to be bride, waiting for her loved one to return. He had been somewhere in a far city across the water and he was coming home.

Tennyson tells with that sympathy and human understanding that makes him the great poet that he was, made him the great poet he was, tells of how this young woman, flushed with anticipation, stood before the mirror and made herself look as good as she could, got the best clothes she knew how, for that evening he was coming. And he indulges us a little in human sympathy as we see this young lady prepare herself for the long-awaited reunion.

Then he adds, but she doesn’t know that for days the one she loved has been floating face up out on the sea. She doesn’t know that the ship whereon he was returning has gone down with all of its crew and that he stares tonight at the stars with sightless eyes. She doesn’t know.

Pleasurable anticipation sometimes blows up in our faces, cruelly disappoints us. And there’s the picture of pleasurable, flushed anticipation turning to bleak, pale-cheeked sorrow in a moment when the news is brought that her loved one is dead. That’s the way human hopes do with us. They throw us down.

But the Christian hope is alive, for it is said here that he has begotten us again unto a lively hope, but the old English word lively, three hundred and forty years ago, that word lively meant what the word living means now.

Now lively means hopping around like a little boy, real fast and full of ginger. But in those days it meant living. And here is a word which comes from God himself. It is the strongest word in the Bible for life and the strongest in the New Testament. It is a word used of God himself when it says He is the living God. So that God takes a Christian’s hope and touches it with Himself and imparts His own livingness to the hope of the believer.

Once more, I repeat that Christians are living too much in the present now. And the pleasurable anticipation of better things to come has almost died out of the Church of Christ, because now we don’t need any tomorrow’s heaven, we’re too well situated now. We don’t need to hope, we have it now. That’s the emphasis in our day, and I think it is a wretched emphasis. And when we do talk about the future, we talk about eschatology instead of heaven.

But the true Christian is one who is kind of sick of this world. If I find anybody that’s settled down too snugly into this world, I’m made to doubt his spiritual regenesis, whether he’s ever truly been born again. He can live here and work here and serve here, but if I find he sits down into the world like a hand into an old and familiar glove, I worry a little bit about the man, because all the Christians I meet that are amounting to anything are Christians that are very much out of key with their age, very, very much out of tune with their generation.

Jesus called it a wicked and adulterous generation, and that generation has not improved any. We’re still the same wicked and adulterous generation that were in the days of Jesus. And if you can live in it too comfortably, I am being made to wonder whether the miracle has ever been wrought within your life or not.

When God works the miracle within the human breast, heaven becomes the Christian home immediately and he is drawn to it as a bird is drawn in the springtime to fly to the north. There is a migratory instinct within the breast of the bird. And without knowing why, along about March, he suddenly begins to look at himself and look around and feel dissatisfied, flap his wings a bit, and finally takes to the air and fans the cool breezes long and far, until he goes back to what is his summer homeland.

And the Christian has a homeland, and the fact that we’re not anticipating it nor looking forward to it with any pleasure is a serious mark of something that’s wrong with us. But that isn’t what Peter had in mind particularly when he talked about the Christian hope, though that’s part of it, and he says that the hope of the Christian is something that’s alive the way God is alive.

I read someplace, I don’t recall where, maybe Time magazine, maybe a newspaper, but I read that there had been one of these pollsters going about, like Roper and Gallop pollsters, and they had gone to the man on the street, the man and woman on the street, and they had taken a cross-section of the American public and asked them whether they believe in God and whether they expected to go to heaven. I think it was 82% of the American people believe in God and expect to go to heaven. I don’t like to deal in percentages, my hearers, but I should like boldly and bluntly to say that I should guess that about 75% of that 82% are indulging in an invalid hope, a hope that can do nothing but dash them when it’s too late and cruelly disillusion them when it’s too late to do anything about it.

I believe, as the old colored preacher said, if you’re going to go to heaven, you’d better begin to live like it now. And if you’re going to die like a Christian, you’d better live like a Christian now. And I have no place in my heart, that is, no hope in my heart, for those who indulge a vague hope.

There’s a Christian hope that isn’t vague, it’s valid. The hope of the world is vain, but the hope of the Christian is a valid hope. You can’t out-expect God, keep that in mind, friend.

You can’t out-expect God. It’s unbelief that prevents our minds from soaring into the celestial city and walking by faith with God across the golden streets. It’s unbelief that keeps us narrowly tied down here, looking eagerly and anxiously to the newspaper ad to see who’s going to come and preach to us to keep our spirits sheared up.

Anybody that needs to have to be chucked under the chin all the time to keep him up is in bad shape spiritually and needs something else. Anybody that has to have the gospel preached to him all the time, and have it repeated all the time, there’s something wrong with him. You’ve heard the gospel, you have believed, you say, you have turned to God from idols to serve the living God and wait for his Son from heaven, then why have to be always attending popular evangelistic meetings and listening one time more to the same thing that you’ve heard a thousand times?

Leaving, therefore, the first principles of the doctrine of Christ, the baptism and laying on of hands and all such, let us go on under perfection, that the Church of Christ is satisfied with the latest gospel peddler, the latest gospeleer that comes along, they’re satisfied because they have cowbells and a handsaw and a lot of other fine things.

You can get them at the 8th Street Theater any night by just riding in. I can’t think of a single one of their names, but anyway, I know they’re down there with their cowbells and banjoes and their hillbilly songs, and if that’s what you want, go down there and get it. And if the gospeleer has to bring that in order to get a crowd, boycott him. Let him preach to empty seats.

But the Christian’s hope is a valid hope. He has been born of God. There has been an act as truly miraculous as that act described in the beginning. God created the heaven and the earth. There’s been a new creation there. And he has a hope now. It’s a valid hope. No emptiness there, no vanity there, no dreaming dreams that can’t come true, it’s a valid hope. And your expectation should rise and you should challenge God and begin to dream high dreams of faith and spiritual expectation and expect God to meet them.

When Jesus said, I go to prepare a mansion, a place for you in my Father’s house, there are many mansions. The best some of us can do is to think of our own house or some house a little better, or maybe think of something up on the Gold Coast. Where our Savior has gone to prepare the simplest and poorest mansion there, would make a $125,000 mansion on the Gold Coast look like a goat’s sty by comparison.

There isn’t in humanity any place, the Taj Mahal or Buckingham Palace or the White House or what have you, that can compare with the glory that belongs to the true child of God who has known the major miracle, who has been changed by an inward operation of supernatural grace unto an inheritance, unto a hope.

You can’t out-hope God and you can’t out-expect God. Remember that all your hopes are finite and all of God’s ability is infinite. Remember that your highest hopes have a limit, but the ability of God to come through is limitless. Remember, you’re on earth and God is in heaven, and therefore don’t be afraid to hope, don’t be afraid to expect, don’t be afraid to dream high spiritual dreams, and don’t be afraid to read your Bible and believe it, and don’t be afraid to read the book of Revelation.

And don’t let anybody shoo you away and say it’s Oriental imagery. Of course it is Oriental imagery, but it is imagery which is struggling to say that which is so wonderful it can’t be said, so that anything he describes in the book of Revelation you’ll find the reality is infinitely greater than his description.

Any hope the Christian has, let it soar, let it loose like a bird into the blue sky, let it spread its wings and soar heavenward, for when it’s soared as high as it can, God will smile still higher and say, Come on up. For the hopes of the Christian are valid hopes, and the expectation of the Christian shall not be cut off.

I have on occasion once in a while, I’m not exactly a Frankie Sinatra, but I have occasion once in a while to sign an autograph book or a Bible, they’ll come when you go somewhere you know, and stick them under your nose and say, Sign this, and they all want you to have a verse of scripture.

I never was much remembering, you know, favorite verses because they’re all favorite with me, so I have one that I get by with pretty well, it’s Jeremiah 29:11, you know what it is? Maybe I’ve signed some of your books with that, Jeremiah 29:11. I know the thoughts, says God, that I think of you, thoughts of peace and not of evil to give you an expected end. God’s thinking high thoughts and dreaming high dreams for us, and every one of which he’s able to bring to pass, and they’re thoughts of peace and not of evil.

Now, one more word and we’re through. What gives this hope life? What is it that imparts the adjective, living, to the word hope here? What links it with the golden link to the word hope and makes that hope live? What is it? He says, by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, that’s what it is, and here is your guarantee.

Let me stand before you to say this, my friends. Your Christian hope is just as good as Jesus Christ, no better, no worse. Your anticipation for the future, live or die with Jesus. Let me say that. If He’s who He said He was, then you can spread your wings and soar. If He is not, then you will fall like lead to the ground. Jesus Christ is our hope, and God raised Him from the dead.

The simple fact is a man died and rose again. He was crucified and came out of the grave the third day and ascended to the right hand of God. There is the guarantee of our future. That is why hope can be real.

When I was in Keswick, I met some, well, years ago when I was a very young man. I came under the influence of a missionary under the African Inland Mission, a man by the name of Emil Sywulka, an Austrian, but an American. There was a man of God, there was a man of God. He gave fifty percent of everything God gave him to the work of the Lord.

He and I would say, We’re going to meet and pray, and I’d get there late. When I got there, my friend would be already down on his knees in tears, naming names of which I had never heard, black boys over there, naming them by name and begging God to have mercy on them and keep them strong and bless them. We’d pray long hours. This brother went back to Africa.

I heard when I was in Keswick that he had been riding his motorcycle from one village to another, felt something go wrong with him, and got off quickly and lay down beside his motorcycle. He never woke up. My friend Emil Sywulka went off to be with Jesus.

Oh, it’s the way he wanted, that serious Austrian face so lined with furrows and wrinkles. With a smile that would light up, I can remember it after these thirty years, a smile that would light up that serious, sad face. And when you’d say something good about the Savior in his presence, he’d laugh with delight. He enjoyed it so. He dreamed about those times when he would be with his Savior. He’s there now.

And Jesus Christ rose from the grave, and because he rose from the grave, he guaranteed this man’s hope, and he dared to lie down beside his motorcycle in a little dirt jungle path in Africa. He dared to do it. Christians dare to die, and nobody else dares to die. Christians dare to die. Christ may come, I know. It’s what everybody has thought, that he would come, and we hope he’ll come, and he will come. But if he doesn’t come, until your old heart wears out, you dare die. Sinners don’t dare die. Christians dare to die.

Behold how these Christians die, they say. And I repeat, they only died well because they’d lived well. And a man who hasn’t lived well will have a tough time getting in. That’ll shock some of you nickel-in-the-slot theologians that put a nickel of faith in the slot, pull down a lever, take eternal life, which you can’t lose, and walk away. That’ll shock you. But some of you need a shock worse than you need whipped cream and lollipops. You need a shock.

So, remember it, that a Christian dare die if he’s lived right, and he’s got his hope alive and he’s been born of the Spirit and walking with God. But he doesn’t dare die if he hasn’t. A man who’s only a church member doesn’t dare die, and yet he has to, and there’s a tragedy of it. Forced to do what he morally doesn’t dare to do.

They said to old Uncle Tom, tell me where she is. He said, I can’t, Master, I can’t. Tell us where she is. I can’t, Master, I can’t. Tell us where she is or we’ll kill you. Well, Master, I can die. That lady who wrote that had something there, brother. He couldn’t betray a friend, but he could die. So Christians dare to die.

Now, somebody to comfort me at Keswick said, Brother Tozer, you must take it easy. He said, we can’t afford to lose men like you. You must take it easy, nice and complimentary. Then he added this, he said, Dr. McQuilken had your hour last year, and we warned him to take it easy, and he didn’t. Dr. McQuilken died suddenly, so I stalked off, you know, feeling sort of morbid.

But I want to live, I want to live. I want to be with my family and my friends and preach the gospel and write a little. I want to live. But if God sees otherwise, I can die. There’s always a place for a Christian to go, because God has given him a living hope by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.

I think that’s all I want to say, but I’m asking Brother McAfee to do one thing. I deplore two things in the Church of Christ. One is that that beautiful Christmas music is concentrated into two weeks in December and sung until it’s worn out and you don’t want to hear it. And yet it’s so beautiful that it ought to be heard a little, spotted in here and there all through the year.

Second thing I deplore is that we’ve taken this majestic, triumphant Easter music and forced it into one Sunday a year. Then the leaders are ashamed to announce a hymn on the resurrection because it isn’t Easter. My brethren, Easter is every Sunday, and the resurrection of Christ is as vividly new as if it had taken place this morning at six o’clock.

So, I want Brother McAfee to lead us in singing a triumphant Easter song, begotten again unto a living hope and guaranteed it by raising Jesus Christ from the dead. Amen.

Tags Hope, Salvation, Supernatural

Messages

Tozer Talks

Post author By pshappard
Post date February 2, 2025

“Jesus Walking on the Water-A Picture of the Church”

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Jesus Walking on the Water-A Picture of the Church

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

September 5, 1954

This story, which I read in your hearing previously, of Jesus going up into the mountain and His disciples going down into the sea, is to be the Scripture tonight for a little talk about the coming again of our Lord.

Now, let me begin by saying that Jesus Christ our Lord, is the Supreme Poet and Artist and Musician of all worlds. All that is beautiful and lovely and gracious and desirable gather themselves up in our Bridegroom, so that our Lord Jesus Christ could never do, and cannot do, a common thing. Our Lord stooped to mortal flesh to be born of the Virgin Mary, but His birth was not a common birth.

Nothing Jesus ever does is common. His birth was uncommon, and He has, by being born, elevated and dignified human birth beyond all possibility of description. Our Lord humbled himself to work, and He worked at the carpenter bench like other men. And yet our Lord never did a common deed, and the work He did was not common work. He elevated all work up unto an uncommon level, and dignified the humblest toil, so that the Christian carpenter, as he saws and planes and pounds the nails, may know that he is doing an uncommon thing, because our Lord was a carpenter, an elevated toil from the level of the common to the uncommon and extraordinary.

Our Lord suffered when He was on earth, and yet His suffering was not the common, tight-lipped, cold-eyed suffering that is going on in the world so much now, suffering that has long ceased to find expression, suffering that destroys the higher regions of the spirit and bestializes us and makes us like the clay from which our bodies were taken. Not that kind of suffering.

The suffering of our Lord was uncommon because he was uncommon, and everything He does and says and said were all infinitely raised above the level of the common. And He raised all of us above the level of the common, if we’re His, so that we are not common people and we don’t do common things. For the commonest act, which may be done by a sinner and thought nothing of, becomes an extraordinary act when it is done by the child of God.

Our Lord also stooped to die, but His dying was not the common dying of other men. It was not the paying of a debt to nature. It was not the making the last payment on the mortgage that nature had upon Him, for nature never held a mortgage on Jesus Christ. And He never owed a dime to nature. The dying of our Lord, like His own glorious person, was an uncommon, unusual dying. It was the dying of the just for the unjust. It was the sacrificial dying. It was a vicarious dying. It was a paying a debt He didn’t owe for others who were too deeply in debt to ever pay out.

That Lord being that kind of Lord, it is therefore to be expected that His words are never common words, that they yield a multitude of meanings to the humble of heart and to the meek that never can be understood by the common, that is, the ordinary vulgar rank-and-file of unconverted men. This has been the testimony of the saints down all the years. For I always try to preach the Scriptures in line with the traditions of the saints, the testimony of the great souls that have lived. And this has been their testimony, that they have come to the flowers of the Scripture like a bee, and they have gotten all the nectar they could carry away, and then returned again and found that there was as much nectar there as there had been before.

And like the barrel of meal that wasted not and the cruse of oil that did not fail, every text of Scripture yields its precious treasures, and then upon another visitation yields another load, so that the oldest tottering Saint, barely able now to read his Bible, can read a chapter which he has read a hundred or a thousand times before, and say and say truly that he has found new nectar there and sweet honey that he had never seen before. And so also with the acts of Jesus, this meaningful act our Lord did, when He refused the crown and went into the mountain, and saw His disciples go down unto the sea, and then later He went down to them and walked on the water coming to them, and they in fear cried out and He said be not afraid and said it is I, and they invited Him into the ship, and immediately He was at the shore.

Now I am not much of a typologist, as you probably know by this time. I am not what you call a preacher of types. I think there are a few types in the Old Testament, but I think they have been greatly overdone. I think that we have been bound by a slavish conformity to types which were created for us by Bible expositors that should have been knitting at the time and have saved us a great deal of trouble. But while I do not go much for types, though I admit that there are some, and thank God for the ones there are, yet you will find not types so much as poetic overtones and a duality of meaning in the Scriptures. To the needy heart it says one thing, and to another needy heart it says another, and to another needy heart it says another.

And it is the same verse of Scripture, and the same Lord, and the same Word falling from the lips of the same Lord, and yet it has a multiplicity of meanings adapting itself to the need of the soul of the various individuals. So that this story that we have here written for us by divine inspiration is more than merely a story. It is an enacted drama, if you like, as little as I like the word drama. It is nevertheless a divine drama. It is God Almighty in His odyssey through the universe, moving vastly, moving through the universe on His way to His predestined end. And it was not by chance or accident or not casually that our Lord went up into the mountain and disciples went down unto the sea.

But in addition to the plain historic facts which are before us, I believe that there are an infinite variety of meanings which the soul can gather from this. I do not claim to exhaust it, but I do claim to show you that the Lord was giving us a very beautiful object lesson here tonight, or object lesson which we may take here tonight.

Now the first thing I noticed is that our Lord declined the crown and went up into a mountain Himself alone. When Jesus perceived that they would come and take Him by force to make Him a king, He departed again into a mountain Himself alone. The average man would not have declined the crown. Even Caesar declined the crown only that he might postpone it to a more auspicious moment when he might better and more fittingly take the crown. That’s why Brutus slew him at the foot of the monument.

But our Lord declined the crown because He knew the crown they wanted to give Him was not the crown He was destined to wear. They wanted a king who could deliver them from the despotic bondage of Rome. They wanted a king wearing their own garments and speaking their own language and having their own physiognomy, that of the Jew upon them. But our Lord knew this was no time for the crown. He knew that there must be a cross out there before there could be a crown.

So, he declined the crown, and He went up into a mountain. If He had stooped to receive the crown they wanted to give Him, Israel would have rallied to Him in a moment. But He took the cross rather in the will of God than to take a crown out of the will of God.

Oh, if we could only see that this is the thing to do, brethren, we would not be losing so many good people from the church to the entertainment world. If you were to go to the entertainment world, the paid trained seals of the entertainment world, and you would find many choir singers there that are now singing borderline sexy songs for money. And half-dressed females at one time sang, The Lord’s my Shepherd, I’ll not want not. I trust, great God, from this church. But they are nevertheless who have sold themselves out. I know one man with a beautiful voice who even one time sang from this platform who is now singing beer ads for the National Broadcasting Company.

Ladies and gentlemen, if we could only learn that the crown that comes before the cross is a tin crown. It’s a gilded crown. And if you will look upon it, you would find stamped, Made in Hell. For it is not a cross or a crown that came down from the glory above, but a crown that came up, a false crown that came up made in hell for the soul that will take it before he takes the cross.

So, Jesus refused the crown and took the cross deliberately, for that was in the will of God. I suppose it’s a common thing and almost a religious bromide for me to say it, but I say it tonight, the will of God is always best, ladies and gentlemen. The will of God is always best. Whatever the circumstances, if you can find the will of God, take that will of God. Even if it means postponing the crown and taking the cross first, take that cross and trust God for the crown. But don’t try to crosscut and short-circuit your life and go past the cross to the crown. For the crown you receive, I say, will be a stamp made in hell and not made in heaven.

So, our Lord took the Father’s will and escaped into the mountain, and His disciples saw Him go. And you know historically that’s what happened. He refused that crown that Israel wanted to give Him and took the cross that the Romans gave Him. And then the third day He rose from the dead, and on Mount Olivet He went up into the mountain Himself alone. And going up into the mountain, He sat down at the right hand of the throne, not on the throne of His own, but on His Father’s throne as the Heir apparent to that throne. And there He is in the mountain alone.

Now what does Jesus do when He is in a mountain alone? Brethren, I ask you, what does any good man do when he is alone? You don’t have to ask that question, and we need not even answer it, though I shall answer it and say that of course he prays. And that praying Man of all praying men, that example of all praying men, that most prayerful of all praying men, Jesus, when He was in the mountain by Himself alone, I wonder what He was doing. We needn’t wonder, we know. He was talking to His Heavenly Father.

And about whom was He talking to his Heavenly Father? He was talking to Him about that little group that He had left just a little before. That little, that little misguided group, which in their ignorance wanted Him to become their king and bring about a revolution that should set Israel free, as had happened under Gideon and the rest of the great prophets or great judges of the Old Testament times.

But He knew them too well, and He knew the worst thing you could do would be to put a crown on the head of those carnal folks and bring them into a kingdom and make them have an earthly kingdom. They had to have some changes made there before they dared become sons and daughters of an earthly kingdom.

So, He was praying for them, praying for them in their ignorance, praying for them in their peril, praying to the Heavenly Father for His sheep. And that is exactly what He is doing now. If anybody should ask the question, what is Jesus doing now? The answer is Jesus is in heaven praying for His people. Now I don’t mean that our Lord is up there on His knees all the time, because there is a kind of praying that is superior to the kind of praying that we do when we are on our knees.

If you will remember the word I gave you from dear old Dr. Max Reich. Dr. Max Reich was asked one time whether he was a man of prayer. They said, tell us about your prayer life, Dr. Reich. Now Dr. Reich was a Quaker, as you know, and he said, well, and said it with that Oxford accent of his, he said, when you ask me about my prayer life, if you mean about my getting alone and spending long seasons in prayer, then I would have to say that I am relatively a prayerless man. But if you mean when you say pray without ceasing, a continual unbroken communion with God, day and night under all circumstances everywhere I am, and continual unbroken fellowship that prays always out of my heart to God, then I can say that I pray without ceasing.

Now that’s the kind of praying our Lord is doing in the glory under that is not necessarily that dramatic, down on your knees, beating the bench type of prayer, though we must do that when occasion requires it. But it was, it’s another kind of praying. It’s the continual communion of the soul with God. It may even be a wordless communion.

And incidentally, I believe in a wordless communion. I wrote something one time called “Wordless Worship.” And I don’t remember all I said, but I know that I tried to present the idea that there is a worship that goes beyond words. In fact, whatever can be put in words is second-rate. Always remember, brethren, if you can say it, it’s second-rate. Because there are divine spiritual realities that cannot be said. Paul called them unspeakable.

And those unspeakable things are the eternal things that you’ll have at last. Remember that God is giving us, letting us live on two planes at once. He is letting us live on this religious plane where there are preachers and song leaders and choirs and pianists and organists and editors and leaders and promoters and evangelists and church spires and all that.

And that’s religion. That’s religion in its overall. That’s the external garb of religion. And we can’t and don’t want to get along without that. But brethren, inside that and beyond that and above that and superior to that, there is the spiritual essence of it all. And that spiritual essence is what I’m pleading that we bring back to the church of Jesus Christ again.

Somebody talked about truth, which began and ended in itself, and said that if truth was not given moral expression, it was no good. I fully agree. But we have much theology, much Bible teaching, many Bible conferences that begin and end in themselves. They start here and circle, pull around on themselves and end here with a benediction. And everybody goes home and nobody’s any better than he was before. That is the woe and the terror of all this thing, my brethren.

And that is the curse of fundamentalism as we know it today. Evangelicalism is rife with it, this textualism which begins and ends in itself and sees nothing beyond. If you do not see beyond the visible, and if you cannot touch that which is intangible, and if you cannot hear that which is inaudible, and if you cannot know that which is beyond knowing, then I have serious doubts whether you’re a Christian really or not. Because the Bible tells us, that eye has not seen or ear heard, neither has entered into the heart of a man the things that God has laid up for them that love him.

But it does say, God has revealed it unto us by the Holy Ghost. My brethren, if we should stop trying to make the Holy Ghost our servant and begin to live in the Holy Ghost as a fish lives in the sea, we should enter into riches of glory that we know nothing about now.

But there are those that want the Holy Ghost in order that they might have the gift of healing. Others want the Holy Ghost for the gift of tongues. Others want the Holy Ghost that they might preach well. Others want the Holy Ghost their testimony might be effective. All that I grant you is a part of the total pattern of the New Testament. But brethren, let us never make God our servant, and let us never pray that we might be filled with the Holy Ghost for a second purpose.

God wants to fill you with the Holy Ghost as an end in your moral life, in order that there might be other ends. There will grow out of that one end, other ends and other secondary things and other byproducts. They all come and they’re all there. But the purpose of God is that we might first of all know Him and be lost in Him and enter into the fullness of the Spirit of God.

I listened this morning to that number, Bless the Lord, O my soul, bless thou the Lord, O my soul, that lovely thing. I said afterward to Brother McAfee, after hearing that, I wonder why we ever sing any common songs. I wonder why we ever stoop to the rank and file of cheap things. I wonder why we don’t live always in the glory.

I have been reading St. Bernard’s “Love of God” lately. That great old Saint, 700 years ago he lived and sang and dreamed and walked with God and was not, for God took him. And he left behind him, Jesus, thou joy of loving hearts, and such songs as that.

And the one we sang this morning, what was it? Jesus, the very thought of thee with sweetness fills my breast. It was not, he was not Bernard of Cluny, not the man who wrote Jerusalem, the Gold and the Celestial City, two different Bernards. This was Saint Bernard, the man who was canonized 20 years after he was dead. But he was a man who walked with God, and he wrote the love of God, and he wrote sermons on the Song of Solomon, which I’ve been dipping into. When I read that radiance, and I see the shining glory of that man’s life and words, I wonder why we ever stoop to read anything else but that which is elevated and divine and wonderful. Because God has given it to us in the Bible, and then he’s given it also to us through the hearts of some in certain other great religious books.

Now, He declined that crown and went up into the mountain, and His presence there is the prayer. His very presence there. It’s not everlastingly telling His deeds before the presence of the Father, and saying, Father, bless this woman, Father, bless that woman, endlessly talking, as some of us Christians do, and covering our inward fears by a multitude of words.

But it’s His presence at the right hand of the Father that’s the prayer. His presence there, the fact He’s there at all, is a mighty prayer, and that prayer is for His people. That prayer is for you and me and for the whole Church of Jesus Christ. Then it says, They went down into the sea, and the evening was come.

When our Lord went up into the mountain, and the clouds received Him out of our sight, the light of the world went away, and the night came. For he said, the night cometh when no man can work. He said, When I am with you, the sun is here, and it is daytime. But when I leave and go away for a while, it will be night.

And so, the night has settled on the world, and the Church has worked in the darkness all these years. I don’t mean the Church has not had light. I mean to say that the condition of the world has been that of darkness, and the night has lain upon the world all these years.

There’s a period in history called the Dark Ages. I respectfully suggest to the historians that we change it from a few centuries, around 8, 9, 10, 11 centuries. We change it and call it all the time since the Son of Righteousness withdrew and left the earth, for it has been dark all over the world.

Now, these disciples that went down into a ship and went down into the sea, what about them? My brethren, it doesn’t take a giant intellect to see the church there, for He had not more than reached the mountain yonder, when suddenly they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and the church of Christ was launched on the sea, the dark sea. And she’s been on that sea ever since.

Now what is the relation of a ship to the sea? It is the relation of propinquity, propinquity in contact without merger. And that ought to be the relation of the church to the world. The world is the sea, like the troubled sea that cannot rest. You will find in the Scriptures every place the figure of speech used of the world to mean the sea, the disturbed, turbulent, treacherous, deadly, cruel sea, the sea so rich and so unpredictable, so calm today, so violent tomorrow, bearing her cargos over her bosom today in peace, and tomorrow dashing them to the blue depths.

Mankind is like that. Our men meet at the council tables and shake hands and exchange cigars and drink liquor together and tell jokes together and have their pictures taken laughing together, and the next day a war breaks out and they’re enemies, and they would kill each other at the drop of a hat. It’s a turbulent, cruel, treacherous, deceitful world in which we live.

And yet the world is here, the Church is here in that world. The Church cannot withdraw from it any more than the ship could withdraw from the sea. But we’re here in it. But thank God we’re on top of it. We maintain the same relation to the world that the ship did to the lake, the Sea of Tiberias. It is contact without merging. And the woe of it all is that the sea is always trying to get into the church.

The world is always trying to leak in, to splash in, to come in with soft words and beautiful white crests moving in on us and always saying, don’t be so aloof, don’t be hostile, let us come in. We have something you want, come on, we’ve got it.

I have a book up here in my study which I use for a prop when I want to get a little more air. And it says, finding God through science. Another one says, finding God through nature and to God through something else, finding God through art. And they’re always trying to find God through one backyard window or another, always crawling out some cellar looking for God, when the whole top side of the building is made of sheer crystal and God is shining down if we only knew it.

And instead of looking through science to God and through medicine to God and through art to God, we can open the windows of our hearts and look up and find God without all that nonsense.

So we don’t need the world. I know, I know, I stand pretty much alone in all this. I know, and even some of my friends wish I’d get lost. I know that, but I also know that I am telling truth, brethren, which will stand when the worlds are on fire, that the world has nothing the church needs. Except, of course, except in the sense that we are citizens and human beings.

I get my starch from the potato field and my carbohydrates from the stockyards and my milk from the cows and my eggs from the hen. I need that part of the world all right. I travel on her highways and fly in her airplanes and ride in her trains and that’s another thing all together.

But even in that, we’re not merging, we’re only in contact without merging. The church of Christ has to have contact with the world as the ship has with the sea, but without merging. And I am sure that that terrible stormy night when the sea arose and hurled herself against a little boat, that they did some wild bailing out of the water.

I suppose if it had been like it is today, there would have been two or three learned apostles there to tell them, stop bailing. What’s the matter with you, man? You belong to the 17th century. Your theology is a 17th century theology. Why don’t you get help and come up to the present time and learn to get adjusted to the world. Let the water come in, it won’t hurt you. But good old hairy-armed Peter with that tin can or whatever he used, he was getting that water out of there as fast as he could. It was a question of survival with him. And believe it or not, it’s a question of survival with the church of Christ today.

Let us not imagine that we have Abraham to our fathers. let not the evangelical church say, we have Abraham to our father, let us alone. Jesus said, don’t you tell me you’ve got Abraham to your father. Look, the ax lies at the root of the tree. And if that tree doesn’t bring forth fruit, there’ll be someone to chop it down, and God will raise another tree. And God will. God isn’t worried about your denomination or mine.

I remember one time many long years ago, I guess 20 now, I was quite perturbed, almost angry, as angry as a Christian man ever supposed to get. Because that great missionary statesman, Dr. Robert A. Jaffrey, said to me, talking about the Alliance, he said, why, it isn’t God’s business to preserve the Alliance, it’s God’s business to evangelize the world. Whether the Alliance continues to exist or not doesn’t matter if God can evangelize the world. Let’s dissolve her if we have to and evangelize the world.

That was vision. I didn’t have it at the time. But that was vision, gentlemen. God isn’t here to preserve your denomination or mine. And the great need of the hour is that the church, the church of Christ, the spiritual church, regardless of what she may call herself, should be saved from the incoming waves. This little bit of the world and that little bit of the world and that other little bit of the world moves in into the church, and pretty soon we’ll have no Church at all, but we have a sinking vessel.

Now it says, the disciples went down into the sea, and they were sailing toward Capernaum and home. We are out on the ocean sailing, and we’re on our way to Capernaum and home. I told Brother McAfee tonight, I guess I’m getting to be quite an old sentimentalist. I love those good Bible names, don’t you? Capernaum, isn’t that a good mouth-filling word? Capernaum, where Jesus lived. Capernaum, back home. And the disciples were in the ship on their way from the other side and were on their way back home. It was night, and so the church is on her way home, the dear church of God.

You know, in my heart there are two churches. There’s the ideal church that I mean when I sing, I love Thy kingdom, Lord, the church of thine abode. And when I sing, the church’s one foundation is Jesus Christ, her Lord. That’s one church. That’s the ideal church, which I suppose doesn’t exist at all. And then there’s the real church, not fixed up and garnished and made beautiful, but just as she is.

Those disciples were not ideal men. They smelled of the sea. Their language wasn’t as good as Einstein’s. They were plain men, and they were sailing home. And there was Somebody on the mountain praying for them while they sailed home. And they were plain men, and they weren’t ideal.

And no doubt the conversation that went on between them wasn’t a perfect, saintly conversation. There might have been arguments. Somebody might even sulk a little on the way. And one man might even have gone to sleep and not pulled his load. And some were better than others on that ship that night, but they were all sailing home, and they all had Somebody in the mountain looking down, praying for them.

And in this real church, this real church, not the ideal dream church of the hymns, but the real church of Christ isn’t a perfect church. I wish it were. If it were, I’d come crawling on my hands and knees and ask for admittance. But we’re a long way from being a perfect church.

There are disagreements among the people of God, even among the saints of God. There oughtn’t to be, but there are. And there were in Paul’s day, there are now. And there’s a lot of imperfection. And there are things we wish weren’t there, but there are. All that’s real, all that’s there.

We might as well be realistic, ladies and gentlemen, and call things by their right names. I suppose that we, in the sight of God, don’t present—we Christians of the present hour—don’t present much a cleaner picture, a nicer picture, than those disciples that night out on the sea, tired and sleepy and weary and homesick, sailing on their way toward Capernaum and home. But we’re the apple of His eye, nevertheless, and it’s for us that He’s on the mountain interceding.

And it was now dark, says the Scriptures, and Jesus was not yet come. Well, brethren, if we would only confess, wouldn’t this be our testimony? O Lord Jesus, it’s dark and you haven’t come. It was dark in the first century and you didn’t come. It was dark in the second century, and you didn’t come. It was dark in Constantine’s time, and you didn’t come. It was dark when the Bernards lived, and you didn’t come. It was dark when Luther preached, and you didn’t come and was dark when Wesley stood on his father’s tombstone and preached, and you didn’t come. It was dark when George Fox walked up and down the hills and vales of England, and you didn’t come. It’s dark, Lord, and you haven’t come.

Now, we don’t want to claim we’re disappointed because that we would offend against the generation of thy people, as David said. We don’t want to admit we’re disappointed, but there’s disappointment, nevertheless. It was an eye-opening thing when the World Council of Churches declared as their theme, Jesus or Christ, the hope of the world, and said they were going to emphasize eschatology. And they ran into a theological snag there, because there were those who don’t believe that the coming of Christ is the hope of the world.

One layman from London got up and said, gentlemen, I believe that we ought to preach the second coming. It was embarrassing for those old boys with their entrenched privileges and their vested interests and their oaths and chains. They had the world by the tail and the church in their hand, and they thought, and they didn’t want to think the Lord should come.

Somebody said to the Kaiser, they tell me, during, he was a religious man, you know, a Lutheran. And they tell me that somebody said to the Kaiser, preach the sermon just before 1914. And the Kaiser got up in a blaze of anger and stared down the man who had dared preach the second coming. He said, don’t you preach anything about the second coming in my presence again. It would ruin my plan.

And that’s why the World Council could not abide the thought that Christ was to come again, or at least why some were embarrassed about it. It would spoil our plans. Brethren, I don’t want any plans that would spoil to have the Lord return, do you?

I don’t want to be caught with any secondary plans, any little schemes that have been dreamed up out of my empty head. I want rather to fit into the plans of God so that my plans would not be embarrassed nor in any wise disrupted if the Lord were to come tonight walking on this sea. It was now dark. And no doubt they cried, where are you, Lord? We wanted to make you a king, and now you’re not even a helper. And the sea arose, and the great wind blew.

And has the church not, even in our lifetime, has the church not known three wars? Has the Church not known the threat of the atom bomb? Has not Euroclydon arisen that dramatic hour when the apostles on the sea, on their way to Rome, says the south wind blew softly? And they went on sailing, believing that all would be well, when suddenly there came down a tempestuous wind called Euroclydon, and it struck upon the ship and hurled them every direction. And for days and days and multiplied nights and days, they saw not the stars by night nor the sun by day. Euroclydon was upon them. A type again, or a picture at least, of the church on the waters, sailing toward home, but oh so sore beset.

I remember 1917. In 1917, the swift wind Euroclydon swept down, and they called it the Bolshevist revolution. The royal rule was upset, and the Bolsheviks took over. Later they got rid of that ugly word Bolshevik and called themselves Communists. And we have Euroclydon upon us today.

I listened to the news report today, and I learned two things, just no later than today. One is that Radio Peking, this fellow Zhou Enlai, has declared the time is now ripe, and they’re going to deliver Formosa. And in the same broadcast I learned that the little island with the unpronounceable name is now under fierce bombardment from the Communists, and there is a small war now going on between the Formosans and the Chinese Communists.

Is this the beginning? Is this the old saber-rattling the Kaiser did, that Hitler did, that Mussolini did before these other wars? Is this it? I don’t know. I only know that Euroclydon still sweeps over the surface of the deep. And I know that the Christians are dying, and their churches are being burned, and they’re being driven into the woods, and the great steel curtain has been pulled down, and our brethren behind it can’t even get a squeak out to us, not even a broadcast, not a carrier pigeon, not a balloon sent by the wind, not a word to know what’s happening back there. Knowing communism as we do, we know what’s happening.

We know that the swift winds of Euroclydon have caught the ship and are trying to tear it apart. The south wind will blow softly for a little while, but Euroclydon will break the ship. But the church, the church composed of all the saints and the people of God, will never perish.

Changing the figure a little, upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. So, churches can die, but the Church must live. The church in Wuchow can die, but the church still lives.

The church in Columbia, her pastor can be slain, and her people chased into the hills and rocks to hide in fear of their lives, but the church can never die. For there is One in the mountain praying for His Church, and even the sweet saints who must give up their lives for Christ’s sake are preserved in the apple of His eye. And their spirit goes to the God who gave it, and there’s not a soul that’s given his life for Jesus Christ since Euroclydon broke on the world in 1917, or for that matter, in the year 100, not a saint, but one who is safe in the bosom of the Lord Jesus Christ. That great, broad garner into which the sheaves are being taken, the golden sheaves of the Spirit, are being gathered into the great barn, the great beautiful garner, and they’ll all shine in their Father’s kingdom in that day.

In the meantime, the Church floats on the sea, and the disciples row in distress, and they see Jesus walking on the water. He couldn’t stand it any longer. He was seeing them all the time down there, and they didn’t know it. He was seeing them all the time, those eyes that never close, those eyes that see through the fog in the night. He was seeing them all the time, and they were held in His hand, but they didn’t know it. Brethren, Jesus Christ is still the Lord, and He is still the head of His body, the Church.

Let’s not apologize for him. Let’s not soften His gospel to make it acceptable. Let’s not qualify His statements to make them softer. Let’s not argue and defend Him. He needs no defense. He holds the church in the hollow of His hand even while she’s being tossed in the sea. And when He couldn’t stand it any longer, He left the mountain and hurried down and walked out on the water.

Are you clean enough and pure enough to see and hear Him? He’s not here yet, but He’s coming, and He’s walking on the sea, and He’s approaching the ship. We don’t know when He’ll get within hailing distance, but we know that He can’t stand it much longer.

We know that love won’t very much longer wait. And we all know that the keen interest He has in His people won’t very much longer permit Him to stay at the right hand of God the Father Almighty. But He’s going to come walking on the sea, and do you know it? All that is within me, I believe that Jesus Christ, the Sovereign, walks on the sea. I believe He will walk on the sea.

Zhou Enlai, he’s got a big mouth now. Why have we always got a big-mouth statement somewhere, with a little heart and a big mouth? In God’s name, why don’t we get some men with big hearts and little mouths once in our lives? But we always have to get men with big mouths and little tight hearts. Mussolini had a big jaw and a big mouth and a heart the size of a peanut.

Hitler’s guttural German gave us the impression that he could shout and be heard on the planet Mars, but he had a heart the size of a walnut. Now comes Zhou Enlai. Why do they always get names you can’t pronounce? I’d like to know, too, but that’s on the side.

But here they are, Mao Zedong with his big mouth, and Zhou Enlai Lai with his big mouth, and Attlee with his big mouth, and all the rest of them with their big mouths. Brethren, that’s the wind that stirs the sea, but there is One walking on the storm, and His name is Jesus Christ the Lord. You ought to be ashamed to be scared.

Never should we be frightened, never for a moment. He’s the Sovereign Lord. It wasn’t the Calvinists that gave us that expression. It was only the Calvinists that popularized it. But wherever it came from, I love it. The Sovereign Lord. He is sovereign. When an English king is said to be sovereign, they mark out his confines. They used to.

It took them this long. They erect so-and-so, the such-and-such, and then they told what he was the sovereign of, India and Ireland and South Africa and what have you. But it’s silly to call him sovereign and then mark out his territory, isn’t it? It’s silly to say he’s sovereign, but he can’t cross over there without a passport, and he can’t go over here without a visa, and he can’t cross over that river without asking permission, yet he’s a sovereign and wears a crown.

What kind of crazy use of language is all that? The word sovereign means absolute, infinite, unqualified boss in all realms in heaven, earth, and sea. And that’s what our Lord is. He’s a sovereign Lord.

In His providential plan for a little while, He’s imposing upon Himself certain limitations for the purpose of fulfilling His eternal plans. But any moment He wants to do it, He can walk on the waters of the earth and the fires of hell and the golden streets of heaven, for He is All-Sovereign Lord. And He doeth as He pleases in the armies of the heaven and in the earth beneath.

And no man can hold his hand and say, what are you doing? He answers to nobody, and He takes orders from nobody. And He calls no counselors in for star chamber sessions. He has no assistant lord that He must go and chat with. He has no secretary to the throne that He must call in and say, what do you think of this situation? He knows in one effortless act all that can be known, and He’s already lived all our tomorrows, and holds the world in the palm of His hand. That’s the Lord I serve and whose I am.

The soft, curly-bearded Jesus of the Italian artist, and the pompous, fast-talking Jesus of the American businessman, I wouldn’t stoop to worship Him. I wouldn’t get on my knees and call Him Lord. He’s as weak as I am, let Him get on His knees to me. Let’s do it a turnabout anyhow.

But glory be to God, He is infinitely beyond all men and all angels and all seraphim and all cherubim, and all archangels, and all principalities and powers and mights and dominions and things visible and invisible. He’s risen above them all, sovereign in His own right forevermore.

So, He walks on the sea. He’s there, if you can only see Him, brethren. Are you afraid you’ll lose your job? Afraid Eisenhower can’t keep us out of a depression? Afraid of John L. Lewis? Who are you afraid of? You ought to be ashamed to be afraid of anybody. He’s walking on the sea, and He’s coming our way. And our little ship is on its way home, and it’s dark and the winds blow loud. But He’s on his way here. Now let’s do what they did.

So, they invited Him into the ship and willingly received Him. And it says immediately they were at the shore where they were going, immediately. Now you don’t have to be technical about the second coming of Christ. I think we have spoiled the hope of Christ’s coming by a lot of nonsensical technicalities in the last 50 years. Prophets have been wiser than Isaiah and have known more Scripture than Daniel. And with their charts and their meticulous, detailed plans of the second coming in prophecy, they have frightened decent people away from belief in the coming of Christ.

You haven’t frightened me away, brethren. I still believe it. Somebody else with his charts and his red pencils can give me the details, and I’ll smile and wait for the coming of Christ. But I believe he’s coming. And I believe that He’s going to walk down there, and He’s waiting for the church to invite Him in, waiting for us to invite Him in.

We don’t need Him bad enough yet, brethren. We don’t need Him bad enough. When we need Him so bad that we can’t get on without Him, He’ll come. But we don’t need Him bad enough yet. We can still get along without Him. You don’t need Him, do you? I mean, you need Him as Savior, but really now we don’t need Him in the world, aren’t the Republicans doing pretty well? I don’t think we need Him as bad as we might. Oh, our politicians are telling us to go to church and be good and pray, because that’s a way to fight off communism and curb juvenile delinquency and comic books.

And in other words, it’s serving God for a secondary reason—prostitution, gentlemen. Whenever I serve God for any other reason than he is God, I’m prostituting my worship. Whenever I get on my supple knees and cry to my Father in heaven and make him a means to another end, my worship is no better than the worship of Baal.

God is the end toward which we all move. All other things are secondary. I don’t get converted to be a good American. I get converted, for Christ’s sake, to be a Christian. I don’t want a revival to stop communism. I want a revival to glorify God and enjoy Him forever.

I don’t want a revival for political reasons. Politicians have always used the church wherever they could, always. And no matter how slimy the politicians are, no matter how crooked, no matter how selfish, no matter how drunk with lust for power, there’s always a reverend or two that will grab a black book and appear with a solemn, holy look on his face and mumble some prayers for the politicians.

Here’s one little unheard-of preacher the politicians will never buy and will never get me, anything I say or write, ever, to advocate Christianity for any other reason than Christianity’s sake. Never Christ for the Republicans’ sake, never Christ for the Democrats’ sake, never Christ for free men’s sake, but always Christ for God’s sake. In the meantime, He’s waiting to be wanted. He’s waiting to be invited inside.

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