Category: Messages

Serving Members Make a Serving Church – February 1, 1959

Life of the Servant series 3 of 3

I want to give what I hope will be a brief talk on the serving church. I have a text here which has been a favorite of mine, often quoted, and woven in and out of my sermons regardless of what the text is. But I decided to preach on it this time, Acts 13:36, “for David, after he hath served his own generation, by the will of God, fell on sleep, and was laid unto his Fathers and saw corruption.”

David, after he served his own generation by the will of God, fell on sleep. Now I pointed out in the two previous sermons, this is a trilogy of sermons. I pointed out that the most beautiful biography was this: he served his generation and fell on sleep. Last Sunday, I pointed to the fact that, as a man is a trinity of spirit, soul and body, so the church is a trinity of spirit, soul and body. That the Holy Spirit is the Spirit of the church, that her tastes and her joys and culture and her growth and knowledge and appreciations, are her soul and the body is the organized group through which the indwelling Holy Ghost works.

Today, I want to give some conclusions drawn from these facts, that the church is here to serve. It’s not here to play, it’s here to serve. And I begin by saying that the church serves only as its members serve. I suppose I’m three-quarters Baptist. I don’t know. The Baptists say I am. But I can’t quite follow along with what I’ve heard in some quarters, that there is such a thing as a mystic, invisible church. I’ve never come across it.

The church is composed of people. If, as they say, the simplest form of a local church is where two or three are gathered, in my name, I am there in their midst. I accept that as being a factual statement. But if this is true, then if you take the two or three away, you don’t have any church. It takes the two or three to make the church and those two or three have names, their people who have telephone numbers, social security numbers, and names and they weigh so much and they look a certain way, they’re people. And the church is composed of people and if you take the people away, there isn’t any ghostly mystical church hovering around waiting to be embodied. The church is people.

We try to dodge out from under our personal responsibility sometimes by saying, well, the great church is serving. The great church doesn’t exist. The great mystical church is a figment of human imagination. The church may not always be identified. But wherever she is, she’s people. And if there are no church people there, there’s no church. And if there is church people, then there are individuals. Keep that in mind. Even the Holy Ghost said that there were about 120 in that upper chamber. And the Spirit of God came to bring the church into being there were about 120. They were individuals and they named some of them. So, the church is composed of people and if the church is going to serve as I have previously declared it should, then it can serve only as its members serve.

The Holy Spirit is the central nervous system of the church you know, and He can work only as He gets the obedience of His members. He can work only as He has the intelligent, Bible-taught cooperation of His members. And the failure of the members is the failure of the total church. And as the individual members serve, automatically the church is serving. The church is serving where they serve. The church is witnessing as and where they witness. The church and the individual members are one and the same thing. You cannot withdraw I repeat, the people away and still have a church. Church takes two.  Jesus Christ in the midst, and people in whose midst He is.

Now, the churches don’t know, a lot of them, why they’re here. We don’t know why we’re here. I read a good many, that is, I scan a good many magazines. I rarely read any, but I scan them and if I see a good article, I read it. But I learned from the brethren who are writing the articles, that we don’t know why we’re here. We’re dressed up and have nowhere to go and nothing to do. We’re not sure of ourselves.

And so the result is that the churches are looking around to see what others are doing. Then they’re copying what others are doing and doing it as they say, for Jesus sake. No matter what is done. If the church picks it up, the church brushes it off and dips it in holy water and says now we’re doing this for Jesus sake, and it’s alright. You’re doing it for the world, but we’re doing it for Jesus. But the point is, they’re doing the same thing. And if that little stripe animal out in the woods, was around your house, you couldn’t make him any more desirable by saying that he was there for Jesus sake. He’s still what he is brother. And you can’t you can’t change him by putting a holy name on it. And as long as the church does what the world does, the church is worldly.

In the last mail, I’m going to do something this morning. I rarely do, but I got two pieces of mail. I think they came yesterday. They came the same day anyhow. And one of them was addressed to the social chairman of the church here. I don’t know who that is. If McAfee wasn’t going to New York, I think we ought to probably make him social chairman. But this comes from the Kenosha Cornhuskers. And they want to come in and put on a social for us, the idea is to raise money.

And now I don’t want to be satirical, nor unkind. These are nice boys, a picture of a fella here with a cowboy suit on and a guitar and I like him. He looks nice. And if I met him, I’d like him and I’m sure he’d like me. And I’d be friendly to him and good to him. So, this isn’t to be unkind. It’s only to say that because the church doesn’t know what it’s called to do, people from the outside look in and suggest things. They want to put on a social here and they say that we can have our choice of almost anything, square dancing, they say, showing them all the grips and holds they need to know. And then they said if you don’t like that, then ballroom dancing, waltzes, foxtrots, two steps, cha-chas, rock and roll and polkas. And if you’re a little more ambitious, then they will mix it for you and give you the Virginia real hokey-pokey, heel toe, class pans, mixer, bunny hop and the Grand March. And they promise you that along with a grand March. They will give each gal a cowbell all during the evening. And singing. It says imagine your crowd, arms around each other’s shoulders and singing Old MacDonald had a farm.

I can just imagine Brother Chase singing baritone and we’d be all around each other there singing Old MacDonald had a farm E-I-E-I-O. Well now Brethren I’ll tell you, I think that’s harmless and if you don’t know any better, that’s all right. You don’t go wrong, you know, there. It’s clean. And it certainly beats the low down, dump stuff that the cities know.

But what I’m trying to make out is that you see people, because the church doesn’t know what she’s called to do, people are trying to tell her what to do. And it’s humorous to you and me taught in the Bible as we are, but lots of churches take this up. They don’t know what they’re called to do. They haven’t the remotest idea. And so if somebody suggests they have a bunny hop and learn all the grips and they learn them and get a little extra and put it in the kitty for the pastor’s salary, and for what they call benevolences. Well Brethren, it’s a lack of information, you see. It’s a lack of instruction. I hope you won’t think I’m bitter about this.

I want to read a passage to you. And I want to ask you, if the churches were all like this, whether I had got this letter or not, listen. Now there were in the church that was at Antioch, certain prophets and teachers as Barnabas and it names them. And they ministered to the Lord and fasted, and the Holy Ghost said unto them, separate me Barnabas and Saul for the work we’re into I’ve called them. And when they had fasted and prayed and laid their hands on them, they sent them away. So they, being sent forth by the Holy Ghost departed and went and so on.

Now if the churches were doing this, would any Kenosha Cornhusker boys write and say, could we come in and put on the show? They wouldn’t. They’d stand in respect. If it could be said of this church and all other churches, as it was said of them in Solomon’s porch. They were all together in Solomon’s porch and no man dareth join himself to them. They were a holy people. The flame was still on their forehead, and a sense of another world was on them. Nobody is going to suggest that they ring the cowbell and sing McDonald’s Farm, a harmless thing. If anybody wants to do it, I repeat I occasionally turn the radio on and hear somebody sing Old MacDonald. I don’t mind it. But I say that’s not the church. That’s not what we’re called to do. That’s not why we’re here. That’s not our business. That’s not our job. That isn’t the world we live in. We live in another world, an elevated world, a world of another kind all together.

Now, I want to read a second thing to you which also came in the same mail. I read it only because I want to show you that if you take a biblical direction and stick to it, it pays off. This comes from a missionary mother, not of our Alliance. It’s from the Newfoundland and Labrador Outpost Mission in Happy Valley, Labrador. And this lady says, Dear Brother, Tozer, greetings in Christ’s name. On the afternoon of December 24, my youngest son Daniel, was suddenly thrust into eternity, as the missionary plane which he was piloting was caught in a whiteout enroute to Happy Valley from Northwest River, where he had flown early that afternoon to carry Christmas mail and parcels to hospital patients and children at the Grenfield Mission School.

Just before leaving home at 1:30, that afternoon, he read a sermon by you entitled, “The Process of Becoming in the December issue of the Pentecostal Evangel. Perhaps the last words he read before entering eternity. While working at United Airlines in Chicago, in 1956 and 1957 in preparation for his ministry up here, he often attended your church and told me that he received more spiritual food than in any other church he had ever attended. Thus, when the magazine came in the mail, he eagerly read your sermon, and I am sure it was a grand climax in preparation for death, which was to meet him a few hours later.

Then there’s a little more about it. And it’s signed by the mother of this fine boy and here’s the picture of the boy standing before his airplane. It says Christ for Labrador with Wings. Daniel McKinney. He’s in heaven now. When he was here in Chicago, he came here, I don’t know him. He was evidently one of the students that comes and goes. I don’t know him, but Brother McAfee, you helped him to learn to love a great hymn. And instead of McDonald’s Farm, McAfee led him in singing the great hymns of Watts, Wesley and Montgomery and Faber. And instead of the bunny hop, I seriously taught the great things of the truths of God and that young man warmed up to. And now as a missionary when he saw my name, he grabbed that and read it, got into his plane and said, I’ll see you at sundown. He never saw sundown. A snowstorm brought him down.

Brethren, which is it? What are we called to do? Are we called to play, even harmless play? Are we called to put on nice deals, even the harmless ones? Or are we called seriously to pray and to live, and to teach and to witness and to worship and to sing, and to create or have God create about us an atmosphere, where a young serious-minded student can walk in and say, I never got so much help in all my life. He was a Pentecostal boy, remember. He never got so much help in all my life. And then go away to die in a snow storm taking food and medicine to babies. I don’t know why. I do know what you think of it. I know we’re together on this Brethren. We’re together on this.

We know where we’re going and we know what we’re called to do. And we know why we’re here. And you’ll never regret that you gave of your money to keep a church like that going. And you’ll never regret that you stayed by and helped through the hardships that kept a church the stands for what this one stands for, alive and moving that will never bend or surrender to the Cornhuskers. God bless them and love them. I’d like to pray with them and talk with them and give them a New Testament. I don’t dislike him. But I just say they don’t know who we are. They’re judging us by what they’ve seen. And it’s not their fault. It’s the great churches fault.  They’re judging us by what they’ve seen in other churches, not all of us, but churches.

Now, we know what we’re called to do and we’re trying to do it. And it’s a solemn commission that’s upon us as individuals. If we wait for concerted action, that is everybody, we will never get anything done. Always somebody has to go rise and do something or somebody alone. And then, another will come along and another. But if we wait for any theoretical, concerted action, nobody will get anything done.

Now, I’d like to point out that we can serve no generation but this one. Yesterday’s generation is gone. Tomorrow’s generation has not been born. But today, all around us, is our own generation. This is the big day of our opportunity. And we are called to practical service. I’d like while I have emphasized as every true Bible preacher ought to do, the beating heart of the church, which is the fullness of the Holy Ghost, the presence of Christ, worship and love. That’s the beating heart of the church. But that’s not at all. You haven’t discharged your obligation when you’ve come here of a Sunday morning and sang a Watts hymn and read the scripture together and listened to an exhortation and made your offering. You haven’t discharged your your obligation. That is only the Sunday worship.

John Ruskin, the great English art critic and philosopher and Christian, seriously questioned whether we ought to call this service at all? He said, do you mean that you go and sing a song and read the scripture and enjoy yourself and have fellowship with happy people in the church. That’s service? “He said, “we call that Christian service?” He doubted whether it was service. Well, I don’t doubt. I think it is. I think it is the heart of the church.

I think it is to the work of the church what your engine is to your car. I think it is to the work of the church, what your heart is to your body. It’s the throbbing vibrating center of it all. And that religious group that tries to work without worshiping, will soon be doing the Devil’s work. We’ve got to be worshipers first in order that we might be workers. We work out of our worship. But our danger is and there’s always a danger in everything. Don’t forget it. And the holier it is, the more dangerous it is. And the further into the throne of God it is, the more temptations the Devil throws around.

So, this I’m talking about is worshiping and having the Lord and the Holy Ghost here and, and staying by the cause of missions and sending out and putting our hands-on men and women and sending them out to all parts of the world to preach the gospel. That’s so important, my friends, but even that can become a source of temptation.

Don’t forget that there’s other kinds of service too and Jesus did it. He went about doing good. And we’re called to practical service. Not only the beautiful things, worship and song and prayer and teaching, not only those things, but there’s feeding and clothing and helping and praying and scrubbing and cooking and peacemaking, and all these things that we’re supposed to do as Christians. I said, and I repeat it that you having all you have and living under the circumstances you do, living on the high level you live, every one of you ought to have somebody in Korea, or Austria or somewhere, that you’re feeding; at least one in addition to your emissions in your church and your taxes. You ought to have at least one.

Woe be to us that we live in a favored land like America and eat ourselves into obesity and early heart attack. And dainty feet never touch a bare floor. And then they are hungry from birth to death in many parts of the world, I believe it’s the business of the church to serve. And I think that when we fundamentalists and evangelicals forgot that we were called to feed the poor and give a cup of cold water to the one who was in need, I believe that we forgot something very wonderful.

Dr. Wilbur Wilson’s brother Diked Wilson writes me sometimes. I don’t know much about him. I only know that he’s a very brilliant and very wonderful Christian man. And he wrote me and sent me a mimeographed sermon. I think he’s a layman. I didn’t read it. I only read maybe the first four lines. But I saw what it was. It was a plea, that God’s church might serve God’s people. That we might serve the poor and the needy and those who are needing help. I believe him. I’m going to read it when I get to it. But I see the direction he’s moving. And I’m for it.

Brethren, let us fight to escape the trap of being well fed, well dressed, respectable, cultured. And the very poor are afraid to under our doors. The churches everywhere are doing it. We say we’re going where the people are, and I suppose that’s right. I’d like to tell you that if it could be done and arranged, I wouldn’t mind one half of this congregation was of another race than mine. I would preach to Indians and Mexicans and Filipinos and Negros with the greatest delight, yet we’re moving to another part of the city and why? It is not because we won’t but because our friends won’t. They move in and they don’t want integrated churches like this. So, we’re going to sell this one to them and bid them Godspeed and pray for them and move out.

Brethren, I hope the day will never be when we will be a typical urban church. Bird singing in bushes beside our lovely church and the lawn stretching away. Nobody of any offensive color near us or any other tongue or language. We will be the typical American babbitt main Street, bourgeois, Christians without any knowledge of the sufferings and groans of others. I don’t mind telling you that if I thought we’d ever fall into that trap. I’d rather go down and offer my service as Assistant Superintendent of a rescue mission and bath the sores of bums off the street. I am not fitted, that is, I’m not fitted and trained and I don’t run in that direction. I have a ministry that’s wider and bigger than that. So, I’m not going to do it.

But I say that if I thought that we would ever settle down to a smooth, lovely suburban church, judging our prosperity by the length of the cars out in front, I’d take the job with a mission. And I’d lead a drunk woman up the street and set her in a seat and preach the gospel to her. I’d rather do it. Jesus, the Christ of God had nowhere to lay his head and his people suffered and went about in goat skins and sheep skins and the skins of kids the best they could and died not dramatically; not as they die in movies and shows, but die hungry and weak and bruised and beaten; die before the fire and the lion for Christ’s sake.

No, my friends, you and I have got to keep the cross on our lives. We’re going to move we’re going to build but we’re going to keep the cross on our lives. And we’re going to keep just as clean in Oak Lawn as we’d been at 70th and Union. And we’re going to keep our emphasis on serving mankind, getting the gospel to the ends of the earth, keeping Jesus Christ in the midst, high and lifted up, keeping filth out of the church, and letting nobody in that isn’t born again. We’re going to keep that standard and split-level houses and picture windows aren’t going to change it. We’re keeping that standard as long as I have anything to do with it and knowing you, I know we’re going to keep that standard. Long after I have ceased to have anything to do with it. He served this generation by the will of God.

So, remember Brethren and let’s fight to escape the trap of well-fed, well-housed, well-transported American bourgeois Christianity. Let us serve. He served his generation by the will of God, served it as he could, served it as he knew how. Paul came and served it as he could. Jesus served it the way He could. We will serve it as we can. Let us gaze and gaze upon Jesus. The artists have made that picture of the cross so beautiful, we want to stand and gaze. But I say unto you that nobody ever looked at a man dying on a cross with pleasure. Nobody but a sadist. For the man dying on the cross, his tongue hung out and he couldn’t get it back in after a few hours. The jaw droops, his eyes bulged and blood dripped everywhere. Finally, the cold blue came around his mouth to show he was dying. And instead of noble words being spoken from that cross, the hoarse whisper came from a dry throat.

You and I are called to bear the cross my Brethren. We’re called to witness to that kind of Savior. Not the Dale Carnegie, Norman Vincent Peale, Chairman of the Board Christianity, but a cross-carrying, God-loving, people loving, serving church. That’s what we’re called to do. Are you with me? As our colored brethren say, let the church say amen.

I recommend that we begin this week, start this week doing an unselfish act of humble service in Jesus Christ’s name to somebody. Sending out a gift to somebody you know that needs it. In as much as ye have done it unto the least of these my brethren, you have done it unto me. Let the dispensationalists do what they want with that. I’m afraid that means you. But the dispensationalist can dodge that all they want to and put that somewhere else, I am afraid that means us. We can make that the nations of the earth and their treatment of the Jew. Maybe it means that, but I think it means a little more.

Jesus called all the Christians, my brethren and we are the brethren of Jesus and He’s the Son of Man and we’re redeemed men. So, He is our brother, our elder brother, and we’re his brethren. As much as you do it unto the least of these my brethren, you do it unto me.

Here’s an illustration. If you don’t mind my getting a little sentimental. I’ve got a daughter at Nyack and of course she has been as our youngest, our pet and our sweetheart. And maybe some of you might not like her, but we do and she’s been that kind. She doesn’t hesitate. Now she went through a little period when she wouldn’t kiss me. She’s ashamed to but now she’ll walked right up at nineteen and give me a big fat kiss. Well, suppose something happened to her out in New York. And some friend out there who didn’t know her but knew me immediately went to her rescue and needed to put his money behind her. Immediately put his service behind her and his wife joined him. Don’t you think I’d sit down and write out a letter of deepest gratitude? And say, and as much as you have done it unto this little one, you’ve done it unto me. Don’t you think my wife with tearful eyes would thank God forever for that kind of people.

Do you remember when a carload of our people, our children, our girls and boys were driving through from Nyack on Christmas Day and Cliff Westergren had driven all night and dozed at the wheel. The car went off the road, struck a bridge, and a steel beam went the whole length of the car on the inside, you remember that? You remember how they were picked up by the police and taken to the hospitals. And a preacher by the name of Joel Winkler, took on our kids Remember that? He went to visit them. He opened his house to them. His church, people took them stuff and went to see them and prayed with them. And out there in that little Ohio town. They had a home there. Do you know what we did as a church? We took an offering and sent to their little church from our larger one. You know what else we did? When Mr. and Mrs. Winkler came to the city of Chicago here to a convention? We got them a fine room in the tower room and one of the big hotels and said, here this is a present from us to you in as much as ye did it unto these, our kids you did it unto us.

Don’t you think that Jesus Christ when we serve his people, that we’re serving him? Don’t you think those He loves who are for a little time away from Him? That is, He’s there at the right hand of God and they’re here. Don’t you think you serve Him best by serving them? Yes, this Church must be a serving church Brethren, and we can’t serve as a body we can only serve as people, individuals.

Therefore, let us as individuals serve our generation, serve people, serve regardless of color or race or tongue. Serve and see to it that we don’t become bloated and fat and oily and be like Ephraim who waxed fat and kicked and disobeyed God. Let’s keep lean godliness on us. Let’s keep stripped down so that we’re always just a little bit hungry and with just a little bit of sacrifice in our heart, and just a little of the cross on our doing. You do it, we do it. Even we do it in some large percentage, but doesn’t have to be 100%. Just let there be a good, large group doing it. And Hell can’t destroy this church. For the gates of Hell cannot prevail against.

Message 2 of 3 on The Life of the Servant by A.W. Tozer

“Serving the Church’s Spirit, Soul and Body”   January 25, 1959

Now this is the second of two talks on this text, second of three, or there will be one more, I think.

For David, Acts 13:36. For David, after he had served his generation by the will of God, fell on sleep. And last week, I said that no man has any right to die until he has served his generation, until these three things have taken place. One is that he’s found his place in the will of God. Second, that he has put into life more than he’s taken out of it. The third, until he’s put his generation in debt to him.

This is almost an obsession. I don’t like the word obsession to be used of Christians, although it seems to me I heard of a book title, which the book I’ve never read called, Magnificent Obsession.” I think it’s a good title even though I have never read the book. But this magnificent obsession has a hold of me. I want to put my generation in debt to me. I’ve taken a good deal out of them. And they’ve contributed a good deal to me. But I’d like to put this generation in debt to me before I hang up my shoes. I think everybody should.

Oh, I think I ought to stop here my friends. I think I ought to stop here and say something that I might never say if I don’t. Somebody hears me and says, Now I know what he’s talking about. He’s thinking about painting a great picture, writing a great book, founding a school, or doing something like that, that will live on. Maybe there’ll be gymnasium named after him or there’ll be something like that. That’s what he’s talking about Torrey-Gray Auditorium, or the Blanchard Hall or Simpson Memorial Church or they will do something of that sort.

Yes, I do have something like that in mind. But I also would like to tell you that it’s possible to put your generation in debt to you and never be heard of outside of your own city block. Don’t you think that Susanna Wesley put her generation and all other generations in debt to her when she had her 17 children? She didn’t know. She died without knowing that she was putting all generations to come, as well as her own, in debt to her. She put more in than she took out.

And there’s many a humble meet prayerful housewife, who has brought up her family and given them to the world and this society. Now, they’re are old and overlooked and their names are written nowhere where it counts, except in that one place. But they nevertheless have put their generation in debt to them.

And I think of some old fellows whose English is not very good and whose job was to saw a board and nail it up or farm a farm or do something else and they say he was a little working man and he was never heard much of and his hands have calluses on them. And he’s ill at ease and embarrassed when great people around him. We say, well, that man of course never did much. But maybe he has a doctor Son out on the mission field. Maybe he has a child serving the Lord in some important pulpit preaching the Word of God in some pulpit giving the Word out. And it was he who put them through and kept them and cared for them.

And these calluses are the marks. They tell a story and the eyes of God can read poetry in those calluses. And art and, and the ear of God can hear music in those calluses because that now the more or less forgotten old fellow, soon to retire and pass away and has produced and has brought up and has to the best of his ability prayed through a family that is serving Him. 

There’s more than one way to serve your generation my brothers and sisters. There are others, and I think of one family in this church who have no children at all of their own. But I think of that family and I say this whether they’re present or not, I don’t care this morning. I think there’s a number of youngsters that they’ve fathered and mothered and watched over and brought to church and given clothing and all that sort of thing down over the years. And if I didn’t mention it occasionally, nobody would know it. They are serving their generation and putting their generation in debt to them. There’s more than one way to do it.

What I especially want to talk about this morning is that this David, serving his generation by the will of God before he fell on sleep, is a kind of picture. I don’t like the word “type,” but he’s a kind of picture of the church. And as I said, man is made up of body, soul and spirit. Spirit, soul and body would be a better way to state it. For it’s in that order of importance.

The church of Our Lord Jesus Christ is a trinity as man is a trinity. That is, a man has a spirit, that’s the most important part of him. And then man has a soul, which is a little lower than the spirit, but vastly higher than the body. Then, man has a body through which the spirit and soul work and operate as a musician has an instrument. That musician, though he be a genius, could not bring music unless he had a hard body of instrument in front of him. So, the spirit of a man, the mind of a man, cannot operate without the body.

The church is a great deal like this. The church is a spirit and the church also has a soul and the church is also a body. Let me go over that. That will be the sermon for today. The church is a trinity. It has its spirit corresponding to the spirit of the man. The Holy Ghost is the throbbing heart of the church, let’s not forget it. There is no a such thing as a church without the Holy Ghost.

Although there are many people, many groups calling themselves churches who do not have the Holy Spirit and do not even believe that there is a Holy Ghost. And yet they call themselves churches, but still it stands there is no church without the Holy Spirit. Because all that the church is, is spiritual. That is at the very root of the church its spiritual. The origin of the church is spiritual. The church was not brought together by some accident, but she was born. In every generation she has to be born and she is kept alive.

Just as the human race in the very root of it, there is life, life, life. And its life that is passed on from generation to generation. It was life that your parents passed on to you and life you pass on to your children and life they’ll pass on to their children. And the body built around it is secondary. It’s that life, that thing, that human life that comes down from generation to generation.

So, the church is kept alive by this life that is passed on, this holy living, throbbing life of God in certain people who band themselves together. And there we have the church, the life of the church. The origin of the church is spiritual, the life of the church is spiritual and the power of the church is spiritual.

We happen to be in a moment, not progress, but a motion of religion where a great deal of emphasis is now being put upon the intellectual side of the church. But always remember, that the power of the church is not intellectual. The power of the church is spiritual. Ye shall receive power when the Holy Ghost comes upon you, and you shall be witnesses under me. And the book of 1 Corinthians tells us in great and careful detail how the Spirit of God is that power and works through His people.

So the church is spiritual. It’s spirit. And the power of the church is spirit. And the enemies of the church are spiritual. Remember, the enemies of the church are spiritual. Just as you come down with a disease and you wonder what its source was, and the doctor will tell you its source was an invisible germ, or virus. So when troubles arise in Christians or in Christian groups, we say who’s at fault? Who’s to blame? The answer is an invisible virus is to blame. It’s an invisible, spiritual thing.

The enemies of the church are all spiritual, don’t forget it. At root, they’re all spiritual and the dangers of the church are all spiritual. There are no dangers to the church except spiritual dangers, or dangers that have their root in spiritual things. And there are no perils, no damage or injury can be done to the church, except it’s done to her spirit.

When the church, for instance, was persecuted in Jerusalem, they had lived very joyously together in Jerusalem, after the first initial persecution had worn off. They were gathered together, those disciples in Jerusalem. Then came a terrible persecution about Steven. And they were scattered abroad every place. The church that had worshipped with such joy there in Jerusalem was now scattered throughout all Asia Minor to preserve their own lives.

Someone could say, why that meant a breakdown, a loss, a destruction of the church. But history doesn’t record it that way. History doesn’t say, that was the destruction of the church. History says, that was the beginning of the great drive that evangelized the whole world within 100 years. And the Apostles and the Christians were driven from Jerusalem under the persecution and they went everywhere, preaching. Those very words are used. They went everywhere preaching.

Sometimes, I have a human pang that so many of our people have gone to so many parts of the world. I’d like to have them all back, wouldn’t you? Wouldn’t it be a gathering here if we had them all back. We would have to throw the old building open and use this lawn out in front. For those who have come and been with us a few years, have met God and have had their direction set, their eyes open, their heart unlocked. They have learned to love the Lord Jesus and appreciate great music, great worship, the cause of world missions, the helping the poor and sweet Christian fellowship. Their work took them or better still, they went to school, and now they’re out somewhere serving. In times I say and wish, Oh, I wish we had them all back.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could gather them all together, and they were all here. And I can preach to them one more time. But yet I wouldn’t be so carnal as to allow myself to wish this. Because just as Jerusalem, the church in Jerusalem was suddenly by an explosion thrown to all parts of the world and wherever they went, they preach the word and started churches. So, our people have gone over the last 25 years, and wherever they’ve gone, they have been very often the life and the pillars of the churches where they’re serving. And some are in pulpits and some in mission stations all over this round world and the sun never sets on your people.

Now, the dangers I said are spiritual dangers. If we can get through to God about it and can reach God, no real danger can come to us. I preached a sermon here during the council. I preached it in the morning. Numbers of people have wanted it in print, but I’ve never gotten time to write it down. It was taken from First Peter and the name of it was, “Nothing Can Harm a Good Man.” I still believe that with all my heart. You can kill him, but you can harm him. You can put him in jail, but you can harm him. He can have a stroke, but he can’t be harmed. He can die in an airplane accident, but you can’t harm him. You can’t harm a good man, a man in the will of God, a man who’s consecrated himself and put himself in the will of God.

Mr. Chase was telling me today of hearing Melvin Lobstin. He said he had never in his entire Christian life had heard a testimony so sharply sure of itself, as this boy’s. He said, it’s not a question of going to a mission field, wherever I’m sent , I know where I belong. I know where I am to go. And he was as certain of that just as certain of that, as a soldier would be, who’d heard his commanding officer telling him where to go and what to do.

Now, Melvin Lobstin is gone. Do you think he’s been harmed? Do you think this thing has blown up in God’s face? Not for one second has it blown up in God’s face. Before he went Melvin Lobstin found somebody that could do ten times what he could do and won him and you don’t know where that person is, but God knows! Or back home on the field, somebody will hear that. Some tall, young fellow will stand up awkwardly and say, I want to be a missionary. And the death of that man will bring forth a man to do a greater work than he could have done.

God is running His world and He’s running his church. He’s still on His throne. And if he doesn’t know it, we ought to serve notice now on the devil, that he can’t harm a good man. Because the dangers of the church are spiritual dangers. And if we are in the will of God and protected by the fiery Presence in the bush, Satan can’t get to us.

And the treasures of the church, our spiritual treasures. We get old and weary and tired and go to an old folks home or shunted off someplace and sit around and look at the floor. Listen to a WMBI and read magazines and read our Bibles and dine. A new generation doesn’t even remember who we were. That’s happening all the time. People who a few years ago were stalwart members of some church with the church leaning on them. Today they are somewhere and people don’t even know who they are. And somebody will say, Did you hear that Reverend So and So or Mrs. So and So died or Mr. So and So. The young people will look up and say, I don’t believe I knew them. But they’ve left their treasures and they took their treasures. And they’ve got their treasures. Spiritual treasures or treasures of a Christian are spiritual. They lie in the heart of the man. You can’t by changing the body structure, or by breaking it down or destroying it, you can harm those treasures. They are sent up above.

The next is the soul. The church is a trinity and she is first of all spiritual and most of all spiritual. Do you know something friends? If there was no other reason for this church holding together and going on through the years as it would be, that this that I’ve been telling you this morning, which sounds so trite to you, because you’ve heard it so much, is just what’s not being said scarcely anywhere in evangelical circles. And if this church ought not to hold together and maintain its testimony and its solidity through the years to come, if for no other reason it ought to be that this emphasis should be laid.

The church should be reminded that she’s a spiritual group and that her origin and life and power and enemies and dangers and treasures and power all lie in the Holy Ghost. But next is the soul which corresponds to the soul of the man. I’ll be brief on this. But I say that the Soul of a man is lower than his spirit, but higher than his body. I admit that sometimes soul and spirit are used interchangeably although there is a difference.

The soul of the church has to do with her tastes, her standards, her appreciations. The soul of a man is, let’s go out to the world for an illustration. Saturday afternoon on the radio, there will be, I’m just guessing because I can’t tell you where to turn, but there will be the New York Philharmonic playing from Mozart. You can turn your knob just a tiny fraction and you’ll hear the wildest rock and roll. There are groups that are enjoying both. It is just a question of your appreciation. It just a question of the soul, your tastes.

If you have a radio like mine, I have a little Zenith with FM and AM which in clear weather I can bring in stations from way down in the southwest. I can hear a fellow saying, all right now neighbor write in and get my song book, square notes and round notes. And their songs all have to do with hillbilly stuff, a guitar and a swing. They are some Christians get help from that I suppose. But it’s too bad that they do, beause the soul of the church is the cultural level of the church. It determines that the spiritual or aesthetic level of the church.

 A generation ago fundamentalism’s aesthetic appreciation took a nosedive into the gutter. Twenty or twenty-five years ago already, I told an editor I was going to write an article called, “The Cult of Ignorance and The Cult of Ugliness,” being the two cults that are in charge in among the fundamentalists.  He wanted to print it, but I never wrote it. It was probably a good thing I didn’t. But it’s still true, the cult of ignorance and the cult of ugliness has ruled in the church of Christ too long. The church should be the most cultivated, the most refined, the purest, the loftiest, the most elevated group of people to be found anywhere in the wide world.

So, the church has a soul. She’s essentially a spirit and take the spirit away and you’ve got nothing left but a dead body. But along with her spirit she has the soul, her appreciations. The church ought to be, I’ve always said, that if the church was doing the job she’s supposed to, there would never be any reason for a Bible school. There would never be any reason for a theological school at all unless it might be for specialized studies, say in Hebrew, Greek, Latin, and a few things that a church normally could not teach.

But if the church was where she should be, her people would come out instructed with her appreciations lifted, trained and polished. But we meet together and sing ‘let Jesus come into your heart” and then send our people off to Bible school to get the instruction they could have gotten if the church had had a soul as well as a spirit. If here mentality, her mind, her ability had been up to where she belonged

I’ll just quit when it comes to twelve o’clock. I’ll just quit, because I feel these things so deeply that you’ll excuse me for leaving my outline and talking about them, but we say, well, we’re living in a different time now. And we’ve got to simplify religion now in order to make it appeal to the masses. You know that the uneducated Roman masses were supposed to understand the book of Romans after they were converted and brought into the church? A lot of those Christians in Rome were not learned men. They were intelligent men, and they were quickened by the Holy Ghost into life. And they got into the church which is in Rome. And they were supposed to be able to hear read, and to understand the book of Romans which is said to be the profoundest book ever written.

And look at the writings of John. Look at the writings of the Gospel of John and 1 John. He wrote for the simple people. Look at the writings of Peter. He wrote for the simple people. Look at the Methodist of 200 years ago. I read their sermons and study their hymn books. There isn’t one cheap song in their hymn book. Were they learned? No. Probably ninety or ninety-nine percent were plain people, people that went to fifth grade, sixth grade, some went to the eighth grade and in some places there were no grades.

The Little Red Schoolhouse and the teacher who taught all grades. You know how it was in the early days, but they sang the great old songs. The fire of God was on those great old songs. And they turned America around to be a great Christian nation, a great Protestant nation, with their testimony strong and wonderful.

Our teachers that now write our literature and lead our publishing houses and edit our magazines say that’s all out. That we don’t, we can’t hope to in interest the multitudes unless we simplify things. So, we simplify them until you can actually take your finger and play with your lip. So perfectly, terribly low. I’ve tried to make this church understand over these years. I’ve tried to make this church understand that either there’s nothing to this at all, or else God has made us higher than the angels and has lifted us to a place above other creatures. And that we are called to be the loftiest and the most cultured, the most refined and the most thoughtful people in the whole wide world.

Then third, and last is the body. The body, of course corresponds to the body of a man. The spirit of the church corresponds to the spirit of the man and the soul of the church corresponds to the soul of the man and the body of the church corresponds to the body of the man. Now body is organized living matter. Living particles that have not organization, two things about them, one is they can’t stay alive long, and second, they have no control and therefore can’t be used.

That’s why I believe in the church. I believe in thy church O God, the house of thine abode. I believe in thy kingdom God. I believe in the group of believers, whether it’s a happy little group such as meets down in South Holland or whether it is a group going through the grist mill as we are here, or whether it’s a great crowd the size of Moody Church. Whatever, remember one thing, a body is the way the Holy Spirit works. He works through a body and the soul of the church must have a body to operate in.

That’s why I can’t go along with those who say I don’t believe in joining a church. I believe we should. I believe that we should identify ourselves with some local fellowship as they did at Corinth and Rome and Laodicea and the rest of the places. Be present there and let everybody know I’ll be there. If possible, I’ll be there barring a blizzard or an earthquake, I’ll be there.

And so just as a man has a spirit and a soul, but he can’t work. His spirit and soul can’t work. Shakespeare’s spirit and soul didn’t write his tremendous poetry. That number the choir did here happens to be one of my most wonderful favorites. Largo Handel, Holy Art Thou. Handel’s spirit didn’t write that. Handel’s spirit was the source of it. His soul enabled him to do it. But it was the body that put the notes down. His life was organized. He was organized. The man was organized. God organized him and put a soul and spirit in him.

So, the church must be organized and must work as a body. If you can take the spirit and soul out of a body and you have not a living body anymore. You have only an organization without life. And there’s lots of that. Or you can take living Christians and teach them that they can just tramp around anywhere and you’ll have disembodied life. But if you have Christians who are born of the Spirit and quickened into life, and then get into body, a group, then you have perfection. You have organized living matter.

The body of the church is all that is external. You can’t see the soul of the church and you can’t see the spirit of the church. You have to see the body of the church and that’s all. The body of the church is all the external, visible, social life of her, that which we see here, that which we see in our missionary convention times, that which we see when there’s any trouble, or anybody dies or somebody is ill. Or that which we see when persecutors come as they have in some countries. That’s the external, active, visible, spiritual and social life of the church, her creed or vows, her gatherings, her loyalties, or cooperation or good works, her worship, her fellowship, her love. This is the body of the church, that is, as far as we can see it, the external part.

Through that body, the church operates, or the Holy Ghost operates, to do two things to witness and to do good works. The witness of the church is her witness to Jesus Christ, her witness to Jesus Christ and her works.

So the church is able to serve her generation by the will of God and fall on sleep. Drive out through the country and you’ll see churches standing, weeds around the door if it’s summertime. Obviously, there’s no services there. Get out and mosey back and you will see a few graves out there. It’s plain that there’s been a shift in population. The farmers that used to be there by the hundreds are there only now in twos and threes and they’re within driving distance of a town. So that church doesn’t serve anymore.

Satan walks around such churches, I suppose three times a day with a leering smile on his face, saying, uh huh. There used to be the voice of prayer rising here, but the doors are boarded now and the windows are stoned out. And owls are where the bell used to ring. And he tries to comfort himself that there’s been a failure there. That Jesus Christ has suffered a loss there.

My brothers and my sisters, if you could call out of their dusty graves, the old bearded farmers and the old plenty heavy, but plenty busy housewives, their wives and the fine young people that were born to them and grew up and now maybe are middle aged or old, and then you could trace their service. You could see if there was some by some miracle a light could go out from that church to all parts of the world where they were blessed all over the world. I think the devil would crawl away and snarl with disappointment instead of sneer.

They served their generation in the will of God. And then they fell on sleep. And times changed. Henry Ford came along with his four wheels and a motor that could almost talk English and chug, chug, chug, and then the Wright brothers came along. And then along came plastics and missiles and factories and the conveyor belts and push buttons and Thomas A. Edison and all the rest. So there’s nobody out there anymore to go to that church. Don’t you drive by a church.

I have often seen statistics by poor fellows mourning and lamenting and saying, woe be unto us. Because there are now thousands of churches in rural America with nobody in them. There’s another way to look at such things my brothers. Statistics can lie to you. Those saints who from their labor rest, once sang the great hymns of Zion in those little churches. And out from there, there went doctors and lawyers and senators and preachers and missionaries and devotional writers and hymn writers and they’re scattered around the world. So, don’t for a minute let the Devil talk us down. He’s a great strategist you know and a great propagandist. If he can slip a bit of statistical propaganda into you and make you think there’s been a failure some place, he’ll do it.

The treasures of the church I say, are spiritual and they’re laid up in heaven and she can’t be harmed. God will raise from there dusty graves, all those dear old saints who served their generation by the will of God and fell asleep. The little body, the little group there that used to recite their creed and kneel at their altars and make their holy vows and gather in, in their sleighs and repeat their loyalties and cooperate in good works. They are gone now and a little old church is locked up, but there’s nothing lost after all. Because the treasures that they had are still in existence. Their God has them put away in His everlasting vaults to be brought out in the day of Christ’s return and paraded before all the intelligent world. They served their generation and fell on sleep.

So, this church has a spirit and a soul and a body. I pray that its spirit may remain warm and sweet and divine. That its soul may never be degenerate by low tastes, bad teaching and poor objectives, and that as a body we will continue. We must! It’s got to. It’s got to. Too many people looking this way. You can put out fifteen churches out in these outlying areas, fifteen churches, and then put one church like this and have more missionary money go out of that one church and out of all the other fifteen or twenty. I know that.

I was called on one time to speak at a women’s group. It was not for one local church mind you, not one local church, but it was a whole conference of a certain denomination. They had somebody else coming. What was his name? He used to be governor of Hawaii I believe. This brother, a preacher, he was supposed to be there and he got sick or something. So, they called me up and I said, all right, I’ll go. So I went down preach to them. And you know what? The missionary leader, a woman of that conference, was joyful and I didn’t have the heart to disillusion. She was joyful. You know how much money they raised? Six hundred dollars. They raised six hundred dollars in a whole conference for missions. One class in this church will give more than that.

Brethren, we’ve got to not only keep the spirit up and the soul together, but the body. You say, well, if somebody else has the gospel, let them. Yes, somebody else has the gospel, but as I explained, their emphasis is different. And they can live and have their banquets and their bowling clubs and all the rest. And they’re fun, and worship a little on the side and continue a lifetime. And in their entire lifetime, not send out as many missionaries as we send in one year or give as much to missions as we give in one year. And that’s not to boast. That’s simply to say, we’ve tried to keep close to the Holy Ghost, close to the person of Christ, close to God, close to the New Testament. Churches like that can’t die. Do you hear me? It can’t die.

Well, all right, next week, I’ll finish

Message 1 of 3 on The Life of the Servant by A.W. Tozer

“Serving with Body, Soul and Spirit” – January 18, 1959

I want to talk on the servant, the life of the servant. And I want to talk about a serving man and a serving group of men called a church. And I want to show you how a man is divided into body, soul and spirit. And the church is divided into body, soul and spirit and that it’s through our body, soul and spirit that we serve. I take a text this morning, a text that I have referred to and used very often because it happens to be one of my favorites. This will be rather an illustration than anything else to get us further into the messages I want to give.

In the 13th of Acts, the 36th verse “for David, after he had served his own generation by the will of God fell on sleep. Now those words you’ve heard me quote often because they are beautiful words. And they illustrate so many things. Now, I personally think that there never was, either in the Bible or out of it, a biography quite as beautiful as this one. David, after he had served his own generation by the will of God fell on sleep. That is not a complete biography certainly, but it is a very significant one.

When we write on the lives of men, we start with their grandparents, their national source, origins, lineage, who their parents were, where they were born, when, where they studied, how they grew up and married. And we put a lot of details in and there are more details than this in the Bible about David certainly. But I think that here when we reach the glory, and look on the face of God, we know as we’re known, the details of our lives will be found to be less important than we thought they were.

He served his generation. He served his generation in the will of God. Then because it was true, we did the only thing possible left for him to do, he went to sleep and he is now with his Lord. Not in the state of perfection, but waiting for that hour when His greater Son, Jesus Christ, shall bring about the consummation of all things.

I say there are many chapters written about David in the Old Testament. But here is about all that really matters. And it’s very lovely to me. It’s lovely, because it’s brief. It’s lovely, because it’s highly condensed, symmetrical and you have a feeling when you read these words, that you have read all that matters really about the man. I suppose actually that there is not much more really important but this. I think that you and I could relax and be more restful if we knew how few things were important. There are not very many things that are important to us at all even though we, down here in this busy wild, crazy world, imagine things are important that aren’t important at all.

A woman will spend more time over the length of a curtain or something else than the President spends on how many millions we’re going to give to Yugoslavia. Everything is relative, you know, on all matters. And all of this stuff is really relative.

I had a son once, we have him still of course, but he’s married and gone. But he had one suit and two ties. And he would get up before he went to church Sunday morning and stand before the mirror putting one tie up against the suit and then putting the other tie. It was a question of choosing which of the two, but it bothered him a lot. And being like his father, he tended to fuss about things a lot. And it was rather amusing. He just had two. It was just a question of which one, but really didn’t matter. Honestly, it didn’t matter.

If you managed to get off to church this morning brother with a tie that doesn’t match, 100 years from now, it will matter. Oh no, it won’t matter at all. And then, if there’s a little fray appearing around the arm, around anywhere about that coat sister, it won’t matter few years from now. It just won’t matter. And there are a lot of things here that don’t matter.

But there’s three things that David did. He served and he served in the will of God until he was through and then died. Now that’s, that’s beautiful, really, I think, I think that’s beautiful. To serve, and then to serve in the will of God. And then when you’re finished, and know what to do, and be able to do it. And be able to do it without remorse, without regret. To do it properly, and rightly and appropriately.

Most people when they die, don’t die appropriately, because they haven’t lived appropriately. They haven’t lived so that their lives can be appropriate, their death. But this man lived so, even though he made mistakes and sinned. Somebody who wants to run holding up David’s sin and say, this cancels out everything that David said, and everything that David wrote. Now, if David had been in heaven, I’d agree with them. Because in heaven, they are sinless up there.

David was in a sick world. You see, this world we live in a sick world. We’re not only bad intentionally, we’re sick, we’re depraved and sick. And for a man who is sick and trying to get well, and visiting the best doctor in the world to have a little relapse, for that to happen to a man, you don’t cancel that man out and say, well just throw him in the dump because he had relapsed. David had a relapse. David was a sick man morally sick, spiritually sick. And he relapsed into sin. Nobody’s excusing it and certainly the ages have not excused it. Certainly, David didn’t. If you think he did, read the 51st Psalm. He didn’t and God didn’t and Nathan didn’t. And the ages haven’t, but at least we can understand it if we can excuse it. So let’s not say this mars the beauty of the story of David. It doesn’t if you understand it in its proper, what the preachers call, its proper context, understanding everything else around about it.

Now, David served. There is a word and a word that’s much abused. When I was a young fellow growing up, the churches were going out for what they called social service. Everybody was taking a cup of water to everybody else that didn’t need it. And they were doing what they did in Washington during the time of the New Deal when one fellow suggested that we ought to give a glass of milk to everybody in the world. Somebody else who had been in the Far East came back and said, you take milk to some nationalities in the Far East and they’d throw it back at you. Nobody would drink milk over there. They considered it terrible. But he wanted to drink milk.

And another fellow suggested that in order to save wear and tear on the horse’s shoes that when we put them to bed at night we ought to take them off. It’s an effort to serve but not a very intelligent effort to serve. Social Service they said.

David served in the will of God. And I want you to know that though this word has been much abused, I want to remind you most solemnly, that the Lord of Glory said, I am among you as one that serveth. Now I do not know about the service in heaven. I suppose they also serve yonder in the presence of the Eternal Light. No doubt they do serve yonder. No doubt they that cry day and night, holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty, are serving and we do read in Ezekiel chapter one of those creatures with the six wings and with two they covered their face with two they covered their feet and with two they did fly. And they went straight forward, then they ran to do the will of God. And we read about in the 104th Psalm, of the angels that are strong to do the will of God. So they serve up there, but I’m sure they don’t serve in the same way. I’m sure that in the presence of the Eternal Light, there is another kind of service required. But if you and I could always keep it in mind that we’re in an abnormal world. These are emergency times in which we live in.

They started when Adam sinned and they will not finish until the King comes down like rain on the mowed grass and like showers that water the earth. In the meantime, we live in emergency times. This is a state of extreme emergency. It’s a sick world. And those who are able must be serving those who are less able. Nobody’s entirely well. But just as when the great influenza epidemics have gone through the world, whole families would go down. But perhaps the mother or the father or one of the family should be less ill, and thus would become a kind of a nurse for the ones who are sicker than he or she was. So it is in a world like ours.

David wasn’t absolutely holy, but he was a good man and he was after God’s heart in that he was aimed in the right direction. And he served God. He served God in God’s will. He served the people. He served God by serving the people, he served his generation. And he did it joyously and he did it willingly. He didn’t do it as perfectly as if he had been an angel and had not been himself infected with the same disease the others had.

David was being cured by the grace of God, moving on toward a state of greater health and greater spiritual robustness, and therefore David could serve. And he served and the Lord of Glory when He came down served. He came down to a sick world. And he could serve perfectly because he had none of the disease. He was not Himself a sick man. The Scripture says, tempted in all points, yet without sin. It says, higher than the highest heaven, separated from sinners so that Christ did not have the depravity. He was a servant down here. And no matter what we may do, or how religious we may feel, if we do not serve, then we’re parasites and we’re sterile, and we do not leave anything behind us.

Well, he not only served and you notice, serve here isn’t a command. To command and to serve are two different things. There’s the servant and the master. And our Lord who was the universal master became the servant of his servants. This I say my friends, is wonderful to read, that Jesus Christ our Lord came and became servant of those who were created to be His servants. He humbled Himself and considered not the holding on to His visible evidences of His Godhead something to be treasured, but gave it up, and came down and became a man and humbled Himself and went down and served his generation. And the Church of Christ is called to do this.

The Church of Christ is called to serve. And she’s called now not to control but to serve. The church is getting quite these days the notion that when we meet we’ve got to send telegrams to Congress and to the President and tell them what to do. We’re not lords over the government, and we’re not lords over society. We’re servants of man. We’re here to serve. The servant doesn’t tell the master what to do. He serves his generation rather than commands it.

Well then, he served in the will of God. And I want you to know that it’s possible to serve in the church and labor and work for a lifetime and not have anything to show for it because we’re not serving in the will of God. It’s entirely possible to have a church, to have it financed, to have it organized, to have regular order of service, to have a fellowship, to have the people meet, to have a fine buildings and need larger buildings. It’s entirely possible to have all the outer evidences of being at church. And yet because of the absence of certain vital, necessary qualities within that church, it’s not a church at all, but something else.

I came out of a church when I was a young fellow, where the women Sunday afternoons used to meet down in beautiful parlors, we now call basements, but they didn’t. They called them church parlors. And there they met, and they made sandwiches and had pies and stuff. You go around, and you will see, what do they call them, rummage sales? Rummage sales.

A woman says, John, I don’t know. I can’t wear that coat any longer. Look at this thing. You don’t want me to look like a tramp do you? No, he said, Honey go get yourself another. So, she gets herself another one and gives that one to God. And they rent a storeroom and have a rummage sale. And all the other people that decided they couldn’t wear the old junk anymore, and that piece, that statuary, or that old chair, that was old fashioned and terrible and they were weary of seeing it around. Give it to the church. Let them sell it. So somebody comes along and buys it. I never had been able to understand who did the buying. I can understand the backslidden carnality of the ones who do the giving, but I can’t understand how anyone would want to buy it. I go to the 10 cent store and get something good. But they run their churches on that anyway. And thus I don’t believe they’re serving God at all.

David one time said, God forbid that I should offer to the Lord that which costs me nothing. And that old battered coat of yours doesn’t cost you anything. And you’ve had out of it plenty of wear and you might as well give it away, so you give it to the Lord. I don’t think you do, but other churches do. And the result is there’s a lot of service burning up a lot of energy in the consuming of a lot of time. But nobody’s being served, because we’re not serving in the will of God. Religious activity is mistaken for spiritual service. The two are not the same.

Spiritual service is religious activity, but religious activity isn’t necessarily spiritual service. David served his generation by the will of God and in the will of God. And thus he sent his labors on a head for God to preserve. And when David finally laid down and went to sleep, David’s labors were over there waiting for him. And Jesus said, Send your treasures on the head. And Paul said, send your treasures on ahead. And we have that right unto God to do it, to send our labors on ahead and thus avoid the tragedy of wasted toil.

Then it says here, that after David had served his generation, by the will of God, he fell on sleep. Now, I have said this before, but I repeat it here now because it properly fits into the topic. This man had earned his right to sleep. He had earned his right. I heard of the man who went to a doctor. He said that he couldn’t sleep. He said he had difficulty. And the doctor said, well tell me about it. Well, he said I do all right at night. I sleep pretty well at night. And he said in the mornings I can sleep pretty well. But in the afternoons I just roll and toss. That man hadn’t earned any right to sleep. He slept all night, part of the day, but he had trouble in the afternoon. And that’s just a story, but that just illustrates something that a lot of God’s people, they sleep all the time. They haven’t right to fall on sleep because they never woke up. They haven’t come out of it. They’re still there, but this man earned his right.

But our hard working man, I talked to a bus driver yesterday. We’re driving along and I was the only passenger and so I went up front where I could talk to him and I began with that most serviceable of all topics, the weather. I said, nice day. Yes, but it’s pretty bad when you have snow. Oh, he said it’s terrible. He said, barreling these big things around when you can’t control them, he said it’s terrible. He said one of our fellows the other day got in his bus to drive off, bend over the wheel and died. He said we’ve lost six of them like that. He said we’ve lost six of them to bad weather. And he said some of them have had nervous breakdowns. He said the responsibility of handling your big bus over the slippery traffic, he said it’s terrible. Well, I’ve often gone out to 95th street with him. And he said, we’re only going to Vincence. It’s as far as I want to go, so I chat with him. I say, is your time over. Yes, I was driving all night. Glad to be over. A fellow that drives a bus all night, he’s got a right to go home and go to sleep. Now don’t ask me. He has a right to go home and go to sleep. But if he’s done nothing but loaf, he hasn’t any right to sleep. Nobody has any right to sleep till he’s worn himself down, so he has a right to sleep.

And David did that very thing. He served his generation in the will of God. And then when God said, David, you’re a tired boy, and you’re old and cold, you can get no heat. And he didn’t have electric blankets, David, poor fellow, he was tired. He was really tired. He served his generation. And no man has any right to die until he is found his place in the will of God. To die out of the will of God and to live out of the will of God and die out of the will of God and to die never sure that you’ve ever found the will of God is a tragic and terrible thing.

No man has any right to die until he’s put more into the world than he’s taken out of it. You’ve taken a lot out of the world. Don’t forget that. Years ago I gave a sermon which I told about it and Sid Harris had it in him the other day. Not my sermon, but he happened to be thinking on the same lines. So, he sends his children to schools he didn’t build. They walk on sidewalks they didn’t lay. He went on and I’ve been thinking about that and preaching it for years that you and I are in debt to society. We’re in debt to the world. That flag that flies over the White House and keeps America free. I didn’t make that flag. And all this network of great highways. I didn’t build those highways. I admit maybe they tax me to get the money, but that’s about all I did, pay reluctantly.

That I grew up and had all the privileges of American civilization and I didn’t put a thing into it. My little old hard-working mother knew I was on the way and when I arrived there, sure enough, there was a place for me. My father, hard, bony, calloused hands, worked to bring me up. I owe a lot to the world. I go in for one dollar and a half or two dollars I buy a book that costs man as Milton said, the lifeblood of a master spirit. And I get education out of a book somebody else sweat over. I read some of the works of Milton and I remember that writing it drove him blind. But it cost me nothing. A couple of dollars.

You and I get a lot out of the world, my friend. But we’re not ready to die till we put more and then we took out. Somebody is putting it in. Somebody is doing it. We walk around, over the shores, up and down across the America we love and we forget, we forget that over there in France, just to name one area, there are little white crosses as regularly and carefully laid out as these seats. Look down this way and they fall into a pattern. Look straight ahead, they fall into a pattern. Look that way they fall into a pattern. And that cost those fellas their all. Nobody has any right to die until he’s put something back in to a land that gave him so much. And nobody has any right to die until he’s put something back into the church. Look what I got out of the church. Look, I got Bibles, translations of the Scriptures. They didn’t cost me anything except to go down to buy them. The labor and what cost me nothing. I have hymns to sing, a long tradition of Christianity and righteousness and godly service in the churches. We got all that free of charge. People prayed for me long before I ever turned to God.

My friends, we owe it to the church to put something back in, something back in there. I’ve often thought to write a hymn that would live. Write a hymn that somebody would be singing long after you have turned to dust. That would be worth something, wouldn’t it? Moody had a more practical notion. He said, I want no monument, except two legged monuments going about praising God.

To live in the world, and to go out of it and to have done nothing for it, in my mind, it’s a moral tragedy. And to be a part of a church, “the” church and to receive, always receive, always receive and never hurt ourselves in any way, never sacrifice anything, give a time, but who wouldn’t. And never hurt ourselves. Ask for service and get nobody to reply. Ask, could you help, but nobody wants to. They want to receive but not give. I don’t say that’s true of you, but I say that’s true of so many Christians that it lies upon us like a black smog all over the church of Christ, ready to take out, ready to always take out, but never to put in.

David didn’t do it. David fell on sleep only after he had put his generation deeply in debt to him. And I beg you to think about yourself. I guess I’m only going to get through the introduction this morning, because this is all introductory. I want to talk about the church as a trinity and man as a trinity. And I’ll talk about that next Sunday.

Now I want to close by asking you if you ever saw a lovelier picture than this one. A great man, a man without any of the modern conveniences. A man that never saw an automobile, never saw a Sputnik, never heard a radio and never looked at it television, never saw anything made out of plastic, never talk to anybody on a telephone. never rode in a train or on a bus or in an elevator, never flew in an airplane. never ate frozen food, thank God, and never had any of this that you and I have. No Oxford then, no Harvard then, no University of Glasgow then, no Chicago University then, just a farm boy brought up among the sheep. And he had a habit of looking toward the sky at night, seeing the stars, and he said, oh when I consider thy heavens, the work of thy hands. What is man and from there on he went on trusting God. And when the bear came up, in the name of Jehovah he slew it. And the lion, he slew it and went on to be king in Israel. But that wasn’t his biggest job. In fact, that wasn’t a big job at all. His biggest job was when he reached into his own heart and dipped his pen into his own life blood and wrote his songs.

The world has been a sweeter place to live in, even the unsaved world, even the lost world. Even the world that doesn’t care is a better place to live in because David dipped his pen in his heart and wrote his songs. Even because David made his homemade harp and put it in the window of the church and in the synagogue for the winds of heaven to blow through, there’s been music there wouldn’t otherwise have been in the world. There have been Of course multiplied millions who have found God through the Psalms of David. Thank God for that man. What he had, nothing. What did he start with? Nothing! A farm boy out on the hill watching the sheep with not much education if any. Perhaps his father saw that he had a little and he certainly had some. But God had gifted him and moved him by the Holy Ghost and so he gave to us. And isn’t it wonderful here friends? I said he served his generation, but he served all the generations from his on. Because he served his generation. He couldn’t have served the next generation if he hadn’t served the generation that was his own.

You may serve day after tomorrow, if you served today. But if you don’t serve the day, you can’t serve the tomorrows. You may serve the generation yet unborn, if you serve this generation by the will of God. We’ve sent missionaries out from this church to all parts of the world. You could draw a picture of this church and put beams of light or as they do on the map, and you’d find they go to many parts of the world. They have gone out there and serve that generation. Some of them sleep. But those that they won to Christ are still over there. And they and others and the devil can’t take that away. They served this generation and in doing it served all the generations to come. So did David. It’s wonderful to be a worshipping church.

It’s wonderful to be a serving church that worships and serves. Some worship only and sit around and admire each other. The idea they’re here to serve never occurs to them. Others serve only and never think of worshipping. They run on tea as a Ford runs on gasoline and on coffee and their banquets and their times of getting together. They have to keep them always recurring in order that they might not run down. Just as you have to pull into Standard or Shell and gas up. A church runs like that, but there’s no worship there. No worship, no sense of the fiery presence of the bush. Nothing, but just serve. They’re the first ones to be out on the corner with a box to take dimes for the needy and that’s all right. I believe in that and that’s part of serving maybe. But remember that serving that doesn’t have worship in it is lost, for it’s not in the will of God.

Worship that doesn’t have service in it, it is religion in theory. It’s a selfish, self-admiration. But to worship and serve and to serve and worship, to worship God in the will of God and to serve your generation For God’s dear sake. That’s what David did and that’s what the church has done down the years. And that’s what this church is called to do. That’s what you and I are called to do. I hope that we’ll hear God’s voice and not fail Him and go to the end and sleep before it’s time. Before we put the world in debt to us and put more into the church than we took out of it. Amen.

Message 4 of 4 on the Deeper Spiritual Life by A.W. Tozer

February 12, 1956

“Our Relationships to God”

Now, this morning again, I want to talk on the deeper live, what it is and how we may enter into it. This will be the fourth in a series. I have for a kind of a text, the first two verses of the sixth chapter of Hebrews. Therefore, leaving the principles of the doctrine of Christ, let us go on unto perfection, not laying again the foundation of repentance from dead works and of faith toward God, or the doctrine of baptisms and the laying on of hands and the resurrection of the dead and of eternal judgment. That exhortation, let us go on unto perfection.

Now, I had wanted to, and have been wanting to talk about the deeper life, but I find that the expression is used to cover almost anything and everything. I want it to be understood that by the words that I do not mean a live deeper than the Scripture indicates.

I have said many times and repeat, that I do not want anything that cannot be found within the framework of the revelation, the Christian revelation. I do not want anything added. I don’t need it. I do not want it. I’m not interested in it. That is why I never buy books nor go listen to lectures on how to wake up your solar plexus and tune in to the cosmic process. All that is extra scriptural and any of it that’s good is found in the Word of God and anything that isn’t in the Word of God isn’t good.

So, I let those fellas talk to people who don’t know the Word and I will stay by the Word. I have said in conversations with people in private conversations that I am a Bible Christian. That is, if an archangel with wingspread as broad as a constellation were to come and shining like the sun and offer me some new truth, I’d ask him for reference, and if he couldn’t give it to me, and couldn’t show me where it’s found in the Bible, I would bow him out and say, I’m awfully sorry, you don’t bring in references with you. So, what I’m talking about is not a life deeper than the scriptures indicate, but merely one that is, in fact, what it professes to be in name.

Now, a Christian isn’t one who has been baptized necessarily, though a Christian is likely to be baptized. A Christian is not one who receives the communion, either one or both of the elements. A Christian may receive communion and if he’s properly taught, will, but that is not necessarily a Christian. A Christian is not one who has been born into a Christian home, though the chances are more likely that you will be a Christian if he has a good Christian background. A Christian is not one who has memorized the New Testament or who is a great lover of Christian songs, or who goes to hear the Apollo club sing Messiah every year. Now a Christian may do all of those things, and I think it might be fine if he did. But that doesn’t make a Christian. A Christian is one who sustains a right relation to Jesus Christ.

Christians enjoy a kind of union with Jesus Christ, a right kind of union. Everybody sustains some relationship to Jesus Christ, just the same as everybody in America sustains some relation to both friends and enemies of the country. We all sustain some relation. My personal relation is one of active hostility so far as it can be within the framework of Christian possibility. We can’t hate people but we can hate everything they stand for and I want them to know that I do when they are enemies of our country.

Everybody has a relationship to everybody else and everybody has a relationship to Jesus Christ. It may be one of adoring, faith and love. It may be one of admiration. It may be one of hostility. It may be one of complete carelessness, but it’s an attitude of some sort. A relationship of some sort exists between every human being and Jesus Christ. That is, every human being that ever heard of Jesus Christ. A Christian is one who sustains a right and proper relation to Jesus Christ, a biblical relation to Christ, one that he is right. That Christian sustains two kinds or relationships, or rather the union is two kinds, its judicial and vital. I’ll explain those two words.

In Romans, the fifth chapter, we have the judicial relationship that everybody sustains toward Christ. Therefore, being justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom we have access by faith, into this grace wherein we stand, and rejoice in hope of the glory of God. Then in the book of Ephesians, the first chapter that very oft-quoted passage, He has blessed us with all spiritual blessings in heavenly places in Christ according as He has chosen as in Him before the foundation of the world, and so on.

Now, I only quote those, not to give them exposition, but only to point out the fact that we sustain, toward God in Christ, a certain judicial relationship. Just as your son in the home has toward you a certain legal, judicial relationship, being born into your family, of your wife, you have legal obligations, and you can get in trouble with the law if you deny them. All law recognizes a certain right, the courts recognize that right. A relationship that is there between you and your son. It is not only the relationship of father to son biologically, it is a judicial relationship. You’re accountable before the law not to neglect him, abuse him, starve him or runaway and leave him. You got to look after him. He is your son.

Now, there is a relationship which we sustain toward God in Christ. It is the relationship of some children to the Father. Yes, we are children of God. There are so many verses that deal with that, that I don’t need to quote any one of them. You as bible students know that. Then, there is a vital relationship, which is another matter altogether. It is possible for a man to adopt a son. A husband and wife have no children and after a lot of waiting around, they decide that they’re going to adopt a boy.

So, they adopt that boy. Now, under law, he has the exactly the same relationship to that man, as if he were his own son. As the legal father before the law, he has the judicial relationship that makes him responsible for the care of that boy. He is responsible to feed and educate and bring up and shelter and care for that boy until he comes of a certain age. So that the relationship is judicial, that of father and son. But he has no vital relationship with that boy. He did not come from the long, age old life stream of that father. He came from some other live stream and was adopted into the family. So, he has a judicial, but not a vital relationship to that son, but a Christian has a vital relationship to God and to Christ.

He said, as I shall show tonight again, I am the vine and ye are the branches and the branch is a branch because it sustains a vital relationship. The life of the vine is in the branch and the life of the branch comes from the vine, and the two are united. That’s a vital relationship. So that a Christian is one who has been judicially, legally made a brother of Jesus Christ and a child of God. But he is more than that. He is one who has been vitally united to Jesus Christ by the power and motions of life so that he is vitally, livingly related to Jesus Christ.

Now, that’s where we begin and my brothers and sisters, that’s where almost everybody ends, in our circles. That’s where almost everybody ends. And so, Bible schools and Bible conferences and books and printing houses, all are dedicated to the constant repetition of the fact that we’re judicially and vitally related to Christ in salvation. And that’s as far as we go.

But there are other relationships which we can also bear toward Christ. And that’s what the writer meant in the Hebrews when he said, let us go on unto perfection. And that’s what it meant in 1 Corinthians chapter three, when the man of God told them that they were carnal and that they ought to move on out of that carnal state into a spiritual state.

There are at least three other relationships that everybody ought to bear toward Jesus Christ, not only the one that you entered into when you believed on Christ, and were born again judicially, and not only the volitional one which you entered when you were born again. So that’s how you entered. But there are there are three others, volitional, intellectual and emotional. And I want to talk about these relationships, this kind of union with Christ.

Now I say that our union is judicial and vital. It’s that by the virtue of our faith in Christ, but there is a volitional relationship too. And what do I mean by that? Well, it’s not as bad as it sounds. I know we preachers have a way of making things awful and then take ten minutes to get the people’s minds back again.

By volitional I mean, that a relationship of our will to God, so that every known will of God should be mine, every known will of God. Everything that God wills I should will, so that I will not only be judicially, legally related to him, and not only vitally related to Him in life, but that I will in my mind, in my volitional life, be united to him by doing and knowing and willing exactly as he does. Now that’s what I mean by, let us go on.

Most Christians do not go on to make all the will of God their will. They sing very tenderly that pretty little ditty, you know, O sweet will of God still bind me closer. I like that too. Don’t get me wrong. I like to hear it once every year or so. But, will of God still bind me closer, we can sing that and have moist eyes, and yet be selfish, and self-willed and not make the will of God our own. The will of God must be known, and then must be adopted as my will. And then I began to sustain a relationship of will, a volitional relationship toward Jesus Christ.

How do I know the will of God? By listening to stories told by preachers? No. How do I know the will of God? I know by prayer, by the study of the Bible and by experience, I go to the scriptures and I read it with regularity. And I go to prayer and I ask God for grace to help me to understand it. You know that song, “Break Thou the Bread of Life?” We have it in three stanzas in our book, but I read it in the Baptist hymn book this morning. I had it propped up while I was eating my gruel.

And looking at it, I find there’s another verse in there. I do not recall the verbatim wording of it but the third or fourth stanza of that hymn, prays that the Holy Ghost might enlighten the Word so we can understand it. That’s the part we don’t sing. I don’t think there is anything sinister in that. They just have to make room so they chop verses or stanzas and they chopped off that one.

Well, my brethren, I believe that the writer of “Break Thou the Bread of Life,” knew what she was writing about when she said, give Thou the Spirit Lord, dear Lord to me, that the Lord might give the Holy Ghost as a light upon the scriptures. So, if we pray and have the Spirit of God give us illumination, and we read the Word of God with careful attention and relish, and then we watch our spiritual experiences, there will begin to crystallize within us, a will that is God’s will.

I wonder if that’s what Jesus meant when he said, but ye have the mind of Christ. There is a mind. There is a set of an infinite number of attitudes and relationships within the heart. And these are all wrong to start with and they don’t all get corrected when we get converted either. And they don’t all get corrected after we’ve been to Bible school. They get corrected only by working on them, by prayer, by study, by spiritual experience, by the illumination of the Holy Ghost. Those attitudes begin to become spiritual instead of carnal. They begin to get right and then get straightened out.

There is a second relationship that I would mention to go on to, and that is an intellectual relationship to Jesus Christ. Now of course there is a sense in which the volitional and the intellectual come as soon as we’re converted, but there is another sense in which they do not, but wait on development and growth.

So, by the intellectual I mean, that we should have, that we should think the way Jesus Christ thinks. That we should think scripturally. That we should see things the way the Lord Jesus sees them. That we should learn to feel the way the Lord Jesus feels about anything or anybody. That we should love what he loves and hate what he hates.

Now, some of your hackles will get up here and you will say, Mr. Tozer, do you think God hates anything? Sure I do. He says so. Thou hast loved righteousness and hated iniquity. Therefore, my God has anointed thee with the oil of gladness above thy fellows. It is a psychological impossibility to love anything without hating its opposite. If I love holiness, I hate sin. If I love truth, I hate lies. If I love honesty, I hate dishonesty. If I love purity, I hate filth. I can’t help that. Don’t think that’s bad. Hate is only bad when it’s aimed against people made in the image of God, or when it springs out of some unworthy or low motive, like jealousy, or envy, or anger. But we should learn to hate what Jesus hates. And I’m sure that if we had the mind of Christ intellectually, so that we judged things the way He judges them, there would be less need for preaching separation from the world than there is today among Christians.

Talking about getting the mind of Christ and having the intellect sanctified, I will talk again about two men. I think I gave this either on the air or here at the church within recent months, but you can open a window anytime to get light and this is a window of illustration.

They tell me that there were in England two men, both of them of course Englishman, Keats and Milton. In my earlier Christian life, I read them a great deal then I got away from Keats. I still admire him very greatly for the marvelous music of his poetry, but there’s nothing of God in it and nothing of Christ. So, I don’t find it very helpful anymore. Milton of course will be alright.  I think we’ll read Milton in heaven. But here’s what they, the critics said about these two men. They said Keats was an Englishman, born of English stock, reared in England, and I think never left England and died when he was in his 20s, an Englishman of the Englishman. Keats had read Greek literature so much that he had developed a Greek mind, and that his mind was not an English mind. He had nothing of the restrictions and strengths and weaknesses of the British mind at all. It was a Greek mind. He thought like the Greeks.

Then they said of Milton. Milton was an Englishman born English, of the English. Lived in England all his life, perhaps a few trips abroad, but not many. He lived and died in England, and is one of the second of all the great English poets. Yet they said Milton read the Bible so much, memorized it so much and lived in it so much, that he was a Hebrew in his heart and that Milton had a Bible mind. And then it got into everything he wrote. He couldn’t knock off a common sonnet of fourteen lines, but what somewhere in it would be the lilt and rhythm of the Hebrew melodies in the Old or New Testament verse. I understand the New Testament was written in Greek, but I also understand it was Hebrew in its thought pattern.

Now there we have two minds, both of them English, living in the same country, and eating the same kind of foods and seeing the same scenery and having the same kind of basic education. And yet one of them became a Greek in everything but nationality, because he loved the Greeks so much. The other became Hebrew because he loved the Bible so much. No, that’s what I mean. That illustrates it at any rate.

You can have a Christian mind, a Bible mind. You can be Bible-minded in the sense that it is not George Washington or even Abraham Lincoln nor Benjamin Franklin or any of the rest of them. Not Longfellow and others and certainly not Whitman. But the New Testament, even though you’re an American, you have a New Testament mind. I believe that’s what the Holy Ghost wants to do for us.

I believe that he wants our intellectual relationship to Jesus Christ to become so close, so intimate, so all embracing, that we’ll think as Jesus thought. I say, love as he loved and hate what he hated and value what he valued and have the mind of Christ in us. And that doesn’t come by believing on Jesus Christ, or buying a Scofield Bible and singing choruses.

Brother, you’ve got to go beyond. Let us go on. Those things are all basically sound and right and good and I have no objection. Stick by your Scofield Bible. It’s good. And it did in the early part of this century, wonderful, yeoman service in helping us to stand against liberalism and modernism, but it has its limitations. Its limitations consist of an excessive emphasis upon the judicial relationship to Jesus Christ and very little about going on unto perfection. But that’s the same criticism that I bring against most of evangelicalism today. So, I say there’s a volitional and an intellectual relationship to Jesus Christ, which we Christians should go on to cultivate.

Then thirdly, there is an emotional relationship, that is, a love attachment to Christ. Do you love the Lord Jesus Christ? Really? Do you really love Him now. Now, I know we sing that. We do. We sing things that aren’t very true sometime. Do you really love Christ?

A half comical answer given to Moody one time when he inquired of a man on the street, do you love Jesus? He answered, I have nothing against him. I think that is about as far as a lot of people go. We have nothing against Jesus. But they say, we love Him. Ask the young mother, with a three-month-old baby, just maybe howling with his first little tooth and able to smile all over his face when it looks up at his parents. Ask the mother, do you love your baby? You know what will happen. She’ll break out and every inch of your face will wrinkle up into a smile. Of course, she does. Do you love your baby? Sure.

Ask the sick, weary boy, sitting in a foxhole somewhere, cold and hungry and tired and weary of life. Do you love your country? He won’t give you any cynical answer like some of our present politicians. I think he’ll break down and say, oh my God, if I only could go back home.

Could I tell you again of our Alliance missionary who’d been in China a long, long time? His name was Jacobson. He’s retired now. He’d been in China, oh, I don’t know how long, years ago. There, while in China, children were born to them. Then they were sent home. They came home by way of the

West Coast to San Francisco. And at every port of call, the children would say, is this America Daddy, is this America? No, this isn’t America. This isn’t America. After three or four such disappointing incidents, the boat came in to the harbor of San Francisco. There, they saw the Golden Gate. Some of you have seen the Golden Gate of San Francisco. He said, way over there was the shoreline and two peaks, with the sun shining down right on them.They stood on the deck and looked, and the little children said, is this America? As he responded, he went all the pieces and let himself go in a welter of homesickness and patriotism and love and memories and said through his sobs, yes, yes, children, this is America.

He didn’t know how much he loved her. He didn’t know how dear her rocks and rills, her woods and templed hills had been to his American heart until he’d been shut away from there so long. His first sight of his homeland, broke him all up, so he cried like the child that he was for a moment. Ask that man, do you love America? He’ll grin at you and sheepishly tell you that story. Yes, he loves America. Do you love Jesus? Really?

Well, I think it’s possible to be a Christian, that is, to have faith in His power and His work and His atonement. I think it’s possible even to have a vital relation to him in the new birth, and yet not have cultivated His fellowship to the point where we love Him very much. We’re not done yet. We’re not finished until the love attachment to Christ has become so strong that it burns and glows and consumes.

When I read the writings of the old mystics in the old devotional writings and hymn writers of the Middle Ages and later I get sick in my heart and I tell God. I tell him, God, I’m sorry. I apologize and I’m ashamed. I don’t love Thee the way these loved Thee. Read the writings, read the letters of Samuel Rutherford. If you haven’t, you should. Read those letters and then see how sick it will make you. You’ll fold that book shut and then get down on your knees very likely and say, Lord Jesus, do I love you at all considering that this was love. What am I? What have I got?

No, there should be an emotional relationship to Jesus Christ. A relationship of love. Thou hast left thy first love, said the Lord Jesus. Maybe that’s what it means, that you’ve allowed things to cool you off, so like the young husband, who really loves his bride, but he’s too busy making a living for, that he neglects her. I wonder if Jesus might not have had something like that in mind. You’re too busy for me. You’re busy dashing here and there in my service but you’ve left your first love.

Now, what is this Christian then, who has gone on until he sustains toward our Lord, a right, a scriptural, a Spirit-inspired, volitional and intellectual and emotional attitude toward the Savior. Well, he is one who has been freed from earthly loves and fears. I want you to put that down. He is one who has been released from earthly loves and fears. What do I mean by earthly love? I mean any love out of the will of God, that is, any love that we would not let God take away from us. If you have anything in this world or anybody in this world, that you would not let God take away from him, then you don’t love Him as you should and you don’t know anything about the deeper life in experience.

For the deeper, Spirit-filled Christian life, means that I am delivered from earthly loves to a point where there is no love that I would not allow Jesus Christ to take away, be it money, be it reputation, be it my home, be it my friends, be it my family, whatever it may be. There is nothing. The love of Jesus Christ has come in and swallowed up all other loves and sanctified them, purified them, made them holy, and put them in a right relationship to that all-consuming love of God, so that they’re secondary and never primary.

If there’s anything, now think with me a little bit, you believe and attend the Alliance church and you believe you know something about the deeper things of God. All right, I want to ask you this question, is there anything or anybody on earth that you love so much that you’d fight God, if God wants to take it? Then you’re not where you should be and we might as well face up to it and not pretend to be something we’re not.

Complete freedom means that I want the will of God only. And if it’s the will of God for me to have these things, then I love them for His sake. But I love them with a tentative and relative love, not with an all, poured out love, that binds me as a slave. It means that I love nothing outside the will of God. And that I love only what or who He wills that I should love. Then you can love everybody. I think Paul loved Timothy and Silas and Titus and the rest of them with a love that glowed like a furnace. But he didn’t love them to a point where he couldn’t separate from them or where he would fight God for them. He only loved them in the margin of his heart. He loved God at the center, and he loved them for God’s dear sake. This is Christianity.

You say, you mean to tell me that I’m not to love my baby? No, I mean to tell you that you’re to love God so much, that you love your baby in its right context. You mean to say I’m not to love my husband? No, you’re to love him, but you’re to love him in right context, in right relationship.

There was a very intelligent, brilliant woman and a writer of note, who laid beside her baby. The baby was very sick. She was trying to get a little sleep and trying to care and nurse the baby too and the little thing was suffering. It had a high fever and was really suffering and she knew it. She said she watched that little, suffering face. And after having done everything she could do to assuage his pains and sufferings, she turned away to think it over. She said, when I turned away, I saw the strain and the pain in the flesh of the baby’s face and it’s two bright eyes and I knew the baby was suffering. She said, I turned and said, God, I’m through with you. You let my baby suffer like that? I’m through. I can’t love a God who let my baby suffer. And she went out to become a rationalist, an unbeliever. Well, she was a poor fool. She didn’t understand. Unless she changed your mind, I don’t think she did, she knows more now than she did then. That’s been a century ago.

What happened there? She loved her baby more than she loved the God who created him. And if the God who created her will let her baby run a fever, she’d have nothing to do with Him. That kind of love isn’t love. That’s supreme selfishness. It’s the extension of her personality, the projection of her personality into that baby and its sheer, pure selfishness.

My own Mother in law had a baby that died. She went through fire and water and blood and tears and toil to come through to a wonderful spiritual experience. She had to sit up in bed, weak and weary as she was, made the baby’s coffin. The husband made it out of wood. She made the lining, not of silk, but of whatever she could get a hold of, to line it. So great was their poverty because they weren’t rich.

And when the funeral was held, she stood by the grave with the rest or the people. As they stood there they were expecting her to break down. Instead she said, shall we sing together? She led off in the Doxology. Some people went away and said Mrs. Fautz is insane. Others went away with moist eyes and said, there’s faith and love. There’s faith and love that can give her newborn to the grave, and sing praise to God from whom all blessings flow, beside that grave.

If you love anything enough, if there’s any question about whether God’s going to have it or not, you know nothing about the deeper life. You’re a slave. You’re a slave to that love, whatever it is. If we’ve been freed from every earthly love, then we will have no unsatisfied longings, and we’ll have no wishes and dreams.

I never use the word “wish,” never. Years ago, I quit it. If it ever breaks out in my speech or preaching, it’s only a colloquialism. I never mean it. Wish is something I never use. If God wants me to have it, I’ll pray for it. And if he doesn’t want me to have it, I don’t want it.

Now, earthly fears. The Christian who goes on, gets freed from earthly fears. I was thinking of this the other day. I still think of it a little at times. There are two chains that bind the whole human race–loves and fears. We love something and can’t get it, or we love something and we’re afraid we’re going to lose it. So, we’re bound to that chain or we’re afraid we’ll get something that we don’t want, or afraid we lose something that we have. We’re bound to that chain. Fear and love bind humanity in two golden chains. And the gospel of Jesus Christ is never finished until He sets us free from our loves and fears.

We love our family more than we ever loved them before. We love our country with cheerful devotion. We love every good thing there is in the world, but in its right context. And we love it for Jesus sake. And we love it and hold it this way so we can let go of it at any second for the Lord’s sake. That’s what it is to be free from earthly loves. Free from earthly fears means, that I choose the will of God now and forever. It’s my treasure. It’s my whole beatitude. The only fear I have, is the fear to get out of the will of God and for it not to bother me, that it won’t bother me! Outside of the will of God, there’s nothing I want. In the will of God, there’s nothing I fear, for God has sworn to keep me in his will. If I’m out of his will, that’s another matter. But if I’m in his will, He has sworn to keep me. He’s able to do. He’s wise enough to know how to do it and He’s kind enough to want to do it.

So really there’s nothing to fear. I get kidded around with my family and friends and brother McAfee, especially likes to do it, but I don’t really think I’m afraid of anything. Somebody says, but you’ll die of cancer. Maybe so, but it is going to have to hurry up though. I’ll die of old age first. But, I’m not too badly worried because a man who dies of cancer in the will of God, he isn’t injured. He’s just dead. He isn’t injured. You can’t harm a man in the will of God. If old Socrates, a heathen, a stoic, could die saying, no harm can come to a good man in this world or the next, if he could see it, a pagan, why should I tremble and walk softly through this world, looking over my shoulder?

Rather, should I not by the grace of God say, Lord, I believe at least as much as a pagan. I believe no harm can come to a good man in this world or the next. But, what if I lose my job? Well, you’ll lose your job then. You won’t lose your head. But, what if I lose my head? Well, if you lose your head, you won’t lose your Savior. You can’t harm a good man.

So, man gets free from fear. I pity the preacher that’s afraid of his congregation or afraid of his superiors and in his denomination. Maybe I’m a little abnormal on that, but I never, never knew up to now, so help me God, one single twinge of fear of my superiors. And only rarely do I ever get self-conscious before a congregation. If somebody who really, is a great teacher is present, and I know that my poor little sermon will sound rather amateurish by comparison, I feel like I am onstage singing before the great John Charles Thomas. I wouldn’t want to do it. And sometimes I don’t care to preach before great preachers, but I’m not afraid of it. I’m just what you would say, shy. Nothing can harm you if you’re in the will of God.

So, if you will do these two things, let the love of God burn and burn within you, until it consumes everything, and you will never be a slave to any earthly yearnings. You will have them and you will have earthly loves and you’ll have people you love and care for, and would weep to part with. Jesus wept beside the grave of his beloved friend Lazarus. There’s no harm in weeping when we must say goodbye. Our son Wendell bid goodbye last evening, flying throughout South America, flying out of this blizzard. I didn’t like it too well. He was breezy and tried to pretend he didn’t care.

You can have your own personal, loving feelings, but you’re not to be a slave to them. You can have your dislikes. I’d run a mile to keep from having a needle put in my arm. A fellow came clear out to the house one time from somewhere around the city. I don’t know who sent for him. I don’t know who, maybe McAfee. Well, he came out to see me. And he came upstairs to my room, sat down beside my bed. He was a heart specialist. And when he came in, he had this huge rocket in his hand with a long sucker affair and I saw it. And brother did I argued him down. And he said, now, I’ll give you this and you’ll sleep and you’ll be all right. It will just be a sedative. And I said, you won’t give me that. And he said, well, if you’re going to make so much of it, probably you’d be worse off if you took it. So, he said goodbye and left and I got all right.

So, I don’t say that the deeper life, the spiritual life, means that you won’t be normally human. If the lightning strikes near you, you will jump. And if somebody comes at you with a needle, you’ll shrink, you’re human. That’s one thing, it’s quite another thing to walk around chained by human fears, chained by the fears of death and the fear of sickness and the fear of poverty and the fear of friends and the fear of enemies. God never means that His children should thus be afraid.

Well, all that I’ve preached to you now isn’t a dream. It isn’t a misty ideal that nobody can reach. It’s the normal Christian life. Anything short of it is abnormal or subnormal. Shall we not obey God and go on to perfection? I believe you want to or I wouldn’t be preaching to you. May God grant, that together, we may press on, out into the deep waters. Yay, waters to swim. Alright.

Message 3 of 4 on the Deeper Spiritual Life by A.W. Tozer

February 5, 1956

“The Problem of the Static Christian”

Now I have been talking these Sunday mornings about the deeper life. What is it and how can I enter into it? I really haven’t a text, but I have been reading this verse in chapter six of Hebrews. Therefore leaving the principles of the doctrine of Christ, let us go on unto perfection, not laying again the foundation of repentance from dead works and of faith toward God, the doctrine of baptisms and the laying on of hands and the resurrection of the dead and of eternal judgment. Let us go on unto perfection has been a sort of an overall text. Then I have also shown from 1 Corinthians three and other passages of Scripture that one of the great problems even of the early church was that of the static Christian.

It is one of the great problems today. I think it is a problem even greater than that of getting people converted. The problem of the static Christian, how to get a Christian interested in becoming more than an average run of the mill type of believers that you see everywhere. And so many of us become static or are static. The static Christian is one who is retarded in his progress. Paul said, What doth hinder you? You did run well, but now you are hindered. And thus the progress is stunted and retarded, and the growth is stunted.

And then there’s the lack of moral dynamic which every Christian should know. Now this is the static Christian. And I believe that if we will listen, we will hear God speaking. He that hath an ear to hear, let him hear what the Spirit said unto the churches. And I believe that if we hear what the Spirit says in our day, we will hear God say, Moses, my servant is dead. Therefore, arise, go over this Jordan and into the land which I have given to you. Every place the sole of your foot shall tread upon, that have I given you.

I believe we will hear the Spirit of God say, let us go unto perfection. Let us go on beyond repentance from past sin. Let us go on beyond forgiveness and cleansing from past sins. Let us go on beyond the impartation of divine life. Let’s be sure however, that we get these first things settled first, to the point of absolute assurance. There can be no deeper life until there has been life. There can be no progress in the way until we are in the way. There can be no growth until there has been birth. And all the efforts toward a deeper life will only bring disappointment unless we have first settled the matter of repentance from dead works and the forgiveness of sins and the impartation of divine life and converted.

But now to break down the deeper life, I want to briefly mention, that it is two things as I shall say today. It is more than that, but two I want to mention today. One is a complete forsaking of the world, and the other is a turning wholly to the Lord Jesus Christ. Now, that’s not only my opinion of it, but that is what the Bible teaches about it. And that is the standard formula that has come down to us from the very early days of the church. You will find it written into the great hymns of the church and you will find it written into the great books of devotion of the church down the years, that these two things are necessary for a Christian who would go on and break the static condition and become a flowing, moving, progressive, dynamic Christian. There must be a complete forsaking of the world, and a turning wholly to our Lord Jesus Christ.

Now, we’ll talk first about this forsaking of the world. It’s entirely possible to be religious, and not to have forsaken the world at all. The proof of this is that you will find professed Christians wherever, well at least almost wherever you will find non-Christians. I want to be as broad minded and fair as I can about this. And I suppose there are places where you will not find men claiming to be Christians. I don’t know whether gangsters who habitually and as a system, destroy by death there those who are their rivals, take them out and shoot them. I don’t know whether you would find any Christians, professed Christians among gangsters or not. Although I do know this, that when certain gangsters have died by the bullet, they have been mumbled into the kingdom of God and squirted into the kingdom of God by oil and all the rest. And their leaders have tried very hard even to get those bloody men into the kingdom of God, unsaved, unblessed, unforgiven, and without time even to say God have mercy on me a sinner. And yet people try to get them in, so I presume that there are those who claim to be some kind of Christian who even engage in the mutual extermination of each other for the sake of the Southside or the Northside or the West side racket.

I do remember hearing of a young man who was a murderer, who was sentenced to the chair a few years ago and was to die out here in Cook county jail. But they set his death hour for a certain day and then later reversed and changed it because they said it fell on a holiday of his religion. And they didn’t want to put him to death on day that was a holiday of his religion. So, they changed it so he didn’t have to die on a holiday.

So, I suppose that you will find Christians just about everywhere, or men who claim they’re Christians. I mean, certainly you will find them at the racetrack. And certainly there never has been a sport invented so vile and violent and vicious, that you will not find Christians sitting around there with their New Testament in their hip pocket. And I don’t think that there is a gambling wall where you won’t find some kind of Christians there. I don’t think that there’s any worldly pleasures where you don’t find them. It’s possible to be religious, and not to forsake the world. Yet nobody can be a Christian in the right sense of the word until he has forsaken the world.

Second, it is possible to forsake the world in body and never forsake it in spirit at all. It’s possible to forsake the world externally and still be worldly inside. Now, the situation with the monks and the nuns down the centuries has been exactly that. Now, I’m not saying this as a Protestant, I’m letting they themselves say it. Some of the great Christian souls were those who tried to reform these monasteries and nunneries and to get them to be in their real inner life, what they were in their external outer life. They were hidden away from the world in their bodies, and dressed a certain way, in order that they might be separated from the world. And yet some of these great souls, declared that these who had thus separated themselves from the world were more surely, and certainly, worldly than some of those who were not separated.

So we have Bernard and St. Francis and we have Teresa and Nicholas of Cusa and Richard Rolle and John of the Cross.And you could name them one after the other of those persons, who were trying hard to rouse the church, that they might be, inwardly what their profession showed them to be outwardly.

Now, Walter Hilton lived 200 years before Luther was born, and so he never heard of Protestantism or the Reformation and yet Walter Hilton, the English Christian was such a Christian, that he wrote a series of letters to the nuns in a certain convent and warned them of the very thing I’m talking to you about. And they call that series of letters, the Scale of Perfection. It’s the most wonderful book. Don’t ask to borrow it but I’ll tell you where you can buy one.

But this Scale of Perfection, the opening part of it, at least, is devoted to this. It is devoted to saying to these sisters, Now, listen sisters, you have come out of the world and closed the door on yourself and put on a certain garb, which indicates that you’re separated from the world. Now, said Walter Hilton, look out ladies, that you don’t take the world with you into the monastery or into the nunnery and be as worldly in there as if you are out on the street. He said, remember that it’s the forsaking of the world in your heart that makes you unworldly. And so there was a great, several great chapters written urgently warning these women, that it was entirely possible to put on the garb of the nun, and to live in a nunnery and, and still at the same time, be worldly inside.

So I say, it’s possible to be religious and not to forsake the world. And it’s possible to forsake the world in body and not in spirit. And it’s never possible, however, to forsake it in spirit and not forsake it in practice. Now, I feel it necessary to mention this, because there are some supposed broad-minded Christians who will do almost anything that anybody will do. I’ve noticed this Brethren, maybe I’ve mentioned it before. But I have noticed this that in this day in which we live, all you have to do is to add “for God” or “for Jesus” onto a thing. And lo and behold that which the church has repudiated and all ernest Christians have not accepted for years is suddenly sanctified. I’m doing it for God. I’m doing it for Jesus. And if you can just get “for God” or “for Jesus”, those little prepositional phrases dangling on the end, and lo and behold, that which wasn’t ever counted right by the church down the generations is now suddenly counted right, because we’ve added, I’m doing it for Jesus.

That takes in almost everything that the world has ever done. And I’m expecting one of these days to hear about the association of Christian bartenders who are doing it for Jesus. They all say, we’re not like the world we’re not serving up this poison in just our own name. We used to before we accepted Christ. We used to deal this out for our sakes and for the money we made out of it. Now we’re doing it for Jesus. Now, it hasn’t got that far yet, but give us time, Brother, we’re on our way. And all we have to do is wait a little and we will sanctify almost anything by saying you can do it for Jesus.

I warn your brother, you can’t do anything for Jesus that Jesus wouldn’t do. And you can’t do anything for God that God has interdicted and turn the canon of these judgments against. The only thing that I can do for God is that which is holy like God and the only thing that I can do for Jesus Is that which Jesus has allowed and permitted and commanded me to do.

But to live like the world and say, I’m separated from the world in spirit, I’m separated in spirit and I don’t have to come out of the world because I’m separated in spirit. I know where that came from boy, I know where that came from. If you would sniff that a little I know what you’d smell. You’d smell brimstone, because that argument came from Hell, and certainly belongs there and doesn’t belong in the church of Christ.

It is never possible to forsake the world in your spirit and not forsake it in reality. Now, let me give you an example of what I mean, Bible examples that I have here, Noah. God said, Noah, I’m going to destroy the world make me an ark and make it of gopher wood. And Noah did that thing. Now suppose that I’d preached on separation from the world. I might have said to Noah, Noah, don’t you think you ought  to get into the ark? What if Noah had said, that’s an old-fashioned idea.

After all, what is the world? Give me a definition of what you mean by the world. The church can’t agree on what’s meant by the world. And therefore I am separating from the world in my heart, but I’m going to stay right down here on the ground and sleep under the bush and eat off of this tree and live like other people. But I won’t be like other people because I’m separated in my heart. You know what would have happened to Noah? He’d been sending up bubbles before very long when the fountains of the great deep broke and the rain came down and the flood covered the mountaintops.  Noah’s carcass would have floated, bloated and distended along with the rest. But Noah knew that to forsake the world meant to forsake the world. So it said he went into the ark and God closed the door.

Take Abraham. God said, Abraham get thee out of thy country and away from thy kindred into a land which I will show thee. Now Abraham could have said, Now I have had a call from God to forsake my country and my people and to go to another land. But he said, I don’t think I should take that literally. I think that that means forsake them in spirit and so I’m going to live right here in Ur of the Chaldes but I’m going to go into the Holy Land in spirit.

No, my brothers, Abraham had to go out in fact. And so Abraham departed and Lot with him. It says, Abraham went and took some people with him. And then take Lot for example. When lot finally got into Sodom and become mayor of the town they say. The angel said, escape for thy life and look not behind thee. Well Lot could have said, now he could have even written several articles on it. He could have had the debate on it and in a panel discussion on it among especially young people who will always know it all. He could have said, now, let’s have a panel discussion on escape for thy life, look not

behind thee, what it means and while they were discussing it, the fire could have fallen and destroyed Sodom and Lot along with it. But Lot knew, escape for thy life, meant get out of old Sodom and stay out. I’m sending fire on Sodom!

And then when those first Christians were told that to love the world and the things of the world, meant that if men didn’t love God, they didn’t hold discussions on what the world meant or what was meant by the world nor how far they could go, and still please God, they got out of the world. And they separated themselves completely from everything that had the world’s spirit. And the result was they brought down fury on their own heads.

And that same world exists today that existed then and hear me say this again, some of you have told me don’t believe it, but listen to me while I tell you again and repeat it again and the great God Almighty, either now or later, will confirm the truth of it. The world is no different now, from what it was when it crucified Jesus and martyred the first Christians. It’s the same world. Adam is always Adam wherever you find him, and he never changes.

The reason we get along so well is that we have compromised our position. And we have allowed the world to dictate to us while we in turn, we’re are permitted to dictate a little to the world. And so we have compromised it. And the result is there are very few people that are in any way embarrassed by the world.

I’m afraid if we ever get too popular, or the community accepts us here, I’m afraid of that. The church that this unsaved, worldly community accepts, is never a church full of the Holy Ghost. A church full of the Holy Ghost who is separated from the world and is walking with God will never be accepted by the community. It will always be looked upon as being somewhat off-center. Maybe if the laws are such that your protected, then civilization as such as it is now, you won’t be attacked, but you will be looked upon as being a little bit off-center.

Now,are you preaching brother Tozer that everybody should probably get into space suits and zoom out of here and get away from the world. No, I’m not saying that at all. I am saying that there is a world that is not the world God means when he said forsake the world. You can eat and work and live and drink and sleep and bath and grow and beget your kind. Then bring them up and God made that. That’s not the world.

The world is that organized thing filled with unbelief, which has got to amuse itself and which is built upon doubts and unbeliefs, self-righteousness and Adam. And the other of course, Jesus was in the world, but not of the world. There’s no contradiction here in what I’m saying, I’m making a distinction between that part of the world which is divinely given, to plant, to reap and cook and eat and do our work and live in the world right. God meant it to be so and that’s not worldliness. But, the worldliness is the pride of life, the pride of the eye, and the longing of the ambitious soul for position and all of that which the world does because of the rising of its sin within it. All that is the world and it overflows into a thousand things that the church has habitually rejected down the years, the church has rejected it.

Now, the second matter is, to turn wholly to our Lord Jesus Christ. First, is forsake completely the world and that’s all negative, you notice that, that’s all negative. Somebody says, Tozer’s a negative preacher. I believe in the negative and in the positive. I do not apologize for preaching negative. I have a quarter here in my hand. On one side is a is a head of Benjamin Franklin and on the other side is an eagle with his wings outspread. Now one of those is the negative and one the positive side. The electricity that lights this building has a negative and a positive.

And so, they are negatives and positives that go all through the world. You turn your back on the north, that’s negative, and traveled towards the south, that’s positive. And so I turned my back on the world, that’s a negative. And then I turn wholly to the Lord Jesus Christ, that’s positive. And every effort to preach the positive without the negative is like dividing this quarter edge-wise and cutting it through and then try to ride on a bus with that. He’d fling that back to you and say, that’s only half

here. You need the other side. But you say, I got the head of Benjamin Franklin, there driver. He says, I know, but I want the eagle on too. That’s the other side. How can you have an electric light with only the positive pole? Wou have to have both.

So, if we’re going to turn ourselves wholly to the Lord Jesus Christ, there’s going to have to be a complete forsaking of the world, all that is worldly in its spirit, all that is wrong per se, all that is unlike Jesus, all that is unlike God. You must forsake that no matter what the world thinks about us. That’s negative and then turn wholly to our Lord Jesus Christ.

And this turning unto the Lord Jesus Christ, I want to talk about a lot more. Next week. I want to talk about that a little more. And I want to talk also next Sunday morning, developing this thought further about the deeper life in Christ leading us to a place where we’re free in our hearts from fear and inordinate loves.

Now, it’s this gives the deeper life, not the turning away, that’s negative. You can forsake the world, quit gambling, quit drinking, quit smoking, quit living for the world. Never go to any of the worldly places of amusement, don’t gamble, don’t dance. Don’t do any of these things you can quit all at and that’s a negative. That has no power to impart any life of any kind. That’s negative, but it’s necessary before there can be any positive.

Well, the positive is then, that you turn to Jesus Christ. That’s gives the power and the purity and the deep satisfaction and the joy unspeakable and full of glory. The negative can never shine. The negative can never be musical. The negative can never be fragrant. That’s why it’s possible to desert the world like the dear old fella with the long beard who rides his buggy along the highway over in Pennsylvania. God bless him. Yet, you go talk to him and he has no more religion than his horse. He has no more spirituality than the old horse with a swayback he’s driving with his old 1890 buggy. He’s separated from the world externally, but he’s a worldling inside. Because he loves his horses. He loves his farm. He loves his crops. He loves the comforts of his life. He loves them all, but he’s separated negatively from all the modern rat race. He isn’t taking a part in it.

A man can go to a cave, you can go to a cave and leave it all in utter disgust like time in a vacuum. Go into the woods and live in a cave and still not have any power, any radiance, any joy, any inward glory.

It’s turning unto Jesus Christ that gives that always. And the two can be done in one act. I could be facing North and God commands me to turn South. If I’d still remember, I don’t know whether I could about face or not anymore and do it in two motions. I used to be able to do it for the time I was in the service. But if God says you’re facing north and it’s the wrong direction for you, about-face and march!

You can turn from the north and to the south in one easy motion. So, when God says forsake the world and turn to Christ, it is one motion. I’d do it in one free and easy act. And my turning from the world is my turning unto Christ. It doesn’t always work that way, but it can be I say. So, the joy unspeakable is when we see Jesus, deep satisfaction.

Suppose we hunt around for new illustration, maybe it’s ridiculous, but it’ll illustrate anyway. Suppose that somebody decided and had the power to do it and he had a lot of gremlins or angels or something at his command. And he said, now I’m tired of this darkness. I’m tired of this darkness. I want you to wipe the heavens clean of darkness. And he got a thousand or a million or two million or ten million gremlins or some other kind of imaginary beings with mops. And they mop the heavens of all darkness. It would still be dark. They don’t have to worry. Go back to bed gremlin. Just wait till the sun comes up. The coming up of the sun will do what all of the mopping of the heavens would never do. Just wait for the sun!

So, some people try by the negatives to get themselves blessed. They won’t do this. I remember one boy who wouldn’t drink pop. He’d been at Nyack, he had said, I don’t really know if they drink pop at Nyack now or not, but they didn’t back then. And he stood at a soft drink counter over in Ohio and was very disturbed about a glass of pop. He said that he felt it was worldly. Well, he was an unhappy man and I have never seen a happy Christian yet that was world conscious, never. If he’s trying to get loose from the world, or if he’s worrying about what is the world or he’s writing letters to find out what the world means, he’s never happy man. He’s busy with these negatives.

I’ve never seen a happy man yet that wasn’t taken up with Jesus Christ the Lord. The sun comes up and the darkness goes out. Not all the little creatures in the universe could wipe the heavens clean of darkness as long as there’s no sun, but when the sun heats up the night departs, and clouds flee away and the shadows are no more.

So, when we turn with all our hearts unto Jesus Christ our Lord, then we find the deeper life. Then we find in Him the power and the purity and the satisfaction and the joy unspeakable and full of glory. Nothing can’t be something and the negative can’t sing and the negative doesn’t smell good and the  negative can’t give off a fragrance. And negative can’t delight. Only the positive, only when I turned my eyes and gaze upon the Son of God, and my inner heart is taken up with His person, then, every instrument inside my music room gets tuned and the music starts. And radiance comes to the life and joy breaks out and Peter said, joy unspeakable and full of glory.

So it is, that’s the deeper life. Two acts can be done at once. Turn from the world and unto Christ. And then all the natural things, eating and drinking and buying and selling, marrying and giving in marriage and all the natural things which God created to be done, which are not of the spirit of the world, but are natural and of God, they’ll all be sanctified too. And they’ll become fuel for the fire of the altar that rise day and night unto God.

So, the common things, things we call secular won’t be secular anymore. The mundane things won’t be mundane. They’ll be heavenly too. Because the commonest thing, the peeling of a potato, the commonest thing can be done for the glory of God if we have turned from the world, and the world’s ways and are looking full in the face of the Son of God. Then the sun will shine. Then all the gremlins of Hell can’t wipe the sunlight away. If Hell should send up a legion to wipe away the sunshine, it could wipe the face of the earth and desperately and follow the sun around the earth and never succeed in keeping the sunshine away from the earth. Because when the sun shines on the earth, it’s sunshine.

So, Hell can’t destroy your spiritual happiness, if you’re gazing at the face of Jesus, for He is the Son of Righteousness with healing in his wings. Well, we have that at least, turn from the world and turn fully unto Christ.

Message 2 of 4 on the Deeper Spiritual Life by A.W. Tozer

January 29, 1956

“The Deeper Spiritual Life—Three Classes of Man”

In the second and third chapters of 1 Corinthians, beginning with verse thirteen, maybe verse nine would be better. As it is written, eye hath not seen nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man the things which God has prepared for them that love him. But God has revealed them unto us by His Spirit. For the Spirit searches all things, yea, the deep things of God, for what man knoweth the things of a man save the spirit of man which is in him, even so the things of God knoweth no man but the Spirit of God. Now we have received not the spirit of the world but the Spirit which is of God. that we might know the things that are freely given to us of God. Which things also we speak not in the words which man’s wisdom teacheth, but which the Holy Ghost teaches, comparing spiritual things with spiritual, but the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God for they are foolishness unto him. Neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned. That he that is spiritual judges all things yet he himself is judged of no man. For who hath known the mind of the Lord that He may instruct him, but we have the mind of Christ. And I, Brethren, could not speak unto you as unto spiritual, but as unto carnal even as unto babes in Christ, I fed you with milk and not with meat for hitherto you are not able to bear it. Neither yet now are ye able. For ye are yet carnal.

Now, that is part of First Corinthians two and three. And this is the second in a series of talks on the deeper life. What is the deeper life and how can I enter into it? And we have as our general text that one in the Hebrews the sixth chapter, which says simply, leaving the first principles, or the principles, let us go on unto perfection.

Now, I’ll be talking over the next Sunday mornings on the the deeper spiritual life. Now, there are three kinds of persons mentioned here in Paul’s description, in 1 Corinthians two and three. They are the natural, the carnal and the spiritual.

The natural man simply means the unregenerate man. The man who is simply of body and intellect, and his appetites and temperament and all that is natural in the man, that every human being has that’s born into the world. That’s the natural man. And it said about him, that he receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God for they are foolishness unto him. Neither can he know them because they are spiritually discerned.

You may test the quality of religious teaching, by the enthusiastic reception given it by unsaved men. If it is received enthusiastically, by natural men, it is not of the Spirit of God. Because Paul says plainly, that spiritual things cannot be known by unregenerate man, and that they are plain foolishness unto them. There is a type of religious teaching, which is understood by and received by and seems perfectly logical to the natural man. But that which is of the Spirit of God is not known to the natural man. He has not the faculty to receive it. Now that’s here plainly.

Then in verse 15, there is what is called the spiritual man. He that is spiritual judgeth all things and he says, that I have talked to you not as under spiritual but as unto carnal. And thus he spots and describes another type of man, the spiritual man. It is the spiritual man.

First, I think I want to say a little more about the natural man. The natural man is the man who is in a state of nature. He may be in perfect health. He may have an IQ of 180. He may be as handsome as a Greek statue or if it’s a woman, she may be at the top and be a perfect example of fine womanhood. Or youth, a perfect example of young American youth, we would say here. And the natural man, though he is in this space, he is in a state of nature. He’s unblessed and he’s out of grace.

Then there is the spiritual man. That is the Christian who is mature, and who is led and taught and controlled by the Holy Spirit, to whom the Spirit of God can speak, and who is led by the Spirit. Then there is the carnal man that Paul talks about here. The carnal man is the immature Christian. He’s not a natural man in that he has been renewed by the grace of God and he’s in a state of grace. But he is not spiritual. He is halfway in between. He is immature and thus carnal. And that is he’s regenerated, but he is not advanced. He’s retarded in his spiritual life. He is not influenced by nor led by the Holy Spirit, but is controlled by his lower nature.

Now, here we have these three. And in the Old Testament, incidentally, the spiritual man is the man that I would say, is living the deeper spiritual life. He is indwelled by, led by, taught by, influenced by, and controlled by Holy Spirit. Now in the Old Testament, we have a prototype of these three. That is, in the story of Israel. Israel at Kadesh Barnea is a perfect example of the immature Christian, who is not advanced and will not advance, who will not go on with God though he’s not unsaved. He’s not in a state of nature, but in a state of grace, and is blessed and does know God as his Savior.

Now briefly, I’ll not take out a lot of time, but briefly, here was the Old Testament picture that corresponding to the natural man who is not in a state of grace, was Israel in Egypt. They were in a state of bondage there. You know the story well, 400 and some years they had been in Egypt and a good part of that time, they had been in bondage to Pharaoh.  Then came Moses with blood and atonement and power. And he brought the children Israel out of Egypt. And the Red Sea closed between them, and between Israel and Egypt. Now that is corresponding to the new birth, the regeneration which makes the natural man, a Christian, which takes him out of nature and puts him in a state of grace. Israel came out of Egypt and went across the river and the river, cross the sea and the sea closed behind them. And the enemy died on the shore and Israel was for the first time in 400 years a free nation, redeemed by blood and by power.

Now, there you have the Christian. He has been all his lifetime subject to bondage, bondages of various kinds, of chains and shackles and manacles have been upon his spirit, but now through the blood of the Lamb, and the power of the Spirit, he’s brought out of Egypt, and the Red Sea closes after him. We used to sing, I’ve crossed the Red Sea of his blood and left the world behind me. And that’s exactly what is happening.

Then there is the spiritual man. That’s Israel in Canaan. This was God’s benevolent intention, that those who had been natural men in bondage in Egypt should come out of Egypt and then go straight on an eleven day journey to the Holy Land, that land offered to Abraham by God in covenant. The Holy Land, the land of promise, Canaan variously called, and that was to be the homeland of Israel. That was to be their spiritual homeland. There, they were not only to be out of Egypt, but they were to be “in” the Holy Land. He brought them out that he might bring them in.

This is what is lost, the note that is lost in so much of our teaching, he brings us out, not that we may be out, rather he brings us out that we may be in. God saves a gangster. Not that he might tell about it once a year for the next 40 years. He saves him from being a gangster that he might become a saint. He takes him out that he might lead him in. And the further “in” the man goes, the less he will have to say about where he used to be. It is not a mark of spirituality when I talk at length about what I used to be.

Israel wanted to forget what she used to be and remember it only occasionally to thank God, but we magnify what we used to be and write books that tell the world what we use to be. Paul said those things are not even to be mentioned among the people of God. They’re not even to be mentioned in conversation, what you used to be. What you used to be, God brought you out of, but he didn’t bring you out to leave you in a vacuum. He brought you out that he might bring you in. And it was the will of God, that after he had brought Israel out of Egypt, he should then in eleven short days march, they tell us they could have been in the land.

The enemy could have been driven out, and they could have had the holy land of promise which God had given to them centuries before. They were not stealing it, they were occupying it as their proper possession. God who owned it, had given it to Abraham and his seed after him. But Abraham’s seed had been driven out there and driven to Egypt. Now God brings them back to put them in the land, not I say, to be usurpers and take the land, but to occupy the land which was properly theirs by a gift of the one who owned it, namely God.

So God brings us out of sin that he might bring us into the spiritual life. And he never has a vacuum in between anywhere unless you would count that short eleven days a vacuum. But it was to be a God blessed, hovered over, and Shekinah-enlightened march straight through to the Holy Land. And when they got in the land of the homeland of their spirits, back into the land from which Abraham had come centuries before Jacob, then they were to be the spiritual men, and they corresponded to the spiritual men in our study.

But now what about the carnal man? The carnal man is the immature Christian who does not go on. He’s not advanced. He’s retarded. He’s not influenced nor controlled by the Spirit but by his lower nature. Now, when Israel came to Kadesh Barnea, after they had marched a little while in the direction of the spiritual Promised Land, they stopped at a town named sometimes called Kadesh and sometimes called Kadesh Barnea, and there in Kadesh Bernina they stopped.

And Moses said to them in effect, well, you’re about to enter into the land, which is the object of your hope toward which God started to lead you when he brought you out of Egypt. They said, we’re a little afraid, let us send out twelve men. So, they sent twelve men up into Canaan and those twelve men went up to examine the land and report back to see whether they could take it or not. And when they came back, all of them, they reported that it was an exceeding good land. They said they were brooks there, one of them called Eschal, brooks of water.

Well, to people in that country and that land, water was water. It was riches untold. It was more valuable than silver and gold and diamonds. And to come back and say it’s an exceeding good land in which there is much water was equivalent to saying that it was Atlantis or a paradise. They found their grapes so large that they took one bunch and carried them between two men,. They found figs and those figs would be their sugar and their candy and their preserves and would be to them what you and I have by way of marmalade and jellies and candies and sodas’ and all the people like their sweet tooth. They had their figs. And figs and dates meant almost all together the sweet element in their day.

Then there were pomegranates. I don’t think pomegranate would be classified among the citrus fruits but it is near to it, very near to it.  And of course if you’ve ever eaten a pomegranate, sometime go to a fruit store and ask for a pomegranate. They may have them and cut it loose, cut it through and eat this pomegranate. It is all full of seeds but it has a tart, pungent taste to it and very, very juicy. You could squeeze them and get good juice.  And I don’t know for sure but knowing that they grow in the sunshine and knowing where they grow and knowing how they taste, I think I’m not too far away when I say that they would literally be packed with what we now call vitamins. They would be well worth their having.

Then, there was milk and honey. And the scripture says that the milk and honey flowed. Now when it said milk and honey flowing, it literally wasn’t using careless language. Why there were those great bee trees back in the state where I come from, Pennsylvania, men would find bee trees that were full of honey. They put so much honey in that they wouldn’t hold and they were dribbling the honey literally dripping down. And so the great rocks where they made honey, literally dripped with honey. And there was milk abundance.

Now, that was the land so different from Egypt from whence they came only a little while before. Now ten of these men came back and advised, they said that’s what the country is like. But nevertheless, we advise you do not go up into the land, because, though it is an exceeding good land with brooks of water and grapes and figs and pomegranates and milk and honey, yet the people are large and strong and there are giants there. And their cities are great and walled up to heaven. They were excited. Walled clear up to heaven, they said, and the land eateth up its inhabitants.

Now a land that had brooks of water and grapes and figs and pomegranates and honey and milk didn’t sound to me as if it was busy eating of inhabitants. And beside that, they hadn’t stayed there long enough to watch the land eat up anything. They were simply frightened and filled with unbelief. And they said, We advise against going up. But stay here in the wilderness. We’re out of Egypt, thank God, this labor is behind this, and we’re not slaves anymore. We’re in the wilderness and it isn’t the best, but we’ll settle for it. Rather than go up among those giants in that wonderful homeland, called Palestine.

But Caleb and Joshua, they appeared to step to the head of the line and said to Moses that we urge you to go in and pay no attention to these pessimists. We can easily take the land. They’ll be bread for us. It belongs to us. Our Father, God gave it to us and gave it to Abraham, our Father, and it’s ours. Let’s go take it. Let’s go up. They saw the rich advantages in the land. And they were unwilling to allow the large strong giants and walled cities to keep them out.

Well, now the effect on the people, it’s always that way Brethren, it has been down the years. All of this modern, it isn’t modern really, teaching about the church being a perfect democracy, and that there should be no leaders is just plain poppycock. And there’s nothing in either Old Testament or New Testament that gives support to it. The leaders were sent out to spy out the land and the people were more or less dependent upon what the leaders said, just as you and I are dependent in this democracy upon what our leaders do in Washington to a large extent. And in the church of Christ, it’s the same.

And the people, when they heard the unfavorable report of the ten men, that is, the majority report had been read. Caleb and Joshua gave a minority report but they’re only two against ten. And so the people wept and fell down in front of their their tent doors and wept and wished they had not come out of Egypt and said, would to God we were back in Egypt. And they pleaded the presence of their women and children. All they could see was walled cities and giants. They couldn’t see grapes. And great cattle were their great udders dripping with milk and great rocks and trees, drooling sweet honey down onto the grass, couldn’t see that. They couldn’t see the rolling lawns and the brooks and rivers.  They couldn’t see that. All I could see would be the great giants and the land and forgot that God said go up now, I give it to you.

And so they said, Oh, you’ll kill our poor women, you’ll kill our children. This is always the unspiritual man’s argument. His argument always is, I’ve got to think about my family. I’ve got a family after all brother and God wants us to be wise. And I can’t push this too far. I can’t become too spiritual because I got to think about my family. I can’t subject my wife and children to difficulties. I can’t leave burdens on them. Always pleading their wives and families, forgetting that the best heritage you can leave your family is the memory of being a good man. You forget that, sir, you forget that Mother. That if you become a spiritual woman, your family may fight you and they may burn you with hot language and scold you with sarcastic speech and they’ll pose you and make you feel like an idiot. But when you’re gone, they will walk quietly away wiser and sadder and will admit that the best heritage you left them was that you’re a good man.

I said here two weeks ago, I can leave nothing to my family. I can leave them nothing except a few books. But if I can leave my boys, scattered all around, all of them but one in church, all of them some kind of Christians and singing in choirs and all that sort of thing around here and there among the Baptist and Presbyterian churches, all some kind of Christians except one. I don’t know what they think of the old man, but I do know this, if I can have lived so that when I’m finished, my family will have to say, he set an example that I could safely follow. And the memory of a man who lived for God in a bad world is more to me than all the riches of LaSalle Street. Then I will have left them a heritage the likes of which no rich man can leave to a son.

And if these had only known. They could have taken those wives, women and families of children of theirs up into the Holy Land within a few hours. And they would have had all that land but for forty years, they wandered in the desert, in a desert land, and those poor wives and children, that they had been so afraid they were going to get killed, if they went up into the land, the spiritual land, those same wives and children, walked on their feet for forty years, aimlessly around and around and around and around in the desert. Now circling back near to Egypt where they had been, now in a wide loop circling back close to the promised land where there should be. Back around again to Egypt where they were and then around again, in a wide loop again near to where they ought to be. Forty years until those children were grown up to middle age. And those old ladies were dead and the young were old, or at least middle age, forty years of it. Because they had whimpered and said we can’t go up. It’s costing us too much. We can’t mistreat our families. I’ve got to be with my family Sunday nights and Wednesday nights and all during missionary convention. I’ve got to be with my family. I can’t make juvenile delinquents. You won’t make juvenile delinquents out of your family. The best way to save them from delinquency is to show them an example of a man who loves God uncompromisingly and who seeks to be spiritual, if it costs him his blood.

I don’t know whether you saw the Alliance weekly or not some weeks ago, when there appeared an article in it, called, “They Hanged Their Prophet. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German, Lutheran who lived in the time of Hitler, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, was a man of remarkable spiritual insight. And I have a certain marginal delight that people are reading him and talking about him now. He saw Hitler rise and knew what Hitler would be. And he got up to a microphone and told Germany look out for this man. And then he began to preach Jesus Christ. Preached Jesus Christ as the Savior of men, and preached what he called costly grace. He said, the grace of God will cost you everything you have. Don’t try to get into heaven cheaply. The grace of God is costly because it cost Christ His blood and it costs us everything and maybe, cost us our lives.

So, they caught him and they put him in prison, oscillating him back and forth and shuttling him from one concentration camp to another and wherever he was, preaching Jesus and comforting people. He was engaged to a lovely young woman. He had a sister and I believe a father, if I recall another one or two other relatives, and they pulled their old tricks, the old totalitarian trick, they pulled in Red China and Russia, Czechoslovakia and Poland and Germany when Hitler was alive. It was this–you better buckle down to me and shut up. I’ve got your children. I’ve got your wife, I have your sweetheart, I have your Mother as a hostage and if you don’t do what I ask you to do, woe be to them.

That was their technique and their trick. They said you surrender and shut up about costly grace and, and freedom and the gospel of Jesus Christ. Stop warning against Hitler and the Nazis or we’ll kill your woman you’re engaged to marry. We will destroy your family. A young man, still in his thirties said, my family belongs to God. And you’ll never get me to surrender by threatening to kill my family. When God calls a man, he calls him to come and die! Do your worst. So they hanged him and along with at same time or near to the same time, they destroyed the woman he was to marry. They destroyed his sister I think and the father if I have it straight. For I am speaking from memory.

You say, what kind of a beast was he? He’s the kind of beast John saw in heaven. The beast and the four and twenty elders fell down before the throne and said, holy, holy, holy, the Lord God Almighty. He was a man who you couldn’t threaten his family.  You couldn’t say, I’ll get your family. That’s the Devil’s trick. It’s always been the Devil’s trick. You give more than you should to the Lord’s work, if you seek to become a spiritual man, you’ll harm your family. That’s the Devil’s trick!

Well, they wandered forty years by God’s judgment. God said, doubtless ye shall not come into the land. Their fear of death and their doubts and their complaining displeased God because God said you have slandered the land. And every man who stands out in the shadows and slanders the deeper spiritual life is slandering the sunshine. Every man who refuses to enter into the holy life, he is in the wilderness, slandering the homeland of the soul. So, for forty years, they wandered aimlessly about, just wandering. God was with them, kept them, didn’t destroy them, He let them die one of the time. Occasionally, he would punish them. You know those stories, but I mean, he didn’t destroy them as a nation.

Now, what’s the meaning for us? The meaning for us is, if you’re a natural man, no matter how learned, how talented, how handsome or desirable, a natural woman, no matter how beautiful, you don’t know a thing about God and you don’t know a thing about the spiritual life. You haven’t the faculties.

If you knew a man stone deaf, sitting and there was a Mozart Symphony, on, playing, you wouldn’t blame the man who was deaf because he would rather read than listen. He couldn’t hear he hasn’t got the faculty that can enjoy the music.  Or if you were in an art gallery looking at pictures, and there was a man completely blind who cannot even see light, sitting on the bench. You wouldn’t say, what’s that Philistine doing sitting there? Why doesn’t he get up and look at the pictures? He doesn’t have the faculty look at pictures. That thing you look at in pictures is dead in him. The deaf man, that which you listen to symphonies with, it’s dead.

So you my friend, no matter who you are nor how learned, how religious, if you’ve not been regenerated, renewed, made over, brought to life by the quickening of the Holy Ghost. You can’t know God. You can’t know Christ. You can’t know spiritual things at all. You can only know the history of it.  And all your enthusiasm for religion is an illusion. For the Holy Ghost says, you don’t have the faculty to know spiritual things with. 

Then what else does God say there was through this. He says that we Christians who are quickened to  life who are his children, who are not in a state of nature anymore but in the state of grace, to continue without progress year after year, as some of us are doing, is to wander spiritually, wander, walking in circles instead of straight ahead, round and round and round in circles. Sometimes a little closer to Egypt than to the Holy Land, but again, a little closer to the Holy Land than to Egypt.

So, we oscillate in our circling round and round and occasionally we can look over the sea and see where we used to be as slaves. That’s getting pretty close to sin. Then again, in a prayer meeting or in some revival, we get around so close, we can almost look over into the Holy Land. But we’re not going in to either place. We’re not going back into the whirl wheel and we’re not going to push on into the spiritual life.

So around and around we go, oscillating between nearness to the old world where we came from and newness to the new world where we ought to be in our spirits. I say to continue without progress year after year, is to acquire a chronic habit. Harder to break as time passes. The best time in the world to plunge into the deeper spiritual life is when you’re a young Christian. When you’re young, you’ve got enthusiasm, and you haven’t formed the habits.

For instance, suppose I was to try to learn, say Japanese. At my age, I couldn’t learn Japanese. I’m positive. I could learn to read and write it. I can learn anything men can print and think you can to. But I could never speak it so as to be understood. Why? Because I’ve been around too long, and the muscles of my tongue, lips and mouth. That whole structure that forms words has been formed to English, the English. All the little twists and turns and slurs of English tongue, they fit my mouth. And the older I get the harder it would be for me to learn a new language. But little Joy here when they go to wherever they’re going, they don’t know yet, but she’ll be able in a year’s time to be rattling in the language of their field with perfect fluency. She’ll pick it up from the other little kids around because her little mouth hasn’t really learned English yet.

And the younger you are, the easier it is to learn and speak a new language. Because habits harden you and I know they’re Christians, and to me, it’s a very, very heavy burden. I don’t say it discourages me because I refuse to be ever discouraged about anything. But I do say it gives me a heavy heart to be forced, as I do much of the time to walk among Christians here, and not only here, but all over where I go. Even old people who’ve wandered for forty long years in the wilderness, not going back to sin, but not going on into the holy life wandering around the nameless circle, sometimes a little warmer and it’s sometimes a little cold. Sometimes a little holier and sometimes very unholy, but never going on in.

Habits has been acquired and it’s hard to break and it makes it almost certain that they will live and die a spiritual failure. To me, this is a terrible thing Brethren, a terrible thing. Man decides to be a lawyer and he spends years learning to be a lawyer. And he puts out his shingle, but he finds there is something in his temperament that makes it impossible for him to make good as a lawyer. He’s a failure, a complete failure. Now here he is fifty years old. He was admitted to the bar when he was thirty. He’s had twenty years and he hasn’t been able to make a living. He’s a failure as a lawyer.

He’s a businessman who buys a business and tries to operate it. He does everything he knows, but he just can’t make it go. Year after year after year the ledger shows red. He’s not making a profit. He borrows where he can. He has a little spurt and has hope. That spurt soon dies down. And he’s back again. Finally sells out, hopelessly in debt, a failure in the business world.

Here’s a teacher who trains in the schools to be a teacher, but just can’t get along as a teacher. Something in the constitutional or temperamental structure that just won’t allow her to get along with young people. So, after being shuttled from one place to another and out and out toward the margin, finally have to give up, go somewhere and run a stapling machine and said, I just can’t teach, a failure.

I’ve known ministers who thought they were called to preach and they trained, studied and learned Greek and Hebrew and what have you, but they just somehow can’t make the public feel they want to hear it, but are just failures.

Now, it is possible to be a Christian and yet be a failure. By that I mean, just as Israel, while in the desert wandering, they’re Israelites, they’re God’s people. They are protected and fed, but they were failures. They weren’t where God meant them to be. They were compromising, halfway between where they used to be and where they ought to be.

That describes so many of the Lord’s people, live and die spiritual failures. I’m awfully glad God is good and kind. Poor failures crawl into God’s arms at last and say, Father, I’ve made a mess of it and I just couldn’t get free from the tuggings and the dominance of my flesh. I wanted to and often I wept, you know and wished I could but Father, you know, I just couldn’t make it. I’m a spiritual failure. I haven’t been out doing evil things exactly. Certainly I know I haven’t been where I know I could be. So here I am Father and I’m old and ready to go and I’m a failure.

You know what? Our kind gracious Heavenly Father we’ll take us in, and he won’t say to us, depart from me, I never knew you. Because that person has believed and does believe in Jesus Christ. That person has been renewed and the seed and root that matters is in him. Oh, but what a failure he’s been all his life.

I’m ready for death and I’m ready for heaven. I wonder if that’s what the man of God meant when he said, for what other foundation can a man lay than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ. Now, if any man build upon this foundation gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay and stubble. Every man’s work shall be made manifest, for the day shall declare it, because it shall be revealed by fire, and the fire shall try every man’s work of what sort it is. If any man’s work abide which he has built upon, he shall receive reward. If any man’s work shall be burn, he shall suffer loss but he himself shall be saved yet so as by fire.

I think that’s what it means all right. We ought to be the kind of Christians that can live so not only to save our souls, but save all our lives. When Lot went out of Sodom, he had nothing but the garment that covered him. He got out all right. Dressed alone in the garment he had on. Thank God he got out. But how much better if he could have had a farewell at the gate with camels and donkey trains loaded with his goods. He could have gone out, head up, chin up, saying goodbye to old Sodom, been changed, transformed and he could have marched away from there with his family, heads up.

Thank God we’re going to make it. But are you satisfied to make it the way have been, wandering, wandering, roaming aimlessly, when there is a place where Jesus sheds the oil of gladness on our heads, a place in all the world more sweet it is, the blood-bought mercy seat? It’s the will of God that you should enter or live under the shadow of that mercy seat and go out from there and circle and come back there and always being renewed and recharged and refed back there by the mercy seat, living a separated clean, holy, sacrificial life, a life of continuous spiritual victory. Wouldn’t that be better than the way we’re doing? I want to talk again next Sunday morning further about the deeper spiritual life and what it means and how to enter in.