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“The Cruel, But Effectual Plow in Fallow Ground“

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The Cruel, But Effectual Plow in Fallow Ground

Pastor and author, A.W. Tozer

December 30, 1956

Now, about 18 years ago, I preached a sermon, and then it got written up and got into a booklet. And I’ve steered away from ever preaching it since, because I didn’t want to repeat myself. I’ve been told wryly by certain people that they have heard men who’ve written books, preach their old chapters over again and they have sat in the back of the of the church and gone over word for word, the chapter. And the way they told me about it, I concluded it wasn’t a very acceptable thing to do. So, I’ve tried to steer away from it. But I feel I’ve just got to go back and preach again on the text. Sow to yourselves in righteousness, reap in mercy; break up your fallow ground: for it is time to seek the Lord, till he come and rain righteousness upon you.

My old friend, Burt Miller back there, may have heard me preach on this once out in Ohio. If he did, he’s going to hear it again. Because I want to talk to you about certain truths that underlie this text. Sow to yourselves in righteousness, reap in mercy and then particularly this, break up your fallow ground for it is time to seek the Lord. I told you this morning that I did not want at the end of the year to talk about what had been and scold you about it, but rather talk about what could be and what is to come. Now we’ll proceed.

Here are two kinds of ground mentioned, fallow ground and plowed ground. And I don’t know what you, in your part of the country mean when you say, fallow ground, because the scientific farmers use the word otherwise than what it was used in Bible days and out where I came from, before there were scientific days. But here are two kinds of ground, fallow ground and plowed. Now what is fallow ground? Well, fallow ground is ground that may be fertile alright, that doesn’t need to be necessarily, but it can be fertile ground. But it has been allowed to run waste.

And there it lies, this piece of ground as safe and smug, and I suppose, well satisfied with itself. No doubt it’s collecting the tradition and buttons for attendance at Sunday school. But it’s a safe, smug, self-satisfied, at ease in Zion affair. And the result of it is, nothing grows on it but green briars and burdock because nothing’s been planted on it and it hasn’t been plowed up. It’s just lying there. Its potentialities are tremendous, but it’s not getting anything done to it, so it lies there. It has no life in it. No miracle of life is present here, because it’s lying fallow, it has protected itself. No doubt it can turn to its constitution and justify its fallowness by Article 3 and by the marginal note showing that it was changed at a council in 1916. But there it lies nevertheless, fallow and there’s nothing growing on it. The blue jay won’t light on it except by mistake because there isn’t any reason why he should. There’s nothing there. It’s simply fallow ground. And then the farmer decides that he’d better put that back in production again. So, he gets out a plow.

Now, a plow was never a pleasant thing, never. Plows are not meant to be pleasant. They do not have pearl handles on them. And they have never been made soft. There never was soft plow yet. So, the farmer gets out his plow, and in olden times, his horses or oxen, back in the days when this was written. And that cruel plow goes to work on this smug, self-satisfied field that’s been lying there so long that it’s gotten gray with tradition. It’s got a beard on it because it’s been there, well-satisfied and content.

But now the plow starts. And so, there’s first the disturbance, and then it’s travailing and it’s pained and bruised and it’s unprotected. There’s one thing about a field, it can’t be protected and plowed at the same time. It just can’t be. A field has to have its fences, at least part of it, taken away so that the plow can get in. So begins the plowing. And if a field could bleed, it would bleed. And if it could mourn, it would mourn. If it could weep, it would weep. If it could suffer, it would suffer. For everything is going on there to make it suffer.

And so round and round go the oxen or the horses, and round and round until it has been thoroughly plowed. Not scratched on the surface, but plowed down deep. And somebody who doesn’t understand, watching the plow, would say, what a cruel man that farmer is. Why, I remember that field for nine years now, and it’s been one of the nicest little old green briar patches in the world, ground squirrels, and blue jays. But now look what he’s doing. He’s plowing it up. He’s cruel, that man. And they won’t come to hear him preach.

But nevertheless, I want to tell you what happens when you get your ground plowed up. After the plow has done its work and that field has had its smugness knocked out of it, and its safety removed and his protection taken away from it, and it knows what it is to be attacked and invaded and chopped up and chewed down and chewed out, and got mad by the plow. Then the wonder of life begins. That which had been lying and only now potential, now becomes a wonderful field full of life with bursting seed and life, and there’s birth and growth and there’s the hand of God manifested in corn or wheat or whatever it may be. And people who go by say, look what a comeback that field made. While I remember when it was an old, infertile thing lying there. But now look at it, why, the wheat’s as tall as a man bent over, with great, brown golden heads of wheat. Well, that’s what happens when the plow gets at the field.

Now, that’s the illustration only. But the application is, that there are two kinds of lives. There’s the fallow life and the plowed life. The fallow life is the contented life. That is, he’s the Christian who is quite satisfied with himself. He’s at ease and he has slowly grown a protective shell. He’s heard all the preachers on the radio and off. And he’s read everything so that he has grown a protective shell, and you can get at him. He’s protected. There he is. God can’t even get at him, because God didn’t say, I’m going to plow your ground. He didn’t say that. God didn’t say, I’m going to plow your ground. God can’t even plow him, because he’s too well-satisfied with himself.

And I don’t mind telling you I hate to wash our linen in public and talk before company, but I don’t mind saying to you that one of the heartaches of my life is that a number of our people and some of you may be here now. A number of our people have grown old and gray in this church, and you’re as fallow and as unproductive as you were when I came here, a black-haired stripling, 28 years ago. And I say that’s a tragedy too terrible. The only thing that’s changed about you is the color of your hair. You’re still the same fallow person you were before. Because you’ve thrown up a protective shield. You will not let anything get after. You’ve built a religious fence around yourself, and you’ve come to approve yourself. But do you know what’s wrong? There is no fruit and there is no growth. And there is no miracle of life, and there’s no wonder of bursting seed, and there’s no miracle of springing fruit. There isn’t anything there but a fallow life.

And the churches of this country brother are full of them. The churches are full of them, fallow lives. They’ve been on the board since the year 1, and they will be there yet, at the end of time. And there they are, religious fellows that there’s no more love, no more tenderness. They’ve never ripened any. There is no mellowness There is no evidence of penetration, no spiritual insight. No, no upward rush of spiritual life, but they’ve remained just what they were because they’ve protected themselves from the plow. They won’t let the Holy Ghost get to them. And there are some of us like that here tonight. We just won’t let the Holy Ghost get to us. We have become what they called blasé. And I think that’s French for dead. Anyhow, it’s French for burned out and dull and sophisticated and a state of just having heard everything, a perpetual yawn inside of their soul. And there isn’t anything that will stir them, no matter who comes to preach. They will come and listen, but they won’t let the plow ever get to them.

Then thank god, there’s the other kind, and we’ve had a lot of them around here and some of them are on the mission field Brother. Some of them are preaching the gospel in various parts of this country and some of them are still with us. And I’ve watched you grow and lived beside you, and in some instances, sat on the committees with you and watched you grow. Well, that’s the plowed life.

Now, what does that mean? It means that you begin to get discontented with your crop of green briars and burdock, and you’ve decided that you’d like to be a fruitful Christian. That you’re weary of producing nothing. That the Son of God’s love beats down, but only bakes you. And the rain of God comes down as sweet and merciful upon you, and yet doesn’t do you any good, and you’re getting weary.

Now, the first step toward any progress in the spiritual life is discontentment. And don’t you let anybody take a New Testament and try to take away your discontent. I am weary of these counselors whose whole job in life is to make everybody satisfied with his spiritual state. I say we need to be dug up sometimes. Not all the time, but plowed occasionally. Now, the plow only went in there once a year, but it did a fine job while it was there. And so discontent, dissatisfaction, and when would there be a time when normally and psychologically, we’d get discontented anymore than now.

We stand only a breath away from the New Year. And you’ve got behind you old ’56 with her troubles and her miseries and her scares and her frights and her weariness. Now look back over it. Are you satisfied with it? Have you been what you should have been? Have you followed God as you should have followed Him? Are you contented with 1956 and with yourself? If you are, then you might just as well go to sleep because I have nothing to say to you. You have got to be discontented before there can be anything else.

Then there must come contrition. There must come a sorrow of heart, and down go the fences. And there must come pain of heart, and we must put ourselves in peril. There must come a stirring up and a humbling and a seeking and a confessing and the going down before God either in church or in private. I don’t care which. I have gotten more from God alone in my own room by myself than I ever did any time anywhere with a company of people. And if you want to do it that way, it’s all right with you. All I’m afraid of is, that if you get out of here, you won’t. And so we insist sometimes that people come and do it publicly, because we know if we let them go, they won’t do it privately. That’s the only reason I ever give invitations, because I don’t care where your knees are resting. But I only know that if there’s a humbling and a seeking and a confessing, there will be preparation for progress at least.

And so that is the cruel plow. That’s the cruel plow. And the man who uses it, or who even exhorts toward it as a rule, isn’t a very popular man. I have noticed that the popular preachers of the day are very careful to be so general, that the plow point never gets in. That’s why we can have campaigns and not have any lasting results, or not raise the moral standards of the country. That’s why we can boast of 100 million church members in America, at the same time, sadly, admit the lowest moral standards in the nation’s history, all one at the same time. More church members and worst sinners, and very often, they’re the same people.

Now, that cruel plow, the odd thing about that is you’ve got to use it yourself. Nobody else can use it. You’ve got to take the protection away from yourself and take the shell off and let the Holy Ghost get to you. And if you do that, then comes the new life. Then comes the wonder then comes that miracle of new life. Then comes the manifestations of God. Then comes fruit and birth and life. And people go by and say, what happened to this fellow? He’s made a comeback. Why, I remember when you looked at him, it was as much as your life was worth. He gave you the half wham just looking at you. He was a cold fundamentalist, satisfied with himself. But now, bless me, he’s warm and fragrant and vibrant and full of something. What happened to him? Well, he got plowed up, and God Almighty poured seed in there, and the kind rains of Heaven came down and the sun warmed it by day. And now the miracle of life has taken place.

Now my friend, religious history shows these two phases, the dynamic or plowed life, when there’s advance and victory and growth and miracle and life, and the static or fallow phase, when there is safety and protection and weakness and silence and barrenness. That’s why I don’t stand always with my own Society, because I see that as we get more and more barren, and more and more fallow, we multiply protective regulations so nobody can get to us. And we’re dying by inches, because we will not expose ourselves. The old days our brother told about back there, 1897, when man had nothing but the will of God, their two knees and faith. Why, that was the day of breaking open things and doing things in the Alliance. But we’re so protected now that God Almighty couldn’t withdraw his forces from us for ten years and we wouldn’t find it out, because we’ve got it all regulated and looked at. And I want this church, we’ve got its constitution, but it’s so skeletal and necessary under law that we have it or I wouldn’t even have that. Because I find that when Christians are growing, they’ve got nothing but God. When they’re dying, they have regulations to protect them from finding it out.

Now, my brethren, these two phases are here, and they’re in church history. I don’t want to belabor it, but only point out that there was an old man one time. He had been young, but now he was a pretty old man. I can see him as a tall, upright old man with quite a beard, dignified and stately. For he never but once in his life did anything that wasn’t dignified that I can find in the Scriptures and his name was Abram. And he was in Ur of the Chaldees, thoroughly fallow, satisfied with Abram, quite, and making idols history tells us. And therefore, it was quite alright, thank you, a respectable religionist, and he was a statistic.

And then one day a strange moving came on his heart and he got discontented, and he walked around looking for somebody to talk to and nobody could understand him. And then when he did dare to bare his heart to somebody they said, now, keep calm brother, don’t get too stirred up. Religion will drive you insane if you to get too stirred up, you know. Psychiatry has proved that. So, Abraham had to get away and throw off each of the “go crazy” fellows and pulled up stakes and uprouted himself and started for a land he had never been in before, not knowing where he was going. Talk about plowing a man up. That was it, sir. He didn’t know his destination. He got his ticket and it was blank. And God said, now, you go but you don’t know where you’re going. But Abraham said, God, do you? And God said yes and Abraham said, that’s enough. And then started the fruit, fruit abundant began to flow out of the man’s life.

Well, then there was Israel in Egypt. You remember how Israel in Egypt, with no power, no victory, no advance, no life, multiplying physically, but having no spiritual life at all. For 100 years, Israel lay fallow, out of the will of God, or at least out of the directive will of God. And then one day God called a man named Moses. And Moses answered the call and went and said, let my people go. And out from Egypt there came a people, a disturbed people, an uprooted people, the people who were leaving or was for they were the people of Israel, leaving the old land and going out where they scarcely knew. And then came the miracle and the cloud of the fire and the crossing of the Red Sea and the manna and the wonder of God’s leadership, all because they got out of that old sandy deathbed where they’d been for 400 years. They had exchanged the static situation for the dynamic.

And then came the Judges. When you read the Judges you will find that there would be periods when Israel would go completely static and fallow. She would lie under the control of some foreign nation, then God would raise up some wild fellow who hadn’t much education or culture but who knew God. And Ehud or Samson or somebody would rise up and do strange disturbing things. And the plow would go into the soil, and Israel would have a renaissance and would come back to life again for a while and the blessing of God would begin to flow.

Well then, under the time the long cressence before Christ’s time, broken only on the surface by the Maccabees. But there was that long period between Malachi and the birth of Jesus, 400 years about, between the strange man named Malachi, that means a messenger of God. That’s all we know about him. History can’t locate the man. But he wrote that terrible, wonderful four chapters of Malachi.

But oh, after that, for 400 long years, there was the fallow ground. There was the static situation. Israel wasn’t growing. She was so dead, so infertile, that when the Prophet talked about the coming of Christ, he called Him a root out of a dry ground. He was born in a miracle out of the dry ground, for Israel was a dry ground. And then when Jesus came and the Gospels began to take place, the events of the Gospels and then the death and resurrection of our Savior and the book of Acts, the outpouring of the Holy Ghost.

And then came the miracles and the wonder. Then came the spread of the gospel. Then heaven opened and shown in its fullest glory. And what had been 400 years of drought, now became a long period of fruitfulness and power. And the rain descended and the floods came and the sun by day and the moon by night, and the plow and the uprooting and the disturbance and the persecution and the praying and the long vigils with God, and the disturbed upset patterning of our pattern of our living. Now, that came when their plow got in. Now that’s the way history shows it you see. I’m illustrating from history, and nobody can gain say it nor deny this is so.

And then there was that long period after the awakening of learning in the Middle Ages, or a little after. And then came Erasmus and the rest of them, the humanists, and they began to do translate and just rediscover the writings of the old Greeks and the rest. And men began to plow themselves up mentally. And they had what is called the Renaissance.

And then about that time also, there came that great big ploughman, we call Martin Luther. Now he was rough, and for an educated man, and for a man as brilliant as he was, for don’t forget, he was not only brilliant, but he was one of the great musicians of his time and composers. And yet he was as rough as a bull, literally. And there came that great big fellow. Now, if it had been some soft rubber-nose plow that was out to be kind to people, and remember they’re just dust, there never would have been any reformation, and you would have been kissing the cardinal’s ring come next Wednesday. And you would never have known the gospel that set you free. But this great big rough fellow had a plow. I think personally, he went down in too deep and hurt people just kind of because he wanted to. But he did it anyhow.

And Erasmus, the polished white-handed scholar who knew so much and did so little and who refused to go along although he believed in the evangelical movement. He wouldn’t go along with it because he said he wasn’t called to revolution. He was called to educate people. But Martin Luther was called to get people converted. And then we had the Reformation. And a nation was born and the Bible was released from its chains in the monasteries and got out among the plain people, so the German youth could read the Scripture and memorize it and quote it as he followed the oxen. And then followed after that period, periods of theory and indoctrination and marking of time, static periods, broken only occasionally by ploughman who came and put in the plow.

Revivals, we call them now in history and there they are. It’s not the wild imagining of an excited preacher. They’re there in history. They’re there, revivals in Ireland, revival in Wales, revival in England, revival in New England, revival in the middle western part of the United States under Finney, revival in Korea, revival in China under Sung. Those periods when a ploughman arrived, and men began to plow up their own hearts. And the periods of theory and a time marking were all broken up, and the plow was put in. Then men did daring things, and they’re walked out in the midst of danger. They did dangerous things.

But nowadays, I want to preach on it some time, but nowadays, our young people, they lack the spirit of daring in their Christian lives. They’ve got to be played into the Kingdom, entertained when they’re there and jockeyed along and fed out of a bottle, and nobody talk rough to them for fear they’ll backslide. And treated like a house plant raised inside, watched over lest they be told that there’s something dangerous in the gospel.

Brother, there is something dangerous in the gospel. There is a no and a yes in the gospel and the no means death and the yes means life. There is a cross and a resurrection in the Gospel. And the cross means death and the resurrection means life. There is a plow and there is fruit. And there is never any fruit before there’s a plow. And to tell our young people as is being done up and down the land, to tell our young people that it’s fun serving Jesus is to tell them a lie that may damn their souls. The cross of Christ is not fun. The cross of Christ is the instrument of your death. And up out of your stony grief and up out of your Joseph’s new tomb, God will bring you in life and wonder, and there’ll be blessing and fruitfulness and there may even be joy that you can’t contain. But it will not be the cheap joy that’s being offered by those who lead our young people astray.

And I’d rather preach to a few young people who have maturity enough to come out to hear me preach, than to preach to 10,000 of them who want only to be entertained, or who want to be told the grand lie that Christianity is another form of entertainment and that you can be, have a lot of fun following the Lord. Have you ever found much fun in it, brother, down there where your life was in danger? I have no trouble at home. I have no trouble with my family. I have no financial troubles. I’m not particularly sick though my family claims I’m neurotic on the subject. But there’s nothing wrong with me. We get along all right. There’s never an unpleasant word or thought between us. I’m not in trouble and yet I have a heart ache two thirds of the time.

But it’s a heartache for the church. Not only this one, but a heartache for the church of God. The heartache for bad evangelism and mislead young people. A heartache for the honky-tonks and juke-joints that pass for Christian churches these days. And I got a heartache for it. No trouble at home, nothing to worry about. I own this suit. It’s paid for. And I know I’m going to get my breakfast. And nobody’s after me. But there’s a heartache, a self-imposed plowing that keeps going on all the time in my heart, not always with the same intensity I suppose, but certainly keeps going all the time in my heart. Why are God’s people so insufferably stupid? Why are the dear sheep of God so easily led astray?

In an ad that I have seen in some of our current religious magazines, there is a fellow, a round-faced fellow that would look like a Christian whether he was or not. You know, he’s got a built-in smile there that he got from his mother in overeating, and he’s written a book. And the advertising for the book is this, “Now, Soul Winning is Easy.” Get his book and soul winning is easy. And to get a few dirty dollars, the magazines publish that stuff and except the money, or else they don’t know any better. But imagine saying, soul winning is easy, my brother. Soul winning is easy. Soul winning is no easier than giving birth to a child. Soul winning just can’t be done by rule of thumb. And it can’t be done. after any methods known by a man or that can be put into a book and sold with royalties attached. You can’t win souls easy. You can make these, what do you call them, these cheap converts that aren’t converts.

Well, anyhow, you can swing them from one religion to another. You can get them to bow their head and say I take Jesus, but you can’t get them converted. For conversion means wrestling a soul loose from hell’s grip, and you don’t do that easy. Getting a man converted means getting him born out of an old deadness into a new life, and that doesn’t come easy. Things are made easy enough and the result is we see all around about us. And so no daring, no danger, no growth, no upset, no plowing, we’re protected and cared for and watched over in order that we might not find out there’s a cross in Christianity. The only cross we know is the one on the church steeple, and the one on the Easter card. But the cross on which He died is carefully hidden behind the door.

My brethren, you can do two things with his talk tonight. You can shake your head and say that’s too rough for me. I preached this sermon 18 years ago on a missionary who is a missionary now, but he was there. Oh, brother, he said, that was brutal. It was brutal, but he went down to the altar. He met God. And he’s been a successful missionary on the field for some years. Brutal maybe. And you can say that man’s too brutal. I’m not coming back. Well, I’ll be sorry If you don’t and it will be another heartache. But I can bear to think. But you can’t dare, you can’t afford to take that attitude, because fruit follows the plow.

God’s power comes when it’s called out and never when the church is in hiding. What I’m worried about here is, we’re too cultured. We know too much. We’re too well educated. We’re too smooth. We’ve got it all worked out. And everybody is dressed so neatly. And nobody’s in trouble with himself. That’s what I’m worried about. God’s power comes when it’s called out, brethren, and never, never when we’re protecting ourselves. Never when we’re in the rut, never when we’re lying fallow. Never when we’ve got the fence up all the way around. And no matter who the preacher is, he can’t get past our guard. No, never does the power of God come then. Because then it’s satisfaction, and resting on our lees, and sterility and infertility, and borderline death. And then, maybe in a meeting like this, the blessing of the Holy Spirit penetrates the disguise and gets past the shield and gets through to the heart and power is released into the life. And the church dares to do something.

You know what can happen to us friends? We can get middle-aged in our church life the same as we can in our normal physical life. I used to remember when I never walked up a pair of stairs, never. I always ran up the stairs and invariably, two at a time. I used to remember when I never allowed a bus to get away from me. If it was in the same block, I caught it and got on. But you know, I’ve philosophically concluded that’s no way to live. In other words, middle-age caught up with me. And my physical daring is gone.

There was a day when long trips and all. I don’t want to go nowhere now, no sir. Lovely English, but I don’t want to go anyplace. I just want to, if I was a tree, I would just be happy and stay right there. I don’t want to go anywhere. And I never go out of the city but what I wish I was back and hate every inch of the journey. Middle-age brother, and you can get that way in the church. We can drag our feet and sit on our hands and be overcautious and not have any daring nor any aggressiveness.

All right, God says, go ahead. If you want to do it, I’ll just withdraw my power. You just go ahead now and become middle-age in your church life, and go through the routine. Have your elections and your board meetings and your gatherings and go your way and get hard and fallow and fruitless. I can’t do a thing unless you plow yourself up, plow up your fallow ground He said. He didn’t say, ask me to do it. We’ll have no all-night prayer meeting asking God to plow up this church. That would be as ridiculous as asking God to go out and drive you home in your automobile. God is not going to do what you’re supposed to do. God isn’t going to fry your ham and eggs in the breakfast nor perk your coffee. He’s given you sense enough to do it, and then you do it. And there are some things God won’t do. And so, God isn’t going to plow you up. God says, you plow up your fallow ground, for it’s time to seek the Lord.

And then will come miracles, and by miracles I don’t mean necessarily physical manifestations of power, even in healing as precious as that. I tell you; I’ve seen miracles that healing never could touch. I’ve seen an old bum get up and look all around wonder what had happened to him, and go on from there to live a wonderful, happy Christian life. I’ve seen a few homes that were broken, cemented back together again by a miracle of the grace of God. And I’ve seen young people full of nonsense. Not here tonight, I think, or if he is, he’ll forgive me. But I saw a young fella who was hot rod driver, if you please. He loved to zoom around corners, you know, on one wheel. And then one day, McAfee walked up and slapped his back and said, what’s the matter with you? Why don’t you get right with God? That same night I preached and I don’t remember what it was, but the plow went down his back. And He almost ran down that south aisle into this room. And I think his two knees hadn’t more than reached the floor until God met his soul.

Well, he’s in his last year at Nyack now and I got a letter from the Foreign Department and one from the Home Department, asking about him. Do you recommend him? And I wrote a letter of recommendation that would sell an electric fan to an Eskimo. And then they said, do you know anything against him? Well, I said, if there’s anything against him, it’s he’s too enthusiastic. But if that’s a fault, it’s one that’s not very common in our day. That’s a miracle brother. And that’s a bigger miracle than the healing of a cancer, though I’d like to see cancers healed too. If God Almighty in His kindness would deliver people, I’d like to see that. But I’d rather see this kind of thing happen to a young man in the dawn of his life, to change him from an opinionated, young, smart aleck to a happy, glorious, young Christian. That’s a miracle to me. And that’s the kind of miracles I want to see. And the other ones will come along if God wills it.

But my brethren, you have got to follow the plow. And you’ve got to use it and then miracles will follow you. For the safety and security of your life, dare to throw yourself out on God for something new. Do you suppose we dare to do that this year? Are we going to go around the squirrel cage this year, one more year around the squirrel cage? Well, I’m going to tell you something brethren, I’m not. I’m not. If God will help me, I’m not. I’m not boasting. I’m meekly, humbly making a statement. I am not. And if there’s going to be barrenness and continued fallowness and no effort to break it and no intention to do anything about it, then there must be some realignments and some partings of the way. Because I don’t intend to. I will be sixty years old next April 21. And a man my age can’t afford to fool around brother. I haven’t got an awful lot of years ahead of me, maybe. I’m not on my own strength. My family rides me for this. But it’s just realism and common sense. Suppose I put on a fiery red shirt and didn’t even tuck it in and ran around trying to be young? Wouldn’t I look silly? I am just admitting my position is off and I am not going to waste 1957 if God Almighty will help me.

And I have a little book here that I’ve got prayers in that go back to 1937. I keep it somewhere here in one of my, and one of those prayers is this one, O God, let me die right, rather than continue to live wrong. I would rather be right with God with His face in full view and drop over and be lugged out, than to continue to be a fallow, unproductive old man on his way to Carlisle old folks home, worse than he was when he was 30 years old. And I’m not going to have it. By the grace of God, I’m going to keep the plow in my life. And I’m the worst member of this whole outfit. And if God can bless me, he can bless you.

What about you, sir? Are you going to let God help you? Are you going to take the fence down, take the protection away and ask God to help you this new year to dash and dare to go out and believe for something new? If you are, God will work on your side. And only high heaven can visualize what may come to you in 1957, if you’ll put away your carelessness and your smugness and your contentment, and plow yourself up until you bleed.

Now, brethren, we’re going to close this meeting, I’ve had a friend who has been my friend. We call each other by our first names. And I think there are not three people in the world that call me by my first name, and he’s one of them. And I’m going to ask him to come down here after a while when I indicate it and take us before God and asked for help for us.

Now, first of all, who wants prayer, for you? You’ll dare to make this kind of prayer, O God, so arrange providential circumstances for me that I will keep plowing myself up and keep fertile and productive rather than become stale and fallow this year. And no matter what cost God, I want to make progress and go on with Thee so I’ll be a better Christian a year from now than I am now. How many will say, pray for me and stand? Brother, Burton Miller, will you come down here please? My friend, Reverend Burt Miller, evangelist and a man with great success in starting churches and resurrecting old churches. Come on up here Burton. Take us before God’s and ask God to do something for us, this church, and me, and these fellas back here who share my responsibilities and trouble.

O God in the name of thy holy Son, our Lord Jesus Christ. We would bow the knee and bow the heart tonight with all sincerity. We’ve listened tonight, Lord, with Eternity’s values in view. We refuse to go the way of the world and the flesh and The Devil. We chose tonight to go God’s way in God’s time. Lord, we thank Thee for the plow tonight. We thank Thee Lord it isn’t pearl-handled, but it’s genuine and real. The Sword of the Spirit, the Word of God. We feel like we’ve been slain tonight. We thank You for it, Lord. And we will go down before Thee in sackcloth and ashes. We will do it now. And as thy people respond to the call of Thy Spirit through Thy Spirit-anointed servant, Lord, meet us tonight. Meet us in this church, with its long God-blessed history. But Lord, don’t let it get on the shelf. Let better days be ahead, days of revival power and fire. O Lord, were so sick of the sham and the program of today with its likeness and its cheapness so far from the Word of God, we can’t even recognize it. Lord. We go back to the book and back to the blood and back to the way of the Holy Ghost, and we do it now. We do it now Lord, not just by standing up here, raising our hands and going down before Thee on our knees. Give us a spirit of brokenness tonight. Lord, as we meet up with our fellow men these days, we’re so helpless to do too many good. We’re so helpless to help them to God. And that’s why they’re going here and they’re seeking things that seem to be genuine, but are so false. Forgive us for failing Thee. Forgive us, Lord, for being afraid to be genuine Christians and the followers of the Lord Jesus. We trust Thee to do it, Lord, even now, even now. I feel while we’re praying folks, God be pleased and begin to move right now, don’t you? I want to be among you to do that. God bless you richly. Amen.

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“How We Can Prevent the Devil from Taking Advantage of Us“

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“How We Can Prevent the Devil from Taking Advantage of Us“

Pastor and author, Aiden Wilson Tozer

January 6, 1957

I would like to share briefly as I can about how you can prevent The Devil from getting an advantage of you during this year. Paul says, in 2 Corinthians, the second chapter, I determined this with myself, that I would not come again to you in heaviness. For if I make you sorry, who is he then that maketh me glad. But the same which is made sorry by me. And I wrote this same unto you lest when I came, I should have sorrow from them of whom I ought to rejoice? Having confidence in you all, that my joy is the joy of you all. Now I understand.

There’s something afoot to try to prove that Paul was a Southerner, having confidence in you all that my joy is the joy of you all. For out of much affliction and anguish of heart I wrote unto you with many tears, not that you should be grieved, but that ye might know the love which I have more abundantly unto you. But if any have caused grief, he hath not grieved me, but in part that I may not overcharge you all. Sufficient to such a man is this punishment which was inflicted of many. So that contrary-wise, ye are rather to forgive him. And comfort him lest perhaps such a one should be swallowed up with over much sorrow. Wherefore, I beseech you that ye would confirm your love toward him. For to this end also did I write, that I might know the proof of you, whether ye be obedient in all things. To whom ye forgive anything I forgive also. For if I forgive anything, to whom I forgave it, for your sakes, forgave I in the person of Christ, less Satan should get an advantage of us. For we are not ignorant of his devices.

Now, that last verse will be the text for tonight. And I want to say that life is not a game, but a warfare. And everything depends, or almost everything depends upon what approach we make to the Christian life. If we imagine the Christian life to be a game, we’ll act as if it was. If we know it to be a war, we’ll act as if it was a war. Because life itself is at stake. When the Western plays the Eastern or when the Yankees play the Dodgers, it is a game. A little money is in it and a little glory, but it’s a game and nobody gets killed. But when it comes to warfare, war is fought for keeps. And when a man goes out on the field of battle, he doesn’t go out to win a game. He goes out to kill or be killed; to live or to die. And in a spiritual sense, but a real sense, this is true of the Christian life.

Now, we’re at war. And this is not a Cold War, but a hot war. And it is a war with the cruelest and most deadly enemy that has ever been known. Not the helmeted soldiers of the Kaiser or of Hitler, not the wild, screaming Chinese, no soldiers, no enemy anywhere, could be possibly as cruel and as utterly sadistic and completely cynically evil as the antagonist we fight. His name, of course is The Devil. He hates God and he hates all good. Anything that is good, He hates it. Anything that has God’s name in it, he hates it. He hates everything and all souls that are escaping from his clutches. And he fights to ruin every human being.

Now, keep that in mind, you’re going to face up if you’re a Christian, to an enemy that fights to ruin you completely. He means to tear you apart, to destroy your Christian testimony and destroy the church if he can and every church that he can, to tear down and to destroy. That’s his business.

Now in this war, there are no rules on The Devil’s part. He is completely evil, And he knows no rules of Geneva or any other rules. He takes advantage; he has an advantage by the reason of the fact that he has no rules and knows no rules. Just as the gangster or the burglar has an advantage over the decent citizen, because the decent citizen recognizes rules, ethical rules, moral rules, legal rules, but the outlaw recognizes none. So, the outlaw always has the advantage. So, Satan has the advantage because he will lie and the Christian won’t. He will deceive and betray and poison. And he wins by getting that advantage if he can, and keeping it.

Now, whatever weakens us strengthens him, and that’s why I want to talk to you now about how we can keep him from getting the advantage. He has it, but we can take it from him and we can prevent him from using it. And that will be the little talk tonight.

Now, here are some ways The Devil will try to get an advantage this year. He has an advantage when we tolerate any wrongdoing. That is in the text which I read to you from Paul. You know what wrongdoing it was back there. It’s a rather a weird kind of verse in 1 Corinthians 5 and I don’t know exactly what it means. And there isn’t any use to read the commentator, because they don’t know what it means either. But it looks like this. It looks as if a man had married his deceased father’s wife, who would not be his mother, but his father’s wife, his stepmother. And he married her and was living with her openly in the Corinthian church. Well, that was too much for Paul. So Paul wrote a severe letter and said he would turn that man over to The Devil for the destruction of the flesh, in order that Satan might not get an advantage, he explains here in his second letter. So, any tolerance of evil, any tolerance of wrongdoing gives The Devil an advantage.

Now, tolerance is a virtue sometimes. You know, that we are now being literally snowed under with pleas for tolerance, the Anti-Defamation League, the Roman Catholics and the Northerners and Southerners and the Asiatics and the Europeans. Everybody is to tolerate everybody. And tolerance is a virtue where it means, patience with views divergent from our own. Now, by disposition, I don’t want anybody to disagree with me. And it takes God longer to take that out of my system than it does to take it out of some people, because I’ve got more of it. But tolerance is a virtue when we tolerate divergent views, when people see differently, and we can still live beside them in what is now called peaceful coexistence.

And then tolerance is a virtue, when it means patience with tastes different from our own. We can’t all be alike. We can’t possibly all be alike.  And even Christians cannot all be alike. So, we’ve got to recognize that and allow people a certain latitude for their humanity’s` sake. So, tolerance is a virtue then. And it’s a virtue and it means living at peace at least with other races and colors and languages and religions.

I remember when I was a lad at home, or when I was in middle teens, that if I were to hear a Hungarian, we had an ugly name for them then. And if I heard him chatter or heard her chatter, I looked down on these Hungarian people who were laborers in that city where I then lived in the East. And I really looked down. I didn’t have a thing myself, but I looked down on anybody that didn’t speak English. I didn’t speak English that a learned man could have recognized, but at least it was English and I looked down on anybody that had any other kind of English, or had any other language at all. But I hope I got over that. So, I can listen with some, with even some interest to languages that I don’t understand. Now, that I say is a virtue and it’s on God’s side.

But there is a tolerance which is quite different, and it means to tolerate that which God abominates. And if you allow that in your home or in your business or in your life, anywhere this year, Satan will get an advantage. What God abominates, it’s not a virtue to tolerate. Keep that in mind. And no matter how much trouble it gets you in, or how much persecution you draw on your head, what God abominations don’t you tolerate.

Take that man, Eli. Do you remember Him? You know, you can’t help what your children do when they’re not at home, but you can help what they do when they’re at home. And here was a man, Eli, a big fat priest. And he had two sons, Eli, he had two sons Hophni and Phineas. And Eli was the name of course of the father. And he tolerated wickedness in those men, those growing young men. They got old enough themselves to be priests. And he was too weak to say no. So he permitted those boys to get away, with what we say, was murder. And you know what the result was, the result was the ark of God was taken, Hophni and Phineas were both slain, the wife of one of them died in childbirth, and Eli fell and broke his neck. And the priesthood passed from him to Samuel’s line.

So now, that is what happened to a man who tolerated what God abominated. And if you do that this year, or we do it in this church, I know that some people imagine that I’m a bit hard and they say that. They think I’m a bit hard and they want to know why I do some things. My brethren, I want to be as soft as possible with people, but not allow to get into the church that which is evil. Keep it out, keep it as far out as you can, enough of it will get in that I don’t know about without allowing any of it to enter that I do know about.

 Now, you remember how Israel tolerated sin? And the result was that she alienated God and turned Him from a friend into an enemy and brought desolation upon herself. You will hear the name Israel, and now Israeli; and you hear the name Jew, and sometimes you’ll hear it spat as though it were an evil word, and it’s been so now for 3000 years. Throughout the world, the name Jew has been a name that has brought a lot of unpleasantness.

Now I don’t feel that way about it. I love the Jews. I’m a friend of the Jews. And I pray for them and I am on two boards dedicated to their welfare, and there is nothing antisemitic here and this. I merely mean to say that God scattered them abroad and they have been scattered abroad. And before that, for many years, they were in trouble with the Midianites and the Canaanites and the Philistines and all the rest, because God withdrew His protection because they tolerated what God abominated.

And you know, that happened to Israel. And to tolerate anything in yourself, if I can only get the people of God. If I could get you people to take yourself seriously, take yourself for the scruff of the neck and pull yourself clear up and say, now I’m going to stop this ragged, sloppy living, and I’m going to stop tolerating bad habits in myself. Well, you’ll excuse it, but God won’t excuse it. And if you tolerate the things that are wrong, you’ll give The Devil an advantage. It’s like going into the ring with one hand tied behind your back. You’ve got enough of an enemy on your hands without deliberately putting yourself at a disadvantage, lest Satan should get an advantage, said Paul. Well now that’s one way we can give The Devil an advantage.

Now, there is another way we can do it, and Paul pointed that out. And that is by being too severe with wrongdoers. Paul had been stern with sin in the Corinthian church, as I pointed out to you, but he had withheld punishment, nevertheless, against this man who was sinning this terrible sin. And He grabbed the first evidence that he could grab, that this man was repenting. The very first bit of evidence he could grab, he took hold of it. He was eager not to turn that fellow over to The Devil. He had been a heathen. He had come in out of darkness. He had been a Greek with very low standards. For the Greeks, you know, were not all philosophers and stoics. They were pagans, and when he’d come into the church, he had done this thing. And Paul was praying and hoping that he’d repent before his body was destroyed. And as soon as he found out that he had repented, he said, why, forgive the man now. Don’t bear down too hard, because you will give The Devil an advantage if you refuse to forgive the persons that God has forgiven.

And so, every church ought to have that rule. Every mother and father out to have that rule. Don’t tolerate wickedness in your children, but don’t throw up their past to them if they repent and do better. But this man, Paul, felt that the transgressor had already been punished enough by the displeasure of the Corinthian crowd and by his own conscience.

Brother, when God starts to lash a man for sin, I don’t want to add anything to it, not a bit to it. For I remember that when God, in order to punish Israel allowed a certain king to come up upon Israel. Then he turned on that king and said, I was punishing my people and you are adding to the punishment. Now, you’ll get it. And so we punish the people that had punished Israel, through great harshness toward the weak and the poor, and the sinning is always bad.

There go I, but by the grace of God, said John Wesley when he saw a man stagger down the street. There go I but for the grace of God. And there isn’t one of you here that has any right in the world, to look down your religious nose at anybody, and I don’t care who he is.

Last Monday, at noon exactly, 11:30 to 12, I preached to 200 men. Brother Moore was with me. And he said, this building, this smells better than most missions, doesn’t it? We were in the office then, or in the little parlor where they kept people, and I sniffed and said, yes, it doesn’t. It really does. It’s fine. Then they led us in to where 200 men off the street were. Men with the blank look, the faraway look, men with beards that hadn’t felt a razor for God knows when. And then we changed our mind. It was the old strange combination of uncleanness and antiseptic.

Well, I preached to those men. And I think I had a tender heart toward those men, even though there wasn’t a man there but what was there by his own choice. He was there of his own accord. He chose to sin. Why wasn’t I sitting there, a humped-over old bum? Why wasn’t I sitting there with a 10-day beard and a shirt that hadn’t been changed since Thanksgiving or before? Why? The grace of God my brethren, what have I that I haven’t received? But if you look down on people that backslide or that fall or that are weak, you’re giving The Devil an advantage. They give Satan an advantage in the church. Harshness never was a right remedy, never since the world began.

My father was an old farmer and he was a harsh man, that is, not with his family. But he believed in doing everything that tough, rough way. And if he could find medicine somewhere, he didn’t even ask what it was, he took it if he didn’t feel well. He didn’t know what it was, he took it. We used to have a stuff called Haarlem oil, a small bottle about the size of my finger there. And when a horse got sick, no matter what he had, anywhere from spasm on up, we just pulled out his tongue, held it and poured this Haarlem oil on the horse, and there was some of it that wasn’t used. So, one day, my father got sick, and bless my soul and body if he didn’t take this Haarlem oil. I don’t know, I don’t know what good it did or didn’t do. It didn’t kill him. But it was a harsh way to go about it. He might have gotten off a lot easier. And there are those who know only one way and that is the harshest, roughest way possible.

My friends, to strike the balance between tolerating wrong or not tolerating wrong and yet being patient with the wrongdoer, takes more grace and more wisdom than you and I have. God has to help us. And if he doesn’t help us, we give The Devil an advantage. We’re too hard on people, The Devil grabs that and runs with it. Where we’re too easy on sin, The Devil grabs that and runs with it. So, let’s watch out we don’t play into his hand either way.

And then, another way that we can allow The Devil to get an advantage is when we’re cast down by defeat. Now you say, aren’t you a preacher, known to be a preacher of what they call the deeper life, the victorious life? Yes, but I’m a realist today. There isn’t any reason in the wide world to walk up and say I’m feeling fine when I’m sick or when I’m pale and can hardly stand. And there isn’t any reason to say the sun is shining today in Chicago when there’s a heavy drizzle and the birds have to walk. There’s no use to be unrealistic about this thing. We might as well face it out. And Wesley said, You’ll never hinder the cause of Christ by admitting your sin, but you will hinder it if you cover your sin.

So, remember this, that defeat does come to people. It shouldn’t, but it does come to people. People are defeated. Sometimes, defeated in their living and their hopes; defeated in their plans, defeated in their labors. I’ve never been very successful, but I’ve never made a complete flop. And I am wondering how I’d take a complete flop. That is, if the Board were to call me in and say, you’ve been around long enough. It has been nice knowing you. Now, that I’ve never had happen to me. Or if the New York office would call up and say you have been editor long enough. Would you kindly send in your typewriter? I don’t know how I’d take it. I’ve never been a big success, but I’ve never been a complete flop. And so I’m giving you something here that I don’t know too much about myself, that is, that kind of failure, the failure of plans and labors. But failure in personal living, that, I’m an expert on. And I can talk to you about it.

Bob Walker of Christian Life wanted to advertise. He said, Mr. Tozer who is–what did he call it– an authority on the deeper life. I called him up and said, “edit that out of there. Don’t put that in. I’m not an authority on anything, much less the deeper life or victorious life.” I am barely, barely, one old poet said he never was an authority on anything but wind. And I am not an authority on anything. So remember it please. But I am an authority I think in a measure on what it means to fall flat on your face and then have the grace of God lift you up out of it. But you will give The Devil an advantage if you get cast down by defeat. There’s nothing particularly terrible about falling down, but when somebody gives up and lies down, then you’ve got trouble on your hands. It’s final my friend, it’s falling, it’s final only when we accept is as final. A man that can still raise a hand and say God help me can get back on his feet again.

Now, you might as well, some of you might as well admit this. I don’t want have anybody in mind, but you might as well admit it, even a congregation, an average small congregation, this size, there’s somebody in it that’s been tumbling around last week. You made a New Year’s resolution Monday night and broke it Wednesday afternoon at three o’clock, and that’s about par for your course. And that’s about as far as you get. Brethren, don’t get cast down. Some of God’s dear people are always dragging their feet. They’re never quite able to rise and face life and face up to things.

Now, if you would ask God immediately to cleanse you, ask him immediately. Don’t wait and let a thing fester, don’t. If you get something, if you get a cut on your finger and you don’t do something with it, it could turn into blood poisoning. But if you will deal with it immediately, you can catch it in time. And so God has a first aid for his people. And you know what it is? It’s back there in 1 John 1:7-9, 2:1-2, where he says, If we say we have not sin, then we deceive ourselves, and we make God a liar. But, if we confess our sin, God is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. And there isn’t any reason why anybody here tonight should go out from here with a stain on your soul, not one, because God has a remedy, the blood of Jesus Christ. And He is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only, but for the sins of the whole world.

So remember, that if your soul has been defeated, or you have been defeated in your plans, or defeated in your prayer life, defeated anywhere, and things haven’t gone so well, that in itself is not too bad. But if you allow it to discourage you and cast you down, you play straight into the hands of The Devil. And you will allow yourself to go out onto the field of battle without a gun. You will let yourself get into the prize ring with one hand behind your back.

Well then, another way we can play into the hands of The Devil is when we’re elated by victory. Not only cast down by defeat, but elated by victory. I used to hear a preacher who would always talk about the good atmosphere. He would say, “oh, we had a wonderful meeting with a fine atmosphere.” He was a religious meteorologist. And he always had to have the right atmosphere before he could feel right about it. Brethren, there is such a thing as being victorious and not having a very good atmosphere to be victorious in. God sends His own oxygen tent around with the children which he has begotten.

Now, the portion of the true Christian, of course, is peace and joy and a certain delight, and it’s the perfection of God. And here is the Christian’s philosophy. If I have God, I can’t have anything more than God. So if I am defeated, or if I have a victory or don’t have a victory, I can’t have anything less than God. I always have God. If the children of the Lord could only find that out, that when you’ve got God, you’ve got everything else in one package. But when God has you, and you have God, there is no such thing as permanent defeat. And if you’re defeated, you don’t lose anything. And if you’re victorious, you don’t gain anything, because you have God win or lose. And talking not so much about sins, to talk about plans and purposes and projects that you may have failed on. Nothing can be added to perfection.

And when you have God, you have that which is perfect. And it’ll take you a lifetime and perhaps several thousand years in the world to come to develop it all, and perhaps God being infinite, it’ll take eternity to develop it all. But still all that you have of God would lead you to say this is my philosophy, if I have God, no success can elate me and no defeat can beat me down. For I still have God.

Now, this isn’t in the sermon, but I’m going to introduce it here, because I’ve observed it. You see, the good preacher, if he’s any good at all, if he’s ever learned anything, he studies, three books. He studies first of all, this book. Then, he studies his own heart. And then he studies other people. And in those three books, he gets all he needs to get, other people, himself, and the Word of the living God. And the Word of the living God gives him 1000 keys, that can unlock 1000 secrets in his own heart and in the hearts of his fellow man.

And so, I sometimes preach to my people just because I see that they need it. And I’d like to say to some of you, you want to come around and check on it afterwards. I’ll tell you whether I mean you or not. But there are some people that just are never there when the blessing falls. That’s the oddest thing. If God blesses, they’re never there. They’re somewhere else at the time. Now, they have too many circles of friendship that are not spiritual. And they have too many little areas of social connection that is not built around the church of God. So, when the Holy Ghost falls on an occasion, they’re out with some of their borderline, marginal gatherings, and the result is they’re just not here. Or if they are they, they don’t understand it and leave. By the time they’ve had a soda and told two jokes and gone home, they’ve forgotten everything.

Well, my brother, the Holy Ghost said through the man who wrote Hebrews, let us press on to perfection, and this will we do if God permits. It looks as if there were some people that were born under a gloomy cloud or maybe shot an albatross, because everything they do turns into defeat for them. And if a sermon is preached or a song. Some people come to you afterward and you know as a minister of the gospel, you know you haven’t done very well. You’ve done the best you could, but that wasn’t very well. And somebody will come to you with a shining face, and say that blessed my heart. Well, that person is in a spiritual attitude that he can get help.

I preached a very ordinary sermon this morning. And a man came with a big smile and said, my heart hasn’t been warmed so much in years as hearing that sermon. Well, it wasn’t a good sermon at all as a sermon, but it was just some truth. But here was a man whose heart was in a spiritual condition to take truth, that’s all. But some dear children of the Lord are never satisfied unless there is letter perfection. If a soprano goes flat in singing “How Great Thou Art, I don’t know that they did brother. I’m using it as an illustration merely. They’ll carry that one little flat squeak out with them and talk about in for ten days. And some other people will go out and say, oh, how great Thou art, how great Thou art. My God, when I adoring wonder look to Thee, all I can say is, how great Thou art. But others hear a flat note. It’s not funny, it’s tragic, absolutely tragic, for it puts us straight into the hands of The Devil. And it gives The Devil an advantage.

Someone came to me this morning. A dear good soul that I have known and prayed for and prayed with for a long time. And He said–I’ll telescope two talks–I had said you know that I was getting defeated in my heart and things weren’t going so good, and you know, I discovered what it was. I’d been criticizing you–me. Well, God knows brother, if you want to criticize anybody, I’ve got ammunition for the next five years. You’ll never even need to look at anybody else. I can furnish you with ammunition to criticize me, because I throw myself open to those criticisms. This woman said sometime back now, a few months back, when I saw that and repented of it, she said, oh, the victory and the difference, that difference. And it always is so. I don’t care if It’s not.

I am talking about so much. It’s just anybody. Just anybody. Criticize the usher. Well, maybe he is. Sometimes, I feel like wringing their blessed necks because some things they let get by, but you know, they’re hard-working fellows that never get one decent word said to them for year in and year out. Yes, they are. And sometimes, I don’t like the way the trustees do things, but whoever walked over to a trustee and said, God bless you, Jim. You’ve done a wonderful job this year. Nobody ever did. Trustees worry about the church and work around it and spend hours looking after things and nobody knows they’re here but me and God and their wives usually.

Well, sir, we can be critics and fault finders and give The Devil an advantage. Every time The Devil hears a sour criticism, The Devil says, “goodie, he’s on my side.” But when we clean up our hearts by the grace of God and the blood of the Lamb, and that doesn’t make us so that we don’t see faults. It doesn’t make us so that we just have to walk around and purr. Some people expect the preacher to have all his claws, carefully peeled clear back to the quick and his teeth taken out. And so, he gums it and walks about a dear man with the sun shining on his noble, bald dome. That’s the poet’s concept of the preacher. You don’t have to be that. And the beloved John was the sharpest critic the church of Christ ever had. But it was kindly done. It was done in love.

So, you you don’t have to accept everything. You can be critical and you can point to faults and ask in God that they be remedied. All prophets and psalmists and apostles and reformers down the centuries have done that. That’s one thing. It’s quite another thing to be a fault finder. Well, if we’re fault finders, I hope the Calvinists are right and everybody that gets converted goes to heaven willy nilly, because that’s the only way they’ll ever get in.

Now, it says here, we’re not ignorant of his devices. I’ll try to be brief, but only to say this, that Satan is a criminal. And every criminal establishes what is called an unconscious pattern. Every expert on crime, that is, every criminologist knows, and every cop knows if he’s been on the beat any time. He knows that crime has a strange way of repeating itself. If a man is a burglar, he always burgles in the same way. It’s very rare that he changes his MO, modus operandi, or method of operation for you, Mr. McAfee. And The Devil is the criminal of the universe. But he isn’t quite wise enough to escape his own pattern. So, God says, if you will read this Bible and pray, I’ll teach you the pattern so you will never need to fall into it. You’ll know The Devil when you see him and smell him. We’re not ignorant of his devices. In all of his tricks there’s a certain sameness, and we defeat him when we know what they are. And then by the grace of God avoid them.

Well, how can we know them? I briefly say this. By the light of the word, by prayer for wisdom, and by the Spirit’s illumination. I don’t want to give aid and comfort to The Devil do you? Not for one split second. Peter once played right into his hands. He said not so Lord. And Jesus turned sadly and said, get behind me. The devil, he said, you speak not as from heaven but from earth. Peter didn’t mean to do it, but he did it. He played into the hands of The Devil.

Brethren, you and I want to be clean victorious this year, clean victorious. We want every week to be a victorious and fruitful week. And we want every day to be a good and clean and victorious day. So now, let us by the grace of God watch out and keep free from these things. But nothing I can tell you tonight will save you from stumbling, unless you search the Scriptures, pray and trust to the Holy Ghost to illuminate your heart, Be obedient and loving and trustful. You can have a victorious life all through 1957. And you know what? This could be the last year. It may not be, but it could be.

Now, I’m not going to give an invitation tonight. I’m going to let you go home after we’ve sung a number. But beginning next Sunday night, as I have said, we are going to deal with the victorious Christian life. We’re going to deal with the four stages in the road toward, path toward spiritual perfection. Don’t go out and say I’m not coming back towards a perfectionist. No. For I tell you that I believe in a perfection that is begun here, but ends in the glory. But we’ve got a long way to go, most of us, even to get started on the beginning of it. And I want to talk about that through the next weeks. All right

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Tozer Talks

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Throughout the remainder of August and September we are going to bring back the noted series by A.W. Tozer on Worship.

Tozer Talks 027 – Worship Series #1 “He is thy Lord, Worship Thou Him”

Tozer Talks 028 – Worship Series #2 “God Great Purpose in Redemption-Worship”

Tozer Talks 029 – Worship Series #3 “Worship the Lord of Glory and Meekness”

Tozer Talks 030 – Worship Series #4 “A Definition of Worship”

Tozer Talks 031 – Worship Series #5 “A Look at Our Worship of God”

“Forward with Christ in Total Commitment“

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“Forward With Christ In Total Committment”

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer speaking to the National Association of Evangelicals Annual Conference
April 25, 1963

It is a privilege for me and an honor to address you. It is an honor that I have not earned and that I don’t deserve. But who am I to argue with your Board. They invited me and Iaccepted and I’m here. Now, there’s one very happy circumstance surrounding my little talk here this morning and that is that I was assigned this talk, “Forward with Christ in Total Commitment.” And if I had chosen it, that’s the one I would have chosen. So, when you get a sympathetic audience before a man, who’s to have the pleasure of speaking on the topic chosen for him, but one that he would himself have chosen, a man should be able to deliver at least a passable sermon under those circumstances. If he couldn’t, I assume he wasn’t called to preach anyhow and ought to leave the ministry and go back to selling real estate or raising rutabagas. We’ll do our best and I will try to keep it in the time. I quit when it’s time, whether I’m finished or not.

Now, in the book of Colossians, the the first chapter it says, Jesus Christ, who is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of every creature. For by Him were all things created that are in heaven and that are in earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones or dominions or principalities or powers, all things were created by Him and for Him. And He is before all things and by Him all things consist. And He is the head of the body, the church, who is the beginning, the Firstborn from the dead, that in all things He might have the preeminence. For it pleased the Father that in Him should all fullness dwell.

Then in Ephesians, first chapter and concluding verses of the second, Paul says that God’s power wrought in Christ, when God raised his son from the dead, set Him at His own right hand in the heavenly places, far above all principality, and power and might and dominion, and every name that is named, not only in this world, but also in that which is to come. And put all things under His feet and gave Him to be the head over all things to the church which is His body, the fulness of him that fills it all in all. And then, second chapter, we are no more strangers and foreigners, but fellow citizens with the saints in the household of God and are built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets. Jesus Christ Himself being the Chief Cornerstone, in whom all the building, fitly framed together, groweth into one holy temple in the Lord. In whom ye also are builded together for an habitation of God through the Spirit.

Now before we talk about our union with Christ and our conscious and volitional attachment to Christ in total commitment, we must look at who Christ is and what His relation is to the redeemed company which we call the church. In one of the passages which I have read to you, you will find this truth set forth which I think I may imperfectly condense into three words. The words being “centrality” and “basicality” and “preeminence.” Now, it says that Jesus Christ the Lord is central. The old writers used to say that Christ is to the church what the soul is to the body. You know what the soul is to the body? It is that which gives it life when the soul flees the body, there’s nothing that can keep the body alive. When the soul is gone, the embalmer takes over, and in the church of Christ, any church, anywhere, of any denomination whatever it may call itself, as long as Christ is there imparting life, being the life of that redeemed company, then you have a church. For Christ is central in His church. He holds it together and in Him it adheres.

And then there is the next word, “basicality.” I never looked to find out whether there was such a word. I made it. But if there isn’t, there ought to be. And what I mean there is, that it’s basic. Jesus Christ is basic to the church. He’s underneath it. And the whole redeem company rests down upon the Lord Jesus Christ. Now, I know this sounds like a string of religious cliches, but I’d like to say it in at least in such tone of voice that the cliche element will go out of it and you’ll hear it as though you were hearing it for the first time. That the whole Church of God rests down upon the shoulders of His Son. I think we might be able to go around the world and simply cry, “Christ is enough. Jesus Christ is enough.” What weakens us in evangelical circles, and that’s all I shall speak to. I never speak to the Liberals on the general ground that is not fair to kill, or shoot at a dead horse or kill a dead lion. So, I don’t bother the liberals, but when I’m among the evangelicals, I like to talk to them.

And I think that our trouble is, what weakens us is, that we put a plus sign after Christ–Christ plus something else. Remember, it’s always the pluses that ruin our spiritual lives personally. And it’s always the admissions or the additives, as they say now, that weaken the church. Let’s remember that God has declared that Christ his Son is sufficient. He has the way, the truth and the life. He is wisdom and righteousness and sanctification and redemption. He is the wisdom of God and the power of God. He gathers up in Himself all things and in Him all things consist, so that we do not want Jesus Christ plus something else or Jesus Christ and something else. And we never want to put a comma after Christ; not Christ with a comma waiting for something else, or Christ with a dash leading to somebody else, but we must preach Christ period. For Christ is enough. He’s basic to the church of Christ,

Hear, O Heaven and give ear for the Lord hath spoken and called the earth from the rising of the sun to the going down thereof. And what He has said is, this is my beloved Son, hear ye Him. So the Lord Jesus Christ is enough. So I think that we of the evangelical faith, which is I have always believed to be the faith of our fathers, and a Biblical faith, that we should not preach Christ plus science, or Christ and philosophy, or Christ plus psychology, or Christ plus education, or Christ plus civilization, but Christ alone and Christ enough. These other things may have their place and fit in and be used just as you can throw sand into vat where they’re making glass and it will all melt up so we could lose all of these things, but we’re not leaning on any of them, but we’re resting down on Him who is basic to the faith of our fathers.

And then there’s that word preemminent, that He might be preeminent and have a place above all things. So let’s think of Jesus Christ, above all things, and underneath all things, and outside of all things, and inside of all things. He’s above all things, but not pushed up as the old bishop said. And He’s beneath all things, but not pressed down. And He’s outside of all things, but not excluded, and inside, but not confined. He’s above all presiding, and beneath all upholding, and outside of all embracing, and inside of all filling. So we are committed to Jesus Christ our Lord alone.

Now, our relation to him is all that matters, really. I want to talk a little about a true Christian faith as an attachment to the person of Christ. An attachment to the person of Christ and total commitment to Jesus Christ includes this or is this. There are four or five things I’ll talk about if I have time to get to them, that the attachment of the individual person to Jesus Christ is an intellectual attachment and I will tell you what I mean the that, and a volitional attachment an exclusive attachment and an inclusive attachment and an irrevocable attachment.

Let’s look at the first one. That to follow Christ forward in complete commitment, total commitment means there’s got to be an intellectual attachment to Christ. That is, we cannot run on our feelings or on wisps of poetic notion about Christ. There are a good many bogus Christs among us these days. And I believe that you and I as followers of the Lamb are not only ought to, but that it is obligatory upon us that we point out these bogus Christs and show them for what they are, and then point to the Lamb of God that taken away the sins of the world.

You know that it was old John Owen that said to mourn people in his day the old Puritan, he said, he have an imaginary Christ. And I warn you that if you’re satisfied with an imaginary Christ, you must be satisfied with imaginary salvation. There is many Christs and many lords and many gods but there is only one Christ. And the really saved man and the man who is following Christ has an attachment to Christ that’s an intellectual attachment, in that, he knows who Christ is, theologically. For you know, there’s the romantic Christ of the female novelist and there is the sentimental Christ of the half-converted cowboy and there’s the philosophical Christ of the academic egghead. Then, there’s the cozy Christ of the effeminate poet and the muscular Christ of the All-American halfback.

Well, we have this kind of Christ, but there’s only one kind of Christ, and God has said about Him that He is His Son. I like what they say about Him in the creeds, that He is God of the substance of His Father begotten before all ages, man of the substance of his mother, born in the world, perfect God and perfect man, a reasonable soul in human flesh subsisting, equal to His Father as touching His Godhead less than His Father’s touching His manhood. Who, although He be God and man, yet he is not two, but one Christ. For as the reasonable soul in flesh is one man, so God in man is one Christ. This is the Christ we adore, and we must have a knowledge of this, that is, we must have the Christ of Christian theology.

I have been blamed or praised for being a mystic. I don’t know what the word means. If to be a mystic, you have to have dreams and all sorts of things. I never had one in my life that I couldn’t trace to something I ate. So, I am not that kind of mystic, but I’ll tell you this, that I would never have anything to do with any book or any new movement or any religion or any new emphasis, that doesn’t begin with Christ, go out from Christ and return to Christ again. The Christ of God, the Christ of the Bible, the Christ in Christian theology, the historic Christ of the Scriptures, He is the one.

So we must have an intellectual attachment to Christ. You can’t simply let your heart run out to Christ as the Catholics let it run out to the Virgin Mary in a kind of warm feeling about Christ, not being sure of who Christ is. This is the essence of heresy. We must believe in the Christ of God. We must believe as what God says He is.

Well then, I must go on. There’s the volitional attachment to Christ. What do I mean by that? I mean that if I’m going to follow Christ forward in complete and total commitment, I must do it by my will. The fellow was in a bad shape, and he’s making a bad mistake who tries to live on impulse and inspiration, who hopes to sail across the undulating sea of titillating feeling. You can’t do it my Brother, because the devil gets you down. The man who lives on his feelings is not living very well and is not going to be able to last very long. The old writers used to tell us of the dark night of the soul, that there’s a place where the Christian goes through darkness, where there’s heaviness there. God isn’t going to take us off to heaven all wrapped up in cellophane looking like we ought to be hanging on the Christmas tree. God is going to take us there after He has purged us and disciplined us and dragged us through the fire and has made us strong and has taught us that faith and feeling are not the same, though thank God, faith brings feelings sometimes.

You know, they use to say High Heaven, that heard the solemn vow, That vow renewed shall daily hear, but people are afraid of that now. But I believe that just as Daniel determined that he would not eat of the king’s meat and just as Jesus set His face like a flint and just as Paul said, “this one thing I do,” I believe that the true follower of Christ must be a man who’s will has been sanctified, not a will-less man. I never believed when we teach the deeper life that we say that God destroys our will. A will-less man would be like a man without a backbone. He would be of no good in the world. You’d have to put him in to traction to the hold him up. And so, if if you have no will, you’re no good. But the beautiful thing is that God unites our will with His will, and our will become strong in His will. And sometimes, as you go on in God, you hardly know whether it’s your will or God’s will that is working at a given moment.

Well, now I go on to an exclusive attachment, and what do I mean by that? I mean that our attachment to the person of Christ must exclude all that is contrary to Christ. You see, there is a polarity in the Christian life. And this polarization begins at the very threshold. These are the days when we’re trying to be positive, 100%, positive. But the Scripture says that Jesus, that Thou hast loved righteousness and hated iniquity. And that was said of holy Christ Himself, higher than the highest heavens and separate from sinners. And if He had to hate in order to love, so do you and I. But they tell us that we ought to be positive. People write to me and say, you’re negative. Why don’t you go positive? Well, to be positive 100% would be as futile and as useless and thank God, as fatal, as to inhale steadily along all your life without exhaling. You can’t do that. The human body requires that you inhale to get oxygen and exhale to get rid of the poison.

And so, the church in Christ has got to inhale and exhale. When she inhales, she must exhale. And when the Church of Christ inhales, the Holy Ghost, she must exhale everything that’s contrary to Him, or maybe I’ve got that backwards. I tell you some of the churches wonder why the Holy Ghost hasn’t been around since last Christmas. And the reason is, they haven’t exhaled. They’ve not gotten rid of the old business that’s in there.

Well, I don’t believe that any man can love until he’s able to hate. I don’t think that any man can love God unless he hates the devil. I don’t think that he can love righteousness unless he hates sin. For the Scriptures would leave us with the opinion, with a belief that in order to accept, there are some things you’ve got to reject. Inorder to own, there are other things you’ve got to repudiate. In order to affirm, there are things you’ve got to deny. In order to say yes, you’ve got to be able to say no. And the man who hasn’t the courage or the intestinal fortitude to rear back on his hind legs and roar a thundering no, that some things can never say yes and make it mean anything. I, for my part have long ago come to the conclusion, I can’t get along with everybody. This idea of soft-handed pastors with a saintly flush on their face trying to get along with everybody, quit it Reverend, quit it, it won’t do any good, because in an effort to please everybody he’ll succeed in pleasing nobody.

I’ve been asked to go on your television a few times and to talk with priests and rabbis and all the rest. Why do I want to do that for? I told the newsman who called me, I’m an evangelical preacher. I preach Jesus Christ and Him crucified, and I couldn’t think of a thing that I could say there. Can you imagine for me to get up with a bunch of fellows who hate my Lord and believe that He was not the Son of God at all, and that I sit there and do or sit there and do fancy footwork. Now, how can you do both? Sit there and try to do fancy footwork, trying to keep from offending somebody that hates my Lord? No, I don’t want to do that at all. If they don’t want Him, they don’t want me. And, if they don’t want to hear Him, they don’t want to hear me. I don’t want a watered-down Christianity, bless God. But I want to be able to say no. I say no to the devil and no to Khrushchev and no to the Pope and no to everybody that has anything to say that’s contrary to the Lord whom I adore and to whom I am attached with an intellectual attachment that theological and with a volitional attachment that is final, and with an exclusive attachment that would exclude everything that’s contrary to my Lord Jesus.

And then there’s the inclusive attachment. Now, what do I mean by that. Well, that’s the inhaling you see. That’s all that Christ is and does and says and promises and commands, and all the glory that circle around His head and all the offices He holds and all the shining beauty of the various facets of His infinite nature. All that is and all that is said and all that is promised, I take that all, I include that all.

And then in addition to that, I’m joined to Him and identified with Him, so I accept His friends as my friends, his friends. I love all people of God. I’ve never been a good denominationist. The president of the society to which I belong, and a lot of the other big wigs, but I like to say this to you Brethren that while I work faithfully along with all my brethren, I never was much of a denomination list. I believe that God has His children everywhere and all of God’s children got wings, and all of God’s children got a robe. And so, I love them all and preach to them all and some of them listen. I accept Jesus Christ’s friends. You know, the Lord has some odd friends really. That fellow that goes down the street with a “Jesus Only” button or a “Jesus Saves” button as big as a dinner plate here, you know, and his hair not combed too well, staring ahead. If he belongs to Jesus, I’m gonna own him.

You’ve got to be willing to own the friends of the Lord, whoever they are. His friends are my friends, and His enemies are my enemies, too. I’ve already talked a little about that. And I think we ought to have the courage to have enemies. This togetherness that everybody’s talking about now; everybody sits down you know and has a togetherness orgy. I can’t go for it at all. I don’t like it. I want to know, what do you stand for? Who do you love and what do you hate? And then after that, I may be able to get on with him.

I remember one time on a streetcar, there was a good brother, he was a Pentecostal brother. He was giving out tracks. He was making a bit of a nuisance of himself I admit there in the middle of the streetcar. People were getting on and off. But you know, my heart warmed to him. And on my way out, I stopped and shook his hand and took a tract and said, Brother, I’m on your side. I’m one of them too. And I shook his hand and we had nice little time there. And I hustled off the car before it got away from my block. So, I like to own all of them you know. The old bishop said that the Lord has His treasures in earthen vessels and some of the vessels are a bit cracked.

Well, I accept the enemies of the Lord as my enemies and the ways of the Lord as my ways and the cross of Christ as my cross. That’s crucifixion. And His life is my life and that resurrection? What is a good definition for a Christian? Well, a good definition for a Christian is somebody that is back from the dead. I think that Paul was one of the oddest and strangest and one of the most glorious of all Christians that have ever lived. And he gave us a little text there that no editor; any of you editors listening to me, you’d thrown that out and shot that back in the first mail going in the direction of the fellow that wrote it. I am crucified with Christ, nevertheless I live.

Now, how do you get that way? I am crucified with Christ, He’s dead. Nevertheless, I live He’s alive. Is He alive or is He dead? And the life that I now live, I live not within myself, but I live by the faith of the Son of God, Who will loved me and gave Himself. You see, Paul is contradicting himself there. And yet, within all that contradiction, there is a synthesis of marvelous and glorious truth, that a Christian is one who was crucified and is alive, being joined to Jesus Christ as He was joined and humanity was joined to the Deity in the hypostatic union forever, and the eternal God joined to the nature of man, never to be reversed. So all the members of the body of Christ join to His body, share in some major in that hypostatic union, so that were united with Him nd when He died on a cross, we died on a cross; and when He rose from the dead, we rose from the dead. And when He went to the right hand of God, we went to the right hand of God. If they need be risen with Christ, seek those things that are above. And it’s written that will sit in the heavenly places, which means that we are willing, where He is, members of his great mystic body? Wonderful.

I remember hearing a great Bible teacher years ago who’s long gone to heaven, Mr. Tucker, Dr. Tucker, he talked about being under the circumstances. He said some lady said, well, I’m feeling as good as I could be under the circumstances. And he said, no Christian average should be under circumstances. You should be on top of them. Rise with God through Jesus Christ to live again and let his life be your life and look down on circumstances. If you look out, you’ll be confused, and if you look down, you’ll be terrified and if you look up, you’ll understand. But if you look down from heaven, then you will indeed be victorious. You will be on top of it all.

Well, there’s the irrevocable attachment. What do I mean by that? It means that the Lord doesn’t want any experimenters. Some movie actor wrote a book one time called, “Try Jesus.” I never read the book. I wouldn’t be caught dead reading it. Try Jesus, all this experimentation. I don’t believe in it. I believe that we ought to be suicide bombers, that we ought to tie ourselves into the cockpit and dive on the deck. And if we go out, we go out. Sink or swim, live or die, irrevocably attached in love and faith in full devotion to Jesus Christ the Lord.

One of my boys, I had six boys, five of them had a uniform on during the Second World War. One of them was a dive bomb in the Navy and they gave him seven battle engagements on the Pacific as a dive bomber off the carrier under, Admiral Michener, we had heard there was such thing as suicide bomber, but I didn’t know whether it’s true. But when he camehome he told me about it. He said, yes, there were suicide bombers in the Jap navy. He said, One day, we saw one coming out of the sun down on our deck, and we desperately tried to get to stop him, but he got through our flak and hit the deck and bounced and came to a stop and the bomb was a dud. And so we got to see a live suicide bomber. We opened the cockpit and found a 15-year old Japanese boy chained in the cockpit. When he had gotten in that plane back at the airfield, they chained him and he’d said goodbye. And now with a bomb in the nose of his plane, he dived on the deck of the carrier. Fortunately for my boy and all the other boys, it didn’t go off. But they took a scared, shaking Japanese kid of fifteen out of there. That’s suicide bombing. And you know, that Christians ought to be those who are so totally committed that it’s final. This weak, looking back over your shoulder to see if there isn’t something better; I can’t stand it.

Now, a young man came to one old saint one time who taught the deeper life and the crucified life and said to him, Father, what is it mean to be crucified? And the old man thought for a moment and said, well, to be crucified means three things. The man who was crucified is only facing one direction. I like that. He said, they only face in one direction. If he hears anything behind him, he can’t turn around to see what’s going on. He’s stopped looking back. He’s looking straight ahead. So, the crucified man on a cross is looking only in one direction, that’s the direction of God and Christ and the Holy Ghost, the direction of Biblical revelation. And the direction of world evangelization and the direction of the the edifying of the church, the direction of sanctification and the direction of the spiritual life. He only looks in one direction. And the old man scratched his scraggly gray hair and said, one thing more Son about a man on the cross, he’s not going back. Now, I like that. The man on the cross is not going back. A fellow who’s going out to die on the cross, he doesn’t say to his wife, oh, goodbye Honey, I’ll be in shortly after five. He isn’t coming back.

When you go out to die on a cross, you bid goodbye to your friends. You kiss your friends, goodbye. You’ve had it and you’re not going back. And if we preach more of this and stop trying to make the Christian life so easy that it’s contemptible, we’d have more converts that would last. Get a man in who knows that he’s a suicide bomber and if he joins Jesus Christ, he’s finished, and that while he’s willing to come up and live in the new as far as this world’s concern is not going to go back. So, the fella who takes a cross on his shoulder is not coming back. Then the old man said another thing about a man on a cross, Son. He has no further plans of his own, and I like that. He has no further plan. Somebody else made his plans for him. And when they nailed him up there all his plans disappeared. On the way up to the hill, he didn’t see a friend and say to him, well Henry, next Saturday afternoon about three I’ll be by and we’ll go fishing out by the lake. He wasn’t going fishing out by the lake. He was finished. He was going out to die and he had no plans at all.

Oh, we busy-beaver Christians with all our plans, and some of them, even though they’re done in the name of the Lord and evangelical Christianity, there as carnal as goats, and they’re our plans, they’re our plans. I met some gentlemen out in the hall and one of them said about a certain book I had written, how what a blessing it had been. And I said yes, that’s the only book I didn’t try to write. I said I didn’t try to write that one and the Lord blessed it all over the world. But I’ve tried to write quite a number that fell flat on their faces. So when you see it depends on who’s making your plans for you. It’s beautiful to say I’m crucified with Christ and know that Christ is making your plans. I tell you gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen, twenty minutes on your knees in silence before God will sometimes teach you more than you can learn out of books. They teach you more than you can even learn in churches. And the Lord will give you your plans and lay them before you. If the boards of the churches would only learn to spend more time with God and less time debating, they could save all those midnight board meetings where everybody leans back weary and on the shades of aging grease on the wall behind where the hair tonic got on the wall, and in the boardroom weary from discussing things. I tell you, you can cut down, you can cut down your time in debating and discussing if you spend more time waiting on God, He’ll give you the Holy Ghost and teach you and give you His plans.

All right now, I think that’s about all I want to say, that we are to be joined to Jesus Christ, intelligently joined by knowing who He is. We’re to be relationally joined and not try to live on our feelings though thank God there’ll be a lot of feelings that go along with it. And we’re to be exclusively attached and exclude everything that’s contrary to him, and inclusively attached, taking in everything that He’s surrounded Himself with. And irrevocably attached, so we’re expendable. And we’re not going back. Well, may God bless us all now. It’s time to stop. Fortunately, I ran out of material just as I ran out of time.

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Tozer Talks

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“The Greatness of God’s Deliverance“

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“The Greatness of God’s Deliverance”

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

May 13, 1956

I’d like to mention again about the evening service with a missionary, outgoing missionary from this church, and then a baptismal service in which there will be three men and three women, at least that many baptized. And then the evening, gospel service, sermon following. We also would like to mention, adding to what’s been said about the going to the Council. The board has asked Brother McAfee to go as a delegate, and brother Maxey and his wife are going because this may be their last counsel for a long time since they’re going to New Guinea before very many weeks and the Board felt that they would like to have them attend and get all of their batteries charged, all they can being present. As for myself, I will be going in my capacity as editor of the Alliance Weekly. I have not in 15 years cost the church anything. So, when I go to counsel, why, you can know that I am going without any cost to the church. I mentioned that for two reasons. One is that I want the facts to be out and the second is that you might be restful in your thought about it.

Now, in the eighteen Psalm, which we read previously; we will deal with a few thoughts. I will not be long. In the fourth verse and on, the man of God said that the sorrows of death encompassed him and the floods of ungodly men made him afraid, and the sorrows of hell encompassed him about and the snares of death prevented him, that is, bound him, held him back, went ahead of him.

Now, the floods of ungodly men you will read in your margin and everywhere else, that’s Belial and Belial is wickedness and destruction. It’s one of those words that translators don’t know what to do with. You can go to the commentators and they’ll disappoint you and go to the Bible dictionaries and they’ll tell you that they think it’s so and so, but they’re not sure. But it appears there to be agreement that Belial was the spirit of destruction and wickedness and lawlessness and vanity, all wrapped up in one. And this Belial was now overflowing on the man David like a flood. The destruction and havoc had come now, not a little bit at a time, but as a flood, and was upon the man of God. Sorrow, death, and hell; there are the three words: sorrow, death, and hell; being surrounded, being floated about in a flood. He now called upon the Lord in verse six. And there is a bold downrightness here about this whole thing. He said that he called upon the Lord.

Now, salvation isn’t the result of man’s effort, not even the result of a man’s strong prayers. But in the Bible, when a man got any help, it was usually when he called upon God. There was no action at all in this psalm from God’s part until David called upon the Lord, “and then my cry came before Him even into His ears,” and it was then that God rose in his wrath against the enemies. We’ll skip the passages that tell us about it. It is thrown into the figure of a tremendous storm, a mighty storm and hailstones and thick darkness and the roaring thunder that discomforted the foe. God sent this storm upon Belial and his wickedness in order that He might roll back the flood of sorrow, death and hell that was surrounding the people of God, and particularly this man, David.

Now, when David prayed, then God was angry against the oppression of Belial. It’s good to get the indignation of God on your side men and women. And if I say nothing else this morning, but that, it would be, I think, worth your hearing, that it is a good thing to get the indignation of God on your side. It is a tragic thing to have the indignation of God against you.

Now, Belial, the enemy, the spirit, as he embodied himself in wicked men, for that of course is here in plain sight, that the Belial will reach David through ungodly men, yielded men, yielded to the spirit of Belial. And when these surging waters of sorrow, death, and hell began to swirl around David, David cried and God became angry with the enemy, and the indignation of God was on David side. And even though David was himself not a perfect man, yet the pity and anger of God were on his side. And God turned against the enemy and opened the floodgates and began this dramatic and colorful and terrible attack upon the enemy. In verse 16, he says that as a result of his prayer, God sent from above.

Now, I want you to notice those words, that He sent from above. You see, the reason God sent from above was the David was surrounded. And when you’re delivering a man from a flood from above it’s the best way. They’re using the helicopter now. They flutter over and settle slowly down and from above, they take a man out of the swirling waters. Well, long before the helicopter was thought about, David knew that when you’re in a flood, the only way to get any help is to come down from above. So he sent from above and he took me. And after all, any final help is going to have to come from above. When we get in a bit of trouble, we run to everybody for help and we get a bit of help I suppose. The chip floating there, we grab that and it helps a little or an old board. We get ahold of that and hope for the best, but we’re dizzy with this swirling, and there’s no shoreline in sight. And the tide is always rising and the floods increasing. There’s only one direction that help can come from and that’s from God above.

And God saves us from above. He sent from above Jesus Christ our Lord to give us an effective ransom. That ransom did not come up from the earth. It did not come up from below. It did not come out of the sea. It did not come out of the ground, but it came down from above. And thus was born of the Virgin Mary, a man who became our Redeemer. Again, He sent from above the Holy Ghost to apply that ransom and to make it effective to men. And He sent from above the Word and information and instruction and conviction. It all comes from God above.

Now He sent from above and then He took me in verse 16. Now I like that expression, He took me. I once heard Paul Rader many years ago preach a great sermon on the text that Jesus took the bread and blessed it and broke it and gave it. I guess you gentlemen are too young to have heard Mr. Rader and heard that great sermon of his. And there without any doubt, this man that of whom I speak now, was probably the greatest preacher that ever-touched America’s shores in 100 years. I wouldn’t doubt that at all in saying this, though, he’s now long gone to be with his Savior. But his text was, He took the bread and He broke it and He blessed it and He gave it, and he preached a missionary sermon from that. And he said, God takes a man and then God breaks the man and then God blesses the man and then God gives the man to the world. There’s an outline for any of you preachers that want to preach.

And that’s the same expression here. He took the bread and here in verse 16, He took David. And sometimes when God takes a man, He grabs him to save him and He doesn’t always grab him gently. For remember that while God has all the grace in the universe and all the music and all the poetry and all the art and all the beauty and all the tenderness that there is, this is a time of crisis and emergency. And sometimes when a man is going down, God grabs the man and grabs him a bit roughly. Sometimes God takes us in a manner that isn’t exactly according to Emily Post. Lots of times that happens.

I remember that when they were praying Peter out in jail, God sent an angel, and it said the angel smote Peter. Now that isn’t the way they would do it in the First Church of the Liberals here where everybody has got to be a PhD or the usher won’t let you in. They would do it so gently and so smoothly and so kindly there, and every voice would be modulated properly. But, God sent an angel and He just hit Peter a good blow. He smote him. Peter was an old fisherman and he wouldn’t have understood any tender, kindly remark, Emily Post fashion. So, God said, when you go down, give him a good one, because he’s a fisherman and he’s used to the wind and the waves and falling out of boats and all that sort of thing, so he’ll sleep heavy. So, give him a good one.

So, when he came down, he gave him a rough blow, and Peter woke up and said, what’s going on? He said, come on, follow me and get out of here. And so he saved him. He took him and took him roughly. And I’m not going to tell you that the Lord will always treat you like a kind Sunday School teacher. The Lord will sometimes be very rough with you when you’re in trouble in order they might get you out of trouble.

Now, He drew me out of many waters. What else could he do? God Almighty appeared like a helicopter coming down from above and grabbing David and then, pulling him up out of many waters of course, up out of the water of sin and up out of the swirling, murky waves of consequences. And of all that you did and all of the trouble with you and all the rest, God takes you out of that. But somebody says, David had to be innocent. David had to be right. If David had contributed any to the swirling waters, he wouldn’t have got out. Now that’s the way it is theoretically, but that isn’t the way it is in fact. The way it is in fact, God has to get a lot of us out of our own trouble, like the little boy that climbs a tree and can’t get down. Have you read about that? He climbed the tree and got stuck in the crotch of the tree. And I forget, did they have to have the fire department was it, to come and get the boy down, and took him to a hospital to rest him up or somewhere to rest him up?

Well, it was the boy’s fault. But then his parents didn’t turn him against him because it was his fault. Our boys as they were growing up, fell off the fences, out of trees, off the street cars, and otherwise proved themselves to be unworthy of anybody’s attention. But they got the attention nevertheless, the best that we could afford, because they were our boys. And so, David was God’s boy. And although David may no doubt have brought some of this on him by his conduct. He still, when he cried unto the Lord that canceled out David’s part and that set God to work.

Always remember this, if God chastises A or B, his children, and C, another one of his children comes along and tries to help God lay the lash on, the anger of God won’t be against A and B, but against C. When God wanted to punish Israel, He allowed Nebuchadnezzar to punish Israel. But Nebuchadnezzar enjoyed laying the lash on, and so God said you thought that I had sent you because you were good. Now I’ll show you. Then he destroyed Babylon and turned His indignation against the very whip that He had sent to whip Israel.

So, if the Lord ever sends you to chasten one of God’s children, chasten awfully easy will you, because you’re very likely to bring the lash back around on you. Remember that everything you throw at a Christian is a boomerang. You just wait around and it’ll be back, and it’ll carry back in its rebound all the power that it had when it first went out. And He delivered me from my strong enemies, said David. Now it transpires here that the real cause of the trouble was this Belial, his strong enemy. You have a strong enemy hidden, a malevolent foe and you can escape him. Or if you don’t escape him, he’ll destroy you, and yet you can’t escape him alone. He said here, them that hated me were too strong for me.

A Christian isn’t a weakling and yet he is a weakling. He has this treasure in earthen vessels. And a Christian can’t fight back like other people, and he can’t do the things. If you live beside a neighbor and that neighbor decides to persecute you, he can do all sorts of unpleasant things to you and you don’t dare do one back. And if a man comes up and curses you out, he can look you in the face and with steely eyes, read your pedigree back three generations. And as a Christian, you don’t dare open your mouth except, “all right, all right, all right. God bless you; I’ll pray for you.” That’s about all you dare say. The ungodly man, he’s always too strong for him. I never saw an enemy yet I could lick, never one, never saw one. The enemies within us and around us and everywhere are just too big for us. Greed and lust and pride and jealousy and malice and evil temper and untruthfulness and the drink habit and the dope habit and all the rest, they’re just too big for us. Them that hated me were too strong for me, so He sent from above and He took me and He drew me out of many waters, and He brought me forth into a large place. That’s verse nineteen.

They say Christians are narrow, but outside of what Jesus said to walk the straight and narrow way, there isn’t much in the Bible about the narrowness of the Christian way. He brought me forth into a large place. And while seen from the standpoint of the flesh it’s narrow. From the stand point of the Spirit it is very, very broad indeed. The Christian way is a very broad way, large enough to accommodate the fullest activity and growth and development. I’ve never yet been able to understand it. I just can’t understand the man who says, in that church there’s nothing to do. Why, Brother, man, if God is in you, you ought to find something to do. If God is in you, you should need to be vote into office. You never need to vote a man into office. If he has anything to do, God will help the man to find something to do, a big full activity and growth and development and the exercise of all of our most brilliant intellect.

Now, there’s a feeling that Christians not only are narrow, that Christians are dull, good, honest, dull fellows they call us, and that we’re dull. But you know that in the kingdom of God and Christian theology and Christian hymnody–in all the fine high thinking of a Christian–there is room for the exercise of the greatest minds of the centuries, and those great minds have been exercised. They say that one of the greatest, if not the greatest mind ever to touch America was Jonathan Edwards. And yet Jonathan Edwards never wasted any time on mere philosophy or mere science. Philosophy and science to him were handmaidens to theology and religion. And he became the great revivalist of New England and one of the greatest theologians that ever lived and one of the mightiest of the Christians that have blessed our native shores.

Well, now, you don’t have to apologize for your mind or to your intellect, there God brings a Christian into a large place. It’s big enough. It’s an ocean. The man who says that the Christian way is narrow, too narrow for him, that it confines him, he’s like the little minnow in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean grumbling because there isn’t room to swim. Just let him wiggle his fins and get going and he’ll not find a shoreline anywhere. There’s ocean enough for the swallow in the air complaining for lack of oxygen. There’s plenty of it there. It runs up seven miles high and it goes around the earth. So, there’s plenty of room for the sparrow and plenty of room for the fish in the sea and plenty of room for the sheep in the pasture field and plenty of room for the Christian in the kingdom of God. He brought me forth into a large place, a place that is pleasant, and a place of toil. That is, eternal toil, where all pure, natural beings are, friendship and love and high service to mankind. All of this can be exercised within the church of God, in the kingdom. Isn’t it too bad that the unbelieving world has gotten the notion that evangelical Christianity consists of believing in God and then not going to theaters, not going to dances, not going to gambling dens, not smoking, not drinking, not using dope, not always, not, not?

You could say to the bird in the air, you’re not supposed to smoke and drink and he’d flap his wings and fly away five miles and circle and come back and he’d say, I don’t want to smoke and drink, I’ve got air enough up here. We’d say to the fish in the middle of the ocean, why, you’re not supposed to gamble, and he’d flap his fins and dive and come up again and say, I don’t want to gamble, I got an ocean to roam in. So, we can say to the sheep in the pasture field, we’re not supposed to go to the movies, and the sheep in the pasture field would smile and lie down in green pastures and gaze down on the silver surface of the water waiting for his nose when he gets thirsty enough to lazily get up and go get a drink. Great, vast pasture fields with a shepherd to lead them. So, we’re always looking at it the wrong way. We’re looking at the things we’re not supposed to do forgetting that there are the little, narrowing things.

Just take such a matter. I didn’t intend to mention it, but just take such a matter as cigarettes. Just take such a matter. You tell me that the man who doesn’t use them is the slave, that he’s the narrow fellow. How foolish can we get? It’s the man that does that that is the slave. Invite him to your house and he’ll come. Have lunch and he’ll be nice and kind out of deference to you, he won’t smoke. Sit down a half an hour and he’ll begin to look around and act uneasy and say, “well I really feel I should get going.” Why? Because he’s a slave, not because you are. Because his blood cells and body tissues are beginning to tell him, get a hold of one of those coffin nails now and light it. He’s the slave.

Who is the slave, the man that smiles and turns his back on liquor, or the man who has to drink? Like the man they laugh about but it’s not very funny. He shook his head and shuttered, he said, I got to go and get drunk. Oh, God, how I hate it, but I got it to do. And men are bound, they’re slaves. That little lady that walks down the street looking like somebody else, all polished up. Old Mother Nature doesn’t recognize her. You tell me she’s not a slave? You tell me that simple-hearted Christian woman who’s relaxed and trusting God and living a simple Christian life, you tell me she’s a slave? No, the other one is the slave, afraid that telephone won’t ring or afraid if it does, it will say the wrong thing. Afraid that little thing on her chin will develop into a blemish that will mar her beautiful face. They’re the slaves brethren, not Christians.

There are plenty of vast expanse in the kingdom of God, all the grand and glorious room for service, service to mankind, service to the human race, service to the world, service to the ends of the earth. And all the sweet Christian music and all the sweet Christian literature and all the sweet Christian poetry to add fragrance and loveliness to your service, and all the vast expanses that lead into communion with God.

I read the other day; I wonder if I can reconstruct it now. I didn’t memorize it, but I read it to Brother McAfee. He read it in German and he translated it out of German for me and we got a hold of it at last. And it said, the bird lives in the air. The fish lives in the sea and the salamander can live in the fire, but Meister Eckert had for his habitation the heart of God. And it rhymed in German. That’s what Johannes Staufer said about Meister Eckert. That as the bird has the air for its home and the fish has the sea for his home, so this man chose the heart of God for his home.

And if I have found my home in the heart of God, I ask you, “is that big enough, that which contains all things? God is that which everything must have to make it complete, but which needs nothing to make Him complete. He is that which contains all that is and surrounds it. What a vast world to roam in is the heart of God. The City that hath foundations whose builder and maker is God. Whose doors and gates are said to be fifty miles across are narrow birdcages compared with a great heart of God that knows no bound and no limit. He brought me also into a large place because He delighted in me.

Now, what did He delight in and what does He delight in? Does He delight in my wisdom? What a laugh that is. Does the omniscient God who knows everything that can be known, delight in my tiny wisdom? No. Does he delight in my purity, the impeccable God, holy beyond the power of an angel to gaze upon? Does He delight in my purity, or does He delight in my strength? Does the Omnipotent One who can do anything that He wills to do, delight in my strength? Does he delight in my deeds, the great God who made the heaven and earth, who calls the stars by name, delight in my tiny deeds? No. He delights in that something in me which He made in His own image, and in you. And let us make man after our image and after our likeness, and not even sin has been able to take it away. Though sin has been able to bring death and judgment upon us and prepare us for hell at last unless we be saved. Yet, there’s still that in us which God can move into.

And as Eckert said, to quote him again that there’s nothing in the universe that God ever made so much like God, is a human soul. And therefore, God finds Himself at home in the human soul and is unembarrassed and restful as He dwells in the human soul, for He made it in His own likeness. And only sin has marred it. But when the power of God comes and delivers us and draws us up out of these swirling waters of sin and makes us new creatures, then He can move into our souls and live there because He’s more at home there than He is anywhere else in the universe, because He delighted in me

God loves you, but I don’t know why. And God loves me and I don’t know why except, as I have said, He made us in His image. Not because of what we know or do or can be or ever were or ever promised to be, but because He saw in us that which He didn’t see in angels. He took not upon Him the nature of angels, but He took on Him the seed of Abraham and was made a little lower than the angels for the suffering of death and by the grace of God, He might taste death for every man, and is that in us, which God loves. He sent from above. He took me, He drew me out of many waters. He delivered me because He delighted in me. Amen.

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“The Book of Jude“

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“The Book of Jude”

Pastor and author Aiden Wilson Tozer

July 3, 1955

I want to talk on that book of Jude this morning. Bringing again after the passing of some years a bit of attention to this little, but powerful book. Now the man Jude, a brother of Christ, had planned to write an encouraging letter just as you might sit down to write your friends a letter of encouragement. He had planned it dealing with what he called our common salvation. But he said it became necessary rather as he was moved, impressed by the Holy Ghost to write something else altogether. An unpleasant circumstance had risen which forced him to write quite another kind of letter from the good encouraging letter that he had planned. Certain men had crept in unnoticed. Now those men were personally men of evil lives. They were and had been foreseen and condemned by the Lord Himself when He was with them. And they taught doctrine that was contrary to the Christian faith. Now he writes to arouse the victims of these teachers to contend for the truth.

Now, I want to talk just a little because I want my emphasis to fall elsewhere, but a little about this false teaching. Not naming any false teaching specifically, and I do not use this because I think there’s any false teaching here. We have had amazing success under God in the last years in keeping from our fellowship, those who would subvert us. They just don’t feel healthy around here. The atmosphere is not wholesome and they don’t stay very long. So, this is general rather than specific, but because it is for the whole church of Christ, it certainly is also for us.

Now, what do we mean by false teaching? Well, it means teaching that things are otherwise than they are. Now, things are, both physical things and spiritual things are. They are and you can put a period after that. And when we have discovered or had revealed to us the facts about them, either things material or things spiritual, then we are morally required to acknowledge those facts, and to make our teaching conform to them. That’s also very simple that I almost apologize for saying it. But it is the broad framework upon which everything else must hang, that things are as they are whether we like them or not, that’s the way they are. God made things and things are. Physical material things are and Spiritual things are.

Now, it is our business to find out how they are. Accept them as they are and then make our teaching conform to them as they are. Now that’s rather simple, isn’t it? Now, correct doctrine then is of vital importance, because it is simply the teaching of things as they are. There are five there and I say that’s five, ten over there and I say that’s ten. It is July, what’s today? The third, and I say it’s July 3. That doesn’t take genius, that’s just stating things as they are. This is Chicago, Illinois, not Memphis, Tennessee. This is Chicago, Illinois. This is July, not August, this is the third not the ninth. This is 1955, not 1957. This, these are this country is the United States of America. Not some other country, not England not any of the Scandinavian countries.

And so, telling the truth about things is simply finding out what they are and then conforming my statement to their facts. Now it’s so as spiritual truths. When a truth has been revealed in the book of God, our business is to find out what that truth is. And then in all of our teaching, conform to that truth. Not edited, not change it, but let it stand just as it is. It is the truth of

God declared as it is and don’t try to change it. It would be ridiculous of me to try, by some twist of logic or sophistry to make this to be August when it’s July; to make it to be the ninth when it’s the third; to make this to be winter when it’s summer; to make this country to be Canada when it’s the United States. Truth is just as it is. God Almighty has made the world to be a mathematical universe. And He runs all things according to mathematical laws. And He has a moral world which runs according to moral laws as exact and as unchanging as mathematical laws. So non-conformity to the truth anywhere brings disaster. Let an engineer be wrong about a position, and let him build according to that wrong concept and his building will collapse around him. Let a navigator be wrong about something and he will run on a rock and his old ship will shudder as it runs onto a sandbar or a rock and will settle in the water and sink out of sight because a mistake has been made. The man has not gone according to truth. Non-conformity always brings disaster wherever it may be. And the vastness and hugeness of the disaster depends upon the high-level or low-level of the facts we have before us.

If I started with a compass that was backwards–we were driving the other day in Mr. McAfee’s car, and we went west all the time. No matter which way we turned the compass said west. There was something wrong with the compass. Now, that didn’t do us a great harm, because there were markers and we didn’t go according to that. But if there had been something serious and we’d had to know when our lives depended upon it, we might have left our bones someplace, because a compass went wrong. And so, non-conformity, failure to stay by facts as they are, will bring disaster if we depend upon it.

Now, false teaching is the falsifying of data. It’s falsifying of data about God, ourselves, sin, and Christ. First of all, any false teaching must begin with the wrong concept of God. You can put that down in the back of your Bible or the back of your memory, that any false teaching of any sort, must begin with a wrong concept of God. It can’t be otherwise. Nobody who holds a right concept of God can go very far wrong in anything else. And all the basic, great mistakes that have been made, the great fundamental errors have all rested down around the concept of God. Men are not willing to let God be what He says He is. They’re always trying to change God and trying to make him to be other than what He is. God is, and we better accept Him as He is. God is, and the angels want Him to be what He is. God is, and the elders and saints and heavenly creatures want Him to be what He is. We’d better want Him to be what He is too, and conform to what he is. Any structure that is crooked, or any foundation that is crooked, will bring the structure down in time. It will either sink or it will collapse or lean or fall over, but it will not stand long. Or if it does, it will lean as the leaning tower there in Italy.

Now God–of all the foundations–God is the most important, because God is God and made the heaven and earth and all the things that are therein. And it is a great error, it would be a great error for a man or a woman to go a lifetime thinking they were talking to the God of heaven and earth and find that they were talking to a god which they had confounded out of their own imagination. It would be a tragic calamity to the human spirit for me to pray a lifetime and preach a lifetime about a God that wasn’t the true God at all, but some other god which was a composite of ideas drawn from philosophy and psychology and other religions and superstitions. No, God is what He is. And we had better learn what God is and then conform our teachings to God. If we take away any of the attributes of God, we weaken our concept of God. We do not weaken God, but we weaken our concept of God.

Christian scientists have taken all the justice and judgment and hatred of sin out of the nature of God and they have nothing but a soft God left. There are those who have taken love and grace out and have nothing but a God of judgment left. There are those who have taken away the personality of God and have nothing but a mathematical God. That’s the God of the scientists. All these are false, inadequate conceptions of God.

While God is a God of justice, He’s a God of grace, and while He’s a God of righteousness, He’s a God of mercy. While he is a God of mathematical exactness, He is also a God that could take babies in His arms and pat their heads and smile. He is a God that could forgive and a God that does forgive. So we had better make the study of this Bible of ours, the business of our lives, to find out what God is.

And then conform our views to God, and then ourselves. That’s this second thing where we make a mistake in any kind of false teaching, because any wrong idea of God is bound to give us a wrong idea of ourselves. Some people approach God through science, through the study of anthropology. But anthropology without theology is bound to arrive at an error at last, bound to arrive at the dead end street. You and I can only explain ourselves in the light of the doctrine that God made us out of the dust of the ground and blew into our nostrils the breath of life. And so, man became a living soul.

Science has discovered many things about God, but they have not discovered it in context. They have not begun with God and reasoned down to His world; they have begun with the world and tried to reason up with God and stop short of finding God, and the result is only tragic to everybody. If a man is wrong about God, he’s bound to be wrong about himself. If He’s wrong about the artist, he’ll be wrong about the picture. If he’s wrong about the potter, he’ll be wrong about the vessel. If he’s wrong about God, he’ll be wrong about the creature. So, while multiplying scientific facts all around about us, men are wrong because they have left God out and say in their heart, there is no God. Or if there is a God, He’s a god of mathematics and laws, but not the God as the Bible makes Him out to be. That is all wrong.

If you believe you’re any better than God says you are, you’re in error. If you believe you’re any different from what God says you are, you’re in error. You have falsified the data or somebody has falsified the data and made you a victim. No, no, my brother, believe about yourself what God says about you. Believe you’re as bad as God says you are and believe you’re as far from him as God says you are. And then believe in Christ who can come as near to Him as he says you can. And accept what He says about you as being true.

My friend, you cannot know truth about yourself unless you first know truth about God. You came from the hand of God, and back to God you must go for better, for worse, for judgment, or for blessing. And until we take God in and understand God, and let God be what He claims to be, and believe about ourselves what God says about us, we’re believing false doctrine.

Then there’s sin. Now sin cannot be understood until we believe in God and believe what God has said about ourselves. Sin is that intrusive phenomenon, that ever present, ubiquitous phenomenon. There it is, hate and lying and dishonesty and murder and crime and injustice, necessitating law and police and jails and galluses and locks and graves. There are those who would deny it, and of course that’s falsifying the data. There are those who would rename it and they’re falsifying data. There are those who would treat it as a disease and they’re falsifying data.

God says that it’s a breaking of the law. God says it’s a rebellion against His will. God says that it’s a nature inherited from our fathers and mothers. God says that it’s an act against the faith and love and mercy of God. God says it’s rebellion against the constituted authority of the Majesty on high. God says it’s iniquity and personally chargeable to the one who commits it. God says the soul that sinneth it shall die. And we had better believe about sin what God says about sin or we will be falsifying the data. And falsified data in spiritual things is more terribly wrong and will bring more terrible consequences and falsifying data in material things.

The doctor who miscounts a number of, or the amount of that which he gives a patient may kill the patient. That would be only to destroy a body. The preacher who misjudges or miscounts the truth concerning sin and man and God will damn his hearers which is infinitely more terrible. Truth concerning God means that I must accept God’s sovereignty, God’s holiness, God’s justice, God’s grace, God’s love and all that the Bible says about God. Concerning myself, it requires that I must believe in myself as a fallen image of God, one who once bore His image, but fell.

Now, the fourth is Christ Himself. For if I do not have the right concept of God and of myself and of sin, then I will have a twisted and imperfect concept of Christ. And I have no hesitation in saying that it is my honest and charitable conviction, that the Christ of the average religionist today is not the Christ of the Bible at all, but a manufactured Christ, a Christ painted on canvas, a Christ drawn from cheap poetry, a Christ of the liberal and the soft and timid person, a Christ that has not in Him the iron and the fury and the anger, as well as the love of grace and mercy, He had who walked in Galilee. If I have a low conception of God, I have a low conception of myself and if I have a low conception of myself, I have a dangerous conception of sin. And if I have a dangerous conception of sin, I have a degraded conception of Christ.

So, here’s the way it works. God is reduced and man is degraded and sin is underestimated, and Christ is disparaged. No wonder Jude said the terrible things that he said. And I recommend, that some of you that are so nice you’re no good, I recommend you read the book of Jude once. I recommend you read that book of Jude. Get your teeth filed to a sharp, eating edge. Get your teeth into something. Dare to believe something, and dare to stand for God. This awful day of so called tolerance. This awful day when men are ready to believe anything.

No, my brethren, you and I are not called to smile and smile and smile. We are called sometimes to frown and rebuke with all longsuffering in doctrine. We must contend, but not be contentious. And we must preserve truth, but injure no man. We must destroy error, but not harm people. Where men were wrong in other days, they contended and in contending became contentious. They tried to preserve truth, and so to do it they destroyed those who held error. All this is wrong. Let us preserved truth, but injured no man. Faith of our fathers we will love, both friend and foe in all our strife and love Thee too; to preach Thee too as love knows how, to kindly deed and virtuous life.

Now in closing, here is what he says to us. He says in verse nineteen, these be they. Let’s pity them. Let’s be sorry. let’s pray for them. Let’s weep over them. Let’s turn away from them, these be they. Verse twenty, but ye beloved. Now he’s come to his own, the true believers in God and Christ, but ye beloved. Then He gives them four or five things to do. I will pass swiftly over them. Building up yourselves in your most holy faith. Are you these days building up yourselves? Have you read a book of the Bible through recently? Have you done any memorization of Scripture texts or Scripture these days? Have you sought to know God or are you looking to the radio for your religion? Or have you a Bible and do your study it? Build up yourselves in your most holy faith? That’s one.

Praying in the Holy Ghost. I do not hesitate to say that most praying is not in the Holy Ghost. The reason we do not pray in the Holy Ghost is because we do not have the Holy Ghost in us. No man can pray in the Spirit, except his heart is a habitation for the Spirit. It’s only as the Holy Ghost has unlimited sway within us that we’re able to pray in the Holy Ghost, and I do not hesitate to say that five minutes of prayer in the Holy Ghost will be worth more than one year of hit and miss praying that isn’t in the Holy Ghost. Pray in the Holy Ghost.

Third, Keep yourselves in the love of God. Be true to the faith, but be charitable to those who are in error. Never feel any contempt for anybody. No Christian has any right to feel contempt, for contempt is an emotion that can only come out of pride. So, let’s feel no contempt. Let’s be charitable and loving toward all while we keep ourselves in the love of God.

And then looking for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ unto eternal life. And of course, that is the second coming of Jesus. Looking for Jesus Christ’s coming. The mercy of the Lord Jesus Christ that is coming. Wonderful isn’t it that His mercy will show itself at His coming? Even His mercy will show itself then as it did on the cross as it does in receiving sinners, as it does impatiently looking after us Christians and it will show itself at the coming of Jesus Christ unto eternal life.

And then, verse 22, some have compassion making a difference, and others save with fear, pulling them out of the fire, hating even the garments spotted by the flesh. There’s a charge that we should win others, that we should do everything in our power to bring others to Christ, saving them with fear, pulling them out of the fire. Wesley all his life referred to himself as a brand plucked from the burning. He never called himself anything else than a brand plucked from the burning. He knew that he was on fire already with the hot flames of hell when Jesus Christ grabbed him out of the fiery pit and extinguished the fire by His own blood. And Wesley became Wesley. And he never dared to rise and think of himself as a great Oxford man or a great genius. Always He thought of himself as a brand plucked from the burner.

So now we look forward to Jesus Christ’s coming, looking for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ. Here was what the old silk weaver said about it. He says, a few short lines from Terstegen. There is a balm for every pain in medicine for all sorrow, the eye turned backward to the cross and forward to the morrow. That’s what Paul said, that ye do show forth the Lord’s death till what? Till He come. There’s a balm for every pain, medicine for all sorrow. Some of the old saints in days gone by called the communion service, the medicine of immortality. And we couldn’t follow them in every one of their beliefs, but that I think they were right. The medicine for all sorrow, and I turned backward to the cross and forward to the morrow, the morrow of the glory and the song, when he shall come. The morrow of the harping and the palm and the welcome home.

Meantime, in His beloved hands are our ways. Meantime, what are we going to do? Give up to Thee? Meantime, what are we going to do? Give up to the liberal? Meantime, what are we going to do? Give up to the dead church? Meantime, what are we going to do? Give up to those who have chosen to walk in the low shadows of Christianity? Never! Dare to contend without being contentious. They are to preserve truth without hurting people. Dare to love and be charitable and there, meantime in His beloved hands are our ways and, on His heart, the wandering heart at rest, and comfort for the weary one who lays his head upon His breast.

Thank God for the old silk weaver who walked with his Savior and was not, for God took him. So let us think of the medicine of immortality today. Let us by the grace of God, with charity for all and hatred toward none, but determination to be loyal to truth if it kills us. Let us put our chin a little higher and our knees a little lower. Let’s look a little further in to the throne of God where Jesus Christ sitteth at the right hand of God the Father Almighty. Let us be courageous, but tender; severe, but kind. Let us pray in the Holy Ghost and keep ourselves in the love of God and build ourselves up in the most holy faith and win all we can until the day of the glory and the song. Amen.

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“Some Christian Qualities to Seek“

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“Some Christian Qualities to Seek”

Pastor and author Aiden Wilson Tozer

October 20, 1957

A brief message from the Book of Colossians. Colossians 3, in the fifteenth verse, often read and memorized by the people of God but still as fresh as a new morning. The Holy Spirit says to us, let the peace of God rule in your hearts, to the which also ye are called in one body. And be ye thankful. And let the word of Christ dwell in you richly in all wisdom, teaching and admonishing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing with grace in your hearts to the Lord. And whatsoever ye do in word or deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God and the Father by Him.

Now, he says, “let” here, and as you know, the word let means, see to it. It doesn’t mean permit only. It’s stronger than that. It’s an affirmative, positive word—permit. Let as we say, let him do it. It’s to grant permission, but “let” here. And also let means hinder. But in this instance, it means see to it that. In other words, as George Duncan said last Thursday night at the Keswick, there is no place in grace where we are free from the necessity of discipline and choice. I agree with that fully. There is no place where you’re going to float to heaven on a pink cloud. You must take hold of yourself, because in us dwell two powers, the natural life, with bad inclinations. I know that some say that the bad, natural life is taken out, but I’ve never met anybody yet that I’d trust if the Lord left him. I’ve never met any Christian yet that I’d trust him very long if the Lord left him.

They say that one great old brother who believed in the elimination, that is eradication of the natural bad in man, the natural flesh. They said to him, brother, you say that the natural life received from Adam has been eliminated? He said, yes sir. That’s what I believe. And he said, let me ask you a question. Suppose that a young man who had had the natural Adam life completely eliminated, married a young woman who had had the natural life completely eliminated. And they had a baby, would the baby be redeemed automatically and not need the new birth? They had him. So, he gave an illustration. He said, well, it’s like this. He said, you have a sour apple tree and you graft a good apple branch in, he said, that good branch will bear good fruit. But if you plant the seeds, you would get a bad tree. That was supposed to answer that question, but all it did was confirm the other man’s opinion, because obviously, that seed was bad, and it’s bad still. So, we’ve got that to deal with. It’s possible to live above it and live in the Spirit and not fulfill it as I tried to preach last week at Keswick.

But there is within us the power of Christ, the presence of the new Man and the holy inclinations and the good inclinations we find in the seventh of Romans yearning to do good. And in the eighth chapter of Romans we’re taught how the yearning to do good can overcome the yearning, the gravitational tendencies of the natural man. But our lives will go in the direction that we determine they should go. He said, let’s see to it, see to it. The indwelling power of Christ then will furnish the power. This that I have said previously is not in any way to excuse poor living. I don’t believe in it. I believe that God’s children are to live day by day in the Spirit and not sin and fulfill the lusts of the flesh. He said, let’s permit, see to it that the peace of God rules in your heart. And whatever rules in your heart, that’s the way you’ll go, just as whoever is at the wheel of the car, that’s where their car will go. And whoever runs the country, that’s the way the country will go. And so, whoever rules your heart, if it’s the peace of God, why, you will have that in your heart and that will be the way your life will go. To which also he says ye are called.

Now, Adam, old Adam and his brood come from that bad seed the brother talked about in that apple. There’s inward discord there. That’s our trouble, inward discord. We’ve always had inward discord you know. It’s only recently that we invented psychiatrists who lay you down on the couch and have you tell your story. But everybody has had inward discord. I can imagine that Adam and Eve walked around grinding their teeth many of time. And Adam went away shaking his head saying, that woman. I am sure of it. I’m sure of it. That’s just because they were fallen human beings, discord was their inward discord. And always it’s the inward discord that causes the outward discord.

If suddenly, everybody in the world had peace of heart we could eliminate the Sputnik and all the armies and navies and policemen. If we had inner accord, I said discord, but accord, inner accord, if we had inner peace, everybody had inner peace, we can eliminate all armies. And we could call home John Foster Dulles and all the rest and say, now, go fishing. There’s nothing to worry about, nothing to worry about, because the inner discord is taken away and everybody’s at peace. And when people are at peace, they won’t hurt each other. It’s when they’re not at peace that the trouble comes, and most people aren’t.

So, he said, have peace. Let’s see to it that the peace of God rules in your heart to which you’re also called. And it’s the inward discord that causes the outward bickering and brawls and wars. And it’s the inward redemption, redemption and reestablishment of peace that results in inward harmony. And he said, ye are called, you’re called in one body, harmonious accord between ourselves as a source of measureless enjoyment. No question. It’s a source of measureless enjoyment. And discord is the source of the greatest suffering in the world.

I have said, I have never had anybody answer it. Maybe it wasn’t worth answering or maybe nobody could, that I have said that I believe the source of the most pain and suffering among mankind is bad dispositions, people with bad tempers. But you say, isn’t cancer worse? No, cancer kills its victim and gets it over with, but a fellow with a bad disposition lives with it, maybe seventy years. And his wife lives with it, poor woman, maybe fifty years. And she suffers, not as sharp and as acute maybe as tuberculosis or cancer or leukemia, but it doesn’t kill its victim. It just tortures them till they die. But inward peace, the harmony and love inside the heart is a source of great enjoyment to us all.

So, let the peace of God rule in your heart to which you’re called in one body. And let the word of Christ dwell in you richly. Now, here’s what the Gideons are dedicated to, to giving out are the word of Christ. The word of Christ. The word of Christ, what does it mean? Does it mean that you will buy a red-letter testament? If you have a red-letter testament, don’t be offended by what I say, because it’s perfectly alright for you to have one I suppose. But I think the red-letter testament unintentionally gives a bad impression, because it gives the impression that the letters written in red, were the words of Christ and the other ones are the word of man which is not true.

The word of Christ is not only the words Christ spoke, but they’re all the words spoken about Christ by inspired man. So, letting the word of Christ dwell in you richly may mean letting the first Psalm dwell in you or the 23rd Psalm or the 22nd Psalm, or the 46th Psalm or the 103 Psalm, or any of the Psalms or the Prophets, or the Gospels, or the Acts or the Epistles or Revelation. So don’t imagine that if you see some words printed and read that that means that they’re Christ and they’re more important, they’re not more important. In addition to the fact they murder your eyes, I don’t know whoever invented that, but it’s invented and so we have.

But the word of Christ is whatever the holy prophet said about Christ, what the holy apostle said about Christ and what Christ said about things when He was on earth. That’s the word of Christ. And let the word of Christ dwell in you richly.

Now, where does it dwell in you? Well, it dwells in your mind by memorizing, and we ought to memorize the Scriptures. We ought to memorize it by loving it rather than mechanical memorization, but we ought to memorize it. It’s in your mind by memorizing. It’s in your heart, by loving it. It’s in your will by choosing. And it’s in your life by enthroning. Those four things–that would make a sermon in itself and anybody can have it if he wants it for a sermon outline of four points here. The word of Christ dwells in your mind by memorizing it. There’s something about the word of God, when it gets into the human mind, it corrects faults and purifies the mind and does something good for it. And then it’s in your heart by loving it. We should love the word as David said he did and it’s in your will by choosing to obey it and it’s in your whole life by enthroning it. Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly in all wisdom.

Now, the Holy Ghost put that little phrase in, “all wisdom,” a little prepositional phrase thrown in here as a modifier. And I want you to notice that he said, let the word of Christ dwell in you and in all wisdom, because it’s perfectly possible to have a lot of the word of God in your mind and have no wisdom at all. And so, it will be worse off than if he didn’t. I mean for instance, Jehovah’s Witnesses quote the Bible continuously, but they have no wisdom. They quote it all out of its context and give their own meaning to it. And so there are other groups that quote the Bible, but it’s not in wisdom. There is a divine wisdom. The same Holy Spirit that inspired the Bible must teach the Bible. He must illuminate the Bible so that when you hear it and read it and memorize it, you’ll know what it means in spiritual meaning.

Then he says, teaching and admonishing one another. In this day and age, we hire our teachers. We hire teachers at school, and we sit and listen to them and go home. But the Scripture says teaching and admonishing one another. Every one of you should be a teacher of somebody else. Admonished means to reprove and to warn gently and kindly, but seriously and determinedly.

I’ve been doing a bit of research on the old Methodists for a series I’m writing on those amazing Methodists. And you know what I find? I find they divided their churches up into groups of twelve, called classes, and up into smaller groups called bands. And they had group leaders, class leaders, and then they had persons over those bands. And the business of those class leaders was not to lead the meeting, not to be as we say now, the emcee. The Methodists never heard of that horrible thing. But what they did was this, they picked out some wise old sharp-eyed, prayerful brother and they said, now we’ll make you a class leader and we’ll put eleven people under you, not actually under you, but we’ll put them into your prayerful care.

And they gave him the list and gave him their names and said, now you watch over them as over your own soul and pray for them. And if you see them going wrong, go to them. So that this class leader with these eleven persons to whom he was responsible, women for women I suppose and men for men. But when this class leader saw anybody beginning to slip, he didn’t go to the pastor and he didn’t go to the open prayer meeting. And he didn’t talk behind his back. He went right straight to his Christian brother. And he said, my brother, I am bothered about you. I’m worried about you because of the way you’re living. And most often he got him straightened out and nobody ever knew anything about it. It was the Holy Spirit using a man to admonish another man–teaching and admonishing one another. But we’re not honest enough nor courageous enough now to do that. Now if you admonished a man he gets blazing mad, but that’s because we’re so carnal and far from God.

In Colossae, they were assumed to be close enough to God to accept admonishments. And in the Methodists, they had to be close enough to God or they got shown the back door. They actually did show them the back door. And if Wesley found things weren’t going right, he said, straighten out you’ll see my face no more and he walked out on them and they straightened out.

Now, if we did this, this would head off many a bad fall on the part of some of our Christian people, particularly young Christians. It says we’re to teach and admonish each other, and one way of teaching and admonishing is to sing. Sing songs and hymns and spiritual songs. Now, this is Paul’s threefold classification: psalms of David set to music, hymns written by the Christians and you’ll find a number of them if I had time. I’d point them out to you in the New Testament. Some of Paul’s epistles contain little gems which Paul didn’t write, but which we borrowed and set in there, the same as if you hear a preacher preaching a sermon, and suddenly, he goes off into a four-line stanza of a hymn saying what he wants to say better than he can. So, Paul, in some of his epistles, quoted certain passages, which were actually hymns which the Christians were singing. And he said that they ought to sing these, and not only the songs but hymns of what the old Methodists and Presbyterians called a human composition. And then spiritual songs, I don’t know what that would be, perhaps it would be another way of saying the other two, songs and hymns.

And then, singing with grace in your heart to the Lord. You know, whenever I go, almost any place I go, what I miss is our singing here. I miss it. We don’t have the greatest singers in the world here. We have good singers. And we have some who have a reputation as good singers. But I mean that we’re not a St. Olaf’s outfit here. But there’s something here, the singing; singing with grace in your heart. And I hear grace in a song when I hear the song. There are some religious songs that you couldn’t get any grace and grace would enter that place. But there are other songs that you’ll sing with grace in your heart, you’ll make a rather ordinary song pretty good. Have you ever had the experience of having a fellow who wasn’t too well instructed, but who did love God and who sang with the Spirit. He would get up and choose a rather ragged number that wasn’t too good and put his head off on one side and close his eyes and sing it, and pretty soon you were getting blessed even if the song wasn’t the best. Now if he’d had a good one, he’d have multiplied his usefulness. But, I’ve seen that happen more than once. And if somebody sang with grace in their hearts, and if the song wasn’t so good, they made it good. And I’ve heard some of the most noble songs ever composed by the pen, inspired man, ruined by being sung without grace.

And then it says, sing to the Lord. Not sing to the congregation, but sing to the Lord. And if you sing a good song to the Lord, somebody’s going to get help as sure as you live. And it’s my positive conviction that next to the preaching of the word and expounding of the Scriptures, the next greatest power to do good in the public assembly is grace-filled singing of great songs to the Lord. Sing with grace in your heart. There oughtened to be anybody in the choir that couldn’t come stand right up before the board and take an examination on whether they had grace in their heart or not. The paid and the professional singer doesn’t do much good.

One of the sexiest singers singing today, I’m not even going to advertise him by speaking his name. One of the most, one of the most carnal, sexiest singers singing today has some sacred album. They said they did it to try to help to counteract bad publicity. Can you imagine a guy, a man, a young fellow so terrible? He’s got a reputation says, well, I want to get away from this reputation for being that kind of a fellow, so I’m going to sing some hymns and so he sings himself some hymns and poor, dumb Christians buy them and put them on and play them and wipe the tears out of their eyes. Well, singing with grace in your heart. And if we don’t sing with grace in our heart, we might just as well not sing.

Then in closing it says, whatsoever you do, whatever you do, and you know we’ve all got a lot to do. Do you ever get up in the morning and say to yourself, I haven’t much to do today, but before 10 o’clock, you were involved in so many things you wish you had twelve hands instead of two. It happens to me all the time. I get up early and come up to church here. I’m up an hour and a half in the church here before you’re present, looking around at things for the Sunday school and straightening out things and praying a little and going over my sermons, and I’m here. And I think I’ll have nothing to do when I get up there but sit and meditate and pray. When I get up here, I find that there’s so much to do that it takes up to church time and behind the scenes, but I’m doing it. Whatever you do, he said, the world’s full of things to do. Personally, I think if we were wiser than we are, we’d find some things that didn’t have to be done. We cut down on our activity a bit. We do them. But if we, do it to the Lord it says, whatever you do, do to the glory of God, in the name of the Lord Jesus giving thanks to God the Father. So, this glorifies all activities, that is if they’re divine, if they’re in God.

Domestic toil, one of our poor pastors. Here he’s been up every night now for ten days. And his poor bleary-eyed wife. The little fellow is healthy, but he just mixed up. He thinks night is day and day is night. So poor Brother Moore has to lug him around at night you know, so if you hear a tramp, tramp, tramp, don’t think the enemies coming, it’s just Brother Moore. He’s carrying the new baby around. You can do it to the glory of God, son if you know how.

And you can do everything to the glory of God, domestic toil, labor, caring for babies, your business, your long-distance calls and closing of that deal if it’s honest. If it isn’t honest, you can’t. But if it’s honest, you can do it for the glory of God and your school. You can do that for the glory of God and your travel, whether it’s by bus which is the worst way to travel, or by plane which is the fastest. Why, you can still glorify God, giving thanks to God the Father. And I say, we must preserve a thankful heart.

I wonder what there is about frost and yellow leaves that makes people thankful? I don’t think we ought to wait until the birds go south to get thankful. Thankfulness should be an ingredient in our Christian hearts, and we shouldn’t be thankful all the time. For thankfulness is more precious than diamonds. And I for my part, I’m determined to be thankful. Every day I considered a bonus. I ought to be dead long ago if God had dealt with me. And if he’d have been as hard on me as I’ve been on His people, I would have been. But He still lets me live. And every day I think of it and say thank Thee Lord and another day a bonus. Every day is a bonus, every day. I think we ought to thank Him and keep thankful. And if we keep a thankful heart and a singing heart and a Bible-filled heart, a Scripture-filled heart and a good honest, courageous heart that isn’t afraid to admonish and reprove when we have to, why, we’ll certainly have peace of heart. And if we have peace of heart, why, we’ll have, and it’s all here in this text. We’ll have harmony and accord and that’s the sweetest thing in the world. It’s like the oil on the head of Aaron that went down to his beard and went down to the skirts of his garment for there the Lord commanded the blessing, even life forevermore.

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“Confidence“

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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“Reasons for Assembling”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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“Reasons for Assembling”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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“The Mistakes of Israel and Possibly Ours”

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“

“The Mistakes of Israel and Possibly Ours“

Pastor and author Aiden Wilson Tozer

April 13, 1958

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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