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Tozer Talks

“Confidence“

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“Confidence”
Pastor and author Aiden Wilson Tozer
June 17, 1956

Whereto we have already attained, let us walk by the same rule. And let us mind the same thing. And another passage is in Hebrews, two passages in Hebrews, the third chapter, verse six, whose house we are if we hold fast the confidence and rejoicing of the hope, firm unto the end. And in the tenth chapter of Hebrews, verses thirty-five and thirty-six, cast not away therefore your confidence which hath great recompence of reward. For ye have need of patience, that after ye have done the will of God, ye might receive the promise.

Now, there are about three things taught in the Bible, particularly in the New Testament that I want to mention to start off here. One is, that the Christian life is a progression. That it is a journey of the redeemed soul toward God. Not only has the redeemed soul found God, but he is also on a journey toward God and there’s no contradiction. That is one thing that’s taught in the Bible. The other thing is that Satan stands to resist every step of that Christian’s way. He is shrewd and skillful in laying his roadblocks and his traps to stop the progression of the soul toward God and God-likeness. But another is, that to advance against this opposition requires faith and steadfast courage. And the apostle calls it–confidence.

Now that’s what I wanted to talk about today, that we Christians are maturing, growing up in God, if we’re obedient and faithful. We’re progressing on a very important journey from where we started up into the fullness of God. We’re being hindered by the skillful and powerful contrivings of the devil, and that we must exercise faith and courage, and hold on to our confidence.

Now, a little exposition of those two texts which I chose. The Hebrew Christians were losing heart. And the man of God, whoever he was, wrote them a letter in which he sought to encourage them to go on with God, and uses these words, hold fast, have your confidence, rejoice, and to hope because there in is great reward. Cast not away he said. Hold your confidence and rejoice in hope to the end.

And then Paul, in the third chapter of Philippians said in effect, I’ll not read it again. But he says in effect, the whole chapter, that he’s not a perfect man yet and God isn’t finished with him. There is yet a good deal to be done on him before he’s ready for the presence of the Lord in fullness. Anybody’s ready for heaven who’s converted, who’s justified, but Paul thought about something bigger and grander than that. He thought about a conformity to Christ’s death and resurrection, conformity to Christ likeness, and the knowledge of Christ greatly increased and intensified and elevated. He thought about all that and said that he wasn’t yet, hadn’t reached that yet and wasn’t yet perfect. And then he turned around and with a fine disregard for consistency says in the text which I read, 3:16, let us therefore as many as be perfect, continue on and abide and go ahead from here.

Now, there are two opposite errors here which I thought I might point out to you though it’s not too important a part of the sermon. One is made by the liberal and the other is made by the careless evangelical, or by the zealous evangelical. The first one is the pastor, the liberal pastor, receives into his church people who’ve never been converted and then proceeds to exhort them to continue in the Christian way, forgetting that you can’t continue in a way that you have never entered. And urges them to grow in grace, forgetting that you cannot grow when you have not been born. And that life cannot be developed when there is no life there. The error is assuming divine life to be in a man or woman, because he sits in a pew or joins a church. That’s error number one. It’s a very serious error, because to continue to assume that a divine work has been done within the soul when it hasn’t, is to place that soul in grave jeopardy and all but guarantee its final ruin.

Now the second then is the opposite completely; for while liberalism assumes that life is present when it is not. Sometimes zealous evangelicals deny that life is present when it is. It is the error of the other side. And the more zealous we are and as keener we are for revival, the more likely we are to cut down the corn along with the weeds, and to insist that every baby be born full grown, and that every pilgrim reach his destination the day he starts. Now, that’s a great mistake. It’s a mistake. I tend toward myself because of my temperament, because of my impatience with the sluggish, plodding feet, dragging Christians. But I’ve got to correct myself and I’ve got be scriptural, even if it means to cut against my own temperament. And I would this morning remind you my friends, that there comes a time when a Christian must make a positive affirmation of faith. There comes a time when a Christian must say, now, I am not yet perfect, but I thank God that I am not where I used to be and that I do see evidences of change life and old things have passed away, and lo, everything has become new.

I’m not as wise as Solomon, but I thank God I’m wise enough so that I own Jesus Christ as my Savior. I don’t know everything yet, but I know Whom I have a believed. I don’t have the gifts of Isaiah or John or Paul, but I have at least the ability to appreciate those men and to learn from them. And I haven’t gone as far as St. Francis yet, but I thank God I’m on the same road headed in the same direction. There comes a time when we’ve got to do that, when we’ve got to thank God for everything that we’ve had up to now.

Now, there’s grave danger that there shall be ingratitude in our hearts about all this. For instance, we read the life of a great saint and after reading it, we find that we intend to compare ourselves with that great Christian. And of course, compare ourselves unfavorably. There are two or three reasons for that. One is we probably aren’t up to them yet, and the second is, we saw only the good parts of their lives.

I got this morning, it was left in the mail yesterday I presume, a package of books from a publisher with the lives of two great Christians, Dr. R.A. Torrey and Reverend William Christie. Well now, those were great men, one of them still living, one gone to heaven. They were great men. And I got here early this morning. I usually get around eight o’clock. So, I had little time and I sketched through both of those books and I didn’t find anything wrong with either one of them. I found only the best side of it. I found that their friends had written them up, and even Paul would feel a little discouraged after reading those biographies, because these two men are just too wonderful for this world. And now they weren’t that great. They were good, godly, wonderful men, men that I couldn’t come up to their knees I suppose, or you. At least we don’t think we could, but we didn’t know everything about them and we didn’t know their weaknesses, and we didn’t know where the spots where they might have been blind. We only saw them in the light of a glowing devotee, through the eyes of those that love them.

Now, there’s danger that we read the lives of the great and conclude that we don’t amount to anything at all and become despondent. I urge you to hold fast and rejoice and hope, and thank God for everything He’s done up to now. I sometimes say that if the Lord never answered another prayer for me, it will take me at least 20,000 years to thank Him for the ones He’s answered up to now. If He never opens a new list of spiritual sight to me, I’ll have eternity to thank Him for all the panoramas and all the spiritual landscapes that have been open to my gaze over the past years. And if He never whispers another time to my heart, I’m glad for all the times He has whispered. And if I can’t pray as well as George Mueller, I thank God at least He inclineth His ear unto me and heareth my cry. And anybody can say that, who really knows God, and I can say it. So, I’m not going to be knocked over by these very burning fellows. They come make a comment and they burn everything to cinders that within any reasonably close distance of them.

The other day, oh, it was a long time ago now, I waited a long time for I dared mentioned it, but I sat listening to a preacher somewhere on this terrestrial ball. And he was preaching in a church where he was a total stranger. He only knew two or three people in the church. And he hadn’t any way whatsoever of appraising the people in that church or of discovering what kind of people they were. He didn’t know them at all. But I sat and listened to him while he discounted and reproached and scolded and disparaged and chided and unchurched people to whom he was a complete stranger and they to him.

And I began to ask myself some questions. And I wrote them down in a notebook and I waited a long time for them to ripen and see whether I just reacted unpleasantly or whether there was really some truth in it. And here they are. Nobody’s ever answered these questions for me. Maybe you can help me. What I asked myself was this. Why do some ministers, in order to take us on in the Christian life, first have to prove we’ve never started yet? Now, I need a lot of help from God. There’s no question about that, but I can’t be helped by the man who makes me admit to start with that I’ve never been converted. He can’t help me, because he’s making me lie to begin with and that bad. So, I’m asking the question, why in order to take us on, do some of our blazing revivalists insist that we have never started at all?

Second, why is it that some of these brethren, to emphasize the truth, assume that everyone else is ignorant of that truth and never heard about it at all? And why is it that to stir us up to more prayer, we have to first be told that we don’t pray at all when we know we do. And why is it that to induce penitence in us, they have to imply by an illustration or by an outright assertion that we’ve had a fierce family quarrel just before church time? And why is it to convict us of sin, that they have to act mysterious and look very grave and roll their eyes modestly to the floor and suggest that there is among us, grave, secret sin? And why is it that if we are not doing their kind of work, they always have to assume that we’re deadbeats and never did any work at all.

It goes like this, you know brother, you’re not only going to have to keep a tender heart, but you’re going to have to develop a tough hide too along the road. A tender heart is necessary and the tenderer the better, but the hide has to be a little tough. A missionary goes to the foreign field and he has to have a tender heart to love the natives and keep right with God, but he has to have a tough hide to stand the mosquitoes and the other unpleasant things.

Now it’s the same on the Christian way. Keep a tender heart, but a tough hide. And I’ve developed quite a tough hide over the years. It hasn’t hurt me any. My heart isn’t as tender as it ought to be, but I’m not worried about my hide, because it’s kept me from going to pieces and being preached clear out of house and home and driven to the caves in the rocks by men who tried to tell me that because I’m not doing their work, I’m not doing any work at all.

It’s like this, someone who loves to work with the Jews will come and they’ll give you such a burning message, and then scold and chide and abuse. If you’re not doing Jewish work, you’re just not doing anything at all. Somebody else will be working in the mountains of Kentucky, and when they’re through with you, if you’re not interested in the mountains of Kentucky, it’s doubtful you’ve ever even been born again. Another one’s doing work in say the institutions, in jails and so on, and they will wring you like a wet towel, and when you’re finished, you’re limp and scared and wondering what’s going on. Why, you’ve never been to jail nor in an institution.

Why must we be like that Brethren? Why can’t we see that God has workers to do all his work? And that the man who is doing Jewish work, if he’s in the will of God, he’s doing it because God put him there. The person who’s in the Kentucky mountains, God sent him there. The person who’s called to do institutional work, the Lord sent him there. The person who’s on the foreign field, God put him there. And why can’t we accept each other instead of making each other feel silly and small and no good because we’re not doing the work that somebody else is doing.

Now, Paul, used big ball games as an illustration, why can’t I? Suppose that there was a little meeting of the Cubs? No, we won’t use the Cubs, let’s use a major league team. Let’s say the Yankees. And suppose that there’s a meeting of the Yankees and one fellow who plays first base delivers a burning speech and makes everybody else wilt and feel no good because he doesn’t play first base. And then some fellow pitches and by the time he’s through, everybody is wilted again feeling that if you don’t pitch, you don’t play baseball. And so, with an outfielder and the next fellow hits home runs. And if you don’t hit forty home runs, you don’t play baseball well. Well brother, can’t you see that each has his place on the field and each contributes his bit and each does each work and each will get his pay; and so, in the kingdom of God.

I don’t have to worry because I can’t do everything. Nobody can do everything. But if you can do one thing and do it well, you ought to thank God for that. But I’ve had to put up with an awful lot of sneers from people who thought because I wasn’t doing the work they’re doing. I’m not doing anything at all. I’m just sitting around twiddling. Well, I don’t know why that is Brethren, but it’s that way.

And then another thing and I’m finished with my seven questions that I haven’t been able to answer. Why do some of the men insist upon creating invidious comparisons? I’ll explain what it means. It goes like this. You talk all you want to about the deeper life. I believe in soul-winning. So, we deeper life brethren are dismissed. They believe in soul-winning, or somebody else says, you can talk all you want to about Bible study. I believe in missions. Another one says, I believe in foreign missions. That’s the Lord’s work. And you can talk about Jewish work all you will.

Now Brethren, there’s no contradiction between these works. God’s doing all of these. And there’s nobody going to tell me that there’s any comparison to be drawn there at all. It’s not exactly to see them as the previous thought, but it’s close to it, because it insists upon drawing comparisons. Somebody will say, well you pray all night. Okay, you pray all night if you want to, I live the Christian life as though there was a comparison between the two and he had to choose. Tom Hare prayers all night, but don’t think he doesn’t live the Christian life. Ed Maxey is going to the foreign field, but don’t think he’s going to give up his Bible to go.

You don’t have to choose either this or that. You can have the whole thing and accept all the people of God and love them all, understand them all. And somebody said, you teach consecration all the time, I believe in soul winning. Well, you don’t draw a distinction between consecration and soul winning; you do both, consecrate men and win souls.

Those comparisons, I’ll tell you why they do it Brethren. They do it to beat us over the head and get us to the altar. And it seems that there are those who won’t believe that they insist upon making you admit that you’ve been deceived and deluded up to now. Oh, you can’t fool me like that, my friend. And somebody says I was there when it happened and I ought to know. I know what the Lord has done for my soul. That doesn’t mean that I’m not pressing on. It does mean that I am not going to allow anybody to destroy my confidence and take away my affirmed faith in God.

Sometimes I’ve had people come to me with a message. They have been in tune with the Infinite and they came to me to straighten me out. Well up to this point, nobody’s ever managed to help me in 42 years of Christian life that way. They put their arm around you usually, that’s to soften the blow and get close to you and then give you the works.

Well, nobody’s ever helped me that way, because I always sort of reason it out. You know Brethren, you don’t need to be afraid of using your head if you use a sanctified brain; it’s perfectly all right. God put it in there. It’s an organ, use it. And I reason things out and I say to myself, now, wait a minute. I haven’t seen it. I haven’t backslidden. I haven’t grieved God. God can talk to me. He was just talking to me few minutes ago. And if he has a message for me, why did He send it around Robin Hood’s barn by a fellow whom I don’t have too much confidence in? Why not come straight to me with it? And I think that’s a good reasonable way to look at things.

A prophet used to be sent and occasionally a prophet may yet be sent to a man who is running from God to rebuke Him and say, though art the man. But, God couldn’t talk to David. David had temporarily pulled the blind down. God couldn’t get any light to him so he sent Nathan. But as long as David’s blinds were up and the sun was shining in and David was sitting on the roof playing the harp, it’s unlikely the prophet could come and tell David anything. God could talk to David.

So, my brethren, let’s thank God for everybody. Let’s even thank God for those who try to insist we’re not Christians when we are. You have this gift? No, well then, you’re out, I’m sorry for you. Here’s a ticket to hell–one way. You don’t rate. Well, I don’t have all the gifts in the world, but I thank God I have a few. Amen.

Now let’s hold fast our confidence and let’s declare our happy, joyful independence. Let’s have faith. Let’s not be our arrogant. Arrogance is of course a sinful thing. But Paul says, and maybe with this we might close, because I think it’s good to close on a scriptural note if I haven’t been scriptural up to now. At least I’ll read some scripture. Now, here’s what the man of God says. He says, wherefore, I give you to understand that no man speaking by the Spirit of God calls Jesus accursed, and that no man can say that Jesus is the Lord but by the Holy Ghost. Now therefore, there are diversities of gifts, but the same Spirit. And there are differences of administration, but the same Lord and there are diversities of operation, but it’s the same God which work is all in all.

Then another twelfth chapter, this Romans, I say through the grace given unto me to every man that is among you, not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think, but to think soberly according as God hath dealt to every man the measure of faith. So, there are gifts and they vary, and they should be in the body of Christ. And we have a right to know we have them. But we’re to think soberly about it all. Don’t get all excited like a boy with a new toy.

And let’s remember that other people have the gifts of God among them, and let us go ahead, steadfastly quietly toughening our armor against the fiery darts of the wicked, having cheerful hope and rejoicing, and thanksgiving. As we go along in the Christian way. Then we’ll progress toward God which I insist is the sum and essence of the Christian life, a moral and spiritual progressing and rushing toward the image of Jesus Christ. And in that day, when we see Him as He is, we shall be like Him. That’s the beatitude beyond which there is none other.

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Tozer Talks

“Reasons for Assembling”

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“The Forgiveness of Sins”
Pastor and author Aiden Wilson Tozer
February 17, 1957

Now, in the book of Psalms, the eight-sixth, verse five; for Thou Lord are good and ready to forgive and plenteous in mercy unto all them that call upon Thee. Then in the book of Acts there is a statement made by Paul; be it known unto you. That’s 13:38 and 13:39; be it known unto you therefore men and brethren, that through this Man is preached unto you the forgiveness of sins. And by Him all that believe are justified from all things from which ye could not be justified by the law of Moses.

Now, I want to talk about one of the bluntest and most simple things, the forgiveness of sin. And while religion is in itself naturally beautiful incidentally, I’d like to say that I don’t think in all of my Christian experience, I saw a more dignified, touching and beautiful baby dedication, than this one this morning. Have you? There’s something about the simplicity of the direct approach that’s always beautiful. And so religion ought to be beautiful. Not by ornate decoration, but by this that we saw, a direct, simple, unaffected approach to the things of God.

But we like to fancify it and pretty it up and give it favor by identifying it with popular causes, and give it a certain kind of beauty by identifying it with art and music and every kind of symbolism, and give it respectability by relating it to learning. This we tried to do. And I think the reason for it is, that simplicity isn’t present. We were not simple about it because we’re frightened. There’s a deep shame of heart. We have known a painful, humiliating thing. That is sin. And this deeply disgraceful thing that we call sin, shocks and embarrasses and humiliates. And so we try to cover it up and make religion to be simply a seeking after God or a seeking after truth. And thus we cover the fact that we’re sinners; that we need to be forgiven, just plain forgiven and cleansed by the blood of Jesus.

Now, the presence of our sin is one of the most shameful and embarrassing things in the world. And to save face, we have stigmatized certain sins and generally agree upon them. We agree to place the hand of infamy, or point the finger of infamy upon certain great, gross sins. And that makes us of course feel righteous by comparison. But all sin before God is a serious thing. God being who He is and what He is, and we being what we are and sin being the filth of the human spirit as it is, we are able to endure our own consciences only by refusing to admit the infamy of our sins by excusing or blaming on others, or cultivating a brazen face like a tavern hostess, and so destroying our sense of shame.

But you will find a great deal in the Bible. In fact, if we were to take it out of the Bible, this thought that God forgives people, that God forgives people. People must be forgiven and God forgives people. If you take that out of the Bible, you really don’t have much Bible left. It would be so thin that the you would think that you had nothing but the covers let the whole basis of the Bible or the whole reason for its existence is that there was a race that has fallen into sin. And that sin is a is an injurious, harmful, degrading and destructive and alienating thing, and that it’s got to be dealt with.

Now, that’s the Bible. The Bible is full of it. The whole book of Psalms is full of it. And the prophecies of the Old Testament speak of it and our Lord refers to it and the apostles. It’s throughout all the Scriptures, so that we must deal with this vital problem, or somebody must deal with this vital problem for us, the disposition of our sins. What am I going to do with my sin? This is so huge, and so overwhelming; a disaster this sin thing, that it demands a solution. Somebody is going to have to deal with this, this polio. They’re talking about polio. Only one in hundreds of thousands are touched with polio cancer, only one in many thousands perhaps. And other diseases, heart failure, they scared most men above forty to death last week. It was heart week and you couldn’t flip a radio or look at a paper but what somebody was yelling at you look out for your heart. And I’ve got all the symptoms myself listening to the fellows tell about it. And they tell us, look out for our hearts.

Well, the heart trouble is a serious thing. But friends, you can add up polio and cancer and heart failure, and you still have nothing compared with this one serious thing, this overwhelming disaster which is come upon the human race, this thing we call sin, that is so huge and so vast and so crushing that it adds up too. It’s greater than all of the other disasters added together.

And so, I say it demands a satisfactory solution. We dare not my Christian people, we dare not deal with it as some have tried to do. We dare not deal with it by renaming it. You can rename cancer, but it still kills. You can refuse to believe that it’s heart, but the heart may still kill. You can call a gun by some other name, but if it goes off when pointed at you, it will still destroy you. And yet some have tried to do it. Rename it, rethink it; and by a new nomenclature, that is, a set of names for things related to sin, we’ll hope that we might have gotten away with it. But no, we haven’t. We haven’t disposed of it. It’s got to be satisfactorily disposed of. And either it must be removed from the soul, or it will remove the soul from the presence of God forever.

This is true. This is true of you. It’s true of me. It’s true of my family. It’s true of those I love the most. It is true of all the good people and it’s true of all the bad people. And it’s true of all the white people and of all the dark-skinned peoples. It’s true of the great men and it’s true of the forgotten, faceless multitudes who mill the streets. It is true of every individual. Either, we must find a satisfactory solution for this sin problem, and it must be removed from our soul or it will remove our soul from the presence of God.

Now, to the sincere man nothing else matters I think, and yet, it’s evident that there are various ways of trying to get rid of it. There are those as you know, in foreign lands, who try every means of getting rid of sin, every effort. I saw a picture on the back page of the Daily News. But the news is something else again, but I think it was there. The picture of a man who had stood up, who had stood up all his life. He won’t lie down. You saw it maybe. He wouldn’t lie down. He was a man I would judge to be 55 years old or older, and he’s never laid down since he’s entered the religious order. He stands up even to sleep.

Now that’s a touching thing, that that man knows what a lot of Christians don’t know, that the most crushing, destructive thing in the world is sin. The most lethal disease ever to visit the human heart is sin and He knows he has it. And he thinks that if he stands up all his life, somewhere a good God will say, well, we can’t punish that fellow because he has stood up and tried to atone for his sin. How tragic that a man can stand up all his life, and yet not remove sin from his soul.

Now, I’m glad for David’s wonderful text. It’s so good to hear David say in that eight-sixth Psalm that thou, O God, thou O God are good and ready to forgive and plenteous in mercy unto all them that call upon thee. And I’m glad for the word in the New Testament, be it known unto you, therefore men and brother, that through this man Jesus is preached unto you the forgiveness of sin. To the most sinful age in the history of the world that has succeeded in euthanizing its sin so they don’t believe that is sin, this doesn’t have the joyous meaning that it might have to those who first heard it, might have had.

Let’s put it like this. Suppose that a man came down here in uniform and respectfully asked permission to speak a word. And he had the credentials of the government, and he arose and said, I am asked by the government to make the announcement that you are free, that you will not any longer be restrained by the government. You can vote as you please, go to church as you please, do as you please, work where you please. I am set to tell you that you are now free. You would look at each, we’d look at each other and thank him courteously and wonder what had happened to him, whether he was real or not.

My friends, that’s because you’ve enjoyed freedom from the time you can remember. That’s because you have the freedom to criticize the very government that’s given you that freedom. The very country that has made you free, you are free to condemn. And so therefore, it can’t hit you. It couldn’t hit you as it would, say in Budapest. Or as those thick-lipped announcers are all saying now, Budapest. Imagine now in Budapest. Suppose that in some church there, somebody were to arise and make such an announcement. Why there’d be an explosion that would rattle the windows. There would be tears of joy. They would turn and hug each other and cry and perhaps break into their national anthem. And thank God for that freedom which we have enjoyed ungratefully so long.

Now it’s exactly the same here. When we who have known about forgiveness so long and have heard of the grace of God preached about so much that it doesn’t reach us as it must have these early persons who first heard it. Be it known unto you, therefore men and brethren, that through this Man is preached unto you the forgiveness of sin, and by Him all that believe are justified from all things from which ye could not be justified by the law of Moses. Men and women who had born the long yoke and had worn their phylacteries, and that had to perform every thing told them by the rabbi’s. Now they hear the joyous news that they can be forgiven through Jesus Christ so that all things which they could not be delivered from by the law of Moses. They are now freed by this Man whom God has made both Lord and Christ.

 Is it any wonder that that early church was a joyous church? Is it any wonder that there was an up springing of emotion that they could hardly contain. Now I know also that it was the presence of the Holy Spirit that made them joyful. But I believe that even that kind of joy can be psychologically analyzed, at least in a measure.

And so the contrast, the wondrous contrast between the great, heavy yoke that couldn’t do anything but make their neck sore and their hearts heavy, was now tossed away, and the good news of Christ, the message that God was ready to forgive. A message that no pronouncement of science can equal. The most valuable message probably that this sin-ruined world can ever know. That’s what the Bible means by the gospel. That’s what it means. That’s the message of the gospel. And all the Bible adds up to this. And there is certainly much more, but this is basic.

Now, you say, how is this applied and what can we do about it and how do I make it real to me? Well, the Bible has been very, very explicit here, very explicit. 1 John 1:9, you know what it says. If we confess our sins, He’s faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. I think that this is one of the most wonderful and yet the most awful verses in the entire Bible.

And I have never heard it and really talked about. I have not even myself, though I have this conviction about it. I’ve never said enough about it. If we confess our sins, He is merciful and gracious to forgive. If it said that I would understand it. If it said that, I would say, well, that’s true, and that’s in line with the rest of the teaching of the Bible because God is merciful and gracious, and therefore, when we confess, He mercifully and graciously forgives. But he doesn’t say that. If it had said, if we confess our sins, God in His pity will forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. I would say that accords with the rest of the teaching of the Bible, about the great pity which God has for suffering men. But he doesn’t say either merciful, pitiful, gracious, kind. He doesn’t use any of those words. It says faithful and just. Did you ever think of that? Did you ever stop to wonder why those words faithful and just are there? If we confess our sins, God is faithful and just.

Now, why, when it looks to me as if faithfulness and justice would mean just the opposite? It would mean that we should be punished without mercy from the presence of God forever. A just and a holy God could not receive sinners into heaven. No man can see God who is unholy. And the soul that sinneth it shall die. And all the nations that forget God shall be cast into hell. That’s the justice of God. That’s the faithfulness and justice of God. And it looks as if it should have said that the faithfulness and justice of God will refuse to forgive sin and will drive us from His presence forever.

But why did it say faithful and just to forgive? It is because one of our own race, one of our own people who was once held in the arms as this little girl was held this morning by an old man and prayed over. One of our race who once walked on baby legs and grew long-legged and bony and awkward when He was twelve or thirteen and then grew on to a fine, symmetrical manhood. And grew in wisdom and in favor with God and men. There was One of our race, completely responsible for us, and taking upon Himself all our iniquities. And He went, and in the darkness did something which now places forgiveness of sin out of the hands of mere mercy, as we might say, and makes it a necessary thing for God to do.

Jesus Christ, by His atonement, made a covenant so that God to be just, has to forgive when sins have been confessed. God to be faithful has to forgive when sins have been confessed. I say this is one of the most astonishing texts in the entire Bible, that God forgives sin justly and faithfully. Why justly and faithfully? Because there sits at His right hand One who went through the unspeakable, hard agony on the cross, and in darkness fixed things so God could not only show mercy, but even justice is on the side of the returning sinner. Even justice is on the side of the man who comes to God. Even God’s faithfulness is on our side. If there had been no darkness, no cry in the night, no wound in the side, no nails in the hands, there never could have been anything for you and me in justice and faithfulness except damnation.

But because the cry was heard in the night, Father, into Thy hands I commend my spirit. And because the sun refused to shine, and because a man went in there into the darkness and gave His all for people that hated Him and were his enemies, now God has turned around so that God must forgive sin. He can’t do anything else, but that.

So, if you will confess your sin, we have covenant on our side, and we have justice then on our side. Isn’t it wonderful my friends? I don’t often say that in sermons. Isn’t it wonderful? I know that’s a rather cheap way to put it, but don’t you see the deep value and wonder of all this? That because there is an atonement made through this Man, through this Man, said the apostle, be it known unto you therefore, men and brethren, that through this Man is preached unto you forgiveness of sins, and by Him all that believe are justified. And now justice is even on our side. Not mercy, not only mercy, but also justice.

And the faithful God can fulfill the text of the Old Testament, that Thou God are the God who forgives iniquity and sin. To me, that’s worth taking everywhere throughout the whole world. People often wonder why I don’t deal in baptism, and they write and ask me whether I believe in pre-tribulation, or post-tribulation rapture, and they write and ask me what I think of this man or that man, as though I wanted to tell them. And people are always wanting to get out on a limb, and I do it myself sometimes. But Brethren, at the beating heart of our message, and of our Christian fellowship is this, that the terrible calamity hit us. And not only did it hit us, but we brought it by our own sin. And we have no excuse in the wide world to offer. We did it as David said. It’s our fault, we did it. And yet God in His great mercy has sent a Man and that Man being God, and man has fixed it now so even justice is on our side.

So I want to close by saying this to your friends. Don’t think of of God being divided up in his attitude toward you. Never think of God’s mercy being for you and His kindness being for you and his pity being for you. And then his justice and his faithfulness and His holiness being against you. Never think of it that way. It used to be maybe that way before the atonement was made. But it’s that way no more. All of God is for you. And all the attributes of God are over on your side. And everything God is, is yours. And there isn’t an attribute or a characteristic of the Holy God, but is over on your side because Jesus died and rose and lives and pleads.

Now, there’s the simple gospel. And yet it has been the throbbing heart of the gospel message during all these long years. So, tell it friends and keep telling it, and tell it to everybody and tell it abroad. And Roy, go back and tell it. I know you will. And we Christians pay and pray to help them to go and tell it. This wonderful message, to us, who are so used to things. I say we have sort of lost the beauty of it. But, oh, to those that know it for the first time, how wonderful, how wonderful it must be. How wonderful.

I think that tonight, I have reason to believe tonight will be one of the greatest meetings we’ve ever had in this church, and I want you to be here tonight.

We thank Thee Holy Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that Thou didst not overlook us rebels here in a dark, forlorn world. But Thou didst send us Thyself, Thy Son. We thank thee for the Fountain which is opened in the house of David and is now open for all of us. We pray that we may not through morbid humility or fear or self-hatred, fail to enter and be washed, but that we might enter and be clean. And now May the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the communion and fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with us all forever.

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“Reasons for Assembling”

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“Reasons for Assembling”
Pastor and author Aiden Wilson Tozer
November 2, 1958

The sermon this morning will be brief, I trust. I want to make some comments appropriate for this communion this morning from the tenth chapter of Hebrews, a part of which I read in the earlier part of the service. I want to call attention to our position in Jesus Christ. Verses 10-12, by the which will we are sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all, and every priest standeth daily ministering offerings, oftentimes the same sacrifices, even though these can never take away sins, but this man after He’d offered one sacrifice for sins forever sat down on the right hand of God. There’s the one sacrifice. And that means the end of sacrifices, the end of sacrifices. Nobody has offered a blood sacrifice that’s been accepted from the day our Lord Jesus Christ said, it is finished. Before that, there were sacrifices plural. Since that there have been no sacrifices offered in blood. There have been many thousands, even millions offered, but none had been accepted. Because to add any sacrifices to the one complete, full, final sacrifice is to do despite to the Spirit of grace. There is one sacrifice.

In verse twenty-one, having an high priest over the house of God, one Priest, and that means the end of priests. The end of sacrifices and the end of priests. We have to keep this in mind. There has not been a time probably since the days before Luther when we were being conditioned mentally by advertising, radio, television, speeches, columnists, news items, pictures, and just a general barrage of propaganda to accept the idea that there is something to be said for the repeated sacrifice of the Mass and the position of priests. There is nothing to be said if we stay by the Bible. There is one sacrifice offered for ever. That means the end of sacrifices.

Therefore, without hesitation and in a spirit of complete charity for the people, but with grief at the error, I say that every sacrifice offered by priests now is an affront to the holy God. However well intentioned, it’s an affront. There is no more sacrifices now and there is only one Priest.

So, we come to the end of priests, except of course, that we are all priests. 1 Peter 2:9; we are chosen generation, a royal priesthood. And we are all priests offering up sacrifices unto God, but they’re all grounded on that one sacrifice. And the Christian priest offers no blood sacrifice. He offers the sacrifice of praise unto God. And so, we explain that when we say the end of sacrifices, we do not mean the end of personal sacrifices, hardships, such as missionaries endure. Neither do we mean that we are not to offer up the sacrifice of praise, well pleasing in His sight. But we mean atoning sacrifice is no more. Nobody can offer them now. Not all the beasts of the mountains, not all the cattle, the bay face cattle that roam the rich hills and valleys of our West, would be enough to wash one sin away. No more priests.

And we can draw near, verse twenty-two. Let us draw near in true faith with a heart in full assurance of faith having our hearts sprinkled and our bodies washed with pure water so we can come together. Here’s what I want particularly to emphasize, that as we draw near to Him, we draw nearer to one another also. Not forsaking the assembling of yourselves together, verse twenty-five.

That word assembly is a word I’m coming increasingly to love. The word assembly of course only means a gathering together. And it has to be a modified or you don’t know what kind of an assembly. When the communists meet, that’s an assembly. When the politicians gather their people in to talk to them, that’s an assembly. When a group gathers to see a baseball or football game, that’s an assembly. But there’s a modifier here, the assembly of God. God’s assembly, the only assembly God calls, and the only one he has called. It is called the church in English. And so, we are not to forsake the church, the assembling, the coming together.

Now, I want to point out briefly why we should assemble. We should assemble because it’s the normal thing. You know, the closer you get to the Shepherd, the nearer we get to each other. When the sheep are scattered all over the meadow browsing and the shepherd issues his peculiar call and they all come running to him, the nearer they get to him, the closer they get to each other. Isn’t that beautiful and simple.

So, we come closer to each other by coming closer to Christ. Five men in a church who are apart, if they come close to Christ, each of them will find they’re closer together because they’ve come closer to the Savior. All the creatures of the forest meet at the water. They all come to the same place. And those scattered all over the hills, when they meet at the water, they’re close together.

Well, we need each other is another reason, even if we don’t feel that we do. The man who feels that he needs other people is normal, but when we feel we do not we’re badly in error and something wrong with us. The individual Christian needs the company of Christians incidentally, the company of Christians. And we should come to that company of Christians with receptivity. God will say to a company what He cannot say to the individual, just as He will say to the individual what he cannot say to the company.

Somebody called me the other day, a member of Moody Church. I told Brother Redpath at a luncheon the other day that one of his sheep had been consulting me. And but anyway, she called and she was concerned about some spiritual problem. Well, she said, I attended, I went all through Keswick and I never went back. I never went back to the prayer room because God never meets me in company. And she wanted to know what’s the matter with her. And I said, well exactly the same thing is true of me. I never meet God at an altar of prayer. I’ve had to meet God alone. But yet God has said things to me in the company. I sit here as we sing and the Scripture is read and prayer offered and God says things to me that He did not say to me when I was alone. But He says things to me alone, that He cannot and will not say to me in a public assembly. So, we need both. We need to come to God alone. But we need also to come to God with the assembly, for God speaks to His assembly what he cannot speak to the individuals of that assembly if they’re not present in the assembly.

Now, how much value I can give to a crowd of Christians will depend upon how close I’ve been to God and how God has spoken to me alone. There must first be personal religion and then communal religion. Our fathers talked about that. You know, I wish that there might be a reingestion and reissuing, a rethinking of all the old Puritan teaching. They had phrases, good, strong biblical phrases that we’ve lost in our modern day. One of them was personal religion and communal religion. They taught that we had to have God in Christ personally before we dare join ourselves to the assembly and thus join in the worship with a company. So, there’s a company that meets. Forsake not the company. Forsake not the assembling of yourselves together.

Then the third reason is that Christ went to the company regularly as often as He could. And I suppose it would be every Sabbath day He went to the synagogue or the temple as was His custom it says. And He didn’t find everything as He wanted it there, but He went nevertheless, because He knew the law of the assembly. And Christ promised special blessings to the company where two or three are gathered and so on.

So, He made a special promise to the company. He also made a special promise to those who pray alone. Enter into thy closet and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly. But He made a special promise to the company. And when we meet, we meet in the historic tradition. I am not a traditionalist, but I’m pretty much inclined to give some credence to the value of that which has stood solidly from the days of Israel down to this present day, unchanged through all the long tradition of Bible religion. And they met, they assembled, they came together in the historic tradition. And when we Christians, if we could only, if we were up looking down, if we were up there looking down and could see history from Abraham to the coming of Christ, we’d see the little companies dotting the map all the way down. We’d see ours, a little company in the historic tradition.

Now, I want you to notice why Christians practice this assembly-going so rarely and some intermittently. Well, I think that there are several reasons. One is a break in internal communion. If I have a break in internal communion, then I don’t feel that I want to go with a larger company. If I have broken with God, if I have broken with the Shepherd, I have automatically broken with His sheep, though I may not have had any fuss personally with any sheep. But, if my heart has been cut off from the Shepherd, I have also cut myself off from the sheep.

Then there is secret backsliding, wrongdoings, evils. I never have believed in that subtle power of suggestion used by some public speakers where they will lower their voice and act mysterious, and talk around and around and try to by the power of suggestion make you feel you’ve been a very evil person indeed. I don’t believe in that whatsoever. I have sat knowing that I wasn’t doing a thing and knowing I hadn’t been guilty of it, knowing before God I hadn’t been guilty of it. And yet, I’ve had men talk me to a point where I felt guilty because of the low subtle, breathy voice suggestion that probabilities were I’d been doing it.

Well, I don’t want to practice that. And I don’t want to suggest there’s been any secret backsliding. But I do want to say that if the heart back slides, then it’s embarrassed when it comes in the company of the saints. To hear two happy Christians with their open countenance discussing the Lord, the man who is secretly backslidden and alienated from God is not, at least in his emotions and feelings, is not very likely to feel comfortable, rather embarrassed.

Then plain coldness of heart sometimes will shut us away from enjoying the church. We ought not only to come to church, we ought to enjoy it. But the coldness of heart will prevent it. And candidly, it simply means that some don’t come to church or go to church because they’re not interested. They find Christian worship boring.

Now, this is the real reason for they’re not assembling themselves together very often or only maybe once a week. But they usually, such persons, usually excuse their conduct by blaming the minister; and I’d be the last one to defend the minister. I listened to two tapes of my sermons here last week trying to get some sorted out to send a man over in Williamsport who wants to make copies of them, and I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t go to hear myself preach if there was any place else to go. I’d go hear Redpath. But the minister may be to blame. And certainly, we’re not all perfect and we preach in a monotone and repeat ourselves. But, you know, that’s only an excuse. Yes, it’s only an excuse.

The company, the company, the sheep gather around the shepherd. They gather at the water. They gather where the grass is. And as they gather, they come close to each other and they fellowship with each other. And if the minister shouldn’t be a Spurgeon, they still feel they want to come together. I have gone out and been in churches where the people were so happy and blessed and warm and loving each other. And there was an enthusiasm and a glow over the congregation. And I knew personally that the preacher didn’t amount to much. That is, he was a good man, but he wasn’t much of a preacher. And I thought to myself, why? Why is this fellow who is not much of a preacher nevertheless, why does he have a church like this? The answer is, the people were still in the fresh blush of their love for Jesus Christ and they were gathered there to meet the Lord Jesus, and they listened to the minister more or less. And if he failed them, they smiled, prayed for him came back the next Sunday with the same glow because they were coming to meet the Lord.

Or, a second excuse is, blaming the music. Well, I have been one of the worst critics of church music. And I know that a lot of it is not much good really. And some is worse than others. But you can get along with pretty bad music, if you love the Lord. If there were a picnic on a beautiful July day, why everybody comes, even if the singing wasn’t so good. And if the speaker who spoke at vespers in the evening wasn’t a Spurgeon, they’d still be there, because they had some other reason for coming. It’s good to have a minister who’s preaching warms people’s hearts and draws them. It’s good to have music that can help Christian people to express themselves. But if we have mediocre preaching and mediocre music in the churches, God’s people will be there anyway, because they’re not going to hear the sermon or the music only. They’re going to fellowship the saints. As they come to each other, they come to meet the Lord. And then when coming to meet the Lord, drawing close to the Lord, they draw near to each other.

And then also, this failure to attend church or this sporadic intermittent church attendance, we blame on unfriendliness of the people. Our church here over the past years has been criticized for being unfriendly and praised to the skies for being the friendliest church in the whole country. The truth is, that it’s neither the most unfriendly or the friendliest, it’s just about what you are if you’re visiting. If you’re visiting here today as a guest in the Lord’s house and you don’t know us, you can get away without meeting anybody if you hurry. Or, if you’ll wait around and grin a little, there’ll be twenty-five people ask you your name and where you are and where you go to church. It depends, he that would have friends must what? Show himself friendly. Sure Brother Tozer, remember that.

Then, we also when we break out, break off with God and get cold in our heart, we start blaming hypocrites. Well, certainly they are hypocrites. Jesus had a few or at least one very serious one in His flock and Peter had a couple. He got rid of two of them in a rather drastic fashion, Ananias and Saphira. But even after they were gone, they still had some. The Church has always had them and always will, people who pretend to be Christians and aren’t. But if I’m going to stay away because of that, why I am breaking the rules of the kingdom and the commandments of Christ and the pleadings of the Spirit and the historic tradition of course.

I never know when I enter a bus and sit down, I may be sitting beside a communist. I never know that I may be sitting beside a man who’s got a gun under his armpit. He’s a dropper, a fellow sent out to bump off the enemies of some gangster. I don’t know that. But I’m not going to leave the United States, the greatest country in the world because we got some gangsters in it, and because there are some vermin called communists crawling in out of the woodwork. I am not going to leave the country and say no to everything American. I thank God for all we have. And if my vote will help Tuesday, why, I want to clean things up. But don’t let’s blame the hypocrites, because they’re not to blame. God will handle them. And you come and make them ashamed by being a happy-faced Christian.

And then when we break off with God, lose internal communion and have secret backsliding and start intermittently attending the assembly of the saints, we blame the church building, it’s too cold or it’s too hot, or it’s too drafty, or it’s too noisy, or it’s too uncomfortable. But, if you want to see a baseball game, you’ll go if it’s 103 in the shade, and no shade. And if you want to go to a football game, you’ll go if it’s 32 and overcast and rainy. So, let’s not please have any of that hypocrisy, that it’s the building, or it’s too cold, or anybody else’s, oh, it’s too hot or it’s too drafty, it’s too noisy. All right, but can you say that when the Lord comes? Can you say that when the Lord comes? When the Lord Jesus Christ and you meet, and he looks through you with those flaming eyes, can you say to Him, Lord, I’m sorry, but it was too drafty. It was too uncomfortable, or it was too noisy, the babies cried.

Well, we conclude. We should be at the assembly. We should be there not only once, comfortable Sunday morning, but we should be there Sunday night, and we should be there wherever there’s a prayer meeting also, because we’ve got something to contribute if we’re a Christian. I don’t mean money either. I mean, you’ve got something to contribute that’s more valuable than money even. And you have something to gain. Don’t forget it. You have something to gain. And don’t forget that we’ll find the Shepherd where the sheep is. If you can’t find Him, go where the sheep are and you will find the Shepherd because He’s where they are.

And Paul said when ye become together, when ye become together. Now there’s the good New Testament expression. Christ fed the multitude in companies. Remember, they sat down in companies and He fed them in companies. And Paul said, when ye come together do so and so. How blessed it is that we can come together. How blessed it is. I know what Brother McAfee meant. He teases me a lot. And I do like books. And you get the benefit of it incidentally. But I love the assembly of the saints and I love the songs of the saints. I don’t always join in the singing because I don’t have too good a voice and if I preach twice in a day and sing along with it, I’m pretty scratchy by nightfall. So, I listen rather than sing for my throat’s sake and my other infirmities. But I love to hear and join in with the saints as they sing the songs of Zion. I love to hear Brother Van Kepel quote the Psalter. I love to hear somebody lead out in prayer. I love to hear the sonorous tones of the song leader and then the sweet sound of the music. I love it my friends, I love it.

And if God were to come to me and say I’m going to take you away from all that and you’ll never hear it again, I’d grieve till I died, for I love the assembly of the saints. But sometimes you have to get away from the saints to get to God on certain things. For the Lord will say things to you alone that He won’t say to you with the saints buzzing around you. But as I said before, He will also say things to you among the saints that He couldn’t say to you if you were alone. So, we’ve got to have both, not one or the other, but both. And so, we need to thank God how blessed we are. Let us give thanks that we can be together today and we can celebrate the Lord’s Supper.

Now, the Catholics would say transubstantiation; this is the very body and the very blood. We cannot agree with that though we appreciate their effort to try to get close to God. Lutherans would say, back of, underneath and behind there is the Presence and that gets a little nearer. We want a little more than mere symbolism. We don’t want to say only this symbolizes. It’s a little more than that. Yet, we know a cracker when we see it and we know grape juice when we taste it. So, we’ll not pretend that it’s Jesus Christ body. But we will say, somehow, through the mystery of the Presence, through the mystery of the imminent Presence, by our obedience to Him in remembering His death till He come, He imparts something to us when we obey it. So, as we receive the bread and the wine, we do it with intelligence, but let’s do it also with faith. Knowing that while it is bread and it is wine, somewhere underneath it and back of it, there’s a Presence, that holy, loving presence. The presence of Jesus Christ the Shepherd, more wonderful than all Mount Hermon and the mountains of praying. Zion, the Perfection of beauty is present. Let us rejoice.

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“The Mistakes of Israel and Possibly Ours”

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“

“The Mistakes of Israel and Possibly Ours“

Pastor and author Aiden Wilson Tozer

April 13, 1958

I want to talk a little about Israel and a mistake she made, and that you and I can make if we don’t watch out. It’s in Hosea, the 10th chapter. The first two lines in my Bible read like this, Israel is an empty vine. He bringeth forth fruit unto himself.

Now, the prophet Hosea was sent to Israel in one of her low times, or times of declension. Declension is a nice word for backsliding and that’s what Israel was doing. She’d forgotten some vital things. She’d forgotten her origins in the covenant of Abraham and she had forgotten in a large measure the God of her father’s. And according to this prophet, she had a divided heart. That’s 10:2. She had a divided heart. And wherever there is a divided heart there is a civil war. A house divided against itself cannot stand said Jesus. And a divided heart means civil war within, what Bunyan called, The Little Kingdom of Mansoul. Jesus said, ye cannot serve God–and. You cannot serve God and, but Israel was trying to serve God–and. She had not quite the courage to reject Jehovah, but she was adding other gods and putting up other altars and she was trying to serve God–and.

Now that’s to be double-minded, and James warned about being double-minded. Jesus said, a single eye. We were to have a singular, that is one, single focal point to which the eyes look. And another prophet said, son, give me thy hearts. God was speaking through this man. And Israel, according to 9:4 had put herself in a position where God rejected her offerings. And so the Prophet said about Israel. Israel is an empty vine. She bringeth forth fruit unto herself. Look at that a minute.

Now, what’s the purpose of a vine. It is to bring forth fruit unto. The fruit of the vine is never brought forth for the vine. The fruit of the vine is not for the vine. The fruit of the vine is a gift from God and the vine receives it as a gift for others. The vine is to bring forth fruit unto others. Israel’s mistake was she brought forth fruit unto herself. The vine is to bring forth fruit unto the food of man and the food of other creatures and for the creation of other vines. Every grape has two or three seeds in it capable of producing other vines, and so any given vine produces fruit, receives the sweetness and fragrance and nourishment from God in order that she might give it to others. She’s backslidden when she produces it to consume it herself. She brought four fruit unto herself. This was true of Israel and it’s true now of many, many churches and many people.

Many Christian people who claim to be God’s children, they nevertheless are bringing forth fruit unto themselves. Now, that was Israel’s failure. She kept her treasure within herself. For it was not God’s wind overhead nor God’s rain. It was not God’s soft soil. It was not the laws of nature nor anything that you could lay the blame to. It was something wrong with the vine, that instead of the gifts of God externalizing themselves and flowing out into fruit for others and for the production of other vines to come, they stayed within the vine. And the vine had nothing but leaves and no fruit. So the fruit was actually brought forth unto the vine for the vine, and this was the mistake. So, the vine missed the will of God and was an empty vine.

Now applying this to the Christian church, applying it to this church, I would say that our lives can become wholly selfish. Good, honest, Christian people can, unknown to themselves, little by little, become wholly selfish so that it’s all in-flow and no out-go. Remember those two rhyming words in-flow and out-go. Ye shall receive power and ye shall be witnesses said the Lord Jesus, and out from within him shall flow. There’s the in-flow and the out-flow or the out-go and this is normal. Because what you receive you do not receive for yourself. If the Lord’s people could only remember that.

We are not like the Dead Sea to receive always and give nothing off, except what is taken away by evaporation. But we are channels to give. We are not lakes not lagoons. He did not say, when the Holy Ghost comes, you’ll be like a lagoon. He said, when the Holy Ghost comes, you’ll be like a like a river, and the rivers always flowing. That is why you can hardly pollute a river. You can pollute a pond or lagoon or a little lake. But it’s very hard to pollute a river, because it’s always flowing.

There was a little saying back among the hills of Pennsylvania where I grew up, that if water flows over two stones and purifies itself. I think that perhaps was overstated. But that was the way we boys decided whether we could drink out of a stream we happen to come to. If it was flowing, and there were two rocks there, we said it’s clean. Well, the river keeps itself clean by flowing. And the Christian and the church, for what is the church? It’s a lot of Christians working together. And what this church is, is what we Christians are.

There isn’t any mysterious, mystical third thing called a mysterious church. There isn’t any invisible church here. The church is you and me in this congregation. And therefore, whatever we are, the church is. And the total cannot be greater than the sum of its parts. The total at the bottom cannot be greater if it’s properly added up, than the parts above it. And so, this church is what we are. It is no less than that, but is no more than that. So, it’s true of us that there must be in-flow and there must be out-go, out from within him shall flow. But we often are like the vine that brought forth fruit, but kept it inside of itself, and had nothing but leaves. Our lives are selfish, wholly selfish.

And then, the second thing is, that it reveals itself in this, that we’re careful to spare ourselves. I was thinking, somebody said to me last week in New York City, this doctor’s orders business; and he gave me quite a little lecture, not talking to me. He was talking about somebody else, but I was getting the lecture and I enjoyed it; this doctor’s orders.

There are so many preachers sitting around afraid to move for they’ll drop over. There were two men out on the West Coast. One of them, a great tall fellow, Robert Kilgore, a good friend of mine and a hard-working Christian brother. The doctor said to him you have, I forgot what of the heart, and you’re going to die. You take these little tiny white things. What is it? I started to say dynamite. No, not digitalis. Anyway, they put them on their tongue and dissolve them and that, nitroglycerin, that’s it. And he said, now, Brother Tozer, we were out to the council out there, and he looked down at me, for he was a great, tall fine-looking man. He said, Brother Tozer, there are three of us preachers out here on the coast, and he said, we’ve all got heart trouble. We are cardiac cases.

Now he said, if I slow down and take it easy, retire and don’t do anything, I may be can stretch my life a little while. He said, I’m not going to do it. I’m going to serve God. He lived about a year, and they found him lying quietly on the floor beside his bed. But he served God that year. He didn’t vegetate. He didn’t sit around and rust. He served God that year. Two other fellows are still out there waiting, waiting, looking every day down the street wondering if that long black car is coming for them, waiting. Doctor’s orders they say, doctor’s orders.

Now, brethren, I wonder if there doesn’t come a place in the Christian’s life when he stops listening to doctor’s orders and he begins to hear God say I count not my life dear unto myself. We talk about Dr. Jaffrey. Dr. Jaffrey never should have gone as a missionary in the first place. He had an enlarged heart and diabetes. And the AMMO, which has kept a great many people home, would never, never have sent him out, but somehow, they got him through in those early days. And you know what he did? He went over there and shook a continent and the islands. Then when he got old and they said it’s time for you to retire, he said I’m going to do that very thing. Retire means put on new tires. So, he put on new tires and opened another whole world, we used to call Indonesia. Doctor’s orders would have said you go back to Toronto, that beautiful Canadian city with all her parks and beautiful buildings. One of the cleanest, most beautiful cities in the world that I’ve ever seen at least is Toronto. And he owned stock and was part owner of the greatest newspaper in the city.

He could have gone back there, had a fine apartment or an estate outside the city somewhere on the edge where you could have lived in the suburbs and all would have been well with him. He might have stretched his life a long time, but he put on four new tires and went back to Indonesia. He died out there as you know. He died in a pig pen, where the Japs put him. He died, well, he didn’t actually die in it. He died in a poor homemade hospital on a cot. But he had been kept in that pigpen by the Japs. But in the meantime, he opened all that area, and there are Christians over there now because he went there. Ed Maxey’s out there with Shirley because he went and opened it up. Walter Post’s out there and Harry Post because he went out and opened it up after he should have according to doctor’s orders, gone back to Toronto and waited for the end. No, my friends, as long as we keep sparing ourselves to bring forth fruit unto ourselves, you are to bring forth fruit unto others. And then we refuse to inconvenience ourselves.

So, the Lord’s work is carried on like the birdwatcher’s society. The tattered edges and the leftover pieces of our time and strength and abilities, or like a crocheting guild, where when they’ve slept all they can and sat around and eaten all they can and nothing else to do and they’re bored with being at home. They go to the crochet guild and sit around gossip. And the crocheting guild gets the tattered remnants of their time.

Well, the church of Christ is being run, and mostly like a birdwatcher’s society or a tatters or crocheters guild, from the tattered remnants of what is left of people’s time. And so, because we refuse to be inconvenienced, we’re bringing forth fruit unto ourselves. When I heard that organ there with that offertory, I raised my eyebrows at Mr. McAfee and I said to brother Jake Hoeber, do you know what that is? That was one of Simpson’s numbers. That was put in my feet to go and put in my heart the woe.

Now, that doesn’t sound like a birdwatcher’s guild. That sounds like somebody given up to something. They have a word they’re using here and there in the world now. It’s too bad the world had to teach it to us. It’s the word committed. They say, he’s a committed man. They say of the communist leader, they’re committed men. They believe in their devil’s philosophy, but they believe so fully that they’re committed men, and they’re ready to be expendable and die for it. And some of them do. They put it across because they’re committed men. But we who know the Red Cross of God, who’ve seen Jesus die on it for our sins and know that He rose again the third day according to the Scriptures, we insist upon giving God the tattered fragments of our time. And Christianity for the most part is run by a bored, blaised, burned out people who’ve been Christians so long, the joy has worn off. Like an old, married couple sitting around behind their newspapers, the freshness and beauty of the dream has worn off and the glory has departed, or as Hosea said here in this book of his, thy glory has flown away like a bird and always centering around ourselves.

You know what the cure is my friends? The cure is found in the twelfth verse. Sow to yourselves in righteousness, reap in mercy; break up your fallow ground: for it’s time to seek the Lord, till he come and rain righteousness upon you. I’m not going along with all of those who are saying, let’s meet and pray all night for revival. Let’s meet and pray for revival. I said to the man that approached me about it, all right Brother, the day that the evangelical forces of Chicago will come to me and say, we have been bringing forth fruit unto ourselves. We have been astray from the Scriptural pattern. We have added a thousand anti-scriptural gadgets to the pure work of God. We are careless about the Lordship of Christ. We are not living as we should live and I want you to join us in the prayers of repentance. And then we promise to go back to our churches and straighten out and get right and clean up from the ground, and from the bottom up. Clean up our churches and cast the money changers out of the temple and the sellers of bulls and cows out of the temple and start clean according to Book of Acts New Testament Christianity. I’ll join you. I’ve never heard from them since. Nobody wants to do that. We want to revival but we want it the cheap way. We want God to come roll over us with a huge wave of emotion. And if we have a huge wave of emotion, each go to the other and say I thought a bad thought about you two years ago, forgive me and everybody have a good cry, and then go back to our idols and back to our selfishness and back to our carnality.

No, there’s only one way to repent and that is to reverse our ways. And instead of doing the way we’ve been doing, do the way we ought to do. You don’t have to notify God. He knows. Those two boys that Jesus told about, the father said to the boys go work in the vineyard today. One of them flared up and said I won’t go. The other one said all right, Father, and then he went fishing. But the boy that had got angry and said, I won’t go, he saw sadness and hurt in the Father’s face. Twenty minutes later, and he was down on his knees saying, O God, what a scoundrel I was and he went right out into the vineyard and worked all day. The father came back and found the boy that said he would go didn’t, and the boy that said he wouldn’t–did, and Jesus said, that’s repentance. There’s repentance. We say, let’s meet and have an all-night of prayer. Yes, Father, yes, Father we’ll work in thy vineyard, but the next day we go back to the old rule again.

Now, I want to tell you about two men. Two men that talked to me this morning. Those two men never dreamed that I would mention it. And I’m not going to mention their names and I’ll keep you guessing for the rest of your lives. I will not tell you. Two men saw me today. And they’re men who are honored in this church and who are in official position. One of them met me and said, Pastor, my hours are such that if I work, I can’t attend the meetings of this missionary convention. So, I’m taking one week of my vacation now in order that I can stay home and go to every meeting of the missionary convention this week. Now, he doesn’t have to send a telegram to heaven. God knows that kind of activity. God recognizes practical doings. He recognizes actual doings. That man is doing his Christianity. He’ll be here at every meeting, because he’s taking his vacation now, part of it, half of it, now, so that he’ll be home able to, instead of sending back cards, wish you were here, he’ll be here.

Now I don’t say you have to do that, but I point that out. As long as we’ve got our hard cores, the Baptists call it, I’m a little afraid of that expression. I’m afraid it’s a little too hard, often, but as long as we got a hard core of that kind of spiritual men in this church, I’m not afraid to stay around here.

Another man said to me, and he’s in a position where he could have lots of lectures. He said to me, you know, Pastor, I think he included his wife in this. I don’t remember for sure, but I know he said himself, that I’ve decided on fewer luxuries. He said, I’ve decided on fewer luxuries. The work of God needs it. And I’ve decided fewer luxuries and more self-sacrifice. The kind of works I believe in.

One of my friends and I met last week in New York. He had written me a letter, one of the most wonderful letters about what God had been doing for him. And I saw him. He lost weight actually. He said, look here and showed me his belt and said, look, I’m losing weight. He said, you know why? He said, I’m getting up early in the morning and meeting God. I’m eating less. I’m missing some meals in order that I might meet God. And his church is going like a prairie fire. Lean godliness, that’s what we need ladies and gentlemen, lean godliness. We got too much fat in our spirit. We need lean godliness. Too much being careful to spare ourselves, and excusing ourselves on the ground that it’s doctor’s orders. I’d spend three fourths of my time in Florida if I listened to doctor’s orders. And I’m not going to listen to doctor’s orders. I’d rather die five years sooner and get something done while I live than to vegetate like an old cabbage.

So, let’s remember. Let’s reverse our ways of selfishness and let’s bring forth fruit not unto ourselves, but unto others. I have confidence in this church. You know this church has suffered over the last two or three years. You know what’s happened. It’s not been from within. It’s not been from the pulpit nor from the board nor from any of the congregation. It’s been from a changing social order here. And almost every other church has fled the neighborhood. We’re still here. And somebody would say, well, we’re down. This is going be a low convention. I don’t believe a word of it. We may, times ahead, we may have to relocate. We’ve got our committee. We’ll talk about that later next fall, but now we’re here and you’re here. And God has sent his messengers here. And we own this place and we don’t owe a dime on it. And in spite of the fact, we lost a whole church in numbers over the last two years who have moved away and out into the suburbs, into Wheaton and all over the country, we still had $36,000 for missions last year. So there isn’t any reason in the world why we will reverse our laziness and our love of luxury and all the rest. There isn’t any reason why this can’t continue to be one of the strongest and most godly and most Christ-like churches.

Israel brought fruit unto herself. Too bad. She had all the light. She had the sunshine. She had the soil. She had the rain. She had everything. But she turned in on herself and she never got a grape for some for weary bird. God wants you and me to keep pouring out of our life and love and sacrifice and money until instead of it saying, that Alliance Church brings forth fruit unto itself, it can be said that church brings forth fruit unto the ends of the earth. Amen. Amen.

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“Ye Are Babes”

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“Ye Are Babes“

Pastor and author Aiden Wilson Tozer

March 24, 1957

To be a spiritual Christian, I discover that almost everybody, almost everybody, thinks that a spiritual Christian, if they think of a spiritual Christian at all, they think of him as being a rather cautious, timid, mousy, soft-walking, soft-spoken, gentle and harmless person who walks about with a permanent smile and who cannot be roused to any kind of spiritual indignation. But I, curiously enough, do not find this to be the Scriptural definition of spirituality. If so, then Jesus Christ, John the Baptist, Paul, and John and Jude couldn’t be said to be spiritual men.

There is another definition for the word and I want to speak about it this morning, rather negatively approaching it, and showing how a carnal Christian is an immature Christian, regenerated, yes, but carnal nevertheless, in that he is spiritually imperfect, retarded in his development. And it’s possible to be spiritually retarded just as it’s possible to be spiritually retarded in our physical development, our mental development, and thus having the characteristics of a baby or of a very, very young child.

Paul uses the word “babes” here and said, I couldn’t speak unto you as unto mature Christians, but as unto carnal Christians, which he then gave this synonymous description, descriptive word, babes in Christ. So, there are evidently in the church of Christ; there are three classes usually, or four, there is in the average church persons who attend all the time, but for some reason never do get converted. They come and they seem to enjoy it. They have friends among the religious people, the Christian people, but they themselves never pass from death unto life. That’s one class. Then, there is another class, those who claim to be Christians, but are not. And then there are those who are truly Christians, but are carnal. And then there are those who are Christians and are spiritual.

Now, we can best know what an unspiritual Christian is and what a spiritual Christian should be by contrast, by noticing the characteristics of a baby. No doubt I’ve mentioned this in illustration or sermon, in times gone by. But we want to focus attention on it for a few minutes today. Let’s look at a baby and there isn’t anything I’d rather look at myself. And I feel just a little bit like a traitor saying the things I’ve got to say about babies this morning, because I am something of an expert on babies, I think. We’ve had enough, enough grandchildren and enough of little adopted friends all around. And I’ve enjoyed dedicating so many in my time. The few minutes I hold them in my hands I consider a ministerial privilege. So, I love the babies, but after all, they’re little human beings. And as little human beings they have certain characteristics and not I, but Paul said those characteristics were unspiritual. He said they were carnal and that when those characteristics are in a Christian, you’ll find an unspiritual Christian.

Now, the first thing about a baby that I note is the self-centeredness of the little thing. The baby has a little world all of its own. And it hasn’t any idea that there’s any other world but its world. Its mother, its father, its brothers or sisters, its crib, its highchair, it is a self-centered little thing. And it is the central sun and everything else revolves around that little central sun. All others are but bodies in its orbit. And thus, we see Paul’s concept of an unspiritual Christian as being somebody that is self-centered, living a self-centered Christian life, being born again certainly, but living so that everything takes its significance from that Christian. Now, that’s one characteristic of a babe and it’s one characteristic of a carnal Christian.

Another is that a baby is affected unduly by its senses. It hasn’t learned to discipline its senses or to ignore them. It draws conclusions based upon evidence rather than go along with its feelings. So, this is a characteristic, and unspiritual Christians are the same. They tend to live by their feelings. If there’s what they call a good atmosphere in the church, then they’ve had a good time. If there isn’t, they haven’t had a good time. And thus, they are more or less victims and fools of their environment. A baby is a victim of its environment, a willing victim because it senses tell it if it pinches a finger it howls like a banshee. Although the finger may stop hurting and the babes continue to cry long after it’s forgotten why it started. Because it’s unduly affected by its feelings or it’s too hilariously, it gets too exuberant for no reason in the world.

I discovered that our little Judy, Judith, if you put your nose down on her nose and mumbled words such as she mumbles, she’s a little over a year, why that she would go into hysterics of laughter. And of course, I practiced on her and we had a good time together. But I wonder why. What’s so funny about that? I don’t know what’s so funny about it. But she thought it was one of the richest pieces of humor that had ever come within her little year-old circle of interest or attention. And she and I do that now. That’s our fun together. But I don’t think it’s funny. It’s humorous to see her go wild about it. But now that’s a child, cast down for no reason; hilarious for no reason, victims of their feelings and of their senses. And Paul said, ye are yet carnal. Ye are babes. And this is also the characteristic of a Christian that is carnal. He is too easily exhilarated. He’s too easily lifted up and too easily cast down. After a while a Christian should learn better, but we’ll look at that later.

Then, a third thing about a baby is its propensity to rest in externals. Now, a baby has no inward life at all. There are even psychologists that say, I don’t believe this, but psychologists say that babies are born without minds, their minds develop. I don’t believe that. But I do know that they’re born with capacities, mental capacities, but without anything in it; and without anything in their little minds. But as they get older, of course, it develops, but they have no inward life. They rest completely in externals.

Now, this also is characteristic of a carnal Christian. He lives too much in visible religion, and it’s externalism. He goes by things on the outside, colored lights and strange sounds or pretty sounds, and garments or the certain uniforms or certain decorations. Anything to please the childish mind by calling it out from the center to the outside, from the internal to the external. Brethren, you may be sure of this, just as sure of this as you live, that just in proportion as we are affected by external circumstances, we are carnal. For Jesus said, that the Father is worshipped in spirit and in truth. No other way. The externals can be a prison. The external can be any unlovely place. But, if the heart is right and the Spirit dwells within, worship and communion with God can be real and can be unaffected, and the tranquility remains the same because the spiritual Christian does not rest in externals.

Then, I noticed this point about a baby too, is his complete absence of purpose. You never saw a baby that ever had a purpose, or if he did, it was the next thing he saw to do. He wants that red ball that lies just beyond his reach and he hasn’t learned to crawl yet. And so, he’ll howl for that. But when he gets it, he’ll throw it down, because he has no purpose. He didn’t want it for any purpose. And when he got it, no purpose was fulfilled. And that of course is characteristic of babies, sweet as they are, and I wouldn’t want them different. But they’re the loveliest thing left on earth. But there’s absence of purpose in the life of a child.

When a child gets a little older, he gets to be ten maybe, or twelve, he’ll begin to save things, or he’ll begin to put things away. He can save stamps or save pennies toward something. He’s beginning to get purpose into his life. And by the time he’s in his teens, he’ll learn how to work after school to lay up money to go further to school. And by the time he’s in his 20s, he will have had a life purpose worked out for himself as far as this world is concerned, but babies have no purpose at all.

And I find that the Christian has no purpose either. He lives for the next blessing. He wants to know where the good preacher is going to be and he goes to hear him. He wants to know where the fine choir is going to sing, and he goes and sits down and tickles his carnality by listening to the finest choir that he can find. Or, he wants to know where the biggest crowd is assembled. And he gets a charge, if you’ll excuse the slang, out of the crowd. Well, there’s no purpose there. He never went aside and got on his knees and said, God, why was I ever born, and being born, why have I been redeemed? And what’s this about?

And then the fifth thing is that the baby lives a life of play and trifles. The most unproductive creature around the place is the loveliest and the most loved, the baby. They have a life. They live a life of play and trifles all together. And everything they do; they’ve got to turn it into play. Did you ever see the babe nurse violently on his bottle for a while, and then when he gets enough, begin to spin it around or play with it or toss it clear out on the floor, and then he’ll laugh uproariously when he sees the milk spilled and the top come off down on the rug. Now everything has to be turned into play with the baby. And I want to be nice about this. I’m trying hard to be nice. Please pray for me so that I can be nice. But brethren, if we’re realistic at all we’ll have to say that the modern generation of Christians, they’re living for play and trifles, play and trifles.

I got a folder from a certain Bible conference, you don’t know where it is, so don’t ask me to tell you. They are going to take a trip and go out on top of the bounding billows on a luxury liner. And they’re going of course to have everything that the heart could wish. And they have pictures of beautiful palm trees and all the rest like Florida and California. And it’s going to be a strictly chaperoned luxury liner with a chaplain on board to give talks on Romans just before the shuffleboard game every morning to give it a religious flavor. And they say, what is the purpose of this? It is to promote an interest in missions. And they say, walk today where Jesus walked yesterday. And a certain evangelist friend of mine wrote yes, but not with the same purpose. We want to play you see. We have no hesitation in advertising our Bible conferences as religious playgrounds. So that’s a proof of how carnal we are. We live a life of play and trifles.

And then petulance, fretfulness and quarrelsomeness. The sweetest baby that ever lived is not sweet when he’s hungry. None of you mothers ever tells me now that your baby is a nice little angel when she’s hungry. She’s not. She takes and makes ugly sounds when she’s hungry even though she’s only two months old. Now this petulance and fretfulness is strictly an immature reaction because it is a temptation to blame secondary causes. I can always tell a carnal Christian because he blames secondary causes. If he is a preacher and he loses his job, he blames his Board instead of blaming his sheer ineptitude and inability to come through, he blames his Board. Or he blames his District Superintendent or he has blamed, old Adam was like that. This woman that Thou gavest me, she did it.

And some of you dear Christian women that aren’t making it very well, you say if you had a good, spiritual husband you would be a better Christian. No, you wouldn’t be. You would just think you were because you would have less reason to know you’re not. Can you figure that one out? Well, that is what I mean. So long as there is nothing there to tempt you, you’ll think you are better than you are. But a grouchy husband that won’t shave Sunday morning and sits around in a t-shirt and plays jazz, you say he’s your trouble. No, he’s not your trouble. He could be your sanctification if you knew how to use him. Wesley said his wife was his sanctification. And if you knew how to use opposition, you could turn it into a help upward toward God. That’s one thing a baby always does, he always blames secondary causes. You never knew a baby that was to blame for anything. It is always somebody else.

And then there’s the restricted and limited diet of a baby. The baby marks its Bible, but it’s always the tender little passages that they mark. They skip over those rough and vigorous passages that tear you apart and bring you down and discipline you and chasten you. And so the baby lives on a diet, the diet of milk and strained vegetables. It has to. Now that my brethren is the picture of a baby.

Now this is not a baby-hater. This is a baby lover. From the time I was old enough to know that I had little brothers and sisters I have been a sentimentalist, complete victim to the smile of a baby. I had a brother seven years, eight years younger than I and we slept in an unheated upstairs and I slept with him. And I remember taking him in my arms and taking him to bed when he was a little chap. And I would put my face down on the pillow and warm it and for him. So, he didn’t have to put his face on the cold pillow. I’d rub it real hard with my hand. I even had sense enough to know in those days that friction would raise heat. So, I’d warm his pillow and then lay him down there and I looked after him, just looked after him as if he was my child out of pure love for him. And when he got a little older, I hated to think the time would ever come when I’d get old enough to leave home, because I wanted to stay with my baby brother.

Well, that’s how much I love babies. But you would just have to admit Brethren that we described a baby here this morning. A self-centered little guy affected unduly by his senses; resting in externals without any purpose; loving to play and having no serious purposes in life, and living on a simple diet. Well, there we have a baby.

Now, what do we do? Well, nature takes care of the baby pretty soon. Nature begins to shift the baby out from the center. And it never gets delivered from being self- centered of course. That’s a part of sin. But it gets interests away from itself and learns to stand up and defy its senses. And learns to reason instead of by its senses. It learns to live for the character within, rather than for external things. It learns to have a purpose in life, even if it’s only to be an actor or a ballplayer or something else to get a purpose. Nature takes care of that for most of us as we mature. But now in spiritual things. That’s an illustration drawn from nature, fallen nature.

Now, in spiritual things, what shall we do? Well, I’ll tell you. I know of no single experience that will instantly transform a carnal Christian into a spiritual one. Now, I like to be able to tell you that I do. I wish that I could say to you, now, here I positively know how you can come to the Lord and meet certain conditions and instantly cease to be a carnal and become a spiritual Christian. Well, it just isn’t that way. We must let the Spirit teach us and discipline us and mature us and grow big within us and to let God walk within us, and learn by trial and error and prayer and repentance and tears and sorrow of heart for our carnality. And then believe in the power of God to fill us with His Spirit, and begin to work with the soul that He leads us away from self-centeredness, and leads us to love the whole world.

They used to sing, I’ll live the world around back in Simpson’s day. They believed a Christian ought to live the world around and pray for the whole world. Somebody said Dr. Simpson lost his mind as he got older and therefore, they don’t believe that healing ought to ever be taught because Dr. Simpson who taught it lost his mind. My Brethren, I examined into that most carefully when I wrote about his life. I talked to those that knew him, his secretary, his warmest personal friends, and I got the facts right down. You know what? He got arteriosclerosis when he was about 75 years old and lived two or three years and couldn’t be used. But you know what? He never forgot the name of one of his missionaries. And they tell the story, certain people do, that Dr. Simpson in his last hours, repented because he hadn’t accepted the teachings of such and such.

Well, now I happen to know what happened in the last hours of Dr. Simpson. The last hours of Dr. A.B. Simpson where these, he sat with his wife out on the front stoop or porch of his house, his modest house. And then he said, Now, Margaret, it’s time that I should pray for our missionaries. So, he got on his knees, he didn’t have 787 then, but he got on his knees and without missing one, he prayed by name for every missionary in the Christian Missionary Alliance, went in and lay down on his bed and died. That’s how he died my brethren. He was not living for himself, but he was round the world with it.

Now, the second thing you got to ask God to do and expect Him to do is to teach you to live above your feelings and your senses. Often in the morning, as three young men came to see me from one of the religious institutions within the Chicago area here some time ago. And oh, how hungry boys they were. They’re the ones that God filled with the Holy Ghost until one of them couldn’t sleep nearly all night for the joy of it. After our meeting, and they’ve sought the Lord. Well, anyway, they were having a tough time of it. And one of them was in trouble, because he said some times when he gets down on his knees, he doesn’t have any desire to pray. And they thought, because I was as old as Methuselah’s twin brother that I never had any difficulty like that. And I just began to testify to them. I said, boys, do you know there are times when I have to force myself to prayer. It’s dull, and for a little while, there’s not much juice in it. And their faces began to shine. One of them said, oh, what a relief he said. I thought I was backsliding, because I have troubles like that. I don’t always feel spiritual. And I said, boy, if you don’t feel spiritual, you’ve got company. There are a lot of others that don’t, but you’ve got to pray through that. You got to pray past that. And it comes after a while, and God met these three young men, but they wrote me a letter and told me what a great relief it was to know that you never get to a place where you’re just sort of an angel waiting to be recognized. You’ve got your fight down here. And you’ve got to learn not to trust your feelings. When you get up in the morning feeling as if you didn’t, or wish you hadn’t. And in the evening, wish still more ardently that you hadn’t. That often happens. Why don’t let that get you down. A baby won’t worry about that and howl for mother. But a grown-up Christian says, well, this wasn’t my day. This wasn’t my day.

No doubt Paul had his days when he stuck his finger with his needle and things weren’t going right. And so we keep our faith in God and Christ and know that no matter how we feel, it’s alright anyhow. And then resting in externals. You’ve got to change that. The spiritual Christian has to stop resting in externals. I learned long ago to preach wherever I stand up. I can’t change. They say, Tozer, why do you go and preach for that crowd. Look at the things they do. I am not responsible. I go to churches and other gatherings and I see things that, I just sit there and wait it out. I hear songs that I can’t see why they were ever written; sung by people that never should have been permitted to do it. And yet, externals, you’ve just got to tune them out you know. Just get on another wavelength and wait it out. Then when they give you a nice long flowery introduction which you don’t deserve, then get up and preach. But if you live in externals, brother, it’s too bad. Babies do, grown up Christians don’t. And then grown-up Christians get a purpose. They know why they’re here. Often my friends, so confusing are the circumstances, so self-contradictory, that if I didn’t know my Bible and know I know God and know certain things and be able to point back to certain markers where the stones were set up at the Jordan to say this was where God blessed me, why I could easily blow my blessed ministerial top. But I don’t do it because I know there are certain purposes I’m fulfilling, poorly, but I’m fulfilling them. So have a purpose.

And then stop playing. God’s poor, playful kittens. They’ve got to have their religion turned into play for them. They drink a while and then throw the bottle on the floor and laugh about nothing and get blue about nothing. That’s carnality. That’s not spirituality. A spiritual Christian has a life of labor. He looks upon the world not as a playground, but as a battleground.

And then the diet, the real Christian reads his whole Bible. This will make some of you mad. but if you’re living on your morning daily devotions taken out of a book somebody compiled, I warn you, that’s pablum. I don’t care who wrote it. It’s still pablum. Read your Bible brother. Read all your Bible, read it all. I don’t say these other things are harmful. I just say that if you have them and nothing else, you’re not nourished. Read all your Bible. Read all the begats, and back in the Kings, so and so begat so and so and so on. Read it. You say, what’s it there for? Well, I don’t know. God put it there, read it. Read the Chronicles and Job and the books you don’t like. Read the whole Bible. A real Christian ought to be able to take a full-rounded diet.

Now that’s a spiritual person as contrasted with the carnal person. Not the mouse, but the person who has grown up in God and who’s mature and has grown in the Spirit. That’s the Christian. So, let’s ask God to make us mature Christians and grow in grace and in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. What do you say? Amen. Amen.

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Tozer Talks

“Three Words-Alienation, Propitiation and Reconciliation”

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“Three Words – Alienation, Propitiation and Reconciliation”

Pastor and author Aiden Wilson Tozer

October 27, 1957

Now, there are three, many, many, but there are particularly three great mountain peaks of truth that stand out, each tall and snow-capped and sun-kist shining in the beauty of the morning. But they’re not separated from each other. They’re part of a range joined at the base. And they are described in three words, or summed up in three words, and I want you to get these three words. Communists are indoctrinating their people. Catholics are indoctrinating their people. But only the protestants are trying to run on inspiration. You can’t do it my friend. Inspiration grows out of information. And without information you have only emotionalism.

So here are your three words. And not one of you listening to me, not one, from smallest, youngest, to the oldest, but should be able after this morning stand up before a communist or an unbeliever or anybody in the world, to tell them what these three words mean, and then tell them what they stand for in theology. The words are alienation. propitiation and reconciliation. They are long words, more or less rumbling, sonorous words out of the Latin into our English. But never be afraid of a big word. I have found that big words are usually either necessary, as here, or in many instances the effort of a man who’s a bit unsure of himself, to cowl his audience. The man can say a simple thing with big words, when people don’t know what he’s saying, is rather shallow. They are overawed by the size of his words. But here we have these three, and you never need to be afraid of them. The one is alienation. We find here a vast alienation. And then we find the universal propitiation. And then we find that effectual, and efficacious reconciliation.

Now the alienation, of course is first. And Paul talks about being alienated in mind, and this is the worst kind of possible alienation. In fact, it may be the only alienation there is. An alien of course, means a foreigner, stranger. Alienate means to make a foreigner and a stranger out of you. And therefore, to say that there has been an alienation means that two persons who were close, have become separated so that they are strangers to each other as Jesus said, let him be a publican and a sinner unto thee. That’s alienation. And this alienation doesn’t necessarily need to be physical. It is mental or physical.

We have what we call alien laws, meaning laws governing persons who come from other countries. And yet I have met people from other countries speaking with an accent or trying to speak our language with an accent, having difficulty, with whom I felt an immediate affinity, or for whom I felt immediate affinity. And there was no alienation, no sense of being an alien. I knew it once that I belonged to them and they to me, because we were not alienated though they were aliens. And if I were to go to their country, I’d been an alien. But if they had met me at the station, there’d be no alienation, because the world wants to draw lines around its nation. Draw a line between here and Canada and between here and Mexico. And then say now north of us they’re aliens and south of us they are aliens.

Actually, you can go to Canada and if you’re careful, nobody will suspect that you’re an American. And sometimes they will say after they find it out, why we wouldn’t have known you weren’t a Canadian. That is their way of complimenting you, making you feel at home. There’s no sense of alienation. It would be a little more going to Mexico because you have to jump the language barrier. But you can take care of that with lots of American money and you will find you’re not an alien. But because distance and space and imaginary border lines don’t make aliens. They do in law, but they don’t, the human heart jumps over border lines. But when the human heart is alienated, then you have something as deep as hell.

And it says here, you’re alienated in your mind. We were strangers to God, foreigners, aliens, broken off from God by a vast alienation that separated us from God. And the world is thus separate. The world has nothing but its racial memories of God and perhaps a little evidence or vision of God somewhere in nature. Further than that, the world knows not God.

We Christians are going to have to stand up, grit our teeth and be true to the faith here, because we’re being brainwashed by a lot of soft talk about everybody being God’s children, everybody in his own way moving toward God. We got to watch this because the world is alienated and they will remain alienated until they are reconciled through their propitiation and His blood. They’ve got to keep this in mind and stick to it and stick to it even if you have to anger people. And even if you have to alienate people, stick to it. We’re already alienated. We’re alienated from God. Broken off from God by the fall, by sin. That’s first.

Somewhere, sometimes, a universal dislocation took place which threw everything out of harmony with God, everything out of harmony. Like someone were to come here, some vandal come here and get under the lid of that piano and twist and turn bolts and screws and pegs. And when we come in here next Sunday morning, every string was out of tune. No harmony there. No music there. They just throw their hands up and say we’ll use the organ until we get this thing fixed. Then if somebody had come and taken out tubes or gone up to the sound chambers and wrecked them with screwdrivers, we wouldn’t have any music except the vocal music which is the best after all, but that’s not part of the sermon.

But the point is, the world has been worked on by the devil with his screwdriver of sin. And he’s gone into the music room of God and He’s broken strings and twisted and turned and pried out pegs, and the whole world lies without harmony. That’s a vast alienation. It’s the alienation of the mind and this alienation antedated man. It went back of man. It went back to the beginning, back somewhere among those strange creatures of which we know little now that we read about, principalities and powers and dominions and demons; and the angels had kept not their first estate, back there it went, back there, this alienation began and it got to us. We were involved and the earth was involved through the sin of man, and death entered the world. And so, the dark shadow lies across the world. And we live in the ruins of a bombed-out city.

This is the Bible explanation of the condition of things and of the world we live in. Don’t you ever believe anything else for that is it. Don’t ever believe anything else. Those who’ve traveled in Europe and have come home since the second World War say that there are still, despite of the recovery made there, there are still great sections of the cities lying in ruins. They have never gotten out from the rubble.

If I were to make a trip there to some of the cities of Germany or England and say, what is this section here? What is this? Roofs are all down and the walls are burst out. What is this? They’d say, oh, that’s the architects plan. That’s all planned this way. Give it time and it’s coming up. It’s coming up. It’s not coming up at all. It went down, bombed down, leveled, and rubble where there was beauty.

So, the human race says, what’s all this we see around about us here? Why, why, what’s the matter with it? Somebody says, oh, its man struggling upward from the, from the protoplasmic mist. It’s nothing of the sort. It’s man in his condition of loss and ruin. Man has fallen; and we’re all fallen creatures. What happened to my hair? It’s not serious. It’s more humorous than anything else. But what happened to it? God put hair on your head when you’re born. He said, hair grow there and then we lose it. What happened?

What happens that a child of three or four years can tumble around, fall off the things and twist and turn like a pretzel and get up and never noticed? In your 20s already, you start stiffening up. By the time you’re in your 40s, you keep everything off the floor because you don’t like to pick anything up. Why? Why? You say it’s not dignified? Not dignified I’ll admit, and it’s not comfortable either. Your body’s going to pieces on you. That’s all that’s happening to you. God gave you that wonderful thing you call a human body. Did you ever pick up a newborn baby and examine him? Did you ever pick up a little wiggly fellow and look at his little fingers? Every nail in place. Everything in place. Look at his little feet. Examine him all over, perfect, perfect, God made him. He’s perfect. And he’ll grow.

And if he could just be assured that there was nothing in him killing him, what a joy it would be but every mother knows but she won’t admit, but every mother knows that with the first baby cry begins the first wail of death. Alienation, alienation, sickness and age and every kind of disease, delinquency and crime. It’s all here. It’s because there’s been a vast alienation. We live in the ruins. We live among the rubble. We’re like house pets rushing about, hunting here and there for scraps among the rubble of a bombed-out city. And worst of all, it’s hit us too. That’s the world we live in. You can see then what a condescension for Him to come down from heaven above?

Pretty soon, Christmas will be upon us and everybody will be beating the drum for Christmas, telling about Jesus coming down, saying peace on earth. The angels sang peace on earth. But did you ever stop to think of the condescension? To come down from that heaven above to this rubble we call the world, this bombed-out, fallen city. This city crawling with disease, the vermin of iniquity, and the rodents of crime and sin. Here He came. He came down from above and took on Him not the nature of angels, but the nature of Abraham, the form of a man, how wonderful. He came because of the alienation.

Then the second word, propitiation. And what does that mean? It means that an offended God, an offended God who was justly and properly offended. An offended God had something happen somewhere in behalf of the one with whom He was offended. That could allow His mind to be changed so that He could not be offended anymore. Propitiation, that’s what it means. It means that when Christ died on the cross, He did something out yonder. Don’t ask me what. I’m glad it’s a mystery. I’d hate to explain it. I’d hate to be able to explain it. I would hate to think that I, in my condition, could explain the mystery of that propitiation. I don’t know how He did it.

Don’t write any books about the blood, the chemistry of the blood, and don’t try to tell how Jesus did it. Nobody will ever know how He did it. When He was doing it, nature in shame and all, pulled the dark veil of secrecy down and He died in darkness. Nobody saw and nobody knew what the angels desire to look into it and can’t, but that propitiation was effective. That’s all I know about it. It’s an efficacious works. The universal propitiation was made. The old prophets taught that there was a golden one coming, that there was one coming about whom all the prophets did write. And He was going to be born to propitiate mankind and to undo the alienation, and to build again the Golden City.

This the New Testament declares was done The Old Testament declared it would be done. The New Testament declares it has been done. And Christ made peace through the blood of His cross. He made peace through the blood of His cross. There were difficulties there. I tell you, difficulties there. Nobody talks about that much now, but the old theologians did. They say there were difficulties with moral government.

The judge that sits on a bench and lightly charges a jury, or influences a jury to set a man free that he knows is guilty, has tampered with the basic foundation of his country. And where there’s a moral government, and where within that moral government there are men and women who are being alienated against the government and against the God of the government, there’s real difficulty. You can’t get it by praying soft prayers and writing nice poetry. There are real difficulties that shape heaven and earth.

And Jesus Christ, when He came to make that propitiation had to grapple with those difficulties and solve them. And He did it. He did it there in the darkness in some way that I don’t understand, but all of the requirements of moral government were met in the Son of God. He had to be Jesus. He had to be God to do it. A man couldn’t have done it. I was thinking as I read over this passage and other such passages, I’m wondering about those who claim that Christ was a good man and did a wonderful thing, but He wasn’t God and that the Bible doesn’t teach He was God.

How my friend? How? Let me ask you. How, let me ask you, could it be that anybody less than God could do what He’s said to I have done? In whom we have redemption through His blood, even the forgiveness of sins? Could that had been said of Abraham? Would that have been said of Jacob? Could we have written Moses, in whom we have redemption through his blood? Why, our hearts cry out against it. Could we have said that that man whose soul was like a harp who wrote the 23rd Psalm and the 103rd Psalm? Could we say, David, in whom we have redemption through his blood, even the forgiveness of sins. The whole human heart would scream, no, no. Don’t desecrate a holy thing. And don’t put David in danger by saying that David’s blood and David’s redemption, never. Not a man that ever lived could write Augustine’s name in here or Anslem or Aquinas. Wesley never, never. Only His dear Son who is the image of the invisible God.

Then again, verse fifteen, who is the image of the invisible God? Who is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of every creature? Could it be Charles Wesley? Could it be Augustine? Could it be Chrysostom? Could it be David Livingstone who is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of every creature, for by Him are all things created that are in heaven and earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones or dominions or principalities or powers? When you will read that, every man is on his knees from Adam down to the newest child born five minutes ago. 

And all the human race must come to its knees before this dominant Being who fills the universe. Principalities and power were created by Him and for Him, and He’s before all things and in Him all things hold together. They say the Bible’s New Testament doesn’t teach the deity of Christ. If that’s not the deity of Christ, then it’s the most insane piece of writing ever written outside of an insane hospital. No, no my brother, this was done, this was possible. The difficulties with the moral government had to be handled by somebody able to handle it. Nobody was. Nobody from Adam on down.

So, He came, Jesus came, the glorious Christ of God, He came, and all the demands of pure justice He met. And all the problem of sin and God’s holiness were all met in Him. We can sing about it and pray about it and thank Him and all the rest of it, but we don’t know how He did it. We only know He went to a cross and God pulled the dark curtain of silence down around Him. And there He died and cried, it’s finished and gave up the ghost. On the third day He rose again from the dead.

And have you noticed friends that at the cross were present all the evidences of the great alienation? First, there was the hate and the tyranny, and the antagonisms of men were all there around the cross. There were the thorns upon his brow, symbolic of all that it was wrong with the diseased and fallen nature. There was the suffering too great to name or describe, symbolic of all suffering from the hour that Eve looked at her murdered son and burst into her first tears. There was darkness symbolic of all the night of hell that settles around the world. And there was separation, bleak, grim separation when He cried, My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken me? And there was death. There are the marks of the alienation, hate and thorns and suffering and darkness and separation and death, and they were all there. When God pulled the curtain down, He did something there between Him and His God. It meant propitiation and the alienation was ended.

And now the reconciliation. That’s the third word. What does that mean? Reconcile means to bring two things or persons together in harmony by means of a change, The change may be in both parties or one. Or if it’s in two parties, alienated parties, the reconciliation may be a compromise, or by a complete change on the part of one only. And that’s exactly what the Bible teaches. It teaches that God was propitiated by what He did there on the cross. It teaches also that man was potentially reconciled by what He did there on the cross. But that man must be reconciled to God one at a time now and turn to God in reconciliation.

God changes not. Only man changes. Therefore, if any man be in Christ, he’s a new creature, old things are passed away, behold, all things are become new. And all things are of God who has reconciled us to Himself by Jesus Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation. To wit, that God was in Christ reconciling the world unto Himself, not even imputing their trespasses unto them, and committed unto us the word of reconciliation. Now we’re ambassadors with Christ, be reconciled to God. We see the reconciliation was done by God for us. And the propitiation in Romans 3 is God’s propitiation. This reconciliation includes all who during this age are reconciled. I don’t know who they are, but all who are reconciled in this age unto God, by faith, by receiving and believing upon Jesus Christ the Lord. The potential reconciliation made by Christ on the cross makes it possible for us now to change, and the change is all ours, not God’s. God doesn’t need to change. He didn’t go wrong. We need to change because we did go wrong. And we need to change 100%, because we went 100% Wrong.

All I say, who during this age are reconciled, and the earth when Christ comes again as King. Read the 72nd Psalm and see He is the King. Thy judgments, O God, and thy righteousness unto the king’s son and on it goes rising higher and higher until it shows a King, a glorious King ruling over all the earth. All the oppression is put down. All evil is banished. He reins from the river to the ends of the earth. That’s the 72nd Psalm. It’s the story of the Christ who reigns over a reconciled earth.

And then, in 1 Corinthians, the fifteenth chapter, we learn that not only man and the earth are to be reconciled to God, but we read that there has to be a reconciliation that is to include the universe. 1 Corinthians 15:23, 24, then cometh the end, when He shall have delivered up the kingdom to God, even the Father, when He shall have put down all rule and all authority and power. For He must reign until He has put all enemies under His feet. The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death. He hath put all things under His feet. But when he says all things, he explains he doesn’t mean God. God isn’t put under Christ. And when all things, verse 28, shall be subdued unto Him, then shall the Son also Himself be subject unto Him that put all things under Him, that is God; that God may be all in all. So, there is the reconciliation of the universe.

So, we saved ones are sent out with only one message really. It is the message of propitiation, because the alienation, we don’t need to tell them. The missionary say we don’t have to tell them, they’re sinners. We don’t have to preach sin to them. They already know it. It’s all about them. And the lowest tribes, the most primitive groups, they have their sense of sin, laws and taboo and the rest showing what’s wrong with them–sin. No one has to go with the message of sin. They know it. But go with the message of universal propitiation in Christ Jesus the Lord and say, be ye reconciled to God.

So now we have the three words. I hope you’ve gotten them. Alienation, propitiation, and reconciliation. In these three words, we have summed up theology faster than all the philosophies of men and as eternal as the throne of God. Amen.

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Tozer Talks

“An Exposition of Psalm 121″

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“An Exposition of Psalm 121”
Pastor and author Aiden Wilson Tozer
December 2, 1956

The 101st Psalm, I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills of whence cometh my help. My help cometh from the Lord which made heaven and earth. He will not suffer thy foot to be moved. He that keepeth thee will not slumber. Behold, He that keepeth Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep. The Lord is thy keeper. The Lord is thy shade upon thy right hand. The sun shall not smite thee by day nor the moon by night. The Lord shall preserve thee from all evil. He shall preserve thy soul. The Lord shall preserve thy going out and thy coming in from this time forth, and even forevermore.

Now the man of God says, I lift up mine eyes unto the hills. And if you have other versions, you will notice that they try to correct the King James and they put a question mark there. Of course, there are no, there are no punctuation marks in the original. And they make it read, shall I lift up mine eyes unto the hills? Why, no, certainly not. My help cometh from Jehovah. But I reject that reading with an explanation. I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, perfectly fits the 121st Psalm because it’s a song of degrees. Now a song of degrees, is a song of accent toward the temple. And these songs came to be written as short hymns which the worshippers sang as they marched upward.

There were 10 steps leading up to the temple, not stairsteps, but broad rises one above the other, making room for choirs and orchestras. And as the high priest moved slowly with his incense up to the temple to enter and make atonement, the choir followed behind, or choirs, followed behind singing as they went facing toward the hills and towards the temple. And naturally, they were lifting up their eyes, watching the high priest as he went into the temple. And they would sing there on those different rises, and then step up again on to a new rise and sing another anthem. And they sang these songs of assent, or songs of degrees. And thus, the worshipers moved ever toward the temple and ever toward the high hill there where the temple stood and ever toward that holy sanctum where the Great Jehovah dwelt between the wings of the cherubim. And the high priest was on his way with blood not his own, to sprinkle it upon the holy mercy seat, and thus make atonement for the people for the year. And thus, these songs were born.

So, we need not juggle punctuation marks. We can understand easily how it was. I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, not looked down at his feet, but gaze upward where the temple stood, where high the Holy Temple stands, the house of God not made with hands as we sing. Well, that one was made with hands, but it was the picture of the heavenly.

Now he says, my help cometh from Jehovah. And though he said, I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills from whence my help cometh, he wants us to know that his help did not come from a hill or even from the temple. But his help came from the One whose dwelling place was in Zion. Toward the holy Presence they were marching, and they said, my help comes from Jehovah who made heaven and earth. And don’t think this is merely a word. I noticed sometimes anthems are written. Now this happens to be something that I had said more on than I have, than I know, and I have information on. I’ve talked just because I felt that way. But I noticed that when some composers write an anthem, they get stuck. They’re genius. They run out of gas, and so they start yelling, Jerusalem, hallelujah. And you can sing an anthem on two words, you know, hallelujah, Jerusalem. You can sing three quarters of an hour and not say any more than that.

But the Psalms were written by the Holy Ghost. They were inspired by the Spirit and He didn’t waste any words. And he said that my help cometh from Jehovah which made heaven and earth. And that’s not a phrase thrown in there as a filler. There is no filler in the Bible. If you publish a magazine, your article will run to within two inches of the end of the page. And rather than leave a corner white, why they put in what we call filler, a quotation usually by Andrew Murray or Spurgeon. But there is no filler in the Bible Brother, none whatsoever. The Holy Spirit has no filler. So, when he said, which made the heaven and the earth, he meant exactly that.

Now, the heathen around about them had local gods with limited jurisdiction. You will read your Old Testament and you will find how many gods there were. They named them, many of them, and they were all local gods. You had to get a passport, you know, a visa in order to get in to worship them, because they had local, there were boundaries, and you couldn’t get past those boundaries, and they didn’t have any jurisdiction outside their boundaries. Baal had his limitation and Astarte had her limitation or was she a he? I’m not sure. And all the gods had their limitations, but Jehovah made heaven and earth and he had no limitations. My help cometh not from a local God, but from the God that made the heavens and the earth. And if He made the heaven and the earth, hence He had sovereign universal authority and power. And these marching Jews, marching upward toward the temple behind the high priest, were thanking God and worshiping and looking forward to help knowing that they were talking to the God who has absolute sway, and who is not limited in His jurisdiction.

Now, the Christian believer is like this, he goes past all secondary things. He goes back of all matter and all motion and life and all mind. And he goes to the God, the un-beginning One, the uncreated One, the primal source of all things that we call our Father which art in heaven. Not a law nor principle, but a Person who made the laws and the principles, and whom we call our Father which art in heaven.

Remember that the praying Christian never deals with subordinates. It’s wonderful to learn that, because down the years, some people have been afraid to go straight to God. They have thrown up a series of subordinates; office boys and clerks you have to get by before he can go to God. But there are no office boys nor clerks to a true praying Christian. He never deals with subordinates. Isn’t it wonderful that you, riding on a bus or washing dishes at your kitchen sink, isn’t it wonderful that you can look up and say, our Father which art in heaven and address directly and without the intermediary, the Deity? The only intermediary is the man Christ Jesus, who is also God, and whom you are addressing, so that when you address the Trinity, you address God at the summit. And every praying man is having a meeting at the summit. That is, we don’t work in degrees of importance upward, but go straight to the summit and talk to God our Father Himself.

Now they said, my help comes from Jehovah which made heaven and earth. And once the blood was on the mercy seat, any Jew anywhere, any place in the world, could look up and say my Father and could look up and say the God of our fathers. And we can say, God the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, so that no Christian ever deals with subordinates nor secondary things. You can go straight to God and address God Himself. Because now the blood is on the mercy seat.

Then they consoled themselves as they stood there and sang and played their instruments, He will not suffer thy foot to be moved. Now this doesn’t have too much meaning for a generation that were born in hospitals and raised on sidewalks, because you don’t slip on the sidewalk as a rule. But to travelers in Palestine who made long trips and found their way on foot to the temple to worship at certain seasons, they could easily fall by stepping on a round stone and having it go out from under them. On some mountain paths, they could easily step on a rock that they thought was solid and find it was only a bit of shale, and would give away and let them go down to break a bone or kill themselves. But it says here, He will not suffer thy foot to be moved.

Now the word “suffer” here is a good word. It means permit, allow, that’s all. But it does mean that, and then it means a good deal more by connotation. God will not permit thy foot to be moved. He will not allow it. And he doesn’t say he will not permit, but he says, He will not suffer, because suffer is to permit with a connotation of pain. If your child, say, has to have a surgery, you don’t want him to have surgery, but you’re suffer him to have surgery. You don’t want him to have to undergo the pain and the fright of the knife, but if he must have it, or if she must have it, then you suffer it to be done. Even as Jesus in one occasion said, suffer it to be so now, permit it with suffering. And so, he says, He will not suffer, that is, God will not endure the pain of seeing your foot slip. Now, that’s what the Bible says here. He will not endure the pain of seeing your foot slip. Not only will He not endure it nor permit it, but He will not suffer. And then he says, He will not slumber nor sleep.

Now, the pagan gods, and you and I don’t understand this as we should. It doesn’t hit us as it should, because in America, we don’t worship idols. At least we don’t worship visible idols. But the pagan gods encircled Palestine except for the Mediterranean, and then beyond they did, they encircled the Jews with their idolatry. And those pagan gods could be caught asleep. You remember that when the man Elijah was on the mountain and the Baal priests were praying and they weren’t getting any answer, he got sarcastic with them and said, well, maybe he’s asleep and you must wake him up. Maybe he’s taken a journey and isn’t home. He’s out of his jurisdiction. But he says here, He will not slumber nor asleep.

Now, Jehovah’s eyelids never close. I wish you could keep that in mind. And the reason, there’s a reason back of all this. I said to Brother Reidhead, you know, I don’t have the interest in study that I used to have, that is, I have interest in spiritual things, but not in other studies. And because I said, why should a man who’s getting along in years study more? Well, he said, remember, you’re learning for eternity. And that was the answer. I had no reply to that one. You’re learning for eternity. And I’d like to find a reason for everything God reveals. Brother, I would, I really would. I’d like to penetrate below the surface and find a reason.

You know something? I don’t believe we’re as good as Christians as we ought to be until we not only accept what the Bible teaches, but until we try to discover why it teaches it, and get at the root of the thing. Now, I think I know why God never sleeps. I believe I know. Sleep is a recouping of spent energy. Sleep is necessary to recharge the batteries. And when we have worked eight hours and done some other things, necessary things, our energy is down, and then we must go to sleep in order that nature can recoup her wasted energy. But Jehovah never expends energy and therefore, he never needs to sleep.

Now, the man Jesus slept in the back of the boat because He was a man, and being a man when He walked ten miles, He had expended some energy and He had to sit down weary on the well or sleep in the boat to recoup His energies. That was the human Jesus. But the God-man and the eternal Godhead, never sleeps, because they never, that is, God never expends energy. How could God expend energy when God is the source of all the energy there is? Where would the energy go? And then if God recouped His energy, that would mean He would have to get energy from somewhere. Where would he get it from?

You say, where do I get my energy from? You got it from food, water and air. You get your energy from something you’ve taken into you. And that’s why we have to eat all the time, to me a bothersome necessity, but we have to eat. And that’s to recoup our wasted powers. But God doesn’t recoup his wasted powers, because He hasn’t wasted them. He doesn’t recharge, because He hasn’t lost anything. And the energy that God gives you to live hasn’t left God. It’s still in God, because God surrounds all things and holds all things.

So, there I think is the answer to why Jehovah never sleeps. And the God who sleeps or has to sleep is not the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. He’s a local god with a limited jurisdiction that’s dependent upon somebody. You can catch him napping. And a lot of the stories, and they’re beautiful stories without a doubt of the old Greeks. They turn up in Shakespeare and in many of the other poets and in Homer and the rest of them. The gods who tumbled off to sleep and somebody slips up while they were sleeping, and did something that they wouldn’t have allowed if they’d been awake. But thank God for One who never sleeps. He slumbers not nor sleeps.

And then he says, the Lord is thy keeper. He is thy keeper and thy shade. And now it says, the Lord is thy keeper, not the Lord will keep thee, nor the Lord will give thee shade. That is true also. But notice that it is not what the Lord will do, but what the Lord is. And we are kept not so much by what God does as by what God is.

The new Christian and some people never get beyond that, the new Christian is greatly taken up with what God will do for them. Tracts and booklets and books and testimonies are given and songs written about what God does for us. And it’s legitimate, I suppose, just as it’s legitimate to walk around on your stubby one year old legs, if that’s the best you got. But to walk around on stubby year-old legs when you’re twenty-five, would be a bit incongruous, and yet Christians for twenty-five years Christians have never gotten beyond what God does for them.

But as you go on into God, brethren, what God does for you becomes less and less important, and what God is to you becomes more and more important. It’s not what God does so much as what God is that matters. Jesus did certain things, and I believe along with my brethren in what we call the finished work. But I think that by always mouthing the phrase, the finished work, the finished work, I think that we can reduce salvation to a job done, a contract fulfilled. It was that but it was infinitely more than that. Jesus not only did something for us, He became something to us. He is our righteousness. He is our wisdom. He is our sanctification. He is our redemption. He did not say I will raise you from the dead. He said, I am the resurrection.

There is the difference between being the resurrection and merely using the resurrection, a vast difference I say. And in our day, in these terrible days of making the Lord your servant instead of being the Lord’s servant, and always emphasizing what the Lord does for us, I tell you, you’ll never grow spiritual giants in the earth with that kind of teaching. We’ve got to turn it around and begin to talk about what the Lord is to us, He is to me. The young wife isn’t so concerned with what her husband gets for her. If she’s unworthy of a decent husband, she is concerned with what he is to her. And children, if they are properly trained, will not be so concerned with what their parents get for them but be concerned with what their parents are to. So, the Lord is thy keeper, the Lord is thy shade. And the Lord will preserve thy going out and thy coming in now that He’s guard and shield and secure and that’s what the word preserved means.

Now this idiom, thy going out and thy coming in is quite common in Hebrew. And it’s quite common to us in our language too. The going out and the coming in. After all, you think about it a little, that’s about all you do. You go out and come in. You go out in the morning and come in at night. The next morning you go out and the next night you come in. And our going out and our coming in, that’s just about it. That about covers it. And the Scripture says here, with a sweeping it in, it takes all of life in. The Lord will guard thy going out and shield thy coming in, and secure thy going out and coming in. Now what more do you want? He not only is thy keeper and thy shade, but He will guard, shield, and secure because He is all these things, Thy going out and they’re coming in.

Then he ends, from this time forth, even forever more. Did you notice God never stops with time? Everything people do, some people wonder why I do not take to politics more and preach politics from the pulpit. Well, there are several reasons. One is, I have no commission from God Almighty to preach politics. And the other is that politics deals with time and God has sent me to deal with something else– eternity.

And I never like a sermon or never like to have anybody come to me and say Brother Tozer, that was a timely sermon. I’m not dealing with timely things. I’m dealing with timeless things. And a Christian is not concerned so much with time. He’s concerned with eternity. From this time forth, even forevermore. Ultimately, only forevermore will matter. Ultimately, I say only forevermore will matter. Time will not matter.

Four years, I thought that the time of the election, when everybody was pushing and two men were seesawing to get a job. But Cal Coolidge had the answer to that long ago. He was walking somewhere with a friend and he saw the White House and the gentleman reminded Mr. Coolidge, who was then President, that it must be a wonderful privilege to live in the White House and be President. Well, he says, it has its disadvantages. And they said, what are they? Well, he said, there’s no chance for advancement. And second, he said, you can’t keep your lease. You got to get out of there.

Now, here we were fighting over who got in there. But how long will they stay in? Four years more and the law says I can go to your farm and settle down and raise Angus cattle. I don’t want anymore. And if Stevenson had been elected. At the best, eight years and we’d said, go back to your farm and raise Berkshire hogs, we don’t need you anymore. So, no matter who gets in or how, or by a landslide, it’s all got time on it. And that’s why I can’t get enthusiastic about anything that has time on it either.

Even from this time forth and forevermore. There you have it. God Almighty is forevermore and He made you forevermore. And all that really matters is forevermore. From this time forth and forevermore. I want to warn you beware of the treacheries of time. Time will get you down. I know that I might as well be singing bass in an angelic choir as to preach this to some of you young people. Because old Mother Nature is making you think you’re going to live forever, you sixteen-year-olds and seventeen-year-olds. You know it hasn’t been more than two weeks ago that I was seventeen. It seems like it, just a little while ago. If my father we’re living now he’d, or my mother we’re living now, she’d be over a hundred. And there we have it. I believe I figured it out right. Time goes by and you think you’ve got all the time in the world young fellow. You have a pitiably short time. And if you get bogged down in time and all tangled up in the temporal, woe be to you. And don’t let anybody get your tangled up in the temporal or in time.

Here’s a story you’ve heard before, but they say that it is true. Some years ago, some sheep perished and were thrown into the Niagara River just above falls at wintertime. And the water wasn’t frozen yet, and it was freezing, but the water was still flowing. And they said that the bodies of these sheep were plunging over the falls. And somebody said he saw some eagles. And those eagles were swooping down, tearing at the flesh of the sheep. And then just before the sheep went over the falls, the carcass went over the falls, scream and fly away and dip and turn and go back and get the next sheep and pull out a hunk of meat and hold it in his beak and then just before it plunged over the falls, leap up again. Something was happening the eagles didn’t know.

And a man said, I saw this thing. I saw an eagle floating and with her great talons deep into the wet wool of the sheep and unknown to her, the freezing was going on. And just when the race started swift and the sheep carcass began to dip, she screamed and spread her wings, but she was frozen into the wool. And so with a scream she plunged over into the rapids and rocks beneath and it was destroyed. So, we fool with time. And we get tangled up in time and we say, well, we’ll get away from that, but slowly we freeze in. And finally, one last scream, and we find that time has ruined us.

Every great thing goes on into eternity Brethren, every great thing. Somebody made fun of a hymn one time in my presence, of a sermon, and said, why these sermons that always end in heaven, I don’t like them. I think they’re the best kind myself because they’re the most Scriptural and in keeping with all Christian tradition.

Look at their great hymns, Rock of Ages, a great hymn. Do you know where it ends? When I rise to worlds unknown and behold Thee on Thy throne. That’s the last verse. Look at Jesus Lover of my Soul. spring Thou up within my heart, rise to all eternity. Love Divine all Loves Excelling. The last verse, stanza says, till in heaven we take our place, till we cast our crowns before Thee lost in wonder, love and praise. Guide me O Thou Great Jehovah, prays in the last stanza, land me safe on Canaan’s side. My Faith Looks up to Thee, the last stanza says, oh, bear me safe above a ransom soul. And My Hope is Built on Nothing Less says, when He shall come with trumpets sound, oh, may I then in him be found. And Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound the last stanza is, when we’ve been there 10,000 years bright shining as the sun, we’ll have no less days to sing His praise than when we first begun. So, the great hymns almost invariably end in heaven, where they ought to end, where a Christian ought to end.

And then look at the 23rd Psalm. Did you ever read it? It starts out that about the Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want, and it goes on to say, and I shall dwell in, I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever. So, the 23rd Psalm ends in heaven, and anybody that criticizes a sermon that sweeps on down the ages and ends in heaven has to criticize the Bible itself. For it begins, In the beginning, God created the heavens, and the earth and ends, and I saw a new Heaven and a new earth for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away and there was no more sea. And I John saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. So the Bible that began with the creation, ends with the new creation and the holy city and the land.

So, my brethren, don’t allow yourself to get involved with anything that’s got the taint of time on it. You will have to handle some things that have time on them without a doubt. You’ll have to handle some things. Your job, your work, your house, your car, your body, your family, they’ve got time on them, but never let them get a hook in you that you can’t get free from. Every child of God should be like a fireman. While he’s sleeping, his ear is geared to the sound of the alarm, whatever it is in the fire houses and he’s ready by just putting on one garment and sliding down the pole. He’s out onto the car and gone. He isn’t twenty seconds away from slumber until he’s on his way. Every child of God should be like that. You ought to be fixed up so in ten seconds even be ready for heaven. It doesn’t have to wait.

Some of you have to cram like a lazy high school student that’s forgotten your homework and your exams are coming up and you have to cram and sit up and cram into the night hours. Maybe you won’t have any night hours to do your cramming Bud. Maybe you’ll go suddenly, the alarm will sound and you’ll be gone. And maybe on a little page in the Tribune it’ll say, such and such died at his home last night of a heart attack. He was forty-seven years old. He was fifty-two years old. He didn’t have any time to cry. He didn’t have any time to make up.

So, the child of God should use time very loosely. And as they say around the camp meetings, wear time as a loose garment. Never button up your garment. Always have it ready to loose and in a second and throwback the garment of mortality, the robe of temporal things. Leave them loose so they can be thrown away, and you can rise to worlds unknown and behold Him on His throne and say, Rock of Ages cleft for me, let me hide myself in Thee.

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“Thirteen Theses Nailed to the Evangelical Church Door“

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“Thirteen Theses Nailed to the Evangelical Church Door“

Pastor and author Aiden Wilson Tozer

speaking to Youth for Christ Meeting

January 8, 1958

Reverend A.W. Tozer is no stranger to this radio audience listening in today for he’s heard every week on Saturday mornings in the series of messages entitled “From the Pastor Study.” Whenever I’m in town I tune in Brother Tozer to your challenging message, and God has repeatedly has stricken my heart as you have opened your heart to the Word of God to me. You may not know it, but I listen regularly and God has spoken to me many, many times from your ministry and heart.

Brother Tozer is the pastor of the Christian Missionary Alliance Church on the southside here in the city and is the editor of the Alliance weekly, the official organ of the Christian and Missionary Alliance Church. You may be interested to know that this morning we presented to this fellowship our new editor of our magazine Vernon McLellan. We prayed with him and for him, and we believe that God has sent to us this very choice servant with a facile pen and typewriter who will be managing the editorial aspects of our Youth for Christ magazine. I want, ladies and gentlemen, that you take now to your heart this choice servant of God who has been such a blessing to many of us here in the room and to a host of people across the country, our brother, A.W. Tozer.

Thank you very much. I suppose that some of you have heard that I have been critical of some things done by Youth for Christ, but I want to tell you that I am critical of my own church and my own denomination too, and everything that I think doesn’t fit quite in with the will of the Lord. So I’m among you as your friend and I believe that I am among friends. And if some of the things I say don’t accord with what you already believe, it could be I’m wrong, but it also could be that you are. So what we want to do is get together, when our friend Headley called me and asked me to come, I said, well, Brother Headley, you know that I don’t agree with everything. He said, well, that’s why we want you. Well, that’s all right.

Now, I’ll tell you what I want to do, and I’m not singling out the Youth for Christ organization. I’m thinking broadly. I never think of my own church or our own denomination, the Alliance or any particular group. I think of the whole church of Christ. I try to cultivate a catholicity of approach, the true ecumenicity. The whole church of Christ is before me, the whole evangelical church. And I’ll tell you what I’m going to begin with. I’m going to begin with a conclusion. I want to watch out that I don’t, after the conclusion, sit down and forget because the conclusion usually comes last.

But I begin with this conclusion, an assumption, and one that I’m increasingly convinced is in accord with the facts, and one shared by growing numbers of serious-minded Christians everywhere. This is the basic thought that I’ll have for you, and if you don’t agree with it, I might as well stood in bed because everything I have to say is going to be based on this. It is that the evangelical church or evangelical Christianity has gone far from the New Testament and is in Babylonian captivity today and needs a restoration and reformation.

Now, you remember that when Israel was in Babylonian captivity, she was still God’s people. And she still had His promises and His covenant and all the blessings that had been given to the fathers. But she was out of the land and she was in captivity. And she needed an Ezra, a Nehemiah, and a few others to bring her out of captivity into the land again. Now, to clear myself, allow me to assure you that I don’t visualize myself as the reformer to do this job. I have no messianic complex. One of these times, I am going to die and go to heaven and leave the work to others. I hope maybe to some of you.

But now 450 years ago, the church was in a similar situation. She was in Babylonian captivity and a man arose. And he diagnosed her disease and he analyzed her trouble, and then he published his findings. That man, of course, was Martin Luther. And he nailed on the door of the castle church at Wittenberg his 95 theses, which he was prepared to defend by public debate or by writing anyway. October 31, 1517, he nailed his 95 theses on the door of the castle church at Wittenberg, and the great Reformation resulted.

Now, I believe that we need not only the evangelical thrust which Youth for Christ supremely embodies, but I believe that we need to have and are in critical need of a reformer to diagnose our difficulties; find out what’s wrong with us, analyze us and then find the cure and then publish it abroad so that we can relocate ourselves, not lose any of our evangelistic zeal, but direct it into a more perfect way.

So, I have for you here now, and I’ll be very cautious; and I’m going to quit when the time comes, because I’ve seen that WMBI sign there so long that I never run over, not even one second. But I want to present to you thirteen theses for the door of the evangelical church. I want you to take these down. These are theses which I am prepared to defend from the Scriptures any warm day or cold one.

The first one I quote from Martin Luther himself, it’s his first thesis. He said, our Lord and master Jesus Christ in saying, repent ye, meant the whole life of the faithful to be an act of repentance. Now, that was his first thesis. And we’re in need of having this repeated in our day, that when the Lord says repent, He meant that the whole life of the faithful should be an act of repentance. We are, in our day I am afraid, certainly I’m not saying this is true of Youth for Christ everywhere; I am saying it’s true in my denomination, it’s true among evangelicals, and I feel that it needs to be corrected if we’re to have the revival we want and escape our Babylonian captivity.

We are forgetting that the whole life of the faithful ought to be an act of repentance. And we’re making Christians either without repentance or with inadequate repentance or with superficial repentance. And you can be absolutely sure that your Christianity will be just what your repentance has been, no more, no less. You dare go high in your building only when you’ve gone deep in your foundation. And repentance is the foundation, and the rest is the superstructure raised on the foundation. And unless we go to bedrock with our repentance, we’re due to have our building tumble down later on. Now that’s thesis number one, that our Lord means that we the whole life of the faithful should be an act of repentance, not simply a statement, but the whole life.

Second one, and I borrow this from Luther is, that when, that Christ does not mean interior repentance only. Nay, interior repentance is void if it does not externally produce different kinds of mortification of the flesh. Now, he defended that and I am prepared too, that it isn’t enough to say, well, I have changed my mind. They tell us you know, that repentance is a change of mind and it is. But it is more than a change of mind. It must eventuate in external conduct. But the acceptance of Christ without cross-carrying and without self-denial, is a snare and a delusion. And to present Christ to be accepted, either not mentioning, or denying that there’s anything of cross-carrying and self-denial as we sing, much self-denial that the dear old Brother wrote into his song, nothing between my soul and my Savior. He said much self-denial.

Well, we’re living in an age when the spirit of self-denial has been, has gone from the earth. But into this snare, the evangelical church has fallen, so that now we’re preaching acceptance of Christ and not telling our new converts that they’re going to have to take up a cross and follow Him, our Lord, and denying themselves. And we’re not telling them, and thus we are betraying them.

The third thesis is, and now we depart from Luther, is that there is no salvation apart from discipleship. Take that down if you wish. In our days now we make a distinction, and I hear it in my denomination as well as in whatever denomination you are in. We make a distinction between the believer and a disciple. I will give any man ten dollars right out of my own little wallet if you’ll find me anything in the New Testament, which properly understood, allows a distinction between the believer and a disciple. The New Testament knows no such distinction. We believe on Christ unto discipleship. We go to the school of Christ by believing on Christ. Believing on Christ is the open door, the act, the way in, but it’s unto discipleship. Now, until we change this, we will stay in Babylon.

And then the fourth thesis is that the way of the cross is hard. Now we have no authority from the Bible, Old or New; we have no authority to make the way of the cross easy, yet we have done or tried to do just that thing. We have made salvation ridiculously easy when Christ made it extremely hard. I would suggest that all of you dear friends listening to me, reread the Gospels, reread the Gospels. Now don’t fall victim to the man who puts the Gospels in another dispensation. Believe as our fathers believed from Paul on down and take the Gospels and read them and see what Jesus says about the difficulty of becoming a disciple; and the way of the cross, how difficult the way of the cross is. But we’ve made salvation ridiculously easy, with the result that we have a cheap grace and a superficial Christianity.

My brethren, I believe that what we need more than we need evangelism, now, is a reformation that will purify and elevate the evangelical church so that her evangelistic thrust may bring people to her, up unto a higher level than we’re now bringing them.

The sixth thesis is that there is no Saviorhood without Lordship. I have been taught, and even I admit being taught in my own denomination, I have been taught that you can accept Christ as Savior now and so have eternal life, and then later on decide whether you want to have Him as Lord or not. You know, nobody ever thought of a more vicious heresy than that, and yet good men teach that.

They invite me, I get invitations from all denominations almost, asking me to come and put on deeper life conferences. Well, you see, the trouble is, the only reason we need a deeper life conference is that we didn’t start right in the first place. If we had taught the truth when we made our convert, he’d move right along nicely and grow like a little weed or flower. The difficulty is, we have said, believe in Jesus Christ as Savior and you’re saved, and then later on discuss this matter of His lordship and their surrender to Him.

Now, if you have accepted Him without knowing that He was to be your Lord, then of course, the only thing to do is to back up and accept Him as Lord. But you can’t take Christ, one of Christ’s offices and neglect the other. He is Lord and Christ. And the Scripture does not say, believe in Jesus and thou shalt be saved. It says, believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved. So when you preach, accept Christ and believe on Christ to a sinner, you’ll include the Lordship of Christ and the right and authority of Christ to be the Lord and boss of that convert’s life all during the days of his pilgrimage.

Seventh is that the methods of the Holy Ghost and those of men are diametrically opposed one to the other. Many evangelical leaders, and I certainly find it among my friends in Youth for Christ, and I find it among my friends in the Alliance; many evangelical leaders lack historic perspective, and thus do not know how the Holy Spirit has worked and how He works. We lack knowledge of God’s ways and so we substitute our own.

Now, there are three methods that are being introduced in our time which are contrary to, and diametrically opposed to the methods of the New Testament. One, the method of big business, the second, the method of show business and the third, the method of the Madison Avenue advertiser. And Bible methods are supplemented, and the Holy Spirit is grieved and withdraws Himself. And we, because we’re young, I’m not, but some of you are, because we’re young and have a lot of animal spirits, we make up by sheer enthusiasm what we lack in the power of the Spirit. And because we lack historic perspective and spiritual discernment, we don’t know one from the other, so Bible methods are supplanted.

Gentlemen, you can be sure of this, that to attempt to carry on a sacred, holy work such as the work of the church of Christ and of evangelism and missionary activities around the world, after the methods of big business and show business and the Madison Avenue advertiser is to grieve the Holy Ghost and remain in Babylonian captivity.

Eight is that Christ needs no sponsors. Now, this particularly irks me. I hope it doesn’t irk me in a carnal way. I try to be sanctified and keep spiritual with all my criticism, and sometimes I have failed and have to apologize, but I do want to be right about this. But you know, the Wheaties approach, it’s this, this ballplayer likes Wheaties, therefore Wheaties must be good. This ball player likes Wheaties. That boxer likes Wheaties. This movie actress likes Wheaties. This big politician, the Chairman of the Board of this so and so company eats Wheaties therefore Wheaties must be good.

Now that’s the Wheaties approach. And we have blossomed out in our day, and it’s in our magazines, our religious magazines, and the philosophy is that this entertainer believes in Jesus Christ, therefore Jesus Christ must be all right. This politician believes in Jesus Christ, why don’t you accept him? This movie actress prays to Jesus Christ, why don’t you pray to Him? This playboy, this politician, this athlete, they have accepted Christ, ergo, why don’t you accept Christ?

Now that’s the Wheaties approach. Do you know what that does? That makes Jesus Christ to ride in on the sponsorship of some big shot. That’s big shot-ism, brethren, and I am against it 100%. And it’s your business to preach Jesus Christ as the sky-tall Savior and never make Him to depend upon the sponsorship of any man. For Paul said, you see your calling brethren. Not many great men believe in Christ. And Jesus said He hides these things from the wise and prudent and reveals them unto babes. And I have seen humble ladies, little old ladies who read little who know nothing except their Bible that were greater, greater examples and demonstrators of true Christianity than a lot of these who were supposed to be big shots. Now, this is an affront to the Lord of Glory. We’re guilty of sinning against the Majesty of the great God when we make Him be to be sponsored by somebody.

Then nine, Christ saves us to make us worshipers and workers, but we evangelicals ignore the first altogether, worshipers, so that we’re not producing worshipers in our day. Workers, yes, we’re producing workers. Founders, yes, they’re a dime a dozen. Promoters, producers, artists, entertainers, religious DJs, we’ve got them. We got them by the thousands. Beat a bush and there’ll be two artists hop out and a DJ. And they’ll have a Scofield Bible under their arm, but they’ve departed far from the Scofield Bible.

We are to be worshipers brethren, Tarry ye until ye be endued with power from on high. Why? Because God wants worshipers first. Jesus did not redeem us to make us workers. He redeemed us to make us worshipers. And then out of the blazing worship of our hearts, springs our worship. In the thirteenth of Acts, it was when they were meet together, worshipping the Lord, that the Holy Ghost said, separate me Barnabas and Saul for the work where unto I have called them. And I challenge you that every great spiritual work from Paul to this hour, has sprung out of spiritual experience that made worshipers. Unless we’re worshipers, we are simply religious, Japanese dancing mice moving around in a circle, getting nowhere.

Now tenth, I’m trying desperately to crowd these in. The tenth is that the spirit of modern evangelicalism seems to me to be foreign to that of the New Testament. There was an old fellow by the name of Democritus or I believe that’s the way you pronounce his name. He was an old Greek philosopher. And George Santayana has written about him. And in the shade somewhere, the philosophers were gathering in and he said, and Democritus began to sniff. And he said, I smell a false philosophy. And the young fellows said, now just a minute there Grandpa, you don’t mean you can smell philosophy. He said, I can. He said whenever an idea emanates from a human mind, it gives off an odor. And he said, I can tell whether it’s good and sound and fragrant or whether it’s putrid. He said, I smell a putrid philosophy here someplace.

Well, I only read that recently. But I’ve been saying for years, that God gives us a sense of discernment and enables us so that we can smell and know when things are right or when they’re wrong. For instance, if an unprejudiced observer who had spent say, ten years in the book of Acts and in the Epistles, if he should come from another planet, or runaway Sputnik or something, and he’d come back down, he’d never been among us evangelicals at all. He never attended a Youth for Christ meeting or been in an Alliance missionary meeting. He just came from another world down. And his nostrils were all tuned to the sweet fragrance that he had got in the Book of Acts or the Gospels and the Epistles, and then He sniffed around. I’m perfectly certain that he’d say they don’t smell the same. They say the same words. They talk about the same Lord, but there’s a difference of spirit here. I recognize a difference of flavor. So, do I. I recognize it among us evangelicals that we don’t smell like those Christians who came out of the ivory palaces along with their Lord, smelling of myrrh and aloes and out of the ivory palaces.

Now, the eleventh is that evangelical Christians every day violate the Scriptures without compunction and without rebuke from their leaders. Such Scriptures as, be ye not unequally yoked together with unbelievers. What fellowship has righteousness with unrighteousness? What communion hath light with darkness and you know the rest. And this, love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man loved the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life is not of the Father, but is of the world and the world passeth away and the lust thereof. But he that doeth the will of God abideth forever.

The church of Christ, to change the figure, is like the ark of Noah that sprung a leak. If the ark of Noah sprung a leak, you wouldn’t be here, because they would all have drowned and there would have been no human race. But the church has sprung a leak and the world is leaking into the church.

Then the twelfth is, meekness, modesty and humility make a man dear to God. The Old Testament, the New Testament Proverbs, Psalms, prophets, Gospels, Epistles, Revelation, all the New Testament teaches and all the Old, that meekness and modesty and humility are dear to God. And the man who’s meek and modest and humble, God will honor. But we evangelical Christians have geared our philosophy to the exact contrary. Instead of meekness, we’re show-offs. Instead of modesty, it’s arrogance. Instead of humility, its ambition.

Well, the thirteenth. Thank the Lord we’ve arrived, the thirteenth. The thirteenth thesis is that we seek revival, but we don’t know what we mean when we use the word revival, because we interpret the word revival or the concept which the word covers, to mean a big enthusiastic increase of what we now have. Whereas, revival must be preceded by a mighty change from what we now have. If what we now have was all right, why don’t we have that revival? The simple fact is, it is not all right and must be corrected and changed and edited and purified and elevated. We must have self-knowledge which we don’t have. We must have a changing, a giving up, a dying. Did anybody ever preach about dying to self among you brethren? It’s in the Book all right, dying to self. Dying to that snappy, vibrant you; dying to that and living in Christ Jesus, a mighty confession of carnality and pride and ambition and self-confidence and timidity and all these things.

Now, there is no escape from our Babylonian captivity. We’ve had a generation born in Babylon. And there’ll be another generation born in Babylon unless we brethren, who are in places of leadership and undoubtedly you, most of you are, unless we see these things and make some specific changes. When Luther nailed his 95 theses, there was a reformation. But I have nailed my thirteen and I don’t suppose there be anything but a song and a prayer. But I do pray, I do pray that we may do something about this. Like it or not brethren, Youth for Christ is in a place of leadership, and you’re the die that is stamping out thousands of other Christians. And the terrible thing is they’re going to be just like you. And what you want to do dear friends is to pray that God will help you to be the kind of Christian so that when he makes other Christians in your image somewhat and they follow you innocently, they will be following the Lord at the same time. Don’t you want that? I think you do. Now, we’ll turn it over to the chairman.

Thank you. Brother Tozer. Some things have been said this morning that we need to heed, not just the voice of man, but I believe to us as an organization, to us as members, leaders in this organization, to me, needs to be said and received by us. We’re grateful to God for this this morning and thank you Brother Tozer.

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“The Power of the Word“

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“The Power of the Word“

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

October 28, 1956

I spoke last Sunday night, on the 119th Psalm as the Word; the Word and the Word, the written word, the speaking word, the Living word, the Incarnate Word. And I want to talk tonight a little again from that same Psalm using some of the verses as I come to them. And I want to talk about the power of the Word and say to you that if we’re going to have the power of the Word released to us, that we’re going to have to be convinced beyond argument that it is true. For a great many years, probably millions of years in the creation and certainly at least 6,000 in the history of mankind, the little invisible atom was all about us. And then, when men learned to break down the atom and get at it and release its energy, we had the terrifying atom bomb.

Now, the word of the Lord God is not destructive primarily, though it can be that. It is primarily created. For it is written that He by the Word created things. And it is written that He by the word begets us and brings us into the new birth. And we’ve got to be concerned or convinced above all things that this word is God’s Word and that this Word is true.

Now, in verse 128, the writer; I’ll probably say, David as I go along, but really, I don’t know whether David wrote this or not. He probably didn’t. But a Psalmist wrote it. I esteem all thy precepts concerning all things to be right; and I hate every false way. Now, that’s nailing it down there where there isn’t any equivocating. There isn’t any, this saying, well now, you don’t quite understand me, and as I see it, it is thus and thus. But the man of God said, I esteem all thy precepts concerning all things to be right, and I hate every false way.

Now, let me say to you my friend, that to come to the Word of God, testing and tasting and tempting and experimenting, is to assure yourself that you will not see anything or learn anything or feel anything. And in this skeptical age, many people come to the Word of God as they came to Jesus, the Living Word, the Incarnate Word, when He walked among men to catch something out of His mouth or sneaking in a back way through the alley by night to ask Him questions. Now, you may be sure of one thing, that nobody that comes thus, unconvinced, will ever receive anything from the Lord. There is an act of pure faith necessary, that reason hasn’t anything to do with; an act of pure faith, an act of faith as simple, as real, as true, as the faith that the Catholic Church requires of the dogmas of the church.

Now, I believe in the faith that asks no questions and takes what it’s told and accepts it. It so happens that I don’t believe in faith in dogmas. If we were required to have faith in whatever some church leader told us, then we’d be required to go crazy in 24 hours if we tried also to have faith in the Word. You’ve got to take one or the other. But the Living Word is settled in heaven forever. And in all things, it is right and it is good the Psalmist says in other verses, good and true and righteous and very pure, good and very pure.

I read this insufferable bit of hogwash in the press the other day that somebody said that the Bible should not be taught to children; that it’s filled full of questionable stories and embarrassing things and that it’s not good at all; that it’s on borderline, its stories are borderline.

Well now, the difference between the Bible and any other book is this, that the Bible tells the truth about people, and naturally it involves sex and murder and lying and robbery and all those things, and it tells the truth about people. But in telling the truth about people, it tells it in a way that makes everybody hate the thing it’s talking about. But the worldly press tell their stories, and they tell them in a less serious and drooling way that tempts everybody to go out and do likewise.

And you will not find one lone instance anywhere in the world where the Bible ever lead anybody into sin. You’ll find the devil did, and you’ll find instances where the devil quoted a verse of Scripture somewhere in order to ruin somebody. But the Bible itself is very pure, and it’s righteous and true and good. And he says elsewhere, that it is like silver purified in a furnace seven times. So don’t be afraid to let your tiniest child read the Word. It won’t hurt the child. As soon as he’s old enough to know what it means it will begin to purify him.

Now, there are a lot of people who come to the Word of God testing and tasting and experimenting, and that just builds the ego up. That puts not only, saves face, that puts four faces on the impenitent ego because always you will find the impenitent man or woman, particularly young men or women, that doesn’t tend to give up his iniquity. He just doesn’t intend to give up his iniquity. You will find him saying, I am searching, I am searching. Pardon me for not being sympathetic with these solemn owls who look at you and say, I am searching.

Well, now I’d like to believe that is true. But Jesus Christ said one time that he that is willing to do My will, he shall know the doctrine. And all we need to do is stop sinning, and our search will be over. It’s not searching, it’s sinning that people are doing. And so, we build up our ego. Let me remind you, my brethren that the Word of God is not on trial before men, but men are on trial before the Word of God. And this patronizing attitude that we are searching, I am reading Buddhism, and I’m reading what Swami so and so said, and I am searching. What unconscionable hypocrisy. They are sinning somewhere, and they don’t want to give up their sin. And buried somewhere, in some closet, you will find a skeleton that will roll out when the door is open. Hidden somewhere, you will find some festering sore of iniquity.

And so, they cover the whole thing up by saying in a very learned way, I am searching. My brethren, the Word of God stands very pure, and all its precepts concerning all things are right. And there is no more trying or testing; here it stands the Book of God. And remember this, that God has given assurance to all men, in that, He has raised Jesus Christ from the dead, and has made Him to be the judge of the living and the dead. And the Scripture and Jesus Himself said, in the Scripture, that the words that I speak unto you, the same shall judge you in the last day.

Now what’s our part? Well, in going through this variously now and I don’t always tell you where it’s found. I don’t think I’m trying to slip modernism over on you. I just don’t want to talk about numbers all the time. It wasn’t numbered in the beginning, some people who get number crazy. And if you can’t give the verse and chapter, they think you don’t know it. But remember, the verses and chapters are put in there by men for convenience. They weren’t inspired of the Holy Ghost. But meditate, that’s one thing. I will meditate on thy precepts he said,

Now, what is it to meditate? Well, like the brother that defined unction, talking one time to a brother preacher he said, what’s unction. He said, unction is that which you don’t have, and meditate is that which nobody does anymore, or at least very, very little meditation. For meditation means to muse. It means to reflect and ponder.

Now my brethren, the heart is like a photographic plate and the Word is light. And when the light of the Word hits the photographic plate of your heart, it makes its image there. And remember this, that what is in the Word comes to the heart by meditation, for God never take snapshots. Some people try to give God His minute. I saw a book somewhere, “God Minute.” What an insult to Almighty God. We have 24 hours a day and live 70 years and give God a minute of the day. God never takes snapshots. God always takes time exposures.

And so, when the Word of God is there as light and you come and expose your heart to the Word of God by long meditation, you will find that what’s in the Book will come to your heart. And there will be help to your heart if you muse and reflect and ponder. But you say, that was written for a slower day. We’re a faster moving people. We’re going to hell faster than they went to hell that sure enough. But don’t boast about doing anything fast. We boast about breaking through the sound barrier. Well, what have we gotten by breaking through it?

These serious old men of God meditated. They weren’t so nervous and scared that they wanted to get someplace else. They meditated. They had time to meditate. And he says, my eyes prevent the night watching and I prevented the dawning of the morning by waiting on the Word of God. So many of us cheat ourselves by not giving the Word of God time to get to our hearts. Well, he said, not only do I meditate, but he said, I choose. I have chosen the way of truth.

Now, the heart must make its choice. There’s no way God can help us until we do. The Lord can’t help an experimenter. The Lord can’t help one of these searchers. The Lord can’t help somebody that is tasting and testing. The Lord can only help a man who’s convinced that this is the book and he needs look nowhere else, and then choose. When a man’s heart, when that in a man we call volition, the will, bites and snaps shut like a bear trap and it’s all over. He’s not testing now and choosing and looking around and acting wise. But he’s decided this is the book and Christ is the Son of God, and God is the one who speaks and the living and written and speaking Word come to my heart. And the heart closes down with a snap on it and says, this is it, this is it.

Some people don’t like sudden conversions, and they don’t like instantaneous conversions. But my brethren, when the heart of a man closes down tight on the Word of God, he says, I have chosen the way of truth. A heart has to make its choice you see, for if you don’t make your choice, you will never get in. Some think they’ll get in by osmosis, a kind of a leaking through the walls and the kingdom of God. And some think they’ll get holy by brushing somebody. And so, they run around after preachers and praying men and good men, and they sit and talk with them and think it’ll come off.

No, my friend, it won’t come off that way. Your heart has to make a choice. This is the Book. God is the God. Christ is His Son. The gospel is the message, and my heart shuts on it like a bear trap. And He said I have chosen. Now, that man you see must aim itself and does aim himself. His heart aims itself like an arrow and sets its seal and burns its bridges so there’s no retreat, and then you have the beginning of a Christian on your hand. Then I have a little word here that I kind of like in the 34th verse, the 31st Verse, it’s as quaint as can be. He says, I have stuck unto thy testimony. Did you hear that, I have stuck unto thy testimonies. O Lord, put me not to shame.

Now, here’s a young fellow in high school, and he’s surrounded by quick-witted, quip artists who don’t care whether it’s true or not, and it’s funny and cute. And he tries to be a Christian surrounded by a crowd like that, or he’s in an office of grown-up people who also are trying to give Bob Hope a run for his money. And it’s all got to be funny and cute, and maybe a little off center. And a certain psychological pressure comes on to ease up a bit; not be so religious, and they grab ahold of every excuse imaginable not to be quite the Christian they are. And so, they keep still about it.

Now, this man of God says, I have stuck unto thy testimonies. And I recommend tonight, that instead of you young people easing up on your Christian testimony, stick to thy testimonies. I have stuck on unto them he said. Because the determined soul always wins, remember that. Daniel set his face that he would not eat of the king’s dainties. And Jesus set His face to go to Jerusalem. And Paul said this one thing I do, and Luther said, Here I stand, I can do nothing else so help me God and the Reformation was born.

My brethren, there’s got to be such a thing as sticking unto thy testimonies. And then what’s the result? Well, the result he says, I will walk at liberty. Verse 45, I will walk at liberty, there’s liberty. That’s one thing that comes to the heart, and that’s about all I’ll talk about for the remaining times tonight. I will walk at liberty, verse 45, because I’ve kept thy precepts.

Now, one of the fallacies of the unbeliever is that the Christian must surrender his freedom to be a Christian. That’s one of the greatest fallacies that I know and I think I know who invented it. Now, I’m not sure. But I think I know who invented it, brother. Just as when a good politician is smeared from one end of the country to the other, I’m pretty sure I know what he’s been smeared with. I think it’s old Bulganin’s paint pot. And when the story gets out that a Christian is in shackles, that he’s in chains, that he is bound up, a little narrow-minded, fenced in and boxed up, and that he can’t get away, I think I know who invented that. Can you tell me in three guesses? I think it’s that old serpent, the devil and Satan.

Now, a sinner imagines he’s free and he ponders and searches and says, now I’m going to search and I’m going to ponder this over. Do you think that I can give up my freedom to become a Christian? Do you think I can give up my liberty to become a Christian?

Well, let’s look at the liberty of the Christian. He has liberty to do what? Does he have liberty to be free from his temper? I wonder how many sinners in Englewood are free from their tempers, free from blowing up like a fire cracker and ruining their home for a week? How many? Is that what they want freedom from, their temper? Do they, have it? No, they don’t have it. How many of them are free from their cigarettes? I am not an anti-tobacco man exactly, but I have had just about enough of this business of the fool on one end of a little stick and a fire on the other and blowing the result of it in my face. I’ve had about enough of it. We spend millions of dollars on air conditioning and in three minutes, you can stink up and foul up the finest air-conditioned room in the world. And the expensive air conditioning labors and groans and blows and puffs but it can’t beat the fool on the one end of the stick and the fire on the other.

And they’re always inventing a new one. I see the newest one out now. I’ve heard it on the radio and it’s got an anthem attached to it too.  You know, they sing anthems now to sell cigarettes. They used to, just, a line or two but they’ve developed whole anthems now to sell that dirt.

Brethren, how many say, oh, I don’t smoke. Well, I wish I didn’t. You wish you didn’t? Why do you brother, you’re a sinner and you’re a slave. All right. All right. You’re free, free to leave that alone? When I am walking around there and I hear him riding along or he comes on the radio. This one won’t hurt your throat as bad as the other one. I say to myself, none of them are going to hurt my throat if I can help it. I don’t have to take my choice. I just don’t want anything to do with any of them. And you can make them as long as you want to and make them emperor size and still, I don’t want them.

All right Bud, you say you don’t want to be a Christian because you don’t want to give up your freedom. Are you free from alcohol? Are you free from blue, gloom and discouragement on Monday morning? Are you free from fiery, heartbreaking jealousies? Are you free from disappointed hopes? Are you free from the fear of death? Are you free from the fear of hell? Is that the freedom you have? No, you know you don’t have it.

All right, what freedom do you have? You have freedom to sin. You have freedom to sin and pile up condemnation, mountain upon mountain, and hill upon the hill to the clouds. You have freedom to sin. You have freedom to get old, and you have freedom to get disillusioned, and you have freedom to die and you have freedom to go to judgment, and you have freedom to go to hell. Is that the freedom you have brother? That’s the freedom the unsaved man has. And he looks at us happy Christians who are as free as birds, I will walk at liberty he says, walk at liberty. What did the rest of it go? Because I seek thy precepts. I’m looking after thy precepts, and walking and I’m meditating and choosing and sticking to thy precepts, and I walk at liberty. And the only free people in the world are the people that God has set free. Whom the Son has set free is free indeed.

So that, don’t let any of you young people now, don’t let anybody fool you. Don’t you let anybody lead you aside and say, well, now, do you think you can give up your liberty? Liberty to sin? Liberty to get old and die and go to hell? If that’s liberty, I don’t want it. And yet, that’s the liberty of the sinner.

Well, what’s the Christian’s liberty? I will walk at liberty. Well, he has freedom. He has freedom from his past, that’s one thing. And I don’t know about you, but I don’t want anything to do with my past, up to here. I want the blood of Jesus Christ to flow like a river and like boundless salvation in the song, to roar like ocean billows over my past and put it where the devil can’t get to it and where God won’t look at. Now we have freedom from our past, and we have freedom from our sin, and we have freedom from the fear of judgment to come. And we have freedom from fear of death and hell, and we have freedom to do good. Now a sinner has freedom to do evil, but the Christian has freedom to do good. He has freedom to love and to serve and to worship, and he has freedom to develop and has freedom to gain immortality at last.

And then verse 47, he’s got freedom to do the thing that delights him the most. Somebody came up to me recently and said, Mr. Tozer, was it Luther that said, love God and do as you please? Well, I think it was Augustine who originally said, love God and do as you please. I believe he’s the man who said it. Luther could easily have quoted it because of course, he was a learned man who knew what all these old brethren had said. But that’s shocked some people terribly. Love God and do as you please. But you know, if you love God enough, you’ll only please to do what God wants you to do, and that’s what that expression means; love God and do as you please. For if you love God, you will please to do the will of God.

So, this man, David, or whoever wrote it. It wasn’t David. I’ve said forty times it was somebody many years after David. And he said he had freedom to do what delighted him. Now the man that is free from fear of death and free from fear of sin, and free from sin itself, and free to do anything he wants to do, and then is delighted with his freedom, do you pity that man, brother? Say, poor sinner, can it be that my heart should pity, the heart should pity me, or I should envy thee? Never, never, never, for the Christian is free. He walks at liberty, freedom to do what delights him.

And so, in this Psalm, we have the mighty Word, the mighty Word. I said, it’s all mixed up. When the Bible talks about the Word sometimes, we don’t know whether it means the Person who is the Word whether it means the speaking Word or whether it means the written Word. So, we have the Word and that mighty Word that made the world, that made man. You know how you came into being? Not as the preacher said in that famous piece that I often quote, for it’s delightful and wonderful, but it’s materialistic of course. And it says, you know, that the Lord sat down on the bank of the river and took a piece of clay and rolled it in His hands until he made a man and into that man, he blew the breath of life and man became a living soul. Amen, amen. It’s beautiful. But it’s just a little too physical to be true. The fact is, God’s spoke and it was done. And out of the creative, dynamic, living voice of God, creation came into being. And it was God’s Word that created man. God said you were to be and that’s why you were.

So that mighty Word that made the world and that made man, now speaks to us in an invitation. It speaks to us in an invitation, come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden. The Spirit says come and let all that hear-say come, and the bride says come. And that mighty Word speaks in invitation. But you know, some people have not believed it to be valid. And some have not the courtesy even to reply. God sent His invitation with an RSVP and some people never even care enough to send God word they won’t be there. They just do nothing about it at all.

Well, I want to read to you in closing the prodigal’s prayer, the latter part, the latter section of the Psalm. And I recommend that if you’re not right with God tonight, and there is grief in your heart, there is sin or sorrow or self-accusation or remorse, or fear, I recommend that you pray this prayer. Let my cry come near before thee, O Lord, and give me understanding according to Thy Word. Then he slips down a verse and says, let my supplication come before me and deliver me according to thy word. Deliver me from what? Deliver me from the bondage of iniquity and deliver me from a record I don’t dare face. Deliver me from judgment, which can only condemn me. And deliver me from the grave and from hell. Deliver me. My lips shall utter praise, and my tongue show speak of thy word. Let thine hand help me for I have chosen thy precepts.

Would you have the heart to go to Jesus Christ tonight and pray that prayer, let thine hand help me? You remember that wonderful hand that healed so many people? That wonderful hand you remember it, let thine hand help me for I have chosen thy word. I have longed for thy salvation O Lord, and thy law is my delight. Do you long for the salvation of the Lord? Then make God’s law your delight. God will hear you. And he says, verse 175, let my soul live and it shall praise thee. There’s the quickening of the new birth, and let thy judgments help me.

And then this tender, lovely little verse at the close, I have gone astray like a lost sheep, poor lost sheep. I have gone astray like a lost sheep, seek thy servant. He knew the servant really couldn’t do much. It’s seeking Him, we think we can, and the Lord lets us try. But the Lord has to seek thy servant, he said. And I wonder, I wonder if our Lord had this in mind when He gave us His great 10th chapter of John, when He told us that He was the shepherd, and the people were sheep, and they were lost, and they heard the voice of the shepherd and that if they’d been taught of the Father they’d come and come back home. And then he said, If you’ll do this, O God, I’ll never forget thy commandment. I do not forget thy commandments.

Why not this evening, before you go to bed tonight, before you let another day or even an hour pass, why not do something about this? Comeback, like a lost sheep. The mighty creative Word has now become the invitational word to call you back, two little written and living and speaking Words, Jesus Christ the Son of God. And He calls in and wants you to come.

Now, we’re going to release you. We’ve discovered that pressure at altar services may result in occasionally somebody meeting God but more frequently results only in confusion, so we’re not going to do it. We’re only going to tell you, you won’t be able to get away from it tonight, the laughter at the soda content, the noisy planes and their automobiles and stoplights and all the rest, nothing can take that out of your ear, the sound of invitation or voice. Come on back home boy, come on back home daughter. Come on, come on back home, the mighty, living Voice is calling you back. You have only to believe and say, I consider it to be true of God and right in every detail. And therefore, my heart will stick unto thy Word. If you do that, you will find your life will begin to marvelously change, wonderfully change. The things you hated before, you love; and the thing you loved before, you will now hate and you will become a new creature in Christ Jesus by trusting in His son.

Will you stand with me please? Brother Ray, lead us in old sweet wonder. Jesus the Son of God, how I love thee, how I adore thee, Jesus the Son of God.

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Tozer Talks

“That in All Things He Might Have the Preeminence“

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“That in All Things He Might Have the Preeminence“

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

September 2, 1956

For a meditation before the communion service, a familiar section of Scripture, the book of Colossians, the first chapter. There in verse fifteen where it says, Christ, His dear Son, God’s dear Son, is the image of the invisible God. The first born of every creature, for by Him were all things created that are in heaven and that are in earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones or dominions or principalities or powers. All things were recreated by Him and for Him. And He is before all things, and by Him all things consist. And He is the Head of the body, the church, who is the beginning, He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in all things, He might have the preeminence.

Now, that’s what Paul said, breaking into it and breaking out of it again. That chapter where it clings together by a tight logic, that one has all but to do violence to it, to select anything from it. But here in verse eighteen particularly, I want you to see that He is the head of the body, the church. He who is the beginning. He who is the firstborn from the dead, that in all things He might have the preeminence.

Now here is Christian truth. Not all Christian truth is here, but all that is here is the proper object of Christian faith. Our Lord Jesus Christ gave us to understand that after His going, some unnamed person or persons should receive new truth, which He could not give them because they were not spiritually in a position to receive it yet. That’s found in John 16. And it seems that Paul became the principal one of those so honored to receive and transmit truth that even our Lord was unable to transmit, because of the condition of the people’s hearts before the coming of the Holy Ghost. Paul was not one of the original twelve, but he was called and prepared under most extraordinary circumstances that he might receive the revelation. And now he tells us in this book of Colossians, it’s 1:18 that I have read twice now in your hearing, what we are to believe.

And so, out goes our vaunted independence. And out goes our appeal to reason, because bluntly, this is above all ability of reason, to receive, or at least to discover. And this is above all the powers of the enquiring mind ever to reach or to learn. And out goes our liberty to pick and choose. A heretic they say, is one who picks and chooses. That’s what the word means. He likes certain passages, and so he picks them and chooses them as his creed. He dislikes others and he rejects them. But there is no liberty for any Christian at any time to decide what he wants to believe.

This is the book of God I hold in my hand. And when an apostle moved by the Holy Ghost, says, that He is the Head of the body, the church, who is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, and that in all things He, Christ should have the preeminence because it pleased the Father that in Him should all fulness dwell. And that He, having made peace through the blood of His cross, reconciled all things unto Him, whether they be things in earth or things in heaven. We are therefore not to pick what we shall like and what we shall choose to believe or emphasize. This is Christian truth to be received, whether we understand it or not.

Now, there is no coercion here however. No one needs to follow Christ. It is not incumbent. It rests not upon anybody. There is no obligation there except the high obligation, which the sinner does not admit. But no one need follow Christ and no one will be forced to do it. All nature obeys Him. And so all nature holds together, and in Him all things consist. But the creatures who kept not their first estate, chose not to obey Him. And all the long history which antedates even the history of mankind, is strewn with wrecks of their lives, and mankind has chosen not to obey Him. And the price man has paid for his refusal to obey is written in tragic letters across the face of the world, written on the bloody highways over this weekend, written on the police blotters, written in the death cells, written on the charts of the hospitals, written in the wild walls of the insane asylums, written all over the world that men would not obey Him. But you and I, as His professed followers are to obey Him. We must. It’s not a question of whether we understand it. It’s a question of, He said it, and therefore we obey it, and we believe it.

Now, faith and unbelief stand together outside the temple, and they look in and there in the dimly-lighted, mysterious recesses of that many-roomed temple, they find mysteries. The mystery of the Trinity stands at the beginning. And the mystery of sin and Adam’s fall, and the mystery of incarnation and Christ’s Atonement, and the mystery of salvation by faith, and the mystery of the resurrection. All this is there in its beauty in the dimness of the temple. And unbelief sees it and walks away, and says, I cannot understand it. I will not walk into the soft-lighted temple. I want to be out where I can see where I am walking. But faith bows reverently and walks inside. And the mysteries instantly flame up and become a bright and shining light that lights them more and more unto the perfect day.

So, you and I are to believe what God says about His Son, not stand outside in our human pride lighted by the sun of reason alone and say, I can’t understand it, therefore I reject it. We must come on in. And when we get inside, we’ll find we can understand it at least to our heart’s content, if not to the pride of our intellect.

Now, it says about Him here, that He is the beginning, the original, of the old creation. You see my friends, there are two creations extant and they coexist, to use a modern word, in the world in which we live. There is the old original creation and the new creation, created in Christ Jesus unto good works, and of that old creation, He was the originator. And that old creation through sin is moving toward dissolution and judgment at last.

And you can’t get away from the word “world.” Hardly a newspaper, I suppose there hasn’t been one printed in the last 20 years that hasn’t had the word world and in some place. I suppose scarcely a sermon has been preached or a prayer made, but what the word world has been used in it, that word. And what is it after all? But there is a new world and He is the original of the new creation. The new creation is moving away from death, and the old creation is moving toward it. And the new creation will finally displace the old, and be there with eternal permanence.

The world is a collaboration between men that die and forms that perish. And that’s all we have in the wide world, men who die with an unbelievable shrewdness and skill, take forms that perish and recut them and shape them, and arrange them and put them together and come up with astonishing things from the simple wheel to the hydrogen bomb. And that we call a world. The men die and the forms perish. That is the world. That’s the old original world.

Now, my feet are down on that rock, I believe that. I couldn’t rest on isolated texts my friends; I couldn’t possibly do it. Those who want to isolate a text and give it to me and say, now you believe this text. I believe it alright, if it’s from the Bible, but if I can’t relate it, it won’t do me very much good. So not an isolated text, not one doctrine handed to me, but this is the foundation, the rock upon which everything else is built, that there are two creations and that one of them is on the way to perish and the other is on the way to immortality. That one was the old creation which was ruined by the fall, and the other, the new creation, which was made one in Christ Jesus. And it’s made up of all who have believed down all the years of every tribe and tongue and color and nation and language and level of education or culture, from the time that Abel offered his acceptable sacrifice, down to the latest convert in Borneo or Peru.

So, this is the message we have that Jesus Christ is the original of the new creation. He was the originator of the old creation, but he is the original of the new creation. And because the new creation is to be born out of death, He is the first born from the dead. And because the church is the first of the new creation, along with her Head, Jesus Christ, why He is said to be the Head of the body, the church.

Now, Paul leads up to this, that in all things Christ might have the preeminence. And I, whenever I get hold of a word like preeminence, instinct tells me if nothing else, but that’s an important word. And I went into the original to see what it might mean; and it just means preeminence. It just means that He’s the most important one. It means that He is the Chief One. It means that He is the top one and that there can be no higher. It means He has authority above which there is no authority. It means that. It just means that. So, we’ll not to try to display any Greek here. We’ll just say it means preeminence. Everybody knows what that means. Eminent, eminent, they say, on a high, rocky eminence means a mountain, way high there. And then, when you put the word “pre” on it, why you have elevated it, so it looks down on everything. And this is our Lord Jesus Christ. In all things, He might have the preeminence–all things.

Now, the term, all things, includes the philosophic universe, the totality of existence. It means life and matter and form and substance and law and spirit and intellect. It means the physical, the material. It means relations. It means laws. And it means all the totality of created things. And in all things, He has the preeminence. And it also denotes heavenly and invisible bodies; persons and spirits and creatures of which you and I know so very little; and the strange beings with four faces and six swings, and the fiery burners before the throne of God. And those watchers and holy ones, those beings that race with the speed of light through God’s vast creation and run to the help of the people who shall be heirs of redemption. And it means all that and of all things He shall have and does have the preeminence. He is the preeminent One. Rise as high as your imagination will lift you, and when you have gone to the highest eminence, there is one that stands on the preeminence above all the highest eminence you can conceive.

I smile sometimes at the names, the grandiose titles we invent for each other. Plenipotentiary. I always thought that was a lovely one. A plenipotentiary, I don’t know what that is. And still, let’s break it down here a little bit. Let’s see, plenty means full in all, and potent means powerful. And the ary hasn’t anything to do with the penitentiary, Brother McAfee. But plenipotentiary means that somebody who has all the power there is.

And the little fella has hardening of the arteries and fallen arches and he’s lost his teeth and he’s on his way to die, and yet he comes in robes and everybody knows. And the speaker gets up and introduces him. We present the plenipotentiary, the man who has all the plentiful power there is, says the Word. There isn’t anybody like that, only one man and they called His name Jesus. And the only plenipotentiary there is, is Jesus Christ. No, we daren’t use the word. Oh, if you put it in lowercase letters I suppose and printed real pale on the page, and have an understanding that we know what we mean, I suppose that we could without sin, call some old king or czar, a plenipotentiary.

But there is one that’s above the all the plenipotentiaries and all the kings. Now, when I think of the kings and the mighty men that have walked over the earth and with the wave of their scepter have condemned thousands to die. I think of that story told us by the missionary of the tribal chief, I think in Africa, who managed somewhere to secure down at the coast, a barber chair, and he put that barber chair in his hut and sat in grandeur and regal dignity in the barber chair and received the plaudits of all of his followers.

And after all, what’s the difference between the tribal chief in a barber’s chair and a plenipotentiary surrounded by all the culture and tradition of mankind. There is only one about whom it can be said, in all things He has the preeminence, and that all things fall down before Him, the philosophic universe, the totality of existence, the heavenly bodies, the kings and those in authority, and the princes and the holy ones and the watchers and the seraphim and the cherubim and the angels and the archangels and all the creatures about which we know only dimly or know nothing at all. By virtue of what He is and by virtue of what He did and by virtue of what God did for Him, He sits supreme in majesty above them all.

That’s why, and I speak with apology to any of you whose feelings might be hurt by this. But, that is why I never could refer to the man who sits in Rome as a holy father. That’s why I never could call him a holy father. He’s a bachelor to start with, and how he could be a father and not be married is beyond me. And how you could call him the most holy father, I will never do it, never do it. While there sits One high and supreme on an eminence elevated infinitely beyond the highest man or angel or seraph. There sits our Lord Jesus Christ. He has in all things the preeminence. And since He has the preeminence, and since for a little time, we can’t see it, but God is working out a plan that will display it. And since it’s true, that in all the moral world He has the preeminence, and all the physical world, He has the preeminence. And in the fallen world, He’ll take the preeminence when His time comes. In all this is a powerful argument for giving Him the preeminence now, in our lives. It argues with an unanswerable logic, that if He’s preeminent in heaven, He ought to be preeminent on Earth.

And I read again yesterday, that which I think I quoted here years ago, that wonderful, strange saying to come from a man who doesn’t claim to be a Christian, Aldous Huxley. That stream saying where he said this, that our kingdom go, must be always and forever the proper corollary to, thy kingdom come. And there cannot be, thy kingdom come until there has been my kingdom go, for no two kings can sit on any one throne.

So, if His Kingdom is to come, my kingdom must go. And prophetically and literally, when the kingdoms of this world go, the kingdoms then become the kingdoms of our Lord, and of His Christ, and He shall reign on the earth. But there will have to go the rule of man before there can come the rule of the God-man. And what is true in society and in prophecy in future events, it’s true right now in my life. My kingdom has to go. Nothing, nothing, nothing that this little dying man would like better than to sit on a throne. Nothing, that he would like better than to be called by magnificent titles and sit on the throne. And if he has to compromise with the barber chair of his own little ragged life, he nevertheless wants to sit on that throne. But my kingdom go before His Kingdom can come.

So, His preeminence in His universe argues and pleads and sings and preaches, that we give Him preeminence now. The wonder and the mystery of the human heart. How wonderful is the human heart. Bunyan called it, the kingdom of man’s soul, and he thought of a single human heart as being a whole kingdom. They used to call it a microcosm, the little world, the whole world in little, lying in the bosom of a man. And I can’t prove this, and so don’t ask me for the verse yet, but I feel and sense and intuit that there isn’t a law nor a beauty nor a loveliness nor a glory anywhere in the created universe that hasn’t been compressed into the human heart. God said, if nothing else, let us make him in our image and after our likeness.

And when God made man in His own image, whatever sin has done and however died, the human heart now may be through sin, potentially lying there is all the wisdom and all the beauty that God put in all in his creation, and He compressed it into the human heart. How wonderful is the human heart. Who has a right to preeminence there? Who has a right to sit there in relaxed majesty and rule the kingdom of man so? None other but He who was born of the Virgin Mary and be crucified under Pontius Pilate and to rise again from the dead the third day, to take His seat at the right hand of the Majesty in the heavens, preeminent above all, preeminent in our hearts, the mysterious wonder of the heart. And He wants to move in there and become its King, its King.

I’m too democratic ever to wish we could have a king back. His Majesty is too big a mouthful for me. And if you are from Canada or England, don’t feel bad, please. I’m just an old American talking. And I understand of course about those things. And I know what you mean when you say, his majesty. You’re simply doing what custom requires, and you have as lofty a view of God as I have. But from my American tongue, his majesty doesn’t sound smooth, unless I’m talking about the One who by a life laid down and taken again, Who by the holy mystery of virgin birth, Who by the deeper mystery of incarnation, and Who by the awesome, dark mystery of death on a tree, could be raised to the high preeminence so that archangels would fall on their faces before Him. And could take our form and our manhood and our blood and flesh, or at least our humanity, to the right hand of God, and look down on all the vast universe. If you meant His Majesty, I would gladly bow with you until my knees were callous before that Majesty. That in all things, He might have the preeminence.

In all our thinking and feeling and willing, in all our thoughts and word indeed, in our home and business and work and money and service, and you think for a second that it’s easy for me to give the preeminence to Christ because I stand here in the pulpit, a bit elevated, a bit removed. It’s harder or just as hard for this old heart to give Jesus Christ preeminence as it is for the man who drives the truck that picks up the ashes in the alley.

Jesus Christ wants preeminence, and He wants it in homes and business and work. He wants it in your monetary affairs. And this, to this glorious project, this church is dedicated. I pray that God will let me die or will let me move, or some providential arrangement will take me out of here before this church ever, ever allows itself, ever there’s a member on the board, ever there’s a superintendent in the Sunday school or teacher in any class, ever there’s a young people’s president or a prayer band officer, ever there’s anybody that wants anything else except Jesus Christ to have the preeminence. When that time comes, we’re not only no longer an Alliance church, we’re not even a church. We’re not a church at all.

For a church is an assembly, met and gathered unto Christ. An assembly of redeemed people of all colors and classes, met unto Jesus Christ to worship Him. And to pray, and when need be, fast and hear God say, separate me Barnabas and Saul. That’s a church. And when this church becomes less than that, I don’t want to be its pastor. And in our service and in our worship, that Christ should be glorified. And in our all in all, in the service of the Lord’s Supper this morning, we trust our Lord Jesus shall be glorified. Don’t let’s stare at each other, please, nor let’s wonder who that is two seats in front. But let’s, if not with closed eyes, at least with reverent hearts, think on the Lamb of God. Think on Jesus as we take of the body and the bread, the body and the blood, the blood of our Savior.

Now, Lord, Thou grant that this whole service today, everything, might reflect the honor, the honor, the Triune God, and that Jesus Christ might have high priority, top place in our thoughts and our feelings and in all are willing and doing and saying, for Jesus sake. Amen.