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“Practical Aspects of the Holy Spirit“

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A.W. Tozer Talks · Practical Aspects of the Holy Spirit

Practical Aspects of the Holy Spirit

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

January 10, 1960

The text we found in the 24th chapter of Luke, and in Acts 1, familiar passages. Our Lord says, Behold, I send the promise of my Father upon you, but tarry ye in the city of Jerusalem, until ye be imbued with power from on high. And Acts 1, it says, He showed himself alive after his passion, and being assembled together with the disciples, commanded them that they should not depart from Jerusalem, but wait for the promise of the Father, which, saith he, ye have heard of me. For John truly baptized with water, but ye shall be baptized with the Holy Ghost not many days hence.

In my previous talk, I attempted to show who the Holy Spirit is, and with great reverence and imperfection, what He is. I tried to show that He’s a real being and not an abstraction, that He is a person and not a thing, that He is very God, having all the powers and attributes of the Deity, and that He is of one essence with the Father and the Son. Now, granted this is true, what has this to do with you and me?

I don’t like to teach in a vacuum. I have never liked to have someone hear a sermon and after hearing, go home and say, so what? If that was the case, I might as well have been somewhere else, as well as yourself unless there is some moral imperative, some obligation lying upon us as a result of what we know, some privilege which is ours as a result of what we can find out.

So, with that in mind, what is the practical effect of the person of the Holy Spirit? What are we to expect and what are we to do? How should it affect my outlook as a Christian? And how should it affect the outlook of your church?

The Father promised the Spirit as a gift to His children. And I don’t know whether this is right or not, but I think God maybe had in mind the example of love people have for their children. He did say, if you being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to them that ask him?

And in making the Spirit, the Promise of the Father, I wonder if He didn’t want to show that you don’t have to be afraid of the Holy Spirit. This is one thing that it is very difficult to get a Christian over, the fear of the Holy Spirit. By that I don’t mean reverence for Him. You cannot reverence the Holy Spirit too much, but you can be afraid of Him.

And I am sure that a lot of people are afraid of the Holy Spirit. But if you could remember that He is the Father’s promise that He is given to us as the Father’s promised gift; just as a man offers or promises his son a bicycle for Christmas, or whatever he wants, and the boy remembers. I know they remember. And they come back and remind you sometimes in an embarrassing time that you’ve promised. And nobody is ever afraid of a promise made by a father who loves him.

I believe the members of the Redeemed Church should be bound in a bundle of love with the Holy Spirit. The truth is that God never thought of His church apart from the Holy Spirit. We were born of the Spirit. We are baptized into the body of Christ by the Spirit. We should be anointed with the Spirit. We are led of the Spirit or should be. We are taught of the Spirit. And the Spirit is the medium, the divine solution in which God holds His Church and has His Church. The Holy Spirit is the essence of the Godhead uncreated; I think the poet or the hymnist said.

God never dreamed of his people apart from the Holy Spirit. And he made a lot of promises to them. Let’s note some of the promises that he made. He said, until the Spirit be poured upon us from on high, and the wilderness be a fruitful field, and the fruitful field be counted for a forest, then judgment shall dwell in the wilderness, and righteousness remain in the fruitful field. And the work of righteousness shall be peace, and the effect of righteousness, quietness and assurance forever.

Then, further on in Isaiah, He says, I will pour water upon him that is thirsty, and floods upon the dry ground. I will pour my Spirit upon thy seed, and my blessing upon thine offspring.

Then there’s that famous passage in Joel 2:28-29, it shall come to pass afterward that I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh; and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions: And also upon the servants and upon the handmaids in those days will I pour out my spirit.

Those are the words of the Father, and Jesus interpreted these words and called them the promise of the Father. And whenever you have Jesus, our Lord, interpreting the Old Testament, you stay close by His interpretation.

Don’t depend too much or lean too hard on the interpretations of men because we can be wrong, but our Lord, the man Christ Jesus, never was. And He called this the promise of the Father. That is, the Father, through the Old Testament, through the years, had promised, and now Jesus sums it up and calls it the promise of the Father.

In Luke 24 Jesus says, tarry ye until ye be endued with power, and I will send the promise of the Father upon you, and in John 14, 15, and 16, you’ll find our Lord talking about the Holy Spirit and His coming to the Church.

And now I notice that in the Church, in the Gospels and Acts, and over into the Epistles, there are three periods that are discernible with respect to the Holy Spirit and His work in the Church. There is what we call the period of the Promise, that is, from John the Baptist to the resurrection of Christ.

Now, the marks of this period, this three-year period, shows the disciples were called, and they were commissioned, and they were taught. Do you know, believing friend, if we could get together a congregation that was as spiritual as the disciples were before Pentecost, we would consider it a very spiritual Church. We’d make bishops out of those boys. We would. We’d elect them to the boards, and we’d write about their lives and name churches after them if we could find somebody just as spiritual as they were before the Holy Ghost came at Pentecost.

They were getting ready, you see. The disciples were called, there’s no question, they were called and they were commissioned and they were taught of the Lord. We talk about these ignorant disciples. Do you know that these disciples had three years in the best Bible school in the world? There isn’t a seminary on earth that can equal the seminary with Jesus as the whole faculty. He was teaching them and instructing them and sitting with them.

They used to say a university consisted of Mark Hopkins on one end of a log and a boy on the other. Put a young fellow on one end of a log and Mark Hopkins on the other. If the log wasn’t too long, you had a university. And a Bible school, a seminary, consists of our Lord Jesus Christ and a willing student. The disciples went to the best Bible school in the world.

Now, they didn’t get a degree which they could frame and put on their study wall, but they had a degree inside of them. And they loved Christ our Lord. These disciples did. They loved Him living, they loved hHm dead, and they loved Him living again.

That was the period of the promise when they hadn’t received anything yet, they had only been promised something. And all this time until His death and even after, Jesus was creating expectation in them. He was telling them there was a new kind of life coming to them. It wasn’t to be a poetic life. It wasn’t to be psychic or to be physical, but it was to be an aflatus from above. It was to be something that was to come to them out of the world, beyond them and over the threshold of their beings. It would come into the sanctum sanctorum, into the penetralia, into the deep of their spirit and live there, and teach them and instruct them and lead them and make them holy and give them power.

Jesus taught that all the way through wherever He could find a time and the people were about him and the circumstances were good, He would tell them these things. And as He came nearer to the end of His earthly life, He intensified this teaching as is indicated in John 14, 15 and 16. He told them there was a new and superior kind of life coming. And He told them it was to be an effusion, an outpouring of spiritual energy. And then He left them.

Then there was a second period, the period of the preparation. In some measure, they were being prepared while He walked with them. But after He had gone, then they began to prepare. They stopped their activities.

And you know what’s the matter with us in our day? We are the busiest bunch of eager beavers that probably have ever been in the religious world. The idea is that if you’re not running in a circle, if you are not breathing down the back of your own neck, you’re not pleasing God. When the fact is, the Lord said, don’t go yet, you’re not ready to go.

You know Peter leaped to his feet when the Lord said, go ye into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature. Peter leaped to his feet and I doubt grabbed or scooped up his hat on the way out. He was going to go right now and maybe found or start something. But the Lord said to Peter, tarry ye in the city of Jerusalem until ye be endued with power from on high.

I think one of the biggest mistakes we make with our young people is to get them born again and then start them out right away. Most people are not prepared to do the work of the Lord when they’re just born again.

The priests were born priests, but they had to be anointed priests before they could serve. They were born priests. They had to be born of the tribe of Levi, of the family of Aaron and Kohen. They had to be born into the priesthood, or they couldn’t be priests. But they didn’t serve even though they were born priests. They didn’t serve as priests until they had been anointed.

Blood was put on their ears, on their thumbs, on their toes and then on the blood was put oil, fragrant sweet oil, a type of the Holy Ghost. Then after they had been anointed for the priesthood they went and served in the Old Testament priesthood.

But you and I, just as soon as we get a fellow born into the tribe of Levi, we give him a bunch of tracts and say, now Bud, get going. And the result is, Christianity has taken on amateurism.

I heard Dr. Busby, the former president of Wheaton College one time say that we are suffering from a rash of amateurism in Christian circles, and we surely are. Christianity has leveled down and down and down, and the high quality, the specific gravity and the weight of it has gone. We’re light as butterflies and we flip, flip, flip around in the sunshine and imagine that we are eagles flapping our broad wings above the rocks of God but instead of that, we’re butterflies. We’re trying to work when we’re not prepared to work. And so there needs to be some preparation, some getting ready. They stopped their activities.

I have said lots of radical things in my ministry, but I don’t apologize because I wouldn’t have enough time. But among the things I have said, and I would stand for it, that the church would be better off if we would call a moratorium on activity for about six weeks, and just wait on God to see what He would do for us. Just wait on God. They did that very thing. They cleaned up the loose ends and they got united.

We pray, O God, send thy Holy Spirit upon us so we’ll be united. We might just as well repeat the three blind mice. God doesn’t hear that kind of prayer because it doesn’t have any sense in it. The Holy Spirit did not come upon the disciples to unite them. The Holy Spirit came upon the disciples because they were already united, being of one accord and in one place.

Now the scholars who are supposed to know, tell me it’s a musical term, that being in one accord is a musical term. It means being one in harmony. They were already one, in harmony with each other. And then they were all together in one place.

If we could only get God’s people, all together today in one place. The trouble is with some of us is, we are here, but we are not all here. Our minds are skattered when in church, wandering around all over, but you are physically present in your body. But they were all together in one place.

Somebody once said that we have yet to see what God can do with a man if He can get him and others all together in one place. If He can just get them together and in one place; get them focused and get them together. And they were there.

And then came the third period, the period of the realization. The Holy Ghost came upon them suddenly. Recently I saw a word here in the Book of Acts, and I found that word occurs quite often through the Scriptures, and that is the word suddenly. And suddenly there came a sound from heaven, as a rushing mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting.

And I rather smiled to myself because that word, suddenly; God’s people are so afraid of suddenly. They always want things to slip up on them a little bit at a time, slowly. Everybody is willing to be filled with the Holy Spirit, provided God does it very gingerly and very slowly, and doesn’t take away their faith or embarrass them any, or doesn’t frighten them.

But the Scripture says, suddenly, they were filled with the Holy Ghost. It even says, suddenly, there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host. I think you’ll find that word, suddenly, occurs pretty near to whenever God did a wonderful thing. He did it suddenly.

But we’re afraid of that. We want to grow in grace. We want to grow, because you can grow and not embarrassed if an altar call is given, and you go to the prayer room and get down on your knees and seek Almighty God. And God comes and fills you and you get up and get your handkerchief out and rub your eyes and say, thank God the Comforter has come.

It’s embarrassing, you know. And it takes a little bit away from your reputation. You’ve got a feeling, like, look at me. I used to be the chairman of the board, and I taught an adult Sunday school class in my home church, and now for me to suddenly be filled with the Spirit, and maybe even break down and cry, or say, praise the Lord, it would be awful.

And the result, of course, is we go on year after year and learn to live with death. We learn to live with a spiritual corpse. We learn to live, but our breath is frosty, and our cheeks are pale, and our toes are frostbitten and we haven’t much spirituality. Yet we learn to live with that and imagine that’s normal and we write books to prove that that’s normal. It’s not normal at all, it’s subnormal, it’s abnormal, it’s below normal. The Holy Ghost isn’t on us and that’s our trouble.

But the period of the realization came suddenly, and the Father fulfilled His promise, and the expectations were fully met and more. Always remember this, that God is always bigger than anything God can say, because words are inadequate to express God and what He can do.

Any promise that God ever made, God has to over-fulfill it. The reason being that God is so great and His heart is so kind and His desires so intense and tremendous, that language doesn’t express it. Not the Greek, not the English, no language expresses God, it can’t. If language could contain God, then language would be equal to God. So, everything God says in the Bible must be understood to be a little greater than what He says, even as God is greater than language.

So when God promised them that they should receive power, that that power should be an aflatus from heaven above which should come upon them. It should cross the threshold of their spirits and enter into the deeps of their soul and dwell there forever. And should work within them to lead them, purify them, instruct them and teach them. We have got to believe that the fulfillment will be greater than the promise because the fulfillment of God and the promise are words. God is always greater than words. Don’t forget that.

Old Testament Scripture says every man shall know the plague of his own heart. But there was deliverance, a balm in Gilead, and there was a fountain opened in the house of David to deliver us from the plague of our own heart.

Now there’s a great modern error abroad the states that the individual Christian is not affected by this promise of the Father, that this happened to the Church once, and it’s not to be repeated, just as the birth of Christ happened once and is not to be repeated. The death of Christ happened once and is not to be repeated. The resurrection of Christ happened once and is not to be repeated.

So, Pentecost happened once, and that’s it now; the church no longer is concerned. It has taken place, that is a historic fact, the same as the birth of Jesus, the same as the death of Jesus, and so it is brushed off.

I’m going to pose some questions now and let you do your own thinking, so you make your own decision without having it rammed down your throat, so to speak. You will have made your own decision about it. There are nine questions I want to ask you, and you decide.

The first question is, was the Father’s promise for the first century Christians only? This promise of the Father that was to come, was that for the first century Christians only, or did that carry over to the second century and the third century and the fourth century?

My theological education came out of the Schofield Bible, and do you know what the Schofield Bible says? The Schofield Bible says that the period that Joel had in mind when he said that it shall come to pass in the last days that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh. C.I. Schofield says that period, the last days, began at Pentecost and continues until Christ returns. We are living in the period of the last days when that text of Joel’s is active and efficacious and applicable to you and me.

I quote Dr. Schofield because often he is quoted as not being on the side of the Spirit-filled life. But he was an honest man and he stated that; that we are now living in those latter days when God will pour out his Spirit upon all flesh. That’s what he believed. Dr. Torrey said that when Peter said, believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and receive the gift of the Spirit which is promised is unto you and your children and as many as are far off. It wasn’t that first generation crowd only. You and your children and as many as are far off.

How far off is Palestine from where you are? I’m a better theologian than I am a geographer so you will have to guess at it. It says, as many as are far off. That’s the first problem. Now you settle it, friend. If I try to make you believe something, you’ll go away and if you meet a man that’s a better arguer than I am, he’ll make you believe the opposite.

That is always the reason I believe in the witness of the Spirit. If you can argue a man into believing he’s filled, he’ll meet another man that’ll argue him out of believing he’s filled. If you can argue a young fellow into thinking he’s born again, he’ll meet some fellow that’ll argue him out of it.

This is why I don’t ever argue with anybody. I point to the Lamb of God that taketh away the sins of the world, and after that God and the man is on his own. Then if I drop dead he’ll have the promise of the Father and he won’t have to go back to me to find out whether it’s so or not. That’s question number one, was the Father’s promise for the first century Christians only?

Question number two is, does the new birth of the first century Christians make my new birth unnecessary? The Lord said that we have to be born again, and he said we were to be filled with the Spirit. And they come along and tell us that that meant they were to be filled with the Spirit. Granted, they were filled with the Spirit, but I happen to be born 1897. That’s a few hundred years too late for that first century and here I am high and dry hanging on a wire and if I didn’t live back there then I’m finished. I don’t have any hope at all. I won’t listen to that kind of teaching. I won’t because you can’t reason it this way.

Consider that Peter was born again. What does Peter being born again do for me? Peter was filled with the Spirit, then what does Peter having been filled with the Spirit do for me? I want to ask you this question, would a breakfast of ham, not ham and eggs, would a breakfast of eggs that Peter ate in 33 A.D. nourish me living today two thousand some years later? No, Peter ate his eggs and drank his milk and ate his brown bread.

But Peter’s breakfast in 33 A.D. won’t do me one bit of good now. I have to eat now if I’m going to be nourished now. Peter’s being born again won’t help me right now all these years later. I must be born again now as he was born again then. Peter’s being filled in that day won’t help me now, I must be filled now as he was filled then. Is there any difference between that and the outpouring of the Spirit?

Another question I want to ask, is it to the church today that the church in Jerusalem was filled with the Holy Ghost? This idea that the church being filled with the Spirit back there in the first century made it unnecessary for the church to be filled with the Spirit now is nonsensical. How silly can you get? No Christians living today were living in the first century. I wasn’t and nobody I know was either. We weren’t even in the minds of our great-grandfathers yet at that time.

But way back of that is the hour when the Holy Ghost came upon the church and the church went out in a blaze of fire to preach the gospel to the known world in the first hundred years, then the long lacuna, the long gap. Now, all these years later, and we have teachers that are so silly as to come and tell us that all we have to do is just go quietly along until the Lord comes and makes us ruler over many cities. They had the Spirit back there and all we have is the echo and the memory and the hope.

Those who believe Pentecost was a one-time event, tell us at conversion we receive what they received back there at Pentecost. Now I want to ask you, have you ever seen anybody at his conversion receive what Peter received in the upper chambers? Have you ever met anybody like that? Do you know anybody like that?

And I want to ask you yet another question. When you were converted, did you have the power Peter had when he was with these brethren? You’ll even level it down below Peter, to the common folk that were around him; just the plain people whose names were not even known, except a few of them. Didn’t they have something that we apparently don’t have in this day in which we live? I think they did.

Now I want to ask another thing. Is modern fundamentalism a satisfactory fulfillment of expectation raised by the Father and Christ? Our Heavenly Father promised the gift to the Holy Ghost to come upon his children. Jesus promised that we should have the Spirit, that He should come and take the things of Christ and make them known unto us. He should bring all things to our memory. We should have power when the Spirit came. He promised all this.

When I look around at the cold, dead, dried-up fundamentalism, textualism, hanging out to dry, and then am expected they want me to believe that what they have now is what they had back there then. I just can’t do it. I just can’t do it. We Christians now are a scrub lot compared with those Christians back there. We’re scrub.

When I was a boy on the farm in Pennsylvania, we had scrub chickens. Occasionally my mother would go out and bring in some buff coachins and Plymouth rocks and some others and try to improve the strain a little bit. But if you just let the hens go a while, just let them go for five or six years, and they’ll revert back to type and they’ll go back to scrubbing. You can’t figure out what they are, and they’re just little old dried-up clucking biddies that lay little eggs, not too many of them, and don’t provide much meat.

We Christians, we’ve just reverted back to the old Adamic type when were thoroughbreds in those early days, thoroughbreds. The early Christians had come from God, or something from God had come to them, and they blazed with light and power and life, and look at us, look at us. And then we try to say we have the same thing that they have. Do you think we have? Now you think it over and answer that question for yourself.

And then I want to ask you one more question. Does your heart personally witness that what you now enjoy is what our Lord promised to His people? Does your heart now bear witness that what you now have is all God meant when He painted that wonderful picture of the fulness of the Spirit, or is there something more for the church?

I am sure some readers want to ask, who is this man, Tozer. What is he? Is this Pentecostal tongue-ism that he’s preaching? No, absolutely not. It’s only what the Christian Missionary Alliance has always believed. It’s only what Dr. Reuben Archer Torrey believed. It’s what Billy Sunday believed, and Billy Graham believed, though Billy was gifted of God to preach to sinners, and he doesn’t enter this too much because his gift is a bit different. He preaches straight to sinners and wins them. But it’s what Torrey, I insist, believed. It’s what Dwight L. Moody believed down in the city of Chicago.

Down on the South Side of the city there was a little home where lived a little nice old lady full of the Holy Ghost named Mother Cook, and a young fellow got converted into the city. He would have made a good salesman. He was a very busy fellow. He loved to run in circles, and he did. He went everywhere running in circles, and his name was Dwight Lyman Moody.

And one day the little old lady, Mother Cook, saw Dwight, and she said, son, I’d like to have you come over to my house sometime, I want to talk to you. So, Moody went over to her house, and she sat him down on a chair, and she said something to this general effect, now Dwight, it’s wonderful to see you saved so beautifully, it’s wonderful to see you so zealous, but you know what you need? You need to be anointed with the Holy Ghost. Well, he said, Mother Cook, I want whatever God has for me. All right, she said, get down here. And she got him down on the linoleum. And they prayed a while, and she prayed, O God, fill this young fellow.

Well, he died out there, and opened his heart and brought his vessel, his empty vessel to the Lord, and took the promise by faith, but nothing happened. A few days afterward, he was out east in New York, and he said, as I was walking down the street, suddenly, now there’s his word again, suddenly, God fulfilled the promise he had made to me in that kitchen. And down unto him came a horn of oil, and the Holy Ghost came on him.

He said he crawled up an alley and raised his hand and said, O God, stay your power or I’ll die. Then he said, I went out from there, preaching the same sermons with the same text, but oh, the difference now, the Holy Ghost had come.

Now the Holy Ghost had been there; He had caused him to be born again. If any man have not the Spirit of Christ, he’s none of His. It’s quite a different thing to have the Spirit as my regenerator and have the horn of oil poured out on my head. Quite a different thing. The reason I can talk about it with a good deal of authority is I went through it, and I know what I’m preaching about. I didn’t learn this at Bible college. The Holy Ghost did this. God did this, so I’m giving it to you. You’ll possibly learn this at Bible college, too, but that wasn’t where I learned it.

I know ask you to ponder these things I have said. There isn’t any use to try to push a person into anything. Too often, we try to push God’s poor children around, pick them out of their shell, and all the result is we get a lot of weird monstrosities instead of saints. I don’t want to do that. I want you to do this. I want you to set aside some time and I want you to search the Scriptures and see whether these things be so.

Some people say they’re not so. Some people say that all I’m doing is confusing people. I once wrote a series of articles for a magazine on the Holy Spirit, and there’s a fellow who publishes things about me, saying I’m confusing the Saints. I wrote him a letter and said to him, my dear brother, if the Lord’s people were as eager to be filled with the Spirit as they are to prove you can’t be, the church would be quite a different church. He published that, too. But it’s true, isn’t it?

It’s true I am not preaching a thing our Baptist brethren don’t believe when you press them. I am not preaching a thing that the Methodist brethren don’t believe. I am not preaching a thing the Salvation Army doesn’t teach. I am not preaching a thing that our Puritan fathers didn’t believe.

So, I don’t apologize. It’s here. Set aside time and search the Scriptures. And if the Scriptures don’t convince you that the Church and the individuals in the Church ought to be living a happy Spirit-filled life, then don’t listen to me. If I was to preach for five hours straight and not preach according to the truth found in the Bible, I am wrong, no matter how eloquent I try to be.

Pray and yield and believe and obey and see what God will do for you in the coming days. Will you do that? See what God will do for you in the days ahead as you search the Scriptures and seek God for what He has provided for you in His great mercy and abundant grace.

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“Christ Offers Us Spiritual Power-Why We Don’t Have It“

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Tozer Talks · Christ Offers Us Spiritual Power-Why We Don't Have It

Christ Offers Us Spiritual Power-Why We Don’t Have It

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

September 29, 1959

Now, it is a privilege any time to take the Word of God and expound it to any group of people anywhere. But it is particularly, it is a particular privilege to be able to preach to preachers, because when you preach to a preacher, if it does him any good, then you are preaching to everybody he preaches to after that.

If you preach to a congregation, you preach to a congregation. But if you preach to preachers, you preach to everybody they preach to after that.  So, it is a particular privilege for me to address the members of Conference, and it’s odd that the congregation is composed almost exclusively of the delegates.

Now, there are two little passages of Scripture that I want to read. One is found in the first chapter of Acts. When they were come together, they asked Him, saying, Lord, wilt thou at this time restore again the kingdom to Israel?

And He said unto them, it is not for you to know the times or the seasons. You see, He caught them up on a word. Wilt Thou at this time, and He said, it’s not for you to know the times or the seasons which the Father hath put in His own power, but ye shall receive power after that the Holy Ghost is come upon you, and ye shall be witnesses unto me both in Jerusalem, and in all Judea, and in Samaria, and unto the uttermost part of the earth.

Then, in 2 Corinthians 7:10, 11, for godly sorrow worketh repentance to salvation not to be repented of, but the sorrow of the world worketh death. For behold, this selfsame thing, that ye sorrowed after a godly sort. What carefulness it wrought in you, what clearing of yourselves, yea, what indignation, yea, what fear, what vehement desire, what zeal, what revenge, and in all things ye have proved yourselves to be clear in this matter.

Now, I want to talk first about the offer of our Lord, that we should have power. And then, try to show why we don’t have, and that will be the second text.

Now you will notice that in the verses from Acts, that the word power occurs twice. Greek sharks complain all the time that the Greek has so many meanings in it, that they can’t find any English word that has enough meanings. But it so happens that here we have an English word that has too many meanings, and that’s the word power. It has enough meaning in that one word to take in both Greek words. For in verse 7 it says, which the Father hath put in His own power, verse 8, but ye shall receive power. The same word in English.

But this English word has two meanings, and so it covers the two Greek words. One meaning ability, and the other meaning authority. In Luke 4, verses 35 and 36, we read of our Lord performing an act, Luke 4, and it says that the power and authority of Jesus, it refers to His power and authority, and there you have both of the meanings.

Now, authority is the right to do, and power is the ability to do, but it so happens that power in English means both of these things. We have to distinguish. Jesus here did not promise authority. That is dealt with elsewhere, but here the word authority, or the thought of authority, is not present. He’s talking about ability to do.

And He said when the Holy Ghost comes upon you, you shall have moral ability to do. This supernatural potency, he said, was to come upon them. It was to be an invasion from outside of them, from beyond them. It was to invade their nature. It was to come into their personality from outside of them.

And here is the great gulf that separates between the faith of Christ and all forms of occultism. There’s Baha’ism and New Thought and Unity and Yogiism and Applied Psychology and Autosuggestions and New Thought and what have you.

Well, they all try to do the same thing, and you know the odd part about it is that they’re not all bad. They have a little good in them.

If a fellow is downcast and hand-pecked and brow-beaten and discouraged and blue, and you can talk him into believing that he amounts to something, it’ll help him a little. You know, he’ll go home and back and face it, or he’ll go to his work and face it. It does him a little bit of good.

Thinking positively helps a little bit. But all of these occult or psychological religions say the same thing, wake up the giant within you. Some of us have no giant, we have a mouse in us. But wake up the giant within you. Others say tune in your hidden potentials.

A man sent me a book called, “You Are Greater Than You Think,” and he autographed it for me, inscribed it, said he knew I’d enjoy it. And then another fellow says, make friends with your solar plexus and learn to think creatively.

Now, all of these are the occult, forms of occultism and psychology. And I say that they’re not wholly bad, not wholly bad, because they help a man to get his chin up and take it. And it’s better than nothing at all for a short time.

But it isn’t what Jesus was talking about. These things have nothing to do with Christianity whatsoever. Our Lord had nothing like that in mind. He knew there was no giant within us. He knew that our hidden potentialities were potentialities for sin. And He knew that our solar plexus was simply the central switchboard for fallen nerves. He knew that. And He knew that we could think until the world came and not create anything. He knew it.

So, He said, what you’re going to have to have is an invasion from outside of you, an afflatus from above, a potency that has come from another world. And you’ll receive that when the Holy Ghost comes upon you. You’ll receive that moral ability that you don’t have now. You’ll receive it.

Now, this has to come. And that’s why ethical Christianity is not sufficient. You know, evangelicalism in one fringe at any rate, very important fringe, is moving the way liberalism moved 50 years ago, going the same direction.

And they’re beginning now to talk about the importance of Christian ethics. Well, Christian ethics, my friends, simply means obeying the commandment of Christ. That was the name for it. But that sounds too dumb. So now we’ve invented terms to sound more learned, so we can hold up our heads among the PhDs.

And all of this ethical Christianity is inadequate. It isn’t enough because it doesn’t bring something to you. It simply whips up a weak dog. It whips up a weak animal, that’s all. When you lay the lash on an old spaven swayback mule, all you can bring out of him is what he’s got in him. If you want an Arabian stallion, you have to have an Arabian stallion.

And so all that books on Christian ethics can do is to whip up the poor old spaven Adam nature that you’ve got, and it isn’t enough. It isn’t sufficient. It won’t do.

So, the Lord Jesus Christ said, you shall receive a potency from above. You shall receive an afflatus of power coming upon you with ability to do, moral ability. If Christianity doesn’t provide this, then it is only one more of the religions of the world.

Now, this power of course is the Spirit of God, and I will say “It” sometimes, meaning the power, abstracting in thought, the power from the Spirit, who is the Power, but only in thought. There can be no division, no cleavage between the Holy Spirit and His power, but I shall talk about power and sometimes say “It.”

So don’t think that I’m going wrong here. It is only the weakness and ineffectiveness of human language that forces me to do it. The power of the Spirit, the Spirit of Holiness, the Spirit of Life, the Spirit of Jesus, the Spirit of the Father, He is the Spirit of the Father, and therefore this power that God, that our Lord offers us, is the power of God.

Now, I want to talk a little about how that power operates. It operates by an unmediated force applied directly to the human spirit by the Holy Spirit.

The wrestler works in the same way. He operates by applying physical power to physical power. The great bruiser applies, he reaches his ends and succeeds, that is, in pinning the other man by applying great lumpy muscle to another fellow who has great lumpy muscle, but maybe not quite as much.

So, the wrestler achieves his end by the pressure of body on body, and the thinker achieves his end by the pressure of ideas upon the mind. And it’s amazing what an idea will do when it gets into the mind.

That little peasant that was over here from Russia the other day, he’s a brainwashed fellow. He’s sold on his proposition. Ideas hit his mind, and they bend him and shaped him and molded him. And even though an Iowa farmer can raise 16 times as much corn to the bushel, he thought he knew how to tell the farmer how to raise corn. That’s because ideas have hit his mind, and the raw force of ideas on a little shrewd mind has turned him into a devoted communist.

Of course, ideas don’t have to be communistic. They’re ideas all up and down the scale from bad to good, and they achieve their ends by naked contact with the human mind.

Then when we come to morals, morals achieve their end by the pressure of obligation upon the conscience. A man does right because his conscience has obligation. He feels a sense of moral obligation upon his conscience.

Now, those are illustrations merely, but when we come to the Holy Spirit, we come to something else altogether. He may make use of ideas, and He may make use of a sense of obligation and a conscience. He may make use of it.

Though I preached a sermon on conscience one time up in your district, the one you came out of, brother, before you came out of it, I mean before you got in it, years ago, and they ran me ragged for talking about conscience.

I believe in conscience. The words in the Bible, and I’ll never run from the words in the Bible, it’s there, the Holy Ghost may use conscience, the Holy Ghost uses ideas. But when Jesus said, Ye shall receive power, he was not particularly thinking about ideas nor about conscience. He was thinking about the application, the pressure of the Spirit of God upon the Spirit of man, the ability of God being brought into contact with the Spirit of man, enabling the man to do what he couldn’t otherwise do or ever hope to be able to do.

Now, it can be experienced, this power, but it can never be described, and never worry about that, any of you preachers. If anybody runs you in the corner and says, define, never worry about that at all, because no scientist can define, no philosopher can define, you can’t define at all. You can only describe.

Definitions are for dictionaries, and they belong there. I cannot define how the power of God works in a man, I don’t know, I can’t define, but you’ve seen it work. You’ve seen the Spirit of God come into a drunkard and kill the desire for liquor, you’ve seen that. You’ve seen the Holy Ghost come into a dope fiend and take away that terrible love of dope. You’ve seen the Holy Ghost come into a man with a fiery, vicious temper and calm him down and smooth him off and make him as quiet as a lamb. You’ve seen that. It can’t be explained.

The Holy Ghost does this, He uses the awe and fear of the supernatural. He secures the end, independent of the intellect.

Now, the greatest force, of course that the Holy Ghost has, the greatest force is His ability to make spiritual entities real to the mind. When the Holy Ghost has come, He shall take the things of mine and He shall show them unto you. There is a veil between the mind of a man and spiritual things until the Spirit of God comes and makes it possible for him to see them.

The Holy Ghost doesn’t create the objects any more than the sun, when it comes up in the morning, creates the landscape. You can stand on a hillside and look down on a valley where there are beautiful farms and lovely farm buildings and little lakes and flowing rivers and see nothing at all, for it’s dark there.

Then the sun comes up in its blazing glory and you see the silver rivers and the little lakes and the farmhouses and the fields all laid out in squares and the highway weaving between. The sun didn’t create those things, they were there, but you didn’t see them. But when the sun came, you saw what was there.

The Spirit of God comes to show you what’s already there. He doesn’t create them. He doesn’t project imaginary things out of your mind. They’re there, but you can’t see them. Then when He comes, He shows them to you. I say this full effectiveness is when the Spirit of God reveals Jesus Christ unto us and enables us to do what you have to do, He enables you to do.

Now, the next question is, with this promise here, with its having been fulfilled at Pentecost and with the perpetuation of Pentecost, and I will say, I do not believe in the repetition of Pentecost, I believe in the perpetuation of Pentecost.

Pentecost is not to be repeated, it is to be perpetuated. But if you have been brainwashed by some of the dispensationalists, why, you will be asking me the question or quietly and smugly, smiling at my ignorance and saying, don’t you know that Pentecost came and went? And I reply, no, I know nothing of the sort. Pentecost came and stayed, it did not come and go.

The Spirit of the Lord, God, came down into human flesh, and wherever there’s a heart that’s open to His incoming, he still does the same thing. But somebody says, that happened back there once for all, that can’t, we never can have that that they had back there.

I say that I might as well try to live on a meal that Peter ate in Jerusalem, as to live on the blessing that Peter got in the upper room. And if I can’t have the same afflatus of power, the same incoming of potency from beyond me, then what good did it do Peter? Peter was filled with the Holy Ghost, but Peter’s dead. Much, much wind has blown over the moor since that hour. In another part of the world, in another age, way back yonder, Peter was filled with the Holy Ghost in the upper chamber.

And they say, now, shh, be quiet, let it go at that. That’s what it meant; you shall receive power. That happened back there, but they’re all dead.

Neither the church died with them, or else the Lord Jesus Christ meant that that should be perpetuated to the end of the age. I believe the latter. I believe that the Lord meant that the power of the Holy Ghost he offered His church here should be perpetuated to all His people and beloved friends. If you read your Schofield Bible margin, you’ll find He believes it too.

Now, why don’t we have this? We Alliance preachers, we claim to believe in the deeper life, the Spirit-filled life. But I preach for an awful lot of people. When I go to New York next week, I’m going to preach for a week in the Alliance church, and then I’m going to preach to a convention of Pentecostal preachers, believe it or not. Then I’m going to preach to a convention two days later of Baptist preachers. And I’m going to preach just about the same thing.

And I’d like to say to you Alliance preachers, I find that we don’t have a thing the rest of them don’t have. We don’t have a thing except the memory of A. B. Simpson. Where are you going to go to find Alliance preachers that have anything extra? Why don’t we have? We’ve got Christ in the Bible series, we have days of heaven upon earth, we have all of those books. We’re supposed to believe in these things. But we’ve learned the ways of the denominations. Some denominations are ahead of us, edge us out.

I run into people, I run into preachers who are hungry for God, that it’s pitiful. A pastor of a Bible church, a Calvinistic Bible church that’s not supposed to believe in these things, told me this. He said, Brother Tozer, I’m so hungry for God, I can feel it in my body, in my flesh. I long for God with a longing that I can feel in my body. I know what he meant, for David said, my flesh and my heart cry out for the living God. I haven’t had an Alliance preacher say that to me in 25 years.

I’m preaching to Alliance preachers, but brethren, if I were preaching to Baptists, I’d never say this. I’m as loyal as a dog when I’m preaching to others, but I’m talking to you, I want to be frank, tell you what I think of you. Why don’t we have this? Why do we preach about it and not experience it?

Why are we satisfied to take a little church, preach to a few people and stay three years, then write the superintendent and get shifted and then two years more, go someplace else and quit and go into evangelism, and evangelism for a year and then go back into the pastorate? Why are we satisfied to do that kind of thing? Why must we always be little and without much ministry?

I’ll tell you, my brethren, why. And incidentally, it’s not because this truth doesn’t stand here, ye shall receive the power of the Holy Ghost coming upon you. Isn’t it that we’ve misinterpreted that? No. It’s because we don’t have what Paul called, a vehement desire. A vehement desire creates a vacuum in the human spirit.

And just as nature loathes a vacuum, so God loathes a vacuum. And He never allows a vacuum to stay in the human spirit. If we empty ourselves out and long for God until a vacuum is created, only one thing can happen, the Holy Ghost will rush in to fill the vacuum.

This longing for God is a vital ingredient in the religious life. It’s found interwoven, of course, with the experience of the saints everywhere. It has other names in the Bible, hunger, for instance. Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after righteousness. Covet is another word Paul used. Long for, yearn, ardor, and fervency, all of these words. But vehement desire, desire that stops being conventional.

The trouble with us, brethren, the trouble with you, is you’re too conventional. You’ve got a cheap brand of sophisticated Christianity, and you’d rather be conventional than to please God. And you’d consider it a terrible thing if anybody said you were fanatical. If you’re going to please God, you’re going to have to run the gamut, and you’re going to have to be accused of everything.

I’ve been accused of everything imaginable, including being a liberal, if you can imagine that. But I’ve been accused of being a liberal. I’ve just had a little of everything. But you’ve got to be what Paul said here. Yeah, what indignation!

A man has to be a little bit tough and a little bit mean to serve God. You know what I mean by that? I mean, if you’re a soft pussy afraid of your reputation and afraid of what the superintendent will think of you, afraid of what the chairman of the board will think of you, afraid of what the women’s prayer band will think of you, you’ll always be a little mouse.

But if there’s a longing for God and a repentance and a sorrow of heart over your own weakness, that is of a godly sort that works in you, carefulness and a clearing of yourself, and indignation not against others but with yourself, and fear and vehement desire, you’ll get a reputation of being different, of course, and they’ll say, he’s weird, he’s different. And somebody says, let’s get so-and-so as our pastor, and somebody says, just a minute, just a minute, I know that fellow, because he’s vehemently longing after God.

But if you’ll go ahead anyhow, if you’ll do it anyway, if you’ll seek the face of God anyhow, if you’ll shut yourself up and seek the face of God until the afflatus from God comes on you, give yourself five years, they’ll be coming to you. The first year they’ll run away from you, and the next four they’ll be coming to you. Remember that. What longing after God, Paul said.

Now, the effect of absence of desire is all around about us. We examine our own hearts, it’ll confirm the truth of what I’ve said, the state of our spiritual desire.

Now, here you are at conference, and you’re going to elect a new district superintendent, and I think that I could safely and charitably say that who your new superintendent is, is the most important matter in the minds of most of us. Brethren, it doesn’t matter much at all. Ye shall receive power when the Holy Ghost comes upon you, and you shall be visited by a supernatural afflatus from another world. That’s what matters.

And if we could meet God’s terms, and we could create by indignation and a clearing of ourselves and a yearning after God, if we could create within our hearts a vacuum and this mighty Spirit of God would flow in, almost anybody will help us to lead us. But we take the least important things and make them to be important, and the one important thing we overlook.

When Peter later on got up and grabbed his hat and started to preach the gospel to every creature, the Lord called him back and said, Peter, you’ve misunderstood me. I said you should go into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature, but you’re not ready to go yet. Don’t go yet, because ye shall receive power, then you go. But never go until you do.

I’ve always claimed that before any man is ordained, he ought to give proof that he either has been filled with the Holy Ghost or he’s longing with vehement desire. But we never ask him that question, at least we rarely do.

So, we grade up and down from practically no desire at all to a very little desire, to a desire that’s stronger than any emotion in the human breast. A longing after God, a longing for God’s Spirit, a longing for holiness of heart, a longing for ability to do.

And if you’ll remember this, that our spiritual state always corresponds with the intensity of our desire. Everybody listening to me has as much of God as he actually desires. You are as holy as you want to be. You are as full of the Holy Ghost as you really want to be.

Remember, that we can think we want to be filled with the Spirit of God, but not want too bad enough to pay the price to be filled. We cancel out our longing and we don’t want to be at all.

If you can make terms with God; a man will kneel at the altar and begin to make terms with God. He’ll never be filled. Man will kneel at the altar and begin to argue with God. He’ll never be filled. It’s when desire goes beyond all dickering and all making of terms and becomes a vehement thing, a tempestuous thing, a torrential thing, then God will bless and fill that man with the Holy Ghost.

I preached to a conference of Baptist preachers some time ago, a few years back, and I preached about Isaiah seeing the Lord high and lifted up. Two years later, two Baptist preachers came to my home out in Longwood Drive and said, we’d like to talk with you, Brother Tozer. I said, Come on in. I knew one of them, and the other was introduced to me. One of them said, do you remember when you preached to a conference of Baptist preachers up in the name of the town up north of Chicago? I don’t remember which one it was. I said, I remember.

Well, he said, you remember when you preached on Isaiah seeing the Lord high and lifted up and he saw that he was no good, he was all dirty inside, he needed to have a hot coal, a flaming coal to touch him. I said, I remember this sermon.

Well, he said, You know what happened to me? I conceived that day such a longing to be filled with the Holy Ghost that it ruled my life, it controlled me, it became the biggest thing in my life.

And he said, For months and months I sought God. I went on with my pastorate, but I sought God. And he said, one day, after more than a year, one day I stood in the middle of my living room floor and I suddenly looked up and I said, God, I won’t wait any longer.

And he said, Instantly and suddenly, wonderfully, there came down an afflatus of the Holy Ghost upon my life. Oh, Brother Tozer, he said, what God did for me. I said, don’t get me wrong. I’m not going to the Pentecostals. I’m a Baptist preacher. I’m going right back and preach right the way I’ve been preaching. But he said, Oh, I got what you preached about.

I could illustrate by telling you case after case, person after person, who, whatever their shade of theology might have been, I never worry much about that, as long as it’s orthodox. But the point is, when they get a longing after God sufficiently, then the Spirit of God will rush in and fill the vacuum.

And always remember, I repeat, you have as much as you want. Maybe you don’t have as much as you’ve prayed for, but you have as much as you really desire. It is wonderful what strong desire will do for a man.

Paul Rader used to tell about a man cast up on an island with just one can of beans. He said he just had a can of beans that floated up there, and he was alone. He said he hadn’t a thing. He didn’t even have a fountain pen. He said, there are the beans. He said, as the days went on, that man got hungrier and hungrier and hungrier. But there were the beans in the can, and he didn’t even have a sharp rock.

But he said, do you know something? That man will get that can open somehow, and he will. You put a man up on an island with a can of beans and let him get hungry enough, he’ll get that can open somehow.

And the man who wants God bad enough, he’ll get God. A man who wants that afflatus of power badly enough, he’ll get that afflatus of power. It may take him five years to figure it out theologically, but the power of God will come upon that life. And this is what we need in our day. This is what we need.

Back a few years ago in Nyack, some of the boys, one of them from this church, Harry Post, some of the other fellows from different places, they got the idea they wanted to have a prayer meeting.

So, they went down in the furnace room of the great big old Simpson Hall, I think they call it now, and they had what they called a glory hole. They were young enough, you know, to be kind of silly, but old enough to be longing after God.

So, they called it the glory hole. And down there they went. And they got to praying, seeking the face of God. And God got to meeting them and bothered the faculty terribly. So, they called them together and straightened them out theologically.

But they were just a little too late to head off the power of God. God had met this half dozen fellows, I could name them on my fingers, and everyone went out to be outstanding missionaries. Everyone. Not ordinary missionaries, outstanding missionaries. You know Harry Post. He gets up, you know, and flaps his ears and talks and moves people when he talks. God came on him. God came on these boys.

Always there’s somebody running and saying, let the Master alone, let the Master alone. When they run, Jesus, son of David, have mercy on me. And some dig and said, let him alone, let him alone. Jesus said, you let him alone. I want to help him. What do you want? He said, I want to see. He said, okay. He touched him and he saw.

But we’re so afraid of getting fanatical. That’s what always tickles me when I get in Alliance churches. They say, now, we don’t want to become fanatical. We’re so far from being fanatical, we couldn’t get there by jet airplane in two weeks. No.

Fanatical? Fanatical, brother? Is a man likely to die of a fever when he’s only, he’s only, he’s only gotten a temperature of 80 in the shade? No, no. You won’t die of fever. We Alliance preachers don’t have to worry. We can go miles toward God, brother, before we strike any place where we’re likely to get fanatical.

And if you’re moving toward God, you’ll never get fanatical. It’s only when you stop moving toward God and start moving out after somebody. As long as you’re longing for God, you’ll never become fanatical. Ah, for the fanaticism of power, the fanaticism of Memminger, and the fanaticism of Dr. Wilson, and the fanaticism of these holy men that founded the Christian and Missionary Alliance.

Well, what shall we do about this absence of desire? Well, we ought to consider it a deep soul sickness. We ought to consider something’s wrong with us.

Now, we can lead in prayer, we can read the Scripture, we can whip up a sermon, we can be chairman of the board, we can build a new church, we can do all sorts of religious things.

But you know, you can do that without God’s help. Did you know that brethren? You can preach a sermon without the Holy Ghost. You can. You can conduct a church for a year without the Holy Ghost. You don’t need the power of God to carry on a church the way we’ve got them organized now. All you need is a pleasant smile and a little patience.

Does that shock you? Well, thank God something happened anyhow. Is it shocking? It’s true, nevertheless. There are churches in this town where the Holy Ghost hasn’t been for generations, but they carry on just the same. All you have to do is get your constitution, get organized, get an understanding of who’s running things, and sing some, and give some, and preach some, and pray some, and visit some, and be nice, and you’ve got a church. But you haven’t got what God talked about.

Ye shall receive a potency from without you, that shall enter into you and give you moral ability to do. And if we don’t want this and we’re not longing for it, we ought to consider ourselves spiritually sick.

A man gets up in the morning and has no appetite, goes to noon and still has no appetite, at supper time his wife can’t persuade him to eat, and the next morning he has no appetite. He’s sick.

And the lack of longing, the lack of appetite, is a spiritual sickness. And we ought to consider how it’s keeping us helpless in this hour of the death struggle, this terrible hour of the death struggle, when evangelical Christianity is going off in four or five different directions.

Oh, how God needs sane, sound men with sound doctrinal position, but aflame with the Power. How desperately we need it, but we’ll not have it as long as we’re satisfied with what we’ve got. Give the average young preacher a little parsonage, second-hand car, and two weeks’ vacation a year, and pay his way to conference, and that’s about all he wants. He’ll probably have a couple of babies, or three, four. But that’s about all. He’s very happy.

Oh, for the men and women, the young fellows that won’t be satisfied with this. They’ll go off and seek God until something happens to their lives. I’d be happy if a young fellow who thinks he’s called to the ministry would seek God until he found whether he was or not.

You know this fellow, Duma. Is that his name? D-U-M-A, I think. Over there in Africa, South Africa. How he, ignorant fellow, Zulu, if I remember. No education, nothing, but he felt called to preach. He came to Dr. Cook, now at Fort Wayne Bible Institute College. He said, Mr. Cook, I believe God’s calling me to preach. And Cook tells it on himself. He said, I didn’t think any of these were ever called to preach. He was ignorant. He was uncouth. He had nothing.

He said, I told him, oh, you better give it up. I don’t think you’re called to preach. He said he disappeared and was gone two weeks. He went up in the hills and went in a cave. He spent two weeks waiting on God to be guided, to be filled with the Holy Ghost, to be prepared, to find out whether he was called or not. At the end of two weeks, he came back with his black face shining.

And he went to the Baptists and said, I’d like a church. And they said, all right. Gave him a church of six members. In a year or two, he had that many hundreds. It was only a little while until he became the outstanding preacher of South Africa.

They say that ignorant man, black as ebony, many times called into the homes of the white governors to pray for their sick. And he prays for their sick and they get well. Nobody, nobody doubted his call when he came back from his two weeks with God. He shall receive power when the Holy Ghost comes upon you.

Now, brethren, you can do anything you want with this. You can interpret it. And you can say that it’s not scriptural, a sound, scriptural position. Do as you please about it, but always remember, whatever you do about it is what you’ll have in your ministry. You’ll get as much as you’re hungry for. You will have as much as you long for.

And if the self-indignation and the clearing of yourself and the godly sorrow and the yearning after God that becomes vehement, if it takes over, you don’t know what God may do for you. Coming upon you in great power, the power of enabling, the power of moral enabling, the power of spiritual penetration, the power to see through the fog bank, power of x-ray vision. God wants to give you that, my ministerial brethren.

The price has all been paid on the cross of Calvary. No price yet to be paid, only conditions to be met. I pray that before this conference is over, some of you may have met those conditions. For when you meet them, instantly the work of God is done. You shall be filled with the Holy Spirit.

Now, I know this is not a good motive to suggest, but I’m going to tell you something. The Christian and Missionary Alliance believes what I’ve preached tonight. But we’re doing so little about it that there are other groups who had not been taught it, but who have in recent years become hungry, and they’re going into the kingdom of God ahead of us.

Now, it’s not a good motive, of course, but I’m just warning you that if we won’t, somebody will. If we’re not, somebody is. May God grant that yet the Christian and Missionary Alliance, with its 850, nearly, missionaries around the world, may go back to Bethel, back to where we found God and start over. Let us pray.

O Lord Jesus, Thou knowest the propensity of the human heart to backslide. Thou knowest how quickly the temperature of the human spirit cools off. Thou knowest how easy it is to become satisfied with ourselves, to be at ease in Zion, to invent instruments of music and stretch ourselves on beds of ivory, and drink wine out of bowls, and care nothing for the captivity of Israel.

Lord, we see this among us. O deliver us, we pray Thee, from complacency. Deliver us from fallow ground. Deliver us from the unplowed heart. Deliver us from deadly contentment. O Lord, we beseech Thee, deliver us from taking by faith and not receiving.

Forgive us, we pray Thee, for our conventional Christianity. Forgive us, we pray Thee, because we’re afraid to be extreme. O Lord, cleanse our hearts from cowardice, and deliver us, we beseech Thee, from being little frightened preachers in the hour when we need lions and prophets and bold reformers and seers who wear the crown of spiritual ascendancy and rule by prayer and the Spoken Word.

We beseech Thee, disturb us, upset us. Let us not settle down to the grind of business, but rather let us, we pray Thee, while we do the business, always have the subconscious yearning, the longing, even if we have to push it out of our mind a little, may it come flaring back like a fire to burn in our bones. Until we seek Thy face and are filled with the Holy Ghost, we ask it in Christ’s name. Amen.

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“Seven Dimensions of the Soul“

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Tozer Talks · Seven Dimensions of the Soul

Seven Dimensions of the Soul

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

June 14, 1959

Now we have sung and quoted scripture and prayed and heard a testimony from an outgoing missionary and we’ve had a good meeting up to now and suppose we suppose we turn together to the 11th chapter of Revelation and read them read the first 15 verses responsibly and reading together the 15th and closing there, the 15th verse of the 11th chapter of the book of Revelation.

And there was given me a reed like unto a rod: and the angel stood, saying, Rise, and measure the temple of God, and the altar, and them that worship therein. But the court, which is without the temple leave out, and measure it not; for it is given unto the Gentiles: and the holy city shall they tread under foot forty and two months.

And I will give power unto my two witnesses, and they shall prophesy a thousand two hundred and threescore days, clothed in sackcloth. These are the two olive trees, and the two candlesticks standing before the God of the earth. And if any man will hurt them, fire proceedeth out of their mouth, and devoureth their enemies: and if any man will hurt them, he must in this manner be killed. These have power to shut heaven, that it rain not in the days of their prophecy: and have power over waters to turn them to blood, and to smite the earth with all plagues, as often as they will.

And when they shall have finished their testimony, the beast that ascendeth out of the bottomless pit shall make war against them, and shall overcome them, and kill them. And their dead bodies shall lie in the street of the great city, which spiritually is called Sodom and Egypt, where also our Lord was crucified. And they of the people and kindreds and tongues and nations shall see their dead bodies three days and an half, and shall not suffer their dead bodies to be put in graves. And they that dwell upon the earth shall rejoice over them, and make merry, and shall send gifts one to another; because these two prophets tormented them that dwelt on the earth.

And after three days and an half the spirit of life from God entered into them, and they stood upon their feet; and great fear fell upon them which saw them. And they heard a great voice from heaven saying unto them, Come up hither. And they ascended up to heaven in a cloud; and their enemies beheld them. And the same hour was there a great earthquake, and the tenth part of the city fell, and in the earthquake were slain of men seven thousand: and the remnant were affrighted and gave glory to the God of heaven. The second woe is past; and behold, the third woe cometh quickly. And the seventh angel sounded; and there were great voices in heaven, saying, the kingdoms of this world are become the kingdoms of our Lord, and of his Christ; and he shall reign for ever and ever.

Now, this is one of the most difficult of all the chapters in the book of Revelation. Difficult, but not impossible. There is a predictive element in it, as you know there is in this entire book, a predictive element, and it is said to cover a period of three and a half years. Twelve hundred and sixty days, forty-two months, three and a half years.

Now, in as much as it states it in three different ways, I am inclined to believe that it is trying to tell us that it is literal and that we are not to look around for a fanciful interpretation. If it had said forty-two months, maybe we could have found some reason to spiritualize it. If it had said three and a half years, we might have, but since it said it three different ways and all adds up to three and a half years, I believe that it is a period that yet lies ahead of us.

And in that period, there shall occur these items. The temple will be rebuilt, if not in that period, before that time. Jerusalem will be overrun by the Gentiles. Then there will be the appearance of the two witnesses. These two witnesses, of course, are the two personalities hard to identify.

I am usually cautious, but I am going to go out on a limb and tell you who I think they are. I think they are Moses and Elijah. I will tell you why I think so. It says that if any man will hurt them, fire proceedeth out of their mouth, and devoureth them, and they have power to shut heaven that it rained not in the days of their prophecy.

Now, there was only one man in the Old Testament times that was able to call down fire. It didn’t proceed exactly out of his mouth, but he spoke, and fire came down. That was Elijah, and he certainly had power to shut heaven that it didn’t rain. That would seem to identify a man as Elijah. Then they have power over waters to turn them to blood and to smite the earth with all plagues as often as they will. Only one man in the Old Testament ever had such power, and that was Moses.

Now, I have another reason for believing that these two were Moses and Elijah. They were the only two men in the Old Bible that I can think of that either didn’t die or didn’t die like other people. Remember that Moses, when he was 120 years old and still never had had an overhaul job, nothing wrong with him, not a rattle, his eyes were as good as ever, and his strength was not abated, and everything was as it had been. Suddenly, about the time he was expecting to go on for another term, God said, Moses, it’s time you come on up and die.

And I think Moses must have been very greatly surprised, if not downright astonished. Why he said, I don’t feel like dying, there’s nothing wrong with me. And God said, that’s all right, I have to take you out of here, you come on up. And he went up and died. And he is the only man that I ever heard of in the Scriptures that died completely well. You’re going to get something wrong, but not Moses, he was perfectly well.

So, since he simply quit breathing at the command of God, that would seem to leave something to be desired there yet. If it was appointed unto all men to die, and Moses didn’t die like other men, he just quit breathing because God told him to, and there was even a quarrel over his body. And God took away his body, nobody knew where it was, as though God were preserving it in a special way.

And of course, we all know that Elijah didn’t die, Elijah went up in a whirlwind into heaven, threw back his mantle, which Elisha picked up. We all know that story well. So, that would leave me to believe that the representative, the supreme representative of the law and the supreme representative of the prophets should now be testifying in the world. And they testified for a while until; and there are their pests, of course, and nuisances. A good man in the bad world is always a nuisance. Now, keep that in mind.

There’s an awful lot of romantic back-patting and cooing over men of God, but the simple fact is, if he’s a man of God enough, he’ll be a nuisance to the people who aren’t men of God. If he’s just a nice, soft, kindly, old stuffed grandpappy of a fellow, why, we can all love him. But if he’s living with God to such an extent that he frowns on our worldly ways and our carnal habits, then, of course, he’s a nuisance.

And these men certainly were. They were witnessing in a critical and extremely sinful hour, witnessing of heaven, and of course, nobody likes it. But they couldn’t do anything about it for a while, and then the beast had them killed.

Now, that seems to be the way it goes. After they’d been killed, God spoke to them again, and they rose up, and there was an earthquake, and there were many men slain, and there was a voice saying, the kingdoms of this world have become the kingdoms of our God and His Christ. And we’re going to let that rest there, because we’ve heard that taught so much, and I can’t add anything to it much.

But once more, I’m going to do what I’ve been doing in this book of Revelation, in the series I’ve been giving. I’m going to pick out a verse or a passage from the chapter which has meaning bigger than its prophetic meaning, and bigger than the period that it touches. It has meaning applicable to all worshipers everywhere, in the Old Testament, in the New Testament, to the Jew, to the Church, and to that temple which shall be in the days out ahead.

Now, the text would be then this one, rise and measure the temple of God, and the altar, and them that worship therein. Now, a great crisis time had come upon them, and there was a semblance of worship. A temple had been built. And don’t imagine that temple is going to grow there suddenly without an architect, and without builders, and without money, and without sacrifice. It’s not.

It’s not going to grow up like a mushroom. It’s going to have to be built. Somebody’s going to have to have zeal. Somebody’s going to have to have generosity to give to make it possible. Somebody’s going to have to work hard, and they will, and they have a temple there. And there is worship going on there, and will be worship, I mean, going on there. But something was wanting, obviously.

So, a mysterious hand was stretched out and gave John a rod, and said, John, take this rod, this reed, this yardstick, take it, John. And John took it. And he said, now go measure the temple, measure the altar, and measure the worshipers.

Now, I’ve checked this out very carefully to see whether this is actually what was said. One or two versions says, count them. But the major versions have it, measure them, and I’m going to stand with the large majority of translations, measure them, he said, measure them.

So, these worshipers that are here in this temple are going to have to have the apostolic test. They’re going to be measured. The apostle must measure them, John must measure them with a rod, not that he had concocted, but that God had given him. And all the worshipers have to have this apostolic test. And the result of the test is not published. There’s nowhere that I can find that any answer is given, but somewhere it was recorded. And there were consequences that followed the recording of the measuring of the temple and the worshipers therein.

Now, we live in a critical period. We do not live in that period. It would be extremely foolish to try to equate what will happen in that period of three and a half years with what’s happening now. They are not identical, although the Spirit is the same. They are not identical historically. They’re not identical.

So, we’ll not say that we live in that time, but we will say that we live in a critical period too. And there is great zeal and activity and even generosity. And there’s a great deal of building, and more churches are going up than you can imagine. And more people are going to church than ever were since the beginning of our country. A great deal of money is being given, more probably than ever was given before.

And this we must not forget that God is not looking at us as we look at ourselves. God never checks statistics. He sends an apostle to measure things and says, you’ve got to pass the apostolic test.

The church is founded upon the Rock, Christ Jesus, and the foundation of the holy apostles. And we got to measure up to the apostolic test. And we are being measured by the apostles. The New Testament is our measure. You can’t tell by how much money is given. You can’t tell by how big a building is. You can’t tell by how many people are present. You can’t tell that way because that’s the way human beings measure things. But there’s an apostolic test, a measurement of an apostle.

Here, John, take a reed, go lay it along the soles of the men that are worshiping there, and the women that are kneeling there, and then come back and record it. And John went, and John measured, and John came back.

Now, it’s relatively easy to measure the temple and the altar. It’s a very extremely easy thing to do. You can tell how many were in your Sunday school, and how much money you took in, and how much money went to missions, and how many went to school, Bible school or seminary from your church. That’s measuring the temple. That’s quite easy to do.

And then whether you have had or have not had, if you go to the altar or make a testimony of faith, that’s measuring the altar, and I suppose that’s relatively easy too. These are our specifications, you know, they’re ours. They have to do with size and cost and membership and the treasurer’s report. And that’s the external thing.

But then there is this terrible thing. I don’t know how these things affect you, but I’m affected by the Scriptures. I wince under it. And I wince under this:  and measure them that worship therein. Now I wince under that, because the measuring of them that are there, the apostle lays a rod, you see, across our souls. And that becomes then tremendously important. If I don’t get it straight about the three and a half years, or if somebody else differs with me a bit about it, that isn’t important. But what is tremendously important to me is that if God measures me by the apostolic test that I measure up.

Now I’m going to ask you in a very quick close here tonight, how you measure up. Now there will always be, said one man, a real and a conventional, a true and a formal. There will always be the real and the conventional. There will always be the true and the formal. There will always be everywhere those who have a name to live but are dead.

But the apostolic test is there, and then the results of the test are recorded somewhere, and there are consequences that follow. And I’m interested in that, deeply concerned with that. I believe that our Father in heaven knows the times and the seasons, and He knows, and not even an angel knows, when our Lord shall return. I believe it will be soon, and I hope it will be soon.

But I also know that there’s a lot we can’t know, but there’s a good deal that we can. I can’t escape the words of the old devotional saint who said that he would rather know compunction and feel it in his heart than to know the definition of it.

And I say that I would rather be measured by the apostles and measure up than to know all the meaning of the revelation, though I am trying to place this before us, and I’m a believer in prophetic truth. But I want now to talk just a little about some of these measurements. You see, there are different dimensions.

We have several different dimensions. I’m going to mention seven of them. The dimensions of your soul, of your Christian life. May the Holy Ghost take this home to my heart and yours.

Now, first of all, there’s the dimension we call faith. And I wonder if it’s real or conventional. What difference has your faith made to you? Now, there was a time when you didn’t have faith, and now you say you have faith.

Now, I’m not challenging your having faith, but I’m asking you, what difference has the coming of this faith had? What are you now doing that you didn’t do before? What are you now not doing that you did do before? Has the coming of this faith made a specific change in your life? Is this faith dimension such that when the apostle lays the rod upon it, it will measure up?

Now, that to me is vastly more important to my eternal future than to be sure who the true witnesses are. I’m quite sure who they are. That’s one thing I’m dogmatic on. I’m quite sure I know who they are. I think they will come back and that they will stand as witnesses to the law and the prophets declaring God’s righteousness among men.

But if I should have missed the mark on that, if I have faith, and that faith is real, and the dimension when the Lord lays his rod upon my soul and finds that faith is there, real faith is there, I can afford to be wrong on the explanation of the text, but I can’t afford to be wrong when it comes to the apostolic test.

And then there’s a dimension that we call love. That’s another way God measures you. Just as a doctor will take a half a dozen different tests and then add them up and see how you are, how healthy you are, so there are these tests, these dimensions, there’s love. Now, we Christians say that we have love, but do you know I wonder how real our love is? John says, if a man says he loves and doesn’t love his neighbor, how could the love of God be in that man, if he doesn’t love his brother.

And Jesus said that after the love of God, the love of the neighbor was next. And that those two, the love of God and the love of our fellow man, they added up to all that a man had to be, to be pleasing to God.

Now, a love that lies supine is not biblical love and it will never stand the apostolic test. James wrote caustically about any kind of faith that did not do anything. And John wrote caustically about love that didn’t do anything. So, these two men are measuring us.

When you sit down to a great bulging, steaming Sunday dinner, did you ever stop to think of the not hundreds, not thousands, but millions of people who haven’t had enough to eat today?

One of the most shocking things that our superintendent, Mr. Thomas, brought back to us was in telling about walking through the streets of one of the Eastern cities early in the morning and having to walk gingerly, picking his way to keep from tramping on little arms and legs and feet and faces and hands and bodies of little boys and girls and babies sleeping on the sidewalk because they had no place else to sleep. To wake, to wake like grass growing up suddenly. There there were whole mobs of them when the sun woke them, not a bite to eat.

Now I believe that love that doesn’t do something to alleviate this is not love at all. And I believe that faith that doesn’t bind my heart to my fellow man is not faith at all. But I’m not saying that we don’t have it. I’m only saying, oh God, the apostolic test is here. The man of God is laying the reed like a rod, rod like a reed upon our hearts. And what does that dimension say, that faith dimension? Remember the Jews believed they had faith all during hundreds of years of their history, but found they had not faith at all, but were rejected because they had creed without true faith.

There were many widows in Israel in the days of Elijah the prophet, but to not one of them did Elijah go, but to a pagan woman of Sarepta. And she had the faith that the Jewish woman did not have.

The Sarah and the Rebecca and the rest of them named after the celebrated grandmothers and mothers of Israel. They were there by the hundreds, but they had not faith. And when God wanted to support a prophet, he had to send him out of the country and find a pagan woman.

And the Sarahs and the Rebeccas and the Hannahs looked down their nose at that pagan woman, but she had faith, and a miracle came to her home. So, it’s possible to think we have faith and not have faith, to think we have love and not have love.

Then there’s humility. That’s another dimension. Religion can be a source of pride. I was talking to a man who came to see me last week. He was here last Sunday night and asked for an interview, and he talked with me. He had been saved seven years, a wonderful Christian brother. I got a lot of help from him, and I hope he got some from me.

And as we were talking, he was telling me of his great yearning after God and his dissatisfaction with the Church he was in. He wasn’t criticizing, he was very kindly about it. But he told me that he said, just God isn’t there. And he said, in effect, I grieve because of all the foolishness and worldliness and nonsense and carnality that I see everywhere moving in and out of the Church, and I don’t like it. And I yearn that the Church should move toward God.

And I warned him, I said, watch one thing. You’ve only been converted seven years, and I believe that I can say that you’re among those whose hearts cry out after the living God but look out that Satan doesn’t slip around and remind you that you’re a superior Christian, that you’re crying out after God and these carnal church members around you aren’t. The further we go up into God, the more terrible the temptation toward pride. Spiritual pride is probably the most awful pride.

Suppose I put it like this. Spiritual pride is at the top as being the most damaging, injurious, and offensive of all kinds of pride, for that was the pride of the Pharisee. Next is intellectual pride, which is pride of intellect. There is only one other kind of pride that’s as nasty as the pride of intellect, the man who says, I am an intellect.

A man came to me before I preached somewhere one time not too long ago. I had preached Saturday, and then I had preached Sunday, and then I was preaching Monday at another place, and he was there. He came and said, Mr. Tozer, I heard you preach Saturday night, and I thought you lost a friend. I didn’t know what he meant. But he said, you recovered yourself nicely Sunday night.

And I still didn’t know what he meant. He said, you know, you spoke rather slightingly of the intelligentsia. But he said, Sunday night, you said something in favor of the intelligentsia. He said, I thought that you’d lost me as your friend. He said, you know, I’m an intellectual. He was an intellectual, a self-conscious intellectual. That’s the second worst kind of pride.

The third is pride of race. I’m a Swede, I’m a Dutchman, I’m an Irishman, I’m an Englishman, or I’m a mongrel. I am whatever I am, and the terrible part about that is the only thing we have to be proud of is all underground. They say that the man whose pride lies in his ancestors has got more underground than he has on top of the ground. That’s an offensive kind of pride.

And then there’s the pride, of course, that’s pride of our looks. Men, as a rule, aren’t bothered with that, but women are. Men are inclined to be more bothered by their biceps and their chest and the women by their looks; pride of person, that is. And then there’s, of course, pride of accomplishment. But the Holy Ghost lays a rod on our dimension we call humility.

I just wonder how humble we are. Stratton, after you’ve sung a good solo, do you ever catch yourself cupping your ear to listen, to wait for somebody to come and say, I enjoyed that?

Now, I’m not asking you, don’t raise your hand. That wouldn’t be fair. But that bothers me a lot. I hate it, too. I’ve done it, too. And after I’ve preached, particularly, you know, I’m used to it here, but if I preach somewhere where there are a lot of people present that I have reason to want to appear well before.

Do you know how I’ve settled that, brethren and sisters? You know how I’ve settled that? I go to God before I go into the pulpit. I did it twice in Buffalo in May when I preached there at our international council. And I say, God, let’s have an understanding. I’m willing to fail and disgrace myself publicly as a poor preacher if you’ll get more glory out of it. But if you can get glory out of my giving a good sermon, all right. But if not, then let me fail. And I know God knows I mean that, too. And I think that that’s one way to keep yourself down.

The preacher that preached the famous sermon on humility and how I attained it, is to be pitied because the man who thinks he’s humble isn’t. Humility is an unconscious thing, and it never knows it’s around. It’s transparent, and it has no smell, and you can’t see it, and you can’t hear it.

Humility cannot be detected. If it’s in a man, he doesn’t know it. And when you see a man do what I said I did, have to go and rub his nose in the dirt, he’s not too humble a man. God is measuring my humility to see how actually humble I am.

And then there is courage. Maybe somebody would say, but I don’t believe that courage is a dimension. Courage is such a dimension, so certainly one that the opposite of it consigns men to hell, for the fearful and the unbelieving shall have their part that burns in the lake of fire. Courage is that which gives you power to stand, and to be different and to be unpopular.

If you could just get a lot of people who are willing to be unpopular, who are willing to stand and be what they feel God wants them to be, and say what he wants them to say, and do what he wants them to do, whether the world likes it or not, you’d have a pretty good Christian. But if you had those who are willing to stand and do and be and say as God wants them to, whether the church likes it or not, then you have a better Christian.

You know, in fundamental circles there’s a hierarchy. They can’t put you in jail, they can’t excommunicate you, but they can frown on you and scare you. And the average young fellow who has gone through a school somewhere is so anxious to please his professors, and so anxious to please whoever happens to be the big evangelical raja in that neighborhood, that he’d shiver and scared stiff if he thought he’d uttered a word or made an interpretation that couldn’t be approved by the evangelical hierarchy. You’ve got to have courage to look into the face of God and do what God wants you to do if it means your neck.

How is your courage, my friend? Do you have the courage to be different? Do you have the courage to be unpopular? I hope so.

Then there is the carrying of the cross, we would call that self-sacrifice. it abideth alone, and there we have self-sacrifice. We’re here not to grow fat and to have much, we’re here to immolate ourselves. We’re here to offer ourselves.

Dr. Ironside wrote a devotional book called “A Continual Burnt Offering.” That’s what I mean. A continual burnt offering. It must be going up night and day on the altar of God.

Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone. Two different figures, but it adds up to the same thing. We’re not to have our way, not self-aggrandizement, but self-sacrifice. Not self-praise, but self-sacrifice. Not self-love, but self-sacrifice.

And then purity of life, deliverance from sin, perfection, deliverance, likeness to God in Christ, habits and tempers, sharp tongue, and just how far have they gone? Are we delivered from them? Are we free? You say, I heard the voice of Jesus say, rise and I rose, I’m alive.

But Lazarus heard that, but he was bound all around with grave clothes. And if we could get the grave clothes off of the people that had been called awake by the voice of God in the new birth, if we could get the grave clothes off, we’d have a revival on our hands that would spread around the world and threaten the iron curtain. But God’s children are satisfied to stand up all wrapped around with their yesterdays; habits and all the rest that they should be free from.

Then I would give you the seventh dimension, and that is integrity. How transparent are we? How candid, how completely honest. You know Bacon, Francis Lord Bacon, in one of his essays, draws a distinction between simulation and dissimulation.

Simulation is pretending to be what you’re not. Dissimulation is pretending not to be what you are. And it’s everywhere, everywhere. In fact, we’ve made a creed out of it in America. We’ve made a creed out of it. We cover things up, paint them over, smooth them over, put chrome on them, put grease paint on them. God wants a simple-hearted people.

Could I tell you again, in closing, a story I told you, I guess, maybe, oh, 10 or 12 years ago when it happened. I was walking around with a man who’s since gone to heaven, dear brother Robert Kilgore, of Seattle.

And we were talking, and I said to Brother Kilgore, I long after God, I long to be simple-hearted, I long to be humble, I long to be Christlike, and I don’t see much example around me in the churches, and I long to be candid and direct and honest and transparent. And I said, if I could find a people that were like that, I think I’d go join them. He said, no, you wouldn’t.

Well, I didn’t know what he meant, but he went on to tell me, he said, you know, I got among the people like that over in the state of Pennsylvania here last summer. He said, I took three weeks off to go and meet God in a cabin, he said.

Now, this very brilliant thinking brother, teacher in a school, he said, I took three weeks off to go up country, and he said, I got up close to a camp meeting or Bible conference. He didn’t tell me the name of the people; it sounds like they might have been Mennonites or something. But he said, you know, they were just like you’re talking about, just what you’re talking about. He said, simple, candid, honest, transparent, through and through.

And he said, Mr. Tozer, Brother Tozer, I met God up there. He said, it was a crisis in my life. I met God among those people. He said an illustration. He said, I slept in a room with an old bearded German fellow who was one of them. He said, I woke up in the night and had gotten suddenly chilly in the night, it was real cold. He said, I slept up on a good bed and my roommate, an old gentleman, slept down on a cot. And he said, the moonlight was streaming into the room, and I looked and I saw that the covers had slipped off of the old man. But he was still sleeping away. He said, I thought, oh, I’ll cover him up.

So, he got out of his warm bed and went over and got the blankets back on the old man. I don’t know whether he put the beard under or on top of the covers, but that isn’t important.

But he got him fixed up and he slipped back to bed. And he was congratulating himself that he had not wakened the old gentleman. Then he said he heard a man in a very thick German accent praying. And he said, O Jesus, he said, you’ve been so good to me. And he listened. He said, you’ve given me a nice farm and some cows and a good wife. And he went on enumerating. And then he ended by saying, and a nice man stuck me in when I get cold. He said, there he was.

He said, Brother Tozer, that’s the way they lived and that’s the way they thought. You know, no, no, none of this jive stuff, none that far out, you know, and it’s the most, none of that. Simplicity.

God is going to judge us by our frankness, our candor, our moral and spiritual integrity. That measuring is going on and the whole New Testament declares that it’s going on, but it isn’t published yet. And I don’t know where I belong in this thing. Do you know where you belong? I know in some measure, but it isn’t published. It wasn’t published there. He just had to measure it and then God kept the record.

And you know, soon everybody will know I can stand up here and look dignified as I am able and pass and get away with murder because I’m a minister and I’m called Reverend. And I can walk down the street looking stern and stuffed and everybody will say, good morning, Reverend. But I can’t get away with a thing before the apostolic measuring rod. And neither can you. Not one thing.

Friends, can write you and tell you you’re wonderful, you’ve helped them, but it doesn’t mean a thing when the apostle lays his rod on your soul. It isn’t published yet. Soon everybody will know. There’s nothing secret that shall not be revealed and there’s nothing done in secret that shall not be shouted from the housetop.

Soon everybody will know, but there’s only one thing that can silence that shouting voice. And do you know what it is? I believe it’s the voice of Jesus’ blood that speaketh better things than that of Abel. I believe that the blood of the Lamb speaks louder in my defense than my own sins can speak against me.

And the only thing that can silence the voice of the prophet or the apostle is if the blood is on my soul. To repent, to tell God we’re sorry, to seek His face, to get out from under this two-facedness, this simulation and dissimulation, to have our love and our humility and our faith tested and tried before God. This we can do, and we can in sorrow repent before our God and our Father.

And as we do, the blood of Jesus Christ, His Son, cleanseth us from all sin. And I said a while ago that we could not know. Now I wonder if I was quite accurate. I wonder if the teaching of the New Testament isn’t rather that God gives a witness, and you can know in your heart.

Other people won’t, but you can know in your heart. The proud man can know when he’s humbled himself till God smiles. The deceiver can know when he’s repented until God smiles. The loveless, hard man can break his own heart before God until God smiles.

And so, with all the other dimensions of the soul, shan’t we tonight, shan’t we ask God to search us? Search me, O God. Do you know that brother? We sang it, didn’t we? All right, could we sing it again? Search me, O God, search me and know my heart. Let’s do it now for just a moment while the brother leads us. It is not in the book, dear friends, but I’m sure it’s familiar to many. And we’ll sing it thoughtfully together.

Dear friends, don’t close your eyes and sleep tonight until you have settled it before God. We won’t press an invitation this evening but ask God to lay the rod of the apostolic test upon your life and measure you. And then meet whatever requirements, make any changes, any restitution, any amendment of life, and do it in faith and love, and you’ll be better for it.

O God, now we thank Thee for this evening. We thank Thee for the fellowship of the Christians. We thank Thee for the presence of the missionary. We thank thee for our friend, Shufelt.

We thank Thee and praise Thee for the Word and ask that as we go out tonight, we’ll go with a solemnity upon us, a cheerful solemnity and a seriousness, knowing that the results are not yet published before the world, but they will be.

So, help us to get to them before they’re published, bury them forever in the blood, and be clean to stand before God and man. Now be gracious unto us, lift Thy face upon us, and smile upon us through this week ahead.

In the name of Jesus Christ, our Lord, and all the people said, amen.

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“The Garments of Jesus“

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Tozer Talks · The Garments of Jesus

The Garments of Jesus

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

December 21, 1958

Let us turn to the second chapter of Luke and read the familiar but still very wonderful story. Luke 2, we’ll read the first 18 verses responsibly and all join on the last verse, that would be verse 18.

Luke 2: And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be taxed. (And this taxing was first made when Cyrenius was governor of Syria.) And all went to be taxed, everyone into his own city.

And Joseph also went up from Galilee, out of the city of Nazareth, into Judaea, unto the city of David, which is called Bethlehem; (because he was of the house and lineage of David:) To be taxed with Mary his espoused wife, being great with child. And so it was, that, while they were there, the days were accomplished that she should be delivered. And she brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger; because there was no room for them in the inn.

And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night. And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid. And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, which is Christ the Lord. And this shall be a sign unto you; Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger. And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying, Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.

And it came to pass, as the angels were gone away from them into heaven, the shepherds said one to another, Let us now go even unto Bethlehem, and see this thing which is come to pass, which the Lord hath made known unto us. And they came with haste, and found Mary, and Joseph, and the babe lying in a manger. And when they had seen it, they made known abroad the saying which was told them concerning this child. And all they that heard it wondered at those things which were told them by the shepherds.

Now let us pray.

Dear Father in heaven, we thank Thee for this Scripture. It’s as fresh and as imperishable, more so than the stars that shine. Nothing, nothing is as imperishable but the throne, the throne around which the rainbow curls.

For this, this is Thee, this is Thee speaking. These words are Thy words. Thou hast spoken to us. Thou hast told us this most wonderful, most wonderful story. We thank thee for all that it means. We thank thee, Father, that if the world were to dissolve today, there would be a victory that the ages would hear because of all who have believed it and all who have been saved. And that great multitude that no man can number, ten thousand times, ten thousand and thousands of thousands out of every tongue and tribe and nation and people around all the world for all these centuries.

So, nothing Satan can do now can hinder. Nothing, nothing, Lord, can stop us. And if the cause of missions should end now and Thou should close and slam shut and lock every door, we thank Thee that the gospel has found its people and they have come out from all tongues and tribes and nations and have joined themselves unto the Lamb and they shall stand on the sea, by the sea of glass, and they shall wave their palm branches and sing and their song shall be worthy as the Lamb that was slain. And we can only say Thine is the victory, Thine is the Kingdom, Thine is the power, and Thine is the glory. And, O Lord, Thou shalt yet take unto Thee Thy great power and reign.

And we thank Thee, Lord, our eyes are upon Thee and we’re looking to Thee, Thou baby Jesus who became a man, Christ Jesus, and who died and rose and lives and pleads with love in all His words and deeds.  And we’re victorious, we thank Thee we’re victorious, and Thy church is victorious, and Thy throne is victorious, Thou hast established Thy throne, O Lord. And the world and the things thereof and the sun from the rising to its setting tells the story.

And we bless Thy holy name that we are celebrating this hour, the coming of God to the world, the advent of Jesus Christ who is the Eternal Word and is now made flesh. And we know what it’s about and we’re not puzzled and we’re not caught in the whirl of it, but our feet are on the ground and our hearts in the heavens. And we can give account of why we feel like this about it and we can tell the people why we believe what we believe. And we have the solid theology of the Scriptures underneath our feet.

Blessed be thy name, blessed be the Triune God, the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. And blessed be all His will and His purposes and His plans and His desires and His everlasting predestination, having predestinated all things after the counsel of Thine own will. And all the mysteries of these things we don’t understand, but we can stand with our hands raised to heaven and cry, it shall be done. Thou art God and nobody can stop Thee. And we thank Thee for Thy son, Jesus, now on the throne.

Oh, we pray that we may worthily celebrate. And Father, we pray for those who have had hard times and troubles over the last times, the last hours, the last days. We pray Thee, the tatters, Lord, who’ve lost this wonderful, fine, godly, old gentleman from them who’s gone only ahead a little while.

Bless them all, we pray Thee, and in thy kind love, fill the vacancy until they shall gather at the throne. Thank Thee for that home, for these people, for the influence and the stream of spirituality and godliness that has come down from this patriarch who is now with Thee.

And we pray Thee for Dorothy Elder of this church and her home and her people, Lord, with her father having died. And we pray thee, Father, thy blessing upon that home, too. Bless them all most graciously, O God, and undertake, we pray thee, and let thy blessing be upon them and upon Dorothy and upon her sisters and brothers and the wife, the mother. Let grace be upon them all.

Keep thy hand upon us today, may we honor Jesus Christ, our Lord, in a manner worthy of Him. Bless our country, we pray, our God, this northern part of our country lying under the great heavy snows and with very great cold.

And we pray thee, Lord, Thou wilt help and bless again, we ask Thee, out on the highways and up in the air and wherever people are traveling, for many shall run to and fro and knowledge shall be increased. Lord, this is happening in our time, and we pray Thee for all who are traveling and all on the sea and all in the air. And let Thy blessing now be upon this service as we wait further on thee, in Christ’s holy name. Amen.

Now, I have a number of texts this morning, and I want to read them. Luke 2:7, She brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger. Mark 9:3, And his raiment became shining, exceeding white as snow, so as no fuller on earth could white them. Psalm 22:18, They parted my raiment among them, and for my vesture did they cast lots. John 20:6-7, Then cometh Simon Peter, following him, and went into the sepulcher, and seeth the linen clothes lie, and the napkin was about his head, not lying with the linen clothes, but wrapped together in a place by itself. Revelation 1:13, In the midst of the seven candlesticks, one like unto the Son of Man, clothed with a garment down to the foot, and girt about the paps with a golden girdle. Psalm 45:8, All thy garments, smell of myrrh and aloes and cassia, out of the ivory palaces. Isaiah 63:1, Who is this that cometh from Edom, with dyed garments from Basra? This that is glorious in his apparel, traveling in the greatness of his strength.

You will notice that each one of these verses which I read mention clothing. And I’d like to talk a little today about the garments of our Savior and let what I have to say revolve around this central verse, All thy garments, smell of myrrh and aloes and cassia, out of the ivory palaces. It’s one of my favorite verses, and no doubt I have quoted it very, very frequently and referred to it often in my preaching. But today I want to talk about seven garments which our Savior wears, or wore, and what they mean.

Now, in the text, all thy garments smell of myrrh, David is addressing one whom he calls one that is fairer than the children of men, and he describes him in radiant, beautiful language. He is fairer than the children of men. Grace is poured out by his lips. He is blessed forever. He has a sword girt upon his thigh. He is mighty and glorious and majestic. He rides prosperously in truth and meekness, and his throne is God’s throne forever and ever. And God has anointed him with the oil of gladness above his fellows.

Now, that’s the One who is described, and we know who that One is. It is none other than Jesus Christ, our Lord.

Now, garments, as you know, express two things. They express office and character. In the Bible we learn of the wedding garment. We learn of the white, spotless garment. We are told not to get our garments spotted, which is not to get our hearts soiled. We learn of the bride and her beautiful white garment, and we learn of the efforts of the sinner to make garments for himself, but they are filthy rags.

So, character is described here in the garment of Jesus, but there is more than character. There is office as well. For men dress as kings or as generals or as what they are, and so we see here in the garments of our Savior, His offices and His character. I’ll sing the character he wears and all the forms of love he bears exalted on his throne.

Now, this means then that His offices are many, for He’s the Infinite God, and that His character is perfect, and that He has an infinite variety of changes. Do not think that in talking of these seven garments, there are many more, that I am exhausting the possibilities, for He is an Infinite Savior, and being infinite, He has an infinite variety of changes.

Now, it says about His garments, all of His garments, no matter which ones, that they smell of myrrh and cassia and aloes. And in the Bible, we find that myrrh is used to describe bitterness and tears, and cassia is a healing herb that was medicinal in its use. And aloes, there was nothing about aloes that could heal, nothing about aloes that suggested character at all, but there was one thing about the little flower, it was fragrant and beautiful. No mortal can with him compare among the sons of men. Fairer is he than all the fair that fill the heavenly train.

So, we have these three fragrances, that of myrrh, which, while it is sweet to smell, has an undertone of bitterness, and cassia, while it is also fragrant, is used for healing, and aloes, which is just fragrant and beautiful.

Now, let’s look at these garments rather briefly, that our Savior wore, or that He wears, or that He shall yet wear. The first is in Luke, and she brought forth her firstborn son and wrapped him in swaddling clothes.

Now, the swaddling clothes worn by our Savior are emblematic of His true humanity, for our Lord Jesus was human, became human, and dwelt among us. He loved the title, the Son of Man. He loved it more, I think, than any other, because He referred to Himself in the third person often as the Son of Man, His favorite title.

Now, our Lord came clear down. I’ve often said, and I repeat now, that I am glad that we are redeemed not as a slumming project on the part of God, that God didn’t decide that we poor slum dwellers in the slums of the universe here in earth, that we needed help, and so he didn’t organize a do-good uplift organization, get them together and say, let’s try to help the underprivileged. But He came clear down where we were, and He took upon Himself all our limitations and took upon Himself all that we are except sin.

There was nothing that He did not take upon Him. He was born as we are born. He grew as we grow. He ate as we eat. He slept as we sleep. He developed and matured as we develop and mature. He stood on the earth. He watched the sun rise and set. He spoke the familiar language of His people. He wore the common garments of his people. Jesus, our Lord, was in every sense a human.

You see, the church has made two mistakes. She hasn’t meant to do it, but she’s made two mistakes. One is to talk too much of His deity, and the other to think too much of His humanity. We’ve got to keep them in balance.

We’ve got to remember that while He was God, He yet came to the world and was wrapped in swaddling garments to tell all the world, I was born into the human race. And I was immediately picked up and swaddled, covered over with the garments they call the swaddling garment.

And they took the little baby Jesus, and I don’t think there’s anything that’s quite so fragrant as a newly bathed and newly powdered and newly dressed little baby. And when they took the baby Jesus up after they had oiled Him and rubbed Him and washed Him and then had wrapped Him in His baby swaddling garments, if they had been as sharp and as penetrating, and probably there were some that were, they would have noticed a fragrance about His little baby garments that they had not put there. If indeed they had scented powders in those days, I know not. But if they had, they would have noticed three fragrances here. There was the smell of myrrh.

When we take a new baby in our hands, we don’t like to think of its future being sad or bitter or tearful or heavy. But when they picked the baby Jesus up, if they had had prophetic foresight, they would have known that this baby was born to suffering and to bitterness and tears.

But if they could have gone on and detected this other fragrance, they would have known that there was cassia there, for cassia was the medicinal herb, and aloes they would have seen and perhaps they did. I doubt whether they did at first, for the Scripture says there is no beauty in Him that we should desire Him.

I think therefore that our Savior did not show up until the time of His death any unusual marks of beauty. The only marks He showed were His moral beauty, and of course that in itself was wonderful. But just as they broke the alabaster box to release the fragrance that filled all the house where they were sitting, so when they broke Him on the cross of Calvary, they released to the world a fragrance like the aloes, a fragrance that was also a beauty, because you know it is possible that which is fragrant and that which is beautiful, they’re very closely related.

I have said to you in times gone by that when I was young, I don’t know what’s happened to it, maybe it’s atrophied since, but I used to be able to see color in music. When I heard an organ or an orchestra or anything, I heard not only the music but saw the color of it. And I thought it was just one more eccentricity on my part, until I learned that they can transmute the, what do they call it, across, the little impulses across, and that actually they are the same. Actually, all the five senses are one.

I thought that out when I was a young chap, and then later on I found out I had been right about it. That’s always comforting, but I had that the senses are all the sense of touch. They all go back to the sense of touch.

Something touches the olfactory nerves, and we smell. Something touches the ear, and we hear. Something touches the eye, and we see. Something touches the taste buds, and we taste. It all goes back to the sense of touch, and it can all be reduced to this one thing.

And so, when we say fragrant and beautiful, we are saying one thing. For we are saying that Jesus Christ is to the heart of a man that which fragrance is to the nose, which beauty is to the eye, which sweet sound is to the hearing. So He is that, and all this was in His clothing, if they could only have known it, when he became a babe and dwelt among us.

But then I ask you to note the second one, and that is in Mark. And his raiment became shining, exceeding white as snow, as no laundry, no fuller on earth can white them. Now here were His lustrous garments, the insignia of His very Godhood. If His swaddling garments were the emblem of His humanity, then His lustrous garments were the emblem of His true Godhood.

Would it be out of order if I quoted again that which I guess I have quoted once a year for the great many years, that glorious form, that light unsufferable, and that far-beaming blaze of majesty wherewith he was wanted heaven’s high council table to sit in midst of Trinal Unity, he laid aside and here with us to be, forsook the courts of everlasting day and chose with us a darksome house of mortal clay.

And this far-beaming blaze of majesty got out of hand only one time while He was on earth. He had become man so completely and so fully and perfectly did His humanity veil His deity that it never got out of hand but one time.

Once up yonder on the mountain where Peter, James, and John were with Him, He prayed. And as He prayed, His raiment became shining, exceeding white as snow. And the result, you remember, on Peter and the rest of them, they spoke not knowing what they were saying.

And they said, let us dwell forever here, build us three tabernacles, and bring back Moses and Elijah, and let’s live here forever. As soon as the lustrous glory of His Godhood shone forth, they wanted to stay where He was. And so, Jesus, who is man, is also God.

We must hold these two thoughts in careful balance. We must remember His swaddling garments. When we seem so poor and weak and human, we must comfort our hearts by remembering that He once wore our baby clothes. And when we become too bold and sure of ourselves, we ought to take a quick look at the mountain where He shone forth in His lustrous garments, whiter than any fuller on earth could make them.

So, He is not only man, but He is God, very God of very God begotten, not created. He was at home among the angels, and He was at home among men.

If we had sent a man to heaven to try to see God and intercede for us, that man wouldn’t have been at home there, for earth is his home, not heaven. If He had sent an angel to earth, the angel wouldn’t have been at home here, for heaven is the home of the angels, not earth. But Jesus, being God and having His home in heaven, and being born in the form of a man, thus could have earth as His home, we have united in the two, heaven and earth–God, God and humanity reconciled.

So now we have the two garments, and even yet if you could have seen or they could have gotten control of their faculties and could have remembered a little there His lustrous garments, they’d have noted they would smell of myrrh, because though He were God, He was not going to finish His redeeming work without tears and bitterness and sorrow.  And, of course, cassia, for that’s why He came, and aloes for all the beauty of His wonderful nature.

Can I ask you to note John 19:23, His seamless garment? We read about that in the Old Testament, they parted my raiment among them and for my vesture did they cast lots. We have that garment of Jesus, that garment that was woven. It wasn’t woven as a piece of cloth and then sewn together leaving seams. It was woven or knitted in some manner so there was no seam, all one piece.

You women are familiar with that kind of thing. I guess they do that with sweaters and other garments that are knitted to the general shape they want and thus have no seam.

So, this was the seamless garment of Jesus, and this was the only garment He had. When our Lord went on a trip, He did not take a suitcase. When He went on a journey, He did not take a bag with Him. They had no need for He wore His total wardrobe on His back. And wherever He went, He carried all He owned with Him. The foxes have holes and the birds have their nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.

Think of it, my friend, his seamless garments were the emblem of His voluntary poverty, for He could have robed Himself in light.

You know, if Shakespeare had written this story, how different it would have been, or Aeschylus, or any of the other great dramatists, how different it would have been. He would have come down like some planet from afar, blazing round the earth and startling the world. But instead of that, He divested Himself of light and He laid aside His glory and came down with us.

He might have robed Himself in light. He might have had the sun for His covering. He might have had the moon under His feet and the stars round Him as a crown round His head. But our Lord came down and had but one seamless garment, the emblem of His voluntary poverty. And when He went to the cross, He didn’t even take that garment along with Him.

Think of it, my friends, this we don’t often talk about. And the artists, when they paint Jesus, out of common decency, manage somehow to drape over His holy form some ribbon of cloth to shield Him from the naked gaze of men. But actually, Jesus died naked. As He was born naked, He died naked. He died on a cross naked. They took off from Him all that He had.

And so, He died, and atonement was made. If those Jews or those Roman soldiers that took His last garment, his seamless garment, if they could have had the sense of smell that a prophet had, they would have smelled myrrh, and they wouldn’t have had to argue about that. The bitterness and the tears and the blood were there in evidence. But they would have smelled cassia, too, for that seamless robe smelled of cassia, the symbol of healing and of aloes, the fragrance and beauty.

Nobody looks good when he’s going out to die. They said of the man who was executed last Friday, last Thursday night at midnight, six minutes after midnight, they said of him that he cut a ridiculous figure as he walked with shaven head and with these trousers cut off a little above his knees as he walked and was guided, blindfolded to the chair.

Nobody going to die, put to death by society, can ever do it with any great dignity. And you’d have had to have the spiritual insight of an apostle to have seen any beauty there, any beauty there, as they tugged off of His warm body, the last garment He had and exposed Him to the sneers and leers of the public and flung Him down flat on His back and nailed Him on a cross and raised the cross and put it like a telephone pole into a hole with a jar, a sickening, shocking jar, and there He hung in nakedness. And the modest women looked aside, and the men grinned and little boys tittered, and God died.

And He died there in darkness and in thirst and in nakedness and in poverty. He died in darkness though the stars were His and all the trillions of suns and galaxies that lie out there, He had made them by the word of His power and all the shining light from all the multiplied heavenly bodies could have been His to light Him out of the dark.

And yet He died in darkness voluntarily and the garment that was had been His, smelled of myrrh and aloes, myrrh for bitterness and cashew for healing and aloes for fragrance. He died in thirst and cried out, I thirst, and the seven seas were His and all the rivers and all the waters in the world and yet He died in thirst. He died in nakedness and in poverty though the cattle on a thousand hills and all the beasts of the forest and all the metals hidden away in the hills and the mountains, and all the wealth of the universe was His.

He might have spun himself a robe out of sunlight. He might have made Himself a garment of stardust for it was all His, all His. But in voluntary poverty He went down as far as He could go.

They say some are poor and we hear of the poor and they tell us of the poverty that are in other countries and even when visitors come here from England, or from any of the more fortunate and advanced countries of the world, almost always when they’re being interviewed or when they’re making speeches, somewhere they put in the bracket, a little word saying, we were getting on fine in our country, of course nothing like America.

So, we’re very rich here but not as rich as He could have been. They could have brought Him orders from Edom, gold from Ophir, peacocks from Africa, singing women and playing men and choirs, all that Solomon had before him He could have had multiplied into infinity. But He died in poverty and blood.

The next is John 20:6,7, I read that to you also. And came Simon Peter following him and went into the sepulcher and he saw the linen clothes lying in a napkin, not lying with the linen clothes but wrapped together in a place by itself. I’m not going to go into detail here, but every Bible student knows what this means.

It means that Jesus Christ did not get up like another man and undress. It means that He came out without disturbing the garments. It means that the metamorphosis, the marvelous transfiguration, the change that came over the dead Man as He lay in the tomb, put Him where He was both matter and still non-material. Put Him where He weighed something and yet could slip through closed doors as though they were open. This wonder I shall never be able to explain. I only know that God did not allow an angel to come down and roll the stone away to let Jesus out.

Therefore, if He had, the angel would have had part of the glory. Somewhere in heaven there would have been an angel. And when the earthly choirs composed of the red and yellow, black and white, round the whole world for all human history, when they got together in a great hymn sing, to hymn the Lamb, it was slain but that had risen again.

Somebody would have pointed to an angel and said, there’s the angel that helped Jesus get up. There’s the angel that rolled the stone away. But when they rolled the stone away, they found He was already out.

And if they had sent someone to unwrap Him after He was dead, they wrapped Him in the garments of the dead. If they had sent some archangel to unwrap Him and let Him go free, as they had unwrapped Lazarus before Him, always when we celebrate in yonder glory, somebody would have remembered and said, there goes the archangel that unwrapped the Savior and let Him get out.

But just as nobody helped Him die, so nobody could help Him rise. He dismissed His spirit, and He rose from the dead. And His garments showed it. Lay a dead body down, wrapped in certain ways, and then take it away without immaterialize it and take it away and you have your garments where they were before, as though the shape of the body is there, but the body is gone.

So that was Jesus. What does that mean? Those burial garments, lying as they were lying, they are symbols of His triumph. He conquered all that men now deny.

We try to get on with ourselves and stay reasonably comfortable by denying the very ghosts that haunt us and the very dragons that threaten us but, Jesus Christ denied nothing. He denied not the devil. He said there’s a devil. He denied not sin. He knew there was sin. He denied not man’s lost condition. He knew man was lost. He denied not hell. He spoke of hell. He denied none of that which was against Him.

But He conquered it, and that’s a different thing. That’s quite a different thing. Instead of denying it and trying to dissolve it in thought, He met it head on and died under the impact of it, but God raised Him from the dead the third day. And because He came out so completely triumphant, He met and conquered all. And now we can say the three sad days are quickly sped. He rose in triumph from the dead. Hallelujah!

Well, then there is Revelation 1:13. John said, I turned, and when I turned, I saw. To see the voice, I saw seven golden candlesticks, and in the midst of the seven candlesticks, one like unto the Son of Man, clothed with a garment down to the foot, and girt about the paps with a golden girdle.

He goes on to describe them, and what are these garments? They are the garments of His priesthood, and insignia of His priesthood, for the priest offers and prays. And this One who was born into our flesh, now is at the right hand of God, our Priest, offering Himself, not offering the blood of others, but offering His own blood. And He bears our names in three places: on His hands, and on His breast, and on His shoulders. On His hands, emblematic of work, and on His breast, emblematic of love, and on His shoulders, emblematic of strength. And the government shall be upon His shoulder, singular.

I’ll never forget when Dr. H. L. Zimmer was still preaching in the apex of his power, that great German voice of his boomed out once, and he preached, says, the government shall be upon his shoulder. Then he asked the rhetorical question, why do the governments of the world rest upon one of His shoulders? Then he lowered his voice and smiled, and said, so I can rest upon the other. He carries the world upon one shoulder, and His people on the other.

And then, for I must be brief, there’s His wedding garment, I’ve read about that, emblematic of His relationship to His people. You will find in that psalm, her garment and his garment. His garments smell of myrrh and aloes and cassia, and her garments, very, very beautiful they are. The king’s daughter is all glorious within, that is, she sits within, all glorious. And her clothing is of wrought gold. She shall be brought unto the king in raiment of needlework. And the virgins, her companions that follow her, shall be brought unto thee.

There’s the wedding garment. Let us not get bogged down in politics. Let us not limit our thinking by the conquest of space. Suppose they do, and they will. Suppose they do visit Mars or Venus or the moon. Suppose they do.

There was a day when America seemed as far from Italy or Spain as the moon seems now from the earth. They’ll get there one of these times. Never say they can’t do it, they’ll do it.

I know one fellow won’t be on board when they go, but they’ll do it. But my brethren, when they do it, don’t let that bother you. Don’t let the voice of a president speaking out of outer space bother you.

There is one coming, wearing a wedding garment, with His sword girded on His thigh, and He’s coming not from Venus or Mars or some far galaxy. He’s coming from the throne of God, wherever that is. And I do not care geographically or astronomically where that throne is.

He is coming from there, and when He comes, He will be wearing His wedding garment. And His wedding garment will smell of myrrh. What? You mean that when He stands with His bride and presents her to the Father in great glory, that there can be a faint trace of myrrh on that garment? For myrrh stands for bitterness and suffering and woe.

Yes, it’s there, my brethren. All thy garments smell of myrrh. And in the hour of her triumph, His bride will remember with a tear that won’t hurt and with a sigh that won’t be sad and with a sorrow that isn’t grief, that she was there because He was there.

She wore her golden robes because He wore His cotton ones. That she stood before the throne because He stood before Pilate. And she’s infinitely rich because He was tragically poor. But she’ll never suffer again because He suffered beyond description. She’ll never quite forget that. Any of you that want to go to heaven and get where you’ll be happy, all happy, always happy, happy, happy, happy.

If you want to go to heaven so you’ll never remember the cross, I don’t think you’d better plan on going. For I’m sure that when they sing, worthy is the Lamb, to every redeemed mind, there will come the picture of a bleeding Lamb. But there’ll be no sadness anymore, no tears, and nobody will cry. But rather they will break out loud and laugh, laugh with holy laughter, to know that the Bridegroom by their side is the same One who once was wrapped in swaddling bands in poverty.

Last of all and I’m finished. His garment dipped in blood, that’s in Isaiah, the 63rd chapter.

Who is this that cometh from Edom? The dyed garments from Basra that this that is glorious in his apparel traveling in the greatness of his strength. I that speak in righteousness mighty to save I am he. Ah then the question wherefore art thou red in thine apparel and thy garments like him that treadeth out in the wine fat? Then he replies I have trodden the wine press alone and of the people there was none with me.

Understandably this verse has been misinterpreted and we talk about Christ on the cross treading the wine press. No, no. He trod no wine press on Calvary’s hill. How could he? His two feet were nailed there on the tree, and they were treading Him, not He them. I will tread them in mine anger and trample them in my fury and their blood shall be sprinkled upon my garments and I will stain all my raiment. Ah my brother, the garment dipped in blood is a symbol of His ultimate conquest.

The world with all its ocracies, its dilemma. Nobody’s good enough or big enough or strong enough to rescue us. But He is coming to rescue us. He’s the only one who has the right. He’s the only one who took on Him all our sorrows.

If there could rise in the world whether he be red or yellow, black or white or whatever race, if there should arise a man with a heart so big and great and wonderful that he could take into that heart all that’s wrong with us, all that’s wrong with us.

All our hates and our jealousies and our malice and our bitterness and our lusts could take them all into his heart and say I suffer with you. I suffer with you. Whether he was an American or an Englishman or a Vietnamese or a Chinese, I’d say there’s your man. There’s your man. I’d follow him. I’d vote for him if you could vote. There’s your man. I’d smell of myrrh. He knows my grief.

But politicians and kings and leaders and prime ministers and all the rest, they want power. They want authority. They want to go down in history. They’re not trying to help us. They’re trying to help themselves. And there’s nobody in the world that can take into his heart my grief, my weakness, my sorrow, my sadness, my loss, my terror. Nobody can do that.

There was One that did it and his name was Jesus. And He could do it because He came as a man. He’s the only one that has the right and he’s the only one I’ll vote for.

So, you needn’t fear to come to Him for He knows more about you than you know about yourself. And one of these times He’ll come back. I wish it were not so. That is, I wish it didn’t have to be like this. But He’ll come back and when He comes to reign, He’ll not fool with summit conferences. He’ll not fool with ultimata, ultimatums. And He’ll not fool with kings and ministers and diplomats and ambassadors and other liars. He’ll walk down and demand His right.

And the meek shall hear His demand and fall at His feet. And the proud and the God-hating shall feel the weight of His mighty brazen feet as He treads the winepress alone and sets up His own throne, King of Kings and Lord of Lords on this earth.

So, we can only close by reminding you that in the 18th of Revelation there is that passage where someone shouts out, take unto thee, take unto thee thy great power and reign.

He’s going to do that one of these times. I don’t know how far God is going to let the world go. I don’t know. I don’t know. I’m not wise enough to know how far God will let us go. But I know that one time soon He’ll get enough.

But even when He comes and tramples down the world in blood and reigns in peace over a peaceful earth, if you come close, you will smell myrrh. For He purchased that right in darkness and blackness and bitterness and tears and blood. And you will smell cassia, for He does it to heal the whole world.

Wonderful if we could wave a wand and heal the whole world. Wonderful if that Pullman car that’s flying around up there 17,000 miles an hour could diffuse healing to all the nations. And as it whistles by, every nation could be healed. All the hospitals empty, all insane asylums, all the old folks’ homes.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if when it passes around the world it could diffuse healing to all below? I’d go down and help shoot them up, wouldn’t you? I’d go down there and help shoot them up if I did nothing but carry water to that scientist in order to get them going around this world to heal all the poor world. I’d send him over Russia. We wouldn’t have any trouble with him then. I’d send them everywhere and heal the world, but we can’t do it.

But when He comes to reign, He’ll do it. He’ll go like lightning flash around the world and His goings forth will be for the healings of the nations. He will do it.

Blessed be God and blessed be His Son, Jesus Christ our Lord. All His garments smell of myrrh and aloes and cassia out of the ivory palaces.

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“The Anti-Christ“

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Tozer Talks · The Antichrist

The Antichrist

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

June 21, 1959

Now please turn to Revelation 12. We’ll read it. It’s quite a good-sized chapter. We’ll read the chapter. Pray that the Spirit of God may open our eyes even as we read. Suppose that we read as we usually do responsibly. The chief value of that method is to keep us from reading too fast. And then we’ll all read the last verse together. Revelation 12.

And there appeared a great wonder in heaven, a woman clothed with the sun and the moon under her feet and upon her head a crown of twelve stars. And there appeared another wonder in heaven, and behold, a great red dragon having seven heads and ten horns and seven crowns upon his head. And she brought forth a man-child who was to rule all nations with a rod of iron, and her child was caught up under God into his throne.

And there was war in heaven. Michael and his angels fought against the dragon, and the dragon fought and his angels. And the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent called the devil and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world.

He was cast out into the earth and his angels were cast out with him. And they overcame him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony, and they loved not their lives unto the death. And when the dragon saw that he was cast unto the earth, he persecuted the woman which brought the man-child forth.

And the serpent cast out of his mouth water as a flood after the woman, that it might cause her to be carried away of the flood. And the earth bowed to the woman, and the earth bowed to the man. And the dragon was wroth with the woman and went to make war with a remnant of her seed, which keep the commandments of God and have the testimony of Jesus.

Now, I note here that this chapter begins by saying, there appeared a great wonder in heaven. Of course, it was a sign, it was a wonder with significance. And I might begin by saying to you that we live in a world of wonders, if we only had eyes to see.

We live in a world of wonders, and I believe they are not only wonders, but they are signs. The poet you know said there were tongues in trees and books in the running brooks. He was only a poet, but sometimes the poet blunders into saying things that are very true, and that is one truth.

I wonder how we’d feel if we saw the sun come up for the first time, or if we saw the stars out for the first time. Imagine how the first man felt who looked for the first time at Niagara tumbling over the rocks, or the great Grand Canyon yawning there in its terrible beauty. The world is full of wonders, but if the earth can show wonders, how much more can heaven? There was an Englishman by the name of Lord Dunsany, whom I read a great deal when I was a younger fellow. He wrote a book called the “Book of Wonders.”

But the Book of Wonders had already been written. This Book of Wonders I hold in my hand, this Book of Wonders. It is not a book spun out of man’s imagination. It is a true account of actual events before they happen. You hear what I say? This book is an account of things that have happened, and a true account of things before they happen.

The prophetic past, I saw, and I saw, and I saw, and yet, to us, it’s a way out in the future. But that which is to be already has happened in the sight of God. And the man John, from his high lookout in the spirit, sees that which is to be as though it already had been.

And this Book of Revelation is a drama of wonders. It is unique in time. It tells us of things that never happened before and never will happen again. Some things God has repeated. We may see them today and wait and see them again tomorrow. Some things happened a century ago and will happen in the next century and the next.

But there are some things that only happened once. As, for instance, when our Lord told us of that terrible period which this twelfth chapter takes in, when nothing like it ever had been before and nothing like it ever was again.

So, this John, from this high lookout, sees the procession of the skies of heaven and earth and hell, and he sees here a woman.

Now, there are several views of this woman. I might mention them and pass on. One of them is that this is the Virgin Mary, and this glory in which she is clothed with the moon under her feet and clothed with the sun and the crown of stars about her head, that this is a picture of Mary. But we know better than this, and we dismiss this, because we do not believe that it has any support from anywhere else in the entire Word of God.

Then there is the view that this is Israel, and then there is the view that this is the Church. I believe there is only one view that is tenable and that can be supported by the Old Testament prophets and by other passages from the New Testament, and that is that this woman that appears as a sign in the wonder in heaven, clothed with the sun and the moon under her feet and the stars about her head, is Israel. I cannot see anything else.

And I ask you to behold then the nation of Israel, a nation as men see her, humble from the beginning. Israel has always been humble. Her glory has never been the glory of Rome or Babylon or England. She came from a simple man who came out of her of the Chaldees and was a nomad traveling south. Her history is known, and she’s been in more trouble than she’s been out of, and she’s had more feet on her neck than we can imagine down the years.

She’s been humble, I say, from the beginning, often in exile and often in captivity. She’s been robbed and spoiled, but she’s been subjected to pogroms and assassinations even down to the present day. And she has been a snare and a curse and a hissing and a byword down to this hour. That has been Israel. That’s the woman as man sees her. But behold, a nation in the eternal purposes of God.

Oh, if we were only wise to be able to see as God sees and see what God sees, we might look at a little child, if we could see as God sees, and behold in that little child a receptacle for the glory of God for all the ages to come. But we see only a little freckled child who has a genius for getting under your feet. We don’t see as God sees.

It’s the same with the church. We see otherwise than as God sees. We ought to pray day and night for the anointed eye that we might see as God sees, that we might have God’s values of things, that we might look upon the world and see it as God sees it, that we might look upon little things and see them as big as they are in the sight of God, and upon big things and see them as little as they are in the sight of God.

This woman as man sees her is nothing. Go down on Maxwell Street and you’ll see her there. But as God sees her, a nation invested with light, the sun and the moon and the stars, crowned and crowned with the stars and clothed with the sun and the moon under her feet.

Now it says that there was a great red dragon there. And I call attention to the glory and the tragedy of being a moral creature. I can perfectly understand why John Bunyan, when he was under blistering, terrible, devastating conviction for sin, why he looked at a dog loping down the sidewalk and looked up and said, O God, I wish I were a yonder dog, for that dog can die and remain dead, and I, a man, have to die and come again to judgment.

The creature without moral quantities and qualities, that creature we can write off and dismiss. But the terror and the glory and the tragedy and the wonder of the creatures who were made in God’s image with progression and regression, degeneration and transfiguration, this we see, this great red dragon.

Now we have him pictured here. We know who he is. We don’t have to be great or profound scholars to know that this is the devil. This is that terrible beast that was once the covering cherub that has come to destroy men.

And some who stand on Mount Zion there, in the 14th chapter, later on in Revelation, they were at one time simple people that nobody, nobody ever dreamed that someday they would stand on Mount Zion. But there was the sun of the morning, that creature that was created by God to overshadow the fiery seat of God there, the throne and the stones of fire. That creature fell, and oh, how he fell and how far down he fell.

What does that teach you and me? It ought to teach us that no matter how far up we may go, it’s possible to descend tragically, and no matter how low down we are, it’s possible to rise in the will of God by the grace of God and be made new creatures in Christ Jesus. That’s the thought I throw in here about this great red dragon. And then here was the man-child.

Now, this man-child, you see, there are also two views about this man-child. I wish that sometime, I imagine when we get to heaven, there’ll only be one view of things. But almost everywhere you’ll find, always find two views.

And if I’ve had illumination on it and God’s spoken to me on it, and if it has to do with things that matter, I usually come down hard and have one view. But where you can believe either side and still be a good Christian, I’m a little more cautious, and there are more than one side.

We used to have a man in the Alliance by the name of William T. MacArthur. He was the father of the MacArthur who runs a big printing house in Oak Park and publishes the paper out there, Oak Leaves. He was the father of Charles MacArthur, the playwright. But he was a godly man, and he had a view, more or less, all his own about this.

And he says that this woman was the church, and that this man-child is that part of the church that’s ready at the coming of Christ. And that the great church in her glory that’s not prepared for the Lord’s return, she gives birth to the small church within her that is prepared. And that was his view.

And he got away with it, and it was all right, I guess. Not very many people followed him in that view, I guess. But I hold to the view that this man-child could be nobody but Jesus Christ, our Lord, and the church seen in one view. Christ Jesus the Lord in the church, Christ Jesus the Lord.

And here we see this woman, Israel, giving birth to the man-child. And of course it was Israel that gave birth to the man-child. And when she gave birth to the man-child, she also automatically gave birth to the church, for it was from the wounded side of Jesus that the church was born.

And here was this red dragon waiting before the man-child to destroy him. You well know that when he was born in Bethlehem, that Herod immediately sent out to destroy him. You know how he was hounded on down and killed another Roman pilot, had him taken out and crucified. You know the enemy, Judas, and you know how Rome persecuted the church.

Now this man-child was caught away. He was taken away and a cloud received him out of their sight. That was said of the head of the church. But you know every head has to have a body, just as everybody must have a head. And Jesus Christ was the head of the body, the church. So when we see the great woman here in her glory, seen as God Caesar, giving birth to the man-child, we see her giving birth to Jesus, the head.

But we also see her giving birth to the church, which is the body of Christ. And so, both that Christ was caught away to the right hand of God the Father, and his body will be caught away to the right hand of God the Father.

You know, my friends, it’s good to continue to believe some things. We have shifted, as I have had occasion to say several times during my talks from Revelation, we have shifted over the last years from the old-fashioned Scofield Bible view of prophecy. I mean, the fundamentalists and the evangelicals have shifted until they’re all mixed up among themselves. They won’t invite a man to come and preach on prophecy anymore without their first asking him what he believes.

I had some Jewish brethren come here one time to see me. They asked me what I believed about this and what I believed about that. And when I told them what I believed, then they cautiously invited me to their conference. They were going to have a world conference of religious or Christian Jews in the Calvary Baptist Church in New York. And there were to be, I think, twenty-three speakers at that. They were all to preach on prophecy.

And they had gone around and called them all out so every man would say the same thing. Well, you know what I did? I didn’t accept that invitation at all. They announced me that I, I said, no, I never told you that I would come, and so I didn’t show up. I didn’t go because I didn’t want to be told what I was to say. I wanted to have views of my own.

But it so happens that with all the study of the Bible that I can do, and all the praying, and looking at world events, and reading as widely as I can, I still believe that Jesus Christ is coming back to the world again, and that he’s going to catch away his church. The body has already been, the head has already been caught away to the right hand of the Father, and the body is going to be caught away.

You can’t separate the bride from the bridegroom. You can’t separate the body from the head. You can’t separate Christ from his church, and so there’s going to be a glorious rising to get out of it all, and to get away from it all.

And so I’m, I’m not going to go along with the brethren who argue with each other about details. There are enough details in the book of Revelation to keep man preaching from now until the next Democrat’s elected president.

But I am not going to go into details. I’m not going to do it. I’m only going to pass it over lightly here, and to say that there’s the great wonder, Israel, the nation of God, and the great dragon, that devil and Satan, who is determined to destroy not only her, but to destroy the man-child born of her, and destroy the church, which is His bride, and destroy every good thing. The devil hates every good thing that’s of God, everything that God blesses, Satan hates.

And now there was war in heaven. Have you noticed this, there was war in heaven? This is one of the astonishing sayings of the Bible. We could have understood it if it had said there was war in hell, because wherefore comes wars and fightings among you, if they come not even of your lusts, but war in your members.

And if the word had said there was war in hell, we could have understood it. And if it had said there’s war on earth, we could have understood it, because there’s hardly one of us alive that’s lived during some war or other. There’s scarcely been a period of one whole year and centuries that there hasn’t been war, big ones or little ones, somewhere among men. And yet they tell us that we’re righteous, basically, that we’re good, basically. And if we’ll only accept a few pointers from the psychologists and the sociologists, we’ll all brothers be for all that and all that.

But the simple fact is, we’ve never been able from the time Cain slew also his brother, we’ve never been able to get along together. Do you feel bad when somebody swears at you from the rear with a horn? You know, they manage to make these horns so they can swear with them.

I have ridden in many an automobile and heard some fellow swear behind you. He didn’t with his own voice, but they managed somehow to play a bunch of curse words on a horn. I’ve heard, just stand where there’s any red light changing to green and hear them. And so why should you worry? Why should you worry if you can’t get along with the neighbor next door, if he just won’t be decent? He’s human and that’s humanity.

So, if it had said there was war on earth, we’d have said, yes, how sadly true. Has there ever been a time when there wasn’t war on earth? And lately there’s been war in the sea and the sky because we’ve taken war down into the dips of the sea and up into the air. And we’re threatening to take it to the planets that revolve around and the satellites that girdle our earth.

But look at the words, there was war in heaven, the brazen effrontery of Satan. Whoever stopped to think what an insane genius this is, this Satan, what a rabid dog of the heavens, what a sin crazy outlaw we’re dealing with here, that he can take war to the very gates of heaven, that he can enter the very circle of Jesus’ disciples and enter a man. And Satan entered into him, it said of Judas, that he can follow Christ into the wilderness and up into the tower and tempt the very Holy Son of God.

There’s an old saying of which I do not believe one word, it is, tell the truth and shame the devil. To shame anybody, they have to have a sense of shame. The devil has no sense of shame. The devil can’t be shamed. The devil has nothing in him that can respond to shame.

He’s a shameless, morally insane, rabid, sin crazy being that hates God, and for God’s sake hates everything that God loves. And he’s against you, and he’s against this church, and he’s against every church in Chicago, and he’s against every praying man and woman, and he’s against the conversion of your family, and he’s against the solidity and cohesiveness of your family. He wants to scatter every good home and destroy every good church.

I remember when Dr. Philpott was pastor of Moody Church. He was preaching in one of our conferences, and he read that passage where Satan’s seat is. And he said, where is Satan’s seat? In the saloons? No, he dismissed that. Where is Satan’s seat? In the gambling dives? No, he said. Where is Satan’s seat in Chicago? And then he shouted in that great voice of his, “Moody Church,” he said. And that wasn’t because he thought Moody Church wasn’t a good church. That was because the better you are, the more you have to fight the devil.

The more you hold true to the faith, the more you have to fight the devil. And it so happens that Moody Church has stood true to the faith through these years. Wherever you go liberal, wherever you don’t care, wherever Shakespeare takes the place of and Browning crowds out Paul, Satan’s busy somewhere else.

But wherever the word of God stands as true and wherever Christ occupies the center of the hope of that church, that’s Satan’s seat, that shameless, conscienceless dragon. And so he carried war to the gates of God. Satan is there permitted to accuse the brethren, accuse the brethren.

You know, the devil can only blackmail you when he’s got something on you. The devil is a blackmailer, and he’ll blackmail you if he can get something on you. He went before God and tried to blackmail Job. But Job happened to be decent enough, though he needed a little bit of trimming up and God gave it to him. He happened to be good enough so that the devil couldn’t do anything with him.

We never have to be afraid of the devil telling on us if the blood has covered our hearts and God’s forgiven our sin. The devil can’t even utter a forgiven sin. Sin that’s been forgiven, God won’t even let him get his mouth open. He can only accuse us by lying and God knows better. I’m not worried much about the devil. I’ve never been particularly devil-conscious preacher, really.

I’ve had preachers in this pulpit that made your flesh creep. We’ve had a few of them here, good brethren. But they were so conscious of the presence of the devil that they preached and preached so much about the devil that I got hives listening to them, you know, almost. You know, actually your flesh creeps after they’ve talked about the devil crawling in and out of your body and all that kind of stuff. I get, I get jeebies.

Now, I don’t believe that we need, I don’t think we children of God need to worry about the devil like that. He hates us, he hates us, he’s after us, but they overcame him by the blood of the Lamb and the word of their testimony. Just as the angel of death passed over Israel and passed over every house where there was blood, Satan stands back and growls, but he can’t come near the heart where the precious blood of Jesus. Let’s make an awful lot of the blood of the lamb.

We’re hearing a lot about Christ incarnate now in liberals. We’re hearing a lot about God being in Christ. We’re hearing a lot in learned religious circles about God coming into history. We’re hearing about God manifesting himself in time. All that sounds big and expansive and philosophical, but I still like to sing the dying thief rejoiced to see that fountain in his day and there may I though vile as he wash all my sins away. I still believe in the fountain, still believe in the blood.

Somebody took that song and tore it apart and said it’s bad song, it’s not a good song, it’s not literary song. There is a fountain filled with blood, said that’s terrible. But oh, how many people are up there in heaven now that once sang there is a fountain filled with blood drawn from Immanuel veins.

How many sang it under their voices when they long ago lost power to vocalize and couldn’t sing so they could be heard but sang it in their hearts as they went away to be with God. And how many will yet all around the world there’s a fountain filled with blood. They overcame him by the blood of the Lamb and the word of their testimony, and they loved not their lives under the death.

Those people that were left, who are these people that were left down here? Churches gone, who were these people? Well, I think either they’re people that are converted during that period or they’re people that didn’t go when the Lord came. Now that’ll shock some of you, but I don’t know. I don’t like this automatic idea that automatically everybody goes.

I wish that were so and I’d be happily glad if it was so. I’d be glad if it was true, as one celebrated evangelist said, that when the Lord comes there’ll be holes in the roofs of body houses and saloons where the children of God suddenly go zooming through. That isn’t the way I heard it, brother. Is it the way you heard it? I didn’t hear it like that. Ye have not so learned Christ is what I hear.

No, I don’t think God is going to go, I don’t think he’s going to send anybody combing through the honkytonks and bawdy houses looking for saints. I don’t believe the saints will be there, brethren. I don’t.

You say, what does that make you, an Armenian? No, it just shows I got some sense is all. It just shows I won’t allow a theory to lead me into gross nonsense. Children of God never did inhabit body houses and saloons and gambling dens and places of iniquity. Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor standeth in the way of sinners, nor sitteth in the seat of the scornful.

But the evangelist, and it’s not Billy Graham, now don’t think I’m mocking good old Billy. He didn’t say that he’d know better. This man did. And he said that there’ll be holes in the roofs where the angels of God went looking for the saints.

Well, all I can say is if God sent me after the saints, I’d go elsewhere, wouldn’t you? Wouldn’t you? The Lord said, Knighton, go look for the saints. Where’d you go? Saloon? Gambling houses? Would you? Neither would I. Oh, you know, one might wander in there by mistake.

We had a fellow here one time, he wanted some food. And so, some of the brethren gave him two dollars. He started out. We had a man there, he’s not with us now, he lives in Grand Rapids. Brother Valentine, he was one of the practical, down-to-earth, James kind of Christians, you know.

And he suspected that the fellow didn’t want food, he wanted liquor, so he followed him down. Sure enough, he went into the saloon, and Brother Valentine went in after him. And when he slapped his dollar bill down on the moist bar and said, I’ll have a whiskey, he said, that’s what you think. And he took the money away from the fellow and left him there.

And if the Lord had come just at that time, there might have been a hole in that saloon, because Brother Valentine was in there, you know. And the Salvation Army girl selling the war cry in there, you’re giving them away, she might go out of there. But in other words, saloons aren’t the habitation of the just.

They’re bawdy houses and they’re gambling dens. All else being equal, the children of God are to be found where good people are. You don’t look for sheep down alleys and in dumps. You look for sheep where the shepherd is, and he never leads his sheep into the alleys. He always leads them into the green pastures.

Well, Satan accuses, but Michael the angel archangel stands to fight him. And there was such a battle as never had been before and there never will be again.

I had a book, have a book, that I read years ago called “Fifteen Decisive Battles of History.” Great battles, the Battle of Saratoga, the Battle of Waterloo, the Battle of Marathon, the Battle of Hastings, the great battles that have been fought.

But this battle, nothing like it has ever been before, nothing like it will ever be again. The gray dragon was cast out, that old serpent called the devil, and Satan, which deceived the whole world, he was cast out into the earth and his angels were cast out with him.

And I heard a loud voice saying, in heaven now has come salvation and strength and kingdom, the kingdom of our God and the power of his Christ. For the accuser of our brethren is cast down, which accuses them before our God, day and night. Woe to the inhabitants of the earth. We imagine the things are just about as bad as they can get, don’t we? No.

Suppose electricity went off in your house and you have a deep freeze and a refrigerator. And suppose it went off in August with the temperatures in the nineties and stayed off for a week. Can you conceive of how your house would smell and what kind of house it would be in a matter of twenty-four to thirty-six hours? You couldn’t live in it. It takes refrigeration to keep corruption down.

And in this terrible world of ours, there are still restraining influences. There are still children of God. In every neighborhood there are children of God. Every church that stands like this on the corner tells the world as they pass by, there is another world than this. There is a God and a judgment day and a Savior.

Even though not all the Christians going to that church are good Christians, there is still enough salt left in the earth and still enough to change the figure, refrigeration left to keep the world from rotting.

But when Satan is cast down on the earth and the saints of God go away, what will be left but corruption? And there is no imagining how morally corrupt we can get when the restraining influences are taken away.

Jack Mabley writes for the Daily News, and I like to read what he has to say there on the third page of the Daily News. And he told the other day, I think it was he, it was in his column it appeared, of pornographic literature sold to eight-year-old boys. Pornographic literature. The vileness, the corruption, the putridity, the spongy, fetid mass of corruption that is the world.

When I listen to the McClellan committee and find out how many high authorities and how many big men in a community can go rotten, I suspect everybody. But I know not everybody is bad. I know that there are still some decent, good, honest people left in the world in spite of all the corruption. The church is still here. The body of Christ is still in the earth. There will be Antichrist when Satan is cast down.

Don’t ask me about Antichrist. I believe Antichrist will be a Jew. I don’t think he will be Mussolini, resurrected as some have said. I believe he will be born of a woman as Christ was born of a woman. I don’t believe it’s Khrushchev or any of the rest of these mafia gang. He knows better. Antichrist knows better than to come into the world like that. It’s God that sees him as a great red dragon. But he knows better than to come to the world, flaking his tail and snorting as a great red dragon. He knows better.

So, it comes a learned gentleman with religious words on his lips. He may become one of the most popular preachers of the day, but he’ll be Antichrist, nevertheless. And just as Mary bore the Christ, an incarnated God to be the Christ, so someone somewhere will bear an incarnate devil. And he will finally show himself to be what he is after he has brought all the world under his feet. Bloody persecution unto death begins, and the nation of Israel will have to take it.

Israel has always been the punching bag of the nation, always been the whipping boy that has caught the lash of the nation. She’s got to take it one time more, at least one time more. Well, this dire event can happen.

Now I’m going to read a passage of Scripture to you that I sometimes do like to read before a congregation. We’d like to get this all fixed out so we know we’re safe. But listen, I want to read this to you.

Take heed to yourselves, lest at any time your hearts be overcharged with surfeiting and drunkenness in the cares of this life. And so that day come upon you unawares, for as a snare shall it come on all of them that dwell on the face of the whole earth. Watch ye therefore and pray always that ye may be accounted worthy to escape all these things that shall come to pass and to stand before the Son of Man.

What is the sensible position for the Christian? The sensible position is to say, O Lord, my brethren tell me that all born-again Christians will go when thou dost return. And I want to believe it, and I hope it’s true, Lord. But O Lord, I want to be morally worthy to join that band.

So please make me holy. Please help me to be separated and clean. Please help me, Lord, though by some act of the grace of God in redemption it could be that even if I were stained and even if I were not ready, I’d go. They tell me so. Still, Lord, I’m not trusting in that kind of interpretation. I want to be prepared. Make me worthy to go, Lord, and help me and make me count me worthy to escape all these things that shall come to pass and to stand before the Son of Man.

Let’s have an illustration. Two brethren, two men, two Christians, members of the First Baptist Church of Kickapoo, Wisconsin, or Chicago, Illinois. They’re Christians, both of them. They love God. One of them is so convinced that there wouldn’t be any possibility of any Christian missing the rapture that he gets careless. He’s so convinced that all has to be done has already been taken care of. His insurance is paid up, and he’s all ready to go.

The other one says, Brother, I hope that’s right. I kind of sneakily believe maybe it is, but you know something, I am going to live every minute as if Christ were coming an hour from now. I am not going to rest on theories. I’m going to trust the blood of the Lamb and keep the word of my testimony bright. I’m going to sacrifice myself so I love not my life unto the death.

Who’s the wise Christian there? If it’s true that all the ransom goes soaring away, certainly the man who tried to live so as he was ready, he’ll go all right. But about the other one, if there’s any doubt, he would be the one on whom the doubt would lie.

So, my urgent suggestion is tonight that you watch always. Be not like the man who said, My Lord, delayeth his coming, but be ready at all times, at all times, be ready. By the blood of the Lamb, by the word of your testimony, by a surrendered life, by the trust in the book, then no matter what comes on the earth or when it comes, it will be all right with you. And the Lord will take you to his Father’s house with rejoicing. And you need not be afraid that you will be ashamed at His coming. Let us pray.

O Dear Lord, when we stand outside of ourselves and think as the world thinks, how foolish is a talk like this tonight. How different from politics and philosophy and psychology and sports and entertainment, labor and capital and industry, and the rest. Thou hast called us, O Lord, and enlightened us, called us to thyself and given us information.

And our language sounds strange and remote and unlike the world. Nothing like this is found in newspapers or magazines, for the world doesn’t know a thing about it. The world is going on its way, doing the best it can.

O Thou hast called a people for thine own possession, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, peculiar people, a cross-carrying people who love thy holy Son, who call thee Father, who believe the prophets and the apostles, who believe the book of Revelation, believe what John saw in the Spirit.

Oh, that we might be among them. Oh, that we might be counted as that blessed group that would not only be ready in that day, but are ready now and will be ready and continue to be ready and will labor to get others ready and struggle and fight and pray and give and push and carry on the work until the story has been told around the world and the globe is girdled with the gospel, at least one time, so that red and yellow and black and white around this whole world can know that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures and that he rose again according to the scriptures.

Help us now, Father, we pray. Now we’re going out into a week that promises to be hot and it’s going to be busy, noisy, there’ll be irritations, hostility and trouble, weakness, physical discomforts and pains. Oh, enable us to rejoice in it all, to be glad and to thank thee and to keep full of praise and to meet every trouble with praise.

Help us to keep praised up and prayed up. Help us to put behind us everything that would hinder us and lay aside every weight and the sin that does so easily beset us and run with patience, the race said before us. This we ask through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

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“Clouds of Concealment“

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Tozer Talks · Clouds of Concealment

Clouds of Concealment

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

March 3, 1957

Now you have been listening to me over these last weeks, and again we ask, what is the pastor advocating? What is this that he’s preaching? Well, I’m concerned that it be nothing else but Christ, because anything anybody offers you that is not just more of Christ is false. I am concerned that in doctrinal foundation it be the Scripture, and in its whole spiritual mood it be apostolic, and that it be in harmony with the best in the historic church, the best in devotional literature, the best in hymnody, and the best in biography. And yet, why does this preaching sound different? Why does it sound strange when compared with much so-called, and true, gospel preaching?

Well, I want to tell you this before I enter in really to the message for tonight, but I want to tell you that about a generation ago, textualism captured the gospel church. By the gospel church, I mean the fundamentalist church, the gospel church, those who believe in Christ as Savior and accept Him as such. And the scribes and the lawyers took over and set up a hierarchy in schools and Bible conferences and churches, and they all went over to it, and the rule became a rigid adherence to words.

Now, it so happens that I believe and have never believed anything else in my entire life, but in the plenary, that means full, verbal inspiration of the Scriptures as originally given. Now, you’ll be honest with me, and if you have reason to quote me, quote this, that I believe and have always believed as a responsible Christian teacher and believer in the plenary, verbal inspiration of the Scriptures as originally given.

But the problem was, and still is, that by school I don’t mean any particular school, I mean a school of thought. The verbal inspiration, the doctrine of verbal inspiration; rigor mortis set into it, and with the result that the religious imagination was stultified, the religious yearning was choked down, the religious aspirations slapped down, and the longing, aspiring wings of the children of God were clipped like a hen in a hen coop, and we were told to shut up and like what we had, that this was it.

Brethren, do you know what happened to this? The result of this thing, with the language of the New Testament persisting and the spirit of the New Testament grieved, do you know what happened? Well, I’ll tell you. There came about a revolt, a revolt against the scribes in two directions. The masses of evangelicals revolted without knowing they were revolting. They didn’t know it. It was the gasping of a fish in a bowl where there’s no oxygen.

The masses revolted into religious entertainment until the gospel churches are now camping on the doorstep of the theater, and then over against that and on the opposite side, some of the more intelligent fundamentalists and evangelicals revolted into evangelical rationalism, which is already busy making its peace with liberalism, and the result is that we just don’t hear what this that I’m speaking about.

It sounds strange to hear anyone preaching as I preach because on one side we have the masses saying, I’ve accepted Jesus, whoop-dee-doo, let’s go and have fun, and on the other side, serious reverent men thinking their way perilously near to the borders of liberalism. And the New Testament message, objectives, and methods have been allowed to lie dormant, and in the name of the lordship of Jesus, which is lordship in name only, we have introduced our own message, our own objectives, and then have thought out our own methods for achieving those objectives, which are in many cases not scriptural at all.

Now, my brethren, I want to ask you, is it heresy to yearn and pray and long after God? Is it heresy? Does it constitute a radical mind to yearn and pray and fight? Do you remember what I read the first night? The great prayer in the “Cloud of Unknowing,” God, I beseech thee so for to cleanse the intent of mine heart with the unspeakable gift of thy grace that I may perfectly love thee and worthily praise thee.

To long perfectly to love God and worthily to praise Him, and to mean more than words when you say it, mean if it costs you everything, is that heresy? Should they put a man in jail for it? Should he be ostracized for it? In the light of our hymnody, in the light of our devotional books back to Paul, in the light of the biography of the saints? No, I think not.

Now, I want to read to you just a brief little thing here from Nicephorus, from a book called the “Philokalia.” He starts out, he wants to help us Christians forward to know God, to do what “The Cloud” called being one with God, united with God. Now, I want you Bible Christians to ask yourself the question, could I go along with this?

Now, this Nicephorus Nicephorus was a Greek Christian. That is, he was over on the Greek side. He wasn’t a Protestant, and he wasn’t a Roman Catholic and he wasn’t a Martoma and he wasn’t a Coptic nor a Nestor. He belonged to over on the Greek side, but he was a saint. And he wrote a little book to help people to go on with God. And he said, you who desire to capture the wondrous divine illumination of our Savior, Jesus Christ. Do you believe in this, and who seek to feel the divine fire in your heart?

Now, here was a scholar and a saint and he wrote it into a book in the, I think, 16th century, which is a classic and is recognized as such. And he dared to use the word, who seek to feel the divine fire in your heart and strive to sense and experience the feeling of reconciliation with God. Who, in order to unearth the treasure buried in the field of your heart and to gain possession of it, have renounced everything worldly. Who desire the candles of your soul to burn brightly, even now, not in the future.

We have become so dispensationalistic-minded that we’ve pushed everything into the future, everything into the future. But this man says, you who desire the candles of your soul to burn brightly, even now. And Peter said, in this present world, and who for this purpose have renounced all this world, who wish by conscious experience, conscious experience, you’d think he was a modern psychologist, to know and to receive the kingdom of heaven existing within you. He said what I’m teaching all the time, that Christ dwells in the heart of every believer. Know ye not that Christ is in you except ye be reprobate. And if a man have not the Spirit of Christ, he’s none of his. And the riches of the minds lie potentially there.

But we have been forbidden to believe it or forbidden to say so. And we have been choked down and the oxygen cut off and our wings clipped and our longings chilled. And that’s why when I say sounds different and strange and people say what is this new doctrine, it’s no new doctrine at all.

Now my brother, I want to talk a little bit tonight about the cloud of concealment. Now Christ has made full atonement for us. Let’s start there. Christ has made full atonement. Christ has for sin atonement made, what a wonderful Savior.

Would you like to hear it said for you by somebody else that could say it better than the theologians? Little Lady Julian, here’s what she said. The precious amends or satisfaction our Lord hath made for man’s sin, turning all our blame into endless honor. Could it be said sweeter than that? The precious amends our Lord hath made for man’s sin, turning all our blame into endless honor. Paul said a little differently. He said where sin abounded, grace does much more abound, turning all our blame into endless honor.

Now God’s face is turned toward us. I want you to think like that tonight. Don’t let the devil cheat you. Don’t let doubt assail you. Don’t let anything I say or anybody has ever said cheat you from this glorious knowledge, that the face of God is turned toward you, and as a Christian the smiling face of God is turned toward you.

Why then do we not enjoy, now to use these words again, why then do we as Christians not capture the wondrous divine illumination of the Savior Jesus Christ? Why do we not feel the divine fire in our hearts? Why do we not strive to sense and experience, or why do we not sense and experience the feeling of reconciliation with God as well as the knowledge of it? And why do we not gain possession of it? Oh, I know they dismiss it by saying it, your position and your possession, but that can get so cold as dry ice.

Why is it that the candles of our soul do not burn more brightly even now? Why is it that we do not have the conscious experience and know and receive the Kingdom existing within us? Well, I’ll tell you why. Because there is between us and the smiling face of God a cloud of concealment.

Now my friends, there is never such a thing as a day when the sun doesn’t shine. In some of the cities, I think it’s Atlanta, Georgia, maybe I’m wrong, but one of the southern cities offers, a newspaper offers, that they will give all of that run, that day’s run to the newspaper free of charge if the sun doesn’t shine somewhere. Is it Atlanta? St. Petersburg? Well now let me tell you something, that the sun shines every day and there never has been a day from the hour God said, let the sun rule the day that the sun hasn’t shone. But there are dark days and misty days and cloudy days and days that get so dark you have to light the lights and days that get so dark that in the country the chickens go to roost. I’ve seen it.

Now there are dark days and yet the sun is shining just as brightly as on the brightest clearest day in June. Why then does it not shine on the earth? Because there is between the sun and the earth a cloud of concealment. The sun is all right, the sun is up there grinning broadly and just as bright and just as hot and just as radiant as ever. But he doesn’t get through to the earth because there is a cloud of concealment.

Now what is this cloud my brother? You know what it is from the standpoint of the weather but what is it as applied to Christians? Why? What’s the matter? Well it’s the cloud of concealment, a cloud that we allow to be over us as Christians.

And what is this cloud? Atonement has been made, there’s nothing to do for it’s all been done. Not a drop of blood needs to be shed, not a spear needs to enter a holy heart, not a tear nor a groan nor a drop of sweat, not a moment in agony. Death hath no more dominion over Him, it is done, it is finished, it is forever done.

And the face of God shines down upon us. And even upon Christians there’s that cloud, or above Christians there’s that cloud of concealment betwixt thee and thy God as the Brother says. Now what is that cloud? Well, it’s a cloud, it may be one thing, it may be many things.

There is the cloud of pride for instance. You are your father’s child and heaven is your home. And yet for a lifetime you may go without the wondrous divine illumination of the Savior Jesus Christ, without feeling the divine fire in your heart, or sensing or experience the feeling of reconciliation with God, and without the candles of your soul burning brightly, because you allow a cloud of pride to be over your head. And the devil says, well God hates you, God has turned His back; the devil lies. The back of God has never been turned to a child of God nor to a repentant sinner since the hour Jesus groaned and died and said, it is finished.

The face of God has turned our way. But we allow this cloud of pride and the cloud of stubbornness. There are some people that are just plain stubborn. They will not bend, they will not yield, neither to man or God or to anybody except the law and death, they will not. And so this cloud of stubbornness, God complained about Israel. He said your neck is brass and your forehead is hard, and He couldn’t get them to yield.

And then there is the cloud of self-will. Now self-will is a very religious thing, and it may become religious and get converted and enter right with you into the church when you join and with you with the chamber when you pray. Yet it’s self-will, and self-will, you’ll note, is good-natured only when it’s getting its own way. And it’s grouchy and ill-tempered when it is crossed. Now you think about that. Is your surrender to God sufficient so that you can be spiritual even when you’re cross?

And then there’s ambition. And you know there’s even religious ambitions. There are people that are religiously ambitious for something perhaps that isn’t in the will of God or that’s for self-aggrandizement. And the result is that it’s a cloud above them between them and their God.

Now there’s a little proverb, and in the Knox translation it reads like this. It rather amuses me because it’s so true and it is such a perfect picture of the human heart. He says, tripped by his own folly, a man eats his heart out, finding fault even with God. And you find Christians like that. Tripped by their own folly, they eat their heart out, finding fault even with God, having what God calls, a controversy with Me.

And then everything I claim for myself. Now this is the one thing I’ve been preaching I suppose that’s hard to grasp. That I’ve got to give up everything, that this pastorate that I have here, must go on the block, and I must be ready at any moment to give it up and let it ride away on any sermon I preach or any position I take. I dare not stick to it. My job as editor of the weekly, my position in the religious world, everything has to be on the block and ready to go.

If I own it, it is a cloud over my head and it becomes a cloud of obscurity that nothing will penetrate. And people try to pray through it, but you can’t pray through it, nothing can penetrate it. You try to fast through it. There are people that fast for days out of nothing but stubbornness. You know that. The history, I won’t go into politics, but over the world in the last 25 years, you remember that there were some who fasted and died for political reasons, just sheer downright stubbornness.

And there are those who try to fast their way through. You can’t do it, brother. The cloud of concealment, if it is something that you say is yours and you won’t give up, you think you do, but you don’t, it’ll put a veil over it. And if there’s any sun, it will not be very bright. It’ll be a cloud, and you can’t pray through it, this idea that if you pray long enough, everything will be all right.

Why, God got some people up off their knees and told them to quit. Two different instances, the Lord stopped prayer meetings. Did you know that? He said, it’s no use. There was the man Samuel, l and he was praying and praying. God came and put His hand over his mouth and said, Samuel, don’t pray anymore for Saul. He’s through. He said, don’t pray for him and shut him up.

And then there was another instance where Joshua was lying face down praying. We’d have written a tract about him. We’d have said, oh, what a saint. But God says, what’s the use of lying there on your stomach? I don’t honor a man for lying on his belly. Get up off your feet and deal with the situation in your crowd and then I’ll bless you and save all that lying around groaning.

So, remember, that this modern idea that if you pray long enough, everything will be okay. It’s not right, brother. The saint of God loves these long seasons of prayer and God gives an answer to prayer and prayer is the soul’s sincere desire and the breath of the saint and all that I believe, and I think practice in some measure. But the idea that I can hang on to things and then pray the cloud away while I’m hanging on to the cloud. No, no, you can’t do it. And that’s the trouble, so nothing will get through it.

And then there is fear. Fear is always a child of unbelief. No matter what you’re scared about, whether you’ve got cancer or whether your child’s likely to have polio or whether you’re likely to lose your job or whether Russia will send a guided missile and destroy Chicago, remember always that fear is a child of unbelief. And fear over your head is a cloud of obscurity and hides that smiling face from you. It doesn’t turn the face away for the blood of atonement keeps His face forever turned toward his people and toward repentant sinners.

And then there is self-love, self-love. We make a joke out of this, but we never should make a joke out of it, because self-love is a cloud of concealment, a cloud of obscurity. And even the Christian who has offered himself to Christ and has believed and is converted, that Christian can keep a cloud of concealment over him simply by loving himself. And to fall out of love with yourself is an accident. That is, I mean a hurt. It hurts you like falling off of something.

And then self-gratulation and self-admiration. These self-sins, they’re there and as long as they remain there, and then, the odd thing about it is that the scribes have excused these and proved that they should be there, and you can’t do anything about it. And yet we cry within us, oh, that the candles of my soul might burn brightly even now.

Oh, that I might know the divine illumination of my Savior Jesus Christ. And we groan with the groan that goes back to Paul in Philippians, it goes back to David in the Psalms, that we might come into a warm, personal, present, lasting fellowship with Jesus Christ that lifts us and irradiates our hearts. And yet we can’t because we admire ourselves and we’re not going to have anybody disturb us. And we congratulate ourselves or we love ourselves.

And then there’s money. Money these days gets between, betwixt thee and thy God, as the Brother [in Cloud of Unknowing] calls it, gets betwixt thee and thy God.

Some evangelist years ago in my hearing pointed out that you can take two dimes and shut out a landscape. You can take two dimes with you to the Great Smoky Mountains and go clear to the top knob of the Great Smokies and with two dimes shut out all the glorious, green, rolling, blue-capped vista of the Great Smokies. Just put them in front of your eyes and put them close enough. That’s all it takes. The mountains are still there smiling in the sun, but you don’t see them because there’s a dime in front of each eye. It doesn’t take much money.

We who don’t have much money are always taking snide remarks at the rich man. But brother, you can be rich and only have ten dollars, because if it is between you and your God, then that cloud is concealing God from you.

And then there’s people, just plain people. The Lord tells us that we shouldn’t be afraid of man with his breath in his nostrils. And yet there are people who are Christians, who have a cloud of fear above them, constantly a cloud of fear. They want to fit in, gear into society. And the sociologists tell us we must do this, that we must adjust to society. And the schools are busy instead of teaching the history and writing and reading and arithmetic and all the rest, they’re teaching the children to adjust so as not to be queer and to get along well. Well, if you’ve got that as your goal, you have a cloud over your heart, my Christian friend.

And then there are our friends. And then there’s the position we hold, whatever it may be. And then there’s loved ones. And this is the tenderest and perhaps the hardest. But that’s all got to go. You say, then what do I do with this? If this cloud is over my head as a cloud of concealment and my Father is smiling at me and I can’t see His face, what shall I do? Well, the old Brother suggests, and I borrow it and suggest to you as a beautiful illustration, he calls it, a cloud of forgetting. He said, put this cloud that’s above you under your feet as a cloud of forgetting.

And Paul said exactly the same thing, forgetting those things which are behind and reaching forth under those things which are before. You see, the things which were behind Paul were a cloud. And if they’d been in front of him, they’d have shut out God, but he put them behind him. His defeats, his mistakes, his blunders, his errors, his wrongs, the times he’d fallen on his face and the time the Lord had to rebuke him for his pride and all this, he put them behind him and under his feet as a cloud of forgetting.

And the old man of God says, put them under you and have them not betwixt thee and thy God. Right so put a cloud of forgetting beneath thee, betwixt thee and all the creatures that ever God made. We’ve got to get that cloud of forgetting under our feet. And of course, that’s the job of the Christian.

And that’s why I’m preaching like this. And some are understanding and are going to do something about it. Others are not. Others have come up to Kadesh Barnea once a week for years and have turned back into the wilderness and wonder why there’s sand in their shoes. It’s because you would not go on at Kadesh Barnea. Right so put a cloud of forgetting beneath thee. And all this that had been a cloud of concealment now becomes a cloud of forgetting.

Now the face of God I repeat is smiling still and not all the clouds I’ve mentioned and not all the clouds the devil can blow up there, and the devil can blow up a storm and put it between you or betwixt you and the face of your God experientially. But remember that God is waiting within the veil or to change the figure he’s waiting for you to move up, to move up.

I remember getting on a plane at LaGuardia Field in New York some years ago. It was about I would say three o’clock in the afternoon. And the smiling, relaxed, friendly pilot came out and made a little speech. He knew that old duffers like me would worry about because it was a raining miserable day like as we get here sometime, just plain miserable. And he said, now we are leaving in a moment. And he said the situation is this, friends, in 15 minutes we’ll be in the sunlight. In 15 minutes, we’ll be in the sunlight. And he says the weather reports show that it will be clear from here to Chicago, and sure enough it was.

You had experiences like that. And so we got into that plane almost feeling our way there through the smog and the mist. And in 15 minutes we’d put the cloud under our feet and the bright shining sun above. And as we rose even the cloud became white beneath us.

You who’ve flown a lot have had the experience of seeing that gray, great billows of whipped cream that are underneath you, white as whipped egg. And when you were underneath them and looked up they were a misty, miserable, smoggy thing that shut out the sun. But in 15 minutes you put them under your feet. And oh, brother, isn’t it nice to take off in the smoke and rain and fly all the way 900 miles in the sunshine.

Now that’s what I mean. You’re going to have to put this under your feet. You’re going to have to get busy about it and do something about this. And more than sit and take in some more, you’re going to have to work on yourself. And yet I wonder if you are? I wonder if I’m not contradicting myself.

For he says, he wills thou do but look on him and let him work. I wonder if it isn’t better more accurate to say that if you’ll consent to put the clouds under you, he’ll put the clouds under you.

What does a man do in an airplane? Now I, being of the nervous type, I help the pilot. I keep balancing the thing as we turn. Now really, I do. But what help am I giving to the pilot that great big, good-natured fellow sitting up there grinning. What does he care about a little fellow weighing 159 in the summer and a little less in the winter. What can I do to that great big four-engine monster. Not at all, but I help him the best I can.

But he gets you up there into the sunshine. Look on him and let him alone. That’s all.

But you’ve got to be willing that cloud get under your feet. I know a lot of people that’ll never go up. A lot of them. Oh, they have every excuse in the wide world but they’re just not going up. They’d rather stay right down here in the smog. And they do. The sun shines brightly and they think the sun isn’t shining when it is.

Now put it under you, my friend. Put it under you. What is it? Well, I’ve said money, people, friends, position, loved ones, fear, all that I claim and call my own, ambitions, pride, stubbornness, self-will, and anything else the Holy Ghost may point to in your life, only you know what it is. He is a jealous lover and he suffereth no rival. And whatever rival there is, is a cloud between thee and thy God.

Now, I don’t say that that you’re not joined to Him. I do not say that you are not read justified. I say that this we’ve talked about, this wondrous divine illumination, this ability perfectly to love Him and worthily to praise Him, that has been choked out and smitten down and taught out of us for a generation.

This, this we lack, and we lack it because we will not put under our feet the cloud of obscurity. We let it rise between us and our God. My brethren, if you will put it underneath you, why you will find that it hides all the past and all that has bothered you and that that shames you and worries you and grieves you. It’s down there and it’s out and it’s gone and there’s nothing but the clear sky above. But if you have put the cloud under you, then he wills thou do but look on him and let him alone.

Simpson wrote a song that nobody ever sings anymore for two or three reasons. One is the tune’s bad, the second is nobody experiences it much. It is, I take the hand of love divine, I count each precious promise mine, with this eternal counter sign, I take, he undertakes. I take thee, blessed God, I give myself to thee, and thou according to thy word dost undertake for me.

Christ doesn’t have to die again. No cross needs ever to be erected again. No value needs to be added to the atonement. The face of God smiles on His people, but the cloud’s hiding Him. Your cloud, my cloud. But you say that’s true of sinners, that’s true of backsliders, but that couldn’t be true of good gospel people. It is true of the masses of the people.

And because that cloud has been above them, and because they’ve been taught they can’t rise, they’ve rushed to get a little heartbeat from the theater, rushed to get a little bit of warmth, the feeling from hillbilly ballad singing, religious songs, and theatrics, and all the rest. I don’t blame them. They’ve been cheated, and the lawyers [textualists] have wronged them, as in the days of Jesus. Jesus walked among men in that day with His eyes bright and His vision keen, and He said to them, whatever they tell you, do because they’re theologically right, but don’t be like them. And they said, we’ll kill that man, and they did kill that Man. But He rose the third day and sent down the Holy Ghost into the world, and He’s mine and yours, our sweet possession. And don’t you let anybody tell you how much you can have of Him. Only God can tell you how much you can have of Him.

Don’t you let anybody take you aside and tell you now not to get excited, and not to get fanatical, that you’ve got all that there is. And brethren, don’t you let any of that happen to you. Just as sure as God lives, now hear me, just as sure as God lives, if we continue in the direction we’ve been moving in evangelical circles, gospel circles, that which is now fundamentalism will be liberalism in a short time.

We’ve got to have the Holy Ghost back, and we’ve got to have the face of God shining down, and the candles of our souls burning bright, and to sense and feel and know the wondrous divine illumination of Him who said, I’m the Light of the World.

Now does that make a fanatic out of you. Come on, let’s us little fanatics just go and be joyful in the Lord. If that’s fanaticism, what a sweet fanatic it makes out of a man. What a happy wonder it is to be a fanatic.

No, no, that’s not fanaticism. It’s fanaticism when you revolt against the Scriptures, imagine things, go do weird things, and misinterpret the Word of God, but you can’t show where one line of the Word of God has been misinterpreted by what I say. Not one line. It’s all here. The doctrines of the faith, the faith of our Father’s living still.

Well, what about it? I take, He undertakes. Now, if you put in, if you’re willing tonight to put that cloud of self and cloud of self-love and cloud of fear and cloud of stubbornness and cloud of pride and cloud of greed and cloud of ambition under your feet, then there’s nothing for you to do. Nothing.

For all has been done, nothing for you to do. You can’t climb to heaven on a rope ladder. There’s nothing for you to do. I take the hand of love divine. I claim each precious promise mine with this eternal countersign. I take, He undertakes. I take thee, blessed Lord, I give myself to thee, and thou according to thy word does undertake for me.

Ah, do you want Him to undertake for you? Some of you dear Christians have been walking around under a cloud for a long time. You can’t get above, you just can’t. Because you’ve tried to pray your way above it, you’ve tried to believe your way above it, but it doesn’t work that way. You can’t. You’ve got to put it under your feet and rise above it and put all these things betwixt thee and all the creatures God ever made. And look away to the sunlight. And then you relax for there’s nothing you can do.

What can a man do? He can’t fill himself with the Holy Ghost. He can’t cleanse his own heart. You can’t crucify yourself. You can’t. God has to do it. And He’ll do it. And He waits to do it. And He waits optimistic and friendly and, on your side, wanting to help you, willing to do it, anxious to do it, if we could use the word anxious as touching God.

But we sit back, and we’re discouraged and we’re blue. And we’ve been to so many altars and we’ve read so many books and we’re all confused. And still the sun shines and still the cloud hovers. And still, God’s poor people won’t crowd it under their feet. Into the sunshine in 15 minutes, said the boy. Into the sunshine in 15 minutes, says the man of God to you tonight, if you’ll put it all under your feet, dare to put it under your feet and look away to the Lord Jesus. Not trying to tell Him what to do nor how to do it, but look on Him and let Him work.

And over the next hours and days and weeks, you will move upward into a place of spiritual restfulness and power, such as you never knew before. And you’ll have a marvelous deliverance from bondage, a marvelous freedom. You’ll believe in the Scriptures. You’ll believe in the Word of God and its verbal inspiration, its full, plenary authority. You believe in it and yet out of it, there will come a fragrance and a radiance and illumination that you never dreamed of before.

Are there those here that can say, amen, that know what I’m talking about? Amen? You know it’s so. But it isn’t talked about very much. And so that’s why we’re where we are.

Now, what about you this evening, dear friend? What about you this evening? Now, I’m not and cannot do the work of the Spirit. And I do not want to intrude any human effort, however reverent, into the work of the Spirit. For it must be the Spirit’s work. But what could be better and nicer and more scriptural and more restful and logical than that a company of believers should pray together about things?

Well, don’t you think that’s all right? You think that, could there be any objection to that raised by anybody? If I thought anybody could raise a valid objection, I wouldn’t ask. But it seems to me the New Testament teaches the Lord’s people met and prayed together, doesn’t it? And they prayed for each other. And the strong ones prayed for the weak ones. And the ones that had fallen, the others prayed for them and helped them. And in one instance they met and prayed together and the place was shaken and they were all filled with the Holy Ghost.

That was in the Book, too. That’s in the Bible. It was until they ruled it away and said it couldn’t be for us. And the blessed Holy Dove was forced to fold his wings and be quiet while the saints that believed it in years gone by, they radiated in the joy of it. But we’ve been slapped down and said, now you shut up. We scribes will tell you what to believe about this. But our hearts tell us the scribes are wrong. And our longing souls tell us that the hymn writers and the devotional writers and the persons whose biographies we read, they were right.

Paul Rader, years ago, preached a sermon on,” Out of His Belly Shall Flow Rivers of Living Water.“ Two men took him aside afterwards and said, Mr. Rader, you’re all wrong. It was a good sermon, but you’re dispensationally incorrect. He sat and listened. And they said, we, we thought you’re, we know you’re a good preacher and you’re a good brother, but you’re wrong in your interpretation.

And they were eating. He said, he noticed one of them bow his head over his meal. Pretty soon he saw the tears come off the end of his nose. His shoulders, big shoulders, shook. He said, Brother Rader, we have the interpretation, but you have the rivers.

You see, stick to your interpretation, brother. But at any cost, some people want God and they want all God wants them to have in this generation, now, right here on this earth. What about it, friends?

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“Looking Forward in Christ“

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Tozer Talks · Looking Forward in Christ

Looking Forward in Christ

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

December 28, 1958

For I will pour water upon him that is thirsty, and floods upon the dry ground. I will pour my Spirit upon thy seed, and my blessing upon thine offspring. And they shall spring up as among the grass, as willows by the watercourses. One shall say, I am the Lord’s, and another shall call himself by the name of Jacob, and another shall subscribe with his hand unto the Lord and surname himself by the name of Israel. Thus saith the Lord, the King of Israel, and his Redeemer, the Lord of hosts. I am the first, I am the last, and beside me there is no God.

Thus saith the Lord to His anointed, to Cyrus, whose right hand I have holden, to subdue nations before him. And I will loose the loins of kings to open before him the two-leaved gates, and the gates shall not be shut. And I will go before thee and make the crooked places straight, and I will break in pieces the gates of brass and cut and sunder the bars of iron. And I will give thee the treasures of darkness, and hidden riches of secret places. Thou mayest know that I, the Lord, which call thee by thy name, am the God of Israel. For Jacob my servant’s sake, and Israel mine elect, I have even called thee by thy name.

I have surnamed thee, though thou hast not known me. I am the Lord, and there is none else. There is no God beside Me. I girded thee, though thou hast not known me, that they may know from the rising of the sun, and from the west, that there is none beside me. I am the Lord, and there is none else. I form the light and create darkness. I make peace and create evil. I, the Lord, do all these things. Drop down, ye heavens, from above, and let the skies pour down righteousness. Let the earth open, and let them bring forth salvation, and let righteousness spring up together. I, the Lord, have created it. Part of Isaiah 44 and 45. Let us pray.

Our Father, we thank Thee by the wonder of the Spirit in working. Thou dost take these words drawn from an old, old book, written to a people that we are separated from by origin and by every human thing. And yet by Thy Spirit they are applied to us as though they were written for us and sent down just this morning.

We bless thee for these encouraging, hope-filled words. We thank Thee not only that Thou hast made them applicable to Israel and fulfilled them in Israel and will yet fulfill them, but we thank Thee for the thousands and multiplied thousands who have slept off, resting their heads upon such comforting words, who have gone into battle, who have gone to far parts of the earth, who have faced impossible situations trusting in these words. And Thou dost never, never let them down, but Thou dost bless them and keep them.

O Father, we pray Thee, Jesus Christ our Lord, that Thou wilt help us now, since our fathers trusted Thee and were not forsaken. Grant that we may trust Thee, and we know we shall not be forsaken either.

And we pray Thee, O God, Thou wilt be with our people scattered round over the earth, be with the nations which we are apart, down on our human side as our President, and we pray Thee for the Congress soon to convene again.

We pray thee, O Lord God, for those who labor in these high places, simply men, poor men, men with breath in their nostrils, and, O we ask Thee, Father, thou wilt make them able for their jobs. And we pray Thee for Thy work round the world in the cause of missions, wherever there are men and women preaching the gospel.

We pray Thou wilt bless every radio program, Thou wilt bless every effort of men and women to get a language, to learn it, to preach in it, and to win people and teach them and instruct them in the way they should go and baptize them and make them into little groups that form churches.

Help Thou, we pray Thee, our God, this day. Give us a cheerful outlook on life, and let us expect that we shall see a performance of all things promised us. Bless the sick and the bereaved and the troubled and the distressed. We ask it in the name of Jesus Christ, our Lord, amen.

In the book of Hebrews, the twelfth chapter, beginning with verse 22, But ye are come unto Mount Zion, unto the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to an innumerable company of angels, to the general assembly and church of the firstborn, which are written in heaven, and to God the judge of all, and to the spirits of just men made perfect, and to Jesus the mediator of the new covenant, and to the blood of sprinkling that speaketh better things than that of Abel.

And then a passage in Acts 14, verses 21 and 22. And when they had preached the gospel to that city, that is, Derbe, and had taught many, they returned again to Lystra, and to Iconium, and Antioch, confirming the souls of the disciples, and exhorting them to continue in the faith, and that we must, through much tribulation, enter into the kingdom of God.

Now, this being the last Sunday of a very eventful year, and being a kind of springboard over into a new year that will, for our church, be a momentous year, and for the whole world, I want to summarize, and sort of add up, some of the things that I find in the Book, and tell you what it’s all about, and why we’ve got to go on.

In the book of Hebrews, I read to you that we are come unto. And the real work of any minister of the gospel is to present Christ in such a way that people gather unto Him. He says that wherever there are those gathered unto Him, in His name there am I in the midst of them.

Now, when we meet His conditions, and they’re not hard, really, they’re not hard. When we meet His conditions, we are a church. I wish that I had, in the very earliest time of my Christian life, been taught of the wonder of the Church. I had to learn it by myself. Not even in the Christian and Missionary Alliance is the emphasis placed, where it belongs, on the assembly of the saints, the gathering of the people unto Christ. We believe it, of course, everywhere, but the emphasis doesn’t fall there as much as I feel that it should. But when we meet His conditions, we have His unseen presence.

Now, this I want to say again, this is a summary, and I’ll probably say many things I’ve said before, but I want to repeat that we gather unto Him, and when we gather unto Him, we have that unseen Presence. Now, this to me is more important than anything that possibly could be offered to me, that we are met where Jesus sheds the oil of gladness on our heads.

And the conditions are unto me, not unto a favorite preacher. It is too bad that churches follow preachers. This I say is too bad, but it’s true in a measure, I suppose everywhere. But we do not please our Lord when we gather to a man, no matter how good a man he may be. We do not please our Lord when we gather unto a name, no matter how great the name may be, except it be that Name which is above every name. And He says that we are to gather in My name, and that means not in the name of any denomination.

We are met here this morning not in the name of a denomination. Or if any have come in the name of a denomination, then I would kindly ask you to rethink this and see whether you are serving God rightly. For we are not met in the name of a denomination, neither are we met in the name of a cause.

That is why I sometimes look rather with a dull interest upon those gatherings, those bristling, scintillating gatherings that are met unto a cause, met to promote a cause. No, an assembly of Christians never meets to a cause. They meet in the name of a Person, and they gather in Christ’s name, not in the name of a cause.

Now, there are many causes, many excellent causes, the cause of foreign missions, the cause of world evangelism, the cause of jail work, or many, many, many causes that are being promoted by the people of God, and properly so. But if we meet in the name of our cause, it won’t be very long until the cause becomes the center of attraction and Christ fades into the background. And that is always bad. Christ must be first and let him tell us about the cause.

We are met to worship. We are met to worship, to worship the Triune God. And then as we worship the Triune God, He’ll whisper the cause to us. He’ll whisper to us what He wants us to do.

And then we’re not met in the name of any peculiar doctrine. We are Protestants, of course, and we stand for all the truth, the doctrines of the truth, but we’re not met in the name of a doctrine. We are gathered unto Him today. And we are gathered sort of as the lame were gathered there at the troubled pool in the fifth chapter of John. You remember why they came there to that pool? Because an angel went down once a year and troubled the waters, and whoever was in first, he got healed, according to the story we have here.

And, oh, I suppose that maybe there were times during the year when there weren’t so many there. But when it came around about the time of the troubling of the waters, or when they hoped the waters would be troubled, then they gathered and lined up as they do in front of a ballpark or somewhere else, and waited long in turn. And Jesus Christ, our Lord, came, and he became to them the Healing Pool. He has been to many thousands the Healing Pool. Do you know, my friends, that if your heart is all right, you can stand almost anything else.

If your heart is all right and you’re restful inside and you’re relaxed inside your spirit, in your heart, and everything is all right between you and God, you can stand just about anything. There’s almost nothing that will get you down if you’re restful inside your spirit, if your heart is warm.

Any of you who may be having troubles of any sort, financial troubles or home troubles or any kind of troubles, I recommend that you take a few hours off. You can do it. You say, but I haven’t the time. Certainly, you have the time. You could fall down and break a hip, and then you’d have time. Take days, weeks off. You could get hit with a car and you’d have time. You could have a heart attack, and you’d take time. You can have time, all right. Take some time off and go before God and do this.

I recommend you do this. Do it before the new year comes in. I recommend that you go and write down your faults and flaws and sins on a piece of paper and lay them before the Lord. And then turn to the Scriptures that tell you that if you confess your sin, you’ll be forgiven, and God will cleanse from all unrighteousness. And get your soul shriven. Get it bathed completely. Get it washed. Get it forgiven. Get it so that you’re not troubled.

If your conscience isn’t bothering you, but God seems close and everything’s all right, it’ll be a healing pool to you, my friend. And even if you are troubled about the matter of physical healing and you do have difficulties, physical difficulties, you’ll find you can bear up under a physical difficulty with great equanimity if you have a restful heart. But the troubled heart, who can bear?

And then we’re gathered today unto Jesus Christ as the Jews gathered to Joseph. You’ll remember when Joseph went down into Egypt that he was the sort of the key to the whole thing. And when he went down there, things started going bad for the folks back home. Then came troubles and then the hour when there was a famine in the land and they went down to Egypt and there they found Joseph and they had to keep going back to Joseph. And finally, they went back and gathered around him and he stood for them before the great land of Egypt and before Pharaoh and he got them a place and got them established and got public favor on them. It was either Joseph or starvation.

So, we gather to Jesus Christ. Not one of two possibilities, nor one of three possibilities, or one of ten, but one of one. It is either Jesus Christ or starvation. And so we gather today to Jesus. And I wish we could keep that in mind. And I wish that sense would suddenly come over us that we are gathered unto him, unto Mount Zion, unto the city of the living God, unto the innumerable company. Not we are going to be gathered, but we are gathered unto, it says. In the present tense, we are now gathered unto. We’re gathered unto that which, though invisible, is completely real and trustworthy.

And then we’re gathered unto Jesus as disciples gathered to a school, as students to a college. We’re learners from Jesus. I often think of that famous saying of the great educator Mark Hopkins. They said, if you put a boy on one end of a log and Mark Hopkins on another, you had a college. Just let Mark Hopkins sit there and talk to a boy on a log and you had a college. And so we learn about the things we are to be taught by our Lord.

Well, Jesus Christ, of course, is the whole faculty. He’s the whole teaching staff. By the Holy Ghost he reveals truth to us. And we’re thus disciples gathered unto Jesus, nobody knowing it all and nobody being the final word.

Occasionally somebody will write me. I have a letter now that I have to answer, saying, I’d like to know about thus and thus.  Whatever you say, we’ll accept. Whatever you say, we’ll believe. Now I don’t want any reputation like that. I don’t think it’s very widespread, but a few people foolishly believe that if I say it, that’s it. I don’t like that at all, because I could be wrong.

I remember once hearing Dr. L. H. Zimmer, that great German preacher who established that great church that’s still going on, the largest church in the Alliance with a missionary offering of nearly $100,000 a year. Why, I heard him stand up in the New York board meeting with President Schuman there and the vice president, I think I was vice president at the time, and the others gathered around there, the leaders in the Alliance, and some question came up, and they said, well, Dr. Simpson believed this way, and somebody read a passage from Dr. Simpson, and that great preacher got up, put his hands on the table in front of him and said, brethren, Dr. Simpson could be wrong.

And I’ve enjoyed that. I’ve enjoyed remembering it, that here was a man, though a loyal to his society and a loyal to his fellowship, yet he was not going to take the word of a man. Any word I give you might easily be temperament.

My opinions could rise out of temperament, out of a background you know nothing about, out of just sheer ignorance.

I remember when Dr. Samuel Johnson, the great lexicographer, made the first English dictionary. He defined the word hock, and he said the horse’s elbow. And gathering afterward, a literary gathering, some woman who wasn’t too delicate said to him, Dr. Johnson, why did you define hock as a horse’s elbow? And she expected, of course, a very learned defense of his position. He stopped eating long enough to look her full in the face and said, ignorance, madam, sheer ignorance, and went on eating. Even though he was perhaps the most learned man in England, or one of the most learned men that England ever knew, he still was willing to admit, I did that because I was just plain ignorant. And it’s entirely possible for a man with all the best intentions in the world to say things that are not so.

But Jesus Christ is the teacher, and we come unto Him and the anointing which you receive of Him abided in you, and you need not depend upon your teacher altogether. You can use him, and he’ll help you, but don’t lean on him. For that same Anointing teaches you all things, says John.

So, we gather unto Jesus because we’re so tragically ignorant and so filled with truth that isn’t the truth at all, but something else that we need to get rid of.

And then we’re a spirit-drawn company also. You know, I was meditating over this and thinking of what draws people.

I have a friend, I don’t know why I could call him a friend, he’s a very jolly fellow and very friendly to me and to Mr. McAfee when we go down for tickets. He is always friendly, and he’s a barn dance fan. And he’s a nice, kind, middle-aged man, but he just loves barn dances, square dances, and that’s all he wants to talk about. And sometimes I tease him a little and say, how are you coming? Oh, wonderful, wonderful. He even invited me to join, but I don’t think I want to at my age. But when they gather together, they gather unto barn dancing.

I suppose it’s harmless enough, I don’t know. I never did and don’t intend to start it. I don’t recommend it. But they gather for that. Others gather for literary reasons. Some gather to hear concerts, and that’s a legitimate thing. Some gather to hear political speeches, that’s a legitimate thing. Some gather to hear scientific papers read, and that’s a legitimate thing.

Well, there are many reasons why people gather together, but a church gathers for only one reason. They are a Spirit-drawn company gathered unto Jesus Christ the Lord. They’re gathered to Him, and that’s their reason for gathering. And there isn’t any other reason, or if there are other reasons, there are secondary and tertiary and on down the line. They are not primary. Spirit draws us together, and we are gathered as a delegation. We are gathered as a delegation unto that, making up that company.

I don’t know whether I overdo this or not, but I think that this is one of the most delightful passages in the entire Scripture. We are come, we are come unto Mount Zion, of course that’s a spiritual Mount Zion, unto the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, to an innumerable company of angels.

God, why can’t I see the angels? Why are we so blind? Why are we so given up to mechanical things and material things? Why do we see walls and chairs and seats and pulpits and pianos? Why don’t we know that we are gathered unto an innumerable company of angels and to the General Assembly and Church of the Firstborn, which are written in heaven, and to God the judge of all, and to the spirits of just men made perfect, and to Jesus the mediator of the new covenant, and to the blood of sprinkling that speaketh better things than that of Abel. And there we are gathered unto all these, these are thy riches, O Israel, and these make you rich, and you need very little else.

Well, you know when Moses blew the trumpet, all Israel gathered together, whatever they were doing, women busy in their tents with their housework, taking care of the baby, and men busy doing whatever the men were doing, and the children busy playing.

But when the high note of the silver trumpet sounded, all Israel gathered unto Moses. And then the trumpet sounded again, and the clouds started, and away they went through the wilderness on their way to the promised land. Then they were on the way, and that comes to my second text, where they met these men of God, and they exhorted and confirmed the souls of the disciples, and exhorted them to continue in the faith, and that we must through much tribulation come into the kingdom of God.

Now we are coming up to the end of the year, and some of us have lost loved ones from our home this year. Some of us have had loved ones leave and go to far parts of the world, and we have all lost good Christian friends who have moved away to many parts of this country and have gone from us. There have been distress and trouble, and many of us have suffered physically this year.

There have been a lot of troubles, but I want to exhort you to go on this morning. I want to exhort you. I don’t want to teach the Bible to you because you know your Bible, but I want to base my exhortation upon what you already know about the Bible and teach you that you ought to go on.

Why? Why? If I had to answer the devil, I wouldn’t honor him by talking to him. I wouldn’t. If he were to come, I wouldn’t answer him. I would not reply. But if I had to answer him or had to answer anybody, let’s settle for communists. Let’s say that some communist would come to me and say, now you are entering into a new year. You’ve been a Christian during 1958, and you’ve had a lot of troubles and all the rest. What’s the idea of your going on?

You know what I could say to that man? I could say to him, oh, my brother, I’m a weak man and I may backslide before Groundhog’s Day and have to be prayed back again, I don’t know, because let him that standeth take heed lest he fall, and I don’t know, I’m not boasting. Peter boasted and then he denied his Lord before nine o’clock the next morning. So, I’m not boasting and saying what I’m going to do, but I’m going to give him reasons for hoping that I’ll be doing, what I think I’ll be doing, and that is following on in the way.

Well, Earth’s greatest figure leads on out of there. Never forget that my friend. We have great figures, great men, you know, and they come up and go down and come up and go down, but He came up and never went down and never went into eclipse. He’s the star that never sets and never has and never will, and He’s the bright morning star and He shines out there and He leads on.

Some will be following Bob Kennedy this year or next and some will be following Paul Douglas and some will be following somebody else. And those men, I suppose, mean well and are as good as the average rank and file of men. I’m not speaking against them at all. I only say that I’m not following any man. I’ve not picked any man I want to follow.

I thank God for Wesley, I thank God for Henry Suso and John Tauler and Augustine, and I thank God for the great hymn writers and the good men who have written good helpful books. Of course, I’m grateful for all of them, but I’m not following any of them, because the world’s greatest Figure stands there supreme above them all, Jesus Christ, the Son of God.

They’ve had Him in a manger over the last few days, the last ten days. He’s been shrunk back to a babe again and they’ve been carrying Him around in plastic, and He’s been a babe in the manger. No, no, that babe hasn’t been in that manger for nearly two thousand years, my friends. And though we celebrate the birthday, what we think is the birthday, though nobody knows, remember that that Babe hasn’t been in that manger for two thousand years.

Jesus Christ, our Lord, is not a babe anymore. He is the man Christ Jesus, having gone through death and risen and now living at the right hand of the Majesty in the heavens. He certainly is the Shining Star. He’s the greatest of all Adam’s sons, because He’s also the Son of God.

So, I couldn’t follow anybody else. I don’t know anybody else who could I follow. Could I follow Socrates. Socrates is dead and he never rose from the dead. Should I follow Joseph Smith? Joseph Smith is dead too. Could I follow Mary Baker Eddy? She died. They expected her to rise, but she disappointed them. She’s still dead, and the way things are, I don’t ever want to see her or have her get up.

But Jesus Christ rose and lives, and He has the appeal and the magnetic attraction that no other one does in all the wide world. So, I could reply, well, I’m going to follow anybody, right or wrong, I’m going to pick the greatest of them all, whose name is Jesus. So, the best I know, I’m going to be a follower of Jesus Christ the Lord.

Now, I’ll tell you another thing. Have you ever stopped to think about it? You Christians have invested an awful lot now. You’ve invested so much now. Think of you older Christians, what you’ve invested. Think of what some of you could have had if you hadn’t invested so much in the kingdom of God. Think about it now, some of you.

Look back over your lives and think how much you’ve given to the Lord’s work. Think of the tens of thousands of dollars and running into the perhaps hundreds that some of you have given to the work of the Lord. Think if you had that now, what a split-level home you could have with a picture window, and what all you could have, and how you could go to Bermuda. And up into Canada when it gets hot.

But you invested, you invested in this Kingdom. You know, there’s such a thing as putting so much in that you’d be a double-barreled fool if you gave the whole thing up. You’ve just invested so much you can’t afford to go back. You can’t afford to say, well, I’m not going to work so hard at the things of God this year because I just feel that I deserve a little vacation from it all. No, no, no.

You don’t deserve any vacation because you’ve laid up your riches in heaven, and there they lie, and there they are, and they’re there for you. And so therefore let no man take thy crown, and let no man take away thy riches. I’ve put so much in and have so much there that there’s no place else to go.

Peter said, Lord, to whom shall we go? Can you think of anybody? Can you think of anybody? I can’t think of anybody that I’d want to follow because I’ve put so much in the following of Christ that my riches all lie there anyway. Would you want to follow the latest scientific venture? I just learned a horrible thing this week, this last week, a horrible thing. I think it’s one of the most awful things.

I said last week that if anybody went to the moon that I didn’t want to go. But I don’t know, but I may change my mind about that now. Because you know what I have learned this last week? I have learned that the Ford Motor Company and the Coca-Cola Company have for the last couple of years foreseen the talking satellite, foreseen it.

Only a few days ago President Eisenhower was saying peace on earth, goodwill to men from a hunk of metal flying around up in the air, that satellite. But you know that those two companies, the advertising departments of those companies had foreseen this two years ago and have been quietly working to put their advertising in a satellite and send it around the world, changing the language with the longitude or wherever it is. If it’s going over Holland it’ll be saying drink Coca-Cola in Dutch and when it gets down to France it’ll be saying drink Coca-Cola in French and when it gets into Africa it’ll be saying drink Coca, I don’t know, I think the moon might be a place of refuge, a place to hide in an hour like this.

How much longer is God Almighty going to let the peddlers take over His world? God made a garden eastward in Eden and he put flowers and trees and beauty there and put men there to relax and rest under the shady bowers.

But we’ve gone mad in our selling. And over the radio this last week when you’d be listening to a beautiful Christmas carol, the next would be, and so the thus and thus beer company sends you their finest holiday greetings. And then they would break into an anthem telling about Burpo Beer, the finest beer on the market. I wonder how much longer God Almighty is going to allow this thing to go on. I don’t know, brother, I don’t know.

But I do know this, that you and I are going to see some tribulations ahead, we’re going to see some hard times. We’ve spent a lot of time, some of us have, we’ve had so much money and so many fine things and so many gadgets and we’ve pushed so many plastic buttons and had so many little machines hum into our workforce. We haven’t known in this country what it is to endure anything.

And when we got so we had a few people out of work, we sighed a sigh like the Israelites in bondage and called it a recession. And yet everybody had everything. Brethren, we’ve got some troubles out there ahead and how are you going to go into them? You’ve got to go into them one way or another.

And I recommend you go into them following the Lamb, whithersoever He goeth, because you can’t even think of anything else now, it’s too late. You’ve been a Christian so long, some of you, that even if you’ve only been a Christian twenty minutes, you’re a child of God and your name’s written in the Lamb’s Book of Life and God holds you in His hand and no man can pluck you out of His hand.

Well, another thing, some have loved faces looking down. I’m a very cautious man and I speak on these tender things only very rarely. Some have faces looking down and they expect you, you’re discouraged and want to quit and say, ah, I’m giving the whole business up.

I tell you that there are faces looking down, they say that it used to be among the sheep, an old shepherd when he wanted to get his flock across a river, he’d carry the lambs over and then the old sheep would swim. They’d swim across because the lambs were already over there.

A lot of people, any of you that have been a long time around our church ever sat down and counted up how many have gone from us these last times? Most recent one was Helen Asplund. They’ve gone, they’ve gone, they’re not going down the valley one by one with their faces toward the setting of the sun. Whoever wrote that ought to have his liver looked into because he was sick. We’re not going down the valley one by one, we’re going up the mountain toward the sunrise, one after the other.

Am I going to live long enough to bury a whole generation? I’ve almost done it, a whole generation of God’s dear Saints, and I’ve laid them away all around this whole area. I’ve planted seeds in the ground by the grace of God and sent earth to earth over I don’t know how many scores. Their prayers aren’t dead. He catches all our prayers in his bottle and all our tears, and their prayers haven’t become ineffective because they’re gone. They’re still effective, yonder, and I know they’re praying for me.

Godliness pays big dividends, my friends, and no matter what the future may hold, what it may be there next year, godliness pays big dividends. It’s always right to be right, and it’s always best to be on God’s side and to take God’s side and to live right.

Some of you could live a smoother, easier life if you weren’t so faithful, I’ll tell you that. The devil’s told you that, so it’s nothing new to you. You could get along a lot easier if you didn’t give so generously and get up and go to church when you felt like sleeping.

You didn’t get out and do God’s service when you feel like sitting in front of the TV. You could get along a lot easier, put on a little more weight, feel a little more comfortable or uncomfortable. But I’ll tell you, godliness still pays, brothers and sisters, it still pays to follow God. It still pays to be on the good side.

I’ve had funerals of people that I knew hadn’t been very big successes. That is, you know, there hadn’t been great successes as the world or even as the church counts success. But as I thought over their lives, I remembered one thing. If they knew what was right, you could be sure they were always over on that side. God takes that into account. A man knows what’s right, and he’s always over on that side; he’s found over there, and it pays, pays.

Well, another thing is, the best company on earth is in the church, and I’m going to stick to it myself. I’ll have to be chased out of the church, or out of the church, blacklisted and forbidden to enter any Christian assembly, otherwise, you’re going to find me in the house of God on the Lord’s Day, and sometimes in between. Because everything else being said, the best company in the world is the company that meets unto Jesus.

You say, but I happen to know there are some hypocrites there. Yes, so do I, so do I. So did Jesus. One of you shall betray me, said Jesus. And each one said, is it I, is it I, is it I? Even Judas said, is it I? Sure, Jesus had His hypocrites. The first church had their Ananias and Sapphira.

Paul had his Demas, the young man that he leaned on. Here was this old balding apostle, wearing himself to a shred, traveling around up all hours of the night, out in deep, driven out of cities, chased and whipped and beaten and thrown into jail. And he got a hold of a young fellow named Demas. And Demas was all full of fire, and Paul said to God, O God, maybe, this is my boy. And so, he leaned on Demas. And just when Paul got in a tight place, Demas remembered the old crowd and went back. Paul said, Demas has forsaken me, having loved this present world. I know that there’s a Demas, he’ll be around, I know it.

I get literature, I could show it to you now, if the janitor hasn’t carried it out and burnt it. I can show you literature that comes, Christian literature that comes from Communism. Christian Communism, Communist Christianity, if there’s such an unholy thing, praising the freedom they have in Czechoslovakia or Russia or someplace else, praising the Communists for their religious freedom. I know that, and I know that there’s a lot wrong with the Church.

But brother, give me five hundred people who regularly gather unto Jesus, and then show me five hundred that don’t, and put them side by side and take your choice. I know that side I’ll be on, if God will bless me and help me, and the people put up with me. I know whose side I’ll be on this year. I say, a man is weak and it’s easy to fall, not fall from grace, but fall in grace. God will keep you.

I’m talking about this miserable business of getting cold or lukewarm. They’ll put up with me, the best company in the world, not this church necessarily, but the church, God’s children, wherever they’re from.

Go into any town, any town, get up in an airplane, say to the pilot, what’s that town down there? And he says, that’s Pittsburgh, all right, land. He lands. Go and hunt the best people, where’ll you go, nightclubs? No, where’ll you go, bowling alleys, pool rooms, saloons? No. If you’re looking for the best people, hunt up a gospel church. They may be a little narrow-minded, may be a little narrow-minded, I don’t say they weren’t narrow-minded Christians, but I do say, nevertheless, they’re the best in the city. And if they’ll put up with me, I want to put up with them.

Well, time is going to be short anyhow. It doesn’t seem very long since we ushered in 1958, now 1958’s a tattered relic, very little left, just a shred or two, then it’s gone, then we enter 1959. I don’t know how many of these years we’re going to have yet, before our Savior comes.

Time is short at any rate, Christ will return, or death will come, but in patience possess ye your souls, for there is a crown at the end of the way. Take heed that no man follows, no man takes thy crown but follow the Lord and trust Him and put your hand in His and He’ll lead you through.

The Son of God goes forth to war, the kingly crown to gain, his blood-red banner streams afar, who follows in his train. Who best can bear his cup of grief, triumphant over pain, God remembers the rest of it, who patient bears his cross, he follows in his train.

So, let’s follow in the train of the Savior this year, let’s expect trouble, let’s expect trouble. Don’t be like the newly commissioned second lieutenant that was thrown suddenly up to the battlefront. He let out a yell and started to run and said, they’re shooting at me. The tough old sergeant said, well, what are you up there for?

So, I say to you, they’ll be shooting at you this year, but what are you up there for anyhow? Of course we’ll be shot at. Some of us will have bullet holes in our ears. Before the year is over, if the Lord lays a hand on us and heals us, if we keep our hearts right and keep right inside, we can endure an awful lot of pressure from the outside. When you’re not right on the inside, you’ll collapse. When you’re right inside, no pressure can collapse you, but when you’re not right inside, you collapse like an eggshell.

So keep right inside, walk with God, make the Book, make the Book, I’ve decided that by the grace of God, I’m going to read the Book more and other things less. Study the Book, learn it, memorize passages. I’m memorizing the Book of Revelation, part of it at any rate. Let’s memorize, let’s study, let’s live by it and above all things, let’s obey and be prayerful, and God will lead us through. He will make the darkness light before us. He will make the crooked straight before us, and all our battles He will fight before us, and the high place He’ll bring down. Amen.

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“The Birth of the Infant Lord“

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Tozer Talks · The Birth of the Infant Lord

The Birth of the Infant Lord

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

December 23, 1956

We have been hearing, I suppose, very much, and hearing quoted and read and printed, that second chapter of Matthew which we read together earlier in the service, and I shall not read it again. But I do want to talk from it this Sunday.

Now, the second of Matthew gives us the story of the birth of the infant Lord. This story is the wonder story of all lands and all ages, and as told by Luke, it is said to be, and I believe is, the most beautiful story in human language. And as told by Matthew, it is beautiful but terrible as well.

For there are three unexpressed facts that explain the chapter, facts that are not here, but that explain it. They are the setting for the chapter, they are that which go before and goes after, and makes it intelligible to intelligent minds. There are these three things, the total moral and spiritual disaster which had engulfed the human race.

Now, we cannot think of the coming of our Savior to the world apart from this. As well, think of a rescue ship going out to rescue those who had not been shipwrecked, as well send a doctor to a place where there had been no accident and no epidemic. This was a rescue. This is the story of a rescue, not a rescue team, but one who came alone to rescue mankind.

And thus fulfilled, and that’s the second unexpressed fact here, thus fulfilled God’s ancient purpose in sovereign grace, the sending of a Rescuer, a Savior is the word we use, and it means the same thing, to the world to redeem men who had been caught in this disaster and engulfed in this woe.

And the third is the black malice, the cold fury of the one we call Satan the Destroyer. You and I, all we human beings, we’re adepts at the business of presenting one side of a question. And all through this rather happy Christmas season, there is but one side presented. It’s the side of the golden bells and the angels who said, peace on earth, goodwill to men.

But I say these unexpressed facts make all this intelligible to mortal men. The evil, the fury loosed against God and against his son, and through God to humankind, or should I say, loosed against humankind and through humankind against God. For it was not the devil’s fury or anger at mankind that caused him to be the devil he is, but it is his anger with God. And since mankind was made in the image of God and God has expressed and did express his great love for mankind, then it was to get at God that the devil attacked that race of beings which God had loved the most.

And so, we have in this chapter, and I want you to think of the entire chapter and not one text out of it, but here we have in this chapter events that are solemn and fearful and breathtaking. We have a view of life inside and outside, and we have a view of the human race and of the religious world and of the irreligious world of the Jewish world and of the pagan world, of the temple and the armory, of the priest and the soldier, all here. And we have this view of yesterday and an explanation of today and a preview of tomorrow.

Now there are ten persons or groups of persons which I shall sketch very briefly. They are Jesus and Mary and the wise men, and Herod the king and the people of Jerusalem and the chief priests, and the soldiers and Joseph and the slaughtered innocents and Rachel weeping for her children. Here they are either individuals or they are groups.

And we begin, of course, where we should begin, with Jesus, the seed of the woman, the star of Jacob, which had come out of the ancient past, whom Moses and all the prophets did write to fulfill the ancient Scriptures.

And then there was Mary, simple, plain, lovely little Mary. I have combed over my memory, and I cannot remember or recall but three times that Mary ever spoke during her entire life, her entire ministry, her holy ministry here in the New Testament.

There might be one or two added which I have for the moment overlooked. But I can think only where Mary spoke to the angel once and to her son a couple of times, and perhaps one or two times more, but certainly no more, this quiet, simple woman who glorified herself by doing the one thing that women are fitted to do. She obeyed and she bore a son, and thus in her womanhood she became most honored among women. And for this we honor her, and for this we love her, and we remember her, and we shall meet her, and meekly we shall thank her for saying, be it unto me even as thou wilt.

So that we have Mary here, and we talk so much about both Jesus and Mary that I’m not going to this morning to say too much about them. But we have them linked here, Jesus born of Mary, and Mary the mother of Jesus’ flesh, who prepared within her the sacred precincts of her own holy body, that body which God prepared for Jesus as a sacrifice to bleed on a cross.

Well, then we come to the other group, the wise men. Now I don’t know how many there were. Whatever tradition says, usually off little, and the tradition says that there were three, and that they represented the three major races of mankind. That I do not know. I suppose that it is simply an idea which got into somebody’s head. But whether there were three or whether there were a dozen, we know something about these wise men. They were the learned pagan religionists of high position in their country, but humble and meek and childlike.

There is a feeling that people in high religious position cannot be spiritual, and there is another feeling that people of great learning cannot be spiritual. And here were men, however many, and they were learned, I say, and had high position there, and were known as the Magi.

The old man of God Milton called them the star-led wizards, meaning it in its pure and not in its modern evil sense. And they were humble and meek and childlike. And though they had their high position, and though they were learned so that even the Holy Scriptures called them wise, still they were humble enough and meek enough and childlike enough in their spirit to come inquiring where the king of the Jews should be born that they might worship him.

And here is one of the sweet mysteries of the past, one of the riddles of history. There isn’t any reason or use for our looking it up in any of the books, because nobody knows any more about it than is found in the books of the New Testament, particularly Matthew the second chapter.

So, though you may read chapter after chapter about these men in commentaries and books of religious instruction, it is being spun like a spider’s web out of the living stuff of the writer and has no basis at all. But we do know from this chapter that we’re dealing with this morning that their acts revealed a certain inner beauty here about these men. They had great knowledge, certainly, and their human hearts hungered after God.

And ought not this to prove that no matter how wise we may be or how learned or how high in religion we may be, we still have a heart, and if that heart hungers after God, then we do well to follow the wise men. And their frank simplicity and delicate wisdom are revealed here, and their discretion. They outsmarted Herod, but of course we understand that they did not do it of themselves, but they did it by the illumination of God who told them what to do.

Now these wise men from the East are a type of all the humble great who bow before our Lord, and there have been many. Paul in an outburst once said, You see your calling, brethren, that not many wise men and not many noble and not many mighty or great are in the kingdom of God, but God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the mighty.

That’s a familiar passage which I’ll not finish quoting. But while Paul said that, he did not say there are not any noble, nor did he say there are not any wise, nor did he say there are not any mighty. He had an “m”on before “any.” He said not many. He didn’t say there were not any, but simply that there were not many.

There are still a few who managed to get past the obstacle of their own learning. There is, I suppose, nothing quite such a temptation to man or quite as likely to become an idol to him as his own learning. A man feels that he’s intellectual, he will worship that intellect of his, and his very education will prevent him from saying too much about it to the public, because his very culture and training will help him to disguise his egotism and his self-love.

But this wise wisdom of men is a great obstacle, but nevertheless there have been a few that have gotten past it, a few that have gotten through and in great humility bow before the Son of God. They were the wise men who came as samples of all the wise men who should come down the years. They have not been many but thank God there have been some.

And then also here parading across the stage of history and letting us see him operate and letting us look through his transparent skin to the heart of the man, we have Herod, the king of Judea, the ambitious man. Here was another great man. Here were great men, and if these three kings from Orient are, were kings indeed, then they stood on the level with Herod, the king of Judea.

But the king Herod was ambitious and desired to reign and perpetuate his line, and he wanted to be known as the founder of the dynasty, the Herodian dynasty, and thus he feared any rival. And in his fear, he became as cunning as the serpent and as cruel as the grave. Yonder in hell where Herod is, they’ll hiss him, and maybe they’re hissing him now as an infanticide, a murder of babies.

And then there were the people of Jerusalem. That’s my kind. I don’t belong up among the wise men of the East, nor certainly don’t belong in the courts of kings, but here were the people of Jerusalem. And now you’re talking to my kind of people, the simple plain people who lived their lives and married and beget children and saw them grow up and saw some of them die and were disappointed and overtaxed and literally in more ways than one overtaxed and distressed and troubled. These were the plain people of Jerusalem.

They had small knowledge, and they didn’t have too much faith and they were more or less at the mercy of events, and you and I are. We can listen to the broadcast, and we can hear what has been pronounced from Washington or London, and when it’s all over, you and I have to accept it, whether we agree with it or not. We are the people of Jerusalem, the plain people, and we’re troubled somewhat.

And they were afraid of civil war in those days. They were afraid to be too hostile toward the hated occupiers, those who came in, the Romans. They were afraid because they feared civil war that should result in deportation of multitudes and the mass murder of many others. And here were the people of Jerusalem at the mercy of events.

And my friends, the people of Chicago are like them now. The people of Chicago listen to the pronouncements of kings and great men, and then they go their troubled way. Then they go to a show or do something else to try to sort of forget that they’re troubled and in distress and are fearing war, that they haven’t much knowledge and they haven’t much faith and are at the mercy of the dance of circumstance. They try to forget it. And here they were, these people of Jerusalem.

But do you know who it was that Jesus came to save? Those very people of Jerusalem. And they were the ones who in large numbers he did save. Jesus was here and Mary was here, his mother and the wise man and Herod and the people of Jerusalem.

And the king now and again came, but the common people heard him gladly. And then here were the chief priests and scribes, and they were the Jewish religionists of their day. And they knew the letter of the ancient prophecies and no doubt had memorized it so they could quote easily. And yet they were blind to the presence of the fulfillment of the Scriptures, easy tools of scheming politicians.

You know, if you stand for truth in a day when error is in the saddle, you are likely to be considered somewhat odious and even churlish. I suppose the rock that stands there a hundred feet out from the shore and feels the frothy billows beat over it for a hundred years, I suppose it’s one of the most unpopular things on all the shore for a hundred miles around. Because if waves and billows and storms had intelligence and sentiency, no doubt they would hate that rock, for the rock stands solid and the waves break and break and break again.

But still the rock stands, and it’s necessary that certain people have to stand like that and refuse to be in any day the tools of the scheming politicians. And yet they try to use the church, the church of Christ which you purchased with His own blood, that divine organism, that household of God, that temple of the Holy Ghost, that dwelling place of the Deity, that new creation born out of stress and pain.

That church of Christ is being used wherever it can be used by the scheming politicians, men who hate the God that they so gently and silkily and smoothly talk about when they want to get elected. My brethren, let’s remember that the church of Christ stands alone like Peter’s sheet let down, separated from and completely divorced from everything around about her. And it’s tragic when she allows herself to be the tool, the utensil of men who have no higher ambition than to get themselves elected.

So, Herod sent for the chief priests and the scribes. Now if the chief priests and the scribes had had the gift of the Holy Spirit, if they had understood, if they had known, and if they had not wanted to curry favor with the king, they would have met and had a little prayer meeting and said, we’ll never tell that old butcher, we’ll never tell him anything. He hates us, he hates God, he hates the Messiah to come, he hates.

And so, we’re not going to put into the hands of a hateful man any prophecy. And they would never have told him anything. They’d have talked for an hour and said nothing, and they’d have gotten around him somehow, or they’d have flatly refused and taken persecution, even martyrdom, rather than to play into the hand of Herod the butcher.

The chief priests and scribes who know the Bible but don’t know God, they can be expected to turn up on the side of some weird things. When Hitler came to power, some preachers turned up on his side, and now some are on the side of Tito, and others on the side of Khrushchev. It’s amazing, it’s shocking, it’s sickening what preachers and priests and scribes and rabbis will do to curry favor with men in power.

Well, there they are, the people of Jerusalem. God said nothing against them, they were just trouble, that’s all. Poor people who didn’t know much, and were simple and plain, hardworking, and ate their plain fare and slept well, and got up and went to work again. They were the plain people, and nothing said against them. But there were the chief priests and the scribes, and they played into the hand of the ambitious and cruel king. Then there were the soldiers of Herod.

Now, I don’t know how you feel about the soldiers of Herod, but I rather pity them. The soldiers are always present, always there, and they’ve got to be there, at the time when some president or king or prime minister or dictator suddenly decides that he’s angry enough to fight. And then a thousand miles from the front line, he sits in his mahogany table while the boys, they call the soldiers, go out and do the dying.

It’s always been that way, and I suppose it always will be that way. Only five hundred, they said, English died when they sent their soldiers into Egypt. Only five hundred. Five hundred tall English boys who dropped their H’s and slurred their A’s and loved their parents and their sweethearts and their kids back home. They had to go and be butchers, and it’s always so. Evil, ambitious men in the halls of state plan their cunning and cruel plans, and then at a wave of their hand and a crook of their thumb, they send the hired boys out, or the boys who have to go, fellows who don’t want to go, and force them to revolting atrocities which all their Christian teaching and all their civilized humanity revolts against.

And then there was Joseph. He appears here too. Good, honest, dull, faithful, plain, obedient Joseph, the husband of Mary. He had to be a good man to be the husband of Mary for a number of reasons. He had to be much older than she, for he knew her not until she brought forth her firstborn son. He had to be . . . what word should I use to be fair to the facts and yet not be condemned as being unkind? He had to be a dull fellow, and he had to be good enough and obtuse enough that he would marry a girl several months pregnant and accept as the explanation that the Holy Ghost had come upon her and the power of the Most High had overshadowed her, which was, of course, the truth.

But if Joseph hadn’t been simple enough and dull enough and old enough and faithful enough and obedient enough, he’d have hit the ceiling when he discovered the condition. But the good, faithful, honest Joseph, they put a hoop around his head, a luminous hoop, and made him a saint. And I guess he’s as much of a saint as any of the rest, but I thank God for Joseph, the husband of Mary. Not the father of Jesus, but the husband of Mary, who bore the Son of God. And so, we have Joseph here.

I’m not sure, friends, but what the world would be better off if we had more simple, faithful, obedient, plain people and fewer brilliant people. I’m not sure but what in the church of Christ, the Quakers and the Mennonites and the Brethren in Christ and the plain people, and the Brethren of the Friends of God and the Brethren of the Burning Heart and the simple people who dress plain and live plain. I’m not sure but what they came nearer being true followers of Christ than the brilliant and the shining and the incandescent who have come down the years. We thank God for them.

We sing the hymns of all the bright ones. We read the devotional books of the superior ones. We read the sermons and the theology of the great Thomas Aquinas and the Lutherans and the rest. But I’d feel more at home among people like Joseph. Nobody ever was afraid to go into Joseph’s presence, great big rough hands and hairy arms with sawdust in it on his arms until he washed up at night. Who could smile and with a faraway look in his eyes wonder about the boy and yet never question it seriously what this boy was born different from other boys and raise no trou ble about it. Thank God for Joseph.

And then there was the slaughter. There were the slaughtered innocents in this chapter too. For here we have a panoramic view. Here are the slaughtered innocents. It looks as if it had been a popular sport from the days of ancient times to kill Jews, doesn’t it? Here were the babies of Jewish blood, unfortunate enough in the long sweep of the ages to be born here in this tight squeeze of circumstance where the Son of God had been born and where an ambitious and murderous king was on the throne.

And so, the soldiers went out and among the dying, screaming terror, these little ones gave up their lives with no one to help them but binding God to avenge them forever and forever and forever. Herod and Satan, they may well tremble for not all the chanting of the angels, peace on earth, goodwill to men, not all the declaration of the love of God for mankind, and not all the dying and bleeding of the Savior will ever balance the scales to take care of these.

They may well tremble for there is judgment ahead and justice, and the God who is good is also a just God, and the God who gave his Son to die also said that there should be a judgment when the sea should give up its dead in the earth, and they should come from the north and south and east and west and be judged for the deeds done in the body.

So, you may relax, Herod, the day is coming, and the blind chief priests and scribes and the butchers of the king, the day is coming, and these little babes under two years of age that were slaughtered innocently there. And you know what I believe, and I can’t give you the text and I don’t know, but I tell you what I believe.

I believe that every one of these little lambs who died with the bayonets through a tiny baby chest, every one of them is gathered around the throne of God now, and every one of them is there and will be there, all of them, for the Savior for whom, in a sense, they died, afterward died for them. And not having sins that they had committed, not having reached the age of accountability, the broad mantle of Jesus’ atonement covers all those little babes. Whether they were baptized or not, or whether they were born into a Christian home or not, means nothing.

Then there was Rachel, and that’s the last, Rachel weeping for her children. Now, Rachel wasn’t anybody. Rachel was a symbolic name for all Judah’s mothers, all the mothers whose eyes protruded in terror and who stifled in their throat the scream that rose when they saw their innocent baby boy, who had never yet more than said, Mama and Papa, and who had never done an evil, saw him go down in his blood before the butchers of Herod.

And every wail that went up all the region roundabout is all gathered up here, and the great God who gathers tears in his bottles, and who gathers in his great heart the weepings and the wailings of his children, said Rachel was weeping for her children. And this is a symbolic name for all the world’s sorrowing mothers. Mother, God hears your prayers, and God sees your tears, and God knows your grief.

Now, how fantastic, how fantastic that when God would send his Son to die for us and rise and redeem us, that man’s hateful answer should be stealth and deception and flight and escape and tears and sorrow and anguish and death. We’re worse than God said we were, dear friends, and we need a Redeemer. How bad we need a Redeemer. And because this is a picture of the world, this second chapter of Matthew, a picture of the world, how bad we need a Redeemer.

And how penitent we ought to be this time, when we have spent more money than we can afford and when we’ll get presents we don’t need. But one thing Christmas does for us down on our human level, it brings our families together. We can look on the faces of our loved ones, but let us not allow the joys of fellowship and social communion to blind us to the fact that when God sent his Son, man’s response was stealth and deception and flight and tears and sorrow and death.

And it’s still so in this awful age in which we live. They have a tree on the White House lawn, and Ike and his family’s going to lunch or dine together, and I’m glad that it’s so. I’m glad for the four little Eisenhowers that are going to come tumble all over happy-faced old Ike there in Washington.

But good a man as he is, he doesn’t know what to do about all this. Wise men and ambitious kings and stupid, plain people like us and chief priests and scribes and religious men who ought to know better. And the butchers of kings and the dying of babies in Hungary, good honest man, but he doesn’t know what to do.

And they don’t know in London, and they don’t know in Berlin, and they don’t know anywhere. Penitence becomes us this Christmas season, dear friends, penitence becomes us. And the star that shone over Bethlehem has been darkened by a cloud that rises from human breasts, clouds of sorrow and anguish and fear.

And so, while we rejoice together, we ought to rejoice with trembling and kiss the Son lest He be angry and we perish from the earth when His anger is kindled but a little. Amen.

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“Living A Life That Befits Sound Doctrine“

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Living A Life That Befits Sound Doctrine

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

March 30, 1958

To Paul, sound teaching had two parts, foundation and superstructure, or otherwise, the root and tree with its fruit. And he said one became the other, that is, one was inextricably tied up with the other, one was the effect of the cause, the other was the cause, one was the foundation, the other the building, one was the root, the other the fruit and the tree. And he couldn’t think of these apart, and he wouldn’t.

He said, now, there in Crete, that miserable place, you notice how often, and just in the passage I read briefly and imperfectly here, you notice how often he said, be sober. They were a Hollywood bunch, evidently, and sobriety, both in temperament and in practice, didn’t seem to be their characteristics. So, he said, he warned them sharply that they were to be so.

Now, I want you to note here that to Paul, salvation in Jesus Christ carried with it beliefs about certain things, and practice in harmony with those beliefs. Now, Paul knew nothing else but that. That was Paul.

If you want to teach Paul, then you can’t separate certain parts of Ephesians and say, this is Pauline theology. Pauline theology had two sides to it, as I’ve explained. The one side was the theology of belief, and the other was the morality that results from the theology. The one side was the right belief, and the other side was the right living. One side we call the foundation, the other the building.

Or changing it around to Paul, Christian belief, Christian doctrine, sound doctrine consisted of the root and the tree, which grew up out of the root, along with the fruit of the tree. That is, again, we have it, the root was the theology, what you believe about God and Christ. And the tree was the morality, and the fruit was the right living.

So, we have theology and morality, right belief and right living, all bound together, and they can’t be taken apart. Strange that we’ve forgotten that in the day in which we live. Strange. And even to mention it is to have it said of you, you’re a legalist. You’re a legalist. Even to mention it, you’re a legalist. We don’t mind names, so we’ll go on and teach what Paul taught.

Now there’s a great delusion, and anybody’s likely to fall into it, and it is the delusion that you can separate the foundation from the building, the root from the tree, that you can have the one and not the other. One reason why fundamentalism has fallen on hard times in our day, and thousands and multiplied thousands of believers who are true believers are turning away from the Word itself.

It’s not as many of the brethren say that they’re turning away from Christ. They’re turning away from foundations without buildings. They’re turning away from roots without trees. They’re turning away from theology without morality. They’re turning away from right beliefs without right living. And I am turning with them if I must, for I believe that we’re to have a foundation as well as if we’re to have a building we’re to have a foundation. But if we have a foundation, we’re to have a building.

Now, how completely foolish to separate the root from the tree or the tree from the root. Would you consider what value a root is buried deep in the earth if it has no tree and no fruit on the tree? Would you consider how vain it would be to have a tree without a root, just as you can’t have a tree without a root, so you can’t have or shouldn’t expect to have a root without a tree? The two go together. And think about how foolish it is to lay a foundation.

Imagine, if you will, laying a foundation, digging down with a bulldozer, getting rid of all the dirt down there, shoveling it away, then laying the footings in and building the foundation up, and then letting it lie there for a hundred years. What good is a foundation? It’s to lay a building upon. What good is theology unless it eventuates in right living? What good is right doctrine unless it means morality and sound truth and sound living?

So, we try to build a building without a foundation. That’s what our liberalistic friends do. They want to live right, and yet they don’t have any foundation for their buildings. So, they push the building up and keep it inflated with wind. And the result is talk, talk, but there’s no foundation.

But we, on the other hand, tend to lay foundations everywhere and not have any buildings. But Paul said, Titus, see to it that you get both. See to it that your people are well taught in sound theology but see to it that they understand that theology without conduct is vanity.

Charles G. Finney, to my mind, the greatest evangelist that ever lived, greatest evangelist that ever lived, and that’s including Paul. Greater than Paul as an evangelist, not as great as Paul as a theologian, not as great as Paul as an apostle, not as great as Paul in receiving the inspired Scriptures, not great in that way, but greater than Paul in the one job God gave him to do, evangelism.

He taught and taught boldly that to teach Bible classes without making an application was to grieve the Holy Ghost and tempt God. And he said it’s all a mistake to have classes where you teach doctrine, unless when you’ve taught your doctrine, you make the application and say to the people, now, as a result of believing this truth, how are you going to live? Bring your life into conformity with it. Right belief without right living has very little value, very little value. And how are you going to have right living if you don’t have right belief?

Now, Christ gave us a powerful illustration, and I will talk about that a little bit and close. Christ gave us a powerful illustration. I want you to notice. In Matthew, the seventh chapter, and it’s in perfect harmony with Paul here. Our dispensationalizing brethren take in Titus but dismiss Matthew. And here yet we have it on the same thing, the same spirit, the same principle, same beliefs, here in the seventh of Matthew as we have in Titus, the book of Titus.

Jesus said, Therefore, whosoever heareth these sayings of Mine, and doeth them. You see, hearing these sayings of Mine, that’s theology. Doing them, that’s morality. Hearing these sayings of Mine, that’s the foundation. And doing them, that’s the building. Hearing these sayings of Mine, and doing them, that’s having the tree and the root, or the root and the tree.

And our Lord never separated the two. He expected and meant that the two should go together. I believe that we could have some kind of revival in our land, some kind of a reformation that would last.

Perhaps it wouldn’t be so dramatic, but it would last. If every preacher started and for three months insisted that everybody obey what he preached and insists upon it that the Word was given that it might get obedience, and that the foundations were laid they might have buildings, and that the root was there that it might produce the tree and its fruit. But Jesus said, whoever hears and does these, I will liken him unto a wise man.

Here was Jesus with His great oriental love for parables and illustrations. He said, I will liken him unto a wise man, which built his house upon a rock. And naturally, the rain didn’t come, nor the floods didn’t descend, just to be a part of this story. But rains descend, and floods come, winds blow, normally. Normally.

In a little country paper that I used to know, there was a character by the name of Peter Tumbledown, and he kept a very bad farm, and he never fixed the roof. And he gave as his reason for not fixing the roof, that when it was raining, he couldn’t, and when it wasn’t raining, he didn’t need it.

Now, when you build a building, you don’t use Peter Tumbledown’s theology. You build it in good weather, with the knowledge that the good weather won’t last. When you build in July, you build with the knowledge there will be a December and a February. You build with not a breath of air and the sun shining calmly on the meadows, with the knowledge the time will be when the wind may hit 50 miles an hour, and the rain come down in drenching torrents.

And our Lord said, this man built his house on a rock, and he did it by doing. He used exactly the illustration I’ve used before. He heard and did, and the result was that his house was on the rock. When the floods came, and the rain descended, and the winds blew and beat upon that house, it wasn’t there they weren’t mad at the house particularly. They were just being the way winds and floods and rain are. But that house had to stand up there. But it fell not, says Jesus, for it was founded upon a rock.

But he said over against this, everyone that hear these sayings of Mine, there’s theology, and doeth them not, there’s failure to have living in harmony with our teaching. He shall be likened unto a foolish man, which built his house upon a rock.

And while I have not used this before, in my sermons on divine wisdom, do you notice here how Christ contrasted between the wise man and the fool? There we have moral wisdom, which is as practical as a slide rule. Moral wisdom, when it builds a house, digs down to the rock and lays a heavy good foundation.

Moral foolishness, when it builds a house, builds on sand. And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the wind blew. The rains and the floods and the wind weren’t mad at the house. It was just, they do those things, that’s weather, and you can expect that. And the beat upon that house, and it fell, and great was the fall of it.

The house was just as, I suppose, as carefully built as the other one, except that the foundation was neglected. The man had the theology, but he didn’t have the light. Somebody says, well, but you’re confusing your illustration, maybe so, but I’m getting an idea across, am I not, that there must be practical soundness, the hearing and the doing.

There you have the two of them, the hearing and the doing. They’re a unit, you can’t separate them. And if you separate them, you have no foundation. It goes out from under you, and even your very beliefs cease to have any value to you.  And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house, and it fell, and great was the fall of it.

Everybody that heard that understood it. Everybody knew about that, everybody. I’ve heard of houses that were built, and built in filled-in sections, or sections that were so sandy, that they hadn’t been built long until great cracks began to appear in the bricks. Plaster began to crack. The foundations were poor. They might have meant well, but the foundations were bad. So, my brethren, a foundation and the building they’re one, and so Paul says, speak thou the things that become sound doctrine.

All right, Paul, what do you believe? You believe in the Trinity? Yes, but I’m not talking about that. You believe in the deity of Jesus? Yes, but I’m not talking about that. You believe in baptism by immersion? Well, of course, we’ll have to have Paul say yes, even though some people wouldn’t say he said yes, but we have a baptistry back here, so we’ll say he said yes.

And Paul, what else do you believe in? Do you want us to teach second coming? That’s not what I’m talking about. What do you want us to teach? I want you to teach it all, but what I’m specially asking you to bear down on here in Crete is the things that befit sound doctrine.

Old Haldeman-Julius was an atheist. There’s reason to believe he finally died by his own hand. When I was a boy, this atheist was publishing books called the Little Blue Books, and I got hold of them and began to learn about the great writers, and what little education I got, I got partly out of an atheist who was a great publisher of great books and published them all, good and bad and indifferent.

I believe I knew the difference between them. But anyway, this atheist wrote a sketch one time about religion. He didn’t believe in it. He said he could drive through the landscape and enjoy the scenery without leaning on the God that was supposed to have made the scenery. But when he came to a chapter in his book about the Quakers, he said this significant thing. He said, then came the Quakers and startled the Christian world by living like Christians.

Imagine that. Startled the Christian world by living like Christians. I believe that without any particularly great leaders maybe, but just the common people, the plain Christians, I believe that we could startle the religious world if we’d begin to take seriously Paul’s admonition to live lives that befit sound doctrine.

Not only believe what the Bible says but do what the Bible says. Not only believe the theology but practice the morality of the Bible. Quit our lying. Quit our deceiving. Quit our gorging. Quit our luxurious spending. Quit our quarreling. Quit our nasty treatment of each other. Quit our laziness. Quit our long, unnecessary, and expensive vacations away from God’s house.

I believe in the vacation, all right, even if I don’t take them, but they run to extremes. In England they say when Friday comes, cars are bumper to bumper for the seashore, and they don’t come back till late Sunday night, and the churches are left high and dry for the owls and the janitor. That’s carrying a decent thing to terrible extremes. They can import Billy Graham or any other great preacher they want to. They’ll never have lasting revival until they’ve started obeying God.

Paul Rees, they say, I always claimed one of America’s greatest preachers, in going to England, said in his church in Minneapolis, that if the English people don’t remember that you can’t bring the blessing of God by bringing a good man to your shores. Speak the things which befit sound doctrine, that aged men live this way, aged women live this way, young men live this way, young women live this way. Employers do this, and employees do that, and all of you do this. That’s the way Paul said sound doctrine ought to sound. And I believe that we could startle the world, rock the liberals back on their heels.

A man wrote me a letter and said, you probably won’t like it that you get a fan letter from a liberal. But he said, I just read something you wrote, and I like it. And I wrote back and said, listen, there are two kinds of liberals. There are the smooth talking, hollow fellows with superficial philosophies who don’t mean what they say and live on wind and words. And I have no respect for them.

But there’s another kind of liberal, the kind that’s been driven to liberalism by the hollow lives of the orthodox and the poor living of those who claim to be fundamental in their faith. And I said, I not only respect them, I pity them, and I think you’re among them. Instead of damning the liberal, we ought to remember the liberal hasn’t had a very good example of godliness.

If we lived the way Paul taught us here, I think the liberals would begin to disappear. One after the other, they’d begin to disappear. Captain Henning, how many of you know Cap Henning? He is connected with the Pacific Garden Mission, and has been a Christian for years. When Mrs. Dietz died, we had her funeral here in this church. Cap Henning sent a floral piece. There was a long ribbon and in gold letters, the florist had written this, I watched her life and sought her Savior.

And I saw Cap Henning and ate with him the other day. And Henning said, I was a fresh, smart, young fellow and I stayed at the Dietz home, and I watched Mrs. Dietz. He said, when I was leaving, they said, would you like to pray with us, Cap? And he said, sure. And he got down on his knees and got converted. I watched her live and then I sought her Savior. But there’s many a liberal today that watches us live and turns to liberalism. Not because he’s got anything against Christ, but because he gags on what he sees.

If the holy season, as we call it, means anything, my friends, it means that we ought to take this whole thing practically. If that was God’s Son that rode into Jerusalem there that Palm Sunday, if that was God’s Son who came out of that new tomb on that Sunday morning and stood among men in shining glory, that’s all true and I stake my eternal future on it.

Then we ought to begin to live as if it was true and stop being animals, civilized animals, living according to our glands, chitchat and gossip and all the rest. We ought to begin to live like Christians.

And if we do, immediately our prayers will take on a new power. Immediately our testimony will take on a new sharp edge. Immediately our joy will begin to spring up like wells in the desert. And I believe that we can make an impression on mankind.

Some of my poor orthodox brethren have begun to believe over the last years that if we can get some good polemical writers, that is argumentative writers, who know how to argue with others, and we get some good books arguing for the faith that we can cure liberalism, never, my brethren, you will cure it when we begin to live like Christians, but never before. So, I beg of you, let’s begin to live the life that befits sound doctrine.

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“The Doctrine of the Remnant II”

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The Doctrine of the Remnant II

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

December 8, 1957

In the Book of Romans, the 9th chapter, verses 27 and 28, Esaias, which is Isaiah, also crieth concerning Israel, Though the number of the children of Israel be as the sand of the sea, only a remnant shall be saved. For he will finish the work and cut it short in righteousness, because a short work will the Lord make upon the earth. Though the number of the children of Israel be as the sand of the sea, a remnant shall be saved.

I began last week a two-sermon series, finishing it tonight, on the doctrine of the remnant in the Bible. And it’s not my intention to give an exposition of the ninth chapter of Romans, a very heavy and difficult chapter. But the 27th verse is not difficult. It says simply that regardless of how many there may be, what the population of the nation of Israel may be, only a remnant shall be saved.

So, the doctrine of the remnant is a doctrine not only applying to Israel, but as I said, it applies to all mankind and to the Church. It is simply this, that in our blind, fallen, sinful world of mankind, at any given time, the vast, the overwhelming majority of the people are lost, alienated from God, their sins unshriven, their souls unforgiven, their hearts unrenewed, being without hope and without God in the world.

That’s true of the majority at any given time. But somebody said, Mr. Tozer, what is the percentage? Don’t crowd me because I can’t tell you. And since the Bible does not tell me, I will not try to tell you.

I only know that the word remnant means a small fragment. I only know that the word remnant means a surviving trace, a remnant. You had a hundred dollars in your pocket, but you spent it here and you spent it there and you spent it the other place and you have a dollar thirty cents, a small fragment, a surviving trace of what you originally had. I don’t give that as a percentage.

Now that’s what the doctrine teaches. And that it’s true, it was true, I pointed out, among the nations, it’s true in Israel, it’s true, it was true when Christ came the first time, the Bible teaches it will be true when he comes back the second time. And church history shows that it has been true all down the years. That of the multitudes who named His name, only a remnant, a surviving trace, a small fragment were saved.

Now I make the devil mad by saying this, the devil doesn’t care how religious you sound, and he doesn’t care how many people crowd a church and listen to lovely phrases, phrases about the laughter of little children and on and on toward better things. The devil doesn’t care. I think the old boy likes it. But when we dare to deal with things that disturb him, then he hates it, and he hates this.

And so, here’s the way he works. He works to whisper to the listener, that man is a bigot. A man who would dare say that is a bigot. For a bigot is who imagines that he and his religion is all there is. And that man is a bigot. It’s strange that a bigot like that could have anybody listen to him in this day.

And so they flounce out. But I didn’t originate this doctrine of the remnant, my friends. In fact, I didn’t originate anything that I preach. And if you can discover anything that I originated, please, for God’s sake, reject it out of hand immediately and for good. Because nothing that I ever originated will stand the test of the judgment day. The fires of God will burn anything I have originated in one quick flash of flame and it’s over.

But this doctrine of the remnant, this teaching that at given time in Israel, in the church, among the nations, that is in Christendom, there are large numbers of people who name His name but a surviving trace that actually know his goodness, a small fragment that really know his grace. That’ll make you mad, and not you maybe, but some. And it will turn some people away. They’ll go away in steaming anger and not come back. And I can’t help that, but that’s in the Book, my friend. That’s here.

Now, I told you that I would talk tonight on where is that remnant? Where is the remnant? Elijah didn’t know where it was in his day. There were 7,000 that hadn’t bowed the knee to Baal, which I showed you was about one-tenth of one percent of the people of Israel in that time.

And Elijah didn’t know where they were. He didn’t even know where the preachers were, the prophets, hidden in caves. He didn’t even know they were there. They were. I don’t know what they were doing in caves, or maybe I do know what, and that’s worse still. But they were hiding in caves, and Elijah didn’t know it. So, I don’t know where the remnant is, but dare we inquire where the remnant is.

Now, as soon as we bring this subject up, immediately all of the half-saved and the one percent saved, and the backsliders, and the borderlines, and the church members, and the professors, and those who have not the witness of the Spirit to their redemption, they begin to squirm and quote Scripture.

And one Scripture they quote is, Judge not that ye be not judged. And they say that that man stands up there, the old bigot, and he judges other people’s religion. And he judges me. What right has he to judge me?

Does not Jesus say, judge not that ye be not judged? And does not the Bible say that love thinketh no evil? And if that man had love, he would not think evil about anybody. He would accept these. He would accept everything that is done in the name of the Lord. And he would not dare to say only a remnant shall be saved. He would accept and believe in the good religious people that go and give of their pennies, and he would believe in them. But he’s not a man of love. He’s not a loving man. He’s a severe, harsh man.

Now, my brethren, I wonder if when Jesus said, judge not, and when Paul says, love thinketh no evil, and when Christ said we should love one another and lay down our lives for each other, and all this that’s said in the Scriptures, I wonder if that was intended to end inquiry and silence rebuke.

I wonder if Jesus meant when He said, Judge not, that ye be not judged, that His prophets were not to go forth, His apostles and His preachers, and speak truth to the church. I wonder if He meant that they were to go forth like the three monkeys on the what-not shell, see no evil, think no evil, hear no evil, and get the permanent smile on their faces, which never will rub off till they die, and believe in everybody and everything and everyone who says, Lord, Lord, accept him into the kingdom of God, forgetting that the same Holy Ghost who said, judge not, through the lips of the Savior said, a remnant shall be saved, a small fragment, a surviving trace.

Well, we have in our audience tonight a friend of mine, Dr. Eldred Heisel of Columbus, a fine Christian physician whom I knew when he was a little lad in short pants. And I don’t want him to think I’ve chosen this illustration because he’s here for the simple reason that this is one of my favorites.

But do you know what we need in the church of Christ now? Do you know what we need? We need diagnosis. And do you know what diagnosis is? It comes from two good hard Greek words, meaning to know all the way through. That’s what we need in the church of Jesus Christ. But they quote, Judge not. As soon as a man of God gets up and starts in, they say, Judge not.

Well, now my illustration is this. Suppose that somebody isn’t feeling up to par and goes to see his doctor and says, Doctor, I feel as if I had a mitten in my mouth when I get up in the morning. My head bothers me, and I don’t have the energy, and I just don’t feel good. And the doctor says, all right, stick out your tongue. He said, What? He said, Put out your tongue. He said, What? Put out your tongue. Well, I can’t understand why you should want me to put out my tongue.

Well, the doctor says, I got to know you. I got to know you through. I’ve got to diagnose you, get to know you through. He said, It’s an improper thing to do, and I beg your pardon. And all right, tell me, how is your appetite?

Well, I don’t see why that’s any of your business. Doesn’t the Bible say, don’t ask questions about people, and judge not, and you be not judged. Love everybody and think no evil, and don’t stick your nose in other people’s affairs. What are you asking me about my appetite? Well, how do you sleep? What’s the difference to you how I sleep? I came for help. Don’t you love me? I came for help.

I want you to help me, but don’t you love me? Yes, but I wonder, do you sleep well at night? None of your business, doctor. Absolutely not. You’re a terrible man.

The Scripture says, love everybody, and judge nobody, and love thinketh no evil, and love covereth the multitude of false. Don’t you read your New Testament asking me how I sleep? Well, what do you eat? Well, it’s none of your business. I want you to understand I’m no glutton.

Well, let me take a bit of your blood. My blood? Yes. What do you want of my blood? I want to know you. I want to know you through. What right have you to know me? I came for help to you. I want encouragement and inspiration.

I don’t give no blood. Well, but I can’t know you like it to your blood. Oh, you’re terrible, and you’re a radical bigot. Why should you want to know about my blood? Well, let me at least take your blood pressure. What do you know about my blood pressure? None of your business. Do you not realize that the Bible says, Thou shalt not judge, and if you take my blood pressure, you’ll be judging me.

What kind of a crazy business would that be? Even Satan would hold his belly and laugh in hell, and yet they demand that that’s the way we preachers treat our congregations. They demand that that’s the way the preachers treat the congregations.

I want to tell you something, my friend. We are beating the drum for revival, and we are getting thousands of people to pray into the night for revival. We might as well jump up and down on the altar of Baal and cut ourselves and cry, Baal, hear us, Baal, hear us. We won’t submit to diagnosis. We won’t let God find out what’s wrong with us. We won’t let God know us through and through, and we won’t listen to the man who tries to find out and minister to our needs.

We go to the preacher for inspiration and encouragement and confirmation in our backslidden ways, and as soon as he opens his mouth, if he’s prayed half the night for his congregation and would give his life for it, we shut him up by ramming a text in his mouth and say, don’t you dare judge anybody.

If a man says, I’m a Christian, you’ve got to accept it. Otherwise, you might be grieving the Holy Ghost. And we shut up the mouth of the man who’s trying to find out what’s wrong and how we can cure it.

Well, if this is true, that I am only to stand up and preach love, that I’m only to stand up here and tell you in the book of Ephesians how wonderful you are, if that’s true, then all the prophets who spake since the world began were all wrong. Beginning with Enoch who said, Thus the Lord cometh with all his saints to take judgment on the ungodly for all the ungodly deeds they have ungodly done.

That doesn’t sound very much like inspiration and courage and moving on to better things.

Sounds to me more like a little diagnosis, somebody getting into it to find out what’s wrong. Well, if I don’t dare do it and you won’t listen to it, then all the prophets were wrong. And Christ was the greatest transgressor of all, for there was nobody that could look you through and make you feel like two cents devaluated.

Nobody could do it as well as our Lord Jesus Christ could. And if that’s the way it is and all inquiry must be ended and all rebuke silenced, then the apostles also were great sinners, and also great bigots and Pharisees. For if you don’t believe it, read what Paul wrote to the Corinthians, read what he wrote to the Colossians, read what he wrote to the Galatians, read what Peter wrote to the general, to the Christians scattered abroad, read what Jude wrote about the people that had crept into the church, read what John in his first epistle and all his epistles has said, read what James said.

Had these men not heard the text, judge not that you be not judged? Sure, they’d heard that text, but they knew what it meant, and these others don’t. Had Paul not heard the text, love thinketh no evil, when he wrote to the Galatians and said, you’re circumcising yourselves, I wish you’d cut your throat? You say, he didn’t say that, you just read a little there and dig around a little bit and see whether he didn’t say what amounts to that. He said, I wish you’d cut yourself clear off.

He said, you lovers of Jewish circumcision are always trying to make Christians with a pair of scissors. I wish you’d get clear cut off, he said, and get rid of yourself and get out of the church. He was the man who wrote the text, which said that love thinketh no evil and love, love, love, he said, was the greatest thing in the world. And then he told the Galatian false teachers, get out of here and cut yourself off.

Well, if I’m not supposed ever to diagnose, to inquire, to search, to get at blood and take blood pressure, then I ask you, I tell you that the mystics were all wrong and the reformers were all wrong and Luther should have been in jail and Finney should have spent a term or two in jail and all of the men who have moved the world for God all should have been in jail.

Well, and if that’s true, it’s also, it’s impossible to obey the Scriptures. If I do not, if I cannot, if I dare not exercise moral judgment, if I dare not stand up and look at a thing and decide in the light of God’s Word, whether it’s right and wrong or wrong, then I cannot obey the Scriptures. The Lord has given me commandments which I cannot obey. Beware of wolves, he says, which come in sheep’s clothing.

And the modern pussycat theologians say, don’t you judge anybody but accept everybody at his own face value and be loving as the Savior was. All right then, when the wolf comes along dressed in a sheep fleece, what do I do? I say, good morning, sheepy. And I don’t dare allow myself to believe that he’s a wolf.

Even though I see his slobbering fangs, I’ve got to be loving and not judge him. Why the Lord’s using him, why don’t you keep quiet, dear brother? I would be afraid. There’s nobody you can get quite so effusively lovemaking as these blind men who are afraid to preach the truth.

Be loving, dear brother. And they paw you, you know, and paw you, dear brother, with their white hands. My dear brother, if I am not to be able to tell a wolf when I see him, then how am I going to keep the wolf out of the fold? And I’m supposed to do it. He said, beware of wolves, and if I can’t tell a wolf when I see one, how can I beware of that which I don’t dare identify? Tell me.

Then he says, by their fruit ye shall know them. Now I go out to an old run-down garden or orchard, and I start looking for sheep-nosed apples, the kind we used to raise out in Pennsylvania, sheep-nosed apple. I suppose they’ve changed their name. Sell them now, you housewives.

But they were sheep-nosed apples to us. And I go looking around for sheep-nosed apples, but all I can find is a crab apple and a thorn apple and a sour, dried-up, degenerate apple full of worms. And I go looking for sheep-nosed apples.

Somebody says, what are you doing, Reverend? I’m out here judging fruit. I’m out here looking for fruit. Well, but you’re not supposed to. Why? Well, the Bible says, judge not. And you’re not supposed to judge fruit. You’re not supposed to do it. Why, it isn’t loving. Doesn’t Paul say, love thinketh no evil? And that you should judge not and you shall not be judged. And you love everybody.

Now that poor crab apple’s doing the best it can. And that thornberry there, as big as a small marble, that tries to look like an apple, that’s a sheep-nose on the way up. And if you would only believe it, why, you’d just, you’d find, oh, the Lord loves the dear things. Well, why should you be so hard on them?

So, I got to go sneaking away. I don’t even dare know the difference between a great, big, gorgeous, juicy sheep-nosed apple and a crab. Because if I do, I’m judging people. You can’t obey the Scriptures. The Lord’s given us truth we can’t obey here. By their fruit ye shall know them. And if you can’t exercise moral judgment and criticize and discriminate, then you can’t obey what you’ve been told to do. And John says, try the spirits, whether they are of God. And if I can’t and don’t dare try the spirits.

I’ve had people, you know, I don’t scare easy. That’s one strange thing. I was afraid of everything when I was a kid, afraid of wind, afraid of dogs, and afraid of everything. But in the kingdom of God, I don’t scare easy. And they come to me and say, now, Brother Tozer, I’d just, I’d be afraid to say what you’ve just said.

My sister said, God bless her, she’s a wonderful Christian. My sister Mildred a wonderful Christian. But she sat up at my happy alongside of me on a bench. And she’s like all other Tozers: talks a lot, you know. And she asked me about somebody currently in the public eye, and I gave a little appraisal. And she said, oh, now watch it. Watch what you say. Oh, I’d be afraid to judge.

Afraid to judge when God Almighty sent me to do it? Afraid to distinguish a crab apple from a sheep’s nose when God sent me to do it? Afraid to look at a wolf and say, you’re a wolf, when God said, look out for wolves? Afraid to try the spirits when God said, try the spirits, whether they be of God? God isn’t going to send me out to do something and then damn me for doing it.

He’s not going to send me out and say, now you go out and judge the fruit and then damn me for judging fruit. We’ll prove all things and hold fast to that which is good. And if we can’t exercise moral judgment, I want to know how we can know good from bad.

And if anyone that is called a brother commits fornication or does any of these other deeds, idolatry, and the rest, don’t eat bread with him. That is, don’t have communion with him at the Lord’s house.

Well, we say nowadays we don’t dare do a thing about this. They’re dear, the Lord’s, dear children, they all mean well, and therefore don’t say anything. But Paul said we’d better say something. And all our churches have died the same way. They’ve died by getting infections in them that they couldn’t get rid of and didn’t get rid of, and pretty soon the infection flared up and destroyed the whole body. They all die the same way.

Well, I think I’ve made my case, I’ve convinced myself anyhow, and I trust I have you. Where is that remnant? Somebody says, you don’t dare ask that question, Mr. Tozer. You don’t. There’s a very small remnant that is saved even in this day.

Sixty million Christians are members of churches now, isn’t that it? Sixty million Christians in America members of church. Sixty million Christians alive in the earth today. You know what would happen if there were 60 million Christians in America today? There would be a doxology that would bring the Sputnik down. There would be a doxology that would rise to heaven and send up such a glorious wave of music that the stars would pause to listen.

But nobody can get me to believe that. Though there are children of Israel, should be in number as the sands of the sea. A small fragment shall be saved, a surviving trace that yet remains.

So it was in Noah’s day, so it was in Israel down the years, so it was when Christ came the first time, so it will be when He comes the second time. So has it been in church history and so is it today. And we are where we are because we have silenced the preachers who dare to find out what’s wrong with us, who dare to inquire where is the remnant or is there a remnant.

Well, you say, then what are we to do? And I answer, first, let’s beware of something. Let’s beware of presumption and self-righteousness. For this is the snare of all the cults and the sectarians and the Pharisees. Let us beware of the spirit that says, I am right, judge yourself by me.

The wonderful thing about a right man is that he doesn’t want to talk about it. The wonderful thing about a godly man is he doesn’t know he’s godly. The beautiful thing about a holy man is that he’s the only one that doesn’t know it. See? And as soon as we begin to talk about how holy we are, we’re not holy anymore, if we ever were.

If somebody else says a man is holy, I’ll listen. But if he gets up and says he is, I’ll close my ear right there because I don’t want the decibels to disturb the atoms inside my eardrum, because I know he’s not telling the truth. A good man doesn’t know he’s good, and a holy man isn’t aware of his holiness, and a righteous man thinks he’s miserable. He says, oh, I’m such a poor wretch, I love my Savior so, I’m so happy in God, but when I think of myself, it makes me sick.

So, remember, look out for presumption. Save me, said the holy man, save me from presumptuous sins. Save me from self-righteousness that says, stand apart, I am holier than thou. No, no. We want this church to have a standard as high as the New Testament, but we never want anybody in this church to be so good that he can’t help a drunk man up the stairs and get him seated and sit beside him and do his best to win him.

We want everybody in this church to be pure as the blood of the lamb can make them, but we don’t want a woman in this church that wouldn’t be willing to help a harlot, painted, off the street and help her in here and try to lead her to Christ. Self-righteousness. You don’t have to be self-righteous, brethren, and you don’t have to be bigoted and presumptuous.

What, then, is the right attitude? The right attitude is, refuse to compare yourself with anybody else. Compare yourself with Jesus. I remember hearing dear old William Jennings Bryan, when he had turned preacher, you know what he did in his old age, and was a better preacher than 99 percent of the preachers who were supposed to be preachers.

I heard him preach when he was quite an old man, just a little while before he went to heaven, and he said the difference between an evolutionist and a Christian is this. He said an evolutionist goes out Sunday morning to the zoo, stands in front of the cage of the monkey, and congratulates himself upon how far he has sprung from the days of his fathers. But he said a Christian goes to church Sunday morning and sits reverently and listens to the preacher preach and looks up and bemoans how far he has to go yet before he’s perfect as his heavenly Father is perfect.

And if you could have heard him say it with those golden tones, it was beautiful to hear. But this is the point. The man who belongs to the remnant isn’t asking if he does, and he isn’t inquiring. He is hoping and believing and trusting and seeking and longing, and he’s comparing himself not with somebody else, but with the Savior. Compare yourself with somebody else and you’ll be proud as Lucifer. Compare yourself with Jesus and you’ll be as meek as Moses.

So, the thing to do is not to look for the remnant. The thing to do is to beware of presumption and self-righteousness and to compare yourself only with Jesus. And then when you’ve done that, say, I am an unprofitable servant.

When I was younger, the Scofield Bible was my alma mater, you know, and I got my degree there and my theology, and I still like it and turn to it often, although I don’t think all the notes are inspired. In the same sense the text is quite. That shocks some people, but it’s still true.

But when I was busy with it, I was seriously wondering about, when I became mayor of five cities, and I could preach on the five crowns of the Christians, right out of the notes. Five crowns of the Christians. The crown of life, the crown of righteousness, the crown of rejoicing, a couple other crowns. And I remembered about the five who rule over five cities. Well, I don’t speak lightly. Somebody’s going to rule over five cities.

But now I know not who it’ll be, but I know who it won’t be. It won’t be I. I remember when I actually believed that I would have a starry crown. We used to sing far, far away beyond the starry sky and about the crown we would wear. I hope so, but I don’t know.

That I’m saved, I know. That I live in the heart of God, I know. That I walk with the Savior, I know. That I wake in the night and say, Holy, Holy, Holy Lord God Almighty, and fall back to sleep, I know. That I carry a hymn book and a Bible everywhere I go, that I know. And that the Lord is literally, literally becoming nearer and dearer as the years go by, I know. That I am his child, I know. That my name’s in the Lamb’s Book of Life, I know.

But further than that, don’t push me, because I don’t think that I’m going to have much of a crown. In fact, I’ve had an understanding with God about that. And if he surprises me by giving me a little crown, I’ll be the happiest man on the golden strand, because I don’t expect it. I’ve done, I’ve been too, I’ve been too sinful, wasted too much time, been too lazy, too cowardly, too everything, for a man to have a crown.

So, I’m not expecting it. And I’m not trying to be humble, so you’ll go away and say, I almost cried that dear, humble man.

Brother, there isn’t a humble atom in my body. Old Adam made me as proud as hell, and it’s only the cross of Christ that can save me from the effects of it. I’m only just testifying, and I’ve got a right to do that, and tell you that I don’t expect much of a reward.

You know, I like to, I like to have understandings with God. I go to God and have understandings with him. I go to God and talk it over, and settle things, and say, Now God, I was, where was I, in my, I think on the train. I like to take a roomette, it costs a little, but I, it makes an office for me, and I’ve got to work.

So, I shut the door and get down, get a, carry an old pair of praying pants, get down on my knees, save my suit, and I get down there and ride for hours and hours, my Bible open. And I told God something the other day that I’d just like to pass on to you.

I said, God, I know where I belong. I belong in hell, I know it, I know it. I belong in hell. But God, I want to tell you something. If I go to hell, you’ll have one fan in hell. If I go to hell, you’ll have one man there singing your praises. If I go there, you’ll have one man that won’t keep his mouth shut, but will run all around over that dark place, telling how good God is, and how wonderful is the blood of the Lamb.

And I had another understanding with God. And it is this, that if I have in my life failed so completely as a Christian, that I’ll have no reward for what I’ve done.

There’s one thing not even God can take away from me. The boys that write in and say, Brother Tozer, I went to Moody Bible Institute, I was going to Northern Baptist, I went to this and that seminary, I was there with the government, I went to your church, oh, how God enlightened my heart.

Nobody can take that away. Satan can’t rob me of that. Don’t you suppose that’ll be a reward enough? Won’t it be a reward enough to see somebody there that’s there because you lived? I think that’ll be a crown, and that nobody can take away from you. That, no circumstances can rob you of that.

And I get letters as I do, saying, oh, Brother, I just read something, and oh, how God has blessed me. Nobody can take that away. And if you’ve prayed and God has answered a prayer, if you’ve given a dollar to God’s work and some soul has been saved, if you’ve, if you’ve taken a bowl of soup in His name to some poor widow, nobody can take that from you.

But the point is, you’re going to have to come to Him in meekness and humility and not say, I am holy, stand thou aside. But say, Lord God, I trust that by thy grace and the power of the blood of the everlasting covenant, I may have some little reward there, but I’m an unprofitable servant.

Now, I want to close by telling you this. It is my opinion, and I believe it’s more than an opinion, I believe it’s insight. Evangelical Christianity as we know it today, gospel Christianity as we know it today, is almost as far from God as liberalism. Its nominal creed is biblical, but its orientation is worldly.

The modern evangelicals, the holiness people, the Pentecostal people, the Bible people, the Bible-loving people, the Alliance people, and we who claim to be evangelical and traditionalists in our Christian faith, our orientation, that is, we’ve gathered around, that is what we have circled around, our orientation is toward the big businessmen. You know, Jesus never got along with any big businessmen in his day, and we use them as our models. Our orientation is around the banquet hall.

Where did I hear that a certain church has a 6:30 supper every Wednesday night? Then they hurry through their meal and at 8 o’clock have a prayer meeting. And the 6:30 supper has a mob, and the 8 o’clock prayer meeting has a pitiful handful. People love to eat, and the evangelical church is orientated around showmanship.

Oh, I can always tell them I smile to myself and pray that God will wake them up, but when I hear a young man leap to the platform, as I do in these schools where I go, and camp meetings and places, I know where he’s been. I know where he’s been brought up. He leaps up just vibrating, emoting. And he’s an emcee. He learned that from TV. He knows how to do it.

He smiles that greasy smile that they put on with the paddles, and he drags that damnable thing into the church and leaps up and announces a meeting. Now Jim Smith, Mabel Persnickerty, and Harry Jones will sing a solo. All right, kids, I know where he’s been, I know where he’s been. And I sniff, no myrrh, no aloes, no cashew, no fragrance of heaven’s dewy rose. I smell, I know where he’s been. His orientation is TV and movie.

But he’s got a Bible as big as a cedar chest under his arm. And he carries it down the road and says, I’m preaching a sermon of five blocks long, carrying my Bible five blocks. Then he upsets his sermon as soon as he arrives at church by acting like a worldling.

And we’re orientated to play and to respect of persons–respect of persons, bigwigs, religious bigwigs. I don’t know whether there’s too much difference between the princes of the Roman church, princes, God bless them, old bachelors, princes. I don’t know whether there’s too much difference between those old bachelor princes that wear all that mess of finery and a lot of this big-shot-ism that we got in the church of Christ today.

You know, James said, if anybody comes into your church and he doesn’t have on a nice robe, he said, don’t tuck him under the, behind the pulpit somewhere and get him out of sight. He said, some brother comes sweeping in, going down the aisle, used to, take a letter, calling to an office boy to come and get this, and phoning somebody to go do that. And he carries that same spirit to church with him. And the pastors, the poor little mice, they accept him at his own value.

Could I tell this old one again? Peter Cartwright, you’ve heard this before, but he was preaching and Stonewall Jackson came in, leaned against the tent pole. And the little seminary preacher who was there, whispered, Peter, Peter, brother Peter, watch what you say, Stonewall Jackson’s present. He said in a big booming voice, who’s Stonewall Jackson? If he doesn’t repent, God will damn him just as quick as he would a hottentot. And he went on with his sermon. And after it was over, the little seminary preacher said, oh, brother Peter, you’ll be horse whipped tomorrow morning. He said, that’s an awful man, that man Stonewall Jackson. He’s terrible. He’s a general. He’ll horse whip you.

So the next day, the big old square-shouldered Peter was going down the street and he saw the general. The general said, Reverend, he went over and said, I heard your sermon yesterday. Peter braced himself. He said, put her here. He said, if I had a hundred generals who had your courage, I’d soon win this war.

But we’re mousy and timid. And when a big guy swaggers down the aisle, the little preacher leaps to attention and salutes.  I’ve got a word for you. There isn’t a man in Chicago high enough in society or deep enough in debt or owning enough property or having enough bank account or able to write a big enough check to shut my little old mouth. Not one. And he may be a prince of this or a cardinal of that or a bishop of the other. He may be the uncrowned poohbah of fundamentalism or the self-appointed without portfolio ambassador of modern evangelicalism. But I’ll preach what God wants me to preach. Amen.

Now I’m about done, and I guess it’s about time. But what is our job? Well, it’s to seek to become a part of the remnant. It is not to judge unkindly. It is not to withdraw in self-righteous pride. It is not to be unloving. But it is to seek to become a part of the remnant.

A remnant shall be saved. It’s to seek to become by returning to New Testament living. You see, a Christian is one who lives according to the New Testament. It’s to return to New Testament living. Revivals don’t come like waves of wind. They come because some certain people return to New Testament living and then pray and ask God to do the same for others.

That’s how it comes. But we can pray a hundred years and never have revival unless we return to New Testament living. Our compelling cross is to seek to become part of the remnant by denying self, forsaking the world, and centering around Jesus Christ.

And if I might be allowed a grotesque modern expression, become Christ-oriented, and resisting the magnetism of the majority, the magnetism of the majority, and the contagion of example.

Oh, you dear young people, there’s a contagion about example. It spreads like Asian flu. You get it and you don’t know where you got it. You get it from the radio. You get it from the advertising. You get it from the car, you see, going down the street. You get it everywhere. It’s the contagion of example. It’s breathing into your soul the germs from other people’s example.

And the Christian’s got to fight that. He’s got to stand and fight that. And kneel and fight that, and say, I don’t care what the world says, I’m fighting that. The Christian’s got to be a fighter. We want a Christian to be a tabby cat with his teeth filed and his claws pulled, soft and fluffy.

The Christian has got to be a fighter. And he stands in the name of the Lord to fight the contagion of example and the magnetism of the majority and refuse to go along with it. And if his whole church goes, he won’t go. And if his whole denomination goes, he won’t go. And in doing that, he’ll make enemies. And in doing that, he’ll no doubt get many a scar.

But it’s his compelling cross in this day of terror that we seek to be like Jesus Christ and become part of the remnant. And owning the lordship of Jesus and throwing our lot in with those who are as near as we can tell of the remnant.

Maybe some of you expected me to say the Alliance Church at 70th and Union is an integral part of the remnant. I think we have some here who are. I’ve known them a good many years and I don’t know one that’s perfect. I don’t know anybody in this church that I couldn’t put my finger on the flaw in their life. I don’t mean a sin; I mean a flaw. But also, I know a great many that with deep reverence and appreciation, I believe belong to the remnant that speak often one to another.

And the Lord hears it and writes it down in a book. And they shall be mine, saith the Lord, in the day that I come to make up my jewels. When Jesus drew near on Emmaus Road to the two disciples, oh, what a difference if they’d been discussing hockey. What a difference. If they had been talking about the Olympic Games and who the great decathlon champion was for that year. Or if they’d been discussing crops. Oh, what a difference.

What a different story the 24th chapter of Luke would have told, or it never would have told it. It would have left it in cold silence. But two Christians, as they walked, were talking about Jesus and that he’d been crucified. And that they’d seen a vision of angels who said he was risen. And that the women also had come and said he was risen. I wonder if it could be true.

This wonderful Jesus, is He risen indeed? They were saying. Back and forth they tossed it as they walked along. And something about their conversation pleased Jesus and drew Him like a magnet. And He walked with them and finally caught up with them, walking a little faster than they. He had nobody to talk to. They were talking and so He slowed down.

So He walked faster and caught them. And He said, excuse me, what’s the conversation? Oh, they said, we’ve been just talking about that strange, wonderful prophet, wonderful in deeds and words that appeared recently. They crucified Him, but they tell me He’s alive again.

But we don’t know. They said it’s the third day and we’re puzzled. Christ smiled deep in His heart and said, oh, you foolish people, why don’t you believe what the prophets have told you? He said, now here, and opening the Scriptures out of His memory, no doubt, beginning with Moses and all the prophets, He preached. And as He talked to them, their hearts got flaming and flaming and flaming and flaming.

But He wasn’t going to push Himself on. And when they came nearly to the house, He said, well, it’s been nice. Goodbye. Oh, they said, don’t go, don’t go. Come on in. Well, He said, it’s late. Oh, they said, but we come on in. That’s why we want you to come.

He went in and they had a little meal. And they didn’t know who He was. They said, we’ve never heard anything like this. And while they were eating, Jesus raised His hand to bless it. And they recognized it was a simple little idiosyncrasy of the Savior. He did it a certain way.

And they looked at His hands and they saw the nail prints and immediately He was gone. And it was a five mile walk or a seven-mile walk. One of the two, I’ve tried to check it to find out, at least a seven-mile walk. They had just come from Jerusalem, seven miles, walking on their feet. And they hadn’t had any rest except the few minutes they’d sat at the table. Do you know what they did? They got up, the Scripture says, and returned immediately to Jerusalem, ablaze with what they’d seen and heard. Did not our hearts burn within us when He walked with us, talked with us on the way?

Ah, there are some people, when they meet, they don’t discuss worldly things, or if they do, it’s only casually. And the magnetic attraction is Jesus and God and prayer and the Bible and the church and missions and evangelism and prayer meetings and good things. You’ll always find Jesus along with a crowd like that.

Brethren, I want to belong to that remnant more than I want to live one more minute. Do you? The remnant, the blood-bought, Spirit-inspired remnant, I want to belong to it. This isn’t a matter now of whether you’re accepted Jesus or not. This is another thing I’m talking about. Shall we pray?

O Lamb of God, I love Thee so, I would with Thee life journeys go. And O Lord Jesus, we would resist the world and spurn the flesh and put our pride on the cross and die with Thee that we might live with Thee.

O Lord Jesus, we pray for these who’ve heard. Some of them we don’t know, some of them we do, some of them we believe are real Christians, some are on the way. But O God, Thou knowest every one of us deeply, deeply. We want to be ready. We want to be ready, Lord, when Thou comest.

We pray, help us that we might be willing to inconvenience ourselves, to upset our neat plans, to stir up our fur-lined nests, and to carry a cross, to go where we’re sent, to give up what’s wrong and to begin what’s right, and cease to do evil and learn to do good.

O Lord, the Church has been betrayed by easy-believism. We’ve been told, just believe and you’re all right. And that’s true, but not true as they teach it.

So help us to believe truly, Lord, believe in faith, believe with a cross on our shoulder, believe, but believe with our back to the world, believe with our faces toward the light, believe with our sword and our hammer in our hands, believe, Lord God, doing something. Bless thou this congregation, Father. Help them, we pray, each and every one, not to lose what they’ve heard tonight in song and sermon, but to go home and think it over, pray about it, and earnestly seek to be in that number.

We sing, I want to be in that number, but Lord, we’re just imitating colored people when we sing that song. We don’t half mean it. We smile and laugh and giggle and go on. We really want to mean it, Lord. We want to be in the number when the Saints come marching in. Bless us now as we bring our service to a close, in Christ’s name. Amen.