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“Following Jesus“

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Following Jesus

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

May 13, 1956

Summary

A.W. Tozer emphasizes the transformative power of answering God’s call, highlighting the redemption from sin and the importance of personal response. He encourages listeners to leave their old selves behind and attach themselves to Jesus, emphasizing the significance of identifying with Jesus for true fulfillment and satisfaction. Mr. Tozer also contrasts the fleeting nature of life with the eternal nature of God, encouraging prioritization of time and resources on things that will last, such as sharing in God’s eternity and immortality through faith in Jesus Christ.

Message

I want to talk a minute or two. We’ve had a good full day with outgoing missionaries and singing and baptismal service and some preaching from the Psalms. And tonight, I want to talk a little about following Jesus, which seemed to be the normal thing in a service like this. And in the fourth chapter of Matthew, Jesus, walking by the Sea of Galilee saw two brethren, Simon called Peter and Andrew, his brother, casting a net into the sea for they were fishers. And He said unto them, follow Me and I will make you fishers of men. And they straightway left their nets and followed Him. And going on from thence He saw other two brethren, James, the son of Zebedee and John, his brother, in a ship, with Zebedee, their father, mending their nets, and He called them. And they immediately left the ship and their father and followed Him.

Our Lord Jesus here, called them and they followed Him. And here He began to do what He had never ceased to do, He began to call men to come after Him; to save them by changing their direction. And I want to explain here, I regret that sometimes it’s necessary to put in a footnote because somebody has spoiled a lovely truth for you. And when I say that Jesus saves men by changing their direction, if it were not for liberals and modernists, and cults generally, I could go on to something else. But I have to stop here and put in a footnote and explain what I mean, because we hear these days a great many people talking about redirecting their lives. They take a man no matter how bad the man may be, or how perfectly putrid in his heart, and they do what they call redirecting. He goes to a psychiatrist or to a counselor, and they redirect him.

Well, I don’t mean that because a redirected sinner is just a sinner traveling in another direction. He’s still a sinner. An unredeemed son of Adam that hasn’t been renewed by the Holy Ghost, though you redirect him, he’s still traveling in another way. The boy in the death cell waiting to die, may pace from east to west in his cell, and then somebody come in, redirect him and having him pace from north to south. But he’s still in the cell, and he’s still going to die for his crimes. So, behind all this that I’m giving you tonight, is blood atonement, the necessity that a life be redeemed before it can be redirected. That is what is overlooked by a great many people in our day.

Now, the truth is, that if first there’s an objective fact, and then there’s a subjective response. The objective fact is that we have redemption in His blood. That’s the objective fact. And we have that redemption in His blood, whether we do anything about it or not. We still have that redemption in His blood. Christ Jesus died, the just for the unjust, and He who was rich became poor for our sakes. And the Son of Man came to seek and save that which was lost. And He said, it is finished, on the cross of Calvary. All that’s true whether we make any response or not; it is an objective fact.

We might walk into a dining hall and there, all placed and ready to go, would be a feast fit for a king. And yet we could stand and look at it and go away starving, making no response. For the second thing is the subjective response. The objective, that outside of you, and the subjective is that inside of you. And the objective fact is, we have redemption in His blood, prepared for us. The subjective response must be, that I, in faith, go and avail myself of that which He provided for me. I hear a Voice and turn and trust and follow, and thus, that which is objective becomes subjective. That which is external becomes internal. That which is true on the outside, now becomes true on the inside.

But Christianity is not a subjective religion of imagination. Neither is it an objective religion of things done on the outside. It is both. It is change within as a result of something God has done outside. God, on the cross of Calvary gave His Son to die, and He died that we might be redeemed sinners, or sinners redeemed. And then we follow and respond subjectively and personally to the call of Christ and the work is done inside. Then we say, tis done the great transactions done. I am my Lord’s, and He is mine.

I want you to notice what kind of people there were. I remember once hearing Dr. Mason, who will preach here next Sunday, give a great message. You know, Dr. Mason doesn’t always preach equally. That is, sometimes he can be as ordinary as I am. Again, he’ll rise to magnificent heights. And I heard him rise once to one of those magnificent sermons, an epochal sermon, when he talked about the kind of people that followed Christ. This is not his sermon, incidentally. But at least he did; he went over, and I have only about eight or nine kind of people that followed Jesus.

But he took a whole sermon to show from the Gospels and The Acts that a cross section of all humanity followed Jesus. Well, they do and did and are still following Him. There were Peter and Andrew who were fishermen. There was Levi who was a publican and Luke who was a physician and Paul, who was a scholar and the woman at the well, who was a fallen woman and Lydia, who was a businesswoman before her time, and Sergius Paulus, who was a statesman, and the servants of Caesar’s household, who were servants in the royal palace. Then there were the old and the young and the rich and the poor.

And then there was that group, which the Bible calls the common people, the people that Lincoln said, God must love, because He made so many of them, common people. I don’t have any aspiration to be anything else but a common person. I don’t want to be known as anything but a common person. Well, the common people follow Jesus gladly. Now, He calls us. He calls you and me. And He called them and immediately they followed Him.

Now, what does He call us to? I’ll only mention two things, because I have a full-length sermon on what the Lord calls us to, but I’ll talk to you tonight about two things which I don’t particularly develop in the sermon on the call of Christ and what He calls us to. But I’m thinking of two things here tonight. He calls us to the good and away from the bad. I wish that we’d get a hold of that. I really do. He calls us to the good, away from the bad, two simple words, I think they’re both Anglo Saxon words, I haven’t bothered to look it up, but I think both those words would be Anglo Saxon, good and bad. We’ve invented such long sesquipedalian terms now. And people don’t believe much anymore in goodness and badness.

My mother, God bless her memory, was a dear little pagan lady who had high morals. She wasn’t converted until she was an older lady, and then was converted, thank God, and went to heaven. But as a young woman who wasn’t converted, she had high moral ideals. Not only sex morals, but all morals having to do with lying and stealing and all the rest. Her morals were very high. And she used the words good and bad. And there were only two kinds of people to my mother, good and bad. There were good people and bad people. And I think, after all, she was more Scriptural than she knew, and more Scriptural than some of us evangelicals will admit that she was. The Lord talks about the good and He talks about the evil.

Now, God calls us to the good, away from the bad. You know, we like to think that there’s a kind of trick by which we can get converted and be what we still are or still be what we were. But the Bible calls us away from the bad to the good. And I’ll say this for you, we Christians get a lot of lambasting and a lot of criticism; and we have some of it coming without any doubt. There are a lot of weaknesses and inconsistencies among us.

But no man was ever the worst for following Jesus. I want you to write that down in your memory forever. That nobody was ever the worse for following Jesus. No honest man in his right mind ever rose in a public assembly and said I want to testify that once I was an honest man, but I heard the call of Jesus Christ and I left all to follow Him and now I’m the thief. I was once a man who held truth in high honor, but I followed Jesus Christ. And now I’m a confirmed liar.

I once was a man who held myself in good control and now, I’m a drunkard and a libertine. There never was a man who would rise and say, once, I was a good, honest husband and a good father, but I followed Jesus Christ and now I beat my wife and kick my children around and drink up my pay. Nobody ever talked like that in his right mind. Nobody ever came and stood up in a meeting and said once I was a humble, meek man, and I follow Jesus, and now I’m an arrogant, proud fellow, proud as the devil. Nobody ever said that.

He calls us from the bad to the good. And when He said follow me, He called them away from the bad to the good, away from the old life to a new life. No matter where you are, how much you know, or where you’ve been, or how cultured you are, you always improve when you meet Jesus Christ. Keep that in mind. He always improves you. Jesus Christ improves a man always. It depends upon how bad the man is, how far God has to break him down and tear him down. If the building is too old to use, he has to be torn clear down, shoveled off and hauled away.

But if a man is living a reasonably moral life and he becomes converted, then God shifts the grounds of his morality from himself to the blood of Christ and from his own ego to the cross on which Jesus died. And his righteousness then ceases to be his own and becomes the righteousness of God in Christ Jesus. But the external life of the man won’t have to be so changed.

I am sure that some of these who were baptized tonight, and who thus in public declares that they’re going to from now on follow Christ before the world. I am sure that the same thing wouldn’t happen and didn’t happen to them, the same that what happened to Mel Trotter or John Newton or Billy Sunday. Or some of those who were worldlings, and some of them not Billy Sunday, but some of them were immoral and low and evil to the point of being unspeakably so. And the Lord had to change them around completely and upset their whole life. But a person who was honest and who loves truth and who is obedient, if he’s a child at home and is moral and decent, there won’t be such a radical external change, but there’ll be just as real an internal change, just as real an internal change.

The man is traveling 20 miles an hour in the wrong direction, and he suddenly stops and turns around. It’ll be a change. But if he’s traveling 125 miles an hour in the wrong direction, and makes a sudden, screaming, skimming, spark flying stop and turns around, everybody will write a tract about that. They would say boy wasn’t that something. He was going 125 miles an hour in the wrong direction, and he suddenly turned around and started the other way around. It was something to see. So, we write books about that. But the man who was only doing 20 miles an hour and turned around was just as certainly converted as the other man.

So, Jesus called men from the bad life to the good life. And while nobody can say, I came to Jesus as I was, pure and clean and true and honest, and I trusted in Him and now I’m impure and unclean, and dishonest. Nobody can say that, but there are hundreds of thousands who could rise today and say, once I was a liar, but God made my mouth clean by a touch of fire. Once I was a wife beater, but today I live in peace with my family. Once my children hated to see me come home, but now they run down the walk to meet me. Once they wouldn’t trust me at my work, but now everybody knows I’m an honest man. Once I had debts all over that I didn’t try to pay, but now, I’ve either paid them or I’m paying on them. Once I was an unclean man, now by the grace of God, I live the kind of life a man should live.

Thousands and hundreds of thousands can say that, but not one lone man can say Jesus Christ called me from good to bad. He called me for my high to low. He called me down from high moral heights into the gutter, never. Never, never, never, Jesus does not act like that. He calls us from the bad and calls us over to the good.

Then I point out also that He calls us to the permanent away from the transient. I don’t know whether it’s temperament with me, but this bothers me more than almost anything else in religion, the impermanence of everything. Every earthly thing is changing. And Henry Francis Lyte said, change and decay and all around I see, the changes in people. You see a fellow and see him 20 years later, and he comes up to you and looks you straight in the eyes and says you haven’t changed a bit. God bless his honest heart. He meant to tell the truth, but he lied. We have changed, and you know we’ve changed. And he was trying to ease the shock. But then on the other hand, you looked at him and what did you see? You saw change there too. That boy’s countenance was gone. That round red face that used to grin at you, has begun to be lean and scaly now or at least dry. the old time is working on him. Change and decay in all around I see.

Some of you people that have been born in other countries. You’d like to go back home. My advice is, don’t do it. You will be disappointed too much to death. I left my home in Pennsylvania when I was 15 years old, and it was 20 years before I went back. I never saw it for 20 years. But oh, man, was I disappointed when I went back. The children that I grew up with were all gone, married and gone, and the old folks were all dead and the middle aged were all old. And the trees that stood around in front of the house were all down, and even the hill that I thought was a big hill, it looked as if it is shrunk. It probably hadn’t, but it looked to me as if it had shrunk. And the distances that I thought were interminable had just become little jumps for an automobile. So, my advice is, don’t go back home because you’ll just come away miserable. Change and decay in all around I see. And there’ll be change everywhere. And that’s one of the hardest things I know is change, always change.

One of my boys came home yesterday and brought home a Saturday Evening Post, 47 years old, I think. 1909, what would that be? My mathematics is just awful. 1909, how long ago is 1909. All right. I’m never sure. I know how old I am. But that’s about all I do know. But there was magazine over 45 years old, and brethren, it’s not only comical, but it’s sad. It’s just sad. Fairy soap and keen cutter razors, Colt revolvers and great big blouses for ladies with huge billowing sleeves. And the hair, great billows of hair up here. And the senator, Senator this and Senator that, and Roosevelt President, I think if I remember. That is, the first Roosevelt, president. And now they’re all gone.

And I flipped over the magazine, and I read about Senator so and so said and I said, dear God, where’s this Senator? He’s dead and gone. And the senators now that we’re hearing on the air and seeing them in articles in the magazines, give them 47 years and where will they be? They will be gone too. Everything has change and decay at the heart of it. And a man can be in the headlines today and forgotten tomorrow. And that’s one of the saddest things that I know in life.

You can’t get anything permanent. Nothing is permanent. Diamonds they say are permanent. But the wearers aren’t. That diamond you’re wearing now that you proudly say to yourself, that thing that shines bright 1000 years from now. Yeah, but who will have it on? And who had it on before you got it? You say, my husband, my boyfriend bought that for me? Yes. But then, he didn’t make it. God made that millions of years ago. And they dug that out and it’s been floating around now a long, long time; cut and re-cut and chipped and chopped and chiseled and polished. And it abides, but the people that wear it don’t abide.

He calls us to the permanent. If there’s anything, if God were to say to me, son, I like to have you tell me, what are the two things you’re most pleased with that I’ve done for you? I’d say Father, two things I’m most pleased with is, that you took sin away and enabled me to have fellowship with Thee. And the second one is that you let me do something that will last. Let me have a part in something that won’t perish, that time can’t gnaw it away and the rust of the centuries can’t rust it away. There it is, permanent.

Moody had as his life text, he that doeth the will of God abideth forever. There you have it. In the will of God, we abide forever. Jesus Christ says, come on, follow me. And we come and follow Him and He lets us share in His eternity and have a part of His immortality. Pray a prayer that changes something while the ages roll. Give $100 to the Lord’s work and somebody gets it and uses it in God’s work, and he changes the face of the world, somewhere in some mission field or in some Bible school or evangelistic meeting or prayer group. Just a little money, but God has allowed us to take that dirty thing the smells of tobacco and sanctify it and give it permanence. Lay up your treasures above where thieves don’t break through and steal, the way Jesus said.

Well, the moment a man touches Christ, that sense of impermanence, that sense of floating goes out of it. And you know that you’ve got hold of eternity and immortality and the absolute. You’re no longer dealing with fragments. The world is dealing with fragments. Everybody’s found a little piece like a monkey in a China store after a windstorm. And there, every monkey finds himself a little piece, and he chat, chat, chat, chat, chat, he says and runs with his pretty little shiny piece. Every little monkey has a piece.

And out there in the world they have it. This is the businessman, and this is the actor and this is the writer and this is the poet and this is the artist and this is the laboring man and this is the truck driver and this is the airplane pilot and this is the housewife, and each of us has a little piece. And we run, chat, chat, chat, and it shines and we say we’ve got it. No, we’ve got a broken fragment of it out of a China shop after the windstorm we call the fall of man. And each of us has his little piece. And we are little philosophies.

Everybody has his own little philosophy. Plato has his, Aristotle his, and the cynic his and the stoic his and John Dewey his and Bertrand Russell his. We each have our little hunk of the China that’s been a smashed vase that we’ve picked off the floor and dug out of the debris. And we write books about it and give it a name and make disciples to our little chunk of pottery. And we think we got the whole world in our grasp and all we’ve got is one little piece that fits into the world.

But Jesus Christ is the all-encompassing One. He was before the world was. He will be when the worlds have burnt themselves out. He’s underneath all and above all and around all in all. He’s above, but not pushed up and beneath, but not pressed down and outside, but not excluded and inside, but not confined. He’s above, presiding and beneath, upholding and outside, embracing and inside filling. I’ve quoted that before from some French archbishop. He certainly said it and Jesus Christ is all that. And He’s all that to you and me. And when I come and touch Jesus and I’m touched with the finger of Jesus, something flows into me that’s immortal and eternal and absolute. And I’m done dealing with fragments; not little pieces anymore.

I heard a rabbi on the air the other night give a marvelous talk, a Jewish rabbi, a marvelous talk. He quoted the New Testament like a New Testament preacher. Later on, he was interviewed, and they said to him, Rabbi, what’s the difference between religion and philosophy? Well, he said, philosophy is a bigger term. They always disappoint you somewhere down the line unless they know God. This philosophy, a bigger term than religion. Why, by religion, you mean faith in Jesus Christ? Faith in Jesus Christ embraces all the philosophies that there are in the world, all science, all learning, all art, all beauty, all everything, are gathered up in the spacious bosom of Jesus Christ. Nothing is bigger than Jesus Christ, nothing is bigger than religion, if by religion, you mean faith in Christ.

So, to follow Jesus, those first disciples left the old life. Now notice it, they left the old life. They attached themselves to Jesus Christ. They joined His band of followers. They began to listen to His words and then they started obeying His teachings and they call themselves by His name.

Now, it’s no different today. We hear the same call today. For He began to do then what He has never ceased to do, and say, follow Me. And today we hear the same Voice. And when we hear the Voice and whoever hears it, follow me, we leave the old life, and we begin the new life. And we attach ourselves to Jesus Christ, and then we identify ourselves with Him. I am proud to be identified with Jesus. Ralph Rader used to sing, I’m satisfied with Jesus Christ, but often I wonder, is Jesus satisfied with me? I am proud to be identified with Him. I hope he’s not ashamed to be identified with me, seeing that His blood and His grace and His Spirit and His forgiving mercy has worked on my heart.

I have heard of foreign people coming to the United States and working like absolute dogs, both men and women, both the husband and wife, and rearing a family. And that family grew up in the luxuries of America, luxuries provided by the hard, rough, permanently dirty hands that never do quite come clean, of the working man, the working woman.

And they went to school and went through college, learned perfect, flawless, idiomatic American English. And when they got old enough to notice that Dad said “vy” when he meant why, “wineger” when he meant vinegar, and “dat” when he meant that, and that they weren’t cultured. I have heard how these children got ashamed of them and wouldn’t invite their young folks home. They wouldn’t invite their friends home because smiling old mama would come out looking like a bit of middle Europe. Speaking poor wretched English, a hairdo that just isn’t hip.

And these rascally, ungrateful, young scoundrels, steered their boy and girlfriends away and wouldn’t bring them home. Shame, shame, shame, Judas Iscariot. But another time I heard this that happened, and father died but the mother still lived. She was apologetic and smiling and always using terrible English. If you understood it, all right, but never matched and never tracked. Never a verb ever followed a noun or whichever way it’s supposed to. And she reared a boy. And that boy finally was graduated from, I think, from medical school to summa cum laude, which is a Latin way of saying he was really on top. And he won some sort of a citation.

And they asked him to stand and receive it and he stood to receive it, and his little all half scared to death, timid mother, a little blob of motherhood, done in a dress that just wasn’t in style, was sitting there two or three rows back, and he stood, and the mother came waddling out. And he turned before all the hundreds, and pinned the citation on her old blouse, and said, if I amount to anything, here’s the reason. And if I have any brains, here’s where I got them. And if I got through school, these hands put me through. See them. She deserves it, not I, and they applauded to the echo and wept with a sheer delight of seeing something good in a bad world. He wasn’t ashamed of an old lady who talked poor English and had rough hands.

O Sacred Head, now wounded by sin and grief bowed down. So scornfully surrounded with thorns thine only crown; O Sacred Head, what glory, what bliss till now is dying. Though despised and gory I joy to call thee mine. He doesn’t stand very well, the real Jesus, the Jesus of the cross. He doesn’t stand very well. The Jesus of the Christmas cards and the Easter cards, he stands all right. Everybody’s ready to say a nice thing about that Jesus. But the true Christ of the cross doesn’t stand very high with people. They don’t want to be bothered with it. They don’t want Him to dictate their lives. They don’t like to think that you got to die before you can live. And He’s going to change your whole life. But He condemns you before He can convert you. That He slays you before He can raise you from the dead. They don’t want to know that. So, our Lord Jesus doesn’t stand very high in public esteem. But I feel it so keenly, I wish I could do it over again.

I was brought up in a family where nobody was converted at that time. I became converted; joined myself to Jesus Christ. Joined the church and was baptized, began to go to church and I was the only Christian in that whole large family that was. And I stood there and was happy to do it. It was not always easy. I admit it was not always easy. And sometimes I slurred things over a little bit, maybe as a young fellow and wasn’t quite as bold as I might have been, but they knew where I stood.

And Father was converted, mother was converted, two sisters converted, brother-in-law converted. And a new dynasty began, a new reign began in the kingdom of God among the Tozers. And there are now Christians scattered all around. Not all of them as good as I want them to be, either uncles, aunts, and cousins and nephews and nieces and all the rest. We’ve got them from Japan to San Diego. But every trace of Christianity that I can find my, two brothers and three sisters, my own, and relatives, every one of them dates back to my conversion, all over the country.

I had a fellow write to me the other day and signed himself Gilbert Tozer. He said, I’m about a third or fourth cousin, five or six times removed. I want you to know that I am converted. And he said, now, I want to throw my house open to you whenever you come into my neighborhood. You come and see me. Well, I haven’t seen him.

You know what you can do, man. You can change not only your own life by the grace of God, but you can change a whole section and block of your  family. You can turn not only one, but you can turn companies and regiments of men and women in the right direction. If you follow Christ and leave the old life and begin the new and identify yourself in Jesus, you can join His people. Don’t be ashamed of His people.

Sometimes, I get cross, I hope it’s in a nice, sanctified way, but I wouldn’t always guarantee it. But I get a bit disturbed because God’s people do such dumb things and seem to be so lacking in a lot of things that I’d like to see them have and have myself. But I’d rather belong to the church of God than any group of people in all the wide world. If I were to be made a 33rd or 39th degree Mason the day after tomorrow, I would turn my back and scorn it and walk to the cross and say, lead on O King Eternal, the day of march is coming. Pick the way of the cross and the thorns and the misunderstandings and the raised eyebrows and the lonesomeness and loneliness. Take it. Take it. Identify yourself with these people. Go along with His people.

Sure, we’ve got hypocrites. Sure, we’ve got people that we think are all right, but don’t live it. Sure, we’ve got young people that attend our young people’s society and sneak off to a dirty movie Friday night or Saturday night. Sure, we have. I don’t know who they are, now, I’m guessing. But I think we have. Sure, always it’s that way. Sure, we have people that we think are great praying saints and if you knew them at home, you’d be shocked. Sure, we have. I suppose. I don’t know which ones, thank God. If I knew which ones, I’d go straight to them. But I never don’t know. God didn’t tell me because He knew what I would do.

So, He keeps it from me. I don’t know who they are, but I’m sure no fellowship ever existed; Jesus had his Judas and Paul had his Dimas and Peter had his Ananias and Sapphira. How can you and I have anything less than a few people that aren’t what they should be?

Nevertheless, I’m not leaving the children of God. If they’ll have me, I’ll have them. Lincoln said he was never going to get married because anybody who would have had him, he wouldn’t have. And that’s one way of looking at it. But any group that would put up with me, I would feel as if I didn’t want to put up with them. But we can’t let logic dictate. We’re going to have to say Lord Jesus, I joined Thy people. I identify myself, and then let the world know. Let the world know you’re a Christian. Don’t make a goose of yourself and go around with big buttons, big enough to stop a handcar, saying Jesus only. Don’t do that. Don’t carry a Bible so big it takes you and your wife to lug it down the sidewalk. Do you think that’s witnessing? No, don’t do that.

Don’t think you’ve got to sing, nearer my God to thee and give you a witness, as we say. Don’t make a fool of yourself under any circumstance. Live your life and where ever opportunity offers, slip a word in for your Savior, in a nice way when you can do it. And above all things, live the Christian life. Live it, live it, live it, brethren, live it. And when you live it, they’ll see it. A candle doesn’t have to shout, everybody, eyes front and center, look this way. Everybody sees a candle once you light it. If you’re a lighted candle, the world will know, and they will look in your direction.

Some of them will be pensive and homesick and go home and cry and wish they could be like you. And some of them will hate you and some of them will scorn you and cut you to pieces. But some of them after thinking it over for a few weeks or a few months or a few years, will surrender and say, I’ve fought this long enough. This man’s life proves to me Jesus Christ is real. So, I’m going to come and follow Him and identify myself with these people and join myself to Him; call myself by His name. Believe on Him and trust Him to save me from the bad and make me good and save me from the transient and give me that which is permanent. Save me from this world and give me a home above.

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“The Throne of Revelation“

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The Throne of Revelation

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

February 15, 1959

Open to Revelation and turn to the fourth chapter. We’ll read responsively fourth chapter revelation. After this I looked, and, behold, a door was opened in heaven: and the first voice which I heard was as it were of a trumpet talking with me; which said, Come up hither, and I will shew thee things which must be hereafter.  And immediately I was in the spirit: and, behold, a throne was set in heaven, and one sat on the throne. And he that sat was to look upon like a jasper and a sardine stone: and there was a rainbow round about the throne, in sight like unto an emerald. And round about the throne were four and twenty seats: and upon the seats I saw four and twenty elders sitting, clothed in white raiment; and they had on their heads crowns of gold.

And out of the throne proceeded lightnings and thunderings and voices: and there were seven lamps of fire burning before the throne, which are the seven Spirits of God. And before the throne there was a sea of glass like unto crystal: and in the midst of the throne, and round about the throne, were four beasts full of eyes before and behind. And the first beast was like a lion, and the second beast like a calf, and the third beast had a face as a man, and the fourth beast was like a flying eagle.

And the four beasts had each of them six wings about him; and they were full of eyes within: and they rest not day and night, saying, Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty, which was, and is, and is to come. And when those beasts give glory and honour and thanks to him that sat on the throne, who liveth for ever and ever, The four and twenty elders fall down before him that sat on the throne, and worship him that liveth for ever and ever, and cast their crowns before the throne, saying, Thou art worthy, O Lord, to receive glory and honour and power: for thou hast created all things, and for thy pleasure they are and were created.

Now, we have here between what was and what was to come. After this, I looked and behold, a door was opened after this. I looked, after this, these things which had just closed, which were the seven letters to the churches. I preached on one of them, and I’m skipping the other six, because they get so much attention from the teachers. After this I looked and then a voice said, I will show thee things which must be here after.

And here stood the man John, between what had been and what was to come. And John saw a door opened in heaven and he heard a voice as it were the voice of a trumpet and he saw a throne and he saw one on the throne and he heard the sound of the chanting of these creatures, holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty.

Now, John had suffered through the seven churches, those seven churches. John had suffered through them. John is here between what was and what was to come. And what was and what was to come, that is, the two chapters, chapters two and three and chapters on from six on to twenty, are anything but good, anything. John had suffered through his seven churches. Look, look what John had had to hear, what he had to hear, what he had to tell the people. He’d had to talk about works and labors and patience and service and poverty and tribulation and suffering and prison and the sword and death and stumbling blocks and idolatry and backsliding and false apostles and religious liars and external riches and internal poverty, blindness of heart and nakedness and danger to life and the loss of crowns and the failure of rewards and the need to overcome. All of this he had heard, and it wasn’t a pleasant thing to hear.

And yet this was for the moment passed now, and before him in his prophetic mind, he saw four horsemen ride out. He saw the opening of the seals and heard the sounding of the trumpets. He saw the opening of the bottomless pit and he saw the great smoke arise and the scourge of the scorpions. He saw the Antichrist come up out of the earth. He saw the mark of the beast and the great red dragon. And he saw finally, Armageddon and the last judgement. Now, he saw all this and there he was caught between his poor backslidden churches that so desperately needed help, that were in danger of great loss to themselves. And these things, and I’ve only mentioned a few that lay out there, what we call the Great Tribulation.

Now, with all these present woes approaching, I want to ask you, how could John stay sane? There’s one way for you to stay sane and restful and enjoy yourself and have your food digest and enjoy your TV programs and your your nice home and your family, and not have too much worry. It is not to care a hoot about the world and about God and about the things of the Spirit and hell and heaven and judgment and losses and gains and rewards and punishment. That’s one way. But it’s a mighty poor way. And John didn’t belong to the crowd who could know these things and be restful about them.

So, how could John keep sane? How could he keep poised and optimistic in an hour like that? And I asked you how can you and how can I at a time like this, knowing what’s out there, even apart from the Bible? Close that Bible. Shut it. Put a rubber band about it. Put it to the bottom of the drawer and shut the door and lock it. And push the desk into a corner of the attic and determine to forget there is any Bible. All you have to do is listen to the radio now, and if you’re at all sensitive, or if you love the human race, you will find it hard to keep poised or balanced or at peace because of what’s facing the human race, all together apart from what the Bible says. Now, how are we going to live in this day? How are you and I going to live, are we going to make it? Well, John said, behold a door standing open in heaven.

Now, there my friends, there’s the direction you’ve got to look. And there is the solution. The only solution is from above. The only solution for earth is something from above. There’s nothing that comes out of the earth that can cure the earth. Nothing that spawns or hatches or is born in the earth can do the earth any good. All that fails, rulers and diplomats and agreements and pacts as the newspaper calls them, a man laws and soldiers and weapons and talks and summit conferences and science and culture and all the influence of learning. These are all good and I’m not knocking them. Certainly, it’s better for two diplomats to meet and talk than it is for them to fight. But they haven’t got the solution.

That kindly and well intentioned and much respected gentleman that lies so ill today in the hospital in Washington, not all that he could do with all his good intentions, some love him, some hate him, some wish that he was in orbit, and others think that he’s one of the greatest man that ever lived. Whatever you think of him, remember, he just couldn’t, he just didn’t have either the wisdom nor the power nor the strength to be able to save us. There has got to be help from somewhere else.

Heaven alone can cure. Heaven alone can heal. Earth has no sorrows that heaven cannot heal. But heaven can heal all earth sorrows. Heaven alone, I say, can heal. When He came the first time, you remember, and there were in a certain country, shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night. And suddenly an angel appeared on to them, and they were so afraid. The angel said, fear not, behold, we bring you good tidings of great joy which shall be to all people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David, a Savior, which is Christ the Lord. And immediately there was with the heavenly host, with the angels, a multitude of the heavenly host praising God and saying, glory to God in the highest, peace on earth to men of goodwill.

Now that was when He first came. When he went away, he said, my peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you. And just as He went away, when He had spoken these things, He was taken up from them and a cloud received Him out of their sight. And as they stood gazing toward heaven, lo, two men in white said to them, appeared and said, why gaze ye up into heaven? This same Jesus which ye saw go, shall come again in like manner as ye have seen Him go into heaven.

Now the world has forgotten this, and the church has forgotten this. All you have to do to find out how unspiritual we are is to get into a tight spot. And then you find how we haven’t been trusting God too much at all. We have been looking to other things rather than to God. But I warn you against looking to anything that doesn’t show through the open door. I warn you against trusting to anything that begins lower down than the throne which John saw. All things were made by Him and without Him was not anything made that was made. And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. We have Him incarnated here, but not His origin here. He came out out of heaven’s open door and through the womb of the Virgin In order that He might redeem mankind.

Now, the church, I say, has forgotten it. And we must take one more gaze into heaven. We must look once more. We must see an open door once again. We must realize that earth’s salvation comes through the open door and that it does not, it is not, it cannot ever possibly originate down here. It cannot be. But you say, did not Jesus originate here? Was He not born here. He got his body here, but He originated nowhere. In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God.

And the Scripture says, behold, a set throne. Now, where it says here a throne was set, I have examined this very carefully. And I know I found out that it does not mean I saw the setting of a throne. You know how you set a table? There’s nothing there and then a woman gets busy and pretty soon she’s got a fine table set, all dolled up and food on it. Well, now that isn’t what it means here. It does not mean I saw a throne being set. That throne was never set. That throne had never been set. He had been with that throne. He the One who had no origin, sat on a throne. And that throne was not a throne being set, that was the set throne. Behold, a set throne. What does a throne proclaim.

When you see a throne, what does it proclaim? Well, it proclaims certainty. And all I pray that you will hear me tonight as I say to you, that in the ups and the downs of the world, that you will look to the throne. There’s no certainty anywhere else, remember it. You know, when we get to the brink of war and then pull back from it, we breathe once more and say, perhaps we will have another breathing spell. But with that breathing spell, we soon catch our breath again as we get to the brink of war once more. No, there is no certainty anywhere but at that throne. John saw it and you and I can see it for it’s set there, and there is certainty.

Now, there isn’t any certainty anyplace else and don’t let anybody tell you that there is. Don’t let them tell you there’s anybody that you can elect that can give you certainty or anybody you can defeat that will bring you certainty or any system or ideology that you can take up that will bring you certainty. There is no certainty in a rotting world, a world of decay.

Then the throne proclaims authority. Authority has got to be somewhere. There isn’t too much authority now. It is broken down everywhere, and broken down in the home, broken down in the schools, broken down in nations. So, there’s hardly a place of authority. But John said I saw a throne set. And that throne symbolizes and proclaims authority.

More than authority, it proclaims sovereignty. There never has been a throne, thank God, there never has been a throne set up in this world that was a sovereign throne. You know, the English refer to their queen as a sovereign, and many other nations have had queens or kings that they called sovereign, but I quarrel with their use of the word sovereign. For the word sovereign is an absolute, universal word. And it cannot possibly be used to designate any queen or anything that ever sat or does now sit or ever will sit on any throne of this world, until the Son of God the Messiah returns. And then there will be a sovereign throne, for sovereignty, of course means absolute freedom, absolute rule over all things without anybody anywhere or any power, any law, anything anywhere daring to challenge it. And there never has been a king like that since the beginning of the world. There isn’t now and there never will be until He comes back.

But this throne that John saw is a sovereign throne. That’s the kingdom of God, the center of the kingdom of God. And it means universal dominion, of course, and it means this other thing that I shall name and that is perpetuity. Oh, my brother, to be able to find something that will last. Did you ever, did you ever get to thinking, now this only applies to people over 35. People under 35, they have no idea in all the wide world but that they live forever. That is, they know better but they don’t feel it. But after you get to 35, which is halfway to 70. And incidentally, any of you thirty-fivers that imagine you’re spring chickens, you’re halfway to 70, just keep on.

But did you ever stop to grieve over the lack of permanence and perpetuity? Things just can’t last. Why, they bring them down and have him dedicated on Thursday and what seems only the next month, they’re married. And in a short while, they begin to get gray and then laugh at their gray hairs, and before very long they slow down and they’re gone. Generation follows generation. Moses prayed that famous prayer, O God, establish the work of my hands. He wanted something that would last.

Well, John here, saw a throne and he saw a throne that was sovereign, authoritative, certain, universal and perpetual. There is one thing that will last; Thy throne, O God, is forever and ever. The scepter of righteousness is the scepter of Thy kingdom. And when God folds up the heavens as a garment and rolls back the stars as a mantle to change, His throne will still stand. I want to testify while I preach and say to you that the older, I get the more I live for that throne. The more I live for that throne, that permanent throne, that which cannot perish nor pass away. There is the throne, that blissful center about which was sing. There’s that blissful center.

And here, my friend, is our sanity. And here’s our certainty and here’s our assurance and here is our cheer. Here’s what gives us cheer. God’s children should be a cheerful people. St. Francis of Assisi believed that a man ought to be a cheerful, and he was a cheerful, happy man.

My wife and I are reading at our morning prayers, we are reading through Thomas Traherne’s great book called “The Centuries of Meditation.” It means meditations done in hundreds Well, he was the happiest man in all the wide world. He thought that when you get up in the morning that you ought to get up like a bird and sing and never be anything but happy. He was an Episcopalian preacher and wrote a couple of great books which went into obscurity and only have been lately resurrected, and I happen to have one of them. But don’t try to borrow it yet for a while. But it’s a great book and hard to get published by Dobell in London.

But this man was delighted man, he was a happy man. And you know that when the old Catholic Church used to canonize people, well, you know that they have to prove that they had a sense of humor; they were happy people. They won’t canonize a gloomy saint. I’m sorry I’d ever be on their side on anything, but I’m on their side on that, because a gloomy saint is more of a problem for the kingdom of God than a modernist. Here is the blissful center. Here’s sanity and here’s assurance and here’s cheer.

Well, One sat on the throne, One sat on the throne. Do you notice, One sat on the throne. And that word “one” there is a kind of “you” general pronoun. It doesn’t say who it is that sat on the throne. A throne was set. There was a set throne in heaven, and One sat on the throne, and it doesn’t say who sat on the throne. But is identification necessary, my friends? Is it necessary that you and I identify why we’re in the last book of the Bible?

Do we have to identify the One that sat on the throne? For here is the center of all worlds, and here is a throne that never was created. Here was the throne that God has sat on from the dim dawn of far beginning. Before there was anything, as the colored brother said the other day, way back on the other side of nothing. There’s going back. And back on the other side of nothing, God had to work. Back on the other side of nothing and this One that sat on the throne. He is not identified here, but must we identify Him? Does He need a name? Don’t we know who it is? Let’s call up a few men and ask them.

There lived a man with a name hard to pronounce, and he was found in the fourth chapter of the book of Genesis and never so far as I remember, mentioned again until the book of Hebrews thousands of years later. He had the long, difficult name of Melchizedek, and he was king of Salem which is king of peace. And he lived before there was any Hebrew race and he lived before there was any Old Testament and of course, before there was any New Testament. He lived before any church spire ever pointed to the sky or any choir ever chanted the praises of God. But somehow or other, he had become high priest of the Most High God.

And if we call up old Melchizedek and say to him, sorry to bother you, you’ve been sleeping so comfortably so long, but we’d like to know. John saw heaven opened and saw a throne and saw one on a throne, but he didn’t name him. Who is this that sits on the throne at the center of the universe. And Melchizedek would say, why, it’s the Most High God, possessor of heaven and earth. Don’t you love that old expression? They say, you know, there’s a progressive development of doctrine in the Bible. But I like to go back to some of those old grassroot beginnings of things. And in the light of what we know now in the New Testament, those old grassroot expressions have tremendous meaning. Melchizedek knelt before the One he called the Most High God, possessor of heaven and earth. And he was the high priest of that God. And so, Melchizedek might answer and say, why don’t you know who He was? This one that sat on the throne was the Most High God.

Let us skip on a little and ask Abraham, to whom he paid tithes. And let’s say, Abraham, who’s meant here? You’re a man of faith. You’ve marched down from Ur of the Chaldees. You’ve come a long way down, and what about it, Abraham? We’re not such good theologians and we see a door open in heaven and a throne there surrounded by creatures of all kinds and seven spirits with eyes and all this wonderful strange, yet there’s a throne and there’s is a, the only one that’s on it is called One and he’s left without a name. Who is it?

And Abraham would say, I’ll give you two names. I’ll give you. I’ll tell you who He is El Shaddai, El Shaddai. What does that mean Abraham? And he would say, why, that’s an old Hebraic word meaning God Almighty, God Almighty, the Almighty God, El Shaddai. It’s He that sits on that throne, the Most High God, El Shaddai.

But Abraham that isn’t enough. Name Him again. Identify Him. Who sits on that throne? And he would say I’ll give you another name, Jehovah Jireh. But what does Jehovah Jireh mean Abraham? And Abraham would answer Jehovah Jireh means the LORD will provide. Don’t worry. The Lord will provide. Do you believe it, my friends? The LORD will provide. El Shaddai, the the Mighty God, the Almighty God, the one that has all the might there is. He says, I’ll provide for you.

And later when He came down in the form of a man and stood among us or sat among us and preached his great sermon on the mount. Me said, why are you people so scared and worried? Why are you bothered, and you get premature wrinkles from worrying? Why, he said, your Father knows what things you have need of before ye ask Him. About whom was He speaking? He was speaking of the one who was El Shaddai, the Almighty God who owned everything, and Jehovah Jireh, who would provide everything.

But if we want still more, we come down the years and say, Moses, we’ve got an odd theological question back here in the book of Revelation. We’ve been preaching on it here and we’re sorry to bother you. We know that you’ve been sleeping well, too. But who is this that sits on the throne? We’ve had a little testimony, but we’d like yours. Moses would bow his head. And in a reverent voice he’e say one time, I, one time I now, by a bush and there was fire in that bush, and I turned aside to see. And when I turned aside, I heard golden voice say, Abraham, Abraham, draw not nigh. I am the God of thy fathers, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Go down and deliver Israel. Go down Moses.

And I said, O God, excuse me. Excuse me. Excuse me and pardon me, but O God, I’ll go if you want me to go, but they’ll say, who sent you? What do I tell them, God? What is the name? They’ll demand a name. And God said in that same, wondrous, healing voice that filled heaven and earth, this is what you’ll say; say, I am that I am. That is my name forever and that’s my memorials above all generations. I am that I am. I am the Almighty. I am Jehovah Jireh, I am Jehovah Tsidkenu. I am.

All right. We ask another man who happens to be one of my favorites, and that is Isaiah. Isaiah wrote his 66 chapters, and they were filled, filled with great music, filled with music. A great musician could take the book of Isaiah and he could write an oratorio on the Book of Isaiah, at least the score, I mean not the score, but the libretto would be there, the words would be there. And he could write an oratorio that it would take a week to sing and would require the voices of angels to do it justice. For Isaiah was a man with an organ in his soul.

Isaiah, you’re a cousin to the King, and you’re a gifted poet. But where did you get your power? Where did you get jirtle lasting quality? What was it? What is this that Jew and Gentile and church of God have loved all down the centuries? And Isaiah would say, the year that King Uzziah died, I saw also the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up. Oh, Isaiah, excuse us. That’s what we wanted to know. Who was that sitting on the throne? And Isaiah would say, why, it was Jehovah sitting on the throne, Jehovah, the God of our fathers, Jehovah, the Most High God of Melchizedek, possessor of heaven and earth, the El Shaddai of Abraham and the I am of Moses, sitting upon the throne.

Ask our fathers, any of our fathers, back to Paul. Ask them with their long Latin musical, Latin names. Tertullian, Polycarp and Chrysostom and the rest of them whose very names are music. Ask and say, who, who is it? We’re just dumb Gentiles and we don’t know much and we’re busy. Who was that sitting on the throne Tertullian? Who was that, Origin? Who, who was that Anselm? Who sat on that throne? And they would say, I believe in God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible. That was He that sat on that throne, God, our Father. So, when we pray, Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. We harmonize with all saints down the years who have said I believe in God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth.

Now, my Brother, you know what our trouble is, that we look around us and we have figured too much. Old Dr. Brown used to when missionary time would come, in his inimitable fashion, he’d get out a pen and sarcastically say, now, you’re going to give to the Lord’s work. You’re going to give. How much can I give? Then, he would stand up here and figure it out, oh yeah, 225.

Well, that’s not it, Brethren. That’s not the place to look. That’s not the place to look for us. That’s not the place to look for you. And you that are young and rearing families, that’s not the place to look for your hope. And you that are worried about your jobs. You’re not supposed to look to the auditor. You’re supposed to look through the open door at the fixed throne and see the one that’s on that throne. And this is our home, my Brethren. God is our home said Moses, a dwelling place for all generations.

And Simpson wrote a hymn by that name, God is my Home. So, this is our home. Your life is hid with Christ in God. And from there my Brethren, we look down. Now you say, how can I do it? You do it by faith. You do it by faith. A young fellow wrote me from, I forget what university. I can’t recall. It was one I was not familiar with the name, but he said, I want to ask you a question. He said, I learned that Jesus Christ is everything to me. But now, he said, how do I get hold of that? He said, do I believe and have faith and believe that it’s true for me or what do I do? And I wrote back and said, my dear young friend, you have asked a question and given your own answer. And I cannot, though I am much older give you any answer, but the one you’ve given. I read, he said, in the New Testament that Jesus Christ is everything to me now. How do I get ahold of it? I said, you’ve answered. Then I quoted him. I said, believe that He means you and dare to rise into it and take it for yours and say it’s not a theory, but it’s a fact. It’s not a doctrine, but it’s a reality, as well as a doctrine.

So, our life is hid with Christ in God. We are God’s. We belong to Him. And from there, my Brethren, we look down. From there we look down, and we look down on everything. We look down on the risen Christ. We look down from the throne where sits the risen Christ. We look down.

Oh, I get accused for being pessimistic because I won’t run around with a daisy in my boutonniere singing all the little songs about toothpaste, because I don’t like that stuff. Because I don’t like it. I don’t like the foolish way people are going. I don’t like what they are making me put up with. I don’t like their opinion of my mentality. They think it’s 12 years old and it isn’t. It’s a little older. I don’t like it. And Brethren, I’m a roaring optimist when I go to the book. When I look out on the world, the Democrats and Republicans and socialists and stragglers, I’m a pessimist out and out where they don’t have the answer. But when I look through the open door at the throne that is set, nobody can be more of an optimist than I am.

So, from up there, we look down. Now, we’re looking down on a problem. A lost sheep has wandered in. Brother bird, he got lost up there in cloud nine. But, let me tell you this. Let me tell you this, anything, anything He is going to say to you has got to be seen from the throne down. We don’t dare see it from our bank account out and from our little place out. We’ve got to see it from the throne down.

And the problem of racism, the problem of modernism and the new ecumenical council called by the Holy Father to woo us back into the fold and squirt stuff on us and make us good Catholics, we’ve got to settle that all from the throne down. If you try to get a lot of angry fundamentalists together down here sending telegrams to the President and to the State Department, all you’ve got is a bunch of people mad. But if you face all these problems from the throne down, you’re on top of it brother, just as sure as you live. No matter what happens to it, you’re still on top of it. Amen.

If I had just been having a good time up there but there’s somebody listening. I don’t know. I lost contact with you 10 minutes ago. So, I don’t know whether you still heard me. But as for me, don’t pity me and say poor man, he must carry a burden. I’m one of the happiest men in the world; by nature, one of the most miserable and by grace, one of the most delighted, because long ago I saw a throne and One sitting on a throne. And though imperfectly, I’ve tried to see everything else from the throne down. Well, everybody said, amen. Amen.

And so, we’ve got to see that throne, that set throne, that fixed throne and that One that we’ve now identified, sitting on that throne, receiving the adulation of all the heavenly host. And from that throne we view the Cold War and from that throne we view any possible hot war and from there we view the missiles and crime and corruption and race trouble and accidents and woes and diseases and death. From there, we look down. So instead of being under the circumstances, we’re on top of the circumstances. Amen.

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“Gifts“

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Gifts

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

December 22, 1957

There are three texts which I would ask you to note. The one is the familiar, John 3:16. Suppose that we just repeat it together. For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. The next is a less familiar, Matthew 20:28. As many as know it, repeat it with me. Even as the Son of Man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister and to give His life a ransom for many. Then, Acts 20:35: We ought to remember the words of the Lord Jesus when He said, it is more blessed to give than to receive.

Now in these three texts, there of course, is hidden or lying, a world of diversified truths. But there are four truths which I would ask you to note. One is that the Father, out of His love gave His Son. And the second is that the Son in humility gave His life. And the third, that the Father and the Son, in their kindness, gave, but gave to supply an existing need. They gave not promiscuously, carelessly, lightly, but the Father gave His Son in order that men might not perish. The Son gave His life in order that we might be ransomed. And the fourth thing is, that it is more blessed to give than it is to receive.

Now, from our Lord Jesus Christ we have received much. The older I get and the more I know the Lord and the more I appreciate what He is doing and has done and is promising to do, the more I see that words won’t express what we’re trying to say. God has to add something to words or else they fall down. Can you imagine this statement? From our Lord we have received much, much, unmodified and yet, what could you say? How can I express what we have received from Him? But I want to think this morning about what we can offer Him and show you from the New Testament, specially gathered round the birth scene, what they gave Him and then ask, what can we give Him?

Well, we’ll begin where the New Testament begins with those wise men. We don’t know how many they were, probably three. Traditions says that they were representatives of Shem, Ham, and Japheth. That sounds too neat to be true, although, it could be true. But they came from afar; they were the Magi. Milton called them the star-led wizards and said they came with odor sweet. But they brought to Him three things symbolic of about all that anybody can bring Him. They brought Him gold; obviously, they had gold to bring.

They were of the upper class. They were learned and they may even have been kings. We sing, We Three Kings of Orient Are and we’re speaking for these three men. That’s tradition, but it could also be true. They brought Him gold, and gold of course stood for a lasting treasure. There is one thing about gold and that is this, you can’t destroy it. I do not think or do not believe that there’s any way known that gold can be destroyed. You can burn it. You can melt it down. You can mix it with other metals, but the gold always remains the gold because it is one of the basic elements in nature. And this is a lasting treasure, this gold and they brought it to Jesus.

Then they also brought frankincense, and this frankincense stood for worship. It always has in Old Testament times, and where it is used in the New, it stands for worship. It stands for the sweet fragrance of prayer that goes up from the heart that is offering something, however little, to the Lord Jesus Christ. But then also, they must have had some kind of Biblical teaching. They must have gotten some light other than we believe the heathen then had because they brought also myrrh. And myrrh was an ingredient of the Old Testament sacrifices. When they came with their incense, part of it was myrrh. And myrrh always stood for the bitter element. It stood for the suffering. And thus, they brought the gold, the lasting treasure and the frankincense of worship with a little remembrance that they were in a world of darkness and sin, and that there must be myrrh there also.

Then there was Mary. Now what can I say about the one they call the blessed Virgin Mary? Too much is said by some people and not enough is said by others, and I would try to be in the middle, where I could say enough without saying too much. But it would take ten sermons, a series of at least ten to say what ought to be said about Mary and to unsay what has been said too much about her, that Mary didn’t have any gold. And I think she also didn’t have any frankincense.

Mary came from the plain people. And we know little about her except we know her lineage and that it went back to David by way of Nathan not through Solomon, but by way of Nathan. If she had been a descendant of Solomon, she could not have been the mother of our Lord, because God said to a descendant of Solomon who was a king, Coniah, cursed be this man, He said. Not one of his descendants shall ever sit upon the throne of David. And yet the lineage that we trace right on back through to David and on back to Abraham goes through the line of Solomon, but not Mary. Mary goes through Nathan, another son of David, so that the curse does not apply to Mary. And Christ could be king, because the curse did not prohibit it. If she had been a descendant, I repeat, of any of Coniah who was a descendant of Solomon, she could not have been the mother of the King.

Well, she had no gold, and she had no frankincense. So, she gave Him all that she had or could give that He wanted. She gave her mortal body to be the cradle where in the mystery of gestation, Jesus Christ was made flesh to dwelt among us. All this is so holy and so chastely wonderful, that I think it had not never to be made the subject of theological controversy. I would never raise my voice to debate with any man about the virgin birth of Jesus.

This, if it’s true, and my heart knows it’s true, this is as richly beautiful as the stones of fire over which once the seraph stretched his golden wings. This is too beautiful to be debated before the public. Mary knew not the man. Mary was the virgin mother and Jesus Christ was born of the Father who is God and of the mother who is Mary, that He might be to us God and man. That He might be human and divine joined in one, indivisible, an everlastingly permanent and fixed union, Christ, was born into the world in time. And Christ, never born, never created, but begotten of the Father before all ages, joined forever in one Man. This is our Christ. And Mary, Mary gave him all she had. She gave Him her mortal body.

Then Mary was married and had this Joseph as her husband. Now Joseph had no gold. He was a carpenter, and he was a peasant, we would say, he belonged to the working class. In that time, they did not drive big automobiles and have country homes as they do now. But he belonged to this simple people. And he had no gold and no frankincense, which was very expensive. But you know, Joseph gave something. It took a man like Joseph to give. Joseph gave faith.

And he gave faith where it was needed. When he was talking to his espoused wife, she had to admit her condition. And Joseph got up quietly and walked away, hoping that he could somehow release himself from her, and yet save her from disgrace. And then an angel spoke to him in a dream and said, don’t be afraid to take to yourself the woman Mary, for that which is begotten is of the Holy Ghost. And Joseph believed it. And Joseph went right back and said, I’m sorry, Mary, I’m sorry, God has revealed the truth.

And so, Joseph gave faith at a time when faith wasn’t a very proper thing and when there was no precedent for it. There was nobody else whom had ever had this situation happened to them. He couldn’t open the Book and say, well, saint so and so had a situation like this, or the apostle had it or some reformer or evangelist had a situation like this, some missionary. Nobody ever had had a situation like this. Joseph had to have faith in God and in his betrothed wife when nobody else in the world would have believed that story. And he did. And he is today called by the world St. Joseph.

So, he had faith in understanding, and he gave them, and he gave them. I said on the radio yesterday that I think he was not a brilliant man, but he had a certain, salty understanding and he did give that, and he gave protection. Now think of it my friends. Joseph gave protection, for remember, that the Son of the world once lay in the manger. Not in the stable as they say, but in a manger, which is something altogether different. The sweet, fragrant hay was in that manger? The cattle were not tramping there. They were eating out of that. It was up at head level, and it was clean and smelled pure and sweet. I’ve put hay into mangers, and I know how beautifully fragrant it smells.

And that Jesus was laid in that manger. And there lay all the hope of the world in that manger. Can you imagine it? Man doesn’t put all his hopes in one tiny, tiny place like that. We protect ourselves. We have our SAC, Strategic Air Command all over the world. Did I read that we had 65? Is that the right number. Is that an understatement? We have at least that many great bases from which we can go if they destroy one to 10, 20, 30, we still have more. And rich men put their money not in one bank or not in one place, but they distributed it around. They buy stock here and stock there and stock at the other place, so if the bottom drops out in one place, they’ll still have plenty.

But God put all in one manger. And when He lay there, He, a tiny baby, you could have taken your thumb and pressed real hard on the top of His head and He would have been gone. You could have neglected him for a day or two, and the infection would have come, and He would have been gone. He needed protection. And Joseph gave it. Of course, Mary gave the loving, motherly care, but Joseph gave the protection. He was a rough carpenter, and his hands were rough. But he would look in with a smile and fatherly protection. And he gave patience, and he gave care, and he gave all this and he gave hard work.

We’ll have Joseph to thank for this, my friends, give him the world to come. We can hunt people out and say, I want to thank you. If we can, we’ll have Joseph to hunt up before we’ve done our duty and done what our hearts require. And we’ll say Joseph, thank you for taking care of Mary, and thank you for believing in her when nobody else would have accepted her story. Thank you for the patience and protection and care you gave to her and gave to the little boy. Thank you, Joseph. We’ll say that. Joseph gave that.

Then there were the shepherds. Now the shepherds couldn’t give what the others had given. They couldn’t give gold or frankincense or myrrh. They weren’t in a position where they could give care nor protection. And only one was in a position where she could give her mortal body.

But the shepherds were the first to come in fear and wonder and praise. They were the first ones to come. Scripture says that they came in fear, but it wasn’t the fear that men felt when the satellite was thrown into its orbit; it wasn’t the fear of impending destruction. It wasn’t the fear that the superstitious people feel for black cats on Friday. It was the godly fear, the fear that heals your heart. It was a wholesome, healing, reverential fear, and wonder. And these shepherds when they came, set the mood for all that will come and see, all the world, all the years. They came in wonder.

And the Christ at whose feet I could not kneel, and wonder is a Christ I would not worship; I could not worship Him. I might pay some dutiful tribute to Him, in keeping with the way the church does, but I could not worship if I could not wonder.

But the shepherds wondered. They said, this is beyond us. We’ve been out under these stars until we’ve counted every visible star. We know the constellations. We know all of these various forms that are etched against the blue green sky of the night sky. We know all that. And we’ve heard all the strange stories and tales that are told; we know it. The long, long night watches as we kept our sheep and talked together. We’ve heard many wonders, many strange things, but nothing like this we have ever heard before. We’ve never heard angels. We’ve never heard a multitude of the heavenly host saying, glory to God in the highest. They wondered and they brought Jesus what is more precious to Him than any talent you might bring.

The man can sing, or a woman, we say, oh, she ought to give her voice, he ought to give his voice to the Lord. If the man has ability to stand up and talk, we say oh, that man ought to give his oratorical ability to the Lord. The man is making great money, we pray, convert Mr. So and so. He has $2 million. Think of what he could do for missions. Let me say to you, that more precious to God than all the money in the world, more precious than all our gifts and talents and abilities is wonder. Bring wonder to Him. And in your wonder, you come to Him and say, O my God, my Lord, my Lord, I know not. I only know, here I am Lord and there Thou art. O Lord, receive me. He’ll receive it with greater joy than if you could bring $1 million and lay it at his feet.

Well, then there was Lazarus later on and his sisters Mary and Martha. They gave Him something too. They gave him this; they gave Him a welcome. There were a lot of places Jesus wasn’t welcome in those days because they were afraid of Him. Lots of Pharisees would never have taken Him into their homes. They said, well, this man’s a fanatic, and we can’t take Him in. We’ve got to keep our doctrine clean and clear. And we don’t dare compromise the synagogue. They wouldn’t have taken Him in.

But Jesus had a welcome at the home of Lazarus and his two sisters, and He had what they now say, a home away from home. And wherever Jesus was, and he got around anywhere near to Bethany, why, He always knew the latch string was out. He didn’t have to write ahead and say, I will be coming, would there be a place for Me? They saw to it that that one place never was taken by anybody else. That was His place. They didn’t quite know why. And you know, sometimes I think that some of our religious acts that are performed for reasons that we can’t quite fathom are more valid and more precious than the ones we can figure out.

When I studied the life of Jesus, the Savior, and the people that were all around Him, I saw them doing things and heard them saying things that they didn’t quite know what they were saying or doing. But they did it out of a not to clearly defined impulse of the heart. And God made human hearts, my brethren. And He loves the human heart more than He loves the human intellect, though the human intellect, when it becomes fused with the human heart, and we think with our heart, as the old Greek fathers used to say. When we think with our heart, then the human intellect can rise to be that of a Luther or an Augustine.

But when the intellect is separated from the heart, God hasn’t much good to say about it. But He lives for our hearts. Behold, I stand at the door and knock, and He didn’t say what door, but the whole church has believed that it’s the door of the heart. So, the home away from home was the heart of Lazarus and his sisters and the home there. They entered Him into their hearts; they gave him their hearts. And this is more desirable than anything else.

And then there were the women, and we don’t quite know who they were either, these women. They gave one thing to Jesus; they gave him a robe. And it was an unusual robe, in that robes have seams, even the garment you’re wearing now and that I’m wearing, you could take it apart at this at the seams and lay it out again, as it once was cut to a pattern. But this seamless robe had no pattern. And they must have, these women, looked at Jesus with a very critical and appraising eye. And they must have met and whispered and put their heads together and said, now, he’s about, I think, five foot 10, wouldn’t you say, 10, maybe 11? And what would you say, He takes middle size or larger, we just went with you. They figured it all out. And then when they had gotten him down so that they had His size and they knew that he would be able to wear it, why, they wove Him a seamless robe, a robe without seam. And they gave that to Jesus.

And that seamless robe was considered to be of such value that the soldiers cast dice to see who would get it when they nailed Him on the cross. And don’t forget, that just as when Jesus came into the world, Mary and Joseph had a layette ready for Him. Don’t forget that when He went out of the world, the women had a seamless robe that they took from Him when He died. He had his friends.

And we’ll have to hunt up Joseph to and Mary and those shepherds, and there’ll be identified no doubt. And we’ll find Lazarus because Lazarus had an experience nobody else had to have much, not many at least. He had died and been raised from the dead and had eaten with Jesus after his resurrection and had died again and he’s still sleeping, waiting for another resurrection. And of course, everybody will gather around Lazarus and say, tell us about that Lazarus. I only got raised once and you got raised twice. And Lazarus will say, don’t feel bad about that because my first resurrection that I got was only temporary. And this last one that I got along with you, it’s permanent–immortality. But he didn’t get immortality when Lazarus came forth, but he got raised from the dead simply for a time.

And these women, if we ever find who they are, I don’t know whether we’ll ever know who they are or not. A great preacher one time preached a sermon on the unknown saints, who they were, I think it was T. Dewitt Talmage, the great Brooklyn orator of a past generation. He said that Paul was let down in a basket with a rope fastened to the basket and was let down over the wall. And he said, now who made that basket? And he said, If the fellow that made that basket had been a shoddy workman, the apostle might easily have been killed. And he said, who made that rope? Nobody knows who made that rope. But whoever made that rope made a good rope. And if he had been careless and left a weak place in it, the apostle weight might easily have broken that and dashed him on to the rocks below and killed him. But somebody had done good work.

And again, I say, though this I suppose is Thanksgiving material, really, but I don’t know why we should wait till November to be thankful. I think we just owe so much to everybody. And I think we owe a lot to these women.

And then there was that other Joseph Arimathea. And I might also add, before I leave those women, that the church owes an awful lot to the women today. There are some people who don’t like the idea of women having any part in religion. A man they believe there, can save their souls, you know. They think they’re at least above the animals. You can save their soul, believe in Christ and be saved and then keep their mouths shut. And one time a man came to this church and a woman testified and he stalked out and said, they’re blaspheming God in this church, letting a woman talk.

Well, I was reading the gospels the other day. And I heard of some women that went to the tomb and saw that Jesus wasn’t there. And the angel said to the women, He’s not here, He’s risen. And they raced away to tell everybody. Did you know that the first persons who told of the resurrection of Christ were women? Did you know it? We owe the women a lot. I think it’s entirely possible to get all sentimental and dewy-eyed about this. But I also so think that it’s possible to get wrong about it.

I’m not dewy-eyed about the women. I know that usually, they give their husband’s money and spend it. I realize that. But we owe the women an awful lot, an awful lot. We ought to thank God for the women, the Christian women, the simple women, the plain women, the women who serve God, and who manage somehow out of their household budget to lay enough aside, they can make a missionary pledge. And they can give where needs are, as well as to say nothing about persuading the old gentleman, that he can afford to give that extra $100 this year to the Lord’s work. Well, that’s assuming that the old gentleman isn’t very zealous. I know that some of you men are equally zealous with your wives. But I thought I wanted to say that about the women because it’s true and this is the opportunity.

And then there was Joseph, that other Joseph, Joseph of Arimathea.  I don’t know much to say about Joseph, only that he went and claimed the body of Jesus. That body wasn’t dirty to him. There was nothing repulsive about that to him. That was a dead body and it was the body of an executed criminal. Don’t forget it, we might as well face up to it and call it by its right name. This was the body of a man who had been executed by the Roman state.

Once I went through Sing Sing prison, and I sat in the chair in Sing Sing, and had a young man strap me in the way they strap in the criminals. He didn’t put the electrical thing on my head, but it was there. And I sat there in the chair. And I said to him, a handsome young, blonde, good looking blue eyed fellow. And I said to him, are you one of the, are you, and I couldn’t get it out. And he said, yes, I’m one of these legalized killers. Well, I said, what do you do? What’s your job? He said, my job is to wheel them away and put them in the ice box. He said, this is the ice box out here, and we went out and saw a whole list of places where they were put, just big enough for a human body. They were put in there and kept on ice until they were either claimed by their relatives or buried in a potter’s field.

And don’t forget that that’s exactly what Joseph of Arimathea did. Jesus had died as men die in Sing Sing. They die because they’ve committed crimes against the world. He died, because we had committed crimes against the world and against God, and He had never committed any. He became sin for us, but the world didn’t know that. And Peter said, if the world had known it they wouldn’t have crucified the Lord of Glory. They thought they were lugging out a criminal. They thought when they took Him down, one more criminal is dead. They put thousands of them to death over the years. But Joseph didn’t feel that way. He knew. He knew. He knew that sacred body, that sacred body was not going to decay. He knew Mother Earth could never claim it.

So, Joseph said, would you mind if I claimed it? They said, you’re not next of kin. Well, he said, would you just miss a point there and jump a point and let me have Him anyhow. They said, oh, sure, take him. You’re saving us burying him. So, Joseph took His body reverently away, and laid it in his own, new grave that he himself had had just as people now buy cemetery lots. Joseph had bought himself a place where he might be buried. Well, I don’t know too much about Joseph. But I wonder where they buried him, finally? In that same grave where Jesus had lain? I’d hate to think that. And I don’t suppose that our Christian sentiment would allow us to think that. But anyway, Joseph gave what he had. It was rather grim. But it was what Jesus needed just at that time.

Well, that’s what they gave Him. That’s what they gave Him. And we ransomed sinners, should we let anybody else outdo us in giving? Is there anything anybody gave that we shouldn’t try to give if we can. If we have gold, we can give it. If we have not frankincense, we can give worship. And we can as Mary, give our mortal bodies unto the Lord. And we can as Joseph, give patient, tender care and faith and understanding to His church, if not to the Savior, then to the ones the Savior came to save.

We can with the shepherds stand in fear and wonder and awe and sing praises on the plains at night to the Lord. We can with Lazarus and the sisters, give a welcome to the people of God and particularly, open our hearts. We can with the women provide Him with what He needs. I can’t give a garment to Jesus, but I can give a garment to some poor orphans somewhere. And Joseph of Arimathea, ah, there is one, there is one gift we can’t match. There’s a gift nobody else ever matched. There’s a gift He doesn’t need anymore. Nobody can give Jesus a grave, for death hath no more dominion over Him.

So we won’t offer him a grave, but we’ll just offer Him the equivalent of it, whatever it might be, we ransom sinners. I say, we should let nobody outdo us in our giving. And yet, when we’ve gone over our poor treasures, when we’ve counted them and weighed them and placed what value we can upon them, what can we give Him? What can we give Him who owns every star? What can we give Him who owns the pearls of all the oceans and the diamonds of all the mines? What can we give Him who holds all the treasures of a vast universe in His right hand? What can we give Him?

Well, we can’t give Him anything really, but we can do what they did. Could the wise men give Him anything, this baby? No, He owned the wise man and all their gold and frankincense, but he lay still and quiet and didn’t let on. Could Joseph give him anything? No. Joseph really couldn’t because He created the very stuff out of which Joseph’s body was made. He was the Word and by him all all things were made, and nothing was made except by Him. Could the shepherds bring Him anything or Lazarus or the women or Joseph of Arimathea? Really, no, because He owned it already.

It’s like a three-year-old boy giving his father a present which he first had to, he bought by first getting the money from his father. So actually, there isn’t much that we can give Him. And yet we can only satisfy our hearts by giving Him all. So, we bring Him our little human toys such as they may be. We think they’re so weighty and so valuable, but actually, they’re not much and we got them from Him, or we wouldn’t have had them. And then when we do come and bring Him everything, we go away laden with His gifts for He won’t be outdone. Bring Him what you will, and He’ll send a bigger, bigger basket away with you.

Come with this great a treasure as you have, and you will take a greater treasure away. Come with your heart and you go away with forgiveness. Come with your faith and you go away with eternal life. Come with your trembling fears and you go away with reinstatement in God’s grace. Come with your timidity and you go away with assurance and safety. Come with your dying and your sickness and your weariness and you go away with peace in death and immortality and heaven at last.

Say, wrote the Poet, say, shall we yield him, in costly devotion, Odors of Edom and offerings divine? Gems from the mountain and pearls from the ocean, myrrh from the forest or gold from the mine?  No, vainly we offer earth’s richest oblation, vainly with gold would his favor secure, Richer by far is the heart’s adoration, Dearer to God are the prayers of the poor. And this, we can give Him.

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“Blind Bartimaeus-Seeking and Receiving Help“

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Blind Bartimaeus-Seeking and Receiving Help

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

June 17, 1956

Tonight, I want to talk to you about blind Bartimaeus. And I’ll read a passage from 10th of Mark: When they came to Jericho, and as He went out of Jericho with His disciples and a great number of people, blind Bartimaeus, the son of Timaeus, sat by the highway side begging. And when He heard that it was Jesus of Nazareth, he began to cry out, and say, Jesus, thou son of David, have mercy on me. And many charged him that he should hold his peace: but he cried the more a great deal, Thou son of David, have mercy on me. And Jesus stood still and commanded him to be called. And they call the blind man, saying unto him, Be of good comfort, rise; he calleth thee. And he, casting away his garment, rose, and came to Jesus. And Jesus answered and said unto him, What wilt thou that I should do unto thee? The blind man said unto him, Lord, that I might receive my sight. And Jesus said unto him, Go thy way; thy faith hath made thee whole. And immediately he received his sight, and followed Jesus in the way.

Now, verse 46, says they came to Jericho. And if you will remember, Jericho was the city of the curse. It was so known as the city of the curse; Joshua had declared it to be so. That if ever rebuilt by the firstborn of the man who had built it. And it so came to pass and became the city of the curse. And yet here was the great God Almighty, that had formed the earth in the hollow of His hand. That had, as the poet said, flung the stars to the most far corners of the night. And here was this great God Almighty, and he was walking into the city of Jericho, the city of the curse.

And I don’t know, but it would be the last place you’d expect God to be. You know, brothers and sisters, we sissified Christians imagine that God only goes to church. There isn’t a harlot house in this town, that God isn’t present at tonight. There isn’t a smelly, smoke-filled saloon in Chicago, that God Almighty isn’t there. And there isn’t a jail in this whole city, where the Lord God isn’t. Because it says in verse 45, the Son of Man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister and to give His life a ransom for many.

Now, that was why the great God Almighty was in the city of the curse, because He was the Son of Man, part and parcel of the human race, for better or for worse, and it turned out of course, to be for better. And He came to minister and to give His life a ransom for many. And there wasn’t any depth He wouldn’t go to. There wasn’t anywhere that He wouldn’t be found.

So, this great God Almighty, comes into this city of the curse. And as He traveled along and went out of Jericho with His disciples and the great number of a hangers-on following along behind them, why, we come to blind Bartimaeus, junior, he was, because to me, this was his father’s name and Bar means he was the son of. So he was to me his junior and he had been born blind. Poor Bartimaeus, the son of Timaeus.

Now I don’t want to press this, my friends at all. But I wonder whether there isn’t something subtly suggestive about this fact that this man was the son of somebody and was found in the city of a curse and was found blind and was named after his father. That’s sort of indicating a hereditary descent. I don’t know that the old gentleman was blind, but I know that his great great great grandfather Adam was. I know that Adams eyes were put out in that hour.

When he looked upon the fruit and found it very desirable and did take and did eat and knew that he was naked. In the hour that he saw that he was naked, he ceased to see God and eternal things. And here all down the centuries later, there was one of his poor, blind descendants still blind and this one physically blind, and he was sitting by the highway side begging. Now not everybody in Palestine was a beggar, though there were many of them. And not everybody in Chicago is a beggar when it comes to the the economic or social side of it. But everybody is a beggar. After all, when you go really back to the root of things, I wonder where we get our pride. Human pride grows like dandelions or ragweed. It doesn’t have to have any reason for growing.

Moody told about the little girl who took chips and strung them on a string and put them around her neck in the slums and strutted around among the other little girls who didn’t have any little string of chips around her neck. And Moody illustrated the fact that human pride doesn’t have to have an origin or a source nor a reason, it just grows there indigenously. It doesn’t come from anywhere. It’s simply there.

And there isn’t a one of us, not a one of us from President Eisenhower down to the poorest tramp that’s sitting tonight with his feet hanging over the curb, half-drunk down on Skid Row, not one, but is a supplant at the gate of God Almighty. He sits a beggar on the highway of life. He sits in this great city of the curse, a blind man begging. There isn’t a one I tell you, the prince of Monaco or the Queen of England, or any of the great and mighty whose names are on the front of Time Magazine and in all the newspapers, not a one of them, but dwells in the city of the curse and is blind, and begging. Because they beg every breath of air from God and there isn’t a breath of air that God doesn’t give them.

And God says their breath is in their nostrils. That Old Testament passage was always to me, the most, most significant and meaningful passage. He told the man of God, he said, don’t be afraid of that fellow. His breath is in his nostrils. Take his breath out of his nostrils for a minute and a half and he’s finished. That’s all there is to him, His breath in his nostrils. And where does he get it? He borrows it from God Almighty, begs it from God. And the water that composes his body, 70% of it he gets and begs from God Almighty. And the food that he takes in to nourish his tissues, he begs from God Almighty.

And the light of reason that blazes in his brain is borrowed or begged from God Almighty. And everything that he has he got from God. That’s why, it seems to me that pride is a cancer on the human soul. Because it is a wild indigenous growth that doesn’t belong there and shouldn’t be there. Because there’s nobody that has anything to be proud of. Why should the spirit of a mortal be proud? Like a fast flying meteor, a fast flying cloud, flash of the lightning or breaking the wave and he goes from his home to his rest in the grave. That was one of Lincoln’s favorite poems. And it’s still true. So, what have we to be proud of? And isn’t that the way all of us are?

Now we’re living in high times, and everybody’s making more money than he should. And we’re spending it faster than we should and we’re living, we call it the American way of life and a high standard of living. Our fathers would have called it extravagance carried to the point of sin. But be that as it may, we’re very likely to get the idea that we amount to something. And one of the sweetest and most wonderful things that can happen to you and me is to find out we’re not. That we dwell in a world that lies under the shadow of a curse.

It’s hard to believe that this beautiful land of ours with its broad highways and its flowing rivers and it’s smoking factory chimneys and it’s millions of automobiles running into billions of dollars and it’s great halls of learning, ivy clad and it’s great newspapers and it’s music and it’s radio and television and all the rest. It’s hard to believe that this lovely, great world of ours lies under the shadow of a curse, but it does. For God’s said to man that the day that thou eatest thereof thou shall surely die and said to man afterwards, with the sweat of your face you shall earn your daily bread.

So, we live under the shadow of a curse. We ought to live our lives remembering that. Don’t let anybody kid you out of it. Don’t let any positive thinkers or any of these pepper uppers and cheerer uppers think you out of it. We live in a country and in a land and in a race that’s under the shadow of a curse and a threat of judgment to come. Well, that was Bartimaeus. That isn’t the type and I don’t claim it is a type. It’s merely an illustration and that’s all I’m doing with it tonight. But here was the man Bartimaeus. And he heard it was Jesus of Nazareth. When he heard it was Jesus, I tried to think tonight about this and how many there were that heard it was Jesus of Nazareth?

I remember a passage that moved me very greatly. I can get blessed. The old brother said, God blesses me on slight provocation. And I can get blessed on some of the most unlikely passages. There is one in the fifth chapter of Acts that said that when He had seated Himself, He opened His mouth. And I thank God for the last, I guess, 25 years that Jesus Christ ever opened his mouth? What would it have been like if Jesus kept His mouth shut? If He had never opened His mouth. If He being God Almighty, the maker of heaven and earth and of all things visible and invisible, had been incarnated in the form of a man, who had grown to manhood, and then looked the human race over and been shocked into silence. What a tragic, terrible, irreparable loss to the human race. But He opened his mouth.

Thank God, He opened his mouth. And He opened His mouth, and He taught people and He said things. He opened His mouth, and He corrected the errors. He opened His mouth, and He spiked lies. He opened His mouth and He let in life. He opened His mouth, and He informed us. He opened His mouth, and He instructed us. He opened His mouth. Now, I’m blessed on that passage that Jesus Christ came to the world and opened his mouth.

But why wouldn’t He? He was called the Word. And the Word was made flesh to dwell among us, and why wouldn’t the word open His mouth? There is no such thing as a silent word. How could there be, since that word means an uttered thought, not a word printed, but an uttered thought? Then he had to open His mouth. And when He opened His mouth, you know, the first word He uttered? Tell me. In that fifth chapter, blessed, blessed, blessed. The first word He uttered was blessed. Of course it would be blessed. Here was the Blessed One come from the realm of the blessed to bless mankind. So, His first word He uttered when He opened his mouth was blessed.

Well, now I see another passage here that he heard that it was Jesus of Nazareth. And I have been wondering how many there were that heard about that, that Jesus was in that city of the curse. He would have been morally justified if He had withdrawn from the city of the curse and gone to the temple and gone to the holy place and sat down between the wings of the cherubim. The Ark of the Covenant was not there at the moment. But He could have gone into that holy place, and there dwelt the only clean and living place there was, but He didn’t. He was seen walking around among people seeing where the people were.

One of the tricks of the devil is to frighten us by self-accusation. We always think other people are better than we are. And that if everybody was like us there wouldn’t be any Christians. And we know ourselves so well and we know our faults and flaws as sinners. And then we say, well, surely God wouldn’t be interested in you and me. But the simple fact is that is exactly what Jesus Christ came to get interested in. He was interested and that’s what brought Him to the world in the first place because we were sinners. For He said in verse 45, again, I repeat, the Son of Man didn’t come to be ministered unto and be carried around on a golden chair. He came to minister and give His life a ransom for many and naturally He went wherever they were.

Hospitals, nobody wants to go to a hospital. I don’t like the smell of a hospital. It’s a clean smell but it’s suggestive of pains and nausea and troubles. And I don’t like jails, but I’m sure the Lord Jesus Christ mingled there. I’m sure He’s there. A lot of people don’t hear that he’s there. But this fellow heard this, Junior here, this Bartimaeus, son of Timaeus. He heard about it. And he heard the Jesus of Nazareth passed by.

I wondered what the history of the world would have been like if nobody had ever heard that Jesus was passing by at all? I’ve never heard if Washington hadn’t heard and Lincoln hadn’t heard and Franklin hadn’t heard, although Franklin never became a Christian. He was yet very far over on the side of God, because he’d heard that Jesus Christ passed by. Emerson never was a Christian, in the sense of being a born-again Christian. But somebody had said that if Emerson went to hell, the migration was set in that direction. He was such a wonderful man because he’d had all the influence of Jesus who passed by.

And so, we have Jesus of Nazareth. Up in heaven, I’m sure somebody’s going to compose a song if they haven’t done it already. And I’m sure that among the ransomed up there, the name Jesus of Nazareth is going to be the theme of some great, great oratorial–Jesus of Nazareth. And this man heard about it, and so he began to cry out. He began to cry out and say, Jesus, thou Son of David, have mercy on me.

Now, here was a blind man and yet he was crying for mercy. He had theological and spiritual insight enough to know that no matter what he wanted from God, it had to come by mercy. David said, have mercy upon me, O Lord, and hear my prayer. Why did he say, have mercy upon me and hear my prayer? My brother, it’s the mercy of God that every inclines His ear unto you. You’ve never earned it. And even as a Christian, if you are a Christian, even as a Christian, you have not lived so as to put God under obligation to hear you. If God hears you at all, it will be because He’s a merciful God.

My old friend Tom Hare said, I don’t believe in merit praying. I don’t believe that anything comes because we have meritorious prayer. And he said, I don’t believe in meritorious faith. He said, everything flows out of the goodness of God. And if we would see that our prayers would be stepped up in quality and quantity vary greatly, if we would only realize that everything flows out of the goodness of God. You don’t have too beg a fountain to flow. The fountain flows because it wants to flow, and God gives because He wants to give an answer because He wants to answer. And it’s all of His mercy that all these things are done. Jesus of Nazareth had come, and He cried, Son of David, have mercy on me.

And here was a poor blind man trying to get delivered. A poor blind man wanting help from God and not knowing how. He had never seen a sunset. He had heard the song of a bird and only had to imagine what it looked like. He’d heard the voices of his friends and had to imagine what they looked like. His was a world of the imagination, and he had never seen the sun rise nor go down. He’d never seen the waves lap and play on the lake or flow on the Jordan. He had never seen anything, and he was blind. He knew that he didn’t have anything to offer God and he didn’t come and whimper to God and complain. And he didn’t come and say, Lord, why did you treat me like this? And he didn’t come and say, Lord, I’m not such a bad fellow.

You know, lots of people go to hell because they say they’re not so bad. They’re not so bad. And if anybody starts to pray and make a sinner out of them, they bristle up and their hackles rise up their back. And they say, now, wait a minute here. Don’t condemn me. I’m not a bum. No, but here was a man who wasn’t a bum either, but when he came to God, he said, have mercy upon me, O God, have mercy upon me. He asked the Lord’s mercy. He didn’t bring a thing.

The Lord had received you if you come bringing nothing. You go and pick up some scraps and try to bring God a present, the Lord will rejected you just as He rejected Cain. He received an Abel because Abel brought a lamb, but the Lamb has been brought once for all and you don’t have to even bring a lamb. You only come because the Lamb was there. He died and rose and lives again.

Well, notice again now that many charged him that he should hold his peace and I’ve wondered about this. Here was a poor blind fellow. He wanted to see more than he wanted anything else in the wide world just then. And here was Jesus surrounded by elders and deacons, potential elders and deacons and secretaries and big shots and people that more or less fronted for Him, self-appointed fellows, officious Peter, and officious John. They were fronting for the Lord, you know, like a small-town policeman when the big, important person arrives. And they were running ahead for Jesus.

And here through all the noise and the excitement, there went the high, thin voice of a blind man, Son of David, have mercy on me. And of course, that wasn’t right. It wasn’t the way it said in the books of discipline. And it wasn’t the way our dear beloved Brother so and so used to do it. And so they said, hush, hush, hush, and Peter ran over and they ran over and said, quiet there boy, quiet there down, down, don’t you know Who this is? Now, why is it that society will stand by and let you go to hell and oppose you as soon as you start to cry out, God have mercy on me. I want to ask you why that is? Anybody here knows that.

A family rearing a young fellow, they let him go out and play pool and never put a block in his way. They let him go out and bowl and run around nights and come in three in the morning and never say no. And they let him go down and stand on the corner and smoke and run with a gang he shouldn’t run with and never say no.

But if it gets converted from listening to the Salvation Army and comes home with a New Testament and says I’ve been saved, they look at each other shake their heads and say, what’s happened to our boy? I know because that happened in my house. My dear old Presbyterian Mother, God bless her memory. She’s in heaven now. She got converted later. But she was horrified beyond all measure when I started seek God and testify on the street and preach the gospel.

And here we have it. He was lying there. He’s lying there blind. They never looked in his direction, never once looked in his direction. There he was blind, and nobody said, poor, blind fellow. Peter didn’t say to John, isn’t that too bad, that fine looking boy there blind. Not a one of them, not one of them. And nobody cared that he was blind. Nobody cared that he was blind. They only cared when he started to ask God to deliver him from his blindness. Nobody cares that a man sins provided he doesn’t sin by taking something away from them, or endangering them. But as soon as he starts to talk about mercy and grace in the blood of the Lamb, everybody raises his eyebrows and says, something wrong there. What’s the matter? Let him alone. Let Jesus alone.

Jesus didn’t come into the world to be let alone. He came into the world to be surrounded by blind men, and touched by blind men. And touched by women with issues of blood. He came into the world to touch the dead and make them live and touch the deaf and make them hear. That’s what He came into the world for. He’s not as touchy as church deacons, Brother, and he’s not as hard to get to as pastors are. He came in to the world; He was here. The Son of man, He didn’t come to be ministered unto. He came to minister and to give His life a ransom for many.

Well, there we have the picture. Many charging that he should hold his peace. And you know, that’s the end of it for some people. They hear a gospel sermon. They hear something on the radio. They read a tract, or they hear the testimony of a friend and they get concerned. They go home and mention it to their parents, or a man hears it mentioned to to his wife, or a wife hears it mentioned that to her husband, or a brother mentions it to his sister, a sister to her brother and a frozen countenance results. And immediately they draw in and say, well, I’m not going to cause trouble in my home. That’s the end. That’s the last you hear of him, but little old Junior, thank God, you couldn’t stop him. Bartimaeus, the son of Timaeus, named after his dad. You couldn’t stop him. So, it says here and I’m glad this is here.

I think God had a smile on his face when he told Mark to write this. But Bartimaeus cried the more, a great deal. All you had to do to get him to yell louder than ever was try to silence him. All he knew was nobody had been interested in him before. But now that he was asking for help from God, everybody suddenly got interested.

They say if you give the devil enough rope, he’ll hang himself and he sure hung and swung high and dry with Bartimaeus because it was the devil that inspired these poor, misguided people to try to silence this man, and he cried out the great deal the more, Son of David have mercy on me. And works like that with some people, oppose him and you’ve helped them very greatly. They thrive on opposition, Bartimaeus did. So, when they said, shush, be quiet Bartimaeus, don’t bother this great man. He said, if he’s a great man that’s just why I ought to bother him, and he shouted the louder.

What about you, Sir? Ah, you will live in a home where there’s not much religion and what it is, it’s very formal and seasonal and very proper. But you know, you’re blind and you need the mercy of God. You know there are vistas of truth you have not seen. You know your sins are still on you as a great burden. You know you’re still carrying the weight of woe of a ancestral grief upon your heart down the centuries that has come rolling like a great juggernaut, rolling down the years, crushing generation after generation. And you felt the squeeze and pressure of it, enough to kill you.

And you would like to know for yourself that God saved you; you’d like to have help from the Lord yourself. And you start to cry out, O God, please. Is there a God somewhere? If there is, maybe is that what I heard on the air there from Moodys, WMBI, about the Lord coming to save people; that book I read, that tract I picked up, that testimony from that fellow where I work. Lord, is this true? Then immediately your friends, so called, are on your neck.

Let me tell you something, Junior, young fellow, let me tell you something. Anybody that gets in your way and stands between you and Jesus Christ, isn’t your friend. Do you hear me? She, He isn’t your friend. You say, but she’s pretty. So was Eve. Did you ever think what a beautiful woman Eve was? Fresh from the hand of God and God never made an ugly thing. She must have been a wonderful looking lady. Grandma Eve, must have been beautiful when she stood up and shook her long hair, looked up at the sun in the first brightness of her lovely, female beauty. She was pretty too, but she wrecked Adam, and the big stoop was weak enough to let her do it. Weak enough to let a pretty wife ruin him. All he had to say was, woman, get away with that.

Job later had more sense that Adam had. When Job’s wife tried to get him to curse God and die, he said, you speak like a fool woman. Why should I curse God? God’s been good to me and all I have or got from God, I came into the world naked, and I will go out naked and blessed be the name of the Lord. And she walked off and left him and that’s the last she appears in the picture. All Adam would have had to do would be to assert his manhood and the Fall wouldn’t have taken place. But she was pretty and that pretty thing stands between you and Jesus Christ is one of your worst enemies.

You say, I’m a woman. I’m a girl. Oh, how I thrill and get duck bumps on my forearms when I look at him, handsome, tall, wonderful, deep bass voice, wonderful. But if he’s standing between you and Jesus Christ. Woman, he’s not your friend. He’s your enemy. Don’t call him boyfriend anymore. Call him by his right name. He’s your enemy. And everybody that gets in the way of a blind man and a Savior, is an enemy of the blind man. But Jesus stood still, and he commanded him and called, they call the blind man, commanded him to be called, and they called the blind man and then everybody got over on the other side.

Peter ran and said, all right, come on, come on. He wanted to be in it, you know, and said get up. He comes. Come on. Be of good comfort. He’s calling thee, and he jumped up, cast away His garments, symbolic, maybe of the robe of filthy rags that all sinners wear by nature, and he came to Jesus. You notice he didn’t enter Bible school. You notice that he didn’t join the church. You notice that he didn’t study theology. I think it only took three words to say it, and yet it was all he needed at the moment. He came to Jesus.

And Jesus answered and said unto him, what did Jesus answer there? He answered that prayer. He answered that cry. Well, He said, Bartimaeus, what do you want? He didn’t just want a vague prayer. Bless the missionary’s father and remember all the interest in our prayers, none of that vague woozy praying. He said, what do you want Bartimaeus? And Bartimaeus prayed about the only thing he knew about. He said, Lord, I’ve been blind and I’m sick of not seeing, that I might receive my sight.

Now, there might have been things Bartimaeus wanted or needed worse, but he didn’t know it. And the Lord took him where He found him. So, he said, I want to receive my sight. And Jesus said unto him, Go thy way, thy faith has made thee whole.

Now, here was a transaction; it would have taken three tons of printed matter and three or four advance man and newspaper advertisements and radio announcements and four or five typewriters and three or four mimeograph machines and three or four sounds scribers to get that fellow converted. But Jesus just did with the simplest, most effortless way in the wide world. Here was the perfect setup. God couldn’t have done any better. Here was a sinner and the Savior. One came to the other and that was that. It didn’t cost anybody. He had died. No offering had to be taken. Nobody had to get up and say, dear friends, it’s very expensive. This is very expensive,

There used to be a preacher where I was preaching. He’d get up every night and told the audience, he said, advertising, et cetera, and I always felt, I was young, and he was old, so I didn’t, but I always felt like saying, Brother Patterson, why do you use so much et cetera around here if it’s such expensive stuff? But he was always taking an offering to make up for the et cetera. Well, pay for the stuff. Jesus didn’t have any, you notice. He didn’t have any et cetera here at all. Just a blind man and a Savior, a sinner and the Man who’d come to save him; a dying man and the Man who’d come to die, to give him life, that’s all there was to it, and you know, that’s all there is to it here tonight. That’s how simple it is. No handsome fellow to beg like a salesman. We don’t need that. We don’t need it, the Holy Ghost is here. Jesus came, this Jesus of Nazareth is passing by and here He is. And He’s listening in. His ear is all cocked ready to hear that voice, have mercy on me.

He won’t ask your theology. He won’t say, are you an Arminian, or do you favor the Calvinistic way. He won’t ask that. I don’t think God ever took those two words into his mouth. I think He would scorn to take them in his mouth. He just wants to know, are you blind and is there something in your heart that wants to see so that you can taste it? Well, that’s all you need, Sir. That’s all you need. You’re a sinner. You’re bound by habit. You’re beaten and cuffed and kicked around by iniquity. And Somebody’s here Who came for that very, very thing to help you. And all He has to know is what you want. A lot of vague praying won’t help you a bit. Get down on your knees and go launch into long prayer you heard a Baptist Deacon years ago deliver. That won’t help be a bit.

What do you want? Well, Lord God, I want to be delivered from drink. Lord God, I want to be delivered from habits. Lord, I want to be delivered from sin. Lord, I want to be saved. That’s all you have to say. Just say. Jesus said unto him, go thy way. Thy faith has made them whole. And immediately, immediately one of Mark’s favorite words, immediately he received his sight.

And then, do you know what followed? Do you know what happened? He followed Jesus in the way. He did it. It was a perfectly natural thing to do, that if you were blind a lifetime and somebody came along and met all your hopes and gave you eyesight and you had known after a life of blindness and nobody caring and you begging on, sitting on a mat begging and you know you had no friends, where would you go? Who would you go to? Wouldn’t it be perfectly natural to identify yourself with the one that had set you free and given you sight? Sure, it would.

There’s the psychology of Christian discipleship. We find we got no friends. I know better than that kind of English, but it just came out. We have no friends. There just aren’t any. Brother, there’s One. And when He sets you free, it’s perfectly natural to identify yourself with Him. Well, there’s one Friend. So, the Scripture says, he followed Jesus in the way.

So, I’m going to close my Bible and ask you to look at that pretty picture. Jesus walking down the street, and his puzzled disciples, off a bit from Him. And right behind Him as close as he could get, a blind man. The handsomest, most attractive and most beautiful thing he ever saw was Jesus’ back. He didn’t look up and see the blue sky and write a sonnet. He didn’t gaze at the mountains there in the distance. He looked at the back of the One he loved. Just the profile of Jesus, as he walked away was more wonderful to him than all the cedars of Lebanon, or the flowing waters of the Jordan. Nothing, nothing was as dear as Jesus. Why? Because he had been blind, and Jesus had made him see. That’s the simplicity of it.

Isn’t it a shame we get so involved and complicated and all complex and mixed up? When the simplest thing in the wide world is, I am a blind sinner in need of mercy, and Jesus Christ is a Savior come to give me that mercy, and we meet. And I follow Him because He’s delivered me. The old bishop said, as I get older, my theology gets simpler. It’s this. Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners. That’s all. Will you bow your heads with me.

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“The Saints Must Walk Alone“

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The Saints Must Walk Alone

Pastor and author

April 29, 1956

Summary

A.W.Tozer explores the idea that many great souls have been lonely, citing examples from the Old Testament. He argues that this loneliness may be necessary for saintliness, as God speaks more deeply and intimately to those who are alone with Him. Tozer emphasizes the significance of solitude for spiritual growth, highlighting biblical examples of figures like Abraham, Moses, Elijah, and Jesus Christ who experienced aloneness in their ministries. He notes that solitude can bring healing and restoration, but also lead to loneliness and isolation.

Message

Now, I want to talk today on this topic: The Saint Must Walk Alone. And in this verse of Scripture, you will find two things mentioned that are, both of which were characteristic of Jesus. The phrase, the multitudes went right along with our Lord Jesus, because He ministered to the multitudes, because He did miracles and cast out their devils and gave sight to their blind and because He spoke simply to the plain people. He had around Him many who wanted to listen to Him, which the Bible calls the multitudes, we call today, crowds.

Now, that was characteristic of our Lord Jesus Christ. But strangely enough, and contradictory as it may seem–there alone–is also characteristic of Jesus, from the time that His parents thought He was with them and found He was not and went back to look for Him and found Him away from them talking to the doctors. On down through His ministry, He was there alone, describes Jesus, about as well as, He was surrounded by the multitudes. I suppose that He was the world’s loneliest man though He was surrounded by these very crowds.

Now, what I want to develop today is that most of the world’s great souls, if not all of them, have been lonely. Loneliness would seem to be the price that the saint must pay for His saintliness. And in order to back up that statement, I want to take you on a little trip through the Old Testament, starting back there with Enoch.

That pious soul, Enoch, who in the morning of the world, walked with God, or perhaps I should say, not in the morning of the world, but in the time of the strange darkness that settled upon the world shortly after the dawn of man’s creation. Enoch walked with God. And while it does not say so in so many words, the inference is very plain, that he walked apart from his contemporaries. That the path he took was a path quite alone and separated from those who lived at the time he lived. He walked to his God. If everybody had been walking with God, then why should the Bible have mentioned that he walked with God? The fact that it was mentioned at all would seem to indicate, and I think we can safely infer that it is implied there, that Enoch walked a path apart from his contemporaries.

And then there was Noah. And all the evidence shows that Noah was a lonely man, that while he had his family, and while he was surrounded, we would suppose by workmen. Well, the ark was a building, yet Noah stood so apart from the multitudes that God picked him out and he found grace in God’s sight. And Noah must have been a man apart, a lonely man. Then come on down the years to the man, Abraham. Abraham had Sarah. He had Lot. He had his herdsman, and he had his servants. All that is very true. But I think it is very plain that his soul was like a star and dwelt apart, as words were said of Milton.

Apparently, God never spoke to the man Abraham in company. Now that’s quite a significant thought that God never spoke to him in company. Apparently, there were those things which God wanted to say to the man Abraham which He could not say with anybody listening. And Abraham evidently had a habit of praying face down, lying in delighted ecstasy in the presence of the great God of his fathers and of the world. And there Abraham prayed and called on God, and he was calling on God face down. Now the innate dignity of the man Abraham, for had that he should have assumed that posture in the presence of others. He would certainly not have lain on his stomach in prayer if there were people around him. So, we suppose that Abraham must have been, very often at least, a lonely man.

I believe that there are things that God wants to say to us which He cannot say in the presence of other people, just as there are things you say to your family or to your wife which you cannot say with others around. I believe that God wants to speak to us, and that He speaks more deeply and intimately and wonderfully when he can get our ear all by ourselves.

Now there is a community of Christian worship, and it is taught throughout the Bible. The very word church means an assembly of persons call out. But notice that it has two meanings, called out and assemble. And the fact that the people that make up the church are called out, speaks of loneliness. But the fact that they are called together, speaks also that there is in some measure an anodyne of medicine for that loneliness found in the fellowship of other Christians. But they are called out. And the man who is called out from his family as I was as a young fellow, called out when I was 17 years of age, to leave my family. And the worst part about it was, not called to leave them in body, but called to leave them in heart and live with Him and walk among them, and still be an alien to them.

And I know the language of the old man of God who said, I am become a stranger to my brethren and an alien to my mother’s children. That while you’re with them in presence, you are not with them in a heart, because your heart has been given to another, even the great God, and they don’t understand it, and so you’re called out. And there is the loneliness.

And then the other side of the picture is when you’re called together with persons of like mind, and for the time you’re with them. There is some healing medicine for your sorrow, but you’re lonely nevertheless. Abraham was and God gave Abraham the knowledge again that he was a man marked out, a man to receive divine grace, when Abraham was alone with his God.

Then there was Moses/ Something in the heart of the man Moses couldn’t stand the court of Pharaoh. It was the Vanity Fair. It was the Mome Cove. It was the Chez Paree, the Broadway, the Hollywood of the time. And the man Moses was there, and there by the providence of God for the time. He saved his life and took him there. And he was brought up and educated for a great job.

And God used Egypt, but Egypt had no affinity for the man Moses and nor he for it. For Moses was a Jew and his people were Jews, and the covenant belonged to him. And Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob were his ancestors, not the Egyptians. And the temple of God was to be, and the tabernacle was to be the center of his thought and life that was to come, not the pyramids and not the Sphinx and not the great buildings of Egypt.

There was a loneliness in the heart of the man Moses, even as a young man. There must have been, because he took long walks, and on one of those long walks, far out from any town, he saw an Egyptian and a Hebrew fighting together and came to the rescue of the Hebrew. And then of course, he had to leave Egypt and flee, and he did.

And for long years, he was alone in the desert. And it was in the loneliness of the nighttime when the birds were out. The day birds were going to rest, and the night birds were beginning to croak, that he saw all by himself that burning bush. If Moses had been at a party, if he’d had friends, if there had been people gathered around him or if he’d been running with a multitude, God never could have showed him the wonder of the burning bush. One of the most solemn and awful and glorious things that ever took place in Old Testament times was that burning bush experience. And Moses never would have seen it if it had not been that he was alone.

And then that scene on Sinai. He left the multitudes far below and took with him only one man, Joshua. And then left him a little behind as Jesus later did, leave his three close friends to pray. And Moses went on into the fire. And there he watched in fascinated awe, that Presence, partly revealed and partly concealed in the fire and in the cloud and came down with his face shining. But he came down because he had been alone. And he went to the multitude and could talk to them with authority, because he had been to the Source of Authority. He did not poll them to find out what he should say. He went to the mountain to learn what he should say, and then told them what they should hear. And that is always the spirit of the true man of God, the prophet of God. He does not send out questionnaires to poll the multitude to find out what they want. He goes to God to find out what they need, and then gives it to them whether he talks to 10 or 5000.

Now, there was Elijah in later years, and all the prophets, these men were alone. Elijah was alone, as much alone on that mountain, more alone on that mountain, as if everybody else in the world had died. For there he was, surrounded by his enemies and with the prophets of Baal ready to slay him. And yet, there he stood a lonely man, absolutely alone in the midst of a crowd of hate-filled opposers. And God spoke to him there and later in the cave and later as he stood outside the cave and watched the mountains rock and saw the trees shake and go down under the roar of the whirlwind. God spoke in a still small voice to his heart and told him in the aloneness of his inner life that which he never could have said or told him if he had not been alone.

Well, carry on over to the New Testament, and there we find Jesus Christ our Lord, I repeat, probably the world’s loneliest man. A little hymn says about him, ’Tis midnight, and on Olive’s brow the star is dimmed that lately shone; ’tis midnight; in the garden now the suff’ring Savior prays alone.  ’Tis midnight, and, from all removed, the Savior wrestles lone with fears: e’en the disciple that He loved heeds not his Master’s grief and tears.

Now that was Jesus, not only in the garden, but very many other places. Forty days alone in the desert and on the mountain alone many times and on the shore alone after His resurrection, Jesus Christ died alone and rose alone. I repeat, there are some things too sacred for the eye of any but God to see. And when our Lord died, God pulled the curtain of the night down around the cross in order that He might die alone.

And when He rose again, He rose unseen by the eye of mortal man. I don’t know whether angels saw Him rise, but I know men did not, as though God were saying, His birth and His death and His rising again are secret, and only My eye can look upon these awesome and awful and glorious scenes. So, God brought Him from the dead unseen by the eye of mortal man, though afterward, He was seen of James and Cephus and Paul and 500 brethren at once, and they told abroad what they had seen. But at the moment of His rising, only the eye of God saw. My dear people, there are experiences with God that you can only have by yourself.

You say you have family prayer with your wife. All right, very good. But there are things God can’t say to you in the presence of your wife. And there are things God can’t say to you in the presence of the dearest and sweetest Christian brother or sister that you know. There are secret communications which God can only tell us when we’re alone. It was the old Meister Eckhart who said that when God gets the temple all to Himself, He whispers what He is to the human heart. Brother McAfee sings a song about in thy secret inner chamber, thou wilt whisper what thou art. God can tell me some things in the crowds, but He can only tell me what He is when my heart is alone.

Now, that’s the price most people will not pay. And I suppose I might as well make the sermon short, but there’s a long line of noble pilgrims. They didn’t march abreast and certainly they didn’t march as armies do, four to eight abreast. They marched alone, and the march was alone, and the gaps were wide between them. But you will find if you know church history and the biographies of the saints, you will know that there is a long parade of holy men and women who lived and loved and labored and worked and made the world a better place and won many, established hospitals and colleges, and built churches and orphan asylums, and left behind them a trail of goodness and mercy wherever they went. And yet they belong to the lonely parade. Their day didn’t recognize them. Or if they did, they didn’t know them well enough to know who they were.

Well, the conventional reaction to what I’m saying now, I suppose I will have to take note of, though I don’t like ever to introduce such matters in a sermon, but there’s a conventional reaction to this, and I hear it in the little chirpy songs. And I hear it in the little chirpy articles that I get. And in the little chirpy testimonies I hear from time to time. And it will all sound the same. And they’re obviously conventional. They are not the true expression of what somebody feels, but the expression of how some people think they ought to feel. And so, their response to a sermon on the lonely soul, is to say, why I’m never lonely for Jesus is my Savior divine. And He said, I will never leave you, and how can I be lonely? How can I be lonely when I have Jesus only to be my companion and my constant friend. So, I’m never lonely.

Now, brother, I don’t want to reflect on the sincerity of any man, but I’d just like to tentatively state here, that it’s my conviction, that that’s too neat to be sincere. That we’re saying what we think ought to be said, rather than what we ever feel in our hearts. Because the people who are always chirping about the fact they’re never lonely, mean that they have never let themselves get to a place where God could separate them from the crowd and talk to them alone. They have had to have companionship and the psychological lift of other people around them in order to keep out of the doldrums.

So, they deliberately forsook the cave and the mountain peak and the sands of the seashore and the holy places and have gone with the multitudes in order to be able to live with themselves. Then because they think it’s proper, why they testify cheerfully, I’m not lonely, Jesus is with me, but what they feel is not the awful, awe-inspiring presence of God in the burning bush. It’s the psychological, social help that they get from the people.

Well, the pain of loneliness results from the constitution of our nature, because God made us for each other whether we know it or like it or not. God made us for each other. And He meant that we should have fellowship with each other, that He meant that we should complement each other, that each could complete the other and that He meant us to be a people together. But sin came in and made God’s children, people apart.

The world isn’t lonely, because the world runs together. They have invented all sorts of inventions in order to keep themselves from being lonely. If the public was not lonely and didn’t have to run together to cure its loneliness, Bob Hope would be probably collecting garbage out here and driving one of the big yellow trucks. And these other entertainers who make more than the President of the United States, would be doing some honest job somewhere.

But because people must have each other in their sinful Vanity Fair, we give to our entertainers pay that we don’t give to our educators nor to our leaders and politicians and statesmen who carry on their shoulders the weight of government. So, people are lonely, but they cure it by running together. But when a man gets converted, where can he run? He sees through all of that, and he knows why they’re like that. And he therefore must be to some degree at least a lonely man. And his desire for human fellowship which God put in him and which is good and holy and right, that companionship, that desire for companionship, creates a pain within his own heart. Though he’s got to walk alone, because there are so few in any given area that walk with God.

You people who work in offices, now, if you work in Deerfield or Moody, or Scripture Press or somewhere where they’re Christians, that’s another matter. But you people who work in offices or factories or shops or go to schools where there’s nobody that knows your language, aren’t you forced to be somewhat lonely? I think so. You try to get along with people the best you can, but always you speak a language they don’t understand.

And always they’re thrilled about something that leaves you bored. And always you’re concerned with something that they don’t even understand. And there must be that loneliness and there is, the saint must walk alone. For loneliness is the price the saint must pay for his saintliness. But the man that knows God and knows himself, certainly is not going to find very many people that understand him.

Now, you’ll find a lot of companionship in religious circles without a doubt. There isn’t a place anywhere, I suppose, between here and the the Bahamas, where there hasn’t been least 1512 get togethers and rib roasts and ham consumptions over the last week, and all done in the name of the Lord. I was to one last night.

So, we do that and it’s all right, and I have no objection. But I am saying, my brethren, that there is beyond that thing, further in than that will take you, further on in behind the scenes than your kind fellowship that we have together, and I love it and don’t think I don’t, and I do. But I’m talking about the beyond, the going on in. I’m talking about going on in past where the commonalities, the simple expressions and the chit chat and the shop talk and the friendly banter is all left behind you and there you are.

The old world looks like an ash pile to you and heaven shines there and you look up and talk about it, and they claim you’re absent minded. Or they claim you’re anti-social or unsocial, or that you’re arrogant, that you are holier than thou. But my brethren, the man who knows himself can have the fellowship that comes, I suppose to a certain degree with religious activities. But as a man goes on with God, the hopes and the longings and the disappointments and the aspirations and the radiance that comes from the heart of Christ, all these things will not be understood. And a man will have to walk by himself. But I’m not complaining about it.

And I don’t want you to. For I know that this very loneliness throws us back upon God. God has to do this to bring us back on Himself. We would never, never seek Him if it were not that we see through the emptiness of man’s social fellowships. And to a large degree we see through the emptiness of man’s religious fellowships, and we don’t want to die like that. I don’t want to have to die in a crowd. Or if I do die in a crowd, I don’t want to have to have the crowd in order to die in comfort.

I don’t want to have to have anybody in order to die in comfort. I know how they do when you die, they surround your bed if you’re lucky enough to last long enough for them to get there, and some weep and some hope and some stand around. And we die in a crowd usually, at least a few people around. But God help the man that has to have help when he is dying. God help the man that has to be surrounded and cheered up and his hand held, and his brow patted in order to keep him from terror in the hour of his demise. God pity that man.

For just as you were born alone, you will die alone. And though you were surrounded by friends and helpers and doctors and nurses, and your mother was there and all the rest, you were born alone. And when you die, you will die alone. So, we’d better get used to a loneliness that isn’t a loneliness. Saint Paul said it back here in this last great book that he wrote. He’s said at my first answer, that is before Nero, his first trial, not his second, the second condemned Him. But the first trial, at my first answer, no man stood with me. But all men forsook me and I pray God that it may not be laid to their charge. Now here he was, he had just testified a few chapters on before that he had finished his course. He had kept the faith. He fought a good fight. He had won a crown. And now henceforth it was laid up for him the treasures of righteousness in the world to come.

That was the happy spiritual Paul, but the hungry-hearted human Paul, couldn’t even in his old age, and when he knew it was his last thing he would ever write, he couldn’t help but say, I can’t get over thinking about it, in that my first answer, no man stood with me. I had taught them to believe in Jesus. I had brought them out of darkness and showed them the Light. I had preached the gospel to them. I had hazarded my life for them. I’d gone hungry for them. I’d been poor and ragged for them. And I stitched tents way into the night that I might be free to preach to them.

But when I was before Nero, no man stood with me, but all men forsook me. I pray God that it may not be laid to their charge. But he said cheerfully enough, notwithstanding, the Lord stood with me and strengthened me. He was lonely, but he wasn’t alone. He was lonely because he wanted his friends around him there. But he was not alone, because the Lord stood with him and strengthened. So the lonely man is not alone. He’s just lonely. The lonely Christian is not one who is alone. A hermit could be alone and not feel lonely. But the Christian’s loneliness springs from his inability to find very many people who speak his spiritual language or have ever been where he’s been.

And then, his loneliness throws him back upon God. David said, when my father and my mother forsake me, then the Lord will take me up. Now, being forsaken by your father and mother is about as neat and as vivid a way of saying that you’re by yourself as it’s possible; when they lead you to the door and turn you out, why, you’re alone. But David said, when they do for Christ’s sake, then the Lord takes me up.

Now, the lonely soul ought not to be surprised, because he is a rather odd individual. He lives a strange life, this lonely Christian, man or woman, lives strange life. The things that make some people laugh; he doesn’t think are funny. And the things that some people will give their soul for he considers absolute refuse. And the desire for gain that some people have, he’s strangely unmoved by it.

My old dad, he said about two of his sons. He said, I have two sons. He had three. I don’t know why he didn’t count the younger one. He was still at home a boy. But he said, I have two sons, one of them makes all he can and keeps all he gets. The other won’t take anything and what you give him he gives away. And I’ve always rather cherished that as a rather disgusted but remarkable testimony to my brother and me. That my brother made all he could get and kept all he made. And I wouldn’t take anything and when I got it I gave it away. I hope that’s true in some measure yet, but it was when he uttered that testimony surely.

You’re an odd person when you’re like that, brother. There’s no question about it. The Christian is an oddity because he talks to somebody he can’t see and professors a loyalty to a kingdom that his eyes have never looked upon and seeks the praise and exultation of another and doesn’t seek anything for himself. That makes the Christian an odd being. And of course, being odd, he’s a speckled bird and being a speckled bird, he has shied away from by the rest.

But I’d like to add this before I close that the soul apart is not a holier than thou individual, satirized so bitterly by popular literature, because the soul apart, his very loneliness stirs him to pity for others. And do you know who it has been that has built all the hospitals or the Christian hospitals? Do you know who it’s been that’s founded the missionary societies? Do you know who they have been that have gone to heathen lands and like our good Dr. Crowell and built a little tiny hospital there. Do you know who they’ve been? They’ve always been the souls that have been rejected, and their father and their mother forsook them, so to speak.

And the Lord found them and their very yearning after humankind. And the fellowship with a world that rejected them and that they couldn’t fellowship because it was sinful; that very pain has very often driven them to poured out devotion and sacrifice. What was it that drove Livingstone way up into the heart of Africa? What was it that drove a sick and delicate Dr. Jaffrey all over the Far East? What was it that drove Simpson to walk up and down on the shores of the ocean out in New England and saying every pebble on the shore was a lost man to my praying heart?

What was it? What was it that caused men and women every place down the centuries to found the hospitals and to look after the old folks and take care of the children and have places for the insane to go where they could be cared for? Ah, it was always the separated man, the lonely soul, the soul that just couldn’t find what he wanted in the world. It just didn’t offer it. It wasn’t there. This odd number, this strange fellow, because he couldn’t laugh at their jokes. Why, they say he’s a sourpuss. And because he wasn’t interested in all of their silly chatter, they said that he was party killer and that he was dull and not interesting. But he walked with his God, and he left betrayal of luminous blessing behind him. And they’re all over the world. No, no, not holier than thou, not the arrogant, proud souls that walked with his chin up and tramps the people he considers to be beneath him.

Jesus Christ, the loneliest man in all the world, put His hands on the head of babies and smiled and blessed them and talked to their mothers and cast out devils and healed the sick and chattered with the poor and went away, leaving the eyes of the poor shining.

The priests and the rabbi walked in their robes with their phylacteries dangling, and in their pride called the multitude, these, this multitude that’s cursed, knowing not the law. But the lonely Jesus walked among them and was lonely while he healed them and blessed them and forgave them and turned their eyes upward and talked to them about the mansions above in the Father’s house. So don’t let anybody tell you that I’m preaching a withdrawn, monkish type of Christianity. I am not. I am saying that the very longing after human fellowship and the inability to find it much in the Earth makes men and women good workers and hard workers.

Well, because the lonely man is detached from the world, he’s able to help it. And because others are attached to the world, they’re unable to help it. The weakness of so many modern Christians is that they feel too much at home in the world. The simple little song people sing, that I don’t feel at home in the world anymore, the modern can’t sing except to smile and think it’s cute, because they do feel at home in the world. They avoid loneliness by adjusting and integrating and becoming a part of the very system they’re sent to protest against. And the world recognizes them for what they are and accepts them. And that’s the saddest thing that can be said about them. No, they’re not lonely, but neither are they saints. And they profess a name that they don’t know. They claim to follow a Savior that’s so far out ahead of them, they cannot even see the shadow of His holy back as he walks away.

My brethren, seek God in the loneliness of your own soul and see what happens to you. See, if all the truth you know won’t begin to glow. And the doctrines that have lain in your heart bedridden in the dormitory of your soul, Skullridge said, won’t take fire and begin to burn with a strange, luminous fire. And heaven will open, and you’ll see visions of God. Then like Moses and Ezra and the rest, you can come back to be a blessing to the very world you had to desert. But if you don’t desert it, you can’t help it. For the saint must walk alone.

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“The Word of God is Quick, Powerful and Sharp“

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The Word of God is Quick, Powerful and Sharp

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

July 26, 1959

Summary

In this message, Pastor A.W. Tozer emphasizes the transformative power of God’s Word in exposing and convicting individuals of their sinful nature, and the omniscience and omnipotence of God. Mr. Tozer shares personal experiences and biblical references to illustrate how God has protected and cared for him and his family, encouraging us to trust in God’s sovereignty and believe that He is always working for their good. Throughout the sermon, Mr. Tozer emphasizes the significance of God’s care and protection in our lives.

Message

Now, in the fourth chapter of Hebrews, verses twelve and thirteen: For the word of God is quick, that is, living and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart. Neither is there any creature that is not manifest in His sight, but all things are naked and opened unto the eyes of Him with whom we have to do. It takes the Holy Ghost to pack powerful words into short sentences. Notice, quick, that is, living, powerful, sharp, piercing, dividing asunder discerner, naked and open unto God’s eyes. These are the words of the text, and I want to talk a little bit about the Word.

Now one of the great realities, there aren’t very many, but one of the great realities with Whom and with which we have to do is God’s Word. I have been a great advocate of realities. I suppose I have kept myself back a little, in some ways before the eyes of men, by my stubborn refusal to fool with things that are not real, or to spend any time with them before a congregation. I have asked my congregations to confront reality. And I asked you this morning to confront one of the great realities, the living Word of God.

Now, the word of God is real. It doesn’t seem to be. There are lots of things that seem real, but actually they are not real at all. And there are things that are relatively important. They are important all right, but they’re not so important that if you lose them, the world will cave in on you. They’re relatively important. But the Word of God is a thing that is, and when I say the word of God, of course I mean the Scriptures, but I mean that which is a little more than the Scriptures. I mean the breath of God in the Scriptures. And when we read of the Word, we’re reading not only a written text, we’re reading of written texts, pulsating and vibrating with the life of God in them.

And here is a reality that we can’t escape. Men run away from things that they should take care of; and they run away for a lifetime, but there’s no escaping here, there’s no evading here. There is no possibility of compromise and there’s no bargaining, but God will reckon with this. The Word of God is. And we’ve got to reckon with this either now or later or at last.

Always, there are those three tenses for anyone who faces up to and confronts reality, or who is confronted by reality. They’ve got to reckon with it either now, not yesterday, that’s impossible, you can’t go back. They’ve got to reckon with it now or a little later, or at last. God in His patience allows us to insult Him and reckon later instead of now. But there will be a time when later will be last. And then we’ll find that it’s too late.

Now, the reality of which I speak, I repeat, is the Word of God plus the Living Word of God, the One who is called the Word in capital letters and that which is called the word in lowercase letters. Not a black book or a red book, not letters, not texts, not ink and paper, but the expression of the mind of God in revelation, the breath of God, the mighty breath of God, filling the world and taking shape in the sacred Scriptures, written by men who were moved by the Holy Ghost. Now, that’s the sacred Scriptures, and it’s God’s living thoughts.

Jesus Christ is God’s Living Word, but the Scriptures are God’s living voice. John 6:63, Jesus said, the words I speak unto you they are Spirit, and they are life. And they are addressed to fallen man for a judgment or salvation, or judgment and salvation, I’d better say, because there can be no salvation until there has been judgment. We stand before the bar of God.

I tremble when I read books written by men who have brought the Word of God before them for judgment. They bring what they call historical, critical techniques to the Word of God. And thus, they sit on the Word of God as though the sacred scriptures were judged by them. No, they are judged by the sacred Scriptures. And God brings every man, all men, fallen men, before the Word for judgment and or for salvation.

There is in the old apocryphal books that some people never read but that I get a lot of blessing out of, it’s called, the Wisdom of Solomon. When Solomon was there, or whoever wrote that book, I presume Solomon, was describing the children of Israel in Egypt and God Almighty leading them through, you come to these two verses. And I think they’re so beautiful and so wonderful, that I want to read them to you, though I do not claim them to be inspired in the sense that the Scriptures are inspired. Here’s what the old man said in telling another generation the story of Israel in Egypt. He said, while things were in quiet silence, and the night was in the midst of her swift course, thine almighty Word leaped down from heaven out of the royal throne as a fierce man of war into the midst of the land of destruction. Thine almighty Word leaped down from heaven out of thy royal throne as a fierce man of war.

This is the power of the Word of God. The most powerful force in nature, without any doubt, is the Word of God. If you will look back through the Scriptures, the Old and the New Testament, you will see how God had but to speak and things came to pass. He spoke to nothing and there came something. For it’s written in Hebrews 11 that the things that we are made, were brought out by the Word of God and were not made by the things which do appear. The things didn’t come from themselves, but they came from a living Voice.

And in Genesis one and two, God spoke to this order, and order came into darkness and the light came. He said, let there be light and there was light. He said, let the waters be gathered into one place, and it was so, and the dry land appeared. He spoke to the barren earth and fields became fruitful. In Exodus 14, He spoke to the sea, and it opened. And He spoke in Joshua to the river, and it opened, and to dry bones in Ezekiel and they lived, and then to death and Lazarus came forth bound hand and foot.

God has but to speak the living Word. I wish that you might see that you never ought to pick the Bible up without realizing, that while it’s only paper and ink, that God Almighty has breathed into the words there His own living breath. And those words can become like the release of atomic particles, tremendous either for destruction or for construction, either for judgment or salvation. And God has spoken and is speaking.

I could not, I couldn’t bring myself mentally to think of the Bible as God’s last letter to mankind; to think that God wrote the book and then died, or at least went away beyond into some far imperium, and now we have God’s letter. God did write the Book. He did breathe into man, and they did write the book. And He did end the Canon. And He did say that nobody add anything to this Book. But what I mean is that God did not only speak in the Bible, He is speaking in the Bible. It is a now voice. It is a present voice. It is as real as the voice that you might hear over the radio that you are tuned in now.

God spoke and is speaking and He’s speaking to human life. And when He speaks to human life, we know our mortality. We know that we’ve got to die. The living man knows he’s got to die. The voice of God there speaks to him and speaks to human conscience, and the conscience starts awaking. And the blind, insensible death conscience that lay for half a lifetime, full of self-pride and confidence and assurance, now suddenly sees and hears and feels and knows, because the living voice of God has waked that conscience up. And the voice of God is speaking to human sin, and it knows itself and it is naked.

You only have to listen to people praying at an altar and you will know that they have not been reasoned into their sin, you know that. You know that a Word has been spoken, that they’ve been confronted by the mighty Word of God, and that the Living Word has stripped their conscience bare, and they know that they are sinners, and they know that they are personally, individually guilty before God.

Now, I want you to notice that God’s Word in judgment brings not a charge; it brings a demonstration. The man is charged with a crime and taken up before a court that charge, that indictment they call it, is not synonymous with a guilty verdict. It’s only a charge. You are charged with .  .  . How do you plead? So, a man stands charged, but the Word of God is not a charge; Paul said, we have before proved both Jew and Gentile to be under condemnation. The Word of the living God is not a charge, it’s a verdict and a demonstration on lust and hate and lies and greed and pride and envy, and all other sins. And it distills like a living mist of vital essence wherever the Word of God is heard, wherever the human conscience confronts the Living Word. And the Living Word brings the human conscience before it as though suddenly there had come upon the man a living mist, a vital essence had descended, and the heart knows its own guilt.

Now, men may deny, because we’re very smooth reasoners, and they may cover, and they may resist. They may resent that the Word of God has given the mortal wound. And until the end, there will never be any deliverance, completely. There might be a temporary healing over and hiding, but there will never be full deliverance until He who is the Living Word pulls out the sword. Because the Word of God is quick and powerful, piercing even to the dividing asunder. And when the heart has been pierced by the Word of God, not the cold steel mind you, but the Living Blade alive and terrible.

And I, for my part, don’t want it any other way. I want the living Word of God to be just what it is. I want it to confront me, and I want to face up to it and I want it to do to me what has to be done. And I want to do what It has ordered me to do and believe what It charges me to believe in order that there may be no resistance and no struggle there but complete rest in God. The Word of God reveals, I say, it’s a great revealer. It strips the life bare before the eyes of God, this wonderful, this terrible thought. Man always thinks he can hide.

There are those Bible teachers who believe that the words of God to Cain, thy brother’s blood cries from the ground, indicated that Abel had been buried after he was murdered. At least the earth had been thrown over him hoping against hope this mad murderer Cain, this jealous man, that his guilt would not find him out. But God said that the blood of Abel cried out of the ground. And they found him and pinned it on him and marked him with a mark of the murderer.

So, the eyes of God see everything. You and I can hide from each other. We can do a lot of little tricks. Men who have only a little hair can let it grow long on one side and smooth it across. They imagine that that tells people that they are not bald, but it doesn’t. Everybody knows they’re bald, but they’ve got to try to cover it up. And women have a way of covering up. Drugstores prosper on women’s duplicity and man’s pride. We try to cover up. But we’re open before the eyes of God. God sees and there’s no fooling at all. There’s no secrecy. There’s no dissembling and there’s no distance that can make any difference for the man David said, if we should go to the uttermost parts of the sea, wherever that is, God would still see us there. And there isn’t any deed that isn’t known.

And that Word persists, persists. The words of God do not relax at death, but they are persistent out there where the dead live again and where heaven and hell waits. The words that I speak unto you, they shall judge you in the last day. We read in Revelation where the books are opened and the book of words and the book of deeds and the book of life, all these are open. And God’s Living Word is there. But that is only the negative side of it, my friends, only the negative side.

There’s no door that is closed. All doors stand ajar before the Word of God. All hearts are wide open before the Word of God and there isn’t a closed book anywhere. But all books are open, all before the eyes of God. And not a thought, not a thought that wears a garment, but all our thoughts are naked, naked and open before the eyes of Him with Whom we have to do. When men invented clothing he invented secrecy. And it’s right and proper up to a measure that he should, but he’s carried that secrecy to his thoughts, to his heart, to his mind, to his plans, to his intentions, to his guilt. The Scripture says no human thought wears a garment. Nobody can cloth his thoughts so God can’t see them.

There’s another side and I want briefly now to mention that and that is the Saving Word. I say that the sacred Scriptures, God’s living Voice are addressed to fallen men for judgment or for salvation, for judgment and for salvation. They must judge you first before they can save you. God never saved a man nor pronounced him innocent who came with a not guilty plea before the bar of the Scriptures. It’s only when we bring our, guilty, Your Honor, before the great God and throw ourselves on the mercy of the court for Jesus’ sake, that the Advocate above, the Savior by the throne of love rises and speaks for us and says, Jesus paid it all, all the debt I owe. Sin had left a guilty stain, but He washed it white as snow.

Here’s the saving Word, Psalm 71 says, thou has given commandment to save me. I’m glad that I get in trouble. That is, my heart gets in trouble. I am never really very much trouble. God knew that I being a sensitive person, am inclined to be more vulnerable than the average person. But I could get my troubles mainly from the inside. So, he didn’t send me all the miseries that he sent some people on the outside. Some fellows are always in trouble for getting kicked out of one place and into another. But I have never had that experience up to now.

But the Lord knew I didn’t need it from the outside, because I was so sensitive and vulnerable that He could trust me to get in lots of trouble inside my own heart and I have. And some of the times that I’ve been in trouble, God said to me, or I found these words, thou has given commandment to save me. And I like to think that the mighty Living Word of God has gone forth.

And the Christian man, the born man, the man who’s born of the Living Word, for it’s written that the Word of God is the seed out of which men are born. And that Word can never die, that it’s jot or tittle can never pass away, that the living man, the living woman who’s been born out of the life of God and is called a Christian, that person has been marked out by God. Just as God sent His fear into all the land of Canaan, and His fear went ahead and He marked out these strange people of another tongue coming out of Egypt, the Israelites, and the fear fell on them wherever they went. Some allowed the fear to make them arm and fight Israel and some surrendered. And some let them respectfully pass. But God said these are my peculiar, special people. Everybody that’s been born of the Living Word of the Spirit is a special object of God’s care.

And God tells all of His world, I’m saving this man. You keep your hands off of him. Do my prophet no harm. Lay not your hand on my child. Don’t imagine you can harm any child of mine. Old Job back there in the Old Testament, he didn’t know it, but he’d been living behind an iron curtain. God Almighty’s curtain had been all the way around him. A hedge is a better word, for that’s the word the Bible used. He was hedged in, and God Almighty had that hedge electrified and the devil couldn’t pass over until God allowed him, for a little while, to bless and benefit his man, Job. Then he sent him away again. Thou has given commandment to save me.

I haven’t a doubt in all the world but that there isn’t an atom of matter in this world, but what has been charged by great God Almighty to look after me and you and all of his children. We lay them away. We bury them out of our sight with grief and tears. But the Earth can no more hold them than the earth could hold the body of Jesus or of Lazarus. Thou has given commandment to save me. If you knew all that disease germs around you. And if you knew all the demons that were set to destroy you. But they can’t get to you. Because God has given commandment to save me. And He’s charged everything. He has charged the stars in their courses.

That’s why I smile at the Space Age and laugh at their Sputniks and their Explorers. Long before man invented the thrust that would cause a missile to escape the gravitational pull and fall into free space, long centuries before that, God Almighty had spoken to every star that shines and every planet that revolves, every angel before the throne, save these people. These are my people. My people marked by the blood of My Son, saved by my life, redeemed by the death of My Son. Save these people.

Physically I don’t like floating around in space. I flew out to Vancouver and down to Portland and back to Chicago, and you can have it. You can have it. I don’t like it. I never did like it. I thought maybe if it took that long, roundabout flight, I’d get to liking it. And I liked it less when I landed here in the airport than I did when I started. I don’t like it, but I do know this, that all space and all creation and the stars in their courses and the moon in its phases and the sun in its strength and the lovely earth and all the rivers and seas our mine. Thou has given commandment to save me. God’s Word, like a mighty armed man leaped out from the royal throne and commanded, no man can pluck you out of My hand.

I grieve that men have turned this doctrine into a hard-case, hardened shell of doctrine that divides the church. Do you believe in eternal security? Do you not believe in eternal security? All that believe, get over here and all that don’t believe get over there and glare at each other. I grieve at this because it’s making a doctrine out of what is a wonderful truth and not a doctrine at all. But God has spoken for His children, all of His children, my children, and they are dear to Him. They’re dear to Him because they belong to His Son because His Son gave His life.

In the war, the boys say, at least one of my boys told me, the hardest thing they had to do in the Navy Air Wing where he was for three years, a flyer. He said, the hardest thing we have to do is to come back home after when one of the boys have been killed and gather up his things and send them to his widow or to his mother. He said, they die, they die all around us, but it isn’t so bad until you have to gather up their things, an old wristwatch and a picture and extra clothing and an old watch chain, maybe that belonged to his dad and an old penknife with one blade broken. The few things that he couldn’t take with him out there but headed back and go get that and wrap it all up. Send it and then write a letter. He said, that’s hard. Don’t you think that when that package arrived. Thank God, this church, though we had during the Second World War about 75 of our boys in uniform, not one of them was killed, not one.

We had, my wife and I, five, and not one of them was killed. So, we never had to do, but don’t you think that when that package came back, that that would have been laid aside and cherished as long as memory kept verdant. I sometimes look up on, my wife has pictures everywhere, she doesn’t have flowers. And here, pictures all around there and I sometimes look at the picture of our boy Bud who was a Marine. All but lost his life. He’s still hobbling around, but he is able to make it alright. In the picture, a good-looking young fellow in his early 20s, grinning with that uniform, that marine uniform. And I said, if he died over there instead of coming home, wouldn’t this be a sacred thing? A sacred thing, for the sake of another, for the love of another, some things become infinitely precious.

And God looked down and saw the children that God had given to Jesus, saw that for the Christ’s blood had run, Christ had died. Christ had cried, Father, forgive them. Christ had said, why hast Thou forsaken me? And God said, whatever He sends Me. Whatever He sends Me will be dearer to Me than the apple of mine eye, dearer than the jewels that are on my throne, dearer than the unredeemed seraphim and cherubim, the burners that cry, holy, holy, holy before the Majesty on High. You are a blood-bought treasure, bought by the blood of Jesus Christ, and the Father loved His Son in death and loved Him in life. And for His sake, He loves you beyond all the Scripture.

Nobody knows how intensely, how deeply, how persistently, how perpetually, how everlastingly, God loves you. He loves you with an angry love. A love that’s angry with anything that would hurt you. He loves you with a tender love, if you belong to Him. The Living Word leaps down, leaped out of the throne of God like a man armed for a war, and God says, I will be with you, and I will go before you and I will keep you, and fear thou not, I am with thee. And no man can pluck thee out of my hand, and the foundation of God standeth sure. Ye are My sheep and know my voice. Goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.

The Word of God is quick and powerful, quick for judgment and salvation, judgment first, salvation second. Judgment for all those whose conscience start awaking before the Living Voice and who cry, my God, my God, I have sinned. Have mercy upon me. And for salvation for all such, the Voice goes forth. Save these people. They’re My people, precious to Me more precious than the apple of my eye.

Ah, yes, the Son of Man has power on earth to forgive sin. The Son of Man has power on earth to bestow life. The Son of Man has power on earth to raise the dead. The dead shall hear the voice of the Son of Man, and they that hear shall come forth.

Well, I want you to hear the Word. I want you to go to this Book reverently. Open its pages and read it and remember that while you’re not a bibliolater and you’re not worshiping a text, you recognize here, not the last words of a dead man, but the living voice of the Living God; the persistent, vibrant sounding Voice that’s still alive. And everything that God says, He is still saying.

You know, when you go anyplace to speak, they come and want your autograph. Now, not because it’s me, but just because it’s anybody. No matter who you are if you’re the speaker, they think that they’d like to have your autograph. So, I don’t know how many I signed while I was at Canby Camp, and I, just to save myself I think a little bit of mental exercise as much as anything else, I signed one Scripture verse on practically all of them I hope they didn’t compare notes. The same Scripture verse nearly on all I signed, a few I have varied to Galatians 2:20. But most all of them I signed, Jeremiah 29:11, God’s speaking. And God says, I know the thoughts that I think toward you says the Lord. Thoughts of peace and not of evil, to give you an end and an expectation. I know the thoughts I think toward you, saith the Lord, thoughts of peace.

God’s peaceful thoughts are coming down to us, peaceful thoughts. Not occultism, not spiritism, not Pealeism, but God speaking in the Word and in His Son, speaking thoughts of kindness and peace and good intention. And God is pleased when you are pleased, if you’re pleased with what He’s pleased with. Why can’t we be better Christians? Why must we drag on and drag on in an old bumpy wagon when God Almighty has the angels and spirits at our disposal and the Holy Ghost within us and the Word of God before our eyes.

Yes, the Word is quick and powerful and sharper than any two-edged sword. Let us believe it. Let us love it. Let us read it. Let us trust it. Let us live by it and let us die by it and all will be well. Amen.

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Tozer Talks

“God’s Hidden Ones“

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God’s Hidden Ones

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

December 14, 1958

Summary

In “God’s Hidden Ones,” Mr. Tozer emphasizes the importance of being a hidden people in God’s eyes, citing examples from Psalm 27 and Psalm 83. He highlights the significance of dissent in society and the importance of being a hidden people, even in times of great turmoil and destruction. Tozer also discusses the concept of God’s hiddenness and how it relates to believers living in a secular world. He concludes that God will reveal hidden believers in the time of trouble and will protect them from harm and encourages believers to remain hidden in God’s pavilion during times of trouble, trusting in His love and support.

Message

The New York office of the Alliance Witness sent out this telegram to Miss Betty Brown. Congratulations on again leading the Alliance Witness campaign in all our churches. The sustained record of the Chicago Alliance is remarkable. Your faithful work is deeply appreciated. Church, this the eighth leading churches throughout the country, and Canada that where our own church, Toledo, where William Bryan is pastor; New York where Paris Reidhead is pastor, Ottawa; Reverend Anderson; Vancouver with Irvin Brooks; Louisville with Reverend Epperson; Pittsburgh with Doctor Fraser, and Akron with Paul Kenyon. These are the eight leading churches. And this year we’re going to put some pictures in, and we’re going to have Miss Brown’s picture along with the lady who beat us out in New York, in percentages, but not in actual numbers.

Now, I want to talk a little while, not too long on, something that’s very wonderful and yet very, should I say, well known. But let me sum it up here as we gather near the close of the year. Psalm 27:5, in the time of trouble, He shall hide me in His pavilion. In the secret of His tabernacle, shall He hide me. He shall set me up upon a rock. And in Psalm 83:3, they have taken crafty counsel against thy people and consulted against thy hidden ones, thy hidden ones, Thou shalt hide me.

Now, the Scripture here sets forth the truth which is well known and yet is not too much appreciated. It is that in the midst of the earth, God has a people. In the midst of the earth, God has a people. At any given time, God has had a people, and God does have a people. God will have a people and they are never very large in numbers. In the time of the flood you remember, there were eight persons. In the time of Israel there was a remnant. When Christ was on earth, they could almost count them, at first at least.

And the Scripture says, few there be that shall be saved. And in the book of Revelation, there’s that troublesome passage, which is interpreted variously, but stands there bothering us. It is the saying that there are 144,000 who shall be saved. Various interpretations are made of this, but there it is out of the world’s masses. And then, these hidden ones know they are God’s and God knows they are His, but the world doesn’t usually know that they are God’s. These that are hidden in God’s holy place, in His pavilion, in the secret of His tabernacle, were called his hidden ones, are usually dissenters and non-conformists. You know, it’s possible to be a dissenter and a non-conformist just out of meanness. That’s entirely possible.

My brother, very much like me in personality is gone now from the earth. I went home many years ago. I went home, and about election time, that is, to the old home and I said, well, who did you vote for? He said, I voted for the socialists. You voted for the Socialists? Yeah. But why? He said, a protest vote. He said, I didn’t want him to be elected particularly, but I just wanted to protest. Well, it’s possible just to be a protester and vote for somebody you don’t want to elect just because you don’t want to vote for somebody, you’ll pray will get elected. I know that thing. God knows it. You know it. We see them everywhere.

So, it’s possible to dissent just out of sheer contrariness. But on the other hand, if 99% of everything is wrong and there’s one fellow that says he knows what’s right, he’s got to be a dissenter. He’s got to be a non-conformist. And if ever there was a time when we need non-conformism it is now. There are these people of God, these hidden ones of God, they’re non-conformist, and they’re usually unsympathetic toward the things the world loves. And they’re at odds with the world’s ideals and philosophies.

I listened to a little program last night. I usually listen at nine o’clock to the singing they have. There was a song, Jews, Catholics, Protestants on various nights, every Saturday nights have that on. So last night it was, I think, Protestant, but in it somewhere mixed up there was the United Nations. And they were reading the tenets of the United Nations with a ministerial solemnity and then singing in between the hymns and giving the impression that somehow God had taken up Alger Hiss and Stettinius and Truman, and a few more to the holy mount and given them the 10 words which eventuated in the United Nations. And I laid there, resting and listening. I wanted to hear the music, but I wasn’t ready to hear that.

So, I was lying there dissenting. And after it ended, I thought now, here you are, you don’t go along with this. What kind of fellow Are you? Isn’t it better to believe in human rights and better to believe in there being no war? Isn’t it better than not to believe in human rights, and I know that it’s true, but still am a non-conformist and a dissenter as far as any hope or possibility of saving the world through its own united efforts. It just can’t do it. We can’t do it and there isn’t any use to try. I honor a man, I honor that indestructible gentleman who got out of a hospital and got into an airplane and lit out for some part unknown, Mr. Dulles. I honor these men. I honestly do.

And I honor our very sincere and kindly President. And I honor those Englishmen and other men who are honestly, sincerely trying to bring peace on earth and goodwill to men. But when it comes down to accepting their methods, I have to be a non-conformist. They’ll never get it done. It’ll never happen that way. For the Bible tells us that until the end, there shall be wars and rumors of wars. A nation shall rise against nation and kingdom against kingdom. And when our Lord shall come, He shall come as a rock cut out of the mountain, hurled down onto the image, to destroy it.

So, I can’t go along with it and I shake it off. It’s soothing and soft and gentle and all the rest, but it’s false. It’s false. It’s based upon false premises. It assumes the validity of things that are not valid. It assumes the truth of things that are not true. And you can’t condemn individuals. You can’t be unkind, and you must speak with great charity as I’m trying to do. But you’ve got to be a dissenter. You can’t go along. It just doesn’t come that way. Democrats can’t bring us hope and Republicans can’t bring us hope. Nobody can.

Well, for the reason that we are dissenters, that God’s hidden people are dissenters, they usually draw the world’s fire; almost always draw the world’s fire. But they are secretly hidden and protected by none other than God Himself. He shall hide me in His pavilion. He shall hide me in His tabernacle. And they’re protected by the Lord Himself, not by withdrawing them from society. Withdrawing God’s hidden people from society would be the equivalent to drawing off all the salt from the carcass. There would be putrefaction and decay and a stench that would reach to the farthest space.

So, God allows His people to be scattered all around over the world, here and there. He doesn’t let them all be of one color. He doesn’t let them all be of one religious group, but they’re scattered every place. And they’re hidden, not by withdrawing, but by the protective providences of God. Notice how Moses was hidden in the cleft of the rock. Now, this hiding of Moses in the cleft of the rock wasn’t a type and isn’t a type, but it is a symbol that sings the song of the hidden life. The life is hidden with Christ in God. And though these hidden ones are visible and physical, yet there is something about them. They’re hidden because you don’t know they’re there.

The Ku Klux Klan tried to put on something like that a few years back. You know, I lived through the time when the Ku Klux Klan was riding so high that if you didn’t join them, you were condemned as not being a Christian at all. There are the days of the KKK. And I publicly, in the downtown where I was, they would come down the aisle with the bed sheet wrapped around them and a pillow slip over their heads with two peep holes. That was their garment. And they would come down the aisle and lay $500 on the table down in front of the pulpit. And of course, that bought the Preacher right there. They could have had him for $498, but they paid $500 for him. And after that he was on their side.

Well, I was right in the area where they were doing that. So, I got up one day and I said, now, the KKK may be walking in here some day and laying some money down here. But I said I have instructed the ushers to hand them their money back, lead them to the door, and physically expel them. We’re not for sale here. But you know, it wasn’t very long until the KKK had gone into a tailspin. But I didn’t know, why, if a preacher opposed them, they were bombing the preacher’s house or beating him up and I didn’t know what would happen. But I was a dissenter.

Well, what they tried to do is this, their power lay in their anonymity. Nobody knew who they were. They never published their lists. And when they appeared, they all appeared with their pillow slip over their head. Nobody knew who they were. They were supposed to be God’s hidden ones. Well, they weren’t God’s hidden ones. They were hidden all right but hidden I had thought rather flimsily behind a bedsheet.

But the power of God’s hidden ones lies right in this, that the world doesn’t know always who they are. Incidentally, the KKK has gone the way of all the earth. They said in that day, you can’t be a Christian and not be a member, and now the people say you can’t be a Christian and be a member. And I didn’t move either direction. I just stuck my ugly chin out and walked down the way. You’ve got a little of that to do, you know. Don’t carry it too far, you’ll get mean. But keep being non-conformist and God will help you if you’re charitable and loving.

Well, there was Moses and then there was Job. Job was hidden by a hedge, a hedge of God’s protective commandment, and Satan had to get special permission. And there again, it wasn’t a type, but it was an example of how things are. Satan had to get special permission to attack Job, and he has to get special permission to attack any of God’s hidden people.

Then when Jesus came to the world, He was hidden by the sovereign will of God. He was born in the manger and how many knew that he was born there. One of the greatest events, the greatest event in the history of the world up to that time, took place right there. And outside of the shepherds, the simple shepherds on the hills, the three wise men, who knew that he was born? Nobody knew it. Mary hid these things in her heart and Joseph just puttered around. So, nobody knew as much that He had come. He was hidden among them.

And when he grew up and ran around with them and played over the back lot with them, they didn’t know who they were bumping elbows with. They didn’t dream, they didn’t dream those boys of Bethlehem that played and raised about and played hide and seek, they didn’t know. Little Jesus taking his place along with the rest, the time he could spare away from helping his supposed father, sweeping up around the carpenter’s shop. Nobody knew who this was. He was hidden there; hidden right in plain sight. And that’s the way God hides things, always. He hides them right in plain sight.

And here was the Lord of glory walking around right in plain sight, and they didn’t know who He was. And they didn’t know, and they kept on not knowing until even when one of them would betray Him. He had to kiss Him in order to let them know who He was. And when He went to be baptized, that Dove had to descend on Him and rest before John the Baptist would know who he had been preaching about. He was preaching about an anonymous somebody that was coming, but he didn’t know who He was.

And when He finally came and was baptized, John looked at Jesus and said to himself, this, this is an amazing man here. Who is this? But he wasn’t sure. And he said, I don’t think that you ought to be baptized by me. Let’s reverse that. There’s something about you. Jesus said, suffer it to become all righteousness, so he baptized Him. And as he baptized Him, the Dove came down and John knew. John knew who he was, and John knew why that strange something had touched his heart.

But for the most part, nobody knew. He was hidden in plain sight. And it says, no man laid hands on Him, because His hour was not yet come. And they hated Him and didn’t know why. Because God had blinded them and confused them and frustrated them and made a fool of the whole world, because His hidden Messiah walked among men. He hid Him there in the womb of the Virgin. Hid him right in the crowds and among the multitudes. And hid him in Joseph’s new tomb, and now He’s hiding Him in the heavens. And when He comes back for His people, He will come back as a thief who always comes traveling incognito, always comes undercover and slips in and takes away treasures and goes again.

Well, now these are hints, I say, of a higher truth. And they hint at the truth that God has opened a way into His kingdom and into His heart. For the individual, that the individual may enter, we mustn’t forget that. And that while living right here below on this earth, people are in the heart of God hidden, in the midst of the heart of God even while they walk in the midst of life. And don’t you think we’re not in the midst of life, Brethren.

A man wrote a book called “In the Midst of Life.” Well, don’t think we’re not in the midst of life. You travel around a little and most of you do. You know we’re in the midst of life. Read your newspaper. Listen to your news broadcasts. And you know that the world is busy, very, very busy. And in the middle of this and walking up and down in the middle of it are people.

I went over to, after the board meeting in New York Thursday, I dictated some letters and then I went over and got my suitcases and went over to the Grand Central Station. And when I stepped into the Grand Central Station, I heard somebody singing, only believe, all things are possible, only believe. And I thought, I’m not hearing right. There’s something’s happened to my head, because they don’t sing like that in Grand Central Station. But I went on down and I searched around. Who is it? A high, thin, rather strident, but pleasant voice singing. And then I noticed up on the balcony here was a little boy about 11 years old and an old lady with a little organ. And she was sporting background music and he was standing.

He’d stop and turn the pages and then he’d step up to the microphone, raise his good-looking little face high and sing. And he sang, into my heart, into my heart, come into my heart Lord Jesus. And he sang, only believe and he sang some Christmas carols. And every time he’d sing, he would get applause from the great hundreds of people. You see, the airplanes, many of them being on strike and the weather being so bad and all the rest, the trains were loaded as I’ve never seen them since the last war. And of course, that meant masses of people milling everywhere waiting on their trains, just the time also when the suburbanites were going out, the commuters.

And they stopped. Everybody stopped and stood looking. I finally got their direction of sight and I saw the handsome little fella standing up there, stiff as a ramrod, about eleven singing in a voice that hadn’t changed yet, into my heart, into my heart, Lord Jesus.

Well, I didn’t ask what denomination he was. I didn’t find my way back up around there and say to the old lady of the organ, are you an Alliance woman? I knew she was one of God’s children. You don’t sing songs like that and not be one of the Gods hidden children. Not very hidden in that instance. But you know the Christmas spirit was on that dirty Vanity Fair we call New York, and so they applauded the little fellow loudly every time he sang,

Well, God has His people I don’t know where they came from. Maybe they were Pentecostal people. Maybe they were Southern Baptists. They could have been Alliance. Maybe they were from some mission and didn’t belong to any church. I don’t know. But I know a little boy there with his handsome little face up turned, singing in rapture and was telling the people of the great city of New York that the Lamb had come and He would come into the hearts of the people.

Well, God has His people, friends, and He has them everywhere. And they’re right down here in the midst of life. You may sit down beside one of them and they don’t all start talking religion to you. You know, some people tell you they all talk religion to everybody they sit down beside. Wilbur Smith told me one time he said, you know, I have an awful time with that. He said, I’m not friendly enough. He said, when I sit down in a train, I’m shy and I want to read. And he said, I don’t talk to people about their souls. I don’t do much of that either. So, lots of people have sat down alongside of me and didn’t know I belonged in heaven. And when you’re waiting around for the upward journey, maybe I should talk to everybody I meet, but I’d be a lovely nuisance if I tried it.

Well, while living right here below, you know, as I say, in the midst of life, you can belong to another kingdom, an eternal kingdom, and belong in another world. Maybe you may sit down somewhere in a public place alongside of a man and you don’t know who he is. Maybe you’re listening to a concert or something or riding on a train or in a subway, sitting alongside a man you don’t know. Maybe he’s an ambassador. Maybe he’s the big man in this country or from one of the one of the countries over there. They travel around like that.

So, we sit down beside a man, or a woman and we don’t know who they are. We know that if they use bad language, we know they don’t belong to God. But just generally we don’t know, because God has them hidden every place, belonging to another world and yet hidden in the midst of life.

Now, these same people have a secret covenant with God. You know, sometimes you sit down alongside of a communist and you don’t know it. That communist is a card-carrying communist. And he owns fearsome, furious, fevered allegiance to Moscow. And he’s sitting right there beside you and you don’t know it. He’s dressed like you. His suit is generally like yours and unpressed like mine. And he just generally looks like you, and you don’t know you’re sitting beside a man that only has the external shell of being an American. Inside of him, he hates every liberty we have and every decent thing that’s here.

He hates the sound of the church bell, the Christmas carol. He hates the name of Jesus. He is a dedicated, sold out, fanatic communist. I don’t know if you ever sat beside him, but you could because there are 1000s of them in this country. And you and he, why, Lazarus and others in the lower world couldn’t have been any different from each other than you and he. If you’re a Christian, a child of God, everything he’s dedicated to you hate, and everything you’re consecrated to, he hates. And yet, you ride together, pay your fares, get up and go up the same stairs out onto the street and go into the same store and shop. And yet, you’re both hidden.

You don’t know who he is, and he doesn’t know who you are. And it’s impossible that we should always tell them. Some people wear big badges in order to let everybody know. But I don’t know that always works. It may be all right, I’ve seen a few badges I’d like to wear, but for the most part I wouldn’t care for them.

Well, we belong to another kingdom, an eternal kingdom, a world that’s invisible, but real. We have a secret covenant, and our dedication is unto God above. And God says in the time of trouble, I’ll hide you, and we’re given over to the belief that we can know God. We can know Him in personal experience, beyond all logical conclusion and above all reason and reasoning. We can know Him through Jesus Christ the Lord who walked around on the earth. People say, I don’t see anything very saintly about you. Well, no, we eat like other people. We clean off the walk when it snows, and we do everything else just like other people.

But God has a people anyways. He has always had a hidden people, a people for His own possession, a peculiar people, Paul calls it; a royal priesthood, a holy nation composed of people. You say, who are they, Alliance people? Some of them are, thank God, some of them are. Some of them are. But not all of them are. They are scattered all around.

I may shock some of you terribly, but I think that there are Christians here and there, scattered in the Greek Orthodox and in the Roman Catholics. Ask me to explain it. I can’t explain it. I don’t know. As a Christian with the information and the light I have, I couldn’t possibly run around crossing myself and wearing chains and believing in the Virgin Mary. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t possibly do it. I couldn’t possibly believe in that jolly old gentleman that they crowned over there the other day in Rome. I couldn’t possibly do it. He’s a nice old fellow, there’s no doubt at all and very bright. But I don’t think he’s the Holy Father at all. He’s not married. But how could he be?

But I can’t believe in that, and I can’t take all that trash. But I am not going to say that nowhere in the midst of all this, that some of the old people didn’t find Jesus while they prayed. I believe they have. And I believe that some of us harsh, bigoted Protestants are going to find that out sometimes. Maybe the Lord will let us introduce one of them to us and let us blush just for our own sanctification in that great day. But I think the system is vicious and rotten. And I think the whole hierarchy from the kind old gentleman down is organically bad.

But I think that even in Sodom God had a few. And I believe that even in Rome, there may be a few. If they had the information, you have and the light you have, they’d come out. They don’t have it yet.

Well, the Lord has His people everywhere and they’re the hidden ones, God’s hidden ones. I was thinking this morning of the song, rock of ages, cleft for me, let me hide myself in thee. But that’s a prayer to be hidden. But this is a promise that we shall be hidden. In the time of trouble, He shall hide me in His pavilion. Is it a prayer to be hidden? Well, that’s legitimate. It is a promise that we shall be hidden. We are hidden, hidden in the Rock of Ages, hidden.

He’s hiding us from what? Well, I want him to hide me from my past for one thing. I don’t want the incarnation of the Tozer that once was ever to follow me into the world to come. I want to be where, if there’s such a thing, the ghost of Christmas past can’t find you. And the ghost of my yesterdays can’t haunt me. I don’t think there would be any such ghost. That’s all imaginary. The Bible says He will remember it no more against us forever. And if God doesn’t remember your sins, I don’t care much who else does.

So, God hides us from our past and he hides us from our failures, and He hides us from our tragic weaknesses. And He hides us because of our vulnerability. We’re so vulnerable and so easily killed. On the farm, turkeys are the most vulnerable things that I ever knew. If there’s anything else more vulnerable, we didn’t have them around where I was. The hen will sit four weeks on a great big pile of Turkey eggs as patiently and nice and tenderly and hatch them all out, and then take them out and in 24 hours have nine out of the 12 dead. She doesn’t know how to take care of her own babies.

They’re vulnerable. They get so many diseases. They pick up so many germs from the ground and die of pip and worms and I don’t know how many other things. And the people of God are vulnerable, you know. They’re just really vulnerable, sensitive and easily killed. I mean to say, of course, humanly speaking, actually that Eternal Life which was with the Father and which was made real unto us and which is in our heart. You can’t kill that. I don’t mean that. But I mean, that we wilt quickly, and we’re easily knocked out. God always has them carry us out and bring us to. But we’re easily knocked out. We knock out easily.

Then He hides us in His pavilion. He hides us in His heart. With all my heart, I believe that God’s children are as safe now, as if they were in heaven. I believe that. Somebody quoted me, before a district superintendent and a board and said, Mr. Tozer said if you didn’t believe in election, you were crazy. And the superintendent said, he never said that. So, they had an argument. I don’t want people arguing over me. But what I said was, I suppose that I believe in election, but I don’t believe in election, period, I believe in election as understood and interpreted in the light of the rest of the Scripture.

But I believe that God’s hidden ones are God’s chosen ones. And they’re chosen according to His eternal purpose, and they’re chosen according to His foreknowledge. That doesn’t mean that you have to come whether you want to or not as some teach; and it doesn’t mean that only certain ones can come. Anybody can come that will come. But they’re chosen in Him before the foundation of the world by the foreknowledge of God. I believe that. And they’re protected and kept and held in His blessed hand. You know, that if your salvation had depended upon your faithfulness, you wouldn’t have followed Jesus Christ one month. He kept you. He held you. You were hidden, hidden.

The baby born into the world is a helpless, vulnerable little thing which soon will die. My fifteenth grandchild came here about, I don’t know, two months ago, a month ago, I don’t know. It’s all happening so fast. I can’t keep up. But they said, oh, he’s home. He’s awful. They said, he’s all nose. But the other day, yesterday, we got the report that he had developed a chin and forehead to go along with his nose and becoming quite handsome. But I do know one thing, that he was unutterably vulnerable when he came. And all that they would have had to do would be to turn their backs 20 minutes and he would have been dead, but now he’s growing by leaps and bounds because somebody hit him, took care of him, nourished him, protected him.

God keeps His people; God is keeping you friend. This is a cold weather we’re having now. And a vicious wicked world we’re in. You never know when you listen to the news broadcast whether they’re going to say, Berlin was bombed, Formosa was attacked. You never know. You never know where trouble is going to start. But you do know one thing, in the time of trouble, He shall hid me in His pavilion in the secret of His tabernacle shall He hide me. I know that. God will hide us in His tabernacle, in His pavilion, and we’ll be God’s hidden ones, thy hidden one. That’s a beautiful expression. You and I ought to believe in it.

We’re having a bit of difficulties; everybody knows in our local church here. I don’t mean trouble. There’s nobody fighting anybody. Nobody’s enthusiastic enough to fight anybody else. You know, that’s trouble with us. We haven’t gotten enough energy to get in trouble. We all love each other and hope for the best. But we will have difficulty and some things are going to have to be changed. But in the meantime, would you keep one thing in mind, God Almighty, that planted this plant back there years ago, hasn’t withdrawn His kindly, loving smile from it. He’ll keep us and He’ll lead us through.

And few years from now, we’ll look back and say weren’t we a bunch of weaklings to worry, when God had His plan, all laid out for us. You keep believing, Brother and Sister, you keep trusting and don’t pay much attention to Santa Claus and keep your eyes on Jesus Christ, the Lord of Christmas and the Lord of the new year and all yours in the coming years. And you will come out all right and so will I and so will we and so will this church and so will our fellowship in the days ahead. Amen.

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“Jesus Christ the Rock”

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Jesus Christ the Rock

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

March 22, 1959

Now, Lord, we are before Thee again for another hour of worship, the reading of Thy Word, singing of the hymns of worship and praise, meditating together over the things that matter. We thank Thee for this passage that we just read. This tells us what is to be and what will come, prepares us mentally to receive it. We pray Thee then Lord, prepare us in our hearts because what we know with our minds, sometimes we don’t know really. And these things that are before us that are up there waiting, when we come into them, even though we know and could turn to the Scripture where they’re found, when they come, they’re shocking, terrible, and incredible.

So, we pray that Thou will give us faith. Give us steadfastness and give us that which Thou didst mean when Thou did say, they that endure unto the end. Lord, we won’t let anybody interpret this away for us. We won’t let anybody divide this and dispensationalize it. We stand by it. Here it is. They that shall endure unto the end they shall be saved. Lord, we would before Thee ask that Thou wilt help us that we may get our hearts ready for quiet endurance. And then whatever comes and whatever it means, we’re on the right side. Help us Lord to endure patiently whatever comes to us. We haven’t any of us Lord endured much yet. Certainly, we have not endured unto blood, striving against sin. Certainly, Father, we are among those who have to admit that we’ve been treated like spoiled children, and we haven’t much. We haven’t much to show, not many scars, Lord, and not many things that ever happened to us. But, O God, we pray that Thou will prepare us for our time. And prepare this church and prepare the people of it and prepare those that are here this morning for that hour when things will begin to move and the world will catch fire, and those enemies that we thought we had bottled up and that they were safe. They will break out and get loose on the earth and things will begin to burn.

And then, we ask Thee to help us Lord that we might know where the Rock is that’s higher than we are. That Rock that is higher than I which the Psalmist spoke and that the hymn pleads, to the Rock that is higher than I, let me fly. Lord, help us, and bless us this morning. Wilt Thou, we pray Thee, help us that our faith may lay hold on Thee, our hope may be cheerful and bright, our expectation may meet Thy promises, that our giving may be sacrificial, that our worship may be pure and inward, and that we may get great help out of this morning service.

Not only us, O God, but we think of the other churches. We pray for them all where the gospel is preached. Gracious Father, help the struggling churches. Help those, Lord, that are prospering, and the very prosperity may become a cause of their downfall. Help those that are struggling and let not their struggles cause them to give up. But keep us, all of us, all types and kinds where we meet in Thy name all over. Help us we pray, Our Father, that we may not fail to quietly endure. Now help us. Be with us. Send in all the funds that are needed to carry on Thy work. Bless the expounding of the Word and the singing of the hymns. We ask it in Christ’s holy name. Amen.

I returned yesterday from a very pleasant and very rigorous visit to Toledo where Brother William Bryan is the pastor, a little church where Brother Zeemer preached for many years. They had splendid crowds. Not because I was there, but because they just have them. They always have them, excellent crowds. They were pushing for a $90,000 missionary offering, hoping for it. Mrs. Constance of Colombia, Mrs. Notson of the Philippine Islands and John Vectral of Hong Kong were there and spoke at various times. I preached every night and once during the day.

There was a convention of engineers there. I don’t know what they were engineers of, but Friday night, they decided to blow the place up. So about 11 o’clock was when I had nicely tucked down for the night. They started drinking, singing, yelling, pounding on doors and generally acting like delinquents until four in the morning. So, four in the morning, I might as well have been with them because I was just as drunk as they were, only in another way. I was bleary-eyed and miserable so I got what little I could out of it from there on. But I’m still feeling it. There were women among them too, women, wives, I suppose. I don’t understand such things. I lay there in bed and composed a letter to the management which I never wrote and will never send.

But really, they weren’t to blame. They did their best. House detectives beat on the door and yelled, this is the house detective, quiet. But they might as well talk to the delinquents that they were. The next morning everybody was down in the breakfast room trying to look just as meek and nice and civilized as ever. If the engineers of Ohio are that kind of people, I don’t know what the machinery of Ohio is going to be when they get through with it. Outside of that it was a beautiful week that I had with the brethren.

Now you’ll excuse me if I approach another angle here. This is Palm Sunday. Christ rode into Jerusalem. But I want to read a passage here that our Lord spoke, for it’s practically all entirely what He said. Matthew, the 21st chapter, 42nd Verse and following. This followed His triumphal entry. This was spoken between the day He entered and the time He was crucified. Jesus saith unto them, verse 42, did you never read in the Scriptures, the stone which the builders rejected, the same has become the head of the corner. This is the Lord’s doing and it’s marvelous in our eyes. That’s the quotation. Therefore, say I unto you, Jesus went on, the kingdom of God shall be taken from you and given to a nation bringing forth the fruits thereof. And whosoever shall fall on this stone shall be broken, but on whomsoever it shall fall it will grind into powder. When the chief priests and Pharisees had heard His parables, they perceived that He spake of them. But when they sought to lay hands on Him, they feared the multitude because they took Him for a prophet.

There were always these Pharisees, chief priests, they were always caught just like the politicians are now. Always a little afraid of the public. They’re always wanting to do something nasty, but they’re a little afraid to do it because of the people. They despised the people, but they had them to deal with. They sought to lay hands on Him, violent hands, that would mean. But they feared the multitude because the multitude thought he was a prophet. And when a Jew thought a man was a prophet, the people, they weren’t ready that he should be crucified quite yet.

Now I want to talk a little about Jesus Christ, the Rock. This familiar figure, you come on it every once in a while, in the Scriptures. And it has certain qualities, as we all know, the qualities of strength. Solid as a rock, we say. And the quality of hardness, impenetrable. We have a word we call adamant. When a man is stubborn, refuses absolutely to yield, we say he’s adamant. That’s comes from a certain rock, adamant rock.

And then the permanence of a rock. I’ve traveled through the country, and I see gray mesas, they call them out West, great rocks, standing up, short mountains, great rocks. I muse over how many generations they’ve seen come and go. How many generations they’ve seen come up and go down, come up, and go down, come up and go down. Because a rock is a pretty permanent thing. Sailors know about the rock; they want to avoid them. Or they want to use them occasionally. And certainly, soldiers know, at least the soldiers of old days knew, they got behind rocks and they fought from behind rocks. Even in our own America, Indians used to get behind rocks and fight from there.

And the traveler knows about the rock. The shadow of a great rock in a weary land is word expression that comes from Palestine, where, when a man traveled over sandy ways until his tongue was dry, thick with thirst, he came to a rock and found the spraying and the shadow. And the cool moss growing there on the moist side of the rock, and he sat down. It was like being born physically over again. The builder knows about the rock. He chisels or hews it down and fits it into place and builds his great building. Now here, Christ quotes and applies the Scripture concerning the rock to Himself and to them. The stone He said, which was rejected by the builders, the same has become the head of the corner.

Now briefly, and I remember trying to explain this when I was in Peter back here, First Peter, that these religionists were builders, and they were busy erecting a temple. That is, they were not actually building a temple. It stood there in Jerusalem. I don’t mean that literally. I mean, that they were building a religious temple, composed of human righteousness and legal requirements and interpretations and texts and prohibitions and tradition, commandments. They were building themselves a building, but the trouble is that it was their building. They were building according to their blueprint instead of according to God.

That’s what I always am fearful of. When I hear men high pressuring, stampeding an audience, trying to get them to do this or that, or to give to this or that, I’m always afraid of it because I’m afraid that the young fellow may have a blueprint that God didn’t draw. God said to Moses, be careful that thou build everything according to the pattern shown thee in the mount. And these religionists of Jesus’ day, we’re building a temple composed of human righteousness, as I say, and prohibitions and traditions and customs and ways, and they were building after their blueprint, but they hadn’t consulted God. They thought they had but they hadn’t. It wasn’t God’s blueprint. So, they were putting stone after stone in, and it looked good what they were building and then they came to a stone that wouldn’t fit. There was one stone they couldn’t make work.

It wasn’t shaped so as to go along with their, the dimensions, the directions that their building was taking, and they couldn’t do anything with this stone. It was too hard to chisel. I don’t know what a stonemason calls it. What does a stonemason call it when he cuts an edge of a thing. Does he call it, chiseling it? Is that the word they use? I don’t know myself. So, I probably will speak like an amateur here, and I am not a stonemason. But whatever they do to stones, to chip the thing down and get the side off of it and get it shaped up. They wouldn’t work on this. They hit this stone, and they couldn’t do anything with it. It sort of was alive somehow.

And they fought back, and they couldn’t do anything with it. So, they just threw it away. They said this stone is no good. It didn’t fit into their plan, so they rejected it as worthless. But it happened to be the only stone God ever had anything to do with here. It happened to be God. But because they were building their building and this stone was God’s stone to be the headstone of another building, it didn’t work. And I don’t complain that Jesus Christ has no place in the average church. I don’t mind that at all. I don’t mind it because, why should He? Why should He?

They’re building their churches. I don’t mean buildings now, but their religious structures, their religious thinking, their codes of ethics, their plans, what they do; they’re building, and Christ doesn’t fit there. It is about the same way Socrates does and Benjamin Franklin, but He doesn’t really fit there. So, I don’t mind their rejecting, because why should they not reject Him. He’s not shaped for a lot of these churches. But He is shaped for the church of God, the church of God. So, they rejected Him as worthless. They threw him out and said, this rock, we don’t know what kind of a rock it is. We’re not familiar with it.

So, they threw it aside, and God responded by rejecting their whole building; picking up the Rock they’d rejected and setting it in the corner to be the chief cornerstone, determining the direction and size and shape of all the rest of the building. And they were out in the cold with their homemade building. And we’re still, by the grace of God, working on that vast cathedral of the sky, which God is building, His Son Jesus Christ being the Head of the corner. And that’s all Peter said about it, but Jesus said more. Jesus said, on whomsoever that stone falls, it’s ground into powder.

These are very sentimental times, very sentimental times; right this moment, this hour, because this is holy week starting today, isn’t it today? Yes, today. It’s Holy Week. I am not too much up on my church calendar. But it’s Holy Week, and everybody gets misty eyed in Holy Week. But we’re likely to overlook something here, that right here in Holy Week, the Man stood up and said, there’s a rock and on whomsoever it fall, it will grind him to powder. There’s a danger of forgetting that this Rock is not only a wonderful Friend, but He’s a dangerous enemy. The messianic prophecies of the Old Testament showed the duality about Jesus. It fits perfectly into the attributes of God, for it was said about God, the kindness and severity of God.

And you will find all through the Bible a kindness that’s incredible. God has been so kind and is so kind that it’s all but unbelievable. And He’s been so severe. I’m reading the book of Numbers again. And I find that God is capable of being tremendously, terribly severe. You will find the same all through here about the Messiah. Take that second chapter or take that second Psalm, why do the heathen rage and the people imagine a vain thing? The kings of the earth set themselves and the rulers take counsel together against Jehovah and against His anointed, saying, let us break their bands asunder. Let us cast their cords from us. He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh. The Lord shall have them in derision. Then shall he speak unto them in His wrath and vex them in His sore displeasure. Yet have I set my king upon my holy hill of Zion.

Now, in Jesus’ time when He walked the earth, whoever ran head on into Jesus, usually went away rubbing the said’s head. When they came to Jesus in trouble, they always got help no matter who it was, the Publican’s child, the poor fellow with leprosy all over his body. Anybody that came to Him humbly went away blessed. Any that came to Him arrogantly, went away whimpering and angry, because this was a Rock here. And I, for my part, am mighty delighted there’s a Rock somewhere.

There’s a black preacher in this town I often quote, who is marvelously Spirit-taught in some things. And he never preaches a sermon, but what somewhere in it he says, Jesus is my Rock. He’s known as the Rock among the colored folks, the Rock.

Well, Herod and the scribes and the Pharisees and the Sadducees and all the rest, found that this gentle Jesus, this Lamb of God most lowly, was also a rock when He needed to be. And I just would like to remind you that this Rock, this Stone, is going to be our Judge at last. And everyone who rejects, neglects, disobeys; the rich, the proud, the arrogant, the self-sufficient, are all going to have to deal with it. We’re in danger of getting so brotherly in our time, and so brotherly, everybody whimpers on everybody else’s shoulder and cries on everybody’s neck. We’re so kind, so nice, so brotherly, we’re likely to forget one thing, that Jesus Christ stood up, hard and solid, and said, who is not for Me is against Me.

I had the extreme pleasure; it was a pleasure, and I said it and mean it, I had extreme pleasure of preaching every night to a Hindu young man. Two degrees he has, an MBA and MA. He’s a consulting engineer of one of the big concerns in Toledo. He came to hear me the first night and after that they couldn’t keep him away. He told me the last night he was so tired, but he decided that he’d have to come because he had to hear me one more time.

He’s a Hindu, and he’s a devout Hindu, and he prays. He brought his Hindu books with him when he came. And quite to his astonishment, I knew about his Hindu books, and I had read them and I knew about his gods and could identify them and so on. Well, he talked about Jesus being a manifestation of God. He said he believed in Him. He believed in him since he was 10 years old. He’s a manifestation of God. And he’s such a nice man. I hated to push him. I wouldn’t make a good salesman because I like people and I hate to bother them. And I didn’t like to push him, but I thought I only had that one chance and sitting there in the hotel room, I decided that I was going to give him the works.

So, I pushed him, and I said, now, remember this one thing, what would you think of Christ? You heard Him say, not only am I a manifestation of God, I’m the only manifestation of God and thus sweep away, your Krishna and all the rest. What would you think of Him if He said no man cometh unto the Father but by Me? What would you think if you heard Him say, he that is not with me, is against me.

He said, I believe that. I believe that. I don’t know. You couldn’t do anything with him. We left friends, but he wasn’t converted. And I doubt whether he ever will be unless the Holy Ghost does a miracle in his heart, because he’s equated Christ with everybody else. And that’s the way it is, you see now. We’re so ecumenical and so brotherly and so tolerant, that everybody believes in everything, and so the result is, nobody believes in anything.

But here stands Jesus and says, the Rock, the Stone which the builders rejected. There it is. There’s the Stone. And everything that doesn’t have that Stone as the head of the corner gets thrown out. But He said again here, whosoever falls on this Stone shall be broken to pieces. Now that sounds terrible. He’s the Chief Cornerstone you say. What did He mean by that? He meant that He was the one everybody was judged by. And here’s a Stone, all every which way and they bring it to this Stone and cut it in line with that stone. They cut it in line with that Chief Cornerstone. The Chief Cornerstone is the shape that determines the shape of all the stones in the building.

And so, they have to be broken to fit. You have to break them, chisel them, drill holes in them and break them to fit. This is the doctrine that’s at large in the New Testament, very large. Blessed are the poor in spirit. He submits himself to be broken. He doesn’t come saying, God, I am the right shape. Well, let the church be like me. He doesn’t get up as the woman did in an Alliance Church over in Ohio and say, Mr. Chairman, I nominate my husband. I’ve been his backbone for 15 years. He doesn’t want anything shaped according to him, but according to the Lord Himself.

And that’s all large there I say. Blessed are the poor in spirit and blessed are the meek and blessed are the humble and blessed are the lowly. And Jesus said, let him forsake all and let him carry the cross and let him come and let him bend and let him be ready to be cut and chiseled and bored and shaped to the right shape. If he falls on this stone, he’ll be broken. If he comes to that Stone, he’ll have the whole shape of him changed. And this is the trouble with Christianity now. We want people to be converted with the least inconvenience to everybody concerned, you know. We want everybody converted but with the least inconvenience.

Miss Jones, we’d like to have you accept Christ. All right, I’d be glad to do it. Mrs. Carbuncle did it down here two blocks, and she seemed quite happy. Well, Mrs. Jones, three packs of happy, happy, happy melbury or whatever they are that you’ve been singing about. I suppose you’d have to quit that. And those cocktails, I don’t imagine that the Lord would let you go on with your cocktails, and chiseling on your income tax, that wouldn’t do. And stepping out on your husband, that wouldn’t do. And those long bridge parties, that wouldn’t do. And those cocktail parties and you come away staggering to your Cadillac, that wouldn’t do. Oh, well she said, in that case, I’m not interested. I’d like to have that happy, happy that Mr. Carbuncle had, but I don’t want any of these things to change in me. I want the least inconvenienced to everybody concerned.

A cross was never a convenient thing. They say nobody ever found a convenient place to have a boil. And having had a few, I can say that usually wherever they are, that’s the worst possible place. And I have never found anybody yet that would be willing to say that a cross is convenient. It picks you up, disregards you, and kills you.

He that falls on this stone, he shall be broken to pieces. God has broken them all down the years, the great, mighty Paul, Peter and down the centuries. But he will beautify the meek with salvation. And you will find all of those that came humbly to take His shape and be shaped according to Him, children, Mary and Nathaniel, Nicodemus and the Centurion, and Paul and the rest of them. They all came and they were shaped, chains were broken, broken.

People are afraid of that word broken. They don’t want to be broken. And the weary and the heartache and those with the heartache and sinful, were never turned away. Never. They find Him as soft and gentle as the arms of an adoring mother. They will come and be broken, yield and let Him change them.

Now, that’s what our Lord said. He said that in Holy Week. Isn’t that a strange time to be saying it. But He said it in Holy Week. Some people fear this expression, whoever falls on this stone shall be broken. Shall be broken, they’re afraid of that. But let me tell you something. Something is going to break you. I don’t care how tall you are and how much you weigh. I don’t care if when you go to a doctor, the doctor slaps your back and says, get out of here, you’re healthier than I am. I don’t care, something’s going to break you.

Sickness is going to break you. Age will break you. Sorrow will break you. Worry will break you. Time will break you. Toil will break you. I read just recently that they think that what ages people is radiation. If they keep on testing atom bombs, there’ll be a world full of old gray beards here on our hands in no time. That’s what does it. But they say it may be radiation that breaks you down, makes you get old. But it will come, just as sure as you live, something will break you. You’re the rock. You’re the granite. Your heart is adamant. No, my brother, you’re just a person. And Sister, you’re just a person.

And as a person, something’s going to break you. Now, it depends on whether you’re to be broken by circumstances or by the Lord Himself. And the only reason He breaks you is because he wants you to fit into his everlasting temple. He wants you to be part of that grand cathedral of the universe. That vast cathedral where choirs of angels will be singing the glory of God forever. For they will rest not day nor night, saying, holy, holy, holy Lord God Almighty. He wants you to be part of that, but he can’t make you part of it, the shape you’re in, morally and spiritually. So, he’s going to change that by breaking you and making you new.

So, in love, He fits us in. In love, He breaks us. In love, He changes our shape to fit His and with Himself as the model, He makes us after His own likeness. So that when He comes, we shall be like Him and shall see Him as He is.

A great ambition of the church of Christ ought to be to be like Christ. So, we can come, we can come to Him and come as little children, tramping on our own wisdom and our own goodness and all the rest and letting Him be everything. But it’s here and it’s good to notice that He said it in Holy Week. Whosoever shall fall on this stone shall be broken, but on whomsoever it shall fall, it will grind him to powder.

So, the thing to do then is to come and fall. The Pharisees took it wrong; you see. The Pharisees took it wrong. They perceived that He spake of them and they sought to lay hands on Him. Isn’t humanity a weird outfit? Go to a doctor, and the doctor looks over and says you have something, and you want to kill the doctor right away. You come to Christ and Christ says, the trouble with you is sin, and they want to lay hands on Jesus immediately. They always want to kill the doctor.

A fellow is found wandering around and he thinks he’s in Ohio when he is in Missouri. And the policeman drives up and says you’re not in Ohio. You’re in Missouri. And he gets mad at the policeman instead of saying, well, I’m awfully sorry. I’m a big fool. My compass must have misguided me. And going where he ought to be, he gets angry with the man who locates him. That’s the odd thing about humanity. Jesus walked around among the people telling him them about themselves, and instead of looking at themselves and saying, say that’s true isn’t it. I ought to do something about it, they wanted to kill Him. It’s always been like that.

So dear friends, let’s remember that this one who rode so meekly into Jerusalem and who died so humbly a week later, rose again from the dead, and He’s at the right hand of God, and He is the Rock. And if it’s necessary for Him to fall on the nation, He will do it. Sometime, He will do it. But all who come and fall upon Him shall be changed into His image and likeness, and shall be like Him, and shall see Him as He is. It’s wonderful, I think. It’s wonderful.

So, I go on instead of losing interest in all this. I’m gaining interest. I can see more and more that this is the only thing that’s worthwhile. This is all. Who is it, they said when He rode into Jerusalem? But we’d better find out, for a lot of people don’t know. We better find who is this? We better find out. He is God’s Lamb. He is God’s Lion. He’s God’s Rock. He’s God’s Great Physician. He’s God’s Shepherd of sheep. He’s God’s Healer of human wounds.

So let us think about Him today and let’s think about Him this week, and let’s let Him have his way with us. The highest ambition a human being could have would be to be like Jesus. And if a man attains, even in some degree, likeness to Christ, he’s wiser. And having done it, he’s wiser than all and greater than all of the great of the world.

Be like Jesus, this my song, Jesus, Jesus only. Tonight. I want to talk on that fifth chapter of Revelation, giving the closing out of that fifth chapter Revelation, where all the creatures worship and say, worthy is the Lamb. I’d like to have you come back and bring your friends along. We’ll have a great evening.

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Messages

Tozer Talks

“There is a Way that Seemeth Right to a Man“

PDF Download with Summary NotesDownload

There is a Way that Seemeth Right to a Man

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

May 6, 1956

Outline

The importance of the end goal in life.

  • Life is a journey with a heavy commission, traveling towards an end.
  • Bible cares little about journey, only end matters.

The importance of choosing the right path in life.

  • Tozer emphasizes the importance of the end goal over the comfort of the journey, citing biblical teachings.
  • Tozer urges listener to take right path for right end, as all paths lead to finality.

Deception in spiritual journey.

  • Tozer warns of deception, noting that what seems right can be wrong.
  • Tozer warns of deception in religion, emphasizing importance of self-examination and proof of faith before it’s too late.

False ways and the importance of following the right path.

  • Tozer: The way of the drunkard doesn’t seem right, but it’s the way that leads to death.
  • Tozer: The way of the gangster, murderer, harlot, and thief doesn’t look right, but it leads to death.
  • False teachers abound, promoting doctrines of demons and lies.
  • Tozer warns against naming names in sermons, citing biblical precedent and personal experience.

False beliefs and the importance of living a life of Jesus Christ.

  • Tozer: Expertise in identifying counterfeit money comes from familiarity with real government issue.
  • Tozer argues that people are drawn to false religions because they seem right, but ultimately, only Jesus Christ is the true God.
  • Tozer warns against self-deception, highlighting examples of those who appear righteous but are actually on the path to death (drunkard, thief, harlot, worldly-minded, carnal professor, and procrastinator).
  • The way of life is the way of Jesus Christ, and it’s crucial to be serious-minded and think about the consequences of living a lifetime in error.

The importance of following Jesus Christ.

  • Jesus Christ is the only way to salvation, and He calls us to follow Him by renouncing sin and taking up our cross (John 14:6).
  • The Lord has people in various denominations and churches, including Catholics, Greeks Orthodox, and Calvinists, who have found the way to salvation despite their differences (Acts 15:14-18).
  • Tozer emphasizes the importance of having a good conscience towards God, rather than focusing on details of baptism or mode.
  • Jesus criticizes the Pharisees for their hypocrisy in religious practices, highlighting that it is the heart that defiles a person, not just external actions.
  • Jesus and his disciples eat with unwashed hands, demonstrating that following God’s laws is more important than following man-made rules.
  • Tozer warns against external religion, emphasizing the importance of a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.

Message

We turn to an old and often-used verse in the 14th of Proverbs. Many, many years ago, I don’t know how many years ago, I talked once on this. And I have been thinking it over the last days and want tonight to use this verse as a basis for a few considerations.

The King James Version text reads this way, there is a way which seemeth right unto a man, but the end thereof are the ways of death. And this is not a comforting verse, and I wish it were, but it isn’t. There is a way which seemeth right unto a man, but the end of it are the ways of death, a way and the ways.

Now, here in this verse, as many places in the Bible, human life is likened to a journey, and you and I are on a journey, whether we believe it or not. And we’re travelers carrying a very heavy commission. Like a wartime messenger, we’re commissioned and strictly accountable to Almighty God. And we cannot go backwards, and we cannot stay still. But life is a journey, and we’re traveling that journey toward an end. And the Scripture says, the end thereof.

Now, let’s think a little together about this, the end thereof. The Bible cares very little about the journey, but the Bible cares everything about the end of the journey. By saying the Bible, I mean, the teaching of the Bible. Of course, God it is who cares. God cares not so much about whether the road is long or short, whether it’s crooked or straight, whether it is paved or muddy, whether there are rocks in it, or whether it lies a black macadam all the way. He doesn’t care about that. He only cares about the end.

Today, it matters very little to the men and women of this world about the end. They think only about the comforts of the way. We have inventions that have made it comfortable. Our journey is more comfortable than it used to be. I often smile when I think about our modern methods of transportation. How they now make it possible for a man who has no reason to go where he’s going, to go comfortably. They now make it possible for a little man who doesn’t amount to much in his own community, to travel in such luxury, that as Caesar, or any of the rest of them of the great men of the world, wouldn’t have believed it possible. The commonest man can lay his money down now, can rise and travel as a king; and the magic carpet of olden times is nothing compared with the way men can travel now.

So, because we can thus travel in luxury, almost in royalty, we get the idea that if we’re going somewhere, we amount to something and there must be some reason for it. I think the old wartime slogan might well be back. Is this trip necessary? Why are you going? People are careful or are thinking only about the comfort of the way, but not the end of the way.

Now, the blessed teachings of the Scripture, reverse that. They do not care very much about the journey, but they care everything about the end of the journey. And remember, that to every man there is an end of the journey. And at last, that will be all that matters. It won’t make too much difference how you got there. It won’t make too much difference about whether you were comfortable or uncomfortable on your journey. But if you got where you’re going; if you accomplished what you set out to do; if you succeeded in achieving; and above all things, if the destiny that is yours is finally the one that God has ordained so that you can go at last assured and right, that’s all that matters. And remember that when the end comes, there’s no changing it.

Now, we can change it. A man is given a certain journey, a certain mileage is built into him, we’ll say. He’s got half a million miles, mileage built into Him. And God says, all right now, you can go half a million miles, and then you will fall apart, and you will not go any further. That’s it. Now, at the beginning, everything depends upon whether we start in the right direction. Because the end of the journey is altogether dependent upon how we aim, what direction we take, whether the journey is started right. But after you have used up your mileage and God says, all right, you’re finished, your through, why then, it’s too late to do anything about it.

Now, I’m very much concerned my brother. I’m not concerned to amuse you. And I’m not concerned even to cheer you up. But I am very much concerned that you might take the right path leading to the right end. Because the way that leads to the end that is right, is the only right way. All paths lead to an end at last. And there is an end for everything in the sense of a final finality. And then there is an end in the sense of achievement and destiny. But only the right way leads to the right end.

And you’re here tonight, and I don’t want to unchurch anybody nor suggest nor feed into your mind any doubts, but I only want to ask as a pastor, if the way you are going now will lead to the right end. Because you see, there is a way that seemeth right.

Now, this suggests the possibility of being mistaken. Religious deception is one of the most prevalent things that you know of. Even the person who earnestly seems to be going right may be mistaken, because it says here, there is a way that seemeth right. Do you notice that the path seems to be right? And the very fact that it seems right, makes it that much more treacherous. If it did not seem right, everybody would be suspicious and say, well, that couldn’t be the right way. It couldn’t possibly be the right way. But every false way, has certain proofs that it’s the right way; and you have to dig beneath the surface to be sure. You have to test and know.

Things are so much alike. Good is so much like evil, and evil so much like good under certain aspects. Truth is so much like falsehood and falsehood so much like truth when seen under certain lights. Just as a wax orange is like a real orange when seen under certain lights. Just as gold looks like brass and copper, and copper looks like gold under certain lights. But we have to do more than see them under certain aspects and under certain lights. We’re duty-bound to be sure about ourselves, because things seem to be so much alike. A live man looks like a dead man and a dead man looks like a live man. See a man lying under a certain light in a bed or on a couch, and you don’t know whether he’s alive or not. You may even have to call in a doctor to determine whether he’s alive or not, because dead men look like living men unless you examine carefully.

So, there are things that are unlike and absolutely hostile to each other and contrary to each other yet may seem on the surface to be the same. So, in religion, so in the journey from here to God, so in the journey from here to heaven or from here to hell. There are many things that seem right, and the ways are so many. And there are so many people shouting from so many house tops that my way is the right way.

There is every likelihood that even a small congregation that we have here tonight for some reason; even in this small congregation, there’s every likelihood that there are some who are honestly deceived. You see, this is not a question of a man knowing better and doing it anyhow, this is a question of a man being honestly deceived about the direction that he has taken; and such persons are doomed to a rude and terrible disillusionment in the awful day of Christ when the end has been reached, and when there is no reversing. No going back, we’ve reached the point of no return.

So, it’s important to prove it now while we can do something about it. It’s very important that we should, now, while we can test ourselves and be very, very sure. Because we only have so much mileage in this, you know, and we’re traveling, and we’re on this journey, and we’re going to reach the end of it one of these times. And it is very important that we don’t allow ourselves to be fooled by appearances.

And then it says here, the way of death. Now I’ve tried to talk briefly about the end thereof and the way that leads to the end and the way that seemeth right. And now we talk about the ways of death. Now, have you noticed that these ways of death are not the way of the drunkard, the gambler, the thief and the gangster and the delinquent? That’s too obvious. And the Bible doesn’t say in here anything about it. It says elsewhere, but not here. It’s a very comforting thing to fill hell with drunkards and say, well of course, a man that gets drunk and drives when he’s drunk and beats his wife and drives his children out the back door and lies in the gutter overnight, of course, that man is lost. Of course, he’s on the wrong way. But you notice that the Bible doesn’t have it in focus here at all. It says there is a way that seemeth right, and the way of the drunkard doesn’t seem right. Nobody ever saw a man staggering down the street pouring out filth and blasphemy from his lips and say that man is right. He’s on the right road. Nobody ever did that.

And yet, when we talk about the wrong way, we think about the drunkard, and we’re glad to use him as a dumping ground to dump all our own sins over on the drunkard and say there’s your man. But the Bible doesn’t say, the way of the drunkard. It says that’s the way that seems right, and the drunkard’s way doesn’t seem right. It’s wrong, but it doesn’t seem right, than the way of the gambler, the man who spends his time playing the horses or playing cards or playing the roulette wheel here in one of the gambling dens. That doesn’t seem right. Everybody knows that isn’t right. And they say that man is wrong. `He’s desperately wrong. You can look at him and know that he’s wrong. You can look at him and be sure that he’s wrong. All the marks of his wrongness are upon Him. The Bible says there is a way that seems right and yet leads to death. Not the way of the gambler, though that leads to death, but it’s not what is before us here.

Then here’s the robber and the thief, the purse snatcher and the man who climbs in the window when you’re away and steals everything he can get his hands on. The crooked businessman, the big shot gambler who robs, does that look right? Did Al Capone ever look right to anybody? Is the man who mowed down seven men on St. Valentine’s Day here a few years back? Did he look right? Did they look right? No, no. That way didn’t look right. The way of the gangster and the murderer, the way of the harlot. That doesn’t look right. Everybody knows that’s not the right way.

But nevertheless, there is a way that seems right and that leads to death. And there is exactly where the woe of it lies. What way is it? Well, it’s the way of the false religionist. Do you know, the Scripture talks about the doctrines of demons, and says that in the last days there shall be doctrines of demons, false teachers everywhere brought, teaching false religions. They’re everywhere and they’re everywhere now. In the last days, perilous times shall come. And those days are upon us now, days that we are speaking of right now.

The Spirit speaks expressly, that in the latter time some shall depart from the faith giving heed to seducing spirits and doctrines of devils. speaking lies in hypocrisy and having their conscience seared with a hot iron, forbidding to marry, and commanding to abstain from meats. The blindness that you can overlook, this is too much for me, forbidding to marry, there’s celibacy, and commanding to abstain from meats which God has created to be received with Thanksgiving, and so on. Why, my brethren, these are false ways.

But you say you’re one more church saying we have the right truth, and everybody else is wrong. No, we’re not, and we are not. And I do not say that we have all the truth and nobody else has any truth, I would be ten times a fool If I dared to say a thing like that. I say that we have in our hands, accessible to us for very little, and you’re going to borrow one from your neighbor, if you don’t have one, a book that tells us the right way, the way of Christ who is the Truth and the Life; the way of the cross, the way of faith, the way of simplicity, the way of repentance, the way of righteousness. And it’s not all held in this church, but there are God’s people scattered all over the world in many groups and denominations who have found the right way. They have the way of truth.

But there are the ways of the false religionist. You know that. So, they look right. And they managed to doll everything up and make it look completely right.

I have been criticized because I do not name names. I get letters saying Mr. Tozer, you lay down principles, but you don’t name names. Why don’t you name people that are wrong? Why don’t you give names and addresses of people that are racketeers and false leaders? And why don’t you name people that are leading the church of Christ astray? And my answer is, two reasons. One is, that if I were to put in print what I know to be true about many people, I would be in libel suits continually. And the second is, I would not be Scriptural. The Lord laid down principles. He said, there shall be wolves in sheep’s clothing. But He didn’t say though that wolf lives at such and such an address. He said, beware of false prophets, but he didn’t name the false prophets.

And Paul said, in the last days, perilous times shall come. And there shall be false teachers, but he didn’t name the false teachers, only on one or two occasions. John named a fellow by the name of Demetrius and Paul named one or two, but mainly they named nobody. They laid the principle down and said, now, this is what is right. And if they don’t conform to this, then they’re wrong.

One of our preachers some years ago, decided to preach a series of sermons on false doctrines. And he really was laying them out good. He was naming them and calling them by name. And Sunday night after Sunday night, he preached on false doctrines. And the more he preached, the colder his heart got, the colder it got. So, at last, after several weeks of it, he went down before the Lord in real earnest prayer and said, Father, what’s the matter? And the voice said to his heart, it’s those sermons you’re preaching on false doctrines. Then he said, he lay literally down and beat the floor and cried, O God, am I wrong? Am I wrong? Are these doctrines, right? And the voice said, no, you’re not wrong in your doctrine, but you’re wrong in your spirit. You’ve got a wrong spirit toward these false doctrines. And that’s what’s the matter with you. You’re fighting false doctrines so hard that you’re losing love and patience and tolerance, and you’re hurting your own heart. And that’s what’s wrong with you.

Well, he said he went to a banker, or a man who worked in a bank and handled a lot of money, and whose business it was to test and tell and find counterfeit money. And he said to him, your job is to be able to locate and identify counterfeit money? He said, yes, that’s my job, that’s what I do in a big bank downtown.

Well, he said, you must have studied it a long time, he said. I did, I took a course in it in order that I might be able to identify counterfeit money. Well, he said, I suppose that you have handled vast amounts of counterfeit money before you got good and became an expert in this matter. The fellow smiled and said, the simple fact is, I have never handled any counterfeit money. And he said all the time that I was studying, I never saw a piece of counterfeit money. He said, we never looked at it. He said, what? You can identify counterfeit money and know it instantly as soon as your eye falls on it and yet you’ve never saw any while you were studying to work at that job? He said, that’s correct.

Well, the preacher said, what did that teach you? He said, they let us see and examine and feel and live with real government issue. And we became so familiar with every denomination, every one of the the numbers of bills that are put out by the government, and the silver, so that we knew the real things so well, that as soon as any variant appeared, we saw the difference in a second.

The preacher relaxed and went home smiling and told God what a fool he had been. He said, Heavenly Father, I have been out trying to teach the people to avoid counterfeit money when all the time I shouldn’t have been teaching them to know the real thing so well, that they’d be able to know the false thing across the street. So, he gave up his series against false doctrines.

So that’s why I never preach against Adventism nor against Father Divinism or against any of the isms. My business is to tell you all about Jesus Christ and all about what He did for you and all about what He will do for you and all about what the Bible teaches about the great major facts of the world and of heaven and earth and hell. And when you get familiar with them, you won’t need to worry about false doctrine, because you will know false doctrine clear across the street. So the way of the false religionist is a way that seems all right.

I wonder tonight how human beings educated in American schools can believe some of the things they believe, but they do, because they seem all right. Father Divine, for instance, bless him, peace, it’s wonderful. And he seems all right. Everybody’s happy, saying peace, peace, peace, and they claim to live right. I think they do. But they say he’s God. And God says, I am God. This little man says, I am God. I wonder who’s going to die. The God who says, I am God, or the little god who says, I’m God. I wonder who’s going to be buried and put away shamefacedly underneath the ground one of these days? The God who made the heaven and earth and says my name is Jehovah, I am God, or the little man who doesn’t know who his father was and who says, I’m God. I think I know which one is going to be buried. And yet there are people following him. All sorts of people saying peace, it’s wonderful and lining up just to get a touch of the father, poor people.

Then there’s the self-righteous. The self-righteous, those who believe they’re all right. You know, it’s possible, brother, to be wicked as the very devil and still think you’re all right. That’s a wrong way. The drunk man who staggered to his feet and says, I’m not so bad. And right in the midst of his drunkenness, defend his own righteousness, self-righteous on the wrong way. But he looks all right. There’s the carnal professor, the religious minded fellow who loves poetry and the Scriptures, but he’s not renewed inwardly. And he’s been confirmed and baptized, and he’s been given the work, but he’s not a Christian, nevertheless. He’s only a professor of Christianity.

Then there’s the worldly-minded person. The man James said, ye adulterers and adulteresses, know ye not that the friendship of the world is enmity with God. Whosoever therefore who will be a friend of the world is the enemy of God. And John says, love not the world neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him. And yet that same worldly minded fellow shows up with his new suit on Easter, and shows up with his flower on Mother’s Day, and shows up with all the external accoutrements that indicate that he’s a Christian, but he’s got a mind that worldly. He belongs not to the kingdom of God, but to the kingdom of Adam. Then there’s the hopeful procrastinator, who’s putting it off.

All of these I mentioned as samples of those who seem to be all right. The drunkard doesn’t. The thief doesn’t. The harlot doesn’t. But these seem to be all right. And because they seem all right, they go on believing themselves to be all right. And the end thereof are the ways of death. Can you think of anything? Are you serious minded enough to think with me a minute here and say to yourself, how terrible, how terrible to go on a lifetime, thinking honestly, believing that I’m alright. And then finding in the end that I was all wrong and was on my way to death?

Well, what is the way of life? The way of life is the way of Jesus Christ our Lord. He said, I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life. And they said, mine eyes have seen thy salvation. And He said, I am the Door and by me if any man enter in, he shall be saved. Jesus Christ, that’s the way. You can state it, this denomination or that one, but it’s Jesus Himself is the way and He calls us to Him. He calls us to Him to follow Him to take His cross, and walk with Him, and be willing to renounce sin. For He came to delivery his people from their sin and publicly owned Him as the Savior.

For if men will not own Him, He says, He won’t own us. But if we own Him before men, He will own us before the Father which is in heaven. It’s all so very, very simple. Come unto Me. Believe in Me. Receive me. Accept Me. Take My cross and follow Me. It’s all so very simple that the church doesn’t half believe it and the world doesn’t believe it at all. So, the way that leads to God and to peace and to a good end and to happiness at last, is the way where Jesus Christ is found.

And you know, He has His sheep everywhere. He has His people, His sheep, thank God, who know Him. Not only in this church, but in many churches. I often look back and remember the Catholic woman that I knew in another city. She was a converted woman. She loved Jesus Christ with glowing devotion. Her eyes shown when she talked about the Lord and salvation. And she did more for me and my family, I think, than any protestant in that city.

But she was a Catholic and went to the Catholic Church. She found the Lord somewhere in the middle of it all. Now, I admit, I don’t know how. In the midst of all the paraphernalia, I don’t know whether I’d ever see the Lord, but she found Him. You will find them among the Greek Orthodox. You will find them in Mar Thoma church by the thousands. You’ll find a few among the Coptics. You’ll find them among the Calvinists and the Armenians, the Baptists and the rest. The Lord has His people. They have all found the way. They’ve put away the way that seems right and they’ve taken the way that is right, which of course, always is Jesus Christ the Lord.

You know, friends, if you’re mistaken on some details, it’ll be all right anyhow, if you have found Jesus the Son of God. You get into an airplane and forget your baggage, you have your ticket, you’ll make it all right. If you will get to where you’re going. You can be mistaken about what town that is down underneath. You can be mistaken about the name of the plane you’re on. You may even be mistaken for the moment about the line, the company that’s flying it. But if you have your ticket and the plane is bound to the right city, you will be alright.

So, Christians can be mistaken about a lot of things and yet right in their hearts, and they can be right about a lot of things and yet wrong in their hearts. You say, which mode of baptism is right? I answer you with the answer of a good conscience to God. But have you got Jesus? Is He your Savior? Do you love Him now? Are you trusting Him now? Then you’re all right, you’ve got your ticket. And you’re all right, even though you’re mistaken about the little details around the margin. God isn’t hard to live with and He isn’t demanding, and He isn’t exactly. He only wants to know that you love Him with all of your heart.

What kind of God would God be that made a difference between heaven or hell, whether somebody had or hadn’t pronounce some word over me; Had or hadn’t put water on my head; Had or hadn’t dunked me into the into the water; Had or hadn’t confirmed it? What kind of God would he be, that would make arbitrary rules, as arbitrary as the rules of bridge or baseball and say now, you either play My way or you go to hell. What kind of God would that be? He certainly wouldn’t be the God of the Bible. He certainly wouldn’t be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who never cared about details.

The Pharisees were great for details. Their phylacteries had to be so wide. They stood in a certain position to pray. And they wouldn’t walk over the grass on the Sabbath day for fear they trample out the seed out of the head of grass, and thus be threshing. They wouldn’t gather an egg or eat it that had been laid on the Sabbath day. And otherwise, they made pests out of themselves. And they thought that God was such a one as they. Jesus Christ smiled and said, you don’t understand. You don’t understand at all, because I am here to save you. I’m here to be your Friend and your Redeemer and to die for you and to rise; and you come and follow Me. And if you follow Me, everything will be alright.

So, he turned their eyes away from eggs and grass and days and meat and clean hands. Those old Pharisees were so rotten inside, you could smell them a block away. And yet, they wouldn’t eat without washing their hands. They scrubbed themselves very carefully before they would touch a bite of food.

Jesus came in one day, relaxed and easy, traveling along with His group telling them about God and heaven and salvation. And Peter said suddenly, say, I’m hungry. And the Lord said, well, it is getting late. Let’s eat. So, they got a basket out and all got a meal. The Pharisees were ringed around them, all ringed around them, their little beards shaking, you know, all around Him. And Jesus sat down, broke the bread and handed Peter a piece, Bartholomew a piece, John a piece, and they all began to eat. And they ran around saying, look, look, He doesn’t wash His hands before He eats. Look, he’s defiling himself. Jesus stood up, put His lunch down and said to these hostile men around the body, not what enters into a man’s stomach defiles him, but what comes out of his heart makes him unclean. And they all turned and slunk away, because crawling out of their hearts were vile worms and serpents and toads and evil vermin and rodents. They were bad inside, but they were careful to wash in soap before they ate their lunch.

So, Jesus always smiled about the outside. He said, what do you have inside, friend? What’s inside of you. What do you have inside? It’s the religion, the way that is right is the religion of the heart inside. And if you’ve got Christ in your heart inside, it doesn’t make too much difference about the other thing. Salvation that depends upon the weather I never thought much for.

Suppose that a man lived way out in the Arizona desert, and he was dying, and there was a little creek there and in wet weather the creek flowed, but in dry weather it didn’t. And he had gotten converted, and he loves the Lord. But he was dying, and the pastor couldn’t baptize him because the creek was dry. And the Lord up in heaven looking down says, too bad about that because if it had rained and it had water, he would have made it through. But it didn’t rain, and they don’t have water and I’ve got to send him to hell. Too bad, I’m sorry to do it. Depart from me.

Can you imagine a grotesque situation like that? Never, never, Brother. Can you imagine God condemning a man because he didn’t wash his hands? You should wash your hands, surely. But what’s that got to do your relation to God? Jesus Christ is your relation. He’s your link. He’s the golden link that binds you to God.

So, you take Jesus Christ, love Him, believe Him, follow Him, trust Him fully, then obey, then obey Him as much as you know how. But in the meantime, know that He’s your salvation. He’s everything. There is a way that seems right, smooth and externally alright, but it’s a deadly way for it leads to the way of death. I hope you’re not on it. If you are, you don’t have to be. You can change tonight. You can move over unto the way that leads to God which is Jesus Christ our Lord. Let us stand.

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Tozer Talks

“Discouragement and What The Christian Can Do About It“

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Discouragement and What the Christian Can Do About it

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

May 5, 1957

Outline

Christian discouragement and its effects.

  • Tozer warns against discouragement, recognizing it as a valuable tool for the devil in his war against Christians.
  • Discouragement affects Christians of all ages and backgrounds, including the young and old, the sober-minded and the radiant.

Causes and cures for Christian discouragement.

  • Tozer: Christians struggle with discouragement despite appearing holy and happy.
  • Elijah’s loneliness led to discouragement, highlighting the importance of supportive relationships.
  • Tozer warns of discouragement in spiritual pursuits, emphasizing shared experiences among believers.

Spiritual encouragement in dark times.

  • Tozer emphasizes God’s promise of never leaving or forsaking believers, even in times of discouragement.
  • Tozer argues that Christians should not be discouraged by the wickedness of others, as it is a normal part of history, and the darkness makes the light of faith more visible.
  • Tozer cites Jeremiah as an example of a discouraged prophet who continued to pray and preach despite his feelings and believing men and women have learned how to live and shine in darkness over the past 2600 years.

Feeling trapped and captive despite freedom.

  • Tozer expresses feeling trapped and captive despite being an American, citing work and financial responsibilities.
  • Tozer reflects on captivity and spiritual growth, citing Ezekiel’s experience in Babylon.
  • Tozer advises young students to prioritize prayer and spiritual growth alongside academic work.

Christian biography and discouragement.

  • Tozer: Discouraged Christians are often gloomy and anticipate negative things, but God’s presence can give them rest and courage.
  • Tozer: Meeting gloomy brethren can be challenging, but God’s presence can overcome their discouragement and fear.
  • Tozer argues that many Christian biographers are dishonest by only highlighting the positive aspects of their subjects’ lives while hiding their flaws and failures.
  • Tozer believes it is the obligation of Christian biographers to tell the whole truth, including both the good and the bad, to their readers.
  • Tozer warns against discouragement from reading about great saints, sharing personal experiences to illustrate the importance of understanding their full story.

The importance of God’s help in times of darkness.

  • Tozer emphasizes the importance of living saints, not just those who have passed away, as they are the only ones God has now to continue His work.
  • Tozer encourages believers to trust God and write biographies about them, highlighting their good deeds and magnifying their impact.
  • Tozer emphasizes the importance of trusting in God’s help during difficult times, citing Psalm 103:1-6.
  • Tozer encourages believers to approach the Lord’s Supper with reverence, humility, and meek self-assurance, knowing that God is watching over them.

Message

This is Communion Sunday, but I am not going to talk about redemption; I’m going to assume it. And the text is found in Deuteronomy 1:21. Behold, the Lord thy God has set the land before thee. Go up and possess it. For the Lord God of thy fathers has said unto thee, fear not, neither be discouraged. Go up and possess the land and remember that God has said, fear not, neither be discouraged.

I want to talk a little about discouragement and what the Christian can do about it. This topic comes up in cycles of perhaps 10 or 12 years in this pulpit. Perhaps, it should come more frequently, because I know what a perfect nuisance discouragement is. It is one of the Christians worst enemies. Maybe it is not the greatest, I doubt that it is the greatest. I doubt that discouragement is the greatest enemy the Christian has, but it can easily be the greatest nuisance the Christian has to deal with. And it is a valuable thing to the devil on his war against the saints, because it is seldom recognized for what it is.

When a Christian becomes discouraged, his good, sound, common sense tells him he’s just being realistic. And he’s forgetting that it’s not realism, it is discouragement, and it works when no other temptation will. The Christian that would not be guilty of any sin willingly and who has victory enough that he or she doesn’t fall into temptation unwillingly, may yet be visited by this infernal, dark shadow from the pit, this thing we call discouragement, and greatly hindered in the Christian life.

Now, discouragement, as I’ve pointed out before on other occasions, is a mood. It is an emotion which can easily become a ruling emotion. And it is more than an emotion, it becomes after a while a disposition. It becomes an outlook and an attitude. It becomes a lens through which we see everything; dark glasses through which we behold everything before us. And of course, mood, is mental climate. It isn’t the man, it’s the weather that the man has on the landscape of his life. Just as weather isn’t the field or the farm, but it goes a long way to determine whether the farm shall have a good crop or not.

So, mood is not the man, but it determines whether there shall be a good crop and what kind of plants are going to grow. A joy and power and effective ministry simply can’t grow in the climate of discouragement. But fear and self-pity and self-engrossment are found there.

Now, you’d be surprised, I suppose, if you could know how many Christians at any gathering are bothered by a degree, at least of, discouragement, because it spares no class of Christian. There is the young Christian and there’s the old Christian. And I find that after serving the Lord, more or less raggedly and spotly, but serving him nevertheless for a long half or two thirds of a lifetime, I am nevertheless as prone to discouragement today as I was when I was 17. So that, if I’m any sample, even a poor sample, it is safe to say that this discouragement spares nobody. The sober minded man that you take to be a solid, well set up and self-assured person, may be suffering from a deep discouragement, so deep, that it’s affecting him physically.

And then there’s the radiant Christian, the shining Christian. I meet a few of them, not many, but you meet a few radiant Christians. They’re shining, ebullient Christians. They overflow. And yet, in the deep of their heart, very often, they also get discouraged. they keep the shine on, and they don’t mean to be hypocritical because they’ve learned to smile and muscles are used more than the other, so they still smile. But if you could get at the root of their lives, you’d find they were deeply discouraged over something.

And there are the very lofty Christians that seem to dwell so very high that you could hardly believe it possible that dwelling as they are, as it were among the angels, that they could be discouraged. But they do get discouraged anyhow. Then there are those practical, down to earth Christians that are followers of the Apostle James, the kind that are practical and salty. And you say, well, surely, they never would be discouraged, but they get discouraged, too.

And if you could know how many right here this morning came to church with heavy feet. Dragging what might not be very big feet, but that seemed to you, like as if each one weighed 40 pounds, dragging them off to church, because you felt you ought to. But you had no particular urge because of the discouragement that’s come upon you.

I want to talk a bit about the causes of discouragement and prescribe a cure. You know, the difference between negative preaching and or positive preaching of the Bible kind is, that negative preaching finds out what’s wrong and positive prescribes for the remedy. The doctor that would only diagnose, tell you what’s wrong and set you on your way, would only be half a doctor. And a book that would only tell us what’s wrong with us would only be half a book. But this book tells us what’s wrong and then tells us what to do about it. I want to do that myself.

Well, one of the causes of discouragement is loneliness. There was the man, Elijah. And he is a dramatic example of a great man that became deeply discouraged. He was discouraged because there was nobody around him that understood him and nobody that was going his way. He lacked the support of like-minded souls. It may be that in your home or in your office, or wherever you must spend a major part of your time, that you have no like-minded souls with whom you can have fellowship. Now, that may bring to you, as it did to Elijah, a great sense of loneliness.

And here is a little trick that I want to call to your notice. That the loftier and more dramatic the character is, the farther down he can plunge into discouragement. There never was a man I suppose in his lifetime, or perhaps in 1000 years period in Israel’s history, that could have gone onto the mount and dared to call the prophets of Baal to make a test. Elijah did it. And Elijah went from that mount where a fire fell, and the victory came straight down to the cave and to the juniper tree.

Now, the higher up you’re able to go, the further down you can go. They have a saying in the prize ring that the bigger they are, the harder they fall. And that same thing is true in the spiritual world. The farther up we get, the farther down we can come unless we watch ourselves and take the means of grace to save ourselves from discouragement. And the higher the ideals; some Christians are never very discouraged because they have never had very much to aim at. They don’t expect anything and when they don’t get it, they just say, well, I didn’t expect it anyway. But there are Christians with fine high ideals, higher than they’re able to reach. And a month or six months of struggling for ideals that they can’t reach, or haven’t yet reached, may turn them back on themselves in deep discouragement; the loftier the ideals, the spiritual aspirations, the wider we are open to the invasion of discouragement.

Now, what is the cure? The cure is simply to remember that your discouragement is based upon an error. You think you’re alone, when actually you are not. In the first place, there are 1000s of others just like you. There are merry clubs and redheaded clubs and ball-headed clubs. I wonder why we shouldn’t form somewhere, a little club of those who are prone to be discouraged and talk it out with each other. You’d find that there are a lot of people like you.

And if you were to go to heaven and gather around you this morning, a group of the redeemed who have gone there, that there would be 1000 of them, and they’d get up and testify. Let me tell you, that if they told the whole truth, they’d remind you that there were times when they felt pretty blue about this whole business of serving God in a bad world like this.

So, there are 1000s like you, and you’re not alone at all. And your discouragement is based also upon a failure to remember that God is with you, and that you’re never alone. In the old Methodist church, we used to sing a song I haven’t heard it I think since. I’ve seen the lightning flashing. I’ve heard the thunder roll. I’ve felt sin’s breakers dashing trying to conquer my soul. And I’ve heard the voice of Jesus telling me still to fight on. He promised never to leave me, never leave me alone. And the chorus was, no never alone, alone. Well, that’s true all right. The song doesn’t rate among the great, but it has a truth in it.

And we’re never alone. If you keep that in mind, friend, you’re never by yourself.  Are not the angels sent forth to minister unto them that shall be heirs of salvation? But you say, yes, yes, that’s all right. St. Teresa and Francis and Finney and Spurgeon; the angels no doubt helped them. What kind of a mother would it be that gave all of her attention to her healthy, strong children and let the sick ones lie and rot?

And what kind of God would God be if He sent His angels to bless St. Augustine and Julian and forgot us poor people that need it? No, no, He sends His angelic ministers to minister unto them who shall be heirs of salvation, but for our moment are in a tight spot. And wasn’t it when our Lord was praying in the garden and was sweating blood that the angels came and ministered unto Him. It was not when He was in Joseph’s carpenter’s shop, helping his father here and there and getting in the way and growing up to be a big boy. That wasn’t when he needed the angels. But it was when blood was flowing from His pores, as it were, sweat, or sweat as blood.

So, if you’re discouraged this morning, you’re the very one the Lord has pointed out. In fact, I have Scripture for this because it was when Elijah was in deep discouragement, so deep, that he went to sleep, blue and despondent, that God said to an angel, go down and feed Elijah the prophet, and he went down and baked cakes for Elijah. Not a radiant victorious prophet, but a discouraged, despondent prophet. And an angel had that job to do.

Now, another thing that may discourage us Christians, is the wickedness of the people; and we have Jeremiah for our Bible example. Jeremiah looked around him and every place he looked was wickedness, just every place. He had no newspapers in that day, but if he had, he would have found a whole front page and most of the rest of the paper covered with wickedness, or reports of wicked deeds or wicked plans. And Jeremiah just got plain tired of talking and not having anybody paying any attention to it. He’s called the weeping prophet. But he’s a long way from being a weeping prophet, but he did get discouraged.

What are you going to do about it now? You remember that man who vexed his righteous soul surrounded by iniquity, the stars in yonder heaven don’t shine in the daytime. Why, because there’s already light upon the earth. Why do they shine at night? Because the darkness makes them visible.

And so, in all the periods of history that have been reasonably decent, the great saints have not stood out. They have always stood out when the darkness was upon the earth. When our Lord came, there was darkness upon the earth. The church burst into paganism as into the deepest Stygian darkness. And the Wesleys came not at a time when everybody was praying. They came at a time when nobody was praying, except a little handful they called the Holy Club, or at least nobody we know about was praying.

So, my friends 2600 years have gone by since Jeremiah prayed and preached in discouragement. And for 2600 years, believing men and women have learned how to live and shine in darkness. And they’ve learned it from the very Jeremiah who was so discouraged so much of the time.

Then captivity. Do you ever feel that you were captive? Do you ever shrug cynically, when you heard somebody talk about our free, American way of life, and say to yourself, free? How do you get that way? I haven’t been able to get away from these four or five children for months. And I love them, and God knows I would die for them, but sometimes I want to scream. And you fellows that get up and go to your jobs, go to your works, punch the card, and hear the bell ring and then punch it out again and go home and back. And it’s repeating in and out, up and down, day in and day out, until you’re blue, and the two weeks’ vacation they give you it doesn’t help you at all, because you take your work with it and carry it back with you. Maybe two months might help you, but the two weeks do not. And you say, I’m captive, I feel I’m captive.

And then, if I’ve got anything left, I pay out in income tax. And if I’ve got anything left from income tax, somebody needs an expensive operation or I have to pay that out, and here I am. Call me a free American? Oh, dear friend, you’re the freest person in all the wide world even politically yet. I can stand up here and condemn anybody from the president down to the corner policeman. And not only that, I can have a loudspeaker out in front, condemning the policeman, loudly. He can’t do a thing. The freest nation in the world, still. So, let’s still thank God for the stars and stripes that are white with the prayers of 1000 saints in red with the blood of 10,000 men who died to keep us free, and blue with the baltic of the skies.

As the poet said, let’s thank God. But still, even though you’re free, you don’t feel you’re free. You feel you’re captive. And you know, it’s possible for preachers to get like that too? Just when I say to myself, now, I can shake my head and be free, I get a special delivery letter. And then there’s something to do.

And brethren, this man Ezekiel was captive. He was captive. And he was sitting among the captives by the River Chebar. I don’t want to travel. Some people want to travel all the time. I don’t want to travel. I could have gone to half a dozen or twenty different countries and had my way paid over the last year and wouldn’t go, because I find that almost everything is in Chicago that you will find anywhere else. And if it isn’t, you can always read National Geographic.

But I would like to see the river Chebar. I really would. I’d like to sit down there and dangle my toes in the River Chebar and have the old muddy stream flow by. And try to recapture the emotions that must have visited the breast of that young priest of Israel as he sat there despondent knowing that he was now a captive, a slave in a strange land. And everywhere he looked, he saw harps hanging on willow trees and a silence that you could cut with a knife. And except for the sobbing of some old lady or the petulant cry of a child, not a sound.

Ezekiel sat by the River Chebar. He was discouraged because he was a captive. But you know what Ezekiel saw while he was a captive that he didn’t see before he was a captive? He saw heaven opened and had visions of God. And you know that it’s right from where you are in your captivity. All people want to serve God the hard way. And I never could understand why.

I wrote here some time ago an answer to a question about how a young student going to college can get free so that he can do his college work and can still pray as much as he ought to, and I made several suggestions. And I said among them, why, readjust your life, adjust it so that your praying time fits in with your study time and all the rest. And not only that, sanctify, consecrate your study, so there’s something good too. And people wrote me mournful letters as though I had joined the cult of positive thinking and said, what in the world do you mean, Brother Tozer, you mustn’t tell young people that they’re to readjust their prayer life. Pray whether you make good grades or not. I didn’t tell him not to pray. I only told them that they could get victory over their academic captivity if they knew what to do about it. Nobody wanted them to know, I guess.

Well, anyhow, that was Ezekiel. What a captive he was. Just home and back again. The kitchen and the baby, when it isn’t needing attention, why, there’s something else. Say, I’ll lie down in five minutes. And you lie down five minutes, the telephone rings, and somebody’s banging on the back door. All he’s wanting you to do is to take a package for Mrs. Jones next door. Would you please? And of course, you would please, and you do, but your rest has been broken. So, you feel your captive. If you could only look up, you might see heaven open. And you might have visions of God. For always remember that when we’re too free, we get carnal and have our own way. And the fellow who has his own way is not likely to be looking for God’s way. But it’s when we have our own way taken from us that we get a feeling of discouragement. But out of it all and through it all, the light of heaven may shine.

Then there’s the gloomy brethren. It says just a few verses down from the text that I read. It says that the brethren made our hearts to be discouraged. The brethren made our hearts discouraged. Whether shall we go up they said. Our brethren have discouraged our hearts, saying the people is greater and taller than we. Half my lifetime has been spent, I think, reassuring people that the Anakim aren’t bigger than we are. They’re just not, that’s all. They may rate higher and weigh more, but in God, they’re not as big as we are. Nobody’s as big as a Christian if the Christian walks in the will of God. He’s bigger than anything you can bring against him any time. If God be for us who can be against this, but these discouraging brethren.

I like to meet old Tom Hare because he’s never discouraged. Now, I have no doubt, but that Irishman gets discouraged. I have no doubt. He’s a human being and as long as he’s in the flesh, he’ll have his times. But I have never met him when he was, I think. But I meet so many gloomy brethren. They’re always anticipating something that is going to happen. Usually, it doesn’t happen, but often they think it’s going to.

Well, do you know the answer and the cure for the gloom that is shed upon us by discouraged Christians? It is, My presence show go with thee, and I will give you rest. Now, that’s what God said to Moses. The brethren said, we can’t go up. And God said to Moses, My presence shall go with thee. And if the presence of God is with you, of whom should you be afraid? You know the answer too well and we’ll pass it on.

Then, I want to point out another thing that discourages the people of the Lord if they’re conscientious. Reading Christian biography does it. You say, now wait a minute; I’ve heard you recommend we read Christian biography. I do recommend we read Christian biography, but you have always got to know how to do things. It isn’t the doing of a thing that helps you, it is knowing how to do it and then doing it. If we do the right thing wrong, that’s not so good at all. And so if we read Christian biography wrong, it may harm us instead of help us. Because we read about the great souls that have lived and then we compare ourselves. And we begin to wonder if we’re Christians at all. And we get very blue as a result. Now, I’ll tell you, what causes that and what you can do about it.

Next month, that is in June, I’m to, O Lord, help me. I don’t know why I ever promised to do it. But I’ve got to go to Wheaton and speak at a convention there of editors and writers and journalists’ students. And they had two subjects they want me to handle. Neither one of them of which I am capable of handling. But they put a little pressure on. So I said, Yes. And one of them is, the obligation of the Christian biographer to his public.

Well, I have some convictions on that and I’m going to tell you at least one little thing I’m going to tell them, that most Christian biography is just plain not so, because the biographer feels that if he were to tell the truth about his subject, he would discourage the readers or take away something of the glamour from this great character.

So, he tells about all the high days and never mentions the low days. He tells about all the light shining peaks of his life and never mentions the deep hollows in his life. He tells about the time he was victorious and never mentions the time that he got defeated. He tells about the time that he prayed all night, but never tell us about the time that he went and fell asleep by nine o’clock and didn’t make it. And tells always the good things and hides the bad. Now, that is intellectual dishonesty. And it isn’t fair to the public that reads. And one of the obligations we owe to our public, if we write biography, is to tell the whole truth.

I told almost the whole truth about A.B. Simpson in Wingspread. And some people huffed and puffed and shook their feathers and said, you’ve sold him short. I didn’t sell him nearly as short as I should have. Because though he was a saint, he was a mighty human saint. And there never was a saint yet that didn’t have a human side to him. And that’s why Thomas a Kempis, himself a great saint said, if thou who would have peace of mind, examined not too closely in other men’s matters, and he was talking about Christian men too. Don’t dig around for weak spots, you’ll find them.

Have you noticed that Christian, that is, biblical biography, always helps you. Whereas the other kind of biography tends to discourage often, but Biblical biography tells the whole story. David wrote a hymn. Sure, he did. David slew the enemy. Sure, he did. David stole Bathsheba, Uriah’s wife, Bathsheba, and murdered Uriah. He did that. But that would have been kept out of the biography the Christians write, but not the one the Holy Ghost wrote. If you can know the whole thing about a person, you won’t be nearly as discouraged as if you only read the very top peak of experience.

Then you will say, well, I never had anything like that. Like the man we heard about, and I’ve often mentioned, who heard a fellow testify how he had been to sea and there was a great storm, and the ship was ready to sink. And he prayed and the Lord delivered them. He went home and cried half the night. He said, O God, you’ve never delivered me from a shipwreck. And God said, have you ever been to sea? He said, no. He had never been to sea, but he wanted to be delivered.

Now, what’s the answer about the discouragement that comes from reading about the great saints? I read about St. Francis and the others, and I say to myself If that man is a Christian, I’m nothing. Well, let me tell you. In the first place, he didn’t see the other side of it. The second place is, they’re dead. They’re dead. If A.B. Simpson were to stand up here, I’d promptly shrink down to the height of his shoe. But he’s dead. He sleeps on the hillside there at Nyack, and I’m still able to walk. And a living dog is better than a dead lion. And so even though you’re not as mighty a soul, as holy; and you’re alive and she’s dead.

We’ve gotten to a place here now after nearly 40 years of history back of this little church. We’ve gotten to a place here now where we get misty-eyed and nostalgic as we talk about the great souls that we once had here in our fellowship. But they’ve gone to heaven. And they can’t win a soul. They can’t teach a class. They can’t do what you’re called on to do. They’re not earning money. They can’t keep a missionary in Borneo. They’re gone. And blessed are they in their reward and their works do follow them. But they’re gone. And if God depended on the saints that are dead, the work would grind to a sudden, terrible jolt and all the churches would fall apart. So, God has to take what he’s got. And what he’s got is you and me; and we’re all God has now. So instead of being discouraged, get your teeth sunk in a little deeper and set your chin a little and trust God and say, Father, I thank Thee that though I’m not as great as the great souls of the past, I think, why I nevertheless, love Thee.

Just think what you could do with a biography. If you were to take just any of us here, McAfee here, or me or Brother Chase up here, any of these my eye happens to fall on. Just think what you could do if you’d write a biography about us and never tell one thought we had. Just tell which souls we were. Tell all the good and magnify that and put it in a perspective in a context where it looked shiny. Why, we’d have saints all over the church here, halos everywhere.

The simple fact is, we know each other too well to believe all that about each other. I know this man. I know how he lies on his face and prays by the hour with me and with Brother Moore and others that come in three times a week. We have our prayers up here. I know his love of God and His worship. I also know his faults and tell him so. And he knows mine and just shakes his head. So, my brethren, thank God you’re you and not somebody else. A little boy was asked, who would you rather be yourself or Lincoln? He said, myself; why, Lincoln’s dead. And there’s sense in that. It was good sense.

So, my friends, remember this and then we’re through for the morning. Now listen to these words from Isaiah 50:7-10, For the Lord GOD will help me; therefore, shall I not be confounded: therefore have I set my face like a flint, and I know that I shall not be ashamed. He is near that justifieth me; who will contend with me? let us stand together: who is mine adversary? let him come near to me. Behold, the Lord GOD will help me; who is he that shall condemn me? lo, they all shall wax old as a garment; the moth shall eat them up. Who is among you that feareth the LORD, that obeyeth the voice of his servant, that walketh in darkness, and hath no light? let him trust in the name of the LORD, and stay upon his God.

So, if you’ve been coming through shadows and darkness. And if you’ve been threatened by the devil or your enemies, you have a perfect right to stand up and say, the Lord God will help me. Wherefore should I be confounded? And hear God say, all of you who walk in darkness and have no light. Trust in the name of the Lord and stay yourself upon your God and you’ll be alright. And I believe that’s true of me and of you and of this church. Do you believe it. Amen.

So let us come up of the Lord’s Supper this morning with cheerfulness, with reverence, humility, but with meek self-assurance as well. Knowing that God didn’t call us out to forget us and leave us somewhere along the way, or rust on the highway, but that the Lord is looking after every one of us. He takes care of every one of us. He knows our names, all about us. And we’re safe in His keeping though storms around us are sweeping. For He’s the Pilot of Galilee.

Now, we will have the communion service to follow. And it is for every child of God. You don’t have to be a member of this church. We recognize that this church is an organization, whereas the church of God is an organism. It is composed of all who are members of His body by the new birth. So, from wherever you come and whoever you are, if everything’s right between you and God, you join us this morning as we go on into the service to follow.