Author: pshappard

Tozer Talks

“Ye Have Not Because Ye Ask Not“

Ye Have Not Because Ye Ask Not

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

December 30, 1956

In the book of James, James, chapter 4, the latter sentence, Ye have not because ye ask not. That’s the negative. And then over against that, the very fine positive statement in chapter 5, last sentence, in verse 16, The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much.

Now I think that most of you know that I do not make too much out of holidays or anniversaries. I nod to them and blow them a kiss and pass on to something that lasts. Holidays have a way of passing. But I cannot escape the knowledge that in this Christian era, we have arrived at the, or very within hours of 1957 that we shall call the New Year. And I am not going to go over the past.

We have a way here of keeping reviewed up and keeping our self-examination current, so that I am not going to examine the past, because that’s been pretty well done, but I’m going to talk about the future. And in these texts which I have read, we have a word from the Holy Ghost.

Now, it is to our everlasting profit that we listen to this Word with meekness and with faith and obedience. When man speaks, just man, no matter who the man is, whether he be a king on a throne, or a scientist in his laboratory, or a philosopher in his study, when man speaks, we have a moral duty to question. We have a duty to doubt and examine.

But when God speaks, we dare not question, and there is no need to examine, and it is a sin to doubt. But we Christians, being yet somewhat in the world and having our old natures, tend sometimes to dull the edge of the Lord’s Sword and avoid the point of the Lord’s Word by what we call interpreting. If a text is too much for us, we interpret it, which means usually not that we’re trying to find out what it says, but that we’re trying to find out how we can get out of it.

But here is no place for interpretation whatever. There are two sentences, Ye have not because ye ask not. And the other one, the effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much. Now only exhortation is needed here, not interpretation, and certainly not question or doubt.

Now the Holy Ghost says here that some Christians are self-made paupers. Ye have not because. Some Christians suffer from self-imposed poverty. I have often thought in a half-humorous way, if we lived in the same kind of homes, or if we lived in homes commensurate with our spiritual state, we’d be living in the slums, most of us. And if we dress commensurate with our inner spiritual condition, we’d be taken off the street for vagrancy. Because too many of us are self-imposed paupers.

Now this is not a misfortune to call up sympathy, this is a sin to call for repentance. Ye have not because? Ye have not because you don’t know where to go. Every Christian should know where to go to ease his poverty and become rich. Ye have not because ye know not who to ask? Every Christian should know whom to ask. And ye have not because ye know not how to obtain? If we know not how to obtain, one half hour of the Bible will teach us. No, ye have not because ye ask not. Ye live in poverty even though you know you do not believe, and so you do not ask effectively.

Now this poverty of ours, which can be shrugged off as long as we’re in reasonably good health and have an income, and there’s no war, this poverty of ours brings loss beyond description. It is not only what we get into, but what we don’t get that’s tragic in the Christian life. In our hearts, in our homes, in our labors, in our churches and assemblies where we meet together, to our friends and to the lost and to the world, we are allowing time to go by and days to succeed days and years to pile up on years. It doesn’t seem like any time at all when I began my ministry here in Chicago over in the little old building, and I remember the first thing I said.

It sounds sort of piteously humorous now, although it certainly wasn’t intended to be funny. I got up and I thought I’d make a nice approach to a nice congregation, and I said I was happy to be here and to speak to you people, but I said possibly some people may take me rather lightly because of my youth. But I said if youth is a crime, it is a crime everybody has been guilty of sometime, and if you will give me a little time, I’ll atone for it. No prophecy was ever more fulfilled than that one has been.

But all down these years, I wonder how much we have lost that we could have had and how much that we didn’t get that was rightfully ours under the terms of atonement because we didn’t ask. Or if we asked, we didn’t ask effectively.

Now there is much unbelief about prayer, even secret unbelief among people who pray. There’s probably nothing in the whole field of religion about which there’s more hypocrisy than about prayer, and yet I feel I want to modify that rather harsh word. Hypocrisy because I do not think it’s deliberate, I don’t think it’s intentional at all, and it even springs from a rather high motive.

This unrealism is a better word, I think, a truer word. I don’t avoid the other one because I’m afraid of it or afraid of you, but only because I think unrealism is better. So, I’ll say that there probably is nothing in the whole field of religion about which there’s more unrealism than there is in prayer.

And this is because I think no one wants to grieve God or injure other people by admitting their doubt concerning prayer, even if they have secret doubts concerning it, they don’t want to admit them, because as David said when he was going through the dark valley of doubt, he said, if I speak thus, I offend against the generation of thy children. So, he kept his mouth shut until he got light on the problem. And I think that’s the high and rather pure motive that helps most of us or that leads most of us to live in this never-never land of prayer that doesn’t get answered. We don’t want to grieve God or admit to our own hearts or certainly to injure others by admitting doubt concerning prayer. So, we go on secretly having our doubts, even doubting our own testimony.

Now, this arises from several causes. The doubts people have about prayer arise from several causes. I’m not going to name sin because we take that for granted, but I think some people are benumbed a bit about prayer, hearing thousands of prayers made that are plainly not answered.

Now I like to be realistic up on a Christian level, and I’ll tell you what I’d do this morning if God were to enable me. I’m no Pope, nor am I anything but a simple preacher of the gospel, but if I had any authority to make any bargains with the Almighty, I would settle with God for 10%.

I would say, God, if you will, oh, I’ll do better than that. I will say, God, will you please answer 1% of the prayers that are made in the pulpits today, this Lord’s Day, the last of 1956. Just answer 1% of them, Lord, and shrug off the other 99. Do you know what would happen? There would be a revival that would change the texture of Chicago society from the top to the bottom or the bottom to the top, if just 1 out of 100 prayers were answered in the pulpits these days. But people don’t expect them to be answered, and so we go on piling them up, words, words, words. And we hear thousands of prayers made that are plainly not answered, and the result is, without wanting it, there comes a benumbing of our faith and expectation, and then there is a nibbling at prayer with no success that most people do.

A nibbling at it. We nibble at prayer in the morning and at table and at night, and on certain stated occasions. If they’re going to have a potato race, they want the pastor to be there to start it off with the prayer. And he asks for enough to bring revival to the whole wide world, just there under the tree. But nothing happens, we just nibble at it.

And then the misuse or the wrong use of prayer is also one other reason. We hear prayer used to get our own way and to crowd out a business rival and help us win the track race and all sorts of things. And everybody in his right mind knows God isn’t going to answer prayers like that, but we smile sentimentally and say that God answered my prayer. The fellow that’s lying on his back looking unseeing at the roof of the stadium, God didn’t answer his prayer, but the fellow who has his hand raised high in the air, he had his prayer answered.

Now everybody knows, that has the brains he come into the world with, that God had nothing to do with either one of them. So, we simply say to ourselves, well, don’t let’s be cynics, don’t let’s be like Tozer about this, let’s believe in it anyhow and get along somehow. And then another reason, another cause of doubt in prayer is seeing things attributed to prayer that prayer never caused. We have a way of doing that, but we’ll pass that by.

So, Christians blandly overlook their own failure in prayer. Ye have not because ye ask not, and ye ask not because ye doubt, and ye doubt because you have seen prayers that were not answered and have known praying people that were always in trouble. And a lot of your own nibblings never got you anything, and so you throw the whole thing overboard and say it is a fine, noble thing that nobody can attain to.

Now ye have not because ye ask not, and we’re self-imposed paupers, and the kindest thing I could ask God for today is that you, my dear people before me, should not suddenly have your external garments made to look like your internal life. I would be ashamed, and you would be ashamed, and the old torn jeans that I’d be dressed in and the old battered stained shirt you’d have on, we’d feel pretty bad if we were as poverty-stricken in our wardrobe as we are in our hearts.

But here the Holy Ghost says over against this, The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man avails much. Now that’s not to be interpreted in the light of the things that I have mentioned here, prayers that haven’t been answered and the unrealism in the field of prayer. This is to be believed, not interpreted.

The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much. I’m not sure that the man James could have got by on that sentence in the average schoolroom. They’d have said that he was tautological. Now tautological, in case you’ve forgotten your old definitions, means to say it twice, like saying a widow woman. Of course, she’d be a woman if she were a widow. That’s tautology, that’s saying it twice unnecessarily.

And I’m not sure that what James might be accused here of being a bit wordy by some when he said the effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man avails much because he could have turned it around and said the availing prayer of a righteous man is effectual. And it would have meant exactly the same thing. But the Holy Ghost was trying to get at us through the Apostle James and he was using such language as we have, not as he has, but as we have. So, he tells us in almost extravagant terms that prayer is effectual if it is fervent, and that it avails, and then God says, much.

Now the words, of course, are relative and they’ve got to be understood in their right context, and you’ve got to notice who uses them. If I were to say I heard a man, I often listen on the air to interviews, particularly when notable men are being interviewed in any field at all, I like to do that. I have an FM radio now and when I’m resting, I listen to these interviews in order to get a little education as I go along. And I heard a man some time ago and he was talking about something, what it was going to cost. Well, he said about six million dollars. You had to know who that man was in order to get your meaning.

If you’re going to put anything into it, I’m going to invest heavily, he might have said. Well, that for me would be fifty cents. But for that man it was six million dollars, if I recall. And you hear that often, they’ll say, well, we expect an income of about nine hundred thousand dollars this year, a little short of a million. Brethren, who was talking? Well, it depends altogether on who says much. The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man avails much, said the Holy Ghost.

Why, it would have been enough for the Holy Ghost to say little. For when God talks, God talks in cosmic terms. The God who says little or some or a small amount or a limited amount or much or many, that God holds the universe in His hands and the galaxies, and the far distant stars are His playthings. And everything that is belongs to Him. All matter, all mind, all life is His. And when God uses the word much, you and I ought to sit up and listen because we’re up in the six million class.

We’re listening to one talk who is infinitely rich beyond all description. And He says, you’re poor and you’re poverty stricken and your bones show through. That at your own fault. You’re not asking for.

Don’t forget that the effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man leads God to move in your direction and the result will be much. And when God says much, he battles the imagination. I say I’d settle for the word little there.

If God were to use the word little. If I used the word much, it would mean a few hundred dollars. But when the government uses the word little, they mean two or three million or maybe a billion. It’s got so they’re ashamed to use common thousands anymore in Washington. Nobody would be caught saying thousand around there. They’d feel ashamed. They only talk in terms of millions and billions.

And that’s the way God is. God has everything. And under the proper conditions, prayer is Earth’s mightiest force. There’s no question about it. Wesley is often quoted for saying things he never said. But I understand that he said this, God does nothing but in answer to prayer. And certainly, he would be a man who had a right to make that statement. God does nothing but in answer to prayer.

Meaning, I suppose, that before there were a need to pray, God out of His own heart moved to create His universe. But that now He has so geared the human race to prayer that God will not move but in answer to prayer. And our Lord Jesus Christ said, nothing shall be impossible unto you.

To whom was he speaking there? Nothing shall be impossible unto you, an angel?, as Milton painted, that when he lay down, lay across several hills. And that when he spread his wings, they went across vast landscapes. That kind of being, no. He was talking to people, even fallen people. Look at him there, he had just been born. And there his little red face. And they can’t figure out whether it’s human, but you had a human mother, so they figure it is. And they brand him and band him and take a footprint. And there he lies, all miserable looking. Can’t raise his head, can’t raise his hands or feet yet. And sleeps curled up the way he’s been for the last while. And there he is, so weak that he’d lie right there and die. If a lot of old nurses and people didn’t help him.

And God says to that kind of creature, nothing shall be impossible unto you. You say he grows, sure, see him a year later. Now with shiny eyes he’s learned to walk. And take a few steps over the smooth floor. Can’t make it if it’s rough, but he takes a few experimental steps on a smooth floor. And balances himself like a skier by holding his hands up. And there he is now. Push him and he’s gone. Weak little one year old. And the Lord’s voice is sounding, nothing shall be impossible unto you.

You say wait till he grows up, sure. Wait till he grows up. Here he is driving behind a car with so much out in front that he can’t possibly see who he hits. So, he drives on in a great big hunk of metal with roaring motors that makes up psychologically for the weakness he feels inside of himself. And when he steps down on the accelerator, the immediate response somehow gets into his system, and he feels that’s his response. I am an American. I live in the 20th century. I live in the period when we’ve conquered nature, he says.

And then an invisible substance from somewhere, so small that only the laboratory can discover it, a little thing they call a virus gets into him and he doesn’t even know where he got it. He doesn’t know where he breathed it in or if it was on the edge of a glass when he drank water. He doesn’t know what friend might have said good morning and breathed it on him. He doesn’t know. But all he knows is he says to his wife, I don’t feel good somehow. My head’s low and I’m aching. Pretty soon he’s down on his back, pale white, and so weak he has to be lifted up.

And two or three doctors and a nurse have to try desperately to keep him from dying. And a little invisible thing, so small and weak, that we’d pass it over without noticing it, has done that to that great big he-boy. With his big chest and his muscles, now he lies there whimpering, and his wife sits and puts cold cloths on his noble brow. But the poor fellow, we’ll hope he gets well. I’m just creating one out of whole cloth for the occasion. I haven’t anybody in mind. But I hope he gets well.

But anyway, there he is, and the Holy Ghost is saying to him, nothing shall be impossible unto you. See him a few years from now. See him when his chin meets his nose at night. But in the daytime, he’s quite normal looking, except that he is badly shrunken, and his voice has gone piping. And this strong fellow, now see him limp with the help of a cane down the steps to meet his grandchildren.

There he is, there’s that fellow to whom God said, nothing shall be impossible unto you. Was God playing with him? Was God simply being humorous? Must this be interpreted and understood somehow poetically or metaphorically? No. When the Lord said, Nothing shall be impossible unto you, write across the page in your Bible, you have the interpretation.

Here it is, because nothing is impossible with God. There’s why God can say to that little thing, red-faced and squally there in the bassinet, nothing need be impossible to you. That’s why God can say to the man lying in his bed, nothing need be impossible to you, because nothing is impossible to Me.

And so God invites us to omnipotence. He invites us to share his muscles and to have His riches and to live in His strength. The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much. If we would set ourselves to prayer, my friends, this year, habits could be broken that have cursed and blasted some of us for years. Temptations could be defeated that we’ve stumbled over for decades. Circumstances that have hindered us could be radically altered, for nothing shall be impossible.

And some of Satan’s captives that are now bound could be set free. And the wanderers could be restored and hard sinners could be converted and minds could be changed completely, and hearts cleansed and filled with the Holy Ghost. If we only dared to believe what our Lord said through the Apostle James, the effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much. Now, let’s face up to it. Ye have not.

Now, let’s not excuse ourselves. That’s the cheapest and easiest way out, but it’s also the way to deeper poverty. And let us not pity ourselves. Self-pity never helped anybody yet. So let us not say, ye have not, and then begin to sniffle. Ye have not, because ye ask not. Now, God can’t remedy this by himself. You and I are going to have to remedy it by remembering and putting into effect these other passages that nothing shall be impossible unto you.

My brethren, we have had two critical years in this Church, two critical years. I don’t know whether it’s the kind discipline of the Holy Ghost, or whether what it is, I’m not sure, I don’t know. But I do know this, that in this Church, more than any other that I’ve ever heard of, except in an Army camp, our personnel changes over. Just when we get going nicely, there’s a blow-up, and I don’t mean trouble, I mean that there will be as many as 8, 10, 12 families moved to parts unknown.

If I could have my congregation together once, brother, we’d have to rent a stadium. But they go, they go. They go to preach, they go to the field, they go marry somebody and become a preacher’s wife, or they move to California or Florida or Wisconsin or Michigan or Nebraska, Nebraska, or New Jersey, and we’ll lose them.

And just this last year we have had 50 of our regular people who would have been here this morning have gone and left us. And it looks as if our business was to sort of set people on fire and then say goodbye to them, sadly, and watch them go. And the only hope I have is that wherever they go, they’ll spread the fire.

But you know, although we have had some pretty heavy sledding, numerically, we haven’t had any heavy sledding financially. In 1955 we were third highest in missionary giving in a thousand churches in the United States and Canada. And I’m happy to tell you that for 1955 we had steadily along the largest prayer meetings that we have ever known in the years that I’ve been here.

Now, my friends, I want to insist in closing that prayer, the right kind of prayer, persistent prayer, sets up an irresistible pressure that nature won’t hold, that circumstances won’t hold, that it sets up an internal pressure. It’ll break through somewhere. Somehow, it’ll break through. Maybe not in the direction you face, but the effectual prayer of a man who’s righteous, that is, living right in the will of God, that prayer sets up an increasing pressure. And it’s going to explode, it’s going to blow, it’s going to get through somewhere. And I don’t know where always.

But I want to prophesy a little this morning. A man is quite a fool who’ll prophesy, but I am willing to be a fool for Christ’s sake and say this to you, that in the religious world, that is, in the evangelical religious world, for the Roman Catholic side of the Church, Christendom, and for the liberal side, I have nothing to say. To them I have nothing to say now.

I’m thinking about the evangelicals, the fundamentalists, the Bible people, the full gospel people. I want to tell you something which may happen within this year or within a few, very few years to come. There’s going to be a realignment of spiritual forces.

We are being taught now that religion is coming into its own because there is increased tolerance. The ecumenical spirit that takes in everybody that says Jesus and that opens his Bible and goes to church once a Sunday, or twice a year even, that religion is on the increase and on the way up. Now, I don’t believe that nor accept it for a moment.

I believe rather that evangelicalism is on its way out, but that as that woman stood— now, this is not the prophetical interpretation. It’s meant to be an illustration. As that woman in the twelfth chapter of Revelation stood and gave birth to a son, and that son immediately became the target for hell’s bullets, and God had to snatch him away to save him.

So evangelicalism is going to hive off, and there’s going to be a realignment of forces. Now you watch it, my brethren. There’s going to be a realignment of forces when God finds a few bold, courageous men who aren’t afraid of their paycheck and don’t care who likes them and dare to pray and then stand up and tell them what God said. And there’s going to be something new born out of this dying thing. And it will not be born around banquet tables. It will not be born around panel discussion tables.

It will not be born in any other way but in the way the man-child was in Revelation 12, the old-fashioned way. I hope I’m still going strong, if you would allow that last word to stand unchallenged, in the day when this realignment takes place. Some of us are going to be asked to stand up and be counted one of these times, whether we are going to follow the New Testament methods and morals and ways and techniques, or whether we’re going to claim evangelical doctrine and then invent our own idols and follow them.

The Holy Ghost will yet triumph, brethren, and I trust it may be in 1957. And I am telling you that if you will give yourself to prayer this year, if you will make prayer your career, and then not watch for little answers here and there, not pray that Peggy might pass her tests and then say, oh, say, God, you didn’t hear my prayer because Peggy got an X. Not that kind of praying, brethren. Not that kind of praying. That kind of praying is the cheap little grocery list praying. I want a package of pep and two bushels of eggs and a quart of milk and send a bill to Dad. Not that. That’s cheap praying.

But there’s another kind of praying, a praying in the Holy Ghost, a yearning that sometimes seems to have no object toward which it’s moving, but a yearning in the Holy Ghost. If you will give yourself to that kind of praying, there will be a pressure built up, and it will break over somewhere, not in the direction that we think, but in God’s direction at last, and the Holy Ghost will triumph. I believe He will triumph. I am not pessimistic. I believe He will triumph.

And this prayer pressure. And what do I mean by prayer pressure? Oh, really, brethren, I’m only using figures of speech because prayer in itself is nothing. Prayer is simply the means by which we bring God’s power into human affairs. That’s all. And it’s the power of God in human affairs that I’m talking about. Prayer in itself has no power. It is the power of God that prayer brings into human affairs. And it’s when God Almighty releases a little trickle of that mighty, mighty, flowing, vast, illimitable stream of energy into human affairs that the Spirit says, much!

So really it isn’t the prayer, it isn’t the length of time you pray, it isn’t how many times you pray every day, it is praying effectively so as to release that power into our Church and into your life and into your home and into your labors and love and business. And if we’ll only dare to believe this, we’ve been so poverty-stricken, so poverty-stricken.

You have not, because you have not asked. But if you’ll ask, the effectual, fervent prayer of a righteous man will do wonders, and it will build up pressure that it will break over into the work of God and the business of God, and we’ll see a realignment of forces, and we’ll see conversions that mean something, and we’ll see transformations that last.

So, shall we not determine, by the grace of God, that 1957 isn’t going to get by? You know what? It could easily be, and even probably will be, that I or Mr. McAfee, Brother Moore, or somebody else you’ve called in, may stand and talk in a low voice over the still form of some that now listen to me.

Time is wasting, judgment draws nigh, the Lord is coming, religion is festering at its root and rotting in its stems and branches. But there’s life, there’s life left yet, there’s life there, the root of the matter is present. And if God can find his praying people, his intercessors, who aren’t worried about little technical answers to prayer they can make a tract out of, but are ready to throw themselves out onto God like a traveling human and wrestle in the Holy Ghost with the powers of evil, until the pressure of the power of God is such that the forces of Satan are driven back and the pure thing is born, despised maybe and wondered at, but a pure thing will be born out of the writhing and prevailing of Christendom as we know it today.

I want to be, by the grace of God present, and I pray this church may be in on it. Ah, little Samuel, when God was going to do a terrible thing in Israel, called Samuel aside and whispered in Samuel’s ear. He couldn’t tell the old man, He had to tell the boy. And it came to pass just as God said it would. And that’s on the judgment side, but I’m interested in the other side. And I pray that when God wants to do something, he’ll tell me and I’ll tell you, or you’ll hear it and tell me.

And we’ll know that God is moving again as in the days of yore, moving to convert and purify and separate and moving to draw a line of demarcation sharp as a razor blade and wide as the gulf that separated Dives and Lazarus, so the church may be realigned and God’s ancient power may begin to flow again. And the muscle boys and the funny boys will take a back seat and watch the Holy Ghost do the work they futilely tried to do after the manner of man.

Shall we pray this year, brethren and sisters? Shall we call on God as we never have before? Maybe tonight we may have an altar service over this. I want to talk some more tonight. I want to preach tonight a sermon I preached eighteen years ago and got written into a booklet and I’ve been afraid to preach it ever since because I didn’t want to repeat it.

But I feel I must tonight re-preach a sermon I preached nearly about eighteen years ago. And I want you present. And perhaps God will break in on us and we’ll see him move to his own glory and our good.

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Tozer Talks

“Christian Subjection to Good Government “

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Christian Subjection to Good Government

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

July 27, 1958

One of the most practical men in the world was Paul. He said, they don’t work, neither shall they eat. He disposed of all tramps that way. And here he said, put them in mind.

Now that’s an old English idiom, which is at least 400 years old or older, because it had been accepted in good literary English 350 years ago. Therefore, it must have been around at least another 50, so at least 400 years–put them in mind. It’s passing out now and we use it very little. But I don’t know whether it’s just age or rigidity, but I hate to see some of these grand old phrases go out. If we could find something better, but usually we settle for something worse. Put them in mind.

My father used to say, put me in mind to do so and so, lest he’d forget it. You don’t hear it much now. We say now, remind me. It’s easier and it’s perhaps a little smoother. But put people in mind. Paul said, put them in mind. The Christians have to be put in mind of things.

I told you about the man who stood in this pulpit, not under my auspices, but at a convention and declared that churches ought not to meet like this, that their business is to go out, go out, always go out. He said, we meet every Sunday and do the same old thing. He said, the Bible doesn’t say, candle my eggs. It said, feed. He said, sends us out. He said, what do you think of a chicken raiser that candled his eggs and then put him back in the box and candled them the next week and put them back and candled them again? And it sounded unanswerable, but it was too neat to be true and I knew it.

So, I looked it up and I found the Bible didn’t say anything about candling eggs, but it did say an awful lot about feeding sheep. And feeding sheep is something you have to keep doing. You can’t just feed the sheep and now say, you’re fed, on your way. He has to be fed again and again, led into deep pastures.

So, this putting people in mind of things is, is feeding the sheep. They make fun of us and call us psalm singers. They used to call them sam singers in England and say these sam singers. They were impractical, but them sam singers that they made so much fun of, conquered continents and built cities and did wonders and exploits and all that.

I was talking to Dr. Hunter, editor of Evangelical Christian, the great Canadian magazine. He was there the week I was there, and we were discussing this and that. And he was talking about the British troops under, under, never can think of the fella’s name. No, back there in the days of Cromwell’s troops. He said they won. They never lost. They won. He said they knifed through their enemies like a knife, like a knife through cheese because they prayed and expected to win. They weren’t, they weren’t weaklings. They were, they were strong men.

Now God’s people have to be put in mind practically to live right. Put them in mind to be subject to principalities–subject to principalities and powers. That means to the state, of course, not to the state of Illinois, but thinking as the word is used in civics, the organized state, organized society. And he said that Christians are to be subject to, that is to obey the state.

Now, it is the Christian sacred duty to be obedient to the state, to the authorities over him. And it is his sacred duty, if those laws are evil, it is his sacred duty to break them and take the consequences. It is the sacred duty of all Christians to obey God first and man second. And when, as I pointed out before, when the instructions of God and the laws of men run parallel to each other, and they mostly do in law, then it’s the business of the Christian to obey the law, even if it costs him something.

But when they run counter to each other, it’s the business of the Christian to obey God, break the law, and take the consequences. Every Christian ought to be a potential rebel. Keep that in mind. He’s not a rebel, but he’s a potential rebel. He could be. He could be a rebel.

If it became, for instance, a law, God forbid it ever should, I hope we’ll all be in heaven before that could ever happen in America. But if the law should ever be passed, that we could not read our Bibles and nor pray, why, it would be our business to break the law and take the consequence–read our Bibles and pray.

But as long as the laws are just, and I say mostly they are under Anglo-Saxon laws, and we are of the Anglo-Saxon people, mostly the laws are completely just. I do not believe that there’s a law in the city of Chicago which to keep would require that you disobey God. If there is a law, I don’t know.

Some people think the income tax is a law that is evil, and perhaps it is evil economically, but it isn’t evil morally. It could be that the income tax, getting heavier and heavier and heavier, particularly on corporations, destroying the very root and fountain of economic life, it could be that it’s an evil economically, but it is not an evil morally. Therefore, pay your income tax and like it. If you can have grace enough, but if you don’t have grace enough to pay them and like it, pay them. Whether you like it or not.

Now, I say again, I don’t think there’s a law. I don’t know the law in the United States that would require me to break God’s law, but if and when, as they say, that time comes, I’ll break the laws of my country without a question. I am a Christian first and an American second, and every Christian should take that position. He should be a Christian first, and then after that, an American, if he’s in America.

And if the laws of America should ever get twisted around and say, you’ve got to do this evil thing, you say, we’ve got to obey God rather than men. Peter set that example. But if there are immoral laws in our country, then we ought not to keep them.

Now, the Christian is free, but he’s not lawless. The Lord’s dear people are like sheep, and sheep aren’t too intelligent. And we, as a rule, are not spiritually enlightened. The PhD, the man with the brilliant mind, is nevertheless stupid when it comes to spiritual things. The things of the Spirit of God are spiritually discerned, and you can have the best education modern society affords, and you can have an IQ of 150 and still be terribly stupid when it comes to spiritual things, because that requires enlightenment from above, enlightenment of the Holy Ghost.

Sometimes I pick up a book written by some very brilliant man, who’s known around the world for his brilliance, and then he puts in a paragraph or two or maybe a chapter about Christianity, and I shake my head and say, how can a man be that dumb? He does not understand spiritual things, but he’s very brilliant in other things. It’s quite natural it should be that way, seeing that there are two kingdoms coexisting, the kingdom of man and the kingdom of God. They coexist, and in some measure, they even intermingle. And yet one is above the other, and we live in the kingdom of God rather than the kingdom of man.

So, the Christian is free, but he’s not lawless. And I say, it’s very hard for us to make the distinction. If we preach, the Christian is free, then everybody shouts, well, the Christian is free and starts acting like an anarchist. Never. He is free, but he’s never lawless. He’s perfectly willing to play the game according to the rules of the game. He does not insist upon making the rules as he goes along, and he does not insist upon breaking them if he doesn’t like them.

Now, a righteous government never needs to fear a Christian. You can be sure of that. A just government with just laws never needs to be afraid of a Christian. But down through history, unjust governments have had to be afraid of Christians. The emperors of Rome became afraid of the Christians. They were multiplying too fast. They were afraid of them.

The first example of it was when the wise men came from the east saying, where is he that is born king of the Jews? And they called the seminary faculty together, and they said, you are prophetic students, where is the Christ to be born? And they knew. They went right to the verse and chapter. And they said, he is to be born in Bethlehem of Judah, for thus it is written. The old king heard about that, and he got scared. He said, a king of the Jews has arisen now. And he sent his men down to kill all the little babies under two years, hoping that he could destroy this potential rival in his cradle. But he missed Him.

The Lord had given a dream to old stodgy Joseph. Brother McAfee and I don’t agree. We’re friendly disagreeing over Joseph. He thinks Joseph was a very wonderful fellow, and I think Joseph just barely made it. But he was the good, faithful husband of Mary. Then the way the angel came, and he told Joseph what to do.

And Joseph took Jesus where he was safe. He missed it, but he tried. Can’t say he didn’t try, this man Herod, he was afraid of Jesus. And that was the first. And all down the years, evil men have been afraid of the church.

You remember how Hitler tried to squelch the church? He was afraid of the church. And Stalin tried to squelch the church. Incidentally, do you know what they’re doing now in Russia? They are adopting Christian forms, and they are baptizing people into Communism. I have been saying that Communism is the devil’s Christianity. It runs parallel to Christianity in so many ways, but just upside down.

Christianity came down from above, and Communism came up from hell. But strangely enough, they are alike. Jesus, the Christ, came down from above. The Antichrist comes up from hell. And yet the Antichrist has to be so much like Christ that he can fool people. And the fact that there is similarity doesn’t mean there’s identity. And Communism is today similar to early Christianity. You can find many, many parallels. Even Communism is seeing that now. And I have been reading about how they come and dedicate their babies to Communism, and go through a form, have a dedication service. Baptize, they don’t only use water, but they use, go through some form, giving them over to Communism.

Well, Communists are afraid of the Christians. Always the need to be afraid of the Christian, because a Christian is always a potential enemy of the state as soon as the state goes to the devil. But as long as the state is just, and its laws are righteous, never, no state ever needs to be afraid of a Christian. He’ll pay his taxes. He’ll keep the laws. He’ll be obedient. He’ll be decent. He’ll teach others to be decent.

Why, if Uncle Sam only knew it, as the dear lady wrote to General Pershing during World War I, they say, I don’t know if it happened, but they said she wrote a very sharp letter about her husband, who was in the service, and she said, if you don’t do something about it, I’ll take it up with Uncle Sam himself.

And if Uncle Sam himself only knew how much trouble we keep him out of by our churches, they wouldn’t require any of us Christians to pay taxes. They’d say, oh, you’ve done your part. You Christians have already done your part. You have set a good example of obedience and law keeping and righteousness and decency and hard work and frugality and generosity and your influence is so strong for righteousness that we will at least exempt you. They’ll never get around to that, but I wish they would. I’d enjoy getting exempted. Amen.

But they won’t, but they could because the church has already done a tremendous lot, and you know they do recognize it. They don’t charge us tax on this corner. They do recognize that. They do recognize that the church has a value. It does have a value in society.

And the church is never an enemy of a righteous government but is a potentially dangerous enemy of a government that is not righteous. And when Russia, her terrible bloody teeth are finally pulled loose from the necks of a third of the world, it may be religious people that do it.

Now he said, be obedient. Put them in mind, he said. Keep reminding them, otherwise they’ll forget it. They get busy with their work, and they’ll forget it. He said, obey magistrates. Now it’s one thing to be told to obey the king or the president. It’s quite another to be told to obey magistrates. That is, a policeman, the constable, somebody you don’t think has too much authority.

You’re driving through a little town and a country policeman comes out. It’s rather humorously pathetic that the one class of people who have the reputation for being the most reckless drivers on our continent are the preachers. I rode down from Muskoka Lakes to the airport about 120 miles from Toronto.

And the driver, a good Christian brother, I wanted to get in there because I hadn’t my ticket yet and I wasn’t sure I could get it. And I was anxious to get there ahead of time. And I’d look at his speedometer and wonder what’s he loafing along here for? He had a big Buick, and why is he loafing along? Bless my heart, always that red line. You know, the red line runs out telling you, like a thermometer on its line on its side, that type of car.

And I’d look down, see the red line and it was on 55 or 65 or 45, corresponding to the signs along the way. This good man would rather keep the Canadian laws than get me to the airport on time. I’d rather have missed the plane than to have broken the law. And we joke about that. Let me tell you, don’t joke about disobeying the Holy Ghost.

If they put a 20 mile per hour zone in this city, go out there and creep along at 20 miles rather than be caught disobeying the laws of man and claim to be a Christian. And they say, oh, you’re a Christian, huh? Well, $10 and costs.

Well, then it says to be ready to every good work. Now that’s so broad in general that I won’t even attempt to apply it. Only to say two things. The Christian should be the first one to respond to a need, whatever the need is, and he should be the most generous with his means and the quickest to help. He shouldn’t be afraid to get out and make himself useful. Jesus went about doing good. And I think as such, it was an example to us all. He went about doing good.

There’s grave danger that we become ivory tower Christians. We have servants and that somebody else does our work for us. I think it’d be good, Emerson said, it’s good for everybody to take their shoes off occasionally and get out and walk around in the ground. He said, there’s something good and healing in the earth and everybody ought to get down and walk around his bare feet on the earth.

We kids, when I was a boy, used to go barefooted through the unpaid roads and they would beat up with the passage of the traffic and get dust, and to feel the dust go through your toes. Oh, it was a pleasure. That’s very good. You’d have to pay $25 to have that much fun in Chicago, but it didn’t cost a dime out on the road. Just walk through there and just feel mother earth sort of taken hold of your feet. That was a pleasure.

Well, God’s people ought not ever to get too far from the mother earth and the sweet ground out of which they were taken. If your spirit were to leave your body and we were to reduce you back to your component elements, the earth could claim every bit of you, every bit of you and say, you don’t own a thing. This belongs to me. You got it from me.

So, we ought not to get too far away from the earth. I don’t mind shaking hands with a man with some calluses. I think they’d do us good to get a few calluses. Usually, we pay our way out. We’ve got money and an indisposition to do anything practical. And if there’s a need arises, we give money, but don’t do anything. He says, be ready to every good work. And he says, speak evil of no man and don’t be a brawler. I don’t suppose I need to tell you Christians not to be brawlers.

And I don’t think I need to tell you to speak evil of no man. I find you a pretty closed mouth people. And I am proud of you on that. There’s not much speaking evil of people goes on around here. As a writer and preacher, I probably do the most. But I don’t speak evil because I don’t like people, but I speak, I trust as a prophet, rebuking and exhorting and it’s not evil, although some might call it that. It’s rebuking people and pointing to their faults.

Well, then he says, be gentle and showing meekness to all men. Now, why? Why should a Christian go about gentle and meek? Well, he said, the reason is that you mustn’t forget who you were once. You yourself was once foolish and disobedient and deceived and a slave to lusts and pleasures, living in malice and hating each other. He said, why should you be too hard on people? Look who you used to be. And who is there here that can say it’s not so?

Is there anybody here above the age of 18 that can say there wasn’t a time when I was foolish? Can anybody here say that there never was a time in my life that I was disobedient? Anybody here? Anybody here say there wasn’t a time that I wasn’t deceived? Anybody here say never was a day, never was a time in my life that I, that I was a slave to pleasures and lusts of the flesh? Anybody here that can say there never was a time I felt any malice or hated anybody? If you say it and you’re above 18, you may be honest, but your memory is bad.

Because it’s human nature to be filled with malice and hate. Go out on the school grounds anytime. I like to walk past the school ground if it’s, if it’s fenced in. Just at recess time and watch them. They seem to all be screaming at the same time. Why, I wouldn’t know. But all at the same time, dashing about and suddenly over here in the corner you’ll see a little scuffle, two little guys stick their chins out and cuss each other out in boyhood blasphemy. Hateful and hating one another.

I remember when I was a young fellow, that a fellow bigger than I was, laid a hold on me and started to wrestle me down. I completely lost my head. Pulled loose from him, and being a farmer, and being a Pennsylvania farmer, I did the most appropriate and most normal thing. I raced for a rock pile, and I picked up rocks, and when the barrage was over, he was a very tame fellow. I threw rocks, and you know, brother, you, a country boy and the rock, you know, if they only knew it, they could take the average country boy and put him in there, and he could out pitch Billy Pierce, because they just throw rocks from the time, they’re big enough to lift one. I remember that hateful and hating one another, and full of malice. I’d have killed that fellow just as sure, only I just ran out of strength.

Well, in this, in this, why did you buy that new 1958? Was it by any means that you needed smoother transportation, or because the fellow across the street had one? In this, that’s why, my brethren, why should we be gentle with each other when we fall, because we still have bumps and purple spots from where we fell. Forget that, keep that in mind. Never take a holier-than-thou attitude. They accuse us of it.

They say that we take where we think we’re holier than they are, but that’s because they don’t know us. The man who thinks he’s better than others isn’t a true Christian man yet. And the man who despises even the poorest and the lowest isn’t a good Christian man yet. Maybe on his way, but he hasn’t made it yet, for the true Christian never sees a murderous picture in the paper, but what he says, there go I, but by the grace of God. And he never sees a tramp sitting on a park bench, bleary-eyed in the semi-coma, staring at the gravel walk, but what he says, there am I, but by the grace of God. He never hears of a deed committed, but what he says, there go I, but for the grace of God. That was John Wesley’s expression. There go I, but for the grace of God.

Let me tell you ladies, you’re fine lovely ladies; you hear of things that are taking place, there go you, but for the grace of God, you’re no better than the rest. Keep it in mind, sister. We’ll try to keep it in mind, we men. Only the good grace of God has saved us from plunging over the precipice, so let’s not look down where they wallow in sin and say, how terrible.

Yes, it’s terrible, but we ought to be very sympathetic and very understanding, because we ourselves are also once foolish, and disobedient, and deceived, and a slave to lust and pleasures, and living in malice, and hate, and envious of one another. There go I, but for the grace of God. And if we take that attitude, we can afford to let them say they think we think we’re better than they. We don’t. They won’t understand, and there’s no use to try to make them understand. Let them talk, because the glory is put where it belongs, on the grace of God and the kind goodness of our Heavenly Father.

The right attitude is expressed in the hymn, when He shall come with trumpet sound. What’s the next line? May I then in Him be found. How? Dressed in His righteousness alone. Whose righteousness? His righteousness alone. How? Faultless to stand before the throne.

It was a song, a song I’ve always loved very, very much. I think Zinzendorf wrote it, translated into English, and I’d loved it a long time. And then when I heard Mrs. Bennett and Mrs. Witt sing it. It restored it to me again, and I went back to it, and I’ve been singing it ever since. Jesus thy blood and righteousness; Thy beauty are my glorious dress. In this mid-flaming world, arrayed with joy, shall I lift up my head. That’s right. Thank God. Amen.

So, we’re no better than others, but we have found a hiding place in the Savior, and we’re saved not by our righteousness, but by His. Therefore, keep mighty humble, brethren, because we may be picking you up off the sidewalk one of these days, and when we do, we’ll try to be as gentle as we’d want you to be with us. Amen.

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“Eternal Life is a Supreme Treasure“

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Eternal Life is a Supreme Treasure

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

January 19, 1958

In the book of Titus, first chapter, first two verses, Paul, an apostle or servant of God and an apostle of Jesus Christ, according to the faith of God’s elect and the acknowledging of the truth which is after godliness, the hope of eternal life, which God that cannot lie promised before the world began. I’m going to pick out five words, in the hope of eternal life, and talk about that. In the hope of eternal life.

Now, eternal life, I don’t think there would be anybody, anywhere, who would deny or even attempt to argue that eternal life is not a supreme treasure, for it is that, eternal life, eternal life. If you don’t appreciate those wonderful words, eternal life, think what they would mean if they were uttered in hell.

Think if it should be by some strange and unknown act of God that down there, where is the rich man and all other men who forget God, it should suddenly be announced, God has declared eternal life. There would be joy that would amount to hysteria there, eternal life. May we not overlook how valuable, how precious it is and what a supreme treasure lies in those words, eternal life.

And this is the life that was lost in the disobedience of the fall and brought again to us by the coming of Christ. I am come, said Jesus, that you might have life and that you might have it more abundantly. And everybody knows, John 3, 16, that God loved so the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth on him should not perish but have everlasting life. So, this supreme treasure, lost once to us, is now brought back to us by Jesus Christ and given to faith.

Now, the question that arises here where Paul says, in hope of eternal life, for you see, hope is a future thing. Paul said, what a man hath, why does he yet hope for it? You hope for that which you don’t have. You cannot hope for that which you have. I think that’s so plain that it need not be labored, that we hope for that which we don’t have, and if we have it, we cease to hope for it. Hope is lost in realization.

So, in hope of eternal life says that eternal life is future to the church. Paul, now hear it, Paul, a servant and apostle, according to the faith of God’s elect, in hope of eternal life. There we have it. Now is eternal life present or future? Do we have it now or are we looking for it? The fact that it says in hope of eternal life indicates that we’re looking and hoping for it, for if we had it, why would we yet hope for it?

Now in this, the Bible seems to contradict itself, but I think I’d better put a take notice sign here and say that the word eternal and the word everlasting, when it modifies the word, life. The two words are I look this up very carefully and I find that where the Bible says hath everlasting life or hath eternal life, it’s exactly the same word in the lips of Jesus or from the pen of Paul or John.

So, I don’t know why our translators in one verse said eternal life and, in another verse, said everlasting life, unless it’s for euphony. There is such a thing, you know, as language that’s musical and there would be places where the word eternal life wouldn’t fit in musically, so they changed it to everlasting, since everlasting and eternal mean the same thing in English and the original means the same thing in Greek, so that if we say eternal or everlasting life, I don’t think that there is any difference.

Bible teachers gain reputations for making distinctions where there are none and laboring those distinctions for 45 minutes. But there’s no distinction here, so let’s accept this as the fact and any Greek scholar or any lexicon will show you that eternal and everlasting is the same in the original and of course they are synonymous in English.

Well, I started to say that the Bible appears to contradict itself here, and in this it does appear, I say, to contradict itself. This has been charged against your humble servant a few times, dating way back to my early ministry. I remember I was very badly hurt because a member of my church, a rather important man, told me that I contradicted myself in my preaching and that bothered me at the time, but it doesn’t bother me anymore.

In fact, it could, in a way, sort of puff you up a little to say that, because you know, a man said that a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little politicians, philosophers, and divines. And this idea that always you ought to keep saying the same thing and become, get in bondage to one line of thought, it isn’t scriptural because, you see, the truth is so vast and so many-faceted that it can rarely be stated in one proposition.

That was why when the devil said, it is written, Jesus said, again it is written. If He had listened to, it is written; if Jesus had been a textualist, He’d have turned those stones into bread. If He had been a textualist, He’d have jumped off that tower. If He had been in bondage to the words of some of my brethren now, He would certainly have played straight into the hands of the devil for fear of contradicting Himself.

But the fact is, truth is so vast that it can rarely be stated in a single proposition. And a single proposition usually is false in that it overstates the thing. Let’s remember this, that truth is a declaration plus what seems like a contrary declaration and then a getting together of the two. In philosophy they call it thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. Those are hard words when you list them. But a thesis is something that you state. The antithesis or the antithesis is a contrary of that. Then, the synthesis is the getting of the two together, and there’s where the truth lies.

Now, that’s always so in the Bible. But you know, people, our minds are like rings. We get a hold of the truth, and we get a childish desire to close the ring and weld it. And as soon as we close it and weld it, we never get any larger, never get any larger.

A Baptist preacher one time stood white-faced with anger when he heard a man talking, and he said to me, why, he said, that man claims he changed his mind about something, opinion he had about the Bible. Why, he said, I haven’t changed my mind about a single thing in ten years. Now a man actually said that to me, brother. He had welded his little mind shut, and it was so small you couldn’t have got it on your finger, I’m sure. Take a baby finger to get that little mind on there if it was a ring. We insist upon closing our minds and welding them shut, and they never grow after that.

You see, we can have a mind like a ring or like a horseshoe. A horseshoe stays open, and as long as it stays open, it can expand. But as soon as it’s welded shut, it can’t get any larger. There we have it.

Now, the problem with us is that we get a hold of a truth, and then we consider that truth to be all there is to it, close our minds and weld it, and then turn our backs on anybody that says anything different. Where the fact is that there always ought to be another passage somewhere found that seems to contradict it, you know, if we’re going to get at the facts.

Now it’s like this. God’s sovereignty, for instance. One man says, I believe in God’s sovereignty. So, he closes his mind and welds it shut, and he believes in God’s sovereignty. Another man stands up boldly and says, I believe in man’s free will, and he closes the ring and welds it shut, and the two men turn their backs on each other and walk away and build two churches. One dedicated to the little ring, I believe in God’s sovereignty. The other dedicated to the little ring, I believe in man’s free will.

But the wise Christian takes thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. And the wise Christian says, now just a minute, isn’t it possible that we can take both of those and rise above them and look down on them and see that they’re both right and get a third truth that’s bigger than both of them? But you can’t get people to do that. We’d rather build churches and be known as founders of something. So one fellow has, he’s the God’s sovereignty man.

I was talking rather in fun to Brother Knighton up here in the study. We were looking at a certain hymnal of a certain church, and it happened to be a hymn that I love very much, the hymn that the trio sang last Sunday night. And I said, look here. They actually, this particular hymn book is a strongly Calvinistic hymn book, being of a strongly Calvinistic organization, which does not believe, or at least not supposed to believe, I think some of them are better than their doctrine, but they’re not supposed to believe that Christ died for everybody, only for the elect.

And one of the verses, one of the stanzas that Zinzendorf wrote, and Wesley translated, says this, Lord, I believe we’re sinners more than sands upon the ocean shore. Thou hast for all a ransom paid. Thou hast a full salvation or full atonement made.

You know, they skipped that one. They actually skipped it. They didn’t put that one in. Now, it could have been they didn’t have room for it, but knowing humanity, knowing humanity, I think I know why they skipped it. Because they say Jesus died only for the elect, not for everybody.

And Wesley said, Lord, I believe we’re sinners more than sand upon the ocean shore. Thou hast for all a ransom paid. Thou hast for all atonement made. They couldn’t take that, so they closed their ring and shut that verse out. But I believe that verse. I believe that stanza with all my heart.

Well, you see, now I want to present two propositions from the Scripture that seem to contradict each other. John 5:24, he that heareth My words and believeth on Him that sent Me hath everlasting life. Now that’s there, isn’t it? Hath everlasting life in the present tense. John 6:47 says, verily, verily, I say unto you, he that believeth on Me hath everlasting life. John 5:12 says, he that hath the Son hath life.

Now there I have three verses of Scripture, and these three verses of scripture establish the thesis. Eternal life is the present possession of all true Christians. Now there we have the proposition with the proof texts. The true Christian has eternal life. He that hath my words, heareth my words and believeth on me hath eternal life. He that believeth on me hath everlasting life. Now there we have it. We don’t have to explain those verses. They’re there and they establish the proposition that eternal life is the present possession of Christians.

But you know, there are some church people that teach that eternal life is future and that you do not have it now, you’ll have it then; you’ll get it then. Well, shall we close the ring and reject everybody that teaches anything else but this? We have one thesis; eternal life is the present possession of Christians.

Now I want to read you some more passages. Matthew 25:46. Then shall the righteous go away into eternal life. That’s future. Then this passage, where do I find it here? Luke 20:35, 36. Listen to this. But they which shall be accounted worthy to obtain that world and the resurrection from the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage, neither can they die anymore for they are equal unto the angels. For they are the children of God, being the children of the resurrection. There is a life which is future. It is something that we are to attain or attain unto in the day ahead. Luke 18:29,30. There is no man that hath left house; oh, and then He says, or property and husband, wife, children, anything. He names everything we can leave.

For the kingdom of God’s sake, who shall not receive manifold more in this present time and in the world to come, life everlasting. Then Romans 2, 7. He says to them who by patient continuance and well-doing seek for glory and immortality, they shall have eternal life. Galatians 6, 8 says, he that soweth to the Spirit, shall of the Spirit reap life everlasting. Now, that establishes the proposition that eternal life is the future possession of the Christian. So, there we have thesis, antithesis.

Now what do we do? Throw up by our hands and say the Bible contradicts itself. I don’t know what to believe. I don’t know what church to join. Then go get drunk. Shall we just give it all up and say a religion such a confusion that I know nothing to do, only go out and live, eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die. Well, that’s the way foolish people do. So, we close our minds on one ring or the other.

But there is a second thing we can do. We can rise above both of these and look down on them and see them in their perspective and see that instead of their contradicting each other, they complement each other, supplement each other, and explain each other.

Now, let’s look at the synthesis. The thesis is, the Christian has eternal life now. The contradictory thesis is, that the Christian lives in hope of eternal life. The synthesis, that is the truth, is that eternal life is the experience, is to experience God in the soul. John 17:3, this is eternal life, that they might know, that is, experience Thee, the only true God in Jesus Christ whom Thou hast sent. And it is therefore a present possession.

And we possess this eternal life now in this world, in a state and world of death. Eternal life grows here in the bosom of redeemed men, surrounded by death everywhere. For the world is asleep, says John, in the lap of wickedness, and all is death around about us. And the Bible tells us that men are dead in trespasses and sins and that they lie in the depth of iniquity and wickedness and in bondage. Now in the midst of all this mortality and death and bondage and wickedness, there are some who have eternal life, now, as a possession. For it is to know God and to know his Son, Jesus Christ.

But further, eternal life is also a future state. It is the kingdom of the blessed. It is where death is banished forever. It is where the Triune God is visibly present.

It is where men shall look on the face of God and with no death present and without the graveyards and the bones and the mortuaries and the undertakers and the hospitals and the ambulances and the doctors and pain and woe and old age and death. We are to look upon the face of God, the first time in human history, look upon the face of God. For it’s written, now He dwelleth in light unapproachable, to which no man can come or ever is able to come and nor can see him.

But then they are going to see Him, says the book of Revelation, and look on His face. That is an expansion of eternal life. Now we have eternal life in our bosoms. Then we will dwell in eternal life. Now we have, as it were, the little diamond of eternal light set in our heart. Then we shall dwell in a mansion of diamonds. Now we have a little bit of the blue sky of eternal life to gaze upon like a prisoner looking at the blue sky through a narrow window. Then there will be so much of it and we’ll be surrounded in it and we’ll swim in it and fly in it and live in it. Eternal life. We live in hope of eternal life, says Paul.

So, you see, my friends, the Bible doesn’t really contradict itself. It simply states a proposition. Then it states another proposition. And it gives us credit for having too much sense to get out on either end of the log and say, I believe this, and I believe this. The most pitiful thing I know is to see two saints sitting on the same log with their back to each other who won’t speak. One of them out on the end that says eternal life now. The other one out on the end that says hope of eternal life. If they would just get off that log and get a little perspective, they would see that both of those facts are true.

A Christian has eternal life now, but he doesn’t have all the eternal life there is now. He has the life of God in his soul, for Peter says that we have the very nature of God in our souls. That a Christian has now. So, when you hear a man in the mission tell the poor fellows from Skid Row, believe in Jesus Christ and you’ll have eternal life, they’re telling the truth. When you hear the serious Bible expositor saying we’re living in hope of eternal life to come, he’s telling the truth too. Only what they mean is that the believer gets eternal life now as a, what does Paul call it, foretaste, an earnest; and that earnest which we have now is the beginning.

It’s like this, it’s like this. Suppose that I were a rich man. That’s a supposition that’ll really strain your brain bad, but suppose that I were a rich man.

And suppose that I had a couple of million dollars salted away down here in the Continental Bank. And I’d say to a son, I only had one, that’s another supposition. And I’d say, son, you’re going to have this. I’m not going to be around long. I already begin to feel the tug of mother nature and I’ll be leaving it, and I can’t use it and I want you to have it. Here’s $10,000 to start. See if you can invest that well. See what you can do with it. I’d like to have the pleasure of seeing what you can do with it while I’m around. So I give him $10,000. But there’s still two million salted away and he says, here’s the will.

And he talks to his friend, and he says, my dad has just made me rich. I have money. I have money. Then the next breath he says, I’m in my father’s will. And when he dies, I’ll have money. And they say, well, now just a minute, you’re contradicting yourself. Now you say you have money. Now you say you’re going to have it. Now you say your father’s already given it to you. And the next breath you say you’re waiting on it. Which is true. Both are true.

And why should, why should they start two churches over that? But if they get together on that and understand what they mean. Now I say I have eternal life, thank God. And then the next breath, I say the gospel, which is in hope of eternal life. And people say, oh, there he goes again. Can’t understand the man. He contradicts himself.

There’s no contradiction there, my brethren. It is simply that you got to know what you mean. He has given us now a little earnest of what we’re to have, but the great glorious inheritance waits for us there. So, that’s why the Bible often talks about looking for eternal life and hoping unto eternal life. The righteous shall go away into eternal life, but eternal life is in the righteous now. The righteous has eternal life in Him, but he’s living in a world of death. Then he’ll not only have eternal life in him, but he’ll move into eternal life.

Well, I hope that that’s clear and that we’ll ask God to help us not to rule each other out, and not to close our minds. Keep your mind open. I know all the cracks that have been made about the open mind. They say that all these flies get into open vessels, and they have all sorts of things. That’s to excuse the fellow who hasn’t got moral courage enough to say, I don’t know.

But when the Lord lays down a fact, believe that fact. When the Lord lays down another fact that seems to contradict it, believe that fact. For they’re both true. And in a short time, you’ll see a third truth that’ll show how they both fit into each other.

So, we Christians have eternal life. Now that’s the thesis. We look forward to eternal life and that’s the contradictory thesis. But the synthesis is that that eternal life has two meanings. It has the meaning of what we have now. It has the meaning of what we’re going to have.

If any of you Christians think that what you have now is all God can do for you, you’re going to have to rethink this whole deal. Because the happiest Christian and the most holy Christian that ever lived is only a beginner. He’s just in the kindergarten, that’s all. He’s just playing on the shore with a sandbucket. There’s yet an ocean lying before him, an ocean of glorious truth and an ocean of riches which Christ has ready for him, yonder. So that eternal life which Paul talks about, says, in hope of eternal life. So, Paul didn’t contradict John after all. It is that toward which we look, and the hope of the church.

I had the pleasure last night, indeed, the pleasure last night of giving a talk to a Methodist church. Methodists they were, old Methodists. Some of those old Methodists. And I started to speak. They all sat there, and they said, who’s this whippersnapper? And I wondered if I was going to get past their guard. And then slowly, one at a time, I saw them melt up and their faces begin to lighten up. And pretty soon I was preaching to those old Methodists. Because I can quote about as much Methodism as any man who isn’t a Methodist, there is. And we Methodists got along beautifully well.

And I told them that we were sharers in a common hope. And they weren’t going to make any charts about it, nor fit Mussolini in. And I don’t know what to do with Khrushchev. He’d probably drink himself to death one of these days. But I don’t know what to do with all of this, this, all of this chirography and all that. Is that what you call making map making? I don’t even try to remember where any country is anymore. I quit 10 years ago. Because about the time I get it memorized, somebody comes in, takes it over and changes his name. You don’t know what anything is doing anymore, much.

But there is a God who has appointed the nations and who rules in the affairs of men. And you know what I believe? I believe that just as one time God looked down and saw some men busy building a tower. They were building a tower. God said, I’ve had enough of that. And he just went down and just made up the whole affair. Leveled their tower and confused their languages and said, I’ve had enough.

Do you know what I think? I may be wrong, but I think one of these days God’s going to look down and see all this hardware circulating around up there reflecting the light and beep, beep, beep, beeping. And God’s going to say, I’ve had enough of that. And he’s just going to wipe the whole mess out. I hope so. For when He does it, that will be what we’re looking for, the coming again of our Lord Jesus Christ unto eternal life. Not the eternal life we have now, but that vaster, deeper, grander eternal life which we’ll have when we arrive there.

Oh, sweet and blessed country, the hope of God’s elect. Oh, sweet and blessed country that eager hearts expect. Jesus in mercy bring us to that dear land of rest Who art with God the Father and Spirit ever blessed. Oh, sweet and blessed country, shall I ever see thy face? Oh, sweet and blessed country, shall I ever win thy grace? I have the hope within me to comfort and to bless. Shall I ever win the place itself? Oh, tell me, tell me, yes.

Then the old brother closes his hymn with a shout, exalt, oh, dust and ashes. The Lord shall be thy part, His only, His forever thou shalt be and art. That was the answer. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. An everlasting, eternal, yes. That sweet and blessed country under which we look, the eternal life, which is to come, which is one with the eternal life we have dwelling in our bosoms. As when the little lagoon suddenly fleshes over and joins the ocean, so all the little lagoons we call eternal life in men down here, deepest calling unto deep at the noise of God’s waterspouts.

And one of these times, all the little lagoons that we call Christians, little puddles of eternal life, so to speak, shall suddenly burst over their dikes and rush out to meet that great vast ocean of eternal life, which we call God. That’s what we hope for. So Paul says, unto the hope of eternal life, and he wasn’t contradicting John, he was just explaining John. Amen? Thank the Lord.

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Tozer Talks

“The Valley of Dry Bones”

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The Valley of Dry Bones

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

April 13, 1958

Quite a number of years ago, I got a sermon on the Valley of Dry Bones, an evangelistic sermon, and I preached it around over the country. I wouldn’t re-preach it here, but more recently I have been reading through Ezekiel, very carefully reading, and I saw a new thing in this chapter which doesn’t touch my previous sermon any, but it’s something different. I want to bring it to you tonight, and I particularly want to bring it, at the beginning of this missionary convention, to you, to the people of this church.

Let’s look at it together. Suppose you turn to Ezekiel 37 and suppose that we just read that together. Then if the sermon doesn’t turn out to be anything, at least we’ll have gotten the Word. Ezekiel 37, verses 1 to 10, don’t read beyond ten, and you come to that, and they stood on their feet an exceeding great army. There’s where we close.

The hand of the Lord, everybody, the hand of the Lord was upon me, and carried me out in the Spirit of the Lord, and set me down in the midst of a valley which was full of bones, and caused me to pass by them round about, and behold, there were very many in the open valley, and behold, they were very dry, and he said unto me, Son of man, can these bones live? And I answered and said, O Lord God, thou knowest.

Again, he said unto me, Prophesy upon these bones, and say unto them, O ye dry bones, hear the word of the Lord. Thus said the Lord God unto these bones, behold, I will cause breath to enter into you, and ye shall live, and I will lay sinews upon you, and will bring up flesh upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and ye shall live, and ye shall know that I am the Lord. So, I prophesied as I was commanded, and as I prophesied, there was a noise, and behold, a shaking, and the bones came together, bone to his bone, and when I beheld, O the sinews and the flesh came up upon them, and the skin covered them above, and there was no breath in them.

Then said he unto me, prophesy unto the wind, prophesy, Son of man, and say to the wind, thus said the Lord God, come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these things, that they may live. So, I prophesied as he commanded me, and the breath came into them, and they lived, and stood up upon their feet, and exceeding great army.

Father, we pray that Thou will take this old story and make it live in us today. Use it as a lever. Use it, we pray Thee, as a trumpet call. Use it as a signal light, we beseech Thee that we here, may tonight, get in communication with the same Spirit who uttered these words and caused them to be written. Breathe indeed, O Breath, upon us, for Christ’s sake, amen.

Now, the only fair thing to say would be that this prophecy is yet to be fulfilled. The restoration and salvation of Israel as a nation is yet in God’s agenda. He will yet bring it to pass. But its spiritual principles apply universally.

This is what so many of our brethren don’t see, that while a prophecy may have fulfillment somewhere historically yet out ahead, and while it may be pinpointed for accuracy as the prophecies that were fulfilled in Christ’s life were, the principles that underlie any prophecy apply anywhere, so with the Old Testament teachings. That is why Jesus, our Lord, and the Apostles did not hesitate freely to use the Old Testament in their teaching in the New.

Though they used prophecy and passages which the sharp-eyed expositor would say doesn’t belong to us, they used them freely. Apparently, they didn’t know they didn’t belong to us. They saw something that these expositors don’t see. They saw that God is the same God whatever dispensation he’s in, or whatever dispensation we’re in, and that whatever is a spiritual truth anywhere is always a spiritual truth anywhere.

Therefore, Christ and the apostles could, quote I say, freely from the prophecies of the Old Testament, or from Job, or from Proverbs, or from the Pentateuch, and applying it to the present kingdom of God, the church of Christ now, without in any wise apologizing, because they saw spiritual principles underlying.

Now, let’s look at this valley of dry bones. I went over it the other day on my knees, literally on my knees, and I had several versions propped around me, and I went from one to the other trying to see this picture again, and in seeing it I saw some things I hadn’t seen before. We’re all familiar with it. It was a kind of vision or a picture in the Spirit, for the man of God says, the hand of the Lord was upon me, and he carried me out in the Spirit of the Lord and set me down in the midst of the valley which was full of bones.

Now, I submit that that passage, being carried out in the Spirit of the Lord, makes this very difficult to find out whether this actually was a fact, a historic fact, or whether it was a vision, whether he was seeing something that would be. But, whichever, it doesn’t make any difference because this is God speaking and putting it before us is a kind of object lesson. And what he saw there was a valley. A valley, obviously a dry valley, and it was filled with bones. The bones must have been rather toward the center of the valley because the prophet was told to walk around them. He walked around them as Nehemiah once walked around Jerusalem.

God always wants his people to walk around the thing and look it over. I have been told, don’t pay any attention to circumstances. If you do, you don’t have faith. Just look at God. And I have had people pray and then say, Now, don’t pay any attention to symptoms. Just look to God. But God always wants us to take in the facts. God believes in a certain realism, and I do. I feel that until we have informed ourselves, our inspiration is very likely to be no more than emotion.

But when we have informed ourselves, have walked around Jerusalem and seen its tragic condition, or walked around the bones there in the valley, and to a Jew that was a terrible thing. And he walked around these bones, when the Bible says it’s almost comical if it was not in a very serious setting. And behold, they were very dry. That means, of course, that they were not the hard bone with the animal matter still in them.

But you’ve seen bones, no doubt. If you’re a countryman or have ever been much in the country, you’ve run onto bones that have been there so long that all the animal matter had gone out of it. Nothing was left but calcium and some other minerals that make up bones, and they’d all become porous. You’ve seen it, all porous. You used to see the skull of a beast lying, and we boys would kick it around, pick it up, light almost as a feather, and porous, so completely dry, that the only way to describe it is, behold, they were very dry.

And God said to the man, Ezekiel, can these bones live? Now, never in the experience of the man Ezekiel had there ever been a bone live. And of course, the answer would be no, but Ezekiel was a man of God. He had seen heaven opened, and he had seen the glory of God, and he had had the hand of the Lord laid on him until he felt it. And he had heard the word of the Lord whispering to him so clearly that he got every word of it. And Ezekiel, therefore, was, so to speak, not going to be caught unawares. So, he didn’t reply.

You remember when Jesus was on earth, He used to ask questions. And after His disciples had been with Him a while, at least if I’d been with Him a while, I’m sure I’d caught on that when the Lord was going to open up some new vest of truth, He turned and quietly asked a question. And He wanted to see who could get it, who was alert and awake there, ready to hear. He’d turn and say, Peter. And Peter would blunder out an answer, sometimes right, mostly wrong.

And this man of God was too spiritual a man, too sighted a man, to answer yes or no. If he’d answered yes, it would have been presumption. If he’d answered no, it would have been unbelief. So, he simply said, I’ll hand thee answer the question back. O Lord God, thou knowest.

Well, God said, thank you, Ezekiel. That warms my heart. Now I’ll tell you what to do. You begin to preach. In the beginning was the Word. Begin to preach. He upholds all things by the word of His power. He sent His Word and healed them. And when God speaks, there’s life and creative power in that word. So, he said, Ezekiel, you preach. And Ezekiel began to preach the Word of the Lord. And as he preached, there was a great rattling, and lo, bone came to his bone.

Now the difficulty before, you see, had been that they had lain there so long that the beasts had eaten everything off of them. And then the rodents had finished what the big beasts had left. And then the ants and the bugs had eaten what the little rodents missed. And then the microbes had rotted away what the insects had missed. And then they had been tugged and pulled by the jackals and lions. They’d been tugged and pulled till the bone was not to its bone. They were all mixed up.

And I used to preach about that as a picture of a sinner. And I think it is a pretty good picture of a sinner. It’s a picture of some churches. Bone isn’t to his bone. Everything’s confusion. We’re all mixed up. Big bone here, fastened to a little bone. And they don’t match. But when the word of God began to sound, bone came to his bone.

Now it’s hard to keep from thinking of this humorously because it was an odd and a strange sight. But all the little bones went where the little people were. And all the big ones where the big people were. And everybody got back to where he’d originally been.

And then that wasn’t enough. There they were. There they were, lying dry. Bones where bones belong. But they were still dry and dead. And the man of God went on preaching. And as he preached, he saw flesh begin to build up over those bones. Then skin began to pull up over the flesh. And he went on preaching and said, O Breath, breathe on these. It took the Holy Spirit to finish the work. And when the Holy Spirit had breathed on it, theologically sound, that’s getting your bones together. That’s theology.

And you know my friends, I can’t resist saying, though that’s not part of this sermon, that’s part of the other one. But I can’t resist saying that that’s the trouble with a lot of our churches that we’ve got our bones together and we spend a lifetime keeping our bones in the right places. theological bones, that is. We’re theologically sound. Bone gets to its bone. And we have men who spend a lifetime matching bones. And seeing that this text belongs with this text and this marginal reference here belongs here. And they write books and write hot magazine articles and all the rest. Getting bone to his bone.

But you know you can have a church that’s got its bones all right. And its bone is on bone and everything is all right. And God himself couldn’t improve it as far as its theology is concerned. And yet it can be just as dead as a graveyard. And it was. But slowly the flesh built up. But that wasn’t enough. They were lying there still dead.

And God said, oh, you preach a little more now. Preach a little deeper life this time now. Preach, O Breath of God, come and breathe. And when the Holy Ghost came and breathed on their theology and breathed on their organization then they stood up a great army and began to march.

Now that’s the principle. There it lies. That’s good anywhere. Old Testament, New Testament anywhere that’s good. Just as good in Vietnam. Just as good in India as it is in Chicago, around the world, the way God works. But I want you to know, here note; hear what God commanded Ezekiel to do, and this is really the sermon. What God commanded Ezekiel to do. He commanded Ezekiel to do an unusual thing, but that’s not enough. And then He commanded him to do an absurd thing and then commanded him to do an impossible thing. And these three things, these three adjectives, unusual, absurd, and impossible that lay before the man Ezekiel.

And here we are coming into our 36th missionary convention. And there’s no use to hide behind and say let’s not talk about it. We’ll talk up a depression. We won’t talk up any depression. We will just say that we’re having a recession. And we will also say that this church has undergone some tremendous blows in the last two years such as we never dreamed could happen to us in losses. Nobody got mad and walked out but they moved out. Moved away.

And when I see them, they run and grab me as if I was their long-lost cousin but they’re gone. This town or that town or somewhere else and we lost them by the scores. Somebody says well that church is in a mess of dry bones over there. It could be. But I’ve got a cure for it and I’m going to lay it before you tonight and I’m going to challenge you if you’re still challengeable. Now if you aren’t challengeable, I’d like to have you come around one at a time shake my hand and tell me so because I won’t waste my time on people that aren’t challengeable. But he said do the unusual thing.

Now mostly, God’s work follows a common pattern. You can get on to the way God works pretty well, usually you can, because God being God and God having a nature that dictates His, to use an awful word. I don’t like methodology, his methods of doing things. God is very likely to do two things in the same way and a third thing the same way he did the two. God’s work usually, is usual, if you know what I mean. But unusual conditions require unusual acts and Ezekiel faced the unusual.

Here was a valley full of human bones and they’d been lying there unblessed and unburied and un-coffined and unhealed. And they’d been lying there so long that they were so dead that, and so mixed up, literally mixed up, bone on bone, all mixed up, churned by the passing of time. It looked hopeless and yet God commanded this man Ezekiel after seeing if he was His man. If Ezekiel had flunked God’s test when God said, Ezekiel, can these bones live, that was his test.

You may be getting a test this week. I hope you don’t flunk it. God doesn’t say, now, next week, we’ll have a test and here’s what we’ll cover. God just slips in and gives a test as He did to Abraham and many another one, and they don’t know they’re being tested. Some of you may be tested this week by some little word one of these missionaries will say or some paragraph some sentence uttered by Dr. Alan Fleece. It’ll be your test. I only hope you’re alert and awake. I only hope that you won’t be asleep at the time, or mentally in a state of suspension.

So, this was an unusual thing and now it’s a great weakness on the part of religious people that we get used to the usual and we accept it as all-inclusive, and we expect God whenever He does anything to do it the way we had seen Him do it before.

I was talking to that great English evangelist Stephen Olford in New York City last week; we had lunch together. And he said, you know the trouble with us evangelists is, he took himself in on it, he said, we try to transplant a work of God from one country to another. He said it’s been done this way in Korea. It’s been done this way in England. It’s been done this way in Ireland Then they come from Ireland or England, and they try to superinduce that same kind of revival in America and it rarely works. I’ve never known it to work.

He’s one of England’s greatest evangelists and yet he admits, he said there’s no use. We were discussing a great Irish preacher that Thomas here could tell stories about him as I can and as most everybody can that ever heard of him, Brother Nicholson. He was the great evangelist in Ireland. But in this country, things didn’t go so well. You can’t enter an unusual situation and do the usual thing, and yet, we expect God always to work the usual way, and we reject whatever varies from it.

Now, this is one of the afflictions of advancing years. This is one of the afflictions of a society that starts to get old. The Christian Missionary Alliance is now an old society. We’re up in the 80s. Now, I learned in New York at the board meeting last week that we have to have 20 replacements, 20 new missionaries each year to hold our own. The reason for that is that our missionary society is old enough now so, that retirements and deaths and illnesses are so many that it averages out 20 a year. Just to keep our own, we’d have to send out 21 missionaries every year if we were going to even increase one a year. Now there’s nothing wrong with that. People do get old. Missionaries get old. They get old and have to come home because they’re sick and weary or else they just downright die.

Now, that doesn’t happen to a young society for the first 25 years of a missionary society, scarcely anybody dies unless they die as they did in our African fields of malaria. They don’t die or retire because they’re very young like a ball club. Some ball clubs I’ve been reading; I never attend the games, but sometimes I’ll read the sports page, and they say, well, Brooklyn is old. Brooklyn won’t make it because they’ve got too many old men on the team, and by old men they mean men your age, not 45 and 6, and they don’t mean old fellas like me. They mean fellas in their 30s, middle 30s. And they say they’re old.

Well, my brethren, a missionary society can do the same thing. It can get old and begin to die and retire. And churches can do the same. This church is about 36 about 38 years old now, and that means we’ve literally buried a generation of our people, literally buried a generation of our people, and we who are left of the older generation, that’s those of you whose silver hair or grey or white hair, I mean black hair has turned to silver. You’ve gotten used to things being done a certain way, and that you have equated with the Bible; and Dr. Simpson and John Wesley and everybody to a point where to vary from that is to be unbiblical and unspiritual.

Now that can become a dangerous thing. Churches die that way, my brother. Churches die that way. That’s why it’s always good to keep putting young blood into a church, getting young people in positions; getting people who see from a different angle. We tend to go to church and sit down and look at the same, from the same direction.

Now there’s some of you that have never occupied a different seat in the last 15 years. You sit in the same part of the church except on those rare occasions when your seat has been taken. Some of you have never seen the left side of my face yet. You sit on the right side, and you have come, you have come to feel that that’s the religious thing to do, and you have equated that with spirituality and New Testament doctrine.

Well, that’s what we call getting in a rut, and you know what a rut is, brother, it’s a circular grave. It is a grave in which you walk around until you beat it down until finally you can’t see over. And when you can’t see over, they usually retire. But it’s too we don’t retire before we get so far down in. That’s our problem now, rejecting what is not usual and fearing the unusual. And yet, here was God calling a man to do that which positively was not usual. The usual thing to do would be to bury those old bones, but the Holy Ghost had another plan. He wanted to resuscitate them, resurrect them, put flesh on them, skin on them, breathe in them, and have them start all over again, when the devil thought he had them.

Then the second thing was getting worse all the way. It was absurd there’s no question about it. This was an absurd thing, and yet I learned from reading church history that oftentimes God causes men to do things that seem ridiculous, they just don’t check, you know. We have rules in every society and church. We have rules in the Alliance that they’ve got to be a certain age and have a certain number of children. If you have more than a certain number of children, you can’t go. But I’m glad we still have spirituality enough to wink and break our rules when they get in our way.

We did it last week. Here was a fine young couple. They were going to one of our fields; they were all set to go. She was brilliant and he was just bordering on something unusual. We were going to send them; they had two babies and then they got a letter up at headquarters and said there’s another one on the way. What are we going to do? Does this mean that we won’t get to the field. Does this mean now that we’re sunk? And those men had enough spirituality to break the rules and appoint them to the field with three kids.

Now that looked absurd, I know. It does to send folks out there with a family so big that the mother has little else to do but to look after them. But I believe God was in that instance. It’s the same with age. We had an age, thirty years, and nobody goes out over thirty. It’s strange how we do, twist and wiggle calendars when people get up around. We want them on the field and God has honored it. The absurd thing: send anybody beyond thirty to a mission field looks ridiculous because after you’ve talked English for thirty years, your tongue is so Englishized and Americanized that it’s pretty hard to get it twisted around any other language. Yet, some of our greatest missionaries have gone out there when they were above thirty. We break our rules and thank God we still have spirituality enough to do absurd things now.

And then I remember some years ago, a woman applied to the Alliance to get out on the field, and they turned her down. She’s too old. I think she was forty some at the time. They always said, we can’t send old people to the field. And they supplied around here and there. Nobody wanted her, so she went anyhow. I forget that woman’s name. She went down to South America. Brother Thomas no doubt knows who that was, but she went down to South America. And though she was what would be called, middle aged, she got that language. And when I knew her, she was quite an old lady. And she’d had twenty or some years down there of wonderful fruitful service.

It’s absurd to send anybody to a mission field after a certain age, but sometimes the Holy Ghost says to some man, can these bones live. And if you’re a Bible student you tell God. But you know, if you’re a theologian, you tell God off right there, yes or no. You can tell, you know where the text is.

But if you’re a prophet you’ll listen and wait for God to tell you. And Ezekiel was a prophet, so he didn’t try to pin God down to the King James Version. He said O Lord God, you know I don’t know about these bones. You’ve been around longer than I have, God, the Heart from eternity, Thou knowest. And God says, yes, they can live if you will work with me, preach. So, sometimes God does absurd things.

I mentioned this morning about that man fifty-five or six years old that had a bad heart and diabetes, and his friend said, retire. And he said, I’ll retire. And he put on four more wheels and more and more tires and went on. That was Jaffrey.

And you will find God doing these things right along, absurd things. But what is an absurdity? It is that which doesn’t fit in with our pattern of thinking. But God says the gospel itself is absurd. He says the gospel itself is foolishness unto men. And all these modern intellectuals that are trying to show how reasonable the gospel is don’t know what the gospel is. The gospel is one of the most unreasonable things in the world, and yet in God, from God’s standpoint, it’s perfectly reasonable, but seen from our fallen world it’s an unreasonable thing. And those wise intellectual Greeks, they laughed at it. They said it’s foolishness. And the Jews with the theologians, stumbled over it, but Christ said it’s the power of God and the wisdom of God to them that believe. There’s nothing absurd about it but just looks that way.

Now, here we are 36 years, we’ve been around here. I have not been, but this church has been, and we’ve gone through the ringer. Somebody says, all right now, what are we going to do? We’re going to do unusual things this year, and we’re even going to do absurd things, and things that the world will look at us and say what a bunch of fools those alliance people are. That’s the best news I could possibly hear then, the impossible.

Now this was impossible, medical science; no science of any sort, anywhere, could ever have gotten those bones back on their feet. And the greater the work and the nearer to being impossible, the more pleasure God has in doing it apparently. The history of the church is replete with impossibilities, literally replete with impossibilities, God simply fills His history with impossibilities, because you know, ultimately the work of God is creative. Here was nothing. Here was nothing and God spake and there was something. And then here was darkness upon the face of the deep, and a voice said, let there be light, and instantly there was light possible. But there was light impossible.

There was light, and here was a maiden. They don’t know how old; some say fourteen or fifteen. I would judge she’d be older. I would think that the little Mary was older. I’d say she’s nineteen maybe. And she was there praying, looking up to her heavenly father and a voice said, Mary, don’t be afraid. I’ve come to tell you something you’re going to have a son, and she was shocked. She said, oh no, oh no, impossible. This is impossible. And God said in effect, don’t say it’s impossible. Behold, the Holy One, the Mighty One, the Spirit, trust God.

So, Jesus was born, and Elizabeth so old, and God appeared to her and appeared to the old man first, that you’re going to have a son. He said, how will I know these things are so? What a stupid thing to say for a creature, but that’s what he said, how will I know these things are so. And Gabriel leaned back on his dignity and said, I am Gabriel, why should you be asking me how can it be? You’ll be struck dumb until the baby is born and never opened his mouth again until the baby was born. And they named him when they said, what are we going to name him? He opened his mouth and said, John, and everybody said he’s seen a vision. And this is God.

Well, the whole Bible is full of impossibilities and God is the God of impossibilities. But I want to point out something else to you here. It is that on the part of Ezekiel, God can do the unusual and the absurd and the impossible, but on the part of Ezekiel, there had to be clear hearing and deep humility and raw courage and great faith. Now there’s a sermon if anybody wants it. You can have it. It’s not copyrighted.

But on the part of Ezekiel there had to be clear hearing When you’re expecting to hear a thing you don’t have to have such good hearing, if you’re expecting to hear it. Your decibel count can be very low, and you’ll still hear it, because you’re expecting to hear it. But when you’re not expecting to hear a thing, it takes a pretty sharp ear to get it. And Ezekiel had that kind of ear. He’d been in the presence of God and seen God lifted up and had heard God speak until his ears were tuned to hear God’s voice. And he had to know it was God’s voice and not some other voice, because there are all kinds of voices Paul said in the world. It had to be clear hearing and there had to be deep humility.

I’ve been struck as I read the Old Testament, Jeremiah, Ezekiel. I’ve been reading it devotionally again and going through it and I’ve got this. I go through my Bible that way all the time. But this time, I’ve been through Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel and Daniel and it’s amazed me how God has humbled most of his servants. He’s made them do things that look kind of ridiculous. And this was that ridiculous thing.

Now, if He had placed before Ezekiel a great congregation of men and said, Ezekiel, preach the Word to them, that would have been proper. Nobody would have been humbled. It would have been alright. But He took him before these bones and said, Ezekiel, preach. The bones there, wasn’t even an ear there. The ears had been chewed off long ago, dried away. And it took a lot of humility on the part of this man of God to do something that that was just plain silly, but he did it. And when he did it, God took over. It takes clear hearing and then deep humility to obey God.

Think of Elijah when God said to him, go down by the creek Cherith, and he preached and said there will be no rain. And God said go down by the creek and I’ll give you water from the creek. And pretty soon, the water began to dry up. Elijah had preached himself out of water for he had said there will be no rain, and the creek had to have rain to keep going. And the thing had to keep going to give water to the prophet and here was the prophet. What a confusion he was in. He wouldn’t have passed if he’d had to make a report to the Superintendent. It would have been a pretty bad report.

Why he would have said, excuse me, Mr. Superintendent, but this is an awful report. I said there would be no rain and God said you drink water, and now I have no water. And when he went down the last time and saw a red lizard sunning himself, for where the water had been, he looked up to Him and said, God, what about this? God said, Elijah, you’re too big. I’m trying to make you little, to use you. Elijah I’ve got to humble you. Elijah I’ve got to humble you. And this Elijah took his humbling, and then later on here this great, bony mountaineer from the heights of mountains, God said to him, go over to a certain village and a widow woman will feed thee.

Now, some people don’t mind living off a widow woman, but brother, you get out among the country people, and you won’t find them wanting to live off a widow woman. And I’m sure Elijah being the kind of man he was, was deeply humbled by having to go and ask for a crust from a widow woman. God made him do it. He made him do it.

I’ve always been so independent about financial things that rather than take a dime too much, I’d toss it back with a red face at a fellow. But you know, before I die, God may have to make me swallow all that. It could be I’ll be out with my hat and my wife. I don’t know, but I do know that God wants to take all of the pride out of you and he took it all out of the man Ezekiel.

Then he had to have a lot of raw courage. It doesn’t take very much courage to do what everybody’s doing. You know, a lot of these preachers and evangelists go around over the country, and they have learned the public pulse. They know how to approach the public. They just know about how much they’ll get in a given place. And they say they’re living by faith, and they’re not living by faith at all. They’re living by expectation based upon knowledge. That’s what it is literally. A fellow says, oh, I have no salary. I trust the Lord, but he takes his offerings when he goes to a town. He calls the right people.

When I go into a town, I wouldn’t call a soul, because I’ve got too much pride. But these brethren, they don’t. And so, they go in and they call somebody, and they say it’s faith. It’s not faith if I come back into Chicago, if I were to leave here and come back and call up Chase. And he’d come to the airport to get me take me out for five-dollar dinner, that wouldn’t be faith. That would be crust. And a lot of people, a lot of preachers just live on sheer crust. They’ve got no pride, just crust.

But it takes an awful lot of courage to do things when there’s no example and nobody around you can count on. You know, a preacher can beat his Bible till he breaks the binding declaring that he’s trusting God, amen, all the time. He’s got it figured out. He knows how much he’ll get, about how much, if it doesn’t rain of course. If it rains it ruins the offering, but he’ll make that up the next time. And we’ve figured out the public, and we run according to what we know the public will do, and then we call that faith. It’s not faith. I say it’s expectation based upon observation.

But Ezekiel hadn’t anything to observe. Nobody had ever done this before. Here was a man, talk about original. This fellow had to be original, because nobody else had ever been there before, except rats. And it took raw courage, I tell you, to do what God told him to do, without a single example or a friend or anybody anywhere. It took great faith. He had to expect an awful lot of God. No religious tricks would work here, you know. We learn religious tricks. I won’t use them. If I know that I’m using them, I won’t use them. But I see them everywhere.

People use religious tricks, you know, just how to lower their voice at the right moment, just what to say, just when to introduce a certain story. It’s worked before and of course it’ll work here but there weren’t any religious tricks among those bones there was nothing you could do; no psychology, no positive thinking, no calling in the mayor to make the opening speech. That’s the way we do now. We call in the mayor to make the opening speech, and then the chairman gets up and says the mayor sends his regrets that he was not able to be here, but he sent so-and-so. And then some alderman makes the speech and we’ve seen that happen so often.

But nobody could work any gag like that here. It was either God or complete defeat for a man to stand up there and practice preaching a sermon to a pile of bones without a precedent, without a friend, without anybody even to say, amen. Nobody to help him there. He stood preaching to bones. That took raw courage, and he had to depend on God an awful lot. Listen to me, in the beginning of a missionary society or denomination, the leaders are thrown back upon God by the hostility of the public and by the fact that they’ve had a spiritual experience. And the public throws them back on God then, when they go on and get organized and get going according to the rules of the game and get their little black books of regulations.

Then instead of turning to God, they turn to gimmicks. It’s happened in every denomination. You say, is it happening in the Alliance? Don’t look at me. Of course it is. I used to call a night of prayer and get through to God, and now we turn to gimmicks here and there. Ezekiel hadn’t a gimmick, not one. Nothing would work there; psychology, how can you work psychology on a bone?

Psychology, by the very definition of the term, has to have the mind and soul. There’s no soul there, no mind there, no place for a mind—bones. But the text I used the last two Sunday nights I preached here was the text, but wisdom is justified of her children, and I can use it again. Here all this looked ridiculous, and all this was a humbling of a great man, but it was justified in the outcome. Lo, they stood up on their feet, a great army.

Now, what I want to know tonight is, are you hearing anything? Have you been hearing anything, or must I make the application? Ezekiel is speaking to us here in this church now. Out of the past, Ezekiel is alive again speaking to us out of the past. Or better, the God of Ezekiel is speaking to us out of the eternal present and is saying, I’m the God of Ezekiel. I’m the God of Elijah. I’m the God of Daniel. I’m the God of the impossible. I’m the God of miracles.

Now, are we going to sit down and nurse our wound? Lick them, and each look at the other and shake a mournful head or are we going to look to God and go ahead. I believe we’re going to go ahead. And I call you, I call you to go ahead. I don’t mean I’m preaching to bones; I well know better. But I’m saying there are principles here that apply to this church, this thirty-sixth anniversary, thirty-sixth convention and we ought to apply it. As soon as you hear somebody say oh but wait.

But you say, wait a minute, the Lord God of Ezekiel is here. The Lord God of Ezekiel and there never was a bone so dry that the breath of the Holy Ghost won’t wake it up. And there never was a life so empty that the Holy Ghost can’t fill it. And there never was a life so impure that the Holy Ghost can’t cleanse it. And there never was a church that fought tough enough, that if they stuck together and prayed and obeyed God, God wouldn’t bring them out to victory. And He’ll do it for us. Not only this convention, but for the future that lies just before us.

So, let’s not worry. Let’s make our pledges. Let’s plunge in. Let’s do the absurd thing. Let’s do the impossible thing. For God Almighty specializes in impossibilities, and who are we but the children of God. And if we’re indwelt by the mighty Christ who commanded the waves to be still and the winds to be silent, He’ll carry us through. And if anybody tries to put a purple wreath around your neck, you toss that wreath away and say, I’m not wearing graveyard wreaths. I’m believing God and that the God who started us here 37 or so years ago, hasn’t left us yet, and He’s with us and we’re going forward, not back. Amen?

All right I want to ask our district superintendent who carries this work on his heart along with all other, to come down here. We’re going to stand. I’m going to ask our brother Thomas to lead us in prayer and to pray that God will so fill us with hope and faith and courage and expectation, that we’ll stand up and march, a great army.

Let us stand.

Tags Dry Bones, Ezekiel, Preaching

Messages

Tozer Talks

Post author By pshappard
Post date October 6, 2024

“The Theology of Revelation”

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The Theology of Revelation

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

March 22, 1959

Have you noticed in the book of Revelation that we’ve been dealing with, have you noticed how much theology there is in it? Some people have the idea that the book of Revelation is a rather strange, forced book of odd beings and strange creatures, but have you noticed as we went along here how many of the great doctrines of the faith are here? They’re taught, they’re taken for granted, they’re assumed, they’re referred to, they’re interwoven, they’re built in, they’re here, the great doctrines of the faith.

Now in that fifth chapter, beginning with verse 7, it says, And He came and took the book out of the right hand of Him that sat on the throne, He and Him, He being the Lamb and Him being God the Father. And when He had taken the book, the four beasts and four and twenty elders fell down before the Lamb, having every one of them harps and golden vials full of odors, which are the prayers of saints.

And they sung a new song, saying, Thou art worthy to take the book, and to open the seals thereof, for thou hast slain and hast redeemed us to God by thy blood out of every kindred and tongue and people and nation. And hast made us unto our God-kings and priests, and we shall reign on the earth. And I beheld and I heard the voice of many angels round about the throne and the beasts and the elders, and the number of them was ten thousand times, ten thousand and thousands of thousands, saying with a loud voice, worthy is the Lamb that was slain, to receive power and riches and wisdom and strength and honor and glory and blessing.

And every creature which is in heaven and on the earth and under the earth, and such as are in them, heard it saying, blessing and honor and glory and power be unto Him that sitteth upon the throne and unto the Lamb forever. The four beasts said, Amen. And the four and twenty elders fell down and worshipped Him that liveth forever and ever.

As I have pointed out before, these two chapters are one. This section of Scripture begins, after this I looked, and behold a door standing open in heaven. The first voice which I had heard was the voice of a trumpet talking with me. It said, Come up hither. Immediately I was in the spirit, and behold a throne set in heaven, and One sat on the throne.

The whole universe is in view, as I have pointed out, and the three divisions of moral creatures is before us here. For moral creatures are divided into three sections, three divisions, the unfallen, the fallen and unredeemed, and the fallen and redeemed. These are the three sections. There are the unfallen creatures. They know nothing at all about sin, because they have never sinned. They know not the joy of forgiveness, for they have never been forgiven. But they are there, ecstatically happy in the presence of God, unfallen creatures.

Then there are the fallen ones that are not redeemed and never will be. Potentially they were. For I believe, along with the man who wrote the song, Lord, I believe, were sinners more than sands upon the ocean shore. Thou hast for all redemption paid, for all a full atonement made. But they take no advantage of it, and so they are fallen creatures and remain fallen.

Then there are the redeemed who were fallen but are redeemed and saved. They are ransomed and brought out from their fallen state. There are the three divisions of the world. You will never find any other kind of people or creatures anywhere in the universe. You will never run into any creatures anywhere that do not fall into one of those three categories.

Now, right at the center of all this is the Holy Trinity. The whole universe is there in view, and the Holy Trinity is in the center. In chapter 4, the Eternal Father is prominent as Creator, and that is as it should be, because the Bible begins with the well-known words, In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. That is repeated and told over and over again.

It is wonderful how the Bible says the same thing over and over again, and yet you don’t get tired of it. You find it said in a different way, and it is the same thing, but still, it sounds fresh and new. It is like a day. You don’t get tired of the day because the day shifts and changes. It is light, and then it is noonday, and then it is long shadows, and then darkness, and then the sky above, and then the moon and the sun, and later in the morning the sun rising, and the stars the next night, and clouds this day.

So, God keeps the same universe revolving around about us, our familiar little world that we know, and yet a man has to be pretty sick and pretty mentally dull to find the world dull. I don’t find the world dull at all. I find that this is a most interesting world, and you find the word like that. In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

Now, that ought to do, because that says that, and there it is, and God wrote that, and that settles it, and that ought to be enough, but not God. God likes to take the golden threads of truth and weave a thousand, thousand kinds of tapestries using the same threads but getting a different picture each time, and yet the pictures are very much alike. The Eternal Father is here, and it’s said that He created. Psalms 102, for instance, Thou of old has laid the foundations of the earth, and the heavens are the work of Thine hands.

And the church has celebrated the Creating Father. You know that old creed, I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible. And here in Revelations 4, here’s the picture, they’re worshiping the Eternal Father. It says, They rest not day and night. Why, we’ve gotten to a state in our country where people feel that if they go to church once a week it’s enough, and if they go to church twice a week, they ought to have a crown. But it says here, they rest not day and night.

You know, the world has missed it. It’s missed it all together. Lent is supposed to be long enough to be serious about religion, and when you die, when you get married, or when the baby’s born. Outside of that, we’re not supposed to take the whole thing too seriously. But they take it seriously all the time. They rest not day and night, and say, Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty, which was and is and is to come.

And here’s why they worship Him. Thou art worthy, O Lord. Now remember, that’s the Father. Thou art worthy, O Lord, to receive glory and honor and power, because Thou hast created all things, and for Thy pleasure they are, were, and are created. So, we have here the Eternal Father, prominent as the Creator, and the creatures of all kinds acknowledging this and celebrating it.

Then there’s the Eternal Son, prominent in redemption. Revelation 5, 7 says that He took the book, and they worshiped Him, and they said, Thou art worthy to take the book, for Thou wast slain and hast redeemed us to God. And the Church all down the years has worshiped the Eternal Son for redeeming that which the Eternal Father had created, but which in the wisdom and long suffering of the Father had been permitted to rebel.

And the Church has worshiped Him, and that same creed that I quoted goes on to say, And I believe in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of the Father, and continue to worship Him. And in the old Latin song that we have in English, it says, Thou art the King of glory, O Christ, thou art the everlasting Son of the Father. Thou sittest at the right hand of God in glory everlasting.

Now I want to tell you that it’s impossible to overpraise Jesus Christ. It’s possible to become a religious fanatic. It’s entirely possible to overdo something and get one string and twang on that until you lose your hearing. People aren’t listening to you, and they run when they see you coming, if you’re layman.

And if you’re a preacher, they just stay away in droves, because they don’t want to hear that. You say it too much, you repeat it too often, it becomes monotonous. But there is one theme that the Church has always majored on, and when she’s majored on it the most, she has been the purest. And when she has preached it the most vigorously, she has been the most active and most wonderful, and that is the glory of the Eternal Son.

It is impossible to praise the Lord Jesus Christ too much. You can go back into the Old Testament, and you find him there. You find Him before you have gone three verses into the book of creation. You find Him in Exodus as the Lamb, and you find Him in Numbers as the Star that shone on Israel and the Scepter that rose above Judah. And you’ll find him in every book of the Bible down the way through, even in the salty, stodgy book of Proverbs.

You’ll run on to Him there, rejoicing with the sons of men, being as ancient as the Father. And you’ll find Him in the Psalms, in Isaiah, in Jeremiah, in Ezekiel, in Hosea, in Daniel, in Amos, and all the rest, down to the end of the Old Testament when the man of God named Malachi saw Him coming, saw Him sitting as a—what did he call him there in the last of Malachi? Brother McAfee sings it sometimes. He says, He shall sit as a refiner and purifier of silver, and he shall purify the sons of Levi.

Behold, I send my messenger before thee, and who shall abide the day of His coming? He is found all down through the Old Testament, and He is found, of course, in the New. Try this sometime as an exercise in futility. Try reconstructing the New Testament with Jesus Christ left out of it. Just try that. Try putting the New Testament together and not having the Lord Jesus in it. Try finding only the Father in it. Try finding only history there. Try finding only philosophy there. Try putting the New Testament together.

Go through in your memory, in your mind, and think, now, let’s see, where could I start? And just for the sake of it, I’m going to rule Christ out of the New Testament. You won’t have any New Testament at all. Do you know that? You won’t have any New Testament. You will find either Christ is in it or there’s no New Testament there. It starts back there in Matthew, and in that very first chapter of Matthew, it tells us about him.

The very first chapter starts out by saying the book of the generation of Jesus Christ. One, two, three, four, five, six words, and then comes the name of Jesus Christ. And all the way through, it is the same. He’s everywhere. He’s in all of this. Nobody can write a letter. Nobody can make a speech. Nobody can offer prayer. Nobody can see a vision. Nobody can be caught into the Spirit, but Jesus Christ is there.

It’s Christ all the way through. It’s impossible to overpraise Christ. And the church that is dedicated to the glory of the eternal sun can go through hell and high water and terror and fears and storms and shipwrecks and still come through whole alive and clinging together and will find her feet and get on and get going again. She’ll never perish as long as Jesus Christ is in the middle.

It’s an ominous thing that when Jesus threatened to remove a church’s candlestick, he threatened it on the grounds that your love for Me is not as great as it used to be. He said, you have lost your first love. And everybody knows that doesn’t mean first in time, it means first in degree. They got so busy and so active and so theological and so social that they were doing everything but one thing, and that was they were losing, they weren’t keeping up their love for Jesus Christ the Lord.

So, if you’re going to be an extremist, be an extremist on the right thing. If you’re going to play one tune, get the right tune. If the church is going to go too far in anything, let it go too far in that, for you can’t go too far in glorifying the person of the Son. It’s impossible, I say once more, to overpraise him.

Well, then, the Spirit is also prominent here in these chapters, in front of this throne, for the three persons are of one substance and having identical attributes. What you can say about the Father and the Son, you can say about the Holy Spirit. You can say that the Father is eternal, but you can say that He’s the Eternal Spirit. And you can say that the Son is eternal.

You can say that the Father is uncreated, and you can say that the Son is uncreated, but you can also say that the Spirit is uncreated. You can say that the Father is holy, and you can properly say that Holy Thing which shall be born of Thee shall be called the Son of God. And you can also say the Holy Ghost. So, you’ll find the attributes that belong to the Father also belong to the Spirit and to the Son. So, the Spirit is here.

You have the Trinity before that throne, on that throne. You have the Trinity. And the acts of God are attributed to all three persons. This may confuse some people. I talked on the Trinity one time, and some Bible teacher told me I made it sound as if there were three gods. He was just tired, because I’m sure I wasn’t that dumb. I’m sure that I didn’t do it that badly. The truth is that there are not three gods, there’s one God. There is the Father, Son, and the Holy Ghost, yet there are not three Fathers, and there are not three Sons, nor three Holy Spirits, but One.

And if you notice in the creation that the Father is more prominent than the Son or the Spirit, but the Son is also said to create. In Colossians 1, Paul celebrates Jesus Christ, Who is the image of the invisible God, by Whom, that is, by Jesus, all things were created in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones or dominions or principalities and powers, He created them. But it had said the Father created them, of course.

And then you’ll find in the 102nd Psalm, Thou sendest forth thy Spirit, and they are created. So, we have creation attributed to all three persons of the Trinity. Is there confusion there? No, there’s identity, not confusion. The reason the Bible can say that the Father created the heaven and the earth, the Son created the heaven and the earth, and the Spirit created the heaven and the earth, is that the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit never work separately. They work together because they are One, eternally One.

And then there’s the incarnation. It says, The power of the Most High shall be upon you, the Spirit shall come upon you, and that holy thing shall be called the Son of God. The Father and the Spirit and the Son of God were at work in the incarnation. Again, in the baptism, I have pointed out before, in other contexts, that when Jesus was baptized, we have the Trinity simultaneously present.

It says that the Spirit came out of heaven, the Son came out of the water, and the voice of God spoke from above, saying, this is my beloved Son. So, we have in the baptism of Jesus all three persons simultaneously present. And you’ll find also in the atonement that the Scripture says that He, Jesus, the Son, offered Himself through the Eternal Spirit without spot unto the Father God. We have all three persons there working together.

The resurrection of Christ is attributed to all three persons of the Trinity. The Father is said to have raised His Son. This Jesus, whom he crucified, has God raised up. But it also, Jesus said, destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up. And it’s also written in Romans 1:4 that it was through the Eternal Spirit that He was raised.

And then in salvation, Peter tells us that the three persons work in salvation, that it’s through the election of God and through the sanctifying of the Spirit and the cleansing of the blood that salvation comes. And in John 14, it tells us of the indwelling. We will come unto Him and make our abode with Him. Don’t be afraid of a plural pronoun before the Deity. Jesus used it. Jesus said, I will send another Comforter, and He will be with you, and the Father will come, and We will dwell with Him and dwell in Him.

So, we have the three Persons here, the three Persons simultaneously present, working and laboring. And while the Father is more prominent in the creation, the Son and the Spirit are there also. And while the Son is more prominent in redemption, the Father and the Spirit are there also. While the Spirit is more prominent in conviction and regeneration, the Father and the Son are not absent.

Now, here we have in this chapter that I have read, the part that I have read, in you hearing the general assembly. Presbyterians have what they call the general assembly. I’m sorry they took it. I’d like to have that. You know, I’d like to call the brethren together and say, let’s have a general assembly. I like that expression. I like some of those big, booming, rumbling, musical, organ-toned expressions the church uses down the centuries. And one of them has been the general assembly.

Well, here is the general assembly, my brother, chapters 4 and 5. Here are the four living creatures, and here are the 24 elders. You know, your associate pastor and I don’t agree on who the 24 elders are, but we’ve not been fighting about it. He’s still been wheeling me around in that glorified kiddy car of his. We’ve been having a good time together, but he believes they’re the prime ministers of the universe.

And you know, I was sitting in Brother Brian’s study the other day over in Toledo while the preliminaries are going on, and I was hearing over the loudspeaker, the missionary talk, and also thinking of my sermon and also looking at books. I can do all three of those things.

And I pulled down a translation, and it said, you know what it said, and I reacted from that something terrible. It said, and when He had taken the book, the four beasts and the four and twenty senators fell down before the Lamb. Yeah? Senators. I’ve had enough senators, you know, and I don’t want any more of these senators. But somebody thought that they were senators, four and twenty senators. Well, it says elders here, and elders, those are good words, Old Testament and New Testament words, and they refer to the leaders of the redeemed.

And then there were angels, and how many angels? You notice how many angels it says, that there are ten thousand times ten thousand. There’s a hundred million to start with, and thousands of thousands, and every thousand, thousands of millions. And since it’s merely plural, and you can put as many ciphers or as many ciphers as you want to on there, there’s just no way of knowing.

But I, as my colored brethren say sometimes, I hear on the radio, they have a little saying. A preacher will be preaching along, and he’ll say, you know what I like about God’s this. And I kind of like that myself. I like that expression. It may not be, wouldn’t be irreverent if a learned professor used it. He’d be slanging, but for a good colored brother preaching away, that just fits. That’s the way he feels about it. He says, what I like about God.

And what I like about God is this, my brethren. I like the fact that God is big and generous, and there’s lots of Him, and that what He does, He does in big vastness and, and hugeness. So, that God isn’t, isn’t small about things. Now, let me, I didn’t intend to say this. In fact, it just struck me now.

But what I want to say now is that you got to watch you don’t get cheap and stingy when you’re serving God. Be awfully careful, awfully careful and watch it. Let’s watch it in this church. You know, we’ve endured. We’ve, we’ve gone through the gristmill and been chewed up here in the last couple of years by our people moving out of the city and the population changing and all that. But let’s watch that we don’t give up and panic. Let’s watch. Let’s keep generous because God is generous. And everything God does is big and generous.

When God makes rivers, he makes them 10 times bigger than they need to be. And when he makes oceans, he makes them 50 times bigger, 100 times bigger than they need to be. And God put leaves on a tree, puts enough leaves on one tree to do for 50 trees.

The average church, you know, with a poor little preacher and a small church board counting pennies would say, I think we can do with the leaf less here on this twig, don’t you? And they’d take that off and say that. Say, now this twig over here, I think you see five leaves. No use to go out on a limb here, excuse the pun, but we take that off. And you can keep trimming back and trimming back.

But God is generous, brother. God gives too much of everything, always gives too much of everything. Think of space. People are talking about space all the time. Think how much space God made. God could have packed all the heavenly bodies there are.

If He’d been careful and kept the tracts from crossing each other, He could have packed them in too. Why, you ever read astronomy and find out how many times, how many, how many earths could have been put in the sun? I forget how many, I always forget numbers, but it runs into millions of earths. You could toss them into the sun and the sun could rumble them around if it was hollow.

And we have too much earth. We got too much earth now. This idea you got to leave the earth in order to, you go off and to Venus. If the right people would go, I’m for it, you know. But the trouble is the right people aren’t going and some of them will come back. But it’s just a vast world.

God is big, but God’s bigger than we know He is, and He’s, He’s vaster. The immensity of God. I wonder if I shouldn’t, I wonder if I shouldn’t preach a sermon on the immensity of God and include that in my book on the attributes. Is immensity an attribute? I think it is. It ought to be because everything God does, he does big and, and immensely. It’s, he’s huge.

And I think it hurts God. God being God and being capable of emotion, I believe it hurts God when we get little. I think so. I believe it hurts God.

Dr. Brown says, you know, that the way to do, to keep God blessing you is when you get out of it–get right back in. Start something else and get right back in. I think it’s all right.

I read an article by a fellow out here in California who establishes churches, and he keeps them down to four to 700 and never lets them get any bigger. Now they start getting any bigger. He promptly goes up to a lot of his members and says, now you get out of here and get yourself a church started over across here. And so out of that one church, he started 10. God just keeps, keeps going.

When they, they could sit back and say, now, isn’t this wonderful? Everything is paid up and it’s just delightful. Absolutely delightful. But you got to keep in trouble if you want to keep blessed. So, I don’t know how I got off on that, but it’s a part of the sermon anyhow.

Now, my brethren, these living creatures, these 24 elders, these angels, a hundred million and thousands of thousands. He doesn’t mention other creatures. He mentions them elsewhere. He mentions them in the fourth chapter here. Each one had six wings about him. Why did they need six wings? And they were full of eyes within. But he said, why are they full of eyes?

A fellow came up to me, Toledo. He was very sincere and he was a sincere man, no question. He wanted to know about all those eyes. I don’t know, brother. I don’t know. But to me, it just means that God just fills them with eyes, that God’s just generous, that’s all. He liked that. Well, now there were harpers and there were crowns and there were golden vials of sweet incense and the hearts of all these redeemed ones and these unredeemed who hadn’t needed to be redeemed because they’d never fallen, these unfallen creatures.

Here they were and their hearts were so excited by the presence of the Trinity that their joy became so intense that it passed on to ecstasy. And it was a chastely, pure intoxication, a bliss so bright and so deep as to become uncontrollable. And so they threw their crowns before the throne and they fell down before the lamp.

And yet reason wasn’t dethroned, though they were tasting the purest, purest ecstasy, drinking deep of the fountain of intense delight, delight in which there was no impurity. Yet reason was not dethroned because their delight had reasonable grounds. They worshipped the Father because he had made the heaven and earth and all things, and for His pleasure they are and were created.

They worshipped the Son, that is the Holy Son, because He was slain and has redeemed us to God by thy blood out of every kindred and tongue and people and nation and we shall reign on the earth. They had grounds for their delight, though their reasons had passed to ecstasy. You see, there is a kind of Christianity that is so theological that it can give you ten reasons for everything it does and believes. But it never passes to ecstasy, quite. These brethren passed to ecstasy, these wondrous creatures. Their joy was so deep and pure, I say, their bliss so unalloyed that they were sent into spiritual intoxication.

But they had reasons, there were reasons underneath it all. This was theology on fire, this was reason incandescent. If we try to be happy without reasons, we simply become fanatics and beat our foot, you know, and try to get blessed that way, the way they do in rock and roll. But if we allow reason to rest on the Scriptures and then are filled with the spirit and meditate and contemplate and worship, I believe that we can taste some of this even now.

Now I know it’s possible to be saved and to live and to die and to go to heaven and be a very ordinary Christian and never go very far. I’ve also seen in a few cases and have read in a great many more, people that were lifted up in the spirit to such a degree that ecstasy took over.

I heard a man one time, a good, serious-minded, sensible, good man, father of a family and a good worker in the church. The man was in every way a man that you could trust, an honorable man, a good man, a sensible man, was never charged with any fanaticism or any being overheated in any way. And yet I saw him at the communion table one time, suddenly burst out into holy laughter.

And he tried to restrain it, but he couldn’t. He knelt and he tried to restrain it, but he laughed, and he actually reached his hands around him and hugged himself as though he would keep himself from coming apart with the ecstasy and the delight of it.

Now we have it here, and if God wanted to send a little taste of us to man here below, it was a man named Thomas Upham. Thomas Upham wrote The Life of Madame Guyon. And incidentally, Madame Guyon happens to be a writer I care nothing about. I read her works years ago, but I never read them anymore. But he wrote her life. She was one of the great mystics you know. But this man wrote a little book called A Night of Great Grace, and that was a testimony of the night God visited him.

And I quoted to you here what Pascal, the French philosopher and mathematician, had said. That wonderful, awesome night when God visited him, and he passed out from being a mathematician to being a happy, joyous Christian. And he tried to write it, but he could only write it in ecstatic phrases. He would say, fire, fire, fire. And he said, glory to God the Father, not the God of the philosophers, but the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, Who can be known only in the ways of the gospel. And he wrote joy, joy, joy.

And though here was a man that ranked easily at the top in all of the mathematicians of his time and great thinkers of his day, declared to be one of the three great thinkers ever produced by France, three greatest ever produced by France, yet that man folded that testimony up and put it here in his pocket close to his heart and wore it there until he died. Never did he forget that one night of glorious ecstasy. And after that, he took over and he wrote in defense of the faith of our fathers so wonderfully that he’s never been answered.

His tremendous logical argument about believing God, I won’t repeat it now, but why we should believe God is one thing nobody’s ever been able to answer down to this hour. And yet that man, with a mind such as only maybe a half a dozen have ever had in the history of the world, yet this man was carried out of himself until, like these creatures, rising like a fire, the heat of his joy, the winds of God played over the harp of his soul, and in the presence of the Lamb he was filled with joy and delight. Here they were, too, and they will be.

Now, I don’t say you must know that kind of spiritual experience in order to be converted or to be saved. I don’t say it. But I will say this, that a generation or two ago it was taken for granted that if a man believed on Jesus Christ and didn’t have some kind of a visitation that would confirm his faith, they wouldn’t believe he was converted. But nowadays we just get them in anyway, you know, just any way at all, get them in.

Well, now notice here what he says, every creature heard I saying, verse 13, Every creature heard I saying, Thou art worthy, Every creature heard I saying, Blessing and honor and glory and power. Every creature, John, what do you mean? Every creature in heaven he found that familiar.

John had walked with his Lord and had been many years since the cross now, and he found they in heaven He found that easy to understand. I heard every voice in heaven saying, Worthy is the Lamb. Then he said, I heard them on earth, and he certainly found that familiar because he had been a man and was a man and had been on the earth and was on the earth.

So, it was easy for him to identify the voices of them on the earth. But now he hears a strange sound, another sound. It isn’t heavenly and it isn’t earthly. It doesn’t belong to the ransomed. It doesn’t belong to the unfallen creatures there by the throne. And it doesn’t belong to the redeemed on earth.

To whom do these voices belong? This strange, raucous, dissonant, discordant choir. It’s the choir of the damned. Under the earth heard I them saying, Philippians 2, 9 to 11 says, Wherefore, God also hath highly exalted Him and given Him a name which is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow of things in heaven and things on earth and things under the earth. There’s the same division and that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father.

Remember, my brother, every moral intelligence will someday confess Jesus Christ is Lord. But not every moral intelligence will enter the bliss of the redeemed. God has said it must be now and it must be under His conditions. But John said, I heard not only the ransomed, not only those upon the earth who love the Lord, but I heard the strange sound of those in hell also. And they were forced to say, worthy, worthy is the Lamb that was slain.

Now I want to close with just a little word that seems to be maybe a little bit off the track. I’ve heard, I know what they say, never tack anything on a sermon, and I don’t want to tack anything on. But I will ask you to note here, who are these redeemed? Well, they’re the blood-washed. They’re the blood-washed, it says, of every kindred and tongue and people and nation. And I point out again that when Jesus comes, there will be nations and they will not be one nation fused together, one smoky colored nation made up of all integrated races. There won’t be.

There will be nations, it says. And when He comes, he’ll call the nations before Him. And we’ll never, no matter how the starry-eyed dreamers talk, there will never be a time when all the nations of the world will speak one language until Christ comes.

They tell us, you know, there’s Esperanto and there’s basic English. And I don’t know whether everybody’s getting ready to speak Russian or not, but brother, there’s one language I won’t talk; I’ll tell you that now. But we’ll never have a smoky race speaking one language around the world. There will be kindred and tongue and people and nations, not one superior to the other, but different from the other. And now the logic of their presence, here’s the logic of their presence, here’s how they got there. They were saved by faith, and their faith came by hearing.

And they heard because there were preachers, and they preached because they were sent. And there we have the logic of missions. There we have the theology behind missions. They came from every kindred and tongue and people and nation and tribe around the world, and they were saved by faith, and their faith came by hearing the gospel. And they heard the gospel when it was preached to them, and it was preached to them when somebody was sent to preach it.

Now, I want to tell you this, that I would never continue to be associated with any denomination or missionary society or local church that would let anything stand in the way of the carrying out of the plan of God. For there must be people before that throne out of kindred, tongue and people and nations. They’re not to be white people from Chicago, but they’re to be people from all over, and they can only be there if somebody preaches to them. And that somebody can only preach to them if somebody else sends them.

And therefore, we have the logic of continuing missions. You know, when the eagle gets old, he gets to be fifty years old, they say. He grows something on his beak here, a bony substance that he can’t get his beak open, and he can’t eat. When he’s fifty years old, he can’t eat anymore, and he begins to droop and get thin, and his feathers fall out, and he’s a mess to look at, and he’s too weak to fly, and he’s dying of starvation. Because he has a bony structure that’s come over his beak, and he can’t get it open, he can’t eat.

Well, nature takes over about that time and renews his youth. He shall renew his youth like the eagles. You ever hear that? What does it mean, renewing his youth like the eagles? That’s what it means. So, he hunts himself out on real rough, sandy rock, say, the naturalist, and he goes over there and he scrapes. And he works away there, he’s poor, weak head. Why didn’t we think of it sooner? That’s what I don’t understand.

But you know, we never do. We never do, you know. We never think of it in time. So he scrapes his beak there, and pretty soon that comes off and he can chew again. He looks around, there’s a mouse, and the mouse said, that old eagle, he couldn’t, he can’t even open his mouth, he couldn’t eat a baby mouse. So, he gets familiar around the eagle, but he forgets the eagle’s working on his beak. Pretty soon, the eagle gets his mouth open, grabs a mouse, and feels better.

Pretty soon, he gets something else and feels better. In a very short time, he renews his youth, gets a new set of feathers, and his eyes get bright again. And pretty soon, he’s screaming in the sun, and he lasts another 50 years.

How long have we been around here, some of you old timers? I’m sorry, I don’t mean old timers, but some of you people that have been here longer than these children have. How long has this church existed? Thirty, Mrs. Hines, 38 years, is it? You don’t remember that far back, but is it 38 years we’ve been here? I mean the church? About 38. Let’s call it 38 years. What’s year, give or take, year between friends? But say 38 years. It’s not quite 50.

But you know what I believe? I like to run down our list and see those 38 missionaries that we got on our list. Not all of them went up here, but most of them did. The others joined us, but most of them did. Now, what are we going to do? Are we going to say, weep on each other’s shoulders, and say, the time of my departure is at hand, and woe be to Zion for the foxes are running over the walls? Or are we going to say, listen, there’s been a hard lump going over our beaks here.

We’ve been pushing in all directions here, and everybody else has fled. We’re an island here all by ourselves, enjoying ourselves immensely, but we’re going to go. But listen, why can’t we scrape our beaks, feather out again, and send twice as many in the next 30 years, and if the Lord tarries. Twice as much money in the next 30 years if the Lord tarries. When kids now back there in the baby pen will be our missionaries. Why can’t we? I don’t think if you’ve got God, you ever have to give up to discouragement, ever start counting your pennies.

Now listen, God, I’m sorry, but you know we only have two nickels there, and here we’ll give you one. I don’t think God wants us to act like that at all. And I refuse to beg, and I’m not going to beg, and I don’t have to beg. You’ll never get me to stand up here and spend a half an hour begging. I’m not going to do it. God is on His throne, and Christ is at His right hand, and the Holy Ghost is here, and the truth is loose in the earth, and the eagle can scrape her beak and start over.

And I foresee the time, I see it in vision, when the 38 missionaries that we count on our roster will have 38 more beside them. There’s no reason why it can’t be so, because they’ve got to come from kindred, and tongue, and people, and nations. They’ve got to come.

Tibet, they haven’t come yet, and they’ve got to come. They’re over there fighting Russia, but they’ve got to come from there, and they’ve got to come from the valleys, and everywhere. And some of the doors that are now closed, God’s going to open wide until you can hear them when they bang back on their hinges. You can hear it around the world, you see. Don’t you think for a second that God is going to let that old boy over in the Kremlin close all his doors? He’ll do nothing of the sort. He says, I open doors and no man can close them. And I don’t think the Church is made up yet, and I don’t think they’re all in.

Now, I’ll say one thing more, and then I’ll be done for tonight. The cause of missions does not belong to the Christian and Missionary Alliance. It belongs to Jesus Christ the Lord. He is the Head of His Church, and as long as we serve Him, we’ll be part of that plan. But if we stop that and get interested in something else and get sidetracked, He’ll choose somebody else, but He’ll have people from tongues, and tribes, and nations.

And I never yet have listened to a missionary complaining about, if we don’t go, the Lord can’t do His work. The Lord will do His work. Jonah wouldn’t go, but Jonah went, and you’ll find it always so.

God, the Sovereign God, will have them there from every tongue, and tribe, and nation, but He won’t necessarily use you. He will if you let Him, and He’ll use me, and He’ll use this church. But if we fail Him, He’ll pick some little old Pentecostal Church down here, Baptist Church, or something else, and they’ll do the work we should have done, but God will do His work, because He says, I saw them there from every kindred, and tongue, and people, and nations, and they shall reign on the earth.

The Sovereign God will do his work, all right, but what I’m eager about is that He’ll let me have a little part in it, that He’ll let me help a little, and do my little part, and work through me. That’s what I’m eager about, and that’s what I’m eager that this Church should do, that we should never allow ourselves to become so ingrown that we forget kindreds, and tongues, and peoples, and nations, because He’ll have them, but I don’t want Him to have to say, I’m sorry, but I have to pass you up, you’re too preoccupied. We mustn’t be preoccupied.

We do what was before us, and we’re going to do it, and we’re going to get it done. But in the meantime, we’re not going to forget them out there, and we’re not going to forget the peoples, and tongues, and tribes, and nations. They’ll believe when they hear, and they’ll hear when somebody preaches, and somebody will preach when he’s sent. Believe it? Amen. Well, amen. I guess that’s all for tonight.

Tags Revelation, Worship

Messages

Tozer Talks

“The Knowledge of God IV”

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The Knowledge of God IV

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

July 15, 1956

Now this will be the last of four sermons on three degrees of divine knowledge. And I have used the same text for all of them. And just briefly to refresh your memory, I said that there were three degrees of divine knowledge corresponding to the three divisions of the tabernacle in the Old Testament ritual: the outer court, which corresponds to reason. And the text I read was Romans 1:19 and 20. Because that which may be known of God is manifest in them. For God hath showed it unto them. For the invisible things of Him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead.

Then there is a second degree of knowledge, superior to the first, and that is, the knowledge that comes to faith. And I took for a text, though there are very many I might have chosen, Hebrews 11:3. Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God. And then. there is another degree of Christian knowledge which is the knowledge the Spirit imparts. And that corresponds to the Holy of Holies in the temple. And I read the Scripture, 1 Corinthians 1:9-14. I won’t read it all now, but only read this part. Now we have received not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit which is of God. That we might know the things that are freely given to us of God. But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God for they are foolishness unto him, neither can he know them because they’re spiritually discerned.

Now on three previous talks I have treated it like this. I’ve talked first about the knowledge of God. Then in my second sermon, two weeks ago, I spoke about what the old writers called natural theology, the knowledge that we may gain about God and heavenly things from nature itself; reason working on data furnished by reason. Then last Sunday morning, I talked about revealed theology, the knowledge received by faith through divine inspiration. Now today, I must talk about a knowledge that’s still more excellent, and that is the knowledge which Paul says, the Spirit reveals to our spirits. And this is so excellent that it belongs to heaven rather than earth. And is only given here as a little earnest of what will come.

Now, there are some things that God gives us that He just gives all of it to us, and there isn’t anything that He doesn’t give. But there are other things that he gives only in veiled measure and degree. And to this knowledge which is the more excellent knowledge, it is a heavenly knowledge and will be perfected and completed in heaven. And it belongs in heaven and is of heaven, but it is given here in small measure. And of course, the degree that we receive of it depends upon our response and our meeting the condition.

Now, it is so excellent this knowledge, this further-in knowledge revealed by the Spirit, that nothing more excellent awaits us in heaven than this knowledge, except that there it will be given in perfection, and here we have it only up to our imperfect capacity. There we will be enlarged and perfected to receive in full degree this knowledge of God. And John says, we shall be like Him and shall know Him. And the Revelator says that we shall look on His face and His name shall be on our forehead.

Now, this knowledge, this more excellent knowledge which I speak this morning, does not contradict the other two. Nothing ever contradicts anything else in the kingdom of God if we could only know it. It is only that we think it contradicts. Nothing in God ever contradicts anything else in God. There are no contradictions in God, so that when I say there are three degrees of knowledge, the knowledge given to reason, the knowledge given to the faith and the knowledge revealed by the Spirit, I do not mean that one contradicts the other, for they do not contradict each other and neither does one make the other unnecessary.

This last degree of knowledge of which I speak, the knowledge that flashed across the human heart by an afflatus of the Holy Spirit does not make the knowledge of reason unnecessary, for we are reasonable creatures. We’re logical beings though we don’t always live like it. And therefore, we cannot cancel out our reason. I do not believe that anything that comes by the Spirit will contradict reason, because reason is an attribute of God. And God can’t contradict Himself. Therefore, anything God reveals to us in our deep heart is bound to be according to reason, though it may go way beyond reason. And neither does it contradict faith. Now, there is nothing that the Spirit of God will reveal to the inner life of a man that will contradict faith. It will be according to faith and not contrary to faith. But it sets a crown upon reason and faith and leads them on to their perfection, but it does not contradict them, cancel them out, or make them unnecessary.

Now, what kind of knowledge is this? Well, this knowledge is by direct spiritual experience. You see, Paul very clearly mentions this here. He says, It is written in the Old Testament that eye hath not seen nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man the things which God hath prepared for them that love Him. But God hath revealed them unto us by His Spirit, for the Spirit searcheth all things, yea, the deep things of God. And thus, these things are divinely revealed by inward spiritual experience. An impartation of divine knowledge by a direct afflatus of the Spirit of God.

And this is what you don’t hear much about these days though it’s the common teaching of the New Testament, and it was the common teaching of the church fathers. And it is not heresy of any degree or kind. It is not a cult or a teaching of any cult, but the common traditional teaching of the fathers and the reformers and the martyrs and the mystics and the revivalists and the church leaders and the hymnists, all down the years. And I can take you to any hymnbook, be it Presbyterian or Methodist or Baptist or Moravian or Episcopalian or whatever, and I can show you everything that I’m saying this morning. We sing them, but we don’t believe them. Or, if we try to believe them, we don’t understand them. And so we sing truths which are scriptural truths, traditional truths, truths which have been believed by the fathers and written into the great books of devotion. We sing them and don’t know what we’re singing about, because we are so languorous and take things so for granted. But this impartation of spiritual knowledge by a direct afflatus of the Holy Ghost, is not contrary to reason I say, but it is immediate knowledge, not mediated knowledge.

Now, those are philosophical terms and I’m going to break them down for the young people. You older people know what I mean. But you know the difference between mediated and immediate, a thing that is immediate and the thing that’s mediated, that is direct or indirect.

Now, there is a knowledge of reason which is mediated to us. The heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament showeth His handiwork. What mediates that knowledge to us? Two things, the heavens and the firmament and our reason, so that we know the heaven and the earth and the firmament, mediated to us by the firmament and by reason. So that the knowledge we get of the heaven and the earth, all of natural theology, all that comes by reason and the human intellect is a mediated knowledge. It is not immediate, it is mediated. It comes to us more or less by gadgets and by means of faculties and organs.

Then, the knowledge that we receive by revelation is mediated to us through faith. The resurrection, for instance, who here knows anything about the resurrection? You know absolutely nothing by immediate experience of the resurrection. There was only one or two men that ever lived, that knew anything about the resurrection by immediate experience, and that would be Lazarus maybe, and the widow’s son maybe, and the little girl. They were raised from the dead, so they’d had an immediate experience of resurrection. But all you and I know about resurrection is what the Bible tells us, and that’s mediated to us through faith.

Did you ever sit down and try to visualize the resurrection? What would happen to you when you rose again from the dead? It’s an impossible task. You can’t do it, because you have not had immediate experience. But there will be a time when you can do it. You can tell the archangel Gabriel all about it, he won’t know anything about it except by faith. Gabriel never died to rise again. So that he only knows by faith about the resurrection, Christ knows by immediate experience, because He rose from the dead. You and I know by faith. It’s mediated to us by faith. And so our poor minds stagger along under the burden of a gorgeous and glorious truth too much for us. And we say, I believe in the resurrection of the dead, and so we do. And we stand at the graveside and look down as our loved ones are being lowered into their quiet sleep and we say to ourselves, I believe I’ll see him again. I shall see her again. We say I know that my Redeemer liveth and I shall see Him in that day. But that is a knowledge given to us by faith and mediated to us through faith.

And now let’s look at another kind of knowledge. How do you know you’re alive? No, I’m not trying to be humorous. I’m serious. How do you know you’re alive? That is an immediate knowledge. Reason hasn’t anything to do with it and neither has faith. You know you’re alive, and maybe some of you never thought about that. Have you ever thought about it? Sit down sometime turn the radio and the television off and fold the newspaper, and all of them, all the newspapers, fold them all up. Put Time Magazine under the desk and see whether you can’t think a little about this. How do you know you’re alive? Well, you know because your mother told you. Some of you never saw your mother. Maybe she died when you were born. Do you know because you read it in a book? How foolish to go to the library and get a book to discover and learn that you are alive. The knowledge that we are alive is not mediated to us through reason or faith. It is an intuition that is immediate and direct.

Then, how do you know you are yourself and not somebody else? Now, am I being silly? Not the slightest, my brethren. How do you know you are yourself and not somebody else? You know it by immediate intuition. If there were some friends of yours, were to pull a little hoax on you and in your asleep were to carefully transport you to somebody else’s bedroom, take all of your clothes and all, everything that belongs to you away and put you there and then put another man’s identification card in your wallet and in every way possible try to make you out to be somebody else. You’d wake up and you’d be confused and irritated, but you wouldn’t in anywise believe you were the other man. Because nobody can prove you’re another man and nobody can disprove who you are, because you have it without mediation, by argument or reason or faith or knowledge. You have it by direct awareness.

Now, that’s exactly what I mean by this higher degree of knowledge. This knowledge which is not by reason, and while it is by faith, it is the perfection and crown of faith in that it comes by direct knowledge. The Holy Spirit illuminates the human spirit and brings it into conscious experience of God. Do you know that Methodism taught that for 100 years in this country? Do you know that? Do you know that Baptists by the hundreds of thousands taught it on our continent? Did you know it? Do you know that Presbyterians used to preach that? Do you know the Salvation Army still does? Do you know that practically every holiness group and every deeper life group teaches it, so that I am not fanatical, neither have I suddenly gone berserk theologically. This is ordinary teaching, but it just happens that the kind of textualism which is in the harness right now, or which is in the saddle and riding a high right now, ignores all this. And I’m trying to restore it to you, not to teach something new, but to joyfully point to something that’s been hidden.

When I was a boy out on the farm in Pennsylvania among the hills, we had snow in those days, real snow. Nowadays, we get a spotty effort at it, and then it disappears in no time at all. I don’t know whether it’s the administration or whether it’s the atom bomb or what it is. But we don’t have the old snows we used to have. We used to get the snow there and would lie there all winter. And then, it would begin to melt away. And as the poet William Wordsworth said, the snow would fair ill on the top of the bare hill and the ploughboy would be shouting anon–anon.

Well, then I as a lad would begin to find things that I lost last fall. Did you ever have that experience any of you? I’d begin to find things that I had lost last fall, a toy, a ball, a toy gun, or some little thing that I liked, a little wagon that had gone down under the snow that had come maybe when I was asleep and buried everything, I’d begin to find those things. And for a while thereafter the snow got off the ground, I was a rich boy. Same old things, but I had forgotten about them and didn’t know where they were. And maybe I had asked for them and couldn’t find them and nobody knew where they were. They’d been covered all winter by the snow. Nothing fanatical, nothing heretical about that. They were the same old treasures, boys’ treasures not worth five cents in the market, but worth two million to me. And I would find them under the snow and I’d walk on air for a few days discovering my old treasures.

Now that’s all I’m doing here today; I am telling you that which has been snowed under by the deep cold snows of textualism over the last years in our circles. And I’m reminding you only of that which now the snow is beginning to melt and we’re seeing again. They belong to you. They’re your treasures. And they’re worth a million dollars to you. The Holy Spirit illuminates the human spirit and brings it into conscious experience of God and of spiritual realities, so you don’t have to ask somebody do you think I’m saved? Neither do you have to read a book on seven ways you can know your converted. You know by the impartation of knowledge immediately without mediation. It’s not contrary to reason. It is in line with faith. But it is so to speak when the altar flames and when the fire comes.

Now, I’m afraid to a great many people, God is simply the sum of what the Bible teaches about Him plus what we’ve heard about it, what evangelists stories, evangelists have told and tracts that we’ve read. And so we add God up and get a sum at the bottom of the column. And that is what God is to us. He’s the sum of what we’ve learned about Him.

Now, suppose, young lady, that you are just married. Suppose you’ve been married a month. And I don’t know your husband, never met him at all, and you come to me and begin to talk to me about your husband. And usually, it is a pleasant experience when they’ve only been married a month. And you tell me about him, and you show me his picture. And you tell me about his background, how many years he spent in service and where he was and all about him, and you give me his height and his weight and his characteristics, eye color and hair color and all the rest? Well, I add him up. And then you tell me about various facial features and his ears. Now, I couldn’t do it. But a good artist could draw a picture of that man. A good artist could do it. And particularly, he could do it if three or four people came and confirmed each other’s description and added a few details the other one had forgotten. Police reporters do that, police artists, after they’ve had four or five witnesses tell what a criminal looks like. They can draw a picture of the criminal that’s simply astonishingly like the man.

Now, that is the way God is to most people. He is the picture they’ve drawn in their minds as a result of various descriptions they’ve heard about God from other people. But they simply don’t know God himself. But now young lady, let me still address myself to you. You know him in a way that I couldn’t possibly know him. All I know about him is what you’ve told me and what I’ve added up. And your husband, your young husband, is to me the sum at the bottom of the column. But what is he to you? You don’t have to tell me. You don’t have to reply. He is somebody you know. You know him immediately. And I know him only mediated to me through description and conversation and talk and reason.

Now, that’s about all most people know of God, and almost all church people know of God. God is simply a sum at the bottom of the column. They learned from one evangelist that God one time got mad and killed the baby because the father wouldn’t go to the mission field. Well, they put that down. Then they learn from another one that God made a dog bark under somebody when Uncle Peter died in Keokuk and they put that on the column. And then they learned also that the Lord answered prayer for a fellow one time that wanted to beat another fellow out of a business deal. And they put that down. And then they learn maybe that God is very holy, and they put that down inconsistently enough. And after they have learned about all he can know about God from books and songs and sermons and illustrations, and superstition, they add that up and they’ve got their God at the bottom, and they call Him Father.

I wonder if we ought not to send some missionaries from the Baliem Valley to Chicago to tell us Christian peoples want what God is like. I wonder if this God of the rank-and-file church member, this God that has been mediated through bits of information, true and untrue. I wonder if that God isn’t as wrong a god and as surely an idol as the old bulls of Egypt, or the cats that they mummified and worshipped.

My brother, there’s something better than that. In the first place, you can have a proper theological knowledge of God from the Scriptures. And the second place, you can have a direct knowledge of God through the Holy Ghost. Our God is not the sum of what the Bible teaches about Him. God is a great reality Himself. And just as you and I must be satisfied to know that young man by description, and his young wife can know him by warm, living, personal contact and fellowship, so the church people seem contended to know God by description. And you and I can know God by acquaintance, if we only will.

Now, that corresponds to the last degree of knowledge in the last department or compartment of the court in that holy place, there is not even a candlestick. In that holy place, there’s only the Skekinah glory, that awful holy fire between the wings of the cherubim. Thou that dwellest between the wings of the cherubim said the old Psalmist. And the Jews of olden days worshipped Him. They worshipped not a fire, but they worship Him who dwelt there.

And when the high priest once a year went into that place, he knew that fire by its warmth and by its light. And he could look at his hands and see them illuminated by that mysterious fire that had no origin on earth at all. It was not the sun or the moon or stars, for they were shut out. It was totally dark in there. It was not a candlestick, for that was in the compartment they called the Holy Place. This is the Holy of Holies, beyond the second veil. And there only, the light of God shines out. He is light, and in Him is no darkness at all. And they knew God, the priest could know God, the shining out of God by direct experience. Do you think those priests were anything but awestruck. Do you think those priests ever came out of there with their chins down and gloomy? Never! They came out of there with faces shining and with eyes like stars. They had looked upon God, the awful, glorious God that fills heaven and earth, and yet, would shine out of the Shekinah between the wings of the cherubim.

Now, what are the conditions? I suppose I should break this up really, and make it a fifth sermon, but I won’t do it. I have kept you this far and I won’t push my luck, as they say. So I’ll talk about, about conditions and in 10 minutes be through. What are the conditions for thus knowing God? Well, of course, the first condition is to repent and be born anew. That’s the first condition. You cannot arrive at any such a deep knowledge of God by nature. The natural man does not know the things of the Spirit of God and to him they are foolishness. There must be a repentance from sin and a turning to God through Jesus Christ, and a believing on Jesus Christ so that your soul is renewed. That’s variously called regeneration, renewal, the new birth, but it’s all the same thing.

Then there must be a renunciation. As long as you try to carry water on both shoulders and walk the fence between heaven and hell, and pleasing God and mammon, and be half in and half out, you will never know anything about God except that which you reason to by logical conclusions. There must be a renunciation of everything that displeases God. There must be a turning to God in fullness of determination, to walk with Him and be His. And then there must be a separation from and a separation unto. We’re separated from everything that is unlike God, and we’re separated unto God Himself, and God must be all in all. Now am I teaching anything that’s too high? Flip your hymnbook open after I pronounce the benediction. Flip your hymn book open and go through the hymns and see whether you don’t sing it there and don’t know what you’re singing about. See if it isn’t there. Sure it’s there.

And then there must be complete confidence in the mediator. Now, there is no approaching into that holy place without the blood of the Mediator. You could approach into the first place by the light of nature. Into the second, only if there had been a sacrifice and into the third only with blood of atonement. So, there must be complete confidence in Jesus Christ, the Mediator. And there must be an anointing of the Spirit of God to illuminate us, and then a waiting on God with our open Bible. The Spirit can sometimes shine upon the Word and bring the truth to light. To cite precepts and promises afford a sanctifying life. That verse precedes the one we sang. Her glory gilds the sacred page. And who was that man? William Cooper, one of the greatest of the English poets, a great Calvinist, a great, I don’t know, Presbyterian, or maybe a Episcopalian, but a great teacher, a man who’s never been considered to be anything but sound in his theology. And he says that the Spirit of God shines upon the Word to bring the truth to light.

My brethren today, there must be, there must be an advance beyond this textualism that looks upon the cold text and says, I believe it. There must be an advance past that that says I believe it, and then moves on to a knowledge of God by the flash of divine light from God, so that I know within my heart and nobody can shake me. If you can be reasoned into salvation, a stronger reasoner can reason you back out of it again. If you know you belong to God by a reasonable conclusion, stronger reasons can cause you to conclude the opposite. But if by faith in the Mediator and the blood that He shed, you come to God and put away everything that’s unlike him and look into His faith with expectation, He will give you a knowledge of Himself and heavenly realities that nobody reasons you into and nobody can reason you out of.

And that’s what we’re missing today. That’s why we’ve got imitators instead of initiators. That’s why we’ve got men and women who follow like sheep instead of men and women who lead like shepherds. And God help us take our Christianity seriously. For me, as far as I’m concerned, it’s either a burning bush or I’ll walk out on the whole thing. No hodgepodge compound of Norman Vincent Peale and David for me. It’s either God everything or God nothing. And God turns around and says to us, either I must be your all or I won’t be your anything. Christ must be Lord all of all, or He will not be Lord at all. Think it over, brethren. It’s a serious thing.

Tags Faith, Holy Spirit, Knowledge

Messages

Tozer Talks

Post author By pshappard
Post date September 22, 2024

“The Knowledge of God III”

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The Knowledge of God III

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

July 8, 1956

The Daily News will have a man here next Sunday morning, to look us over and write us up. They were already here and took some pictures. So, you’d better come dressed tomorrow, next Sunday I mean, in the morning, for the occasion. The brother will be here and they usually are pretty frank about what they say.

Now, these mornings, I have been talking about three degrees of Christian knowledge. This is the third message on the subject and there will be one more next Sunday morning. And I pointed out that there are three degrees of knowledge possible, corresponding to the three divisions of the tabernacle. The first being that of reason. Romans 1:19,20, because that which may be known of God is manifest in them. For God hath showed it unto them. For the invisible things of Him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead.

And then, faith, corresponding to the holy place. Through faith, we understand, Hebrews 11. And then corresponding to the Holy of Holies, the knowledge that comes by the revelation of the Spirit. Now we have received not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit, which is of God, that we might know the things that are freely given to us of God. Which things also we speak not in the words which man’s wisdom teaches, but which the Holy Ghost teaches. Comparing spiritual things with spiritual, for the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness unto him, neither can he know them, because they’re spiritually discerned.

Now, there we have it, that there are three degrees of knowledge, reason, the outer court, the light of nature; faith, the holy place; and the Holy Ghost, the Holy of Holies. And about the first I talked last week about that kind of knowledge which comes to us by reason, working on data, furnished by the senses: observation, research, experiment, discovery, or just ordinary, practical, common sense, looking around us.

Now, there is a knowledge more excellent than the knowledge gained by reason; and knowledge further in and nearer to God, and it is the knowledge offered to faith. And that is what I want to talk about today. Next Sunday morning, I want to speak about that spiritual knowledge, that knowledge, which is intuitive, which comes by a flash of the light of the Holy Spirit in the human breast.

But now, I point out to you that revealed truth is addressed to faith only. And when I say revealed truth, I mean the Scriptures. Holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost. And they gave us revealed truth, which we find in the Old Testament and the New. And it is revealed to faith only. There was an old man of God by the name of Anselm, they call him St. Anselm now, who lived way back in the early days. He was known as one of the church fathers and is a great theologian. And he taught that in religion, faith plays the part played by experience in the things of the world. What experience will teach you of earthly things, faith will teach you of heavenly things.

Now in experience, we know as a result of data furnished us by our famous five senses, by the things of sight and sound and taste and touch and smell. And then we make deductions from these, and we piece them out, and we put them together and we draw conclusions. And we build up philosophies and sciences and common knowledge, farmer knowledge, the knowledge of the farmer sitting on the fence chewing the straw. Or the knowledge of the scientist in the laboratory, the knowledge of the philosopher in the library. All of it is only knowledge which has been gained through the five senses and then taken and compounded and made into other knowledge, which we drew from that knowledge. And that sound badly confused, but it’s not so badly confused as we go along.

Now, for that kind of knowledge, no faith is necessary, absolutely none at all. Let us reduce it to its simplest form. A little boy feels in his pocket and feels that he has marbles there. And it suddenly strikes him, he wants to know how many. So he takes them out into the palm of his hand and laboriously counts them, and finds he has nine. Now, he has counted his marbles, and he knows he has nine. Now it doesn’t take any faith, and it isn’t guesswork. It’s just knowledge gained by observation. He has counted them. And he knows how many he has.

Or a jeweler will test to see whether that metal before him is gold or not. Or, whether that thing he holds in his hand is glass or diamond. He has certain tests which he puts them to. And when they have met those tests or failed to meet them, he knows exactly what he has in his hand, whether gold or something else, whether diamond or glass. And it doesn’t take any faith. It doesn’t call upon faith at all. He knows. He’s found out by reason. He’s tested it. Experience has taught him and he doesn’t have to believe anything or take anybody’s word for anything. It isn’t a question of character or promise, it’s a question of finding out for himself.

That is the knowledge which reason has, or the naturalist observes the habits of, say, the ringneck pheasant. And after he has spent half a lifetime, and some of them actually have, observing this or that bird, and writing their observations in a book, he doesn’t have to have faith, he knows. He’s watched them until he knows how they act. He knows all about them. Or the chemist analyzing some sort of liquid to determine what it is. Finally, after putting it to careful tests, will be able to write down on a piece of paper, the formula he knows what he has there.

Now that doesn’t take faith. The simple fact is the data that reason furnishes is not addressed to faith at all. The scientist doesn’t have to have any faith unless you want to actually stretch it thin and say that he has to have faith that everything will remain as it is. Well, if you call that faith, then that’s faith. But that isn’t what I mean when I say faith. I mean something else as I shall point out.

Now we are discovering more and more facts about nature. And to do so men have worked out more and more, and finer and finer techniques. And we’re getting to know more and more about everything. And faith is not called upon. A man who spends his lifetime examining and counting and weighing and measuring and analyzing. That man doesn’t have to have faith. He finds out. He could put it down. He knows. He tests it. What a man has, why does he have hope for it. And what he knows by observation, why does he have to have any faith? Why is he trusting in anybody’s character, yet he doesn’t. He doesn’t have to.

But now my brethren, there is a body of knowledge, and that body of knowledge is too high for the human mind to reach. There is no technique by which it can be gotten at. It is super sensible in that it cannot be reached by any of the senses. Simply stated, it cannot be smelled nor tasted nor touched nor heard nor felt. And why, because we cannot through our senses get any data about it naturally. There is nothing that we can do with it. It’s just out there. It’s beyond us. Otherwise, God would not have had to send holy men and say to them, thus saith the Lord. There would have had to be no divine revelation. There is that revelation to reason. It is the heavens which declare the glory of God and the firmament which showeth His handiwork. Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night showeth knowledge. It is the sun and the moon and the stars and all nature, they are addressed to reason. And so that is a revelation addressed to reason.

But the revelation addressed to faith is way above that and far beyond it and deeper down and further out and beyond so that reason cannot get to it. And that is the body of knowledge which we have no technique to discover, and which is addressed to faith alone. You either believe it or else you don’t. And there’s no way of proving it. Although men have labored lifetimes to try to prove it. But it is known to faith, and it receives its data, not by examination or research or observation, but by a direct statement of God Almighty. It is a revelation handed down and given. It is a statement made, or a series of statements made.

Now what are these data? What are these truths? I can’t hope to name all of them in one sermon. It would take two weeks to do it. But I can only, I shall name twelve if I get that far, just as samples and the major truths, but certainly not all of them. For instance, there’s the Trinity of the Godhead. Now, after we have had it revealed to us that God is a Trinity, then reason can go to work on that revelation, and can try to show that we knew it all the time. And there are philosophers and theologians who do that very thing. They try to show that the Trinity is revealed everywhere in nature. But until God Almighty revealed it in the Bible, nobody dreamed of it, which ought to be proof enough that it’s not revealed in nature. Nature revealed certain truths to reason, but the Trinity is not one of them. The Trinity is revealed to faith.

And it’s only by faith that we know there’s a Father, Son and the Holy Ghost. It’s only by faith that we’re Trinitarians and not Unitarians. It is only that we believe what God has said, that we can sing, praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, so that you either believe or you don’t. And you have no way of confirming it. We sometimes try to illustrate it so to understand it and break it down a little bit. And we show how water might consist of mist and rain and ice. And we show how man has his three dimensions. And we try to explain it, but we had to have it handed to us, ready made by divine revelation, or we never could have arisen to know it.

And then that man is made in the image of God. How could we know that? This is one of the sweetest doctrines in the Bible that God made man in His own image, in the image of God and likeness of God made he him. And I believe this with all my heart, but who would ever have thought of that? Who could have smelled that out, or thought it out or heard it or felt it or sensed or tasted it? How could it have yielded to the instrument of the scientist or to the prying mind of the philosopher? No, we had to be told that man was made in the image of God.

The Greek philosopher said that man showed that he was born to think and to practice virtue. And therefore, back of it all, there must have been a God who thinks and who is virtuous, but that’s about as close as reason ever got to it. That man was made in the image of God is a truth completely hidden to reason but gloriously revealed to faith.

And then there’s the fall of man. Now, how did we get here? Revelation tells us that we got here by creation of God as men, and then that we fell. Now, that’s the way God says it happened. And when we deny faith or have no faith, then we try to reason it out.

Some years ago, I read a book. What was this man’s name? He was a famous scientist. For the moment. I can’t recall. He’s gone now, but he was quite popular 20-25 years ago. {William J. Fielding} And he called it, The Caveman Within Us. And he denied divine revelation, but he began with reason. And he said, man, is two kinds of being. Now, I’m paraphrasing what he said certainly, but giving the gist of it. He said, Man is good and bad. He has in him so much of good, but he also is capable of being so terribly bad.

Now, he said, here’s the reason. We have come up from the beast by evolution. And we are slowly purging out the beast out of us, but we haven’t gotten rid of it yet. And the good in us is that toward which we’re developing, but the bad in this is the caveman, the beast, the animal that’s still there. And he said, now all of this growling and snarling and lying and violence and impurity and gluttony and drinking, he says, this is the result of the caveman. The old beast that hasn’t yet been purged out of us. But the love and kindness and mercy and patience and peace, that’s the good thing toward which we’re moving.

Now, isn’t it strange that he said the same thing that Paul said, only he said it upside down. Paul said that we were originally made in the image and likeness of God. Genesis says it and Paul accepts it, but that we failed because of one man’s sin. And that caveman within us is the fallen man inside of us. Not the man that crawled up but the man that fell down. But observation shows the same thing, that man is both good and bad. That he’s capable of love and kindness and self-sacrifice, or a nasty ill-tempered abuse and swearing and gluttony.

So, reason tries to explain it and comes up with a caveman. But revelation doesn’t explain it. Revelation sets it forth as a shining light and says, man sinned. And the day he sinned, he died spiritually, and that’s what’s wrong with him. And so, death came upon all men. And that caveman within us is no caveman at all. It’s simply the old fallen man. You’ve got to take your choice now my brethren, either try to reason it out or accept it by faith. I accept as a datum of knowledge that man is a fallen creature.

And then again, the doctrine that God so loved the world. How are you going to figure that out? Is it obvious to us? Is it obvious to reason that God so loves the world when the lightning will flash down and kill fifteen children picnicking? Is it obvious to us that God so loved the world, when the great ocean will swallow a ship with 900 people on it? Is it obvious to us that God so loved the world when the desert will swallow up a band of foolish travelers and let them die and be eaten by buzzards on the hot surface of the sandy desert?

Is it obvious that God so loved the world when that sweet woman, beautiful to look at, suddenly twisted out of shape with polio or cancer? No, reason doesn’t tell us that God so loved the world. Reason tells us that the God who made the world cares for it after a fashion. Reason goes that far. But reason never said, God so loved the world. That was a revelation from God, my brethren. You and I have heard this until it’s old stuff to us. And we imagine that everybody ought to know it.

You know, there are people, our good friend Ed may be in Baliem Valley today. He was in Hollandia yesterday, arrived there. And if he’s gotten into the Baliem Valley today, or as soon as he gets in, he will be trying to tell those people that God so loved the world. And at first, they won’t believe it, for they haven’t believed it. But when it slowly dawns on them that the God that made the world loves them, then we may be making some converts there among the Danis. But that will be wonderful news to them. To Ed, it’s just old stuff that he heard when he was a little kid. Little toothless Ed learned that when he was in Sunday school.

And so, it’s common to him and to you and me. But oh, what a revelation to those that never heard it before. God loves mankind. God loves the world. And in spite of the lightning and the sandy desert and the ocean and the wind and the flood, God loved mankind to give His Son.

That’s revelation, brethren. And that is a datum of knowledge which is given to our faith, not to our reason. Hymnology has been wondering about it ever since it was first revealed. How can it be? Oh, how can it be the hymns all cry? Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound? Oh, depths of mercy, can it be, God left that gated ajar for me? Brother McAffee and I have amused ourselves a bit in a spiritual way by looking at the old Methodist hymnal and finding out how many hymns start out, oh, and an. And can it be, and oh, the love of God. Why that’s revelation, my brethren. Reason never could get to it. You can’t smell that truth. No scientist can get that into his test tube. That’s a revelation from God to faith.

And then, that Christ was virgin born. I shudder deep in my heart when men talk about parthenogenesis and try to show how there are certain circuits possible in certain low levels of nature, to bring about offspring from a mother only as it is. Oh, my brethren, this is not something to be reasoned about. This is a burning bush to be knelt before. We get down on our knees and say, I believe in God the Father Almighty and in Jesus Christ His only Son, our Lord was born of the Virgin Mary. And we kneel there with our faces hidden and cry, holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty. But only the man who doesn’t understand, tries to understand. Only the man of unreason tries to reason in that holy place. There are times when reason is an affront to God Almighty. There are times when the brazen mind enters the sanctuary and tries to understand that which is ineffable and inscrutable. And when it enters there, it’s an insult to God.

So, the man who tries to explain the virgin birth, is insulting God Almighty. There’s only one thing to do before that miracle and marvel and mystery, and that is to cry, my Lord and my God, Thou knowest. And that Jesus Christ’s blood which was shed on the cross, saves men from sin. There is a revelation to faith, and we never should try to explain it. When men get up to preach about the chemistry of the blood, I want to grab my hat and get out of there so fast. Trying to explain how the blood of Jesus Christ can cleanse a man from sin. I sat one time and shuddered while a man preached on the chemistry of the blood.

Another man had written a book on the chemistry of the blood. One man is dead and the other still alive. And I wouldn’t hesitate to say bluntly that I don’t believe that any man ought to try to take it on himself to explain by natural processes, how the blood of Jesus Christ can atone for human sin. Never, never my brethren! The moment I can understand it, I can say I will arise and be like the Most High. I will exalt my throne equal to the throne of God. The devil tempted mankind when he said, thou shalt be as gods knowing. And the desire to know what was never intended to be understood, and to explain what can only be known by faith, has crushed the church from Augustine to the present hour.

So, how the blood of Jesus cleanses me, I do not know, but oh, I believe it. I believe it. In that hour, which may come to me as it may come to you, when everybody knows, and we know that we’ve only a little time. And tomorrow won’t matter because tomorrow we’ll be with God. On the eve of our coronation, we won’t say, get down that book and read the chapter about corpuscles. Get me down that book and read about the serum in which the white and the red corpuscles float. I want to have a little more assurance before I die. Oh no, no brethren, we look away from all man’s puny bird brain. And we look away to the Lamb of God who taketh away the sins of the world. And we’ll say the blood of His Son cleanses us from all sin. Thank God, I know it, I know it.

The old dying bishop, they said to him, Bishop, what have you to say? And he said, I have only this to say, that now that I’m about to go, my theology has been reduced to one text. Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners. That’s it, my brethren.

And that Christ rose the third day. I wonder why the children of God won’t let this alone, trying to prove the possibility of the resurrection. Trying to show how men can be raised from the dead, can never be. We possess no technique to prove that Christ rose from the dead. And even if scientists could get to a point where they could restore human life after death, there will never be, but granted for a moment, it might be. Still, it would be no proof that a man, 2,000 years ago, rose from the dead the third day. That’s not a doctrine to be defended, that’s a doctrine to be proclaimed. And the Spirit of God never witnesses to defense. He witnesses to proclamation. The gospel evangel is the gospel of assertion and proclamation, never, never is a defense or apology.

So, it is told to us by the great God Almighty, that this Jesus Christ who walked in Galilee was virgin-born and that He was God and that He died for our sins and His blood cleanses from sin. That He rose from the dead the third day, and that He now sits at the right hand of God the Father Almighty. There isn’t any way to prove that. Not all the illustrations, not all the science films, you can quote that if you want to. They know what I think of their science films, my good friends down at 108th, whatever it is. Not all your scientific films will ever prove anything except to reason. It’ll help you to have a little more knowledge out in the outer court, out in the light of nature, out where Mohamedans can be and Roman Catholics and all the rest. Out there where there is no Holy Ghost and no faith. For no proof ever helps anybody’s faith from the beginning of the world. Never.

And if tomorrow morning, if God should take me aside and surround me by the angels, and prove to my intellect that Christ had been risen from the dead, it couldn’t confirm my faith at all. I already believe it with everything inside of me. God said it and I believe it. It’s a datum of knowledge given to faith. And faith grasps it and says, amen.

Back to Anselm again, in religion, faith takes the place that experience takes in nature. Just as a scientist can measure a star and know exactly how large it is and how fast it’s moving–and that’s by experience–so I know that Jesus Christ rose from the dead and that’s my faith. I know my sins are gone. That’s a revelation of God to my heart, revelation of God to my faith. I know that, but I can’t prove it. It may be that it’s only gone underground. Reason would say, oh I know what’s happened to you. You got yourself all worked up and you had a psychological explosion and your sins went underground, and your sense of self-accusation and sin-consciousness just went underground. It’s still there in your subconscious. Not. That isn’t where it is Brother. I will bury your sins in the sea of My forgetfulness and will remember them no more against thee forever. That’s where they are. They have not gone underground, they’ve gone under sea, the sea of God’s forgetfulness. I believe that, and I can die with that. I can live with that. And I can face eternity with that.

A man’s resurrection from the dead. Go to almost any library and you can run onto a lot of books which aim to prove that there’s a life beyond this life. Some dear old widow, God bless her, she goes to Madame Zelia and they go through certain crossing of the palm with a nice bill and then a few eerie shrugs and the light goes out and Papa speaks from the other world. And it’s funny how dumb Papa always sounds. Everybody that dies gets so dumb, they always say the same thing. Do not worry. I am at peace. All is well. Then there’s a click, and the circuit is cut off. And they don’t hear from Papa, but she worries and goes back and pay some more, and he says the same dumb thing again. Nobody ever yet returns to say it’s hot here. Nobody ever yet said I saw Jesus. They always say, all is well. I’m at peace. Do not worry. It’s like flying to Florida and sending a telegram back to your worrying wife saying, we made it. Don’t worry.

Well now brethren, if you want to place your hope of immortality on that kind of silly business, you may. But I have something better than that. Listen, what I read about here. Listen, for our friend Paul, God bless him, he was just about to go. He’d finished his course, and here’s what he said. Jesus Christ was given us in Christ Jesus before the world began but is now was made manifest by the appearing of our Savior, Jesus Christ, who hath abolished death, and hath brought life and immortality to light through the gospel. That’s it. Then rest my long-divided heart, fixed on this blissful center rest and don’t bother Madame Zelia. She doesn’t know anything about it either. And when she comes to die, she’ll howl like a banshee and all her supposed knowledge will fail.

Man’s resurrection and Christ’s triumph and all of eschatology, all that lies out there. And that big ugly word eschatology, which mean future events. All of that I take by faith. I believe it will be. I believe that righteousness will triumph, that God Almighty will have his way. The sovereign purposes of God will be fulfilled. That Jesus Christ will sit and the earth will be His footstool and heaven will be His throne. And that the Jew will be back in Palestine. The church will be sitting as a bride of the Lamb. And the nations of the earth will be walking in peace and every man shall sit under his own vine and pick trees and none will make afraid for the earth shall be filled with the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea. I believe it. Do you? That’s a revelation to faith. Reason can’t enter there. There’s the candlesticks, burning brightly. That’s revelation. It’s not God, it’s revelation of God. And there’s the incense table that sends up spiral prayer. And there’s the shewbread which is the Lord’s Supper. That’s in that holy place. No night light of reason enters there, it is faith.

And so, Faith is an organ of knowledge. Remember, reason is an organ of knowledge. Faith is an organ of knowledge, and the Holy Spirit. It is hard to say an organ of knowledge, but the human spirit is an organ of knowledge that to which the Holy Spirit can impart what He wants us to know. Now, these are facts that are known. And all the efforts to harmonize science and the gospel message is a tacit proof that the attempted harmonizers are not believers at all. They’re reasoners. They are rationalists.

And there’s a school of thought which has sprung up in the last fifteen years in America, and they’re busy proving it that Christianity is scientifically sound and philosophically correct. I believe it’s all that, but we can’t prove that it is. And the moment we start proving it is, faith lies down and dies. God doesn’t have to prove to me that He’s true. He doesn’t have to. He tells me. I believe it. If a man trusts his wife, he doesn’t have a detective running around after her proving anything. He trusts her. I trust God Almighty. I don’t have to have the detective reason nosing around to see whether God is telling the truth or not. I know He’s telling the truth.

There is further-in knowledge, and we’ll talk about that next Sunday. I hope you can be back. It is the knowledge beyond faith. It is the direct knowledge which through faith, the Holy Spirit imparts to the human spirit. And I don’t think you’ve ever heard a sermon on that, probably in fundamental circles in your life, and yet it is the common belief of the church fathers and is written into our hymns and our books of devotion. So, I hope you can be back next week.

Tags Faith, Knowledge, Reason

Messages

Tozer Talks

Post author By pshappard
Post date September 15, 2024

“The Basis for True Conversion”

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The Basis for True Conversion

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

September 26, 1954

Now please turn to the sixth chapter of the Gospel according to John, John’s Gospel, sixth chapter, verse 45. It is written in the Prophets, and they shall all be taught of God. Every man therefore that hath heard and hath learned of the Father cometh unto me, verse 44.

No man can come to me except the Father which has sent Me draw him. And then verse 37, all that the Father giveth Me shall come to Me, and him that cometh to Me I will in no wise cast out.

Now, this will be, I think, of all the sermons that I have preached and may yet preach on the book of John, this will be the most difficult. It will be the most difficult to preach because it deals with the deep profound of Bible truth. And it will be the most difficult to understand because it may sound self-contradictory.

And to use the language of Peter, it could easily be that the unlearned and the unstable might rest these words to their own destruction. But I notice that even though Peter said that he didn’t recommend that we forego reading Paul. He said Paul’s there and go ahead and trust God somehow that it won’t happen, but it’s potential dynamite for the people who come in the wrong spirit. I think the same thing might have been said about all the Scriptures, but it was said on Peter of Paul’s writings, and I would apply the same passage to the text before us tonight.

Now in what I want to bring to you, there will be many familiar truths appearing. But you know I think of the Bible like a loom with, say, about a hundred threads, each of a different color, each of a different color, shades of the same color, but distinct from each other in their shades and tone, about a hundred and no more than a hundred. And yet using that same loom and using no more than that hundred, and I might easily have cut it down to half a hundred; using no more than that hundred or half hundred threads, each of a different color, there can be produced in that loom, tapestries and rugs of the most exquisite beauty of shades and richness of tone, such as might make it worthy to hang in the palace of kings.

So, in the Scriptures, whether it be a simple pastor in some country church or whether it be some great world known preacher in some cathedral, if he is true to the scriptures, he has only about, I’ve said, a hundred threads to work with. They are the familiar threads of Christian doctrine. And no matter what he’s preaching on, and no matter to whom he’s preaching, no matter where he gets his text, and no matter what passage he’s expounding, he’ll always be using those same threads. But out of those threads, the Holy Spirit weaves the gorgeous tapestry that hangs in the church of the living God and makes it not only a safe haven for sinners, but a place of charming beauty for the saints.

Now, we notice here that nine times Jesus in the passages is read, nine times he refers to the Father. And He refers to Him in such a context as to present Him as Sovereign. And I want to talk for a little while about the Sovereign Father, the Sovereign Lord. For it always must be kept in mind that the Father was not incarnated. It was the Son who was incarnated. The Father and Jehovah are the same. Jehovah and the Son are not the same persons.

So that it is never proper to say, and right here I’m throwing a tiny little “zoop” bomb into the neatly made-up theology of the average fundamentalist, for I am myself a fundamentalist on the edges, and certainly an evangelical all the way through.

But there are those who say that the Jehovah of the Old Testament became incarnated in the New Testament, which is false. It’s bad theology. It isn’t so. The Father is the Jehovah of the Old Testament, but Jesus Christ is the Son, the second person of the Trinity. It was not God the Sovereign Father who became flesh and dwelt among us. It was Jesus Christ the Son who became flesh and dwelt among us. There’s a distinction there.

You say, how do I prove it? Well, take such a passage as this, Jehovah said unto my Lord, sit thou on My right hand. Find that in the 110th Psalm. Jehovah said unto my Lord, who was David’s Lord? Jesus. Who is it that sits at the right hand of the Father? Jesus. So that Jehovah said unto Jesus, sit thou on My right hand. Jehovah the Father said unto the Son, sit on My right hand.

That text alone ought to make it clear, but you’ll find it throughout all the Bible. You’ll find the Sovereign Father mentioned here, and it was the Son that became incarnated, not the Sovereign Father, Jehovah the Great I Am. And yet the Son was as much Sovereign and as much I Am as the Father. For as I have said over and over again from this pulpit, the Three are One. And what can be postulated about the Father can be postulated about the Son. And what can be said about the Father and the Son can be said also about the Spirit.

I received a letter this last week from a Presbyterian brother out somewhere on the California coast, and he ended up by saying something of this effect, God bless you and may the Lord the Spirit bless you and your ministry. I like that. I’d never had that in any letter that I remember, nor I’d never seen it in print except in the book of 2 Corinthians.

The Bible has no hesitation at all in calling the Spirit the Lord. He has no hesitation in calling Jesus the Lord, and he has no hesitation in calling the Father the Lord. For as the old creed says, the Father is Lord and the Son is Lord and the Holy Ghost is Lord, yet there are not three Lords but one Lord. This is also very wonderfully beautiful to me.

I preached one time in a Bible conference this summer on the Trinity, and when I was through, the man who ran the shebang said to me, shaking his head, he said, Brother, when you preach thus on the Trinity, it makes it sound as if there were three gods.

Well, I don’t understand how anybody can be so infinitely and exquisitely plain dumb as not to understand English when it’s preached in their presence, and when I have explained and explained that there is one God and that He is of three persons, the Father is God, the Son is God, and the Holy Ghost is God, yet there are not three gods but one God.

The Father is Lord, the Son is Lord, the Holy Ghost is Lord, yet there are not three Lords but one Lord. The Father is sovereign, and the Son is sovereign and the Holy Ghost is sovereign, yet there are not three sovereign gods but one sovereign God. That doesn’t sound like three gods to me. That sounds like one God in three persons. And so, we have the Father spoken about here, the Son is speaking about the Father, and He calls him nine times here, the Father, and calls Him and puts Him, I say, in the context of the sovereign, Most High Ruler, and God of heaven, earth, and hell.

Now, I want to talk a little bit about sovereignty.

I preached a sermon several years ago on the sovereignty of God, and if I ever get around to it and God ever delivers me from little duties that I can write my book on the attributes of God devotionally considered, I want to deal with the sovereignty of God. And when I do, I will have the Calvinists on one shoulder and the Arminians on the other pecking away at my poor, rapidly balding head. But tonight, I want to talk a little bit about the sovereignty of God and show you what it means as applied to God the Father.

Well, now I give you a definition. I like to give definitions, I like to define, because if I use a word and I mean it one way and when you hear it you mean it another way, I haven’t communicated with you at all. I might as well have been talking Sanskrit or Welsh. So that if I use a word and you don’t know what I mean by the word, not that you are not as well educated as I am, but merely that you may give a different meaning to a word. So when I use the word sovereign, I think it well that we define what we mean by the word sovereign.

So, I want to give it to you simply like this. I don’t borrow it from any book. It comes out of my own heart, and I trust out of the scriptures that God’s sovereignty is that by virtue of which He is free to do always as He pleases and fulfill all His goodwill without hindrance. That’s sovereignty. That turns God loose in his universe, free to do as He pleases in heaven, earth, and hell, and to have His final way and to carry out his eternal purposes to perfect completion in the time to come. Now that’s sovereignty. That’s what it means and that’s all it means or at least that’s an outline of all that it means.

Now God’s will, when I say that the sovereignty of God means that God is free to carry out His will, then we come to, what is the will of God? And I point out something to you here which you may not be familiar with or hear some places by oversight and that is that the will of God is on two levels. There is the primary will of God and the secondary will of God. The primary will of God is the sovereign purpose of God whereby He has His way always and always succeeds in getting everything He wills to have done. That’s the primary will of God.

Now, the primary will of God touches all of God’s eternal purposes. I’m a great believer in the eternal purposes of God.

They talk about our State Department. I saw a cartoon. You won’t think I’m getting political with you, but I saw a cartoon that while I don’t like the cartoonist, I had to admit he had something there. It showed a picture of Dulles, the Secretary of State under Eisenhower, our present Secretary of State, our peripatetic, traveling Secretary of State. It showed his desk there and here was he just disappearing on his way to catch a plane. He had his briefcase in his hand and one thing he had not, he had no head on. His head was still on his desk and his head was saying, well, you can’t blame a fellow for forgetting something sometimes. Here he was hustling off, but he lost his head.

Now that of course was the politicians, the political cartoonist way of saying that he was a no good and that he didn’t know where he was going. Brethren, I think he may be a good man, but you know, I wonder if he knows what it’s all about. And I think that these brethren, these men are all opportunists, and they are like a mother with 14 sets of twins trying to keep them in line. She never can predict what anybody’s going to do and the best she can hope is to block something when she sees it start. Junior starts over this way to knock over a quart of milk and she grabs him and blocks that and another one starts over here to wreck a mirror, and she grabs him, and she spends her blessed life just blocking, but she never knows ahead of time what she’s going to do. The best she can ever hope to do is to watch these, how many did I say, 14, that’d be 28 kids, to watch these 28 kids and get to them before they get it done.

Now brethren, my dear friends, without any political meaning whatsoever, that’s where dear Harold is. He has no more purpose in what he’s doing than the boy down the street, but he’s just hoping if he sees a commie jump out, he’ll block him and rush there and forget his head, but get to him in time and so we have a foreign policy of watch them and then jump and stop them before they get it done.

Ah brethren, if I thought God Almighty was like that, I’d fold my Bible, shake hands with my friend McAfee and leave the whole business and say what’s the use of being a Christian when all God does is stand up there nervously watching for the devil to make the next move and then blocking him.

Oh no, my brother, this is not a football game. God Almighty is the Sovereign Father and before the hills in order stood and received her frame, God had it all planned and in His primary will He is carrying it out and He will do His will and heaven and earth and hell someday will bow and declare that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God’s eternal purpose, the glory of God the Father.

So that’s why I can be as relaxed as I can ever get because I’m not worried about the future. I’m not scared because I know it’s going to work out all right. God has a primary will, and I can see now that I got two sermons instead of one but I’m hoping that maybe the people will hold on.

But brethren, God has a purpose for the universe. He has a purpose for the earth. He has a purpose for the human race. He has a purpose for the church, and He has a purpose for Israel, His people. And every one of those has a specific interlocking purpose which God Himself brought out of His own triune heart before the world was.

When there wasn’t a cloud in the sky nor drop of water in the ocean or the ocean bed there, nor a star in heaven or an angel beside the throne, when, as the poet said, thou didst live and love alone without creation. God had it all planned.

So never worry about God being afraid and rushing in and hurrying off and grabbing a long-distance phone and trying to get somebody blocked. Nah, God wouldn’t stoop to that kind of child’s play. His eternal thoughts move on His undisturbed affairs. And His primary will means that He is carrying on His purposes. That’s God’s primary will.

Then there’s a secondary will and that secondary will is that God has given people a will and He’s given them a right even to exercise that will even if one opposes the will of God. I wonder if we could illustrate it like this. I wonder if we could say that the primary will of God is like a great ship. It pulls slowly and majestically away from Pier 39 and starts out down toward the ocean, down the great mouth of the Hudson. Liverpool is its destination. The ship’s papers, the captain, whoever handles them, has the ship’s papers there, Liverpool. He’s responsible to get that ship in and have her pulled in and tied up at the dock in Liverpool in five days. About, I think it takes five days, does it? Or six for the great ships?

Well, all right. He’s going over there and he’s the captain in charge of that ship. So the purpose is that that ship should leave New York at such a day, pull into Liverpool at such a day. That’s the purpose. Now that purpose is going to be fulfilled. And the owner of the ship, all that are on board the ship in the capacity of crew and the captain and all the rest, that’s their purpose. And they’ll carry that purpose out.

But now in the meantime, there’s a great deal on that ship that doesn’t know a thing about that purpose. A little baby may be tumbling around over the deck and a weary mother may be lying out there trying to get a little sun. And a fat old boy that can barely see over may be playing the shuffleboard. And there may be rats running about the ship and sailors playing cards and people just naturally doing as they please. They’re not paying any attention to the purpose of the captain. He knows what the purpose is. His primary will is to get that ship into the dock at last.

But the secondary will is you can do as you please as long as you’re decent on board and I won’t bother you. So, God has a primary will. It is to bring the ship of his purpose to the ultimate goal, to the harbor. In the meantime, the rats run all over the ship. Brother, we’re alive with them today.

And somebody says, if God is God, why doesn’t He stop this? God knows where He’s taking the ship, and all of His purposes will be worked out. But in the meantime, His secondary will allows certain people to oppose His will, to be careless of His will, to be ignorant of His will, or to go directly against His will.

Now, if you were on board a ship and it was moving at so many knots an hour due east, and you decided to buck that ship and you’d start in the prowl, that’s the front of the ship, and walk to the stern. And you’d say to yourself, I’m not going, I’m not going, but you’d be going all right. Don’t imagine you wouldn’t. You’d just be getting some exercise. But even though you determinedly walked in an opposite direction, the great old ship would be carrying you there.

So, we have our Hitlers and our Mussolinis and our Stalins and all the rest of them, our Mao Zedong and our Zhou Enlai, we have them all. We have them all around over Chicago. They’re walking against the direction of the ship. But don’t you think for a second God won’t have his way with them at last. It’ll be heaven or hell. Heaven for those who do His will and believe His Son, and hell for those that don’t. God is in charge of His great purpose, and while He allows people to have a lot of freedom, He still will fulfill His purposes in that day.

Now, I want to give my definition again. I’ve given this definition in colleges and before people who are supposed to know the difference, and I’ve never had it challenged. Nobody’s ever come to me and said, how come? And yet I never read it anywhere. I don’t know whether it’s in print. It ought to be.

But here’s our difficulty, you see. If God is sovereign and has His will and can’t be thwarted, then how can man be free? There it is. You put a Methodist over here and a Presbyterian over here, and you ask a Presbyterian, how can it be? He says, Man isn’t free. God’s sovereign. Ask a Methodist, and he says, God isn’t sovereign. Man’s free, and they can’t get together. But I don’t think, I don’t see why they shouldn’t link up, because I believe in both the freedom of man and the sovereignty of God, and I’ll show you how it is.

God’s sovereignty is His freedom always to have His own way and to do His will. And man’s freedom is his right to say no to God’s will and to go the other direction. How then can you bring them together? You bring them together like this, that when God in his sovereign freedom created the heaven and the earth and all things that are therein and made man on the earth and put a soul within him, He said in His sovereign freedom, now to man I bequeath a limited freedom, and the right to oppose Me within limits. And I give you that right, and I hand it to you. Now use it. Use your own free will. I sovereignly declare that it’s My will that you shall have your will.

So, when man rises against God, he is exercising the free will which God sovereignly gave him. And when Judas Iscariot turned his back on God and sold the son of God for 30 pieces of silver, he was fulfilling this much of God’s will, that he was using the freedom God gave him, ladies and gentlemen. And so instead of canceling out the sovereignty of God, he was only using that limited freedom which God sovereignly had given him.

So, when I refuse to obey God, I am only doing what God has sovereignly given me the right to do. That’s God’s secondary will. He allows the rats to play over the ship and the winds to beat the across its deck, but He’s going to carry her through to the harbor, nevertheless. And that doesn’t mean that everybody’s to be saved. It only means that those are to be saved who are repentant and believe in Jesus Christ and are born again.

But it does mean that the overall purpose of God will be sovereignly fulfilled, and that man in his freedom has the right to make his own little choices on the little deck of that moving vessel. And if he makes choices that are contrary to the will of God, it’s because God said, son, you’re free to do it if you want to. I give you that freedom. So when a man raised his fist against God, he is not thwarting the will of God. He’s fulfilling God’s gift to him which made him free.

Now if that’s as badly confused as I’m afraid it is, come back next week and we’ll see what we can do. But I’ve never had that challenged. Nobody’s ever said, now wait a minute here, that isn’t true, it can’t be true. And I have given this little definition of mine before a great many people and before a great many theologians. So that’s what I mean when I say it that the sovereign Father is sovereignly carrying on His will.

Now, it says here, they shall all be taught of God. You see, men are in the hand of God and subject to the sovereign disposal of God’s primary will. Thine they were, said Jesus, thine they were, and Thou gave them to Me, and they have believed that Thou did send Me.

So, God deals with the men whom he has created. He deals with them as fallen creatures. And how does he deal with them? He deals by testing them and teaching them and instructing them.

They shall all be taught of God, Jesus said. And so, He teaches and tests and instructs. Now this is the Sovereign Father who does this, and He does it with these creatures by virtue of their creaturehood and His creator hood, not as Christians, but by virtue of their being creatures of His hand and beings whom He has created.

And so, God teaches and tests and instructs. They shall be all taught of God. How does God teach and test and instruct sinners? By the light of intelligence, working on natural creation, plus moral conscience, plus the mysterious presence of the Logos.

My brethren, I don’t know in all Christian theology anything that shuts my mouth tighter and makes my head bow more quickly and silences me when I am not forced to speak in the Lord’s name as I am now, but that makes me bow my head more quickly than the thought of the mysterious Logos, the Word that was in the world before Bethlehem, before Mary was born, before Abraham, before Adam, before oceans and seas, before stars and planets, that was in His universe. And when stars and planets and oceans and seas and creatures came into being, the mysterious Logos, the light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world was present, instructing, teaching. And wherever there is a moral creature, that Holy One is there. This is the light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world.

And in Romans 2 we are told of that strange light, that strange moral knowledge that men have who have never heard of the law of God as given by Moses or the Scriptures as given in the New Testament. And so, God goes among men. They shall all be taught of God. And God goes among men, and He tests them, I say, and they are tested in a hundred ways for their basic reverence.

Now, there was Esau and there was Saul. What is the matter with Esau? Find a bad thing Esau did. He never did a bad thing. At least, I can’t find anything evil that he did. He got hungry and sold his birthright, but that was a bowl of soup, no more immoral act there, a man of porridge. I can’t find anything bad that Esau ever did.

But God was testing Esau for basic reverence and didn’t find it there and found that Esau was akin to the red clay, and they named him Edom red clay. He had no side of his soul open to heaven. The window at the top of his soul was shut and the blind pulled. There was no window open toward God, no reverence there, nothing basically reverential. Look at Saul, great strapping tall fellow, and the beginning of his life was all right.

But there was something wrong with Saul in that he was not basically a reverent man. God, before he ever brings a man to Jesus, before he ever presents Jesus to a man, God tests man. Now this is the doctrine you don’t hear, but brethren, if it isn’t here, and you prove it isn’t here, I’ll buy you the best chicken dinner at Walgreens. It’s here all right. They shall all be taught of God.

I better read my text a few more times. They shall all be taught of God. Every man therefore that hath heard and hath learned of the Father cometh unto Me. No man can come to Me except the Father which has sent Me draw him. And all that the Father giveth Me shall come to Me. And him that cometh to Me I will unknow as cast out. And there you have the mysterious working of the Sovereign God over the souls of men.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is to my mind one of the most awe-inspiring thoughts in the Bible, that before I ever heard the name of Jesus, before the Holy Ghost ever presented Him to me as Savior, the Father was dealing with me, the Sovereign Father. They shall all be taught of God. And He was determining and finding out whether I was a basically reverent man, whether I was a greasy Esau, fond of the sticky, slippery red earth, or whether I was a man with the topside of my soul open so God could look down and I could look up.

And then God looks for humility in a man. The Sovereign Father goes among men, and as He’s going among you tonight, and looking for humility, and seeing if it is there. And He’s looking for that hidden something that I have said the topside of his soul is uncovered. I don’t say that saves any man. I know it doesn’t. But I only say that there are some people that God never preaches to.

It is a great mistake, ladies and gentlemen, to believe that every man who has heard the gospel has been evangelized. It is a mistake to believe that every man that has heard a Christian or heard a sermon has been talked to by God. There are some people to whom God can’t talk. Their ears hear, but having ears they hear not, and having hearts they cannot obey. They shall all be tested of God. They shall all be taught of God.

And the Sovereign Father who created them before He sent His Son to redeem them, as their Creator, is testing them to see which ones will go to His Son. And as many as hear the Father and are taught, they come to Jesus Christ, and He doesn’t cast them out, but He gives them eternal life, and no man can pluck them out of His hand.

Now, we make a mistake, and that is we urge the claims of Christ upon men that have never heard God. They are not prepared for Christ. They will not believe, and they could not if they wanted to. No man can come unto Me except the Father drawn. And he that has heard of the Father will come.

But, oh, the millions that hear the gospel without hearing the Father! The millions that hear the Truth without ever being affected by the Truth! But our trouble is that we rush in with our tract and try to ram Christianity down the throat of a person that has never had a moral preparation for it. There has been no evidence of humility there. There has been no repentance there. There has been no fearing and trembling there. There has been no willingness to break with the world and serve God.

But in our mistaken zeal, we try to make converts, and then we wonder why they backslide, or why the level of Christianity is so tragically low. It is so low because we have forgotten part of our Bible. We have forgotten that the Bible says they shall all be taught of God, that God deals with men as Creator before He deals with them as Redeemer. And that the light shines in the world.

Two men are riding in the same car, and they pass a church. They are both sinners, both lost and both on their way to hell. But one man looks up and sees the church, and instinctively something in him causes his head to bow a bit, and he is silent for a moment. The other man laughs as though it were a tavern and goes his way. Two women are playing cards together, both lost and both on their way to hell. The third person comes in and raises the religious question. One laughs it off, the other is strangely silent.

They shall all be taught of God, and the Sovereign Father that created them deals with them and prepares them. And as many as have heard the Father, they come straight to Jesus. And when they come, He gives them eternal life. Now, am I wrong on this? No man can come to Me except the Father which has sent Me draw him, and I will raise him up at the last day.

It is written in the Prophets, and they shall all be taught of God. Every man therefore that hath heard and hath learned of the Father cometh unto Me. Then He said, But I said unto you that ye also have seen Me and believe not.

And why have they not believed? Because they have not tested up, because there is no side of their soul open to heaven. They enjoy singing a fast chorus, I suppose, and they would enjoy a banquet, three-course banquet, five-course, ten-course banquet. They love religion all right. They like to be around where there is something nice going on. But there is nothing open to God in their souls at all. They hear the Word, but they don’t hear the Word. They have ears, but they hear nothing. They have not been taught of the Father. Then they get jockeyed into believing in Christ, and they make such poor, hopeless Christians. The reason is, that they are not Christians at all.

Every man therefore that hath heard and hath learned of the Father, he cometh unto Me, not that any man has seen the Father, save He which is of God, He has seen the Father. I am that Bread of Life, and this is the Bread which came down from heaven, that man may eat thereof and not die. I am the Living Bread which came down from heaven.

So, you see, my friends, there is such a thing as the mysterious workings of the Holy Ghost, of the Sovereign Father, through the Holy Ghost, before the Spirit ever presents the claims of the Savior to the soul at all. How different this is from our come when you want to, do what you please, think it over, and then decide. No, no, that is a modern heresy, and it is not Biblical, and there is no place for it in the entire Scriptures. No man can come to Me except the Father which has sent Me to draw him.

So, before God has tried and tested and proved, and at that hour then there is no impudent will of the man. The man has a will, and he knows it, but no more the impudent will that says, my will, my will, no more of that. There is conscience. The man that can’t sweat because he sinned can never repent, and the man who can’t repent can never be forgiven, and the man who can’t be forgiven must perish. And by sweat, of course, I don’t mean physical perspiration. I mean groan before God for his own iniquity. And I’ve said reverence and repentance and our general attitude toward God and the world above.

O Brethren, the Sovereign Father is here, and the Holy Spirit is exercising His right to select and test and try and prove and see and know whether we will or not; whether there’s anything here that can respond.

O Jacob, who would want to save you, you crooked conspirator? Jacob, you’re a wicked young chap, you’re a delinquent. Why don’t you be like your brother, a good, obedient fellow that smells of his work? The Bible says he did, says he smelled of the field which the Lord had blessed.

Esau was a good fellow. Jacob was a crooked, nasty little guy that you wouldn’t want to have lived around. But the difference was Esau loved Esau. And Jacob hated Jacob. Therefore, God hated Esau and loved Jacob. And though Jacob was deserving of death and damnation a thousand times, there was something inside the heart of Jacob that leaped to the voice of God, that leaped up.

The topside of Jacob’s soul was open to heaven, and he could look up, and God could look down. Esau was well thatched. He had no top to his soul. What top he had had no window in it. He was a pretty good man and a forgiving man and a nice, stodgy fellow, but he belonged to the earth. Jacob was a man who didn’t know where he belonged, but he was a miserable fellow, hated himself and his sin and all the rest, and he wanted to do God’s will and couldn’t and tumbled and fell. But all the time God knew he had a man.

So, no matter how bad you are or how crooked or what a sinner you’ve been, that doesn’t need to mean anything to you if you’ve been honored by God, if you’ve heard the voice of the Father. And in your spirit, there’s that basic reverence and a desire to do God’s will and a hatred, self-hatred for your sin, and you’ll want to come to the Lord Jesus. You’ll come, all right. They that have been taught of the Father, they come to Me, and them that come to Me I never turn away. I give them eternal life, and no man can ever pluck them out of My hand. They’re Mine because thine the Father’s they were, but He has given them to Me, and I have given them eternal life.

That’s how every Christian became a Christian, the mysterious working of God, conscience, repentance, and our general attitude toward the world above. Oh, how different from all this mechanical conveyor belt Christianity, this conveyor belt Christianity.

Do you know what I heard this last week, brother? You won’t believe this. I heard of a man, a soul winner so-called, who was too eager to make converts and to get the convert to say he believed in Jesus Christ, that he actually tricked sinners into saying, I believe in Jesus, but moved the conversation and got the conversation going around and got the fellow to moving and got him in a corner and jumped him, back on the checkerboard. And when the fellow finally admitted he believed in Jesus Christ, he said, there, you’re a Christian, there, I got you, you’re a Christian.

Now, that fellow, he’s supposed to be a Christian. I’m glad there aren’t very many men with ears that long in the world. We’d be worse off than we are. God knows we have hair enough on our long ears in a lot of places, but when they get that bad, brother, somebody ought to throw a net over him. But that kind of soul winning, I’ve heard that almost that bad; I’ve heard it talked from this pulpit on one occasion. It wasn’t my meeting, just a fellow in here preaching for some other organization, but I was present.

And I heard something almost that bad. You can trick a man into saying, I believe in the Son of God. All right, then, you’re a Christian. You’re a Christian, you hear? For the Bible says, he that believeth on the Son hath everlasting life. You said you believe you’re a Christian. Goody, goody.

But the Sovereign Father has never touched him. And the Holy ghost has never prepared him. And he’s never been taught of God. And he’s never heard of the Father. And the basic reverence isn’t in him, and basic humility isn’t there, and repentance isn’t there. But they’ve jockeyed him and tricked him into saying, I believe. And that’s why we’re as we are.

Oh, my brother, if God’s people would only pray and pray till the presence of God would become as thick as fog, holy fog, and men would walk around with a sense of reverence and fear and repentance on them so terrible that sin would become intolerable and the thought of hell and judgment and death would be unbearable, we’d get some converts that would come bounding out like a healthy child. But we jockey them and trick them and push them and massage them into the kingdom of God. And when they get in there, they don’t know what it’s all about.

How about you, sir? All that the Father giveth Me shall come to Me. He said, verse 37, all that the Father giveth Me shall come to Me. All I want to ask is, are you of the kind of moral material God can give to His Son? Is there any repentance there, any sorrow for sin, any grief at your wrongdoing, any fear in the presence of the great, mysterious God? Is there anything there God can handle or deal with and you’ll have reason to hope? Turn thou to Jesus Christ, God’s Son. He is the Bread of Life. And as I said last week, believing is eating. Just as you take the bread into your mouth by eating, you take Jesus, the Bread of Life; into your heart by believing.

So, you can come tonight, and you can believe tonight, and you can be saved tonight. And He says, I will in no wise cast him out. Now whether that means, various translations have it differently. Whether that means I will not turn him away when He comes, or I will not cast him out after he’s in. To me it means both, because if He takes him in, He has no reason to cast him out. So, there he is.

When I think of how many, many years ago it is now, I came up out of a pagan home, a father that had no knowledge of God, a mother who hadn’t been but two or three times to church in probably thirty years but was surrounded by ungodly people. Not bad evil people, because my mother managed to keep the moral standards very high, very high, so high indeed that not one of her three boys ever smoked or drank, and not one of her three girls ever did anything that you could consider evil, perhaps except one. Apart from her, Mother’s family was a high-living family. And they were all that on morals alone. They didn’t have to get born again to live right; they were living right on simple, sheer morals alone.

And into that home, to a seventeen-year-old, gangly, ignorant boy, came the Sovereign Father in the Holy Ghost and talked to my heart. And I had no help from anywhere else and talked to my heart. And fear and terror of God, and reverence and a longing to be right, and a yearning to sin, all played like shadows and light over my heart. And then one day I heard a man on a street corner say, if you don’t know how to pray, pray, God have mercy on me a sinner. I went to my mother’s attic, got on my knees, stretched my two hands up to God and said, God have mercy on me a sinner.

And God saved my soul. Then, after that, it was all like the opening of a flower, like the developing of a field. Jesus Christ became all in all to me. I trusted him perfectly, as I do this night. Why did God come to the worst member of the family? It was generally and publicly stated.

I’m not trying to be humble now. Everybody knew that. Mother knew it. Everybody knew it. I was the only one who would swear. I was the only one who would sass my mother. I was the only one who would disobey my father. I was the only one that was a little devil. Why did Jesus Christ find me and my brother, seven years older, a gentleman, walk into his presence, and he makes me look like a hillbilly, gracious, suave, friendly, knows when to talk and when to keep still, and never a spark. Never a spark. And I dealt with him and talked to him and preached to him and dealt with him until I gave it up. Never a spark.

They shall all be taught of God. And they that have heard and have learned of the Father, they come to Me, and I give them eternal life. So, if there’s the longing, the dream, the aspiration, the want to be good, the fear of sin, the future, you’re already one upon whom God’s hand has been laid.

Oh, how wonderful. More than the check for a million dollars, more than being elected President, that God has laid His hand upon you. That out of those teeming millions, God’s laid His hand on you.

How about it tonight? How do you feel about it? What’s your response? Anything there? Any live nerve there? Or are you another Esau without a live nerve? You can jab and probe and not a lot of response. No live nerve. But if God the Father has taught and tested and by the Holy Ghost convicted you of sin and righteousness and judgment, there’s a live nerve.

You can come. No man can come to Me except the Father draw him. But if you’ve got that live nerve that the probe of the Holy Ghost makes you wince, come unto Me, all ye that labor under heavy laden, and I will give you rest.

Will you do it?

Tags Sovereignty of God

Messages

Tozer Talks

Post author By pshappard
Post date September 8, 2024

“Abiding Elements of Pentecost”

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Abiding Elements of Pentecost

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

Speaking at the American Keswick Conference at Moody Church in Chicago, 1960

My topic tonight is the abiding element in Pentecost, and I want to read from the Book of Acts, Chapter 2. A very familiar passage, a very controversial passage, but I don’t intend to treat it controversially. Second chapter of Acts, when the day of Pentecost had fully come, they were all with one accord in one place. And suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting.

And there appeared unto them cloven tongues like as of fire and sat upon each of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues as the Spirit gave them utterance. And there were dwelling in Jerusalem, Jews, devout men out of every nation unto heaven.

Now when this was noised abroad, the multitude came together and were confounded because that every man heard them speak in his own language. And they were all amazed and marveled, saying one to another, Behold, are not all these which speak Galilean, so how hear we every man in our own tongue, for in we were born? Then skipping over the list of seventeen nations to verse 11, they said, we do hear them speak in our languages, the wonderful works of God.

Now here in this experience, as in every, or almost every, probably every valid religious experience, there are these elements present. There is first the external element, and because it is external it is variable. Then there is the internal element, which is of the Spirit, and so tremendously important. And then there is the incidental elements, which are of relative importance. And the fundamental elements, which are vital and eternal.

Now I want you to bring this analysis to what took place here on that day called “the Fifty Days,” Pentecost, and I want to point out some things that can never be repeated, although my sermon, I’ll break it down and toss it out to tell you in case I don’t finish it, you’ll know what I started to say. There are elements which can never be repeated, and some which, according to my knowledge of history, never have been repeated. And then there are elements which are eternal, and while they are not repeated, they are perpetuated. For I’d like to say this, that I do not believe in the repetition of Pentecost, but I believe in the perpetuation of Pentecost.

Now, what can never be repeated? Well, the physical presence of all the Church in one place. The members remained together in Jerusalem. They were all there and that never happened after that, because Saul made havoc of the church, and they were scattered abroad. And they have never been all together since. I started to say, thank God, I mean by that, that there are so many of them that there’s no building and no town that could house them, so many of the people of God. So that could never be repeated. You never can get all God’s people together outside of heaven, and that in itself may be a blessing.

Now, the second thing is that there are elements, there are things that occurred here that, in addition to one I’ve named, that never have been repeated, according to my knowledge of Church history.

A friend of mine said to me one time, when I get up and talk at conference, why don’t they listen to me? He said, because you have a habit of speaking ex cathedra, and sometimes there’s more ex than cathedra.

So, it is entirely possible that I could be wrong here, though I never am deliberately so, but what has never been repeated, so far as I know, is the sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind. Now, I’ve never heard that that happened. I’ve heard all sorts of things that were supposed to take place, but nobody ever said the whole house was full of a sound like wind.

Then I have never heard that the appearance of a great body of fire was seen by a company of people, dividing itself into flames like little tongues and resting upon the foreheads of each one. That seemed to be peculiar to that first coming of the Holy Ghost.

Then I have never heard that they all began, all the company present, began to speak languages which did not need to be interpreted, but which were understood by everybody present. Seventeen different languages of people there, and they understood it without an interpreter.

Now there’s a good logic back of all this, my friends. If these things had been necessary to the life of the Church, then they would have had to be repeated every time the Spirit filled anybody, or there was a company of people that was Spirit-filled. The Church couldn’t have continued without them. But if they were never repeated, then the Church must have ceased the day it was born, or at least ceased when the one who first composed the Church died.

Now those are the passing elements, the noise, the wind, the presence of everybody in one place, the sudden visitation of God in fire, visible fire that separated and sat visibly upon them, the out bursting of a joyous testimony in languages that couldn’t be understood by everybody without an interpreter. Now all this was there, but this is not the abiding element in this Pentecostal visitation.

What was, or what were the abiding elements? Well, we can discover them by going to the New Testament and finding what the Lord had promised that would come. He said, He shall send you another Comforter. And He said, when the Comforter is come, He will take the things of mine and will show them unto you. And He said, I tell you the truth, that I go away, and I send Him, and when He comes will convince the world of sin and righteousness and judgment.

And He said that ye shall receive power, and as every student knows, power means a moral ability to do. Now that, those are the vital elements in the Pentecostal outpouring, and these have been perpetuated to the Church and are ours, available to us as certainly as to them.

Now I want to illustrate this thing by showing you how when our Lord came there were certain phenomena which occurred, but which were never repeated in the ministry of our Lord.

You remember when Jesus was born in Bethlehem in the days of Herod the King, there came wise men from the east, and there was a star, and there were angels that chanted over the fields of Bethlehem, and there were the wise men, and there was the inn where the Lord was born, and the excitement, and later on the flight into Egypt.

Now, all these were external phenomena which surrounded the birth of the Lord Jesus, but they all passed because they were incidental and not fundamental, they were external and not internal, they were visible and audible and of the flesh, and not the invisible and inaudible deep workings of the Holy Ghost. There was a star out there, and there were angels, and there were wise men, and there was the inn, and there were donkeys, and there was the flight into Egypt, and all that.

But when all that was gone, the Lord Jesus Christ was still there, because the abiding element in Bethlehem was the presence of the Word to become flesh to dwell among us. After the wise men had gone back east again, and the shepherds had gone back to their flocks, and the star had gone wherever it went, and the inn had been forgotten, and the flight into Egypt was a memory, He was still there. He abode. He remained, and all that He came to do was perpetuated through his entire ministry and still continues.

That is an illustration, and I believe a valid one, of how it was when the Holy Ghost, the third person of the Trinity, came at Pentecost as the second person had come at Bethlehem. There were external and dramatic, colorful phenomena that surrounded the coming of the Holy Spirit, as there had been surrounding the birth of Christ. But when those external phenomena passed, the thing that God had wanted to do and had succeeded in doing, still abodes, still remains forever the same.

Now, what did God do there, as recorded in that passage which I read to you? Well, the Holy Ghost had come to dwell among men and had come to dwell in the hearts of His people to make His Church one and to forever inhabit the redeemed bosoms of those who believed on God’s eternal Son. Wouldn’t it have been a ridiculous thing if the people had heard about the phenomena that surrounded the birth of Jesus, and nobody would have believed that he was healed unless there was a star and a donkey and a hymn and a wise man and all of the external things?

The point is, God used all those things to get His eternal Son into human flesh, to get Him here. That was God incarnating His Son, and these things were external manifestations. But they all passed, and the Lord remained and healed the sick and gave eyes to the blind and unstopped the ears and drove out the devils and forgave sin and blessed mankind.

Now the Holy Ghost came as the Second Person came, and He came upon them in visible fire. He sat upon their foreheads; they broke out into languages that could be understood without an interpreter. It was a wind, or like a wind, that filled the building. But those, I repeat, were the external elements. The eternal element was that the Holy Ghost had come, the Comforter has come, we sing, and that’s what had happened there. That was the mighty truth.

Now, the meaning of it all is that the Holy Ghost now inhabits His Church in power. I’d like to point out that the word power there is ability, and it’s the ability to be and ability to do.

All the religions of the world that I know anything about, and I have made myself acquainted by reading the holy books, so-called, of most of the great religions of the world, and never could quite wade through the Book of Mormon. That was always a little too heavy for me, I began to nod about page 3. But most of the great religions of the East, I have read at least some of their books, and they are practically all the same in that they talk about what you do and don’t have very much to say about what you be. But the Scriptures talk about our being first and our doing second, and we do what we be.

Back in Pennsylvania where I grew up, they used the word be for do, and it’s a good word, it’s the verb I be, I am. God says that He was to give us ability to be, and because we have ability to be, of course it’s quite normal that we do. A bird has ability to sing because he’s a bird, and a Christian has ability to live like a Christian because He is a Christian. God has given him the power.

I want to analyze the power a little bit. We’re suffering in the day in which we live from two extremes. We’re suffering from the extremes of those who take the external phenomena of Pentecost and try to repeat it 19th centuries later, and nothing but trouble can come from this and nothing but trouble ever has; divisions and all sorts of things.

And then we’re suffering from another extreme just as bad, and that is that we’ve all gone into our holes and frozen over the entrance and sit back there blowing on our hands, afraid of the Holy Spirit. We’re afraid to preach about him and talk about him and pray to be filled with him, because some have gone to extremes.

They have misunderstood and they thought that the wise man and the star and the shepherds and the inn and we have to have all that. No. I don’t believe on a star to be converted. I don’t believe on a shepherd to be saved. I don’t believe on an inn or a donkey in order to be blessed. I believe on the One who came into the middle of all that and remains in mortal flesh.

So, I don’t believe on tongues, and I don’t believe on flaming fire on foreheads. I don’t believe on winds that fill buildings. I believe on Jesus Christ, and I receive the one who came in that hurricane of blessing to remain forever in the breasts of his people.

Now, I don’t hear any amens, but I love my own preaching, you know, I do. I enjoy preaching the truth, and if anybody says amen, he’s on, it’s all right. And if he doesn’t say amen, he’s either asleep or else he’s wrong.

Let’s break this down a little bit, keeping within our time. What is this power to be and this power to do? Well, there’s love, joy, peace. We talk about love. A fellow like I am, I couldn’t love anybody. Now, Stephen Olford, who will follow me, he could love anybody. He was born that way. He’s a lovable fellow, but nobody loves me for myself because there’s nothing here to love. And I couldn’t love anybody. But God gives you power to be and to do, and He gives me power. He can give me power to love people that just aren’t lovable.

And then there’s joy. Now, a fellow like I am, again I’m born gloomy. I see the dark side of everything. My friend McAfee, if you’re here, knows that. And if it is clears as a bell in the morning, I say that’s probably a weather breeder, it likely to rain by noon. I’m naturally pessimistic. And for me to have anything like joy and peace takes a power that isn’t in human nature, at least it isn’t in mine. But I enjoy quite a little bit of peace and joy because I have been given ability to be and ability to do.

Then there’s long-suffering. Now, long-suffering, of course, is the ability to suffer a long time. Everybody’s willing to suffer a little while but suffering a long time just to put up with things and ride them out and live them down and hope for the best and go on, it’s not natural, it’s not natural to me. I don’t think it’s natural to any American, really.

A Chinese person might because they’re a very quiet, slower people, but an American wouldn’t. And an American complains if he misses one section of a revolving door. So long-suffering, it takes something out of heaven to make a man suffer long and be kind, a disposition to bear injuries patiently.

Then there’s gentleness, which is the opposite of harshness and severity. Then there’s goodness. Now, I’m quoting, of course, from Galatians. There’s goodness, which is morally good. Now, here again we’re a victim of extremes because none is good save God. We’re unwilling to say he was a good man and full of the Holy Ghost. We’re afraid of the Bible itself. We run and hide from the words of the Scripture. We say nobody is good, nobody is good.

A friend of mine preached one time on righteousness. He preached that people ought to be righteous, and an old fellow came down the aisle walking fast, and he said, why do you preach goodness? Don’t you know there’s only one good and that’s God? You’re preaching legalism. He said, people can’t be good, they aren’t good.

This dear old brother was hurt so badly by the criticism, and I called him aside and I said, don’t worry, Doctor, God has his treasures in earthen vessels and some of the vessels are cracked. Don’t let it bother you at all. Some people are afraid of goodness, just sheer downright goodness.

Do you want me to say a radical thing? If all of you listening to me now were just ordinary, plain, downright good people, your testimony would be stepped up a hundred percent. Goodness is a virtue given by God to the human heart.

Then faithfulness, that’s ability to keep right on being faithful, opposite of instability, fidelity to a trust. And meekness, which is the opposite of arrogance and temperance, which is the opposite of intemperance.

I had hoped I might be able, while I’m here, to preach on discipleship, but it didn’t fall in the scheme of things that I should. But I believe that the Lord wants us to be disciples and learn from him and learn by the power of the indwelling Holy Ghost. He gives the power, and we give the willingness and the determination to be Christlike, and temperance is one of the virtues, living temperately, to be strong and masterful in control of ourselves.

Now, the will of God for us is that we should have all these virtues, that is, this power which God offered, this power which the Holy Ghost brought, this power which the Holy Ghost is. For I’d like to make it very clear that God never gives anything away. When God gives, He still retains what He has given, and He gives Himself along with His gifts.

It would be a tragedy from the highest, farthest out celestial body down to Moody Church; it would be a moral tragedy that would be vast and cosmic if God should shuffle off gifts and throw them to his people like Rockefeller used to throw dimes. Never does God separate the gift from Himself.

When God gives you a gift, He gives you Himself. When God gave us these precious virtues, He gave us the Holy Ghost who brought these virtues to us, and so it is the indwelling Holy Spirit that brings these virtues.

Don’t think for a minute tonight that I’ve read the Keswick program and that I’m preaching this because Keswick believes it. I preached this before Keswick ever reached Chicago. I preached it for years and continue to preach it because I believe it’s biblical, that it’s the indwelling Holy Ghost who came at Pentecost and enables all of His people in whom He dwells to be virtuous, to have love and joy and peace and gentleness and goodness and faithfulness and meekness and temperance. I believe that this is the secret of godliness and the secret of the victorious life.

Now this, I say, can only be done by divine indwelling. It’s impossible that this should ever be given to us from the outside. You can’t take a gorilla and put up a sign and say, Be human. In the first place, he couldn’t read. In the second place, if he did read, he wouldn’t know how to go about it. How could a gorilla be human? He can’t. He belongs to another world of life. He’s not. He can’t be human.

And so, you can’t say to a sinner, Be holy. That’s an impossibility.

A sinner can’t be holy any more than that gorilla can be a man. But if we had the power to say to the gorilla, I can extract the spirit of a good man from him and I can fill you with him, that would take care of the gorilla. Just as soon as the spirit of a good man entered the gorilla, say the spirit of Eisenhower entered the gorilla, he’d be a kindly gentleman and a man you’re proud of when he stands up. He’d be a man.

But as long as you can’t give the Spirit, the power to be and to do, you’ll still be a gorilla. You can put a bib on around him and put pants on him and teach him to eat with a knife and a fork. But when he begets his kind, they’ll be little gorillas. And he’ll be a gorilla until he dies. And when he dies, you’re putting him down in a gorilla grave, because gorilla he is, gorilla he’ll be forever, as long as gorillas last.

And I say now, my friend, you can’t take a sinner, no matter how well he’s an educated sinner. A Ph.D., for instance, a Ph.D., that’s a Doctor of Philosophy. You take a Doctor of Philosophy and say to him, Be holy, be Christlike, and he’ll look at you and he’ll be nice and friendly, because he’s educated, but he won’t know what to do. He just won’t know what to do, and it’s impossible that he would know what to do.

The flesh of Adam can’t produce holiness. The flesh of Adam cannot produce love and joy and peace and longsuffering and gentleness. It can produce all sorts of imitations and write books and sell books. And if you write a book on how to be loved and have longsuffering and gentleness and be good, you can sell them by the millions; people want to know.

But nobody has ever been able to produce Christ’s character in Adam’s flesh. The nearest thing is Stoicism, I suppose. I’ve been a great lover of the Stoics. But some people think the “stoic” is the bird that brings the baby. But they said the Stoic. But the Stoic was an old philosopher. But it’s no use, brother, you can’t do it. All it did was make zombies out of them. And they walked around hard and stiff.

When Socrates was dying in the prison at Athens of hemlock, they brought his wife in. She came in sniffling, and he didn’t even kiss her good-bye, he said, take her away. He was in control of himself, it was self-control, and they controlled themselves by becoming as stiff as icicles and just as unattractive and as cold.

And then there’s the contemplative religions of the East. You hear a lot about it now, Zen Buddhism and Yoga. Don’t waste a dime on it, but you hear a lot about it. But they haven’t done anything for anybody much, really. And if anybody does get any help from them, it’s because they’re pretty good people to start with. You know, as Adam counts people good.

But the fruits of the Spirit are only the fruits of the Holy Spirit and cannot possibly grow in unblessed, uncleansed and unfilled and unregenerated human nature.

So, most Christians, I think, and most Christianity; it’s only Adam at his best, really. You go to the average church now, even good churches, and it’s just Adam at his best. Everybody comes dressed up, looking out over his collar with a narrow tie on. And he looks all right, and he smiles and bobs his head, but you don’t know what he’d been doing the week before. He’s not necessarily a holy man because he’s in church. But as for being holy, that’s another matter.

When Pentecost was fully come, the Holy Ghost came into human nature to make people holy and to keep them holy, that they might live holy lives and reproduce in human beings the character that had been and is in Christ. That’s the abiding element in Pentecost.

It is not to be repeated, it is to be perpetuated. It is to be carried on from generation to generation, but we must tell the truth to the people and not let them down. Some people don’t believe in the Holy Ghost, nor believe they ever ought to be filled with the Holy Ghost at all. Some people say it’s just an ideal. He is not an ideal. No, no.

He’s no more an ideal now than Christ was an ideal when He walked around on earth. He was born in that dramatic setting, but when the dramatic setting was passed, He was still there healing the sick and raising the dead. The Holy Ghost came in that dramatic setting at Pentecost, but when the dramatic setting passed, He still remained and still remains, and He’s here now.

All He needs and wants is that His people should want Him bad enough and that they should yield to Him and let Him have His way, and He will reproduce all the essential spiritual and everlasting elements in us now that He produced on that historic day of Pentecost.

Tags Holy Spirit, Pentecost

Messages

Tozer Talks

Post author By pshappard
Post date September 1, 2024

“Trials and Disappointments“

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Trials and Disappointments

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

September 26, 1954

Summary

A.W. Tozer’s sermon titled “Trials and Disappointments,” explores the concept that all events and circumstances in a Christian’s life, including trials, temptations, failures, and disappointments, are from God and part of His divine plan. He draws from biblical examples, such as Rehoboam, Joseph, and Peter, to illustrate how God’s hand is present even in adversity, shaping and guiding believers for their ultimate good and His glory. He emphasizes that Christians should view their challenges as opportunities for spiritual growth and trust in God’s sovereignty, understanding that even the most painful experiences are orchestrated by God for a greater purpose. Mr. Tozer concludes with the encouragement that what may seem like disappointments are, in fact, God’s appointments, meant to bring about His will in the lives of believers.

Message

In the book of 1 Kings, the 12th chapter, in verse 24, Thus saith the Lord to Rehoboam, Ye shall not go up, nor fight against your brethren, the children of Israel. Return every man to his house, for this thing is from me.” They hearkened therefore to the word of the Lord and returned to depart according to the word of the Lord. Rehoboam was the son of Solomon, and he had become king at the death of his father and had listened to the bad advice of his counselors and had taken certain political action which had alienated a part of the nation from him.

Jeroboam, an ambitious man, had taken part of the nation and had become, or was to become, the king. Rehoboam felt that he wanted to try to stop this by war. But he had just enough ability to hear God left, but he didn’t have much. But he had just enough ability left to hear God say, Ye shall not fight against your brethren, the children of Israel. Go every man to his house, for this thing is from me. That is, God had told Solomon that his kingdom would be divided. And now Solomon was gone, but God was working out his plan nevertheless, and it was taking place under the eyes of his son.

And his son was going to throw himself in to try to straighten out this tangled skein, and God said, don’t you do it, this thing is from me. Now that’s the historic circumstance that gave us this beautiful text. And the truth which lies hidden here in the text is one of the most liberating and consoling truths in the entire Bible.

And the thought suggested here is not alone, but it is developed and strengthened throughout the entire Bible, till in the New Testament it shines like a health-giving sun, bringing light and warmth and health to all of us. And it is simply this, we might condense it for our own use and good into these words, that whatever comes to a Christian is from God.

Now you and I know that the natural world is governed by natural laws, and these laws are administered blindly, and from all we know, impartially, so that the sun rises on the just and the unjust, and the rain falls on the good and the bad. Grain and the fruit of harvest come to the man of God and to the man of sin about alike. And sickness and pain visit not only bad people, but good people as well.

There is loss and there is sorrow, and the loss and sorrow come as certainly and as frequently perhaps even, to the Christian as to the sinful man. And even death finally visits the man of God, for it is appointed unto all men once to die. And all the good who have died in generations gone have gone to their death according to the law of cause and effect that governs the natural world.

And it looks as if we were pieces, helpless pieces. You know, this thought has given some sad and beautiful poetry to the world. Man has likened himself to many things. He’s likened himself to shadows. We are but shadow shapes that come and go, says one of the poets. We are but shadow shapes, a moving roll of magic shadow shapes that come and go. They’ve likened themselves to checkers, but helpless pieces of the game God plays upon this checkerboard of night and days.

Now, all this fails to take Christ into consideration, but we are thinking for the moment that there is a natural world filled with people, and that this world is governed by natural laws, and that an observer might well and accurately conclude that mankind is simply a roll of magic shadow shapes that come and go, or each being a checker which is played over the checkerboard of life. And that is accurate, not pessimistic, it is rather realistic.

And if we take our Lord Jesus Christ out of consideration, I do not see how any human being, if he has any realism in his system at all, if he has any mental or fiber or intellectual courage, can deny that we are but checkers to be played, that we are but a football to be kicked, that we are but corks to float and bob around on the moving surface of the water, but thus to be blown through the valleys of this world, and slaves to the law of cause and effect.

But my friends, I have very good news for you this morning. I have the news that a Christian does not fall wholly under this law. A believer has entered a new kingdom, and here all things are different. He may poetically describe himself now as a football, but he may smile wryly when he feels himself being kicked. But he knows that he’s being kicked toward a certain goal.

He may still feel that he is a checker being played over a great board, but in this new place in the kingdom of God, he knows that he’s not subject to the laws of chance. He knows that the great player in the heaven is playing a game for the glory of God and the good of mankind. He may feel that he is but dust, as the psalmist said that he was, but he knows now that he is being blown gently toward home and heaven and God.

He may feel that he is a cork and bob up and down in depression and boom, and in sickness and health, and in loss and gain, and in sorrow and joy. He may feel himself upon the undulating waves of time, and yet know positively that he’s under the watchful eye of God, and that though he’s a cork bobbing on a great surface and couldn’t find his way alone, that the Father knows the way and was taking him through.

Now my friends, I was thinking about that song, If I Had My Druthers. Did you ever hear any hillbillies sing, If I Had My Druthers? Of course, as you city people probably don’t know, druthers means rather, rather. If I had druthers, I’d rather had druthers. So, we say I had my druthers means what I’d rather have.

So, when the cowboy sings If I Had My Druthers, and twangs his harp or guitar, and puts a lot of tears in his voice, he is giving plaint to that which mankind has always wanted. He’s wanted the ability to lay hold of things. And the same poet I quoted a while ago said that, how does it run, oh could you and I with him conspire, and grab this sorry scheme of things entire, and break it down to its component elements, and then put it together again after our heart’s desire.

Now I paraphrased it, but that’s the way to run. And this is the same plaint that the cowboy wants when he says he wants his druthers. He’d like to have it his way. And when we want things our way, did you ever stop to consider, ladies and gentlemen, what a world we’d be in in 24 hours if God said, now I’m going to give everybody everything he wants. All he has to do is wish and he gets it. We all go back to Anderson’s fairy tales, and what a world we’d be in.

Well, Chicago weather, for instance. If it’s baseball season, they want it warm. If it’s football season, they want it cold. If a church is going to have a picnic, they want it dry. And the people who own lawns want it to rain. The farmer wants the calm, still, hot air to make his crops grow. And the city dweller with the fog and smog wants a wind to carry all the fog and smog away.

So, you’d never find people agreeing. The old man wants it quiet, and the young fellow wants it noisy. The young fellow puts two or three noise makers on his old jalopy and goes down the street sounding like the charge of the last brigade. And the old fellow would want everything set in foam rubber so there wasn’t a sound to disturb his tired old ears. You couldn’t get together at all for the simple reason we don’t know what we want. We only think we do.

The reason we don’t know what we want is that we don’t know ourselves, we don’t know the world around us very well. We don’t know the future at all, and we don’t know the past except sketchily. And we don’t know what’s good for us. And so if we had our druthers, it would be one of the worst things that could possibly happen to us because we’d all kill ourselves.

It would be like a three-year-old having his druthers when it comes to the meals. He would fill up on cake and suffer for the rest of the night. And he would never eat anything good, he’d never drink his milk, and he would never go to school when he gets old enough, he would never accept discipline, he would never grow up to be even an average kind of citizen, but he would be a little impossible hellion if he had his druthers.

You have to impose discipline and the grown-up who’s supposed to know what’s good has to tell the youngster what’s good for him until he finds out for himself.

Now that’s exactly where we are in the kingdom of God. Even though we’re Christians and born of the Spirit, we still don’t know always what’s good for us. So, God has to choose for us. It says in one place that he chooses our inheritance for us. I like that chapter, that verse of the chapter. He chooses our inheritance for us, and he chooses and sends us the things that we ought to have.

Now that doesn’t preclude prayer, because the Spirit can tell us what we ought to pray for, and thus we can help shape events by intelligent Spirit-inspired prayer. But if you think of your life in the long sweep of circumstance between the time you were converted till you die or the Lord comes, you’ll be glad somebody else is hunting out your inheritance for you, and you’re not forced to choose yourself.

And you’ll even be glad in the day to come that you didn’t get that prayer answered that God refused to answer for you. You’ll be glad then, but now you’re wondering and worried about it.

Now I have, I think, about seven. If time gets away, I’ll shorten it, cut out some. But I want to go to the Bible itself and show you about seven different things, circumstances, that have come to men. And we can write after every one of them, this thing is from me, for this is what God does. He picks out our inheritance, and when we look at it and say, I don’t want that, God says, son, this thing is from me, and blessed is the Christian who knows how to accept it.

Now, first, there’s temptation. People don’t want to be tempted. I get letters, and I get phone calls, and I get people visiting me personally, and they want to know how come. I’m a Christian, and I’m being tempted. How come? And I always feel, though I don’t do it, unless I know them very well, but I always feel that I’d like to answer in the language of the young officer who said to the rookie soldier who started to run when the bullets, he said, they’re shooting at me. And the young officer said, what do you think you’re out here for?

And so, when a Christian comes and says, why, pastor, I’m being tempted, I feel like saying, well, son, you’re a soldier now, you’re a big boy, and what do you think you’re here for, if it isn’t to get shot at? But notice, when our Lord was tempted in the wilderness, He was tempted cruelly, and His temptations were real, regardless of what some theologians may say, they were real and valid. And He was tempted there by the will of God, for two reasons that I know, that He might be perfected for His life work and learn obedience by the things that He suffered, and the second being that He might force approval, unwilling testimony even from hell itself.

For don’t think that Satan, when he gave up his, our Lord, his master, our Lord, when he gave Him up and found he couldn’t get Him to sin and sulked away into his cave, don’t you think the story of it didn’t go throughout all the nether regions, and that Jesus Christ was proof against the temptations of the devil, caused that same devil to lose face, and caused hell to shudder to her foundations? How else could God thus have given a testimony of hell and earth to Jesus if it had not been in temptation.

But when our Lord went forty days hungry and was in great anguish of body, and now weariness of mind, and was tempted so bitterly, don’t you think His human heart might have said, why must this happen to Me? And if it had, God’s answer would have been, this thing is from me. I’ve allowed this to come to you, you’re not alone, I’ve been with you, and you’re being tempted in My will.

Now that ought to encourage anybody, and if you’re being tempted, let me say to you as a company what I couldn’t possibly say one at a time, there’d be too many, that if you’re being tempted, cruelly even, and bitterly tempted, don’t let it get you down. They don’t tempt dead men.

I remember the colored brother who was hunting with his boss, and they were in a boat, and the colored man was a real Christian, and yet he was in trouble all the time. Something was always going wrong. His wife was ill, or his children, and they broke a leg, his cow died, something was always wrong, and the man, the white man with whom he was hunting, or with whom he was fishing in this instance, they were in a boat together, and they were hunting, as I recall, and it was a duck hunting arrangement, and they were in the boat. And the white man got to philosophizing, and he said, Sam, you’re a Christian, you go to church, you attend every prayer meeting, you never miss your chapter, you pray at table, you talk and testify all the time, and yet you’re in trouble all the time. And he said, me, I haven’t had any trouble for years and years, everything breaks my way, everything turns to money for me, I have friends, everything breaks my way.

He said, now how is it? You belong to God, and I don’t. You get the troubles, and I don’t. Well, Sam said, boss, it’s like this. He said, when you shoot at a duck and kill it, and it drops plop into the water and lies still, do you shoot at it again? He said, no. He said, which ones do you shoot at again? He said, I shoot at the ones that are wounded and are getting away. And Sam said, that explains it, boss. He said, the devil knows that he has you, and he lets you alone, but he sees me escaping, and that’s why I get a bullet every once in a while. I’m getting away.

Now, that’s it precisely, and it’s good sound philosophy. Temptations, this thing is from Me, says God. Now stop that worrying and abusing yourself, lashing yourself like the flagellantes, and saying, I’m no good, I’ll whip myself, I’m being tempted. Of course you’re being tempted. The servant is not better than his Lord, this thing is from God.

And there is persecution. Some people do get persecution, and then there was Joseph. You remember Joseph in Egypt, that passage back in the last chapter of the book of Genesis, tells us a wonderful thing. Joseph was sold, you remember, down into slavery into Egypt for a small amount of money, and went down there and was put in jail, and went through two years, or at least a long period of imprisonment.

And later on, when his brethren came down, and Joseph was second to the king, running all Egypt as sort of a prime minister, the brethren came down. He made himself known, and they wept, and he said to them, don’t weep, it’s perfectly all right. As for you, ye thought evil against me, but God meant it for good to bring to pass as it is this day, and to save much people alive.

If when poor Joseph was going through his persecution, he had thought it over as no doubt he did, he’d have wondered why God allowed it. He was being persecuted by his brethren. God says, son, don’t get excited, this thing is from me, to perfect you and save many people alive. So, persecution is from God, either directly or indirectly.

Then there is failure. I hesitate to say this, some people want to leap on me for it, but I believe in being real. And here was a man named Peter, and you’ll remember that he denied his Lord. And you’ll have to admit it was a failure. But long before Peter lied and used bad language and denied his Lord, his Lord had foreseen his coming failure and had said, Satan has desired you to sift you as wheat, but I have prayed for you that your faith fail not. The prayers of Jesus had been prevenient prayers, and they had been put up to heaven effectually for Peter before he was put into the sieve.

Our Lord Jesus saw Peter as a half bushel of chaff and wheat, and Peter saw himself as a half bushel of wheat. He didn’t see the chaff at all. And the devil wanted to destroy Peter. So the Lord said, all right, devil, you go ahead and shake him and sift him and blow on him a while. And the devil no doubt smiled one of his rare devilish smiles and said, I’m going to actually get at this prime apostle. I’m going to get at Peter.

So he got at Peter, and he shook him and sifted him. And Peter, in the middle of it all, got morally dizzy and denied his Lord. And when the sifting was over, the chaff was all gone and Peter was reduced to what he had been all the time, a quart of wheat and 50 quarts of chaff. Peter thought he was all wheat, and the devil thought he was all chaff. But Jesus knew he was part chaff and part wheat. So, he got rid of this chaff. This thing is from me.

Now I’m not talking, I suppose, to oh, a very few people. But what overrates yourself? We all tend to overrate ourselves. We like to brood over our successes and what people think of us and mull over our mail. Editors are tempted to do that. Occasionally somebody will write one that sort of take a quart of chaff out. But mostly they’re praising you for this and that. And you’re likely to get a notion that you’re more valuable. That’s not the way to put it now, really, because your value is infinite before God. But at least I mean greater than you are.

The only way God has to do, he can’t tell us. We won’t believe it. God comes and said to Peter, Peter, you’ll deny me. Peter said me? Deny you? Oh no. He said these others may, but not I. you’ll see. Peter wouldn’t believe it when the Lord told him he was one fifth-sixteenth wheat and fifteenth-sixteenth chaff. Peter didn’t believe it. He said, oh no, there’s a mistake here someplace, Lord. They’ve got, you’ve got, you pulled the wrong card out of the file. It isn’t I. So, the Lord smiled and said, this thing is from me, Peter. And when poor Peter had been loved back into fellowship with his Lord, he never made that mistake again. He found his right size.

There is such a thing, brethren, as stepping on a scale. Some of you growing youngsters want to believe you weigh more than you do. And some of you youngsters that were once youngsters but are now not anymore and are growing in the wrong directions. You want to believe that you don’t weigh as much as you do. I recommend a scale. Step on and stop arguing. You know how much you weigh after the scale gets done with you.

And so, this thing is from me. There’s your nice, lovely, streamlined scale sitting there in a corner. And you’ve got an inflated notion about yourself. You like to think you’re as willowy as the breeze-blown bush down by the riverside. And the scale says, this thing is from me. Step on. You step on and you’re instantly disillusioned. Then that’s what failure will do for us. I don’t think we ought to fail. And I think if we were spiritual, we ought to be. There’d be other ways to teach us, but it seems there isn’t. So, the Lord used Peter’s failure.

Now some of you have failed maybe this last week. I wish you hadn’t. I hope maybe you didn’t. But if you did, there’s no reason why you should wear a black armband for the rest of the month and say to yourself, oh, I’m no good, I’m no good. Of course you’re not. But you have one who thinks you are. And He thought it so fully that He died for you. And He made you the apple of His eye and He wrote you in His hands and in His heart and on His shoulders.

So, you must be worth something after all. And if you failed him somewhere this week, I’m sorry. This thing is from me. Now if you’ll bow your head and ask him to forgive you for failing him, you’ll know how small you are and how weak you are and how to trust your Lord better than you did.

Then there is bereavement. Look at this man, Lazarus. He died while Jesus tarried. And Jesus came way late. And when he got there, Lazarus was in the grave. And Jesus went to the grave and said, Lazarus, come forth. And Lazarus came forth. But he didn’t come forth alone.

Do you know what came forth out of the grave with Lazarus? The 11th chapter of John. When Jesus said, come forth, out walked Lazarus. And trailing close behind, out walked the 11th chapter of John. And the 11th chapter of John has set alight in more graves than you could count on a summer’s day. And has given hope and cheer to more people who’ve lost their loved ones and has made dying easy for the souls of a million Christians from that hour to this. Oh no, He didn’t come out of that grave alone, but that hopeful, cheerful, buoyant, vibrant 11th chapter of John came out with Him.

This thing is from me. I let you die, said Jesus, in order that this might be a ladder to coming race, coming ages to climb on. This might be a star of hope over the cemetery. This might be a light for all Christians.

And there’s tribulations. Paul had his tribulations. I read this morning about how the front part of the ship stuck on the sandbar and the hinder part of the ship, the stern, they say now, was caught in the waves and wind and broke into pieces. The ship went to pieces, and everybody fell out and grabbed a board and got ashore. Well, it was pretty tough. Paul had said two nights, 14 days and 14 nights, there hadn’t been a sun or a star. And they’d been practically without food and without hope in that little old-fashioned ship being tossed in the terror of the Mediterranean Sea. But God said, don’t worry, Paul, this thing is from me.

And what was the result? The result was that the light of Christianity reached to pagan Rome and all the lives were saved into the bargain. To Paul, it looked as if somebody was picking on him. But to God, it was all a part of a far-looking purpose. This thing is from me.

So, you’re in tribulation. You’re having your troubles. Things aren’t doing so well at home. Well, you can take it one of two ways. You can get out your crying towel and say, why does this happen to me? Or you can hear Him say, this thing is from Me. Hold still and wait. Watch Me. And then you will see the miracle.

And there’s illness. Now, I have an example or two from the Bible. There was a man born blind.

When his parents noticed that the little chap couldn’t see, I suppose their hearts grieved terribly over it. They said, our little boy can’t see. And when he began to stumble and fall and run into things and hurt himself, no doubt bitterness came to his parents’ heart. Or if they were good believers and God lovers, if it wasn’t bitterness, it was a wonderment and a puzzlement. Why was our baby born blind? But that same man born blind found Jesus Christ through his blindness. We haven’t any way of knowing, nor do we have any grounds for believing, that he’d ever have found Jesus if he’d been a seeing man.

If he’d been a seeing man, he might well have been out working when he was rather sitting by the wayside. But because he was not a seeing man but was shut up in the dark precincts of his own mind, his ears were sharp, and he heard the sound of passing footsteps. Who is it? It’s Jesus of Nazareth. And he cried, Jesus of Nazareth. Thou son of David, I think the language he used, have mercy on me. He found the Lord and rose and followed him in the way and became a disciple. And he’s in heaven tonight with both eyes bright and seeing. This thing is from me.

So, the sickness you don’t like, everybody would like to be as healthy as Carolina, what’s his name, Carolyn, that big football player here down at Notre Dame. Everybody would like to be in state of perfect health. I wish we all could be. That is, my human heart says, I wish you well. But I don’t know, but what maybe some of us are kept in the way because we just don’t have energy enough to get out. This thing is from me. Make something of it, please.

And there are disappointments, and I’m finished. Disappointments, oh, we want our own way. You know the acme of all disappointments? I’ll tell you. A 12-year-old boy, Saturday morning of the Sunday school picnic, when he jumps out of bed, 12 feet from the bed and lands, a foot for a year, and then looks out the window, it’s pouring it down. That is the acme of disappointment. What a time he was going to have that day. And suddenly the sharp bite, the sting of disappointment. I can’t, we can’t go. There’s no use even to call. It’s out. We’re finished. That disappointment to a 12-year-old, that’s pretty serious. And it can hurt like everything.

And when we get older, we don’t get any better, we just get tougher. We’re just as quickly and as easily disappointed later on. Mama, you were going to shop today, or not today, but maybe Tuesday you say. You’re going to go to Marshall Fields, Boston store. And if nobody’s looking, you may even sneak into Woolworth’s. And you’re going to, your husband has given you a check, and you’re going to stop at the corner currency exchange and have it turned into good green. And Tuesday’s going to be your day. And the baby comes down with an infected throat. And you can’t get out of the house now.

Don’t look at me honestly and tell me that doesn’t hurt you. Of course it hurts. You’re disappointed. You don’t like it. You say to yourself, I never get anything that ever goes my way. And you reach for the crying towel. And you begin to wipe it off. Wipe off the bitter tears that start, as the poets say.

Now that’s the way we are. You men, you got a golf game coming up. You’re just about to break 80, 82, 83, 84. You’ve been able to get around those 19 holes, 84, sometimes 90 when you’re not feeling too well. You’re after 80. And you’ve got a fellow who’s going to give you some tips, and he’s a semi-pro, and you’ve got a morning, oh I’m going out there and I’m going to learn today. And by next week it’ll be 80 and maybe even under 80.

And the next day your wife said, listen, it’s impossible. Look, look what’s got to be done. Look. And you give up. But you don’t give up gracefully. You say, but listen, I can only have the benefit of this man today, this semi-pro, who’s going to give me some tips. I can break 80. And she says, if you break 80 at the expense of the house, and the home, and the children, and the car, and the lawn. All right, he gives up, but he doesn’t talk much that day. Now, he doesn’t sulk. He’s a Christian. But you know, he’s just sort of meditating. He doesn’t say much. He just sort of meditates as he goes around doing what he doesn’t want to do.

Now those are only trifling disappointments, but dear people, there are other kinds of disappointments that you don’t laugh about. You laughed about the ones I gave you as an example, because they’re shallow. But there are disappointments you don’t laugh about. They cut so deep in and so deep down.

I’ve had women come to me, a few of them in my time, white, gray, chalk-faced, and sit and say, Mr. Tozer, my home’s finished. It’s finished. I have no longer any reason to believe that my husband has any regard for me, and it’s only a matter of days until the whole thing blows, and our children will be separated. You don’t laugh about that. That’s not surface. That goes way to the deeps of the being.

A man worked on me once, and I groaned, and he said, I’m sorry, but I couldn’t help it. He said, what you felt there is what surgeons call surgical pain. Surgical pain isn’t a skinned knuckle. Surgical pain goes clear down to Adam and shakes his teeth out, and you’re hurt into your ancient family tree, cleared down to the roots.

And there are disappointments that you don’t laugh about. It isn’t a skinned knuckle, a disappointed golf game, a picnic that didn’t come off. It’s a grief that wrings you like a towel. What are we going to do with it? The answer is, child of God, this thing is from me. You can’t believe it now but try to believe it. Believe it in your grief, and the day will be when you’ll believe it in your joy. Believe it in your tears, and the day will come when you’ll believe it with your smile. This thing is from me.

Somebody wrote a doggerel poem, which I’ll spare you, but in too many verses and too many lines, there is at least one thought embodied. It is this thought, that disappointment needs only to have the letter D taken off and the letter H put on, and you’ve changed it from disappointment to his appointment. What is disappointment to you may be God’s appointment for you.

And if you’ll remember what I told the Sunday school, if you want to be happy in the future, do now what you will in the future wish you had done. So, if you want to get the best of your disappointments; incidentally, there’s a Methodist preacher who is going to write a series of articles for the Alliance Weekly. He’s an evangelical Methodist preacher from the East, calling it with New Jersey, First Methodist pastor. And he’s going to write a series of getting the best of, getting the best of your illness, getting the best of your disappointment, getting the best of your losses, and so on. I look forward to reading them myself.

If you will want to get the best of your disappointments and tears and griefs and temptations and all the rest, then hear God say now what you wish you’d heard him say then. Hear him say now, this thing is from Me.

Tags Deliverance, Disappointment, Trials