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A.W. Tozer Talks

“Seven Roots of the Righteous Life”

Seven Roots of the Righteous Life Download

Seven Roots of the Righteous Life

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

June 12, 1955

The passage in the Song of Solomon, the fourth chapter, the last verse, three, 14, 15, and 16, three verses, and one in chapter five. Spikenard and saffron, calamus and cinnamon, with all trees of frankincense, myrrh and aloes, with all the chief spices, a fountain of gardens, a well of living waters, and streams from Lebanon. Awake, O north wind, and come thou south. Blow upon my garden, that the spices thereof may flow out. Let my beloved come into his garden and eat his pleasant fruits. I am coming to my garden, my sister, my spouse. I have gathered my myrrh with my spice. I have eaten my honeycomb with my honey. I have drunk my wine with my milk. Eat, O friends, drink, yea, drink abundantly, O beloved.

This passage likens the church to a garden, and the beloved, which is Jesus Christ our Lord, looks down on this garden and cares for it, and enters it, and lovingly goes over what is in it, pomegranates, camphor, spikenard, saffron, calamus, cinnamon, frankincense, myrrh, aloes, chief spices, and says that he has come into his garden and calls the church his sister, his spouse. I have gathered my myrrh and my spice. I have eaten my honeycomb with my honey.

Now, there is a most attractive picture of the spiritual life, and there is fruit and fragrance and beauty. And as you approach the garden, the fruit is seen, and the fragrance is smelled, and of course the beauty is seen.

Now, we Christians, for the most part, go in greatly for the fruit and the spice and the beauty of the garden. And in Proverbs there is another verse which says, the root of the righteous yieldeth fruit. And we, for the most part, go to church, I think, for the same reason that a child climbs into its mother’s arms after a long day’s play, with many falls and bumps and frights and disappointments. The child wants consolation, and most people go to church for consolation.

In fact, we have now fallen upon times when religion is mostly for consolation. We are now in the grip of the cult of peace, the cult of peace of mind, peace of heart, peace of soul. And we want to relax and have the great God Almighty pat our heads and comfort us. And this has become religion. This, along with one other thing, and that is, if you don’t be good, the atom bomb will get you. These are the only two motives that are left in the wide world for religion.

My brethren, there is something better than all this, and it is that there should be a people; they don’t have to all belong to one church, but that there should be a people called out by the Lord God and subjected to a spiritual experience given by God, and then should learn to walk in the way of the Truth and the way of the Scriptures until they produce in themselves, whether any atom bomb gets them or not doesn’t matter. They that destroy the body aren’t important, only they that destroy the soul.

And you can disintegrate a man, a saint of God, with an atom bomb, and he’s in heaven with his Lord. And whether communism comes in or doesn’t come in isn’t important in that man’s life because he is instantly with his Lord. And the communists have slain many a Christian and sent them off quickly to be with God, and they cast their bodies aside as an unclean thing, but the soul of the man or woman was immediately with the Lord.

And then the question of consolation and peace, always feeling relaxed and at rest and always enjoying ourselves inwardly. This, I say, has been held up as being quite the goal to be sought in the evil hour in which we live, and we forget that our Lord was a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief, and we forget the arrows and spear that went to the heart of Jesus’ mother Mary. We forget that every one of the disciples died or the apostles died a martyr’s death except John.

We forget that there were 13 million Christians slain in the first two generations. We forget that they languished in prison, they starved, they were thrown over cliffs, they were fed to the lions, they were drowned, sown in sacks and thrown over into the ocean. We forget that most of God’s wonderful people in the early days of the Church didn’t have peace of mind, they didn’t seek it. They knew that a soldier doesn’t go to the battlefield to relax, he goes to the battlefield to fight.

And they accepted their position in earth as soldiers in the army of God, fighting along with the Lord Jesus Christ in the terrible war against iniquity and sin. Not the war against people, but the war against sin and iniquity and the devil.

So, there was much distress, many heartaches, many tears, much loss, and many bruises, and many dead. There’s something better than being comfortable. The Church of Christ ought to find that out, and the poor, soft, over-swollen Christians of our time ought to find that out. There’s something better than being comfortable.

We Protestants have forgotten altogether that there’s such a thing as discipline and suffering. We live under an economy that enables us to have plenty. We live under a political system that enables us to believe anything we want or nothing at all and not get into trouble with the law. And the result is we have concocted a religion of sweet wine that we drink and hope that we can walk around in a state of pleasant intoxication.

Now what is the real thing God wants to do for a man? The real thing that God wants to do for an individual and for the Church is to bring in him the fruits of the Spirit—joy, peace, long-suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, and temperance.

It is in the language of Paul in Ephesians to cause him to be so that he will love everybody and let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor, and evil speaking be put away from among you with all malice. Be kind one to another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God hath for Christ’s sake forgiven you. Be therefore followers of God as dear children and walk in love as Christ also hath loved us, and hath given himself for us an offering and a sacrifice to God for a sweet-smelling savor.

To bring out the likeness of Christ in the heart and life of a man—that is the purpose of God. Not to make him happy, though he is likely to be happy. Not to make civilization safe, though if there are enough of people like that in the world, civilization would have a better chance to exist.

But now here is our difficulty, my brethren. We try to arrive at the fruits of Christianity by a shortcut. Everybody wants to have peace and joy and love and goodness and gentleness and faithfulness, and everybody wants to be able to endure and to sacrifice and to suffer.

Everybody wants to be known as being spiritual, close to God, obedient and walking in the truth. Everybody wants the fruit of the spiritual life. And it’s beautiful, and in heaven it will be paramount. Outside of, and next to the beauty of Jesus, will be the beauty of his people revealed.

But here’s what I want to get at this morning, that flowers do not grow in thin air. A beautiful, fragrant blossom does not grow in a vacuum. They do not come suddenly down from somewhere and hover over us like a hummingbird. They grow, and they come up out of a root, and the root of the righteous yieldeth fruit.

And all that beautiful garden that you see there, whose fragrance comes out to welcome you, all roots down into the hard earth. And all has stalks and strong roots, and the flowers grow on top of that. They are a part of it. But you take the roots away and you’ll have your flower about one day. Then the sun will scorch it, and it will be gone.

Now what I want to talk about today is the roots of spirituality. We all want the fruit and the blossom and the fragrance and the flower. But we have misunderstood about this, and we think that we get it by some kind of magic instead of by a cultivation. But I want to tell you that every flower has a stalk, and every stalk has a root. And long before there’s any flower, there is the careful tending of the stalk and the root.

Now, some of us wonder why we just can’t keep our spiritual lives right and why we can’t have patience. Some wonder why they can’t have the fruits of the Spirit and the flowers of the field in their lives. Because they’re trying to get to the fruit and the flower and ignoring the root and the stalk. I want to talk about seven of the roots or stalks of the spiritual life.

Now this will not tell you how to be saved. I want to be very careful here and tell you that this is not a sermon on how to be saved. This assumes that you are already a converted Christian and that the wonder of the new birth has already taken place in your life. If that is not true, then this will not help you much because this is for those who are already Christians.

But while it does not tell you how to be saved, and by deliberate design I do not this morning preach on how you can be saved, but while it does not tell you that, it does tell you what you must do and how you must live being already saved if you are going to have produced in you the beautiful fruits and fragrances of the Holy Ghost.

Now I want to talk to you about some of the roots and I will mention the first one as being the root of regularity in religious habits. All nature testifies of the value of regularity. The seasons are regular. If the weather is two weeks off, as it is now, people grumble a lot about it.

But in the main, the seasons are regular, and the heavenly bodies are regular, and the very fields are regular, and the birds are regular, and the animals are. There’s a regularity about life, a regularity about the rising and setting of the sun, a regularity about the phases of the moon, and that regularity keeps things going.

We forget all about that. We forget that back of the sunshine and the rain and the beauty of the stars at night and the loveliness of the forest and the green of the field and the sound of birdsong. We forget that back of all that is a good, sound, solid undergirding of regularity. God has built it into nature so that it does what it does regularly.

In the Old Testament, if you will read it, you will find that the Old Testament religion was built around a regularity. It said about the old man of God that it was in the order of his course that he went into the temple of God that time, and everything was laid out in order. There was an orderliness about this spiritual life.

And it is of immense value to the Christian life that you should learn to be regular in your prayer life, that you should learn to be regular in your giving, and that you should learn to be regular in your church attendance. But you see, we say, now I believe in Christ, and I’ve had a spiritual experience, and I have the right doctrine.

And then after that, we all go to pieces and become whimsical and pray according to the impulse and give according to the way we feel like it at the moment, attend church when the weather’s good, and do what we do with whimsical irregularity, and then wonder why we do not smell the sweet fragrance of aloes when we approach the church. It’s because people have neglected the root and the flowers have died. The root of regularity has been forgotten, and the result is, of course, that when the root is gone, the flowers die shortly afterward.

Now you say, I wanted to get into the spiritual, the Christian faith in order that I might get freed from the necessity of having to do things regularly. Well, you’ve missed it, my brother, and you might as well close your Bible and walk out, because you’re in the wrong church and the wrong pew and the wrong dispensation. God would have his people learn regular holy habits and follow them right along, not to become slaves to them, but to make them slaves to Him.

Now the second root is that of dependability. Let us notice that everything in nature is dependable. You sow corn or plant corn, and you get corn. You do not get wheat or barley. Plant and you get barley. You do not get wheat or corn. Set a hen on hen eggs and you get chickens. You do not get guinea hens. And so, with everything after its kind. Everything is dependable in nature except man.

And even in human society, there is a certain amount of dependability. That car of yours, you’ve got to depend on that. If you find it fails you a few times, you’ll get rid of it. You can’t have a machine that you can’t depend on when you’re hurrying off to work or to church or on a business engagement. You’ll have to be able to depend upon it.

You women know that your refrigerator must be dependable, or your food will spoil unknown to you. You’ll go out some evening and find you’ve been gone all day and come back and find everything warm and soggy and spoiled. We have to have dependability in machinery. And we have to have dependability in the monetary system.

Suppose for a minute that in Chicago a dollar was worth a dollar. In Milwaukee it was worth 75 cents; in Detroit they wouldn’t take a dollar at all. In St. Louis it was worth 32 cents. And in Seattle you couldn’t buy anything with a dollar.

Suppose that every state and city throughout the United States had a whimsical and undependable idea about money so that the currency was not stable. It would throw the whole economy into confusion in no time at all and would help to bring the nation down to the dust. One of the first things to go to pieces when a nation is falling is its economy and the soundness of its currency.

So, in society we have to have it. And so, with the mail, and so with the milkman, and so with the schools. There must be a dependability. You’ve got to be able to trust somebody.

And the sad thing about it all, my brethren, is that people as a rule are trusted because they get something out of it. The milkman doesn’t come around because he’s a good, faithful, dependable soul. He comes around because he gets paid for it. The mailman doesn’t deliver his mail to you because he’s a sweet fellow that hopes you get a postcard from Ann Mabel. He’s paid for doing it.

And so, with everybody else and everything else. Your car is dependable not because somebody said, oh, that fellow Ed Johnson, he’s such a wonderful fellow, I’ll make him a good, dependable car. No, no.

It’s dependable because the makers know that if they’re to sell two, the first one has to be dependable. And if they’re to sell ten, the first two have to be dependable. They know that they depend upon dependability being built into their car.

And it’s only at the altar of God that men can be depended upon. It’s only in the sanctuary that we can’t get but a few people that can be depended upon. The root of dependability is dead in most churches except for a faithful few that you can depend on. And then that faithful few get abused by the unfaithful ones and the undependable ones. The faithful few that can always be depended upon and are always in evidence, they get criticized for wanting to run the show.

Now I want to ask you a question this morning. I want to ask you this, and I don’t have any one person in mind, I’m just throwing this out into the anonymity, and asking you this. Think about your life over the last year. This is June 12, 1954; one full year. Now think about your life, your religious life, your church attendance, your giving, your praying, your dependability. Think about it since 1954, the same date.

Now be honest with yourself. Nobody will know anyhow. We all do, but I mean at that moment we won’t pay attention. Think now, how dependable have you been? And then ask yourself this question, if everybody in this church had been exactly as dependable as I am, where would our church be? That’s a question that we well ought to ask on our knees with tears and sorrow and pray that God will help us to be dependable. When you have something to do, do it, no matter how simple it is. But you know, in this day of Roy Rogers and drama, nobody wants to be known as dependable.

Oh, they say, a mule is dependable. Dependability, that’s for any moron. I want to do something dramatic. I want to do something with a flair to it. I want to do something big and grand.

Well, the chances are you never will, but if you do, it will simply be a flash in the pan, a rainbow without meaning, and will have no final stability. Who wants to be known as a dependable person? Somebody you can count on. If he says he’ll be there, he’ll be there. If he says he’ll do this, you won’t have to talk to him five weeks later and say, why didn’t you do it? If he makes an appointment, he’ll meet it. He’s a dependable Christian.

And brethren, remember that sweet flowers are beautiful to look at and very cheerful to smell. But somebody had to be out there on these knees poking around in the dirt long before there was any flower, and fertilizing, and digging up, and going back and doing it again, and then watching the weather and watering when it got too dry, and looking after that root.

And one of the roots is dependability. And you can’t have spirituality without dependability any more than you can have a begonia without a begonia stalk, or a lily without the stalk the lily grows on.

And then I mentioned a third root, and that is the root of loyalty. And by this I do not mean loyalty to your denomination, church loyalty. Loyalty to an effete or corrupt church or denomination is not a good thing. I mean identification of myself with a principle, a truth, or a cause, to the point of where I’ll sacrifice for it.

A great breakdown in modern times is lack of loyalty. Every church must have a few who are loyal and will die if they must for their loyalties. But everybody talks about that one, so I’ll pass on to the fourth one, and that is punctuality.

Isn’t it strange, my friends, that the fault that would wreck a business, sink a ship, ruin a railroad, is tolerated at the very altar of God? And in the very Church of Christ that can be carried on carelessly, loosely, which I say would sink a ship, wreck a business, ruin a railroad, or upset an economy, or even if done in our bodies would ruin our health. And yet in the church of God nobody thinks anything about it. The impunctual person wastes time, other people’s time.

John Wesley had a date to meet a young fellow at a certain hour, and John was there. Fifteen minutes later he came. John Wesley said with that usual sweet gravity that he always had. He said, young man, you have stolen fifteen minutes of the time God has given me. I can see the young fellow’s face red.

But anybody that’s impunctual is guilty of deception and falsehood. He says, I’ll be there, and if he isn’t there, now, of course it’s understood if there’s a traffic jam or a flat tire or illness or an accident, that’s another matter. But we’re talking about impunctuality that has become a habit in the life, and there isn’t anybody important enough to justify impunctuality.

If I had a date to talk to President Eisenhower and he stood me up, he’d never get another date with me till he apologized. There’s no man on earth important enough to stand me up fifteen minutes or twenty minutes unless there’s been an accident, or he’s been ill or there’s something wrong. That, of course, always is understood in this terrible, unpredictable world. But there is no man important enough to take another man’s time. Punctuality is a beautiful thing.

How about you Sunday school teachers? One of the woes of the Sunday school committee, one thing that puts gray hairs in every superintendent’s head, he doesn’t have any when he starts, he has them when he gets out of office, is how can I get my teachers to be there on time?

Now listen, fellow, you don’t fool me at all. An old fellow that’s been around as long as I am, I know you’re not spiritual if you’re not punctual. You have a sacred duty. You have in your hands the teaching of immortal souls. You have characters to mold and souls to win and the work of God to do.

And you’re so lacking in self-discipline, so selfish that you’ll keep the Sunday school in an uproar because you will not be punctual. And then you lead in prayer like a saint, and we look for the halo. You’re fooling nobody but yourself. If you’re not punctual, you’re not spiritual. You can’t have a rose without a rose bush and punctuality is the rose bush on which the rose grows. Not alone on that, but of many other things.

So, let’s keep this in mind, my friend. That’s why I like to see a church service start right on the head. Not two minutes, three minutes, five minutes late, but right on the head. And everything we do for God should be done with beautiful precision.

Now God understands if we can’t, if we can’t, God understands, something breaks down, God understands. But the point is, why should we keep God forever having to overlook it when we don’t have to be impunctual?

And the fifth is honesty. Just plain downright honesty is a very fragrant flower, but it never yet grew in a vacuum. It never yet came down like a flying saucer and hovered in front of anybody. It is a flower that grows on a stalk, and somebody has to take care of the stalk.

In our testimony, we ought to be perfectly honest, always, never overstate it. And we preachers should never overstate it. An evangelist that will say he preached to 5,000 when there were only 250 or 2,500 there is a liar, and he’s certainly as much of a liar as Ananias was.

But we joke about it and say it’s evangelistically speaking. Any lie is of the father the Devil, whether it’s told in a church service or somewhere else. So, let’s learn to be absolutely honest, and we’ll be perfectly safe.

God’s Word does not need pious lies to support it. Tell the truth, shame the devil. You’ve heard that old one? Tell the truth and shame the devil. And if you’ll tell the truth, there’s only be one person embarrassed, and that’ll be the devil, because the devil runs his business on lies and half-lies and half-truths.

So be perfectly frank and perfectly honest. Honesty is a good root, and out of it and from it there comes the fine virtues. Faith and love and peace and long-suffering and patience and goodness, these grow on the roots that I have mentioned. A very fragrant root is honesty.

The Quakers had a lot to tell us. We don’t go along with them in everything, but you couldn’t get a Quaker to lie. One old unbeliever who died of suicide later on, Haldeman Julius, who 25, 30, 35 years ago was flooding this country with every kind of unholy literature, but in his better moments he was capable of some pretty sound critical judgments, and he said this about the Quakers in a little sketch he was writing about religion. He said, then came the Quakers and astonished the Christian world by insisting upon acting like Christians.

That’s why the Quakers were considered to be such weird, impossible persons. They acted like Christians. They wouldn’t exaggerate, they wouldn’t lie, they wouldn’t steal, they wouldn’t be dishonest, they wouldn’t do anything wrong, they wouldn’t get down on their knees and flatter a big shot when they knew all the time how little he was.

And of course, they got thrown into jail and kicked around. It was quite a sport in England for quite a long while, kicking Quakers around. Because all the Quakers would do would be to honor God and honor the people who deserved it, call each other by their first name, put away all bombastic titles, and live like Christians. And the Christian church looked at them and said, what’s that breed of cat? And they put them in jail because they didn’t recognize them. Christians weren’t acting like Christians. They were acting like the world, and when people came acting like Christians, they were queer.

And then here is faithfulness as the sixth root that I would mention. Now God rewards us for our faithfulness, but most of us want to be dramatic. We desire to get into the public eye. Publicity is our God in the day in which we live, so we want to do something that will be recognized. But fail to remember that God said, thou good and faithful servant, enter thou into the joy of thy Lord. Goodness and faithfulness are at the root of all the flowers that grow in the kingdom of God. Now let’s look at goodness for a little bit.

Will Durant, I think he’s not a Christian but he’s a great philosopher, and he said this, that a good man, everything else being equal, will be infinitely more precious than a great man. I think he said a hundred times or five hundred times or something more precious than a merely great man.

You see, in the Bible there were good men who were not particularly great, like Jabez, say, that got three verses. There were great men who weren’t good, like, say, Solomon or Ahab. There were great men who were good, and good men who were great, of course, but there were also good men who weren’t great. And which is the target at which we shoot? Which is it that we’d rather have? Do we want to be good, or do we want to be great?

Well, only God will know whether you’ll ever be great or not. Greatness is something that it takes several generations to produce. You have to breed the greatness. Say, Churchill. He didn’t come up by accident. It took several generations to produce a man of his size.

Now I’m not talking about his politics, I’m talking about his size. It took several generations to make a man like that. Nature had to be smiling on the genes and hormones and other strange mysteries down the years to produce a man of that vast size. Great indeed, but don’t you think he’d have been greater if he’d been known also as a good man, if he’d been known as a man who loved God and in humility prayed, sought the face of the Lord, as many another great Englishman has done; Gladstone and Gordon and many another.

Yes, goodness is always better than greatness, and anybody can become good because the gospel of Jesus Christ came that men might be good.

I was preaching over in Keswick, New Jersey, and the song leader there, who was head of music at the Philadelphia School of the Bible; I said something about goodness. God’s people ought to be good, and he came to me afterwards, and he said, Mr. Tozer, here’s something amusing. He said, some time ago I sang a solo called “There is a Green Hill Far Away.” Do you remember that one? He died to make us good, is one of the lines.

He said, after I had sung it, a man came down to the front and said, Mr. Curtis, why were you singing a modernistic song today? He said, modernistic song? Did I? He said, yes, you sang a modernistic song. You sang that Jesus died to make us good.

I don’t know what Curtis did. I suppose he shrugged his shoulders and walked away. That’s what I’d have done. Because what can you do with a man who believes that orthodoxy and nastiness go hand in hand, and modernism and goodness go hand in hand?

My brethren, it is a tragic misunderstanding of truth to teach that Jesus Christ did not die to make men good. He died to wipe away their past sins, to give them the new birth, to write their name in the Book of Life, to introduce them to the Father in eternal life. He died for all that. But the result of all that will be that they will be good men and women.

And when we say Christ died to make us good, we’re not being modernists, we’re being scriptural. He was a good man and full of the Holy Ghost. What more could you say about a man? To put it on his tombstone and put it there honestly, somebody said about the graveyard, you walked through a graveyard and looked at all the tombstones and came out and said, I wonder where they bury the sinners.

Everybody here is a saint, obviously. But you can’t make them saints by writing it on their tombstone. But if it can be honestly and without flattery written on a man’s tombstone, here lies a man who was a good man and full of the Holy Ghost. What can you say about a man more than that? That’s it.

Well, faithfulness, goodness and faithfulness, thou good and faithful servant. You can be sure there can be no goodness without faithfulness, and there’s not likely to be any faithfulness without goodness.

I thought this morning of the dear old men who were faithful, Noah faithful in his day. If Noah had been a baseball fan or had retired early and gone to Florida, if Noah had something else in mind beside God’s work, there’d have been no ark, and no seed preserved and no human race.

Abraham, if Abraham had on his wanderings downstruck uranium or gold and given up the idea of going down to Palestine and establishing a race there out of which Christ would come. If he had turned aside and built himself a little city and made himself mayor of it and lived on the fat of the land, where would we have been? Abraham was faithful and Moses. Scripture says about him, he was faithful to Him that called him and appointed him. How faithful Moses was.

Think of our Savior Jesus Christ. All the world was around him. The devil was there with his temptations, offering Him the world if He would not go to the cross. But Christ was faithful to us. Should we not be faithful to him?

A lot of you love this, church. You don’t agree with everything I say, and you don’t think I’m in any wise an angel with wings. You know better. But you do get help here. You do find the fellowship of truth here, and you do find spiritual life here.

But do you ever stop to think how many faithful people, some of them now dead, that helped to make this possible? Every stone in the wall was a tear, a faithful tear. And every cubic inch of air in this atmosphere felt the hot breath of somebody that was faithful. There must always be somebody faithful. Faithfulness is a wonderful root, and out of it there comes much good fruit.

I’m going to skip the last one and talk about, well, unselfishness. That’s really the last one, so we’ll mention that, not quite skip it. Unselfishness.

To live unselfishly, in service, in giving, in enduring, in loving, in working, in waiting. Faithful, useful, unselfish. Thinking first of God and then of myself.

Now, just in order that this might not be something floating around where you can’t get to it, I want to bring this down where you can reach up and touch it if you have the courage. Christians who go on vacation, have you ever noticed this about them? Most of them, I don’t say all, but I do say I’ve noticed it so often that I’ve almost given up looking for any change. They go away for a week or two weeks, God bless them, they’re welcome, and I’m glad they can.

Get out of Chicago, smell and noise and dirt for a while, get somewhere that’s good, if you can do it. But do you notice when God’s people come home? Late Sunday night so they’ll be ready for work Monday morning, not late Saturday night so they’ll be ready for church Sunday morning. What does that indicate? It indicates a selfishness that’s as big as a goat, and a carelessness about the work of God. It shows where the real interest lies. It lies in their job and not in their church.

Drive all day Sunday on crowded highways to get here late Sunday night to be able to go to work Monday morning so as to keep the job. But never drive all day Saturday to get here late Saturday night to be in the house of God Sunday morning so as to keep the confidence of God on me. And then we say we’re spiritual. I was born again; I do thank the Lord I was born again. Pray for me that I may hold out unto the end. You better do something about your root, brother. It’s drying up on you.

The root of the righteous bringeth forth fruit. And if you’re trying to get the fruit, frantically grasping after the fruit, neglecting the root, the fruit won’t have any root to grow on and you’ll find yourself without fruit or root before very long. Now if I’ve sounded harsh, I hope you won’t think I really have been.

But I recommend that we try, as Jesus did, to please not ourselves but Him that called us. And if we do, if we’re ready to be disciplined, that’s what’s wrong with us. We’re not disciplined. We’re not a disciplined people. Lent doesn’t mean anything to us. We eat what we please. No discipline there.

So, we don’t have the disciplines that are laid upon some churches, say the Roman Church. The disciplines are not on us. We have the Truth, and we have the experience, and then we go to pieces and live as we please, live on whimsical impulse. Nobody around to boss us.

We can’t frighten anybody with purgatory. We don’t believe in it. You can’t frighten anybody with Latin words or long robes. We’ve got to depend upon faithfulness to God.

And that’s why, for the most part, evangelical Christians are an undisciplined, careless lot of people, a disgrace to the name of Him who pleased not Himself but lived a life of careful discipline, imposed upon Himself by Himself, and finally went out to the cross and there in the last agony gave Himself to die for us unfaithful, undisciplined people.

Oh, my brethren, the fruit is sweet to the taste and the flowers are fragrant to the smell. Beautiful are the flowers and lovely is the garden. But somebody has to be in there on his knees digging at the roots with dirty hands and keeping the roots of his spiritual life right.

So lovely is faith and joy and peace in the heart of a Christian. Beautiful is Christian character and the sweet smile of the holy man or woman, beautiful indeed.

But that holy man or woman didn’t get there by accident and he didn’t get there by coddling himself. He got there by laying strong burdens on himself, by putting the yoke on his own neck and saying, for Christ’s sake who bore the cross I’ll bear the sweet self-imposed yoke.

So, let’s settle for being good spiritual people and let them be great who can. Let’s seek that we might be good and let’s remember that goodness grows from a root of obedience, prayer, Bible reading, and surrender. Amen.

Tags Character, Christian Growth, Sanctification

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A.W. Tozer Talks

“Fashioning Ourselves as Christians”

Fashioning Ourselves as Christians Download

Fashioning Ourselves as Christians

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

November 29, 1953

Continuing in 1 Peter 1, as obedient children, not fashioning yourselves according to the former lusts in your ignorance, but as he which hath called you is holy, so be ye holy in all manner of conversation, because it is written, be ye holy, for I am holy. Now we let the Holy Spirit tell us what to do here from verse 14. Not fashioning yourselves according to the former lusts in your ignorance.

That is a truth negatively stated, but carrying with it a positive truth. We all know, and have studied it sometime in our lives, I suppose, how everything carries its opposite along with it in its concept.

If you say short, in the back of your mind there is its opposite, long, or else there would be no reason to call it short. If you say high, you have in the back of your mind the opposite, not so high, or there would be no reason for you to say high, short, large, small, cold, warm.

So here the apostolic injunction carries its own opposite. He does not say, do not fashion yourselves. That would be contrary to Scripture and contrary to human nature. He says, fashion not yourself after the old pattern, the pattern of your former lusts in your ignorance, but fashion yourselves nevertheless, but not according to the old pattern. That’s the positive element. So, it is the positive element that I want to accent here. Fashion yourself, but do not fashion yourselves after the old pattern.

Now that’s what the Holy Spirit says to us, and as Christians there is no argument here. You and I have no reason, no excuse in the wide world to sit in the Church service and find fault with what the Holy Spirit says. You might find fault with interpretations that the preacher did, that’s another matter. But when once we know what the Holy Spirit has said, you and I as believers are committed to carry out that injunction without one word of demerit. We must obey.

So, the word fashion here means to conform to a pattern or to become like a pattern or to shape ourselves according to a pattern. That’s actually what it means in the language Peter used when he wrote this. Fashion yourselves, that is, conform yourselves to a pattern, become like that pattern, and shape yourselves according to that pattern.

Now human nature, we therefore conclude, is not fixed. Human nature is fluid. Clay is the happiest illustration of it to be found, I think, in the entire Bible; the clay is not fixed, it is not fluid, or at least it is malleable, and in a figurative sense fluid, so that it can be shaped.

But after it has been shaped, and the potter says, now that’s what I want, and then he bakes it, and then burns it, and then perhaps glazes it, that’s fixed. Then it is no longer fluid, it is no longer subject to any changes. The only way it can be changed is by being destroyed. It can be crushed and ruined, but it can never be changed into anything useful, because it has passed its fluid state and has become fixed.

Now the very fact that the Holy Spirit would say, fashion yourselves, or do not fashion yourselves after a wrong pattern, indicates that that burning and glazing has not yet happened to human nature. We are in a state of fluidity as regards normal, or as regards moral character.

Now, there are two things that may be said about any man, I don’t care who that man is, whether it’s little John Mark, just born a few days ago, or whether it is the man who sits waiting to die in the death cell in Missouri for the kidnapping and murder of a child.

There are two things that can be said about any human being, you can be changed. We talk about men being hardened, but always remember, friends, that we need modifiers if we’re going to get at the truth. And when we say that that man is hard, he’s beyond help, we are saying that as far as any powers that we know are concerned, the man is probably in a state where he can’t be changed.

But actually, nobody is beyond changing as long as he is alive and conscious. Two things may be said about him, one is that he can be changed. And this is the dim hope that every man has, the dim hope of the drunkard, when once he allows himself to get sober just long enough to give it a moment’s serious thought. He is saved from complete despair by the knowledge that he can change.

Or the dope addict, who must have so many shots a day, or he is in frightful misery and will sell his own soul to get dope. The only reason he doesn’t commit suicide is that there is a dim hope burning there yet, that he can be changed. He knows that he is not yet fixed. He is still in a fluid state.

So, for the drunkard and the dope addict, there would not seem to be much hope, but that there can be hope, and there is, and that a man can be changed, even when he’s an alcoholic, history has fully and completely confirmed.

Now that is not only the hope of every addict and drunkard, but it is the hope of every average sinner everywhere in the world, that he does not have to remain what he is, that he may be deeply in sin, so deep that he’s ashamed of himself. But the very fact that he is ashamed indicates that there is a model, a pattern after which he could shape himself, and he hopes that there can be change come. And the hope of change is what keeps men alive in the earth.

And the second thing that can be said is that you’re not finished yet. That wherever you may be, old or young or in between, you are not a finished product, you’re only in process.

You know, you and I tend to fix terminal points. I heard Dr. Alan Redpath on Thanksgiving Day, and I noticed that he spoke about terminals. He called them termini. I take it that’s a British expression, but I’ll not use the Latin plural, but the English, and say that we tend to fix terminal points, terminals. And beyond that, you don’t go.

For instance, birth. Looked at one way, the obstetrician, when the baby is born and examined and found healthy, the obstetrician says, this is fixed. Now, as far as I’m concerned, my part’s over, and a child is born into the world, and so he goes somewhere else about his business. That, as far as he’s concerned, is done. And he fixes a terminal point there. Through the long months preceding, he’d been very anxious.

Now, the terminal point. A healthy, normal child has been born into the world. The mother knows that’s not terminal. He’s not fixed yet. Basically, if she’s had any before, she knows that trouble has just started, and the fun. And she knows that education must now take place. She knows it from the time she teaches him to play patty-cake, until he walks out of the college hall with his degree, that there’s a process of education. He’s not fixed. He wasn’t fixed and finished.

When the doctor was through with him, he had to have all the influences of education. And then when he gets his degree, we call basic degree, we say, ah, we’re glad we got our boy through college. And we tend to fix a terminal point there and put a period and say, now he’s done. He wasn’t done before, but now he’s done. No, he isn’t done yet. He’s still on cooking, and he’s still being changed, and he’s still being shaped and being fashioned.

And then we come to another terminal point, and that’s marriage. Many a mother has breathed a sigh of relief when her son suddenly became serious, settled down, got married, got home. And she says, now my worries about him is over. He’s settled down, we call that. But not everything that’s settled down is finished. Keep that in mind.

Then when success comes, and he becomes first vice president of his company at 15,000 a year, and gets his big car and his lovely home, we say, now he’s fixed now. Now he has arrived, he is an American businessman. No, he’s still moving along.

And then when we come to middle age, when, as the poet said, gray hairs appear here and there upon him. I always thought that was a nice expression. Gray hairs appear here and there upon him. And the first couple or three, he says, they make him look distinguished. And after that, he pulls them out, then finally gives up. And we say, well, he has arrived now. He is certainly somewhere.

He’s now a portly, well-proportioned businessman. And he hunts in the fall and fishes in the spring and goes to baseball in the summer. And does the things that professional middle-aged businessmen do. No worry about him, he’s fixed. No, he’s not fixed yet. And he’ll never be fixed until the soul leaves the body.

Even the old man in his old age is still changing somewhat. Certainly, the proportion, the speed and rapidity and scope of change is not so great. That slopes down from maybe our 30th year. But there is change, nevertheless. So, remember, you’re not finished. And remember again, you can be changed.

Now somebody else would say, yes, but I do know a terminal point, Mr. Tozer. You’ve been talking in terms of humanity, unregenerate humanity, and I have. Now I know a fixed point, a terminal, and that is when we are converted. Then we are fixed. That we can say, now rest my long-divided heart, fixed on this blissful center, rest.

Surely that means that the fluidity in our nature is over with and we’re fixed now. And the answer is no, my friend, you are still fluid. You are still subject to being fashioned, to being changed, to being shaped. You can grow and develop and change and be fashioned still as a Christian.

And so Peter writes and says, don’t fashion yourselves after the old pattern, but fashion yourselves after a new holy pattern; you recognize that we’re still in process. Christians don’t seem to realize that.

Nowadays if we just get them converted, we put a period and say, now it’s all over, rest my long divided heart. And there is a sense in which that song is brilliantly, beautifully true and I love it and sing it often, so don’t think I’m reflecting on it. I’m only pointing out that he did not mean that you are now no longer fluid, no longer malleable, can no longer be shaped. It means as far as your being fixed in Christ is concerned, that’s settled. Thank God for that. That’s what he meant and that’s what we mean.

But when it comes to the shaping and development and growth and enlargement and exploitation and artistic shaping and fashioning of our characters, that doesn’t stop when we’re converted. It just takes a new direction is all.

Now I’ll talk about for a minute how men fashion themselves. Some people would say we Christians don’t fashion ourselves Mr. Tozer, God fashions us. We are clay and God is the potter and God does the fashioning.

Now that’s the way it should be ideally. And if we were to be completely surrendered from the moment we’re saved to the time we die, to the influences of God and to the powers that work in us from heaven, that would be true. But there are powers that shape men even in the kingdom of God that are not divine powers.

And then there are times when God uses powers to shape us, providential powers, secondary powers to shape us and to bring us. Let’s put it like this. I think I can illustrate it. Usually, when you can’t explain, you can illustrate. Take such a thing as getting a suntan. This is not exactly an appropriate or happy time of year to talk about it after the snow we had last night.

But suppose that a young fellow decides he wants to get a suntan. Personally, I was always glad that I was light as I was. Never cared much for suntans. But suppose that a fellow says, I’m going to get a suntan. So he strips to his trunks, goes out and sits in his backyard, or goes to the beach, and exposes himself to the sun.

Now, who’s tanning his hide anyhow? Where is it coming from? Is he doing it? There’s a sense in which he is doing it, for if he’d kept his shirt on, it wouldn’t have happened. But there is a sense in which the sun is doing it. The sun is tanning him, but he had to go and expose himself to the sun, cooperate with the sun, in order that the sun might do its work upon him.

Now, that’s exactly what we mean when we say that we fashion ourselves. Just as a man tans himself by exposing himself to the powers of the sun, so a Christian fashions himself by exposing himself to the divine powers that shape him. Just as a man can keep his jacket on and not get a suntan, even though the sun is there trying to tan him, so a Christian can keep himself wrapped in the cloak of his own stubbornness and never receive any of the beneficial graces that leap down from the throne of God where Jesus sits as mediator.

So Christians can go through life without very much change having taken place. They’re converted, yes. They believe in Christ, yes. They have this root of the matter in them, yes. The seed of God’s in them, yes. But they’re embryonic, at least infantile, and the growth and development and beautifying and enlarging and shaping has not taken place because they would not expose themselves to the powers that shape them.

Then there is another way in which even a Christian may shape himself, and that is to expose himself to the wrong kind of influences. And I believe that this is done to an extent that grieves God.

Now, there are powers that fashion us, and we know what the old powers were. We know those old powers were the powers of the former lusts in our ignorance. It tells us in the second chapter of Ephesians about those powers, wherein in time past he walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that now worketh in the children of disobedience, among whom also we all had our intercourse, our conversation or conduct or fellowship. In time past, in the lusts of our eyes, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature children of wrath even as others.

Now those are the forces that were shaping us once. But we came to Jesus as we were, weary and worn and sad. We found in Him a resting place, and He has made us glad. Now we are supposed to put away those old forces, not expose ourselves to them anymore.

But you say, how can I keep and hold myself from being shaped when I am thrown now among men? I work in an office where men are wicked and vulgar and obscene. You can keep yourself from being shaped by them, just as a man out on the beach can keep himself by being tanned with the sun, keep a robe around him. You can draw your heart up tight and say, stay out, you devilish influences, and let my soul alone. It belongs to God.

If you are in school where there is dirty talk and irreverence, you can keep it from shaping you or having any influence in your life at all by shutting it out of your heart. You can even make it a blessing to you. When you hear an obscene mouth, you can say to God, O God, I hate that so bad, make my mouth ten times cleaner than it was before. When you see a wicked and injurious habit, you can use it to account. You can turn and say, O God, help me that I may keep clean from this thing.

You know how when you walk down the street and you see a man walking along, bent over, I don’t mean a crippled man who can’t help himself, I mean just some lazy fellow who’s allowed himself to turn over like a perpetual question mark. For the next block, you straighten up and walk better, don’t you? About the only time I remember to do it is when I see some poor old fellow all bent over, I straighten my shoulders back and say, I don’t look like that. You can turn that man to account by straightening up yourself.

And so, in the world where we are, the licentiousness and obscenity and vileness, we can use those very things and react from them with a violence and do what they call in psychology, overcompensate.

There once lived a man, I think I wrote this up in a publication. There lived a young fellow one time, maybe he was 14 years old, 13 or 14, and he got into a fire, I don’t remember, his house burned or somehow, he was thrown into a fire. He was burned from his heels, I think way up his legs and up his back. Particularly his legs were terribly, tragically burned.

And that young man, after it got healed up so he could walk around again, they said, you’ll never be able to run again, Glenn. You’ll never be able to get around very well, but thank God everything will be all right, you’ll be able to walk and you can get around. He said, I’m not only going to walk, I’m going to run.

This young man set out deliberately to overcompensate, to use those very burned legs, and the very burns on those legs to spur him on. And he went out without anybody knowing it, and he learned to run. And he ran and ran, tall and lean and thin he grew to be.

While the scars weren’t pretty on his legs, he learned to use them. And the very scars themselves drove him forward. His hard, bright mind said, I’m not going to be licked by scarred legs. And the day came when that young fellow could go out on the track anywhere and win the mile run, Glenn Cunningham.

Glenn Cunningham has been replaced by Gil Dodds and some of the other boys that have come up later. Glenn now must be in his late thirties. But when he was a lad, he overcompensated. He went so far in one direction to get away from the thing that pulled him in the other direction.

So, in the kingdom of God, I don’t have to give up to the devil. And I don’t have to yield my weak soul to the influences that pull and drag me. When I see something wrong, I can react from it with violence and say, if God will help me, I’ll be different from that, and make the very sight of evil to drive me further into the kingdom of God.

Now, let’s just notice some of the things that shape us. Whether we’re Christians or whether we’re sinners, we’re shaped by these things, and we fashion ourselves by them. I’d like to give you eight things that will fashion you. Any of you young people want to take these down? Get out a pencil, put these down. I’d like to give them to you.

I want to tell you eight things that will fashion and shape you. I won’t be long at it, but put it down. Older people too, but in a reduced proportion, but particularly for young Christians, take this down. These are the things that will fashion you whether you know it or not, and whether you believe it or not, or whether you like it or not. These things will fashion you.

The literature you read, put that down, one. The literature you read is going to fashion you. It’s going to slowly condition your mind, little by little, even though you’ll fight it. If you read it and like it, it’s going to shape you. Slowly you’re going to take on the shape of the mind of the man who wrote that book. You’re going to put your emphasis where he put his. You’re going to put your values where he put his. You’re going by liking what he liked and thinking as he thought, you’re going to be shaped into what he was.

And then, two, the songs you sing and the music you enjoy, that is going to shape you. I can take you to parts of this country, if they still do as they did when I was a lad, and I can let you hear songs so obscene and vile, for I’ve heard them, farmers and woodmen and drivers, singing vicious, vile, gutter songs and enjoying them.

Maybe you’ve never heard them, I trust not. But there are other songs just as dangerous and as damaging to the human spirit, other music just as harmful to the soul. And that song you sing and that music you enjoy will determine what you’re like inside.

But you say it doesn’t amount to very much, it’s nothing really. Don’t you fool yourself, it’s nothing really. It is something indeed, for it stirs your emotion, it moves you out. It’s like the fingers of a potter to shape that clay and push it into the crevices and get a form there.

And if you’re a Christian that comes and sings Isaac Watts’ hymns of a Sunday morning, and then through the week listen to Boogie and all the rest and enjoy it, then you wouldn’t listen if you didn’t, unless you’re forced to listen, as I sometimes am in restaurants. Ray and I have a place we go to eat in a hurry to keep from spending time. Bless my heart, some stuff you hear coming over that loudspeaker there, you’d think the devil had collaborated with Judas Iscariot in writing it.

But there it is, and that doesn’t affect you because you’ll react against it. It drives you the other way. And you love to sing a good hymn after hearing that dirt better than you did before because you say, thank God with something better. If you like music that’s low, that touches the baser emotions, it’ll shape you whether you like it or not.

And somebody here says, oh, listen to that old man. What business is it of yours what I listen to? None. You can drink strychnine if you want to, brother, but I’m still friend enough of yours to warn you if you do, they’ll carry you out in a box. I can’t stop you, but I can just warn you.

So, I haven’t the authority to tell you what you can listen to, but I have the divine commission to tell you that if you love and listen to the wrong kind of music, that music will do something to your inner life.

Three, the pleasures we indulge in, whatever kind they may be, they shape us. Say, what’s wrong with this and what’s wrong with that? And there’s no answer, maybe, but the answer is, give him ten years in that kind of pleasure and then look at his spiritual life. That’s the answer now. What’s wrong with that, we say?

A kid who insists on fourteen, smoking and drinking and living poorly, what’s wrong with that? You can’t argue with him but give him ten years. Give him fifteen years. Before he’s thirty years old, look him over and you’ll know what’s wrong with that. What argument won’t do, plain evidence will do finally. It’ll convince you that wasn’t the way to live. And all the pleasures we indulge in are shaping us just as sure as we live, for whatever gives us pleasure changes.

And then the ambitions we entertain. Think of the ambitions people entertain. Whatever’s eating at you there, whatever you’d like to be, whatever you dream over, that’s shaping you.

And fifth, the places we go. Again, somebody says, you can’t tell me where to go. No, sir, I don’t want to. I hope you end in heaven at last. But on your way there, be careful where you visit along the road, because that’ll shape you and me.

And then the words we speak. The American people, I think of all people, are careless with language. The typical American joke is an exaggeration. Mark Twain and his exaggeration and our tall tale clubs and all exaggerations, you’ve got to watch them. Watch the language you use.

And seventh, the friends we cherish. This has always seemed to me the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do, because I value friendships and I know how people love each other. Even in this wicked old world, friendships are very beautiful things. And I’ve always felt something like a churlish heel in standing before audiences and say you’d better break with certain friendships if you’re going to serve God. It seems like such a rude, churlish, uncivilized thing to say.

But my Savior said it more plainly than I could ever say it, more bluntly than I could ever say it, when He told us that we must take up our cross and follow Him, and we must turn our backs on everybody that was necessary to turn them on, even if it came to our own relatives and friends, yes, our own husband or wife.

Because Jesus Christ was first in the saving of our soul of prime importance. It’s better to have no friends and be an Elijah alone than to be like Lot in Sodom, surrounded by friends that all but damned him. If it hadn’t been for Abraham on the side hills of Mamre praying, Lot would have been damned by his friendships. And he very nearly was, and his family was ruined by his friendships.

So, your friends, he sitteth not in the seat of the scornful. Watch that, or goeth in the way of sinners. Walketh not in the counsels of the ungodly. Watch the ungodly counsel. Watch the scorner. Watch out for the opposer. You make a friend of him, you have given the enemy the key to your heart. You have opened the gate, the city will be stormed and taken.

And last, the thoughts we brood over. There never was a murder committed yet that somebody hadn’t brooded over that murder. There never was a robbery committed, but somebody brooded over it, maybe half the night long. There never was an evil deed, unless we might for the moment make an exception of those sudden deeds of passion, anger, temper, or jealousy that sudden blinding rage brings a man, leads a man to do something. But even at that, I’m inclined to think that if he had disciplined his emotions by right thoughts and right living, he could control himself in the crisis.

So there never was a crime committed that wasn’t preceded by a conditioning as a result of brooding thoughts. Whatever thoughts you brood over in the night season will make you. Whatever thoughts you entertain as you ride or walk along will shape you. Whatever thoughts you give place to will change you from what you are into something else, and it won’t be for the better unless your thoughts are good thoughts.

So if your friends are sweet friends, Christian friends, godly friends, then they will bless you, and you’ll keep them forever.

If the literature you read is good literature and it doesn’t all have to be Christian literature. There’s lots of good literature that isn’t Christian. So I don’t say you’re confined yourself to Grace Livingston Hill and Paul Hutchins and A. W. Tozer.

I say read what you please, but let it be the kind that won’t hurt you and will help you. The classics, for instance, are good literature. I’ve had to shake people off my neck who didn’t like it that I read the classics. I’ve read them all my life, and I’ve never been hurt by one yet.

And when I see they hurt me, I throw them aside. I picked up one once, a book years ago, a very famous classic. I tore it into shreds and threw it away. I’m not a book burner, but that particular book, I liked it too well, and it was harming me, so I threw the thing away and have never owned a copy since.

Somebody says, you mean to say there’s a classic you don’t own? You’re not educated. Well, but I’m a lot better off, and if I’d have wallowed through that guy, I’m thinking of Samuel Pepys since his education, the old scoundrel. So, Samuel Pepys can keep his diary. I’d rather read Paul.

Now, be not conformed, but be transformed and I’m finished. You have a soul, and you have opportunities. God gives to the potter the clay and says, now shape it. God gives to the builder the material and says, now build it into a worthy temple.

And then He says at last, now, how did you shape it? How did you fashion it? What have you got to bring Me out of the material I gave you, the forces that I turned loose like lathes and saws and hammers and buffers to shape and change you? I gave you those things. What have you done? To what have you exposed yourself?

I trust in that last great day we won’t have to take our rich material before the blazing eyes of God and there before the judgment seat of Christ, and shamefacedly admit that we allowed ignoble or unworthy things to have a place in shaping our lives. Let us rather be transformed by the renewing of our mind that we may know what is that good and perfect and acceptable will of God. Amen.

Tags Christian Growth, Holiness

Messages

A.W. Tozer Talks

“In the Beginning was the Word”

In the Beginning was the Word John #2 Download

In the Beginning was the Word

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

October 18, 1953

The opening 18 verses of John 1 are such that anyone sensitive to the truth contained there is in danger, and in attempting to preach on these verses, is a danger of a kind of spiritual suffocation. I find it so in these opening verses. I want to read a few verses and then talk from the phrase, In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by Him, and without Him was not anything that was made. In Him was life, and the Light was the light of men. And the Light shined in darkness, and the darkness comprehended it not.

Now all the excuse I have for the message I want to attempt tonight is contained in a famous line by Pope that, fools rush in where angels fear to tread. No man ought to try to preach on the phrase, In the beginning, and yet it is here.

And so, to begin with, I want to ask you to do something that is virtually impossible. I’m going to ask you to do that which is equivalent to standing in a market basket, reaching down, taking hold of the handles, and lifting yourself up on the table.

Now, I’m going to ask you to do that tonight. That would be impossible, and what I’m intending to ask would be impossible, except that when God made the human mind, He made a wonderfully flexible and resilient instrument, capable regularly of doing things that can’t be done, so that, while it would be impossible physically for you to stand in a basket and lift yourself onto the table, it is not impossible for you to do what I intend to ask. And I’m going to pay the compliment to your intellect to believe that you can do it.

And then I’m going to have, and do have, confidence in your spiritual hunger to believe that you want to do it. To believe that you are not satisfied with religious toys, but that you actually come to church to gear in to Deity, and meet God, and hear from the world above.

Now, what I’m going to ask you to do is this. I’m going to ask you to think everything out of existence. I’m going to ask you to go along with me and dismantle the universe. To take it down, stone upon stone, and hurl it into nothing, and unmake everything that is made. And in doing this, I’ll not be acting the part of a fool, or playing with the truth, but I’ll be only trying to get back to where my text begins.

So, I want you to think away everything with which you’re familiar, a time, for instance, this rolling stream of time. I want you deliberately to get a hold of the handles of the basket, and lift yourself up and say to yourself now, there was a time when time wasn’t. And because our language is so limited, we have to use a word that we’re trying to get rid of, to tell you to get rid of the word.

So, we’ll have to say that we want you to think of a time when time was not. And then, we want you to think away space. That used to be that a half a mile was quite a distance, and two miles was quite a journey for an old horse.

And now, we have telescoped space until we can get around pretty rapidly. They’re going to come over from London, they tell me, and their new British jet planes in how long? Four or five hours? They’ve already done it. And that makes space look pretty small.

But I want you to think away and dismantle that idea, and break it down, and get it out of your head and say there’s no space. There isn’t any such a thing as space, that, there isn’t any. And there isn’t any such a thing as time, and there isn’t any such a thing as matter, that familiar matter that, that one of its attributes is impenetrability. I strike it with my knuckles and it stops me. That’s matter. It has many forms.

But I want you to think of the timeless time before space was, when there wasn’t any matter, there wasn’t anything in the universe, there wasn’t any of those little things that they’re breaking down now to make the atom bomb, there weren’t any. They just didn’t exist, they weren’t there. And I want you to think away of all beings and all created things, and then think yourself away, and then go back to the void, and then think the void away.

Now, to aid this, I want you to get in a rocket ship with me and race backwards, not in space, but in time. Race backwards in time, and as we race backwards in time from 1953, we’ll get rid of a lot of things, and the latest things, of course, will disappear first. Just as when you get in a plane and soar upward, the closest things necessarily are the ones that disappear first, and then as you go up and up and up, you get the general skeletal outline of things.

But in time now, as we move backward in time, away from this present moment, we first get rid of a lot of things that I’m not so sure it wouldn’t be a pretty good idea to get rid of anyway. I don’t know about that, that would take another lecture or a lecture to take care of it.

But if there was a debate, I think I’d know whose side I was on. I want you to think away every city, dismantle them all. Let’s get rid of London and Berlin and Tokyo and New York and Chicago and every city that there is, and then let’s think out of existence also every bridge and every highway and every famous hotel and every ship and every train and every automobile, and I say those are the things I’m not so sure it might not be a pretty good idea to get rid of anyway. I know a man would be considered a heretic for even daring to say that.

But Adam and Eve didn’t do so bad when there wasn’t any automobile to get around the garden in, and when there weren’t any ships to ride the sea and run away from their Edenic home. They didn’t do so bad when there was only a bower with the moon shining through to bless them as they slept. They didn’t do so bad when there wasn’t any highway to get killed on or any city to get lost in. They just lived and loved and knew God. It wasn’t so bad back there.

So, there’s a case to be made for it, but that isn’t our purpose tonight. And I want you to think clear back down the years. It would be something of an adventure for the mind to think back to the time when Columbus discovered America, when there wasn’t anybody over here but Indians. They had this whole hunk of land we call the North American continent from Hudson Bay country to the Rio Grande. They had it all, and nobody was bothering them.

And then think back to that, the cave builders and the mound builders, and on back of that to the day when Abraham walked in Ur of the Chaldees, and on back of that yet to the time when there was just Adam and Eve. And think it all away. There isn’t anything now but Adam and Eve, and then we go back of Adam and Eve and think them out of existence. They don’t exist either.

We’re talking about in the beginning tonight. And then when we’ve gone back of Adam and Eve and have depopulated the earth and taken away every bone and every marker and every track and trace and every leaf and blade of grass and everything that is the earth, and then we begin on the stars that jut and jot down out of the heavens. They are like pinpoints, and we get rid of every one of them.

For there was a day when they were not, and we’re wanting to go back there tonight. As we race onward, backward through time, we haven’t any stars now, and the moon is not, and the sun is not, and the stars are not. And then we go to heaven itself, and there is then no sea of glass, and no archangels, and no seraphim, and no angels, and no cherubim, and no four-square city, and no anything, just the void.

And that is what it means when it says, in the beginning. And do you know what you would have found there then, when you came to that place? You would have found God. For it’s written that, I Am, and there is no other. And Moses, when you go to Pharaoh, go and say, I Am that I Am sent you. So that there before the beginning, not in the beginning, but before the beginning, there was God.

Now, God had no beginning. I gave a series some years ago in which I mentioned that, that God had no beginning, because beginning is a creature word. And it means that somebody was working on something, he started to work on it, he worked a while, and he finished it. And it had a beginning, and then it had a finish. And that’s a creature word, but God is not a creature. God’s the Creator, so that you never can say that God had a beginning, for He never had any. God could not receive anything from anybody, because God had all there was. You see that?

Now I want you just to stop and kick that idea around a little while. Brother, it may give you Charlie Horse in your head, but it’ll do you a lot of good. It’ll be worth more to you than the latest chorus that rolled off the press Friday, and it’ll do you a lot more good than that cheap brown tract that somebody wants to sell you on, although I kind of like tracks myself, but as a rule, they’re cheap and brown.

And I want you to get back of it all, and way back to where God was, and find there that God is the Uncause One. Everything around here has a cause. This building is here because, the woman reasoned, because, and it is here because there were some people who prayed. It is here because it’s caused by something or someone. It’s here because there were a group of adventurous and faithful brethren who believed it could be put here. It was here because there were some Swedish gentlemen who lay brick on brick, and brick on brick, and rubbed snus, and laid brick on brick, and finally the building was here. That’s the cause of it. And everything else has a cause.

You have a cause, and I have a cause. Everything is the effect of some cause. Until we have gone into our machine and gone back where there was nothing and no one only God, where there was not a creature stirring, not an angel, nothing, and there you have causeless existence, self-sufficient, uncreated, unborn, unmade. You simply have God.

Now I say that if God received anything from anybody, then He’d be in debt to the people that He received it from. But because God is all, God never received anything from anybody. Some of us lay a $10 bill in the plate with a triumphant bounce, as much to say, now God will feel better. God doesn’t need your $10, brother. He just doesn’t need it.

Now that hurts some of you. Some of you think you’ve been bailing God out every Sunday morning by giving to the offering. You say, well, poor God’s in bad shape, and no doubt there’s a depression in heaven, but if I give faithfully, I’ll save God’s face and I’ll bail God out. God doesn’t need your money, brother. He doesn’t need a dime of your money. And if you want to keep it and let it rust and ruin you, keep it. But don’t think if you give it that you’re doing God a favor.

God doesn’t need anything you have. God says, if I had need of anything, would I tell you? No, if God had need of anything, he’d be ashamed to tell us because he wouldn’t be God. And God, to be God, has to have no need of anything. God doesn’t need an angel. And don’t ever imagine that the archangels and seraphim and angels over in heaven are God Almighty’s little helpers, that He created them in order that He might get along, as a farmer might hire ten hired men to help him in harvest time so he wouldn’t get stuck and the rains wouldn’t catch his grain in the head.

Now, God doesn’t need anybody. I know that God had himself a wonderful, glorious time in creating the universe to admire Him. But God doesn’t need anything because, you see, when you give God anything, you only give what God gave you in the first place. And every gift that anybody ever gave God, God never got any richer by receiving it. And when God gives anything, He’s never any poorer for giving it.

If you give ten dollars out of a hundred, you have ninety left and you’re ten dollars poorer. But when God gives anything, God does not lose it. He gives it without separating Himself from it. He gives it without loss, and He receives back without gain, because God is all and takes in everything anyhow, so that God never received anything from anybody. That is God, not in the beginning, but before the beginning, because it says that in the beginning God created. But we’re concerned with that which the Bible calls before the foundation of the world tonight, for the moment.

So, I would point out further that God doesn’t need his creation, that if he needed anything, He wouldn’t be omnipotent. If God needed strength, he wouldn’t be omnipotent. And if he wasn’t omnipotent, he couldn’t be God. And if He needed counsel, He couldn’t be sovereign, because He therefore wouldn’t be, He wouldn’t have His sovereignty. And if He needed wisdom, He couldn’t be omniscient. And if He needed support, He couldn’t be self-existent.

God has to be utterly self-existent, self-created, and yet not created. Uncreated is a better word, and self-existent, that’s to be accurate, rather than the other phrase that slipped out. And that is God.

Now, you’ve got God to deal with, ladies and gentlemen, all this little business you’ve got around about you, little churches, and little preachers, and little editors, and little authors, and little writers, and little singers, and little musicians, and little elders, and little deacons, and little tape recorders, and little radios, and little cities, and little statesmen, and little Sir Winston, and little General Eisenhower, and little men, and little things.

And we’re so smothered under the little dusts of grain that make up the world, and time, and space, and organisms and matter, that we’re likely to forget that God once lived, and dwelt, and loved, and existed without support, without help, and without creation, a self-existent God.

Now, Faber celebrates God’s self-existence and all in some lines which, because I’ve got too many things to think about to memorize, I want to read to you a few lines to you. He says, when heaven and earth were yet unmade, when time was yet unknown, Thou in thy bliss and majesty didst live and love alone. Thou wert not born, there is no fount from which thy being flowed, there is no end which thou canst serve, but thou art simply God. Thy life is one unwearying day, before it’s now, thou hast no varied future yet unlived, no lapse of changeless past. Far upward in the timeless past, there form, and space had come, We see Thee by Thine own dread light, Thyself Thine only home.

Now, that was before the beginning. And then it says, In the beginning God created. Now, of course, it doesn’t mean in the beginning of God, for the reason, as I’ve said, God has no beginning. But it means at the beginning of the creation, and it so has it in so many, in some translations. In the beginning of the creation, and God made the heaven and the earth.

So that phrase, in the beginning, doesn’t mean the birth date of God Almighty. It means the time when God ceased to be alone and began to make time and space and creatures and beings.

So, God began to create. And God created matter, that I’ve spoken about already, that which is totally and altogether unlike God. You know, they talk about materialism.

Sometimes some people feed the audiences on great resounding terms, and I’m afraid the audience is busy with something else and doesn’t know what the term means, turns off his receptive powers until the learned Brother is through talking, sings a hymn and goes out for fresh air. I’m afraid that often happens. And we have the term, materialism.

You’ll hear a man get up and say, we’ve got to fight this materialism. And everybody looks around for the enemy and can’t find the enemy. He doesn’t know what materialism is, and therefore he doesn’t know what he set out to fight. As long as you don’t know who to shoot at, you’re not likely to kill an enemy.

And many don’t know what materialism is, not because they’re dumb or not even because they’re uneducated, but because materialism is a jargon. It’s a jargon phrase which men have picked up. And all it means is this, that we have accepted matter as the ultimate, that we have accepted matter, anything you can touch and anything you can smell and taste and handle and see and hear, that yields to the senses, that’s matter.

And there are those who say that’s all there is, there isn’t anything else. All this talk about God and spiritual life and spiritual beings is so much superstition. We’re simply here in the world and our bodies and minds and our chemical outfits within our body and our nerves and that’s all there is to it.

Now that’s materialism in its crassest form. That’s what people mean when they say we’ve got to fight materialism. It doesn’t mean you’re going to get up and get a sword and run after a fellow named material and cut him down.

But it means that you’ve got to start believing in the beginning God and that matter is only a creature of God. That God rubbed his hands together and rolled them and tossed it out and we had matter and all the matter there is. So, God began by creating matter.

And then God had to have some place to put matter, so He created space. He had to have a room to store matter in, so to speak, so He created space. And we have this strange, terrible, wonderful, incomprehensible thing we call space. And then God had to make room for motion and so he created time.

Now do you ever think about it, what is time anyway? We imagine time as a material thing. We think that there’s a great big spool in heaven and that time rolls off that spool. They keep rolling it off, it rolls off faster for men than it does for women. But we roll this off and that’s time.

No, time isn’t anything like that. Time is the, what shall we say, is the medium in which things change. It isn’t time that makes you old, brother. It isn’t time that took those hairs off the top of your blessed head. It isn’t time that took your 32 honest teeth out and got you those hypocrites. It isn’t time. It isn’t time that does that, it’s change that does that.

Nobody ever has to be afraid of time. Time never hurt anybody yet. Time is just a word for things. Time is a medium in which change takes place. It isn’t time that makes a baby grow up, it’s change that does it.

Things change, and in order to change there has to be a sequence of change. There can’t be two before there’s one, and there can’t be three before there’s two, and there can’t be five before there’s four. You have to have a sequence. And that sequence is time, and we call that time.

So, God made matter and then He made space to put it in, and then He made time in order to give it a chance to jump around. And then He made law to govern it.

And so, law governs time and space and matter, and that’s about all there is to it. That’s simplifying, and perhaps it’s oversimplifying, but at least you don’t have to read nineteen books to get it. That law is simply, God said to matter, now you behave in a certain way.

And He said to time, now stretch out and let things move around. Let there be sequence so babies can grow up and things can change. They won’t always have to be sitting around in a rut.

And then He said, now you take care of space. And then God created life. He created life in order that life might be conscious of all of this, time and space and motion and matter, so that life is self-conscious or conscious of all that.

And then He created spirit in order that there might be creatures who are conscious of Himself. And then He organized the whole business, and they called it the cosmos. And thus, we have the world. Now it took longer than it’s taken me to tell it, and I suppose it’s a good deal more complex than I have said, but in the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth.

Now that was the beginning, and that was the beginning of human thought. And I want you to think of the beginning that all things began. It was back there in the beginning of John, the first verse, first chapter, first line, in the beginning. That was where time began and that was where matter began, that’s where space began, that’s where created life began, that’s where law and order began, and that’s where history begins. They talk about prehistoric times, and they mean by that what happened before man got so he could write about it.

But history didn’t begin when a man first put down the thing down on paper; the murders committed in Cicero, two gangsters shoot each other up, and history, that’s history. But it isn’t written up until the next day. They didn’t get on the job, and the reporters are slow, so that that was prehistoric in the sense that it happened before the historians got there to record it for the front page of the newspaper. When we talk about anything being prehistoric, we only mean that it’s back there before they started writing.

Now let’s look at the Scripture a little bit here, and I want to give you a little baptism of prepositions again. We talked about the prepositions this morning, and I know that my brethren make a great deal of prepositions. In fact, you would think that to hear some people preach that the Bible had said, in the beginning, was a preposition, but it didn’t. It said in the beginning was the Word. That’s quite another matter.

But here are some Scriptures, and I want to show you four prepositions having to do with the beginning. Hebrews 1:10 says, Thou Lord in the beginning. That’s in the beginning. Matthew 19:4 says, in the beginning. No, He made them at the beginning, male and female. So, we have at the beginning. Matthew 24 says, For then shall be great tribulation such has not been since the beginning. And then in 1 John 1:1, that which was from the beginning. So, we have here in the beginning, at the beginning, since the beginning, and from the beginning, and they all mean the same thing.

So, I want to remind you now, when some fellow comes along and tries to hang you high and dry on a preposition, you tell him you heard a little guy say one time that no matter what God uses, in the beginning, from the beginning, at the beginning, it’s all talking about the same thing. It talks about the time when the God who dwells alone and lived and loved alone, uncreated, the Father in love with the Son, and the Son with the Holy Ghost, and the Holy Ghost with the Father and the Son, dwelling in a tranquility that had no beginning and can have no end, that when God began to create, that was the beginning. And that’s what it means.

And the beginning and the foundation are identical because it says in Hebrews 1:10, Thou, Lord, in the beginning, has laid the foundation of the earth. So, when we learn about the foundation in the Bible, we know that it means the beginning, the time God started things.

Now, that makes foolish all inquiries about God. When I was a youngster, what seems like several hundred years ago, one of the stoppers, one of the stoppers, when some fellow wanted to stop you, bring you up with a jar, make your teeth rattle, he’d say, where did God come from?

And when he said that he asked a question only a fool would ask, because he knew not the Scriptures nor the power of God. For the simple reason that the preposition from can’t apply to God, for from means that it was somewhere else and came here, whereas God is everywhere. Heaven and earth is filled with His glory, and God can’t come from anywhere, but all things came from God.

Now, I want you to notice, in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. And in that pre-creation void, that word, void, is a good word, it’s a most useful word, it’s a utilitarian word. When you don’t know what else to say, we say it’s a void. And the pre-creation void, there was no void there. Pre-creation times, God was there, and God is not a void. God is all there is.

God is the Triune God. And back in that pre-creation time, God was already busy, busy with eternal mercies, busy thinking, and his mind was stirring with merciful thoughts and redemptive plans for mankind. So that we read in Ephesians 1:4, sometimes when I preach, I worry the Calvinists, and sometimes when I preach, I worry the Arminians. This is the Arminian’s night to sweat.

But here in Ephesians 1:4, we were chosen in Him before the foundation of the world. Now somebody will run me around a lilac bush and say, how do you do it? How do you make it? How can it be that you were chosen in Him before the foundation of the world? How can you ever think of a time when you didn’t exist?

How can you think of a time when your grandfather didn’t exist? How can you explain a time when there was no matter, no law, no motion, no relation, and no space and no time, and no beings, only God? And if you can explain that to me, then I can explain to you how God chose me in Him before the foundation of the world.

I suppose it is by the foreknowledge of God, for it says in Peter that you are elected according to the foreknowledge of God the Father through sanctification of the Spirit and belief of the truth. Then there’s 1 Peter 1:20 that says Christ’s death and the blood He shed, that Christ was foreordained before the foundation of the world.

Now it says, in the beginning God created, but that was not God’s first activity. God had been busy before that, and God had been busy in choosing and foreordaining from the beginning. I wrote a little squid several years ago called We Travel an Appointed Way, and I said that we’re not orphans in the world, and we’re not accidents if we’re God’s children. But that our heavenly Father is going before us, as the shepherd goes before and leads the way.

And I got a very wonderful and very serious letter from some dear man. I wrote and said, Dear Editor, I read your, this was reprinted then recently, and I said, I read your article, We Travel an Appointed Way. Now he said, I was brought up a Methodist, and he said, do you mean this to be foreordination, or just exactly what do you mean?

He said, that’s what the Presbyterians preach, and I was brought up a Methodist. And I wrote back and I said, Dear Brother, when I said, We Travel an Appointed Way, I wasn’t thinking about foreordination, predestination, or eternal security during the eternal decrees. I was just thinking about how nice it is that the steps of a good man are ordered by the Lord, and if a consecrated Christian will put himself in the hands of God, there’ll never be any accident, but God will turn every accident into blessing.

And He’ll make the devil himself work for the glorification of these saints. If we are in the will of God, that sour old hen-pecking wife will buck you down and polish you up and smooth you over, and you’ll be better off for having married the gal. And if you’re in the will of God, that which looks like tragedy and loss will turn out to be gain in the end. That’s all.

I wasn’t going so deep as all that. I was just saying that our heavenly Father leads our way. The steps of a good man are ordered by the Lord.

So, when you go down the pathway and look back, you’ll see where God has been all the time. You see, brother, when you’re looking down, you can’t see God’s footprints. But when you look back, you’ll see two sets, yours and God’s. God never makes a footprint ahead of time, but he always leaves one when he’s gone by. And so, you look down the path, and it looks like just sand. But if you’ve gone a century or so and look back, you’ll see two footprints, yours and God’s.

So, the steps of a good man are ordered by the Lord, and my poor, worried Methodist brother can go to bed tonight knowing that he doesn’t have to turn Presbyterian to get the blessing than to know that God is looking after him. I don’t know how that part got in. That wasn’t in my notes, but I thought I’d like to tell you that anyhow.

And then it says in Revelation 13 that the Lamb was slain from the foundation of the world. And that says from the foundation of the world, and that was before ever Adam came into the world.

You know, brother, I’d hate to be the servant of a God that got nervous. I would hate to be a worshiper; in fact, I don’t quite think I ever could worship a God who ever was caught unawares. And yet sometimes it’s made out as though God was always in a dither and that somebody was always jeopardizing God’s plans.

I couldn’t get on my knees to a God I had to apologize for, could you? I couldn’t get down and say, now Father, I know that things are going tough for you these days. Things are tough everywhere. And I know that communism is a serious threat to Thy kingdom. And I know that modernism is making it tough for the saints. And I know that you really need my help, God. So, I offer myself to you.

I couldn’t offer myself to a God that needed me, brethren. Now that’s all there is to it. Brother Hare, if God needed me, I couldn’t respect Him. And if I couldn’t respect him, I couldn’t worship Him.

So don’t come to me and base your consecration on the grounds that God needs me so desperately bad. Some of our missionary conventions are simply whining sessions. I told them in New York, I didn’t believe that we ever ought to go to people and say, let’s engage in missionary work because God needs us so bad.

The fact is that God is riding above this world and the clouds are the dust of his feet. And if you do not follow Him, you’ll lose, but God will lose nothing. He’ll still be glorified in His saints and admired in all them that fear Him.

And in that great day, that consummation, all that we’ve called matter and law and time and space and angels and spirits and mind, all organized into a redeemed cosmos, they’ll gather us around a maypole and dance and sing and glorify God who made us and say, worthy is the Lamb, for by Him were all things created. And He by His blood has redeemed us out of all kindreds and tribes and nations.

So come and give yourself to God because you want to do it, because God is infinitely worthy to have you do it. But never come to God as a gesture of pity because poor God needs you. Oh no, no, my brother. God has a hell for people that don’t want to serve Him.

Anywhere from the covering cherub that walked up and down in the stones of fire to the bishop or the Pope or the pastor that would rather serve his flesh in the devil than serve God, God has a hell for that kind of thing and doesn’t need anything. God is unsupported, unserved, needing nothing, dwelling in holy perfection, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, by the good kind impulse of His own unstimulated heart, no propaganda, no pressure, not even any prayer was made. But out of the impulse of His own heart, He said, I’ll make Me a world.

And so, He made the world. And then He said, now I’ve made it all. And now I’ll make a being that wondrous being, capable of appreciating me as the angels cannot even do. And I’ll call him man. And I’ll give him a mate and I’ll call her woman. And so, God made man in His own image, male and female made He them, and said, increase and multiply.

And the dirty-minded fellow that says that increase and multiply is itself sin, is too dirty even to be washed with ordinary detergents. He needs something else. For God commanded increase and multiply so that the world will be filled with others like you that can gaze at the stars and say, what is man that thou madest him, that can kneel on his knees and say, our Father who art in heaven, and who can admire and worship and adore?

And that was out of the kindness of God, not out of any necessity laid upon Him. No greater being could lay a necessity upon Him. He did it because He wanted to do it. Did you ever think a little bit, I recommend, don’t open the old Tribune tomorrow morning, don’t open it. Just let the thing lie there. Don’t turn the radio on to see who assassinated whom. No, don’t bother.

Just think a little bit, and say to yourself before God, I’m glad I’m alive. You know what? I am delighted that I was ever created. I’m delighted that I was ever born. I’m delighted that God ever thought of me before the beginning. I’m utterly and completely delighted that God ever made me.

But you say, didn’t you, haven’t you suffered a lot, old brother, if you knew how much. A sickly boy, frightened of everything that moved, scared of company, people, lightning, wind, mice, strange dogs, the future, the past, and the present. And then aches and pains and three sieges of rheumatic fever that nearly killed me. And a toothache that I think I was never free from until recent times. And all that, yes, sir, and disappointment and heartache and grief and pity.

Yes, I tell you, I’ve suffered. I’ve suffered until my heart is scarred in my body. But that’s only a temporary thing. Why should I care about that? I have a long, long, long time to live and love and laugh and rejoice and worship and serve and travel.

There was an old English preacher of Puritan days named John Flavell, and as a kid way back on the farm, somebody put into my hands a copy of Flavell’s sermons. And one of his sermons sounded so wonderful to me, even as an unsaved boy, I thought it was absolutely wonderful.

He said, you know that heaven isn’t an end in itself. He said, when a Christian goes to heaven, God doesn’t put a period after him and say, all right, now you’re all set, this is the end. He said, we are of a nature, we are so created in God and so renewed in God, that through all the endless ages of eternity, we’ll develop and grow and learn and increase. And I think he’s right because it says in the Book of Revelation, he that is holy, let him be getting holier still while the ages go on.

So, going to heaven isn’t simply like the modern novel, that if the lady gets her man, that’s it. The old novel used to carry them down the years and give them three or four children and give the reader a chance to think about how nice it was they had ever met. But nowadays, they meet and suspend them in space, and they leave the rest for your imagination and usually it turns out to be divorce.

But we think heaven is like that, that heaven’s a place where you finally get to. I remember one fellow; God help his ignoble soul. One fellow said one time to me in my presence, he said, if I can just get inside the gate, just get in, I’m willing to sit with my back against the wall and never go any further. He probably will get his wish all right. And God never intended anything like that to be, that you and I should go to heaven and sit with our back against the wall. And thank God we ever got in.

Some of you have read Robert Burns’ famous, funny and hilarious poem, Tam O’Shanter. And Tam O’Shanter, you’ll remember, was the Irishman, or Scotchman that was, that got on, yes, Scotchman, pardon me, brother here, who got on a horse named Old Meg and he was coming home from a pretty wild party, and he was rather more or less stimulated. He had a few glasses of ethyl and was feeling a bit high, and he passed an old church, and the witches were dancing there in the old church, and he was so taken with it that he got off of Old Meg and went and looked in and they saw him and started after him.

And he jumped back on Meg and started at a dead gallop across the water, and they said that if you crossed running water the witches couldn’t follow you. And one witch, a little livelier than the rest, was making time on Meg and just when her hoofbeats were drumming over the wooden bridge she grabbed Meg’s tail and with one mighty superhuman bound Meg got loose. And after that she had no tail but she at least carried Tam to safety.

And that isn’t funny but I’m thinking of some people I talk with, their idea of getting saved is just exactly that. You accept Jesus and as the last jump just before the devil gets you and you leave maybe something in the devil’s hand but thank God breathless and panting and covered with perspiration you get in at last. How unutterably silly the whole business is brother.

When God Almighty, before the beginning of the world, thought about you and planned your redemption and in the pre-creation times God was thinking loving thoughts about you. And when you and Adam and you in fact grieved him by your sins, He still didn’t turn you over to hell. But a Lamb slain from the foundation of the world came to save you and redeem you.

Now when you get converted you’ve only just started. When you get converted to Christ, you’re a new creature. You’ve come up out of the old Adamic crash, you’ve crawled out of the wreckage by the grace of God and been made new. God introduces you into His royal family, gives you of His Holy Spirit and in increasing measure if you’ll let Him do it and throw your heart away.

Then begins that glorious growth upward and onward, and that happy and holy pursuit of God and holiness and wisdom that will never end. It begins in conversion, is greatly stimulated and accelerated when you’re filled with the Holy Ghost. We’ll be still further perfected in that glorious day when Jesus comes but it’ll never end as long as God remains infinite and man remains finite, growth through the ages, expansion of heart and mind and knowledge and imagination and appreciation and brilliance of vision and penetration and worship and adoration while the ages roll along.

Now I don’t know what it all means to you, but it makes Chicago look pretty dirty to me. It makes money look like a pretty sordid thing to me. It makes the praise of man to be a pretty cheap thing to me and it makes me pretty careless of whether anybody likes me or not or whether they’re willing to follow me or won’t come to hear me. I’m pretty careless about the whole business. In the light of eternity and the long, long thoughts of God and the plans of everlastingness and perfection and the consummation and the coming of Jesus I wonder what it all matters whether they like me or not.

And yet there are Christians that are in mortal fear of offending some carnal old fellow. They wouldn’t draw blood unless somebody would say they’re fanatic. There never lived a good man in all the world yet but some son and child of the devil didn’t say he was a fanatic. There never was a holy testimony given by the breath of the Holy Ghost yet from the beginning. Somebody didn’t say the man was a fanatic. And some people would rather die than be called a fanatic.

There are hungry-hearted people around over the South Side that if they could take the stigmata of coming to a church like ours, they’d do it but they can’t take it. Well, we got more strikes on us than Mickey Mantle.

First, we’re fundamentalists. Then they say they’re not only fundamentalists but they’re pre-millenarians. They actually believe that Jesus Christ is coming back. How silly. That was all right for way back there and now sometime in a few million years in the end of the world it’ll be all right but imagine it.

There’s no culture, no education there. That’s strike number two. And then they say why those people actually believe in the fullness of the Holy Ghost. They believe that a Christian ought to be filled with the Spirit and walk in power.

Then brother that’s mighty close to being fanaticism and I’m not going around there. But in the light of eternity and the long, long reaches I wonder if it matters very much anyhow what somebody thinks about you.

Just down on a common political level it didn’t make much difference really what they thought about Lincoln did it? The ages have justified Lincoln. It doesn’t make too much difference what they thought of Martin Luther. Not too much. Now who cares now? He is with his Savior.

So, the Lord Jesus Christ is calling you. He’s calling you out. If you were a heathen, I’d have to explain but I can only quote John 20:31. These things were written that you might believe that Jesus is the Christ the Son of God and believing you might have life through His name.

So, Christ has every claim on you, and I tell you this is the hour, the very hour. They’re dying everywhere, falling out of the sky, blown up on battleships, dropping over with heart disease. Nobody knows what tomorrow will bring forth or even tonight or the next hour.

But there’s One who walks one among us who walked among the ancient trees. There walks One among us who walked before the world was. In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God.

And He came unto His own and His own received Him not. But as many as received Him to them gave you power to become the sons of God even as many as believe on His name who were born not of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man but of God.

So, the claim is mighty strong, stronger than anything else in your life. The claim of Jesus Christ to your life, this would be a good time. I understand that last Sunday night a couple of people were saved here in the city of New York, quite a number I didn’t count them. Some from the galleries came down and went into the prayer room to be saved. God is still saving people. What about you this evening? Let us pray.

Our God, our help in ages past, our hope for years to come, we lift our hearts to Thee. We thank Thee Thou didst ever create us. We grieve that we ever marred that creation by sin. But having done that, we rejoice that Thou didst find a way through love to save us, the sacrifice of Thyself. He who was from the beginning yielded Himself on a tree that He might die.

We thank Thee, Father, we can never thank thee enough. We pray Thee for those who are lost and in our midst this evening. O Holy Spirit, do Thou draw and pull.

May the unsaved hear the voice of Jesus say, come unto Me and rest. May the thirsty hear Him say, Come unto me and drink. May the blind hear Him say, Come unto Me and see. May the dead hear Him say, come unto Me and live. O Lord God, for Jesus’ sake. Amen.

Tags Beginning, Eternity, Jesus Christ

Messages

A.W. Tozer Talks

“A Friend that Sticks Closer Than a Brother”

A Friend that Sticks Closer Than a Brother Download

A Friend that Sticks Closer Than a Brother

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

August 26, 1956

Along toward the end of Dr. Simpson’s ministry in New York, one of his ushers, who had himself gotten old in the service of the Lord and under the ministry of Dr. Simpson, said to somebody, and he said it with an intention to be complimentary. He said, Brother Simpson only has one sermon. He meant by that, of course, that Dr. Simpson preached Jesus Christ and Him crucified, only he approached it from a different angle.

And after a man has been around as long as I have, it’s inevitable that he should repeat himself. And I suppose that I repeat myself more frequently than I know. But is there any excuse for a man deliberately setting out to do it, as I am tonight? I hope there is. Because if there isn’t, I’m an excuseless preacher tonight.

Because I want to talk about a verse that I have quoted so often and prayed about so much and talked about, but tonight I want to condense a few thoughts about it. And there will be repetitions, without any doubt, but it’s that verse 24 of Proverbs 18. It says, a man that hath friends must show himself friendly, and there is a friend that sticketh closer than a brother. Now that’s the way the King James Version has it.

And I looked it up in quite a number of versions, and I wrote three others down here, all standard, accepted, and off-quoted translations. One of them says, there are friends who pretend to be friends, but there is a friend who sticks closer than a brother. And then another version says, there are friends who only bring you loss, but there is a friend more loyal than a brother. And then another one says, there are friends who play at friendship, and there is a friend who sticks closer than a brother.

Now, the variations here are not very many. That is, they all end up by saying that there is a friend, a loyal, loving friend, that is dear and near and closer and more loyal than a brother. But they vary only in their approach, one saying that if you want friends, you’ll have to be friendly. That’s King James. And the others indicating, and almost all of them indicate, that it’s drawing a contrast, this verse, between a real friend and the other kind, a friend that pretends to be a friend, or that brings you loss, or that toys with friendship, and that friend who is loyal, that loving friend that sticks closer than a brother.

Now, I want to talk a little while about this friend. And I feel I ought to say it again to a new generation, to a new people who have grown up, and to you that are listening to me for the first time.

Now, let me begin by saying that everything presupposes its opposite. Have you ever thought that if it was not for the word short, there would be no meaning to the word long? If it was not for the word up, there would be no meaning to the word down? And if it was not for the word, bad, the word, good, would have no meaning to you? And if it was not for the word, large, the word, small, couldn’t mean anything. Everything presupposes its opposite. Straight presupposes crooked, and if you didn’t know straight, the word, crooked, you couldn’t explain that to anybody.

And so, with truth, if there was no lie, no falsehood, the word truth would have no meaning. You would say, what’s truth? What does that mean? Well, it’s the opposite of a lie, or if there were no truth, then lie would have no meaning. If there were no bad, then good could have no meaning.

And so in our text here, there is a friend. There is a friend. And if there were not an enemy, the word, friend, could have no meaning here. So, everything presupposes its opposite, and the word, friend, presupposes, enemy. That’s why I think these versions that set in opposition a friend who is not a friend but an enemy to the one who is the friend indeed are the correct renderings of the text.

Now there is an enemy. And I wish I didn’t have to say this. I wish that I could go smoothly and optimistically along and tell you that the world was safe and beautiful and nice and full of good thoughts and there was no harm anywhere. But if I did, I would be an enemy that would bring you loss. I would be a friend who would be playing at friendship.

I must tell you that there is a real, a formidable, and a dangerous enemy or enemies abroad in the land, and those enemies are ubiquitous, they’re everywhere, they’re treacherous, and you don’t know them until they have done their harm, and they’re determined and they’re cruel, and they’ve planned the whole thing. And over all these enemies that there are, there is one grim, gaunt, hungry shadow that is the worst enemy of all, and that is the word, the enemy we call by the word death. And these enemies are too great for us.

Now I believe we’re living in a world full of enemies, and they’re too great for us. And these enemies are here and they’re present, and no matter how we try to smooth it up, or how we, in our desire to be, to accept the popular view of things, how we try to gloss over the presence of the enemy, the enemy is here.

Now I want to tell you something, and I tell you without apology, and I don’t want anybody going and saying, now Mr. Tozer said this, but I’m quite sure he didn’t mean what he said. I believe in the devil.

That’s what I want to tell you. I believe in the devil. I believe that he exists. I do not believe that he is a euphonious expression which has been invented to cover everything undesirable. I believe that he is a being. I believe that he exists in the world. I believe in the devil. And I believe that he is the criminal who would like nothing better than to report himself dead.

They tell about a criminal who reported himself dead, got somebody else buried, and the report went out that this terrible man was now dead and in his grave. Somebody else had been mistakenly identified as this criminal. And after they got him buried and the police let down on their vigilance and they stopped locking windows, he went back to work again. And he could work much better after he had had himself pronounced officially dead.

And the devil is the kind of devil that doesn’t seek to be known. He seeks to be unknown. He seeks not to be praised and accepted and hailed. He seeks to be thought non-existent. And he is back of every book written to prove he doesn’t exist. He’s back of every sermon preached to show that he doesn’t exist. He’s back of every apologetic statement made by any half-believing preacher who says he doesn’t exist or throws any doubt upon his existence.

The devil is a reality. He is the essence and the concentrated terror of all that is antagonistic and hostile and cruel and brutal and sadistic and deadly. And he’s out to get everybody that he can get.

Now the Bible tells us in Genesis that he came and tempted Adam and Eve. And it tells us later on in the Scriptures something about how he got where he is. And it tells us that he came to our Lord Jesus Christ and tried to tempt Him and ruin Him. And Paul talks about him and says that he blinds the minds of the unbelieving.

And we hear about him in the book of Revelation. And we learn of his ultimate disposal and fate. And the church fathers and reformers and saints and holy men and women who have lived down the years have all believed in him as a being. He is an enemy. Now he’s the real enemy that makes all the other enemies real and gives strength and fiber to all the others. So, I believe that there’s an enemy.

And then I believe there’s another enemy that we call sin. Now again we have euphonized this thing and by dressing it up in a lovely garment we have tried to smooth it out. But sin is still sin. We have to hear of a man stealing a month-old baby and leaving it to die in a brush heap before we’re made to see that sin exists.

But remember sin has every color and every face and every complexion and wears every face and has every form and takes on itself every kind of a body and appears with many masks and under many disguises and in many guises. And sin, from the abstractions of the mind to the outward fleshly sin of murder or adultery, sin is an existent thing and sin is an enemy.

Now the world is full of these enemies, full of them. You walk among them, you move among them. And the past is an enemy to a Christian. The criminal’s past is his worst enemy. If a criminal did not have a past he would not have an enemy in the wide world. But it’s the fact that he’s got a past and the fact that his handwriting or his fingerprint or his mugshot as they call it or some witness to his crime can be produced to pin his past to him, then his past becomes an enemy.

And every sinner’s past is an enemy to him. Don’t forget that my friend. You’ve lived down your past, but your past is your enemy because we’ve all sinned and come short of God’s glory and there isn’t a son or daughter of Eve anywhere on the earth’s surface above the age of accountability who hasn’t got a past. Past may be lurid and terrible, or it may be very dull and ordinary but there’s sin in that past nevertheless and for all of us sinners the past is our enemy.

And then the law, the law of God, they talk so freely now about the law. Once I was standing waiting for a streetcar years ago and it was raining and I crowded into a doorway and a man crowded into the doorway with me and while we waited on the streetcar, I said a word about God and religion to him and the gospel and he told me, he wasn’t angry nor hostile, he was just telling me what he thought. He said, I think the Ten Commandments is enough. He said the Ten Commandments, they’re enough, that’s enough. The keeping of the Ten Commandments, that’s enough. He said, I don’t believe that there’s any need for any other religion or any other gospel than the Ten Commandments.

Well, streetcars have a way of coming even though it seems they never do, and we didn’t finish that and I didn’t convince him. But my dear friend, there isn’t a sinner in the wide world that can turn to the law as a friend for the law is not your friend. The law is not a friend after you’ve broken it. Until the penalty has been paid, the law is an enemy.

And so, we have this sin, look, look, the lying and the stealing and the cheating and the swearing and the drinking and the uncleanness. In all of these things we have forfeited our right to be protected by the law of God and the law has turned from being a potential friend to being an actual enemy.

And then there is change. I don’t know whether you feel the way I do about all this change, change, change and decay and all around I see. Change and chance are busy ever and there’s a change going on all the time and we’ve rather accepted it. No matter if your boat is moving toward the falls and ready to plunge over, there’s some big mouth orator who will get up and say, we must accept change, yes sir, we must accept change from the flat faceted surface of the water to the roaring bellows below. There’s always somebody to defend change.

But have you noticed that change rarely does anybody any good? Have you noticed after you’re about middle age that changes are never for the better after that? Have you noticed it, fellow? Have you noticed what change does to you from that time on? If it doesn’t take your hair, it changes its color.

And so, change slowly and insidiously and sometimes quite rapidly takes us downhill to the grave. Change, change, always changing, always motion, always the shifting undulation of life, always and always it’s our enemy.

If you could always stay three years old, wouldn’t that be wonderful? Or if you’re in good health, if you could always stay sixteen, or if you could always stay twenty-three, and after old mother nature has stampeded you along, if you could only stay thirty, if you could only stay where you want to stay, but you can’t. Change and chance our busy ever, and so change becomes our enemy.

And unless we’re right with God, change makes us from what was better to worse. And the moral condition goes from better to worse and never from worse to better, however it may seem, unless there has been the miracle of God wrought in the meantime.

And so, with cold hostility these enemies go on, and I believe in them. I believe they exist. I believe that they are real. I believe that they are here. And I believe that some of them are intelligent. I believe at least that they are directed by intelligences. I do not believe that we’re in a world of luck and happenstance. I believe that we’re in a world of directed hostility.

I believe that just as the communists way back in 1914 or 1910, even as early as that, began to lay their cold plans to destroy the world, so Satan had laid his terrible plans, and I don’t think Milton missed it too far when he pictured Satan in paradise lost as talking to his demons in the world below and deciding that instead of fighting God head on or instead of accepting hell or wherever they’d been driven to as their final abode, that they were to go back and fight God by flanking him. Fight God by coming in from the side and destroying that which God loved most.

And so said Satan, I will myself go, and I will tempt this man, this great being that God has made so much like Himself, and I believe that I can appeal to His self-love, and I can destroy Him.

Now Milton doesn’t give chapter and verse, but it’s easy to find chapter and verse in the Scriptures, and that just happened that way, and Satan came and he’s still here. And the same devil that tempted Adam, and the same devil that tempted Job, and the same devil that tempted Jesus, and the same devil that down the years has tempted men and ruined them, that same devil is present now.

There is an enemy. And if there were no enemy, there would be no gospel or any need of one. If there was no enemy, there would be no Bible or any need of one. And if there were no enemy, there would be no friend and no need of one. But because there is a hostile, cold-eyed, level-gazed, deadly, determined, thoughtful, cool enemy out to get us, and to get you and your child, and that little, infant that was born into your home less than a month ago, out to get him there is the coldest, most hostile, most sadistic, most incredibly vile and wicked being that the human mind can conceive.

And he has as his help sin and the flesh and organized society and temptations of every sort. And young people raised in this hot age, this age of pepped up jazz, this age of paint and hollow sounds and colored lights, this age of fun and frivolity and circuses and bread, this age of jokes and silliness, young people reared in such an atmosphere of this are openly challenging the men who lead the church and are saying, why should you tell us that there are things young people shouldn’t do?

Why do you tell us that there are shows we shouldn’t see, and that drinking is wrong, and we shouldn’t gamble, and that we shouldn’t do the things the world does? Isn’t that old-fashioned and wrong? And we all have to go on the defensive, because Satan has flanked our young people, and he couldn’t meet them head-on because we had verse and chapter, so he came in from the side. And a whole generation of evangelicals have been taught to go with the way of the world, and they’ve been taught by men who ought to know better, who set an example of worldliness before them.

Why, they used to say of the old Puritans that they didn’t believe in bearbaiting, which of course was sort of like cockfighting, only they used bears, they said they don’t believe in bear-baiting, and the reason they don’t is not because they pity the bear, but because they don’t want anybody to have any fun.

So, they say, you don’t believe in worldliness because you don’t want young people to have fun. It so happened, I was converted when I was seventeen, and I believe exactly then what I believe now. Not that I’m rigid and unchanging, I think, I adapt where adaptation is proper and right and necessary, but I saw the world then as being a hollow old whore with a mask, a painted grinning mask, and I see it so still.

And the world, the flesh, and the devil are our enemies, but somebody says, can’t we help ourselves? Well, there are some who try it, and they say, I’ll help myself, I’ve got courage, I’m not going to lean on a God that may not exist, I’ve got courage. What grounds are your courage on, tell me, tell me, how can you escape? Where are you going to go for help? Tell me.

If a wild cell gets loose in your body, tell me how you’re going to fight cancer off. Tell me. One of the greatest women athletes ever known in the history of the world, Babe Didrikson Zaharias, lies very, very low tonight, and I’m sorry, she was a wonderful woman, I’m sorry. She lies very low tonight, she laughed, and she kept her chin up and she made funny cracks, and she did her best, but cancer’s too big for the greatest woman athlete in the world.

And her great overgrown hulk of a tender-hearted husband, who is himself a professional wrestler, there he is, he could pick everybody on his platform up and three or four fellas from down there in one hand and throw us over his shoulder. But an enemy has got a hold of his wife, and he can’t do a thing. He can flex his great biceps and swell his great chest, but he’s as helpless as a two-day old kitten. Babe Zaharias is dying.

No, self-help won’t do, my friend, just as you can’t fight a disease germ or a wild cell loose in your bloodstream. So you can’t fight sin. And so you can’t fight the devil. And so you can’t fight the law that you’ve broken.

But some say, I’ll ignore the whole thing, and it’ll go away. Babe Zaharias can’t say that. Some things don’t go away when you ignore them. They only bore in deeper. When you try to ignore it, it’s true, nevertheless. There’s an enemy, there’s a past, there’s a broken law, there is a hurt God, there’s a crucified Savior. There is justice in the universe.

And then some say, well, improvement, we’ll improve ourselves. Well, I believe there’s improvement and certainly there’s a vast gap between what a man is and what he can make of himself. All our schools are built upon the belief that man can change and improve and make himself better, that he can learn, that he can purge out of his mind superstitions and wrong ideas, and that he can fill his mind with good knowledge and good thoughts, and he can educate himself, he can improve himself. We all believe that.

But what skill can restore a forfeited life? The soul that sinneth shall die, said Paul to the Christians, you were a four-time dead in your trespasses and sins. What self-improvement can restore a forfeited life?

Some say others can help me. How can I help you when I can’t help myself? How can you help me when you can’t help yourself? How can the third man help us when he can’t help himself? How can a hundred helpless men help a helpless man when the hundred helpless men with all their pooled wisdom can’t help each other? How can they help us when they can’t help themselves?

And there isn’t anybody, remember this, sir, remember this. There isn’t anybody that can ever take your responsibility before the enemy or the judge. Nobody. Somebody puts a ticket on your car, and you know somebody, maybe you can get off. I think it’s a poor way to do, and I don’t think a Christian would do it.

He’d do what I did once when I boarded Mrs. Hines’ car and got arrested. Huh? I had R.R. Brown in the car with me, and I said, talk him out of it, Brown, but he didn’t. He didn’t talk him out of it. I had to go back, stood up there, felt like a criminal, fined me a dollar and told me not to do it anymore. And I told them I’d never do it anymore, so help me, and the next time I went through their town, I’d slow down to a walk, and we smiled, and that was it.

But if you, if you know somebody, sometimes you can get off before the law. But who’s going to be responsible for you before the broken law of God? There are friends who pretend to be friends. There are friends who play at friendship. There are friends who bring you only loss. But who’s the friend that’ll stand for you? Where is that fellow, that man that tempted you into some iniquity? Is he going to stand before the bar of God and be judged for your iniquity? No, you will. Nobody can take my responsibility on himself. I stand all by myself alone.

So, the world is full of enemies, and the broken law, and the slow, cold approach of that blood-chilling war we call death, wearing us out and beating us down and flattening us out at last. But there’s a friend.

Now, if I stopped here and dismissed, you could justly say, Tozer is a pessimist, and I’m not going back to hear him. If I hadn’t anything else to say but what I’ve said up to now, I’d better have stayed home and so would you, because I’ve simply been telling you the terrible negative side of human life.

But there’s another side, and it is, there is a friend. Spell that Friend with capital letters. Let that Friend, the word, Friend, glow there. Let it glow there. There is a Friend.

The tremendous powers are friendly. I believe in a friendly heaven, and that God is a friend, and that Jesus Christ is a friend. The law of God can never be a friend to any man that’s broken it, for heaven can never be a cheap police court where you can know somebody and get off. Justice must be done, and the law of God must be vindicated everywhere in heaven, earth, and hell. But I still believe there is a Friend there.

You and I, I was thinking about it today and wondering why I wasn’t happier over the gospel and why the people aren’t happier over the gospel. And I thought of those who are behind the Iron Curtain, where they’re in danger every minute of their lives, where they stand in bread lines to get a little bit of black bread, and where they can’t call their soul their own, and where they’re afraid of every unidentified shadow, lest it be an enemy. And then when by some way they get to the United States, they’ve been known to fall down and kiss the ground. And I’ve heard them interviewed on the air, and I’ve heard them say in broken English and with broken voice, oh, how glad, how glad to be in America.

Our political parties fight and tell each other they’re ruining the country and everything but get to come out from behind that Iron Curtain and see that old lady that stands so tall and noble there at the foot of Manhattan with a torch in her hand, and you’ll thank God on your knees for America. And for a country that’s never known freedom, how beautiful freedom is.

But you and I, we complain, if they won’t let us part more than an hour, we complain over trifles and forget that God Almighty has given us a bit of His own free heaven here on this lovely continent we call America. And God’s been so good to us that not all the pooled efforts of all the politicians for 200 years have been able to take our liberty away from it. We still have it. And I wonder if we aren’t the same when it comes down to the gospel.

The man who cuts himself and tries to let the blood out and let his sin out, the man who cuts the chicken’s head off and tries to atone for his iniquity, the man who crawls on his hands and knees to the Ganges River, the man who stands with raised hand on the riverbank and prays to Gitchi Manitou, the man who fasts or raises his hand and holds it till it withers, or who sleeps on beds of spikes or walks through fire, don’t laugh at them. They’ve got religion in them, they’ve got a religious yearning in them, and they want reality, and they can’t find reality. And they go down to the last without finding it.

Oh, how good it would be for a man or a woman like that to be told there’s a Friend, there’s somebody up there that isn’t mad at you, there’s somebody up there that knows your dust, there’s somebody there that became your friend, not in a morbid sentimental way, but he became your friend in the only way He could. He became your friend first by taking on Himself your nature without sin, your nature.

An angel couldn’t be my friend, he could be my messenger, my servant, God’s messenger, sent to be servants and messengers to them who shall be heirs of salvation, but imagine making a friend of an angel. Imagine talking freely with Gabriel. I couldn’t do it; I don’t know whether you could.

For a man to be my friend, he has to have my nature, and he’s got to know all about me, and he has to understand me as a friend understands me. You can teach a chimpanzee to eat with a knife and fork, but you can’t make a friend out of a chimpanzee, he doesn’t understand you. He’s got to have your nature to understand you.

And the Second Person of the Trinity took my nature, and He took on Himself the form of a man. And as the old creed says, as I’ve repeated so often, He is man, not by the degrading of the manhood in the flesh, but by the taking up of the Godhood in the flesh, but by the taking up of the manhood into God. He elevated humanity into God, and thus became the God-man and walked among us.

So, when Christ became a man, it was not to the degradation of deity, it was to the elevation of humanity, and He’s our friend. He accepts all responsibilities. He charges Himself with everything that’s against me.

And so, I can say I know Somebody. Before the broken law, before the enemy, before sin and the devil, I know Somebody. And He accepts my responsibility for my forfeited life, and He can do it because of who He is. He can do it because He’s man and God, not one or the other, but both. He can do it because He’s Jesus and Lord. And His Jesus name is my man name, and His Lord name is His God name. And He’s both, God and man. And because of what He did, always remember, friends, that you’ll never get any lasting help nor protection nor safety by manipulating words or thoughts. Always remember that. Saying things over or repeating things over will never help you. Always remember that Christian paganism won’t help you.

There’s no magic in anything. You can go to sleep under a cross and go to hell in the night. There’s no magic in a cross. There’s no magic in blessed water. And there’s no magic in a biscuit. And there’s no magic in oil on your forehead after you’re dead. I don’t believe in magic; I believe in Christ. And He can because of what He did. I don’t let anybody talk you into thinking what a nice person you are.

Dale Carnegie and the gentlemen in New York and a few others have gained great popularity by telling us that we ought to remember what wonderful people we are. But brethren, there has been a long, noble stream of sincerity from Abel who offered blood of a lamb down to the latest Dayak converted in Borneo. And they’ve never started by saying, I think I’m wonderful. They always started by saying, depart from me, O God, I’m a man of unclean lips and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips.

And the doctrine that I’ll be all right if I’ll just chuck myself under the chin is a doctrine of damnation and deceit. I must begin with a forfeited law. I must begin with forfeited life and a broken law. I must begin with a God who can’t receive me and the law that can’t approve me and an enemy that I can’t deal with. I must begin where David began.

Have mercy upon me, O God, according to Thy lovingkindness and according to the multitude of Thy tender mercies, blot out my sin. For in sin was I born and in iniquity was I conceived. I must begin there. I must begin by not raising my eyes but gazing down at the floor and beating my breast and saying, have mercy on me, a sinner. And then the Friend comes. He’s only a Friend to the friendless.

If you’ve got a friend in a book, or if you have a friend in a technique, or if you have a friend in a crucifix, or if you have a friend in a bottle of water, or if you have a friend in a chain of beads, he can’t be your friend. But if you have no friend, no friend, no friend, my God, no friend in the universe, no friend, no friend.

I have friends in this congregation tonight. I have people in this congregation tonight that if I were to go to them and say, I want to borrow $1,000 without signing anything, they’d hand me $1,000. I’ve got friends here that if I’d go and say, I want to borrow your car to take a trip, they’d lend me their car like that and walk. I have friends here that if anybody came and attacked me, they’d fight for me down to the end.

I have friends like that, but I haven’t a friend that could go before the terror and thunder and lightning and fire and the sound of a trumpet and the voice of words and dare therefore in white-faced terror to defend me before the broken law of God. Not a friend have I got. I haven’t a friend that can help me in that terrible day, that day of terror when I face the Judge. Not a friend. Neither have you.

That pretty little girl that you’re going with or that you’re married to, oh sure, she believes that you’re a cross between King Saul and King David and Liberace. All right. Very good, very good. I wouldn’t want her to think anything else. But in that day of terror, that day when the voice of God shall entomb the universe and the world shall fall apart, she can’t help you then.

Big old, bulgy-muscled Zaharias stands with tears beside his wife and watches her die. And your dearest closest friend would have to stand before that terrible bar of judgment and see you led away. If indeed we do would see a thing like that, I don’t know what that could happen. But I know they couldn’t help you.

Well, some don’t come to the Friend, but I tell you there’s a Friend. And I want to close on that note. I want to tell you that Jesus Christ is your friend. Jesus, lover of my soul, says the song, lover of my soul, He’s your friend. The proud and the self-confident say I don’t need Him. And the quiet lonely soul says I’ll think my way out. And the meek self-effacing soul says I’m too bad. But there never was a man yet so bad that he didn’t have one friend. Never a man. Never one lonely man.

When Frank, what’s his name, I’ve forgotten now, robbed a bank down here on Michigan or near somewhere in the loop, raced out onto Michigan Avenue in a car. Those great big handsome square-shouldered policemen they have on Michigan Avenue, they’re directing traffic. One of them tried to stop him and he turned his gun on him and killed him. He raced one more block and that policeman tried to stop him, and he turned his gun on him and killed him. Two men, do you remember? Caught him in a very short time. Sentenced him to die.

Harry Lundquist, a Baptist, a Swedish covenant preacher in this city, walked with him to the chair. But before he went, he repented and sought the face of his God and Dr. Harry Lundquist believed that he was a true Christian and that he died a true Christian. It’s possible.

The young man who was sentenced to die and was soon to go to the chair, they asked him whether he had anything to say and he said, no, I have nothing to say but if you don’t mind, I have something to sing. Well, it was not regular, but they said, all right, go ahead. So, he stood up there and sang, Is there anyone to help us when the end is drawing near? Yes, there is one, only one, the blessed, blessed Jesus, he’s the one.

It’s too bad they have to wait until that time, but he did thank God, he did. And if you could ask that man on the cross there that died a thief and a traitor there on the cross, if you could ask that man who said, have mercy on me, remember me when thou comest into thy kingdom, if he could have sung and had known that song, I think he could have sung it there from the cross, Is there anyone to help us, one who understands our grief?

Yes, there’s One and there He was dying between them on the cross. The one on the other side died with curses but he wasn’t any worse than the one on this side who died in peace. The difference was, one of them repudiated his righteousness and took the Friend, the other clung to the tattered remnants of his spotty righteousness and died. You’ve got a Friend, sir, you’ve got a Friend, madam. There’s a Friend and His name is Jesus.

And He died for you and He rose and He lives and He pleads and He’s your friend. There’s a Friend. And all around you the enemy, but there’s a Friend. And all you have to do is turn to Him and say, O Jesus, Jesus, friend Jesus, I don’t know much about theology, and I’m all mixed up about churches and baptism and all that, but Jesus, they say you’re a friend. He’ll take you as you are and ask no questions, except that you throw yourself in His arms and on His mercy and He’ll be responsible for you before a broken law and an outraged God. He’ll be responsible and He can do it because of who He is and what He did. Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ tonight, will you? Let’s pray.

O Christ, we thank Thee that we ever heard Thy name, Thy wonderful name, Thy golden name. We thank Thee, we call Thee, Jesus. And that’s Thy man’s side, that’s our side. And we call Thee Lord Christ and that’s Thy God’s side. So, Thou dost unite in Thyself, God and man.

Father, we thank Thee we believe in Thy Son. We daren’t, daren’t face the future alone. We daren’t face the treacherous foe. We daren’t face tomorrow’s uncertainty. But we throw ourselves in the arms of our friend, Jesus Christ. Jesus, what a friend for sinners.

Jesus, lover of my soul. Will Thou grant that some here tonight may go home and kneel down by their bedside tonight and say, O Friend, I take Thee tonight. I take Thee as my sufficient Savior and Helper and Advocate and Lord, my Lamb of God, my Husband, my Shield, my Protector, my Advocate above my Savior by the throne of love, I take Thee.

Let nobody go out of here tonight without this Friend. We thank Thee for all our friends, for all our friends, we thank Thee for them, dear Lord. And we thank Thee they’ll go with us until we stop breathing and they can’t help us anymore. But we can sing, I’ll praise my Savior while I’ve breathed. And when my voice is lost in death, praise shall employ my nobler powers.

So, when our earthly friends have reached the end of their health, our nobler powers will awake, and we’ll sing more loudly than ever. Blessed be Thy name, we thank Thee, Jesus.

But the undertaker and the embalming fluid and the grave and fiery judgment, we can last from our place under Thy wing, under Thy feathers. For Thou art our Friend and we thank Thee Thou stickest closer than a brother, closer than any brother, for Thou art our Brother and our Friend.

Graciously bless us now, for Christ’s sake, amen.

Tags Divine Friendship, Jesus Christ

Messages

A.W. Tozer Talks

Post author By pshappard
Post date June 14, 2026

“The Very God of Peace Sanctify you Wholly”

The Very God of Peace Sanctify you Wholly Download

The Very God of Peace Sanctify you Wholly

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

December 2, 1956

On the text found in 1 Thessalonians, the fifth chapter, the very God of peace sanctify you wholly, and I pray God your whole spirit and soul and body be preserved blameless unto the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, faithful is He who called you, who also will do it.

This is a topic not of academic importance, but of critical importance to all the children of God, and tragically and shamefully neglected by evangelicals almost everywhere. But before I preach, I want you to sing. I’ll tell you about it.

I have a good friend in this audience. I don’t see him very often, but he’s my good friend, and he came up this morning and thanked me for talking about Jesus, Lover of my soul, and Rock of Ages. He said there were two favorite songs, and he’d never heard them in this church, and I said we’ve sung them, but he’d never heard us. Now that man with his wife every Sunday drives here from the border of Indiana. I’m not sure whether it’s across the line or just on the line or somewhere very close, and he’s back here tonight.

Now I think the least we can do is to sing that, brother. Number 627, and if you don’t mind standing, you old folks can put up with it and you young people won’t care, 627, and I want you to sing it full voice, worshipfully, and every verse of it, every stanza clear through to the end. Jesus, Lover of my Soul. There are those who would say that it’s the greatest hymn ever written. That’s open to question. There might be maybe it’s in the half dozen greatest hymns ever written in the life of the church.

Number 627, so let’s stand to sing. Jesus, lover of my soul.

Jesus, lover of my soul,
let me to thy bosom fly,
while the nearer waters roll,
while the tempest still is high;
hide me, O my Savior, hide,
till the storm of life is past;
safe into the haven guide,
O receive my soul at last!

Other refuge have I none;
hangs my helpless soul on thee;
leave, ah! leave me not alone,
still support and comfort me.
All my trust on thee is stayed,
all my help from thee I bring;
cover my defenseless head
with the shadow of thy wing.

Plenteous grace with thee is found,
grace to cover all my sin;
let the healing streams abound;
make and keep me pure within.
Thou of life the fountain art;
freely let me take of thee;
spring thou up within my heart,
rise to all eternity.

Let’s have a moment of prayer.

Lord, we feel as if we were, or had been, standing in front of a burning bush. O God, never let this yearning die out of our hearts. Let us die before Thou dost let the yearning die.

Now, Father, Thou knowest that we are neither worthy to speak, nor are these friends worthy to hear. But through the infinite merits of Jesus’ blood, we both speak and hear. So, trusting alone in Him, and believing that He’s good and kind and courteous and gracious, we approach this sermon. In the name of Jesus Christ, Thy Son. Amen.

Now, the man of God here writes to the Thessalonian Christians, that is, the assembly, which was meeting at Thessalonica, all of the assemblies. It could be there were more than the one. And he develops a thesis, more or less, rather several of them.

Then he comes to the fifth chapter, and he begins to exhort them. He exhorts you, brethren. And then he warns them in verse 21, to prove all things, and hold fast that which is good.

The Lord never wants us, nor is it Christian, to close our eyes and plunge in, because our emotions are moved, or because somebody has a good speaking voice. Prove all things and hold fast that which is good. And then in verse 23 he says, and may, that’s the force of it, and I pray that, and may, the very God of peace sanctify you wholly, and I pray God your whole spirit and soul and body.

Now that’s all there is to us, there’s no more. There is the triangularity of the human spirit, the human personality, rather, corresponding with the Trinity, spirit, soul, and body, may these be preserved blameless unto the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. Not at the coming, but unto the coming. Then he adds these very wonderful and encouraging words, Faithful is He that calleth you who also will do it.

Now, these words before us are important. You will notice, if you have been in attendance at this church, we have such tremendous turnover here, that those who have been, you’ll excuse the expression, the hard core of our church. You know, they talk about the hard core, that means the ones that don’t move away but come over the years. Not that you’re hard, but merely that you’re faithful.

Those of you who have been faithful over the years and have not lately moved in or moved away will know that I never deal with a topic that merely has academic interest. I look at the Saturday daily news and smile a rather tired smile at some of my good brethren trying to get the crowds there, if it kills the crowds and them too. Anything to get people there, but I never do it. I never have done it. Lord, now help me, maybe that wasn’t quite right. I think maybe I have sinned somewhere back down the years, but certainly not in recent years.

And this tonight is more, I repeat, than of academic interest. These are the solemn words of an apostle. And he indicates here God’s will for God’s children. And these words have been fuel to the flame for one school of thought. The Methodists, for instance, and the Salvation Army grew up in it, and the Moravians, the great Moravian church, and they have been a source of embarrassment to many teachers of sinful sainthood.

Now I want you to hear that strange anomaly, sinful sainthood. And here, when we come to this passage, this 23rd, is it, verse, we embarrass certain teachers, but if these words are permitted to stand, you know all I want anybody ever to do is to read the Scriptures and let the meaning stand and not explain it away. If these words of the apostle are allowed to have a fair meaning, there will be a sorrow and regret on the part of many Christians.

I believe that some of us, some Christians and some I’ve preached to, God knows how long, have never quite faced up to the issue. You are still unprepared for the coming of Christ, and you hope that there is some intermediate state where you’ll get fixed up.

Now, I believe that if we just allow these words to mean what they mean, that they will be the cause of some teachers humbly re-examining their teaching and reason for all of us to examine the Scriptures and ourselves.

Have you noticed that in the opening of the fifth chapter, we always let the words mean exactly what they mean. Nobody hauls out his Greek lexicon and goes to work to try to emasculate the text. Just let it stand as it is. But of the times and seasons, brethren, you have no need that I write unto you. Nobody tries to explain that away. We have Bible conferences that revolve around such passages.

For yourselves know perfectly that the day of the Lord so cometh as a thief in the night. For when they shall say peace and safety, then sudden destruction cometh upon them, as travail upon a woman with a child, and they shall not escape, and so on.

Now, that’s academic. That is, it is not instantly now binding with moral necessity upon the heart. It’s something that is to come, and we can talk without any moral embarrassment about something that is to come. That is why teachers of prophecy are so fluent. They are able to talk about something that is to come and about which they have now no immediate worry.

Now, we allow the words to stand right as they are here, and then when we come to verse 23, we begin to twist and dodge and turn and hike up an alley and turn a corner and dig up Greek roots and marginal references and try to get away from this. The very God of peace make you holy, and I pray God your spirit and soul and body be preserved blameless unto the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Now, I’ve got to do a little defining, because if I use a word one way and you accept it another, then I haven’t communicated with you at all. So, I want to define here the word sanctify. Some people have a phobia for this, and I don’t blame them at all because that’s all some people can see in the Scriptures. But what does the word mean?

Well, it’s a verb, an adjective, and a noun. As a verb, it’s sanctify you wholly. That’s an act performed. As an adjective, it describes something sanctified. And as a noun, it is a state, holiness or sanctification.

Now, I know that I preach under considerable disadvantage because this has become, the word sanctified and so on, have become, what should we say, they are conventionalized. The thing has been conventionalized by certain brethren, and they carry it to an extreme that is not scriptural and push it beyond its scriptural context and make a great deal of it.

And the result is that some honest Bible teachers and Bible lovers have withdrawn or have drawn back from it. And I know that a good deal of prejudice has been raised in many minds. And to discuss this topic is to push myself, put myself into the middle of a very difficult, very difficult battle. But I don’t mind.

Now, Webster says about the word that it means to set apart to a sacred office. And he says also that it means to make free from sin and purify. And the Baptist expositor and Greek student, Robertson, says that the word means to consecrate, to separate from things that are profane and to render or declare holy.

Now, I want to show you, I want to tell you what the lexicon says. It says it gives four meanings for the word as Paul used it here. One is to make holy. The other is to purify. The other is to consecrate. And the other is to venerate. Now I want you to tell me which meaning, see if you use an English word that has a number of meanings.

For instance, you use the word case. Well, the word case probably has 50 meanings in English. And when you use such a word, you have to know by the surrounding words what that word means. Take the word horse. Well, that word has a certain meaning, a fixed meaning in the animal kingdom, but it also means something to a carpenter.

So, it could have one of two or three meanings. And when we take this word, I’m not going to try to pronounce it in Greek. My Greek pronunciation is very much like my French. Nobody knows how it sounds. But it means one of four things, to make holy, to purify, to set aside in consecration or to venerate.

Now let’s eliminate. We take the word venerate out. He didn’t surely say that, and the very God of peace venerate you holy. Let’s cross a blue line through that and say, now that’s out.

And then he meant, maybe meant consecrate, set aside for holy purposes. For that is one meaning in the Bible. It is used in the Scriptures to set apart to God as a vessel. A vessel that is set apart to holy uses. Now I want to read it again, and then you put, let’s put the word set apart in here and see if you think.

Now if you think that, then I won’t argue with you, we’ll just go on. But do you think that Paul meant this? And the very God of peace set you aside holy, and I pray God that your whole spirit, soul, and body and so on. Do you think he meant that? I can’t see how he could possibly mean that.

And remember that the word here, the very God of peace sanctify, that word is the same root word as the word for holy, when we say Holy Spirit or talk about a holy God. It’s the same word. And so, we have two meanings left. We have purify and make holy.

Now brethren, I will not argue about it, and you don’t go away mad if you don’t agree. But I can’t see, trying my very level best, leaning backwards to try to be fair, I can’t see how this can mean anything, but the very God of peace make you pure, holy pure. And I pray God your whole soul and spirit and body be preserved blameless under the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Now I think that that is fair, and I do not believe we have to hide or run away from that. It is there. And whenever the word consecrate, or that word is applied to a human being, it’s the same word that describes God. It’s the same word that describes, I saw the holy city. Now did that mean I saw a city that had been set aside. Certainly, it had. But didn’t it mean more than that? Didn’t it mean more than that?

And then when Peter, when the Holy Spirit said in the Old Testament, repeated by the Apostle Peter, be ye holy for I am holy, do you think that it meant be ye set aside because I’m set aside? Do you think so? Do you think that God said that somebody had set him aside or consecrated him? Certainly, He did not. He was talking about a state of moral purity. And He said, be you holy because I am holy. And when applied to moral beings, that unquestionably is the meaning.

Then what did Paul mean? Did he mean no more than that we were to be set apart? That’s what the easy doctrine of sinful sainthood that has cursed the church over the years has taught us. That it just means that we’re to set aside. God comes along and sets certain people aside, consecrates them, that is, turns them over to a certain use. As you might allocate $10 out of 100 and set that aside and say, this, this is my tithe.

Now, then the next words reveal the meaning. It means a deep inward work. It means a cleansing that shall preserve us blameless. The whole man inward and outward shall be preserved blameless unto the coming of Christ.

Now, how are we preserved blameless? Well, in a world like this, with people like us, there’s only one way God can preserve anything blameless, and that is by dwelling in it.

How was the bush, the burning bush, preserved blameless? It was preserved by the Indwelling Fire that was in it. And while the Fire was there, the bush was a holy bush. If the Fire left the bush, as it no doubt did, it would only need to cool off, just take 12 hours or maybe less, until bugs and parasites and moths were beginning to crawl back up and lay their eggs, and fungi and all sorts of things were coming back into the bush.

As long as the Fire was in the bush, there was a clean bush. And there isn’t any other kind of purity known in the Scriptures than the purity that results from the fiery indwelling of Jesus Christ the Lord, the Holy Spirit dwelling in the hearts.

Now, it says that we’re to be preserved irreproachable, blameless. Now, that requires a state of inward moral purity. And how can this be done by men who have evil natures? And do you know that this, what should we call it, this yin to misunderstand Scripture and lift the pressure off and let the carnality have its way, has been so great that we hide behind everything.

We even hide behind such a song as this. I didn’t think about it until we sang this song, and then I put a card in here so I could read it and remember it. You know what it says? It says, false and full of sin I am, thou art full of grace and truth. And here is a confession that the singer is false and full of sin.

And people say, well, now listen, Charles Wesley wrote, false and full of sin I am. And if Charles Wesley was false and full of sin, then what about us? And can we expect to be any better? Now, that’s stanza three. But brethren, have we forgotten what he says in stanza four? Plenteous grace with thee is found, grace to cover all my sin. Let the healing stream abound, make and keep me pure within. The singer, when he cried out in distress, false and full of sin I am, was getting his heart confessed out. And in the next breath he prayed, let the healing streams abound, make and keep me pure within.

And so, Charles Wesley is not on the side of those who teach sinful sainthood and say that we are supposed to go on as sinful saints, set aside, but still sinful. I can’t conceive of God setting anybody aside for his use and not cleansing that person. Now, if you can, then we haven’t read the same Bible, surely. Can we conceive of a moral being given over to God, wholly given over to God in consecration, and at the same time not be made entirely pure?

Now he says, sanctify, that is, make you pure, wholly pure. Now, just how much is holy? Well, now I’m quoting a Baptist here, so you’ll know that I haven’t gone to the Nazarenes for this. I’ve never been to Nazarene service in my life. I don’t think that I can recall. Maybe when I was a boy I’d wandered in somewhere. But they’ve had no influence on me.

Robertson the Baptist says, and he’s an honest Baptist, in the Greek he says it means the whole of each of you, every part of you, made holy. And Luther says, make you holy through and through. Doesn’t that sound like Luther? Luther was readable and practical and salty and down-to-earth, and so he says, make you holy through and through.

Now, for the application of it to our own lives, it simply means that this apostle prayed for a deep, thorough, through and through cleansing. A moral conformity to a standard which God has set up. A spiritual conformity to God and a preservation of that state by the indwelling of the Holy Spirit.

Now, I want to ask you, what does hinder? There is the deadly doctrine, I say. It is a deadly doctrine. It is the doctrine; I do not need to be holy. Another has been holy for me. Now, the terrible part about all this is that the latter part of it is true. Another has kept the law for me, else I’d perish in hell forever. Another has been holy for me, or I should perish in hell forever. Another stands before God and represents me, or I should be driven to darkness from the face of God. That part of it is so. But the application, I don’t need to worry about that. I don’t need to be holy because another is holy for me. He has stood in my place. He has been holy for me.

My brethren, this is nothing short of a frightful and frightening misunderstanding and manipulation of a text to cover up a life that is not clean. And I am no more, I am little more than astonished at the children of God. I talked to some people, I talked to a preacher, and he said, I’ve heard him said more than once, said, I got so mad I could have, I was furious.

Well, nobody needs to come to me and tell me that anybody that gets furious and gets quite angry is clean. He’s not. He’s got a stain. He’s got, he’s got leprosy. He’s got something in him that can be purged out. But you say, is it possible to get delivered from the temper?

Well, there was a man by one time, a great big fella by the name of John Fletcher. He was a student at Oxford College. He was a Christian, and he was a good Christian. But he had a temper, and obviously a pretty bad one. And once he got into an argument with a school friend, and the great big angry fellow picked this school friend up at the head of a pair of winding stairs and was going to plunge him down those stairs and would have broken every bone in his body and cracked his skull. It would have killed him.

And suddenly something came over him, the grace of God evidently intervened, and with shaking, with terror, he put the fellow down. And then he went to his room, and he put a sign on the door. And the sign said, “Do not disturb me.”

And he was in that room 24 hours with the door locked, without meeting anybody. When he came out, the student said there was upon his face the tranquility of a saint. There was upon his face the calm, kind, shining countenance that Moses must have brought down from Sinai. And they said from that hour on, he was the easiest, smoothest, quietest chap, couldn’t be offended and couldn’t be made angry. He had almost committed murder in a flare-up of temper.

The God of peace make you holy through and through and purge and purify you. That’s what it means unless we hide behind the meaning the God of peace venerate you. I don’t think that’s what it means, do you? The God of peace set you aside, do you think that’s what it means? The God of peace make you like himself, holy, that’s what it means.

Now my brethren, I am not preaching eradication here tonight. I have never believed it more than maybe six months of my life when I was a very young boy. But I am preaching that it is the will of God that a work of purgation take place in the life of every one of His children, that will deliver them from their habits, that will cleanse them from their carnality, that will make them spiritual, and that will take out, take out now, there are the words, take out the things that the world has that make sinners out of them.

Dear God, I pray that we may have the courage in this terrible day to dare to rise up and fight the heinous doctrine of sinful sainthood, to cancel each other out. For the word saint means a holy one. And we go to the New Testament and we hear Paul say to the saints and faithful brethren, to the saints in Christ Jesus at Philippi, and to the saints and faithful brethren in Ephesus, and to the saints in Corinth, and we say, well, that means set aside, that means just that we are set aside, the same as I would set aside something for a certain use, a vessel to be used.

Well, all of God’s children are set aside, there’s no question about that, no question about that at all. But the word saint means a holy one. And when the word, as long as the word holy has to do with things, it means set aside and consecrated. When it has to do with moral beings, it describes a moral state.

And so, when we say the holy angels, we don’t mean beings up there somewhere that have been set aside, as a sergeant might come in and say, you and you and you and you, you four come over here, I want you–to set them aside.

Did you ever hear of the sergeant who lined them up in the morning and said, I want four volunteers, you and you and you and you? Well, that’s setting them aside, special detail, they call it, I remember, special detail. And then, O my God, only in heaven, only knows what you’re going to have to do before the sun goes down.

But now that’s setting four fellows aside for a certain purpose. But do you think that God has beings over in heaven that he has set aside, and they are not holy, pure beings? How then can we make the word holy mean morally pure to an angel and make it mean something else to a Christian?

Well, my brethren, maybe you won’t agree with my interpretation. And I’m not too much concerned whether you do or not. But I’ll tell you this, that it’s an outrageous perversion of the doctrine of vicarious atonement, that says Jesus Christ was holy for me and died and rose and lived and pleads and therefore, I’m not to be concerned with whether I’m holy or not. It is simply a cover-up, a deep desire to preserve our Adam life alive, and also a fear to take issue with entrenched authority.

For 40, 50 years now we’ve had theological authority, entrenched authority. They’ve written the books, and they have written a good many of the songs, and it’s entrenched authority. And that entrenched authority says sinful sainthood is the normal order. And that Christ was the holy One and that there’s no reason why you and I should worry about whether we’re holy or not.

Now, my brethren, nobody’s saved because he’s holy. He is saved because Christ is holy and died for him and rose again. But the very purpose of Christ in dying for him and rising again and sending the Holy Spirit and giving His blood as a fountain is that that man also might be made holy. And the work of redemption is not just to die to cancel the sentence. This doctrine of a canceled sentence is one of the cheapest doctrines I know.

Now, let the sinner come knowing that he’s a guilty sinner, tragically terribly guilty and deserving of hell, and let him come and believe in Christ and one of the greatest joys of his life will be that he’s had a canceled sentence. That will be one of the greatest joys. He’ll leap to his feet like an old Methodist convert in the deep woods and shout the place down because once he had guilt on him and now it’s gone.

God has laid on Him the iniquity of it all. I say that’s perfectly normal and right and good. And the sinner that doesn’t rejoice in the knowledge that his sins have been taken off and laid on another is not a normal man, and he’s not been converted.

But the purpose of the Lord was not that we should stop there, my brethren. The purpose of the Lord was that we should go on to be conformed unto the image of Jesus Christ our Lord and that we should have purged out of our lives things that don’t belong there.

Do you know that if you’ve got a hungry heart, God will teach you a whole lot of things in spite of some mixed-up theology? You know, He will, really. You know, God will do a lot for a fellow if he’s got a hungry heart. In spite of mixed-up theology, there are a lot of people better than their doctrine. That’s my hope. That’s my optimistic hope is that a lot of people are better than their doctrine. For there are a lot of people that are thirsty after God.

I remember hearing a man one time. He was an ignorant man from down in the state of West Virginia. Kind of a one-horse preacher, sort of. You know, plow and harrow and pick pumpkins and preach on Sunday morning. That type of fellow. But he was a good man. He told me this. He said, Brother Tozer, I got converted a long time ago.

And when they get converted down there, you know, it’s quite a production. They put on quite a show a lot of times. It doesn’t often last. But then he got converted and it did, it lasted. And he said to me, you know, he said, shortly after I was converted, I had a dream.

Now, I never had a dream in my life, personally, that I believed in. That is, I never had a dream I couldn’t trace to something I’d eaten or something I’d seen or something. So, I’m not a dreamer. Don’t say, behold, that dreamer cometh. But I’m just telling you what this fellow said. He was just a poor, ignorant fellow.

And he said, Brother Tozer, I had a dream shortly after I was converted. And he said, here stood a tree. And he said, a man walked out with a pair of pruning shears. And he began trimming that tree. And he’d look it over and then he’d trim again. Then he’d look it over and then he’d trim some more. And he said, I wondered, why is this man trimming off these things? And he said, suddenly a Voice said to my heart, now, you’re My child. You belong to Me now. Now I want you to get busy getting rid of things that hurt Me. Get rid of things that I don’t like. He said, use your shears. He said, I came out of it. And he said, the first thing I saw was my pipe. He said, I tossed that thing over the bushes, and I was finished with that. And then he said, I began on my life.

Now this poor, ignorant fellow that thinks the King James Version, you know, is the one that Paul read out of, and has all ignorance in the world, but he had a hungry heart, and God will teach a hungry man, and he’ll let the theological fellow go. For I have learned that theology is a good place to hide your carnality.

And many a man is as carnal as a skunk cabbage. And he knows just exactly where to go in the Greek to justify it. He just knows where to put his finger on the Hebrew root, and say, you don’t talk to me, I know what the Hebrew says there. Don’t talk to me, I know the interpretation of Dr. So-and-so. And that’s what he says about it. A place to hide our carnality. Brethren, I don’t believe a man is converted unless he has a longing to be holy.

Now, there are differences of opinion about the matter of wholly, entire sanctification; differences of opinion, I say about that, and I’m not going to press that for tonight. I’m only going to say that if we do not have a deep longing to be inwardly pure, we have serious reason to wonder if the nature of God has ever been imparted to us.

And the person who will stand off and fight to preserve his temper and his lusts and his jealousies and his love of money and his worldliness, the man who will stand off and fight and quote the Greek to prove it, is to me, at least he leads me to wonder whether the root of the matter is in him.

For the man that has the nature of Christ in him has at least a great longing for through and through purity. And my brethren, without changing your position or your doctrine or your view of life, if you’re a good, sound Calvinist, I’m not going to try to convert you.

And if you have views from your childhood other than what I’m preaching, we’re not going to fuss about it. But I’m only going to ask you this. Is there within your heart a great longing to be like Jesus? A longing to be free from the things that bond you, that bother you, the moral blemishes, a longing to be like God. If that isn’t there, then I, for my part, don’t think the root of the matter is in you.

For Peter says that by exceeding precious promises, God has given us of His own divine nature. And the divine nature, the nature of God, longs to be holy. That is in you, longs for you to be holy.

Suppose now, I don’t want to be thought silly, but let’s illustrate it a little bit. Suppose that you had in you the nature, had imparted to you and added to your nature, say, the nature of a wild fowl, say, a duck. Well, within you, that nature would begin to long after water, long after water. Suppose you had within you the nature of a mole. That nature within you would long for the soft, cool earth. Suppose you had in you the nature of an eagle. It wouldn’t be very long until that nature would begin to leap and reassert itself, and you’d long for the wild blue yonder.

And when I have in me the nature of God, that nature will assert itself and begin to long to be holy.

The Baptist preacher wrote that famous hymn, he’s now with his Savior, but he wrote that famous hymn, help me to be holy, O Spirit of light, sin-burdened and lowly I bow in thy sight. How shall a stained conscience dare look on thy face? E’en though in thy presence thou grant me a place, A longing to be holy. And another one wrote, I long, O I long to be holy, Conformed to his will and his word. I want to be Christ-like and humble. I want to be just like my Lord.

And if you go to your hymn book, you will find in that hymn book a longing to be Christ-like, a longing for inward purity, a longing after the conformity to Christ. And yet we have had the thing so mixed up.

And you will hear the old rugged cross, for instance, sung over the air. And a bunch of cowboys will be singing the old rugged cross to a guitar. And they’ll come to that verse, it was on that old cross Jesus suffered and died to pardon and sanctify me. They have no more idea what the word means than I know what Sanskrit means.

But yet, and we sing these songs, we sing songs and then get up and cancel our songs by our theology. And we hear a man say, cleanse and make me pure within. And then get up and spend 45 minutes proving that the Lord never meant we should be pure within at all. That we’ve got somebody in heaven that stands for us and so let’s go play golf. What’s the difference? Let’s go have a soda.

Brethren, a lot of people think they’re converted that haven’t been converted at all. They have never had an impartation of divine life to their souls. They’ve run and hidden behind a mantle of Jesus and said, I accept Christ now and I’m not going to go to hell. I accept Jesus and I’m not going to go to hell. But they’re living like the people that are going to go to hell.

And you’ll always go where you live like. Don’t pay attention to the grammar there. That’s poor grammar, but it’s good truth. You’ll always go the place that your life and heart prepare you to go.

So, choose you this day, my brethren, whom you will follow. The contented, carnal purveyors of proxy purity? We say I am all right, I know I get mad, sure I know it. I’m grouchy all day, I know it. I know I don’t feel like praying, I know it. I don’t feel like reading the Scriptures, I know it. I know I get jealous; I know all these things. But the Lord died for me, amen.

Our brother used a word a while ago, what do you call it, flippantly? Glibly. Glibly, yeah. That kind of glibness worries me. That kind of glibness worries me, brethren. For that doesn’t sound as if the seed of God was in that man’s heart. That sounds as if he wanted to get some of this world and some of heaven too. That sounds, as Dr. Brown says, as if he wanted to raise hell on his way to heaven.

Whenever a man allows any doctor or any interpretation of the text or any secondary meaning of a Greek word to provide an excuse for carnal living, that man is a hypocrite. And that man, I have serious reasons to believe, has never been born again.

Now I want to read an old hymn to you here. I want to read an old hymn. I went upstairs and got this because I want to read it to you. Here’s a man, and here’s what he says. Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, thine all-victorious love, shed in my heart abroad, then shall my feet no longer row, rooted and fixed in God. Oh, that in me the sacred fire might now begin to glow, burn up the dross of base desire and make the mountains flow. O that it now from heaven might fall and all my sins consume. Come, Holy Ghost, for thee I call, Spirit of burning, come! Refining fire, go through my heart, illuminate my soul, scatter thy life through every part and sanctify the whole.

Does that sound like Paul? It does. Then he concludes by saying, my steadfast soul from falling free shall then no longer move, While Christ is all the world in me and all my heart is love.

You see, the Wesleys have been greatly misunderstood. And they have been made to teach a patented sinless perfection, which they never taught at all. They taught perfect love. They taught that when God had sufficiently purged us and cleansed us, that we were filled with love, then we wouldn’t backslide and we wouldn’t go astray, and the old things we used to do would fall off, and we’d be innately pure, because of the love of God that was shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost.

But we have that in the text now, and people get up and quote that text, but they don’t have it. The love of God shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost. They taught perfect love, the Wesleys did. And somebody said, But Mr. Wesley, I have perfect love, and I failed the Lord in sin. What shall I do? Confess it, he said. Let the people know. He said, this doctrine won’t be harmed by honest confession, but it’ll be harmed by hypocrisy. He said, tell it out.

I’m not a Wesleyan. I’m not a Moravian or Nazarene or Methodist, but I believe what the Bible says. And my brethren, if we would spend more time, or as much time, seeking to be holy as we do, proving that we can’t be, our spiritual lives would rise wonderfully, and the love of God would be shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost.

We sing the songs of Francis Ridley Havergal. Sing them glibly, almost flippantly. But do you know what Francis Ridley Havergal said? She said, I had been reading my Bible, and I had been reading 1 John, and she said, I had been longing, oh, how I’d been longing in my heart that I might be holy.

And she said, I read in my Bible, where it said, in the first chapter of 1 John, The blood of Jesus Christ cleanseth us from all sin. And she said, suddenly God enabled me to believe, and I bowed my head over my Bible, and raised my hands to God, and for the first time in my life believed that God meant what he said. And she said from that, oh, the change, the change, the change.

Well, now, my friends, if you Christians, whatever denomination you belong to, whatever group you are with, if you Christians can run a temper and not worry, get over it and cool off, I worry about you. And if you can commit any other kind of sin, inward, in thought, outward, in act, or in your words, and still not be distressed over it, I have reason to worry about you. For nature always seeks nature, and the nature of God in a man will seek God again and leap up as fire leaps to fire.

Oh, that in me, oh, that in me that from heaven it now might fall, and all my sins consumed. Do you believe that there is provision in the gospel to deliver you from sin?

Now, this is not a question of eradication. We’re not going to be metaphysicians tonight, practical Christians, down-to-earth Christians. Let the metaphysicians fight over that. Just in case any of you don’t know what’s going on in the world, I’ll tell you something. Fundamentalism has gone bankrupt.

That is, the old, dried fundamentalism that we used to know, that insisted you couldn’t be clean, and that there was no such thing as being filled with the Holy Ghost and all that. There’s been a change, rather.

And when God sent a certain Englishman to the north side, he did a wonderful work for Chicago. And he helped, he helped me. I didn’t need his preaching, but I needed a big man over there that could believe about the same thing and dare to say it. And I heard him stand before an Alliance Council once.

This man, and I don’t make him responsible for my teaching, only for his. But he said this. He said, is there another work of grace to purge a man after his conversion? He said, how could I deny it in the face of what the Bible teaches and what Christian biography says? I heard him say it.

And so, there are hungry souls who find him in Moody Bible Institute, who find him in Wheaton College. And they call me up and say, I’d like to talk with you. I don’t have any panacea. I’ve got no pill I can give them. But I only know this, that nobody ever longed to be holy that God didn’t meet him pretty soon. Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled.

And for you to go about judicially protected from the fires of hell and satisfied with it is a frightful blasphemy. But for you to go about reverently thankful that you’re saved from the fires of hell and then go on from there and say, O God do for me. I don’t quite understand it, Father. All kinds of doctrines afloat about it.

But I only know one thing. And Thou hast said and given me reason to believe you would make me holy. And my heart, deep calleth unto deep. And my heart calls unto Thy heart that I might be holy. O God, make me holy. You can’t talk like that to God very long until changes begin to take place within you, brethren. Yes, sir.

In the olden days they used to have Methodist preachers come up for ordination. They’d say to them, has God made your heart holy? Well, they said, I don’t know. They said, are you longing after it? They said, oh, yes. They said, okay, they’d ordain it. They just wanted to know that the longing after God was there.

All right, I’ve preached myself out and it’s time to quit. There’s lots more to say. But what are we going to do about it? Now, I could do this. I could give an altar call and a lot of you people, especially young people, would be up here at the altar. But I don’t think it’ll do you any good.

I think what you need to do is to seek God like Moses and Paul and Christ and the saints of other days and go to Him with confession, detailed and painful confession of inner impurity, and ask Him by the fire of the Spirit and the power of the blood to make you inwardly, deeply, purely clean. And dare to believe that He will do it. And keep pressing your case.

I believe that the Lord will help you and hear you. And you can’t go to very many people in Chicago and ask about this because they wouldn’t be able to help you. They’d either give you a stereotyped formula that they’ve gotten or else they’d dismiss you and say you’re worried about yourself. Don’t you know Christ was holy for you? So, neither one would help you. So why don’t you go home and look up in your Bible every passage that tells you you can be a clean and inwardly pure of heart and clean and like Christ, and then press on and press on and press on. Don’t worry about doctrines but press on until He has made you inwardly pure and cleansed you from these things.

Somebody says, has God done that for you, Mr. Tozer? Well, I’ll tell you this. You don’t know my disposition. And you don’t know what a tangle you’d think when I was a boy, first converted. You would think that I was a cross between a wolverine and a wildcat and a bull. And the fact that I can even be reasonably decent is a triumph of the grace of God in a disposition such as I have by nature. And brethren, God can do this for you, and He wants to.

Now, Brother Chambers, we’re going to sing. I don’t want you to pick the number or not.

Tags Holy Living, Sanctification

Messages

A.W. Tozer Talks

Post author By pshappard
Post date June 7, 2026

“The Rich Young Ruler”

The Rich Young Ruler Download

The Rich Young Ruler

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

October 7, 1956

Now it takes a good deal of courage to preach on old texts, familiar ones, texts that come up every so often in the Sunday school lesson, that every traveling preacher uses, but it’s here, it’s God’s book, and I want to talk to you about the rich young ruler tonight. There came one to him, that is to our Lord, and said unto him, this is in the 19th chapter of Matthew, good master, what good thing shall I do that I may have eternal life? And Jesus said to him, why callest thou Me good? There is none good but one, that is, God, but if thou wilt enter into life, keep the commandments. Don’t you know that you’re a Jew, you’ve been taught?

Well, he said, which? Are there some commandments I don’t know about? And Jesus said, no, the regular ones, thou shalt do no murder, thou shalt not commit adultery, the ten commandments, He said.

And the young man saith unto Him, all these things have I kept from my youth up, what lack I yet? And Jesus said unto him, if thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven, come and follow me. But when the young man heard that saying, he went away sorrowful, he sorrowful, went away, for he had great possessions. Now that’s the story.

And we see in it Jesus and a young man. And this young man is typical of many, young and older, that I have met, and that are everywhere around about, high in religious circles, but miserable. Maybe yet I’m getting more sensitive to it, but I think that I have never had a year in which more people, high up in church circles, sought me out to know what’s the matter with them, than this year.

Now if they were only beginners, or not Christians at all, I would say that’s normal. If I have never known God, or never been near to God, and have no religious standing whatever, it’s quite expected that I should try to seek the way. But it is the people, many of them, who are high up, and are heard from, and whose names are current names, even in evangelical circles.

And here was one of them, a ruler of the synagogue, that would be a pastor, somebody in charge of a synagogue. The word ruler here doesn’t mean with a crown, and scepter, and robe, it simply means a chairman, a president, a pastor we would say, in charge of a local worshiping group. And this young man comes to Him and says, good master, what shall I do, that I may have eternal life? And here is a young fellow, leading the worship of the ancient people, and yet himself, not sure about eternal life, or if anything is sure, he’s sure he doesn’t have it.

Now this is more common than we know, and I am beginning to ask, what’s happened anyway, and what have they done to us? And what have they fed us? And where have they led us? That the bright, crisp assurance, the brittle, bright, shining assurance that our fathers knew, scarcely find it any place anymore. Hardly anyone knows. Hardly anybody has the inner witness that rings bright, and clear, and sharp, and he knows where he is, and knows why, can stand up, and smile, and grin at the whole world, and lift his hand to heaven, and say, I know that I know, there’s very little of that much anymore.

Now, here was this young fellow longing for eternal assurance. He wanted something more than a conclusion drawn from a text. He wanted more. He wanted the knowledge in his own heart that he had entered into a state of eternal benediction, a place, we call, that I may have eternal life. And he’s asking the way, and you’ll notice his question is, what good thing shall I do that I might have eternal life?

Now, our Lord Jesus Christ had never studied the books, but He was a master in dealing with people. He was a master psychologist, which means simply that He knew the ways of men and how their minds work. And that’s all psychology is, is how your mind works. When they make philosophers out of them, and soothsayers, and nerve healers, and all the rest, then they’re no longer psychologists, nor students of how the mind works. They’re quack doctors.

But Jesus was a great psychologist in that He knew how the human mind worked, and He heard what this fellow said. And He appraised him quickly, with a flash, and knew that here was a young pastor who had come to Him to find out how he might have eternal life. He’d been reading in the Psalms of Zion, and he’d been reading the great, noble, sonorous Hebrew Scriptures from the Psalms, and from Isaiah, and from Moses, and from the Minor Prophets.

And he had been lifting his hands to God, and leading them out in prayer, and still this young man was miserable because there was an aching lack within his own heart. And Jesus knew that, and read into what he, the young man, said infinitely more than you and I could have done. So He took him where he found him, and for the sake of the argument, He accepted him at his own estimate.

And He said, now, here you come to Me, and you lay this matter of your relation to God and eternal life, you lay this on the foundation of doing good things to obtain life. Now, he said, in that case, let’s go back, and let’s think about it. Just how good would that thing have to be, young fellow? Just how good would that thing have to be, because you know there’s only one good, and that’s God, and if you’re going to do something good enough to move God to give you the gift of eternal life, how good’s that going to have to be? Seeing that there’s only one good, and you don’t think I’m God, so you called me good master, and you talked about a good deed that would bring you eternal life, and you called me good master, good teacher, all in the same breath.

Now, if you want to start there, I’ll argue with you on that basis. If you want to move out into the realm of good deeds and merits and virtue that wins life, why, all right. How good is this going to have to be? There is only one who is good, and that’s God, and how are you going to be good master? If there’s only one good, and that’s God, and to win anything from God on those terms, you’d have to do something good enough for God to accept.

So, young fellow, if you insist on buying your way in, I’ve got the answer. Keep the commandments. That’s the way you do it. If you want to buy your way in, keep the commandments. You know the commandments. The young fellow said, which ones? He said, you know the commandments, the commandments of God, the will of God for you. And the young man stood there and said these words to him, all these have I kept from my youth up.

Now, that young man, no doubt, had kept certain commandments from his youth up. I doubt whether that young fellow had ever murdered. He probably had never committed adultery. And I suppose that he never stole. And I would suppose that he might have honored his father and his mother.

The Jews did that as a rule. But one of the strangest things that I know is how a whole population of religious people down the years from that time on have completely, each one has completely misunderstood this thing and have accepted this young man’s testimony as being valid. That he had kept these from his youth up.

And many a sermon has been preached in which this young fellow has been made a Sir Galahad, whose heart was as the heart of, strength was as the strength of ten. Was that Galahad or somebody else? I don’t know. Somebody whose heart was as the heart of ten, strength of ten, because his heart was pure. And they’ve made this young fellow out to be a wonderful young chap.

Now, he was what we call a moral man. That is, he was good enough to deceive himself and bad enough to damn himself. But he didn’t know that. Because he was good enough, he deceived himself, and because his goodness prevented him from knowing his badness, he turned his back on God and walked away.

Now, people say, any kind of religion is all right. I just want to ask that question. Is any kind of religion all right? Is any kind of a mustard plaster all right for a cancer? Is any kind of food all right for a baby? Is any kind of an old wreck all right to put fifty people in and take them three miles up in the air?

No, my friends, sometimes having anything is worse than having nothing. And if I were going to go to hell from anywhere, I’d rather go to hell from the Baliem Valley than from Chicago, Illinois. Because in the Baliem Valley, they don’t know much and they don’t think they’re anything.

And I would rather, much rather, have no religion at all than to have just enough to deceive me. And that’s exactly what the young man had. He had just religion enough to deceive him, and he was just righteous enough to make himself think that he was all right.

Now, had he kept the law of God, I want to ask you whether he had or not. The Bible says, Thou shalt have no other gods before Me. Doesn’t it say that? It does. And I believe that Jew and Catholic and Protestant and all of us together would agree that whatever comes before God is God to the man. And that whatever shuts God out and stands between the soul and God is an idol. It’s a God. Thou shalt have no god before me. I must be first in your life.

And here was a young man who was very rich, and when our Lord put to him on his own terms the question of selling everything and giving it away and becoming a theological student, going to school, to him and following Him, he turned his back on it. He turned his back on God because he had another God that he wouldn’t admit.

And here was a young man in a synagogue, a young pastor in a church, raising his hands solemnly to heaven and praying in the great noble words of David and Isaiah and Moses and leading out in the Psalms of Zion and reading the Scriptures and worshiping with his people. And yet unknown to them, he had a God tucked away, and when the chips were down, he chose the God of gold instead of the God of his fathers.

That young man was not a keeper of the law. He shattered and smashed the first one like a glass on a pavement, because when the God of his fathers said, sell everything and follow Me, he turned his back flat upon Him and walked away.

And then it also said, not in the Ten Commandments, but our Lord summed the Ten Commandments like this, so it’s here, thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart. And when it came down to a question of love for God or love for his wealth, he went away because he had great possessions. So, he broke this summation of all the commandments, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God, and thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.

Now all around about him were the poor, lying by the gates beautiful and lying by the pool of Siloam, and begging as they do still, they say, crying, Bacchus, Bacchus, begging on the streets in the Middle East. And there they were by the hundreds and multiplied hundreds, I suppose running up into the thousands, and this young man had a big sock and had it full. He had great possessions, the Word says, great possessions.

But all around about him there were the poor. All around about him were old ladies starving and old men. And there they were, and there were little children with hardly a crust to keep them alive. And there were the lepers picking and grubbing roots to stay alive and eating grasshoppers and snails and worms to keep their poor emaciated bodies from falling apart. And yet this young man could stand in the temple and pray and lead out in song and glorify the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and yet he was a rich man with poor people all around him.

And when our Lord suggested as a condition of following Him that he distribute his goods, the young man flatly refused to do it. The second is like unto it, thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. Did that man love his neighbor as himself? He thought he was a noble law-keeper and could look into the searching eyes of Jesus and say, all these I have kept from my youth up. He wasn’t lying, he was simply terribly deceived, for he had broken these commandments.

And thou shalt not covet is another one, the last one in the Decalogue. Thou shalt not covet, and it names a great many things, thou shalt not covet. And that word covet in the rest of the Bible and in the Old Testament and in the New Testament is made to mean want anything inordinately.

So, thou shalt not covet was another one. He shattered that one wide open, standing on his feet there. Because when the Lord said thou shalt distribute thy goods, get rid of them and come and follow me, and be like Peter and the rest of them poor and own nothing, I own nothing, come and go with me. For this is a new thing that’s starting, this is the new regeneration that’s taking place. Come with me. He flatly refused, he couldn’t leave his bank account and his property.

So, he was a covetous man, and he was a self-lover instead of a lover of his neighbor. And he was a lover of wealth instead of a lover of God, and he had something else ahead of God. And so, the commandment was broken, the commandments were broken.

And a Jew once said, he that breaks one commandment has broken them all. And the commandments of God hang from the ceiling like links of chains. And we’re down at the lower end, and if one of those links is broken, the whole chain goes to pieces. And so he had broken these commandments, and I don’t know how many more.

Now my brother, what does this teach us? It teaches us a lot, but among those things, this is one that it’s entirely possible to imagine ourselves to be all right when we’re not all right. It’s entirely possible to have so jockeyed with our conscience, and so played over the checkerboard of our conscience, that we imagine everything is all right. And we can stand in the presence of God and say, I’ve kept these from my youth up. I’m not as these other men.

Now I don’t like to debunk anybody, but here’s a young man that’s been waiting to be debunked for 2,000 years, nearly. People have accepted him when he said, I’ve kept them. Everybody said, so long, thou hast kept them. He hasn’t kept them, and he didn’t keep them, and he was a lawbreaker, and a covetous man, and a self-lover, and a money lover, and he didn’t love God.

Now, Jesus our Lord laid before him the terms of salvation, and those terms of salvation were three, full acknowledgment of sin, not defense, complete trust in Christ, and utter abandonment to Christ. Now those are the terms he laid down here, and he never made any different terms anywhere else.

As soon as the young man had stood there and told how good he was, and right standing knee-deep in broken laws, and dared to stand there knee-deep and say, I’ve never broken a law in my life, Lord. All right, he said, farewell. And then He began to expose him in laying bare and cutting to him with a sharp scalpel, until the inner life of the man was laid bare, full acknowledgment of sin, not defense.

Any man who is penitent, and will go before God in supposed penitence, and will remind God of one sin he didn’t commit, is not a penitent man. Because if there are one hundred possible sins, and I’ve only committed ten of them, I will be so overwhelmed if I’m truly penitent, I will be so overwhelmed with the ten that I have broken, that the ninety that I haven’t will never be remembered. And before the great God Almighty, I will on my knees grovel and tremble and cry out and say, I’m an unclean man, O God, remembering the laws that I have broken.

An outlaw is not a man who breaks all the laws of this country. An outlaw is a man who only breaks two or three. Old Jesse James only broke about two laws, the law that says you shall not rob, and the law that says you shall not kill. Those aren’t the only two laws Jesse James broke, just two of them. And I suppose there were thousands of laws on the statute books, but he broke two or three or four at most. But he was an outlaw nevertheless, with a price on his head.

And so, when I come before my God as an outlaw returning home, as a prodigal returning back from the swine pen, and as a publican beating my breast and crying, I have sinned, I’ll not be dickering with God about the sins I didn’t commit. Even though I didn’t commit them, I’m not likely to be conscious of that. The fact that I have broken any of God’s laws or committed any sins will so overwhelm me that I will go before God as though I were the worst sinner in all the wide world.

A man one time who was one of the finest men that ever lived in the world, he’d lived in all good conscience before God all his life, and he had been the strictest sect of the Pharisees, and he’d kept the laws of his God with great care, and said, I’ve lived before God and man. And yet that same man who said that said, I am chief of sinners. Now, that’s both true and false. It’s true the way Paul meant it, but for anybody to try to pin on the man Paul as many gross and heinous sins as Bluebeard and Hitler and the rest would be ridiculous.

He was a noble man, this man Paul, a strong, noble man, and lived the best he could in the law of God and did the best he could in his unregenerate state. And he was a member of the Sanhedrin, like our Supreme Court, yonder in Washington, and nobody could pin on him the cheap, dirty little sins that you see everywhere in the newspapers. And yet the fact that he had committed any sin at all, bit down so hard on the man that it crushed him like an eggshell.

And out of his crushed heart, he cried, I am chief of sinners, I’m the worst sinner in the world. We know better, but he didn’t. He thought he was the worst man in the world. And that’s why God could make him one of the best men in the world, because he cried, I’m the worst man in the world.

The problem now is that we don’t get that sense of being the chief of sinners. This young man didn’t. He stood, he dared to stand before the very Man of whom he was inquiring the way of eternal life. He dared to stand before Him and defend himself. I’ve kept these laws, he said, I’m no heathen. But he hadn’t. And the very fact that he could remember that he’d kept any disqualified him instantly for eternal life acknowledgement of sin, not defense, and complete trust in Christ.

There’s no hope in the wide world apart from complete trust in Christ. Christ Jesus the Lord is the lifeboat, and there’s got to be complete trust in the lifeboat. He’s the rope down which we climb from tenth story, and it’s either trust that rope or perish. He’s the panacea that heals all ills, and we take that, or we die. He is the bridge from hell to heaven, and we take that bridge, or we stay in hell. And so complete trust in Christ, absolute trust in Christ.

I wonder how many people really trust Christ; I wonder. We trust Christ and this, trust Christ and that. Like the woman who was baptized by immersion, later she was baptized by sprinkling, later she was baptized by pouring. And somebody said, Madam, what seems to be the difficulty? Can’t you make up your mind? Oh yes, she said, I just thought that if I took all three of them, if one didn’t do any good, another one would. And so, she took all that she could.

Now that kind of thing is no faith at all. She had no faith that she might just as well stay dry, because she was experimenting. It was Christ and baptism, Christ and pouring, Christ and sprinkling, Christ and something else. And I’ve said before and repeat now, Christ will never stand at the right side of a plus sign.

If you insist upon having plus Christ or Christ plus, Christ indignantly walks away in His holy dignity and refuses ever to be the other side of a plus sign. Christ plus anything, and you haven’t got Christ at all. And this young man had everything, or at least he thought he had, but he had nothing, an utter abandonment to Christ.

Now those are, that’s all, Christ taught that all the way along, that was nothing new. He simply skillfully got that fellow into a place where He could say that to him, that’s all, and said it, a complete abandonment to Christ.

And I wonder how many Christians have abandoned themselves to Christ. We are teaching nowadays, accept Christ. That’s the only word you ever hear anymore. A painless, accept, an easy-believism that accepts. But this idea that you got to abandon yourself to Christ has not been in our theology.

And I think that may be the reason that there are so many high-end religious circles that are asking, coming and writing and saying, what can I do? What can I do? Have you got any help for me? Can you tell me anything? And it is a process of re-education. You’ve got to start all over with them. Because they’ve been told to accept and they’ve accepted, but they’ve never been told, I guess, apparently not, that the terms of salvation were acknowledgment of sin and complete trust in Christ and abandonment to Christ.

Now these, the rich young ruler simply wouldn’t take. He just wouldn’t accept these terms at all. The Scripture says, he sorrowing went away. He wanted eternal life, but he wanted something else more. He wanted to follow Christ, but he wanted something else more. And yet he was a religious man, and no doubt wore on his lapel a button showing that he had attended Sunday school so many times in a row without missing.

Now this reveals what? That not everyone that is lost is morally careless. Some care very, very deeply, but they’re lost. And some that are now beyond any hope cared very deeply while they lived, but they’re lost. Let us not imagine that only the careless perish. The careful perish too. This young man perished, and he cared enough to come to Jesus and ask the way of life in a reverent, tender question that’s come down the years.

And it teaches us also that not everyone that is lost is prayerless. For this young man talked to God and said, how can I be saved? And in the synagogue led the prayers. And as a Jew and as a leading religious Jew, as a praying man, but he was also a lost man and a lawbreaker and a sinner and a rebel.

And the Lord revealed it skillfully. He was a surgeon. Not everybody that’s lost is prayerless, let’s not forget it. Some pray earnestly on their road to perdition. They want God, but they don’t want God enough. They want eternal life, but they want something else worse. They want to follow Jesus, but they want something else more.

Dear God, burn this in, that we may see how frightful it is, that we can be respectable and religious and prayerful and careful and eager and ask questions and talk about religion and consult people that ought to know and still be lost.

We think nowadays that if we find an eager seeker that we found a treasure. Actually, we rarely find anybody that is as eager as that rich young ruler. Where are they? Where are they that are this eager?

Nowadays, you got to go to them. You got to prove to them that you don’t intend to harm them or don’t demand anything of them. You got to go and joke with them, kid with them, prove that you know all about their sports and all about everything they know. Find a common ground of fellowship and be a powsy-wowsy, back-slapping fellow, and then slowly tell them in gingerly that if they’ll accept Jesus, they’ll have peace of mind, and everything will be all right. Amen. And they’ll have good grades in school. That’s modern Christianity.

And that’s why not only plain people, but the leaders are coming, as it were, by night and saying, what’s the matter with me, brother? What’s the matter with me? Only in recent months, I have been questioned by people that I thought were high up yonder.

They say, Brother Tozer, what can I do? I’m miserable. Because they’d been leaked into the kingdom of God. They’d got in between the cracks. They’d blown in as dust. They’d crawled in a window. They hadn’t come in the way of repentance and abandonment and trust. And the result, of course, is what we could expect. No inner witness, no assurance, no peace.

And now, if we think we’ve found a seeker, we say, that’s wonderful, he’ll be all right, he’s a seeker. If you could see all the seekers that are in hell tonight, who were seekers while they were on earth, but they didn’t seek in the right way, or having sought and found what they had to do, they refused to do it.

This rich young ruler was a seeker. And they’d have put him down on a card somewhere and counted him. He’d have been a statistic in some evangelist’s book. But he walked away and left Christ cold. For he walked away cold and left Christ. He turned his back flat on Jesus.

And you know what I’ve seen right in this church? Now, there’s no use, we might as well come in from Jerusalem, to Chicago, and from Chicago to Englewood, and from Englewood to the corner of 70th and Union.

You know what I’ve seen in this church? I’ve seen young women that I thought were Christians and had a right to believe they were Christians, and who’ve sung in this choir, and I’ve seen them walk right down those steps and right down that aisle and right down the steps onto the sidewalk and marry some wretched tramp and turn their back on Jesus Christ. I’ve seen it. They wanted to be Christians, all right, and they loved Brother McAfee’s joyous song leading, and he even liked my preaching, maybe. But when nature stirred, they turned their back on God and walked away. I’ve seen that, and I’ve seen some who were in high circles turn their back on the things of God and go to the world, give themselves up.

A man who once led singing from this platform, now, unless he’s been restored to God within the last 12, sings beer ads over the radio, he needed money and went and got it. Don’t you think that I’m being unethical either? I dare say what I want to say. And a man with a voice, silky, soft voice like an angel, singing tenor in a beer quartet, walked right out of the house of God, because while they want God, they want something else more. And brother, you can have what you want most.

And this young man got what he wanted most. I don’t know anything more about him. I only know that the last sight we have of him is him walking away and Jesus looking after him, sorrowful. The two were sorrowful. He was sorrowful, but so was Jesus. And these who have walked away and out of our choir and out of our church, into the arms of sinners, haven’t gone very happily.

And I’ve had some of them come and consult with me. And try to get a pastoral excuse for turning their back on God. Well, I’ve committed a lot of sins in my day, which the blood of the everlasting covenant I trust has cleansed and blotted away forever. But that’s not one of them. I never told anybody it’s all right when it wasn’t all right. And that’s no virtue.

But for every one of those virtues, as a minister that I might have practiced, God Almighty knows how many infinite numbers of sins I’ve committed. It’s only to say that they have never succeeded in getting me to soften it up for them.

A man wrote in to me and said, dear Mr. Tozer, I have been attending a certain church and there’s a young woman in that church. She and I have been keeping company and we love each other, and we want to get married. She’s had a history.

Here it is. She married a young man who was in service. They lived together a while. He went into the service, I think, if I recall, and she began to lose interest in him. And when he came back, she didn’t care for him anymore. She’d fallen out of love. That abominable, twice-damned Hollywood expression, falling out of love. And now we want to get married. Should I marry her or not?

Ask my secretary what I dictated back to her. Of course not. You’re a Christian. Of course not. She fell out of love. God pity her and love her. She fell out of love. And so she wanted another man because she’d fallen out of love and wasn’t interested anymore. But they do it like a horse snorting across a field. They walk straight out to sin against God Almighty and turn their back on Jesus Christ.

Now, the victorious life, why have I preached around here so long about the victorious life? And we have scarcely a tattered remnant of people that will say, I’m living the victorious life.

Well, I’ll tell you, many are concerned and eager and inquiring, how can I be filled with the Holy Ghost? How can I die to myself and live a life in the ranges above the necessity of everlastingly tumbling around in the wallow of iniquity? How can I live a life in Christ Jesus? And you tell them that unknown to you, there’s a sock of gold someplace. And you go away sorrowing. They want to live like A.J. Simpson, but they want to be worldly. And you can’t have both. They want to be as saintly as McShane and as worldly as the world. You can’t have both. The love of the present world, the love of the present world.

You say, if you preach against the present world, Mr. Tozer, we’ll lose all of our young people, and I’ll stand and cry at the door while you go. But I won’t deceive, and I won’t damn you by telling you that you can be a Christian and love the world. You can’t.

You can be a hypocrite and love the world. You can be a deceived ruler of the synagogue and love the world. You can be a cheap, frothy, modern Christian and love the world, but you can’t be a Bible Christian and love the world. And if you’ll all leave me, I’ll tell you that. Stand alone and grieve. But I won’t lie to you. Love this present world.

But don’t you think, my brother, that everybody that loves this present world is happy. He loves it and he’s going to have it. But it grieves him that he’s got to take it and lose so much. The rich young ruler wanted that money, but it grieved him that he had to pay such a price to get it.

But no man ever paid more for a thing than he thought it was worth. That is, if it is worth a million dollars, no man is going to pay a million and a half for it. You always think we get at least as much as we pay for it. Value received is the phrase. And if you paid ten dollars, you expect ten dollars back in value. And the rich young ruler wanted God, but he didn’t want him bad enough to give up his wealth.

And he was satisfied with his bargain, but he wished he could have had both. And he chose one and grieved for the other that he lost. He chose money and grieved for the God he deserved. He chose wealth and grieved for the Savior who he turned his back on.

So, there are a lot of religious schizophrenics, with split personalities, that’s what I mean. They’re split personalities. I’ve never seen a happy backslider in my whole life. Finney used to preach on a terrible Old Testament text called, the backslider in heart shall be filled with his own ways.

Brother, you can get filled with your own ways. I’ve talked to women who in an earlier time had married some rascally bum that they fell in love with and had deserted God to do it, and they’re miserable now. And I know men who have given up God and walked away, but I don’t know a happy one.

I know them, they plunge in like a wild horse, and they try to make up for what they lost, and they grieve because they had to give up so much to get so little, but they felt what they were getting was as much as they were given. That’s what’s the matter with us. There isn’t a person listening to me that couldn’t be filled with the Holy Ghost between now and nine o’clock, and it’s 8:25 now, if you meet God’s condition. But you won’t meet God’s conditions, and therefore we go, and the flag flies at half-mast and the battery’s down halfway, and we go weakly about our way wondering, why Master, why could not we cast these out?

So, we go away sorrowing, but the point is, we go away. We go away sorrowing, we read the book. I don’t know how many people have written in to me, I don’t know how many people have talked to me in person, and have said, Mr. Tozer, the book “The Pursuit of God” opened a new world for me, but I am afraid to ask them whether they walked into that world or not.

You can open a new world and turn your back on it. A rich young ruler had that happen to him. It isn’t enough that you should want to know the power of a crucified life and a Christ-indwelt life and a Spirit-filled life, it isn’t enough that you should want it. You must want it more than you want anything else. You must want it enough to abandon yourself to Jesus Christ to get it. You must want it enough to turn your back on whatever you know is between you and Him and walk straight into the arms of Jesus.

And you can read books and say, that was a wonderful book. No doubt that rich young ruler told the story of his encounter with Christ to his grandchildren, if he lived that long. But he was still a sinner, still a lawbreaker, still Christless, still godless, still a money-lover, still a covetous man, still a hypocrite now for his veil had been taken away.

He turned his back and went away sorrowful that he had to pay so much to get what he wanted. He had to pay Jesus. He sold Him as Judas Iscariot sold Him. Judas sold him for 30 pieces and he sold Him for whatever the big sock was he had back home with the money. He wouldn’t follow Jesus.

Oh people, am I over serious? No, I think not. No, I think not. I don’t think I’ve made an extreme statement here tonight or one that needs modification. And I don’t think I have been as severe as the New Testament itself is. And I don’t think I’ve said as much as Jesus said when He laid down His terms in the New Testament.

What about you? What about you? You want Him and you want His best, but do you want that worse than you want anything else? Or are you a split-personality, reaching with one hand for this precious thing you want on earth and for another for that precious thing you want in heaven? He that is not on with Me is against Me. You can’t have both. You can’t serve God and mammon. You can’t serve Christ and the world.

So, we go away sorrowing, but we go away.

Are you too going away, said Jesus once. Are you too going away?

What about it, friend? What about it, young lady? What about it? In your young heart, you feel a yearning tonight to be all God wants you to be. But the old nature’s strong inside of you. And somewhere, there’s an attachment, an ambition, a boy, or an ambition, or something else, a pride, an unwillingness to pay the price somewhere. And you’re hurt in your heart, and you grieve that you’re not going to pay the price. And you, young fellow, you’re not a pagan. You’re not an agnostic, an atheist. You’re not an infidel.

You’re an inquirer. You’re concerned. You ask questions. You like singing. You even enjoy a sermon if it isn’t too long. You’re religious-minded, but you want something else worse than you want God. And you’ll never get God till you want Him first and most.

Would you bow your heads with me in a little time of prayer?

O Son of Man, Thou walkest as of old among us, unseen by mortal eye but visible to the heart. Thou walkest among us, thou, as Thy seamless garment has not lost its ancient healing power, and Thy delicate fingers have not lost their surgical skill, and Thy great heart has not lost its power to forgive, and Thy wide arms are not hanging at Thy side but stretched wide to receive penitent men and women.

We, not thee, Lord, we’ve changed. Not Thee, Lord, we. O Christ, Thou art here, saying, come unto Me. And we say, what are the terms? And we remember high school, and we remember the job, and we remember the fellows we run with. We remember the girl we go with. We remember the boy that we sit by the phone and wait for him to call. We remember, Lord, the group we play cards with. We remember these things, and we go away sorrowing.

O my God, how long shall this continue? How long shall old Satan continue to reap these harvests? We beget them, and conceive them, and give them birth, and bring them up, and teach them, and give them schooling.

And Satan reaches up as a robin grabs a ripe cherry, and plucks it off, and swallows it. And that which we’ve sweat over, and prayed over, and labored for, and worked for, Satan gets. How long, O my God, shall this continue to be? And how long shall the treasure of tears continue to perish?

While we wait a little moment here, before we close our prayer, are there those who would say, Mr. Tozer, include me in your prayer before you close. All right, I see you, young man back there. Who else? Who else? Yes, I see you, young lady.

Who else? I don’t say, don’t look around. We don’t have courage enough to put up our hand for people to see. If we haven’t got courage enough to address God. But you put your hand and say, pray for me. Who else? Yes, in the middle section here. Yes, sir. Two men. Any more here in this middle section? Now, yes, I see you. And who over here in the north section, to my left, to your right, over here, who would say, I want you to pray for me? Yes, I see you back there. Who else?

Now, dear Lord Jesus, we pray for these who said, pray for me. O Lord Jesus, Satan hath desired to have these that he might sift them like wheat, and he wants them. Thou didst buy them with blood. Thou didst give thy life for them, and Thy soul was made an offering for sin. Thou didst give Thyself a ransom because you loved them so.

But Satan is trying to win them, and they’re caught in the middle. O Lord, we pray that they may this very night now, while there’s opportunity, believe and dare to believe that the blood of Jesus Christ cleanses from all sin. Make them willing now to look back to see the blood applied.

Help us all, Father, help us all. Don’t let any of us be deceived. Don’t let McAfee, nor Merrill, nor me, nor the board members, nor the Sunday school teachers, nor any missionaries who might be present, nor any of these who witnessed and testified on the street, nor in jails or hospitals. Don’t let any of us be deceived, Lord.

We want to know the whole truth now and have it over with so we can look up to heaven and say, arise, my soul, arise. Great God, help these people every last one of them.

Tags Discernment, God's Will

Messages

A.W. Tozer Talks

Post author By pshappard
Post date May 31, 2026

“Where There is No Vision, the People Perish“

Where There is No Vision the People Perish Download

Where There is No Vision, the People Perish

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

March 1, 1959

I want to call attention to the new issue of the Alliance Witness. It’s interesting, more than usual. I’ve written an editorial on Wesley’s poetic commentary, which some of you may find enjoyable.

Somebody already did, a lady had the courage to write me and ask where she could get it, and if she couldn’t get it, would I lend her mine. Well, I’m going to. I may never see it again, but I’m going to actually send it to her. She lives in Upper Darby, PA, very close to Chester, and she must be all right. William D. Carlson has a missionary, the kind of missionary needed today, which I think is most interesting. Bernard King has an article called, It Came, A Floodtide of Missionary Giving.

And then there’s a lovely picture, so lovely that your heart is moved by it, of Mr. and Mrs. Melvin Lobston, lovely faces, and a story of Melvin’s accident in which he was killed.

Then we also have here something that most of you will enjoy. That is the picture and the story of Dr. Richard A. Forrest, Dr. R. A. Forrest. Without a sound to indicate his passing, Dr. Forrest went into the presence of his Lord. He said he wanted to go with his flag flying and his boots on, and he did. He’s been here many times, and we loved him here and love his memory.

Then on the back is a picture of Raguel Chavon, who is the moderator. I’m sure those Indians would enjoy my pronunciation here. But Raguel P. Chavon, the moderator of the Alliance Marathi Churches in India, and the story of the self-supporting churches in India. I think this is a most unusual issue. If it comes to your home, why, that’s something else. But if it doesn’t, pick up a copy, keep it, any that are left, Brother Myers takes around and uses them in the neighborhood as he visits.

Now for the morning sermon. In Proverbs 29:18, I just want the first half of it, because as is often true with these proverbs, the second half says something else, quite away from the subject. First sentence, where there is no vision, the people perish. And if you are a margin addict or a lover of other versions, you will notice that, perish there, has to do with desolation and nakedness. Where there is no vision, the people are desolate.

Now, it is a cliché to say that we are serving God in a changing world. We sing a little song, wrongly attributed to a man named Alan, I don’t know how he got in it, but actually it was written by Sir John Bowering. One stanza says, Chance and change are busy ever, worlds decay and ages move. You and I might as well not attempt to change this. The only thing we can’t change is change. Chance and change are busy ever, worlds decay and ages move. And as time goes on, the face of the world is being altered.

Now, everybody under 20 will think, will wish I was somewhere else, or they were, because they won’t believe this. The reason they won’t believe it is they haven’t lived long enough to experience it. But everybody over 30, we leave the ones from 20 to 30 to figure it out, but everybody over 30 will begin to know that I’m telling the trope. Chance and change are busy ever, and we are serving God in a changing world.

And the face of the world is being altered by irresistible forces. There are at least four forces that are at work changing the face of the world. One is political.

Those of you who are old enough to remember the 30s, 37 and 38, will note a painful parallel between the rantings of Khrushchev and the rantings of the paper-hanger Hitler. He said, give me five years and you won’t know Europe. They gave him five years and they didn’t know Europe.

And there are parts of Europe that today lie in desolation and rubble. And the same irresponsible mouthings, the same troublemaking, the same moving from one part of the world to the other and starting trouble there and then withdrawing and starting trouble somewhere else like a gang of delinquent boys breaking windows and when the police rush there they go someplace else where the police are not and break a window, and keep a neighborhood in trouble. That’s what’s happening in the world now. Those political forces are at work. They’re at work in Africa.

About eight years ago, Brother Roseberry, while he was still chairman of our French West Africa field, said to me that he would give, well it’s been longer than eight, it could have been ten years ago. He said he would give Africa five years yet for missions to operate there, Christian missions to operate there. And he said communism and nationalism would take over and drive out the missionaries.

We have been driven out of China. We have been driven out of North Vietnam. We’ve been driven out of North Korea. We’ve been driven out of Arabia. And there is a likelihood, if things continue, that foreign missions, Christian missions will be driven out of Africa. Political changes are taking place. Political forces are changing the face of the world. And there are economic changes.

When I was a boy, they used to say about a man, in order to sort of commend him, to give him a compliment, they said he raised ten kids on a dollar a day. But you couldn’t raise a real healthy parakeet on a dollar a day now. And economically, the face of the world has changed. And biologically, there has been what they call a population explosion. It started with the Second World War.

You know, in those days, the soldiers said, if it moves, salute it. If you can lift it, pick it up. If you can’t lift it, paint it. If it cries, change it. If it’s hollow, rent it. And if it has wheels, buy it. That’s all gone now, and the population explosion has altered everything.

A few years back, you would ride out and you would see cows contentedly munching. And then now you go out there and you see a schoolhouse, a lodge hall, a movie picture house, a chain store, and a whole carpet of new houses. South Holland is an example of where our New Alliance Church has been located. Fortunately, in time, the population explosion has literally spattered the world with houses and homes and young couples and new children and overflowing schoolhouses, everything overflowing.

And then, of course, military. One of the forces that’s changing the world is the military force. I have myself lived in three different Americas.

I lived in the America from the time I was born near the turn of the century to 1917 when America entered the war. A new America was born out of the First World War. Then things went on.

And another, there was until between the two wars, we had a different world altogether from the world that we knew before the First World War. Then came the second, and after the second, we have a different world altogether.

If in 1925 you had talked about countdown, would anybody know what you meant? You’d think it was a kid’s game. If anybody had talked about orbiting Venus, as they did in the newscasts last night, you’d have smiled and said more of that Jules Verne stuff or H.G. Wells.

Now that’s common talk. I saw the other day a list of the new words that have been created in the last few years. Panelist, for instance, and simulcast, and countdown, and missile. Some of them are created and some of them are used in other ways than they had been, so it added up to a new word. And I suppose that you could do with 150 to 200 or maybe many more than that words that a little while before simply had no meaning, but political forces have changed the world completely. And the next world war will change it still more completely. If there’s another world war, as there undoubtedly will be an Armageddon, but we’ll not go into prophecy this morning.

Now, I say that we’re serving God in such a world as that. We’re not serving God in a static world. I wish that we could. I’m static by nature, I don’t mind telling you. But I have said that if God had made me a tree and made me conscious, I’d have been a happy man, rooted in one place, loving the familiar scenes and never changing. I don’t like to travel never did and like it less all the time. I get invited all around.

I was invited to Japan here last week, but I’m not going unless the Lord sends me because I’m too much of a tree by disposition. I like to stay. But you know we’re serving God in a changing world, not in a static world, but in a changing world.

And the Christian or the church that lives for just a little while will be forced to serve God under a set of circumstances different from those that were extant when he was converted, altogether different, in a radically new situation.

Your grandchildren, if the Lord tarry, will serve God in a world so different from the one you know now that your grandchildren will look at your pictures and laugh and will look back at the houses you lived in, the automobiles you drove, and grin and say, isn’t that quaint, if they used the word quaint in that day. A radically new situation.

If you’re going to serve God on and endure unto the end, you’re going to have to learn to adapt to all these situations. Rigidity is always a bad thing. You know rigidity belongs in the cemetery, and that’s the most rigid, most carefully well laid out and carefully planned and most conventional part of the world is the poor, pathetic cemetery. People are rigid there. They do not move; they do not adapt.

They say that intelligence is the ability to adapt mentally to a changing situation. You’re intelligent if instead of going straight down the line, you can adapt. You’re fast in your mental footwork to change with the new idea that comes up.

Now, if you’re going to serve God until the end, and I trust all of you are, then you’re going to have to serve Him under changing sets of circumstances. This one we know now will have to change, and the one that we’re going into will have to change. If the Lord tarry in another generation, we’ll have to be alert to see it change. We’ll have to occupy new territory and witness to a new generation.

But what do we mean now about the vision? Well, the vision, what does it mean? To follow Christ and to follow Him rightly, there must be a vision. There has to be a vision. But what do I mean by vision? I mean a knowledge of the inspired Word.

You see, we are the victims of the planners who know not the word. They know not the word. They’re the planners. They’re our city planners, and we can resist it all we will. We get shoved around by these planners. But those who know the Word, they have a vision. That is, they have insight and intelligent awareness.

The average person does not know where he is. He knows in a general way, or he can look at the street signs and tell. But mostly as touching situations and current circumstances, we don’t know where we are. Even newscasters and men who gather gossip all over the world from all halls of legislation and debate, from presidential palaces and palaces of kings, they know what is taking place, but they don’t know why.

Now, vision means that we not only know what’s taking place, but that we know why. And without a vision, people are desolate. People perish. Not only the people that they go to help, but they themselves, because they have not a vision.

Vision means insight, ability to see in, to see through. Back in the 11th chapter of the book of Isaiah, it tells about the Holy Spirit coming upon Jesus and making him of quick understanding in the fear of the Lord. That quick understanding in the Hebrew means a sense of smell. He has a quick sense of smell. He’s a bloodhound. He can tell smells.

A thousand pairs of gloves can lie in a pile, and a bloodhound will go in and pull one out, the glove that belongs to the man he’s after. Or he’ll rub that one glove out of a pile of fifty on the dog’s nose, and he’ll follow the scent of the man who wore the glove right through swamps and across rivers and on until he finds him. And God says the Holy Ghost comes on a man, and He makes him of a quick sense of smell.

He doesn’t simply vegetate and live in the world, letting circumstances push him wherever he will, but that he’s alert and alive and awake, and he can see, and he knows where he’s going. And he knows the current situation in which he lives.

I have not prayed to God that I might have the gift of divine healing. I did when I was a boy, but I soon gave that up. But I have long prayed to God that I might have prophetic insight, that I might live in the world and know what God is saying to the world at a given time, and to know what He’s saying to the church at a given time, to know what He’s saying. He doesn’t always say the same thing.

And what is good for fifty years ago still stands, but the emphasis may lie someplace else, when times and circumstances change. And the wise prophet is the one who has insight to know what God is saying at a given time, under a given set of circumstances, and to know our relation to conditions and the purpose of God in those changing or changed conditions.

Now, there are two purposes of God that I want to talk about briefly. There is the remote and the immediate. The remote purposes of God, of course, have been set as the beam upon which the airplane flies on, and it never alters any. Those are the purposes of God. They are, as far as we know, they involve Israel and the church and the nations, the earth and the heavens.

God has a remote plan for Israel. That is why I do not get excited when some little thing happens in Jordan or Iran, because those are immediate, short-term things. But the long-range plan of God must be carried out, and it will be carried out. God would not lie to Abraham, his friend, and God has a long-range purpose for Israel.

He also has a long-range purpose for the church. That long-range purpose is that she, after she has suffered a while and has bled sufficiently and groaned and wept enough and prayed and worshipped enough, she will be led into the presence of God on the arm of her Bridegroom, and that from north and south and east and west round the world the Bride shall be gathered, and Jesus Christ, who left the earth apparently a defeated man, shall come back bringing her on His arm to show unto to all created intelligences as being a Bride worthy of Her Bridegroom. God has that in mind for the Church, and that is a long-range purpose, and it can’t change and won’t.

Then for the nations, God has purposes for the nations. That is the reason I keep telling you, don’t you let yourself get excited about warnings from the scientists and the writers. Keep calm. God has His plans, His remote plans, plans way out there.

And the day will be when He will call all nations before Him, and there will be nations in that day as there are now. He will call the nations before Him. It won’t be one brown nation, so those who would have His intermarry all around the world are not going to win.

There will be nations and there will be tongues, and we won’t all be speaking Esperanto or basic English. The planners are trying to teach us Esperanto or basic English. They say we ought to cease to have so many languages. We’d love each other more if we only had one language, and so the poor butterfly brains are trying to create one language.

Listen, when Cain slew Abel, he spoke Abel’s language without an accent, whatever it was. And when he planned to take Abel out into the woods and murder him, he said in a language Abel could understand. Come on, brother, let’s take a walk. And there was no accent. A common language between Cain and Abel did not prevent Cain from murdering his brother.

We have fought Britain twice, and we speak the language of Britain, even though the British don’t think we do. But at least we make a stab at it. And we speak the language of Britain, and yet we fought Britain twice.

So, language doesn’t mean a thing, yet they say it does. The nations of the earth are going to have their languages redeemed from tongues and peoples and tribes. And so instead of the planners making us all one brown race with an antenna on top of our head and no hair as the comic artists make it, we’re going to remain very much as we are now until we see Jesus. I don’t know whether you scientists believe that or not, but it’s so.

All right, now, that’s the remote purpose. God has a remote purpose for this earth on which we live. I love the earth, always have loved the earth. I love the red birds that sit and sing their poor little goofy heads off these cold mornings because the sun is shining and the temperature is 30 and they don’t know the difference. But there they sit and sing to beat the band. You know, if they’d look at the thermometer out on our porch, they’d go back to bed. But because the sun is shining, they’re singing. I love the earth.

I love to see the trees blossom in the spring and lose their brown leaves in the fall. I don’t like too much snow. You can get enough even of a good thing, and while snow is beautiful, we overdid our beauty this year.

But I love the earth. I love God’s wonderful, lovely earth, and God has a plan for the earth. Don’t write the earth off, and don’t allow anybody to tell you why we’re going to dissolve it into atomic dust. We’re going to do nothing of the sort.

Jesus Christ, when He died on the cross, the blood that ran down over His legs and down off His toes onto the ground was earthy blood, blood that He had gotten out of the ground. It was the blood of men, the blood of man, made of dust. Though He was God, His body was man’s body.

And this is our Mother Earth, and when we call her Mother Earth, it’s not a poetic flight of fancy. It’s a reality, Eighty percent of it is water, and the rest is dust and earth, eighty percent water. And the part of us that’s from heaven is inside, the spirit, the soul, the mind. But physically we belong to the earth. It’s our mother, as God is the Christian’s father.

And God isn’t allowing old Mother Earth to be dissolved in atomic dust until the day when He burns all things up with fire. Then they will not be annihilated. They will simply be rejuvenated. The fire that Peter talks about in 2 Peter 3 is not a fire that makes ash, it’s a fire that burns out impurities and renews, as the fire of the Holy Ghost renews the heart of a Christian. So, He has His plans for the earth, and He has His plan for the heavens above.

Brother Chase said this morning that he kind of wished that one of our satellites would bump into a Sputnik and blow it up. But there’s too much room up there for them, you know. The traffic isn’t heavy enough up there yet for there to be any bumping. There’s plenty of room up there yet, but one of these days God is going to take His rake and rake the leaves off His front lawn, and they’ll be the Sputniks and all the rest of the satellites that we hurl up there in our pride. That’s the remote plan of God.

Then there’s the immediate plan of God. And the immediate has to do with current situations and conditions which break out because of political changes and because of economic forces and because of military campaigns. And now a vision means that while I keep in mind always the remote purpose of God, I’ve got to be able to adapt to the immediate purpose of God.

Now, that’s why we need a vision. We’ve got to know what the current situation is. And you know that it’s so easy to settle down and not know what the current situation is. And you think, you know, I think we did it here over the past few years unintentionally.

We love to sing so much in this church, and I’ve been preaching over the years about worship and the eternal wisdom and the Triune God and the Attributes, and people have been enjoying it, they tell me and coming to hear it. And we’ve been no trouble, nobody’s raising any fuss, no divisions.

And we have just enjoyed it to a point where it’s been wonderful. And even the people have moved away, and God knows they’ve been vast numbers. They’ve all left with a tear in their eye. Nobody wanted to go. But changing circumstances, chance and change are busy ever.

A sample of it was here about the latter part of May. I’ve got a wrap on my door here. And I said, come in. And in came Brother Campbell with that red face, you know, and a head innocent of hair. And he was really shocked and excited. And he was never an excitable man. And I said, hello, Brother Campbell, how are you? He said, good morning, and he sat down. He said, you know what, Brother Tozer? I said, no. He said, I have been transferred to Los Angeles, and I’ve got to report there by the 9th of June. Just a week or two away.

That was a sample. And his wife came up then, too, almost wringing her hands, as much as that good godly woman ever would. Said, what are we going to do? Well, they didn’t want to leave, but they had to leave. They wiped away a tear and said goodbye, and they have done it and done it. But mostly we like to hear the old truth. You don’t hear deep truth in too many places. And this church has enjoyed it tremendously. The chance and change are busy ever. Worlds decay and ages move.

And the situation, the current situation, is not what it was even five years ago. Conditions have changed, and the purposes of God, the immediate purposes of God, not the long-range purposes. They never change. But the immediate purposes, the plans of God, the strategic purposes of God.

Now, the present question is, for us, and I think that it is biblical, it’s here before us, the present question is, what direction is God moving now? Here my human sympathies conflict with the call of God. And you know that it’s possible for our human sympathies to go one way and the will of God to go another for a little while. It was so with Peter.

Jesus said to Peter, to his disciples, Peter heard it, He said, now the Son of Man, and they loved him so much, the Son of Man, they said, is going up to Jerusalem and He’s going to be arrested by the Gentiles, and the people are going to crucify Him. And Peter jumped up and put a comforting hand across Jesus’ shoulder and said, not so, Lord, not so. And Jesus said, ah, Peter, you don’t savor of heaven, you savor of earth. Your human sympathies are getting away with you.

It’s entirely possible to let our human sympathies miss the will of God if we don’t look out. And I’m in great danger of it because my human sympathies are away from what I believe the plan of God is.

And I refer particularly now to this church, this fellowship, having to relocate its place of worship and have a new field of service. My heart says, now wait a minute here. You don’t want to run away from the poor. You don’t want to let a neighborhood rot. You mustn’t do that. You must stay and minister to what we call the poor classes of people.

That’s where my sympathies lie. And you just have to bump me twice real hard, and I’d go down and apply for assistant superintendency at the Pacific Garden. Because that’s where my sympathies lie.

But you know, friends, here are some things. Now some people won’t like this, and I may alienate a few minds here. But I’ll say it anyhow because it’s true and it must be said that slums are changing, are moving. And they’re moving out and covering areas like a blight.

Now somebody says, but wait a minute, should not we minister to these blighted areas? The answer is yes. The slums will always be a mission field. There will always be an important place for the rescue mission. There will always be an important place for the mission church. And there will always, I suppose, be a place for the storefront gospel mission. Always.

But have you noticed one ominous thing? Rescue missions, mission churches, and storefront gospel missions have to be staffed and supported from without. A blighted area never supports itself. The slums will never be the place of spiritual outreach. Missionary societies have never been born there. Never.

The appeal of Christ, while it is rarely to the very rich, it is never to those who are willingly of degraded taste, to persons without aspirations and without ambitions, lazy drones who are satisfied with degeneration.

Now you say, isn’t that a terrible way for you to talk? Are we not all sinners in the presence of God? Brother, I don’t suppose any man or woman here has spent more time beating the floor and telling God what a hopeless, worthless, rotten sinner he is.

But every city does have a people without aspiration. You can’t make them aspire. You can’t. Every city does have people without ambition. They don’t want to be any different from what they are.

I remember visiting a rescue mission once down on Madison Street. I was standing in the doorway and men were coming in. I saw a particularly good-looking young fellow coming in. He was bright-faced and smiling, and I spoke to him. I found he wasn’t a Christian at all. He was there coming into the mission. I said, I being the father of six sons, I loved him. I said to him, now listen. I took hold of his sleeve, and I said, listen, you don’t want to go on like this, do you? I said, look, you’re young, and if you continue like this you’ll be a bum. He said, I’m a bum now.

I didn’t faze him. He was contented. I don’t know what his background was. I only know he was physically good to look at and wasn’t too badly gone yet in his clothing. And he’d had a haircut at least within recent months. But he didn’t mind saying, I’m a bum now.

And there are hundreds of thousands in the great cities, while they’re those for whom Jesus died, and while they are just as good as you and me, and if we stood on our own merits, we’d all perish alike, they simply don’t aspire. They have no ambitions. A mug of beer, unshaven, shoes off, while the wife splashes around barefooted and hair down, getting up for breakfast, cussing each other while little kids run about.

You say, but shouldn’t the church do something? Brethren, the church tries hard. Through the arm of the church, her missions, her mission churches, her storefront churches. But there are masses of people who simply don’t care and they won’t care. You say, well, now wait a minute. Don’t write cities nor sections of cities off.

Did not God write Sodom and Gomorrah off? He did. And he wrote Pompeii and he wrote other cities off. It’s possible simply to get so degenerate that we’ve lost all desire to be different.

And a church with a message such as ours, I wish that we could move further north and settle further north in the middle of this and try to do something. That’s where my human sympathy says. But all of church history cries, No.

Denominations were not born among lazy, degenerate people who live in their lusts and who live like beasts and don’t care. You say, The Methodists ministered to common people? Yes. But John Wesley was an Oxford man, along with all of his brothers. You say, The Salvation Army ministered to the poor in the slum? Yes. But William Booth was a man of high social position and education and aspiration. The Moravians? Yes. But Zinzendorf was a Count.

What do I mean by this? I simply mean that it’s possible to get up where God can’t reach you and it’s possible to get down where God can’t reach you. It’s possible to be a Gold Coaster and live up where the gospel of Christ is scorned. It’s possible to give up to saloons and sex and beer and shows and poker until there’s no thought of God, and not all the rescue missions in the world will ever win people like that. Not all the help you can give them will ever bring them. One here, one there, maybe.

Harry Monroe was rescued and came out of Pacific Garden. Billy Sunday came out of Pacific Garden. But those men were men with fiery ambitions. Don’t forget the very missions that won those two men were supported by the middle-class Christians, who did have some ambition and some aspiration, and who did want to shave and put on a clean shirt.

Now, it says here that the common people heard Him gladly, and the fruitful field has always been the middle classes. It is from these that the support comes for foreign missions. It’s from these that the support comes for rescue missions and mission churches and institutional work, hospital work such as ours from this church, and other such work, old folks’ homes and orphanages, and home missions and foreign missions, and missions among the Indians.

Practically none of these, at first at least, are ever self-supporting. Foreign missions may become so, but not at first, neither the Indian work, and certainly never the orphanage work. The little chaps can’t earn any money. A dime is high finance, you know, to them. Somebody has to think for them, and somebody has to be where he can be producing so he can think for them.

You want to know why we’re planning to move and why we’re leaving this area and going to a place, a simple place, a plain place, not the Gold Coast, but where young couples move and where babies are born and where schools are overflowing and where the simple people, the plain people like you and me who do have some ambitions in God and in the world, who are aspiring, who do believe in education and a bit of culture, at least, and who do have some aspirations where they are. They have always been those to whom the gospel of Jesus Christ appealed.

That’s history, brethren, and you can’t get away from it. You can get up so high, behold your calling, brethren, not many mighty, not many noble are called. But also behold your calling, brethren, that there are whole blighted areas where people’s ambitions are dead and their aspirations lost and where they live for liquor and food and sex and gambling and care nothing about God.

And if they’re going to be ministered to, it must be from the outside. Somebody out there that does have some ambition and that does care will go back there and preach to them. But they’ll never support a church, and they will never be interested enough ever to carry on the work of God. And foreign missions to them, the name wouldn’t even be known.

So, my brethren, over top of the nostalgia of my own heart and the grief and the heartache, we must go and open a truth center where the common people are and where they will be over the next years and where the next economic or military bump will put them by the hundreds of thousands. And the vast numbers will be.

But we’ll never forget the missions and we’ll never forget the jails and we’ll never forget the hospitals. And we’ll never forget those who are ready to forget themselves. And always we’ll be a part of the missionary activity that takes the Truth to them. And we’ll always have boys like Lou Finney, Dave Lutschweiler, and Stan Lemon, and I could name others of you if I just look around here, that feel called to go and minister to the people that haven’t any money, to the people that can’t support missions, to the people that you have to catch them and make them listen.

We’ll always have them and God bless them and increase their number by the thousands. For to me it’s a tragic and terrible thing to leave whole sections of blighted areas of the city without a gospel witness. Or worse, to leave them with a witness every third storefront of church presided over by an ambitious ignorant preacher who lives off of the fears and superstitions and emotions of his people, but who has no message, no vision, no outlook, no aspiration, no desire for anything but a bit of fast music and some shouting. So, with a heart full of nostalgia, we plan to relocate.

A young person wrote a letter recently. We’ve got a lot of kids out from here in the various schools, and one of them wrote and said, I am so sorry that the church is going to have to move. I have such sweet memories of the Alliance Church, one of our girls. Sweet memories, and I know it.

And have I? I have such sweet memories of this church and of the people here and of the music, Brother McAfee, the gorgeous, wonderful music. We’re not a Robert Shaw chorale or a choir, I know. You’re hard-working people that work all day and then drag yourself to practice Friday night. I know we’re not a Robert Shaw chorale, but brothers and sisters, we’ve sung beautifully about a wonderful God.

And for me to get put where we’d hear nothing but choruses and cheap gospel numbers, I think it would break my heart. If I’d ever have to leave here, I think that I would take three days off, like Nehemiah, to grieve. But sometimes you have to do what your heart doesn’t want you to do. I’m talking now about locating. I think when we do relocate, I’m going to have to come back every once in a while.

I don’t drive a car, but I can get a bus by, walk around and look it over and try to recapture some of the blessedness that I’ve known in this place among the good people. I have a little trouble here and there once in a while, one every ten years, but it doesn’t last, and everybody loves everybody else. It’s been very sweet and very wonderful.

But the change has come. Chance and change are busy ever. World decay and ages move.

And if we’re going to maintain this blazing gospel witness that has sent young people to the ends of the earth over the last thirty years, we’re going to have to go with God on it, literally go with God. And if we can’t see it and have no vision, without a vision the people perish. Without a vision, that is, without knowledge, without the insight and intelligent awareness to appraise the situation and know what you ought to do, without it we fail God.

Tomorrow I’ll preach twice. I have to preach one, two, three, four, five times next week, in addition to a board meeting and radio meeting. But I’ll be preaching for the Mennonites at a conference of Mennonites.

For many years they’ve had at the corner of 19th Street and Union Avenue a church and some kind of an institution there. I never was too sure what, but it was a church. One of these churches where they don’t have musical instruments, they sing a cappella, and I enjoy being with them.

And I’m going to enjoy it tomorrow when I preach for them twice. But you know what? The thruway condemned their area. Now after trying to hang there, they’re having to go; 19th and Union. Good people. They stuck.

But chance and change are busy ever. And when the man with the star-spangled hat and the white beard says, I want to put a highway through where your church is, no matter whether you’ve dedicated and wept over it and soaked it in salty tears, I want it!

I want to put a highway through so beer trucks can travel over where your church used to be. And young fellows drive wildly while they sit close to their girlfriend, and traffic can come back and forth. People want to go out in into the country, and we’re going to have to provide them a way out of the city, and your church is in the way!

So, they condemn it. So, our poor friends the Mennonites have to pick up and move. Leave a lot of heartaches behind, but they’re having to go. So are we. And we are going with mixed feelings, but we’re going with certainty that we have the vision that we see where God is moving to.

I preached here a few, I guess, ten days ago at the Methodist church down here at 70th and Union. And a good fellow, an old brother by the name of Mr. Cox, a Methodist brother, Mr. Cox, drove me out to my house after the meeting. Had a nice meeting, I enjoyed it, I preached on the cross of Christ. We sang about the cross.

And I said, well, Brother Cox, I suppose you’ve been a member here a long time. He said, 40 years. He said, you know, Reverend, when I joined this church, it was on the outskirts. He said, this was way out when I joined it. I don’t know whether anybody here can remember back 40 years or not. But I remember whole areas out here that were what the boys called prairies, that is, we call them vacant lots, are now packed solid.

The city is moving. And we’re going to move with it. We’re going to have in mind little fellows that need a Sunday school, young couples that need a church home, older people that are retired and can afford to build a decent little cottage out, and those who are leaving in droves or being driven out from this city.

So that’s what we’re doing. And that’s why we’re doing it. And remember one thing, that while we’ll never forget the jails and the hospitals and the institutions and the street corners, the hope of the Church for tomorrow does not lie with them.

The hope of the Church for tomorrow lies with responsible families. And we’re going where the families are.

Tags Future, Vision

Messages

A.W. Tozer Talks

Post author By pshappard
Post date May 24, 2026

“Man’s Accountability to God“

Man’s Accountability to God Download

Man’s Accountability to God

Pastor and Author A.W. Tozer

June 13, 1954

In the book of John, the fifth chapter, I want to read verses 22, and 26 to 29. For the Father, the Father judgeth no man, but hath committed all judgment unto the Son, that all men should honor the Son, even as they honor the Father. He that honoreth not the Son, honoreth not the Father which hath sent Him.

Verily, verily, I say unto you, he that heareth My word, and believeth on Him that sent Me, hath everlasting life, and shall not come into condemnation, but is passed from death unto life. Verily, verily, I say unto you, the hour is coming, and now is, when the dead shall hear the voice of the Son of God, and they that hear shall live. For as the Father hath life in Himself, so hath He given to the Son to have life in Himself, and hath given Him authority to execute judgment also, because He is the Son of Man.

Marvel not at this, for the hour is coming, in the which all that are in the graves shall hear His voice, and shall come forth, they that have done good unto the resurrection of life, and they that have done evil unto the resurrection of damnation. I can of mine own self do nothing. As I hear, I judge, and my judgment is just, because I seek not mine own will, but the will of the Father which hath sent Me.

Now, I don’t mind telling you that I would very much rather not speak on the topic which is mine tonight. But in preaching through a book of the Bible, we must either preach it all or tacitly assume that some of it was not supposed to be preached. I don’t believe that any of it should be skipped.

And we come now to the matter of the Judgment, Christ Jesus our Lord, the Judge. I’m going to treat it like this. We’ll talk a little about the basic concept of judgment, and then point to some inadequate concepts of judgment, and then show the qualifications which the judge of mankind must have, and then show that Christ qualifies as the judge.

Now, the basic concept of judgment is very simple, and it has been believed by practically all religious people that have ever lived anywhere, with variations in detail. And it is that human beings are morally accountable. They are not self-created beings, nor self-sustaining. They have their life as a derived thing from Another and not from themselves.

The Father hath life in Himself, so nobody can judge the Father. He is not a derived being, He is the original Being. And He hath given also to the Son to have life in Himself.

No one can judge the Son. He is not a derived being but is of the Father alone. This concept of judgment is universal, with, I say, variations in application, and that human beings are morally accountable, and that while they are free to make moral choices, they are nevertheless under necessity to account to some authority for those choices.

Now, I have used a word and a phrase, and one seems to cancel the other one out. I have said free and under necessity, but there is nothing inconsistent here. Men are free to decide their own moral choices, but they’re also under the necessity to account to God for those choices. That makes them both free and also bound, for they are bound to come to judgment and give an account for the deeds done in the body. Now, that’s the basic concept of judgment. Some have tried to deny that.

In your high school days, you read Emerson’s famous self-reliance, I believe it was, or compensation, I think was the essay that contained this doctrine, that there is no such thing as a judgment, that everything is judged now and sentenced and rewarded or punished now. This, of course, is not the universal belief, and it’s not the belief of the Old Testament, it’s not the teaching of the New Testament, it is not the teaching of the Church, it was hatched out of the head of the very great man who lived in Concord.

Now, let us look at some inadequate concepts of judgment, and I think maybe we might mention that one first. That judgment is the operation of the law of compensation. That if you take it out of your left pocket, you’ll have to put it in your right pocket. And that everything that you do in one direction is counterbalanced by something that’s done in another direction.

The thief steals from himself, says Emerson. And the only punishment the thief will ever get is the knowledge that he is a thief. Now, that is true, but it’s not enough. That’s an inadequate concept of judgment. There is another, and it is that we are accountable only to society. Now, it is true that we are accountable to society, but that is only a portion of the truth, not all of it. The rest of it is that we are accountable to God, which we’ll mention later.

Now, we are responsible to public opinion, for instance. Everybody here is responsible to public opinion, and public opinion is going to judge you, and indeed has already judged you.

A rather silly but nevertheless accurate definition or proof of what I’m saying, that we are judged by public opinion, is seen in some time ago, it’s been some years ago now, I was walking down the street, and a little boy that just about came up to here, I would say, up to the lower part of this pulpit, and he took a good look at me as I walked along.

Usually I’m friendly to children, but I was preoccupied that day, I must have been. And when I got within hearing distance of him, he looked up at me and said, hello, picky puss. He had me figured out already, I was a pickle puss. And I was responsible to human society for the very shape my face was in. Now, I wasn’t mad at anybody, but he evidently thought I wasn’t as cheerful looking as I might have been, thought he’d needled me a little, which he did.

So we’re responsible for everything we do. You drive down the highway and you’re accountable to public opinion. They’re either going to conclude that you are a fine driver and a good man, or they’re going to conclude you’re a road hog, one or the other.

You live beside your neighbor, and your neighbor is going to judge you as being a good neighbor or not being a good neighbor. Now that’s true. But to say that that’s all the judgment there is, is to argue like a backward child, because there’s something more yet, and that is human law.

We’re also accountable to human law. Every nation makes its laws, from the most primitive tribes of New Guinea to the most civilized nation in the world, they have their own laws and everybody’s responsible to those laws.

But you say, how about the outlaw? And the answer is that the outlaw is an outlaw only in a few things. An outlaw will rob a bank in order that he might get money to pay taxes or pay something else. He is keeping one law and breaking another one to get the money to do it. So the outlaw is an outlaw only in certain details. In the majority of his life, say that in 95 percent of his life, he’s a keeper of law, not a breaker of law. But he is an outlaw, nevertheless, in those details.

A man is a murderer. Well, he’s broken the law that says that we’re not to murder our fellow man. But he might have been up to that time a keeper of all the laws of the land.

Another thing is that an outlaw is never a happy man. He’s accountable to the law even while he is breaking it, and he’s miserable even while he’s flouting the law.

Now, there’s a third thing here about this, that we are accountable to society. And it is that society cannot reach us in that sphere of our being where we’re most vitally accountable, namely, to God and to ourselves. I am a human being, an American living in Chicago. I am accountable to public opinion. I am accountable to the law of the land. But I am also accountable to myself and my God. Human society can’t touch me there. And in the very relationships that are the most vital to me, human society cannot touch me at all.

A man wants to commit suicide, he turns a gun on his head and blows his own brains out. He is not accountable to society nor the law. He’s accountable to some higher authority, for society cannot punish him.

A man stands up and says he’s an atheist and turns his back on God, society cannot punish him for that. There isn’t a country in the world that can punish a man for hating God. They can only punish him in some countries for not going to church, not paying his ecclesiastical tax, or not kowtowing to the host as it passes by. But he can hate God in his heart and never be punished because society cannot reach him in that important and vital realm.

Well, then there is a third inadequate concept of judgment, and it is that man’s accountability is to himself alone. That every man stands before the bar of his own reason and of his own conscience, and that the judge and jury of man will be man’s reason and man’s conscience.

Now this is the infamous relativity of morals that is taught in many of our universities. That each man is a law unto himself, and that good is whatever brings social approval, and evil is whatever brings social disapproval.

The answer to that of course is very simple, and it is that if that were true then there would be as many moral codes as there are human beings, and each one of us would be our own witness, our own prosecutor, our own judge, our own jury, and our own jailer. A man is accountable to himself. You know, that is so silly as scarcely to be worthy of consideration here tonight.

But never underestimate the ability of human beings to get mixed up. Any of you that are preachers or will be preachers, take a little advice and never overestimate the ability of people to get confused. And if a man with an eloquent tongue were to come to some of us and preach man’s accountability to himself alone, some silly people would accept it, forgetting that it has no basis anywhere.

How can a man be accountable to himself? You say, well, he’s accountable to his conscience, and I ask, to whom is his conscience accountable? How can I be my own prosecutor, my own prosecutor, witness on the prosecuting side, my own prosecuting attorney, my own judge, my own jailer, and my own executioner? All very silly and very poetic and very dreamy, and sounds very learned and very mystical, but it’s all ridiculous. It’s an inadequate concept of judgment.

For I never knew anybody yet except Leonard Ravenhill, it would be hard on himself. He’s hard on himself. He’s a judge and jury of himself, and he punishes himself, but outside of Christians like that, and they’re rare, God knows in our day, I don’t know anybody scarcely but what’s pretty easy on himself, you’re undersigned included. I know that if I were to be a judge and jury and witness and prosecutor and executioner, I’d lose my axe. I wouldn’t cut my own head off. I wouldn’t have the courage to do it.

So, God is not going to make this man accountable to Himself finally, and neither is He going to make you and me accountable to the law finally, human society finally. We are accountable to the One who gave us being. We are accountable to the One out of whose heart we came and who laid His laws upon us. We are accountable to God.

And it was this and is this that makes Christians and makes men and makes character and makes nations. And it’s the absence of this belief that makes soft, spineless Christians and churches without any meaning in them.

Someone was telling me of a young man in our Sunday school who went to a church down in Indiana that belonged to a denomination. The church was part of a denomination that used to be holiness people. I know them. I know the people.

And he said he’d been there recently, and they talked about books and your dreams and the effect they have on your life. And you know the topic when our friend was there? Peptic ulcers. Now believe that or not, that was the religious topic of the day. The church had backslidden and was talking about peptic ulcers. I’d get an ulcer if I stayed around a church like that or had to.

My brethren, when we backslide from the Truth and run away from the Word of God and build up our own notions out of our own heads, there is no telling what fools God will make of us, and how far we’ll go, and how silly it will all be, and how foolish we’ll become.

In the city of Detroit some years ago, some of our Alliance preachers were walking down the street past a church, and that preacher’s subject was out on the board in front. And he announced that next Sunday morning at 10:45, the Reverend Doctor would preach on the theme, Who Killed Cock Robin? You see, when the old Greeks have a word, they said, whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad. That is, drive them crazy.

And when the judgment of God begins to fall on the church, when they cease to believe in the judgment of God, then the judgment of God begins to fall. And you never know what that church will get into next, or where it’ll go.

It was belief in the accountability of man to his Maker that made America great at one time. One of the great leaders of America was Daniel Webster. That great bulging brow of his and those blazing eyes used to hold the Senate spellbound. His oratory used to, as he stood there and talked to them, not silly quips, not funny remarks.

The Senate in those days was not composed of half-baked comedians, but of strong noble statesmen who carried the weight of the nation on their shoulders. And someone said, Mr. Webster, what do you consider the most serious thought that has ever entered your mind? He said, the most solemn thought that has ever entered my mind is my accountability to my Maker.

And men who talked like that couldn’t be corrupted and bought off. And they wouldn’t have to be ashamed to have their telephone calls read back to them. They weren’t worried about what people thought as much as the fact that they were accountable to God.

Now, the third is that the judge of mankind must have certain qualifications. And according to this that I have read to you, there must be an authority to execute judgment. That is, the ones that are to be judged must be accountable to the judge. In this tentative and provisionary world in which we live, one group of men may make a law, and a judge, born a hundred or two hundred years later, may enforce that law, and may not even be remotely acquainted with the person whom he is judging.

But it is not so in the kingdom of God to be a judge according to the Scripture that judges those who are accountable to Him, and accountable to Him not only not by a law imposed by another, but accountable to Him morally and vitally, rather than merely legally. And in order to be a judge, a righteous judge of mankind, the judge has to have all knowledge.

Now let’s look at it a little, and sort of toss it around, let it get home to our hearts. I point out here that the judge has to have all knowledge so there can be no error. Many an innocent man has been hanged, and if the truth were known, many a life-termer who died in grave pallor behind prison walls was paying a debt he had never contracted, and the rascal who did the crime for which he was sentenced died in his bed surrounded by his friends. Human justice does its best, but because it is not all-wise, it makes mistakes.

But God Almighty is never going to judge the race of mankind and allow a mistake to enter. The judge must be one who has all wisdom. Therefore, I appeal away from St. Paul, I appeal away from Moses and Elijah, I appeal away from all men, because no man knows me well enough to judge me finally.

And I don’t know you well enough to judge you finally. I may pass brief judgment on you on some simple matter, or you on me, but when it comes to the placing of my eternal and everlasting soul somewhere, I don’t want any mistakes made. The judge of mankind is going to have to be one that will never need the testimony of a third party.

Nowadays they get witnesses in, and the judge sits solemnly and listens to the witnesses as the witness says, I saw him do this, I heard him say that. And if the witness is lying, the judge is misled. But the judge of mankind is not depending upon the testimony of another.

Listen to what He says. Verse 30, I can of mine own self do nothing, as I hear, I judge. And My judgment is just, because I seek not mine own will, but the will of the Father which sent Me.

And there is another point. The judge has to be disinterested. He must have no personal interest in the case.

Many a judge has been severe because election time was coming up, or because public opinion was getting stronger, the newspapers were getting on him, and to save his own hide he passed a severe sentence, or didn’t pass a sentence, and his motives were ulterior and false.

The Son of God says, I judge as one who seeks not mine own glory, but the glory of God alone. Therefore, He can be the judge. He can be the judge because He’s personally related and yet disinterested and has nothing to gain or lose by His judgment. But all the glory belongs to God. Jesus Christ, therefore, I say qualifies as the Judge.

But more than that, he must have a sympathetic understanding. I don’t want to be judged by an archangel that never shed a tear. I don’t want to be judged by a seraphim that never felt a pain. I don’t want to be judged by a cherub that never knew human grief or disappointment or woe.

The judge of mankind must be one of them. For Jesus said, The Father hath given the Son power to execute judgment because He is a Son of Man. Because He is a Son of Man, He not only can be their advocate above, a Savior by the throne of love, but He can be their judge to sit upon the throne also.

Then there will be no dodging, no whimpering, no whining, no crying on our wrists and saying, But Lord, you didn’t understand. He does understand because He became one of us and walked among us. And never was a tear that He didn’t shed, never a bitter disappointment He didn’t feel, never a grief that He didn’t suffer, never a temptation that did not come to Him, never a critical situation that He wasn’t in.

So, because He’s a Son of Man, He has authority to execute judgment. Christ qualifies on every count to be the judge of mankind. The tears that He shed, the pains that He suffered, and the griefs that He bore made Him not only a just but a sympathetic Judge of mankind.

Now, His presence in the human race is our present judgment, or present judgement on sins. For judgment am I come into this world, that they which see not, might see, and they which see, might be made blind, 9:39, in the same book. For judgment am I come into this world.

Now, here is one of the forgotten doctrines of the Bible. Somebody could write a great and, I believe, important book on neglected Bible doctrines. This would be one of them, that Jesus Christ is the judge of mankind, that the Father judgeth no man. When the Lord, the Son of Man shall come in clouds of glory, then shall be gathered unto him the nations, and he shall separate them.

It is He who is the judge. And when the Judge of mankind shall appear, He’ll have the shoulders of a man, and the face of a man, and be a man, the man Christ Jesus. God has given authority to judge mankind, so that He is both the Judge and the Savior of man. That makes me love Him and fear Him. Love Him because He’s my Savior, and fear Him because He’s my judge.

And if the ten-cent store Jesus that is being preached nowadays by a lot of men, if the plastic-painted Christ, who has no spine and no justice but is a soft and pliant friend of everybody, if he is the only Christ there is, then we might as well close our books and bar our doors and make a bakery out of this or a garage. But that Christ that is being preached is not the Christ of God, nor the Christ of the Bible, nor the Christ we must deal with.

For the Christ we must deal with has eyes as a flame of fire, and His feet are like burnished brass, and out of His mouth come with a sharp two-edged sword. He will be the judge of mankind.

You can leave your loved ones that have died lost in His hands, knowing that He Himself suffered, knowing that He knows all, no mistakes can be made, there can be no miscarriage of justice, because He knows all that can be known.

It’s said one time, rather, or as though it was an afterthought, sort of thrown in, it says that Jesus need not that any should testify of man, for He knew what was in man. That’s in John, second chapter, 25 verse. He didn’t need anybody to testify about men, because He knew all that was in man.

Let me read verses 28 and 29. Let me read them. Marvel not at this, He said, for the hour is coming into which all that are in the grave shall hear His voice, the Son of Man’s voice, and shall come forth, they that have done good unto the resurrection of life, and they that have done evil unto the resurrection of damnation.

And this coming out of the graves will be at the invitation of the Son of God Himself. Like a file officer He will command, and they will stand on their feet, a great army, to receive judgment. And the judgment will be based, strangely enough, upon the kind of life they lived in this world. That’s another forgotten doctrine, but it’s here. They that have done good unto the resurrection of life, they that have done evil unto the resurrection of damnation.

And this is the Judge, the Judge with the flaming eyes, so that Jesus Christ our Lord is one with whom we must deal, cannot escape Him. We can shrug Him off and drive away in a cloud of fumes, but we’re going to have to come back and deal with Him finally. You’re going to have to deal with Him, and I am.

And be sure of one thing, He’ll either be my Savior now, or my Judge in the end. And the tenderness and sympathy of the Savior now will be laid aside while the justice and severity of the Judge then, comes to the front. Without canceling out one, He will exercise both, so that Jesus Christ is both the Lord and the Judge of men, as well as the Savior of men.

Where’s our book, Brother? We have 1,000 or 800 or 900 of these, and still, I never can keep one down. 116, let me read it. Not all the blood of beasts on Jewish altars slain could give the guilty conscience peace or wash away the stain.

Now, where is that taken from? The 8th and 10th chapters of Hebrews. But Christ, the heavenly Lamb, takes all our sins away, a sacrifice of nobler name and richer blood than they. The precious blood of Jesus Christ takes away all sin. Then says the writer, My faith, and I want you to think yourself into this, My faith would lay her hand on that dear head of thine.

Does anybody know where he got that? In the Old Testament, a sinner used to come to the priest, and he would say, I have sinned, and I bring a lamb, or some other creature. And they would take that creature, and the sinner would lay his hand on the head of the beast, and they would kill it and sprinkle it blood, and the sin which he had committed would be forgiven him. My faith would lay her hand on that dear head of thine, while like a penitent I stand and there confess my sin.

Those of you who don’t want Him as a judge, you better think seriously now about Him as a Savior and stand like a penitent or kneel like one and confess your sin. My soul looks back to see the burden thou didst bear while hanging on the cursed tree and knows her guilt was there.

Do you believe that brothers and sisters, that your guilt was there on that cursed tree? He that knew no sin became sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him. And then he says, believing, we rejoice to see the curse removed. I’ve seen this song edited and they’ve twisted it around and some educated, sophisticate, who didn’t like this word, curse, and removed, he fixed it up.

But I won’t sing it, I sing this one. Believing we rejoice to see the curse removed. What curse? The curse of the broken law, the curse of sin.

We bless the Lamb with cheerful voice and sing His bleeding love. How wonderful all this is, came to my heart tonight as I was upstairs by myself there in my room. I thought of this, what a wonderful invitation song, what a wonderful song of triumph, what a song full of theology and meaning and gospel. That what blood of goats couldn’t do, the blood of Christ is doing and has done.

So, I would urge you tonight, if you are not now consciously forgiven, consciously forgiven, close your eyes and by faith lay your hands on that dear head of His, and like a penitent confess your sin and then the curse will remove from your heart and you will know your sins forgiven and the blood will cleanse and you’ll know you’re delivered.

Which is He going to be for you, Savior or Judge? He will be one or the other. If He is the first, He won’t be the second. But if He is not the Savior, He will be the Judge. I for my part can’t afford to face Him as my Judge. I must have His protecting blood and face Him as my Savior, now. Praise God He knows too much me for me to dare brazenly barge into His presence and let Him judge me.

Scripture tells us of certain ones who have sent their sins on before the judgment. You can send your sins on before the judgment, have them judged and settled and dispelled of, now while you’re still on the earth, the Savior will cover your sins, cover them.

As the old brother said, if Jesus Christ had covered our sins with His life, when they took His life away, they’d have been exposed, but He covered them with His death. And by His death forever He put my sins where they can’t be found, for the blood of the everlasting covenant. Do you believe it? You certainly have powerful control over your emotions. Amen, I get blessed when I get thinking about these things.

What about you, my unsaved friend, my borderline friend, my doubtful friend, my doubting friend, if there be such here. What about you? Right now, this is your opportunity, there’ll never be a better one.

Bow your head, look back and see the burden He bore. Lay your hand of faith on His holy head and confess your sins and the curse will remove. And you can say, believing, I rejoice to see the curse removed, I praise the Lamb with cheerful voice and sing His dying love. Amen.

Tags Accountability, Judgement

Messages

A.W. Tozer Talks

Post author By pshappard
Post date May 17, 2026

“The Foundations of the World are out of Plumb“

The Foundations of the World are out of Plumb Download

The Foundations of the World are out of Plumb

Pastor and Author A.W. Tozer

May 3, 1953

You will find the Book of Psalms to be a very revealing book, for the Holy Spirit is in the Book of Psalms, and as has been said, the Spirit of Christ is in the Psalms. And many places in the Book of Psalms you will find the Holy Spirit looking down the centuries and making present tense statements, which were not present tense, but were future prophetic tense.

The “is” is sometimes way down the years, and this 82nd Psalm is that kind of psalm. Certainly, it has its local application to circumstances that gave it birth. But just as certainly there is more here than at first meets the attention, there is the groaning and the yearning of the Spirit of Christ which was in them, to quote Peter, who saw and here foretells conditions that are to be in later times. We have a picture here of God standing among the mighty angels, not sitting because He had risen.

If you are interested in this, you will find many places in the Bible where God stands, but almost always God sits. A judge always sits. It is a subject that stands. So that we find God sitting and men standing in His presence, that is as it should be. The great God sits quietly and calmly in His everlasting rest while men and angels stand before Him. But a few times we see God standing.

When our Lord Jesus Christ went to heaven, the Scripture says that He sat down on the right hand of the Father. We read of that very many places in the Bible, that Jesus Christ sat down on the right hand of God. His position is that of a seated one. Having completed the work on earth, He has now gone to sit down, waiting the time when His enemies shall be made His footstool.

But there was one exception to this, and that was when they were stoning Stephen to death. Stephen looked up, and his death-dimmed eyes became preternaturally bright, and he said, I see Jesus sitting, standing at the right hand of God. He had been sitting, now He is standing, as though he had become suddenly so keenly interested that He rose and was gazing down, in His divine excitement, watching His first martyr die.

Here we find God standing now, and He is standing among the mighty angels. Here is what He sees. He sees injustice, and oppression, and poverty, and ignorance, and darkness, and dying, and He sees it all over the earth. It says here that He judgeth among the gods. That gives some people a notion that there are gods, and that God recognizes these gods. The truth is very much otherwise. God does not recognize any gods.

He says, I am the Lord, and there is none other beside me. But the word “gods” here is elohim in the plural, and it is a reference to leaders and judges of the earth. It is, says Rotherham, God ascribing to those whom He has placed in high position, something of His own name, because they are His ambassadors. He gives them not the sword in vain. They are the judges and rulers of the earth. And God boldly calls them after His own name, and says, God standeth in the congregation of the mighty, He judgeth among the elohim, the judges, the rulers of the earth.

And what He sees there, I repeat, is injustice, and oppression, and poverty, not the poverty that a reluctant earth might impose upon a people who could not rest a living from her, but rather the poverty that comes from oppression and from injustice. And there was ignorance and darkness and dying. The sad thing about this all, my friends, is that it could be avoided. All of this could have been avoided.

Now, in this dark world in which we live, there are some things that can’t very well be avoided. And I suppose that we might as well get used to them and say, there be here; they were here when my grandfather walked the hills of Ohio or Indiana. And they were here when the red Indian roamed and hunted the buffalo there. And they were and will be and always have been, and we may expect them to be.

There will always be accidents, and there will always be diseases, and there will always be bereavement as long as the sun rises and sets. And there will always be the sad leave-taking when friend greets and shakes the hand of friend and tearlessly turns away with an agony that knows no respite in tears. There will always be the lightning that will flash out of the sky and smite the great oak, and the boy that lies sleeping under it. And there will always be the wild beasts and the rampaging river and the tornado and the tempest.

And my friends, you can take all of the accidents of the world and all of the adverse forces of nature and include in it all the diseases that mortal flesh is heir to and combine them together. And you will not have all told and added up as much sheer misery and pain as man imposes upon himself by his wicked deeds.

This is not merely a preacher talking. Let us look at over the last hundred years. There have been floods in Europe, and there have been earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. And there have been in Europe over the last hundred years epidemics and the outbreak of diseases. There have been storms and lightning flashes. Nature has shaken her fallen shoulders, and poor victims have died. No one with an ounce of brains would deny that nor attempt to deny it.

And nobody would dare to close his eyes if he has any regard to his own reputation for sanity, and say that nature is all gentle and tender, and that all is good, and good is all, and all is God, and God is all, and all is all, and none of that. We got to face facts, and we might as well be realistic.

Europe, just to choose one continent, has suffered greatly in the last hundred years, sporadically, now and again. There has been toil, and there have been tears, and there have been bereavements and losses. But ladies and gentlemen, it fell to the lot of one little undersized man, inconsequential in looks and build and weight, education and gifts, it fell to the lot of one little man to bring to the continent of Europe more suffering and agony and pain in four years’ time than one hundred years of the combined forces of misfortune was able to visit upon that same continent.

Korea has had her famines, and she has seen her people die. The snows and bitter cold of the winters have taken their toll, and diseases have taken their toll. But in the last two years in Korea, man has visited upon that peninsula more sheer misery and unbearable pain than all the unfortunate circumstances that nature might have visited in the last five hundred years.

God standeth among the mighty. He judges among the elohim, and He’s not pleased with what He sees. For He sees injustice and oppression and a poverty that’s imposed, and He sees an ignorance that can’t be excused and a darkness that shrouds the minds of men, and He sees dying and dying and dying.

Now he says, ye are gods, but you shall die like men, because you will bring down upon you your social structure. You will bring it down on your heads by the natural law of cause and effect. It will not be as the astronomers sometimes dream by a sideswipe from some wandering maverick planet. It will not be as the result of the insects taking over the earth as some naturalists prophesy morbidly.

It will be that man proves himself unfit to live and therefore must die like men, that he proves himself unfit to build and must watch his structure collapse around his ears. Your building, says the Holy Ghost, is worthless. It can’t last because all the foundations of humanity are out of plumb. And everybody knows that if you build a building upon a crooked foundation, your building will stand in imminent peril of falling. The higher you go and the heavier your superstructure, the more certain will be the collapse.

Now, the hope of the nations is deceitful. I wish that I might be able to be an optimist one time in my life if God would only allow me. I’d love to do it. I’d love to get up sometime and for 25 minutes or 45 minutes just stand here and spout optimism and tell you that I believe that the world is getting better. But I’d be a liar if I said it. The hope of the nations is deceitful. But the nations of the world, strangely, are seeking to make a sound, free world for themselves. And they’re promising it to the people.

I am not as old as I will be if I live ten years more. I’m older than I thought I was because I was in a restaurant tonight with my little girl. She’s 13 and looks older. And the waitress came up and wanted to know if that was my granddaughter. Imagine that, she needs glasses.

But I’ve been around quite a while, and I have seen quite a number of men get elected. I’ve seen three presidents elected on the promise that there wouldn’t be any war. Or if there was any, they’d get over it right away.

When I was just old enough to be interested in such a thing, Woodrow Wilson ran for the presidency on the slogan, he kept us out of war. And we elected him with a great big majority. And he was hardly inaugurated when he had to declare war on Germany. And we had three years of World War I.

There was a silver-voiced gentleman whom I never followed, but whom I can’t help but admire because he certainly was a big man. And with his New York accent, he told the trembling mothers of America, I say to you again and again and again that your sons will never fight on foreign soil. Three of mine did. That was World War II.

And in our horror of dying and blood and woe and prison camps, the American electorate last fall turned in fury on the man they thought had put them in Korea and listened to the voice of the man who said, if I’m elected, I’ll go over. No, I admire the gentleman that said it. I think he’s just a good, honest American, and a good and big American. But he opened his mouth a little too wide when he told us, or gave us to understand that he could bring war to a end. One hundred days he’s been in the White House, and they’re still dying in Korea. It’s not his fault.

The only fault would lie in a man saying they can when the whole world is stacked against them. They can’t. Woodrow Wilson meant well, but the foundations of the world are out of joint. Franklin Roosevelt never meant to betray the mothers when he said again and again, they’ll not go overseas. They did go. And Ike Eisenhower’s honest, Kansas heart meant what he said, that the foundations of the world are out of joint.

How long has it been since they were promising us the four freedoms? How long since they said we’ll fight this out and finish it and then we’ll never have any more war? We’ll have freedom from war. I think at that time they called it war. Freedom, they said, from war, because we hate war. But war we’ve had, brother. Go and ask those poor Koreans.

My son who fought in Korea said, Dad, it was touching and almost unbelievable a wave of war would sweep over a hillside. And there would be a little hut, and you’d see the old Korean with his tired old wife and a kid or two, and he’d get his belongings on his back and disappear into the woods or cave someplace, and the wave of war would pass over.

As soon as the last retreating soldier’s neck was, back of his neck was seen, they’d be right back in where they’d been before. Next week, the wave would come back the other way and out would go the Korean to the hills with his sack full of possessions. And as soon as the backs of the necks of the soldiers seen back, he was in his little hut again.

Go to Korea and say, are you free from war? Go to Indochina and ask that question. Go to Laos, where they’re rapidly engaged in the terrible business of losing their nation to the Communists. Ask them, are you free from war? No. It was all big, windy talk, this talk about freedom from war. And they said we were to have freedom of religion.

I’m just reminding us of what they said, freedom of religion. But we have gotten more persecution and had more religious troubles since the war ended than we had for decades before. Go to Columbia and ask our missionaries, is there freedom of religion there? No, of course not. Go to Palestine and inquire. Arab and Jews quarreling. Go to India.

Nehru has lately come out with an edict that nobody dares make converts there. No freedom of religion. Freedom from want, they said. The orators and the silver-tongued boys that yodel down the airways, vote for me and we’ll fix up this business. Everybody will have enough. Go into the dark places of the earth and inquire.

Our missionaries say, and all the good people tell us, such a percentage, and it’s a large, high percentage, never have enough to eat from the time they’re born till they die. No freedom from want.

And then freedom for the masses. No freedom for the masses. We have the greatest freedom in America, and I thank God we do. But there’s no freedom in Czechoslovakia. There’s no freedom in East Germany. There’s no freedom in Yugoslavia, nor in Russia, nor in China, nor in Manchuria, nor in Austria, nor wherever the heel of the Communists has gone, there’s no freedom. Freedom is a mirage.

And the relative and conditional freedom which we have in this country has been at the price of everlasting vigilance and eternal warfare to keep ourselves free. But the foundations of the world are out of plumb.

And the temple of freedom rests upon a foundation. It isn’t something that simply grows up like a dandelion without planting and without cultivation. There are great foundations that are there, and if those foundations are crooked, the building will be crooked. It’s just a question of time till it collapses.

These foundations foretell the future of the temple. Any builder can stand up and look at a foundation and know theoretically what will happen without ever waiting around. We built this building, we had on our board a gentleman who’s still with us.

I don’t know whether he’s here tonight, Mr. Marx, a structural engineer. And he could look at a few marks on a piece of paper and tell you whether the thing was structurally sound or not.

Somebody wrote him all enthusiastically, his daughter Esther, from up in New York State, and she told him about the building that the Alliance district had built at Rome, Delta Lake at Rome, and gave him a description of it. And he made a few marks on a piece of paper and said that building won’t stand, that it’ll collapse.

And that year, somewhere, I think in December, when the heavy snows came, it collapsed. It went down so flat that even the seats went down with it. It was a big tabernacle. Even the seats flattened out. There wasn’t anything around there that wasn’t as flat as a hymn book. He never saw the thing; he just heard the description of it.

You don’t have to be there if you have any imagination, brother. All you have to do is project what you know into what you don’t know, and you have what you known. See what I mean?

So, you don’t have to wait around to see whether Democrats or Republicans come out on top. All you have to do to project and foretell the future is to say, look at your foundations. If your foundations are solid, your superstructure will stand. If they’re not solid or if they’re crooked or out of line, it’ll go down, it can’t help it. You needn’t be a prophet; you only need to be a man with a bit of imagination and information.

Now let’s look at the foundations of human society. Sketch them out here a minute as we go along. One of the first is faith in God. It’s absolutely essential to the sanity of the human race that men believe rightly concerning God.

Put these down, if you will, for they constitute the foundations of society. And if they’re crooked, society will be crooked. And anything built upon crooked foundations is bound to collapse.

The day in which we live, faith in God is a rarity. Somebody will say, no, I know better, Mr. Tozer. There are more Bible schools and more big evangelists and more coast-to-coast broadcasts and more FMs and shortwaves and more Bibles printed and all that. I know that there’s more faith in God than there used to be.

Well, maybe, faith of a kind. But what kind of God is it people are believing in now? I ask you. They say that there’s a resurgence of religion in America, that more people are buying books about religion and more people are going to church than used to go to church. One man said, greatly encouraged, that there was, I think, sixty-some percent belong to churches now and only ten percent belong to churches in the days of the founding fathers. Therefore, the difference between ten percent and sixty-some percent is the difference in how good we are compared with how good we were then.

My friends, it’s impossible to be very much wronger than that. Faith in God doesn’t simply mean to have an area of your hide somewhere that’s sensitive to religion. That doesn’t mean that. You can find more carnal, unborn-again, self-centered old maids than you could bury in Grand Canyon who have religion and they’re sensitive toward it.

You can find more stoop-shouldered, weary old beaten-up men like me who have some sensitivity toward religion. You can find it. You can find men that live like the devil but they’re sensitive toward religion. And if an evangelist sweeps through and the excitement gets big enough, they’ll go to the meeting and swell the crowd and give a dollar and get counted and get photographed and it’ll look big.

But the catch is here. After it’s all over, the moral standards of the community are right where they were before. And whatever does not raise the moral standard of a church, or the community has not been a revival from God.

We have become too chummy with God altogether. We have dragged God down to our level in place of painstakingly trying to help Him to bring us to His, humanly speaking. And the God we believe in is not the sovereign God who judges men.

And when we believe in that kind of God, we’ll change our way of living, and we’ll change it for the better. And we’ll repent and we’ll reform, and we’ll turn to God, and we’ll cease to do evil and we’ll begin to do good. And we’ll put away our evil from us and we’ll turn from the world and turn hard unto God.

Seek to crucify our flesh and put on the new man which is renewed in holiness. Faith in God is all but gone. When the Son of Man cometh, will he find faith on the earth? So don’t you be taken in by statistics that tell you that more people belong to churches now than belonged in the days of our fathers.

In the days of our fathers, everybody except a rare infidel now and then, and he had been taken. But everybody went to church. Grandfather got up. Grandmother got up. Married couple got up. Then they dug their babies and children out of their beds and all fixed them all up. And washed them off and put clothing on them they hated thoroughly. They got into their starched clothes, out of their ginghams. And marched off to church and sat together in church through sermons an hour to two hours long. And rode there in a buggy and rode back in a buggy. Hayburners, if you please, took their time about getting there. And almost everybody went to church.

But nowadays almost everybody goes to church Easter and Christmas, and for the rest of the time they don’t. That’s number one. Faith in God. Any hope for the nations that is not built upon faith in God is a false hope and will collapse.

Then there’s love for our fellow men. Thou shalt love the Lord thy God and thy neighbor as thyself, love for our fellow men. But in place of that we have quarreling and lying and exploiting and competing to a shocking degree.

But did you happen to notice this? Since the beginning of the world there never has been more hatred among nations than today. And that hatred doesn’t cross the color line always. In fact, rarely does. It’s within the race itself. The presence of specific races is not the source of our trouble. Our trouble is the disease of our own hearts.

And the white Russian hates the white American. And twice within 25 years the white German tried to kill and destroy the white Englishman. Occasionally there’s race flare-ups between races. But mostly it’s within their own racial strain. It’s not race, brethren, it’s sin. Sin, sin, sin, sin. And the foundations of the world are out of focus, out of plumb, because we hate instead of love.

Then there’s a mutual trust, and that’s very close to what I’ve been saying before. Mutual trust among men and nations. Where is there any trust among nations? Do you trust a communist? Does he trust you? No. I wouldn’t believe a communist if he stood on the stack of 150 Bibles and swore by the beard of Lenin. I wouldn’t believe him. He’s a liar. He’s a liar from the beginning. He’s been taught to lie. Lying has become his religion. And hell has become his heaven. Sin has done all this.

So, there’s no trust among nations. And friends, if you can’t have trust among nations, you can’t have a lasting edifice of any sort. I might mention the relation of parents to children. Children to their parents has gone so badly out of plumb in the last 50 years, under the prodding of John Dewey and the Columbia School, and old maid preachers that wear trousers and shave, but have enough manhood to be able to tell the truth. There’s no obedience to parents left anymore. The foundations are upside down and out of joint.

And as soon as the children are able to earn their own money, they turn on their parents, scorned in a great many instances. And until there has been established a proper relationship between the parent and the child, there never can be a foundation that is strong. And until we have a strong and level foundation, we never can have a safe superstructure.

The English couldn’t whip us. Some fellow took a ride one time and said, the British are coming. You remember that? One lantern, if they’re on, coming in canoes, and another lantern if they’re walking. Remember that? That was Paul Revere. The English couldn’t beat us. The Indians couldn’t beat us, and the Spaniards couldn’t beat us, and the Germans couldn’t beat us.

And I’m not a jingoist, but I don’t believe the Russians can beat us. But I’ll tell you what can beat us. Our kids can beat us. They can beat us by grieving God Almighty and outraging divine justice, by violating the right relation between child and parent, and upsetting the normal order. That can beat us, because God will withdraw His defense and we’ll be left as helpless as was Samson after his hair was cut, the right relation between men and women in their respective places. The world is sowing a field of thorns.

Now my friend John R. Rice has written a book called Bossy Wives, Bobbed Hair, and what was it? I haven’t read the book and don’t intend to. I think I sketched it when it first came. And I don’t follow my friend John on that, but I will just tell you this much.

God made man, and He made woman. In spite of Christine Jorgensen, He made them different from each other. And He not only made them different from each other, He gave them different functions in society. But we have all mixed it up. Mixed it all up now until we don’t know one from the other. We say, isn’t that funny, Mr. Tozer? He’s such a cute fellow.

Yes, our old boy’s telling you some things somebody ought to tell you. And the proper relation between the sexes. I’m not talking now about immorality, that’s another field. I’m talking now about the right social place for both. We have violated the Scriptures, and we have violated common sense, we have violated the laws of biology. And we’re going to reap, and don’t you think we’re not going to reap? The foundations of the world are out of plumb.

And then I think also of our rapport with nature. Dr. Mason said, and rightly said, and I thought so much of it I wrote it into an editorial right away. Man was born in a garden.

Now why didn’t God build a city? He could have done it, made it out of plastic. God could have done that. Let there be a plastic city, and it came to pass there was a plastic city, and the morning and the evening were the ninth day. God could have made a plastic city and trimmed it in chrome. He could have done it, and placed man in it. And said, here you are, get on to that escalator, go up nine stories and come to the stories, and come down the elevator. God could have made a plastic city and put man in it.

He could have gone better; He could have made it out of gold. But He didn’t, He made a garden; worms in it, flowers and fruit, and all of it makes a garden. God put man in a garden. I think it was Milton that said, God made the country and man-made the city.

Now, we are losing our rapport. You French speakers please forgive; I don’t know whether any other word to use there except that bad French. But we have lost our rapport with nature. We are born in hospitals, laid out in mortuaries, and buried in memorial parks. If anything goes wrong with it, we are shot full of mold, penicillin or something. People live and die and never get off the sidewalk. We’ve lost our power.

Mr. Chase tells about some artists from Chicago that went down in Brown County, Indiana, for a little vacation and do a little painting. They were city fellows, and they slept down there in a little house in the woods among the beautiful rolling hills of Brown County.

I suppose they all more or less felt the same way about it, but it was the job of one fellow to shamelessly tell how he felt about it. He said, these birds are driving me crazy. He said, listen to them, I can’t stand that. He said, listen to them, birds, birds. And he got on the train and came back and listened to the elevator. He couldn’t stand birds. God put man in the garden and man says, I can’t stand birds. So, he comes back to listen to the elevator.

Some fellow said, who was it? I believe it was here in Chicago. Somebody said that New York was the dirtiest city in the world and this fella indignantly denied it. He said, New York isn’t as dirty as Chicago. He said, let the person that said that New York was dirty in Chicago feel our air between her thumb and fingers. He said, just let her take a little of our air and feel it like that and just see how dirty it is. And yet there are people that love it and look on a whore with a lovely worm with a fur coat or a bird that drives them crazy.

Now, of course, those are extreme. That’s not true of many people. A great many people love nature. So, they get a basket full of sardines and pickles and olives and they go out and have themselves a picnic and commune with nature among the sardine can.

But we’re as artificial as it’s possible to be, nevertheless. We’ve lost our rapport with the garden or with that best thing after the garden, the field in which God’s cast us. So, we’re going to pay a price for that? Oh yes.

One of my favorite writers as a younger fellow, he still is when I don’t have much time for him anymore, was William Wordsworth. My heart leaps up when I behold a rainbow in the sky. So was it when my life began, so is it now that I’m a man, so let it ever be or let me die.

One of my boys told me that the kids in the college or university where he got his degree referred to Wordsworth as Nature Boy. When they had to study Wordsworth, they scornfully referred to him as Nature Boy.

But his heart leaped up when he beheld a rainbow in the sky. And was he that talked about the cataracts blowing their trumpets from the hills, praising the art that could catch that cloud before it disappeared and put it in on a canvas and hold it there. He loved the world around him.

And our fathers loved the world around us. Strong men, they didn’t have any chlorophyll in those days, but they weren’t so confined, and the embarrassment was not so great. The big out-of-doors helped them out so that they didn’t need the chlorophyll. Why reeks the goat on yonder hill who seems to dote on chlorophyll. But they sell us chlorophyll nevertheless and all the rest. And we’re a bunch of artificial zoo animals.

Emerson said, every once in a while, take off your shoes and go out and walk on the ground. It’s good for you. Get in on the floor with the earth. He might have had something there. Try that sometime in your fourth-floor apartment.

And then I got one left and I’m through. Are you glad?

And this is very serious, and it is basic righteousness, justice, and honesty. If the blood of Jesus Christ can’t cure a man’s dishonesty, it can’t guarantee his entrance into the kingdom of heaven.

Our Salvation Army friends sing a song, when I reached the pearly gates, I’ll then put in my plea, I was once a guilty sinner, but Jesus died for me. I believe that. I believe it with all my heart. Supposing Jesus Christ came to me and said, son, you’ve been a sinner, but I’ll justify you by my blood. And I said, thank you, Lord Jesus. Thank you.

When it comes time for you to die or I come in the glory, you will enter into the presence of the Father with exceeding joy, all by my blood and righteousness. Thank you, Lord Jesus. Thank you. Another thing, son, my blood is going to cleanse you and make you clean. And my spirit is going to enter you and help you to live a right life. Thank you, Lord Jesus. Thank you.

But I found after 25 years of following Him that His blood didn’t cleanse. The Spirit couldn’t make you right, that Christianity didn’t have the power to make you live right. It didn’t. Now this is all hypothesis. I know better, of course. I’m talking from the other side for the moment.

So, I find after 25 years of praying and trying and reading and giving and listening to sermons, I find Christianity doesn’t work. And then you expect me to die in peace and say a Lord who lied to me once won’t lie to me again. The Savior that was too weak to save me from iniquity will be strong enough to take me boldly through the pearly gates. I wouldn’t believe it for a second yet.

A Savior that can’t save me from my sins now and here can’t have my confidence to save me from judgment in that great day. But he can do both, thank God. He can do both. I want no other argument. I want no other plea. It is enough that Jesus died and that He died for me.

I believe that. And I’m helped to believe it by the fact that that same Lord Jesus Christ can take a sinner and make a Christian out of him down here now, can clean him up and change him, put a new impulse within his heart and a new direction to his life and change him. He’s not a phony and he’s not selling you a bill of goods.

He’s promising you safety in the judgment and He’s proving that you’ll be safe in the judgment by demonstrating that right down here now He can give you a new heart and renew a right spirit within you. And the things you used to want to do, you don’t want to do. And the things you used to be careless about, you’re now doing with delight.

You used to hate your brother and now you love him. You used to be stingy and now you give generously to the Lord’s work. You used to be dirty-minded and now a dirty thought hurts you so bad you repent before God for it. You used to have sinful tendencies, but God’s cured them. God can lay solid foundations, ladies and gentlemen, He can. I don’t know whether He ever will for the nation of America or not. I doubt that very much.

I ought to be ashamed to say that. But I don’t know in this confused country of ours, the light we’ve had, the truth we’ve trampled under our feet, and the insults we’ve offered to God, the trying of God over the centuries.

Possibly we’ve sinned away our day and like Pompeii and Babylon and Assyria the future may see us pass from the scene if the Lord tarries. I don’t know that. But I do know that wherever righteousness is laid down by faith in God and Christ, there is a solid foundation. I do know that.

And I know that any religious individual, and I’m through in three minutes, less than three, any religious individual, anybody, that wants to be sure that his superstructure will stand in the eternal light of God only needs to build down upon the Rock, Christ Jesus. That’s all.

But if he builds on anything else, the foundations of his life are out of plumb. And no matter how high he goes; the collapse will only be the greater. So let us tonight, let us turn to Jesus Christ our Lord.

We’re units of society. I can’t help Chicago too much, nor the state of Illinois, nor the country, but as a unit of society, as one individual, I can lay my foundation solid down on repentance, down on the Book, down on high conceptions of the sovereign majesty of God, down on strong faith in the power of Jesus Christ to save me now and in the day of judgment. I can lay my foundations down on those, my building down on those foundations. So can you. Starting now, let us pray.

O Lord Jesus, we can feel the breath of hell on our necks. We hear his ugly, ominous growls. He hates us, and he hates our church, and he hates our people, and he hates us for God’s sake and Christ’s sake. And he hates to see foundations solid. He’ll undermine them. He’ll get us interested in something else, so we’ll lay crooked ones if he can. O God, we’re not scared in spite of it. We’re not frightened.

Jesus, Thou art our big Brother, our Lord. God has given Thee power in heaven and earth. All power is Thine. Thou hast made a show of principalities and powers and exposed them openly, defeated them and risen from the dead. Thou art seated at the right hand of the Majesty in the heavens. Thou hast sent Thy Holy Spirit here to the earth, and we thank Thee that He’s with us tonight and in us tonight.

Now we beseech thee, Lord Jesus, Thou wilt help us to go out and straighten our lives, straighten them reverently, tearfully if need be, before the throne of grace, with repentance and sorrow of heart and strong yearnings for righteousness and true holiness, so the foundations will be solid.

Lord, here’s a church. It isn’t a big one, but it’s a church. And we’re building on solid foundations. Eternity itself can’t eat away nor dissolve what we’re doing. But Father, look at our foundations. They’re crooked. They’re out of plumb.

O Lord, we tremble for that day when Thou wilt judge the deeds of every man. We shall stand and say, I wrought, I worked there in that church, I attended there, I went there.

O Lord, we pray that our church may be founded upon the solid foundations, so that all our money won’t be wasted, so that our prayers won’t be wasted, so that everything like the pieces of broken bread will be gathered up and nothing be lost.

Now we trust Thee to bless this Word spoken. We don’t claim anything for it, only that it’s true, that’s all. Send these friends out, we beseech Thee, to a week of strong faith and holy living and earnest prayer and Bible reading, worship, and faithful testimony, and honesty, and truth-telling, clean thinking, frugality with themselves and generosity with everybody else.

We ask this in Jesus’ name. Amen.

Tags Judgement, Justice, Oppression

Messages

A.W. Tozer Talks

Post author By pshappard
Post date May 10, 2026

“The Feeding of the Five Thousand“

The Feeding of the Five Thousand Download

The Feeding of the Five Thousand

Pastor and Author A.W. Tozer

August 29, 1954

I hope that you patient friends will be still more patient with me as I talk again on the feeding of the five thousand. I’ve spoken twice before on it and this will be the third talk and I hope there will not be too much repetition though the first little point I want to make will be a bit of repetition. For it says in verse three that Jesus went up into a mountain. He went up into a mountain and there He sat. There he sat.

Now He withdrew, our Lord withdrew from the press of the people, and I’d like to say to you, I don’t know whether it does much good or not, but I think maybe there will be those who will hear, but I’d like to say to you that there are some things you’ll never learn with anybody else present.

I’m a church man and I believe in churches, and I love the fellowship of the assembled brethren, and there is much, very, very much that you and I can learn when we come on Sundays to the church and sit among the saints. But there are certain things that you will never learn when anybody else is with you. You will never learn in company.

Our Lord certainly, his disciples came unto him and he talked to his disciples, but it is also said in the 15th verse that Jesus departed into a mountain Himself alone so that He knew that there were some things you can never learn in company. So, He sat and there we have, I suppose, the epitome of inactivity. There He sat.

Now there can be an inactivity in the religious life which is plain laziness and there is very much laziness. I used to hear with a kind of sad smile the exhortations of the brethren in the little churches down in the West Virginia area years ago when they accused each other of what they called sitting on the stool of doolittle. You’ve heard that? Well, this sitting on the stool of doolittle, I’ve always had such a such a vivid imagination that I’ve tried to picture that stool, three legs I assume, and no back, and here was some dear old saint sitting down on that stool doing little.

Now there is such an inactivity, and I do not recommend it, and I told you last week that the Lord hasn’t anything to say good about the sluggard. There isn’t one lonely text in the whole 66 books of the Bible that says anything kind about the sluggard. He’s always branded as being no good. So, the inactivity that arises out of sheer laziness has no place in the Bible.

And then there is an inactivity that arises from fear. People are simply afraid to do anything, and they figure that they can cut down and narrow the area of their peril by doing nothing. If they simply stand still, there will be less danger of their getting into trouble.

And of course, that kind of inactivity is no good either, in that it springs out of a wrong motive, and it has that element in it which God never forgives, or at least never overlooks, though He’ll certainly forgive it, that of fear.

And then there is an inactivity also, which may come from lack of vision and confusion. People don’t know what to do, because they don’t know what to do, they don’t do anything. Now I think very great sections of the church are in that condition. They don’t know what to do, they lack vision, they’ve never seen anything, and so they don’t know where to go.

They’ve never seen a path and they don’t know where to find one. They have no highway stretching ahead, so they stand still because they don’t know where to go, nor what to do. That kind of activity is not the kind recommended in the Bible, and it’s not the kind our Lord practiced, nor His disciples.

But there is an inactivity which is the highest possible activity. I think I’ll want to stop here and explain what I mean. I’m pointing out to you that there is a nervous activity, an effort to help people, which adds up to sterility and finally, inactivity. And then there is a suspension of the activity of the body, as when our Lord told His disciples to tarry until they were filled with the Holy Ghost.

And they did, and they waited on God. And the Old Testament is full of these expressions of waiting on God. It is good for a man to wait on God. Oh, wait on God, wait on God is the exhortation found often in the Old Testament Scriptures. And it meant to come before the presence of the Lord with expectation, and there wait with physical inactivity and mental inactivity.

Dr. Simpson wrote that song you just sang. Well, Dr. Simpson was a great evangelical mystic, and he got an awful lot done. But he was also a man who understood the deep workings of the inner life. And he had much to say, particularly in his hymns, about keeping still and waiting to hear what God would say to you. Be still and know that I am God was a kind of text of his, though I don’t think I ever knew him to quote it. But the sum of it was what he taught.

And he taught the inactivity; there was a place where the mind becomes inactive. He wrote, cease thy thinking, troubled Christian, where the mind ceases to figure out its ways, and throws itself wide open to God. And the shining glory of God comes down into the life and imparts an activity.

Do you understand what I mean when I say that we can go to God with an activity that is inactive? We go to God with a heart that isn’t in the flesh or in the natural trying to do anything but is going to God and waiting.

Now, the inner spirit is seeing and hearing and mounting up on wings while the outer physical person is inactive, and even the mind is in some degree suspended. And that was where Jesus took His disciples.

I know that He once rebuked a woman who was too active, and that was Martha. And I know that we sometimes add a good deal to what the Lord says. I remember in the Old Testament that when God punished anybody, and then anybody else saw God punishing that person and decided to get a few licks in on his own. God always punished the fellow that added too much.

When the Lord punished Israel, and then along came some nation and said, well, if God’s punishing Israel, that’ll be our cue. And so, they sent an army out and started, God turned on their army and he said, you won’t add anything to My punishment, don’t you add anything.

And I think sometimes that the Lord’s kindly rebuke to Martha has been a cue for the preachers to abuse the poor little woman an awful lot. I think we’ve abused her too much. I thank God for the Marthas of the world. If it wasn’t for the Marthas of the world, we wouldn’t be so sleek and well-fed as we are now.

Somebody has to cook, and somebody has to do dishes, and somebody has to work, somebody has to do it. There has to be a few Marthas around certainly, and the Lord’s rebuke to Martha ought to be enough. I don’t think that you and I ought to add so many licks to the chastisement that the Lord gave us.

But here was Mary, and Mary was simply sitting. There’s the same word is used, she was simply sitting at the feet of the Savior, and the Lord rebuked Martha for her nervous activity. She carried her activity beyond the point where it did any good, and she didn’t buttress it and back it up by her spiritual inactivity.

Now the people came to Him, I note here. In the text they came to the Lord, and he was ready for them because He had been quiet and silent, and there alone had sat and meditated and looked upward and waited until the full charges of Divine Life moved down from the throne of God into His own soul. And He had gotten poised and like a violin tuned, and like a battery charged, and was prepared for them when they came.

Now my brethren, the failure today, there’s no question about it, is religious activity that is not preceded by aloneness and inactivity. Aloneness, the getting alone with God and waiting in silence and in quietness until we are charged. And then when we are active, our activity amounts to everything because we have been previously prepared for it.

Now here were the people. I talked to you about them before, this great multitude of people without anything to eat, a great mob of them. They had charged out and followed the Lord, and they brought their babies along, and some people were old and some weren’t very strong, and now they were three days on the way and their food had all run out, and there was no place to buy anything, and they were in need.

And our Lord said to Philip, whence shall we buy bread? Now what does that say to you and me? It says to us that our human Lord was concerned with the bread.

There never was a camp meeting yet that didn’t have a kitchen attached. There never was a Pentecost anywhere that didn’t have a cook someplace around the corner to feed the Spirit-filled saints. The Lord knows that we’re human beings.

I’d like to have you get that. I don’t want to relax you too much, and I don’t want, certainly see any of you sitting on that stool of Doolittle, but I’d like to have you know that the Lord understands all about you. Do you ever have the feeling that; I wonder why God gave me a body and didn’t give me wings.

My dear old Dutch grandmother, God bless her memory, she’d have made a good a good writer or something if she’d had a little more opportunity and come out of the hills there. But she used to imagine the strangest things. She said, I wonder why God, when He made us people, didn’t give us just a nice coating and covering of feathers. She said it would have saved so much trouble. She said, just think of it, if we’d all had feathers, we wouldn’t have had to worry about changing clothes, we wouldn’t have had to worry about all this business styles and fashions and sewing. She said, a nice coat of feathers.

And I thought my grandmother was just a little bit off, but she wasn’t. She was just using her imagination, and we have a right to do that if you wanted to know why we didn’t have feathers. And I sometimes wonder why God gave us a body and tied us down here.

I knew one man that knew. He said that it was, God gave him 60 children, you know, and tied them to his coattail in order to keep him down. He ran an orphanage. But I think God gave us our bodies more or less as a discipline. I don’t know what else they’re for. They’re a sort of discipline.

Emerson taught that, that nature had one function toward the world, for people, and that was to discipline them. But the body sometimes it gets a little out of hand, and it takes as much time and energy and care to look after this tabernacle as it does to look after all the rest of the family and your business too. And we wonder about that.

But I’m glad that God understands about it, and He knows. He gave us these mortal frames, and He expects us to take care of them. And when they got hungry, He said, whence shall we buy bread that these may eat? Now, the Lord is concerned about our eating.

Years ago, I preached a sermon on the, on the fact that there was no dividing line between the sacred and the secular. And then I wrote that chapter into the pursuit of God, which said, I called it the sacrament of living.

And I heard a talk today from the United Nations up here, I mean the World Council of Churches up here, and two men, one from South Africa, a bishop, and the other a layman from England, were talking. And they actually came to this thing that I have discussed, and I think disposed of most happily years ago, this distinction, this dividing line between the sacred and the secular. And they evidently hadn’t handled it. They obviously hadn’t read my book.

But anyway, I have never believed in the distinction between the sacred and the secular. If I ever did, I do no longer. I believe that eating can be as religious a thing as praying. I believe that it’s just as spiritual to eat your breakfast as it is to have family prayer.

And I believe that the man who separates his breakfast from his family prayers is making an unnecessary division. And he is putting eating in one category, and apologizing to the Lord, and saying, I’m awfully sorry, Lord, but you know I have to eat now. I’ll be seeing as soon as I’m through. But now I have to eat, and I’m sorry.

So, we divide up our work, the thing we do, our physical necessities. We divide them and put them on one side, and we put praying and singing and giving and Bible reading and testifying on the other side. And we say here on the other side, this is spiritual, and this is secular. And we try to walk the tightrope in between, a kind of a braiding, lacing in and out of the secular and the spiritual, apologizing to God when we have to turn aside for a little while to do something secular.

My brother, I’ve got a better way to live than that, and I can tell you that the Lord Jesus never made such a distinction. Never did he make such a distinction. He said he was the Lord. He was God himself. And He said, where can we get bread that these may eat?

And so, He broke the bread and gave it to them, and they ate, and the eating was as spiritual as the teaching had been. And the teaching and the eating were equally spiritual, and the praying that was before, the grace before meal, was just as spiritual, but no more so than the eating afterwards.

Now, if you can get a hold of that, it would mean a wonderful thing to you, that the Lord is the Lord of our bread, and the Lord of our eating, and the Lord of our bathing, and the Lord of our sleeping, and the Lord of our dressing, and the Lord of our working. So that when we work, we need not say, now, Lord, I have to work today, but I’ll see you tonight. We do not leave God at the door as a man leaves his wife when he goes to work, but the Lord is with us, sanctifying everything we do, everything we do provided that it is honest and good.

Now, God doesn’t sanctify the bartender’s activities. No bartender can pray in the morning and say, now, Lord, be with me today, because God isn’t going to work with a bartender. I’m sure of that, though I’m not so sure but what if things continue to go downhill as fast as they have been in the last few years, that we won’t have a society of beer tender, bartenders and beer sellers.

And they won’t have John 3:16 painted on the bottom of the cup so that when they drain the glass, they will see John 3:16. They say, why, these dear people are Christians. They’re good Christian beer drinkers and bartenders. Look at, they’ve got a text. They’ve got a text on the ceiling. It says, the Lord is with thee, be not afraid. And as soon as they tip their glass up and it’s empty, they’re seeing a text on the ceiling. Don’t say they’re not Christian. You, why, you would condemn those dear beer guzzlers? Why, they’ve got a text on the ceiling. Of course they have their text in hell. Don’t forget that.

But anyhow, the Lord is not going to bless the gambler and the bartender, but if your job is decent, the Lord is going to bless it. And if the Lord is in you, the Lord will be in your labors. Whence shall we buy bread that these may eat? Now the Lord of glory said that. He didn’t delegate it to a prophet or an angel, but He Himself was concerned with our eating.

And now these hungry people, here they were; it was Jesus’ problem really. But you know, he made it Philip’s problem. He honored Philip by taking him in with it.

I preached a sermon quite a while ago now in which I said the Lord was self-sufficient and didn’t need us. And I bothered some people by that because I assume that they thought the Lord needed them. And if they should retire or resign, the Lord would have to scramble around to find somebody else. What a low view of God that is, my brother. Could you get down on your prayer bones and bend your supple knee and cry to a God that needed you? I couldn’t.

A God that needed me would be a God that had to have help from somewhere. He doesn’t have to have me, and He doesn’t have to have you. That’s bitterness to some people because we have come to believe that we’re indispensable. And when we go, there will be a great tree fall and leave a vacant place against the sky. Brother, I’m afraid that when some of us die, it’ll be like a stalk of grass that was eaten by a grasshopper. Nobody noticed the difference anyhow.

But here were these hungry people, and the Lord was going to feed them, but He didn’t want to just feed them and have it over with. He wanted some blessing to flow all around as a result of it. So, He picked out one of His disciples and He said to Himself, Now I’m going to take Philip in on this. I’m going to honor him by letting him be a part of this plan. And he helped Me work it out here, though actually I don’t need him at all.

So, He encouraged Philip to tackle the problem along with Him, though He certainly didn’t need him as was proved later on. But He nudged Philip a little and got him into a hard spot in order to reveal to Philip his own emptiness.

Now, my friends, it is never a waste of time to learn that you don’t know something, and it’s never a waste of time to learn how little you have. That is a very useful procedure. It’s a positive victory when I learn the things I can’t do, a positive victory when I learn the things I haven’t got.

So, there is so little filling these days because there is so very little emptying these days. We don’t stay to get empty, and so we cannot be filled. And the Lord cannot fill a vessel that is already full. But He has to empty and empty, and He had to empty this fellow Philip. He had to empty him in order that He might fill him. But Philip was full of his own ideas, and Philip couldn’t have been filled because he was already full. And the Lord wanted to empty the man.

Very little is said after that about Philip here, nothing is said here at all about Philip. But I’m sure that Philip’s face was red, and I’m sure that he was a much meeker and humbler man after that. And his obedience and his humility were far more perfect after this experience.

And Philip didn’t acquit himself very well here. The Lord said, Philip, where are we going to buy bread that these may eat? And Philip revealed a type of mind, uninspired and uninspiring, calculating and altogether earthy. Here is what Philip did. When Jesus said, Philip, where are we going to get bread? Philip reached and took out his pencil and clicked the button and went to work. And he brought his pencil to bear on the miracle. He brought his little pencil and his sheet of paper to bear, and he became Philip the Calculator.

I don’t know why we don’t name people the way they used to. In the olden days, Middle Ages and previous to that, they named people according to what they were. And even in country places up when I was growing up, they named people according to what they were. Black Simon Pennington was a man in our neighborhood. He wasn’t any blacker, I guess, than I. He was a white man, but he was named Black Simon. Another one was called Little Simon.

So, there was Black Simon and Little Simon, they distinguished them. And if you’ll look in history, you’ll find one man called, what was his name? The Bald. Another man was named so-and-so, the Good. And then there was Alexander the Great. They named them according to what the characteristic was that strewed out of them.

And you can easily figure for yourself a hirsutic situation. That is how much hair the man had who was called so-and-so the Bald. We know his condition just by his name. You’d never want to run your fingers through his curl just because he was Philip the Bald. I think it was Philip, wasn’t it? Philip the Bald.

Now, I wonder why we couldn’t go to the New Testament and name some of these characters. Here would be Philip the Calculator, Philip the Mathematician, Philip the Clerk. And he took out his pencil.

And every Christian group has a boy with a pencil. I’ve sat on boards now for a good many years, good many years. And oh, there’s rarely a board that doesn’t have the Philip the Calculator present. When you suggest anything, he takes out his pencil and leans back a little and leaves a few streaks on the wall and comes up with a proof that you can do it. You can’t do it.

When we built this church, we had this old mule barn over here, and we built this church. And that was 12 years ago or so. And when we started to build it, we had more Philips who said it can’t be done. Can’t be done. And they proved it. We built it and paid for it for in six years. But it couldn’t be done. It just couldn’t be done.

And I sit on boards. I suppose now, God willing, I’ll be sitting on boards all the rest of my life. Brother Chase once said that he had been on the Ways and Means Committee ever since he was converted. And I have been on boards, little boards and big boards. And I will be, week after next, sitting on the board in New York.

And there’s always two kinds of men. The man who can see the miracle and the man who can see the pad and the pencil. They even provide pad and pencils in our New York board. They got a little table there and there’s a pencil and a pad. I wonder whether they expect us to use them or not.

Philip did. He took out his pencil, he went to work, and he said, how much was it here now? Let me see. He knew how much money he had. Two hundred pennies. And he counted the number of people, and he figured out how much he could buy with two hundred pennies. And then he cut the two hundred pennies worth of bread, knowing how much bread sold for, up into little slices, big enough to feed the five thousand, and turned to the Lord and said, two hundred penny worth of bread is not sufficient for them, that every one of them may take a little, period. And then he walked away. That was his contribution. It was one hundred percent negative. And if they’d listened to Philip, they’d have dropped starving in the wilderness, and the glorious miracle never would have taken place.

Philip the Calculator, the man with a pencil, a dangerous man, brother, in the Church of the Lord Jesus Christ. Every suggestion that is made in the direction of progress is voted down by the calculators.

And then we come to the next man, and that was Andrew. And Andrew did a little better. Now Andrew made a timid suggestion, and he said, there is a lad here, and he has a little lunch, five barley loaves and two small fishes. And then added, but what are these among so many?

Now I wouldn’t call Andrew a world-beater here. If he were living now, he wouldn’t be what we call a founder, nor a promoter. That’s sure enough. We’ve got so many founders now and promoters. We’ve got founders every place. I know because it says on the door, so-and-so, Founder. And we have founders, and we have promoters.

But Andrew wouldn’t have done, because Andrew was only partly over on this side of the wonder, only partly. He looked around and said, surely this final tally at the bottom of the column isn’t the end of things. He said, my brother Phillip here’s a good boy and I like him, but he’s a bit on the negative side.

And he looked that sheet over and so much bread for so many pennies, so many people sliced bread into so many. No, he says, no use. Merely be a little, a hollow toothful for each one. But he said, that can’t be the end. Can’t be. He said, there must be help someplace. And the man Andrew began to look around.

Now you’re getting a little closer to a miracle when you can get a church full of Andrews. If you don’t have anybody else, you have an Andrew or two. They usually have a footnote and they say, why there’s a boy here that has a lunch and some bread and fish, but then after all that’s not very much.

And there’s a sort of a rising inflection in the voice as much as to say, well, somebody come to my support and help me a little. If I can just get a little encouraging word from somebody, I think I can go someplace. That’s Andrew.

You’re getting a little warmer when you’re like Andrew, brother. Phillip was cold as ice. He had his adding machine, and he proved conclusively nobody was going to eat that night, and he could show you. But Andrew looked around and said, well, we got to start. Got a little lunch here, a little basket, a lad, a boy.

Now I have never been able to figure out how that boy ever managed to hang on to that lunch. Boys that I know would have been, would have had it eaten by nine o’clock the first morning and here it was the third day. But he still managed to hang on to a little lunch. Maybe his good mother had given him a little extra. He still had it. Three loaves, three slices. They weren’t really loaves; they were simply glorified pancakes. That’s all they were, five of them, I’m sorry, five. And two small fishes.

Now, this was the lad. Andrew didn’t have anything himself, but he knew somebody that did, he thought, might help out a little bit. He’d have been a help on any board because at least he was looking around for a fellow with a lunch.

And there was a little note of hopefulness here and a little faith. I know what the Lord means when He says, sheep. All you have to do, brethren, to kill a church is to begin to talk it down. That’s all you have to do. Just let the sheep begin to bleat the blues and the thing will die in no time at all. Just begin to bleat the blues.

I used to tell a story about a power of suggestion. A healthy, robust extrovert who never knew he had a stomach nor a heart nor any other organ. He walked around healthy as a horse on the earth and some fella came along and said, you know, the power suggestion’s tremendous and they got to arguing about it in the country store and so they decided to work it on this fellow.

And a half a dozen men fixed it, so they met this big healthy boy on the sidewalk. The first man that met him ran up with a smile to shake his hand and then dropped a smile and shook his hand very carefully and said, good morning, John. Don’t, uh, feeling so well? Oh, sure, he said. He just exuded all over the place. Sure, he said, feeling well. He said, I, I’m glad. I thought maybe when I first saw you weren’t looking so well.

And then about a block further down, the second fella met him, and he rubbed it in a little further than the third fella met him and the fourth. And by the time he’d met the fifth rascal, his feathers were down, and he went limping off home, pale and discouraged and said to his wife, I got to see a doctor. She said, why? He said, well, I don’t know. I’m not feeling so good.

And so, he showed up at the old family doctor’s office and cooled his heels there and waited. And he was as healthy as they come. But the prior suggestions put him in the doctor’s office. And if the doctor had only been a bit pessimistic, it could have landed him right in the hospital.

You know, there is in medical circles, a disease. I don’t know the name of it. I always forget the name of the thing, but it means a heart disease induced by a doctor. Now, you know the Latin on that, I don’t, but it means a disease of the heart that has been induced by a doctor’s suggestion.

A fellow goes in, you know, and he’s overeating or something. And the doctor looks at him and says, you look like a coronary to me. And the poor fella gets scared to death, and they rush him around and electroplate him, I mean electrocardiogram him, and fix him up. And the first thing he knows, he begins to go slowly up the stairs. And he let three streetcars pass before he’d run for one. There’s nothing wrong with him, but he has a heart condition induced by the suggestion of a physician who didn’t know any better. Doctors themselves, they got that name. I didn’t invent it.

And you know, churches are like that too. You can talk a church down and one fellow will meet another fellow and say, things aren’t going so well, are they? No, not going so well. In other words, they’re not going so well. No, that’s what I’ve been hearing. Just had heard it five minutes before from another fellow. And then another fellow meets another, still another fellow and says, oh, have you heard what the talk is? And pretty soon they have talked the church down.

And the calculators and the clerks and the mathematicians, they’ve seen the pencil, but they haven’t seen God. They figured things out, but they haven’t figured God in. And we have so much of this in the day in which we live.

Brethren, it’s time we at least find an Andrew or two that can look around for the tokens, for that’s all this lunch was. It was merely a token. It wasn’t very much. It wasn’t enough for more than one. The little boy had saved it up, saved enough that he expected his lunch to last him, and he had that. It would have done with a little water on the side to wash it down. But after all, it was only a token. It didn’t amount to very much. But Christ took that inadequate token, and He made it enough for 5,000.

My brethren, oh, you know, I told them, quoted the little passage I got from the dear old Walter Hilton who lived back before Shakespeare’s time. He was talking about how we ought to serve God and how much we ought to give and how we ought to go about serving God. And he said, I’ll give you a little rule. And he used the old English word mickle, meaning much. He said, mickle have, mickle do. Less have, less do. Nothing have, at least have a good intention.

Oh, I can’t think of a better rule than that. If you’ve got mickle, that’s much, do much. If you haven’t got mickle, but scarcely anything, then just do what you can. And if you haven’t anything, then, have a good intention. Andrew at least had a good intention and a lunch, a token. He was on God’s side at least far enough. He was optimistically inclined. But the lad was caught in the middle. Andrew didn’t have anything, but he knew a boy who had.

And so the little boy was caught in the middle. And it doesn’t tell us at all about how they got that lunch. It says Jesus took the loaves. It doesn’t say how He got the loaves. It says, He took them.

Now, it doesn’t mean that He took them away from the boy by force, certainly. Ordinarily this lunch wouldn’t amount to very much, but the circumstances made the lunch vitally important to the boy. Jesus had shown the importance of food by saying, if I dismiss these now, they’ll go fainting on the way. He knew there was no food between there and their homes, and He knew that they had to have it. It was vitally important.

And this little lad had something vitally important here, important to him. Yet, he surrendered it to Jesus. I know he did. I’ve read too much about my Lord to believe the Lord took it away from him by force. He never takes anything by force.

So, He must have gone and smiled and said, boy, would you like to help all this crowd and happy little boy looked up and said, certainly Master. Well, He said, let me have your lunch. And the boy grinned and handed it to Jesus.

And Jesus said, all right, tell him to sit down. And they sat down in an orderly tiers and rows. They sat down and Jesus took the bread and blessed, lifted up His heart and said, O God, bless this little scene. Bless this, this little optimistic note of hope, bless this token of belief. And then He began to spread it around, fill the baskets, empty baskets. Where did He get those empty baskets? Those were the lunch baskets of the people that had eaten theirs, all the food.

That’s where He got His baskets. Plenty of baskets around there, but only one lunch. And the Lord took the one lunch and multiplied it into enough for 5,000 because the lad surrendered his lunch to the Lord Jesus.

Now I briefly bring this to a close and ask you a question. Where do you stand? Are you a Philip, an Andrew, or the lad? Philip was so good at figures that he figured the situation out and didn’t figure God in. And Andrew was a little nearer. He didn’t have anything himself, but he thought he knew where he could dig up something. And it worked. And then there was the lad. He hadn’t much, but what he had, he gave. What he had, he gave to the Lord Jesus, and the Lord Jesus Christ made it sufficient.

Now there we have it. Which side are you on? There are those who are convinced that the Lord can’t do anything. They have their good reasons. They’re sure of themselves. They’ve got it figured out. And then there are the uncertain ones whose hearts are on the right side. They don’t think that that lunch is enough, but they think it’s something.

And then there’s the lad who says, If I give you this, Master, I don’t eat. But I like the way you do things, and I’m ready to go along with you. So here, take it. He didn’t know in surrendering his lunch that he was going to feed all the five thousand and have enough for himself.

And don’t you suppose that when the Lord had to send a basket full to the lad, He put an extra piece of fish on? I think He did. It’s quite in keeping with the ways of the Lord. Put a little extra bread in the basket of the fellow who had given his all. I know He does that in spiritual things, and why shouldn’t He do it with a lunch?

Well, there are some lessons from Jesus feeding the multitude. And I recommend, with the coming on of the fall days, and the return of the children back to school, and the coming home of people, and the coming of students, and the presence of persons who will be here in larger numbers, who in turn will reach others in times to come, I recommend that we ask God for at least the grace of Andrew.

And instead of a dead end, a cold calculation that says, No, it can’t be done, period, that we at least begin to look around for some tokens of the grace of God. And we’ll find those tokens. You may have a token like that and don’t know it.

You think the lad knew he had the key to the miracle? He didn’t know it, but he had it. He carried it in his lunch basket and didn’t know it. He’d lugged it for three days and didn’t know it.

You may have in your hand this night the key to the future of how many souls? You may have tonight in your hand, without knowing it, the key to the salvation of tens and even hundreds, yet if you only knew it. And if you’ll only surrender it and let the Lord have it. Say, Master, I only have a token, only a little, only this token. But take it, Lord Jesus, take it. And the Lord will take it. How He multiplies it, I don’t know, but He can do it and He will do it and He does do it. But He has to have the lad, and He has to have the willing heart and He has to have the surrendered lunch. Let us pray.

O Lord, our Lord, this night, here we are in the midst of a great, dangerous, ugly, dirty, sin-infested world, full of crime and sin and danger and death. And all around, among the bushes, there are hungry sheep. There are men and women who daren’t be sent away. They’re here in this city. They’re here even around this neighborhood. We daren’t send them away. We daren’t prove that we can’t feed them. We daren’t, we dare not say it can’t be done.

O God, our God, Thou hast given us a token of Thy grace. Thou hast given us a little beginning. We pray, help us to surrender it to Thee tonight in devotion, in sacrificial surrender. And let Thee take what we have, our minds, our tongues, our money, our abilities, and touch it with a miracle and bless it and break it and give it.

O God, we pray Thee that before the snow flies, we may yet see in this fellowship added numbers plus increased spirituality plus mounting faith plus deeper devotion plus holier living and plus more radiant worship.

We beseech Thee, O Lord, raise up some Lazaruses that will be the advertising we need. We can spend our money by going to the newspapers and telling people we’re over here. But we remember Thou didst raise Lazarus from the dead. And they came from everywhere to see the man that had been dead and lived again.

O God, we pray thee in the next weeks, find some drunkards and restore them again to sanity and health. Find some worldlings and cut them loose from the bondage of iniquity. Find, we pray Thee, some who are now bogged down and mud and sand flats of the world. Float them off, we pray, by the coming of new grace and raise them from the dead again. That the people may say this man was dead and lo, he liveth.

Raise us up some Lazaruses, O God, we pray, and some Martha’s and some Mary’s and some Paul’s and some who are now turned against Thee but will soon be turned toward Thee. Great God, help us over these days just ahead.

And we pray Thee that we may mount up with wings as eagles. We pray that we may run and not be weary, that we may walk and not faint. We pray that Thou will help us not to look back at the things that have been. But Thou hast said, say no more, talk no more of the things that have been. Lo, I do a new thing, now shall it spring forth. We pray that Thou who art the God who maketh all things new, will begin to make things new in our fellowship, in our Sunday school, in our choir, in our pulpit, in the pew, and on the board and in all of the Christian fellowship.

Great God, we pray Thou do new things among us. We pray that some of our sick may be miraculously restored to health. We pray that some who are now dragging around the edges and keeping their family divided may surrender and unite the family in the grace of God.

We pray thee that sulking, stubborn men may bow on their knees and beat their breasts and say, my God, what a fool I’ve been, and I’ll surrender my all to Jesus. Here, take my little all, the token of thy grace, bless it and give it.

God, we pray for Jesus’ sake thou will convert our young people. We pray for Jesus’ sake that Thou will send or bring in or cause our people to become so concerned that they will bring in the unchurched mobs that mill around Englewood, the crowds that are everywhere, but in the churches where the gospel is preached.

Now, Father, we are trusting Thee. We pray send us out with our eyes upward and our hopes cheerful and our beliefs strong that we shall yet see the goodness of God in the land of the living, and we wouldn’t forget to thank Thee for everybody that’s gotten help over the last weeks, these cruelly hot summer days with humidity incredibly high and our minds dull from the pressure and all the hindrances and obstacles, yet there are some whose faces are bright with what thou hast done for them even recently.

Thou hast been good, O God, otherwise we’d have fallen apart and flown apart by centrifugal force and been scattered over a thousand acres. Thou hast kept us together. Thou hast blessed us. Thou hast preserved the unity of our Christian assembly, and we like an army are ready to march. We like a club of players are ready to go out to do battle. Lord God, like farmers are ready to till the soil, like carpenters to build, like fishermen to fish. We only ask, bless what we have, Lord, bless what we have, bless what we have.

Let’s remain in an attitude of prayer, please.

How many would like to say something like this? Now trying to word somebody else’s request makes it awkward, I know, and I may miss it, but it’s something like this. You will say, O Lord, I’ve been a little on the blue side and certainly I’ve been negative, and I’ve lived a pretty negative life, but I’m sorry, and I believe that there’s hope, and I don’t have much, but I have a little, and what I have I’m ready to surrender, and I want Thee to take it and take me and begin to do something in my family and where I work, where I am going to soon be in school. Lord, I want Thee to take that and bless it and break it. I don’t know how you’ll do it,

Lord, but I just want Thee to know that I’m on your side, and I’m optimistic about it, and I have hope, and I’m cheerful and expectant, and I want Thee to take what I have, and I promise that I’ll obey, and I’ll walk with Thee, and I’ll expect.

And I want prayer. I want prayer that this might become real in my life, that I may like Andrew have hope, and like little lad, I may give some practical meaning to that hope by surrendering a token at least to be used as Thou will. Amen.

Tags Divine Preparation, Waiting on God