Category: Messages

Tozer Talks

“In Hope of Eternal Life“

In Hope of Eternal Life

Pastor and Author A.W. Tozer

January 26, 1958

At the young people’s hour tonight and the senior young people, I expect to be present and will give a short message. I want all my young friends to be there to hear what I have to say. I want to give a practical talk on how to make the most of your present spiritual privileges and means of grace. And then I’d like also to accent the family night, Wednesday night, 7:45, this Wednesday night. It will be Family Night, Reports Lecture.

Now, we are in Titus, where Paul says that he is a servant of God and apostle, sent to declare the faith of God’s elect and acknowledging of the truth, the promotion of the truth, which is after godliness, in a hope of eternal life which God that cannot lie promised before the world began. Now, I think that’s probably as far as we’ll get.

I talked last week on this phrase, in hope of eternal life, now, which God that cannot lie promised before the world began. If you people who don’t preach want to know how humiliated we preachers feel, why, I’ll whisper something to you. That an apostle, inspired by the Holy Ghost, can write a letter to a church or to a man and pack it so tight with truth that four or five words will be enough for us. That’s rather humiliating. I’d like to think that I could paddle right along beside Paul, but Paul has to wait for me to catch up, wait weeks, months for me to catch up with him. So, he said, in hope of eternal life, and that was last week, which God that cannot lie promised before the world began, that’s this week.

Now, we look at that, God that cannot lie, of course we know what God it is, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, whom Paul has said to be the only God. We have one Father, one God. And he told us here of the hope of the promise. We have the hope of eternal life, we have eternal life now, and we have the hope of eternal life in its broader aspects in the world to come. Now, we have this as a promise. We have this as a promise. And I would rather have some people’s promise than to have other people’s gifts.

A long time ago, a great preacher was in this city, I think one of the greatest preachers of the first fifty years of church history, Paul Rader. He said that a man, a businessman that he personally knew to be rather windy, and not too much given to fulfill his promises, who allowed his imagination to run away with his ability to produce, promised him he was going to give him, I think, if I recall, a hundred thousand dollars for missions. Rader said, have you got a dime? He said, Sure. He said, could I have it now for missions? He said, yes. Now he said, Thank you. He said, I know God will get this. But he wasn’t sure about that promised hundred thousand, but the dime, he knew God would get that.

Well, that was his half-humorous but profoundly meaningful way of saying that some people’s promises are not too valuable. And I would turn it around and say that I would rather live by some people’s promise than by other people’s gifts. And here we have a promise, not yet that full eternal life, but the promise of eternal life.

And always remember this, that a promise is only worth whatever the character is of the man who made it, so that the God that cannot lie, promised, and this promise is worth just as much as God, no more, no less. All truth rests down upon and begins with God. A promise is only as sound, I repeat, as the one that made it. It is amusing, if it were not so obviously painful, to see people struggling to have faith, on their knees struggling and writhing to have faith.

A frantic struggle to believe only indicates that the person who is thus struggling has lost sight of God and has got involved in God’s promises. God’s promises are made by God, and they are as good as God and as sure as God, and they are to us whatever God is, and they cannot be less nor more. They are whatever God is. And when a person is struggling to believe a promise, it’s obvious that he has detached the promise from the God who made it and is for the time in a state of mental confusion.

Remember, you only have to ask who made the promise, and if you can get a satisfactory answer, who made the promise, then you’ve gone a little way. Then if you say, what has the record been of this person who made the promise, and if examination shows the record to have been 100 percent sound, that he always came through the promise, if further investigation shows that this person has never been known to be anything but honest and true, and if further investigation shows that this person is able to make good on the promise, then why worry about the promise? Think first about the man who made it. You get a letter promising you something, and you say, now, Lord, help me to believe this. Help me to believe this. Oh, I want to believe this, Father. Help me to believe this.

Well, you don’t want to believe it if it isn’t so. If a man wrote me a letter and said, Mr. Tozer, I’m going to give you a Cadillac. Well, I don’t, my wife, I guess, could learn to drive it, but if somebody gave me a Cadillac, or was going to give me a Cadillac, first I’d look whose signature was at the bottom of the letter. And I would then quietly decide, or try to find out, whether the man was used to making promises.

One dear little old brother who’s long ago gone to heaven, who used to be in our church years ago, and whose mind began to break, and I never noticed it, never noticed anything wrong until one day he came up to me and said, did you get the car? And I said, what car? And he said, why, I have given 40 automobiles to missionaries and preachers this last month. And he said, I wonder if you got yours. And I shook his hand and said, no, not yet, and I knew. Dear little old brother, he, not long after that, he went off to be with his Lord. His mind was breaking. And what do they call it, blood shut off from the mind and it doesn’t function? Some great men, including Emerson, and Dr. Simpson, and Dr. Zemmer, and many others have gone that way. Their minds wouldn’t work toward the last.

Well now, if I investigated and I found that this was simply a kindly promise by a man who was beginning to slip, then I’d smile it off. But if I looked at the bottom of the letter and I knew that that letter was signed by a man who not only had always kept his promises, but was fully capable of keeping them, why, I wouldn’t worry about it. I’d be looking up on which lever to pull to start awaiting the curb, because I know I’d get it. And it’s this way with the promises of God, God who cannot lie promised.

Now that’s all you have to know. Grant me God and the promises are all right. The struggle to believe promises, I insist, is psychologically and mentally off. It’s not sound, because it is a wanting a thing to be true, but not being sure that it is and trying to make yourself feel that it is. That’s not the way to approach it. Who made the promise? Is he able to make good on it? Is his character such that he will make good on it? Find that out. And when you’ve found that out, your promise is as sound as the throne of God.

God that cannot lie promise and all truth begins with God and rests down upon God. So don’t struggle to believe God and don’t insult God by asking, help me to believe thee. God, that’s saying, help me to have confidence in thy character, O God. Help me to stop thinking that you’re crooked. Help me, Lord, to believe that you’re honest.

Well, that would insult your father if you’d go to him and say, Dad, you promised to see me through college, but I can’t believe you. Help me to believe you. Well, your father would say, have I lied to you in the past? And you’d say, never. And have I always made good on all my promises? Yes. Well, why do you doubt me now? And he’d feel bad about it because it would be a reflection on his fatherly kindness and his basic honesty.

God that cannot lie made these promises, this promise of eternal life. And I, for one, don’t intend to lie awake nights wondering if he can keep it. I know God will keep it all right.

Now, Paul here uses a negative, I want you to notice. He said, the God that cannot lie. Saint Dionysius said, we know God more perfectly by negatives than we do by affirmatives. That is, we can know what God is not better than we can know what God is seeing that the name of God is secret, and the nature of God is so infinitely removed from ours that we fallen men find it very difficult to visualize what God is like, but we can know what God is not. And the theologians have always had to follow that more or less. To understand God’s perfections, they have to go to negatives.

For instance, if you were preaching on the self-existence of God, you’d say God had no origin, and I don’t know how else you would say it, because human language won’t go any further than that. That’s it. God had no origin. Everything else had an origin, including the very seraphim and archangels, but not God. Therefore, if God had no origin, therefore, He must exist in Himself.

And so, we get the positive by means of the negative. If you wanted to preach on God’s self-sufficiency or meditate on it, you could say God has no support, and if God has no support, if nothing holds him up, then he must hold himself up. Therefore, He must be self-sufficient.

And so, by a negative, you would have arrived at a positive. If you wanted to think on the eternity of God, you’d say God had no beginning, and if God had no beginning, he always must have been. And if he always must have been, therefore, he is eternal, and you’d have the eternity of God.

If you wanted to meditate on the immutability of God, you’d say that God knows no change, and if God does not change, He always must have been what He is now. And if He always was what He is now, it’s easy to reason that He will always be what He was and is. And infinitude, if you wanted to meditate on God’s infinitude, you could say God has no limitations.

Well, if God has no limitations, then it can only mean that there is no boundary anywhere, that God is limitless. This is, of all thoughts, the most difficult to grasp, so we’ll skip over it pretty fast. And if you wanted to think on the omniscience of God, you’d say, well, God cannot learn. God cannot learn. Why? Because he already knows all there is to know. Knowing Himself perfectly and containing all things, He knows all that can be known.

That is the negative. So, Paul used it here, God that cannot lie. And the Scriptures, not only the theologians, but the Scriptures also follow this method. He says in Isaiah about Himself, the Lord fainteth not, neither is weary. And He says, I, the Lord, change not. And He says, He that keepeth thee will not slumber nor sleep. And He says, He cannot deny Himself. And He says, with God, nothing is impossible. And He says, with God, it was impossible for Him to lie.

So, there we have all these passages from the Scriptures showing that we can know God by what He is not. And so Paul used it freely and said, God that cannot lie. If he had simply said the true God or the God of truth, you could have figured that out, all right, but it’s more powerful put negatively.

And the gentleman who believes in positive thinking might learn a lesson here, though he never will. That sometimes you can back into the station better than you can pull ahead in, in this terrible day. And this is true, that sometimes God is able to tell us what He is by telling us what He’s not, better than by telling us what He is.

So this hope of eternal life was promised by this kind of God. What are you going to do? Go home and sweat it out and wonder if it’s true and pray for faith. No, get acquainted with God and be at peace. Acquaint thyself with Him and you will not worry. And then he says He promised before the world began. That is, other versions say before eternal ages He promised.

Now, if He promised before the world began, He must have promised somebody who was present. And if He promised before the eternal ages, He must have promised somebody who was before the ages were.

Now to whom then was the promise made? Well, I wouldn’t have thought of this myself, but there lived about 200 or more years ago, a brilliant and godly Presbyterian preacher by the name of John Flavell. I’ve always called him Flavell, but I see that the dictionaries of biography call him Flavell. John Flavell, he was an English Presbyterian preacher.

And when I was a boy on the farm, for the sheer paucity of reading matter, I read everything I could get a hold of from the time I can remember, calendars, anything, railroad schedules, anything, even the writing material or printed matter on cereal boxes. I read everything. And we had nothing around there to read, nothing. We didn’t even take a daily paper. I couldn’t read that, nothing. My mother borrowed a book occasionally and I’d read that.

And somewhere there fell into my hand a book of sermons by John Flavell. Now, John Flavell was an old Puritan, old Presbyterian Puritan type of preacher. And though I was only a boy, maybe 12, I read his sermons. And I remember to this day after the passing of the years, some of the brilliant and wonderful things John Flavell said.

And he was preaching in one sermon on the text, therefore, from Isaiah 53:12. Therefore, I will divide him a portion with the great and he shall divide the spoil with the strong. And he was preaching on that text, therefore. And he said, this indicates, this indicates that the Father made a covenant with the Son before the world was and before man was, and that the covenant rests not upon poor man, but upon God. That man’s salvation was a compact made between the Father and the Son. And incidentally, John Milton puts that same thing into Paradise Lost. We’ve forgotten to read Paradise Lost.

Well, my brother, I think we ought to read Flavell and Milton. I believe we’d get more out of it than we would out of reading Moon Mullins. And he says that the Father made a compact with the Son, back there, and therefore shall He divide a portion with the great and divide the spoil with the strong. And he went on brilliantly to set before his readers in heavy language without illustration and without any side remarks. They weren’t supposed to have illustrations and side remarks. They had gone to church in those good old days, or the “Kirk,” they called it in Scotland. They went there, not to hear stories, but to hear theology, an hour long, two hours long.

And John Flavell’s sermon on, therefore, from Isaiah 53, that God made the covenant with the Son before eternal ages. With whom else could He have made a covenant before the worlds began? Before there was a seraphim to stand by the throne of grace or the sea of fire, before there was an angel, before a man ever breathed, with whom did He make His compact and to whom did He make His promise? He made it to His Eternal Son, who later became flesh to dwell among us, so that the God who cannot lie promised before the world began.

Now your certain hope for the future rests upon this kind of God, this kind of God, the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, and the promises depend upon the covenant, and that’s why you don’t have to worry. Your certain hope for the future absolutely rests in God, and I want to say this to you. It’s independent of anything you can see or touch, independent of anything you can see or touch, this covenant, anything that you can see, touch, taste, smell, hear, anything that is sensible, that belongs to the senses, is completely divorced from the things we tie it up to.

We try to tie Christianity up to democracy, civilization, politics, financial conditions, and all the rest. Never, never, never, never. Your hope for all the ages doesn’t rest upon democracy. What do I think about democracy? Do I think that democracy is a good way of life? Yes, I do, but I don’t think it’s the best, but I think it’s a good way of life.

I think the best government is theocracy. When Jesus Christ comes back to rule the earth, that will be theocracy, the rule of God over the world, that’s the best. I think second best is democracy, the rule of the people.

And I am quite satisfied with our republican form of government, our American way of life, and I have nothing to say but good about it. But I would only say this, that Christianity has flourished under every sort of political system. It flourished in the court of Caesar. It flourished in the Middle Ages, in the days of chivalry and the days of manors and lords of the manor and serfs and slaves. It prospered in the day when men were slaves, as Paul said he was a slave of Jesus Christ, drawing an illustration from current society.

It flourishes now in Korea. It flourishes now under Chiang Kai-shek, out on that little island of Formosa. It flourishes in tiny little places in some of the hard, tough countries of South America. And Christianity rests upon God and it antedates not only all political systems, but all politicians, all statesmen and all men. And it goes back before eternal ages and links itself like a mighty chain to the very throne of God. Therefore, political systems don’t change anything. But you say, well, political system can soon stamp out Christianity.

That’s what we think, my brethren, but I don’t believe it for a moment. I am not, I am not for these Russian and other church men who come over here and try to pull our legs and tell us that they have religious freedom in Russia. I know that they don’t, but I also know that the Holy Ghost hasn’t permitted the seed of God to die in Russia.

I heard the other night on FM a beautiful, beautiful choir. It was a Russian choir. The recording was made in London, and it was made recently. It was sung by Russian voices. I lay in my bed after I’d gone to bed. I lay and listened to the FM, to this wonderful music of the Russian choir. And in my heart, I had an indignation. I said, people like this, that have genius like this and ability like this, that have the warmth and the emotion and the feeling of passion that they have, that they have to be ruled by those devils in the Kremlin. That these fine, warm-hearted, friendly, religious-minded Russian people have to be ruled over by these communistic, atheistic devils.

In my heart, I’m indignant that it should be so. And I pray that the day may come, even in Russia, when God will destroy this octopus and will take from the hearts and brains and bodies of the Russian people the chains that are there. For all you have to do is destroy the ruling classes in the Kremlin and destroy communism. And you have the finest and most emotional and passionate and friendliest people.

Now, don’t misunderstand me and go ahead and say Tozer made an impassioned speech in favor of Russia. Never in favor of communism. It is the breed of the devil. It is the vomit of hell. It is the seepings from the sewers of limbo. And I hate it with everything in me. And all of its sneaking devilishness and all of its evil chicanery. I hate it. But I pity the people upon whose hearts and minds it’s been clamped down like a vice. They’re better than that. They don’t deserve it. But you say, then, why don’t they rise and throw it off? They tried that in Hungary, didn’t they? You know what happened there. Only God can deliver them.

So don’t you believe for a minute that the ancient seed of God that was planted in the minds of the common, plain people is dead in Russia. There are still Christians. They are operating under difficulties, but they’re still there and they’re still in China. Don’t think that the 40 or more years that our Alliance missionaries labored and sweat and struggled and suffered in China is for nothing. There are still Christians. The God who cannot lie promised before the world began and He promised before Marx and Lenin and He promised before Mao Zedong and Khrushchev.

Well, some others would say, well, Christianity must go along with civilization. No. Civilization is simply a combination, application of science to man’s life. And it’s given us this we call civilization. Christianity, philosophy, and science are combined. That is the top froth of Christianity that’s combined with science and philosophy to create this civilization that we have now. That civilization can disappear, and we can go back to the ox cart. And still, it won’t change anything in heaven yonder. It won’t change anything inside of men. It won’t change the covenants of God and the God who promised His Son in holy compact before the ages began. He will not fail us if our civilization is destroyed. It goes back to the Constitution of the United States.

I believe in this constitution of the United States. I hold it to be one of the greatest documents, as the English said, ever struck off by the hand of man. For all these years it has kept us free, the freest people in the world. And I grieve when I see Supreme Courts interpreting the constitution so as to shield the communistic vermin that crawls in Washington. But nevertheless, before the Constitution of the United States was written, the cross stood high above all time.

And so, it doesn’t depend upon it. It doesn’t depend on politics, nor wars, nor financial situation, nor space travel, nor churches, nor denominations, nor the Christian and Missionary Alliance. God that cannot lie promised before the world began. And there is our hope. God never does anything new, said Meister Eckhart. By that he means that God never does anything suddenly or impulsively.

He says, behold, I will do a new thing, and I make all things new. But he’s talking about our new. He only talks from our side. He said, behold, I will do something that from your standpoint will look new. Behold, I will do something that to you will seem new. But He does nothing that He hasn’t covenanted to do with His eternal Son before an angel wing trembled by the sea of fire.

He never does anything new. And the old German theologian is right. God never does anything new. And if He blesses you today, He promised it before the world was. And if He saves you today, He does it according to a covenant He made with His Son before the eternal ages. And if He answers your prayer, He answers it according to a compact He made with His eternal Son before the world was.

So, God never does anything new. God never adds any codicils to His will. When God made His will, He made it and sealed it in blood and settled it in the God who cannot lie, swore by Himself because He could swear by no other. And He never adds any codicils. Our assurance is in Him.

Let me read 2 Timothy 1.9, and we’ll close. Who has saved us and called us with an holy calling, not according to our works, but according to his own purpose and grace, which was given us in Christ Jesus before the world began. Maybe we could read yet a little passage from Ephesians 1. To the praise of the glory of His grace, wherein He hath made us accepted in the beloved, in whom we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of sins, wherein He hath abounded toward us in all wisdom and prudence, having made known unto us the mystery of His will according to His good pleasure, which He hath purposed in Himself, that in the dispensation of the fullness of times He might gather together all things in Christ, both which are in heaven and which are on earth, even in Him in whom also we have obtained an inheritance, being predestinated according to the purpose of Him who worketh all things after the counsel of His will, that we should be to the praise of His glory who first trusted in Christ.

Ah, my brother, you don’t have to worry about the promises nor about the God who made them. All you have to be bothered about is whether you are living as you should live, whether you love Him as you should, whether you are living as clean as you should live and as right and as good, and whether you are as useful and as fruitful as God wants you to be. You can think about that and pray over that all you want to, distrust yourself all you want to, never insult the Majesty in the heavens by doubting Him. For He is the God who cannot lie, and He promised eternal life before the world began. And we who have believed Him become part now of that eternal compact which He made with His Son for eternal ages. Amen and amen.

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Tozer Talks

“How We Can Know the Will of God“

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How We Can Know the Will of God

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

December 9, 1956

The book of Isaiah, 48th chapter. Isaiah 48, verse 17. Thus saith Jehovah thy Redeemer, the Holy One of Israel, I am Jehovah thy God, which teacheth thee to profit, which leadeth thee by the way that thou shouldst go. Now the words, the word Lord in capital letters, twice used here, Jehovah of course. I am Jehovah thy God. I teach thee to profit. I lead thee by the way that thou shouldst go.

Now I said that I would tonight talk to you about how to discover the will of God for your life. And this is one of two of most asked questions. When a new man comes, an evangelist or a Bible teacher goes somewhere and appears before an audience, and people come to him and say, I’d like a word with you. You can be sure, or at least it’s very probable, that he will ask, how can I be filled with the Holy Spirit? Or how can I be sure of God’s will for my life? Sometime again I’ll come back around to talk on that first question. How can I be filled with the Holy Spirit? But tonight, I want to talk about how I can be sure that I have the will of God for my life.

Now the text is very plain, and the embarrassment of getting a text or choosing a text to talk on this matter is that there is so much Scripture, so many passages of Scripture, that you are embarrassed for the abundance of them rather than for the absence of them. And in the text it says that Jehovah is God and He teaches us to profit, and He leads us in the way that we should go.

Now the first thing that I will say to you is that you’re going to have to start believing something. And one of the things you’re going to have to believe is that God is willing to lead you and teach you, and that it is for your eternal profit this side of the grave and beyond. God doesn’t do things halfway. He has in mind our present and our future. And He leads us and teaches us to profit for our good in this side of death and on the other side. And that’s the only two sides there are.

Now this is basic to successful Christian living. You see, you’ve always got to be fighting your tendency, as I have, to plunge into paganism and think as a Christian in a pagan manner. For we have absorbed from paganism the notion that God is a testy and exacting God. Jesus used a word about it, austere: very hard and logical and legal and tough to get along with.

And we have absorbed this from paganism, American paganism, that God is testy and churlish and that He enjoys seeing us squirm. The whole idea of penance is built on that, that God enjoys seeing us squirm, that God is altogether such a one as we are. God complained about that once. He said, thou thoughtest I was altogether like you.

And that’s wrong because God is exactly the opposite from that. And we have absorbed the idea that God will punish us sternly and that he will somehow beat and chasten and flail the badness out of us. And our sense of guilt helps this and makes us feel this, because our sense of guilt makes us bring in a verdict that we ought to be punished.

And the man is not of what we call under conviction for sin until he believes that he ought to be punished. The man who doesn’t believe he ought to go to hell will never go to heaven because it is one of the requisites of repentance that we believe that we ought to perish except by the mercy of God. And because we have this guilty feeling that we ought to be punished, why, we won’t forgive ourselves and we’ll not really believe that God has forgiven us. We punish ourselves. The psychologists have names for these things, and to some degree theology has also.

But the refusal to forgive yourself, the idea that you ought not to be led, that you’re not the one, that this is all right for saints, but you’re not the one because you ought to be punished. Well, of course you should. But as Eckhart says, this notion, that is, I want to quote him on one sentence, but he says about this notion that God is testy and exacting, he says, the Lord wants His friends to be rid of such notions. I think he’s perfectly right.

The Lord wants his friends to be rid of such notions, for the truth is that God is all goodness and mercy and delights not in punishing but in being good to us. And He never delights in punishing us. The Lord never took any pleasure in the death of sinners, and He never takes any pleasure in the chastisement of his children. Never. And the Lord never takes any pleasure in humiliating us.

Now, there is a school of thought, it isn’t really organized, you just hear it here and there, it flutters about like a sour butterfly, but it lights here and there, and you will find it getting into the language of the preachers, that God loves to humiliate His people. Stories are told of how God brings somebody down until he whimpers and trembles and blubbers, and then the Lord forgives him, and all is well.

Well, the Lord humbles us, but he never humiliates us. The devil and the world and sin will humiliate, but God made us in His image, and God is not going to humiliate His image. He’s going to humble sin, but He’s not going to humiliate us. The Lord never wants us to get to a place where we lose self-respect, and that’s of course what humiliation is.

Now, God delights in our profit forever. He delights in our holiness, in our health, in our happiness, in our fruitfulness, in our profit and in our reward. God delights in this. If you could only go out with this one thought in your mind tonight, God delights in my prosperity, it could change the whole weather, all the climate of your life for all time to come, if you could go out with that idea in your mind. And because God delights not in punishing, but He delights in our health and happiness and fruitfulness and reward, He leads us in the way that we should go.

Now, I want to show you that there are three dimensions here, and these dimensions are, he leads us in a way that will honor God, profit us, and bless others. Now, those are the three dimensions, and you can’t get away from them. There is no place else you can go. Of course, you’re in a world as big as the universe, but it’s a three-cornered world. It is a three-dimensional world at any rate.

In God, everything that you do, God wants it to have three reasons and three motives, back of it, or at least three to eventuate in three results. To honor Him, profit you, and bless everybody else. That’s the will of God. Now, how does God do this? And this is what we’re concerned with tonight.

Now, if you want to, you can start taking notes right here. I will say one thing tonight, everything else I’ll say, probably you have heard before. But I will say one thing tonight, and I’ll point it out when I come to it, that if you believe, if you dare to believe, and if you will go home believing, and if you will write it in your heart and across your mind, and in your thinking, and in your praying, if you’ll have this one thing, it will give you guidance for all the rest of the days. I’ll point it out when I come to it. But leading up to it, let me point out to you that to get a leading from God, first of all, the lead of God requires that we be his children indeed.

Now, there’s a sharp line drawn in the Bible between the children of Adam and the children of God. Religion, just religion, Christian religion as we know it, what we call Christendom. I never liked the word. Christendom doesn’t draw that sharp line. We gloss it over for politeness’ sake and for tolerance sake. We gloss it over. And if a fellow is decent at all, he doesn’t beat his wife and curse his children, why, we’re willing to believe that he’s in the kingdom or partway in the kingdom. And if he gives a hundred dollars to Hungarian relief, we’re willing to believe that he must be a wonderful fellow. And if he appears at church on the average of three or four times a month, why, he’s in.

Now, the Bible makes a sharp distinction between the children of Adam and the children of God. It isn’t a question of righteousness, it’s a question of birth. And to ignore it for any reason, tolerance or politeness, is to violate the Scriptures and to go contrary to the teaching of Christ and of the apostles and the historic church.

Only the children of God can profit by what I’m saying to you now. And only the children of God can take the text, I am Jehovah, which teacheth thee to profit and leadeth thee in the way that thou shouldest go.

Now, another thing is, we must be dedicated to the glory of God. There is an evil emphasis today, and it’s getting stronger and stronger all the time. It is to use God and bargain with God and go into partnership with God, and even give your money in order that you might invest it in God and God get a return back on it, like going to the First National Bank. You give your tithe, or you double your tithe, and then you tell the story with shining face, I doubled my tithe last year, and so I doubled my profit. It’s wonderful how God blesses me.

Now, that is the Christianity of the day. It’s not the Christianity of those men and women who hid in caves in the rocks, and who took the spoiling of their goods joyfully. It’s not the Christianity of Him who had nowhere to lay his head. It’s not the Christianity of the apostles who gave up everything and followed Christ. It is not the religion of the fathers who were slain, who were sawn asunder, who were thrown over cliffs, or who were sewed up in sacks and drowned in the sea, who were thrown into the arena and chewed up by lions, and who lost all.

It was not their Christianity, but it’s ours. It’s today. It’s to use God. Get what you can out of Him. You’ll find question-and-answer columns and a little column on the editorial page of the newspaper with some reverend writing and telling you how you can use God, and it’s on the air sometimes, how we can get a profit out of God, and how we can bargain with him, like old Jacob. Oh God, if you’ll bless me, I’ll give you a ten. God had to change Jacob’s name. He was ashamed of it. He changed it to Israel and got rid of that business.

And then we accept earthly success as a proof of heavenly favor. Now, that isn’t positively any proof at all. You can go bankrupt and still have the smile of God on your heart. You can make millions and have the frown of God on you because of your sin. Now, God will never lead anybody for his own glory.

Now, I think I ought not to lean over backwards the other direction. I don’t mean that if you’re having a profitable year that therefore you’re backsliding. No, we do not equate backsliding or profit with backsliding. We only say that whether it’s the will of God that for a given year you should make money or lose, it is always the will of God that you should profit for now and for eternity. But it’s not financial profit.

You never can tell how well off a Christian is by looking at his bank book. Never. You never can tell the spiritual status of a Christian by looking at the size, model, and year of his automobile. Never, never, because there’s no relation there. God prospered Israel in earthly things, but he profits His church in spiritual things. But God will never lead us except for His own glory. And He will never lead anybody for his own glory.

And then, we must be fully surrendered to Christ. So, when I say a little later, how can we get the will of God, remember that if you’re not fully surrendered to Christ, you cannot be sure you have the will of God. Because it requires that we do be dedicated to the glory of God and surrendered to Christ Himself.

Now, let me warn you, don’t imagine that if you’re dedicated to a church, everything will be all right. There are people who have lived a lifetime in a church. They’re part and parcel, they’re part of the furniture in a church. They’re old deacons who have watched a generation come and go down. And we say, oh, he’s dedicated to the church, he’s surrendered to the church. Never, never, never. To be surrendered to a denomination or even a local church like this, no, never.

Then there are others who are all whipped up over a doctrine. They have just discovered that immersion is the right mode, or a pouring is the right mode. Or, they have just discovered that there will be a seven-year period between the first and second coming, or that there isn’t going to be two comings. So they get all whipped up over a doctrine. You can go vastly astray if your consecration is to a doctrine, however right the doctrine might be. The Lord never says, surrender yourself to the doctrine. He says, surrender yourself to Me.

And then there are those who are all surrendered to a project. Somebody decides that God has called him to paint a Scripture text on rocks along the highway. And he gets himself a paintbrush and an old Ford, and sweats and labors and works hard and lives on hamburgers in order to get that done. He’s got a project on. Somebody else’s project is something else. Christians are all divided up into projects. They used to say we’re divided into sects, but now we’re divided into projects. And it’s this project and that project.

Come up some, oh, say Wednesday to my office and I’ll show you some mail. They want you; I don’t know where they think we got the money, but everybody has a project and he’s dedicated to that project. He lives and dies by it. Never make the mistake of dedicating yourself to a project, neither foreign missions or evangelism or Jewish work or anything else. Do those things and serve in those things. They’re all in the will of God. But surrender yourself to Jesus Christ and not to a project and not to a plan, but to Jesus Himself.

And always remember that a shepherd can’t lead a self-willed sheep. If you’re not surrendered, you can’t be led. I am the Lord that teacheth thee to profit and leadeth thee. But of course, He assumes that they can be led. God cannot lead a self-willed Christian.

And then we must give the right place to the Holy Scriptures and to the Holy Spirit. As many as are led by the Spirit of God, they are the children of God. And so, the Spirit is sent to lead us, and we must give complete surrender to Him. And we must have Him. The Christian who denies the Spirit, quenches the Spirit, grieves the Spirit, rejects the Spirit, doesn’t need to expect to be led. He’ll have to go by the book, the Constitution. He’ll have to take down what they call naively the minutes. And he’ll have to go according to the black Book.

Sometimes when we’re no longer able to get the leadings of the Lord, we organize, get a constitution, bylaws, and regulations. And then after that, we don’t need God. We just get along by looking at the book. If a question comes up, we turn to page 298, Article 3, Section 4, line 5. And we know where to go from there, and we don’t need God. But remember that I’m talking now to Christians who want to know how to be led. I point out, you’ve got to give the Holy Spirit His right of way, and you’ve got to give the Holy Scriptures their right place.

Now there are three possibilities. We make a heavy burden out of being led of the Lord when it’s one of the easiest things in all the world. A praying, Bible-loving, Spirit-conscious Christian ought to find the guidance of the Lord very easy. And yet they do not, or at least people do not. Maybe it’s because they’re not praying Bible-loving, Spirit-conscious Christians. But a lot of people write in to me, and I’m only one, a small one of thousands. Or they come to me, and they say, I want to know the will of God.

Well, it ought to be a very easy thing. If you’re a praying Christian, if you’re a surrendered Christian dedicated to the glory of God, and you’re truly a Christian, and not just a church member or a professor, but you’re truly a Christian, then God could lead you very easily.

Now here’s one mistake we make. Put this down at least in your memory, that some people refuse to be led in any other way than by a wonder or a miracle. If it isn’t wonderful, they don’t believe God did it. Now, don’t require God to do a miracle to lead you. He said that He would guide His children, but He didn’t say that He would guide His children in a miraculous manner or even a supernatural manner. He just said He would lead us in the way that we should go. So don’t require God to do some wonderful thing.

A silly sample of this is the man who said, I said to God, this happened down in the state of West Virginia, where such things often happen. The young man said, I was walking down the railroad track, and I was wondering if I was called to preach or not. And I said, oh God, if I’m called to preach, have that bird over there light on my shoulder. And he said, the bird lit on my shoulder.

Now that’s making God do it the hard way. And that is insisting that the Lord do something that I’d be rather embarrassed about it, because I don’t think that God is going to use a bird to help call me. He might use a rooster to bring an apostle to repentance and a jackass in order to rebuke the madness of a prophet. And I suppose the Lord could use a bird to call a preacher. But knowing that preacher, I think the bird called the preacher instead of the Lord.

Now my brethren, about some things, there just isn’t any use to ask guidance. Hear me now, about some things, there’s just no use to ask guidance. Don’t think you’re pious every time you go to your knees and pray. Don’t think that. There are sometimes when prayer can be a sin, or when at least can be unnecessary, superfluous, and out of order.

So about some things, there’s just no use to go and ask God’s will because God has already said an emphatic, no. And about the things that are here in the Bible to which God has said an emphatic, no, you just waste your time going to God and asking God to guide me.

Now suppose that I ran a store, and a man backed a truck up and offered me at a very great reduction a fine shipment of something that I sold, say cornflakes. Well, if I knew that those cornflakes had been hijacked out on the highway, there wouldn’t be any use for me to say just a moment, I’ll go in the back room and then drop on my knees and say, now Father, should I or should I not? Why, you’d insult God by going to Him and asking Him to guide you about whether you accept stolen goods. That’s an emphatic, no. The Christian is to be honest if he starves to death. The Christian is to be clean and right and true and honest. And so, there isn’t any use to go to God to ask Him whether you ought to buy stolen property.

And there isn’t any use for you to go to God and ask whether you ought to bet on a horse. There isn’t any use to go to God and ask if you ought to run off with another man’s wife. There isn’t any use to go to God and ask whether you should do the wrong thing. God has declared, no, with a loud voice.

Well, then there are some things about which God has said just as emphatic a, yes. And there isn’t any reason to go to God about that except to thank Him sometimes. Read your Bible. Here you will hold in your hand the Book. And I think we grieve God because we read Life magazine more than we do the Bible, a lot of Christians do. And they read the box score and the standings of the clubs, and they know them, but they don’t know what’s contained in the Book of Romans. Then when they get in a pinch, they say, O God guide me.

Well, we haven’t gone to the Book to find out what God has said, and therefore we don’t get guidance because we’re not familiar with the Scripture. Everything else and all else being equal, the most perfectly guided man is the man who knows his Bible the best. But in the Scriptures, there are some things about which God has said an emphatic yes.

And it isn’t a pious nor spiritual thing to go to the Lord and ask Him, Now, Father, should I do this? Please guide me. And call up that Brother Tozer and say, you pray for me that I’ll have guidance on whether I ought to give a tithe or not. You don’t ask God about that. To do so is to insult God. Of course, the Bible declares a man ought to give. And somebody says, Will you please pray that I might be guided?

There’s a widow down the block and she’s been sick in bed, and she’s run out of groceries and her check won’t last through. And should I take her basket? Don’t bother God about that, mister. Don’t go to God at all and don’t call up the parsonage because you know you ought to do that. The Scripture says, do good unto all men, give and it shall be given to you, shaken down and running over.

He has scattered abroad yet given to the poor and His righteousness remaineth forever. And the whole sweep of the Bible teaches us that we ought to do those good things. So, we only waste our time and confuse our mind and practice a kind of mental hypocrisy when we go to God and ask Him whether we ought to tithe and whether we ought to serve and whether we ought to help people and whether we ought to be baptized.

Somebody says, will you please pray that I might have guidance? No, I won’t pray that you will have guidance. I will pray that you’ll get some faith and good sense, but I won’t pray that you’ll have any guidance because the Bible is very plain. It says, teaching them, making converts of all the nations and baptizing them in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost and teaching them. That’s plain.

And then you, somebody has had a row with you and there is no forgiveness and you’re in trouble. And you say now, God, please teach, show me whether I ought or ought not to forgive that man. Why, of course, you ought to forgive that man. Doesn’t the Scripture say, forgiving even as God has in Christ, for Christ’s sake, forgiven you. There’s no use to pray to God about that.

And there’s no use to pray to God whether you ought to pray or not. Somebody says, please pray that I’ll be guided about my prayer life. There’s only one way to pray, mister and dear sister. Only one way to pray and that’s to pray.

I often think of dear old Dr. Adam Clark, that godly, saintly old man of God who wrote the commentary. He got up at four o’clock in the morning to work and pray, that is, pray and work at his writing and preaching. And some young man went up to him and said, Dr. Clark, I understand you get up very early in the morning. How do you do it? Do you have some rule by which you get up? No, I just get up. And that’s the only way to get up, just get up. Don’t make a production out of it, just get up.

And so it is with praying. You pray for me that I’ll have guidance about my prayer life? No, I’ll pray that you’ll be obedient, and I’ll pray that the Lord will enlighten you, but I won’t pray that you pray because you’ve been told to pray. Pray without ceasing. We have the example of everybody from Abel down. And we have the commands of the Scriptures and the examples of the saints and therefore nobody needs to pray whether he ought to pray or not.

And then some say, would you pray for me that I might know whether I ought to witness or not? Doesn’t the Bible say, ye are my witnesses? Doesn’t it say ye shall be filled with His Spirit and shall be witnesses unto me? Of course you ought to witness.

So there are some things that you just don’t pray to God about. Some things God has said, no, these are not for my children. Other things and then many more he has said, yes, these are for my children.

And then there is a third set of things and here’s where everybody gets in trouble. Now this is the point that you’ve probably never heard said before, a thing you’ve never heard said before, and that is this, that for the blood-washed, obedient, surrendered child of God, there are a hundred things that come into his life that God doesn’t care which he does, that he can be perfectly free and relaxed and not worry himself nor do more than simply send up a little thanks to God that he’s free. But you don’t have to go to God for everything.

Now, my brethren, I say that most of our lives, almost everything that touches not all, but so many things that touch our lives are like that. The Lord lays the principle down and He says, now I’ve given you intelligence and common sense. I’ve given you experience and history back there. You’ve got your Bible and now you’re free. You don’t have to consult me on every detail.

Now I am your Lord and I’ll be ready when you’re in a jam and I’ll always be with you and communing with you. But as for the details of your life, you don’t have to worry about them. The shepherd leads the sheep. And Jesus said that he would lead His people as a shepherd leads his sheep. But you know how we sheep try to make it out. We want the Lord to show us which tuft of grass to nibble on at a given time.

Now, let us suppose that this is a shepherd. We won’t smile about it when we think about our heavenly shepherd, but earthly shepherds for a minute. Here is an obedient sheep. And he said to the rest of the sheep of the flock that morning, now I am an obedient little sheep, and my shepherd has promised to lead me. And I’ve been praying that he would lead me.

And so, all day long, I’m going to have my shepherd lead me. And so, all day long, he’s in a state of frustration and borderline nervous breakdown. He’s always saying, oh shepherd, should I nibble on this one? And the shepherds say, yeah, nibble on that. And so, he nibbles that one down. And then he says, now, could I go over here and nibble here? And so, the shepherd says, yeah, you can nibble over there. And pretty soon you’ve driven the shepherd crazy and the sheep crazy.

My brother, the Shepherd says He leads His flock, but He leaves the individual tuft of grass to the intelligence of the lowly sheep. And He’s out ahead of them, leading them, keeping the way clear, driving off the lions and the bears and seeing to it that they’re led by the still water. But He’s not going to tell each sheep how many gulps of water to take. And He’s not going to tell each sheep how many times to chew each bunch of grass. He leaves that to the will of the sheep. What kind of mechanical men would we be if we expected the Lord to go into all the details of our life?

Now, here’s the part you think is unspiritual, but it is just the thing that’s going to free you from a whole world of worry if you listen to me. There are some things to which God has said, no. There are some things which God has said, yes.

And then there’s a whole world of common living to which God hasn’t said anything. He just has given you common sense and intelligence and says, now, honor Me, love Me, put yourself in My hands, and I don’t care which you do.

Now, let’s illustrate a little bit. One of my faults as a preacher is that I don’t tell enough stories, I guess. I’ve got to buy me a book, One Thousand Stories for Preaching. All right, get me that for Christmas, and I’ll use it to hold the window up.

But God gives a man a watch, and God says, all right, now this is a watch. I’m giving it to you. And it’s an excellent watch, and it’ll keep time perfect, with perfect precision, for the rest of your life.

Now, do you think we honor God then by going to God every five minutes and inquiring the time of day? Why, I think not. God says, I’ve given you a watch, son, can’t you read? There’s the time of day. If you want to praise me and you want to pray, pray continually. If you want to intercede for others, all right, I’m ready to hear your prayer. But don’t bother me about the time of day, because I’ve given you a watch. And all you have to do is consult the watch, and it’s a precise watch. It’s mine, I gave it to you. And by trusting your watch, you honor me and my gift.

Or a sailor out on the sea with his compass, or with his wheel. He’s a pious sailor. He’s been to a Bible Institute, and he carries a big Bible weighing 12 pounds. And he’s a real Christian. And he wants to be led of the Lord. And he’s read booklets on how to be led of the Lord. So, he kneels down by the wheel and says, Lord, should I turn it to the left or to the right? And the Lord said, just a minute, son, what’s that right ahead of you there? That’s a compass. Well, I gave you the compass, and it always works. Go according to the compass and relax.

And that’s exactly where we Christians make our mistakes. We want God to pick out everything for us, and we’re not satisfied unless He does. We read some biography of some Christian, some praying Christian who had a wonderful experience, and we want one just like it.

Bud Robison was a great preacher in his day, and he was a happy old child of God. He wasn’t always old, but he got old. And sometime during his life when he was just learning, he heard a remarkable testimony about a man who had gone to sea, and the ship was sinking, and he prayed, and the Lord delivered him, and a miracle took place. It was wonderful.

And Bud, his lips stuck out, and he pouted and went home and got down on his knees and said, God, I never had an experience like that. You never saved me from a watery grave. After he had prayed himself out and whimpered a while, a still, small voice said, Bud, have you ever been to sea? And he said, no, I’ve never been to sea. Well, then said the still, small voice, how could I save you from shipwreck when you’ve never been off the land? Bud smiled and got to his feet and said, thank you, Lord, I get it. I see it.

Now, it always seems to be very spiritual to go to the Lord about every little detail, whereas actually, God doesn’t care. Now, shall we illustrate some more? Suppose you’re going to buy a car, and you’re in the Plymouth, Ford, and Chevrolet bracket. You know that by just how much you make and how much it costs to live, and you say to your wife, well, we’ll get a new car, but it’s got to be one of the lower priced cars. She agrees. It’s all right. You’ll get the family around, nice cars.

So, you start downtown. O Lord, lead me as to which one I should choose. Lead me, Lord. The Lord says, son, don’t do that. I don’t care. They’re all good. Go ahead and buy one. I’ll bless you. I can take care of a Ford as well as a Plymouth, and if you should by any chance like a Chevrolet, buy that. I don’t care.

You see, brethren, the will of God is that we should put ourselves in His hand, expect Him to lead us, and then relax and act naturally. But to expect the Lord to go downtown with you and choose the model and the color and the year, well, that’s silly. But you say that sounds unspiritual. I always pray the Lord will show me which street to take to work. Why don’t you pray for the Chinese or the Koreans or the Hungarians or somebody while you’re wasting God’s time and yours, praying for the Lord. Don’t you know the way to work? God’s given you a watch and God’s given you a compass. Use them. But you say the Scripture says, lean not unto thine own understanding. Sure, the Scripture says that.

The carnal man who has his own understanding and rejects God and rules God out, why, he’ll not get anywhere because God will turn his back on him. But the man who has given God his understanding and it’s been redeemed and renewed and sanctified and Spirit-filled, that man needn’t worry. That’s not his own understanding, that’s the understanding God has given him.

Somebody goes into a restaurant, and they bring him what is a bill of fare. And here it is, lamb chops, white fish, hamburger under a very florid and beautiful name. I’ve discovered about 12 different names for hamburger. And there they are down the line, small steak, whatever, all down the line.

Now, are we going to have a prayer meeting and ask God which to choose? No, God says, you honor me by relaxing and choosing whichever you like. Whatever you like, take it. It’s all right with me. Eat what’s set before you and ask no questions, for conscience’s sake.

Oh, my friends, the leading of the Lord is a beautiful thing if we didn’t make such a tough job out of it. If you shouldn’t do it, it’s written in the Book. If you should do it, it’s written in the Book. And then all in between, there’s a whole world of perfectly natural and good and right and common things that you and I can do or not do. We can have or not have; we can do it this way or do it that way. But you and I like to put up an either or and say it’s got to be this or this. And God says, no, son, it can be this or this or 12 other things. And you’re right no matter what you do.

Somebody will come and say, Mr. Tozer, will you pray whether I ought to go to Moody, Northern Baptist, Bethel College, Taylor, Nyack, or Asbury? Well, I’ll pray for you, but I don’t think that you’ll go wrong no matter where you go if you’re in the will of God. That is, if you put yourself in God’s hands and will then let God’s providence and circumstances and your own personal feelings about the matter decide where you’re to go.

Now, it could be an instance where somebody is so totally ignorant, he never heard of Moody’s. Could be that somebody in the world somewhere is so benighted that he never heard of Nyack. The oldest of such schools in the world, any of you students from Moody’s, I’d be glad to tell you that. But it could be.

So, the Lord may have to do an unusual thing, but He only does an unusual thing when you’re haven’t faith enough to let Him do the usual thing.

So, brother and sister, God doesn’t care whether you take lamb chops or a hamburger with a Latin name, just so you thank Him. The old here old brother Compton used to say, return thanks over a soup bone and it’ll go a long way.

So, thank God that’s all. He doesn’t care which street you drive down. Now, there could be a situation once in a lifetime where you didn’t know and where you were in real danger. Then the Lord by his providence would prevent you from getting into that trouble. But that’s once in a lifetime. It’s not the way to live. To insist on living on that tension all the time, it makes people neurotic and then they think they’re spiritual. When they get neurotic and all blub-blub-blubby, then they say, that’s near to God. No, you’re not near to God. You’re a big baby and God has to lead you around.

Now, to lead a little fella around, I wouldn’t mind. I wouldn’t mind leading that little girl with all that hair that we dedicated this morning. I guess she can’t walk yet, but as soon as she gets through, she can. I’d like to lead her. But when she’s 14 years old, she won’t want me to lead her. She’ll be able to get around on her own steam long before that.

And so, if I insist upon being a carnal baby and always worry about whether I’m in the will of God or not, I suppose the only thing God can do will be to take me by the hand and toddle me along. But he doesn’t want me to be like that. He says, you’re still children. You’re children yet. Grow up into a mature man in Christ Jesus.

Now, just a minute or two more, the unusual situation. You say, ah, that’s me, Mr. Tozer. I have an unusual situation. And I can’t get information about it. I don’t have information. My watch won’t work on that one. My compass is out of order on that one. I just haven’t the information.

Well, let me give you some Scripture. If, let me read it to you right out of the King James Version, then you’ll know it’s inspired. Now, listen to this. If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God that giveth to all men liberally and upbraideth not, and it shall be given him.

Notice how he’s liberal and not upbraiding. And we think he’s stingy and churlish. He gives to all men liberally and upbraideth not, and it shall be given him. But let him ask in faith, nothing wavering, for he that wavers like a wave of the sea driven with the wind and tossed, let not that man think he shall receive anything of the Lord. Let him ask in faith for wisdom, and then let him do whatever he thinks and believes after quiet thought is the right thing to do.

And don’t be afraid to make a decision. If you make the wrong decision, the Lord will providentially guide you into the right one. If you’re surrendered, if you’ve given up to Him, if you’re happy in Him and will do anything He says, you can’t go wrong. And anything you’ll do will be right.

The young lady says, should I be a nurse? Should I be a secretary? Should I do none of those things? Should I try to be a physical instructor, a culture instructor in the college? Just what should I do? Well, I’ll pray for you, but I don’t think you can go wrong if you’re in the will of God. Put yourself in God’s hand and then trust His providential dealings. That will be your wisdom.

But you want a big miracle, do you? You want a production. You want the Lord to come down and light the candles and put up the colored balloons and give a fanfare and say, look, this is my child. Isn’t he wonderful? You know what would happen to you? You’d backslide in 24 hours.

The Lord is not going to do it that way. The Lord is going quietly to lead you. And he often leads you without your knowing He’s leading you in order that you won’t be proud of the fact you’re being led.

Listen to this. And I will bring the blind by way that they knew not. You can’t write any book on that, you know.

If you’re crossing a bridge and it breaks and in a wonderful way you’re saved from destruction, you can write a tract on that. But I will bring the blind by a way that they knew not and lead them in paths that they have not known. That’s too humbling. Nothing to do there but just look up and smile and thank God in a kind of a shamed-faced way and say, Lord, I’m sorry I was so dumb. I will make darkness light before them and crooked things straight. These things will I do unto them and not forsake them.

That is Isaiah 42:16. I will bring the blind by the way that they knew not. Never read that in a tract, never read that in a book, no counselor ever helped you there. You didn’t know which way to go, and you were totally blind for the moment on that one.

So you went to the Lord and said, O Father, lead me. And God said, all right, I’ll lead you. And go ahead, just walk, just walk and trust me. And so, you walk and trust Him. And after a while your sight comes back, and you look down the road and bless my heart you’ve never been an inch out of the way all the way down. And you didn’t know where you were, but you’re trusting God. Abraham went out not knowing where he was going, but as their brother said, he knew who was going with him. And that’s all you need to know.

Well, the trusting child of God will never go astray no matter what he does, provided of course it’s right. I’m talking about a series of choices. Mostly we make it one thing and a possible alternative, but God says maybe a dozen things.

I wonder why God raised up so many good schools, so that people could go to anyone they happened to be near to or knew somebody there or found a catalog or their mother-in-law graduated there or their father. Or, in some way or other a web of providence led them to that school. And then they say, oh, I’m sure God led me here. Sure, God led you there. But by another set of circumstances, you might’ve been a Nyack or Taylor. It doesn’t make any difference, son.

You’re driving a nice new 57 Chevrolet with a back wing swept wheels or whatever they are. All right. Very nice. Very nice. Somebody happened to get to you, or you happened to pass by a window when they had the lights on. So, you bought that one. You might just as well have been driving a Ford. And the Lord wouldn’t have cared if you’d been driving a Plymouth.

The New York Board, I’m going there tomorrow, you know, the leaders of the flock, bless them, everyone, me included. And one day they, they said, we’re going to buy, we’ve got to buy a station wagon to transport Christian missionaries around up at Nyack. And, uh, we want either a Ford, Plymouth or Chevrolet. And things were kind of dull. So, I got up and said, Mr. Chairman, who’s to decide whether we take a Ford, Chevrolet or Plymouth? Well, while they were waiting around, why I said, Mr. Chairman, I think I have a quotation from Longfellow that’ll help you to decide. Well, they waited. I said, Longfellow wrote, did he lay there in the forest by the Ford across the river? And, uh, I said, I think that’s it.

Well, if you didn’t have a sense of humor, sometimes you’d die of frustration. But, uh, all those dignitaries let down their hair, what there was of it, mostly, mostly to get on that board, you don’t have any hair, but they let it down, laughed, and I left the room for a little breather.

Now, my friends, seriously, for this is a serious talk, while you are yielded and confident, you can’t go wrong. And whether you have a sharp, clear leading or not, you can’t go wrong if you seek God’s will. It is only when you resist God’s will that you go wrong. You can’t go right while you’re resisting God’s will, and you can’t go wrong while you’re yielded to it.

So, no matter what city you live in, where you buy a house, what car you drive, what job, what school, who you marry, put yourself in God’s hand, and then relax and act naturally. And you’ll have lots of time then to be thankful.

Instead of begging, begging, you’ll have lots of time to be thankful. And all the time, the Lord will be leading you and guiding you to His glory and for your profit and for the blessing of mankind, and you’ll not go astray, and you’ll not make a mistake.

And if you should blunder and make a mistake, while your kind Heavenly Father knows you meant well, He’ll correct it for you. We have a word for that, and it’s “overrule.” You used to hear the dear old Saints, O Lord, overrule any mistake. That’s good praying, brother. God will overrule things if you make a mistake accidentally. If you set your teeth and make a mistake, you’ve got judgment coming. But if you’re surrendered to the will of God and you make a mistake, God will overrule it, and there won’t be any final lasting mistake at all.

So now the text again. I wonder if we could turn to it and read it, and that’ll be all for tonight. Isaiah 48:17. Everybody, thus saith the Lord thy Redeemer, the Holy One of Israel, I am the Lord thy God, which teacheth thee to profit, which leadeth thee by the way that thou shouldst go. Do you believe that? Amen.

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Tozer Talks

“Spiritual Action – God Working Through Us“

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Spiritual Action – God Working Through Us

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

December 14, 1958

Well, tonight I am to talk on some spiritual axioms. I know that’s the way to get nobody to come, is to announce a subject like that, because that sounds terribly dull. But I want to read three verses from the Bible. John 5:17, But Jesus answered them, My Father worketh hitherto, and I work. Philippians 2:13, For it is God which worketh in you, both to will and to do of His own good pleasure. First Corinthians 12:46, Now there are diversities of gifts, but the same Spirit. The differences of administration, but the same Lord. Diversities of operations, but the same God, which worketh all in all. You will notice the Trinity there. Diversities of gifts, but the same Spirit. Differences of administration, but the same Lord. Diversities of operations, but the same God. There we have the Trinity.

Now as is generally known, my method in preaching is, and has been many, many years, to extract from the Scriptures certain basic spiritual principles, and then to turn those spiritual principles into axioms, stated truth. And they are valid everywhere, anywhere, at all times, always.

Tonight, I want to talk about God working. And I extract what I have to say from the Scriptures, as I have read to you the texts. But for the statement of two or three of these axioms, I would acknowledge my indebtedness to a lady who has been dead 600 years. She called my attention to this, 600 years after she had stopped living in this world and gone to live in another, in a better, and she put it down in that amazing little book I have referred to quite often called The Revelations of Divine Love.

Now the first axiom, it might be good for you to take these down, because you will forget them if you don’t. The first axiom that I want to note is that God does everything. That is, that God does everything, creative and constructive. He does not do evil.

Sin is a work of temporary rebellion against God, and the explanation is yet concealed. Sin is concealed. That is, the reason and the how that the great God can be working and still sin can be in the world, it’s concealed from us. We don’t yet know. We call those concealed things mysteries. People don’t like the word, but it’s a good Bible word, and it’s a word that we ought to learn to live with. For the world, everything around us, is shrouded in mystery, that is, in things concealed. And I saw, she said, not the creature doing, but I saw God doing in the creature.

Now here is exactly what the Bible says, both in the Old Testament and in the New. Remember that when the Lord would work through Gideon, he did what in some versions says he clothed himself with Gideon. He took Gideon and put Gideon on and worked through Gideon and in Gideon to do his mighty work. It wasn’t Gideon that was doing it, but it was God working in the man Gideon.

Then we come to David and Goliath in the Old Testament, and we notice that the upholding of this principle, that God does everything that is constructive, God does it, not people or men or creatures, but God. This is the reason there was no armor.

Now, I don’t suppose, I really don’t, and I don’t want to sound humorous, but I really don’t suppose that there would have been a committee or a board anywhere in Israel that would have gone along with David and allowed him to go out and meet the great, overgrown Goliath with his mighty sword as big as a weaver’s beam. He couldn’t have sold that idea to anybody. He could have argued and pleaded and written, but he couldn’t have got anybody that would have allowed him to go out there without armor. And even he, for a little bit at the first, put the armor of Saul on, it was too big for him, he took it off and said it wasn’t his armor.

But if he had to go through a committee or a board to get this armor off, he never would have got it off. They would have sent him out there so loaded down with hardware that he couldn’t have moved. And of course, Goliath would have simply pushed him over and tramped on him. But he didn’t go out that way, he had no armor. Why did God send a man out against a giant without any armor, though the giant was all covered with armor? Because God wanted to say, God doeth everything. He wanted to show that it is God who worketh through you to will and to do of His own good pleasure.

Why did he send David out against Goliath when there was such a vast disparity in size and strength? There was a vast difference, you know, in size and strength. This man, Goliath, was a huge Carnera, and David was an ordinary sized man, I’m not even sure that he wasn’t a little undersized. And yet God pitted the two against each other. Why? It was that David might never boast about it anywhere. David never boasted about this. David never said to one of his wives, if she got a little out of hand, you remember what I did to Goliath? Because he knew he hadn’t done it, God had done it.

And then there were the unequal weapons. The man David had simply five smooth stones, little marble-sized pebbles that had been made round by the water, the rolling them, the water rolling them along, and that was all he had with a slingshot. Now it wasn’t a rubber slingshot such as boys use now, rubber hadn’t been invented, it was made out of leather thongs.

But can you imagine now, God sending a young undersized fellow out without any armor, and without any weapon properly, against a huge, oversized giant of a fellow who had proved his strength? Why, it’s preposterous, but God did it because it is God that we’re given you.

I want you to notice here the difficult passage in that Corinthian passage, 1 Corinthians 12:4-6, I’ve already read it. God is telling how the Holy Spirit, how God works in people and through people there in 1 Corinthians 12, and he says that God has a work to do, and he does it himself in and through his people by the gifts of the Spirit. The same Lord, though there are differences of administration, the same God, though there are diversities of operation, the same gifts, though there are diversities of gifts, it’s the same Spirit.

Now the point is that mortal minds can’t think immortal thoughts. If we could only know that, there would be a lot of crawling to board meetings instead of coming assured that we had the answer. There would be a lot of us who instead of answering all questions would begin meekly to ask them. Mortal minds can’t think immortal thoughts. God has to think immortal thoughts through us, or our thoughts are mortal thoughts. And mortal hands can’t do immortal deeds. That’s a total impossibility. God does his eternal works through the hands of men, yes, but it’s the work of God in us.

Now God doesn’t give us a reservoir of wisdom and power. Here is something that most people don’t know, and I suppose that we’ll learn it and forget it, but God doesn’t give us a reservoir of wisdom and power. If He did, it would very soon become stagnant. If it’s wisdom, say, God comes to a man according to the way we think about it, and He pipes him full of wisdom, and He says, now, if you get in any trouble, come see me or call me up and pray, but in the meantime, you have a whole cistern full of powers of wisdom here. You draw on that wisdom because it’s yours. God never did it that way.

God gives to a man a word of wisdom, and He gives to a man power, but He is power in that man. He is the word of wisdom in that man. It is God working in the man, and it is not the man working, if we could only remember that. God becomes wisdom to us, and He becomes power to us. That is why Christians blunder so pitiably. If it is, say, a baseball player, and he plays, say, twelve years in the league, big leagues, we say, well, he’s skillful, he has learned, he has caught on, he knows. The same with anything people do. They learn by experience. They learn how to do things by doing them.

But you know, in the kingdom of God, it’s completely other than that, completely otherwise. A man can be seventy-five years old and have served God most of his lifetime, and yet make such pitiful blunders and be so ignorant and untaught. It’s because if God isn’t working through the man and in the man, the man himself is right back where he was when he started. It is God that worketh in you.

Did you ever have the experience of having some seeker come to you and want help, and to your chagrin you had no help for the seeker? I told you about my foray into pastoral counseling a year or so ago, a couple of years ago. Some people came, they had heard of me, and so somebody sent them, I don’t remember who, maybe Moody, I don’t remember who it was. They sent them to me, they said that they thought I could give them some pastoral counseling, that is, family relationship counseling, and to a man and his wife, who were about ready to divorce, came to see me. It happened the same twice. They came in, I talked it all over with them, and the result was that both of the women left hopping mad at me. The husband admitted that we got no place.

Well, now God didn’t send me out to be a marriage counselor, He sent me out to preach the gospel, and if He gives me a word for somebody, it is His word and it will help people. But if I think that I can, out of years of experience, tell people how they ought to live, I am only making a fool out of myself.

And there is a great deal of this kind of fool-making going on in the church of Christ in the name of Christianity. We forget that we have no wisdom for anybody unless God wants to give us the wisdom at the moment. Take no thought, said Jesus, by one instance, what ye shall say, for the Father will say it in you.

I have heard old gentlemen preach, and they had everything all worked out very carefully, and they had little statements, little proverbs which they kept repeating all the time, but they never got anywhere because God was not speaking in them nor through them, but they had learned little things to say, and they were saying them.

So that is the first that I would lay down. It is true everywhere all the time. We extract this from the Scripture as always being true, that every creative thing, every eternal thing, God does it. God is doing it. Man is not doing it. God is doing it. If we were to strip the churches from all that man is doing and leave only what God has done and is doing, we would trim the average church back down to a nubbin. There would not be enough left to have a decent service.

But almost all of the churches are running on their own steam. They have learned how, they have gone to school to find out how, and we have written books on pastoral psychology and pastoral theology, which means how to do it in ten easy lessons. The answer and the result is that we just do not know. We count on our reservoir in place of on our Lord.

My friend, if you talk to, oh, let’s say a Christian Scientist or Roman Catholic on Wednesday, and you have an amazing success with them, and perhaps even maybe win one of them to God, and then on Friday you try the same way, you can fall flat on your face, because God is working in you on Wednesday, but you were looking to what God did on Wednesday, expecting to work on that same thing on Friday. You may even write a book about it. I have seen books on how to win Roman Catholics and what to say to Christian Scientists and how to answer Jehovah’s Witnesses.

Well, you can answer one on Monday and answer successfully, and try it on Wednesday and he’ll put the half Nelson on you and throw you to the mat. It takes the Holy Ghost to work in a man. Always keep that in mind. God doeth everything, and I saw that man is doing nothing, it’s only God that is working. Remember that it is the Eternal Lord who is creating a new generation and a new creation.

Just as Adam didn’t create himself, and just as the angels did not create themselves but God created them, so He is building His church. People are not building the church. It’s impossible. God is building His church. He isn’t building his church; you’d simply have a religious organization.

And the second thing that I would say to you is, that God does all in His foreseeing wisdom. Now, all that God is doing and does, He is doing in His foreseeing wisdom, so nothing is done by happenstance or by adventure. Would you write that down? That everything that God does, He does in His foreseeing wisdom.

God knows our tomorrows, He knows our day after tomorrow, He knows all about us down the years, and it’s all been planned before time was. The only reason I’d like to live any length of time yet is that I’m curious. I’ve always have been a very curious person, almost unnaturally or excessively curious. And I’d like to know what they’re going to do with this time and space deal. I’d like to know. I’d like to hang around long enough.

I’ll tell you this, though, if Jesus tarries, some of you young people now listening to me will see the day when they’ll be sending men off to planets and heavenly bodies far removed from this earth and bringing them back again. I’m busy, that is, I’m curious to know these busy people, time and space, long before there was any space, God had planned what He’s doing now, and God isn’t all mixed up.

You know how they do in Washington and London and Berlin and all the rest? You know how they do it? They play by ear. Nobody ever plans anything and says, now here’s the way it’ll go. They play by ear. And whatever Khrushchev says, then we counter him. We’re always counter punching. All the Western nations are busy counter punching. Nobody punches out there solidly and leads, but they’re always counter punching.

When some big rumbling burp comes out of Moscow, a result of vodka and egotism, then everybody in Washington runs in circles and begins looking at each other and saying, did you hear that? Did you hear that? Yes, I read that. Then they try to counter-punch. And they’re playing by ear all the time to change the figure.

My friends, God Almighty never does it that way. All that is now happening was foreseen in the wisdom of God before any space stretched out yonder or before any star was out there. Long before there was matter or motion or law, God had foreseen it all. You’ll either believe that or you’ll be frustrated and miserable all the time. It’s taught in the Bible that God does it all in His foreseeing wisdom. He foresaw it all and He isn’t allowing anything to happen.

The world isn’t a truck running downhill with the driver having a heart attack at the wheel. No. The world is moving toward a predetermined end and God Almighty standing in the shadows is seeing it go and watching it and guiding it.

The nation of Israel and the nations of the world and the great worldly church we call Christendom and the true church that He hides in His own heart, God knows where they all are at all times by His infinite and perfect wisdom and He’s running everything according to plans which He made before Adam ever stood up on the earth. Before there was an Abraham or a David or an Isaiah or a Paul, before Jesus was born in Bethlehem’s manger, God had this all planned out.

Now I don’t want you to think of God sitting down with a pencil and working it out the way you and I would have to do it. God thinks and it’s done. He wills and it comes to pass. God doesn’t have to work with a pencil and a slide rule and a compass and a square the way architects and builders do. No. And He doesn’t sit and follow an agenda the way conventions do. He thinks it done, He speaks it done, and it’s done because He thinks, and He speaks. In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God and all things were created by Him. Without Him was not anything made that was made. How is that? Why, it’s He was the Word and He spoke it done.

So, you’re a Christian, all right, and something very, very unusual, very, very bad has happened maybe, and you wonder, you wonder, why did God let this happen to me and how could this? This must have been a huge mistake somewhere.

Well, there’s only one possibility, of course, and that is that you have not trusted and obeyed because what I am saying is valid if we trust and obey.

If we rebel against God, then of course we can get into all kinds of trouble. And we may bring on ourselves happenings that are temporarily not in the will of God. But even then, if the root of the matter is in us, God absorbs this and turns it into victory.

There was Jacob, when Jacob fled from the face of his angry brother and was in the waste howling wilderness. He saw that ladder standing up on the earth and I’m still wondering whether Jacob would ever have seen that ladder if Jacob hadn’t been on the run. If Jacob hadn’t been back home in good company and staying around the house helping his mother with the dishes, as the Bible says he did, or most says he did, it says he was his mother’s helper. And the other, his brother. His brother was out running around and hunting and bringing in savory meat. But if Jacob had never had any upset here, Jacob never would have seen that ladder. That’s just as sure as you live.

So, I’d like to suggest one thing. Remember that sin is always wrong, and if we insist on rebellion against God, we’re going to get ourselves into real serious trouble. But remember another thing, that if you are God’s and you do belong to God and you have learned the art of true repentance, God will turn even your defeat into a victory.

And a fleeing Jacob will see a ladder and a Jonah that has disobeyed God may be swallowed by a fish and thus saved. And look at Saul, Saul was breathing out threatening and slaughter there and suddenly he stands and sees, he sees Stephen die, but he starts away from there and as he goes away, on his road on the road to Damascus, he sees the Lord high and lifted up and he hears a voice and he’s a converted man.

I wonder if Saul would ever have been converted if he’d been a quiet professor in Gamaliel’s university and had simply said, well, there’s no use to get excited about it. No use to get excited. Everything will work out all right. If he had said that there would never have been any Paul, the mighty servant of God. But Saul was a man, the root of the matter was in him, but that was about all. And so, God had to even absorb the man’s wrongdoing, turn him around, start him right and then begin to work in his life.

Now I give you the third thought here tonight. It is that much that God is doing looks to us like an accident or a mistake. Much that God is doing, I say, looks like an accident or a mistake, but you know that is due to our blindness and our ignorance. We don’t know why God is doing the way he’s doing and so we begin to fidget and wonder if God does really know.

My friend, God sees tomorrow, and we see only today. God sees both sides and we see only one side. God knows what we don’t know, and God has all the pieces to the puzzle. You and I have only a few of the pieces. Did you ever put together a jigsaw puzzle? Half a dozen times, I guess, over the year I have been inveigled into sitting around a table and trying to put a jigsaw puzzle together. I don’t know why anybody, with a world so full of miseries as it is, should ever invent one.

You know, just sit right down and invent one. With a world full of trouble, problems to solve and all kinds of worries and frustrations and then invent one, actually invent and create one, sell it. I don’t know why anybody would buy it, but I have tried it a few times and usually wandered off before we got the first square, first corner finished. But you see, we don’t have the pieces.

Incidentally, I have almost always, much to the good-natured disgust of my boys, my daughter and sometimes my wife, insisted that piece and pieces were lost. Oh, where are they? And I’d look under the table and say, well, those kids have lost them. But they weren’t lost, I just didn’t know where they fitted.

But you know, you and I are like that. Here’s our pattern of life and how we like to see it bloom into a beautiful picture there, everything in place, but it’s all scattered around. And I don’t know where the pieces are, nothing fits, and you, do you ever try that? Do you ever do this? Two pieces look as if they belong together, but they don’t, and so you try to force them in place. You ever try that? Force them in place, and then you break an edge off, and then you’re worse off than you were before.

But we take the work of God, and we try to push pieces together. I’ve spent a good part of my lifetime trying to shove pieces that don’t belong together and trying to separate pieces that do. It’s ignorance, and we forget that it’s God that gives us the wisdom, it’s God that works in us, and if we’d only know it, if we let God do his work through us and in us. That’s why I believe in the gifts of the Spirit, brethren.

I don’t think that I have done myself any good, that is along with the fundamentalist hierarchy, by coming out as I have and always have, only in belief that there ought to be all the gifts of the Spirit ought to be in the church today, the same as they were back yonder at Pentecost.

I read in the newspaper the other day a long, about six-point type, very small and hard to read, I read about the gifts of the Spirit, and this fellow says the gifts of the Spirit all ended, all ended, and he’s a fundamentalist, too. Well, he’s just plain wrong, R-O-N-G. He is wrong. The gifts of the Spirit did not end. He even goes to quote 1 Corinthians 13, I don’t remember who he was, fortunately, and I wouldn’t advertise him if I did. But he says, now abideth faith, hope, and charity, of these three, but the greatest of these is love, and says all these things will be put away, knowledge will cease and vanish away, and everything will cease, and so he says all these things ceased. Doesn’t he know that they ceased by fulfillment, they did not stop being, and so we cannot get rid of faith, hope, and love, and we cannot get rid, we dare not say that the gifts of the Spirit are no more. They are.

God is working through his people, and what God works will last. What God doesn’t work won’t last. And I don’t care how much personality a man has; he can’t do immortal work because he’s a mortal man. He can’t think immortal thoughts because he’s got a mortal mind. But if the Holy Ghost works in him and through him, distributing to every man severally as he will, and it’s the same Father working in us, and the same Son working through us, and the same Spirit working through us, then God will do his work.

Well, these accidents that you and I think we’re in, we’re not in the accidents at all. If a man follows the Lord with anything like reasonable faithfulness. He’ll not find any accidents. He’ll find that God is working his life out for him.

You know what I wish? I wish that the psychologists and the counselors and all these experts would let people alone. When I was in my teens, what seemed like a couple hundred years ago, nobody had thought of that fool thing yet. And I actually grew up from 12 to 20 without knowing that I was in a period that was the most deadly, the most dangerous, the most unheard of, the most unusual, the most miserable, the most frustrating, the most confining, the most harmful period possible, and that I just needed somebody to tell me every move to make. I just came through the whole business doing what came naturally.

You know, you just came through the whole thing doing what came naturally. And I didn’t have a psychiatrist to help me, nor a psychologist, nor a youth counselor, nor a panel discussion. Didn’t have a thing. I just lived right through. When I was halfway through in the middle, I got converted. When I was 17, a little over, I was converted. And after that, it was easier than before. Fortunately, I hadn’t been told that I was unique, different, that my mother was against me, that my father was jealous of me, and that my brothers were down on me. And the result was I didn’t develop any complexes, and didn’t get any mother fixations or father complexes. I just lived through it.

But now they won’t let the poor kids alone. God bless you young people. You have an awful time now. Every religious magazine you pick up wants to try to dissect you and take you apart. You know what teenage is? It’s just when you’re past 12 and haven’t come to 20 yet. Just forget. Relax and go right on. You’ll be all right. You’ll come through without a scar.

Well, I don’t know how I got over on that. I didn’t have that in my notes really, but I wanted to say that because if they’d just let people alone, you’re living, living with your wife, getting along all right, and everything’s okay, and then you pick up a magazine, and you read an article in the magazine, and you begin to look out of the corner of your eyes at your wife. And they create suspicion. They create suspicion. Young people are friendly and get on fine with their parents. Then they read an article, and after that they’re suspicious of their parents. They’re sowing suspicion in our hearts, friends. I wish they’d let us alone.

I sat on a committee one time not long ago where a fellow had applied for service in the Christian Missionary Alliance, and they said that he had gone to college and had specialized in psychiatry. But during the meetings in New York last fall or October, he’d come down to the tabernacle of the Alliance Church there where Brother Reidhead been a pastor, and he’d heard some of us, and he was pastor of a church that was a denominational church, and he’d gotten under blistering conviction.

So, I got up and asked if he’d been delivered from his psychiatry. And they said he had, that he’d gotten delivered from it, thank God. Because I consider the average psychologist is just an educated witch doctor. And if you think that’s because I’m ignorant, I was studying psychology when you weren’t even born yet, some of you. You know that? I was reading Freud and William James and Jung and many of the great psychologists when you weren’t even born yet. So don’t think it’s ignorance. I know what they teach.

But experience and further knowledge of God and watching them operate has left the impression with me that I don’t need them at all. Let nobody come to me peddling spare heads. I’ve got one. I don’t need a spare head. I’ve got one. It’s getting very good, and it’s becoming slightly bald. But I still have it, and I’m not going to need a spare. Let them let me alone. I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus, and I don’t want these people bothering me.

You trust God, my friend, and God will bring you out all right. There won’t be any accidents. There won’t be any accidents. The accidents I thought were accidents back down the years were simply God helping me through when I didn’t know He was doing it.

Well, another one I want to give you, and I borrow this one now and I’ll quote it. God changes never His purpose, nor never shall world without end. God changes never His purpose, nor never shall world without end. That doesn’t sound to me as if that had been written 600 years ago, but it was. But here it’s part of the truth, it’s the Word of God. The gifts and callings of God are without repentance. God never loses heart. I’d like to have you know that.

Religious people lose heart. I have seen some good godly people that had gone into a tailspin, an emotional tailspin, and they were so low, there was no describing how low they were. But God never gets low, because God sees the end from the beginning. And to God all the things have already happened. They’ve already happened. If you knew you had to die tomorrow, I suppose you’d feel a little low tonight for a while, then you’d get elated. If you’re a real Christian, you’d get elated.

But God never gets up and then down and then up and then down, because everything has already happened with God. God isn’t going around watching dials and looking at gauges and seeing if everything’s all right and testing to see if you’re on the beat.

Oh, no. God doesn’t have to do that, because God changes never His purposes, no, nor never shall the world without end. He’s moving toward a predetermined end, which He purposed in Christ Jesus before the world began. When the angels sang over Bethlehem’s manger, they were not announcing anything new. It had been known back to the Garden of Eden, and it had been known to the heart of God before there was an Eden or a Garden or an Adam or an Eve.

So, God changeth His mind never, no, never shall be. Jonah, go up and preached in Nineveh. And Jonah bought a ticket in another direction. God changes not His mind, no, never shall. So the way it ended up was, Jonah was up preaching in Nineveh. And so it’s always that way. Israel sinned against God. God didn’t change His mind. He just punished them and disciplined them, and they’ll yet be where God said they would be.

There’s a lot of difference of opinion now on prophecy, but I’ll tell you what I believe, holding this holy book in my hand. I believe that the seed of Abraham shall yet walk upon the mountains of Israel. I believe that God shall yet have his people back there. He’s not changed His mind, no, nor never shall change His mind. If when He sent His Son to die on that cross or sent His Son to save the world. If He had gotten discouraged when He saw how they received His Son, He wouldn’t have been God. So in knowing what He had in mind, Jesus walked quietly to the cross and died.

You know, things may seem helpless, and conditions hopeless. You read Bible history. A man asked me one time, a young fellow, he said, why didn’t God condense the Bible? He said, oh, that old, dry history. You know what that old, dry history teaches? The old, dry history teaches that God is working providentially through men. That history are the footprints of God, or the footprints of God are history. And the way God worked with Abel and Noah and Abraham and Lot and all the rest down the years. That’s why I refer to these men so much. Because it’s the way God works, and He’s not changed his mind.

Well, then I’ve got one more yet, and it’s this. That God never lifts His hands off His work. He leads all things to an ordained end. He never lifts His hands off His work.

When Michelangelo died, they say that he had a big backyard, and the whole backyard was stacked full of partly done statues. Now, Michelangelo was an Italian, and was in addition to having the high, hot Latin temperament, he had a double charge of genius. He wore the five crowns, they say, of genius in his day. And when he wanted a statue to change and be the way he wanted it, he wasn’t fooling.

You know, he was like the farmer that cut five holes in the barn door, and they said, what’s that for? And he said, it’s for the cat and her kittens. Well, he said, wouldn’t one be enough? No, sir. He said, when I say scat, I mean scat. He wasn’t going to fool around having them go out one at a time when he said scat, there were five holes for five cats.

And that was Michelangelo, you know. When he said to a piece of rock, become something, he wasn’t willing to wait around. And he got disgusted, and he had a whole backyard full of statues that he’d started and lost heart on, and it wouldn’t work fast enough, and so he quit and threw them back there and started on something else. He had done an amazing amount of work, but there was an amazing amount of work he was too impatient to finish. If he’d just had given it another day, it might have turned into what he wanted it. Instead of that, he threw it out in the backyard, and after they’d buried him, they found his backyard full of half-done pieces.

Well, God never lifts his hands off his work. Now, I believe that. I don’t care what happens. I believe it. I said something about the fact, here at our recent board meeting, that Alliance people say they believe in healing, but don’t. They say they believe in it, but they run for help as soon as the temperature goes up half a degree.

And dear Brother Kopp, he’s been here and preached, you know he is often quoted. He’s a Dutch farmer from out in Pennsylvania, but I consider him a kind of a rough-hewn saint. He said to me afterward, he said, Brother, I’m going to preach healing and anoint people and pray for them if I die surrounded by doctors and nurses with a syringe needle in each leg. He wasn’t going to be fooled. He wasn’t going to be discouraged. He’s going to preach and teach what he thinks. God sent him to preach and teach. I’m for him.

God never lifts His hands off His work. And when God says, you do this, He means you go do it and I’ll work through you and I’ll not be discouraged. You may be discouraged, but I won’t. He leads all things toward a preordained end. Satan and Israel’s foes and those who crucified Christ have all tried to stop us.

You know, I think sometimes it’s a mistake to think Communists are smart. If they were as smart as they think they are, they wouldn’t advertise their intentions, would they? Wouldn’t they be wiser if they didn’t advertise their intentions? They’re always blowing off, saying, we’re going to do so-and-so. And so we brace ourselves and say, you and how many others? I don’t think they’re as smart as they think they are. I never thought Hitler was smart.

They said Hitler was such a genius. I thought he was a great big bumbling fool. Because he tipped his hand, he told in advance. He even wrote a book telling us what he was going to do to us. Yeah, he did. He wrote a book telling us what he was going to do. He called it Mein Kampf. And they translated it into English, and we read it, and we found out what he intended to do, and we stopped him. I didn’t have much to do with it, but anyhow, we stopped him.

And I think the Communists are the same, and you know I believe the same of the devil. If the devil was as smart as he thinks he is, he wouldn’t allow us to catch on to his plans. You know, there’s an old saying, the higher up the ape goes, the more his tail shows. And the devil rises up there and starts, you look, and you’ll see it hanging. You’ll know it’s the devil.

And if the devil only knows one thing, that if you hit God’s people hard enough, they brace themselves. All you have to do is to get after God’s people just enough, and you bring out everything that’s in them. And everything’s going all right with me. I’m one of the laziest, easy-going persons you ever saw in your life. But when things start against me, I back up a few steps, and then suddenly I see, well now hold on here, and the very intention of the devil to drive me back has exactly the opposite effect.

And I believe the same is true with Christians everywhere. God doesn’t take his hand off his work, he’s moving toward a preordained plan. And if we work with him in that plan, Satan’s effort to stop us can only cause us to snap our teeth shut and say, in the name of God and in the strength of Jehovah, we’re going forward. And for this church, that’s my message. God never takes His hand off His work but leads it forward to a preordained end by the same wisdom and power and love by which he created everything in the first place.

You’re no accident. Don’t think you are. You’re no accident. God made all things by preordained purpose, by foreknowing wisdom. And when you came into the kingdom, you weren’t an accident. We think we went and knocked on the door, and God said, go see who’s there. And an angel came and said, it’s Jim Docherty. All right, Jim Docherty, the Irishman knocking on the door of the kingdom. He wants to get in. God says, isn’t that wonderful? We’ve got a new applicant.

Now, don’t let’s think about God like that, brethren. God knew Jim Docherty long before his grandmother ever made an eye at his grandfather. God knew them long before they were ever born clear, back to Adam and back to the beginning when there was nothing but God and vacuity, emptiness and God. God knew all about that, knew all about him, knew what sins he’d bring with him when he came, knew when he would come, knew what he would say. God never lifts His hand off His work. He does it by wisdom and power and love. There’s no less wisdom, no less power, no less love now than there ever was.

Now, this is hard for us to understand because, you see, we can’t see it. You see, we can’t see. But we must believe, and believing is a kind of seeing, you know. Believing is a kind of seeing. And if I believe what God has said, I am seeing in a sort of way. But I’m not seeing down on my human level. And so, you know, it’s the humanity that gets in trouble.

I heard a man preach a sermon one time years ago. I never heard anybody else talk about that, and I’ve never done it myself, I think. But he said the Christian has three men inside of him. The old man, the new man, and the hu-man. He said those three men, there’s the old man. And that’s all there is until he’s converted, and then he gets the new man.

Oh, I mean, there’s the hu-man, of course, all the time. And the hu-man gets us in so much trouble. So much trouble. Even that long after you’ve gotten victory over the old man. The hu-man, you know, just plain you. You know, the thing your wife loves about you and can’t stand. You know what I mean. Yeah, that thing, just you, you know. Just you, you fellas. Just you.

The hu-man, you know, you inherited it, and it’s an unpalatable mixture of genes. You come down the years and got bumped around, you know, down the centuries. But here you are, and it’s what makes you, you. That’s the hu-man. And that’s the part that gets blue.

And the part that gets carnally happy over things and gets carnally gloomy about things. The old man is to die in order to live in the power of the new man. And the new man keeps the hu-man sort of under control.

Maybe I told you this before. I have a friend down in Brazil. I never saw him. His name is Ernest Michaels, or Michaelis. I don’t know which they pronounce it. He writes me. And he sends some of the things I’ve written all over the world to the people. And he sends me stuff from other people. And he’s quite a correspondent.

He wrote a very complimentary thing to me here some time back. Very glowing with compliments. And I wrote him back, and I said, Brother, I’m afraid you don’t know me. You’re highly complementary and you’ve got so many things to say. You don’t know me. And then I went on to tell him what kind of a mess I was. I thought that probably ended the correspondence. But instead of that, I got a better letter than ever. This time he said, oh, you don’t know something we know. He said, the very thing you deplore in yourself is what puts an edge on you and makes you such a blessing to fellows like me. I kind of liked that. It helped me. It was a place to hide my bad disposition.

But if we don’t remember that now and get a hold of it, that God does everything, and he does everything in his foreseeing wisdom. And while much that he does looks like an accident to you and me because we don’t know enough, God never changes His plans and never will, and never lifts His hand off His work, but goes forward toward a preordained purpose using even such people as I and you.

Tags God at Work

Messages

Tozer Talks

Post author By pshappard
Post date November 10, 2024

Through the end of the year, we will be digging back into the Tozer Talks archive for some messages that struck a responsive chord in many viewers.

November 17 – “Each of Us Matter to God”

November 24 – “What do we Mean by Accepting Christ?”

December 1 – “Prepare by Prayer”

December 8 – “Consider Your Ways”

December 15 – “The Kingdom of God Lies Not in Words”

December 22 – “The Theology of Christmas”

December 29 – “Take Heed How Ye Hear”

“The Reason for Paul’s Commandments“

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The Reason for Paul’s Commandments

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer
June 8, 1958

As most of you know, I am preaching a series of messages Sunday nights called The Angel Before Thee. And tonight, I want to talk about how to make your enemies work for you. I’d like to have you here and bring others here and learn, literally, this is not a trick sermon, this is literally true, and I shall develop it and show how it can be done, how I think I do it, make my enemies work for me. While they think they are getting me down, they’re getting me up.

Then don’t forget that next Sunday night, we’ll continue with it, next Sunday morning I’ll be present and then we’ll introduce the president of the Alliance Churches in the Philippine Islands, Mr. D. Jesus. But in the evening, I’ll resume my series.

And on Wednesday evening at 7.30 sharp, we teach for about 40 minutes on the Sermon on the Mount. The rest of the time is spent in prayer. We have fine discussions. It’s a class, which of course the teacher always ends up by being right, but we do allow discussion. I enjoy it myself; I believe others do, Wednesday at 7.30.

Now, the words of our text. You know I am going slowly through the book of Titus. A tightly packed little book is filled with theological meat, as a boiled egg is filled with meat. In verse 11 of chapter 2, there is the little word “for.” For the grace of God that bringeth salvation hath appeared to all men, teaching us that denying ungodliness and worldly lusts, we should live soberly, righteously, and godly in this present world, looking for that blessed hope and the glorious appearing of the great God and our Savior, Jesus Christ, who gave Himself for us, that He might redeem us from all iniquity, and purify unto Himself a peculiar people, zealous of good works.

Now, it would be a total impossibility for any man, I don’t care who the man might be, to treat this all in one sermon and do it any justice at all. So, I am not going even to try. I am going to allow my thoughts to wander a bit around the word “for” there, for the grace of God.

Now, that little word “for” is very important. I don’t go along with that type of Bible teacher that takes some unimportant verse, looks mysterious, and says, this is the key to the whole Bible. I have heard that so much that I have become immune to it. Immune to it would be a better word because I don’t believe it.

Some expositors take that 117th, isn’t it, Psalm, that shortest of all the Psalms, and they look very wise and say, undoubtedly this is the most important Psalm in the entire Bible. It says, O praise the Lord, all ye nations, praise him, all ye people, for his merciful kindness is great toward us, and the truth of the Lord endureth forever. Praise ye the Lord. And they want me to believe that that’s the most important Psalm and that all the rest of the Psalms center around that.

Well, I believe in faith, and I also believe in skepticism. I think a good hearty dose of skepticism is the only way to treat some teachers. So, I don’t want to fall into this trap and say that the most important word here is for, for it isn’t by any means the most important, but for my purpose this morning, it’s quite important in that I want to show you something here. This is, of course, a preposition, but theologically it’s a conjunctive here. It’s, it joins two great thoughts.

Now Paul had been saying above this, that aged men should be sober and brave and temperate and sound in faith and in love and in patience. And that older women should be, be as becometh holiness, not gossipers and not given to wine, teachers of good things. And that young women should be sober, love their husbands and their children, be discreet and chaste and good housekeepers and obedient to their husband. And that young men also ought to be sober and that Titus himself should show himself a pattern of good works, and that employees should be obedient to their masters and to please them and not steal from them and should be faithful to them. And that, that doctrine might be adorned.

Now that’s what he had been saying. Now we say, Paul, wait a minute here. We don’t believe in just being pushed into things. Uh, you want the older men to be grave and sober and righteous. You want the older women to be holy and good and pure and tight mouthed. You want the younger women to be good housekeepers, love their families and be an example to others. You want employees to work for their employers faithfully and well, and not be guilty of stealing little things here and there, but remember that stealing is wrong at any time. Now, why Paul, uh, this isn’t the way the Romans taught, nor the way the Greeks taught.

This isn’t the way the average American looks at things, Paul. Why, what can you say to us that will give us a reason for this? What’s the reason that you want us to live like this? Paul said, well, this is the reason, this is the reason. And the word for gathers up all of that.

It means this which I have previously required of you. The reason for it is this, that the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation to all men, or for all men, teaching us that denying ungodliness and worldly lusts, we should live soberly, righteously, and godly in this present world, looking for the blessed hope and the glorious appearing of the great God and our Savior, Jesus Christ.

When the Bible makes a statement or lays down a commandment without any reason being given, it is the immediate duty of all Christians to believe that statement and obey that commandment and wait to know why God made that, gave that commandment and made that statement. But it is very rare that God requires anything of His people that He doesn’t either before or after explain why. God knows we’re intelligent people and a Christian should be one of the most intelligent of all persons.

I have never accepted the implied creed that a Christian is one who, he’s retarded. And the Lord comes along and puts him in a home for retarded children, that the church is a home for retarded children. I never have believed that. I still don’t believe it. I well know that a wild intellect, uncontrolled and egocentric and filled with sin can be a very dangerous and terrible thing. I also know that a brilliant intellect filled with the Holy Ghost can be a very wonderful thing as David and Isaiah and Paul and John and Augustine and Luther and Wesley have taught us.

So, I believe in the intelligence. I believe the Bible is an intelligent book. It goes beyond intelligence. And that is one of the glories of the Scripture and one of the glories of Christianity, that we go beyond intelligence. We never go contrary to it, but we often go beyond it. The prophets of the Old Testament and the apostles of the New, heard and saw things which their intellects were never able to equate with anything else they knew or with anything taught by mortal man. They saw visions and dreamed dreams and looked into the face of the awesome God with a rainbow around His shoulders and they rose above the power of the mind to climb. But it was never anything they saw, never anything was contrary to good sound reasoning. It was above it, I repeat, but never contrary to it.

So, God has given us reasons for things and has said here, take this book and you’ll know not only that you should be good, but why you should be. Not only that you should believe, but why you should believe. It was Anselm that said, we think because we believe, not in order that we might believe. In the believing man, faith is always first. And the believing man believes and then he can think as deeply and intensely and widely and imaginatively as he wants to do it because he has faith to start with. And he never goes beyond faith and never rises above faith. He rises above reason, but never above faith.

So, Paul gave us the reason here. He had been exhorting. Paul didn’t do it that way usually. Usually in his epistles, Paul begins with heavy theology and lays the foundation down, good and solid, and then builds up on it exhortations and commandments and urgings that we’re to do this and thus and this and live this way and go there and do this and we’re to live in this way and that way in order or because these other things are true which were previously stated. Here Paul reverses himself and gives us first the commandments and then gives us the reason for.

Now he said, for the grace of God hath appeared to all men. I think it should read, for the grace of God hath appeared bringing salvation for all men. Now what does this mean? I find a very convenient and I believe helpful way of going about Bible study and Bible teaching to find out what a thing doesn’t mean. If you can’t know what a thing means, you can save yourself a lot of confusion by finding out what it doesn’t mean. And some people not knowing what this doesn’t mean, they have read into it meanings that it does not contain.

As a young Christian on attending a church over on Locust Street in Akron, Ohio, I used to pass by every Sunday, used to pass by a great expansive imposing looking church. It said Universalist Church. I don’t know whether they’ve changed their name, I haven’t seen a Universalist Church sign for years. But the Universalists weren’t wholly bad. They believed in the redemption which is in Christ Jesus. They believed that God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten son. They believed that Jesus Christ, when he died, paid the price for all men. At least I think this is a fair statement of what they believed.

But they took verses like this in this chapter, the grace of God hath appeared bringing salvation to all men. And they said, well, that just means what it says, that God’s grace is so vast and infinite and all comprehensive that it leaves nobody out and therefore everybody will be saved. They believed in universalism.

Now, I didn’t intend to tell you this, but it fits in so beautifully that I must. A man said that he was a Universalist preacher, and he said he went into a neighborhood and decided that he wanted to establish a Universalist church. So, he went around finding if he could find, looking about, seeing if he could find any Universalists of the Universalist persuasion.

He finally ran on to a man and he said, yes, I’m a Universalist. Oh, he said, that’s fine. Perhaps we can interest you. We want to establish a Universalist church. Well, he said, I think it’s fair to tell you though that I’m not quite the kind of Universalist that you are. He said, you are a Universalist, and your creed is that everybody will be saved. Now, he said, I’ve lived in the world a long time and I have mingled with men, and I’ve mixed with them everywhere, all out over the world. I’ve watched them live. I’ve had them lie to me. I’ve been cheated and skinned and sold down river and deceived and betrayed. And he said, I’ve decided that I believe in the universal damnation of all men. He said, I’m that kind of a Universalist.

Quite a shock, I take it, to the brother who believed in the salvation of all men. But the Universalists and others believe in the universal salvation of all men, grounding it upon such passages as this.

Well, I say they’re not wholly bad, but they’re not certainly right about it because this doesn’t mean it. You say, well, how do you know that it doesn’t mean it? I know it for this reason, that the Bible is to be understood not by what this verse says, but by what this verse and this verse and this one and this one and this one says. And when you get a dozen of them to agree on something, then you have Bible dogmatics.

And when these dozens agree, and then you find one you can’t understand, and if he doesn’t agree with these plain ones, then you say, well, we’ll put that aside as Gypsy Smith did with the bone when he was eating fish. You ask him what he did with the passage, he couldn’t understand. He said, the same as when I’m eating fish, and I ran into a bone. He said, I just lay it on the side of the plate.

And so, when you find a passage that seems to contradict the plain teachings of 25 other verses, lay that on the side of the plate because you don’t understand that. And always remember there’ll be some blazing-eyed fanatic rushing in and telling you that because you don’t know what that teaches, therefore he is now sent to enlighten you. And what he says it teaches is what 25 other passages deny.

So, I know this doesn’t mean that all men are to be saved, that the grace of God has appeared to all men savingly, and that the grace of God is working actively in all men. I know better than that, for the man who wrote this said, not all men have faith, and said that evil men and seducers should wax worse and worse until the end came.

And then I know also that it doesn’t mean that all men have heard of the grace of God. It’s appearing. The grace of God which bringeth salvation hath appeared to all men, and that would leave us with the false impression, if we don’t watch it, that everybody in the whole world has heard of the grace of God. I wish that were so. I wish that everybody that lives everywhere from the youngest inhabitant of the jungle to the oldest man in London or Paris had heard of the grace of God, but it just isn’t so.

And I might add that it is perhaps one of the great and serious crimes of all time that the church of our Lord Jesus Christ has failed so dismally to instruct the world that the grace of God has appeared bringing salvation for everybody that will take it. That we’ve had nearly 2,000 years to do it, and that we have succeeded not in doing it.

The revolution, the Bolshevistic revolution, came in 1917, and 31 years later, one-third of the earth’s population are under the hammer and the sickle. They did in 31 years what the church has not been able to do. That is, they did for the devil in 31 years what the church has not been able to do for God in 2000.

Now, it doesn’t mean that everybody’s heard. If it meant everybody had heard, Christ would have been back long ago, and this terrible nightmare we call history would have ended, and Christ would now be reigning from the river to the ends of the earth, and every man would be sitting under his own vine and fig tree, and no man should be wicked nor sinful nor harmful all over the earth. From sunrise to sunup, and from sunup to sunrise, no evil would be anywhere about. So, it doesn’t mean that.

What does it mean? It means that there has been a shining forth, epiphany, a shining forth. The word is used here for the shining forth of the sun, for the grace of God has appeared. This is the epiphany, the shining forth of the grace of God like the mighty sun in the heavens. It has shone forth around the person of Jesus Christ our Lord, shone forth in His love and pity and mercy, shone forth in His willingness to die for His enemies, shone forth. It was not a gleam of light, as some would say, but it was a shining forth, as the sun at ten o’clock on a June morning, shining forth in its glory all over the earth, wherever the clouds will withdraw and let the sun shine.

So, that’s what it means. The grace of God has shone forth like the sun, and this grace brings salvation, and that salvation is for all men everywhere that will receive it. That’s what this passage means. And the grace of God has appeared teaching us. I want to bear down a little on that. The grace of God has appeared teaching us.

Now, in what way can the grace of God teach anybody? The answer is that the word grace has at least two meanings, and two meanings here. It means an attribute of God, a quality in God, of love and mercy and kindness and goodwill that predisposes God always to be kind to those that don’t deserve it, and to be good to those that deserve only judgment, and to pour out Himself and His love and even the blood of His son for the salvation of those that deserve nothing but hell. That is a quality in God, a characteristic of the heart of God.

Now, I am conscious that both when I use the word quality and characteristic that I am humanizing God because we can’t rise to the elevation where we can talk about God in divine terms, we have to talk about Him in human terms. Actually, there’s no such thing as a quality in God or a characteristic in God. God’s unitary being has about it a unicity, a oneness.

And anything we say about God is simply our minds attributing things to God, for God dwelleth in light that no man can approach unto. But this is an attribute, this grace, and of course this can’t teach anybody anything. An attribute of God can’t teach a man down in Grant Park on a park bench anything. An attribute in God can’t teach a Doni in the Baliem Valley anything, or an Indian in Columbia. The grace of God as an objective thing, objective to us, outside of us, an external thing, cannot teach us anything. It can move God to act in our behalf, but as long as it’s outside of us it can teach us nothing.

But the grace of God has another meaning too. The grace of God means a divine influence upon the heart. It means an inward enabling; it means an active moral force. Remember in 2 Corinthians 12, where Paul told us how he had been praying that the thorn might be, he might be delivered from the thorn in the flesh which caused him great distress. He said he prayed three times about it, and on the third time the Lord said, Paul, my strength is made perfect in weakness, for my grace is sufficient for thee. He didn’t mean my attribute of grace which lies in me, in the great undulating infinite sea of the Godhead.

That would do Paul no good at that moment, but he said there’s another kind of grace, another aspect of that grace, which is an active working force that enters the heart of a man and does things for him. He said my grace is sufficient for thee. My grace, my active grace, this influence, this moral power within your bosom can lift you above the thorn which you’re trying to get rid of.

Paul caught it in a second. Paul was a spiritually intelligent man, and as soon as God said it, Paul added his own comment. He said, therefore, I will glory in my infirmities, that the power of God might rest upon me. And he knew the grace of God and the power of God were all one.

So, the grace of God is a teacher. It is a moral force. It gets inside the intelligence, gets inside the will, motivates the life, gets inside the heart and disturbs the emotions and excites them. So that’s what it means, the grace of God that bringeth salvation, teaches us, teaches us.

Now, my brethren, it was a low moment in the orthodox church when the word grace lost its second meaning and was forced to take only the first one. It was a low moment, I say, an awful moment in the history of fundamentalism when the word grace lost its second meaning, that of a divine power working within us, and was forced to be satisfied with its first meaning, that of an attribute of God flowing out of kindness and love and mercy which sent God’s Son to die for the lost.

So, the grace of God, for most people, remains in God. And it leaves the recipient of grace unchanged by grace. But do you notice that Paul taught that grace changed people? He said grace changed them. He said the grace of God has appeared teaching us, inwardly teaching us, that denying ungodliness and worldly lusts, we should live soberly and righteously and godly in this present world. It was a very slick trick of the devil indeed when he disassociated the two meanings of the word grace.

And everybody goes out now teaching, grace, grace, grace that is greater than all my sin. Do I believe it? Oh, with everything in me, I believe it. Do I preach it? Well, you know I preach it. Do I believe in the grace of God? Nobody, nobody can sing with a worse voice and a happier heart, amazing grace, how sweet the sound that saves a wretch like me. Nobody, nobody can sing it worse, and nobody can love it more. The grace of God that brings salvation has appeared to all men.

And that grace in God, that’s why we’re here, brethren. I’d like to prove sometime that everything God ever did since the beginning of time, he did out of grace. I’d like to prove, and I believe I can show you, that everything God does is grace, that God never did anything by law, never did anything by law, all is by grace.

The Psalmist used to pray, have mercy upon me and hear my prayer, be gracious unto me and hear my prayer. He knew that God’s willingness to hear prayer was God’s grace in operation. The very stars and sun overhead are the grace of God in operation. Nobody deserves anything from God. If they could only get that. One time more see the sovereignty of God, that God owes nobody anything and gives everybody everything, and therefore we owe him every gratitude in all the world. And all is by grace.

When God made the heaven and the earth, it was by grace. When he laid the foundations thereof, it was by grace. When He girdled the earth with the firmament, it was by grace. And when He made man upon the earth and blew into his nostrils the breath of life, it was by grace. And everything that God has ever done has been out of the goodness of His heart.

But if the grace of God was only a principle of which causes God to operate, it could never get to me. But the grace of God is more than that. The grace of God enters human hearts and other hearts, I suppose.

I believe that the very angels in heaven are motivated by the workings of God’s love and grace in their own hearts, although they never understand it quite as you and I will. The grace of God teaches us, enters our hearts and teaches us. But you know, the devil has, through false teachers and ignorant teachers and persons who will not think nor pray about things, disassociated the two meanings.

And we have only one meaning, and that’s the one I’ve been talking about here now for a few minutes. The wonderful goodness of the heart of God, which gave us everything that we have, which gave us His Son to die, and gave us eternal life without money and without price, gave us mercy, gave us forgiveness, and gave us a place in heaven itself, all this by grace. And you can’t overdo it.

You know, you can’t sing too loudly or too often of the grace of God. But here’s what you can do. You can misunderstand the meaning of it, and you can forget that it has its second meaning. The second meaning being, I repeat now for the third time, the divine influence upon the heart, the inward enabling, the active moral force working to teach us morality, spirituality, ethics, inward goodness. But anybody that talks the way I do now is attacked by these one-definition boys. They say he’s a legalist, or they say he’s seeking to be saved by works.

I read that passage once more, not by works of righteousness which we have done, according to His mercy He saved us. I read that, and I believe it. Or they say he’s mixing law and grace. No. I’ve never mixed law and grace in my life consciously, and I don’t think I’m doing it unconsciously.

You know, the habit is now to blame everything on the Schofield Bible. And I’ve said a few sharp things about some of the notes myself, but the Schofield Bible can’t be blamed for this. The Schofield Bible’s 100 percent right in its attitude toward grace. Let me read a note on 2 Peter 3:18. I don’t know who wrote it, of course, one of the half-dozen editors.

But it says under the caption, Grace Imparted, here’s what it says. It says, Grace is not only dispensationally a method of divine dealing in salvation, it is also the method of God in the believer’s life and service. Having by grace brought the believer into the highest conceivable position, God ceaselessly works through grace to impart to and perfect him in corresponding graces. Perfectly right. The grace of God that set him as high as it’s possible to set anything above the angels, ultimately, ceaselessly works in him to impart to and perfect him in corresponding graces.

Grace, therefore, it continues, stands connected with service, with Christian growth, and with giving. So don’t let’s blame the Schofield Bible for that one. The brethren have gone far beyond in separating grace from grace, the grace of God from the grace in man.

Oh, my friends, let’s not be satisfied to keep all God’s qualities in God. God wants some of His qualities to get into us. There are attributes of God which no man can share. For instance, His eternity, His self-sufficiency, His infinitude, His incomprehensibility. Those are attributes which belong to God, and God cannot share them with creatures. But there are other attributes that God can share with creatures, kindness, love, mercy, grace, goodness, wisdom.

Now I close, or rather just break it off here, and any preacher’s presence will know this is no way to close a sermon. But I’m going to close it this way, that we have every Scriptural reason to believe that if grace has saved us, it has also changed us.

We have every scriptural reason to believe that if we are not changed by grace, we are not saved by grace. For the grace of God that bringeth salvation has appeared, teaching us, denying ungodliness and worldly lusts. We should live soberly and righteously and godly, and I shall show in a succeeding sermon that soberly and righteously and godly takes in the triangle of man’s possible existence, God and man and self, and all the ethics of an Aristotle, or all the righteousness of a Moses. The holiness of a Paul can’t take the man out of that triangle. He’s there, but it’s as big and vast as the heart of God.

So, remember it, that if you believe you’re saved by grace, but there is not a corresponding working within your heart toward holiness and righteousness, I must in honesty tell you, you’re probably deceived. For the grace of God, when it’s received, when a man says, I accept salvation by the grace of God through Jesus Christ, God smiles and goes to work inside the man. If the man really receives God, He goes to work inside of him to produce the very graces that the New Testament is chock-full of.

And so, if a man says, technically, I am saved by the grace of God, and then goes his own way and isn’t changed, I believe he is a deceived man and completely deluded and will be lost at last. We’re saved by grace under good works. We’re saved by grace, and the same grace by which we are saved now becomes an active force working within us to make us pure and good and righteous.

May God grant that we’ll not miss this, that we’ll not go so far out on a limb in our committal to the one meaning of the grace of God that we forget there are any other meanings. There is at least one other. Let’s trust him. If He saved us by grace, let’s trust Him to save us in grace, and that grace may operate through us to make us the kind of Christians that will adorn the doctrine of Jesus Christ.

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Tozer Talks

Post author By pshappard
Post date November 3, 2024

“Ye Have Not Because Ye Ask Not“

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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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“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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Tozer Talks

Post author By pshappard
Post date October 20, 2024

“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.

Tags Eternal Life

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Tozer Talks

Post author By pshappard
Post date October 12, 2024

“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