A.W. Tozer Talks

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

February 12, 1956

“Our Relationships to God”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

February 5, 1956

“The Problem of the Static Christian”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

January 29, 1956

“The Deeper Spiritual Life—Three Classes of Man”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Message 1 of 4 on the Deeper Spiritual Life by A.W. Tozer

January 22, 1956

I begin this morning a series of talks. I do not know how many will be in it. I hadn’t planned it. But, as a result of my reading and praying, I thought about this and then I wanted to give one talk on it, but I find that I cannot do it justice in one talk. So, it will be a number, each sermon complete in itself, but each following the other. I want to talk on “The Deeper Life –What is it?”

I want to read, but not to give close exegesis of this passage of Scripture. For there’s a truth that this that I am to talk about was known in Bible times and that the Bible writers felt as I feel about it this morning.

It is in the fifth chapter of Hebrews and over into the sixth. He talks about Melchizedek in the tenth verse and then in the eleventh, says, “of whom we have many things to say, and hard to be uttered, seeing that ye are dull of hearing. For when for the time ye ought to be teachers, ye have need that one teach you again, which be the first principles of the oracles of God and are become such as have need of milk and not of strong meat. For everyone that uses milk is unskillful in the Word of righteousness for he is a babe. But strong meat belongs to them that are a full age, even those who by reason of use have their senses exercised to discern both good and evil. Therefore, leaving the principles of the doctrine of Christ, let us go on, unto perfection, not laying again the foundation of repentance from dead works and of faith toward God and of the doctrine of a baptism and laying on of hands and the resurrection of the dead and of eternal judgment. And this will we do if God permit.”

I thought that you might like to hear it in another translation. I don’t often read other translations. But, all English Bibles are translations. Let me show you how the Phillips translation has the same passage that I read. “There is a great deal that we should like to say about this high priesthood but it is not easy to explain to you since you seem so slow to grasp spiritual truth at a time when you should be teaching others, you need teachers yourselves to repeat to you the ABC of God’s revelation to man, for anyone who continues to live on milk is obviously immature. He simply has not grown up. Solid food is only for the adult. That is for the man who has developed by experience his power to discriminate between what is good and bad for him. Let us leave behind the elementary teaching about Christ and go forward to adult understanding. Let us not lay over and over again the foundation truths, repentance from the deeds which led to death, believing in God, baptism and laying on of hands, belief in the life to come and the final judgment. No! If God allows, let us go on.”

Now those are the words of the man who wrote the book of Hebrews by the pen of the Holy Ghost. And I’ve only selected this as one passage out of very many that I might have given to show that the temptation to settle down and not go forward is very strong in the Christian life. And that masses of people do it. And yet, the Spirit of God rises up early, and gets into men and urges them forward and urges them to urge others.

And so, we have such passages as this in Hebrews five and six. Now, this idea of there being a better Christian life than most people know, is not a modern idea at all, nor a modern development. Israel, for instance, began her history in a burst of Divine power when God led the children of Israel out of Egypt in that famous and memorable journey through the Red Sea, and over into the wilderness and on through the wilderness, and across the river Jordan, and into the Holy Land, with a fire in the cloud going before and the children of Israel drinking out of the mysterious water from the mysterious rock, and the food being manna, which God called angel’s food which came down from above.  And one miracle following another and grace upon grace with faith and love and worship at the center like a beating heart.

Now that was Israel when Israel began her famous history. But then came a slow shift from the center, out toward the perimeter, out from the beating heart, out to the epidermis, out to the outside skin of things. And then externalism took over in Israel. And a good deal of the long history of Israel in the Old Testament is the history of Israel yielding to the propensity to live on the surface. And the prophets of God urging Israel back to the center.

Always God urges men back to the center and always men by centrifugal force tend to fly out to the outer edge of things. Always, God wants men to have content and always men seek to be satisfied with words. If we can simply say words, why, we in the major, satisfy our conscience. And then, men like ceremony without love or meaning, and God always insists upon love and meaning, regardless of ceremony. And man loves form without worship and God wants worship whether he has form or not.

Externalism lies in words and ceremonies and forms. Internalismin lies in content, in love, in worship, in inward spiritual reality. So God sent prophets and seers, and reformers, the last one being Jesus Himself. And these rebuked externalism. They rebuked hollow form and they pleaded for what we would now call a deeper life, which is simply deeper than the average life around about us. Which is near to the norm of the New Testament, the New Testament ideal.

Now in the book of Malachi, there is one of the loveliest, tenderest, little passages imaginable. And I want to read it to you. It is the testimony of the prophet Malachi 400 years before Christ came, before the Maccabees. And he was the last prophet to appear to Israel as a prophet, at least the last prophet that got into the sacred Canon. And here we read this at a time when Malachi rebuked and warned and in every way that he knew, exhorted and urged the people who had gone astray who had gone to externals and the surface of life, and were satisfied with the whirling machinery and the motion of the pieces and parts, but cared nothing about the beating heart of it and the life within.

And here is the tender little testimony of a few that we would say, sought the deeper life. Listen, “Then, they that feared the Lord spake often one to another, and the Lord hearkened and heard it and the book of remembrance is written before Him, for them that feared the Lord and that thought upon His name, and they shall be mine saith the Lord of Hosts. In that day when I make up my jewels, and I will spare them as a man spareth his own son that serves him. Then shall you return and discern between the righteous and the wicked, between him that serveth God and him that serveth Him not.”

Even in Israel, that religious nation of Israel, there were righteous and wicked. There were those who served God and those who thought they served God but served him not. And this company of people, I take it, there weren’t very many. They were called, “they that feared the Lord.” And they spoke often to each other. And the Lord was pleased with it so that he wrote it down in a book and probably wrote what they said. And God said joyfully, that they should be His in that day, they should be His jewels. Now that was the Old Testament.

Now when we come over into the New, after all the wonders of the Incarnation, and the Crucifixion and the Resurrection and the pouring out of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, then the church began as Israel before her had begun in a blaze of life and power. And simplicity marked her and faith and love and purity and worship.

All of this great, top heavy Christendom that we know today was never known in the day of the Book of Acts in the days of the apostles. Utter simplicity was at the root of everything. Faith was the power, or at least the instrument and the Holy Ghost, the power that led them on, and love throbbed at the heart of their worship, and purity of life was demanded of them. So they had worship and love and faith, and their moral lives were pure and their whole lives simple. And then as the years passed came a shift toward externalism, just as had happened in the days of Israel, a shift outward from the center toward the surface.

Always remember this, that it could be the easiest thing in the world to live at the center. But it usually is the hardest and it’s easier to live on the surface then it is in the center. So, the church shifted toward externalism and institutionalism took over.  And then came form and ceremony and tradition.

But again, God sent His prophets, Augustine now called St. Augustine came, and met God in a marvelous and wonderful way. And while he lived within the framework of the organized church, St. Augustine knew God with trembling raptures of worship, and he wrote it into his magnificent and justly famous books.

Along came Bernard of Cluny. We’ve read about him and I’ve mentioned before here I think in other times of how long about the 10th or 11th century, this Bernard of Cluny was a monk. And he had had a dream that he might someday visit Rome. So, after much effort and preparation, he finally succeeded in realizing that dream. He went to Rome and there at the very headquarters of the church, he saw what was going on. He saw the abuse by the priests. He saw how form and ceremony took over and there was very little true spirituality anywhere among even the Prelates and those in high position. It so broke his heart that he went back to his little valley, and there hid himself away and wrote his famous, “The Celestial Country. One of the most rapturous things ever penned by any human being on this earth.

It was the mighty cry of a hungry man after God and the protest of the soul against all the formality, and particularly against the corruption that he saw in the church. They had back in those days groups of men and women that call themselves the Friends of God. They did not leave the church, they stayed within the church, but they paid little attention to the forms of the church. They made the Spirit everything. They had also groups they call the Brothers of the Common Life. And those men of God lived their simple life.

St. Francis of Assisi came along. And his was a protest also against formality and he formed his order. In fact, the great orders of the church, I think, almost invariably grew out of a great revival in the heart of some man and he formed that order in order that he might give spiritual religion a chance to live again. And then he had more than died and gone to sleep with his father’s until formality and externalism took over again. And it has been the history of the church down the years.

And these such men as I have named, rebuked and pleaded for a life that was real. A life as old Walter Hilton said to the nuns in a certain place. He said, “now my ghostly sisters, my spiritual sisters, this book that I’m writing to you, is written in order that you might have actually in your heart what you seem to have, that what you have with the dress you have that indicates that you belong to a certain level or order, that you may have within you.

And then he wrote his great book called “The Ladder of Perfection” or the scale of perfection, pleading that they might have within their hearts, the power and love and grace and worship in purity that their garments indicated that they had. So, God always had his men who pleaded and earnestly longed that they might be holy and they might have in themselves that which they knew the Bible had taught.

Well, we say you’re talking all together about the Roman church. Well, I come to the Protestant church now. And I point out to you, my friends, sadly, as I must that this shift toward externals is just as strong within Protestantism ever was in Israel or ever was in the church before Luther’s time, where the temptation to go outward toward words and traditions and forms and customs and habits, and we carry upon our back whole loads of traditions that have no place in the Word of God. And Jesus taught that when in vain you do worship God, teaching for doctrines the commandments of men. And if we can allow a word to stand for a deed, we’ll do it and not do the deed and the forms and customs.

I’m thinking about something that a gentleman told me I’m trying to remember where but when I go into cities I visit usually cathedrals and great religious centers wherever I can, Catholic or Protestant. And I was in one city and I’m trying to recall now where it was and can’t for the moment. But a man took me around and told me this. He said, now these windows that you see are exact replicas of a famous cathedral in Europe. And he said artists went to Europe and they copied with exquisite precision the stained glass windows of that famous Cathedral now hundreds of years old, and they brought it back to this country. And now we have it. This is a perfect replica of such and such Cathedral, all of these beautiful stained glass windows.

And he said, Now I point out something to you. He said, Do you notice here and there are rather spotted splotchy appearances? You notice how down the edge along close to the frame, there’s a bit of discoloration? And I said, Yes, I do notice. Well, he said I tell you what that is. He said these windows were hundreds of years old. And they have stood there as centuries rolled on and nations and kingdoms rose and fell and they naturally got washed only by the rains and they collected on themselves, a certain tarnish, a certain discoloration, the dust of the centuries was upon them. And he said, there were those who believed that the dust and discoloration actually improved and mellowed the windows and made them look better than they were before. So, he said when the artists went over to copy them, they did not wash the windows, nor they did not try to copy the window without the dirt, but they copied dirt and window. So that what we have here is not only the glass of the artistry of the stained-glass windows of the cathedral, but we have, in addition, perfectly reproduced the dust of centuries that gathered on those windows.

Now there is a perfect illustration of how the church of Christ tends to go on, how Israel did. And how every order that’s ever been established and every new denomination that has ever come up born out of an earnest desire to bring men to God, how then they became the dust. The centuries went on and passed on and that got on their windows and that became a part of their beliefs and a part of their practices so that they’re hardly able to tell which is of God and which is simply the accumulation of tarnishing dust from the centuries.

Now, that’s what we have done in our time. But my brethren, don’t imagine for a minute that we have been without our prophets and our pleaders who have stood and warned us and tried to bring us back to God. God still has those who are not content with surface religion. I find them all up and down the country. They’re not all one denomination, but they’re not content with surface religion. They long to recapture the true inwardness of the faith and they insist upon reality. They don’t want anything artificial. They want to know that whatever they have is real. They’d rather it would be small and real, than to be large and unreal. Better a living dog than a dead lion, said the Old Testament. And so better to have a little church that’s real than a big church that’s artificial. Better to have a simple religion that is real than to have a great ornate ceremony that is only hollow. 

And God has had his people down the years. And I want to describe these people to you and they live today. They’re not all in this church, but they live today. And they live among God’s people everywhere. I’ve found them here and there. I think there are some of them in almost every religious group. There are those who want nothing apart from the New Testament.

Now remember this, you and I are brought to the Bible. For this is our rock from which we drink our water. This is our manna. This is our blueprint upon which we build our cathedral. This is our guide to the desert in the wilderness. This is our all in all and we want for nothing.

These that I speak about, who want nothing except what’s in the New Testament, we asked not that we might go abroad into heresy abroad and follow Jehovah’s Witnesses or what have you, into some wild doctrine which has not had the approval of the centuries. My brethren, do you know, that the difficulty down the years as a rule, was not that men taught wrong doctrine, but that they didn’t live to the doctrine they taught.

It was not when a reformer came along or a Prophet came along. It was not to correct doctrine. It was to rebuke men for holding the doctrine without having the inward reality. And so when such men as Wesley came along, they didn’t try to straighten out the church. They didn’t try to correct the doctrines of the church. They said there should be a witness in their heart that these things are true in us.

And men followed them because they found true reality in the Word of God for their own hearts. They wanted nothing outside of the Bible. They simply wanted what the Bible had for them. And these of which I speak, have only one source of riches, and all those riches are in Christ. Jesus Christ is enough. It is not Christ, plus somebody else, Christ and somebody else. Jesus Christ is all in all, fully sufficient, and these who seek for the deeper Christian life, are those who want the riches that are in Christ Jesus the Lord. And these seek no place, no wealth, no fame.

So much is being carried on these days. That is, where men are using religion as a source of either wealth or else fame or publicity or something else. They’re using religion to get something for themselves. The result is, they’ll take advantage of whatever happens to be current.

I’ve preached now for quite a while, since I was nineteen years of age. I’ve been preaching and that’s a long time ago. And I have outlived innumerable sheaves of men who came along and tried to cash in on whatever was popular at the time. And so they rode the coattails of whatever new thing there was that came along, and I went right on preaching the gospel. I never preached to big crowds, at least not to big crowds, but I preached to consistent crowds. But this thing of wanting to get some people around you, be known or get a reputation.

Those who seek the deeper life do not want this. They want the riches that are in Christ Jesus and they’re willing to lose their reputation if they must, in order to get on with God and go on to perfection. They seek no fame, they seek no place, they seek no wealth. The man who longs after God wouldn’t turn his hand over to get elected anywhere to anything. The seeker after high ecclesiastical position, brethren, it is pathetic, this desire to be known as to be somebody. Yes, he wants to be somebody and then he dies.

Every once in a while I hear about some great, big shot that dies. And immediately I say to myself what now brother? What now? What now? While you lived, you climbed the ladder of success and you trampled other men down in the name of Christ and religion. Now you’re dead and the worms will soon eat you and your poor tarnished soul goes out to face the Judge of all the earth. What now man?

The seekers after God, don’t ever want fame nor place nor wealth. They’re never seeking high position. They don’t want to be elected to anything. They want rather to know God and to be where Jesus is. Only to know Christ, that’s all.

Paul said, “I consider that all I ever was to be, but dung, that I might win Christ and be known in him. This is the plea  and the testimony of those of whom I speak. And these seekers after God are deeply dissatisfied with mere form. You give them a beautifully painted package and they shake it and if nothing rattles, and they weigh it and it doesn’t weigh anything, they toss it aside. You can’t fool them with painted toys. They want content. They want to know what’s there.

One diamond, small enough to be lost in our pockets and we may have plenty of them. You could lose a diamond worth thousands of dollars in a little crease somewhere in one of our pockets. And yet it is worth more, ten times more, twenty times more than a base drum. The base drum is how many times, maybe a thousand times larger and infinitely noisier. And they usually paint some things on the outside of it, but one tiny diamond will buy a whole room full  of those windy bags they call bass drums.

And the people of God that are seeking the face of Jesus, in all denominations everywhere, and kindness and charity leads me to say, I think some of them are over on the other side of the fence. I believe the Thomas Merton, of the Capuchin Father’s, I believe he’s a seeker after God and don’t you follow me around afterwards and say that I shouldn’t have said that. I should have said that. That’s why I said it!

I believe that there are those who have never left the ancient Roman church and still they know God and they’re seekers after God. I personally can’t see why they don’t leave. But I say I believe there are a few and I think Merton’s one of them, a man who knows God and seeks after God. Brethren, God has His people and they’re everywhere. And they’re known by the fact that they hate mere form. And even though they may go through with it, they have something within them that’s bigger than all of that.

Brother Lawrence, Nicholas Herman of devotional fame, when he was in his monastery, he said, I learned to pray to God all by

myself. He said, I just talked to God all the time, everything I was doing, washing dishes, traveling, whatever I was doing, I was talking to my Heavenly Father. He said, I developed such a sense of God’s presence around about me that I never lost it for 40 years. He said I didn’t need their forms.They told me set times to pray and I did. I was obedient. I prayed set times but he says it didn’t mean a thing, any more than they did any other time. He said I had learned the inner secret, the fellowship with God myself.

So, when they said, “all right now brother Lawrence, you go and pray twenty-seven minutes, he went and prayed twenty-seven minutes. He did what he was told. But he smiled and said it didn’t mean anything, because I had already found God. And I was in communion with God all the time.

So, you’ll find them my brethren everywhere who know God. The average Christian’s spiritual progress is not sufficient to satisfy these longing, longing seekers after God. They want something better than that, spiritual progress. The average fellow doesn’t make any spiritual progress. He gets converted, joins a church and five years later, he’s right where he was. Ten years later, he’s either where he was or he slipped back a little. That’s not satisfactory to the thirsters and those hungry after God. 

As the heart panteth after the water brook, so panted my soul after you God. My heart and my flesh cry out for God, for the living God. That’s the testimony of the seeker after God, that he’s not going to let somebody else’s slow snail progress, keep him back.

And then these seekers after God are impatient of the substitutes that are offered. You see when you don’t have anything inside and try to get something outside. When it’s well known fact out in the world that when the fire goes out in the furnace, they paint the outside to make it look as if the fire was still there. And I have seen them, God bless them. I have nothing but sorrow and smiling pity in my heart for them.

But I have seen old ladies that should be sitting in front of a fireplace, if they could find one in this busy chrome age, knitting booties for their great grandchildren, but in place of that, bless them, they are painted like a flagpole. And with every gadget and prop known to modern man, they’re trying to recapture, if only for one fleeting evening, the lights and glory of their girlhood. But it just won’t come back. That’s all Granny, it just won’t come back. And you might just as well come out from behind the mask because we know who’s back there and we know all about your wrinkles and we know a lot of things we won’t say.

Well, the church is the same, and even Evangelicalism and so called, Full Gospelism, when it loses something from its heart, then it gets these bangles and dangles on the outside in order to pretend that it’s got something on the inside. But you can’t fool the seekers after God with this kind of thing. They know better when some red-faced, curly haired fellow rushes in with a briefcase full of samples and wants to show you how you can have the biggest church in all of Cook County, bar none, they smile. They say, listen son, cool off, be still and know that God is God. Go somewhere and reduce your temperature by two degrees and get ahold of yourself. Read the Bible calmly and see whether you don’t find that all of this you’re trying to feed me is only paint for the corpse, that’s all. Bells on the old goat that’s too battered to be a goat anymore.

Now brother, substitutions. A lot of you are tired of hearing me say it. I know, and I don’t blame you. If you’ve got your mind made up. You’re not going to go on with God. I must sound like a grade Z idiot to you, because I’m talking about going on with God. But substitutions are always. . .  my mail brings me substitutions. Always they want to substitute something else for the fire on the altar. They want me to buy or bring something else.

I got a letter one time from a man who said, “I am an ex-chaplain in a prison. And he said, I’d like to come to your church and put on a meeting. He said, here’s the way that I do it. He said, I come in and I set up an electric chair replica on the platform. Then I get somebody to play the part and I have a young fellow come and sit in the electric chair and go through the motions of dying in chair.” He said, “I have seen I forget how many died in the chair and I’ve seen how many hung, then I saw a great heavy woman one time hang. He told me some things about that I won’t repeat because we’re it’s too near to dinnertime. But he said, I don’t ask for an offering but I’ll just wait at the door and the people can give what they want to as they go out.

I sat down and wrote in the letter. As near as I can remember, this was the letter, I said, My dear sir, I have your letter and your literature, your promotional literature, and your request to come to our church and have a meeting. I said, now first, if you have stood beside young men who have died in the chair and have comforted them with a gospel text in their last hour, I want to thank you. And I said for any little comfort that you’ve been able to give to these poor, misled, reckless boys who have been forced to pay the last full measure of punishment to society for the crimes they have committed, receive my thanks and I deeply appreciate anything that you’ve done. But I said, if you for a minute, imagine that by putting up a replica of an electric chair in the platform and going through a mask and masquerade and pretense. if you think that helps anybody your mistaken.

And I said, I personally wouldn’t have you anywhere near our church. And I said, the fact that you don’t take an offering doesn’t mean anything to me. And I said to see you sitting after you had properly shocked the audience with this terrible display in the name of the Lord, to have you sit at the door with a smirk and receive the offerings from the shocked and pop-eyed congregation that was foolish enough to come and see your carnal exhibition. I still think you’re out for the money. And I said, so according to the above, I’m quite sure you will draw the proper conclusion that we have no place for you in our church fellowship, Sincerely yours. He never replied. And in fact, I’m not sure he didn’t drop dead. But I’ve never heard from him since but still I suppose if he hasn’t retired now, living on the proceeds in Florida, why, he’s somewhere with his portable electric chair.

My God in heaven above, what have we come to, that the people of God aren’t shocked enough by Calvary with a man dying on a gallows on a hill outside Jerusalem, who was God-man, dying for the sins of the world, that leaves them dull and unmoved. So, we have to bring in a half-witted ex-chaplain with his cheap buffoonery in order to move the congregation

Well, that was a way back there before all this outburst of modern theatrics that’s taken over Protestantism. But it was the beginning, it was the seed that grew the dragon’s teeth, that grew into more dragons. So, we don’t like it. The hungry hearted saints of God don’t want it, but they read with great eagerness, the lives of holy men and the devotional books of the centuries.

For instance, I wonder, if I can find it here. I wonder if you have ever read the Song of Songs or the Love of God by Bernard of Clairvaux. I wonder if you have ever read the Dark Night of the Soul of Saint John of the Cross or the Scale of Perfection or The Golden Love by Walter Hilton, or The Amendment of Life or The Life of the Servant, or the Little Book of Eternal Wisdom by Henry Suso, or The Great Sermons by Meister Eckhart, The Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis or The Devout Life by Francis de Sales or The Anonymous Cloud of Unknowing or The Letters of Samuel Rutherford or the works of William Law, or The Letters of Milan or The Journal of Fox or the hymns and writings of Zinzendorf and Murray and Wesley and Simpson.

Why have I named these? I’ve named these men because they were those who rose like the prophets in Israel and didn’t change a doctrine, they just protested against a the hollow externalisms of the world and sought to find and recapture again the glory that was in Jesus Christ the Lord, of worship and prayer and desire to be holy.

Brethren, these that I have named, they form a fellowship, a fellowship, a sacred brotherhood down the years, and I find them, strangely enough. I don’t find them by any means all in our own society. There are men in our own society that are just ordinary men. They have no longing after God. They grind out their sermons, week after week and take their little trips here and there and fish and play golf and come back and preach again. Go again and spend their lives that way. But you can’t talk with much because there’s not much to talk about. After you’ve talked about a little chit chat and business, then they’re they’re sunk. But they’re not all that way. There are those that you can meet for hours on end. They can talk together about God in Christ, and they that love the Lord spoke often one to another. And they heard it and wrote it down in a book.

You say, “This is Mr. Tozer’s idea of religion. Well, there are Presbyterians that believe in this. I was just invited to a Presbyterian church in Milwaukee. Give a Holy Week series of sermons on these various subjects. And I have just been invited this week by telephone and by letter to give a series to the Baptists out in the east. And if I hadn’t canceled out I’d been at Taylor University, a Methodist college and they want to hear this kind of preaching. And I just came back from a Baptist College in St. Paul, and I preached this same way.

And they gather around me and talk with me. Not because I’m a good preacher, I know I’m not. I’ve heard myself on tape. I’m too jumpy to be a good preacher, too nervous, not because I’m a good preacher. But it’s because I talked about things that the hungry-hearted want. That’s the fellowship of the longers and seekers after God.

Yet these same people may be practical and plain and cool-headed and have no sympathy with false doctrines and keep away from extremes and excitement and fanaticism. They don’t want any of that. But they just want to know God and grow on to be holy and to seek the face of Jesus until it they’re aglow with His light.

Brethren I have described them. Now, I want to ask one question. Have I described you? Have I described you? It isn’t a question of how far you’ve gone. It’s a question of which way you’re headed. It isn’t a matter of how deep you yet have plunged. But have you got your diving suit on? It isn’t how far the arrow has sped, but has the arrow left the bow. It isn’t that you’re perfect, but thirstest thou after perfection? Seekest thou God?

Or, is your religion social? Is it satisfied with a once a Sunday, once a week gesture to Almighty God? He gives you the wind. He gives you the rain. He gives you a body to contain your wonderful soul. He gives you an amazing mind. If you got steady Cs or Ds in your school all the way through, still your mind is so amazing that the angels wonder at it. Given you his Son. He’s given you the ability to know Him. He sustains you, holds you up and keeps your heart beating. He waits to receive you yonder, but you toss him a sop once a week. Here you are God, come get it. So, God gets what’s left, the tattered remnants of your time. And then you’re a follower of the Lamb.  Don’t fool yourself, you’re not.

Are you weary of externals and long after God? I do. I long after God and this is not old age and this is not the result of anything I’ve been reading except the Bible. This has been growing on me through the years. The only gratifying thing I have apart from my communion with God is the knowledge that I’m not alone in this. God has His people everywhere who are in revolt, in revolt against pretense and textualism and externalism and tradition, and they want to seek God for Himself through the Scriptures as revealed by the Holy Spirit.

Have I described you? If I have, God bless you. They that love the Lord spoke often to one another. We know you by the conversation we have with you. We know you by what you’re interested in. We know you about how you talk, what the topic will be when conversation begins, and has been. We know God has these people there are not many. But I Thank God, it’s amazing that there are this many. Amazing that they’re sufficient that we can keep a congregation going and even growing a little, giving a little more and doing a little better. I think it’s simply amazing. In this day of surface religion, this day, when externalism has taken over and become triumphant. I’ll have no part of it!

Have I described you? If I have, I want to help you. I want to help you to know God. The pastures are greener, the waters are deeper and bluer and still further on. Do you want to go on?  I trust so.