Category: Messages

Tozer Talks

“How to Think as a Christian“

“How to Think as a Christian”

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

March 17, 1957

Now, in the 16th chapter of the book of Matthew, the second of two talks on that, where Jesus began to show His disciples how He must go unto Jerusalem, and suffer many things of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and be raised again the third day. And Peter took Him and began to rebuke Him saying, be it far from thee Lord. You’ll notice the margin says, pity thyself, Lord. This shall not be unto thee. But He turned and said unto Peter, get thee behind me satan. Thou art an offence unto Me, for thou savorest not the things that be of God, but those that be of men.

My almost invariable method is to consult anywhere from five to a dozen or more translations in order that I may be sure I know just what the man said, or what Christ said, or the prophet said, or the apostle. And what Jesus said here was this, you’re not thinking like God, you’re thinking like a man. Last week, I talked about that and showed that human sympathies and affections can get in and make us think like human beings down on the earth instead of spiritual beings born from another world. And I closed with the question, how shall we escape the world’s influences, and think the thoughts of God, we Christians?

For you see, the world has all of the techniques of brainwashing. The world has all the techniques. They have literature, schools, the general-accepted mores of society; they have history and tradition. They have every kind of sort of communication now, the two new methods of communication, radio and television. And they have all this.

And so, the world creates a mentality, but it is not the mentality of heaven. It is the mentality of earth. And the work of the Holy Ghost is to create on earth a mentality of heaven in the hearts of people who are on earth, but whose interests are in heaven.

Now, how shall we escape the debauchery of our minds by the world? And how shall we gain the mind of Christ so that we shall think like God? Well, briefly, there are I said, three, I said four last week, but I want to give you a fourth one. The first is revelation, the Scriptures of truth. You see, there are two kinds of theology abroad. There are three kinds. There’s a theology of the world, which is simply paganism. That’s all, nothing else, just paganism. They may name the name Jesus or God or the Bible or have some Biblical words, but their theology is that of the world. It’s been influenced by Christianity, but not controlled by it. So that while it is not Greek or oriental, it’s pagan. Nevertheless, it’s American paganism and we must, then there’s a second, we must correct that, there’s a second. We’ll never be able to correct the world’s theology, but there is a second, and that is, the church’s theology.

And the church’s theology is a compound of badly, infrequently read and badly understood Scriptures, along with what has been called, chimney corner Scripture, and what Paul called old wives tales. And when you shake this all up together, you have a strange and corrupt mixture which is neither one nor the other. It is neither Christian nor totally heathen, but it’s a mixture in between.

Well, how are we going to get to the truth, the Word of God? This book that I hold in my hand is the Word of God. And we correct misconceptions and cleanse our minds and deliver ourselves from wrong thoughts about God and ourselves and the world and sin and the future by reading the Scriptures themselves. There never was a time when so many Bibles were printed. It’s the world’s best seller, everybody knows it. And I read just this week, this last week, that the librarian down at the main library down in the city said that the Bible was the most asked for and the most read book that they have down there. That is true and that’s good. But it’s not good enough. In going to the Scriptures, we are not to go to them to criticize them nor to bring anything to them, but to find out what they teach about all these things, and what they teach about God and Christ and creation and man’s relation to Himself, and man’s relation to God and man’s relation to the future. And all of these things that we must know, we’ll have to go to the Bible to find it out.

There is a sentence used by, I think the Baptists, which ought to be true of everybody, that it is the, what do they call it, the source book of faith and practice, the only alone source of faith and practice. What we are to believe and how we are to live is given to us by revelation. And the Spirit breathes upon the Word and brings the Truth to sight. And we must go to the Scriptures themselves, the Word of God and read the Word of God.

How much Bible reading do we do? That’s an important question. Because I well know how much newspaper reading we do. I well know how much reading is done of other things. And remember, whether you know it or not, if you do not constantly correct your thinking and purify your mentality by the Word of God, you will be thinking like a man and not like God just as sure as you live, and nothing will change it but that. There’s revelation. That’s first.

Then there’s inspiration. And what do we mean by inspiration? We mean the Spirit’s impulses within the mind to correct any wild notions that we might have. Job talked about the wild ass’ colt, the untamed wild creature given over to its impulses and whimsies, that puts its nostrils in the air and snorts and bays and races across the fields untamed and uncorrected. And so with the impulses of the human heart, even Christian impulses, unless we have what the old men used to say, the sweet influences of the Holy Spirit, you know, when we came under the domination of the imagination-less, inspiration-less, beauty-less culture, we got afraid to talk about the influences of Spirit because they said while the Spirit is not a thing, the Spirit is a person.

Well, of course we know it’s a person. We can quote the creed’s. We know what the Bible says about it. We know the Holy Spirit is a person and not an it, though even the King James version uses it once or twice. But the Holy Spirit is the third person of the Trinity. But, shall we say, that because He’s a person, He can’t have influence? They talked about the influences of the Spirit. And they believed that there was a divine inspiration that came on men, and came through the Scriptures and by means of the Scriptures. But that it put within the hearts of Christian men, impulses to righteousness, the influences of the Spirit, they called it. We will rule that all out. Nobody will talk about that now. But that’s one of the things we ought or bring back into the church again, and, and dust it off, and polish it up, and make it mean what it used to mean, the inspiration of the Holy Spirit in the heart to correct the wild notions that we have; the impulsive, Adamic notions and ideas, and bring them into line with revelation.

Then there is a third word and that is illumination. It’s not quite the same as inspiration, for inspiration has to do with impulse and influence, while illumination has to do with Divine Light that falls upon the Scriptures. The Spirit breathes upon the Word and brings the Truth to sight. And it was our father’s belief that the word of God could not be understood unless the Spirit breathed upon it. The Methodist believed that. The early Baptists believed that. The Salvation Army believed it, and the Lutherans used to teach it. And it was true taught in the Presbyterians. All Protestantism once believed it, that it took an illumination of the Holy Ghost to make us see Truth. And the German said, the heart is always the best theologian, always better than the head, because it’s there the illumination falls.

So, illumination is the third word. And we must have the illumination of the Spirit on the Scriptures. Saw through the Word of God. Saw through it and read it through, and yet never have any illumination on it. It’s like walking in the night. But when we have the illumination of the Spirit, breathing on us, then we know we know. And it saves us from the darkness of reason, for reason is dark, don’t forget it. In the world they tell us, and this is part of the world error; they say reason is a lamp. And there is a sense in which that is true. Reason is a lamp.

When I was a boy, I went fishing with an old fellow named Billy Q as I recall, an old man. And we fished along a creek, or run, we called them there. It was very dark, very dark. We had no lights of course, of any sort, and it was very dark. But he had a fire going. And I said, Billy, how are we going to get home? How are we going to get out of here. We were really in the bushes. And he smiled in front of the fire there. He was an old woodsmen and an old fisherman and he knew. So, he picked up a firebrand. And you know, a burning firebrand gives off very, very little light. But Billy knew what to do with it, so he just began to swing it. And swinging it around his head, he walked ahead of me. And as he swung it around his head, the flame went out, but the glow came on, and Billy enlightened our pathway. Illumination took us clear up the path and back onto the road so we knew where we were out of the bushes. He did it by swinging around this brand that glowed by the wind, in the wind.

Now, that is one kind of illumination. But there’s a better kind, and you know what it is. We have now the electrical lights, various sorts of electric lights. And we have artificial lights which aren’t really artificial. They’re actually, they go back to the sun, but they’re caught and funneled in another way and we call them artificial. And that kind of illumination is infinitely better than swinging a firebrand round your head.

Well, now about all the light that you and I can have by nature is the light of the firebrand we swing around our head. But there is a better light than that, and it is the illumination. Reason is a firebrand, and it’s better to have it than not to have it. And if we do have it, it’ll help us to walk right and stay out of jail and look after our families and be decent. Reason will do that. And we can by vigorously swinging a little stick we call reason. We can get enough light to walk right, but we can’t get enough to save us from the torch itself. We can’t get enough to save us from the world itself. It takes revelation plus illumination that our minds might be illuminated by that which is above reason. If you think that Paul ever fell on his knees before reason, and Paul was Greek-taught, don’t forget it. Paul knew the Greek and was taught by the Greeks under the Greek philosophers and knew about them and could quote them. And yet, if you think that Paul was on his knees before reason, read 1 Corinthians 1 and 2. That’s all you have to do. Just read 1 Corinthians 1 and 2, and you’ll know better from that time on. For He said, where’s the wise man? Where’s the scribe? Where is the disputer of this world and the reasoners, that God made them all foolish, and He has by the Holy Ghost through the gospel given us the real light. And then I mentioned a fourth, and that is the presence of the Holy Spirit Himself to create the mind of Christ in us.

But I want to issue a little warning right here, and it is that no single act of grace will do for us alone, and we with finality, what we want. I picked up a hymnal here, my old 108-year-old hymnal. I go to it sometimes as a source of inspiration. Here was a man of God and they used to sing this in the Methodist Church and other churches. Jesus, plant the root in me; all the mind that was in Thee. Settled peace I then shall find, for Jesus is a quiet mind. Anger no more shall feel, always even, always still. Meekly on my God recline, Jesus is a gentle mind. I shall nothing know besides Jesus and Him crucified. Perfectly to Him be joined, Jesus is a loving mind, I shall triumph evermore, gratefully my God adore. God so good, so true, so kind; Jesus is a thankful mind. Lowly, loving, meek and pure, I shall to the end endure. Be no more to sin inclined, Jesus is a constant mind. I shall fully be restored to the image of my Lord, witnessing to all mankind, Jesus is a perfect mind.

Now they used to long for that, and when a young preacher came to be ordained, they said, have you succeeded in entering into the experience of this perfect mind, perfect love? And he said, no sir, I haven’t yet. And they said, are you seeking? And if he could say, yes sir, vigorously; earnestly seeking they would ordain him. They wanted to know that he either had had some kind of an experience or was earnestly seeking.

Well now, I want to warn that no single act of grace, and it’s never meant to teach it, no single act of grace will do this alone. The mightiest, overwhelming anointing of the Holy Ghost that ever came on a man, will not do this work finally and alone. We can undo the work of God and do it in our own hearts. God wants to baptize us with a spiritual mind and He will do it, but it requires that we live by the Word, that we study the Word, that we fill our minds with the Word, that we look to Him every moment for illumination.

And then there comes our fifth word, cultivation. There is something for us to do. We must cultivate the Spirit’s mind, the mind of Christ. Let this mind be in you, said the man of God. Bent is really what He meant rather than intellect. But let this mind be in you. We’ve got to cultivate. It’s a great mistake to think that we can get converted and then because we have it in Christ, we have everything and from there on we can give little attention to it. It’s a great mistake to think that if we go on and are filled with the Spirit of God, that’s the end of it, and that there’s nothing nowhere from there.

My brethren, when Jesus was filled with the Holy Spirit, anointed is the word that was used by Peter, anointed with the Holy Spirit. Do you know the next thing He did? What was it? He was led of the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted of the devil. That was the next thing. So, don’t think for a second that the anointing of the Holy Ghost in any degree or measure that God may give or may have given it to you is sufficient. There must be cultivation. And by steeping our minds in the wrong things, we can undo the work of God in making the mind of Christ.

I wonder if I could dig up kind of a grotesque illustration. Suppose that there is a very fine interior decorator. He has consulted the finest, most artistic minds that he can could locate, and he is busy decorating a room. And he has his various colored paints there, and he’s doing it slowly. And this room is evidently going to be a beautiful room, beautifully designed and beautifully done. And then quitting time comes and he goes home and in the middle of the night, some scoundrelly little vandal-ish boys come in and to have themselves a good time, and I wouldn’t have been above it when I was a kid. They pick up brushes and go to work, and undo everything up to that moment. And it’s repeated the next night and the next night. That’s exactly what you and I can do my brother. The mighty Holy Ghost can bring a thankful mind, a noble mind, a pure mind, and begin to teach us to think the thoughts of God. And we can walk right out and fall into the hands of influences like bad boys that will paint weird pictures and make our ugly faces all over the walls of our hearts. And instead of the walls of Zion, standing in their beauty, they will be defaced by the mischief of the devil.

So, you and I have to cultivate the mind of Christ. You cannot without the Scriptures have the mind of Christ, and you cannot know the Scriptures without the illumination and inspiration of the Holy Ghost. But even these will not keep your mind heavenly unless you cultivate a heavenly mind, by prayer, by meditation, by dreaming over the Scriptures, by deliberately thinking God’s thoughts about things, and by deliberately eliminating the influences that make your mind either impure or worldly.

I sometimes don’t care whether I’m with some certain Christians or not. They don’t do me any good and I can’t do them much good. For everything from the time, you get with them until you leave is the world. It’s the world, it’s a nice part of the world, but it’s the world nevertheless. But there are some thank God that when you talk to them, the conversation swings around as a needle in the compass swings around to the north magnetic pole. And pretty soon, you’re talking about wonderful things. They that loved the Lord met and talked often one with another. And the Lord heard it and wrote it down in a book. And they shall be mine, saith God in that day.

We can be too jocular. We can be too worldly. We can know too many things, and we can be interested in too many things, and thus scatter our mind. Jesus talked about a single eye, and Paul said, this one thing I do. So there must be a unifying of the forces of our minds and a settling of our minds on the Lord Jesus Christ. And then we’ll think like Jesus. Would you say that narrows our minds, narrows them terribly? Oh, my friends, just what little experience in a small, imperfect way that my own heart has had, I want to tell you that it doesn’t narrow them at all, but it releases them into a vast world of freedom, our minds I mean, into a vast world of freedom that we never knew before.

He is not a caged-bird, who looks heavenward and moves toward God. He’s released. He’s in the cage who thinks as man thinks. Peter was in a cage. His mind was in a prison when he said, Lord, that isn’t the way we do it here. Don’t go get yourself killed. You don’t need to. Pity yourself, Lord. He was in a cage, and it was the Lord who was free when He turned on him and said, you’re thinking like a man instead of like God. That’s not good grammar, but that’s the way we say it now. We’re thinking as a man thinks instead of as God thinks.

Now, my brethren, may we not these days, don’t go home from church this morning, or wherever you’re going, and by remembering the latest Reader’s Digest quip, or the funny thing somebody said, or some worldly thing, dissipate the influences of the Holy Ghost. But, rather go and live in line with them. And then you move upward into freedom. And it’s the centered mind that is the free mind. It is the scattered mind that is an imprisoned mind. And the mind of the world is imprisoned, but the mind of the Christian is released upward into God, upward into infinitude, upward into the vast sea of being we call the Godhead.

So, that is how we escape the evil influences of the world and get a mind like Christ: revelation, inspiration, illumination, the indwelling Holy Ghost, and cultivation.

I hope you’ll be back tonight. There will be a lot more here. If things go as they have been, I think they will. Some are coming that I know from out of town. And I want to talk tonight and give the 10th in a series which I’ve been following Sunday nights and we’ll have one of those gracious, wonderful song services. I don’t ever hear anything like it anyplace to go. And I could come and sit and listen and join in with my cracked baritone and when time comes to preach, I could go home and say, well, I’ve been to church. So you come tonight. Breathe deep before you get here. Get your lungs ready. We’re going to have a great evening by the grace of God. All right.

Tags Christian, Illumination, Jesus Christ, Peter, Revelation, Satan, Tozer

Messages

Tozer Talks

“Peter and the Lord“

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“Peter and the Lord”

Author and Pastor A.W. Tozer

March 10, 1957

In the 16th chapter of Matthew’s gospel, the Gospel as written by Matthew under the inspiration of the Spirit, beginning with verse 13. When Jesus came into the coast of Caesarea Philippi, He asked His disciples, saying, whom do men say that I the Son of Man am? And they said, some say that Thou art John the Baptist, some Elias, others, Jeremias or one of the prophets. He saith unto them, but whom say ye that I am? Simon Peter answered and said, Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God. Jesus answered and said unto him, Blessed art thou Simon Barjona, for flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but My Father which is in heaven. And I say also unto thee that thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. And I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven. And whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatsoever thou shall loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven. And charged He that his disciples that they should tell no man that he was Jesus the Christ. From that time forth, began Jesus to show unto His disciples how He must go up unto Jerusalem and suffer many things of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed and be raised again the third day. Then Peter took Him and began to rebuke Him saying, be it far from thee Lord. This shall not be unto thee. But Jesus turned and said unto Peter, get thee behind me, satan. Thou art an offense unto me for thou savoreth not the things that be of God, but those that be of men.

Now, I want you to notice the illogic that is here. First, Jesus blesses Peter because Peter is illuminated and has a testimony that our Lord approves. And then following immediately upon that, Jesus, because there’s more light there, gives still more light and says, I must go up and suffer and be killed and rise again. And the same Peter, whose name had been changed and who was said to be the rock, and thou art Peter, and the same Peter that had had the words blessed art thou for the Father has revealed this to thee, takes Jesus aside. Took Him I assume, took Him aside and rebuked Him and said, be this far from thee Lord. This shall not be unto thee. What you’ve said, isn’t so. It can’t happen to you. But He turned and said under Peter, get thee behind me satan. The same one that He had said, blessed art thou, Simon Barjona. Get thee behind Me satan. Thou art a stumbling block to me, for thou savorest not the things that be of God, but those that be of men.

Now, if these two stories, or the two situations that are revealed here, had been backwards to each other, I could have understood it. In verse 21-22, and three where Jesus says that He has to be crucified, and Peter rebukes him for it, and Peter says, get behind Me, Satan, if that had come earlier. And then the great confession had come later, I’d have done what everybody is forced to do. I’d have concluded that there had been a conversion take place in between. But it was a backward conversion. Jesus had predicted that He should be taken and arrested and crucified, and finally He should rise again from the dead. And Peter had protested this. And Christ then rebuked Peter. Now that’s the situation. And the fact that Peter had been illuminated by the Heavenly Father, according to Jesus own words previously, that he had faith in Christ Jesus and nobody else had, and that he was willing to give that as a testimony. This, though it brought the approval of the Savior, and the pronouncement of blessing upon Peters head, it didn’t guarantee Peter against mistakes.

Now, with that thought as a background, I want to go on and point to you simply, that human sympathy can impair spiritual judgment. Peter loved the Lord Jesus. And when Jesus said, I’m going up to Jerusalem now; and you’re thinking of me as the great Jesus that can heal the sick and raise the dead and still the waves and do wonders. But I’m going up to Jerusalem and in a measure, I’m going to disappoint you. I am going to be taken by the Gentiles. And at the hands of the elders and chief priests and scribes, I’m going to be killed. And then He added, I’ll rise again the third day.

Now, if it had been today, they’d have suggested a vacation to our Lord. They’d have said, now the pressure is too heavy, Master. And we love you and we believe in you, but the pressure is too heavy. Evidently, you’re not in a very good mental state. And therefore, we suggest, we will pay your way to Florida. And we will give you a month just to loll around in the sun. But there was nothing wrong with our Lord’s mind. Nothing at all, no exhaustion here, no need of a vacation. He rested when he needed to and told them to do the same. But that wasn’t the trouble here. The trouble was, as He said to Peter, thou savorist not the things that be of God, but the things that be of man. Peter’s mistake was natural enough, and that was just why it was a mistake. It was a natural conclusion.

And Jesus said, you think not, though I’ve looked up about a dozen versions and read about a dozen versions, the most scholarly and accurate, to see what He really said, and they vary. And what Jesus said seemed to be about this. He said, your point of view is earthly instead of heavenly. Your viewpoint is man’s and not God’s. You’re thinking like man, instead of thinking like God. That’s what he said, in effect, thou savorist not is rather old English and we don’t say that anymore. You don’t walk up to a man and say thou savorist wrong. You go up to him and say, I think you’ve got a wrong opinion. It’s just a different way of talking. But that’s what Peter said. And it was Peter’s sympathy. That’s what Jesus said, and He said it because Peter’s sympathy had led him to deny truth, rebuke the Lord and called down self-pity on the Savior. The margin says, pity thyself, Lord. Another version says, why, God have mercy on you Master. This can’t happen to you.

Now, human sympathy then can impair spiritual judgment. Now, we can hardly exaggerate the injurious effect of the fall. When the devil began to deny the fall, about the time of higher criticism and what we now call modernism; when he began to deny the fall and say that humanity has not fallen from a better place, but climbed up to its present position from a worse one. One of the major tenets, one of the keys to unlock all Christian understanding was taken away from us. But we can hardly exaggerate the injurious effects of the fall. And we are made to see, by the words of our Lord and by the Bible generally, that even our good is bad. Or if that’s too strong to say that even our good is bad, then we may say that if it is not bad, it is at least, it at least may blind us and mislead us.

Now, it’s pretty hard to walk up to Peter and say, Peter, your human sympathy is bad. And yet our Lord seemed to do it, for He said, you’re satan; that’s satan talking through you. And this viewpoint of yours, that I’m to be protected and not allowed to suffer, it’s not right. It’s a human thing and a fallen thing, and it’s not God thinking in you. It’s you thinking yourself, or the devil thinking through you. Get behind me satan. So that human affection, one of the most beautiful and tender things left in the world, yet places us on the other side from God, for that’s exactly what happened here. Peter was placed on the other side from God because his affection for the Lord Jesus forbade that Jesus should go and suffer, and said, God, have mercy on you. Don’t you pity yourself Master? Don’t you see, this can’t be. We won’t allow this. And his human sympathies were talking, and his affection was eloquent. And it was this beautiful thing as we say. Human sympathy untouched by Divine Love that placed Peter over on the other side, even though I hesitate to say it, on the side of the devil temporarily and away from Jesus Christ.

Now, the human reason is fallen. And being fallen, it’s not trustworthy. It is like a false compass that is just a little bit off, not much, but enough off so that if a ship or a plane trusts it, there’ll be tragedy and break. It is like a watch that varies, first running ahead and then falling behind. And it may do for a farmer maybe who doesn’t care whether it’s seven or nine to him. It doesn’t make too much difference, but to someone who depends upon a watch, such as a railroad man, it can mean wreck and death. If it’s a varying watch, the human reason is like a colorblind eye in traffic that doesn’t know when the lights have changed.

Now, that’s human reason. And that’s what Jesus meant when he said, Thou thinkest as man thinkest and that’s why you’re so mistaken. And because the human reason is fallen, the religious judgments are warped. They’re warped by passion and by fear and by desire and by prejudice and by pride, all these warped human judgments, just as a watch may have something wrong with it, and its hands may thus be deceiving the owner. Or, just as a compass may deceive the sailor, so human judgments are deceiving to the human who has to trust them, because they’re twisted by the magnetic attraction of passion. They are driven by the dynamic force of fear, desire and prejudice and pride and many other things, twist our judgments. And yet, we are dependent upon our religious judgments to a great degree, because we’re bound to approve and disapprove every day, we’re alive. The Bible says, test the spirits and see whether they be of God.

And the Bible also says, prove all things and hold fast that which is good. And the Bible says, by your fruits, you shall know them. And it says that in one place where it’s possible to be where our senses are sharpened, and our inner life able to tell what is good and what is bad. Hebrews and Paul talks about that now, yet be even though we have a warped, religious judgment, and even though some of those things that are best to us, our sympathies and our affections, will help to warp our judgments. Yet we are forced to use those judgments I say and make decisions that involve life and death and heaven and hell. A carpenter or a farmer or a coal miner or a man who deals in great rough chunks of things, a little mistake might not be so harmful to him, but let us surgeon make a mistake. Let a surgeon make a mistake and how tragic it is. Let a pilot in the air there make a serious mistake, and how tragic it may be and sometimes is for everybody on board.

And you and I are compelled to make decisions, not great chunks of decisions that don’t matter; don’t matter whether it’s seven or nine o’clock, whether we’re on this latitude or longitude or another one or what, but that involves life and death and heaven and hell and peace, a woe forever. And yet, the Lord said to this man, Peter, your thoughts are not God’s thoughts, but the thoughts of man and you think like a worldling.

Now my brethren, up to now it might be discouraging, but I have this to tell you, that the Bible, the Christian dynamic, engages to redeem and save the human mind. The Christian dynamic engages to purify the emotions and to deliver us from the things that warp our judgment: fear and hate and prejudice and pride in these things, and warp our judgment. And the Christian message and the dynamic engage to save us from the carnal human sympathies and from inordinate, carnal affections.

Do you want me to give you an example of what a carnal, human sympathy will do? Here is a pastor, and while he may be himself a saved man and believe in the new birth and the gospel, his human sympathies, such as Peter showed here, often lead him to do, to say this. He goes to visit a man who has been and is known to be a sinful man, a very sinful man. And he’s always been sinful and he’s never lived any other kind of life but a sinful life. And they tell him at the door of the hospital room, the nurse whispers this man has only a few hours. And he checks with the doctor, yes, he has only a few hours. And the weeping wife outside trying to keep back her tears and says, John’s gone in only a few hours. And then she says, but Pastor, I want to ask you one thing. He’s a very sensitive man. He has been all his life, easily hurt, and he’s an affectionate, warm-hearted man and his ideas of religion have all been very broad, and please don’t talk to him about Jesus. Please don’t talk to him about the Savior at all. Because if you do, you will stir him up and he may even have fewer hours to be with us. So when you go in, console him and comfort him.

Well, this pastor stands there in the door, looking at the sad, eager face of the wife, and then looking in at the set face of his old sinner friend whom he knew, and he’s caught in the middle. Is he going to think like God, or is he going to think like a man? Is he going to have divine love or human sympathy? Is it going to be God’s way or man’s; but he’s too weak. He has his children think of, a nice job, and he’s too weak. So, he allows sympathy to get the better of him.

So, he goes in and chats a bit about the weather and he saw a robin this morning, and you’ll be ought of here soon, John. You’ll be back on the golf links and I’ll see you again. He knows he’s lying. And so, after a little perfunctory prayer in which nothing is mentioned about sin or repentance, or the new birth, or hell or death, he goes. He’s made his pastoral call. Three days later, he has the funeral. Again, human sympathy comes and dictates, and human affection says you don’t dare tell the truth about this man. So, he gets up and reminds the public what an outstanding citizen John was. And the shadow falls over everything. The coffin is screwed shut. The man is put down in the grave to await the judgment of the wicked dead. And there has been a falsification of divine truths. Human sympathy has conquered over God’s love. And human affection and pity have taken the place of the tender mercies of the Holy Ghost. Truth dictated that he go in and say to the man, friend, please don’t feel bad, but I must tell you that you’ve been a sinner and except you be born again, you shall surely perish. You may not have long and I’m here as your best friend you ever had. You don’t know it, but I am the best friend you ever had, because I’m telling you, you don’t dare face judgment the way you are. That would be the kindest thing, but it wouldn’t be the most sympathetic thing. It would be the truest thing, but it wouldn’t be the most affectionate thing. And that happens all the time. Afraid to talk to them when they’re dying, for it will hurt their feelings and then preach them into heaven after they’re in hell.

Jesus turned on his old friend Peter and said, and I can hear sadness in that voice, but I can also hear sharpness there. He said, Peter, satan has taken control of your thinking. Get behind me. You are an offense unto me. That is, you’re stumbling block in my road. Get behind me. He was trying to get Jesus to pity himself and miss Calvary.

I think there has not been a time since I’ve been a preacher and been connected with the Missionary Alliance, which has been most of my all, of my adult life that I ever felt this until the Maxeys. Somehow or other I fell in love with those, Shirley and Ed and their lovely children. And they seem, as my wife and I often say, like our children and grandchildren. And for once, human sympathy rose up in me. And I felt like saying, you can’t take these darlings, to that awful Valley. You can’t, this refined, gracious, smiling little woman, you can take her in there Ed. I didn’t say it. But my human sympathies were at war with my, the divine love in my heart. For if ever there was a rose in a dirty junk heap, it is to send the Maxey’s into the Baliem Valley. Human sympathy would have said, no.

And our Lord would have said, get thee behind me. This isn’t the way my church is run. My church isn’t run on human sympathies. My church is run on sacrifice and giving up and cross-carrying and dying, and it means martyrdom or death or cannibalism. My church is run that way, not run by human sympathy. Well, thank God, the Christian dynamic, the power of God in the human life, I say, engages us to deliver us from carnal human sympathies which may be very dangerous. And other cases of sympathies get in the way.

A couple pray and they believe God and finally, years go by and there’s no children, at last, thank God, they’ve got a little girl. Well, now she’s, their delight. And they offer her to the Lord in dedication and they pray over her, and their faces shine as they tell how God answered their prayer and when they had given up hope of ever having children, had this lovely girl. Now, she’s 20 years old and she’s at a missionary convention somewhere. And she’s a Christian and she hears the call and she goes forward with the rest and says I am putting myself in the hands of God. I’ll go anyplace. And she comes home, delighted to tell her parents, I am going to be a missionary.

And that beautiful thing, human love rises and strikes and says we brought you up, we’ve educated you, we’ve prayed over you. You can’t treat us like this. And many such a young woman or man, young man has been beaten down and defeated and forced to take a path God never called him to take, and the foreign field lost a missionary because human sympathy said, no, you can’t go and waste your culture and your education and your intelligence somewhere in some hole in a foreign land among half naked pagans. Sympathy, won over consecration, and human affection over divine love. That’s happening all the time.

And so, the carnal mind is present. It’s present even after we say, thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God. And even after Christ repeats, blessed art thou, you’re my child. The Father has revealed who I am in your mind. Even after that, the carnal mind is present, and the world influences, and it has its educational media, tradition, and history and society; in schools and literature and all the rest. And these capture and charm even Christian minds. And so, we say, we’re Christians, but we think like men, we’re going to heaven, but we’re thinking like the earth. We say God has our heart, but our mentality is a carnal thing. How shall we then escape the world influences?

It would be time for another sermon, and I wonder, if right here, I shouldn’t break off, and next week, give you a four-point sermon on how we can escape the carnal mind and the earth and the world’s thinking and think like Christians. I’ve got a little four-point conclusion here. But I think I’m going to hold it. It’s five minutes to twelve and I’ve talked about long enough.

But I’ll conclude anyhow by saying this. That we don’t dare trust our human sympathies, and we don’t dare trust our human affections. And yet, we can’t eliminate our human affection. How can you? Already I’ve loved that little boy that I held in my arms this morning. I’ve never seen him before, but already, he grinned at me with that broad, toothless grin. Already I love him. How can you keep from it? What can you do? Is it wrong to love your babies? Is it wrong for me to grin every time I think of my little grandson Paul? No.

Human sympathy is a valid thing. Human affection is a valid thing. But when we project it upward into the spiritual realm and try to understand the strange, self-contradictory mystery of a cross, by means of it, we always fail. And that’s what’s the matter with liberalism and modernism and half of these so-called churches that have no life in them. They have glorified the tender virtues, sympathy and kindness and friendship and tolerance. They’ve glorified the human virtues, and they’ve pushed them upward into the kingdom of God, or tried to do it. And their religion is simply a composite of human virtues.

My brethren, salvation is not a human thing, though it was done for human beings. It’s a divine thing. And My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are My ways your ways said God. And when we try to understand Christianity with our human heads and evaluated it with our human sympathies, we’ll miss it every time. Now thinkest not as God thinkest. Thou thinkest as man thinkest. Get behind me.

Now, those are pretty stern words. And I’m sure, Christ would have been called unChristlike for doing it. But he did it and boldly put Peter behind him. In one version says He turned His back on Peter it’s told, dramatically saying, get out, I can’t listen to that kind of talk. And just three to four verses above, He’d said, blessed art thou. No, my friend, the fact that you’ve been converted, won’t save you from thinking like a worldling unless you do something about it; unless you let God save you from it.

Next week, I want to talk about four escapes: revelation, inspiration, illumination and the power of the Holy Ghost. That’ll be next Sunday morning’s sermon. In the meantime, let us thank God we don’t have to be carnal men and think like carnal men. That God has given us His book and He’s given us His Spirit. And if we dare to be cross-caring Christians, we can get deliverance from the sentimentality of the world and rise into the love of God and see clearly. Amen.

Tags Jesus Christ, Peter, Satan, Tozer

Messages

Tozer Talks

“The Consequences of the Resurrection“

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“The Consequences of the Resurrection”

Author and Pastor A.W. Tozer

April 5, 1959

A great, solid, hard fact that won’t erode nor soften nor chip away, but a great, solid fact of history, something took place. The God-Man rose after His Passion. He showed Himself alive, said Luke. He showed Himself alive after His Passion by many infallible proofs. These infallible proofs have satisfied the simple people, the plain people, scholars, geniuses, great men, and men of all nations since that time, so far as I’ve heard about them. The Son of Man is risen again.

Now, this event doesn’t come and go. It remains. We only celebrate it. But this event has consequences. And because of this event, this great historic event, things can never be the same. Never can they be the same. They cannot be the same in heaven, for the everlasting doors opened wide to receive Him and He sat down beside the Father, the Majesty in the heavens. And the earth can never be the same, because He who was God came, stayed awhile, did His world-shaking work and went again, and left the earth different from what He found it.

And Israel can never be the same. Israel scattered all over the world. Something happened that day. Something happened that morning as the sun was rising. And for Israel, it changed things, it confirmed things. It made possible for God to fulfill the Scriptures which the holy prophets did write.

And because of this event, the gentile world will never be the same. Somebody else now is in authority. Somebody owns the nations of the world all around from pole to pole, all because He rose and man’s responsibility now is confirmed. It’s the same, no arguments anymore, nothing unsettled or uncertain. He did come. He did live. He did die. He did rise and there are consequences. And because of this great fact, the people called Christians stand by themselves. They stand by themselves unique among men. They stand by themselves, reconciled, forgiven, accepted before God in the Beloved, related to God as sons.

I don’t think many Christians stop to meditate on this, but let us this morning; that because of this great historic fact, one consequence is that the people called Christians are now related to God as sons in a way they couldn’t be before. And these sons of God are commissioned, the Christian because of that open grave, because of that triumphant ascension. The Christian is a commissioned man. He is not his own. He is one whose life now is completely committed.

An Englishman said on one occasion, a churlish, impatient Englishman, when the claims of religion was being pressed upon him, he said, things have come to a pity pass when we allow religion to interfere with our daily living. I think he was an ignorant man, and as such, God will have mercy on him. But my friends, the Christians, because Christ rose from the grave, the Christians are those who are interfered with. The cross of Christ slices, slices into the life of every Christian.

Every man who believes on Jesus Christ savingly, the cross of Christ slices into his life like a spear into the side of Jesus. There’s interference there all right, sharp contradiction. The old life changes and things aren’t as they were. The empty grave made a difference. It’s not simply something that we talk about as we talk about Abraham Lincoln’s assassination or some other lovely or terrible or wonderful scene in history. But this has consequences on every human being that breathes the breath of life today, and particularly upon the church. The church is commissioned and the church is empowered. Let’s not forget it.

You have seen the Alliance Witness for this issue, if you have not, they can be picked up out there in the lobby. But if you have seen it, perhaps you took time to read the great sermon by the Methodist preacher, Daniel Steele on the authority of the believer, the rights of the Christian, what rights we have. The signet seal of God is given to the Christian. That Christian goes forth in complete authority carrying more authority before this world than our ambassadors carry when they go to foreign capitals to represent our land. Carrying more authority than our soldiers carry. Carrying more than any man, for the Christian has the authority of God, authorized completely and empowered and obligated beyond other men.

Although I don’t like ever to talk when I’m preparing a sermon and I’m praying and thinking it through and setting down a word here or there that I want to remember. I rarely use the word obligation or obligated or duty or dutiful. I rarely use those words. Perhaps it was my early upbringing as a Christian. I was taught in those early days that I did not serve God by duty or obligation. I serve God out of the sheer joy of serving Him.

Yet I know there’s another side to it. And I know that some of the old Puritan writers made a very strong and noble case for our obligation to God. But service that is done as an obligation is not much of a service. That is why I never in 30 years have I appealed to you to be loyal. Never in 30 years, have I said, be loyal to your fellowship, be loyal to your church. Never, I trust, can it be found anywhere in print or on tape or can it be remembered that I ever said it? If I did, it might have been a weak moment, or when I meant it in a certain context. But for the most, I have never said be loyal, be loyal, now you’ve got a duty to perform. I think that’s the purest, lowest approach ever to take toward the work of God. I have never served God because I felt I had an obligation. I have served God because I felt it was one of the highest privileges accorded to mortal man. I have served God because I feel that I have a privilege higher than the very angels above.

And it’s not an obligation or a duty, something that I do, because the pressure is on me and I cannot help it. Rather, it is something that I do joyfully out of my love for Christ, I do not say that there are not duties and obligations. But I say that that’s not the highest motivation behind the service of God. Rather, we are permitted. We are privileged, we are allowed of God to share with Him.

A little farm boy, when he gets big enough to be able to toddle and keep from falling over the furrows, when he goes out with his daddy into the field, his smiling, good-natured father will allow him to do some little thing. And he considers that the highest privilege. No farmer needs to say to a five-year-old boy, Junior, I will let you do this. Why, anything that he can do, he’s delighted to do. Or the little girl in the kitchen four years old, so eager, so eager to do something that Momma’s doing. You don’t have to say, now, it’s your obligation as my daughter to do this. Why, she’ll break dishes for you joyfully. She’ll drop them joyfully for you, happily, and spoil the dough gladly, just for the joy of doing it because Mama does it. And so I follow along beside my Savior. And I know I’ve dropped many a dish. I know that I’ve spoiled many a bit of dough and I know that I failed God. But I also know that He smiles because He knows why I did it. I did it because I wanted to be along with Him, the privilege of it.

Now, that great event in the opening verses of this chapter, there were Mary and the other Mary. And there was the great earthquake. And there was the angel of the Lord that descended from heaven and rolled back the stone from the door. And his countenance was like lightning and his raiment white as snow. And for fear of him, the keepers did shake and became as dead men. There’s the great fact. And the disciples now get a change of direction. These women represented all the rest of the disciples, and they represent you and me today. And it says in verse one, they came to see the sepulcher. And these women, their direction was toward the sepulcher. Notice it. They were directed toward the sepulcher. But verse eight said, they departed quickly from the sepulcher with fear and great joy, and did run to bring the disciple’s word.

Now, this set the direction for the church and for all the disciples. It’s away from the sepulcher. You know, what is that poem that says that our hearts, like muffled drums, are beating funeral marches to the grave. I’ve often wondered how, when congregations met and sang, we are going down the valley one by one with our faces toward the setting of the sun. Down the valley where the mournful cypress grows where the stream of death in silence onward flows. I wondered how they could look at each other without breaking out laughing, because we’re not going down any valley, and we’re certainly not going down a valley where there’s cypress trees that are hanging and mournful aspens. We are risen. They departed quickly from the sepulcher. With fear and great joy they did run. And though later they went by the natural way of death, they went into no valley. They went where their Lord went.

So, I couldn’t possibly sing that without breaking into a grin. The idea that the Church of Christ, 1900 years after the angel had rolled back the stone contemptuously and sat on it. The idea that we can sing, we’re going down the valley, one by one, with our faces toward the setting of the sun. No. The man who wrote that was still living back in the gospels, or back in the Old Testament, for the time being. I don’t know who he was, and don’t remember, don’t intend to bother looking it up. Because if he’s with his Lord, he’s with his Lord. But I don’t know why he left us that legacy, because the Christian direction is not toward the grave. The Christian direction is away from the grave.

And I say that not only did these women, when they ran, set the direction, but they set the mood. It said they had fear and great joy. Their fear wasn’t the eating, gnawing fear. It wasn’t anxiety and apprehension. It was another kind of fear. It was the joyous fear that men feel in the presence of supernatural beings and the holy powers. It was delicious, a delightful fear; fear and great joy. And this also set the example, because they did run to bring the word.

Verse nine says, as they went, Jesus met them, and they could not see Him by looking in. They ran to the grave to look in. But as they went, Jesus met them. They couldn’t see Him in there for He wasn’t there. Why? Why? Because He had come out. But, as they went, He greeted them. Now, I want you to hear this. That as they went, He greeted them. On their way to the tomb, they didn’t see Him. But, on their way out, with their backs to the tomb, He greeted them.

Now, let’s break in right here with a discordant note. I didn’t put it here. The Holy Ghost wrote it here. It tells us this. It says that they were going to hold, some of the watch came into the city and showed unto the chief priests all of the things that were done. When they were assembled with the elders and they had taken counsel, they gave large money unto the soldiers, saying, see ye, His disciples came by night and stole Him away while we slept. And of course, that would put any soldier into immediate trouble with his superiors. Your word would be, why, we gave you the watch. You were to stay awake. Soldiers are shot for falling asleep on duty under certain circumstances. And those soldiers knew they would be in trouble. And they said, if we say, we fell asleep and these disciples stole away his body, we’ll be in trouble. And then they said, well, but if it comes to the Governor’s ear, we will persuade him and secure you. They wouldn’t have, and probably didn’t. But that’s what they said. So, they took the money and did as they were taught. And this saying is commonly reported among the Jews unto this day.

Now, why is that here? Why is that here in the midst between, lying between the open grave and the Great Commission; the fear and joy of the disciples; the happy racing away with the message; the the strong promise, I will be with you to the end of the world, lo, I’m with you always, go ye into all the world. All this radiant delight, right in the middle of it is this awful story of religious people who hoped to turn the clock back and buy and pay for testimony that was false in order to save their own hides and nip in the bud, this Jesus story.

Think of it my brethren. Think of the awful horror of this. Right in the presence of the resurrected Christ. Right there with the open grave, and right there with the shining angel and with the living person of Jesus, this awful thing occurs. Did they hope to turn back the wheel of God? Did they hope to put the man back in His grave again by saying He’d never come out? Did they hope to send Him back to death again, who had conquered death? They hoped to do it. They’re forgotten and their names are not known. But the name of Jesus has circled the globe. And if all the hymns that were written in praise of that One who came out that morning were in one book, nobody in this building could lift that book. Nobody, nobody, not two men could carry it out if all the hymns of the Greek and the Latin and the German and the English and all the rest. I tell you; they’re forgotten. And they’re anonymous, faceless men, hunting the grave they said they had stolen Jesus out of, but Christ lives.

Why is it there? I suppose it’s because we’re on the earth. It wouldn’t be there in heaven, and it won’t be there in heaven. And if this scene had taken place in heaven, it wouldn’t be there. But it took place on earth. And never forget this Christian, no matter how happy you may be this morning, and I hope you’re too happy to contain, but no matter how happy you may be, remember this, that there isn’t a garden without a serpent; that there isn’t a rosebush without a thorn; that there isn’t a city without a cemetery, don’t forget it; and that there isn’t a human being without a pain, then forget it. The world lies here all about us, but Christians are another breed of people all together. And even among Christians still down here, there’s thorns in our rose. And there’s likely to be trouble, even among the dear people of God, because there’s somebody here that won’t let us have all this joy to ourselves, they won’t. They won’t allow us to run joyfully in fear and wonder to tell the story of the resurrected Christ. They’ll trip us up somewhere, somewhere there’s a little conspirators group buying false testimony.

And it says here that they paid to have this told abroad, large money, it said, a bought and paid for lie. And here’s the tragedy, that for millions, this became history, and for millions, it is still history. And there are those today after 1900 years that still hear the echo of those words, “while we slept, his disciples stole him away.” And they don’t believe that Christ rose from the dead. They believe that His loving disciples laid him reverently and lovingly in Joseph’s new tomb, but that while the Roman soldiers slept, the disciples stole him away, and falsely reported that he had risen from the dead. That lie was bought and paid for, and it has affected the thinking of nineteen centuries.

Now, Christ commissions them, but He commissions them by telling them first of all that He had all the authority there was. In this instance, the word power there doesn’t mean power, it means authority. Other places it means power. Ye shall receive power when the Holy Ghost comes upon you. That means power. But here it means authority. Authority and power always go together in the Bible. Jesus Christ couldn’t have had authority without power. How could He? How could Jesus Christ be commissioned of God to bring the world under His feet and to rein from the river to the ends of the earth and not have power to enforce His authority? No, he couldn’t.

What good is power without authority and what good is authority without power? Khrushchev has power without proper authority. There are men who have authority, but no power to enforce it. They’re overthrown by rebellions. To do His work, Christ must have both authority and power, and He has both. He is Himself power. And so He gives to the Christians this same authority. He gives to the child of God authority, and every Christian has that authority. But not every Christian has the power, because he hasn’t paid the price to receive it. Ye shall receive power, but not every Christian has believed that and has waited before God until the power came.

Anyway, the authority and the power are His and ours. Go ye therefore He said. Go ye. Why? Because I have the authority. You’ll never be any place where I can’t take care of the situation He said. He said, I’ll never send you any place, and not all the camels or airplanes in the world can take you anyplace where I haven’t authority. He said, I have all authority. No situation can ever develop where I don’t have authority. I have all authority. Remember, He said that. He said, go ye therefore because I have the authority, go ye, go into all the world. He said, you do these three things, make disciples out of all nations, preach the gospel.

Did any of you read Mrs. Walter Post’s article about the Ilaga Valley. That has sent a happy thrill around the world. I received a call just last week from one of the largest missionary societies, a gospel missionary society, larger than our own, slightly. And the man’s voice was hushed as he said, I’ve just been reading Mrs. Post’s, report of God’s working in the Ilaga Valley. He said, you know, we want to publish it in our magazine. And so, we got permission to publish it. We’re sending him the pictures. They’re going to carry it in their magazine, TEAM, the Evangelical mission, the Swedish crowd that’s now taking in everybody and they’re a great and growing concern.

Well, the delight of it, the delight of it, the Ilaga Valley wide open. God sent them in there and said, go and make disciples there. They went and made disciples. Not very nice-looking disciples. The picture we sent the editor to reproduce, certainly they weren’t in formal clothes. They were squatting around, almost anyway. But the point is, they were believing on Christ by the scores, meeting together and saying, let’s, let’s learn about this Jesus, we want to obey and we want to do what He says to do.

Incidentally, that article comes by a new arrangement that we have in the Weekly, the Witness in order that we have now in every field, foreign correspondents whose business it is, elected by their own field conference, to report such things to us. I think I can safely say that you’re going to see lots better foreign field reporting now from here on.

Well, anyway, He said, go and make disciples of all nations and baptize them. Then He said, teach them. I want you to notice, He didn’t say, teach them, period. He didn’t say teach them My commandment, period. He said teach them to observe my commandments. It was a strong verb in there. He said, go first win them, then baptize them, then teach them to do after my commandments. He said, If you will do that, lo, I am with you, lo, I am with you.

My dear friends, Easter is today and tomorrow and next week and always. The victory is today and next Sunday and next week. And the power is today and next week and the week after next. The joy and the authority and the happy obligation, to use a word that I claim I don’t like to use. The privilege at all hours and it’s tomorrow, it’s today, it’s next week. Shortly we’re going to hear the words, ye do show the Lord’s death till He come. Why has He not come along ago. I don’t hope to nor claim to know anything of the deep secrets of God’s dispensational plans. But I do know this, that until He comes, He will have His people busy gathering pearls, bringing in lost lambs, and winning souls. And He said, go ye therefore and lo I am with you.

Beginning next Sunday, we are going to spend a week in thinking over again, our privileges granted us by the open tomb and the shining angel and the command of our Savior.

Now my friends, the great wonder is, He appeared after His Passion. That’s the great wonder, He showed himself alive after His Passion. And he said it would be so and when they went where they told them to go, He appeared unto them. As they went, He appeared.

Tags Grave, Resurrection, Risen, Tozer

Messages

Tozer Talks

“What Jesus Endured for our Sake“

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“What Jesus Endured for Our Sake”

Author and Pastor A.W. Tozer

September 5, 1954

Some thoughts from these texts, these verses from the 53rd of Isaiah. Surely He hath borne our griefs and carried our sorrows, yet we did esteemed Him stricken, smitten of God and afflicted. But He was wounded for our transgressions, He was bruised for our iniquities. The chastisement of our peace was upon Him, and with His stripes we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray. We have turned everyone to his own way and the Lord hath laid on Him the iniquity of us all.

Now, it is characteristic of fallen men to busy themselves with trifles and to avoid the settling of important matters. I suppose that there will be 40,000 to 45,000 people at the White Sox game today. A few years from now, a few days from now, it won’t matter to one lone human being whether the White Sox win or not today. But for the hour, for the two hours that they will watch, it will be the biggest thing in the world. But it is only a trifle as seen against the backdrop of important matters. Yet it is characteristic that we habitually busy ourselves about things that don’t matter and refuse to think about the things that do matter.

We avoid the settling of important questions and preserve a sort of silence by consent. You can talk religion as they did at Evanston by the hour. You can talk on almost any subject, anything up from the latest style, on up to Plato, up and down the scale. People will talk about anything they’re familiar with to anybody they happen to get into social fellowship with. But there is a strange silence, a conspiracy of silence if you like. It is that nothing vital as touching our souls will ever be discussed. We may talk about wanting peace. We may talk about the good the church is doing. We may even talk freely about the church being a bulwark against communism, and you’ll hear a lot of that now. And our leaders may appeal to us to pray and go to church in order that we must preserve our moral strength to stand against the attacks of the enemy. All that, we can hear and nobody’s embarrassed. There’s no silence about that. That’s freely discussed.

But when it comes to my sins and judgment and a dying Savior and an outraged God and hell, there’s a silence over all mankind. People do not want to discuss that anywhere, not even in many religious circles is it discussed. And where it is discussed, it is discussed theoretically, but not personally. My friend there is only one thing that really ought to matter today. And that is, that He was wounded for our transgressions, that He was bruised for our iniquities, that the chastisement of our peace was upon Him. And with His stripes we are healed. Now that’s what what’s important. That’s what’s important.

If as a result of a great game of baseball, worldwide as it’s repercussions may be temporarily, if in that one man should lose his soul, then we have been guilty as human beings of sacrificing gold for ashes and giving diamonds for glass and focusing our attention upon that which doesn’t matter and neglecting that which does. I don’t say that because I am against baseball. I listen sometimes to the games because, more or less, the boredom of it sort of takes my mind off of my troubles. But I’ve never been to see a game but once in 18-20 years, and don’t plan to go back because I’m too busy. I don’t have time to waste my time sitting down there and getting a tan and listening to them selling beer.

But apart from that, I don’t claim that you’re going to go to hell if you like baseball, but I do say those things just don’t matter. They really don’t matter. Neither does the color of your car. Neither does whether it has floating power or not. That doesn’t matter. Neither does whether that new shirt of yours is Dacron or nylon or all gone. It doesn’t make any difference. It simply isn’t important. But it is important whether the man under that shirt is right with God or not. That does matter. That matters whether the heart that beats under that Dacron shirt is clean or not. That does matter.

Now it says here, He was wounded for our transgressions. And we have here the wounding of Christ. We have lying upon us as a great shadow the fact that for the human race our Lord was wounded. Let us not evade the responsibility. Let us not eloquently blame Judas nor Pilate nor the Jews. Let us not curl our lips to Judas and say he sold Him for money. Let us not curse the Jews for killing Him. Neither let us pity Pilate, the weak-willed because he didn’t have character enough to stand for the innocency of the man he knew had done no wrong. All they weren’t guilty certainly, but they were our accomplices in crime. They and we put Him on that cross. Not they alone but they and we.

That anger that burns in your breast this morning. That dishonesty that you were guilty of in your income tax returns. That turning back of the speedometer on your car 10,000 miles to get a better trade in. That put him on the cross. The evil, the hatred, the suspicion, the jealousy, the lying tongue, the carnality, the flesh, the pleasure-loving. That put Him on the cross. And we might as well admit it, we all had a share.

Now, it says here transgressions and iniquities, two terrible words. And they were not his, they are ours or were ours. Transgression means a breaking away or revolt from just authority. All the moral universe except man and the fallen angels have kept faithful to the authority of God. But men are in violent rebellion against that authority. Twisted and deformed and perverted and crooked, all those words are found in the original language. I don’t put them in here. There is nothing in the English that can carry the weight of terror that is in these words.

So we use one word or two and hope, but we don’t get all this vast charge of concentrated misery and pain and the heinousness that lie in these words, transgression and iniquity. There they are, a perversion and twistedness and deformity and crookedness and rebellion, they’re all there. And this is undeniably the consequence, or the reason that He went to the tree. That word “iniquity,” it’s not a good word. God knows how we hate it, but the consequences cannot be escaped.

And it says “our.” I want you to hear the word our, our, our iniquities. The fingerprints of mankind are every place. We deny it and say no, but like the awkward burglar who enters a home and robs it and leaves his fingerprints on the mirror and on the dresser and on the knobs of the doors and on the table tops, is easily picked up because they’ve got his record. So, men will find their fingerprints down every dark cellar and in every alley and everyplace around over the world. And every man’s fingerprints are recorded and God knows man from man. And we can’t escape it nor blame it on somebody else, but it’s there, our iniquities, the possessive, personal, it’s our iniquities.

And then it says here, He was wounded. He was wounded for this. And that word wounded, I don’t even like to tell you all that it means. It means profane and broken and stained and defiled. And He was all that, like some beautiful shrine. He was profaned and broken, and they stained Him and plucked out his beard and stained with blood, and defiled with the grime, the wounded one, Jesus Christ, the wounded one. Israel’s great burden and great blunder was that she felt that this wounded one on the hillside there was being punished for His own sin. We thought, says the Jew, in confession, we thought He was smitten of God. We thought that God was punishing Him for His iniquity, but we didn’t know then that God was punishing Him for our iniquity. We didn’t know that. And we know it now. It was for our transgressions. He himself was God, the second person of the Trinity and yet He was wounded. It was not only the physical wounding, but it was a profanation. He was profaned for our sake, as when they might go into some beautiful church and profane it. They profaned Him for our sakes. He was wounded and bruised for our transgressions.

And it says the chastisement of our peace was upon him. And that peace is that which restores us to God, the health and the prosperity and the welfare and the safety of the individual. The chastisement was upon Him. Rebuke and discipline and correction, these words are found there, the chastisement.
Now you know, when He was chastised, He was chastised in public, He was whipped in public by the decree of the Romans. And they lashed Him in public as they later lashed Paul. They lashed him and punished him there. And His bruised and beaten and swollen form was the answer to the peace of the world and to the peace of the human heart. He was chastised for our peace.

Now, the truly penitent man wants to be punished openly. Have you ever felt this, or did you feel this sometime in your life, that you rebelled and turned against yourself. You revolted against yourself in that awful hour of your repentance. You revolted against yourself so violently that you wanted to be punished for your sin. You didn’t feel that you could dare ask God to let you off. You wanted as it were, to impale yourself and suffer and feel the disgrace and the shame, and you didn’t want to hide it up and say, I haven’t done it or even asked God to hide it from the angry eyes of the multitude.

I guess there is no more humiliating punishment ever devised by mankind than that of publicly whipping men in the public place, they whipped and chastised. They used to do that. They could put a man in jail and he might feel himself a hero. They could fine him heavily and he’d boast about it. But when he had been taken out before the laughing, jeering crowds, stripped to the waist and soundly whipped like a child, a bad child, he lost face and he was never able again to boast and never was the bold, bad man he’d been before. Whipping does that. It breaks the spirit and humbles and humiliates. The chagrin is worse than the lash that falls on the back. And there are some of us who in the days gone by, have felt the personal sense, the pointed pinch of iniquity so terribly that we felt the only fair thing to do would be to take us out in public and chastise us.

Well, that’s what happened, my brothers and sisters, the chastisement of our peace fell upon Him. And He was chastised in public, publicly humiliated and disgraced like a common horse thief. Like a common chicken thief, He was lashed until His bruised and bleeding body, open to the public, quivering and stinging under the lash, dragged itself away. He did that. And it says, with His stripes we are healed. Stripes is not a pleasant word either. It means to be hurt until you’re black and blue. I’m giving you actually what is found in the words as they were originally written.

Now, this punishment was corrective, not punitive. The only punishment that man knows is more or less punitive. You punish a man for his sin. He does wrong, you punish him. You’ll fine a man if it’s that kind of crime. Or they put him in prison if it’s that kind of crime. Or they send him to the gallows, if it’s that kind of crime. But always, it’s punitive. It’s revenge, it’s society taking vengeance against the individual who dared flout the rules. But the suffering of the Savior was not punitive. Nobody was being punished as an end in itself. The sufferings of Jesus were corrective, not punitive. He let Him suffer in order that He might correct us, in order that His suffering might not begin and end in suffering, but that it might begin in suffering and end in healing. That’s the glory of the cross. That’s the glory of the sacrifice that was offered for our sins. It began in His suffering and it ended in our healing. It began in His wounds and ended in our purification. It began in His bruises and ended in our cleansing.

There’s a word coming back now. A word that had been out of favor for a long time while quasi-fundamentalism or Calvinistic fundamentalism held its grip upon the world, upon the evangelical church. You didn’t dare breath the word unless you want it to be branded as a holy-roller. But it’s coming back now. It’s the word sanctification. It’s coming back into the usage of the evangelicals. As I told you, a Baptist preacher in this city has written quite a book called “Holiness for our Times.” And he’s arguing again, even for the purity of heart of Wesley. You run into it in the magazine articles occasionally. The word is coming back. I hope what the word stands for comes back too. For it was for this that Jesus Christ allowed Himself to be thus maltreated. He was bruised and wounded chastised in order that we might have pure hearts and clean hands, in order that our minds might be pure and our thoughts pure. It began in His suffering; it ends in our cleansing. It began with open bleeding, twitching wounds, and ended in peaceful hearts and calm demeanor.

Now my brethren, repentance is mainly remorse for the share we had in the revolt that wounded Jesus Christ our Lord. That’s mainly what repentance is really. A truly repentant man never quite gets over it. And you know that penitence is not something that comes and then leaves when you’re forgiven and cleansed. The acute conviction leaves and a sense of peace and cleansing come. But sometimes even the holiest man when he thinks back over his old part in the war wounding of the lamb, a sense of shock comes over him, a sense of wonder that the Lamb that was wounded should turn His wounds into the cleansing of the one who wounded him. That the Lamb that was bruised, should by His bruises heal the one the bruised Him. And he cries out amazing grace, how sweet the sound. Amazing wonder that this should take place, that this should be true.

Brethren, if you’ve got so snug and so smug in your little nest that you never have periods of wonder in the mystery of it, something’s wrong and you need to have your stony ground broken up again. For Paul, the holiest men that ever lived, would have spells of remembrance. He knew God didn’t remember it against him forever, and he knew it was gone and his own happy heart told him that all was well. At the same time, he’d shake his head and say, I am unworthy to be called for I did it. If that sense of perpetual penance ever leaves the human heart, we’re on our way to backslide.

Charles Finney, one of the greatest of them all. Said occasionally, he’d get cold in his heart. He didn’t excuse it. He said, I took a half day off, fasted and prayed and plowed up until I struck fire again and met God. I recommend it brethren. I recommend that we keep upon us two things, positive knowledge that were clean through His wounds, and have peace through His stripes and are healed through His bruises, and all is right inside. You never ought to excuse sin. You never ought to excuse wrongdoing. You never ought to excuse evil, never.

Having said that, then I would say this too. The second thing we always ought to keep upon us is a sense of great gratitude for the bruised One, the wounded One. Oh, the mystery of redemption, that the bruises of One healed the bruises of many. That the wounds of the One healed the wounds of the millions. That the stripes of the One healed the stripes of the many. And the wounds and bruises that should have fallen upon us, fell upon Him. And we’re saved for His sake.

Sometimes I don’t want to sail or soar very high. I just want to rest and quietly say over and over again, He was wounded for me. And He was bruised from my sins. And all my old putrid past put Him where He was. But He came back from the grave again and was alive forevermore. And all the healing power of that dying Lamb is now available to you and me. We can have it this morning. We can have it this morning. Don’t take communion this tell morning in a state of half-backsliding. Don’t do it. Don’t take communion this morning in a state of coldness. Don’t do it. If you’re sulking, mad at somebody, for God’s sake, bow your head and confess and let a tear trickled down your nose this morning and tell Jesus Christ what a poor heal you are for daring ever to feel that way in the presence of the wounded Savior.

If you’ve been so busy with the cares of this world that your heart is overcome, for God’s sake, bow your head now and ask Him to forgive you for Jesus’ sake and plead the promise, if we confess our sin, He’ll cleanse us. Get delivered and cleansed and then take communion. Don’t touch a holy thing carelessly. Don’t slide through. Don’t say what’s the difference? There is a difference and it does matter. Let a man examine himself. Let him see. The old Presbyterian set three weeks aside, three weeks, and they said, these three weeks, we’ll walk softly, we’ll search our hearts, we’ll wait on God, we’ll seek His face. Then they took communion, every three months for them. I think it’s not often enough. They said we’d rather have it every three months and come up prepared than let it become a careless thing. I believe that all right. Better to have it once a year if we enter into it in the right spirit, and never be careless about brethren.

So today, we go on into the communion service. It can all be explained, all be explained. You can explain it all. Just as you could explain the bush. Any botanist could have told you more about that bush than Moses knew. Any botanist, ask any botanist in the University of Chicago to talk to you about the acacia bush of Arabia. He will tell you more about the acacia bush than Moses knew for all he’s learned. For they’ve had several thousand years to study such things. But the trouble is, the botanist can explain the bush, but there’s no fire in the bush. And so, the scientists can explain the communion service, the bread, the wine. Historically we go back and we find they did it this way and they did it this way. We know more about the bread and wine now than the apostles did. But the danger is that we’ll only have bread and wine. That the fire will not be in the bush and the glory will not be in service. So, it’s not important that we know the historic facts or the scientific facts. It’s vastly important that we know God and that we come with reverent spirits to this service. Let us pray.

O Lord Jesus, we’re not worthy, but we’re eager to deport ourselves worthily. We’re not worthy, but we’re very anxious that we should be so in our inward moods, reverent and loving and trusting that Thou would pronounce us worthy. Now Lord, bless us as we wait through Christ our Lord. Amen.

Tags Cross, Isaiah 53, Tozer

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Post author By pshappard
Post date April 10, 2022

“Good Works–God’s Design for Christians“

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“Good Works–God’s Design for Christians”

Author and Pastor A.W. Tozer

August 24, 1958

In Pilgrims Progress, the Christian is given certain information, instruction by one of the characters, the Evangelist, or someone else. And he says, these things do make me both hope and fear. And I feel the same way when I come to the Bible, particularly the writings of Paul or the sayings of Jesus. They do make me both to hope and to fear. They both encourage me and make me ashamed.

I am ashamed, for instance, that the man Paul, in prison could write a letter, a brief letter. I think probably, well, it would easily go on two typewritten pages. And yet, pack it so full of truth that it takes me weeks to go over it, and then, I don’t hope to get everything that’s there. For instance, this morning in the third chapter of Titus, or that’s the book I have been preaching from in the mornings as you know and unto which I now refer, the third chapter of Titus, the eighth verse there is a little line in the saying which he simply threw in, Paul just threw that in. If anything, it’s inspired, can be said to be thrown in. I do not mean to slight what he said, I only mean to say that to him, this obviously wasn’t a critically important thing. And yet, I find that I can’t get by it. I have to preach a whole sermon on it. Here are the words: These things are good and profitable unto men.

Now, Paul I say, put that in as a kind of salty saying, and yet, it gives me material for a whole talk. That’s humiliating to me to know that the man of God as he was inspired by the Holy Ghost, can put into a few words that which takes me a whole sermon to fathom.

Well, here we have the saying, these things are good and profitable unto man. Now, what things? Possibly these things that men might be careful to maintain good works, but more likely, all these things from chapter two verse one on, where Paul says, speak thou the things which become sound doctrine, for these things are good and profitable unto men. He said that aged men were to live gravely and temperately and patiently. Aged women were to live in a way that becometh holiness. Young women were to be sober, discrete, keepers at home, good and obedient. Young men were to be sober-minded, that workmen were to work as Christians, and all on down he tells us how we’re to live. And then says, we’re to be subject unto principalities and powers and obey magistrates. Then he says, and then, another thing I want you to keep saying is that everybody that believes in God should be careful to maintain good works. And then, he sort of adds it up at the bottom, because these things are good and profitable under men.

I know that you don’t want a lesson in semantics, nor do you want a lesson in English, but let’s look a minute at that word, good. These things are good. The word good has a long list of meanings in the average dictionary, because it’s one of those workhorse words that you can get on and ride anytime, and because it just means so many things. But here, the thought of morality is not present. When he says these things are good, he doesn’t mean these things are morally good, virtue. They are all right, I suppose if things can be, but that isn’t what he means. What he means is, these things are valuable to you. These things are to your advantage and profit. That’s what he means by good. You’ll find exactly the same Greek word we have in our English, but the same original word where it says, some fell into good ground.

Now good ground wasn’t ground, morally good, virtuous. A hunk of earth can’t be morally good. A turned-over sod can’t be virtuous. But it means valuable and profitable. There is soil so worked out that you can plant something in it, and it will either not come up at all, or if it does, it will be a scrub and it will produce practically no fruit at all. There’s other ground you can see it as you go, say, take a train here and go through Indiana and Ohio. And if you go through, you’ll see the great black fields. Now, those fields were originally buffalo fields probably. And the buffaloes beat with their hoofs over the centuries down into the ground, the reeds and rushes and grass and weeds until it’s literally alive with power and fruitfulness. The result is, they can grow almost anything over there. The great truck farms, that’s at least one of the places where we get our onions and lettuce and tomatoes that we serve on our tables all over the United States. That’s good ground, although it’s not morally good. The idea of virtue isn’t there.

Then we say, they bringeth forth good fruit. There are trees that bring forth fruit that can be eaten, good fruit, profitable fruit. Then, there are trees that bring forth only lumpy, small, sour, wormy fruit that’s no good. And we have the same, where Peter said, Lord, it is good for us to be here. He didn’t mean this is a morally holy place. He meant it’s advantageous. It’s a good thing for us. This is a great place to be.

Now, with that definition, I’ve gone way around Robin Hood’s celebrated barn to get to the meaning. And now, let’s apply that meaning a little. Say, suppose there’s a sick man and the doctor says to him, now, you take this treatment. It won’t be pleasant, but it’ll be good for you. You will be well in 10 days. That is a good thing. It’s good in the sense that it is advantageous. It’s profitable to me. You’ll get well if you take it. we say to a starving child, here, eat this, this will be good for you. The child eats it. It nourishes the little body and pretty soon the eyes begin to shine again and the color comes back into the face. The good food that is advantageous, profitable food, has made the little ones healthy again.

We say to an intelligent young man, it is good for you that you should finish high school. And he comes around again and says, now I’m finished high school, what shall I do? And we say well, you’re intelligent, I believe you’re college material, it’s good for you. Go on, go on to school and learn. We mean not that the college is going to be a morally good place, although it should be that certainly true. But we mean if you study certain subjects, they will profit you. So, that’s what Paul meant when he said, these things are good and profitable unto men. In other words, God always has the good and the profit of people in mind. If you could just put that down. And after you’ve heard that, then if we dismiss and you go home, if you remember that and take that with you and hold that as a tenant of your faith, it will help you in this wicked old world?

Almost everybody that comes to us, comes for their own profit. They come to you and these things are good and profitable unto them. If somebody comes to your door selling you something, and it’s because, why if he can make a sale, it’ll be good and profitable unto him. But he’s not thinking about you. It is so with everything. They sing anthems about cigarettes now. And that’s because it’s good and profitable unto the man who is selling the cigarettes; that it gives the man who smokes his lung cancer. That means nothing to them. He’ll have a son who will be ready by the time the old man dies of lung cancer, he’ll have a son whom he’s taught to smoke the dirty things and he’ll be and his family will be good. They know it’s good and profitable unto them. But it’s wonderful to hear it turned around and to hear it said, God always thinks of that which is good and profitable unto us. That when God approaches us with an exhortation, a command, He never comes saying, this will be good for me, but this is good for you. This will be good for you. The whole book of God is like that.

When we rise to the everlasting; when we rise to the eternal, how beautiful and how solemn it all is, so that sick man, though he takes that treatment and gets well, he’ll later died, notwithstanding. And if the starving child eats the food and gets it’s health back, it will die after a while too. The students will wither away and cease to need the learning that he with such great pains managed to get at the college or university. So that’s only for time. We say, go ahead, eat, drink, take care of yourself, learn, read, think. These are good and profitable things. But we realize that we’re thinking in time and talking in time. These things are good and profitable for time.

But when God speaks to a man, He says these things I say to you are good and profitable to you forever. God always thinks in terms of eternity and thinks forever. Isn’t it a solemn and a wonderful thought that you have in your bosom that which time can’t wear out? Isn’t it wonderful that you have in your breast that which the passing of the century cannot diminish or that cannot grow old with the passing of the years?

One of these times when people get back and we’re settled again. We are in our three worst Sundays of the year. But when we get around that we’ll have our people with us, I’m going to start a series, oh, I’m going to call it, A Journey into God. But then, before I get to that, I want to preach a sermon called, “The Space Age Seen from Above.” I’ve heard enough about this space age, and I can only take things so long. And I’ve been kicked around enough about the space-age view. And I’m going to reply now, a Christian is going to reply. What about this space-age business and I’m going to think from the throne down. And when you think from the throne down brother, you’re not the slightest bit worried about vanguards or any of the rest. If they blow up or go up, it makes no difference. Because, you’re thinking from the throne down, but I won’t preach my sermon. I will wait for the time. And you’ll come and hear it.

Now, think about the eternal soul of a man. Here he is, what’s space to that man? What’s time to that man? What’s space or time to that man? What matters to that man? What motion and law and attraction and gravitational pull and zones of radiation and empty space? What’s that to the man? God Almighty made him of a different material altogether. He lives differently. He’s of another matter altogether. It’s nothing to him.

So, God says now here, I’ve given you that which cannot whither, which cannot die, which cannot cease to be at any rate. And what shall it profit you to gain the whole world and lose your soul. God made the earth and He made man upon it. And He wills the good of that man. God’s will vigorously, actively wills the good of that man. If we could get ahold of a half a dozen great ideas and they begin to then get ahold of us, it would change our whole outlook.

One is that God is not passive and sluggish waiting to be stimulated, but that God is the active aggressor, waiting for us to recognize Him. If we could only see that, that God wills actively and aggressively my highest good for the longest time. And he says these things are good and profitable. He means, this will be advantageous to you while the ages roll. This will profit you as long as the stars burn and when I’ve wiped them out as a child wipes out a picture off a blackboard, you’ll still be there eternally profiting by these things. Now, God means the fullest development of my soul and He makes appropriate preparation for it, beyond death and beyond the resurrection and in the heaven above and in the fellowship of God forever.

Now, good and profitable. I think these words could be written over everything that God ever said or did in His relation to man, this is good and profitable for you. If God’s children would only find that out and stop fighting. You know, there’s a little saying in the world, they say don’t fight it. It sort of a cute little saying people have. Well, don’t fight it. And so, they just give up to the deal whatever it happens to be. But if we could only remember that the will of God is not something to fight, but something to accept joyously, it would change our whole lives.

When God made Eden, He made a garden eastward in Eden. And He said there to the man, now this is good and profitable for you. And He put the man in there and said, this is good and profitable. And he made certain fruits and he said, now these are all for you. Look at them hanging there, all these trees. Here’s one. Don’t bother that. For my own reasons I have proscribed that, but all the rest of the garden is yours. And these things are good and profitable for you.

And then, when man had disobeyed and sinned, God cast him out of the garden, and why? Because it was good and profitable for him that he should not remain in the garden and eat of the tree, that would fix him like a photograph plate so that he never could change. God puts a man out where he could be fluid and malleable and changeable, so God could get hold of him and change him back from his sinful state, back to his back to holiness.

So, God drove him out of the garden. And of course, man mourned. In his trip out of the garden, Milton shows Adam and Eve hand in hand walking away from the gate of the garden, looking pensively back over their shoulder at what had once been their happy home. And then, hand in hand they went out into the world. But it was good and profitable for them that they should. That’s always God motto, this is good for you. This is profitable for you.

And then, come all down through the Scriptures, when God instituted sacrifice, and redemption. He said, here slay this animal. Put the blood on the altar. Confess your sin, for that’s good and that’s profitable for you. Later on, when the time came, Mary, as the little song says had a baby. And they named his name Jesus. All across the world, God wrote, this is good and profitable for you. This is good and profitable, and when Jesus opened his mouth and taught them, it was to their good and their profits. And when He died on a cross, if they’d had eyes to see, they could have seen written in letters of fire: this is good and profitable for all men, for God means it always to be so.

It is the devil’s libel that God looks upon men seeking to find fault and to punish and to harm. The devil brought that dirty, scandalous libel to Eve and got her to sin and he’s been telling everyone of Eve’s children from that hour to this, their sits God on the throne, the great bully. And your weak and helpless and short-lived, and He’s got eternity to throw His weight around. And so, they turn the minds of people against God forgetting that God gave man free will and said this is good and profitable for you. God gave man the world and said it’s good and profitable for you. God sent His Son to die and raised Him from the dead and set Him at His own right hand and said this is for your profit. This is for your good. If we can only remember that and know that always God is thinking of our good and our profit.

Let’s suppose it’s a little baby. Let’s think it’s a little baby. There he lies, or she. There they lie face down, cheeks red, hair, one sock kicked off, the other one still on. Indeed, in restful, healthy, slumber. And the parents pass by and tiptoe in and see. What do they think about? And they go out again smiling. Are they going to plan how they can get him? How are they going to harm him? Are they going to sit out in the living room and plan the blocks, the hindrances they can put in his way? Are they going to teach him evil and harm him? No. You know better than that. Every father that’s normal, the abnormal few, I can’t tell you about them.

But every normal father thinks about his family, every normal father. Well, I remembered, this wasn’t a spiritual thing to do, but it was a perfectly normal thing to do. If I would have been more spiritual I wouldn’t have done it. But being just where I was, I did it. And it was perfectly normal. I used to think of my six boys. And they used to think if I should die or something should happen to me, what would happen to them. And I used to wake up in a state of panic way back there, I got over it, but it was normal. I was thinking of the welfare of those boys.

And every normal father or every normal mother thinks only of the welfare of their children. And if ye being evil know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more will your heavenly father give good things to those that ask Him? Because God is aggressively determined that He will give you that which is good for you; that which will profit you the longest time.

So, God sends these things to us, the promises, the warnings, the exhortations. There they are. Some of them are pretty severe. But if you will notice and read the fine print, you will see there, this is good for you. This is profitable for you. And then when it comes to the things we don’t like, sorrows and pain and loss and tribulations, nobody ever will love them yet. Nobody ever rushed headlong into pain deliberately yet. Even the man who takes a gun and puts it to his temple knows he’s going to cause himself sharp pain, but it will only be for an instance and his pain will be over, so he thinks though he’s trying to escape pain, not trying to run into it. And yet, when God allows them to come, he says, this is good for you, and I’m thinking of your profit.

Did you ever have anybody in your family take piano lessons. You know, the easiest thing in the world, is to get them to start and the hardest thing is to keep them at it. The easiest thing in the world. It’s a romance, Oow, I’m going to take piano, so off they go. And for the first week, you can hardly get them loose from the piano. Second week, they take off. The third week, you have to keep reminding them. The fourth week, threatening them. And then after that if you’ve got good sense, you call the whole thing off. Because you know, if you have to drive into the piano, they’ll never be a Horowitz anyway. Well, the point I’m trying to make is that God has to make us do some things sort of. I know we’re free will. But sometimes the Lord puts a little pressure on. And when we look up into His face questionly, He says, now this is good for you. This is profitable for you.

When I was a small boy, I used to have the unfortunate habit of picking apples off the tree before they were ripe and eating them, with the result that you can easily get, but which I for certain reasons I’m not going to go into. And of course, I’d be sick. I’d be in bed, cramps and miserable. And my mother would go to the doctor. Now personally, I think that probably the doctor gave the same powders.They tasted the same and looked the same no matter what I had for the first 14 years of my life. The same doctor brought me into the world, fed me this white powder. And I think it was probably the same stuff. But at least the point was, my mother thought it was good for me and so she made me take it. It was bitter. The idea in that day was, the worst it tasted the better it would be for you. I think that that probably was taught in the medical schools at that time. Now, I don’t know whether that’s true. But I do know this that sometimes God gives you bitter medicine and you might just as well face up to it. It’s a modern notion that Christianity is one huge Sunday school picnic with a swim thrown in. It’s all wrong.

The Christian life is a reasonably happy life and if you live close to God, a very happy life. But a life shot through and through with sorrows and hardships and pains and tribulations, and these sorrows and tribulations are not God’s highest will, for they’re not going to be any of them in heaven. But in this mixed up world where we are now and with us in the shape we are, they’re necessary tools. So, the Lord gives us the bitter medicine and says, now this is good for you. This will be good for you. Take it and thank me for it. It’s good for you. Now, he says, good works, good works, that God’s people should maintain good works. This is good for you. Do it. Do it.

I want to ask you a couple of questions and then I’m going to close. I want to ask, why is it, that it’s so hard to get people to do the things that are good for them and so easy to get them to do what’s sweet and pleasurable for them whether it’s good for them or not? I wonder why? Why is it hard to get people to do the things that are good for them? Why is it so easy to get people to do the things they like to do? Even though they know they’re not good for them? Why is it that when it’s a choice between the flesh and what’s good for us, ninety-seven times out of 100 Christians will choose the flesh? Why is it when God gives a choice between time and eternity, the vast overwhelming number of people will choose time? Why?

Let me give you an example of what a fool man can be, choosing the immediate short range profits instead of the long range profit. I came out of the United States Army as a young man. The United States government at that time had on every one of their men, they had a $10,000 insurance policy. One day, I got a letter from the government as all us men did. The letter said this. Now, you can take your choice, we will give you, I think it was $150 veteran benefits, now in cash. Or we will give you your paid up policy for life. We’ll just hand it to you. You don’t have to pay a dime and it’s yours. If you live to be 108, when you die, your relatives will get $10,000. I was a young struggling preacher in my first pastorate, getting about $3.48 a week as a salary. I was superintendent of Sunday School, the janitor, chairman of the board and was the board and was just generally everything. What I didn’t do, my wife did the rest. And you know what I took? I took the short range $150 instead of the $10,000 I might have had this government to pay my descendants.

Now, that’s an illustration. God says, now, you can have your chooce, time or eternity. Get the short range thing or take the long range thing and wait for it. Almost every time we take the short range pleasure and lose the long range benefits. Why? Why is it when it’s a choice between God and the flesh, almost every time the flesh wins and God loses? Why is it when God runs on a ticket against flesh, why it must almost always it be that the flesh defeats God in the choice. It’s because we’re so badly fallen. It’s because we’re so deeply, incurable dense. And it’s because only now and again does God find one bold enough and faith-filled enough that he’ll turn short-range benefits and take the long-range profits. Moses was one. He despised the court of Pharoah that he might claim the long range promises of God.

Go to the 11th in the Hebrews and you’ll see it, a long list of them, short range benefits and took eternity and the long, long profits that God gives to men. Always remember God gives you choices and then says, now, this isn’t so good, but this is good and profitable unto. For God’s sake, my brethren, let’s learn to take the thing that’s good for us rather than the thing we like. Let’s learn to suffer it out and batter it through.

People are suffering in this city of Chicago tragically and won’t get one little bit of blessing out of it. Old Andrew Murray said, it’s shocking to think how much suffering some of God’s people can do to not profit by it. I hear and see and meet many people whom I talk every week almost. I have interviews in which people pour their sorrows and griefs out to me. And they without seeking it get sorrows and tribulations and hardships that Christians don’t have and won’t take and if God offered it to them, they wouldn’t accept it. They’d escape it and plow around it to get away from it. It’s too bad.

Who has done this? I think an enemy has done this and I think I know his name. I think I know his name. He has done this. The devil has done this, that evil one who hates us. Always remember, if it’s the world of the flesh and the devil and they make a proposition, always remember, it’s for your pleasure for a short run. And God sets over against that something that isn’t so pleasant. But, it’s for your good and your profit while while the ages roll.

Young people, learn to choose the hard way if it’s God’s way, for its good and profitable unto you. You can start in the beginning, God made the heaven and the earth and end up with, even so come quickly, Lord Jesus, amen. And all the way through, this is good for you and profitable unto you. I recommend you go into this and let it slice you and chew you and grind you and soften you and prepare you for eternity. Because you’re going there one of these days. You’re going there either having lived a life of artful dodging of the cross, artful escaping of tribulation, the easy, fleshly way, or you’re going there, like the Christian on his road to the Celestial City wearing his armor and carrying his sword and with his roll under his arm, ready to face any dragons or lions or devils that are in the way. Always remember whatever the devil says, and when God speaks it’s good for you. And when God speaks, it’s good, good and profitable for you.

So, if you don’t like to do it, do it anyway and thank Him. Don’t grumble. Don’t complain. Don’t pull a poor mouth and go through life gloomy. Thank Him for everything and say Father, this isn’t particularly enjoyable, but I’ll enjoy it anyway, knowing that you sent it and it’s good and it’s profitable for me. Amen.

Tags Good Works, Salvation, Tozer

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Tozer Talks

Post author By pshappard
Post date April 3, 2022

“Good Works–The Proof of Salvation“

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“Good Works–The Proof of Salvation”

Author and Pastor A.W. Tozer

August 17, 1958

Now this as you understand, represents stages in the journey. This is about twenty-some sermons that I’ve preached on it and we’ve arrived at verse eight, chapter three. This is a faithful saying and these things I will, let thou affirm constantly. That they which have believed in God might be careful to maintain good works. These things are good and profitable unto man.

Now, this little phrase, this is a faithful saying, it’s really a sentence, is characteristic of Paul, in fact, peculiar to Paul. And commentators don’t quite agree; they don’t disagree, they just don’t quite agree about whether Paul meant, this the foregoing is a faithful saying, that after the kindness and love of God our Savior toward man appeared, and so on, or whether Paul meant, the following is a faithful saying. You can’t judge by the way it’s versified, for the versification was not the original. Mott translates it, it is well said and I would have you dwell on it. That those who have learned to trust in God saw it.

So, I think and believe that Paul meant, the following is a faithful saying, and these things I will that thou constantly affirm, namely, that they which have believed in God might be careful to maintain good works. Now, this phrase is used by Paul in the Bible and by nobody else but Paul. The nearest to it comes in that passage, two passages in Revelation, these are the truth sayings of God, and these words are true and faithful. But no place else does anybody say, this is a faithful saying. That was Paul’s phrase.

Now, he said in 1 Timothy 1:15. This is a faithful saying that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners of which I am chief. He said in 1 Timothy 4:9, bodily exercise profiteth little, but godliness is profitable for all things. And he says in 2 Timothy 2:11, is it? 2 Timothy 2:11, if I have it right, if isn’t, I will not bother to look for it. But yes, he says, it is a faithful saying, for if we be dead with Him we shall also live with him. If we suffer we shall also rein with Him. If we deny Him, He will also deny us. Then, he uses it again in the text of the morning.

Now, I think this needs to be explained a little bit. Not that any great world-shaking matter hangs upon it. But it’s good to know what a man means and why he said it, even if it is not the most important thing that he ever said. The using of the phrase, this is a faithful saying, doesn’t make the Bible any less true or any more true. But we’re interested in this man, Paul. We owe more to him than to anybody else except Jesus Christ, and perhaps, David.

So, we’d like to know why he said this? No, I give you, my explanation. I think that the fact that it’s stated in simple non scholarly language doesn’t make it any less true. And if I were to encumber it with learned jargon, it wouldn’t make it any more true. So, here’s the explanation, that in the early church before the epistles were written, there were many sayings that came from Jesus our Lord and from his apostles that had not got written yet. And they were sung as snatches of hymns. They were repeated often among the people such as some of our phrases, Jesus never fails and God answers prayer and so on, or trust and obey. Phrases that are not biblical, but that sums up biblical truth simply, and you hear it often.

You many times hear a preacher say, we sing, and then he’ll quote part of a hymn and say, this is truth. Well now, that’s what Paul meant here. The people of Paul’s time had a little saying among themselves that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners. He said, now that’s true. That’s a faithful saying, that you hear it and it’s so. Then, bodily exercise profits little, but godliness is profitable unto all things. He said, now that’s true. You hear this said and that’s faithfully said. And then, this about Christians, all Christians are to maintain good works. You hear that said often. The preachers say it often, and it’s come down to us from our Lord. Now, he said, that’s a faithful saying. That’s the explanation. And that’s why he used it.

Now, he said, I want you to affirm this constantly. Keep saying this. Dwell on it said the translation read before, dwell on this. They had been saying it, but he said, now, I want you to know that it’s true. And therefore, keep saying it. This is more than a good thing. It’s so true, that it’s divinely true and it must be repeated. You must keep bearing down on this. And I will that you affirm it constantly. See, preachers are supposed to have nothing much to do but sit around and then appear in the pulpit on Sunday. But the simple fact is, to keep a balance between unnecessary repetition and sufficient repetition to make the thing work, takes a lot of prayer, and a lot of hard thought. Some brethren just repeat continually until I don’t know where I could go to sleep better than sitting in the third roll back in their church. Because they won’t say a thing that I haven’t already heard. And they won’t even say it in a different way.

But there is another matter, and that is that if you don’t keep hammering on it, people will forget it. If you don’t keep saying it, it won’t have any dynamism in it. So, he said, I want you to affirm constantly. So, if you want to pray for your preacher, you pray that he will know how to say it often enough, and emphatically enough to detonate it and set it off and cause a moral explosion, and yet, not saying it to say it so dully that people go to sleep under it. Keep that in mind. young preacher there. That’s a job we have to do.

Now, what is this saying that he said he often heard it. He said, you often hear they say it among the brethren and I want to assert it that it’s true. I want you to keep saying it because it’s of God. It’s this, now they which have believed in God should be careful to maintain good works. They which have believed in God should be careful to maintain good works.

I want you to hear this little phrase, they which have believed in God. What did he mean by this anyway? They would have believed in God. You will have to admit it’s not very plain because Parsis believe in God, and the Hindus believe in God, and I can say by saying simply that every religion known to man except perhaps Buddhism, and there’s an argument over that, and Confucianism and Confucianism is not religion, but the philosophy. So therefore, every religion known the man believes in God. And every praying person believes in God. And everybody believes in God. So, he says, they which believe God should maintain good works. Now, that’s making it pretty broad.

Do you know my brethren, that we can know what is meant by knowing who said it? Often times, a man will say a thing, a lot of things. And it’ll be ambiguous, which means it can be taken two or three ways. Two ways, but often more than two ways. And he doesn’t make it clear. But you can know what he meant by knowing who he is, by knowing his testimony, by knowing what his past life has been.

Now, there are men in this city, and I’m not going to dignify them by mentioning their names, or degrade myself. But there are men in this city, who are so liberal and modernistic in their view, that when they say I believe in God, you don’t know what they mean, because they are Mr. Facing both ways. And they balanced themselves on the tightrope carefully, and are careful to please everybody. And the result is when they say they, they that believe in God, you have no remote idea to whom they refer, because they have no sure convictions themselves though they use the phrase loosely and carelessly, but never did Paul. Paul said, they that believe in God ought to maintain good works. He’s writing to a church, and he was an apostle.

Now, it is the same with anybody that’s known across the street. If he speaks ambiguously, don’t write him a letter scolding him. Know what he means by what he believes. The man Paul, you know what he believes? Believing God, he said. What did that mean to a Jew who had become a Christian? What did that mean to a man who was a believer in the Messiah? You know what it meant?

Who was this man Paul? Oh, my brother, he was one who would go all over Asia Minor preaching one thing, God is and Jesus Christ is the Messiah. God the Father is, and Jesus Christ is His Son. He’s been in jail and out of jail. He’s been stoned and cuffed and kicked and starved and tramped upon and shoved around and lied about and maligned. And he had to endure all that because he loved God and Jesus Christ, His Holy Son, and everywhere he went, he went quoting the Old Testament Scriptures. Jehovah, Great I Am by heaven and earth confess.

So, he didn’t have to write a whole page to make them know. They knew what he meant because they knew who sent it. So, my friend, it’s possible for you to live a life that you can keep pretty tight-mouthed and still have a mighty good testimony. Everything you say they won’t misinterpret you, they will for a little while. But as soon as they get to know you, they won’t misinterpret you. You only half say it. They’ll know what you mean. Tom Hare could come here and talk for half an hour and never mentioned Jesus and go way, I wouldn’t worry about it. I would if some men did, because I know the context, as they say, would indicate they didn’t want to mention it. But Tom Hare lives in his heart so much all of the time he takes Jesus Christ for granted and so did Paul. And so when Paul said they that believe in God, everybody knew what he meant. He meant trusting Jesus Christ, who is the way unto God and who God made manifest to dwell among us, mysteries of Godliness.

Now, Paul used this same thing before. Paul would have been flunked out of Wheaton or out of Nyack or the Moody Bible Institute for this one. Paul said, for I know whom I have believed, and I am persuaded that He is able to keep that which I have committed unto Him against that day. Now, he said that. That’s there in print in English, and it’s a good, fair, close representation of what he wrote in the Greek. Now, he had been flunked out. They would have written in red pencil across the top, unclear. Your pronouns have no have no antecedent and they’d have marked him down to 55 on that paper and send it back at the old man of God. That was the last book he ever wrote, that second Timothy.

So, he said, I know Whom I have believed, and he didn’t say whom the Whom was. He didn’t put any name there you see. I know Whom and some Jew could say, I know what he means, he means Jehovah and a Parsi could have said he means Zoroaster, and somebody else could just put his god in there. But they’d have arrested Paul’s language to their own destruction because Paul never meant anybody but Jesus Christ as Lord. He was the one who went around turning the world upside down by what he had to say about Jesus Christ. He was the one who said that I count my life but nothing that I may win Christ and be found in Him.

So, when he said, I know Whom I have believed, he didn’t need to put the antecedent to the pronoun in. The pronoun was Jesus. It’s possible to live so that when you use a pronoun and say He, people know who you mean. You don’t have to ask to explain it. It takes a little living to get there, but after a while you can get there and Paul was there brother. He was there. It takes a little living to get to a point where you just raise your hand and folks know what you mean?

Ah, God has His people. He has them. I saw some of them out at Summit Grove, the first meeting, I was there. I got there Tuesday, and they introduced me, or just before they introduced me, they said, Brother Olin Jones will lead us in prayer. Well, I didn’t know Olin Jones, but the man, a young fellow about my age got up to lead in prayer. And oh, brother, what a prayer. And I said to the District Superintendent afterwards, I said, is that man as good as he sounds? Oh, he is, he said, he just walks with God. What a prayer. It was worth my going over there to hear that man pray. What up prayer. Well, so childlike. So reverent. So deeply sincere. So radiant. He just talked to God as if he just was addressing Him face to face. And then he quietly sat down. Well, that’s the meeting up for me. I didn’t have to have anybody sing the girl’s trio after that. I was already set up for the sermon. Just to hear that man pray. Now, that man after that could say anything he wanted to say. And I knew what he meant, because I knew who he was. So, Paul said, I know Whom I have believed, and of course the whom is nobody else but Jesus.

And I know that He’s able to keep that which I have committed unto Him. Now, what’s that? There’s no antecedent there. That relative pronoun has got to have something back of it, but it doesn’t have anything back of it, Paul. Well, Paul said, I was so wrapped up in God that I forgot to be grammatical. So, he’ll keep that which I have committed unto Him.

What’s that which he’s committed? Oh, my brother, I just wish we could just read all of Paul’s epistles and his sermons in the book of Acts and see, everything Paul had. Hope for the future, his glorious crown, his heaven, his Father’s house. Everything that Paul had lived for and was doomed to die for. That’s what Paul had in mind. He didn’t have to make a grocery list here or a bill of lading to tell us what he meant. He said, that which I’ve committed. Knowing Paul, we know what he meant. And I repeat that you’d better get fast to a place where you can keep still and still give your testimony. You better get there quick to a place where you don’t have to spell it all out for people to know what you mean. They know what you mean.

You’ve got people in this church, who get up and pray never mentioned Christ’s name and sit down, and I knew what they meant and God knew what the meant. A theologian or the Bible students, particularly the freshman, would condemn them out of hand. God knew what they meant just as they knew what Paul meant. He knew who Paul meant. Then he said, He’d keep that which I’ve committed unto Him against that day. And he didn’t say what day. What day, somebody’s birthday? Christmas? Easter or what day? Paul didn’t say what day. So, you see, Paul made three errors there. School marms would have turned him down. But Paul’s life was his grammar.

And Paul’s known message, what he stood for, what he lived in, what he assumed to die for, said what he didn’t say and couldn’t say in print. What day is it? The day of His appearing. It’s the day of His appearing. The day when He shows us and walks down the sky and shouts with a loud voice that’s heard around the world and wake from the dead, every sleeping saint and glorify every living one. That day, Paul looked forward to that day. We’re so learned in some evangelical circles now that we are ashamed to admit we believe in that day, but I still believe in that day. I haven’t got it all straightened out as I used. But I believe in that day. I believe in the coming of the day. And that’s the only day that a Christian lives for anyhow. He lives for that day. Paul said, that day, he didn’t have to explain it everybody that listened to Paul knew. They knew that he had written, he had preached, he had prayed, he had exhorted, he had labored with that day in view. So, he didn’t need to say what day.

Now he said, they that believe in God should be careful to maintain good works. Now there’s confusion, and this will be repetition, because it’s occurred before. But let’s hope instead of it being repetitious, it’ll turn out to be just underscoring for emphasis, the confusion about good works in the church. Incidentally, I got another letter last week. Some weeks go by and I get nice letters and others go by and I don’t. This last week wasn’t my week. I should have stood in bed. But, a second lady wrote me and she also scolded me for about three solid, finely written pages, because of what I had said that not all faiths please God. Well, poor lady, she’s in, of course, confused because her teachers have taught her wrong. Some have taught error about this, that good works are meritorious. Jesus said after you have done all you can do and have done the best you can do, say, I’m an unprofitable servant. That’s what Jesus thought about good works.

And Paul went to great pains to teach that you couldn’t be saved by good works. But some people have taught that you could. They have taught that salvation is achieved by good works and that grace is a supplement to good work. There’s a place for grace, but the grace merely comes in and pays out what you can’t pay. You pay 75% of your way to heaven by doing good and grace comes in and graciously helps you with the other 25%. Now, that is taught in some circles, not of course in that rather ridiculous way, but they teach it.

Now, this of course, is in violent contradiction to the teaching of the New Testament. The hymn says, could my tears forever flow, could my zeal no respite know, these for sin could not atone. Thou must save and thou alone, and that is a faithful saying, and worthy of much repetition. But others have gone in the opposite error. Always remember that the human race very rarely stays in the middle of anything, except when they’re caught in the middle. They’re moving from one extreme to another constantly.

For instance, dresses, but we won’t go into that. After the First World War, I saw the girls walking around dressed just as they’re dressed today. The pendulum has swang once more. Well, have your fun girls, have your fun. But the pendulum is swinging from one extreme to another. And the other extreme is, and it’s the extreme we’re in danger of in our school of thought. We so fear the first error, that salvation is by good works that we’ve ruled out good works as a part of the Christian system. There’s a great danger there my brethren. Yet, through the atonement in Christ’s blood, here’s the formula and this is a faithful thing and worthy of much repetition. That through the atonement in Christ’s blood, we are saved by grace through faith unto good works. There’s your formula. You can put that down. Through the atonement in Christ’s blood, we are saved by grace through faith unto good works.

Now, the New Testament says, 2 Corinthians 9:8, that we are to abound in every good work. Hebrews 13:21, Paul prays, or the writer prays that God will make us perfect in every good work. Acts 9:36 says, Dorcas was full of good works which she planned to do. Am I accurate? Dorcas was full of good works which she planned to do. Is that right? What did it say? She was full of good works, which she did. I like that. Again. Nobody put that in. I’d rule that out of course. Anybody who would be correcting papers would rule it out. But the Holy Ghost said, Dorcas was full of good works which she did. But many of us Christians are full of good works, which we hope to do after vacation is over.

And then Ephesians 2:10, we’re created in Christ Jesus unto good works. 1 Timothy 2, women should not adorn themselves with outward adorning, but rather with good works. 1 Timothy 5, let not a widow be taken in. Now, remember, this was the old folk’s home in the early church. And when a Christian woman came to the door with her application blank, they said, who have you got for a reference. They said, well I’ll give them my pastor and Paul knew me and Timothy knew me. They checked with Paul and Timothy and they said, did she do good works and did she wash the same feet? And if they said yes, they took her in. If they said no, they said, we’re sorry grandma. But we can take you when you have got a life of good works back of you. Can you imagine that? Wouldn’t that empty some of our old folks’ homes? The only thing, the only qualification to get into the average denomination old folks’ home is just to be old. It’s all you have to be, just be old and you can get in, if you have the money.

But their qualification was they had to be filled with good works and had to have a record behind them of having served the saints and looked after the church and prayed and loved and labored in the kingdom of God, else they wouldn’t take them in. They didn’t believe they were Christians. They could carry their big Bible under their arm, but they still didn’t believe they were Christians. They said, no, we’re sorry. A Christian is one who is saved by grace through faith unto good works. And good works is the only part you can see you know, everything else is submerged, invisible. Grace is invisible. Faith is invisible. How do I know you have faith? You say you have. How do I know you? You say you believe in the grace of God? How do I know you do?

There’s only one proof–good works. Paul didn’t say, don’t take any old lady in unless she testified that she was a believer, it didn’t say that. He said don’t take her in unless she has a record of good works behind it, she’s been a hard-working Christian. Because you see, if you come to be 65 or 70, or 80, or whatever it is years old and you’re ready to retire and go to a home, if you haven’t shown the last time by your works that you’re a true believer, you’re not a true believer. That was Paul’s argument.

In Hebrews 10:24, the Holy Ghost says provoke unto love and good works. And that’s what I’m trying to do this morning. I’m provoking and I may provoke some of you too, but you’ll get over it. And Acts 10:38 says that God anointed Jesus Christ of Nazareth with the Holy Ghost and power, who went around doing good works; doing good and healing all the effects of the devil.

Now, I gave you some Scriptures here to show, nine of them, plus the text. We can find many, many more to show that while nobody is saved by good works, everybody is saved unto good works. And if we’re not saved unto good works, we’re not saved at all. Could my tears forever flow? Could I go into the desert and starve to death in the cave? Would I give my body to be burned? Could I contribute all my goods to feed the poor? If I have not faith in Jesus Christ as my dying Lord and risen Savior, I’d perish. Could I preach a lifetime? I’d be a castaway myself unless I’ve trusted in the merits of Jesus’ blood alone for my salvation. Grace is a charming sound, harmonious to the ear. And how sweet it is to know that the grace of God saves us without works and without merit. But the devil gets behind that. And, from behind that he whispers, now look out for good works. Watch it. Watch it. Watch it! Don’t do any good works. It’s enough that you go to church and sing.

The Bible teaches that if you’re saved by grace through faith, you’ll do good works. What kind of good works? Well, of course they vary with the age in which you live and they vary with the opportunity. But I’m quite sure it isn’t putting your money in the basket. That’s one of course. I believe that God’s people ought to be the busiest helpers in the whole world. I think that we ought to be. But as long as we think that salvation is by grace through faith unto sitting down, why we’ll have to have outside help.

A French or Swiss writer, I think he writes in French, a Swiss writer, by the name of Rougemal has said a very beautiful and wonderful thing. I bought his book the other day and I’ve only read two or three pages, but I got this out of it, he said, God Almighty says, I am He that is. And the devil says, I am not. He says, God works by asserting His being and the devil by denying it. So, he says, the devil gets hold of us by denying He exists. And so, why be afraid of a non-existent thing? Why be afraid of someone that’s merely an old wife’s tale, or a ghost or a spook.

The devil hides behind not anonymity, but non-existence, and whispers I don’t exist and goes to work on people. Oh, I believe the devil has been busy behind his screen of non-existence as we people so learned and so sophisticated that we don’t believe in the devil. I believe the devil has gotten his work in so that Christians are not doing good works. Paul said they should be. And Paul set an example by using threads and needles. Dorcas said it’s by using threads and needles. Others went about giving of their goods. The centuries have shown how the church can labor and work.

My dear friends, you ought so to live that somebody, somewhere will have you to thank at the end of the day. You should so labor and work and sacrifice, pouring your money and your sweat into something helpful to mankind to alleviate human suffering, assuage human grief and give light to the blind. You should so live that in that great day, they’ll know you’re a Christian. They won’t have to say are you a believer? Have you got the right doctrine about grace? They look at your good works and know that anybody that wasn’t saved by grace through faith would never live like that and they would say, okay.

Faith saves you by grace through the blood of the lamb that after you’re saved, not to sit down on what the old country people called “the stool of do nothing.” You’re to get up and get busy. Dave Lutchwiler wrote an article saying that Christianity was a layman’s movement. He said that every Christian ought to be active. I’ve already gotten a two-page blitzer on that. A two-page blitzer but I still believe it. I read the article, made a few suggested changes and printed it. Every child of God should be busy at something. If you can’t sing, don’t try to sing, please. Don’t try to sing. So many of God’s people want to be used of the Lord but they want to sing. Well, if you can’t sing don’t try to sing, but there’s something you can do. You can turn the pages for the organist. You can do that. You can do something. Find out what to do and don’t say, oh, there’s nothing for us young people to do. You don’t have to organize things. Do them Brother, do them. You’re intelligent Sister. You read up; you know you’re alive in the world. You’re a 20th century person. You know where the needs are. And if you don’t know where they are, you know how to find out where they are.

Therefore, see to it that you work in the name of Jesus Christ, a labor of love. Get good works behind you. The only way we’ll know you’re Christian, you know you’re a Christian you say, by your faith and by your witness. Very good and I believe in both. But we’ll never be sure you’re a Christian unless we see you laboring for the Lord Jesus Christ in faith and love. So, while we can have good works of a kind, as I’ve said, without being saved. You can’t be truly saved and not have some kind of good works.

Over at Summit Grove, I met a man 48 years old, a Mr. Henry P. Kirks, a photographer by trade or profession, whichever that is. He’s been living that way and he’d come to the camp meeting for the purpose of taking down sermons on faith. And as soon as he could get to me, he said, do you Brother Tozer, I’ve been converted just a year and a half. And you know how I was converted? I was converted by hearing a tape recording of a sermon you preached. You know, now the tape recording of course, I might have been asleep at the time he was hearing that. But while that tape recording was being made, I was pouring something into it. And before it was being made, I was getting ready for it and pouring something into that.

So, I think that when the Lord comes to give every man according to the deeds done in the body, he won’t give that reward to a hunk of celluloid. He will know somebody was back of that praying, laboring and preparing. I hope to meet a lot more like that. I hope you’ll meet a lot like that. And I believe you will. I believe you will. I don’t mean to scold you. I believe you will. But some of you need to be provoked, because you just sit around. In God’s name, brethren and sisters, let’s hear this faithful saying that he that believes in God should be careful to practice good works. Amen.

Tags Good Works, Salvation, Tozer

Messages

Tozer Talks

Post author By pshappard
Post date March 27, 2022

“Casting All Your Care Upon Him“

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“Casting All Your Care Upon Him”

Author and Pastor A.W. Tozer

August 8, 1954

We’ll talk a little about casting our care upon God, since God careth for us. Now, this is addressed, as you will read in the first verse of the first chapter, to the elect. And it’s to the elect only. Those who have been renewed by the work of God in the new birth and have been brought out of darkness into light. They are the elect, through sanctification of the Spirit, unto obedience and sprinkling in the blood of Jesus Christ. Those who are begotten again unto a living hope by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. They are the ones addressed.

Now, I emphasize this a little in passing, because I have noticed the common error of applying promises to persons not included in the promises, that God did not have in mind when He made the promises. For instance, it would be totally impossible to think of God’s saying this, cast all your care upon Him, you who are dead in trespasses and sins, who walk according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that now worketh in the children of disobedience, you who walk in the lust of the flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and are by nature, the children of wrath. God couldn’t possibly say in the same breath, cast all your cares upon Me. He couldn’t do it, and he doesn’t do it. And it’s always a mistake to take a verse that doesn’t belong to you and apply it to you, or a verse that applies to anybody who meets a certain condition, and you apply to yourself if you haven’t met the condition. There is the error.

For instance, if a letter came to your house and you opened it up rather carelessly, and then you notice that you had become heir of $100,000. I suppose there would be a lot of human delight with the knowledge that you are now relatively well off as men count such things. Then you looked a little more closely, and you notice that the letter had been opened by mistake after having been delivered by mistake. It belonged to a man with the same number but another street. Well, you couldn’t possibly apply for that money. It wasn’t you. It was a mistake you got the wrong mail.

And so, when God says to certain ones, cast all your cares on Me, you’ve got to know who He means. To whom is He addressing this? He’s addressing it to the humble and the repentant and the believing and the obedient and the renewed and the elect.

Now, the Father’s promises are for the Father’s children. And we ought to keep that in mind. When the Jews in Jesus’ day claimed certain promises for themselves because they were children of Abraham. Jesus said, that’s where you’re mistaken. If you were children of Abraham, you’d act like your father Abraham. But you’re not children of Abraham, and all the promises made to Abraham are invalid and did not apply to these who are the descendants of Abraham, but not the seed of Abraham according to the Spirit. I only mentioned that because I notice how politicians and newspapers and all the rest, are always coming through with tender quotations from the Bible when they’re putting themselves by their living, in a place where the Bible quotations cannot apply to them.

Now, this text is for God’s children, not for the prominent children of God only nor the gifted nor the successful. Lots of good Christians aren’t successful. And lots of good saints aren’t prominent saints. And lots of wonderful people aren’t gifted people at all. God has given His gifts as He sees fit, sovereignly through nature and grace. And we tend to laud the gifted into prominence and the successful. I don’t know that God does. It’s only faithfulness and love that is mentioned in the Scriptures and the willingness to give all to Him. Apart from that, there’s not much mention made of success or prominence. So, don’t Imagine this doesn’t apply to you just because you humbly say, well, I’m not prominent nor gifted nor successful. I’m just one of the plain Christians. Well, so am I. And after all, so are we all really before our Heavenly Father. And the weak and the struggling and the obscure are just as dear to God as are the prominent and successful.

I looked a little at the presence of care in the world. It uses that word care, c-a-r-e. And of course, that means anxieties carried to the point of hidden fears, anxieties and fears, their care. Now, fears and anxieties have a reason for existing. Let us remember that. They have a reason for existing. All optimism is irresponsible and unrealistic. Nobody can possibly be a sound judge of human affairs and be optimistic. All schemes to conquer fear by ignoring their cause, they’re deceptive, and those who would follow them would be living in a paradise of fools. They would be ignoring the causes of our fears. The causes of our fears are here, and we’ve got to admit their presence.

There’s illness, for instance, illness. . . I just read somewhere, I don’t recall now, but in the last day that there are 4 million people a year the die of malaria alone throughout the world. I think it’s a higher figure than that yet, that many alone die of malaria. So, there’s illness everywhere. Throughout the whole wide world there’s illness, and accidents occur. They do occur. They occur among the good people. Mrs. Sandrock is a good woman. She’s walked with God these many years. She’s a good woman, but she’s had her accident. Accidents occur, accidents and illness and loss of jobs and betrayals and separations and bereavements and death and war. These things are loose in the earth.

Isn’t it a rather touching thing that the newspapers came out with big headlines when the truce in Indochina went into effect, and saying that for the first time in how many years, I’ve forgotten, I guess twenty, there’s no war anywhere in the world? No war anyplace, the first time in so many years, more than a decade. My friends, these things are present in the world. And the response of the human organism to this is, anxiety and apprehension or plain downright fears. People are afraid.

Now, the world is full of all this, I say and people are anxious and apprehensive. And we react variously when we are apprehensive. When we get scared, some people get very hard and churlish. They develop a shell over them like a turtle, hoping that they can keep away the dangers they’re afraid of, and they retire within that shell. Others, drive themselves to what they call success. And they become opulent, hoping they can buy their way through. It was said of John D. Rockefeller before he died, that he’d have given millions of dollars for a good stomach. He lived on milk and crackers and a few little, easy to digest things because his stomach wouldn’t take good food.

Now, some people would go on and on and believe that they can stand off these fears by succeeding, but you can succeed and have plenty, and still these fears creep in; and the reasons for them are here. You can’t buy off illness. You can’t buy off accidents. Nobody can be so successful that he won’t feel the war. Nobody can possibly be so high up in the world that he won’t be a victim of bereavement, and finally, of illness and death.

And of course, pleasure-seeking is nothing else but a reaction to fear. Eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we die. And the idea that tomorrow we die, was what gave rise to the eat, drink and be merry. If I’m going to die tomorrow, I might better make good of it while I can, to make what I can of life. So, eat, drink, and be merry today for tomorrow, that deadly thing appears, that fearful thing. That’s the way some people react. They go wild. They do not want to face the anxieties, so they go out and scatter the anxieties for a little time by worldly pleasures. That’s why you can always, if you can think of a new thing to please the people and make them play, you can be sure of a lot of money. And then some people become nervous wrecks and have mental disorders of all kinds. All because we’re scared.

Friends, is there someone? Is there someone that can meet our enemies that I have mentioned here and a thousand I didn’t mention, illness and accident and loss of job or possibility of it; betrayal, separation, bereavement, death all these things? Is there somebody that can meet these enemies? Somebody has to do it. They won’t go away. Ignore him and he will go away is the humorous remark made about a lot of things and a lot of people. Ignore him and he will go away. But these things don’t go away by ignoring them. Illness doesn’t go away when you ignore it.

In Beulah Beach last week, I heard, my wife and I, of a woman we knew years ago. A very fine woman, a mother of four children, active in the Alliance Church. She died last week, or recently at any rate. She died of cancer relatively young. She wasn’t an elderly woman, though she certainly wasn’t a girl anymore. But she died of cancer. As you can’t ignore that and say to it go away. It won’t go away. Neither will death go away. Neither will war go away. Neither will accidents go away. And they cut it down a little by being careful. But the law of averages says, so many machines will break, so many people will fall asleep, so many reckless men will be on the highway. So, these things won’t go away. Somebody has to face them and conquer them. Who’s going to do it? You can’t do it.

Is there somebody else that will take them on? Is there somebody else that will dispose of them? Is there someone that will say, now listen child of God, you’re in the midst of a deadly world. Death walks on every hand, error, accidents, mistakes, diseases, mental breaks. All these things walk up and down the land, but I’ll take care of them for you. I don’t promise you won’t get into any of them, but I promise you, you don’t have to be scared. I’ll get you out of them. And I will make them work for you. And I’ll turn your evil to good. And I walk before thee and I won’t let one thing happen to you that isn’t good for it. And when you need it, I’ll let it happen. But I’ll watch over you as a physician over his patient. I’ll watch over you as a nurse over her child. Is there somebody that will say you don’t have to be an optimist and ignore things. You can be a realist and admit their presence. And you don’t have to collapse and be sent to an institution. I’ll handle them for you.

Yes, there is somebody. Cast all your cares upon Him, for He careth for you. Now, that is the some of the Lord’s word to us on that subject. It’s not all He has said, but it’s sort of a summation. That same theme runs through the Old Testament, and it runs through the New Testament, and it is taught by the Savior, and it is taught by all the apostles. It is simply, God is personally concerned about you. You the individual, not the mass. We think in masses now, blocks. It was common to see these graphs, or these charts in the news magazines in which it will say, it will show a little figure standing there in silhouette, dark outline. It’ll say, each of these stands for 5 million persons, thinking in a block. The Lord never thinks in blocks, in masses. He thinks in individuals. He thinks of His one sheep, of his one child.

So, that’s the teaching of the Scriptures. God’s personally concerned about you. And God is not too high and lofty to remember that His children are in a land where illness is prevalent, where there are accidents happening every day, where there are loss of jobs and financial worries. Where people get to be trained by their closest loved ones, where there’s separation, as for instance, when the boy that has been close to us so many years, shakes hands with a grin that isn’t quite real, and walks down the sidewalk and waves at the corner on his way to report to the military service. Separations come. Some never come back. God knows it and says, now, I know that’s the kind of world you will live in, but I have laid hold on you for forever. And I know every detail of your trouble and all your problems. And I’ll anticipate every act of the enemy and every act of every enemy. I anticipate it. I will go before you. Not only so, but He accepts our enemies as his enemies. I will be an enemy to your enemies. Have you read that in your Bible? I will be an enemy to your enemies. And that can only mean the one thing, that if an enemy turns on me, God turns on him. And if I’m partly in the wrong, God will let that enemy through to me enough to chasten me, but He’ll never let him destroy me. And He will never let a blow fall that I don’t deserve.

The old grandmas out home where I was born, used to say good-naturedly. Some great big strapping fellow would say, Mother, you spanked me an awful lot when I was a boy. And the old grandmother used to dismiss it by saying, you never got a lick amiss. That was an old-fashioned expression. You never got a lick amiss. In other words, I never whipped you once too often. Here were five great big handsome sons, doctors and what have you all, around sitting at a homecoming and here sets the mother presiding like a queen in the middle of it. They’d all gone to college, they all had modern ideas, but they all still loved the home and the old folks and mother. And they were discussing how severe she was with them when they were boys, and how she gave them the works occasionally. And a great big friendly doctor said, Mother, don’t you think after all, that you punished us a little too often. She straightened up and said, young man, when you’ve raised five such fine boys as I have, come back and talk to me.

That was the answer. And God never strikes a lick amiss. And He never lets anything happen to you, if you’re trusting, that isn’t good for you, and says, now, I’m handling this and you take your hands off and stop you’re worrying. This won’t go away, but I’ll handle it, and I’ll look after you because I am personally concerned about you. And every enemy you have, is my enemy too. You’re on my side and I’m on your side, and the enemies on the other side. And God always handled the enemy. Cast all your care upon Him.

What are your cares? I don’t know what your cares may be. I have given an outline of them here. They may not, none of them may touch you at all. There may be something else I don’t know about, worries that I have a remote notion you feel. But the Bible says cast all your cares upon Him.

Now, this must be done at a given time by a firm act of the will. We don’t just ooze into this or grow into it. If you were walking along and you had a great burden, and I said, let me carry that awhile, you wouldn’t ship that gradually over onto me. You’d either give it to me, or you would keep it. And the act of transfer from you to me, would be a crisis, an exact crisis that happened at a given moment. One minute you had the burden, and the other minute, I had the burden.

My Father, when he was a young man, in later years he told us on himself. He said, he and some friend of his had somewhere to go and they only had one horse. They had long miles to go and only had one horse. So, my father’s name was Jacob. They called him Jakey. And he said, I’ll tell you what we will do Jakey, I’ll ride a while, you can walk. Then, when you get tired, you can walk awhile and I’ll ride. And my father innocently, a country boy that he was, agreed to that. And that’s the way it worked. The other fella rode around and Jakey walked. And after a while Jakey said, my father said, don’t you think it’s about time we ought to change off? Oh, sure, getting tired? He said, sure, we’ll change now. You can walk awhile while I ride.

Now, I don’t introduce anything humorous in here, if that should be called humorous. My father thought it was. But I will say this, that there’s an awful lot of that same kind of arrangement among us Christians. We let God carry it awhile, we think, but He doesn’t. We walk awhile and then; we walk some more. And all our transfers are stymied. They don’t go through; we don’t make a complete transfer of our burden. The old man that carried a 300-pound bag of grain on his shoulder while he was riding his mare. And somebody said, why don’t you put the wheat or the grain on the horse’s neck ahead of you. And he said, she got burden enough without carrying that too. I’m a heavy man he said. We carry our burden, and God carries us and our burden. Why not be sensible and roll the burden off on God?

Now, we’ve got to do this at a given time by a firm act of our wills. Why don’t we do that this morning? We came in here trusting, but under a heavy load. Why don’t we just now, roll that burden over on to the Lord? Don’t you want to do that? If you’re walking with the Lord. If you’re a humble person trusting in His grace and you know you’re His child and this promise is to you. Why should we not do that then? Roll our cares upon Him. Let us for a moment now as we pray.

Lord, we’re a company of Christian people. And we have said yes, to thee and no to the world. Thou hast given us eternal life, and we are blessed. But we confess Father that we’re in a deadly, dangerous world. We’re like the tiny rabbits of the woods or like the deer of the forest, we live by staying alert. We exist only because we’re watchful. And this works on us to make us nervous and anxious. It fills us with apprehensions and fears. It isn’t pleasing that it should be so. Thou would look after us. Thou art around us and beneath us, before us and behind us. Help us we pray Thee to cast all our cares on Thee. This morning we would cast on Thee, fear of war. The great of the world point to half a dozen or more dangerous spots where war could leap out like a fire in a moment.

Father, we can’t anticipate and suffer through a war that hasn’t yet happened. Help us to roll the next war on Thee. And then Lord, depressions and losses of jobs; men have deep apprehensions that they don’t talk about. Father, we’re alright now, so we pray Thee, help us to trust Thee for tomorrow and next year and all the years to come. We roll upon Thee industrial fears and domestic fears. Some are worrying about their children. They’re growing up, and they’re worrying about what they’ll do and where they’ll go when they’re no longer under their parental care. My God, Thou hast these thousands of years seen the generation grow up. And parents have wept and grieved over their growing children because they were soon to go out from under their care. My Lord, help us we pray, that we may roll the future of our children over on Thee. Help us to roll over on Thee the fear of disease, polio and all of these devilish things. Save us we pray, from all these fears. We would roll our cares upon Thee. Grant this we pray, for Jesus’s holy sake. Amen.

Tags Care, Comfort, Concern, Fear, Tozer

Messages

Tozer Talks

Post author By pshappard
Post date March 20, 2022

“Holding Fast to Sound Doctrine“

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“Holding Fast to Sound Doctrine”

Author and Pastor A.W. Tozer

March 16, 1958

The book of Titus, the first chapter. The book of Titus. Word by word almost, we’re going over this book. Verse seven, the bishop must be so on. Verse nine, holding fast the faithful word as ye hath been taught, that he may be able by sound doctrine, convince, to exhort, and to convince against errors. For there are many unholy and vain talkers and deceivers, especially they of the circumcision, whose mouths must be stopped; who subvert whole houses, teaching things which they ought not, for filthy lucre’s sake. One of themselves, even a prophet of their own said, the Cretians, Cretians it is here. Cretan, it is in almost every other version and in the dictionary, so chances are, that I will be seeing Cretan, though Cretian it is in this particular version. The Cretians are always liars, evil beasts, slow bellies. This witness is true. Wherefore rebuke them sharply that they may be sound in the faith.

Now in about three or four sentences, I want to relate today’s talk to those which have preceded it. Paul says by the Spirit that bishops, presbyters, that means teachers. And I would assume it includes pastors and others who try to expound the Scripture. That among other qualifications, they must hold fast to the faithful word. They must have ability in sound doctrine, for the dual work of teaching the teachable and silencing the gainsayers. Now, that relates what I am to say from here on, to what I’ve said before, and what Paul wrote, for after all, that’s what I’m trying to do, to make what I’m saying hug very, very tightly to what Paul said before.

Now, we have the expression, there are many unruly. And I honestly am sorry that I have to deal with this, with these words, unruly and vain talkers and deceivers, because I don’t like to. I’d much rather talk over on the happy side of things. But in a world of sin and the devil, a world that is all out of moral focus, where the church is like a flock of sheep in the wilderness surrounded by a wolf even where the wolves put on the garment of dead sheep, and come and run with the flock. And the poor sheep don’t recognize it.

Well, you’ve got to deal with things as they are. Wouldn’t it be comfortable if we never had to deal with ill health? In a world like this, if nobody ever had to pick up the newspaper and read so and so is in the hospital? Wouldn’t it be a comfortable world if nobody ever got sick, if there was no enemy called sickness? Wouldn’t it be comfortable if there was no such thing as known as an accident, if we never picked up a newspaper and read so and so was killed in an accident on the highway or in the factory or on the farm? Wouldn’t it be a comfortable world if we never saw in the newspaper, so and so was held up last week and robbed of $3,000, he was beaten over the head by the gunman, no crime anywhere? Just a world without crime, without accidents, without ill health, without death. It would be a comfortable world, nice place to stay.

And wouldn’t it be ideal if there were no unruly persons? No vain talkers and deceivers anywhere, but the truth just grew without cultivation. No weeds to cut down, no hard ground to break up with a hoe? But we just taught the Word and everybody smiled and received it and began to obey it. Nobody came rushing in upset about what had been done? It would be a comfortable, beautiful world. But you know, that’s not the way it is. And maturity requires that we deal with things as they are, not as we wish they were.

There is a kind of religion of Christianity, a form of it, a weakened, watered form of it, that honestly and I think well-meaning the people are, they try to make Christianity to be just that. They look at the world with one eye, the good eye. They see the sunset, but they never see the storm. They hear the birds sing, but they never see the vultures. They see the roses, but their blind eye will not look at the thorns. They hear the happy laughter, but they will not hear the moans. They see the joyous Christian, but they will not acknowledge the presence of the unruly, the deceiver, and the vain talker. Now, that is spiritual immaturity.

If I were in serious trouble, and I were wanting to send, if I actually got where I had to have prayer help from somebody, I wouldn’t send for a man who had a reputation of never facing reality. I couldn’t because I would be calling a spiritual boy into my presence. I would be calling an immature child into my presence. I wouldn’t want to send for too happy a man if I were in serious difficulty with my family or myself. And if I wanted somebody to consult with and to pray with me, I wouldn’t send for a man if he’s too happy. Because in a world like this, if you’re too happy, you’re immature, because an immature man sees with only one eye. He sees all the happy things, but he doesn’t see the other side. He won’t face it.

Paul wrote from the prison and said, rejoice and again I will say, rejoice. But in the next breath, he said, I write unto you even weeping. And he said, sorrowful, yet always rejoicing. He was a mature man, he saw both sides. And I would want a man who had within him a spiritual buoyancy that came from the engrossment with a resurrected Christ, I would want to come to pray with me if I were in trouble. A man whose heart was buoyant with the inward lift of the life of God, but whose heart was also heavy with the griefs of the world, then, I would have a mature Christian. So, I can’t skip this, unruly and vain talkers. I can’t skip this, it’s here, and maturity requires that we deal with it.

Now, the unruly. Dean Spence of Gloucester, a famous old Bible expositor said this, this unruly person, He said, nominally he’s in the congregation of Christians, but in reality, refusing all obedience, acting for himself, factious and insubordinate. That was the definition of the Dean of Gloucester put on this word, unruly. In the congregation of Christians normally, but in reality, back of the nominal, which is in name, the real have these four counts against him: refusing all obedience, acting for himself, factious and insubordinate.

Now, such as this is self will of course, headstrong and defiant. You know it just occurs to me, that I’ve stopped being defiant. I think there was a time when I was pretty defiant. I know as a boy I always was defiant, and I didn’t care how big the fellow was. I defied him even though I was scared stiff. I defied him. And when I got converted, I carried that spirit of defiance over into the church. And a lot that used to pass for courage, was just defiance. But I find that that’s gone out of me. I don’t defy anybody.

I got a letter from a man, a young man who said he was an undergraduate in a certain college. He said he hesitated to criticize me but felt he had to. Then he wrote me a lone letter taking me apart. And he said, I defy you. Well, it struck me, it had been a long time since I use that expression, I defy you. While the Scripture says that even Michael the Archangel, when disputing with the devil about the body of Moses, didn’t dare say I defy you. He said the Lord rebuke thee.

The defiant man imagines he’s strong, but he’s not, he’s just carnal. And he will allow himself to go on in that way, defiant, headstrong, and self-willed. He’s hurting only himself. Then, such of course scorns the spirit of the flock. We’re members of the flock, and there’s a spirit in the flock. And the unruly defies that spirit, scorns it and refuses the voice of the Shepherd and the under shepherd and set their personal opinion against the pastor and all the godly Christians, and the whole church.

Now, this is the state of heart that brought about the fall of Satan. Satan defied God Almighty, and he defied rules and laws and all the rest. It’s also the state of heart that brought about the fall of Adam. Adam was obviously defiant. And it was the state of heart that brought and kept Israel in constant turmoil into, and kept in constant turmoil. Always backsliding and getting restored again and tearfully bruised and beaten and then repent and be restored, and then get defiant and headstrong and go down again.

The whole history of Israel was like that. And it’s a tragic thing, that even when Messiah came, they defied Him and said, we won’t have this man to rule over us. And what was supposed to be strong, manly courage, was satanic defiance. And their rejection and dispersion throughout the whole world, the ghastly pogroms and and ghettos and gas chambers and massacres and assassinations that have occurred all down the years have been the result of this rejection. And this defiance on the part of Israel caused them to crucify Christ. Well, we all measure ourselves and see that’s all, whether we are in this class or not. Certainly, there are not many here, if any, but if there should be any who measure, I’m talking about this unwillingly. I wish I could skip it. But as a mature teacher of the word, I dare not, for everywhere, these are, just as everywhere there’s sickness.

Now, we come to the vain talkers and deceivers. They’re the restless, uneasy spirits who quote Scripture for their purpose. But they’re empty talkers. And Paul says about them, whose mouths must be stopped. Now, why not let them alone. Those who believe in the letting alone process quote the passage that says let the weeds and the wheat grow together until the harvest. But what they overlook is, that the weeds and the good grain grow together in the field and the field is the world. But he never said let the weeds grow in the church. He said, let the sheep and the wolves live in the world. But he didn’t say let the wolves live in the sheep fold. There’s a difference there. We’ve got to watch it.

But he says if you try to weed out by too strict preaching, if you try to weed out any of the vain, unruly persons and vain-talkers, you’re likely to root out some of the good plants along with them. Let the two grow together until the harvest. Yes, grow together in the world, but not grow together in the church. Paul said, whose mouths must be stopped. Why? Because they subvert whole houses. Now, the word subvert means to overthrow by undermining the morals of and destroying the allegiance or faith of, undermining the morals or destroying the allegiance or the faith. He says the reason these unruly vain-talkers have to be silenced is that they subvert whole houses.

Now let’s talk a little bit about this subverting whole houses. You know what Paul means here is, whole churches. Because you see, in the day of Paul, they hadn’t begun to build church houses yet. And they only met in synagogues, or preached in synagogues, and they met in people’s houses, in upper rooms, wherever they could meet. They hadn’t any church buildings yet. So they met in the houses of the people.

You remember in Acts 12, when James had been slain with a sword, and they took Peter intending to bring him forth and slay him, but it says . . . I remember Dr. Torrey divided that up for preaching like this. But prayer was made, continually of the church, unto God, for him. Isn’t that an outline for a sermon? Prayer was made continually, of the church, unto God, for him. The result was, God sent an angel and turned Peter loose, took him out and set him free. And Peter lit out immediately. Where do you suppose he lit up for? To find the church of course. He knew that they were praying for him where the church met. And that particular church met in the house of Mark, his mother, Mary, the mother of Mark whose surname was John. So, there was a house.

Now, that was a church meeting in the house. And that’s what it meant when Paul says, to the saints in thy house I send my greetings. That’s what he meant when he said, he preached the gospel publicly and from house to house, as we might say, on the street and from church to church.

So, the word “house” is used to mean the church. You see, we’ve got it backwards now. We use the word church to mean the building. And we use the word that belongs to the people and attach it to the building. They use the word that belonged to the building and attached it to the church. But nobody got mad. The Lord didn’t send judgment. There are Christians now, who if we say this is a church here, why, they fly white with shock. They say, don’t you realize that the church is the Body of Christ, and this building is just a building? Why sure we realize that. But brethren, we have one thing that governs us. We make words our servants. We never let words become our masters.

And when I say, the third Presbyterian Church or the First Baptist Church, everybody knows I don’t mean the building. Everybody knows what I mean. And if I’m referring to the building, everybody knows I’m referring to the building. So nobody has ever yet been deceived by our use of the word church to mean a building. It’s an extension of a word. You will say, a motion was made from the floor that such and such be done. Well, what did they mean by that? Why, they mean the people standing on the floor or sitting on chairs from the floor of the House made a motion. They don’t mean the floor made the motion.

When we say that there will be a meeting of the board, we don’t mean there’ll be four pine boards meet in the pastor study. They used to sit around a board, and so the word was extended from the board where they met, to the people that met around the board. It’s the same with a House of Representatives. When it says it has not yet been passed by the House, we don’t mean the building there in Washington, we mean the several hundred men who sit in that House. So let’s not get enslaved to words.

When it says the church which is in thy house. Why, he was explaining when he says, the saints in thy house. And he says, you preach the gospel from house to house. They met in houses and they extended the word to cover the people that met in that house, and we do the same thing. We’ve reversed it and we say church, meaning the the building sometimes. So, the church can mean, according to our English, either the building or the people. And nobody’s ever deceived. But there are semantic slaves who insist upon being accurate in everything, so accurate, that it’s a pain to be around.

Well, now what are you going to do with the unruly, the vain talkers and the deceivers? How can we deactivate them? Is that the word they used to take the trigger out of a bomb so it is harmless? I remember when one of the huge atom or hydrogen bombs didn’t go off. They had to send some fellows up there to pull the stinger out of it. And I’ll tell you, I shook for those fellows for a couple of days until I found they got their job done. Can you imagine going up a high tower to pull the stinger out of an atom bomb. And if you made a little mistake, you’d be instantly atomized, literally atomized. I am not fooling, I mean that. They would be literally made into atoms. You’d never know what has happened. Talk about the cool nerves of a man like that. I would have lost fourteen pounds in perspiration just walking from the building to the tower. But those calm, cool fellows went up there and did it. They pulled the stinger and came back down smiling and said it done.

Well, how do you deactivate these unruly people and vain-talkers and deceivers and make them harmless? Well, the Scripture says you do it by setting forth the Faithful Word and by sound doctrine, convincing and exhorting, so that all the efforts to subvert is harmless. The only perfect defense against error is truth. And the only defense against the big lies is the big truth. Always remember that.

I got a letter from a man in Brazil in reading the Alliance Weekly. He said I fled from Germany under Hitler and from somewhere else under Stalin. And he said I don’t want you ever to write anything with politics in it. I’ve had enough. Well, poor fellow, I don’t blame him, the fellow that had to fly from a devil and a bear and a tiger. I understand that. I think I know what he means. But I will venture to step aside long enough to say this, that if we plain Americans were sufficiently convinced of the soundness of our position, we wouldn’t have anything at all to worry about from the subverters from Moscow. But because a lot of Americans aren’t convinced, they tremble before the impact of the big lie. But do you know how to meet the big lie, with the big truth?

And it’s the same in the church of Christ. You meet the big lie with a big truth, and the only defense against the deceiver is the Spirit of truth. For Paul said, you Christians there in Crete, you look out. And you teachers, you’ve been sound in the faith and careful, hold the Faithful Word because remember Cretians are always liars. That’s a proverb down the years, lie like a Cretian they say. Thomas Hardy has that in one of his books, lie like a Cretian. Well, they said Cretians are always liars. If somebody says, and then he adds, of course the rather awkward expression, always liars, evil beasts, slow bellies, lazy people. But somebody says, don’t you think that was a sweeping generalization?

That’s what I get criticized for so much they say, “but you make sweeping generalizations.” Well, Paul made a sweeping generalization here for a man. He hadn’t studied logic I suppose, so he said, Cretians are always liars, evil beasts, slow bellies. Paul, is it possible that you can indict a whole nation? Yes, it is possible. For don’t you know that there have been great cities that have gone completely rotten. Look at Sodom and Gomorrah. They had gotten so completely rotten that only half a dozen people got out. Is it possible to corrupt a whole population? Look at the flood. They had become so completely corrupt morally, that the only thing God could do with them was to drown them all except eight people that he picked out who had yet a bit of decency left in them.

And it’s possible if you have read the history of England about the time of the Wesleys. You won’t believe what you read. You won’t believe it. The complete corruption of moral standards. At that time, the Wesley’s came forth and began to preach, and historians said saved England from a revolution. There would have been a revolution grown up out of that rot, except they repented. And they did repent under the Wesleys.

When I was a kid, I used to, long toward the Spring, go into apple barrels or apple boxes. We didn’t have refrigeration, so we had to do what we could do to keep our fruit overwinter. And sometimes, a box of apples would rot. And it would rot so completely that if you just stick your hand into it up to there. And boys don’t mind that, so I used to do it and feel around and I’d feel one hard apple and take that out, wash it off. And you can believe this or not. There would be one apple completely sound, not even smell of the rot after it was washed, because there wasn’t a single break in the skin anywhere. It was sound all over and in the midst of that rot, there was one or two maybe, or half a dozen sound apples. I’ve seen that.

So, in a city like Sodom, there were eight people, or a few people, and by the time of the flood, they were eight. And the time Christ came to Israel, there were a few. And in England, there were Susanna, Wesley and Samuel and their family and a few others. So, it’s possible for a whole population to rot. It’s possible for us to learn from each other, accept each other standards, and rot a whole population. That’s why I stand and condemn the beer songs and the cigarette songs. And that’s why I condemn the glorification of evil men and women who happen to look good. They’re made the heroes and heroines of our youth. The result is, we rot a whole generation. It’s possible to do that. They did it in Crete. Somebody did it. And so, in Crete there was a population morally so rotten that the only thing to do with them was to turn on them and rebuke them soundly.

Now, when Christianity is taken into a country where there are low moral standards and corruption abroad, the temptation is, when they get converted, to bring their moral standards over into the church. In some places they stand for that and defend it. Certain missionaries say, not of our society, they say they preach the gospel to an old tribal chief with nine wives. They say, we don’t interfere with his cultural standards. That’s nine wives, that’s part of his culture. Concubinage belongs to his culture. Therefore, we’re not going to to interfere with his culture. We’re just preaching Christ to him. That wasn’t Paul’s idea. In Japan, some of them say, we know that our Japanese Christians bow to the Shinto shrines, but it’s purely their culture. We can’t interfere with their culture. Paul did. Paul said, Christianity comes with two things, sound doctrine and sound morals, and I don’t believe you’re sound until you have both. Therefore, rebuke them sharply. There’s only one standard for Christianity, whether it’s in the Baliem Valley or in Boston. There is only one standard, whether it’s in cultured, sophisticated England or over in Russia. Only one standard, the standard of Christ. We won’t bother customs. If they wear their hair long, we let them wear it long. They wear it short, let them wear it short. Whatever kind of clothes they wear, we won’t bother that. There are various mores as they call it. Don’t bother those. It is none of our business. But when it comes to moral questions, we do bother them. Because if we don’t, we’re not preaching the Word and we’re not carrying out the commission for which we send out our missionaries and preachers.

Cretians are always liars and slow bellies and evil beasts he said, and when they get converted and come into the church, they come in carrying a lot of that with them. He said, rebuke them soundly and sharply, and teach them and exhort them so they give up all that.

Well, when Paul said sound in faith, always remember this, all men orthodox in belief and pure in conduct. That was orthodoxy in Paul’s concept. Orthodox in belief and pure in conduct, and the one springs out of the other, and you can’t separate the two. And if you only hold an orthodox creed that does not result in a purity of conduct, then your creed isn’t orthodox.

So, the ideal is and with this I close. The ideal is not to accept arbitrary moral standards. You shall eat this. You shan’t eat this. You shall wear this. You shan’t wear this. Those are arbitrary and they are things that perish where they use it. You shall do this this day. You shall not do it that day, perish with the using. Paul said, don’t accept those. Read, the second of Colossians. Don’t let anybody, anybody put down on you any arbitrary rules at all, but stay by what the Bible says. Let no man judge you in meat or drink or in respect of a holy day or the new moon or the Sabbath which are but a shadow of things to come, for the body is of Christ. Let no man beguile you of your reward and voluntary humility and worshipping of angels intruding into those things which they have not seen, vainly puffed up by their fleshly mind. They’re not holding the Head, Jesus Christ, from whom all the body by joints and bands of nourishment minister and knit. Wherefore if ye be dead with Christ from the rudiments of the world, why, as though living in the world are ye subject to ordinances? We don’t allow anybody to screw down on our Christianity any rules of conduct that aren’t in the book. The ideal is to accept no arbitrary moral standards, but let the truth purify us.

Now, you are clean through the word which I’ve spoken unto you. Christ is the truth and Christ is holiness incarnate. And we are under obligation to be a disciple of His in belief and practice, and then worship in spirit and in truth. That’s the ideal. So, Paul said, that’s the thing to do. Rebuke them sharply that they may be sound in the faith and sound in the faith Paul meant, sound in their beliefs and sound in their conduct. That’s wonderful to me.

Right in the middle of a rotten city like Chicago, God can feel around and find some apples that are just as shiny and red-cheeked and sound, all by the wonderful, wonderful keeping power of God. All by the wonderful keeping power of God, we drive their streets, we ride their buses, we work for them, we buy from them, we sell to them. We keep their books. We drive their trucks. We live in the world and Paul said, you can’t escape that. But all the time we’re with them, we’re like a sound apple in the midst of a rotten barrel. We can be kept by the power of God through faith unto salvation ready to be revealed in the last time and never even smell of the world around about us. That’s wonderful, isn’t it? And within the church of Christ there should be no rot. The church of Christ should be a place where every apple is sound and every Christian is pure. And if they’re not Paul said, sharply rebuke them and tell them they’ve got to be sound in their faith and practice if they are going to be Christians. Amen. All right.

Tags Doctrine, Tozer

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Tozer Talks

Post author By pshappard
Post date March 13, 2022

“Seeking God Through His Word“

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“Seeking God Through His Word”

Author and Pastor A.W. Tozer

August 31, 1958

But avoid foolish questions, and genealogies, and contentions, and strivings about the law; for they are unprofitable and vain. A man that is an heretic after the first and second admonition, reject. Knowing that he that is such is subverted, and sinneth, being condemned of himself. When I shall send Artemas unto thee or Tychicus, be diligent to come unto me to Nicopolis for I have determined there to winter. Bring Zenas the lawyer and Apollos on their journey diligently that nothing be wanting unto them and let ours, I think if I remember my Bible, this is the only place in the New Testament this occurs. Ours, let ours also learn to maintain good works for necessary uses, that they may not unfruitful. All that are with me salute thee. Greet them that love us in the faith. Grace be with you all. Amen.

He said, avoid foolish questions and genealogies and contentions and strivings about the law. There used to be a very fine writer who wrote for the Chicago Daily News. It was syndicated, but we had it here in the Chicago Daily News. I think he had gotten his start with the News. His name was Howard O’Brien, H.V. O’Brien. He was also a critic, literary and theatrical critic. He was a man of the world. He was a very fine man. He was kind. One time, a show came to the city called Lysistrata. Written as I remember by Aristophanes, the old Greek writer. And I didn’t go to see it of course. I haven’t seen a show since I was converted as I remember ever. I don’t even believe in them in church to say nothing of going to theater to see them.

But O’Brien started out his criticism of this play, Lysistrata, by saying this. I don’t remember anything else he said, but I do remember this. He said it is rather depressing to go and see Lysistrata and learn that nobody has thought of a new joke in 3000 years. They were still rehashing the same old jokes that Aristophanes had thought up, if he thought them back there nearly 1000 years, several hundred years before Christ.

Now, I thought of that when I hear these words of Paul, avoid foolish questions. It is rather depressing to know that people haven’t mended their ways any in 2000 years. Paul wrote this nearly 1900 years ago, and we still have these people with us. Human nature hasn’t changed. Nothing’s been able to change human nature, nothing except the grace of God. The problems of debate and argument are still with us.

Our brother Knight and I were discussing religious journalism. And we rather agreed that a great many magazines are running, and running well, by the simple gadget of introducing argumentative articles; to raise contention and get people arguing and writing in angry letters and then subscribing in order to read what else there might be. But it’s simply foolish questions. They’re to a large extent genealogies and contentions and strivings about the law. We have them today. Churches are filled with them. I think we have a minimum here, but I would not be so naive as to think we don’t have any. He said avoid foolish questions. That is, he didn’t say, avoid asking foolish questions. That’s not what the word question means, but it’s proposition, something to debate. That’s what the word question means, and genealogies then he said.

Now the Jews had the biblical records, and those biblical records were very important to them; very important to you and me. Because, when the Messiah came, He had to be born of the seed of Abraham. But not only of Abraham, He had to be born of Isaac. For in Isaac shall thy seed befall. Not only Isaac, but He had to come through Jacob. And not only Jacob, but He had to come through, what was that son of Jacob, and then on down through David and on down the line. The genealogies were very important. God was keeping Israel separated, and they had to have their family tree, their records. Talk about birth certificates. We think that this is a modern invention, and that there are people now living that didn’t have birth certificates when they were born. I didn’t. I had to have my father after I became a grown man. I had my father swear to the fact that I’d been born. And he did and had it notarized.

But birth certificates were issued back in the days of the fathers, way back there. I don’t know that they handed them to you, but they put your record down. For instance, the sons of Joseph after their families were Manasseh and Ephraim. Of the sons of Manasseh: of Machir, the family of the Machirites: and Machir begat Gilead: of Gilead come the family of the Gileadites. These are the sons of Gilead. And so on down the line, page after page after page of these genealogies. They had to be there so that when a man came saying, I am Christ, they could go to the records and see whether he could prove that he came of the seed of David, and of the seed of Nathan, not Solomon, and of the seed of Jacob and Isaac and Abraham. So they were very important.

But you know, religious people can’t let things alone. So, the Jews abuse these genealogies. In order to give them something to do, they began to work with them, and give meanings never intended. Count the letters and then use them for puzzles sort of, and crossword puzzles and work on them and supply fanciful interpretations and turn them into allegory. Abraham begat Isaac begat Jacob. And Jacob begat Ephraim. Now, what does that mean in its deeper meaning? So, they went deeper and they found by counting the letters Abraham, and then the letters Jacob, and subtracting and adding, they managed to get some kind of a weird old wife’s tale going about these genealogies. And one brother said, this had eaten the heart out of Judaism. It had eaten the heart out of Judaism. It was this kind of thing Christ fought when He appeared.

Now, the Talmud had encouraged that. The Talmud is you know, was a commentary several times bigger than the Bible itself, a commentary on the Bible, written by the rabbis. It had it start, oh, maybe the time of Ezra, and finished along maybe 400 or 500 A.D., and they still have it. I have read, I’ve not ,I can’t say I’ve read the Talmud, but I can say, I have read in the Talmud. I’ve examined it and searched into it to see how, what it means when he says these genealogies and foolish questions.

Well, they’re unprofitable and vain. And always they are the proof of a juvenile mind. I remember when I was a young preacher, I was walking through, past the town square in a little town in West Virginia. And here, gathered sitting around chewing tobacco and spitting on the sidewalk, whittling, were a group of old patriarchs. And they saw me and knew I was a minister. And so, they thumbed me over, come over here. I went over. And they propounded to me this question. They said, Reverend, would you give us an answer to this question? What is man?

Well, of course I didn’t give them an answer. I said the first thing like Truman usually does that popped in my head. And I said, oh, man’s a two-legged animal and turned my back. And as I left, they said, well, God’s a two-legged animal for he made man in His image. And of course, both my answer and their parting shot were too foolish to be recorded. But they spent their lifetime, now here they were old, bearded and bald fellows, ready soon to die; and to be called before the Judge of all the earth, to give an account of the deeds done in the body. And it was either heaven or hell for them.

And they sat around and chewed and smoked and whittled and argued endlessly over the question, What is man? And you know, that question, they say, that’s Biblical. David said, what is man? But do you notice how David worded it? David said, what is man that Thou art mindful of him? He said, O God, who am I that you should love me? What a difference? What a difference, careless men who have no thought of God, sitting around arguing on the technical question, what is man and the loving, reverent worshipful man looking at the stars and say, what is man that Thou shouldst love him? All the difference in the world? For David was not propounding a shallow philosophical question. He was exclaiming, O God, how could you love me?

Well, the juvenile mind is always ready. No matter what kind of head it’s in, and I apologize to all serious-minded young people when I say the juvenile mind. The fact that you’re juvenile in years doesn’t mean you need to be infantile in your mentality. A lot of young people are mighty serious-minded, so I am not reflecting on being a juvenile. Everybody is at some time. We older folk may have a twinge of jealousy we’re not still so young. But the point is the juvenile man, the careless, irresponsible mind, I mean, and a shallow religious curiosity, springing out of a basic moral insincerity.

The more I study the human scene and read the Word and pray, the more I am convinced that one thing everybody has to have, that will ever get converted, is sincerity. You may be so sinful; it may be as black as the blackest pit of hell. He may be as corrupt as a maggot infested pool. But if he’s sincere five minutes in the presence of God, he can be delivered.

There isn’t anything the blood of Jesus Christ can’t cleanse from. There isn’t anything God won’t forgive. It’s insincerity that curses mankind. And these people with their foolish questions in genealogy, simply were basically insincere. And God can’t save a man no matter if he’s a man of high morals. God can’t save him if he’s insincere. And no matter how deep a man is, I repeat, if a man is sincere and looks to Jesus Christ to can be converted.

Now, there’s only one motive, one motive that God approves or accepts. There’s only one motive for approaching the Scriptures. And I will break that motive down into four, though it’s really one. The motive is to seek reverently to discover the will of God, to seek holiness of heart and life, to seek to know Christ intimately, and to learn how to instruct others to do the same.

That’s the only reason, the only reason I have for going to the Scriptures. If I go to the Scriptures to try to find the Sputnik, I am guilty of foolish and unprofitable questions which can only be vain at last. If I go to the Bible to find, with reverence and prayer, how I can do the will of God and be holy, then God will honor me and accept me as a sincere man. If I’m not a good man, at least a sincere man, and He’ll get busy making you good after a while, to seek to know Christ and to learn how He can help us.

Now, this unprofitable business of seeking foolish questions, answers to foolish questions and genealogies and all the rest, have eaten the heart out of Judaism that Paul sought to protect the church from. And I’ve done it all down these years. Maybe that’s why false teaching has never got to start in this church. Anybody came in, it never got rooted.

I remember maybe it was 20 years ago or 22 years ago that somebody got British Israelism, somebody began to talk about it. I think some old lady got into the prayer band. Somebody came and tipped me off. I remember who it was. I think she’s here this morning. Miss Sandra, excuse me for telling on you. She told me, she said, you know some people here are beginning to believe British Israelism, and I said, thank you for letting me know.

So I went down to their office and I bought a box full of their books, and I read them. And I announced a sermon called “Faith of our Faddist.” Moodys picked it up and advertised it for me over the radio. They thought it was kind of interesting. And I preached on that, British Israelism, a religious fad. That killed that so dead I’ve never heard of it since. That’s more than 20 years ago, and I’ve never heard of it since. It perished and was buried and gone.

I wonder if the reason we’ve been so blessedly free from crackpots and weirdies and odd balls and all the rest; I wonder if it might be because with all of our faults, we’ve tried to be basically sincere. And tried to place the emphasis on that where the Bible places it, upon the need to know the will of God and do it, and the need to desire holiness of heart and the righteousness of life. I wonder if that could be one of the reasons God in His goodness has helped us on that.

Now, 1 Timothy 1:4, Paul tells Timothy about that same thing. He says, neither give heed to fables and endless genealogies, which minister questions rather than godly edifying which is in faith. Now, the end of the commandment is love out of a pure heart and of a good conscience and faith unfeigned. Notice, the whole purpose of the Bible, is love out of a pure heart, a good conscious, and faith unfeigned. From which some having swerved aside, have turned unto vain jangling, desiring to be teachers of the law, understanding neither what they say nor whereof they affirm.

Paul was determined he was not going to allow any neat little tricks of interpretation to ensnare his people. He wanted them to be a holy people. And you know you’ve got to watch, got to watch the books you read, you’ve got to watch what you hear over the radio. Even from good stations, you’ve got to watch. Because there are teachers who are busy. They’re not false teachers exactly, they’re simply teachers who are trying to twist out of responsibility. For instance, Psalm 1, blessed is the man that walks not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor stands in the way of sinners nor sitteth in the seat of the scornful. But his delight is in the law of the Lord and in His law doth he meditate day and night. You know what our teachers tell us about that Psalm? They tell us, some of them, that that Psalm, is a picture of Jesus Christ. The Psalms are messianic and that’s the introductory Psalm, therefore that Psalm is a picture of Jesus Christ.

And you know what that interpretation does? It instantly relieves me of all responsibility. If that pictures Jesus Christ, then I don’t come in on that at all. And isn’t my business to see to it that I walk not in the way of the sinner or the counsel of the ungodly, nor stand in sinners’ way, nor sit in a scornful seat. If I can make that to describe Jesus, I’m perfectly willing to say, oh sure that pictures Jesus. And so I’m free. I can kick up my heels and as Brown says, raise hell on the way to heaven.

And then 1 Corinthians 13, that wonderful, terrible chapter that gives me more trouble than any other chapter in the entire Bible probably, Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels and have not love, I’ve become a sounding brass and tinkling cymbal. You know what our teachers do with this, some of them, they say this describes Jesus. So, let it describe Jesus, and you and I have no obligation toward it at all. Well, of course, the terrible snare lies in this, that Jesus Christ is described in Psalm 1, and He is described in 1 Corinthians 13. In as much as anytime you describe a holy man, you describe Jesus, for He was and is a Holy Man.

But 1 Corinthians 13, was never written as a description of Jesus. It was written to show how Christians ought to be. And until we Christians have done everything that we know how in prayer and surrender and faith and obedience, to have this kind of love in our own hearts, we have been simply tricked by this chapter. Imagine, if you will, a man who has the gift of tongues and the gift of prophecy and understands all biblical mysteries and has all knowledge and has such faith that He can move mountains and bestows his good to feed the poor. He’s so generous, he’s the talk of the town. And though he’s willing to give his body to be burned as a martyr. And still he can do all of this and still have a bad motive in it, and have not love and it will profit him nothing.

A mighty easy way to get rid of this, turn it over to Jesus Christ, just the way they got over the Sermon on the Mount, by giving that to the Millennium, saying that’s the charter for the Millennium. That’s the kingdom constitution. And when Jesus institutes the Millennium, that will be the constitution. Well, my brethren, I don’t want to be abusive. I want to be kind, but I’ll tell you this, I can’t bring myself to be so insincere as all that. I believe that this means me and I’m going to take it to myself and I’m going to struggle and labor and pray that these passages may describe me as well as describing Jesus Christ our Lord.

Now, he says in verse ten, a man that is an heretic reject. Here’s a strange thing and a solemn thing about this word heretic. It doesn’t mean what it means now. Now, a heretic is a false teacher. He is somebody who does not teach the truth. By picking out certain things and denying certain other things, he builds a fabric of untruth and teaches that. That is a heretic, as understood in our day. That is the meaning in church history. But that is not the meaning of the word as Paul used it.

Anybody who knows the Greek or has access to sources where he can learn what the Greek means, knows this is not what is meant. By the word heretic here, he meant not a false teacher, but a schismatic. That is, somebody or anybody who for any reason, is resentful and offended or has his feelings hurt, who tends to get silent and withdraw from communion and sometimes gather a few malcontents around him and have a little group of quiet rebels who don’t go along with the crowd or the other Christians. They’re not teaching false doctrine, they’re schismatics.

A man that is a schismatic; a man that is a divider; a man that is a troublemaker; a man that is an injurious critic, reject. But the word reject here means shun or avoid. And of course, it is after a first and second admonition. You don’t just pick a man up and throw him out. But after you have given him a quiet admonition and maybe a second one. After that, shun him and avoid him the Scripture says. That’s in harmony with the words of Jesus in Matthew 18, where he tells us that if people do what they shouldn’t do, try to be reconciled to them. And if they won’t listen, go to them again with some others. And after that, let them be publicans and sinners.

Well, now Paul says a man that is an heretic, after you’ve done what you can for him. That is, a man who is a schismatic, a troublemaker. Up to now, I’ve never split anything except a bit of wood when I was a boy. And I hope I’ll be able to run my race as a obscure Christian minister, without dividing the children of God in any way. But I wouldn’t hesitate to divide them if I knew it meant a matter of doctrine or moral.

I believe that there may come a time in the future when God will send somebody with an axe to split the Christendom wide open; line the men up on one side and the boys on the other and find out who the men are. I believe that. But in the meantime, to be a schismatic, to out of resentfulness or offence or hurt feelings, withdraw, cease to testify, stop praying, say little, but what you say, all on the side of the devil and against the local church. That’s what Paul had in mind. And sometimes if a man like that was influential enough, he managed to get a group of malcontents around him and he started another church. A great many of the churches started in this country were started that way.

Well, I never split one but I help bring two back together again. Some of you old timers remember that, that this church had split before I came here? About 32 years ago, it had split. And part of them had gone down here and part of them stayed here and had two churches. And after I’d been here about two years, they all came back together again. They threw their arms around each other and made up and turned the old building down there over to a garage. And we’ve got some of your right here now that belonged to that old crowd.

So, it’s good to do it all be over on the other side, not a schismatic and divider, but a healer and a bringer together. No, I don’t think I did that. So don’t think I’m boasting here now. It just happened. I was here when it happened. I didn’t bring them together. They just came together. He says, knowing that these subverters and schismatics, knowing that he, that is, such is subverted and sinneth, being self-condemned.

Then, to conclude, Paul instructs Titus. Remember he had left Titus at Crete that he might organize the church and appoint elders, get everything straightened around there. It was rather a mixed-up, confused church and Paul wanted order there. Always like Wesley and that he wanted order, so we got order there. And he says in verse 13, something that I, reminded me last Sunday night. He said, brings Zenas the lawyer and Apollos on their journey diligently, that nothing be wanting unto them. Zenas and Apollos were, Zenas was a lawyer who had turned missionary and the Apollos was a great orator who had turned missionary.

And these two men were on their journey somewhere, and he said, now when they come by Crete on their way, have a shower for them. And give them, help them diligently that nothing they wanting for them. He said see to it. And I thought of last Sunday night when we and the time before that, times before that. Next Wednesday, when they have a shower on Peggy Argyle. Receive these and send them diligently on their way and see that there’s nothing wanting unto them. That kind of ties in with the old Pauline method of doing things and I like it.

And I don’t know what the Lord may do with me in old age if I live to be old. But I remember what he said to Peter, he said, when I was young, thou didst gird thyself and do what you please. But when you get old, somebody else will gird you. You’ll have to do some things you don’t like. Probably, the Lord to finally humble me and prepare me for heaven will let me be a member of a church somewhere that does everything I don’t like in order to humble me. But I hope one thing he doesn’t do, I hope He never lets me get into a church where they never send out a missionary or have a shower on anybody to send them fruitfully on their way. Bring Zenas and Apollos on their journey diligently he said. Nothing be wanting unto them.

Then verse fourteen, notice, and let ours also learn to maintain good works that profess an honest trade in order that for necessary uses, in order that they may be not unfruitful. Do you know what Paul had in mind here? He had in mind these showers and this preparation of missionaries. He said, send them out well-equipped and in case any of you can’t give anything, get a job, he said, inorder that you’ll have some money to take care of things like this, actually. This dear old man of God, I guess he forgot people have to live, because he tied it right in with Zenas and Apollos and their missionary journey and said, profess honest trade and get a job in order that you might have an income so that you be not unfruitful and you can do this kind of thing.

Well, that was Paul. And he then finally in verse fourteen, leaves us with, maintain good works. Paul couldn’t stand idleness. And Paul couldn’t stand irresponsibility. He couldn’t stand slothfulness nor unfruitfulness. When Paul looked at a tree and there was no fruit on it, his heart ached. He wanted fruit on that tree. He looked at a Christian who was just twiddling his thumbs and immediately he sat down and wrote a stiff epistle and said, get up and get going and get a job and go to work and let the word of God tee you off. Let it get you moving, get you going. Don’t simply sit in an ivory tower and be a Christian in your head. Get down to business. Gear into life and be useful and don’t be unfruitful. I think it’s a good way to leave us.

Then he says grace be unto you. Thank God for this old man. Grace be unto to you all. They say he was a Georgian, that he was a native of Atlanta. But anyway he closes his passage, grace be with you all. And incidentally, the students, who make it their life work the dig into such things, say that Elizabethan English, you all, was a pure Elizabethan phrase. And the reason that is used in the south is, that several hundred years ago, people came there from England, lived in the mountains and country sections and were insulated somewhat and kept the pure language of old England. And so when a man comes up and says, well God bless you all, come back, he’s speaking Elizabethan English. We kid about it and say he has a southern accent, but maybe it’s us that had the accent and they then have the pure Elizabethan. Let’s not be so sure of ourselves. Anyway, both are nice. So, it’s alright.

All that are with me salute thee. What a gathering it’s going to be. There, there’s going to be Tychicus who is a faithful and beloved brother, Zenas the lawyer turned missionary, Apollos the orator turned missionary, Paul and Titus and the rest of the brethren says, everybody salutes you. Greet them all in love and faith. Grace be with you all. Amen.

I love it myself. I love this old book more now than I ever did in all my life; wonderful old book. Just turn across the page and you run unto Epaphras, Marcus and Aristarchus and Demas and Lucas. All these brethren, we’re going to see them there all right in that day. There’s no question about their being there. The only question is, will we be? They’ve made it. Their journey’s ended. They’ve laid down their burden. They’ve picked up, maybe not their crown yet, but at least they’re there. We’re still traveling on the way.

In the John Bunyan’s great classic allegory, Pilgrims Progress, Pilgrim and some of the others, the Christian and some of the others swam across the river. Old Christian almost sinks, and Hopeful says, I found a sandbar, come on, and pulls you over onto the sand and pretty soon they come up on the other side. And there is the great gate of the city Celestial. And up before that gate, struts a self-important cocky fellow, knocks at the door and says, well, open up, I’m here. And the old man who handles the door says, where’s your proof? Well, I don’t have any, he said. Where’s your script? And to Bunyan that meant the inner witness. He said, where is your witness? Well, he didn’t have any. He said all right, go down. And then Bunyan closed his great book with these awful words. And then I perceive there is a way to hell from the gate of heaven. Terrible. Old Calvin, Puritan. The Calvinists nowadays wouldn’t accept that. They’d edit that out, or at least sluff it over. He said, I perceive there was a way to hell from the gate of heaven, and closed His book.

Brethren, don’t take yourself for granted. The blood cleanses and God delivers and wherever there is sincerity and humility and faith, God will build a wall around you and protect you from everything. He’ll send His angels to guard thee and shall bear thee up in their hands, lest thou dash thy foot against a stone.. As soon as you start taking yourself for granted, look out. Aristarchus and Demas and Apollos and Zenas, they’re over there. You and I aren’t there yet.

I’m not opening the question of eternal security here. I’m only saying, let’s be awfully sure we’re there, we’re in the grace of God. That we have the grace of God indeed and not only imagine we have. Let’s be awfully sure about that. For a lot of people traveled the Christian highway that have not the credentials in their hearts. They only think they have. And they that go from the gate of heaven to hell, are not those who have the credentials. That’s not the point and lost them. No. They are those who never had them but only thought they did.

And maybe that some of you have gotten religion on your Sunday school teachers’ reputation. Or you’ve gone with the crowd and you moved along with your bunch. That’s not harmful. It’s alright, I suppose. But be awfully sure each of you. And I pray that you young people who are going off to schools, don’t live on the enthusiasm generated by youth. Don’t take anything for granted. See to it that the blood cleanses and the Holy Ghost renews and that God has accepted you and that you’ve got the witness within. For there’s a way to hell from the gate of heaven.

Goodbye, Paul. We’ll be back to see again next Sunday. No, later, because you can’t preach without Paul. There’s no use. The Lord made him so important in the book, that you start preaching in the book of Numbers and you’ve got to get to Paul pretty soon. God gave him such a place, Paul and David. David in the Old Testament, Paul in the New, what a pair they make. I never asked anybody for his signature, his autograph, so help me in my lifetime. I’ve autographed a good many hundred things, but I never ask anybody for one. Outside of being on a check, it wouldn’t be of any value to me. And I don’t get many of them. But I’ll say this, there are two men I want to meet. I don’t want to go up and meet them as equals. I just want to be permitted to stand off at a little distance and gaze at them with love and wonder, David and Paul, marvelous old brethren.

Paul, a man of God who couldn’t stand a tree that didn’t bear fruit. David, the man of God with his homemade harp, who looked up with tears and said, what is man that Thou art mindful of him. I want to meet them both. And you know what? I’ve got a real deep feeling I’m going to do it one of these times. For the God, the God Eternal has taken all my sins away. And David’s royal fountain has delivered me from all the weights that would take me down there. I hope you can say the same. I trust you can. God bless you.

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Post author By pshappard
Post date March 6, 2022

“The Blessed Hope of Christ’s Coming“

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“The Blessed Hope of Christ’s Coming”

Author and Pastor A.W. Tozer

July 6, 1958

We are continuing in the book of Titus, the second chapter of the book of Titus. The man of God says, for the grace of God, that bringeth salvation to all men hath appeared. Teaching us that denying ungodliness and worldly lusts, we should live soberly, righteously, and godly in this present world. Looking for that blessed hope and the glorious appearing of the great God and our Savior Jesus Christ. Who gave Himself for us, that He might redeem us from all iniquity and purify unto Himself a peculiar people, zealous of good works.

Now, I have on a previous occasion dealt with some care with that, denying ungodliness and worldly lusts, and living soberly and righteously and godly in this present world. Now, looking for that blessed hope and the glorious appearing of the Great God and of our Savior, Jesus Christ. Those words will engage our attention for a brief time.

Now, if you will note here, and it’s always well to follow punctuation carefully in our King James Version, and not break into verses without regard to punctuation. If you will notice what it says here. That the grace of God teaches us to live–looking. It teaches us to live. Of course, there are some adverbs coming in between, soberly, righteously, godly, and the phrase, in this present world. But, it doesn’t in anywise destroy the force of the passage, teaching us that we should live–looking.

Now, I want to just talk about that a little bit, that the Christian lives–looking. That is, the Christian life is a joyous anticipation. Everybody knows what anticipation does for human life. If you did not have some hope of something you planned to do, somebody you hope to see, some advance you hope to make, your life could soon level down to a drab, colorless existence that wouldn’t be worth the living. If you were to take joyous anticipation out of the hearts of men, the suicides in the world would be so many, that literally there would not be enough technical help to dispose of the dead. We must have something to look forward to. We should live, looking, says the Holy Spirit here to Christians. We Christians should live–looking.

Now what is it that a Christian looks forward to? A Christian looks forward to what the Bible calls, the blessed hope, which is the glorious appearing of the great God and our Savior Jesus Christ. Now this is the epiphany that the churches talk about the shining forth, used for the coming up of the sun, and used also for the coming of Jesus Christ to the world. Used of His first manifestation to the world and also used of His second. The churches, the ritualistic churches that follow the church calendar, have certain times when they celebrate the Epiphany, the shining forth, the coming, the appearance of Jesus Christ our Lord.

And the Bible also talks about another epiphany, a shining forth. The two of them are found together in the Books of Timothy. Paul wrote Titus, from which the text is taken; he also wrote First and Second Timothy. And here’s what he says, God, who has called us, saved us and called us with a holy calling, not according to our works, but according to His own purpose and grace, which was given us in Christ Jesus before the world began. But is now made manifest by the appearing of our Savior, Jesus Christ, who hath abolished death, and hath brought life and immortality to light through the gospel, there, after an eternal purpose.

I want you to understand I’ve said this and continue to say it because it is a very basic spiritual truth, that the Bible-taught Christian is not an orphan. He is not somebody who by some accident has happened upon a book and is now a Christian. He is a part of an eternal purpose which God purposed in Christ Jesus before the world began. And this eternal purpose says, the Man of God is now made manifest by the appearing of our Savior, Jesus Christ, who hath abolished death and hath brought life and immortality to light through the gospel.

Now, those are all past tense expressions. That’s something that has in our modern English, has been done. Now, if you have the same kind of Bible I have of columns, just cast your eye up, just a quarter of a page and you will read these words, where the man of God says, same man writing in a different letter, to the same man. I give thee charge in the sight of God, who quickeneth all things, and before Jesus Christ, who before Pontius Pilate, witnessed a good confession. I give thee charge that thou keep His commandment without spot, unrebukable until the appearing of our Lord Jesus Christ, which in His times He shall show. Who, is the blessed and only Potentate, the King of Kings and Lord of Lords. Who only hath immortality, dwelling in the light which no man can approach unto, whom no man hath seen or can see, to whom be honor and power everlasting. Amen. Now, below, he has brought life and immortality to the light through the appearing of Jesus Christ our Lord. That’s one. He will show in His own times, at the appearing of the Lord Jesus Christ, who only hath immortality dwelling in life.

Now, there we have the two epiphanies, the two shinings forth set before us in sharp, beautiful contrast, the one to the other. We should live–looking. And what are the directions, for there is not one, but there are two. What are the directions that a Christian should look in his living?

Well, at our communion services, we often quote, in fact, almost always quote, somewhere, we do show forth His death till He come. A Christian is one who deeply appreciates the past for what has been done, but who does not anchor to the past knowing that the past is a prelude to the future. And therefore, his gaze is sometimes back for reassurance, and sometimes forward in happy anticipation. When he looks back, he sees the Epiphany, the shining forth of Jesus Christ, to be born of a virgin, to suffer under Pontius Pilate, to be crucified, dead and buried, to rise again from the dead the third day, to go to the right hand of God the Father Almighty to be seated there at that right hand ever making intercession for His own

That’s the past, but then we tear our eyes from the past and gaze into the future. So that time when He shall appear, and there shall be another world epiphany, when He shall be shown forth to the world as the Potentate and King, the only Potentate, the only King. The way they’re getting rid of Kings these days, it looks to me as if we were kind of cleaning house for the coming of the Lord. There was a day when we had so many kings, every third fellow you would meet in Europe, either was a king or was related to one. But now, either they aren’t kings or they’re ashamed to admit they’re related to them. We don’t have many kings left, very many potentates left, nor plenipotentiaries.

I remember when we had a confluence of big shots, political big shots come to this country some years ago. I listened on the radio to the speeches and the introductions and they talked about the plenipotentiaries and potentates. Well, the plenipotentiaries and potentates are sort of petering out. And we don’t have so many of them anymore, because the Lord is bringing us to a time when it shall be seen who is the only potentate who only hath immortality; who is King of Kings and Lord of Lords who dwells in the light which no man can approach unto, to Whom be glory and honor everlasting.

Now, even if we should die, yet, we will see this Epiphany, this awaited revelation. Because in 1 Thessalonians 4, notice that again. We’re just reading from the Bible itself. Paul says, for if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, and all churches do believe that Jesus died and rose again, or they’re not churches. Even so, them also which sleep in Jesus will God bring with Him. For this, we say unto you by the Word of the Lord, that we which are alive and remain unto the coming of the Lord, shall not go before them which are asleep. For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout and with the voice of the archangel. And the trump of God and the dead in Christ shall rise first. Then, we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so shall we ever be with the Lord.

Isn’t it rather ironical that we reserve the reading of passages like this for funerals? Isn’t it rather a cynical twist of the human mind, or of the devil, himself that we should have taken all such beautiful passages as say, John 14? Let not your heart be troubled. Ye believe in God, believe also in me, that we should take these and reserve them almost exclusively for funerals.

My dear little old mother was a great lover of flowers. She raised them and had flowers every little spot where a flower could grow she had flowers. But she insisted that they grow, that they have their roots in the ground. When they were cut and put on a table, she shied away from them. The reason being, she had gone to so many funerals, and had seen so many cut flowers, and it smelled the heady fragrance of so many bouquets for the dead, that she instinctively associated the smell of cut flowers with the coffin. So, Mother didn’t care for cut flowers. She liked the kind that grew in the ground. They reminded her of sunshine and rain and wind and clouds and birdsong and beauty. Whereas cut flowers reminded her of the dead.

And we find the same thing true of such a delightful passage as this, let not your heart be troubled. There’s Jesus cheering up his people. And isn’t it unfortunate that we have relegated this to the dead with the cut flowers, and the silent tread, and the sonorous, solemn tone of the minister. Isn’t it too bad that we can’t see that this is the Lord calling His people to look forward with anticipation to the Father’s house and the many mansions? So it is with the Thessalonian passage here. For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again. Soon as you start to read that, you look around for the coffin. And you wonder whether, who died and how you got at the funeral without knowing it?

Well, the simple truth is, this is not for funerals only. This is the word of the Lord for all of his people, all of the time. I tell you again. I’ve said this many times. In fact, I don’t say anything anymore that I haven’t said many times before. But I tell you again, that there are lots of worse things than dying. Dying is one of the easiest things possible, and one of the most delightful for a Christian, so that we ought not to associate all the hopeful promises of the Lord with dying, and dying with something we don’t want to do. The Lord says, that we are to live, looking. That is, there’s anticipation there. What do we anticipate, or rather, who is it that we anticipate? Well, he says, the great God and Savior, Jesus Christ our Lord. You know, the great God and Savior, Jesus Christ. That Christ is God is taught here. Do you hear me, that Christ is God is taught here, this is the book of God. And that Christ is God is taught in that book all through that book.

Now, there are some who consider that Christ is not God. That He is only a very, extremely good man. Oh, nearly as good as Albert Schweitzer, but that He is a very good man. Not as wise as Albert, because He didn’t know of course how to perform operations and cure up the yaws by an injection of penicillin, but they’re willing to put Him along at least with Albert Schweitzer, but He is not God.

My brethren, why can’t we be honest with ourselves. I have a great deal more respect for an out and out unbeliever who stands up and smiles and says, I respect your faith, but I don’t own it. I don’t have it. That can say with Emerson, why should the robe on him allure which I could not on me endure? He said, I like a church; I like a cowl; I love a prophet of the soul; Yet not for all his faith can see, would I that cowled churchman be. Why should the vest on him alure, Which I could not on me endure? I confess I’m modernizing the English, but that’s it generally.

And the man said, now, I respect your right to believe. I don’t care what you believe, but I just don’t believe it. I respect that man. I could shake hands with him and live alongside of him and borrow his hose and lend him my grass cutter. I have no trouble with him and be perfectly tolerant, and he with me and I with him. But what I can’t understand, is the person who says I am a Christian, and then denies or doubts or holds in foggy uncertainty, the deity of the Son of God. My brethren, why don’t we do one thing or the other? Why don’t we get over onto one side or the other? If the people of the Lord, or the people who claim to be people of the Lord, were just to get over on one side or the other, what a fine housecleaning we’d have. It wouldn’t be any trouble, no difficulty, we wouldn’t fight. We’d still be Americans together. But at least we’d know where we stood. So many of us, we don’t know where we stand.

Now, when they said Jesus was God, the old scribes of Jewish days thought he was blaspheming. The Unitarians of the day reject His deity, many liberals reject His deity, and many cults reject His deity. But the man called Paul, who wrote as he was moved by the Holy Ghost said, we look for the great God and Savior, Jesus Christ our Lord. Now, either he was wrong, or else somebody is wrong today. And I have decided that I’m going to go along with Jesus, who claimed to be God, and with John and Paul and Peter and Jude and Luke and Mark and Matthew and James, who said He was God, rather than going along with those who doubt that He is God. For to doubt or deny the deity of the Son of God is to reject the Holy Scriptures.

And you will have a perfect right to reject the Holy Scriptures, remember that. Nobody is bound in any wise to accept the Holy Scriptures. You can reject the Scriptures and you will get no argument from me whatsoever. I would never spend one minute of my time arguing with anybody, not even pleading with anybody to believe the Book of God, because not all men have faith. And if you have not been touched by the mighty Holy Ghost, you won’t have faith. You know, the Presbyterians in their prime, taught election and predestination. And they believe that when God touched a man, he believed, he believed. When he was touched, he had to have some work done on him, some previous work done on him before he could believe.

That’s pretty well gone down the drain now, but I still happen to believe it. I believe that no men can come unto Jesus Christ except the Father draw him. And if the Father draws the man, if that mystic something settles on the man and draws him toward the Son of God, he’ll come. And when he comes, he’ll believe and when he believes he will be saved. That’s Bible my brethren. The whole book of Gospel of John teaches that. And our spiritual fathers, the Methodists and Baptists and Presbyterians thought that, well, the Methodists taught it, but not with such finality, perhaps as our Presbyterian forebearers.

But nevertheless, we’re live now between two mighty events. His appearing to redeem us and His appearing to glorify us. This then is interim. It is interim, but it is not vacuum. I cannot find in my Bible where any man is ever called to live in a vacuum, that he is called to live in a spiritual emptiness, looking no direction. The Bible says we live in an interim between two epiphanies, two mighty, world-shaking events: the appearing that brought life and immortality to the light through the gospel, and the appearing that shall show to all the world who is the only Potentate, King of Kings and Lord of Lords, worthy to rule the world.

Now, between those two appearings we stand. And you say, well, when is this second appearing going to take place? Now, you won’t fool me like that. I’m too wise an old trooper ever to give myself up to a prophecy of when another appearing will take place. Frankly, my brethren, I don’t know. I can always answer all questions, either by giving you information which is reasonably accurate or by saying I don’t know. And in this case, I say, I don’t know. Don’t be too hard on people who have set dates and been fooled, because they meant well. But the Lord says, no man knoweth, not even the Son, save the Father which is in heaven. He knows. But we do know that we look for His appearing.

And incidentally, if you imagine that this is some kind of cultism or some sort of strange borderline or fringe doctrine, let me tell you that the Dutch Reformed church believes in it. Let me tell you that the Presbyterians, the Methodists, the Baptists, the Nazarenes, the evangelicals, and you can just name them up and down the line and there isn’t one church that exists today, that believes the Bible but what also believes that there’s to be another shining forth, another shining forth. When he was shown forth, being born in a manger, will shine forth wearing the robes of royalty. Not one. They have differences of opinion about how it will take place. And I for my part, don’t care one little bit how it takes place. I haven’t the remotest care how it takes place.

A man called me just before I came down here, and he said, Mr. Tozer, you don’t know me, but I’m in trouble. I said, I didn’t sleep all night last night, I went to bed at seven, got up at seven and didn’t close my eyes all through the night and I’m in deep difficulty. Will you pray for me? And I said, yes, I will pray for you and also, I want to give you this verse, that the Lord will not suffer you to be tempted above what you’re able to bear. And he said, but you didn’t quote the rest of the verse. And I said, well, I couldn’t quote all the Bible at one sitting. I said, I gave you that part of it. Well, he said, the rest of it is, but will with the temptation make a way of escape. Now, what is my way of escape? And I said, my friend, this is just the neat, little way the Lord works with people. He promises them a way of escape. He leads them out and saves them, but he doesn’t show them how ahead of time. If the Lord were to take you aside and give you a schedule, or up in Toronto, they’d say shedule of future events, your head would get so big there isn’t a hat in Cook County would go down on it, not one. You would lose your humility and become so proud, you couldn’t keep from telling you wife and everybody else but what you knew about the future.

So, the Lord says, I will make a way of escape, but you leave the way of escape to Me. And so the Lord says, looking forward to His coming. And I said, when will it be Lord and what will be the signs? The Lord said, now, don’t ask me questions. You leave that to me. And you trust Me and I’ll take care of it. Just believe that there’s to be a shining forth. So I believe there’s a shining forth. And so this is interim.

But what are we to do in this, live in a vacuum? No. We are to live soberly, righteously, and godly in this present world. Soberly, that is my relation to myself. Righteously, that is my relation to my fellow man. Godly, that is my relation to God. And so, there are the three dimensions of the Christian’s life, soberly and righteously and godly; God and others and myself. And you can’t get out of that. And it’s a strange thing that as brilliant as the human mind is and as utterly wonderful as it is, still, we cannot escape these three dimensions. We cannot get beyond them, any more than you can jump into the fourth dimension in space. You’ve got to stay within them. Everything that you can think about, that touches humanity in your life, everything has to do either with yourself, with somebody else, or with God, and there’s no fourth place. Only three. That’s where you live. And so we live soberly and righteously and godly.

Then why? Why did the Lord say there’s to be another epiphany, a shining forth. Why did He say that. He did it because he that hath this hope in Him, purifies himself even as He is pure. The Lord did it. Oh, could we could we pull an illustration out of the air? Suppose that a man has been away. And, oh say, he’s a soldier and he’s been on some duty in some far-away country, in the Far East or in Europe. And he hasn’t been home for a couple of years. And he calls transatlantic telephone and says, I will be in at such and such a time by Air France or some other of the great lines. And I will land at such and such a field and I’ll take a taxi. I should be there by 3:10.

Well, you know what they will do, Mother and the girls? They will clean up that house as it’s never been cleaned up before. They will busy themselves fixing things up. And then the girls will dress themselves up in their finest and wait for their father. Now, that’s what anticipation does. It gets you ready or tends to want to make you want to be ready and to get your work done, and be ready when he comes. So, he that has this hope in him, he purifies himself even as our Lord is pure.

So, the hope of the shining forth, which is yet future, is not a foolish notion held by certain cults. In fact, a very few cults hold it. It is a doctrine held by our fathers back to Paul, Augustine, and all the church fathers down the years. They varied I say in regard to detail and schedule, but they never varied one little bit with regard to the overt fact. He is coming and there is to be a shining forth. And so in the meantime, we do show the Lord’s death until He comes. And there is the beautiful meaning of the Lord’s Supper.

I had not planned to bring this up at all, and this is not dragged in by its ears in order to fit. But just here that I have received of the Lord what I delivered, that the Lord took bread the night He was betrayed and when He’d given thanks, He’d break it. And He said, take and eat. This do in remembrance of me there. That’s the remembrance of the epiphany that was. And as oft as ye eat this bread and drink this cup, you do show the Lord’s death until He come. And there is the epiphany that will be. So, that is one of the meanings among many, of the supper of the Lord, that we remember that he died for us. We remember that He’s coming for us. That He died for us is a fact. That He’s coming for us is a fact. How His death for us could prepare us to meet Him, we do not know. When He’s coming, we do not know. That He’s coming, we are certain.

So now, we do show the Lord’s death until He come. Only this you say, what qualifies a person for the Lord’s Supper? The answer is soberly, righteously, godly. Let a man examine himself. Is he living soberly, righteously and godly in this present world, looking. That’s all. Let a man examine himself.

How have you been living? Soberly? Or have you let yourself go? Have you forgot you’re a Christian when you were out on your vacation? Did you do a lot of things you wouldn’t do if you had been home? Strange isn’t it how it works? A tame, domesticated Maltese-type of husband who says yes dear, yes dear all year-long, goes away on convention. And the tamer and the more domesticated he was while staying at home with Mama, the more of a long-eared donkey he made out himself when he got in a strange city on convention. It’s almost always that way.

Now, that ought never to be so of Christians. A Christian is one who carries his shrine with him. His sanctuary is in his heart. And whether he is traveling somewhere to see relatives out in the mountains for a rest wherever it is, he should never be out of his sanctuary. He should be in the holy place because the Holy God is with him and living in his heart. Lo, I’m with you always, even unto the end of the world. How’s it been with you this last week? Have you lived soberly? How’s it been with you and your neighbor? Have you lived righteously or have you had a tiff with somebody two doors away? If you have, don’t take communion this morning. How has it been with you and God? Have you kept up your prayer life and your devotional life and your Bible loving life? I don’t say you haven’t and I don’t ask those questions in a tone of voice tending to accuse. I’m just inquiring.

Now our friends, the brethren will meet us and we will have the Lord’s Supper. We take it once a month in this church, every first Sunday. It’s not for members of this church, but members of the church of Christ. And if you qualify–sober, godly, righteous living and confident faith in our Savior–you join with us because you’re a member of our church anyway, whether we ever saw you before or not. Let’s gather.

Tags God, Grace, Second Coming of Christ, Tozer